Best SNES RPGs – Feature – Nintendo Life

The expansive software library of Nintendo’s 16-bit powerhouse wasn’t short of any of the most popular genres of the ’90s, and perhaps least of all RPGs. Intense strategy, whimsical adventure, tear-jerking goodbyes to characters you’ve spent months with… the SNES has it all.

And that makes compiling a list of ten of the console’s very best a piece of cake, right? Well… The problem with having this embarrassment of riches to choose from is realising you’ve got twenty or even thirty games all equally deserving of a spot on a list of ten, and that means so many games, no matter how good they may be, have just got to go.

To make this a little easier on ourselves, we’ve automatically jettisoned anything that didn’t receive an official English language release – don’t worry, we’ll save those fantastic Japanese exclusives for another time – and we’ve politely put aside a few (just a few!) of the better-known titles in favour of a few hopefully interesting (and varied) alternatives equally deserving of an RPG connoisseur’s adoration.

So here goes – and remember, this is in no particular order…

Famously headed by three of the biggest names in the industry at the time (Final Fantasy’s Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest’s Yuji Horii, and Akira Toriyama, the man behind a little comic you may have heard of called Dragon Ball), there was no chance this time-travelling saga was ever going to end up as anything less than the stuff of legend. Blurring the expected boundaries between battle scenes and standard exploration allowed players to feel closer to the action than ever before, and the strong cast drawn from the past, present, and futures that you hope will never come to pass, help to hold together what could in lesser hands have easily ended up a fractured and incomprehensible tangle of plot threads.

Nintendo choosing to publish this Quintet-developed action RPG marks one of those occasions European SNES owners could hold their heads high and just for once feel slightly superior to their RPG-enjoying counterparts in the US – even if Terranigma was released in such small numbers many of those who would have happily dedicated their evenings to it were completely unaware of its existence at the time. Ark’s journey to restore the world and the trials he’s subjected to along the way are a rare example of genuinely epic RPG storytelling; encompassing as it does nothing less than god, the devil, and a world with strong similarities to our own.