10 JRPGs That Deserve a Place in the World Video Game Hall of Fame

The World Video Game Hall of Fame has been running since 2015, and it does important work. Dragon Quest finally made it in 2026, which is great and long overdue. It lives amongst some fierce competition, like Final Fantasy VII. But the JRPG genre is still massively underrepresented for what it has contributed to gaming history, and I want to make the case for ten games that should have been part of this conversation a long time ago.

The Hall judges four criteria: icon status, longevity, geographical reach, and influence. Every game below clears all fours. Some of them clear them embarrassingly easily. If it was up to me, these are the ten titles I would present to the judges.

10 Dragon Slayer

The Game That Invented the Action RPG and Nobody Talks About It

Dragon Slayer came out in 1984, blended real-time combat with role-playing progression, and is directly credited with inventing the Action RPG genre. Its item management and block-pushing puzzle mechanics directly influenced The Legend of Zelda. The Legend of Heroes/Trails series – one of the most beloved interconnected JRPG franchises running today – started as a Dragon Slayer spin-off.

Most people have never heard of it, which is the exact reason it belongs in the Hall of Fame. It made possible an enormous amount of what came after it, and it gets almost no credit for that. The Hall inducted Ultima for being the Western RPG template. Dragon Slayer is the Eastern equivalent. It should have been in there years ago.

9 Chrono Trigger

The Dream Team Made Something Impossible to Argue Against

Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, and Akira Toriyama in one room. Yasunori Mitsuda composing the soundtrack – who, incidentally, had to be hospitalized with stomach ulcers from overwork, lost significant music data to a hard drive crash, and still produced one of the best game soundtracks ever made, with Nobuo Uematsu stepping in to help finish it. A team of 50 to 60 people making something that still tops best JRPG lists thirty years later.

Chrono Trigger famously introduced New Game Plus to the genre and multiple true endings tied to player decisions throughout the game. Sakaguchi himself described wanting even the smallest changes in player behavior to create subtle differences in how the world responded. The game delivered on that. It is 1995. It is still the benchmark. The fact that it is not in the Hall of Fame is the most baffling gap in the whole thing, and I will keep saying that.

8 Earthbound

It Became a Cultural Touchstone Despite Being Nearly Impossible to Play

Earthbound spent years being almost impossible to legally play outside of Japan, and it still became one of the most discussed and beloved RPGs in history by pure word of mouth. That alone should tell you something. Shigeru Miyamoto is credited in the game under the alias "M.D. Seeger" for providing rock guitar sound effects. Bootleg copies triggered a legendary anti-piracy measure that would freeze the game at the final boss and wipe your save file, forcing a full restart. The world is entirely seamless with no overworld map, which was genuinely unusual for the era.

Its influence on indie gaming is direct and enormous – Undertale, LISA, OMORI all trace a clear line back to it. It shaped what an entire generation of developers believed games could do and say. Nintendo Switch Online has now made it accessible globally. There is no longer any argument against it being in the Hall.

7 Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei

It Pioneered Monster Collecting Before Pokémon Existed

The original Megami Tensei came out in 1987, adapted from Aya Nishitani's sci-fi and occult novel trilogy, and it introduced demon negotiation, demon fusion, and alignment systems to the RPG genre. Before Pokémon. Before any of the monster-collecting games people associate with those mechanics. The Cathedral of Shadows fusion system, the Law versus Chaos philosophical framework, the urban occult setting where demons are summoned via a high schooler's computer program – all of it starts here.

The series stayed Japan-exclusive for years due to the Satanic panic of the 1980s, which limited its Western reach at the time. The Persona series – which has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide – would not exist without it. Shin Megami Tensei would not exist without it. This is as foundational as it gets.

6 Fire Emblem: Awakening

It Saved a Franchise, Then Redefined It

Nintendo has said publicly that Awakening was going to be the last Fire Emblem game if it didn't sell. It sold. Casual Mode removed the most intimidating feature of the series and opened it to a new audience. The romance and marriage system spread it further. The marketing leaned on Marth and Ike being already recognizable from Smash Bros., and later added Robin and Lucina to that roster. It came out a year into the 3DS lifecycle, when a large audience had their systems and were hungry for games.

The result was the best-selling Fire Emblem game at the time and a franchise that went from near-cancellation to global phenomenon. Three Houses followed the same playbook – release to a hungry audience mid-console-cycle – and became another massive hit. But Awakening is where the turning point happened. That deserves recognition.

5 Persona 3

The Persona Phenomenon Started Here

The social link system, the dual structure of dungeon crawling at night and daily life during the day, the calendar mechanics, the Evoker guns, the story set precisely at the stroke of midnight – Persona 3 built the formula that Persona 4 and Persona 5 would carry to global success. Without this game, neither of those games exists in the form that made Persona a household name.

What I love about it beyond the mechanics is the cast dynamic. These people are forced to live together because of the circumstances they're in, and they don't all get along, and that feels real in a way the series hasn't always managed to replicate since. Mitsuru and Yukari are some of the best-written female characters in the entire franchise. The themes – mortality, finding meaning in a finite life – are handled with a seriousness that was unusual for the genre then and remains unusual now. The Reload remake in 2024 reminded a new generation why. It belongs in the Hall of Fame.

4 Final Fantasy X

The First Time Final Fantasy Felt Like a Movie

Final Fantasy X was the first game in the series with full voice acting, the first on PlayStation 2, and the first to introduce the CTB system – a visible turn order that showed you exactly when every character and enemy would act, which influenced the design of turn-based JRPGs for years after. The Sphere Grid replaced standard leveling with a board you navigated manually. You could hot-swap party members mid-battle based on the enemy type, which made every member of the roster relevant.

It was also the first Final Fantasy to get a direct sequel, which tells you how significant the impact was. The world of Spira tackled religious dogmatism, institutional control, and the cyclical nature of grief and death in ways that made it genuinely unusual for a mainstream RPG. It has sold over 21 million copies across all versions. Final Fantasy VII is already in the Hall. Final Fantasy X belongs there too.

3 NieR: Automata

Square Enix Thought It Would Sell 300,000 Copies

Executives at Square Enix projected 300,000 global sales. Yoko Taro threatened to walk away from the company if they didn't greenlight it. It has sold over 10 million copies. That gap between expectation and reality is one of the most remarkable in gaming history, and it happened because NieR: Automata turned out to be something extraordinary.

26 endings labeled A through Z. The main five are full story routes, each recontextualizing what came before. The rest range from genuinely moving to completely absurd – one ends because you ate a poisonous fish, another because you abandoned your mission too early.

NieR: Automata was built on a tight budget, reusing assets creatively, developed in just over two years. The predominantly black and white character designs came from Akihiko Yoshida joining the project late and having limited direction from Taro, which turned out to be a happy accident. The soundtrack is a standalone listening experience. It sold ten times what was expected. It's not in the Hall of Fame. It should be.

2 Kingdom Hearts

The Crossover That Nobody Believed In and Everyone Fell For

Before Kingdom Hearts, the idea of a major cross-studio crossover between two wildly different corporate entities was essentially unheard of. Tetsuya Nomura made it work by treating both properties with total sincerity – this is not a game that winks at the audience. It commits completely, and that commitment is why it landed.

It pushed Square toward fluid real-time action combat at a time when most of their games were still turn-based. It showed that mainstream pop – Hikaru Utada's theme songs – could genuinely elevate a game's emotional impact. Yoko Shimomura's score integrated classic Disney themes with original compositions in a way that became one of the most recognizable soundtracks in gaming. "Dearly Beloved" shaped a generation of players in a way that is hard to fully explain to people who weren't there for it. Over 35 million copies sold. Not in the Hall of Fame. Fix that.

1 Suikoden

108 Stars, a Castle That Grows, and Influence That's Still Being Felt

Suikoden came out in 1995 and introduced a recruitment mechanic where gathering all 108 Stars of Destiny – everyone from famous generals to simple washerwomen – built a functioning castle headquarters that expanded and changed as your roster grew. Duels. Tactical army battles. A political narrative built on corruption and the moral ambiguity of war that critics have compared to Game of Thrones in its complexity and willingness to not offer easy answers.

Warren Spector, the designer of Deus Ex, has cited the original Suikoden as one of his favorite games of all time, specifically for how it provided limited choices that still fostered meaningful player decisions. That influence is traceable and real. Eiyuden Chronicle arrived as a spiritual successor and reminded a new generation why the original mattered. Interest in Suikoden is higher right now than it has been in years, and there has never been a better time for the Hall of Fame to finally acknowledge what it built.