i played and finished a lot of really good games this year! and a few not as good ones that i also loved. and also didn't finish a few but definitely knew that they were great
i guess my first and foremost pick would be
sin and punishment; demi modded up her old n64 with new rgb outputs this year and played the game for a while, so i saw some of it and wasn't entirely sure what to make of it. but once i decided to play it for myself a few months later i was completely sold immediately. it's a phenomenal distillation of one end of that treasure magic, taking very simple-seeming controls and throwing them into fast action with a ton of nuance and mastery to see. the mashup of rail shooter action with some more run-and-gun type elements just works so well, and the sound design and music still rule too, and while it's not quite on the level of vagrant story i find the game's angular designs very beautifully rendered and textured.
mischief makers was great too. while it doesn't use that many more buttons it definitely has that very opposite, "chaotic" feeling; most levels are based on some core concept or theme, and sometimes that means they literally only take fifteen seconds. then it's onto something else and you'll never see that thing happen again. to me, that's a sense it shares with
radiant silvergun and a lot of
gunstar heroes, and the former in particular is still one of my favorite treasure games, while the other is still great. and it honestly looks and sounds incredibly bizarre. i remember being bewildered the first time i saw it so many years ago, but now that i've played it, that's just how it is, and i love it for that. it really would feel so different if it didn't have so many freaky faces everywhere.
bombastic is the sequel to one of my favorite puzzle games ever, and i'd never heard much about it, leaving my expectations low, but it's an extremely fun entry in the series in its "endless" mode and features all of the previous games' rulesets there as well, as well as having a much improved and expanded single player mode. might have the best soundtrack in the series as well.
demon king chronicle is a wild game. apparently this is an rpg maker game from 2007, but it has these mechanics i'm a little shocked to see in a game that old, like "pulling" in the mmo sense, angular AOE attacks, and an anarchic equipment system where everything, including weapons, armor, and consumables, are equippable as accessories with their own stats and sometimes abilities. it reminded me of dept. heaven as soon as turtle started talking about it in discord once, but really it's even more mysterious and bizarre than most of that series. i absolutely love it.
speaking of games that were ahead of their time?
everblue 2. i feel like a modern game with this concept could really wow everyone now that there's a wider view of what games are and the tech is there to make something truly stunning visually, plus the photo mechanic, which is a bit clumsy in this game (partly because of how much space it takes on ps2 memory cards...) has become a central feature in so many recent games. it's not entirely great, with a very silly storyline and some other very bizarre mechanical contrivances, but there's such a cool variety of chill exploration vibes and intense horror sense in the diving mechanics, plus a pretty cleverly designed progression system that doesn't feel too unfair or restricting overall, but still offers a lot to look forward to.
i beat
moon: remix rpg adventure back in march. i made a couple posts about this in the thread but they never really summed up my feelings or experience with the game, which is a beautifully trippy adventure with some issues but also a lot of stuff that feels far ahead of its mid-90s vintage. the soundtrack and overall aesthetic have a wild dream sense and i felt the game ultimately hit a nice balance between its parodical metanarrative and underlying sincerity. and it caused me to want to play
super mario rpg having heard that many of the staff came from that game, which, while i'm only about halfway through, is fucking incredible. i don't even consider myself a particularly big mario fan, but the amount of love that went into selling this quirky world full of surreal gags and mario as a main character is simply fantastic. i don't know if i'll ever find him more appealing than in this game, and he never even says anything! he just jumps and mimes stuff. overall it's easily one of my favorite 16-bit square games already.
i also finally beat
tales of vesperia this year, on the switch version. it really does feel like the "ultimate" tales game, for better or worse: it's longer, more technical and difficult, and grindier (though not even really "because of difficulty", just that the ff9-style skill system means there are SO MANY weapons to make and learn skills for your builds from) than any other entry in the series i've played. but i ate it up. it's kind of a weird story, focused on the clash of leading characters' philosophies and motivations with honestly a lot of the twists and other conflicts feeling like afterthoughts, and i loved the characters way more than enough for me to be totally sold on it. it's also the one game in the series that truly "feels like a fighting game" to me, with enemies having all sorts of really cheap shenanigans and super long combos being doable but frequently difficult and often having some degree of risk. i spent 160 hours with it from december-march and i still feel like i could play it for so much longer.
i'm not sure i love it more than
phantasia still, but it's far ahead of any of the others to me.
dungeon encounters is the best rpg i've ever played where i straight up turned off the sound before the end of the game. it starts out as a fine but weirdly straightforward-feeling dungeon crawler, but eventually you are given the choice to turn it into another game entirely. in my case the tipping point looked like something intentional but as far as i can tell was actually a COMPLETELY RANDOM occurrence that just
happened to look designed and perfectly set me up for exactly the kind of game i wanted to play. which means maybe they did realize it because the map was set up in a way to enable it perfectly? i don't even know!!! what a wild game
i already wrote a bunch about
monster hunter freedom unite/portable 2nd g, but i played a while after writing that and finished my big G1 equipment grind before taking a break since then. of course it's not as good as
rise, but i found it way more compelling in a way, because i love old pain games. it also explained a LOT about what jrpgs were doing in the late ps2 and early 360 era to me
(sunbreak is gonna be rad though, i'm still super looking forward to it)
very tiny mentions:
fate: grand order: yuga kshetra is the only game story i read this year that caused me to read four different books after finishing it. this should not actually be taken as an endorsement.
final fantasy xiv:
the zodiark age was also a bit of a mixed bag, but pretty damn good overall.
capcom vs snk 2 is a fighting game that i still think is Way Too Much, but its chaotic and unstoppably 2000-2001 aesthetic is too appealing not to love
final fantasy xv has a ton of problems but remains the only game i've played that represents what it's like to be a teenage boy camping in the southwestern us mountains and desert. i'll keep saying it until something better comes along
games that i keep saying i hate, but i really don't, they just clearly were designed to annoy me specifically and i really struggle to actually play them:
touhou 18: unconnected marketeers,
final fantasy ix
