Best of the Series
These are what I believe to be the best installments of a video game series to date. You may disagree with me, and that's fine, but only because it's OK for you to be wrong.
List items
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KQ5 was more "revolutionary" and possibly even more of an immersive story, but the game was so linear that it might as well have been a cartoon. KQ6 took everything from 5 and made it better. Especially the CD-ROM version, which featured some great voice acting and added a lot of humor and personality that was missing from the text-only floppy-disk version. The characters are entertaining, the visuals were good for the time, and the music is wonderful. Challenging puzzles later in the game make it a tough one to finish the "best" way, especially because there were so many different possible endings.
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Many people feel like the first 3D Mario game was the best one, but it never worked for me. It was like the 3D "Lemmings" games. SMW took the amazing SMB3 and expanded on it in dozens of creative ways. The Star Road, the Yoshi dynamic, that wonderful cape. It still feels like the perfect game, and no matter how many Mario games I've played in the two decades since SMW, they all seem to be missing some fundamental "rightness" that existed inside that cartridge. It is the single most compelling reason to use an emulator.
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I know that most FF lists put FFVII on top. If it were all about the story, I would agree. However I spent many, many more hours in the world of FFX, and I kept going back for more because of the world that they created for us to explore. The Sphere Grid was a genius mechanic that has never been equalled. The monster arena was also one of the best in the series. The beautiful (for PS2) graphics didn't hurt, either. This was the FF that I most wish had never ended, which is ironic, because as the first one with a real sequel, it actually DOES continue, and I HATED the sequel. Main characters shouldn't be imaginary unless there is a way to make them real somehow.
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OK, so this game proved that turning a 2D game into a 3D one doesn't automatically make it suck. Mario would have done well to learn a few lessons from Link, because most of what I hated about Mario 64 was fixed or rendered unimportant when it came over to the Zelda side of the isle. Beautiful story telling and legitimately fun quests make for a game that is worth playing more than once. The only other Zelda game I would say that about is the original.
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Everyone else loves San Andreas, but for me Vice City was the perfect open-world game. So many of the "advancements" in San Andreas turn out to be annoying, tedious time-fillers that must really appeal to the WOW grinders out there, but not to anyone else. I mean, really, who wants to sit in a virtual gym and do virtual push-ups? Anyway, Vice City had a great cast of hilarious bad guys, lots of stuff to do, and my favorite cliché American environment for a backdrop. How could you look back on the '80s and NOT laugh? Time to go sell some "ice cream."
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This is the only Halo game I really enjoyed. That's all I have to say about Halo.
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