Players have chosen the highest quality trilogies in the gaming industry – Mass Effect, God of War, Metal Gear Solid, and Batman: Arkham are leading

There's a special category of game series where you don't have to pick a favorite entry. Three games in a row turn out so consistent in quality that debating the best one becomes a pleasant formality.

That exact phenomenon sparked a discussion about trilogies that never dropped the ball once.

The original God of War trilogy pulled in maybe the loudest consensus of all. This is one of those rare cases where the bar holds up not for three games but for all five mainline releases in a row.

From Ascension to the 2018 reboot, the series never delivered a genuinely weak entry, which for a franchise with two decades of history is nearly unbelievable.

Metal Gear Solid came up first and dragged along nostalgia for that soundtrack with "The Best Is Yet to Come."

Opinions split nicely here: some give their heart to the first game for its tight base atmosphere, while others defend the second one and Raiden story, which plenty of people rejected on release. That brilliant tanker intro mission and the Zone of the Enders nod still come up as a gold standard for delivery.

A separate thread formed around Batman: Arkham and the endless Arkham Knight argument. The complaint is always the same – too much Batmobile, and boss fights, including Deathstroke, lean on tank sections.

Someone calculated that driving sections take up around 19% of the whole game if you play it casually, and the locations themselves, like the Stagg Airships and Pannessa Studios, are built well for stealth and combat. Nobody has complaints about the graphics either – over a decade later, it still holds up.

A few paradoxes snuck into the list too. Someone proposed Half-Life as the perfect trilogy made of two and a half games, with Alyx in VR becoming one of the strongest single-player experiences out there. A similar irony landed on Portal and Dark Souls, where people still fiercely defend the second entry for its particular charm despite the wave of criticism against it.

As for Mass Effect, the person behind the collage admitted they put it together specifically for this series, and people remember the first game for its dense lore and the Sovereign reveal, delivered in full cosmic horror fashion.

The list kept growing: Metro, BioShock with Burial at Sea, the original Resident Evil, GTA from the third game through San Andreas, Uncharted, Baldur's Gate, Crash Bandicoot, the new Doom, and the Bungie-era Halo.

Everyone has their own idea of the perfect trilogy, and the urge to replay it hits all of them every couple of years.