I really enjoyed that game and would love to see a follow-up.  New York Noire?

travo said:

I really enjoyed that game and would love to see a follow-up.  New York Noire?

I wouldn't even take it out of L.A., just move the timeline and set it in the 60's.

Foolz said:

Isn't it a problem with triple-a development in general? (And probably not just triple-a development.) In any case, always wanted to play LA Noir. I probably actually should sometime given I have it on Steam. Also, there are two Australian games in your top 10..

Yes it probably is, at least in Western companies  (it's probably just accepted in Japan though supposedly Nintendo has stuff in place to prevent crunch). I don't think I've heard any bad stories about any first-party Sony Studios though.  Anyway, go play it.

And what was the other game made in Australia?

#2. Monster Hunter World

When it was announced that Monster Hunter World was going to have some considerable changes from previous entries in the series, I had some doubts. Clearly this was a ploy to dumb down the game to make it more accessible to Western audiences. How dare they change so many core signatures of the game? I don't want to know how much damage my strikes are doing to a monster. I don't want to easily find my prey! Make me hunt blindly for the beast and lose half my gameplay time before I lose him ounce again because I didn't bring enough paintballs for tracking! Keep things the same and inconvenient so that new few fans are equally inconvenienced.

Yeah I was wrong. The changes were for the better. Monster Hunter World is definitely the most accessible game in the series, and a strong arguement can be made for calling it the best of the series. The QoL changes mostly just eliminated the frustrations of the most irritating parts of the game, and time you spent properly preparing for a hunt. So hunting prep is now at a minimum and hunting the beast is now truly the game's focus.

Good thing too, because the new lands you hunt in are massive and even when you know where you're going it's not hard to get lost. The very first level, the are you visit the most often can become an absolute labyrinth if you end up there at night during a storm. It's glorius really. And the new battles are still are fierce as ever. The monsters lack a little of the variety that MH3U and MH4U both had, but these monsters are giant and harder to predict. Hell, sometimes they even pick fights with one another, and then the shit really hits the fan. Capcom also did an excellent job of supporting the game with new content as time went on. A few extra monsters showed up over time, a cross-over with The Witcher, and real-time seasonal festivals (to say nothing of the Iceborne expansion that I still need to properly dive into) made it worth coming back to the game from time to time). It certainly was worth 200+ hours of my time at any rate.

Archangel3371 said:

Man do I ever love Monster Hunter World. Never really played much of the other Monster Hunter games, not that I wasn’t interested in them though, just something I didn’t get around to playing. I have put in nearly 1,300 hours into World and Iceborne combined. Still putting in more time here and there so total time will be quite a bit.

While I did enjoy my time with MH World, I'm still not convinced of the QoL changes.  Some were for the better, but others took away from the series' quirky charm for me.  The accessability argument also doesn't hold up well in my opinion, as a lot of the menu's, especially concerning online play and co-op are still very convulted and user unfriendly, resulting in a game that still doesn't explain itself pretty well and makes playing together more of a slog than it should be.

My biggest gripe is how they tackled late game progression.  Augmenting your weapons, or whatever it's called, didn't appeal to us at all.  It's just random gaicha mechanics.  You could argue that the randomness is also part of the series, as some elusive parts required for crafting specific weapons have very, very low droprates, but at least back then you could say 'I want to craft this weapon, so I'll end up beating the same monster dozens of times untill I have all the required material'.  Now it's all up to chance what you get and how you can upgrade your gear.  It also didn't help that the Nergigante weapons are fairly easy to acquire fairly early on and that they're better than almost anything you can craft through the main game.

Monster diversity also takes a hit compared to tri and MH4.

Anyhow, I can see a game like this make your list, but despite everything this game got right, it made some profound bad choices as listed above, that meant Ididn't take to the game like I did to Tri and MH4.

No, we haven't checked out Iceborne yet.  My co-op buddy had his fill with the base game.  Maybe we'll get to it in 2021.

I never had much issues with playing on the 3DS for longer periods of time.  I do miss the stereoscopic 3D though.  That was awesome and it's sad we'll probably never see it again.

Let's finish this up shall we?

#1. Final Fantasy XV

This game may have surprised me more than any other in the past decade. Despite once being a huge megafan of the series I had sworn off Final Fantasy games after FFX. I was left feeling very unimpressed with the stories, characters, and overall direction with the series was heading in. However, a while back I was reading one sentence descriptions of Final Fantasy games, and for XV it was, "A bachelor party goes very badly." For whatever reason, that amused the crap out of me and always kind of stuck in my head. Eventually it's probably what convinced me to get the game. And wow.... a road tripping action RPG with J-Pop dude bros. I never knew I needed that in my life. Truth be told, that's probably why I had such a connection with the game. Road trips across Texas were a big part of my life in college and into my early 20's. A lot of the areas in the early part of the game almost felt like a memory with the wide open spaces dotted with occasional gas stations and rundown towns. Its one of those things I wish I did more of then, and still did now.

But there was more to why I liked the game than just that. I know there were a lot of gripes about how the story was handled and the rushed feeling towards the end, but I kind of liked the way it broke down. The first 75% of the game is a slow trickle of story with lots of exploration and sidequests, and then when you're tired of exploring you pretty much tackle all of the story at once with the exploration taken out. That's sort of how I tackle open world games anyway, so this was perfect. And the story itself was actually kind of good. Its messy, but the characters are pretty well put together and grow. It's not all happy either. In fact, one of the most masterfully put together sections of the game was when the team suffers through some consequences of a giant battle. The "sad moment where the team has to rally together" is an RPG troupe almost as old as the genre, but in FFXV it's not the 5 or 10 minutes of exposition before things get good again. When things get bad.... you are forced to wallow in it. It's dark, depressing, and after a while you almost start to wonder if things are actually going to get better because even though you're still actively playing it feels like you've grinded to a halt. It's something you don't see a lot of, and once it was over it was a moment that was hard not to appreciate.  

And despite being as big of a game as it was, it felt like it was designed with restraint. My biggest complaint about modern jRPGs is that they're too god damned long. Persona 5 was 90+ hours. Dragon Quest 11 was 90+ hours. And both of those games now have "ultimate editions" that push their run time well into the 100+ hour zone. I DON'T WANT TO PLAY A GAME FOR THAT LONG!!!!! It totally kills my interest in revisiting the games since I know I don't want to invest that much time. FFXV was a comfortable 50 hours, and if I wanted more I could easily continue in the post-game (or shockingly start over and enjoy some parts of the game a second time).

So there it is. Final Fantasy XV.  A game I didn't expect to like or even play ended up being my favorite game of the past 10 years. I had a hard time putting it down and still really want to get back into it (soooo much backlog though). And when I look back at games, that's usually how I determine what the very best ones are. What's tough to put down? What do I want to go back to? What do I want more of? Definitely FFXV.

SupremeAC said:

Damn, and I was so sure Xenoblade Chronicles would be your number one.  

Second best game, well worth 200+ hours of your life. Best game, you're glad it was only 50 hours...