Top 20 Best RPG Series of All Time

RPG series come and go. Some are worthwhile and some are so-so. I’m very opinionated on the genre (as it’s my most favorite) and I’ve been playing role playing games for decades now. I prefer the classics, but there are a lot of modern titles I enjoy too. With that said I thought it would be interesting to chronicle the top 20 best RPG series today. Let me go over a few rules before we jump right in:

• I’m only counting franchises with more than two installments. That’s why there’s no Chrono representation here.
• This is a very JRPG centric list. That’s just what I enjoy. It’s not that I haven’t played WRPGs before they just generally aren’t my cup of tea.
• Of course I haven’t played every RPG ever created so if your favorite is missing there’s a chance I just have little to no exposure with it at this point.

Without further adieu let’s get started. These are the top 20 best RPG franchises of all time.

#20. – Seiken Densetsu (Mana)

# of Good Games in the Franchise: 5

Active: Yes

The Mana series (as it’s called in North America) started out on the Game Boy. It was first released as Final Fantasy Adventure here, and went on to the Super Nintendo for two sequels. As with most of their franchises Squaresoft kept things going on the Sony PlayStation with Legend of Mana, and then on the PlayStation 2 we saw Dawn of Mana and that was the last mainline release. Since then we’ve seen low budget spin-offs and remakes which are still released to this day.

Final Fantasy Adventure (or Adventures in Mana as some may know it) was a pretty good game. It wasn’t until Secret of Mana released that the franchise struck a big cord with the market. Many consider it to be the best action RPG of all time, and I can see why. The sequels didn’t fare quite as well. It’s easy to see why the Mana series faded out because it never performed anywhere near Final Fantasy level, and sales dropped with each future installment. Now we mostly see spin-offs for the mobile market or handheld iterations which are a bit of a mixed bag.

The Best Way to Play:

The first three Seiken Densetsu games have remakes (the first one has two actually). These are obviously pretty low budget but were at least released in all regions. I prefer Adventures of Mana to Final Fantasy Adventure, but Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 are best experienced in their original forms. Dawn of Mana was kind of a misstep, but it’s a PlayStation 2 exclusive still. I recommend playing the originals but the remakes aren’t half bad.