Most of the best games ever made have appeared in the past few years. There was a long drought before then, but suddenly everything started to click again. It's an interesting dynamic and I'm not sure why it happened.
Dragon Quest XI kicked things off in 2017, making the first truly great DQ game ever. It's such a good game that it invalidates all the DQ's before it. You can just play this one and consider the whole series covered.
Then there was Valkyria Chronicles 4, which you can say the same about as DQ XI. It was such a good game that the entire rest of the franchise is unnecessary, you can just play this and have it all.
2017 also saw the release of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, an amazing game which led directly into the Xenoblade 1 Remake (the only playable version of the game) and the beyond stellar Xenoblade 3. The three Xenoblade games together are as good as Final Fantasy 1-6.
Fire Emblem Three Houses came out in 2019, a Fire Emblem so good that it rendered all previous entries in the series moot. Instead of playing old Fire Emblems, you could just play this one again and again and get more out of it each time. But then Fire Emblem outdid itself again and released Engage, with just as good mechanics and an even more emotional story (though sadly a shorter one). Engage took advantage of the entire history of Fire Emblem and filled itself up with all the best settings and characters and mechanics from its entire franchise. By doing so it produced a nigh perfect game. These two Fire Emblem games together are better than Final Fantasy 7-10.
Of course, Final Fantasy wouldn't take all this laying down, so it also decided to make the best game ever, Final Fantasy 7 Remake/Crisis Core Reunion/Intergrade/Rebirth/etc. Steadily, since 2020, it's been recreating the world of FF 7 in brighter color and greater depth than ever before. Now it shines like no other game before it, as expected of a game that spans multiple games' worth of content.
Unicorn Overlord came out last month and it easily became one of the best games ever, replacing the older version of the same idea, Ogre Battle.
Octopath Traveler 1 and 2 also came out in this 2017+ era, giving us back the varied jobs, 2d sprites and turn based combat of the old Final Fantasy series. I don't think the characters' stories or designs are as gripping as the old guard Final Fantasy, but the music is if anything better.
It feels like the only games that haven't been superseded these days are Xenogears, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy Tactics and Tales of Graces/Xillia. Triangle Strategy and Tactics Ogre Reborn tried to be as good as FF Tactics but it was just impossible. A bridge too far.
Of course, there's no reason why people shouldn't play the old greats and the new ones, but the old greats all came out in the 1990's, and the new ones all came out after 2017. What happened to gaming inbetween? It's bizarre how the whole hobby essentially disappeared for decades and then came back as the best hobby possible. You don't see this resurgence anywhere else. Anime is steadily releasing fewer big hits, books have been on a continuous downslide, all the best manga have ended or are close to ending, visual novels aren't even being translated anymore, etc. It's only video games. They're the only thing that keeps getting better every year. They have completely saved the 2020's. Thank God for all these games.
If they would just make an anime of Tales of Graces and Xillia like they did Symphonia, Zestiria and Abyss, Tales would be covered. After that all they would have to do is remake Chrono Trigger and Xenogears with modern graphics, plus a bit more content to patch the holes that were in the originals, and we could forget about all games prior to 2017. . .
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