I've been thinking about this list. (Except for number one, that spot is pretty clear to me lmao.)
Works kinda slow right now, so I'll send one in before my second coffee.

Sadly, I didn't get to play Replicant as much as I'd hoped. And it currently is somewhere buried in my backlog.

I'm kind of late to its posting, but Tales of Arise was amazing. I can't say that it's flawless, but it is a delight for classic J-RPG fans and it has tight gameplay that I honestly wasn't expecting. This was the first Tales game I played to completion, and I had assumed I would have to helicopter-mom the AI in battles like in FF7 Remake. Sometimes you'll have to make adjustments for boss fights, especially in post-game content, but the AI was pretty good on their own most of the time and that impressed me.

I'll admit, I was wrong about Souls games still being niche. Competition with other games aside, it's fascinating to me that Sekiro or Demon's Souls (PS5) were not nearly as hyped as Elden Ring. I have no clue why Elden Ring has captured gamer's attention in a bigger way than both of those, but I have my theories.

The zeitgeist around this games, even excluding their similarities, feels exactly like Skyrim to me. Back when Skyrim was released, I remember there were droves of people playing it who hadn't played previous Elder Scrolls titles. And, much like with the Souls games, previous Elder Scrolls games were not that inviting. After putting 13 hours into this game, and intentionally avoiding the next main-story boss after beating the first one, this is easily the first Souls game I would recommend to series newcomers. On top of that, even if a player hates Souls games, this is a gamechanger for open world games.

I feel exactly the same about Skyrim in both regards.

I was expecting to receive it this Monday, but it showed up last night around the same time as my DoorDash order.

"I'll try it out for an hour, I'm still at the end of Tales," I said. 7 hours later I beat the first major boss of Elden Ring.
Holy shit, this game is awesome.

@dipset Yeah I agree with all of that.

As I was re-reading this thread, I realized a Pokemon game came out less than a month ago. From a marketing perspective, THAT's a release you definitely want to steer clear from. I don't think Pokemon Legends: Arceus is going to influence the sales of these February releases, but I'm interested in the sales comparison of all three games.

The highest selling Souls game sold 10 million copies. Alternatively, Horizon Zero Dawn has sold 20 million+ copies.
Additionally, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is hovering around 5 million+ units and that was From's latest game.

From Software still sells pretty niche games compared to what the majority of gamers like. I think Horizon Forbidden West probably won't get as many day-one sales as Elden Ring does, but it's better than releasing a game three days before a mainline Zelda game.

I'm really looking forward to this. I can't recall the last time outlets, fans, and others have had such differing opinions.

@phbz I agree with this, except that I only like it better than a handful of Zelda games. The variety of weapons in combat was awesome, and the dungeons were great.

The use of Japanese mythology and Shinto deities was awesome. Usually that is an aspect of Japanese culture that you mostly find in museums, but it was great how much they leaned into it. It gave Okami a sprinkling of God of War-vibes.

I'm playing Tales of Arise. It's one of two Tales games I've played for at least 10+ hours, and I'm loving it so far.

@brannox It does seem daunting, but usually about 50-60% of the characters are recruited automatically. And the requirements to get the best endings revolve around getting all 108 characters before a certain plot-point in the game. ( With Suikoden 1, a big problem was knowing how to recruit certain characters without killing them. Also some of those characters could glitch and die even if you did the right thing) The side stuff beyond collecting the 108 characters is completely optional.

What is fun to me, is that many of the secret characters are recruitable at different points of the games. So you get some wiggle room and can experiment with when/how to recruit them.