10 Best Fantasy RPGs Of All Time
4. Elden Ring
From one stunning open world to another, although this time the considerably more brutal, gory, and unforgiving expanse of The Lands Between, Elden Ring stands in here for not only its own merits but that of every stunningly deep FromSoftware RPG, replete with rich RPG mechanics, a dense world that demands to be unfolded with care, and loads of stories to tell.
Sure, there’s the dying a lot bit too, but FromSoftware down to merely their difficulty is doing them an enormous disservice.
While their difficulty is a clever aid to ensure you take your time exploring as you need to constantly have your wits about you to act in the face of a treasure around a corner or, in the far more common case, a creature from your most horrific of nightmares barrelling toward you. While many games are hard simply for the sake of it or to demand players simply get better if they want to progress, Elden Ring feels like it wants you to best it. Its challenges are surmountable, and its wide open world gives you more freedom than FromSoft have ever provided their audiences to grind for levels if they so choose, or take a bold approach and go full steam ahead.
One of the biggest reasons it easily makes this list, though, is that in a day and age when most studios are terrified of alienating players, FromSoftware puts an enormous about of trust in theirs.
This is a game happy to sit back and let you work out its systems, its lore, its secrets, its combat tricks, and everything in between. It respects your skills, your freedom of playstyle, and even in many cases your discovery of hacks. Alright, sometimes those hacks get nerfed or otherwise dismantled, but these are games built to be ripped apart and put back together which explains why hundreds of devotees are still committed to doing so years after the game’s initial release.