I did this on a whim last year and this year has been one of the best years for video games ever so I figured I’d do it again. My mistake was deciding to write something about every game I played this year, instead of only those that came out this year. Turns out I played a lot of games! Oh boy! These are listed roughly in ascending order of how much I personally enjoyed them and not necessarily a ranking of their actual quality.
#30 Animal Crossing Pocket Camp
Animal Crossing is a series that I managed to pass by completely. I had never played an Animal Crossing before, so I had very little idea of what to expect from Pocket Camp. It was really only the enthusiasm of so many friends that got me to give it a try. While I wouldn’t call my experience with Pocket Camp bad, or unenjoyable, I felt as if it was missing something basic. A continually updated mobile game like Pocket Camp needs a persistent draw to keep players coming back. Gradual and meaningful progression is the easiest way to do this, but Pocket Camp does this poorly.
The basic gameplay loop of Pocket Camp is:
1. Collect items like fish, fruits and bugs from the various areas.
2. Give the items to NPCs to fulfill their requests, rewarding money, crafting materials and friendship with that NPC.
3. Use the crafting materials and money to create new objects for you camp.
4: Use the new objects to attract new NPCs and design new layouts for your customizable spaces
The progression hook is tied up in #4, using your crafted items to design a campsite. There are other progression hooks, like player level, NPC friendship, and camper expansion, but all of those feed directly into designing your campsite/camper. I think the biggest issue with this is that the quality of your designs is purely subjective. If you spend the extra effort to craft that new, expensive piece of furniture, whether that furniture is an improvement is entire up to the player’s aesthetic preferences. There are no clear upgrades, no incremental improvements. Once you’ve achieved the designs you want, Pocket Camp offers little incentive to load it up again until new content is added. While new content has been frequent so far, all of it relies on the assumption that you’ll want to place the new objects in your campsite. Without any sort of progression in this content, fewer and fewer new items will be able to catch the player’s interest.
I’m probably being too analytical for a game all about aesthetics like Pocket Camp and Animal Crossing in general, but it absolutely did not catch my interest for as long as it should have. Perhaps having more experience with the series would have helped, but I’ve had almost zero desire to load it up since the second week after launch. To reiterate, I don’t think Pocket Camp is a bad or unfun game, but it fails horribly at its goal of getting players invested in the long term.
#29 Persona 5
Oh boy. Persona 5. I see you picking up torches and pitchforks because of this game’s position. Calm down and let me explain. Don’t start pillaging until after I tell you why you’re all wrong and Persona 5 is shit.
Persona 5 was my introduction to the Persona/SMT series, but I’m a long-time veteran of the JRPG genre. I’m sure some of these gripes are held over from the earlier games in the series, but that doesn’t make them any less awful. Even belonging to a genre known for slow progression and long run times, P5 takes it to a new level. To say P5 is a slow game is a colossal understatement. I would say glacial. At the end of my fairly typical playthough, missing a number of sidequests and not bothering with persona collecting, I had clocked over 120 hours with this god-forsaken game. A long run time alone isn’t necessarily damning, even if P5’s is absurdly high, it’s the amount of content in that time that matters. P5 absolutely does not have 120 hours of content to offer. Through some really egregious padding, P5 manages to stretch 60 hours of content to double its length. Over-long cutscenes, cheap game overs, convoluted puzzles with extensive backtracking, exhaustingly long boss battles, respawning enemies and tedious stealth mechanics all help to make P5 a frustrating experience. For the final 30 hours of the game I was begging for it to end because I had already put too much time into it to stop.
Persona 5 is all about the story of [Protagonist Name Here]’s journey to save the world through friendship and mysterious powers that can change a person’s heart. I won’t go into details to avoid spoilers, but the gist is that the player traverses otherworldly manifestations of peoples’ minds while trying to act like a normal high school student in the real world. Outside of the shadow world, you’re spending time with friends, studying for exams, working a part time job, etc. Most of your time is spent doing these mundane tasks, but the real meat of the gameplay happens in the shadow world, where actual battles take place.
Other than the endless padding, I could go on for thousands of words griping about other aspects that annoyed me about P5. There’s the awkwardly localized dialog, poor character development (Haru is barely developed at all), repetitious level design, absurd plot points and more, but for brevity I’ll only go into a few issues.
The battle system is probably the most enjoyable part of the game, but it places far, far too much emphasis on the main character (aka Joker). If he falls in battle, it’s an instant game over. You have no chance to revive him. This is absolutely ridiculous when the enemy can potentially chain attacks infinitely from lucky critical hits. I game over’d once before I could even act because I was ambushed and the enemies focused on Joker. It gets worse. Only Joker can have multiple personas, leaving all other party members with one small list of abilities. Persona 5 places a huge emphasis on hitting enemies’ weaknesses, so his versatility gives his turn in combat many times the weight of the others’. I’m fine with Joker being more powerful, but please don’t make the gap so wide that half the time the other characters feel like they’re just there to kill time before Joker can act again.
Persona 5 is a darker game than its predecessors (or so I’ve heard). Handling heavy topics like suicide, sexual extortion and misogyny well requires a good amount of awareness of the issues and tact. It fails on many of these. I’ll jump into minor spoiler territory for a moment to give one of the most egregious examples. If you’re worried about spoilers for the second palace, go ahead and skip the next paragraph.
Ann is a very unfortunate character, in that she seems to get the worst of Persona 5’s treatment of women. Beyond her shadow world costume being a skin-tight fetish-y leather catsuit (which she herself laments having, as the characters’ shadow world attire is not their own choice), the driving force behind completion of the second palace is Ann being forced to pose nude. Yusuke, not yet on the team, threatens to call the police and report Ann and the others for breaking and entering unless she poses nude for him to draw. While he insists there’s no sexual motive behind it, fuck you Yusuke. This is straight up blackmail and sexual harassment. What really turns this into a shitheap is that Yusuke joins the party after the dungeon and that disgusting debacle is presumed to be forgotten with only a half-hearted apology. If it was Yusuke’s heart that was changed at the end of the dungeon it might have made a sliver of sense, but no, it’s Madarame’s heart that was changed.
I’ve already gone on way too long about this game. If it had half the run time, less tedium and cut out the gross bits, I think I would’ve actually enjoyed the game. It does have a very stylish presentation that I appreciate, but there’s nowhere near enough good stuff backing it up.
#28 Magikarp Jump
Magikarp Jump is a simple and cute game where you train magikarps to jump. You fish up a magikarp, feed it various types of food that randomly appears in your pond, do random training sessions with it, and bring it to compete in the jumping leagues. Your player character has a level which determines the maximum level your magikarp can reach. The higher your magikarp’s level, the further you can progress through the leagues and eventually become the magikarp jump champ.
Where Pocket Camp’s progression was primarily subjective, Magikarp Jump’s is almost entirely objective. Every level, every training session, every piece of food eaten increases the dumb fish’s jump power. Jump power is a direct measure of how well it can jump. You make measurable progress with nearly everything you do, which is probably why I played it even longer than Pocket Camp. There is, however, very little variety in what you do in the game.
The gameplay loop doesn’t stray from: feed & train the fish to max level, progress in the league until you’re beaten, gain a player level and fish up a higher max level magikarp. Sometimes you may need to repeat the first two steps multiple times to gain a player level, but it’s always the same. There almost no interactivity in feeding and training. The only real options are choosing which foods and training types to level up.
It’s such a simple game, but numbers are constantly going up and it has a cute and silly sensibility to it. If you make your fish jump out of the water too much, a Pidgeotto will swoop in and fucking kill and eat it, forcing you to fish up a new one. Eventually the repetition got to be too much and I lost any interest in it. It’s not a bad way to kill 5 minutes once or twice a day though.
#27 Doki Doki Literature Club
When I first heard about Doki Doki Literature Club, I heard it called the scariest game of the year. Something that had to be played completely blind. Something that will get in your head and fuck it up. All of this set my expectations extremely high. I’m not much of a visual novel person, so I went in very skeptical with the intent of just seeing what sort of gimmick this game had to offer.
I was reading through the first half of them game very quickly, assuming it was subtly setting up some twist that would retroactively give a disturbing new meaning to everything that had happened previously. We’re heading into Spoiler Town here, so just skip to the next game if you’re concerned about that.
The event that sets off the gimmick is Sayori’s suicide. While I anticipated it and thought it was executed fine, everything that followed threw even the slightest bit of subtlety out the window and bombards the player with various fake and cheesy glitch effects. It goes full on into bad creepypasta territory with some downright comical effects. Yuri’s close-up with poorly rendered blood bursting from her eye legitimately had me laughing for a minute straight.
I appreciate what it does as a free game that makes an attempt at the rare horror visual novel genre, but the incredibly high expectations surrounding it and the more comical than scary horror elements makes it impossible for me to take the game seriously.
#26 Hiveswap Act 1
Let’s just get this out there. I read all of Homestuck. I didn’t enjoy all of it, but I slogged through the entire thing. Homestuck started out as a reader-controlled spoof on the point-and-click adventure genre, with all sort of dumb mechanics and bizarre interactions. This part of Homestuck I enjoyed quite a bit. It was silly, didn’t take itself very seriously and was a refreshing parody. Later on, the author stopped taking reader suggestions and it became a more classical web comic. After this switch much of the humor drained away, it became much more serious and the story kept expanding to the point that it was absolutely impossible to keep up without regular visits to the wiki.
Hiveswap (at least the first part) goes back to the style of early Homestuck. It’s a goofy point-and-click adventure with the same sense of humor. Admittedly, it was slightly meme-y, but not enough to drag it down any significant degree. My only real complaint about Hiveswap is that there are a few pixel hunts. That is, required interactions that are difficult to notice, sometimes degrading into sweeping the cursor across the entire screen to find an interactable area. There was one point there I spent 20 minutes looking all throughout the 10 or so screens that were accessible to me in order to find the one thing I needed. A way to identify what you can click on would go a very long way to streamlining the game.
Basically, if you enjoyed the humor of early Homestuck, Hiveswap will probably be up your alley. If the mere mention of Homestuck causes you to foam at the mouth from a blinding, primal rage, it might be best to pass on this one.
#25 The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a very good looking walking simulator. It’s one of the few recent games that have made me stop and look at the vistas. The game takes place in a fairly open area in a heavily wooded small European town. There are plenty of hills and caves and lakes and rivers separating the scattered, run-down buildings. It’s actually a very interesting location to explore.
Beyond looking pretty, it’s primarily a walking simulator with some basic puzzle elements. You play a paranormal investigator looking for the titular Ethan Carter by piecing together events of the past. Though there is a bit of variety in the puzzles, most of it involves choosing pieces of evidence at a scene in the correct order. Unfortunately, these are probably the weakest puzzles because the causal links between the pieces are tenuous at best, resulting in some irritating trial and error.
By the end, when you finally track down Ethan Carter, things start to get a little weird in a good way, for the most part. There is a bit of a twist at the end that I felt was a bit lazy and retroactively cheapened the adventure, but it scratched an itch for a narrative exploration experience.
#24 Puyo Puyo Tetris
To be honest, I’m not sure why I bought Puyo Puyo Tetris. I hadn’t played Tetris in close to a decade and I had never played any iteration of Puyo Puyo, While I don’t regret my purchase, I don’t think I got as much out of it as I could have since I really only played the story mode. The cutscenes before each level were cute, the dialog was clever and the voice acting was good. The character interactions were pretty fun, but the story was paper thin, as you would imagine in a game trying to add a story to tetris. The tetris levels were generally pretty easy and enjoyable, but I always had a hard time with the puyo levels. Maybe it’s just my inexperience, but I had a very hard time setting up combos in puyo puyo and it became frustrating pretty quickly. The more exotic game modes tended to fall somewhere in between because of the more manageable tetris mechanics.
#23 Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
I already wrote my thoughts on all of the Igavanias, so I’ll make the titles of those games link to the relevant section of that article.
#21 Shantae Half Genie Hero
Half Genie Hero is a big upgrade over Risky’s Revenge — the only other Shantae game I’ve played. Being fairly linear and level-based, HGH eliminated the poorly telegraphed progression that dragged RR down so hard. I’m usually a huge fan of the structure RR tried for, but it was too poorly executed.
HGH is a very solid platformer with enough hidden goodies scattered around to give you a reason to come back to past levels once you’ve found some new abilities. There’s a good incentive to go for the completionist route because you’re rewarded with a few absurdly powerful items. Most levels and bosses are easy enough, but the final boss is an irritatingly big step up in difficulty and the completionist items smooths out the curve a bit.
Visually, it’s bright and colorful with an almost Nintendo-esque style, with the exception of the tendency to have large, bouncy chests. Since HGH was built for modern systems from the ground up, every asset is crisp and high quality. I enjoy the GBA era pixelated graphics, but in this case, I think the modernization is a significant improvement.
#20 Fire Emblem Heroes
I had never played a gashapon game before and I had only played one Fire Emblem game before, so this sort of came out of nowhere. Where Pocket Camp’s progression was almost purely subjective and Magikarp Jump’s was almost purely objective, FE:H fits neatly in between. You’ve got all of your anime wives and husbands from your favorite FE games with a variety of stats and skills and upgrades that can be applied to them.
While the battle system is simpler than a normal Fire Emblem (much smaller maps, no accuracy, no class changes, fewer units on the map), I think that helps the game overall. Battles in other Fire Emblems tend to drag on, with some in FE:Fates taking me the better part of an hour. Battles in Heroes rarely last more than 2 or 3 minutes, which makes it much easier to play in small bursts, as you often do with mobile games.
I’m fairly impressed by the amount of content and the rate at which new stuff is added. Clearing all of the story missions your first time through on all three difficulty levels will take a good number of hours and give you a plethora of orbs used for gashaing. The range of difficulty is massive as well. Even for someone like me who has cleared all of the story missions and has a number of powerful and kitted out units, challenges like Squad Assault and Infernal difficulty special maps still pose very difficult challenges. Devising a strategy and team composition, however, will allow almost any challenge to be completed done without spending a penny on the game. I still have yet to make any purchases in it.
If you’ve only got 10–15 minutes per day for video games, FE:H is a good option with enough content to keep you busy for quite a while.
#18 Fire Emblem: Fates Birthright
Birthright was my first ever experience with a Fire Emblem game. I had played about half the game back in 2016 before I lost interest. This year I picked it back up and powered through to the end. Give me all the shit you want for playing without permadeath, but resetting whenever an important unit dies sounds aggressively unfun and I was having none of that.
The battle system is much deeper than Heroes, of course, but I felt rather overwhelmed at times. I hadn’t even internalized the weapon triangle until fairly late, so many battles had me hemming and hawing over each move as I tried to figure out all the mechanics going on under the hood. By the end, I had a decent grasp on everything and had enjoyed it for the most part. One thing I don’t miss in Heroes is the random elements. I really don’t think randomness does this type of gameplay any favors, since it emphasizes strategic thinking, but occasionally throws it all out the window at the RNG’s will.
What little I remember of the story was rather bizarre and convoluted and didn’t really grab me. Since I only played Birthright, I’m guessing the other two Fates games flesh things out a bit more, but I couldn’t be bothered to play this another 40–50 hours.
#17 Blaster Master Zero
Blaster Master Zero came out of nowhere and I immediately picked it up because there wasn’t much else on the switch at the time and I have a huge weakness for metroidvanias. In the end, it was decent. Nothing spectacular, but still enjoyable.
BM0 was a bit more linear than I usually like. There’s relatively little exploring to do and story cutscenes leave little question of where to go or what to do at any point. Combat in the tank is fun with a variety of weapon and movement abilities.
Combat out of the tank, however, is less than good. It takes on a top-down shooter style with much stiffer controls and a bizarre weapon system. The weapons you can use is determined by your weapon energy. When you have none, you can only use the awful pea shooter. At max energy, you have access to a completely overpowered penetrating double sine-wave shot. You only lose energy by taking damage which creates an awful downward spiral after you take the first hit. The more damage you take, the worse your weapon options became. The worse your weapon options, the more likely you are to take damage. It’s disproportionately difficult to come back from low energy. These sections end up being either trivial if you manage to not take a hit, or frustrating otherwise.
#16 Graceful Explosion Machine
Similar to Blaster Master Zero, Graceful Explosion Machine was an early indie title for the Switch that I picked up because there wasn’t much else at the time. GEM is an arcade style shooter where you clear massive waves of enemies with your loadout of four weapons, three of which are limited use.
The game is fairly simple, but it has a steady difficulty curve with a variety of enemy types and stage obstacles added along the way. Just clearing each stage is easy once you get a feel for the weapons and your ship’s dodge function. The real meat of GEM for me was the score attack. There’s a fairly complex combo system that makes optimal score runs much, much more difficult. It demands managing enemies, weapon energy and positioning much differently.
I only managed a perfect combo on a few levels (even getting a few world records at the time), and only after many tries on each, but those were some of my most satisfying gameing accomplishments of the year.
#13 Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
If there was a theme in the games I played this year, it would be: dipping a toe into series I had never touched before. MGR:R is the first and currently only Metal Gear game I’ve played. I usually despise stealth mechanics, so Revengeance with its over-the-top hack-and-slash action was way more up my alley.
There are a few rough edges around the combat system, notably a tendency to be stunlocked in multi-enemy battles, but it’s overall solid once the upgrades start coming in. The absurd cutscenes and action were about what I expected and were really fun. It’s a fairly short game and necessarily so, since the mechanics do start to get old by the end.
I had a few issues that dragged it down a bit though. The checkpointing in particular can be extremely punishing in that it saves your health pack quantity just before most bosses, meaning you’re not able to collect anymore. One boss in particular too me far longer than normal because I got to him without any health packs.
#12 Owlboy
Owlboy is a side-scrolling Zelda-like with some very nice pixel art and animation. I hesitate to call it a platformer because the main character, Otus, can fly almost everywhere from the very beginning of the game. Instead, the main challenges lie in the combat and puzzle solving. There are several stealth sections though, and while they’re not awful, they’re definitely a low point.
The allies that Otus can carry each have their own abilities and act like items from a Zelda game. They give the game a nice variety and personality. It has a very Zelda-ish feel, but its structure is quite different. Instead of a series of dungeons, progression is more freeform, linear and story-driven. I would’ve liked a little more structure, since it seemed to meander at times, hopping from one location to another fairly quickly.
My only real complain with Owlboy is the length. It’s very short for this genre. My playthrough ended abruptly at about 6 hours. I felt that the plot had only just started to really get going by the final boss. I was pretty surprised to see the credits pop up when I was expecting the next act to start. To me, it’s like if Ocarina of Time had ended right after acquiring the Master Sword. If Owlboy had extended another 4 hours or so at the pace it had been going, I probably would have put it much higher. What there is in the game is still fun and quite pretty.
#11 Environmental Station Alpha
Environmental Station Alpha is a love letter to the metroidvania genre, and Metroid in particular. At the beginning of the game you’re tasked with exploring a derelict space station and eventually find that some disaster has befallen it. You’re left to explore at your leisure with the characteristic metroid sense of loneliness. The story bits are slightly more substantial than your typical Metroid in that there’s more than just a couple of text boxes at the start. Occasional text logs from the crew lead you around the station, but that’s about the extent of it.
The level design in ESA is solid and generally flows well, so long as you keep toward the critical path. Most of the time the location of your next objective is marked on your map. This smooths things out a bit without completely compromising the exploratory aspect, since the path to the objective is rarely clear. I only have one complaint about the level design. There are a number of one-way paths that block you off from returning. Limiting the player’s scope like this is an important part of metroidvania level design that steers the player toward their objective. What ESA misses here is that many of these paths remain one-way even after acquiring the item they push the player toward. The worst example of this is in the aquatic zone which blocks you in using crackle/crumble blocks. Except for the very late game, the quickest way to get out of the zone is by traversing most of the area to get to the teleporter. This managed to trap me more than a few times as I scavenged for secrets, so I know the path to that teleporter very well now.
ESA’s combat really surprised me in how tight and difficult it is. Your combat capabilities aren’t very numerous, but you learn to use them very well with the precision and reflexes that are required. There’s also a bit of pattern memorization which I’m not a huge fan of. You’re going to die to most bosses on your first attempt because the player character is far more frail than in any Metroid game. Metroidvanias are rarely focused on tight, intense combat like this, so I was a little annoyed with it at first. Once I accepted it for what it is, I came around and enjoyed it. I’ve heard the final boss is just too much though. I managed to cheese it through some absurdly overpowered optional upgrades, thankfully.
My only other gripe with ESA is the hookshot. I’m not sure I can accurately describe why, but it feels very bad to use. Getting exactly the momentum you need with it is very precise and chaining these grapples together quickly becomes frustrating. I remember one instance in the aquatic area that requires you to fling yourself upward quite high and missing means swimming back up to the platform to try again. This took me the better part of 10 minutes to get the first time. I dreaded having to do any precision hookshotting from then on.
#8 Quern: Undying Thoughts
The Myst-like genre is very sparsely populated so, as a fan of puzzle games, I’ll jump at them very quickly. Last year I was a little disappointed by Obduction, but Quern felt much more like a modern, streamlined Myst game. It did not disappoint.
The story of Quern is that you’ve suddenly found yourself on this bizarre island named Quern where time doesn’t pass and you become immortal during your stay. You’ve been forced through some sort of star gate thing and are being guided (using various written notes) by the sole inhabitant of the island to be his apprentice.
The majority of the game takes place on top of this weird island with various machines and buildings and all sort of oddities scattered around. As you solve puzzles more of the island opens up and more puzzle tools are introduced. There are several areas that restrict your movement, forcing a certain puzzle or set of puzzles to be solved, but the majority are solved with access to every open area of the island. Something from the first room you visited could be relevant to a much later puzzle. There are a few places where it felt a little overwhelming and I opted for a quick hint from a guide to set me on the right track, but for the most part the progression is fairly well telegraphed.
The puzzles are all very Myst-ish, but there’s a good variety: connecting lasers, mixing various plants to create a specific concoction, rotating a room to line up electrical wires, etc. My only complaint with the puzzles is that some of them require distinguishing similar reds and greens and purples. I have mild colorblindness and these were nearly impossible. I had worked out how to solve the puzzle, but I had to look up a guide for one of them because the colors were too similar.
The second act of the game is a change of pace in that it’s more linear, but it includes some very interesting locales and puzzles such that I didn’t mind I was basically walking down a corridor of puzzles. My only major complaint with Quern is that the plot is very back heavy. Most of it is told in a single expository dump very close to the end of the game. Quern isn’t a very story-centered game though, so it doesn’t detract too much.
#7 Nier: Automata
Nier: Automata is another of my first tastes of a series. From what I’ve heard of the original Nier and the Drakengard games, I’m better off staying with Automata. Yoko Taro’s bleak sci-fi masterpiece explores what it means to be human as robots and androids fight a near endless war. The story and characters of Automata have been analyzed far better than I could ever do, so I’m not going to touch on that.
The combat in Automata, with its flashy combo system and very powerful dodge, fits perfectly between spectacle and challenge. For the bigger boss fights I never felt like I was just button mashing, but at the same time it simple enough that I could take in all the ridiculous flips and shit the characters were doing.
I had expected the game to go off the rails at some point based on what I had heard of Yoko Taro’s previous games. For the most part it exceeded my expectations. I vividly remember being flabbergasted at the first hacking minigame as part of a wild and intense boss fight. Another boss near the true end had the perspective shift frequently between characters as everything quickly headed for a climactic finish.
And the soundtrack. Holy shit that soundtrack. It instantly went into my top 5 video game soundtracks, up there with Final Fantasy 6, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Undertale.
If I had to pull out a major complaint, (spoiler warning, I guess) it would be that the second playthrough retreads a bunch of the same content as the first. I’d say only about half of it’s new, leaving the other 3 or 4 hours feeling a little repetitious. 9S’s hacking ability adds a nice twist to it though, since most enemies can basically be turned into a shmup challenge.
#6 Metroid: Samus Returns
HOLY SHIT A NEW METROID GAME AAAAAAAA
It’s very good. Other than it being based on Metroid 2, which has a number of inherent issues, I have no major complaints about Samus Returns. The environments are gorgeously rendered. Samus’s free aim feels incredibly liberating. Her movement feels very tight and quick. Even the 3D effects look amazing.
The ugliness of Metroid 2 can’t really be helped while still calling this a Metroid 2 remake. It’s a very linear experience. Once you’ve murdered the requisite number of metroids in an area, you move on to the next area and you’ll never be required to go back. This drastically limits your ability to explore and kills most sense of world familiarity, since it’ll all be useless when you move to the next area. Samus Returns does its best to make each area feel expansive and fun to explore. It also adds teleporters for easy item hunting in past areas.
The metroids themselves are another issue from Samus Returns’s predecessor. They represent almost all of the major fights in the game, and yet there’s only four varieties of metroid to fight. Each variety is fought a number of time, making them rather same-y eventually. Samus Returns tries to spice up the metroids by giving each one a different room layout, giving some of them different elements (like fire or electricity) and having some of them run away to another part of the room, forcing you to track them down again. All of this helps, but it can’t solve the issue that you’re fighting the same thing over and over again.
As an upgrade from the original Metroid 2, Samus Retruns is fantastic. Even with such a flawed base, Samus Returns still feels like a metroid game and a damn fun one at that.
#5 Xenoblade Chronicles 2
I probably shouldn’t include Xenoblade here since I haven’t actually finished it at the time of writing. I’m currently near the end of chapter 6 with over 60 hours of play time so far. I still have a lot of the game left to do, but I think I have the gist of it by now.
In short, Xenoblade 2 is a gem with many rough edges. For every good quality, there’s an aspect that, while not necessarily bad, feels clunky or unpolished. Most of the characters are quite fun (Poppi is my perfect robot daughter and I love her), but there’s a lot of very poor voice work. Pyra and Rex in particular sound awful and it’s distracting.
The combat is on the slow side, but very rewarding when you manage to set up hugely damaging combos while juggling a wide array of enemies, party members and other battle mechanics. On the other hand, some mechanics are poorly explained and tutorials can’t be replayed. The blades, which are the backbone of the combat system, are acquired through a bizarre gashapon system where core crystals contain a randomized blade. Fortunately, there’s no real-money to be exchanged in this system.
There are a dizzying number of ways to progress your drivers and blades besides just simple levels. You have drive art levels, driver accessories, affinity charts, pouches, aux cores, weapon modification chips, store deeds, mercenary missions, region development levels, the standard character levels, and probably some more I’m forgetting. It can all be a little overwhelming at times, but managing all of these at once isn’t (or at least hasn’t yet been) necessary in order to progress normally.
The outdoor areas in the game all are absolutely gorgeous and huge. The first time I looked up to see Gormott’s colossal head moving around far, far off in the distance it gave me a feel for the massive scale of the game. I continue to be impressed with every new area. Those huge open areas come at a cost though. Xenoblade 2 is a game where I wished I could see it on a more powerful console. The game renders at a noticeably low resolution, especially in handheld mode. The fuzziness is definitely hiding some very good looking pixels that I would love to see in full 1080p.
#4 Tales of Berseria
Tales of Berseria is far and away the best Tales game. The cast of playable characters doesn’t have any stinkers. It’s the only Tales game that ended without me actively hating at least one character. Velvet is great in that she has no time for these sappy JRPG tropes. Just fuckin’ murder everyone and everything in the way and don’t look back. That attitude extends to most of the other characters as well and it’s a refreshing change from the typical goody-goody Tales protagonist (I’m looking at you, Sorey).
Berseria’s combat takes a little getting used to, but it’s so much fun when it clicks and you set up a huge break soul combo with a mystic art finisher that wipes out 2/3 of the boss’s hp in one go. I only ever played as Velvet because she’s the main character and she’s hideously overpowered. Her break soul effect puts her in therion mode until she finishes a combo or her health hits 1 at which point she does a strong finishing attack. Most importantly, she cannot die in therion mode. With some luck, I could sometimes spend entire fights in therion mode because I would break another soul immediately after the previous finisher and keep on truckin’. I’m still not a huge fan of inflicting statuses on enemies to get souls, since there’s a heavily random element to that. Sometimes I would hammer a boss for a full minute without any soul gains because the stars didn’t align for a while. There are ways to mitigate some of it, but you’re still at the mercy of the RNG.
The story of Berseria is uncharacteristically solid. The ending was a little weird, but I wouldn’t say bad. It even manages to tie up a few loose ends in Zestiria’s trash fire of a plot. The dungeons are pretty standard Tales fare in that they’re long and boring corridors with an occasional thing to interact with. They’re bad, but slightly improved over other Tales games. I enjoyed Berseria so much that I took the time to do all of the side quests. I haven’t done that in a JRPG since… god, maybe Final Fantasy 5 or 6? RPG of the year for sure.
#3 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Breath of the Wild isn’t the Zelda game I wanted. I do not at all like open world games. I hate limited durability for equipment. Crafting and cooking are usually turn-offs for me. I hate scouring huge areas for ages to find the one item or location I need. Despite all of this, Breath of the Wild is designed so brilliantly and with such care that it very quickly secured its spot near the top of my game of the year list.
The paraglider and climbing mechanics destroyed many of my reservations about this being an open world game. The freedom these two simple tools gave made exploring legitimately fun and interesting. They sucked all of the frustration out of trying to find the one intended path to any particular destination. Don’t see a path up to where you’re going? Just climb straight up.
Limited and fragile weapon durability really worried me early on where everything broke in just a few swings. Before long my weapon inventory was constantly overflowing as the game practically showered me with new and better weapons. Weapons are so plentiful that it managed to chip away at decades of hoarding habits learned from JRPGs. It’s okay to use the weapons. Use them until they break because of the big critical hit. They’ll be replaced within a few minutes. Once I was in this mindset I came appreciate the weapon system in BotW and maybe even prefer it to a permanent weapon in this context.
In the end, the only thing I was disappointed with in BotW was the major dungeons. With the possible exception of Naboris, they were all very small and short and didn’t capture the feel of a dungeon in other Zeldas. Perhaps that was the point, but they feel very thin and anemic compared to the buildup they receive. If they had just been fleshed out to the degree of a Wind Waker dungeon, BotW very likely would have taken the #1 spot this year.
#2 Splatoon 2
I fuckin’ love Splatoon. My play time of Splatoon 1 and 2 combined is somewhere around 500 hours and it’s still fun as hell. Nintendo managed to make a competitive online team-based shooter into my most played game of the past 2.5 years even though I despise every word of that description. It’s competitive without feeling competitive. The controls are very smooth and intuitive. The entire aesthetic is bright, cheery and fun. The variety of weapon, specials and subweapons can keep the game feeling fresh for hundreds of hours. If I had to choose a game of the entire generation, it would be Splatoon 2.
The sequel is mostly more of the same old Splatoon, but with some new maps and weapons. There are a ton of small improvements though. All of the specials from the first game were removed and replaced with new ones. While I do sometimes miss krakening someone from time to time, it’s a much needed change. Specials in Splatoon 1 were far too power, particularly the ones that granted invulnerability. In Splatoon 2, the specials are less devastating and all have the ability to be countered, making them feel more fair. Just recently the game was updated to include a long-requested feature: switching weapons without leaving your current lobby. When playing with friends I would always end up missing a match and waiting >3 minutes for the next if I wanted to switch my weapon. Gear still generally works the same, but now it’s far easier to get the minor slots to have the abilities you want. In the first game, you could only randomly shuffle the minor slots and pray they landed on what you want. Now, through scrubbing abilities from gear for chunks, you can put whatever abilities you want on there.
Even 6 months later, the amount of support for Splatoon 2 continues to impress me. New weapons are still being released almost weekly. There’s a new stage every two or three weeks, and just the other week they added a completely new ranked mode for the first time since Rainmaker was released for Splatoon 1 over 2 years ago. Splatfests continue to be a thing and continue to be fun, especially when I can wrangle three friends on the same team to group up.
The avalanche of good games this year has forced Splatoon 2 to the side more often than I would have liked (though I have put in about 120 hours so far), but when I do get around to it, it’s always a blast. Nintendo struck a massive vein of gold with Splatoon and I hope they do more with the franchise because this squid kid can’t get enough splatting.
#1 Super Mario Odyssey
Super Mario Odyssey is THE best 3D Mario game by a large margin. I’ve always preferred the sandbox style Mario games (64 and Sunshine), so Odyssey was already right there in my wheelhouse. What I wasn’t prepared for is how lively and dense each kingdom feels. There’s so much to do and explore and all of it is just plain fun. There’s never a dull moment, there’s no tedium or frustration (with only very few exception). Mario’s movement options and capture abilities make even moving around really fun while you do all sorts of crazy cap jumps, flips, pokey bird sproinging, etc. Everything feels perfectly tuned, rewarding and so much fun. It’s like a big warm hug in game form.
Everyone has already talked about the motion controls and how they’re not great, especially if you’re not using separated joycons, so I’m not going to go into it. I’ll just say that yes they’re bad, but also optional in most cases. Other than that, some of the cap-less challenges in the postgame don’t feel great, like the one where you need to long jump quickly and precisely across about a dozen very small platforms.
My only concern is where Mario could go from here. They’ve introduced a barrel full of fantastic new mechanics that wouldn’t make much sense outside the context of Odyssey. A Mario Odyssey 2 or maybe even 3 would be a dream come true, but beyond that they’re going to have a very hard time surpassing what they’ve done here. Super Mario Odyssey exemplifies all of my favorite aspects of the Mario series in an incredibly polished package. I think it deserves to be placed alongside other classics like Mario 64, Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy 6 as some of the best games ever made.
