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I decided I was probably going to try to write something about every one of the games I considered eligible for my list this year and... woof, just wrote 1200 words about my last-place game. Can't imagine I'll get close to that with any of the others but wow.
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Dec 5, 2023 18:30
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Mr Hootington posted:Do it for every game. How many do you have on the listm I only rank games that had some kind of major release or update this year that I played enough of to actually count. There's 25 games that fit that criteria this year.
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Dec 5, 2023 18:42
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Bugblatter posted:Whenever someone posts a descending list, I scroll to the bottom and read it backwards. This is demonic
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Dec 10, 2023 00:28
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Finally finished writing my list 
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Dec 21, 2023 23:00
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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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ToxicFrog posted:I bounced off Agent 47 and Silent Assassin pretty hard, but I really enjoyed Blood Money and this writeup has me thinking that next time I want some Hitman I should perhaps pick up this rather than replaying my favourite BM missions. So, the first two games in the original series, the ones you mention here, are very different structurally to modern Hitman. They're very basic and strict, some levels not even having proper targets and the "rules" of interactions not really clear a lot of the time. Blood Money is the game where you find Hitman stretching its wings and developing into its current form, so if you gravitated towards BM's more open approach, World of Assassination takes that idea and runs with it. WoA is incredibly open and there's several scripted (and countless unscripted) ways to approach each target whereas BM generally only had like, one scripted kill each. Also, good news! It's less racist, sexist, and overall misanthropic than Blood Money! Anyway, can't speak highly enough of WoA. Definitely give it a try.
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Dec 22, 2023 20:38
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haveblue posted:This makes me want to play FFXVI more than anything else I have read so far It's pretty accurate at times
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Dec 24, 2023 02:12
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this count is a sham!!!!!
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Dec 30, 2023 20:39
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It's not that they're that similar, it's that they're both laser-targeted at goons and are overwhelming favorites to win Personally, I think Disco had a stronger consensus in its (first) year to my recollection (which is hazy tbf), BG3 seems pretty split vs. TotK this time around, but without Zelda in the mix idk
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Jan 2, 2024 21:37
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not even trying to insult the winners but I have to believe some of those were the results of sarcastic troll campaigns. Like, RDR2 isn't even receiving updates anymore, so it winning a "best ongoing" category is... questionable
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Jan 3, 2024 04:44
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Every time I remember the game I think it's Curse, not Case, yeah
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Jan 3, 2024 20:21
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Pentiment was made by Obsidian, which was acquired by Microsoft, so it's not likely to be ported, no.
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Jan 4, 2024 19:43
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Unfortunately for IW, a Final Fantasy Fourteen expansion comes out this year, lmao
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Jan 12, 2024 20:56
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The Muppets better show up at this awards show
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Jan 12, 2024 22:04
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Alxprit posted:If tears of the kingdom doesn't crack top 10 I will be very shocked. Calling my shot now, it's #2
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Jan 12, 2024 22:13
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Three of my games already counted
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Jan 13, 2024 14:08
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VideoGames posted:I have always wondered how to pronounce this game. Is it Live a Live? Or Live a Live? Or Live a Live? Or even Live a Live? It's the one that doesn't make sense, OP
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Jan 13, 2024 14:55
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Maybe in that you don't have to use ASCII graphics now and there's an actual tutorial, lmao
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Jan 13, 2024 15:53
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Persona 5's pretty okay, I guess
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Jan 13, 2024 16:25
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I played a bunch of FFVII OG in the last couple weeks, think I'm nearing the end of Disc 2
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Jan 13, 2024 16:27
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fridge corn posted:Persona 4 is better The joke there is that I've LP'd Persona 5 twice, but also, yes, I probably agree with this
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Jan 13, 2024 16:28
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I liked FFXVI but I'm utterly shocked it hasn't shown up yet
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Jan 13, 2024 16:51
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Infinitum posted:I believe it's at 37 points, just edging out Dragonflight at 36 wrong roman numeral!!!!!
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Jan 13, 2024 16:54
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I haven't played the DLC for that game yet
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Jan 13, 2024 18:07
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Jossar posted:Curious to see what the game with the highest overall average is, especially as we head towards the top 10. The highest one so far is Hollow Knight, averaging at 8.8, right? Hollow Knight is the highest average, there was an award for it and everything
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Jan 13, 2024 18:19
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Cannot believe FFXVI made it to the top 10, as someone who ranked it in his top 10
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Jan 13, 2024 18:22
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Okay, stuff that hasn't appeared yet: Alan Wake II TotK Baldur's Gate 3 Armored Core VI Street Fighter 6 Super Mario Wonder Final Fantasy XVI Missing two here
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Jan 13, 2024 18:35
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Escobarbarian posted:Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty And Octopath II is probably the last one
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Jan 13, 2024 18:37
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Regy Rusty posted:Gonna just forget about Octopath 2 huh? I see how it is I remembered! Eventually!
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Jan 13, 2024 18:38
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If you're voting for Lies of P, STAY IN LINE
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Jan 13, 2024 18:43
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I just realized I don't know if Mortal Kombat 1 is on the list???
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Jan 13, 2024 18:46
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Phenotype posted:Hahah omg seriously? I forget how the totals break down, I voted it as #6 I think. I can't believe it didn't get into the top 20, I didn't even think to look for it in the lower ranked games. Upon review, I think the number of points it got is wrong, but it still wouldn't have placed.
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Jan 13, 2024 18:48
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Anyway, the real injustice is clearly that if you add up all the points all the versions of Hitman get it would have placed, and since World of Assassination consolidated all those versions, that should count as one game!!!!!
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Jan 13, 2024 18:50
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Okay, wow, I'm shocked some of these games are hanging in there for this long. Either Octopath II or FFXVI or both made it into the top 5, that's nuts.
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Jan 13, 2024 18:51
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Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the GOTY room!
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Jan 13, 2024 18:55
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haveblue posted:clive a clive
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Jan 13, 2024 19:01
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Time to call shots: 5. Octopath II 4. Phantom Liberty 3. Armored Core VI 2. Tears of the Kingdom 1. Baldur's Gate 3
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Jan 13, 2024 19:03
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Arist posted:Time to call shots: 
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Jan 13, 2024 19:15
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 15:06 |
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SirSamVimes posted:drat FF16 made it into the top three? top three times two, yes
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Jan 13, 2024 19:16
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