DoorCurtain's Year in Review (2021)
The following blog post contains no spoilers for anything discussed, as I want anyone to be able to read it without apprehension, just like my previous blog post. Images are taken from official sources like itch.io pages, Steam pages, website images, etc. but if not then I got it from a wiki. I apologize in advance if I have to source images from a wiki powered by Fandom, as out of spite I won't directly link those.
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Normally I only list playing a few games a year, but in 2021 I played an absurd amount of excellent games, so I felt like making a big end of year roundup blog post like how Freezing Inferno likes to do it. Unfortunately, I went overboard—instead of only writing about those standout games, I made the foolish decision to write about literally every game I played this year. To be fair, I played a lot of games! Next year, though, I’ll probably just write about games that have stuck around in my head in the months since I've played them.
Below is a chronicle of every game I played and my thoughts on it. They’re listed in the order I played them, but my favorite games (and a handful of others…) I played this year are an exception—they’re listed after the chronicle, where they have their own section. So if you know me and you know I played a certain game at a certain month, well, now you know where it is~
I used to not keep track of when I replayed a game, but now I do. Sometimes I felt like revisiting something, and that marks its own point in time, at least for me. Replays are labeled with parentheses.
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DECEMBER LAST YEAR
I’m part of a community that hosts an annual Game of the Year podcast, where three hosts read off user-submitted lists. Their cutoff date is usually the second Sunday of December that year. In 2020, it was December 13, so here’s a small list of games I played after that day.
I want to be a Triangle
The Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality that itch.io hosted back in 2020 hosted more than 1000 games, which is pretty overwhelming. Aside from some of the more well-known games in the bundle, I decided to be a little adventurous and scroll through to find a few games that I felt like playing simply because they caught my eye. This is one of them, as is the second January game—you’re a rectangle that wants to get in with the triangles in the manor in the northern part of town. After going through some hijinks to change your shape and meet with the lady of the manor… the game abruptly ends. Despite its charming exterior, the page for the game on itch.io openly admits that it was just a small test for messing with the Godot game creation tool. I think that even taking that into consideration, this game doesn’t lead up to its conclusion too satisfyingly. Even tiny projects that take about half an hour for a player to finish can be self-contained stories! I wish this one was.
Semblance
This is a puzzle game where everything is squishy. The player character is squishy, the environment is squishy, the obstacles are squishy… it’s delightful. You have a dash move that can bend the floor and the walls, or, rather, squish them, which allows for a bunch of physics-based challenges that are interesting to solve. It didn’t make much of an impression on me, ironically enough. Apparently you get a more conclusive ending if you get a bunch of optional collectibles, and man, I’m not a fan of when a game does this these days. Still, if you don’t mind and are just interested in some neat puzzles about squishing, then you should already have it if you bought the bundle.
One Way Heroics
Procedurally generated content is becoming less and less popular in my friend circle as the years go by, but conceptually this game is an interesting take on it. One Way Heroics generates an entirely bite-sized RPG campaign where you talk to NPCs, fight enemies, manage resources, and take on a dark lord at the end (they’re the same size as you rather than having a huge sprite, which is refreshing, but they still hit really hard so watch out). Maps are horizontal, starting at the left and scrolling to the right. Before each adventure begins, you’re given a choice of what class to be, and to invest your points into stats you want to prioritize. The nice thing is that if you die, you can keep a handful of items you collected on your last attempt for your next attempt, which makes it easier. I completed only one adventure but I had a nice time.
Thanks again to Pauncho Smith for the Steam gift!
JANUARY
Final Fantasy Adventure
This game was special, in a way. I had been playing it in the final few days of December 2020, and right when the New Year hit—as in, either a minute or two after the clock struck midnight—I beat the game. The ending is pretty sad, to the point where I think if I played it when I was really little, I would have cried, but as an adult I just went “Whoa… that sucks”. In general, Final Fantasy Adventure is pretty jank, as the weapons don’t quite have the snappy feeling that future Mana games would, and the dungeons have many purposeless rooms and several dead ends, so you won’t get quite as smooth dungeon-crawling experience you’d get in later Game Boy games like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Still, there’s something very important to note—Final Fantasy Adventure came out before Link’s Awakening, and hell, it even predates Final Fantasy IV. Keeping that context in mind, Final Fantasy Adventure is seriously impressive. You have a huge world to explore, a great soundtrack even today, a plot with actual story beats, and a cast of characters that come and go—a few of whom actually die. As a reminder, this game came out in 1991. 30 years later, in 2021, this game still hits, at least on a few levels.
The Sword and the Slime
Another game I got from the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality (which I’ll be calling “the bundle” from now on), this is a fun mix of puzzle platformer and point-and-click gameplay. With your mouse, you control a sword, and you can left-click to swipe it at obstacles and enemies. You can move the sword in any direction. But then there’s also a slime that follows you, strictly from side-to-side, going down and up platforms as you open and close paths for it. You must work together with the slime, either by feeding it enemies or by having it press some switches. It was a really cute and fun way to spend my evening that day, and if you have the bundle then I encourage you to check it out.
Gunpoint
This game is so cool—it’s sort of a 2D side-scrolling stealth puzzle game. Using the mouse, you look over the entire map and check for each building’s security terminals, guards, laptops to hack, and then formulate a plan to get what you need and get out. The protagonists can leap onto guards and incapacitate them with a punch (you can keep punching after they’re knocked out though…), leap onto buildings to cling to their side (and climb up and down), and even leap through windows, which is pretty noisy (unless you buy a silencing upgrade). So between the puzzle-solving, route-planning, and building-hopping, you’re getting a really fresh experience. The story itself has a glib, cynical edge to it, but it knows how to be lighthearted, too, so I think it strikes a nice balance.
Thanks again to Cecille for the Steam gift!
New Super Mario Bros. (replay)
Something I wanted to do, as a big Mario fan, was to get around to playing the New Super Mario games that I never played. I could afford it this year, and I had a lot of free time, so why not? I started by revisiting the first one on the Nintendo DS. Having not played it in a while, I remember that, in the context of the time, it was really fresh—a 2D Mario game where Mario has a 3D model and still moves strictly left to right. Still, despite “New” being in the title, it relied a lot on classic Mario callbacks, like the flag at the end of every level, or how Bowser Jr. acts as a Koopaling stand-in during the fortress levels. New Super Mario Bros. also brought the concept of multiple optional collectibles to 2D Mario, as while Super Mario World had the 5 Yoshi coins, they just gave you an extra life, but here they unlock paths, levels, and shops. This turned a lot of levels into more careful affairs for completionists, but arguably removed a core part of the appeal for older Mario fans, where just blazing through levels with precise movement and technique usage was all the fun any level needed. Not that you can’t play New Super Mario Bros. games this way, but if you do they aren’t quite as difficult anymore. Starting all the way here, in the beginning, 2D Mario became very easy, at times boringly so. Still, upon replaying all the NSMB games, I remembered that I did like it well enough, and it’s my second favorite of them all.
Splinter Zone
I had an interesting journey with this game. Back in October of last year, I played the game blind, thinking it was a score attack thing. The gameplay is similar to Mega Man, with similar ladder climbing sprites and enemies, as well as an arm cannon to shoot with. However, the levels themselves, while constructed manually, are played through endlessly in a random order. Like in Cave Story, the more pickups you collect without taking damage, the stronger your weapon becomes, but on the flipside getting hit weakens your weapon considerably. All in all, it was a fun time, and I eventually went through a run so long that I earned the achievement for getting 1,000,000 points. Thing is, after doing so, I looked at the Steam achievements and saw that there was one for beating the game. I didn’t even know you could beat the game! As this game isn’t the most popular one in the world, looking up guides for what to do to beat the game proved fruitless, so I left a Steam discussion thread asking for the steps required. Months later, on New Year’s Eve, the developer themselves responded! I was very flattered to receive help from them as a result, and decided to save beating the game for later in January. Well, uh… the attempted coup on the U.S. capitol happened on January 6. It was an extremely anxious time, as the footage of people forcing their way into the building was making everyone nervous. I needed a way to distract myself, and I felt that if I could focus on beating Splinter Zone, I could forget about what was happening on the news. Thankfully, it helped, as by the time I got the achievement, things had settled down and the rioters left. I left a message on the Steam discussion thanking the developer for the help and that it helped distract me from a frankly terrifying day. They were very happy that it helped.
I already thanked you but I’ll do it again—thank you Cecille for the gift a few years ago!
Oxenfree
A game I recognized that was in the bundle, Oxenfree is an interesting narrative game where you play as a young girl who’s going on a trip to an island with her friends that turns out to be deserted due to ghostly shenanigans. It has a very nice art style that uses no outlines, but the major appeal of the game is the unique real-time dialogue choice system. At various scenes, the player is given a choice of up to four dialogue options, each mapped to one of the four face buttons. You can choose one, or you can choose to stay silent—conversations happen in real time so you have to decide on the spot what to say, if you want to say anything at all. The story concerns a group of friends coping with teenage issues like impressing girls or figuring out their future, but the heart of it all is the tension between the protagonist and another girl who are at odds about the death of the protagonist’s older brother. Using a cool radio device, you pinpoint supernatural transmissions from ghosts with unfinished business, which provides extra conflict. As someone who doesn’t really dabble in horror or coming-of-age teenage movies, I didn’t connect with this game as much as others did, but it was an enjoyable time for me nonetheless. They announced that a sequel is coming out, which I might check out.
New Super Mario Bros. Wii (replay)
I didn’t really like the Propeller Suit that much, but the Ice Flower was extremely cool to me—freezing enemies to use them as stepping stones over water is something that just fits perfectly into Mario as a platformer game. This game added multiplayer, but I played most games this year by myself so I played alone. Doing so makes it stark how spacious a lot of the levels in this game are—having to show all four players onscreen at once and programming the camera to zoom out to accommodate them all will change the level design to do that, I suppose. I remember thinking, back when this game came out, “Super Mario Galaxy looks way better and more creative than this game, what gives?” and I still think that. New Super Mario Bros. 1 looks great on the Nintendo DS, but for the Wii, this game looks and sounds a bit underwhelming. This game has an interesting approach to collectibles—with the Star Coins, you unlock movies depicting fun and skillful ways to get through levels. While you unfortunately need every Star Coin to unlock the extra hard bonus world, it otherwise gives off the impression that the collectibles are there to have the developers themselves show you cooler ways to play. For anyone looking to play this game, check out those movies periodically, they can look pretty cool.
Final Fantasy IV
Final Fantasy Wiki (Fandom)
The holy trinity of classic Final Fantasy games that everyone recommends is FF4, FF6, and FF7. This year, I finally knocked out FF4. I had tried to play the DS remake many years back, but it became very difficult for me, as it was apparently intended for veterans of FF4 looking for a fresh take on it. I stopped when you got to the moon. This time, playing the original game, I made it all the way through. Though apparently not as hard as the Japanese original, the U.S. version on the SNES that I played could still feel tricky in places, so it wasn’t a cakewalk for me. The actual highlight of FF4 for me was recognizing all the tricks it used in terms of dungeon map design—you can see RPG developers going on to do similar things with their RPG mazes, like junctions that hide a chest from sight until you walk in a certain direction, only to trigger an encounter on your way back to the crossroads. It’s not the only RPG to do this, or even the first—Dragon Quest did it all the time, and earlier—but for a Western audience that never got into Dragon Quest, it’s certainly the birthplace of many a Western JRPG map designer.
New Super Mario Bros. 2
Definitely my least favorite New Super Mario Bros. game. The marketing, and several in-game notices, tease you with something big for getting a million coins, and every level is designed to give you coins upon coins upon coins. You can go through yellow rings to make coins, blocks with multiple coins no longer stop giving them out at 10 but rather something higher like 14 or 16, etc. While the Raccoon Leaf is back, the real star of the show is the Golden Flower, which allows Mario to shoot golden fireballs that cause blocks and enemies to explode into coins. It’s excessive and gaudy, and worse, the only thing you get for accruing a million coins is a different title screen. How boring. Otherwise, the game graphically resembles a slightly upscaled NSMB DS, and musically there are no new tracks, other than extra “bah” sounds. That’s probably even more boring.
Ys Origin
The conceit of an Ys game that serves as a prequel to the series, and in particular Ys 1 with all the specific callbacks to it, is interesting. There are multiple characters to play, each with their own campaign. Yunica is who I played, as she’s the most similar to Adol. I didn’t play the others, though—what hamstrings this game for me is the uninteresting setting. It takes place entirely in Darm Tower, where the second half of Ys 1 took place, so even though you’re going through lava floors and ice floors and desert floors and stuff, it’s unfortunate that you’re stuck in one place nonetheless. A big part of the appeal of Ys is the sense of adventure, so this decision to confine everything to one location makes me hesitant to go back for another round through the tower, even if I’d be playing as someone else.
Escaped Chasm and Dweller’s Empty Path
Temmie Chang contributed to Undertale, and has made a few interesting things in her own time. These couple of games are bite-sized combat-free RPG Maker games with her appealing art style. Escaped Chasm is about a girl who goes through each day in a listless, detached sort of manner, as it’s implied that she struggles with making friends, so she escapes into the worlds of her books and her favorite TV shows. Dweller’s Empty Path has a much more vibrant and lively world, depicting a cast of characters going about their day as you uncover bits and pieces of your memories, while butting heads with a mysterious demon man. As colorful and appealing as these games look and sound, my problem with them is the same—they both feel like they end right when they’re about to begin. For Escaped Chasm, it was more understandable, as that game is only an hour long and feels more like some kind of test, and unlike I want to be a Triangle never tries to build up to anything big. For Dweller’s Empty Path, however, it’s about 4 hours, which is long enough to feel like you know what the story going forward might be about and what each of the characters will be like. And then both games end with a kind of cliffhanger and a promise that the story will continue in some form someday. It’s a bit deflating. I hope Temmie Chang’s next part of the story feels more self-contained and rounded so I don’t get that “wait, that’s it?” feeling. I think she’ll keep doing just fine with her art and characters though.
FEBRUARY
New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe
The latest New Super Mario Bros, game, ported to the Nintendo Switch with extra content. I think this is the first NSMB game where I like how they handled the “double jump” power-up. The Propeller Suit felt linear, as you gained a higher jump before floating down, but the Flying Squirrel Suit is more interesting to control. It’s not quite a hover, as you need to be moving forward for the slowed descent to take effect, and when turning around, you fall at normal speed for a split second. You can cling to walls without sliding down them, you can press the shoulder button in midair for a double jump with a worryingly fixed trajectory, and if you spin jump from the ground, you actually go higher than a regular jump from standing still. What an interestingly-considered power-up, I really like it. Even if I’ll still find Raccoon Mario and Wing Cap Mario more fun, they’re meant more for flight, and as just a hover / double jump power-up, the Flying Squirrel Suit is honestly the best one. The levels themselves are standard fare, and unlike the Wii U original, you don’t need to get any Star Coins for the extra hard bonus world. In fact, Star Coins are 100% optional in this version, as even the developer movies showing cool ways of beating levels are free right from the get-go. With this in mind, I’d recommend fans of classic Mario who haven’t tried the New Super Mario Bros. games to have this one be the NSMB game they play—just have fun blazing through the levels like always, even if the aesthetics and in particular the music isn’t anything mind-blowing. If you get a Mini Mushroom, don’t hoard it to activate it for the Star Coin that’s locked behind it—just challenge yourself to blaze through the level with enhanced floatiness but only a single hit point. It’s fun!
Skyblazer
Back when I used to watch Game Grumps, I remember this game sticking out. Both Arin and Dan had a really fun time playing this game, and I liked the Hindu theme, which I generally don’t see in games. Although the game is short, it’s very tricky, so don’t underestimate it. What makes this game special is that it’s a 2D action game where all four of the core cast members feel like actual characters, with personality and everything. The hero, the old man, the damsel, the villain, the people who worked on the game had fun writing them and it shows.
The Cherry Orchard
You’ve heard of kinetic novels, which are games that don’t feature any choice other than pressing a button to advance a story, one text box at a time. Now get ready for the “kinetic movie”, where it feels more like a film or a play that’s rendered entirely within software on your computer. Just sit back and watch… and read, as sometimes it shifts to stills of 3D models with text boxes at the bottom. This is based on the play of the same name by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, but it’s given this extremely cool neon vaporwave aesthetic. I have, uh, zero familiarity with either of those things, but I enjoyed this one hour video-game-but-it’s-a-movie all the same. Having never seen the play before, I was struck by the depth of some of the characters on display, particularly the protagonist Lopakhin and his desire to buy out an estate that mistreated him, conflicted by his grateful feelings toward the one person on the estate who treated him well, who is most at-risk from his purchase. I’d say, with zero qualifications in Russian theatre or Chekhov in general, that this is a great way to experience the play for the first time. Reading up on the play afterwards was pretty interesting, too. Pretty much one person hand-animated the whole game, which just blows my mind while also explaining a couple of things. Can you animate a play all by yourself? I know I can't!
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (replay)
After mostly shrugging at New Super Mario Bros., I decided to play all of Mario & Luigi, as I had only played 3 out of 5 games in the series. I replayed the first one, and something that struck me was just how breezy it was. It only took me about 13 hours to replay it, which was way faster than I remember as a kid. It’s for the best—at this point in time, the strategy for fights is pretty minimal, as the focus is more on dodging the enemies’ attack patterns that are telegraphed similarly to Punch-Out matches. Actually attacking enemies is pretty simple, as you time a button press just right, over and over again. Although there are both jump and hammer attacks, I almost always jumped as hammering generally didn’t do as much damage unless I had no choice (like with spiked enemies). Like I said, though, the game is surprisingly brisk, so it doesn’t wear out its welcome. Either way, the story, characters, and world are all still delightful—this is the first Mario RPG where the overarching story doesn’t involve collecting seven plot tokens, and you instead go from one interesting new plot beat to the next, all the way until the end. It’s the first Mario RPG to really go for comedy, too, and a bunch of it still makes me laugh years later (which is good, as a big theme in Beanbean Kingdom is laughter).
Remnants
June Flower has an extremely unique visual style in their RPG Maker games (these, like Temmie Chang’s, are also combat-free), looking like harsh, vibrant graffiti depicting abstract concepts and shapes formed into tile maps. This was the first one I played, as while it’s free, it was included in the bundle so I checked it out. It’s an hour-long romp through a place—a dark place, with seemingly inexplicable designs, free for the player to interpret. It doesn’t really tell a traditional story, but the place feels like it’s hiding secrets the whole time, so you’re free to form one in your head as you descend, deeper and deeper.
Two Minutes And Six Seconds
image provided by me
This is a free Twine game that came with Remnants if you paid June Flower extra for it on itch.io. For anyone unfamiliar with Twine, it’s mostly used to make simple text-based games. In this one, you’re a bug. It’s tragic! If you pay extra for Remnants, remember that you get this game too. As the title suggests, it’s even shorter, so knock it out when you have a moment to spare.
Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
I missed this one when it came out, due to not having a Nintendo DS at the time, and now that I’ve played it, I can honestly say that it’s probably my least favorite Mario & Luigi game. It introduces this time travel premise, but, get this… you only ever explore the past, and the present is only used as a hub level! It’s boring. It’s also an alien invasion story, which sounds pretty cool, but the aliens only ever speak in a language the player can’t understand. While this does make them more frightening, it also means that they don’t have the interesting writing of other M&L antagonists, and if, like me, you don’t find them scary, then this language barrier makes them kind of boring. Mario and Luigi are also joined by their baby selves, and, sorry, babies aren’t cool. The explorable world is also just much less interesting, as instead of one interconnected map like the Beanbean Kingdom, you only ever explore discrete, separate parts of the Mushroom Kingdom in the past. While Superstar Saga had obstacle course-like design in its maps, it still went to great pains to make everything feel like a real place, but Partners in Time’s areas are so disconnected that it really does feel like abstract levels where eventually plot beats happen. The final kicker is the way special moves are handled—they’re items, instead of moves that use up a resource like BP. Enemies are tough in this game, and in America, they were given extra health, so you have to use special move items to dispatch them quickly. Except “quickly” is relative, since instead of being 5-second-long sequences, every special move is a minigame now, and these minigames take much longer than 5 seconds to do. This game was just… exhausting. It’s a wonder I beat the final boss with how much health she had.
Ocean OI
Something I always say about RPGs is that I’d generally find the encounters more interesting if 1) there were fewer of them, and 2) they were harder. Ocean OI is a game made in RPG Maker by sraëka-lillian, also known as @fulgadrum on Twitter, that really confirms my belief in this regard. In it, you play as four voyagers on a ship, going into 13 battles on the ocean. Each of them has a specific subset of skills that makes each of them extremely important for your battle strategy, to make sure that having any of them die fills you with dread if you can’t revive them in time. The party member who stands out is Ron—as the Conduit, they are the only way to restore everyone’s “numen”, or, in more typical terms, MP. That’s right—this game has an MP healer, and as a result is an extremely important party member to keep alive. You have a limited amount of resources—there are no shops to refill them, and if you use too much and save afterward, you might be screwed. The mood of the fighting is somber and mysterious, and combined with how downright tough the fights get, it makes for one of the most interesting RPG experiences you’ll ever play. I’m looking forward to sraëka-lillian’s next project, Cataphract OI, which they recently released.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story (replay)
A strong contender for the best Mario & Luigi game, and certainly my favorite, the gimmick of the game is that you get to play as Bowser. After a game where you play as babies, this was the best possible change they could have gone with for the next entry. Special attacks aren’t items anymore and are back to using BP, although they’re all still minigames. The world is interconnected again, although it still feels like an abstract obstacle course the way Partners in Time’s areas felt. It would seem that Superstar Saga still has the edge over this game, but, once again, you get to play as Bowser. He’s perfect—his punch attacks feel meaty as hell, and his fire breath attack hits every enemy onscreen. His special moves utilize beloved Mario enemies like Goombas, Bob-ombs, Magikoopas, etc. which makes you feel like a real evil king. Fawful from the first game is the antagonist, and his delightful manner of speaking makes him as great a source of comedy as he’s ever been. The premise of the game, where the Mario brothers are trapped inside Bowser’s body and work with him from inside, is inventive, though ironically they got the Bowser parts so right that when I had to play as Mario and Luigi again, I felt a twinge of disappointment. Pro-tip—for anyone who has trouble with the fire breath move, which involves actually blowing into the Nintendo DS’ microphone, don’t blow so hard into it—just take a deep breath and then exhale a small, tiny, steady stream of air directly into it, and it should register without you blowing out your lungs. I can’t guarantee it’ll work, sadly, as some DS mics aren’t as good as they used to be, but it helped for me.
MARCH
Mario & Luigi: Dream Team (replay)
I hadn’t replayed this game since I finished it back in 2013, and upon doing so this year, I had a rude awakening as to why. On the surface, the game seems appealing, as the setting involves an island with several NPCs, both old ones from past Mario and M&L games and new ones made for the game, where a “holiday gone wrong” plot goes down, and the gimmick of entering Luigi’s dreams to affect reality in the material world sounds really cool. But then you have to play the game, and it just doesn’t do that much with the concept. In dreams, you play as Mario and a giant horde of dream Luigis aiding him, and battles in the dream world involve several enemies at once. While an impressive showcase of the 3DS hardware, it’s not that meaningfully different to what we’ve been doing for the past 3 games. The dream world itself is what kills the game for me—like with Bowser’s Inside Story, these segments play in 2D side-scrolling fashion, meaning these dream dimensions where anything can happen resemble something we’ve done already. Nothing cool with the idea of “dream logic” is done, as you just do things we’ve seen other 2D side-scrollers do like flip gravity, go across background and foreground planes, and *gasp* activate doors and remove barriers. What kills Dream Team even harder, depriving this game even of its future lives, is that it’s long. It’s the single longest Mario & Luigi game in the series. Remember how I praised Superstar Saga for not overstaying its welcome, given how shallow the combat is from an RPG strategy perspective? That still isn’t addressed—with the bulk of the difficulty coming from dodging tricky attack patterns, by the time you enter the final dungeon the attack patterns become horribly obnoxious. This game made me hate Fire Bros. for this reason. There are also giant battles like in Bowser’s Inside Story, but they also use the 3DS flipped on its side. It made sense on the original DS because both screens were the same size, but here it’s just really awkward-looking. The worst part of these battles is how they’ll use gyroscope controls—a couple of battles involve tilting the 3DS to move around and hit a moving target, and it’s so unreliable, at least for me. The last giant battle requires gyro, and it made me nearly throw my 3DS because I lost due to not being able to calibrate it in-battle, and I never get that frustrated playing games anymore. It’s just sad—Luigi finally gets his own game in a series partly named after him, and it’s this bloated, uncreative, gimmicky mess. Cool final boss, at least.
LABYRINTH - Derelict Abyss
June Flower’s more recent RPG Maker exploration game, it follows a similar beat to Remnants, but instead of a series of floors that you explored until you moved onto the next one, it’s one big, interconnected map, with teleporters and looparounds that make exploration very engaging. The art, a standout in Remnants, is even better in LABYRINTH, with full-screen NPC collectibles (it makes sense in the game) and a segment where you transform into a worm climbing a cavern’s flora to get around. It’s as abstract as ever, though, so keep that in mind as you play. The game ends on a really cool moment, so look forward to that.
Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam
A crossover between Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario seemed like a cool idea, but this game has a couple of conditions. One, all the Paper Mario content is from Sticker Star, the worst one. Two, the setting for the game feels less based on either of the two series in the title and more like they turned New Super Mario Bros. into an RPG. This is a very clean, stripped down Mushroom Kingdom you’re exploring. Otherwise, once you get past that, this game is pretty decent. Paper Mario as the third party member is surprisingly well-integrated, as his physics for jumping and hammering, both in the attack and dodge phases, have an interesting particularity to them that really makes him stand out. His gimmick is that, since he’s made of paper, he’s weak on his own unless he uses an ability to clone himself, doing tons of chip damage this way. Story-wise, the game has a surprisingly uninteresting premise—Bowser and Paper Bowser team up to rule the Mushroom Kingdom, and many Mario characters are accompanied by their paper counterparts. Due to the way the paper characters are handled, where they’re just the exact same person as their non-paper counterpart, having them stick together like this makes for pretty uninteresting interactions for Mario / Paper Mario, Bowser / Paper Bowser, and Kamek / Paper Kamek. However, there’s an interesting wrinkle (pun intended) with Peach / Paper Peach and Bowser Jr. / Paper Bowser Jr.—they’re both characters that enjoy their own company for interesting reasons, like Peach being around someone who understands her and Junior having someone like him that he can play with. As a game, it’s fine… though I think the real deal-breaker is that you have to do these missions where you rescue Toads who are running away from you because they think you’re an enemy. As someone who likes Toads and thinks they’re adorable, I’m sick of Nintendo making Toads dumb and annoying to get on the player’s nerves. There are a bunch of these missions, and while they do pay off in a cool way at the end, in the moment they’re aggravating. Overall, it competes with Dream Team as my second-least-favorite M&L game—DT is way more stretched out, but this game feels more squeaky-clean and brand-adherent. I’ll say that Paper Jam feels less tiring to play, so it has that going for it.
APRIL
In April, I played only two games, both of which are huge playtime-wise. I give extended thoughts on each of them further down.
MAY
Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht
Xenosaga Wiki (Fandom)
The newly-formed Monolith Soft’s first new project, and Tetsuya Takahashi’s successor to Xenogears, began here. The overall plot is very complicated, with an entire segment of space being the setting for metaphysics, energy source chasing, existentialism, and lots of religious imagery. The central plot, however (at least for this game), is very simple. Shion Uzuki, a scientist working for private corporation Vector Industries, has to reach her destination of Second Miltia (it’s like Earth, but not literally Earth) with her robot KOSMOS, a literal person of mass destruction who was made to combat the Gnosis, a frightening species of interdimensional ghost monsters who can’t be killed through normal means. KOSMOS’ Hilbert Effect reaches across the physical plane to drag the Gnosis down to our plane of reality, allowing them to be killed, or at least dissipated. Through several mishaps and misadventures, Shion and KOSMOS join up with most of the other party members (her brother, Jin, is the last one but isn’t playable until the second game) after they get separated from Vector, and eventually arrive at their destination—though not without many of the following games’ key figures and plot elements set up—Albedo and the the blue eyes KOSMOS gains at certain points being big standouts. I like that it’s an entire game that sets up the worldbuilding and lore, while keeping the character interactions interesting and enjoyable. I admire that even at this early stage in Xenosaga, Shion is being stressed as an RPG protagonist that struggles with mental health—you really don’t see too much of that, even today. As a game, Xenosaga Episode I is… slow. Attack animations take forever and Shion’s walking speed on the overworld is far from brisk, making traversing through both battles and the environments more tiring than they needed to be. The kicker, and what makes me sigh the most, is the lack of background music for areas you traverse through. According to a friend of mine, the people working on the game prioritized grand, sweeping music for the cutscenes to make them feel cinematic, and listening to the cutscene music on its own reveals that, yeah, these are good tracks, but since the orchestra they hired was so expensive, they didn’t have enough money to make background music for actual gameplay. It makes going through the areas feel frankly lifeless. I remember the Song of Nephilim being the only one with a background track. You’re also going to hear the exact same battle theme over and over and over again. Thankfully, this was addressed in the following games, but the lack of music combined with the slowness of the rest of the game makes this game a pretty rocky beginning.
Ys: Memories of Celceta
Compared to past Ys games, this one is more about exploring one big area, namely the forest of Celceta. You’re given the mission to map all of it out, which fits perfectly with the series’ feel of adventure, though of course as you map it out the plot stuff starts kicking in. There are multiple characters to control this time, and up to two others help you out with AI, which you can toggle between attacking and retreating commands. It works, and I don’t remember running into any issues with it. I like that this game allows us to get glimpses into Adol’s past through the memories scattered about, like how his father inspired him to become an adventurer (this isn’t a spoiler, the actual memory has more delightful details for you to see for yourself). There’s not as much as I would like, though, as the other memories mostly detail how Adol lost his memories to advance the story, which eventually turns into an intriguing plot about higher powers bestowing knowledge onto humans. Compared to the other Ys games I played prior to this one, this was also pretty long, I think my playtime is something like 25 hours. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but Ys gameplay is pretty same-y throughout, and the skill toggling stuff doesn’t break up the monotony as much as I would like. I think I’d like this game more if it was shorter, is what I’m saying.
Xenosaga Freaks
Xenosaga Wiki (Fandom)
A series of gag visual novels released only in Japan, and hosted on a flash website, of all things. Fans have taken to completely recreating each party member’s story in Ren’Py, though Shion and Allen’s stories are only translated through text on the Xenosaga wiki, unfortunately. Taking place during a distinct moment in the first game where the party was relaxing, it isn’t too high stakes, though it does involve KOSMOS running loose because of a virus that turns her into a catgirl. Xenosaga Freaks clearly isn’t taking itself too seriously, which is part of the fun. Some of the stories (Ziggy’s and Jr. 's) foreshadow things that will happen in Xenosaga II and Pied Piper, though, and while this doesn’t make Freaks mandatory, it’s a nice thing to throw players in between the laughs.
Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse
Xenosaga Wiki (Fandom)
Following the events of the first game, Shion turns KOSMOS over to another division of Vector, and promptly sulks about it, as the two of them became close over the first game, at least in Shion’s eyes. The rest of the game’s plot largely centers around chasing the Y-Data, a mysterious lore dump that several powerful people want to get their hands on. One of them is Albedo, who has a connection to Jr., the second most important party member after Shion (or third most important if you count KOSMOS). This results in Xenosaga Episode II focusing a lot more on Jr. and Albedo’s backstory, and damn if it isn’t well-written. It’s here that Albedo became cemented as one of my new favorite antagonists. Otherwise, Xenosaga Episode II, despite now having background music for areas and more than a couple of battle themes, is a big step down from the first game. It doesn’t seem that way at first—there’s a really cool mechanic that Xenoblade would later expand upon, where you get enemies into a state where they become vulnerable to attacks that either knock them into the sky or flat on the ground. Party members have attacks that hit different parts of the body, specified by being labeled A, B, or C, and each individual enemy (and, for certain bosses, certain phases) have a unique “code” that guarantees a knockdown. Combined with the first game’s mechanic of giving your party members multiple turns in a row, and you can dish out some devastating damage, and it feels really satisfying. The problem comes with how time consuming this process is—it makes sense for bosses, but regular enemies have it too, and this game throws tons of them at you. It’s so tiring going through the motions again and again for the harder enemies, and while you don’t have to spend turns giving your party members extra actions every time (you have a max of 3, but for regular enemies you’ll usually only need 1 or 2), it’s horribly tedious all the same. I was feeling pretty patient with this game until I hit the Ormus Stronghold. After that, I checked out, and played the rest of the game on autopilot, with all the joy in my face having permanently left. Some people also complain that this game doesn’t have any equipment, though that didn’t bother me—I think RPGs can do more interesting things to give a sense of progression than “here’s a stronger sword than the one you had before for some money, repeat this for the whole game”. The skill tree in this game keeps things somewhat fresh, though since every character can learn any skill, they become homogenized pretty quickly once you run into the best ones and adjust accordingly. Xenosaga Episode II is a slog, even more than the first game, but I can only emphasize that, eventually, it does become worth it, so don’t listen to anyone telling you to skip it (especially with all the character and story stuff, which is as good as ever).
JUNE
Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir
I’d always wanted to play Famicom Detective Club since I was little. In Super Smash Bros. Melee, there were these collectible 3D models of Nintendo characters, famous and obscure, from worldwide releases or from Japan-only games. The entry for Ayumi Tachibana caught my eye. I was struck by the concept of a Nintendo game that focused on story and narrative, particularly one about solving mysteries. Famicom Detective Club, alongside The Portopia Serial Murder Case, were hugely influential to the adventure game genre (in Japan, I doubt they influenced the LucasArts folks) and how visual novels would go on to present themselves. All of these facts made it one of my most wanted translations for a Japan-only game, and this year, we got these lush remakes with voice acting and everything. After finally playing it, at least starting with the first game, I was subtly let down. Even knowing that it wouldn’t be as accessible as the games it would go on to inspire, I was annoyed with all the event flag hunting I had to do. If you’re playing this game, I recommend keeping a guide open, and to not feel any shame about it no matter how much of a True Gamer you are. The protagonist is also pretty generic, which makes the later plot elements that feature him hit less hard than they could have with a more interesting character (no, they aren’t a silent protagonist, which may have helped). Aside from that, though, I was pleasantly surprised with how the story went down. It revolves around a rich family whose members die in mysterious, seemingly inexplicable ways, and as you progress through the game you also gain insight into how the townsfolk's several opinions and even superstitions concerning them and their history came about. The story, for this game and the second one, was originally penned by Yoshio Sakamoto. I dunno what went wrong with Metroid: Other M, because his plots here are pretty strong all things considered.
Xenosaga: Pied Piper
Xenosaga Wiki (Fandom)
This was a Xenosaga game for cell phones, and like with Final Fantasy VII: Before Crisis, it hasn’t been preserved anywhere at all, which is a huge bummer because it’s a great look at Ziggy, a party member in the other games who otherwise generally keeps to himself. Except, unlike Before Crisis, fans haven’t been able to attempt to recreate this game using personal interpretation the way Before Crisis was in 2019 (look it up, they did it in RPG Maker). The whole script has been translated, however, so I read it on a friend’s preservation of a fansite that hosted the script. It’s a story about Ziggy’s time as a police officer in his past life, when he had his original name of Jan Sauer, who hunts down hacker terrorists trying to mess with encephalon dives, which as Xenosaga has established are manifestations of someone’s subconscious hosted on another plane of existence (which you “travel” to, hence “dive”, it’s a little complicated I know). While things look up at first, the story ends on a tragic note. That said, this whole story took place in Xenosaga’s past—what happens in the present is still up in the air for Ziggy. Reading the script is an amusing experience, as you’ll sometimes read the game preparing for a boss fight that you’re never going to play. On the other hand, these boss fights feel largely inconsequential to the narrative, which is both a blessing for readers and a revelation on how a lot of bosses in Xenosaga (and its predecessor Xenogears) felt shoehorned in because they felt they needed to have a boss fight somewhere.
Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind
The other Famicom Detective Club game that got remade, in part, for overseas audiences. I liked the first game well enough, but I thought The Girl Who Stands Behind was much cooler and better in its characters and story. Instead of focusing on a rich family, it focuses on a student body and faculty at a local high school who spread ghost story rumors of a mysterious girl standing behind them, covered in blood. The victim in this game is a close friend of Ayumi Tachibana, who is given a lot more focus in this game, and she’s a nice presence to be around so I liked this change. Like with The Missing Heir, though, keep a guide open. The gameplay is still “what if Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was just the clumsy investigation sections?” For example, you have to examine the victim’s corpse at the start of the game, but nothing tells you that you need to click her neck to progress—it doesn’t stand out at all (I suppose that’s a hint, in a way, but eh), so have that tip on me. Again, this kind of thing is worth putting up with because more than 30 years after it first came out, this story is really cool. There’s a third FDC released exclusively for the Satellaview, which sucks since it’s the only one that focuses on Ayumi as the true main character.
Xenosaga: A Missing Year
Xenosaga Wiki (Fandom)
So Xenosaga Freaks wasn’t preserved, and Xenosaga: Pied Piper wasn’t preserved. But this one is the clearest example of “man, it sucks that Namco didn’t go to the effort of keeping this around”—it’s an important “in-between” story that directly follows Xenosaga II, setting up events for the then-upcoming Xenosaga III. Many players who go straight from II to III are confused as to why Shion, in particular, is so different, and who can blame them? Not every prospective Xenosaga player is going to know that the proper order isn’t just I>II>III, but rather I>II>Pied Piper>A Missing Year>III (you can play Freaks after I, and while I’d recommend it, it’s just a fun extra and not necessary). The worst part about A Missing Year is the clumsy way it was preserved by fans—I’ll directly link to what is the best way to view AMY, here. Since AMY was just a series of flash animations (yes, you heard right, Namco limited the Xenosaga developers to making flash animations for this important part of the story, and they’re as cheap-looking as you’d fear), the translated text is superimposed over the Japanese original text, and early on some of it is actually cropped off by the video border! Nonetheless, I still insist that you check it out before diving into Xenosaga III—while that game does have in-game data entries detailing what happened here, it’s only in text format and it assumes you’re already familiar with AMY right off the bat. As for AMY itself, it concerns another Realian child (think “lab-grown human designed for a specific purpose, like a robot, sometimes even having computer-like abilities like storing data”) and her role in a plot cooked up by a criminal to activate a device called Lemegeton that can interface with the Zohar, the series’ central plot token. If you can glean the story from the fuzziness and badly-cropped text, it’s honestly pretty sad. It sets up a very big move from Shion that, again, is a big surprise in Xenosaga III if you skipped this one.
Gorogoa
This is an interesting game that’s hard to explain in words, so look at the GIF. You essentially move this 2x2 grid, zooming in and out of each square, as you align background elements in interesting ways that link them to other squares. It tells a pretty grim story about trying to live life after the horror of war has made its mark on it. It’s one of those artsy games that is definitely unique, but didn’t make too much of an impact on me.
Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim
This game was the start of “modern” Ys, where Adol now has the ability to freely jump, and a more expanded moveset besides “just” slashing. He can do a rising slash, a diving stab, a three-hit combo, etc. The story concerns Adol being stranded on an island, but unlike in Ys I, this island is host to both other humans (previously stranded from other voyages that got too close to the island) and the native elf-like Rehda species, who are in tension with one another. If you point a gun to my head, I’d say that, honestly, nothing stands out in this game as being all that bad (well, I don’t like how the two main Rehda are stronger than the rest because their skin is paler, yeesh). In a way, it’s the best Ys game, with great dungeon maps, an interesting mechanic revolving around 3 swords that Adol can swap freely between for different strengths and weaknesses, and a plot that largely wraps everything up nicely with no loose threads. Still, something about it just made me shrug at it—I suppose it’s one of those “nothing bad, but nothing stood out to me as amazing” situations. Still, I’d recommend it—it’s not like Ys: Memories of Celceta or Ys SEVEN where the game feels too long. It’s a breezy 10 hours, and I think hour-long sessions over the course of a week or so is the best way to enjoy the game. Of all the Ys games, it’s probably in the top 5.
Super Mario Odyssey (replay)
New Super Mario Bros. U and Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam were both, well, fine, but they aren’t my favorites in either the mainline Mario series or the Mario & Luigi games, respectively. I wanted to have lots of fun playing Mario again, so I gave this game a replay. Having not touched it in 4 years, this game was a huge delight as the fun I remember having came back to me fresh and new all over again. Mario just feels great, not too slow like in Galaxy and not too slippery like in Sunshine, and of course possessing enemies and obstacles is just as fun as it was when this game came out. I don’t have too much to say about it other than, before I replayed it, I was in a funk where I wasn’t terribly enjoying most games that I was playing. Odyssey brought me out of it and I looked forward to having fun with games again. I didn’t 100% it this time, though—those trace-walking missions can go jump in a dumpster for all I care.
JULY
No More Heroes
The beginning of the legend of Travis Touchdown, one of the most delightfully outrageous video game characters ever created. He started killing people just because he wanted money for more video games, and he does it with a not-lightsaber he bought off of an auction site. He yells things like “Blueberry Cheese Brownie!” when activating special abilities, which are references to his favorite anime show about concerningly-dressed little anime girls. He watches wrestling and kills people with stuff he sees other wrestlers do. He climbs through the ranks of an assassination league, in part, because he wants to get laid. He funds his climb through the ranks by doing menial labor like mowing lawns and collecting garbage around the city. No More Heroes is delightful because it’s a mix of the developers having a lot of fun putting crazy shit in their game and never letting you forget that Travis is a weird smelly loser, defined both by the poverty of the city he lives in and his own personal flaws, really pushing the “hero” part of his anti-hero label as far as he can before he can verge on becoming a villain protagonist. The bosses in this game, well, as cool and creative as they are, they could be pretty clunky to actually fight. Get used to them having invincibility frames in places you wouldn’t normally expect, and a bunch of poking and prodding to see when the game feels like letting you hit them. At least they got the secret final boss just right. No More Heroes is a game you play for everything besides the actual action, which is something Suda51’s games are apparently known for, unfortunately.
Ys SEVEN
I think this game is longer than Memories of Celceta, which is unfortunate as generally I prefer Ys games to be short, not long. This game was the foundation for Celceta though, so it’s another game with multiple playable characters, though this time you explore most of the land through plot events rather than a mission to map everything out. I remember finding this game weirdly tough, as if you don’t get the dodging and perfect guarding mechanics right, you’re going to really struggle against the bosses, who require multiple uses of a super move to take down their monstrous HP bars. Unfortunately I found this largely pretty annoying the whole game, though I’d settled into a comfortable groove by the very end of the game. Geis from Ys VI comes back, which is pretty cool—he’s the other slashing attack user if you don’t want to use just Adol for that. After visiting every major dungeon and area, the game unfortunately makes you revisit every dungeon to access a secret pocket dimension they all have, so the sense of adventure is hindered as it’s new dungeons you’re going to, not new areas. Playing this after Ys VI also made me remember that I’m not the biggest fan of crafting and material gathering, since Ark of Napishtim didn’t have any of that and SEVEN introduced it.
AUGUST
Fallen Star
This game was an entry in an RPG Maker game jam hosted on itch.io made by a friend of mine, jetstorm4 a.k.a. Thomas L. It’s a bite-sized hour-long adventure with exactly 15 encounters, all of which are pre-existing unlike his previous epic Silus, which had random encounters. The battles are challenging, and test your strategy really well. There’s also room for lots of different tactics, as HP and MP is restored after every battle and you can use your limited money to buy more items and accessories to give you an edge over the later fights. What little story there is here is great, and you get a good view of what all 4 party members are like with the minimal dialogue Thom had to infuse them with. I like the twist with the final boss, it was great.
No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle
I found this game less memorable than the first one, despite the fighting being vastly improved and less of a hassle. It’s a revenge story, in part, since the antagonist goes after one of Travis’ friends from the first game, because Travis himself killed people the antagonist was close to. Travis himself goes through some character development—in the first game, he thought that what he was doing was largely cool, but he’s more disillusioned with killing in this game the longer it goes on. Otherwise, it follows a similar formula of fighting bosses and the levels preceding them with regular enemies to slaughter. Some stuff hasn’t aged well—there’s this character named Ryan, who runs the gym (a place to increase Travis’ attack power at) and is a big macho gay stereotype who hits on Travis. No More Heroes 1 was already pretty trashy, but this game can be a bit more skeevy, too, so just know what you’re getting into.
SEPTEMBER
Luigi Floating on an Egg Over the Sea
A friend of mine, Polly, made this game for another friend of mine, Sayara. The latter likes the part in Super Mario Bros. 2 where you have to jump on top of an egg that Birdo spits out across the sea to reach the rest of the level, which inspired the former. This is a fun shmup-like take on it, though you don’t shoot any projectiles and dodge things instead. It’s tricky, cute, and brief—it only took me about 30 minutes, but about 10-15 of those were due to restarts. Don’t underestimate this game!
Game Builder Garage
A very simplified game creation tool made by none other than Nintendo. It was subsequently left to die—“Nintendo releases an official game creator” should be one of the biggest deals in the world, but it got absolutely pitiful traction on social media and other important parts of the internet. That said, on some level, it’s understandable—while people have made seriously impressive games with this thing, they can’t be too ambitious in their length. It’s also not as friendly to anyone looking to inject text boxes into their game as other tools like RPG Maker are. In my experience, you can only include text boxes as literal in-game boxes with text printed onto the side of it, which isn’t quite the same thing. I was also disappointed that no matter how much I adjusted the jump physics, I couldn’t find any kind of appealing speed or velocity that I was looking for. None of this is an excuse for Nintendo burying this thing, of course. Game Builder Garage has an educational mode built in to help players understand how its coding works. Has anyone reading this blog ever heard of Node-RED? All the programming in this game is just like that—connecting things to other things on a grid to have your game formed out of this language. It’s really appealing to me, and looking up what other players make and finding the few communities there are around this game encouraged me to try a lot of things out. I haven’t made any games for this thing, sadly—it made me more interested in getting around to RPG Maker, ironically—but I’d like to make something with it, someday. The postgame (well, post-tutorial) puzzles are really cool and made me use my brain to reexamine things I thought I already knew, which is the appeal of programming, after all. Props to Nintendo for conveying that in a really intuitive way, even if they’ve ignored it ever since.
OCTOBER
A Hat in Time
I really wanted to like this game as much as everybody else did. It’s really cute, I like the little wall climb that Hat Kid does, and the art is appealing. But I couldn’t click with it—for me, the voice acting was too over-the-top, the platforming was good but not amazing, and I didn’t find the abilities that Hat Kid got by stitching new hats all that interesting. Actually, speaking of which, the main collectible I got all the time was the yarn balls you use to make a new hat… except that to make a new hat you already have, you have to find at least one yarn ball made specifically for the new hat. They lock these until later worlds, so I found myself collecting a lot of extra yarn balls that ended up going to waste since I made the foolish decision to stick around in older areas until I exhausted them of their hourglasses (this game’s main collectible). And yes, I know that I can turn the voice acting off—I can still voice my opinion on it. Overall, I wasn’t able to gel with this game’s flow and that may have been the clincher for my nonplussed reaction to the otherwise pretty cool final level.
NOVEMBER
Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition / Future Connected
Xenoblade Wiki (Fandom)
I’d played Xenoblade a few times before I ever touched Tetsuya Takahashi’s past work, and unfortunately going through his games did not sway my original dislike of Xenoblade. In fact, I think it worsened it—the plot, which I was originally impressed by, is now something that lets me down, as it feels like a reeled back and safer version of Takahashi’s past plot beats. I still don’t like the offline MMORPG style of gameplay—the last thing I think a game ever needs is useless “loot” that’s only ever good for being sold or being sidequest filler. Man, the sidequests in the game—I only remember the Bana one and the one for Tyrea and Melia’s mother. Otherwise there’s literally hundreds of quests that involve hunting down goblin scrotums and pelican penises or whatever. You’ll learn to hate quest givers that ask for monster parts, since nooo, their guitar they’re trying to build won’t accept just any Orluga muscle strings, they need the rare drop version, which can take an hour of solid farming. The combat itself is just micromanaging cooldown timers, which is incredibly boring to me. People loved that this game got rid of using items in battle so you’d never have to worry about resource management, but that means that you can go through almost every single encounter on autopilot, clicking the same abilities and waiting for the same cooldown timers to run out. Otherwise, I found new appreciation for the big, sweeping landscapes that you’re free to explore, after Xenosaga mostly railroaded you through the story (which I didn’t dislike, just that it made Xenoblade refreshing comparatively). The music is still beautiful, one of the best RPG soundtracks ever, I’ll happily admit that. The Definitive Edition added a pretty beefy epilogue that took me about 20 hours to go through (I did take my time), where they bring back and build upon an area that was cut from the original Wii release. I also like how it felt like a response to Xenoblade criticisms like mine—gems (accessories that give various buffs) don’t need to be crafted anymore, as deposits that originally gave gem materials now just give you gems right off the bat. Nice stuff like that.
Even The Ocean
Analgesic Productions is mostly known for their Anodyne games, but in between the two they made, they released this 2D physics-based puzzle platformer. It has a really cool twist on the idea of a health bar—instead of something that drains when you’re hit too much, it instead has two colors comprising it derived from dark and light energy. It’s best to keep it split down the middle, as running into too much of either dark or light substances will kill you. On the other hand, the more dark energy you have, the faster you move horizontally, and the more light energy you have, the higher you’ll move vertically. You also have a shield you can aim in four directions, to affect your vulnerability to environmental hazards. You can use this shield to do things like slide down iron bars or move yourself further with wind gusts. The story itself revolves around power plants going haywire, and your job is to fix them. The game has themes of balance, environmentalism, and transience. I think you should give it a shot.
Arc Symphony
This game was part of this word-of-mouth marketing stunt where the developers posted images of a PS1 game called Arc Symphony, which was a beloved cult classic RPG. Their friends started sharing their memories of it, and other people who weren’t part of the stunt joined in. Here’s the thing—Arc Symphony doesn’t exist. It was a neat experiment on people’s willingness to pretend to know what they’re talking about in order to be part of the conversation, as the developers met people in person who claimed to have played it. However, it did culminate in a Twine game hosted on itch.io and a fake fansite for Arc Symphony that really evokes accurate vibes of the early 2000s internet. The site even hosts dead links to fanfiction sites that aren’t around anymore, just like the 2000s fansites you, the reader, like. The Twine game itself is neat—it’s a tiny glimpse of what fandom hosted on MUDs in the late 90s were like, and captures things like drama between users, someone who says a character is more important than they actually are, and an in-game IRC chat. Unfortunately, that’s all it is—a glimpse. It felt like it ended before it really began, which was deflating. Arc Symphony is one of those things that’s more interesting to talk about than play.
Luigi's Mansion (replay)
I finally got around to getting Dolphin to work on my PC, and this was the game I tested it with. It worked, and I remembered how much I liked this game. It’s one of my favorite games, but many years ago, I gave my GameCube and several of my GC games to a cousin of mine for his birthday, and this was one of them. Now, on my very first replay, I got an A rank at the very end, all from being observant and thorough. Nice! I used to complain about how short this game was, but now that I’ve played it, it feels like the perfect length for the simplistic fishing-based combat the game revolves around. Boolossus is still a pain in the ass, though.
All Our Asias
Melos Han-Tani, one of the two people who comprise Analgesic Productions, made this game largely on his own. It concerns a Japanese-American young man entering the subconscious of his dying father, who he never knew, as the latter left him and his mother to fend for themselves. It’s a moody game, as the anger the protagonist feels slowly subsides and is replaced with more complicated feelings as he gleans the life his father led. The themes of family, race, and gentrification are really well done. The visuals are this beautiful faux-PS1 look, and the music Melos Han-Tani composed for it is as good as anything in the Anodyne games and Even The Ocean. I think if you spend an evening with this game, you’ll have a good chance of possibly resonating with it, so give it a try—it’s free, and if you like it, you can always donate to the creator.
Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes
After a big years-long absence, Travis returns in an odd stop-gap game between No More Heroes 2 and the eventual release of No More Heroes III, which the game teased at the very end. The gameplay is as shallow as the previous No More Heroes games, but the wild and crazy spirit of the series is still in full swing. You venture inside of video games in one of the most delightfully outlandish fictional game consoles ever made, the Death Drive Mk. II. It has a ramen cooker built right in! The story revolves around finding 6 Death Balls (the Death Drive’s spherical cartridges) to grant a wish to bring Bad Girl from the first game back from the dead. Each game is a delightful send-up of something gaming-related, like pixel arcade games or PS1-era CG cutscenes or in-progress Unity levels. My favorite parts were the text adventure intermissions you get between beating the Death Balls—at one point, Travis taunts Jeane, his cat, who can talk now (it makes just as much sense in-context), for worrying about gamers who bought an action game driving down the game’s Metacritic score for the text adventure sections, asking if she’s “scared of gamer reviews”. That was one of the hardest laughs I’ve had in a long time.
DECEMBER THIS YEAR
This year, the cutoff date is December 12, so I played a couple of games before then. One of them became one of my new favorite games, and the other, well…
Super Mario Sunshine (replay)
I’ll just copy + paste my tweet on this game.
“replayed Super Mario Sunshine for the first time since I was a kid
I wanted to like it more than I did but Mario is too slippery, there's not as much platforming as I'd like, and you only need to do the 7th mission in every world to beat the game
I still had an alright time tho”
Also the final level sucked, fuck that mudboat. Aside from that, I’d like to stress that I liked how Isle Delfino felt like a real place, far more than any of the Super Mario 64 levels did. It’s one of the most memorable Nintendo locales for a reason.
—
So many games! So many thoughts! But the following ones are special—unlike past years, in 2021 I ended up playing a motherlode of games that would become some of my new all-time favorites. They get their own section. Though, we need to briefly talk about one game first—it's a game on the border between "games I enjoyed" and "new favorite games".
Xenogears [April]
Xenosaga Wiki (Fandom)
Xenogears almost made my favorite games list, since the good parts of the game are really good. It has one of the coolest and most ambitious stories you’ll ever see in a game, to the point where this single PS1 title would go on to inspire not one but two spiritual successors, both of which comprise multiple games rather than a single title. It’s the definition of an epic, with a story spanning 10,000 years, an extremely huge cast of characters, a central premise involving piloting giant robots, and going all in on Gnostic themes that were virtually unheard of in the West at the time of its release in 1998. Each and every room in this game is an individually hand-crafted 3D diorama, which makes walking around towns and interesting locales really immersive. Lastly, the soundtrack is pretty great and the art and animation is still gorgeous all these years later—I’d definitely say it aged better visually than Final Fantasy VII did. That said, man, is it an utter slog to actually sit down and play. Considering just how long Xenogears is (about 50 hours, my playtime was about 80 since I took my time carefully reading the boatloads of text and exploring everywhere), that’s a lot of random encounter loading you’re going to have to put up with. Yeah, I said random encounter loading, because you can still move around when you get one for a second, and during this second you can’t jump or open the menu. There’s a dungeon in the game with a ton of platforming, good luck trying not to have encounters screw you during your attempts to jump from place to place (I actually did have good luck on that front, actually)! The on-foot battles start promising, with an interesting button combo based system where inputting specific sequences give you superpowered attacks called Deathblows with no MP cost, but less than a quarter into the game it becomes apparent just how shallow this system is. Almost every Deathblow is better than the previous one, so if you’re playing without a guide like I did, most of the random encounters will involve desperately experimenting with button sequences until you manage to grind out the next one—I recommend just looking up a guide for these and to not flail blindly like I did. The giant robots are really cool to use, as their limited fuel means you have to be careful and use your powerful attacks with them sparingly, but they’re a huge pain in the ass to maintain, as the shops for upgrading them are some of the clunkiest parts of the game. Not every party member is thoughtfully fleshed out, either, as I can count at least three that either feel shoehorned in or just didn’t get enough meaningful screentime. Lastly, most of the dungeons in Xenogears weren’t very interesting to actually navigate if we put plot aside. Off the top of my head, I enjoyed storming Bledavik, investigating the Church of Ethos, and infiltrating Solaris, but Xenogears otherwise doesn’t care that much about making memorable dungeons to explore, especially with how short and thrown-together they become in Disc 2. That was actually my favorite part of the game, since Disc 2 cut out most of the dreadful gameplay in favor of just sitting down and telling the story to the player. What weird alien creatures actually prefer the dungeon crawling to the story, anyway? Why did nerds complain about Disc 2 being compromised? It’s to the credit of the writing and scenarios of Xenogears that I can still say I love it, even if I never want to touch this game ever again unless it somehow gets a remake that addresses all my issues with it.
Again, to stress this one last time: I do love the good parts of Xenogears. Take a look at the name of my blog—you should recognize it as a reference to one of my favorite songs from that game.
FIFTEEN NEW FAVORITE GAMES
I thought really hard about how to order these, but rest assured, I love every one of these games, even the lower-ranked ones. These aren’t just my favorite games of the year, remember—they’re some of my new favorite games, period.
15. No More Heroes III [December This Year]
Starting the list off with a bang is the single wildest game I’ve played this year. The other No More Heroes games were extremely out there, but the grand finale (at least according to Goichi Suda a.k.a. Suda51) takes the cake. Aliens who like to think of themselves as superheroes are taking over the earth, and with the help of Sylvia, Travis goes though another set of assassination rankings to kill them one by one. This game sees Travis evolve from a nerdy loser with almost no friends to someone with loved ones supporting him, and despite his usual personality and ever-present love of killing, he does his best to make sure as little harm comes to them as possible. All of this goes down in the midst of one of the best audiovisual feasts you'll ever enjoy. Each assassin's episode has an anime opening in the style of Ultraman, an anime ending in the style of mecha anime like Gundam, podcast segments with head drawings modeled after Dr. Slump (I thought they were Lupin III until I looked it up), and adventure game segments like the ones Travis Strikes Again had—and so many more styles. For me, the sheer spirit of "let's just put in a ton of shit we love" that the developers were clearly going for makes the true final boss fight hit even harder. NMH3 is going to be one of the most memorable games I've played—which is ironic, as otherwise the fighting itself, in between the ranking fights, gets shallow as quickly as the earlier games. I recommend picking the easiest difficulty option to get through the fighting quicker, as it's everything else about these games that people love.
14. A Short Hike [January]
I love The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and this game feels like the exploratory and experimental strengths of that game in miniature. You play as an adorable bird girl, and you can talk to the other islanders, participate in races, climb, jump, and glide your way across a deceptively large island. It's one of the most adorable games I've ever played, but there's a real strong core to it as well. The reason you're exploring the island is something of a rite of passage for you, and as you learn the mechanics and get familiar with the island, by the time you finally reach the top, you'll almost feel like you went through something important as well. If you bought the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality in 2020, this game was included in it for free. If not, it's well worth your money, so plunk down some money and give it a shot.
13. moon [December Last Year]
This game is known as "Moon: Remix RPG Adventure" in Japan [note: when I wrote this, I was talking about the Nintendo Switch version, which is just called "moon", but now that I see the Steam page for it, it has the full title, though "moon" is still lowercase at least], and is one of the most influential games you'll play, inspiring games like Undertale. The premise is essentially "what if you were an ordinary person who had to live in a typical (Dragon Quest-inspired, not Final Fantasy) RPG?" Rather than turn-based combat, moon is an adventure game, with some of the most interesting puzzle solving you'll get to do. The hero of the game has slain several animals to become stronger, and it's up to you to collect their spirits to reunite them with their bodies someday. A big theme of the game is love, as you can actually accrue love points depending on how many good deeds and helpful activities you do for everyone. Both saving animals and gathering love depend on puzzles revolving around the time of day, so observation and schedule tracking is the most important thing you can do. As a child trapped in the world of the game, your job is to save everyone while also finding a way to go back to the real world—a premise the game does very interesting things with. It also does interesting things with music. By default, there's no background music, as instead you play music from an in-game CD player. While the game works without any music, you'd be missing out on one of the most inventive and experimental soundtracks you'll ever hear in a game.
12. Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana [October]
After hearing tons of praise for this game the past few years, my Ys marathon leading up to Ys VIII was worth it. Though it's the longest Ys game—and the later Ys games being long is my biggest issue with them—everything else is completely nailed down. The exploration feels great, the combat feels excellent, the cast is wonderful, and the story is original and thrilling. The titular Dana is the coolest "blue-haired girl" incarnation in the series, being the first blade weapon user that I actually liked to use (I otherwise stick to Adol) because of just how incredible she is as a character. I'm even able to forgive the crafting in this game, because it makes sense in context (you're stranded on an island) and it completely replaces money anyway. Normally I don't 100% Ys games, but here I at least did every quest, all because all the people stranded on the island with you are so enjoyable to be around and I always wanted to do right by them. If you're going to play just one Ys game, make it Ys VIII (if you're playing more than one… start with Ys I lmao I love Ys I as well, or at least check that one out after playing this one).
11. SeaBed [March]
A very lengthy slice-of-life yuri kinetic mystery novel, this is one of the most unconventional stories I've ever experienced. SeaBed tells the story of a plucky girl named Takako and a more withdrawn girl named Sachiko as they live their lives in a series of vignettes. These glimpses into their lives are absolutely gorgeous—many of them showcase their vacations around the world, and the writing describing the environments and the music and sound effects dispensed throughout as you read make for an unforgettable audiovisual experience. The soundtrack is entirely public domain—I had no idea public domain music could sound so incredible! As for the "mystery" part, well, it's a bit odd. The mystery is "what the story even is". The kinetic novel is mostly read as a series of seemingly disconnected looks into the girls' lives, but their significance becomes clear either very late into the novel when it finally spells everything out, or quite a bit earlier if you're able to make the right connections between details and events. I'll admit it's not for everyone, but if you're able to connect with it, you're getting an experience you won't find anywhere else. SeaBed celebrates the mundane and the everyday of the lives we lead, in the most colorful, beautiful, and introspective ways you'll ever see.
10. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles [August]
These games were limited to Japan until this year, and now that that's finally changed, I can confidently say that they're some of the absolute best Ace Attorney games in the series. You play as Phoenix Wright's Japanese ancestor, Ryunosuke Naruhodo, as you team up with one of the best versions of Sherlock Holmes you'll ever encounter (renamed Herlock Sholmes for copyright reasons—just like the Arsene Lupin version) to solve mysteries in and out of court. The new mechanic here is the jury, something I've wanted very badly ever since Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney addressed the possibility only to discard it in Dual Destinies. Every now and then, the jury will reach its verdict prematurely, and you have to use an obscure law to convince more than half the jurors' opinions to continue the trial. Since they've generally made up their mind, evidence won't work so you'll need to pit their statements against each other instead. It's a great way to show that sometimes, people let themselves get caught up in the moment and have to clear their heads to see the truth. The overarching story is even cooler, easily one of the series' best. It also depicts some pretty harsh racism towards Japanese people, so make sure you know that going in so you can adequately stomach it. It's also best to play these two games as one big game, as that's how they were written and it flows better that way.
9. OneShot [December Last Year]
Right from the get-go, this game breaks the fourth wall. This is because you, the player, are a vital part of the game's world. Your job is to guide Niko, the most adorable cat person ever, on their quest to return home after being transported to the world the game takes place in. There's no combat, just talking and puzzle solving, but the setting and cast of characters are so enjoyable that you'll be fine if you're used to games with more verbs. One of the most inventive parts of OneShot is that certain puzzles rely on you using actual files that show up on your actual computer to progress through the game, which is played on a small window in the middle of your desktop. In its original version, OneShot was named after how the game would permanently delete itself the moment you closed the game, to make your experience as delicate and, I suppose, as meaningful as possible. It sounds like a fun parlor trick of a game, but the newer version that I played does something different and, I think, better. The Solstice update is one of my favorite meta video game experiences I've ever gone through.
8. Yakuza: Like a Dragon [April]
I'd been interested in Yakuza for a while, but put the series off for years since I'd wanted to start at the beginning (well, at Yakuza 0) and because I'd heard each game is extremely lengthy. A friend of mine wouldn't stop singing the praises of Like a Dragon, however, so I took a chance and skipped straight to it, the latest game in the series. As a big Dragon Quest fan, I loved Ichiban Kasuga's mentality of approaching everything like Dragon Quest. This game is also an RPG, and since it's in a series about gang wars and older people, it has one of the most eclectic RPG casts in the genre without even really trying. How many Square Enix RPGs have you played with a homeless guy spitting fire using alcohol and a lighter? As my first Yakuza game, I fell for Like a Dragon's mix of comedy, melodrama, and poignancy hard, the game deftly dancing between the three moods quite expertly. My biggest problem with the game is that it's too "modern day AAA game"-y, with the crafting and tons of busywork sidequests (not the side stories, those are great), though I'm sure you can play this game without bothering with either of them too much if you don't want to. I also felt that the game was longer than it needed to be, though that's apparently something ingrained into Yakuza as a series at this point. Nonetheless, if you're looking for a fresh take on RPGs, give Yakuza: Like a Dragon a shot, even if like me you hadn't played the prior games before.
7. Anodyne 2: Return to Dust [January]
This is a very atmospheric and moody game, like Analgesic Productions' other works. It concerns a girl born into the world with a specific and defined purpose, who works to fulfill it at the behest of her surrogate mothers serving The Center, an unknowable being located, well, take a guess. Your job is to meet people who are facing problems and then shrink down to microscopic levels to enter the worlds inside them. There, you address whatever issue they're facing in a short 2D Zelda-style dungeon. This makes up half of the gameplay, the other half being exploring these beautiful 3D faux-PS1 environments with a standard platformer move set (double jump and hover, though you can also turn into a car for interesting shenanigans). These places are gorgeous and evocative, in large part because they all strive to capture a specific feeling, like soaring over a highway, or feeling small around a mountain range, or the coziness of a familiar city. The highlight, however, is the story. Without giving anything away, this game presents its central premise in a very interesting way, and becomes more poignant as you progress. It's very meta, if you know what I mean.
6. Yume Nikki [March]
Sometimes you have to play a game simply because it inspired a lot of your favorite games. Yume Nikki is one of the most important indie games ever made, and despite knowing bits and pieces about it for years like Uboa, this game still surprised me again and again. Purely in terms of gameplay, it's a bunch of abstract and sometimes mazelike rooms that you journey through to find 24 different Effects, which change Madotsuki's appearance and sometimes her abilities. There is nothing else—only the extremely evocative environments and NPCs who you can't interact with at all (well, except one way…) that fully sell the hard-to-explain and difficult-to-capture feeling of dreams. It's one thing to know about Yume Nikki, but actually sitting down and experiencing it for yourself is another, and I'm glad I took the time to do so.
5. Xenosaga Episode III: Also Sprach Zarathustra [June]
Xenosaga Wiki (Fandom)
Getting to the conclusion of Xenosaga is commitment. Not only do you have to play the first two Xenosaga games, but less intuitive (I had to have a friend tell me this before I started the series) is that you should read the translated script of a Japan-only cell phone game and a cobbled-together subbed translation of a Japan-only series of flash slideshows. Yeah, you read that right—Namco relegated an important part of the Xenosaga story to incredibly low budget flash animation that isn't even proper animation, just a sequence of static art and text. But trust me when I say the commitment is 100% worth it. While past Xenosaga games all had some big issues, the final game in the series is just uninterrupted greatness. They finally get the fighting in the game just right, with everyone having unique strengths that set them apart from everyone else while still allowing for some degree of customizability. Every character gets their due, even ones introduced this late into the story. The walking speed, oh man, the walking speed is finally fucking reasonable. The fighting in the E.S.'s (the giant robots from Xenosaga Episode II) is actually fun, finally! Rather than constantly getting Game Overs like in the first two games due to high speed enemies or cheap hits, the game made me constantly feel like I was at risk of dying if I didn't plan out my every move as carefully as I could, and I only died a single time—the whole time believing that I was a hair's breadth away from death. But the story, well, that's probably the best part. Again, this blog post is strictly spoiler-free, so I can't talk about the story at all. Instead, I'll note that it features corporate espionage, several Xenogears callbacks, actual biblical figures (or at least the Xenosaga versions of them), and cosmic mental instability caused by contact with an alien entity who understands people about as much as people understand it. And despite how many plot elements and character arcs it has to juggle, Xenosaga ends all of it perfectly. I can't recommend this series to everyone, but for those willing to put in the time, you'll be rewarded with the experience that is Xenosaga Episode III.
4. Hypnospace Outlaw [March]
I wrote about this game! So, while this game is in my top 5, I'll keep this section short and link to my thoughts again here, but to add onto my previous blog post (which is also spoiler free), I want to add that Hypnospace Outlaw can be surprisingly emotional. I neglected to mention it but I now want to stress, for anyone still on the fence, that Hypnospace Outlaw isn't just a wacky fun internet simulation game, it understands the human element of the internet so well that you'll find yourself shocked and upset by what goes on in the world of Hypnospace, in between all the lighthearted stuff. "Millennium Anthem" is going to be one of my new favorite video game songs of all time.
3. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky trilogy [FC July / SC August / the 3rd September]
Not sure where to start with this entry, other than “Yep, these games are just as incredible as my friends had been telling me for years”. The appeal of Trails in the Sky, and maybe the following Trails games as well (I haven’t played them yet), is “it’s a series of games about doing sidequests”. That sounds boring, but think about it. In most mainstream AAA games, most sidequests are a series of banal checklists given by NPCs that never feel like people. Well, in the world of Trails in the Sky, this isn’t the case, as the crux of the games is that you’re a Bracer—in other words, a hero-for-hire. You help out the locals! You gather materials, deliver things to people, give tours around town, help plan weddings, catch fish, clear out nearby monsters—all the usual sidequest bullshit. But remember, in Trails in the Sky, this isn’t there to pad out the game, but rather it is the game. The story involves a girl and her adoptive brother (that he’s only an adoptive brother is important for story reasons) following in their father’s footsteps and becoming Junior Bracers, going around their small country of Liberl and doing enough good deeds to be promoted to Senior Bracers. Since Juniors can only accept jobs from the local area, while Seniors can accept them anywhere in the country, it’s a big milestone to aim for. Most NPCs are named, and have defined, observable relationships with others, and with party members. The few settlements in the games have clear economic and cultural significance, depending on themselves and on each other in ways that, over the course of getting to know them over 200+ hours, feel completely natural. The quests in each of these areas emphasize and reinforce the richness of the setting, because each quest is treated like its own event (well, maybe not the monster sighting quests), with characters and NPCs commenting on the task, its place relative to the rest of the story, and how the feel when each quest is wrapped up and done with. So when the next game, Trails in the Sky SC, kicks the ongoing plot into high gear, yet almost completely reuses the entirety of the locations from the first game, it’s difficult to complain because you’re seeing each of the five regions get affected in ways that remain intriguing in spite of all the asset reuse. By the time the final game of the trilogy, Trails in the Sky the 3rd, reuses assets in even more blatant ways, it’s fine because by that point it emphasizes the incredible cast the series spent the last couple of games building on and enriching. Trails in the Sky, as well as the following games from what I know, have mountains of text, and somehow, all of it is used to make players feel like everything they do matters to the people and the world the games take place in. That’s what makes Trails in the Sky special—it treats “going the extra mile” like the minimum, and is all the better for it. I haven’t even mentioned how Estelle Bright and Kevin Graham are some of the best RPG protagonists I’ve ever seen, so I can only hope you’ll enjoy their company if I’ve convinced you to check out the series.
2. The House in Fata Morgana [October]
A house sits alone beyond dark woods, having been witness to tragedy in several past eras. As someone who wandered into this house, a maid, calling you her master, regales many tales to you as you open doors throughout the house, containing the full breadth of the beauty and tragedy within. That’s about all I can say without going into spoiler territory. This is technically a visual novel, not a kinetic novel, as you do make choices, but I’d prefer if it was just one long continuous novel as the choices you do end up making are kinda corny and took me out of the experience sometimes. That said, if you just make sure to save before most choices, you’ll be good to experience… one of the best stories you’ll ever read, to be perfectly honest. The level of care put into the writing and presentation is phenomenal—it feels like every single individual line was written to hit as hard as it could, from descriptions of the environment to inner thoughts and dialogue of the characters. The soundtrack contains some of the best music I’ve ever heard, featuring beautiful and otherworldly-sounding vocal performances that elevate the already incredible string and piano pieces. The stories this novel contains go to some very intense and dark places, and at no point does The House in Fata Morgana ever let up. The unrelenting rawness of the experience is matched only by the intense care it shows every major cast member—no matter what they do, it goes to great efforts to show you where they were coming from and why they did what they did. Fata Morgana is a story that, as Food4Dogs put it, revolves around selfhood. People are attacked for being who they are, in a world that doesn’t really accept them or accommodate them. Characters have differing grasps on themselves, some are shaky on who they are and others have concrete ideas on what person they are. Without getting too spoilery, this game surprised me with an LGBT character that felt positively portrayed while never shying away from what this person dealt with, nor defining them solely by what they went through either. That’s as vague as I’ll get—if you are at all interested in great fiction, give this melancholic gothic horror novel a shot. Oh, one last thing—I played the Nintendo Switch version, and I dunno about the other versions, but this one used controller rumble disturbingly well, so I recommend having it on as you read.
1. Omori [February]
images provided by me
For the most part, when I play a game these days, it’s usually because a friend recommended it to me. My friends have really good taste in games—most of the entries here in my top 15 are recommendations they made to me. They clearly know what great games are. This time, I played this game because I was interested in it, because it looked right up my alley. I like really surreal landscapes, mental worlds, gameplay mechanics that showcase character relationships, humorous enemies, beautiful hand-drawn art, and down-to-earth believable writing. Omori has pretty much all of these things, wrapped around an extremely strong emotional core. Literally, too—it's an RPG with emotions as its central gimmick. Anger raises attack and lowers defense, sadness raises defense and lowers speed, and happiness raises speed and critical hit rate but lowers accuracy. The battle system has tons of ways to capitalize on and change everyone's headspace, from friend to foe, to better affect the outcome.
Really, though, the battle system isn't the reason to play this game. Again, this blog post is spoiler-free, so without giving anything major away, I can say that Omori tells what is probably my single most favorite story about escapism I've ever seen. If you write the plot down, it's not terribly complex or interesting—rather, the appeal comes from how it's told, which for me at least, is "phenomenally". Omori is a game that is absolutely in love with video games as a storytelling medium—you'll examine a lot of objects for flavor text, take note of how the battle mechanics reflect on the characters involved, explore environments that suggest interesting things about the protagonist, and generally just poke and prod around the game's world as much as you can. At no point does it ever resent having to be a video game, which is what bothered me about some of the games I played this year. Heck, even the parts where it feels like you're railroaded into doing something, it feels like it says something about the situation and the protagonist as well, so while it's not as choice-driven as other examples of excellent video game storytelling, it's not like it doesn't know what it's doing, either.
The content warning at the beginning of Omori should not be taken lightly, but rest assured that (almost) none of the horror elements in the game are there purely for shock value. Omori is, top to bottom, a very delicately and carefully constructed experience, one that feels like it was aimed directly at me. Omori tackles heavy subjects and explores trauma, but while I have little to no experience with that sort of thing, without giving anything away I really related to Omori's protagonist… much more than I'm comfortable with. But it's true. Compared to most TV shows, movies, books, and games, Omori felt the most like I was seeing myself in the main character, even if it's not 1:1 for reasons that should be obvious if you've already played the game. The more little details I observed about him, the more uncomfortable I became with how in common he had with me, to the point where for a while after I played it, I tried projecting away from him by assuming my friends would like the game more than I did, which in hindsight was always going to be wrong (though I am happy that everyone who did play it ended up liking it, just to be clear). I'm no longer uncomfortable with it, and I'm now thankful I got to enjoy a story with someone I identify closely with as the protagonist. Omori is an incredible video game, for all the reasons I've detailed, but that right there is probably the biggest one for me. It more or less clinched Omori as not just my Game of the Year, but my new favorite game. I've had the rest of the year since I first played it in February to think about it, but yes, after all that time I feel comfortable saying that about this game now. For reference, my previous favorite game was a tie between Mother 3 and Undertale. Omori pulled the rug out from under me and affected me deeply to the point where, for me personally, it surpassed those other two games.
I'd like to thank Carmichael Micaalus for gifting me $10 in Steam credit back in January. Since Omori costs $20, I was initially hesitant to play it right away, but having to only pay for half the price made me eager to jump right in and unintentionally find my new favorite game. I returned the favor by getting the game for him, and then also many of my other friends.
…phew. That was a lot of love being expressed. My word count in Google Docs so far is… 17.5 thousand? Wow…
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Tokimeki Memorial
This is my favorite game this year that I never actually played. Rather, I watched a six hour YouTube video by Tim Rogers detailing the context surrounding the game, its general gameplay loop, his thoughts on the game, and two included abridged playthroughs showcasing two different approaches a player may take with the game. Like most Tim Rogers videos, it’s 50% actually talking about the game and 50% just him going on about himself and his life, but rest assured that I think he’s fascinating enough to get away with it. I’m not gonna watch that 4 hour Quinton Reviews video on iCarly despite me remembering liking that show as a kid, simply because I don’t think the guy running that channel is interesting enough to not make me ask “why can’t this just be 1 or 2 hours like Jose’s sitcom documentaries are?” Otherwise, I’d always been interested in the history and context of dating sims because of how prevalent they are in Japan but overlooked over here in the west. Sitting down with this video over the course of a week or so felt like an experience, because it details the game that kickstarted the genre’s popularity.
Deltarune Chapter 2
I was as obsessed with Undertale as everyone else was back in 2015 and most of 2016 before I transitioned my obsession into a more general fondness. So when Toby Fox unveiled Deltarune Chapter 1 back in 2018, I was excited, only to not be entirely onboard with whatever this Deltarune thing was gonna be. I liked everything it was doing, but I didn’t necessarily love it. Three years later, Chapter 2 came out and I think I’m now a firm believer. I just liked everything about it more than Chapter 1, from the setting to the characters to the music to the improved battle mechanics. What I especially loved were the story and thematic implications—I detected a more solid understanding of what Toby Fox seems to keep teasing with Deltarune’s refrain that our choices don’t really matter. I understand that some people liked Deltarune Chapter 2 so much that they’re putting it in their own Game of the Year lists, but I won’t do that. I’ll wait however long it takes for Toby Fox to release the entire finished thing before passing that kind of judgement. Could be three years, five years, even ten years—I have hopes that Deltarune will be something special by the time the whole thing is out.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
This is the only multiplayer game I ever get to play these games, so I’m glad that I find it so fun. I’m including it here since the DLC finally came to an end, giving us something we’ve never seen before in a video game—Sora, Cloud, and Sephiroth in the same game together. I kid, I kid—even if I’m not as familiar with Kingdom Hearts as others are, Sora was undoubtedly the biggest name they could end on, so I’m sincerely happy for everyone who wanted him. People are calling that shot at the end of Sora’s trailer where he shakes hands with Mario the new “Ryu shakes hands with Cyclops” shot, which speaks to how unreal this crossover really feels. Now, for me—the final balance update is out, meaning I can finally get back to modding this game without having to worry about a future patch causing me to redo all my work.
DISHONORABLE MENTION
Plok
Image provided by me
This is the only game this year I never actually finished. Don’t let this game’s incredible soundtrack fool you—Plok is hard. Ruthlessly, frustratingly hard. I refuse to believe anyone played this game in a single sitting on the original hardware, and in fact most fondness I’ve seen for Plok on the internet come from people who enjoyed it but never actually finished it, or they did but with emulator save scumming. The later bosses take forever to kill, and you have to be patient since any mistake is deadly with your tiny health bar and precious few health restore items in each level. The final world consists entirely of vehicle levels that play nothing like the rest of the game if you didn’t find the very hidden bonus levels beforehand. I got as far as the level right before the final boss after days of attempts before I gave up. I tried turning the difficulty down from Normal to Child’s Play, but since I did this in the final world, it warped me to the beginning of the game. This is because Plok does this gatekeeping thing where Child’s Play difficulty removes the final world entirely, meaning you don’t really beat the game that way. It looks beautiful and sounds phenomenal, but it’s maddening to try to complete. I salute anyone with the patience and skill to beat Plok fair and square, and you know my salute means something because I beat Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts legit.
ANTICIPATED GAMES FOR NEXT YEAR
You know how The Game Awards has this category for “Most Anticipated Game”? What a weird, corporate kind of award to give out. TGA is a glorified commercial in general since almost no one I know actually watches it for the awards anyway (last year, as soon as the trailer for Sephiroth being in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate wrapped up, I turned the event off and went back to writing an essay that was due later that night), but the thing is, the games a person is looking forward to getting sometime is a really nice thing to talk about. It shouldn’t be an award to give out, it should be a fun topic of discussion among friends. So, here are mine!
Ring Fit Adventure
Image provided by me
I’d wanted to get this since last year, as someone who didn’t want to pay for a gym membership or go to the gym in general, but wanted to get in better shape. This year, before I bought this game, my mom offered me a deal—she’d get a treadmill for our house if I paid for half of it. During this time, I couldn’t find Ring Fit Adventure anywhere. So, I accepted her deal, and I’ve been using the treadmill ever since… but while treadmills do make you sweat a lot and work out your legs, I don’t have the first clue on how to work out the rest of my body. I finally found a copy of this game in the wild and judging by the one time I booted up Ring Fit Adventure this year, it certainly knows how to do that—as someone who’d been on the treadmill every weekday by that point, I was exhausted a measly five minutes into the story mode. I have a lot more faith in this $80 video game than the $1000 treadmill I’d already been using the previous month and a half (and that I paid $500 for on my part). It sucks since I’m still trying to figure out how to use both Ring Fit Adventure and the expensive treadmill we now have in the house. I want to have that conundrum solved by next year.
Metroid Dread… and Metroid games in general from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes onward
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I like Metroid games quite a bit, but I didn’t grow up with them as a kid the way most of my friends did, so I don’t have as strong an attachment to the series as I do with Mario or Zelda or Pokemon. Still, I noticed all the positive buzz around Metroid Dread, the first brand new 2D search action game in the series that isn’t a remake. I bought the game but like a fool, I didn’t play as soon as I got it and instead made a decision to continue Metroid as a series where I’d last left it off—Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. See, I didn’t dislike Metroid Prime 1, I thought it was excellent, but first-person perspective games fuck up my brain and give me strong headaches. I had to play through these headaches to eventually finish Metroid Prime 1, and that was a nauseating experience. After playing Metroid: Zero Mission, the thought of playing another Metroid Prime filled me with nausea, so I put it off for years. Still, I think I can stomach three more of these games (Prime 2, Prime Hunters, and Prime 3) before getting back to the third-person games in the series. I’m looking forward to eventually, finally getting to Metroid Dread later next year after all is said and done.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
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I heard a lot of cool things about this game, and the only reason I didn’t play it sooner was because I’m always hesitant to try new game genres. From what I know, 13 Sentinels is part visual novel but also part tower defense, and I am very unfamiliar with tower defense games and don’t know if I’d even like them that much. Still, a friend of mine said this was her game of the year back in 2020, which by her standards is really high praise. I want to see how cool this game is, eventually.
Xenoblade Chronicles X
After coming down from the high that was Xenosaga Episode III, playing Xenoblade Chronicles again on the Switch was pretty disappointing, especially the combat. While Xenoblade Chronicles X has similar combat to the first game, a friend of mine insists that it’s not that big of a deal this time since they made the main character you build at the start of the game overpowered. I’ll trust her on that one. My favorite part of Xenoblade 1 was exploring the big, vibrant locations that had barely any invisible walls, and from what I know Xenoblade X has even cooler worlds that are even more fun to look at and explore. If it’s as good as I hear, I probably won’t mind the story and characters being apparently not as good as Xenoblade 1’s were, probably because upon revisiting it I didn’t like them as much as I used to anyway.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 / Torna: The Golden Country
This should go without saying, but after spending time with Xenoblade Chronicles X, I plan on putting Xeno to bed. There are rumors that Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is going to be announced in 2022, so if I finish Xenoblade 2 only for the next game in the series to reveal itself, I’ll have the joy of having freshly caught up with Tetsuya Takahashi’s gargantuan meta series while playing the next game as blind as everyone else will be. That, and I see Pyra and Mythra retweeted onto my Twitter timeline literally every day—it’ll be nice to finally see them as proper characters instead of anime pinups.
[This space between Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Cataphract OI used to showcase games by nomnomnami as something I was looking forward to playing next year. In light of the backed-up accusations against them for grooming, I've removed it as of January 14, 2022.]
Cataphract OI
This is by the same developer who made Ocean OI. This time, the gameplay hook is that you only have a few hours to complete your objective, and almost every single individual action you take in Cataphract OI takes up in-game time. The idea of micromanaging every tiny thing to complete an RPG Maker game under par sounds terrifying, yet thrilling. I definitely want to check it out when I feel up to the challenge—when done well, time limit games are extremely engaging, and I already love games like The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
When They Cry
Higurashi and Umineko are some of the most beloved kinetic novels that I’ve heard about. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine read the entirety of Higurashi to her Twitch audience, and they all subsequently put Higurashi in their top games of the year that year. Since I generally prefer doing the reading myself, I didn’t tune in, but I was always interested in a story apparently written and developed by one person by the username of Ryukishi07. That sort of thing is inspirational to me—one person wrote something that deeply resonated with people, and still does several years after it’s done. This year I read SeraBed, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, and The House in Fata Morgana, so I hope you understand why I put it off until next year.
Messing around with the EverDrive-64 X7 and EverDrive-GBA X5 Mini
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Nintendo apparently shat the bed with Nintendo 64 emulation on their Nintendo Switch Online service. You have to pay like $50 to access N64 games and they have all these weird issues apparently, it sucks. What sucks even more is that Nintendo 64 emulation is just weird and unpolished in general—most emulators still can’t quite figure out how the system works, which is why games like Banjo-Tooie have lots of issues that still aren’t fixed. However, since I do have an original Nintendo 64 with me, I can have the next best thing—a flash cart that can load any Nintendo 64 ROM to play. On Black Friday week, I bought an EverDrive-64 X7, which has a micro SD card slot for you to load any ROM of N64 games that you want. Though it’s very costly, it’s the next best thing if you want to play Nintendo 64 games as they were originally supposed to run, rather than weird emulator incompetence. I also got an EverDrive-GBA X5 Mini, which is for Game Boy Advance games but can run Game Boy and Game Boy Color games as well. Though I don’t have any concrete plans with these in mind, I’m thinking of checking out the Nintendo 64 Goemon games, as well as Harvest Moon 64, and Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, since I couldn’t connect with Animal Crossing last year but maybe I’ll enjoy these games instead.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sequel
Ah, now we get to games that aren’t even out yet. This is probably the only major Nintendo game that I’m still excited for. As much as I love The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it’s also the first try at something new, meaning that the sequel will most likely take things in a more focused direction than the first game did. I don’t have much to say other than I hope it’s as magical as the first game was for me. Maybe then I’ll forgive what the trailer seems to imply about Zelda not being playable and instead a damsel-in-distress all over again, which hurts since she’s probably my favorite Zelda in the series by this point.
Sephonie
As much as I’m looking forward to BotW2, I really liked Analgesic Productions’ games this year, since they’re so unique from everything else I’ve played and because Anodyne 2: Return to Dust became one of my new favorite games. After the straightforward platforming of that game, Sephonie promises to have cool wall running and grappling hook mechanics while keeping the same abstract and evocative atmosphere their games are known for. I love what they make and I’m really looking forward to this new game of theirs.
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Besides video games, I enjoyed a few other pieces of media this year. I didn’t keep track of them the way I usually do with games, so I may be forgetting something, but nonetheless:
NON GAME MEDIA
Zeroes: The Reunion
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Back in high school, I read a book called The Zeroes. People hyped up the year 2000, since it was finally the time we got into not a new decade, or a new century, but a brand new millennium. This book detailed how it, and the optimistic view of the future that came with it, made way for crushing reality. For example, the unnamed narrator of The Zeroes never went to college, simply because he was told that he never needed to go to college to be successful and he believed it. He, and the rest of his friends, were left behind as a result of these kinds of empty promises. It doesn’t have a happy ending. Zeroes: The Reunion is a follow-up that focuses on the narrator’s first girlfriend, and through her we get commentary on things like how the internet has changed and how it affects people, the growing pressure of being with a partner who is too cynical about the world to actually maneuver in it, and the soullessness of marketing jobs. It’s told much more creatively than the first book, with a very long opening act consisting entirely of journal entries, followed by a third-person omniscient exhaustive look at a high school reunion for the 30-year-old crowd. Without giving anything away, it focuses on more than just her, and we get a complete, sad look at the state of things in the 2010s. I actually emailed the author, expressing my thanks and appreciation for him writing the book, and in response, he sent me a postcard! I still have it in my computer desk drawer, I really appreciate it.
The Library of Babel (Labyrinths)
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Along with the postcard, the author of Zeroes: The Reunion also emailed me a list of books he liked that all inspired it. One of them was a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges called Labyrinths. I haven’t read all of them, as they’re pretty complex and I don’t fully understand a lot of them, but I did read The Library of Babel, which is really cool. It details a vast collection of complete knowledge of the universe, visualized as a seemingly infinite series of hexagonal rooms. It goes on about the concept and how humans would interact with it, mostly the bad ways. It really stoked the imagination in me.
Dirty Pair (original series, OVAs, and movies)
I started this delightful series last year and I finished it this year. Dirty Pair is about a couple of pretty young ladies named Kei and Yuri who get sent out on missions to solve a myriad of problems. They call themselves the Lovely Angels, but they get their nickname "Dirty Pair" from how circumstances beyond their control inevitably cause most of their missions to end up with tons of destruction (and, in one morbid example, it's on a planetary scale). It's a very entertaining action comedy sci-fi show, and since it was made in the 80s, it's a very specific kind of retro that I just adore. I'm not really interested in Dirty Pair Flash, since Kei and Yuri aren't in it, but I did enjoy the OVAs and movies based on the original anime quite a bit.
Revolutionary Girl Utena (original series and The Adolescence of Utena)
Months later, it's still difficult for me to describe what Utena even is. I regret not watching this when I was younger—Revolutionary Girl Utena strikes me as a "watch with your feelings" show, which I struggled to do when I saw it this year. If you're not on board with the show on that level, you'll be needlessly confused on a lot of the imagery and plot, since it's mostly all metaphorical, not literal. Regardless, I still enjoyed it. A girl, Utena, who says she's a prince, attends an academy in search of someone she also believes to be a prince, and gets wrapped up in a fencing competition for the hand of a girl in marriage. This girl, Anthy, devotes herself to the victor of the competition, regardless of their gender, which bothers and emboldens Utena. This show is very fancy and surreal, at times delightful and utterly nightmarish. It tackles some heavy themes near the end, so just know that going in. The movie would bring some of the LGBT subtext of the show to the forefront, which felt refreshing when I watched it.
I think that’s it. Besides those, I watched a bunch of stuff on YouTube, but I wouldn’t want to bore you with my YouTube history. I think I was already pushing it with the TokiMemo entry.
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Final Thoughts
2021 was the year I learned that I graduated from college, since, due to COVID-19 and some incompetence at my university, I had to send a lot of emails to unceremoniously get a bot to inform me of the news. To celebrate, I let myself spend a whole year not working, instead using my unemployment money to treat myself to a ton of longform games and series that I had been interested in for years, but put off because I didn’t have the free time I felt that I needed. Now, I finally did.
As I type this up, I am looking for work again, with a tinge of sadness. I’m relieved that I’ve finally received the vaccine, but the reality that yes, I will have to repay my student loan starting next year, and yes, I will run out of disposable income unless I get a job soon, is a bit deflating. Even if it’s a part of life that everyone experiences, it still feels uncertain, and thus, scary.
I’m very happy that I had the opportunity to play all these games, since I ended up with more “new favorite games” in this one year than I ever had in any previous year. Regardless, part of why I typed this whole thing up was to put a bow on all of that, as I begin what I assume will be a much busier period of time in my life.
If you read this all the way through, thank you. I felt surrounded by friends, and yet, at the same time, very lonely this year. If you’re one of my friends, know that I most likely played a game this year specifically because you recommended it or you straight up loved it, so in some small way, I hope it brought us just a little closer.
Otherwise, I’m looking inward next year. Enjoying other people’s favorite media is certainly one way to get to know them better, but another, more important way is finding ways to grow. Since around August or September, I’ve been making a concerted effort to better myself. I don’t want to go into specifics, but essentially, I’ve decided that while I don’t hate myself (as much as my mind may be willing to tell me), I could certainly stand to be better in some ways.
I’m generally a pretty closed-off person and, even on the internet, a bit socially awkward. But I’m hoping that with my self-betterment comes less hesitance to keep to myself.
Happy Holidays, and have a Happy New Year, from DoorCurtain~
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