MSN just dropped a ranked list of the 25 best video game stories of all time, and you already know what happens next. Half the internet agrees, the other half is composing angry paragraphs about an omission, and somewhere a forum thread just hit 40 pages.

That's the fun of lists like this. Nobody actually expects them to crown a winner. They exist to start arguments in the best possible way, the way guildmates argue over the best raid tier at 1 a.m. when the DPS check has already wiped you four times.

Two names from the source writeup that jump out: Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2. I can't tell you exactly where they sit in the order without clicking through, but I can tell you why both belong in any conversation like this. The suicide mission in Mass Effect 2 is still the gold standard for making your choices feel like they matter. Every squadmate you recruited, every loyalty mission you ran, every ship upgrade you bought, it all pays off in one gauntlet where anyone can die because you got sloppy. It's good writing wired directly into gameplay, which is rarer than it should be. The intergalactic soap opera of it all, the romances, the betrayals, the bartender on Illium, it holds up.

And Arthur Morgan's arc in Red Dead Redemption 2 is maybe the most expensive character study ever put on a disc. Slow burn doesn't begin to describe it. You spend dozens of hours living inside a dying way of life, and by the end, the story has quietly reorganized how you feel about everyone in that camp.

The full 25 stretches across genres and eras, the kind of list that wants to make room for RPG epics and smaller character pieces alike. And that's the right instinct, because games don't tell stories one way. Sometimes it's a branching dialogue tree. Sometimes it's the environmental storytelling of a ruined vault, or a journal entry, or the silence between two characters riding horses. Sometimes the story is the one you and your friends made up yourselves on a wipe night that went sideways.

My favorite thing about rankings like this is what they reveal about the moment we're in. Fifteen years ago a mainstream list of best game stories would've leaned almost entirely on RPGs and adventures. Now the medium's storytelling vocabulary is so much wider, and audiences expect actual narrative craft from shooters, farming sims, horror games, everything.

Will your personal number one be on there? Probably not, if my Discord is any indication. The debates started the second the list went up. TJ and I already have a running bet about whether any Final Fantasy made the cut, and if one did, we will never agree on which one deserved the slot. That fight is ours, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Go read the full ranking, then come argue. What's the best story a game ever told you, and more importantly, does it hold up on a replay?