Star Wars Rebellion (or Star Wars Supremacy in Europe) had a GameRankings score of 50 but I had a blast with it. I must have had 200 hours in it over the years. As a 4X game, it’s definitely below average, and there’s zero challenge once you figure a few things out.

Where it succeded was by being a bit of a sandbox with a fun license. The soundtrack is phenomenal, there are recognizable names everywhere, and the moment when you get to go toe-to-toe with the Empire after scrapping together a fleet big enough is great. Problem is, it had a rough interface, obtuse mechanics, glacial pacing, and that epic fleet battle looked so bad it probably would have been better off being icons on a star field.

I also think Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII (72) and Rune Factory 4 (79) were underrated, especially the latter. I think to this day, RF4 is the best game in its genre (and that includes Stardew Valley).

All of Sega’s PC ports I’ve played have been excellent. Nihon Falcom has a top-tier studio handling their PC games as well.

Can’t help but wonder how much of this is due to Hasbro’s mismanagement.

As much as I’d love to see more content from them on BG3, seeing what Larian can do now that they have scaled up to being a major studio is exciting.

Edit: Swen said on Twitter today that it’s not on WOTC.

Aside from FTL (which I’m glad to see is well-represented here), my top ones would probably be Papers, Please and Disco Elysium. Papers, Please manages to pair a good narrative leading to many endings with oddly fun gameplay. Disco Elysium simply has some of the best writing ever in a video game and world lore that I can’t get enough of.

I also really liked The Binding of Isaac (Rebirth and later), Don’t Starve, Shovel Knight, and Hollow Knight.

The way I see it, there could be three things going on: 1) Vanillaware was so done with this game after ten years of development and didn’t want to spend a minute more contributing to their first PC port, 2) they are still ignorant/disbelieving of the recent ascendancy of the PC market despite Sega and Atlus surely pushing otherwise, or 3) someone high up at Vanillaware doesn’t want mods.

We’ve seen the aversion to modding for whatever reason with Japanese developers for a while now. Sometimes they get fiercely protective.

Persona 3 is one of the “shorter” ones in the contemporary Persona series at a mere 60 hours. Persona 5 Royal is a beast, though. Hard to get through that one in under 100 hours without rushing.

Final Fantasy X still holds my personal ugly-cry record. To this day, I can’t hear some of the music from it without tearing up. It’s one of those games that has emotional react videos on YouTube.

Shadow of the Colossus manages to be emotional with very little explicit story. A lot of it has to do with its use of dynamic music in an orchestral soundtrack.

Persona 3 just had a remake, and that’s part of a series that can really gets its hooks into you. A big part of it is the parasocial gameplay, but even if you’re not the type to get into that, the story is still very moving. Persona series composer Shoji Meguro recently said the ending theme in this game was his magnum opus.