#10. PERSONA 5
For years, Shin Megami Tensei’s Persona offshoot had been described as a niche franchise, but in 2017, it finally broke out into the mainstream with the incredible Persona 5– and it’s not hard to see why this was the game that managed to do that. Its blend of dungeon crawling, role playing, and social simulation is engrossing and addictive, and the game makes use of all of it to tell a spectacular story, driven by an ensemble cast of some of the most loveable and best-developed characters we’ve ever seen in an RPG. It’s also an audio-visual treat, with a fantastic art style, a jazzy, memorable soundtrack, and the fact that every pixel of the game is overflowing with an unbelievably sense of style. Hell, even the menus are amazing to look at. Persona 5 is a culmination of all the best qualities that the series has been defined by over the years, and a perfection of a formula that was already unbelievably engaging.
