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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:Awesome. Top 5 is all RPGs, Fridge would be proud. My baby's all growed up 🥲 Chrono Trigger at #3???  
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Dec 30, 2023 09:11
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You wrote some lovely things about some lovely games! This was a joy to read 
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Dec 30, 2023 09:16
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Blah blah blah incredible year for videogames etc. I usually count replays but also require i finish any game i list in the calendar year. Well this year there's so many good games that at least this once, I'm disqualifying replays, because I don't want to leave off orher good games. That doesn't mean all of my top ten is new(though a good portion is), just "new to me." I wanted to include YouTubes and images and stuff but I mostly wrote the blurbs on my phone on a long bus ride and I'm mostly editing it on my phone at a laundromat sp i just hope there aren't glaring spelling errors. Well lets start off with... Ineligible Replays Chrono Trigger (PC) Once upon a time this ranked very high on my "best games of all time" list. It's still a great, fun game, with a fun if simple story, but my love for it has a huge nostalgia component even though I didn't play it first until I played the PSX version in 2001. The soundtrack is literally all bangers though. Control (PS4) If I hadn't disqualified it at the eleventh hour (was tempted to exempt it from rhe no replays rule), it would have been my GOTY. I played it back in 2021, but this time I did all the side content and read EVERYTHING. It felt like a new game. There's so much lore here, and flying around as a spectre of death is fun as hell - it feels much like you are playing as the game's boss once you have multilaunch. But the game just kind of...ends. Remedy did this with Alan Wake 1 as well. I will buy Control 2 day one but I hope it actually has some resolution. Disco Elysium (PC) "An inordinate amount of time passes. It is utterly void of struggle. No ex-wives are contained within it." A three-year stalwart, was in my top 5 both in 2021 and 2022. This game is at the same time incredibly depressing and distressing, but also, in my opinion, ultimately hopeful. And I think at the end of the day, the most important message, for Raphael Ambrosius Costeau, for Revachol, for the deserter, is to accept the past and move on. But I'll keep coming back to this game, probably forever. Hades (PC) What can I say about this game? First time in 3 years it hasn't been on my top ten, due to my new no replays rule. In 2021 I played it on PS5. In 2022 I played it on PS4. This year I 100%'ed it on the Deck. I just hope they make the RNG for events to happen less ridiculous in Hades 2. The Last of Us Part I (PS5) I bought this drat game for the third time because I wanted to replay it in the wake of the first season of the show. Still fun to play, great story and scenery. And scenes that hit hard a decade ago still do. But where is Factions, Druckmann?!? Yakuza Kiwami (PC) "KIRYU CHAN!" The story is pretty simple and the combat is always a little disappointing after Yakuza 0 (which I replayed right at the end of 2022). Especially needing to make sure you have a certain heat counter for the first boss. That said, it's still a good game. And Pocket Racing is always welcome. Yakuza Kiwami 2 (PC) I was about to say how the plot is dumb and doesn't make sense if you think about it even a little bit, but I guess I could write that about any Yakuza game. That said, my favorite main antagonist in any Yakuza game. Though I still don't get why he's blonde. "New to Me" Honorable Mentions Alan Wake Remastered (PS5) I never played this back in the day as I had sold my 360 by the time it came out, and on the strength of Control, I decided to get it and get caught up for Alan Wake 2. Boy am I glad I did. The combat and random spawns especially are frustrating but the story grabbed me from the start, along with the chapter format (which to be honest they more or less kept for Control with the cutscenes at the end of each main mission). Alan Wake is a terrible writer but his writing has a theatric quality that works hearing him read the manuscript pages...but imagine actually reading a whole novel written that way  The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons (GBC) I think I never beat this (or Oracle of Ages) because shortly after I got them, I got a PS2 and started discovering the whole PSX generation I'd missed. This year I played it using my original cart on the Analogue Pocket. It was a fun Zelda game with a few legitimately challenging boss fights. I really dislike being limited to two items though, where the sword and shield count as items. Sort of wish it had come out on GBA so it could have used the shoulder buttons. Return of the Obra Dinn (PC) I was fascinated with this immediately, from the unique graphics and play style to the sparse but effective audio. But it quickly became kind of tedious to me. What music is here is perfectly cromulent. But I quickly grew to dread the initial playback of a memory. It's always the same song which I grew tired of from its repetition, and you can't end the scene early, but neither can you keep it from ending at the end of the song. Also some of the triggers for memories are ridiculously hard to find with no cue except for the watch being brought out. Also the story was in the end, logical in its own way but inconsequential, existing only for the sake of being a puzzle to solve and kind of bad otherwise. Glad I experienced it but I doubt I'll ever replay it. Now on to... The Top Ten 10. Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun (PC) "Falling will be considered...dereliction of holy duty." This game is both charming as gently caress and metal as gently caress. Plays very much like a more modern Doom, but with a lot more weapons. The enemies and scenery are accurate to the lore, the retro graphics (both the 2D cutscenes and sprite 3D gameplay) are great. The bolter and heavy bolter are satisfying to use - the heavy bolter sound, :chefskiss: . Where the game falls a bit short is first in level design - it's hit or miss, and level 3-4 honestly cost this at least one spot on the list, whoever designed it should feel bad - and it's just too long. I think it could be improved by being like 2/3 as long, but add a deathmatch or horde mode for replayability. I'll buy a sequel day one though. 9. Yakuza: Dead Souls (PS3) "What things?" "You're going to make me say it? The zombies." Yes, I played this on my PS3 in TYOOL 2023. This game takes the Yakuza ridiculousness and says "how about we skip 11 and turn it up to 12?" There's a lot to live here for me - the story is actually quite good for a zombie story, and it's quite good for a Yakuza game. The shooting is awful as you've probably heard. It was a 2011 game from a team that didn't do shooters. I think a Kiwami / Gaiden revision that modernized the controls could be a truly great game. Favorite moments included Majima being excited about getting to fight zombies, and Kiryu trying to beat up the zombies and refusing to let people shoot them...because of course he would. Also in my mind this game is canon and nobody not even RGG can tell me otherwise. 8. Dave the Diver (PC) This game wasn't even on my radar, then I decided to get it when it was on sale for Black Friday tonsee what all the fuss was about. It immediately hooked its talons in. The core gameplay - diving for treasure and fish, and running the restaurant - is great, and you always want to do "one more dive." The pixel art is great, as is the music - especially in the deepest region. And the simple story and cast of characters are even memorable and fun! I thought midway through the game it might make my top five. However, it's dragged down because they have too many one time use gameplay ideas that just detract. Including but not limited to a crappy mini stardew valley introduced late game. Guys, you already blended roguelike and overcooked and pulled it off alright. Your game doesn't have to be every game! 7. Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (PS5) Insomniac keeps winning. This game takes the Manhattan of the previous games and adds scaled down versions of Randall's Island, Queens and Brooklyn. There's more options for movement including a new gliding option, and there are more combat options for both Peter and Miles. As you'd expect, the story is solid though you can probably see some of the twists coming from miles (heh) away. It was at least logical, unlike some of the actions of the primary antagonist in MM. The soundtrack was good but ultimately forgettable to me, compared to others from this year. I did get a little tired of fighting the standard enemies by the end of the game, but I can't wait to play Wolverine. 6. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch) In June I would have put this at number one. A million people have said a million things about this game, so I'll keep my comments brief and just say if you liked BOTW, this is even better. It's only not in my top five because honestly this plus my top five could have been number one in any other year, and ultimately this is just more BOTW which already was done. This year was just nuts. 5. Judgment (PC) "Objection!" This game takes a LONG time to get going, plot wise. But once it does, it's great. A spin-off from the Like a Dragon / Yakuza series, this (until Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name) was actually the most recent action game by RGG Studios, and it shows. The combat is fluid and fun. All the interfaces are slick. The investigations are fun as well, adding something to do outside of combat (besides mini games, which are of course here). Yagami and Kaito are a great team. The story is way better than any Yakuza game, with a villain with believable and sympathetic motives, even if he's not much of an adversary himself. The only things I don't like are the tailing missions, but there aren't so many of them as to drag it down. 4. Final Fantasy XVI (PS5) "The only fantasy here is yours...and we shall be its final witness!" Another game that wasn't on my radar at all, until I played the demo. From the art direction to the deep lore to an incredible soundtrack (which I bought not long after release, to be able to listen to it on a couple long flights), to the DMC like combat that eventually clicked with me, to the ridiculous eikon fights, I fell in love with this game. Clive is definitely my favorite FF protagonist. Cid is probably my favorite SE character, ever. I really don't think this counts as an RPG but I'll leave that debate to others, it's just a great game. And the ending will be argued about forever, though I dislike ambiguity for its own sake. At the risk of this going into goons.txt, this is only the third time I've cried at the ending of a game. The previous ones being MGS3 and GOW: Ragnarok. 3. Baldur's Gate III (PC) I never thought we'd see an isometric RPG with a huge branching story and tons of options be a hit again, let alone possibly a bigger hit than ever. I thought the genre was done. Larian proved it just needed some modern sensibilities. Despite the isometric gameplay, the up-close cutscenes with an incredible cast of characters draws you into the epic and desperate tale. One of the greatest soundtracks ever doesn't hurt either! The only thing I have to say against it, and this is personal opinion, is it's just too long. I spent sixty hours and got into Act 3 and then there's just so much to do, my analysis paralysis and desire to play other games made me stop. I will pick it back up and finish though - I enjoyed it enough to break my "must have finished the game" rule and include it in my top 3. 2. Outer Wilds (PS5/PC) I had tried to play this game once before and gotten stuck early. This time I stuck with it and got so into it that, as I was halfway through it on PS5 when I had to go out of town for a week, I bought it for Steam Deck and played through the whole thing on my trip. The sense of wonder and accomplishment here are addicting. Wondering if I can land on that comet, and then doing it...even if one of my first attempts ended with mw barely alive among the wreckage of my ship. My friend was watching me play and I said "uh, I don't think this is fixable!" I find the loop a bit too unforgiving at times, and the controls are just bad. But overall it's a wonderful game, with a great world, great art, great music, and an incredibly bittersweet ending. Finally... 1. Alan Wake II (PS5) "I understood how this worked now. I could control it. No more surprises." I never even had this on my list of games to consider buying, at the start of the year. This game, more than any other game I've played, challenged what I consider a good game to be. I hate the combat and controls. I don't know if hate is a strong enough word. But I was immediately drawn in by the story (again) and the characters. The way live action works with gameplay here surpasses any other attempt at blending the two mediums(media?). And the layers within layers, the fourth wall breaking, the self referential meta-ness of it all. And an amazing soundtrack. While there are many other games where I enjoyed the core gameplay loop more, Alan Wake 2 stayed with me like nothing else in this year of great games. And I wanted to always get to what insane scene was next, and it was always more than worth any frustrations I had with the game. I consider three parts of this game worth mentioning in the same sentence as the Ashtray Maze. After Control and this, I'll buy anything Remedy puts out sight unseen. Now I'm gonna start Like a Dragon Gaiden: TMWEHN tonight, my first game of next year. Tldr list for easy tabulation by veeg 10. Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 9. Yakuza: Dead Souls 8. Dave the Diver 7. Marvel's Spider-Man 2 6. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 5. Judgment 4. Final Fantasy XVI 3. Baldur's Gate III 2. Outer Wilds 1. Alan Wake II Nail Rat fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 30, 2023 09:41
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ToxicFrog posted:Definitely don't sleep on Death of the Outsider, either, it's shorter than the first two games, has some nice levels (although not, IMO, anything Dh2-good), and provides some closure to the underlying mystery of "what the gently caress is going on with the Outside anyways?" Yeah I scooped up Death of the Outsider in a Fanatical bundle yesterday, it's already installed and ready to go. Escobarbarian posted:02. Disco Elysium (2019) Feel like highlighting this part because I think it's so important to how successful the game is. You're spot on that the "weight of that history" is felt everywhere. It's hard to put into words but the setting feels substantial and real in a way that few other games ever manage, which maybe owes to how much it takes from real world history (plus that it was developed and written by an actual writer). You could probably argue that the game itself is about history, at least in part, and that the world it's set in is one of its main characters, but that's for smarter people than me to articulate.
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Dec 30, 2023 09:48
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I have always loved reading these threads, and have bought a decent number of games thanks to them. I intend to participate every year, but always procrastinate until I miss the deadline. I enjoyed so many games this year that I really wanted to make sure to add my voice to it. To simplify my choices, I'm only including games that I played for the first time this year and have beaten (although I may have fudged that a bit with a couple of them). Honorable Mentions: Powerwash Simulator: Probably the most perfect game to play while listening to a podcast. I played this game to completion last year on Gamepass, and bought it on Steam this year to do the entire thing again. I will keep booting this up every time they release new DLC. The Case of the Golden Idol DLC: This was one of my favorite games of last year, and I could take new DLC for it forever, especially when the quality is this high. The recently announced sequel is quite possibly my most anticipated game of 2024. Marvel Snap: Despite normally having no interest in mobile games, cards games, or Marvel, I gave this game a shot last year and am still playing it daily. With games only taking a few minutes each, and the core gameplay being so simple and enjoyable, I don’t plan on stopping any time soon. Metroid Prime Remastered: An absolutely fantastic remaster of one of the best games of its generation. I really hope they keep going and give us remastered version of the other two games in the trilogy. Luck Be a Landlord: Fun and addicting little game about spinning a slot machine to pay your ever increasing rent while choosing what symbols to add to create more valuable combos. F-Zero 99: I’m pretty sure my elementary school friends and I used to talk about how cool this exact concept would be: “What if all those computer controlled cars were real people!” This game worked way better and was a lot more fun than it had any right to, especially in that sweet spot right after its release when there was a huge playerbase and the meta hadn’t quite been figured out yet. Baldur’s Gate 3: The only reason this isn’t in my top ten is because I haven’t beaten it yet. I’ve played through the entirety of Act 1 twice, but keep getting hit with restart-itis and distracted by other, shorter games. I’m currently on my third playthrough, right about the point at which I stopped my last two, and I think my half-elf rogue/bard might finally be the one I push on to the end with. I can already tell that this is a game I will be revisiting for years to come to experience different origins, builds, and outcomes. I’m also hopeful that the strong reception and sales will keep both Larian and modders working on it for a long time to smooth out some of its rough edges, like the inventory and party management systems. Based on my experience so far, I’m guessing this would likely end up somewhere around number 5 or 6 on my list. The Top Ten: 10. Cereza and the Lost Demon What I thought was going to be a linear puzzle game ended up being much closer to a 2D Zelda game. It was a lot meatier than I expected and managed to keep me smiling for the entire playthrough. It’s biggest highlight may have been its storybook aesthetic which made exploring the environments a joy, and did a lot to enhance the already adorable characters. 9. En Garde I was really charmed by this game and felt compelled to include it in my top 10. A 3D character action game that nailed the feeling of fighting as a swashbuckler. Rather than attacking your enemies head on, winning fights requires you to constantly be on the move and utilizing the environment to keep your foes surprised, angry, and off of their feet. The gameplay is well designed and incredibly fun to play. The style is phenomenal as well, with vibrant colors, fun characters, and a killer soundtrack. The game is short, being fairly easily to beat in a single sitting, but it’s got some fun additional challenges and modes. Even though I would love to play something longer in this style, a short game that stays great for the entire run time and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome can be a very welcome break from the 100+ hour monoliths. 8. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Looking back, I have somewhat mixed feelings about this game. Despite that, when it hit, it really hit hard. Exploring the depths epitomizes what I most enjoyed about the game: building contraptions to travel into the dark unknown filled with dangerous mysterious monsters and treasures. Perhaps the most satisfying moment that I had while playing a game this year came when I suddenly had a revelation about how the depths worked that completely changed the way I approached them for the rest of the game. It was something that the game never told me directly, instead leaving it to me to deduce simply by being observant and paying attention to my surroundings. If the other two layers of the world would have been as interesting as the depths, this could have been my favorite game of the year, but I sadly found the surface and skies somewhat more repetitive. The lack of variety in the sky islands really bummed me out, after how much the previews hyped them up. Despite those complaints, the Ultrahand alone made this game a truly special experience. While I hope the next entry in the series changes things up a little more than this one did, there are definitely some aspects that should stick around. 7. Final Fantasy VI: Brave New World I’ve been in the mood to revisit the Final Fantasy series thanks to a later entry on this list, and decided to start by replaying a game that I was absolutely obsessed with as a teenager. Instead of playing the SNES original or one of the remasters, I decided to give this fairly popular mod a try (along with the optional translation mod that used the original SNES script as a base instead of the modder’s translation, which seems to be pretty divisive). Overall, I thought the mod did a great job of its stated goals of overhauling the Esper system, differentiating the party members, and making the combat more interesting and less of a cakewalk. That, along with the many quality of life changes, makes this my preferred way of experiencing this classic going forward. 6. Hi-Fi Rush Easily the best surprise of the year. This game is fun, creative, colorful, and packed full of content. Others have pointed out some of their favorite needle drops, and the one that always comes to mind for me is Free Radicals by the Flaming Lips perfectly underscoring the first boss fight. 5. Marvel: Midnight Suns I mentioned earlier that I’m not a big fan of Marvel, or superheros in general really, but I am a fan of Xcom and decided to give this game a shot early in the year after seeing a string of positive reviews. While the gameplay ended up being quite different from Firaxis’s other tactical combat games, it hooked me just as much. The non-combat gameplay involving exploring the grounds of the Abbey that makes up your home base and building relationships with your superhero teammates may have fallen flat for some, but it worked for me and I never really got sick of attending book club meetings with Blade and Captain Marvel or trying to become best friends with Nico and Magik. I’m bummed that the game bombed commercially and will likely never receive a proper follow up, but at the very least I have another playthrough with the DLC that I haven’t played yet sometime in the future. 4. Theatrhythm Final Bar Line I was hugely into Final Fantasy (and Squaresoft in general) in the SNES & PSX days, but haven’t played a game in the series since X. Despite that, I tried the demo for this oddly named game on a whim after seeing some excitement for it in the Switch thread, and immediately turned it into a full purchase. Since then, it’s become my most played Switch game of the year, and I still boot it up regularly to play a few tracks and try to beat some of its many challenges.. The core rhythm gameplay is really well done, and leads to a really satisfying loop when combined with the RPG elements. The nostalgia bomb from playing this game hit me hard enough that I’ve gotten the urge to both go back and re-experience some of my old favorites from the series, as well as giving the newer games that I’ve never played a chance. It’s a daunting prospect, but one I’m excited for once I get through the deluge of games from this year I haven’t fully gotten through yet. 3. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Three years after bouncing off of it at launch with only a few hours of playtime, I would now consider this one of the best games I’ve ever played. Phantom Liberty made a now great game even better, with a bevy of quests, characters, and gameplay updates that fit flawlessly into the main game. While the term ‘immersive’ may be a little overused when it comes to describing games, I think that’s what Cyberpunk absolutely excels at. The way the game told its story while stubbornly doing absolutely everything in first-person felt really ambitious and I think it paid off in a big way. 2. Star Wars: Jedi Survivor I enjoyed the original well enough, but I would never have considered it a Game of the Year contender. This game improved upon it on so many ways, however, that for most of the year it was the one that I thought was going to top my list. The combat gameplay was absolutely spot on, both when dueling with another lightsaber user or taking on a horde of Stormtroopers or Battle Droids. Exploring the various planets was a joy too, thanks to the variety of new traversal options and fun rewards around every corner. The story itself was a solid Star Wars tale, and I was really charmed by the characters, especially Cal and Merrin (and BD-1, of course). I’m always a sucker for a game that gives you a settlement to slowly expand by completing sidequests and recruiting new characters. I enjoyed this game so much that after beating it, I was almost immediately compelled to start another playthrough. It's the only game on my list that I've already played a second time. While another game managed to take the number 1 spot at the very end of the year, I still hold a real fondness for this game that made it stand out in an absolutely packed year. 1. Alan Wake 2 I don’t think it would be possible for me to put anything else in this spot. Since finishing it, this game has stuck with me in a way that few games ever have. I don't think there's much that I can say about it beyond that. There is one segment in particular (everyone who has played the game knows exactly which one) that must have taken a baffling amount of work to bring together. They completely nailed it, and it became one of the most incredible things I’ve ever experienced in a game. While I've always enjoyed their games well enough in the past, I am now fully onboard for anything Remedy wants to do going forward. Show me the Champion of Light I’ll show you the Herald of Darkness Easy top 10: 10. Cereza and the Lost Demon 9. En Garde 8. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 7. Final Fantasy VI: Brave New World 6. Hi-Fi Rush 5. Marvel: Midnight Suns 4. Theatrhythm Final Bar Line 3. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty 2. Star Wars: Jedi Survivor 1. Alan Wake 2
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Dec 30, 2023 11:08
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Manoueverable posted:As many people have also noted, Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising is a game very well suited to beginners with simplified controls. Both that and SF6 are very good entry points into the genre, but if even those aren't clicking then yeah, the genre may just not be for you. I can vouch for Rising being very good at getting people interested in FGs actually playing FGs, and it has a pretty generous free edition to boot.
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Dec 30, 2023 11:44
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Jokymi posted:Since finishing it, this game has stuck with me in a way that few games ever have. I don't think there's much that I can say about it beyond that. This is a big part of why it's my #1 as well. I still find myself randomly singing Champion of Darkness, or Dark Ocean Summoning, or thinking randomly about Yotun Yo. It is a blending of mediums and layers of fourth wall breaking that shouldn't work - but it does.
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Dec 30, 2023 12:24
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Man, I've been putting off making my list for a while. I don't think I have 10 games I can put on this list for this year, I spent so much time on live service stuff. Two games in particular. I've got enough for a list of 5 at least, I'll see what I can confidently put on a list.
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Dec 30, 2023 12:50
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1. void stranger an utter masterpiece. a fantastic puzzle game with a shocking amount of depth and secrets, much more than is on the surface. it took me nearly 50 hours and still i wish it went deeper and deeper. 2. nioh 2 i'd been hesistant about this for the longest time because the first one was just fine but it's really such an improvement and i'm glad i finally got around to it. the big thing is probably just having enough enemy variety that i didn't quickly get bored out of my mind, unlike the first. the yokai abilities and yokai form also did a lot to make combat even more interesting. 3. lies of p a very solid souls imitation and that's all a game really needs to be good (especially given how most souls imitations manage to fall horribly short), though i do wish it had better ideas of its own. 4. wo long: fallen dynasty sekiro: nioh edition, just with many more convoluted mechanics thrown on top in team ninja fashion. somehow even more parry-focused than sekiro and doesn't really reach the same heights as it or nioh but still a good time. 5. dwarf fortress being a bit more of an eccentric simulation than a game has a lot of charm but it does mean you very much have to make your own fun. i certainly got enough fun out of it at least. 6. the legend of zelda: tears of the kingdom good but ultimately too much? games don't need to be quite this big. an improvement over botw in a lot of ways (side quests, points of interest, story, dungeons - though those are still massively lacking to pre-botw zelda), but the shrines are ultimately a little worse - the vehicle building (while amazing) is still a bit clunky and the other mechanics feel a bit overly situational. the depths are a cool idea at first but are ultimately just vast nothingness. 7. baldur's gate 3 undeniably a landmark in its genre for good reason and there's a lot to like but there's also such clear room for improvement in so many ways. it's too big for its own good! combat is a noticeable step down from d:os2 - video games should really stop using ttrpg systems! they just don't translate that well and end up more convoluted/unintuitive/frustrating due to the high variance and other limitations from relying on dice. dice rolls in conversation also suffer from never having interesting outcomes from failing a dice roll, unlike disco elysium. the writing is fine but not that interesting (a big step up from d:os2's writing being utterly forgettable), and when choices more complex than fairly simplistic good vs. evil happen they often just feel contrived. 8. chants of sennaar a solid puzzle game but it really didn't need to have those stealth sections and some of the drawings that represent concepts are frustratingly ambiguous/unclear. 9. the case of the golden idol enjoyable puzzles but disappointingly short since i was able to finish the whole thing in one setting 10. stranger of paradise: final fantasy origin unfortunately did not live up to 'final fantasy nioh' and the combat was just ok. the writing is fascinating and deeply ridiculous but just like the combat could have been so much better executed? i want to like this more than i did (which was still a reasonable amount)
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Dec 30, 2023 13:51
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Nail Rat posted:This is a big part of why it's my #1 as well. I still find myself randomly singing Champion of Darkness, or Dark Ocean Summoning, or thinking randomly about Yotun Yo. It is a blending of mediums and layers of fourth wall breaking that shouldn't work - but it does. They released an album of the chapter end songs, as well as an Old Gods of Agard greatest hits collection with all their songs from all the games so far, and both of them went straight into my regular rotation. Unfortunately “This Road” is MIA, I can only assume due to some licensing snag
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Dec 30, 2023 14:01
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haveblue posted:They released an album of the chapter end songs, as well as an Old Gods of Agard greatest hits collection with all their songs from all the games so far, and both of them went straight into my regular rotation. Unfortunately “This Road” is MIA, I can only assume due to some licensing snag Oh I got the old gods vinyl 
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Dec 30, 2023 14:12
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I am switching out my #10 spot from "The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog" to "Patrick's Parabox"
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Dec 30, 2023 16:37
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Nail Rat posted:Oh I got the old gods vinyl
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Dec 30, 2023 17:42
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Mean people in Discord yelled at me to post my list here. I have played 13 games total that I think would be eligible for this list and I am surprised that I enjoyed my time with every single one. Its rare that I managed to avoid at least one stinker in a year but 2023 was truly a fantastic year for games that ranking the bottom half of these was difficult. ---Honorable Mentions--- 13. Metroid Prime Remastered Lowest ranked game on my list but I still enjoyed my time with it. 3D Metroid works extremely well and the environments in this game are still top tier. Its only real flaw is a lot of its combat feels clumsy and dated to me and when it ramps up heavily in the back half of the game it dampened my experience. 12. Nier: Replicant Story was enjoyable but only meh gameplay. I played Automata first and added this to my backlog but Automata is pretty much the better game in every way. There were strong story moments but was mostly going through the gameplay motions to even get to them, especially on the extra playthroughs. 11. Persona 5 Strikers I picked this up immediately after playing Persona 5 Royal. It took me some time to get used to the musou-style combat and while it was fine it didn't feel great. However, it did a good job at being an interesting sequel story to P5R and fleshing out characters who got the short stick in the main game. Plus, some amazing moments with the new characters made this a good time. ----MY TOP TEN OF 2023---- 10. Forspoken Picked up the game very cheap. Story and banter is as cringey as reported but moving around the world with the parkour abilities just felt amazing and was alone enough to carry this into my top 10. Also I liked that the controller changed colors with the abilities. 9. Stranger of Paradise - Final Fantasy Origin An overall good time. Jack is great, the party banter was weirdly wholesome, and there is some genuinely affecting story moments. Void Knight best class. However, I wasn't interested in gear fiddling to then play the higher difficulties. 8. Kena: Bridge of Spirits I picked up Kena on a whim and was pleasantly surprised. The animation and environments in this game are gorgeous and the combat was enjoyable and challenging though a bit stiff in the controls. the "failure cycle" on the final boss was way too long and was my only real frustration with an otherwise fun game. 7. Returnal A shooter roguelike that I did not suck at… and thus it was fun to play. Most of the weapons were fun to mess around with (except for the stupid “shotgun”) and I had a blast on pretty much every run. Story was mostly silly and the roguelike game cycle was just a little but too long for a full run. Still, I was engaged to really want to push through to the full ending in both the main mode and the Sisyphus mode without losing interest. 6. Final Fantasy XVI FF16 has some of the best set pieces I've ever experienced in a video game. Great voice acting and soundtrack and fun combat that unfortunately only got interesting in boss fights. The spectacle of those big moments in the game were so much fun that carried me through some of the pacing issues that come up the last third of the game. Looking forward to the DLC. 5. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Not much to really say about this other than it was a blast to play. I had not touched BotW for some time so exploring the TotK world and its changes felt extremely fresh. There is a LOT to do in the game but I think that not having a completionist mindset for this was the best approach. Once I felt I did enough random quests/shrines I beat the game and had a hell of a time. 4. Octopath Traveler II My favorite game that was actually released in 2023. An improvement upon the first in basically every single way and I was hooked until a killed the final boss. What made it special though was doing the thing that most RPGs hope to do: Make me struggle on bosses and forced me to think carefully about my next move but still manage to win first try. Gives me that perfect stress relief high every single time it happened. 3. Final Fantasy VII REMAKE (+ Intermission) This is a weird one. I spoiled myself on basically everything I possibly could in this game in 2020 but it did not reduce my joy and excitement of playing it one bit. The combat in this game rules and is the best mix of real-time and turn-based that still feels like an old FF game to me. Characters were great and still manages the perfect serious to silly moment ratio. I can’t wait to play Rebirth in a couple months. 2. Outer Wilds Just a breath of fresh air. Went into this completely blind (as one should) and the self-directed gameplay just hit the spot for me in a way I did not anticipate. A fantastic game if you go into it with the right mindset. 1. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (+ Future Redeemed) Mechanically this is probably not actually the best game I’ve played in 2023 but still takes my top spot on vibes alone. Combat is fun but still a bit overwhelming in all the ways that Xenoblade can be. However, the story hit me like nothing else I’ve played this year and I still can’t help but think about some of the big moments in this game. The party interactions are fantastic and I was hooked wanting to see what came next. Hit one particular plot point and then accidentally found myself up until 3am and didn’t even notice.
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Dec 30, 2023 17:52
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This was an insane year for video games. Too bad I didn’t get to participate in it! My backlog has grown to astronomical proportions. Baldur’s Gate and Super Mario RPG came to me during Christmas so they’re probably a lock for next year. With how little I got to play, this is a favourite AND least favourite of 2023 list. 10. Silent Hill Ascension  Gollum this, Kong that. THIS was the worst game of the year. Sorry, worst “interactive streaming series with community interaction” of the year. This thing premiered on Halloween and planned to stream daily for MONTHS and even sold a season pass in preparation. That schedule is now very reduced. From the very jump this was a mess. The UI is cluttered beyond comprehension. The gameplay is decided by bots with the highest influence points.The graphics are muddy. The animations are rudimentary. Within a day people realized they could just post slurs with no censors in place and the chat was taken down. I can’t even tell you what the plot is at this point because it’s probably written by AI. Konami continues to find new ways to sully the corpse of this godforsaken franchise. 9. Starfield  I heard this game described as 'feeling like you're coming out of a cult.' I’ve played Skyrim to death. It’s one of my all-time favourite games. I’ve explored every peak and cave countless times and got less each and every time. But I loved it because it’s so easy to get lost in Skyrim. The jank gets excusable when the experience is enjoyable. That’s Starfield’s core problem. It felt like a jetpack simulator between loading screens. I’m pretty easy to appease with open world sandboxes but this felt like a scam. Thank god I didn’t buy an Xbox for this. 8. Pokedoku  This is the closest I’ve ever come to doing a Wordle. Pokedoku is a 3x3 daily sudoku-esque game where you have to fill each square with a different Pokémon according to the description on the axes. It’s usually the first thing I do every day that requires brain power and I’ve become so addicted. 7. Jackbox Party Pack 3  This was the go-to game this year when it came to friend hangs. Every game in this pack is a hit and has spawned an inside joke. The group chat is named after a Tee K.O. shirt, and I’m pretty sure a Quiplash 2 answer led to the eventual dramatic destruction of one of my friends’ relationship with his roommate. 6. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom  Yet another year where the GOTY contender is a game that I… feel disconnected from. And I liked Breath of the Wild! I do respect Nintendo for the direction though. It would have been easy to use the same formula that shifted the gaming industry but they tried something experimental here—and achieved it. Unfortunately, I’m not into the building/crafting gameplay of the Ultrahand at all. In my opinion!! it slows the entire flow of the game to a halt and feels like a chore. I couldn’t find enough interest in myself to get past the first few hurdles to continue. Don’t worry, I hate me too. 5. Street Fighter 6  Street Fighter 6 has the glow-up of the century and it started with a stock logo. It was robbed of a best art direction nomination so bad. The style and presentation of the game are incredible. It truly has one of the best gaming franchise refreshes I’ve ever seen. It’s too bad that I’m the worst player on the loving planet at it—even with the conscious strides they’ve made to make casual play more accessible. 4. Goodbye Volcano High  Let the record show I am NOT a furry. But something about this game drew me in from the first trailer. I love coming of age movies and the juxtaposition with one during the end of the world is such an interesting story—all within visual novel that’s part rhythm game (doesn’t matter much but it’s set to the best soundtrack of the year), part texting sim and part D&D (the most enjoyable part of the game, oddly). It could’ve been longer and had more sequences to develop character relationships but it still has such a satisfying romance option. Also, games with fake twitter feeds. Gotta be one of my favourite genres. 3. Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered  I used to play Spider-Man on the GameCube to swing around the city and I thought it was the pinnacle of technology. This is the game I thought I was playing. I don’t know if this is an accurate map of New York City but I believe it could be and that’s insane. I could have fun just searching for backpacks and taking photos of landmarks. The sheer amount of suit perks and gadget power-ups mean you can play a hundred different button mashing combo styles (I main Spider Punk and holo clones). I can’t wait to get to Spider-Man 2 next year. 2. Disco Elysium  If you’re still in line to vote for Disco Elysium in your lists, STAY IN LINE! At this point I think it has a dedicated top ten slot in my list. 1. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet  Last year this game made my list a little more than a month after release. Now we’re deep in the trenches of generation 9. Is Scarlet and Violet beating the hot mess allegations? No. It’s barely holding it together. 2023 launched two DLC installments: Teal Mask and Indigo Disk. I was disappointed in the Teal Mask DLC because I wasn’t engaged enough in the characters like the game is demanding you to be, plus Kitakami is an awfully designed region. Indigo Disk seems better as I play through it, but it’s blatantly introduced ANOTHER in-game currency and locking everything and the kitchen sink behind it in an antiquated way. But this franchise has a chokehold on me. This year marked the first time I ever completed a Pokédex from scratch. This was also the first year I really got into the competitive Pokémon scene. I trained to go to my first regional championship–and it’s no joke. I can see how people make careers out of this based on how much time it takes to research and prepare. I lost in round 6 but managed to beat a mentor I learned from on YouTube so it was absolutely worth it. The VGC community was fun to dip into and everyone I battled had good sportsmanship. It really was a bucket list experience. My list begins and ends with examples of how communities that form around a game can make or break the experience.
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Dec 30, 2023 18:12
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I’m not a very good gamer. I’m good at buying gaming equipment and games (I am pretty surprised I didn’t get a Christmas card from Gabe this year), and reading about games and watching things about games, but man when it comes to the aiming and planning and moving parts I suck eggs. Nonetheless, I shall burden this lovely, highlight-of-the-season thread with my opinions about 2023’s gaming. Honourable mention: Dwarf Fortress, Stack That Paper edition: I of course bought this on Steam to support the incredible devs and opened it up briefly to revel in the new UI, but didn’t get a chance to really play it meaningfully. I hear that there are good Deck bindings for it, but I think I would want to do worldgen on my real PC. 10. En Garde In addition to Elden Ring (see below) I dabbled in DS and DS3 this year, and after that En Garde was a delightful experience of actually being able to play the game decently. The environmental interactions are fun, the art was nice, and the plot is gleefully light and silly. Short but joyful game. 9. Halls of Torment I of course got into Vampire Survivors when I got my Steam Deck, but Halls of Torment got its hooks into me deeper. The equipment retrieval mechanic was a nice touch and this game handily took care of some long rides. 8. Elden Ring Elden Ring was #2 in my list last year, and really opened my eyes to what Soulslike stuff could be even for a player who aspires to be middling. That bled into the first part of this year, and I still mean to go back and finish it, but at this point I’m pretending that it’s not just attention-span issues but rather a principled decision to wait for the DLC. I can still clearly recall some of the boss fights and the first time I descended the river elevator, about a year later. Maybe someday I’ll be brave enough to try Sekiro. 7. Cassette Beasts I never really got into Pokemon or other collectible sorts of games, but this one really worked for me. Loved the sticker mechanic and building crazy poo poo, and the plot/setting were intriguing enough to keep me going. Was a perfect relax-on-the-cottage-deck game that found me at the perfect time. 6. Caves of Qud Goon-made, goon-loved. Truly inspired worldbuilding, some of the most hard-working devs in the business, and a wonderfully inclusive Discord community (?!). I haven’t made it past Bethesda Susa, and I don’t think I really fully understand how the action economy works, but every time I pick up an item or talk to an NPC I get another peek at this weird, wonderful world. Really want to spend more time here! 5. Jupiter Hell This was the first roguelike I really got into, and I really enjoyed the feeling of curated mastery development. Also loved the sound design here. I was never a huge Doom fan, but this does justice to what I remember the aesthetic and vibe to have been. 4. Tears of the Kingdom I bounced pretty hard off of BotW back in the day, but I’m glad I dug out the Switch for this one. I feel like I have some sort of Ultrahand-related developmental delay, because I see the stuff people build and just cannot imagine it, and the Koroks felt more like obligation than opportunity, but for a casual Zelda fan it hit pretty well. (Underground was a little spooky though!) 3. Baldur’s Gate 3 Baldur’s Gate 3 was everyone’s game this year. It was gaming’s game, pushing past TOTK and utterly shaming Starfield to carry the banner for AAA entertainment artifacts. At Christmas, I spent an hour talking about Act I with cousins, and my therapist and I have discussed the druid bear sex trailer. I’m so happy for Larian to have found this level of success, and I hope they next get to work their magic without the constraints of 5e’s mediocrity. I should probably revisit D:OS2 and see if I get past the first area this time. Someday my wife and I will go back to our MP game, I’m sure. 2. My Time at Sandrock This game asks so little of me, with basically no way to lose progress or fail, and provides such a pleasant experiential in return. There’s always tomorrow. I’m invested in building this little desert town back up, and earning Amirah’s affection and petting my animals every morning. I don’t even get super antsy any longer if I spend the day on some quest stuff and don’t have a chance to use all my stamina. Playing this alongside my wife’s own playthrough has been a treat too. 1. CP2077: Phantom Liberty I pre-ordered CP2077 and built a new machine in anticipation, and then upgraded that machine after the first big release slip. I bought the art book. I have a Samurai hoodie. I took 2 days off work for the release, and then rescheduled them when it was moved. I winced in sympathy for the developers (but not the managers) at its poor launch and reception, knowing they must have been so disappointed. I played it in December 2020 but didn’t finish it, and then came back for a new complete playthrough with 1.6 after watching and loving Edgerunners. When 2.0 and Phantom Liberty dropped, I dove back in and when I got to Dogtown I realized that I was finally, finally playing the game that Comte and his thousands of colleagues at CDPR wanted to make. They’ve said that PL is the last big update, and I can understand that they want to focus on their other stuff in development, but getting to experience this in its final form is bittersweet. Imagine if this had been the game they’d released originally, and had been building on for the last 3 years. Imagine! Anyway, it’s my GOTY because the character arc of V is wonderful but the arc of the game itself is sublime. Easy mode for VG: 10. En Garde 9. Halls of Torment 8. Elden Ring 7. Cassette Beasts 6. Caves of Qud 5. Jupiter Hell 4. Tears of the Kingdom 3. Baldur’s Gate 3 2. My Time at Sandrock 1. CP2077: Phantom Liberty E: somehow copied the wrong draft of this and omitted Cassette Beasts! Subjunctive fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Dec 30, 2023 |
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Dec 30, 2023 18:59
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What a year! I played SIXTY FOUR games this year (thanks Gamepass). Not gonna waste time talking about every single one of them, but yeah this was a great year for games. Let's get into it: The Missing: Armored Core 6 – Normally I would jump on any FromSoft game on release but I’m really not sure this one is gonna be my thing. I will probably check it out eventually. Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name – These games always seem to come out near the end of the year when I don’t have time to get to them. Oh well, next year! Dishonorable Mentions: Tactics Ogre Reborn – I talked about my difficult relationship with non-Fire Emblem strategy/tactics games in last year’s list and mentioned being hopeful about this one due to the near universal praise it got. Well I’ve learned my lesson. I’m done taking recommendations in this genre, especially when it comes to older games. Clearly there’s some fundamental disconnect between my tastes and those of others because this game was absolutely awful. It didn’t even feel like there were any tactical decisions to be made during the fights. It was just balls of stats and hugely inflated HP pools bashing against each other on generally dull and uninspired maps from start to finish. The story was fine I guess. It really took a huge push to finish the last few chapters of this game as I was so over it by then, but I was curious enough to see the ending. Soul Hackers 2 – This game makes me mad because I was genuinely enjoying it for about 80% of its playtime. It had great gameplay and a pretty engaging story with fun characters. Then in the final act the story decided to go completely to poo poo with an absolutely nonsensical betrayal by one of the core cast who goes on to become the final boss and tries to destroy the world. Absolutely none of her motivations made any sense and the entire final chunk of the game was deeply stupid. I did get the good ending where you pull her back and save her yay but the whole thing just completely ruined the game for me. Also there’s no endgame level dungeon or anything to use your coolest highest level toys so even the gameplay ends with a wet fart. Special Award for Most Frustrating Nonsense: Trails Into Reverie – Before we launch into my thoughts about this game, let’s check out some reviews: “… cute and charming at times…” “… it doesn’t completely suck.” “Instead of eliciting anger like the last game did, this installment merely bores. That’s progress to me.” “An improvement I guess.” “I find myself much more forgiving and able to lower my expectations to the point that this is at least playable.” “Garfield is a cat who says funny things” Ah wait I seem to have selected quotes from reviews of Garfield: The Movie and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties by mistake. Let’s try that again, this time I’ll write my own review blurbs. (This joke shamelessly stolen from lasagnacat). “features characters I can remember caring about.” “The gameplay continues to be competent” “Most of the interminable final dungeon is optional” “At least Rean is only in a third of the game this time” “only the final act actively infuriated me” Okay enough goofing around. I’ve put this game in its own category for a few reasons. For one, I really liked it for a lot of the time I was playing it and didn’t want to put it in dishonorable mentions. But it also finally has convinced me to abandon a series I once loved which is a really big deal to me. It’s a complex mess of emotions and I feel the need to get it all down somewhere, so bear with me (or skip the rest of this if you haven’t played these games and don’t care!). The Trails in the Sky trilogy is one of my favorite set of games of all time. When I first discovered them back in 2015 I was absolutely enraptured, playing through the first two games back to back then waiting eagerly for the third to be localized. The next year I also played Trails of Cold Steel 1 and 2 and loved them too. In 2017 Sky 3 came out and I played it on release, completing the original trilogy. And from there the waiting began. It would be two long years before Trails of Cold Steel 3 was finally localized, and in that time I learned that not only would it not complete another trilogy, with a fourth Cold Steel game still to come, but CS3 would take place after the two other games in the series that had not yet been localized – the games referred to as the “Crossbell games”: Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure. At this point it was becoming clear that this massive story stretching over 9 games was getting a bit too big for me. I wanted to play CS3, but knowing that I’d lack some context and that I’d still be waiting who knows how long for CS4, I decided to wait. I knew there was a fan translation in the works for Zero so I figured I would play that, read a summary of Azure, then move on to CS3. Once I’d done all that and was back to waiting for CS4 though, my concerns had grown. The story they’d started and set up so intriguingly in the Sky trilogy had now started to become a bloated mess. In the Cold Steel games in particular there were now far too many characters for any of them to have any serious development, and the wheel spinning in CS3 was really awful. I still had some hope though. CS4 was definitively supposed to be the end of the five game arc that included Crossbell and Erebonia. If they could stick the landing and tie a bow on this bloated mess and set up interesting places for the series to go from there, I figured it would still be alright. Unfortunately that isn’t what happened. CS4 was localized in 2020 and not only did it continue along the same route as the previous game, it made things much much worse. They squandered the series’ best villain who had been built up since Sky 3. They had characters behave in ways that made absolutely no sense. The ultimate plan of the villains was so convoluted and confusing and introduced so much bizarre nonsense in the final act that by the time I was finished I was only glad everything was over. This could have been the end of the series for me, but Reverie was out in Japan and from the reception of the fandom I was just barely persuaded that it would be interesting enough to give a shot. As a sort of epilogue to the Cold Steel and Crossbell series it featured the main characters from both of those to sort of tie a bow on that region and set up where the story goes from there. Maybe, I thought, this game would do what I’d hoped CS4 would do. So three years passed as I waited for Reverie to be localized. Meanwhile the Crossbell games were finally officially brought to the west, and more games in the series continued to be released in Japan as English players fell further behind. I didn’t play the official versions of the Crossbell games and I mostly put the series out of my mind until this year when Reverie was finally released in English. The worst part about this game is that for most of it… I actually really enjoyed myself in a way I hadn’t with this series since CS2. The third protagonist, C, was a breath of fresh air, exploring new and interesting things with a character who had really gotten the short straw in their treatment in CS3 and 4. Even the parts with Lloyd and Rean were mostly tolerable, though they continued to lean on the same incredibly tired jokes and tropes that have plagued the games for a while now. No I do not find it funny how every character falls over themselves to comment on Rean’s love life or lack thereof. I am utterly sick of how obsessed Erebonians are with swords and repeating the same lines of powering up and comparing strength and overwhelming auras. But these elements were at least somewhat restrained, and the actual story was interesting – adding new elements to the lore of the series and doing exactly what I hoped for – pointing out actually intriguing new directions for the series to go. But alas, it couldn’t last. The final act revealed that everything happening actually was tied into exactly the stupidest parts of the ending of CS4. All of the interesting aspects were thrown out for yet another fight against a nonsense nightmare demon or whatever. C still had a bit of interesting character work in the finale (but they even hilariously decided to undercut that at the last minute as well, good show). Not to mention that at this point the gameplay has been largely the same for 5 games, adding only tiny new elements each time. The Cold Steel series in particular seems obsessed with always including a massive combat only dungeon that’s mostly divorced from the main plot, and Reverie doubled down on this. It has an entire postgame dungeon that doubles the length of the part in the main game, and asks you to slog through hours more of repetitive gameplay to see some extra story scenes and bonus foreshadowing stuff. At that point I’d had it with the game and just watched the extra scenes on youtube. The fact is that even at their best I still feel like I can no longer trust Falcom to write a compelling story. They’ve gone so far up their rear end, padding their games and stories to ridiculous degrees, obsessed with drawing out mysteries and repeating jokes and even whole plot beats over and over again. This game showed glimmers of what I once loved about the series, but even that was lost underneath piles of the worst bullshit the series has to offer. So that’s it, I’m done. When the next arc begins to get localized, I’m not gonna play them. Maybe it is just barely possible that once the entire arc is complete I might look into what the consensus is on them, but judging from what I’ve heard about the two games already out in Japan, it seems like they haven’t changed their ways one bit. So goodbye Trails series. I’ll miss what you once were to me, but at least I still have the first 3 games to look back on fondly. I might even replay them someday to reexperience the best the series had to offer. Honorable Mentions: Chained Echoes – This was an awesome little indie RPG. It had a cool unique combat system and an engaging story. I don’t have too much else to say about it but it was really fun! Neon White – I don’t usually go in for speedrunning focused games, but I make it a point to always play Mark Brown’s Most Innovative Game of the Year if I haven’t already, so I made sure to check this out. And it was really fun! The movement is polished to the absolute highest sheen and I was very much driven to get ace medals on every single level. Didn’t go for red medals, I’m not insane, but I loved feeling like I’d mastered each level well enough. Misericorde: Volume One – This probably would have made my top 10 list if it wasn’t episodic. It was great but I need more! A cool mystery in a very unique setting. Looking forward to replaying this episode when the next one comes out to experience the whole thing at once (I will probably make sure to check if episode 2 is actually the conclusion first…) Chants of Sennaar – Lots of games here in honorable mentions came close to making the main list but this was probably the closest. It’s an extremely cool puzzle game about learning to translate numerous different languages with no starting knowledge of their grammar, vocabulary, or even script. It’s certainly simplified and contrived to be a fun game, but it works extremely well. Best part by far is the endgame series of puzzles where you have to help the different cultures communicate with each other by translating directly from one language to another. Cocoon – An excellent little puzzle game with some really mind bending concepts. I loved diving into and out of pocket universes and taking other pocket universes into a different pocket universe and then carrying around all the pocket universes on my back so I could go multiple pocket universes deep. Cool. Super Mario Wonder – Probably my favorite 2D Mario ever? So many wild and unique ideas. Definitely something that could have made the top 10 list in another year. American Arcadia – The gameplay with this was serviceable at best but it gets a spot here in the honorable mentions for just how clever its story was. A truly excellent bit of satire. Don’t be a fool! Slay the Princess – I almost didn’t play this one, but decided to squeeze it in right at the end of the year. It’s really an extremely clever game. Its big picture story is kiiind of a bit pretentious and nonsensical but what I love about it is just finding all the different princesses and variations to explore. Gotta catch ‘em all! And finally, the main event: Top 10: 10. Octopath Traveler II – I was really cool on Octopath 1. It had some cool ideas but the disjointed nature of the stories just didn’t work for me, and the extremely half hearted manner in which it tried to tie them together at the very end fell completely flat. I didn’t really want to play 2 but the reception convinced me to change my mind. And I’m glad I did! Octopath 2 fixed literally every issue I had with the first game and then some. The characters were more fun and memorable, the individual stories were better, and while they are still disjointed to some extent, there are loads of direct interactions between characters to experience and it does actually all tie together in a way that even culminates in a final boss that has you use all 8 characters at once. It was brilliant and really clever. Just in case there is still anyone out there who came away disappointed from Octopath 1 and hasn’t tried 2, give it a chance! 9. Baldur's Gate 3 – Hoo boy. This game. Did I like it? Yes a lot. Did I love it the way a lot of people seem to? No, definitely not. Between bugs, godawful UI, extremely tedious and inconvenient inventory and character management, and some encounters (especially in act 3) that are mindbogglingly poorly designed, I definitely don’t see this as the greatest RPG of all time or whatever. Buuuuuuut it still is something special despite that. Its characters are memorable and compelling (Shadowheart <3), its main story is filled with twist and turns and there are so many good sidequests and secrets to find it’s almost never boring. I’m certainly never going to touch it again, but I came away very satisfied with my one playthrough. Shoutouts in particular to all of act 2 for being the most thrilling and well paced part of the game, the underwater prison escape for being an extremely clever and challenging twists on game mechanics, and to the Raphael fight for yes, probably being my favorite single boss fight of the year. 8. Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane – I dunno if I’d ever have thought I’d be putting something that is almost just an Ace Attorney fangame on one of these lists, but Tyrion Cuthbert manages to transcend what it is imitating and finds its own identity. The mysteries are not all great, but there are some definite great ones in there. The evidence system is kind of a mess, but for the most part it works and usually it’s tricky but not impossible to find what you need in the slightly bloated evidence lists. What really sets this game apart though is its commitment to its world and tying its mysteries into the broader story it wants to tell. It takes a world where magic is real and explores the systems thoroughly in each one of its cases. All while dealing with a political backdrop that is intriguing and engaging. I may be a sucker, but hell I even really loved the little romance story they put in there with the two protagonists, it was super cute. The game ends with a sequel hook that has me really excited for the devs to make another game in this series. Here’s hoping they pull it off! 7. The Roottrees are Dead – It seems the Obra Dinn style deduction game is still alive and well. This free, solo dev game came out of nowhere but really impressed me. It combines Obra Dinn’s concept of identifying specific information about people with Her Story’s idea of searching through databases for keywords. The combination works really well! It was great fun learning the stories of this whole massive family tree and trying to figure out where their pictures would appear. I found it a little more frustrating than Obra Dinn, but with a few small pushes from a friend I was able to solve everything. I only have two small criticisms. First, that finding everyone’s occupation sometimes felt particularly arbitrary, just an obstacle to make you need to spend more time searching for information. But I get it, there needed to be something else besides name and photograph. Second, the use of AI art is disappointing but at the same time it is a free game with a solo developer so I guess I can give it a pass. Overall it’s a great entry in the genre and I hope we continue to see more people experiment with it. 6. Fire Emblem Engage – Hell yeah it’s been a long 4 years but Fire Emblem is Back! This game had a bit of a weaker story than Three Houses, but it was still a fun one and the gameplay is the best the series has been since before Awakening. The engage mechanic was extremely clever and mixing and matching units and spirits was a great way to help each character feel unique. I never did get to the DLC aside from the added spirits, but I had a blast with the main game. Always great to see my boy Hector getting some love. Standout characters from this game include Jade, Etie, and of COURSE Yunaka. Hiya papaya! 5. Darkest Dungeon 2 – Been looking forward to this for a while. I loved Darkest Dungeon, I’ve played through it 3 times to varying states of completion. While I don’t think I liked DD2 quite as much, I do respect the different direction they chose to take things in. The more pure roguelike design worked pretty well for the most part and I felt the difficulty was about right (except for the second boss, gently caress that thing). The final boss in particular was an incredible spectacle that overshadowed any single fight in the first game. A couple of the characters feel a little undercooked (no idea how to use the Runaway effectively) but overall it feels well balanced with lots of opportunities to try different teams. I’m letting the DLC build up a bit before I go back for another run but I’m looking forward to revisiting it. 4. Lies of P – Winner of the best game with the worst name award, I still have a hard time believing this game is as good as it is. Up until the demo came out it looked like it was going to be an incredibly forgettable FromSoft imitator that decided to be about edgy Pinocchio for some reason. But instead it’s easily the single best non-FromSoft soulslike released to date. The devs put so much care and attention into every aspect of this game. Almost all the bosses are incredible, the weapon blade and handle switching was inspired, and the setting oozes atmosphere. I greatly appreciated all the little nods and inspiration the game drew from Carlo Collodi’s original book (only disappointment in that regard was the sea monster just being a submarine). I am extremely psyched about the sequel they teased at the end which is going to be about a different 100+ year old children’s book character, one even nearer to my own heart than Pinocchio. Can’t wait! 3. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist – I should have played this last year when my vote would have counted towards its rankings! But alas, I only even learned about it from last year’s top 10 results so I finally picked it up this summer and it BLEW ME AWAY. This game is what Disco Elysium wishes it could be (fine, to be more accurate this game is what I wish Disco Elysium was). Making this kind of stat and dialogue based rpg into a time loop was a brilliant way to make your choices actually matter. Discovering problems in one playthrough and then figuring out how to solve them in a later one was immensely satisfying. I loved every character and exhaustively explored every one of their stories. I got every unique ending, solved every major puzzle, and even looked up a guide to do a theoretically “perfect” playthrough right at the end just because I wanted to leave things on the highest possible note. I wrung every bit of joy I could out of this game and as one way to demonstrate that – I spent exactly as long on this 3-4 hour per playthrough game as I did on the massive bloated RPG that is Trails into Reverie. 2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – I liked BOTW a lot. It was cool to see Zelda taken in a different more exploratory direction, and I had a lot of fun playing it. My primary disappointment was that while the shrines were mostly great fun, the divine beasts and final boss left a lot to be desired. What good was a Zelda game without proper dungeons? TOTK didn’t fully fix the dungeon issue, but everything else about it was unbelieveably better. The dungeons were at least a bit bigger and more complex, but the bosses were so spectacular. Especially the final boss sequence which was a non stop thrill ride and had me CHEERING in the final moments after I won. I took so many screenshots of the ending section. The new mechanics introduced in this game were ingenious. Ultrahand is just the perfect video game tool. Its versatility allows you to do such a wide range of things that it works both for people like me (purely utilitarian puzzle solvers not interested in creativity for its own sake) as well as for people who love just to build whatever they can imagine. Add rewind and fusion into the mix and you have this incredible recipe for gameplay that manages to never get old. Every hour of this massive game was filled with new ideas and discoveries. They really pulled it off this time, achieving what BOTW grasped for but couldn’t quite reach. I don’t think they can improve on this formula now, so I do hope they try something different for the next Zelda game. I think if they hadn’t taken my boy Kass out behind the woodshed and murdered him, this game would at least have been in serious contention for my number 1 spot this year. But as it is, there was never a competition. The best game of the year was always going to be: 1. Pikmin 4 – Pikmin is probably my favorite video game franchise of all time. Every game has managed to be dramatically different from what preceded it, and every game has fully enraptured me. I’ve played these games more than practically any others, and Pikmin 4 will likely join the others in that status. I’ve been waiting for this game for 10 years and they absolutely delivered on all of my expectations and beyond. Going back to Pikmin 2 style underground caves was a delight, but they also kept overworld levels even bigger and more numerous than Pikmin 3! This game had absolutely everything I could have wanted. The piklopedia and treasure information were bigger than ever. There were multiple extra game modes and challenges all built into the main story. Captain Olimar is back and playable again. Oatchi rules. If I had to give any criticisms it would be that the game is a little bit too easy and the night missions are a tad undercooked. But who cares! I loving love Pikmin!!!!! Gonna start waiting for Pikmin 5 now Miyamoto!!!!!!!!!!!!! Final list: 10. Octopath Traveler II 9. Baldur's Gate 3 8. Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane 7. The Roottrees are Dead 6. Fire Emblem Engage 5. Darkest Dungeon 2 4. Lies of P 3. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist 2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 1. Pikmin 4
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Dec 30, 2023 19:58
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This year I actually played enough games from 2023 that I am limiting my list to only games that came out this year. Couple of random things though. Most played game by a longshot was Hunt: Showdown. This was high on my list 3-4 years ago when I started playing, but this year was probably the year I enjoyed and played it the most. it's become one of my favorite multiplayer games of all time. it was nice not touching COD this year or for the foreseeable future, in favor of playing MP games I actually enjoy vs. ones I feel begrudgingly addicted to. I also spiced it up with a decent amount of TLOU Factions, Titanfall 2 and The Finals and even some Lethal Company. All around a nicely diverse year of MP gaming. Some stuff that very well might have made my list if I finished or played it at all but alas I did not have time for: Ghostrunner 2, Talos Principle 2 and Cocoon Wanted to start this out with an honorable mention for Alan Wake 2 . This was my number 10 until I got hooked on Aliens. This is game was pretty interesting and unique which I appreciated. At the same time it was pretty meh in the gameplay department and I found it dragged a bit, but still deserved a mention, just for being so confidently weird. it really feels like people had a ton of fun making it.  10. Aliens: Dark Decent Picked this up like 5 months ago and forgot about it when BG3 came out. I recently picked it back up and it clicked and I'm hooked. I'm actually yet to finish it, but feel pretty confident putting it here. This is pretty weird concept for a game. People like to call it "Aliens XCOM" but that's not what it is outside of some pretty surface level similarities, In fact, I've been asked a lot about wtf the game actually is since I think a lot of people don't really know. The best I can come up with it's that it's an open level survival horror game with an RTS presentation. It's a pretty drat interesting idea for a game and I think it works really well. Aliens usually feel like chumps in games, but I think this game does a good job of being tense and making the Aliens feel threatening. Supplies are scarce, levels are huge, and the more you dawdle the more dangerous the Aliens become. It's a perfect tone for Aliens as a franchise. it does have some issues with UI and sameyness, but overall I think it's a great first effort and I hope it gets a sequel.  9. Metroid Prime Remastered A beautiful remake of a great game. To this day I think this is the only metroidvania that truly captures the spirit of the genre in 3D. The remake looks stunning and somehow runs at 60fps on switch. Was great to go back and play this although I will say some of the lack of QOL stuff is a little much. Would have loved some form of limited fast travel. I love how little the game holds your hand though.  8.Marvel's Spiderman 2 Not normally my style of game but I enjoyed the first one well enough. SM2 really felt like a huge improvement though. It does have a decent amount of generic open world stuff that was sort of boring, but swinging around the city never gets old and the game looks stunning with a lot of setpieces that could give Naughty Dog or Sony Santa Monica a run for their money. Even the side poo poo didn't get that old because the game is smart enough not to wear out its welcome. Think I platted it in under 40 hours which was about 1 hour before I would have been sick of it. Just great popcorn gaming shlock. It never fully engrossed me but it was always just fun and chill to return to.  7.Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon All around the best AC game I've played. I think it'd rank higher on my list, but I was kind of hoping it would like, evolve the series a bit more I dunno. Still, a new AC in 2023 feels very fresh and different, and overall it was a lot of fun. Like I was playing an overclocked PS2 game the whole time. I kind of wish more of my AC related gripes like controls, sense of scale, and some of the mission design were addressed but it's a cool rear end game regardless. Building a mech and blowing poo poo up will never not be fun and it was fun Seeing AC with production values that felt in line with other recent Fromsoft games. Also hands down best soundtrack of 2023.  6.Dead Space Remake After this was announced my first thought was "why?" Dead Space still looks and plays fine. It's not even the best Dead Space, that's Dead Space 3 of course lol jk it's 2. But I was sort of intrigued by the little developer diaries that the dev team were putting on Youtube. They were showing the game off in a state that looked about 10% done, but they were so enthusiastic about it and everything they said they wanted to add to it I was just like "YES!". I got the vibe that they really got what a good Dead Space remake would entail, so I became cautiously optimistic about it. Nowhere near as exciting as the real deal, The Callisto Protocol, but oh wait oops that game sucked poo poo. nevermind. Let's see how this Dead Space remake pans out...Well, Dead Space 2 is no longer my favorite DS game. I felt like they addressed everything I disliked about the original game and more. Aside from the obvious graphical boost, they made the world so much more fun to explore with just a few tweaks, Issac has his proper VA instead of being some dork that stares at things, RNG is much better, the world just vibes better. Motive just killed it so hard I just want them to do as much Dead Space as EA will allow.  5. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom This is a weird one to write. I thought this would shoe in for my GOTY. No chance anything else would top it. I feel like I wanted to put it at #5 as an insult. But TOTK was one of the crappiest sequels I have played in a long time. It addresses basically none of the issues I had with BOTW in favor of adding a bunch of stupid bullshit I mostly disliked. I feel like I am in upside down world where this game has been called one of the most ambitious sequels of all time when I found it mostly pretty whack. Imo BOTW is a fantastic physics playground with a really good, but flawed ARPG built around it. I feel like this was the common complaint about it. But instead of building on the ARPG aspect and making it better, they quadrupled down on the physics stuff to the point where it got annoying and tedious, while doing literally nothing to improve the ARPG part. in fact I think it's worse in a lot of ways. Stuff like upgrading armore feels pointlessly tedious now. Just a giant pain I gave up on it after one fairy. The original BOTW map is by far the highlight of the game, but it's basically just the same map with a slight remix. Actually it's worse, because traversal was such a big part of what made it good, but now instead of climbing a mountain and stumbling on beautiful new location you can drive there in a homemade monster truck with a crooked wheel that runs out of batteries in 40 seconds if it doesn't roll down a mountain into the ocean. I could do an effort post just about how much I didn't like the building for the most part, but I'll save that for another day. The Sky Islands are quite cool and getting from one to the other is one of the better parts of the game. Sadly they are all just pretty much copy pasted from about 4 templates so the novelty wears off pretty quick. Don't even get me started on the depths. When I first heard that TOTK had a cave system the size of the whole game I think I got a lil boner, but the reality was much less exciting. The depths panned out to be butt ugly and mostly just served as a dumpster for padding and recycled content. Ultimately I left about 70% of it unexplored and I felt like I spent about 5x too much time down there. Those labyrinth areas under the Gerudo desert were awesome and so was that cave from the bunker to the castle, I wish there was more of that and less of whatever the gently caress the depths were. Also I heard game reviewers say they cried at the story for this game. Are you serious? It's the most generic boring rear end story with no twists or interesting plot beats. Zelda is missing again find her. Whoop de doo. Guess what u find her and she's ok. Not a single moment of the story was interesting or remarkable. At this point you might be asking how the hell this is my #5 GOTY and well, the framework for a BOTW game is just that good. I played it for over 100 hours and had a blast almost the whole time. If I am being honest with myself, I can't put it any lower on the list, but I feel like this game went in the exact opposite direction of what I wanted to see in a sequel for BOTW.  4. Cyberpunk 2077:Phantom Liberty/2.0 I bought this game day one when it was a disasterfuck dumpster fire, and while others deleted or refunded it, I just kept playing it. I did almost everything and loved it even if I couldn't go more than 5 minutes without running into a bug or something that wasn't comically unpolished.There was just something about the world and the story that really landed for me and kept me playing and loving it. I felt like I could see the game it was supposed to be underneath everything. Now I don't have to do that anymore, because with 2.0, while not perfect it really feels like the game it was meant to be. This is only amplified by Phantom Liberty, which is imo the best content in the game. Dogtown is the coolest area in the game. It's just so dense and visually interesting. Idris Elba kills it and I swear Keanu is about twice as good in PL as he is in the base game. If this was a standalone game, I would have been happy with the purchase, but it also comes with the best version of the base game. I can finally recommend CP2077 without an asterisk. It's just a great game and I think we can forget about the terrible launch now, although let's be a little skeptical of the next CDPR game a bit on launch day probably.  3. Star Wars: Jedi Survivor Allright, this one was out of left field. I did not love Fallen Order. Jedi Survivor was not even on my radar. It just sort of came and went and I forgot about it. I went to buy ghostrunner 2 and saw this was on a BF sale in November and decided to give it a chance for some reason I'm still not sure of. I guess I just like Respawn as a dev and wanted to give them another chance. This game was awesome. One of the most improved sequels I have ever played. The first one was pretty lackluster in the exploration dept. but the exploration in survivor is a blast. Every corner seems to have secrets to find and rabbit holes to go down. I am pretty close to doing everything in the game which is rare for me. This is helped by the excellent platforming. Another thing that sucked in the first one. Goddamn I love the platforming in this game. The platforming is frequent, fun and challenging and to me was the highlight of the game. The combat is better, the visuals are better, the scale seems about 5x bigger, it feels more like a proper arpg...It's all around a much better and more ambitious games. It still runs a little rough on PS5 at least, but I found it forgivable and sometimes I dunno how well Dark Souls translates to Star Wars. Still, top notch sequel. I'll but the third one day one. I can't believe this is my #3 but I'm happy to say it is.  2. Resident Evil 4 Remake Wowity wowowow. Ok! This is the best loving remake ever as far as I am concerned. The original RE4 came out in a period where I had stopped playing games for about 4 years. But I always loved RE and my friend gave me his gamecube he didn't use, like a week before RE4 came out and I thought gently caress it. Game blew my mind. Years later I have trouble returning to it though. I just find the controls clunky and the QTEs annoying. RE4 remake managed to capture the exact feeling I had in 2005 playing RE4 for the first time, and really brought it into the new era. It feels like the most ambitious RE project ever in just about every department. Then they go and drop the bomb of releasing the entire game in VR, for free. And this is no lazy VR port. I think it's the best VR game I have ever played and I've played a lot of them. This game is unreal in VR. The VR mode almost made me bump this to my number 1 slot this year, but alas...  1.Baldur's Gate 3 CRPGs were always a bit of a mystery to me. I grew up with parents who always cheaped out on computers so I couldn't ever really play anything cool on them. Ultimately I became a console kid. But I always found CRPGs fascinating. I tried Baldur's gate and Fallout at friends houses but frankly had no idea what was going on and they seemed very complex. The CRPG always stuck in the back of my head though. Finally, around 2016 there was a push to start releasing them on consoles. I was picking up whatever I could and finally getting to enjoy the genre (I've since got a gaming PC I use a lot but that was just about 4 years ago) I picked up wasteland 2, POE etc. and a game called Divinity Original Sin. DOS was a really interesting game. Like, a CRPG mixed with immersive sim and a physics playground all wrapped into one game. Ultimately I did quit playing it after about 60 hours. It was a really interesting game but I felt like it was blueprint for something much better. Turns out I was right. Early on in the pandemic I got my new PC with unemployment funbux and the first thing I picked up was DOS2 definitive edition. Holy gently caress. This was the game that DOS was ramping up to. I have never played something with so much player choice that was all so well written and dynamic. I was just blown away by it. If Baldur's Gate 3 was just as good as DOS2 it was gonna be an all timer. But then they went and added this whole layer of cinematic presentation that only adds to it and causes the formula to hit a new level. So much loving care is put into everything in this game it's insane. In some small ways I still prefer DOS 2 but for the most part BG3 is just better. After 130 hours I am still thinking about the next 130 hours I want to put into it, and then the next. The game is just that good and that dynamic. Also as someone who has been following Larian for the better part of a decade, seeing them have their Elden Ring moment has been wonderful. They are a really great and singular dev and they deserve every bit of attention they have gotten this year. Baldur's Gate 3 is not only the GOTY but one of the greatest games ever made in my eyes. A truly singular experience you can't get anywhere else.
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Dec 30, 2023 20:24
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What a ridiculous year, I finished something like 33 games but for the purposes of keeping things somewhat reasonable I've trimmed it down to top 20, and upon realizing that any of 11-20 could be #11 and half could be top 10 I've decided to instead declare 11-20 a higher tier of honorable mention: Extremely Honorable Mentions (screenshots are my own except when I forgot to take them (often) or they're across too many devices for me to deal with it (also often)) 20: Elden Ring (PC, Series S)  (my current 100% co-op playthrough, join the LLJK and lljk multiplayer groups on PC and give Ser Frog a summon if you see me!) I’m still playing this, and I’ve still probably got more hours in it this year than any of the others on this list. However, in this year where so much incredible stuff came out I could not give it the top spot it still deserves, so I am settling for giving it the bottom spot, so it will be the first thing readers see. If we had actually gotten DLC this year it probably would've been #1, alas that will have to wait until next year. 19: Death's Gambit: Afterlife (Switch) (Sure you may be an unstoppable killing machine, but could you.....run a kitchen?!)  This apparently came out years ago in a pretty sorry state, and the Afterlife in the title refers to both a big continuation of the story, but an overhaul of much of what was bad before. I didn’t play the original, but this was a very fun game and best of all it had a great big dumb hammer that scaled its damage off of vitality. There has never been a more perfect weapon for me in any game I’ve ever played. 18: Brotato (Switch)  It’s Vampire Survivors, with much more actual variety in how your final build on a run looks, and it will run on a Switch. That’s all the pitch I needed, and it’s a very fun one to do a run or two when there’s some down time. It’s a bit too RNG heavy for my tastes but I haven’t unlocked everything, and it can afford it because even a dumpster fire of a build can make it to the end and stand a puncher’s chance. 17: Void Bastards (Switch)  Very odd game with comic book styling to its very DNA, and gameplay is like FTL if the ship combat was a DOOM level, lots of humor and the wackiness fits, had a blast playing this and ended up wishing there was more. All the weapons feel both very useful, very powerful, or both and scrabbling to glue random poo poo together to get them or get more of them never stops being funny. My favorite weapon ended up being a friendly robo-cat companion that "hugs" the first enemy it seems by releasing a bunch of cluster grenades. Some of these ships are very spooky and navigating them very tense. 16: Dredge (Switch)  It’s what I had hoped Cult of the Lamb would be. Had a good time with it, really liked it and how the scary stuff both wasn’t scary and the game didn’t seem to care if you were scared or not. You really can just put on your “FISH FEAR ME” hat and ignore all the spooky stuff, and I admire that. 15: Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle (Switch)  This game wins the award for Biggest Overperformer. I had no idea what this strange beast was supposed to be, so image my surprise when it turns out to be an X-Com game with every edge sanded off, but in a good way. It is quite easy with a decent party composition and boy howdy are there a lot of ways you can build a party, but most importantly it stays interesting and getting perfect scores on all levels is hard enough to feel rewarding but not so hard as to be, well, how these things usually go in XCOM games. That said, I can’t imagine anybody getting a perfect score on the final boss that isn’t some kind of inhuman monster at the hardest in the genre. 14: Graveyard Keeper (Switch)  Adult Swim in its prime does Stardew. A really addictive formula here where you build up your graveyard for cash and church for the currency for a ton of stuff, both of which also get fed back into themselves. An absolutely incredible amount of content as well. If you give this a whirl, don’t repeat the terrible mistake I did – build up your zombie army ASAP and not just at the very end of the game, and get the waystone from the innkeeper before then as well. Anybody who has played it knows what a testament it is to the game itself that I liked it so much despite walking everywhere and having no automation. 13: Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin (Switch)  A very strange game, best summarized as the most meticulous and detailed perfect rice growing simulator around (the original manual I’ve heard recommended contacting the Japanese ministry of agriculture), and since you’re playing as the Goddess of the harvest, how you grow your rice and what kind you grow make you more powerful in the other half of the game, which is a chaotic brawler wherein you mercilessly slaughter screen after screen of enemies with farming implements in a high speed orgy of destruction. The people who you are sharing exile with are interesting and throw in a lot of twists and turns. I’d sometimes find myself forgoing combat for an entire year just to constantly monitor disease and pest levels, that proper irrigation is in place for the phase of growth, and tweaking the twice daily fertilizer application to ensure what is needed is delivered in the morning where it will do the most. A very odd game but very good. The physical copy for the Switch even comes with a little booklet! 12: Pokemon Legends: Arceus (Switch)  I caught’em all when Red/Blue were new on the scene and retired on top until Sword and Shield pulled me back in. I didn’t play Scarlet/Violet because I just didn’t feel the compulsion, but I did pick up Arceus on the grounds that it was doing something very different. Well, it was, and it rocked. Pokemon are genuinely scary at times for the first time playing this series, and the final battle was actually extremely difficult, as were a few others which is very rare in a Pokemon game. It’s been mentioned before but I’m very excited to see if the pains in 8 and 9 were growing pains after all and 10 really revolutionizes the series. I also hope that TotK finally convinces studios to devote significant time to polish when, to pick an example entirely at random, your franchise is the most recognizable and profitable on THE PLANET EARTH. 11: Afterimage (Switch)  A game much higher up the list got me into metroidvanias and I played an awful lot of them this year. Afterimage sticks out not just for the extremely diverse array of weapons and combat options, but because even in such a short amount of time playing them its lush, extremely alive and varied settings stood out as a breath of fresh air. It's also an enormous game, probably the biggest metroidvania I've ever played, so it's good that stuff is fun to experiment with and the world is engaging. Performance could be a bit spotty on Switch, but only in the open world and especially with screens using parallax. It's playable but if you're put off by things getting herky jerky at times, PC is the best bet. !~~THE REAL DEAL TOP 10 LIST~~! 10: Kingdom: Two Crowns (Switch, Series S)  There’s no way I could describe this game that would make anybody believe it’s as compelling and fun to play as it is. Great for co-op too, you basically ride around on your horse or other mount and do the only thing you can do, which is pay people to do things. It’s a 3 button game including movement, but god help me if it isn't a blast keeping your people safe while expanding to within striking distance of enemy structures, as every night and with every structure destroyed things get progressively harder and harder and your larger kingdom becomes harder to defend both directly and because it takes you so much longer to traverse it. The difficulty is forgiving even on the insane difficulties, and recovery from losing a crown (game over, new dynasty begins) is exceptionally forgiving and even has a lot of upside. 9: Monster Sanctuary (Switch)  It’s a Pokemon Metroidvania that is both just plain fun and extremely well executed, and probably the most balanced game I’ve played, especially considering the fights are 3v3 from a pool of 6. No monster is OP on its own, nor did I find a single one that is bad, because it’s about team building first and foremost. One big way it is different from Pokemon is that it also gets fiendishly difficult in parts and has a ton of very difficult optional trainer fights. I didn’t have to wonder if my final team (Spectral Frog named Croaku, a lizard with a spear and armor, and an adorable ice blob) was as strong as I thought it was and that I had actually done a great job. I knew all that was true because I pulled that team through hell and back and made it back alive. 8: Dave the Diver (PC)  Couldn’t get enough of this game, can’t wait to return to it eventually. Perfect humor, great mechanics, I just loved it from start to finish. 7: A Space for the Unbound (Switch)  It’s not an uncommon thought that I may have a heart of stone, but this one did get me near the end so there’s warmth there yet. A VN about 90’s Indonesia with a big serving of slice of life that very gradually becomes something from an combloc sci-fi novella. The visuals are perfect for what it is, and, well, I really dislike what I usually refer to as “magical high schooler bullshit” and I still loved this game despite it being (starting out as at least) literally that. Very good Switch game. 6: Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights (Switch)  This was an odd one for me for the first half of the game, because all I’d ever known about this game was that most people who played it didn’t like it that much. My shock came from the fact that it was in fact extremely good. Hell the first real deal spirit they gave me was the big dumb hammer guy I would go on to use for the entire game, the map doesn’t track to the in game world very well BUT it tells you when you’ve found all the secrets in a room which is worth any amount of flowchart look. This game had one of my favorite boss fights of all time (Julius, that is the only one in a 2D game that really felt like I was fighting one of From’s best bosses, boss theme included.) Maybe it had a rough launch or something, but this game is GREAT. 5: Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin (PC)  “Worst Souls game, 9/10” Dark Souls 2 is a lesson in why developers always put all the good stuff at the start and leave the ending being as good to hope and prayer, because when they don't do that they get a Dark Souls 2. This game has probably the worst start for the genre you could make – all the bad parts of the new stuff are all front and center, and none of the good stuff shows up until midgame. There’s about 50% too many enemies and the bosses are frankly boring and way too easy. Your character within these levels of gank rooms moves like molasses and has horrible iframes on dodges until you invest 30 levels into ATT and/or ADP. Every interesting weapon requires midgame levels of stats and way too much dex. BUT once you get past that, the game is a lot better. A LOT better. Genuinely interesting and weird level design even if you have to make a point of not thinking about how they all fit together, the ADP hurdle is crossed quickly because the game just loads you down with levels and souls such that you’ll be finishing this at a higher level than you would a completionist Elden Ring playthrough, and this also means fun builds because the soft caps are pretty hard so you’re incentivized to branch out if you aren’t a caster or powerstancer. Probably my most controversial take is that the usual wisdom – the DLC makes the base game worth it – is wrong. The back half of the game is legit great and this really stands out because this was very much not the case with DS1, and while the Iron King DLC is probably my favorite DLC, Sunken was about as good as the best parts of the base game and Ivory King was frankly worse in most regards. The Ivory King fight itself though was fantastic, easy if you’ve got a complete build by then but it’s basically a DOOM arena and kicks rear end. Probably my most controversial take is that the Outskirts aren't that bad. Iron Passage is truly hell, a zone that is the pinnacle of making an area infuriating to even step foot in much less traverse. Outskirts is just a matter of killing a few reindeer and then two of a boss that still manages to only be about as hard as Red Wolf of Radagon. It is a test of patience, and a test of if you're using a weapon that is good at fighting reindeer, and a test of if you have Warmth and 100 lifegems, but it's tivially easy to solve. Not so with the run-up to Blue Smelty which has you coming AND going. 4: Chained Echoes (Switch)  This game blew me away, the first JRPG I’ve played since the original FFVII that blew me away and kept me hooked to the end. There’s a lot to be said about the overdrive system and sheer variety of options to build your party, but I think the biggest thing is how much QoL there is. Your characters move like greased lightning everywhere they go and grow more powerful not from grinding, but from progressing the story and killing bosses while exploring. Fast travel is one of the first things you get and is very fair. Combat is balanced (assuming you haven't selected the hard modes which are fiendishly difficult) and upgrading weapons is easy and anything you do to them beyond that is pure upside. The story is great and the characters even better, and the OST is simply incredible. Any other year this would be vying for first place. This game is just a real pleasure to play, like taking the aircraft carrier that is the genre standard and somehow making it as sleek and fast as a destroyer, with a great story and even better characters. 3: Hollow Knight (Switch)  I picked this up at the beginning of the year after bouncing off it multiple times in the past, most recently on a run where I ended up fighting a really annoying midgame boss (Brooding Mawlek) as like my 2nd or 3rd by freak chance and giving up in frustration. This time I explored more and found the intended route, and actually got to feel absorbed by this world, and boy howdy did I suddenly get the praise for this game. Charming, hard but fair, many of my favorite boss fights in any 2D game, and a really incredibly well made world. So much of this game is empty, thoughtful, and sad, something that many games striving to make an eerie and mournful setting forget in favor of making every screen a platforming or combat challenge. The dream nail grave fights were some of my favorite, because the fights were frequently fantastic but mostly because the sad little wistful bits of world building that was their stories, your real reward for felling them, became the most touching parts of the game for me. Now ghostly voices recounting what the collapse you are wandering the ruins of was for people living through it. A warrior monk who has become infected and is succumbing to violent frenzy is killed, with clarity of mind enough left to know he is being killed but not know why until the truly final act. A funny grub and proud knight both desperately seeking the security of the respect of their King but finding themselves adrift and seeking anything at all when he goes missing as plague ravages the land. A little grub that harnesses his fear and becomes a giant warrior styled after a king, your reward being following him into the afterlife to confirm that even if he had been as powerful as he saw himself as, it wouldn't have been enough. And who could forget Gorb, who needs no introduction. Every Metroidvania on this list and quite a few others I played because this finally opened up the whole genre to me. 2: Dark Souls 3 (PC) https://i.imgur.com/WBe3my9.mp4 This year I decided I was going to complete the catalogue of Souls games after going from DS1 straight to 500 hours of Elden Ring. The first of these was 3 and it wasn’t too long before I understood why it is still the favorite of so many. The boss fights are incredible, with even the easy ones being an incredible spectacle with a badass theme. Combat and movement felt really good, and best of all I got a big stupid hammer really early that did frostbite as well. What really rocketed this up to 2nd place though was the setting. It was really good already and then you get to the eerie magical city and it’s just another level. Then comes the big reveal after that, and holy poo poo what a reveal, and then the grim deathmarch begins where you are reminded of the cycle of these things in a very visceral way, walking through a graveyard you remember being alive past the bodies of your old friends. You’ve now become what you were before, a wanderer plundering ruins and harnessing old dead mythologies from past ages the same as the forces you now battle are doing, only now you’re plundering the ruins of something familiar and the mood is very different. It is this heavy shroud you carry through the rest of the game, and all that follows fits neatly underneath, like chapter after chapter being added to a book until you reach the page that is absolutely the final one. Or is it? Ashes felt very short but the Friede fight was just incredible. Solo and with a greathammer it was a real dance that took me probably 20 tries to finally come out on top. Ringed City was probably the best ending to the series there could’ve been, one where they managed to make a FUN dragon fight and a final boss that is an all-timer even if he’s maybe a bit too easy if you aren’t easily flustered by chip damage and have a weapon with a lot of stagger. 1: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch) (Judge Dredd of the Hyrule Fashion Police executing his duty)  To be entirely truthful, half of my top 10 could’ve been here, but TotK took it on points because it did a whole bunch of really wild poo poo with the formula and, thanks to also getting a year dedicated to just polish, it all worked incredibly well. The story was passable, and literally every complaint I had about BotW was not just fixed, but was elevated to one of my favorite things about the game. The main bosses are interesting and varied, fusion made weapon durability really great actually, and building never stopped being fun. The story was great but the way it was told left a lot to be desired to say the least. I’m actually a fan of the disjointed time thing, but every cutscene after every boss being the same and the companions being totally useless aside from Tulin because he stays out of your way pulled it down a lot. My first playthrough of this was as long as my first for Elden Ring, and the final fight was just insanely cool. TotK was just a real achievement in a lot of ways, it totally consumed me for a month in a way that almost nothing out there can anymore. Top ten cheat sheet: 1) TotK 2) Dark Souls 3 3) Hollow Knight 4) Chained Echoes 5) Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin 6) Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights 7) A Space for the Unbound 8) Dave the Diver 9) Monster Sanctuary 10) Kingdom: Two Crowns
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Dec 30, 2023 20:27
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I was using the 2018 data to test my vote counting script and I think I found a few errors. The first is that three goons, cyclical, JBP, and Zephro weren't counted. Notably, if they were counted Pillars of Eternity 2 would be at #5 instead of #9.cyclical posted:... JBP posted:... Zephro posted:... The second, and more notable, is that in training had their vote counted as Monster Hunter World when it was for Monster Hunter Generations: In Training posted:... The vote seems to have been half-counted where it was counted for points but not number of votes or #1 spots, because I also have 14 votes and 5 #1s but only 112 points: code:Rarity posted:[b]1. MONSTER HUNTER WORLD (CAPCOM) Full output (note that I use a less advanced tiebreaker so some might break differently): code:Microcline fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Dec 30, 2023 |
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Dec 30, 2023 20:31
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okay
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Dec 30, 2023 20:37
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this count is a sham!!!!!
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Dec 30, 2023 20:39
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Regy Rusty posted:3. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist – I should have played this last year when my vote would have counted towards its rankings! But alas, I only even learned about it from last year’s top 10 results so I finally picked it up this summer and it BLEW ME AWAY. This game is what Disco Elysium wishes it could be (fine, to be more accurate this game is what I wish Disco Elysium was). Making this kind of stat and dialogue based rpg into a time loop was a brilliant way to make your choices actually matter. Discovering problems in one playthrough and then figuring out how to solve them in a later one was immensely satisfying. I loved every character and exhaustively explored every one of their stories. I got every unique ending, solved every major puzzle, and even looked up a guide to do a theoretically “perfect” playthrough right at the end just because I wanted to leave things on the highest possible note. I wrung every bit of joy I could out of this game and as one way to demonstrate that – I spent exactly as long on this 3-4 hour per playthrough game as I did on the massive bloated RPG that is Trails into Reverie. I'm so happy that Exocolonist is getting at least a couple of votes this year. Such a good game with such an awful name. 
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Dec 30, 2023 20:40
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Unfortunately former forums poster Microcline has met with a freak Rarity-induced accident I'm sorry to report
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Dec 30, 2023 20:40
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nobody: Microline: struggeled
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Dec 30, 2023 20:43
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2018 had la mulana 2, crosscode, AND iconoclasts. thats actually an insane year for gaming
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Dec 30, 2023 20:45
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lunar detritus posted:I'm so happy that Exocolonist is getting at least a couple of votes this year. Such a good game with such an awful name. Hell yeah. I got a bunch of my friends to finally play it too. Love that game
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Dec 30, 2023 20:47
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Epic High Five posted:11: Afterimage (Switch) Yeah I have to say this might be my favorite in the genre. Would have put it in over Bloodstained on my list but it's a game I picked up early this month. Gorgeous, fluid movement and I really gelled with the combat to the point I enjoyed brute forcing bosses I was underleveled for. Real drat shame about the translation job though. Can't decide on pronouns for some characters, and sometimes even in the same box of text you'd see inconsistencies.
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Dec 30, 2023 21:10
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I love this thread. I legit look forward to it all year. I picked up probably 16-18 of these just because of these threads. WARNING: expect to see the phrases "cool and chill" and "short and sweet" overused here. I am creatively bankrupt. First off are some games worth mentioning that, for one reason or another, don't quite have a place on the list:  corru.observer - Really neat mystery webgame! Sort of like a VN for aliens. Very cool, but I liked it better with the gameplay / JRPG elements switched off. Also, it is not finished yet.  Unnamed Space Idle - Free idle game. Playing it right now.  Vampire Survivors w/DLC - WOW there's a lot more to this now. That's a good thing. No complaints. It is almost inexcusable how much of this I've played now. Almost.  Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous AGAIN - I keep playing the opening part of the Inevitable Excess DLC because it is pure D&D 3.5 grognardiness. It isn't about roleplay, it's about who can out-bullshit the DM. I've logged over 200 hours just replaying the opening segment finding new ways to use the rules to my advantage.  Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader - Isometric RPG with turn-based land and space combat and management elements in the WH40K universe. This isn't going on the list yet because I'm just not far enough into it. Jank aside, it's pretty great so far! I mention it here because it's the game that stole me away from BG3. I guess I lean more toward Owlcat jank than Larian bloat (though they're both great). The list (they were all good enough to play through, but it will start out a bit gripey):  The House in Fata Morgana - Tragedy / horror VN. HOO BOY, this writing style. I've never seen anything quite like it in any VN or novel. The author has the most weirdly SLOW and redundant writing style I've ever seen. Everything takes 3-4 times longer than it should to read and so much of the dialogue is "......" it feels like it was written in Morse code by a snake. There's also a lot of stammering. At first I thought it was a translation issue, but a reviewer who played it in Japanese confirmed that the author's writing style is just like this. I played it on console, and even when speedreading and just mashing X to get through the slower, more redundant parts of the story it still takes forever. I spent most of my time with this pressing X and wishing I was doing something else. Like reading a visual novel. Which is a shame, because I honestly liked a lot of the story and characters. There were some genuine heartfelt moments. Usually when a number of core mysteries in a narrative have been solved, the story starts to get stale. Not so here, it does a good job of using the solved mysteries to recontextualize the story leading up to that point. The art was between good and iffy (why did so many characters look like they had no teeth?). The music was good enough, though some of the loops could get a bit tiring with how long some of the segments go on. There was also a neat one-off gimmick involving the text log that I don't think I've seen before. THAT WRITING STYLE, THOUGH. It really feels like you're trudging through deep mud as you read. On the weakness of that alone I don't think I'd give it a recommend. Or I'd give it a really rough recommend. The redundancies, the stammering, and the ellipses are just too drat much. I don't even mind a tragedy-horror VN being written like some cheap high-school harem manga, it's just (press X) ...... (press X) S-SO (press X) ...... (press X) F-loving (press X) ...... (press X) S-SLOW (press X) ...... (press X) T-TO (press X) ...... (press X) R-READ.  Dear Esther - The walking-est of sims. I feel like Red Bull was the wrong choice of beverage for this experience. It was slow and atmospheric and looked and sounded nice enough, but I wasn't sure what they were going for. It turns out that there's an in-game director's commentary track and the vibe they were going for was "dreamlike". A number of in-game events are randomized so each player has a unique experience and the "point" is to be subjective. What they were going for was kind of interesting, but I found it to be ho-hum as hell in execution. I can't in good faith recommend this one. The small dev team seemed very passionate about it, though. Good for them!  Blue Reflection: Second Light - Semi-freeroam dialogue-heavy JRPG with lots of unrelated mechanics. It's... fine. I've seen it hyped up a lot in these threads and I'm not sure I understand why. Everything about it is fine, but nothing more. Graphically, it looks and runs like a Japanese porno game from 2014. It's fine. The music doesn't get in the way and is appropriate for the scenes and setting. It's fine. The story is a mishmash of elements we've seen plenty of times before. It's fine. The combat system is simple enough to pick up easily and it works well. It's fine. The dialogue is the most clichéd anime / JRPG stuff in the world. It's fine. It has THE most forgettable cast of characters I've ever seen in a game, though. It succeeds magnificently at the Bechdel Test, but falls face-first onto a turd at the RLM Star Wars Test (describe a character without describing their appearance or what they do). It feels like a game that doesn't really lean into any of its strengths. It's slightly intriguing, it's somewhat fun, it's slightly heartfelt, it's slightly horny, and it's slightly gay. The sound, music, visuals, animations, and gameplay are fine. It's a fine game, but everything it does has been done many times before and much better. It's like if you thought 13 Sentinels was TOO mysterious and intriguing or Persona 4 was TOO interesting and heartfelt, then this game is for you. It was good enough that I didn't feel like I was slogging through it, but by the end I was looking forward to playing something else with more personality. It's fine.  Frog Detective (series) - Charming, humorous, whimsical adventure games. VERY simple, relaxed gameplay. Very short, but weirdly slow too. There were a few jokes that got a genuine laugh out of me.  Saints Row 2022 - 3rd-person freeroam crime action-adventure that was better than I was expecting. A lot of very consistent and annoying bugs that were present at launch were still present 6 months later. There's a design philosophy that they're trying to funnel you through an "experience" instead of letting you play out missions by solving problems with the game mechanics. This means that there is no reward to the player for intelligent or skillful play, you're just going to get the same "experience" either way. It has some very fun scenes but is overall lacking in the storytelling department because none of the story beats felt like they carried weight. The game plays well enough, and the classic hip-hop station was pretty good. Also, if you are not playing as Big Girl Country Boss, you are playing the game incorrectly. I can only imagine that anyone who didn't would score it less favorably than I did.  S Garfield - 1st-person freeroam sci-fi RPG. Jon Arbuckle (pictured above) said I should buy this, so I did. A lot of people were disappointed by this. I'm not sure why. Bethesda stopped trying to do ambitious, interesting things after 2002. They peddle in Comfortable Mediocrity© now. It's Skyrim in space. It has its ups and downs, it's jank as poo poo, filled with poor design decisions (especially for a high-budget full-price title in 2023!), and they'll never fix it. It does a good job painting the future as a blasted hellscape where the only literature is Charles Dickens. I mostly enjoyed my time with it, but I couldn't find Garfield anywhere.  Vampire the Masquerade: Coteries of New York - Visual novel in the World of Darkness setting with a really nice hand-painted art style. It does the thing that good lore-heavy games do where you can quickly reference the definition of unfamiliar terms when they are spoken. You can tell that the devs had originally intended for it to be a LOT more ambitious in terms of reactivity and game mechanics. It felt like they'd only made about 2/5ths of the game they'd wanted to. Still, it was a nice little ride while it lasted.  Vampire the Masquerade: Shadows of New York - Sort of a "companion piece" to Coteries, and the art, writing, and style are of the same quality. It's shorter and less ambitious than the other one, and I liked the main character a lot. All in all, a good bite-sized read.  AI the Somnium Files - Kotaro Uchikoshi mystery VN. It looks, sounds, and plays nicely enough. Everything is Uchikoshi as poo poo, for better or worse. It was pretty long but it kept me wanting to find out what happens next. That's exactly what I want out of a good mystery and this delivers. There is an option for the skip / fast forward function that allows you to skip previously unseen content. I'd never even think about turning it on in any other VN, but it's a godsend when you're up to your knees in Uchikoshi Bullshit™.  Lacuna - Cool sci-fi noir mystery adventure with a side-scrolling pixel art style. I really like how mysteries are handled in this. You gather clues and testimonies and then try to piece them all together diagetically. This is how puzzles should be in non-puzzle games. The game was short and sweet, I liked it. This is an excellent example of diagetic puzzles that EVERY OTHER GAME DEV should take inspiration from.  Hexcells (series) - Short and sweet puzzle games. I accidentally bought this for 3 bucks and played it to completion. It's like a hand-crafted Minesweeper with a few new mechanics and everything can be solved logically. If you pick this up, do yourself a favor and get the whole set. They sort of work best that way. They are a pleasant distraction with a chill vibe.  The Roottrees Are Dead - Free online deduction puzzle with a late 90s vibe. You feel very clever when you figure things out. It scratches that Obra Dinn itch.  What Remains of Edith Finch - An actual GOOD walking sim! Well-written, heartfelt, and from time to time... BUCK WILD. I got it on sale for $5 and it was worth it.  Superliminal - 1st-person puzzle game. Neat puzzles, and just the kind I like. Rock solid game, very chill, clever puzzles. Short and sweet, doesn't overstay its welcome.  House Flipper - 1st-person home design / maintenance game. (Pictured above: Your mom. Your mom is a tarantula named Scrojacublaster.) Kinda like Powerwash Simulator with building and design mechanics. As far as dadgames go, this one ain't bad. It's jank but it gets the job done. Barely, but it DOES get there. (I'm just kidding around, the tarantula's name is actually Ruby.)  The Case of the Golden Idol - Very cool deduction / mystery game. It's exactly what I was hoping for. Short and sweet. There is DLC, and it does some neat stuff, but I feel like it pales in comparison to the main game.  Sable - 3rd-person exploration game. Very cool and chill. It's sort of like a cross between A Short Hike and Journey. The game's surprisingly buggy, enough to warrant mentioning here but not enough to detract from the fun. Buggy, but a very good game!  The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante - A very interesting CYOA with a distinct style. It's wild how tense a mostly text-based CYOA can be. It does the OG Fallout-style ending well and is worth a few playthroughs. It's well-written, engaging, and generally just a good time.  10. Grow: Song of the Evertree - Very chill, cute 3rd-person exploration / farm / townbuilding sim. You fly around on a monster helping plants and animals and fighting off THE CORRUPTION® until you've built some villages that people want to move into. It was cool and chill and good.  9. Citizen Sleeper - Story-based sci-fi time management game. Great little game! It's just a solid combination of elements that works well. While it's not a "chill-out" game, I like how not stressful it is.  8. Spiritfarer - Sidescrolling seafaring friendly death adventure with some base management elements. Fantastic animation and character design. It's a very chill, thoughtful, and heartfelt game with excellent characters. It's not often that a creative work gets my eyes to tear up, but this one got a tear out of me. You can hug the cat.  7. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries - 1st or 3rd person mech combat sim with management elements. This is basically what I'd wished Mechwarrior 2 was back in '96 or '97 or so. A bit on the buggy side, but not quite enough to get on my nerves. There are a host of customizable difficulty options to make things more lore-friendly, put on training wheels while you git gud, make it more of a power fantasy, or just adjust the balance until it feels right. Environments are almost fully destructible and the mechs feel appropriately big and stompy. It's a very nice-looking game and it plays pretty well.  6. PowerWash Simulator - 1st-person powerwashing simulator. It's exactly what I thought it was and hoped it would be. This helped me get through being really, really sick. Cute and relaxing. It has free Tomb Raider and FF7 DLC.  5. Snowrunner - Like QWOP Farcry for trucks. It's nothing like I was expecting because, on paper, there's nothing about this game I should like. I don't care about driving, hauling, or trucks. There were some humorous Youtube videos with people getting stuck in the mud, but it didn't look like fun to actually play. I am very glad I gave it a try anyway! It's very much an "at your own pace" kind of game with no penalties for experimenting with different approaches or equipment for problem-solving. You're given sets of tasks and challenges but it's entierely up to you how to approach them. It's my new chill-out game and is sort of filling the place in my heart previously occupied by Elite Dangerous.  4. Paradise Killer - First-person open world murder mystery. Great setting and style. The first-person platforming is really bad until you discover THE FOOTBATHS. (It took me 15 hours to figure that out.) I like that the game never says "this is right" or "this is wrong" and leaves you to figure it out for yourself. Refreshing. A rock-solid murder mystery!  3. Marvel's Midnight Suns - CCG / Tactical battler with base management elements. The game's kind of like Slay the Spire meets XCOM: Chimera Squad but with Spider-Man in it. For as many characters as there are in the game, Firaxis did a really good job of balancing them. If you look up discussions on the "best" team compositions, almost every single person has a different one. I feel like that speaks well to the game's balance. The story and characters are well-written and it's neat to interact with Marvel characters in a personal way, though the whole cloying "You're so cool, (Customizable Main Character), you're the best!" schtick gets a bit tiresome. (Deadpool, of course, calls you out on this) The voice cast is top-tier, and Michael Jai White as Blade was an inspired casting choice. I played way too much of this game. It's pretty cozy in a weird way. You are rewarded for petting the dog.  2. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist - Character and story-driven sci-fi isometric RPG with a card game mechanic. Good music and neat visual style right out of the gate. Buck-wild pronoun customization, never seen anything like that before. I CAN FINALLY HAVE MY PREFERRED PRONOUN OF "ARACHNOTRON"!!! My gender is ARACHNOTRON. Please, "Mr." was my father, you can call me ARACHNOTRON. My first playthrough was in one 19-hour sitting, but it didn't feel like that long. I thought I was being completionist, but I'd really only scratched the game's surface in terms of discovering the story and character beats! There are about 30 endings, each with their own OG Fallout-style variations. It really is a game intended to be played several times. It's a well-written game with more reactivity than you might think. The devs did a great job of remembering the player's prior actions, even if only for flavor text. Months later, I was still thinking about this game. It really stuck with me.  1. Yakuza: Like A Dragon - Semi-freeroam dialogue-heavy JRPG with lots of unrelated mechanics. Where the Ryu Ga Gotoku series openly wears its Shenmue influences on its sleeve, this wears Dragon Quest on its sleeve. This may be my favorite Yakuza game. It's great. It has all of the fun, intrigue, and drama you'd want from a RGG game. The character writing is very good. Hokey as all hell but heartfelt and I actually cared about the characters. Despite both being semi-freeroam dialogue-heavy JRPGs with lots of unrelated mechanics, this couldn't feel any more different from Blue Reflection: Second Light. I befriended a crawdad. Her name is Nancy. Fantastic game, everything I'd hoped it would be and more! VG version: 10. Grow: Song of the Evertree 9. Citizen Sleeper 8. Spiritfarer 7. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries 6. PowerWash Simulator 5. Snowrunner 4. Paradise Killer 3. Marvel's Midnight Suns 2. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist 1. Yakuza: Like A Dragon
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Dec 30, 2023 21:12
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FireWorksWell posted:Yeah I have to say this might be my favorite in the genre. Would have put it in over Bloodstained on my list but it's a game I picked up early this month. Gorgeous, fluid movement and I really gelled with the combat to the point I enjoyed brute forcing bosses I was underleveled for. I've seen a lot worse but yeah the translation can be inconsistent at parts. I've been trying to play whatever games come across my radar out of China lately because they're reliably deeply weird or a breath of fresh air in whatever genre you find it, but reliable translation is really lacking. Warm Snow is on my list next but wasn't going to make it on this year's list, and apparently it got a DLC? "It's like Hades" was all it took Luckily for Afterimage the world and combat can carry any story
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Dec 30, 2023 21:36
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Honorable Mention Unsighted - Top down pixel action game. Would have been on the list but I saw I played it in October 2022 so RIP. Definitely recommend, especially as a cooperative game to play with a friend. Went through the entire story over remote play and didn't have any issues with parrying or dodging. 5 - GTFO - I absolutely hate this game. It's miserable as hell having to lose hours worth of time because you or your friends made too many mistakes. Yet, I guess I'm a masochist because I still find myself willing to play it with my friend who is addicted to it. Maybe it's the sense of achievement when you finally manage to get through a level and overcome everything that was giving you such a hard time before. I don't really want to put this up here but I put a lot of hours on it this year so that must count for something. 4 - Darktide - I scoffed when it first came out, having not been particularly impressed by the demo. A year later, bought it on a whim since my friend plays it regularly and I don't regret it at all. Been enjoying getting immersed in the world with my Psyker and Ogryn just popping on and plowing a level or two. People generally seem to be decent, never trash talking or dropping slurs. And that OST absolutely slaps. 3 - FF15 - I sat on this for the longest time, getting annoyed as poo poo at how far apart things were on the map. At some point I embraced it for the road trip that it was and took my time hanging with my boys and take photographs all the while. The questing system was kind of exhausting, but the highs were enough of a high to get me through to the end. Hell of a cover of Stand by Me. 2 - Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy - I love Guardians of the Galaxy as a franchise. Was my first went getting into marvel comics and I fell in love with the movies. This game is essentially a 30 hour movie. I had a great time going through this obvious love letter to the franchise, so much so that I could ignore how the combat was probably 6/10 at best. 1 - Baldurs Gate 3 - A stupid long RPG I can play with friends? Instant goty. The fact that they put a stupid amount of work into crafting countless possibilities for dialogue paths and multiple ways to resolve quests is just the cherry on top. My only real complaint is it's SO LONG. And I wish you couldn't talk no jutsu so many of the bosses.
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Dec 30, 2023 21:56
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I hadn't actually looked at Warm Snow until now despite passing over it a few times in the PS Store, but I'm definitely snagging that since it's 30% off, thanks for the heads up!
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Dec 30, 2023 21:56
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I need to say a massive, massive thank you to everyone here who has shared with us all their lists. I love each iteration of this thread and it is wholly down to everyone sharing their honest loves. Some posts here push games straight into my horizon from nothing but the sheer positivty . This whole venture is a lot of time and effort but so worth it and could not be successful without your words and I am entirely grateful for them! You all rock!  However, I gotta post a list as well. It is a bit of a running joke that my username VideoGames is a misnomer because of the amount of classic games that I have never made my way through or have any semblance of a clue about. All these criticisms are valid and I have been attempting to rectify this these last three years with a routine stream three times a week. As such, another huge thanks to everyone who has chosen to spend time with me laughing at my incompetence and then sudden extreme luck in a ton of the games on the list below. Without the stream keeping me on track and helping me finish games, I probably would have stopped playing them altogether. The whole thing properly rejuvenated me and my love of this hobby and I know I am going to eventually have played everything in existence. The sheer amount of gaming ambrosia I have absorbed these last 36 months are making me powerful beyond belief, however, and I will consume the world. Keeping it real.  This year I played a ton of Wintendo games (and checking my schedule for next year looks like I will be playing even more GOATs than before but not as much Nintendo) and due to my top ten music list you might see some familiar faces. You might also see some entries in strange places and some weird write ups. This list is, as always, based on my vibes and my feelings after the fact. I connect to games, as we all do, on a unique level based on everything that has happened in my life up to that point and with whatever emotional state I am in. A moment of greatness may not land or may land harder due to an infinite number of variables happening within my brain. This is true for all of us and why I enjoy the discussions on what makes a game so good, so good. If I can align myself for even a moment with someone elses thoughts on a game then it enhances my own thoughts and feelings and helps me better understand myself and the game. Time changes all and these current standings are how I personally feel at this moment in time because lord knows looking back at 2022 and 2021 I could reorder those lists slightly as present me but that would not reflect the me of those years. There will be spelling mistakes galore. HONORABLE MENTIONS: These appear here due to not completing them. I only like to put games I have finished in my list otherwise it feels rude. Starfield: I spent over 100 hours in this game and I think I am the only person on the forums who had a thorouhgly wonderful time with it. I wanted the ability to just travel between planets and scan and build bases and be a lone explorer and I got it. I know mods and DLC will probably improve it further, but this was my most played game of the year. I just never started the main storyline so I did not 'complete' it and thus it is ineligible. Wo Long: I am currently stuck on a boss (the lightning guy who makes a million copies of himself) but what I have played has been fluid and frenetic and a great souls like. I could not progress in Nioh 1 or 2 but this works for me. Especially the cool deflecting system. I know I will eventually beat that boss and keep going, just need to find the time. Frozen Wilds: DLC for HZD and in keeping with my own imposed restrictions, like Echoes of the Eye last year this does not count for a full entry. It had some unbelievably good side quests and new characters and got me stoked for my eventual playthrough of the sequel. Great DLC! TheatreRhythmn Final Bar Line: This is a game I love but am atrocious at. I made it a point to only play those games I know and have heard the music from, which means I could (thus far) only play six of the FFs and the Xenogears, Nier Automata and Chronotrigger track listing. There are still hundreds of songs to go and so I have barely scratched the tip of this game. Also I am REALLY bad at it.  Bowser's Fury: I was told I had to count this seperately and yes, I know I am the rulesmaster of the thread but it kind of makes sense. This reminded me of Sunshine and definitely had roots based in that style of Mario game. It was a wonderful epilogue to the main SM3DWorld game and took everything from the main game and moved it across with some modern nostalgia. It being DLC of a sort means I will not include it in the main list. Quake II: Nightdive released an updated version with the same level of care they did to Doom and Quake with full expansions, a mod list, some QOL features and full bot match. Considering I have played it multiple times to completion before this year and I had tens of thousands of hours in the multiplayer from back in the day, it did not feel right picking it for this list. It is still the best Quake and works amazingly on Steam Deck. Metroid Prime Remastered: Still playing it, loving it. It is not finished yet. THE RUNNERS UPS:  16. Super Metroid. (SNESflix) Castlevania Symphony of the Night last year made me want to visit some of the other classics of that genre. So earlier in the year I played through Zero Mission and had a thouroughly good time, and then tried Super Metroid which people say is the best one. It is fantastic. I never felt lost in the game and going back and forth felt relatively speedy. The grappling was a bit tough to control is really the only negative I have. I was spoiled by how swiftly the movement in Dread work, and that is still my favourite metroid, but this is a close second. It also has the bleeps and brinstar music which absolutely slaps.  15. Phoenix Wright: Justice For All (PC) The last case in this game is probably the joint best case of the two Phoenix Wright games I have played. However, this reason does not feature higher because of the cases before it not quite being as engrossing. Especially the circus one. That last case though is just phenomenal and the resolution retroactively raised my enjoyment of the game as a whole. The main characters remain as wild and wacky as the first time I met them and Maya Fey remains the best. I await to see how she manages to find trouble in the third game when I play it next year.  14. Link to the Past (SNESflix) This is one of the oldest games on my list and it has lost nothing in the decades it has been out. It feels just as huge as any modern Zelda, even if it is confined entirely to 2 megabytes of space. I am incredibly impressed by just how much the SNES can do in this game and the point where the map doubled by introducing the dark world totally got me. The music whips so much, as does most Zelda music, and each of the dungeons felt proper beef and gave me some cool powers. My second favourite power has got to be the big hands and I would love to see them back. Nothing quite like using big hands to chuck rocks!  13. Okami (PC) Inside you there are two wolves and they are literally the same wolf. I did not realise that Amaterasu and Shiranui were the same and stream chat had a field day with that one. Sometimes I get lost playing games and miss stuff, but that is one thing I will not live down. I adore games where they go for a distinct and different art style that has never been seen before and Okami, like Cuphead, has one of the greatest styles I have witnessed. It feels like playing a living painting and is one of the biggest games I have played. There are three games worth all stuffed into here and they are all captivating. I knew very little about the legend/history that formed the foundations of the storyline but it never lost me (aside from the two wolves thing) and I emotionally connected to every last one. Issun is a menace, but a menace with a big heart and he was one of my favourite of the many in game companions that this years games brought me. I would love to play another game in this art style.  12. Super Mario Galaxy (Switch) Playing Super Mario Galaxy is like being transported to a dimension where the only beings are pure and good. I am not fully sure if that describes it well enough, but the combination of a fully orchestral sound track, the incredibly starkly coloured art style, the simple movement style compared to the complexities of Sunshine and the fairly linear but not visually levels constructs a game that is easy to see why it is so beloved by so many people. I had a smile over my face the whole time I was playing this game. It was not the smile you get when laughing at something, but the kind of grin you get from a memory of an earlier time in your childhood before the grind of daily life gets you. I was reminded of the simplistic purity of just liking something without caveats. This was not a tough game, certainly not daily tough like Sunshine or last level tough like 3D World, but I get the feeling they did not want it to be. This was the Wii's Mario game and the console had crossed generational boundaries more than any other console so it needed to be more accessible than ever before and it clearly is. I sailed through this game with more ease than 64 or Sunshine before it, which I believe is due to the levels being incedibly straight forward and much more like a ride at a theme park. And what a theme park it is! All of the individual galaxies make up a cornucopia of sights and sounds and gimmicks that translate into one of the best games from the Wii era. I have heard the sequel is just as good but sadly no idea how I will play it unless Nintendo release another limited time digital copy.  11. Banjo-Kazooie (N64flix) Yeah I went 3D platforming wild this year! Banjo Kazooie being my first non Mario 3D platformer that I attempted to complete and boy what a fun and silly exprience it was. This being a non Mario game meant getting to grips with an entirely different team's idea of how to control a character in a 3D space, but also an older one without any of the QOL upgrades we have learnt in the intervening decades. I never needed to worry. This plays just as well today as I am sure it felt back then. I sailed through this game having the sort of grand fun I know younger me would have felt had he gone the Nintendo64 route rather than the PlayStation 1 route. I am a sucker for games where the levels are preset and you enter them over and over and Click Clack Wood is by far the greatest level in this game. The idea of it being split into four seasons and each having such a drastically different style of play while being the same basic level works perfectly. If I ever make a game myself I would want to do this kind of thing. Banjo and Kazooie are a really fun combination even if Kazooie is one of the rudest characters in video games. She is so mean to everyone but that did not stop me laughing a ton at their antics. All their movesets where appropriate for the stages and it really moved the needle forward for what a 3D gaming world could be at the time. I got all the musics, all the jigsaws, all the jingos, everything. I had a blast doing so and despite some bad gameplay from me trying to best Gruntilda at the end and messing up royally managed to get the full ending. Banjo Tooie is definitely on my upcoming list! Also apparently I have to 100% DK64 or something? THE TOP TEN  10. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch) I am not entirely sure what to write about Breath of the Wild. This is a game I had started twice before - once in 2017 when I got my switch, and once again 3 years later when I wanted to give it another try. Both times I completed the great plateua and then was so overwhelmed that I fizzled out. It is something that occurs a lot during open world gaming to me. The sense of scope and hugeness of the map overtakes me and I wander and do my own thing. I struggle to stay on track with storylines because I am more concerned about what I might miss during my travels and so I make my own path. I streamed this game, which was an absolute godsend for making me stick to the storylines. I need that focus to help me, I need the eyes and people teasing and suggesting because I am a terrible solo game player. I have hundreds of hours in openworld games purely because I stroll about and then I put them down due to burnout or not really connecting with the scope in front of me. Having an audience helped me so much and I finally got to experience what occurs to me to be one of the most divisive of the Zelda games I have witnessed posting about. I know the arguments against it such as the durability mechanic and there are no real beefy dungeons so to speak, but as I was playing it I did not care. The durability mechanic never affected me because there was so much to pick up. I thought I would get stuck with weaker weapons due to them breaking but the game is tailored so that wherever you are things are on par with you and those new drops match what broke. It causes you to have to mix it up and play around and I liked being forced into playing in a way I would not have before. I like to meet games on what they are asking me to do more than what I think I want (despite me occasionally misunderstanding a game and inventing my own rules and them adhering to them until told by chat that I am being ridiculous again and there is no consequence for reading people's diaries even though Purah asked me politely not to!!) The dungeons were kind of there, just seperated out into tens of shrines all bitesized and breezy. Not going to lie, I wanted the shrines to go on for ages. They are phenomenal but always end too soon. I think my exact desire would be for there to be 10 mega shrines each 14 shrines long and each concerned with one of the gimmicks, but then someone pointed out that that is basically asked for dungeons and even though that is not quite what I mean in my head, no one can see in my noggin so it does not really matter. Talking about this game feels as overwhelming as playing it. There is so much here despite the fact that you feel so lonely most of the time. The lack of music during the walking portions helps increase the sensation of isolation that someone who had been dead for 100 years must have felt upon returning to a world so utterly changed. I am conflicted. I really loved it, but yet I did not love it the way I feel I should have and I cannot articulate why. The controls and abilities were grand and gave to so much invention (that I discovered after the fact) my mind was not so imaginative when playing. The side quests were full of cool characters and fun things to do and I became super invested in a number of them, like Tarrytown being built up. As well as travelling muscian Kass who led me on a grand tour of the world and his accordion is burned into my ears. The divine beasts were fiendish and required me to properly think how to use each ability to change the internals to reach my little podiums. I gained some super cool abilities too (no big hands though) and met some of the best characters in all of the Zelda games; Urbosa, Mipha (who I accidentally called Mipfa for a time), Daruk and Revali were all top notch and the quest reward for finishing all the memories had me tear up at the resolution. And finally the end Ganon fight was a spectacle I had seen earlier in the year in a different but still just as awesome to see here and one of my favourite moments in a Zelda game - even though I messed up for a bit and did not quite attack the right areas. I loved it and the ending. There is just something missing from my heart about the game and I cannot put my finger on it. It might be the fact that they would not let me stable the Bones Horse.   09. Xenogears (PS3) I played 80+ hours of this and I still struggle to articulate what actually happened. I did call a number of things out but also got SO much wrong. There are ambitious games, and then there is Xenogears, which takes that word and wrings out every last drop. This game takes preconceptions of what it might be and throws them out the window every step. There are so many unique mechanics and fully fleshed out fighting minigame that it is literally bursting at the seams. It felt as though I was playing a game where they threw everything at the wall to see what would stick and everything did and they ran with it. Well I ran with them and had an incredibly good time. The combat style is up there with FFVIIIs in a style of a type I would love to see elsewhere. Using points tactically to eventually pull off double moves or more powerful moves or the ability based on health to be super powerful is just great and unique. It also moves across to the mech battles. I think I liked the party on the ground stuff just slightly more, but it was a wonderful experience none the less. Figuring out how to bump up my moves and when to store power when some battles could last a while and the game sending me between each of them was part of the fun. Someone posted in reply to me to not hold the second half of the game against the first and I can safely say I did not. I know it becomes a bit of a rush, and you can see where they had all these elaborate set pieces planned that become nothing more than our characters sat in a chair describing how cool the events were. I completely give this a pass just because of how dense the rest of everything else is. I am not just easy to please, I give a ton of leeway to ambition and experimentation - even if it does not quite match the vision. I have explained before why I love FFVIII, Majora's Mask and DSII so much. All three followed games often seen as the greatest in their field. All critically lauded and beloved and none of them played it safe. They did their own thing. Xenogears is the very definition of doing its own thing, only it is doing about 60 own things and all of them are struggling to work in tandem and mostly working out. I will always look fondly on this often baffling and beautiful mess and I am incredibly glad that even if I only experienced three (classic) RPGs from Japan that this was one of them. Except for spending an hour to do a small jumping section in a tower. A whole hour. 60 minutes. Also Saitan allowed two main characters to conduct cannabalism and that makes him evil. Also the end credits saying End of Episode V had my eyes popping out. Also there were secret doors and I figured that out.  08. Super Mario 3D World (Switch) Of the three 3D Mario platformers I played this year, this was the most sprawling. I genuinely cannot believe the amount of content within this game. It harkens back to the SMB3/SMW/NSMB style of Mario with a large overworld map that you wander through full of themed sections, sometimes gimmicky. The main game is already the longest and most varied Mario I have played, and the addition of Bowser's Fury made it even more jam packed. There is so much Mario here and I am here for it. I love platformers and last yeaer Mario 64 showed me that I can platform in the 3rd Dimension...eventually. By the time I had reached this game, the embarassing deaths and silly mishaps were way less and I felt more confident in my abilities to make it through the game. This, of course, all dashed by the final world. With a lot of encouraging I did not only play the main game, but I collected every gold flag and every green star from all levels to unlock the final, final challenging world. For those not in the know, the final final world has 3 levels. One is a fairly long Captain Toad level but by far the simplest of the three. The other two are university level tests of skill, proving to everyone how you reached this point in the first place. One is a series of 30 mini challenges in a row. Each challenge has a time limit of ten seconds and you must do them consecutively each time you attempt it. Fail on challenge 24? Too bad! Start from 1 again and make your way through. That took me about 1 and a half hours. The ultimate, however, is a long level of 400 seconds with no checkpoints, 3 green stars and the most devious setups of the skills you should now have as second nature. It took me just over 6 hours to beat it. 6 whole hours of replaying the same level and getting slightly farther just for a new setup to demolish me and then attempting to get back to the spot I needed to practice. It was an ordeal, but not a bad one. Before Mario 64 I struggling greatly with 3D platforming. I have depth perception issues so where I am in a 3D plain is not what I see and 2D is where I find comfort. I whiff jumps, I whiff attacks, I genuinely mess up greatly because I cannot convert those 3D images on a 2D screen into spatial awareness. (This happens in real life too but real life is not a game, just a sequence of embarassment). Mario 64 and getting all 120 stars is one of my greatest achievements because it meant I could platform in 3D and I was able to overcome my inabilities. I treated this last challenge in this world the exact same way. I knew I could complete it, despite however long it would take me. I had the confidence to not give up thanks to Mario 64 and finally finishing this last level gave me a kind of elation I had only felt during besting FromSoft bosses. It was the kind of win that only few games can make you appreciate and I surely do. Also Bowser world music slaps uncontrollably!!  07. Horizon Forbidden West + Burning Shores (PS5) I go into almost all games with no real knowledge because I am pretty good at keeping myself spoiler free. I do not really watch video game trailers and I love surprises. Horizon Zero Dawn was one such surprise where I discovered a story full of intrigue and heartbreak. I was glued to that game and I just had to see the full outcome and what had happened to the world to leave it in the state we found it. The sequel had a ton to live up to, but also faced the problem of the biggest mystery and greatest hook of the first game being revealed. Can you even recapture the magic again without it as it truly was such an integral part to my enjoyment of the first? Well. I think they did. I think the sequel capitalises on all the strengths of the first and enhances and evolves the world in which we live while creating new struggles for us to deal with that would exist as a result of what we did in the first game. Aloy is a truly well acted and developed character. Her growth and choices in this game are more important than anything else going on within (and yes, I know the world is ending) but this is the flavour for our journey on understanding why Aloy is and how Aloy chooses to be. I am a sucker for great stories and the writers of Forbidden West captivated me again; though I will say you definitely need the Burning Shores DLC added to experience what I feel is the actual full story of the game. It twists and turns much like the first and we visit so many places hinted at and learn even more just how much this current world is messing up the future. Aloy gets more room to be herself and not just who she is supposed to be and it leads to a lot of early friction but for good reason. She experiences certain events that allow her to properly self examine why she is the wya she is and how she can be better, and in the Burning Shores we finally see a more in touch and confident in her own self worth Aloy and it is a real joy to experience that fun with her. The gameplay is way more complex and requires a lot more control over the radial menus and knowing what to do and I was quite rubbish. The amount of deaths to the raptor bots was staggering and I crouched so much by mistake to then get hit by something that I was properly annoyed with my own ability to use a controller. The very end boss of the Burning Shores was not just spectacle, but spectacle not for the sake of it. We see these instruments of destruction all over the world, these Behemoths that brought the downfall of everything, lying dormant. Our bad guy starts one up and we have to face off with it. We are terrified of doing so because basically all we have are bow and arrow style weapons and all the amazing future tech of the past could not doing anything against them, so how on earth would we. And they handle it magnificently. It does not feel contrived or weak or convenient. It feels like we just got lucky enough to scrape through another potentially apocalyptic event with no recourse and is the ending that this game deserves. I am so sad about the loss of Lance Reddick and he felt so absent in this game, I almost wonder if he was supposed to have a much larger part in 3 to make up for it. He was one of the best. In fact all the acting and voice work in this game is stellar and we meet a whole new cast of really great folks and new tribes with new customs and beliefs. The world of Horizon is really one of my most favourite and a third game is a hands down own as soon as it is released.  06. Super Mario Brothers Wonder (Switch) A 2D platformer that is brand new and Mario? This is my heaven. This is how I was introduced to the world of video games via the original Super Mario Brothers. This is the best of the 2023 games that I have played (and I have played a few current releases unlike previous years) quite easily and is my favourite 2D mario game, surpassing SMB3. There is only one negative about the entire game: there is not more of it. Every level, every power up, every wonder raddish, every last bit of this game shows a Wintendo who wanted to make a 2D Mario game that took the formula into a new and improved evolution the same way we went from SMB1 to SMB3. The NSMB games were really just slightly updated SMW games and they are solid and fun but they never really lived up to their legacy the way the 3D games were doing so. Super Mario Wonder is a concerted effort to rectify that and show everyone that 2D Mario has not only been a powerhouse but can become one again and it shows. It feels dynamite to control just from moving and jumping, but then we have new power ups AND badges that slightly change the way we can traverse. Some badges cause the game to be drastically different and some make things a bit easier. Each one of these badges has two seperate levels proving you can use them in both beginner and advanced sections. Every level in this game is made with the utmost confidence and knowledge that you will have a fun time going through. Especially the way the wonder radishes affect a certain aspect. There are moments of real wonder while playing and if this the first in a new line of 2D mario games then we are in for a treat. Mario Maker 3 with a Wonder skin? Oh dear. I would not be able to contain myself!  05. Final Fantasy X-2 (PS5) FFX was my GOTY last year. I re-read what I wrote about it as well as FFVIII. To be honest either one could have been my GOTY. They both called to my heart and grabbed me. If I look back at this year FFVIII has been the game I have thought about the most so perhaps it should have taken the number 1 spot, but then again FFX had the Besaid Island theme and that floored me and still does. The piano and violins in that piece open my heart so wide that nothing remains of me and I am absorbed by the music and then I think about everything I did and even with the Birds it really was just an amazing time of all so yeah, #1 spot for FFX. FFX-2 had a ton to live up to for me. The end of FFX and where our characters were left worked so hard for me. I loved it and I think Tidus is really the greatest FF protagonist of the games I have played so far. A beautiful happy go luck himbo is a character we should see in more games. No more dark, brooding, misunderstood reluctant heroes please - I want a guy who bumbles from place to place, helping out because it is his nature while he barely has any clue what is happening around him. In that sense, and like I said last year, we may play as Tidus but Yuna is the hero and the one with the standard hero's journey. She is also the emotional core of the game and everything we feel is a result of how events affect her and the relationships with the rest of the cast. FFX-2 being about Yuna and her new journey through the consequences of the previous game is handled so very well and I was relieved. She was well written previously, but this game stood even taller. Her acceptance of the way Spira is now and how she deals with her grief and loss, and the potential of a new way forward is engrossing and entertaining and believable in a world as weird as Spira. The cast is almost all still there, but now instead of party members with specific abilities you dress up the three main characters in different outfits that do different things and you can do it mid battle and depending on how the outfits are laid out in your inventory grid system they can be super powerful! Basically this is like FFVIII in so much as it is a combat system I have never seen before and does everything right for me. I had a whale of a time attempting to learn how it worked and how I could make it sing. Revisiting every location from the previous game also really worked for me and originally I was a bit sad that the entirity of the sound track was different but really in the context of the story it needed to be. The world underwent such a drastic change and all the music is way more upbeat to match that. Rikku and Paine as companions are very much the good angel and the bad devil on Yuna's shoulders and the three of them as a trio are just fantastic to listen to and play with. That we merely change their outfits to match the battle rather than swap in other characters means the whole story is tailored to just these three rather than having to account for any random party make up. We get to spend all our time with them and watch them grow and reveal their pasts and their wants and their friendship. They truly work so well a a group that I wanted to keep the story flowing constantly and learn about all these weird memories and events that kept our team on the tips of their toes. The ending that I got did make me tear up. It might feel like a sort of 'everyone wins just undo the previous game' but I think that is not quite the point. Yuna not only saved the world twice but she grew to the point where she was happy and content and was rewarded for it and she deserved that. If the rumours of an FFX-3 are true, then I am so ready for YRP to be in position and ready to rock more concerts!  04. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney The Von Karma case. If you know, you know. If you do not, and have never played a Phoenix Wright game, then I really recommend you do so. I was enjoying the game. It is sort of a really complex visual novel with a life system. That feels a bit reductive on all the stuff at work within the game itself but it is ultimately a game where you play a lawyer who defends the innocent from serious outcomes of trials. You get to investigate, collect evidence and make deductions. Then in court you get to cross examine witnesses and object to testimony and see if you deductions are correct. For such a simple way of playing it really is thrilling to hope that you were correct and you are looking at the evidence the correct way and that you can help save your client. A puzzle game through and through with an incredible series of cases all designed to push my brain to the edge. It was everything I never knew I wanted from a game where you could be a lawyer. I had so much joy trying to figure things out before the game revealed them to me that I got completely and utterly stuck into each case. One such wacky theory were the red bushes theory. So there is a death at a movie lot and there are these bushes that are red. No other bushes are red. There is also a ton of paint cans around the area in all different screens of the movie lot. Only one can is open and it is the red paint can. I theorised that someone had been killed near these bushes, their blood had leaked all over part of the bushes and that red paint had been used across all of the bushes there to cover it up. I told LVG this theory that I was so excited about and had been stating throughout the case and she asked one question that demolished it: Why not paint them green? So yes, it was a bad theory. The fun of coming up with them and the fact that the cases in these games are wild and out there, as shown by the incredible Von Karma case, meant that this was in line with the sort of results you can expect to see and that I will bad theory again and again! And also be chastised for them but you cannot stop me and my brain. There were some cases where I figured things out but was too eager and kept trying to prove something before it was even ready and while that is a shame, it does make you feel pretty amazing to have unravelled the story in your head before hand. This is one of the few games I feel I could enjoy solo. I am going through the whole trilogy and was hoping to get to the third one this year, but time ran out a little. Plus, there are another couple of trilogies to play and you bet I am going to devour them. Phoenix, Miles, Maya, Pearls, and Mia are the toppest and my future time with them all shall surely include many more objections! BRONZE:  03. Super Mario Sunshine (Switch) I have the softest spot in my heart for Mario Sunshine. It sits between Super Mario 64 - a literal game changers and Super Mario Galaxy - a revered classic that is joyfully lauded by almost the whole world. How is any game supposed to compare to them? It absolutely does some wild things that make no sense - such as killing you if you lose a race against another character. It decided that making a movement system around water jets would be the way to follow up from Mario 64, and if you read earlier entries then you know I am here for mixing it up and I stayed for as much as I could. I grabbed all the shines I could possibly manage excluding the blue coin ones. I super dig the approach to levels in this game the way Mario 64 did them. Yeah the world approach of SMB3/SMW is great, but a single level that changes every time you enter it and requires you to be observant and complete the new goal is the absolute best. Sunshine does that with the added bonus that the whole game feels like one big level sliced up. Isle of Delfino is the level and you keep checking out small corners of it and doing your thing. It is certainly the most cohesive Mario game but I could see someone thinking that everything is a bit samey due to it. There is no, for instance, change from a grassworld to a desert world like you see in SMB3. There IS however, a change from a small town on the island with a fair bit of grass to a beach level which is a bit cheeky, but it feels like just an extension of the land outside the town. I think the world is very smartly put together and really enjoyed getting to grips with going through everything. I did every one of the special stages and then the redo of the special stages (I will have nightmares of the Upchuck one) and I made my way to the end and experienced everything. I had the most wonderful and funny time in this game but not because of the game, but because of the audience while playing it. I love playing games with friends - I have always beleived the best console to get is the one you can play with your friends and the best way to play games is ones you can share and I played this on stream and it was more of a mess than the story of Xenogears. Mario Sunshine is all the things in terms of movement that I cannot deal with appropriately so the numbers of failures within the game were immense and ludicrous. I died to misjumps, to misplaced confidence, to slipping on walls and floors, to my depth being drastically over estimated or under estimated, from pressing the wrong buttons and having to redo entire sections and running out of time, to just plain VG incompetence. And it was glorious. I could not get mad because I was laughing so hard and I was encouraged because everyone in chat was laughing with me and at me and it felt like being back on my sofa when growing up and my friends and I would tease as we failed in Sonic 1 and Streets of Rage and Magical Flying Hat Turbo Adventures. The atmosphere of playing the game overruled how it did not quite match up to the reputation of 64 and Galaxy but it does not matter. I had so much fun. Even the frustrations with any loss being a death, or some FLUDD jumps requiring a kind of spatial vision that I genetically lack and precision found in the fingers of a younger more dexterous me, it was not enough to colour how great of a time I had playing it. It is one of two games I would consider speedrunning if I ever got into that arena. Yeah, I have an incredible soft spot for this game and I will say it; I had more fun playing Sunshine than any other 3D Mario. SILVER  02. Chronotrigger (PC) Chronotrigger is one of the games I played these last few years with a reputation that dwarfs it. Almost everyone knows of Chronotrigger and how adored it is. This is the game responsible, my darling, for the existence of the Zybourne Clock! Another marvel of the SNES, Chronotrigger is a game I can say did not just live up to that reputation but shattered it. So often you hear of something mega loved and hyped up and you go in a tad wary. Oh yeah, they say it is this good but can it really be? Yes. Yes it can. And then it can demolish you. Every single area of this game is operating at an 11 out of 10. - The spritework across the whole game is big and gorgeous. Every character is distinct and colourful and expressive, which means a lot in a pixel based game in the resolution the SNES output. - The combat is not too involved but not at all basic. It has simple turn based action choices but augments it with a party based modifier. Basically, whoever you have running around with you can alter the moves of another member to perform some super powerful combos! This means that it is always fun to battle and they are not random either - you can see the enemies who are going to fight you on screen all the time and can choose to engage! - The soundtrack goes all in and is up there in the greatest of all time list. Chrono's theme, Schala's theme, Corridors of Time, Frog's Theme, Memories of Green, Robbo's Theme, Secrets of the Forest...goodness me the SNES has never sounded SO good. - The story and characters are some of the best of all time. Every single one of your party shines throughout and you are given enough time with all to form proper connections to them and their arcs. Some might be your favourite, but there is no one who is left by the wayside. - Difficulty is perfectly balanced and I mean perfectly. The game is never too hard and never too easy. So many times I would get through a hairy situation by the skin of my teeth and waiting for me would be a save point so that I always had a reward at the right time. It never felt like I was breezing through and also never felt like I would be roadblocked by any big boss. - The driving minigame was a ton of fun! Going back to the story, the whole thing had me from start to end. I loved the unveiling of every event and the changing of the map due to the different time zones and how going back and forth made alterations. I forgot that I was playing a SNES game! It really cannot be stated enough just how incredible it is to see a game come together with such effortless grace and make it appear as though making a game can be easy. I would not change a single thing about it, and the future refused to anyway! GOLD:  01. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (WiiU) Between this year and last year, I have now played six of the most recent mainline Zelda games. Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Windwaker, This and Breath of the Wild. I feel like I understand what people say when they mean 'a Zelda game' and I am here to say that I do not think there really is such a thing as a Zelda game. One of the things I have been most impressed on playing all of these, is the way each new entry reinvents itself. We take our hero Link out on an adventure is the only constant between them all but the structure and decision making in each game is as varied as the one before it. To go from Link to the Past to Ocarina of time is more than just a shift to 3D. To then go to Majora's Mask from Ocarina and then from Majora to Wind Waker is showing a level of comfort in trying new things within the structure of an adventure game that I can safely say that I love. I dig changing things up and not repeating oneself over and over. Give me sequels that want to do things differently and I will give you a fan. I heard how Wind Waker's reveal after Majora did not go down well while I was playing it. I still think that is ridiculous and that Wind Waker is easily the third best Zelda game after Majora's Mask and now this one. Twilight Princess was apparently the 'dark and gritty' Zelda that people thought they wanted but when they got it they still were not impressed. I went into this game with the knowledge only that it was a darker Zelda game and nothing else. I did not need anything else, partially because of my spoiler views but also because I had been conditioned to arrive at each Zelda game with the preconception that it would be completely different to the one previous one. Boy did this one go in a tone I completely unexpected. This is a darker Zelda, for sure, but not in the gritty reboot imagining kind of way. No, this is a game built around the same terror and dread that you last experienced on the DAWN OF THE FINAL DAY and looked up to see that moon staring at you so very closely. This game built the entirety of its story around that feeling and this is its super power. From the very moment the twilight theme played and the world was a strange mix of digital pixels and dark shadow creatures I wanted out (in the good way where I wanted to save the video game world). The largest part of my reasoning to put this in first place is Midna. Up until this point, with the exception of Link to the Past, I had played Zelda games with an ingame companion. There had been Navi, Tatl and King of Red Lions and each one had been a great help in keeping me updated with knowledge and guidance (when I remembered to use them.) It was almost as if Nintendo saw me playing and made a companion WAY more suited for how I bumble through games than any other. Midna is dismissive and sarcastic and unimpressed and completely done with my tomfoolery. She was the absolute perfect foil for how I play a video game and I found it hilarious. Then the story began to move on and truths became revealed and my feelings for Midna and the situation she was stuck in grew alongside it. I truly wanted to help her out despite the ever increasing dread at what I might be doing. I could not tell if she was one of the good guys to start with and all I had to go on was vibes and princess Zelda assuring me Midna was on the level while the world was all messed up by Zant. It was a really, really great story with a spectacular end boss. Gannon and I ending it all with swords in the middle of a lightning storm and his final end being met with the sunrise and easily my favourite final Zelda boss thus far. Then the end which was sweet and complete and followed by the credits. I was feeling pretty great about what had happened...then the actual ending and my heart was ripped from my chest. That has stuck with me ever since I saw it. The very real, bond and connection that Link and Midna had felt real. And she chose to keep Hyrule safe by breaking the only way she had to see Link, a man I think she fell in love with. That is the choice a real ruler has to make. Other things I could not get enough of: - The dungeons are the best! Yeah, you might not use the abilities you get from each one that much outside of them but when you are in that dungeon and messing with stuff it feels great! The big hands analogue was a very funny reveal (the statue grabbing one that jumps everywhere). Goron Mines, Lakebed Temple, Arbiter's Grounds, Snowpeak, Forest Temple, Palace of Twilight and Ooccoo City were all brilliant. Not a bad dungeon among them! - The fidget spinner. This is the dungeon ability where you stand on a cog and go spinning around bumping into stuff. Not only was this the best dungeon of all but it also has my all time favourite Zelda boss battle. Going around the outside of that cylinder chasing him on your fidget spinner was exhilerating and cinematic! - The catching of the insects mini quest. I love nature (bees are an all timer in terms of cool animals) and this was one of the best ways to pass the time doing mini sidequests. - The twilight world itself. I said up above, but the way the music becomes this haunting and hollow ambience with occasional spikes of sound makes it so other wordly but not evil or bad. Just different. It captures that dread you feel when walking out in pitch black even though you walk down those same places in the light any other time. - The music! What is a Zelda game without great music? A zelda game that does not exist. Every single Zelda game sounds great and this one is no exception. I love the contrasting in the tracks when we are in light world compared to twilight world and the Hyrule field theme in this game matches the grand scale of the field as we ride across the whole thing. - The ball rolling minigame in the fishing centre. I love games like that and blasted through so fast. I wish there had been a thousand boards! - The snowboarding in Snowpeak. Just grand fun! - The Wolf changing. I actually really liked being forced to use a different toolset while in this form. It made the scope feel even larger and it was fun to talk to the cats! Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess are basically level in my eyes. Majora has the song of storms, AKA the best bit of Zelda music, but Twilight Princess has Midna and her story. Either can be my all time favourite but as I played Twilight Princess this year, it is hands down my GOTY. 
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Dec 30, 2023 22:09
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For as absolutely loaded as 2023 was for games I sadly ended up playing way less games than I would have liked. My final total of new games played this year was 34, and I had to really struggle to wrangle up my top ten out of that number. Let’s start with what I wasn’t able to get to this year. The 2024 Backlog Shortlist: -Alan Wake 2- My wife and I got through AW1 and Control over the holidays but decided to take a break before this one to avoid burnout. -Resident Evil 4 Remake- Only had time for one quintessential survival horror remake this year, sorry! -Fire Emblem Engage- This one just slipped me by, I love Fire Emblem and have already just now started this one, too late for list consideration. -Lies of P- Wanna play Pinocchio Bloodborne so bad, need more tiiiiime. -Yakuza Gaiden- I’ll get to it real soon since I wanna get it done before LAD 8 -Chants of Senaar- Saw my wife play some of this and it looked rad. -Roottrees are Dead- Heard my wife play this and saw it does the little musical stinger like Obra Dinn does whenever you solve a mystery, so I know it’ll rule. Honorable Mentions: I ended up playing a lot of old school throwback JRPGS this year including Chained Echoes and Sea of Stars, both of which contained great pixel art, fun combat, bopping music, and some funky ESL writing. Despite being a French Canadian myself I think I have to give the nod to Chained Echoes over Sea of Stars just based on the pacing and ambition at play when it came to the actual writing. If you gotta pick one of the two hotly contested indie jrpgs this year, make it Chained Echoes. I ended up playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for the first time this year. I still have the DLC to go before I can play 3 but it was a generally fun time mired by some of the worst voice direction I’ve heard in a JRPG in a long while. The Gacha mechanics are also rear end. Blasphemous 2 came out and was an extremely rad sequel in terms of world design and combat but I felt like it was missing a bit in terms of the atmosphere and the new cutscene style took away from the dreary mood the first game established. Dishonorable Mentions: The very first game I played this year was Grime when it finally hit PSN. I am a huge Metroidvania fan and I was really looking for something to fill my Hollow Knight itch with this game. I ended up really not jiving with the art style and world as much as I would have liked. It felt really disjointed and you could tell they had tried to fix up some of the exploration problems with its new DLC areas but I remained underwhelmed. On the opposite end of the disappointing Metroidvania spectrum we have Afterimage. What I need you to understand about Afterimage is that it loving rules. The beautiful art, the massive world and the tight gameplay comprise everything a good Metroidvania should aspire to have. This would be an easy contender to the MV throne that Hollow Knight occupies in my heart if it weren’t for one core problem. The game’s localization from Chinese to English borders on incomprehensible to the point where I’m almost certain it was machine translated. The only thing more baffling than the current state of the script is the fact that the entire thing is fully voiced by big name American voice actors like Kira Buckland with what seems like minimal voice direction. I get that the writing is the least important thing in these kinds of games but the level with which I was wracked with confusion every time someone talked in this game is insane. But anyway that’s enough rambling because it’s time for RARITY’S FAVORITE POSTER(That’s me, Zaggitz)’S TOP TEN LIST 10. Theatrhythm Final Bar Line This was my go-to game this year when I wanted to shut my brain off and groove to some good tunes, the lineup of music in this game is absolutely staggering, pulling from essentially every single noteworthy Final Fantasy game alongside a slew of DLC from Square Enix’s legendary catalog of non FF jrpgs. Throw in some fun and compelling party building mechanics and you have a certified banger on your hands. 9. Final Fantasy XVI Not gonna lie, this game would probably be in the top 3 if it weren’t for it’s absolutely dogshit ending.(Here’s hoping that big spring DLC helps with that somehow) As it stands though, this game was an extremely fun action rpg with setpieces that legit feel like you are playing those badass summon animations you loved to watch for minutes on end back in the PS1 days. The world is well realized, the characters are likable and the soundtrack, while not Soken’s finest work, still has a few hype bops to nod along with as you fight a Kaiju battle in space versus Bahamut. 8. Case of the Golden Idol Lots of cool new mystery games came out this year but the only one that I really got to make a lot of time for was this gem from last year. I love the bad art and the world building and the little stories you can chart for the background characters from the start of the game to the end. Some of the final reveals revolve around some of the most petty grudges from the earlier chapters and were hilarious to deduce in the end. Peter Battley the ultimate Chad Failson. 7. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince Two whole-rear end Pokemon DLC came out this year but who gives a poo poo because this was easily the most fun I’ve had with a monster taming game this year. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of the older portable DQM games but as a soft refresh of the series for newcomers I thought it was a great time. The roster is beefy but not overwhelming and the Oracle of Seasons style mechanics made exploring the world and looking for seasonal variations of monsters really fun. The fact that all this is also tied to a genuinely great little adventure story set alongside the events of DQ4 with tons of little references and cameos is just icing on the cake. That’s a funny line if you’ve played this game because one of the zones is made entirely out of cakes. Laugh!!! 6. Dead Space Remake The first two dead space games comprise some of my absolute favorite survival horror gameplay and worldbuilding ever. The mix of RE4 style gameplay with The Thing style body horror set in claustrophobic space stations? Sign me the hell up. This new remake of 1 combines the best gameplay aspects of both games, updating pretty much all of the original DS1’s clunkiest elements and adding in a whole lot more. Isaac speaks now! He has a character arc and actual agency in the plot and the way they've reworked the script to make that work just makes the entire game that much more engaging and is a reminder that he’s one of the better horror game protags out there. 5. ASTLIBRA Revision Now here’s a game that almost defies explanation. Originally released piecemeal in Japan as a browser game over the course of 14 years, made by one guy entirely with premade clipart assets and music, eventually re-ported into its own engine with some new art and music and then localized into english(twice, they recently updated the script to be a bit less clunky) The final result may Look low rent and can get a little horny at times but the crunchy satisfying gameplay and insane but surprisingly earnest plot will carry you through all 50+ hours of that low rent nonsense and leave you clamoring for more at the end. 4. Super Mario Wonder It’s the best 2D Mario has ever been. Pure joy start to finish. Literally my only complaint is I wish the difficulty had been a bit less back loaded to the special zones. Everything else, from amazing music and sound design, to the art style, to the new bespoke animations every character gets for every little thing, is best in class for a 2d platformer. 3. Octopath Traveler II What I need you to understand going into this entry is that I did not enjoy the original Octopath Traveler. It was a colorless, joyless game with poor pacing, drab characters and terrible structure saved only by its quite engaging and fun combat and job systems. OTII goes back to the drawing board on every single aspect of the first game that doesn’t work while doubling down on the few things that did work. The resulting game features what is essentially the best turn based combat/job system JRPGs have to offer while ALSO dishing out some fantastic likable characters, colorful fun locales and a much more engaging and satisfying story in pretty much every respect. If a third OT game ever comes out and is as much of an improvement as this was, I might never need another JRPG. 2. Baldur’s Gate 3 My two favorite games this year both operate under one singular principle. This principle is the idea of making a player make a plan and go “there’s no way this will work” and then making them revel with glee when it absolutely does work in spades. BG3 doesn’t have my favorite story in an rpg this year but it does have the most reactive story I’ve ever played. The amount of choices and reactions this game accounts for over the course of its 100 hour rollercoaster is staggering and people will be trying and failing to imitate it for years to come. Shout out’s go to Act 2 where my Bard/Paladin multiclass was given full reign of his Charisma based abilities to convince an entire dynasty and their collective armies to commit suicide in various escalatingly stupid ways that all worked. 1.The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Where BG3 excels in dialogue/choice reactivity, Zelda outshines it by miles when it comes to world reactivity. The absolute insane lengths you can go to in this game by either building some insane contraption or manipulating the world around you or manipulating yourself are simply astounding. Couple that with some of the best storytelling, world design, boss design, dungeon design, sound design…GAME DESIGN??? The industry has to offer? Look,I just built a giant wood penis to help this man hold up a sign about his cool boss. It’s a masterpiece okay. Also hey at least it has good music this time unlike BoTW.
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Dec 30, 2023 22:14
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VideoGames posted:
HER EYES ON DEEZ NUTS
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Dec 30, 2023 22:17
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Dec 30, 2023 22:18
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Got em
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Dec 30, 2023 22:18
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Rarity posted:HER EYES ON DEEZ NUTS Disproven as of April 2023.
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Dec 30, 2023 22:19
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 I will increase the counter
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Dec 30, 2023 22:20
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Lmfao at the last posts
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Dec 30, 2023 22:27
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