I wrote a better list.
Each of my top ten games this year is the best at something, so I've given each of them an award. There were many other games that I enjoyed greatly, too.
#10: Most Likely to Rank in the Top 10 in 2025 When I Finally Finish It: Metaphor ReFantazio. It seems really good so far, honest.
#9: Best Game That I Beat in One Sitting: Thank Goodness You're Here! What a splendid little cartoon of a game this is. Taking the concept of a highly local setting to such an extreme that it even has a "dialect" subtitle option sets the tone for the kind of all-consuming caricature you're in for. As you loop through the town, solving everybody's problems as a good adventure game protagonist should, any time spent stuck looking for the trigger forward only enhances the surprise when the punchline lands, turning a weakness of the genre into a strength.
#8: Best Game From 2022 That Took Me Until 2024 to Finish: Xenoblade Chronicles 3. This was actually the first time I've finished a Tetsuya Takahashi game, and the only game in its series I've played. Let's be honest: the real draw here is the storytelling. This detailed, high-concept mecha fantasy world unraveling without the benefit of an "outsider" character fascinated me from the beginning. Plus, I'm a sucker for job systems, and getting a new job by making a new friend and saving their hometown is a great way to structure it. It's a giant game and I resolved to savor it slowly, and, well...
#7: Most Mysterious: The Rise of the Golden Idol. The star of the show here is the deductive mechanics, improved from its already excellent predecessor. Each wonderfully sordid case has its own unique sub-puzzles, building up to the logical determination of what exactly happened and how it connects to the conspiracy. It avoids the frustrations that other deductive mystery games so often fall into, by allowing you to fill the details in in whatever order they occur to you rather than strictly following an intended chain of reasoning, while still granting periodic confirmations of correctness.
#6: Best Remake: Dragon Quest III. The 1988 original, like its more conservative prior remakes, is a simple enough game that a few small adjustments to its systems can have a drastic effect on the overall experience. They did right by it: adding abilities for each class to learn, and filling the overworld with hidden treasures, brings a whole new rhythm to the classic of all classics. It feels at once familiar and fresh, and did the impossible of making me genuinely excited for a version of Dragon Quest I.
#5: Best Old Game that I Played for the First Time: Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War (1996). Did you know that this owned? All this time? I sure didn't. I suspected, but I didn't know. Now I know. I'm grateful to the fan translators for saving me from having to learn Japanese before experiencing this iconic strategy RPG. Hugeness dominates this game's design. The maps are huge, each of them structured like three or four consecutive levels in a normal game, ever-changing and filled with rewarding risks. Huge drama plays out in its story, two generations of war developing rapidly across a script more economical than any RPG in 20 years. If you can finagle the right equipment onto your guys, legendary weapons and whatnot, it makes a huge difference in their combat effectiveness. This is a game that's not afraid to let you feel overpowered. Complex strategies arising from the interaction of simple mechanics. Maybe use speedup and savestates though.
#4: Most Exactly Designed for My Own Personal Tastes: Unicorn Overlord. This is like the third or fifth game ever that has the same mechanical concept as Ogre Battle, which I always thought was more interesting than the more commonly imitated Tactics Ogre. Minutely customizing the tactics of a bunch of squads of little guys, feeling clever for mastering the rock-paper-scissors balance or assembling a wombo combo, and doing a bunch of sidequests across a dense overworld, all satisfy me to no end. And all that beneath the luxuxy of gorgeous hand-drawn Vanillaware art? You spoil me. I beat it twice and ended up in first place on the online leaderboard one season.
#3: A Very Good Video Game: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. I really like this game a lot and I think it's wonderful, unique, cute, and clever. If there's a big theme to my pickings this year, it's that I love games that let you just try shit, and this one exemplifies that concept like nothing else. The minion-based combat system is more convenient than I imagined such a thing could ever be, chaotic and freeform yet still rewarding knowledge and creativity. The puzzles strike an excellent balance between being strict enough that you have to actually solve them and open enough that you can feel like you cheated. However, there is a certain je ne sais quoi missing from it. And since my attempts to find someone who can tell me what "je ne sais quoi" means have been consistently stymied over the years, it doesn't feel right to put it any higher than third place.
#2: Most Impressively Large Budget: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. They say quantity has a quality all its own, and that's a quality I'm susceptible to. Enough minigames to fill a Mario Party, enough cutscenes to make Hideo Kojima blush, half a dozen open-world environments full of checklists and sidequests, and never a moment's hesitation for inserting a whole dungeon in between plot points. It adapts the more languid middle act of the original Final Fantasy VII, which well befits a game full of detours and distractions. It's rare to find action-RPG combat as good as this, giving you seven rich movesets, refining further the proofs-of-concept from its predecessor's four, and noticeably improving the encounter design on top of it. With a confidence born of knowing that the source material has been beloved for a quarter century, the cast of multifaceted characters are realized in even greater detail than the lavishly detailed environments. This, to me, is the apex of AAA.
#1: Most Games Per Game: UFO 50. This anthology is a towering achievement. Everyone should play it, because everyone can find at least one full-size faux-retro game in it that they will fall in love with. For me, stealth puzzler Camouflage alone would've been a contender for this top 10 list, but then they threw in Party House, the first deckbuilder I've actually liked, and the absolutely genius Mini & Max too? Nothing else stood a chance. Bundling them all together like this, aesthetically unified by a shared palette and limited controls, created space to make games that could not thrive if they had to be sold independently, avoiding the harsh reality of independent games diluting their merits in the name of perceived value, and instead letting the design virtuosity run to the most extreme places. (Though I still think some of them would be better if they were easier. I will never see the end of Campanella 2)
