Nobody's 2025 Top 100 Games: 80-71

80: Atelier Ryza 2

Recent Atelier games have been somewhat controversial for gradually becoming more forgiving, laid back experiences and for constantly making dramatic changes to the alchemy system. I enjoyed the careful time management and resource usage required in earlier games, but Ryza 2 just nails the good time feeling. The main plot hardly matters here. It’s something about a mystery fairy, and it’s there entirely as a justification for why you’re going out into the wild with all the characters from the first game. You’re really here to make silly overpowered items out of all the crap you find exploring the overworld and to experience fun character moments once you’re ready to go back to town. Sometimes it’s good enough to just be fun.

Previously: It came out a week before I started making the list and I hadn’t played it yet

79: OneShot

I always compare OneShot to Calvin & Hobbes. They both have protagonists who view the world kids see it instead of falling into trap of a lot of fiction and giving us kids who are just short adults. It’s also compared to Undertale a lot, both because of its dreamworld setting and the way it interacts with the player. It’s hard to say much more than that without ruining the surprises that are core to the experience, but suffice to say that it’s very worth playing. It’s another great feel good experience even if the tone isn’t necessarily always happy.

Previously: 30. I put more weight on how often I think back to a game than I did when making the last list. That hit OneShot harder than most games.

78: Pokemon Emerald

There’s no denying that Emerald, like HGSS earlier on the list, benefits from a big nostalgia factor. And while that’s no doubt part of making the list, it also has plenty of its own merits relative to later games. The Hoenn region is one of the most varied and colorful, which can also be said of its Pokemon designs. For all the memes about too much water, it does a good job of giving each of its biomes their own little twist, whether that’s super tall grass, sandstorms, volcanic ash, or undersea trenches you can explore. Add in some great music and the Battle Frontier to get one of the most complete experiences in the whole series.

Previously: Slightly outside the top 100. This was helped by discovering some romhacks that will appear later on.

77: Animal Crossing: New Horizons

New Horizons missed the list last time because I played too much of it in 2020 and burned out, which seems to have happened to almost every other Switch owner as well. I still don’t think I’ll ever play it again, but I have to give it credit where it’s due. There’s a tremendous amount of content here that is provided at the perfect pace to keep you interested for weeks or months at a time. There’s always another fish, fossil, or upgrade that’s just slightly out of reach, or another holiday event right around the corner. It’s extremely compelling while the magic lasts, but it can’t go much higher than this because the content drip eventually starts to feel like a treadmill you can’t escape from. Enjoy responsibly.

Previously: Unranked.

76: Yakuza 0

Yakuza 0 is the only one of the Kiryu games on this list. That is entirely due to the fact that, for some reason, I still haven’t played any of the others. I have no idea if they’re better than this one or not, but I can tell you that this one is very good. Like every RGG game, it takes a couple of small city maps and uses every part of them for either the very serious main quest or the very stupid side quests. The juxtaposition of deadly serious yakuza murder stories and completely absurd adventures about helping a kid buy Dragon Quest or stealthily approaching a vending machine shouldn’t work, but it does. It’s proof that even serious stories don’t always have to take themselves quite so seriously.

Previously: 33. It got a big boost from association with Like a Dragon, which I didn’t finish in time to include on the last list.

75: The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel

The first Cold Steel game is pretty clearly Falcom taking their shot at making a Persona game, which they do here much more successfully than with the even more closely comparable Tokyo Xanadu. You’re one of a group of students at a military academy who are part of a special squad that gets assigned to go do random quests in a particular region of the empire every month. In between assignments, you do school segments that are almost exactly like Persona except that you just play a particular week instead of going through the entire calendar day-by-day. It’s fun for basically all the same reasons that Persona is, and I might actually like the battle system more here, but only a few of the characters come close to being as memorable as what Atlus created. A great RPG and an even better way to fill the time until P6, but it can’t quite match its inspiration.

Previously: 89. I didn’t care much for CS3 and probably penalized both earlier games a bit because of it.

74: Dishonored

I’d have had a very hard time choosing between this and Human Revolution as my favorite stealth game when both were current, but it’s Dishonored that’s held up better with the passage of time. Although ostensibly about being a magic superpowered assassin, it’s actually at its best when you choose to play as a regular human who solves every problem non-lethally. Finding the sequence of movements and takedowns necessary to get through each level this way is immensely satisfying, especially since Dishonored‘s gritty alt-Europe is so well realized. It certainly suffers from the era’s obsession with brown, but creative environmental design keeps it memorable where so many other games blur together. I also love its more nuanced take on morality. Although it’s very possible to complete the game without taking a single life, the actions you take to do so are often far grimmer than a stab would have been.

Previously: 59

73: Thank Goodness You’re Here

Portal 2 is probably still the funniest game I’ve ever played, but if anything has ever come close, it’s Thank Goodness You’re Here. It’s 3-4 hours of nonstop silliness that should get grating, but never does. Escalating absurdity and running jokes keep things interesting and build to an unforgettable finale. If British humor is at all your thing, you really can’t go wrong here.

Previously: Unreleased

72: Chrono Trigger

I’m just going to steal what I said last time:

Chrono Trigger may not be my favorite of the Golden Age JRPGs, but I absolutely see what the many people who consider it the greatest game ever love about it. Yasunori Mitsuda’s soundtrack is without a doubt one of the best, it had a truly innovative approach to combat that still feels fresh after 25 years, and, of course, it has an amazing story to tell. Really, the only things holding it back for me are that a few characters are a bit boring and the late game gets grindy. But everything else? Brilliant.

Previously: 50

71: Pokemon Black 2 and White 2

BW2 is no longer my favorite Pokemon game, but it’s still the best of the official mainline games. It’s got a killer soundtrack, a surprisingly good story for a series that’s not known for writing, and oodles of content. Rotation battles are my favorite of all the weird battle systems the series has tried and the Pokemon World Tournament is the best of the endgame battle trees. Most importantly, it retains the excellent world and Pokemon of BW1 while solving that game’s problem with massive spikes in the level of opposing Pokemon.

Previously: 80. I’ve played a lot of Pokemon in the last 5 years and the series has moved up a bit as a whole.

Next time: Spiritual successors that beat the originals and some spooky monsters

Nobody’s 2025 Top 100 Games: 100-91

Nobody’s 2025 Top 100 Games: 90-81

Nobody’s 2025 Top 100 Games: 80-71

Nobody’s 2025 Top 100 Games: 70-61

Nobody’s 2025 Top 100 Games: 60-51

Nobody’s 2025 Top 100 Games: 50-41

Nobody’s 2025 Top 100 Games: 40-31

Nobody’s 2025 Top 100 Games: 30-21

Nobody’s 2025 Top 100 Games: 20-11

Nobody’s 2025 Top 100 Games: 10-1