47. Final Fantasy XIII (2009)
Dropping from 29 because it didn't hold up as well in my memory as I'd hoped; Final Fantasy XIII makes up for its lackluster story and sidequests with an interesting new battle system. Instead of the focus being on selecting individual commands, the choice is which set of roles to prepare and when to switch to a particular set of roles. If you don't fully understand and capitalize on how to combine paradigms and affect the stagger gauge you'll miss out on the surprising depth of strategy available in a battle system where you spend most of your time choosing the auto command. Understanding what cues to take from the enemy is important to knowing which paradigm you should use at any given time. I actually liked the doom counters in boss fights because they kept you aiming for time-efficient ways to win the fight. This was only made possible because of the wonderful ability to immediately retry fights if you lost and not having to worry about when you loast saved as long as you were planning to keep playing. Keeping the monsters visible on the overworld map has grown on me since I don't have the same patience for trudging through and area as I used to when the feature annoyed me in XII. The battles are much more interesting than in many JRPG because your whole skillset is available to you since you don't have to worry about saving resources for your next fight.
Primarily an RPG player but have interest in any game that will make me think.
