RICE GAME RICE GAME RICE GAME
It came out in 2020 but as a long form game that would suffer greatly if you beat it in a week, really showed itself throughout the year.
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smt3 hd and smt5, truly the year of megaten innit
i can’t really remember much about re8 and forza + halo have been my normige quotient for the year
best oldie i played for the first time was genealogy of the holy war
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new old stuff:
all my favs this year were remasters: nocturne hd is a more or less ok way to play a goat; shiren 5 (which think dropped last dec but im gonna roll it over) was my life for a few months, and even got me to check out rhe pokemon mystery dungeon games (unexpectedly delightful); and the cave switch ports are all good. mushi is the standout, imo, but i havent dug too deep into ddp dfk yet so that could change.
new new stuff:
-i have issues with metroid dread but enjoyed it overall and it resuscitated my interest in prime 4, which i didnt expect.
-smt5 is cool if uneven. i think it’ll grow on me on replay.
-forza horizon 5: great graphics, beautiful graphics
standout old old stuff:
pokemon mystery dungeon, panzer dragoon saga, the last remnant, esprade, sekiro, yakuza like a dragon
yet to play but want to:
dungeon encounters!!!, resi 8
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the answer is probably cruelty squad. not a true “best” game but its probably the most correct game for the year. the game is dumb in the right way and the discourse is even dumber (you look dumb if you say you don’t like it). i have a longer post simmering.
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a game i wish had any impact on me whatsoever, but a game i completely forgot that i played until you mentioned it
i’d rather just play Post Void
I’ll be able to answer this in 24 hours
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Nioh 2 came out on PC this year and I had a blast with that one. I’ve been actually thinking about going back to it to do more of the post-game infinite item grind stuff but it gets harder to pick back up the later you get in the difficulty levels I think.
Dungeon Encounters is very good/interesting as a really humble and pure refinement of DRPGs. Aside from mechanical things I really like that it manages to reduce the DRPG format to something that feels almost on the tier of something like Solitaire or Minesweeper.
SaGa Frontier was a remaster but it still counts to me. GOTY material even purely by virtue of having a really extensive post-game Credits Room situation where you can go around reading staff comments, playing back music and fighting stupid joke/gimmick battles
I have a hard time rating Monster Hunter Rise in retrospect because it ended up being one of those games where you end up feeling “ehh there’s not that much to do” despite putting in 200+ hours into it - maybe the fate of a lot of live service/instanced mission style games. It was very good though. I really liked what they did with the moment-to-moment gameplay (palamutes, wirebugs and single-loadscreen maps made traversal super fun and also all the weapons felt really cool to use) but I’m kind of not a big fan of bigger picture stuff like every mission having basically the same structure, and just wishing some fights in general felt harder.
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oh yeah nioh 2 rules, need to finish that one
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did serotonin return though
maybe for a month there
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My gotys
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Gnosia : Billed as a visual novel, in reality it is RNG Werewolf, utterly impenetrable until it clicks and you dominate it in a way that feels both wrong and very good. Unforgettable characters despite 95% randomized boring dialogue. Killer SFX when your character realizes someone is lying
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SMT5: Real Shin Megami Tensei Shit. I’m very pleased
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Great ace attorney : AA with less cringe, more character, and no supernatural elements, I only got tired of it during the last case of the second game which is MUCH farther than usual for AA. I extremely love Herlock Susato Gina etc and all the animations
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Disco Elysium: It got an atrocious switch port this year, I was mesmerized the entire time despite the constant crashes.
I would have liked to invest more into my favorite skill (Half light) but the game did put enough pressure that I felt real weight to my every choices. -
Sakuna: I’ve experienced the entire Hero Journey Narrative in my head through gameplay alone just with my relationship with rice in that game
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Astalon Tears of the earth: I play a ton of Keyring games, they’re my guilty pleasure and this one was the best in a while. Top notch exploration. I almost missed it too because the art direction did nothing for me, at least at first
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as is tradition, I did not play much released this year.
I was not as big on REVIII as most people here. I thought it was pretty fun, but I’d have much preferred a whole game out of the first half, rather than what we got. I don’t see myself ever playing it again.
playing SMTV right now. I’m liking it. it’s never going to feel as aesthetically perfect as nocturne, which is always going to disappoint me, but it’s closer than I thought it’d be and everything else about it is really solid so far. SMTIV felt like more of a place than V does, but everything else about V is better so far.
guilty gear strive is definitely my most played game of the year. I think my final opinion is…very playable, not very fun? it’s too easy to get up to the skill level I’m at, and too hard to get anywhere else. the game feels very rigid. most matchups feel the same. it’s a gorgeous game, but it does sacrifice a lot of what made guilty gear it’s own thing in order to get there. which is what you can also say about how it plays. if I didn’t click so strongly with potemkin I think I would’ve abandoned it a couple months in.
I think that’s it from this year.
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I can feel my annual average games played ticking down a bit. Here are the notable, gotyable ones:
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G-String was very fiddly but had excellent world building and music. Title makes the game very difficult to recommend but this is the best climate anxiety game I think I’ve ever played.
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Disco Elysium got a little too adventure gamey at times when trying to exhaust opportunities to progress time or find dialogue I had not yet clicked on yet, but overall the writing is just ridiculously solid. I didn’t read much fiction this year so this feels like the next best thing. Phasmid encounter was sublime.
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I’m less than 10 hours into Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin and have been playing it since late 2020. I really love the game and don’t know why I can’t just finish it. 2022 New Year’s resolution is to finish this and Final Fantasy VII. Sakuna is exactly the kind of game I complain they don’t make enough of. My most anticipated game I’m already playing.
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Final Fantasy VII is still the breeziest JRPG I’ve played lately. I will finish it next year.
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Ring Fit Adventure and Pikmin Bloom may have collectively kept me alive this year. Without some structured motivation to pump lactic acid and then endorphins into my blood, my mood would be far worse. Bloom has surprised me as basically being the more co-operative, low stakes, low chance, and cuter version of Pokémon Go. Naming your Pikmin is the best way to play.
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Guilty Gear Strive and Melty Blood: Type Lumina are two fighting games that came out in a year where I am basically 2 days from retirement from the genre. I enjoyed them both, they were very juicy and usable but I only really stuck around for Potemkin fun and not much else.
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I played three Nier games this year and scrapped an ill-advised video essay that was becoming far too long. Nier Replicant [remake], Nier Reincarnation, and Nier Cogito make for an interesting triptych that makes me wonder if the Nier series only really has one good entry and if it wouldn’t just be a better series handed off to other creators more regularly. Cogito showed how you can basically take that world and premise and make any kind of interesting game with it. Reincarnation showed that it doesn’t mean shit if the original writer is on a sequel project and that endless quelle intrigue carrot-and-sticking makes up the most indulgent tendencies of the series’ writing. Replicant showed that Nier is still a fine game.
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SB gave me the gift of SMT as I played both Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne for the first time and Shin Megami Tensei V. Nocturne is peak PS2, peak JRPG, peak demon shit. Aesthetically peerless and scratched the map-reading itch hard. V is also great but much wonkier although I prefer its direction to a straight retread of Nocturne generally. It almost feels like V should not be the scale of game that it is and it’s a special thing for that. I love being given highschool friends and battling them to the death over ideological differences. V’s soundtrack is 2021’s soundtrack.
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No More Heroes 3 is my goty, surprising everyone. It’s not the best game that came out but it felt, cataclysmically, the end of a particular era of my life with games. In 2007 I slipped NMH into my Wii and enjoyed the same kind of violent emptiness I did 14 years later. My crusty honeymoon memories are a rebellious teen at this point. Cruising down the void streets of the most shamelessly empty open world only to stop and plant trees or catch scorpions is where I want games to be, but the realisation of this in NMH3 in 2021 is almost too painful. Finishing it made it feel as though there is no more future for games for me; I am barely anticipating anything. ‘The light and flashing attracted me as the light the moth. To convey this mysterious [sic] to a new generation – that is all I want’
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Genuinely, I can barely remember what games are from what year or what year I’ve played them in, tbh
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I’ve been keeping a phone note divided per month otherwise I’d be completely lost too. I probably couldn’t accurately place in time anything I played before July without it.
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holy fuck this was a joke but its not at all its absolutely endwalker. i know i love ffxiv but this is the best for real
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SMTV saved the year
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My top 3 in no particular order:
- BlazBlue Central Fiction
- Pokémon Blue Kaizo
- Tetris the Grand Master 2+
The only 2021 game I played this year is Strive and it was just fine
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Here’s my top 10!!
- Deathloop
- It Takes Two
- Solasta: Crown of the Magister
- Hitman 3
- Halo Infinite
- Sable
- Pychonauts 2
- Yogurt Commercial 3
- Subnautica Below Zero
- Metroid Dread
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Thinking about Village’s structure as one of my favorite game structures. Each section is a conversation with its boss as executed perfectly in Snake Eater and to mixed results elsewhere e.g. Shocks, Arkane games, D2, etc.
Games are terrible at verbal conversations but I love the designer embodying the antagonist.
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I like that you see the bosses before having to fight them. Cool bosses are like, “I’m gonna getcha… in about four hours of gameplay!”
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