9. Final Fantasy VI Advance GBA

Many people credit Final Fantasy VII as the best game in the series, but FFVI does almost everything both before, and better than FFVII. The active time battle system that adds tension to turn based combat was there first. Epic cutscenes like the opera scene were done with excellent spritework, that holds up better than FFVII's CGI. There were over ten unique playable characters each with their own story arcs and questlines. The esper leveling system allowed you to give any character whatever moves or stats you wanted. Most games threaten to end the world, if you don't defeat the bad guys, but FFVI actually does end the world halfway through the game. Oh and did I mention you can suplex a ghost train in this game? 

8. Dark Souls PS3


In most games dying doesn't mean much other than loading up your save file, and trying again. The Souls series brilliantly changes all that by constantly saving for you, and forcing you to play on a single save file. Dying once will make you drop all your XP and Money in a pool of blood. If you can get back to your old corpse before dying a second time you get your experience and money back. Dying twice in a row means you lose all your hard work since your last level up. This adds a very real element of consequence to the game, that most games these days are lacking. Add in an online element that allows other players to hunt you down, or help you out, and the tension becomes very real. Dark Souls is often billed as a hard game, but it isn't hard so much as it forces you to pay attention. Carefully probing a new area, while well stocked with supplies, and summoning other players for boss fights will let almost anyone beat this game. Dark Souls is an open world game ala Metroidvania titles, meaning everything is interconnected, and there are shortcuts abound. The story of Dark Souls isn't told in game, but rather in the lore written on items. I've always enjoyed this method of storytelling, because it let's the player play the part of detective instead of being told outright how the game's story goes.

7. BotW Switch

After Ocarina of Time came out Zelda really stopped moving forward. The series turned into a tradition, instead of a series that grows with time. To make matters worse every Zelda after Ocarina did everything worse than Ocarina. There were almost always less dungeons, less things to discover, and less new unique ideas. After nearly 20 years BotW finally changed all that. Eiji Aonuma rebuilt the series from the ground up, while keeping the spirit of the original games. BotW gets rid of what I'd like to call "video game logic". In other games why can't you drop a boulder on someone? Why can't you light a field on fire? Why can't you kill a monster with Cuccoos? Videogames are riddled with things that should work, but don't, and things that work, but shouldn't. This breaks immersion, but with BotW many of these instances have been removed. Once you play the game on hard mode you start to get forced to get creative with ways to kill enemies. This opens your eyes to the possibilities, and make you truly realize how much freedom and creativity you have in the game. The world of BotW is bigger than Skyrim, yet there's always something to do around every corner. You can't walk for more than a few minutes in any given area without finding something like a Korok, Enemy Camp, Treasure Chest, etc. The addition of Climbing and Gliding gives you the ability to go anywhere you want at any time. Going from that sort of freedom to games like Horizon, where you can only climb certain areas, and have to hoof it down a mountain is just flat out jarring. How many times have you played a videogame thinking "I have to get down there, without dying"? Or "I have to figure out a way up there"? Chances are you spend a good ten to twenty minutes wasting time, just to reach your goal. Finally, the weapons, and potions are really meaningful. Nintendo could have made it so that all weapons are permanent, but that would just lead to easily killing all enemies with your +120 attack ultra rare Lynel drop. Instead weapons degrade over time forcing you to use potions to help fight enemies. The Witcher 3 has a potion system, but it's far too weak and useless, so nobody uses it. On the flip side Elder Scrolls titles have potion systems that borderline break the game. Nintendo perfected potions in this game. They aren't too OP, but aren't useless either. Anyway this is the best Zelda title in nearly 20 years, and the best open world game ever made.

6. Into the Breach Switch


Into the Breach is a turn based Rogue-Like, where you control a team of three mechs trying to protect humanity's cities from giant bugs. Like Subset Games' previous game FTL, you are thrown into a randomized shop every few turns, and can stumble upon a great variety of Pilots or Crewmembers while playing. The shop lets you buy mech parts to upgrade your mechs as you go through the game. Pilots all have special abilities that improve after leveling up. The brilliant thing about Into the Breach is that it literally tells you what the bugs are going to do on their next turn. It is up to you to then spend your turn doing whatever you can to prevent damage to your cities. There are two health meters in Into the Breach. The first one is the health of your mech. The second one is the health of  your power grid. If cities take damage your power grid is damaged. If your power grid falls your mechs lose all the power that was being supplied to them, and that means game over. Because of this, you'll often find yourself having to decide whether to have a mech jump in front of a bug-bullet that was meant for a power grid building, or just let your grid take the damage. There are a lot of ways to tackle the puzzles this game throws your way. Standing on a fissure with a mech will prevent bug reinforcements from coming out of the ground, but will damage most mechs in the process. Pushing a non-flying bug into water kills it instantly. Raising a smokescreen will prevent many bugs from firing. You can even push and teleport bugs so that they wind up inducing friendly fire on their own kind! With 9 different mech teams to choose from the game is endlessly replayable. Each team has a different theme. The fire based team has one mantra “KILL IT WITH FIRE!”. The Judo team focuses on making enemies hit themselves. Then there's the team with the giant laser cannon of doom, or the laser whip. Nothing is more fun than lining up 8 buildings and enemies to use that damned whip to murder 5 bugs in one go! Into the Breach is easily one of the best three tactics games of the decade!

5. Hollow Knight Switch

Hollow Knight is huge, and I mean fuckin huge! You know how in most Metroidvania games you have to do a ton of exploring to reach a boss and then get a new power up or ability? Yeah, see Hollow Knight has 34 bosses! No Zote doesn't count! And even after your standard 34 bosses there's secret challenge versions of several bosses as well. So just imagine how big this game is. Hollow Knight is also gorgeous! Just look at this screenshot. Everything is hand drawn or at least made to look that way. The world of Hollow Knight is this foreboding whimsical land of an old kingdom of bugs that fell years ago. As you explore this bug kingdom you'll kill thousands of crazed and cursed kingdom inhabitants. Every once in a while you'll come across a sane bug that is willing to give you a quest, sell you stuff, or just talk to you. You know that weird feeling you get whenever you come across an NPC in Dark Souls? Yeah it's like that. Hollow Knight also uses the Souls as currency, and lose all your souls on death gameplay concepts. The combat in this game consists of a combination of bullet hell, and swordplay. Most of the time your little character will be using his Nail to slash at enemies, but with each hit you build up a spell meter. You can consume this spell meter mid fight to either heal yourself or cast a spell at enemies. If you time your Nail slashes perfectly you can parry enemy attacks, which will knock you back slightly. You can even do this mid air, by aiming down and slashing just as an enemy is slashing up towards you. Landing a mid air slash like this will knock you up if the enemy is below you. There's also a double jump which refreshes every time you hit something with your nail. So during a lot of boss fights you'll be dashing, parrying, and double jumping like crazy. At first this might sound like too powerful of a main character, but once you play the game you'll realize the bosses are just brutal. Some of them just come into the fight throwing around a thousand projectiles, or two bosses will team up on you. Here just look at this crazy boss fight!

4. Dragon Quest 11 S Switch

When Dragon Quest VIII came out on PS2, I was blown away by how perfect of a JRPG it was. The sequel DQIX wasn't quite as good, mostly due to limitation of the DS. Then Level 5 left to make Ni No Kuni and Yokai Watch. I thought that there would never be a DQ game as good as VIII. I was wrong. Dragon Quest XI does everything right that VIII does and then turns it all up several notches! Instead of having two or three skill trees to follow, like in DQVIII, each character has a massive skill panel. There's got to be five or six different ways you can spec each character with Weapons, Skills, and Armor. The frequent random battles are gone, in favor of touching enemies to start a battle. Party members can be set to several different automatic strategies. Want Silvando to go all out? That can be done. Need a dedicated healer? There's an AI option for that. This makes DQXI play a lot more like an action RPG than a turn based slog. The epic music by Koichi Sugiyama is back, and fully orchestrated in this version! There's even more sidequests and things to do off the beaten path than DQVIII. The game designers over at Armor Project know just how to place chests, monsters, and secrets into a game to keep you following a trail like a lost dog in the woods finding milkbones. What really sets DQXI above all other JRPGs is the ridiculously good plot. You know how there's one or two epic, mindblowing plot moments in a JRPG? Yeah, this game has five of them!

A lot of these amazing moments are saved for the postgame, but the postgame is more like the second half of the game. Yes, it's that long! Akira Toryama's monster designs are better than ever in this game! They just have this level of whimsy and hilarity that I haven't seen in such a long time. The animations for both Heroes and Monsters are just so damned detailed, that it rivals Fire Emblem Three Houses. I especially love the combo attacks, where two to four characters can combine their moves to do devastating moves. And yes, there are a literal shitton of them! There's more combo attacks in this game than most games even have attacks. Leave it to the original inventors of the JRPG to finally dethrone the SNES twins (Chrono Trigger/Final Fantasy VI) of their shared title. I really didn't think anything would be able to move Hollow Knight out of my top 4 this year, but DQ11S swings for the fences. No, forget that. It swings for the moon!

#3 Sekiro Shadows Die Twice

Ladies and Gentlemen say Hello to the new king of Hack n' Slash! In 2001 DMC brought the Hack n' Slash genre to 3D, and possibly invented the genre altogether. In 2004 Ninja Gaiden further honed the genre by way of crushing difficulty, and having to choose whether an attack was best dodged or blocked. Blocking a heavy attack would either deal heavy chip damage or not be blockable at all. On the flipside trying to dodge a quick attack would get you hit. In 2009 Demon's Souls came out and introduced the Souls' XP/death system that has been copied by Hollow Knight and Nioh. When you die you leave a puddle of XP on the ground. Die again and you lose all that XP. This made death in games a lot more meaningful and punishing, upping the tension. In 2019 Sekiro built on all of this even further. Here's how...

First off instead of just flatly dying you can stock power to resurrect yourself effectively giving yourself multiple lives before leaving that Soul Puddle. This led to being able to reset smaller fights if you messed up and died, lowering the tedium in the game. Second Sekiro came with a whole slew of Ninja tools that you can equip to your prosthetic arm. From a big axe that can break shields to a ghost blocking umbrella these tools were all extremely useful against certain enemies and bosses. They allowed players to customize their playstyle in a game that only offers a single main weapon, the Sword. But the best thing Sekiro did was the damned posture system.

Blocking an attack, dodging, or doing pretty much anything in the game usually increases your posture meter. If the posture meter fills up the enemy can instakill you. But the enemies in this game all have posture meters too, and you can do the same thing to them. Enemies in this game deal a ton of damage to you, so it's in your best interest to instakill them if you can. Pressing block during the instance an enemy's attack would land parries their attack. Parrying an enemy attack keeps your posture meter from growing as much as a regular block. It also prevents chip damage, and adds to your opponent's posture meter. There's also a system of counters in the game. You can counter a sweep, stab, or grab by pressing the appropriate button at the right time. If you counter correctly your opponent either takes a ton of posture damage or is left wide open to a few quick stabs from your Sword. The lower your health the faster your posture meter grows, and the slower it shrinks. This is true for both the player character and enemies in the game. The end result of all this is that fights demand that you get in the bosses' face, and keep the pressure on with a flurry of parries, dodges, and counters. Since bosses all have absolutely massive HP bars and Posture Bars, as well as devastating attacks this makes for the most intense fights in any game ever. 

How to counter a stab attack in game. Step on their spear and then kick their ass!

Finally enjoy some hilarious Dunkey Highlights of the game!

2. Metroid Prime GameCube

Retro Studios somehow kept the same feeling in the art direction while moving the game to 3D. Prime added three key elements that didn't quite exist in the previous games. They are the descriptive lore, the 3D Morph Ball, and the different scan settings. The ability to scan and read about everything added a massive catalog of lore to the series. Whoever did the writing at Retro Studios pulled out all the stops for this. Everything in this game has great descriptions in the scan visor. How do you make a description of just a simple door sound so compelling? The Morph Ball in 3D leads to some of the most unique and interesting puzzles in any game I've ever come across. Once you get the magnetic Morph Ball the puzzles really get crazy. The X-Ray, and Thermal visors are the first ever rendition of Batman's "Detective Mode", and Geralt's "Witcher Senses". These modes of gameplay for revealing hidden secrets of the map have become a staple of many games. Metroid Prime is an absolute classic and perfect to a degree that few games reach these days. 

1. Mass Effect 2 Xbox 360

Last year I went through my list and asked myself one key question. If you were to wipe my memory of all these games, and force me to replay them in 2019, how well would I rate them according to 2019 standards? This year my question was how do I rate these games based on Graphical Aesthetic, Gameplay, Controls, Storytelling, Soundtrack, and Personal Opinion. The funny thing is that Mass Effect 2 still takes the entire list by my new 2020 criteria. Mass Effect 2 always made a really good spot on my list every year, but in 2019 I finally decided it deserves the #1 spot. Hindsight is 2020, and I usually need a good 5-10 years of it to call a game the Greatest Game of All Time. Also, the difference between #10 and #1 on my list is razor thin. Well, last year I just had to give it to Mass Effect 2, and it hasn't moved since! Partly because my old roommate who normally hates western RPGs with a passion loves it. As I said in my Chrono Trigger commentary, whenever a game can transcend genre hatred you know it's special. Just look at all the people that never touched traditional Zelda, but absolutely love BotW do death! 

Mass Effect 2 streamlined Mass Effect's gameplay, by taking out the clunky menu system. From the beginning Mass Effect 2's storyline is interesting, and compelling. The game opens up with the main character dying, and then being brought back to life, by a mortal enemy. Said mortal enemy wants the main character to put together a team for a suicide mission. Everything you do in this game determines whether or not your suicide mission is successful. Several supporting cast members either end their character arcs dying for the mission, or rising above and living, depending on what you did through the game. Almost all of these supporting cast members are written perfectly, and are genuinely interesting. We have, a mad scientist responsible for genocide, trying to make up for his past mistakes, an ex-cop gone vigilante, a dying assassin, two science experiments gone wrong, a hivemind AI robot, and a girl who's entire species has huge immunodeficiency problems. Mass Effect 2 makes this spot for it's dynamic choice/consequence system that remembers everything you did, including your save file from the original game.

Sekiro is so good and so underrated. I was so happy when it won Game of the Year 2019. Kinda shocked to be honest, but it was definitely my favourite game of the year.

I don't mind linear games either.  I've got Skyward Sword as the third best Zelda game at number 22 on my Top 50 List this year.  With Okami, the one thing I remember being surprised by was just how linear it was.  The first couple of maps are pretty narrow corridors.  Then the first big field you get to has one alternate path with a dead end, and then the one direction you need to travel in.  I think it just took me by surprise since it had been endlessly compared to Zelda games.  I guess I was expecting a hub area like Hyrule Field that the rest of the game built out from.  Of course, I am also working on a roughly decade old memory here.  Who knows what else was going on in my life or what other games I was playing at the time that made me eventually drop it.

It is pretty interesting how differently we interpret our experiences with the same game.  For me, Wind Waker has the weakest exploration element of all the 3D Zelda games.  Once I realized that each square on the map had a single island, and that most of those islands were pretty small and empty, it killed my drive to explore that game.  I mean, I still did, but it became more of a chore to check off all 49 squares for me.  With the land based 3D Zelda games, it always felt like there could be anything in the next section of the game.  Who knows how big the next area will be.  I didn't have that feeling with Wind Waker, because I already knew what was coming.

Anyway, I did always want to go back and finish Okami sometime.  I'll probably wait to pick up the Switch version instead of re-playing the Wii version on my Wii U.  The disc drive on my Wii went out a while back, and I haven't bothered to replace it yet.

I'd recommend doing this. The touch screen controls are far superior to the motion controls.

Alright, last game to cover, and then the overall summary of my top 50.

#1

Final Fantasy IX (PS1)

Change YOY: =

For almost 20 years now, Final Fantasy IX has stood at the top of my all time favourite games list, and unless something truly incredible comes along in the future, that's where it will stay for the rest of time. In my opinion, there's no such thing as a perfect game, something like that just does not exist, and never will no matter what. There will always be something in every single game in existence that doesn't come together perfectly, some small elements or detail that you don't like. However, if there's one game that's come as close to that as possible for me, then it's Final Fantasy IX.

Nearly every aspect of the game, from the music to the art direction, from the story to the characters, and from the game's world to the wonderfully translated script, is either THE best or among the very best in its category. Quite literally, the only even remotely notable criticism I've ever had regarding Final Fantasy IX is that I wish it was just a little bit more challenging, or that it would had one or two more optional "superbosses" to tackle. Basically, my problem comes down to "I wish there was more of the game to play", so I can't really call it much of a negative.

Final Fantasy IX is also probably the game I've played through more times than any other. I'm not entirely certain about that, as there are a few other possibilities for that particular designation as well, but even if that's not the case right, it will eventually be true. I literally just replayed the game a few months back on the PS4, and while the port isn't quite perfect, I still enjoyed it just as much as the original on the PS1. Nothing has changed over the years, and playing it again just cemented my opinion on the game as the best ever. There are many games I would consider true masterpieces, but none exemplify that word better in my mind than Final Fantasy IX. It's the closest thing to a perfect video game there is, and even though I just recently played through it, I'm already looking forward to the time when I eventually do so again.

Now that I've finally managed to cover all 50 games on my list, here's one final post to summarize my entire list, mostly just for fun. And I like statistics anyway, so you'll just have to deal with it. Regarding the release dates, I'm going by when the games were released in Europe.

Other Stats:

Oldest game: Super Mario Bros. 3 (#30), 1991, EU release date 

Newest Game: Final Fantasy VII Remake (#26), 2020

New Games on the List: 4 (Breath of the Wild (#39), Trails of Cold Steel III (#33) Final Fantasy VII Remake (#26), Nier: Automata (#20)

Best Year: 2017 with 5 games, 6 if you count Okami HD. Breath of the Wild (#39), Yakuza 0 (#25), Hollow Knight (#22), Nier: Automata (#20), Horizon Zero Dawn (#19)

And that's it for this year's event for my part. Took a lot longer to get through everything this time because I was constantly busy with some other stuff, but at least I finished things up in the end. 

Making this kind of list is really hard, like, at first I think "this game should be above this other one" and then some time later I think "mmmmm maybe it should be the other way around", it doesn't help that I'm kind of indecisive.

if I tried to redo the list 5 times a week I'd come out with 6 different orders, aside from a handful of entrants. With my more comprehensive list (the one with collections and ties) I am pretty solid, but deciding where DKC1 goes compared to 2 and 3 changes every time I make the list, where I actually like the trilogy as a single entity so I put it on the list as a single entity.