Everyone remembers Final Fantasy and the Zelda games, but the NES had a deeper RPG bench than its reputation suggests, much of it ported down from home computers where the genre actually grew up. Those ports are strange objects: games designed for a keyboard, a manual and an afternoon, squeezed onto a controller with two buttons. My shelf:

• The Ultima trilogy: Exodus, Quest of the Avatar and Warriors of Destiny, Richard Garriott's landmark series brought to the console. Quest of the Avatar is the interesting one, because its whole design is a moral system. There's no final boss to kill; you win by embodying eight virtues, and the game tracks whether you cheat merchants or flee from fights. Console RPGs would not try anything like that again for years.
• Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, the first-person grid-crawling dungeon RPG that shaped an entire genre. It landed far harder in Japan than at home, and you can draw a line from it through Shin Megami Tensei and Etrian Odyssey. Permadeath included: a wiped party stays wiped, on the floor where it died, until another party walks down and collects the bodies.
• Hydlide, an early action-RPG from 1984, infamous now for its grind and its habit of making you stand still to regenerate health. It predates Zelda, though, and it's a real piece of history.
• The Magic of Scheherazade, an underrated action-RPG with a time-travel hook, party combat and a structure that flips between overhead action and turn-based battles. Culture Brain never got the credit.
• Legacy of the Wizard, Falcom's sprawling password-driven Metroidvania-RPG, where you play a different member of the same family each session and each one can reach places the others cannot.

And for the strategists, Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Shingen the Ruler brought deep historical war-sims to a console most people associated with jumping on turtles. Those cartridges are enormous and battery-backed out of necessity, since one campaign runs for weeks.

The NES contained multitudes.