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#7: Persona 5 (PS4)        Persona 5 is the longest I have ever taken to complete a single player video game before. Finishing my playthrough at about 120 hours. To put this into perspective, the total run time of the show Breaking Bad is 62 hours long. Suffice to say, Persona 5 is a lot of video game, and I haven't played it in over half a year, so it's a very challenging game to write about and perhaps why I've stalled a little bit in putting toge ther this top ten of the year. I'll do my best to make this succinct and not-spoilery.     Persona 5 is comfortable and familiar, but also impressively risk-taking and exotic. It is a game that stretches the confines of familiar JRPG tropes to their absolute extremes. It is a game where you explore dungeons, collect swords, fight monsters, and open treasure chests. It is also a game about depression, teen suicide, social anxiety, ennui, The Patriarchy™, class discrimination, and the fantasy of enactin...
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#8: Yakuza 0 (PS4) I love Japan. It's where everything good and decent that I loved as a child came from. I remember when I was first learning how to read and staring at the cartridge to Super Mario Land for Game Boy and I saw "Made in Japan" written along the side of the cartridge sticker(). I asked my dad what this meant, as I had never seen this "Japan" word before. Nor had I ever really though of video games as being a product that is created somewhere. "Japan is the country that Nintendo's from and that's where most of the video games you play come from," My dad replied. It wasn't just video games, but anime I grew up on, like Dragon Ball Z, Cowboy Bebop, Pokemon, Digimon, the list goes on. Even things that weren't created in Japan certainly had a cultural influence from that country such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which was all I lived and breathed when I wasn't playing Nintendo games. A ninj...
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#9: Metroid: Samus Returns(3DS) You know that episode of Seinfeld where George builds a cool little fort underneath his desk at work? Growing up that may have been my favorite plot arc ever in any Seinfeld episode because of my love for claustrophobic, snuggly spaces. I remember coming home from school the next day after that episode aired and my mom surprised me by building a small blanket fort in my closet. It was one of the most touching and creative ways she had ever showed her love for me. I spent hours in that tiny nest, reading Sonic the Hedgehog comics and John Bellairs novels underneath the warm glow of the dusty closet light bulb above me. Even younger still, I remember a day that a friend of mine and I assembled a time capsule to bury in his front yard. It was filled with drawings and a paper with scribbles of predictions of what would happen in the future(I specifically recall thinking that the inevitable sequel to 'Donkey Kong Country' would b...
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#10: Forza Motorsport 7 (Xbox One/PC) My least favorite part of having a job is having to drive to work. It's stressful. Driving kills tons of people every day. You have to follow all these rules and regulations, driving for long distances gives me shin splints. I drive an old shitty car that breaks down constantly. I've normalized the alarming, creaky noises it makes when i back out of my driveway every morning because my car still gets me to places and the sound goes away after a little while. I don't trust other people on the road, they might be drunk, tired, overworked, or just plain careless. I put my life in the hands of complete and total strangers every single day when I get behind the wheel. It's also really hard to eat Taco Bell while driving which is unbelievably tragic. I also guess driving and burning fossil fuels and stuff contributes to pollution and climate change which will kill us all probably some time in the next hundred years. When I...
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