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Metroid Dread will be on my list whenever I gather the brainpower to actually post it. It's one of only two 2021 games on there, I think.
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Dec 15, 2021 14:13
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Harrow posted:Metroid Dread will be on my list whenever I gather the brainpower to actually post it. Correction: there will be three 2021 releases on my list, though one is a remaster of a 24-year-old game
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Dec 15, 2021 15:37
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Escobarbarian posted:Speaking as a non-FFXIV player separating the expansions doesn’t really seem to me to make any sense at all? I think the reason is that, when people are ranking FFXIV expansions on these lists, they're not really talking about the overall MMO experience of playing the game. It's not usually FFXIV as a whole that's being listed. Instead, it's the main story of a specific expansion that's being brought up, and each expansion's main story is a 40-60 hour JRPG in and of itself. I'm ambivalent about whether they should be counted separately or not but it makes more sense to count FFXIV expansions separately than it would to count, like, a Civilization game expansion separately, at least to me. Votes for Endwalker might as well be votes for the game as a whole, though, given that the whole point of Endwalker is that it's the ending of the entire main story up to this point.
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Dec 18, 2021 14:06
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Yeah that comparison doesn't quite hold up because there aren't two different versions of FFXIV running at any given time. WoW Shadowlands and WoW Classic: TBC are functionally entirely separate games in a way that FFXIV Shadowbringers and FFXIV Endwalker aren't. FFXIV expansions are in a weird spot where you could make very strong arguments either way, though. You could argue that if FFXIV expansions can be counted all together than maybe Yakuza games should all count together, because they also tell a sequential story? But then there's no progress carryover there so it's not quite the same. You could argue that FFXIV expansions are functionally like the separate discs of a PS1 FF game and wouldn't it be weird if Disc 3 of FFVII had to be counted separately from Disc 2 even though they're all part of the same continuous story experience? But then the discs of a PS1 FF game all released at the same time and not as separate purchases years apart. So yeah it's a weird spot for the purposes of a ranking like this. This distinction is mostly academic though because I would be very surprised if enough people voted for FFXIV but specifically not Endwalker for it to actually affect the rankings in a meaningful way.
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Dec 18, 2021 16:29
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Well, this sure has been a year. To tell you the truth, I’ve been having a hard time this year. That’s not special, a lot of people had a hard time in 2021, and my version of that was pretty mild in the grand scheme of things. Still, this year, starting around late spring, it started to be hard for games to break through the fog. There are plenty of games that I was excited about, and still am excited about, that just couldn’t get a mental foothold, that I started and never finished, or bought and never even started. I’ll get to them one day. This wasn’t going to be that year, though. Last year, I listed the games that I knew I’d love but that I hadn’t gotten to yet (three of them are even on this list!). This year, that list would just be long enough it’d just bum me out. In some ways, though, that makes the games that made this list all the more special to me. They’re the ones that broke through. It’s not a long list, but every game on this list is something I loved enough, that grabbed me enough, that I had no trouble at all playing hours and hours of them, seeing them through to the finish and usually quite a lot more. This year, I’ve got a top eight.  8. Persona 5 Royal I’ve written a lot this year about Persona 5 (specifically Royal) and why I love it. Specifically, I’ve written about how I’m not entirely sure why I love it. It’s got problems. The pacing is, to put it kindly, insane. The character writing is sometimes flat and inconsistent. The plot is… well, until Royal’s third semester I don’t know if I’d ever say it’s better than fine, I guess. But if there was ever a case for sheer style carrying an experience, Persona 5 is it. That, and the smooth, snappy combat, the satisfying dungeon exploration, the persona customization, and yeah, the day-to-day life sim aspects. All of it combines to make a game that, I think, is much greater than the sum of its parts. Royal makes it even better. I was skeptical that I’d ever want to play through Persona 5 a second time, even years after I first played it, but Royal grabbed me and didn’t let go anyway. I even maxed out all the confidants a second time. The quality of life improvements, better dungeons, new parts of Tokyo to explore, and better boss fights kept me engaged right up to the new Royal semester, where I got to see what Persona 5 looks like when the writing is actually pretty good. As I’ve written before on these forums, if Persona 5 Royal is a sign of where the series is headed with the departure of its previous director, I’m very excited to see what’s next.  7. Monster Hunter Rise I tried, many times, to get into Monster Hunter, but it wasn’t until World came out in 2019 that I finally got it. That’s not unusual, I’m sure, as World was a wildly successful entry in the series. I absolutely fell in love with Monster Hunter World and with Monster Hunter as a franchise (and with the insect glaive, my favorite weapon now and forever). And somehow, I think I like Rise even more. The addition of the wirebugs, the fancy new moves for every weapon, the more colorful and exciting weapon and armor designs, the beautiful town music, all of it is just purely fun. This is a joyful game through and through, and I can’t wait for Sunbreak.  6. NEO: The World Ends with You Never, in a million years, did I expect The World Ends with You to get a sequel. I played the original years ago when it first came out and it stuck with me ever since. It’s a niche game with really idiosyncratic gameplay, a great cast of characters, and a bangin’ soundtrack. I only played it once, but I never forgot it, and as much as I wanted a sequel, enough time had passed that I assumed it would never happen. And yet, here we are. A sequel no less colorful, fun, and exciting, more than a decade later, delivering another kickass soundtrack, a new spin on the teamwork-heavy combat mechanics, and resolutions to character arcs I didn’t even know I wanted more resolution to. Another absolute joy of a game and I’m so thankful it exists. That’s going to be a theme of this list, I think: games that I’m thankful exist. Speaking of sequels that we had to wait a long time for, how about one we had to wait even longer for? That’s right, I’m talking about…  5. Metroid Dread I’ll be honest: if every time Nintendo’s like “hey we don’t have anything to show you for Prime 4 quite yet” we get another Mercury Steam-developed Metroid game, I’m fine with another couple of delays. It’s a little bit odd to realize that it was nineteen years ago that I played Metroid Fusion, all the way back in high school, and that it’s been that long since there was another sequel in the mainline Metroid series. But drat does it feel good to be back. Metroid Dread pulls off a fascinating tightrope walk. It guides you forward in ways that are subtler than Fusion but still obvious enough that you almost never get lost unless you go off searching on your own. It gives you new upgrades at a pace that should be too fast but somehow still feels satisfying as your arsenal steadily expands. Its boss fights are punishing in a way that could easily be frustrating but never quite gets there. And I think its final boss battle pulls off an extraordinary trick that lets a challenging final phase somehow still feel like a victory lap. Metroid Dread is an absolute blast, and I hope its success brings about the revival that 2D Metroid so strongly deserves.  4. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim This is one of the coolest loving games ever made. I don’t have much to say about 13 Sentinels that hasn’t already been said. This game is a dazzling achievement. It somehow weaves together thirteen separate stories that all seem to take place in their own pastiche of a specific type of sci-fi, with plot twists and grand reveals so huge and frequent that you’d think the whole thing would be completely incoherent, and yet it never is. It’s carried by an extremely charming cast of characters, not to mention that beautiful Vanillaware art. If you haven’t played it yet, please do. If you like narrative games at all, this one’s a winner on just about every level. Go in about as blind as possible and with an open mind and you’re going to have a fantastic time.  3. SaGa Frontier Remastered How the hell did this get released? And I mean, like… how the hell did this get released twice? SaGa Frontier was an extremely strange, idiosyncratic JRPG when it first came out in 1997. It was impenetrable, obtuse, light on narrative, even lighter on any sort of direction or instruction, but once you got past that, it’s an absolute blast to play. Also, one of the playable main characters is Asellus, a lesbian unseelie fae vampire queen on a quest to get revenge on the evil vampire who turned her and y’know what, that rules. Somehow, all these years later, it got a fantastic remaster that made it even better. SaGa Frontier Remastered adds an eighth playable character—a character who was planned to be playable in the original, but with a reimagined role for the remaster—and some very welcome quality-of-life features like New Game+, not to mention some additional superbosses for people (like me) who just really love doing crazy things with this game’s character building and combat systems. But here’s the thing that’s baffling to me (in the best way possible): SaGa Frontier still has its rough edges. Just about all of them, in fact. It gives you a bit more direction, but it’s just as obtuse and strange as ever. That this remaster leaves intact SaGa Frontier’s sheer weirdness makes me happier than I can express, and diving back into the game this past spring felt like going home again. To close this entry, let me share with you a snippet of an interview from the Japanese book Essence of SaGa Frontier, where one of the systems designers is asked about the game’s skill learning system, called “sparking.” quote:Interviewer: Regarding the “sparking” system, what kind of rules are there for sparking abilities? That’s the kind of game SaGa Frontier is: the kind where one of the lead designers made changes at the last minute so even he wouldn’t understand how it worked. God I love this game.  2. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker I had a very hard time deciding which of my top two games of the year would be #1. Maybe this should’ve been. If I’m being honest with myself, I might have even knocked it down a ranking just to combat recency bias. (Also, I wanted to use one of my own screen shots, but believe it or not that's the only one I took during the story that wouldn't be a spoiler!) Final Fantasy XIV is a remarkable game, in that it uses the medium of an ongoing MMORPG to tell a story that is essentially a Final Fantasy prestige drama TV series. It’s a pretty rare opportunity to get to tell a story in this way in video games, and Final Fantasy XIV takes that opportunity and runs with it. And it’s rarer still for an MMORPG’s story to have an ending, a series finale that ties up just about all the loose ends and celebrates everything that came before. That’s what Endwalker achieves. Endwalker tells a story that strikes a lot of the same thematic notes as my favorite Final Fantasy (that’d be IX, the best one), so maybe part of the reason I loved it so much is that it resonated so much with another game that is lodged deep in my heart. But at the same time, Endwalker got to build on years of character development, setting development, and setup to deliver one hell of a conclusion, clearing the table for a new story to begin soon. And that new story is almost as exciting a prospect as the ending we just got. I really, really loved Endwalker. It gave me just about everything I could’ve asked for. Which means that #1 game really ought to be something special, huh?  1. Yakuza: Like a Dragon For all intents and purposes, Yakuza: Like a Dragon was my first Yakuza game. I’d played a bit of Yakuza 0 before, but I don’t think it was the right time for it, and the mood never struck me to pick it back up. Going into Like a Dragon, I knew just enough from general gaming culture osmosis to know what a Goro Majima is, why Kazuma Kiryu is such a good boy, and that Kamurocho is a second home to a growing legion of Yakuza fans. I picked up Yakuza: Like a Dragon mostly because I couldn’t believe an established, long-running series would make an abrupt shift to an entirely different genre in its seventh main entry. The switch from a brawler with light RPG elements to a fully turn-based Dragon Quest homage was absolutely fascinating to me, and with the knowledge that Like a Dragon was meant to be a good jumping-on point for new fans, I couldn’t resist. Listen. I love the modern Persona games. I love Persona 5. Those games hold a special place in my heart, and I’m here for whatever Persona does next. So bear that in mind when I tell you that Yakuza: Like a Dragon is what Persona 5 wishes it was. This is a game that perfectly sells the slow development of the main cast into a newly-formed family. A game that doesn’t bury its social commentary under layers of metaphor but tackles it head-on. A game that never loses sight of the humanity of its characters, heroic or villainous or anywhere in between, and where the humor somehow works to build the world and characters without feeling out of place or distracting. What really sticks with me, though, is the main cast. This is a story about 30-, 40-, and 50-something fuckups who’ve lost years of their lives through spinning their wheels, through mistakes and lies, through just being screwed over, who come together to build themselves a new family and start finding new meaning in life together. It’s a story about an empathetic guy who badly wants to be a hero in a world that’s not built for heroes, and who can somehow love and forgive even people who have wronged him terribly, because they mean so much to him. That’s something I really needed in a story. Yakuza: Like a Dragon was my first Yakuza game, but it already led me to jump back into Yakuza 0, and I get it now. In 2022 I’d like to play through the whole series, and maybe even replay Like a Dragon, in time for Yakuza 8. I can’t wait to hang out with Ichiban and friends again. Thanks for reading, everyone. I hope you all have a great new year! Shortened list for easy tabulation: 8. Persona 5 Royal 7. Monster Hunter Rise 6. NEO: The World Ends with You 5. Metroid Dread 4. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim 3. SaGa Frontier Remastered 2. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker 1. Yakuza: Like a Dragon Harrow fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Dec 29, 2021 |
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Dec 29, 2021 23:33
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Sir_Phobos posted:1. SaGa Frontier Remastered 
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Dec 30, 2021 01:27
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Kull the Conqueror posted:This is neither a critique nor a judgment but I had no idea an MMO was this IN in 2021. It's kind of a perfect storm for FFXIV, really. It's a game that has been telling a coherent ongoing story for 10 years that just released an actual conclusion to that story. At the same time, MMOs got a boost in 2020 thanks to the pandemic. And then, WoW imploded completely with the combination of the latest expansion being so bad even the streamers left and the horrible behavior that came to light in 2021, so a lot of WoW streamers and WoW players in general gave FFXIV a try and ended up liking it. The MMO genre is still on the decline I'd say, but FFXIV carved itself out a really unique niche and was at one of its highest points ever at the moment WoW hit one of its lowest, so it was perfectly positioned to pick up a lot of the former WoW players who left.
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Dec 30, 2021 21:22
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Rarity posted:Maybe in the Year of No Games it was the only game This is SaGa Frontier erasure
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Dec 30, 2021 21:34
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They recently announced server merges, so not really. New World stepped on a pretty impressive number of rakes in its first few months, and every time it tried to avoid stepping on a rake it stepped on three other ones instead.
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Dec 30, 2021 21:51
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I stopped paying attention to New World eventually but I'm sure someone could write a pretty great post detailing all of the pretty remarkable ways that game collapsed. For example, sometimes servers would just jump forward in time by 40 days, meaning that players would suddenly be 40 days behind on their in-game property taxes (yeah, there's property tax if you owe a house) and lose their house, and also there was no way to roll back so you just had to live with it.
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Dec 30, 2021 21:55
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Jerusalem posted:All the talk about FFIV having a great story. Is it a story you can actually play/complete by yourself or do you have to do it with a group? Most of the story is solo but you do have to do dungeons and the bigger story boss fights with other players. The game has very easy matchmaking for these activities, though, and heavily incentivizes experienced players to populate those matchmaking queues so there are always people to play with. They’re designed to require minimal to no communication to facilitate that. Starting in Shadowbringers you can do story dungeons with NPCs, but you still need to group for most of the big boss fights. The game is also tuned so that you don’t really have to engage with much (or any) grinding if you just want to play the story. You get gear for doing the story and it’s generally tuned so that just doing story quests is enough to keep up with levels.
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Dec 30, 2021 23:36
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Jerusalem posted:
I will say that FFXIV and WoW are very different beasts when it comes to how pleasant it is to play with other people. FFXIV has extremely strict community moderation so it is very, very rare for someone to be mean or even slightly snippy at random other players in dungeons. If someone's being a dick, they can very easily get banned for it. As a result, FFXIV players tend to be extremely patient with new players (called "sprouts" because they have little green sprouts by their names) or even experienced players learning a new dungeon or fight. I was personally and very obviously responsible for getting my whole group killed during the Endwalker final boss, right before the final phase, and the worst anyone said was "RIP lol" Obviously if you don't wanna play an MMO, you don't wanna play an MMO, but it's worth mentioning that WoW and FFXIV really couldn't be more different in that regard. They've gone to pretty great lengths to make playing with randoms suck as little as possible in FFXIV.
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Dec 31, 2021 01:37
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Mostly just comparing to WoW specifically, it's night and day. WoW is notoriously toxic in the specific way that FFXIV's moderation is designed to prevent. That said you can't play right now anyway and who knows when they'll reopen it for new players so we should probably stop evangelizing now, of all times 
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Dec 31, 2021 01:49
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ShallNoiseUpon posted:You'd think a mod would read the entire OP before posting. Never
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Jan 1, 2022 03:06
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cheetah7071 posted:Blue Reflection 2 is the best slow paced character game this year Do you need to play the first game first or are they not direct sequels
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Jan 1, 2022 18:04
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lmao
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Jan 1, 2022 22:54
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Sakurazuka posted:The gameplay is basically the same as it's been since 2012, so outside of boss mechanics and job specific changes there's not much to really talk about? It can be hard to convey to someone who isn't a player but I would say that the boss fights in Endwalker dungeons and trials have been a lot of fun so far, and pretty clever. People generally don't like when you talk about specific mechanics outside of spoilers but I do think the fight have been more fun this time than in any previous expansion, even the solo duty battles (especially the last one). Encounter and job design have been continuously improving, even if the core gameplay systems are still the same. Stux posted:this ithread is now for talking about old school runescape. the pheonix pet in my post is a 1/5000 drop and i love it. what color should i make it: It's extremely Basic but I'm feeling the orange
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Jan 3, 2022 02:06
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Stux I read your Old School Runescape review and it made me want to give it a shot one day. What makes RS3 so much worse, out of curiosity? I was sorta interested in the Dungeoneering skill but I saw that's only in RS3 and if the rest of the game kinda sucks then that's obviously not worth it.
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Jan 4, 2022 18:50
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SaGa Frontier Remastered appears to have made an actual ranking 
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Jan 8, 2022 16:34
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Rarity posted:FF9 loving CHARTED
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Jan 8, 2022 16:52
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VideoGames posted:I don’t know Harrow but it sounds like you’re glad it did!  SaGa Frontier is a weird unicorn of a game and it makes me very happy!
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Jan 8, 2022 17:34
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Zaggitz posted:I keep buying SaGa games in an effort to get into the series but am always instantly intimidated by their systems. Please come to the SaGa thread, we are all happy to explain any inscrutable system you'd like because our brains are broken by learning those systems in the first place! https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3964838
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Jan 8, 2022 18:19
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Regrettably I'm not going to be around for most of the rest of the countdown I hope all my favorite games place highly and that we all remember that we all win because we got to play cool games
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Jan 8, 2022 18:51
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VideoGames posted:Now this next game is a very special one. It’s an elect member of a very exclusive club, one with just a handful of members. This is one of the few games to have ranked in every version of our countdown dating all the way back to 2018. But just who will it be? It’s time to find out as we see your #48! Checking in to for Dragon Quest, hell yeah Some day VG will know where my av comes from
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Jan 8, 2022 20:21
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VideoGames posted:FFVIIremake. It was the game. FFVII solidified it, and FFVIII has confirmed it. A stunning declaration 
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Jan 8, 2022 20:26
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Loving the Kirby awards 
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Jan 8, 2022 23:01
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13 Sentinels owns so much
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Jan 8, 2022 23:26
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Metroid Dread loving rules
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Jan 9, 2022 00:29
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Jan 9, 2022 00:34
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Someone probe Stux with a picture of something from Endwalker, I can’t because I’m biased
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Jan 9, 2022 00:38
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If nobody hits me with an Endwalker probe before I get home I’ll dish them out myself (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 9, 2022 00:43
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