Best IOS RPGs

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Brett44444444

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Hi all, I have found this is the best way for me to pass time on long international flights while watching movies in which I am only half interested. I've pretty much cleared all the old Final Fantasy series (1-9, Tactics, XV), Oceanhorn and am working through the Mana Series (Secret of Mana etc). Don't know many good ones beyond that. The obvious but restrictive requisite while flying internationally is no working wifi! so title has to work offline on my iphone. Any great suggestions are welcome - thank you!
 
Fantasian suppose to be good. It is from the creator of FF.
 
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I played Icewind Dale EE on an iPad Pro during long international flights. If you don’t mind RTS - the Rome Total War and Company of Heroes iOS ports are also quite enjoyable and well done.

The benefit of these being proper games instead of poorly disguised skinner-boxes is that there are no microtransactions/IAPs or other shady shenanigans.
 
You kinda already have the best stuff. Sad to say most titles on mobile are straight trash.

If you have a dev account and a newer phone, you can sideload on emulators and play basically anything from NES to Switch.
If your phone is older then GC/Wii/Wii-U/Switch may not perform well enough.
Bring a bluetooth gamepad and a stand and it's more or less whatever you want at that point.

Otherwise a newer Macbook with M1/M2 chip will do all of the above handily and likely get over 12 hours of battery life. And when you get bored of that you could load up games.

Personally the motion when trying to read or game while on a flight makes me slightly sick. So I generally prefer contemplation or watching a few films. I do generally at least one 10 hour + round trip international flight a year. And some years as many as 3.
 
I think Divinity Original Sin 2 has an iOS port. Probably enough game there to stay occupied for several flights.
 
I am not sure how old school you are with your gaming, but I will throw out a few old school Sega RPG's that tend to really fly under the radar.

if you handled the first few Final Fantasies then I would recommend looking at the Phantasy Star series. I know II, III and IV are on IOS, I am not sure about the Phantasy Star 1 but it is worth it as well as it is one of the more impressive 8-bit RPG's that I have played. The whole series is pretty good, but IV is supposed to be exceptional (I have only played the first two so far and just a tiny bit of the 3rd one, myself). They are top-down dungeon crawling RPGs (Phantasy Star 1 uses a combination of top-down as well as the first person style corridor navigation approach in dungeons similar to how the old school RPG's like Might and Magic worked). If you can't find the first one, it's not really a problem if you start with Phantasy Star 2: the games are interconnected in a thematic way but they stand alone individually quite well. I will say this, Phantasy Star 2 has one of the better plot twists I have ever seen in a game at the end (and another unexpected one about midway through), I really didn't anticipate that from a very early 16-bit RPG and it made the 40 hour playthrough definitely worthwhile.

Also, the Shining series is also really worth your time: it looks like Shining Force I, II and Shining in the Darkness are all on IOS. Shining Force is a tactical RPG series (similar to Fire Emblem) and Shining in the Darkness is another first person dungeon crawler but a little more advanced than Phantasy Star 1 since it was made for the Genesis.

I find that turn-based RPS's are such a timeless genre. It's probably the only genre where I find games made in the 80's are still fairly accessible and fun to play today. The big difference is the amount of grinding and there's definitely more of that in these early RPG's but if you're like me and you enjoy levelling up your party that isn't really a bad thing. Most gaming genres (racing, fps, platforming, puzzle, etc) require you to develop your skill, judgment coordination as a gamer in order to beat the game. With turn-based rpg's (especially old-school ones before the mid-90's) you are investing time as your primary asset to complete the game. There is something really satisfying looking at a well levelled-up party that is able to put away the final boss even with relative ease. It's like looking at a nicely knitted blanket that didn't necessarily require exceptional skill to create but took hours and hours of dedication an patience to slowly build from nothing. Definitely a good genre for long plain trips, and even if you're half asleep you can focus on basic grinding and you are not wasting time as you are still building experience.
 
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Complete version of XCOM 2 works on iPhone. Runs pretty good. One of the better RPG type games that works on the phone and not just iPad.
 
Been a LONG time, but I used to play one called Zenonia. Was a blast 10 years ago. A quick google says there are now 5 releases. Pretty sure I played 3 and 4.
 
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