Well, it's time for the next entry into my top 100. This is probably going to be the spiciest bracket to date. I've also had a very difficult time rating these relative to each other. Let's jump right into it. This is gonna be long.
60: Super Mario 64 (DS)
This game pretty much started and ended the conversation on full on 3D platforming. It's honestly kind of mind-blowing how great this game is. The level design is brilliant, incredibly simple and fully explores every facet of its mechanical design space. The music is great and iconic. The reuse of levels with different objectives is brilliant. I love Galaxy and 3DW as well, but to me 64 has a certain "classic" quality that makes it unsurpassed. I think it's a certain quality of simplicity that 64 has that the sequels (except for the 3D world/land games) just don't. Adding more mechanics just takes away from a formula that doesn't need more. The game doesn't become more fun when you can waggle your wii remote to spin, or have 4 different types of collectible or a water meter. It's just great as is.
(I have a fondness for how the game originally looks instead of how it looks emulated)
The level design not being constrained by any sort of desire for reality helps as well. It lets them design weird geometry that makes no sense and is fun first, realistic later. While that approach may not work for other games, for a game purely based on the mechanics of platforming, it does. Also, I'd like to point out that the community surrounding this game, including speedrunning and stuff makes it feel alive in a sense. Pannenkoek still posts videos about glitches he discovers towards
his minimal A press run (except mostly in his
second channel). The speedruns are still an event and fun to watch, especially if it's a minimal run or a race or a 100% run. It's really an incredible classic. The DS remake is pretty fantastic too, adding a bunch of new content. It's objectively the better version of the game, but of course it isn't anywhere near as iconic and doesn't have many of the glitches the community use for the speedruns and stuff. You need a circle pad (or play it on the 3DS really) to get full value from it though.
59: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Yeah, it's here. There have been many detailed analysis videos on this game, and I've participated in many threads discussing those and the game in general, so I'm really not in the mood to retread a lot of that. Still, I guess I can express my thoughts here without having them framed against a thread's current. BOTW is an incredibly impressive game. It has a great world, one of the best open worlds especially in terms of world design. The sense of discovery is just fantastic. Everything surrounding the process of discovering and exploring (for example climbing) is amazing as well (except maybe climbing in the rain, but it's not a deal breaker). The rest of the aspects of the game aren't always as good, but overall it's mostly great, and if you play it primarily for the exploration it's just top notch.
There's not too much point in quabbling over some of the flaws that have been discussed to death, like how the combat could have been a little bit better, how shrines aren't necessarily a replacement for dungeons, how some quests are kind of underwhelming, etc. I think those are mostly self-evident and while they are nuisances, they don't detract from the overall experience too much. My biggest gripe would be that a lot of the non-exploration aspects, especially combat, not being as interesting as the exploration, which kind of detracts from the exploration. If different areas had different monsters, the world felt more populated and lived-in, this game would receive a significant bump in my list, I think. It's hard to rate a game that is so transcendentally good in some areas and so surprisingly basic in others. But I think it's easy to say that this is one of the best Zelda games, one of the best open world games, one of the best Nintendo-made games, etc. It also feels like a game that just isn't made like this these days, as it's clearly received a lot more attention than any other open world game in recent memory. I haven't even touched on many aspects of the game, like the physics system. Yeah, great stuff.
58: Persona 5
Yep, the other big release of recent memory. If this game hadn't come out and wasn't so good, SMT3: Nocturne would have been in my main list. But the games aren't distinct enough for me that I can justify keeping both in my list, so this knocks out SMT3 as part of the franchise rule. I know it might be blasphemous, but I just love Persona 5 so much. Previously I'd hold that SMT3 is the best JRPG of all time. Now, I thought that P4G was weak compared to SMT. The story didn't have bite, the battle system was nowhere near as interesting, the dungeons were terrible, and overall the game just didn't resonate with me as well, despite me really enjoying it overall. P5 fixes all that. The darker tone and more serious subject matter, the urban setting (you should have seen this coming), bringing in more SMT elements for the combat, having hand-designed dungeons with actual stuff happening in them, the game is just much, much better than P4 for me. And while I love SMT for its atmosphere and combat, P5 has enough of both of those that the non-combat related parts of it just push it over for me.
Obviously, it's impossible to talk about P5 without mentioning how stylized it is and how incredible everything looks. It's really incredible. Just the menus of this game itself have more work in them than the entirery of many other games. The game is just a joy to play. The characters are a lot better this time as well. P4 had me gaming the system because I didn't care for most characters and I tried to pick the objectively better S-Link abilities, but here all of them provide meaningful bonuses and I actually want to know more about the characters themselves so I actually have a hard time choosing. The overall formula and balance feel much more refined as well. I kept going back and forth with the ranking of this and BOTW, but in the end this won out despite BOTW being better in several (but not all) ways for me, because I was pulled into a setting, a world that felt real and populated, with characters who have their own stories and motivations, and it simply being the prime example of its genre for me. I love BOTW, but every play session I can't help but think how it would be so much better with minor tweaks, whereas P5 is just basically perfect as it is. I also really appreciate virtual Tokyo tourism and I was pretty amazed that I can navigate some ingame areas by knowing their real life counterparts.
57: World of Warcraft (+ expansions)
I fucking hate World of Warcraft. What? Yeah. Let me explain. I played this game at launch, and I played it for years. YEARS. Daily, religiously. I was so engrossed in the world. I think if you are grading simply based on the playing field itself, WOW has the best open world, by far. Taking all the locations you know from previous games and bringing them to life, then connecting them with real-feeling areas that also have good gameplay is no small feat. Yesterday I mentioned how much I enjoyed exploring every nook and cranny of the dreadnaught in Destiny's expansion. Well, WOW provided an entire world of that. So much to do, so much lore to ingest, and all of it can be shared with thousands of people. This is still to date the only MMO that works as a concept, despite its many flaws. It's an actual world, and it's so incredibly varied and full of content. It's honestly just incredible how full WOW's Azeroth was of stuff even just at launch. No developer can come close these days. There was so much going on too, with factions and micro-factions at war and many storylines to follow. Sure, none of it went anywhere, but Blizzard are the best at creating the illusion that the theme park MMO is actually more than just a Disneyland ride. It helps that they follow up on stuff in expansions, and they improve their storytelling and make the mechanics more engaging. Something like Alterac Valley is just not a gaming experience that you can find anywhere else. There was an entire community around this game, creating machinima, lore, content, and playing together. It was unlike anything else. Yet I can still remember the somber, small moments in the game, just me exploring the world. Stuff that felt like this:
Now, on to the bad. I really hate the game's combat system. It's just clunky and uninteresting. At the time, it was on par with its peers like KOTOR, which was ok, but as the RPG genre moved on WOW didn't. Of course, I understand that they can't just change an MMO from the ground up. But oh wait, they did. They rehauled the entire world, the engine, the graphics, added phasing, even tried to add some stuff to make the combat less mind-numbing. But it never evolved significantly past its fundamentals, and that's annoying. Still, when you got a 40 man raid going, it was less about the awful combat and more about making the most of it by coordination and positioning. Would have been nice it was good on its own too though. Secondly, they got worse over time at making their questlines beyond the main ones compelling. As people started getting sick of fetch quests, they didn't react fast enough. Still, in Legion, there's a ton of annoying fetch quests. To be fair, WOTLK and Legion are overall fantastic expansions. Especially WOTLK. It being the last unanswered question in prior Warcraft lore, they were able to go all out on the storytelling and making it feel climactic and consequential. Legion doesn't have that, but they're tried really hard to tell interesting stories regardless. At this point it feels like they're running out of gas, but they've really put in the effort still. I also hate the game for some personal interactions I've had within it and how it shaped my social circles at the time, but that's water under the bridge at this point. I just don't feel the same sense of wonder from its world, as I think post-WOTLK they've focused on designing content for other facets of their audience. Which is fine. I've moved on. I still go back for new expansions, and I spent a decent chunk of time with Legion, but it's less me being immersed in the world and more just going through the motions. There are too many things to nitpick about and speculate as to why that happens, but it just does. Regardless, when WOW works, it's just a masterpiece.
56: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Oblivion is the most maligned entry in the series for many reasons, and it deserves most of it. The game did not age well. It wasn't the first Elder Scrolls game that came to consoles, but it felt like it didn't come from the same CRPG ethos that came to define the series up until this point. Morrowind is the game usually brought up when talking about RPGs that didn't have or need quest markers. The game used oral descriptions and directions, and was incredibly immersive for it. However, when oblivion came, it brought along quest markers with it. This resulted in a loss of complexity in gameplay, but it was probably to get with the times and appeal to a broader audience. I can understand that even though I don't prefer it. They tried to compensate for it in different ways. Each NPC now had daily life cycles, doing chores and walking around the place. Obviously it was fairly rudimentary, but it helped the game feel like it was alive. They also added a physics engine that was pretty pointless, but added a lot of enjoyment to what you could do with the game. I'll always be thankful for them doing this, because despite having no gameplay purpose it always made their games feel incredibly immersive, and it probably paved the way for BOTW.
What I really loved about Oblivion was the guild questlines. The Dark Brotherhood story was fantastic. The characters introduced were all great and relatable, and I cared about all of them instead of just trying to hand in quests to advance. They kind of tried to recreate this with Skyrim but it didn't work nowhere near as well. The Thieves guild quest was also great, and its culmination in the tower and stealing the most important item in the series was pretty amazing. The end of the main story, however was infuriating. Just sitting there and watching as the meek guy from earlier beat the big bad was... something. I don't think Bethesda were trying to go for some ironic deconstruction on the hero narrative with this one either. It was just weird. I think if it were today's Bethesda they'd totally let you do it. Maybe it was a technical limitation at the time. Beyond these, I think the game is criticized generally for its fairly vanilla setting, but that's kind of how Cyrodiil is supposed to be, and I think that's convenient for Bethesda to deflect criticisms. In the end, Oblivion is a conflicted but great game. It definitely overreached for its time, and it made some missteps, but in the end it was a trailblazer and did so much right that I think it still deserves this spot. I replay it every once in a while and I still enjoy going through some quests I missed and even redoing ones I haven't, like getting back together with old friends.
I'd caution against expecting an experience too similar to fallout from STALKER, they're fundamentally different games (but STALKER is still better 
