My favorite game would have to be Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland. Totori was my first adventure into the Atelier series and I was instantly hooked during the first hour of gameplay. The game focused around alchemy and time management, where adventuring outside your workshop and performing alchemy would take a certain amount of days. The game gives you three years to do the initial things, and then an extra two years for more. The time system in the game is very lenient, and a newcomer can pick this game up without feeling intimidated.
Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland was one of the first games in quite a while that I really tried to go out of my way to get my hands on. I actually wrote a blog post about it. I ended up using a quarter of a tank of gas visiting different Gamestops, and revisiting some, to see if they had any premium copies left. I eventually had to resort to purchasing online, and had to spend an extra ten dollars. However, the sixty dollars spent on this game was well worth it, even though at that point I knew nothing about it, or the series as a whole.
Atelier Totori is also one of the first games in quite a while that had me playing for longer sessions. Most games I played at the time I could hardly play for an hour, but Totori was played for at least three hours per sitting. It seemed I could never put the game down. The gameplay was great, and felt very rewarding when it came to getting a good ending. There was even a time in the game that almost made me cry. The game had what I believe to be a great soundtrack, especially the opening and ending themes. There was nothing that I disliked about this game.
It was a hard decision to make, whether or not to talk about Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland or Super Mario Bros., but after thinking it over, my love for Super Mario Bros. just couldn't compare to how much I loved Totori.