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.

Why We Love The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Three GQ writers share their experiences with the biggest game of the year so far.

"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.