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Figuring out my list made me realise that I got a lot of trouble figuring out what I played in any given year. Looking through Steam purchase dates and such made me realise a few "Oh wait, this was this year?" games  Anyhow, my personal games of 2023, which is a mix of new releases, old games I played a lot this year and so on. 9. Shadows of Doubt It's a game about solving crime (and also commiting) , but it all takes place in a procedurally generated city set. You walk around doing odd jobs until you get a message that a murder was reported and from there have to figure out the culprit via clues left at the crime scene (How did the victim get murdered? Are there fingerprints?) and any other sources you might be able to think of. Not gonna lie, this game can be pretty drat jank (Vents can have some odd interactions when getting in/out, had one pawn shop have the door to their backrooms be entirely blocked off by shelves, etc.) but the game is still being worked on and sometimes it makes you feel like a goddamn genius. Like the time where I thought I was at a deadend, security cameras gave me no good info on who might be the murderer beyond a few pictures of potential suspects and asking cititzens if they saw anything odd seemed to only let me know the culprit came from around an area where the trail went cold. Until I realised, the victim was shot and said area included an apartment building with a arms dealer in the basement. After some breaking and entering I find their sales ledge, which included a sale of a gun and bullets right before the time the culprit was seen coming from that area. Got a name from that, which I shortly afterwards was able to confirm was my culprit. 8. F-Zero 99 Nintendo keeps making weird quasi-battle royale games and I hope they won't stop. It's the SNES F-Zero games, so fast paced racing but with some modern additions (like making your boost use up your "health" meter rather than being a once-per-lap thing) and also tossing 98 other drivers in who are all competing. It is somehow the right amount of chaos where you are constantly bumping into others while still feeling like I mostly got control over what is happening. Making boosts take your health under these conditions as well can make some races absolutely harrowing, as trying to rank high means boosting yourself close to death, especially with certain cars like the Golden Fox which basically demand constantly ping-ponging between boosting to near-death and then healing to full at the pit stop areas. Personally for me the big highlight are the Grand Prixs tho, five races where each lap a set amount of players get eliminated until the final race is the 20 best players on a track which is not in the rotation of regular races. Being in that final race is intense as hell since you want to place high, but also don't want to get eliminated by making a mistake or leaving yourself open to be rammed at low HP either since the stakes feel so high. 7. Barotrauma Essentially a multiplayer-focused game about playing a crew on a submarine, doing various jobs and trying to survive in the alien infested waters of jupiters moon europa, exploring the cavernous depths and occasionally needing to suit up and go outside to explore smaller caves and ruins. I played this game a bunch, both single player and with a group of friends over the last two years and figured since we hit a point where we got our playtime done with it this year, it should be at least on the list. I had a lot of fun slowly learning the ins and outs of this game with my group, going from being happy to survive a round to playing the campaign and getting competent enough at it where even the depths of the abyss started feeling managable to us. Heck, I even started designing my own subs for it and got a bit into logic circuit kinda shenanigans. And the feeling of working as a crew when something big shows up on the sonar and now the captain is shouting both where the monster is for the gunners while the repair crew are frantically fixing leaks and fixing any machinery that broke is pretty fun. My only real regret is that we ended up burning out on it before getting a 1.0 campaign to the end, but who knows, maybe that will happen another time. 6. Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord Got this game at the end of last year, though only really played it during this year and I had (and probably still will) have a lot of fun with it. It's basically a weird game about leading a mercernary/clan group, starting with recruiting random villagers to join up and fight bandits to slowly gaining more prestige, money and troops till you are working as a mercernary for one of the various kingdoms and join their armies in fighting against properly equipped enemies, become a vassal and eventually get to govern a castle or even a town or at some point decide to say "gently caress it" and make your own kingdom (and suddenly end up in a forever war as the other kingdoms are not happy about a new upstart one popping up ). And you are not even just a abstracted commander, but activily participate in the battles with whatever equipment you got so far so you too can be a honorable noble running down fleeing peasa- I mean, fresh recruits on your horse. The game got a few problems still, the economy is weird and doing things meant to make money like caravans will barely earn you anything while other activities will make money stop being a concern at all, the AI can be stupid as hell and if they are in charge of an army you are part of will do all kinds of stupid things that get your units killed and so on. But it is a unique game that touches a certain itch that not really any other game does. And that feeling when for example you are in a sieged castle and somehow fight off the attackers despite being horifically outnumbered or get attacked by what the game thinks is a superior force and manage to win just via clever positioning and use of terrain, it feels pretty dang good. Also you get to swing a giant axe at guys as you pass each other by on horses and I am surprised every time the game says they somehow got only knocked out 5. Phasmophobia A multiplayer focused horror game about going into various buildings and using a large set of tools to get evidence and figure out what kind of ghost is haunting the place. Like Barotrauma this is a game that is on here mostly by the fun I had with my friends group playing this. Going into houses together, splitting up until someone says they might have figured out where the ghost is, followed by bringing in all the evidence equipment and trying to see what we get while also trying to stay alive if we end up taking too long. My only real complains with this game is that I wish the ghosts had more kinds of non-lethal spooks they could do as you are investigating them and that the more familiar you get with it, the less scary it becomes (though I'd argue that last part is not really the game's fault and more a natural aspect of the horror genre). But when the ghost surprises you by doing something unexpected or seemingly tricking you, or you realise that it has begun doing hunts and staying around to check for evidence becomes riskier it can be pretty fun and spooky. Nothing quite like that feeling of "Two people died and we got no evidence, let's grab some incenses and just hope we don't die". 4. The Last Spell Wizards have messed up the world and now everything is covered by a magical, corrupting fog, safe for a few settlements left trying to survive. The only hope to fix this is by breaking the seal that binds magic to this world. Your job is to keep the mages casting the Last Spell (tm) alive as they require several days to break said seal, via fighting off hordes of those who were corrupted by the fog at night and building up the settlement and it's defenses by day. I really enjoyed the gameplay in this, the heroes got various perks they can get as well as equipment giving various modifiers and each weapon type having their own attacks and skills, allowing for quite a bit of customisation and build ideas, like a hero specialised in dealing enourmous damage to targets that got no other enemies next to it, so you seek out isolated, strong enemies or specifically create them with others to take those out in single hits. Or someone who applies tons of debuff and the contagion debuff, which means that when an enemy dies all it's debuffs get transferred to two nearby enemies. Also the game can get really intense at times, had a few nights where halfway in I lost a hero or made another serious mistake and told myself "Yeah, this is not gonna happen", followed by a desperate struggle using my tankier heroes to stop enemies from going through destroyed wall parts, as well as blowing all of my MP (which only a small amount recharges per night) for crowd control to somehow barely survive, even if half the town is destroyed. 3. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom It's more open-world Zelda, but now you can glue poo poo together into things stretching the definition of vehicle! I had a lot of fun with this game, the new tools were fun to use, I enjoyed messing around with the building aspect to make both efficent and easy to use vehicles as well as unwieldy messes and the weapon fusing allowed for some fun experimenting. In a weird way the overall "map" being the same but with a lot of small changes felt right to me to, with all the crazy vehicle options you can eventually do it gets easy to move long distances (On top of the added layer of floating ruins allowing one to just jump and glide a decent distance), and I wonder if Nintendo would have let us seemingly "skip" as much of the carefully crafted world they made if we hadn't already gotten to more slowly explore it first in BotW. Story wise I also thought it was neat, even if the open nature means that there are some rough spots in how it is told. 2. Omori This is an entry I am constantly debating it's place on the list. It is a RPG game where you play as the titular character Omori, exploring a strange and colorful world together with his friends. It also starts with a content warning about depictions of depression, anxiety and suicide. As a result it's mood can be very different between parts, sometimes even deliberatily to contrast. A lot of time is spent exploring new areas, fighting enemies with your group of friends in a fairly neat rpg system where you can influence the emotions of enemies and your party members which both affect their stats and also might give bonuses with certain skills, but also certain sections feel like straight out of the horror genre. Part of why it is so high on this list is probably due to some parts of it resonating with me as well, like meeting old friends after several years and that thought in the back of my head of how long it has been, how different (or even the same) they seem and that nagging feeling that it is my fault we drifted apart in the first place. 1. Betterified VI: Bestified Now this is niche as gently caress. To explain what this even is, there is a software called Super Mario Bros. X which is essentially Mario Maker for PC, and a while back it got picked up after the original dev abandoned it and even got lua scripting support. Cue the Betterified series of "Episodes", which basically takes levels taken from well known (in the community) episodes and put a shitpost-y spin on them. The only reason I am even aware of this is that I watch Raocow's stuff where he plays a lot of Mario World romhacks as well as SMBX stuff. Anyhow, he plays Betterified 6 and the first video made me go "This looks funny and neat, I am gonna play it myself (since it is literally free)". Cue me essentially marathoning this game as it sucked me in instantly and still booting it occasionally to check things out I realise I might have missed or could try out. It is in essence still a Mario game where you play as Mario or Toad, you got a SMB3-esque world map where you go from level to level as you unlock them, but with the ability to return to old maps, save at any time, etc. Meanwhile the levels themselves are that sort of "Sampled" style, where it is essentially levels borrowed from previous episodes (a lot for example are from The Invasion 2, one episode that SMBX comes standard with and is sort of the intro episode for a lot of people, others are from level design contests and so on) and put a spin on them to change them, sometimes drastically. What if touching sprites made a Donkey Kong style blast-barrel appear? What if you took a SMB3 style tank level, but removed the floor and made you come out the top of the screen when you fell to the bottom? What if enemies touching water changed into different enemies in a level where you constantly hop in and out of water? Which typing it out like this sounds like it could go bad or stale real fast, but there were only three levels in total I remember disliking, and even has some actually really fun bosses as well. It is pretty funny too and manages to play that "shitpost" aesthetic just right where it plays at looking bad without actually being bad gameplay wise. And there is even poo poo I feel necessary to spoiler tag. Like there is so much hidden stuff, a star in most worlds, deep coins, secret levels, secret codes for secret players, a whole postgame world, actual lore somehow and also stuff that simply goes nowhere. No other game this year had me keep track of a txt file with stuff I remembered to check out or keep in mind, made me watch raocow's playthrough not just for fun but also to see what I might have missed and basically made me feel like a crazed conspiracy theorist on the verge of finally cracking the code. I'm not sure how much Betterified 6s general style and vibe would work for people who aren't familiar with SMBX stuff or Mario romhacking, but if it sounds interesting I can 100% recommend at least trying it. It is literally free after all.
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Dec 11, 2023 18:02
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Songbearer posted:That little pause for autosave is the equivalent of your dungeon master clearing their throat, shuffling papers and chuckling Hooooly poo poo you're right.  It really does capture the D&D experience perfectly! Such a great game.
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Dec 11, 2023 18:29
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Games that have not left my mind since I finished them: Disco Elyisum Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Games I look forward to finishing next year: Super Mario Wonder Spider-Man 2 Hades Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Signalis Resident Evil 4 (2023) Etrian Odyssey II and III HD Baldur's Gate III Every game listed from this point forward is a game I completed this year. Dishonorable mentions: The Last of Us, Part 2 The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Dead Space (2023) Alan Wake 2 Games I completed this year that are not included elsewhere on this list: Final Fantasy I through VI, Pixel Remasters Etrian Odyssey I HD Kirby: Return to Dream Land Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Super Mario 3D World Pony Island Honorable mentions: Star Wars: Jedi Survivor Vampire Survivors Anodyne Apologies in advance for the E/N nature of this post. But hey, it’s my list. 10. Super Mario RPG  Pictured: the point at which my daughter fell in love with this game Remakes are, somewhat by definition, a failure of creativity. You’re devoting time and resources to a photocopy of an original work rather than just making something original. Despite this, creative choices do go into their formation. Systems are refined, graphics are made shinier, music is recomposed. There’s an art to remaking a game well, and very little of that art is the simple fact of making it available on modern hardware. What a remake even is varies based on so many things. What makes a good one varies considerably more. Super Mario RPG is already a great video game. It was a great video game when it came out in 1996. It’s better than every single successor in its lineage. It is readily accessible, albeit not via legitimate means. So, the logical conclusion here is that remaking it is a cash grab, and that was what I sadly thought when I saw the trailer, even as my inner ten-year-old smashed the preorder button. Regretfully, I am the exact market for such a cash grab. It is evident that ArtePiazza is as in love with the original as I am. ‘90s Mario’s weird little squashed body is testament to that. Nearly every inch of this game is as I remember it from my childhood – animation cues, sound effects, timed hit timings. The dialogue is nearly entirely untouched, despite an occasionally questionable translation. It has all the brashness and humor I remember, and it is timeless. Some minor changes here and there, probably because Nintendo now maintains an iron grip on their IP which they didn’t bother with thirty years ago, and some changes I object to (why does Square Enix hate good fonts in their remasters? Where did the card suit magic effects go? Why remove the dated Mack the Knife joke and replace it with an equally cumbersome joke?), but overall playing it again was a deeply enjoyable nostalgic experience. I am instantly transported to being 10 again and hooking my Super Nintendo into the TV in my grandmother’s guest bedroom so I could monopolize it with Super Mario RPG, running my little feet through the dated-even-at-the-time red shag carpet as I practiced my 100 jumps. At this beginning of this I mentioned that creative choices were made here, and while the transition to the modern era of hardware is a positive one, the actual additions are underwhelming. The team-up limit breaks are stupendously powerful, making an easy game even easier. The endgame boss refights, while creative in their execution and an overall positive addition, are still not very threatening. The teams-switching mechanic is half-baked, resulting in little more than Final Fantasy X “I’m going to swap in X to perform this one specific role and then swap them back out next round” whack-a-mole. It could have been more – maybe they’ll spin this engine out into a sequel that could be more, someday – but for now it feels like an afterthought. As I said, Super Mario RPG was already a great game, with limited room for improvement, so there wasn’t much runway there. My daughter, age 5, loves this game. She struggles with platformers but also paradoxically believes she is the best to ever hold a controller, resulting in a low frustration threshold for her own failure. She is pathologically incapable of uttering the phrase “could you please help me” when it comes to any facet of her life. This means that games like Super Mario Wonder, while simple and delightful and approachable, become life lessons in dealing with challenges, particularly when dad effortlessly sails through the course. There’s value in that, sure, but it’s not always a good time for her. Super Mario RPG gives her a more level playing field – she can deliberate, she can focus on nailing the timing of a timed hit, she can waste FP with flashy moves and then recover them all with an item and still emerge victorious. She can laugh as Mallow pastes himself into a wall, and then rewatch it in the cutscene viewer and laugh all over again. I gently nudge her in the proper direction to advance the story, and she can handle all the rest. Except for the Yoshi egg minigame, that’s a group activity. I did have to explain to her what a bazooka is, though. Being a dad is a curious journey sometimes. 9. Final Fantasy XVI  Pictured: clash of the Titan(s) Final Fantasy XVI is a conservative video game. It’s not necessarily a video game for conservatives, though if you hate women and queer folk I’m sure you can find something in this game to enjoy. Or even if you just hate people in general. This game is awash in misery and only occasionally punctuated by moments of small joy, true to its inspirational source material (early Game of Thrones). Some of that misery is also directed at you, the player, as you enjoy tedious side quests, entirely too frequent combat, and minimal tangible reward. This was easily my most anticipated game of the year. I, a Final Fantasy XIV degenerate and longtime FF stan, was the target demo for this. Naoki Yoshida was at the head, Masayoshi Soken was doing the soundtrack, they got that guy from the Devil May Cry series to do the combat so that’s cool I guess, this seems like a slam dunk. But, for all its talk about “the legacy of the crystals has gone on long enough,” Yoshida was weighed down by the series’ legacy. He had to make a winner, it had to get out the gate with a minimum of team dysfunction and bad press, it had to look great and sell well and usher in a new era of Final Fantasy products for younger folks who are not inured to selecting items from a menu. It had to strip out unnecessary complications. To their detriment, they were wildly successful and made the thing I believe they wanted to create. The result is often boring. The plot is rote, well-worn territory, awash in characteristic FF melodrama but without any of the joy. Gone are mini-games, a hallmark of the series. Gone are the dungeons, replaced with action hallways. Gone are the RPG elements, curiously enough, though to its credit the newly released DLC does have some excellent equipment choices in it. Gone are the interesting explorable spaces, replaced with Potemkin castles and squat gray villages. The world feels cramped and small (which I would argue is an FF tradition at this point, going back to at least FFX). The plot itself even feels small – they aspire to the sprawling geopolitics of Game of Thrones or the many historical wars of Middle Ages Europe, and they even give you a whole NPC and plot board to help you unravel the grand tapestry they feel they’ve woven. In truth, it’s wholly unnecessary, as the plot has the depth of a puddle and is easily understood by just playing the main storyline. The plot pacing is bad, the second and third acts drag on forever, and the soundtrack is readily outclassed by the multiple standouts of its composer’s previous work. It’s on this list because when the bat connects with the ball, it smashes it into the next zip code. The combat is the thing that kept me coming back. It feels great to play, stylish as all hell, dripping with fantasy swagger and fancy visual effects. My main complaint is that ironically there’s too much of it – the moment-to-moment enemy battles are unthreatening, tedious, and entirely too plentiful. When the bosses arrive, and they get the title card, and the horns kick in, it’s exhilarating. I get the privilege of fighting this ancient construct/pissed off dragon/etc. and figure out the best way to overcome impossible odds with high stakes. Thankfully the main story is full of such moments, which makes pushing through it less burdensome. This game has piqued my curiosity about the Devil May Cry series and other character action games like it, even though I bristle at the notion of rankings-based combat encounters. The Eikon fights sometimes drag on a little too long, but they’re always a delight. These huge, Godzilla-scale clashes are some of the best and most enjoyable parts of the story. My bout with Titan is one of my two most singular moments this year. (The other will be documented later in my #1 pick.) FFXIV has smartly used British voice actors to ensure that vocal performances are generally positive across the board, with occasional standouts in key roles. Ben Starr offers in this game one of the best voice acting performances in the history of the medium, and to tell you more would be a spoiler. Like the combat, he is also overused – I did tire of hearing him grunt and go “alright.” by the end of the story, probably because I did all the side quests and heard it quite a lot – but that’s probably hard to avoid, given that the story is so single-mindedly focused on Clive. But he’s absolutely the most singular voice actor since Doug Cockle as Geralt, a voice so permanently tied to the character that it’s impossible to think of anybody else in the role. (Sorry-not-sorry, Henry Cavill.) To reiterate, Final Fantasy XVI is a conservative video game. However, it sometimes excels despite itself. Like an Eikon, there is a beating heart of an exceptional game within the cumbersome bulk of the rest of it. 8. Inscryption  Pictured: the trappings of a nightmare I place a high value on “vibes.” Vibes will get me through the door and encourage me to try games I otherwise would not. I like spooky aesthetics and body horror. I like blood and gore and viscera (but not torture). I like a mysterious puzzle box to solve. I like a plot slowly unraveling but also teasing you with the notion that there are larger forces at play, and that you are unwittingly completing the villain’s scheme. I especially like the kind of well-executed metanarrative that often emerges from that kind of plot. On the other hand, I can’t think of a genre I like less than a roguelike deckbuilder. (First-person shooter might be a close second.) It isn’t that I’m allergic to all roguelikes. My preference is for the kind wherein death pushes you to a later victory by unlocking something every time you fail, especially the kind that gives you an objective to shoot for while you’re on your way to your inevitable demise. (Vampire Survivors, which almost squeaked onto this list, is a master class in that specific kind of mechanic.) Nor do I immediately hate all deckbuilders. But card games inevitably reach a level of complexity wherein my poor little brain can’t handle it anymore, can’t put together a strategic deck that’s viable. Combining the randomness and difficulty of a roguelike with the need for strategic thinking of a deckbuilder (looking at you, Slay the Spire) is a surefire way to get me to check out. I noticed last year when many folks had Inscryption on their GOTY lists, and the vibes compelled me to wait for a sale and pick it up. I muddled through the opening hour or two and began to figure out how the card game worked. I began picking at the puzzle box of the cabin. I may have brute-forced a puzzle here and there. And, before I knew it, I sailed through the remainder of the first act. After the first act, I was hooked. I devoured the rest of that game like a ravenous beast. I couldn’t get enough. I seem to recall that most people think it stumbles a bit in the third act, and I agree with that, but it was still enjoyable enough to push through and see the rewarding conclusion. I even poked around with Kaycee’s Mod a little bit afterwards. A literal roguelike deckbuilder! Truly a miraculous thing. Unlike many of the games on this list, I don’t have a lot of interesting insight into my time with Inscryption. It’s just very, very good, compelling enough to draw me in and keep my attention despite being miles away from my comfort zone. 7. Metroid Prime Remastered  Pictured: the preeminent space badass “But Lisztless,” I hear you saying, “this is a first-person shooter! You just said you didn’t like those!” You’re right. I also said I didn’t like roguelike deckbuilders either, yet one is memorialized on this very list. To borrow a line from a future entry, “a whole lot of inconceivable poo poo happens on this hell of an Earth.” And truthfully, Metroid Prime really isn’t much like other first-person shooters. It does not require twitch reflexes. The beams don’t provide good feedback when they hit the target. None of the weapons feel “fun to shoot.” (Maybe super missiles. I’d entertain that they do feel somewhat satisfying.) It is plodding, lethargic, and I swear you can feel the weight of gravity tethering you to Tallon IV. Despite this, it’s my favorite first-person shooter of all time, and the clue is right in the title: it’s a fully realized version of a first-person Metroid. It had to feel like this, because it couldn’t feel like anything else. This game is over 20 years old at this point, so hopefully you don’t need me to explain to you what that means, or that it’s phenomenal. I said earlier that remakes are, by definition, a failure of creativity. Remasters, perhaps, doubly so. A remaster doesn’t really add anything to the experience, it’s a glorified port, an airbrushing of your memory. But why, then, do so many games screw it up? How come Silent Hill 2, for example, can’t ever get a good remaster? (The short answer is they can’t get the fog right. The longer answer is that Konami has no idea what makes that game good.) I would argue it is because we rely on our fallible sense memory of these classics and inevitably hit a moment in our playthroughs wherein the illusion is shattered. “It didn’t look like that. It didn’t sound like that. I remember this being harder. I remember this feeling different.” It’s easy to consider that our aging brains misremembered something. However, in my experience, we are forced to look behind the curtain because at some point an adjustment was made that thrust us out of the experience. I can’t play the War of the Lions port of Final Fantasy Tactics because, right in the first battle, I can tell immediately that the units are marching double-time and Night Sword’s sound effect is all crunchy and compressed and wrong. This isn’t me misremembering something – I know full well what it sounds like, and it isn’t whatever that is. Metroid Prime: Remastered looks and sounds like the original Metroid Prime did. They overhauled the graphics and rendered textures with loving attention to detail coupled with modern effects. It looks like a modern game. It looks exactly the way it always did. Obviously that’s not true, there’s plenty of comparison footage out there to put the lie to that. But in my mind’s eye, Metroid Prime always looked like this, ran this well, sounded this way, shined this bright. It has a modern FPS control scheme, unlike the original, because it has to. The one change they made to it was out of necessity, and it elevates the original. (And from what I hear, they already made that change back in a Wii port or something.) It is a well-executed remaster because they took a good thing that worked and they didn’t monkey around with it any more than was strictly necessary. Many other remakes, including some that were released this year, including some that made this very list, could not help themselves but tinker with things that were already great in an attempt to further elevate them. Metroid Prime: Remastered shows that often, you just don’t have to, and you get a better result for it. If my kid wants to play Metroid Prime someday, she can play the remaster and have exactly the same experience I did in 2002, and there’s a beauty in that timelessness. 6. Pentiment  Pictured: making time for all of God’s creations (It feels kind of weird to discuss this knowing that Josh Sawyer occasionally peeks his head into these forums like an anchoress, but here we go.) Pentiment wants you to think it is a game about history, but really, it’s a game about time. History is the confluence of time, space, and events, all playing off one another. The main cast of Pentiment have very little agency to control the spaces of Tassing and Kiersau, or the events that happen there. If you’re a 16th century peasant, that’s not your domain and you know it. You can gripe about it, and sometimes fight in vain against it, but it’s a losing battle. God steps in to fill the cracks, promising salvation in the next life with the rarely spoken (and occasionally blasphemous) implication that it’s because this one is garbage. So, knowing that, what do you do with the time you have available to you? In Pentiment, Andreas Maler finds himself at the center of a murder mystery. Thankfully, he’s not the accused, but he’s invested in the outcome. His investigation into the murder becomes an exercise in time management. Where do you go? Who do you converse with? What leads do you follow up? Knowing that time is limited, how do you best spend it? My playthrough was a disaster. Almost every lead inevitably wound up at a dead end. People could not be convinced to give up their hard-kept secrets – I had exactly two successful persuasion checks in my playthrough, and neither were related to the case. My outlandish schemes to uncover mysteries ended in flames. I, the player, often felt like a time traveler who simply could not create a paradox – time was resilient and unbending. These events were going to play out whether I liked it or not, often with outcomes I was not personally happy with, and with mistakes I could never undo – mistakes I had to make because History demanded that I make them. Time was my enemy, as it is in real life – you will never have enough of it for your satisfaction, and you will make compromises out of necessity. I could make changes in the margins (heh), but when I tried to put things right, History told me to get hosed time and time again. I have somewhat unusual criteria for what makes something a role-playing game. People tend to focus on the mechanics, like numbers and combat and menus. I think a role-playing game has to either 1) allow you to create the role you want, and then reinforce that choice via mechanics, or 2) place such limitations on you that you are forced to accept that you’re playing a role and play it accordingly. (As an aside, most Japanese-style role-playing games are, by this definition, not very good role-playing games, and I’ll stand by that.) Pentiment is the latter kind of role-playing game. It forces you to play the role of a 16th century lower-to-middle-class citizen, subject to the lord(s), and the Lord, and History. It is astoundingly successful at this, not just because of its loving devotion to historicity but also the mechanics of the gameplay. To my surprise, the plot led to a satisfying conclusion. However, right through to the end credits, I saw things unfold that I had to make my uncomfortable peace with. After all, I, too, am a subject to History, even this fictional one, echoes of which reach their long arms through time to claw and pick at the scabs of the very real present. The cast of Pentiment made some peace with their shared history after unprecedented misfortune, and I hope and pray that we all find such contented resolution to our woes within our lifetimes as well. 5. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker  Pictured: ugh. my wife’s side piece What does it mean to go on a journey with someone? We’ve all gone on vacations or trips with people we love. Road trips, international travel, whatever. You learn a lot about yourself when you travel. You can learn a lot about a place and the people who live there, if you have the mind and opportunity to do it. If you go with a friend, you’ll learn a lot about them, too. If you go on a trip for long enough, at some point it metamorphoses into a journey, but most of us don’t have the luxury of knowing ahead of time that we’re going on a journey, only discovering it after we arrive home. My wife knew that I was a FFXIV obsessive. At some point, she decided that she wanted to learn more about this thing I couldn’t shut up about. I initially tried to warn her off. “Honey, I’m appreciative, but this is an insane thing you’re asking. It’s gonna take us like a year or more to get through it all. I just want you to fully understand what you’re committing to.” “Well, it’s not any more insane than being married to you, is it? And a year is nothing compared to our marriage.” Touché. She doesn’t play many video games, outside of the small handful we play cooperatively. She gets motion sickness from games, which can make even watching them a challenge. On top of that, she does not find playing them to be the stress-relieving experience that I do. Even when the stakes and difficulty are low, she still gets frustrated. If she’s going to play FFXIV, this would not do. So, we settled on a compromise: we treat the series like something in between a visual novel and a TV series, and I do all the playing. I steer the character, she controls the dialogue and makes the choices. A few times per week, for a delightfully coincidental 14 months now, we have slowly chiseled away at FFXIV, doing all the content available. (Excepting Eureka and Bozja. Once was bad enough). It became a thing we do after dinner, once the kiddo is in bed. We brush her hair and she asks us, “oh, since I’m going to bed, are you going to play Little Mom?” Little Mom is what she calls my wife’s character, who is a minimum-height Lalafell. (Little Dad, of course, had been previously established in 2019.) “Yes honey, I think that’s what we’ll do.” “Will Little Mom get stronger?” “Yes, Little Mom is always getting stronger. She already beat up a mean dragon, and I think next she’s going to fight some bad guys who are hurting people.” Her eyes widen. “Wow....” Final Fantasy XIV has made these GOTY lists, including my own last year, with such frequency that it no longer needs an introduction. You know if this sort of game appeals to you or not. Either you like a team sport, a bombastic dungeon, a lovingly crafted and mature story, an engaging community, a thrilling puzzle-combat system, a nostalgic theme park experience, or you don’t. I don’t need to convince you. I will say this: the truism that everybody’s favorite Final Fantasy is their first one feels accurate to me. (Shoutouts to FFIV.) However, this might be the outlier, both because it maintains its relevance with every passing year, but also because it gives you an opportunity to grow alongside the cast. Your journey through this game need not terminate once the credits roll (twice per expansion); your personal growth need not stop because the characters have finished their assigned arcs. Playing this game together with her is my favorite experience of this year. Nothing else compares. We’ve shared jokes, made new friends (shoutout to Wilfwyb, whose name my wife gleefully screams every time they log on/off, this FC mate who has no idea we exist), made headcanon, watched me identify where Fatebreaker vanished to and then casually waltz right off the platform, shipped characters, shed tears, and walked to the end. We routinely make recipes from the FFXIV cookbook (it’s a lovely cookbook) and buy each other FFXIV-related Christmas gifts. We memorialize it so we can look back and say, “this is a time where we did something really meaningful together.” So we can tell our daughter about it someday, so maybe she can learn about the kind of people we were then. Isn’t that the point of a journey? To set off on a new adventure, to see new places and people, to stretch the boundaries of your soul and give your spirit a little more room to grow? To become, forged by the experience, a better, wiser person? Even if it takes a year, even if it takes eight years, what could be more worth your time than that? And to share that with one you love, how could anything possibly be better?  So why, then, is it in the middle of the list? Because Little Dad has sat mostly ignored on the shelf, as the patch content has been less than thrilling this time around. (And again, I’m an FFIV stan, I am the target demographic for this nostalgia, and it didn’t land aside from the phenomenal remixes for Battle 2 and The Final Battle.) Oh well. Every journey has some rocks in the road. 4. Valkyrie Profile  Pictured: spiritual concentration Me, in basically every chat thread or halfway relevant forum post in my life: ”Have you sons of bitches heard about Valkyrie Profile?” It’s possible you haven’t. It’s possible you heard about one of its handful of sequels and spinoffs, most of which aren’t any good. (Like Konami, Square Enix is occasionally a company that forgets what makes their classics great.) It’s possible you were interested in it but realized the only way to play it these days was on a tablet, which is no way to play a video game, let alone a platformer. Regardless, it’s on PS4/5 now, so allow me to educate you. Valkyrie Profile is a game where you control a valkyrie, a minor goddess (named Valkyrie, though occasionally called Lenneth). Ragnarök is coming and the gods are scrambling to rally their forces before the cataclysmic confrontation. You, a chooser of the slain, are tasked with recruiting valiant human souls post-mortem to serve as foot soldiers in the gods’ armies. Conveniently, there are tons of horrible monsters around which serve as valuable fodder for sharpening your party members’ skills prior to their ascension to Asgard. Monster crypts and untraveled wilds become platforming and minor puzzle setpieces, and the monsters themselves as lead-ins to turn-based button-mashing battles. There is some strategy to the combat, and there’s a lot of it, but it is often fantastically brief as your warriors unleash potent magic and explosive finishers and generally overwhelm their foes. There is joy to be had in playing the turn-based fights well, as multiple successive hits on enemies can shatter defenses, cause restorative crystals to manifest leading to additional spellcasting/finishers, and charge your individual characters’ super moves. That’s all well and good but let’s talk a bit about the story. This is a role-playing game. Per my earlier definition, it is a wildly successful one. Valkyrie, right from the jump, senses that something is amiss. She’s got some amnesia, and some hazy memories of a prior life. Recruiting the fallen souls (i.e., the einherjar) means bearing witness to the final moments of their lives, often wherein they prove that they are worthy to face further endangerment in the upcoming battle of Ragnarök. The main plot of the game eventually unfurls as you recruit the various einherjar, but nothing really points you to seek out the true ending of the game. It’s entirely possible to just run out the clock on Ragnarök, which is helpfully measured on the world map screen, and proceed straight to the endgame. You’ll get one of two endings - a truly bad ending if you fail to recruit/train einherjar, and a middling ending wherein Valkyrie averts Ragnarök and earns no reward for it. But there’s a good ending, and to get it, you need to have a keen eye and treat it like a role-playing game. Every time Lenneth recruits an einherjar, it lowers her Seal Value, a subtle and seemingly meaningless stat on her character status screen. In addition, following plot threads regarding her previous life will also dramatically lower her Seal Value. It represents the control that Odin has over you, so you want it as low as possible; Ending B, or just having the experience of working under a bad boss in real life, will tell you that. But you can’t forget to do your job (represented by your Evaluation Score), or Odin will forcefully terminate your contract early, so you need to do the bare minimum so you can go back to your actual job of following up on what happened to you. There’s a bit more nuance to it than that, but acting in this way will put you on the right path – and, if you had amnesia and a lingering sense of unease about your lot in life, isn’t that what you would do? In short: Valkyrie Profile is a game where getting the good ending involves subtly telling your boss to gently caress off. The port is a solid one. The anime cutscenes don’t add anything, and I don’t prefer them over the original sprite work. Valkyrie Profile has amazing, beautiful, detailed sprite work, with more soul in it than every HD-2D game put together. (Octopath, take notes.) Motoi Sakuraba is at the apex of his career on the soundtrack. The voice acting is a product of its time, which means ‘90s anime voice actors are well represented, for good or ill. (For every Megan Hollingshead as Valkyrie there must be a Tara Sands as Llewelyn doing an Ash Ketchum impression.) The one significant change in this port is that they included a save state system, which is a blessing because some of the platforming sections do suffer from PSX-era collision weirdness and save states do take the sting out of a mistimed jump. 3. Kirby and the Forgotten Land  Pictured: Kirby and, per my kid, Kirby’s Friend Last year, this game was at number six on my list. It was the only game to rank that I hadn’t completed, its inclusion based solely on my sheer delight that my then four-year-old would play a video game with me. It was the very first one she played together with me as my sidekick. We played through the entirety of the game together, right through to the end credits after an amazing finale, right through to the special secret levels and true final boss, right through to the 100% mark. For me, part of being a parent is encouraging them to foster their own interests, even if they’re things that don’t interest you. I don’t object to playing dolls or make-believe, it comes with the territory. But I also think it’s unavoidable that you want your kid to like some of the things you do. It’s part of sharing yourself and your life with this little person you’re raising. Part of that is accepting the fact that sometimes they just don’t give a drat about the things you like (and often will tell you so, indelicately). I was determined to not force her to like anything I like solely because I like it, or to make my affection a condition of her engaging with me in this way; either she gravitated to it on her own terms, or she would bounce off and I would deal with my wounded ego in solitude. Needless to say, I was thrilled when she took to Kirby like a duck to water, and it quickly became a thing we bonded over. If I close my eyes, I can still hear her uproarious laughter as Kirby kicks his friend out of bed and hear her yell “OOF!” at the top of her tiny lungs as his little plush body collides with the floor. I can still envision her regaling my wife at the dinner table with tales of her exploits. I can still see her oohing and aahing as I showed her secret passages I intuited and hear her pouting about never being allowed to collect the “rainbow stars.” (Ignore the inconvenient fact that I let her collect nearly all of them.) It all came together during the fight with the superboss. I had gently encouraged her the entire game to actually fight the enemies as Bandana Dee rather than flee in mock terror. “But I’m too scaaaaaaaared!” she’d whine in response. Maybe she was, but almost nothing in Kirby is all that threatening-looking, so I don’t think that was the real reason. I think she just didn’t want to learn a new skill and was content to be dragged along in my wake. So, as the superboss was revealed, I paused the game and laid down the law. “This is going to be really hard. I’m going to try not to die, but I’m not making any promises. If I die, we both need to start over, so try your best to fight. Okay?” A little nod and we were off. To my surprise, she really did her best to put up an offense, throwing her little spears and rapid-fire jabbing whenever the boss stopped moving. I don’t know where these skills came from; at no point were they on display prior to this moment. I suppose she had spent the entire game studying the blade and, like the wise master, knew the exact moment to strike. Maybe she entered a berserker rage because her friend Elfilin had been eaten by an alien monstrosity, and she resolved to solve that problem with spear pokes. I’ll never know. I remember quickly glancing over and seeing the little furrowed brow of a determined face. Like any good superboss, this fight has multiple phases, and by the end of the fight the sheer attrition of it had worn down my health bar. She had died in catastrophic fashion on multiple occasions, but always eagerly rejoined the fray. The boss had a couple moves I hadn’t figured out how to dodge, and I knew that eventually we’d hit that spot in the action rotation and it would be curtains for me. And as the boss lined up a laser blast to fry me, my kid scored the final blow. We had cleared it together on our first try. There was screaming, clapping, cheering, and I’m pretty sure I threw her around in the air. I couldn’t believe it. She had surpassed my expectations. As we recounted the story later, I said proudly, “I couldn’t have beaten it without her.” Sincerely, I couldn’t have beaten it without her. 2. Live a Live (2022)  Pictured: what you can do if you spend 80 years not skipping leg day My wife has asked me a few times over the years to assemble a list of what my favorite games of all time are. It’s a wonderfully self-indulgent exercise, awash in nostalgia with little regard for objective reasoning or strident analysis. The items on that list are ever-changing; the top five are generally set in stone, but 6-10 are a bloody battlefield littered with the corpses of titans. Two of my top five would unquestionably include Chrono Trigger and Earthbound. Chrono Trigger was, to my mind, the first perfect game – lush, vibrant, endlessly replayable, and mechanically satisfying, with a plethora of secrets to discover. (And, a quality that I’ve grown to appreciate more and more as I grow older, brief.) Earthbound, on the other hand, was a little more artsy in its execution – this rudimentary veneer of Americana gives way to a bizarre, cosmic horror nightmare where an unlikely protagonist saves the heroes at their darkest hour. Earthbound was the first game to really make me feel something – in this case, despair, as all the bottle rockets in the world couldn’t save me from Giygas – and it was one of those personality-defining events whose ramifications are still felt today. The particular blend of aesthetics, metanarrative, and emotional core presented by Earthbound was something I would spend the next 20 years chasing before finding it again, to my surprise, in Undertale. What if, all along, there had been something like it that I had never known about? A sort of missing link between Chrono Trigger and Earthbound? I was aware of Live a Live having received a fan translation at some point in the aughts. I had played at least some of the Final Fantasy V and Tales of Phantasia fan translations and found them to sound very strange – strange enough to be off-putting, regardless of the quality of the gameplay. When Live a Live had a fan translation, I was interested in the concept – seven different lives, seven different starting points! - but by that time I was too busy with other things, and had already been soured on the quality of other fan translations. (My preconception about fan translations would persist until the unofficial localization for Mother 3, which was one of the first games I played with my now-wife and definitely the first one to make me sob uncontrollably in front of her.) I had passed on Live a Live. I had missed out. Live a Live is lush, vibrant, replayable, and mechanically satisfying, with a plethora of secrets to discover. Live a Live is artsy in its execution of its metanarrative. The ending of Live a Live made me feel emotions about the human condition, even if the presentation is a little childish. Live a Live now has an excellent localization, and one of the best soundtracks of the entire SNES generation. (Yoko Shimomura is the GOAT. Square Enix wisely let her rearrange her own original compositions for this remake, and for Super Mario RPG as well, and the results for both are extraordinary.) Live a Live is a game that, long before I had seen the credits roll, made me realize that I would have gone absolutely apeshit over this game if I was 10 years old. I would have never stopped talking about it. I don’t know if it makes my personal top 10 of all time. After all, it has stiff competition with the rose-tinted favorites of my youth. If I had played it then, perhaps the outcome might be different – but then, it was never released localized until 2022, so I’ll never know. What I do know is this: it’s in conversation with Earthbound and Mother 3 and Undertale as being a game with a thesis statement, that wants you to think about bigger things, and what you take away from that (or don’t) is up to you. Maybe its ideas are a little juvenile or trite or schmaltzy, but it plants the seeds and gives you the space to consider what they might grow into. Most games, by design or by omission, do not do that – and we should cherish and celebrate the forgotten ones that do. 1. Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon  Pictured: I’m still the king of my city ‘cause I’m still calling them shots In the unlikely event you recall my GOTY list from last year, you will remember that Elden Ring came out and inspired me to conquer the modern Fromsoft catalog. This resulted in Sekiro taking the top honors as my game of the year. It is, to me, the best action game of at least the last decade. It is a challenging, uncompromising thing. It demands that you learn its systems and internalize the way it wants you to play it. It is the wizened kung fu master at the top of the mountain rapping your knuckles with a bamboo rod when your grip on the water bucket slips. “Again. *crack* Again. *crack* Again. Do it again. Do it better. *crack*” It taught me the joys of mastery and lessened the sting of failure. It’s not for everybody, but it’s for me. It also sneakily accomplished something I hadn’t expected – I began developing an aesthetic appreciation for ninja and samurai. I slew the true final boss and thought, “oh, okay, I get why this stuff is cool now.” (To be fair, this hasn’t exactly paid dividends – I played samurai in FFXIV for a bit, I watched some Kurosawa, I retried Ghost of Tsushima and immediately put it down again.) So, when Armored Core 6 was announced I thought, “maybe this is the game that will teach me that giant robots are cool.” Finishing the Fromsoft catalog did not inspire me to play through the Armored Core back catalog – like King’s Field it was too dated and inaccessible, and like my original vibes concerning Sekiro it did not appeal to me aesthetically. My limited mecha experience began at Xenogears and ended at Zone of the Enders, the latter of which I only bought because it included a demo disc for Metal Gear Solid 2. I do not by my nature look at the robot and go “wow, cool robot” so I was skeptical. I can’t analyze how Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon compares to its predecessors, but I can say that it is alike in spirit to Fromsoft’s Souls-era games in both gameplay and themes, particularly Sekiro. The main aspect that makes it feel like Sekiro is that it is fast. These are giant hulking pieces of metal attached to rocket boosters, and they move like it. Gunfire and lasers come in lightning fast. Timely dodging is essential, loading your damage into a tight window is paramount. The warning chime of your systems picking up an incoming rocket gives you maybe a second-and-a-half lead time before you need to react. It’s a third-person shooter but it gives you the sensation of being in a VR module, and I mean this as high praise. The joy of Sekiro, for me, was learning the tells of your opponent and reacting in time. In the Soulsborne games, panic dodging would get you out of a lot of sticky situations. In Sekiro, you always lived on the katana’s edge between life and death because the safest spot was typically right in the boss’s grill as you deflected blows. Armored Core 6 feels like a more refined exploration of that concept. You can panic dodge a little bit, but generally you need to figure out Your Role In Space and how that impacts your reactions to the boss. As it turns out, Your Role In Space is actually a very complicated thing, because it is a function of your loadout. Not just your firearms, though that is perhaps the most noticeable area where one could switch things up. Your legs are possibly the single piece that changes the most about how you play, and I suspect every player could point to a particular model and say “that is the best, to me.” For me, it was the Spring Chicken reverse-joints, allowing me to jump and soar into the sky, controlling the verticality of the arena. Most enemies have a hard time shooting at targets overhead, and I have an easy time shooting below. But “most enemies” does not mean all enemies. The point at which you push your comfort zone probably changes for every player, but at some point you must do it. For me, it was the Chapter 4 boss. Verticality would not save me from an onslaught of lasers and a boss who could effortlessly zip across the arena. So I made a change to bipedal legs with good quickboosters, allowing for more frantic dodging. It felt weird and alien at first, felt slower and less mobile than my beloved Spring Chicken legs. But that change made all the difference and I clowned the boss in one shot. This is the main mechanical difference of Armored Core 6 compared to its predecessors – the Assembly system allows you nearly unlimited abilities to customize your character in response to a stumbling block. Despite the sheer challenge of its gameplay, it is perhaps the easiest Fromsoft game in recent memory, because Assembly gives you all the tools to tailor your experience. Frustrated by shields? Put on a shield-killer weapon. Enemies plinking you from above? Put on hover legs so you stay at their level. Boss not staggering enough? Put some Songbird grenade launchers on your shoulders and blow them up. This is a gameplay mechanic; this is also a difficulty slider more elegant than anything released in ages. It does not excuse you from playing the game the way its creators envisioned; it instead says, “we have given you all the tools, even the top shelf ones, now put them to use. Time to get to work.” Armored Core 6 is replete with memorable moments due to the variety of its mission structure. My favorite is the boss of Chapter 3 – you know the one, you know the line. I gasped when it happened, so perfectly timed, the audio cue and the sickening writhing of the boss. The music, the world, the vibes are all immaculate. I do not care for sci-fi as a genre, but Armored Core 6 feels gritty and real to me in a way other sci-fi does not. As a species, it feels inevitable that this is the road we are headed down, with corporations slap-fighting as their foot soldiers are deployed and exploded and discarded for being obsolete. Unlike the Souls series, there is no esoteric philosophy at play here – the thesis statement is right there on the page. Like Sekiro, the player character is a somewhat defined entity with stakes in the plot. Unlike the Souls series, your choices’ dubious morality yields tangible, knowable consequences. Like Sekiro, it is deeply enjoyable – perhaps even mandatory – to play the game multiple times and experience every ending it has to offer. It is a master class in action gameplay. It shows, again and again, to the dismay of myriad middling pretenders, why Fromsoft is unparalleled in their field. It is comprehensively, undoubtedly, the single best game of 2023. Lisztless fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 18:36
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Hell yes another person voting for AC6 as number one. We might have a shot at getting in the top numbers!
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Dec 11, 2023 18:41
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10. The Roottrees are Dead (2023) “Check this game out”, said a goon in the chat thread. And check it out I did, and it rocked. A deductive game that combines Obra Dinn with Her Story, the goal is to identify the names, occupations, and appearances of the members of a very large family, using magazine articles, news clippings and book excerpts that you download off a 90s web search engine. It ate up a workday and a half, it was all I could think about. Just amazing work. I was a little disappointed by the AI art, though I understand why it was used (solo dev, for one thing) 9. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023) There’s no escaping it, TotK rules. It’s Breath of the Wild Plus, taking an already excellent game and making it more excellent. What impressed me the most in retrospect was the amount of trust the devs put in the player, you can skip their carefully designed puzzles with a rocket shield or minicopter and the game will say “Okay, that works too!”. That said, yeah ok I started skipping cutscenes because the story was so dull, but I still can’t deny that driving/flying around the massive underground layer on my dumb hot-air-balloon-glider was an experience unlike any other 8. Pokémon Scarlet (2022) It’s the best Pokémon game. But good God is it far from perfect. I could list the many tiny frustrations, but at the end of the day, it’s got an okay story, the open world works very well, and it’s a lot of fun in general. At the time of writing, the next DLC isn’t out yet (release date is December 14th), though that looks like it’s going to be “more of the same” so I don’t think it’ll affect Scarlet’s ranking on my list. 7. Theatrhythm Final Bar Line (2023) I don’t do rhythm games. But I do do RPGs. Having a party-building component really sold me on this game, and of course I like Final Fantasy music. Well, to be precise, I like 70% of Final Fantasy music, I really like 20% of Final Fantasy music, and the remaining 10% is kinda not to my taste (coincidentally, mostly FFXIII music). I was really happy that I could 100% the game without having to actually get good at it, since the optional “quests” can be done in the easiest difficulty or can be brute forced with the aforementioned party-building 6. Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023) I should point out a few caveats: I’m a BG1 & BG2 superfan. I replay those games about once a year. I’m also a big fan of Divinity: Original Sin and especially Divinity: Original Sin 2. And in my opinion, BG3 has a lot more in common with D:OS2 than with the earlier BGs, to the point where I can’t help but see it as a sequel to D:OS2, and not BG2. And that’s not a bad thing at all! Although the combat compares unfavourably to D:OS2’s (I much prefer the action point system to the Action/”Bonus Action” system), writing-wise it’s a step up, and although I haven’t finished the game yet, I’ve been having a lot of fun with it 5. Six Ages (2018) It makes you FEEL!!! like the leader of a clan of weakened magical ancient barbarians with very particular rituals and beliefs that has some complicated relationships with the neighbouring magical barbarian tribes. If the goal of art is to express an exact feeling, idea, mood, theory, then Six Ages is a perfect work of art. I look forward to getting into Six Ages 2: twelve ages in 2024, which, from what I’ve seen, accentuates the “weakened” part of “weakened magical ancient barbarians” so will take some adjusting, since I’m not used to numbers going down 4. The Case of the Golden Idol (2022) I like this more than the other popular deduction game, Obra Dinn, just because it doesn’t require physically moving an avatar around to look at stuff. Golden Idol gave me a ton of “ohhhhh” moments, which are more powerful versions than “ah ha” moments: moments when I discover on my own (that part is important) that an earlier small detail is, in fact, crucially vital to understanding the greater conspiracy at play. Also all of the DLC rules 3. Europa Universalis IV: Anbennar (2018) This game will always be on my list, in some form or another. Fan-made EU4 fantasy overhaul megamod that keeps adding interesting stories every couple of months, and offering unique gameplay challenges that the base game, being set on Earth, could never present 2. Europa Universalis IV (2013) This game will always be on my list, in some form or another. The reason it’s here alongside Anbennar is because, lately the (official) expansions have been excellent, a lot more focused on revamping existing nations and regions by adding unique mechanics and mission trees, instead of tacking on global systems that can sometimes be remarkably tedious and low-impact 1. Pentiment (2022) Alright, so I’ve played Europa Universalis for many years now, and it taught a fair bit about late medieval, early modern history. Mostly in Europe. I like that stuff, a lot. And Pentiment is all about that time period, presented with some of the most careful attention to detail I’ve ever seen. But that’s not why I love Pentiment, or at least not the main reason I love it. I love it because… It is so warm, so compassionate, so genuinely interested in the characters, all two hundred of them. It is beautiful. The story is a real page-turner, and in terms of video game-ness, it does some very interesting things with the visual novel format, and it even comments on games as a medium. Such a rich, and enriching, experience God bless you, Andreas
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Dec 11, 2023 19:12
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Wanted: Dead is my game of the year. Its a game with a lot of heart and a bad rear end tall woman with a sword. It's the only game I played this year where I really didn't want it to end, and I ended up replaying it on hard and then the "Japanese hard" mode, which is something I never do. I've never beaten a Souls game or really loved a difficult game before but after playing Wanted:Dead I feel like I could handle some new stuff I couldn't before. The story is obviously rushed, but its actually kind of good. It deals with AI in a way that feels timely, and ponder what it is that makes humans unique in a world where machines can do so much of what we previously relied upon human labor for. It has a bit of fun tech satire in there and a good arc with the main character. Gameplay is kind of like playing Resident Evil 4 with the enemies in the background, while you're playing Sekiro with enemies in the foreground and also you just smoked some meth. It's awesome, well animated but still a little janky, and aggravating in a good way.
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Dec 11, 2023 19:16
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Writing words is the worst. I don't have any real justification or insight for the list. Simply liked them more than other things I played. 10. Final Fantasy XIII A continuation of my slow playthrough of Final Fantasy games. It's well known as being a series of corridors but the gameplay and story were both fine. The open world area was tedious but I finished it which is more than I can say for both of the other FFXIII games. 9. Deep Rock Galactic It's co-op, has a lot of fun gameplay elements and is still being updated. 8. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life I mean...it's another Yakuza game. I didn't like a lot of Yakuza 5 so this was an improvement. 7. Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition Generally liked the visuals and the story was interesting enough. The actual gameplay was alright. Played on PC and found aiming on a controller a nightmare no matter what settings I used, probably wouldn't have finished it iif i hadn't changed over to KB+M. 6. The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition I played this after it had been patched up so didn't have any performance issues. Kind of agree with the overall sentiment. It was a fine game, nothing stood out as great but it wasn't bad either. Some strange lighting issues which didn't impact gameplay but sometimes you'd be in a building and the lighting would suddenly shift mid-scene and not be so intensely saturated which looked much better. 5. Red Dead Redemption 2 Visuals still look good. Voice acting and dialog was pretty solid. Story probably went on a bit too long but overall was fine. Controls could be a bit annoying and the constant animations on actions you've done a hundred times before just gets annoying the longer you play. 4. STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor More of the same from the first one really. One of those games were I felt the side-quests really weren't worth the bother which means some zones I didn't really fully explore. Story was...fine I guess. 3. Wasteland 3 Have been playing this co-op which has been fun. I didn't like Wasteland 2 at all so was tentative to try this one. The game doesn't take itself seriously and the writing and choices available to the player have been entertaining. 2. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Could never really get into Witcher 1 or 2. Nothing really stood out as amazing but everything was pretty good as a whole package. 1. Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition Played the base game earlier this year and enjoyed it. Went katana and just hacked everyone to pieces. The Keanu scenes were all fine, I never felt his performance was very good at all. The only driving I could stand was the motorcycles, everything else was atrocious to drive. Playing Starfield and then coming back to this for Phantom Liberty was just a huge lightbulb moment that really threw everything I didn't like about Starfield into contrast. Wow, I can walk around while people are talking, I don't have constant loading screens, and some of these characters I almost care about. Kaiser Cortez fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 20:00
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Kaiser Cortez posted:10. Final Fantasy XIII You have to add little blurbs for this - even just a single sentence - if you want it to be counted in the overall results. loving screaming internally
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Dec 11, 2023 20:04
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Lisztless posted:4. Valkyrie Profile Is this the first time you've played Valkyrie Profile? God, I love this thread.
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Dec 11, 2023 20:30
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Fighting Elegy posted:Wanted: Dead is my game of the year. Its a game with a lot of heart and a bad rear end tall woman with a sword. It's the only game I played this year where I really didn't want it to end, and I ended up replaying it on hard and then the "Japanese hard" mode, which is something I never do. I've never beaten a Souls game or really loved a difficult game before but after playing Wanted:Dead I feel like I could handle some new stuff I couldn't before. Did you wanna rank anything else or just shout that into the abyss? Escobarbarian posted:loving screaming internally Hehe
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Dec 11, 2023 20:37
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DalaranJ posted:Is this the first time you've played Valkyrie Profile? Oh heck no. I played it back in the day on PSX. But it got ported to PS4/5 super late in 2022, and I replayed it in January 2023, cementing its inclusion here.
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Dec 11, 2023 20:39
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Every time I play VP I am so sad that Maddie Blaustein died well before her time. Liam O'Brian is a great Lezard but Maddie Blaustein was so drat good.
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Dec 11, 2023 20:44
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Lisztless posted:4. Valkyrie Profile 
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Dec 11, 2023 20:54
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(sorry my write ups are so short I'm lazy + not good at it also I used the ranking thing cheetah posted so if you don't like the rankings it is entirely their fault) I think I finished 45-50 games this year, I haven't bought Armored Core 6/Pikmin 4/Octopath 2/Yakuza Gaiden yet and I'm still in the middle of Fire Emblem: Engage which I might edit in later if I finish it in time (it's very good) but for now here is my list: Honourable Mentions Fuga: Melodies of Steel - It's great but I stopped playing because it was stressing me out. I have heard in Fuga 2 they found innovative new ways to terrorise the children like an autoload-child feature for the soul cannon Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Final Bar Line - It's good enough to be in the top 10 tbh but it's more Theatrhythm Baldur's Gate 3 - I've never played any kind of D&D/tabletop thing but it really grabbed me for the 35 hours or so I put into it. I only stopped playing because work was getting busy and I never went back to it Hitman: World of Assassination - I'm not a big fan of roguelikes at all but Hitman is really a perfect fit for it and I ended up putting another 50-60 hours into the game because of the Freelancer update Gunvolt - I got the platinums in the first two Gunvolts and the Luminous Avenger spinoffs, v good if you like Mega Man Zero etc FFXIV - I'm still checking in every few months for the new patches - I hope Dawntrail is good!! Pizza Tower - Extremely good but my playthrough feels unfinished because I'd rather wait for a console release to properly go back and get all the P ranks #19 - Logiart Grimoire  It's Picross on PC I'll keep buying all the 2D Picrosses but what I really want is Picross 3D: Round 3 #18 - Fashion Dreamer   It's a big step down from the Style Boutique/Style Savvy games (feels real barebones without the shop management stuff and there are some weird omissions from the old games too like styling people's hair & makeup/and there are no bags or necklaces) but it's fun checking in each day to see the outfits people have designed for your character and then putting together a few for other players #17 - The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass    Time travel VN that really hooked me at first but I was completely sick of it by the end. Looking through all the flow charts etc post game the time travel plot they've put together is seriously impressive though (to me at least, maybe time travel nerds would find holes to pick). The game does a bizarre thing towards the end where the writer of the game keeps interjecting to ask you a total of 94 questions on how well you understand what happened (IIRC from the post-game stats screen the average score is like 30% but I'm assuming most people were like me and started picking random answers) #16 - Advance Wars 1+2: Boot Camp  These remasters were good and I doubt they'll lead to a new game but I hope they did ok enough to at least justify a remaster of Dual Strike. I'm still convinced they could successfully revive the series if they make some kind of Three Houses style game!! #15 - Pokemon Violet  I don't know if I'm sold on the open world thing yet but it worked for me here better than in Arceus and got its hooks in me pretty good despite the technical issues. See above for my extremely bad team of losers and Meowscarada #14 - Resident Evil 4  They did an amazing job but idk if it needed to exist and I haven't thought about it a single time since getting the platinum #13 - New Pokemon Snap    what a nice game #12 - Super Mario Bros. Wonder  I thought it'd be higher because I loved every second and have no complaints but I got 100% in like 6 or 7 hours and it didn't leave much of an impression  #11 - Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown My first Ace Combat but I loved it and I'm trying to will Ace Combat 8 into existence by putting this on my list. The flying itself hit a nice balance between arcadey/sim + I like the goofy plot/weird not-Earth setting. It's one of the few VR things I'd like to try too as I've heard it's actually good here my only complaint is that I would like more opportunities to fly through narrow gaps and tunnels like in the final mission please #10 - Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane  Really fun fantasy setting Ace Attorney style game that goes places. They nailed it with the courtroom music too! I hope they make a sequel #9 - La-Mulana  I played this over a couple weeks in October (and eventually got to a point where I caved in and had to start looking up hints - if I didn't I would 100% still be stuck now) I don't know if I was just in the right mood for it or something but it really clicked with me and I was thinking about it a lot afterwards. I also have the sequel but I knew if I jumped right into it I'd get burnt out so I'm saving it. #8 - Shin Megami Tensei: Soul Hackers 2 https://i.imgur.com/9ReTJTS.mp4 I know it doesn't have any business being in a top 10 in a year like this but I liked it!! It got mixed reviews because of some repetitive dungeons + it was missing some basic QoL stuff (which they'd patched in by the time I played it) I wasn't expecting much but for whatever reason it really grabbed me and I played the whole 40 hours in 4 days or something silly like that. It's got all the usual SMT fusion stuff with a fun variation on Persona's battle system called "Sabbath" where your demons do all out attacks at the end of each turn based on how many stacks you built up by hitting weaknesses. The story is w/e but I like the cast/the whole vibe of the game + Ringo is just great #7 - Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty https://i.imgur.com/tdR0Mzo.mp4 I'm not a big RotTK person but I think it might be the only game I've played where you can actually parry every single attack (even magic/grabs IIRC) #6 - Street Fighter 6  I didn't put as much time into it as I was expecting because despite liking the roster there's no one who stands out as a main for me (I'll go back when they add Sakura or Makoto or w/e) but it's an amazing game. Really easy recommendation for people new to fighting games too, I had zero interest in the world tour mode going into it but it's surprisingly pretty fun + people seem to like the modern controls #5 - Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin https://imgur.com/L95lfMI.mp4 I think it's easily Team Ninja's best game, they did an amazing job translating the FF job system to an action game + the story is really much better than it has any right to be (I played the FF1 pixel remaster before jumping into this which I would recommend) also Jack is just a delight #4 - Paranormasight  Supernatural mystery VN about people killing each other with very specific curses. Honestly it starts out ridiculously strong and then the rest doesn't really live up to the opening but something about the whole vibe/presentation clicked with me and I think back on it pretty fondly #3 - Final Fantasy XVI There didn't seem to much fanfare around it after release so I wasn't sure what to expect but I loved it. Some of the set pieces are wild and idk what the consensus is on the story/setting etc. but I was into it. Also after XV's attempt at a more action based battle system I was surprised the combat here is actually genuinely good (there's not much to it at first but it's really satisfying once you've got a couple eikons to work with) Clive would also rank p high on my list of FF protagonists but no one has made a thread for that #2 - Rain World: Downpour  I had this on my goty list a few years ago and it's back again because of the Downpour expansion which added 5 new slugcats with their own campaigns/multiplayer (and some assists to help make the base game a little easier to get into) Each campaign takes place at a different part of the timeline and a couple of them signficantly change the map for story reasons so it's interesting if you're into the lore (the amount of work they put into updating the world for the Rivulet/Saint campaigns in particular seems crazy because I could imagine the majority of people not even unlocking/bothering to play them). For whatever reason Rain World is a game I find myself going back to a lot when I can't get myself in the mood to play anything else so this expansion honestly felt like it was made for me + I loved it #1 - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom https://imgur.com/Ct5MJJi.mp4 I realise it's sad but games are the only thing I look forward to and this is one of the best I've ever played for reasons other people have already explained much better than I can ascending list for all the psychopaths: 1 - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 2 - Rain World: Downpour 3 - Final Fantasy XVI 4 - Paranormasight 5 - Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin 6 - Street Fighter 6 7 - Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty 8 - Shin Megami Tensei: Soul Hackers 2 9 - La-Mulana 10 - Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane thank you! vvv Help Im Alive fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 21:00
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Good list! I've been meaning to check out Attorney of the Arcane. (I love me some Ace Attorney, so much!) Just haven't had the time.
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Dec 11, 2023 21:32
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Man Jay Rust good list. Everyone should play Six Ages for real. I'm so glad we live in a timeline where King of Dragon Pass gets an honest lineage. A genuinely unique series of games that really force you to internalize the values of another culture, doubly impactful since xenophobia is a big theme of the game. Got back into it this year cause I never beat it and want to play the sequel. Still haven't beaten it but I did buy the next.
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Dec 11, 2023 21:55
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10. TOEM Cute game, and I enjoyed the afternoon I spent with it, but it also feels like an aperitif you play between real games. It's kinda 'kiddy' which is fine, but like, at a certain point it just feels like checking off boxes when it challenges you so little. 9. Pikmin 4 I love the Pikmin series to death, and it's certainly a good game, but it kinda clashes with what makes Pikmin so appealing in the first place. Like, the charm of Pikmin is that even though everything is cute and you're just a tiny little guy, everything is also extremely loving dangerous and deadly and most of the time you're feeling like you're stretched thin and about to snap. Pikmin 4 does away with a lot of this by a) giving you an incredibly strong set of tools and moves to pretty much instagib anything that gets in your way and b) making this not a deserted unknown planet by having like a million people crash land here. If anything I wish it was a little jankier or a little rougher around the edges, which I guess is a good problem for a game to have but it still makes me like it a little less. 8. Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line S-tier toilet gaming. 7. Yakuza Kiwami I've tried a lot of Yakuza games but I always get to a certain point and then peter out. Kiwami was short enough that I powered through, but even if I hadn't been able to make it, it would still be on the list. Yakuza games are great and I will never stop playing 3/4ths of them. 6. Super Mario Wonder Impeccably made, pretty much every level follows the formula of introduce mechanic -> build on mechanic -> flip mechanic on its head during trippy sequence -> end level. Which is fine but I feel like at times the game pulled punches and could've gone a little further. I'm a big fan of the Mario Maker games and it's interesting to note how much of the level design at times was influenced by some of the more popular levels on Mario Maker, likewise I'm excited to see if we get another mario maker out of wonder along with some more inspired tools. 5. Doom Like, the original Doom, the first one. I didn't get to play it as a kid due to my family's rule on violent video games. There's a reason it's a classic, I've found. I even went so far as to download ultimate doom builder and make a few wads myself. After this year I'll definitely be dedicating some time every year to fall into a doom hole and download some wacky loving wads. 4. Ghost Trick Every night for the past couple of years me and my wife play like 10-15 minutes of a story based game in bed before we get drowsy enough to go to sleep. For the most part we've been slowly working through like, every Shu Takumi game, and this year we got to Ghost Trick, which is just excellent. I've played it before and getting to see it for the first time again through my wife's eyes gave me an even better impression. All of the puzzles and animations and the character dialogue just hits every single time. The prison escape is the only 'bad' portion of the game but that's forgivable given everything else. 3. La-Mulana Another game that I previously only played like 3/4ths of. Not only did I beat it, I beat it hard mode. Not only did I beat it hard mode, I also beat Hell Temple Hard Mode. If there's a gamer heaven, that for sure gets my name in the Gamer Book of Life. 2. Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Integrade I hear a lot of complaints about straying from a strict retelling of the first game but it's actually way cooler that they're doing it this way. Final Fantasy is a series I think defined by its fantastical excess and melodrama and this really goes for it, every second I play this game I feel cool, not just when I stagger a boss with a big loving counter attack and annihilate him with huge combo moves but also just existing in Midgar is great. They did a great job at making it somehow feel both oppressive and bleak and also like, really comfy and homey, dunno how they did it. 1. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I always though Nuts and Bolts was ahead of its time and this kinda proves it.
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Dec 11, 2023 22:05
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Plebian Parasite posted:5. Doom Ayyy! I started doing that this year as well, and I have played some absolutely incredible stuff. I knew the Doom modding community was great, but I didn't know until I actually dove in and experienced it for myself. You're in for a very wild ride.
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Dec 11, 2023 22:31
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Plebian Parasite posted:5. Doom I kinda did something similar! I circled back to a really old genre-defining game that I had somehow managed to avoid playing until this year. (Mine was Castlevania SotN).
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Dec 11, 2023 22:39
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Regy Rusty posted:Did you wanna rank anything else or just shout that into the abyss? I guess that would be sorta fun, but I do like shouting praises of Wanted:Dead into the abyss. Best games of 2023 for me that actually came out in 2023 1. Wanted:Dead 2. Jagged Alliance 3 3. Resident Evil 4 Remake 4. Pizza Tower 5. Super Mario Bros Wonder 6. Myhouse.wad (It's a weird Doom mod) 7. Alan Wake 2 8. Zelda TOTK 9. Mario Kart 8 (DLC) I played at least one other new game this year (Starfield) and while I don't think its a terrible game I don't see it as worth being ranked. Best games including old ones I played 1. Wanted:Dead 2. Jagged Alliance 3 3. Resident Evil 4 Remake 4. Max Payne 5. Pizza Tower 6. Devil May Cry 3 7. Alan Wake 1 8. Super Mario Bros Wonder 9. Mario Kart 8 10. Ninja Gaiden Sigma Fighting Elegy fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 23:01
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jesus christ read the loving OP
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Dec 11, 2023 23:11
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10. Caves of Qud - Big year for Qud as we approach 1.0 next year. I always enjoy my time in this world. 9. Dwarf Fortress - An enjoyable constant that I can always hop into and lavish in. Looking forward to Adventure mode next year. 8. World of Warcraft - Thoroughly into its redemption arc. I really enjoyed Dragonflight, and all of the changes to the base game over the life of the expansion have been excellent. Blizzard finally has a good path forward after some dark years. 7. Total War: Warhammer 3 - Whatever issues the game has and the overall sentiment of the community, I still love bashing vampires against dinosaurs against demons, and I really do think that, totally in a vacuum, the game is better than it's ever been. 6. Against the Storm - Finally out in 1.0 after an amazing run through Early Access. A blend of roguelike mechanics with a city builder had me a little skeptical, but in reality it works brilliantly. One of the most helpful UIs I've ever experienced. 5. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader - It's almost exactly what I'd expect out of a Owlcat cRPG set in the 40K universe for better and worse. If that sounds good to you you'll probably really like it! 4. Lunistice - On its own this is a very solid if not entirely remarkable 3D platform with great music and fantastic vibes. For me, though, it's been the first game I've really played through entirely with my daughter. Watching a 5 year old from literally never having played a video game to triple-jumping through difficult jumping challenges has been such a treat, and a moment in gaming that I probably can't recreate and will never forget. 3. Octopath Traveler 2 - The first JRPG I've really enjoyed in a long time. Arguably the best JRPG soundtrack ever. 2. Age of Wonders 4 - The first time I've been able to properly get into this series. That such a sprawling 4X game can also have such a satisfying tactical combat layer is really an achievement. A great way to sink 3-4 digits of hours played into a game. 1. Baldur's Gate 3 - It's very rare these days that I play a game that feels like a milestone. Something definitive for a genre that's so singularly exceptional it makes you view some other games in a different light. A remarkable achievement by a developer long deserving of the accolades they're now receiving.
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Dec 11, 2023 23:13
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Escobarbarian posted:jesus christ read the loving OP I think you should take a break, friend.
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Dec 11, 2023 23:18
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Escobarbarian posted:jesus christ read the loving OP People who don't give a poo poo and just want to drop a list should be left in peace
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Dec 11, 2023 23:27
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Jay Rust posted:10. The Roottrees are Dead (2023) Heck yea, here's the game for people to check out. It's free and you play in the browser. It's really drat good. https://jjohnstongames.itch.io/the-roottrees-are-dead Massive shoutout to goon Superrodan who made it.
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Dec 11, 2023 23:35
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Anno posted:5. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader - It's almost exactly what I'd expect out of a Owlcat cRPG set in the 40K universe for better and worse. If that sounds good to you you'll probably really like it! WOW, it was only released a few days ago and already made a list! Agreed, it's pretty darn good, but whoa buddy it needs a patch. And Owlcat badly needs to stop trying to add puzzles into their games. Like, Rogue Trader and Wrath of the Righteous have gaming's worst puzzles this side of Alex Kidd: High Tech World.
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Dec 11, 2023 23:46
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Lisztless posted:
Such a great list you wrote, but especially this
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Dec 11, 2023 23:52
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So glad to see Pentiment appearing on lists again, everybody play Pentiment! Absolutely loved this write-up, thank you. "Little Mom", your kid is very cool  
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Dec 12, 2023 00:04
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Sakurazuka posted:People who don't give a poo poo and just want to drop a list should be left in peace Plz these are the first people who would be like “I voted for this and my vote wasn’t counted!!!!”
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Dec 12, 2023 00:05
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Escobarbarian posted:Plz these are the first people who would be like “I voted for this and my vote wasn’t counted!!!!” No, I wouldn't care and even more likely, would not even notice. Just don't count the votes, problem solved.
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Dec 12, 2023 00:08
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This year, I managed to complete more games than I bought for once, and hoo boy, there were quite a few golden ones. 6. Skyward Sword HD: Given this was the ONLY Zelda game I had never played, I was hoping for it to be better. It very much feels dated, and the fact that the final boss is easier to defeat WITHOUT motion controls feels bad when it was originally designed around them. Fi is thankfully not nearly as annoying in this version, and the Quality of Life Changes from the original are very apparent. I wish I could say more about this, but I was wholely disappointed in this game, that while fun, felt like it had a LOT of backtracking. 5. Majora's Mask 3D: As someone who has never played Majora's Mask, I went into this with high hopes, but given I was also late to the party on Ocarina of Time (only beating that a few years back for the first time), I feel like the luster is lost on me. Story wise, the sidequests are where everything shines. Outside of the sidequests, it felt very "Zelda", and I did not appreciate that the bosses had "HIT ME HERE" weaknesses because I wanted to be somewhat challenged. All in all, great game, but I feel I missed out by having my first 3D Zeldas be Twilight Princess and Wind Waker. 4. Persona 5 Royal: This game was something I waited for to release on a console I owned with baited breath. I beat the original, but Royal improved on it in basically every way! I played for 150 hours, and every little bit of it was (mostly) enjoyable, even if I can't get one singular dungeon theme out of my head. The story here is where it really shines, and I feel that I liked this game a lot because of the characters and how they interact with each other. Even the side characters where you raise social links are mostly good. I wholeheartedly wish I could play through this again, but I can't devote that much time to games again lately. 3. Super Mario RPG Remake: Somehow, SOMEHOW I managed to go into this game completely blind. I don't know how, but I am very thankful that I did. While easy, this game was amazing. The artstyle, the charm, the music, all of it was top tier. I loved every minute of the short game, and can safely file it away as one of my favorite games this year. Turn based RPGs from Mario seem to have just...died though. I wish we got more like this game past Superstar Saga. 2. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: While I haven't exactly "beaten" this game, all I have left out of the main story is the final boss. I loved breath of the wild, but this game was leagues above. One thing I loved doing was just strapping a bomb to my shield and going "Yeah, don't feel like solving this shrine" and bomb boost up to the final part. Somehow that feels cathartic after some of the Shrines in Breath of the Wild kicking my rear end. The building mechanic was hilarious, but I wasn't a fan of building up battery power, I understand why it is there, but I really don't like it, because only one area in the game upgrades your battery and it can't be fast travelled to because it is in a cave. Minor gripes aside, I know this is the last of the games in this Hyrule, but I would like to see this kind of mechanics going forward in Zelda, the experimentation was amazing, and it worked out well for them. 1. Xenoblade Chronicles 3/Future Redeemed: As I finished both of these in the same year, I'm rating them as a whole, which I feel works better for this as it provided much needed context on WHY the game's story even happens. I was basically playing nonstop since this game came out, and I couldn't stop going forward, exploring every nook and cranny. By the end of it, I feel that this game landed the first place of ALL my games compared to previous years, if I look at the entire story from XBC1 until now. There's just so much there to talk about, and so little time. The characters themselves are the heart and soul of these games. I felt attached to them basically right after the first chapter, and I couldn't wait to sink my teeth into it more. There were times where I was just engrossed in what I was doing, and couldn't even properly react to the game because I had been playing for hours. There's a specific point where I went "Okay, this will only take like...an hour tops" and then 5-6 hours had passed by in the blink of an eye just exploring and pushing further in the story. This game holds a great place in my heart, and I love that it exists. If there was any way to wipe my memory of any game series, it would be this one, so I could experience it for the first time all over again. Now, Future Redeemed on the other hand, is far shorter than the main game itself. I played it for quite some time, but it worked differently than the main game, and I wish some of the stuff got backported over, like the collectable tracker. Just filling out a list is so satisfying, and I wish there was more of that. The story of it was also amazing, because I really wanted to know what was going on, and why things are the way they are. I spent far less time on this than the main game, but it was still close to about a day's worth of playtime. I wish I could go back to it, but there's almost nothing left for me to do in the main game or the DLC at this point. XBC3 is a masterpiece, and I don't use that term lightly when it comes to games. Looking at Xenoblade Chronicles as a whole, I love this story and wanted more in this world.
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Dec 12, 2023 00:19
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Silegna posted:5. Majora's Mask 3D: As someone who has never played Majora's Mask, I went into this with high hopes, but given I was also late to the party on Ocarina of Time (only beating that a few years back for the first time), I feel like the luster is lost on me. Story wise, the sidequests are where everything shines. Outside of the sidequests, it felt very "Zelda", and I did not appreciate that the bosses had "HIT ME HERE" weaknesses because I wanted to be somewhat challenged. All in all, great game, but I feel I missed out by having my first 3D Zeldas be Twilight Princess and Wind Waker. So funny thing about MM 3DS, it made a bunch of mechanical changes from the original game that a lot of fans were... particularly not happy with. The big giant obvious weakpoints added to each boss is one of them. There's arguments to made in both directions but a lot of the fans of the original (me included) find 3DS to be the worse version of the game outside the shiny coat of paint. I don't think playing the original would've changed your overall opinion though because the version differences are purely mechanical things. Makes me happy to see MM on a list anyways though!
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Dec 12, 2023 00:25
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Silegna posted:2. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: The building mechanic was hilarious, but I wasn't a fan of building up battery power, I understand why it is there, but I really don't like it, because only one area in the game upgrades your battery and it can't be fast travelled to because it is in a cave. I may be misremembering or misunderstanding, as both of the following are in caves, but isn't the Construct that upgrades your battery sitting directly across from a shrine that you can fast travel to? Or if it is the mining guys inside the sky island cave who sell the charges you can use to upgrade, you can set up your portable teleport so you can always jump straight to them rather than having to jump to the shrine up above and then glide down to get to the cave entrance
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Dec 12, 2023 00:38
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Jerusalem posted:I may be misremembering or misunderstanding, as both of the following are in caves, but isn't the Construct that upgrades your battery sitting directly across from a shrine that you can fast travel to? Or if it is the mining guys inside the sky island cave who sell the charges you can use to upgrade, you can set up your portable teleport so you can always jump straight to them rather than having to jump to the shrine up above and then glide down to get to the cave entrance Yes there’s one right outside the first hub area you come to
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Dec 12, 2023 00:42
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Bought those Alwa games someone was talking about! Assuming that was this thread. I'm quite tired. They're on deep sale though! https://store.steampowered.com/app/549260/Alwas_Awakening/
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Dec 12, 2023 01:05
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xoFcitcrA posted:
The early chaos of a eurojank cRPG/Bethesda game/MMO is all part of the charm.
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Dec 12, 2023 01:29
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Plebian Parasite posted:3. La-Mulana My dear god in heaven I hope they roll out the red carpet for you for that
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Dec 12, 2023 04:41
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Lisztless posted:Oh heck no. I played it back in the day on PSX. But it got ported to PS4/5 super late in 2022, and I replayed it in January 2023, cementing its inclusion here. Valkyrie Profile is great; I played it on the PSX and then bought the PSP remaster and played it again there. Haven't played it since but I still have a lot of fond memories of it. First game I ever recorded video clips from, too. Then I tried so hard to like VP2 and Resonance of Fate and just...couldn't.  Plebian Parasite posted:5. Doom TheHoosier posted:Ayyy! I started doing that this year as well, and I have played some absolutely incredible stuff. I knew the Doom modding community was great, but I didn't know until I actually dove in and experienced it for myself. You're in for a very wild ride. The Doom community has its own annual WADs-of-the-year event called The Cacowards, which runs at about the same time as this thread; it's mostly focused on maps (both individual maps and megaWADs), but mods and music also get a smaller mention. And there is some choice content in there every year. Whenever you're looking for some new Doom maps to play, check out the Cacos, and unless you have way more time for gaming than I do, it will take you a very long time to catch up. Alternately, just load up one of the gigaWADs like Sentinel's Lexicon or Compendium and go nuts with thousands of curated maps from past decades.
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Dec 12, 2023 04:45
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Valkyrie Profile 2 is one of my favorite games of all time but it's definitely a completely different vibe than VP1. It's so much more mechanically focused on its systems which makes the combat really robust but it's nothing like the atmosphere of the first game despite the fact that it's both a sequel and a prequel at the same time. Resonance of Fate is kind of the same thing, very mechanically focused with an extremely barebones story, but the party banter is neat.
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Dec 12, 2023 05:43
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Valkyrie Profile 2 is such a gorgeous game, but I simply couldn't stand the battle system. OTOH it feels like new rpgs are still trying to discover the secret sauce that made VP1's battles so engaging, Octopath II comes immediately to mind...and it that case it's largely successful. Square-Enix ended up having to take a look backward to make any headway on new titles it seems. So yeah, Valkyrie Profile is goated.
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Dec 12, 2023 06:42
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