#year wrapup

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Cool Games I Finished In 2021 (In No Real Order)

Hello again, website. Been a bit. I’m not gonna get into it too much but this year was straight up the worst year of my life. Will it remain that way with so many years left to come? Who knows, but I’m pretty sure it will at least always be in the running. Sorry to start this off on a bummer but it’s just been a bummer of a year. I have good, tangible reason to believe 2022 will at least be an improvement though. Hopeful for the future and all that. Anyway! One way that this year did not suck was in regard to those lovable Visual Games we all enjoy playing. Good year for those, which means it’s time for yet another one of these. Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2021.

Shin Megami Tensei V (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

Shin Megami Tensei V is a cool video game. It is not as cool as Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. I know this applies to most video games created before and since, but it feels relevant to note here, this game being in the same direct series and all.

SMTV's combat and demon management is absolutely on point. There were some changes I initially didn't know if I agreed with, like lowering the amount of times buffs/debuffs stack and the introduction of the Essence system, but in the end the gameplay was basically as engaging and challenging as it ever was so all that stuff won me over. What didn't win me over as much is the move to open areas. In SMTV, the world is made up of a handful of large open areas that you're meant to platform around in and explore to find treasure, sidequests, all that JRPG stuff. It's functional and the platforming is surprisingly decent for being inserted into a turn based RPG, but looking through every nook and cranny for all the treasures and Mimans you're missing gets tiring after a while, and the map being incredibly unhelpful at describing differences in elevation exacerbates that. It also doesn't help that most of the areas just feel like the same desert wasteland with different colored lighting. There's not a ton of visual variety which, combined with the kinda underwhelming characters and plot, do a lot to make the game Not As Cool As Nocturne(tm).

All in all though SMT5 is a good time, and probably the only entry in the series so far where I'll go for 100% completion (mostly because beating the game in New Game+ takes like five hours if you just run towards the main objective markers). I'd love to see what they could do if they expand on this framework with a Maniax/Apocalypse style release in the future.

Metroid Dread (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

Metroid Dread is like, shockingly good. MercurySteam not only finally made a good game, they made a fucking great game. I replayed (at least one version of) the mainline Metroid then-quadrilogy this year in the leadup to Dread releasing and picked Samus Returns as my Metroid 2 experience since I hadn't played it, and I thought that game fuuuuuucking sucked. Slow, clunky, repetitive, annoying, I just did not have fun with that game outside of thinking the post-Queen Metroid stuff was kind of neat. Like I'd genuinely rather replay original Metroid 2 before I touch Samus Returns again, and it majorly tempered my expectations for Dread.

So how fuckin’ surprised was I when Dread comes out and it's the most fluid feeling and fun to play Metroid game yet? Samus controls like a dream in Dread, the combat is snappy and satisfying, just moving around in and interacting with the world feels great. Basically every lame idea they had in Samus Returns is either massively improved or outright gone, and there's a bunch of cool new powerups that are fun to use and feel like smart additions to the series rather than the devs going "I don't know, Samus get machine gun?". The combat is also way more engaging. The basic enemies aren't a slog to deal with like they were in Samus Returns, and the bosses are uniformly great, with the final boss being probably the most fun fight in the series.

I did have one big complaint on my first playthrough (and keep in mind this is a complaint that disappeared in subsequent playthroughs), and that was that progression felt super railroaded to me. Not as in your face "You Will Go Here And Only Here, The Objective Marker On Your Map" as Fusion and Other M were, but it still felt like there was really only one obvious, correct way to go from whatever room the powerup you just acquired was in to the next room a powerup is in, and if you tried any other way you got hit with a door you couldn't open. It felt very hard to get lost or miss anything important (but boy howdy did some people still manage to pull off both of those spectacularly, the discourse around this game for the months after it came out was fucking insufferable), very hard to go anywhere the devs didn't intend for you to go, very limited.

Then I replayed it with the express purpose of looking for sequence breaks and holy shit sequence breaking this game is so fucking fun. Maybe BECAUSE that first playthrough felt so restrictive, finding ways to skip around and avoid shit, both in ways intended by the devs and ways unintended by them, really made me appreciate the world design way more. It's not like Zero Mission levels of masterfully designed to allow you to do whatever if you're smart enough to know how, but they let you get away with some duuuuumb shit if you're trying to. Like, I beat the game without any sort of extra jump ability just to see if I could. I got myself in so many dumb situations that I had to improvise my way out of, got myself locked into boss fights that I was just barely equipped to handle, and it all felt great! You can get so dumb with this game! I beat it like 5 times within the month it came out. It fucking rules. Play Metroid Dread, it's a good game.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (Nintendo Switch & eventually PlayStation 4, 2019)

And on the other end of the search action spectrum, I finally got around to playing Bloodstained and man if this isn't the best search action Castlevania game without "castle" or "vania" in the title. Right up there with Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow.

It's not too much of a looker, but it makes up for it basically everywhere else. There's soooooo much weird shit to discover and so many weird systems on top of systems on top of systems. It's just a weird game in the best way possible. The power curve is great too, by the end of the game you're zipping around at 100 miles per hour, warping through walls, stopping time, near-instantly decimating everyone with chain lightning and 8-bit fireballs, all sorts of wild shit. If you like the exploration-focused Castlevania games you owe it to yourself to play this.

Just don't play the Switch version. It's indefensibly bad, like it should be illegal to sell that version. Buggy, crashy, framey, hard to look at, just a total fucking mess. Really wish the full scope of how terrible this version of the game would be was more readily apparent before I ended up choosing the physical Switch version on my backer survey!!

Lost Judgment (PlayStation 5, 2021)

Lost Judgment was another big surprise for me. I enjoyed the first Judgment's story, but kind of hated almost everything about actually playing it, and only hated playing it even more when I picked it up again this year to refresh myself before the sequel came out. Lost Judgment, on the other hand, is the most fun a Yakuza game has been to play since Yakuza 0 with a story that's just the dictionary definition of acceptable.

But yeah holy shit they did it, they finally paid off the Dragon Engine debt and made a Yakuza game that's got fun action combat and a ton of weird optional side activities. Like, really fun combat. Best in the series combat. The new Snake style is super fun, having three styles makes a lot more sense than having two, they all flow into each other way more naturally, you can do funny air juggles, it's genuinely the best it's ever been. The breadth of side stuff reminds me of Noted Best Game In The Series Yakuza 5, there's wayyyy more than you think there would and reasonably should be. Like even more than Yakuza 7, and that already felt like it was mostly back on the right track in that regard. And sure it's all pretty hit or miss, but that's the way things should be with these games, dammit. They should get wild with it and they super did and I'm so happy it finally happened again.

It's a shame the story just isn't super engaging! Not awful, just not that compelling. I really hope the weird business with Kimura's agency not knowing what a computer is doesn't stop a third Judgment game from happening, because an iteration on the gameplay from this one with a story that's more in the caliber of the best this series is capable of could be fucking killer.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

This is kind of a weird game to talk about. There's a lot of weird aspects to unpack about how it was released.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a collection of two games, "The Great Ace Attorney Adventures" and "The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve", neither of which were released outside of Japan until this year. The first game originally came out in 2015 and was met with, from my outsider view, a pretty negative reception. So much so that I really didn't hear anything about the sequel when it released two years later in 2017. It seemed like a flop that was destined to sit in the no localization corner with Ace Attorney Investigations 2 (Capcom! You dumbasses!! Give AAI2 an official release!!! It's one of the best games in the franchise!!!) until suddenly in 2021 it didn't. Capcom was just bringing them both over here in a compilation, suddenly as that.

After playing through this collection I can say two things: I 10000% percent understand the initial reception in Japan, and I think The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is pretty damn good. Releasing it like this was absolutely the only correct call on Capcom USA's part. If US fans got it piecemeal like Japan did there would've been riots. The fact that it was initially split into two games with a two year gap between each is insane. This is just one bigger than usual Ace Attorney game.

GAA1 is, when taken on its own, SO fucking weirdly paced. The first case is genuinely bad in my opinion. It's your average Ace Attorney tutorial case except expanded out to three and a half hours. Then you get to case two expecting things to pick up and, while not bad, it's entirely an investigation segment. The third case is trial-only (but again, not bad!). The fourth case finally has you do both one investigation segment and one trial segment, and then the fifth and final case is the first and only one that dares to take place over more than one day. And then it's over! And it's over with an almost Halo 2 level "see ya next game suckers" ending! I wouldn't go so far as to say GAA1 is bad, but it is a game that's mostly setup and, when taken as a standalone product, has bizarre pacing that's only acceptable in the context of it being the first half of a larger thing you can immediately continue.

With all that out of the way though, when taken as the one large product it was released worldwide as, Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is the best game the series has had since Ace Attorney Investigations 2. The first half being basically nothing but setup is, coincidentally enough, good at setting up overarching mysteries and characters for the second half to very successfully make good on. Especially the characters. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles has the most eminently likeable core cast of characters since the original Ace Attorney trilogy. It was extremely bittersweet leaving them at the end of it all. Herlock Sholmes is the best character of 2021. He is a huge dip shit and he is my huge dip shit. The ultimate lovable dumbass. And then it has all the charming writing, music and animations you'd expect from a good Ace Attorney on top of that. If you're in the mood for an XL AA and you go in knowing that it's gonna be big and take its time, I can't recommend it enough.

Bravely Default II (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

Ok look, I know every single year I have one game where I go "this was objectively good but still disappointed me" and in recent years I've even made a disclaimer similar to this one right here. Bravely Default II is this year's game. But before I get into it I feel the need to stress, emphatically stress even, that this game is objectively good. I played it, I beat it, and overall I enjoyed it. It would not be on this list if I didn't. Please please please do your best to keep this in mind as you read the following rambly wall of text.

Bravely Default II might be one of the biggest disappointments of my life. I love the first Bravely Default. It's one of my favorite JRPGs of all time. Final Fantasy V is my favorite Final Fantasy and they made a shiny new FFV just for me with an insanely good soundtrack. Just that would have been enough for me, but they also went and did one other thing: they made it weird. Bravely Default gets fucking WEIRD.

What starts out as a purposefully traditional "warriors of light please you must save the crystals" story suddenly turns into what appears to be a time travel story after you "save" the last crystal, which then turns out to actually be a multiple dimensions story when you find out your cutesy fairy companion Airy is secretly a major villain, which is signified by the game's subtitle on the title screen changing from "WHERE THE FAIRY FLIES" to a big goofy red "AIRY LIES". You run through multiple dimensions, each one becoming more and more warped and distorted from the original one you knew, until you eventually face the final boss on the edge of all realities, banding together with every alternate universe version of your heroes as represented by your actual friends on your 3DS online friends list. And that's just an extremely surface level synopsis of how the back half of that game just fuckin’, goes for it. Just does a bunch of extremely weird, over the top, unexpected things that make it stick in your mind forever.

I don't like the direct sequel, Bravely Second, as much as the first game but it also Just Fuckin’ Goes For It. Maybe even harder in some respects! Like, the game opens immediately on a scripted unwinnable fight with the final boss and halfway through the game you fail in stopping his plan, and the solution is to use the newly unlocked New Game+ button on the main menu to go back to that unwinnable fight and break the scripting so you can win. The true final boss attempts to defeat you by sending you back to the main menu and literally forcing your cursor to pick the delete save option. The Bravely Series Fucking Goes For It! It rules!! I love it!!!

Anyway, the scene is late 2019. I'm on the last leg of my commute home from work, walking to my apartment from the bus stop, begrudgingly watching The Game Awards on my phone. Suddenly, the announcement I never expected to see on Geoff's dreadful obligation of a show magically appears: fucking Bravely Default II. I honest to god started jumping up and down and yelling on the sidewalk. I cannot remember the last time a game announcement surprised and delighted me that much, let alone one at the fucking Game Awards. It was all I could think about for the next couple of weeks. My mind raced with all the wild directions they could possibly go from the end of Bravely Second. Hell, they were already calling the third game in the series Bravely Default II, what title screen nuttiness would they get up to this time? I was so fucking pumped. They were doing it! They even got the original composer back after scheduling conflicts stopped him from working on Bravely Second! This was gonna rule!

Bravely Default II is a good game. It still has the rock solid core job system gameplay the rest of the series has. Bravely Default II is also the worst game in the series. Bravely Default II Does Not Fuckin’ Go For It, in any respect aside from the music. Revo did his job there. Nobody else did.

For starters, Bravely Default II wasn't developed by the studio that developed Bravely Default and Bravely Second, Silicon Studio. It was instead handled by Claytechworks, the developers of the mobile game Bravely Default: Fairy's Effect. I'm assuming this is the reason a lot of Bravely Default II's gameplay and mechanics feel like varying degrees of a regression from Bravely Second. Bravely Second (and technically Bravely Default: For The Sequel, which is the upgraded version of the original that was the only version released internationally) introduced a lot of interesting new job mechanics, skill interactions, and overall gameplay systems that are either severely pared down or completely absent in Bravely Default II.

It's also just kinda fucking ugly? The first two games were pretty damn good looking for the 3DS, with well-stylized characters and very pretty painted backgrounds. The backgrounds here in Bravely Default II are still nice, but the models look rough and on a technical level everything just looks grainy and blurry and there's a lot of framerate hitching.

The whole thing very much feels like a separate studio that wasn't several iterations deep in a series had to scramble to hammer a game into a shape mostly resembling the shape of those old games while missing a lot of the details. I don't know why this change of studios was made. I hope either Claytechworks gets it together or Silicon Studio comes back for a hypothetical sequel.

But beyond the gameplay shortcomings, my biggest misgiving with Bravely Default II is that it does not have that Bravely series juice, and I was DESPERATELY craving the juice. It makes some meager attempts to provide the juice, but it's just water with food coloring. The story and presentation just does not have it together, and the "wild stuff" they do try to pull mostly falls flat. The final boss genuinely snuck up on me. They do a few fakeouts with the final boss near the end of the game and I honest to God thought the actual last fight was another fakeout until it was over, with only the degree to which how hard the music was going (extremely hard, hard enough for me to look back on the fight as being cooler than it actually was) giving me any sort of suspicion that this was truly supposed to be the climactic final battle.

Even worse than the stuff they fumble is the stuff they just don't do, which is most of it. One of those later game fakeout bosses starts to play a key theme from the original Bravely Default, hinting at some sort of deeper meaning/connection/plot, but there isn't any. Nothing comes of it. That character just disappears after that fight, leaving you to maybe potentially go out of your way to find a hidden lore page to get any info on what her deal was, just like so much of the rest of the game's plot details. I also didn't think the final dungeon was the final dungeon! It's just kind of a lightly altered version of the world map!! Hell, they don't even do anything weird with the title screen!!! They named the third Bravely game Bravely Default II and they don't even do anything weird with the title like the first two games did!!!! Fuck!!!!!

Bravely Default II is a good game. I played it, I beat it, and overall I enjoyed it. It's a shiny new Final Fantasy V just for me with a good soundtrack and, as previously stated, that's enough for me.

Psychonauts 2 (Xbox Series X, 2021)

In a list already full of big shocks, this was the biggest shock. I genuinely kinda can't believe how well they pulled Psychonauts 2 off.

If you asked me what my favorite games were in 2005, as one of the handful of people who played Psychonauts, I would have put Psychonauts pretty damn high up on my list. I spent at least a decade after it came out lamenting the lack of a sequel and cursing the world for ignoring such an incredible game, so much so that eventually all the energy I had behind those feelings was just depleted. When Double Fine finally did announce Psychonauts 2 as a crowdfunding campaign, my reaction was along the lines of "sure, fine, I'll believe it when it's out". The release of Psychonauts 2 ended up sneaking up on me.

I only ended up realizing it was imminent like a week or so before its release date, and in an "oh fuck wait shit I actually am excited about this" frenzy I decided to replay the original to refresh myself, and I'm glad I did because it just made it that much more clear how much they fucking NAILED Psychonauts 2 when I ended up playing it right after. It's like the original game came out 16 days ago, not 16 years ago. They didn't skip a beat, didn't age a day. It's uncanny, like everyone involved with the first game immediately time traveled to 2021 after production finished. The entire voice cast is back and firing on all cylinders (except maybe Cruller, whose voice got much more southern and much less grandpa in the interim), the writing and environments are as wild and inventive and charming as ever, and the gameplay is monstrously refined from the first game. Just wildly better, it's full of smart improvements and plays great (Jeff if you're reading this you're insanely, impossibly wrong (also hi)). I could go on and on about what they got right but I'd have to list nearly everything.

I genuinely think the only criticism I have is that by focusing the story so hard on having a big central mystery, it feels more like you learn how characters relate to that mystery rather than learning about the characters themselves, and I liked naturally learning what made each character who they were over the course of a level in the first game. For instance, I had zero idea why Compton's level was game show themed until I looked at his room in photo mode at some point and saw that he was watching game shows on TV and kind of inferred from there that he's just cooped up watching them 24/7, whereas I feel a detail like this would have more effortlessly revealed itself over the course of the level in the first game.

But I'm nitpicking. Psychonauts 2 is an incredible, almost impossible seeming follow-up to one of my favorite games ever. Just stunning considering the gap between releases and what Double Fine has done/been through in that gap. I'm so happy it happened, and I'm so happy I got to play it. Psychonauts 2 is game of the 2021, just edging out Metroid Dread. Thank you.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania (Nintendo Switch, 2021): This is a good game, but mostly on the merits of being built off two great games. They made a lot of weird decisions with it, and it's an aesthetic downgrade on every level, but for the most part it's still those Super Monkey Ball 1 & 2 levels, and those are still good. 100% the best Monkey Ball product released in the last decade and a half. Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (Nintendo DS, 2008): And in search action Castlevania games that DO have "castle" and "vania" in the title, this is probably the most fascinating of them all. Absolutely the best one mechanically. The glyphs are a cool mix of standard weapons and Soma's soul system, and turning the MP bar into a Souls series-style stamina meter is a cool shakeup. If they managed to make a sequel to this before Konami decided to be Konami, it probably would have been the best in the series. Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (PlayStation 5, 2021): This is a better version of a fantastic game and the added Yuffie side mode is very good. Yuffie might just straight up be my favorite character to play as? Super versatile and fast with a real fun ability set. Really looking forward to using her more in the sequel. The story for her campaign is decent too, I just wish they left the Deepground dipshits in the basement where they belong. New Pokémon Snap (Nintendo Switch, 2021): New Pokémon Snap is exactly that. It is a New Pokémon Snap, but bigger and fancier. I was never one of the ones clamoring that there's GOTTA be another Pokémon Snap RIGHT NOW like a lot of people were, but I would have gladly accepted one at any time, and here I am now to accept it. It's extremely similar to the first game, but that 20-something year gap does a lot to mitigate that being a negative. Looking forward to Newer Pokémon Snap in 2041! Monster Hunter Rise (Nintendo Switch, 2021): Monster Hunter Rise whips. Literally, you have a grappling hook you can whip around with. But yeah, it's solid as hell Monster Hunter with very little of what got in the way in MH World. They completely revamped the Hunting Horn, and while I think it's still fun I do miss the old one. Also a little light on content, but nothing a G rank expansion won't fix. Good stuff! Hitman 2 & Hitman 3 (PlayStation 4 & PlayStation 5, 2018 & 2021): Grouping this in as one game since it essentially is and I played it all at once. A bucket load of great new levels and mechanical additions to the formula established in the previous game. Not much more to say than that, it all just kinda rules. Hitman just kinda rules. Except Sniper Assassin mode, that sucks. Mario Party Superstars (Nintendo Switch, 2021): I feel a lot of the same ways about this as I feel about Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania. A good game carried on the backs of great games with a lot of weird decisions around the edges, but still the best product released in the franchise since the mid 2000s. Some of the items are just too busted, and a lot of the rules changes drain the typical Mario Party tension and stakes out of the whole thing. Great online play though, hope it eventually gets more boards as DLC. Resident Evil Village (PlayStation 5, 2021): I had fun with Resident Evil Village. It's good. When I was done with it I never wanted to play it again. It's going for something more action-y than Resident Evil 7, and what it ends up being is weirdly reverent towards Resident Evil 4 but with none of the mechanical chops to back it up (masterfully demonstrated by its absolutely terrible take on The Mercenaries mode). Entertaining in the moment but instantly forgettable. A popcorn video game, and there's nothing wrong with that. Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown (PlayStation 4, 2021): Virtua Fighter 5 rules and it's nice that they ported it to something other than 360 and PS3. I would have rather had a Virtua Fighter 6. They also should have given it rollback netcode. And put it on the PC. The apparent success of this release has given me high hopes that I will eventually get all of those.

And that’s a wrap on 2021, gamers. What does the new year hold for this neglected website? I dunno man. I’d like to at least get that article about the ToeJam & Earl 3 racism final boss up so that story is somewhere other than a Twitter thread, but beyond that you’ll just have to wait and see. As always, thank you so much for reading to the end of this. See ya next year.

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Cool Games I Finished In 2020 (In No Real Order)

Oh, hey! Right! I have a website! I’m like a week late on writing this, but what’s a week on top of an entire year of not writing, right? 2020 was... well, we all know what 2020 was. For me personally, it was simultaneously the best and worst year of my life. The worst in both ways you can probably assume and ways you definitely can’t (neither of which I’ll be getting into), and the best in ways I absolutely never would have guessed. That uncertain job I mentioned last year got very suddenly much more certain, at a much bigger company, for a much larger amount of money. That allowed me to get my own place, making my weird living situation much less weird. Still haven’t gotten the majority of my belongings off of the east coast, but if the entire world wasn’t currently fucked up by a global pandemic I’d have sorted all that out too. What I’m saying is that, for the third year in a row, my life has been a complete whirlwind that has left me very little time to get comfortable with any aspect of it. But I did manage to play more video games than I did last year! Which is perfect, because it’s once again time for another one of these. Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2020.

Astro’s Playroom (PlayStation 5, 2020)

My one word description of Astro's Playroom is "delightful". It's just an absolute goddamn delight. A total surprise too! Included with every PlayStation 5, Astro's Playroom is, in my opinion, one of the best pack-in games of all time.

First off, it's an incredible tech demo for the PS5's new DualSense controller. It was easy to brush off Sony's talk about the controller's haptic feedback and triggers as some Nintendo-style HD Rumble bullshit, but it really is incredibly cool once you get your hands on it. The game is obviously more than a tech demo though, or else it wouldn't be on here. It also just so happens to be an extremely solid and fun platformer on top of that. Astro controls exceptionally well and the levels are all well-designed and fun, even the gimmick vehicle ones designed to show off different features of the controller. It also has an oddly compelling speedrun mode, made all the more compelling by the PS5 notifying you when your friends beat your times and the ability to load into it within two seconds from anywhere on the console. But the biggest thing for me and, call me a mark, because I am, is that the game is an honestly incredible love letter to PlayStation history.

For the first time ever, Sony has pulled off a nostalgia piece without it ending up as embarrassing garbage in the vein of PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. There's a Nintendo-like joyful reverence for all things PlayStation oozing out of every single corner of this game. There are so many nods and references and gags for literally every PlayStation thing of note throughout the the last 25 years, and then on top of that there's a whole heap more for the things that AREN'T of note that only hyperdorks like me would get! A sly reference to the ill-fated boomerang controller? Yep. A goof on the fat PS3's Spider-Man font? You betcha. A trophy you can earn by repeatedly punching a Sony Interactive Entertainment sign until it breaks and reveals the Sony Computer Entertainment sign it was slapped on top of? Yeah buddy. It's deep cuts all the way down, even up until the final boss which had me grinning like a total dipshit the entire time. The game is endlessly, effortlessly charming.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo Switch, 2020)

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the perfect game at the perfect time. That doesn't mean it's a perfect game, I actually have some issues with it, but it could not have released at a better time than when it did. It came out at the very very beginning of everyone going into lockdown due to the pandemic, and it was the biggest game in the world for a couple of months as a result. I played like 300 hours and that pales in comparison to the amount of time many others put into it.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the most different Animal Crossing game there's ever been, and I'm of two minds on it. Like, I loved the game, I played a ton of it, but it's lacking so much of the stuff that made me love Animal Crossing in the first place. The series has been slowly trending in this direction for a bit now, but it's not really a game that happens around you anymore. It's all about total player control. You select where everything goes, you customize every detail of everything to your liking, hell, you can even terraform the landmass to be exactly what you want. Your neighbors take a backseat in focus and end up as little more than decorations with limited dialogue and next to no quests associated with them. Series staples like Gyroids are missing in action. Facilities and services that have been around since Wild World aren't implemented. It's similar to past Animal Crossing games in a lot of ways, but on the whole it feels like a different thing.

But like I said, two minds. New Horizons strays from what I truly want from an Animal Crossing game, but I can't deny that the game as it is is a hell of a lot of fun. There's SO much you can do and SO many options, it's super addictive. Plus it implemented my long-requested feature of letting you effortlessly send mail to friends online! Too bad the actual online play is as cumbersome as ever.

In conclusion, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a land of contrasts. I'm kidding. It's good, but definitely missing something in a way where I can understand some people being disappointed in it. I had a ton of fun though, and I'm probably going to get back into it later in 2021.

Trials of Mana (Nintendo Switch, 2019)

Late in 2019, with the physical release of Collection of Mana for the Switch, I decided I was going to play through each game on it for the first time and finally find out what this whole Mana thing was about. I went into Final Fantasy Adventure (the first game in the Mana series, because every RPG had to be Final Fantasy back then) with zero expectations and found a totally serviceable little Zelda-like with light RPG elements. I enjoyed my time with it. I went into Secret of Mana with the expectation of it being a beloved classic and found the worst game I beat that year, hands down. That game fucking sucks. I get why it made an impression on people at the time, but it's just so so SO awful to play. Needless to say I was pretty disappointed. Honestly, I would have been disappointed even if I hadn't heard it was one of "the best games" for so long. It would have been a disappointing follow-up to Final Fantasy Adventure, a game that in and of itself isn't anything incredible. Secret of Mana is just that rotten.

I braced myself for more disappointment when (after a much needed vacation from the series) I started up Trials of Mana. This game had a reputation too, as a long-lost classic that never made it stateside. One of the best games on the Super Nintendo, criminally never released for western audiences! Like Secret of Mana before it, I'd heard nothing but effusive praise. Unlike Secret of Mana, however, I was very pleased to find out that Trials of Mana mostly lives up to the hype. From a gameplay standpoint, Trials is an improvement on Secret in almost every single way. It's not perfect. The menus are still kinda clunky, animations for things like magic and items are still frequently disruptive. But the main thing is it actually plays like a sensible video game designed by humans with brains. Attacking is responsive! Hitboxes aren't complete nonsense! You don't constantly get stunlocked to death! There are more answers to combat than casting the same spell for five straight minutes to kill your enemies before they get a chance to move! It's great!

On top of being an enjoyable video game to actually play, the presentation is top notch. Secret of Mana could be a pretty game with decent music in some spots, but Trials is consistently gorgeous and the soundtrack is across the board great instead of randomly having songs that sound like clown vomit. And while Trials of Mana doesn't have the deepest story in the world, it manages to avoid being completely paper-thin like Secret. The story actually kind of has a reason for being a bit straightforward, and the reason is that it has a really cool system where you pick your three playable characters from a pool of six. Each character has their own goals and storyline, some of which line up with other potential party members, some of which don't, and you'll even run into the characters you didn't choose as NPCs along the way. This and the relatively brisk pace of the game make it highly replayable.

I'm really glad that Trials of Mana made it over here in an official capacity, even if it was like 25 years late. It's as good as I expected Secret of Mana to be and singlehandedly saved my interest in seeing any more of the series. I'm aware the quality of what came after is very spotty, but I'll get to the rest eventually!

Final Fantasy VII Remake (PlayStation 4, 2020)

They (almost) did it. They (basically) pulled it off. They remade (a chunk of) Final Fantasy VII and (for the most part) didn't fuck it up. Ok, funny parentheticals aside, Final Fantasy VII Remake is astoundingly good coming off of over two decades of just absolutely dreadful post-FF7 sequels, side games, and movies.

Final Fantasy VII has been historically misremembered as this kind of miserable, angsty, brooding thing, both by fans and by the company that made it. FF7-branded media after FF7 itself is a minefield of changed personalities, embarrassing original characters, and monumentally lame stories. Final Fantasy VII Remake is the first post-FF7 anything that actually remembers the characters, setting, and plot of Final Fantasy VII and what made them memorable and special to people in the first place. Which isn't to say it's a slavish recreation! There's a ton of changes and additions, and I actually like almost all of them! Except for some really big stuff I'll touch on in a bit!

The combat in Final Fantasy VII Remake is great. I was super skeptical about it when the game was first announced, but they actually managed to make the blend of real-time action and turn-based RPG menuing fun and engaging. The characters all play super differently from each other too, which is a huge and welcome difference from the original game. The Materia system fits like a glove in this revamped combat system as well. The remixed music is good as hell, and the visuals are beautiful (outside of a couple of very specific spots that I'm kinda of surprised they haven't fixed in a patch yet). It's a well-executed package all around.

But alas, as always, there are negatives. For starters, this is only part one of the overall Final Fantasy VII Remake project. It goes up to the party leaving Midgar which, as you may or may not recall, is the first six hours of the original game. They compensated for this by fleshing the hell out of the Midgar section the game, ballooning the overall playtime to total of about 30-ish hours. The game feeling padded is a common complaint but for what it's worth, I didn't really feel it until the unnecessarily long final dungeon, There's also the previously mentioned and funny parenthetical'd changes and additions I don't like.

This is big time spoilers for this game so if you don't want that jump ahead to the next game on the list. The Whispers suck ass. Final Fantasy VII Remake should have been brave enough to be different without having to constantly derail everything in the most ham-fisted and intrusive way possible. You can have Jessie twist her ankle without making a spooky plot ghost trip her. I don't want to fight the physical manifestation of the game everyone thought they were getting as an end boss. If you're not doing a straight remake, that's fine, but have the fucking guts to stand by your artistic decisions without feeling the need to invent the lamest deus ex machina I've ever fucking seen. The last couple of hours of this game are 100% about the Whispers and are awful for it. It's a true testament to the strength of the rest of Final Fantasy VII Remake that this aspect didn't completely sour me on it. I can only hope that they stay dead and gone for good in the games yet to come and the remake can be different while standing on its own two feet.

I truly cannot wait for the next entry in the Final Fantasy VII Remake project. I'm excited for Final Fantasy VII in a way I haven't been since the late 90s. I have a bit of trepidation that they could royally screw it up. I mean, they already got kinda close, as I said in my last paragraph. But they got so much right in this entry that, for the first time in decades, I'm willing to believe in Square Enix when it comes to Final Fantasy VII.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (PlayStation 4, 2020)

My one word description of 13 Sentinels is "fucking crazy". I realize that's two words, but shut up. A bizarre hybrid of visual novel, adventure game, and strategy RPG, 13 Sentinels not only makes that work, but makes it work incredibly well. 

The story is fucking bonkers. It's told entirely non-linearly and is purposefully dense and confusing, but it does an amazing job of hooking you with a cast of likable characters and some impressively well-paced twists, made all the more impressive by the fact that you can tackle the story in basically whatever order you want. I'll say it again for those in the back, the story is Fucking Bonkers. Wherever you think it's going, it's not going. Where it is going is PLACES. Seriously, if you want a wild goddamn ride, this is the game for you. The presentation is also stunning. It's a drop dead gorgeous game with a really nice soundtrack. Easily Vanillaware's best looking game, which is saying something seeing as looking good is Vanillaware's whole deal.

If I had to levy one criticism against the game, it's that the strategy RPG portion is just kind of ok. It's enjoyable enough, it doesn't get in the way and there's not too much of it, but once it starts introducing armored versions of previous enemy types it's kind of done doing anything different. It is really good at getting people to out themselves as having no idea what tower defense is as a genre though!

Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition (Nintendo Switch, 2018)

I haven't really historically been a "Musou Guy". Not to say I've actively disliked them, they're just not something I've seeked out very often or played very much of. Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition kinda turned me into a "Musou Guy" a little bit? It's good, surprisingly-less-mindless-than-you'd-think fun.

I actually super don't care about the Zelda branding. I think all the fanservice stuff is meh at best. What I do care about is that there's a ton of character variety and a metric shitload of content. There's so many different characters and weapons for those characters that all play differently from one another and SOOOOOO many levels to play. Like the story mode is, again, kinda meh, the real meat of the game is the Adventure mode and there's a ton of it. It's 8 different world maps, each based off a different Zelda game, with each square of the map containing a little mini-scenario with unique objectives and rewards. There has to be at least 1000 scenarios between all the maps. There's so much. And that's not even getting into some of the other side stuff like the challenge modes and the fairy raising. It's a crazy amount of game in this game.

And again, it's not as mindless as it'd seem. It's not really a game ABOUT destroying 5000 guys, it's an area control and resource management game where the 5000 guys are one of those resources. Knowing who to send where and when to fight who is way more important than pressing the XXX YYY XXX YYY on the more than one million troops.

I'd say that if you're even cursorily potentially maybe interested in a musou game, this is the one to try. And if you like it, it could literally be your forever game. A sequel came out recently too, and I'm looking forward to trying that out soon.

Phantasy Star Online 2 (Xbox One, 2020)

Phantasy Star Online 2 finally came stateside in the year 2020, eight years after its initial Japanese release and initial American cancellation. It's no Phantasy Star Online 1, but it is a really fun game in its own right provided you can find the willpower to break through its clunkiness and eight years of confusing poorly tutorialized free-to-play MMO cruft.

The main thing going for PSO2, and this is a major improvement from PSO1, is that the act of engaging in its combat is fun. The combat is just feels really really good. There's a bunch of different weapon types and classes, and once you find the ones that really click with you you're in for a good time, whether you're izuna dropping dudes with wire claws or literally doing air juggles and rainstorm from Devil May Cry with the dual machine guns.

The other stuff around that combat is weird. I generally like it, but it's weird. The story mode is one of the most bizarrely presented things I've ever seen. It apparently used to be something you'd seek out in the levels themselves, but presently it's just a list of scenes you pick from a menu and watch with next to no context until it makes you fight a boss sometimes. There's some weird moments in there that MIGHT have been cool if it were presented in literally any other way?

The systems and presentation are also way more... I dunno, pinball? Pachislot? In very stark contrast to how chill original Phantasy Star Online was, everything in PSO2 is designed in a way to maximize that flashy light bing bing wahoo you got ~*~RARE DROP CHANCE UP~*~  feeling. Which isn't to say I don't like flashy light bing bing wahoo, but it's a weird different thing.

Was it worth the wait? Yeah, sure! For me! This is another one that I played like 300 hours of! I haven't even seen half of it, I fell off right before Episode 4 released because it coincided with my move! I'm gonna go back and see all that shit! PSO2's fun! A different flavor of fun than the original, sure, but fun all the same. Another one that I'm glad finally made it over here.

Riichi Mahjong (A Table, 1924)

Holy shit I fucking did it I finally learned how to play Mahjong and it rules.

It started when I picked up Clubhouse Games for the Switch. I saw that it had Riichi Mahjong and something in my brain snapped. For whatever reason, I decided that this was the time I was going to rip the band-aid off and figure this shit out. It wasn't too dissimilar to the first time I decided to try eggs, but that's a different and much stupider story for a different time. I did the tutorial in Clubhouse Games, looked up some more basics and advice because the tutorial wasn't super amazing, and I kept playing while being aided by the game's nice helper features like the button that pulls up recommended hands. I kept playing and... sorta got it. I learned the basic rules, but none of the strategy. And then I stopped playing for a few months.

In that few months, for whatever reason, a decent amount of people I know had their brains snap the same way? Like a more-than-two amount of people I'm either friends with or following online also decided to learn Mahjong. I decided to get back on the horse and downloaded Mahjong Soul and I don't know whether it was perseverance or the power of anime babes, but this time I got it. I still refer to a sheet with all the hands and whether they work open or closed, and I'm by no means a master player, but I actually honest to god understand what I'm doing and it's an incredible feeling.

Mahjong has such a huge amount of what I like to call "Get That Ass" energy. It is the energy you feel when you get someone's ass. In Mahjong you are either constantly getting someone's ass or getting your ass gotten. Someone puts down the wrong tile and you fucking GET THEIR ASS DUDE! They're got!! They're a fucking idiot that put down the wrong thing and now you have their points!!! Or you draw what you need yourself and you're a brain genius all according to plan and everyone gives you points because you're so wise!!!! It's great!!!!!

Mahjong has long been one of those games where I'd say "I'll learn this someday" and never reeeeally actually try to learn, and I'm so glad I finally took the effort to because it's good as hell. And, truth be told, it wasn't THAT hard to learn? Like you can get to the point where I was where I didn't know the strategy fairly easily in my opinion, and once you do that It's just a matter of continuing to play to understand the rest. I highly recommended that you also go out and learn it if you similarly revel in getting that ass, it's so satisfying once you do.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon (PlayStation 4, 2020)

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio took a big gamble with Yakuza: Like a Dragon. After seven games (more if you take spinoffs and remakes into consideration) they decided to focus on a new main character and, even more unexpectedly, they decided to change things up by turning the series into a turn-based JRPG. Their gamble paid off in spades. This is easily in my top 3 favorite Yakuza games.

The JRPG gameplay is surprisingly solid. There's definite room for improvement, but they nailed a bunch of it right out of the gate. Some mechanics are a little janky and I wish the job system was more fleshed out or just worked more like Final Fantasy V's, but they nailed one of the most important things and made the battles brisk and fun. It's a great foundation, especially for a team that's never attempted anything like this, and it's way more fun than the combat's been in any of the previous Dragon Engine games. I can't wait to see them iterate on it.

Everything else is top fuckin' notch. The music is great, the side content is fully fleshed out in a way it hasn't been since before they switched to the Dragon Engine, and I love the characters and story so much. Yakuza has a new main character in Ichiban Kasuga, and he's my son and I love him. Kiryu was great, and I love him too, but he was a bit of a passive protagonist. Stuff happened around him and he mostly just stoically reacted to it. Ichi is a much more active lead and it's great. He's a big lovable dope, and his tendency to keep an upbeat attitude and eagerness to leap into action is such a breath of fresh air. And it's not only Ichiban, since this is an RPG you have a whole party of characters and they're all great! Having them with you at all times bantering with each other and reacting to things is another great change of narrative pace, too. 

Yakuza: Like a Dragon just straight up rules. As someone who has historically not been too much of a fan of the Dragon Engine games, it's simultaneously a refreshing new take on the series and a fantastic return to form. I can't wait for what comes next. Wherever Ichiban goes, I go.

Moon: Remix RPG Adventure (Nintendo Switch, 2020)

After 23 years of Japanese PS1 exclusivity, Moon: Remix RPG Adventure finally got an English release this year for Nintendo Switch. I'm glad it did, because Moon isn't just the very definition of A Sebmal Game. It's the Sebmal Game missing link. In addition to being just a great video game, it helped me make a mental throughline for a bunch of games I love and a large part of my taste in video games.

To keep a long story short (seriously, I have a much much longer version of this saved in my drafts that I'll maybe finish someday), Moon turned out to be not the JRPG I assumed it was, given the title and basic story pitch, but a secret prequel to a game I love named Chulip. Moon's developer, Love-de-Lic, was formed by a handful of ex-Squaresoft employees, many of which worked on an extremely formative game I love named Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. Love-de-Lic broke up in the year 2000 and its staff went on to form a bunch of different studios that ended up making a BUNCH of different games I love like Chibi-Robo, Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, Dandy Dungeon, and the aforementioned Chulip. These games, when you make the connection and line them up, all have a very distinct weirdness in common that makes perfect sense once you've realized many of the same people worked on them. Figuring this all out felt like snapping a piece of my brain back in place, and it was really crazy to come to understand exactly how much this studio that formed and disbanded decades before I'd even heard of them had impacted my tastes and, hell, my life.

So what is Moon, for those who don't innately understand what I mean by "a secret prequel to Chulip"? Moon is an adventure game where you explore a world with a day/night cycle, learn about that world's inhabitants, and eventually solve their problems. Think of it kind of like The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, but if the sidequests were the entirety of the focus with no Groundhog Day time reset mechanic and none of the Zelda stuff like combat and dungeons. You play as a young boy who, after a late night JRPG binge session, is sucked into the world of the game he was just playing. Everything is off from the way it was portrayed while the boy was playing the game, though. The hero he had previously controlled is actually a silent menace, raiding peoples' houses for treasure and slaughtering every innocent animal that crosses his path in an endless quest for EXP. The townspeople seem more concerned with problems in their day-to-day lives than the supposed world threatening crisis outlined in the game's intro. It's up to you as the boy to investigate this world's mysteries, help the townsfolk, mend the damage the hero has done, and eventually restore love to a loveless world.

Speaking of love, I fucking loved Moon. I loved the story, I loved the characters, I loved the music, I loved the way it looks (even though the Switch port is a little crusty in that basic emulator-y kinda way), I loved how constantly bizarre and surprising and funny it was. Like I said earlier, it's the very definition of a game made for me. It was essentially the progenitor of a long line of games made for me, and of games potentially made for me but I don't know yet because I haven't played them due to not understanding Japanese (UFO: A Day in the Life translation next please? Anyone from Onion Games reading this??). For as similar as Moon and Chulip are in their systems and pacing, I think I might actually like Moon better despite it coming earlier? It's not as full force maximum impact absurd as Chulip is, but it is a lot more playable and less obtuse once you get a grip on the time limit mechanic. You don't need a full strategy guide included in the instruction manual for Moon, and you don't need to exchange business cards with every single character to get information vital to finishing the game either.

I truly cannot recommend Moon enough if your taste in games ventures anywhere off the beaten path. Maybe this is a little conceited of me, but I assume if you're reading this article, let alone this far down into it, you relate to my video game opinions at least a little bit? You should play Moon. Everyone reading this sentence should play Moon. Moon: Remix RPG Adventure is my game of the year for the year 2020.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Death Stranding (PlayStation 4, 2019): Death Stranding, much like Metal Gear Solid V, was a game I enjoyed for the gameplay and not much else. The story, characters, and writing were a huge disappointment for me, but man if I didn't enjoy lugging those boxes around and setting up my hellish cross-continental goon summer camp lookin' zipline network. Mr. Driller Drill Land (Nintendo Switch, 2020): I am a known Mr. Driller Enjoyer, and I enjoyed this Mr. Driller. Originally released for the Gamecube, Mr. Driller Drill Land is another long-time Japanese exclusive that finally came stateside this year and it's packed with new and novel twists on the Mr. Driller format. It looks super sharp, the music's great (also the credits music is the most impossibly out of place and extra as hell shit in the world and it's hilarious), and it's just a good ass time. The main campaign is pretty damn short, but if you're a post-game content kinda guy it has that and it's all super hard. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 (PlayStation 4, 2020): They finally made another good new Tony Hawk game, and all it took was perfectly remaking two of the best old Tony Hawk games! Plays exactly like you remember it with the added benefit of the best mechanics from up to THUG1, looks great, packed full of content, even has most of the music alongside some mostly crappy new stuff. It's the full package as is, but I do hope they end up adding THPS3 to it eventually. Mad Rat Dead (Nintendo Switch, 2020): Mad Rat Dead was a pleasant surprise that I only picked up because I saw a couple of people on my Twitter timeline constantly talking about it. A fun and inventive platformer where all your actions need to be on beat with the music. The gameplay feels great (aside from some not so great performance issues on Switch), the soundtrack is fun, and it's got a real good style to it. Demon's Souls (PlayStation 5, 2020): I love Demon's Souls and this is Demon's Souls. It plays exactly the same with some minor quality of life changes. I don't agree with many of the artistic changes, but there's no denying it looks incredible on a technical level. If you want to play Demon's Souls again or for the first time, this is a perfectly valid and fun way to do so. Groove Coaster: Wai Wai Party!!!! (Nintendo Switch, 2019): Groove Coaster is one of my favorite rhythm games, and they finally made an acceptable at-home version with Wai Wai Party. It's not a perfect replication of the arcade game control-wise, I have some issues with the song choices, and the pricing is frankly fucking ridiculous if you're not a Groove Coaster maniac like I am, but the same ultra satisfying gameplay is all there. You can even play it vertically in handheld mode! Flip Griiiiiiiip!

And we're done! Phew! Honestly didn't realize I played that many good games until I typed all this out. Thanks as always for reading this far. I'm gonna try and get back to regularly posting Breviews this year at the very least. Honestly don't know if I'll get anything else up on here, but we'll see. Here's to hoping 2021 is a little bit less of a nightmare!

[coolgreatwebsite]

Cool Games I Finished In 2019 (In No Real Order)

We’re here. The end of the decade. 2019 was a weird, turbulent year for me. Despite my cross-country move already being a year behind me somehow, nothing’s really settled yet. Living situation is still weird, still separated from most of my belongings, I left my full-time QA job for a contractor position at a mobile game advertising company that may or may not convert into a full-time position... everything about what’s going on with me still just feels like I’m completely winging it, and while that’s not a position I’m really comfortable being in for such an extended amount of time, everything seems to be working out okay enough despite it. All this is probably why I spent most of my time playing the shit out of a handful of games rather than playing a bunch of different games this year! Needed some sort of stability. Also when I did manage to pull myself away from the timesink games and play something else, a lot of them ranged from “okay” to “real bad”. But I still managed to play just enough stuff that I liked to where I can put out yet another one of these.  Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2019.

Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst (PC, 2005)

I haven’t bothered to do two thirds of the story quests yet and have barely touched any Episode 4 content so this game technically doesn’t count for this list, but if I left it off I would be neglecting to mention an extremely large portion of my video game playing time this year. I fell back into PSO preeeettty hard this year after the surprise announcement of Phantasy Star Online 2 finally coming to the US. Guess what: game still rules. It feels stiff to play and it’s obviously far less expansive than it seemed back in 2000, but the core of Phantasy Star Online is still as fun as it ever was and the aesthetics are still entirely my shit. I love everything about the way this game looks and sounds, I love stumbling on a weird new weapon, I love participating in the custom seasonal events the server I’m on runs, and I love how oddly relaxing the experience of playing this game and taking it all in is. I will probably continue to play Phantasy Star Online into 2020. I will probably still dip back into it after PSO2 US servers finally launch. If I know you and you want to join my Discord server for PSO get at me. PSO forever.

Cookie’s Bustle (PC, 1999)

You ever play a game that just speaks to you? Even through a language barrier? A game so incredibly out there and bizarre in the exact way you love that you can’t help but adore it despite barely understanding it? Holy moly did I ever find that game. I learned about Cookie’s Bustle through a news story last year about some rare games leaking from a Japanese collector’s stash. Didn’t manage to get it to run back then, but my off and on attempts to get it working finally paid off in March of this year and I’m so glad I kept trying. I knew nothing of this game other than it had a weird name and was about a bear doing sports, and it turned out to be a fully voice-acted and mostly unsubtitled adventure game starring Cookie Blair, a 5 year old girl from New Jersey who sees herself as a teddy bear and has traveled to Bombo World, an island nation once visited by aliens and currently in the middle of a civil war, to participate in the Bombo Sports Tournament. Dead level, I probably shouldn’t have been able to genuinely love Cookie’s Bustle as much as I did. The only context I had for what was happening and what I was supposed to do was provided by a 20-year-old Google translated walkthrough with broken images, the game’s slightly higher than usual reliance on English loan words, and 30-ish years of video games and anime allowing me to halfway pick up on a handful of Japanese words. However, Cookie’s Bustle is dripping with an undeniable and off-beat charm that genuinely transcends language. Even if you can’t understand the words and specifics, you can understand the basic plot, characterizations, and emotions they’re going for. Cookie’s Bustle manages to both be completely off-the-wall bizarre and feel totally genuine and heartfelt at the same time, a balance very few games manage to successfully hit but many of my favorites do. One could say that’s why it seems to have resonated with a decent amount of other people this year, too. Games rarely make me feel sad that they’re over. but when they do that’s how I know they’re one of the good ones. Seriously, go look up a longplay or stream of Cookie’s Bustle if you (understandably) don’t want to go through the hassle of setting it up and figuring out how to play it, it’s impossible not to love.

Devil May Cry 5 (PlayStation 4, 2019)

Here’s something crazy to think about: Devil May Cry 4 came out 11 years ago. Aside from being a potent reminder that time is moving too fast and we’re all going to die soon, that means that there hasn’t been a DMC for over a decade. Devil May Cry 5 does not bare this fact even a little bit. Not only did they pick up right where they left off and manage to make another Devil May Cry game without missing a beat, they made arguably the best Devil May Cry game. I mean I still like the story and single-character focus of DMC3 the best, but DMC5 is the best playing game in the series without a doubt. Nero finally feels like he has a complete and complex toolset, Dante is the most mechanically dense and fun to play he’s ever been, and they even added a new guy that’s... neat to play as, until you start trying to S-rank the harder difficulties. Then he’s kind of annoying to play as. But it’s still cool that they tried something totally different and mostly got it to work! They also did something very stupid that I love and used this game as an excuse to make literally every single piece of Devil May Cry media canon. Like, characters exclusively from the anime and the books show up and act like they’re someone you already know and love? And they go out of their way to explain the most esoteric lore shit possible?? And despite it all they still intentionally give DMC2 as short a shrift as they can??? It’s so dumb, it rules. It’s just one of the many things about the game that show that even with so long of a gap between entries, no love for the series was lost by the people that make it. I don’t think the suits at Capcom expected this game to hit as hard as it did though, because despite there being clear areas where the game could be expanded on with DLC there still hasn’t been anything announced. I hope they’re maybe saving it for some sort of DMC3-esque special edition, or maybe just already working on DMC6, because even after getting all S-ranks I still wanted to play more. The game’s just that damn good.

Hypnospace Outlaw (PC, 2019)

I expected very little from Hypnospace Outlaw. I backed the game on Kickstarter solely because it looked cool and I thought a game about fake GeoCities was neat, and then I immediately forgot about it until it released. Admittedly my lack of expectations stemmed mostly from the fact that it’s kind of hard to set expectations for a game you never really thought too hard about, but even in the brief period of time where I considered it enough to give it money, I never expected it to be much more than a pretty-looking 101 Great GeoCities Jokez delivery vehicle. Boy was I wrong. I mean, it is incredibly good at that, but Hypnospace Outlaw is so much more than a funny period piece. The basic premise is that you’re in alternate universe 1999 and have just become a community moderator for an Internet service provider that allows people to connect to the Internet while they sleep. You’re tasked with browsing the game’s weird fake Internet and issuing demerits to users who violate the five basic Hypnospace rules, but it quickly evolves into something way bigger. Hypnospace Outlaw’s greatest strength is its exceptional ability at weaving together subtle world building, small and engaging character arcs, esoteric microjokes, and a genuine sense of mystery and discovery into an incredibly cohesive and engaging package. It’s as much a game about the people that use and run its weird fake Internet as it is about that weird fake Internet itself. And a lot of the problems both face echo the problems we face with our real world Internet today. When I was mapping out writing this article like a month or two ago I was prepared to go on about how at its core, Hypnospace Outlaw is an incredibly poignant story about how uncaring tech corporations actively harm their users and always have, but then a couple of days ago I read Colin Spacetwinks’ game of the year list and his #1 entry put most everything I would have said about that topic down in a way more eloquent and well-written way than I ever could have. And then I remembered that Friend Of The Site Heidi Kemps covered some of the same angle but from the perspective of the early Internet in an article earlier this year, again way better than I could have. So I highly recommend you read those when you’re done here. What I wanna bring up instead is just how effortlessly surprising and interconnected a lot of stuff in Hypnospace feels, using a mildly spoiler-ish late game example. Two of the first “zones” you’re allowed to moderate when you start Hypnospace Outlaw are Teentopia and Goodtime Valley, which are essentially alternate universe Yahooligans and a little slice of Hypnospace just for Boomers respectively. On Teentopia you’ll see a bunch of kids that are wild for Squisherz, Hypnospace’s alternate universe version of Pokémon, and over in Goodtime Valley you’ll see (much like there was back in real world 1999) a few pages made by religious fundamentalists convinced that everything the kids like these days is the work of Satan. This of course includes Squisherz, and you can find a page by one organization full of crackpot conspiracy theories with flimsy evidence that TOTALLY DEFINITELY backs up their claim. Squisherz contains a wolf, which the Bible warns about many times! This giraffe monster CLEARLY has a pentagram in its design!! And the eye of this snake-like Squisherz is the eye of Horus, an Egyptian occult symbol and NEED I REMIND YOU that Lucifer took the form of a snake in the Garden of Eden!!! It is very clear what this page is goofing on and throughout the course of the game it doesn’t get updated at all, so it’s very easy to laugh at it and forget about it. Very late into the game, you get an optional sidequest. Adrian Merchant, one of the CEOs of Merchantsoft, the company that created Hypnospace, was found out to have logged traffic indicating he was a frequent visitor of a website called Children of HORUS, and a call is put out to investigate what that even is. You can easily find the website, but it asks you for a password if you click the Enter button. Adrian Merchant is consistently portrayed throughout the game as a complete idiot, and the solution to this puzzle has you capitalize on that. Another early game objective ended up with you finding a list of cracked passwords, and one of those passwords happens to be for the instant messenger account of Adrian Merchant. If you can remember that he was even in that text file from forever ago, and then put two and two together that of COURSE that dumbass would use the same password for everything, you just punch in his messenger password and you’re granted access to the Children of HORUS page. It turns out that HORUS is an acronym that stands for Hiding Occult References in Utmost Secrecy, and the page itself is a basic leaderboard with a list of names and two numbered columns reading “Hidden” and “Found”. In that list of names you’ll find A. Merchant, along with the names of various other CEOs and celebrities you might have read about elsewhere in Hypnospace. One of the other names on this list is F. Kazuma, the CEO of Monarch, creators of Squisherz. The funny conspiracy theory website from the beginning of the game that you most likely forgot about was, about this one specific thing, correct. There was an eye of Horus hidden on the snake from Squisherz. Not as any sort of Satanic plot, mind you, but only as part of some weird millionaire dickwaving contest. This dumb tiny revelation is not called out by the game at all and nothing comes of it, it’s just there for you to notice if you’ve been paying enough attention. Hypnospace Outlaw is LITTERED with stuff like this. Weird small interconnected things you wouldn’t expect to be interconnected. Little dumb things you wouldn’t expect to have any sort of payoff but somehow do. And it’s also just as chock full of big things. Having all the pieces fall into place at once to where I was able to access Hypnospace’s equivalent of the dark web was the best sequence in a game this year for me, even beating out the outlandish shit in DMC5. Getting and solving the final case was a rush. Hypnospace Outlaw is full of incredible moments big and small. It’s genuinely engaging and affecting, which is so much more than I was expecting from a game that was pitched to me as “Funny GeoCities Cop”. It almost has no right being so good. But it is. Hell, even the music rules! I didnt even get into that! I don't have enough time or space to get into that now! The music is so goddamn good! I know I started these lists because I had no interest in ranking games, but every year I sort of jokingly-but-not-jokingly say “haha this game sure would be my number one if I did that!” for at least one game. It’s time to fully lean into it. I don’t gotta rank ‘em all, but I can pick a favorite. Hypnospace Outlaw is my favorite game of 2019 with a goddamn bullet.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Etrian Odyssey (Nintendo DS, 2007): Man, this series just started out good, huh? I dabbled with the first two games in college when I got a DS flashcart but never really dug in until EO4, and the first game is enjoyable in just about every way the modern ones are. Definitely more barebones and punishing though. Kero Blaster (PlayStation 4, 2017): This is a game by the creator of Cave Story that does not aim to be Cave Story, and that’s fine! A fun little shooter in its own right, though I do think the shooting in Cave Story felt a little better than it does here. Space Invaders Extreme (Nintendo DS, 2008): I played the shit out of this game in college thanks to that flashcart I mentioned before, but I never finished a playthrough in full until this year for some reason. Still way stylish and way fun! I need to get a copy of the second one... CROSSNIQ+ (Nintendo Switch, 2019): Incredibly chill puzzle game that can be as hard or easy as you want it to be. Almost uncanny in how well it emulates the style of late PS1/Dreamcast games. Super Mario Maker 2 (Nintendo Switch, 2019): Mario Maker 2 is kind of weird for me. It’s a solid improvement in a lot of aspects, but a clear regression in a lot of others. Also the online multiplayer is the second least amount of fun I’ve had with a video game this year (Secret of Mana swooped in and stole the number one slot near the end). Still, I had a lot of fun with it and I’ll probably end up going back to it eventually. Katamari Damacy Reroll (Nintendo Switch, 2018): The original Katamari Damacy is still every bit as fun and charming as it was upon its original release. This port is weirdly based on the Japanese version with the English text inserted, which means no English voice acting and Wanda Wanda only plays in the multiplayer mode. The Joycon sticks also aren’t the greatest for doing charge rolls. But none of these faults detract too much from the game. Bring on We Love Katamari Reroll! Earth Defense Force 5 (PlayStation 4, 2018): Sandlot somehow keeps finding ways to make each new EDF bigger and explodier, and EDF5 is the biggest and explodiest yet. I think the mission design in 4.1 was more solid overall, but 5 feels the best to play and has the most fun tools. Also the dialogue is the most absurd its ever been, and the final boss goes for it way harder than the series ever has. Pokémon Shield (Nintendo Switch, 2019): This game is honestly just okay, but leaving it off would again be neglecting a game I put a ton of time into this year. Pokémon Sword is fun in the way most Pokémon games usually are, and extremely half-baked in basically every other aspect. I’m still having a good time putting together teams and finding shinies and doing The Pokémon Thing regardless.

And that’s 2019 (and this decade) in the bag! I don’t know where anything’s going from here, but I’m going to ride it out as best as I can! I hope you do too! As always, thank you so much for getting to the bottom of all these words. I’m hoping to be in a more stable place mid-2020, and then I want to get back to all the things I haven’t had time to do. I want to get back to streaming, I want to write more dumb articles like The Best Babies, I want to do it all! I hope I will be able to do it all. Until then!

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Cool Games I Finished In 2018 (In No Real Order)

Man! Wow! 2018! 2018 was a wild year for me. I managed to deliver those elbow drops I talked about last year and ended up doing a lot of of things. I left my job and moved cross-country in the span of like 2 and a half weeks! I took a new job in the video game industry (play Ninjin and Override)! I took a trip to Vegas a week after that! I got in a relationship! I got out of a relationship! It’s been a ride. A ride that hasn’t left me a ton of time to play video games or write about video games, but I’m like 1000 times happier now so it’s probably a fair trade. No matter what though, I will always be here at the end of the year to make a bunch of terrible MSPaint banners and provide you with another one of these. Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2018.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (PlayStation 2, 2004)

Nocturne is a game that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since I beat it. It’s so damn cool. It starts with you witnessing a demonic apocalypse where only you, your two friends, your teacher, a reporter, and the man with the world’s wildest widow’s peak survive. These people are, with a couple of notable exceptions, the only real characters in the entire game. You barely see them, and when you do your meetings are usually pretty brief. Sure, you talk to and recruit a horde of demons to your side as party members, and you interact with a handful of demonic antagonists and various demonic NPCs, but for the most part the game is just you. You, alone, wandering the weird hellscape remnants of Tokyo. It’s one of the most solitary-feeling video games I’ve ever played, and it nails this atmosphere flawlessly. The music, the visuals, the writing, every element gels with every other element so smoothly to create a prevailing, almost overbearing feeling of loneliness. The combat and gameplay mechanics are what I understand this series to mostly be like (this being the only mainline SMT I’ve played), and are fun and engaging in a way that’s not too dissimilar from the Persona series. The only knock I have against Nocturne is that the dungeon design super sucks. I’m fine with endless corridors, my love of the PS2 Persona games can attest to that, but almost every dungeon in Nocturne has an annoying gimmick to it, and they all essentially boil down to different takes on a teleporter maze. I was kind of almost dreading navigating dungeons by the time I got to the last fourth of the game, but my intense love for literally everything else saw me through. For those of you who like JRPGs and haven’t played Nocturne, I’m sure you’ve heard this plenty of times, and I was like you once. I didn’t listen. But now I’m on the other side of the tunnel, so I get to say it. You should really, really play Nocturne. It’s good.

Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion (Nintendo Switch, 2018)

Octo Expansion is what Splatoon 2′s single player mode should have been from the start. Don’t get me wrong, the packed in single player campaign is fine, but it’s basically a level pack for Splatoon 1′s. Octo Expansion, on the other hand, is 100% fresh. Structurally it’s much more diverse, with the campaign taking place over 80 mostly-bite-sized missions with varying objectives. There’s a couple of stinkers in there, but overall the quality of the missions is much higher than what was in the original single player campaign. They can actually be pretty tough sometimes too! It was fun to see some actual challenge in a Splatoon campaign. Everything wrapped around the core gameplay of Octo Expansion is kind of phenomenal. The setting and visual design is super weird, the music is way more mellow than anything else that’s come out of the series and creates a great sense of atmosphere, and the writing is actually genuinely pretty great. There’s a lot of funny dialogue and good character moments. They made me like Pearl! The weird gremlin that eats mayo! She’s my friend now! The last half an hour or so of Octo Expansion is also straight up my favorite sequence from a game I played this year too. Don’t sleep on this thing just because it’s DLC. It’s legitimately great.

Monster Hunter: World (PlayStation 4, 2018)

At the outset I was incredibly skeptical of Monster Hunter: World. This wasn’t entirely fair to the game, as a lot of this feeling was based on its initial E3 reveal trailer kinda sorta matching up to some mostly not true pre-E3 leaks, namely that it would be much more action heavy to cater to Western audiences and tie into the then unannounced Monster Hunter movie (which, as an aside, looks like a trainwreck that I desperately want to see). You can probably pretty easily find some tweets and posts from me around that time saying that the game looks like trash because of some misinterpreted new game mechanic. I am here to say that I am a big wrong dumbass and Monster Hunter: World is very good. You might be surprised to hear this, but it’s Monster Hunter! With a bunch of good and well-executed gameplay refinements! And graphics that aren’t repurposed from a PS2 game! It’s a ton of fun and I put a lot of time into it, but it’s not without its flaws. The number of monsters and weapons is comparatively way lower than in previous games, mostly due to that whole not repurposing PS2 models thing. It’s still kind of clunky in a lot of the places Monster Hunter has been historically clunky in, but also in some pretty big new ways, mainly around playing multiplayer. Also the story, while it’s as bland as it’s ever been, is exponentially more intrusive thanks to the addition of voiced cutscenes (which need to be triggered before the game lets you bring other players into story missions, causing a lot of that clunk I mentioned earlier). It’s all nothing game-ruining, of course. The game wouldn’t be on the list if it was! Monster Hunter: World exceeded my expectations, and I’m super looking forward to playing the recently announced G Rank expansion when it comes out next year.

Contra: Hard Corps (Sega Genesis, 1994)

I wish I could go back in time and kick my own stupid ass for not playing this sooner. I’d written off Contra: Hard Corps for the longest time based solely on some bullshit I read on the internet at an age where I just took other peoples’ opinions and made them my own. This and Castlevania Bloodlines were the bad ones, the ones some weird b-team crapped out for the Genesis while the SNES got the good stuff like Contra 3: Alien Wars. Well, it turns out... they were right about Bloodlines. But MAN were they wrong about Hard Corps. Hard Corps is the best Contra game. It fucking rules. I would have gone on with my life never giving the game a glance if not for this excellent Giant Bomb feature happening, and a couple of episodes in I knew I had to play it for myself. Contra: Hard Corps is fucking nuts. It’s balls to the wall 100% of the time. There’s so many unique enemies and wild bosses and they’re all never not exploding. The game has four characters with unique weapons and multiple different level paths that have totally different levels, bosses, and story beats. Oh, and the soundtrack fucking rips. Sometimes it’s a little too much, and there are definitely some sequences and boss attacks that are total gotchas that you can’t survive without prior knowledge of how they work. I’d also be remiss not to give a special shoutout to level 4′s awful, tedious, unskippable-on-any-route boss. But god damn if the rest of Hard Corps doesn’t outshine these flaws. It’s the high water mark for insane non-stop 16-bit action.

Deltarune (PC, 2018)

Does this count? It’s a demo for a full game that won’t be out for a real long time... I suppose it does, it’s self-contained enough. Deltarune, the free demo for the sort of but also sort of not sequel to Undertale, is unsurprisingly good as hell. Less surprising for sure, as Undertale is a known quantity these days, but I’m still way into it. The story is interesting and full of charming characters, and the battle system has been overhauled to include things like multiple party members with different abilities while still keeping all the things that made Undertale’s battles novel. The music is, of course, fantastic, and the visuals look much nicer while adhering to the same general style as the previous game. It’s fairly short, and some character development feels a little rushed because of it, but again, it’s a small chunk of the beginning of a much larger game. I can’t imagine any of this stuff wouldn’t be expanded upon. It’s hard to judge this thing story-wise due to the nature of it being a demo. I thoroughly enjoyed what is there, though, and look forward to playing the rest of the game in 50 years or whatever.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Nintendo Switch, 2018)

This game is so much. Even though the first thing I learned about this game was “everyone is here”, I still wasn’t ready for how much it is. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is maybe too much. Of course, as previously stated, everyone (meaning every single previous playable Smash Bros. character) is here. Most of the previous stages are also present. This was all known. Where the game really, truly goes overboard though is in the single-player content. There’s the usual classic mode for every character, this time specifically structured around a theme for each character, but the vast majority of it is actually comprised of the all-new spirits system. Spirits are non-playable video game characters that you can collect and equip to your fighters for special abilities, sort of like a less terrible version of Smash Bros. Brawl’s stickers. You collect these spirits through spirit battles, which are fights themed around the character the spirit represents via extremely clever usage of already existing fighters and mechanics. These battles range from the obvious (Big the Cat’s battle tasks you with fighting a giant purple Incineroar), to the obscure (fight the main characters from Zangeki no Reginleiv as represented by Link and female Robin while you’re giant-sized), to the creative (Porygon’s spirit puts you in a fight against wireframe Little Mac and Akira from Virtua Fighter, normally an assist trophy), to the downright in-jokey (the spirit of Ness’s Father, displayed as the telephone spirte from Earthbound, makes you fight an invisible Solid Snake). There are like 1200 spirits. The vast majority of them have an associated battle. And you don’t just experience these battles through a menu, at least half of them are implemented into the 30 hour long adventure mode, World of Light, which has you fighting spirits, navigating dungeons, and facing bosses. It’s insane. They focused on spirits in lieu of collectible trophies this time around and they absolutely made the correct choice. The trophies in the last two Super Smash Bros. games were fine, but easier access to existing 3D models of most represented characters made them inherently less exciting than Melee’s tailor-made collection of high quality (considering the time period) renders, many of which would never receive a 3D model again. The spirits system manages to be exciting in the same way Melee's trophies were, fostering a genuine sense of anticipation to see what they cooked up next, but in the context of gameplay. They completely knocked it out of the park. Smash 4 made it on one of these lists long ago, and I essentially just said “it’s more Smash Bros. and that’s good”. Smash Ultimate is also more Smash Bros., but it’s SO much more Smash Bros. It’s so much more extremely good Smash Bros. The only things I can ding it for are some totally subjective stage preferences (where the hell is Poké Floats) and some slightly less than optimal music sorting decisions. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is, ultimately, the ultimate Super Smash Bros.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Nintendo Switch, 2018): Remember Castlevania 3? Inti Creates sure did! This prequel to the still unreleased Koji Igarashi Kickstarter project Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is an unabashed love letter to Castlevania 3, and it’s pretty good. Mom Hid My Game! (Nintendo Switch, 2017): A charming little game in the style of those old escape the room Flash games. It even looks like one (in the literal sense, not the pejorative). It’s not tough or replayable really, but it is $5 and consistently absurd and surprising. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (PlayStation 4, 2018): Yakuza 6 is kind of a weird juxtaposition. It’s the final chapter of Kazuma Kiryu’s story, but also the first game to use the Yakuza team’s new Dragon Engine. The story end of things is a good, solid sendoff for a bunch of characters I’m going to miss very dearly, but the gameplay feels very formative and limited in a way that sort of reminds me of Yakuza 1. I had a good time with it overall, but I hope they manage to dial it in like they did with the previous decade of Yakuza games and make something truly excellent again. Looking at you, Judge Eyes. Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth (Nintendo 3DS, 2017): Etrian Odyssey V is a return to basics for the series, ditching things like overworlds and sub-dungeons and just pitting your party against one big labyrinth. Honestly, gotta say, I miss the stuff they left behind! The core of Etrian Odyssey is still super strong so I had fun regardless, but the overall simplicity of the game and the changes to how classes work had me missing EOIV more often than not. Soundtrack’s great though, as expected. Sonic Mania Plus (Nintendo Switch, 2018): To be completely honest, most of the stuff they added to Sonic Mania in Plus really isn’t that fantastic. Mighty’s spike and projectile immunity is fun, but Ray’s flying is more interesting than effective. Encore mode is largely disappointing, with most of it feeling identical to the base game outside of its all-new (and too hard for their own good) special stages. HOWEVER, Sonic Mania Plus was an exceptional excuse to play through Sonic Mania another six or so times. Congratulations to Sonic Mania for being game of the year for two years in a row. WarioWare Gold (Nintendo 3DS, 2018): A good compilation game, executed much better than in the team’s previous Rhythm Heaven Megamix, but lacking in reasons to come back after you’ve played all the games. There’s the usual toy room stuff WarioWare has had since Touched!, but it’s bogged down by reliance on a currency system and the fact that sooooo many things you unlock are just parts that feed into a larger, not that interesting thing. The part where you play WarioWare is great though, and the new visuals make it all feel fresh even though it’s mostly older games. Mario Tennis Aces (Nintendo Switch, 2018): I had a brief, passionate love affair with Mario Tennis Aces. The core gameplay is rad as hell and more like a fighting game than a tennis game, with multiple different special shots and a focus on meter management. I played like 40+ hours of it between the full game and the demo and never even touched the single player (which makes it technically not count for this list, but, shut up). I got 2nd place at its very first tournament at CEO 2018. Then I... stopped playing. It had some weird balance issues, sure, but I think it was more a victim of circumstance rather than anything else. I moved basically right after CEO and just never went back to it. It’s still incredible though. I hope this game’s systems are the standard for Mario Tennis games going forward.

We made it! Bottom of the list! It was a shorter trip this time, but I’m still proud of you for making it here all the same. Thank you for reading the words I typed about video games. I’m looking to get this web page back into gear in 2019, so you can probably expect part 2 of The Best Babies sometime in January. Hopefully I’ll actually play some video games too so I can bring back Breviews on the first of February. Until then!

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Cool Games I Finished In 2017 (In No Real Order)

Civilization The year is nearing its end, so that means it’s once again time for one of these. 2017 has been rough for pretty much everyone, but even divorced from the state of the world this was unquestionably the worst year of my life. 2017 was a goddamn nightmare where nearly everything went wrong for me in the most major way possible. Consequently I didn’t get to do as much writing as I would have liked, and I ended up playing fewer games with almost all of them being 2017 releases. But! The video games were very fun!! So it all cancels out!!! Everything’s okay!!!! Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2017.

Dandy Dungeon: Legend of Brave Yamada (iOS, 2017)

Dandy Dungeon is weird as hell, which makes sense given that it was made by a lot of people who originally worked on games like Chulip and Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland. It’s a free-to-play phone game that’s sort of a cross between a puzzle game and a dungeon crawler. Guide your semi-nude hero Yamada to the exit of the 5x5 dungeon grid in a single line, trying to touch every tile along the way, gathering treasure and beating up enemies to level up. Solving the floors and making the perfect line is satisfying, the story and enemies are all very strange, and there's a ton of content. The free-to-play monetization isn’t too obtrusive either, you can either buy straight up convenience features like unlimited energy and a mid-dungeon item storage system or buy rice balls that can be used as gacha entries or continues if you die in a dungeon and don’t want to give up your treasure. I felt 100% okay with giving the weirdos who made this game money. The same people put out another game this year, Million Onion Hotel, and I barely put any time into it because I just kept playing Dandy Dungeon. I’m very much looking forward to really playing that whenever the hell I finally burn out on this.

Yakuza 0 (PlayStation 4, 2017)

Yakuza 0 is a hell of a game, and a hell of an introduction to the Yakuza series for anyone who hasn’t played it. Set in 1988, the game follows series mainstays Kiryu and Majima as they deal with the events that made them who they are in the games to follow. While I ended up still liking Yakuza 5 more if only for the sheer scope and variety of it, Yakuza 0 is very easily the second best game in the series. It has one of the most straightforward, coherent and engaging narratives out of all of them, it pulls off its setting so well that it made me sort of nostalgic for an era I wasn’t even alive for, and the localization/writing is unquestionably the best the series has had. Almost every single sidequest is funny or memorable in some way and I just can’t say that about the rest of the games. It’s not flawless. The combat unsurprisingly pulls very heavily from Yakuza 5 but with multiple fighting styles for Kiryu and Majima taking the place of multiple characters, and I mostly found myself just sticking with one style for each of them. Beast and Breaker were just too good. The story, while mostly good as previously stated, does have its stumbling points. Some characters and events definitely aren’t given enough breathing room, mostly on the Majima side of things, and weirdly enough the game holds back on having Kiryu and Majima interact for the most part. Overall though, Yakuza 0 is a fantastic encapsulation of why I love this series so damn much and the absolute best jumping on point a newcomer could ask for. Plus Space Harrier is in it! Every game is better when you can also play Space Harrier.

NieR: Automata (PlayStation 4, 2017)

I feel like every year I do one of these lists there’s a game where I start off by saying “This game is good, but”. NieR: Automata is this year’s game. NieR: Automata is a good game, but I did not have the fervent, visceral reaction to it that most other people seem to have had, and my feelings are muddied even further by the lingering feeling that I SHOULD have. I love the first NieR. It’s one of my favorite games of all time. I love PlatinumGames. They’re one of my favorite developers of all time. Yet I came away from Automata somewhat... I don’t know if it’s disappointed. I guess “left wanting” might be a more accurate description? Again, don’t get me wrong here, this is a good game. There’s a lot to like in NieR: Automata. It’s a wild ride, but for me that’s... kind of it? The game shuttles you from crazy setpiece to crazy setpiece, but the second I stopped to think about anything that happened in any sort of detail it all just got real murky. I didn’t feel connected to any of the characters, outside two exceptions, and one of those is a character from the first game that I already loved. NieR: Automata’s storytelling is much more reliant and focused on its themes and imagery than anything that really actually happens during the course of the story, and I’ve never been a huge fan of narratives like that. I need a strong connection to characters and events and places, and whereas the first NieR had that by the truckload, Automata super doesn’t. There’s also the part where a lot of what Automata does, I feel the original game did better. Automata’s music is good, but NieR’s is better. The multiple playthrough system feels like it’s just tacked on because the first game did it, where in the original it was absolutely vital to that game’s story. Same goes for the choice you make in the final ending. The most I can say as far as improvements go is that the combat, while about as mindless, certainly looks better and overall the sidequests are less tedious and grindy. It’s been a very weird experience seeing the huge, widespread positive reaction to this game essentially mirror my feelings on the first game while I’m just sort of left to grumble about how the first game did all that better under my breath. Not that I’m not glad it got a positive reception! It’s great that this game has been such a success and that so many people have finally had their Yoko Taro Moment™. Like I’ve gone out of my way to state multiple times: the game is still good. There’s some wild shit to see in NieR: Automata, and while it didn’t leave a positive lasting impression on me, I very much had a good time with it in the moment.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo Switch, 2017)

I thought I was done with open world games. I had pretty much decided I was two years ago. I was so tired of the checklists, the boring traversal, the endless swaths of fucking nothing between mission A and mission B, the heaps of useless collectible garbage littering the ground trying to trick you into thinking you’re doing something. I was perfectly content with never playing an open world game again, and when Nintendo started promoting the new Zelda with that familiar Bethesda-esque “go any direction, climb any mountain” rhetoric and showed you climbing towers to reveal the map, I for all intents and purposes checked the fuck out. I didn’t care that it was Zelda, I didn’t care that it was Nintendo, I was just fucking done with all of that... I thought. The more time went on, the more impressions got out, and the more impressions got out, the more of my individual sticking points seemed to have been addressed. Yeah, you climb towers, but all that does is fill in the topography of the map. You don’t get flooded with a million activity and collectible icons, it’s up to you to scope out what looks interesting. And most importantly, while the landmass is large, there’s always something around the corner. I decided to get Breath of the Wild along with my Switch and I’m so glad I did. If I hadn’t been whittled down by pre-release chatter I would have missed out on one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s like Nintendo explicitly set out to fix every problem I had with open world games. The way the systems in the world interact with each other, how much of a joy it is to explore and traverse the terrain, and the fact that there really IS always something to find make for a breathtaking game. If you go in any direction, you’ll trip over dozens of neat things to do and see. If you climb any mountain, there’s a good chance there will be something waiting for you at the top (and along the way), from a simple Korok seed puzzle to a full-blown shrine dungeon. The game gives you no truly firm direction once you leave the tutorial area, so it really is up to you to explore and find what you want. You can even run straight for the final boss if you want! The traditional Zelda-style puzzles are all super smart and satisfying to solve. I even liked the Divine Beast dungeons and boss fights, which I feel like I’m in the minority about. I finally took on Ganon after about 100 hours of playing the game and I hadn’t been so sad that a game was over since I beat Persona 3. Breath of the Wild is just an incredible, once in a lifetime game. I can’t wait to do it all again next year when I do another playthrough with all the DLC.

Persona 5 (PlayStation 4, 2017)

Persona 3 will likely always be nearest and dearest to my heart, but Persona 5 is objectively the best Persona game. They’ve polished the Persona formula to such a perfect mirror sheen in this one and I’ve never seen a game so consistently and effortlessly ooze such a concentrated amount of liquid capital-“S” Style before. The plot doesn’t intimately revolve around the cast to the degree Persona 4′s does, but they’ve made another charming band of anime teens nonetheless. They’ve either restored or re-worked nearly every mechanical aspect that was dropped between Persona 3 and 4. The soundtrack is incredible, there’s actually a decent amount of non-party S-Links again, the end of the game sticks the landing in a way Persona 4 very much does not... I could keep going. Persona 5 just plain rules. It’s the only game in the series where (even though I haven’t yet) I’ve actually wanted to jump in and do a New Game+ run.

Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap (Nintendo Switch, 2017)

As I may have mentioned in a certain other article from this year, I have had very little love for Wonder Boy over the years. That changed a bit when I decided to try out Monster World IV a few years ago, and I think I’m officially a Wonder Boy Liker after playing The Dragon’s Trap. A remake of Wonder Boy 3 for the Master System, Dragon’s Trap is essentially just an extremely pretty coat of paint on a very early Metroidvania sort of game, but it’s remarkable how well the core gameplay holds up. You start as a human and very early on you’re transformed into a dragon, and you explore the world until you reach a boss which, upon being defeated, transforms you into a mouse. Your mouse form has the ability to enter narrow spaces and stick to certain walls, which allows you to reach new areas, bosses and transformations. Defeated enemies drop coins that you can use to purchase new weapons and armor from shops hidden across the world. It’s fairly simple, but I think that’s the reason it’s still so enjoyable today. The controls are tight and responsive and it doesn’t really date itself in too many ways. They went to great lengths to recreate the original game, down to being able to swap between the remade and classic graphics and music with a button press. Old passwords from the original game even work in the remake. The new art and music are beautiful and the game is the perfect length to not overstay its welcome. You can tell the people who made this really love the original game, and they absolutely did right by it.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (PlayStation 4, 2017)

I never in a million years expected to like Resident Evil 7 as much as I did. I played the demo back when it came out and thought it was okay, and I mainly got the full game so I could play something on my PSVR. It’s kind of crazy how, after so many years of Resident Evil stumbling, Capcom managed to just get everything back on track just like that. They made Resident Evil tense and scary again. The VR is insanely effective but even playing through on a regular ol’ TV, which I did multiple times after my initial VR playthrough, they manage to capture a really good, persistent sense of dread. For most of the game, anyway. The last third definitely slips a bit too far back into action game territory, and while it’s still enjoyable it’s definitely weaker than what came before. I beat this for the first time right before the next game on the list came out, and even while super deep into that I couldn’t stop thinking about Resident Evil 7. I really need to go back and play all the DLC.

Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo Switch, 2017)

2017 was Nintendo’s year. They released my favorite console in a good long while with the Switch, launched it with one of the greatest games of all time, and closed out the year with another incredible game in Super Mario Odyssey. Mario Odyssey has finally dethroned Mario 64 as my favorite 3D exploration Mario game. It’s like Breath of the Wild in that there’s something to find in every nook and cranny, but condensed down into multiple, more tightly designed areas. It’s an absolute joy to play. I 100%ed the game and not once in the 50-ish hours that took did I get tired of controlling Mario. The movement options all flow together so naturally and complement the spaces you explore so well. Landing a long jump > hat throw > dive > hat bounce > dive combo across a huge gap was the most satisfying thing in the world to pull off even as I grabbed the very last power moon. The variety of the worlds and challenges and things to capture kept me in a constant state of excitement about what was coming up next, and the game is consistently charming in both weird new ways and a couple of very effective nostalgic ones. My only real complaints are that I think it’s maybe the easiest Mario game ever made, and I wish more of the platforming challenges were baked into the worlds proper instead of cordoned off into their own little challenge rooms, but basically everything else about the game manages to make those minor somehow. Mario Odyssey is distilled happiness in video game form, and the world needs more of that.

Sonic Mania (PlayStation 4, 2017)

Ohhhh myyyyy Goddddddddddddd Sonic Mania. I cannot fucking believe how awesome Sonic Mania is. I love the Genesis Sonic games so fucking much and while I like Sonic Adventure 1 despite itself, there hasn’t been a good Sonic game since Sonic 3 & Knuckles. The Genesis games always were and will always be great fucking video games, despite what internet fuckboys say because Sonic’s an easy target to dunk on. I’ll take Sonic 3 & Knuckles over Super Mario World any day of the fucking week. Fight me. I’ll cut you. With Sonic Mania, there is FINALLY, fucking TWENTY-THREE GODDAMN YEARS LATER, a legitimately great Sonic The Hedgehog game again, and I’m stunned. I was INSANELY skeptical about this game from the minute it was announced until basically the moment I played it. Yeah, they brought in people from the hacking and fan-game community to work on this one instead of letting Sonic Team touch it, but I’m close enough to those communities to know that that on its own is NOT enough to guarantee the game would be good. Yeah, Taxman and Stealth made an extremely good replica of the Sonic 1-3&K engine, but they absolutely did not have the design chops to tackle anything but ports successfully. That new version of Hidden Palace they added into the iOS port of Sonic 2 was a complete trash fire. Thankfully they linked up with PagodaWest Games, a company made up of a lot of the non-insane elements behind the old Sonic 2 HD project, who as it turns out very much did have the design chops. Together they made something incredible. It obviously controls perfectly given the engine, but the levels are so fun and well-crafted. The classic levels manage to mix in so many different elements from other levels that didn’t quite make it in the game on top of there being weird twists on those on TOP of all the completely new elements, and the brand new levels are lavish with all sorts of super fun new gimmicks and details. The game looks fucking gorgeous, going for a sort of “what if they had made a 2D Sonic for the Saturn” look that it pulls off great, even going so far as to render the special stages in low-poly 3D. The music is P-H-E-N-O-M-E-N-A-L, sounding like a lost ‘90s Japanese arrange CD but without all the bad aspects that usually come with those. There’s so many dumb, great little details for hardcore classic Sonic and Sega fans littered throughout the game. They managed to fucking combine Oil Ocean and Sandopolis, my least favorite zone from Sonic 2 and one of the worst zones in the entire SERIES, and have me come away from it not hating it. It’s masterful. It’s beautiful. It’s right up there with Sonic 3 & Knuckles for best in the series. Nothing this year made me so genuinely, personally delighted. Sonic Mania was made just for me and I love it and I want another one with all original levels as soon as possible. Please let these people make video games for me forever.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Nintendo Switch, 2017)

The original Xenoblade is one of my favorite RPGs of the last generation. Then they released Xenoblade Chronicles X for the Wii U and broke my goddamn heart. They tossed out nearly everything I loved about the first game in favor of haphazardly dumping as many disjointed game mechanics as they could on top of bland open world exploration and needlessly grindy progression. It was such a hard swerve that by the time they had gotten around to announcing a proper Xenoblade 2 for the Switch I had basically abandoned all hope of it being a game I’d like. But for some reason, I still decided to give Monolithsoft one last shot. And I’m glad I did! While not quite as cohesive and instantly-endearing as the original, they definitely righted the ship. There’s a bunch of weird mechanics, but in the good Xenoblade 1 way where they mete them all out at an appropriate pace and explain them and they all fit together. The cast of characters is likable, the music is great, the gameplay is engaging all the way through. They managed to pull it off, and I’m back on board for a potential Xenoblade 3.

These games were also cool, I just had less words to say about them: Splatoon 2 (Nintendo Switch, 2017): Splatoon is great. Splatoon 2 is more of that. The new weapons are fun, the new maps are cool, Salmon Run is the most fun I’ve ever had with a horde mode. I played it for like 100 hours already. Not too much else to say! Play Splatoon 2! Hitman (PlayStation 4, 2016): Hitman is an amazing sandbox. Whether I was following along with the authored ways to kill my targets, doing things my own way or trying to get out of a situation that went completely south, Hitman constantly surprised me with the variety of things I could do and options I could take advantage of. And there’s so damn much content to do it all in.   DDRMAX, DDRMAX2 & Dance Dance Revolution Extreme (PlayStation 2, 2002, 2003 & 2004): This doesn’t really teeeechnically fit on this list but I would be remiss not to bring up my rekindled love affair with DDR this year. My very good friend who I am very appreciative towards at all times Geoff generously gifted me an old Cobalt Flux dance pad back in like June and I have been playing DDR again ever since and it’s still great. I can clear some songs on heavy now. Thanks Geoff. Glittermitten Grove (Steam, 2016): A very normal game about fairies, and not about shaving. Tekken 7 (PlayStation 4, 2017): Tekken 7 is the first Tekken game I’ve cared about in like a decade. I couldn’t really tell you exactly why, to be honest, but the fact of the matter is that Tekken 7 is very fun to play and I highly recommend it. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (PlayStation 4, 2017): I think the gameplay of this is worse than the first game, but everything else is stronger. Hopefully they fix it up and make a game that’s great all around next time. Gundam Versus (PlayStation 4, 2017): Gundam Versus is basically a team based Virtual On. I had a lot of fun with an old version of the game at various events I went to throughout the year and I had a lot of fun with this one even though I didn’t play it nearly as much as I wanted to. Clowning on people with Guntank in 1v1 is probably the hardest I laughed all year.

And that’s it! That’s 2017! It’s done! Good riddance! Thank you all again for bothering to read my video game words. If you need me, I’ll be training to deliver many extremely savage elbow drops to 2018 until it gives me what I want.

[coolgreatwebsite]

Cool Games I Finished In 2016 (In No Real Order)

Hoo boy. 2016, huh? It’s an overplayed meme at this point but man, what a shitshow of a year! Luckily I had some pretty good distractions, and now the time has come to write about them in the third one of these. The first one on this website, too! That’s exciting. Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2016.

Omega Boost (PlayStation, 1999)

Omega Boost is a high-speed mech action game from Polyphony Digital. That’s right, the Gran Turismo guys. This is the only game they’ve ever made that wasn’t about cars, and it’s fantastic. The controls are simple, fluid and responsive, letting you easily navigate 3D space (and outer space) to blast the hell out of tons of enemies and really fun, crazy bosses. The game looks super sharp, especially the wireframe computer terminal looking mission briefings, and sounds… extremely 1999, but in a way I appreciate. As a nice bonus exclusively for me, it’s full of goofy as hell FMV cutscenes. It really is just the full package. It’s a shame more people don’t talk about it, but it’s even more of a shame that Polyphony’s been trapped in Gran Turismo Hell. They’ve got real chops, and Omega Boost is like a little window into an alternate dimension where they got to flex them instead of making the same car game for 19 years.

Kirby: Planet Robobot (Nintendo 3DS, 2016)

On most days I would tell you Kirby is my favorite Nintendo franchise, but I thought 2011′s Kirby’s Return to Dreamland was mediocre. While it was a welcome return to Kirby Superstar’s gameplay style after about 15 years of the series sticking closer to Kirby’s Adventure, I just wasn’t feeling it. The level design was uninspired, the new powers were uninteresting, the co-op gimmick added nothing and the game felt like it lacked its own identity, from the music sounding straight out of Kirby 64 to the final boss sequence being nearly identical to that of Superstar’s. 2014′s Kirby Triple Deluxe was a step back in the right direction, building off Return’s framework with the important addition of fun levels, powers and bosses. Then 2016 came around and they released arguably the best damn game in the series. Kirby: Planet Robobot takes everything great about Kirby games, nails it, then pours on even more. The levels are varied and engaging, especially the ones centered around using the titular Robobot. The new powers are fun with the standout being ESP, which allows you to dodge around the screen and parry like some sort of super cute Souls game. The game looks vibrant, the music is great, and the final boss is without a doubt the best in a series with a history of great final bosses. I still slightly prefer Superstar due to its co-op play and unique structure, but Planet Robobot stands right up there with it as the pinnacle of Kirby.

Fighting Vipers 2 (Arcade, 1998)

This one is kind of an outlier for these lists as I didn’t really “finish” it, technically. In fact, I only played it for a day! Anyway, I think the first Fighting Vipers is a pretty cool game. It was basically AM2 making a less stiff and more high speed version of Virtua Fighter 2, and its engine was also used for the excellent Fighters Megamix. Despite my appreciation of the first game though, I had never played the sequel… mainly because it never came out in America. It wasn’t until friend of the site Zerochan brought a setup to this year’s CEOtaku that I finally took the time to sit down and play it. Turns out Fighting Vipers 2 kind of rules. FV2 shakes off all residual jank of being “fast VF2″ (I just realized the acronyms are the same letters in reverse order, fuck) and really comes into its own. Everything feels great to do. Movement is fluid and responsive, attacks come out fast and hit hard, the counterattack system is much more quick and fun. You can even counterattack counterattacks, leading to some real crazy exchanges. The new characters are even weirder than the returning ones, featuring a hacker girl with a giant robot bear and a dude who just uses a whole damn bike he carries around on his back as a weapon. It’s great, great enough that my one session with it got it on this list, and I’m really bummed out that we never ended up getting a Fighting Vipers 3 around the time Virtua Fighter 4 came out.

Gotta Protectors (Nintendo 3DS, 2016)

Gotta Protectors is a hard game to describe. It’s a mishmash of a bunch of different elements, and I guess the most accurate description would be a… beat ‘em up RPG Musou-like with tower defense elements? That’s a mouthful. What I am sure of is how fun it is. You’d be excused for not knowing this, but this game is actually the sequel to 2010’s Protect Me Knight, released for Microsoft’s ill-fated Xbox Live Indie Games service by Ancient, Yuzo Koshiro’s company. Gotta Protectors takes the first game’s base formula of running around a map, setting up defenses and destroying f$%in’ goblins then dumps a mountain of new things onto it. Two new characters, an in-depth skill and weapon system, dozens of levels and a level editor, new mechanics like keys and enemy spawners, the list goes on. Ancient also managed to get some of the best composers of the arcade and 8-bit eras to handle the soundtrack, which is excellent and even has an FM synth version available as DLC. The only thing to really hold against Gotta Protectors is the fact that you can only play co-op over local wireless. It’s tons of fun, has tons of content and is a true, heartfelt love letter to the 8-bit era of video games from a group of people who not only grew up with it, but also a few who helped shape it.

Blue Revolver (PC, 2016)

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m friends with the lead designer/programmer and lead artist of this game and I helped test it. That has no bearing on my feelings for the game, I just like to put it out there for anyone who cares. That all said, Blue Revolver is the best shoot ‘em up I’ve played in a very long time (not that I play a million of ‘em, mind you, but I like the genre a lot despite being kinda bad at it). The scoring system is dead simple: build a chain of up to 8 defeated enemies with your regular weapon, then cash that in by defeating enemies with your special weapon for a limited-time score multiplier, repeat. It’s immediately understandable but incredibly deep, and adds a fun layer of strategy not only to aiming for high scores but also to surviving. Do you use your special weapon ammo on defeating a tough midboss, or do you save it for a spot you know you can rack up points towards an extra life in? It’s also full of tons of small, well thought out touches that go a long way towards making the game stand out, such as using bombs giving you an extended period of invulnerability. This not only lets you get your bearings and readjust to bullet patterns after the bomb’s done doing what it does, but it also opens up the possibility to use bombs offensively and do some real dirt to enemies while you’re invincible. The game also features a rank system that dynamically adjusts the difficulty, but doesn’t feel overbearing like some other games’ implementation of the idea, and a mission mode designed to subtly teach you how to get better on top of adding some variety to the game with unique objectives. Blue Revolver also benefits from a sharp look, catchy soundtrack and general overall polish that I feel like you don’t really see from western indie shoot ‘em ups. It feels like it could have been a Japanese arcade release, and I feel like that’s about the highest praise you can give a game like this. If you even sort of like shoot 'em ups, you owe it to yourself to give Blue Revolver a shot.

Pocket Card Jockey (Nintendo 3DS, 2016)

If in 2015 you told me I would spend 48 hours of the next year playing a combination horse racing/solitaire game, I would have called you insane. I’m hard pressed to think of two things I could care about less. But here we are in 2016, and I spent two full days of my life completely addicted to Pocket Card Jockey. One of Game Freak’s few non-Pokémon games, Pocket Card Jockey is, in a word, nuts. You’re a terrible horse racing jockey who gets kicked by a horse and dies, and is then brought back to life with the ability to link his horse racing skill with solitaire. Do good at solitaire, do good at the race. Simple, right? Not so simple. Pocket Card Jockey layers a ridiculous amount of mechanical depth on top of this premise, and knowing how to wrangle it all is the key to victory. Knowing where to position your horse and when, how to keep your horse’s mood up, how much you should rub the giddyap button to increase your unity level, what bonus cards to go for on the track and in the solitaire game, how much stamina to expend on the final stretch and a million other things are all pivotal to doing well. And that’s not even getting into the horse leveling, skills and breeding mechanics. It’s a lot to take in, but somehow the game manages to tell you everything you need to know without it seeming too daunting. Pocket Card Jockey isn’t perfect though, as winning or losing can rely on luck to a frustrating degree. You can feel like you did everything right and still lose, or literally every single thing possible can go wrong and it can be completely infuriating. But when you finally manage to win that race that’s been slipping away from you for generations, the feeling of satisfaction is immense. Layer on a bunch of weird characters, goofy writing, fun music and cute visuals and you got yourself a real triple crown winner! That’s a horse thing, right? Thoroughbred!

Super Robot Wars OG: The Moon Dwellers (PlayStation 4, 2016)

The first two Super Robot Taisen Original Generation games are probably my two favorite games on the Game Boy Advance. Combining engaging strategy RPG gameplay with (for the system) fantastic visuals, incredible music, fun characters and cool as hell robots, I was obsessed with these games in high school. Then they stopped bringing them to English speaking territories. The series moved on to the PS2 and PS3, and I was just kinda stuck admiring them from afar. I’d even sort of convinced myself that I didn’t care about anything past the GBA games, but I super cared. I desperately wanted to play another one of these games, but I didn’t exactly speak the Japanese to be able to do so. This year my wish was finally sorta halfway granted, as Banpresto announced that the newest game in the series, The Moon Dwellers, would be getting an Asian English release. I was so excited that, in the time between pre-ordering the game and it being delivered to me, I read fan translations and watched videos of all the games I had missed. Then the game finally arrived, and it… was good. Not the instant classic the first two were, but it was good. Although it isn’t titled as such, this game is very much a Gaiden entry in the series. It’s heavily built off the last full game on PS3 and uses a lot of assets from it, and it’s kinda skimpy on secrets and replay value. But it’s still one of those games, and still has plenty of what made me love those first two entries. It was good, and I’m glad I got to play it, minimally understandable Asian English translation and all.

These games were also cool, I just had less words to say about them:

Strider 2 (PlayStation, 1999): I’m not the world’s biggest Strider fan, but Strider 2 is undeniably cool. The movement is really freeform and fast and lets you do some sick ninja shit with ease. Short, replayable, fun. Bravely Second: End Layer (Nintendo 3DS, 2016): For as much as I love Bravely Default, I only liked its sequel. Its mechanical improvements and new jobs are all nice, but I feel like it wasn’t as strong when it came to everything else. The music especially suffered from its lack of REVO. Still worth a playthrough! Galaxy Force II (Arcade, 1988): Galaxy Force II is impressive as hell. Sega’s Y board and the lessons they learned from previous games resulted in the ultimate culmination of the Super Scaler shooter. It’s really, really hard though. Pokkén Tournament (Wii U, 2016): A weird combination of 3D arena fighter and 2D fighting game, Pokkén Tournament manages to be entertaining despite its odd systems. It also had better online play than Street Fighter V, somehow. And I managed to make a man ragequit in real life at a tournament, so actually I love it. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (TurboGrafx-CD, 1993): I didn’t have a lot of experience with classic Castlevania, so I took the opportunity to fix that in 2016. Rondo of Blood not only stands out as the best old style Castlevania, it’s an absolute classic in its own right. Smart level design with branching paths, two playable characters, great boss fights, beautiful pixel art and a boss as hell soundtrack. I don’t have a bad thing to say about this game. Power Drift (Arcade, 1988): Another Sega Super Scaler game, but this time it’s a pure white-knuckle racing game. Really fast both in the gameplay and the rate it throws new tracks at you. A good time, except for when the collision detection gets wonky. Rhythm Heaven Megamix (Nintendo 3DS, 2016): I love Rhythm Heaven, so much so that even this greatest hits collection was exciting for me. It’s a good game with a lot of content, but some weird design decisions put me off a little bit and it’s the only game in the series I haven’t 100%ed. If you’ve never played a Rhythm Heaven game though, this is a hell of an entry to start with. Target Earth (Sega Genesis, 1990): Tough as nails mech action game. Super unforgiving, but super satisfying. Great soundtrack too. River City Tokyo Rumble (Nintendo 3DS, 2016): They made a new River City Ransom. It’s good. There’s not a lot to say, other than it doesn’t have co-op of any sort which is ridiculous. 3D Gunstar Heroes (Nintendo 3DS, 2015): I really like Gunstar Heroes, but I’m not fanatical about it so it’s easy to forget how technically impressive it is. 3D Gunstar Heroes reminds you of that fact by slamming it right in your face. It’s incredible how good the 3D is in this, like the game was designed around it all along. Easily the most impressive Sega 3D Classics release. Dariusburst Chronicle Saviours (PlayStation 4, 2015): I first played (a version of) this game at MAGFest earlier this year and only got around to getting my own copy near the end of it. Fun super-widescreen shoot em up with a ton of stages and a surprisingly in-depth special weapon mechanic. If you like sick beam clashes, this is the game for you.

And that's 2016! We made it. 2017's about 5 minutes away from this post going live, and I hope to have an article about DotEmu going up pretty soon. Provided we all survive. As always, thank you so much for making it all the way down here. I love you.

[rakiyang]

2015 was a good book year!

2015 was a good book year!

First of all, yay!! I completed my challenge! I’m pretty happy with how many books I read, especially since I started in June and it takes me a really long time to finish a book. Also yay! I find books over 250 pages a bit intimating, so having read a book over 500 pages long makes me pretty happy! Overall I read really good books!

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