"I giggled and continued my Sunday routine (lunch, walk in the park in this beautiful sunny day, a bit of Dodonpachi)" - mecca 2023, not the best year for gaming ever, not by a long shot.
Yep even 1998 was mostly sequels. It's just that a lot of those games like MGS and FF7 were transitioning to 3d and everyone was like omg. Unless, we find a new Fourth Dimension somehow, we will never have that experience again. best we can hope for is franchises like Souls and Zelda going full open world which they already have.
There were a lot of amazing sequels in 1998, but there were also a lot of great original games including StarCraft, Banjo-Kazooie, Half-Life, Thief and Baldur's Gate to name a few.