Street of Rage
Golden Axe
Final Fight
The King of Dragons
Knights of the Round

Not gonna lie, I don't know or care which games belong to which genres anymore.

I suppose Sekiro is a "better" game than any character action or hack and slash I played, including Devil May Cry 1, the king of the "genre" when time and impact are considered. But DMC in 2001 was truly something special, it remains my tied favorite Capcom game alongside RE1 Remake, and both should have sold at least 10 times more.

I noticed that the older I grow the less I care about ranking stuff. Sekiro and DMC are different games from different eras. To me, no modern game is as flavourful as DMC was back then, but I recognize that my taste buds aren't the same.

Anyways... some of my favorites include DMC (definitely not 2), Onimusha, Shinobi (especially Revenge of Shinobi), NieR Automata, and Sekiro if it counts. I was never a huge fan of God of War, I didn't enjoy Bayonetta 1's demo enough to buy it, and I didn't play Ninja Gaiden more than 10 minutes and instead enjoyed watching my brother play through it. When one of us played a game, the other would often skip it.

Puyo Puyo
Daytona USA
Pong
Grandia
Crazy Taxi

Ask and you shall receive!

From what I played....


1. Devil May Cry 3
2. God of War 3
3. Bayonetta 2
4. DmC Devil May Cry
5. God of War 2

Huh, I never knew about this series. Nice one. I'll keep an eye on this new one.  

Shinobi? Yeah I guess unless you were a Sega console fan in the 80s/90s, you wouldn't have much knowledge on the franchise. 

If you have a PS2, there was a 3D action Shinobi game that released which was very character action oriented like others you'll find in this thread. It was a really fun game, but of course got overshadowed by likes of Devil May Cry. The rest of the series has primarily been 2D side scrolling. I'm really looking forward to the new one!

Shinobi and Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound. The unexpected return of 2D action games!

Oh yeah, I think I remember it now on ps1 and PS2, where you're like a Ninja running over roof tops and they were really punishing games. Yeah, I kinda liked them but they were way to difficult for my child brain. 

Edit: I'm thinking of Tenchu. I looked up Shinobi and never seen it in my life. 

Playing through Black Myth Wukong now and it's at least a solid 7, the first chapter is really misleading and would have you believing it's not balanced going from really easy to hard and has no mechanical depth.... Well, it doesn't gain much in mechanical depth but the boss encounters get better and the difficult finds its slow curve up. It's still quto combo no matter how you build and very much just The Witcher 3 combat with more spells and the ability to build. Not that you'll need to cause the best spells and transformations are given at the start, oddly. Very basic game, with a terrible performance mode that is barely holding together at the seams but there is something here I can't put my finger on and it's definetly not the exploration or story cause both are trash teir but something in the core combat, as basic as it is, it has a feel to it like few other games, somewhere between floaty and impactful that I fail to come up with a game, other than TW3 that has this style of play and it does it far better than TW3. Infact, this would be the perfect template for The Witcher 4 and Ciris new adventure, since she'll have access to spells and the whole perfect doge works with her warping abilities.

Tenchu was great! Had the first one on PS1 and Wrath of Heaven on PS2 and loved them both. Very unique games in how they played. Another brutal Ninja game that I felt was underrated and no one talks about is Ninja Shadow of Darkness, this game kicked my ass and I enjoyed every second of it. I had a thing for Mythologies Sub-Zero too. It goes without saying all of those had more differences than similarities and weren't really in the same genre, let alone sub-genre.

Shinobi-PS2 was very basic but fun, challenging, and gloomy in a good way. It wasn't in the same league to me as Revenge of Shinobi, Shadow Dancer, and Shinobi 3 on the MegaDrive. Myself and my brother played DMC2 soon after Shinobi-PS2 and disappointingly said "DMC has fallen so low, Capcom is shamelessly copying Shinobi's monster tanks, except the game is so much worse" lol. It also got a sequel named "Nightshade" which I didn't play. Nightshade's protagonist was a hot af no-nonsense kunoichi. I'd let her slay me... and maybe step on me :)