Rules: just pick 1 and explain why.
I’ve been playing since the NES and despite being from a low income family I had the luck of being able to play and own many consoles over the 3 decades of my life, plus some pc.
If you ask me right now? Resident Evil 4 (2005).
A before and after in gaming, to this day still extremely fun to play even for casuals but 20 years ago it was THE masterpiece. And everyone took notice of it, everyone played it, even players that didn’t cared about resident evil. The gameplay was so good that it got photocopied by everyone right after in the action genre.
Arguably the last big innovator in videogames minus Minecraft and… PUBG (Fortnite did it better I know).
Try to NOT pick your favourite game, that’s a different thing.
As someone who liked FF7 a lot as a kid,and a bunch of other FF games, I really like remake.
I think 1 thing you have to know going in, is it isn’t FF7 just in a new engine with updated combat, and I think remake is a bit of a bad name for it.
Reimagining might be better.
You are correct that it isn’t the whole game, but it takes Midgard and makes a handful of setup hours from the first game, a good 40 hours of compelling story and world building(with some side stuff as well). It is very clearly a different story with changes that are interesting, but could very easily go off the rails if it isn’t properly managed.
It also has some incredible improvements to certain characters and even to areas of Midgard expanding on what was a very small part of the original games.
Combat is very good at mixing turn based actions(skills and spells and items), with action based combos. Dodging is a bit of a bait and is more positioning because you don’t get i-frames to actually dodge, blocking is important but doesn’t feel great(I heard it is improved in rebirth). The ability to switch characters and how unique they all feel is really enjoyable to me as well.
I am eagerly looking forward to Rebirth on PC cause I ain’t buying a PS5.
Remake in my opinion is significantly better than 16 which I think is pretty mid, and I would recommend it as long as you don’t expect a 1 to 1 of the original.