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This week's release of Persona 5 is just one highlight in Japan's crazy-good year in video games so far.

If you, at any point in your life, loved video games, odds are you owe Japan a big thank you. For years, the country led the industry, regularly exporting seminal classics from Space Invaders to Super Mario Bros to Street Fighter. Companies like Nintendo and Capcom produced beloved hits in almost every genre, and American video game fans often had to wait months for exciting new titles they read about in enthusiast magazines to be localized and exported Stateside. Lately though? Not so much.

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"Japan used to rule video games," reads one 2014 headline from The Verge's Sam Byford, "so what happened?" The story centers on quotes from Keiji Inafune, the creator of Mega Man, who paints a grim picture of the Japanese games industry as "a large tree that's just begun to wilt," a process that began in the mid-aughts, as Western games like Call of Duty and Mass Effect grew in popularity, and persisted well into the 2010s.

At least, it did until this year. Four months in, 2017 has been absolutely stacked with excellent video games of all stripes, and most of them from Japan. We've told you about a few of these—most notably, Yakuza 0, Resident Evil 7, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild—but they're just the tip of the iceberg. Here are a few you really shouldn't miss.

Persona 5: Out this week, Persona 5 is wholly unique. It's full of life and verve and full-on anime weirdness. It's also made up of a bunch of disparate parts that don't seem like they work together on paper, but absolutely sing in action. Persona 5 takes the monster collecting and turn-based fights of a game like Pokémon, a Buffy-style plot about Japanese high school teens taking on secret supernatural evil, awkward teen romance, the coolest damn jazz-lounge score you've ever heard, and an art style that makes you feel cooler just looking at it—and creates a pure confection of a game.

If you've never played a Persona game before—and you don't need to know a thing about the series to play Persona 5, or any Persona game, really—the whole experience can feel a bit, well, odd. There's a bit of culture shock to adjust to, both in the very real aspects of Japanese social life it reproduces, with its suffixes and pronouns and a very different school year that you will learn to navigate intimately—and also with the storytelling conventions and tropes of anime, which can sometimes be uncomfortably horny but never explicit. That said, Persona 5 is also a game that attempts to wrestle with big, heavy themes—one of the first antagonists you'll encounter is a powerful gym teacher who uses his position to abuse the volleyball team he coaches physically and female students sexually. He's a contemptible scumbag, but because you play as a troublemaking teen who associates with troublemaking teens, it's his word against yours—and it's not like we live in a world that aggressively sides with the victims of the powerful.

Good thing you and your pals have a secret superpower—one that allows you to travel to a funhouse-mirror version of reality where bad people's twisted desires and perceptions driving their greed and abuse are given physical forms whose asses you can kick. In that way, the game is a kind of supernatural revenge fantasy, in which its teen heroes target those who have been corrupted—and protected—by power and wealth, on behalf of those who have been victimized by them.

Persona 5 is a big game, one of those 80-plus-hour monsters that might make you want to just watch a TV show instead. But it never feels big, and it's extremely conducive to playing in short bursts. The game unfolds across a calendar year, and each day you only have the time to do maybe one or two things out of an immense list of choices. Are you gonna hang out with a friend after school? Which one? Wait, there's a test coming up, you should study. Or go on that date. Or you know, fight some demons.

I know it sounds terribly unsexy to recommend a game that mimics the busyness of normal life and also superhero crimefighting, but Persona 5 does it with conviction and confidence and the boldest visual design in a game this year. It knows it's cool, and doesn't really care what you think. Good thing it actually is, too.

Nier: Automata: Science fiction is really fond of repeating itself; depicting possible, often dystopian, futures to explore similar ideas about the nature of existence and humanity. This is why we have so many stories about technology and robots, some of which are great (like the original Ghost in the Shell movie), some of which are not (like the new Ghost in the Shell movie). It's rare then, that a genre as shopworn as post-apocalyptic robot uprising can truly surprise or unsettle while also being remarkably meaningful, but Nier: Auotomata comes out of nowhere to be one of this year's standout games.

Automata is a sort-of sequel to the little-played and nearly-forgotten 2010 game Nier, a messy, frustrating work that hid away some incredibly wild twists that revealed the game you thought you were playing to be something else entirely. While Automata doesn't expect you to be the least bit familiar with Nier, it does attempt to accomplish something similar, constantly throwing new ideas and weird twists at you, which only get deeper and wilder once you finish the game. Seriously: The game goes out of its way to tell you that you haven't finished the game when you think you have finished the game, encouraging you to find alternate endings that substantially shift your understanding of what you just played through. It's like watching a Nolan or Shyamalan film, and then finding out there are more twists to find. And the straightforward story you play through the first time ain't bad either—even though it reads as a bit generic on paper, about a war between androids who look like and fight on behalf of humanity against the more straightforward robot machines of an alien nature—the presentation of it is eerie and uncomfortable, with some truly bizarre scenes casually dropped in front of you like they're no big deal.

It's also one of the most self-aware video games you'll ever play. It knows and actively makes fun of the things video games have you do—sometimes making you the butt of its jokes, like when it straight-up says it's not going to tell you how to save the game; that you'll have to play and find out. (I'll spare you this one: You have to clear the first level. It might take you a couple tries.) Nier: Automata has a weird sense of humor, but it's also a joy to play through, never settling into a predictable rhythm and switching genres at a moment's notice. It's an old-school arcade shooter one moment, a 2D platformer another, and the modern 3D action game you thought you were buying most of the time. I'm not done with Nier: Automata, but I've not played a single game like it, and will happily seek out every ending I'm able to find.

Gravity Rush 2: Easily the most straightforward game on this list, Gravity Rush 2 is refreshingly simple: You play as Kat, a girl with gravity-warping powers, and you like helping people. Of course, things get a bit more involved than that—eventually, you get wrapped up in a plot by the ruling class of a flying city plans to steal from and raze the slums beneath it for their own profit—but you don't mind, because helping people means using your powers. And Gravity Rush 2 has one of the coolest powers in video games.

Put as simply as I can manage, it's a game that let's you decide which direction gravity works for you: Pointing your cursor skyward will turn up into down and you'll begin to fall straight up. Or point at the side of a building and you'll immediately fall straight towards it with dizzying momentum. It's wild and disorienting and seems confusing when you talk about it. Don't worry though, it all makes sense, and it never gets old—partly because Gravity Rush 2's protagonist is kind of a klutz, crash landing willy-nilly as she falls her way wherever you want to go.

For its sunny disposition, Gravity Rush 2 is, as I hinted earlier, a game that's pretty thoughtful about issues of class and wealth. It's a theme that kind of comes out of nowhere but ultimately is handled quite well, a pleasant surprise in a game full of pleasant surprises. It's charming and fun and despite the confounding gameplay conceit at its core, remarkably coherent. That said, there are one or two curveballs the game throws your way—namely a big, unwieldy boss battle and an unforgiving escape sequence—that are immensely frustrating, but so much of the game is so delightful that they mostly come across like the nuts in a white chocolate macadamia cookie—a really bad idea that sticks out more than you'd like, but doesn't change the fact that you're eating a damn good cookie.

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