The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


There are few people who love a good console RPG more than I. Games like Final Fantasy, Grandia, and Skies of Arcadia set a standard of majesty and wonder and immersion that American game designers are challenged to match. And yet, as I play the latest masterpiece to come out of Japan I sometimes can't help the feeling that, somehow, I've seen it all before... WARNING! There are spoilers in here for many popular CRPGs. I mean, duh.


The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés lists 192 trends that frequently recur in RPGs, and sometimes other genres. The purpose of this page is to find matches to existing tropes as well as provide inspiration for new ones. For performance reasons, they are split into the 8 pages below. Feel free to discuss possible matches in the discussion page or create new tropes through the YKTTW.

See also: Evil Overlord List and The RPG Cliches Game.

Note to Tropers -- The list item text and order should not be changed. Adding links to tropes should be fine, as long as they don't change the displayed text. Please follow the established pattern of blue-shifting just the title when a complete match is found.