Alright, I still need to cover the last two games on my list before I do a wrap-up of the whole list, so here goes:
#2
The Legend of Dragoon (PS1)
YoY: =
The last time there was a change in my personal top three favourite games of all time was somewhere around summer or autumn of 2001 when I first played through The Legend of Dragoon. Since then, no new game has managed to enter the top 3, Dark Souls being the only game since that I genuinely considered putting there at one point, but decided against it. Perhaps those three games just exist in the perfect cross-section of nostalgia and and quality, or maybe the reason is something completely different, but it's really difficult for me to imagine any new game pushing any of them down the list.
The Legend of Dragoon is a game with which I always associate a sense of melancholy with, not because playing it makes me sad or anything, but because the world the game is set in has this feeling of lost history to it. Of once great kingdoms having fallen to ruin and then forgotten, of many prominent species being driven to near-extinction by war and genocide. Those aspects aren't necessarily at the forefront of the game's story, but they are always just beneath the surface, set slightly to the side but always still in view.
Obviously I still love every other aspect of the game as well, except for the voice acting, which is about as good as you'd expect from a JRPG of its time. That is to say, middling to awful. Besides that, I genuinely have nothing to complain about The Legend of Dragoon. A near-perfect game, and one I'm going to go back to many more times in the future.
