What’s the best implementation of a common idea you’ve seen in a game?

I cannot believe how much I love the way Starfield implemented New Game Plus.

It’s perfection. It’s integrated into the expanding lore of the setting, it’s weird as heck, and it allows you to do and say things no other game has ever been brave enough to do, in my opinion. Ever been playing a NG+ and gotten to a key point in the story where you know what’s gonna happen? Well, in Starfield, they literally let you walk in the room and say I already did all this once so here’s the skinny on what the MacGuffin actually is, and better still, there’s even a built in lore reason for why you can’t just go back to the same exact places to do the main story quest — because those places aren’t there.

It’s genius. You get to replay the game on your original character, with all of their powers and abilities — but none of their gear and the reason for that is brilliant too, I’m not even mad — and you can even use your knowledge of the previous playthrough in the current playthrough as a plot point. You can literally just tell everyone you’ve already done all of this and skip entire questlines, or you can keep it to yourself and replay the previous events while making baffling asides about things you shouldn’t know about.

Seeing this has me thinking of how other games have implemented ideas that are pretty common and made them distinctive in some way. Whether it’s the way Kingdoms of Amalur used an ultimate combo move system and made it part of your character’s mystical origin, or the really clever way that Darksiders Genesis handled juggling two different characters, or even The Ruined King’s take on fusing JRPG turn-based combat with League of Legends mechanics, there have been a few games out there that have taken something we all take for granted and made it cool and interesting. What’s your favorite way a game took a familiar concept and made it their own?