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Curated playlist

Fantasy video games

  • Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera OmniaOne fan recorded about 100 hours of Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia before its servers closed.
  • Dissidia 012 Final FantasyDissidia 012 Final Fantasy is both a prequel and a remake of the game before it. It launched on PSP in March 2011.
  • Hades IIHades II arrived without warning on the 5th of May 2024, and a rival studio rearranged its calendar because of it. Evil Empire had planned to release The Rogue Prince of Persia on the 14th of May. It pushed the launch to later that month…
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the KingdomIn The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, fusing a rocket to a shield is enough to send Link soaring through the air. That one trick says a great deal about this 2023 action-adventure game for the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo EPD built it…
  • Dota 2A month before its official launch in 2013, Dota 2 already had nearly 330,000 people playing at the same moment on Steam. That crowd outnumbered the players in the rest of the platform's top ten games combined. Dota 2 is a Valve game in…
  • The Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimA modder made Falskaar for Skyrim as a job application to Bethesda. Bungie hired him instead.
  • Dragon Age: OriginsDragon Age: Origins got its title before it had any dragons. A random name generator produced the name first.
  • Hollow KnightHollow Knight has sold more than 15 million copies as of August 2025, and it was built by Team Cherry, a small independent studio based in Adelaide, Australia. The player controls a nameless insectoid warrior, commonly called the Knight,…
  • NierNier is a 2010 action role-playing game, and its own director summed up its commercial fate with a shrug: "we weren't really in the red, but it wasn't exactly a success either." Cavia developed it and Square Enix published it for the…
  • The Elder Scrolls IV: OblivionPete Hines, Bethesda's vice president of public relations and marketing, once described the mood before The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion arrived with a wry line. He said: "People were expecting the game to cure blindness and heal the sick."…
  • Dragon QuestOver 300 Japanese schoolchildren were arrested for truancy when Dragon Quest III went on sale.
  • The Elder ScrollsThe Elder Scrolls began as a gladiator game about arena tournaments. Side quests grew as the tournaments shrank.
  • Kirby (series)Kirby is a media franchise created by Masahiro Sakurai and owned by HAL Laboratory, and it began as a rough prototype. Sakurai drew a ball-shaped character as a stand-in. People liked it so much that the stand-in became the final design.…
  • Hades (video game)Hades is a 2020 action game from Supergiant Games in which the hero dies again and again, and that failure is the point. Its hero, Zagreus, is the son of the ruler of the Underworld, and he badly wants to leave home. Every attempt turns…
  • The Witcher 3: Wild HuntWhen The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched in 2015, Poland's prime minister, Ewa Kopacz, and its president, Bronisław Komorowski, visited the studio behind it. That studio was CD Projekt Red, and the game was an open-world action role-playing…
  • Vagrant StoryVagrant Story, a 2000 PlayStation game, had no shops at all. Players built their own gear in workshops instead.
  • DarkstalkersIn Darkstalkers, Demitri's move Midnight Bliss turns an opponent into a girl before he drains their blood.
  • EverQuestSony expected little from EverQuest, but it drew ten thousand subscribers in a day.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind WakerThe Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker sold 4.6 million copies on the GameCube. That sounds like a triumph until it is set beside the 7.6 million copies that Ocarina of Time had sold. Nintendo released this 2002 adventure to enormous critical…
  • Middle-earth: Shadow of MordorIn Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, an Uruk whom the hero throws into a fire may later return, disfigured and hungry for revenge. No writer scripted that grudge. The game remembered the encounter and built a rival out of it. Released in…
  • Middle-earth: Shadow of WarCut the arm off an orc in Middle-earth: Shadow of War, and that orc may return later wearing a metal prosthetic and a grudge. This enemy carries the title the Claw. The designers made it an archetype that appears only once per game.…
  • Genshin ImpactGenshin Impact, a 2020 action role-playing game from the Chinese studio miHoYo, caused an uproar before anyone could play it. At the ChinaJoy convention in 2019, fans of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild gave the Sony booth the…
  • ŌkamiŌkami began as a one-minute movie of a wolf racing through a forest, with flowers blooming in its footsteps. Hideki Kamiya made that clip with no gameplay behind it at all. From it grew a 2006 action-adventure about Amaterasu, the Shinto…
  • Dragon Age: The VeilguardDragon Age: The Veilguard reached players on the 31st of October 2024 for PlayStation 5, Windows and Xbox Series X/S. BioWare developed it and Electronic Arts published it. It is the fourth major game in the Dragon Age series, and the…
  • Bravely DefaultThe team behind Bravely Default never expected the 3DS game to leave Japan. It sold a million copies by July 2014.
  • Granblue FantasyA live-streamed 700,000 yen spending spree forced Granblue Fantasy to apologize.
  • Shadow of the ColossusIn Shadow of the Colossus, a young man named Wander lifts his sword into the sunlight, and the blade throws beams of light across the land. The beams converge when the sword points toward the next giant. Sony Computer Entertainment…
  • Monster HunterIn Monster Hunter, the hero never levels up. The Hunter has no intrinsic statistics or attributes whatsoever, and nothing about the character grows stronger with experience. Monster Hunter is a Japanese media franchise of fantasy action…

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