We're back with Round 2 of our "Essential Games" list, and this time, it's the consoles' turn!
*** A recap of the Rules***
With the latest generation of hardware a combination of being ludicrously expensive and generally having uninteresting software line-ups, it looks like the realm of video games is going to be dead to me for a while. So! It’s time to look back and judge once and for all, which system was the best!
There are two judgments made: The highest overall score and the highest of the highs. Overall score is a tally of all the essential games on that system. Highest of the highs is a tally of the scores only from games rated 3 or 4.
We have a list of the “essential” games to play on each system. It’s not necessarily the ONLY games you should play, but the ones that SHOULD be played. If you dropped a new person into the world of games and needed to explain to them why video games are fun, you go by our list.
These are the Canon rankings of games. They’re based on my experience so that’s objectively the correct ranking.
There are plenty of games that are historically important, but they’re not essential to play, so they’re not on our list. Super Mario Bros 1, Sonic 1, and Mega Man 1 are historically extremely important, but they’re not “essential”. They don’t hold up well in the modern day and what they do that’s special has been far outclassed by later games in their franchises.
We tried to avoid remasters/remakes/ports/compilations unless the new version did something significantly better or important compared to the original release.
Sound off in the comments if there’s anything that escaped our infallible eye!
*** Recap over. Let the Judgement begin***
With the highest overall rank and the "highest of the highs", I was kind of surprised to see the Playstation 3 come out on top. To me, it's kind of the last "interesting" console, so they went out with a bang.
3D Dot Game Heroes is a flawed and buggy riff on Zelda, but dang is it great, has a fun whimsy about games themselves, keen gimmicks, and a wonderful soundtrack.
Another remake on our list, Bionic Commando: Rearmed, but it's such an improvement over the original that it earned its spot. Fixing the original's awful inventory system, giving you more grappling hook goodness, and amping up the already great soundtrack, gets BCR on the list.
Final Fantasy 13- I didn't beat it because the UI/UX are bad, the characters are awful, and the writing is trash. But the battle system is just neat. A nice advancement over 12's combat, 13 is just... it's kind of neat?
Folklore- A solid RPG with a good combat system, story, and a different look and feel from the typical fantasy stuff.
Guacamelee! had fun exploration, enjoyable combat, and was a tight well-made game that knew what it was and didn't try to clutter that up with anything extraneous (like the sequel fell to).
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light- I'm a fan of the ideas behind turning big games into arcadey experience and GoL does it really well. Fun levels, a challenge system that encourages replays, and a return to the fun Lara instead of the dire major games.
Lost Planet 1 and 2 are highly flawed games, but I really dig them and their flaws almost make them more charming. They had giant bugs, wintery hellscapes, and so much charm. And still the best motivational speech set to atmospheric reentry through a space mine field.
Monster World 4- Technically a port, but the original didn't come out in my territory, so it's allowed on the list. MW4 didn't hit the highs of the prior game, but it's still a cute game with simple exploration in a fun world.
Nier easily makes our list. A great game with fantastic writing, great characters, and a super compelling story. Part of what makes Nier so great is that it really only works as a video game. The fact that you're playing it makes you complicit with the main character's actions and the disparity between what you know and what the character knows really drives a lot of the emotion.
The PS3 has a great block of Resident Evil games. The remake of RE1, Revelations 1, Revelations 2 (for the Raid Mode, the main game is pretty junk), and two light gun shooters with Darkside and Umbrella Chronicles.
Rock Band 2 (with drums) was a lot of fun to play, even as somebody with awful music talent and poor rhythm. It's the only game in the franchise with a great story mode and progression that the future games just messed up badly.
Rogue Legacy managed to overcome my distaste for rogue-likes with fun gameplay, an amazing soundtrack, and a surprisingly emotional gut punch of a story.
The guiltiest of guilty pleasures, Saints Row 3 and 4 make our list. The current pinnacles of open world crime games manage to turn "I should replay this" into "I need to 100% this again" almost every time I return to them.
Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is the king of kart racing for me. Great cast, great tracks (both courses and music), great visuals, and a great mission mode to give you more fun things to do. Every game after it has always mucked it up by adding new mechanics that heavily detract from the fun.
Spider-Man: Web of Shadows might be our last great Spider-Man game. A refinement of the combat and web swinging, cool set pieces, and still willing to give into goofy comic bookness like a boss fight against Wolverine that's mainly a trivia contest.
Time Crisis 4. The Gun Con 4 was too good for this world. This industry failed you.
Tokyo Jungle is a super weird game where you can fight dinosaurs with a dog. And it made me tear up and get sniffly at the end of the story. The duality of man. And deer.
Valkyria Chronicles might still be the best tactical RPG around. The story, characters, and writing are... not great, but the gameplay is exceptional and allows you to look beyond all that to just a masterfully made game.
Coming up with Overall Rank 2, it's the Playstation 2! Maybe the last console we got that great mix of technological advancement but companies were still willing to experiment and be weird on a big scale.
Ape Escape 2 and 3, man. Monkeys in super science helmets, time travel, TVs. This series knows what video games are about. Sadly, not knowing how to put a decent camera in your game.
Burnout Revenge is one of the only Burnout games I got into. It feels like it's the only one that really embraced "just have fun".
Chaos Legion is another of my "it's not GOOD, buuut..." games. It's just neat and kind of enjoyable and goofy and feels very "of the era".
Disgaea has a ton of charm and a ton of the worst of anime BS, but it probably has the best core gameplay for a SRPG. I so so wished they'd drop the "big numbers are good" obsession and just make a solid game without grinding, but the company drove that garbage into the ground.
God of War is a game of spectacle like I'd never seen before. From the scale of the world and characters to the extreme violence, it felt like every time you got up after playing, you'd seen some crazy shit you just needed to talk about.
Grand Theft Auto Vice City, maybe the last time the series focused on just being fun? The setting goes a long way for making the game great thanks to the visuals and soundtrack and the franchise lost its focus on being enjoyable to play afterwards.
Grandia 3 is a poor follow-up to one of my favorite games, but it still has an undeniably great battle system.
Katamari Damacy is the kind of game you can only truly experience once. Having no idea what you're in for and the glory of what's about to be done to you, you can never return to that or replicate it, no matter how hard you try.
Mister Mosquito... is odd.
Okage: Shadow King really doesn't stand up over time thanks to some plodding pacing and game mechanics, but it's still visually enjoyable with a great world and cast, and a story that gets weird.
Ratchet and Clank 1 is probably the best olde timey platformer turned 3D and the R&C3 just perfected that with improved gameplay and levelling up Ratchet AND your weapons, while telling a goofy but still satisfying story. I really disliked R&C2 and I don't think any of the subsequent games were nearly as fun.
Shadow Hearts 1 and 2 are more games that are rough to go back to for pacing and RPG ploddingness, but they ooze with style. Great characters and story, managing to come up with enough shenanigans that make the good and bad endings canon at the same time. SH2 wraps up sooo well.
I'm not a fan of visual novels, but Shadow of Memories walked that line really well. That game goes places and "Homunculus" is very fun to say.
Simpsons: Hit & Run kind of serves as a great jumping off point for the whole Simpsons franchise. The show had gone downhill by the time this game came out, but it served as great fan service and a nice sendoff for the series. Enough old stuff to remind you when the Simpsons was special, and enough garbage to remind you why you stopped watching it.
Spider-Man 2 pretty much redefined what all Spider-Man games should be. And it was a movie-tie in game on top of that, defying so many odds.
Stretch Panic... is odd.
Time Crisis 3 is another great light gun game. A good collection of unlockables and modes added a lot of replay value.
Timesplitters 2 and Future Perfect are good fun and enough to get somebody averse to shooters to play them. The aiming controls in 2 are godawful, but 3 cleaned things up nicely, and expanded on the ridiculous story in great ways. But aside from the main game, all the extra content and challenges made those games shine.
I always want to like the Tomb Raider games more than I actually do, and while Tomb Raider: Legend isn't great, it does enough well to show why you want to like them. There really aren't any other games that capture the spirit of the franchise back when it was still fun and cartoony.
Playable Venom makes Ultimate Spider-Man a great follow-up to Spider-Man 2 and really makes the game stand-out, even more than the visual style did. Sadly, either from slowing reflexes with age or the delays from modern TVs, the game is practically unplayable due to the instant death QTEs the game throws at you one after another. You were of an era, USM, and you won't let us forget that.
Another surprise for me is that our second highest of the highs went to the Playstation 4. Maybe owing to just how long the console stayed in an active role, it was a lackluster generation but it still managed to put out some really solid games.
Destroy All Humans gets on our list as a remake partly just from the audacity of it. DAH was a fun game but did it really need a remake, and then they do it and do it surprisingly well.
Earth Defense Force 4.1 and Iron Rain- I'm not ashamed of liking EDF. As long as you buy them on sale and not for full price, they are some of the dumbest fun you can get for your bucks. Wing Diver squad for life.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I think it would get on the list purely for the sound design alone, but this is a "remake" in concept only. A ground up modernization of an already good game, it understands what it is, its audience, and the marketplace fantastically well. It stumbles a lot and doesn't pull everything off, but they really did something big with this.
Resident Evil 2, 3, and Village- I really dislike that this franchise has just become shooters, but these are also just dang good games.
SEGA Genesis Classics- I went back and forth on allowing this on the list due to it being a collection of ports, but I allowed it because of how good of a job they did on it. It's kind of the gold standard on how to do game collections thanks to generous save states, the rewind function, AND the fast forward function. I think every system should have those rewind and fast forward features built in.
Steamworld Heist is the only worthy successor to Dig. My simplest explanation always comes down to "hey, what if XCom style games were actually fun". Going 2D and removing the reliance on random chance makes for a great game.
Yakuza Kiwami and 0. Sure, Kiwami is technically a remake but the less said about the US original, the better. The core gameplay of Kiryu's Yakuza games aren't great. Or even good at times. But some incredibly smart upgrade systems, secondary gameplay systems, and side content make it totally playable. Yakuza really shone a light on just how bad most open world games' worlds actually are. Then you have the mixing of a pretty dramatic crime saga with some of the craziest side quests, and Yakuza is something special. Where else can buying a girlie mag from a vending machine cozy up to a story about generational trauma from war and abuses of power actually work.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon leans a lot heavier in the "crazy" versus "drama", but some exceptional writing and characters make the new cast and gameplay worthy successors to the franchise. It's flawed in its balancing and some really tedious parts, but I never thought for a second to drop it, and then I beat it, then beat it a second time, then did all the post-game content. It has one the most tense final showdowns that puts most films to shame and manages to be sad, inspirational, funny, and comforting thanks to the quality of the writing and characters.
Enough modernity! We go back to the classics for a tied spot on overall rank. We'll start with the Genesis because that tied for the third highest overall score but it also had the third highest of the highs.
Adventures of Batman & Robin and Aladdin make the list. Not necessarily because they were groundbreaking gameplay-wise, but they're both just really solid games with artistry on the visual and technical level you didn't see from most platformers.
Beyond Oasis is super clunky but still a really enjoyable action-RPG. It tried to do some different things with weapons and combat to separate itself from Zelda games, and it had a real style to it.
Castlevania: Bloodlines, Contra: Hard Corps, and Rocket Knight Adventures are solid Konami entries. They didn't redefine anything, but they're good entries that did their things well and had enough extras that expanded the gameplay without getting in the way.
Ghouls 'N Ghosts- I'm a big fan of the franchise, but it's too hard for its own good. Don't play them. But do play them. At least the first level. Then start cheating.
Gunstar Heroes might be the perfection of the run and gun gameplay. A really solid game that gets plussed up by a weapon customization feature and enough gameplay twists that prevent it from getting boring in the back half.
Landstalker is a damned good action-RPG, giving you a big world to explore, treasures to hunt, and a sprawling story with some fun characters. The isometric view does not serve some of the platforming well and the later dungeons rely too much on mazes, but it's still great to play.
Mega Man: The Wily Wars sneaks in on the remake front because it goes pretty far. Packing three games together, a graphical overhaul, and a new series of stages that let you mix and match weapons and items from across the games.
Shining in the Darkness- I'm not really a fan of dungeon crawlers, but SitD does a fine job thanks to simple gameplay, fun characters, and great music. Use a map when playing; don't make this unenjoyable for yourself just because.
Shining Force- As good as SRPGs got for a long while. A great world, cast, and art style. The story was pretty simple but it's just a fantastic game and still worth playing.
Sonic 2, 3, and & Knuckles- Genre-defining when they came out, wonderfully made, excellent debug modes, colorful, full of joy, and very very special. Just pretend the franchise ended here and you'll be fine.
Wonder Boy in Monster World was my precursor to the Castlevania-style exploration games. A great mid-point between the open world/castle style modern games and Zelda style games, it's thoroughly playable and enjoyable today, even when compared to the exploration games of modern systems.
Zombies Ate My Neighbors- This mainly gets in on style. The gameplay is cheaply difficult and pretty repetitive, but this game has the looks and audio to get it by on heart.
And tied with the Genesis for Overall Rank 3, we have the NES!
The NES was home to so many classic games or games that went on to rightfully spawn franchises.
Bionic Commando, Castlevania 1 and 2, Dragon Warrior, DuckTales, Kid Icarus, Kirby's Adventure, Legend of Zelda, Mega Man 1, 2, 3 and 4, Punch Out!!, and sweet sweet Tetris.
Then you still have games that weren't quite classics or that haven't survive over the years, but you can still feel that there's greatness there in the ideas, even if not the execution.
Battle of Olympus, Crystalis, Faria, and StarTropics.
Phew, so that's a lot of Essential games! But that was also only the top three for Overall Ranking and Highest of the Highs! There are still plenty more consoles and games that made our Essentials list.
The SNES was danged close to the NES and Genesis for highest ranks. It has Breath of Fire 1 and 2, Demon's Crest, Donkey Kong Country, Kirby Super Star, Legend of Zelda: A Link to The Past, Mega Man X, Secret of Mana, Super Ghouls N Ghosts, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario RPG, Super Mario World, and TMNT: Turtles in Time.
Even some of the smaller titles shine and can only be considered "smaller" next to the giants above. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is much maligned but I think it deserves a lot more respect. Twisted Tales of Spike McFang is a goofy take on action-RPGs. Wild Guns lets you play as a retro future frontier lady fightin' robots. And we'll re-include Zombies Ate My Neighbors, even though it also made the Genesis list (it seemed unfair to the rankings to include it only in one place even though they're pretty darned close).
The Sega CD shined bright, but sadly didn't have much of a library.
Lunar: Eternal Blue! Popful Mail! Shining Force CD!
It was my place to play Secret of Monkey Island. And even Vay is enjoyable, despite being about as generic a turn-based RPG as you could get, the story was really keen.
The Turbografx-16. You had Bonk's Revenge and nobody can take that away from you.
The Saturn may have been a corporate mess, but it was the first place I played my favorite game, Symphony of the Night. Plus it had Dark Savior, Darkstalkers 3: Vampire Savior, Dragon Force, Legend of Oasis, Mega Man 8, Mega Man X4, and Virtua Cop 2.
The Nintendo 64 had Super Smash Bros. And that's pretty good, back when the series gameplay was least bogged down by unnecessary additions.
The Playstation 1, also featuring my favorite game, Symphony of the Night. And a very strong lineup that ranked the console quite high in the listings. Final Fantasy 7, Koudelka, Mega Man Legends, Mega Man Battle & Chase, Parasite Eve, Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2 Dual Shock Edition, and Valkyrie Profile. Good showings!
Our sweet pure Dreamcast, taken from us too soon. The last bastion of weird and experimental stuff where a lot of games that didn't really work out still managed to be worthy of our list. Blue Stinger, Evolution, Grandia 2, Gunbird 2, Illbleed, Ooga Booga, Phantasy Star Online, Power Stone and Power Stone 2, Sonic Adventure, Soul Calibur, Time Stalkers, and Worms Armageddon. Bless your heart and weird controller, Dreamcast.
The Gamecube righted some if the wrongs of the 64 and actually put in an effort here. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, Evolution Worlds, Luigi's Mansion, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and Super Smash Bros. Melee.
Finally, the Switch. No highest of the highs on the system, but a decent collection of solid/good games. Fuga 2, Hyrule Warriors, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, TMNT: Splintered Fate, and Vampire Survivors.
We still have our eyes on a few stragglers that have yet to be released and played. Could they make the Essential list in the future?
Fuga 3
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
And there you have it! The canonical list of Essential games to be played if you want to understand why video games are keen and once worthy. Let our spreadsheets remain so the scriptures can be studied by future scholars and our educational endeavors be useful.