One of the best RPG's of all time was Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky, released in Japan on Windows (very strange platform for a JRPG but whatever) in 2004. Unfortunately it wasn't released in the west until a few years back, but it is a great game. It has one of the longest scripts of any game in history, this is one of the reasons it took so long to port, the translation task is incredible. 716,000 words for the second chapter, the first chapter is only slightly smaller. The thing is that there is a dialogue change among virtually every NPC in your current area with *every* movement forward in the current story. Every random NPC goes through their own character arc, they aren't like FF NPC's, which tend to only have one "bark" and then that's all you get out of them for the rest of the game. Every location is incredibly fleshed out with a wide range of real characters that develop with the story.
Baldur's Gate II was the game of my youth. I bought it accidentally in 2000 and have spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours playing it. The second chapter is just a monster, the side quests in the second chapter are literally each have as much content as entire other games. I've never even beaten this, I just get sidetracked doing side quests in the second chapter lol and rarely get beyond that. This also has one of the longest scripts of any game in history (four longest of any single game). 1,060,000 words.
This is Planescape Torment, it was released with the same engine as Baldur's Gate II (the legendary Infinity Engine), but it was made by a different developer, Black Isle studios (they would later reform into what is known today as Obsidian Entertainment). It has a much darker tone than Baldur's Gate II and is much less focused on combat, it is almost a piece of interactive fiction more than a game properly. I could never get into it when I played it when I was young because of this. I bought it around the same time as Baldur's Gate II. However a couple of years back after the motorcycle crash I was disabled for a month and finally ploughed through it, and it was amazing. The key really was to just stop worrying about typical gamey rpg things, and just go up to every single character one by one and exhaust their dialogue. The amount of script for each character in this game is amazing, they are all incredibly fleshed out, you absolutely should not just race through and try to get the quest objectives as quick as possible as is sometimes the impulse (you will literally get stuck because the quest actually required talking to some NPC that you ignored in your rush). The story is incredible, philosophical, one of the deepest of any video game in history, not about saving the world, but about the prospect of facing your own individual sins, and mortality. There are actually only three required moments of combat in the entire game, it is one of the few games where you can literally talk to the final boss into submission.
One piece of advice: pump wisdom as much as possible, it is the only stat that really matters. Combat stats are nearly irrelevant. Charisma and Intelligence even should be prioritized above them.
This has the *eighth* longest video game script of any game in history, at 950k words.
