The most aggressive thingPersona 5 Royal does to you happens on an ordinary Tuesday in June. School finishes. The game returns control. You have one afternoon and one evening, and in front of you sit a part-time job that would raise your Charm, a friend who has been waiting three in-game weeks to advance a relationship, a book that would raise your Knowledge before an exam, and a dungeon with a deadline in eleven days. You can do one afternoon thing. Some of those options will eat the evening as well.

Nothing threatens you. No enemy is on screen. This is the most tense the game ever gets, and Atlus knew that when they built it.

The system, stated plainly

Persona 5 came out in Japan in September 2016 and in the West in April 2017, directed by Katsura Hashino, with Shigenori Soejima’s character design and Shoji Meguro’s soundtrack doing an enormous amount of the heavy lifting.Royal is the expanded edition — Japan in October 2019, the West in March 2020 on PS4, and eventually everywhere in October 2022 when Atlus finally put it on PC, Xbox, Switch and PS5.

The structure is a school year. Each day gives you a small number of discretionary slots. You spend them on Confidants — twenty-odd relationships, each ranked one to ten, each granting mechanical benefits as it climbs — or on the five social stats, Knowledge, Guts, Proficiency, Kindness and Charm, which gate the Confidants. Meanwhile the plot delivers Palaces: cognitive dungeons with a hard calendar deadline. Fail to finish one by its date and the game ends. Actually ends.

So every single day is an allocation problem with an audit at the end of it. That is the machine. The phantom-thief business, the jazz, the extraordinary menus — all of it is upholstery on a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet is where the feeling comes from.

Why the scarcity works

Scarcity is easy to design and hard to makehurt. Most games with a time limit produce anxiety, which is a cheap emotion.Persona 5 produces regret, which is expensive.

The mechanism is that the game makes the thing you gave up visible. You skipped Yusuke, who texted, and whose Confidant is at rank four, and whose rank five would give you a combat ability you can name and want. The cost of every choice is a person with a face and a text message. That is the whole trick, and it is why the strategy-game version of this system, where you allocate abstract workers to abstract buildings, does not feel like anything.

The second mechanism is that the game refuses to let you win the allocation. A completionist run of Royal is documented to sit well past a hundred hours, and even a perfect one is a scramble, because the Confidant ranks are gated behind social stats that are themselves gated behind days. You are always behind. The design’s honest position is that a year is too short to be good at everything, which is a considerably more mature statement than the phantom-thief plot manages in its entire runtime.

The real ancestor of this is not the RPG lineage at all. It isTokimeki Memorial, Konami’s 1994 dating simulator, which established the loop of stat-raising against a school calendar with affection as the scoring function.Persona 3 imported that structure into Atlus’s demon-fusion RPG in 2006 and discovered that the calendar made the dungeonmatter, because now the dungeon had an opportunity cost. EverythingPersona 5 does is the third refinement of that fusion. Fifteen years earlier, on the home computers I grew up with, the closest equivalent wasElite’s fuel economy — a resource that turned exploration into a decision — and the shared idea is old: the interesting number is the one you cannot have more of.

Where Royal fights itself

Here is the argument I want to make about the definitive edition, and it is not a comfortable one.

Royal’s improvements are almost allloosening. Palaces now contain Will Seeds, which reward exploration with SP-restoring accessories; SP was the original’s scarcest combat resource and the reason a Palace took multiple visits. The grappling hook opens shortcuts. Safe rooms let you leave and return without losing progress. Morgana’s early curfew — the notorious business of a cat sending you to bed — is relaxed. Ranked SP items are purchasable. Showtime attacks give you a free burst of damage on a random timer.

Each of these is a quality-of-life win. Collectively they mean that a Palace which used to consume three or four calendar days now goes down in one, and those recovered days go straight back into your Confidant budget. Atlus made the dungeons kinder and thereby made the calendar softer, and the calendar was the antagonist.

I do not think this ruinsRoyal. I think it is a real cost that reviews at the time under-reported because the additions were so obviously generous. The 2016 game’s cruelty was doing structural work: when SP ran out, the Palace ended, and you went home having spent a day and achieved nothing, andthat was the day you learned what the game was about.Royal rarely gives you that day. It replaces it with a third semester — new content from November onwards, a new Confidant in Takuto Maruki, a new party member in Kasumi Yoshizawa — that is, and I say this having sat with it for years, the best-written material Atlus has ever shipped and structurally the wrong place to put it.

Because the third semester arrives after the calendar has finished threatening you. It is a coda. It is superb, and it is playing in a mode the entire preceding hundred hours had been arguing against: a stretch of time where the pressure is narrative rather than arithmetical. The best thing inRoyal is the part ofRoyal that stops beingPersona 5.

The upholstery, briefly

I have been dismissive about the surface and should correct that, because the surface is why anyone tolerates the spreadsheet.

The interface is the most confident work in the medium. Every menu is animated, angled, red-and-black, scored, and no two transitions in the game are the same shape. That is functional work: a game asking you to spend a hundred hours in menus has to make the menus a place you enjoy standing, and Atlus solved that by treating the pause screen as a piece of graphic design rather than a list. Meguro’s soundtrack does the same job in the other channel: the battle theme is the reason a random encounter you have fought two hundred times still snaps you awake.

And the writing, when it is good, is very good indeed. Futaba’s Palace, in particular, does something the genre almost never manages: it takes a character’s psychology, renders it as architecture, and then makes navigating the architecture the act of understanding her.

When it is bad it is very bad. The plot’s politics are adolescent, the Phantom Thieves’ celebrity arc goes nowhere it has not been dragged, and there are stretches of the middle third where the game will hold you in a cutscene for forty minutes to say something it said at the start.

The verdict

Persona 5 Royal is a hundred-hour game about the arithmetic of a finite year, wearing the best clothes in the industry. Its greatness is entirely structural — the fact that a Tuesday in June is harder than any boss — and its expanded edition is a slightly compromised version of that greatness in exchange for content nobody could reasonably decline.

PlayRoyal, since it is the only version anyone can now buy, and play it on whatever is nearest; the 2022 ports run fine and the PC one is the obvious pick. Take the third semester. Do not look up an optimal Confidant route, because a schedule someone else calculated removes the entire game.

For a much smaller, much sharper treatment of the same idea — time as a currency you are always short of, with none of the upholstery — readCitizen Sleeper, which does in eight hours what this does in a hundred and is honest about which of those is a virtue. And for the other end of the JRPG’s structural ambition,Nier: Automata makes the shape of the playthrough itself the argument.

Spoilers below

Maruki is the reasonRoyal exists, and he is a better antagonist than Shido by a distance that is almost embarrassing.

The third semester’s premise is that the counsellor who has been helping you all year has acquired the power to remove suffering, and has used it, and the world you wake up in is one where everybody’s worst thing simply did not happen. The dead parent is alive. The ruined career is intact. The friend’s trauma is gone, and so is the person the trauma made.

What makes this land is that it is acalendar argument. Maruki’s reality is a place with no opportunity cost — every choice is available, nothing is foreclosed, no Tuesday in June ever charges you anything. He is offering the player exactly what the player has spent a hundred hours resenting the absence of. The game has trained you to want this. The whole system has been a machine for generating the specific hunger Maruki proposes to satisfy.

And the refusal — the choice to reject a painless world and go back to the one where things cost — is the only moment in the entirePersona series where the theme and the mechanics say the same sentence at the same time. Everything else inPersona 5, the rebellion, the masks, the chains, is a metaphor stapled to a combat system. This is not a metaphor. This is the game asking whether you understood what the schedule was for.

The answer arrives in February, in a fistfight in the sky, which is the most Atlus thing imaginable and does not diminish it in the slightest.

Final Fantasy VII arrived in Europe in November 1997, and I remember the specific texture of that moment better than I remember most of the game: the Amiga had gone quiet under me, the PlayStation had turned up carrying the future on three discs, and a Japanese role-playing game about a mercenary with a comically large sword was suddenly the thing everyone had an opinion about. Midgar — the opening city, the bombing run, the plate, the slums — took maybe six hours. It was the best six hours on the console and then the game left it behind and went off to be a world map.

Final Fantasy VII Remake, released for PS4 in April 2020, takes those six hours and makes them the whole game. Forty of them, give or take. This is the fact that decided most people’s reaction before they had played a minute of it, and it is the least interesting fact about the thing.

The combat is the achievement

Start here, because the combat system is the part that deserves study, and it is a genuinely clever piece of hybrid engineering rather than a compromise.

You control one party member directly in real time. Attacking builds ATB — the gauge from 1997, now a resource rather than a clock — and spending ATB is how you cast, use an item, or fire an ability. Opening the command menu drops the game into Tactical Mode, where time slows to a crawl while you choose. You can switch to any party member instantly, and the ones you are not controlling fight competently and build ATB slowly on their own.

The read: this is an action game whose action generates the currency of a turn-based game, and whose turn-based game happens inside a bubble of slowed time carved out of the action. It sounds like a fudge. In play it produces something quite precise — you are always simultaneously executing and planning, and the slow-motion menu functions as a held breath.

Then Stagger. Every enemy has a stagger gauge, filled by pressure — pressure being generated by doing the specific thing that enemy dislikes, which the scan spell will tell you. Staggered, they take a burst of extra damage for a window. This mechanic did not come fromFinal Fantasy VII. It came fromFinal Fantasy XIII, and the people who built it are the people who made this: Motomu Toriyama on scenario, Naoki Hamaguchi on game design, both veterans of the XIII trilogy, under Tetsuya Nomura’s direction.XIII was pilloried for a combat system that most players never got far enough in to understand.Remake takes that system’s actual idea — combat as the management of a vulnerability window rather than an exchange of numbers — and wraps it in something you can touch.

That is the real ancestral trace, and it is more honest than the one the marketing wanted.Remake’s fighting isKingdom Hearts hands welded toFinal Fantasy XIII’s brain, made by the people who had both. The 1997 game contributes the Materia system, which returns almost unchanged and remains one of the best build systems anyone has designed: spells are objects, objects go in slots, slots are in gear, and therefore your entire capability is portable between characters at any moment.

Where the design fights itself

Forty hours of Midgar is not, in itself, a crime. Midgar can hold forty hours; the concept is strong enough and the art direction is comprehensively magnificent. The problem is thetexture of the added thirty-four, and specifically that Square Enix appears to have solved a large fraction of them with corridors.

There is a category of moment in this game that everyone who played it can describe: the gap you squeeze sideways through while the level streams, the ladder you climb at a fixed speed, the arm you hold out to a robot claw, the pair of levers that must be pulled in sequence in a room built exclusively to contain two levers. The Train Graveyard chapter and the long descent through the Shinra building are the usual examples cited, and they are cited because they are correct. These are pure duration, purchased at the cost of your goodwill.

I take this seriously because forty hours is a real thing to ask. A game asking for a working week of somebody’s life owes them a reason for every one of those hours, andRemake has stretches where the reason is plainly that the chapter needed to be longer than the content in it. The side quests are the same instinct wearing a friendlier face — go and find some cats, go and kill some rats — and they exist to buy you affection scenes and a slightly better relationship with characters the game could have simply written more scenes for.

What rescues it, and it does mostly rescue it, is that the expansion isspecific where it counts. Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are three names and a death in the original. Here they are people with a flat, a family, opinions about Cloud, and a plan; when the plate falls the arithmetic has changed, because you have had dinner with them. Wall Market is no longer a joke and a dress — it is an economy, with Don Corneo sitting on top of it and a genuinely superb set piece built around a piece of 1997 comedy that could have gone very badly and instead goes big, sincere, and slightly magnificent.

The thing it is actually doing

Here is the read that matters. Every remake has to decide what it is faithfulto, and the available options are the text or the memory of the text.Dead Space’s 2023 rebuild chose the text and treated the job as restoration — clean the varnish, fix the joints, do not repaint.Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 chose to argue with its original about tone, and won some of that argument.

Final Fantasy VII Remake chose something stranger and considerably riskier. It is faithful to thememory — to the way Midgar is bigger in your head than it ever was on the disc, to the way Aerith is more important in retrospect than she is in her introduction — and it treats that gap between the game and the recollection as the actual subject. The forty hours are the game rendering your inflated memory at the size your memory has it. That is why the added material is nearly alltexture rather than plot: the plot was never what got exaggerated.

And then it goes further, in a way I will keep below the line.

The verdict

This is a magnificent, sincere, overlong thing, and the overlength follows directly from the ambition. Play it. Play it on PC or PS5 where Intergrade’s performance mode makes the combat legible at the speed it wants to run — the PS5 version arrived in June 2021 with the Yuffie episode attached, and the PC release followed later that year, reaching Steam in 2022. Turn the difficulty to Normal and use Assess on everything; the combat only opens up once you accept that scanning is a verb.

And then decide, honestly, whether you have another eighty hours forRebirth, because the 2024 sequel doubles everything here including the problems.

If you want the argument about endings and structure taken somewhere weirder,Nier: Automata is Square’s other great swing at making the shape of a playthrough into a statement.

Spoilers below

The Whispers. Let us have this out.

From very early on,Remake has ghosts in it — spectral figures who appear whenever the story deviates from the events of 1997 and physically shove it back on course. They stop Aerith from saying a thing. They block a road. They intervene at the moment Barret dies in a way he did not die before, and undo it.

The obvious reading is that they are the game’s own canon, personified and armed. The obvious complaint is that this is Nomura being Nomura: a metafictional device bolted onto a story that did not need one, resolved in a final act where the party fights the concept of fate in a sky arena while a dead character from a spin-off walks past.

I have gone back and forth and I have landed here: the Whispers are the honest expression of what this project is. Square Enix could not remakeFinal Fantasy VII straight — the original exists, is playable on everything, and is better than a straight remake would be at the only thing a straight remake could offer. What they could do is make a game about the pressure of the original’s existence, in which the characters are pushed around by a force that wants events to go the way you remember. The Whispers are the audience. They are the wiki. They are the decades of accumulated players who know Aerith dies and will riot if she does not.

And the ending — the party choosing to fight that force, and the game closing on a Midgar that has explicitly diverged from the one on the discs — is a studio saying out loud that it refuses to be a museum. I think the execution is muddled. The sky arena is bad. The Sephiroth escalation arrives about six hours before it has been earned. But theidea is the boldest thing a major publisher has done with its own back catalogue, and the alternative — a respectful, tasteful, identicalFinal Fantasy VII with better shaders — would have been a much safer game and a much emptier one.

The thing you remember is not the thing that happened.Remake knows that, and builds the knowledge into the plot. Whether it can land the consequences across three games is a question for the third one.

Somewhere around the second act ofPathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, the game stops asking you what kind of hero you are and starts asking what kind ofthing you are willing to become. It offers, among other options, becoming a lich. This goes considerably past an evil alignment tick-box: the game grows a new questline, a new set of abilities, a new attitude from your companions, and a substantially different ending. It does this for ten separate answers to the question.

Owlcat Games released this in September 2021, three years afterKingmaker, funded by a Kickstarter that pulled in around two million dollars. It is adapted from Paizo’s tabletop adventure path of the same name and built on Pathfinder’s first-edition ruleset, which is to say the ruleset that took Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 and asked what would happen if nobody ever said no. That question is the entire aesthetic of this game, and I want to defend it.

The sheet is the toy

Twenty-five base classes. Archetypes on top of those in numbers that require a wiki. Multiclassing with no meaningful guard rails. Feats that combine into things the designers plainly did not sit down and enumerate. If you have spent any time in thePathfinder build community you will know the folk canon: the Scaled Fist monk dip that turns your charisma into armour, the Vivisectionist alchemist who is a rogue with better chemistry, the Sword Saint whose entire job is to make one attack per round mathematically obscene.

The honest criticism of this is that it is not balanced, and the honest answer is that balance was never the promise.Wrath of the Righteous is not a game about a curated encounter budget. It is a game about a character sheet as a construction kit, where the pleasure is the pleasure of ademoscene release — someone found a hole in the rules and drove a lorry through it, and everybody else gathered round to admire the lorry.

The real ancestor here is SSI’s Gold Box run on the eight- and sixteen-bit machines.Pool of Radiance in 1988 gave you a party, a rulebook, and no interest whatsoever in whether your combination of decisions was sensible; the manual assumed you would read it and the game assumed you had. Everything that came after — theBaldur’s Gate line, and especiallyThrone of Bhaal’s High Level Abilities, where 2000-era BioWare quietly conceded that the endgame of a build game is absurdity — descends from that permission. Owlcat picked the permission back up after twenty years of the genre apologising for it.

What the mythic paths actually do

The headline is the ten mythic paths, and it is worth being precise about their mechanical shape, because “branching narrative” undersells it.

You commit around Act 2. Aeon polices causality and can retroactively unmake things. Azata is a chaotic good party that summons a dragon called Aivu who grows up over the campaign. Demon eats your enemies’ powers and your own restraint. Trickster rewrites the game’s jokes into rules — it can make a critical hit on a Perception check literally see through the plot. Lich raises your dead enemies and quietly poisons every companion relationship you have built. There is also Gold Dragon, Angel, Devil, Swarm-That-Walks and Legend, which discards mythic power entirely to become spectacularly good at ordinary things.

The design read: a mythic path is alens, applied at the midpoint, that recolours content you were going to see anyway. That is an enormously efficient piece of engineering. Owlcat did not build ten campaigns. They built one campaign with ten sets of rules about how you are allowed to interact with it, and because the paths land at Act 2 rather than at character creation, you have already met everyone before the lens goes on. Your companions therefore have opinions about the change. Regill, the hellknight, approves of order arriving from any direction. Arueshalae, the succubus trying to stop being one, has a complicated time watching you become a demon.

This is the thingWrath does that no other CRPG of its era matches, including the one that sold ten times as many copies.Baldur’s Gate 3 has better faces, better cameras, better everything you can photograph.Wrath of the Righteous has more consequential branching per pound, and the branching is welded to the build rather than sitting beside it.

The crusade, and the argument about it

Then there is the army layer. In between the dungeons,Wrath hands you a strategic map, a recruitment budget, stacks of crusader units, and a set of turn-based battles that play like a thriftyHeroes of Might and Magic. It is optional in the sense that you can set it to resolve automatically. It is not optional in the sense that it sits in the middle of the game asking for your time.

Most reviews at the time called it a mistake. I think that is too quick, and the reason is thematic rather than mechanical. The adventure path is about acrusade — a mass mobilisation of ordinary people against a demonic incursion — and every CRPG convention pushes against that theme, because the CRPG convention is that six exceptional individuals resolve everything personally. The crusade layer is the game’s way of insisting that the war exists whether or not your party is in the room. When your mythic power scales up the units you can field, the two layers finally touch, and the campaign map stops being homework.

The problem is the tuning. The economy is opaque, the general system rewards a couple of obviously correct picks, and the layer arrives before you have any reason to care about it. Owlcat’s own answer — the Enhanced Edition update in 2022, and the option to skip it — is a studio admitting the theory outran the execution. I would rather a studio reach for something structurally interesting and land it two-thirds of the way than ship the safe version.

Where it fights itself

The launch was rough. This is a matter of public record and Owlcat spent the following year patching it hard: scripting faults, encounter bugs, save issues, the usual toll of a game with this many interacting systems shipped by a mid-sized studio. It is in a substantially better state now, with the Enhanced Edition and five DLC releases behind it, and the console versions arrived in 2022 with the fixes baked in.

The deeper structural fault is the difficulty.Wrath is a game whose default settings assume you have read the rulebook, and whose enemies from Act 3 onwards start layering resistances, spell immunities and attack routines that will simply erase an unoptimised party. The customisable difficulty sliders are the most important feature in the game and the least advertised: you can tune enemy stats, damage taken, and the swinginess of the maths independently, and doing so is the correct response rather than an admission of anything. The record puts a full run somewhere well past a hundred hours, and a hundred hours is a real thing to ask of someone’s life. Any game asking it should let the asker set the terms.

And it is long past the point of shame in the fourth act. The Midnight Isles content, the drift into demon-realm sameness, the sheer volume of trash encounters between the good ideas — this is a game that would be better at eighty per cent of its length and does not believe that for a second.

The verdict

Wrath of the Righteous is the most generous CRPG of the last decade, and generosity is a real virtue with real costs. It gives you more rules than you can hold, more branches than you can see in one run, and more army admin than you asked for, and it does so out of a conviction that the player is an adult who can decline the parts they dislike. That conviction is rarer than good writing and considerably rarer than good faces.

Play it on PC where the mods and the build community live. Turn the difficulty sliders to something honest before Act 3 rather than after it. Pick a mythic path that scares you slightly, because the game is at its best when the answer to “what are you becoming” is one you are not entirely comfortable with.

For the opposite approach — an RPG where the character sheet has almost no combat function at all and is instead a set of arguments you have with yourself — seeDisco Elysium. The two games are as far apart as the genre stretches, and they are both right.

Spoilers below

The Trickster path is the one I want to single out, because it is a joke that turns into a thesis.

Trickster’s mythic abilities are structured as punchlines: improving your Perception until you notice things the plot did not intend you to notice, improving Knowledge until enemies are humiliated by trivia, turning the rules themselves into a bit. It reads as the comedy option for about ten hours. Then the game starts quietly showing you what a person who treats a demonic invasion as material actually looks like from the outside, and the companions start noticing, and the ending has a cost the jokes were papering over the entire time.

The Lich path does the inverse and does it more cruelly. It is the strongest path mechanically and the loneliest narratively — the game gives you power and then removes, one by one, the people who liked you. Several companions leave. One in particular can be kept only by doing something to them, and the game does not soften what that is.

The Aeon path’s best moment is the retroactive one: the ability to declare that a thing which happened did not, applied to a specific historical injustice the campaign has already presented as settled fact. It is the single most CRPG thing in the game — a rules interaction that is also a moral position — and it exists because Owlcat took Paizo’s mythic rules literally instead of politely.

That is the case for maximalism. A restrained version of this game would have had one ending, four classes and no lorry-sized holes in its rules, and nobody would still be arguing about it five years later.

There is a moment, somewhere around twelve hours intoNier: Automata, where the credits roll, the game thanks you, and then it hands you a fresh save slot and expects you to start again. Most games treat that screen as the exit. This one treats it as a chapter break. PlatinumGames and Square Enix shipped it in Japan on 23 February 2017 and in the West a fortnight later, and the thing that made it a word-of-mouth monster was the same thing that should have killed it: it asks for your time twice, then a third time, then once more.

Asking a stranger to play your game four times is an enormous imposition. I take that seriously. A 40-hour commitment is 40 hours of somebody’s actual life, and the medium is full of designers who spend it like it’s free. Director Yoko Taro has been running this trick sinceDrakengard in 2003 and the firstNier in 2010, and both times the structure was the part people forgave rather than the part they praised.Automata is where it finally works, and the reason it works is mechanical rather than literary.

The chip system is the argument

Start with the thing nobody puts on the box. 2B’s abilities live on plug-in chips slotted into a storage grid with a fixed capacity. You spend that capacity on the things you’d expect: auto-heal, ranged attack buffs, drop-rate boosts, melee damage. You also spend it on your HUD. The health bar is a chip. The minimap is a chip. Damage numbers, the XP display, the enemy targeting overlay — all chips, all occupying slots, all removable.

Pull them out and you get more room for combat upgrades. You also lose the ability to see how close you are to dying. The game turns interface into an economy, and the exchange rate is brutal and honest: legibility costs power. I have never seen the trade stated so plainly. Every game has a HUD budget — art directors argue about it, players mod it away — andAutomata is the only one I can think of that put the argument in your hands and made you pay for the answer.

It goes one step further. One of those chips runs the operating system. Remove it and 2B dies on the spot, and the game files the death as one of its endings rather than a bug. That is a joke with a design thesis inside it. The interface is diegetic; the android is running software; the software includes the bit that draws your health bar. Once you understand that, the ending structure stops looking like an art-house imposition and starts looking like the same idea at a larger scale.

Why the second pass earns its keep

The pitch is that you play Route A as 2B, then Route B covers the same events as 9S. If that were a straight replay with a new hat, the game would deserve every complaint it gets. It isn’t a replay. 9S is a scanner model, and his combat kit is built around hacking, which drops you into a twin-stick shooter played inside the enemy’s head. Same fights, different verbs. The bullet-hell overlay that runs on top of the third-person action — machines firing lattices of white spheres while you’re mid-combo — is Platinum showing off, and it’s also the connective tissue that lets the game slide between genres without a loading screen.

More to the point, 9S can read the machines. Route B gives you access to information 2B didn’t have, so the same scene plays with a different amount of knowledge in your head. That is the whole engine. The repetition isn’t padding because yourcomprehension is the variable being upgraded, and comprehension is the only stat in this game that can’t be farmed.

Route C is new content outright, and by the time you reach it the game has stopped explaining its structure and started using it. The endings past the fifth are largely jokes — walk away from a mission, eat the wrong fish, quit at the wrong prompt — and they exist to teach you that the ending list is a systems menu rather than a narrative achievement board.

Where it fights itself

I’m not going to pretend the seams aren’t visible. The open world between set-pieces is thin, the city ruins and the desert and the amusement park are connected by a lot of running, and the sidequests range from genuinely wounding to fetch-quest filler that Platinum clearly built to a schedule. The PC port shipped in March 2017 in a state that took a fan patch — FAR, by Kaldaien — to make presentable, and Square Enix only patched the resolution and window handling years later, in July 2021. That’s four years of the definitive version of an acclaimed game being a community project. Worth remembering when a publisher tells you the platform matters.

The combat, too, is Platinum on cruise control. It’s fluid, it’s readable, it has the dodge- cancel rhythm you’d expect from theBayonetta lineage, and it has nothing like the depth ofBayonetta. Difficulty on Normal will not test you; the auto-chips will literally play the fights for you if you let them, which is a design statement in itself and also an admission that the fighting is a delivery mechanism. Play it on Hard, where one hit is catastrophic and the HUD chips suddenly feel like life support you can’t afford to unplug.

The ancestor

Everyone reaches forChrono Trigger and New Game+ here, and the shape is right — multiple endings, a replay that recontextualises — but the real ancestor is closer to the adventure games that built a full run around a single missing fact. The structure thatAutomata actually inherits is the one where the game withholds a perspective rather than a key, and you can’t buy your way past it.

For the modern version of the same idea, look atInscryption, which does its frame-breaking in a single sitting and pays for the compression with a weaker back half. OrHades, which solved narrative repetition by making the story respond to the loop instead of sitting behind it — the cleanest answer anyone has given to this problem, and a useful contrast, because Supergiant made repetition voluntary and Yoko Taro made it compulsory. And if you want the piece that tookAutomata’s melancholy and its multi-ending structure somewhere tighter and considerably nastier, that’sSignalis.

The verdict, argued

Nier: Automata is a game with mediocre traversal, decent combat, an ugly launch on PC and a script that lurches between undergraduate philosophy and genuine grief, sometimes in the same conversation. It is also the most structurally intelligent big-budget game of its decade, because it found a way to make the player’s time investment into the medium of the work rather than the price of it. The chip grid is the thesis in miniature: everything you see costs something, and the game will let you sell your own eyes for damage.

The four-route ask is real and it’s the honest thing to warn people about. Route A alone is a competent Platinum action game with a strange tone. Stopping there is the equivalent of reading the first act and filing a review. If you don’t have the hours, that’s a legitimate reason to skip it entirely; the game does not have a short version and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours. If you do have the hours, it repays them at a rate almost nothing else manages.

It’s on PS4, Xbox One, PC and Switch, and the Switch version —The End of YoRHa Edition, October 2022 — is the one that finally treats the structure as a feature to be supported rather than an obstacle. Play it on Hard. Strip the HUD when you’re feeling brave. Put it back when you aren’t.

Play next:Hades for the friendly version of the same problem, orSignalis for the version with worse dreams.

Spoilers below

The reason the structure earns its reputation is Ending E, and Ending E only works because of everything above.

After the fourth route resolves — after A2 and 9S have had their argument with a sword — the credits roll for the last time, and the game turns them into a shoot-’em-up. You fly a small ship at the names of the people who made it, and the names shoot back. It is unwinnable. The difficulty scales past any reasonable input, you die, you retry, you die, and the game asks whether you’d like help.

Say yes and rescue messages appear: real sentences written by real players who finished before you, floating in the bullet field as encouragement. They join your formation. They take hits for you. Dozens of them, wrapped around your ship like a shell, and every one of them is somebody who beat this sequence and then agreed to a bargain the game explains only at the end — to leave a message and offer help, you delete your save file. All of it. The chips, the routes, the hours.

The prompt is unambiguous about what it’s taking. And the game has spent four routes teaching you that data is what an androidis — that 2B and 9S are backed up, restored, replaced, and that the horror of YoRHa is precisely the persistence of the file. Then it asks you to give yours away so a stranger you’ll never meet can get through a credits sequence.

I know exactly what it is. It’s a magic trick with a permanence lever, engineered for maximum effect, and the emotional physics are shameless. It also works, and it works because it’s mechanical. Nobody tells you sacrifice is meaningful. The game charges you for it, in the one currency it has spent forty hours teaching you to value, and takes the payment without ceremony.

That’s the whole desk’s argument in one screen: the mechanic makes you feel it, and the mechanic is the only thing that could have.

Every role-playing game I loaded off tape as a kid had the same secret: the character sheet was a list of ways to hurt things. Strength was for hitting. Dexterity was for hitting first. Intelligence was for hitting at range with a fireball. The numbers described a weapons platform with a name on it.

Disco Elysium takes the sheet, keeps all twenty-four numbers, and removes the thing they were for. There is no combat system. Nothing to swing at, no initiative order, no HP bar on a monster. And the sheet ismore dangerous than any of its ancestors, because ZA/UM worked out that if your stats aren’t fighting the world, they can fight you.

Released 15 October 2019 on PC, expanded into The Final Cut in March 2021 with full voice acting and a run of political vision quests, then onto PlayStation, Switch and Xbox — it took four awards at that year’s Game Awards, including Best RPG and Best Narrative. Four years on, nothing has caught it, and the reason is structural.

The premise, briefly

You wake up in a trashed hostel room in Martinaise, a rotting district of a city called Revachol that lost a revolution decades ago and has been paying for it since. You have no name, no memory, and a body that has clearly been in a fight with a week. There’s a man hanging from a tree in the courtyard behind the hostel. You are, it emerges, the detective assigned to that.

Your partner is Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, who is competent, patient, and watching. Kim’s presence is the finest piece of characterisation in the medium’s last decade for a single mechanical reason I’ll get to.

You have four days.

The sheet talks back

Four attributes — Intellect, Psyche, Physique, Motorics — with six skills apiece. Twenty-four.

And each of the twenty-four is avoice. They interrupt. Logic offers a deduction. Inland Empire tells you the necktie is speaking. Electrochemistry wants you to find out what’s in the fridge and drink it. Shivers reports what the city itself is doing three streets away. Half Light is convinced everyone in the room is about to kill you. Volition tries to hold the whole lot together and mostly fails.

Here’s the design move, and it’s the one everything else hangs off:investing in a skill makes it louder. Points don’t buy competence, they buypresence. Put six points in Inland Empire and you are a man who receives visions and cannot tell whether they’re true, because the game will keep handing you visions and never confirm them. Put six in Electrochemistry and you will be offered a drink in every conversation, by yourself, from inside your own skull. A high number in a normal RPG means you succeed more. A high number here means that part of youwins the argument more often, and some of those arguments should be lost.

That reframes the build entirely. You are not optimising a tool. You are choosing which of your own tendencies gets a megaphone, and then living in the room with it. It’s the only stat system I’ve played where the min-maxer’s instinct — dump everything into the good number — reliably produces aworse life.

The failure design finishes the job. Skill checks are 2d6 with modifiers, and they come in two colours: white checks, which you can retry once something about you or the world has changed, and red checks, which resolve once and stay resolved. A red check failed is a door closed forever, and Disco Elysium’s whole reputation rests on those doors being more interesting from the outside. Failing to open a fridge in this game generates a better forty minutes than succeeding at most quests elsewhere.

Morale is a health bar

The bit I don’t think gets enough credit: there are two damage tracks. Health, which the world takes off you, andMorale, whichideas take off you.

Be humiliated in a conversation and Morale drops. Have a memory surface that you weren’t ready for and Morale drops. Run out of Morale and the game ends — you are dead, in the full and final sense, having been killed by a thought.

That single system does more thematic work than every grimdark narrative in the genre put together, because it makes the abstractionliteral at the mechanics level. This is a game about a man held together with string, and the string has a number, and you can watch the number go down while somebody is being unkind to you about your jacket. You heal it with cigarettes, with a drink, with a small act of self-mythology — each of which is a bad long-term idea that the systems reward in the short term, which is the most honest model of self-destruction anybody has shipped.

And Kim. Kim is a mechanic. He is standing next to you during almost every conversation, he reacts, and the game tracks how he’s reading you. There’s no visible approval meter to game — you just have a colleague, and you can feel him deciding. That absence of a bar is why he works. Every RPG companion since Baldur’s Gate has been a slot machine you feed dialogue options into for a romance payout. Kim is a person whose respect you can lose without a notification.

The ancestors

Planescape: Torment (1999) is the acknowledged parent and the comparison everyone reaches for, and it’s fair: a text-first RPG about an amnesiac, where the great question is what can change the nature of a man. Torment had combat, and Torment’s combat was the worst thing about it — a Infinity Engine obligation bolted to a novel. Disco Elysium is what you get when a studio finally has the nerve to cut the obligation.

The deeper ancestor is thirty-nine years old and ran on the machine under my telly.Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, 1985, C64 among others — the RPG that removed the final boss and replaced him with an ethics exam. Richard Garriott’s game watched what you did, tallied it against eight virtues, and the win condition was becoming a particular kind of person. It was clumsy, it was gameable, and it was the first time a computer RPG asserted that the interesting variable was the player’s character rather than their arithmetic. Everything Disco Elysium does with the Thought Cabinet — where you internalise an idea over real hours of play, and it changes your stats permanently, sometimes for the worse — is Ultima IV’s proposition with forty years of writing craft applied to it.

The Thought Cabinet deserves its own paragraph, actually. You pick up an idea. It occupies a slot. Itcooks — for an hour of play, while you do other things — and then it resolves into a permanent modifier, and you can’t easily get rid of it. That’s the best model of how convictions actually work that I’ve seen in software. You don’t decide to believe something. You carry it around until it sets.

Where it fights itself

The Final Cut’s voice acting is magnificent and it slows the game down, and I’ve never fully squared that. Disco Elysium is areading machine — a million-odd words, a prose rhythm that rewards skimming back and forth, an internal monologue that works at the speed your eye moves. Full VO puts a metronome on it. Lenval Brown’s narration is extraordinary and it is also a pace limiter on a game whose original virtue was letting you set your own. I’d still recommend the Final Cut, and I understand people who hard-disagree.

The four-day clock is the other tension. The game presents time pressure and then, for long stretches, doesn’t actually apply it — you can wander Martinaise indefinitely within a day, and the deadline turns out to be softer than the framing implies. That’s a mercy for the player and a small dishonesty in the design.

And the save button undermines the red checks. ZA/UM built a game where failure is the best content, and then shipped it on platforms where reloading takes four seconds. The design’s central bet requires a discipline it can’t enforce, and most players will quietly welch on it at least once. I did.

I’ll note the obvious and stop: ZA/UM’s ownership has been through the Estonian courts since 2022, and a planned expansion was cancelled alongside layoffs in 2023. That’s the public record. What it means for anything after this game is a matter for lawyers, and it doesn’t change what’s on the disc.

The verdict

Disco Elysium is the most important RPG since Torment, and its importance is almost entirely mechanical rather than literary — which is a strange thing to say about a game with a million words in it. The writing is extraordinary. Plenty of games have extraordinary writing bolted onto a combat engine that resents it. What makes this the one is that ZA/UM turned the character sheet into a psychology, made the damage tracks include your dignity, and then had the nerve to delete the swords.

You will fail at things. The failures will be the parts you talk about at dinner. That’s the design working exactly as specified, and four years on nobody has copied the trick properly, because copying it requires giving up the thing every publisher thinks a game is for.

Play the Final Cut. Take your time. Let Kim decide about you.

What to play next:Citizen Sleeper, which takes the “your stats are your circumstances” idea and makes it a clock;Norco for the same species of rotting-place writing; andBaldur’s Gate 3 if you want to see what the genre looks like when it keeps the swords and gets everything else right.

Spoilers below

The Thought Cabinet’s cruellest entry is the one that makes the whole system legible: some thoughts are traps. Internalise the wrong conviction and you take a permanent penalty and a permanent identity, and the game charges you skill points to forget it. Nothing warns you. The idea looked good when you picked it up, the way ideas do.

The political vision quests added in the Final Cut are the sharpest thing in the expanded version and the most misunderstood. Each ideology — communist, fascist, moralist, ultraliberal — will let you commit, reward the commitment with a mechanical bonus, and then show you the sad little end of that road. The quests aren’t lectures. They’re the game applying the same logic it applies to Electrochemistry: hold a belief loudly enough and you become a man who holds that belief loudly, and there’s a scene waiting at the end where you get to look at him.

The Deserter and the phasmid are where the whole architecture pays out. The case resolves through police work — real, sourced, tedious, sit-down-and-do-the-interviews police work — after fifty hours in which the game has been feeding you visions, hunches and Inland Empire’s psychic nonsense. And then the phasmid arrives, and it’sreal, and the game refuses to say which of your two epistemologies was correct. Both. Neither. Harry gets to keep his string.

That’s the closing argument for the no-combat design. A game with a fight in it would have had to pick a winner. Disco Elysium ends on a man standing in reeds looking at something impossible, having solved the murder by asking questions, with a colleague who has decided about him. There’s nothing to hit. There never was.

In 1998 the originalBaldur’s Gate arrived on five CD-ROMs and asked you to learn THAC0, a stat where lower numbers were better and nobody could explain why without drawing a diagram. BioWare’s Infinity Engine ran combat in real time and gave you a pause key to survive it, which meant every fight was a stop-motion argument between you and six people who kept walking into fireballs. It sold well for what it was. What it was, was a genre with a moat around it.

Twenty-five years later, Larian Studios releasedBaldur’s Gate 3 on PC on 3 August 2023 and put something like 875,000 people into it concurrently on Steam over the launch weekend. That is a Counter-Strike number attached to a game where you spend forty seconds deciding whether to use a bonus action. Something in the design broke the moat, and it is worth working out exactly what.

The turn is the load-bearing decision

Larian’s single biggest choice was made years before this game existed. The Ghent studio, founded by Swen Vincke in 1996, spentDivinity: Original Sin (2014) andOriginal Sin 2 (2017) building a turn-based tactical engine while the received wisdom said turn-based CRPGs were a museum piece and real-time with pause was the commercial format. When Larian took theBaldur’s Gate licence, the loudest early complaint from the old guard was that turns betrayed the series’ identity.

The turn is why the game is legible. Fifth Edition D&D — the ruleset Larian licensed from Wizards of the Coast — is built around an action, a bonus action, a reaction and a movement allowance per round. Rendered in real time with a pause key, that economy is invisible; you are managing an approximation of it through a queue. Rendered as a turn, it becomes a small puzzle with four visible pieces, and a person who has never rolled a d20 can read the whole board in a glance. Illegibility is what keeps people out of tactics games, and a turn is complexity you can see.

There’s a second-order effect. Because a turn is a discrete unit, a bad decision is attributable. You know precisely which choice cost you the fight, which makes losing instructive rather than mysterious. The Infinity Engine games lost you fights in a fog. This one hands you the postmortem.

The verb list is the actual invention

The ruleset is licensed. The engine is Larian’s. Where the two meet is where the game gets interesting, and the meeting point is a list of verbs.

Baldur’s Gate 3 lets you shove people as a bonus action. In tabletop 5e, shoving costs an attack — a real price. Larian discounted it to a bonus action, which sounds like a footnote and is in fact a design thesis. It means every ledge in the game is a weapon. It means a level designer placing a chasm is placing a damage source. Players worked this out in about a day and started building parties around gravity, and Larian, who had watched three years of early access telemetry since Act 1 went out on 6 October 2020, plainly knew they would.

The same logic runs through jumping (a bonus action that spends movement), throwing (anything you can lift, including a smaller party member), and surfaces. Grease, water, ice, fire, poison clouds — this is theOriginal Sin elemental sandbox smuggled into Faerûn, and it does the same job it did there: it converts the environment from scenery into inventory. A barrel is a spell you don’t have to prepare.

Why it works is a matter of authorship. A fireball is a solution the designer wrote for you. Stacking three crates, shoving a goblin priest off a bridge and setting the water on fire is a solution you wrote, and the game merely failed to prevent. Games are generous when they let you feel like the author of your own cheating. The real ancestor of that feeling is the immersive sim —Deus Ex and theThief games teaching you that the intended path is a suggestion — and Larian’s contribution is proving the trick survives being turn-based and having a d20 in it.

The camera bought the audience

Here is the expensive part, and the part the genre could not previously afford. Every line in this game is performed. Larian’s own figures put the cinematic runtime north of 170 hours, on a script in the millions of words, with motion capture on conversations that a 2017 CRPG would have delivered as a portrait and a wall of text. The camera drops to shoulder height, the elf looks at you, and the genre’s oldest tax — reading — is quietly waived.

I want to be careful about what this achieves, because “voice acting” is a shallow reading of it. What the camera does is make refusal legible. When Lae’zel, the githyanki who joins you in the first hour, sneers at a decision, the sneer is a piece of feedback about the state of a system — approval, in this case — and the system is now readable without opening a menu. Larian used cinematics as a UI for the relationship model. That’s why the origin characters landed the way they did: Astarion, Shadowheart, Gale, Wyll, Karlach and Lae’zel are bettersurfaced than a goodPlanescape companion — a different achievement from being better written, and a harder one to fake.

The tabletop debt is real, too. The Dark Urge origin, the Inspiration points you earn for playing your background and spend to reroll a failed check, the way a failed persuasion opens a worse door instead of a load screen — this is a game that understands that the actual pleasure of D&D is the table’s reaction when the plan collapses. Failure as content is a hard sell in a genre trained on optimisation, and it’s the most quietly radical thing here.

Where it fights itself

The long rest economy is the design arguing with the fiction. Rests cost forty camp supplies and restore your spell slots, which is 5e’s core balancing act — resources across an adventuring day. In a video game with no dungeon master enforcing pace, the day is whatever you say it is. The optimal play is to rest constantly, which trivialises attrition; the honest play is to ration, which the game never asks you to do. Meanwhile most companion content is gated behind rests, so the game actively bribes you to break its own tension. Larian resolved this by shrugging, and I think it was the right shrug — but it’s a seam.

Inventory is the other one. Four characters, weight limits, and a loot table generous enough to bury you in gear you’ll never equip means real minutes of your life spent as a warehouse clerk.Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has the same disease, asI’ve argued before; the maximalist CRPG keeps mistaking abundance for generosity.

And a note on the platforms, because it’s part of the story: the PS5 version is dated 6 September 2023, and the Xbox release has been publicly held up over split-screen co-op on the Series S — Vincke has talked about the memory problem openly rather than pretending it away. A game this size on a console this small is a real engineering fight, and Larian have been unusually honest about losing rounds of it.

The verdict

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the CRPG that stopped apologising. The genre spent two decades treating its own systems as an admission price and hiding them behind either nostalgia or automation. Larian’s answer was to make the systems the attraction — visible, physical, shovable — and then spend blockbuster money on the interface. The result is a game where the tactical layer and the character layer feed each other instead of taking turns, and where a first-time player and a 1998 veteran are looking at the same readable board.

It sprawls. Act 3’s city is denser than the game’s own pacing can support, and you can feel where the ambition outran the schedule. I’d take that trade every time over a game that never reaches.

If this is your entry point, the two places to go next areDisco Elysium, which proves how far you can push failure-as-content when you delete combat entirely, andPersona 5 Royal for a completely different answer to the same question: how do you make relationship systems feel like they cost something?Baldur’s Gate 3 is on PC now and PS5 shortly. It will still be worth playing in a decade, which is more than the 1998 original could claim by 2008.

Spoilers below

The Emperor is the structural masterstroke and the most divisive thing in the game, and both facts have the same cause. For most of the running time your protector is a voice in your head asking for trust it hasn’t earned, which means Larian built the central mystery out of the same substance as the tadpole mechanic — every illithid power you accept is an argument you’re losing. That the reveal makes some players feel manipulated is the design working. You were.

Astarion’s ascension is the sharpest fork Larian wrote, because it’s the only one where the “good” ending is unmistakably the smaller one. You can let a man take enormous power at a cost paid by thousands, and he will be happy, and he will be worse. Refusing it gives you a frightened person with two centuries of damage and no compensation. Most RPGs make the moral choice the powerful one. This one prices it correctly.

Karlach’s ending is the game’s honest admission that not everything is solvable. The engine gives you infinite verbs and none of them fix her, and Larian held that line through early access feedback that must have been brutal. The Netherbrain finale is the weakest hour — a big fight at the end of a game whose best fights are small ones — but the last conversation before it is the reason the whole enormous thing works.