In this order for me:

  1. Capcom

  2. Squaresoft (Enix)

  3. Konami

The big three I had in my regular playing rotation growing up. And while over the years all three have fell off in various ways from their golden age of gaming status, I still keep coming back to them.

Biohazard, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, shame though that Castlevania is dead in the water, save for a good anime adaption.

  • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 months ago

    1. New Blood

    2. Troika

    3. Looking Glass

    I'm mostly focusing on design ethos, not the games themselves, otherwise larger companies would dominate unfortunately, like CAPCOM, Konami, Nintendo, Fromsoft, Bethesda, Obsidian, Valve, and CDPR. I tried to focus on what the devs tried and successfully accomplished.

    New Blood does cool shit in the realm of blending old and new, constant bangers. Favorite modern dev with actual games under their belt.

    Troika has RPG GOATs like Vampire and Arcanum, and had a better team than Obsidian even when Obsidian made New Vegas, my favorite RPG.

    Finally, Looking Glass birthed ImSims, which are just incredible moments in game dev history.

    Looking forward, I am obviously a fan of Radical Fish, Consumer Softproducts, Team Cherry, and what is now Extremely Ok Games, but those largely have a single game or maybe 2 under their belts. I will buy pretty much anything they release day 1, but they haven't released anything beyond Crosscode, Cruelty Squad, Hollow Knight, and Celeste in "recent" years despite having games in their pipeline. We will see.