PlayStationhas always been the go-to console for big-budget, large-scale,story-richRPGswith tons and tons of content. If it’s a big enough game, it’s coming to PlayStation (unless you’re Nintendo, of course). And the PS5 is the best that PlayStation has been in a long while, and the catalog for games to choose from is larger than ever.
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Games that fall under the umbrella of RPGs are incredibly diverse, fromlarge, open worldsto top-down,turn-based gamestobite-sized indie titlesand niche gems. If the RPG genre is lacking in anything, it’s not variety. This means when deciding on the list of the best PS5 RPGs of all time, we were spoiled for choice. And after a lot of deliberation and quite a bit of second-guessing, here we are. Only games that were released in some form or the otheron thePS5qualify.Games released only on the PS4 didn’t make the cut.
10Octopath Traveler 2
16-bit Nostalgia Goodness
Octopath Traveler 2continues the tradition of itspredecessorand elevates the formula that worked so well in the previous game to new heights. Both Octopath games let the players play as one of eight starting characters (Octo in Octopath=8) to start their journey. You’ll eventually be able to recruit the rest of the eight to your party as well and continue the story together, but the main character you choose will remain a permanent fixture of the party.
The nod to Super NES-era 16-bit JRPGs is just as unmistakable in Octopath Traveler 2 as it was in the first one…
The nod toSuper NES-era 16-bitJRPGsis just as unmistakable in Octopath Traveler 2 as it was in the first one, but with more polish, better implementation, and a new story of eight characters to experience. For combat, the developers followed the rule of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and went with exactly what worked the last time: turn-based standardJRPG fare. It’s not a bad thing by any means, but if you’re familiar with the original game and its combat, be prepared for more of the same.
Octopath Traveler 2
9Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Infinitely Fun
TheYakuza serieshas always been a cult classic with a dedicated fan base, but withYakuza: Like A Dragon,Ryu Ga Gotokuplaced itself firmly in the limelight. The shift to turn-based combat was inspired, and changing the protagonist fromKiryu to Kasugaserved as an excellent entry point for players completely new to Yakuza, allowing it to be the most accessible the series has ever been.
Infinite Wealth is everything you’d expect from a Yakuza game: absurdly funny, deadly serious, and gut-wrenchingly sad at the same time.
Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealthtakes what its predecessor was and dials it up to eleven — a better story, a completely new map on top of multiple old ones, and so much side content you could sink dozens of hours into a single mini-game and still have stuff left to do. Completing theDondoko Islandcontent can easily take up to 12 hours on its own. On top of that, you get over 20 jobs, each with its own set of skills, weapons, buffs, and outfits to explore. Infinite Wealth is everything you’d expect from a Yakuza game: absurdly funny, deadly serious, and gut-wrenchingly sad at the same time. All with so much care and effort put into it that you’re able to’t help but fall in love with it at every turn.
Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth
A Bloody Good Time
Diabloplayers only want two things: a literal mountain of loot to drown in and an uncountable number of builds with which to bash some monster heads. Combined, this is lightning in a bottle, andDiablo 4nearly managed to catch it. The world of Diablo hasnever looked as good and as macabre as it is in Diablo 4. The choices for what type of character you want to be are myriad, each more than viable to tackle the in-game content if you’re not deliberately shooting yourself in the foot.
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Take away all talk of end-game content and the live-service nature of the game, and even the biggest detractors of Diablo 4 can agree that the journey to the end game is engaging, fun, and spellbinding. The lore, the gameplay, the build options — and most of all the loot — are everything anARPGfan could ask for and more. But eventually, the live-service seasonal content is going to rear its ugly head to spoil a bit of the fun. My advice to anyone thinking of jumping into Diablo 4 would be to take it as a single-player campaign experience. Sink 100 hours into the game, explore what there is to explore, fight whatever there is to fight, and when you reach the end game and start to chafe under the season pass model, leave. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but there it is.
7Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade
FF7’s Remarkable Reimagining
The nomenclature can be confusing as theFinal Fantasygames are notorious for being rehashed and revamped multiple times and released as separate instances. But to break it down,Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade(2021) is the definitive version of theFF7 Remake(2020) experience, which was a remake of the originalFF7(1997). Intergrade is a beefed-up version of the Remake, which covers the first part of the original FF7’s story.
Where Intergrade shines especially bright is the Materia system that lets you customize your characters and create builds to tackle combat in different ways.
As far as upgrades go, FF7 Intergrade is one of the best at what it does — offering polish, gameplay improvements, balance changes, and even adding Yuffie’s journey in the Intermission DLC that’s happening parallel to Cloud’s struggles in the game. Where Intergrade shines especially bright is theMateria systemthat lets you customize your characters and create builds to tackle combat in different ways. The action combat mixed with turn-based mechanics works brilliantly and feels like the dawn of a new combat style in these types of games. Intergrade is the complete package with a solid 30-40 hours of gameplay for new and returning players to sink their teeth into.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade
6Disco Elysium: The Final Cut
Text-based Detective Absurdity
Disco Elysiumis a different flavor of RPG compared to everything else on this list. A text-baseddetective role-playing game, Disco Elysium puts you in the shoes of an amnesiac cop who needs to solve a seemingly simple murder mystery. The game offers twists at every turn and mind-bending, completely out-of-the-blue narratives sprinkled in to muddy the waters. It starts off simple but gets progressively more and more complex as time goes on, and you start losing track of what’s really going on. Added on top of that is a robust, unforgiving role-playing system where you level up your detective’s attributes to figure out what’s really going on in the game. Disco Elysium isn’t afraid of hiding information, and you’ll be constantly reminded of the fact when your character fails the equivalent of a perception check.
Good, Evil, cheesy, witty, strange, and everything in between is on the table in Disco Elysium, and it only gets better from there.
Where Disco Elysium truly shines is in its choices. True, the mind-bending stuff is pretty neat, but if the game was just about subverting expectations, it would not be as good of a title as it is. At every opportunity, in response to every question, you’ll be faced with the choice of what to say. The game lets you, no, encourages you to choose whatyouwant your character to say and then evolves to adapt. Good, Evil, cheesy, witty, strange, and everything in between is on the table in Disco Elysium, and it only gets better from there.
Disco Elysium
5The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition
The Most Expansive DLC Storylines Out There
No RPG list would be complete without mentioningThe Witcher 3, the best action-adventure fantasy role-playing game that’s been released in recent memory. Geralt is an enigmatic protagonist against the backdrop of a dark fantasy open world that’s as brutal and unforgiving as they come. Stunning graphical fidelity aside, the main pull of the game is the story itself. A dark tale with no good guys, constant conflict, and choices in every shade of gray. The Bloody Baron questline remains one of the most gut-wrenching stories I’ve ever experienced in a video game.
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The third-person combat can be customized and honed with skill points to specialize in either Witcher magic or straight swordplay. The gear and weapon system is extensive, incentivizing exploration at every turn and rewarding completionists with better gear. Altogether, it’s a complete, polished experience with tons to offer and dozens of hours of gameplay.The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Editionwas released on the PS5 in 2022 with the base game, two major DLCs, and a bunch of small stuff thrown in to sweeten the deal.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
4Persona 5 Royal
The Perfect JRPG
Remastering a game can be hit or miss, often with more misses than hits. An ideal remaster should be a second go at an already great game, fixing small frustrations, adding quality of life changes, making balance changes, and improving every single thing in some way, shape, or form to give players a completely fresh experience in a familiar world. And that’s exactly whatPersona 5 Royalis.
Persona 5 Royal is the closest thing to a perfect JRPG in recent memory.
The originalPersona 5was already an excellent game, but Persona 5 Royal is the closest thing to a perfect JRPG. Anything and everything that players hada complaint about in Persona 5 was fixed in P5R, elevating the game to a new level. Deliciously in-depth turn-based combat, engaging slice-of-life segments, and a story with rich, nuanced characters are what Persona 5 Royal has to offer. And all of that in a package so well put together you could never find the seams if you tried. It also serves as an excellent entry point into the Persona universe, asit’s one of the most accessible titles in the series. And I haven’t even touched on the incredible music! If you haven’t played it, go do that now. If you have, go play it again. It’s just that good.
Persona 5 Royal
3Cyberpunk 2077
Chrome-tinted Sci-fi Adventure
Cyberpunk 2077is a touchy topic to many because of its infamously rocky release. Cyberpunk 2077 1.0 was a hot mess; no two ways about it. But at the same time,2.0 is one of the bestrole-playing games ever made. The contrast between the two extremes is jarring, true, andCDPRwill have to knock it out of the park withThe Witcher 4to earn back the lost goodwill. But if we’re talking about what a game is instead of what it was, it would be a monumental injustice not to give Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 its spot on this list.
From the tallest skyscraper to the most dilapidated shack out in the boonies, everything in this world feels like it’s a real city with real people…
A sci-fi adventure for the ages, Cyberpunk 2077 puts you in the shoes of V, an up-and-comer in Night City’s underworld whose string of bad luck never seems to end. Players can customize V any which way they want. Melee combat, hacking, gunplay, or a mix of all of them are all perfectly viable build choices in the game. Each one with a different skill tree and accompanying upgrades to choose from and find. One of the things that was never a question about any version of Cyberpunk is the quality of the world-building. From the tallest skyscraper to the most dilapidated shack out in the boonies, everything in this world feels like it’s a lived-in city with real people walking the streets. Slap on a coat of neon paint and futuristic augmentation, and you’ve got yourselves a sci-fi world worth spending hundreds of hours in.
Cyberpunk 2077
2Elden Ring
Intimate FromSoftware Combat Meets A Vast & Beautiful Open World
FromDemon’s SoulstoElden Ring,FromSoftware’s journey of success has been well-documented. When you become so big thatan entire genre of games is named after your titles, people sit up and take notice. So when Elden Ring was first teased as FromSoftware’s newest project back in 2019 — and it was their first foray into open-world game design — the amount of hype mixed in with skepticism was sky-high. The challenge was to deliver a complete Soulslike package in a true open-world setting. And boy, did they deliver.
The challenge was to deliver a complete Soulslike package in a true open-world setting. And boy, did they deliver.
Elden Ring takes the best elements from theprevious Souls gamesand interweaves everything in a massive open-world map for players to experience. The game feels like a true culmination of everything a Soulslike aspires to be and then some. The leveling up, the weapons, the bonfire system, and the lore are exactly what you’d expect from a FromSoftware title, only polished and delivered in a compelling open-world package. Elden Ring earns the second spot on the list due to the fact that, even years after release, the game retains its standing as the de facto king of the genre, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change any time soon.
Elden Ring
1Baldur’s Gate 3
The Best RPG… Of All Time?
Baldur’s Gate 3is a game that’s made special by what it sets out to achieve. A true living, breathing world that reacts to your choices and your actions and their impact on the world around you. The game does what the rest of the industry didn’t even envision could happen because the scope of it is so massive and so incredibly resource-intensive that it’s mind-boggling. The game has been decades in the making, and I consider the game’s predecessorsDOSandDOS2to be trial runs whereLarianperfected their craft before setting out toachieve something truly historic.
The promise of true player choice has never been executed this well and with this much polish.
BG3 is a role-playing game to its core. The promise of true player choice has never been executed this well and with this much polish. While not every single choice the player makes will have lasting consequences, so many of them do that you are never quite sure if something you did in a particular way might come to haunt you later on. And the cherry on top?Everythingisvoice-actedby the best VAs in the business, adding a thick layer of authenticity and immersion over everything.
Baldur’s Gate 3
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