It just might be because I'm in a good mood as of writing this, but 2019 has been a pretty good year all things considered. Some ups some downs, but I'm slowly learning that, yeah, I have a condition that makes the downs happen more often. I'm okay with that. I'm learning to live with that. I'm never gonna be as smart or productive as I used to be, but I can be smart in other ways. I'm learning to live with that too.
Making a list of the the Games of the Year is a tradition for this blog. It's less a celebration of the best games released this year, like most GotY lists tend to be, and more a personal reflection about what has happened in my life during the year, seeing through the games I played. Games, in any form, have been a constant companion throughout my life. They become as good an anchor for my memory as anything else.
I started this list at the beginning of the year, so I can go over them chronologically. Each game roughly represents a month, but not always.
1. Hollow Knight
This game has been in my list for three years in a row! God I love this game, but it's a slowburn kind of love. It frustrated me the first time I played it, but it gradually grew on me. The experience of having its world slowly opening up for me, of getting slowly better at it, of exploring and finding new things, always finding new things, well, it's really like nothing I've experienced before.
I'd be remiss to not mention the terrific soundtrack and sound design. Sometimes I'd just wander from room to room, listening to the music and soaking in that atmosphere. It's soothing. Even in a boss fight where I die again and again, I don't mind going back and trying again because there's always the soundtrack to look forward to.
I beat the game this year, my third year playing it, after putting off the final boss for so long. I played a lot in January, and then I played again in the middle of the year or so, and then I think I only finally reached the ending on November. It's funny. I used to have so much trouble with the game, but now I can leave it for months and when I come back, I'm better at it than I was before. I wonder what changed.
I'm still scouring through the game to this day, trying to get to the True Ending. I'll probably still be playing this into the next year.
2. Fire Emblem Awakening
There are three Fire Emblems in this list. 2019 for me is just straight up the Year of Fire Emblem, huh.
The first time I played Fire Emblem was in 2009 or so, playing the GBA games on an emulator. I enjoyed it a lot, but I never got very far and it just kinda fell off my radar. And then towards the end of last year I got my hands on Fire Emblem Fates and, whoops, I guess I just fell into the fandom.
This series does two things for me: it lets me obsess over tactics, and it lets me obsess over characters. I've ranted about this. By those two traits, Fire Emblem has constantly been in my mind throughout the year. I've just kinda been the happiest when I'm arranging stats in my head, figuring out classes and abilities and whatnot. And when I'm not messing with tactics, my brain wrote stories in my head of what the characters are up to.
Fire Emblem Awakening I will still say is the best of the series, if only because it's so laser-focused in what it wants to do. Like most Fire Emblems, the plot isn't particularly intricate, but the delivery is done so well, with such competence. Just one line of dialogue can put out so much lore and characterization without being overwhelming. And then it can fit three different story arcs in the same length that most games can only put one. The sheer, what should we call this, narrative economy? It's remarkable.
I started the game not knowing a thing about the game beyond that Lucina, Robin, and Chrom are characters who show up in Smash Bros.; how dare this game has three characters to represent it in Smash while other series barely have one? By the end I was like: Chrom is my husband, Lucina is my daughter. The entire game I keep thinking "every word that comes out of Chrom's mouth is narrative excellence". He's great. I love him.
3. Unavowed
I nearly-cried a lot during this game, didn't I? Not because it's sad, I guess, but because it touched a lot of my life that's pretty personal.
This game definitely was a lot for me, but oddly enough, I barely remember anything from it. I think, it's because this game filled a particularly empty time in my life, or I played it during at a time when I don't want to remember much. Huh.
I guess that's a sign that I should play it again! I actually remember starting a new game immediately after finishing it. The game has a lot of branches; I wanted to know what else changed if I made different choices. But I couldn't get into it the second time; my first playthrough already felt so definitive. Playing through it again but differently felt wrong, somehow.
Maybe that's changed. Maybe I'll make different decisions this time, and not just because I want to know what different decisions will do.
Speaking of which, I apparently wrote a short story based on a subplot in the game. It's story #4 in my short fiction collection. You can download the collection through that link, or read just the story here.
4. Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth
Oh, this is my commute game!
For my fourth semester of college I decided to not rent a place near school, choosing instead to stay at home so I can sleep in my own bed, under the same roof as my family, and have the occasional meal together. That does wonders to my health, by the way. I'm very close with my family, so being with them is much nicer than living alone.
The downside is that I have to take about 1.5-2 hours of commute by train, five days a week. It can get pretty exhausting, especially during rush hours. Can be pretty depressing too, just standing around doing nothing, waiting for the machines to move. Fortunately, I have a Nintendo 3DS, which is easy to whip out during those long and boring train rides. And during a silly browse through Amazon in March, I decided on a whim to buy Etrian Odyssey V, delivered all the way from the United States.
I love this game so much. It's basically a dungeon-crawler turn-based RPG with Atlus's usual brand of high difficulty. This thing is therapeutic. I can just casually play it to pass the time, anxiety-free, but my mind is still engaged with the gameplay, just enough I don't get kicked around by my other worries. It's grand.
As usual for the series, you create your own characters in Etrian Odyssey V and they go on an adventure up a maze-like structure dubbed the Yggdrasil Labyrinth. The character creation is simple enough: choose a pre-made character art, change their hair/eye colour, give them one of 30 preset voices, and choose their character class, done. Do this five times and you have a full team.
The story is uncomplicated and since the characters are entirely custom, there's no dialogue options either. It might be a bit barren for some people, but for me it gives a lot of narrative leeway. I made up my own stories for the characters, what their relationship is like, how they work into their class, moveset, and role during battle. The cheerful leader, the brooding warlock whom she was childhood friends with, the tribal prince who ran away from home looking for an adventure, the deathbringer mom friend, the suicidal old guy who can't help surviving because he wants to protect these silly kids. Their stories just kind of progress naturally in my head as I play through the game. I don't know if I'll ever write them down, but they're good companions for me on my long commute and at home when I need to unwind.
5. Return of the Obra Dinn
Funny thing about this one. I was actually going to buy Baba is You, on the sole reason that it's adorable and just the kind of puzzle game that I can puzzle through together with my sister. And then on checkout I decided on a whim to also buy it together with Return of the Obra Dinn, which I've been eyeing since last year but just haven't gotten around to getting. My sister was intrigued with its distinct art style, I was intrigued by all the mystery-detective thing I keep hearing about it.
It's funny, because to this day I haven't finished Baba is You.
Return of the Obra Dinn was an absolutely wonderful game to play together. You're exploring a ghost ship filled with corpses, armed with an incomplete book containing the profile of everyone on board, and a compass that lets you see the exact moment of their death. Your job is to match faces with names and titles and figure out how exactly they died. You're basically a detective: you look for clues, even the tiniest bits of information, and try to piece them together. There are 50 faces, 50 names, sharing one ship, with dozens of possible ways to die. You can't just randomly assign them. There's a logic to everything.
Playing together, it's a game of discussion, of pointing things that the other didn't notice, of saying, "Let's go see that scene again, I think I'm on to something", of "You fooool, no it's not that!". And then when everything comes together and we solve it, together, it was incredibly satisfying. I have so much fond memories of this game, and they won't be as strong if it's not a game we play together.
I wrote a thing about the "mystery" in Obra Dinn.
6. Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
When the 3DS was first released, my cousin was one of the first to get it. His 3DS has the Ambassador's Certificate, which doesn't actually give you much except a virtual certificate and a couple virtual console games, but it still feels special. A couple of years back, he gave the console to me because he didn't play it as much anymore.
I don't dare mess about too much with this 3DS. No custom firmware, not even changing the SD card that comes with it. It feels like something sacred, this first-edition 3DS that still works perfectly other than a broken R button.
Around June this year, I decided to play Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, which just happen to be one of the virtual console games that came with the Certificate. The Sacred Stones was my first Fire Emblem, about 10 years back, but I never finished it and lost the save file long ago. Playing it again was kind of like revisiting an old friend. I recognized a lot of the characters, but faintly. I even got some deja vu with the battle maps, even though I don't remember the intricacies. It was good to see it again.
I've heard that Sacred Stones is one of the easier Fire Emblems, and by this point I was already a veteran with hundreds of hours of Awakening and Fates under my belt, so I had plans to make it more challenging.
One: when someone die, they die, no resetting the battle to save them. I broke this rule a lot of times, because I am weak, but still by the end the death toll is slightly higher than other Fire Emblems I've played. Rest in peace, Artur, Marisa, Lute, Cornag, and if we're counting the part where I have to restart half the game because I did something stupid, also rest in peace Forde, Colm, Joshua.
Two: Don't use Seth for every battle.
Three, and this one I can't do anything about: I can't use the R button. R button in Sacred Stones is used to see unit's stats and items. If I can't use R, I can't check enemy's defense/attack. I can't check what their weapons are. I can only make wild guesses and some longform math with the battle forecast. Marisa died because I didn't know that one of the enemies has Swordweaver. That's life, I guess.
7. A House of Many Doors
I have a... what should I call this? An undiagnosed health problem. It's chronic migraine, it's a constant pain that eats at my brain, it's something that scrambles my thoughts to the point that I have no way of showing it, like a parasite forcing me to act like I'm okay when I'm not. I've met like, three doctors about this, and none of them are very helpful. I'm learning to live with it, and I am living with it, but it's still something I can't get away from. Wherever I go, there I am, there it is.
So, video games are kind of like places where I can be someone else in addition to being somewhere else. Games with heavy systems, like, ah, Fire Emblem, take me away from myself by making me think in an abstracted, constrained, but entirely different way. Games like A House of Many Doors give me a whole different world to drown myself in.
And drown I did. The world of A House of Many Doors works in an entirely different way from the world we know, with different set of rules. The House is told to be a parasite, patchwork, dimension that grabs, kidnaps, random bits from other worlds into its massive rooms. There's a huge variety of weird, gothic, absurdist, fantasy culture to see here: a city where people don't speak for fear of the angels always flying overhead, a city you can only walk around in while dreaming, a castle of knights who are also poets, a town of eerily violent clowns, a cathedral made out of parts stolen from other religions, its gods an amalgamation of stolen pantheons.
Unlike its more popular godfather Sunless Sea and its step-sister Sunless Skies, A House of Many Doors is mostly a solo effort. It contains hundreds of thousands of words, encompassing dozens of cities, each a world of its own, and all written by one person. In a way, it shows. There are some bugs. A lot of its questlines are more straightforward than it could've been.
In other ways, it shows. Instead of boasting that it can let you be anyone, the game has an idea of who you are: you're a poet. You're an explorer. You're someone who is curious about the world. This singular focus give the writing a cohesion that I think is absent from Sunless Sea's multi-writers approach. There's a chance that you might not vibe with the writer's ideas, and that will probably suck, but when you vibe, and I do certainly vibe with it, it's brilliant.
Also, what the hell. All these hundreds of thousands of words, by one person? Holy cow.
8. Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Right. Where to begin with this. The story? The characters? The way it reignites my creativity and made me create things after a long time of creating nothing? The mechanics? The way it manage to be so many things at once, spinning all these plates? How one of the characters made me fall in love in a way that I've never experienced since I had my first crush in high school?
I played Golden Deer on my first playthrough, and it's still the one true path for me. I love every single one of my kids, students, allies, friends. When they show up after the timeskip, I felt like a teacher seeing her students as adults. They grow up so well. Even without me, they grow up so well.
I genuinely love everyone in this game. Everyone is my favourite character, and even those I don't like I can appreciate. Everyone has so many layers to them. On first glance, it's like the same old tropes, the same old anime characters with one exaggerated trait and not much else. But then you get to know them and there's a whole lot more under the surface. Each character is a whole world underneath.
It's so massive, so enormous. So many characters in a world that's built all the way from the beginning of its history. And it doesn't tell you everything. It teases you with bits of lore, shows you who the characters are without telling you their entire life story, and it lets you fill in the blanks yourself.
It's not perfect. Its enormity work against it sometimes: it's a bit exhausting to play, and it takes a looong time to play all the way through. There are ways to go through it faster---I can't wait to see what the speedrunners are gonna do with it---but a casual player is dissuaded from taking them. Gameplay-wise, there are a lot of parts that are lacking. Most of the unique mechanics can only be appreciated on Maddening difficulty, which is too harsh for casual play.
But the whole experience has been... it was a lot. I'll carry it for a long time.
This game also dragged me out of my creative rut and pushed me to write my first fanfic in yeears. I wrote my first shipfic, an ongoing long-form mostly original fic that explores a massive part of the world that was left unexplained in the game, and a small vignette that's subtly personal.
9. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
I got this for my birthday.
It took a long time for me to click with Breath of the Wild. The starting area was just empty and boring and it frustrates me that Link walks so slowly. Then the game opened up. I met people---you have no idea how excited I was just to see a random person walking down the road---I get to ride horses, I did some amateur photography. It was fun, just wandering about, fooling around, finding new areas.
But I suspect I wouldn't enjoy it as much if not for my sister. She doesn't play games a lot, but she absolutely adores Breath of the Wild. She just likes to wander about, messing around, stumbling on quest lines, helping people. I, on the other hand, just want to explore new places and do the main quest lines. I don't like doing the puzzle temples, but my sister likes it. She hates doing boss battles, while I relish the opportunities. We work well together.
We don't often play it together. She plays it the most, usually when I'm not around. I often play it when she's not around too. As a result, often, I'll open the game up and it'll be a new place each time, which can be a nice surprise. We exchange notes and anecdotes about what silly things we did, what story bits we encountered. It's, I think, the only game where we can do this. The sheer openness of the game works in such a way that I can dropped into a random place each time and it'll still be a great experience, and it'll always give us something new to talk about.
10. Tangle Tower
I was very sad when I got to the end of the game, because I know this game I won't carry around with me. I know I won't remember it in its entirety. I know I'll forget it, that it'll just be a hazy part of my memories, already full of other games and other stories that are more notable or unique or interesting. And that's sad, because the experience of playing this game has been genuinely, incredibly, lovely.
I wrote a review for this game a while back, where I said it's like meeting a stranger on the train, having a pleasant talk, and then saying goodbye with the knowledge that we'll never see each other again. That's really what it's like with this game. It's just this small, compact, self-contained, pleasant experience. It doesn't have to be anything else. It works very well as a compact, self-contained, pleasant experience.
I'm not sure exactly why it made me feel like this, why it feels like an ending that's cut short and will never be continued, and that we're okay with it. I can't say that's a flaw, because it's, I think, part of the charm. It feels like... oh. It feels like online friendship, with someone from across the world, in communities before social media. They have a very different culture, but you share enough that you can talk to each other. You call each other friends, even though you never see each other's face and know you'll never see each other in real life, and that's fine.
I played this with my sister too. We helped each other in solving the mystery, in solving the puzzles, in piecing out the personalities of the characters. It was an impulse buy after seeing the trailer, right after its release. I definitely didn't regret it.
Coda: Disco Elysium
"It just might be because I'm in a good mood as of writing this," I wrote earlier in this post, "but 2019 has been a pretty good year all things considered."
It's nice to have a reminder that this year has been good, because the end of the year has been rough. Four months of freelance work has really taken its toll on me. I've been incredibly lonely, I've been clamming up more and more. I just hole up in my house for days, not talking to anyone who isn't family. My health problem has also been getting worse more often. I still tell myself things are going to be okay, and that helps a lot. But will it, really?
Disco Elysium. I haven't beaten it. I'm playing through it very slowly, on account for some lags that makes it kind of painful to run. But, boy, whenever I play it, it just never fails to make me laugh. It's hilarious, with the kind of humour that I just can't find anywhere else. How to explain it, this kind of self-aware, politically-savvy, devil-may-care kind of humour? I don't know, but I certainly laugh a lot playing it.
This game also, how should I put this, it lets me play as how I see myself, instead of as myself, ya dig? It lets me make the silly, stupid choices, with loud opinions about things. Things I'll never say out loud in real life, but often say inside of my own head. It's incredibly refreshing to just go in for what I would very much like to say instead of the things I feel like I should say. I'm a fuckup, and it's okay to be honest about that.
And the way your skills manifest as voices in your head, bickering with each other and with you, that's, uhh. That's relatable. It's almost like how I talk to myself inside of my own head too. It feels kind of silly, admitting that I talk to myself inside of my own head, but it feels validating to see it in a game this way. It's also where a lot of the more hilarious conversations come from, and I like that.
This isn't one of my 10 games of this year. I haven't beaten it, I can't say it's a 2019 game for me. It feels like something I have yet to really take in. I hope I will. There's a lot from it that I think I can pick up from. The way I can be myself in that game, I hope I can carry that sensibility into my life too, going forward. I hope I can be braver, more outspoken, more confident about my own thoughts and opinions. I hope I can, like in the game, say "I have an opinion about this" and actually say it, in a way that's true to that opinion instead of trying to please the other person.
Next year is going to be better. I'm going to get better. I'm going to be a better person. The world is not going to shit. We're all going to be fine.
