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2025 has plenty of great titles to choose from, we’ve touched on some of them recently and decided to expand the list further to do them justice. RPG fans are going to eat well this year too!
Dragon Quest 12: The Flame of Fate was announced in May 2021 during the 35th anniversary of the series. Since then there’s only been a very small amount of information as to actual game progress.
The game's creator, Yuji Horii, mentioned in an interview that the game will have darker themes and focus more heavily on choices that the protagonist makes, potentially leading to more “serious” outcomes.
There was also a mention of changes to the core mechanics, including combat, which causes concern amongst the fans whether the series will depart from the turn-based combat system. There’s no definitive answer yet so there’s still hope.
Due to the passing of two legendary figures who were responsible for
Music composition and character design, Kōichi Sugiyama and Akira Toriyama respectively, this would be the final title in which they were involved, marking this game as the final goodbye to their creative works in the series.
The game is expected to release either late 2025 or at the beginning of 2026. It could be the beginning of a new era or a big dud, depending on how well the, supposed, changes are implemented and whether the community likes it.
Fingers crossed it’s the former!
The newest title from the Yakuza (now Like a Dragon) series. As the name suggests, the game will take place in the Hawaiian archipelago with Goro Majima, a well known character in the series, being stranded on one of the islands after losing his memory due to an unknown cause.
This puts him on the journey to rise as a pirate captain to recover his memories and hunt some valuable treasure along the way. Similarly to the previous titles in the series, the game will use the beat’em up system to deal with various ex-yakuza and pirate opponents in the game. On top of that, the game implemented a ship combat in which the player can use weapons for ship-to-ship combat or perform a ship boarding to engage in a hand-to-hand combat with the enemy crew.
As is traditional in the series, there’s plenty of side content, quests and activities outside of the main storyline, which itself is more on a lighthearted side, meaning that it shouldn’t be too much of a problem even for the newcomers to join the weirdness of the Like a Dragon franchise.
The game is set to release on the 21st of February 2025 so there’s still some time to make that decision.
Gearbox Software’s latest in the looter-shooter with RPG mechanics. Borderlands 4 is set on a new world called Kairos, a planet seemingly on the brink of huge conflict and during a catastrophic event that can spell doom for all of its inhabitants and a loss of its Vaults.
As in previous installments in the series, there’s supposed to be “billions” of weapons to deal with various mechanical abominations, ruthless bandits and all kinds of beasts. The players themselves can choose from 4 new Vault Hunters to seek our riches and glory in either a solo or co-op playthrough with 3 other teammates to go against the tyrannical Timekeeper antagonist.
There are promising extensive level-up trees to develop each Vault Hunter that should allow them high combat mobility, action packed engagements to make each fight as enjoyable as possible.
While there's currently no fixed release date the game is expected to release in 2025, potentially in the earlier months but there’s no definitive proof of that other than speculations.
A highly anticipated release within the Monster Hunter series. Series that focuses on “Hunters” tracking, capturing and defeating various monsters to upgrade their gear to hunt even more powerful creatures. A very satisfying game loop that works thanks to the impressive and imposing looking monsters with fun filled action combat.
The game is said to take place in the “Forbidden Lands” an uninhabited landmass full of monsters (shocker!). The player character will be a fully customisable Hunter on a mission to find a missing expedition as the main (initial) objective.
It’ll follow the usual open world, third person style of the Monster Hunter series, now with an addition of a mount to travel the world more freely and to add mounted combat into already exciting monster hunting adventures.
Its estimated release date is set for 28th of February, with a second open beta planned a few weeks before.
It’s possibly the best time to join the Monster Hunter series for the newcomers!
Atelier Yumia is the next game in the long time Atelier series, an RPG series focused around female alchemists saving the world from destruction, while having a cozy time synthesizing items of course.
This time the protagonist is the titular Yumia, a more mature and serious character than her counterparts from the previous games. She’s seeking out the truth behind her mothers past and the cataclysm that was brought, supposedly by the alchemists, onto the now gone Aladissian Empire, which caused all alchemy to become branded as “evil” and “taboo”.
Just like in other Atelier games, the main focus is the aforementioned synthetising new powerful items, gathering ingredients, exploration and of course combat.
The story seems to be a little bit more serious than usual, with the whole post-cataclysm situation, but there’s still plenty of cozy atmosphere to enjoy with an addition of construction to create various workshops (ateliers) around the gameworld.
Combat takes place in real time with a selectable menu of attacks/actions to perform between 3 active participants, with the possibility to switch characters around mid-fight. A more action focused style, as opposed to the usual turn-based style from the previous games.
All in all, there’s a lot to enjoy in terms of content, story, combat and of course character design and there’s still some time to prepare for its release, which is on the 21st of March 2025.
Plenty of titles to choose from in the first half of 2025. Despite the challenge for the developers when it comes to producing sequels, there's still a large interest in the RPGs all over the world.
So long as there isn’t much interference from outside of the gaming side within the company to sabotage it, there’s very little to get in the way of a good RPG. Especially when seeing how many sequels series like Atelier, Dragon Quest or Yakuza (Like a Dragon) managed to create.
Here’s hoping this trend stays its course for a long time!
Definitely, established companies are constantly trying new things to keep longtime series fresh for players, both newcomers and veterans. There’s plenty of already existing ones with new games coming out all the time.
Mass Effect series is quite easy to jump into, similarly Skyrim for more action oriented RPG fans.
PC remains one of the best platforms with a huge variety of games. Both new and old titles.
