A perfect video game is a game that everyone on the planet can enjoy from the day they start playing it to the day they die.
I don't think a perfect video game will ever be made. Not every game appeals to every person. Each person is going to have their own taste in the way they experience a game, and what is ideal for me won't be ideal for anyone else. Nor should a perfect video game exist; if one did, it would make every other video game pale in comparison.
When I think of the closest thing to a video game can come to perfection, a few names pop up again and again. Minecraft is the first and closest example that currently exists. It can be played by anyone for almost any reason at all; the missing piece of narrative can be found on Youtube, in every person sharing the story of their Minecraft world with anyone willing to watch.
Minecraft is such a joy to play. It's an infinite world that resembles a sandbox that has so much variety in the types of sand that it may as well be something else. The game can be understood immediately by anyone looking on, even for the first time. You can play by yourself or jump on a server to have fun with friends or strangers. When the game runs dry, all you need to do to reinvigorate it is download someone's map, install some mods, or even step away for awhile and let your mind wander.
I've built my fair share of Minecraft worlds since release. There's a whole youtube series on a modpack called Magic Maiden where cute little maids were perfect stand-ins for soldiers. Being able to command my own personal army while delving into a dungeon and completely wrecking the entire world as I went along is such a unique experience that I was still playing it up until 2018 when the Aquatic Update released.
In the past, I would have said that Minecraft was a wonderful game with a flawed experience in its gameplay loop. The end result was always worthwhile but it took a long time to get there. Mods in Minecraft's early life span were very popular to shore up some of the missing content and add in systems that could be in the game someday.
Now, the game doesn't really have any glaring flaws. The worst I can say about the game is that you can't get more than 200 people on a server or that it doesn't run well on every computer.
Super Metroid is Nintendo's shining masterpiece of a platformer that did all of the right things at the right time. , but the game is designed to be played multiple times. You get better and better at it each time the game is played and the game rewards you for getting better.
Super Metroid is one of the most ran games in all of speedrunning experience. The game has a functionally infinite skill ceiling. It's a game that anyone can get into due to the low skill floor. The amount of mastery you can express over the game and the sheer amount of competition that can be eked out of a game that is only 3 MB in size is quite astonishing.
Super Metroid only has a few flaws. The graphics are dated due to being
designed for a CRT and the controls are kind of weird to wrap your head
around. There's a concept known as the "Metroid Moment", where you can't
figure out what to do so you start bombing everything you can see. The
very end of the game has a door that you can save in, and can never go
back. A proper update to the graphics via hacking and a control scheme
that closer resembles Metriod: Zero Mission would fix nearly everything.
Super Metroid by itself isn't that interesting to me. When you strap on another game and randomize both of them, well... a thousand hours of my life have been very well spent. I have some friends that like to race against me and there's a niche speedrunning community around this ascended meme that I can poke at any time. It does help that both of the games are masterpieces in and of their own right; putting them together like this has to be the crowning achievement of ROM hacking.
The experience of running two games side-by-side and figuring out the best route to get from point A to point F is quite compelling. The technical skill to do this fast is also quite fun. The worst thing I can say about strapping two games together like this is that Super Metroid has roughly 40% of the time in any given run but requires far, far more skill to pull off at any decent speed. That and the bugs.
Mabinogi is my go-to for a general gaming experience. The sheer amount of content that you can pull out of an MMORPG that is currently 16 years old is something that only really happens in a game that's constantly worked on by a large team. The game is still putting out content to this day.
Mabinogi's combat system is quite unique. It is best described as rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock meets Dark Souls. Most of the skills have strengths and weaknesses, including the basic attack. You have to be aware of what each enemy is doing and have the game knowledge of what every skill does. Skills have massive penalties for guessing wrong. There are large charge up times and huge moments where you get stunned from an attack and can't do a thing.
Characters aren't broken up into classes like other games in the same genre. Instead, your character can learn every skill in the game. Characters are differentiated by the amount of training they want to do in a skill, and a lot of skills have learning requirements based on the level of other skills. Spend enough time using each skill and you'll feel like you master both the mechanics and the skill leveling system.
Mabinogi's crafting system puts Minecraft to shame. Every skill in the game can be trained, including life skills. Each skill has a minigame for processing or finishing a product, and the end results can be worn or used for other crafts depending on whether it's a utility skill, like carpentry, or a finishing skill, like handicraft. Enchanting is present in the usual MMO modifier style, but it's generally forgiving to use. Just ignore the pay-to-win reforging hammers added in 2016 and all is fine in the world.
Dungeons complement both of these ideas so perfectly that I'm surprised I haven't seen it elsewhere. You can enter an instance of a dungeon, fight off room after room of enemies, gather some of their loot, and pick herbs or mine ores along the way. You can get weapons, crafting items, or enchant scrolls at the end of the dungeon, but it's random so you're encouraged to try the same dungeon multiple times.
The story is something else. Mabinogi's entire world is steeped in Celtic lore, until it's not. One day you'll be working through the rolling plains around Bangor and hearing the story of Lugh, the Knight of Light. The next day you'll be exploring the icy land of giants or the lost desert of the elves. The story progresses from searching out the shadow world, to gods and alchemic magic, all the way up to divine creatures trying to corrupt everything in the entire land. Quality here is good and the variety has to be played to be believed.
No old MMORPG is complete without completely arbitrary side content. There's a land of forever carnival called Festia that rolls the idea of carnival rides, christmas, and various other holidays together in a place you can warp to at any time. You can bring out your inner merchant
I really want to play Mabinogi again. Unfortunately, the game has bright white full-screen flashing that easily causes migraines if I see more than two. One of the reasons I played so much of the game was that there was a modding system that could change some of the client-side graphics. Flashing could be disabled, shadow mission instances could have maps showing where the orbs were, and there was a bunch of other useful effects that mods provide.
As much as I want to play the game again... I do not wish to torture myself. The modding system is updated sparsely, if at all. Some of the content is still a huge amount of fun, but some of it false flat compared to everything else the game has to offer. Ranking up skills require ability points, and when those are gone the urge to train anything vanishes.
There's also a few things that don't belong. Shakespeare does not belong in a game about gods and celts, and neither does alchemy. At least alchemy was worked into the story in a way that made sense... sort of.
I do think that a video game in a single category can exist, and maybe
even cross across quite a few genres to pull in a lot of people. Minecraft is certainly evidence of that. I don't even think that a perfect video game should exist. There's a lot of value to be found in the flaws, quirks, and bugs that come with games. Sometimes the flaws can make the experience that much better. The bugs make things more memorable at the very least.