Holy shit that’s an interesting list you got there @Giles_Habibula!
Let’s see if I can come up with 5 franchises I love.
1. Monster Hunter Definitely my all time favorite franchise by a pretty large margin. Been playing these since the first game on PSP (later played the PS2 game as well).
2. Street Fighter I am never any good at these but I’ve been a fan since SF2 in arcades and on SNES. Just fun, even if I can’t seem to dedicate the time to learning it for real. SF5 is probably me best effor tto learn though.
3. Dark Souls I’d include Demon’s Souls and Bloodbourne in this as well. Terrific series and Demon’s Souls very much blew my hair back when I first played it. One of those games I thought about even when I wasn’t plaing it.
4. Gran Turismo Love these racing sims.
5. Current Tomb Raider I really like these games and I have even finished the first two (haven’t gotten to the third yet, but I will). That’s high praise from someone who rarely gets around to finishing games.
Destiny almost made the cut, but I mostly just played the crap out of the first game and the second fell pretty flat for me. maybe once we see more of these It’ll make the cut. Red Dead Redemption also was my favorite game of last gen and one of the only huge open world games (possibly the only) I have ever finished. Still I haven’t even played the second game so it’s hard to call it a favorite franchise at this point.
No particular order because I’m not sure how many tricks my memory is playing on me and I’m old:
Football Manager
Age of Wonders
Civilization
XCOM (first two old ones and both the Firaxis versions)
Imperialism
I would have put the first two Master of Orions but the third (and the remake) kinda ruins the idea of “best”.
Zelda
Metroid
Metal Gear
Mario
Castlevania
Huh. Thought about it for a while and looks like I came up with a bunch of Nintendo and Konami stuff. Really want to put Street Fighter on there but I can’t take any of these off, each of them has at least a half dozen greats and they’ve all been with me since forever (I didn’t get into SF until later).
I can respect this.
Mario
Civilization
Age of Wonders
Final Fantasy
Sims
Loose criteria, decades of looking forward to new games, lots of gems in the series, ability to move the series forward… even with some missteps. Runner ups: Might and Magic (includes HOMM and MM), Xcom, Europa Univ and Zelda.