The Best PlayStation Games Of All Time

It’s been 25 years since the launch of the original videogame console PlayStation, and while games have evolved very quickly in the two and a half decades since, it’s impossible to deny the lasting impact Sony’s console had on the industry and pop culture at large. From bandicoots to battle-hardened super-soldiers, the PlayStation is single-handedly responsible for some of the most iconic characters and franchises of all time, and while there are so many to love, we wanted to look back at the very best the console had to offer. These are the top 3 greatest PlayStation 1 games of all time:

Metal Gear Solid: it offered a singularly unique blend of stealth/action gameplay, and coupled it with a wholly bizarre yet absolutely delightful cast of characters and a story that challenged our ideas of traditional video game "heroes", and pushed at the boundaries of cinematic storytelling in video games at the time. All these elements were combined to create a gaming experience that still holds up as one of the best to this day.

Final Fantasy VII: No one had ever seen anything quite like it when it launched on the original PlayStation in 1997. The dark, sci-fi storyline and incredibly of-the-times character design took a whimsical fantasy franchise, and brought it to an international audience in a way that neither Sony or Square could have possibly predicted. It’s a timeless classic.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night: Releasing an "old-looking" 2D Castlevania on the PlayStation seemed like a strange move to some in 1997. Other classic franchises had already made the jump into the third dimension, and new games like Tomb Raider were showing what the PS1 could do that previous consoles could not, but keeping Symphony of the Night 2D allowed Konami to refine Castlevania’s gameplay to absolute perfection, and its beautiful pixel art has aged much better than many of its 3D contemporaries.

Those are our picks for the most amazing games on the original PlayStation; did any make your list that weren’t on ours? You can check out our full list of the top 25 PS1 games on IGN, or if you want to look ahead, be sure to follow all our coverage of the upcoming PS5 and Xbox Series X.

(Avaliable in: https://www.ign.com/articles/best-ps1-games-playstation – text adapted specially for this test).