Fantasy games are all but synonymous with epic adventures, building stories with high stakes and often placing you as the world’s last hope. From large maps and giant bosses to events that reshape entire kingdoms or even civilizations, everything carries that overwhelming, larger-than-life sense of scale, even when the journey beneath it all is deeply personal.

While distinct, epic fantasy and dark fantasy often overlap, enriching each other with themes and conflicts like warring demigods, fallen kingdoms, and ancient powers, making you and your allies responsible for deciding the fate of an entire age. For this list, we’ll be covering the greatest epic fantasy games that perfected the formula within their genres, with the priority on pure fantasy over sci-fi or steampunk settings.

Final Fantasy 16 might not be the best in the iconic series, but when it comes to epic fantasy, it’s definitely somewhere near the top, not just for the franchise, but for all of gaming. Its bombastic set-pieces involving Eikon battles can pretty much serve as the literal definition of the word “epic,” where visuals, soundtrack, scale, and gameplay all combine to deliver moments of sheer awe and goosebumps.

Final Fantasy 16 deserves to be here for its exceptional portrayal of kingdoms at war, godlike powers, and enormous spectacle, with its world and politics reinforcing that scale, even if some plotlines aren’t fully paid off. For me, the biggest issue with FF16 was how excessively “grounded” the game gets between its best, truly epic moments, with its Game of Thrones inspirations and insistence on being mature and serious sometimes hurting the overall adventure.

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