We have proved in the past that fighting game characters have some of the most ridiculous backstories in the gaming world. Digging a little bit shows us that role-playing games are not that far behind. With RPGs, however, the ridiculousness is not reserved for only one or two characters per game. When things get weird, it’s often the entire game which gleefully throws conventions to the wind and embraces its eccentricity.
The stereotype tells us that most role-playing games are about chosen one protagonists on a quest to save the world. It’s true that many classics of the genre are about avoiding an apocalypse, or about defeating the ultimate evil. However, the examples we have assembled below show that there is more to RPGs than characters with weird hair colors and gigantic swords. In fact, the majority of the games on this list are more than just quirky titles. Most of them are exceptional titles in their own right.
Gaming as a medium has grown immensely since the first role-playing game was created. The technology has evolved tremendously, but we are now at a point where each new generation looks only marginally better than its predecessor. For a new game to distinguish itself from the rest of the pack, it takes more than pretty graphics. Games with strange and quirky stories have been around forever, but hopefully, they will become even more of a staple to keep the marketplace varied.
In that spirit, we hope that you will enjoy these 25 shining examples of ridiculous RPG backstories.
25 Mallow Is A Cloud Who Thinks He’s A Tadpole
Super Mario RPG was the first time that the Mario series was allowed to get really weird. I mean, we all knew something was up with the dinosaurs and the frog suits, but SMRPG put those feelings into words. The most peculiar part of the story is about Mallow, Mario’s companion.
Poor Mallow is a cloud (who looks like a marshmallow), who was raised by frogs and thinks he’s a tadpole.
He hopes that one day his jumping ability will kick in, but in the meantime, he just wonders why he doesn’t have a tail. Way to go, Mallow!
24 A Supreme Being Wants To Take Over, Goes Undercover In A Gas Station
I am by no means an expert in Persona 4, but I know people who are. When I discussed ridiculous RPG backstories, I was told I needed to include Persona 4 in there. After inquiring more, I knew they were right. As they explained it, it’s a story about a gas station attendant who happens to be a Goddess in disguise. Her goal is to bridge the regular world with the TV world so that one can invade the other. The sad side effect is that a bunch of people have been found hanging lifeless from TV antennas lately. Oops!
23 A Bunch Of Misfits Must Fight Aliens And A Fussy 13-year Old Kid
The Japanese version of Earthbound had to be censored in some places, but the localized Western version still brings the weirdness. Ness must team up with a psychic, a martial artist, and an inventor to fight off an alien invasion (and maybe some zombies). The best way to do this is to go back in time to destroy the aliens, who along the way became souls trapped in robot bodies. Of course, all of this could have been avoided if a 13-year old didn’t turn off the machine holding the aliens captive.
22 It’s Final Fantasy, But With Donald And Goofy… In SPACE!
Kingdom Hearts is very popular with a certain demographic, one which grew up with Disney movies and a steady diet of PSX role-playing games. It’s obviously just a flimsy excuse to put Final Fantasy-like characters in everyone’s favorite animated world, but Square still tried to tie up everything nicely. That’s how we ended up with Mickey sending Donald Duck and Goofy out in space to help anime characters travel through the different worlds of Disney’s animated movies to save them from heartless creature. Somehow, Square managed to make what could have been a paper-thin cash grab surprisingly touching and memorable.
21 A Fishing Trip Leads To Improvised Time Travel
Dragon Quest VII starts simple enough, with an old man on a fishing trip who just happens to find a special map. This map shows that a long time ago, the world used to have more continents in the world, but these somehow blinked out of existence at some point. So what can a man do? He sends his kid and his friend to travel back in time, hoping that they can save the continents, thus making them reappear in the present. Why? Because the kids were bored, obviously. It sounds as solid as any plan I’ve ever heard.
20 Peach’s Voice Is Stolen, Replaced With Explosives
While Mario’s following RPG outings could not keep the same cast as Super Mario RPG due to copyrights, it certainly kept the same offbeat storytelling. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga is no exception. Starring the titular brothers, it’s about a witch and her assistant who steal Princess Peach’s voice and replace it with explosives. The brothers have to team up with arch-nemesis Bowser, convincing him that should he try to take Peach in the meantime, his castle would be destroyed by Peach’s booming voice. Hard to argue with that logic.
19 Poor Sap Loses Two Entire Towns, His Parents, His Best Friend
Legend of Dragoon just might be the story of the unluckiest hero of all time. His name is Dart, and when the game starts, he is just coming back from a five-year journey to kill a monster who had slain his parents and destroyed the town where he was born.
When he arrives home, he discovers that it, too, has been destroyed.
The malevolent enemy also took his friend at the same time, so he's really angry now. Obviously, he has to go back on the road to avenge THAT misdeed. The cycle just never ends.
18 A Demon Is Blackmailed Into The Most Convoluted Plot Ever Using Paparazzi Pictures
Disgaea: Hour Of Darkness has a deep and complicated story, so let’s try to keep it brief. A demon prince is blackmailed, using salacious pictures of himself, into fighting to become the Overlord of the Netherworld. Along the way, he discovers that his mother is now a penguin, and he must stop a complicated plot by a bunch of double agents who are planning to invade either the Netherworld, or the human world, or Heaven, or maybe all three? Amazingly, by the 100th hour of gameplay, all of it makes sense.
17 A Whole Civilization Builds Itself On The Corpse Of A Defeated Giant Being
It’s not really the backstory of Xenoblade Chronicles which is ridiculous; it’s the entire game world where our protagonists exist. In the game’s lore, two gigantic beings one day started fighting for supremacy and didn’t stop until both of them perishes, except that their bodies were left behind in a perfect fighting stance. Because they were so huge, their corpses became home to different organic species, as well as a bunch of robots. Just think about it: On a smaller scale, this game would be about the mites living on your eyelashes going on an epic adventure.
16 A Man Visits A Hospital And Bumps Into Lucifer
Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne might be the ultimate story of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When the game starts, a young man is just visiting a sick teacher in a Tokyo hospital. While he’s there, the apocalypse just happens to start at that exact moment, and the poor guy is stuck in the middle of the final conflict between two cults looking to end the world for different reasons. He has to acquire skills from Satan himself to survive the ordeal, and somehow, this all ends well for the story’s nameless protagonist.
15 An Adventurer Just Wants To Help, Ends Up In Hell
For a game that has grown to such legendary status, the actual storyline behind Diablo is deceptively simple, but also surprisingly weird when you think about it. In the beginning, the story is that of a nice adventurer who arrives in Tristram.
All they want is to help rid the town’s Cathedral of a few monsters within.
The fact that the basement is also infested with demons and creatures, and that’s it has been dug really, really deep (all the way to the dark below, in fact), is just a coincidence.
14 Save The World From Aliens And Figure Out Who You Are (If You Can)
One of the few role-playing games on N64, Hybrid Heaven mixed science-fiction with contemporary politics for a storyline which was fun, but extremely confusing. The player is Mr. Diaz… No wait, you are actually Johnny Slater, who was pretending to be Diaz. Or maybe you are actually Diaz, who is pretending to be Slater, who is the president’s bodyguard. But you are a clone. Or are you? Or is Diaz the clone? Are you Diaz? Anyway, you just try to save the USA from aliens, and you can throw suplexes in turn-based combats, so it’s a great game.
13 Mario Becomes A Wrestler, Stays On Top Of His Emails
Mario’s brand of quirkiness is back again in a third RPG series. In Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, what should be a simple “collect the stars” story takes a turn for the strange when Mario and Luigi end up separated. Both brothers try to save the world in completely different ways, although the player only gets to play as Mario and read about Luigi’s adventures. As Mario, you must side with pirates, become a pro wrestler, stop a villainous plot, and fight aliens to stop an ancient evil from taking over the world. Also, Peach lends a hand via email.
12 A Kid Uses Trained Pets To Fight Organized Crime
We have accepted Pokémon as the juggernaut that it has become because we’ve been exposed to its oddities for so long. When you boil it down to its core, the first generation is the story of a young boy leaving home by the time he’s 14. He then picks his first pet and uses that very same pet to battle other animals, some of which should actually be inanimate objects, others which look almost human. In the end, he acquires even more pets to fight a villainous organization. Then, the same story repeats itself in different regions, and we eat it up anyway.
11 It’s Not Bad Luck, Mischievous Spirits Are Out To Get You!
Yo-kai Watch offers a pretty interesting proposition for people as clumsy as me. You know all those times you think you’re just stuck with bad luck, or things are just not going well for you?
Turns out its invisible beings and ghosts doing all of it, and most of them are actually out to get you.
Better recruit nicer, friendlier ghosts to turn your luck around! If only the real world functioned on such a ridiculous premise, I would finally have an excuse for waking up late. Or spilling water. Or crashing my car.
10 Magic Spells Are So Last Year; Cool Kids Program Demons Into Existence
The Megami Tensei series makes another appearance, proving that the series is more concerned with fun gameplay than with stories that make sense. Digital Devil Story is about a bullied high school student who programs a software which summons demons to take care of his enemies. Unfortunately, it eventually unleashes Lucifer himself. With his only friend, he must travel through mazes to fight the demons and right the wrongs he created. I’ve worked in I.T. I wish I could have done anything half as cool with my coding, but turns out you can’t do much with Excel spreadsheets.
9 Link Must Fight His Own Shadow To Save Zelda (Not That One, The Other One)
Most Zelda games would not qualify as role-playing games, but the second NES game, Link’s Adventure, took a little detour through the genre. It was also Nintendo’s first try at explaining the series’ lore, and it was a mixed bag. Remember that Zelda princess you saved in the previous game? Turns out she wasn’t the only one, and that the real Zelda has been asleep for hundreds of years, and that every princess in the Kingdom since then has been named Zelda. Anyway, you must fight your own shadow to save yourself, and hopefully, wake up the sleeping princess.
8 Mike Jones Looks For His Uncle In An Island Paradise, Finds Little Green Men
StarTropics is a bizarre NES title which blended action levels with RPG-like level progression. The story starts simple enough: you spend the first half of the game trying to find your missing archeologist uncle by talking with villagers, dolphins, and parrots, which is kinda strange on its own. Once you reach the second half of the game, it takes a History Channel turn, and you realize that your uncle’s disappearance was because of aliens. So what can you do? You just go up there and fight those aliens, my friend.
7 God Could Not Finish The Job Against The Devil. Maybe You Can?
It’s all right if you have never heard of Terranigma. The game never made it to North America, though it was available in Europe. Its story give us some much needed background on the genesis of the world as we know it.
Did you know that a long, long time ago, God and the Devil fought in Antarctica?
Unfortunately, it was a stalemate, which destroyed Earth’s surface as we know it. Many years later, it’s up to a kid, whose family survived by hiding in the underworld, to awaken as a new God to rebuild the world. No Pressure.
6 Hire The Best Mercenaries, Take Over A Country, Make Money
Most RPG cast the player as a hero, with the noble goal of saving the world, or at least to make things better in the end. Jagged Alliance suggests something else. In the game, a nuclear test has altered an island’s trees to the point where their sap becomes a potent medicine. You thus play the role of the owner of an alliance of mercenaries trying to take over the island because money is cool. It’s a refreshingly honest though slightly devious game, but the gameplay more than carried the game to respectability.