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shyguycity · 1 year ago

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It's been a while since I made a formal game of the year list on this page; in 2020, my now wife and I decided to make an entire fanzine about my favorite games of the year, which ballooned in size and scope from there. If you're interested, you can find the link to the (free!) magazine, Critical Diversions, as well as see what else I've been up to in the gaming space, over at https://twitter.com/crit_diversions. It was written by five people, myself included, layoutted into a magazine format by me, and with some lovingly done illustrations made by my wife. We've also started a discord, games club, and podcast, all under the Critical Diversions banner, if any of that sounds appealing to you.

Since that magazine project, I haven't really had the creative energy to write a full game of the year list the way that I used to. Until now! 2023 has been the most incredible year for game releases that I've been alive to see, and there's so much to be excited for and talk about, I just couldn't resist anymore, despite the fact that we're gearing up to do a community game of the year podcast. But before we get to the top 10 list proper....

Honorable Mentions:

We Love Katamari ReRoll + Royal Reverie

The original We Love Katamari, released on the Playstation 2 in 2005, was already one of my favorite games ever made, so it's borderline unfair of Namco to release an absolutely perfect HD remaster of it in 2023. Namco must've thought so, too, because this was one of my most anticipated games of the year, and I didn't even realize it had released until I happened to see it on the eShop. To the uninitiated, Katamari games task you with rolling up real world objects with your sticky katamari ball, growing bigger and bigger as you go, all with the intent of making your katamari big enough to make stars in the sky. It's a simple yet delightful enough concept on its own to be enjoyed by anyone, but add in an unmeasurable amount of charm and one of the greatest soundtracks ever made, and it's easy to see why this goofy little series has persisted for over two decades now.

For my money, this is the best entry in the series, practically spilling over with creative and fun new ways and reasons to roll over innocent bystanders and animals with a space ball given to you by your negligent, abusive father, who is also basically god. Oh did I forget to mention that there's an actual well told narrative with a genuinely emotional-but-not-saccharine message at its core? Buy this fucking game y'all, I've already seen it for as low as 15 dollars.

Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster

Final Fantasy as a series misses way more often than it hits, for me. Yeah I love 7, its remake, 10, and 10-2, but by and large, every other entry I've tried to spend time with has left me incredibly cold (looking at you in particular, 6). Between craving a turn-based RPG and having the flu earlier this year, I decided to take a chance on the pixel remaster version of 5, released on consoles for the first time in 2023. Imagine my surprise when it became hands down my favorite entry in the series, as well as one of my favorite RPGs I've ever played.

Not to say that what's presented here hasn't been improved upon in the past 30 years; Octopath Traveler 2, a game we'll be talking about in my actual top 10, seemed to base its entire design around "Hey remember Final Fantasy 5? Let's make a way more open and less restricted version of that". Still, though, what FF5 was doing as an early Super Famicom game is pretty impressive; boasting a fairly open-ended job and multiclass system that's absolutely begging you to make as many fun combinations as you can imagine with your party members, it's a game that's infinitely more replayable than your average Final Fantasy fare, despite its lacking (but not horrible!) story. I ran through the game with a samurai that could also shoot hoardes of squirrels and bees out of my pockets, so you know it's a great game.

Super Mario RPG

Look, you'll never convince me that Mario RPG and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door aren't both wildly inferior to the original Paper Mario on the Nintendo 64. I've held this belief (and grudge against these other Mario spinoff fandoms) for most of my life, and I will continue to do so. And I say this as someone whose first exposure to RPGs was renting the original version of this game as a seven-year-old!

"It's too simple!" I would always bleat feebly in the general direction of the nearest hardcore Geno fan whenever this game was brought up. "It's a solid blueprint for what was to come later, but largely feels like a rough draft, a 16-bit Final Fantasy with a Mario coat of paint!" And, yeah, I am right about all of those things, and I'll continue to never let any of you forget it. But in 2023, playing this remake of one of Nintendo's most annoyingly favorited fan favorites, I couldn't help but let myself get washed away in its charms. There's no build variety or real "role-playing" to speak of, you can 100% the game in like 12 hours, and you just generally never have to turn your brain on while playing the game at all. Call it softness, call it old age, call it just really being in the mood for a cute and charming little adventure, but I fell in love with this game and its world in a way I never was able to previously. Bring on that Thousand-Year Door remaster next, Nintendo; I'm in a forgiving mood.

Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania

Speaking of being in a forgiving mood, did y'all know that I thought the original 1.0 release of Dead Cells was incredibly boring? Released in 2018, this sidescrolling roguelite was getting a ton of accolades at the time that had me extremely excited. That's not to say that it was bad, of course; I could see the markings of a well made game, and obviously the game was appealing to someone out there, with all the praise it received. But after 10 hours with it I deleted it off my Switch, thinking I'd never.........return.

It only took five years and a paid Castlevania expansion to make me give this game another look, but I'm glad I did, because I would put this pretty high up there on my all-time roguelite list now. To be clear, most of my issues with this game still remain, mostly that it gets repetitive much sooner than you'd expect of a game with as much content as this does. But instead of cooling on it 10 hours in like I did back in 2018, I got over 60 hours and dozens upon dozens of runs in before calling it quits on Dead Cells this time.

And if you're a Castlevania dork, honestly, just pick this up. There's more than enough love and fanservice here to keep even the most ardent of Castlevania freaks crying bloody tears, including the ability to replace the entire soundtrack with Castlevania songs, most of them the original version but with some new compositions included. Roguelite shredding in a video game hasn't been this good since Hades.

Now...the actual list.

10. Marvel's Spider-Man 2

No one is more down on open world checklist collectathons than I am; the idea of spending over 100 hours playing a modern Assassin's Creed game honestly makes my tummy hurt. And by and large, Spider-Man 2 doesn't stray far from this design template. You run, jump, swing, and glide all over New York City, stopping burglaries and car chases on your way to the next story objective or side mission, leveling up and spending points on various skill trees to level your Spider-Men up to gain new/upgrade old abilities, rinse and repeat. Structurally, this game isn't really doing anything different from the previous two Spider-Man games from developer Insomniac, and yet this entry was an absolute joy to play to me in way those weren't.

Largely, I think it's the pacing of the game. And not just on a macro scale, though I do think that's improved here as well. No, for me it was most noticeable in the combat; no longer are you holding down a button to freeze time and pull up a gadget wheel and having Spider-Man select one of his little science tools to shoot out before doing a few melee attacks and web shots. Instead, all of your gadgets and super moves are activated in real time with different button combinations. It might sound breathlessly dorky, but that simple change really sold the illusion of playing a Spider-Man simulator to me, and not just a Ratchet and Clank game with a Spider-Man skin.

The story I also found to be a wholesale improvement over the last two games, albeit with the caveat that the symbiote and Venom storyline almost never come across as anything beyond tryhard 90s edgelord shit in any form of media. Truly, I think Venom is just a straight up awful character, and is even worse here than usual, and I was exceptionally tired of Peter's gruff mean guy voice by the end of his time wearing the symbiote. Miles more than made up for any issues I had with the Peter side of the story, and with the way the game's story leaves off, I hope to see that character again sooner than Spider-Man 3 in another half decade.

9. Pikmin 4

This feels like Pikmin's big breakout moment as a series. And honestly, maybe my biggest surprise of the year isn't how great this game was, but how many other people were (finally) raving about Pikmin. The fact that it's this relatively low on my own list when most people I know that played it have it near the top of theirs shocks, while also making me feel pretty damn great about Pikmin's future.

From a casual perspective it's pretty easy to see why this has been such a hit for the series. It retains all the charm and cuteness and great gameplay loop of previous games in the series, while making a ton of smart changes along the way. New to 4: a fully adjustable camera that makes you feel way more involved in the action (and see all of the impossibly cute death happening around and to you); a whole host of quality of life changes, like being able to move your spaceship around each stage at will to have a more accessible base of operations; bonafide multifloor dungeons where you're able to soak in some of the best aspects of Pikmin's gameplay without worrying about time passing; "dandori battles", both against the CPU or local rivals where you aim to manage your armies as efficiently as possible; and partner space dog Oatchi, who can help you and your little army of dudes in whatever way you see fit, from battling to carrying to scouting, thanks to an honest to god skill tree. In a Pikmin game! Who woulda thought.

Honestly though, as great as this game was, I can't help but pine for the more complex level and puzzle design of Pikmin 3, as well as the local splitscreen cooperative play of Pikmin 3 Deluxe. That second feature in particular was sorely, sorely missed in our household, as Pikmin 3 Deluxe's sublime coop is some of the most fun I've ever had playing a video game with my wife. Here's hoping the now inevitable Pikmin 5 manages to bring these missing elements home, much like my group of 100 Pikmin carrying an entire watermelon the size of a small mountain back to our spaceship for the day.

8. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

Besides just being a great year in game releases, 2023 was also the year where my expectations were subverted many times over. I'd seen plenty of overhyped indie spiritual successors to fan favorite games from the late 90s and early 2000s come and go, so my interest level for BRCF as someone that's never played a Jet Set Radio game couldn't have been much lower. But that's all on me, because if I'd known that this game and its inspirations were essentially just 3D platformers dressed up as a 2002 cyberpunk anime that'd air at 2am on Toonami, I'd have been all over it much sooner.

This game effortlessly pulls off everything I value in 3D platformers. The level designs are masterful and well thought out while still feeling organic instead of just abstract obstacle courses (the game does dabble into the latter at times, and they're some of the most standout moments as well). Being set in a city, it's naturally got a large emphasis on verticality that I think not enough games in this space bother with; I want to feel my stomach drop when I miss landing on a grind rail half a mile in the sky, even if falling from that far has no consequences beyond needing to pull off the platforming section again. And unlike the earlier Tony Hawk games, I'm free to explore each environment to my heart's content, looking for new songs to add to my playlist or spots just begging to be tagged with graffiti. Wrap all of this up in a style and soundtrack that are both just fucking cool, and what else could I really ask for? Well, besides just more of this, please.

7. Resident Evil 4

In a year full to the brim with remakes, remasters, and revisits, Resident Evil 4 is the one with the most expectations put on it, due to not only the pedigree of the original RE4 (often cited as one of the best games of all time, and surely the catalyst for the modern over the shoulder third-person shooter), but the obscenely high quality of Capcom's other recent remakes from the series; 2019's Resident Evil 2 remake, in particular, being one of the best big budget games of the last half decade, by my estimation. A lot of fans cited RE4 as both "impossible" and "pointless" to remake, though I imagine those same fans were the ones most anxiously waiting for this remake to drop with bated breath.

The end result? RE4 as a remake can't live up to the lofty expectations a lot of people probably hoped it could, not really, but I think it's also one of the most successful video game remakes I've ever had the pleasure of playing, in terms of the fun factor. The gaming landscape has changed a lot since 2005, a lot of that change because of RE4, so what do you even do to make a revisit under a modern lens worthwhile? I think Capcom didn't fully know the answer to that question, as the biggest mechanical additions to this game are the ability to parry the vast majority of attacks with your knife, and erm....craftable ammo? You'll of course find a handful of new enemies and remixed encounters, an even fewer amount of new weapons, and a couple welcome completely redone areas, like a mini open sandbox where you're free to explore the shores of a lake, and a much more clever and interesting version of the brief time spent playing as Ashley.

This might all sound like damning with faint praise, but truly, Capcom's ability to thread the needle here and deliver an honest to god, full on remake of RE4 with modern production values and budget, all without compromising the vision of the original, AND managing to make the remake tonally fit with the current vision of the extended Resident Evil universe? There's some black magic at work here, surely. Or at the very least some ancient parasite bugs at large.

6. Kirby's Return to Dreamland Deluxe

Kirby is the best Nintendo series, and this is an excellent remaster of one of the best Kirby games. What more is there to say? The only reason this isn't top three of the year material is because, well, I played it when it originally released on the Wii. But what's your excuse, coward?

I often hear the refrain of "Kirby games just aren't for me", and I used to humor that line of thinking, largely to avoid prolonged contact with dumb babies. But that dies today, and so will you if you don't stop being a dweeb. High quality sidescrolling brawlers with lite platforming elements and puzzle solving, set to some of the best music ever made for the medium, sporting an adorable aesthetic that's used as set dressing to cover up some of the best backstory and lore this side of Dark Souls? That's not for you? What is for you then, besides being a sad weirdo that still waxes nostalgic about the girl you held hands with once in middle school? Her mom dropped you two off at the theater once to see White Chicks and she never thought about you again. Grow up. Change something about your life. Kirby's got more charm and delight in whatever his puffy mass equivalent to a pinky is than Super Mario Bros. Wonder managed to wearily attempt to slump over its shoulder for an entire game. Y'all should be ashamed.

...

I dunno what this bit is anymore, so let's pivot back to normalcy. Yes, I know, I know, I'm the Kirby guy. It's my favorite gaming series, hell, maybe my favorite franchise in any medium period. But I'm also not blind to its faults and missteps, such as 2018's Star Allies. When I tell you that Return to Dreamland Deluxe, a remaster of a game I played over a decade ago, now with additional content, is one of my favorite games of 2023, I really mean it. The base game was already excellent, and the first entry of the modern era of Kirby, under the helm of Shinya Kumazaki. A new cel shading-adjacent rendering, coupled with completely new abilities Sand and Mech on top of perhaps the overall best set of copy abilities in a Kirby game, really help make the game feel fresh; Sand's combo and damage per second capability in particular is through the roof, while not feeling imbalanced.

The meat of the new content, however, is the new epilogue, in which you play as fan favorite character Magolor. Magolor plays very differently from Kirby, eschewing copy abilities and quicker movement for magic, and the game also introduces an honest to god skill tree into the series. This mini adventure culminates in not only what is probably my favorite boss fight of the year, but an in-universe lore explanation for why Magolor shows up in spinoff Kirby games adorned in green instead of blue and trading in crystal apples.

That may sound goofy and extremely in the weeds, and it is, but for a man in my mid-30s that's been beyond bored of Nintendo's refusal to do any significant kind of world building or storytelling in almost any of their mainline games, Kirby manages to continuously surprise and delight me with both its gameplay and universe in a way no other Nintendo game is even interested in trying. The Super Mario games should take heed.

5. Octopath Traveler 2

I played both demos for the original Octopath Traveler back before that game came out, and to say I didn't like it would be an understatement! The writing was at best flat, and at worst, overtly sexist (and that was just from a demo!), I found the battle system to be clunky, and the thing most people praised it for, its "HD2D" approach to graphics, I found quite ugly; it seemed to be throwing away any attempt at an actual artstyle in favor of cranking a bunch of photoshop filters up to max and letting people ooh and aah over some particle effects and oversaturated lighting. Great soundtrack, at least.

I couldn't tell you what drove me to check out the demo for 2, but I did, and instantly, something clicked for me that didn't in my limited experience with the original. Full disclosure, I haven't finished this game yet, and in fact I don't think I'm even halfway through. And that's a shame, because I think it could honestly rise even higher up this list, based on what I've already played. The battle system is fast and snappy, as long as I'm paying close enough attention to all the information on screen, like enemies weaknesses and my current BP situation. The overworld feels far more inspired by popup books than I remember 1's world feeling like, while still retaining the gorgeous battle sprites that the original excelled in. The soundtrack is an all-timer, to put it lightly. Even the writing for the characters, while still nowhere approaching the rest of the game's strong points, feels less like it works exclusively in lazy caricatures and broad stereotypes. Yeah there's a merchant character named Partitio from an old west-styled silver mining town, and yes I was just as worried about that fact as you probably are reading that sentence. And yet, Partitio has honestly become one of my favorite characters of the year, his desire to use his mercantile skills to ease the burdens of the working class only being outshone by the electric guitars and saxophone in his theme song.

What truly impresses with Octopath Traveler 2, though, is its sheer openness. The world is, while not quite your oyster right from the start, pretty dang free form for the most part, allowing you to go recruit your party members and explore towns and monster-filled wildlands in whatever order you see fit. This extends to the job system, which affords you the most freedom to truly make whatever kind of team you see fit I've ever seen in a game of this kind. I'm currently multiclassing my cleric, Temenos, into a scholar, and I've rarely felt cooler/dorkier at the same time, wielding nearly every magic type offered in the game at once with one world-weary church inquisitor. Just typing up this entry has got me itching to get back to the game, hoping to discover even more jobs to multiclass the rest of my crew into.

Take it from me, someone who as little as a few years ago felt pretty much over turn based RPGs, especially those coming out of Square-Enix: this game is very worth your time, regardless of your feelings towards the series, or even genre as a whole.

4. 30XX

In a year chockful of exceedingly excellent roguelites (Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania, Risk of Rain Returns, Cobalt Core, Vampire Survivors, just to name a few), 30XX stands tall above the rest for me, not just in terms of quality, but also in its ability to completely take over my gaming time for a couple months. This has all the trappings you expect from a game with the structure of a roguelite; permadeath resulting in having to start your entire run over, unlockable items and stat upgrades purchasable with currency carried over from the run you just died in, powerups that you collect during a run to give yourself a fighting chance (and which force you to make on-the-fly decision making about how best to synergize your build), and a white knuckle intensity that makes the runs when you really start to shred feel all the more rewarding, albeit no less anixety inducing.

What ends up separating 30XX from any other game in this admittedly crowded space is that it's essentially a roguelite take on Mega Man X4, the beloved Playstation 1 entry in an even more beloved series. X4 was the first game that really fleshed out lightsaber wielding cool guy Zero as a fully playable character, for the first time letting you play through the entire game as both him and series protagonist X. 30XX makes no bones about its inspiration; Nina, the blue one, is the X equivalent, meaning you'll be primarily shooting enemies with your arm cannon, while Ace, the red one, slices and dices with an energy sword, just like Zero. Likewise, the (absolutely gorgeous) spritework and extremely catchy soundtrack are doing their best to evoke the oft overlooked aesthetic and sounds of 2-D games from the Playstation 1. Rounding out the package are full-featured coop, both local and online, community made levels, daily and weekly seeded runs with leaderboards, and the promise of even more updates, including new characters(!!).

Even Mega Man series staples you might not expect to show up in a roguelite take on the formula end up being major focuses of the game, like gaining new abilities from defeating bosses. The game even takes that mechanic a step further, letting you mix and match two abilities to form completely new ones, like combining your black hole and homing lightning abilities to create a barrage of homing lightning strikes emanating from a swirling void. Or, in true roguelite fashion, you can even forego an ability from a boss altogether, if a different reward suits you. And that's just if you're playing as Nina! Ace gets an entirely different set of abilities and mechanics, all built around melee capabilities and close quarters combat.

If any of this sounds appealing to you, you're probably now asking yourself "why have I never heard of this game?" And I truly can't answer that, as this feels like it should already be a revered indie darling on the level of Shovel Knight or Super Meat Boy. If you're a Mega Man fan, please do yourself a favor and check this out. There's even a separate mode that minimizes the roguelite elements, including a removal of permadeath, if that suits you! This is a better Mega Man X revival than you'll likely ever see out of Capcom, if a day even ever comes for that at all. It also happens to be better than just about any official Mega Man game Capcom has ever put out, as well.

3. Sephonie

My personal gaming identity feels inexorably linked to Analgesic Productions, the two person development team that's putting out the best indie games most people have never even heard of. The only thread on Resetera I've ever made was solely for the purpose of evangelizing Anodyne 2: Return to Dust, a game that resonated so hard with me the effects are still reverberating outwards, as my habit of recommending that game anywhere I go has helped me forge genuine friendships (and probably gotten me on to a few government watch lists). Even the Ocean was the third game my friends and I covered in our games club, and was by far and away the best talk I've ever had about video games, sparking a creative spirit in me for months afterward. Marina Kittaka and Melos han-tani make some real affecting fucking games, is what I'm saying, and the idea of trying to sum up what makes Sephonie so special (and maybe even my favorite of their impressive work) is a bit daunting.

At its most base level, Sephonie is a 3-D platformer not dissimilar from the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series, or even the above Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, albeit without any wheels; instead of tilting the analog stick to move at whatever angle you want, you hold a button to run forward, the stick's sole purpose being to make adjustments to direction. Your mobility on its own isn't very versatile, and getting around requires careful and clever use of the environment to do wall runs and jumps, grabbing giant dandelions to float, landing on mushrooms to bounce, etc.

Even for a self-proclaimed platformer guru (maybe even especially for one!), the movement feels unwieldy or even downright intimidating at first. But in Analgesic we trust, and by the end of my initial 8 hour or so playthrough of the game, I felt like a parkour god, able to pull off complex maneuvers that I would have never been able to dream of in the opening sections of the game. Coming to grips with the controls and eventually mastering them was one of the biggest joys I experienced in video games this year; don't go into this expecting s Super Mario Odyssey-level of 1:1 control that lets you immediately start flowing through the environment like a hot knife through butter, because that's decidedly not the point here. Despite what the past few console generations have taught us, we don't need standardized controls across every game, as all that would serve to do here is sand down the distinct personality and learning opportunities presented in Sephonie.

Rounding out the gameplay are linking puzzles. The three playable characters are researchers who have come to the remote island of Sephonie to study its unique animal and plant life. Linking with each new lifeform you discover presents you with tile-based block puzzles, which end up being a nice change of pace from the platforming. As a testament to just how much love and care was put into Sephonie, the vast majority of these linking puzzles each have unique mechanics, be it teleporting tiles, tiles that are blocked and need busted open by matching blocks on adjacent tiles, tiles that multiply your point total, creatures that travel the puzzle and alter when and where you're even able to place your tiles, etc. With some tweaks, the link puzzles could be a whole game unto itself, and it's really impressive!

That's all well and good, but the main reasons I come to Analgesic games are the unbelievably good writing and even unbelievably-er soundtracks, and both are where Sephonie truly shines for me. Unfortunately, to talk too much about the story here would be bordering on a cardinal sin, and you're better off listening to some of the music on your own. Why not try the entire playlist here?

The previously mentioned Anodyne 2 opens by telling you it's a game about life. That's a bit of an understatement for me with Analgesic's games in general, but Sephonie might be the best example of "a game about life" that I can think of. As someone that grew up in a midwestern town full of basically nothing but nothingness and corn, the Bloomington, Illinois section of the game is without a doubt the most beautiful segment of any game I've ever played, and the main thing I keep coming back to with this game even six months later. I've never been so simultaneously full of nostalgia, regret, disdain, self-loathing, and fond memories as I was while platforming around an abstract dreamscape version of a midwestern town right off the highway. And I don't think I've ever related to a character in any fictional work as much as I did when Amy was talking about feeling lucky she was born in a small town, because it made learning how to drive much less intimidating.

If there's one game on this list I would beg someone to give a shot, it would be Sephonie. Hell, if there was one game I could force anyone to play, Sephonie might be taking that spot as well. As a thorough contemplation of what it means to be alive, and what connecting with one another can truly mean and feel like, there's no better work of art out there today, and certainly not one anywhere near as fun, either.

2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

What can I say about TotK that hasn't already been expressed in a million think pieces, essays, and podcasts across the entire internet by now? As a direct followup to 2017's stellar Breath of the Wild, I had concerns going in - would the magic still be there? Is exploring the same incarnation of Hyrule going to be fun when I know all of the broad strokes already? Are the bosses not going to suck this time? The answer to all of these is a resounding "absolutely", but there's so much more on offer here.

Everything in this game makes BotW feel like a rough draft, a sentence I never in a million years thought I'd be typing prior to getting my hands on the game. Any mechanic you can think of that you loved in the prior Zelda entry is either improved upon here or excised for something infinitely more interesting. The Sheikah slate abilities from BotW feel not only basic, but downright boring compared to the powers on offer in this sequel. Who cares about being able to spawn bombs at will when I can fuse batwings to arrows to make them fly further? Or just swim through through the damn ceiling!? To say nothing of the fact that you can build basically anything your imagination can spring into existence, from cars to rocket ships to pilotable mechs to lawn mowers. And it all....just....works, somehow, not only tonally with the game's world, but also from a game perspective. The game even lets you have five CPU controlled companion characters out at the same time, every one acting independently to take down enemies near you! It feels like your Switch is going to collapse under the weight of this game's ambition at any moment, and yet I put over 300 hours into the game with not a single crash in sight.

If there's one thing I can complain about, it's that the story feels like an actual afterthought, to the degree that it actually bummed me out, even as someone with rock bottom expectations when it comes to story in a Zelda game. The marketing REALLY hyped up the return of longtime series antagonist Ganondorf, and he just....kind of has no motivation for anything he's doing here. I'm not asking for much, and there are genuinely great character moments lightly sprinkled throughout the game's runtime, mostly with princess Zelda herself. But I couldn't help but imagine how much harder some story beats could have hit if Nintendo, again, actually even attempted to give people the tiniest but of anything to chew on when it comes to the stories they're telling.

But whatever, I've got a catapult to build to launch me and a korok buddy up a damn mountain.

Baldur's Gate 3

Like most people who cut their gaming teeth on more straightforward action fare on consoles, the term "CRPG" (computer RPG) seemed beyond out of reach for me. Dice rolls? Skill checks? Playing as a charisma based character to persuade bosses to kill themselves instead of having to fight them? READING!? Uh, I'm an American, thank you very much; I like my video games game-y and my gravy portion extra, ma'am, and I don't have the patience to think about probability and stats.

So imagine my surprise when, after my wife started playing the game on her own, I found myself itching to get into the character creator myself. Not the moment to moment gameplay, mind you, but the character creator, a step I'm notorious for getting through as fast as possible so I can start "actually playing", even if I'm stuck with a boring default character named Goober. Something about watching my wife agonize over which horn style and subrace to go with on her tiefling bard, which hairstyle and color looked cutest and would match her vision of how she was going to roleplay in the world, stirred something in me I didn't know existed. While she was perusing all the customization options, I spied the class "monk" and a race called "dragonborn", some anthropomorphic dragon people with a lot of pretty color options for their scales that also affect your elemental resistances. "Yes," I thought to myself. "I'd like to make a humanoid lizard dude that punches shit to death. I'd like that very much". And before my wife was barely out of the tutorial section on her first character, we were already backing out to make a second save file where we would play the entire thing cooperatively, fretting over the decisions and romance options each step of the way together. I got to make my silverscale (that means he's got ice powers, baby) dragonborn monk, Shikai, and the following 300+ hours (and counting!) with Baldur's Gate 3 have been the most fun I've ever had playing a video game.

Would I be as gobsmacked with the game if I was intimately familiar with the genre? Maybe not, but I guess that's my point. Living with my wife and playing games together has completely changed how I engage with a lot of them; Animal Crossing was basically a cute chores and debt repayment simulator with a dash of fishing on the side until watching my wife play the game for thousands of hours taught me the joy of decorating.

Elden Ring was her first foray into the Souls-like genre; she had a similar reaction watching me play the opening hour of Elden Ring as I had watching her in the BG3 character creator, growing increasingly frustrated as she watched me putz around making a boring dexterity based samurai character when what she wanted to see was some faith-based holy magic in action. Despite my love of Souls-likes, I had always just made standard melee based characters in them, usually katana wielding doofuses; I'm an American, I don't know a lick about incantations, I HATE thinking, and please keep your Wes Anderson movies to yourself, ma'am.

But as I saw how much fun my wife was having shooting fireballs and throwing lightning bolts at enemies, I eventually started speccing my dexterity character into intelligence as well, making a samurai sorcerer, undeniably the only thing cooler than a normal samurai. That's not to say that playing Elden Ring with a melee exclusive character is wrong, but just that with a touch of curiosity and willingness to take the tiniest step outside of my comfort zone, a comfort zone I didn't even realize was as tiny as it was, I opened up a whole new way of enjoying a game I already loved playing. Learning to enjoy Baldur's Gate 3 feels like I've opened the door to an entire new avenue in my mind, waiting for me to fill it with opinions about games I've been avoiding my whole life. I'm gonna actually make a concerted effort to finally play stuff like Mass Effect and Disco Elysium sometime soon, two games I had preemptively decided years ago were just "not for me", and I'm genuinely excited about it.

This entry is so long already, and I didn't even mention anything about how the game actually plays (it's the best turn-based battle system I've ever experienced, to say nothing of the freedom you're afforded to solve every single scenario presented to you in the game.

Or anything about the characters (this is the best cast of characters I've seen in any medium, and they feel like genuine friends of mine in a way that no other game has ever come close to feeling).

Hell, to save time and my poor fingers: Baldur's Gate 3 is without a doubt the best video game I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. And as little as a few months ago, my only thought towards it was "that game probably isn't for me".

Don't make my all too human mistake; check out shit that looks interesting, take the chance to expand your mind and your taste. They're not all gonna be Baldur's Gate 3-level bangers (what is though, really), but you truly never know what you're going to discover. And you might even find yourself open to a whole new avenue of life to enjoy that you had previously assumed was just for mega dorks.

#gaming #nintendo #pc games #ps5 #goty 2023 #game of the year

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