When someone says they don’t enjoy role-playing games, it’s hard to blame them. Between statistics, keeping track of abilities, long-sprawling stories often with similar medieval settings, they can appear tedious. Who has time for that these days?
While those may be some cornerstone classifications of typical RPGs, there are plenty more options available that break those traditions. So, if you want to give RPGs a try without being weighed down by all the baggage of tradition, here are some that might work for you.
5
Jade Empire
For the early part of their existence, Bioware was famous for hardcore RPGs; their games were literally set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. It wasn’t until they traded D&D’s traditional swords and wizards for Star Wars’ sci-fi that things began to change with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. But that was only the beginning.
Bioware finally created a world of their own with Jade Empire, and it was unlike anything ever seen before in the genre. It was less Excalibur and more Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with real-time martial arts combat replacing the staid turn-based battles that even KOTOR implemented.
It’s the studio being let loose without restrictions for the first time, and the result is a game that goes against the tropes of an RPG even more than the original Mass Effect did.
4
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Nintendo’s legendary mascot Mario, best known for his platforming adventures, first entered the RPG world during the 16-bit era in the most suitable way: a Final Fantasy-style SquareSoft RPG. While Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars seemed like an anomaly then, it led to two of Nintendo’s most beloved franchises: Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario.
While most of the titles in either series are pretty good, none strike that balance between “traditional RPG” and your typical super-accessible Mario game quite like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.
Unlike the perception of most RPGs, The Thousand-Year Door is not overly complicated—you’re not going to be punished for not paying hyper-focused attention to Mario’s stats. You’ll probably be too busy laughing at how downright hilarious the game is. The writing is genuinely funny and still holds up even now. Plus, it’s only about 31 hours for the main campaign, and more importantly, it’s fun.
3
Stardew Valley
ConcernedApe’s Stardew Valley is another title you may have passed on due to its reputation of not being an RPG, but a farming sim. To be fair, people playing it in the hopes of experiencing a modern version of Harvest Moon will certainly find a lot to like. It’s just that there’s so much more to it.
Stardew Valley is a farming sim if you want it to be. It can also be a fishing sim, a cooking sim, a dungeon crawler, or a dating simulator. It legitimately is whatever you want it to be. There are RPG elements, but they come into play in the background. All you need to do is focus on the aspects of the game you like the most, and Stardew Valley does the rest.
On top of that, between the regular (and free) official updates and the thousands of mods available online, you could conceivably be playing Stardew Valley for years and always find something new. And if you get tired of it and step away for a while, it’s easy to pick up where you left off. So, there’s no pressure to remember anything or to plow through a campaign; just your fields if you want.
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2
Middle-Earth: Shadow of War
This entry is particularly fun, as Shadow of War isn’t just an RPG for people who don’t like RPGs; it can also be considered a Lord of the Rings game for people who don’t necessarily like Lord of the Rings.
There are plenty of RPG elements in Shadow of War—you need to allocate ability points and upgrade your weapons and armor. But since you’ll be killing orcs, which helps you upgrade your weapons, you’ll be having too much fun to notice. With a combat system adapted from the Batman Arkham games, and a few Assassin’s Creed elements, the gameplay is addicting.
As for the story? Let’s just say you don’t need to be a Tolkien scholar to get into it. The real story is in the gameplay and the nemesis system, which allows you to hunt down and get revenge on any enemy in the game that kills you.
1
Pokémon Legends: Arceus
If there’s any franchise that really popularized the RPG for the masses, it’s not Final Fantasy. It’s Pokémon. All the elements are there: turn-based battles, levelling up, that sort of thing. Much like Stardew Valley, if you’ve been playing the Pokémon games all this time, you’ve been playing RPGs. Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus takes the long-established Pokémon formula, however, and even mixes that up. You take the role of a modern-day Pokémon trainer who is sent back in time to the days before being a Pokémon trainer was even a thing. This means that even if you only have a passing familiarity with the series, you automatically know more about Pokémon than anyone else in the game.
It’s also the first game in the series—short of Pokémon GO, anyway—that lets players explore an area and catch the little monsters simply by throwing a Pokéball at them. There are plenty of traditional battles and everything else you’d expect from a game in the series, but it’s also a real breath of fresh air, too. Plus, its main campaign is only around 25 hours.
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Will any of these five games turn you into a hardcore RPG fan? You never know. They may just encourage you to give the genre more of a chance in the future. After all, there are a lot of them to choose from.
