Great video games can come from anywhere, including role-playing games, one of the most popular genres. But JRPGs are in a whole different league, delivering some of the greatest video games of all time.
These games have taken players to faraway lands, given them fantastical powers, and broken their hearts with tragic narratives and characters. When you put all of this together, it creates a collection that RPGs from America or other countries constantly try to live up to.
Final Fantasy VII is Square Enix’s Greatest
Final Fantasy VII Aerith looking towards the screenImage via Square Enix
Over the years, Square Enix has built a reputation as one of the best developers of JRPGs. The biggest and most successful of these franchises is Final Fantasy, with many of its titles considered some of the greatest games ever made. The most recognizable game is Final Fantasy VII.
It followed Cloud Strife on a mission to liberate the planet Gaia from the all-consuming Shinra Corporation, which also put him on a collision course with his rival Sephiroth. The world of Final Fantasy VII is massive, with tons of lore and characters to dive into. Both of these serve as the driving forces of the narrative, a tale that features some of the most shocking and devastating plot twists for a Final Fantasy game at the time.
CBR Exclusive · Quiz WHICH FINAL FANTASY HERO ARE YOU? The Crystal Has Chosen You From the slums beneath Midgar to the shores of Spira, from the burning ruins of Vector to the edge of a godless future — Final Fantasy’s greatest heroes carry worlds on their shoulders. Each one is a different answer to the same question: who do you become when fate asks everything of you? Fifteen questions. One destiny.
FFVII Cloud Strife Ex-SOLDIER
FFVI Terra Branford Magitek Warrior
FFX Tidus Star Blitzball Player
FFXIII Lightning L’Cie Warrior
01
The party is falling apart before the final dungeon. You: Every hero faces the moment the mission starts to crack.
02
Your past is catching up with you. How do you carry it? In Final Fantasy, no hero escapes who they were.
03
What is the source of your greatest strength? Power in Final Fantasy always comes from somewhere real.
04
You must give something up to save everyone. You choose to sacrifice: The hardest choices reveal a hero’s true values.
05
Someone tells you to smile more. You: Small moments reveal the biggest personalities.
06
A prophecy names you the chosen one. Your reaction? Fate is Final Fantasy’s oldest weapon — and its greatest test.
07
Your battle style in a crisis is: The way you fight is the way you live.
08
The crack in your armor is: Even the legendary have a weakness in the stats screen.
09
An ally betrays the party. Your response: Trust is the most fragile currency in the Final Fantasy world.
10
The world is ending. What keeps you moving? Final Fantasy always asks this. The answer defines everything.
11
Strangers meeting you for the first time would say: First impressions in the overworld matter.
12
You discover everything you believed about yourself was a lie. You: Final Fantasy loves this moment. So does character.
13
What does the party mean to you? No hero wins alone. But why they need others varies.
14
The world that shaped you was: Every hero is a product of the world that broke them.
15
Standing before the final boss, you think: The last save point is behind you. This is what you’ve been building toward.
THE CRYSTAL HAS SPOKEN YOUR FINAL FANTASY HERO
Your scores appear below. The character with the highest number is your match — read their description to discover which legend of the Final Fantasy universe has always lived inside you.
FINAL FANTASY VII Cloud Strife
FINAL FANTASY VI Terra Branford
FINAL FANTASY X Tidus
FINAL FANTASY XIII Lightning
You are formidably capable and brutally self-contained. You built walls so high that even you sometimes forget there’s someone worth knowing on the other side of them. Your strength is real — but it was forged in grief, and part of you has never fully left that burning town. What makes you extraordinary isn’t the sword or the silence: it’s that underneath all the cold precision, you still care about people with an intensity that frightens you. The ones who earn your trust don’t just gain an ally. They gain someone who will walk into the end of the world for them, without ever saying a word about it.
You are extraordinary and don’t fully believe it yet. Something inside you — something ancient and luminous and untameable — has always been there, waiting. Others have tried to control it, define it, weaponize it. What they never understood is that your power isn’t the dangerous part: it’s your heart. The capacity to love that you spent so long being afraid of is your greatest strength. You are not a weapon. You are not what was done to you. You are what you choose to become — and that choice, made quietly, every day, is the most heroic act in the game.
You feel everything at full volume and refuse to apologize for it. Where others calculate, you leap. Where others grieve in silence, you cry out loud and then help everyone else back to their feet. You understand instinctively that love is not sentimental — it’s the most courageous thing a person can do. You walked into a journey you didn’t fully understand for people you had only just met, and you gave it everything you had. That isn’t naïveté. That’s the rarest kind of bravery: the kind that smiles on the way into the dark.
You are relentless in a way that unsettles people who don’t know you — and humbles the ones who do. You buried everything soft about yourself because the world required it, and you made yourself into something no fate, no god, and no system could stop. What people mistake for coldness is actually grief in armor: you loved someone so completely that losing them rewired everything. Underneath the discipline and the precision is a person who would unmake the laws of the universe for the people they love. And has. More than once.
All of this is held together by a turn-based battle system that hosts a series of incredible battles, including one against Sephiroth himself. There have been many sequels, remakes, and tie-ins connected to Final Fantasy VII, but the original PlayStation classic will never be forgotten as a JRPG masterpiece.
Persona 5 is the Ultimate Social Simulator
Image via Atlus
Developer Atlus has also established itself as a big player in the JRPG space. They are best known for the Megami Tensei series, which has its own spin-off, Persona. The latter centers around high school students with the ability to summon supernatural monsters and must band together to prevent reality-ending events.
The most recent main entry, Persona 5, is the perfect embodiment of what the series does best: balancing social simulation elements with dungeon-crawling exploration and turn-based combat to make every moment more exciting than the last. The story deals with numerous heavy themes with elegance and care for the main characters, all of them being fully fleshed out and wonderful to interact with. Battling and capturing Personas is highly addictive since no two encounters are the same, and the selection of Personas is quite large.
The world of Persona 5 has also been expanded, with anime adaptations, spin-off titles, and an expanded version of the base game. It will be hard for many to leave this era whenever the next game comes out, but it was time well spent with one of the best turn-based JRPG masterpieces.
Fire Emblem Awakening Was the Franchise’s Biggest Swing
Image via Nintendo
Nintendo’s Fire Emblem franchise used to be a niche property that got very little exposure outside of Japan. Around the time the Nintendo 3DS launched, the company was ready to end the franchise with one final game, titled Fire Emblem Awakening. What was originally supposed to be the series’ swan song ended up being the game that saved it from extinction.
The tactical turn-based combat that Fire Emblem is known for is all there, with challenging AI to give veterans a real challenge. Although not the first to do so, Awakening was the first worldwide release to give players the ability to turn off permadeath, allowing their party members to stay in the game even if they are downed in battle. It might not be a classic Fire Emblem, but at least players got to romance their favorite characters since they never died.
Fire Emblem Awakening is not only one of the best JRPGs ever made, but it’s also one of the most important ones. Because without its success, games like Fire Emblem Fates and Fire Emblem: Three Houses wouldn’t even exist.
Kingdom Hearts is an Unlikely Marriage of Two Amazing Properties
Kingdom Hearts key artImage via Square Enix
Another Square Enix JRPG franchise that has achieved massive success is the Kingdom Hearts series, which blends Disney and Final Fantasy characters into a single universe. It follows protagonist Sora as he teams up with Donald Duck and Goofy to save his friends from the Heartless that destroyed Sora’s home.
Unlike many of the early Final Fantasy games, Kingdom Hearts is an action RPG that puts Sora directly into the action. The hack-and-slash gameplay is exciting to play and satisfying to master, with plenty of new abilities to go around. Exploring the various Disney worlds is also a treat for longtime fans, and watching their characters interact with both original Square Enix and Final Fantasy characters works surprisingly well, even if the plot surrounding them is very convoluted.
Kingdom Hearts is unique compared to many other games that use licensed characters. And that is the reason why the original game is one of the best JRPGs anyone could play.
Though it’s only a little over a year old, Metaphor: Refantazio wasted no time showing Atlus fans can still deliver fantastic JRPGs outside the Megami Tensei and Persona franchises. This new IP takes place in a fantasy world where characters can control “Archetypes” and must use them to overthrow a mad prince set on destroying the world.
The gameplay loop will feel familiar to fans of Atlus: players can divide their time between crawling through dungeons to battle various monsters or spending the day with party members to improve their skills and attributes. New elements such as changing battle formations during turns and gifting other party members different archetypes keep things fresh, as well as some of the toughest boss battles ever put in an RPG.
And just like the Persona games, Metaphor Refantazio deals with plenty of heavy themes that can resonate with players. The game uses its large cast of characters to discuss themes of racism and discrimination, doing so in a way that feels natural to the world while also asking gamers to confront many uncomfortable truths about the real world.
