Ico is right!

#27 is something else. It has many great boss fights, including a fight with the boss.

Oh, so that would be MGS 3 then?

28: Final Fantasy VII

25: There's a lot of monarchs in Smash .

Prince of Persia

• Mac OS
• 1992
• Action Platformer
• Broderbund

An old game that was re-released on almost every platform under the sun. I played the Macintosh version of 'Prince of Persia' on our Apple Performa 630, our very first home computer, and later the PowerMac 5500. Unknown to me at the time, this meant I was actually playing the better version of the game with higher resolution sprites and overhauled graphic design. The prince actually looked like a Persian prince here.

The player has to make his way through the dungeons and the halls of the palace towards the chamber of Jaffar, the Grand Vizier who has imprisoned the princess in an attempt to take power over the kingdom after the Sultan died. This is the main hook of the game, the princess will die in 60 minutes because Jaffar will kill her if she doesn't marry him, which of course, she doesn't. Which makes the game very hard because after that one hour it's game over. This time limit is real-time, and includes deaths and other mistakes. And this is not really a short game either, basically requiring the player to speedrun from the start. A case of massive trail and error.

At one point in the game, the player is halted by a big mirror that's impossible to break. In one of the most embarrassing moments of me and my parent's gaming life, it took us, literally, years to figure out what to do. This wasn't the age where you could just casually look up a walkthrough on the internet, mind you. We tried finding ways around, tried to destroy it somehow, tried to climb it. As it turned out however, all you had to do was, jump through it...

28.  Final Fantasy IX
26.  Psychonauts
25.  Super Mario Sunshine
24.  Tomb Raider

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

• Nintendo 64/GameCube/3DS
• 2000
• Adventure
• Nintendo EAD/Nintendo

'The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask' was the Nintendo 64's swan song. It was late in the system's cycle and it happened to have one more thing left in it; an excellent game. It turned out to be one of the best looking 5th Generation games in general as well. However, it is a game you either love or hate because for the Zelda series it's very untraditional.

Of course, there's the famous '3-Day System'. From the start of the game, it becomes clear that in 72 in-game hours, the moon will crash into the world and destroy everything. The moon is controlled by a seemingly spoiled and ignored little creature, who also jinxes multiple other things throughout the world. It turns out this "imp" is just a vassal, and he is himself controlled by a demon hidden inside a mask he stole, the titular 'Majora's Mask'. Link gains the ability to turn back time however using the magical instrument from the game's predecessor to redo those last three days as many times as he sees fit. On the surface, a simple concept, but when you look further, the player would notice the game actually has a very deep story involving the implications of 'friendship', relations between people and the feeling of loneliness it could cause in an individual.

I feel it's the perfect follow-up to it's more famous predecessor, a game that takes a different style yet still obviously belongs at the side of the other. I remember television ads being aired when the original game was about to come out in 2000. In it, they mentioned the 72 hour time limit. My mother was certain they said '27' instead of '72' and you only had 27 hours, so we bet one Guilder (the currency here before the Euro). Naturally, I won.

Mmm, my formatting doesn't really look very good anymore with the dark mode...

#22: "I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed" - Marco Polo

Right!

That's right!

Psychonauts and Tomb Raider are right!

For #25, this monarch has experienced some highs and lows--or hys and los perhaps.

25.  A Link Between Worlds?

^^ Ow I get it. Zelda in Smash is based on the ALBW design. Clever.