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2021 for me felt a lot better than 2020 did. Though I didn't spend too much time playing things that were absolutely brand new, I did engage with many things that I had always wanted to get to, but never did. And that gave this year an overall pleasant feeling as I conquered challenges old and new and broadened my horizons further beyond the scope of Nintendo. Let's talk about a few of the games that stuck with me. 10) MONSTER SANCTUARY  Though most of the game is in a splendidly chibi style, the detailed pixel art in the monster manual is quite fetching too. An indie game that combines metroidvania dungeon exploration and progression with monster collecting and turn-based battle systems sounds like a recipe for success. Even better when your monster designs are by and large cool, cute, and everything in between. But what really marred my experience with this game was the high difficulty. The game scales to you as you go through it, as you can explore various areas in any order you desire, so grinding wasn’t much of an option. You also hit a level cap by the end of the story, so when I found myself struggling with a battle near the endgame, I realized that my team and strategy simply weren’t good enough which meant I would either need to redo and re-grind an entire team back to the level cap from scratch or just give up. I chose the latter, unfortunately, and though they have since added an easier difficulty and further nerfed the challenge of those battles in particular, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth knowing that some devs are still unable to understand why Pokemon is so approachably simple to clear and only tends to get hard after the credits. Still, the journey through it was by and large enjoyable, and I don't regret the time I spent on it overall. 9) NEXOMON  My final team had some strong rare guys and some buggos, as is customary for my style. Between the prior game, Pokémon, and my frustrating foray into Digimon World: Dusk, I played a lot of monster collectors this year. Uh, anyway, Nexomon is something I heard about from a personal friend of mine. They had played and enjoyed the sequel, Nexomon: Extinction, and recommended to me to play the first game as the story logically follows from it. Nexomon started life as a mobile game, so when it came to Steam it had a bit of its blood sloshed around in wonky ways. Items that were normally in-app purchases were found in random places as hidden treasures, for example, and characters often made metatextual references to the fact that I was playing on a phone, when I wasn’t. However, the world design was quite pretty, the characters were amusing, and the actual creature designs for the Nexomon are impressively solid - more than the game frankly deserved, I think. Battle itself is a stripped down version of Pokemon. Speed isn’t a thing, you always go first and the enemy always goes second. A defeated enemy will be able to switch in and attack you immediately. Every single status ailment is immensely debilitating and remarkably easy to abuse. Also, every Nexomon only has a single type, limiting potential fun combos, along with many mechanics being obscure and difficult to figure out. Now that I’m saying all this to myself I’m surprised that I still left this game feeling positive about it. It only makes me more excited for the sequel, which I’ve heard fixed basically all of these issues and made things a lot more interesting. 8) HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER  An example of the game's "dialogue". Can't say it isn't pretty, at least. Hyper Light Drifter is a game I enjoyed purely on the back of its gameplay. Combat was very tricky, but I never felt cheated by the game, and checkpoints weren’t too crippling. I've even been complimented in my persistence and skill in figuring out the combat system as quickly as I seemed to. My only main issue was difficulty in locating some of the important collectables you need to progress. But, this game has a bit of a hard to understand story! It’s told entirely through actions and pictures, which is not my favorite thing in the world. I didn’t really Get It my whole time through and needed to rely on outside material in order to have a semblance of an idea on what was actually happening. There was also a myriad of optional content and hidden items I never found, and I wasn’t really encouraged to go back and seek them out without any kind of guidance. This isn't to say that these are things that can't be good or that aren't good, but it doesn't personally jive with me. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t as overall solid as some other indies I explored. 7) HYRULE WARRIORS: AGE OF CALAMITY  Maybe not the most original scene to capture, but definitely the best one regardless. I never played the original Hyrule Warriors much. I would play it at a friend’s house here or there, take in some of the coverage as it got its DLC updates and eventual release on Switch. And that’s also why this game is in my list - I borrowed it, not bought it. And for the price of free, this was a splendid experience. Though the story’s “alternate timeline” approach is seen by some as cowardly or unfitting of Breath of the Wild’s atmosphere, I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to see things from Zelda’s perspective, get more fleshed out characters beyond the champions and fall in love with an adorable time-traveling egg baby. It was a deceptively simple game all things considered and bad framerates never marred my experience personally. Something fun to waste time with. 6) THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: SKYWARD SWORD HD  I loved the original races in this game. Future Zelda games should come up with more unique ones. Skyward Sword was one of two Zelda games I had never played before (the other being Spirit Tracks) and I had heard tons of opinions about it. All ranging from, fantastic story, great dungeon design, creative items, to the other end of repetitive bosses, lack of freedom, annoying fetchquests, and boring traversal. So where do I land? I generally liked the game, and its flaws didn’t overwhelm its good points to me. I got a bit annoyed with Scrapper, and the dungeons blended together a bit for me, and that second Imprisoned fight really blows… but I would die for my best friend Beetle whom scout, acquire item, and kill small foe. Also one of the most satisfying acquirals of the Bow in the series with it coming so late and allowing you to pretty much trivialize basic combat as a result. The story was good as advertised, Groose entirely lived up to the hype. I am glad I played this game with the new button controls though. 5) BASTION  This game's heart is in its action, but there's plenty of fun little nonsense if you poke around. A classic indie game, the first of Supergiant’s ilk, that I had always said I would play but never did, until this year where I finally followed through as part of the aforementioned indie focus. And you know what? It lived up to the hype! Some of the things I liked about it were the great soundtrack, the challenging but not overwhelming combat, the variety in weapon choice, and the story’s framing and presentation were far from Hyper Light Drifter's muddled style. Sure, it helps that I have a sweet talking narrator to get me through everything... but still. This is a game that’ll stick with me and I’ll always remember. 4) PSYCHONAUTS  Every so often you feel like you're falling back into normalcy, then the game shows you something like this and you remember where you are. Yes, not the sequel, but the first game! Psychonauts was always one of those games I would lightly hear about every so often. Someone would be like, oh man this old game was great! And I never knew why or how it had come to be that way. I was graciously able to win a Steam copy of this game from a giveaway and decided with the sequel looming that this was the best time to finally give it a try. This game blew me away! There’s an insane amount of love and detail put into the voice acting and the character interactions, the overall world and mental worlds are designed with the utmost care and sincerity, and it was all wrapped up in humorous and wacky hijinks that kept me guessing as to what nonsense would be happening next. My only main criticisms are the lack of ease with which you could find all the collectables and some annoying puzzle aspects in levels like the Milkman Conspiracy or Gloria’s Theater, along with a bit of motion sickness potential in the way some levels move and shift. Psychonauts 2 looks immensely fantastic and a perfect evolution of the first game’s personality, so I’m really glad that their legacy was able to continue. 3) DELTARUNE (CH 1 & 2)  It might be a Picture Taken Moments Before Disaster... but it felt cozy in a way I envied. My secret shame is that I never myself played Deltarune when it first released three years ago. I watched one person play through it on a livestream and from there I felt like I had seen it all. When Chapter 2 was announced, I thought that maybe this time I would finally play it myself, but I was feeling pressured at the time and didn’t want to commit to it yet. But the amount of spoilers I had seen almost immediately basically forced my hand and made me play the game very quickly after its console release. And for once that kind of pressure didn't make me regret my decision. Deltarune is an interesting game because it’s still currently incomplete but it feels very evolved and beyond its time. Like Psychonauts it has a solid amount of comedy weaved in with its setting, but it also tells some very important stories for its characters. The battle system is also much more fleshed out in Chapter 2, feeling like the numbers and equipment I acquire are mattering in a way that they never did in Undertale. Plus being able to see your “spare progress” is just smart. The endless theorizing, discussion, and obsession with this game is one of the few “popular” things that really has its hooks in me, and I don’t feel ashamed to admit it - it’s a good game! 2) MONSTER HUNTER RISE  It's so cute before it spews fire at your toesies! There’s not a lot to say about Monster Hunter that hasn’t been said already. So for my part, I favorably compare this game to its predecessor, Monster Hunter World & Iceborne, in several aspects. The silkbind skills flesh out a lot of weapons, feeling more like core parts of their movesets in many ways that the Hunter Arts from Generations did not. The Wirebug adds accessibility in recovering from fumbles and new ways to traverse the terrain that never existed before, but there’s also an element of skill in using it right, and not just launching yourself straight into the monster’s next attack. And I don’t know about you, but I like that monsters are just always on the map 100% of the time and you don’t need to bother throwing a paintball at them or gathering their footprints. I’m looking forward to this game reaching new peaks with its expansion, but as it stands now I’m not dissatisfied with Monster Hunter Rise. Also, one of the best final bosses in the series, and this is a series that had a final boss that was a bug. Just saying, if it managed to impress me despite that, it surely did something right. 1) FINAL FANTASY XIV ONLINE (count it as Endwalker I guess for voting purposes)  Being only lightly perceived at the precipice of existence is kind of swell. From the moment this game was new and fresh off the cusp of its A Realm Reborn stuff, I knew that I would like it. However, I was not a very privileged person in that I didn’t own any Sony consoles, nor did I have a PC capable of running the game. So the game mostly left my mindspace beyond a few mentions of it here and there as my life progressed. This year, I finally decided that after all the quest culling, the addition of flying to ARR, and the new expansion hot on everyone’s minds, that I would finally give it a try. And you know what? Big fuckin’ surprise, I love it. I loved it in ARR. I loved it more in Heavensward. I loved it a lot in Stormblood. I loved it more than that in Shadowbringers. I caught up fully, and despite the pressure to make it just barely right on time for its release, I loved this game more than I thought possible in Endwalker. And the best part is as I go through the tedious tasks I love in games like these, I can feel myself improving not just in my number go up, but in my own personal skill in hitting my buttons, dodging mechanics, understanding the flow of battle, so on and so forth. It feels like something I have been missing from my life that I’ve finally found. It’s so great to be able to share this experience with friends who support me and want to see me succeed in this game as much as they did when they were newer. It’s a game that makes me feel loved, both in-game and in real life. And there’s nothing more valuable than that. GAMES THAT DIDN'T MAKE THE TOP TEN: Digimon World: Dusk, for being just awful in almost every way. Fire Emblem Awakening, for being totally Seinfelded into not making much of a personal impact for me. Baba is You, for spooking me with its metaverse manipulation. Pokémon Shining Pearl, for losing the polish that one would expect after foisting it off to a third party. Technically I'm still playing gachas and MapleStory but those feel less like games and more like an extension of my daily life so they don't count. I hope you all liked my post! I'll get to reading some poster posts myself soon enough. Alxprit fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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Dec 14, 2021 00:36
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 09:21 |
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Heads up I edited my list to clarify that I want my XIV vote to be counted for Endwalker even though I talked about (and played) the entirety of the game and all its expansions from start to finish. Also I'm glad to see so many people talking about The Forgotten City since I wasn't sure if it was "obscure" or not but it seems like it's captured a lot of hearts! I didn't play it myself since it's not my kind of genre, but I watched a friend stream it and it was a compelling story with plenty of cool moments and choices.
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Dec 22, 2021 18:25
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I won't complain but I also won't pay full attention.
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Dec 27, 2021 07:14
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ChrisBTY posted:5) Pokemon: Per Aspera Ad Astra wait no this is the only one I'm actually curious about
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Dec 27, 2021 18:34
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I might be the only human being who played Nexomon 1 this year
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Dec 28, 2021 23:06
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Shoutout to the person that included Webbed. I haven't gotten to it yet but as the resident Bug-Obsessed Gamer it's definitely on my shortlist for next summer of indie streams.
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Jan 1, 2022 05:28
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Runa posted:
Glad you like it, it took a lot of compression
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Jan 1, 2022 06:15
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When I saw 6 pages of posts I thought the countdown would've been done by now. Silly me.
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Jan 8, 2022 18:12
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My Top Ten's current placings: 10) Monster Sanctuary - 13-point bracket 9) Nexomon - 2-point bracket (probably should be 1 because it's listed under Nexomon: Extinction, which is the sequel?) 8) Hyper Light Drifter - 3-point bracket 7) Age of Calamity - 10-point bracket 6) Skyward Sword HD - 9-point bracket 5) Bastion - 6-point bracket 4) Psychonauts 1 - 7-point bracket 3) Deltarune - Top 50 2) Monster Hunter Rise - Top 50 1) FFXIV Endwalker - Top 50 One of my didn't quite places, Baba Is You, was in the Top 75, so maybe I am the April Fool of gamer tastes.
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Jan 8, 2022 19:18
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Rarity posted:I googled Nexomon and Extinction came up so I assumed you'd forgotten to put the subtitle That's the problem with your second game containing the entire title of your first. I forgive you.
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Jan 8, 2022 19:42
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Dragon Quest XI is art.
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Jan 8, 2022 20:16
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You'll all get yours when Sunbreak comes out this year and it's on PC so everyone will be playing Rise.
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Jan 8, 2022 23:49
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Perhaps one of the most beautiful krebbos I've seen.
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Jan 9, 2022 00:41
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 09:21 |
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:Me seeing the probe incoming Couldn't have said it better myself. Please. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 9, 2022 00:52
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