Top 20 Games of All Time - Right Now, Anyway

Every few years, my friend Kyle and I decide to re-evaluate our top X number of games. I haven't discussed this 2012 edition with him yet, but figured I would go ahead and write this post with the knowledge he will eventually too. I'd like to sort of see where I stand now, and maybe revisit this once a year or every other year or something like that to see how my tastes evolve over time (plus it will give me an excuse to write about these games over and over again).

So! With no further ado and for no particular reason, here are my top 20 favorite games with a short blurb attached to them.

20 - Sonic 3 & Knuckles - My favorite Sonic game of all time, and still the one to beat in terms of level design, music, and controls. A very long game that has the ability to save but doesn't overstay it's welcome (except for Sandopolis Zone 2, the worst level in the Genesis games), this is the Sonic game I keep booting up the Gamecube collection to play.

19 - Shining Force II - Though it has fallen way down my list due to the fact that I think I love it so much because of nostalgia, I still say this is a great game. It's like Fire Emblem, but way more forgiving. Easily the best RPG on the Genesis (as much as I think Phantasy Star IV is great) and the best in the series. Perfect difficulty curve, great music, interesting character progression (I love the idea of "Promoting" someone to a better class).

18 - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - The pinnacle of the Grand Theft Auto series. It took what GTA3 did, but improved upon it in every way. Slightly better controls, a much more interesting world to explore, a lot more vehicles, an interesting and likable protagonist (sorry, Vice City) and a great soundtrack. Plus, it doesn't have GTAIV's crappy controls, annoying cell phone, ugly graphics, etc.

17 - Dragon Quest V - As much as I fought to get through this game (I had to play it almost three times through to finally beat it!) I have to say this is the finest Dragon Quest game. I had a lot of fun with both VIII and VI, but the story in Dragon Quest V is one of the most heart-wrenchingly good stories in the entire videogame medium. There is nothing like it.

16 - Ghost Trick - I asked myself as I was making this list what my favorite adventure game was, and although I loved the Phoenix Wright series and thoroughly enjoyed 999 and Hotel Dusk, I kept coming back to Ghost Trick. It's excellent music, intriguing story, great ending, and 100% enjoyable gameplay from start to finish put it past every other game in the genre. Seriously, there wasn't anytime where I had to force myself through a puzzle to get to "the good parts." Although some of those last few puzzles were rough.

15 - Fallout: New Vegas - The game that sold me on Western RPGs. Yes, it took until 2010 for me to be interested. It was the world of this game that really drew me in. Gone are the endless subways of Fallout 3. A wide selection of interesting characters (and Matthew Perry!) to meet and sometimes murder. An incredibly well-designed faction system that adds more gravity to the decisions you make. Also, you can get an ending where you screw basically everyone over and crown yourself King of the Strip.

14 - Pokemon Diamond - I struggled to pick my favorite Pokemon game. I have played almost all of them, but none of them hooked me as much as Diamond did. My game clock is over 320 hours. I caught them all - at the time there were 493 of them - and proceeded to IV train around 30 of my favorites to level 100. Without using Rare Candies. I think I may have burned myself out of Pokemon games for a long time (I beat White's story mode, quit, and haven't looked back), but what a way to go out, huh?

13 - Wario Land: Super Mario World 3 - As much as I enjoyed Wario Land 2 and 3, this one still has my favorite mix of platforming and puzzles. It's also one of those weird Game Boy games to have an excellent soundtrack. The Wario Land series are almost all excellent, and I'm glad they all tend to be different from one another because I don't think this game could really be improved upon in many ways.

12 - Phantasy Star Online Episodes 1&2 - Who knows how many hours I've put into this game. A time sink like no other, this game was so much fun to play with other people it's ridiculous. I used to play split-screen with the aforementioned Kyle way back in the day, and briefly last year we sort of hacked the game to play online again. Kyle had other things to do, but I actually got a new character almost to level 40 before I put the game down so I would play other things. Addictive as hell, obviously.

11 - Donkey Kong - The Game Boy version, that is. The best puzzle platformer of all time. Mario is tasked with finding a key and then bringing it to the exit - it sounds simple, but you must simultaneously figure out how to get the key to the end of the level, and avoid all the traps and enemies along the way. Brilliantly paced and with very in depth controls, it is one of the most replayable games ever.

10 - Super Smash Bros. Melee - The best multiplayer game of all time. A brawler that is as deep as you want it to be. An impressive level of prowess can be exhibited while playing this game, and having four players wail on each other on a tiny arena never gets old. All told, I've probably put over a thousand hours into this game (I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhere around 2000, to be honest. I played this game several nights a week for almost six years straight).

9 - Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - On a platform with three fantastic Castlevania games, the first one released outdoes them all with the soul system. Soma will occasionally acquire the souls of his defeated enemies, which grant him new powers. They range from new attacks to stat boosts to transformations and with the ability to equip different weapons, the amount of ways to attack are really second to none in the series. The level design is also very well done as well, and the bosses are perfect, at least in terms of difficulty (not really any with cheap ways to kill you, although still very tough).

8 - Final Fantasy VI - My favorite Final Fantasy of all time by a long shot. This game has amazing graphics and one of the best soundtracks of all time. The story is quite good as well, with great villains, a couple famous twists, and plenty of neat sidequests. The battle system is also full of quirky ways to fight, but isn't stupid like in some of the later games in the series.

7 - Tetris - Whatever version you want to put here, I will be playing some kind of Tetris until the day I die. This is the best puzzle game of all time. There is no other puzzle game where I dream about the pieces after a long late night session. This is probably the purest videogame on here - no fluff, no extraneous BS, just a d-pad, a rotate button, and usually great music.

6 - Super Mario World - The best Mario game ever contains the most fun things to do in the series. There aren't any extraneous power ups, the levels usually contain their own unique ideas, and Yoshi and the cape add a great dimension to an already robust suite of abilities from Mario 3. I usually play through this game once or twice a year, and I can usually do so in two very quick sittings (maybe an hour or so each). I have this game memorized and I still love to play it.

5 - Super Metroid - Another game I have pretty much memorized, this is 2D level design at its absolute zenith. Exploring is always rewarding, and the combat is sometimes tough but always fair. The bosses are all amazing, and the almost dialogue free main quest is eerie and atmospheric. I love the Metroid series, but this one stands head and shoulders above them all.

4 - Devil Survivor Overclocked - The best strategy RPG of all time. The demon summoning in this game lends an almost Pokemon-like quality to creating a battle party. The complimented but very good story is worth playing through the game several times to see all the possible endings. Face it - a game in which God (as in, THE God, the Alpha and the Omega from the Bible/Koran/etc) basically tells you "I'm going to destroy the world in 7 days unless you do something about what your idiot species caused," cannot be a bad game. That it slavishly includes figures from prominent religions that we've all heard of, and demons from places as obscure as 19th century Russia is only icing on the cake.

3 - Etrian Odyssey III - And with this entry, we've really reached the games I consider to be a pretty much three-way tie for the best game of all time. EO3 has the deepest, most customizable RPG party system in memory that is also manageable. There are so many different party combinations, you almost can't go wrong (almost. Good luck with your Yggdroid/Farmer). A fairly decent story combined with excellent sidequests. The sea exploration mode, which I still haven't completely finished despite having killed several endgame bosses (conquering those dragons are some of my proudest videogame moments). I still go back to my file every once in a while to grind a little bit just because the battles are so much fun (and because my party kicks so much ass).

2 - Persona 3: Portable - This is a seventy hour game that I have beaten four times. It came out in 2010. I have beaten it four times. Why? Probably my favorite story in all of gaming with an incredible battle system makes this game hard to put away for good. Great quirky music with a cool cast of believable characters (all of whom you can actually directly control in battle now! Sorry PS2 Persona 3, this makes the PSP version infinitely better). This was the game that got me into Shin Megami Tensei, and it hasn't been topped yet.

1 - Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - This is probably what I would say is the greatest video game of all time. An incredible setting with a great hook - the world is going to end in three days, what are you going to do about it? The cyclical nature of the time traveling meant that unless you completed a big task, you might not accomplish much in this playthrough. You have to go back and forth through time to unravel the intricate messes the Skull Kid left for you before you can even attempt to stop him. The atmosphere in this game is amazing - the sense of foreboding that just pervades every second you play this game is unsettling. And, the fact that this game introduced me to my future wife will always make it hold a special place in my heart.

So, there you have it. My favorite 20 games of all time, at least according to me in May of 2012. This actually took a bit longer to write than I thought, and I was surprised by some of the rankings on this list, but rereading it, I have to say I wouldn't change anything. These are the games that I will come back to time and time again. I would be surprised if this list changes very dramatically in the future - in fact, the only way I could see it changing much is if a bunch of newer games supplant the ones here. Nothing that exists currently can top these ones.