It’s that time of year again. The time where I write entirely too much about the entirely too long list of games I played this year, very loosely ranked from worst to best. This one is even longer than last year. I either need to play fewer games or learn how to be more concise when writing my thoughts. I will likely do neither.
Final Fantasy Adventure
As a wee tot I loved Secret of Mana with all my heart, so the mana collection announcement during E3 knocked my socks off. I had always wanted to play this supposed sequel to Secret of Mana, now called Trials of Mana, but for whatever reason, I felt the need to play the original mana game: Final Fantasy Adventure first.
The game starts off pretty well, for an old gameboy game at least. The path forward is very well indicated and it even includes some practical, wordless tutorials. “Wow, this game has some surprisingly modern design sensibilities” I said to myself for a time. However, as the game went on, the trash started to settle.
First it was as simple as frequent weapon switching because some enemies were inexplicably immune to my strongest weapon. Then it was dungeons requiring a certain number of generic keys, forcing a trek to the nearest shop to buy more when I ran out. Then it was needing to cast certain spells on enemies when they’re in certain positions, and having to leave the dungeons to respawn them if you missed. Oh, and leaving the dungeon also respawns key doors.
By the end of the game, it was a long, irritating slog. I was done with it well before the credits and resorted to some “light” save state abuse to avoid the tedium. I’ll give it credit for introducing some of the Final Fantasy series staples like chocobos and moogles, and for having more of a story than your typical gameboy game, but hoo boy do I never want to play it again.
Ring Fit Adventure
Ring Fit was basically an $80 impulse buy, but it might be one of the better impulse buys I’ve made. As an RPG, it’s very simplistic and the story is almost nothing, but as a tool to get me to exercise, it’s been fantastic. I’m both a professional and hobbyist programmer, a player of video games, and hopelessly Online, so I often spend 12+ hours per day at my computer. I don’t get up and out that much.
I’m not sure if it’s my RPG experience coercing me into trying to break the game over my knee, or my drive to finish a game that I’ve started, but Ring Fit has kept me coming back for 35 days as of this writing. That’s exercising in about two thirds of the days since I bought it, which is at least 5 times more often than I had been doing prior.
I got over the initial walls in just the first few days (and was very sore shortly thereafter) and managed to hit a stride where I was able to bump up the difficulty every couple of days while working up a sweat without getting destroyed. It’s been such a smooth curve that I’ve barely noticed a change in difficulty while playing, but I’ve definitely noticed I’ve become a bit stronger. Despite the Baby’s-First-RPG simplicity, I have to give it some respect for doing the impossible and getting me to exercise regularly.
Hob
Hob is a wordless Zelda-like adventure through an odd mechanical world that’s been overtaken by some corrupting force. It’s a very straightforward game. So much so that at times I felt as if I was playing on autopilot, with even most puzzles being solved just by messing around with each piece. Maybe I just play too many games, but I rarely had to actually think about how to progress.
The game is mostly linear, but its world opens up gradually much like a metroidvania. What it lacks in memorable or engaging level design, it makes up for in pure creativity of the world and characters. Landmasses in this world appear pre-made from an unseen void below and lock into place after you raise them. A friendly robot finds you dying and grafts its arm onto yours to save you. There’s a massive robot graveyard, a reservoir with giant man-eating fish, lush jungles with hostile plants, enormous underground factories with bizarre technology, and a lot more.
I guess I don’t really have that much to say about Hob other than: not too engaging to play, and: neat world.
Blaster Master 02
Y’all liked Blaster Master 0 The First, didn’t you? Well hold on because we’re making a sequel and we’re cramming in even more anime this time! It basically is just the first game, but bigger and with more anime.
The biggest change is that the game world is now broken into a number of planets, most needing a certain key to unlock. That makes getting around a bit easier, but I usually prefer one large, contiguous world to give it a more cohesive feel. There’s also a bit of a change to the top-down segments in that there are special abilities, like counters, that took me far too long to learn the timing for. There are a few new traversal abilities as well, which are neat, but nothing groundbreaking.
Overall it’s a solid sequel that does some minor iteration on the first. It was worth the price of entry for sure, but wasn’t going to knock anyone’s socks off.
Actually wait, I just remembered the cute robot girl with a giant robotic dragonfly pet. This is actually my game of the year.
Minoria
I previously wrote about how much I loved Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight (aka Momodora 4), so I of course eagerly jumped on the boat for the developer’s next game: Minoria. Minoria made the leap from 2D to 3D well enough, but I walked away just being disappointed.
Minoria takes a lot from its predecessor: a dark, bleak setting, dark soulsian mechanics like respawning enemies and health items, and playing as a tough anime girl. It seems to play it very safe… too safe. Minoria felt like a clunkier Momo 4, but with most of the charm sucked from it. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I never felt as engrossed in the world or characters as in the predecessor. So much of the world just merges together in my mind to become very unmemorable.
I think the biggest omission in Minoria is the lack of a bow for combat. Momo 4 had strong short range leaf attacks and weaker long range bow attacks that let you decide the best method for dispatching a target. In Minoria you only have your melee weapon with a single 3 or 4 hit combo. It makes for much riskier, but also less interesting combat, which is a powerful recipe for frustration and/or boredom. There is some long range magic, however they have a limited number of uses, with most doing pathetic damage — often even less than a melee attack.
Minoria is not bad by any means, but it definitely doesn’t escape the shadow of its predecessor.
Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure
Gurumin was another impulse buy, purely because it looked cute. It’s about a young girl who finds her way to a world filled with monsters and vows to help rebuild a town of friendly monsters that was destroyed by an evil group. It’s a third person action/puzzle/platformer situation, with levels scattered across an overworld, Mario World style.
The character designs and animations are all very cute and the entire vibe is very lighthearted and fun. Visually, it’s simplistic and reminiscent of its time (it was originally released in 2004 on the PSP), but I think that only added to its charm. The soundtrack is a bop as well and rocks surprisingly hard.
Gurumin’s main shortcoming is its controls. They feel incredibly clunky, slow and unresponsive. In general, the game doesn’t demand very much precision, and yet controlling Purin is still a major hurdle. There are several special abilities that require certain control stick inputs, almost like a fighting game, but the detection of those inputs is just awful. Half of the time I would end up doing some other move with what seemed like the same input as the other times.
I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the level design either. The vast majority of the levels just aren’t memorable, and most of their difficulty comes from trying to overcome the weird controls. There are some interesting oddities though, like the light-speed motion-sickness-inducing mine cart rides, or the peaceful lake, open for exploration, or the terrible soccer minigame.
Looking back, it’s a game with a lot of charm that really stands out, but I would not want to actually play it more than once.
Timespinner
In Fire Emblem Echoes, the character Faye loves Alm… a lot. Like, she would probably never wash her hand if Alm touched it. Like, she would probably want to kill Alm and wear him as a skin suit. That sort of relationship is how I see Timespinner and Symphony of the Night. Timespinner so desperately loves SotN that it wants to be SotN.
Timespinner takes so much from SotN that it also takes its less than great aspects. Most notably it takes the dull level design with large, mostly empty rooms with copy/pasted enemy groups. Some aspects it takes aren’t well realized either. Equipment and shops, for instance, don’t have much to them.
Timespinners biggest deviation from SotN is its world and story. It’s about a tribe that’s attacked by an evil empire because they have a time machine. The protagonist uses the time machine to try to stop the attack before it happens, but things don’t go quite as anticipated. Visually, the world is decently well realized. The sprites and backgrounds are well done and the music is complimentary and generally pleasant, but what really hurts it is the writing. As someone who likes writing fiction myself, so much of Timespinner’s writing is just painful. I would put it on par with a C-grade high school creative writing student.
Despite its shortcomings, it does steal from SotN, so there is something to like here: the combat and exploration in particular feel quite good. If the devs make a sequel and manage to find a better writer and maybe make their level design a little more interesting, I would definitely buy into that.
Gato Roboto
Gato Roboto is a small, cute metroidvania about a cat in a robot suit. What’s not to love? For what it is, Gato Roboto does what it sets out to do, but it was never meant to set the world on fire. Graphically it’s very simple, with a 1-bit color depth and low resolution pixel graphics (the animations are decent though) and the game is very short. My first, leisurely almost-100% playthrough took just under two hours.
With how short it is, it seems like it would be a pretty good speed game, but I unfortunately never got around to running it. I’ll add that to the never-ending stack of gaming things I’d like to do but probably never will.
Exapunks
It’s another Zachtronics game. For those who are unfamiliar, Zachtronics’s specialty is programming puzzle games. You’re given various commands or components or tools and told to develop a system that will automate some task. Some of their games like Spacechem, Infinifactory and Opus Magnum are a bit more abstract in their programming, but Exapunks is not one of those. In exapunks you write code to control special virtual robots using a special assembly language. These robots can worm their way into other computers through the net and tinker with what they find inside.
Confession time: I never actually finished Exapunks. The very late game kicked my ass pretty hard, and this is coming from a professional programmer of about 10 years. As satisfying as solving the complex late game puzzles is, the real fun of Zachtronics games is optimization, and Exapunks offers plenty of vectors for that. Since each robot runs its own code independently and more can be spawned almost indefinitely, there’s a lot of room for parallelization. Making efficient parallelism work with the limited tools for it requires a bit of trial and error and a bit of ingenuity, but seeing your solution at the lowest end of the final histograms is worth the trouble.
Trials of Mana
I had heard tale of a sequel to Secret of Mana for many years, but never really knew anything about it. I knew Seiken Densetsu 3 let you choose your party of the start and that it was supposedly even better than Secret of Mana. Emulating it using a fan translation was always an option, but not something I ever felt like doing for whatever reason. The Mana collection on swtich was finally my excuse to play it.
I may be a little clouded by my nostalgia for Secret of Mana, but I still think it’s the better game. Trials of Mana has a lot going for it: amazing sprite work for an SNES game, a solid soundtrack, a much larger cast of characters whose stories merge together seamlessly regardless of the combination you choose and deeper RPG elements. Despite that, there are a lot of rough edges and half baked ideas that severely hold it back.
The game was very obviously rushed to completion, and nothing shows that more than the menu system. It’s an absolute nightmare to navigate. First of all, simply opening it takes several seconds as it loads on the order of the PS1 Final Fantasy remakes. All of the information is spread out over the 9 “tiles” and switching can only be done to an adjacent tile with a slow pan. Not only is it incredibly slow, but it’s also very glitchy. The text typically has to disappear for a short while whenever you select or change something and it will drop your inputs unless it is completely done with whatever it’s doing.
The menus are painfully slow, but the biggest time waster was the trap rooms. These rooms trap you inside until you’ve killed all of the enemies. There are a lot of them, and they respawn very frequently. Also there’s no in-game map, so it’s very easy to accidentally stumble into one you’ve already been into. Also also, many of them are simple dead ends with nothing in them but one exit and enemies to kill. They’re designed solely to wear you down. And wear you down they do. They really tried my patience after a while.
Healing is particularly rare for whatever reason. There are scant few characters who have healing magic, and some only after many levels and a class change. I had to rely entirely on items to keep me alive through a large portion of the game, and the carrying limits for items are even lower than in Secret of Mana, and you can still only buy one at a time. Perhaps it’s my fault for not choosing the dedicated healer character, but I had assumed that I wouldn’t be running back to town every few minutes because I had to constantly cram chocolate bars into my gob.
There’s also the issue of magical counters. Offensive magic is pretty strong and I used a lot of it, but some enemies, especially in the late game will counter your magic with their own. And their own will absolutely obliterate you in an instant. So the options are: leave your spellcaster to uselessly bonk the enemy for 8 damage a hit, or try to blitz down the enemy before they can retaliate. I went with option #2 primarily, and I think I may have made the late game a lot harder on myself.
It’s a flawed game, but I would still say it was an enjoyable experience. It’s flaws could easily be fixed though. I’m very much looking forward to the upcoming full remake and hope I can enjoy the game as much as I should’ve been able to.
Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse
It’s just another Shanty game! The Shantae series has never been particularly fantastic, but Pirates Curse is easily the most solid entry. I don’t have that much to say about Shantae. Basically everything I said about Half-Genie Hero last year applies to Pirate’s Curse as well, but Pirates Curse has some better and more open level design and some abilities that are much more satisfying to use.
Indivisible
LabZero is best known for fighting games, possibly my most disliked genre of games, and they wanted to make an RPG styled after Valkyrie Profile, a game I barely knew anything about, with some fighting game elements peppered in. Yes, this clearly seems like a game whose crowdfunding campaign I would eagerly contribute to. That’s exactly what happened.
Indivisible has a very unique combat style, even deviating from Valkyrie Profile as it often blends typical battles with action platforming. It definitely takes a bit to get used to. The first few hours were mostly me flailing around trying to figure out all the controls. Eventually, maybe around the half-way point, the combat really clicked for me and I was cranking out 100-hit combos back to back while barely taking a hit. I think it might have clicked too well for me? The difficulty seemed to take a gradual dive in the latter part of the game, making some of the bosses seem almost trivial. What saved the battles from being a snooze-fest was how some of them integrate the game’s many platforming mechanics. You might get kicked out of the typical battle system and have to jump around to avoid various new attacks and whack the boss with your axe a few times manually before being thrown back into the battle proper. This really cements Indivisible as being as much a platformer as it is an RPG.
The biggest surprise for me was just about complex the 2D platforming mechanics became. By the end of the game you’ve got a mountain of abilities, and you’re expected to use them all. It starts off pretty simple with a wall jump and an axe to chop down obstacles, but by the end you’re using your hyper dash to spring jump into a vertical boost and an air dash to climb across the ceiling with a spear and bust through the floor with a ground pound. Once you get a feel for the platforming, it’s actually quite satisfying, and the generous checkpointing keeps it from becoming frustrating and repetitive.
At first I was pretty down on the game though. It’s a very barebones RPG with no character advancement outside of simple level ups. There’s no items or inventory or equipment or skill trees or deep, engrossing story. It’s definitely nowhere near as deep of an RPG as I was expecting and it took a bit to accept the game for what it actually is. That said, I was never able to get over the generally flat writing and characters. Most of the characters are very one-note. Some of them do change over the course of the game, but the majority might as well be background decoration. The voice acting is generally pretty good, but some of the lines the actors were given to read sound particularly awkward or stilted given the character or their voice.
The game needs a better fast travel system. I spend a long-ass time just running through the same long stretches of the environments for the 10th time because there’s only one fast travel point per area, not to mention that fast travel doesn’t even unlock until the half-way point in the game.
Also, the final boss is hot trash that requires heavy button mashing, memorization and reflexes. Visually and thematically it’s neat, but I wasn’t having fun after the 20th death while trying to figure out how to avoid the next attack.
Overall I enjoyed the game a fair bit though. It’s very obvious LabZero didn’t have much experience with the genres they were going for, but they managed to make a fun, if flawed, game anyway. If they ever try for an Indivisible 2, I’ll be lining up to try it.
Iconoclasts
I had never played a Joakim Sandberg game before, despite how fun they look, so what I saw he had made a metroidvania and jumped at the chance… about a year and a half late. Iconoclasts had gotten lost in the backlog for a while, but I finally managed to get around to it.
As a metroidvania, Iconoclasts is a little weak. It doesn’t put much emphasis on exploration, focuses heavily on a linear story. As an action/puzzle platformer, however, Iconoclasts is very solid. It doles out new abilities rather slowly, but they are all pretty interesting and fun to use. I wish the bomb didn’t overheat quite as fast, but that’s basically a nitpick.
What surprised me most about Iconoclasts is the story. I won’t into it to avoid spoilers, but it’s a particularly well done story about faith, family and finding ones purpose in life. It gets a little heady and heavy handed at times, sometimes (intentionally) uncomfortably so, but it was probably in the top 3 most interesting and thought provoking video game stories this year.
Cadence of Hyrule
I’m the most musically inept person alive and have no sense of rhythm. I barely got anywhere when I played Crypt of the Necrodancer. Why, then, would I buy a Necrodancer spinoff? ZELDA. C’mon, that should be obvious. It’s a randomly generated Zelda game with some rhythm elements tacked on. It even gives you the option to turn off the rhythm elements- wow! I played with the beat on for some reason though? I don’t know, I’m stubborn about that sort of thing, even to my own detriment.
Cadence started out feeling a lot like Necrodancer as I was flailing around with the beat and dying to enemies with very simple patterns. Turns out the very beginning is actually the hardest part of the game. Once I had a few heart pieces under my belt, it was surprisingly easy to stay alive thanks to the ludicrous number of diamonds the game gives you. When I hit that threshold, it felt a lot more like a Zelda game and I started enjoying myself a lot more. It even has dungeons! Take that, Breath of the Wild!
I’m not a huge fan of random generation. I usually prefer level design to be, well, designed. The overworld being consistent between deaths is a huge plus, but the non-puzzle sections of the dungeons really felt like they were randomized, and not in a good way. They didn’t seem to have a coherent design theme or structure and just felt generic.
I probably should’ve turned the beat off, but either way Cadence felt like a weird 2D zelda game and really, that alone is some high praise.
AI: The Somnium Files
AI: The Somnium File is Kotaro Uchikoshi’s newest game, where the player controls Kaname Date, the horniest man on Earth and his artificial intelligence companion, Aiba, as they investigate a brutal murder.
This is Uchikoshi’s writing at its finest. The story builds a small, but well developed cast of characters, settings and concepts and uses those to hit you with a near constant stream of curve balls. You’ll likely suspect every single character as the killer at some point in a playthrough. Every little piece of new info you’re given shakes up the careful balance of what’s presented to you, almost forcing you to ruminate on the implications for a bit. Fans of Uchikoshi’s other games should definitely play AI. I would even say it rivals 999 and VLR.
I did have a few problems with AI though. The most prominent was the stability. I played on PC and had to deal with very frequent crashes; probably about 30 in my 28 hour playthrough. I don’t see any patches since I played it, so I would strongly recommend the console versions instead. The frustration isn’t worth the benefits of playing on PC.
My other issue is the “escape room” equivalents where you explore a person’s dream world with Aiba. The concept of them is great, but the limited time mechanics and trial-and-error nature of the choices feel very out of place. To interact with things in the dreams, you have to expend some of your limited time, however the interactions are very opaque. You rarely know exactly what will happen when you choose a particular interaction. There are many, many red herrings that don’t actually do anything meaningful, so it’s easy to run out of time and have to start over. The whole time mechanic, while making sense in the story, seems to be shoehorned in as a gameplay mechanic. Nothing would really be lost without it.
Skies of Arcadia
I already said my piece about Skies of Arcadia. Go and read it here:
https://medium.com/@Qwarq/sailor-vyse-says-in-the-name-of-the-moons-i-will-punish-you-a-look-at-skies-of-arcadia-714c495cf394. I will add one addendum to it though. It was pointed out to me that the HUD elements I so dearly wanted actually are there. I just somehow never managed to press the button to show them. Whoops.
Super Mario Maker 2
It’s Mario Maker, but with slopes.
SMM2 was my most played game of the year, but it still seemed like it fell short of the original. I don’t think this was the game’s fault, so much as it was my own. I put a lot of creative energy into the first game, to the point that I may have burnt myself out slightly. I tend to build stages more than play them, so I’m still feeling that burn a bit, with that spark of creativity hitting me far less often.
Beyond slopes, there are some fantastic additions to the game. On and off switches alone add a massive amount of depth to what can be created. The new update that dropped recently adds several new items with as much impact, such of spikes and their spike/snow balls and the master sword that essentially makes it a Zelda game. If I was in the right frame of mind, you can bet I would still be going to town on SMM2.
Many of the new additions, unfortunately, are locked behind certain game styles. The 3D World style in particular sort of sits apart from the others, as it has many unique features, but is also missing many of the objects available in other styles. There are no kickable shells or spike traps in 3D World, for example. It’s bizarrely limiting and almost drove me away from the style completely.
The story mode campaign, on the other hand, is probably the best addition over the original. It has just enough substance and charm to drag you in to teach you how you can use all of the different objects and sow some seeds of creativity that makes you want to fire up the course builder. My only gripe is that there are a few elements in story mode stages that, inexplicably, can’t be used by players. The super heavy block and the toads are the main ones. Let me put the heavy blocks in my levels, Nintendo. What are you hiding from us?
Pokemon Shield
I don’t want to go too deep into Sword and Shield because The Discourse surrounding them exhausts me whenever I start thinking about it. Basically, it’s extremely A Pokemon Game. It’s pretty much what I expected from a pokemon game, and in that sense I’m satisfied with it.
The story is rather lacking, though the final stretch is actually quite good. I was a little disappointed by how heavily you’re railroaded through the various towns and routes. If you try to go somewhere that’s not the correct destination, you’ll probably be blocked by some Team Yell grunts.
I really loved the idea of the wild area. An open area with free camera control and lots of little nooks and crannies to explore while hunting for pokemon is basically a dream come true for the series. I hope they expand on this in later games, maybe even making the entire region one huge wild area. An unexpected plus in the wild area is being able to see and interact with other players there. I didn’t expect how much more lively it made the world feel until I accidentally left the game in offline mode for a bit.
In conclusion, gen 8 added wooloo and is therefore the best generation yet. (alright, I still like gen 7 a bit more but… wooloo).
Touhou Luna Nights
I only know three Touhou characters: the maid, the witch and the ice one. I know about the maid, Sakuya, entirely because of Touhou Luna Nights. Even with very little knowledge of the series, I have to say Luna Nights is a fantastic action platformer. I was drawn in by the gorgeous sprite animation and the promise of metroidvania gameplay.
While the animation stays incredible the whole way through, it’s a very light metroidvania. Once you work your way through an area and defeat the boss at the end, you’ll never need to return to that area. There are optional upgrades to find in past areas, but the critical path is a straight line though the different areas. That said, for what it is, it’s very good. The various upgrades are all very fun and are used in interesting ways. The biggest mechanic in the game is Sakuya’s ability to stop or slow time. As the game progresses it introduces enemies and obstacles that interact differently with time stoppage. For example, some may not be affected by it at all, or some might not move unless time is stopped. It goes a long way to keep time stoppage an interesting mechanic the whole way through.
The combat system as a whole feels fantastic as well. Sakuya’s primary attack is throwing a bunch of knives that hit with a very satisfying crunch. Doing so consumes some MP though, requiring some mindfulness of your basic attack. MP regenerates on its own, but it does so quite slowly. This is where grazing comes into play. Borrowing from the Touhou bullet hell games, if you get close to, but not touching, an enemy or projectile, you’ll graze it and recover some MP. That alone sounds pretty tough, as it would force constantly putting yourself in danger, but this is where the time stop mechanic comes in. Sakuya has a separate resource that dictates how much she can do while time is stopped. While time is moving, this regenerates slowly, but not as slow as MP. When time is stopped, attacks use time power instead of MP and the distance at which you can graze is greatly increased. This creates a loop where one resource feeds into restoring the other. Once you learn how everything works, boss fights become a frantic dance trying to manage these resources so you can keep the damage coming and keep the obstacles manageable.
Luna Nights released an update to add an extra, supposedly super hard, boss that I haven’t had a chance to try yet. My main grievance with the game was how short it is. I wanted more and they gave me more, but I just don’t have the time play it and it pains me.
Astral Chain
Astral Chain has a lot of similarities to Luna Nights now that I think about it. It’s an anime game with lackluster story, characters and structure, but more than make up for them with their style and incredible combat system.
There’s so much to the combat system in Astral Chain that it would take a few thousand words to describe everything. There are many different mechanics, but with a little practice, it doesn’t feel all that overwhelming. The addition of the legion, a separate demon thing attached to you with a magic chain, adds an incredible amount of depth to the game. It honestly surprises me how well it works. Nailing the sync attacks where you and your legion attack in tandem are incredibly satisfying and is a big motivator to try to perfect your fighting style and get a good grade.
Pushing players to go for high grades at the end of each section of each chapter has its own problems though, as the meta mechanics are actually pretty hostile to that end. Most notably is that there’s no way to retry a section. If you fumble a fight and get a low grade on that section, your only recourse is to restart the entire chapter and re-do each section up to where you were. It really really needs a way to restart a section. Also, there’s the problem of the grading system being rather opaque. It displays a breakdown of your score at the end, but some of the score categories aren’t very clear as to what they mean and there’s no indicator of what the requirements for each grade are.
The characters are all very forgettable (with the exception of Lappy the police dog) and the story is borderline incomprehensible and half baked. The structure of the game is very repetitive: prep in the police station followed by a somewhat free-roaming exploration with side quests, followed by a linear gauntlet of battles until the end of the chapter.
Despite all the problems, the amazing combat system still holds it up as one of the most fun of the year. Good job, Platinum. Just please, please, please add a retry option next time.
Baba Is You
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
I also already wrote some words about Bloodstained. Look at me, writing two other articles in one year.
Ni no Kuni 2
After watching all of the Ghibli movies with friends a while back, the Ghibli style really grew on me. Ni no Kuni 2, unlike its predecessor, wasn’t actually made with Ghibli directly, but it absolutely keeps the style and mood. I had never played it, but I had heard some mixed feelings about Ni no Kuni 1, which left me slightly cautious of the sequel. A friend gave me the game as a birthday present last year, so I decided to dive in anyway.
The game opens with the president of the not-United States heading toward not-New York just as it’s hit with a nuke. The president, Roland, suddenly wakes up to find he’s young again and in a strange, magical world. Fuck, Ni no Kuni 2 is an isekai story. Anyway, he met up with Prince Evan, whose father had been assassinated, embroiling him in a violent coup that wanted his head. Evan sets off with Roland’s protection to found a new kingdom and spread peace across the land. The journey is a long one that takes him across the world, meeting many fascinating characters and building a shining kingdom.
What struck me more than anything is how positive the game is. Despite the very dark intro, the vast majority is a very upbeat, whimsical, and has a generally pleasant atmosphere. Just booting up the game and running around the weird, colorful world would be enough to improve my mood. Evan is a very idealistic and naive little boy who is also the king of a new kingdom. By all accounts, this is a recipe for disaster, but in this storybook world it just works. It’s a world where most of the complication and painful realities of the real world simply don’t exist, and there’s something comforting in that.
The story is punctuated by a real time battle system that’s extremely reminiscent of the “Tales of” series. It’s certainly not as polished and fluid of Tales of Berseria, but it definitely gives some of the earlier Tales games a run for their money.
In founding a new kingdom, Evan unlocks a pretty basic city building mode wherein you choose which buildings to buy and upgrade and research, which tie into the battle system by way of equipment, new magic spells and small passive bonuses. Each building can have citizens assigned to it to both work the facilities and to train the citizen in a specific skill. A major part of the game is recruiting citizens for your kingdom. Some join you throughout the main story, but most are recruited by doing their side quest. As the number of citizens grows, the rate of money flowing into your coffers increases, letting you improve your kingdom even more. Once your kingdom has advanced to certain points, you can upgrade it as a whole to expand its borders and unlock a bevy of new options.
The kingdom building gameplay on its own is fun enough to tinker with between major story beats, but it’s also the source of my biggest gripe with the game. At one point near the end of the game, you suddenly face a gate in which you need to upgrade your kingdom to a certain level in order to advance. It’s a pretty high level too. To get there you need a large number of citizens, buildings and resources that I fell far short of at the time. I had taken on a decent number of side quests as I went, but I still came up quite short. I was ready to move on with the climax of the game, but I was forced to take a 4–5 hour side questing detour. That very quickly took the wind out of my sails and soured the ending slightly.
Looking back on the whole of the game, it was probably for the best that I did those side quests — I met many great characters that I would have been sorry to have missed, but forcing such a long catch-up is an awful way to encourage players to do it.
Return of the Obra Dinn
Let me start off by saying that I’m incredibly jealous of Lucas Pope and his superhuman game development talents. Obra Dinn is nearly a 1-person job, and there’s more detail and nuance in it than many high budget games I’ve played recently.
Your job is to investigate a ghost ship where nearly the entire crew had been killed. Your main tool is a metal as hell pocketwatch of the dead which lets you explore a snapshot in time just as a person was killed. Each body on the ship has its own diorama that reveals a bit of the story and some of the dialogue from the time. Using this info with some reasoning and deduction, you need to determine who each rotting body was and how they died. Each diorama contains a truckload a minuscule details to lead you to the answers. Not all of them are necessary, but more information makes your job easier. Slowly uncovering the dark secrets of the Obra Dinn, the most cursed ship to ever sail, was probably the most satisfying puzzle of the year.
Fates of the crew are solved in sets of three. Once you have three fates correct, the game lets you know and marks them as solved. This grouping by three is very important for showing you’re making progress, but it also opens up a bit of cheese. It didn’t feel great, but I ended up solving some fates I wasn’t completely sure about by guessing among the few relevant options until the game told me they were correct. I’m not sure if there’s any way to prevent this though.
Just thinking about the game while writing this has me wondering if my memory has faded enough for me to play it again. The more dramatic dioramas wouldn’t have the same impact, but the gameplay is something I want to go back to eventually.
Luigi’s Mansion 3
I’ve never played the original Luigi’s Mansion, but the impression I got from it was that it had metroidvania-style exploration elements around a large, extremely detailed mansion. I’m not sure why I never played the original, but my impression was enough to get me interested in LM3. It doesn’t quite fit that description, but it’s close enough and so intensely creative that it’s easily in my top games of the year.
The first third of the game seemed to be exactly what I wanted. Luigi gets to explore a bunch of super detailed rooms, each with many, many things to do, all the while navigating back and forth between the floors as needed. Around the middle, there were a few irritatingly linear, floors back to back that didn’t really do anything for me and made me a bit concerned for the rest of the game. Thankfully, the rest of the floors were all so wonderful with the occasional interlude to previous floors. I love almost every minute of the rest of the game. The crusty basement level 2, shifting magic room and incredible disco number are just a few highlights that really won me over with their style.
I do wish the progression of floors hadn’t been quite so linear. At the end of each floor you find the elevator button to the next for the majority of the game. I found myself wanting some sort of branching path where I was given two buttons at once with the ability to choose which to tackle. The few times you do return to previous floors, it’s after you’ve already completed the current floor. Some crossover between floors would have been great. Also, with the exception of the first 2 floors, the only way to access floors is through the elevator. If some had been accessible only through some hidden stairwell or air vent or something, I would have loved it.
Chrono Trigger
Despite playing more JRPGs than any one person ever should in a lifetime, I somehow managed to avoid playing one of the most iconic of all time: Chrono Trigger. I finally rectified this grave error this year and the game absolutely still holds up today and earns its title as one of the best RPGs ever made.
Mechanically, Chrono Trigger is pretty simple. It uses a fairly standard turn-based battle system, with some seasoning on top. There are no random battles, which is a huge plus. Instead you can usually see the enemies you’ll fight on the map beforehand. In battle it’s your options are basic attacks, items, magic and combo attacks, sometimes with directional/area of effect attacks. Character positioning does have an impact on area effects, but there’s no way to change positions in battle, which makes it feel like it’s missing a mechanic, though it’s very rarely an issue. Battle mechanics are definitely not the defining qualities of the game though.
Right out of the gate, Chrono Trigger is one of the best-looking SNES games, with some pixel art that’s still impressive 25 years later. The intro into the Millennial Fair, meeting Marle and Lucca, the time portal, etc. all seems to have more weight to them than you might expect. Maybe I’ve gleaned a few bits of second hand nostalgia over the years, or maybe it’s a masterful blending of art, music, writing and design, but it’s something that really sticks in your memory. It creates a strong, whimsical mood that the rest of the game plays off of, creating dozens of iconic moments. Seeing Robo’s little sprites on the overworld toiling away in the fields as he resigns himself to centuries of work to restore the land is something that’s stuck with me. Then there’s the bizarre, magical floating city of Enhasa. Its mysterious music, the brief time spent there and eccentric inhabitants give it sort of a dream-like quality. It creates fleeting, ephemeral memories as the city is soon destroyed, leaving its mysteries forever hidden.
The entire game is filled with moments like these: Chrono’s death, his resurrection, the battle with Magus, the bike race in the future. They’re all iconic moments burned into my memory after only one playthrough. This is what makes a game endure through multiple decades. I can easily see myself reminiscing about Chrono Trigger when I’m 50.
It also has an awesome playable robot character and a nerdy mechanic girl, so yeah, it’s basically perfect.
