Welcome back to Save State, where we’re nearing the end of the year, and everyone’s releasing their top 5 games of the year lists as Neal Sayatovich did with his Modern Gamer column last week. Now, anyone who has followed my Save State column for any length knows that I absolutely love role-playing games of any kind. CRPGs and JRPGs are all great. Just add a letter in front of RPG, and I’ll probably enjoy it.

Now, this time of year, everyone’s going back one whole year to talk about the best games, but I think it may be fun to go back in time maybe two or three decades. Also, since Neal already did his top 5 games of the year, and we share two of the same entries, I’m just going to admit that he beat me to it and do something completely different. Alas, foiled again!

And so, I decided to write about my top five favorite developers who make role-playing games. Here are the first of my top RPG developers:

Larian Studios

Kicking off my list is the developer responsible for my largest addiction throughout 2024: Larian Studios. I put hundreds of hours into Baldur’s Gate 3. But the recent success of Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t mean that we can forget this studio’s history. Larian Studios is most known for its Divinity series, which started in 2002 with Divine Divinity. In the early 2000s, I was actively playing anything that even remotely looked like Diablo II, which is how I stumbled across that first Divinity title…and each subsequent entry.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of Larian’s most impressive works, but I still have a soft spot for Divinity: Dragon Commander and Divinity: Original Sin 2. Dragon Commander is a turn-based strategy game that shifts between a complex, Risk-like board game to a real time strategy mode, that basically makes this a dragon-riding version of Total War, which I was all about 12 years ago.  As for Original Sin 1 and 2, any title that lets me actively break it in half with strange, theory-crafted builds and goofy quest interactions is always something I love to sink my teeth into, which is probably why Larian has claimed so much of my time with their CRPGs over the last couple of decades.

My personally recommended titles:

• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Divinity: Original Sin 2
• Divinity: Dragon Commander

Atlus

Atlus as a publisher has released many of my favorite games, such as Vanillaware’s Odin Sphere, 13 Sentinels, and Unicorn Overlord, but they develop their own games too. Trauma Center, a series on the Nintendo DS and Wii, were some of my favorite games to showcase how interesting and inventive developers could be with Nintendo’s hardware and were developed entirely by Atlus (aside from one entry, that is). Trauma Center: Second Opinion is still one of my favorite games to this day, requiring you to set bones, burn polyps, perform surgery in a moving ambulance, and stop a man-made pathogen that effectively makes up the title’s boss fights.

Atlus has also been responsible for some of my lifelong addictions, such as the Etrian Odyssey series, dungeon crawlers where it was your responsibility to make a map on the bottom screen of your Nintendo DS or else you risk getting lost. The series’ first game’s deer F.O.E., which was effectively a mini-boss players were encouraged to avoid initially, gave me a distrust of deer that still sticks with me to this day. Shin Megami Tensei, Persona, and Radiant Historia, just to name a few, each take up a few slots in some of the best RPGs of all time. Not every game that comes out of Atlus is a win, but they have a batting average way higher than most of the industry for the niches they appeal to.

If you pick up an Atlus-developed title, you’ll be able to experience everything from incredible dungeon crawling in Etrian Odyssey, turn-based combat creature collection with spirits and demons in Shin Megami Tensei and Persona, turn-based strategy gameplay with Devil Survivor, and whatever the hell Catherine was. This isn’t even accounting for the sheer variety of titles Atlus publishes – odds are, if you’ve enjoyed fewer mainstream games on PlayStation consoles, you have a few Atlus titles on your shelf.

My personally recommended titles:

• Shin Megami Tensei IV, V Vengeance
• Persona 2 Innocent Sin/Eternal Punishment, 3, and 5
• Etrian Odyssey IV and Untold II.

Nihon Falcom

Falcom is a developer that’s been around for over forty years, but not many have heard of them until recent years with the Trails series finally reaching slightly more mainstream appeal after two decades of being very niche titles. Which, it’s a damned shame because Falcom’s premiere franchises are always a joy to play, either storytelling master classes or pure adrenaline in video game form. The Ys series of action RPGs usually put players in control of Adol Christin in games with unique action combat systems.

Early Ys titles utilized a bump system where you needed to bump into foes slightly off center to take them out, while later ones would allow you to use both grounded and aerial combos to take down giant monsters. If you just want to play a game with a simple story, high energy soundtrack, and excellent combat, you could pick up nearly any entry of Ys and have a great time, though I can highly recommend Ys I, The Ark of Napishtim, Origin, The Oath in Felghana, and VIII. Thankfully, between ports and remakes, avid fans of action RPGs can play most of the Ys series on Steam.

The Trails series, which is a subset of the larger and older The Legend of Heroes series, are commonly turn-based RPGs with deep worldbuilding and beautiful storytelling. Anyone who is a fan of JRPGs should at least check out Trails in the Sky, which just recently received an excellent remake with great visuals and voice acting. The first three Trails in the Sky titles are incredible, with so much dialogue that you can go to NPCs all across the world after different story events, and they’ll each have something new to say because they’re living their lives.

If you’re tired of static NPCs who exist just to be tutorials, the Trails series is going to be your new bread and butter.

Which, thankfully, if they’re your thing, there are tons of Trails games. Trails in the Sky form the first three entries, then you have Trails from Zero and Azure for the next arc of the story, the four Trails of Cold Steel games, Reverie, Daybreak 1 and 2… gamers who enjoy detailed world design and well-presented stories have a ton to enjoy with the Trails games stretching back over twenty full years. Falcom even has some lesser-known titles like Brandish for dungeon crawling fans and the Xanadu series of action RPGs. Nihon Falcom just makes extremely competent games on tight budgets, and the more who play them the better.

My personally recommended titles:

• Ys I, Origin, The Ark of Napishtim, The Oath in Felghana, VIII
• Trails in the Sky 1-3, Zero, and Azure
• Tokyo Xanadu
• Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection

I wound up writing more about each developer than I initially planned, so I’m going to split the final two of my top five favorite developers, as well as all of the honorable mentions, into the next entry of Save State.

Stay tuned for that. I hope I’ll see you again in two weeks!