Curated playlist
Turn-based 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…
- 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…
- 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 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…
- 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…
- 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 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 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 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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 (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 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 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…
- 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 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…