I don't have justification? I could just as easily say that its my matter of opinion, but thats not what I;m going for. I fail to see Gears' art direction as anywahere close to Bioshock's. My reason for omitting Gears primarily, is that it is all destruction and decay. However, if I found that it has such an impressive and unique art direction like Bioshock or Mass Effect, I would have added it to this list anyway. It doesn;t have a bad art direction, but I;m afraid it simply isn't an impressive enough artistic styling to me to include in the top 5.

Again, I consider Vesperia both unique and distinctive, in that it recaptures the feel of what is essentially an anime with its style of graphics and models. To me, its the height of Cell shading, and how its style endears me to it like no other game has. Though now I'm interested, with the exception of Valkyria chronicles, what game shares this similar anime inspired style? And Eternal Sonata didn't seem to have so much an anime inspiration as much as simply cell-shaded graphics.

I would put Viva on there...

HAVE FLOWER ON IT.

I haven't played enough PS3 games to do it myself, but fl0wer and Valkyria Chronicles are simply neccesary for that kind of list.

Every other Tales in 3-D shares the same graphical style and art direction. There is nothing unique about it.

Tales of Vesperia is part of that series. Its series is unique in itself, and thus unlike any other series, thus Tales of Vesperia has a unique graphical style and art direction. Saying otherwise simply because its a part of a series is also saying that Mass Effect, gears, Uncharted, etc. dont have unique styles because other games in their series have them too. But even then...

Not really. I divide Tales games into two groups; the Symphonia groupd and the Abyss group. The Abyss graoup looks like this:

Although its not realistic, its much more similar to a realistic attempt on the game's graphical style then one of a cartoony style like Vesperia, which is more like this:

The distinction is made mainly by whether or not its cell-shaded, but to me, cell-shading can make a world of difference on whether or not a game looks good.

You can't keep dancing around the definition of "beautiful". You shift between interpreting it as meaning graphically impressive, emotionally touching, and how aesthetically appealing a game was to your own preferences. Look, you can't have it both ways: either gauge beauty aesthetically or gauge it technically. This list has so much of your personal bias brough into the list (which is practically inevitable when making a list like this) that it makes arguing (or even reacting to) it fairly pointless: we would just be attempting to recolor your opinions with our own.

However, you titled this thread "Top 5 Most Beautiful" which implies a certain level of objectiveness, kind of swinging the definition of beaty as used here, to mean technically impressive coupled with engaging art direction. Defined like this, you can't honestly try to leave Gears off of this list. Your logic in doing so is that any beauty it has is completely smothered by the games inescapable atmosphere of destruction and waste. This argument is grounded in nothing but your personal interpretation of beautiful--which, again, makes this list seem like it is sentiment more than merit based.

As long as this list is truly meant to be the 360's top 5 most beautiful games, Gears belongs on it. If you want to leave it off completely, than I think that this list should be retitled as "The 5 360 games most beautiful to me" or something like that.

Tales of Vesperia is beautiful what are you talking about? Tales of the Abyss was ugly (still an amazing game) and Tales of Symphonia's art style does not compare to Vesperia's art style. It was ver unique. Just look at these screens

Also, this is neither here nor there, but man, does having to read posts in BOLD BLUE get old fast. On a "how annoying is it?" scale, it's the textual equivalent of having somebody talk a few notches too loud, in a contrived guido accent, ALL THE TIME.

I really cant belive the grief Shadowblind is getting.
Every game on the list he made can be counted as beautiful, so what if he missed out a few games what maybe deserved to be on, but aint this the same with EVERY list like this?

Tales deserves to be in the top 5, i can see that just from the screens g-value posted.

fallout 3 and resident evil 5 maybe?