Summary
One of the many joys of the RPG genre is becoming completely immersed in another world, and that pleasure is only amplified when the world is beautiful beyond compare. Some RPG worlds almost don’t even need combat or conflict because the beauty of their world is good enough.
Whether it be towering jungles filled with teeming wildlife, the quiet beauty of an anime countryside, or the strange beauty of a corporate dystopia, RPGs have plenty of truly beautiful worlds to offer.
In a lot of ways, theMonster Huntergames have a tricky problem trying to make their player out to be good guys. After all, your job is to literally kill wildlifewith a whole armory of deadly weapons, which can feel a little icky (unless they’re a world-ending threat of course). That disjunction has never been more prominent than inMonster Hunter: Worlddue to the beauty of its environments.
The sheer scale of the world’s jungles, subterranean bio-luminescent caves, and sand-swamped dunes makes the player character feel incredibly small in comparison. One of the chief joys of the game isn’t just the violence, but simply wandering around the richly realized worlds of a land completely untamed.
The ever-underplayed and underratedXenoblade Chroniclesfranchise has never quite caught on in mainstream circles outside of Nintendo fans, which is a really big shame, because they are some of the finest RPGs made, and their worlds, in particular, are a real pleasure to just exist in.
Xenoblade Chronicles Xputs a twist on the fantasy leanings of the original trilogy and leans fully into sci-fi, blending the two together with startling success, leading to worlds that show off the best of both genres.
Beauty doesn’t just come in the form of realistic graphics or striking art styles. Sometimes, it comes from returning to game graphics of yesteryear and reinventing them for modern audiences.Octopath Traveler, in many ways a love letter to the JRPGS of the NES and SNES era, does just that, and in truly beautiful detail.
The game keeps the pixelated graphics but uses stunning lighting, rack focus, and particle effects to sell the beauty around the lo-fi polygons, resulting in a game that truly stands up to any modern RPG in terms of its sheer beauty, and drawsits rich roster of job-filled charactersin loving detail.
Despite an undoubtedly shaky launch and unstable years thereafter,No Man’s Skyhas been on one long redemption run ever since, continually adding new features, improvements, and changes, turning a pretty bad game into one of the best open-world space RPGs available.
One reason it works so well is because of its stunning beauty. There’s an undeniable majesty to takingone of many ships from the hangarout into the cosmos and admiring the spinning planets, many of which have probably never been explored by any other player. Match that with great art design, a vibrant color palette, and strange but delightful creatures, andNo Man’s Skymakes a compelling case for itself as containing genuine beauty.
Beauty comes in all forms, and Night City isn’t the conventional way of looking at it. Instead of crimson sunsets and rolling hills, Night City is a cyberpunk dystopia dominated by hyper-consumerism,weird hidden locations, and the death knell of modern civilization.
However, zooming out, there is an undeniable beauty to Night City, and the game wants the player to know it. Throughout, the player will have long conversations with NPCs as they stare out over the dynamic Night City skyline that stands as a testament to what humans are really capable of, and their capacity to still make beautiful things, even if it’s in the worst of circumstances.
On the entirely opposite end of the scale fromCyberpunk 2077,Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witchis an absolute cozy delight from start to finish, in large part due to the massive influence Studio Ghibli has over its cutscenes, and the art style in general.
Everything inNi No Kuniis drawn in stark bold colors with cosy lines and adorable characters. It’s a storybook world intentionally, and one a player can lose themselves in for hours at a time. Ghibli and Level-5 are impeccable at creating worlds that feel safe, nostalgic, and undeniably beautiful.
Beauty comes in many forms, and in video games, the most beautiful worlds are often those that are graphically rendered in the most realistic detail.Horizon: Forbidden Westis one such game, managing to build upon the work of its predecessor and manage to push the PS5 to its limit to produce some of the very best graphics available on any platform.
That means as Aloy scraps her way through the wasteland the player is more than likely to be greeted by stunning vistas, crystal clear azure oceans, or the rambling robot wildlife roaming the lands. If Attenborough could make a sci-fi documentary, it would probably look something like this game.
Beauty does not need to come in realism. Sometimes, all it takes is a striking art design and a technical team willing to push underpowered hardware to its absolute limit. The fruit of that labor becomes crystal clear inThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which builds on everythingBreath of the Wilddid beforehand and pushes everything further.
The Hyrule of the modern Zelda games is nothing short of stunning. The rolling green hills, steep mountains, and dusty desert dunes aren’t necessarily realistic, but they express a quiet sense of nature’s resolve to persevere past an apocalypse, and it’s hard not to be swept up in the romanticist idea of it all when playing.
