I have spent a lot of time playing JRPGs in my game-playing years. I have played a lot of the big hits, gotten many playthroughs under my belt for some all-time classic games. I have also sought out niche titles, and evangelized them to those around me. However, there are gaps in my experience, and I wish to share those gaps with you dear readers, along with my everlasting and perpetual shame. This is a list of 20 JRPGs that I have never rolled ending credits on, which maybe I should have done instead of spending a few thousand hours in World of Warcraft. Hindsight as always, is 20/20 and I cannot turn back time. Instead, I can use this list as a guidepost, and maybe start ticking down some of these entries over the rest of 2022 and beyond. If any of these are in your piles of shame as well, feel free to join me, tell me how the list is going on Twitter. Without any further ado:

2021 was a shitty year for sure, and I am not heading into 2022 with much confidence. However, while society falls apart, video games have been pretty great. That was a depressing, yet also probably trite sentence to write at the end of this year. While society continues to grapple with sickness on unprecedented scales, it becomes more the role of video games to make our lives feel more normal, more fun. In a year where I had only recently been to a movie theater, and where I don’t feel comfortable at things like bars, the stories and experiences we take in come increasingly through a screen at home. Whether that be a television, computer screen, tablet, or phone, we need to have fun, and be able to remind ourselves not everything is doom and gloom all of the time. That being said, maybe don’t use the television to watch the news…

Ray's JRPG Shame Pile

Ray McGill's Top Games of 2021