Legend of Dragoon is super under-rated. All these remakes going on, I’d kill for that to be one of them.
It’s been a long time, but the combo timing system from LoD was something I loved a lot. Want to say that Shadow Hearts for PS2 had a similar style of iteration on traditional JRPG battle systems, where they landed on a timing minigame to make it stand out. If you’ve not played the series before, I highly suggest it.
System Shock 2
Many games come close for me… Mass Effect, Zelda Link to the Past, Factorio and Homeworld would round out my top 5 for instance. But System Shock 2 was my first immersive sim game. It started a love affair with the genre that I’m still trying to scratch 25 years later.
There were many spiritual successors, with Arkane’s Prey being the closest approximation I’ve found. Nightdive just released the original System Shock’s remake a month back, so the wait for them to announce they’re giving SS2 the remake treatment is torture.