truly found it hard to rank these, as i came into this mixing a bunch of conflicting criteria: games i love, games i think are standout experiences, games that were formative to me in my life, etc. so this is really just a mishmash of 100 games that build up my character more than anything. only real criteria (that wasn't really followed through to the end) was trying to minimize series repeats (spinoffs/side series didn't count for this), but i still ended up doing a few series repeats because it became hard to feel strongly about games to round out the end of this list without double dipping