Love them or hate them, inventory management systems are the lifeblood of many RPGs. Whether you’re sorting through your backpacks, or trying to fit your battle axe into a Tetris-style briefcase, a good inventory system can make or break a game.

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Some games, though, are broken for other reasons, either because they had a bad story, were glitchy, or just weren’t paced well. And while you might not go for a game purely because it has a cool way of storing your loot, the item management of these average games might tempt you to give them a second glance.

7 Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist Of The Mysterious Book

Sophie from Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book

The Atelier series has a history of solid, innovative JRPGs that track all the way back to 1997 with the launch of Atelier Marie: The Alchemist of Salburg, and Atelier Sophie is no exception to the rule. With an interesting mix of crafting, Harvest Moon-esque relationship building, and combat, Sophie’s polished inventory management — which allows you to search and sort through the hundreds of items you’ve gathered — is exactly the kind of organization you’ll need for your alchemical experiments.

Unfortunately, the rest of Atelier Sophie is a bit uneven. It struggles to get the plot paced well, and sometimes you’ll spend days waiting to figure out how to progress, only to be confronted with more significant plot events than your mind can handle. The simplistic combat system also drags down what could have been an amazing game into the just-sort-of-OK category.

6 Darksiders 3

Darksiders 3 accelerated speed combat

While not exactly a clone, Darksiders 3 does take a lot from Dark Souls, though not always in the best ways. By trying to take on a more soulslike edge, the game lost the hack-and-slash charm of the previous games. It retains plenty combos that you won’t use, because any enemy worth its salt will punish you for trying. The game came out buggy, too, with glitches, crashes, and random level loads galore. While the gameplay had a solid core, the game seemed to be trying too many things — and didn’t do exceptionally well at any of them.

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That being said, Darksiders 3 does also take liberally from FromSoftware’s intuitive inventory. It allows you to pause while you manage said inventory, which you might think of as an improvement after getting killed by a giant crab for the fourth time while trying to sort through your armor in Elden Ring.

5 Ultima Online

Ultima online gameplay
Ultima online gameplay

One of the first successful MMORPGs, Ultima Online was perhaps too ambitious for its launch in 1997. This was principally because most players were still on dial-up internet. To play, you would have had to compete with whoever wanted to call their friends or answer their email. The game was also plagued by technical issues when it was launched, and required you to go through a bunch of boring, repetitive tasks (like making candles) before you could go out and actually play.

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Ultima’s inventory system, though, was fairly interesting. The shop and home inventory was physically represented, and had you placing bags in a container — each of which served like a glorified folder for your stuff. The cool thing was that you were able to arrange these bags however you wanted. You could even stack them on top of each other, leaving your most valuable items on the bottom to prevent theft.

4 Fallout 76

Fallout 76 Wastelanders Power Armor

It would take an entire article to explain just how disappointing Fallout 76 was on launch. Suffice to say that trapsing around a gigantic, buggy, post-apocalyptic West Virginia without any NPCs wasn’t an experience you were hoping to pay sixty bucks for. Add on a bunch of less-than-micro transactions for in-game advantages, and the fact that you actually have to pay to play the game without twenty other people running around on the map, and you have a recipe for mediocrity — despite the game’s fantastic foundations.

Fallout 76’s inventory system was also a bit of a mess when it was launched, but recent patches have returned it to something like you’d find in Fallout 3 or New Vegas. These changes also came with the ability to carry more weight, and to sort through items in surprisingly intuitive ways. It doesn’t make the twenty bucks you spent for a Santa skin sting any less, but at least you’ll have enough room in your stash to store it for next year.

3 7 Days To Die

Players Fighting Zombies In 7 Days To Die

Though technically still in alpha, 7 Days to Die was a bit of a disappointment when it first launched. The scope and ambition of making an enormous, open-world survival RPG with zombies and thousands of crafting possibilities is commendable, but with The Fun Pimps pumping out patches and extras since 2013, it’s a bit like watching the sausage get made. It has its fanatics, but playing a half-finished game is only satisfying for a select few.

One of the high points of the game is its searchable inventory. This is extremely welcome, since for most of the game you’ll focus on building, crafting, gathering, and otherwise preparing for the next horde of zombies to assault your meager fortress. Though it has its kinks to be worked out, this makes the game feel less complicated and therefore more accessible than it might seem at first.

2 Magic: Legends

Magic Legends Preview

Wizards of the Coast’s attempt to get a piece of the Diablo pie, Magic: Legends never really got off the ground. It closed down in beta, only four months after the servers went up. Fights were bland, the different classes didn’t really change how you played all that much, and after a while the gameplay just got samey — lacking the skill needed for its isometric bretheren.

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The idea behind Magic: Legends' combat, though, which involved using random powers drawn from a deck you built before every encounter, was extremely interesting. Rather than spending time sorting through what epic items you were going to use against what boss encounter, the deck building mechanic theoretically gave your encounters the chaotic excitement of the card game. It didn’t really work in implementation, but the idea of managing inventory via a deckbuilding mechanic deserved more exploration than it got.

1 Outward

player hunting a deer in Outward

Developed in 2019 by indie developer Nine Dot Studios, Outward is ambitious if nothing else. Almost as much a survival game as it is fantasy themed RPG, Outward has you play as a normal villager tasked with doing impossible things. This includes fighting monsters that will easily kill stomp your face in, no matter how strong you get. Survival requires patience, preparation, and, this cannot be stressed enough, a really good backpack.

Backpacks in Outward have a serious impact on your game. They act as an actual space, one that gets heavy and cumbersome if you don’t have the right kind of satchel. Having the ability to move freely with as much stuff as possible is essential for crafting traps and preparing spells — something that's important, since Nine Dot seems to have paid as much attention to melee combat as your friend does to that dying succulent in her living room. With gameplay that is sometimes unfairly difficult, Outward probably only appeals to the most masochistic of gamers. However, for those of you who want a mixture of Dark Souls, Death Stranding, and The Long Dark: welcome.

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