Curated playlist
Role-playing video games
- Final Fantasy Legend IIFinal Fantasy Legend II shipped in Japan on the 14th of December 1990, carrying a name that was, in its home country, entirely different: SaGa 2: Hihou Densetsu. That gap between identities tells you something about the game's unusual…
- Suikoden TacticsSuikoden Tactics arrived on the PlayStation 2 in late 2005, and it carried a quiet distinction: it was the first game in the long-running Suikoden series to abandon the franchise's traditional turn-based battles entirely. Where previous…
- Final Fantasy XII: Revenant WingsFinal Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings began its life with no connection to Final Fantasy XII at all. Producer Eisuke Yokoyama and Japanese developer Think & Feel were building a standalone real-time strategy game for the Nintendo DS. Only…
- Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred HeroesEiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes surpassed $500,000 on Kickstarter in just three to four hours on the 27th of July, 2020. Its lead developer, Yoshitaka Murayama, had built his reputation on a celebrated series at a different company…
- Gensō Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no TokiGensō Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki dropped into Japanese game shops on the 9th of February 2012, and by the end of that first week it had sold more than 61,000 units. That made it the highest-selling title in the country during…
- Suikoden IVSuikoden IV arrives at an unusual place in a beloved series: set roughly 150 years before the events of the original Suikoden, it asks players to forget almost everything familiar and sail out into open water. The hook at its center is a…
- Final Fantasy IV: The After YearsFinal Fantasy IV: The After Years asks a question most sequels are afraid to pose: what happens seventeen years later, when the heroes have grown old and their children must face a threat their parents barely survived? The second moon has…
- Final Fantasy Mystic QuestFinal Fantasy Mystic Quest arrived in North America in 1992 with a label that few major game publishers would dare to put on a box: it was marketed as a "simplified role-playing game... designed for the entry-level player." Square, the…
- Final Fantasy Legend IIIFinal Fantasy Legend III arrived in Japanese stores on the 13th of December, 1991, carrying a secret: in Japan it was called SaGa 3: Jikuu no Hasha, a title in a series its creator had already decided to end. Series creator Akitoshi Kawazu…
- Final Fantasy VFinal Fantasy V launched in Japan in December 1992, and within a single day it sold roughly 900,000 cartridges. That opening figure was about 4.5 times the first-day numbers posted by Final Fantasy IV the year before. Japanese authorities…
- Role-playing video gameRole-playing video games place the player inside a world where an ordinary person can become, over time, something extraordinary. The genre traces its roots to university mainframe computers in the mid-1970s, where developers first tried…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Final Fantasy IXFinal Fantasy IX arrived on the PlayStation in 2000 carrying a quiet act of rebellion. While its two immediate predecessors had chased a sleeker, more cinematic realism, this ninth entry turned deliberately backward, back to medieval…
- 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 X/X-2 HD RemasterFinal Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster arrived in 2013 as something more than a polish job on two beloved games. It raised a question that fans had been quietly asking since the PlayStation 2 era: what happens to a world after it is saved? The…
- 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 Tactics AdvanceFinal Fantasy Tactics Advance arrived on the Game Boy Advance in 2003, carrying the weight of a beloved predecessor and the ambitions of a team that had spent years waiting to build it. The original Final Fantasy Tactics, released in 1997,…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Suikoden VSuikoden V arrived on the Sony PlayStation 2 in 2006 as the fifth and final main installment in Konami's long-running Suikoden series. Loosely drawn from the classical Chinese novel Shui Hu Zhuan by Shi Nai'an, it plants the player in the…
- Shin Megami Tensei: Liberation Dx2Shin Megami Tensei: Liberation Dx2 puts a demon-summoning app in your pocket. Developed and published by Sega, this mobile role-playing game arrived in January 2018, first reaching Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau before eventually…
- Baldur's Gate 3Baldur's Gate 3 reached players on the 3rd of August 2023, ending a development that had nearly not started at all. Wizards of the Coast, the publisher behind Dungeons and Dragons, turned down Larian Studios' first request to make the game…
- Final Fantasy IVFinal Fantasy IV arrived in Japan in 1991, and with it came Cecil Harvey, a dark knight who steers warships through the sky for the Kingdom of Baron. The game opens not with a hero's triumph but with a crime: the Red Wings, Cecil's own…
- Final Fantasy VIFinal Fantasy VI arrived in Japanese homes on the 2nd of April, 1994, carrying a premise that broke from every rule the series had established. Where earlier installments placed players in medieval kingdoms, this game opened with…
- Final Fantasy XIFinal Fantasy XI launched in Japan on the 16th of May 2002, asking players to share a single online world with strangers who spoke different languages and lived on different continents. That was a radical proposition for a console game. At…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Final Fantasy TacticsFinal Fantasy Tactics arrived in Japan on the 20th of June 1997, bundled with a demo disc for SaGa Frontier, and it told a story most players had never encountered in a Japanese role-playing game. At its center stood Ramza Beoulve, a…
- The Final Fantasy LegendThe Final Fantasy Legend arrived on Game Boy in December 1989, carrying a name it had not been born with. In Japan it launched as Makai Toushi Sa·Ga, the first title in what would become the SaGa series. Square's president Masafumi…
- Suikoden TierkreisSuikoden Tierkreis landed on the Nintendo DS in December 2008 in Japan, arriving as something unusual in a long-running franchise: a game that asked what it would mean to fight for your own future. The central villain, known only as The…