What games do you think have the best/most character interaction and world building?

Undertale has pretty darn good character interaction. Especially due to the whole being able to learn about and spare monsters. The game definitely has a lot of personality. World building is.. decent. Though more is left unanswered than answered.

The Tales series has stellar character interaction, with lots and lots and lots of skits. Characters are always being chatty, and every time a skit is unlocked, Tales becomes a Visual Novel for a little white. I would say outside of the linear action combat system, skits are what the Tales series is known for. And skits are nothing is not a character interaction dump. World building is eh, it depends on the game. And even for some of the best entries in the series, leaves a lot to be desired.

If the Trails/Kiseki/Legend of Heroes series doesn't have as much character interaction as Tales, it's close. There is a lot of dialogue in Legend of Heroes games. On the other hand, Legend of Heroes excels as world building and has some of my favourite world building in a game series.

As far as Final Fantasy goes, Ivalice, Vana'diel and Hydaelyn all have great world building. Though some games in the Ivalice series are better than others at this. And Final Fantasy XII has very little in the way of character interaction for most of the game. Final Fantasy XII has a lot of exploration, and very little character interaction by comparison. And there are long sprawls where absolutely no characterization or human personality happen.

Now that Final Fantasy XIV is A Realm Reborn, there is a lot more NPCs with a lot more to say. And while you can choose to ignore that and the MSQ as best you can if you so want. I would say the game heavily involves and relies on a great deal of personality, with or without players to talk to. The same is true of Vana'diel.

Chrono Trigger is decent for its time. Though Chrono Cross doesn't manage to do much characterization for the sheer fact it has so many characters to characterize. Most characters don't get enough time or attention.

I have admittedly mostly played JRPGs. But for the sake of fair discussion and curiosity, this is limited to only video games, not just JRPGs or even RPGs.

Kind of hard for me to think of a Mario game with a lot of character interaction and world building outside of their RPG games like The Thousand Year Door. And Nintendo has seemingly moved far away from that direction. Mario Galaxy was decent, but building on that shard of the Mario universe, and characters like Rosalina hasn't been done since. Ironically, the character from Galaxy who has been built most on since, is Captain Toad.

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and Skyward Sword are all pretty decent in this regard. Breath of the Wild is a great game, but could have more NPCs with more things to say, in this regard. How good the world building is, depends on how seriously you take the Zelda timeline theory.

Visual Novels as a whole clearly excel at this because they're closer to a literary genre or at least medium than a "game".

So does the Adventure genre, including the Point and Click Adventure genre, if not especially. Or games similar to that genre. For instance, Touch Detective definitely features a great deal of character interaction.

Harvest Moon(Story of Seasons) and Harvest Moon-likes like Stardew Valley also feature a lot of character interaction. Not a great deal of world building, though.

Animal Crossing has very little in the way of world building. But character interaction is also half the game.

While Metroid and Dark Souls are an example of games with world building, but are defined by an almost complete and utter lack of character interaction and personalities to be around. With the exception of Other M, which most feel didn't turn out the best. Your friendly character interaction in Super Metroid is limited to a few space creatures on Zebes showing you have to wall jump.

The Suikoden series is pretty high up there.

I really liked the way Fable 2 and 3 essentially gave you a relationship meter with each and every NPC. It didn't really amount to much considering A) By the end of the game, as long as you made the "good" choices everyone loved you no matter what and B) That mostly just determined how they reacted to your emotes. But I still thought it was a really cool expansion of the kind of stuff we saw in Morrowind and Oblivion. I've always wished that kind of system could be expanded to games with real character depth like Dragon Age Origins or Fallout New Vegas or whatever, but on that same grand kind of scale. Sure, having party member-level interactions with every NPC in a huge game world will probably never happen just by sheer cost of VO alone, but a man can dream.

The way the Banner Saga games allow you to shape the story and the characters you meet through your choices has always stood out to me. I can't think of any games that do it better. The game constructs it's dour, apocalyptic tone so well.

Call me crazy but I love how Deadly Premonition handles Greenvale and the lives of the townfolk. Despite all the various extremely videogamey elements and the PS2 era graphics, it manages to construct a setting and characters that felt real in their own way. I'm super excited for The Good Life to explore that aspect further.

I like the character interaction in Binary Domain. It's weird, gamey and ultimately not great, but it's an interesting thing to layer over a third person shooter.

Regarding Dark Souls, I'd argue that the character interaction and world building go perfectly hand in hand. In Dark Souls 1 especially, the characters really give you a sense of the world and navigating their stories fleshes out the setting in really interesting ways. Just because there aren't large dialogue trees, doesn't mean how you choose to interact with these characters can't be meaningful. It wouldn't be the same game without Solaire, Siegmeyer, Lautrec, Petrus, and so on.

To take a more systemic approach, the interactions between the various factions, wildlife and mutants in the Stalker series did wonders to make it feel like a living breathing place. Even though most NPCs are only good for buying sausages from.

I think Grim Fandango does an excellent job fusing a ton of different ideas together and make it feel like it belongs together. They don't even have to explain the finer rules of the world, it just all looks very convincing and comes across as a real world. Monkey Island deserves a shout out as well.

Some game is can think of have heavy 'character to character' interactions, and one game I can think of has a character talking to himself!

The single character game is Dear Esther. I think you get to know they guy in that games very well throughout his soliloquized personal journey. The multiple character games are Mass Effect 2, Life Is Strange, Fire Watch, and many more. In the past 10 years, we have had a rich harvest of character interaction games.

Legend of Heroes is pretty intense if you have the patience. Not only does it go deep with the proper main casts but all of the NPCs have constantly changing dialogue throughout the games and little mini story arcs that are not the least bit important but definitely help to build a solid sense of place.

Elder Scrolls and Fallout both come to mind instantly, but no explanation needed there.

Bioware games have always done a good job, for the most part. Star Wars KotoR, Baldur's Gate, Dragon Age, Mass Effect. These games are basically made for character interaction.

The Witcher series excels at both the character interaction and world building aspects better than any game in years. Most of that game is spent either talking to NPCs, learning about monsters so you can defeat them, or poking around the incredibly detailed world.

All very popular games and nothing edgy or obscure, but these are the main standouts for me. All western games too. I don't generally like Japanese games.

Spoilers, obviously.

Kingdom Hearts has done a really good job of building up it's characters and world over it's 10 game span. KH1 started pretty simple, but as time went on they started introducing more characters and concepts. Before you knew it, we had a timeline hundreds of years long and a huge cast of characters. Here's hoping KH3 can pay it all off in a similarly rewarding manner to how MGS4 did for that series.

Zero Escape is another good example. Once again it's started pretty simple with 999, but then blew the doors off with VLR. One thing I really like about all those games is how they'll go on a complete tangent to do some world building. They'll spend 5-10 minutes talking about ice that doesn't melt until fairly high temperatures, or the mysterious circumstances surrounding the sister ship to the Titanic. Unfortunately, while pretty good the final game does not tie everything together quite as well as one might hope. This is due to the decision to try and make a story that new players could pick up and understand pretty completely without having played the other games.

I think in general I prefer serialized game stories that do that character work and world building throughout multiple games and build up to an epic conclusion. That's why Kingdom Hearts, Zero Escape, Metal Gear, and Legend of Heroes are some of my favorite series of all time.