There’s a genre called the tactical RPG, or strategy RPG (SRPG). You move units across a grid, read your opponent’s next move, and build a plan around it. It delivers a kind of “cerebral pleasure” that action games just can’t. Classics like Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre have built up a long…

“Died on B2. Turned to ash. Didn’t even leave a tombstone behind.” Wizardry is the holy ground you only reach if you can take a sentence like that as a reward. More than forty years have passed since the original was born on the Apple II in 1981, and the veterans who’ve been baptized by…

Mystery Dungeon is built on one very specific flavor of dread: game over means every item you were carrying is gone, and you walk right back down into the dungeon anyway. It started with Torneko’s Great Adventure in 1993, then branched off into Shiren, Chocobo, Pokémon, Etrian and beyond, racking up more than 23 million…

Nearly 40 years after its 1987 debut, Street Fighter remains the gold standard of the genre — the fighting game series players all over the world keep coming back to. The series has shipped more than 55.5 million copies (as of fiscal 2023). Words like “Hadoken” and “Shoryuken” have soaked so deeply into pop culture…

The worlds are all secretly connected. The story goes to some genuinely dark places. The music is on another level entirely. If you’ve heard the reputation but keep wondering “where am I even supposed to start?” — you’re not alone. The Drakengard and NieR series form a lineage of dark action RPGs stretching back to…

“Which Resident Evil should I start with?” — it’s the question that stops so many players dead in their tracks when facing this legendary 30-year series. Since the original launched in 1996, there have been more than 10 mainline entries alone, and once you count remakes and spin-offs, you’re looking at nearly 20 games. The…

When you hear the phrase “wacky game,” what comes to mind? Off-the-wall premises, gameplay that ignores reality entirely, the kind of game that makes you yell “who on earth came up with this?” the second you put the controller down. That’s the magic of a truly goofy game. Drawing on more than 20 years of…