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notably, i havent been able to play a lot of games recently for personal reasons, so the ones i can give my time and attention to are all really special for very clear reasons in my mind. right now, i've been playing through Persona 2 and reading Higurashi, as well as grinding Umamusume like i'm possessed; all of those are great, but i havent experienced enough of them to call them favorites yet. As for the games that i actually can include on this chart, they tend to have a strong sense of atmosphere in common, which probably explains why they've stuck with me so long.
Yume Nikki
Fate/stay night
Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne
Nier Automata
Silent Hill 3
Chaos;Head
Neptunia Re;Birth 1
The Game Boy Advance has been my favorite piece of gaming hardware. ROB the Robot has a more special place in my heart, but he's not hardware, he's my buddy. Either way, Summon Knight Swordcraft Story perfectly exemplifies the charms of the GBA; it might not be the most interesting game on the system to me but it has a transcendent charm that has made
Halo 2 is probably the least complicated game on my chart. CE is already about as good as a console shooter from 2001 was ever gonna be, it has really dense space opera lore for a single (again, console FPS) from that time, while also never slowing down the shooter action. It's near peak. Halo 2 just takes all those elements and steps them up. Humanizing the Covenant has always been a contentious choice with the more action-focused side of the fanbase, but for my money Halo is as much "war as hell" (down to ODST's references to Dante's Inferno in New Mombasa) as it is about "killing aliens and not afraid of anything". In a time when a lot of media about war was dumbing itself down to "realism" in order to appeal to the widest possible audience, Halo 2 deliberately narrowing its scope on a more complex narrative surrounding both the idea of "the enemy" and the enemy–the Covenant's–own internal politics reads as a definite choice, and a strong one for one of the biggest military SF series to take on its second installment. But if Halo 2 were just a more interesting story... The gameplay also gets a major kick in the ass. i don't think it's a stretch to say that while CE approached boomer shooter levels of frantic action, Halo 2's addition of dual-wielding bore its generation of FPS into a bespoke style of chaos. i'm using genre terms loosely here; the point is, it feels badass to play. If "switching to your sidearm is always faster than reloading," switching to your fallen enemy's needler in your off hand has to be a whole new level of speed. Speaking of, i understand why it got nerfed in Halo 3, but the versatility in how many weapons available for dual-wielding really made it feel like playing as humanity's strongest cyborg supersoldier, easily hefting infantry weapons like SMGs and Needlers in one hand each. It's such a solid bridge between the last of a new era in CE and Halo 3 as one of the first steps in console shooter's dominance, while being unique in that interstitial position. Nothing else feels quite like Halo 2, and certainly no other game has quite as good of a Breaking Benjamin needledrop. -------------------------------------------------------------