I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
I'm also saying Baldur's Gate 3. The writing is juvenile, the combat is a slog, the characters are cliches, it retcons the story and characters of the game it's supposed to be a sequel to, it has possibly a worse UI than the original Baldur's Gate, and the famed reactivity and choice only works if you do things exactly how the developers intended you to do them. Oh, and the music is just forgettable.
and the famed reactivity and choice only works if you do things exactly how the developers intended you to do them
Even after patches, a fair number of plot moments were missed/flubbed not because of bad choices but just "you should have done X first" timing jank. I never met the Zhentarim hideout people because I did other quests too much so I got an empty room after convincing the lookout to give me the key.
Do you think it's better to take the time to replay 1 and 2 before trying 3, or are the retcons so bad that it's better to not even know what happened earlier in the story? I played a bit of 1 a long time ago and don't remember anything.
I don't think you'd gain much enjoyment of 3 by replaying the originals. The characters that come back are basically just for fanservice and the story kind of acknowledges the premise of the originals but conflicts heavily with Throne of Bhaal. Other than that, there's just a few written jokes referencing various old characters. So if you want to play 3, just go for it.