Six Beyond Awesome SNES RPGs You May Have Missed

The SNES was truly an amazing system for RPG titles, playing host to incredible titles like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy IV & VI, Earthbound, Shadowrun, and more.

Lots of folks are aware of these incredible games, often spoken in hushed tones when speaking of the glory days of console RPGs – many of them hold up today and have found their way to modern consoles, handhelds, and mobile devices in some form or another.

But there are some lesser known, still worth playing treats among the RPG titans of days long past – let’s take a look at some of them.

Soul Blazer
Hey, you can watch us play through the entirety of Quintet’s action-RPG in this Super Replay! In case you just want to pick up and play yourself though, Soul Blazer is the first of a trilogy of games that are all worth playing, with the follow-ups to Soul Blazer being a bit better than the frontrunner. Get your hands on a copy of Illusion of Gaia or Terranigma for some real sword-slinging fun.

Drakkhen
Trying to play this game as a kid was all kinds of confusing, wandering around the wilderness for days without any idea how systems or character building worked, maybe picking up a few items before being slaughtered by a random enemy that just rolls around one-shotting your helpless adventurers. Today, it’s still pretty much like that, but it’s a unique experience I’d recommend anyone to have at least once. It’s a sort of weird cult-classic dungeon/overworld romp with a lot of “interesting” design decisions.

Arcana
This card-based RPG was a real-deal dungeon crawler that had awesome summons and lengthy delves into labyrinthine depths. Like Shining In the Darkness this was a core crawler, but changed things up a bit with its elementals and cards. If you’re looking for a classic-style RPG with  danger lurking around every corner and traditional level progression/dungeon exploration, this is one to check out.

Robotrek
This game is still awesome. Another Quintet classic, Robotrek has players travel through a traditional console RPG, but there’s a twist – you create your own character robots from scratch, inventing new weapons and items to plug into them over the course of the game. You get to customize your robocrew as they move through traditional RPG encounters, and it makes this one a memorable standout.

The 7th Saga
I want to watch Reiner play this one sometime. It’s known for being crazy difficult, and that’s not far from the mark – this is a fairly formulaic RPG, but is pretty cool in that it offers players a varied selection of characters with different playstyles and abilities at the beginning of the game which makes one playthrough quite different from another based on choice.

Secret of Evermore
Yeah, so it’s no Secret of Mana, but you could definitely do a lot worse with your old-school SNES RPG time. You should probably play this one if you haven’t.