Curated playlist
Japanese 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…
- Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera OmniaDissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia launched on the 1st of February 2017, in Japan, assembling heroes and villains from across the Final Fantasy franchise into a single free-to-play mobile game. At its peak, it had been downloaded more than…
- 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…
- Final Fantasy IV (2007 video game)Final Fantasy IV (2007 video game) arrived on the Nintendo DS on the 20th of December 2007 in Japan, timed precisely to the Final Fantasy series' 20th anniversary. The game being celebrated was not a new entry but a rebuilt one: a full…
- Final Fantasy XIIIFinal Fantasy XIII opens in a place that should not exist: Cocoon, a massive artificial sphere floating above the surface of Gran Pulse, kept aloft by mechanical gods called fal'Cie. Development of the game began in February 2004, and when…
- 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…
- Final Fantasy IIIFinal Fantasy III launched on the 27th of April, 1990, and within its first week sold 500,000 copies in Japan. By March 2003, that figure had reached 1.4 million, making it the highest-selling domestic release among the first three games…
- Final Fantasy VIIFinal Fantasy VII arrived in Japan on the 31st of January, 1997, and within three days had sold over two million copies. That pace was not an accident. It was the product of a project that had burned through multiple platforms, consumed…
- 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 XIII-2Final Fantasy XIII-2 arrived in Japanese stores on the 15th of December 2011, carrying an unusual burden: it was designed from the start as an answer to complaints about its predecessor. Square Enix had sold Final Fantasy XIII to roughly…
- 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 III (2006 video game)Final Fantasy III sold 500,000 copies in Japan in its first week on the Nintendo DS, surpassing Square Enix's own prediction of 350,000. That figure is striking on its own. What makes it more remarkable is that the game behind those…
- 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…
- Final Fantasy X-2Final Fantasy X-2 arrived in Japan in 2003 as something the series had never attempted: a direct sequel. Every numbered Final Fantasy before it told a self-contained story, with new worlds, new heroes, and no obligation to the game before…
- Suikoden (video game)Suikoden, the 1995 role-playing game from Konami, asked players to do something unusual for its time: recruit 108 warriors to overthrow a corrupt empire. Not five. Not ten. One hundred and eight. The number was not arbitrary. It came from…
- Dragon QuestDragon Quest, the Japanese role-playing franchise that first arrived on the Famicom on the 27th of May, 1986, turned into something Japan had never quite seen before. Schoolchildren skipped class to wait in stores. Over 300 of them were…
- Final Fantasy IIFinal Fantasy II launched on the 17th of December 1988, almost exactly one year after the original game, and Square's small team of around ten people had already decided it would be nothing like its predecessor. The first game had saved…
- Final Fantasy XFinal Fantasy X shipped in Japan in 2001 and sold more than 2.14 million units on its first day alone, including 1.4 to 1.5 million pre-orders. A million copies moved within hours of release. Square had expected modest returns from a…
- Final Fantasy XIIFinal Fantasy XII arrived in March 2006 carrying five years of development behind it, a record that once earned it a Guinness World Record for longest production period in video game history. It sold more than 1,764,000 copies in its first…
- 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…
- Final Fantasy (video game)Final Fantasy arrived in Japan in 1987 as a last-ditch effort by a company that nearly did not survive to publish it. Square was threatened with bankruptcy. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the game's creator, had privately decided he would quit the…
- Final Fantasy XIVFinal Fantasy XIV had already failed once. In September 2010, Square Enix released an online game that was so broken, so poorly received, that then-President Yoichi Wada stood up and admitted it had "greatly damaged" the Final Fantasy…
- Final Fantasy XIV (2010 video game)Final Fantasy XIV launched on the 30th of September 2010, and within months Square Enix had suspended subscription fees, postponed its PlayStation 3 version indefinitely, fired its entire development leadership, and issued a public apology…
- Final Fantasy VIIIFinal Fantasy VIII sold 2.21 million copies on its first day of release in Japan, grossing the equivalent of $151 million in a single day. That figure made it the fastest-selling entry in the Final Fantasy series at the time of its launch…
- Suikoden IISuikoden II arrived on PlayStation shelves in Japan on the 17th of December, 1998, and almost no one noticed. Konami had crafted a role-playing game with over 100 recruitable characters, warring nations, a fractured magical rune, and one…
- Bravely DefaultBravely Default arrived on the 11th of October 2012, on Nintendo 3DS shelves in Japan and promptly sold 141,529 units in its first week alone, with a sell-through rate above 85%. That debut was strikingly higher than the sales of its…
- 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…
- Suikoden IIISuikoden III arrived on the PlayStation 2 in 2002 with an idea that was genuinely strange for its era: what if a war story had no heroes and no villains, only sides? Developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, the game placed three…
- 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…