LogFAQs > #949906494

50. Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (DS, 2005)

In a rare move for the series, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow is a direct sequel to its predecessor, Aria of Sorrow. This allows it to expand on the story and systems from the original in a much larger game. There's one of the best castles in the series - the size and variety of environments is great, and the variety of enemies is pretty solid (though there are the usual palette swapped variations later on). The bosses are pretty great too, they're challenging but not to the point where you can't learn their patterns to win and have to rely on swaths of healing items. And the story, while less novel than Aria of Sorrow, is still pretty decent and does the now-standard Symphony of the Night thing where the "basic" ending at the top of the castle is not nearly the actual end of the game. The soul system is back from Aria as well, and it's still easily the best mechanic the series has produced - here you can even power up souls by collecting more of them and you can use collected souls to forge more powerful weapons. It's perhaps a little tedious but none of it is necessary, and it's much better than the convoluted systems that weigh down Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, for example.
Dawn of Sorrow is just really solid overall - it's my favorite of the DS trilogy easily and I think the peak of the handheld era. As an early DS-era game, it uses unnecessary touchscreen gimmicks, but they don't intrude in the game too much. (Hot take alert: I actually really like the seal-drawing to finish off bosses; I think it's a satisfying way to cap a challenging battle by banishing them to the shadow realm. I absolutely get why people hate it though.) As someone who loves Metroidvania-style games, Dawn of Sorrow is pretty much the safest bet of all of them; it has a good balance of difficulty, has a lot of variety of weapons and powers, is packed with content, and also doesn't get bogged down too much by bloat.

49. Mario Kart 8 (Wii U, 2014)

For all intents and purposes, it's the definitive edition of Mario Kart. Counting the DLC or the Deluxe edition, you've got 48 tracks, 30+ characters (including other series crossovers) and a whole host of vehicles, weapons, and modes. As much as I love Double Dash's gameplay feel, you pretty much can get whatever you want out of MK8, since the numerous vehicle options let you tailor your driving experience to your liking, whether that's fast drifty cars or tight-turning bikes. Online play is surprisingly great here too; I feel like since MK Wii, Mario Kart online play has been the one consistently decent subsection of Nintendo's generally disastrous online service. Even Battle Mode, which was terrible and largely forgotten upon MK8's release, got a huge upgrade with the Deluxe release on Switch, adding five unique modes on actual Battle tracks, and it's similarly integrated into the online well.
The gameplay additions in MK8 are both solid and largely non-intrusive: Coins return from the 2D Mario Karts, giving you a small speed boost as you go up to 10, trick-boosts off of jumps/ramps and hang-glider sections are back from Mario Kart 7, and there are upside-down portions of track where your vehicle shifts into a hovercraft and can gain boosts off of track sections and other vehicles. The courses are the best in the series; there's not a ton of duds (the weakest tracks are the intentionally simpler ones) and the variety of themes and ideas poured into them are always impressive. Plus let's give MK8 a shoutout for being the first non-Smash game to actually formally recognize F-Zero in the past 15 years. Somehow even in a completely different series, F-Zero is still the best part of this game.
The whole of these past two entries is basically "I like this series a lot and this is a slam-dunk entry on that series." Each aspect of the game is excellently crafted and builds upon previous entries' strengths while improving their weaknesses. I've had a ton of good multiplayer sessions with friends in MK8, even playing with 4 players online in the same room via two TVs and Wii Us, back in 2015 or so. There's really just a limit on how much I can rank "really solid multiplayer experience" over the more transcendent game picks later on my list.
Top 5 Courses (w/ Deluxe/DLC): Big Blue - Mount Wario - DK Jungle - Sunshine Airport - Rainbow Road

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it's an underwater adventure ride