Tag: general ramblings

This was just a busy year for me. Between the projects I was on at work or having a new kid at home, finding time to really power through games was not that easy this year. However, within that there were still some absolute highlights that I can point at as must plays.

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Game Ramblings #190 – Dave the Diver

I know this isn’t an indie game and I know it came out a long time ago, but it’s the closest thing to an “indie” experience that I’d totally recommend this year. This one surprised me a lot in how well it blended an arcade-style sushi shop experience with surprisingly fun scuba diving segments into a game that I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did, much less actually complete it and play it for a couple dozen hours.

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Game Ramblings #183 – Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

This was easily my Metroidvania of the year. This was the perfect mix of traversal and melee combat that allows the genre to work so well for me. Retraversing old areas was never a chore due to new shortcuts making things shorter and abilities opening new paths. Combat felt appropriately challenging but not unfair. Unfortunately it seems like the studio hasn’t made the cut at Ubisoft after its sales numbers came in, but hopefully we’ll see more things out of those folks wherever they end up because this was a winner.

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Game Ramblings #195 – The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Look, it’s just fun to spawn a horde of crows to attack your enemies while you run in circles avoiding damage. This both is and is not a top-down Zelda game, but it just works. This being good wasn’t necessarily a surprise but it being maybe one of the best games I played this year certainly was. This is easily up there with the Oracle games in quality for on the go Zelda.

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Game Ramblings #185 – Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Game Ramblings #184 – Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name

These were my stand out RPGs of the year, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they’re both action focused. I’ve increasingly become less willing to sit around and grind in turn-based RPGs because to me it feels like they’ve increasingly become unnecessarily long. Both of these games don’t give me that feeling, and that’s with FF7 Rebirth still being a very long game. Modern action gameplay just continues to be more fun over time than a lot of turn-based combat setups even against similar levels of variety and I don’t doubt that that will continue.

In this year’s case, Gaiden is a return to the Yakuza series action combat that also just had incredibly good flow. FF7 Rebirth was an iteration on the gameplay of Remake. Neither were perfect games, but they were both ones that I wanted to continue when I finished, rather than being games that I was glad were over.

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Game Ramblings #194 – Astro Bot

I’m probably lying if I say that this wasn’t my game of the year, or at least if there is a better game from last year I simply haven’t gotten around to playing it yet. This game just had such a great mix of platformer flow, nostalgia kicks, fun moments, and impressive level design. Could it have been a bit more difficult? Sure, probably. Could it have had more levels that were fully themed around games rather than one at the end of each group? Sure, probably. However, that would just be me nitpicking. This is one that I can point to from this year and go “when you get the system, play this first” and I think that’s the only one I can say that about on this list, so by that measure it should simply be game of the year for me.

Game Ramblings #168 – God of War: Ragnarok

Game Ramblings #179 – Spider-Man 2

Both of these are pretty similar things. These were both hugely successful sequels that didn’t necessarily iterate that much on their formula, but had such fantastic foundations that it didn’t matter. These games were going to be good, and I can confirm that. They’re both absolutely worth playing.

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Game Ramblings #171 – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Game Ramblings #174 – Pikmin 4

Game Ramblings #178 – Super Mario Bros Wonder

Nintendo had an extraordinary year, and this isn’t the last you’ll see of them in this list. They had a wide array of fantastic games in a wide array of genres and continue to show that they are just the best in the industry, despite the age and low power of the Switch hardware. That’s to say nothing of other things like their Xenoblade Chronicles 3 DLC, which was also incredible. Tears of the Kingdom took an already great base and threw most of it away, replacing the core conceit with a building mechanic that is baffling in its ability to just work. Pikmin 4 reinvigorated the series with larger scale gameplay and a ton of collection that I just wanted to keep playing. Super Mario Bros Wonder did for 2D Mario what Odyssey did for 3D and proved just how many fun ideas can still be pulled out of the same core gameplay. You could own only a Switch and have come out of this year absolutely pleased.

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How’d It Age #3 – Metroid Prime

How’d It Age #7 – Super Mario RPG

How’d It Age #8 – Star Ocean: The Second Story R – DWGames

We were absolutely spoiled this year with remakes of varying complexity. Metroid Prime is a fairly straightforward remake, but did enough to modernize an already great game for a new audience. Super Mario RPG is the type of remake that at first glance feels like a simple visual upgrade, but has a bunch of tweaks to really improve the core experience that I didn’t necessarily expect. Star Ocean 2 brings an interesting mix of old and new to the visuals and keeps the existing fun gameplay to modernize a pretty janky title enough to feel worth playing in a modern context.

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Game Ramblings #176 – Sea of Stars

This isn’t a perfect game, but boy is it refreshing. To me it’s probably the new JRPG series of the year and definitely my indie game of the year. It runs a fine line between retro experience and modern gameplay and generally does a wonderful job of it. It combines great combat and a solid story and does it without dragging on. In a year with some really solid JRPG entries it stands out as the one that really hit for me. As far as indies go, this one was far and away the best that I played across the board.

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Compared to last year, this year felt predictable to me – but that’s not really a bad thing. The games I expected to be good were good. The games I looked at in previews and went “nah” ended up being duds. The remakes of great past games were still great. To me, that felt like a good thing because it generally felt like teams were living up to their potential. We’re in that point in a console generation where longer development titles are coming out, and having the big titles generally hit means that we’re in for treats through the tail end of the generation as these teams get to their next game.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.