Time to read some manuals.


It's 1991. You're young, but not so young you can't earn a bit of allowance here and there. You've played Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, others. You loved them. You want more. But you've scoured the rental shelves, played everything. Thankfully, a new shop has opened up next to the place your mom works, where you often go because a babysitter is too expensive. It sells games. Not for your NES, but for the computer your dad has.

You go in. The guy behind the counter, an older man, pays little attention to you. There are shelves of games you've never heard of, ones with spaceships on the cover, pirates, dragons. The back of each box makes each one sound incredible, expansive. You pick one. A dragon, a man with a sword, a desperate battle. You buy it. You take it home.

Inside the box there are… things. Maybe a cloth map, maybe a coin, almost certainly a manual thicker than any book you've ever read. Your dad helps you install the game. You try to play it. You… fail. It doesn't make any sense. There's no guidance, no indication of controls. There are so many keys on the keyboard. You ask your dad for help, and he tells you to read the manual.

So you do.

It's overwhelming. There's so much information. So many spells and skills, lore, maps. You find the controls. You try to play. You succeed, in a sense. There's no progress. Defeat in the first battle.

Here's the thing: you can't return this game. It's for computers, and you could have just copied the disk. The man behind the counter doesn't care. This is what you have, and what you don't have is the allowance you spent on a dragon, a man with a sword, a desperate battle.

It's enough to leave you in tears.

When you come home from school, each day, the game is there. You ignore it for a while, bitter. Eventually, boredom and curiosity combine and you give it another shot. You take notes. You ask your dad for help, look up words in the dictionary. You win that first battle. You escape the city. You recruit a companion. There are no hint lines, no help to be had, no strategy guides or even a sense that the game cares if you see its ending. It's just you, a rich world, an uncaring system.

And, for now, it's all you have.

So you play it after school. You make maps, throw them away when they're wrong. Keep lists of clues, push further out into the world. You play on weekends. Save files are carefully managed after learning bitter lessons one too many times, maps become more accurate, notes more fleshed out as riddles, puzzles, traps are solved. You inch closer. You start over. You pour your stat points into proven skills, attributes. You take what you've learned and you push through to the end. The end itself is underwhelming, but it's yours.

There is nothing quite like meeting a CRPG on its own terms. The way you get to know it, discover its flaws and unfair ways, its world and the love poured into it. You get to know its systems, play by its rules, know its places and people. It's a personal connection, a mark of honor to see it through. It's an experience that is yours and yours alone.

About This List

This list, as the above heavily implies, started as a way to shine some light on the golden age of CRPGs in the same way that the Arcade Gaming Passport was crafted to highlight the forgotten nooks and crannies of arcade history. This golden age would, in my opinion, roughly range from '75-'85. This was a wild, formative time, one of growth and of games made by default amateurs. It was followed by my personal silver age, heading up to the late 90s. This was an era of graphical leaps and bounds, interface improvements, streamlining. Eventually, though, turn-based would fall out of favor. It was a time for Diablo and Elder Scrolls, real-time combat and streamlined systems, all exacerbated by the ever-rising success of the console side of the business.

Those years are the ones that changed this list, because they weren't the final ones. A revival came afterwards, new games based on old schools of thought. It felt disingenuous to leave this modern era so empty due to dogmatic adherence to traditional CRPG structures. It's not as if Diablo and Morrowind, Gothic and Dragon Age weren't being played by the same people who once played The Bard's Tale and Ultima. I certainly was.

And so there's a period, starting in the late 90s and moving forward, where the rules for inclusion become a little more... lax. The cataloguing is less thorough, mostly attempting to trace the arc of CRPGs to the revival by noting major players and worthwhile novelties. Expansions are not as rigorously marked, series are cut off when quality flags. It's a compromise, and a fair one, but it's also likely the portion of the list to elicit the most opinions, being both less thorough and more recent. Please remember that this section of the list is an olive branch, and that exclusion is not intended as judgement.

Criteria

- This list focuses on CRPGs and DRPGs.
- While there are no rigid rules for what constitutes a CRPG/DRPG, the traditional concept is largely adhered to, with greater leniency for the experimentation of earlier titles and the evolution that followed the broad death of turn-based games.
- Traditional roguelikes are acknowledged as a critical offshoot of the genres, but are mostly limited to major players.
- English must be available as a language.
- Entries must include computers as a launch system.
- This list overwhelmingly favors and focuses on older entries.
- This list attempts to balance quality, novelty and historic importance.
- Attempts at emulating JRPG-style games are excluded.
- When it comes to various hybrid CRPGs, the criteria is (generally) whether or not the majority of the game functions as a traditional CRPG. The gameplay within and outside of combat is considered, as well as the overall quality and novelty of the game.

Missing:
dnd (1975)
Dragon Maze (1978)
Wizard's Castle (1980)
SwordThrust (1981)
Moria (1983)
Shards of Spring
Wizards Wars (1988)
Escape from Hell (1990)
Magic Candle III (1992)
Excelsior Phase One: Lysandia (1993)
Excelsior Phase Two: Errondor (1999)

Notes:
Tunnels & Trolls release date should be 1990
Moraff's World release date should be 1991
Disciples of Steel release date should be 1991
Fate: Gates of Dawn release date should be 1991
Worlds of Legend: Son of the Empire release date should be 1992
Protostar release date should be 1993
Liberation: Captive 2 release date should be 1994
ADOM release date should be 1994
Odyssey: Legend of Nemesis release date should be 1996