Welcome back to Save State, where I missed the end of 2025 due to extenuating circumstances. Now, the Game Awards have come and gone, and likely everyone and their grandmother has already mentioned their top games of 2025. Instead, I figure it’d be cool to finish off what I started a few weeks back in this column with a list of my top five favorite RPG developers, as that is my favorite genre.

Square Enix

Square Enix is basically the final boss of RPG development studios, known for bringing them mainstream with the long-running Final Fantasy series. Created by the union of Squaresoft and Enix, Square Enix publishes some of the most interesting games out there for RPG fans, such as titles by tri-Ace like Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile, and Dragon Quest spin-offs by Tose like Dragon Quest Monsters. Square Enix even co-develops games with many other studios like Acquire, who worked on Octopath Traveler I and II. What everyone really knows Square Enix for nowadays, however, is Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Kingdom Hearts, and to a lesser extent Mana and SaGa.

Final Fantasy was a big enough series to push into the mainstream, and while more recent games fall a bit short of the tour de force Square and Enix had during the SNES and PlayStation days, Final Fantasy XVI is still a beautiful title with an interesting story to tell and combat to experience. Dragon Quest 11 is considered one of the best turn-based JRPGs out there, with almost any Dragon Quest game riding that perfect line between classically challenging and cozy. Several early Dragon Quest games have also recently received HD-2D remakes, and VII will be receiving one soon too.

The series, which is near and dear to my heart, has received a lot of ports in the most recent console generation allowing many more people to enjoy some of the most unique progression systems in RPGs. SaGa games typically have no character leveling, and they have non-linear story progression where your choices can influence who joins your party or what cities wind up destroyed later in the game. Freedom and combat are thrust to the forefront, and you’ll very likely have a difficult time if you don’t explore the world and utilize status effects in battle.

If you’ve heard fellow GIN writer Neal Sayatovich gush about The Last Remnant, that’s a SaGa title in all but name with the creator and lead developer of SaGa contributing to its development (though Last Remnant doesn’t let you impact the story with your choices). Square Enix’s publishing arm shifts back and forth from brilliant titles to objectively terrible games, but generally speaking, if the game was developed by Square Enix, you’re generally in for a great time. For every Octopath Traveler II or Fantasian Neo Dimension that Square Enix publishes, there’s at least one Foamstars or Babylon’s Fall.

My personally recommended titles (there are a lot):

• Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars

• Final Fantasy VI, VII (original), and Tactics

• Trials of Mana (original or remake)

• Dragon Quest III HD-2D, IV, V, VIII, and XI

• Romancing SaGa 3, SaGa Scarlet Grace: Ambitions, and Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven

Honorable mentions

If this were a list about video game publishers rather than developers, Sega would have been 100 percent on it. Its own studios as well as subsidiaries have produced some of the finest RPG experiences out there, such as Phantasy Star and Shining Force. Fun fact: Did you know Sonic Software Planning, who helped create Shining Force, would later go on to become Camelot, the developers of Golden Sun and many of Nintendo’s Mario sports titles?

Speaking of Nintendo as a platform, Intelligent Systems games like the Paper Mario and Fire Emblem series have been cornerstones of Nintendo’s offerings for decades now. Paper Mario has been in an interesting state of late, but Thousand Year Door is quite possibly one of the finest RPGs of all time. On top of that, Fire Emblem titles can tend to snag the attention of newer players even if they aren’t big on strategy RPGs.

Another honorable mention is Bioware, who is likely just a shell of the company it used to be. Baldur’s Gate II plus its expansion was a game that taught me to love Dungeons and Dragons despite having to look up on GameFAQs what a “THAC0” (to hit armor class zero) is. With titles like Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age: Origins, seeing the Bioware logo on a game case practically guaranteed you were in for a good time so long as you weren’t a Sonic fan (and if you were a Sonic fan, the mid 2000s was a pretty bad time). Things haven’t been great for the studio of late, but they were a sign of greatness for those who grew up at the start of the 21st century.

Enough millennial regret of what Electronic Arts did to one of my favorite games studios as a kid. Let’s move on to my number one favorite developer.

Monolith Soft

Finally, we reach what is most likely my favorite developer of all time: Monolith Soft. Monolith was created by the scenario writer of Xenogears, along with other former Square Enix employees, and it’s the single developer with the largest percentage of games that I would call some of the greatest of all time. Xenosaga 1 to 3, with the third being in my top three favorite games, is a rollercoaster of emotion. A sci-fi JRPG space opera series that’s heavily influenced by the works of Nietzsche, Zoroastrianism, and Biblical mythology, Xenosaga was a spiritual successor to Xenogears in the best of ways.

Monolith also made Baten Kaitos, which is still to this day my favorite card-based JRPG, a title complete with a story development that still has my wife cursing one of the characters over twenty years later. Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Endless Frontier, Soma Bringer (very enjoyable with a translation patch), Project X Zone 1 and 2, and even their stranger ones like Disaster: Day of Crisis bring something interesting and inventive to the table. Of course, it’d be remiss to talk about Monolith Soft without mentioning Xenoblade Chronicles, which is quite possibly my favorite game series of all time.

Xenoblade Chronicles is where Tetsuya Takahashi has really gotten to stretch his wings as a writer. Ever ambitious, the first Xenoblade game has such a unique story and presentation style, that it’ll leave you on the edge of your seat at some times, and perhaps on the verge of tears at another. If you pick up a copy of any Xenoblade game and you’re even remotely a person who enjoys JRPGs, you’re in for an incredibly deep and involved experience with wonderful premises, world building and design, and combat mechanics that you likely won’t experience anywhere else. Xenoblade 1 and 2 are among my favorite games ever due to this.

Not to mention, even a big company like Nintendo sees the talent in Monolith Soft, regularly tapping them to help with world and level design for the last four Zelda titles, each Splatoon, and Mario Kart World.

Of course, I could keep you here and gush about my favorite developers all day, but I think it’s about time I bring this entry of Save State to a close.

Hopefully, while you were reading my list, you thought of some of your favorite developers or maybe even decided to give some of the games by the guys mentioned above a shot.

See you all again in two weeks! And Happy New Year!