The 10 Best SNES RPGs – Feature – Nintendo Life

Release Date: 1st Nov 1993 (Cyberpunk 2077 should have been (don’t @ me). Check out our “making of” the game here.

What needs to be said about legendary title? The opera scene. The World of Ruin. Watching Magitek armour slowly trudge through the endless snow. Sabin meme-ily suplexing an entire train. Kefka’s laugh (we know you heard that text). Squaresoft’s beloved RPG often feels like a non-stop parade of effortless excellence, churning out memorable scenes one after the other as if the team had an excess of creativity that just had to come out.

It’s the vague baseline of almost-normality that makes Shigesato Itoi’s off-kilter RPG feel more bizarre than most games that try to make a conscious effort to create a weird and wacky setting. Story heavy games are filled with triple-headed monsters and sentient globs of goo but how many have you square up to armoured frogs and aggressive cups of coffee? EarthBound may have been criminally overlooked on its release but there’s no doubt fans – old and new – have more than made up for that in the years since (and even Nintendo remembered to include it on the SNES Mini).

Combining the thrill of real-time tactical battlefield management with Yasumi Matsuno’s now trademark penchant for weaving tales of political turmoil over straightforward clashes of swords and sorcery, Ogre Battle and all the games that were created from it, whether part of this series or set in the wonderfully similar world of Ivalice, remain a high point for the entire genre. This is one of the best instalments and is well worth a look, despite the passage of time.

Rejected by many on release as being Final Fantasy: For Babies (or for Europeans, Final Fantasy: Sorry No Mainline Games For You Edition), later revisits after the annoyance has died down have revealed this spinoff to be a thoughtfully streamlined adventure containing some incredible monster art accompanied by a fantastic soundtrack. There are other games with more depth to their combat systems, and others with stronger characterisation, but when you’re playing Mystic Quest you’re unlikely to care about anything other than the engaging RPG playing out before you. While history hasn’t been kind to Mystic Quest, we’d urge you to give it another chance (or a first chance, if you’re a newcomer).

This first-person dungeon crawler felt truly revolutionary on its floppy disc debut back the in late ’80s, and was no less impressive when it appeared on the SNES a few years later. In this inescapable underground labyrinth fiendish puzzles combine with real-time combat to create a deadly dungeon filled with traps and monsters that must be defeated… and then eaten if you don’t want your team to slowly starve to death. The freeform character growth system gives players more opportunities to customise their party than many of the similar games that would follow in its footsteps, and help to make every trip through Lord Chaos’ dimly-lit halls (did we mention you have to maintain your own source of illumination, too?) feel different from the last. Sure, it’s somewhat sluggish on Nintendo’s console and really needs mouse control to feel natural, but the scope of the experience remains remarkable, even today.

There’s little doubt Nintendo’s 16-bit console was home to some of the finest RPGs of its generation, encompassing everything from thoughtful slow-burns to breathless action and everything in-between.

Whether coming to some of these fresh via Nintendo Switch Online or revisited regularly as part of a nostalgic annual ritual over the past twenty-plus years, the games we’ve chosen to highlight here – and many more on the system – are still able to satisfy and surprise even the most battle-hardened spellcaster.