A few from me...
- Tales of Berseria. I absolutely despised Tales of Zestiria, and learning that this would be a prequel put me right off it. Velvet's awful character design and the theme made me think this was going to be some preachy emotional garbage with the usual Tales tropes that got boring several games ago, and the same mediocrity that plagued Zestiria. What I got is the second-best game I have ever played...and honestly, in some aspects - characterisation at the very least - I'd say this tops Xenoblade. I highly doubt the Tales series will be able to surpass this...at least not for another decade or so.
- Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I don't know what convinced me to try this, but I am so very glad I did. I wanted to explore, and I very rarely experience that with open world games, especially when the world is MASSIVE. With AC there is the added problem of the Animus narrative, which is the whole reason I had avoided the series up to this point - it's a BAD narrative framework. It breaks immersion completely. Odyssey had moments of this, but they were few and far between, and lasted for all of a few seconds...and the rest of the game more than made up for it.
- The Ace Attorney series. I wasn't expecting to like these games as much as I did, because problem solving isn't really my sort of thing. But the narrative more than made up for the occasional irritation (although I could have done without the one pointless case every AA game seems to have to have, as well as the bad touch-screen and mic gimmicks) and I grew very fond of the cast.
- Final Fantasy XIII-2. FFXIII was divisive, and I came down very hard on the "I hate this" side of things. But I actually really enjoyed XIII-2, for many of the reasons I enjoyed X-2: it gave the protagonist some much-needed backbone and personality of her own. Much as Yuna was weak-willed and pathetic in X but more assertive and likeable in X-2, Serah transformed into a strong and fairly likeable character not dependant on Snow, and it was nice to see. The game also had a proper villain, more responsive and engaging combat, and even though the narrative was absolute trash it wasn't afraid to run away with it sometimes with paradox endings, and I could appreciate that. Lightning Returns wrecked it all again, but XIII-2 was an unusually good title.
- Disgaea. Would you believe that I initially really didn't want to play the first Disgaea title? It looked awkward and grindy and filled with unnecessary statistics. It is all of these things, but it is the best SRPG series ever made for precisely those reasons. I wasn't expecting how engrossing and enjoyable it was going to be once all of those things finally clicked for me; once I knew what to do to maximise the potential of my characters. I also didn't expect the cast and the ridiculous story to be as good as it was.
- Final Fantasy XII. The opening few hours were very, VERY hard going. It drops you right in the middle of it and then throws you back into the shoes of Vaan, one of the worst FF protagonists ever...not as bad as Zidane or Tidus, but still BAD. FFXII's story grew on me with time, and once I got the hang of the Gambit system it became my favourite FF title.
...there are more. Watch this space for Part 2.