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Games that have not left my mind since I finished them: Disco Elyisum Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Games I look forward to finishing next year: Super Mario Wonder Spider-Man 2 Hades Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Signalis Resident Evil 4 (2023) Etrian Odyssey II and III HD Baldur's Gate III Every game listed from this point forward is a game I completed this year. Dishonorable mentions: The Last of Us, Part 2 The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Dead Space (2023) Alan Wake 2 Games I completed this year that are not included elsewhere on this list: Final Fantasy I through VI, Pixel Remasters Etrian Odyssey I HD Kirby: Return to Dream Land Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Super Mario 3D World Pony Island Honorable mentions: Star Wars: Jedi Survivor Vampire Survivors Anodyne Apologies in advance for the E/N nature of this post. But hey, it’s my list. 10. Super Mario RPG  Pictured: the point at which my daughter fell in love with this game Remakes are, somewhat by definition, a failure of creativity. You’re devoting time and resources to a photocopy of an original work rather than just making something original. Despite this, creative choices do go into their formation. Systems are refined, graphics are made shinier, music is recomposed. There’s an art to remaking a game well, and very little of that art is the simple fact of making it available on modern hardware. What a remake even is varies based on so many things. What makes a good one varies considerably more. Super Mario RPG is already a great video game. It was a great video game when it came out in 1996. It’s better than every single successor in its lineage. It is readily accessible, albeit not via legitimate means. So, the logical conclusion here is that remaking it is a cash grab, and that was what I sadly thought when I saw the trailer, even as my inner ten-year-old smashed the preorder button. Regretfully, I am the exact market for such a cash grab. It is evident that ArtePiazza is as in love with the original as I am. ‘90s Mario’s weird little squashed body is testament to that. Nearly every inch of this game is as I remember it from my childhood – animation cues, sound effects, timed hit timings. The dialogue is nearly entirely untouched, despite an occasionally questionable translation. It has all the brashness and humor I remember, and it is timeless. Some minor changes here and there, probably because Nintendo now maintains an iron grip on their IP which they didn’t bother with thirty years ago, and some changes I object to (why does Square Enix hate good fonts in their remasters? Where did the card suit magic effects go? Why remove the dated Mack the Knife joke and replace it with an equally cumbersome joke?), but overall playing it again was a deeply enjoyable nostalgic experience. I am instantly transported to being 10 again and hooking my Super Nintendo into the TV in my grandmother’s guest bedroom so I could monopolize it with Super Mario RPG, running my little feet through the dated-even-at-the-time red shag carpet as I practiced my 100 jumps. At this beginning of this I mentioned that creative choices were made here, and while the transition to the modern era of hardware is a positive one, the actual additions are underwhelming. The team-up limit breaks are stupendously powerful, making an easy game even easier. The endgame boss refights, while creative in their execution and an overall positive addition, are still not very threatening. The teams-switching mechanic is half-baked, resulting in little more than Final Fantasy X “I’m going to swap in X to perform this one specific role and then swap them back out next round” whack-a-mole. It could have been more – maybe they’ll spin this engine out into a sequel that could be more, someday – but for now it feels like an afterthought. As I said, Super Mario RPG was already a great game, with limited room for improvement, so there wasn’t much runway there. My daughter, age 5, loves this game. She struggles with platformers but also paradoxically believes she is the best to ever hold a controller, resulting in a low frustration threshold for her own failure. She is pathologically incapable of uttering the phrase “could you please help me” when it comes to any facet of her life. This means that games like Super Mario Wonder, while simple and delightful and approachable, become life lessons in dealing with challenges, particularly when dad effortlessly sails through the course. There’s value in that, sure, but it’s not always a good time for her. Super Mario RPG gives her a more level playing field – she can deliberate, she can focus on nailing the timing of a timed hit, she can waste FP with flashy moves and then recover them all with an item and still emerge victorious. She can laugh as Mallow pastes himself into a wall, and then rewatch it in the cutscene viewer and laugh all over again. I gently nudge her in the proper direction to advance the story, and she can handle all the rest. Except for the Yoshi egg minigame, that’s a group activity. I did have to explain to her what a bazooka is, though. Being a dad is a curious journey sometimes. 9. Final Fantasy XVI  Pictured: clash of the Titan(s) Final Fantasy XVI is a conservative video game. It’s not necessarily a video game for conservatives, though if you hate women and queer folk I’m sure you can find something in this game to enjoy. Or even if you just hate people in general. This game is awash in misery and only occasionally punctuated by moments of small joy, true to its inspirational source material (early Game of Thrones). Some of that misery is also directed at you, the player, as you enjoy tedious side quests, entirely too frequent combat, and minimal tangible reward. This was easily my most anticipated game of the year. I, a Final Fantasy XIV degenerate and longtime FF stan, was the target demo for this. Naoki Yoshida was at the head, Masayoshi Soken was doing the soundtrack, they got that guy from the Devil May Cry series to do the combat so that’s cool I guess, this seems like a slam dunk. But, for all its talk about “the legacy of the crystals has gone on long enough,” Yoshida was weighed down by the series’ legacy. He had to make a winner, it had to get out the gate with a minimum of team dysfunction and bad press, it had to look great and sell well and usher in a new era of Final Fantasy products for younger folks who are not inured to selecting items from a menu. It had to strip out unnecessary complications. To their detriment, they were wildly successful and made the thing I believe they wanted to create. The result is often boring. The plot is rote, well-worn territory, awash in characteristic FF melodrama but without any of the joy. Gone are mini-games, a hallmark of the series. Gone are the dungeons, replaced with action hallways. Gone are the RPG elements, curiously enough, though to its credit the newly released DLC does have some excellent equipment choices in it. Gone are the interesting explorable spaces, replaced with Potemkin castles and squat gray villages. The world feels cramped and small (which I would argue is an FF tradition at this point, going back to at least FFX). The plot itself even feels small – they aspire to the sprawling geopolitics of Game of Thrones or the many historical wars of Middle Ages Europe, and they even give you a whole NPC and plot board to help you unravel the grand tapestry they feel they’ve woven. In truth, it’s wholly unnecessary, as the plot has the depth of a puddle and is easily understood by just playing the main storyline. The plot pacing is bad, the second and third acts drag on forever, and the soundtrack is readily outclassed by the multiple standouts of its composer’s previous work. It’s on this list because when the bat connects with the ball, it smashes it into the next zip code. The combat is the thing that kept me coming back. It feels great to play, stylish as all hell, dripping with fantasy swagger and fancy visual effects. My main complaint is that ironically there’s too much of it – the moment-to-moment enemy battles are unthreatening, tedious, and entirely too plentiful. When the bosses arrive, and they get the title card, and the horns kick in, it’s exhilarating. I get the privilege of fighting this ancient construct/pissed off dragon/etc. and figure out the best way to overcome impossible odds with high stakes. Thankfully the main story is full of such moments, which makes pushing through it less burdensome. This game has piqued my curiosity about the Devil May Cry series and other character action games like it, even though I bristle at the notion of rankings-based combat encounters. The Eikon fights sometimes drag on a little too long, but they’re always a delight. These huge, Godzilla-scale clashes are some of the best and most enjoyable parts of the story. My bout with Titan is one of my two most singular moments this year. (The other will be documented later in my #1 pick.) FFXIV has smartly used British voice actors to ensure that vocal performances are generally positive across the board, with occasional standouts in key roles. Ben Starr offers in this game one of the best voice acting performances in the history of the medium, and to tell you more would be a spoiler. Like the combat, he is also overused – I did tire of hearing him grunt and go “alright.” by the end of the story, probably because I did all the side quests and heard it quite a lot – but that’s probably hard to avoid, given that the story is so single-mindedly focused on Clive. But he’s absolutely the most singular voice actor since Doug Cockle as Geralt, a voice so permanently tied to the character that it’s impossible to think of anybody else in the role. (Sorry-not-sorry, Henry Cavill.) To reiterate, Final Fantasy XVI is a conservative video game. However, it sometimes excels despite itself. Like an Eikon, there is a beating heart of an exceptional game within the cumbersome bulk of the rest of it. 8. Inscryption  Pictured: the trappings of a nightmare I place a high value on “vibes.” Vibes will get me through the door and encourage me to try games I otherwise would not. I like spooky aesthetics and body horror. I like blood and gore and viscera (but not torture). I like a mysterious puzzle box to solve. I like a plot slowly unraveling but also teasing you with the notion that there are larger forces at play, and that you are unwittingly completing the villain’s scheme. I especially like the kind of well-executed metanarrative that often emerges from that kind of plot. On the other hand, I can’t think of a genre I like less than a roguelike deckbuilder. (First-person shooter might be a close second.) It isn’t that I’m allergic to all roguelikes. My preference is for the kind wherein death pushes you to a later victory by unlocking something every time you fail, especially the kind that gives you an objective to shoot for while you’re on your way to your inevitable demise. (Vampire Survivors, which almost squeaked onto this list, is a master class in that specific kind of mechanic.) Nor do I immediately hate all deckbuilders. But card games inevitably reach a level of complexity wherein my poor little brain can’t handle it anymore, can’t put together a strategic deck that’s viable. Combining the randomness and difficulty of a roguelike with the need for strategic thinking of a deckbuilder (looking at you, Slay the Spire) is a surefire way to get me to check out. I noticed last year when many folks had Inscryption on their GOTY lists, and the vibes compelled me to wait for a sale and pick it up. I muddled through the opening hour or two and began to figure out how the card game worked. I began picking at the puzzle box of the cabin. I may have brute-forced a puzzle here and there. And, before I knew it, I sailed through the remainder of the first act. After the first act, I was hooked. I devoured the rest of that game like a ravenous beast. I couldn’t get enough. I seem to recall that most people think it stumbles a bit in the third act, and I agree with that, but it was still enjoyable enough to push through and see the rewarding conclusion. I even poked around with Kaycee’s Mod a little bit afterwards. A literal roguelike deckbuilder! Truly a miraculous thing. Unlike many of the games on this list, I don’t have a lot of interesting insight into my time with Inscryption. It’s just very, very good, compelling enough to draw me in and keep my attention despite being miles away from my comfort zone. 7. Metroid Prime Remastered  Pictured: the preeminent space badass “But Lisztless,” I hear you saying, “this is a first-person shooter! You just said you didn’t like those!” You’re right. I also said I didn’t like roguelike deckbuilders either, yet one is memorialized on this very list. To borrow a line from a future entry, “a whole lot of inconceivable poo poo happens on this hell of an Earth.” And truthfully, Metroid Prime really isn’t much like other first-person shooters. It does not require twitch reflexes. The beams don’t provide good feedback when they hit the target. None of the weapons feel “fun to shoot.” (Maybe super missiles. I’d entertain that they do feel somewhat satisfying.) It is plodding, lethargic, and I swear you can feel the weight of gravity tethering you to Tallon IV. Despite this, it’s my favorite first-person shooter of all time, and the clue is right in the title: it’s a fully realized version of a first-person Metroid. It had to feel like this, because it couldn’t feel like anything else. This game is over 20 years old at this point, so hopefully you don’t need me to explain to you what that means, or that it’s phenomenal. I said earlier that remakes are, by definition, a failure of creativity. Remasters, perhaps, doubly so. A remaster doesn’t really add anything to the experience, it’s a glorified port, an airbrushing of your memory. But why, then, do so many games screw it up? How come Silent Hill 2, for example, can’t ever get a good remaster? (The short answer is they can’t get the fog right. The longer answer is that Konami has no idea what makes that game good.) I would argue it is because we rely on our fallible sense memory of these classics and inevitably hit a moment in our playthroughs wherein the illusion is shattered. “It didn’t look like that. It didn’t sound like that. I remember this being harder. I remember this feeling different.” It’s easy to consider that our aging brains misremembered something. However, in my experience, we are forced to look behind the curtain because at some point an adjustment was made that thrust us out of the experience. I can’t play the War of the Lions port of Final Fantasy Tactics because, right in the first battle, I can tell immediately that the units are marching double-time and Night Sword’s sound effect is all crunchy and compressed and wrong. This isn’t me misremembering something – I know full well what it sounds like, and it isn’t whatever that is. Metroid Prime: Remastered looks and sounds like the original Metroid Prime did. They overhauled the graphics and rendered textures with loving attention to detail coupled with modern effects. It looks like a modern game. It looks exactly the way it always did. Obviously that’s not true, there’s plenty of comparison footage out there to put the lie to that. But in my mind’s eye, Metroid Prime always looked like this, ran this well, sounded this way, shined this bright. It has a modern FPS control scheme, unlike the original, because it has to. The one change they made to it was out of necessity, and it elevates the original. (And from what I hear, they already made that change back in a Wii port or something.) It is a well-executed remaster because they took a good thing that worked and they didn’t monkey around with it any more than was strictly necessary. Many other remakes, including some that were released this year, including some that made this very list, could not help themselves but tinker with things that were already great in an attempt to further elevate them. Metroid Prime: Remastered shows that often, you just don’t have to, and you get a better result for it. If my kid wants to play Metroid Prime someday, she can play the remaster and have exactly the same experience I did in 2002, and there’s a beauty in that timelessness. 6. Pentiment  Pictured: making time for all of God’s creations (It feels kind of weird to discuss this knowing that Josh Sawyer occasionally peeks his head into these forums like an anchoress, but here we go.) Pentiment wants you to think it is a game about history, but really, it’s a game about time. History is the confluence of time, space, and events, all playing off one another. The main cast of Pentiment have very little agency to control the spaces of Tassing and Kiersau, or the events that happen there. If you’re a 16th century peasant, that’s not your domain and you know it. You can gripe about it, and sometimes fight in vain against it, but it’s a losing battle. God steps in to fill the cracks, promising salvation in the next life with the rarely spoken (and occasionally blasphemous) implication that it’s because this one is garbage. So, knowing that, what do you do with the time you have available to you? In Pentiment, Andreas Maler finds himself at the center of a murder mystery. Thankfully, he’s not the accused, but he’s invested in the outcome. His investigation into the murder becomes an exercise in time management. Where do you go? Who do you converse with? What leads do you follow up? Knowing that time is limited, how do you best spend it? My playthrough was a disaster. Almost every lead inevitably wound up at a dead end. People could not be convinced to give up their hard-kept secrets – I had exactly two successful persuasion checks in my playthrough, and neither were related to the case. My outlandish schemes to uncover mysteries ended in flames. I, the player, often felt like a time traveler who simply could not create a paradox – time was resilient and unbending. These events were going to play out whether I liked it or not, often with outcomes I was not personally happy with, and with mistakes I could never undo – mistakes I had to make because History demanded that I make them. Time was my enemy, as it is in real life – you will never have enough of it for your satisfaction, and you will make compromises out of necessity. I could make changes in the margins (heh), but when I tried to put things right, History told me to get hosed time and time again. I have somewhat unusual criteria for what makes something a role-playing game. People tend to focus on the mechanics, like numbers and combat and menus. I think a role-playing game has to either 1) allow you to create the role you want, and then reinforce that choice via mechanics, or 2) place such limitations on you that you are forced to accept that you’re playing a role and play it accordingly. (As an aside, most Japanese-style role-playing games are, by this definition, not very good role-playing games, and I’ll stand by that.) Pentiment is the latter kind of role-playing game. It forces you to play the role of a 16th century lower-to-middle-class citizen, subject to the lord(s), and the Lord, and History. It is astoundingly successful at this, not just because of its loving devotion to historicity but also the mechanics of the gameplay. To my surprise, the plot led to a satisfying conclusion. However, right through to the end credits, I saw things unfold that I had to make my uncomfortable peace with. After all, I, too, am a subject to History, even this fictional one, echoes of which reach their long arms through time to claw and pick at the scabs of the very real present. The cast of Pentiment made some peace with their shared history after unprecedented misfortune, and I hope and pray that we all find such contented resolution to our woes within our lifetimes as well. 5. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker  Pictured: ugh. my wife’s side piece What does it mean to go on a journey with someone? We’ve all gone on vacations or trips with people we love. Road trips, international travel, whatever. You learn a lot about yourself when you travel. You can learn a lot about a place and the people who live there, if you have the mind and opportunity to do it. If you go with a friend, you’ll learn a lot about them, too. If you go on a trip for long enough, at some point it metamorphoses into a journey, but most of us don’t have the luxury of knowing ahead of time that we’re going on a journey, only discovering it after we arrive home. My wife knew that I was a FFXIV obsessive. At some point, she decided that she wanted to learn more about this thing I couldn’t shut up about. I initially tried to warn her off. “Honey, I’m appreciative, but this is an insane thing you’re asking. It’s gonna take us like a year or more to get through it all. I just want you to fully understand what you’re committing to.” “Well, it’s not any more insane than being married to you, is it? And a year is nothing compared to our marriage.” Touché. She doesn’t play many video games, outside of the small handful we play cooperatively. She gets motion sickness from games, which can make even watching them a challenge. On top of that, she does not find playing them to be the stress-relieving experience that I do. Even when the stakes and difficulty are low, she still gets frustrated. If she’s going to play FFXIV, this would not do. So, we settled on a compromise: we treat the series like something in between a visual novel and a TV series, and I do all the playing. I steer the character, she controls the dialogue and makes the choices. A few times per week, for a delightfully coincidental 14 months now, we have slowly chiseled away at FFXIV, doing all the content available. (Excepting Eureka and Bozja. Once was bad enough). It became a thing we do after dinner, once the kiddo is in bed. We brush her hair and she asks us, “oh, since I’m going to bed, are you going to play Little Mom?” Little Mom is what she calls my wife’s character, who is a minimum-height Lalafell. (Little Dad, of course, had been previously established in 2019.) “Yes honey, I think that’s what we’ll do.” “Will Little Mom get stronger?” “Yes, Little Mom is always getting stronger. She already beat up a mean dragon, and I think next she’s going to fight some bad guys who are hurting people.” Her eyes widen. “Wow....” Final Fantasy XIV has made these GOTY lists, including my own last year, with such frequency that it no longer needs an introduction. You know if this sort of game appeals to you or not. Either you like a team sport, a bombastic dungeon, a lovingly crafted and mature story, an engaging community, a thrilling puzzle-combat system, a nostalgic theme park experience, or you don’t. I don’t need to convince you. I will say this: the truism that everybody’s favorite Final Fantasy is their first one feels accurate to me. (Shoutouts to FFIV.) However, this might be the outlier, both because it maintains its relevance with every passing year, but also because it gives you an opportunity to grow alongside the cast. Your journey through this game need not terminate once the credits roll (twice per expansion); your personal growth need not stop because the characters have finished their assigned arcs. Playing this game together with her is my favorite experience of this year. Nothing else compares. We’ve shared jokes, made new friends (shoutout to Wilfwyb, whose name my wife gleefully screams every time they log on/off, this FC mate who has no idea we exist), made headcanon, watched me identify where Fatebreaker vanished to and then casually waltz right off the platform, shipped characters, shed tears, and walked to the end. We routinely make recipes from the FFXIV cookbook (it’s a lovely cookbook) and buy each other FFXIV-related Christmas gifts. We memorialize it so we can look back and say, “this is a time where we did something really meaningful together.” So we can tell our daughter about it someday, so maybe she can learn about the kind of people we were then. Isn’t that the point of a journey? To set off on a new adventure, to see new places and people, to stretch the boundaries of your soul and give your spirit a little more room to grow? To become, forged by the experience, a better, wiser person? Even if it takes a year, even if it takes eight years, what could be more worth your time than that? And to share that with one you love, how could anything possibly be better?  So why, then, is it in the middle of the list? Because Little Dad has sat mostly ignored on the shelf, as the patch content has been less than thrilling this time around. (And again, I’m an FFIV stan, I am the target demographic for this nostalgia, and it didn’t land aside from the phenomenal remixes for Battle 2 and The Final Battle.) Oh well. Every journey has some rocks in the road. 4. Valkyrie Profile  Pictured: spiritual concentration Me, in basically every chat thread or halfway relevant forum post in my life: ”Have you sons of bitches heard about Valkyrie Profile?” It’s possible you haven’t. It’s possible you heard about one of its handful of sequels and spinoffs, most of which aren’t any good. (Like Konami, Square Enix is occasionally a company that forgets what makes their classics great.) It’s possible you were interested in it but realized the only way to play it these days was on a tablet, which is no way to play a video game, let alone a platformer. Regardless, it’s on PS4/5 now, so allow me to educate you. Valkyrie Profile is a game where you control a valkyrie, a minor goddess (named Valkyrie, though occasionally called Lenneth). Ragnarök is coming and the gods are scrambling to rally their forces before the cataclysmic confrontation. You, a chooser of the slain, are tasked with recruiting valiant human souls post-mortem to serve as foot soldiers in the gods’ armies. Conveniently, there are tons of horrible monsters around which serve as valuable fodder for sharpening your party members’ skills prior to their ascension to Asgard. Monster crypts and untraveled wilds become platforming and minor puzzle setpieces, and the monsters themselves as lead-ins to turn-based button-mashing battles. There is some strategy to the combat, and there’s a lot of it, but it is often fantastically brief as your warriors unleash potent magic and explosive finishers and generally overwhelm their foes. There is joy to be had in playing the turn-based fights well, as multiple successive hits on enemies can shatter defenses, cause restorative crystals to manifest leading to additional spellcasting/finishers, and charge your individual characters’ super moves. That’s all well and good but let’s talk a bit about the story. This is a role-playing game. Per my earlier definition, it is a wildly successful one. Valkyrie, right from the jump, senses that something is amiss. She’s got some amnesia, and some hazy memories of a prior life. Recruiting the fallen souls (i.e., the einherjar) means bearing witness to the final moments of their lives, often wherein they prove that they are worthy to face further endangerment in the upcoming battle of Ragnarök. The main plot of the game eventually unfurls as you recruit the various einherjar, but nothing really points you to seek out the true ending of the game. It’s entirely possible to just run out the clock on Ragnarök, which is helpfully measured on the world map screen, and proceed straight to the endgame. You’ll get one of two endings - a truly bad ending if you fail to recruit/train einherjar, and a middling ending wherein Valkyrie averts Ragnarök and earns no reward for it. But there’s a good ending, and to get it, you need to have a keen eye and treat it like a role-playing game. Every time Lenneth recruits an einherjar, it lowers her Seal Value, a subtle and seemingly meaningless stat on her character status screen. In addition, following plot threads regarding her previous life will also dramatically lower her Seal Value. It represents the control that Odin has over you, so you want it as low as possible; Ending B, or just having the experience of working under a bad boss in real life, will tell you that. But you can’t forget to do your job (represented by your Evaluation Score), or Odin will forcefully terminate your contract early, so you need to do the bare minimum so you can go back to your actual job of following up on what happened to you. There’s a bit more nuance to it than that, but acting in this way will put you on the right path – and, if you had amnesia and a lingering sense of unease about your lot in life, isn’t that what you would do? In short: Valkyrie Profile is a game where getting the good ending involves subtly telling your boss to gently caress off. The port is a solid one. The anime cutscenes don’t add anything, and I don’t prefer them over the original sprite work. Valkyrie Profile has amazing, beautiful, detailed sprite work, with more soul in it than every HD-2D game put together. (Octopath, take notes.) Motoi Sakuraba is at the apex of his career on the soundtrack. The voice acting is a product of its time, which means ‘90s anime voice actors are well represented, for good or ill. (For every Megan Hollingshead as Valkyrie there must be a Tara Sands as Llewelyn doing an Ash Ketchum impression.) The one significant change in this port is that they included a save state system, which is a blessing because some of the platforming sections do suffer from PSX-era collision weirdness and save states do take the sting out of a mistimed jump. 3. Kirby and the Forgotten Land  Pictured: Kirby and, per my kid, Kirby’s Friend Last year, this game was at number six on my list. It was the only game to rank that I hadn’t completed, its inclusion based solely on my sheer delight that my then four-year-old would play a video game with me. It was the very first one she played together with me as my sidekick. We played through the entirety of the game together, right through to the end credits after an amazing finale, right through to the special secret levels and true final boss, right through to the 100% mark. For me, part of being a parent is encouraging them to foster their own interests, even if they’re things that don’t interest you. I don’t object to playing dolls or make-believe, it comes with the territory. But I also think it’s unavoidable that you want your kid to like some of the things you do. It’s part of sharing yourself and your life with this little person you’re raising. Part of that is accepting the fact that sometimes they just don’t give a drat about the things you like (and often will tell you so, indelicately). I was determined to not force her to like anything I like solely because I like it, or to make my affection a condition of her engaging with me in this way; either she gravitated to it on her own terms, or she would bounce off and I would deal with my wounded ego in solitude. Needless to say, I was thrilled when she took to Kirby like a duck to water, and it quickly became a thing we bonded over. If I close my eyes, I can still hear her uproarious laughter as Kirby kicks his friend out of bed and hear her yell “OOF!” at the top of her tiny lungs as his little plush body collides with the floor. I can still envision her regaling my wife at the dinner table with tales of her exploits. I can still see her oohing and aahing as I showed her secret passages I intuited and hear her pouting about never being allowed to collect the “rainbow stars.” (Ignore the inconvenient fact that I let her collect nearly all of them.) It all came together during the fight with the superboss. I had gently encouraged her the entire game to actually fight the enemies as Bandana Dee rather than flee in mock terror. “But I’m too scaaaaaaaared!” she’d whine in response. Maybe she was, but almost nothing in Kirby is all that threatening-looking, so I don’t think that was the real reason. I think she just didn’t want to learn a new skill and was content to be dragged along in my wake. So, as the superboss was revealed, I paused the game and laid down the law. “This is going to be really hard. I’m going to try not to die, but I’m not making any promises. If I die, we both need to start over, so try your best to fight. Okay?” A little nod and we were off. To my surprise, she really did her best to put up an offense, throwing her little spears and rapid-fire jabbing whenever the boss stopped moving. I don’t know where these skills came from; at no point were they on display prior to this moment. I suppose she had spent the entire game studying the blade and, like the wise master, knew the exact moment to strike. Maybe she entered a berserker rage because her friend Elfilin had been eaten by an alien monstrosity, and she resolved to solve that problem with spear pokes. I’ll never know. I remember quickly glancing over and seeing the little furrowed brow of a determined face. Like any good superboss, this fight has multiple phases, and by the end of the fight the sheer attrition of it had worn down my health bar. She had died in catastrophic fashion on multiple occasions, but always eagerly rejoined the fray. The boss had a couple moves I hadn’t figured out how to dodge, and I knew that eventually we’d hit that spot in the action rotation and it would be curtains for me. And as the boss lined up a laser blast to fry me, my kid scored the final blow. We had cleared it together on our first try. There was screaming, clapping, cheering, and I’m pretty sure I threw her around in the air. I couldn’t believe it. She had surpassed my expectations. As we recounted the story later, I said proudly, “I couldn’t have beaten it without her.” Sincerely, I couldn’t have beaten it without her. 2. Live a Live (2022)  Pictured: what you can do if you spend 80 years not skipping leg day My wife has asked me a few times over the years to assemble a list of what my favorite games of all time are. It’s a wonderfully self-indulgent exercise, awash in nostalgia with little regard for objective reasoning or strident analysis. The items on that list are ever-changing; the top five are generally set in stone, but 6-10 are a bloody battlefield littered with the corpses of titans. Two of my top five would unquestionably include Chrono Trigger and Earthbound. Chrono Trigger was, to my mind, the first perfect game – lush, vibrant, endlessly replayable, and mechanically satisfying, with a plethora of secrets to discover. (And, a quality that I’ve grown to appreciate more and more as I grow older, brief.) Earthbound, on the other hand, was a little more artsy in its execution – this rudimentary veneer of Americana gives way to a bizarre, cosmic horror nightmare where an unlikely protagonist saves the heroes at their darkest hour. Earthbound was the first game to really make me feel something – in this case, despair, as all the bottle rockets in the world couldn’t save me from Giygas – and it was one of those personality-defining events whose ramifications are still felt today. The particular blend of aesthetics, metanarrative, and emotional core presented by Earthbound was something I would spend the next 20 years chasing before finding it again, to my surprise, in Undertale. What if, all along, there had been something like it that I had never known about? A sort of missing link between Chrono Trigger and Earthbound? I was aware of Live a Live having received a fan translation at some point in the aughts. I had played at least some of the Final Fantasy V and Tales of Phantasia fan translations and found them to sound very strange – strange enough to be off-putting, regardless of the quality of the gameplay. When Live a Live had a fan translation, I was interested in the concept – seven different lives, seven different starting points! - but by that time I was too busy with other things, and had already been soured on the quality of other fan translations. (My preconception about fan translations would persist until the unofficial localization for Mother 3, which was one of the first games I played with my now-wife and definitely the first one to make me sob uncontrollably in front of her.) I had passed on Live a Live. I had missed out. Live a Live is lush, vibrant, replayable, and mechanically satisfying, with a plethora of secrets to discover. Live a Live is artsy in its execution of its metanarrative. The ending of Live a Live made me feel emotions about the human condition, even if the presentation is a little childish. Live a Live now has an excellent localization, and one of the best soundtracks of the entire SNES generation. (Yoko Shimomura is the GOAT. Square Enix wisely let her rearrange her own original compositions for this remake, and for Super Mario RPG as well, and the results for both are extraordinary.) Live a Live is a game that, long before I had seen the credits roll, made me realize that I would have gone absolutely apeshit over this game if I was 10 years old. I would have never stopped talking about it. I don’t know if it makes my personal top 10 of all time. After all, it has stiff competition with the rose-tinted favorites of my youth. If I had played it then, perhaps the outcome might be different – but then, it was never released localized until 2022, so I’ll never know. What I do know is this: it’s in conversation with Earthbound and Mother 3 and Undertale as being a game with a thesis statement, that wants you to think about bigger things, and what you take away from that (or don’t) is up to you. Maybe its ideas are a little juvenile or trite or schmaltzy, but it plants the seeds and gives you the space to consider what they might grow into. Most games, by design or by omission, do not do that – and we should cherish and celebrate the forgotten ones that do. 1. Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon  Pictured: I’m still the king of my city ‘cause I’m still calling them shots In the unlikely event you recall my GOTY list from last year, you will remember that Elden Ring came out and inspired me to conquer the modern Fromsoft catalog. This resulted in Sekiro taking the top honors as my game of the year. It is, to me, the best action game of at least the last decade. It is a challenging, uncompromising thing. It demands that you learn its systems and internalize the way it wants you to play it. It is the wizened kung fu master at the top of the mountain rapping your knuckles with a bamboo rod when your grip on the water bucket slips. “Again. *crack* Again. *crack* Again. Do it again. Do it better. *crack*” It taught me the joys of mastery and lessened the sting of failure. It’s not for everybody, but it’s for me. It also sneakily accomplished something I hadn’t expected – I began developing an aesthetic appreciation for ninja and samurai. I slew the true final boss and thought, “oh, okay, I get why this stuff is cool now.” (To be fair, this hasn’t exactly paid dividends – I played samurai in FFXIV for a bit, I watched some Kurosawa, I retried Ghost of Tsushima and immediately put it down again.) So, when Armored Core 6 was announced I thought, “maybe this is the game that will teach me that giant robots are cool.” Finishing the Fromsoft catalog did not inspire me to play through the Armored Core back catalog – like King’s Field it was too dated and inaccessible, and like my original vibes concerning Sekiro it did not appeal to me aesthetically. My limited mecha experience began at Xenogears and ended at Zone of the Enders, the latter of which I only bought because it included a demo disc for Metal Gear Solid 2. I do not by my nature look at the robot and go “wow, cool robot” so I was skeptical. I can’t analyze how Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon compares to its predecessors, but I can say that it is alike in spirit to Fromsoft’s Souls-era games in both gameplay and themes, particularly Sekiro. The main aspect that makes it feel like Sekiro is that it is fast. These are giant hulking pieces of metal attached to rocket boosters, and they move like it. Gunfire and lasers come in lightning fast. Timely dodging is essential, loading your damage into a tight window is paramount. The warning chime of your systems picking up an incoming rocket gives you maybe a second-and-a-half lead time before you need to react. It’s a third-person shooter but it gives you the sensation of being in a VR module, and I mean this as high praise. The joy of Sekiro, for me, was learning the tells of your opponent and reacting in time. In the Soulsborne games, panic dodging would get you out of a lot of sticky situations. In Sekiro, you always lived on the katana’s edge between life and death because the safest spot was typically right in the boss’s grill as you deflected blows. Armored Core 6 feels like a more refined exploration of that concept. You can panic dodge a little bit, but generally you need to figure out Your Role In Space and how that impacts your reactions to the boss. As it turns out, Your Role In Space is actually a very complicated thing, because it is a function of your loadout. Not just your firearms, though that is perhaps the most noticeable area where one could switch things up. Your legs are possibly the single piece that changes the most about how you play, and I suspect every player could point to a particular model and say “that is the best, to me.” For me, it was the Spring Chicken reverse-joints, allowing me to jump and soar into the sky, controlling the verticality of the arena. Most enemies have a hard time shooting at targets overhead, and I have an easy time shooting below. But “most enemies” does not mean all enemies. The point at which you push your comfort zone probably changes for every player, but at some point you must do it. For me, it was the Chapter 4 boss. Verticality would not save me from an onslaught of lasers and a boss who could effortlessly zip across the arena. So I made a change to bipedal legs with good quickboosters, allowing for more frantic dodging. It felt weird and alien at first, felt slower and less mobile than my beloved Spring Chicken legs. But that change made all the difference and I clowned the boss in one shot. This is the main mechanical difference of Armored Core 6 compared to its predecessors – the Assembly system allows you nearly unlimited abilities to customize your character in response to a stumbling block. Despite the sheer challenge of its gameplay, it is perhaps the easiest Fromsoft game in recent memory, because Assembly gives you all the tools to tailor your experience. Frustrated by shields? Put on a shield-killer weapon. Enemies plinking you from above? Put on hover legs so you stay at their level. Boss not staggering enough? Put some Songbird grenade launchers on your shoulders and blow them up. This is a gameplay mechanic; this is also a difficulty slider more elegant than anything released in ages. It does not excuse you from playing the game the way its creators envisioned; it instead says, “we have given you all the tools, even the top shelf ones, now put them to use. Time to get to work.” Armored Core 6 is replete with memorable moments due to the variety of its mission structure. My favorite is the boss of Chapter 3 – you know the one, you know the line. I gasped when it happened, so perfectly timed, the audio cue and the sickening writhing of the boss. The music, the world, the vibes are all immaculate. I do not care for sci-fi as a genre, but Armored Core 6 feels gritty and real to me in a way other sci-fi does not. As a species, it feels inevitable that this is the road we are headed down, with corporations slap-fighting as their foot soldiers are deployed and exploded and discarded for being obsolete. Unlike the Souls series, there is no esoteric philosophy at play here – the thesis statement is right there on the page. Like Sekiro, the player character is a somewhat defined entity with stakes in the plot. Unlike the Souls series, your choices’ dubious morality yields tangible, knowable consequences. Like Sekiro, it is deeply enjoyable – perhaps even mandatory – to play the game multiple times and experience every ending it has to offer. It is a master class in action gameplay. It shows, again and again, to the dismay of myriad middling pretenders, why Fromsoft is unparalleled in their field. It is comprehensively, undoubtedly, the single best game of 2023. Lisztless fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 18:36
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DalaranJ posted:Is this the first time you've played Valkyrie Profile? Oh heck no. I played it back in the day on PSX. But it got ported to PS4/5 super late in 2022, and I replayed it in January 2023, cementing its inclusion here.
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Dec 11, 2023 20:39
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Arist posted:Finally finished writing my list  Great list! I need to play Hitman, even though it feels like I’ve missed the boat at this point.
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Dec 22, 2023 01:16
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:
This was exceptionally lovely. Thank you so much for sharing it. Party Boat posted:3. Dark Souls The novice-enthusiast-connoisseur pipeline. I went on a similar journey last year. Welcome to the club, friend. Enjoy Elden Ring and Armored Core 6 in 2024 - you've already got two of your top five for next year right there, trust me.
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Dec 29, 2023 16:23
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:drag and drop that bad boy to number one, friend.
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Jan 4, 2024 22:59
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Star Ocean 2 is a huge blank spot in my tri-ace knowledge and I need to get through it this year.
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Jan 13, 2024 14:28
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VideoGames posted:
Live a Live owns. Glad to see it this high. (And for the record, it’s the same pronunciation as “live music”, for both.)
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Jan 13, 2024 14:58
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Yay Ghost Trick! Featuring the best dog in video games.
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Jan 13, 2024 16:57
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Disco Elysium the goat
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Jan 13, 2024 17:29
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I started Baldur’s Gate III, seems pretty good so far imo
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Jan 18, 2024 01:05
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Jan 18, 2024 01:07
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