Guessed by @Darashiva
Opening up my top 5 this year is... the same game that opened it last year. Yeah, my top 5 is completely unchanged for the first time ever, it's the same 5 games in the same positions.
I'll never forget playing through Persona 5 for the first time. This is a 100-hour game I blasted through in just over a week. It was instant addiction from the moment I first booted it up and I couldn't think about anything else or do much else at all until I finished it. I got ridiculously attached to every character, was extremely invested in the story, I was so immersed that it felt like I myself was living the double-life Joker lived - boring real-life stuff whenever real-life stuff had to happen, then off to being a phantom thief whenever I got to play the game, which thankfully was rather often. And I don't care about how "edgy teenager" it is, it felt damn cool to be a phantom thief.
This game also came at a good time in my life because it's full of irredemable scumbag villains you're supposed to beat up without feeling even an ounce of remorse. Had I played it earlier, maybe I'd still be in my phase where I thought "every person has good in them", but I played this in 2019, when both my country and the world's most powerful country were under the rule of irredemable scumbag fascists, so nothing felt better than having this game where I could punch the living shit out of them and get that feeling of "us against the world".
And outside of those main villains, Persona 5 is also great in how it depicts the general apathy of society towards everything, the way people just don't give a shit about anything, or how they put up with bullshit because it's just the way things are - it's why the main characters have to take off their masks to unleash their Personas, because everyone is living life through a mask. And then, the way everyone is so easily manipulated into a certain way of thinking that leads them to defend these insane fascists or even the massacre in Palestine which yeah, somehow some people defend that. The fact that this game came from Japan, an extremely conservative country, makes it even more incredible.
Persona 5 is fucking red, man.
I love red.
Essay Pro