The Forever List

There’s a YouTuber named Gregor Kartsius who’s spent the better part of twenty years playing every RPG he could find, and he finally did what everyone does eventually—he made a list. Not just any list: 101 best RPGs, plus some extras squeezed in, stretched across videos that’ll take longer to watch than some of these games take to beat.

I respect the impulse. You play enough RPGs and you start mentally ranking them whether you want to or not. Every new one gets measured against the ones that mattered, against Chrono Trigger, Dark Souls, whatever captured some specific moment in your life. You remember them like people.

The thing about RPGs is they’re time. They’re the only medium where you can sink months and lose all of it to amnesia—start playing at six and look up and it’s three in the morning and you’re still one boss away from closure. They ask you to care about characters with barely any dialogue and somehow you do. You get attached to the music, the way a town looks, the pointless side quest. And then it ends and you move to the next one and the first one starts fading like a real memory does.

So a ranking matters and also doesn’t matter at all. Someone will definitely argue that the list is wrong, that it’s missing the obvious choice, that it’s wrong from the foundation. And they’ll be right. But whoever made it is right too, because they played all of them and genuinely loved them. That takes something.

If you need months of your life dedicated to deciding whether one SNES RPG deserves the 47th spot instead of 49th, the list exists. But the list is just proof that someone cared this much, and if you care this much too, you get it.