This year I played a lot of RPGs. Long ones. I also spent less time Gameing overall this year too, so my list of games to rank is unusually short this year. That’s great for me writing it and great for you reading it. I should play even fewer games in 2023.
Trails of Cold Steel III
I’m about 600 hours into the Trails series so my sunk cost obligates me to play the rest. The first half of the Cold Steel arc, as I said last year, felt like a significant downgrade over the earlier Trails games, and I think Cold Steel III continues that downward trend. I wouldn’t call CS3 outright bad, but it’s toeing the line.
At over 98 hours, CS3 is by far the longest Trails game I’ve played. The next longest was CS1 at just over 80 hours. I just don’t think there’s anywhere near 98 hours worth of content in the game. The padding feels so much worse here that it could trim probably a third of its runtime and lose almost nothing. The comically long cutscenes, particularly at the end of each chapter, have an increasingly absurd train of characters appearing out of nowhere to join the fray. Each new character needs to chat up every other character they have a strong relationship with before they actually leap into action for 10 seconds, then another new group joins. It really is quite funny.
The scene in Hamel really stands out. Hamel is a ruined town whose existence is a closely guarded secret by the Erebonian government. An entire chain of quests is needed to gain access from the highest officials of the region for your party of 4. Once you get there though, a parade of no less than 50 characters shows up, including a horde of oblivious students who have absolutely no reason to be there.
The quality of the writing is on the same downward trend. The broad strokes of the story are mostly alright, if a bit contrived, and the world building is still one of the main draws of the series, but the moment-to-moment dialog ranges from bland to uncomfortable. For some reason, all women or girls within a 50 arge radius of Rean Schwarzer get at least one of two types of brain worms: hopelessly infatuated or pervert accuser. Either they will talk endlessly about how dreamy Instructor Rean is, or they’ll talk about how he’s a disgusting sex pervert if he so much as puts his socks on backwards. It’s absolutely exhausting. That’s not even mentioning the general creepiness with girls.
On the positive side, CS3’s battle system shakes up the formula by adding the break and order mechanics. After doing enough break damage, the enemy is stunned for a turn, becomes more vulnerable and makes the unbalance chance 100% for guaranteed BP. This more reliable source of Bravery Points (BP) plays into the order system as well. Each character has a unique party-wide buff called an order that can be activated with some amount of BP. These orders have a wide variety of effects and can be very powerful. The Trails battle system was already very solid, but this adds a surprising amount of depth, to the point that it’s become one of my favorite turn based battle systems. Unfortunately, I mostly play the Trails series for the story and characters, so the battle system can’t quite pull it up from the bottom for me.
Transiruby
A few years ago I wrote about Kamiko, a fun and very short action-y puzzle-y thing that I got into speedrunning a little bit. The developer, Skipmore, released a full-length metroidvania called Transiruby, so of course I had to play it.
At first glance Transiruby looks like a fairly generic indie pixel art metroidvania and, for the most part, it is. It has some wonderful pixel art and a rather interesting and unusual vehicle area, but it doesn’t really stand out very much. It’s a fun and solid game with tight controls and decent level design, but I had to go back and watch a few videos about the game to refresh my memory for this writeup. I hate to say this since the game is well made, but the flood of games in the genre means the worst impression a game can leave is a weak one.
Chrono Cross
Despite playing so many PS1 RPGs, I somehow missed Chrono Cross. I not only missed it, I managed to live under a rock for a few decades because I knew almost nothing about the game going into it.
Chrono Cross stratches that PS1 RPG itch extremely well. It’s got the chunky models, overly dramatic camera angles, gratuitous attack animations and the gorgeous pre-rendered backdrops, while the unusual and slightly awkward battle system gives it the perfect garnish.
It’s not a difficult game by any measure, but the balancing between stamina and element levels, as well as rationing limited elements gave it an interesting and unique strategic element. I played the Radical Dreamers edition which somehow has even worse performance than the original on PS1, but it does have a speedup button. The battles are so agonizingly slow at their base speed that I’m not sure I would’ve finished without that. The leveling mechanism is quite bizarre as well. I’m still not sure I understand it, but I think you only get real stat bonuses when finishing certain encounters and receive a star. There are a finite number of stars you can get in the game, but some are missable, so it’s possible to be stuck permanently underleveled. Not a fan of that.
The story of Chrono Cross is, I think, where the meat and potatoes of the game lies. I can’t begin to describe the entire story though, because the final quarter of the game had my head spinning. At first I thought the game was related to Chrono Trigger in the same way Final Fantasies are related to each other, but no, it’s actually very tightly coupled with Trigger in ways that become increasingly bonkers. The final third of the game is like that rollercoaster that kills you from G-forces pulling blood from your brain; it’s constantly throwing you through new loops and becoming decreasingly comprehensible. I really liked some of the twists and turns it took, but it didn’t know when to stop.
DRAINUS
I had a really awful drainus/anus joke here, but I removed it because it was just too awful. Everyone needs to make at least one anus joke when discussing the game though. DRAINUS is the next game by Team Ladybug, of Luna Nights fame, so I was instantly interested. Team Ladybug is very good at action combat with mechanics that create a really addicting and rewarding circular flow. The main mechanic involves absorbing enemy attacks and firing them back. It sounds Ikaruga-like on the surface, but there’s a lot of Gradius and R-Type and more going on under the hood with upgrades, guard timers, power levels, etc. Combine that with some super fast paced action with some absolutely incredible pixel art and animation, and an actually pretty interesting story and you’ve got what might be my favorite shmup of all time.
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
This is the story of a game called The Stanley Parable. The Stanley Parable toiled day in and day out at the Comedy Mines, finding and refining only the highest quality Joke ore. Eventually The Stanley Parable said “That’s enough jokes. Now it’s time to participate in commerce and exchange these jokes for currency.”, and thus the adoring public was able to witness the amazing jokes. The whole world loved The Stanley Parable’s jokes for being very clever meta commentary on the nature of video game narratives, but being the gluttons for Content that they are, the public demanded more. More jokes. More insightful commentary. More of the narrator’s sensual voice.
Eventually, The Stanley Parable took notice of the public’s demands and said “We will mine more jokes for you, our adoring fans”, and so they did and called it The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. These new jokes were even more meta and more commentarious than before. The bar had been set very high, but could The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe reach the same lofty heights? Yes! It certainly could and it did! The public rejoiced once again, for The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe had exceeded expectations and brought jocular joy to the world once more.
Salamander County Public Television
SalCo is a wonderfully absurd minigame collection glued together with an even more absurd story involving a TV station filming content despite everyone in the county going missing suddenly. I might be slightly biased since it was made by my friend tininsteelian and I’m credited as a tester in the game, but in terms of pure fun density, SalCo is easily able to compete with vastly larger games. It’s one of those games where I’ll eagerly tune into a stream where someone is playing it for the first time just to see their reactions. It also managed to hit that high score grind nerve, where I had a burning drive to get some world records on various minigames. I did have a few records, but sadly they’ve all been beaten over time.
If you’re a streamer, SalCo is an easy choice to play on stream, since there’s something zany happening every few minutes to keep the viewers interested. If you’re not a streamer, the game will keep you wanting to see what crazy minigame is next and what wild swerve the story will take next.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land
After sitting here and thinking about Kirby and the Forgotten Land for a few minutes, I’m realizing I don’t have a whole lot to say about the game. It’s extremely a Kirby game, but finally in 3D. The dimensional jump feels very natural and adds some good exploration gameplay. Having an upgradeable home base is (I think?) a new idea for Kirby which adds a very welcome sense of progression. Kirby’s new dodge ability adds a new layer to fighting, but it also might be a tad overpowered, since constantly dodging can trivialize some bosses. The mouthful transformations are a weird addition that could easily have been replaced with regular copy abilities, but they give the game a little extra personality that I appreciate. Overall a really solid and fun game. I haven’t actually played too many Kirby games, but this is probably my favorite so far?
Final Fantasy VI (Pixel Remaster)
Final Fantasy VI is my favorite game of all time. It made such an incredibly strong impression on me at a young age that I don’t think any game could reasonably dethrone it. It’s not a perfect game by any means, but what it got right, in the era that it happened, was unparalleled in its impact.
I could talk about the intricacies of Final Fantasy VI for another 5000 words, but I want to focus only on what the pixel remaster did. First off is the most obvious: the font. For some absurd reason, Square Enix decided to use a wholly inappropriate font for all the English text in the game. It looks horrendous. Thankfully there’s a very easy fix on PC where you replace the English font pack with the Japanese one, which vastly improves the look. Next there are plenty of small quality of life improvements, such as showing exact stat changes when viewing items in shops, changing equipment and espers for benched characters and more. The most iconic scene in the game, the opera scene, was eve given a gorgeous HD-2D treatment.
The music has been almost entirely redone, which sounds like a recipe for disaster with such a beloved OST, but the pixel remaster music is actually fantastic (with a few exceptions). The scene where Setzer finally takes flight with the Falcon again made me, a 35 year old supposed-adult, cry my eyes out for a good 5 minutes, and the music was a major factor in that. It was like being run over by an emotional semi-truck you’ve seen many times but just noticed the sick new paint job.
I would say the pixel remaster is the definitive version of Final Fantasy VI, but there’s one glaring issue. The extra dungeon and other content added in the GBA version is absent. The extra GBA content wasn’t going to light the world on fire, but the current package feels just a bit incomplete without it. If you’ve never played Final Fantasy VI though, the pixel remaster is a very easy recommendation.
Pokemon Violet
If you asked 13 year old me what Pokemon would look like in 30 years, Pokemon Violet is probably close to what I would say. The wide open world with sprawling cities, vast fields, shimmering rivers and lakes and pokemon just hanging around, fully visible, doing whatever it is that pokemon do, was basically the idealized idea of pokemon to me. Over the decades my tastes have changed a bit, but not drastically. The biggest change actually game earlier this year with Legends: Arceus, but we’ll get to that later. Violet and Scarlet (or just Gen 9) has the recipe to easily be the best pokemon game out there and, at least in terms of the mainline series, I think it succeeds at that, despite it being released at least 6 months before it was ready.
Gen 9 pokemon has a lot of problems, most of which stem from it being a very rushed and unfinished game. There are plenty of small glitches, to the point that it’s hard to not run into at least a few per play session. Thankfully most of the glitches are benign, but full on crashes aren’t especially rare. I was lucky to only run into one issue that affected gameplay, but I know several who were affected much more often. Visually it seems like a mess as well, with some objects seeming to have just flat, single-color textures, surrounded by much more detailed objects and textures. Draw distances are a bit funky as well, with terrain very noticeably morphing from lower detail meshes when you’re just a few meters away. The general performance as well leave a lot to be desired, with some areas seeming to dip below 20 fps, and a solid 30 is a rare treat.
While the open world nature is the most obvious feature, the one that impressed me the most was the story. Instead of the usual “get 8 gym badges” you have three separate storylines. One has you get the usual 8 gym badges, but the others have you find and fight titan pokemon and defeat all of Team Star’s bases. Something about slowly working through three different stories as I explored the world struck a chord with me. Perhaps it’s just refreshing to break down the barriers of tradition in pokemon games where the one and only goal is to become the strongest trainer. The story really comes together after all three paths have been completed. I won’t spoil anything, but the characters interactions and visual design of the final stretch of the game is just superb and was the perfect capstone to one of the best pokemon games.
AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative
I adore Kotaro Uchikoshi’s batshit crazy stories. When he starts writing about some pseudo-scientific nonsense to incorporate it into the game, it’s like when your teacher wheels out the TV because it’s time to watch a movie in class. He manages to create interconnected narratives that keep you guessing until the very end, while also feeding you just enough to keep your imagination running. The original AI: The Somnium Files did all of that amazingly well. The sequel tries to do the same and, for the most part, succeeds at recapturing the same feelings.
It’s a bit hard to talk about AI:TSF:NI in depth without dropping some spoilers, so I’ll be quick about it. My biggest annoyance with the first game is that the somnium segments felt like trial and error to figure out which options happened to have the right effect. The sequel manages to mostly fix this by making the correct options much more logical and obvious. I found myself running out of time far less often, but I also likely missed more funny but optional interactions. Speaking of funny interactions, they really went wild with them this time. One somnium in particular had me busting a gut for almost the entire thing.
Having more of an emphasis on Mizuki is a big plus too. She’s easily the most interesting character in the series, and putting her and Aiba together is a dream team. The story with Mizuki gets especially wild when [REDACTED].
While I think the overall mystery isn’t quite as strong as the first game, it’s more than a worthy successor.
Pokemon Legends: Arceus
Legends Arceus and Violet/Scarlet both include huge changes to the standard Pokemon formula, and there’s a lot of overlap in the changes. Arceus’s unique changes, I think, are the most interesting additions to the pokemon forumla, which push it slightly ahead of Violet for me.
The realtime gameplay aspect of Arceus is a perfect compliment to the slower turn based battle system. Having to pokemon being an actual threat out in the field makes for more engaging exploration and adds a little nugget of actually relevant stealth gameplay. Violet also has the crouching in tall grass mechanic, for instance, but it has very little practical use; I never used it in 40 hours. It was essential in Arceus, however. Most major battles in the game are a combination of realtime action segments and relatively traditional turn based battles. This made for the most interesting encounters I’ve ever had in a pokemon game.
The field gameplay has plenty of small mechanics that makes it more interesting as well. Collecting materials, for example, is vastly more fun in Arceus thanks to being able to visually identify the items and use your pokemon to collect them. Having a use for your pokemon outside of battle is something that pokemon in general has been sorely missing. Crafting is just much more interesting in Arceus than Violet. Violet crafting is essentially only for TMs, which isn’t a bad idea in essence, but TMs are typically needed only very occasionally. I crafted perhaps a half dozen in my playthrough, but spent huge amounts of time collecting the vast numbers of crafting materials. Arceus makes crafting feel much more worthwhile by having it be the primary source of healing items and pokeballs. Combined with the generally higher difficulty and greater emphasis on catching many of each pokemon species, these items are in much higher demand than normal, making crafting actually rewarding.
Where I think Violet has the advantage is in the world layout. Arceus’s world is split into several discreet maps, while I feel like Violet’s fully open and world would work better with the systems at play. Arceus’s world also has much less human presence than most games, with only a few small towns (aside from the main settlement), which don’t even offer much outside of some NPC dialog.
We’re very close to the perfect Pokemon game, and combining Violet and Arceus in just the right way will get us there.
Splatoon 3
The Splatoon series is automatically the game of the year for all years, but again, let’s try to let some of the other games shine.
Splatoon 3 keeps everything that made the previous games great and makes it even better. The new squid roll ability adds a huge new option in a fight. While ink armor as a special is gone, anyone can now get armor briefly when squid rolling.
The new story mode campaign takes the free roaming overworld from the other games and cranks it up a notch, while using the same mission format and quality as the Octo Expansion, making it probably the best single player content in the series.
It introduced two new weapon classes: stringers and splatanas. Stringers are bows and splatanas are swords, essentially. Considering I’ve essentially picked up the tri-stringer as my new main weapon, you could say I’m a fan of the new weapons.
Most importantly in Splatoon 3 is the vast improvements to the UI and lobbies. Nintendo is still awful at the internet, but Splatoon 3 is the first game where it’s not missing a critical feature. There’s still plenty of room for improvement but they’ve reached an acceptable baseline. Also Salmon run is always available now. This might be the most important thing, since the mode feels like it has a lot more emphasis now, especially with Big Run taking over the square occasionally.
TUNIC
Tunic implicitly promises a Zelda-like experience with a cute fox, but it does so much more than that. The game centers around collecting pages of an old video game instruction manual in order to learn how the game works and solve various puzzles. Early on, almost every page will show you a new ability that you’ve actually had since the very beginning. It’ll show you how various aspects of the world work, that you likely could have interacted with at any time. It’s a game where knowledge is the biggest powerup you get. In this way Tunic reminded me of one of my favorite games of all time, Outer Wilds. This style of gameplay and progression hits a part of my brain that causes me to think about it constantly for weeks at a time.
I’ve seen a lot of talk about Tunic’s souls-like combat. There are certainly strong similarities, but it’s not as refined or complex as your Dark Soulses or Bloodbornes. The combat is still interesting and engaging, but Tunic’s strength lies in it puzzles. The depth and breadth of the puzzles reminds me of La-Mulana, but without some of the offputting obtuseness. Rarely is it so rewarding to put all the pieces together to find the answer that was hidden in plain sight all along. The final puzzle in particular goes so incredibly hard on this theme that finally solving it instantly catapulted it into one of my all time favorite video game puzzles.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3
I don’t know where to begin with Xenoblade 3. This is such a massive game with so much to it that I can’t possibly scratch the surface. Xenoblade 3 exemplifies basically everything that I love about Xenoblade. It’s got the best exploration in the series, a cast of main characters without a single dud, a deep and rewarding battle system, a world-class soundtrack and a story that gives you a burning desire to see what happens next. The game is a love letter to the series, while also improving on the previous iterations in almost every way.
While the story lost a bit of steam at the very end, I think it’s overall my favorite. The incredible character writing is a big factor in that, since the hardest hitting moments play off of your emotional connections to the characters and the characters’ connections to each other. Those moments are so impactful that they’ve already secured a permanent place in my memory.
Xenoblade 3 has the sort of gameplay that makes me want to dick around for 10 hours to do various sidequests and explore before moving on to the next part of the main story. It made me want to immerse myself in the world as much as I could. It’s not often a game does that to me. The previous one was the Trails Crossbell games, and before that it was Xenoblade 2.
Nothing consumed my thoughts so thoroughly and made such a strong impression this year than Xenoblade 3. Not even Splatoon 3 managed to hit those highs. It’s one that’ll stick with me, at least somewhat, forever.
