Probably my new favorite final fantasy, this game is as close to rpg perfection as I think there's ever been. It's dripping with soul in every aspect and every character is lovable. It was insanely impressive for the SNES and eclipses most pixel rpgs released even nowadays.

The design of resident evil games is very deliberate. I absolutely love the loop of going through every area scrounging for resources and using them strategically on hordes of baddies, and out of all the RE games I played since this one put me onto the series, this is still the peak.

There's been a notable backlash since this game came out that "it's great just not much more than botw" and I couldn't disagree more. As someone who 100%ed both games, BOTW's flaws only became more obvious as I reached that goal. TOTK does the opposite, the genius of it showing more and more as I dug deeper in.

I feel like there's been a drought of actually challenging puzzle games recently. There's been great concepts that don't nearly soar as high as they could because the devs seem scared to actually challenge the player (cough viewfinder cough). Sennaar isn't that. It's not as hard as Talos 2, but it's very smart and scratches and wholly unique.

Possibly the most flashy action game I've ever played, the spectacle of XVI makes up for a lot of its shortcomings. I could criticize a lot about the pacing and combat, but I was hooked from the second I played the demo, and there are some boss fights here that are the best in the medium.

A game that is just as smart as it thinks it is, Talos adds an RPG aspect to the puzzling that slots right in and delivers a compelling philosophical story that has a genuine chance to change your outlook on life.

I don't usually like western rpgs very much. I only liked skyrim with a mod that turned it into violent animal crossing, but new vegas gripped me. It isn't perfect by any means, the Legion is very undercooked and the game is quite buggy, but it was so fun to just explore the wasteland and find cool shit.

A balls hard entry in a series that I think most people hadn't touched until this year. Pikmin 2 is one of the rare nintendo games that demands you reach its skill ceiling, and I love it for that.

A game that took about a decade to make, saw multiple revamps to its entire battle system with new pokemon generations coming out, and still kicks ass. This is THE pokemon fangame.

This is functionally the infinity war of yakuza, existing solely to set up the events of yakuza 8. If 8 sucks ass this will probably become less good in retrospect but as of right now? It's great