Last one before the breakdown of the whole list.
#1
Final Fantasy IX (PS1)
YoY: =
And here it is. The best game of all time in my opinion. The one game that I consider as close to perfect as possible. Final Fantasy IX has my favourite cast of character, soundtrack, setting and story out of all the video games I've played over the last 30+ years. It is the game I can go back to and replay over and over again without a single fear of getting bored, and every single time I do I end up discovering some new thing, a small detail that I had missed on all my previous playthroughs. And even after all this time I know I've still not done everything there is to do in the game, because I've never done the Excalibur II side quest, which I genuinely want to get around to doing at some point when I have the time.
Final Fantasy IX is also something of an end of an era for the series, featuring numerous callbacks to earlier games in the series, being the last Final Fantasy game with a solo score by Nobuo Uematsu, and obviously being the last PS1 release in the main series. Of course, for me it was only the second game in the series I had ever played, so many of those references to earlier games went over my head the first time around. However, that is partially why my appreciation for the game has only gone up in the years since.
To but it as simply as I can, I don't there is such a thing as a perfect game and never will be, but Final Fantasy IX is as close to one as a game can be.
