APB: Reloaded is by far the best one I’ve seen despite the game being pay to win. You can customize your character to no end from designing decals for clothes, tattoos, cars, even making your own theme song. Not to mention the basic stuff like face, hair, and body customization. But like I said, be wary of the game. It’s a sweat fest.

Trash game, but I gotta give it to Fallout 4, mainly because I like some of the presets. It’s first-person so you don’t look at your character all that much, and just picking a preset I really like is an important feature. If all the presets are trash and I gotta work, that’s keeping me from the game.

We joke about Skyrim giving you too many choices and people spending hours in character creation. That’s not a good thing. I’m all for choices, but give me a few good presets to choose from and give me the option to change it later. Cyberpunk and Animal Crossing are two (vastly different!) games that let you remake your character at any point, short of changing your gender (and in AC, your name). So you don’t have to stress about it too much at first, you can get into the game, and then change it up later. (Cyberpunk lets you do it at any mirror. So does Animal Crossing, but you’ll have to buy one first — or move in a neighbor who has one in their default house, like I think Kidd does (and regarding his name, yes, he is a goat)).

With games like Cyberpunk with full character voice acting, I wish they’d tell you about the voice actor. Like, in Cyberpunk, “This is Cherami Leigh, she works out of Los Angeles, and she voices Asuna from Sword Art Online and (list a few other notable roles).” Or “This is Gavin Drea, he’s from Ireland, and list some of his credits (he hasn’t been anyone major in anything major).” Rather than just listen to the voices. Not specifically because I think voice actors should get more credit (I do, and they should, and you already know Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba are in it and who they are, so why the hell not) but because I think it’s more information about the voice than just listening to a sample they recorded that probably isn’t even in the main game.

Monopoly.

From old worn-out shoe to indestructible battleship - everything is possible!

Still remembering all those epic battles among the siblings on who gets to play the racing car… Good stuff!

I wish I could recommend the character creator for Phantasy Star Online 2, because in theory it’s great, with the ability to mix and match clothing layers, recolor clothing, fine tune your body proportions, select from various customizable faces, etc. Most importantly, you can attach accessories to your character however you like and adjust their scaling and rotation in ways that let you repurpose them. For example, for a while I was using a head ornament, scaled down, rotated, and clipped into my face, as a pair of fangs, and it looked pretty convincing!

I can’t actually recommend it though because the process of actually collecting outfits and accessories is FOMO gacha hell. (Gacha items purchased with “AC,” the real-money only currency, can also be bought secondhand from other players, but you’ll pay an arm and a leg for them, and you can’t trade items bought with “SG” which is the premium currency that can also be earned in game.)

Elder Scrolls Morrowind and Oblivion, and (to some extent) Fallout 3 & New Vegas. They had a good amount of character customization compared to their later entries.

Cyberpunk 2077 had quite a bit as well, more than what I was expecting.

Stardew Valley has a lot of different shirts and accessories to choose from during character creation.

You could argue that, to some extent, Minecraft has the best character creation in the form of skins.

I think the wii mii creation system is probably the best since there’s such an excessive amount of customization while being still very limited in scope that you can make some crazy stuff

There used to be this game called Aion. It was an MMO from like 2007. I had, hands down, the best character on there. The character looked like a cartoonified version of a Muppet Mr Bean. Most people just made short and wide characters with tiny heads, but that’s all games. My character was like 10ft tall, super lanky with a beer belly, and made everybody else look ridiculous with how interesting he was. I honestly could have made a real life muppet version of him out of foam and sticks and felt and stuff.

Edit: apparently it’s still around. Which is wild. Maybe I’ll make a new account or see if my old character is still there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aion_(video_game) it’s Korean and from 2008. I don’t remember it being particularly good or unique other than you could glide places with wings, but that’s been done by every game under the sun now.

It also looks like there’s a sequel that either just came out recently or is about to very soon.

Not the best, but GaiaOnline has a soft spot in my memory.

I know it’s not what you meant, but Paranoia (the TTRPG) has a great mechanic where each player’s choices pisses off other player, ah you picked weapons skill 2, cool, so the next player gets -2 on weapons, hope you didn’t expected a high skill there.

It’s Dragon’s Dogma for me

I really enjoyed the character creator in Sunset Overdrive, it’s too bad the actual game was garbage.