It's the Last of Us, but if I were to make a case for each...
Uncharted: Strong nostalgia factor, given for quite a while I owned a PS3 without any games. I'd sit in my dorm playing Guitar Hero 2 on PS2 most of the time, and whenever I wanted to fire the PS3 up it was the Uncharted and DIRT demoes I'd turn to over and over again. Also perhaps the bravest and smartest time in the entire series is the first hour or so of this game, which features absolutely no combat and sets an incredible atmosphere thanks to it. Naughty Dog and other game designers would do well to learn from the example they set here (the closest comparison I can think of is the first half hour of Bioshock Infinite).
Uncharted 2: It's an amazing thrill ride, many of its set pieces and locations are among the most memorable of the generation. And yes, that counts for a lot. But this was also the game in the series that exposed Naughty Dog's gun combat as fundamentally flawed, it just doesn't feel like you're hitting the enemy until they're dead (and it takes a LOT to kill the PMC enemies), and once the magic gets involved just as with Uncharted the whole thing becomes a mess of frustrating gameplay threatening to swallow a neat story whole.
Uncharted 3: Unlike most users on this board, I feel like Uncharted 3 took everything Uncharted 2 did well and put a compelling game on top of it. The gunplay still feels loose, but the challenge finally feels balanced for the majority of the game, so much so that where I flipped both previous games to Easy somewhere in the final third of the game, this one I immediately started a Hard play through after game one. Uncharted 3, to me, is likely the perfect action game, with amazing cutscenes (particularly whenever Drake deals with Marlowe face-to-face) and finally the gameplay to match. It probably helps that I played all three just this past May-July, so there wasn't any sort of lingering nostalgia for 2 when I got to 3. By the end of 2, I was shaking my head constantly at all the mistakes from the original they were so stubborn to make again. But 3 was just a dream.
The Last of Us: Which just goes to show how great I thought the Last of Us was that this decision came to be before the thread was done loading. I recently had some old friends in town for the holidays who don't game as much as they used to, and when I showed them this game (the opening sequence and the first couple Joel & Tess combat tutorials followed by the hotel area with Ellie from the infamous E3 demo) they were flabbergasted, could not believe what they were seeing. Drop that game in front of someone who primarily plays small Steam and iOs stuff or sports games from a couple years ago and their jaws will be permanently affixed to the ground. I had forgotten just how complex the enemy encounters could become in a tense firefight gone wrong, and we were all on the edge of our seats pretty much the instant I threw the game on both times. The game's not perfect - one especially annoying quibble I have with the game is how the A.I. seems to become more and more erratic at the beginning of encounters as the game goes on, to the point they're essentially sprinting in random patterns like bugs - but it's perfect enough.
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