5 Games That Made 1995 the Best Year for RPGs

Branden Johnson
Games
Games

Back in the early ’90s, video game release dates were hard to come by. With no Internet, I relied on the inventory of my local rental store for updates. It seemed a cool new game would materialize there every few weeks. But one year, that store’s inventory brought me a ton of surprise releases, particularly RPGs, and many of them would go on to become classics. That year was 1995. These are some of the heavy hitters that helped make ’95 the greatest year in RPG history.

Lunar: Eternal Blue

If you weren’t a Sega CD kid, you couldn’t experience Lunar: Eternal Blue until its excellent remaster on the PlayStation years later, but 1995 saw the RPG’s original release for Sega’s under-supported peripheral. Fans of the original, Lunar: The Silver Star, already knew they were in for a cool story and exciting battles. The previous game had also been well known for its use of (roughly) animated, fully voiced cutscenes. Lunar: Eternal Blue expanded upon this, boasting six times the voiced lines as the previous game. In an era when RPGs meant hours upon hours of reading, Lunar: Eternal Blue gave us a tiny glimpse of the future.

Its localization was a cut above many other games of the time. Led by localizer Working Designs’ head honcho, Victor Ireland, the company put out a funny and moving translation that proved game writing didn’t have to be stilted — no awkward “spoony bards,” a la Final Fantasy II, to be found here, just tightly written, hilarious lines. Whether you enjoyed Working Designs’ joke-filled script or not, Lunar: Eternal Blue was a milestone achievement in RPGs.

Breath of Fire II

I was definitely too young to appreciate the original Breath of Fire, but its sequel caught my attention. Never mind the terrible localization (sometimes bordering on indecipherable nonsense) or excruciating difficulty. The game had strong characters and a dark plot unlike the often childish stories of past RPGs. In older games, your villains were plain old dark lords and your heroes pure, virtuous figures. BoF2 gave us an entire religion to battle, long before Final Fantasy Tactics made it cool, and a couple of vagabond rogues to head up the hero side. Future games of the genre would have dark and complex plots, but that trend began in earnest here.

Games like Xenogears owe a great debt to Breath of Fire II. By pushing the genre forward with a darker storyline, Breath of Fire II is definitely a classic role-playing experience that paved the way for twisted tales to come.

Secret of Evermore

There are some who would throw Secret of Evermore into the waste bin of RPG history. After all, this was (gasp!) an American-made action RPG in the style of Secret of Mana. Spending time thinking about how Secret of Mana is “better” does the game a disservice. Secret of Evermore is inventive, full of colorful characters to meet and environments to explore. Battles were action-packed and required making good use of your morphing dog companion’s abilities. No other games at the time, or since, gave us a story and combat like this, marrying the exciting battles of Secret of Mana with a light-hearted, schlocky, B-movie-style plot — with scientific experimentation gone awry, robot dogs, and parallel universes.

Secret of Evermore won’t be remembered by most as one of the “greats,” especially coming out in a year so densely packed with hits. But it’s such an interesting experiment, it deserves its place on any list of great mid-’90s RPGs.

Earthbound

Earthbound RPG

Nobody wants to sound like a hipster, but I have to say it: I was into Earthbound before it was cool. Back in ‘95, people were drawn to games that pushed the envelope graphically, and Earthbound was decidedly old school in its presentation. Its text-scrolling battle system seemed anachronistic, even at the time. But Earthbound gets the last laugh. Look at it compared to many of its more “graphically rich” contemporaries: which holds up better? By sticking to a simple, tried-and-true pixel art style, Earthbound could pass for a cool-looking indie title today, no problem.

A game that sees four kids equipped with baseball bats and frying pans taking on New Age retro hippies and territorial oaks to save the world from an evil menace from the future was too good for our cool-obsessed mid-’90s culture. Fortunately, Earthbound has gotten a lot more attention lately, thanks to its inclusion in this year’s Super NES Classic Edition mini-console. Earthbound married a classic, lo-fi look with modern, intelligent writing. Now, if only Nintendo would give us the sequel.

Chrono Trigger

Chrono Trigger RPG

One game on its own could have crowned 1995 the best year for RPGs, and that game is Chrono Trigger. The fact this game landed the same year as the others on this list just shows how amazing ‘95 was for RPGs.

Chrono Trigger feels like the culmination of 16-bit RPG storytelling. It’s a story with layers — what starts out as a light, time-traveling romp, soon transforms into a terrifying ordeal with the fate of the world at stake. Its characters remain favorites of RPG fans even now, more than two decades later. The writing, the beautiful artwork, the music, everything came together to make this a near-perfect game. Not only that, but it eliminated random battles, long thought to be an RPG necessity. RPG fans have been begging for a “true” Chrono Trigger sequel for years. (Chrono Cross, the PlayStation follow up, is good, but not Chrono Trigger-good.) It could be even Square is too afraid to touch the perfection that is Chrono Trigger.

There has never been another year quite like 1995 for RPG fans. There have been some real classics since then, many from the same developers as games on this list; but the stars aligned for 1995 to become the most memorable of them all.

Branden Johnson