Yeah yeah, we joked a lot about it. "2021 is just 2020 part two lol". "I blinked in March 2020 and when I opened my eyes 2021 is over already". After the pandemic started in March last year, for a lot of us it seemed like time stood still. Normal life was halted. Everything happens at home now instead of in the office/school, video calls replaced meetings, online conventions replaced physical events, and everything bought and sold now pass by the post office instead of hand-to-hand. In 2020 all of this was new and uncertain and terrifying.
In 2021? We slowly got used to it all. And then the vaccines started rolling out and the threat became less severe. When I posted last year's Games of the Year list, Jakarta alone has 2000 new cases a day. Today the number is low enough that there aren't daily reports anymore. Though the virus still continues to mutate, we're also better equipped to handle them. I think, I hope, I can say that the hardest part is behind us for this particular case of world-threatening issues. There are of course still the destruction of our planet's ecosystems and the slow death march of late-stage capitalism to consider, but I'm feeling hopeful. We can do this.
Personally, this year has been a lot of self-discovery for me, in ways I'm not sure how to articulate. On the surface, not a lot of things have happened. I'm still in college, but I'm finishing up. I'm still not sure where I want to take my life after I graduate, but I have a few ideas. Maybe. Sorta. Crossing that bridge when I get there! But I feel like I understand myself a bit better, I can accept what my flaws are and work with them instead of against them.
I've been writing these Games of the Year list for the last couple of years. I always talk about the games, but I know I'm also talking about myself. The games I play are like, little markings in time. Time is funny and something that happens a long time ago can feel like it only happened yesterday, and vice versa. Remembering the games I play in a year is like encapsulating what the year was like.
Well, I didn't play as many games as I was hoping for this year (thanks, the number one game on this list that's consuming my life), but they're still a big part of my life.
1. Genshin Impact
(I couldn't decide which images to go with this section lol, so have some selections from my ridiculous number of screenshots)
If you tell me a year ago that all my playtime this year will be dominated by this one single game, my past self would... look at its character designs and world design and battle system and say "Yeah, that checks out." There was a year when I was obsessed with Fire Emblem, after all.
If ever there's a game made for my exact taste, Genshin Impact would be pretty close to being it. Interesting distinctive characters, expansive thoughtful worldbuilding, mythic themes and every opportunity to fistfight a god weaved around tales of the common people, a battle system that's action-based but rely heavily on turn-based games conventions (buffs, debuffs, effect stacks, equipments and team composition theorycrafting), and tons of things to read if you feel like it. I often joke about how all my favourite works of literature has at least one of these three elements: murder mystery, a heist, or the act of fighting a god. Genshin's got them too, among every other little things.
I wrote about Genshin twice already in this blog. I've played so much of this game and talked about it for so long that when I realised it wasn't mentioned even once in my Games of the Year list last year, I was genuinely surprised. So it hasn't been that long? I could have sworn this would the second year in a row this game made it in. It's like I've had it forever.
lt's just... what a fascinating game. I could talk forever about what I love about it, but instead here's a quote from the first time I mentioned Genshin in this blog: "It takes inspirations from so many games, so many genres, the whole history of video games, if you look. It learned from its predecessors and then went on to become its own thing."
Also, it made me write. I am obsessed with the ship Tartaglia/Kujou Sara even though nigh near no one else pair them together. Currently I wrote three out of the grand total of five fics featuring this ship on Archive of Our Own. For a fandom of this size, that's not just a rarepair, that's lonely as hell. Which I guess also describe a lot of my writings.
I just think they're neat. Both soldiers since too young an age, both find meanings in the battlefield and little else. They both have masks, though with different meanings for them both. Veering into personal interpretation for a bit, they both have no idea what a relationship will even entail; they're more accustomed to bringing death. So finding new meanings within each other? That's beautiful! Give me that battlefield drama! I have fifty bazillion words written about them! Where is this energy when I write about literally anything else??
2. Blaseball
"The Expansion Era was this year?" I holler at the void, but then within the same breath I also say, "Blaseball is already over a year old??"
No game make me question the passage of time as much as this weird live-service horror sports simulation. Games take place within a "season", which is one real life week. Matches on Monday to Friday— some of them mundane, some of them exciting— and then final matches, always exciting, on the weekend that are often accompanied by visits from high-dimensional beings. Sometimes there are weeks-long breaks between seasons, and months-long between eras.
What this means is that there are some weeks where it feels like Blaseball has always existed, has always been running, there has never been a time when Blaseball did not exist, play continues forever... and then there are weeks when it's just a distant memory, it has always been a distant memory, looking back on it is like reminiscing an event you went to five years ago ("Blaseball is only a year old??").
The Expansion Era began in March this year and lasted 13 seasons, starting with the opening of the immateria floodgates, the duplication and subsequent destruction of a long lost player, the discovery of the Vault, the Library, the Reader, the Desert, the threat of sharks swimming in the water, the duplicitous suns, so many suns, always a new sun, a new feature, a new mechanic as the reigning Blaseball god, the Coin, tried to make good on her investments. And it ended with a literal big bang as her greed overwhelmed us all, but not after we found a way to fight back with the help of our undead comrades, released by the overworked guardian of the gates of hell who had finally called it quit.
Does any of that make sense? Lmao. I loved that era. So many things happened, impossible to tell in only a few paragraphs. It only became evident later, both to us fans and I suspect also to the game's writers, that it's a story of unsustainable growth, and of the small people being crushed under that weight. More personally, it's also the era where I first popped into the team's Discord, and then I really started to get to know my team, the Unlimited Tacos, on the same wavelength as everybody else in the community.
My favourite character ended up being Basilio Mason: early in the season he was very lackluster despite his seemingly fine stats. I occasionally popped into the chat to say "Bmason continues to disappoint" when he failed to hit the ball. It was a running gag with the team that "Bmason does not want to play" and that he is punished by always having to play. Fast-forward a couple of seasons and some changes and lucky blessings later, I found myself posting "I love you Bmase!" very very often. He's a good player now! Can hit the ball! Also he's like the only functioning team member since our team captain got stolen away so now he has to deal with the responsibility of the captain-replacement! Emergent storytelling! Character development! Love that!
3. Persona 5 Strikers
As of writing this it has been just about six and a half year since I graduated high school. My God, I miss high school. Of having friends I can hang out with. My last year in high school was probably the first time I was properly happy, the first time I figured out how social interaction worked. It was cut short before I could really figure everything out, though, and college was so big a shock to me that six years later I'm still slowly putting myself back together from the fallout.
This, perhaps, is why stories about teenagers just hanging out with their friends can hit me hard. Persona 5 Strikers is a story of a bunch of very close friends going out on a road trip and god, good god, did I enjoy it vicariously. I've always wanted to go on a road trip with my friends—most of whom I can't say I'm friends with anymore because I'm very bad at keeping up connection—and this game at least partially fill that hole in my heart.
Add that with some fun action game mashing, a father-and-daughter relationship plot arc, and a little tour of Japan's major cities, and, well, I can honestly say I enjoy Persona 5 Strikers far more than the messy, heavyweight game that is the original Persona 5. P5S's main story might be merely functional, perfunctory even, but it has always been meant as a vehicle for this group of friends to spend their time together. The little moments add up to the point that, tired as I was from the long trip, I was sad to see it over. Eventually the road trip will be finished and we'll go back to our separate lives, but for those few days when we were together, it felt like we could live forever.
4. Sunless Skies
Sometimes I just sit and think about Ajax. I miss Ajax, the sky-captain my brain formed into being as I played this game. He's young, was young, or at least he looked young. Reckless, kick-the-door-down type of character. But he got a caring streak on him, would never let his crew take the fall for what was his mistake. Or he tried to, at least. The skies can be cruel. He can be a bit of a bastard, a bit of a rebel for rebellion's sake, but he's a gentleman about it.
He sings sometimes, and more often when the locomotive flew across calm skies. He's not afraid of the stars, the same way he's not afraid of defying gods. When one of his closest friends died, he wept quietly. He still keep the memorabilia that Devil gave him, the only being who'd ever made him feel after he thought no women or men could stir him. He still thinks of the Eccentric often, the woman who sings to his engines and the only one who'd ever hear him talk the truth.
He'd explored all the known corners of the Skies. He'd written his magnum opus, the Song of the Sky. He's retired. His story's finished. There's nothing else in the skies for him.
Sunless Skies is a lot of... things, of experiences, of places to see and think about, of characters whose stories still haunt me. It can also be unbearably slow, but despite that it still made me want to sing. I wanted to sing about the High Wilderness, and so my mind went on and on weaving tales of this sky-captain I've grown far too attached to. But at some point, at some point I felt like I've seen enough. The game let me decide when I wanted to write "The End" and I took it. Ajax went home. Wrote his story. Retired. I moved on.
But I still miss him, sometimes. It's so, so strange to know that his entire existence is just in my head. I know I ought to write about him, at least so he's isn't just stuck in parts of my brain that I'm sure will deteriorate eventually. Already my memory of him and his adventures is failing. I guess I'm afraid I won't be able to do the story justice, which is dumb. Even a badly written memoir is better than non-existence. (Is it, though?)
5. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
The fan-translated 3DS version of this was part of my games of the year list in 2018, apparently! Well, that was a million years ago. I remember playing this in the room I rented close to my university. I also remember finding a quiet corner in the library to play it with the headphones on. It was a nice oasis from the exhausting mess that 2018 was, judging from what I wrote in that post.
I never expected that Capcom would return to this duology, that they would finally, actually, localize it into English and release it. You bet your ass I preordered it as soon as I was able, even though I only managed to play it a few days after release because the distributor was overwhelmed by about a hundred of us feeling the same way.
I played it in a different context, this time. I'm a different person since I was three years ago—I'm a bit more stable, I'd like to believe, a little happier with my life. It wasn't an oasis when things get rough; instead, I made time for it. When my sister and I have lunch together, which is most of every day, we'll play this game with the Switch on tabletop mode. It was nice, having that shared moment, laughing together at all the silly jokes and puns and figuring out the murders together.
We're not finished with the game yet. This is two games worth and we're taking our time with it. After we do finish it, I hope we have other games we can share lunchtime with.
6. NEO: The World Ends With You
TWEWY is really good at encapsulating the Teenage Perspective, huh? To the exclusion of everything else. This is a good thing, mind. Few games understand what it's like to be a teenager as much as TWEWY and its sequel NEO: TWEWY do, and few lean so hard into it. The devil-may-care feelings, the anxiety of growing up and figuring yourself out even when we wouldn't have put it that way, the dark-edged, myopic, rose-tinted glasses we see the world, all its flaws and beauty magnified, but only what we can see in front of us.
I read somewhere of someone praising the portrayal of Shibuya in the game, saying it reflects real life Shibuya's trait as a fast-moving bastion of creativity. A comment accused this take of being flaming garbage, because if anything, Shibuya and its branded department stores is more a monument to exploitative capitalism. I've been thinking about that and I realised, real life Shibuya can be both. Real life is messy and complicated.
But Shibuya as depicted in TWEWY and NEO: TWEWY isn't exactly real life Shibuya. It's Shibuya as seen in the eyes of teenagers, who sees it as a cool place to hang out where they can dress up and discover what new things is on fashion lately. More importantly, it's a place to meet their friends and have a good time. Teenagers aren't yet (and shouldn't be!) burdened by the idea that everything they do might contribute to an exploitative supply chain or climate change. They have enough on their plate already, which TWEWY shows with its loud music, bold colours, and skewed perspectives.
I love it for that. It's a testament to its strength that whether I played it as a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-four-year-old, I still receive the same message that the game tries to convey. That of, well, being a stupid teenager trying to figure things bigger than themselves, of trying our best regardless, of holding on to what's important. In some respect, we're all still stupid teenagers.
7. Caves of Qud
Here's a very late contender to the list. I've heard winds of Caves of Qud throughout the year, but only as ridiculous hearsays. Something about getting killed by a colony of lichens, trapping yourself in a sarcophagus and having insight to a new recipe as you die, an item called the Fist of the Ape God, cut out from the dead body of divinity and containing the following traits: Arm, Arm, Arm, Arm, Arm, Arm. That last one was featured in Blaseball, which was sponsored by Caves of Qud for two weeks and was finally the thing that pushed me to try the game in December.
After a couple of false starts and silly deaths (I was killed once by a horde of goats, whom I provoked because the quest says something in the area is causing trouble and my dumb ass thought, "well, there's these goats. No harm in fighting goats, right? They should be easy to fight." Hubris), in my current run I'm a human who has mutated to have bird wigs and bird beaks and can thus talk to birds, the ability to dilate time, create a force field, and emit laser beams out of my eyes, and yet despite all this my best weapon is Guns. I still die when I get lost in the forest because goatmen cult who hang around there throw bombs at me.
It's... Caves of Qud is ridiculous, but it's the kind of ridiculous I can get behind. It describes itself as a "layer cake of thousand-year-old civilization" and though they remove the term "layer cake" in some promotional materials, I like the feeling it evokes. For people who like this kind of ridiculous, it's a cake, a delicacy, and we do love to taste it bit by bit, right before we die again.
Honorable mentions
Boyfriend Dungeon was the most anticipated indie game for me. It was released this year and I played it soon as I could and, honestly, by the end my feelings toward it is just kind of lukewarm? It's fun I guess, the boys and girl are cute, I guess. The story is fine, I guess?? Some part of me is worried that this because I don't understand romantic relationship the same way most people do, but that's neither here nor there.
But then! My sister, who doesn't usually play games, played Boyfriend Dungeon because of me and, I think, well, long story short I think it single-handedly formed (or solidified) her taste in men, lol. Good game!
I'm a pretty big fan of music rhythm game, though compared to the rhythm gods out there I'm probably just a fledgling casual. Arcaea on the Switch is my current favourite, with its collection of artcore music (love those strong beats with flowing classical melody) and a good balance of casual maps and those that take real skills to master (my hand do be getting sore after trying those Level 9 maps). I've probably mentioned this before in my previous lists, but I like music rhythm game for the way it can make me turn my brain off for a bit. Take me away from all these thoughts that keep piling in my brain, let me think of nothing but the beats.
Arcaea has been a good refuge to me this year.
I almost forgot about Four Horsemen. That game was something special, though it got so lost in the weeds of my life this year, I was surprised when I realised I played it this year. Here's some quotes from when I talked about the game back in July: "It’s a visual novel about being four young immigrants in an alt-present day where the cultures is not entirely unlike the ones we have today. It’s a delicate subject, but Four Horsemen tackled it with care, and also anger, a blaze of glory, a serving of attitude, and true lived-in understanding of what being an immigrant is.... It’s bold and brave and isn’t afraid to be entirely what it wants to be."
I got Ending A and B in NieR Automata this year, after finally having a computer capable of running the game. I'm in the middle of my C playthrough, which to my surprise is a totally new story compared to what came before. Somehow I just never got back in the mood to play the rest of the game, though. It doesn't capture me the way the original NieR did it. Maybe next year.
I got Call of Juarez: Gunslinger for free during their anniversary sale. I'm not usually a big fan of shooting game, preferring my violence to be less overt, but Gunsliger surprised me. The gunfight was fun with some excellent gamefeel, but just as importantly, it is narratively interesting. The gameplay section is narrated by its main character, Silas, who is telling the story to some people in a bar. He exaggerates details, and so the gunfight is exaggerated. He talks about how "it's like there's no end to these bandits" and so during gameplay there are barrages of people just showing up out of nowhere to shoot at you. At one point he talked about considering alternate routes through a mine shaft, and as he pondered it you actually went to these alternate routes in-game before dying at the end as he said "but I knew before taking it that it was a stupid idea". And then you respawned at the moment before you went in there, an alternate route materializing as Silas talked. It's brilliant.
Shin Megami Tensei V is... to say it's a disappointment would be dishonest. I was expecting an unforgiving-but-solid turn-based JRPG with familiar mechanics and a plot that's meant more to paint a world than a story. That's exactly what I get, with some nice animation and map traversal to add to that. So why does it feel like a disappointment?
Was I expecting more? Was I expecting it to be as bold and enticing as SMT IV? Its level balance might be off-kilter, but at least it has some personality. Was I expecting it to be as wild as Drakengard? Was I expecting a battle system as thoughtful as Octopath Traveler? Was I expecting the monster-collecting aspect to actually grab me? Okay, I actually did not expect that last one at all and yet this is what happened. Monster collecting is fun.
It's not a bad game, though the writing in the main story feels so awfully wooden even killing gods don't interest me anymore. It's a good game to relax with on an evening; its mechanics truly is rock solid. And there's something about how its demonic characters are so down-to-earth and chatty that makes an interesting contrast with the oppressive atmosphere. If nothing else, I don't regret playing it so far.
Games on my mounting, terrifying, wishlist
Necrobarista, The House in Fata Morgana, Gnosia, Umurangi Generation, One Step From Eden, Eastwards, Outer Wilds, Legend of Tianding, Unsighted, Inscryption, Black Book, Library of Ruina, World of Horror, Solar Ash. World of Horror is probably what I'm most excited with, but I'll wait until it gets the Switch release before digging in.
Coda: OPUS Echo of Starsong
This year has been a lot, huh? How can a year be both the length of two years and the length of a month? Blaseball was this year?/Blaseball was only this year?? energy.
OPUS: Echo of Starsong isn't a particularly long game. It's about the length of a novel, I say. I'm not yet finished with it, as for some reason I can only play it when the planets align and the mood was right; everything else feels like heresy. When I looked at my playtime, I was surprised that I only had 4 hours total on it; despite my self-imposed limitation it feels like I've been playing for far longer than that. The short moments I spent with the game feels meaningful. Not a single moment wasted; what space there were was just about enough for quiet contemplation.
Starsong is a heartfelt, genuine, game. Maybe it's a bit cheesy, but that's cheese written so earnestly, I feel bad for even considering it cheese. Maybe it's a bit reliant on classic plot beats, but those beats come out so naturally out of the honest action of its characters. I wish I can write as earnestly as Starsong does, I can create as honestly, as meaningfully, as fully-realised as Starsong is.
Is OPUS: Echo of Starsong a good game? Hard to say. It's not for everyone. It has limitations inherent in its existence as a small game made by a small studio in a non-western country. Is it perfect? Yes. Who was it who said "Perfection is not when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing left to take away"? There is nothing to take away from Starsong. All its pieces are in perfect accord with each other. It knows what it is, it understands its own limitations, and it works with them instead of against them.
I hope I can create something like that too. I hope I can be a bit like that too.
Here's to 2022. May it be a good one for all of us.
