Your Gen 8 Defining Titles

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Man, there were so many good games this gen and I have even played all the ones I'm interested in. So far these are some of my favorites:

Zelda Breath of the Wild - Took the most prominent genre of the generation and showed everyone how it's done, there's an almost relentless focus on freedom.

The Last Guardian - A victim of its own hype, it was never going to have the "accessible" appeal of Shadow of the Colossus, but it is a worthy entry in Team Ico's catalogue, and since Ueda is my favorite designer I have to put it on this list.

Celeste - Laser focused level design that explores its mechanics to absolute insane heights. I could never do it, but seeing a playthrough of chapter 9 is completely mind-blowing. Except I could totally do it, because this game taught everyone how to do accessibility right with its assist mode!

DK Tropical Freeze - I flipflop between this and Celeste as my all time favorite platformers. Celeste pushes its mechanics farther, but DK has some of the most elegantly designed levels out there, with every single one introducing at least two new stage specific mechanics and combining them in really interesting ways, sometimes culmination is some really cool final challenge to close the level. It's also amazing with theming, no abstract floating platforms here.

God of War - I thought this was going to be an awful attempt at ripping off TLoU but it turned out to be a really powerful story in its own right. I think the combat suffers a little because of the camera and we could have used more boss fights that werent reprises, but other than that it's hard to find issues with it.

Maybe Last of Us Part 2 will earn its place here eventually, but it's a little too recent for me to know if it will stick, but so far it's my favorite game I played this year and a worthy sequel to one of my favorites from last gen, so there's that.

Edit: Oops, forgot about The Witness! That one is probably my favorite puzzle game of all time, probably tied with Braid, but they're both great for different reasons imo.