Happy new year!
I wonder if there's a universe out there where I'd be embarrassed for spending so much time on video games. Maybe in a universe where I went on to become a politician or a diplomat or some sort of activist? Or perhaps I'd be a physicist, get a doctorate and get out of this country to someplace where being an academic is feasible (now that I think about it, is that anywhere?). Maybe there's a universe where I got married at 24, have children, learn to cook normal meals and the games I'd be concerned with are those I can share with my kids. I think I'd still have to work with my chronic pain and physical disabilities though, whatever universe I may be in.
Sorry, lots of what ifs in my mind these days. You know this year I'm as old as my mom when she had me. By then she's got a Master's degree in Australia and been in a relationship with my dad for a few years. At my age I've, well, I guess I'm a senior developer now. I've been been in the game industry for over two years. I can't drive and I'm shit at cooking and I'd fall apart living alone and yet I can't say I still feel like a child. I feel like a grownass adult. It's just that my opinion of what a "grownass adult" mean has adapted to the times.
Video games have been a big part of my life and one part of being a "grownass adult" is accepting that yeah, sure, it's going to continue to be so. For a few years now I've been writing an end-of-year list of the games that I played in that year. It's not necessarily games released the same year, and not even the "best" games I played this year, but they're defining for me in some ways. It's a nice way to look back at the year through the things that I love and maybe there'll be some insights I can gleam from it.
Well, without further ado, then. In roughly chronological order...
0. Arknights
If any game, any fictional world, is going to be a lifetime obsession to me, I'd be happy if it's Arknights. What can I say about this that I haven't yet said? It's a wonderfully realised world, filled with so many fascinating characters. It's not afraid to be both about politics and also political. At its core: the idea that all lives are worth living, that all oppression against this must end, that we can strive to be better even when the world is against us, that we must strive to be better either way.
I wouldn't call it flawless, but only because to love something would also be to see all its flaws. Arknights can be messy sometimes, it reaches for things beyond its scope, it made some questionable decisions. But through all that I feel like it means well. Through making this game, writing its stories, the developers tell the world what they think are important, and I vibe with it, on the most part. And I do think they nail the delivery, or at least most of it, most of the time.
This year gave us some pretty banger events, from the gentrification of an island city-state to the SCP horrors of the cold north, from the cultural and emotional effects of a dictactorship to the weight of decisions that come with genocide (and how that's always fucked up). Hard to pick a favorite, but I am rather fond of Zwillingsturme im Herbst. Not joking when I said it was so good it made me want to continue to live.
Arknights this year is also taking bolder choices vis-a-vis creating a sense of continuity to its stories. Characters and nations develop. We're hurtling towards something: a climax, a conclusion, a denoument. It's rare to see this in a live-service genre generally built to last forever. I wonder what else they got for us next year.
1. AI: The Somnium Files - NirvanA Initiative
I wrote a review of this game when I finished it early this year. It's been a lot of months since then, and I'd trust that review more for a judgment of the quality of the game, aha.
But, I will say with hindsight, I really do enjoy Uchikoshi's Wild Ride even when it sometimes devolves to Uchikoshi's Meandering Bullshit. I respect the guy, and in this world where art and fiction increasingly need to fit some kind of... how do I put this, checklist, quota, focus group? It's nice to see someone going Entirely On Their Bullshit.
I don't think about them as much these days, but I'm still very fond of Ryuki and Tama and Mizuki and Aiba. My sister got a crush on Ryuki and Mizuki, so they're my beloved fav-in-law. I also still have fond thoughts for Kaname "I want to kiss him and also push him down a flight of stairs" Date.
Playing the two games with my sister was a good highlight of late last year and early this year. We never really got another game-we-played-while-having-lunch like that this year, but hopefully there'll be something for next year (I already have The Nonary Games ready to play, maybe that'll be the one, I can handle some more of Uchikoshi's Bullshit).
2. Guilty Gear Strive
Funny story about this one, I wasn't expecting to be this obsessed with it. I had Xbox Game Pass for, I think it was Persona 3 Reload, and Guilty Gear Strive was also part of Game Pass at the time. What the hell, I thought. I kinda missed playing fighting games.
I was actually very close to dropping the game. I love the art and the music is all sorts of wonders, but the actual fighting itself... Well, anyone who has played a fighting game understand this feeling, I'm sure, of just not getting it, despite going through the tutorial and understanding the inputs, despite trying to not just button mash.
Right before I gave up, though, my sister popped in and asked if she could play too. When we play together it immediately clicked. Wow, a game meant to be played by two people works really well when it's played by two people, who wouldda thought. Suddenly a fighting game is not a button-mashing affair and more a battle of wits and the most elaborate rock-paper-scissor game.
There was a time when we played every single night. I could feel myself getting better, and her as well. We keep one-upping each other: when I thought I got an edge, she'll find a way to overcome it, and vice versa, on and on. These days, we've stabilized a bit, though. Maybe we've both peaked, but more likely we just got too used to each other's quirks and neither of us are ambitious enough to get even better. Playing online, which we very rarely do, we're only about Floor 5 or 6 or so. The game's still fun, though, so I don't mind staying in this level for a while.
Strive is our first Guilty Gear. I was satisfied with what we got, but my sister hungered for MORE! LORE! She went back to Xrd and Guilty Gear 2 and further back, read all the supplementary materials, watched all the extra arcade episodes and whatever, and then she went back to me and randomly dropped factoids about each character or what happened in the previous entires. It genuinely was pretty fascinating just to hear the stories secondhand.
We also listen to the songs a lot. A lot a lot. We got plenty of karaoke or sing-a-long sessions. Heavy metal, which is all that Guilty Gear is about, is very much an acquired taste: in the early days we could make tier lists of which song is "better" or more approachable than others, but nowadays we're just, "this one's a banger. this one too. banger banger banger, it's ALL banger." Anything Daisuke Ishiwatari serve, we devour.
3. Opus Magnum
This is another Game Pass game that I went, "what the hell, sure, why not" and then twelve hours later I have my brain creating alchemical engines in my sleep.
What can I say, I love thinking, and this Zachtronic's masterpiece tickles my brain just right. It's really quite a wonder how it gives us all the tools early on, and it was us, the players, who get better at it that we can go back to the earlier puzzle and solve them more efficiently.
I'm also honestly a big fan of the story. It follows Anateaus, an alchemist who's not an asshole, honest, but can sound like one because he's smarter than everyone else in his class and also dumb as bricks in social situations. What can I say, I feel a kinship. Most of my motivation for solving the puzzle was not the puzzle itself (I know, sacriledge!) but because I want to see what else Anateaus is gonna be up to.
In general, though, Opus Magnum is a really good game to play when I'm not in the mood for anything else. When I'm feeling shit I can make shit machines and still feel accomplished, and when I'm not feeling shit I can make beautiful efficient machines that make me feel even more accomplished. Win-win. Just gotta be careful that I don't spend too long on it, lest my responsibilities gather dust in the corner.
4. 1000xRESIST
Rare to see a game that knows exactly what it wants to be and not only hurl themselves that way with full force but also succeeded. 1000xRESIST is about a lot of things: family, legacies, the rise of fascism and the sort of revolutions needed to counter that. It's also about an alien invasion and humanity going extinct and all the drama that comes with that.
I wrote a bit more about the game in a previous post, if you want to see me gush about how good it is. I just want to reiterate how unabashed it is at being what it is. You can tell it's running on a budget: its animations are minimal, its visual stylized to a low-budget degree, its gameplay consists mostly of running from point A to point B and listening to people talk, and yet it arranges all its elements it have in such a way that they all serve the story it's telling. It's a perfect game: nothing to take away, nothing to add.
Not to put another game down, but playing it I keep thinking of another game I played earlier this year, Ex Astris. That game also has grand ideas and a fascinating science fiction world but it's severely bogged down by trying to follow conventional combat + dungeon formula. 1000xRESIST is a team working together to tell you a story. Ex Astris is a bunch of departments working on a product. How does a game remain a former and successfully ships (to critical acclaim, at that) while avoiding being just the latter? Hmm.
5. Metaphor: ReFantazio
I LITERALLY STARTED PLAYING TWO DAYS AGO oh but this is getting IN the list. I was actually conflicted on who gets the fifth slot but Metaphor just ram in with a steel chair.
I love the UI sooo bad. It's sooo painterly, the whole aesthetic is doubling down on wanting to look like paper, illustrated by hand like the olden days. This is pretty heavy counter to contemporary user interfaces which are big on minimalism, and before that they were big on making round buttons with illusions of depth in them. Metaphor says, Nay! I will instead treat you with Interesting Brushwork and Colors and Typography. They're also bold enough that there's always a piece of the UI that's moving. Brushwork threatening to burst out of the paper, pencil sketches drawing a circle again and again. Like a storybook coming alive.
I'm still very early in the game (on account of starting TWO DAYS AGO, as of writing this), but I'm already falling for the story, for the world, for the characters. I love me my high fantasy where you can just tell the writers are having fun exploring the world. What do the environments look like and how does that affect the people's day-to-day lives? How do the people live, and what do they feel about their rulers?
The whole lot of it is, of course, constrained by the needs of this being a video game. There are battles to be done: so what would motivate those battles? Who do they fight, and how? How can we structure a gameplay loop along with a story that progresses? I always say limitation breeds creativity, and Metaphor is such a good example of how gameplay, narrative, and lorebuilding go hand in hand. Sure, there are some hiccups like needing to get that superpower really early on, before you "deserve" it narratively, because there won't be a combat system otherwise. That's just intrinsic to the nature of the medium. Every medium has their quirks.
The story relies on a lot of old tropes but play with them in interesting ways. The king was murdered, and the usurper wants to claim the throne, but the king was kind of an asshole anyway, and although the usurper claims he'll be a fairer ruler who'll do away with the nobility, he still relies on violence and military rule. Things are already a little more complicated than the classic Shin Megami Tensei's law vs chaos route here, but what really got me is how the main characters remain earnest throughout it all. Look past the intrigues and politics and at its heart these people want a good life for everyone and they will be LOUD and melodramatic about it. With the setting as is, Metaphor could be as bleak and gloomy as Game of Thrones or Dark Souls but they decide to go full-blown shounen JRPG instead and I'm here for it.
It helps that I'm also reading book 5 of the Stormlight Archives while playing this, aha. They both have earnest characters in cataclysmic-scale high fantasy, zooming in hard on the characters even as they develop the world.
But as I was saying, I'm pretty early in the game so my opinion can still shift. I'm already enamored with what I've seen, though. Here's hoping I'll actually get around to finishing it! I have a bad track record with JRPGs...
Honourable Mentions
I actually played quite a few games this year! Unfortunately I don't have all the time in the world to ramble about all of them, so let's see if I can mention them real quick.
There were three games that were competing for the fifth slot prior to Metaphor just snatching that spot at the last minute, the least embarrassing of which is Cyberpunk: 2077! I'm not usually fond of AAA games, but I got a decent powerhouse PC late last year and I was itching for some taste of that glorious high budget.
Cyberpunk, I think, make damn good use of all that budget. The world feels so big and lived-in, the characters received so much care to make them feel alive: the voice, the animation, the tone in the writing. On a technical level, there are so many interlocking systems I'm in awe at how well they work together. I don't mesh with the game as well as I had wanted—I can feel the artifice, under all the effort. It's not as earnest as I would like, like they're all too polished to impress you—but it was still a game I'm glad to have played. Big fan of Johnny Silverhand.
The second contender is a little embarassing: Wuthering Waves! I gave this game a try during its launch and pretty much hated it, haha! It's trying sooo hard to be Genshin Impact, and it fails at every metric that Genshin plays at. Only when I gave it more chance, started exploring it beyond its Genshin skin, that I realise this is a game desperate to be its own thing, pushed back by the executive decisions.
Make no mistake: Wuthering Waves is not a good game. Its story and writing is so bad, I often pressed that skip button and did not feel even slightly bad about it. It has that gacha genre trapping of fucked up balancing and way too many currencies to keep track of. The character design is lame as hell.
But it is a pretty fun character action game. Its world is pretty nice to run around in, and they've polished the movement and camera to double-down on that. It's a nice game to come back to after a tiring day and just mess around in. Wait, shit, I guess in this way it is Genshin. Better at some things (traversal, combat), worse at other things (a world that I can care about).
Third game, also embarassing: Honkai: Star Rail. I'm deep in the gacha mines, I'm sorry. While Cyberpunk fails to really rein in me in because it feels a little too artificial, Star Rail just went full whimsy in its artifices. It's game that looks you in the eye and tells you, I am a video game specifically designed to entice you, I will make jokes and milk them until they aren't funny anymore, I will wow you with spectacles, I will throw you insane lore pieces at random moments, I don't care that the story goes in circles, I have fancy cutscenes and I need to justify their inclusion.
It bores me to tears, but it's also soo fascinating, seeing the length that it goes. The combat system also goes hard. Unbalanced as all hell and a torture to grind through but it's sooo interesting. You can do so much bullshit with it, the likes of which no other turn-based combat system has ever seen.
I have a love-hate relationship with this game. I have a, shall we say, a sadomasochist affair with it. Hate to play it, hate to let it go, let's see what level of bullshit it's aspiring to next.
Moving away from gacha games and going into Real Games™, I started playing Pokemon Sword this year and I really enjoyed it. Yes, I deliberately picked Sword instead of the newer Scarlet/Violet because I wanted the nicer graphics. I wanted a world that's more comfortable to come back to. I also end up liking the Pokemon designs a lot too; I haven't played Pokemon since Black/White era and it's such a delight to see the new Pokemon here and their evolutions.
On top of that, the gameplay in Sword/Shield is honestly excellent! Their level balancing is very well-done and I can tell they make careful choices when deciding which Pokemon is available in which area. It's the little things in RPG designs that people often won't notice but has a major impact on the experience.
I played some Splatoon 3 this year, mostly concentrated during the final splatfest. That was so cool; I took so many screenshots of the concerts. Sad they don't just make the three-way battles a more permanent game mode because that was some of the most fun I had with this game.
I played about a quarter of Persona 3 Reload on Game Pass. I knew I wasn't going to play to the end since I already played Persona 3 like, three times. It's very smooth: did some things better than the original and some things worse. Good for newcomers, I'd say, but I'd still recommend Fes or Portable for the Real Freaks.
Late last year, I got a hankering for some Assassins' Creed-style parkour, but the games themselves aren't doing it for me. This desire remains unfulfilled until this year when I started, on a whim, Ghostwire: Tokyo. That was apparently everything I wanted: to jump around in an urban setting. I love the atmosphere, the freedom in its traversal, and that the whole thing wrapped in some stylish Japanese urban myth is the icing on the cake. I honestly didn't really pay attention to the story, I just love jumping around and throwing magic fireballs at ghosts.
Nine Sols is a really good game that I'm really bad at. I'm a Hollow Knight fan and also an anthromorphic animals fan and a fan of Chinese history and language so yeah, of course I really like this game. Impeccable style, very well-done level designs, fascinating Chinese SF story. Hopefully I can actually play this to the end.
I played Ex Astris on launch with high hopes and have those hopes shattered so badly, I can only laugh. This is ostensibly by the same studio as Arknights which, as we all know, has some of the best writers in all of gaming, but, I don't know, did they lock Arknights's writing team in the basement such that they never get to mentor the flock of interns that get handed this one?
I wrote a full review of it already. It's an interesting game bogged down by checklist-minded development process, as I already mentioned in the 1000xRESIST section above. I hope it doesn't discourage Hypergrpyh from making more stand-alone non-live-service non-gacha games, though. I want them to keep trying new things.
I played three visual novels I really like this year: Bustafellows, The House in Fata Morgana, and Heaven Will Be Mine. That's three very different stories!
Bustafellows is top-ranking for my favorite otome, simply because the way they write the protagonist, Teuta, feels soo ace. She's ace! She doesn't feel "attracted" to any of these boys, but she loves them so much. They're a family! I love how they write the boys as good friends too. They all fall for Teuta but it's never awkward when only one specific guy get to kiss her in each route, and they all fall for her in different ways besides. It's very character-centric writing, love that.
I started The House in Fata Morgana expecting some gothic melodrama and, well, that sure is some melodrama! But it's a lot less gothic than I expected. It mostly relies on unreliable narrators who each speak in modern everyday dialect, but, like gothic writing, it still has an enormous wordcount because boy do these people just keep talking. Some points get reiterated over and over again, but it's all in the service of the theme of the game. If you get battered with pain and hate over and over again, will you still choose to do good? I admire their commitment to that bit.
Overall an excellent visual novel, even with the bits that I thought unnecessary and the weird tonal shifts. It's also a surprisingly earnest queer story. I can also probably write an essay about how it feels a little too comfortable with torture but, hmm, that's a blog post for another day.
I wrote a blog post about Heaven Will Be Mine already! It's very fascinating to read, as someone who's ace and also straight. It also has a writing style that just refuse to hold your hands, instead going full force with whatever science fiction world it has developed. Together, they make for a style that takes some effort to figure out, but in the process of figuring things out, I feel like I understand these girls a lot better. I play games to touch other people's lives (well, among others) and I really did feel that way with this one.
One last game I have to mention: the cognitohazard known as Immortality. I also have written a blog post about this game! I had trouble sleeping for three whole days as I played it. Can't get it out of my head. I kept feeling like I saw something in the shadows. I didn't even particularly dig the game, and in hindsight it feels a little mean-spirited. Gotta applaud it for taking over my life for three days though, fair play.
Ha, that's a lot of games! It feels like a good sign that I'm playing more games and talk about them more than last year. Last year was such a haze that I didn't even manage to finish writing my GotY blog post and what I did write, now that I'm reading it again, feels so bleak. Maybe I'll post these later.
This year's was a lot more... hmm, what's the word.... I realise I've been using the word "fascinating" a lot. Let's go with that. I am more capable of fascination this year. I've been more willing to engage with new works earnestly, instead of just treating them like a diversion.
I'm also noticing that I've been putting more value into games unafraid of being their own selves, instead of being tied to executive decisions. Games that know what they want to be, and run abashedly toward that. A part of this is, perhaps, influenced by my career change. Last year I was part of a big studio focused on making games that make money so they can provide stability to its workers (which is not a bad thing, by itself), while this year I joined a studio that's in it for the love of the game (while also keeping an eye on market trends).
I had thought that I want stability, but this year, I guess, I realise I'm in the privileged position of being able to reach for something greater. I'm already comfortable, and it is precisely because of this that I should do more than just what's necessary for survival. Join an indie studio. Spend my time programming a video game, a that luxury people wouldn't think possible a hundred years ago. Create art. It might not be as useful to society or as respectable as, I dunno, being a doctor, being a diplomat, being a researcher. But making and understanding games is what I know what to do, what I can do. If we are to have this art form called video game in this world, and I believe that's something worth having, I am better suited than most people to make it. It's a worthy career. I can be proud of being here. I hope.
Here's hoping I can continue being a game developer next year! Here's hoping next year is going to be better, for everyone. Happy new year!
