Two more or less important games missing, which I want to add are Outlaws and Doom 64.

Outlaws is a western shooter from non other than LucasArts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-Agkdkr12s

More important though is Doom 64. Which is very different from the original Doom and I do like the atmosphere a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2W2LzDZHQI

As I wasn't a console player back then I didn't play it originally (didn't even now it existed at all), only now with the remastering. And I do like it.

Although another game from the year, which I indeed played back in the day, I do like also a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Kr5i5F43U

It is a hard decision between Diablo and Doom 64, both are great games (although the walk speed in the village in Diablo was infuriating). I have to give it to Diablo, it is the start of an important series, it is one of the more well-known rogue likes (as in: the devs actually wanted to make a graphical rogue clone), it has also spawned a subgenre. And this first game nails the atmosphere and wasn't that egregious with the loot stuff, which expanded sours the game. But in this first entry the random loot is somewhat reasonable.

This year has a lot of important games I haven't played yet and should. This includes Final Fantasy VII, but more importantly I am sure Final Fantasy Tactics is right up my alley. Also this marks the year the first Age of Empires released, which I haven't played. I also missed out on Zork: Grand Inquisitor. And Fallout I have definitely to play one day. I also heard MDK is a pretty cool game.

I'm voting for "Other" this time, more specifically, Fallout. What a game! Such an incredible experience. From the awesome combat, to the fully realized world to the interesting and unique soundtrack not to mention an absolute nuke blast of an ending (lol). It's one of those games you never forget. It's the game that made me become a huge fan of post-apocalyptic/nuclear apocalypse media and it ended becoming my N1, all-time favorite game of all time.

The rest of my top for 1997 would look like this:

1. Fallout
2. Diablo
3. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
4. Final Fantasy VII
5. Mega Man X4 (The only Mega Man I really like! lol)

You make a good point about the loot. Diablo 2 was better in a lot of ways but it already had me question the amount of random loot. That only got worse with clones like Titan Quest and Torch Light. Adding more ways to carry out more and more loot and it's even in the marketing "dive into an epic journey with endless loot". Sure you don't have to pick up everything but it sure would be a lot nicer to have sparse meaningful loot and coins. I really don't see the appeal of carrying out tons of crap to sell one by one or in stacks. Heck games even have options now to sell all the crap in bulk. But still got to carry it all.

Baldur's Gate 3, no matter how much I enjoy it, falls into the same trap. Why is there so much crap to pick up. It doesn't add to the immersion one bit, just makes a bloated inventory where you spend a lot of time searching for the few useful things. Also picking up things from a table full of clutter is a pita on console. You can move the cursor yet that also moves the camera. I imagine on PC you can use the mouse without the screen moving.

The charm of these older games is that they are a lot more focused than modern games. Too many options, too much clutter is my biggest complaint about modern gaming. TotK is guilty of it as well, so much stuff. I need to go sell a bunch of crap now in BG3 as I'm up to 5 or 6 radial wheels in combat lol. I don't know what all this stuff is for, nor do I ever have time to use or try it all. I often feel paralyzed by the amount of choice on offer and can't play more than an hour at a time because of it. I long back to the 'simplicity' of the original Baldur's gate, which incidentally had a bigger party size as well. Anyway that's for 1998 :)

I'm more inclined now to play the original Fallout and Fallout 2, but where can you get that nowadays? It seems the GoG version has been censored :/
https://www.gog.com/en/game/fallout

I have a lot of great and interesting memories of Diablo.  This is the era when people first started playing games online.  My first online experience was with Diablo.  While I found the single player experience to be extremely well designed and balanced, the online experience of Diablo was madness.  Almost every person I encountered was using hacks where they could generate as much loot as they wanted.  Now don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun, because I think that first time a person experiences internet play it's going to be fun.  However, the fun could only last for so long because the hacks kind of destroyed the gameplay.

A few months later I tried Ultima Online for the first time, and I thought it was much better, if for no other reason than the hacks were gone.  After a few months I quit UO, because of the PvP system, but I appreciated that it had a dynamic working economy.  It really took developers a few years before they had something of a handle on online play.

Best and most popular are not equivalent.

7 is when FF when mainstream.  

Don't get me wrong 7 is amazing, so is 9.  But on the snes I felt like I was the only one who knew FF but on the ps1 everyone knew FF.

Forgot about Outlaws, should’ve mentioned this one in my post as well. Fun game, though I never got far. The bandits taunting you was great.

Tomb Raider II, easily. My second favourite game ever. More fluid and fun than the original, which itself was a really good game. Some people lament the increase in gun toting foes and lack of isolation, and whilst I can agree with the latter point, I enjoy the combat (minus the occasional point where it gets a bit cheap).

Shout out to Goldeneye and Symphony of the Night.

I am actually not against random loot per se. But if I have to stop every ten minutes, to sort my inventory for crap and useful, it is too much. Actually, a good loot frequency makes it so infrequent, that I actually look at it the moment it drops, instead of collecting it until the inventory is full to look at it in bulk. I like being happy about dropping loot and looking if it fits my character. But I stop looking if I know that the next loot drop is only seconds away. Borderland suffers the same problem, the first game has an acceptable loot frequency for me, but even the second game already does it too much (but has more fun story and characters, which still keep me engaged).

And Fallout is censored? Hmm, reading it Bethesda opted to remove kids and change the language. Booh Todd Howard! Apparently there are links shared to mods that reenables that stuff.

I am not big with online gaming. It is even uncommon for me that I currently play Baldur's Gate 3 coop with friends. But they are actually friends I also play Pen&Paper RPG with and BG3 is close to that experience in ways. Anyways, I played Diablo always offline, so I am more interested in the experience of atmosphere it build, and the first one is pretty good at that.

I haven't ranked my favourite games in ages - it is lengthy process, I use Pub Meeple ranking engine, which is best for boardgames, since it can draw data directly from your BoardGameGeek account, but it can be used for anything with custom list - it is "choose one from two items" process, and then it goes on like that for quite a while comparing items from your list, until it finally, after lot of iterations, makes a list - the more items you have, the lengthier the process.

Anyway, Fallout 1 and 2 come up fairly frequently on top places - I like Fallout 1 somewhat more, cause it was first and that first playthrough when you don't know much about that world, and the clock is ticking, was one of the best gaming experiences I ever had. But I find Fallout 2 to actually be a better game - it expanded on the world and on the gameplay quite a bit, giving you more freedom to tackle things differently, and is, to date, one of the games that does best representation of what RPGs are about. So much that my younger son (15y), after playing Baldur's Gate 3, which he enjoyed, decidedly announced that Fallout 2 is "much better CRPG". Made me proud.

I do however find that Fallout 1 and 2 are somewhere in the 8-9/10 range. Now, I'm am bit on a harsh side with scoring, even with my most beloved games, compared to current distorted standards where everything is "10/10 masterpiece", and while RPGs are notoriously hard to make properly, I do find that there was still lot of things that could be improved and built upon in following Fallouts - if there was actually to be Fallout 3. We all know how that went, with Interplay going bust.

Such a pity Bethesda got their hands on IP, they really never understood (or didn't give a shit) what is the core of Fallout - “My idea is to explore more of the world and more of the ethics of a post-nuclear world, not to make a better plasma gun.”  / Tim Cain, creator of Fallout