GAMEING IN THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHTEEN

I guess this is basically a yearly tradition for me now. It’s time to look back at all the games I played this year and give my thoughts on them. They’re listed vaguely in increasing order of how much I enjoyed them. Before you ask, I’m not including Smash Bros and Let’s Go Eevee on this list because I don’t feel like I’ve played enough of them to form solid opinions yet.

1. Dragalia Lost

After Fire Emblem Heroes, I truly thought I would never play another mobile gacha game. What a fool I was. Nintendo made a fuss about this new game they were developing and, being the obedient fan I am, I listened.

Dragalia Lost is quite different from Fire Emblem in many ways. Its gameplay focuses on fast paced real-time hack and slash dungeon crawling, sharply contrasting FEH’s slow, tactical, turn-based battles. Dragalia’s gameplay sounds like a great change of pace, and in most ways it is, but there are a few issues that really sour the experience for me. My biggest gripe is how repetitive, short and uninteresting nearly every quest is. While I said “dungeon crawling”, it’s really more like “corridor running” with quests mostly consisting of a single map with monster-filled hallways that lead directly to the quest-ending boss. I’m not expecting some Legend of Grimrock quality dungeons or anything, but man, there is barely any meat on those bones.

I never expected this to be an issue from a Nintendo game, but the technical problems I’ve run into have colored my views of it for the worse. The game has crashed for me dozens of times in seemingly random locations. I’ve had to restart quests I had almost finished more than a few times because the game suddenly vanished. Each crash also incurred at least a minute to reload the game (did I mention the loading times are quite long?). Needless to say, it becomes astoundingly frustrating very quickly. Also, while my phone isn’t exactly high end, it’s more than capable of running Dragalia, the menus in this game of a million menus are incredibly slow and choppy. The menus are meant to have quick, fancy transition animations, but they all freeze and stutter constantly, making nearly every menu maddening to navigate.

Another big difference between Dragalia and FEH is how players progress. FEH’s progression boils down almost entirely to gacha pulling units for use in battle or for skill inheritance. Units can be leveled up, but getting a unit to the max level can be done in just a few minutes. One of Dragalia’s stronger points is that it takes a large portion of progression away from gacha, favoring a much slower system emphasizing small incremental improvements from simply playing the game. For example, the elemental shrines in the town building system can be upgraded to provide persistent stat bonuses to characters. Building and upgrading these have no direct link to any gacha and can be done simply by completing quests. Those shrines represent only one of many similar progression points. These systems give the game a lot more longevity in the late game and better encourages players to return day after day.

It may be unstable, exploitative gacha garbage, but it stimulates the primitive part of my brain that enjoys seeing numbers go up, so I’m still tinkering with Dragalia in my downtime at work, along with FEH.

2. Aquaria

Aquaria was one of the first independent games that really got me interested in game development. At the time, I had a fantastical top-down 2D metroidvania shooter in mind, and Aquaria came along and had a gameplay style similar to what I had in mind. I played the demo and was fascinated by how the developers built the game, even spending a little too long looking at the source code when they released it along with a Humble Bundle many years back. Despite this, I somehow never played the full game until this year. Long story short: it’s a competent metroidvania, but also slightly disappointing.

Starting with the good: the environmental design is the big star here. The very animated aquatic environment with all sorts of fish and plant life bustling about does an excellent job of selling the feeling of being in a wild water world. The soundtrack, while perhaps not particularly exciting on its own, compliments the visuals quite well to create a strong atmosphere.

My biggest gripe is the singing mechanic. The player character, Naija, interacts with the world primarily through singing. Holding down a button will bring up a ring of notes that can be sung, and a mouse or joystick can be moved in the note to sing. By the end game, you’re expected to sing at such a frantic pace that errors become very easy to make, causing things to quickly spiral out of control. I had been playing with a gamepad the whole time and it wasn’t until after I finished the game that I learned there are keyboard shortcuts that skip many of the songs. There just aren’t any such shortcuts with a gamepad, which is very frustrating since it’s otherwise a far more comfortable control method.

The story is a mixed bag. I quite enjoyed learning about the past of Aquaria, some of it through environmental storytelling, some with plain old exposition, but Naija’s journey seemed rather shallow and uninteresting. The bulk of it revolves around her love interest: a guy named Li who she stumbles onto suddenly and within a literal minute of game time has apparently formed a close relationship to. He has essentially no characterization, and yet he’s the driving force for the climax of the story.

Beyond those gripes, there’s the unnecessary crafting system and the very sparse and sequential (think SotN teleporters) fast travel system in a very expansive world. While I did enjoy my time with Aquaria, I don’t think it could have lived up to the image of it I had built up in my mind in the past decade. While it didn’t outright fail at anything major, I couldn’t help but be disappointed that Aquaria is just a good indie game instead of the inspiring masterpiece I wanted it to be.

3. Tacoma

Tacoma is a short interactive narrative experience (or walking simulator if you prefer) that follows a contractor for a sci-fi mega-corporation as she investigates an abandoned space station and learns what happened to the crew. The world is fantastically well realized and detailed and the augmented reality records are a fascinating expansion on the idea of audio logs. Those records are the most interesting aspect of Tacoma to me, actually.

Instead of simply playing an audio file, Tacoma has 3D recordings of each character’s position, movement and voice in a particular place and time. They’re played back as if they’re holograms in an augmented reality environment with the ability to freely rewind or fast forward. Some characters may move to another room to have a separate conversation while others stay where they were and continue a previous conversation. It encourages you to explore not only in space, but in time as well, since interesting events occur in certain places at certain times.

These 3D recordings are usually limited to just one or two rooms, but I would love to see it expanded to a wider area. That’s basically my main wish for Tacoma: just more of it. The entire game is a mere 2 hours or so in length, which is barely enough time to develop its cast of characters and tell their stories. I would have loved to see another hour or two to finish building its characters and world, but what there is is still enough to tell an engaging story.

4. Kamiko

I had a few gold coins on the Nintendo eshop and noticed I had just enough to buy this little game called Kamiko since it was on sale. Kamiko turned out to be a short but sweet action puzzle-y type. My first playthrough took less than an hour, even at a very slow pace. The intense boss fights and maze-y puzzle-y levels behind them were fun the first time through, but I think most of my enjoyment from the game came from subsequent playthroughs.

Kamiko has three different playable characters to choose from, each with a unique set of attacks that can drastically affect how you play the game. I originally chose the character with a bow; the slow and safe long-range option. On my next run I played with a sword and shield character, who plays far more aggressively. Since I already knew all of the puzzles and bosses, I was able to speedrun the game far faster than I expected, eventually getting into a small speedrun race with @Onlerin on twitter.

For me, Kamiko is a lot like Graceful Explosion Machine from last year in that the base game is enjoyable enough, but it was metagame challenges are what got me the most for my money (or coins, in this case).

5. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is a love letter to the old NES Castlevania games. I never played any of those NES games, so the nostalgia is lost on me. It goes very hard on the classic style gameplay with slow, stiff control and very punishing knockback if you take damage. Thankfully the level design is a bit better than the old games in that it’s less cruel, more varied and even somewhat instructive.

Even without the nostalgia factor propping it up, I still enjoyed my time with it. Curse of the Moon is potentially a very short game if you’re only playing to an ending, which is what I did, so it didn’t overstay it’s welcome. The levels have a decent flow to them that only killed me a few times. Some of the bosses were a bit more complex and needed some learning, while others were simple to take out on the first try.

From my own playthrough I really don’t have many things to say about it. I’ve watched @Kaubocks stream his speedruns of the game and seeing it played well, along with a handful of wild glitches, made me appreciate it more than I had before.

6. Just Shapes and Beats

If you like chiptune music, you definitely need to play Just Shapes and Beats. It takes dozens of amazing tracks from many different composers and syncs them with wild obstacle courses of moving and morphing pink shapes. There’s a story mode that has a surprising amount of character that had me grinning like an idiot in more than a few places. I was pretty surprised to see that it had online co-op as well, and even more surprised that it actually worked quite well. My only real complaint is that I wanted the story mode to be quite a bit longer. It was over far too soon.

7. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia

I have a confession to make: I don’t actually like turn based strategy games. Why, then, would I play another Fire Emblem game? The simple answer is peer pressure. I had more than a few people nag me to play Shadows of Valentia, saying that it’s very good and I finally gave in. Y’know what? They were right. It’s quite good. It’s by far my favorite turn based strategy RPG that I’ve played, because it’s the least like a typical Fire Emblem game.

SoV shakes up many of the normal Fire Emblem mechanics, making it feel completely different from Fates. It still has the basic turn based strategy on a tile grid, but even many of the staples of the series either aren’t present or are turned on their heads.

The biggest and best change in my eyes is the addition of fully 3D third person dungeon exploration. This is completely separate from normal battles in that you directly control your character through caves or dungeons or castles, finding hidden passages and treasure chests and enemies to fight along the way. Fighting enemies in these dungeons jumps to the normal turn based combat, but they’re much smaller fights, often with just a few enemy units on a tiny map. They rarely took more than a few minutes. For me, this is the perfect way to implement a strategy RPG since it involves exploration (you all should know I love me some exploration in games) and breaks up battles into small, digestible chunks, instead of the massive, potentially hour-long slogs that are at the core of other Fire Emblems.

Dungeons in SoV are only part of the experience. Larger battles are still the focus of the game, but they’re still smaller and more frequent than in Fates. There’s an overworld this time as well. Instead of a series of battles back to back with an occasional cutscene between them, SoV gives each battle at least a modicum of spacial relativity. If I’m traveling east through a desert to confront a pirate king, I can see my characters moving right across the screen through the desert on the map. It’s a fairly small thing, but it makes the world feel more cohesive.

Another oddity in SoV is the relatively small cast of characters available at a time. You control two separate armies which rarely interact directly, with each army having only a handful of characters. I really enjoyed the more intimate grouping because it forced me to rely on and bond with more characters more closely. Even when combined, the total number of characters is far less than Fates, leaving far fewer being eternally benched and forgotten.

SoV changed a few things in battle as well, mostly for the better. The weapon triangle, one of the most iconic Fire Emblem mechanics, is gone and, honestly, I don’t miss it. Characters used to be able to carry a veritable armory with them, but SoV only gives each character one slot. It can be used to replace the character’s default weapon with a more powerful version, add stats with a shield, or keep a restorative item in case of emergency. I didn’t care for this at first, but I came to appreciate the simplicity and the bigger weight of deciding what each character should carry. Last, but certainly not least: Mila’s Turnwheel. I absolutely love this thing. It allows you to rewind time a certain number of turns per battle. Did your only healer get taken out by an incredibly lucky crit at the exact wrong time? Nope. It never happened. Thank you, Mila.

I’ve been extremely positive about SoV so far since it seems to cater to my sensibilities and yet it’s fairly low on the list. Although the story is a bit predictable and a few characters are underdeveloped, what hurts it the most is that it’s still very much a turn based strategy RPG at it’s heart. It does almost everything else right, but I can’t get past the core gameplay.

8. Night in the Woods

GREGG RULZ

9. Bayonetta

I somehow missed out on Bayonetta on both the Wii and Wii U and I’m honestly kind of puzzled as to why. During the Wii era I didn’t have much money of my own so there’s a plausible reasoning there; in the Wii U era, though, I can’t remember why I never picked up the Bayonetta games.

The Bayonettas are good, y’all. Platinum Games has built their brand around over-the-top character action games because they’re really good at it. Bayonetta revolves around frantic combo-based combat with crazy witch powers against wonderfully horrific angels. The spectacle is really the most important thing with this game and with events like riding a motorcycle into space to punch god into the sun, it absolutely delivers.

The main thing that separates the first game from the sequel for me is the difficulty. It might just be that I wasn’t familiar with the combat system yet, but I found myself dying repeatedly to some bosses and other significant encounters. It wasn’t consistent either; I coasted along with no trouble through most of the game and was suddenly roadblocked periodically. I don’t normally mind a bit a challenge- dying a few times is fine if the encounter is well designed but demanding- but in this type of game, I find that dying and having to restart takes a big toll on the mood the game tries to create. It causes the tense, fast paced, bombastic action to screech to a halt. Of course there does need to be some risk of failure for that tension to exist, leaving the game in a tricky spot. It needs to keep the player from failing too often, but still make them feel as if they can fail. I think the best option for this is an adaptive difficulty system where the game adjusts itself on the fly to keep pace with the player’s skill level. This would kill any significance to the game’s ranking system, but I think that would be better implemented in a separately scored individual-level mode with fixed difficulty.

10. Octopath Traveler

Octopath Traveler is a game I probably shouldn’t be writing about because I’ve completed relatively little of it, but I feel like I need to air some grievances. It’s a game I very much want to love, but I’ve found it hard to do so. It has some amazing qualities and some others that undermine the good.

First off I adore the visual style. It’s a gorgeous take on old 16 bit graphics including lighting, bloom, depth of field and 3D models that somehow doesn’t look out of place. I absolutely want to see more games take this approach. Just inject that 16 bit nostalgia into my veins.

The battle system is the biggest highlight for me. It doesn’t quite live up to the Bravely Default system, but I would call it an able successor. It continues the theme of storing additional actions, allowing you to unleash massive attacks at just the right opportunity. The breaking system provides that opportunity by making an enemy much more vulnerable after enough hits from their weaknesses. It brings over the job system as well, allowing for cross-job skills to synergize with each other.

The dungeons back in Bravely Default were usually quite boring. You’d have some corridors with branching paths and treasure hiding in dead ends and not much else. Octopath took this format and simplified it even more. Not only are dungeons completely empty except for the boss at the end and unskippable random encounters, but their layouts are even simpler and less interesting to play. They may look very pretty, but there’s no substance to them.

Octopath sells itself as a retro-style RPG with eight distinct characters, each with their own paths. Individually, each character is reasonably well developed and interesting. My biggest problem with Octopath comes with the interactions between characters and their stories, specifically the lack thereof. Each character’s story is completely separate from everything else. The other seven characters basically don’t exist in the context of a story chapter. There’s no significant overarching story to bring the characters together (or so I’ve been told from friends who have progressed further than me), so I can’t help but wonder why these characters are traveling together. The only interaction between characters comes in the form of very short dialogues that appear sporadically, something like the skits from a Tales Of game, except much less frequent and less lengthy. If each characters’ story had started separate and started to intermingle and eventually merge into one overarching plot, I would be extremely on board for that, but as it is, everything just feels a bit hollow knowing that essentially nothing has any significance outside of the path it exists in.

11. OneShot

Whenever someone first sees OneShot, they always jump to Undertale comparisons, and for good reasons. They both use simple 2D graphics to create a bizarre world filled with even more bizarre creatures, have a theme of non-violence (OneShot doesn’t even have combat) and breaking the fourth wall. Despite this, they have many thematic, mechanical and stylistic differences. It’s difficult to discuss these without spoiling both games, so I guess you’ll have to take my word for it.

OneShot follows child of undefined gender named Niko (who is definitely NOT a cat) as they journey to restore a magical lightbulb to revitalize a dying world. Niko is accompanied on their journey by you, the player. Niko addresses you directly and relies on your guidance and companionship, eventually turning the player into a significant figure in the world and story.

The world of OneShot is incredibly bleak, as the source of all light and energy was suddenly snuffed out some time ago. This bleakness is prevalent throughout the game as Niko meets many bizarre creatures clinging to the last reserves of light and heat. The contrasting warmth and light from Niko, both literally from the constantly glowing lightbulb they carry everywhere and figuratively from Niko’s kind, caring and enthusiastic personality, makes them a shining beacon of hope. Niko is so endearing and well realized that they’re probably my favorite character from the games on this list.

12. Bayonetta 2

Basically everything I said about Bayonetta 1 applies to 2 as well. In 2, though, I felt the difficulty issues had been completely smoothed out. Throughout all of the story sections, I don’t think I died even once, but I frequently felt as if I could have died. The difficulty felt much more uniform. It was only in a few of the periodic and optional challenge rooms where I actually failed. Again, this could easily just be my experience with the combat system showing through, but regardless, the entire game flowed so much better that I ended up enjoying it more than its predecessor.

13. Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion

We all know that Splatoon 2 is the game of the generation and all years forever to infinity (or at least until Splatoon 3), but for now I’ll pretend that the Octo Expansion is just a normal game.

First and foremost, you get to play as octolings. I mean, that alone should put it at the top of the list, but again, we’re intentionally downplaying these things to be fair to the other games. The expansion mostly consists of a series of octoling test chambers far below Inkopolis, most of which have one very focused challenge. The amount of variety in these chambers is really impressive. You’ve got a trek through a parking garage filled with hostile turrets, a car wash suspended over an infinite void and a massive billiards table just to name a few. Some of them are actually challenging as well, even for someone with over 400 hours of play time between Splatoon 1 and 2. I imagine they’re great for honing new players’ skills.

You travel to the various chambers by selecting them from inside a subway train filled with all sort of bizarre deep sea creatures. This is where most of the interaction with other characters is done. There are wonderfully adorable chat logs between Marina, Pearl and Captain Cuttlefish, as well as some dialogue with quirky characters on the train like the mob boss with a soft spot for memory cakes. It does a good job of fleshing out both the octoling and, to a lesser extent, the inkling societies.

Beyond the test chambers is a sequence of larger, more adventurous levels that has you escaping through an octarian stronghold. This is far and away my favorite section of the expansion because it opens things up and lets you explore larger and lengthier areas that utilize many of the skills taught in the test chambers. It’s a wonderful capstone to a very solid chunk of new content.

14. La-Mulana 2

La-Mulana combines explorative metroidvania gameplay with tongue-in-cheek retro mechanics and a healthy dose of ball-bustingly hard puzzles and riddles. It’s a game that very much needs a certain mindset when going on in. If you’re not considering all of the information you’ve found so far and hope to suss out the puzzles as they appear, you’ll run into a wall very quickly. Reading and absorbing everything to learn about the world and its history is vital to many of the game’s puzzles and provides a unique sense of immersion and accomplishment when you finally find the solution.

When I played La-Mulana (the first one), I didn’t have the right mindset through most of the game and my experience suffered for it. I ended up simply looking at a guide for most of the puzzles. I finished the game and had a lukewarm opinion of it until I watched a well produced let’s play that explained the processes for how everything could be solved. That’s when I realized I had cheated myself out of the actual La-Mulana experience and wished I could go back and do it properly. La-Mulana 2 was that second chance I wanted

I jumped at the chance to back La-Mulana 2 on kickstarter and waited through multiple delays until it was finally released this year. I went out and bought a notebook specifically to record info I found along the way, I took screenshots constantly, I made diagrams connecting the various locations, I went full La-Mulana on it. The game exists for those “eureka!” moments where you connect two or three different bits of information, come up with a possible solution and find that you were right. Those are what make the La-Mulana games so beloved by their fans- it’s very powerful and rewarding feeling that no other game has given me.

15. Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna - The Golden Country

In last year’s writeup, I included Xenoblade Chronicles 2 even though I hadn’t finished it yet. I’ve since finished it, but I’ll omit it this year because basically everything I said held true through the end and I’ve already got too much Xenoblade to write about with Torna and Xenoblade Chronicles the First on this list.

Torna - The Golden Country is a standalone expansion of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 that tells the story of the lost civilization of Torna. It follows anime pretty boy Jin and his not-yet-encased-in-crystal driver, Lora as they fight back against Malos’s rampage.

Torna makes a few important changes to the battle system: you can now play as both blades and drivers and switch between them in battle, every driver has exactly two blades that can’t be switched, special attacks (not blade combos) add elemental orbs to the target and adds damage that can be recovered by switching between the driver or a blade. In particular, limiting each of the three drivers to 2 blades each is very much appreciated, especially in this shorter (but still very large) expansion. This lets you becoming closer and more familiar with each character, both in their battle capabilities and their personalities. The change to elemental orbs puts even more emphasis on chain attacks, which were already the highlight of the base game’s battle system, by making them much easier to setup.

A big point of contention among reviews of Torna is the community system. In order to progress the story, you’re required to build your community to certain levels by doing potential community members’ side quests. While I can see this being irritating if playing only to dash through the story, this method misses what I think is the entire point of the game. It’s meant to endear the people of Torna to you. It gets you involved in the day-to-day goings on of this land and it’s peoples hopes and fears. The gates to story progression aren’t there to pad out the playtime with meaningless side quests. They’re there to make sure Torna is a community that you can care about. The story may follow Lora, Addam, Mythra and the other playable characters, but the real focus of the game is Torna itself and its people. Experiencing the story this way elevates it to something with the impact to leave a lasting impression.

16. Okami

Like Bayonetta, I somehow missed out on Okami across multiple console generations. Okami is a Zelda-like too, and I fuckin’ love Zelda-likes so I have no idea why I didn’t play it until this year.

As beautiful and well made as Okami is, I really can’t find many words to say about it. The art style is gorgeous and timeless, the ink mechanics are usually quite clever and fun, and the story, while pretty simple at its core fits well with its mythical qualities. Also you get to play as a dog. A DOG. A VERY GOOD DOG.

17. Monster Hunter World

I’ve been playing Monster Hunter games since a friend dragged me into Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii. In that time I’ve been able to internalize all of the obtuse mechanics and annoyances, but for new players, the Monster Hunter series has always been a very hard sell. It’s a series that is famously unfriendly to new players with a learning curve just shy of a sheer cliff.

Then Monster Hunter World came along early this year and shook up the series. Many of the irritating and obtuse mechanics have been reworked to be more intuitive or removed completely. For example, in previous games, eating and choosing equipment could only be done before choosing a quest, not even heading out, just selecting what you wanted to do locked you out. World lets you eat and change equipment even in the middle of a hunt. There’s no more abandoning quests immediately because you forgot to grab cooling drinks, or didn’t eat the right food, or brought the wrong weapon.

It also takes more steps to teach the player how everything works. Beyond just the expanded tutorials, there’s a training area where weapons and combat mechanics can be tested in a stress-free environment . It even has a display of all the possible actions and their associated inputs in the corner of the screen at all times. There are far too many quality of life improvements to list here, so I’ll just say that I feel like I’m able to recommend World to new players without any caveats. It’s still a fairly complex game, but it’s actually approachable now, and that’s the best thing they could have done for the series.

18. CrossCode

Several years ago I stumbled onto CrossCode on steam shortly after it went into early access. At the time, the demo basically only consisted of a very short prologue that doubled as a tutorial and I immediately saw a lot of promise. I bought the game and decided to sit on it until it got a full release. It finally released a few months ago and I’m glad to say my first impressions were spot on. CrossCode absolutely delivers on what I expected, and more.

The premise is that you play a mute girl named Lea who has lost her memories and plays through a futuristic MMORPG to try to trigger some recollections. The world of CrossCode is a pretty important part of the game. The MMORPG takes place in a real world, physical location on another planet, with players mentally controlling avatars made of very light and fragile stuff called “instant matter”. CrossCode tries very hard to sell the idea of being dumped in an MMORPG and I think it succeeds. There are dozens and dozens of named NPCs standing or running around that exist solely to make the world seem active and populated by players. You join a guild, have private chat messages with friends, fight in player vs. player duels, battle through instanced dungeons, etc.

Speaking of dungeons, I can’t stop talking about how good the dungeons in CrossCode are. They’re very much Zelda-style dungeons, but I think they’re better designed than a good number of actual 2D Zelda dungeons. CC’s dungeons tend to be more puzzle focused, but they feature their fair share of combat, either through dedicated combat rooms or the occasional puzzle combat room where you need to deal with various puzzle elements to defeat the enemies. There are an incredible amount of mechanics to CC’s combat and puzzles and they’re all taught organically through clever level design. These dungeons are beefy as well. You’re looking at no less than an hour per dungeon on your first go, probably closer to two hours. They remind me of how long Zelda dungeons used to feel when I was ten years old, except they’re that long even with almost 30 years of gaming experience.

CrossCode is a huge game. My final playtime was 45 hours with about two thirds of the side quests completed. There’s so many elements to this game that I’m frankly surprised it took the small team of developers less than a decade to complete. That size is also one of CrossCode’s biggest weaknesses. It includes so many mechanics that some feel overwhelming or add unnecessary complexity. For example, you have a skill tree that you can put points into. That’s pretty standard stuff, but when you start learning how to use other elements, it gets a little out of hand because you have a completely separate skill tree with its own pool of points to allocate for each element. I feel like even the crafting system (if you can even call it crafting, it’s just trading items to a vendor for other items) is a little overly complex when it starts providing a half dozen vendors to exchange crafting goods for other, slightly rarer crafting goods.

If you’re itching for good, meaty Zelda-like dungeons to sink your teeth into after Breath of the Wild’s somewhat disappointing divine beasts, I absolutely recommend CrossCode.

19. Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight is a metroidvania that draws heavily on both Super Metroid and Dark Souls. It’s also one of the best designed metroidvanias in the past decade. The world design in particular is very clever in how it keeps the player on track while maintaining the feel of being large and open, even in parts where it isn’t. I know some people had issues with getting lost, but I found the game’s subtle guiding to be very effective to the point that I felt like I always had some objective to investigate and never needed to go exploring aimlessly for progress.

Hollow Knight’s bleak, melancholic world, unhinged characters and vague, disjointed storytelling draw heavily from Dark Souls and create a very strong atmosphere. The character designs range from the small and cute player character to the silly overly affectionate charm merchant to the genuinely disturbing Nosk. Some of these feel cute and silly bugs feel a bit dissonant with the world, but not enough to outright break the immersion.

As far as metroidvanias go, Hollow Knight is very lengthy. My 90% completion run took a little over 20 hours, when a typical game in the genre clocks in around 10. Most tend to be on the short side because significant upgrades need to be spaced out appropriately to keep the player’s attention and provide a smooth progression from powerless to unstoppable. Hollow Knight gives out several of its most fun traversal upgrades fairly early on and spaces the others out a bit further, filling the spaces with a variety of other upgrades like magic spell, nail abilities, health/soul boosts and charms. Having this big pool of rewards to give out lets Hollow Knight expand its world and playtime while keeping the player engaged with new things at a decent pace.

20. Celeste

Celeste is a game that has been raved about ever since its release. The story tells an inspiring and relateable tale of overcoming ones own insecurities and fears. The soundtrack is beautiful, builds a strong atmosphere and has clear inspirations from the type of hardships Madeline tries to overcome. The gameplay is incredibly tight with level design that teaches, leads and challenges the player expertly. Dozens of articles have been written solely for this game already and I don’t think I have anything important to add, so I’ll keep this short:

Celeste is fantastic and you should absolutely play it. Yes, even you who isn’t that good at platformers. Just don’t feel obligated to play the B or C sides and try to find a controller with a high quality d-pad.

21. Xenoblade Chronicles

I suppose this year’s theme was “getting around to games I should have played years ago”. When Xenoblade Chronicles was released, it was barely on my radar and an errant review calling it an offline MMORPG squashed any interest I might have had for it at the time. It wasn’t until after I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2 that I put the original back on my radar. I’m very glad I did because it’s a good-ass game.

Having played XBC2 first undoubtedly colored my perception of XBC1. There’s a significant difference in graphical quality, character design, story, battle system and more but the basic DNA of a XBC game is apparent among them.

XBC1 is fairly consistent with its characters. The main cast is all quite likable, multidimensional and plays off of each other well. There aren’t really any Toras in this game. There’s one moment that really sticks out to me. It’s fairly early on, after Shulk had been having visions of the future for a little while and was hesitant to tell anyone. Reyn was able to pick up on Shulk hiding something, asks about it and Shulk tried to dismiss it. Instead of dropping the subject and letting it fester like so much other media, Reyn comes out and straight up scolds Shulk for trying to take on everything alone and for not trusting in his friends. This little snapshot alone perfectly illustrates that Shulk and Reyn have been friends for a very long time, care deeply for each other and aren’t above telling stinging truths if it helps in the end. The game is full of these sort of moments that give me a deep appreciation for the characters and how they’re written.

The story, being a massive JRPG, takes its time to really get rolling. The mechon attack early on jump starts it and it’s not firing on all cylinders until Eryth Sea, but from then on, it had its hooks firmly in me and it didn’t let go until the final battle. I don’t want to spoil anything so I don’t go into any details, but I definitely cried actual real tears at least a few times.

Also, hey, did you guys know that Xenoblade Chronicles for the Nintendo Wii has a [link to mechonis field] good [link to satorl marsh day] soundtrack? Well it does. I’m sure not many people know that, so I thought I’d throw that out there.

If I had to pick out something negative to talk about, it would be the side quests. Admittedly, I only completed about a third of all the side quests, but the majority of the ones I did were just not all that interesting. They were mostly MMORPG style quests to kill X monsters, find Y materials or talk to Z person, all while being prefaced with just a few standard dialogue boxes. Very few of them felt like they had any real impact or significance.

Xenoblade Chronicles is a widely beloved game and I can see why now. It managed to create an immersive story with endearing characters, all resolving around a huge and lively world. I wish I remembered which reviewer initially turned me off from the game so I can send them a strongly worded letter for misrepresenting it so egregiously.