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I'm not ready to make my list yet since I'll probably play more games in the next two weeks than I did all year... at least once I finish Endwalker
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Dec 12, 2021 22:33
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 15:35 |
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This was a tough year, and maybe that contributed to me being less adventurous than I like, with my plans of playing a variety of games being winnowed down to focus on comfortable genres and franchises. Nevertheless, this was a good year for them, so... (Note that I am a year purist and even with this thread's rules I self-impose only having 2021 releases in the main list, because I use this to remember what a year was like in terms of game history. Thus, the first "special award" category...) Best Old Game:  Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne HD Remaster (Runners-up: Persona 5 Royal, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, Astro's Playroom, Wingspan) Some things in this game feel ageless, and the things that feel firmly rooted in an older era (particularly its dungeon design) were totally my jam. What makes this game resonate with me, even coming to it decades after its original release, is how much of an Absolute Mood this is, evoking the sense of wandering post-apocalyptic wastes and confronting truly inhuman visions of the world with a minimalist yet striking visual style that completely holds up. Perhaps set unfair expectations for SMTV lol Best Future Game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctS9DPDdPbA Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin I spent more time with this game's two demos this year than some full games (including some of the ones on the top ten list lol) because it really is a lot of fun. It's already getting some traction because of memes but the core combat and gameplay is really strong (should have been expected from Team Ninja) and just being layered with Final Fantasy trappings just amps up my excitement even more. The Dragoon Jump in this game is extremely satisfying, and I will probably main that, but the wealth of job possibilities and how differently they play really has me anticipating even more varied encounters and experiences beyond the two levels they've already shown. Best Game Soundtrack for a Game I Don't Actually Want to Play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18RxkHgNAGg Battlefield 2042 I spent so much time listening to this OST and literally getting Jokerfied (award-winning hildur guđnadóttir's work here) by its haunting industrial soundscapes that capture the mood of glimpsing the end of the world in sight as devastated climate refugees turn to the only option left to them, the meatgrinder of perpetual war. Obviously none of this actually resonates with the game but hey they spent the money to get a good soundtrack album out of it. The List  10. NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139... I wondered whether to count this as a "new" game at all, a la Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne HD Remaster, but I feel like re-recording the whole soundtrack, plus all the stuff with Ending E feeling like the real capstone after so long deserve it to clock here. And although lots of things about this game are still beautiful and powerful (none more than the soundtrack), the structure of repeating busywork in the subsequent playthroughs really grates, and shows why Automata would modify things years later. That new addition, on the other hand, was a poetic way to close things out...  09. Outriders Yes, this game's story is laughably bad and edgy to the point it becomes enjoyable again like a SyFy Original, unlike their attempt to do the same with Bulletstorm. But the main reason it clocks on this list is that the gunfighting, mobility, and moment-to-moment action feels so good. I legitimately don't understand what people mean when they say the shooting in Destiny "feels good" and assume it has to do with controller vibration, but here you genuinely feel like a demon tearing through the battlefield, like Doomslaying but with cool loot drops. In most circumstances, the enemies just have enough resilience to feel satisfying when you punch through them with your special abilities, without them feeling like bullet sponges that are just wasting your time. Yes, there is a cover system in the game, but the moment you realize that the cover is for them, not you, and that it mostly serves for you to know where your enemies will be pinned down so you can teleport behind them and go "nothing personnel, kid" is when the game creates a paradigm shift for you. It almost dropped off the list (or would have been here with an asterisk) because of some embarrassing attempts to "balance" a co-op shooter along with a bunch of technical issues, but thankfully they managed to right the ship and at this point I can recommend it without any reservations.  08. Metroid Dread I haven't played a Metroid game since Super Metroid, but I immediately felt right at home here. I am not an expert in the Metroidvania genre and I can't point to any significant innovations or things that the game does exceptionally well, but it felt like a solid and cohesive journey, the momentum just carrying me forward for all ten hours. The parry feels great to use. The early stealth sequences where suitably tension-filled and did the thing that I constantly blame survival horror games for not doing, and that's threading the needle between making chases too easy that there's no feeling of danger, and ones where you die so much that any tension evaporates to be replaced by annoyance. The midgame EMMI sequences started to drag, but overall it paid off with some great moments at the end. The final boss was especially fun to work through -- one time I felt great that I managed to do a phase skip and then immediately threw it away by dying. I feel like one of my defining gameplay traits is enjoying bosses where I bash my head against the wall until things click (like in Souls games) and they managed to capture that here, too.  07. New Pokémon Snap I have never been able to finish a mainline Pokémon game, as I missed the boat on being enthralled with the franchise as a kid and the games really seem too lightweight for me now. This, on the other hand, was perfect for me -- delimited gameplay, getting to see and catalog all the mons, and just bask in the sense of wonder of being in this world.  06. Before Your Eyes There's a certain niche of narrative indie game, short-story-like meditations on life and death, that sometimes feel like easy outs, especially when there are certain tropes and strategies that seem somewhat manipulative to me. This game certainly trends in that direction. This kind of game, therefore, is something that can be made or broken by a couple key design choices, and in this case the developers made the right ones. The gameplay "gimmick", using blinking as gameplay input, is extremely interesting to me in the way it creates a different embodied relationship with what's going on. (It might seem overly fussy to make a webcam a requirement, but if you have a laptop or a phone to hook up to your computer, you can probably play this game.) Whether you eyes are open or closed might seem to be limited design space but they do quite a good job of enabling different kinds of action, and different conduits for narrative, using it. Particularly, the way that the game might become a staring contest in some points, because you're straining to stay in the moment but your body won't let you, is used to powerful effect. And without spoiling too much, they are quite aware that tearing up might affect someone's ability to control their blinking and they certainly play with that, too. Get it on sale! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaqDu16Rfe4  05. Unbeatable [white label] This one came out of nowhere. Again, classification questions about a Kickstarter free "prologue" to what will be a much larger game, and who knows how that will turn out, but all I know is that this feels like a full-fledged rhythm game with over a dozen tracks, and with enough narrative vignettes around the edge to evoke enough of its setting and characters like a clipped but poignant short story. The style is extremely confident out of the gate, and the music is really drat good, what else do you need from a rhythm game? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXhYlgvCbfE  04. Shin Megami Tensei V This game feels incredibly good to play. The SMT Press Turn and Fusion mechanics continue to be polished and link throughout all of the game's other systems of exploration and overcoming powerful challenges. They've done an amazing job of translating the exploration of dungeon crawling out into sprawling spaces that recall open world games but without feeling as rote as the standard AAA activity-menu open world. It remains a satisfying puzzle to navigate through the environment and get a sense of its geometry and geography, and the boss fights are really thrilling -- this is one of the few JRPGs where I can suffer multiple losses in a fight and still feel like I can pull things out with reinforcements. The story is... fine, I'm not complaining that it needed to have more endearing characters or anything like that, if anything, the petty squabbles among pantheons pale in comparison to the cosmic horror that underlies Nocturne, but I blame my expectations more than the developers for successfully doing what they sought to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tghBJbeMQRQ  03. Final Fantasy VII Remake: INTERmission A rich, full, experience in itself, and I'm not just saying that because it obviously has to be with a 3-disc OST including a full 15-minute jazz suite. FF7R fully realized "active time battle" as an actual combat system that married tactical decision-making faithful to the original with a flowing battle system, and the refinements they've made to make playing just Yuffie were all successful. It really does make you feel like a descendant of shinobi, and the character they sketch here is one I hope to see in the main story soon enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q92loM2fE8  02. Persona 5 Strikers Just like with FF7R, another move into action RPG combat from a turn-based system that still feels "true" to the tactical foundations of an older system, really satisfying to unleash the all-out attacks and team-ups that were slightly more abstracted in the original. Moreover, I was blown away by encountering what really is a true sequel to Persona 5, and not just a less-essential spinoff like previous side games. It was just long enough away from these characters to geniunely be glad to see them again, and the story in a sense addresses many of the complaints one might have had with the original, especially in terms of characters with less screen time getting their chance to shine. I'll be playing this one again next year when it's time in my "real-time" playthrough lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXYUjJrGMjA (pictured: me wandering aimlessly waiting for Early Access to drop lol)  01. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker Near the end of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a tech quote cites Soren Kierkegaard, saying "And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not." Regardless of the merit of this mote of existentialist thought, it landed so strongly with my younger self because of how it meshed with the game I had been playing up to that moment: building a colony from the ground up, year by year, seeing them be able to make and do more miraculous things, to the point where their technology became indistinguishable from magic, and it was fitting that at the end of that story they would be thinking: what does it mean? I was thinking: my playing this game, taking this time -- what does it mean? This is the same territory that Final Fantasy XIV walks, and it is a landmark achievement that across all these years, they have successfully reached the end of this journey. One of the major skepticisms I see leveled at the game is its basis in MMO gameplay, and yet this is something that fits me like a glove. The feeling of etching a class's rotation into muscle memory (you're free to do all the classes on one character), and taking that into the boss fights where you link up with others in ways that sometimes feel like a struggle but sometimes move like music, and each of those battles capturing both the satisfaction of unlocking a puzzle while also being a dazzling spectacle of sight and sound. That works. But even the smaller mundane things, the dailies and the sidequests, the things which are more routine but which never cross the line into exploitative addiction fodder -- even those work, even those matter. This is because of what FF14 achieves with its time, with its years of building its world and all its locales and all its characters great and small. So many games ask you to save the world, but it's always in the abstract. You only see a sliver of it on a single path, and the rest is some vague archetype of duty. But when Endwalker asks its protagonists to save the world (this is hardly a spoiler lol), there is something meaningful in remembering the moments I spent in Ishgard literal years ago (and many more years ago for others), and the people there; the people in Doma, in Norvrandt, in every city that was home to not just epic battles but minor things like crafting decorations for a festival celebration. All these moments underpin the meaning of where FF14 takes its story. The title announces what this game is about, and the trailer signals that this is an End: the End of Days in the story, and the end of this current storyline in the game as a whole. There are so many ways in which it sinks its teeth into our current moment, in witnessing the world collapsing and some people rail against what seems like inevitability, other continue pointless petty struggles and cruelties, others hope to escape their problems by literally running away from them, and others give into despair. It legitimately and thoughtfully raises the philosophical question of whether what these characters do has any meaning, if the struggle is worthwhile if it will end up in the same place regardless. And in there, there's perhaps the echo of what meaning the players of this game find in it. The other note of trepidation that people have with the game is the sheer time it takes -- at this point, five full-length JRPG campaigns, literal hundreds of hours. A quantitatively signification portion of one's life. Is it worth it? Every person's life is different, so I cannot answer that. But I think about the concept of "legacy" that permeates this game, both in its narrative about people in the present grappling with the challenges left by those that have come before, and in the game's literal legacy built upon the ashes of a dead game (which continues to rear its head -- the infamous "2002" error that plagued slammed launch servers was a problem built into 1.0 code...). A game with a legacy, with history. It was what I was thinking when (ENDGAME SPOILERS IN LINK) this musical cue dropped. It is a moment that works because it recalls all of the game's history, stretching back years, to remind us that the moment we are playing was built on top of all those other moments. Maybe some people skipped to get here; the game will not begrudge you for that and they will be happy to take your money. But for those who worked their way through the journeys of the Warrior of Light to reach this point, it makes those layers of experience etched over the years that much more meaningful. I have also been thinking about Alpha Centauri because it gives me the confidence to think this about Final Fantasy XIV: This will undoubtedly be one of the greatest games I will experience in my lifetime. // (tl;dr) 10. NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139... 09. Outriders 08. Metroid Dread 07. New Pokémon Snap 06. Before Your Eyes 05. Unbeatable [white label] 04. Shin Megami Tensei V 03. Final Fantasy VII Remake: INTERmission 02. Persona 5 Strikers 01. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker CharlieFoxtrot fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Dec 31, 2021 |
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Dec 28, 2021 10:41
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Party Boat posted:I'm shocked that I didn't win biggest hipster last year by including the Guardian crossword on my list I was thinking about including the NYT Crossword on mine this year... but I didn't know what would count as "finishing" it and also I guess Deathloop was "slightly" better
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Dec 28, 2021 21:46
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VideoGames posted:*veeg deploys counter materia linked with justpost materia to steal back the rest of Rarity's post and make it for her*
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Dec 30, 2021 21:53
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Hmm I think I might have a last-minute addition to my list but I'll sit with it for a day and see how I feel about things tomorrowBeanpolePeckerwood posted:I'm sure they'll release a complete edition where I can skip the mmo crap one day. I'll wait for that! CharlieFoxtrot posted:One of the major skepticisms I see leveled at the game is its basis in MMO gameplay, and yet this is something that fits me like a glove. The feeling of etching a class's rotation into muscle memory (you're free to do all the classes on one character), and taking that into the boss fights where you link up with others in ways that sometimes feel like a struggle but sometimes move like music, and each of those battles capturing both the satisfaction of unlocking a puzzle while also being a dazzling spectacle of sight and sound. That works. But even the smaller mundane things, the dailies and the sidequests, the things which are more routine but which never cross the line into exploitative addiction fodder -- even those work, even those matter. CharlieFoxtrot fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Dec 31, 2021 |
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Dec 31, 2021 03:45
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(RARITY ALERT) What a coincidence, I just updated my list to include Before Your Eyes. It was added at #6, bumping everything below (and knocking "Deathloop" off). CharlieFoxtrot posted:
Updated list: 10. NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139... 09. Outriders 08. Metroid Dread 07. New Pokémon Snap 06. Before Your Eyes 05. Unbeatable [white label] 04. Shin Megami Tensei V 03. Final Fantasy VII Remake: INTERmission 02. Persona 5 Strikers 01. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker
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Dec 31, 2021 08:31
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Rarity posted:If you'd rather the points go to Elden Ring or split LoU/ER into a 1-2 and drop your #10 game that's fine, just let me know what you wanna do gently caress, if we can give votes to a demo maybe I should put stranger of paradise: final fantasy origin in the main list... no i will abide by my own code
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Dec 31, 2021 21:07
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The 7th Guest posted:
 
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Dec 31, 2021 21:54
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yw5jkAHgME
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Jan 1, 2022 08:44
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Happy New Year's to all who celebrate
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Jan 1, 2022 09:03
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The real new year's celebration is about to begin...
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Jan 7, 2022 22:26
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Rarity posted:I heard the countdown will have Relax or DIE doing a tribute performance of the classic FFX2 song 1000 Words legit one of my favorite vocal songs in the franchise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuqMbCCUclQ
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Jan 7, 2022 22:56
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I overslept and had to catch up on 20 pages but I'm live now for the good stuff
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Jan 8, 2022 21:12
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BowFu is a good abbreviation
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Jan 8, 2022 21:16
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When streaming Bowser's Fury, Tim Rogers mentioned that he and his friends called Plessie "Yoshi's Hot Mom"
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Jan 8, 2022 21:18
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Yeah I liked Prey more than Deathloop for sure, good wrenchfeel
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Jan 8, 2022 21:22
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Nice
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Jan 8, 2022 21:45
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I ate breakfast and did some paperwork so fell behind... More people should play Persona 5 Strikers, it's great Did anyone else think putting Neo in the title of your game and nothing else sounds too much like a remake? Perhaps one of the reasons it was one of Square's worst-selling games of the year
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Jan 8, 2022 22:28
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I enjoy these superlatives
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Jan 8, 2022 22:32
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https://twitter.com/SunhiLegend/status/1343361760129122312
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Jan 8, 2022 22:39
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New Snap almost has TOO much content, I was like "I have enjoyed my dozens of hours with the game and I'm sure some people are going to complete these piles of special requests but I'm good"
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Jan 8, 2022 22:44
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Entenzahn posted:A friend of mine talked me out of the new Pokemon Snap and now I feel stupid. I loved the first one, will definitely pick it up ASAP. This "friend" of yours...
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Jan 8, 2022 22:49
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Jan 8, 2022 22:51
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I still have to play Echoes of the Eye... I guess I played the original one year later so catching up will feel like deja vu
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Jan 8, 2022 22:56
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Kirby FPS...
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Jan 8, 2022 23:00
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I feel like a timeloop game must reset back to the same exact worldstate where things would unfold exactly the same way save for the player's actions
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Jan 8, 2022 23:10
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didn't the kirby fighting game come out this year
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Jan 8, 2022 23:17
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13 sentinels is mostr definitely a timeloop game thoug!!!!!
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Jan 8, 2022 23:29
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Regy Rusty posted:Not even slightly. Having time travel doesn't make something a time loop There is literally a part of the game that loops over and over until you get it right There are multiple parts of the game that do this
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Jan 8, 2022 23:31
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Deduction mode is like a timeloop
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Jan 8, 2022 23:37
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People will demand a recount
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Jan 8, 2022 23:41
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What are the PriceWaterhouseCooper guidelines for timeloop games
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Jan 8, 2022 23:43
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Mode 7 posted:That said, Before Your Eyes only getting 20 points was a crime. It made a last-minute landing on my list lol
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Jan 8, 2022 23:45
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adhuin posted:I mean tallest vampire lady, driving game, fighting? this post is not wrong
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Jan 8, 2022 23:47
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I'm getting MonHunRise in 4 days, maybe it will make it into my "Best Old Game" award this time next year
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Jan 8, 2022 23:53
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"blood and darkness"
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Jan 8, 2022 23:56
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Hades best Greek Pantheon Game of 2021
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Jan 8, 2022 23:57
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Once I realized that SMTV and Hades shared a lot of similar story beats it made me more favorable to the former
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Jan 8, 2022 23:58
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cheetah7071 posted:now to lie in wait to see if my stux bait worked
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Jan 9, 2022 00:01
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 15:35 |
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repost the image with the k crossed out and replaced with a t imo
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Jan 9, 2022 00:03
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