I saw @unknownmerc 's one of these a few days ago and threatened to make an entire post about it, and my adoring fans demanded that I do (read: @dragonsbutalsorabbits sent a single 🍿 emoji), so here I am.
Turning it into an entire post is mostly because I have too much free time, too many opinions, and am never satisfied with my answers for any of these things and need to explain why they're all bad and wrong choices and all the other better options I could've gone with instead.
Favorite Game: Xenoblade Chronicles 3
Ask me on a different day and you might get a different answer, but it's pretty settled at this point that Xenoblade is currently my favorite series, and this is my favorite game in the series. I already have a much longer post about it from when I originally played it, and I'll probably have more to say when I finish my current replay, but in my opinion they've only gotten better and better at storytelling and character writing over the years.
Best Story: 1000xRESIST
Many, many good options for this, including the previous one, but I have to give it to this one for now. They really pulled off something special and unique weaving so many different elements together in it in a way that isn't seen much in games. Honorable mentions would probably have to include all the numbered Xenoblade games, Vengeful Heart (see "criminally overlooked" below), 13 Sentinels (even if the ending is a bit weaker), Link's Awakening (for doing so much with so little), and a whole bunch of VNs not immediately coming to mind right this second. Oh, another good one is Can Androids Pray, for how much it manages to do in so little time, or Unpacking for how effectively it tells a story without dialogue or even any characters appearing directly, or The Awkward Steve Duology for how well it shifts from very silly to very sincere, or...
Favorite Art Style: Legend of Mana
I feel like there have to be tons of things I could be including here, but I'm one of those people who can't picture stuff in my head, and I don't really want to look through a list of games I've played that's easily into the four digits in as many decades. Legend of Mana still stands out to me though for being an absolutely gorgeous game on a platform full of incredibly ugly games (mostly because most PS1 games were 3D, and the PS1 sucked at 3D even compared to other stuff at the time). The watercolor and ink backgrounds still look great, and so do the characters. For something more recent in a similar style from some of the same people there's Egglia, which also looks lovely even if hardly anyone played it.
Biggest Personal Impact: To the Moon
Plenty of good choices for this one too, depending on what kind of impact at what point in my life. This feels like as good as any though. I had already been playing plenty of indie/shareware games for like 25 years by the time this one came out, but it was really a turning point where they started frequently being more interesting and more meaningful to me personally than bigger budget games on a more consistent basis. To the Moon also contributed to me thinking more about game stories as something that could reflect or be relevant to my own life (as someone in a years long autist4autist relationship at the time that was just as significant), rather than just being interesting things on their own. Those things had already been changing for me for some time by then, but that was really a turning point where it stood out directly rather than just happening without me really noticing or paying as much attention.
Best Combat: BlazBlue Entropy Effect
It just feels great. It's tight and responsive, has relatively simple inputs so basic execution is more straightforward than the fighting games, but has nearly as expressive a combo system that lets you do all sorts of ridiculous things as you keep learning and want to show off. As someone who kinda hates the things Dark Souls inflicted on the industry (committing to long animations I can't cancel out of, being punished harshly for mistakes rather than rewarded for doing well), it's kind of perfect for me. A lot of Platinum's games are similar, like Bayonetta 2 or Astral Chain, where just getting by isn't too hard, but the ceiling is super high, and you can learn how to pull off all sorts of crazy things. And they're fast and responsive and let you dodge cancel out of nearly anything so you're not stuck in a three second animation waiting to die. I'm here to rush in like an idiot and improvise when I get there, not be cautious and have a plan. This is also why I played Athena Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and Vanguard in Mass Effect 2/3: they literally give you a "charge in like an idiot" button, and I'll figure out what I'm doing on the way there.
I guess I should also mention non-action games while I'm here. For turn-based Fire Emblem Engage is definitely up there. The emblem abilities are super satisfying without being too game breaking with the way their use is restricted, and there are lots of great maps to encourage you to get wacky with them. I still haven't finished it, but SaGa Emerald Beyond is also super compelling from the couple dozen hours I've played, with so many tricks for manipulating the turn order and chaining abilities together.
And then there are games where what makes the combat so satisfying for me is largely the stuff surrounding it like putting together unique builds and seeing what I can pull off with them. That would include things like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and X and Grim Dawn, which are all perfectly fine on a base level, but it's the flexibility to get weird with it that elevates them for me.
Overhated: Depression Quest
Anything that's gotten review bombed or death threats sent for being woke or DEI or otherwise ruining games forever by not catering to the absolute worst white cishet men on the internet is a reasonable answer for this one, but only Depression Quest pissed them off so much that it started GamerGate and eventually lead to a fascist takeover of the US government, so it's the clear winner for me. The super weird thing about it for me is that I'd already played it on my own several months before any of that happened, and I liked it enough to mention it to my therapist as something attempting to do something new with how it addressed mental health in an interactive way. And then out of nowhere the entire internet burst into flames, and the whole world has been a worse place ever since.
Underrated: Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising
This is another one with plenty of good options, but I'm going with this for how big the difference was between most reviews and how much fun I had with it. I understand why it got so many hovering around the 65 range, even if I'm a little surprised it wasn't more like 75 on average, but for me it was one of my favorite things I played last year. I even liked it so much that I played it again this year. The presentation is delightful, the characters are charming, and it's a solid mix of town building and side scrolling dungeon crawling. I still can't get over it being a Kickstarter stretch goal for an entirely different game that I was pretty disappointed by.
Overrated: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Ok, this one is kind of trolling a little bit. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great game, and I had a great time with it when it came out, and I still have my gold cartridge from launch almost 30 years ago. I just don't think it's the best game ever. I don't think it's even the best at doing that style of Zelda game. Was it one of the most influential games ever though? Absolutely. Other options include FF7 for similar reasons, or Chrono Trigger if I really want to make someone mad by saying I think nearly every aspect of it is great individually, but they come together to make something less than the sum of their parts. My first instinct was to go with literally any Bethesda game or GTA game or any number of other nearly universally beloved and extremely popular AAA games I don't have much nice to say about, but I preferred the idea of going with something I did actually like.
Needs a Remake: Xenogears
Needs no explanation really. Xenogears has needed a remake since the day it came out, like with the game actually finished, a translation done with more of a budget than like three bucks and a deadline that isn't "we're shipping the game in like 20 minutes, think you can both start and finish translating the entire game by then?" And while they're at it they could improve everything else about actually playing it. That camera has been garbage since day one. There's a great game in there, buried under the deeply flawed and unfinished one we ended up with.
Criminally Overlooked: Vengeful Heart
I have run into exactly one person ever who's ever played it or even heard of it without me being the one who told them. Fantastic story in a near-future dystopia with too many parallels with our current real one that compares and contrasts the benefits and drawbacks of reform vs revolution, with great characters and one of the best modern takes I've seen on PC-98 art. Too many other good things to list here that I could've picked instead, so just go look at my end of year posts for stuff in the best/bottom two or three categories that you've never heard of (and if anyone actually reads this and wants to do that and can't find them just let me know and I'll make sure if have them all tagged so they're easy to find...I've been meaning to do that for a while, but I keep putting it off until I don't have to use my phone to do it).
Favorite Protagonist: Untitled Goose Game
Kind of a cheap answer to get out of having to answer, but I do appreciate the horrible goose causing problems on purpose. I feel like a lot of my favorite characters end up not actually being the protagonists, so this one is hard for me. Like one of my favorite Xenoblade characters is still Melia, but she's not the protagonist of anything except I guess Future Connected, and that's not even really its own game.
Favorite Antagonist: Portal
I really wanted to be far too clever and pick something where the antagonist is an abstract concept or something, but I wasn't coming up with anything that felt right. GladOS is always a good fallback though, and one that doesn't really need any explanation on this site.
Best Soundtrack: Jack Jeanne
Many, many good options for this one, but Jack Jeanne deserved a spot somewhere on the list, and unlike most games the songs are actually diegetic and an important part of the story. It also helps that they're great songs too. Bonus points for being able to interpret them both as commentaries on their own performances and on gender and its construction and performance.
Best Multiplayer: Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
I kinda felt like I had to go with some flavor of Smash or Mario Kart for not just being lots of fun but for being very accessible so I've been able to play them with all sorts of people over the years who don't normally play games much or even at all. I went with this one for the unique single kart co-op/teams, which was a very particular kind of experience with a room full of people passing controllers around and getting paired up in different ways.
Not Usually My Thing, But...: Mark of the Ninja
I hate stealth. One of my least favorite mechanics, and it's usually enough to make me not like the entire game if it's a major part of it. This should be not at all surprising after the combat section. ADHD is not here to be patient and make a plan and wait for just the right moment. It's here to rush in impulsively and hope it can fix whatever problems that causes by doing something else even more reckless. And yet I actually liked Mark of the Ninja enough to finish a significant amount of it. Not the entire game or anything, but I made it through a solid chunk of it. Partly it might be that is 2D, which let them make all the visibility and sound information very easily readable compared to any 3D version I've seen. It also just felt really well put together in general though. It's coming across things like that every once in a while that keeps me trying things I don't think I'll like now and then, just in case.
Turn My Brain Off: Grim Dawn
With over 3000 hours in it across more than a decade I can theorycraft new gimmicky meme builds and put them into practice half on autopilot at this point. There's just something satisfying to my brain about the huge amount of flexibility and how much silly stuff it lets you get away with once you understand the systems. It was my podcast/new music game for a while because it kept me busy enough to help focus on listening through the ADHD while not engaging any conflicting parts of my brain. At the moment that role's been getting filled by Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection for a while though, which would also be a good choice for this category.
Best With Friends: AI War: Fleet Command
Lots of things qualify for this, but I picked this one because it was my game night group's game for a while many years ago and easily my favorite thing I played with them. I hung out on the forums back then too and got to know the devs and did some playtesting for them too (hi Chris if you still somehow have the time to search for every mention of anything Arcen has ever done and appear out of nowhere to respond to it). I had plenty of fun with it by myself for many hours too, but the shenanigans we pulled off together as a group are still the most memorable.
Best Retro Game: Star Control 2
You can just go play it for free and find out yourself. The original devs have the rights to basically everything but the name again at this point, and you can just play the whole thing as The Ur-Quan Masters. It's a little dated now, but it's still plenty of fun if you can get over not really having a journal within the game or a good way to track stuff on the map. It was hugely influential for a reason though, and there's a direct line from it to stuff like Mass Effect a couple decades later. All the different quirky aliens and their catchy theme songs still live in my brain after all this time, and there's still dialog I quote or reference too. I used to replay it every couple years for a while, but I haven't in a long time. Looking forward to it finally getting a proper sequel though.
Nostalgic Childhood Game: Mega Man 2
The previous one could go here just as well, or any number of other NES and SNES games, or some other Mac or DOS games, but the thing they all have in common is sitting around with friends working our way through them across weeks or months. We weren't especially good at them because we were just kids, but we were figuring it out together, and on our own because you couldn't just look stuff up online, whether it was drawing our own maps for Zelda or struggling to git gud at Mega Man. I play a lot more games these days and talk about them with a lot more people, but it's a very different experience from the 80s or early 90s. Much better in most ways, to be honest, which is why most of my answers for most of these skew more recent (I genuinely think games have gotten substantially better overall over the years, and most of even the best games from back then hardly compare to what's out there now, especially on the narrative side of things), but there are some things that have been lost along the way that aren't coming back. And that's ok.
Game Everyone Should Play: Super PSTW Action RPG
I was pleasantly surprised this came up as an option when I searched for it. I kind of meant it as a joke at first, but I stand by it. It's only like ten minutes, and it does a nearly perfect job of poking fun at a whole bunch of JRPG tropes. I occasionally go back to it, and it's still funny every time.
