8 Amazing RPGs for Time Poor Players

Role-playing games are best characterised by their rich, dense stories, huge casts of characters, and their tendency to be bloody time sinks.

As great as the recent likes of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth are, for instance, they're also designed to eat up vast swaths of your free time for weeks, even months on end, as even their critical paths require a solid 40-50 hours of your waking life.

And for many of us who are busy adults with a wealth of responsibilities, it may simply be untenable to even bother starting an RPG that long. 

Yet thankfully, not all RPGs are created equal - or equal length - and there are precious few which are a perfect fit for players with a severe limit on their gaming time.

These RPGs sacrificed nothing despite their more reasonable, pared-down play-times, delivering deeply compelling stories, unforgettable characters, and addictive gameplay inside of an experience as brief as five hours.

None of these masterful RPGs will take up more than a weekend or two of your time at absolute most, and some of them can even be beaten in a single day, believe it or not...

Let's kick this list off with an RPG basically tailor-made to be played in bite-sized chunks. 2022's remake of Square Enix's 1994 cult classic Live A Live divides itself across nine distinct chapters in which players take control of eight separate characters, with each chapter lasting two or three hours on average.

As such, it's easy to play a chapter, put the controller down, and then pick the game back up again a few days or even weeks later and not feel lost. 

For though all the disparate chapters are slyly building towards something bigger, they stand alone on their own merits as fun and fascinating little adventures.

These movie-inspired chapters span all manner of styles and tones, from Westerns to sci-fi, martial arts, and many more. 

All in all you can expect Live A Live to take you around 20 hours to beat, and there's barely an ounce of fat on the thing. 

The chapters certainly aren't created equal and you'll definitely vibe with some more than others, but even the lesser ones are over quickly enough that it's basically impossible to get bored.