RPGs come immediately to mind. Your partner in Disco Elysium is more competent than the main character for reasons that will be immediately obvious. Bethesda's RPGs are also open world, and while you'll start out alone in them, you get permanent companions pretty quick (especially if you know where to look). They also get more chatty in the world and more character development in the later games. Fallout 4 more so than Skyrim more so than Fallout 3, for example. Starfield makes you swap them out if you do the main story, which I don't know if you'll like or not.
For a dedicated shooter, I think Titanfall 2 has the most protective companion I've seen in the genre. Get this one on sale, since it has its robust multiplayer priced in, but it has an excellent--if a bit short--single-player campaign.
Probably the same reason it's happening all over the corporate web: fewer eyeballs moderating content. I was never enough of a regular on Steam communities to be sure, unlike GameFAQs (which I can tell you has always been that way).
Dropping a random tip here that might help a couple people that are running Metaphor on PC with an RTX card: turn on DLDSR and FXAA from your Nvidia Control Panel, and set 100% rendering scale in-game. The game doesn't have anti-aliasing for whatever reason and the shimmer is real bad compared to Atlus's earlier games. The best you can do in-game is crank up the scale, and I think some pretty beefy hardware is still required for good framerate with that.
Some stuff is probably going to be bad no matter what you do (like Strohl's vest), but this way I can reduce a lot of the aliasing and still get a rock-solid 60 FPS on my modest 3060Ti. There are likely better third-party solutions being developed by the community right now, maybe even some good presets in Reshade.
Meanwhile I'm over here thinking about how I greatly prefer to put my saves in my own cloud storage (too many games these days not giving me as many slots as I'd like), the community forums are some of the most toxic places on the Internet right now, it's a coin flip whether Steam's going to give me a problem with my DualShock4, I hate how the Workshop is a walled garden, and I'm so much happier with my streaming now that I've dropped Steam Link and moved to Moonlight.
I guess the guides and Big Picture Mode can be nice?
Steam's still the #2 best option for me on PC storefronts; the battle.net launcher has some aggressive advertising, as an example of hellscape we're avoiding here. But Steam continues to not offer me much added value. I go there only because some of my games aren't available on GOG.
I will say I appreciate what Valve is doing with the Steam Deck, and I'm really hoping it continues to grow an ecosystem that directly competes with Nintendo. They are actively burning up banked goodwill right now, and that segment of the market is getting unhealthy without someone keeping them in check.
It should also be noted that playing on authentic hardware is an inherently destructive action. Parts wear out--especially on hardware with disc drives or fans--discs get scratched, cartridge contacts corrode, etc. On top of all this, goods get destroyed or lost in transit all the time even in the collector market. All of this is driving prices up.
If one wants to have an authentic experience, they still can, but they had better be prepared to pay a premium for it. People are already compromising on displays since CRTs are rare and/or cumbersome, and there are other compromise options like MiSTers and repro carts that aren't just emulating on your home PC.
As a general rule of thumb, if it has dialogue, it's going to be pretty good, and surprisingly so a lot of the time. The Witcher 3 is still unmatched for quality and quantity of side quests.
This wasn't a particularly good open world game even for its time, so I'd say ignoring the map markers completely is often smart.
I think the most damning thing about Star Wars Outlaws was that I completely forgot it had come out. It barely showed up in my news feeds, and literally no one in my gaming circles was playing it (not surprising after the report on its sales performance). Now it's got the problem of not being overshadowed, being a heist story after Andor blew me away with its take on it, and I just started Ghost of Tsushima, so far one of the best open world games I've ever played. Oof.
Ghost also does have smoother melee combat than either of Respawn's Jedi games, but lightsabers and force powers will always allow me to overlook a thing or two. The latter is one of the major reasons why I liked Survivor more than Fallen Order. They felt super limited in Fallen Order (even if it arguably makes sense with the narrative) and even Survivor had fights boiling down to hacking away with a lightsaber a tad more than I'd like. Still, lightsaber duels!
I blame Metroid Dread for that one. Such a bizarre design choice for Phantom Liberty, especially being very late in the game. At least Dread flipped that around.
Unfortunately, FromSoft wasn't on Tenchu until later in the series when it...wasn't so great. Still, that Sekiro started as a Tenchu concept is why I picked up the game in the first place. And like Tenchu, effective stealth is there, it's just especially challenging.
Now, Zelda: Skyward Sword is one I can't defend (and one of the reasons I'm surprised OP is getting crushed for this post).
Can't help but feel like this is a step back for Brace Yourself on their music games. Loved the first NecroDancer and Cadence of Hyrule. Tried the demo, but this one just wasn't for me. Maybe I need a gimmick for these kinds of games--for Dance Dance Revolution it was the dance pad, Rez had the vibrator and the visuals, Frequency and Amplitude exposed me to new music genres, etc.
Elite Beat Agents and Theatrhythm both did well in the games that were just press-the-right-button, so I know there's an audience for this. I'm just not in it, I guess.
I don't know how well it's aged for a new player, but I found it very notable at the time for being dark, if not outright macabre, at times. We had very little of that in the 16-bit era.
Drawing from real-world locales and cultures was interesting, too. Ys is another series that does that to good effect.
It helps to understand that Chrono Trigger's story was the result of a bit of a struggle between Yuji Horii (aka the Dragon Quest guy) and Masato Kato, who would later write and direct Chrono Cross. Horii's end was light-hearted, which makes sense given his pedigree, while Kato liked darker stuff. That's why Zeal in particular is a shift in tone from the rest of Trigger.
One of the core themes of Cross is that actions have consequences, and I personally loved how the game pulled no punches on that topic with respect to Trigger's cast. The idea of repercussions is only hinted at in the first game, but it's there, and the revelations on the beach are heavily foreshadowed within Cross's story itself. It's a grown-up narrative from an era when players were starting to demand grown-up narratives. Its reception reflects that, as well; it earned some of the highest review scores among JRPGs of its era, and it sold well enough to require reprints. This was a game that was well-received in 2000, aside from the grumblings of a few upset Trigger fans. Cross hasn't endured simply because it was very much a game of its time, and it hasn't aged as gracefully as Trigger (especially its visuals).
I consider Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross to be an excellent cause-and-effect pairing, and Cross's connections to Trigger serve to enhance both games. I love the way Cross can reframe Trigger; I think it adds weight to the actions of a bunch of kids who stumble upon time portals and start messing with things. Time travel raises questions, and Cross's story is why I mull on those questions in my head whenever I replay Trigger.
The script was a little rough at times for sure, like plenty of the other localized games of its era, but I don't remember it being especially bad. Terranigma was definitely worse, though, possibly due to not getting a North America release. Would love to see a project tackle that one.
They really leaned into the Chrono Trigger vibe with this one.
I like their marketing approach here by making a big splash at TGS. Sea of Stars also had a broader marketing approach. I'm not entirely sure how possible grassroots marketing is with this kind of thing anymore, at least in English-speaking communities. Chrono Trigger is a sacred cow in the JRPG community, and Sea of Stars got a surprising amount of backlash for not living up to those lofty expectations (yes, ridiculous ones considering CT was lightning in a bottle even among a dream team of developers and producers).
Same. I had my eye on this because anything that remotely looks like the next Pharaoh or Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom always catches my eye. There was also so. much. micro. I'd rather be shuffling citizens or buildings around than manually selecting what plants to harvest. Plus I hate the name, lol.
Forever ago, out of morbid curiosity. I do vaguely remember it being quite bizarre.