A piece of literature that is nearly on the level of Game of Thrones, a novel that released in the same year. Genealogy of the Holy War is so thunderously successful at everything it tries to be that even bringing up anything that might be "wrong" with it makes me feel like pedant. I'll admit, my initial playthrough of Genealogy was exhausting, and it took me forever. Playing a chapter of Genealogy takes a lot out of you., particularly if you're determined to keep everyone alive. The tactics in play here in Cavalry Emblem are wildly different from the traditional games, but different is not worse. I could complain about having to move my units individually for miles and miles across each chapter, but the more time that passes since my first playthrough, the less that feels like it matters. It's truly difficult not to feel like Fire Emblem peaked right here, and while it has managed to survive and produce many more games that I've greatly enjoyed, Genealogy is so impressive that a starry eyed player from its day would surely be disappointed at what we have now... not because it's any sort of grim future, but because Genealogy makes it feel like Fire Emblem can do anything it sets its mind to.

Having grown weary with owning the world, Miyamoto withdrew so that he could spend a few years creating another one. Mario 64 codified the public identity of the "video game" just as much as Super Mario Bros did in 1985, and just as Super Mario Bros 3 emasculated all pretenders, Super Mario 64 made Crash Bandicoot look like a visionless hack and made Bubsy look like an absolute fucking moron.

This time though, the frontiers were so unknown, so vast and unexplored, that not even Miyamoto and his hardened gang of murderers could pull it off flawlessly. Super Mario 64 has an infamously whiny, uncooperative camera by any modern standard, but I'm pretty sure that's entirely forgivable considering it invented the fucking thing. Even Jumping Flash just dodged the question by going first-person.

For a second time, Mario had not just tightened his grip on video games, he had remade them in his own image. 3D platformers made from the same mold would define the next two generations. Then and only then would video games begin to slip through the plumber's glovey hands.

The game that single-handedly made America care about JRPGs. Lured in by the cool dude with the motorcycle and the big sword and the fancy graphics, players found a genuinely moving story about loss and grief. The gameplay is great thanks to the robust and flexible materia system, though not quite the pinnacle of the series. While this may not actually be true, I consider FFVII to be the easiest mainline Final Fantasy game, and none of those are particularly difficult to begin with. This has led to me wishing across all of my many subsequent playthroughs for something more. Something just a little bit rougher. For a first time player in 1997 however, FFVII was exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, and it is a game that will never stop mattering. It's inescapably memorable and is as close to perfect in its pacing as anything ever gets.