pokemon colosseum and pokemon xd gale of darkness are both honestly such good games and i wish more people knew about them since look, listen, how many games do you get to actually have the team rocket experience by stealing pokemon (bonus points for colosseum having you play as a former criminal) and you start the games canonically with either eevee (xd) or espeon + umbreon (colosseum). they also introduce the singular best character in all of pokemon, miror b and the games are actually surprisingly difficult considering they're spinoffs from the gamecube era and i just think more people should know about them.

pokemon conquest too since it's another largely forgotten side game from the nintendo ds and it's a weird play but it's also just genuinely interesting since it's medieval pokemon kingdoms where you have partner dynamics and most pokemon evolve from how strong your relationship is with them (instead of level or power or movesets) and the pokemon art is super gorgeous. the combat's a lil weird, since it definitely plays a bit more like a fire emblem game than a pokemon game, and the story's a lil bit weaker but the post-game story is almost a whole new game too, since you then get to start smaller individual campaigns playing as various npcs and get to unlock a bunch of new 'mon you didn't have access to in the main game. honestly, it's the only pokemon game i ever truly tried to 100%, and i still feel sad to this day that i lost the copy with the attempt when i was kicked out of my home years ago.

paper mario 64 and paper mario: the thousand year door are also great plays (i say knowing that the ttyd remake is probs gonna get hype back for them), they're just genuinely great stories with lots of cool world-building (there's an entire penguin village! a haunted forest of boos! an ice castle with a dead king!) and a fun partner system and a turn-based combat system with experience points and a badge system to make it fun and the speedrun + randomizer communities around at least pape64 are honestly just so great and wholesome. like. i usually replay pape64 once every few years, just because the game is so fun even as a replay, and i would honestly want little more than to go up to miyamoto himself and tell him how much these games mean to me and how much i wish he'd actually bring the paper mario series back to when it was "a mario rpg but they all just happen to be made of paper" rather than "a mario game where everyone's paper and that's it that's the prompt"

for a non-nintendo and current game? uh. probably slime rancher and my friendly neighborhood. i've spent way too many hours herding slimes to not highly recommend the game (i am still so sad that the sequel doesn't have multiplayer, i just wanna chill with some friends herding slimes together), and my friendly neighborhood is just a really fun take on the mascot horror genre but with a nice, neat story and resident evil style mechanics that just work really well together. they're both great games and i think they deserve more recognition than they get.