Curated playlist
Action role-playing video games
- Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy OriginStranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin opens not with a hero, but with a man named Jack who wants only one thing: to destroy Chaos. Released in March 2022, this action role-playing game celebrates the Final Fantasy series' 35th…
- Final Fantasy XV: Pocket EditionFinal Fantasy XV: Pocket Edition reached three million downloads within its first month on the market. That number turned a stripped-down mobile spinoff into one of Square Enix's quieter success stories of 2018. The game took a full…
- Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VIICrisis Core: Final Fantasy VII arrived in 2007 with an unusual burden: explaining one of gaming's most beloved tragedies before it happened. Zack Fair, a young member of the elite military force SOLDIER, would carry the entire weight of…
- Kingdom HeartsKingdom Hearts began with a conversation between two Square employees sharing an elevator. Shinji Hashimoto and Tetsuya Nomura found themselves talking about what it might look like to blend Square's role-playing games with the worlds of…
- Action role-playing gameAction role-playing game, commonly shortened to ARPG, sits at the crossroads of two very different gaming traditions. On one side stands the role-playing game, with its menus, character sheets, and deliberate pacing. On the other stands…
- Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VIIDirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII arrived in 2006 as something nobody expected from Square Enix: a third-person shooter set inside one of gaming's most beloved fantasy universes. Vincent Valentine, a brooding gunslinger who had spent…
- The Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimThe Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim shipped seven million units in its first week of release, and within two years had crossed twenty million sold. That was 2011. By June 2023, the number had climbed past sixty million. No other single-player…
- Dragon Age: OriginsDragon Age: Origins begins on the eve of the fifth Blight, a moment when the monstrous Darkspawn threaten to swarm the surface world for only the fifth time in all of recorded history. Players step into this crisis not as a predetermined…
- Final Fantasy VII RemakeFinal Fantasy VII Remake arrived on the 10th of April 2020, nearly a quarter century after the game it set out to reimagine. Square Enix had spent years insisting no remake was in development. The question that hung over the gaming world…
- Final Fantasy VII RebirthFinal Fantasy VII Rebirth landed on the PlayStation 5 on the 29th of February 2024 - one of the first major video game releases to arrive on Leap Day. Square Enix chose that date deliberately for a game that had been in active development…
- Final Fantasy XVIFinal Fantasy XVI arrived on the 22nd of June 2023, carrying the weight of a franchise that had defined Japanese role-playing games for nearly four decades. The sixteenth mainline entry in one of gaming's most storied series, it made an…
- The Last StoryThe Last Story arrived on the Nintendo Wii in January 2011, carrying the weight of a question its creator had spent years trying to answer: what was he doing wrong? Hironobu Sakaguchi, the man who invented Final Fantasy, had watched his…
- Final Fantasy XVFinal Fantasy XV shipped five million units in its first twenty-four hours, a figure Square Enix said allowed the game to break even on development costs immediately. That launch number was remarkable for a franchise that had been…
- Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIIILightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII opens on a brutal countdown: thirteen days until the world ends, and only one person to save every soul in it. The game, released in Japan in November 2013, is the third and final chapter in the Final…
- Mass EffectMass Effect began not with a game but with a pitch. In 2003, BioWare project director Casey Hudson presented an idea codenamed SFX to company co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. Hudson wanted BioWare to build a science fiction…
- Dark SoulsDark Souls arrived in 2011 and did something most games had long stopped doing: it punished players without apology. Developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, the series was the creation of director Hidetaka…
- Mana (series)The Mana series began not as its own creation, but as a side story attached to one of gaming's biggest franchises. In 1991, Square released Final Fantasy Adventure on the Game Boy, a handheld game carrying the Final Fantasy name. Within…
- Namco × CapcomNamco x Capcom arrived in Japanese game shops on the 26th of May 2005, carrying inside it nearly one hundred characters drawn from two of the largest video game publishers in the world. The idea was ambitious enough that, at the time,…
- The Elder ScrollsThe Elder Scrolls began its life as a medieval gladiator game that nobody expected to succeed. In 1994, when Bethesda's small team told the developers of Wizardry VII they were building an action role-playing game, they were met with…
- Elden RingElden Ring, a 2022 action role-playing game from the Japanese developer FromSoftware, sold 13.4 million copies in its first five weeks alone. It was the fastest-selling game Bandai Namco had ever published, the second-bestselling game of…
- Vagrant StoryVagrant Story arrived on the PlayStation on the 10th of February 2000 in Japan, and it came with a peculiar design decision: no shops. In a medium where buying potions and swords from a merchant was as expected as a health bar, Square's…
- Dragon's DogmaDragon's Dogma arrived in 2012 carrying a question its director had been holding since the year 2000: could a Japanese studio build a Western-style open-world RPG that let players climb on the bodies of enormous monsters and tear them…
- Final FantasyFinal Fantasy began as a desperate gamble. In 1987, a Square designer named Hironobu Sakaguchi was convinced he was about to wash out of the video game industry. He poured everything into one last project, a fantasy role-playing game for…
- Granblue FantasyGranblue Fantasy launched in Japan in March 2014 on Android, iOS, and web browsers, built by a studio called Cygames. What made it remarkable from the start was not its platform or its genre, but two names on the credits: composer Nobuo…
- Assassin's Creed ValhallaAssassin's Creed Valhalla sold more copies in its first week than any game in the franchise had ever managed. On the 17th of November 2020, one week after launch, Ubisoft confirmed over 1.8 million players. By February 2022, the game had…
- BloodborneBloodborne is a 2015 action role-playing game that sent players into a rotting Gothic city where the cure was worse than the disease. The city of Yharnam once held a miraculous substance called the Old Blood, capable of healing almost any…
- Diablo IVDiablo IV crossed one billion dollars in total revenue by September 2024, making it one of the fastest commercial rises in the history of its genre. But the road to that milestone was anything but smooth. The game's original concept,…
- Diablo ImmortalDiablo Immortal arrived on the 2nd of June 2022, and within a single week it had become the biggest launch in the Diablo franchise's history. By the end of July, thirty million people had downloaded it. Yet at the very same moment, the PC…