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veebs-hates-video-games · 11 months ago

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I'm glad I waited until the last minute to figure out how I felt about the games I played this year because there were some surprise changes right up until the end. I think I managed to get most things I played this year that weren't just demos onto a list and will have opinions on them.

There will potentially be too many to tag properly, but maybe I'll try linking the game titles to the tags and see how that goes, which should bring up any previous posts about them with more detail (although I still haven't finished updating all the old posts to the new tags yet as of writing this so they might not all work right away).

Also except for the final category stuff within each group isn't really in any particular order, and there's no hard boundary between some of the categories where I think everything in one is definitively better than everything in another (e.g. I think Aria of Sorrow is better than at least some of the stuff in the "pleasantly surprised category", but I liked it exactly as much as I expected to so it is where it is).

So starting from the worst:

Fate/EXTELLA LINK was the least fun I had with a game all year. It's like what if a Musou game felt worse to play and also had an extremely uncomfortable level of pandering to weebs and their waifus in the writing. Blech.

Diablo 2: Resurrected is literally unplayable without creating an account and being online even though D2 has always had offline single player. They don't actually mention this. I only have it because it was cheaper to get the bundle with D2 and D3 than D3 by itself.

Super Mario 3D World is the least fun I've had with a Mario game in literally decades. 3D movement with a fixed camera is awful. I still like the full 3D games and the 2D ones, but this is nope for me.

Pendula Swing is honestly probably fine on a different platform (read: with a mouse and keyboard), but the Switch version is borderline unplayable. The idea seemed interesting but it was so clunky I couldn't get into it.

Ys Origin just hasn't aged well. I played it a long time ago and it was in the "fine, I guess" category, but trying to replay it after some of the newer ones (which will be further down the list) was rough.

And then games that were mostly just disappointing to me:

Diablo 3 is one of those things everyone kept saying at least feels the best to play out of all the modern ARPGs for years, so I finally gave in and tried it to see what all the fuss was about. It feels like Torchlight 2.5 with a bigger budget and was kind of uninspiring overall.

The Outer Worlds was something I was really hopeful about, but I just didn't find anything at all about it enjoyable.

Pokemon Picross is just a bunch of free-to-play bullshit ruining something that could've been fun. The world is better off with the eShop shut down so no one can play it anymore.

Persona 5 Royal is another one I was really looking forward to that I just did not click with at all. The first few hours were full of minor annoyances and did very little to win me over.

AI: The Somnium Files had potential and sounded interesting, but moon logic for solving puzzles should've stayed in the 90s and I could do without all the random horniness.

The World Ends With You: Final Remix and NEO: The World Ends With You are frustrating because they have so many interesting ideas and a neat presentation but just aren't any fun to play, especially the first one.

Tales of Vesperia just hasn't aged super well I think. I know there are people who like it, and I was looking forward to it, but I think I would've had to play it closer to stuff like Tales of Symphonia to appreciate it.

Inscryption is not my thing at all. It's a shame because I loved Pony Island, but I just couldn't get into this one.

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is a Donkey Kong Country game, which have always been just ok to me. I should've remembered that and not bought into the hype over the years.

Next is stuff I liked the idea of but didn't really like playing enough to stick with it:

Titanfall 2 has really neat movement and stuff, and I've heard the later levels do some interesting stuff, but beyond that the actual combat wasn't really my thing.

Ori and the Blind Forest had too many frustrating bits to keep me playing through the parts I did like.

Disgaea 4 seemed fun and like it had a lot of potential, but I always find that kind of SRPG way too fiddly, ever since I tried the original Final Fantasy Tactics.

Marenian Tavern Story: Patty and the Hungry God is just a worse version of Blacksmith of the Sand Kingdom (see later on the list), which is understandable because they made it first.

Bravely Default I mostly played a couple years ago, but this year I put another dozen hours in and finally gave up on it. I really like a lot of stuff about it, but there were just too many things that frustrated or annoyed me.

They Bleed Pixels seems like fun and has some good pixel art (mostly the story stuff outside the gameplay segments), but I don't think it's for me.

Hero Hours Contract is an amazing idea and I love almost everything about it except for actually playing it.

Luckslinger took forever for me to get around to. The idea of luck being a consumable resource you have to manage is really neat, but I wasn't really enjoying the actual game, even if "pixel art hip hop spaghetti western" sounds great on paper.

Carto is one I don't really have anything against beyond apparently glitching it into an unrecoverable state and not being invested enough to start over.

Cris Tales is another one of those ones where I like a lot of stuff about it except for actually playing it.

Anarcute was a lot of fun for a little while, but it started introducing more elements I tend to not really like. Definitely one of the cuter games on the list with one of the best theme songs though.

Followed by things I had mixed feelings on or the "fine, I guess" category:

PixelJunk Eden 2 was fun enough, but they changed things from the original in a way that seems to be to make it more suitable for mobile, and I feel like most of them made it worse.

Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars didn't quite stick the landing. I loved the idea of everything being cards on a table with a single narrator/GM running everything, and the world and characters were interesting enough for a while. It didn't quite hold up for me all the way through to the end though.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is...better than Breath of the Wild, at least? It's smoothed over a lot of my biggest annoyances with that, and it's amazing that half the stuff in it even works at all, but it still doesn't feel like Zelda to me and has been pretty low priority to get back to and finish.

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout has one of the worst openings of any game I've played in years and absolutely awful pacing. It did seem to finally have opened up and gotten potentially rather good where I left off (and might get back to one of these days), but it shouldn't take half a dozen hours for that.

Yoku's Island Express is a clever idea and was a pretty good time for a while, but it's also one of the buggiest things I've played in the past year, and that's what drove me to stop playing.

Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age is frustrating to go back to. I loved the demo when I played it a couple years ago, but redoing everything now because I'm playing the full game on a different platform kinda sucks because of how slow the start is.

Will Die Alone has an interesting premise and way of interacting with it, but it stops short of quite saying as much with it as I would've liked.

Chaos;Head Noah had so much potential that kind of got wasted in the end. I really liked a lot of stuff about it along the way, but it's also kind of a mess. Hopefully when I get around to Steins;Gate they'll have learned to do it better because the anime for that one was great.

I'LL KILL HER is basically an interactive comic book, and the main strength is the art. The rest is fine I guess. Every content warning for this one.

Murder by Numbers is a constant mix of mildly amusing and mildly annoying. I hope they can even things out if they make more games in the future.

And then games that were pretty good but not my favorites:

Kuukiyomi: Consider It is a silly idea and doesn't overstay its welcome. I haven't felt an urge to play the sequels so far though.

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line is definitely the best in the series and has tons of great music, but I still have some issues with this style of music/rhythm game that keep me from completely loving it.

Cadence of Hyrule was kind of annoying when I first started playing the demo, but once I got the hang of it I had a pretty good time mostly. The huge difficulty spike at the end left me less happy with it than I was for most of the game though.

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is probably the best game in this category, much better than most of the others, and my favorite Castlevania game, but it's a little short of being one of my favorites overall this year.

Syrup and the Ultimate Sweet is probably my second favorite in thie category and rather cute and silly.

One Night: Burlesque is the "worst" game in this category and doesn't entirely succeed at what it's trying to do, but I appreciate the effort and the overall vibes.

Gunma's Ambition -You and Me Are Gunma- is literally just a single joke drawn out for like an hour, but they lean into it enough to make it work.

LOUD: My Road to Fame has a couple weird design decisions that make it a bit frustrating toward the end, but up until then it's a surprisingly fun music/rhythm game with decent original music.

Lara Croft GO has some pretty decent puzzles in it and is probably my second favorite Tomb Raider game at this point, but I also had some Issues with it that held it back a little bit.

Next are the ones that I was pleasantly surprised by that were better than I expected:

Pixel Puzzle Makeout League was not what I expected. I figured it would just be picross with a silly dating sim on top, but I had no idea about the themes and ideas it would go into, and the entire ending section of the game in general was great and totally unexpected.

Blacksmith of the Sand Kingdom really surprised me. I had zero expectations going in, and while it isn't quite great at anything it's good to very good at a lot of things and was pretty satisfying in the end.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is the most Zelda-like game I've played this year (with close competition from another game down the list), and an actual Zelda game came out this year. Exactly as long as it needed to be and went in a more interesting direction than I thought it would.

Majotori is something I accidentally stumbled on because it was on a list of games that at least tangentially have lesbians in them, and it's delightfully silly.

Death end re;Quest really surpassed my expectations, even if I have significant enough issues with it that it's hard to recommend without caveats. it did some surprisingly interesting things though, and I keep thinking about it from time to time.

Rabisco+ was an impulse purchase because it randomly came up and was very cheap and I had no idea what was going on in the cover art. It turned out to be a short but pretty fun arcade-style puzzle game.

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana was the first Ys game I played since Ys Origin first came out in English, and the series has really come a long way since then and is much better these days.

Demong Hunter was basically an impulse joke purchase because I had to know what makes a demong different from a demon. I still have no idea, but this was way better than I expected from what initially seemed like a cheap mobile game.

Ys IX: Monstrum Nox wasn't quite as good overall as the previous game in the series, but I still had a lot of fun with Goth Adol, and all the new movement abilities added a lot to it.

Perfect Gold did a surprisingly decent job of having flawed characters who worked through problems in their relationship without making them annoying or unlikable like often happens.

Trigger Witch is the other most Zelda-like game I played this year. I totally grabbed it because of the cover art and it was on sale, but it's a pretty solid twin-stick shooter mixed with the LttP/LA era of Zelda.

Will You Snail? was pretty unknown to me before I started playing because I somehow avoided anyone else playing it or talking about it, but it turned out to be a pretty good precision platformer with a fun gimmick, which is hard to pull off for me because I can be kinda picky about how platformers feel to play for some reason.

Vivid Knight managed to absorb nearly all my game time until I finished it, which I did not see coming. I did eventually start to see the cracks in the systems and stopped enjoying it as much, but up until then I got pretty wrapped up in it.

And finally the ones that were probably my favorites, not necessarily in order but with the best generally toward the end:

Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition and Xenoblade Chronicles: Future Connected would be more toward the top of the list except this was a replay so I'm disqualifying it. I played the Wii version originally, and they sure did improve almost everything in an already great game in this version.

Bowser's Fury was about as enjoyable as Super Mario 3D World was unenjoyable. I'm not sure it would quite work for a full size Mario game, but there were some good ideas in this one.

Trials of Mana really polished up an older game that I thought was kind of underwhelming back in the day and turned it into something I had a great time with. Between this and the recent announcement of the new game I'm cautiously optimistic about something good in the Mana series finally happening for the first time since the PS1.

Harvestella really caught me off guard. I was expecting a farming sim with some Final Fantasy-style nonsense on top, and it turned out to be 85% JRPG with a story I liked more than anything FF has done in years.

Can Androids Pray is the most last minute addition to this list on December 30th. When a short story (in any medium) really focuses in on a single relationship or conversation or event or idea so well that it implies the existence of the entire rest of the universe around that my brain just starts vibrating. This is one of those.

The House in Fata Morgana takes a long road to get to its ending and the characters earn every step of the way there. It also surprised me by being a totally different flavor of queer than I expected.

Unpacking wins the award for best vibes. I had a lot of feelings about this one, probably including some they weren't expecting people to have when they made it, and it does a better job telling a story than most stuff on this list despite having no visible characters and almost zero dialogue.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim I think wins for my favorite story/writing this year. People said it was a great sci-fi story, and not just for a video game, and they were right.

Fire Emblem Engage is the winner for my favorite gameplay. They absolutely nailed a lot of the mechanics and systems on the game design side of things, and it's my favorite Fire Emblem game at this point.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed gets this spot for my favorite overall. They polished the already great gameplay of XC3, introduced some great new characters and brought back some old ones, and managed to expand on a lot of the story from the entire trilogy and tie up a bunch of stuff all at the same time.

And I guess that's finally that. There were some pretty big disappointments for me, but there were even more really great games I played and ones I had no idea I'd like as much as I did. I think I'm just going to tag stuff in the final two categories (since that's what'll fit) and call it a day.

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