Another Code: Recollection
I picked at this off and on over the course of a couple months. (It was a good companion during a several-day stretch over the summer when high winds had knocked out my internet connection and I couldn't play any online games, browse the internet, or watch streams or YouTube.) I bought this because I had never played the sequel, and, well, I still haven't. Honestly, I think I might still prefer the DS version of the first game, though... its character design for Ashley is among the most expressive I've ever seen, firmly establishing her as a kid -- an intelligent and unusually mature one, sure, but still ultimately a kid. (Most fictional kids are depicted as either small adults or large toddlers, so it's fun to actually see a nuanced depiction of the in-between phases.) The 3-D models and voice work don't really capture that in the same way. This is still a fine version, though. I'll get to the sequel someday.
Persona 3 Reload
Ah, vindication. People have been crying for a P3 remake for years, and my response to that has always been that P3 required more invasive surgery to bring it up to the standards of modern games in the series than it would probably realistically get, and I was right. This version of the game makes it look nicer and adds some additional usability features that make it substantially easier, but it's still basically the same game, warts and all. There's still too little to do at night, social stats take forever to raise and don't do anything except unlock Social Links, the Social Links themselves still only increase the Arcana Burst and unlock Ultimate Personas (and are still far and away the most sycophantic and sociopathic in the series), it's still horribly paced with long stretches of time when nothing is happening and you are explicitly just waiting for the next plot thing to start, and Tartarus is still mind-numbingly boring and repetitive. It is a substantial regression both mechanically and narratively not only on Persona 5 and Metaphor, but also Persona 4 Golden in some respects, a game that is itself twelve years old.
This game has the major flaw I've noticed in a lot of recent remakes in that it feels trapped between the original game's design and what is currently considered "correct" design for major releases, and tries to split the difference to its own detriment. The original Persona 3 had a very clear throughline to its overall design and structure -- you are a single person, living your own life, and accomplishing things that require other people means accommodating them to some degree. Essentially all of the strange decisions it made were attempts to reinforce this theme, from AI-controlled party members, to the fact that you had to give your party members new equipment directly rather than managing their stuff in a menu, to managing not only your own schedule but other peoples', to reversing Social Links. You were a person living in the world, and so was everyone else, and their lives weren't yours to toy with at your whim. Not all of these elements were good to keep around -- a lot of them, in fact, sucked! -- but they were all directing the intended experience in a specific way.
Modern game design is all about empowering the player, removing all points of potential friction or anything that could serve as a potential offramp, and making it easy for players to sculpt exactly the experience they want, so every subsequent rerelease and remake of this game has chipped away at those elements. Now they're mostly all gone -- but the new version hasn't replaced them with anything, so it feels a little hollow, like it's going through the motions. For example, Tartarus was originally intended as something players would slowly tackle over the course of many days, and so the game was designed with lots of "free" nights that you could dedicate to dungeon-delving... but players quickly realized it was more efficient to do all your Tartarus for the month in one night, so that's how they played it. Future Persona games would incorporate this feedback by essentially assuming the player was going to do the time-limited dungeons in as little time as they could manage, and both made it easier to do so and gave the player a lot of alternative uses for their time once they'd finished. P3 Reload makes it incredibly easy to do the Tartarus segments in one night... but there's still nothing to do at night to fill the time you were "supposed" to spend doing it. Sure, there's some new activities you can do with your party members... but they take almost no time to do, so by June you're back in the "go raise a social stat" loop every night, just as you were in vanilla. They could have fixed this, but it would have required a pretty fundamental change to the way the game was structured, and you wouldn't be able to sell it as "P3 just as you remember it, just on newer hardware" anymore. Same deal with Social Links -- it was pretty obvious in the original that they decided on ten events for each Link before they started writing any of them, and there wasn't much meat on the bone for a lot of the characters. A surprising number of Link events are just "it sure is good we're friends! C=" with nothing else to them -- and to rub it in, in this game the correct dialogue option in basically every Link is to agree with the person or praise them, even if what they're doing is clearly harmful to themselves or others. This was forgivable in the original because it was their first try, and indeed future games would expand on the system both mechanically and narratively -- but you're remaking it! You could have rewritten any or all of the Social Links! You've even got some newer, better games as a baseline for what to do! But they didn't. It wouldn't have been P3 enough if they did that. So the whole endeavor feels like a waste. There's no need to pay $60 so you can get some extra cutscenes where Takaya tells you that you're not so different, you and him, you know?
Also, I mentioned this a couple times before, but I shouldn't leave it merely implied -- this version of the game is painfully easy. I played the whole thing on Hard and sleepwalked through it. Almost nothing is done to adjust the challenge to the presence of player-controlled party members, baton passing, controlled inheritance and skill management, more powerful (and more easily-acquired) gear, and, most of all, Theurgy. Like last year's SMRPG remake, the addition of a new limit break mechanic completely destroys the balance of battles in this game. I will certainly concede that I'm fairly experienced with these games, but one-rounding Tartarus guardians and skipping whole phases of the final boss with my monstrous damage output feels like something that just shouldn't be. If you want to just stroll through the story and mark P3 off your bucket list, this is certainly the version to get, but if you want it to actually push back at any point, you will be sorely disappointed.
One more thing... the music seems really bad in this version? I'm not enough of a music person to really nail down why it's so, but the whole thing feels just vaguely off-key. An option to use the original soundtrack would have been nice. Thumbs up for the new voice cast, however, and I thought it was cute that the entire non-sex-pest original cast returned in minor roles as well.
Balatro
An interesting game, for sure, and one I devoured for about a month... but not something I was quite as obsessed with as a lot of other people seemed to be. After about 40 or 50 hours I found myself in that rut I usually do in "endless" games where I've already won in every way that seems interesting, and doing it any other way just seems like box-checking. Like, sure I could try the hardest difficulty or try the challenge modes, but those mostly seem like just hoping to luck into a good build rather than something that changes up the game in an interesting way. I'll certainly pick this back up once the expansion comes out next year, but I'm done with it for now.
I don't know that there was a game this year more pitch-perfect audially and visually for what it was trying to do, though. And I have to give it a thumbs-up for resisting the urge to dive into monetization hell when it could have easily done so. It uses gambling as a visual motif, but it's not really a game about gambling, and in a year when gambling is suffusing our culture in a distasteful way, that was something I appreciated more than I expected.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Without question, my biggest disappointment of the year.
I loved FFVII Remake back in 2020. I thought it was both expertly designed as a game and intriguing as a story and as a commentary on both the original game and the phenomenon of remakes in general. In an age when nobody has any original ideas to speak of, FFVII Remake actually seemed to be in conversation with the original work instead of merely attempting to replicate it so they could sell it to me again for $60 in lieu of coming up with something new. Its ending opened the door to fascinating possibilities that you don't normally see in a medium where developers are too afraid the audience will get mad if they deviate too far from what is familiar. On top of that, it was just a joy to play, with a wonderful battle system that expanded at a good pace and felt satisfying to master.
So, after writing a game whose whole point is that things don't necessarily have to go the same way they do in 1997, they release part 2, and things go basically the same way they did in 1997. Jesus.
I have to admit I found myself wondering while playing Rebirth -- if the developers had set out to make a no-frills remake of the 1997 game just with updated graphics and mechanics and such, would this game look any different? I'm not sure. You go to the same places and do the same things in more or less the same order while meeting the same characters who are mostly the same. I got my hopes up when Tifa tells Aerith the secret about the events of Nibelheim right after the prologue only to see that plot thread largely dropped over the course of the actual game.
Also, mechanically, I didn't like the game as much. The Open-World Hater has logged on, but, honestly, I don't see where being (sorta) open-world adds anything to this game. It's twice as long as Remake but not anything like twice as good... The open-world stuff is just busywork -- kill these monsters, climb this tower, touch this point on the map. You're more free, but the freedom comes at a cost, because it's harder to know what you should be doing and what you should bring with you when you go. Like, one of the underrated elements of Remake's design is that right after each new character joins your party, you get a lengthy segment that's just them and Cloud, so you can learn how they play, what their strengths are, what monsters they're good against, what materia works well with them, and that's knowledge you can carry forward as they learn new skills and gradually become more complex to use. In Rebirth, you start with five characters, one of whom is entirely new, and you can swap them in and out at will. Even though you have Red XIII for basically the entire game, I was probably 80% of the way through before I really felt comfortable using him and had figured out the correct way to play him, just because I never got that training-wheels segment with him. And you don't want to just stick him in your party until you learn him, either, because the other characters still have skills to learn and situations you want to use them for, so they need their turns in the rotation as well. Cait Sith never got used outside of his required segments just because I just did not have enough space in my brain at that point to learn his gimmicks. I can't imagine how this is going to work in part 3 when Cid and Vincent are (presumably) added to the crew.
Combat just felt generically worse in a way I find difficult to describe. There are a lot more gimmick enemies who are only vulnerable to one thing, which you may or may not have equipped when you go to fight them. The VR fights are absolutely godawful, and the Odin fight is the least fun I had playing a game this year even with all the "make this easier" toggles I could find turned on.
Additionally, the game is crammed with terrible minigames. Minigames of... let's say less-than-optimal quality are certainly on-brand for FFVII, but I need some time to breathe and I wasn't getting it. Not only did every minigame from Remake return, we got a bunch of terrible new ones as well. It seems like basically every minor character from Remake pulled up stakes from Midgar at the same time you did, and they all brought their respective minigame with them, so you get to do them all again. And then there's the new ones, which are on balance even worse. They're not universally bad -- Queen's Blood is a fun timewaster, and its associated sidequest is deeply amusing -- but chasing Cactuars, racing dolphins, and fucking Fort Condor decidedly are. It was deeply disappointing to play hours and hours of awful minigames and sidequests in the hopes of fighting a certain frenzied swordsman, only to find that the actual fight is scaled for maxed characters on a new game plus, which I was far too exhausted with the game to bother doing.
Then there's the story. The events at the Forgotten Capital hang over this game like a shroud, leaving the intervening events feeling a lot like marking time. The character work and voice acting are still excellent, and the depiction of Cloud's gradually deteriorating mental state while his friends recognize that something is off but feel unable to do anything to help is an improvement over trying to maintain the twist from the original in my view, but that ending... the most generous interpretation is that it's just setup for the final game. A less generous interpretation is that they have no idea what endgame they desire and are flying blind, leaning on multiversal shenanigans to cover any potential plot holes. They were too cowardly to either unambiguously do something different from last time or do the same thing, so they hedged their bets and wrote and ending where it could be either, or both, or neither, who knows, buy the third game in five years to find out.
It is certainly possible to make too much of this. The game still plays excellently on balance (although I personally didn't like it as much), it looks and sounds great, etc etc. It's entirely possible that they stick the landing in part 3 and when they're releasing compilation rereleases a decade down the line I end up looking back at Rebirth and marking down these complaints as little more than middle-part-of-a-trilogy doldrums. But where I ended Remake excited and enthused about what was coming next, I ended Rebirth looking towards the final installment and wondering how they could possibly tie it together in a satisfying way.
Unicorn Overlord
I've been saying for years that the market for Ogre Battle-likes was criminally underserved, and here's Vanillaware proving me right.
There's not a whole lot to say about this one, good or bad, it's just an exceptionally well-done One Of Those, helped by the fact that we almost never get One Of Those. I guess my major criticisms would be that the story is nothing special (it's basically Fire Emblem 1 with the serial numbers filed off) and that it's weirdly difficult to find a front line that works as you move into the second half of the game. Unlike the Ogre Battle games, where some classes are better on the front line and some are better in the back, in this game basically everyone would prefer to be in the back if you can manage it, and you only put people in front if the unit runs out of space back there.
Oh, and it has a similar problem to many games with a lot of optional stuff to do where you're incentivized to do it all, but if you do it all, you break the level scaling on story missions and turn them super easy. The whole game doesn't turn super easy, thankfully, since a lot of the optional stuff is damn hard, but it's hard to find a route through the game that feels like a smooth, gradually scaling difficulty curve.
Those are nitpicks, though. Highly recommended.
Princess Peach: Showtime!
Speaking of things being super easy. Actually, this game has a pretty bad case of Yoshi's Story Syndrome -- there are ways you can play it to make it more challenging, but those ways make it incredibly tedious and drain away any additional fun you might be getting from the added difficulty. Playing levels over and over, not moving on until you've examined every nook and cranny, restarting levels from the beginning the second you miss a time-limited collectible, etc. The intelligent way to play this game is to completely ignore all collectibles and simply play through the levels in order, smiling whenever Peach does something cute. That's mindless and undemanding, but if you do it that way you'll get the good parts out of this game with a minimum of fuss. I've got collectathon brain, though, so I couldn't play the game that way, and had a pretty miserable time as a result. Still, what was I going to do, not buy the game where Peach dresses up like a ninja and ambushes enemies with cardboard shrubbery? Get real.
1000xRESIST
This game came highly recommended to me, and yup, it's good. It's basically a walking sim, so don't expect incredibly deep gameplay or anything like that, but I can't imagine there was a better story in any game this year. I've actually got a bit of a mouthful to say about this game's story, but I can't discuss it without spoiling it, so... Instead, I'll note that this game's shot composition is exceptional. In a medium where getting something besides shot-reverse-shot or talking heads is like pulling teeth, seeing a story where the characters' positioning actually matters to scenes is refreshing.
Maybe don't play it on Switch, though. I picked it up there because, hey, it's a walking sim, how demanding could it be, and was harried by long load times and frequent crashes throughout the game (and, in one case, a long load time that immediately led to a crash).
Hades II
Should I count this? It's still in Early Access, but... I put 65 hours into it and built a new PC just to play it, so I'm going to talk about it.
Hades I was my GOTY in 2020, and I put something like 300 hours into it between PC and Switch, so I've clearly got an affinity for this kind of game, but... Well, I started to feel at around 40 hours the way I felt after 250 of the first game. I'm just not sure the world was crying out for another Hades game. You remember how Mega Man 9 had one of the best master weapon arsenals in the series by stripping away a lot of the cruft and just making a well-balanced, useful example of each of the common weapon types? And then Mega Man 10 came along and the developers apparently thought "Well, we can't just do that again, we need something new" and made a roster of overcomplicated, hard-to-use weapons that just felt infinitely worse than 9's? Hades II feels like that. You certainly can't criticize them for sitting on their laurels and reusing stuff from the first game -- this is by no means a glorified expansion pack -- but the spaces they're innovating in just feel worse than the original. The weapons don't feel as useful at base, some of the aspects are absolute garbage, and the addition of Omega moves (and their associated Boons and Hammers) means that you're much less likely to find something that synergizes with your build. (I groan every time the Skull gets the run bonus.) Also, I find the new direction of incentivizing the use of the new cast by flooding the game with enemies that are insufferable to fight without it to be... well, insufferable. Hades I was fun to mess around with because if you didn't want to use Special, Cast, Call, etc, you could just ignore them, and you could still put together a build that works. Hades II seems to want you to use all your tools in every run, which makes it a lot harder to learn and a lot more difficult to piece together strong builds.
Also, this is maybe something that will get fixed in tuning over the course of Early Access, but melee feels really bad right now. The bosses especially give you barely enough time for a single combo with a melee weapon (if that) before the area around them becomes a no-go zone. The basement's not as bad in this respect, but going upstairs is just terrible. Don't even bother with the axe. Build around ranged attacks, or die.
I never thought I'd say this when Hades II was announced, but I find myself wishing Supergiant had kept to their "no sequels" policy. I'm more curious to see what they'd be doing with new characters and genres than I am to see how far they can stretch the Hades formula.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Every time Nintendo released one of their awful new Paper Mario games, people would tell me that TTYD hadn't aged well and that my love for it was just nostalgia and that the new ones were just as good, I was just being an elitist snob about them. Well, this game came out and it turns out TTYD is just as good as ever, so nya.
That being said, I'm not sure the world is much improved by this getting a full remake as opposed to the more simple upres jobs that i.e. Pikmin got. It looks nicer, but this is counterbalanced by the music being vastly worse. (Why do remakes keep doing this? TTYD might be -- dear lord -- twenty years old, but it's not like its soundtrack was chiptunes. It's cute that each area has its own arrangement of the battle theme now, but whoever decided that Yuka Tsujinoko's catchy melodies for Glitzville and the X-Naut Fortress should be replaced by... what we got... should be tried for war crimes. At least this one lets you use the original soundtrack fairly painlessly, unlike P3 Reload.) There's a couple of new bosses, but it's lame that they're rigid timing tests when the genius of the original game's design is that there are so many different ways to be strong enough to complete it. The updated translation is a mixed bag -- while it's unquestionably awesome that Vivian can be open about her gender identity rather than dancing around it the way they had to back in 2004, some of the other changes seem... unnecessary. Are people really going to picket NOA's headquarters if Goombella says she's "bummed" or the kid Yoshi calls someone a "loon"?
This is something you won't notice unless you've played the game a million times like me, though. Buy this so Nintendo knows to make good Paper Mario games from now on, rather than bad ones. (You're still not tricking me into playing Brothership, though, so don't bother.)
Visions of Mana
Did I really not buy a new video game all summer? Maybe I'll become an adult someday after all.
This game was all right. It has some weird tonal elements to it. On the one hand, I was charmed by the fact that the characters seemed like they were itching to go on a world-spanning JRPG adventure within five minutes of power on. (Me too, kids. Me too.) On the other hand, they are horrifyingly blase about the fact that their entire adventure is a culturally-approved suicide pact. During the early aughts there was a trend of RPGs using the premise of a girl having to go on a grand pilgrimage to save the world, and the twist was always that she would have to sacrifice her life in order to complete it, to the horror of her party members. This game uses that premise too, but everyone in the whole world knows from the start that the heroes are doomed to die at the end -- and it still treats the whole thing as a lighthearted fantasy romp. I didn't finish this, so I have no idea where it ends up, but it was already getting pretty weird at the time I fell off it, and I'm told that was only the beginning of the wacky shit that goes down in endgame.
Mechanically, this game is fine. I had some issues with the class system -- each character has basically three movesets based on their weapon, but each class is locked to one weapon. So, for example, if you like Val's one-handed sword moveset, you have to put him in a class that uses one-handed swords -- and if those classes have crummy abilities, you kind of have to pick and choose which you prefer, a good weapon or a good set of class skills. Additionally, each class is tied to an element, and only one character can use an element at a time. So not only is someone stuck going without until you find three elements (which takes a bizarrely long time), if two characters both have a class you want to use that share an element, you again have to pick which you want most. It's a lot of busywork, and the game's not hard enough to justify that degree of micromanagement. I'm not sure the game really loses anything if you just let characters equip the same element simultaneously, or if you let characters equip weapons independent of their class.
Also, like the Trials of Mana remake from a few years back, attack magic is obscenely overpowered, at least on the difficulty level I was on. There's not a lot of drawback to playing as Palamena, standing on the edge of the arena, and hitting enemy weaknesses with the strongest attack spell you can manage over and over, which is kind of a shame when the basic weapon movesets are generally much more fun.
Maybe I'll come back to this someday and finish it. I didn't quit it because I was fed up with it or anything; I just had other stuff coming out that I wanted to play more. This game has a "wait until it's $20" or "grab it off GamePass or PS+" vibe to it, though.
The Legend of Zelda: Dungeons of Infinity
This was some kid's attempt to crossbreed A Link to the Past's graphics and gamefeel with The Binding of Isaac's roguelike, run-based design. I was intrigued by it because it was not a romhack and subject to the limitations thereof. And, indeed, the game does an excellent job of feeling like a ALttP roguelike, with extreme faithfulness to the way the enemies move and Link feels to control.
Sadly, though, the game is dogshit. In retrospect perhaps foregrounding ALttP's combat (probably its weakest aspect) was not the best idea. More damningly, the game feels extremely limited in ways to get stronger, and it doesn't really know how to make enemies more challenging aside from increasing their HP, so fighting them becomes frustrating without really ever becoming difficult. The Armos Knights aren't really hard even when they take twenty hits per Knight, it's just tedious and easy to make mistakes from repetition. Basically, if you're not getting a damage upgrade every floor, you're falling behind. Additionally, it does not seem as though the game has put much thought into making every run winnable -- sometimes it'll spawn tons of shops but no rupees, etc. As a result you never feel like you're either working towards a build or improvising based on what you find, it's just "did I get enough stuff this run" or not.
Moreover, the game has tone problems out the ass. On one floor you see familiar ALttP sprites being bloodily tortured to death by Agahnim's goons, with old men asking you to carry letters to their family on another floor so they'll be able to find peace... and then on the next floor there's a joke about Zelda cucking Link with some chad at a bar, lololol. Managing tone is hard enough at the best of times, and even more so when you can't decide if your game is going to be a parody or Zelda With An Edge.
This seems to have found its audience, because I still see people streaming and speedrunning it, etc, but I bowed out after less than a dozen runs and will never pick it up again.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
This is more like it. A delight.
...That being said, though, this is a game that I soured on more I let it digest. While I was playing it I was thinking "easy GOTY, this is great" but by the end I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed.
Again, I don't think this needed to be an open-world game. This game's core systems cry out to be used in a more guided, structured setting, but the game has to let you go anywhere because that's what Zelda games do now. But half the time when you explore outside the bounds of where you're supposed to be, you end up in a room that's empty or blocked off by an NPC because you haven't tripped some quest flag yet, and the other half you find some useless treasure like crafting materials or rupees. Additionally, a lot of the echoes you can find are just better than the others, and so expanding your roster doesn't so much expand your options as compress them down to only the most generically useful ones. Why mess around with stacking objects when water blocks or clouds are pretty much strictly better? Why summon a weak monster when stronger ones are right there on your menu? There is such a thing as being too free, too mobile. Exploration doesn't feel satisfying except for its own sake. It's cool that there are a lot of alternate solutions to puzzles and such, but I can't help but think of how much better this game would be if you really got to maximize the use of each echo, with opportunities to color outside the lines if you were observant, rather than a more open experience where not much of anything you can do truly matters. The game was winding down just as I felt it should have been taking off the training wheels (because it can't count on you having anything in particular, so nothing can be too hard or too complex), and I found myself hoping for some kind of Dark World/Second Quest-type twist even though I realized it was unlikely. But we're never getting a linear Zelda again, so that's that, I guess.
It was also kind of lame to me that Zelda's first leading role was so by-the-numbers in so many other respects. The locations aren't memorable at all -- there's not even one cool dungeon in the game, and all the areas are just Places You Go In A Zelda Game. You get alternate costumes -- but only a few, and fewer still that actually have abilities. Sidequests are mostly just "show me this echo." I'm also not a huge fan of the "beastmaster" style combat -- I get that they wanted playing as Zelda to feel different than Link, but it's obnoxious when you lock on to an enemy and your echoes simply will not attack them, and the final boss is incredibly lame because you're just running in circles while the AI does most of the real work.
I'd like to see Grezzo get another crack at this style of game, because this one feels weirdly unfinished. It makes a stellar first impression but ultimately settles into the middle tier of Zelda games. I wonder if another six months or a year of development might have elevated it.
Metaphor: ReFantazio
Far and away the better of the two time-management dungeon-crawler RPGs released by Atlus this year. I was a little skeptical of this one because there was such a long period of radio silence in between the project's announcement and its release, which usually indicates severe development dysfunction that can't help but bleed through to the final product. In this case, however, the game that we got feels of a piece and largely (if not entirely) complete.
If you read reviews of this game they'll often characterize it as "not just fantasy Persona," but really, that's what it basically is. If you like those games, you'll like this. It uses Press Turn instead of One More! and it's got a job system instead of fusing Personas, but otherwise it's largly Persona at a Ren Faire. Honestly, the biggest diversion from the Persona formula is that it's about adults and their problems instead of being locked into a teenage perspective of the world, but don't get too excited -- this is still a largely PG-13 universe, if that makes any sense. The cast is likable and fun, though, and there's a lot of cool areas to explore and fun monsters to fight, and the story has a lot of amusing twists and turns and some fun accent work from the English dub, so what more can you ask of an RPG?
I could honestly write a book about my thoughts on this game, but instead I'll reduce it down to two observations, one positive and one negative. The positive, which I haven't seen anyone else mention in all the discussion I've read about the game, is that treasure hunting is shockingly fun in this game. I've never really noticed the treasure aspect of Persona or Megaten in general as being particularly stellar in the past, and I've had NPCs tell me some variation of "if you go kill this monster for me there might be some valuable treasure in it for you" so many times I'm completely inured to it, but when someone tells you that in this game, they mean it. If you go off the beaten path in this game you can almost always find a strong weapon or useful accessory or a pile of cash, so it feels great to do. This starts from the very beginning of the game, where if you defeat the early enemy the game tells you to avoid, you'll earn a sword that can carry you through the first arc and a handful of riches to go with it. Then, after you get the Thief Archetype, you immediately realize that quality steals abound, and you can quickly power yourself up if you pay attention. After years of playing Persona 5, where you can almost always make better equipment than anything you can find in dungeons by using the Electric Chair (and where equipment isn't really that important in the first place), being able to not only hunt down quality items in the game world but also having them be real difference-makers is a huge change, and, in my view, a huge improvement.
The negative observation is that it is painfully obvious there was a plot arc cut from the game (or at least severely compressed down), and it's painfully obvious where it was supposed to go and the area it was supposed to take place in, as well. As a result, there's a portion of the game where the pace of the plot picks up substantially after being at a more leisurely tempo both immediately prior and right after, and it's really jarring. It's pretty clear that this was the result of trying to cram two months of game into about three weeks, and the results are fairly inelegant. I wanted to play those weeks. Maybe we'll get to see it when Atlus inevitably does an updated rerelease in a year or so.
I've definitely got a replay in store for this one. Maybe not right away, though, because for what are probably obvious reasons, the game's guiding theme that people of all races and creeds working together can realize their shared humanity and work towards a more just, equitable goverment rings a little hollow to me right now. I was sure this was going to be my GOTY, but then...
Ys X: Nordics
At some point the Ys games have become reliable comfort food for me. I didn't really get into them until well into adulthood, but I still find myself slipping into each new one like a warm bath, and this one was no exception. This is another one I was fairly skeptical of before release because I'd read prerelease interviews with the developers citing the Souls games as an influence, and the list of games that have killed my interest in them by aping Souls is getting pretty long at this point, but my worries were unfounded. The Souls influence is mostly restricted to the more ground-based combat and the greater emphasis on blocking and parrying as a defense. In Ys VIII and IX, I never did get the trophy for fifty perfect guards despite hundred-percenting both games; in X I popped the equivalent trophy on the third boss.
I will unashamedly plant my flag as preferring the party-based Ys games to the ones where Adol goes it alone, and this one kind of splits the difference -- there's one other playable character, but she and Adol spend the whole game joined at the hip so they mostly operate as a unit anyway. You definitely have a party narratively speaking, and a pretty large one for that matter, but you only ever play as Adol and Karja, so you kind of get the best of both worlds -- you're always learning new skills (and mastering skills is actually a reasonable ask in this game, unlike prior ones where you've got six characters with a dozen skills each), so you skip out on some of the doldrums of being stuck with the same character using the same moves for the whole game, and you still get some good character work that is often missing when your only PC is a silent protagonist, but you don't have to juggle a bunch of different characters and skills trying to find out which ones are actually good.
I actually think that this game has a genuinely good story, as far as it goes. The fact that Adol apparently became a seasoned sailor and raider a few months into his adventures raises some eyebrows when later in the series he's doom for any ship he sets foot upon, but this is made up for by the fact that you can actually roleplay him has an obnoxious adrenaline addict who irritates everyone he comes into contact with, unlike later in his life when you have to play him as more world-weary and experienced. The game is paced extremely well and you never spend too much time on any one plot arc before resolving it and moving on to the next thing, and the characters all have inner lives which make sense in the context of the story. The game also does a pretty strong job of remaining relatively grounded as fantasy stories go, which I appreciated after one of my major criticisms of Ys IX is that it frontloaded the wacky supernatural stuff too early and too heavily.
Additionally, the game is great to play. Combat feels amazing once you get used to it, the bosses are incredible (except one, and you know Falcom knew it was terrible because they cut off the demo right before you fight it), the various movement abilities feel good to use without becoming too overcomplicated or gimmicky, the challenge is tough but fair throughout, and exploration is great, both on foot and on the ship (or at least it is once you upgrade the ship a few times so that it's not absolute dogshit). It's just a really solid overall package with very few flaws. Although the gameplay is entirely different, I don't think any game has come this close to evoking Skies of Arcadia for me in years (and certainly moreso than the more direct imitator I saw on the eShop). I can't wait to see what sort of semi-historical, pseudo-mythological nonsense they throw Adol Christin at next.
Oh, this is a minor quibble, but I have no idea how anyone at Falcom plays these games on the default settings. The first half an hour of every Ys game to me is swapping back and forth between the menu every five minutes, adjusting button mappings and sliders until I can settle on something that doesn't feel awful to control -- then doing it again every time I get a new ability to make sure it doesn't conflict with any of the button mappings I've already set.
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake
Meh.
This sure is a Dragon Quest game. (One might argue that it is the Dragon Quest game.) For some reason I don't like the DQ games as much as I should... I don't hate them, but I find I can never work up the energy to finish them. A look at the games I've played this year proves that I have no issue whatsoever with... let's call them leisurely-paced... RPGs, but I always end up tapping out of DQ games around the halfway point feeling like I've seen more or less everything there is to see. I thought this one might be different since it's pretty short, but no, I got a little bit into the Orb hunt and suddenly had a crushing urge to play literally anything else. Maybe some day.
I'll Get to It Someday
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown: Ubisoft kind of fucked themselves here. I was interested in this game, and heard nothing but good things about it, but the $50 price tag gave me a little sticker shock, and I had other things to play, and I knew that Ubisoft would mark it down sooner rather than later. So I waited on it. And waited on it. And I still haven't bought it, and even now that it's cheap, Ubisoft dissolved the team that made it, so I'm in no real hurry to. I still do want to play it, but I have to figure it's only a matter of time until it shows up on some subscription service and I'll get it for free.
UFO 50: This was one of my most anticipated games for years and years, but just when I'd finally resigned myself to it being vaporware, it finally came out, and I found I didn't really have time for it. Now I know that the moment I buy it, console ports will be announced, and I'd rather play it in that form if at all possible.
Astrobot: I've heard mixed reviews about this one -- some people have said it's one of the best platformers in years; others have said it's a by-the-numbers experience that only serves to remind you how cool PlayStation used to be before they stopped making anything that couldn't be turned into an HBO miniseries. This, too, I figure is probably going to end up on PS+ eventually, so I'll just play it then.
It's New to Me
There was about a week in between when I finished Echoes of Wisdom and when Metaphor came out. I knew I wanted to play something during that time, but I didn't want to start anything big since I knew I was going to dive right into Metaphor as soon as it was in my hands. Normally, my go-to strategy when something like this happens is to pick up an Ace Attorney game I haven't finished yet and play that -- but for the first time since I got into that series about five years ago, I didn't have any uncompleted ones to turn to. (Capcom made a big error in releasing two Ace Attorney collections this year, because I just played all the games in them last year.) I was still in the mood for something in that vein, though, so I instead turned to something I'd purchased on sale untold ages ago but never touched: The Danganronpa games.
I'm obviously about a decade late to this, but it's easy to see how this games became such a huge hit among the Tumblr kids back in the day. In my case, though, I found that I was most interested in the class trials. After playing both the Ace Attorney games and these things, I find that I'm most interested in them basically as argument simulators -- for me, they're at their best when they're asking you to think on your feet and survive with just your mind and your words. My attention tends to wander when the games ask me to scour crime scenes for evidence or block out a sequence of events to prove or disprove someone's alibi, but it swings right back when the time comes to knock someone off balance with a killing point or poke holes into something that seems obvious. I often find myself getting ahead of the plot and zeroing in on something that I know is important, but the characters are still hung up on the intermediate steps. In Danganronpa specifically, I had mixed feelings about the more action-y interface -- I get that the intention is to make you feel like you're in a life-or-death struggle even when you're essentially just picking something off a menu or presenting evidence, but playing Fruit Ninja or a Sonic Advance Special Stage to do it is often more frustrating than it is exhilarating. What Danganronpa does get right, though, is its use of multiple voices during arguments. In AA it's basically you versus the person on the stand with occasional interference from the prosecutor, but in DR an important clue or statement could come from anyone, so you always have to pay attention, and characters can sometimes surprise you (although not as often as I'd like). This trick wears thin, though, both as people start dying and you start to realize that in actuality, three or four characters per game really direct the trials, and the rest mostly exist to state the obvious, fall for red herrings, ask leading questions, kill, and be killed.
I'm still part of the way through the third one, but so far I think the first one is still the best (although V3 is growing on me). 2 is apparently the fan favorite, but it feels a little too ridiculous for me even by Danganronpa standards; the murder schemes are absolutely ludicrous, the cast has a few too many no-thoughts-head-empty characters for my tastes, 2-3 is unquestionably the worst chapter in the series so far, and you have to put up with that freakshow Nagito for the entire game. Additionally, I'm not sure how much continuity a series like this really needs. I have to think all you need are sixteen wacky students in a closed location and Monokuma, and boom, that's your premise...
This Year in Hearthstone
Fucking hell.
2024 was Hearthstone's ten year anniversary, and you kind of have to wish it went better than it did. You can sort of see Microsoft looming over the entire operation, exhorting them to increase player spending or get sunsetted. On the one hand, it is easier than it has ever been to get a bunch of cards and build the decks you want without spending money -- I would have killed for all this free stuff back when I was F2P -- but on the other hand the game has become increasingly aggressive about pushing monetizable elements like premium card treatments and hero skins. And I like collecting premium card treatments and hero skins! But even I have to admit that the constant pushing of this stuff feels gross. Especially since it is coming at the expense of general improvements (they've cut down on new game boards and music to one per year), alternate game modes (Duels and Mercenaries were shuttered, Tavern Brawl has been reduced to endless repeats, and Twist has been in a state of neglect since launch), and overall stability (the game has run worse this year than it has at any point in the past). I really don't want to leave that last point as just subtext -- there have always been bugs in the game, that's just the nature of a live game, but in the past they've been limited to specific cards that you could avoid, or been weird corner cases that don't often come up, or needed a deck specifically built to abuse. 2024 was the first year where two people playing normal decks (well, as normal as you get in 2024 Hearthstone) could queue up a normal ladder game, and one or both of them would be at risk of a game-breaking bug or unforeseeable disconnect. This isn't queuing up a bunch of actions with Nozdormu to skip the other player's turn; it's normal as-intended play. This is not really acceptable behavior for a game that's ten years old.
And, like, this would be one thing if they were actually, as they'd claimed, putting their resources into making their core game modes as fun as could be -- but Standard balance has been constantly dysfunctional all year. It hasn't been completely unplayable like it was in 2021 when solitaire decks ran rampant, but they don't seem to have a clear vision about what they want the format to be, what they want players to do. On the one hand, you've got the director saying that their ideal for Hearthstone is one where the board could shift at any moment, where your next draw could always be the power play that lets you turn the game around, where power swings and reversals are common -- but when the players do that, their decks get nerfed as "sentiment outliers." The sets provide themes for the various classes to build around -- but when players build those decks and play them as intended, the balance team tells us they're not interactive enough. I mean, come on, you guys, you printed this stuff! It's not like the players are discovering unintended interactions (for the most part -- I'm fully willing to believe that Lamplighter Rogue wasn't an intended deck type) -- you told us to play this stuff! You can't make handbuff the theme for Paladin and then emergency nerf it the week after the set comes out because people built that deck and played it the way you told them to. You can't make spell damage Druid a major theme and then decide you don't actually want OTKs in the format. Whose idea was to buff the entire Mage big spell package knowing full well that Portalmancer Skyla was weeks away and would crack the whole deck in half? Puppetmaster Dorian! Sure the card enables obnoxious swings -- but enabling obnoxious swings is the only thing the card can do! If you didn't want people doing that, don't print the card that way! Nobody is going to put Dorian in their deck so they can get a second crack at Hematurge or whatever. What are we even doing here? It's like the design team and the balance team don't even talk to each other. Sure, let's nerf Yogg, Reno, and Reska because they bully our new Starship mechanic... then print Bob the Bartender, who does the exact same thing, and give him to everyone for free. Come the fuck on.
It seems pretty clear to me that they want to do a soft reset on Standard's power level in the next rotation, but they seem unwilling to commit to the fact that this means the new cards will not be desirable in the meantime. If you want Invasion or Ravnica, you've got to suffer through Masques or Kamigawa first. So they keep fucking with the power level, and I'm willing to bet it will not end up where they want it to be in March, either.
They've committed to at least one more year of new content, but I have to think Microsoft is looking for any excuse to put the chairs up and turn off the lights at this point. And if they do, I guess I'm done with card games. (I'm certainly not jumping to Magic and its six sets a year and eighteen-set Standard, half of which are crossover slop.) Crossing my fingers things get better.
Looking Forward to 2025:
Meh. I've got the Tales of Graces remaster preordered, but that's more of a "I'm going to want this eventually and I want to show my support for more games like this" preorder than a "I must play this immediately" preorder. Other than that, 2025 looks pretty barren. Presumably the Switch successor will come out and bring a host of new games with it, but it's hard to get excited about them until we know what they actually are, never mind how difficult it will actually be to get your hands on a Switch 2.
2025 looks like a backlog year. I want to start knocking out these Trails games -- I've got like eight of them across various systems, and I need to play them if I'm going to keep buying them. Maybe that'll be my project for 2025.
