RPG Games

The RPG Genre's 2025 High-Water Mark

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won the 2025 Game of the Year award at The Game Awards — a stunning achievement for Sandfall Interactive, a debut studio, and a turn-based JRPG-influenced RPG at a time when the format was supposed to be commercially risky. The game's combination of JRPG-style mechanics with a distinctive French art direction and an emotionally resonant narrative demonstrated that the genre continues to find new expression even after decades of landmark releases.

Also in 2025: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 expanded Warhorse Studios' meticulous medieval Bohemia simulation into one of the year's most discussed RPGs. Avowed gave Obsidian Entertainment their first major original IP since The Outer Worlds — a first-person RPG set in the Pillars of Eternity universe that rewarded the studio's long reputation for writing and world-building. Monster Hunter Wilds crossed 8 million copies sold and brought co-op action RPG to its largest audience ever.

All-Time Reference Points

The all-time CRPG benchmarks are well established. Baldur's Gate 3, Larian Studios' 2023 masterpiece, is the game that has most recently redefined what the CRPG can be — turn-based tactical combat, genuine consequence to choices, and a world built to accommodate improvisation rather than resist it. Fallout: New Vegas remains the standard for writing and faction design in open-world RPGs. Mass Effect 2 is the consensus peak of the narrative RPG, where every character arc lands and the whole functions better than its parts.

For JRPGs, the reference points are different: the Persona series (particularly Persona 5 Royal), Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Nier: Automata, and Final Fantasy XIV have defined what the format can do in the 2010s-2020s. The turn-based JRPG resurgence — visible in Clair Obscur, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and the continued success of the Trails series — shows the format has life well beyond nostalgia.

2026 and the Trails Saga

Trails Beyond the Horizon, releasing in 2026, has been described by Nihon Falcom as the "beginning of the end" for the Trails saga — a narrative epic that has spanned multiple sub-series across more than 20 years and constitutes one of the most extensive interconnected stories in gaming. For fans of the series, this is a watershed moment; for newcomers, it represents a compelling endpoint to approach after catching up with earlier entries.

Action RPG vs Turn-Based: A Genuine Divide

The RPG genre's internal tension between action and turn-based systems isn't about which is better — both approaches have produced exceptional games — but about different relationships with time and challenge. Action RPGs like Monster Hunter Wilds, Elden Ring, and the Souls series demand real-time reaction and mechanical precision. Turn-based games like Clair Obscur, Baldur's Gate 3, and the Persona series reward planning, build theory, and strategic thinking without the pressure of a moving clock.

Hybrid approaches complicate the picture: the Divinity: Original Sin series, Pillars of Eternity, and Tyranny use real-time-with-pause systems that borrow from both traditions. Final Fantasy XVI moved the mainline series to a full action system while retaining deep character progression.

The JRPG Renaissance

The Japanese RPG was widely written off as a commercially declining format through the 2010s as audiences shifted toward open-world action games. The subsequent decade proved that assessment wrong. Persona 5 Royal's 95 Metacritic score, NieR: Automata's philosophical depth and combat system, the Trails series' decade-spanning narrative ambition, and culminating in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 winning Game of the Year 2025 — the JRPG format has demonstrated remarkable creative health.

Metaphor: ReFantazio, released in 2025 from Atlus, brought the Persona team's narrative RPG approach to a completely new fantasy world and received exceptional reviews. The game's political themes and fantasy world-building drew comparisons to Persona 5 while establishing its own identity. Coupled with Clair Obscur's success, 2025 was arguably the strongest year for narrative turn-based RPGs since the late 1990s JRPG peak.

Soulslike RPGs: A Genre That Defined a Decade

FromSoftware's influence on RPG design over the past decade is difficult to overstate. The Dark Souls trilogy, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring collectively established a new set of expectations around difficulty, environmental storytelling, and non-linear world design that have influenced hundreds of subsequent games. The Soulslike label now describes a recognisable design language: deliberate combat with heavy punishment for error, world exploration rewarded with lore fragments, and boss encounters designed as culminating skill tests.

Elden Ring (2022, 96 Metacritic) expanded this formula to a fully open world with a scale and content density that required FromSoftware's largest team and longest development time. The result was the highest-rated game of 2022 and one of the highest-rated games of the decade, demonstrating that the Soulslike formula was not a niche acquired taste but a mainstream design achievement.

What Defines a Great RPG

The best RPGs create a sense of authorship — the choices you make over dozens of hours are woven into a narrative that feels specific to your playthrough rather than delivered to you. Baldur's Gate 3 achieves this through genuine consequence to in-game decisions; Fallout: New Vegas through faction allegiance and dialogue options that produce visibly different endings; Elden Ring through build variety that makes two players' experiences of the same boss fight feel mechanically different.

Browse our RPG collection on pcforest.net by rating to find the titles critics considered most successful at achieving that authorship feeling. The genre has been in exceptional form — the list of outstanding RPGs from 2020 to 2026 is as strong as any comparable six-year window in the medium's history.