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| the 10 most unique AAA games of the last five years. |
The AAA gaming industry is huge. There's a lot of good stuff, but some times, it's a little samey. That said, every once in a while, there is just something incredibly different coming out of the AAA space.
the 10 most unique AAA games of the last five years.
Starting off with number 10, the "Final Fantasy VII Remake," which came out in 2020.
Now, what makes this game so unusual compared to other RPGs of its time is how it manages to combine the old and the new. The creators of the remake were faced with a really unique challenge. How do you update an old-school turn-based RPG for the current AAA market and still feel true to the original? Their solution was actually pretty ingenious. They combined the Active Time Battle combat system from the original game with the gameplay of third-person action game.
So they could have easily just reskinned the "Kingdom Hearts" battle system and called it a day. And a lot of the stuff leading up to it, I sometimes assumed that that's what it was gonna feel like, ultimately. But instead, they managed to create something that felt both new and old at the same time. It's simple and it's easy to understand, but it still has a lot of tactical depth.
Other than the battle system, the other standout feature that "Final Fantasy VII Remake" has is that it's a remake in the literal sense of the word. It's kind of controversial with fans, but a major part of the plot is that the story is getting a literal do-over, and things are happening slightly differently. There's these ghosts that are trying to stop things from changing. It's all kind of weird and meta, but in the end, it means the sky's the limit for the next "Final Fantasy VII Remake" game. Anything literally can happen.
The other thing that's weird is it covers only about 20% of the original game. They're splitting it into three parts, so I'm sure they're adjusting as they're going along, and I think that they have a pretty wild overarching plan for it. - Time enough for you. Perhaps. But what will you do with it? Let's see.
At number nine is "God of War" From 2018.
Another major seller from a big franchise, the "God of War" reboot managed to take the series in an entirely new direction, and it just worked perfectly.
It's rare to see a series change this dramatically and for it to just be so widely embraced. The original "God of War" games are over-the-top spectacles about a screaming madman who wants revenge, and they're awesome, but they're definitely not high art. In contrast, the new "God of War" is a character-focused drama.
It has more in common with "The Last of Us" than the original games, but it works. That alone makes this one of the more unique sequels of all time, a true crossover success. But the gameplay at the time was also pretty novel. Instead of using the combat system from the original games, it switched to a more over-the-shoulder, intimate combat system that played a little like the old games, but also pretty different. It's really rare to see a series take such a left turn and go off in a completely different direction from the previous games in the series and work as well as "God of War" does. It's just an all-around great action-adventure game that in many ways redefined what third-person action games could be.
I mean, it's coming up on five years and look how many games conjure "God of War" 2018 when you play them now.
At number eight is "Doom Eternal,"
and it's interesting that the first three games on this most unique AAA games in the last five years are remakes, reboots, or sequels, but "Doom Eternal," well, at first glance doesn't seem that unusual. Yeah, it's another fast-paced first person shooter. What's the big deal? It's one of those games you get into the nitty gritty of the combat, and you really notice how divergent it is from pretty much every other FPS out there.
In a lot of ways, "Doom Eternal" has more in common with "Devil May Cry" than other FPS games, which probably sounds ridiculous, but believe me, there is a lot going on here. Most of the time, these old-school shooters just let you pick up your guns and go nuts, but "Doom Eternal" is much more complex. Ammo is severely limited for everything, so you got ta make use of the game's many systems to keep yourself stocked up and healthy. There's a Glory Kill system that ties everything together. It makes enemies drop health or ammo when they die. There's the Flame Belch that makes it so enemies drop armor when they take damage, a Blood Punch that charges as you get kills.
Every gun has multiple alt fires that are more effective against certain enemies. There's double jumping, grappling, air dashing. There's a lot to think about. And all of this is just going on at a blistering pace. It's sometimes overwhelming for even the best players. And this heightened gameplay has gone on to inspire its own subset of shooting games that have stylish FPS action.
In a lot of ways, "Doom Eternal" isn't really an old-school shooter at all. It's something pretty new and different.
At number seven is "Monster Hunter: World" from 2018.
Capcom took a big gamble trying to turn their niche "Monster Hunter" franchise into a big mainstream AAA game. Man, did it end up working out for them, though. There's really nothing else like this game in the AAA space.
Even games that are pretty inspired by it just aren't the same. It's just this highly technical action game that's about hunting giant monsters. Nothing about it is standard.
Everything's just a little bit removed from what you'd expect. Combat's a little more deliberate than in most action games, no auto-targeting, and positioning and timing your attacks, it's pretty essential. The creatures you're facing off against are really tough, there's a complex series of towels and visual clues that help you understand how to react to them, and you have to kind of synthesize all that information in the middle of a fight. There's a ton of weapons you get right from the start.
Each one has its own complicated skill tree. There's no leveling up. The only way you improve your character is through crafting better weapons, using better parts, eating meals that give you temporary stab boosts, et cetera, et cetera. At the end of the day, it's a game all about grinding to get better equipment, but how you actually do it is so different from everything else out there that isn't trying to copy this formula.
And let's be honest, it's pretty different from anything that's trying to copy it, too. There's multiplayer where you can team up with other hunters. You get a cat companion called a Palico. There's a ton of little systems and nuances to everything. And they somehow made a
way for it to be palatable to a general audience.
The "Monster Hunter" Series just does things its own way, which makes it totally unique in the AAA space.
At number six is "Elden Ring" from last year.
Talking about AAA games can be a tricky thing because the definition of the word AAA, or I guess three letters, I don't know, it's vague.
That's the point. It's vague. Most people think that games with a big budget and a bigger marketing push as being AAA, but it's actually kind of hard to say where you draw the line there. With all that said, I think "Elden Ring" is probably From Software's first real AAA game. "Sekiro" came out in the last five years. It was published by Activision, but honestly, it doesn't feel AAA to me. It's just one of those you-know-it-when-you-see-it things. As a AAA game, "Elden Ring" is wildly unique, an open-world action game that twists just about every open-world game tradition to a breaking point. It does everything conventional wisdom says a AAA game shouldn't do. It's player unfriendly. It's confusing. It's difficult.
Even the basic story is hard to decipher at first. It's a game that throws players to the wolves, both metaphorically and literally, to be frank. From Software's been doing this for years with the "Dark Souls" series, of course, but I think those games are arguably not AAA, and "Elden Ring" is. Even though "Elden Ring" is mostly just iterating on concepts introduced in previous games the developers made, it's still unique in how it incorporates all that stuff into the open-world game format.
If you just hear the game described, it sounds like a bigger version of their previous games, but the experience of playing "Elden Ring" is unique. And let's just be clear. Even though there are a lot of From Software copycats, From Software is a unique developer. For them to pretty much actually break into the AAA space, that game is kind of automatically unique. It's unique by default.
And then, of course, there's all of the reasons I just talked about in this point.
At number five is "Kingdom Hearts III"
from 2019.
You can't really say that there's a more bonkers AAA franchise out there than "Kingdom Hearts." The plots are impenetrable. The gameplay changes are, at times, bizarre, and oh yeah, they're also crossover Disney games starring the ultimate original characters, do not steal.
These games are fan fiction with a $100 million budget, totally insane and glorious at the same time. There's so much weird about the third one. It's not really a sequel to "Kingdom Hearts II." The plot directly connects to the many confusing continuations and side games that have appeared on various handhelds over the years. It's a sequel, frankly, to a bunch of games that came out between the game it's technically a sequel to that a lot of the people who played "Kingdom Hearts II" possibly haven't played.
Even with a fairly extensive recap, it's possible to completely miss what is going on here. And it's not just the plot and setting that make this game unique. It's the weirdly old-fashioned but still very effective gameplay. "Kingdom Hearts" is one of the first attempts at an action RPG from Square Enix, and it's a formula they've been expanding on for many years. "Kingdom Hearts III" is probably the culmination of those ideas.
Battles play out in this ridiculous kaleidoscope of colors and sounds. It's really entertaining. You play as an anime boy voiced by Haley Joel Osment, who hangs out with Donald and Goofy and helps out, I don't know, the characters from "Frozen"? It shouldn't work, but it does. It keeps me coming back.
At number four is "Control," 2019
a bizarre and inspired action game that's part third-person shooter, part Metroidvania, part SCP Foundation horror story, and a lot more in between. It's got one of the most inspired and intriguing settings of any game in years and throws in Remedy's trademark physics-heavy action. It's one of the most unique games out there.
Again, it's kind of iterating on stuff from previous Remedy games, but the fact that they've
gotten it into the AAA space just steamrolls a series of other games. It's just masterful. The setting alone is fascinating. The game takes place in the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, a seemingly infinite space called the Oldest House.
The Federal Bureau of Control is an organization meant to contain supernatural threats, but not like the usual ghosts and monsters. The stuff you face in this game is often a lot more abstract. The main threat of the game is a Resonance, which I think is sound, technically. I mean it doesn't manifest as sound, but it kind of does also. It's weird.
And of course, you're still killing stuff with a gun, which plays to the developer's strength as kind of the kings of third-person environmental destruction. To mix things up, you get access to a bunch of powers and movement abilities, the most satisfying and unique being the Levitate ability that's a literal game changer when you unlock it. It's a game that's persistently disorienting and has this odd tone through the whole thing, and you never really know exactly what's supposed to be happening. Still, it's immersive, and everything works really well.
And although the combat, while extremely fun, doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel at the end of the day, like I said, it's kind of iterative on Remedy's trademark gameplay, but bringing their gameplay to the AAA space, bringing the strangeness of this story to the AAA space, it just, it's one of the most unique games at that level.
At number three is "Deathloop" from 2021.
It's a game so odd that the developers at Arkane, you know, of "Prey" and "Dishonored" fame, struggled to explain it. It's kind of an open-world, time-based immersive sim that's also a roguelike. It's set on this strangely out-of-time island called Black reef. Your goal is to kill the eight Visionaries and escape the island.
The problem is the island is trapped in a time loop, so every time you die or the day ends, time resets, so you got ta kill all of them in one day. So while the gameplay is kind of similar to "Dishonored," in fact very similar in the best possible way, there's also a lot of little twist to change things up.
For one thing, there's no quick-saving, which, by the way, that's a lot, but a big part of the game is just figuring out how to kill all eight targets in a single day, which is a challenging puzzle on its own. Killing just one of these guys can be tough, so you got ta scout out each target, figure out the best and safest way to take 'em out and what time of day you have to do it in.
You can go to the districts whenever you want, but but depending on the time of day, the Visionaries might be somewhere else, might be under heavy guard, so the time when you go after each target is also super important. Sometimes, it's possible to take out more than one target at once, but it usually takes a lot of investigating to figure out how to make those interactions happen. Basically, it's one big "Dishonored" level that can take dozens of hours to completely solve.
A lot of people have cooled on this one recently, but I really think "Deathloop" is an impressive and unique game. Even if it's not quite as ambitious as it might sound at first, I still play it. I regularly play "Deathloop."
At number two is "Sea of Thieves" from 2018.
Back when "Sea of Thieves" first came out, a lot of people were kind of scratching their heads at exactly what it's supposed to be.
At its most basic, it's a multiplayer pirate game with some persistent elements. It's not the first multiplayer pirate game, and that makes it sound pretty normal, but there's way more to it. Right from the start, the game is very odd. Instead of creating a character, you get assigned a randomly-generated one. You share the world with other players. You can either play solo, which isn't a lot of fun, or team up and form a crew.
From there, you can go on missions, hunt other pirates, look for treasure, or just trade goods. It could've been left as a mostly empty sandbox experience, but Rare has been super busy since its release, consistently adding new stuff year in and year out. The easiest way to describe "Sea of Thieves" is it's a AAA "No Man's Sky Game" that came out to middling reviews and managed to revitalize itself with constant updates from an active developer. So the game's already unusual gameplay make it stand out among AAA games.
And finally, at number one, it's "Death Stranding" from 2019.
Really, what can you pick for number one if not "Death Stranding"? It's unusual on every level. The gameplay, the story, the multiplayer implementation, nothing about it is not weird. It's a AAA game where you're mainly delivering packages from one place to another. It's set in an insane, almost abstract, world where ghosts are only visible by the black handprints they leave. There's rain that causes anything to age rapidly. There's a baby in a tube strapped to your chest. It's totally nuts.
And that's just the premise. It gets more bizarre from there as the story goes on, all for a game where you play is a sci-fi delivery man who attacks enemies by using his pee as a weapon. Seriously, that's a weapon. It's just an unrelentingly bizarre game that has no right to be as good as it ended up being, and it's one of the most daring and audacious games ever made.
Only somebody like Hideo Kojima could make something like this, something this astoundingly weird, and have it work. And it does. It works. Even for those people out there that don't like the game at all, you have to respect how unique it is.
There's just nothing else like it in the AAA space. It's an indie game that somehow has big name actors and a massive budget. A couple of bonus games for you. "NieR: Automata" from 2017.
That might extend beyond our five-year limit, and arguably, it might be AA game, but it was a major release from Square Enix, so I mean, yeah. It's also uniquely strange, weird, dark, sometimes ugly, sometimes frustrating, but also fascinating in a way few games are. It's also basically a lot like "NieR," except the game plays way, way better. "Sonic Frontiers" from 2022. It's borderline AA, but it's such an unusual turn for Sonic, it deserves a shout out.
By combining the open-world formula with Sonic in a, in my opinion, successful way, it makes something that feels very different and exciting. It's a little rough around the edges, but it's a a great new direction for the franchise. I really look forward to the second "Sonic Frontiers"-style game, because wow, this one was great.
And that's all for today. Leave us a comment. Let us know what you think.