Summary
RPGs tend to be pretty long in terms of playtime. Some RPGs, particularly JRPGs, can stretch well into the hundreds of hours, telling vast and epic stories that are mind-bogglingly big. Yet, despite the length, gamers love a good RPG because they’re so satisfying to conquer.
Whether it’s because of a massive level of character development, a satisfying end to an epic story, or a simply epic final boss fight, no games are quite as enjoyable to finish as an excellent RPG, and there’s plenty to choose from.
Trying to determine the very bestStar Warsgame is a Sisyphean task, but if there is a consensus pick, it’s probably BioWare’s 2003 magnum opusStar Wars: Knights of the Old Republic,which told one of the very best stories in all ofStar Warslore.
The epic story sees players adventure across the galaxywith a ragtag group of pals, choosing whether to align with the dark or light side of the force, and a revelation about the player’s true identity that has gone down in history as one of gaming’s biggest twists. It leads to an amazing final battle in the Star Forge, resulting in an incredibly satisfying ending.
In a list of the bestFinal Fantasygames,Final Fantasy 15is probably not going torank among most people’s favorites. There are a lot of good reasons for that, and the story is kind of a mess. However, its ending is stellar and makes for a genuinely emotional and satisfying conclusion.
The best parts ofFinal Fantasy 15are about building up relationships with Noctis and his pals, and the finale of the game is all about those relationships coming full circle. In a game drowning in convoluted lore, it’s a wildly impressive emotional grounding that makes the whole ending one of the most emotionally impactful conclusions in the entireFinal Fantasyfranchise.
Undertalecame out of nowhere and made a statement that the age of indie RPGs had truly arrived, marking the apotheosis of the early 2010s indie game movement that forever changed how games were made and proving that more experimental games could reach massive levels of popularity.
One reasonUndertalereached that level of popularity is due to the incredibly satisfying journey the game leads the player along. By the end of the game, players aren’t just trying to encounter a surprise final boss and a catharsis for the friends they made along their adventure, but also rethinking the core tenets of what makes an RPG tick. For RPG fans, there’s few better feelings than finishing a truly emotionally impactful story likeUndertale.
In recent years, the reputation ofFallout: New Vegashas increased drastically, now ranking as many players' favorite entry in the entire franchise as appreciation grows for its RPG credentials and experimental gameplay.
WhileFallout: New Vegasmay not deliver the same emotional impact in its final moments, the sheer amount of choice a player has in shaping the future of the Mojave Wasteland makes the concluding slideshow a famously brilliant bit of low-budget storytelling that makes the player feel like they made a real difference and their choices matter,even for the minor factions. There’s few feelings more satisfying than looking back on all the work completed.
Personagames are famously lengthy titles that can take hundreds of hours to complete, particularly for completionists who want to maximize time in the dungeons.Persona 5 Royalis no different, clocking in as one of the longest entries in the franchise.
Yet,Persona 5 Royalisn’t lengthy for the sake of it. Instead, the whole game is about building social relationships over time,growing to bond with the protagonist’s pals, and putting those relationships to the test in a twisty conspiracy narrative that holds a load of brilliant end-game twists and surprise dungeons that make the player truly appreciate the epic journey they’ve been on.
As BioWare’s gameography matured, the scope of their RPGs started to gradually dwindle, until they became more like action games than RPGs. Yet, in 2010, BioWare found the perfect balance between RPG storytelling and action gameplay inMass Effect 2, resulting in The Suicide Mission, one of gaming’s most notorious missions ever, that led to a really satisfying ending.
Most ofMass Effect 2’s plot is dedicated to building up the new Normandy shipwith a ragtag crewto stop the Collectors and their nefarious plans. This is all a carefully crafted plan to get the player to care about these characters, because they can die in the Suicide Mission, and it is heartbreaking to see it happen. Beating it is like few other experiences in gaming.
TheFinal Fantasyseries has gone through many evolutions during its long existence, yet few of its entries have been able to crawl out from the shadow ofFinal Fantasy 6, often considered the fan favorite, for a particular narrative move that changed how many gamers interacted with games thereafter.
Because, spoiler alert, about midway through the game, the player finally gets a chance to fight Kefka, the big bad, and they fail. They fail horribly, and the world enters an apocalypse. Building themselves back up and taking on Kefka one more time to take them down for good is so incredibly satisfying, and it tells a story to rival an epic movie or book.
On its own,The Witcher 3: Wild Huntis a satisfying game to beat. It’s massive, with some great DLC, and the best writing in modern RPGs. But, where it really shines is as a conclusion to the wholeWitcherstory and a goodbye to Geralt as a character.
To put this in context, for fans of the franchise,The Witcher 3isn’t just a conclusion to the game trilogy, but to the original books as well. That meansThe Witcher 3: Wild Huntpulls no punches in its final hours, delivering catharsis after catharsis, and telling a fantasy epic that wraps up in a satisfying way that few games can beat.
