#2020 actio. role playing games series#

Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo didn’t rock the boat too much with Nioh 2. The end result is the biggest and best Yakuza game yet, and also, remarkably, one of the best RPGs of the generation.

#2020 actio. role playing games series#

Series staples such as incredibly involved and nuanced minigames and great sidequests are all here, while Like a Dragon also sheds baggage by jettisoning the old cast and location, and following a new set of misfits in an entirely new town. Taking liberal cues from sister franchise Persona, Yakuza: Like a Dragon nonetheless retained the core and spirit of the series, from the charming characters and aesthetic to the surprisingly wholesome stories about crime lords and political drama (don’t ask). Taking your flagship game franchise – really, the only game franchise you have that does consistently well critically and commercially – and completely rethinking it as a game that is literally the exact opposite of the kinds of games that previous titles in the series have been known for is a bold move indeed, but Sega’s RGG Studio did just that when they rebooted their brawler franchise Yakuza as… a turn based JRPG. Really, the only blemish on an otherwise fine experience was the presence of bugs and glitches – though a lot of those have been addressed by now, which means you have very little reason to not give the game a go, if you haven’t already. The RPG mechanics are staggeringly deep and nuanced, what seemed to be forced humor is some marvellously dry and uproarious satire, and the world just begs you to engage with it. All doubts were put to the rest when the actual game came out, however, and delivered arguably the best Wasteland game yet. So people being skeptical about a third game in the series had every right to be – especially when the overtly MCU style quippy tone was revealed in trailers. It wasn’t bad, just subpar and underwhelming. Wasteland 2 was a bit of a disappointment. Throw in some of the best combat the series has seen yet, along with some hugely improved writing, a world that is brimming with secrets, and some incredible quests (that rethink how quests in an open world game should be approached in the first place), not to mention one of the best and most meaningful skill trees in recent memory, and you’re left with a title that truly stands out as one of the best RPGs of this year. The result is a game that’s not small by any means – Valhalla may actually have the most content of any game in the series yet – but one that doesn’t feel bloated, one where every bit of content truly feels as though it belongs, rather than just being put there to pad out the hours players can get from the game.

This Viking game excises the excess bloat that dragged down Origins and Odyssey, getting rid of a lot of extraneous systems and content that just muddied the water, and streamlining and pulling together everything that remained. However, the vision of the series as an RPG has never once been as clearly distilled and gorgeously well realized as in this year’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. NOTE: The nominees and winner were decided by an internal vote held among the entire GamingBolt staff.Īssassin’s Creed had been tending towards role playing game elements for years even before Assassin’s Creed Origins reimagined the franchise as an action RPG back in 2017. But here are the ones that stand out as among the very best ones. As you might expect, there were a lot of incredible ones.

This list is very specifically about honoring the best role playing games – true role playing games, as opposed to games with role playing elements – that came out this year.

Fast forward to today, and role playing games represent the single most popular genre of games on the market, to such a ridiculous degree that elements of RPGs pervade and infect every other genre on the market – including former kings of the hill such as shooters or even fighting games.īut this list isn’t about those. Once long ago, role playing games were the purview of a small niche of a market, and were largely considered to be financially unviable.