10 SNES JRPGs Where the World Feels Like It’s Slowly Falling Apart Around the Player

3 days ago 6

Published Jun 9, 2026, 3:48 PM EDT

Daniel Trock is a Contributor at DualShockers specializing in PC games, lists, and reviews. He has been writing professionally since 2018 and covering games since 2020, with previous work spanning guides, news, lists, and reviews across multiple publications.

Before joining DualShockers, Daniel contributed guides to GamerJournalist and lists to TheGamer. He currently covers tech topics for SlashGear and BGR. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Marist College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing from Western Connecticut State University.

I could understand the assumption that, if you wanted to tell a story of apocalyptic proportions, you’d probably want something of a higher visual quality. That’s why we started getting a lot more disaster movies in the early 2000s. Even so, you can tell an appropriately apocalyptic story with nothing but 16-bit graphics, if you know what you’re doing. You just have to be a JRPG on the SNES.

The SNES was a veritable incubator of the JRPG genre, with both improved processing power and visual quality over the NES days that allowed games to tell more elaborate, compelling stories. Such stories, on occasion, included scenarios where the entire world is literally coming to an end with cataclysmic destruction ravaging the planet, or at least metaphorically coming to an end with everything getting weird and unstable and people going buck-wild and vicious. Even if these games can’t render said apocalyptic events in full 3D, it doesn’t diminish their overall impact.

Spoilers for the following games ahead!

10 Secret of Evermore

Time to Wake Up

Throughout the course of mildly obscure action JRPG Secret of Evermore, our young hero and his dog traverse a series of seemingly independent worlds reminiscent of both periods in history and certain movie tropes, all after getting caught up in a weird device in an abandoned mansion. All of these worlds are representations of different utopias dreamed up by a handful of other people who have gotten trapped in this wild expanse.

Putting aside just how in over his head our young lad is in all this, being trapped in Evermore and its sub-worlds puts him at the mercy of a legion of evil robots, headed up by a germophobic robotic butler who would very much like to destroy Evermore and everyone inhabiting it. This entire fabricated world could fall apart at any time, especially after that butler guy is defeated, and the entire place starts to become unstable. This is why you don’t make a virtual world and try to live in it. It never works out.

9 Illusion of Gaia

Just Look Up

Will, the protagonist of Illusion of Gaia, has had an unpleasant life so far. He and his father went on an expedition to uncover the secrets of the Tower of Babel, but then something horrible happened and killed his father and their crew, and Will, despite being the only survivor, can’t remember what happened. This is all before he gets a vision of a giant comet screaming toward the planet. When it rains, it pours.

It turns out that this comet isn’t actually a comet at all, but an ancient weapon that can shape and inhibit the evolution of the world and its denizens. Apparently, the reason why the world is so weird and fantastical right now is because of the comet’s influence, which is what makes the game’s ending so bittersweet: even though Will ultimately succeeds in stopping the comet, doing so causes reality to return to normal, which completely erases all traces of his adventure and the relationships he forged. It’s a rather more literal example of the world falling apart, and in more ways than one.

8 Terranigma

Washed Away

The setting of Terranigma is a two-sided planet, one with a flourishing civilization on the surface and a declining civilization on the flip side beneath. Before the start of the story, a big war in Antarctica completely floods the surface and seals away the underside, so needless to say, we’re starting with a bit of a rigged deck here.

Things only get worse as our hero, Ark, a denizen of the only remaining village in the underworld, accidentally unleashes a curse that freezes all the other villagers, and his only recourse is to restore to continents of the surface to break it. Ark does good work gradually restoring the surface and its residents, but things come to a screeching halt when he revives a mad scientist from cryo-sleep who wants to turn all of humanity into immortal zombies, and gets pummeled to the point of near-death. Yeah, it turns out this was all an elaborate ruse by a dark god who wanted the planet revived so it could be conquered. Whoops.

7 Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen

Things are Bad, Let’s Make ‘em Worse!

Ogre Battle March of the Black Queen gameplay

Ogre Battle: The March Of The Black Queen

Prior to the events of Ogre Battle’s story, the five kingdoms that shared rulership of the land were gradually subsumed by the dark magic of the newly-formed Zetegenian Empire, which then goes on to rule the world with a cruel iron fist. Our only hope is the hero and their allies in the Liberation Army, of whom they’ve just assumed command.

To their credit, the army does a pretty good job with the whole liberation thing, gradually beating back the Zetegenian Empire. When the imperial family is successfully defeated, however, the evil sage guy who facilitated their rise runs one last dark ritual to summon an all-powerful demon lord, who’s all queued up to wreck the world all over again. Even if the hero successfully defeats the demon lord, depending on the choices you made during the game, you could end up with an even worse empire in place. Just because the world’s falling apart around you doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from it, I guess.

6 Dragon Quest V

Maybe Not The World, But Certainly Your World

Compared to most Dragon Quest games, which involve a chosen hero battling some manner of demon lord, Dragon Quest V was a big departure, in that it focused on the entire lifespan of a protagonist as they gradually find their place in the wider schemes of powerful entities. To say this protagonist has a rough go of things along the way would be an understatement.

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Things start innocently enough with the protagonist and their father on a treasure-hunting, globe-trotting adventure, but after a little bit of this and that, their father is killed, and the protagonist is sold into slavery, where they toil for ten whole years. The protagonist does manage to escape eventually, and manages to secure both a spot on a kingdom’s throne and a wife, but right after having kids, both he and his wife are turned to stone for another eight years. His grown kids eventually free him (meaning he missed a big chunk of their upbringing), but they still have to defeat the local bad guy to un-curse his wife. It may not be a quest of Earth-ending proportions, but it’s a lot of small, personal tragedies that would wear on a person over time.

5 Secret of Mana

Oops, Broke the Tree

Secret of Mana, like many fantasy stories, begins with a lad pulling an old sword out of a stone. Rather than being crowned King of England, though, the poor lad is banished from his village for causing a supposed bad omen, and it only gets worse from there.

Our hero attempts to reinvigorate the sword by visiting the Mana Temples and getting a whiff from their enshrined Mana Seeds, but at the same time, the Imperial forces pursuing him also manage to unseal the Mana Seeds and unleash the ancient Mana Fortress, which then gets taken over by the malevolent sorcerer Thanatos. Even when the hero tries to visit the Mana Tree to do something, the Mana Fortress just nukes the thing from the sky, which not only destabilizes the flow of Mana, but it also unleashes an enormous monster that will completely destroy the world if left unchecked. Maybe we should’ve just left that sword where it was, yeah?

4 Shin Megami Tensei

Apocalyptic Scenarios are a Series Staple

If you’ve played enough Shin Megami Tensei games, you know that a world-ending event isn’t a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. It makes sense; you don’t usually get a war of angels and demons on Earth unless something has gone really wrong. Naturally, the first example of this was the very first Shin Megami Tensei on the Super Famicom.

Shin Megami Tensei is more or less a nonstop sequence of Biblical-level apocalypse events. Demons and angels emerge in Tokyo, the U.S. launches ICBMs at Japan, the party gets catapulted 30 years into the future where everything is in ruins, a literal flood comes and wipes away most of the city, and at the end of it all, assuming you didn’t go for the Neutral route, either God’s messenger or Lucifer are summoned and the course of humanity’s entire existence is inexorably changed forever. It’s a lot for one teenager to endure, frankly.

3 Earthbound

The World’s Getting Weirder

As Buzz-Buzz explains at the start of Earthbound’s story, ten years ahead of the game, the all-powerful alien Giygas will attack the Earth, with his virulent psychic malice driving people, animals, and even objects mad with rage and hatred. The entire reason Buzz-Buzz came to Ness in the relative past was to prevent this from happening in a state when Giygas is weaker, but even ten years out from his emergence, things are already getting weird.

Throughout Eagleland, bizarre phenomena are already beginning to manifest. It starts simply enough with angry wild animals, but it gradually worsens as the game goes on, with people becoming erratic and hostile and inanimate objects springing to life with malicious intent. Even with Earthbound’s signature off-kilter vibe, you get the very distinct impression that something is going wrong here, that you’re battling against a veritable force of nature slowly consuming the world. This is proven all too true when the party has to abandon their bodies to time travel to the past and confront Giygas, who becomes a force of evil so powerful, they can’t even comprehend his attacks.

2 Final Fantasy VI

What Happens When Kefka Gets Bored

I think I could count the number of times a story about creating super soldiers has ended well for the world on one hand. It’s a consistently bad idea for all involved parties, but powerful fictional organizations just can’t seem to stop doing it. Take, for example, the oddly compelling Kefka of Final Fantasy VI, and what he ends up doing as the court mage of the Gestahl Empire.

Things are already pretty nasty from the outset of the game’s story, with the Empire ruling with an iron fist and forcefully creating Magitek Soldiers like Kefka. Despite the best efforts of Terra and the Returners, the Empire always seems hot on their tail with Kefka at the forefront. This culminates in Kefka, after murdering the Emperor, futzing with the very balance of power and magic in the entire world, which not only decisively throws the very fabric of reality of whack, but also completely wrecks the majority of the planet’s surface. We even get a one-year time skip after this to show just how bad things get with Kefka in the seat of power, and that’s before he gears up to wipe out existence itself.

1 Chrono Trigger

In More Ways than One!

You may assume that, if a story is going to have an apocalyptic scenario, it’s going to be exactly one apocalyptic scenario. It’s gonna be bad, but at least you have a good idea of what's in store. However, when you introduce time travel into the equation, as in Chrono Trigger, not only can those apocalyptic scenarios get even worse, but multiple apocalypses can begin to converge upon one another. It’s known as one of the most ambitious SNES JRPGs for a reason.

For most of Chrono Trigger’s story, the primary looming doomsday scenario is the emergence of Lavos in 1999 A.D. The big guy pops right out of the ground and completely wrecks everything, leading to the blown-out future Crono and company visit. However, while Lavos’s emergence is a looming problem, it’s also a separate component of a completely different problem, that being the rise of Queen Zeal in the former Ocean Palace as the Black Omen, floating ominously in the sky across all time periods post-Prehistory. Even as the party travels through time to prepare for the worst-case scenario, it’s always floating there, an inevitable reminder of both Lavos’ emergence and the power Queen Zeal will draw from it.