Alright, I still need to cover the last two games on my list before I do a wrap-up of the whole list, so here goes:

#2

The Legend of Dragoon (PS1)

YoY: =

The last time there was a change in my personal top three favourite games of all time was somewhere around summer or autumn of 2001 when I first played through The Legend of Dragoon. Since then, no new game has managed to enter the top 3, Dark Souls being the only game since that I genuinely considered putting there at one point, but decided against it. Perhaps those three games just exist in the perfect cross-section of nostalgia and and quality, or maybe the reason is something completely different, but it's really difficult for me to imagine any new game pushing any of them down the list.

The Legend of Dragoon is a game with which I always associate a sense of melancholy with, not because playing it makes me sad or anything, but because the world the game is set in has this feeling of lost history to it. Of once great kingdoms having fallen to ruin and then forgotten, of many prominent species being driven to near-extinction by war and genocide. Those aspects aren't necessarily at the forefront of the game's story, but they are always just beneath the surface, set slightly to the side but always still in view. 

Obviously I still love every other aspect of the game as well, except for the voice acting, which is about as good as you'd expect from a JRPG of its time. That is to say, middling to awful. Besides that, I genuinely have nothing to complain about The Legend of Dragoon. A near-perfect game, and one I'm going to go back to many more times in the future.

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. 

#1: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

A fucking legend indeed. I won't talk about all of the details of how BotW handles exploration and all because that would be way to long and has been done plenty of times. I will talk about how it affected me personally.

On the 10th of March 2018, my 16th birthday, I got up early and unpacked my highly anticipated birthday present. A Switch and Breath of the Wild. After setting up the console I jumped straight into the game and from the very first moment I was captivated. It was during the spring holidays so the next two weeks I didn't have any school and I spend every hours I could to play the game. Every time I booted up the game I completely lost sense of time and played for hours. Sleep? Nah. I played the game until 6, 7 or even 8am, slept for 2 or 3 hours and then just continued playing. I was seriously addicted. To this day when I start playing it I just don't to stop.

It was the first HD game I played. In 2018. So obviously I was blown away by how the game looked. But it weren't the graphics that truely blew me away, it was the stunning artdirection and artstyle. Until this day I think that BotW is the most beautiful game I've ever played. Yesterday I played a bit of the game on my last save file from six months ago. I climbed a high mountain and just flew down and was stunned by the landscapes. It's marvelous.

Usually in almost every game where it's possible I go of the path and just start messing around, doing whatever. That was in many games always my favorite part and still is. Breath of the Wild is that part only. It's everything I've ever wanted. In many games I quickly feel like I've seen and done it all. In BotW I feel like I can never have seen it all. I've put in a massive 1200 or more hours into the game and still find new stuff I didn't know of before. Just yesterday I found a beautiful peninsula that is called maple point. It's on the south east corner of the map. I didn't expect to find anything special there, but instead I found a view of serene beauty. A small lake surounded by cliffs and three thin waterfalls coming out of holes in the cliffs. It's beautiful.

BotW never fails to surprise with more unique places and interesting details. There's so much to do, so much to see. The combat and the physics system make it even better. So much fun. The only letdown are the divine beasts as dungeons and the blights. They lack their own identity and are all the same. Only Thunderblight Ganon is great, since he is such a challenge. Windblight was the easiest by far, a joke really. Thankfully Hyrule Castle is an excellent dungeon  rivalling the one from Twilight Princess and the divine beast from the DLC is pretty good and ends with Monk Maz Koshia, my favorite boss fight in the entire series.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece featuring the best open world in any game and is imo the best game ever made. Playing this game for the first time was the most memorable experience I ever had. There is no other game I would love more to be able to experience for the first time again. It's magical. My favorite game ever.

14. Nobody guessed it but 14 is Dragon Quest 11.

9. This PS1 JRPG was overshadowed when it first released. It has gained a cult following in recent years.

It features three different battle types. regular battles, duels, and massive battles.

6. This game's gameplay is focused around gravity.

After 100% you unlock another playable character.

#6: Super Mario Galaxy

Alright, here's the breakdown of my whole list, diving all the games on my list by platform, developer, decade and so on. If you want to see my whole list you can find it HERE.

• First, a quick look at the games that dropped off from the list this year:
  • Dragon Quest VIII: The Journey of the Cursed King (PS2) - #50 last year
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (PC) - #48 last year
  • Mega Man 4 (NES) - #47 last year
  • Rogue Galaxy (PS2) - #46 last year
  • Tekken 5 (PS2) - #43 last year
• And the games that replaced them:
  • God of War 2018 (PS4) - #48
  • A Plague Tale: Innocence (PS4) - #42
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd (PC) - #40
  • Tales of Berseria (PS4) - #33
  • Stardew Valley (PC) - #32

Games by Platform: (by their original platform or the one I played it on first)

Developers:

Franchises:

1. Final Fantasy: 6 games 
2. The Legend of Heroes: 6 games 
3. Dark Souls: 3 games
4. Uncharted: 2 games
5. Grandia: 2 games

Decades:

1990s: 9 games     2000s: 11 games     2010s: 29 games    2020s: 1 game

Biggest Climbs:

1. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II (+18)
2. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC (+9)
3. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III (+5) 

I replayed the whole series this year, so there were a lot of changes on their rankings.

Biggest drops:

1. Command & Conquer (-10)
2. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (-7)
3. Batman: Arkham City, Kingdom Hearts 2, Metal Gear Solid 3 (-6)

Other Stuff:

• The oldest game on the list is Super Mario Bros. 3, released in 1991 in Europe.
• The newest is Final Fantasy VII remake, released in 2020.
• The year with the most entries is 2017 (going by European release dates), with seven games. The highest ranking of them is Horizon Zero Dawn at #16
• Finally, there is a chance that next year Final Fantasy will no longer be the most represented franchise on my list, which would be the first time that has ever happened.

And that's a wrap. I've written way too much already, so hope that was at least somewhat interesting to read for some of you.

Yes super Mario galaxy is correct

#9: Suikoden II

That is correct!

Alright throwing together some bonus stuff. First comparisons with last years list:

New debuts:

• Metroid Dread (#50)
• Celeste (#41)
• Nier: Automata (#29)
• Undertale (#26)

Games that got cut:

• Mass Effect 2 (#49)
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (#48)
• Tales of Xillia (#47)
• Tales of Graces (#46)

Biggest climb:

• Black Mesa (#35 to #8) - Yea, after replaying this and Half-Life 2, I realized they were more or less equal for me. Even put Black Mesa a little higher.

Biggest drops:

• Smash Bros. Melee (#24 to #31)
• Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (#23 to #30)

Then on to a few games I want to shout-out, including some that might not be top 50 material for me, but which I enjoyed a lot in the last year.

Honorable Mentions:

• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Was really close to giving it #50)
• Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire
• The Talos Principle
• System Shock 2
• The Witcher 1 & 2
• Batman: Arkham City & Arkham Knight
• Uncharted 4: A Thief's End
• StarCraft
• Portal
• Deltarune (Playing it now, and it's amazing)

Highlights of this last year:

• Hades
• Cyberpunk 2077
• The Last of Us Part II
• Skies of Arcadia: Legends

Yea, guess much of it was me being a year behind. That's a trend that I expect will continue.