The 20 Best RPGs of All Time, Fully Ranked

I have been making versions of this list, privately, in the backs of notebooks, on my laptop at three in the morning, and in arguments with my friends, for about fifteen years. I have finally decided to make one that is public, committed, and defensible. This is it. These are the twenty best RPGs ever made, in my honest and bad-faith opinion, ranked. The phrase honest and bad-faith is doing a lot of work there, and it should, because a list like this is both things at once: honest about what I actually love, and bad-faith in the sense that any ranking pretends a clean order exists where really there is a tangle of memories, moods, and late-night play sessions. Committing to an order is the discipline. Admitting the order is personal is the honesty.

Rules I set for myself before making the list: first, it must be a role-playing game, broadly construed — meaning character progression, narrative, and choice are core, not decoration. Second, it must be finishable in a single playthrough, which cuts massively multiplayer games, because a list about endings should not include games that never end. Third, I have to have actually finished it, or at least played sixty-plus hours, to include it. Fourth, one entry per franchise. Sorry, Final Fantasy fans. Those rules are stricter than they look, because they exclude brilliant games I love but have not finished, and they force choices between beloved siblings in the same series. That forcing is the point. Without constraints, a top-twenty list becomes a top-hundred list with better marketing. With constraints, every inclusion costs something, and that cost is what makes the ranking mean anything at all.

A note on a live inconsistency, preserved rather than silently fixed: The Witcher appears at both 20 (Witcher 1) and 6/1 (Witcher 3), despite the one-entry-per-franchise rule, and Witcher 3 itself appears twice (6 and 1, the latter with Blood and Wine). This rebuild keeps both placements as published live, treating 1 as the expanded edition, without inventing a new ranking. If you disagree — and you should, that is the point of a list — that disagreement is with the original ranking, not with a quiet edit made here.

20–11: Writing, worlds, and beautiful jank

The Witcher 1 at twenty is janky, dated, and essential, and that combination is the thesis of the whole lower half. The first twenty hours are rough. After that, the writing becomes, I think, the best writing in any computer RPG ever made. The choices in Chapter 3 are still the choices I measure other RPG choices against, not because they are flashy, but because they refuse to let you feel clean about them. A good RPG choice is not a menu with a right answer. It is a situation where every option costs you something, and you carry that cost forward. Witcher 1 understands that, even when its combat and pacing do not understand much else. Putting it at twenty is not an insult. It is a recognition that a game can be hard to recommend and impossible to forget, and that those two facts can be true at the same time.

Disco Elysium at nineteen is the best prose in the history of the medium. Not the best game — the combat, such as it is, is bad — but as a piece of writing it is, unqualified, one of the finest things the medium has produced. If you have not played it, play it. Bring a notebook. That notebook advice is literal and metaphorical at once: you will want to write things down, because the game trusts you to notice, to remember, to connect a throwaway line in one conversation to a revelation hours later. Most games treat writing as delivery. Disco Elysium treats writing as the game itself, and it is willing to be difficult, dense, and strange in service of that idea. It belongs on any serious RPG list precisely because it proves the genre is not defined by combat systems. It is defined by what happens inside the player's head.

Fallout: New Vegas at eighteen is the best-written Bethesda-engine game, despite not being a Bethesda game, and that distinction matters. Obsidian's ability to construct a narrative in which every faction is both plausible and morally complicated remains unmatched. There is no faction in New Vegas that is simply right, and no faction that is simply a villain, and that moral complication is not a trick. It is the result of writing characters who actually believe their own arguments, and then letting those arguments collide. Planescape: Torment at seventeen asks the best framing question any RPG has ever asked — what can change the nature of a man? — and then lives inside that question for its entire length. The combat is bad. The writing is sublime. Play it with a speed-up mod, because the writing deserves your time more than the combat deserves your patience. These two games, back to back, tell you what I value most in the lower half: not polish, but seriousness about ideas.

Baldur's Gate 3 at sixteen is the most complete computer RPG ever released, and its placement here is a statement about time as much as quality. If I were writing this in ten years, it might be higher. For now, it is sixteen, because the third act is, everyone agrees, cooked. That is a harsh word, but it is honest, and it captures something important about how we judge huge games: completeness is not just about systems working. It is about endings landing. A game can be extraordinary for dozens of hours and still lose a few places because its final stretch does not match its opening promise. Morrowind at fifteen is the opposite kind of imperfection. It is twenty-two years old, as stated live. It is janky. The dialogue is a wiki. It is also the single most imaginative fictional world ever committed to a game, and nothing has matched it since. Morrowind does not hold your hand, and it does not apologise for its strangeness. It gives you a world that feels like it existed before you arrived and will continue after you leave, and that feeling is rarer than any polished quest marker.

Dragon Age: Origins at fourteen is the last great BioWare game, depending on how you feel about Mass Effect 2, and its origins system — six different playable backgrounds that actually change the story — is something nobody else has bothered to do since. That last clause should embarrass the genre a little, because origins are not a gimmick. They are a promise that who your character was before the story started matters to the story itself. Persona 5 Royal at thirteen is not the most mechanically deep Persona game — that is probably Persona 4 Golden, as stated live — but it is the one that is about something specific and urgent and has the best soundtrack. One hundred and twenty hours, and I would play it again, which is the highest praise a long RPG can earn: not that it was long, but that its length felt like a reason to return rather than a reason to recover. Chrono Trigger at twelve is the most elegantly constructed Japanese RPG ever made. No fat. No filler. The multiple endings make replays meaningful, because a replay is not just repetition; it is a different answer to the same question, and Chrono Trigger respects that difference.

Dark Souls at eleven is the one that changed the industry, and I have the original Dark Souls in this slot even though you could argue for Demon's Souls or Bloodborne. I have the original because the level design of Lordran — the way it folds back on itself, the way a shortcut reveals the whole map at once — is still the best spatial design in any game. That folding is not just clever architecture. It is storytelling without words. You learn a place by walking it, by getting lost in it, by suddenly recognising a doorway from the other side and understanding, in a flash, how the world fits together. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim at ten, the start of the top ten, is at risk of being basic, and I accept that risk. There are more focused RPGs, better-written RPGs, deeper RPGs. There are not, in my opinion, RPGs that produce as many moments as Skyrim. Fifty hours in, you are climbing a mountain, you find a shack, there is a note, the note leads you somewhere else — that gameplay loop, which Skyrim did not invent but perfected, is the reason people still play it twelve years later, as stated live. Moments are Skyrim's argument, and moments are enough.

9–1: Character, systems, and the peak

Final Fantasy VII at nine is the original, and that clarification matters because the remake is a separate thing. The original is still the most ambitious narrative any game attempted in the 1990s, and the third act is, I will fight you on this, perfectly constructed. That willingness to fight about a third act is the point: Final Fantasy VII does not just tell a big story, it commits to its big swings, even when those swings are strange, even when they risk alienating players who wanted something safer. Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire at eight is Obsidian at the peak of their computer RPG powers. The ship combat does not work. Everything else does. The writing in particular — the theological arguments between different gods' followers — is some of the sharpest in the genre, because it treats belief as a system with consequences, not as flavour text. When gods argue in Deadfire, they argue like people with stakes, and that makes the player's choices feel theological rather than mechanical.

Mass Effect 2 at seven has the best character writing in any game I have played. Twelve party members, twelve loyalty missions, each one a complete short story. The final raid rewards everything you have built. Cinematic is the right word, but not in the shallow sense of looking like a film. Cinematic here means structured like a story that earns its climax: you spend the game learning people, and then the game asks you to risk those people, and the risk matters because the learning was real. The Witcher 3 at six, as listed live, is a game where the first forty hours are good open-world game, and the next eighty hours are sublime. The Bloody Baron questline is the best single questline in RPG history. I will take no further questions on this. That refusal to take questions is a joke and also a position: some questlines do not need defending, because anyone who played them knows. The Bloody Baron works because it refuses easy villains and easy heroes, and because its consequences linger long after you have left its village behind.

Dragon Quest XI at five is comfort food, perfectly executed. The most joyous one hundred hours I have spent in an RPG. If you have been waiting for a Japanese RPG that is just relentlessly, cheerfully committed to being good, this is it. Joy is an underrated critical category, because critics are trained to praise darkness, complexity, and subversion, and Dragon Quest XI praises none of those things. It praises kindness, clarity, and craft, and it does so without irony. Bloodborne at four has the best combat in a FromSoftware game, the best art direction in any game, and the best Lovecraft adaptation ever made that is not technically a Lovecraft adaptation. It runs at thirty frames per second on the only console it is playable on, as stated live, and I will still die on the hill that it is one of the greatest games ever made. Technical limitation as a badge of honour sounds perverse until you play Bloodborne, and then it makes sense: the game's atmosphere is so complete that frame rate becomes a footnote, not a verdict.

Elden Ring at three, setting aside my reservations about its downloadable content as noted live, is the most complete realisation of open-world design the medium has produced. A hundred hours in, and I was still finding new zones. Magical is the right word, because discovery in Elden Ring does not feel like checking boxes. It feels like wandering into a place you were not supposed to find yet, and realising the game was ready for you anyway. Divinity: Original Sin 2 at two has the best systemic combat in any RPG, and the best emergent gameplay solutions to any quest. Set a barrel of oil on fire, turn around, the enemies are all dead, you did not plan this. That accidental brilliance is not a bug. It is the design philosophy: give players systems that interact, and then get out of their way. The writing is not Planescape-level, but it is plenty good, and plenty good is enough when the systems are this alive. One hundred-plus hours in my first playthrough. Sixty more in the second. That second playthrough is the review.

And at one, as listed live, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, with the Blood and Wine expansion. Still the best. Still, in my honest and somewhat boring opinion, the peak of the genre. Two hundred hours, and at the end I was sad to leave it. The expansion, Blood and Wine, is its own forty-hour campaign and is the single best expansion in RPG history. Geralt is the best protagonist in the medium. Yennefer and Triss arguments aside, this is the one. Sadness at leaving a game is not sentimentality. It is evidence that a world, a cast, and a protagonist became part of your routine, and that leaving them feels like leaving a place rather than finishing a product. That is why Witcher 3 sits at the top, even with the live list's double placement noted above: whether you count the base game at six or the expanded edition at one, the centre holds. The genre's peak is not the game with the most systems or the biggest map. It is the game you do not want to end.

Disagreements I will entertain, because a list without them is not a list at all: the candidates I cut most painfully, as stated live, were Outer Worlds (too short), Divinity: Original Sin 1 (superseded by its sequel), Tactics Ogre (tactics, not RPG, in my view), Knights of the Old Republic (BioWare quota filled by Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins), and Xenoblade 1 (not ready to admit it should be here, but it might be). The list is also, I will admit, biased toward Western computer RPGs and away from older Japanese RPGs. Someone more familiar with the 16-bit era than I am would probably have three more Squaresoft entries. Fair. Send your angry emails. My inbox is open. I will read them. I may even change my mind. This is what lists are for: not to end arguments, but to start better ones, with better evidence, about games that deserved the argument in the first place.