The Modern JRPG Canon

Turn-based combat has spent the better part of two decades being declared dead by people who then kept playing games built on it. The declaration never quite lands, because the format solves a problem real-time action combat doesn’t: it lets a designer build encounters around information and decision-making rather than reflex, which means a JRPG can ask you to think about a fight rather than execute it, and that’s a genuinely different kind of pleasure that action combat structurally can’t replace. The games on this list all made a specific, current argument for why that pleasure still matters, rather than just inheriting the format out of genre habit.

Persona 5 Royal — the calendar as the real antagonist

Atlus’s late-2019 expanded rerelease of Persona 5 makes its argument somewhere most players don’t expect it: not in the turn-based dungeon combat, which is solid but conventional, but in the calendar system governing every day between dungeons. Time is the actual scarce resource in Persona 5 Royal — study, work a job, build a social link, or train a stat, and every choice forecloses the others for that day, which means the game’s real difficulty curve is a resource-management puzzle wearing a high-school disguise. The full read on the calendar as antagonist covers exactly how that system turns a hangout scene into a decision with real weight, in a way pure combat difficulty never could on its own.

Persona 3 Reload — the remake that had to choose what to keep

Atlus’s 2024 rebuild of 2006’s Persona 3 faced a harder problem than most remakes on this list’s neighbouring canon: the original’s tone was bleaker and stranger than the series’ later, more polished entries, and modernising the combat and social systems risked sanding down exactly what made the original distinctive. The full account of what the remake sanded down and what it kept makes the case that Reload’s mechanical improvements are real, but the argument about tone is the one worth having, and it’s the rare modern JRPG remake where the design conversation is as much about what a series should sound like as what it should play like.

Metaphor: ReFantazio — Atlus runs an election inside a fantasy world

The team behind Persona’s modern era applied the same calendar-and-social architecture to an original high-fantasy setting in 2024, and the boldest choice in Metaphor: ReFantazio is structural rather than combat-related: an in-game election, contested across the entire campaign, that reframes party recruitment and social systems as political coalition-building rather than friendship-collecting. The full read on Atlus running an election covers how that reframing changes what the same underlying calendar system is actually asking you to weigh, turning a familiar Atlus structure into something that reads differently because the stakes attached to it changed.

Final Fantasy XVI — the JRPG that wanted to be something else entirely

Square Enix’s 2023 entry belongs on this list precisely because it argues against its own genre’s central convention: Final Fantasy XVI drops turn-based combat entirely in favour of real-time action modelled openly on character-action games, a bet that only makes sense read against what the series was trying to prove it could still do. The full read on the JRPG that wanted to be Devil May Cry is essential precisely because it’s the counter-example in this canon — the game that argues turn-based combat isn’t required for a story and a world to still read as a JRPG at heart, which is a claim the other five titles here implicitly push back against.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth — the substories as the actual game

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s 2024 entry continues the Like a Dragon series’ pivot to turn-based party combat (begun with 2020’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon), but the argument this particular entry makes is about scope rather than combat mechanics: a Hawaii-set second location running alongside the series’ usual Kamurocho, and a density of optional substories — job systems, minigames, character-specific side content — so large that the main campaign becomes almost incidental to the actual experience of playing it. The full read on why the substories carry it argues that this is the series correctly understanding what its own audience actually shows up for.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth — the middle chapter with everything in it

The second instalment of Square Enix’s remake trilogy, released 2024, faced the classic middle-chapter problem — no clean beginning, no ending, just the long middle of a story everyone already partly knows — and answered it by making the overworld itself the argument: an open, densely detailed regional structure layered with side activities, mini-games and optional character content dense enough that the turn-based-inflected action combat becomes one system among several competing for a player’s attention. The full read on the middle chapter with everything in it covers whether that density serves the story or competes with it.

Why the format never actually needed defending

It’s worth stating the design case for turn-based combat directly, because the “is it dead” framing obscures what the format is actually good at. A turn-based fight removes reflex and reaction time from the equation entirely, which means every variable a designer wants to test — resource management across a long fight, weakness exploitation, formation and positioning, risk-reward on a big single-turn gamble — can be presented to the player as pure information, evaluated at whatever pace they choose, rather than compressed into a split-second window that favours quick hands over careful thought. That’s not a lesser kind of challenge than a real-time game’s; it’s a different one, testing planning and pattern recognition rather than timing and coordination, and there’s a substantial audience for whom the planning version of that challenge is the more satisfying one. The genre never needed to apologise for the format. It needed games willing to build something as structurally interesting as Persona 5 Royal’s calendar around it, so the combat wasn’t left carrying the entire weight of the game’s appeal on its own.

The genre’s oldest tension, still live

Every one of these six games is also still negotiating a tension that’s been part of the format since its earliest days: how much of a JRPG’s forty-plus hour runtime should be spent on the authored critical path versus optional systems the player can engage with at their own pace. The series that pioneered the modern calendar-and-social-link structure did so specifically to answer that tension — give the player a reason to return to town between dungeons that isn’t just shopping — and every game on this list is a descendant of that same design problem, answered differently each time. Metaphor: ReFantazio’s election adds political stakes to the return-to-town loop. Infinite Wealth’s substories make the optional layer so dense it threatens to eclipse the critical path entirely. Rebirth’s open regions do the same thing spatially rather than socially. None of these are new problems. They’re the same long-running design question about pacing a lengthy RPG, still being asked, and the fact that six different 2023-2024 releases each found a genuinely different answer to it is the strongest evidence that the question isn’t close to exhausted yet.

What earns a place, and what doesn’t

A genre this prolific produces far more entries than any single list can cover, so the exclusions matter as much as the inclusions here. This isn’t a list of the best-reviewed or best-selling JRPGs of the period — several titles outside this six sold more copies or scored better on aggregate. The bar for inclusion is narrower: each entry had to be making a specific, identifiable argument about a system beyond its combat encounters, one you could state in a sentence and defend against a sceptic. A perfectly competent JRPG that simply executes the genre’s established grammar well, without pushing on any particular seam, doesn’t qualify for a canon built around argument rather than execution — however enjoyable it is to play, and however deserving of praise on its own separate terms. That standard rules out plenty of good games and rules in at least one, Final Fantasy XVI, that plenty of genre purists would rather not claim as a JRPG at all. The list is stronger for including it anyway, because a canon that only admits comfortable agreement isn’t doing the job a canon is for.

Reading the six together

Line these up and a pattern emerges that’s more interesting than any individual entry: none of the strongest arguments for the modern JRPG are actually about combat mechanics in isolation. Persona 5 Royal and Metaphor: ReFantazio locate the real design tension in calendar and social systems that wrap around combat rather than replace it. Persona 3 Reload’s argument is about tone preservation during a remake. Infinite Wealth’s is about optional content density outgrowing the critical path. Final Fantasy XVI’s is the outlier that abandons the format the other five build on, which is exactly why it belongs alongside them — a canon that only included agreement wouldn’t actually be arguing anything. Turn-based combat’s survival, on this evidence, has less to do with combat itself holding up and more to do with how much genuinely interesting design a JRPG can wrap around it once combat stops being the only system carrying the weight.

That’s a useful thing to hold onto the next time a new entry in the genre gets dismissed on the grounds that turn-based combat is inherently old-fashioned. The combat was never the whole pitch, not for any of the six games above, and judging a JRPG purely on whether its battle system feels modern is judging it by the metric it was least trying to win on. Ask instead what the calendar, the social system, the optional density or the political structure wrapped around the fighting is actually doing, and the genre’s supposed staleness mostly evaporates — replaced by six very different, very live design conversations that happen to share a combat verb.