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I hear this is the place for a list. 10: Puzzling Places Helped me get my VR legs, for sure, but it's just a good, chill puzzle game that wouldn't work outside of the headset. 9: Trials Of Mana Even though I owned the Collection on Switch, I enjoyed the 3D remake combat significantly better: enough to Platinum it. 8: Gotham Knights Yes, it got panned for it's 30fps, but it's an excellent co-op brawler and a serviceable single player game. 7: Powerwash Sim Better written story than it had any right to have, and the best game to listen to a podcast to all year. 6: Final Fantasy XVI Until the next DMC comes out, this is the best character action game on PS5, attached to an awesome RPG and kickin' rad OST. 5: Spider-Man 2 Definitely the best locomotion in videogames, since Just Cause 2, with amazing combat and a gripping story. 4: NEO The World Ends With You. Didn't expect a sequel to one of my favourite RPGs on the DS to live up to it with an even better soundtrack, better combat, and catharsis for story beats from back then. 3: Sea Of Stars You have Gamepass or Plus Extra, you need to play this game... it's basically nostalgia juice directly into my veins, with a unique spin on turn based combat where you can prevent enemy actions with careful use of your resources. 2: Midnight Suns There's a Venn diagram of Marvel, X-Com and card games, and I fit firmly in the middle of it. This won't be for everyone but if you liked Fire Emblem 3 Houses it's like that with superheroes. 1: Theatrhythm Final Bar Line The best Final Fantasy Guitar Hero RPG you'll ever play.
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Dec 20, 2023 19:00
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Seedge posted:There's a Venn diagram of Marvel...and card games, and I fit firmly in the middle of it I hope you've tried marvel snap
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Dec 20, 2023 20:13
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Fate Accomplice posted:I hope you've tried marvel snap Got everything I owned to Gold borders, and uninstalled when it became clear I'd never be able to own all the cards.
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Dec 20, 2023 20:18
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10. Final Fantasy XIV The excitement of XIV has waned a bit as we wait for the next big expansion, but it continues to be to go-to game for my wife and me. And all they had to do was crash a meteor into it and rebuild it from the ground up to be good! 9. Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children  Troubleshooter has finally (?) wrapped up their 3.5 year support of their first game, only to begin on their second. One of the finest SRPGs I’ve ever played, and now the wait begins for the second one. 8. Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX  Monster Ranchers back baby! There was even a new Ultraman one if you’re not paying attention! And a phone game if you want to learn Japanese! Did you know Legend Cup still exists and looks the same 30 years later? 7. Snowrunner  Despite being a game about grueling travel through harsh terrain, it’s surprisingly chill. You can never really lose anything. Everything buys and sells for the same amount, and it throws trucks and money at you. You can just kind of mindlessly zone out and wind down to big trucks and engine noises. 6. Marvel's Midnight Suns https://i.imgur.com/DIK5yGu.mp4 Look, no game will ever be Marvel Heroes. But you know, there can still be good Marvel games and I dare say this is one. 5. Cyberpunk 2077 (and DLC)  Cyberpunk and its Phantom Liberty DLC pulled me back in after dropping it shortly after launch, and I ended up playing basically non-stop from start to finish. The new skill trees, the ease of switching between everything, it all just clicked for me. And all they had to do was crash a cybermeteor into it and rebuild it from the cyberground up to be good! 4. Octopath Traveller II  The year is 2023 and I’m playing a turn-based pixel-art JRPG. And its wonderful. The art and music probably put it on this list alone. 3. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles  I’m still digesting this, but I think they’re my favorite entry in the Ace Attorney series. Especially Herlock’s trolling. 2. Case of the Golden Idol (and DLC)  My favorite puzzle game since Obra Dinn. Can’t wait for Idol 2’s release. 1. Baldur's Gate 3  As someone who played through Early Access this was no surprise to me that it’d be first on my list, and I doubt I have much to say that hasn’t been said already. Baldur’s Gate 3 put me through that phase of constantly thinking ‘I-could-be-playing-the-game-right-now’-thoughts I haven’t had since I was a child. Saint Freak fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Dec 20, 2023 |
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Dec 20, 2023 21:05
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I didn't game much this year, not enough to populate a top ten list. Thankfully I'm still in the base game of The Witcher 3 and haven't touched either of the DLC so I will definitely be ending that journey in 2024 and I might be able to include it on a list next year, or else I'll just have to write an entry about it anyway because what a game. One of the handful of other games I played is Troubleshooter, which I've seen in a couple of lists. It's really a fascinating take on the gameplay of anime XCOM with a lot of other systems giving it another level of depth and focusing on a relatively small roster for a tactical rpg (in my experience) but more deeply fleshed out with a lot of possible build varieties. I see people talk about it on SA but it feels like an underappreciated game for sure. The story is pretty generic (in the 30-40 hours I've played) but it gradually fleshes out the setting and the characters and quickly conveys you from skirmish to skirmish without dragging its heels too much at any given point. I found it kinda bland in a Fire Emblem sort of way but enough to keep me there, and I'm enjoying the gameplay loop. I hope to come back to it soon and would solidly recommend it, there's just so much game here. Also I understand that the first game is done in terms of content and the developers are focusing on a sequel now. Just thought I'd share a little about my gaming year even though I don't have a list. The Witcher 3 is an awesome game. I played through TW1 and TW2 years ago keeping track of my save data and then started TW3 and went straight to find Letho after White Orchard and ragequit when I saw my decisions from the previous games hadn't been loaded properly, haha. The Slavic mythology Sapkowski wove into his setting and which CDPR built TW3 from just give it a really nice texture of dark fantasy that doesn't feel as derivative as a lot of middling fantasy fiction that tastes like reheated Middle-earth. I also think that I like their approach to single player RPGs more than the Bioware or Bethesda tabula rasa protagonist. If TW3 is this good and after the latest expansion Cyberpunk is the game it was meant to be, I might just dive straight into it after I finish TW3 in 2024.
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Dec 20, 2023 21:58
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when i was going through everything i've played this year doing a first pass for contenders, i ended up with a nice neat 30 games so uh, sorry. there are a lot of pictures so get your scrolling finger/wheel ready Honorable Mentions: Metroid Prime Remastered Ape Escape 3 Big's Big World Ib A Highland Song 30. Silent Hill 4: The Room Music: Into the Depths of Self Discovery  This game is a weird janky mess but it happens to be the kind of jank that makes my brain go yup that's for me! The way the game builds up your titular apartment as your home base and safety net by refilling your health and repeatedly showing you scenes of your neighbors checking up on you and trying to figure out if you're okay, only to yank that away from you at the halfway point as the famous hauntings kick in and poo poo gets real, is brilliant. 29. ElecHead Music: Area 2 (Head Version)  A pretty simple but enjoyable puzzle game with a similarly simple yet evocative look. You're a robot who charges anything you're touching with electricity. You can throw your head at things to charge them but do whatever you're doing quick because your body will shut down in ten seconds without your head. Different visual palettes act as collectables tucked away in hidden rooms, as well as card keys that unlock a secret ending. 28. Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe Music: Dusty Steel Field  Finally I can play this game without the dang wiimote. Also the new Magolor epilogue and minigame carnival whip rear end. 27. Wonder Project J2: Josette of the Corlo Forest Music: Friendly Folks  A decent chunk of my gaming time is always dedicated to games I recall reading about in Nintendo Power as a kid to which I only now have access. With its striking 2D anime-esque art (in the sense that it is trying to look like a literal cartoon) and unorthodox mixture of point-and-click and raising simulator mechanics, I'm not surprised neither Wonder Project J2 nor its SuFami prequel ever left Japan back in the 90s. But this is a charming game about teaching an orphaned robot girl how to live on her own as a human. Teach Josette how to read, cook, make friends, recognize when some of those "friends" turn out to be assholes, grapple with death, grapple with professional soldiers, enjoy movies, pilot a submarine, and even DM a whole one-person role-playing game. While there is some trial and error involved in finding out where and how to trigger some of the game's many events as well as getting Josette to stop eating anything you hand her, and the gameplay segments in the endgame can be uh frustrating, Wonder Project J2 is another successful past-pick from child-me, proving I've always had good taste. And that ending, wow! 26. The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages Music: Mermaid Cave  I rented this as a kid during the brief window Blockbuster offered Game Boy Color games and I was too stupid to get very far but, thanks to the Game Boy Game Club I had as good an excuse as any to revisit this and check out sister game Oracle of Seasons. Turns out both are solid top-down Zeldas, though I give Ages the edge for having more involved dungeons and doing a better job of presenting the big temporal calamity as a looming problem. Compare Seasons, where at best the citizenry are mildly inconvenienced by the fluctuating seasons. 25. Astra and the New Constellation   A slick little platformer for the PICO-8 digital console featuring a cute little star. Jump, slide, float, and don't die! Editor's Note: I died 233 times. 24. Kuru Kuru Kururin Music: Cave  AKA the game that weird propeller Assist Trophy in Smash came from. You're a bird and your bird family is lost so hop in your helicopter and go find them! You find them, of course, by navigating your slowly rotating vessel through increasingly byzantine mazes, every corner a needle to thread by timing your movement with the automatic rotation of your helicopter blades. Colliding with a wall generally damages you, but bouncing off a spring will instead reverse the direction of your blades, allowing you to slip through different angles on your way to the goal. Kururin was one of the first titles available on the Switch's GBA catalog and I was kinda shocked by how quickly it drew me in. It's a very simple game but so addictive -- and so devious at times! -- I couldn't help but immediately play the first sequel, Kururin Paradise, afterward. 23. Sonic Superstars Music: Lagoon City Zone Act 2  A solid 2D Sonic with some fun level themes and more than a couple moments that made me go "oh my gosh" out loud. And Fang is back! 22. Pikmin 4 Music: Tough Enemy (Crusted Rumpup)  This game could easily be presented as a successor to Pikmin 2; dungeons are back, goofy product treasures are back, the lack of a time limit is back. But where it really shines is the incorporation of the timed challenge and versus modes from previous games now under the Dandori umbrella, in which you're presented with a gamey room and encouraged to plot out the most efficient way of grabbing everything. While these gamified challenges, with their high scores and medals, contrast the naturalistic design of the overgrown surface maps and the collector's delight that is the spelunking maps, they all blend together nicely into a game that presents the strengths of every Pikmin game (except Hey!, fortunately). You even unlock a remix of Pikmin 1's campaign set in Pikmin 4's stages after rescuing Olimar, so this really is the complete package. Also, as someone who was on one, it's really nice hearing a drumline used in the soundtrack, you don't get that too often! Dandori. Dandori today. Dandori tomorrow. 21. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog Music: Casino Car  It's kind of a shame Sega felt the need to present this as a tongue-in-cheek April Fools' jape because it is earnest and delightful and basically exactly what I want more of out of the Sonic series: small scale projects with the cast hanging out being buds. Also,  20. Smushi Come Home Music: Glass Glade  A cute little 3D platformer about a mushroom who got carried off by a bird and has to find its way home. Smushi is I think an ideal example of a comfy game, it's cozy without being in-your-face schmaltzy or utterly devoid of anything interesting to do. As a mushroom you utilize your natural mushroom athleticism to wall jump and glide around appropriately sized gardens, not unlike Pikmin environments, meeting fellow oddballs and identifying any less ambulatory mushrooms you happen to bump into. The platforming itself feels pretty good and "macro zones" are always a delightful level archetype for a platformer. You can also find new caps to wear, I'm particularly fond of the ink cap. If you liked A Short Hike and are interested in something a little longer and involved, check out Smushi! 19. Pokemon Super Gold '97   You may remember some hubbub from a few years ago about lots of old beta pokemon from Gold and Silver. If not, well, okay. Nintendo used to hold an annual trade show back in the good old days called Space World where they'd show off tons of cool stuff, it was like E3 but just for Nintendo. One of these featured a demo for Pokemon Gold and Silver but it was veeery different from what we ended up getting, most notably taking place not in the Johto region but in the Nihon region based on all of Japan. The game ended up getting a big overhaul into what we know and love now, but thanks to that big leak a few years ago, some enterprising fans were able to cobble together... Pokemon Super Gold '97! Phew! Anyway, the goal of this rom hack is to take everything we know about the Space World demo and turn it into a real fully functioned and feature-filled Pokemon game. All the beta pokemon, towns, gym leaders, Team Rocket plots involving the infamous Imposter Oak better known from the TCG, and even a beefy postgame area to explore culminating in a heartwarming bonus boss! It's a real labor of love, and there's even an extremely cute Player's Guide modeled after classic guides from Nintendo Power and Prima available from the dev's discord. 18. Drainus Music: Determination  From the esteemed developers of Touhou Luna Nights, Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, and some other cool games I haven't played yet comes, an original game, and a shmup at that. Drainus is badass, pure and simple. I'm not a shmup gamer despite appreciating them from afar, I've always thought they're too hard and I'd lack the patience to improve, but this made me feel like one. The difficulty is very approachable but can scale up to what to me at least seems pretty dang hard, with lots of ways to tweak and customize your ship's Gradius upgrade path to build your own experience. And the visuals are gorgeous, some of the finest from some of the best pixely artists in the business. While I loved their licensed games, I'm real glad Team Ladybug is getting to branch out into their own now. 17. Advance Wars 1+2: ReBoot Camp Music: Grit's Theme  they made fog of war work right now remake the DS games too OH and also they made the background of the volcano map singed that was a nice touch 16. GrimGrimoire OnceMore Music: Heated Magical Battle  I love Vanillaware! And somehow missed this one back when it first came out. While Vanillaware is better known for their sidescrolling action games I think, GrimGrimoire is an RTS with unit production and mana gathering. You play Lillet Blan, a new student at a magical academy doomed to destruction a mere five days after her enrollment, but fortunately Lillet somehow manages to get herself caught in a time loop at just the right moment, allowing her the opportunity to not die, and hopefully help her new classmates and teachers not die in the process. As a strategy game GrimGrimoire is pretty basic, the computer is never that aggressive so you're free to chill out until you're ready to throw a clump of your biggest baddest units (usually dragons) at whatever problem you're facing. Where it really shines is the loop story and Vanillaware's signature visuals, which even for one of the developer's earliest projects are still just plain unfair in how good they look. A particular highlight is how some units such as dragons and chimeras are a bit too large to fit on the hallway-and-stairwell battlefields, so they instead clamber around the "outside," sinking their claws into the foundation to move. Lillet herself proves a cunning and bold protagonist who outfoxes catastrophically powerful foes without missing a beat once she understands what she's actually dealing with. Also the remake has a speed-up feature which I expect I would desperately miss were I to ever play the original. 15. Resident Evil 4 [Remake] Music: The Drive  The crafting system is a waste of time when the game already has perfectly good adaptive item generation and I'm getting a bit tired of seeing crouch walking as a means of shoehorning low effort stealth mechanics into games that don't need them, but uh with that out of the way, Resident Evil 4 ftw. I love Leon, Ashley, and Luis, I love how this game messes with a veteran's expectations (especially regarding That Dog), I really enjoyed how much fuller and denser the environmental elements were that made spaces feel much more lived in, and I love parrying. If game developers want parries to be an overused overexposed mechanic then go for it, I say. Now to see if they really are gonna try to fix 5 while I cry about no Code Veronica Remake some more. 14. Super Mario Wonder Music: Petal Isles  A pal called this the Mario take on Donkey Kong Country 3 and I think that's apt. The number of fun goofy level gimmicks is frankly absurd but at the end of the day I do wish they'd pushed some of them a bit further than they did. Very pretty game though and if you mute the flower guy you're a monster. 13. Super Mario RPG [Remake] Music: Barrel Volcano     The nostalgia pick of the year. Super Mario RPG was my first rpg and I still have very fond memories of my dad renting it and loading a previous player's save data from the Sunken Ship, then later buying the game and getting real confused when I kept asking him to enter the cheat code that lets you start at the spooky ghost ship. And also of asking my mom to stand in the room whenever I started a new file of my own (often) because I was too scared of Exor crashing into Bowser's Keep in the prologue. And finding Samus taking a nap in the guest room and not having any earthly idea who she was at the time because I didn't play a Metroid for another six years. I replay the original regularly and and every time I'm impressed all over again at what an effective fusion of platforming and RPG the folks at Square managed to develop. And the remake managed to maintain the snappy feel of the platforming while breathing new life into the RPG elements with new Triple Moves, quickswapping party members in battle, and a bestiary so you can reference all those now accurately translated Thought Peeks. Speaking of, I was surprised to see that aside from those Peeks and a handful of names getting tweaked, the translation is very faithful to the one I grew up with, providing a nostalgic peek of its own into 90s RPG writing which, when coupled with the very 2020s style writing present in the new bestiary entries, achieves that effective blend of old and new in a way I think all remakes of this sort ought to aspire. 12. Sin & Punishment: Star Successor Music: Undersea Tunnel  This is the peak of the medium and it is a sad testament to humanity's unceasing folly that we let Treasure die. 11. Pokemon Violet Music: Area Zero    I think I caught like 200 pokemon before getting my first badge. Or maybe second, I don't remember, but the point is Pokemon ScarVio is a blast to run around in and is the natural evolution of SwoShi's Wild Areas I was hoping for. Such a powerful cast, too! That initial descent into Area Zero and the whole endgame is no doubt one of the sickest moods seen in this series. I do wish your dorm room had a decorating element and that the towns were a little more involved/had interior spaces but Pokemon has been on an upward trend and I'm looking forward to the fabled Generation Ten. Now, liberate yourself from framerate brain. Unsubscribe from Digital Foundry. A bug is just a type of pokemon. 10. Sonic Triple Trouble 16-Bit Music: Tidal Plant Zone Act 2    What do you get when you take the best Sonic game on the Game Gear and throw it in a blender with a Genesis, tons of effort, insane production values, and playable Amy Rose? Well uh, you get this. I've played a lot of Sonic fan games and this one blew me away. 9. Baldur's Gate 3 Music: Raphael's Final Act    I have a lot of issues with BG3, the anemic soundtrack that seems afraid to be heard, the incredibly clunky inventory that makes me think the developers have never played other RPGs, your party members barely acknowledging anyone else on the team aside from you, the absurd bloat in Act 3 that made me think they should've stuck with the perfectly good climax they had at the end of Act 2 and just, split the game in half, and, most importantly, the sick custom statue I commissioned of myself in my underwear turning into a generic human man in generic human man clothes after the latest patch. But on the other hand it's hard to put 260 hours and counting into something without having a few nitpicks, so I still have to admit this game wins the coveted Best Game to Play with My Partner in 2023 Award. Between the thoughtfully crafted battles full of unique enemies with weird abilities, the many ways you can talk yourself out of said battles, and the frankly overwhelming number of rad magical items the game constantly throws at you, it's clear the developers of Baldur's Gate 3 above all else want you to have a good time, honestly moreso than the actual designers of D&D itself. Did you know grease isn't flammable in tabletop D&D? 8. Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon Music: Farieland Tower (Spooky)     For a while now Platinum has been messing around with the idea of controlling two characters simultaneously, with the left and right sticks, perhaps as a way of distinguishing themselves since they haven't been the only notable names on the character action scene for a while now either. Whatever the reason, the pursuit of that idea has culminated in Bayonetta Origins, a bizarre side project nobody asked for that turned out to be maybe the best Bayonetta game? Certainly the most consistent. With your left stick you control Cereza, aka Bayonetta as a teen apprentice witch, and with your right you control Cheshire, the young demon Cereza failed to summon properly who is now stuck in her plush cat. These controls will likely feel about as awkward and uncoordinated as our protagonists' teamwork at first, but that's the synthesis of mechanics and narrative baby! And it doesn't take long to feel natural, especially when you acquire abilities like boosting Cereza's movement speed if you have Cheshire moving the same direction dragging her behind him. As you grow more comfortable with coordinating their abilities, so too do Cereza and Cheshire grow more comfortable with each other. The ultimate result of their teamwork is such a brilliantly simple little twist and yet one of the hypest events I've seen in any Platinum game and is the perfect capstone for their journey together. I also have to mention the art style this game employs. The colors and shading and texturing all come together to create a gorgeous living storybook, I really hope Platinum revisits this aesthetic (and also doesn't die) because I really really really want to see more like it. Even the cursor on the map is just the cutest thing I've ever seen in my life. 7. No More Heroes 3 Music: ITADAKIMASU     they did it, they figured out how to make one of these that is super fun to play. also travis is such a good friend for real :sob: 6. Pokemon Orange Music: Prepare for Trouble!      Another Pokemon rom hack?? Yes, sorry. I love rom hacks. They are the fanfiction of video games and I mean this with the utmost respect. Painstaking passion projects made not for profit but for pure love of the medium. This hack in particular takes the Orange Islands arc from the anime and turns it into a very authentic feeling Gen2 game. You've got Professor Ivy, you've got a Lapras that knows Surf, you've got the Orange Crew, you've got the god drat GOAT Tracey Sketchit himself, you've got Pinkan Island with real working Pinkan Berries, you've got the Crystal Onix (and yes it can evolve into a Crystal Steelix), you've got that weird island full of Meowth worshippers, and to top it all off you've got a badass postgame quest about Pokemon the Movie 2000 featuring one of the baddest big birds to ever do it, the one and only Lugia. The hack is technically unfinished, as the main developer grew frustrated with trying to update its old code base and has chosen to remake it with much newer tools (as Pokemon Orange: Island Walker Version), but what's there is complete up through the Champion and aforementioned 2000 questline. And honestly if anything leaving the mystery of the GS Ball unresolved is just staying faithful to the anime. There are so many little touches and fantastic custom sprites everywhere in this hack, I was pogging the whole time. 5. Misericorde: Volume One Music: Each Day Here     The year is 1483 and you are an anchoress. You've been locked up in a small room near the top of your monastery since you were a young child, you're not sure exactly how long, maybe twenty years? You spend your days studying scripture, illustrating manuscripts, and providing theological advice, verbally, to anyone who comes knocking, like a living Ask Jeeves. You are forbidden from seeing anyone. That is, until the Mother Superior informs you that someone has been murdered. I was immediately intrigued by the premise of a monastic murder mystery, with its stark black-and-white visuals and engrossing music lending a heavy dose of noir, but what makes Misericorde really special is the dialogue. Hedwig, the anchoress unceremoniously ousted from a lifetime of isolation, is horribly, woefully out of her element as she has to reckon with things like stairs or the fact that she is by far the most devout sister in her convent. Her clumsy attempts at conversation are both endearing and frustrating, and her peers are no less colorful. I want so much to like and trust all of them (well except Angela, she can eat poo poo), they're all so delightfully complex and the tension is thicker than the monastery's stone walls. This was such a pleasant surprise, I can't wait for Volume Two. 4. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood Music: Seaside    Witches in space. You're a seer banished to a tiny meteorite for a thousand years after you made a little oopsie and predicted the fall of your powerful coven. Denied any visitors and even your old tarot deck, you decide to do what anyone driven mad by isolation would do and summon an ancient demon. I think one of the nicest things I can say about this game is that the choices and their framing really remind me of the fortune telling sequences at the beginning of my beloved Ogre Battle games. These are really powerful choices though; your exile may prevent you from witnessing the consequences of your readings firsthand, relying solely on word of mouth, but in a way that makes the decisions you make, how you choose to read the cards, feel even heavier. I started off determined to roleplay as a bitter quietly angry witch, but these characters melted my heart, I couldn't help embracing love and sisterhood. That drat demon is just so charming, to say nothing of the many other characters! This is a Choices That Matter game that really made me pause and think through the ramifications of my words at almost every turn, so the other major gameplay mechanic besides doing tarot readings, designing your own cards out of really pretty clip art, is a welcome decompressor. And the art is phenomenal, lots of warm palettes, and every new witch and familiar design wowed me right up until the end. 3. Astral Chain Music: Task Force Neuron     This is peak Platinum. They took every sick mechanic from previous titles, came up with some amazing new ones, and mixed them all together into the ultimate action game. PLAY THIS 2. SIGNALIS Music: Mynah       "An astounding achievement." "I loved every second." "A profoundly moving experience." "Achtung." "A delightfully retrofuturistic example of retrofuturism." "The perfect blend of classic Silent Hill and Resident Evil that relies on neither and surpasses both." "I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks." "Things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl." "I've never been so happy to have a map." "wake up" 1. Fire Emblem Engage Music: Trial of Blazing       The last few Fire Emblems from Awakening to Three Houses have been fine but none of them have really wowed me with their gameplay. And if I'm being honest, the initial reveal for Engage left me pretty unenthused due to the emphasis on Marth and all of the past protagonists, so my expectations weren't exactly high when I started playing this. But I kept playing and it quickly became very clear that 1. the people who made this are Fire Emblem Turbo Fans, 2. the cast is near completely comprised of colossal idiots (good), and 3. Marth and friends are here to arm the actual characters with tactical nukes you can fire at will. I don't think any other game in the series has given you so many fun powerful toys to mess around with and encouraged you to wield them with reckless abandon. The maps are challenging and well-paced with a good mix of gimmicks and straight forward assaults. The whole cast is endearing enough that I had a legitimately tough time deciding who to bench, which is very unusual for me, because I just wanted to field everybody (well, except Bunet. And Amber. And Jean). The story unfortunately might not be capable of ensnaring the terminally online in an echo chamber for years but much as I appreciate Fire Emblem for the relative simplicity of its mechanics, I appreciate Engage's story for being, at its core, a celebration of Fire Emblem and in particular everyone's favorite cornerstone of the series, the supports. And also for having the gumption to take toys away from the player at the perfect moment. The plotting probably isn't going to surprise you at any point, but a story doesn't need twists to be engaging, and the presentation and voice performances uplift any number of emotional moments. Engage skillfully synthesizes narrative and mechanics at key points, especially in Chapter 11, not only one of the most effective scenes in the game but the series as a whole. There are people who will tell you Engage has great gameplay but a story better off ignored. Those people are wrong. Fire Emblem Engage was an absolute delight and I'm so happy to know that those devs, not only do they still got it, they love Fire Emblem even more than me. 
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Dec 20, 2023 23:08
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top 10 for easy tabulation 1. Fire Emblem Engage 2. SIGNALIS 3. Astral Chain 4. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood 5. Misericorde: Volume One 6. Pokemon Orange 7. No More Heroes 3 8. Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon 9. Baldur's Gate 3 10. Sonic Triple Trouble 16-Bit
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Dec 20, 2023 23:10
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Mushroom butt, haha yes! But also thank you for the very comprehensive write-up!
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Dec 20, 2023 23:15
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Huh there are still some FE characters that aren't in smash yet?
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Dec 20, 2023 23:16
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Jay Rust posted:Huh there are still some FE characters that aren't in smash yet? Quite a few. Smash has only been adding the protagonists of the most recent games at the time it is coming out + Marth. (Except for returning ones who came back due to fan demand.)
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Dec 20, 2023 23:17
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Awesome, another person where signalis ranked very high for them!
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Dec 20, 2023 23:21
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The recent signalis patch offers a few options to ease the inventory slot problem so it's better than ever !!
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Dec 20, 2023 23:44
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Seems I really need to pick up Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood.
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Dec 20, 2023 23:53
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theblackw0lf posted:Seems I really need to pick up Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood. Yeah it rules. Great game.
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Dec 21, 2023 00:05
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signalis is amazing. i'm particularly fond of the author rejecting any one particular reading of its narrative in favour of multiple overlapping interpretations.
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Dec 21, 2023 03:16
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Jay Rust posted:10. The Roottrees are Dead (2023) you dare reduce me to this
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Dec 21, 2023 03:44
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mods plz change Metis of the Hallway's name to "a goon in the chat thread"
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Dec 21, 2023 03:50
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as someone who is also a goon in the chat thread, i think it's a fine title
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Dec 21, 2023 04:05
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Sally posted:mods plz change Metis of the Hallway's name to "a goon in the chat thread" Metis of the Chat Thread
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Dec 21, 2023 05:03
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DalaranJ posted:Metis of the Chat Thread
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Dec 21, 2023 05:17
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Looper posted:16. GrimGrimoire OnceMore I had the original, but I didn't actually make it that far, mostly due to the frustration of trying to control a cursor-based RTS using a PS2 controller. I wonder if it's possible to connect a mouse to a Switch? VW's games are unreasonably pretty but the only one I've actually finished is Odin Sphere.
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Dec 21, 2023 05:34
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GrimGrimoire will probably be quite frustrating if you're already into RTSes. It sacrifices a lot to be functional on a controller.
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Dec 21, 2023 05:49
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DalaranJ posted:Metis of the Chat Thread ^^^
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Dec 21, 2023 06:06
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Lisztless posted: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. I'm in this post and I don't like it
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Dec 21, 2023 08:04
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very chuffed to see another signalis and misericorde appreciator
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Dec 21, 2023 16:08
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Metis of the Hallway posted:you dare reduce me to this I also said something of the sort in the chat thread so maybe you weren't even involved. But to be fair, that was just yesterday so I doubt it.
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Dec 21, 2023 19:56
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Metis of the Hallway posted:you dare reduce me to this Thank you for making this game.
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Dec 21, 2023 20:53
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Sally posted:mods plz change Metis of the Hallway's name to "a goon in the chat thread"
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Dec 21, 2023 22:39
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Also absolutely loving all these lists, please keep em coming!!
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Dec 21, 2023 22:39
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I've got my list all ordered, I just haven't had the time to write them up yet....
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Dec 21, 2023 22:43
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Finally finished writing my list 
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Dec 21, 2023 23:00
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Arist posted:Finally finished writing my list Lmao hell yeah.
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Dec 21, 2023 23:19
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Before I start, I should mention that I only like to rank games that had a major content release this year that I played more than an hour or two of. For instance, I played a good few hours of Cyberpunk 2077 after 2.0 came out, but I didn’t touch the DLC, so it’s not on here. I also didn’t make it to Armored Core VI or Alan Wake II yet, so those will be rather glaring omissions here. Here’s every game that fit that criteria this year, starting with my *least* favorite. 25) Starfield “Nasapunk” is the dumbest genre name I’ve ever loving heard, Todd Starfield is one of the most compelling games I played this year. I found it hard to stop playing, hard to pull myself away from it. It would eat up hours and hours of my time before I realized what happened. It is thus, strictly by definition, compelling. It compels you. Unfortunately, I mean that in a bad way. Normally, I fall off of games gradually. It’s not a conscious choice I make. I just decide I don’t feel like playing the game right now, and after many repeated instances of “right now,” the game taking up less and less of my mental real estate each time, I just kind of lose interest. That didn’t happen with Starfield. With Starfield, I was still playing regularly, still finding new quests and leveling up and was actually quickly approaching the end of the story, which I never get close to in most Bethesda games (though Starfield’s main story is both very short and heavily incentivized in several ways). I was still “having fun” in Starfield, you could say. And then, about sixty hours in, I just decided enough was enough and promptly deleted it from my hard drive. I needed to stop playing. How did I put sixty hours into the last-place game on this list? The short answer is that the game’s oppressive scale and overbearing shallowness formed a symbiosis with the other half of the equation, my ADHD. If you still don’t get it, here’s the longer version: The general cycle of Starfield is to get a quest that takes you to a new location where you get more quests and find new things. That’s the classic Bethesda mold. Now, I didn’t play Fallout 4 or 76. This is my first Bethesda game since Skyrim, which I thought was okay. I did play a ton of New Vegas in between Skyrim and Starfield, though, so the latter game really suffers in comparison! Anyway, the Bethesda mold favors breadth over quality, and Starfield is no exception. The entire game is made out of random tangents, asides that add nothing but playtime, distractions that are meant to break up the tedium of whatever the hell you were doing before. And that’s how the game gets you, or at least me. There’s so many bad systems, shallow sidequests, weak characters, random doodads, looting, shooting, running, running, running, running out of stamina, running, and running to do that you’re never more than ten minutes from a new thing. Whatever that thing is, it’s a diversion. Starfield isn’t a very interesting game, but I’d hesitate to call it “boring.” It never falls into tedium. How can it, when you’re constantly having to make new decisions about what to do and re-prioritize your goals in the short- and long-term? That sounds like I’m actually complimenting its design, but what is any of that stuff I mentioned for? What do all these systems do for the game? What does any of this poo poo add? Because despite the game never getting boring, all of the things I just mentioned in that ramble were bad or shallow or annoying or all three. Like, let’s examine some of this: I need to make a new upgrade for my spacesuit. Well, unfortunately, there’s a bunch of bullshit crafting in here now for some reason so you have to scour every location for upgrade materials. Honestly, you should probably just collect everything you find because you never know, right? And we’re also going to need to make outposts on a bunch of barren planets generated with machine learning algorithms for some of the resources we need. Unfortunately, all that fills up your ship’s inventory fast, so you’re probably going to need to buy a new one, or do what I did, which is overhaul the one you start with to add a ton of cargo bays because none of the buyable ships seemed any good. But we need money to do that, so there’s a bunch of radiant quests for passenger transport or what-have-you. We take the passengers to a new system, where we get hailed by some random rear end in a top hat with a sidequest for us if we land on his resort planet, so we land and pick up all twenty sidequests there, and oops, now I’m helping some putz do the lowest-stakes corporate espionage of all time by stealing the recipe to a latte. None of that matters. None of it is relevant to my initial goal. Hell, none of it is even good. If anything, it’s hindering my progress, because I’m just loving around now. ADHD, as much as it’s about attention, is about concentration and forgetting. That goes in multiple directions: I get the new quests and forget that I had another in-game priority. I concentrate so hard on finding and completing these new quests that I lose track of time and forget I had an appointment at 4:00 and whoops it’s 6:15. And that would be all right if I was getting legitimately absorbed in what I was doing, but I’m looking back on it three months later and realizing that I can’t remember almost any of it, because none of it made an impression. My time with Starfield was a constant cycle of finding a new thing to do and hoping in vain it was better than the last thing, broken up every so often by realizing I had hunger pangs because I never ate lunch. The game tricked me, constantly, into checking what was over the next horizon, even as every time I got there I found nothing at all. And I mean that literally! Whenever you have to actually “explore” any of those planets generated with machine-learning algorithms, it’s inexcusably atrocious. They’re both massive and empty, and in retiring the single contiguous map they cut out the core joy of a Bethesda game, which is cutting your own path through the wilderness and finding something new there. There’s nothing new to find at all in Starfield, no serendipity. You find it because the game handed it to you. The game honestly started to feel kind of predatory and disrespectful to my time, and when I say that, keep in mind that there’s also a loving gacha game on this list and it’s several places higher than Starfield. I’m not accusing the developers of intentionally creating a labyrinth to disorient and entrap neurodivergent people, but I am accusing them of making candy: something with no nutritional value, that doesn’t even necessarily taste good, but that your body craves nonetheless. Fittingly, Starfield is a black hole of the player’s time and energy: avaricious, voracious, all-consuming. This is not what I want, and I’m going to go further and say that you shouldn’t want it either. The common idea of the “forever game,” the one game that will be everything you could ever want, that will be the only game you ever need to buy again, that will cure cancer and get your parents back together, is an idea I find incredibly dark. I don’t think it’s possible, for one, but it also leads to absurd expectations and games like this being bloated out the rear end while all the things you actually do in them are a dull gray slurry. It leads to corporate, paint-by-numbers, empty experiences. It leads to loving Starfield. 24) Payday 3 Overkill has been taken into custody! I played a lot of Payday 2 back in the day, though I stopped in 2017, which isn’t all that deep into that game’s total lifespan. I was tentatively excited for 3, though I remained aware that Overkill had made its share of blunders over the years. I wouldn’t go so far as to consider Payday 3 among those blunders (though, the fact that it was nigh-impossible to actually play the game in the first few days after release due to server issues would absolutely be one of them), but my main thought looking back on 3 is, “drat, I’m glad I got this on Game Pass instead of buying it.” The shooting is fine, the mechanics are alright, the music is still stellar, but the game just felt kind of stale and thin. I ran the first four heists (of eight at launch) one time each, logged out, and then never came back to do the rest. Looking back on Payday 2, which was about as content-sparse while also probably being several times as janky and weird, I think about how much fun that game was. Payday 3 is “better” than 2 in a lot of ways, it’s a more polished experience, but something’s been lost in the transition. Or maybe I’m the one who’s changed. Maybe clicking on cops with three friends for hours on end isn’t the joy I thought it was. …On second thought, no, shooting cops still rules, it’s gotta be the game. Edit: Since I wrote the preceding paragraph, Overkill announced some DLC for Payday 3. Eighteen dollars for the whole bundle including a heist, a weapon pack, and some outfits. While the game is still kind of broken and hemorrhaging players. You know what, maybe this game is an Overkill blunder after all. 23) Honkai: Star Rail Space train is here to deliver the butt rock Yep. I’m a rube, a sucker, a mark, whatever. I had some fun with this dumb gacha bullshit, though. The RPG mechanics are simple, but still fun to play with. I spent some money, unlocked some cool characters, saw some neat animations, I’m fine with that. I do definitely feel the scummy vibes radiating off this thing, but… oh, whatever, I don’t actually have a good excuse to put here. Hoyoverse has their top evil scientists working around the clock to induce the fun brain chemicals, I’m not made of stone. All that said, I definitely hit the point where progression slows to a crawl and you basically need to optimize your daily activities with a loving spreadsheet, so maybe I’m done with this thing after all. 22) One Piece Odyssey “I won’t go on a boring adventure!” I’m a big fan of One Piece. It’s legitimately one of my favorite stories ever told. A turn-based RPG with those characters just feels right, somehow, and when this game was announced it was hard to believe it had never happened before. One Piece Odyssey is, unfortunately, the definition of “boilerplate.” I remember exactly one legitimately funny bit of worldbuilding original to the game, but the vast majority of the game involves traveling through memories of story arcs I was already familiar with as a fan with occasional very slight changes, mostly to condense the plots of each arc. It’s just not very interesting, and the difficulty of the combat is a joke. I managed to get through the first memory arc (of four, I believe), which took much, much longer than it had any right to, and never came back to it. It’s not that I thought the game was bad (it’s honestly still probably the best One Piece game that isn’t just a Dynasty Warriors spinoff), but I definitely got to a point where I felt my time was better spent elsewhere. Now that the turn-based RPG was kind of a dud, it’s time to wish for a One Piece fighting game like FighterZ, although that’ll probably never happen because of Sanji. 21) Like a Dragon: Ishin! Choose your weapon: fists, sword, gun, or sword/gun For years and years I’ve been hearing about the feudal Japan-set spinoffs of Yakuza/Like a Dragon, Kenzan and Ishin (Kenzan less so because it’s apparently not as good). I was really excited when this was announced, but I have to admit, it’s… not quite what I was expecting? I know it’s an old game, but it definitely felt more like older entries in the series in both gameplay and general tone, more like Yakuza 4 than even 5 or 6. Yakuza 3 and 4 are not exactly my picks for strongest entries in the series, so maybe that’s why I didn’t spend as much time with this game as I really should have. Or maybe I was still trying to work through a bunch of other poo poo and got sidetracked. It’s probably the latter. There’s a lot of cool variety in combat styles, but a lot of the progression mechanics involving upgrading your gun and sword chafed with me. I need to return to this next year, probably after Infinite Wealth. 20) Star Ocean: The Second Story R The only star-themed body of water I spent time with this year I also only spent a couple of hours with this one, so I feel like I’m grading it on the potential I see in it, in the radical amount of freedom it affords the player to progress through the game their own way, with their own combinations of party members and skills. The game’s pretty easy, and the story hadn’t hooked me yet, but I can’t ignore a classic RPG with a dedicated counterfeiting mechanic. This is where I start actually caring about these games. The placement of everything past this point was fought over tooth and loving nail. This is the hardest one of these lists I’ve ever had to write. 19) The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero Anime Cops Are Benevolent I have some personal beef with the way Trails games are written. I find a lot of them rely heavily on cliché in place of motivated drama, they can be extremely cloying and hamfisted emotionally, no one in them reacts to anything like an actual human being, they’re laughably resistant to killing anyone off no matter how important or unimportant, and the stories tend to end on abrupt cliffhangers without even a proper denouement. Most of that held true in the case of Trails from Zero. All that said, I finished it and moved right onto the sequel, so it did something right. The gameplay is pretty interesting and can be surprisingly tough even if you know exactly what you’re in for and how to break the game like I do at this point. I found the combat deeper than most of the Cold Steel games, at least. And there’s something cozy about the way the game invites you into its world, lets you form a routine of getting to know all of the dozens of NPCs (who all have their dialogue update basically any time anything happens whatsoever), and has you involve yourself in the affairs of the local community. Now, technically Zero is a PSP game from 2010, but I’m counting it here because it didn’t get officially released into English until… wait, 2022? poo poo, I forgot! Uhhh… Welp! I already wrote these paragraphs, so I might as well keep them in here! There we go. That’ll fix it. 18) Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name Oh man, those live-action cabaret scenes are *real* trippy I’ve been a big fan of Yakuza/Like a Dragon since I played Yakuza 2 when it came out. That said, I’ve always found the stories a little disjointed? Like, they’re always just a bit too complicated and manufactured, with too many last-minute betrayals and final bosses that come out of absolutely nowhere (looking at you, Yakuza 5). Like a Dragon Gaiden isn’t devoid of that stuff, but it feels a bit more natural than it usually does here, the final act of the story turning on some ridiculous betrayals that are nevertheless given time and focus to make sense in this story. There’s still issues, of course, like the game being little more than a twenty-hour prologue for the upcoming Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, somehow both condensed and drawn-out, but it’s still solid. One of the final scenes is emotionally devastating in a way that justifies the entire enterprise, so I don’t regret my time with it, but again, it’s hard to judge without having played the game it was designed to lead into. 17) Humanity Oh god, we were the lemmings all along Humanity is an awesome little puzzle game about trying to shepherd the most foolish creature of all: man. The highest praise I can give it is that I played through most of the game in a couple sessions and never once used the built-in feature that shows you the puzzle solutions if you get stuck. I was just that engrossed in figuring it out for myself, and the solutions always seemed within my reach. By contrast, I loved Baba is You, one of the most brilliant and most devious puzzle games ever made, but some of the later solutions in that game seemed almost impossible to come by naturally, whereas even the most challenging stages in Humanity are approachable and your options are always clear. I only have two real complaints: first, there’s occasional small fiddly bits, like having to have the crowd push a block exactly one square by pointing them in one direction and then immediately turning them around once they push it. Second, the fact that the game revolves around crowd dynamics means solutions aren’t necessarily deterministic and what works on one attempt might not work on others, but that just means you’re probably doing something wrong if that happens. 16) Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed DOUBLE SPINNING EDGE Future Redeemed is a strong piece of DLC that still didn’t ultimately do much for me. I liked the progression mechanics and incentives to explore the map, but the game wasn’t all that hard. I liked some of the new characters, but they didn’t get a ton to do. I think it really just comes down to the leftover story hooks from 3 not being all that interesting in the first place to me, so a lot of this DLC is spent dealing with questions I found kind of irrelevant to the stronger story in the main game (and a lot of the time, not even really answering them). The finale goes some cool places though, even if looking back I found the whole thing kind of inessential. Side note: it’s very funny how broken Rex is, in just about every sense of the word. He’s legitimately irrationally strong in this game, to the point he rips aggro and dies constantly. It rules. 15) Street Fighter 6 I am very bad at this game, so if you get hit it’s probably your own fault This game deserves some serious kudos for what is by far the most comprehensive tutorial and set of learning tools I’ve ever seen in a fighting game, period. I gravitate more towards the hyperkinetic “anime” or MvC strain of fighting games, so Street Fighter isn’t really in my wheelhouse. Indeed, I only played a couple of sessions with a couple of characters, but I still really appreciate how friendly this game is to people that aren’t great at fighting games like me. And drat, it sure does look and play a hell of a lot better than 5. 14) The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure One of your party members in this game is named “Wazy Hemisphere” I mentioned Trails from Zero earlier before I realized it wasn’t eligible under my criteria, but part of the reason I left that segment in is because what I said there is still relevant here, as that game is honestly totally incomplete without Trails to Azure. They’re two halves of the same story. Now, to be fair, they’re pretty disjointed halves, as Zero has some dropped ideas and doesn’t do quite enough to set up Azure’s story in a few ways, but Azure is still the culmination of what Zero is setting up and neither entry properly stands on their own without the other. Azure is, in my view, the superior game. I still found a lot of the story somewhat forced and clichéd in the way I mentioned earlier, but hey, the payoff in the end is really strong, some of the final twists legitimately fascinating in their own right to the point they actually do a lot to address those earlier criticisms. The game’s still hard, definitely harder than Zero, especially certain boss fights you don’t have to win (but really, you do if you want 100% like me), but the combat is as engaging as ever. Note: I also played like an hour of Trails into Reverie right after finishing Azure before quickly realizing I needed more time before jumping headfirst into more Trails, so that game is not on this list. 13) Theatrhythm Final Bar Line There’s an arrangement of One-Winged Angel in this game that’s like six minutes long, it is pure endurance I bought this game on Switch and trying to play this game on joy-cons is a loving nightmare, I really can’t recommend it. The game is phenomenal, though! Dozens and dozens and dozens of great Final Fantasy tracks (though some of the more famously long ones have been cut down) to play through, campaign quests for most of those songs that’s basically a mini-RPG where you choose your party and equip them with skills, and at least one really fun easter egg. I don’t know how they managed to include a reference to this video in the loving chart of the corresponding song, but it’s great that they did. 12) Octopath Traveler II The cleric in this game is basically Gay Batman I booted up Octopath Traveler II again recently and I was really struck by something fairly esoteric and minor that I’d never properly articulated to myself: the scale and intricacy of the boss sprites, especially in relation to the tiny and more rudimentary PC sprites. It blatantly hearkens back to old SNES RPGs like FFIV and V and VI, games Octopath Traveler II is very much riffing off of. I always appreciated this little bit of dissonance between the grandiose, imposing enemies and the stubby little PCs, but I had never really thought about why that was before. It’s an obvious little bit of storytelling, though: through the sprites, they build up the foe as something magnificent or terrifying or eldritch, while your PCs are just tiny little guys. How can they possibly stand against… whatever the gently caress that thing is? Octopath Traveler II takes that idea and just runs with it. The enemy sprites, particularly boss sprites, are complicated yet readable, horrifying yet aesthetically pleasing, majestic even when they’re banal. Furthermore, despite the HD-2D style mixing 3D environments with the pixel art, it never clashes. Everything feels of a piece with the world, even if that same HD-2D style tends to overdo it with the bloom. I legitimately don’t know where I’m going with this thought, but… oh, wait, I just found it! *ahem* It’s these kinds of small, yet meaningful expansions on the formula of classic RPGs that sell Octopath Traveler II. I’m not really a guy who tends to sound off about visuals, but I felt it was warranted here. The first Octopath Traveler has something of a reputation as a good “proof of concept” that nevertheless overstayed its welcome and couldn’t quite hold the audience’s attention to its end. That’s certainly what happened to me. Somewhat controversially though, I don’t actually agree with the claims that this game really “fixes” the problems with the first one. A lot of those issues are still there, albeit some have been papered over a bit. You still can’t swap out your starting character until you finish their story. Each starting class is basically identical to their loadout in the first game. The characters still barely interact, though there are now a set of side stories that let each character interact with one other. No, the improvements here are mainly structural and somewhat invisible. There’s one major new mechanic, latent power, which makes the individual characters a bit more unique and opens up new synergies, but that’s about it. The most obvious fix is that the individual stories, which still don’t intersect, are just more interesting, with more vibrant characters to liven things up (well, besides Hikari, Hikari’s pretty boring). It’s for that reason that I can’t really explain why I got so much more absorbed into this than the first, why I spent probably twice as long playing it before I got distracted. In the first game, I barely touched the second chapters of the character stories, whereas in the sequel I managed to get pretty close to the end of most of them. It’s not a perfect game by any means; when I returned to it I was struck by how a lot of the later-game boss difficulty was directly tied to giving them an inordinate amount of turns as their HP dropped, and it can be a pain to have to constantly gently caress with your party because everyone has different Path Actions during day or night. Despite that, it’s a very engrossing RPG of a kind that seems to have largely fallen by the wayside as time has progressed. 11) Persona 5 Tactica “If you want peace, win it yourself” I’m The Persona 5 Guy, and this game is… pretty all right! It’s got some interesting gameplay systems, but it nevertheless can’t help but feel a little slight and inessential even within the expanded Persona 5 canon. I enjoyed my time with it a good deal, but it wasn’t very hard at all (if anyone reading this plays it they should definitely put it on Hard like I eventually did, which turns on friendly fire and thus makes you consider your actions more). Really, I just wish the game was a bit better balanced on the party member side, because I realized long before the end that the optimal party was just Ryuji/Ann/Yusuke due to their skill combinations. Yusuke in particular is a loving beast, with some of the longest gun range in the game and the ability to totally shut down enemies with Freeze. Anyway, the story eventually picked up and went in a rather interesting direction, even if it pulled its punch at the last minute. It’s not Persona Q levels of disposable even at its worst, so that’s something at least. There’s also a DLC campaign that I’ve already forgotten! (The rest of this list continues in a later post due to hitting the character limit)
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Dec 21, 2023 23:53
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10) Final Fantasy XVI “Accept the Truth – L3 + R3” Mental impressions can be fickle, can’t they? What we retain of an experience can shift over time, the vagaries of imperfect and fading memories forming a pernicious feedback loop until the recollection bears no resemblance to what actually transpired. Those two sentences had basically nothing to do with Final Fantasy XVI, but at the same time, neither do my current feelings about that game. I often find with games that I lose track of my own opinion over the course of time, becoming suggestible as more and more people offer their own opinions for me to consider. Final Fantasy XVI suffered in this way, parts of it decaying in my mind. I didn’t hate them while I was playing the game itself, but those moments weren’t engraved strongly enough in my head to push back against that negativity. Yes, there’s a lot of rote fetch quests, the combat mostly isn’t very hard outside of some damage sponge bosses, the RPG systems are threadbare and would largely be better off excised entirely, and the story loses some of its luster in the final act while also doing a disservice to some of its more interesting characters. But that’s not what I thought while I was playing it. I had a great time making my way through it, even if it was a bit too long. I thought a lot of the later-game sidequests actually added a lot to the setting and characters, there were a lot of neat ability synergies in the combat system, and as a longtime player of Final Fantasy XIV I thought a lot of the MMORPG cruft Creative Business Unit III left in was more charming than anything else. I had a lot of fun with it, and I shouldn’t forget that just because parts of it were stronger than others. I liked the story, which in a lot of ways felt more like Fate than GoT. I liked the combat, which had a ton of interesting tools to play with. I loved the spectacle, which was best-in-class. I loved the score, featuring Masayoshi Soken just going absolutely nuts. And I loved Clive, who was just a phenomenal protagonist played to perfection by Ben Starr. Below that deep, guttural growl, there was a real pathos and vulnerability shining through. He’s one of my favorite game characters in ages. The game wasn’t exactly what I wanted it to be, but I’m not gonna let others’ negativity quash my own positive feelings for it. 9) Hi-Fi Rush Look, I’m bad enough at character action games when I *don’t* have to time my attacks I fought over whether I should put this above or below FFXVI for a while until I remembered Track 10, which features, among other things, a Xenogears reference, The Prodigy’s “Invaders Must Die”, and the Roquefort boss fight. There’s a lot of sheer joy in the musical tastes of this game, from Nine Inch Nails to The Flaming Lips. My only real gripe is that some of the mechanics don’t really do it for me. Attaching basic actions you need to perform constantly to disrupt enemies to cooldown abilities that can miss isn’t great, in my opinion. But again, it’s hard not to feel that infectious joy whenever a song you’ve loved for a decade comes around–or especially when you’re introduced to a new great track to beat up robots to, as in the case of “Whirring” by The Joy Formidable. Overall, it’s a solid, fun game that I don’t really feel a strong desire to return to. And that’s okay, because the experience left strong enough an impression that I can still hear the beats in my head. 8) Anonymous;Code “Hack Into God.” Anonymous;Code (yes, with a semicolon and no space is how it’s spelled) is a visual novel by Mages, part of the Science Adventure series. If you’ve heard of that series at all, it’s because of its most popular entry, Steins;Gate. Truth be told, Anonymous;Code isn’t the entry in that series that left the strongest impression on me this year. No, that would be Chaos;Child, which emotionally devastated me at times, though that VN came out in 2019 and is thus ineligible under my criteria. I’d say my pick for the “best” entry in that series would be either Steins;Gate or Chaos;Child, with Anonymous;Code trailing at #3, maybe. I should explain that Anonymous Code is a true visual novel, in the sense that there is effectively zero gameplay. You read the game like a book while taking in the visual and audio components. The only method of control you have is tied to the story. In Steins;Gate, this method of control was pulling up the main character’s phone to send text messages or make calls. That was it. In Anonymous;Code, it’s even less direct. The main character, Pollon, gains access to an “app” that lets him Save and Load reality as a state, letting him effectively “time leap,” or short-term time travel into his own body. Pollon believes the player character to be a fellow hacker who has gifted him this app, and the only ability you have to interact with the story and change it is to suggest when Pollon uses this ability–and sometimes, he’ll do it without your prompting! Sometimes, you don’t even want to use it! It’s a very cute idea that plays into the way the player is engaging with the visual novel format, making constant saves to protect their progression. The player’s saves and Pollon’s even go into the same menu, though Pollon will only Load his own, and it creates this fascinating layer of character interaction with the medium. However, the problem with this system is that it can often be somewhat opaque when you’re actually expected to prompt Pollon to Load, sometimes being as specific as a single line of text. In those cases, you might get stuck replaying a short section and spamming the Load key on every line until you find the right one. There’s also a late-game scene where you have to figure out a new method of interaction on-the-fly that also involves remembering a specific line of dialogue from at least an hour earlier. I imagine it would be incredibly cathartic to figure that out on your own, but unfortunately, I did not manage to. Anonymous;Code does have some other issues: first, it’s easily the shortest entry in the Science Adventure series at about twenty hours, with only one route. By contrast, Chaos;Child took me over fifty hours to see to completion, and had about six routes. I’m not saying it should be as long as C;C was, because that was a trial of endurance and especially because A;C’s production values are pretty high for a “true” VN, but it’s kind of disappointing all the same. It’s balanced out by there being an English voice track for the first time in the series, and it’s honestly pretty solid! It was a welcome addition. The other minor complaint I’d make is that while I found the story to be largely pretty engaging, I called a few major twists extremely early on, some about as early as the seeds for them were first dropped. I’m not saying this is inherently a problem, but I’m usually more gullible and easily misled than this so I found it a bit disappointing. What Anonymous;Code does have is some of the most palpable, thrilling tension in the series. Part of it’s the masterful soundtrack by Takeshi Abo, but whenever the action picked up I was on the edge of my seat, dying to read what would happen next. This extends to basically every major action scene from the beginning to the early final act of the story. The story kind of peaks before the final confrontation and true ending, but everything leading up to that is absolutely stellar and some of the most engaging VN action I’ve read yet. Again, Anonymous;Code isn’t my favorite entry in the series, there’s other entries that hit much harder emotionally, but as a pure thrillride there’s no competition in Science Adventure. 7) Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 “Spider-Men we’re at it again, this time with 50% more Spider-Meeeeeeen!” I really loved the 2018 Spider-Man game by Insomniac, and this is largely more of that. That’s not at all a problem, I still think the game plays great. The swinging is better than ever and the wingsuit adds a new dimension to the travel mechanics that helps speed things up while keeping them fresh. I think where I’m slightly less enthusiastic is the story, which ends up feeling a lot less focused than the original game. I really love most of the places it goes, though. There’s a focus on rehabilitative justice for Spider-Man’s villains that’s kind of hokey but I thought was very earnest and sweet. Like, yes, Sandman just turned into a giant monster and terrorized the city, people would not realistically be willing to forgive that any time soon, but also this is a game about two spider-themed superheroes with the same name. Realism shouldn’t be the priority here, not when you can get at a larger emotional truth. The Mysterio side missions in particular were a highlight, Mysterio being my favorite Spider-Man villain, so I was caught between rooting for him to be better and wanting a massive boss fight. Spoiler alert: I got both. As I mentioned earlier though, the story is less focused than the original game. The Venom plotline is rushed in more ways than one, the final act being very short in comparison to the rest of the game and the setup for the heel turn feeling rather abrupt. There were resonant moments scattered throughout, but it ended up feeling like the final hours got much less attention than they deserved. Likewise, while I think Miles is great and a real highlight of this game, he feels like he has a lot less to do here than he really should, and his overall story ends up spinning its wheels a bit trying to draw things out for the climax. His side characters, however, are a real highlight, especially his mom, who rules. On the lighter side, I really appreciated the city in this game. They’ve expanded the boroughs beyond just Manhattan to include small segments of Brooklyn and Queens, which diversifies the landscape greatly (and justifies the wingsuit for areas where the buildings are shorter). It’s not just that, though. The city changes as the game progresses, reacting to the events of the story. The city gradually cleans up the opening Sandman attack over the course of the entire first half of the game, eventually finishing entirely. Destruction carries over after major villain attacks and rescues. It really adds to the feeling of a living world you’re inhabiting and helping to save. The combat is still great (though they standardized Miles’ and Peter’s kits at the beginning of the game, which is a minor letdown), the traversal still phenomenal even for the high expectations of “an open-world Spider-Man game,” and the story filled with the kind of ridiculous sincerity that I want out of this character. I have my criticisms, but it’s been a good year for Spider-media, this game included. 6) The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I sympathize with Aonuma because I also don’t give a single poo poo about the Zelda lore I recently returned to and finally finished Breath of the Wild, a game that never super resonated with me. I had an appreciation for it, but when I came back to it I described it as “the best 8/10 game ever made.” Tears of the Kingdom is better in a lot of ways, but there’s still a distance between me and the game for whatever reason, like it’s a little too sanded down or something like that. I dunno, maybe it’s something about modern Nintendo games in general, because whenever I try one I have a similar reaction: “This is great, but something about it pushes me away.” Let’s start with my negatives: I don’t think this has fixed my fundamental problem with Breath of the Wild: the combat. That issue isn’t really breakable weapons, but the way they often create scenarios where fighting enemies is negative sum, where you lose more resources than you gain from a fight. The other part of that is that I find the health and damage inflation on minibosses to be incredibly excessive, like the only way the dev team could figure out how to make challenging fights with this level of openness was to crank up the values to a ridiculous degree. This is made worse by the fact that I think Gleeoks are just massive pains to fight, I’ve never even bothered actually killing one because they one-shot me and take a year to kill. Also, gently caress those darkness hands, especially when they spawn out of nowhere. My other major complaint is that no matter how hard they try, I think the attempts to graft more traditional Zelda staples onto the open-world experience don’t really work. I’m really thinking of the temples when I say this. I’ve done three so far: Wind, Fire, and Water. Wind was kind of annoying but had a couple neat puzzles and a great boss fight, Fire was extremely annoying to the point that the couple of neat mechanics weren’t enough to salvage it, and Water was just extremely nothing and had a terrible boss fight at the end. They’re long enough to be annoying, but not long enough to feel substantial. The shrines are a smaller version of this problem as well, but I think it really just comes down to the freedom of most of the game going with the restrictions of a temple like oil and water. This was evident in the Divine Beasts of the first game, too, which were occasionally clever but always just seemed kind of weird and out of place. I’m not saying this because I think they should abandon Zelda dungeons, either, because it’s the other way around: I don’t think I prefer the open-world style of Zelda, really, especially when it means basically the entire story has to take place in flashback again. Zelda stories are never super deep or engaging, but I want something a bit more substantial than what I’m getting here. That’s enough kvetching, though. The temples really are better than the Divine Beasts, and while I still don’t like the actual moment-to-moment combat of TotK, the Fuse mechanic makes it so much more interesting to engage with weapons in general now that you can kludge together something serviceable from anything in your inventory (though another major complaint would have to be the menu for selecting items being atrocious). The other powers are equally useful. I don’t love having to drop everything to make a vehicle, but Ultrahand is just so versatile and (mostly) easy to use that it doesn’t matter. Recall is great in tons of scenarios, especially for upwards mobility, and Ascend is just absolutely ridiculous. It’s impressive that the world does actually feel wholly different despite being almost entirely the same geometry, even if the sky islands themselves are kind of thin in execution. The Depths are a really fascinating addition as well, scary yet enticing. There’s a ton of new ways to get around and things to find when you get there. Basically, Tears of the Kingdom is a land of contrasts. It feels bold and new and reenergized, but it doesn’t exactly address my problems with what came before. Still, in terms of raw creativity, both from the developers and the player, it’s hard to match. Just hoping that I don’t have to cart around any more goddamn Koroks. 5) Guilty Gear Strive We Are Now In Year 2 of Bridget Discourse I’m not really very good at fighting games, so this is almost certainly the game in my top 10 I played the least of this year. That said, they’ve done a lot to freshen things up lately. When I first bought Strive on release I exclusively played Ramlethal. Then when Bridget came out I gave her a try and thought she was super fun so I stuck with her for a while (even though I was way worse with her than Ram). Now Elphelt’s out, and holy poo poo, is she fun. That rekka is completely bonkers. That said, if I was just judging the game based on the four characters that were released this year (Bedman?, Asuka R♯, Johnny, and Elphelt), I probably wouldn’t consider it worth listing here, but Arc System Works has done a huge overhaul with the 3.0 patch that added new game mechanics in Wild Assault and Deflect Shield (Wild Assault being a major game-changer) and new special moves for several members of the original roster. Strive is exactly what I love in a fighting game, and the changes add new depth and strategy, as well as a bunch of fantastic new characters. Asuka in particular is maybe the most bonkers thing I’ve ever seen, he reminds me of UMvC3 Phoenix Wright, except he’s not a joke character. Now just add Slayer, Daisuke. 4) Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker “...Among these uncountable stars, it was yours that crossed my path. For that I shall be forever grateful. I wish you well on your journey. A journey as long as your star is bright–a journey not bound by this world or any other.” Final Fantasy XIV is my favorite game of all time. That I’m not giving it the top spot this year might therefore indicate that the game’s going through a rough patch, but I really don’t think it is. It’s definitely slowed down in release schedule, at least. Call that a “content drought” if you must, but there’s been three major patches this year and all of them have felt meaningful. The real reason I’m listing it at #4 instead of #1 is mainly just that the story for these latest patches has just been all right. I don’t have any real complaints, but this game has had much more engaging stories even just for periods between expansions, so it’s a bit disappointing that the current story has felt somewhat slight–the stakes relatively high, but ultimately somewhat disconnected from the ongoing metaplot and without most of the principal cast heavily involved. I still enjoyed the story we got, though, and the raid story was interesting enough that it made up for any deficiencies there. Even outside of that, it’s been kind of a rough year for my engagement with FFXIV in general. My raid static, which I’d been a part of for 3 years, broke up before clearing the final fight of the final raid tier for this expansion. It was a bummer, especially because what I played of the last fight was pretty fun. That ended up causing me to disconnect from the game more than I usually do. I did do a lot of Extreme Trial grinding this year, more than I’ve ever really done before, but it’s not quite the same. Some of those fights are absolutely mind-bending, though, and I had a great time with them. We’ve still got some time to go before the next story patch, and from there it’s going to be months until the next expansion. I’m looking forward to that expansion next year to hopefully reinvigorate this game for me. Even if that doesn’t quite manifest, I’ve been playing this game since 2015 and I can’t imagine stopping now. I can’t wait for Dawntrail. 3) Resident Evil 4 (Remake) They needed all the advances in processing power made since 2005 to make Luis the greasiest man alive I’m not that into our remake culture, personally. Remakes have a natural tendency to supersede the original, to replace it in cultural memory, to make it obsolete. Why play an inferior version of the game, right? This goes even further with stuff like the Bluepoint remakes of Demon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus, which are basically the exact same games with upgraded graphics (and depending on who you ask, degraded art direction). Sometimes a remake comes out that is such a radical expansion and reimagining of the same material that the original is still necessary just to gain proper context, as in the case of FFVII Remake, a fantastic game and an exception to my distaste for do-overs. Resident Evil 4’s remake doesn’t go that far, isn’t a radical departure from the idea of RE4, isn’t trying to Rebuild of Evangelion this poo poo, but it’s still going for something a bit different than the original. Quite a few sequences like the cable car, the laser hallway, and U-3 have been cut from the main campaign and moved into Ada’s DLC, Separate Ways. Other parts have been expanded greatly, like the minecart sequence or the Mike scene. The game is a lot more atmospheric than the original (because OG RE4 frankly isn’t too atmospheric most of the time besides the overbearing music that plays when in combat) without ever becoming too scary for a coward like me. Ashley is much less of a prop and more of a character without ever feeling like the game is overcorrecting for the original, while Luis is a far more well-rounded and memorable character, someone you want to like as he spouts off lines from Don Quixote but always with an undeniable undercurrent of shadiness that the original never really properly captured. Having all these improvements-slash-cuts in a remake is generally worrying to me because they risk erasing elements of the original even further, but I’m okay with all this, I think. For starters, they make the game different from the original, no longer an equivalent experience and not something that can properly replace the 2005 version. But the other reason is simple: OG RE4 is one of the most important games ever made, and it loving holds up. RE4’s remake has been brought up to modern standards with a ton of new conveniences and mechanics, but the original is still extremely accessible, extremely playable, and extremely fun. You can’t replace RE4 because there’s no way the remake will ever be as important as the thing it’s doing over. But the remake is phenomenal in its own right, with smart changes made to the pacing and structure. They’ve updated the game in a lot of ways, and I was worried they’d make it too serious, but the goofy core shines through. Leon is still a dork spouting action movie lines, they’re just slightly less ridiculous action movie lines. Honestly, my main gripe with the reworked story is that they cut a lot of the most fun bits with Salazar and he kind of feels vestigial as a character as a result, but I digress. There might not be a massive lava room or a giant statue of Salazar chasing you over a bridge, but it’s fine that the game is a little more serious, because it’s still just as goofy where it counts, and again, it’s not replacing anything. It’s just a different take on the material. They preserve so much of the spirit of RE4’s gameplay: the ridiculously good reload animations (most of them are downgrades, but you couldn’t move while reloading in the original), the different weapons all having their own niches and place in your playstyle (even the ones that were kinda worthless in the original), buying treasure maps and looking everywhere for precious gems to upgrade your guns, and even the shooting gallery. Speaking of the shooting gallery, you can play a gacha machine to unlock charms for your briefcase to change stuff like drop rates. And speaking of your briefcase, the absolutely iconic item sorting minigame is back and is just as much fun to mess with as it was eighteen years ago. The merchant’s even still there, just being a weird little guy, and now he gives you sidequests! And then there’s the knife, which is probably the crowning jewel of this remake. It’s exactly the right kind of silly and it’s incredibly fun to parry attacks with it. I don’t even mind the durability because now it’s an interesting resource to manage! All in all, the RE4 remake succeeds because it’s not trying to be “the definitive RE4,” but because it’s trying to be a new RE4, one that can stand alongside the original and not try to supplant it. Too often, these kinds of remakes feel revisionist instead of constructive, and I question their necessity. Not here, not at all. I had my doubts going into this remake for sure, but it’s an incredible achievement and made me love Resident Evil 4 all over again. Anyway, I have no idea if they’ll try to remake RE5 from here, but they honestly would probably be better off not doing so. 2) Baldur’s Gate 3 Why would I ever not be a bard? Ridiculous. Couldn’t be me. So, obvious disclaimer here: I only made it partway into Act II of Baldur’s Gate 3. From what I hear, this means I didn’t see a lot of the famed reactivity of this game, but on the other hand, Act III is apparently kind of a mess, so it’s a mixed bag. I’ve heard Act I is the best, most complete one by far, though, so I guess I can still appraise the game well enough. I’m not a big CRPG guy. I’ve dipped my toes into Fallout 1 and Planescape: Torment for about an hour each, but I’ve never had major experience with the genre. This is my first real entry into this space, and I’ve gotta say: it was pretty incredible. There’s something wonderful about the incredible freedom and trust in the player here by the designers, the willingness to indulge so many possibilities and to let the audience fail or screw themselves over. It’s staggering. Hell, in Act II I found the main hub and near-immediately wandered into an encounter that killed everyone in that hub when I lost a fight (I reloaded, because, wow). The game feels incredibly alive in that way, there’s just so much going on. At the same time, there’s also something to be said about the way the game can demand knowledge of its systems and interactions to succeed. Characters like Shadowheart have baffling starting stat distributions and specializations that really hamper their effectiveness, the action and bonus action systems can be somewhat confusing at the start, combat rolls will miss constantly and it’s often hard to know why all my attacks only have a 40% chance to connect, and the game just does a bad job in general of guiding the player in leveling up. That’s not necessarily a negative, but it is me saying that I don’t know how I would have the patience for this if this game hadn’t taken off like a wildfire and there weren’t tons of resources available. Which, itself, is also not necessarily a complaint. The game isn’t hostile to me, it’s just opaque, and that can be thrilling and rewarding in its own right when I discover something new. And redoing a character build is as simple as paying 100 gold to my good buddy Withers and picking all the level up rewards again, so it’s not a huge deal to gently caress with things. As for my character, I picked, semi-randomly, a Half-Orc Bard and quickly discovered that Bard is maybe the best class in the entire game. I get Speak to Animals for all the best interactions, I get Cloud of Daggers which can be utterly hilarious when the AI doesn’t know how to get around it, I get Haste to turn an ally into a blender, I yell insults at enemies to attack and debuff them, and I can talk several major bosses into killing themselves! It absolutely rules. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a triumph in every way. It was originally my number one on this list, but ultimately, I didn’t have a lot of personal passion for it. Again, I don’t have a long history with the genre, so while I recognize that it’s stellar, it’s not something I have a lot of personal attachment to or context for. I think the game is great, but my feelings for other games were ultimately stronger, and that won out in the end for one game in particular. 1) Hitman: World of Assassination “Somebody’s doing something they shouldn’t!” At the start of this list I said that I was only considering new content from this year for this list. Hitman: World of Assassination probably seems like an odd pick for #1, considering. World of Assassination really only consists of two things: consolidating all the content from Hitman 1, 2, and 3 into a single package that you buy once, and one new game mode (ignoring semi-regular seasonal events and time-limited target rotations on old maps). It’s for that reason that I didn’t feel I could justify putting this game at #1 by my own criteria. It just felt kind of slight in comparison to everything else this year. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great game that I enjoy playing, so even though I don’t have a lot of personal passion for it as my “favorite game of the year,” the incredible achievement of that game’s very existence just can’t be matched by Hitman simply adding a new mode, right? Nevertheless, that lack of passion for Baldur’s Gate kind of ate away at me until I decided to go back and reappraise Hitman’s new content: Freelancer mode, which turns Hitman into a roguelite with randomized targets, loadouts, and objectives. You start with basically nothing and must acquire all your tools on-site, mostly from finding crates containing random assortments of useful items, or purchasing them from dealers with the currency you get from completing objectives. At the beginning, you select a contract type to control which objectives and maps you’ll get, and once you’ve done a few of those, you’ll run into a Showdown, where you’ll have to identify your target from several options on-the-fly. Now, one thing you should know about me is that when I’m playing a stealth game like Hitman or Dishonored or what-have you, I savescum out the rear end to do the perfect nonlethal ghost run. I know these games are supposed to be more fun when you improvise and go with whatever happens, but I’ve just never been able to avoid compulsive saving and reloading, especially when I know I’ll probably only play the game once. The newer Hitman games, however, are designed to be replayed, so at least I sometimes manage to try a broader range of possibilities on later runs. Freelancer takes that up to eleven. You cannot save during a mission. If you die, you lose everything you brought. If you fail the campaign, you lose your entire toolbox of useful gadgets. Furthermore, there’s no real way to know who your target will be before you enter the mission. That sounds like a negative, but really, it just means you have to plan based on your knowledge of the map and the objectives in front of you, planning just far enough ahead that you can hopefully take advantage of whatever opening presents itself. And even if you get screwed by a bad target spawn or a devious bonus objective you can’t complete with your loadout, you might be able to get a new opportunity by purchasing what you need. You have to play every situation by ear, and folks, they were right when they said it’s the most fun way to play Hitman. Taking absurd risks and having them pay off is an exhilarating thrill–almost as thrilling as when they blow up in your face. Really, the joy of Freelancer is seeing these maps, intricate and brimming with detail, with some of the best level design in the business, and being rewarded for knowing them like the back of your hand. You can’t really take advantage of the set story objectives in the Freelancer versions of the maps, but they’re still the same maps, with all the same routes and hidden items and disguises. Knowing your way around them is the best and only way to succeed in Freelancer, and having that knowledge fully rewarded with a successful run that was nevertheless won by the skin of your teeth is the best possible feeling. All that said, the Showdowns at the end of each contract can occasionally be a little jank, you can really get hosed by the game picking a bad target on basically any map, and the overall campaign length is absurdly long at 18 (!) assassinations. I think I made it about eight maps into the campaign once or twice, maybe. But the fundamentals are so strong none of it matters. The core mechanics of the game are so strong it makes it seem absurd to even mention petty gripes like those. Freelancer plus the all-in-one package cemented it for me: Hitman: World of Assassination is probably the best stealth game ever made. It doesn’t matter that all the maps are old, because the way you experience them has been redefined and revitalized so thoroughly that they feel new again. This is what Hitman was always, on some level, striving to be. In summary: 10) Final Fantasy XVI 9) Hi-Fi Rush 8) Anonymous;Code 7) Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 6) The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 5) Guilty Gear Strive 4) Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker 3) Resident Evil 4 (Remake) 2) Baldur’s Gate 3 1) Hitman: World of Assassination Arist fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 21, 2023 23:56
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drat good list and solid number one choice. I should go back to it, I haven't played since 3 originally came out.
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Dec 22, 2023 01:02
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Arist posted:Finally finished writing my list  Great list! I need to play Hitman, even though it feels like I’ve missed the boat at this point.
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Dec 22, 2023 01:16
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Hell of a list. One Piece Odyssey was such a weird game in that I really enjoyed the hell out of playing it but I'd never recommend it to anybody, because it really is only carried by the charm/fun/familiarity with the characters. Hitman is a spectacular game, blows my mind how many hundreds (well over a thousand at this point I think) of hours of fun I've gotten out of all three games in this current run of the series, and I'm still not tired of playing it.
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Dec 22, 2023 02:36
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Hello I am Metis of the Chat Thread, as I have always been known, and this is my GOTY list. NUMBER TEN - THE BEST FREE GAME - THE ROOTTREES ARE DEAD  My insane notes I took while playing. This year I stumbled upon a dangerous power: browsing the most recent free browser games uploaded to Itch. Mostly I used this to find new idle/incremental games to ruin my life with for days at a time, but I also found some absolute gems. The best of these games was The Roottrees Are Dead, a deduction game in the vein of Obra Dinn and Golden Idol where you are tasked with identifying the extended family of the Roottrees, and uncover a mystery or two along the way. I spent an entire evening filling out the family tree, unable to go to bed until I had finished. I then shared it to the games chat thread so I could watch vicariously as other people made their own varied paths through the deductions. I’m thrilled to see it mentioned on several people’s lists this year! You, reader, can play it too (if you haven’t already): https://jjohnstongames.itch.io/the-roottrees-are-dead Other notable free games: Trigaea https://ryngm.itch.io/trigaea - interactive fiction about exploring an alien wasteland, augmenting your DNA, and determining the fate of multiple hostile factions. Trace https://colorbomb.itch.io/trace - really solid room escape game that took me back to the many many room escape games I used to play in high school Good Morning Dear Sister https://laingsam.itch.io/good-morning-dear-sister - a goblin collects mushrooms in order to brainwash her sisters into being polite to her NUMBER NINE - THE BEST IMMERSIVE SIM - SPIRITTEA I have stolen a joke MockingQuantum posted in the RPG thread for this superlative, forgive me for my sins. If you watched the scene in Spirited Away where Chihiro washes the gunk and ooze off the River Spirit and thought, “that’s the job for me,” then pick up Spirittea. Spirittea is a life sim about moving from the big city to a quaint Japanese town, where you discover you can see and speak to lost spirits. One of them enlists you to run a bathhouse for spirits, and the core of the game is managing your spirit customer’s needs as well as recruiting villagers to help you out. I’m still in the middle of playing this but it’s incredibly charming. It feels like a really innovative life sim, and not just another Stardew knock-off. I especially like how making friends with villagers is based on hanging out with them doing their favourite hobbies, rather than pumping them full of gifts. NUMBER EIGHT - THE BEST DEDUCTION GAME - STRANGE HORTICULTURE Have you ever wanted to own a plant shop and solve occult mysteries? Strange Horticulture has you sorted! This is a really neat little game about identifying plants, deciphering clues that allow you to find more plants, selling them to people to cure their various ailments, and also there are murders. It has a cute desk system with draws where you file away all your paper clues and tags for your plants so you can organise everything how you want. I really enjoyed the writing and vibes. Other notable deduction games: The Case of the Golden Idol - this is a really great deduction game! The logic is straightforward, the story is fun, and the art is really distinctive. It didn’t consume me in the way that other deduction games have, but a very good entry in the genre all the same. NUMBER SEVEN - THE BEST MINDEY GAME - AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES - NIRVANA INITIATIVE  Superlative provided by Booky I think the original game is by and large better, it’s a more cohesive story with better developed ideas, but I loved getting to revisit the world and characters of Somnium. I laughed, I cried, I danced, I tried to go to Atami, I got really confused by puzzles. What can I say, I love being taken on a wild ride by Uchikoshi. NUMBER SIX - THE BEST SUMMER VIBES GAME - BLUE REFLECTION SECOND LIGHT I played this in the dead of (a fairly mild) winter, when I truly needed an injection of summer into my veins. Blue Reflection Second Light is a sequel to a game I have not played and have no intention of playing, and it turns out that had very little impact on my enjoyment. Second Light is about a bunch of teenage girls who have lost their memories finding themselves in a weird pocket dimension simulacrum of a typical Japanese high school. They venture into even stranger environments full of monsters they must defeat by turning into magical girls. This is the only way to return their memories and find a way to understand their own emotions. It is, basically, the summer version of cozy. I associate cozy with being wrapped up in a blanket by a fireplace with a hot drink, but this game is more like lying on a beach towel, comfortably warm but protected from sun and sand, with an ice cold drink and listening to the relaxing sound of waves. It also has one of the sweetest lesbian love stories I have encountered this year! NUMBER FIVE - THE BEST ARCHAEOLOGIST GAME - HEAVEN’S VAULT  I bought this gecko against my robot's advice, then it ran away and I was devastated, and then it appeared on my spaceship. A real rollercoaster of emotions. Heaven’s Vault is a difficult game to sum up. Aliya, an archaeologist, travels the rivers of the Nebula to abandoned moons, finding and translating artifacts inscribed in the language of the Ancients. You develop your understanding of the Nebula’s history as well as the ancient language throughout the game, and different playthroughs will uncover different information and travel varied paths through the story, without you realising there were ever choices to make. It’s an elegantly reactive narrative. Aliya is prickly and difficult to like. She is relentlessly rude to her robot companion Six, and offends most of the people she interacts with. She tries to make up for past mistakes but she’s not very good at it and often makes things worse. She is quite simply not a nice person at all. And I love that! It makes for a much more interesting character, even if I do wish she would be kinder to robots. I love robot characters… I also can’t go without mentioning the gorgeous Islamic-inspired architecture on all the moons you visit. The art design of the game is beautiful. The NG+ experience is a little clunky, as you can’t skip through content you have already seen, making finding new story and interactions frustratingly slow, especially given the already glacial pace of movement. I tired of replaying it despite knowing there was at least one major divergence I hadn’t experienced yet. Still, even just the first playthrough made it one of my favourites to play this year. NUMBER FOUR - THE BEST CONTRAPTION BUILDING GAME - TEARS OF THE KINGDOM  On the day this game was released, I played it in my friend’s building’s cinema room, and on the big screen I made a wagon with skeleton arms attached to the wheels and drove it, cackling, through a forest. There is no more pure fun than this. It is essentially Breath of the Wild but More, and that is exactly what I wanted and needed. I don’t think there’s anything more to be said! NUMBER THREE - THE BEST FLAMINGO BEFRIENDING SIMULATOR - FIRE EMBLEM ENGAGE  Behold, the flamingo. Engage is a love letter to Fire Emblem created by people who care deeply about the series, evident not just in the fact that it features characters from every past entry but in the level of attention given to adapting each game’s unique features into Engage’s gameplay. The map based on Thracia 776 encourages copious warp strategies and theft; Ike is a behemoth of a man who will smash through entire buildings; Sigurd is an idiot who will run immediately into enemy lines. The characters and story are simple but charming, and it has the most purely fun gameplay of any Fire Emblem in years. Put all those accolades aside, though. What’s important is that in Engage you can adopt a flamingo as a pet. Doing so requires you to donate a significant amount of money to a sovereign nation so that they will, I guess, give you a permit to export native species? Then you have to find the flamingo. I had to fight a random skirmish in a particular location three times and then savescum until the RNG blessed me with the appearance of a flamingo. I took it home and discovered it only gave me rare fish, a basically useless item. Nevertheless it remained in my petting zoo for the entirety of the rest of the game. NUMBER TWO - THE BEST GAME I PLAYED THIS YEAR - ELDEN RING  A succinct distillation of my Elden Ring experience. Elden Ring is my favourite game that I played this year. It’s the game that, if I had to erase all of the games I played this year and leave just one, I would choose to keep. Why is it at number two, and not number one, then? We’ll come to that. But back to Elden Ring. I have never played a Souls game before, beyond spending half an hour dying in Dark Souls 3 and then giving up, but Elden Ring looked so beautiful and compelling that I decided to get over my nervousness over being a certified bad gamer and just give it a go. I am so glad I did because Elden Ring is an incredible experience from start to finish. I went in knowing nothing and basically got all my hints from badgering friends into telling me how to progress a quest. I was playing at the same time as a couple of other friends and we were all basically posting in parallel about cool poo poo we were finding and comparing notes on NPCs we had or had not found and it was the most fun I’ve had playing a game possibly ever. A selection of quotes I posted in discord while playing: quote:gah skeletons quote:killed by skeletons again quote:oopsy, disturbed a giant crab habitat quote:Is moving tower a friend??? quote:wtf do i do quote:Should I fight the minor erdtree? quote:Gahhh I went below Raya Lucaria on the big wheel quote:just whipped a crystal robot to death quote:There's nothing I hate more than those little glomping freaks in the manor quote:omg this coffin is like a rollercoaster track. A funicular coffin NUMBER ONE - MY PERSONAL GAME OF THE YEAR - FIRE EMBLEM FATES I didn’t play this game this year. In fact, I haven’t played it in several years, and the last time I did I’m pretty sure I put it down after just a few hours, having realised I had no desire to sit through either the convoluted, nonsensical story, or struggling through difficult gameplay without the option to reverse time, a feature I have probably come to rely too heavily on in modern Fire Emblem. I would go so far to say that Fire Emblem Fates is my most actively disliked game - one that I was excited about before launch, only to be badly disappointed after playing. But this game isn’t taking my Game of the Year because of any qualities of its gameplay, plot, characters, design, soundtrack or anything inherent to the game itself. Fire Emblem Fates is my Game of the Year because it funded this entire year of gaming and beyond. If you don’t know anything about Fire Emblem Fates, I’ll explain the unique circumstances that came together to create this possibility. Fates is, in actuality, three games: Birthright, Conquest and Revelation. Birthright and Conquest were sold as two separate versions for the 3DS, similar to different Pokemon versions, except that they are two entirely different campaigns, with different plots, characters and maps. After buying one version, you could buy the other as DLC from the eShop, as well as the third version, Revelation, essentially a golden route that provided a happy ending for all* the characters from both, which existed only as DLC and not as a physical standalone cart. Except! If you were a person who was extremely hyped for the upcoming entry in your new favourite series, who was certain that you would definitely love the game and want to play all three versions no matter what, you MAY have preordered the special edition for $125 which came with a steelbook, a poster, and a cart with all three versions of the game. And maybe, after you realised how much you hated the game, you deeply regretted your purchase and left it to languish at the bottom of a cupboard, still in the shopping bag you brought it home in. Until! Nintendo announced they would be closing the eShop for the 3DS in March of this year. Which meant you could no longer buy any games or DLC from the online storefront. Which would make Revelation impossible to purchase except in the form of the special edition. Which massively inflated the special edition’s value. Which meant that, when I sold it on eBay in March of this year, accounting for the initial purchase price and subtracting fees and postage, I made six hundred and fifty (650) Australian dollars of profit. And that is why it is my Game of the Year. Thank you all for reading, and I will leave you with a picture of one of the things I bought with my fates money.  Cheatsheet for VG's tabulations: 10. The Roottrees Are Dead 9. Spirittea 8. Strange Horticulture 7. AI: The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative 6. Blue Reflection Second Light 5. Heaven's Vault 4. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 3. Fire Emblem Engage 2. Elden Ring 1. Fire Emblem Fates
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Dec 22, 2023 03:35
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Lmao that ending loving ruled
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Dec 22, 2023 04:56
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Escobarbarian posted:Lmao that ending loving ruled
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Dec 22, 2023 04:57
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