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Square's "Dream Team" — Final Fantasy's creator, Dragon Quest's creator, and Dragon Ball's artist — built a time-travel RPG so good that thirty years later it still tops greatest-of-all-time lists. A dozen endings, no random battles, and the game that gave New Game Plus its name.
Chop the vegetables, crack the eggs, flip the pan at exactly the right second — or watch Mama's eyes literally catch fire. The DS stylus-cooking game that made "Don't worry, Mama will fix it!" a generational catchphrase.
The boy's answer to Tamagotchi, and somehow more addictive: a digital monster you didn't just keep alive, you trained to fight. Snap your device to a friend's, and both creatures would duel on screen, their fate determined by every decision you'd made. The winning evolution wasn't the prettiest — it was the strongest.
The after-school anime that taught a generation of American kids the words "Super Saiyan." Adapted from Akira Toriyama's manga and animated by Toei, Dragon Ball Z turned multi-episode power-ups, screaming energy charges, and glowing gold hair into appointment television — most of all on Cartoon Network's Toonami block.
A prairie dog — not actually a chipmunk — whips its head toward the camera in slow menace, scored with a sinister orchestral sting from a 1974 Mel Brooks film. Five seconds of pure reaction gold that became the internet's shorthand for "something just happened."
Sony's 1992 answer to the cassette: a recordable digital disc in a plastic shell that let you name tracks, shuffle them around and copy a CD without a hiss, and that played on through a bump thanks to a memory buffer. Japan bought it for twenty years. America shrugged.
The Japanese magical-girl anime that took North America the long way around: transformation sequences, a talking cat, saving the world in a sailor uniform, and a catchphrase declaimed on a thousand playgrounds. By the time Toonami got hold of it, you couldn't escape it.
Sixteen giants, one horse, no other enemies and barely any dialogue. Team Ico's October 2005 PlayStation 2 game sent Wander across an empty forbidden land to climb and kill colossi for a dead girl's sake, and every victory played like a funeral. It became the standard exhibit whenever anyone argued that games could be art.
Yu Suzuki's Dreamcast epic put you in 1986 Yokosuka as Ryo Hazuki, avenging your father one conversation at a time: shops that close for the night, buses on timetables, a forklift job at the docks, and half the town asked where the sailors hang out. The most expensive game ever made at the time, it sold 1.2 million copies and still lost money.
The egg-shaped digital pet that lived on a keychain and died if you ignored it during math class. Bandai's Tamagotchi demanded constant feeding, cleaning, and attention, sparking a global craze — and a wave of school bans.