2022! The count this year was definitely lower for me – 14 ramblings, 6 shelved, and a couple of more retro look backs – but shipping a game does that to you, which brings me to my first one.
Go buy High on Life! Help pay my salary!
With that self-serving nonsense out of the way, what do I think I played that was actually worth the look last year? Unfortunately a couple big names aren’t on the list because frankly I haven’t gotten to them. Crisis Core and God of War: Ragnarok are both games I’d normally expect to recommend, but I just didn’t have the time. I’m getting to that early this year though, so maybe they have a catch up chance next year. There are some things that I think stood out though.
Game Ramblings #154 – Kena: Bridge of Spirits
This was just such a pleasant surprise to me. It’s not without some level of jank, but it gave me a Souls-like combat experience without feeling over the top difficult, and when I hit points where the difficulty was frustrating me it had a slider to turn things down for me to get to areas that I was enjoying more. Little things like that are so important to my ability to enjoy games with the limited time I have, and I applaud them for doing stuff like that. It was backed with great visuals and enjoyable lore to give me a pretty early surprise for the year.
Game Ramblings #156 – Pokemon Legends: Arceus
This is an incredibly janky game. It’s often an incredibly ugly game. The balance often makes no sense to me. However, it’s fun. Having the player focus on catching instead of battling is interesting. Having the player be able to be attacked by Pokemon and be in danger is obvious. Having a relatively open world is a huge change to the meta game of finding Pokemon. This feels like an important step for the Pokemon series as a whole, and while the new entries a couple months ago feel like a step backward intro traditional territory, I’m hoping Arceus is allowing the long term planning for the series to move in new directions.
Game Ramblings #160 – Xenoblade Chronicles 3
This is an easy selection for my game of the year. It’s got a solid story, fun characters, incredibly addictive combat, a neat class system, and spectacularly impressive environments. It’s the culmination of a lot of things that were learned across the previous titles, and feels like it takes the best of each entry to finalize the overall story arc for the series. This is a game that I recommend buying a Switch for.
Game Ramblings #166 – Sonic Frontiers
I expected to absolutely hate this game just based on how inconsistent the 3D Sonic games have been through the years. This also wasn’t helped by coming out of the gate with some really awkward trailers. However, in practice it was hard to put down. It feels like the Mario Odyssey of Sonic games where there’s always something fun to do around every corner. However, that does come with a heaping side of usual Sonic jank. Luckily it wasn’t enough to really put a damper on the experience, and this probably came in as my surprise of the year.
The common thread for me this past year is that I’m becoming increasingly unwilling to deal with annoyances. Between family time and trying to ship a game, I just didn’t have the time to waste on bullshit. That left me with far fewer JRPGs than typical with me saving that time for truly spectacular entries. That had me shelving a higher amount of games than usual, basically once I hit the first sign of boredom with what was in front of me. However, there’s still so much quality stuff being released that I was never without something cool to play. I’m entering 2023 still catching up on some big titles and I’m looking forward to cranking through those to start off the year here.