5 Cult RPGs From 1992 All ‘80s Kids Know Were Absolutely Flawless

The 1990s were a great time for RPGs; however, games were coming nearly as quickly as they do these days. Instead, RPG fans often had to wait weeks for a new game in their preferred genre to hit, and sometimes Japanese RPGs took years to come to the West. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that games like Dragon Quest V and Ultima Underworld sucked up most of the oxygen in 1992. After all, they were major releases that captured the imaginations of players worldwide. If you were really invested in the RPG space, though, these five, lesser-known games also had plenty of juice.

5) Arcana

Arcana is a nifty first-person dungeon crawler from Hal Labs on the Super Nintendo. Characters are represented by cards, but don’t expect deckbuilding or any other mechanics you’d expect from a card game. Instead, battles are fought in first person and mostly restricted to text descriptions due to the hardware’s limitations. And like any good dungeon crawler of the era, it’s nearly impossible.

This RPG has so many ways to kill you. Each encounter can go sideways in seconds, and if you lose even one character (outside of a few exceptions), you’ll get a full game over. You also get almost no warning that an enemy is about to attack, and save points are incredibly sparse. Toss in a limited inventory and an inability to return to easier dungeons to grind, and you have one of the toughest RPGs of the era. That said, if you can get past the difficulty, Arcana is a solid ’90s RPG.

4) Rings of Power

Did you know that Naughty Dog once made a Genesis RPG for Electronic Arts? Well, if you didn’t, you do now. This was originally pitched as an MS-DOS and Amiga game, but EA brought in the Naughty Dog founders, Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin, to make this for the Genesis, making Rings of Power the developers’ first console game. At launch, Rings of Power was praised for its presentation and scope, but the gameplay was a little lacking.

However, if you can make it through the relatively steep learning curve and get over some of the choppy visuals, there’s a great RPG in here. Naughty Dog tried to build a massive world filled with things to do, and it became a modest commercial success. Unfortunately, EA decided to stick with John Madden Football and decided not to reprint Rings of Power. That decision left Gavin and Rubin in the lurch and led to the duo taking a brief hiatus from the industry before coming back with Way of the Warrior in 1994.

3) Soul Blazer

Developer Quintet is better known for games like ActRaiser, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma, but Soul Blazer was another solid game from the team. The action RPG launched between Quintet’s two ActRaiser games, which might be why it went a little under the radar in 1992. Still, if you’re looking for an RPG that plays a little like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, you don’t need to look further than Soul Blazer.

You’ll work your way through several villages, fighting off monsters and saving souls. As you bring more souls back to their former towns, you’ll liberate them from various boss monsters. After saving enough towns, you’ll have one last major fight as you step into the “World of Evil.” Interestingly, Soul Blazer doesn’t have any true connection to ActRaiser or Gaia, but fans have often viewed it as the first game in the Gaia series. However, Enix has said it’s more of a prequel to ActRaiser. No matter how you slice it, Soul Blazer is a must-play RPG for Quintet fans.

2) Shining Force

Shining Force is a turn-based tactical RPG from the developers at Climax Entertainment and Sonic! Software Planning. It is technically the second game in the Shining series, following up on the 1991 game Shining in the Darkness. If you’ve played the Fire Emblem series, you basically know what to expect. Obviously, that series has modernized tactical RPGs, but Shining Force uses many of the genre benchmarks you’d expect to create exceptional combat.

What makes Shining Force stand out is the exploration mode that you’ll jump into between battles. This plays much more like a standard RPG of the time, letting the developers add fun characters and a robust item system to the mix. It’s also relatively accessible, which could be a problem at times during this era. Almost anyone could dive into Shining Force and quickly understand all of its systems. Thankfully, publisher Sega has continued the series, making it less obscure than some of the other games on this list. Still, it’s worth checking out if you’ve missed this classic RPG.

1) Romancing SaGa

Square started the SaGa series on the Game Boy with The Final Fantasy Legend. Fans got two more games on that system before Square decided to give the series a name change and bring it to the Super Nintendo. However, Romancing SaGa did not come to the North American market until 2005, so many fans missed this game during the ’90s unless they were very in-the-know with the Japanese market.

It’s too bad that it took so long for this classic RPG to come stateside. Sure, Romancing SaGa didn’t look quite as good as Final Fantasy in 1992, but players have so much more agency in how the story progresses. That’s because you need to play through the quest lines of eight different protagonists, and exploration is completely nonlinear. It all comes together for one last boss battle that brings Romancing SaGa to a satisfying conclusion. Toss in phenomenal turn-based battles, and you have one of the best RPGs of 1992. If you haven’t played it yet, you absolutely need to give it a go.

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