Many of the best RPG titles are refinements of lessons learned from hundreds of trials and errors. They take an established formula, execute it with more ambition than their predecessors, and occasionally cement their names in history. These become the new benchmark, and often without admitting it, other studios will copy their blueprints and methodologies; after all, every work has its inspiration.In this article, we attempt to follow a chronology: evaluating the ten RPGs that most defined the genre in gaming and how each influenced the industry in the following decades. From the first dungeon crawler with Wizardry to the gacha phenomenon Genshin Impact.Wizardry (1981)Before there was JRPG, there was a group of Cornell students recreating Dungeons & Dragons on a computer terminal. Wizardry, developed by Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead, established the skeleton that practically every Japanese RPG of the 1980s and 1990s would use: character creation by class and race, party formation with front and back lines, first‑person dungeons navigated by coordinates, and the anguish of losing a character forever due to carelessness.Wizardry was never a hit in the West, but its relevance is indispensable for understanding how we got to modern works. Yuji Horii and Hironobu Sakaguchi were influenced by the title before creating, respectively, Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, which recycle terms and even menu structures from the American work. Without Wizardry, the vocabulary and mechanics still present in RPG roots today would never have left the drawing board.Dragon Quest (1986)Yuji Horii's genius with Dragon Quest was to take the complexity of its predecessors, Wizardry and Ultima, and simplify it to fit into an eight‑year‑old's head. Combat abandoned the poorly translated formulas of tabletop RPGs, the world was viewed from above rather than through dungeons and labyrinths, and the player only needed to manage one character instead of an entire party.Dragon Quest made RPGs more intuitive and became a cultural phenomenon in the process. Combined with Akira Toriyama's character design, the franchise created lines in front of Japanese stores on each sequel's release day, to the point where the company asked Nintendo to move the release to the weekend due to the high number of school absences recorded when Dragon Quest III launched on a Thursday.Chrono Trigger (1995)Sakaguchi as producer, Horii writing the script, Toriyama designing the characters, Nobuo Uematsu composing the soundtrack. Chrono Trigger was a work created by a true dream team and broke away from the patterns of its predecessors, creating structures that would only become widespread decades later.It eliminated random encounters, introduced multiple meaningful endings accessible through New Game Plus, introduced a system of temporal consequences that gave players some sense of agency based on how they completed certain subplots, killed the protagonist in the middle of the game, and gave players the freedom to decide whether to revive him or finish the title without the hero.Chrono Trigger was far ahead of its time and managed to make so many bold choices while still being one of Square's biggest commercial successes. To this day, many call it the "greatest RPG of all time."Final Fantasy VII (1997)The RPG that brought RPGs into the mainstream... and did so without saying it was an RPG. Final Fantasy VII's marketing budget was unprecedented. The title had TV commercials in the United States, graced magazine after magazine before even reaching shelves, and rode the wave of anime's rise in the West to become a global phenomenon.All of this without mentioning its most memorable moment, compared by journalists to the "Luke, I am your father!" of video games. The RPG would never have left the niche of just a few enthusiasts without it. Since then, hundreds of RPGs have tried to replicate the formula. Just look at how many protagonists with giant swords and messy hair emerged in the following years. None were able to take FFVII's crown, and today, fans of all generations await the conclusion of its episodic Remake, whose systems could shape what Final Fantasy becomes in the next decade.Diablo (1996)With Diablo, Blizzard North took a genre that was theoretically dead in the first half of the 1990s and turned it into an entirely new subgenre. The dungeon‑crawling structure was compressed into a loop of clicking, killing, looting, and repeating that became a craze among players and a wave of moral panic for their religious parents.Its innovations, however, did not stop at creating a new way to play RPGs. The color‑coded item rarity system, which now appears in hundreds of games across multiple genres, was popularized here. Online multiplayer support via Battle.net anticipated the service model that would dominate the industry. Diablo was the predecessor of numerous elements that today form the essence of a billion‑dollar Action RPG niche, which now ranges from Path of Exile to Genshin Impact.Baldur's Gate (1998)By the mid‑1990s, the computer market seemed to have abandoned traditional CRPGs, but where Diablo created a subgenre on top of it, BioWare helped revitalize the genre using the Dungeons & Dragons license — a title that, seventeen years earlier, had inspired Wizardry and started it all — to create Baldur's Gate.The title brought companions full of personality and a dense, rewarding isometric world for those who enjoyed exploring, all without relying on impressive graphics, while also revitalizing the genre's combat with immersive real‑time tactics. Without Baldur's Gate, CRPGs would likely have fallen into obscurity and become a dead, dated genre.World of Warcraft (2004)MMORPGs existed before World of Warcraft, but it was Blizzard who developed the formula that stopped punishing any player without dozens of free hours per week and made it accessible to the public. The title introduced the quest hub loop, with experience curves designed to provide a constant sense of progress and endgame content organized by increasing difficulty, which became the standard that every title released after 2004 either draws inspiration from or tries to copy.In 2010, the title peaked at 12 million subscribers, driven by the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion in China. That number was a signal to the industry of just how much online genres could still expand, both in China and the West.Dark Souls (2011)Dark Souls defined a design philosophy that would become its own genre, to the point where "soulslike" now describes games that are not even considered RPGs. Difficulty became the central focus, and defeat became not a sign of seeing a game over screen, but of losing progress and needing to restart the path to the enemy or boss that defeated you.The Souls series and its successors also popularized a narrative and storytelling model that does not rely on dialogue, but on details like item descriptions and the architecture of a specific region, requiring players to piece together the puzzle and reconstruct the world's history as an act of interpretation and collective discussion on forums and social media.Genshin Impact (2020)It seemed financially impossible to produce an open‑world RPG with AAA production quality and distribute it for free, monetizing through a character summoning system. MiHoYo, now HoYoverse, made this miracle happen with Genshin Impact and practically changed how the entire industry views games.The title proved it was possible to compete visually and financially with traditional console games, and the rest of the industry followed, establishing direct competitors like Wuthering Waves, or hundreds of failed attempts to create their own gacha that end up shutting down months later because they did not understand what makes Genshin Impact so special to its target audience: the world, the characters, and above all, the social engagement with packed events and lines stretching for blocks at booths.Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025)Turn‑based combat was considered dead and dated for over a decade, despite franchises like Persona and Dragon Quest still using it today. In times when freely moving the character is seen as essential, menu‑based combat often feels like a tedious simulation of numbers, and the system itself would need to reinvent itself.No one expected, however, that the reinvention would come from a small French studio, formed by former Ubisoft employees. Sandfall Interactive released Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 almost as a love letter to the games that inspired them to create games, and presented the world with a more interactive model of turn‑based combat through Quick‑Time Events for dodging and blocking attacks, placing this mechanic at the core of combat.QTEs in turn‑based RPGs are not new. Legend of Dragoon and the Mario RPG series had already experimented with button timing in attacks over two decades earlier. Placing this interaction on defense, however, means that not paying attention inevitably leads to defeat by the enemy. The mechanic transforms combat into a game of reading movements, capturing visual or audio cues to understand when to press a button and which one to press, especially at higher difficulty levels.Expedition 33 returned agency to turn‑based RPGs, placing the player in a role in every combat where, even if it is a trivial battle involving a few menu presses, they still need to be ready to dodge and counterattack.Wrapping UpMany titles are missing from this list. Ultima, Mass Effect, The Witcher 3, Persona 5, and Baldur's Gate 3 all have legitimate arguments to occupy one of these ten spots. The genre is constantly evolving, and the next chapters of this story are still being written, whether through episodic remakes, the first title from an independent studio no one was watching, or perhaps through a title we do not yet know about that will revolutionize how we appreciate a good electronic RPG.Thanks for reading!
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