 Hey everybody. So even though I was deep into working on my video about Dead Space 3 and why it's better than we all remember, I'm sticking by the results of a poll I put up about what my next video should be. This, the best games of the generation idea, actually is the result of someone asking me in the comments what my top five games were, and I kind of answered off the cuff there. Truth is, this is a pretty tough thing to put together. Preparing for this, I went through my libraries on PS4, Xbox One, Steam, GOG, and Origin. Then I went to Metacritic and looked at every game that scored above a 70 on both the PS4 and Xbox One to make sure I hadn't missed anything, and even still I'm nervous I'll forget something that was only on PC and that I just don't remember. After all that work I ended up with a list of my favorite 46 games of the generation. No, that is way too big to even start ranking them in order. So in an effort to pare it down, first I split the games into a list of genres. I ranked my favorite FPS games and my favorite RPGs, my favorite Indies, etc. After that, I went through and finally arrived at a top 15, but making this list I realized it's kind of impossible and unfair and leaves out way too many amazing games. So I'm also going to be doing short videos on those other genre lists. This will let me both talk about all the generations best games, and as a bonus It'll let me get up short easy videos every week for a month while I work on my Neo 2 and Dead Space videos. First up will be the FPS games, which is already written. But today let's take a look at my totally subjective top 15 games of the generation. This was so hard man, and I'm sure many will disagree with some of my omissions, but it is what it is. And as always if you like what I have to say or at least how I sound saying it Do me a new favor and share this video somewhere. Also like, comment and subscribe if you haven't. Plus the bell if it's not a big deal. Also, I could use something for lunch if you don't mind. Maybe a nice filet with grilled asparagus. Rare on the filet, please. Thanks. After the logo. As a quick note, I discovered doing this just how hard it is to rank games that all come from different genres. So in order to give a varied and diverse list, I tried to include at the very least the game I ranked first in each class. And that's why number 15 is Listen, we could argue about whether this is actually the 15th best game of the generation. I mean, it's very possible I enjoyed playing Borderlands 3 more than this, and that's not going to be anywhere up here. But the truth is it would be crazy to leave this game off of any list that tries to capture what people should play if they wanted to see the most interesting and best the generation had to offer. Edith Finch is in my opinion the very best of the narrative walking simulators. Tacoma and Oxenfree are also pretty great. Both of those games will make it into the videos about each specific genre. But Edith Finch combines what storytelling does best and what games do best. It's a totally fresh and completely unique use of the medium because it lets you inhabit the body of Finch and physically walk through her emotions and memories. It's incredibly imaginative and daring in the way its gameplay and story are interwoven and it's like nothing else ever made. Nearly every room in the house is completely unforgettable and it's the rare game that sticks with you and powerfully moves you emotionally. Several of the rooms were so effective. They made me set the controller down and just sit and think for a little bit. If you love fiction writing or films or art, you need to play this game. It's a textbook example of what makes games different from films. Many great great games have a hard separation between gameplay and story. They have the interactive sections and then they have their cinematic sections that at this point are literally just short CGI films you watch in between levels. The previous generation tried to deal with this separation through terrible, terrible QTEs. And this generation just gave up and decided to at least make sure that the cutscenes were excellent little films. But Edith Finch shows it's possible to combine gameplay and cutscenes in surprising ways that makes both better for the effort. A masterpiece in so many ways. If you haven't played it, you really really should. I want to appreciate how strange and brief all of this is. I grew up playing sports. In fact, I played baseball all the way through junior college. And as such, I was a huge fan of the early sports video games, RBI baseball on the NES, golf, NHL 93, Tecmo Bowl and Super Tecmo Bowl were the cause of frequent heinous violence in my house between my brother and I. I even had a Tony LaRusa baseball league at my apartment with a schedule we made between five friends. This was before the internet was really a thing and you could, you know, you had to like get together to play games. But as the game stopped changing beyond just having better graphics, I kind of lost interest in them. Well, this generation finally brought a couple of very fresh sports games that I loved enough to play dozens and dozens of hours. Rocket League is an intensely competitive game, the kind of game that you will get brutally mauled playing if you pick it up late in its life. It's a totally original take on the sports genre. There reminds me in many ways of those early Sega Genesis NHL games, except harder and faster and way more intense. I'm not playing it anymore now, but it would be impossible to talk about the best games of the generation without mentioning Rocket League. If a sequel featured a single-player campaign with cars that had different stats and the ability to draft and trade them, it would be a massive hit that would have me hooked, but we can only hope that's coming next generation. This is also a good time to point out that there will be a heavy bias in favor of single-player games. As I've gotten older, I've become mature enough to realize that my competitiveness makes me truly miserable when I lose. I'm just a terrible loser who reacts to failure with fury and violence. So I try not to play many games that make me feel like that anymore. If I'm not instantly excellent, I stop because I simply can't handle it. Luckily, I was good at Rocket League, so I was able to play it for a good long spell, and hence it's on the list. It's not common knowledge, but the 8th generation has been pretty damn good on the immersive sim front. Immersive sims always review mixed because the games are weird and appeal to a very specific taste, and mainstream reviewers tend to view them not as their own genre, but as like bastardized shooters or frustrating hack-and-slash games. But this generation, we got a very good, though not great, Deus Ex. A kick-ass hitman with the recent Hitman 2. In my opinion, an excellent modern take on Thief with Dishonored 2. And Prey, which is just an amazing modern reimagining of System Shock. Prey reviewed strangely average, despite being excellent, and I chalk that up to people playing it and not really realizing that it isn't actually a shooter, but rather dishonored in space. And also to the fact that reviewers have done a very bad job explaining to players what they're getting into with Immersive Sims. Go read Prey reviews and notice that you will almost never see Deus Ex mentioned in them, which is like writing a review of Neo without mentioning it's a souls-like. Prey is not perfect. There were some performance issues, and there might be too much backtracking in the middle, and ultimately, the game goes on for about 6 hours too long. Plus, the robots at the end are just infuriating and awful and the worst enemies in the game that make me want to throw shit. Still, Prey is easily this generation's best entry in the immersive sim genre, and that means it has to be on a best-of list. It's even better as Prey Mooncrash takes Prey and sands down all of its problems other than loading times and adds a roguelite twist to it. If you haven't played either, it's easy to recommend Mooncrash first. But both games are really great and are an easy inclusion on a best-of-the-generation list. Immersive Sims may be an acquired taste, but they're an essential genre that really should be more popular than they are. It annoys me to no end that there are no plans for a Prey too. Bethesda think maybe using the Prey license to just randomly throw it on a game it has nothing to do with might have been stupid and confusing to consumers? Why is this game called Prey, Bethesda? Did anyone in a meeting ever say, hey wait, why are we calling this game Prey? Like, why buy the license to only not use it and then be like, well fuck it, I guess which game is in development that we can call Prey? It's just so dumb. 12. Destiny 2. Destiny 2 was hot fucking garbage when it launched. I told this story in one of my first ever videos, but after only 5 minutes with the beta, I turned down my wife and said, holy shit, this is garbage. They totally broke this. After 1500 hours of Destiny, the sequel pissed me off so much it made me start a YouTube channel. Movement was broken, cooldowns were horrendous, and the new loadout system destroyed the combat. It was a cavalcade of disasters, it was so bad, looking back, it's amazing. The talented professionals managed to flub every single change they made to a hugely successful franchise. And I have to admit that I've stopped playing recently because a whole bunch of shit pisses me off so much. Like, I hate the battle pass, I hate it so much, I hate the seasonal content model, and the failure to have an actual transmog system, which made me do two videos begging Bungie to implement full transmog as microtransactions. Oh, oh really? Well shit, that's awesome. Anyway, for all of its many, many, many flaws, Destiny 1 was a totally innovative game, and Destiny 2 now is easily one of the smoothest, slickest, most highly produced shooters out there. When it comes to moment to moment game feel, Destiny 2 is as good as it gets. Add to that Forsaken, which was nearly perfect. Raids, which remain the very best co-op activities you can play in a shooter. And movement, guns, and powers that just look and feel awesome. Look at this. So it's easy to put Destiny as the very best of the live service Looter shooters. In fact, it might be the very best live service game out there. Yes, Warframe and the Division 2 and the Division originally have things they do better than Destiny. And yes, World of Warcraft is always going to have its massive amount of content and its huge community. And yes, Destiny 2 is way too freaking easy in most places. The game desperately needs more challenging solo and match made content. Like, can I please have story missions that I need to be awake to finish? It's stupid how easy it is in most places. But all around Destiny 2 is the king of this genre. And mechanically, it's one of the best shooters around. And it's one of the best co-op games around. I can't take a game that I've played hundreds and hundreds of hours and leave it off this list. And with live service games being so important to this generation, you can't leave the best of them off of a list. At least until Anthem 2.0 launches. Am I right? Alright guys? No? Number 11, Fallout 4. I'm aware this is probably going to be quite controversial as Fallout 4 is a game people, including myself, love to criticize. Fallout 4 has many big problems. It's pointlessly simplified progression is garbage compared to the previous titles. Its main story is dumb. The game features factions to choose between, but they're all either boring, stupid, annoying, or totally unexplained. And its dialogue is so bad. It's hard to understand, like how does a dialogue system this freaking terrible make it into the game? Also, Preston Garby is just the absolute worst NPC in a game, ever. But, the game has an uncanny ability to hypnotize the player for 150 hours and that's not an accident. It's become cool to shit on Bethesda these days and kind of imply that they became hugely successful by accident, but that's just ridiculous. Bethesda basically created a genre with the Elder Scrolls series and the Fallout games happened to fit remarkably well in that genre. Even with all of its flaws and steps back, the things that Fallout 4 does well, it does really, really well. The Commonwealth is a fantastic map. Big enough to feel real, but small enough to make exploring on foot not annoying as hell. It's creepy and depressing and filled with tons of dungeons and locations that really drive the apocalyptic vibe home. Simply walking the map, exploring is as good in Fallout 4 as it has ever been in any Bethesda game. Text and audio logs have tons of really great writing that will keep you reading and listening and looking for the next terminal to hack in the worst hacking mini-game ever. Seriously, this is the worst. The side quests aren't as good as 3 or New Vegas, but there's still quite a few that are really cool and the actual moment-to-moment gameplay is a tremendous leap forward. With combat that isn't just good for a Bethesda game, but just good, period. It's a good combat system. Bethesda smartly designed the game so that all of that junk and loot actually feels rewarding because of the weapon and armor modding, the crafting, and the base building. And that core loop of shooting, looting, and crafting is really well designed and enjoyable. If Fallout 4 had the quests, story, factions, and dialogue of New Vegas, it would be one of the greatest games ever made, like at the very top of any list of the best games ever. Unfortunately, it has the quests, story, factions, and dialogue of Fallout 4, which means it's only one of the best games of the generation. One of my earliest videos was called Horizon Zero Dawn, cliched, derivative, perfect. And I think that honestly describes this game pretty damn well. Horizon Zero Dawn is an open world action game, and it does all the shit that open world action games do. Bandit camps and combat encounters to clear from the map? Check. Radio towers to open up areas? Check. Audio and text logs and hiding a grass for light stealth? Super simple crafting. Very simple RPG light skill tree progression? Check. Check. Check. Check. And check. It's pretty much precisely what you would expect when someone tells you it's an open world action game, you know, like a Ubisoft game. The difference is instead of 17 identical radio towers, you have six. Oh, and there are 50-foot tall robotic dino giraffes stomping across the world and surrounded by enemies. Instead of pointless audio and text logs, Horizon has masterful writing and acting in its logs that are so freaking good, they'll make you put the controller down and appreciate how tragic they are. And instead of a villain of the month story, what's here is actually a really amazing sci-fi story about everything from culture to religion and the danger of capitalism and technology run amok. It's an amazing sci-fi story that's full of shit that works on multiple levels narratively. Like the all mother that Aloy's people worship as a creator god? She is a creator god. It's just an AI creator god. The game has a very clever yet easy to follow plot and story that works on multiple levels and it can be enjoyed just as a roller coaster ride and as a complex fable with a bunch of moral complexity. Its crafting is turned into a well-balanced combat mechanic as you slow time and flee while crafting the right tool for the job and its combat is deep, complex, and ridiculously smooth and satisfying. I cannot wait to play the PC port of this at 144 FPS because I have a feeling it is going to be insanely good like that. Stripping parts off of a tremendous robo-T-Rex and then picking them up to destroy it just doesn't get old. Horizon is probably the very best game ever made in this genre. It's the best Ubisoft game ever made, probably because Ubisoft didn't make it. It would be easy to put this higher on the list and I debated long and hard about how high this one should go. In the end I dropped it some because of things like the games weak combat against humans and the fact that it's voice acting at lip syncing can be really poor in some spots. But I still think it's one of the greatest games ever made and the best of these type of games ever made. But the games coming up will have less and less flaws as we approach the top. Either way, if you didn't play this one, it's one of the four or five games that make buying a PS4 worth it, no matter what. You haven't seen the best this generation has to offer without Horizon Zero Dawn. Number nine, Titanfall 2. Titanfall 2 is the perfect big-budget modern shooter. It's the very best possible execution of the Call of Duty Halo type AAA multiplayer shooter game. Its campaign, like the very best of the COD campaigns, is a tight kick-ass six to seven hours that starts to prepare you for its multiplayer offerings, but it's also more than that. The campaign takes the pilot and Titan combat and creates levels and scenarios to push and test the player in every way the developers can think of. All of the mechanics are exhausted through smart level and mission design. Platforming, parkour, combat arenas, Titan combat, it's all there in the campaign and the levels range from good to some of the very best shooter levels ever made. And it's important to note that Titanfall 2 was, first and foremost, a Call of Duty-like package that focuses more on multiplayer than on its campaign. It's a very different product than the modern dunes that are single-player games first with a multiplayer add-on. Titanfall 2 is a multiplayer shooter that just so happens to have given a shit when its campaign was being designed. It's not just a box to be checked off so reviewers can mention it in passing. Instead, it's more like the early Halo games in that both parts of the package are indispensable. Even without its multiplayer suite, Titanfall 2 would be amongst the best games of this generation. But luckily, it also happens to be the best multiplayer shooter of the last 15 years. And I'm not even going to argue that it's fact, man. It offers a huge range of maps and modes, all for free, by the way. It has great progression of weapons, Titans, and skills to unlock. And the game isn't marred by free-kill superpowers like airstrikes. Its incredibly innovative and awesome attrition mode is still going strong enough to matchmake right now. And its co-op PDE Frontier mode, at least on PC, is still full of players. Map design alone sets it apart from every other shooter out there. And it is truly amazing how committed to its mechanics Titanfall 2 is. That parkour and movement system isn't something to show off in trailers, but then render useless by boring three-lane corridor maps. The best of Titanfall 2's maps are sprawling complexes that feel like real places. And as a bonus, camping is basically impossible in this game. Now, currently it's tough to go back because many of the people left playing are just stupidly good now. So even though I left with a 2.0 kill-to-death ratio and almost never finished anything but first, I currently have trouble getting higher than third. Occasionally, I've ended up being last as they get farmed by people who have never stopped playing. Titanfall 2 demands you master its gameplay or else fail miserably. It's still easy to recommend, especially if you're less prone to frustration than I am. And its campaign is worth one month of the $5 origin access all on its own. As a total package though, Titanfall 2 might be the best of these type of games ever made. It's basically call of duty, but the modes are totally fresh and amazing, and the progression isn't grindy as fuck and you can double jump and grapple over buildings and shoot while you sprint and run on walls and pilot a mech, and the maps are free and the campaign is awesome. I could've easily put this in the top three in a different day. Number eight, Nier Automata. Or Automata, Nier Automata. Nier has dated textures, a ton of pop-in, a really bland map kinda, and dialogue that's sometimes a little bit off. Its side quests are pretty fetchy, its combat is kind of simple and lacks depth, and its progression is kinda confusing as hell. Luckily, moving the characters around that map feels freaking amazing. That combat isn't deep, but it is so smooth and flashy and satisfying you will never get bored of it. And it has a world that is totally engrossing, even with a plot that seems kind of ordinary. It's a game with enemies that are so damn cute and with a story that's so good at humanizing them, you'll eventually start to feel very bad about killing them. But you will, because it feels so good killing them. The story in world is so fresh and complex and filled with deep philosophical and religious themes, it's the rare game that will keep you thinking about it for weeks afterwards. Music is perfect, and the game seamlessly switches up the perspective and gameplay so that every time you feel like you're comfortable, you'll end up in a top-down shoot-em-up, or a side-scrolling chase scene, or a huge boss fight, or a 2D hack and slash section. Nier never, ever stops surprising you. Even after you've completed the campaign, it's got a whole bunch of surprises left. Nier's individual parts are all good enough, but it's the way all of those parts are mixed together and presented to the player that makes it a total masterpiece. It's one of those rare games that's impossible to describe in a short blurb. Open World Action Game doesn't even come close to describing it, and RPG doesn't work either. Maybe a good way to describe it is a game that takes a bunch of familiar things and scrambles them all up into a sometimes confusing but always compelling package. Probably the best way to describe it is it's essential. It is absolutely essential you play Nier Automata, or Nier Automata. It's that good. Number 7, Hollow Knight. Okay, Hollow Knight can be a bit frustrating at times. Some bosses are very, very hard, and the final arena encounters are ridiculous, and require you to have totally mastered its movement, platforming, and combat. Also, it's easy to get lost and screw yourself over. But that's also a huge part of its charm. Hollow Knight simply refuses to hold your hand. Shit, you've got to find and buy the map of each level, man. Hollow Knight is Metroid plus Dark Souls, divided by .25 Ori and the Blind Forest. The fact it was made largely by a three-person team and is ridiculously underpriced is a bonus. Seriously, it is way underpriced. Also, it's free on Xbox GameBlast. Hollow Knight just exudes the term lovingly crafted. Its world feels real. Fights are extremely challenging, but everything is so addictively good. You'll keep playing, even when the game pisses you off enough to throw the controller, because you've failed some ridiculous platform challenge, and now you have to restart all the way back at the bench, which is Hollow Knight's bonfire. Artwork is stunning. Creature design is creative, its progression is clever and open-ended, allows for a wide variety of well-balanced builds, like extra health or more magic or different spells or more damage, extra healing. It's just great. Its music is haunting and rich and powerful. And, again, the game hands you nothing. It doesn't tell you where to go. It's possible to miss the NPC who upgrade your weapons, and then that dude moves later. This kind of design means you need to earn everything, and because it's unforgiving in this way, it forces you to pay attention if you want to progress. This is a game that stays with you for days and days, and it's the best Metroidvania ever made. It is significantly better than Metroid andvania, and I played the shit out of those games right when they released. Hey, remember how you saved Metroid? Were you like me and lost your notebook with your saves and then went nuts? Luckily, Hollow Knight doesn't require nuclear launch codes to save, either. It's a game that I honestly think every person who likes games enough to be watching this now, needs to have played. Yes, it's hard sometimes, but it's so damn good. It's worth any frustration getting to the ridiculously hard, but amazing, final boss. I cannot wait for Silk Road to release. Number six, God of War. I think the new God of War is incredibly ballsy. The God of War games were ridiculously successful, so it must have been very hard to decide to completely reinvent them into a kind of unique mixture of souls born and uncharted. There are very few similarities to the old games left, and that's a shame because the old games were also awesome. But what's here is so polished and so serious and adult themed and impressive, that it's clear to me that they made the right call, in my opinion. The beauty of the game is that it appeals to both casual players and weirdos like us. The combat is satisfying and balanced on hard. Once you've unlocked enough skills to deal with the ridiculous amount of enemies the game chucks at you. But uneasy, it's easy enough that anyone who plays games can enjoy it just for its beauty and its story and its world and map design. Which is great because its story and voice acting are top notch examples of AAA blockbuster game design, with a narrative that's simple on its face, but complex and rich just below the surface. And its story of a father and son and the tension between loving your kids while preparing them for a world that is a hellish jungle of misery hit me very, very hard. Kratos, the character, is aging along with his audience. And just like me, he's gone from a rage filled idiot to a conflicted and sometimes sad old man. The quiet time spent traveling by land or boat is filled with great stories about Norse mythology and wonderful character moments and these breaks from combat, exploration and puzzles give the game time to really slowly develop Kratos and the people he's with and to watch him and them change. It's not perfect of course, there's a lot of climbing rocks uncharted style which I don't like and any embossed variety or a major knock on the game it's probably what's keeping this from being in the top three and I think there's a bit too much inventory management and loot. But the side quest stories are absolutely excellent. The characters and acting and animation and set pieces are better than the game has ever been and the moment to moment gameplay from exploration to QTEs to combat to puzzles is a good mix that feels consistently fun to play. It's a can't miss. Number five, the binding of Isaac. Here's why it's impossible to do lists like this. How do you rank Titanfall 2 and God of War and the binding of Isaac? They're utterly different in every way but a list is what I set out to do and so Isaac is the fifth best game of this generation. The binding of Isaac is so incredibly unique that it's able to draw you in and keep you playing for hundreds of hours. Just the animation and art design of the enemies and characters are enough to be forever memorable like it may be instantly one of my plushies of these things and I don't usually do that. I've got two t-shirts. The only t-shirts I have of games are binding of Isaac and Dark Souls. Bosses are both fantastic to look at and fight and the game is hard enough to always be a challenge but screwtable enough to always have a chance to win no matter how bad your luck is. And Edmund didn't make the mistake of insisting on balance and nerfing anything fun. The game balance isn't maintained by the developer coming in every time something remotely fun appears and smacking you in the dick. Instead the game is balanced by the sheer ludicrous amount of work that has gone into it. It's balanced by chance. Yes, the guppy transformation breaks the game to the point that it's almost laughable. Yes, brimstone and bended spoon and Tammy's head make it a hilarious joke but there are like 50 million items so the second you obliterate Satan with brimstone and Tammy's head you'll end up with a run where you get garbage and struggle through before dying early. I love roguelites, I love Risk of Rain and Risk of Rain 2 and Nuclear Throne and Gungeon and Dead Cells and Hades and Spelunky. All of them. But no other game does what Isaac does. No other game has such sheer lunacy in its items. No other game allows for the player to just break it into pieces because of the nearly infinite and surprising combinations that arise from 436 items most of which stack and synergize in ways both good and hilariously catastrophically bad. Isaac takes you from heaven to hell in the course of a few rooms. Also it has a surprisingly depressingly sad story. Music is impossibly awesome too. It's one of the 20 or so greatest games ever made and it's one of the five best of the last seven years. Easily. Number 4, Doom Eternal. I struggled here. I really really considered putting Doom Eternal first. I honestly think it's that good and I stand by my contention that it's the very best shooter ever made by a decent margin. It's good enough that I played it through four straight times before moving on and I've been back a few times since to play a level or two. It is ridiculously deep mechanically and it is nail-bitingly tough on Nightmare. Even on my fourth time through I couldn't make it past the fourth level without dying and I still haven't gotten past that level on the Permadeath mode. I plan on continuing playing it on Ultra Nightmare every so often to see if I get better but the game requires such mastery on that mode that you really have to commit to hope to be able to beat it. Its weapons are perfectly balanced, its progression is perfect, its levels are so freaking cool, its platforming is fun, movement is stupidly fast, skills, enemies, tools, it's perfect. Hell, its story is pretty good even though the game is great enough to not even need one. The only thing keeping this from number one is that the next three games are just incredible. I would pay 30 bucks for a wave-based co-op horde mode of Doom Eternal. I love its combat and movement so much it is very hard to play another shooter now. Oh and it's also gorgeous, N runs on Ultra at nearly a locked 144 FPS. I like when developers make my 144Hz monitor useful. Hey Ubisoft, are you seriously going to make AC Valhalla run at 30 FPS in the new consoles? Why? Your games feel like shit on console and that's a big reason why, stop it. Number three, Bloodborne. Who thought this was number one? I kinda did for a while and to be fair these top three are all so good you can easily switch them around and I do on different days, I kinda think differently. I'm not gonna talk here about the reason it's only three, I'll get to that at the end. Instead, I'm just gonna talk about how great Bloodborne is. It is literally good enough, all on its own, to justify buying a PS4. I honestly think Bloodborne is good enough to pay 300 dollars for. Soulsborne games are, with FPS games, my two favorite genres and Bloodborne is one of the best of them. Bloodborne's animations are amazing. I've used this clip before, but just look and listen to this man. Those animations and sounds are a big part of what makes Bloodborne feel so damn good to play. It also features some of the best levels ever to appear in the series with Central Yarnham and Cainhurst Castle being so good every enemy placement is seared into my brain so well that I could draw a map of them in just a few seconds. Enemy design is hard, but fair. Enemy variety is spectacular. With monsters feeling like they belong where they are and feeling like they tell a story just by where they're placed. Oh and the DLC is amazing, aside from the shark asshole who's one of the worst enemies ever in the series. While Bloodborne's RPG systems are kind of bland and its armor has gone full fashion souls with very little build utility, its variety of weapons are really great with several that are the best the series has ever had. Ludwig's Holy Blade, the Pizza Cutter, the Spinit to Win It Axe, Simon's Bow Blade, each of them is memorable and unique and really does change up your approach to combat. The game is fast and aggressive and unforgiving. Its bosses are extremely memorable even the ones that are a big blobby mess where you can't figure out what the hell is going on. Even the much maligned Chalice Dungeons have a bunch of cool enemies and bosses in there. Bloodborne is Soulsborne level design at its best and aside from it running like dog shit, it's so darkly gorgeous you'll find yourself stopping to stare at it all the time. Also at the end you get to turn into a baby alien slug god so there's that too. Number 2, The Witcher 3. Ha ha, fulja admit it you clicked on this shit positive that number one would be the Witcher 3. And to be honest when I first sat down to write this list I pretty much assumed it would be 2. But the more I thought about it the more another game kept pushing itself to the front of my mind. Anyway I doubt I need to spend too much time talking about why the Witcher 3 is so good. Its maps are gorgeous and it's filled with things to find and see. Its main story is kinda underappreciated at this point even. Yes it gets a bit sidetracked but the truth is while the story of finding Ciri might not be the most amazing thing ever, the actual plot of how you do that is riveting. Each area you go to has its own rich and fascinating story happening. From the barren and the hunger and the swamps to the witch pogrom of Oxenfort to the political chaos in Skellige, the Witcher 3 feels like you are a regular person caught up in a world that is tearing itself apart. The game is totally political in its commentary without being preachy. It's all about ethics without being condescending and its side stories feel real and important. Voice acting is great, quest and mission design is the best of any RPG ever. Exploration is amazing, the combat is way better than it gets credit for and progression is balanced and important and impactful. Gear is fun, the economy makes sense and its DLC is so damn good you can't miss it. It's not oh hey the DLC was pretty good too, it's oh you haven't even played the whole game if you missed the DLC, it's that good. The Witcher 3 has a bunch of branching choices that are so cleverly hidden and seamless some people don't even realize they're there. The Witcher 3 is a lot like Doom 2016, it's so good it has made me skeptical about Cyberpunk just like I was about Doom Eternal. It's like really hard for me to imagine a studio meeting or exceeding a game as good as the Witcher 3 or Doom 2016. Hopefully they prove me wrong just like it has, something really cool too is that the Witcher 3 is like an interesting genre blender. It is the ultimate mix of the Ubisoft open world game and the Bioware cinematic RPG. It's not groundbreaking in any one system, it just takes the best of what games do and does them perfectly. And there's just a truly impossibly absurd amount of game here, just enemy variety alone is crazy. If you look at the monster codecs it's clear how much effort went into the game like lots of things in the game the Witcher 3 goes overboard on its quality. It's so good they could have easily cut enemy variety by a quarter and no one would have cared. They could have left out like 20 great side quests and no one would have noticed. It's so good it's uneconomically good. Thank God for CD Projekt Red man. Number one, Dark Souls 3. Hey you want to see proof that Metacritic is kind of insane? Dark Souls 2 Metacritic? Dark Souls 3 Metacritic. Hmm, okay. When Dark Souls 3 came out a lot of critics and a surprising amount of players said something like, yeah it's good and all but this whole Dark Souls thing is kind of played out now. I mean how many castles do I have to walk through? Okay, here's the thing. Dark Souls 3 is a very different game from the original, very different. And while I love, absolutely love the original, I think Dark Souls 3 is a better game start to finish. Yes, it had some bugs at least, but as long as they're patched in I don't ding games for that. I've occasionally done a less than perfect job at work when I'm on a strict deadline too. Dark Souls 3 is pretty much a perfect mix of the first game and Bloodborne. 3 features some of the very best levels in the series. It features most of the very best bosses in the series. Its combat is fast and challenging, but it still allows for a slower, more defensive style. Which means it's got the most combat variety in the series and just a ton of replayability. It has just as much depth and complexity in its builds as Dark Souls 2 without having a lava world at the top of a windmill. Or just awful animations and it doesn't have a lost isolith or a bed of chaos. Of all the games, it's the best paste. Every single level is memorable in some way in several of them. Like the Cathedral, the High Wall, Irithyll, the Catacombs, Undead Settlement, the Grand Archives and Lothric Castle are the very best the entire genre has to offer. Seriously, those levels are better than any other example of Souls levels anywhere in the world. Boss fights are almost all excellent, with only a few misses when the game forgets its Dark Souls and thinks it's Bloodborne. Music, atmosphere, progression, equipment, any variety, build diversity, it is all great. The DLC isn't as good as Old Hunters, but it at least features several incredibly cool bosses. And the Ring City is a great level to explore and serves as a nice send off to the series with one of the best bosses they've ever designed. Now I've never been a huge lore guy, but the sad creepy tone of the game grounds you in a world that feels lived in and real and the item descriptions are as good as ever. Art design is spectacular and the game is just gorgeous almost everywhere. Animations, especially player animations, make the combat visceral and powerful and the ambient sound is perfect. Walking about the levels, hearing only the wind, the clink of your armor and the distant mode of Undead fully immerses you in what Dark Souls does best. I'm sure many people will disagree with this ranking, but I don't think any game more perfectly realized what it wanted to do than Dark Souls 3. It fully realized what the series had been reaching for and the game feels like an epic, lonely, sad journey through the depths of a dying world. I think it captures what this generation did best, pushing graphics to a point where they served to create a fully realized world that the player can inhabit and actually tell a story just by the geometry around you. And even though I prefer the first two games magic system, I think the combat in 3 is the best the series has to offer. Even the multiplayer is the best it's been, despite everyone praising 2 all the time. I can't enjoy multiplayer when I'm backstabbed from the front, man. Sorry. Dark Souls 1 was probably the best game of the last generation. Dark Souls 2 is a total embarrassment that's still somehow fun to play anyway. And Dark Souls 3 is an all-time classic that's the pinnacle of what this genre has to offer. When we look back at all the different genres and try to pick out which games best accomplish the conventions of the medium, Dark Souls 3 will stand as a nearly perfect game when looked at from that angle. Alright, that's my list. I'm sure in the comments some of you will prove me wrong or post things I totally forgot about. And the bonuses, I've already got most of the other videos ready. I'll be doing the top 10 of each genre for the generation. The best 10 FPS games are up next. It's already written. I'll get that up within 10 days or so. Alright guys, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.