I feel like Skyrim gets the same sort of boost over Morrowwind that FF7 got over FF6. Both previous games were superior but the later games in their series managed to break into the wider cultural awareness. 

Personally disagreed in both cases. FF7 is in my top 20, whereas Skyrim I feel like I placed too low in the 30s. But hey to each their own.

Some people genuinely like FF7 over FF6. But I think a lot of people either haven't played it or played one of the many inferior ports. The GBA version is the best version IMO, but having a GBA without a faded screen or hooking up a Gamecube with a Gameboy Player and Swiss installed to fix all the native GBPlayer issues is asking a lot of people. Then you have the pixel remaster which is pretty bad with a lot of bewildering changes. Anyway FF6 just languishes unnoticed by a lot of people. 

As for Skyrim, I feel it was inferior when it came to story, worldbuilding, and scope to Morrowwind. But then Morrowwind has it's own issues of being completely outdated in so many ways. Skyrim's combat, graphics, and fast travel were amazing for a 2011 open world game. But these days we have so many better open world games that vastly improve on what Skyrim had to offer. (But I suppose not everybody builds their lists based on what the best game is today, but rather how good a game felt to them in the past. Both are a valid way to build a list IMO.)

The GBA version of FF6 is actually the only one I've played. It's a solid game but I would put it fourth when ranking the mainline games.

As for Skrim, I do actually rank my games based on how much I like them today, but Skyrim I haven't played for many years which is the main reason it's so low (used to be in my top 20). I think the thing about Skyrim is that it's true its combat isn't exceptional and it's open-world has arguably been surpassed a little (though I still consider it among the best), but it still feels like the definitive fantasy sandbox game in so many ways. Witcher 3, BotW and Elden Ring are better in a ton of areas for example, but they don't offer quite the same thing so if you want to go experience a fantasty world with total freedom and build your own character it's still the best at that imo (except maybe WoW, but that's a different thing as well and subscriptions are expensive lol).

Solid list and great work to all of those who put this together. Look forward to seeing how next year's list shapes up.

A couple of personal recommendations that *could* make it on your top 50 lists:

-Outer Wilds
-What Remains of Edith Finch
-It Takes Two
-Star Wars: KOTOR

Thanks for keeping the event going. Nice work!

I am a bit surprised to see, that this time Heroes of Might and Magic 3 got four votes, most pretty high too, and that is even without LiquidLaser this year. Have some people tried this old game and realized it's greatness? Happy to see that.

I’m really curious how the user base of this website became so skewed towards Japanese Developed games. Sometimes it feels like I’m on Gematsu or something…

Japan was carrying console gaming in special up until the HD gen, so older people that played on consoles had a lot of contact with japanese games, and if they are still excited about gaming nowdays it's likely they liked many of those japanese games and franchises.

Companies like Nintendo, Sega, Capcom, Konami, Bandai Namco, Square Enix and Sony have some of the most beloved games ever.

To me Japan is instantly the first country I think about when I think about gaming and by very far my favorite country out there both because of that and anime.

Even as nowdays Sony in special is way more focused on the west and its best studios are almost all from the USA or Europe, so pretty much not many japanese developed titles per say, and IMO they do make the best games out there by a comfortable margin, that doesn't change the fact that for many years (and those were years where games released way faster than nowdays so even more games in proportion) that was not the case, so many successful franchises came from japanese devs, and that won't ever change.

PC focused gamers had more contact with a bigger variety of western games earlier, so that certainly may have helped them develop different tastes compared to console gamers, so if you are more into PC it might have been the case.

But nowdays younger people are certainly more into mobile, which means Chinese gachas or Western shooters have access to an insane ammount of players and your perception, if not aligned to it, might also already be very strange to them as a console or pc gamer as well, so there is that too.

Thanks for all the shoutouts! I really just helped adding data in. Thank you for all of your hard work as well! The thread turned out great. Let me know if you need help this year as well if you plan on keeping the tradition alive! 

Thanks for keeping one of the reasons I joined this forum going!