My Top 5 Games

I've played way too many games in the 21 years of my life. So many that I probably can't remember quite a few of them. So I'm just gonna name five off the top of my head which I can remember being awesome. (I won't cheat and use new games, I promise)

Final Fantasy VII
Does this even come as a surprise? Most JRPG players of my age would have similar opinions (retro-er players may say DQ or the older FFs), but FF7 was the perfect blend of story, epic and flashy combat (as flashy as it could go at the time at least). Not to mention fond memories of skipping sleep just to breed a gold chocobo so that I can get Knights of the Round materia, not so fond memories of losing my savegames at the Northern crater twice and thereby forcing me to replay the game twice to finish the game (I played the game once more in recent years) - granting me more than a hundred hours of gametime. Advent Children may be a huge pile of fanservice, but to many of us, it brought us tears of joy as we see our old 'friends' and whisper "welcome back".

Phoenix Wright
The entire series. Despite the occasionally frustrating trial-and-error nature of the game (in fact, this 'game' is less of a game than an interactive storybook), Phoenix Wright is filled with lovable characters, an awesome story, and over-the-top epic scenes that brings out the hot-bloodedness in all of us. Coupled with the fact that this is the game that made me buy my DS, and my personal affection towards anime-ish things, this game fully deserves its spot in my top 5.

Valve
Okay, Valve is not a game. But Half Life (and its successors), Portal, Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead are. Go ahead and accuse me of fanboying this company - I'm not even going to deny it. But the fact still stands firm that Valve has one of the shiniest track records of any game company - producing triple-A games that sank hours and hours (and hours and hours... you get the idea) of my time without having me regret it. That, and I didn't feel like cheating and dumping an allvalvelolollol top 5 list.

Front Mission 3
Not 1, not 4. Three. Again, it's probably my bias for the anime artstyle, but I absolutely loved this game. Loved how the game made me feel epic in its anime mecha theme. (I specifically made my main wanzer melee because of my anime bias) That, and it was one of the first ever SRPGs I have ever completed. It still saddens me that I have long since lost my disc, and searching for an old copy is near impossible. =/

Naruto: Narutimate Hero series
In my defense, despite the anime bias I had shown throughout this post, I'll say that despite its anime appearance, this is a very solid fighting series in its own right. It had a huge roster (from 2 onwards at least - the first game had like 9 characters pfft), an interesting 2.5D system (basically two 2D planes to fight on), allowance for high-level play (buffering, cancelling, juggling, even a few infinites to boot), and (*sigh* here I go again) anime epic-ness to wash it all down. We had quite a small competitive community playing this game religiously, and quite a few communities have sprung up over the years too (shishi-rendan, anyone?). Of course, the biggest reason this game deserves a space on my top 5? I initially bought my PS2 so that I could train at this game. Heh. I'm such an impulsive bastard.