Can you believe we didn't have a best JRPG list until now? Baffling. To be fair we did once tackle this topic with a preliminary blast of recommendations for those completely new to the genre. We also have a few familiar fantasys in our list of the 50 best RPGs on PC. But until now we haven't addressed the genre in its own right. In an act of contrition, we offer you this: our list of the best JRPGs you can play on PC this year, according to our own tastes.
]]>Akira Toriyama, the mangaka whose work in video games included designing the characters for two of the most influential RPGs ever made, Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest, on top of creating one of the most influential series across all of pop-culture in Dragon Ball, has passed away.
]]>If 2023 is remembered for one thing, it's that it was a 100% critical success year for the RPG. Role-players across the land have been feasting exceedingly well these past few months, what with the stonking success of Baldur's Gate 3 (and to lesser extents, Starfield and Diablo 4), so we thought it was about time to celebrate your favourite RPGs of all time. Your votes have been counted, your comments have been sorted, and the cream of the RPG crop has been assembled. But which of the many excellent RPGs have risen above all others? Come and find out below as we count down your top 25 favourite RPGs of all time.
]]>When Square Enix first released RPG classic Chrono Trigger on PC in 2018, it was in a sorry state. Their 'updated' version was worse than the 1995 original, with blurry sprites, ugly menus, an incongruous font, and other problems. But they fixed it up a lot with patches, and now, almost four years since the last patch, they've applied a fresh coat of polish with another welcome update.
]]>Whether you like wizards, sword-and-board warriors, the irradiated wasteland, vampires, or isometric text-heavy stories, the RPG is the genre that will never let you down. Accross the dizzing number of games available where you can play a role, there's something for everyone - and we've tried to reflect that in our list of the best RPGs on PC. The past couple of years have been great for RPGs, so there are some absolute classics as well as brand spanking new games on this list. And there's more to look forwards to, with rumblings of Dragon Age: Dread Wolf finally on the horizon, and space epic Starfield in our rear view mirror. Whatever else may happen, though, this list will provide you with the 50 best RPGs that you can download and play on PC right now.
]]>I never played Secret of Mana 2 on the Super Nintendo, but I could recognize its trees in a blink. I saw them in countless other games, their lush branches decorating the corners of fantasy worlds filled with magic, dragons, and bugs. Oh, so many bugs. I've never played the first Star Ocean, the Suikoden series, Terranigma, or Chrono Trigger. But I know them. They are games I’ve always appreciated in a disjointed state, their plants and furniture dissected and laid out on sprite sheets like tiny organs on an autopsy table.
I saw all this because, when I was a teenager, I illegally ripped art assets from commercial games.
]]>I don't think it's unfair to say that when Super Nintendo classic JRPG Chrono Trigger first hit PC back in February, the quality of the port could be summed up as 'hot garbage', with blurry sprites, a clumsy interface and even using Windows default system text in places. The iconic opening screen of the game - a clock pendulum swinging - was even undermined by being completely out of sync with the audio.
Fortunately, Square Enix have made genuine efforts to improve things, with the previous patch cleaning up the blurry, overly-filtered sprites and yesterday's update making significant improvements to the combat UI, with more improvements due in June.
]]>Even after peeling away the shell of nostalgia, Chrono Trigger is a truly classic JRPG, so it's understandable that people were a bit miffed when the recent PC release of the game was a messy port of the Android edition of the game with no shortage of technical issues. Today, it received its first major patch, which goes a long way to getting the game back on track.
]]>Chunky pixels are on their way back home, according to Square-Enix, as the first of a wave of improvements coming to Chrono Trigger's wonky PC port. Promising several patches over the coming months, the publisher/developer are starting with addressing probably the most immediately obvious flaw with the genuine JRPG classic's PC version: The graphics.
]]>Twenty-three years, eh? Some of you reading this are probably younger than that. Well, you whippersnappers had better sit up and pay attention, because a genuine, no-qualifiers-necessary JRPG classic just popped up on Steam, over two decades past its original Super Nintendo debut.
While others such as Square's own I Am Setsuna have attempted to recapture its spark, there really is nothing quite like the original time-travelling classic Chrono Trigger. For the first time, us PC folk can experience it without having to go emulate old consoles, though perhaps not without some issues.
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