#every few months xenoblade takes over my life again

[sntoot]

youve hardly changed to my eyes

[seijch]

➣ the fate of a blade has (and always will be) to live and live and live. whether or not they retain their memories is optional.

kuroo tetsurou + gender neutral!reader (no pronouns mentioned)

high fantasy au, angst

2k

this fic is inspired by the video game xenoblade chronicles 2, but knowledge of that game is not needed to enjoy this fic :-) this fic also takes place in the same universe as my ushijima fic simple life, but the stories of both take place independently of each other !!

Wait.

Stop.

"Kuroo?"

You know him; of course you do. You'd recognize the sharp lines of his face from anywhere, any place, any time. You take his appearance in the same way one would thumb through the pages of their favorite book: with familiarity and all the care in the world.

He turns at the sound of his name, his gaze searching for a moment for the source of the sound. When it lands on you, your heart breaks.

He looks about the same as always, hair permanently disheveled and exactly as annoyingly attractive as you remember.

(He used to lord it over you when you'd admitted it to him. "Oh?" he'd asked, chin in his palm and a twinkle in his eye. You had wanted nothing more than for the ground beneath to swallow you whole.)

It's been almost a full year since you've seen him. You didn't think you'd get the chance to ever again.

"Do I know you?" he asks.

You did, you want to scream.

You did—

(Your eyes blink open for the first time. Well, not really; they've blinked thousands, millions of times before. This just marks the first time your eyes have opened to your current incarnation.

For a moment, you think you're seeing double, the girl you assume is responsible for awakening you shadowed by her doppelganger. Ah, you think. They must be identical twins.

Introductions are standard. They have to be, when all you've come into this life with is your name and the innate knowledge of your power. Such is the life of a blade, you suppose. You come into this world with one purpose, one goal: to serve your driver, the person who summons you. 

Thankfully, your driver and her sister look nice enough, but their company does not, all scarred faces and scowls.

"Tough crowd, right?" a voice asks, low in your ear. You startle, whipping around to strike your would-be assailant. It's another blade, judging by the gem embedded in his chest and the vaguely unhuman look in his eyes. He holds his hands up in surrender, a playful grin on his face. "What a way to greet someone you've just met," he drawls. When your body relaxes, he offers his hand for you to shake. "I'm Kuroo. And as for this," he nods to the grim atmosphere of the camp, "you get used to it."

Niceties, it seems, are few and far between when your trade is entirely underground. Both your driver—and Kuroo's, whose driver is the mirror image of your own—were involved with the illegal dealing of core crystals, the very thing blades are summoned from.

You voice these concerns to Kuroo on your second night. "It took me a while to get used to it, too. Turns out our drivers aren't as morally corrupt as the rest of the crew." Blades tended to take after their drivers, their personality overlaid over the blade's to make each incarnation unique. "But hey," he rations, tossing a deep orange gem with one hand, "money makes the world go 'round, doesn't it?")

You did—

("You've got to try harder than that," he teases, the tip of his katana kissing the gem on your chest. "I was just starting to have fun, too." You hiss, ignoring the sting as you get up from where Kuroo's knocked you on your ass.

"Oh, I'll show you fun," you growl. He only smiles, dropping into a fighting stance as you pick up your weapon, a cannon drawing its projectiles from the ether energy in the air. You've long since learned that Kuroo is an opponent you can't hope to beat; there were a select few blades that were lauded throughout history for their power. Kuroo Tetsurou, wielder of the Chaos Uchigatana, happens to be one of them.

But that sure as hell won't stop you from trying.)

You did—

(The sparring sessions become routine, and you end up playing into Kuroo's hands every time. Each blow landed is an uphill battle against his strength, his skill.

Out of all the mornings and nights spent butting heads, you can only remember one instance where you come out on top.

Your breathing is hard, the cannon focused at his head. You'd tumbled into his lap at some point, but your head is hazy with the fog of victory. "I did it," you pant, chest heaving.

"After what?" he asks, as though he wasn't pinned to the ground. "How many losses did it take you, hm? Fifty? Eighty?" The real number—not like anyone was counting—is closer to ninety-seven. You wisely choose not to tell him that.

"You're not going to take this from me," you tell him as your breathing evens out, crooking a finger at him. Only then do you notice the space—or lack thereof—between you. You scramble to get up, offering him a hand. It's warm. Calloused. Fits perfectly in your own.

You try not to think about it.)

You did—

("What is this, Kuroo?" You're the only two awake, up for the last shift of guard duty while the rest of camp snoozes under the night sky. The only light around is the campfire Yaku set up hours ago. It burns low, crackling enough to cut through the silence.

"What is what?"

"Don't play dumb with me," you mutter from his shoulder, a bit muffled. "We both know you're smarter than that." His shoulders rise a bit, like a wave cresting and falling as he exhales from his nose in a half-laugh.

"Let's say," he deflects, "one of our drivers dies tomorrow." 

“How morbid. Are you talking about my driver?”

“Why would I be talking about your driver? It could be either of us. That’s the point of a hypothetical situation. It’s not likely to happen.”

“You tell me, Mr. Ninety-Seven.” You’re sure he’ll take the compliment, say something about how his total number of wins against you has gone up into the hundreds, but he surprises you with what he says next.

“Don’t pretend like we’re not equals.” When you huff, he exhales, refocusing.

"Let me finish. Let's say one of our drivers dies tomorrow. One of us returns to our crystal. When they're reawakened," he does his best to crane his neck, trying to make eye contact, "we won't remember this. We won't remember us."

"Yeah." It's a fact of life; blades only live as long as their drivers do. They return to the conscious, corporeal plane once they're reawakened. It's something you know, something you'll always know, through this life and the next. You're sure there are countless people, blades and drivers alike, that have been wiped clean from the slate of your memory. "And?"

"Is it so bad," he says, barely audible, like he's trying to convince himself to believe it rather than persuade you into agreeing, "to be so selfish with your present because you'll never remember the past and aren't promised a future?")

You did—

(The next job ends in an ambush from some of the competition.

You're sure the exertion will weigh on you later, but right now, you relish in it. You've long since passed the point of being one with your driver. The ether bond between you causes you both to glow golden with the raw energy being used, and she handles your cannon with ease. They say that it's during battles that the lines that separate driver and blade are the most muddled, and right now, you know it to be true. You’re certain that you two can take on whatever comes, that you’re on top of the world and nothing will take you down.

So you do just that, the cannon's shots of ether echoing into the night, against the rock walls of the cliffs surrounding the valley.

The dust clears. The euphoria of battle begins to seep out of your bones.

Your driver's twin sister—Kuroo's driver—lies broken and bloody on the dry grass.

"No," your driver sobs, her eyes glassy in a way you've never seen in all your months together, "you said it was us against the world." Her voice cracks, "You said-"

"I know what I said." Kuroo's driver has always been the more rational twin, hasn’t she? When she smiles, her teeth and gums are stained red. "I meant it. Still do." Her words are punctuated with a gurgle bringing with it a bubble of blood that pops on her lips. "It always will be. Now run."

"What-"

"Reinforcements are coming!" Yaku shouts, out of breath as he runs in your direction. You're not sure if it's because of exhaustion or because his driver's life force is ebbing away, the ocean itself receding in time for low tide.

"I can't leave you behind," your driver cries, tears running down her cheeks unbidden. Kuroo is fighting them off by himself, a speck barely recognizable in the distance. He's winning, too—for now.

A blade with a driver on their last legs won't last. The realization is heavy as it drops to the pit of your stomach, like a pebble creating ripples in a pond.

"You have to. What's the first thing we learned on the job?"

It's one of the first things you learned about the job, too: when things go south, it’s time to bail out.

You're told to run and not look back.

You and your driver—you're sure it's a trait inherited from her—have never been good listeners.

When you chance a glance behind you, you're just in time to see Kuroo and Yaku's core crystals fall to the ground as their driver takes her last breath.)

You did.

(Life is dull after that. Colors are no longer as vibrant, the excitement that came with each day long gone. You wonder if that excitement was something that came with Kuroo alone.

Gone are the sparring sessions, the late nights spent on watch duty. You know your driver has it worse; she's despondent half the time, enough for the crew to leave her to fend for herself.

"We have enough money," you tell her one afternoon. The coins clink softly as you draw the strings of her purse closed. "Let's buy a place somewhere. I hear Uraya is nice this time of year. Would you like that?"

"Yeah," she replies. The firecracker you’d come to know and love has fizzled out. "I'd like that."

You pretend to not notice the locket she clutches close to her chest when the nightmares get the best of her. When you'd first awakened, Kuroo had been the one to tell you the story behind it: it was the first thing the two of them bought with the money from their first job.

You wonder where Kuroo and Yaku are now, eyes trained on the view of the sky from the window of the inn. You wonder if they've returned to the land of the living.

But thinking like that won't get you anywhere; after all, even if they were, it wouldn't be the Kuroo and Yaku you know.)

His eyes are guarded, entirely without recognition. In the end, he was right. (And you're sure that if Kuroo—your Kuroo, not this Kuroo that stands before you—was still around, this would be yet another victory held over your head. You find it a little annoying that he's still winning, even now.)

In the end, you are the one left with the memories. The weight of them is enough to bring you to your knees, to drag you into the depths with no chance of ever seeing the light again. Every fiber of your body wants to reach out to him, to ask "Don't you remember me?"

But you've had your share of selfishness.

Your driver is waiting for you to return with the groceries. (She's taken to cooking these days. She's no good at it, but the humming you hear from the kitchen on good days makes eating her awful dishes more than worth it.)

You swallow, but it does nothing to get rid of the lump in your throat.

"No," you smile up at him. The edges of it are a bit too strained to be genuine, and he notices. You’ve known him long enough that you can read his tells, the slight narrow of his eyes when he picks up on something poorly concealed. He’s perceptive, as always. You suppose some things never change.

(Your Kuroo knew you. He knew you well enough that the slightest change in mood would tip him off. But then again, that feels like ages and years and lifetimes ago.

Now, you’re just a stranger that’s stopped him in the middle of the street.)

"You don't."

[semi-sketchy]

Alright, so I beat Sonic Forces and I’m going to go into opinions on the plot and characters like Infinite, so if you don’t want spoilers, don’t read below.

Not gonna lie, I’m a little burned out after playing through the entire game in a few hours, so I’m going to give my opinion on the gameplay later when I get the chance to slow down and walk through it at my own pace. My opinions on the story could also change when I play through again without recording so I can hear all the details.

The story I liked, then it really slowed down to dialog before a stage. I like how each stage is very plot-driven and plays a purpose, but the ending. After 20 or so stages, “it’s the final fight!” 10 stages later “We won!” I felt that many stages with so little narrative slowed the plot to a halt. It lost the tension considering a third of the game was the ending.

While on topic of the ending, the ending was sweet, but...what about Infinite? He “flies” off after his boss battle, he loses his Ruby to Eggman, so what happened to him? Did the Ruby consume him? Did he vanish? I honestly thought it was going to be a cop-out like “SUCK IT I’M THE REAL FINAL BOSS” but no, he’s just...gone. I expected a lot more from Infinite. He had a really nice song that told so much about him.

“I was born in this pain, it only hurts if you let it.”

“I’ve been up against better, just take a look at my face”

“So look around you and tell me what you really see. You live a lie and that’s the difference in you and me”

Then...nothing. I felt he could have been an amazing character and I liked what I saw of him, but it’s almost like he wasn’t finished. I thought he was going to have a redemption arc or we’d at least know what happened to him, but we get nothing. Even the comic we got today doesn’t explain anything. We don’t ever see him unmasked in the game, even when Shadow beats him and he wants to hide his face. I get he’s scarred, but why? What turned him so bad? What made him want vengeance like this? What happened to him? I liked what I saw, but that’s only what I saw. His backstory is never told and I was under the impression that we’d get a lot more from him. I’m not sure but it almost felt like it was done so there would be room for a sequel later on. I feel he is completely capable of returning and I wouldn’t be opposed to it. Heck, make it a 3DS game or something where we hear about him, I don’t care, I’ll buy it.

It also took me until just now to realize we never had a Shadow or Chaos boss fight. I know Shadow beat us to the punch of fighting...himself. But Chaos? I would have liked to see that. Chaos was very tacked on, a lot like Classic Sonic.

Eggman was great as a villain though. Very prepared, you could tell he had a backup plan and had learned from his mistakes, which honestly made it a little annoying because it was “we got him down!” “no” “oh shit he had a backup plan for that backup backup plan” and I felt it dragged on. But he wasn’t stupid in setting all his eggs in one basket. (Heh, eggs.)

And can we talk about Sonic’s snarkiness? I literally screamed “I can’t believe the Encaged AU is canon” when I heard what was going on, although I’m sad we never got to see anything from Sonic’s side until he busted out. We just hear that everyone thinks he’s dead until “oh, he’s been held in solitary confinement on the Death Egg for 6 months and is being tortured” but we never see him struggle with any of it. It’s just “come, time for you to be shot out into space like Eggman’s SA2 plan” and “lol nope”. People go mad when being left alone for a long time and I get it’s part of Sonic’s character to be happy-go-lucky, but...we get nothing from him. We just hear “oh yeah he’s not doing good” yet he seems just fine. Most of the game follows a “tell, don’t show” route and I’m not too sure how I feel about it, but for Sonic’s case, I felt it was really lacking. This might have also been a design decision to keep the game rated E10+.

Another thing that’s a lot like Infinite was Silver. He is never explained at all. If you didn’t read the comics, you wouldn’t understand a thing. If you haven’t gotten into Sonic and knew about him in ‘06, you would think “huh I guess he’s always been around and I never noticed” because they don’t bring any attention to him. It’s not like “this is a time traveler that has mind powers” it’s more so they treat him as if they’ve known him for years and he’s nothing special.

I’m not too sure what happened with Omega. He was shut down, but...why? It was explained in the comics, but again, very little detail. Was it an illusion like everything else? Why did he only show up in the end like “yo I’m here”? More importantly, who fixed him? Also Shadow. I get the Shadow fighting was a fake and wow, everyone was REALLY wrong about the mind control (just had to rub that in for everyone who was like “MIND CONTROL IT HAS TO BE” when I said “no”). But, if Sonic was held captive for 6 months, what was Shadow doing? Was he just chilling in his Hawaiian shirt like “meh, someone else is doing my job”? It’s clear he’s fighting for the resistance, so why didn’t he join them earlier?

Tails for me is both a great aspect and a bad one. He thinks his best friend is dead and basically has a meltdown. I liked how we saw “he’s great, but still just a kid caught in the middle of a war” (I’m a sucker for that trope) and it was a very interesting aspect. A nice perspective and how when he met Classic, he was so desperate to have his friend back, he just latched on even though that wasn’t the Sonic he knew. I thought it was so cute when he got to reunite with Sonic, despite it being short-lived. However, I feel they totally tossed aside any development he had beforehand. Sonic had to save him in the city and when Chaos came, he cowered in fear screaming for Sonic even though he wasn’t there. I understand he’s in denial about his friend and it’s a habit, but didn’t he learn independence back in SA1? He fought for Sonic in SA2 when he believed he was dead, so why not here? I understand Sonic’s “death” hitting him hard, but Tails was never one to stray from helping in the fight.

The avatar I actually thought was handled decently rather than being a statue like Xenoblade X (seriously, how do you screw something up THAT badly?) which was one of my biggest fears. They weren’t given a backstory, which is understandable, but the way they made it was so your character felt important, but wasn’t the whole show (something I wish fan fiction would catch onto). It never felt unnatural and I wasn’t ever faced with the “ugh this would be so much better without it.” The story was built around the avatar and made to work with it and I didn’t think I’d like it, but I do. While the avatar returning wouldn’t be something I’d jump for joy over, I also can say I wouldn’t mind it.

One more minor complaint: despite this world being so clearly full of life, it felt empty. I understand the cities were destroyed, but aside from the ending with the army of resistance members, we never saw any refugees. Not a big issue, but something that stuck out to me.

The tone was really set and let me say....the soundtrack was amazing. I loved every second of it. I look forward to playing through the story again without talking over it so I can hear more of the dialog and music because that voice acting was the best it has ever been. The voice actors were amazing and I applaud every one of them.

I did enjoy the plot and I’m very welcoming to seeing the old characters again along with this darker story line. I feel it’s a step in the right direction, although it could have been done better here. It almost feels like they didn’t have the time to put in all the details they wanted in or couldn’t find a place, so they stuck them in side comics or tossed them aside all together.

[rooreelooo]

GOTY 2016

2016 was a really big year for me. It’s the year I got married, purchased my first home, and finished the part-time studies I had been doing outside of work. It’s been very long, and very stressful in places, but also very happy - it’s certainly a year that I will look back on for the rest of my life to come. A lot of people say that 2016 has been the worst year in living history, but I don’t think that it will be remembered that way. I think it will be remembered as the last good year, before everything went fucking bananas.

Assembling this list was really hard! All that stuff I listed up there left me with reduced quantities of both money AND time, and as a result 2016 was a really scant gaming year for me. It’s true that I played a bunch of stuff, but when you strip away everything that was released prior to 2016, as well as the various ports and re-releases, there honestly ain’t all that much left to choose from. I think I ended up having about 13 viable games for this list, so it wasn’t too hard to assemble, but ordering everything up was tough and there were LOTs of last-minute changes.

It was fun though. I kept a gaming diary in 2016, and it was invaluable in assembling this list. I highly recommend that other people do this - keeping notes and recording memories about the games I played was probably the highlight of my gaming year!

Anyway, here’s some video games. There shouldn’t be any spoilers in here, I tried hard to avoid them, so you should be safe if that’s the sort of thing you worry about.

To start with, how about a non-2016 game that I played the hell out of anyway:

Final Fantasy Record Keeper

I need to cover this early - it was my GOTY 2015, but has it managed to stand the test of time? Well obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about it here. I FUCKING LOVE FFRK! I play it every day, multiple times a day, and have so much fun with it… but it’s not just more of the same old thing. This year has shown a lot of improvements to the game itself! It’s easier to get your hands on the items you need to progress, and is far less reliant on gatcha systems, meaning that high-level content can be cleared more consistently and easily. In fact, it’s become so good in that respect that I have transitioned into being fully free-to-play, and haven’t spent a single penny on this game in over 6 months. God, I hope 2017 is as good for FFRK as 2016 and 2015 have been.

that genuine book boy is so fucking good at his job

And a few honourable mentions that didn’t make the cut into the top 10 list but are still worth paying respects to:

Drawful 2

We played the shit outta Drawful 1 last year, and so Drawful 2: Draw Fuller was always gonna be a knockout in this household. The addition of a second colour is a fun gag, and the custom draw prompts added a unique way for us to have a good time too, but it turns out the one addition that my friends all needed was the simplest one of all - MORE Drawful to play. After wearing out all the prompts in Drawful 1 through overuse, the blank slate afforded to us by the sequel has been the biggest justification of purchase of all.

next, please make drawful 3

Final Fantasy Explorers

This was always gonna be a weird one. Going into it I really thought this was gonna be a huge gamble, and that Final Fantasy Meets Monster Hunter would either rocket to all-new heights or plummet to destructive lows. The end result surprised me in as much as it did… neither of those? It’s a fair-to-middling Monster Hunter me-too that is pretty fun if you like that sort of thing, which I do, so I enjoyed it! I didn’t have anyone to play it with though and the single player stuff is not the main focus, so it was never able to make my top 10 for that reason.

on the whole this was a good year for chocobos

And as for the actual top 10 list list…

10. Xenoblade Chronicles X

I know this is technically a 2015 game, but it was such a late-year release that I never got a chance to load it up until January this year, so I’m grouping it together with these. The first Xenoblade game is the secret best JRPG of the decade, tucked away on the Wii of all places, and so I had high hopes for the “sequel” finger quotes.

In reality, this is not so much a descendant of the first game as it is a weird distant cousin - the narrative is tonally and stylistically very different, and the gameplay even moreso. This world, with its sprawling horizons, gigantic aliens, and evocative atmospheres, took my breath away as the most immersive gameplay world of the year. Every environment feels handcrafted and perfectly balanced to have a different look and feel - stepping into Primordia makes you feel as if you are breathing a cold lungful of air on a crisp winter morning, and then stepping into the rainforest continent (I forgot its name) is almost like stepping into a warm cloud of colours and humidity that reminded me of coming indoors in my winter coat and feeling the cold breath in my lungs suddenly turn into condensation. The graphics may not be the strongest, but XCX really really makes good use of what it has.

The game manages to shock you with a few paradigm shifts along the way as well, upping the pace and scale in such a way that everything beforehand feels like a different game. The fact that it’s capable of pulling this exact same trick like 3 or 4 times is outstanding.

XCX’s biggest crime is that it drowns itself in features and systems. Every menu hides like another 5 or 6 submenus, and although it all sorta slots in place eventually it’s a steep climb; one which requires you to read a 142-page pdf to become fluent in it. I never completed it because eventually it sorta coalesced into an impenetrable slurry of pointless sidequests, repetitive character interactions, and enemies who will oneshot your robot suit and set you back millions of dollars in repair funds. I may not have finished it, but I don’t think these alien world will ever leave my memories.

Something else that will never leave my memories: The weird soundtrack, with its overly-literal lyrics.

a rare shot of the fabled ‘non-destroyed’ skell in its natural habitat, taken moments before it was destroyed

9. Pokémon GO

For the few weeks I played this game, I loved it. I loved being a part of the zeitgeist. I have always loved the Pokémon series, and that brief window of time in which seemingly everyone in the world shared my passion made me feel incredible. Every café and shop on my street had images of Charmander and Pikachu in the window, advertising themselves as Pokémon GO-friendly environments. So fucking weird, but also so fucking cool!

When I said ‘for the few weeks I played this game’ though, I was being generous. The hype was like Charizard’s flamethrower - rapidly escalating into something huge and volatile, but swiftly dissolving afterwards leaving little sign that it had ever existed save for a comically-burnt Ash Ketchum, puffing a cloud of smoke out of his mouth in shock. It took me about 15 days or so to see and evolve every pokémon that was native to my hometown, and from that point onwards the gimmick of seeing the same stuff over and over again lost it’s lustre. Catching a Magnemite on my way to work was cool! Catching a Magnemite on my way home again was pretty good too. Catching nothing but Magnemites every day is not so fresh. Also, battling gyms was boring and it didn’t take me long to realise that it was tedious enough that I would never care about it in my entire time with this game. The tribal mentality between the three teams rubbed me the wrong was as well, and having my friends plant their flag in the sand in a different team to me for seemingly no reason other than to incite inter-team conflict rubbed me the wrong way. Why can’t we all just get along???

If it sounds like I’m pretty negative about this game, then yeah I guess at this point I sorta am. I haven’t played it properly in months, even the arrival of some Generation II pokémon recently failed to rekindle my passion. The thing that ranks this so highly on my list is the memories of that one wild fortnight… that post-release window where it was like I was in my childhood again, from the groups of friends eagerly discussing where they had seen certain monsters to the constant news reports questioning the effect it was having on the nation’s children. God I miss the 90s.

this game was released in july and i didnt see any pikachus until december, whats up with that

8. Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright

Fire Emblem games should have three things I think - fun and memorable characters, units with a variety of diverse battlefield skills, and challenging maps that require strategy to overcome. I believe that this game delivers the second and third items on the list in great quantities, but shortchanges you a little on the first one. Corrin never quite manages to become as interesting as more memorable protagonists of past Fire Emblem games like Ike, Chrom, Robin, and… uh… Marth? Hmm, my lack of experience and knowledge about this series is failing me here, sorry.

There are two kinds of people I think - people who play the Fire Emblem series because they want to enjoy a complex tactical RPG, and people who play it because they want to play matchmaker with an army of anime soldiers, choosing who gets to kiss eachother and have babies. This is where the problem lies - I didn’t think it would be an issue for me that this game lacks memorable characters because I arrogantly thought I was the former kind of person. You know, the kind who wants to look at numbers, study maps, and strategise his way to victory. I was laughably wrong though, and it turns out that I was obviously the latter kind of person all along. Without being able to spark any wild or interesting couples within my army I just didn’t have as much fun as I could have with this game.

Still, a Fire Emblem game that delivers on two out of three fronts remains a VERY good game nonetheless, and I had loads of fun with Birthright this year. I never did get round to playing Conquest or Revelation. Maybe the story would have made more sense to me if I had completed all three chapters? Probably not.

Shoutout to Azama for being the hidden best character in the game - if I was picking a Character Of The Year award it would almost certainly go to this dude.

love that magical donkey

7. Pony Island

The developer to Pony Island wanted to create a game that felt like it wasn’t meant to be played, and that sums up this game better than anything I could have ever come up with. Satan has trapped your soul inside an unwinnable video game, and only by tearing it to pieces and fucking with the internal coding can you ever hope to escape. It’s so cryptic and it’s so grimy and it’s so unsettling and it’s so weird, I LOVED it! Coming into this game completely blind was a hugely rewarding experience, so if you don’t know anything about it then you’re perfectly primed to grab it and enjoy it too.

Despite loving it so much, I really don’t have much else to say… and even if I did, I would be hesitant about accidentally spoiling some of the endgame aces that it has up its sleeves. If I was choosing a ‘boss battle of the year’, or a ‘moment of the year’, then Pony Island would win both of those because of one specific antagonist later in the game who manages to do something that I have NEVER seen a video game do in my life, and that I didn’t even think was possible. You gotta see this shit for yourself, seriously!

Buried deep within this satanic gaming cabinet, with its filthy surfaces and fractured display, lies a nest of some of the most creative, surprising and unsettling game design I saw all year. I’m not gonna forget this game in a hurry, and the only thing stopping it ranking higher on my list was the fact that at a few points it puts its entire premise to one side and asks you to do a little legitimate puzzle solving. Those sections were HARD.

pony island will ask a LOT of you

6. Orwell

This was one of two narrative episodic games I played this year, and I was unsure what order to put them both in, although Orwell ended up being my slightly less-favourite of the two. It’s still super good though! You play as a faceless government agent tasked with solving the mystery of who has been committing a slew of terrorist attacks, and your main methods of interacting with the game world involve monitoring civilian conversations, hacking into people’s computers, and trawling the internet for snippets of info related to your case.

Delving into the personal lives of the characters and invading their privacy to such a degree was very scary! Especially when you realise that there is no right answer to be found - it’s not about digging until you find the truth, it’s about coming up with your conclusions beforehand and then pulling snippets of info out of their original context so they can be used to support your argument. Turns out that the long weird rant this lady posted on her Facebook wall is PERFECT for framing her as a terrorist when you omit half of it and only provide the bits where she talks about how much she hates the government.

It’s a game about context, and the lack thereof - and how this can be manipulated to meet your goals. It doesn’t quite stick the landing when it gets to the final chapter, but the journey to get there is fun, memorable, and realistically malevolent.

sorry the screenshots are super dense so it’s really hard to make it resize cleanly

5. The Lion’s Song: Episode 1 - Silence

I haven’t played the later episodes of this game yet - I think there are 4 in total, but I’ve only played the first one. Still, it took me by surprise how touching it was. You play as Wilma, a young WWI-era musician who is struggling to overcome her writer’s block and compose a new melody for a performance she has been booked into against her will. The scope is VERY small, VERY intimate, and VERY personal - trapped in a mountain cabin and awaiting the passing of a storm that has stranded her there, we guide her through her creative process, help her adapt to the environment, and discover sources of inspiration buried in the world around her. I was fascinated by the slow process of finding her muse by unravelling all her anxieties and worries, and when I got to the end I felt like I had been welcomed into something deeply personal.

It’s also worth mentioning how amazing the game looks. It barely uses 6 colours throughout the entire game, but it uses them well enough to present mountain ranges and forest in a suitably ominous and gloomy scope. The whole thing looks like a cross between an upscaled DOS adventure and a box of of WW2-era photos.

I think that each chapter is a standalone narrative, mediating on various aspects of the human condition as they relate to creativity and inspiration, so I'm really keen to explore the other three episodes. If they can retain the scale and intimacy of narrative and the detail of characterisation then I will be very pleased.

colours? who needs em, surely you only need 6 of them to make a picture

4. Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley, aka Harvest Moon 2016, aka One Concerned Ape’s Love Letter To Farming Simulation. Throughout 2016 I made a few attempts at getting into this game. I also made a few attempts at getting Steff into this game. She ultimately ended up grabbing a refund on it because she didn’t like the way that it ‘copied everything about Harvest Moon’, but personally that never bothered me much at all. It’s true that this builds heavily on that series, but it’s way more of a loving homage than a cheap imitation - every inch of this game seems lovingly hand crafted by one guy who, upset over the decline in that series, decided to rectify that himself and smooth over all the creases to bring us the Game That Harvest Moon Should Have Been.

It’s amazing! I love it, I haven’t got this invested in a farming sim since 2001 when I pored over Harvest Moon 2 on the Gameboy Colour - I loved to systematically dig up squares, plant stuff, run out of money, wonder what the hell you had to do to get animals, restart my save file in frustration, and do it all again. If that sounds like a pointless waste of time, then yeah you’re probably right - but I was like 12 years old at the time, so cut me some slack. While it’s true that I ended up running through that EXACT same sequence of events again as a 27 year old, this time I got to do it in a game with a much prettier soundtrack, much more interesting characters, a more compelling narrative, and a greater variety of things to do and see along the way.

My one gripe with it is that I REALLY wish there was a handheld version, or a Wii U version that I could play on the gamepad. I feel like that is where this game belongs, and only being able to play it on a PC or a TV is a massive downer to me. God, it’s awful that the Wii U version was cancelled. Maybe 2017 will be the year I play this on the Switch and actually make some good progress on it. (Also the fishing minigame sucks, sorry but it’s true.)

fuck big business

3. World of Warcraft: Legion

One of my biggest gripes about WoW is that there are many many different choices you can make about your character, but very few of them have any noticeable distinction. In this world that is defined by constant skirmishes, struggles for power, uneasy alliances and clashes over the individual interests of each faction, you’d think that the play experience would have meaningful differences depending on which race and class you choose. But nope. Call it a gameplay limitation if you want, or a deliberate design decision, but whatever the reason it basically means that within the 111 possible race/class combinations of the game, there is only one meaningful choice - you gonna be Alliance or Horde? Once you decide that, it all kinda blurs together from that point onwards.

That’s why I loved Legion so much. For the first time in memory, the questing experience is different depending on class! If you’re like me and you play as a druid because you love their culture and lore, then Legion will be an expansion pack that sees you visiting signifiant druid locations, interacting with major druid characters, recovering important druid artifacts, and carrying out a druid-specific mission. Finally, I can actually start to feel as if my character's identity is a worthwhile choice to make and not just some unimportant fluff in the background!

The Alliance / Horde distinction has been kicked to the kerb, and instead the twelve different classes are all banding together across race and faction boundaries to deal with the impending threat of the legion in the ways which make most sense to them. It actually made me care about the story of the expansion, since the feeling of ‘oh shit everything is going wrong, we all need to do whatever we can to help the war effort’ really pushed through.

As always with WoW, I had a hell of a lot of fun questing to the level cap and then I dropped that shit like it was hot as soon as I ran out of unique and interesting missions to do. I have never cared about the ‘MMO’ part of MMORPGs, but this expansion in particular seemed to have a larger amount of awful dungeon experiences than the normal. I don’t know if that’s unique to Legion or if the general trend of player assholeishness has risen since I last played WoW, but it’s kinda just encouraging me to entrench even further in my mindset of ‘I’m just gonna do all these fun quests, enjoy all this dumb lore, and pretend that I’m the only one here by ignoring all these strangers.’ As always, this remains a perfectly legitimate way to enjoy an MMORPG.

oh the emerald dreamway is so so so so so pretty

2. Bravely Second: End Layer

I love Final Fantasy. I’m just gonna put that out there first, because it’s gonna contextualise a lot of what I say about Bravely Second. The Bravely series doesn’t fall under the FF banner and it lacks the FF name, but I would definitely class it as ‘FF adjacent’ as a result of of the shared heritage and development teams. The distinction is very important - by severing the game from the baggage of the FF series, it actually allows it the freedom to become one of the greatest games in this genre I have ever played.

I loved this game so so much. Gameplay wise it takes the most well-loved system from a Final Fantasy game (the job system of FFV) and polishes it until is is flawless. Every job is fun and gives you meaningfully unique abilities to use, and the game expects you to constantly shuffle these around and find fun combinations to help you out. I don’t know which of the new jobs are my favourite. Is it the Exorcist, who can heal your party by basically hitting Ctrl-Z and undoing any enemy attacks that you don’t like? Is it the Guardian, who can possess your other allies to share with them all of their stats and abilities? Is it the Kaiser, who is able to impose radical changes that affect both party members and enemies alike, forcing all involved to adjust their battle strategies to accommodate the new conditions? Or is it the Catmancer, who utilises kitties to assassinate people and gather information via the Informeowtion Superhighway? The answer is that it’s a team of all four, working alongside eachother in perfect harmony.

Quality of life additions like the ability to adjust the frequency of random encounters and the ability to chain enemies together for greater rewards encourage you to interact with random battles on your own terms - sure I guess the logical follow up question is ‘why do we even need the random encounters in the first place’, but… I dunno if you start to tug on that loose thread then you might end up unravelling the entire sweater and ending up with no video game at all. You need to have battles, otherwise there’s no canvas on which to experiment with all the cool jobs and abilities.

If I can talk about the story as well, it’s pretty neat. The first game in this series had a very ambitious plot twist in the middle of it that required you to replay huge chunks of the game multiple times in order to carry a narrative about ‘time repeating itself over and over again across alternate universes’. It was a neat idea with a clumsy-as-fuck execution that was borderline unplayable, and I can say that this game manages to pull off its mid-game switcheroo with MUCH more skill and finesse. No spoilers, but I REALLY liked the way the paradigm ended up shifting, and your team of always-one-step-behind-the-enemy losers manage to get their shit together and hurl some massive spanners into the internal workings of causality.

With some genuinely emotional character stories blended into the mix, excellent voice acting, fun side characters, amazing enemy designs, and a few boss battles that really made you reconsider certain truths that are taken for granted in a JRPG system, this is probably the best game of its kind I have ever played in my life. The few flaws that it had pales in comparison to all the things it did which just blew. my. fucking. mind.

most impractical design for a town 2016

1. Pokémon Sun Version

Sun & Moon may mark the beginning of the Seventh generation of Pokémon, but they themselves are the 16th swing at a main series Pokémon game (assuming that you’re counting the ones that were released in pairs as a single game). Game Freak always tries to stave off the feeling of repetition by mixing and matching some of the secondary features, so to a certain extent every Pokémon game comes with it’s own look and feel. In Sun & Moon however, the shakeup is far bigger than it’s ever been in the past, and for the first time in a long long time the game feels truly fresh and unique.

This game has more tiny changes than I can count! They’re all little things that you might overlook, but when taken en masse they are kinda amazing. See you in hell HMs! Those are gone. Also the unpopular Mega Evolution has been… not kicked, but nudged to the kerb in favour of the far more interesting and accessible Z-Moves. Changes to the EXP system allow you to switch your party members and catch up new monsters with greater frequency, preventing you from feeling like you got locked into a bad decision. The gym battles have been given a fresh coat of paint and rebooted as Trial challenges, something that is fundamentally the same but brings a different kind of experience and allows for a more flexible approach to gameplay progression. I could keep listing new shit, but I don’t need to do that here - maybe these are all small changes, but for me they felt huge. I didn’t have any gripes with the series beforehand, but I love these games and I want to see them try new things! More importantly, I want them to create lots of legroom for themselves to allow them to keep growing and changing in the future! This is a positive step on that path.

I’ve been trying to keep a spoiler-free policy in this list, and that’s not gonna change, which is a shame because I’d really really really love to talk in detail about the storyline to this game, and how much I enjoyed it! I’d also like to talk about the main characters, specifically the way they grow and change as the game goes on and the narrative starts to get stranger and more bizarre. I won’t though - I will say however that in a general sense, this game works harder than any before to tie each character into the larger story than any previous games have - too often in this series it feels like you, despite having no personal stake in the narrative, are forced to resolve it singlehandedly. This time around that is NOT the case.

TEAM SKULL ARE SO GOOD. They… god, I can’t get over how good they are! In the pantheon of Weird Pokémon Teams Who Are Trying To Do Fucked-Up Shit, they take the top slot as most memorable, most entertaining, and most overall satisfying as antagonists. There’s no ‘wipe out humanity for no reason’ or ‘flood the world because we feel like it’ rubbish here, their role in the story is legit as hell.

Look, there’s not really much else I can say here! Nintendo took a series that I love very dearly, and shook it up to give me something that is both refreshingly new and reassuringly similar. This is the best Pokémon I have ever played, even better than Black & White which, up until now, were my favourites. I’m really happy that I got to experience this, and I can’t wait to see what happens to this series in the future.

exeggutor is the manifestation of the stupid ‘eggs tree’ gag from homestarrunner