What indie games do Dragon Quest, Megaten and Trails fans play?

One of my favorite game genres is the JRPG. Though I would consider it niche today (especially compared to the PSX days when Final Fantasy VII was the hottest and most impressive game around), it's still a strong and healthy niche with dedicated fans. There are even some runaway successes, like Persona 5, which has sold over 10 million copies.

As I am myself developing a JRPG (more specifically a DRPG, i.e. a Dungeon RPG, an even more niche subgenre of JRPGs), I've been wondering what games fans of big JRPG series actually play. Specifically, I'm mostly interested in what indie games fans of series such as Dragon Quest and Megaten play. Maybe I as an indie dev in this space could learn something about audience tastes from this data?

So that's what we're having a look at today. I have scraped Steam data on the two aforementioned series, along with data on Trails, and I think there is some interesting signal here. Let's have a look!

Self-promotion alert!

Sorry, but if you're reading this, you are probably into indie games and RPGs. I'm working on an indie RPG and I think this is a good time to show it off. :)

Now back to the blog post!

Three series, six seed games

I picked out three series that I believe are among the bigger long-running ones in the hardcore JRPG space: Dragon Quest, Megaten and Trails. All these are old series with roots in the 80s: The first Dragon Quest was released in 1986 for the Famicom (and on the NES as Dragon Warrior in the West a few years later); Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei was released in 1987 also for the Famicom; and Trails is essentially a spin-off of a spin-off, with the root game being Dragon Slayer released in 1984 for the PC-88 (and the Legend of Heroes series being the link therebetween).

To represent these series, I picked two modern games from each:

• Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age
• Dragon Quest VII Reimagined (a remake)
• Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance
• Persona 3 Reload (also a remake)
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon
• Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter (this too a remake)

Method

My methodology was this: For each game, I scraped its Steam reviews. Then I checked the profiles of positive reviewers (whom I'll refer to as the game's fans in this blog post), and for those that had open profiles (which was slightly more than half) I scraped the play time data from their libraries. I then aggregated this data, counting games that the fans had spent at least 1 hour playing, in order to get a feeling for which games are played by fans of these three JRPG series.

One problem with the raw data, however, is that the same few games dominate on Steam: for example, everyone plays Stardew Valley. So I wanted to compare this to an average Steam player. As comparison cohort, I decided to use a sample of Grand Theft Auto V reviewers. Why GTA5? Well, I think it's a game that almost everyone has played, whether you are a mainstream "normie" or a hardcore gamer. It's a game that is widely popular, so I figured it would be good for comparison.

Based on this, we calculate PMI, i.e. pointwise mutual information, for each game in the JRPG fan data compared to the GTA5 cohort. This gives us a measurement showing which games are uniquely popular among each fan crowd compared to an average Steam player (i.e. a GTA5 fan).

For our cohort of JRPG fans, we sample 2000 positive reviewers from each of the six seed games. There is however one exception: Trails beyond the Horizon was sitting at only 671 positive reviews at the time of scraping, so we're using its whole set of reviewers. Note that this means that Trails is slightly underrepresented in the dataset.

One more thing about our method: Calculating PMI directly on a sample group like this creates a risk that small, noisy variations would have disproportional impact on the results. For example, if we find a game that 1 out of our 2000 GTA5 reviewers play, and another game that 2 out of our 2000 GTA5 reviewers play, that doesn't actually mean that it's twice as likely for GTA5 players to play the second game compared to the first (and comparing to a game that none of our GTA5 reviewers plays, our 1/2000 or 2/2000 example games are of course not infinitely more likely to be played by a general GTA5 player than our 0/2000 example game).

For this reason, we assume that our number of baseline players is a noisy Poisson variable, and we replace the observed baseline number with the upper endpoint of its 95% Poisson confidence interval before calculating lift and PMI. This means we get a number that represents the lower bound of the true lift, at 95% confidence. In short, we do this so games with few JRPG fan players and zero players in our GTA5 sample don't outrank games with many JRPG fan players and just a few GTA5 players.

Results

Let's start by looking at some plots representing JRPG fans in general. Note also that we filter out the six seed games from all lists, so they don't dominate.

First, we'll look at the top games played for at least 1 hour by our JRPG fans:

Ah, Wallpaper Engine, Counter-Strike 2 and Left 4 Dead 2: the classic games beloved by all JRPG fans. Or hmm, maybe not. These are super common games (or "games" in the case of Wallpaper Engine) that any random Steam player has played. There are some meaningful entries in this list: we see a couple of Persona games (plus the almost-Persona game Metaphor: ReFantazio), a Monster Hunter game, a few CRPGs and Stardew Valley. These are all widely played games, but they certainly skew a little more towards what a JRPG fan might like.

Let's look at the top games tagged as indie played by JRPG fans instead:

This list really just reads as a generic top indie games of all time list (except for Wallpaper Engine...). So once again, looking at the raw games isn't that interesting.

Let's look at the tags too:

Singleplayer, action, adventure, multiplayer... OK, this isn't giving much. It seems to be time to bring out our PMI-based lists.

As mentioned before, PMI as a measurement here will be high if a game is commonly played by our JRPG fans, but not by our sample of GTA5 fans. More exactly, it's calculated like this:

Lift = P(plays game | JRPG fan cohort) /
       P(plays game | baseline cohort)
PMI = log2(lift)

So a high PMI means a player in our JRPG fan cohort is much more likely to play a game than a player in our GTA5 control group. Let's now look at all games, ranked by PMI:

Now this list says more about JRPG fans. And what it says is: JRPG fans play JRPGs! Not very surprising. Specifically, we see other games in the same series as our seed games, such as SMT3 Nocturne and Trails through Daybreak. But we also see a couple of Tales games, NieR Replicant, Octopath Traveler II, among others.

However, our focus is on indie games, and we are soon going to look at what indie games our JRPG fans are uniquely interested in. But first, let's take a look at the top tags ranked by PMI, JRPG fans vs GTA5 fans:

This is more interesting! These tags show what distinguishes a JRPG fan's taste from mainstream players. Some tags might not be so surprising, like JRPG, Party-Based RPG or Turn-Based Combat, but seeing tags like Dice, Musou, Traditional Roguelike and Roguelike Deckbuilder appear is interesting. These are gameplay/story elements not really appearing in the six games we're looking at, but that still interest our JRPG fans.

Now let's look at that indie game list:

Now we're getting some real signal! I think these games deserve a deeper look, so we can clearly see what kinds of games we have here.

The indie games JRPG fans play

Below, we present the top 15 indie games that interest JRPG fans more than a general Steam audience (i.e. GTA5 players). I want to note here: While the list is ordered, you should not focus too much on the strict ordering. Looking at the numbers, the games at the top of the list clearly belong here. Below 5 or so, the ordering becomes less clear, and noise in the sampling of our baseline affects the order and exactly which games appear here. Despite that, the core assumption holds for these games: they are much more popular among JRPG fans than among general Steam audiences.

Our top three isn't that surprising. These are essentially the main premium indie JRPGs we have, and they were all inspired by 16-bit classics such as Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI in both gameplay and graphics. They were also all crowdfunded.

In-depth lists per seed game

If you are interested in what fans of the different seed series (DQ, Megaten, Trails) are into, then expand the sections below to see series-specific plots.

Dragon Quest fans — click to expand

Top 15 games by PMI, Dragon Quest fans vs GTA5

Top 15 indie games by PMI, Dragon Quest fans vs GTA5

Megaten fans — click to expand

For Megaten, I decided to include plots for the two individual seed games, since from what I can see the two audiences are actually pretty different.

Top 15 games by PMI, SMT V: Vengeance fans vs GTA5

Top 15 indie games by PMI, SMT V: Vengeance fans vs GTA5

Top 15 games by PMI, Persona 3 Reload fans vs GTA5

Top 15 indie games by PMI, Persona 3 Reload fans vs GTA5

Trails fans — click to expand

Top 15 games by PMI, Trails fans vs GTA5

Top 15 indie games by PMI, Trails fans vs GTA5

Takeaways for JRPG devs

JRPG fans like great pixel art

Not all games on our list above have pixel art, but many do, and certainly the share of games here with pixel art is greater than in a general list of well-received Steam games. Not surprising really, since the JRPG genre does lean nostalgic, and fans of new JRPGs are probably also fans of the old classics.

RPGs can take different shapes

Despite our seed games all being turn-based (with the caveat of the newer Trails games having a hybrid combat system), there is a mix of turn-based games, action games, SRPGs, metroidvanias and more in our list of indie games. There is even a western CRPG in there. JRPG fans appear to like different types of RPGs, and don't seem tied to one single formula.

Games in modern genres work too

We even see some games that are not strictly RPGs, such as Chrono Ark being a roguelike deckbuilder and Core Keeper being an open world survival craft game. These are modern Steam genres with wider appeal, but if there is JRPG DNA then JRPG fans still want it. Creature collectors (which could be called a subgenre of the JRPG) have also found a home on Steam, and while they might not have as wide an appeal as roguelike deckbuilders, they seem to have a dedicated niche audience that turns up for quality games in the genre. Perhaps doing a modern genre game with JRPG influences is a safer option than making a pure JRPG?

Crowdfunding seems to fit this genre

Six of the indie games listed above were crowdfunded. Now I'm not very well-versed in the world of crowdfunding, I don't really know the pros and cons or if it's still a viable strategy in 2026, but based on this data it might be worth looking into.

Closing words

If you've reached the bottom of this blog post, then you must have found my writing at least somewhat interesting. Thank you for reading! If you want to show your support and get notified about new posts, then the best thing to do is join the mailing list using the form below.

Have a great rest of your day!