#44 Monster Hunter World
The Monster Hunter series is at an impasse right now. Monster Hunter World has all these great quality of life changes, like no loading times, a radial menu, accessible multiplayer, and a slingshot for your flash bombs. But it just lacks the sheer variety of monsters, weapons, skills, and armor sets of previous games. In the older games, fighting enemies near the edge of a loading area is a pain. You’ll either have to bait the enemy back towards the middle of the area, or risk getting tossed into the loading cutoff point, and have battle interrupted for two seconds while you wait. Using items in older MH games is tedious because you have to hit left or right on the D-Pad until you’ve gotten the item you want in your items box. MHW just has you hold a button to bring up a radial menu, like a modern game. I got into MHGU on Switch, and just couldn’t really get into online. The game just flat out asked you to go to an online area and wait for people to show up. In MHW you can just keep playing and see who drops in and out of your lobby at any time. Or you can use your friends list to invite or join parties. It’s just so much easier to play online with MHW than previous games. Finally, the Slingshot is just a nice thing to have. It basically let’s you have two items quipped at once, since one is your standard item, and the other is your slingshot item. But like I said a lot of things were missing from MHW when it came out. There’s not all that many monsters, and the ones that do exist are sometimes recycled from weaker monsters. Weapon skills, and styles from MHGU are missing from MHW. This effectively cuts the character build variety in MHW down to a fifth of what it was in MHG. I put MHW on my list, because I feel like only games that are a blast to play in modern times should be included in lists like these. This list needed a Monster Hunter game. Games that used to be fun like Goldeneye, or Phantasy Star II will never make this list for that very reason. So I chose World for my list. I made my list just a few days before the new MHW expansion was announced. With said expansion, I hope to see the return of all those things that are missing from the current version of MH.
#43 Stardew Valley
I never played the Harvest Moon series, but I’ve read a lot of reviews of it. Why? Because I was waiting. Biding my time. Looking for that once in a lifetime Harvest Moon game that would be the one to take the series from good to fantastic. Well, that game is Stardew Valley. From what I understand it just takes all the good ideas from every Harvest Moon, and Rune Factory game, while dropping a lot of the tedium and grinding. It also seems to borrow heavily form Animal Crossing. Stardew Valley is a game about farming, but it is also a game about collecting, and fishing, and mining, and adventuring in said mines (yes, baddies show up in the mines). The farming aspect is all about buying seeds, and then planting them so you can make money, come harvest time. Why do you want to make money? So, you can go get a wife, a bigger house, and afford some sprinklers to take care of your crops. That way you’ll have more time for some relaxing fishing. And of course, you’ll need to go adventuring in the mines if you want to quickly get enough ore to craft better farm equipment. Otherwise your character will tire out, using all that old rusty farm equipment before the day is even halfway over. While you’re in the mines, you’ll encounter enemies that you need to kill with a word, slingshot, and bombs. Eventually those enemies become too hard to kill, so you need to upgrade that gear as well with a combination of ore, and money made from farming. Of course, while you’re doing all these things the days pass by in ten to twenty-minute intervals. This means you only have so much time per day. And as the days pass so do the seasons. The people living in the sleepy little town you inhabit can all be befriended and talked to just like Animal Crossing games. There’s an arcade like Animal Crossing. And a museum like Animal Crossing. Did I mention this game is like Animal Crossing? Anyway, just get it. 100 hours for $15 is a steal.
#42 Mortal Kombat (2012)
What I really loved about MK9 was that there were combos, but not combos that require perfect timing. There’s no need to sit by yourself for hours on end practicing a string of attacks, before you go online. MK9 was also one of the last non-Nintendo fighting games that didn’t lock half the characters behind a DLC paywall. MK9 was well balanced, because most of the movesets, and characters had been in previous MK games long enough for the development team to understand how to balance them properly. The best part about this game was the original fatalities. In older MK games every other character either got decapitated or cut in half, due to memory issues. But with this game, there was enough space to include way more animations for fatalities.
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