Oh hey there. Because I’ve put myself down a dark path, the games I’m currently playing the most in this current year are Monster Hunter World’s Iceborne expansion, and my continual Total Warhammer II habit. Backlog? What even is that? Oh, I guess I did play Bloodstained, but other than saying fairly definitively that game is "hella good" I don't really have much to add. Thus, while I’ve written extensively about my dangerous Monster Hunter habit, I figure it’s time to get some #content out of the best game I played last year that didn’t come out last year.

That, of course, comes by scientifically ranking all fifteen factions currently in Total War: Warhammer II. It’s no secret that I’m generally a sucker for strategy games, especially of the turn-based variety, and one of my favorite things about the genre is when there are varied and interesting faction choices to influence different strategies and playstyles. Total Warhammer is probably on the far end of this, with each individual faction playing significantly differently from one another on both the strategic map and in tactical battles, and that’s part of the reason why it’s currently consumed upwards of 200 hours of my life.

This inquiry is done as objectively and correctly as possible based on my entirely subjective opinion and my half-assed knowledge of Warhammer Fantasy lore gleaned from staring at a wiki for multiple hours. This list is also going to be split up into multiple parts, because no one should want to read all of the words I wrote about this game in a single, unbroken chunk.

15. Warriors of Chaos

Lore: The End Times are here, and with them comes the dark forces of Chaos, pouring out of the Northern Wastes! Servants of the four dark gods come to bring ruin upon the world and upon all life! You know those dudes who look like they’re straight off an 80s metal album? These are those guys.

Campaign Mechanics: The Warriors of Chaos are a Horde faction, which is a mechanic I’m to understand was introduced in Total War: Atilla. Instead of capturing and holding territory, each individual army is a settlement unto itself. Income is mostly derived from raiding and razing enemy territory, since it doesn’t really make sense for the heralds of doom to settle down and hang out in the towns they burn to the ground. While this sounds fun in theory, it offers three large problems that make them sort of a pain. Enemies can retake territory fairly easily, losing an army is devastating (since you lose all your infrastructure with it), and you don’t really ever need to engage in diplomacy and/or economy.

Army Roster: With only one artillery piece and zero ranged units outside of skirmish cavalry, it’s abundantly clear that Chaos’ focus is around their heavily armored infantry and powerful, terror-inducing monsters. Once you get past the lightly-armored Chaos Marauders (and you’ll want to, given that they’re a bunch of shirtless viking men capable of taking exactly zero punishment) you’ll get to the iconic Chosen, some Chaos Spawn, maybe a Hell Chariot or two for funsies. Just make sure to keep the enemy occupied long enough for your main force to get there.

Favorite Legendary Lord: While there’s certainly a part of me that wants to give it to prettyboy of Slaanesh, Sigvald the Magnificent for being a complete dweeb it’s really hard to deny Kholek Suneater, the massive Dragon Ogre whose entire deal involves tearing through… just about everything. One of the few monstrous lords in the game… just keep him the hell away from high-level spearmen and people with guns.

Official Scientific Ranking: Last Place. Horde Faction mechanics aren’t very fun, and Chaos’ starting position at the very top of the map is extra not fun. Given that Total War: Warhammer III is supposedly going to be very chaos-focused, it’s heavily speculated that these guys are going to get some sort of rework around then to fit in more closely with their Daemonic counterparts.

14. Beastmen

Lore: Hey guys, it’s your friends at Chaos again, here to bring ruination to all things. However, instead of heavily armored warriors serving hellish masters, it’s the devolved savage Beastmen who dwell in the deep forests and seek the destruction of all uncloven ones. One of the DLC factions for the original Total War: Warhammer.

Campaign Mechanics: Like the Warriors of Chaos, the Beastmen are a horde faction who hasn’t really received any updates since the launch of Mortal Empires in Total Warhammer II. All of my qualms still apply, though Beastmen at least have a mechanic where you get to choose a powerful buff and debuff every few turns based on the phases of the moon. Their armies can also hide themselves when encamped, and have an automatic chance to ambush enemies.

Army Roster: If the Warriors of Chaos are defined by their roster of (mostly) slow-moving, heavily armored infantry then Beastmen are all about hitting that rush as quickly and cowardly as possible with their lightly armored cheap infantry and monsters. Most of their basic units have vanguard deployment and stalk, which allows for easy flanking setups (especially with their large unit sizes) alongside a mechanic that makes them faster and more dangerous while their leadership is high. Unsurprisingly, that speed and aggression comes at the cost of armor and leadership, which means most of their units have terrible staying power. Get in, maybe charge some minotaurs or razorgors into their backline, and give them zero chance to retaliate. If an enemy can weather that assault, things tend to go far less well for our Satan-worshipping goatmen.

Favorite Legendary Lord: Malagor the Dark Omen, Prophet and Crowfather to the Beastmen is the obligatory caster lord of the bunch, with access to the Beastmen-exclusive Lore of the Wild. While creating explosive novas of vermin is fun, his real appeal is a constant, passive reduction of enemy leadership, which fits nicely with the Beastmen’s modus operandi of routing the enemy as quickly as possible. He’s also one of the components if you want to create quite possibly the dumbest doomstack army in the game.

Official Scientific Rating: Despite being one of the weaker factions in the game, I think I like the Beastmen more than Chaos, if only because you can pick your starting location and because their maximal rush style fits what I like to do more in combat. They’re likely due for a similar rework in the inevitable Total Warhammer III, but until then they and Chaos are probably the two DLC factions I’d warn any new player away from unless you wanna play them in competitive multiplayer

13. Greenskins

Lore: If you know anything about either flavor of Warhammer that isn’t just SPAYCE MUHREENS, it’s that the Orcs (or Orks, if you’re in space) are just football hooligans who are very into fightiness and waaaagh and being “tha rite tru git.” It’s exceptionally British and I’m very into it.

Campaign Mechanics: The Greenskins have remained virtually untouched since their debut in the first game, which means they feel really bare-bones next to most of the other factions, what with their “Elector Counts” and “Rituals” and “Interesting things to do outside of just conquering stuff”. They have a Waaagh mechanic, which summons an additional NPC army to accompany your own, if you keep your “fightiness” high enough. In theory, it’s a way to encourage momentum and emphasize how much the Greenskins are into constant fighting. How this works in practice is that you can summon an AI army who isn’t much good for anything other than suicide charging enemy settlements because they move after you do. They’re, uh, due for a rework this year.

Army Roster: Because said rework has been talked up for a while, the Greenskins are the faction I honestly have the least experience with. They have a large, varied roster with the general trend of “big unit size, bad leadership” and exclusive access to the Big Waagh and Little Waagh spellbooks. Goblins are fast (and often sneaky), but squishy. Orcs (and especially Black Orcs) are strong, but not especially fast. Savage Orcs have no armor, but have a significant physical resistance to compensate. There’s a lot of overlap between them, and it can feel a little bloated as a result, but it also means there’s generally a tool for any given situation and any price range. Well, unless you want cheap armor piercing, because they don’t have that outside of the circumstantial Nasty Skulkers. Gee, sure would be nice to have a reliable early-game, low-cost form of armor piercing when the Greenskins main enemy is *checks notes* The Dwarfs, a faction whose roster revolves almost entirely around heavily armored units.

Favorite Legendary Lord: The greenskins have the dubious distinction of having the single most difficult campaign currently in the game, via Skarsnik, Night Goblin lord of Crooked Moon. Their other two choices, Black Crag and Da Bloody Handz, seem like they basically have the same starting area, except one emphasizes Savage Orcs more than the other. So, I dunno, Azhag seems fun, since he's the only way to get the solid Lore of Death and can still fight in melee.

Official Scientific Ranking: Wait for the rework.

12. Wood Elves

Lore: The Asrai protect the Oak of Ages, one of the few beacons of order keeping the forces of Chaos at bay. Other than that, they’re about what you’d expect from Wood Elves if you’ve ever been in a fantasy setting where varieties of Elves are distinguished from one another. Namely… they’re xenophobic, tree-hugging assholes who engage in things like “The Wild Hunt” and also hang out with treemen. One of the DLC factions for the original Total Warhammer.

Campaign Mechanics: One of the DLC factions for the first Total Warhammer, the Wood Elves have a unique settling mechanic and resource. Given the whole “xenophobic homebody” thing, the Asrai cannot construct major settlements outside of the forests of Athel Loren. Instead, capturing an enemy settlement just leaves you with an outpost that can’t be upgraded. More crucially, capturing settlements (or engaging in Military Alliances) gives the Wood Elves access to Amber, a special resource they need to build special buildings, recruit high-tier units, and ultimately reach their campaign victory conditions.

I’m to understand it worked pretty well in the first game, but the amber mechanic doesn’t scale especially well with the much larger map facilitated by the Mortal Empires campaign. Being stuck with just a small handful of “real” settlements is obnoxious, for as lore-conscious as it seems. Since most of your income is going to come from sacking enemy settlements, there’s something almost quasi-horde about the way the Wood Elves play… which as mentioned above, isn’t necessarily my favorite form of gameplay.

Army Roster: If you guessed that the Wood Elves have some of the best ranged and skirmish units in the game, congratulations, you’ve successfully absorbed decades (if not centuries) worth of fantasy stereotypes. What you might not have guessed is that the Asrai also have solid melee infantry, “ok” cavalry, and even some monster options with their treemen units. What almost all of them share in common is either lack of armor (in the case of most of the elf units) or a significant fire weakness (in the case of treemen.) Glass Cannons, essentially. But they don’t actually have any cannons, or any sort of artillery, so you’re still going to have to close *some* distance.

Favorite Legendary Lord: Orion might be a solid hybrid lord capable of erasing things at range or up close, but Durthu is basically angrier Treebeard with a giant sword made out of amber. I’m going to let that sink in.

Official Scientific Ranking: I think the Wood Elves actually have a pretty fun, fast army that is very good at harassing and whittling down the enemy. If their campaign wasn’t one of the more boring ones in the entire game, they’d be ranked much higher.

11. Brettonia

Lore: Brettonia is what happens when a bunch of British tabletop game designers make a fictional nation that is an over-the-top parody of Arthurian Knights, Feudalism, and the French. Brettonians love chivalry, honor, and the Lady of the Lake just as much as they enjoy taxing the shit out of peasants, treating them like subhuman garbage, and using them as cannon fodder in battle. It’s some real borderline Monty Python stuff, honestly. A free DLC faction for the first game.

Campaign Mechanics: The Brettonians take chivalry so seriously that it’s an actual, measurable mechanic/resource that ties into their victory conditions. Sacking an enemy settlement? Unchivalrous. Razing a den of evil to the ground? Very chivalrous. You can get more chivalry by issuing holy edicts calling for the extermination of a certain kind of faction, and as a result Brettonian campaigns are a little more sandbox-y.

Doubling down on the “feudalism” angle, the Brettonians are reliant upon their peasant economy to keep things flowing. How that translates in gameplay terms is that you can only field a limited number of infantry units based on number of settlements before it starts to eat into your income (to compensate, they don’t suffer a “multiple armies” penalty to upkeep) You can focus on that sweet sweet farm cash if you want, or you can emphasize industry to try and mitigate it instead.

Army Roster: Brettonia might have the single most skewed roster in the entire game. Their infantry are infamously cheap and expendable (Foot Squiers, their best foot unit, only cost 700. For comparison, Empire Greatswords cost almost twice as much) but that’s fine because they do cavalry better than anyone else. They have great cheap cavalry, they have great expensive cavalry, they have melee cavalry who can hang in combat, they have shock cavalry who are supposed to charge, pull back, and charge again. They have Pegasus Knights and Hippogryph Knights capable of maintaining air superiority, and they have Lords and Heroes are capable of riding horses or pegasi to charge through things too. Also they’re such dorks that they bless their trebuchets so they don’t cause splash damage.

Favorite Legendary Lord: Louen Leoncoeur is one of the strongest legendary lords in the game, Alberic de Bordeleaux is one of the weakest, and the Fay Enchantress is a squishy wizard. But are any of them Fantasy Joan of Arc? Nope. But Repanse de Lyonesse sure is! She’s also the only Brettonian lord available to play in the Vortex campaign and the only one who doesn’t start in Bretonnia itself.

Official Scientific Ranking: So, here’s the thing. I’m bad at cavalry micromanagement. Give me more than two units of shock cav and things are probably not going to go well, as I fail to cycle charge in and out. Brettonia is a faction who can run entirely off cavalry if they so desire, and in fact are penalized for fielding too many infantry. That means I’m, uh, not good with them. Other than that minor quibble, being able to throw endless horses at the enemy has its appeal. Assuming they’re not fielding endless spearmen.

10. Norsca

Lore: One of two factions on this list without a direct tabletop analog, Norsca asks the important question “What do all those Northmen tribes do when the end times aren’t happening?” The answer, of course, is to ravage and plunder the southern lands in the name of the four dark gods because Chaos is predictable that way. Just, you know, with more werewolves and mammoths.

Campaign Mechanics: As the last DLC faction released for the first game, as a bridge to the second, it feels like Norsca represents all of the lessons Creative Assembly learned over the course of making the first Total Warhammer. Namely, answering the important question of “What if Chaos was fun to play?” since you can actually capture and hold territory within the Norscan Peninsula. However, given that they live in a frozen, twisted wasteland, the Norscans don’t exactly have the most advanced building trees and economic infrastructure. If you want to maintain any sort of serious force, expect to do a lot of raiding, plundering, and even monster hunting to keep the cash inflow coming.

Similarly, when you raze and pillage enemy settlements, you can do so in the name of one of the four Chaos gods (Khorne, Tzeentch, Slaanesh, and Nurgle) to grant yourself fairly significant perks, either attempting to min-max the devotion towards one of them, or attempt to juggle favor between them. I would expect a similar mechanic to reappear should the other Chaos factions get reworked, or possibly if the Daemons of Chaos end up appearing in the third game.

Army Roster: Unsurprisingly, Norsca shares several units with the Warriors of Chaos and the same basic playstyle. Like their dark brethren, Norsca isn’t much in the ranged department (Marauder Hunters are actually capable of some pretty solid damage output, but are much shorter-ranged than the average archer unit) and are a melee-focused rush faction with strong infantry and scary monsters capable of inducing terror. The difference is mostly one of degrees, and Norscan units are generally faster and have larger unit sizes than their heavily-armored Chaos counterparts.

Favorite Legendary Lord: Only two choices for this one, and I think I have to go for Wulfrik the Wanderer over Throgg, for as much as I’m into a giant, intelligent frost troll as a faction leader. Wulfrik has been cursed to wander the world and challenge its greatest warriors, but he also can ride a mammoth and summon his accursed boat like it was a line spell. So… that’s pretty cool. He also gets upkeep discounts on Marauders and a hefty attack bonus for Mammoths, which is more useful than Throgg’s discount on trolls.

Official Scientific Rating: “Chaos, but Fun” is a solid way of describing Norsca, especially given how much of their roster borrows from Chaos. Even if their roster can sometimes feel a bit limited, they're one of the more fun rush armies in the game and being able to field a big stupid doomstack of Mammoths is something I can get behind.

And we'll stop here, with a third of the roster done. A THIRD. This was almost as much text as either of my Game of the Year blogs, but we're not stopping here. Here's Part 2.

I’ve put it off long enough. If you are looking for the games that didn’t come out in 2019, that blog is over here! Starting at ten and working our way down:

AI: The Somnium Files

Listen, I’m probably not going to do an anime blog this year. For better or worse, I didn’t watch a ton of Japanese Animation in 2019, and most of what I did watch has already been discussed to death (an overdue rewatch of Evangelion that probably got to me more as an adult that it did as a teenager) memed to death (Hey, it turns out I liked those first two parts of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure exactly as much as I thought I would!) or scattered fragments of this year’s obligatory hot seasonal shows of the season that everyone immediately stopped talking about after the season ended (Based on the… approximately four 2019 anime series I watched, the anime of the year is probably Mob Psycho 100 S2, with Kaguya-sama: Love is War at second. Also the Konosuba movie was a lot of fun.)

However, don’t let this drought make you assume I didn’t deal with some ANIME in 2019. Aside from going down the Higurashi hole, putting Danganronpa on some list, and yelling at random people to play 428 Shibuya Scramble, I even played an anime that came out in 2019. AI: The Somnium Files is a cyber-cop adventure game from Kotaro Uchikoshi, the guy responsible for the Zero Escape series (and also Punch Line, the anime/game where the main character gets super powers if he sees panties and is also a ghost stuck in a time loop. Listen, it’s a lot.) That should give you a pretty good baseline for the kinds of storytelling and characterization Somnium files pulls, but if you’re unfamiliar with his work, it’s a game wherein Kaname Date, a constantly horny cyber cop with his AI anime lady partner who is also his eyeball (Listen, it’s a lot) solves crimes by going into people’s dreams and deriving important clues from their subconsciouses (Listen, it’s a lot.) Uchikoshi’s trademark are clockwork puzzle plots, made of a bunch of moving pieces that all fit together once you have enough of them, and Somnium Files doesn’t deviate from that too hard. There’s a hard, fairly comprehensible line of causality to follow for the various routes, characters will exposit on psuedoscientific concepts that may or may not be integral to the plot, and the entire time you’ll be wondering if a 13-year-old wrote the numerous “lol boob” jokes at every turn.

It’s a formula that works for him, and I think it works for this game as well. Given that the actual “game” parts of Somnium Files mostly solving some basic-ass dream puzzles and clicking on objects in the background, I can’t really talk about what works (and doesn’t work) about the various twists and turns of the story without getting into spoiler territory. If you like interesting, stylishly designed characters delivering witty dialogue, lowbrow dirty jokes, and quite possibly the best/worst puns imaginable with some genuinely fantastic English voice acting, it’s worth a look.

Kingdom Hearts III

Trying to write about Kingdom Hearts is an all-encompassing black hole, whose gravity is inescapable by all but the most dedicated or mad. I tried multiple times to write a blog on the series particular brand of insanity this year, between my playthroughs of Kingdom Hearts II/Birth By Sleep and then my culminating playthrough of Kingdom Hearts III. Here’s the thing: I love Kingdom Hearts’ hypersincerity, I love how profoundly stupid it is, I love its weird, incredibly stilted dialogue, and I still have just enough lingering childhood affinity for Disney that I love the bizarre ways that stuff is portrayed in the context of Tetsuya Nomura’s very audacious, officially sanctioned crossover fan-fic. Writing seriously about Kingdom Hearts is a nightmare tightrope, however, and I couldn’t find a tone somewhere between seriously discussing the nuances and intricacies of “Getting ‘Norted” and just going full goofball “Haha Mickey Mouse and anime boy with zippers talking about the friendship and the darkness how truly silly, is this not quaint, am I not original?”

It’s a shame that full write-up never materialized, because there’s some shit in Kingdom Hearts III that is worth discussing. It’s weirdly self-aware at times! Haley Joel Osment is a man in his thirties trying to do the same voice he had as a young teenager! You can very explicitly tell which Disney worlds they were given narrative leeway with and which ones they absolutely weren’t (The Frozen world has NOTHING beyond a vague retelling of the movie and a part where Sora, Donald, and Goofy literally just watch a shot-for-shot recreation of the “Let it Go” scene.) At one point it kinda just turns into Assassin’s Creed Black Flag for a few hours! There’s that entire scene where Donald Duck shoots a giant-ass laser at Terra-Xehanort and then DIES, which made me start screaming at my television. It has an almost Metal Gear Solid 4-like obsession with resolving every single asinine minor plot thread set up over the course of 17 years, but unlike MGS 4 it didn’t make me angry. And then it has the gall to try and set up even more things, especially if you feel like extrapolating implications from the hidden ending movie.

It’s a delightfully loopy experience, one I would wholeheartedly recommend if not for the part where I found the actual act of playing the game to be a dull slog. Even on hard, I got my way through 80% of the encounters by mashing X, occasionally pressing triangle to make some ridiculous screen-clearing bullshit (or keyblade form that allowed for ridiculous screen-clearing bullshit) and it just… started to grate. I know they eventually patched in Critical Mode, which people seemed generally positive on, but I shouldn’t have to play on the absolute hardest difficulty just so the mechanics matter. On the other hand? You get to hear Rex from Toy Story, still voiced by Hollywood Actor Wallis Shawn, say the word “Bahamut.” 10/10, Game of the Year except for the games in front of it.

Disco Elysium

In what might be a shocking turn of events, I didn’t love Disco Elysium as much as some people clearly did. I did, however, like it enough to put it on this list. In a lot of ways, Disco Elysium is a game made for me. It’s heavily inspired by Planescape Torment, but without any of the perfunctory combat encounters. It’s set in a more grounded world than Planescape, with far more worldly philosophical and political points, but it’s still just weird and esoteric enough to feel strange and fantastical. It’s an RPG where you play as a disaster cop trying to solve crime and dealing with the psychotic voices in your head, represented as your various skills, as well as your eternally patient partner Kim Katsuragi. The part where I pretended to be a paranormal investigator so I could dig through the “haunted” remains of ill-advised failed businesses is maybe one of the low-key funniest side quests I’ve seen in an RPG, and it’s a game filled with those sorts of weird vignettes.

Where Disco Elysium fell apart for me mostly has to do with its tone and some of its mechanics. The writing is generally quite good for a game with a lot of writing, even if it’s a little high on itself and sometimes feels like it was written by ironic left-wing twitter. But it bounces between absurdist humor, extremely broad political satire, and genuine melancholy at the drop of a hat, and that didn’t quite work for me. The ending, while metaphorically and philosophically consistent, felt like I glimpsed a little too close behind the curtain and realized how much railroading a lot of the game’s much vaunted reactivity actually surrounded. It also, for better or worse, made me realize why I’ve always been more fond of Baldur’s Gate than Planescape, despite the latter being a significantly better-written, thematically rich, and stylistically unique game. And it’s this: I like combat in RPGs. I like mechanics. I like “numbers ‘n shit.” I’ve always stuck with some lineage of Dungeons and Dragons with my tabletop RPG groups over more rules-lite “collaborative storytelling” rulesets like Fate or Powered by the Apocalypse because I like having a crutch of spontaneous orcs to fall back on when people don’t want to (or aren’t good at) RP. For as much as Disco Elysium is paying homage to the CRPGs of old, in a lot of ways it has more in common with those rulesets, or maybe even a point-and-click adventure game (if that point-and-click adventure game had people from Chapo Trap House in it.) Clearly, it resonated with a lot of people, and enough of it resonated with me that it’s one of my favorite games of the year. But when people say all other RPGs are dead to them, in that very hyperbolic internet way, I just can’t see it. At best, it just made me dislike Outer Worlds more.

Remnant: From the Ashes

If you needed proof that I will always be a sucker for mechanics over anything else, consider Remnant: From the Ashes. Despite having the single most generic name in all of video games (only lacking the words “Storm” and “Reckoning”) and despite clearly not having a AAA budget, it’s a pretty compelling, unapologetic mish-mash of Souls, a third-person shooter, and a little bit of Diablo and Stargate. It’s not the most polished experience, nor could I tell you a damn thing about the story, but do you know what it does have? The most satisfying take on the basic act of firing a gun this side of Destiny. The “feel” of shooting has always been a nebulous thing to pin down, but I think a lot of it comes down to not only obvious stuff, like audio design, enemy hit reactions, and time-to-kill, but also more subtle stuff like the generosity of the aim assist when you press the left trigger and simple bullshit like “enemy hitboxes.” Remnant nails this aspect, and they nailed it with a fun arsenal of interesting weapons, which keeps it going when the environments get a little repetitive, the constant add spawning during boss fights gets slightly frustrating and rerolling for specific events becomes banal.

Age of Wonders: Planetfall

Did you know a Civilization VI expansion came out this year? I did, because with the release of Gathering Storm I tried to give Civ VI another shot after bouncing off of the vanilla version like two years ago. It didn’t fix any of my problems with the game, which is to say that Civ VI feels less like an improvement over Civ V and more like a series of sidesteps, nor does it really change my core issues with the series in general. Namely, every game of Civ feels like it unfolds in roughly the same way for me, at a very lackadaisical, passive clip unless I’m going for a particularly aggressive early-game warfare strategy (which I’m usually not, because the combat in Civ has never been great.) Basically, with any given game of Civ it feels like I’m more incentivized to wait for things to happen and react, than actually instigate those things. Turtle up, build up that culture or science or religion, and sometimes fight Montezuma, then 20 hours later I’ve either won or lost. Or, more likely, I’ve quit 5 hours into any given game because I’m bored out of my skull.

It’s probably not a coincidence then, that Age of Wonders Planetfall is the first 4X game that really grabbed my attention since, well, Age of Wonders III. It’s probably cheating, since I’ve always thought Age of Wonders operates in a middle ground between a more straightforward fantasy strategy game like Heroes of Might and Magic and the true Civ-likes of the world, but with the shift to sci-fi, Planetfall is at least the most 4Xish the series has ever been. Admittedly, I think the actual city building parts of Planetfall are similarly dull to Civ. I wish there was slightly more differentiation between the factions when it came to how you structured your cities, which is one thing that Civ at least has in its favor. The good news is that the tactical combat is still great, as is the new focus on unit mods, which makes basic units viable the entire game and solves AoW III’s late-game problem of running around with nothing but top-tier units in massive doomstacks. Really, if not for Total Warhammer bludgeoning me over the head with its giant sack of content, Age of Wonders would easily be my strategy game of the year.

Apex Legends

What is there to say about Apex that hasn’t already been said before? It’s the first Battle Royale that I feel like I could actually compete at, after PUBG got a little too hardcore and Fortnite continued to not be fun. I had a pretty consistent group of friends to play it with, which absolutely kept me on it longer than I otherwise would’ve, but credit must also be given to the way Respawn has managed to mix things up over the course of the game’s first three seasons. I’m not going to pretend I’m great (Like most competitive games, my abilities range from “oh wow I can’t believe I nailed that headshot” to “oh wow I missed every single shot with this SMG at point-blank range”) and I’m not going to pretend that running for 20 minutes before getting ganked immediately isn’t sometimes frustrating, but it’s the most consistent fun I’ve had with other people this year. Now all we need is Titanfall 3. Make it happen.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Sekiro is both simultaneously one of my favorite games of this year, easily, and also quite possibly the first time one of FromSoft’s games has broken me. Even moreso than Bloodborne, which focused down Dark Souls’ wide variety of playstyle options to “Do you want to use the fast or not-as-fast weapon with your agile, aggressive hunter?” Sekiro is a game that wants you to play it on its own terms or get crushed. No summoning, no grinding, just you and some parry and counter mechanics you’re either going to learn or you’re going to have a bad time. There are sub-weapons and various techniques to give you some amount of leeway with that, but unless you go out of your way to cheese for an entire game, you’re eventually going to have to figure out how to read enemy attacks and block at the last second. There’s an appeal to this, and this hyper-focus is probably what allows Sekiro to be as demanding as it is. When a boss’s previously inhospitable attack patterns become legible and everything starts to click, you can steamroll them into the ground. It’s the satisfaction of beating a boss in a souls game distilled into an even more raw form.

Also, Sekiro is really hard and I’m not sure if I ever want to play it again in my life. The final boss literally took me somewhere in the neighborhood of six or seven hours to defeat, at which point I briefly looked at the optional late-game boss, said “nope” and took the disk out of my Playstation. It was satisfying as hell, but at some point became a miserable enough experience that I’m not sure if I want to relive it again. 10/10 Game of the Year except for the games in front of it.

Devil May Cry 5

It’s sort of impossible to talk about Devil May Cry 5 outside of that context of where the series has been for the last 11 years, so I’m going to pull off that band-aid nice and quick. I don’t hate DmC: Devil May Cry, and on its own terms I think it’s a perfectly solid character action game that made the mistake of actively trying to alienate devoted fans of the series with some of its watered-down gameplay decisions and aggressively dismissive marketing. However I think we’re better off living in a world where Keiji Infaune’s doom-and-gloom proclamations for the Japanese game industry were proven utterly wrong and Ninja Theory’s attempt at an edgy, mid-2010’s franchise reboot fell flat on its face, because DMC 5 is quite honestly the most fun I’ve had with a character action game in at least five years. The environments might be repetitive, the story might be silly and nonsensical (at least it’s self-aware of that fact), but also you can dual-wield rocket launchers and combine them together to shoot a giant-ass death laser. You didn’t have that in the game where you constantly have to be holding a shoulder button to switch weapons to hit color-coded enemies, now did you?

Once again, I can’t pretend to be one of the hyper-competent lunatics who put out the world’s most impressive combo videos and finish the game on all difficulties with all S ranks. However, I’ve certainly pulled off a jump cancel or two in my day and I’ve even gotten alright at style switching mid-combo with Dante. While Nero’s various robot arms can be a lot of fun, and V’s attempt at translating a puppet character into DMC is interesting (even if it feels like you can get SSS ranks by mashing things out) I’ll be clear that it’s still crazy uncle Dante with his multiple styles and giant arsenal of swords and guns who steals the show, and having played the first game last year, it’s genuinely fascinating to see how much his playstyle has both stayed consistent and progressed since 2001. Where does the series go from here? I have no idea, because it really does feel like they’ve pushed that playstyle as far as it can reasonably go for anyone but the most dedicated. All I know now is that we’re probably going to get Dragon’s Dogma 2 at some point, so, uh Capcom is back?

Fire Emblem Three Houses

Fire Emblem Three Houses fixes the most crucial flaw of Fire Emblem Fates in that it isn’t quite possibly one of the worst stories I’ve seen in a story-heavy video game. Listen, I liked Fates alright, especially the Conquest campaign with its wide variety of (perhaps slightly too) uncompromisingly difficult asshole maps, but there’s no doubt it left me rather ambivalent about the series future. It seems like Three Houses got the memo, by cutting down heavily on the pandering waifu shit and taking its characters and world remotely seriously. Solid localization and voice acting helped elevate Shadows of Valentia to something more than a remake of an NES game, and similarly great writing and VO helps elevate Three Houses into a Fire Emblem game that even excites normal people.

Where Three Houses falters for me might actually end up putting me at odds with some of the mainstream praise the game has gotten. The week-to-week scheduling and exploration at Gareg Mach Monastery, while a fun idea for the first half of the game, starts to really wear out its welcome post-timeskip and really starts to wear out its welcome on a second playthrough when you’re spending multiple hours between chapters doing the same handful of repetitive tasks to ensure your already overpowered units are even more optimally overpowered. The game is, quite frankly, very easy even on its “Hard” difficulty. I’ve heard Madness offers a more inviting challenge, one probably more suited to my preferences, but the game didn’t launch with it (also I’d have to finish my current run before getting there). It also, to be blunt, looks like a damn PS2 game sometimes and not in the way that hyperbolic internet people sometimes get about graphics. I played through Might and Magic VII (a game that didn’t look all that good in 1999) this year so I wouldn’t call myself particularly picky about visuals, but I think partnering with Koei-Tecmo and using the Dynasty Warriors engine was a bad call for as “neat” as it can be to zoom down and see all of the individual battalion troops on screen at once.

Don’t let my criticisms fool you though, I’m at least semi-optimistic that Fire Emblem is back on track after years in the wilderness, and I feel like Three Houses serves as a hell of a foundation for whatever Intelligent Systems has going on next (which, let’s be real, is probably a Genealogy of the Holy War remake.) And if not…? Well, Vestaria Saga finally came out on Steam if you want that raw, unfiltered Kaga-Emblem madness. Edelgard did nothing wrong.

Resident Evil 2

I’ve made no secret that I’m a sucker for a good Resident Evil game, and Resident Evil 2 remake is pretty much my ideal Resident Evil game made manifest as if formed wholly from my own dumb imagination. Actually, in some ways RE2 is better than the game I imagined in my head when they first announced they were doing this remake. Resident Evil 7 was a step in the right direction, let down by a weak last third, and Resident Evil 2 feels like the realization of those ideas on a bigger scale. Ammo is limited, even basic-ass zombies are dangerous, and the entire time there’s a sense that something could go very wrong at any given moment. If I was into marketing buzzwords that somehow got turned into genres, I might say it’s a great example of “Survival Horror” done right. You’re not powerless, but you’re never quite powerful enough to brute force everything. While it’s not as interested as messing with expectations as the remake of the first game, it does a great job of directly bringing over a bunch of things from the original Resident Evil 2 (and even some nods to Resident Evil 1.5, like Mr. X wearing a hat) and messing around with them in ways that make sense. The only way it could be any better is if it had tank controls and fixed camera angles. Okay, maybe not.

I have my minor nitpicks, like wishing they recreated the A/B scenario structure of the original instead of mildly remixing things for whoever you play second. I think the sewer section goes on for a little too long and the lab section doesn’t go on long enough, and I wish Claire’s classic outfit was actually accurate. But those are nitpicks, and don’t stop Resident Evil 2 from being my favorite game of this year. It almost feels like cheating to know that a similarly styled remake of Resident Evil 3 is only four months away.

Honorable Mentions: Astral Chain, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Gears 5, Pokemon Sword/Shield, Etrian Odyssey Nexus, Ring Fit Adventure

The fact that there are no less than six honorable mentions for this list should put to rest any complaints of 2019 being a “weak” year.

Astral Chain’s ambitious Cyber Cop who Summons a Stand gameplay is a lot of fun when it all starts flowing together. It’s a pity that it never quite gets there, between some awkward pacing (I *love* spending an hour of each mission doing banal police tasks. Oh wait, I meant “hate”) dubious scoring criteria, and a story that mostly manages to waste its style in the service of being a dumb ripoff of better anime stories. Still, it’s at least the most interesting thing Platinum has done in recent years, especially if you don’t count Nier. Definitely could see a second game being a significant improvement.

I’ve always liked Zelda, but I don’t think the series has ever quite endeared itself to me in the same way some people seem to fawn over it. In that sense, Link’s Awakening is good. It has a very charming aesthetic that I love, but for all my time with it I couldn’t help but feel like I was playing a very pretty Game Boy game that is only slightly younger than I am, but paid $60 for. And maybe for some people, that’s enough. There’s a contained efficiency to Link’s Awakening’s pacing and scale that is admirable put in contrast to Breath of the Wild’s terrifying vastness, and for the most part I think the dungeon design is solid, if not especially daring. But yeah, I haven’t finished it yet, and even if I did, I'm not sure it would’ve made the main list.

Everything I said about Gears in my last blog mostly applies to Gears 5. They might have thrown in some pseudo-open environments, added some color variety, cut down on the dudebroishness, and actually established an identity over Gears 4’s soft reboot blandness, but it’s still a game where you hide behind waist-high cover to engage in best-in-class third-person shooting. Is that enough for a game in 2019? Should the story be more dumb, or less dumb? Why are you asking me these questions? Does it really matter when it only cost me a dollar to play Gears 5 in the first place?

Pokemon is Pokemon is Pokemon. For all the controversy over Game Freak’s unwillingness (or perhaps inability) to drag the most conservative RPG franchise this side of Dragon Quest into any sort of modern design sensibility, I still had fun catching dumb/cool looking animals in balls and training them like I did when I played my copy of Red literally 20 years ago. Did I finish the main story? Nope! Did I actually get around to training a competitive team like I threatened to do in Sun and Moon, but then got bored and just imported my (competitive-ish) team from X version? Nope! Do I think that excuses some of the flaws and omissions of this game? Probably not! But yo, I love how much all of the fossil pokemon look like horrific abominations who are also in constant pain.

From a JRPG franchise that is arguably even more conservative than Pokemon comes Etrain Odyssey Nexus, which was definitely going to be #10 at some point before I decided to opt for Somnium Files if only to give that game some recognition. It's probably going to be the last 3DS game I ever buy (at least until I end up importing The Great Ace Attorney, hacking the damn thing wide open, and then installing the fan translation.) As a "Best of" game that includes a bunch of remixed dungeons, classes, and bosses from the series past, it's a decent package, and there are definitely a lot of fun party compositions one could make with the TWENTY avaliable classes at your disposal. That said? While I appreciate its commitment to having a bunch of smaller, 3-5 floor dungeons over one massive 25 floor one, there's no doubting that the heavy recycling feels a little... cheap.

Ring Fit Adventure could honestly be #1 on my list if only because it tricked me into working out on a consistent basis by throwing video game mechanics on top of exercise. But I feel weird ranking it among games that do the complete opposite, so an honorable mention it is. No other game this year has made me hurt all over in such a literal way.

Games from everyone else’s list I guess I need to play now: Control and The Outer Wilds

Well, I bought Control, and I guess Outer Wilds is on Game Pass whenever I get around to subscribing for a dollar again. Yup. Control sure does seem neat, as someone who once spent the better part of an afternoon looking at a bunch of SCP stuff. On the other hand, I’m not sure if The Outer Wilds is “for me” given my aversion to riddle solving in all of its forms and my general suspicion whenever people get very hyperbolic about a neat indie game, but enough praise has been given that I at least feel compelled to give it a look.

Games that might’ve made this list, had I not decided to lock it in when I started writing this blog: Bloodstained Ritual of the Night and Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair

Hey I started playing both of those games this week and they both seem pretty good!

Most Disappointing Game: The Outer Worlds

Instead of summarizing a thing I wrote last month, why don’t I link to it? You should read it. You know, when you have the time. The Outer Worlds is both profoundly okay and also… just sort of underwhelming.

Best thing in a game that otherwise seems, uh, fine: Code Vein’s Character Creator

From the team responsible for God Eater (a series I’m to understand is basically a less deep, excessively anime take on Monster Hunter) comes Code Vein, a game that seems like a less deep, excessively anime take on Souls. It’s fine. No, really, it’s fine. It’s mashy, airless, and easy where Dark Souls is deliberate, weighty, and difficult, and also there’s approximately 9000% more melodrama, but it seems like there’s some legitimately interesting character building stuff with how you can customize your skill and class loadouts. I think I might actually get around to finishing Code Vein as a sort of diet Souls, something I don’t have to think too hard about after Sekiro almost broke me and Nioh 2 will inevitably do the same.

But that’s not why this game is getting mentioned. No, Code Vein is getting mentioned because it has what is quite frankly the most impressive character creator I’ve seen this side of Black Desert Online. I am not someone who spends much time making a character. At most, I’m going to select a preset, tweak some of the variables and the hair, and call it good. I spent more than an hour making a pretty lady in Code Vein, and I've forcibly shown this character creator to anyone unlucky enough to be friends with me. If you don’t think the number of options it has to make the best pretty anime vampire waifu or husbando aren’t comprehensive, then just take one look at some of the very impressive recreations of various characters people have made. The Hair and Accessory options alone put pretty much any recent video game to shame. Sure, it’s pandering. The “physique” slider for male characters is basically “how broad do you want them shoulders?” but a general “boob, ass, and general thiccness” slider for the females (not to mention the general dearth of pants and/or non-cleavagey outfits for them) But as far as pandering goes, Code Vein deserves credit for not half-assing that pandering. Unless you only want half an ass. Also the game is, I dunno, fine?

And that’s it for me, I think. I hope 2020 treats us all well, but if not there are always video games as a distraction, I guess.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! It’s time for everyone to get very excited, and very upset about what other individuals, various gaming publications, and even mainstream outlets decide is their “Game of the Year.” Sure, 2019 was a pretty great year for games, but what if I told you there was a better way? What if… there were games that didn’t come out this year? Hard to believe, I know, but I’ve managed to cobble together a list (in descending order, starting with 10) of such things. Take a look!

Best big dumb AAA Co-Op Game I played with my Brother-in-Law, but I can’t put Gears 2 on this list because I put it on last year’s list: Gears of War 3

I played through every Gears of War game over the course of a year and a half, and it’s a franchise I cannot fault for being anything less than consistent. Consistently great shooting mechanics, consistently dumb, emotionally stunted storytelling, and consistently high production values. Even moreso than Microsoft’s other (flagging) flagship series Halo, Gears is exactly what you’d expect, exactly all the time. Even Judgement, the definition of “unnecessary late-gen filler game”, is actually a lot of fun if you approach it as a series of varied Gears score attack maps made by the Painkiller/Bulletstorm people (that you don’t have to pay money for because Game Pass.) It’s both very easy and very difficult to directly compare them for that reason. Even if I found The Coalition’s direction for Gears 4 almost as underwhelming as 343’s direction for Halo 4, there’s no doubt that it is entirely capable and entirely competent at the incredibly safe (and slightly boring) things it tries to accomplish.

Still, in my shared adventure with my brother-in-law, the one we enjoyed the most was definitely Gears 2. But since we played that last year, the runner-up for these escapades is Gears 3. While Gears 2 has the better, bigger, and dumber set-piece moments, I think Gears 3 is when Epic fully managed to nail the moment-to-moment shooting and encounter design for the franchise. There’s a nice, solid range of weapons (The Retro Lancer is a favorite of mine, both for that great bayonet charge and for how ridiculous its damage output is if you can keep that recoil under control) and the shift to four-player co-op means the encounter areas are wider and allow for more varied approaches. For something more than eight-years-old, it still offers some legitimate best-in-class cover shooting. That might say as much about Gears’ accomplishments as it does about how little the genre has advanced since 2011, but I enjoyed myself nonetheless.

Oh, also, I laughed hysterically when Mad World started playing during that scene. You know, the one. That might make me an elitist or a sociopath, but I do think Gears hyper-masculine, excessively dudebro, decidedly video game-y style of storytelling is not something worth lauding or taking especially seriously. It is, however, very entertaining.

Best Week Spent Doing Basically Nothing Else: Stellaris

You know that one game? The one you think “Man, this is great, I’m going to be way into this!” before you never play it again? That was me and Stellaris. I played exactly one game of Stellaris, as a Strongly Authoritarian, Militaristic Empire of Bird People and that was more-or-less how I spent my free time that week over the course of 30 hours. It was a legitimately eye-opening experience, one that made me *get* Paradox’s brand of Grand Strategy in a way several hours spent fumbling around with Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis never quite managed to. It helps that Stellaris is a more traditional Space 4X scaled up instead of a Dynamic Dynastic Medieval Soap Opera Simulator, but it also helps that the game unfolds at a leisurely enough pace that I had time to figure everything out. And once I did, it was… grand? No, but really, the best thing about Stellaris is how it manages that absurd scale, and manages to make that absurd scale meaningful and comprehensible. You can micromanage as much as you want, or let automation handle your less important star systems for you. One of the things I really appreciate about the game was the variety and depth of weird random events I would get, with some events having ramifications throughout my entire game. It’s a nice bit of personality for a game that can sometimes comes off as a little cold or generic, and it made me understand *why* those packs make up a substantial part of the obligatory avalanche of piecemeal Paradox-style DLC.

So yeah, that one game of Stellaris was awesome until the endgame crisis event happened, and suddenly I was onset by a vicious race of organic eye monsters from beyond the boundaries of the galaxy and my federation partner decided to declare war on one of the game’s ancient empires. Instead of spending another dozen hours clawing my way back to victory after my massive Imperial Bird Fleet was ravaged, I decided to call it there, satisfied with what I had accomplished. And then I never played Stellaris again after that week in May. It’s not that I won’t play Stellaris ever again (especially given how few 4X games have remotely grabbed me over the last few years) but it was also heavy enough that I didn’t feel the motivation to jump right back in and… some other games on this list managed to grab me a little harder. Still, if you’re someone (like me) who likes strategy stuff but has always been daunted by Paradox’s Grand Strategy, Stellaris is a great place to start. Hell, maybe I’ll finally play a full game of Crusader Kings in 2020.

Best Fighting Game I’ll actually try to get okay at: Street Fighter V

This is a bit of a late addition, but it’s been years since I’ve seriously “gotten” into a fighting games. While I will sing the endless praises of Dragon Ball Fighterz, Samurai Shodown V Special, and Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late(st) as my casual goof around games of choice for last year, my self-confidence when it came to playing against complete strangers has basically been shit for years. I’ve had this crawling anxiety that trying to “get good” and go online would mostly involve an endless train of getting my ass kicked by people who were much better than me, especially with a game more niche and selective (and anime) like UNIST. Well, the good news is that Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code is my current best “Casual Goof Around Fighting Game” for 2019. I will still maintain that is the most fun I’ve had just jumping into a fighting game with my handful of fighting game friends and pressing lots and lots and lots of buttons with the cast of my favorite erotic visual novel about moon vampires or some shit. (I don’t actually know anything about Tsukihime other than it’s the thing Type-Moon did before they did Fate/Stay Night)

HOWEVER, the idea of putting my foot in the Melty Blood door by joining some discords, downloading a “community edition” of the game with better netcode, and looking for any nearby hotel bathrooms was perhaps a step too far for my weak scrub sensibilities. So, instead, I decided that $25 Championship Edition upgrade for Street Fighter V was an acceptable alternative. I briefly messed around with Street Fighter V around the time that story mode came out, and found it genuinely underwhelming. Worse, my mains from Street Fighter IV, Bison and Vega (The dictator and the claw man, not the boxer and the dictator) were decidedly *different* characters from their previous incarnations. And so, I basically didn’t think about Street Fighter V for the next 3 years. But now I have, and I have great news: There are people still actively playing Street Fighter online who are worse than me. Oh, also the game has a much larger, more varied roster and bunch more features than it did in 2016, but who really cares about that when I’m fighting against the worst flowchart Ken players like it was 2009 all over again and slowly climbing my way through Bronze (only being halted when I go against people who actually know what they’re doing.) It’s been a nice low-key confidence boost in a year where I’ve felt like shit a lot, and I can’t wait to eventually hit the brick wall where I actually have to improve my matchup knowledge and execution instead of just understanding how to block and punish. That’s fine by me. Capcom is, uh, back?

Most overhyped gameplay “twist” in an otherwise great game: The Messenger

Hey, SPOILERZZZZZ for a game that came out last year, but The Messenger has a mid-game twist where it turns from a Ninja Gaiden-esque 8-bit platformer into a slightly more nonlinear, Metroid-ish (but not really) 16-bit platformer. If, like me, you got incredibly tired of games press, internet people, and the Giant Bomb staff dancing around this mid-game twist, I have good news: It’s not that revelatory. It’s neat for all the music and graphics to shift like that (especially if those things weren’t spoiled in the game’s pre-release marketing) but the bigger shift to a nonlinear format actually makes things worse by disrupting some previously tight pacing.

The good news is that, even with that shift, The Messenger is still a solid-ass platformer that pays homage to NES Ninja Gaiden without ever really feeling like a direct copy. I could’ve done with a little less snark in the writing, especially from that asshole demon who taunts you every time you die, but some of the Shopkeeper’s lines are genuinely amusing.

Best multiplayer game I spent time on this year not named “Apex Legends” Dead By Daylight

Dead by Daylight is seemingly the only asymmetrical multiplayer game to have “made” it for the long haul. Having heard nightmare stories of its early, hilariously imbalanced days from my roommate, I’m genuinely floored it managed to last this long in the first place. It’s janky, somewhat unintuitive, and it doesn’t look particularly great, but once I got the hang of it (i.e. watching my roommate play for months until I actually started playing with him) it was a lot of fun. Playing Survivor and Killer are two very different experiences, with very different goals and very different approaches. Survivors, in third person, have to power five generators and escape through one of two exit gates, while the killer (in first person, with an intentionally tight FOV) has to chase them down and sacrifice them on hooks. There’s a lot of fun interplay between perks, add-on items, map layouts, and killer abilities that makes what sounds potentially repetitive a lot more interesting. The Hag might not run as fast as some of the other killers, but she can lay down traps that allow her to teleport when triggered within a certain range. Halloween’s Michael Meyers starts out slow, but silent, but as he continues to stalk the survivors he becomes faster, more dangerous, and more audible. And so on it goes.

Of course, there’s always a downside, and the downside is that I’ve found Dead By Daylight’s player base to be occasionally toxic. Not quite Rainbow Six Siege-level toxic, but the number of ways you can grief someone (and the number of ways to get griefed) are significant, as are the number of ways you can be screwed over by incompetent teammates. The other major thing is how grindy the progression can be. Good luck unlocking any of the unlicensed killers with in-game currency (the licensed ones always cost money, though I’ve had a lot of fun with Freddy Kreuger) and it’s going to take time through matches to get the perks you want. One could argue that’s part of the game, and most perks are plenty viable during regular play, but it annoys me that Dead by Daylight sometimes feels like it has the progression systems of a Free-to-Play game despite not being one.

Best game that aggravated my RSI: DUSK

For a game that caused me a decent amount of actual physical pain, I can’t really say enough nice things about DUSK’s approach to retro-style twitch shooting. It’s a game that understands the appeal of the 90s games it takes influence from without slavishly devoting itself to their faults. It has a fun (if conventional) arsenal of weapons, all of which are useful. The level layouts are not only full of the requisite secrets and branching paths, but are also far more distinct, varied, and creative than you’d expect, and the game’s very polygonal, Quake-like graphics meshes very well with some of the more impressive, ambitious parts of the horror/grindhouse aesthetic. Oh, it’s also fast as shit, there’s a powerup that turns the game into SuperHot, and at no point (as far as I know) have the developers doubled down on profoundly lame, potentially offensive jokes for no good reason. Sounds pretty good to me!

Best Example of a Game that was so good that it got me to play a genre I otherwise have little affinity for (also 2019’s 2018 Game of the Year): Forza Horizon 4

I don’t play many racing games. If it’s not Burnout Paradise or Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed, I’m probably only vaguely aware of its existence. Forza Horizon 4 is an exception. I could care less about the extremely dull, slightly-too-friendly British people constantly talking in my ear and calling me Count Driftula, I could care less about the various “Live Game” aspects that exist because it’s a modern AAA video game from a major publisher, and I could care less about the obligatory car porn stuff that exists because Ferraris are cool, I guess. Nah, Forza Horizon 4 is on this list because it nails the basic act of driving a car in a way that is straight up one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had this year. Changing seasons, different race formats, different vehicle classes, and that one weird mission where there’s a Halo Warthog bring some fun variation, but it’s just fun to drive around thanks to a model that splits the difference between a purely simulationist approach and something a little more arcadey.

Danganronpa 2 and Danganronpa V3 are some crazy bullshit that you need to see

When I played the first Danganronpa two years ago, it was a fun but occasionally frustrating anime-ass anime adventure game crossing wires somewhere between Ace Attorney, Persona, and Battle Royale. At its sharpest, it balanced the tension of its killing game/class trial premise with the ridiculousness and absurdity of its characters. At its worst, it had some pretty embarrassing character moments, a cast with likeability issues, and exceptionally unfun mid-trial minigames. If you want to read what I thought about it at the time, the blog is here.

Having finally gotten around to them now, its sequels solve a lot of my issues… mostly by doubling and tripling down on ALL OF IT. While the first game plays its style of aggressively quirky, aggressively stylish nonsense fairly straight, Danganronpa 2 and V3 play with that premise in a far more experimental way, to their own benefit. Danganronpa 2 has more likeable characters, more embarrassing, dubious “anime fanservice” (Being self-aware about it just means you want to have your cake and eat it too) sharper writing, worse trial minigames, and more genuine batshit insanity. To say how it manages to one-up the original game would be a spoiler, but somehow Danganronpa V3 manages to escalate even beyond that. Its ending might be one of the ballsiest, most divisive things I’ve seen in a video game, and I kind of loved it. It’s messy, maybe a little hypocritical, but it’s, uh definitive in a way few endings are. How much did I love it? Enough to put it at the #3 spot on this list despite not really loving the interactive parts. Play Danganronpa. (Mild spoilers in the video. Skip to 13:00 if the embed doesn't work)

Best Cult Classic Old Game that manages to mostly live up to its absurd hype: System Shock 2

I already wrote a blog about System Shock 2, and all of the praise I can sing about it still stands 7 months after I wrote it. Clunky, awkward shooting and clunky, awkward inventory management aside, it’s genuinely impressive how much of the game feels directly analogous to its modern immersive sim counterparts (most notably, Arkane’s Prey 2017.)

My “Old” Game of the Year: Total War: Warhammer II

After my positive experience with Tales of Symphonia (and my less-than-positive experience with its sequel) last year, I all but predicted that Namco-Bandai’s much beloved series of comfort food RPGs would be my next great franchise hole. That… didn’t end up happening. I now own approximately 8 Tales of Games (Symphonia, Symphonia 2, Vesperia, Graces F, Berseria, Xillia, Xillia 2, and Abyss) and got around halfway through Xillia this year before other things got in the way. While I might eventually pick it back up, it turns out my general level of tolerance for Japanese RPGs still isn’t quite as high as I think it is, and the specifically formulaic nature of Tales makes it harder to play multiple installments in quick succession. (if I’m going to be perfectly honest, I might just try to play Trails in the Sky as my JRPG for next year)

Instead, my new prediction for a potential franchise hole is Creative Assembly’s Total War series. Despite having a bachelor’s degree in History, it took the one with the elves for me to finally pay attention. That’s on me, and I’ve been messing around with Shogun 2 here and there to rectify that. HOWEVER, while I do appreciate some Sengoku period, at no point in Shogun 2 do any of the samurai summon giant pillars of flame, spawn hordes of ratmen out of the ground, or ride giant-ass dinosaurs into battle (on the other hand? Oda Nobunaga) Much like Stellaris and Paradox Grand Strategy, I’ve always assumed that Total War was too much of a galaxy brain franchise for me as someone who’s PC strategy baseline was always Heroes of Might and Magic. Generally, when people who are very into military history start talking about period-accurate tactics being replicable, my eyes start to glaze over a little bit as I quickly look for an exit. The nitty-gritty aspect of warfare has never been my favorite aspect of history, and I’m always slightly afraid the person in question is going to break out the measuring tape and pewter miniatures while yelling about “Napoleonic Musket Formations.”

WELL, 130 hours later the good news is that not only do I sort of understand Total War, with its various “hammer and anvil flanking charges” but also I sort of understand Warhammer Fantasy. The big advantage of setting your Total War game in a fictional setting is that you’re no longer constrained by “reality” and “historical accuracy” when creating your unit rosters. Instead, you’re “constrained” by 40 years worth of tabletop wargaming from the less popular of Games Workshop’s two franchises that were ripped off wholesale by Blizzard. While the game has plenty of content with its base “Heart of the Vortex” campaign, if you bring in the first Total Warhammer and all of its DLC as part of a separate “Mortal Empires” campaign (which combines the maps of both games,) the number of playable, entirely distinct factions in Total Warhammer II (each of which has multiple legendary lords, starting locations, and semi-unique music tracks) is 15. FIFTEEN. There are Humans (of the Germanic “Empire” variety and the excessively French, excessively Arthurian “Brettonian” stock) and Orcs and Dwarfs, sure, but there are also Mummies, Vampires, Vampirates, Lizardmen, Ratmen, Beastmen, Northern Chaos Marauders, and no less than three varieties of Elves. That’s not counting subfactions with their own campaign-specific mechanics, all of which are supposedly more reverential of the series’ lore than what Games Workshop has apparently done with Age of Sigmar. It’s a lot. And it’s also kind of amazing that I can have such different experiences with all of them. Even if I wasn’t an idiot and bought all of the DLC (and, to be perfectly clear, I bought *all* the DLC) there’s still dozens of hours of dinosaur wrangling and pike formation-ing on its own.

It’s not all roses, necessarily. The Ritual victory condition for the Vortex campaign basically just requires you to turtle, the AI occasionally comes off as, uh, dumb on both the strategic and tactical levels, some of the factions are way more interesting to play than others, there are random crucial things the interface just doesn’t bother showing you, and siege battles kind of suck.I’m to understand Total War Three Kingdoms fixes some of these issues, and is apparently the best the historical side of things has been in years. I’ll probably check it out, once it goes on deeper discount. However, at no point does Lu Bu have the ability to fly around on a Black Dragon like Malekith, Sorcerer King of the Dark Elves, so… I dunno maaan. Game of the Year. At least, the one that didn’t come out this year.

Special Achievement Awards:

Honorable Mentions: Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep, Tales of Xillia, and Bioshock 2 (but really just Minerva’s Den)

I went down a Kingdom Hearts hole this year, and you’ll probably read more about it in my eventual next blog. What I’ll say in Birth By Sleep’s favor is that it does an interesting job setting up this tragic, doomed prequel that basically explains the entire series. It’s also *almost* a good action RPG. I say *almost* because, unlike Kingdom Hearts 2, it’s painfully clear how much the game was throttled by the technical limitations of the PSP. Environments are segmented and fairly empty, there aren’t many enemies on-screen at any given time

As mentioned prior, the 30 hours of Tales of Xillia I played were pretty good. Well, by that I mean the combat is a lot of fun and I generally like the cast of anime goofballs going on their adventure to save the world. If Xillia’s generic-ass environments and dungeons weren’t the literal worst, I might have more to say about the story’s actual conclusion. Maybe this will be revisited next year.

Minerva’s Den is easily the best DLC of 2010. Sorry Shadow Broker.

“Honorable” Mention: Beyond Two Souls

I wish I had written an entire blog on Beyond this year, but I feel like dumping on Quantic Dream and David Cage has become almost too easy. My entire time with Beyond, I just felt bad for Ellen Page. The game wants to be approximately 15 different movies (none of which is presented with even an ounce of creativity,) and Page is giving all of them better than she deserves (especially given the way her character is tormented and creepily objectified the entire time.) It’s profoundly stupid, tone-deaf, and self-serious, which is also why it manages to be unintentionally hilarious when it’s not accidentally succeeding at being emotionally resonant. It’s not a bad time if you want to play along with someone else.

Visual Novel of the Year: 428 Shibuya Scramble.

With Danganronpa already taking up space on my list, I didn’t quite know where to put 428 Shibuya Scramble, a visual novel that came out more than a decade ago for the Wii (of all systems) but only received an English localization last year. Imagine, if you will, a thrilling “race against the clock” anti-terrorism story in the vein of 24… but more anime, and “choose your own adventure.” One of the characters is a detective on the case. One of them is a freelance reporter trying to save a failing newspaper. One of them is a woman stuck in a cat mascot costume trying to sell a dubious weight-loss supplement. Now imagine, instead of that visual novel being filled with talking heads of cute moe characters, it was screenshots of real actors, acting out the ridiculous nonsense and striking melodrama depicted on screen. I think that, more than anything else, is what sells it to me. It’s very funny and extremely weird, and the various bad endings you can get as you try to juggle five different characters are somehow funnier and weirder. Perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Even as a fast reader, I’ve found most VNs tend towards being long-winded, which is why the roughly 60 hours I’ve spend with Higurashi When They Cry is not my VN of the year.

But yeah, I didn’t know where to put it on the list, so it’s getting its own special category. I’m always a little reticent to put Visual Novels alongside other games in a ranked list, often because they’re barely interactive and 428 is no exception. Regardless of my hang ups, it’s one of my favorite experiences of the year and you should “play” it.

And that’s going to do it, I think. Look forward to my “actual” Game of the Year listblog sometime around New Years.

(And Other Good Uses of Time and Money)

Hi, hello. With the year winding up to a close, my life winding up to a mess, and video games continuing to exist, I figured I should write something. But, since my inevitable overdone Game of the Year and “Real” Game of the Year blogs are only a month away, why not instead spend my time dumping on a popular, relevant game that a lot of people like?

The Outer Worlds

In a lot of ways, The Outer Worlds feels like Obsidian’s audition to make big-budget mainstream RPGs again after spending most of this decade trying to make it in the crowdfunded, CRPG throwback space. After all, it’s been five years since South Park: The Stick of Truth was salvaged from the THQ graveyard, and a whopping nine years since Matt Rorie’s Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas. (also, Dungeon Siege III came out in 2011) Given how timelines and production cycles work, it’s probably a coincidence this was the game which came out after Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity II underperformed and after the studio was acquired by Microsoft, but the word that kept echoing in my head during my 18-ish hour run was “Safe.” The Outer Worlds is a profoundly safe game on pretty much every level of its execution, which is a little disappointing given that it’s also the reunion of Fallout 1 leads Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky. It’s comforting, competent, and just a little... boring? Yeah, it’s boring.

On paper, the idea of a more focused, contained take on a game like New Vegas sounds incredibly appealing to me. I thought Tyranny (rushed third act aside) was a genuinely solid case for the 20-30 hour RPG in a genre full of 60+ hour juggernauts, my attention span is kind of a mess these days, and I found Fallout 4 to be a lukewarm, broken, jank-fest. I should, in theory, be the audience for this game. In execution, my enthusiasm started high, only to continue down a consistent downward slope. Maybe I’ve reached a weird critical point, where I’ve become difficult to please with this sort of genre. Between this and being less enamored with Disco Elysium than some other folks (you can expect my thoughts on that game in approximately a month) it’s been a weird year for me and RPGs that I should ostensibly love. Maybe finally getting around to finishing Divinity Original Sin II set an unapproachable standard, or maybe I just judge these sorts of games more harshly because they don’t come out all that often.

So, where do I actually think The Outer Worlds goes wrong? First and foremost, mechanics. I care slightly too much about RPG mechanics, as a fan of “dice rolls and shit” and as a result I’m going to get granular and slightly grognard-y for a bit. Now, you might roll your eyes and point out that I’m the lunatic who spent multiple years of his life blogging about Computer Role-Playing Games, and still won’t shut up about some of them. That’s entirely fair. The only perspective I can offer is my own. In my eyes, the hallmark of a good RPG progression system is forcing the player to make interesting choices and trade-offs, especially in a classless system with a solo player character like this one. The Outer Worlds is philosophically torn between paying homage to that sentiment (because it’s something expected from the genre, and from Obsidian especially) and offering a mainstream-friendly, streamlined experience that offers no wrong choices. It errs on the side of the latter to its own detriment. I understand the fear of “missing out” on content or the paralysis of choice when presented with too many options (see: me spending multiple hours staring at the character creation screen for Pathfinder Kingmaker because I might as well start over if I’m ever going to finish that game) but I find the more generous alternative toothless and boring most of the time.

One of my biggest problems with the later Bethesda games, especially Fallout 3 and 4, was that it felt like it was incredibly easy for my RPG brain (I’m no munchkin, but I understand how numbers work, sometimes.) to make a character who was a “Jack of all trades, master of most.” You get an absolute shitload of skill points in The Outer Worlds, and while you can’t do everything, you sure can do *almost* everything with just a modicum of optimization. Thanks to skills increasing per-category until they reach 50, it is trivially easy to be able to pass most speech checks, pick most locks, and hack most computers while still being able to kill almost everything that moves as long as you aren’t trying to beeline through the main quest. Sure, you’ll have to specialize a little bit if you want to pick every lock and pass every speech check, but most of the other skills offer diminishing returns. The weapon and companion damage/health skills aren’t super necessary, since combat is both dull and trivial on the default normal difficulty. While bumping it up makes it less trivial, it doesn’t make it any less boring, since you’re still dumping endless bullets into (or ineffectually whacking) enemies who either charge you in melee or stand and shoot. Between companion and armor bonuses, it was not hard for me to have lockpick and all three dialogue skills maxed out by the end of the game, and if I had given up (the game’s rudimentary, perfunctory) stealth I probably could’ve gotten more out of the science skills as well. This is where perks and equipment would step in, to allow for more customization and personalization… but the perks are practical, but boring and the equipment is even more boring. There’s a (rudimentary, perfunctory) crafting system that seemingly exists out of obligation, but you don’t really ever need to touch it.

Now, to be fair, I think The Outer Worlds is generally well-written and often quite clever. If it nailed that aspect all the way through, I wouldn’t have spent nearly as much time complaining about how boring the stats and shooting are. Fallout: New Vegas isn’t exactly a cult classic because of its scintillatingly wooden combat, after all. I like most of the NPC companions alright. Parvati is everyone’s favorite (for good reason) but they’re all likeable goofballs, even if I wouldn’t call any of them particularly deep in the same way I’d point to the better characters of KotOR II or Mask of the Betrayer. Where does it break then? In an answer you probably saw coming, it’s that the writing is very ”safe.” It’s not a particularly strong or daring statement in 2019 to say “Hey guys, maybe capitalism has some problems,” but the actual problem is that… it doesn’t really say anything beyond that, at least until some vague gesturing near the end of the main story. There can only be so much mealy mouthed “Corporations are bad but also maybe complexity(?)” in your quest writing before it starts to feel repetitive and mildly insulting, especially when most of the game’s conflicts (explicitly political or otherwise) can often be resolved in a slightly-too-clean manner. That’s not to say there aren’t interesting individual quests or characters (as mentioned, I think most of the companions are pretty good, and the game does a solid job of having them react to your circumstances and to each other) but it falls into a rhythm I’ll liken to the IFC comedy show Portlandia. I think Portlandia is pretty funny and often quite clever, but there’s a certain formulaic quality to it in which the punchline for every single skit is “Look at how conscientious and weird all of these people are!” In the same way, a lot of writing and worldbuilding in The Outer Worlds can be boiled down to “Hey, look at this comically awful corporate dystopia!”

Monarch represents a pretty good microcosm of the game’s problems in general, since it’s a single (fairly large) landmass with three separate settlements and the largest number of quests. The major faction conflict between Monarch Stellar Industries and the Iconoclasts feels like a variation of Edgewater, except this time the corporation is reform-minded and the outcasts are religious extremists whose leader might not have the interests of his flock at heart. However, any complexity and serious conflict between these two factions can be discounted once you realize (as I did) that you can just eke out a boring, “safe” compromise if you’ve done everything up for both of them up to that point. This is also where I stopped doing every side quest I came across. Part of that had to do with my aforementioned issues with the writing and combat (I turned the difficulty from Hard to Normal at this point, because dumping infinite bullets into infinite Mantiqueens wasn’t my idea of a good time) but also because the rewards are often not great. The gear isn’t interesting, money isn’t a huge problem most of the time, and the only benefits I was getting from leveling up were more ways to increase my carrying capacity (to sell more vendor trash to continue to ensure money was never a problem) and more skill points to ensure I could pass all the inevitable end-game speech checks.

So, where does that lead me? For all my griping about how safe and dull it eventually becomes, I think The Outer Worlds is at the very least a competently made video game that people less exacting than I will probably enjoy. I had only one major crash my entire time with it, I didn’t have to endure it all that long once I started to lose steam, and at the end of the day I only had to pay a single dollar to play it at all thanks to GamePass. That alone makes it a… difficult prospect to condemn (or regret) in its entirety. Clearly, it’s done well for Obsidian, but I can’t help but think it’s one of their worst RPGs. It’s probably better than Dungeon Siege III and the Storm of Zehir campaign for Neverwinter Nights 2, but beyond that I think I might take every single other one they’ve made. If that’s not condemnation, I don’t know what is. I'll see you next month. I hope you're ready.

When I started blogging on this site a decade ago, my original focus was almost entirely on older video games that I had “missed.” While part of this was an attempt to distinguish myself from the other blogging types, it was also an extension of what I was already doing. I spent my early teenage years locked to Nintendo consoles and a desktop computer my parents bought in 2002. While I eventually got a Xbox 360 in 2007, I didn’t exactly have the disposable income to keep up with the current release zeitgeist more than a few times per year. Thus, a lot older PC games, often obtained cheaply or illegally often served to fill that void. It’s why I, someone now in his mid-20s, occasionally seem to have the taste of someone a decade older. It’s also worth mentioning there’s a wide gulf between the kinds of games that were popular during the early 360 era and the kind of games that were popular on the PC in the late 90s/early 00s. Say what you will about the quality of the 360's library, but it didn't have anything resembling most of the PC games I was messing around with.

I’ve now reached the age where a lot of my childhood favorites are inching towards or have passed the 20 year mark. The majority of the Nintendo 64’s catalog is already there, and so are many of those old PC games I was blogging about during the early years of the Giant Bomb forums. I’ve always thought the discussion over whether or not something “holds up” to be sort of reductive, but I also think it’s healthy to examine one’s own nostalgia instead of keeping it locked up in a box of perfect memories. With that in mind, I finally replayed one of my favorite games of all time a few months ago. It was an, uh, interesting experience.

Might and Magic VII, or: “The Curse of Remembrance”

Might and Magic VII, indeed the entire Might and Magic franchise, is arguably just as foundational to my love of Computer Role-Playing games as Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur’s Gate II. Compared to fellow classic RPG counterparts such as Wizardry (which focused on more in-depth party building and ambitious or Ultima (which focused on simulationist elements, storytelling, and characterization) I’d place Might and Magic’s focus as exploration and discovery. While still capturing that very basic dungeon crawler appeal of taking a player-created party of weaklings and turning them into unstoppable juggernauts, from the series beginning it’s always been set in the context of a large, explorable world whose secrets you’d spend most of the game uncovering. Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor was my favorite because it set that exploration and discovery in a smaller, more-focused scale than some of its predecessors. It had more built-in replayability (a thing that mattered when you were young and didn’t have a shameful amount of unplayed games in your Steam library,) with its two story paths and wider variety of classes. Depending on party composition and the path chosen, you could see a much different chunk of the game than someone who went another way.

It’s a strange experience, going back to a game that you played to death as a young teenager, but haven’t touched in at least a decade. There’s still a part of it hard-wired in some dark adolescent corner of my brain, alongside random Fire Emblem growth rates, Homestar Runner quotes, and snippets of innumerable questionable-to-bad fantasy novels. How do you approach a game focused on exploration and discovery when you half-remember where everything is? Being a game from 1999, the discrete zones in Might and Magic VII are not especially large, nor are the dungeon puzzles especially taxing. As a result, with some minor glances at a guide, I zoomed through the game in like 20 hours, a sort of slow-motion speedrun. With some strange crystal clarity, I saw the limitations and weaknesses of the game’s design, once unseen or in the background. Earth and Mind magic basically have like two useful spells each. Rangers are kind of bad at everything. You're often better off just buffing everyone to death and mashing the A key than you are going into turn-based mode and planning out your moves.

I know this sounds like some sort of weird paean to lost innocence, but it also means I have no fucking clue how another human being would approach this game fresh in 2019. I mean, I enjoyed myself, I think it’s still a solidly-designed game, but keeping any sort of critical distance to explain it to other people is difficult. Would you, the reader, like Might and Magic VII if you picked it up from GOG, installed the fan patch (bug fixes, QoL improvements, high-resolution and windowed support, etc) and went to town? I honestly don’t know. Probably? It's probably still good? You might be able to delve something out of my comments, but I’m not sure if I can anymore.

This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way, mind you, it was also how I felt after I played through Ocarina of Time a couple of years ago. Previously one of the games in my “replay every few years” rotation, my most recent playthrough on 3DS felt less like a comfortable return to an old friend and more like a cold mechanical script that I followed without much trouble. How do the dungeons of OoT compare to the other 3D entries? Are the side-quests fun or frustrating? What about Gold Skultilla placement? Hell if I know. Ask this guy. What I do know is that when I do decide to go back and revisit Ocarina of Time, I’m going to play the Master Quest mode. Mirroring the world is a simple, but effective method to disorient, and if you think I remember anything about the remixed dungeons from the time I played through the Gamecube Bonus Disk… I don’t.

Back to the main topic of discussion, I need to give full credit where credit is due: the source of my problem is ironically also one of my favorite things about of Might and Magic VII (and the other two games on the same engine.) The difficulty level and your progression through the game are far less tied to the stats of your characters (or your progress in the main questline) than your knowledge of the world and the amount of cash you have on hand at any given moment. Money is more important than experience, because not only do you need to pay to level up, you need to pay for spells, skill training, and equipment. Vaguely knowing how to get that money and spend it in the most efficient way possible means you can break the difficulty curve in short order. Master-level magic, from flight to invisibility to regeneration to shrapmetal, not only make exploration and discovery more convenient, they also allow you to circumvent a lot of areas or sequences that might otherwise cause you problems, either by flying, sneaking past, tanking through, or just plain shotgunning your way to victory. In a world where I didn’t already know exactly how to break things, finding these things out organically would be a huge game changer. It’s also an excellent way of party composition directly impacting player experience. Swap out the pure caster classes (Cleric, Sorcerer) for their hybrid counterparts (Paladin, Archer, Druid) and suddenly you can’t get access to those spells until much later, which might drastically change how you approach certain situations.

It’s an incredibly flexible game in this way, and I think that’s one of the reasons I played it so much. Compare that to something like Wizardry 8, a game in the same genre from the same era that’s similar on paper. While still you can definitely wander into places you have no business exploring for your own peril and profit and come up with unorthodox party compositions, the aggressive level scaling and deeper, more involved combat means there are rarely any shortcuts from playing the game at the developer’s pace. Knowing where to go to solve quests may save you a few hours of exploration, but at no point are there ever going to be wonderfully incomprehensible 27-minute speedruns of that game. I think Wizardry 8 is quite good, and it’s definitely one of my favorite CRPGs, but it doesn’t nail the exploration and discovery aspects in nearly the same way as Might and Magic.

So… where does this series of ruminations leave me? Physically? Emotionally? Spiritually? “Does it hold up?” I’m not going to throw all of my nostalgic faves to the sidelines over the fear that I’ll ruin them with my broken brain, but it’s made me think about why I choose to revisit old favorites. I don’t think I can deal with investing much in comfortable repetition anymore, at least not outside of my “comfort food” strategy games or speedrunning old Resident Evil games every now and then. Does that make me weird? I see people who are on like their eighth dang rewatch of The Office and I can’t understand that anymore. My time is limited, my tastes are varied, and if I’m going to put a significant amount of time into something I’ve already seen/played/done then I’d hope to get something new or interesting out of it. Make me love it again, make me hate it. Just don’t leave me confused enough to write 1,500+ words about it. Man, I hope any of this made any sense to you, because it almost doesn't to me.

A Corollary: Neon Genesis Evangelion

I mean, I feel like you could’ve guessed this was coming eventually, given that the title of this blog series is an Evangelion reference. Like Might and Magic, Evangelion occupies a very important, formative spot in my adolescence. If you want to point to the reason why a lot of my favorite anime series are weird, dark, and/or slightly fucked up, watching EVA while being slightly-too-young for it is probably a non-insignificant factor. (no, seriously, I was probably too young for it, especially since the only anime I’d been exposed to prior were series that aired on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block) Like Might and Magic, it’s been about a decade since I last revisited EVA. Unlike Might and Magic, my revisit of Evangelion was an unambiguously positive one.

Thanks to the recent Netflix release and return to the public eye, you’ve probably already had your fill of discussion on everyone’s favorite super fun story about a boy who won’t get into a cool purple robot, so I’ll keep it brief. Rewatching EVA was a much more emotionally draining experience than I was expecting. I’m genuinely shocked by how much of the series seemingly flew over my head when I was younger, but I’m more surprised by how much more it resonated with my current situation as an adult (or everyone’s situation everywhere, honestly.) It’s equal parts brilliant, frustrating, and up its own ass (also occasionally problematic) but it’s also stuck with me in a way that most disposable “flavor of the season” anime series have not. It was a nice reminder that, for as much as time can make some things worse (or… qualitatively indescribable) it can also make things better.

Oh, by the way, I’d just like to say for the record that the Rebuild of Evangelion movies are great. If you want to watch Hideaki Anno throw a bunch of upraised middle fingers at his fans via a series of multi-million dollar films, they're worth your time. Messy? Yeah. Unnecessary? Maybe. But don't write them off.

I’ve decided to keep writing. If nothing else, I’d like to keep in practice and celebrate a decade of me writing stupid internet blogs on Giant Bomb, which is a terrifying thing to fathom. June 29 marked 10 years since I wrote… whatever the hell those adolescent scribbles about Goldeneye were supposed to be about, which I mark as the beginning of my internet writing “career.” Things have changed a lot since then, I’m not exactly as active as I was in 2009 (then again, neither are the Giant Bomb forums) but I do legitimately credit these blogs with helping me improve my writing skills. So, to celebrate this occasion that really only matters to me, I’m going to try and put out some blogs focusing on the kind of self-indulgent topics that I care about and have defined my writing on this website. I know that committing to any sort of serious timetable with my current levels of motivation is a fool’s errand, but you can expect *stuff* over the next few months. Look forward to it.

Let’s Talk About The Last 5 Years of CRPGs

See? I told you things were going to get self-indulgent. As far as I’m concerned, this year’s mostly lukewarm E3 was over before it began with the announcement that Larian Studios is developing Baldur’s Gate III. From a dramatic perspective, this really does feel like the culmination of the “CRPG Renaissance” that started around 2014. That was the year the first wave of big Kickstarter success stories started to come out, including for our purposes I feel like I shouldn’t have to hammer on the point too much, but computer role-playing games as I know them were basically dead by the mid-late 2000s. There are plenty of reasons for that (enough to make a write-up of their own) but my point is that outside of Neverwinter Nights 2 and Dragon Age: Origins, the back half of the previous decade was a barren crater if you liked your higher-budget Role-Playing Games PC-oriented, potentially isometric, and filled with “dice rolls ‘n shit.”

Honestly, dates are fuzzy, genres are fuzzy, but for the purposes of this write-up we’re going to focus on the games from the last 5 years that have explicitly embraced the CRPG label, be it through dense storytelling or dense mechanics, with a decent amount of player customization or control. Similarly, this overview is as much a personal report card as it is an industry one. I’ll be frank: my attention span isn’t what it used to be and I’m not as hardcore of a grognard as I pretend to be. These games are often long, and I don’t quite have the same kind of free time that I did when I spent the better part of a summer playing through Wizardry 8 without the speed hack. Expect some hearsay, introspection, or speculation when it comes to the games I haven’t played.

It’s convenient that a lot of the higher profile games of this revival come from just a small handful of studios, because it means I can clump all of their games together like this:

InXile Entertainment

Games: Wasteland 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera, The Bard’s Tale IV

Before helping start this revival with their Wasteland 2 kickstarter, InXile was best known for being the thing Brian Fargo founded after he left Interplay (In Exile? Get it?) Before W2, their most notable titles were the “comedic” Bard’s Tale revival with Cary Elwes and Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, which I’d generously describe as “The Most Forgettable, Most 2011 Game In Existence.” I haven’t played either, and to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I’m going to.

I’ll be frank: for one of the heavy hitters of this RPG resurgence, I have yet to really love any of InXile’s output. The highest praise I can give Wasteland 2 is that it’s profoundly okay. It came out right around the time my old laptop was on its last legs, so I only finished around half of it, but I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what that game is (grain of salt, etc etc.) When I mean profoundly decent, I mean I enjoyed my time with it well enough, but have zero interest in actually going back and completing it. While a lot of these games have done the work towards modernizing the experience with varying levels of streamlining and quality-of-life improvements, Wasteland 2… feels like it could’ve come out of the late 90s with all of the positive and negative implications that brings. I could go on about how profoundly unsatisfying it is to watch a bar fill up slowly every time you make a skill check, the vanilla version’s terrible UI, or the giant, Fallout-sized recursive influence problem the game has, but for the most part I think it’s… fine. The combat is XCOM-lite, quests have a surprising number of multiple solutions, and in general I think you’d be fine giving it a look if you were so inclined.

My thoughts on Torment: Tides of Numenera are well-documented at this point (see: my blog and the last post of this thread for details) and I stand by them. Planescape Torment was lightning in a bottle and Numenera’s attempt to recapture it doesn’t work. It has all component parts intact, from a verbose script to an intentionally weird and alienating setting, but it doesn’t ever quite come together. It’s a game that’s only become more disappointing in retrospect as I think about it further, and I’d seriously recommend any interested soul just play Planescape Torment already. It’s coming to Switch for heaven’s sake.

Like a lot of Kickstarter games, The Bard’s Tale IV was a technical mess when it first came out. I was not interested in sitting through minute-plus loading times or substandard frame rates, so I kicked that can down the road. Given the release of a “Director’s Cut” in August, I think I’ll reserve judgement for that. I will say as someone who tries to keep himself semi-informed about these sorts of games, it sure does seem like discussion surrounding this one fizzled up immediately.

Obsidian Entertainment

Games: Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

During the dark times, Obsidian was the perennial clean-up crew for other RPG developers. Never quite given enough time or resources to polish their games, they nonetheless earned a reputation for making thoughtful, ambitious stories in their limited means. They’re responsible for personal favorites like Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer and Fallout: New Vegas, as well as flawed but beloved cult classics such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II and Matt Rorie’s Alpha Protocol. They also made Dungeon Siege III.

Pillars of Eternity was my favorite game of 2015 and for the most part I think I stand by that sentiment. There’s a strange divisiveness surrounding both it and its sequel that I’ve never quite been able to parse, because I think both manage to nail the style of the old Infinity Engine games better than anything else, for better or worse. Perhaps it’s the writing? Pillars 1 especially has a very somber, almost melancholy tone that never really lets up, and goes fairly dense with the world-building. It also has that fairly obnoxious early kickstarter thing of having some blatant backer content that sticks out like a sore thumb. I could see that seriousness being sort of overbearing, especially when compared to the very D&D high-fantasy hijinks of Baldur’s Gate. I don’t have much to add about Pillars II, other than I think it’s a marked improvement on both a mechanical and writing front. Well, aside from a lukewarm main quest that goes a little too far up its own lorehole and some companion questlines that never quite feel like they go far enough. One of these days I'll get around to finishing it, once I accept that it's okay to play long video games with a mouse and keyboard, even with a mild chronic RSI.

Tyranny is a game I will continue to maintain never got enough attention. Having the misfortunate timing of coming out the week after the 2016 election with the tagline “Evil Won” probably didn’t help, but an RPG about being middle management in the vast, grinding gears of an unambiguously evil empire is a fun premise when detached from the realities of Our Current Political Situation™. Its combat is worse than Pillars, its RPG elements are watered-down, and it seems blatantly clear that the game was significantly scaled down during development. However, if you like the mild discomfort that comes from picking between a series of morally ambiguous “worse and worser” choices in a shorter form (it took me a little over 20 hours) adventure, I seriously recommend Tyranny. In any case, both it and Pillars II sold somewhat poorly and now you’re never going to get another game like them again because Microsoft sure as hell isn’t going to fund isometric RPGs with that giant paycheck of theirs.

Harebrained Schemes

Games: Shadowrun Returns, Shadowrun Dragonfall, Shadowrun Hong Kong

In addition to their successes with Shadowrun in the CRPG space, Harebrained Schemes also managed to successfully revive Battletech, which is yet another game that I’ll need to play more of one of these days.

I think I’ve gone off about it before, but I just need to reiterate that I find Shadowrun’s entire deal to be… a little hard to take seriously. Even at its best, the entire cyberpunk setting and aesthetic tends towards the cornball. You can only have so many MegaCorps, rain-soaked streets, bad retrofuture slang and mentions of “The Net” before can’t take it seriously. Throwing elves and magic on top compounds that problem, and for as much as I’m normally in favor of the Fantasy/Sci-Fi genre mash-up, Shadowrun’s particular blend is something I can’t help but make fun of. I get it, that’s my problem, but throughout my entire playthrough of Shadowrun Returns, I was eternally, keenly aware that it was a setting that was originally created in the 1980s. I fully understand this is a me problem, but I said upfront that this blog is a personal reflection and not a 100% factual objective reflection of the facts.

Shadowrun Returns itself isn’t anything special. It’s profoundly linear, mechanically simplified, bereft of much character, and generally feels like a proof-of-concept for its toolset and an introduction to the world. I wrote a review of it at the time and feel safe saying it’s something you could easily skip. However, I’m to understand that both Shadowrun Dragonfall and Shadowrun Hong Kong have made good on those concepts and that world in a way that people claim is much better. They’ve both been on my short-list of RPGs to play, and honestly, if you want the most compelling reason I want to check out either, it’s that they’re at a reasonable 20-30 hour length instead of the colossal 50-80 hour mark I’d throw around for most of the other games here.

Larian Studios

Games: Divinity Original Sin, Divinity Original Sin 2

I’ve said it vocally multiple times before, but I think Larian Studios has shifted from a developer of charming, if heavily flawed Eurojank (Divine Divinity, Divinity 2, Dragon Commander) to the arguable winners of this current RPG resurgence. They didn’t need to get bought by Microsoft to stay solvent, so clearly they’re doing something right.

I feel like I’ve gone off, at length, about both Divinity: Original Sin games and how much I love both. While Pillars of Eternity might be closer to my heart, there’s also no doubt that Divinity makes a stronger case for this sort of RPG to an audience who isn’t already nostalgic for it. The first game, both in its vanilla and enhanced forms, is undoubtedly flawed. You can win a significant chunk of otherwise solid turn-based tactical combat using the same handful of crowd control abilities from levels 1 to 20. On the other end, the writing maintains an obnoxious level of tongue-in-cheek goofiness that makes it difficult to take seriously. Original Sin II fixes both of these problems, with combat and writing that maintains a stellar level of quality the entire time. If I have to pick a bone with both games, it’s a combination of both of them maybe being about a dozen hours too long, and the itemization being aggressive to the point of almost being exhausting.

And the rest!

Games: Too many to count.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention some of the other games from the last few years, and in some ways I think I’m almost doing a disservice by just focusing on the larger-scale, multi-million dollar crowdfunding successes. Unfortunately, my experience with the smaller indie RPGs of recent years is far more limited. I can’t think of much outside of playing through Age of Decadence and finding it… not for me, and putting just enough time into the notorious Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar to ask for a refund from Steam. I still intend to give games like Underrail, Serpent in the Staglands, Lords of Xulima, and Tower of Time a shot eventually, but if I’ve learned anything from my backlog, eventually can be a long time, or sometimes never. Still gonna play Arcanum one day, I swear.

First and foremost on my list is Owlcat Games’ Pathfinder: Kingmaker, based on the adventure path of the same name. If Pillars of Eternity is the streamlined, human-friendly take on the Infinity Engine that makes reasonable adjustments for a computer game, then Kingmaker is the raw unprotected Pen and Paper monstrosity that gives you six characters, a notoriously complicated ruleset, and a punch in the face for good measure. As someone who loves the customizability of Pathfinder in the abstract, but often finds the minutiae obnoxious in actual P&P sessions, Kingmaker gives me the complexity I want, without the part where I constantly need a calculator open to keep track of all of my modifiers. It’s also an adaptation of one of Paizo’s most ambitious official adventure modules, so in addition to having the crunchy dice rolls I so desperately need, it’s also a fairly open, sandbox-y adventure with some kingdom management stuff on top. It’s really great, so… like half of the other recent RPGs on this list, I got sidetracked at some point and haven’t gotten back to it.

While Legend of Grimrock is slightly too early to fit onto the convenient 5 year window, its sequel came out in 2014 and thus totally counts for the purposes of this blog. I think both games are admirable, stellar attempts at recreating the Dungeon Master/Eye of the Beholder/Lands of Lore style of real-time, puzzle-heavy, strafe parades. I’m also kinda trash garbage at that exact style of game, and Grimrock 2 had the misfortune of coming out around the time my old computer was well on its way to exploding. It’s in my backlog for a reason, and like everything else in my backlog, I’ll get to it. Someday. Maybe.

Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear is the weirdest fucking shit and I still cannot get over how little anyone talked about it outside of a bunch of idiots angry that it acknowledges the existence of trans people. It's a goddamn Baldur's Gate midquel/reunion special a good 15 years after Throne of Bhaal that tries to bridge between the first and second game from the people responsible for the Enhanced Editions of all the Infinity Engine games. The most insane thing is that it's honestly far more successful at that than it has any right to be.

I could keep going for a while, but I’m already pressing up on 2500 words, which I feel like is a good sign that I should stop. If I missed anything egregious, feel free to let me know. If you agree or disagree with my very hot takes, feel free to let me know. Politely. If you want to point out how few of the games presented in this blog I've actually played to completion... fair enough. Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who’s encouraged or inspired my writing over the last 10 years. I dunno how many of you are left ‘round these parts, but thank you. Oh! And a happy 11th anniversary to Giant Bomb on top of that!

It only took 5 months, but I finally mustered enough willpower to start long-form writing about video games again after a combination of a capstone paper and two back-to-back Game of the Year blogs ruined my desire to throw thousands of words at a screen. I’m sure you’re as excited as I am, so let’s get to it.

Bioshock 2

As part of my “I should probably play something other than these damn Kingdom Hearts games or I’ll go insane” initiative, I finished Bioshock 2 recently. For a farmed-out sequel to a game that ended fairly conclusively, it’s better than it has any right to be. It meaningfully addresses a lot of the first game’s mechanical shortcomings, with stuff like dual-wielding, a significantly better hacking minigame, and a generally wider set of options for plasmids and tonics. I’m not going to go out here and claim it’s Doom 2016 or anything over here, but that dual-wielding means combat has more of a flow to it and incentivizes more than using electro-bolt and the wrench for a good 75% of encounters.

However, I think it’s fair to say the original Bioshock is not oft heralded for the quality of its gunplay, or really most of the part where you play it, and the same is true for Bioshock 2. It was the quality of the writing, the environmental storytelling, and the philosophical ideas at play. Sure, I could go back and argue those ideas only come off as well as they do because big mainstream video games didn’t exactly care about immersive storytelling or basic philosophical concepts in 2007, but that’s besides the point. I might be the dingus advocating for Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer as the best written game story of 2007, but if we’re talking games people other than me and my CRPG dork friends have heard of, it’s Bioshock. And Mass Effect.

Bioshock 2 opts to pick up the pieces of Bioshock’s Underwater Ayn Rand Utopia by saying “What if that, but the opposite?” Sofia Lamb is an inherently less interesting figure than Andrew Ryan, fan-fiction’d into existence as his nemesis who totally existed the entire time. (Fontaine who?) For as contrived as much of the game’s setup is, I don’t begrudge the writers at all. There is effort and there are moments in Bioshock 2’s storytelling, which is why it’s sort of tragic that they’re constrained by being in a direct sequel to a narrative that already exhausted most of its concepts. Even with that excuse, however, saying “Hey, unrestrained collectivism would be pretty bad too!” isn’t a particularly daring stance to take, and the Subject Delta/Eleanor stuff is a weird attempt at putting an emotional core behind the whole thing in a way that doesn’t really work. It all comes together in an experience I’d describe as equal parts competent and unmemorable, which might be the single most damning thing I can say about it. Bioshock Infinite might be a beautiful, somewhat problematic mess in retrospect, but I cannot say any part of it is forgettable.

If there is an corollary to my thoughts on Bioshock 2, it came in the form of the Minerva’s Den DLC. Much of the team behind Minerva’s Den would go on to make Gone Home and you can see a lot of that in how it’s designed. While there are still combat encounters and an accelerated progression ramp, most of Minerva’s Den’s 2-3 hour runtime is dedicated to telling the small-scale, personal story of a few people in one little corner of Rapture. Not only is it a better-written, more cohesive story than the main game, it feels like a promise of DLC that never truly manifested itself. Outside of something like Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry, I struggle to think of many similar examples in the AAA space, and that’s a shame. Legitimately, if you randomly stumbled into a copy of Bioshock 2 and haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you take a look at Minerva’s Den. It’s worth playing on its own.

System Shock 2

For whatever reason, I wasn’t done with convenient audio logs and abandoned environments in my video games. System Shock 2 is arguably far more on-brand for me, a cult classic PC game from the late 90s that I somehow never wrote about when that was my whole thing. It’s a game with a reputation and legacy that almost speaks for itself, spoken of in hushed whispers alongside other Looking Glass games like Ultima Underworld and Thief. While I’d certainly played parts of it before, it’s been something of a white whale for years now, alongside the likes of Arcanum and Morrowind in the pantheon of “Old-ass PC games that I should play more of.” It’s a bit of a surreal experience to come to in 2019, one I think still holds up astoundingly well in spite of its age.

Going into SS2 straight off of Bioshock 2, I think the most striking thing is how immediately recognizable a lot of it is despite being almost 20-years-old. While one can go even further back to the first System Shock or even Ultima Underworld and see the roots of the entire “immersive sim” genre, I find them both a tad archaic, even for my tastes. Meanwhile, if you put System Shock 2 in front of someone who’s played Bioshock (or, even more directly, the excellent Prey 2017) they wouldn’t have much trouble understanding the basics. Almost every single mechanic has a direct analog, and the different levels of the Von Braun are set up in the same way as different areas in Rapture or Talos-1. I spent a lot of time digging through environments crafted to feel “lived in,” listening to audio logs and scrounging through the trash for ammunition or random cans of soda. It’s a comparison that I find impossible to avoid, especially since I’m already so fond of the rest of the Looking Glass/Ion Storm pantheon. I hope you’ll bear with me if I lean into it, rather than pretend my experiences are separate and exist only in a void.

The key difference between System Shock 2 and the games influenced by it is that it comes from the perspective of a PC-ass RPG pretending to be a shooter, rather than a shooter awkwardly pretending to be an RPG. Right off the bat, you’re picking starting stats, skills, and psi powers as part of your choice of military branch and using dice rolls to determine your chance of success when hacking/repairing/modifying. Shooting is less of an exercise in precision and more one of “vaguely pointing your gun in their general direction” with some survival horror-esque ammo management during the early game. It’s not especially restrictive, however. Playing as a Navy (tech) character on the normal, I had more than enough cyber modules by the end of the game to max out pretty much everything I wanted. While some skills are more useful than others none of them feel totally useless, which is more than I can say for some of the other RPGs from this period.

Given I just made the case above that few played Bioshock for its airless shooting, the same can be said of System Shock 2. The combat isn’t engaging, falling into the awkward no man’s land between shooter and RPG that games like the original Deus Ex or Mass Effect are guilty of, including some fairly aggressive weapon degradation early on. However, I legitimately derived more enjoyment from becoming profoundly overpowered by the end of this game, knocking over most enemies in 2-3 shots with the Assault Rifle or EMP Rifle because my RPG numbers were good, than I did with just about any of Bioshock 2’s tedious little sister protection sequences. That might speak to my impossibly high standards for shooters at this point versus my far more permissive ones for RPG combat, but if you’ve followed me for any serious length of time, you already know that I have an affinity for clunky, weird old shit.

Of course, System Shock 2’s greatest strength is in creating a coherent sense of place, tone, and atmosphere with its environments. The graphical fidelity may be worse (though I did install some texture packs that made the whole thing look slightly prettier), but it still manages to make a spooky spacecraft feel believably fantastical and mundane at the same time, which is always 100% my shit with the whole “immersive sim” genre. Sure, there’s horrific alien biomass everywhere, but do you know what else is everywhere? Bathrooms. Personal audio recordings that conveniently have door codes or help you understand what happened. Admittedly, it’s hard to take some of the audio logs seriously when they’re delivered with all the monotone enthusiasm of “some guy from accounting” but the rest of the sound design is top-notch. I don’t find the game especially scary, but there’s something really disturbing about the way the infected enemies beg you to kill them, or the way the voice of the collective alien intelligence echoes in your mind. It’s nothing so striking as Bioshock’s philosophy, Prey’s meta-commentary, or Dishonored’s entire aesthetic, but it executes on a fairly straightforward sci-fi horror premise well.

In what is likely to be a controversial take, I’m less keen on SHODAN. While it’s amusing to know that Irrational literally stole the “The person talking to you on the radio for the first part of the game is the antagonist” twist in Bioshock from itself, there’s something very 90s about an an evil AI continually taunting you with a bunch of vocal distortion. Nah I get it, she’s gonna say the word “insect” a lot and then passive aggressively compliment you for not being dead. Speaking of “very 90s” I think most of the game’s industrial synth soundtrack is effective at creating a sense of dread. However, that won’t stop me from accusing some of its faster-paced tracks of sounding like they’d be more at home during a rave than a game where you’re slowly digging through corpses, managing your inventory, or attempting to listen to audio logs. I’m talking to you, first real music track encountered in the game.

Minor caveats aside, I really enjoyed my 10-ish hours with System Shock 2. It feels foundational and rough around the edges, but coming to it after Bioshock 2 was a little like when I played Demon’s Souls after finishing Dark Souls II. While mechanics have progressed and ideas have matured, the core of the experience is still recognizable and intact. It certainly left a big enough impression to get me to start writing again, and if that isn’t endorsement enough… I dunno, at least play Prey 2017, you Philistine.

Random Endorsement:

Alright y’all, it might be late, but it’s time for the REAL game of the year list. You can take those cowboy simulations, dying cells, and drug tetrises elsewhere. After taking a year off, it’s time to talk about the best games I played in “two thousand eighteen” that did not come out during said calendar year. In some ways, I actually like putting this list together more than the other one. For as much as my playing habits have shifted over the years towards more current stuff, there’s still very much a part of me that enjoys messing around with a varied collection of archaic nonsense. I got my start blogging about old (usually PC) games that I happened upon for the first time. It’s likely no coincidence that the three blogs I managed to put out this year were partially or entirely about random-ass old games from “like 2004, or something.”

These games are in descending order, starting at 10, though honestly don’t take most of the ranking very seriously. At some point, this is more an exhibition of my weird, esoteric backlog habits than anything else.

Personal video game rabbit hole of the year: Doom 64 Retribution (and Doom source ports in general)

While I’ve certainly played some OG Doom in my life before, I’d never thought to dip my toe into the frankly endless, somewhat terrifying abyss of various Doom mods and source ports. This year changed that, and there was a brief period this summer where messing around with them was basically all the gaming I did. Brutal Doom is, to be perfectly frank, very stupid. It takes what was already a poster child for violent adolescent power fantasy and escalates it to the point of absurdity. As a way of replaying Doom, it’s a lot of fun, and for whatever it loses in purity it makes up for in intensity and a hilarious over-abundance of features. There’s something to be said for mowing through a bunch of imps while dual-wielding SMGs, watching their body parts fly everywhere in a way that feels like it shouldn’t be happening in an engine from 1993.

In similar non-pure experiences, playing Doom 64 via source ports seems like it would be much more enjoyable than playing the actual game with a N64 controller. It’s a strangely designed game that feels surprisingly different from the PC originals, with unique enemy sprites, fake N64 colored lighting, a moody, atmospheric soundtrack, and far more contained maps. It leans a little too close in the direction of “gotcha” teleporting enemy spawns and bullshit puzzle map design than I like, but it was a fun contrast after decapitating pretty much everything in Brutal Doom. I don’t think I’ll play it again, but it might be worth a look if you haven’t seen it before.

AAA Game from a decade ago of the year: Gears of War 2

My brother-in-law and I were looking for games to play together after finishing all of Bungie’s Halo games last year. Deciding upon Microsoft’s other tentpole franchise of the last generation, we… only managed to get through Gears 1 and 2 this year. While I had played it once before, going back to the original Gears of War a dozen years later feels like accidentally stumbling upon a parody of every single “grey and brown dudebro shooter” that became something of a reductive criticism during the 360 and PS3’s lifespan. Even moreso than Halo: Combat Evolved, with its slow pacing and recycled environments, Gears 1 is a slog. It doesn’t so much have a story as it has things that happen. The core shooting is obviously solid, mind you, but it all sort of mushes together from one sequence of waist-high walls to the next.

By contrast, Gears 2 is a pretty marked improvement in every way. While still very grey, brown, and dudebro, there is a lot more variety in its mission design and set-pieces. You’ve got sequences with razor hail, automated turrets, vehicles, and no less than two giant monsters who need to be destroyed from the inside. I cannot take any of its characters or story even remotely seriously for the life of me, but I had a lot more fun and am even vaguely looking forward to Gears 3.

Obscure Bullshit Computer Role-Playing Game of the Year: Wizards and Warriors

This is my list, dammit, and I can put Wizards and Warriors on here if I want to. Of everything, and I mean everything else here, I think this might be the game I’d have the hardest time selling to another person. A CRPG released in 2000 by Heuristic Park (a small team led by D.W. Bradley, who was the lead designer on some of the later Wizardry games) it’s a janky, ugly, decidedly low-budget take on the first-person party-based RPG (or “blobber”) that feels like an interesting cross between the sensibilities of Might and Magic and Wizardry. Like Wizardry, it has a heavy emphasis on deep character progression and (sometimes gratingly obscure) puzzles, while its movement speed and general pacing is arguably closer to the brisker Might and Magic. Even the bizarre pseudo turn-based combat, which I would generously describe as “sort of like SuperHot” feels like a cross between both those influences.

If your eyes are already rolling back into your head after I referenced no less than two dead RPG franchises, that’s okay. Even in its time, it doesn't seem like W&W was much of a hit. It didn’t review especially well, had trouble running on operating systems newer than Windows 2000, and never really obtained the same kind of cult status as contemporaries like Arcanum or Wizardry 8. Finding comprehensive walkthroughs has been… surprisingly difficult, and the number of full, or mostly full playthroughs I could find on YouTube number in the single digits. In some way, it feels like I’ve stumbled upon a new, old game, something that I would’ve written a blog about if it was still 2011 and I didn’t have a remotely modern PC. To be perfectly frank, if I were to recommend a game of this type to someone, it’d still be Might and Magic VII or Wizardry 8, but in the context of finding something new it’s been a pleasant surprise. Maybe I’ll even try to finish it.

The “why didn’t I play this earlier” of the year: Devil May Cry

As a fan of character action games, it’s sort of remarkable that the original Devil May Cry didn’t click for me until this year. In a lot of ways, it feels like a rough proof-of-concept, a scrapped version of Resident Evil 4 turned into its own thing. It lacks the depth of later Devil May Cry games (well, maybe not DMC 2.) and occasionally betrays its age with some of those camera angles and repeating boss fights. Even then, however, I found it to be a pretty good time. The controls are still tight and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. I’m not really planning on replaying it anytime soon, especially with a new DMC on the horizon, but as a historical curiosity it was worth my time.

Obscure Bullshit Fire Emblem of the Year: Tear Ring Saga

Developed by the creator of Fire Emblem after he left Nintendo, and then subject to successful legal action from Nintendo because of its similarities to Fire Emblem, it’s fair to say that Tear Ring Saga might as well be a Fire Emblem in all but name. As “guy with Fire Emblem avatar” I’ve finally started doing my due diligence by playing through it. If you thought Fire Emblem was already a series with little regard for balance, have I got a game for you. Tear Ring Saga makes Genealogy of the Holy War look restrained by comparison, throwing around characters with ridiculous personal weapons left and right. Why does Shigen have a sword that literally revives him when he hits 0 HP? Wait, does that light spell really hit all enemies in a 3x3 space? Why are axes complete ass? Does this map really only have two enemies? Tear Ring Saga feels a little like a ROM hack with all of its esoteric hidden content, but in a lot of ways it also feels like old-school Fire Emblem with the limiters taken off.

Similarly, while main lord Runan’s tale might as well be every other Fire Emblem game ever made (especially the SNES ones, with their “Game of Thrones but anime” proper nouns and politicking) his buddy Holmes is an asshole bow user who goes around doing radical pirate stuff. And if you know anything about me, it’s that I’m very into any game involving radical pirates. If I have a serious problem with the game, it’s that I’ve basically been keeping my eyes stuck on a guide the entire time because of how much optional, missable stuff there is. Similarly, I think the map design is sometimes lacking, being more concerned with looking vaguely plausible than being fun to navigate around. Given that a translation patch for this game’s sequel, Berwick Saga, is finally being worked on, I can’t wait to see what the hell that game brings to the table.

Potential franchise hole of the year: Tales of Symphonia

I’ll just put my blog post here so I don’t have to re-write everything. In summation, Tales of Symphonia was a game I wanted to play for years. When I finally did, it turned out to be right up my alley, and now I’ve gone down a horrible dark hole where I want to play multiple games in the series despite already having a massive backlog and a questionable attention span. Hooray!

Best Bullshit 3D Collectathon Platformer of the year: A Hat in Time

I’ve said it before, but I actually kinda liked Yooka-Laylee in a very guilty pleasure sort of way. For as much as that game felt like it missed the point of what made Banjo-Kazooie and friends memorable in the first place, it filled a very primal need of mine to collect random bullshit and do butt stomps on switches. A Hat in Time, by contrast, aims to capture the feeling of those sorts of games without necessarily attempting to recreate a Nintendo 64 design, warts and all. It has a lot of variety to its various challenges, a goofy sense of humor, and is only a couple of hours long.

Best multiplayer experience of the year: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege

In what might be the most direct effect Giant Bomb actually had on my gaming habits this in 2018, I picked up Rainbow Six Siege partially due to Dan Ryckert’s enthusiasm. When everything clicks into place, it’s the kind of tense, fraught experience that reminds me of when I used to play League of Legends, but concentrated into 5 minute rounds. When it doesn’t click, maybe my team is incompetent or otherwise getting steamrolled… it also reminds me of when I used to play League of Legends. It’s a game of high highs and low lows, and while I sometimes want a more mindless online shooter experience, there’s nothing quite like R6 Siege when I’m actually on the ball.

I am, to put it lightly, pretty terrible at it. I don’t wear a headset as often as I should, I still pick Rook like 75% of the time on defense because his game plan is really simple, and sometimes I just end up getting wasted because I was doing stupid shit or running around without any idea of where to go. It’s okay though, because despite being a game all about communication and map knowledge, it turns out the majority of people playing unranked on PS4 aren’t much better than I am. That’s encouraging, right?

Best Game from Irrational that doesn’t have “Bioshock” in the title, of the year: SWAT 4

I’ll just direct you to the blog post I wrote about SWAT 4, but this game was a pretty big surprise. If you want the case for why I got into R6 Siege in the first place, SWAT 4 probably also had something to do with it. After playing a bunch of Doom, it was nice to try something on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, a slow-paced tactical shooter hung up on procedure. Nothing quite feels as satisfying as flashbanging a room, constantly mashing F to yell at people, then pepper-spraying them when they don't comply. Police work!

2018’s 2017 Game of the Year: Divinity Original Sin 2

I say with all sincerity that Divinity Original Sin 2 is probably the single best thing to come out of the “CRPG Renaissance” of the past few years. Admittedly, I might have a little more personal affinity for Obsidian’s takes on the Infinity Engine, and I’ll shout from the high heavens that Tyranny deserved more attention than it got. However, I think Larian Studios has put forward the strongest case for the kind of systems heavy, mechanics heavy role-playing games in a modern context. If you want involved tactical combat, a staggering variety of viable and flexible characters builds, and the ability to approach quests and combat from a bunch of different angles, it does that incredibly well. Like the last one, it’s probably a dozen hours too long for its own good (as my 60+ hour playtime suggests) but that’s more a problem with my desire to complete all things than anything else.

However, perhaps the biggest improvement of Original Sin 2 over its predecessor is the quality of the writing. While I still can’t claim to care all that much about the world of Rivellon as a setting, the overall quality of prose and dialogue is so much better than the often jokey, weirdly irreverent tone of previous Divinity games. It’s a pretty serious step-up, and I’m very interested in seeing how they manage to follow it up.

Replays of the year: Heroes of Might and Magic III, Dark Souls

It turns out I not only was capable of playing video games that didn’t come out this year, but also capable of playing games that I’ve played before! In particular, I beat the vanilla campaign for Heroes of Might and Magic III for the first time, and found it a pleasant experience. I’ve already talked at length about what that game means to me and defining my tastes, but I will continue to reiterate that Heroes of Might and Magic is pretty good.

Using the fancy-pants remastered version as an excuse, I replayed Dark Souls this year and can confirm that Dark Souls is still pretty great. There’s something to be said for going back to it with all of the acquired knowledge from the rest of the series. In 2011, it was this inscrutable, arcane, niche thing that no one fully understood. Playing it 7 years later, with everything fully documented and no less than 4 other From Software souls games under my belt was a little like doing a victory lap. I hadn’t seen the DLC areas before, and if I might brag for a second, I definitely beat Artorias on my second try. Gotta love that Crystal Soul Spear.

Worst Game I played to completion this year: Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

No other game this year entranced me with its profound stupidity as much as Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. The closest runner-up was probably getting around to finishing The Evil Within 2 (which, man does that game go some weird places) but even that can’t match the bizarre parade of lazy fanservice and “direct to DVD” level of effort that Dawn of the New World puts forth. You only have two permanent party members to worry about alongside a pokemon-esque monster capture mechanic that barely matters. The combat, while still serviceable, feels way floatier than its forebear. The world map has been replaced with a menu of locations, and the plot… well, it has one. Feel free to read my full blog if you are so inclined, but this was definitely an experience that was memorable for all the wrong reasons.

And that’s it from me, I think. If I’m going to be totally honest, I don’t know if I’m going to end up finishing that anime blog or not. I’m honestly pretty tired of writing stuff after multiple papers for school and these two GOTY blogs, so if I do end up writing it, consider the whole thing a bonus. If I don’t end up writing it, all you need to know is that Fate/Zero is the only great Fate anime, and the seasonal anime rush is for chumps. Oh, and you should watch Hunter x Hunter.

Boy, 2018, am I right? It’s been a weird rollercoaster for me, with plenty of good stuff and goals accomplished to go alongside the endless nightmare of our current political reality™ and the more personal nightmare of sometimes life sucks.™ For better or worse, I haven’t exactly written as much as I thought I would. I wouldn’t exactly say the Giant Bomb’s blogging community (or the forums in general) is super active these days, so motivating oneself to pump out a 1000+ word internet blog can be difficult. Somehow, my incredulous teardown of Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World was the most successful thing I’ve posted since 2015, which probably says something about something. That said, the less depressing reason I only ended up writing three blogs this year is simply that I’ve been pretty busy between school, work, and various other adult-ish responsibilities. I plan on still doing what I can, when I can, and I hope you’ll join me along the way.

If I’m going to be totally honest, I’ll be glad to see another fresh year of video games. This list was harder to compile than I thought it would be, and I wouldn’t say it’s because I had an overabundance of games to choose from. While I would happily, unabashedly recommend the games on this list, I wouldn’t say anything blew me away quite like the top half of my 2017 list. For better or worse, it seems like many of the standout hits of 2018 were big-ass open world games and tighter, run-based experiences. If you know anything about my gaming trajectory at this point, it’s that I’m pretty tired of big-ass open world games and run-based roguelikelikelikes. Red Dead’s ponderously slow, indulgent animations seem like a pretty big indicator that it’s not my thing, and after my first successful run of Dead Cells (at the 10-hour mark) I kinda lost motivation to keep going.

Thus, my list for 2018 is a pretty eclectic assortment of everything else, and to be perfectly honest I think the ordering is pretty fluid here. You could switch most of this list around and I’d probably tell you that it looks totally fine. All you really need to know is that I think these games are good. Starting from 10 and going down.

The Holiday Backlog Catchup Award for “Game I’m still playing”: Pathfinder Kingmaker

Partially because I couldn’t think of a great #10 to round out the list, and partially because I’m really enjoying going through it, I’m going to put Pathfinder Kingmaker on this list. Sure, I’m only like a dozen hours into it and have just barely encountered the kingdom management side of things, but it’s good. When the game launched in September, it was in a decidedly rough state, with multi-gigabyte hotfixes being released weekly to try and address stuff like broken quests, abilities, and inflated enemy stats. In an increasingly common trend, it was something I was going to wait on.

Having decided to jump in a few weeks ago, I’m glad to announce that it seems a lot better on that front. Underneath is a decidedly ambitious attempt at recreating one of the the more ambitious Pathfinder adventure modules. Sure, it’s still occasionally buggy, the ruleset is terrifying in its intricacies, (even as someone who knows it) and the writing can occasionally skew generic, but I’m having a surprisingly great time. Might have more to say about it next year.

Tie: Dragon Ball FighterZ and Under Night In-Birth: Exe Late[st]

Man I wish I still had it in me to play fighting games on a regular basis. Between last year’s pleasant discovery of Samurai Shodown V Special and this year’s discovery of “Anime Fighters I’m Capable of Comprehending” I’ve had plenty of games to play during those brief periods when I’m interacting with a friend who also plays fighting games. If I liked the sensation of getting curbstomped online or perfunctory AI battles, these games would likely be higher on this list. Similarly, if I had played Blazblue Cross Tag this year, that sounds like it would’ve been up my alley as well.

While I am still one hundred percent trash garbage at Dragon Ball FighterZ, it’s probably the first Arc System Works fighting game I’ve wanted to get better at. I certainly respect the likes of Blazblue and Guilty Gear, but I’ve always found them impenetrable. Dragon Ball solves this problem with a (mostly) straightforward roster and (mostly) streamlined systems underlying the same kind of 3v3 tag battle insanity of a Mahvel that I’m one hundred percent trash garbage at. Oh, and also it’s Dragon Ball and there are no less than four characters named “Goku” so I’m pretty into that.

By contrast, UNIST is all the trappings of your usual bonkers anime fighter, but for humans. That’s my secret way of saying “You can mash shit out and it’ll probably work” which turns out is my favorite kind of fighting game mechanic. It also has a fun cast of characters who are esoteric enough to feel pretty different from one another without being impossible to pick up and figure out.

Best Left 4 Dead: Warhammer Vermintide 2

While partially responsible for the repetitive stress injury in my right arm, Vermintide 2 takes that Left 4 Dead formula of the first game and takes it to a logical next step of “what if there were subclasses and way more kinds of loot” to give the player some motivation to play levels more than once. It worked for me, and I not only sunk around 30 hours into it earlier this year, but also tricked multiple others into also playing. While playing cooperative games on the internet with strangers is always a dicey proposition, my experiences were mostly positive.

While I can’t speak to the game’s current state, it sounds like things have maybe not been supported as well as they should, so I should probably throw that in as a caveat.

Octopath Traveler is also a video game I played.

I wrote a blog about Octopath Traveler that explains my feelings on it in detail, so I’m just going to leave that here if you care. I’m not sure if all of the game’s weird episodic storytelling works, but it worked enough that I willingly played through all eight character’s tales… before reaching the “true” final boss, deciding I didn’t want to grind, and turning the whole damn thing off. So… only about 60 hours.

Everyone is here: Super Smash Bros Ultimate

Smash Ultimate is more Super Smash Bros, and it turns out I’m still into that. I’m fully on board with most of the new characters, as well as Sakurai’s willingness to just shove in more Fire Emblem swordboys to make certain people on the internet very angry. Honestly, I don’t think as much of the single player spirits mode as some other people seem to. It’s neat seeing the various different ways spirits are represented in the game, but it can also be grating to work through a bunch of AI gimmick battles and numerical struggles.

Best game I didn't finish: Pillars of Eternity II Deadfire

If not for the part where I didn’t finish it (see: repetitive stress injury putting a damper on long PC gaming sessions) Pillars of Eternity II could’ve been my Game of the Year. It’s a pretty marked improvement from the first game on a lot of fronts, with stuff like multiclassing and subclasses slowly but surely inching toward supplanting Baldur’s Gate II as the king of the CRPG. It’s also that pirate RPG that everyone apparently wants (did you know there are no less than two Pathfinder adventure paths that involve being radical pirates?) and, in general, the prose is a little less purple and wordy than the first game. If Pathfinder Kingmaker is the rough around the edges attempt at directly converting Pen and Paper to computers, than Pillars II is the refined, polished take that says you maybe don’t need to

But, of course, I haven’t finished it. I’m to understand that the main story goes a little up its own lorehole, and some of the companion questlines feel a little sparse. While those may end up being true, I still think Pillars II is the best CRPG to come out this year. Hopefully Obsidian will make another one of these and just nail it, but between this game’s apparently poor sales numbers and the Microsoft acquisition, this could be the last one from them for a while.

Most Hitman: Hitman 2

Hitman 2 is more of the same great Hitman flavor, slightly improved and refined. Given how good Hitman 2016 was, I am more than okay with that. I think the general quality of the maps is better this time around than the last one, and I hope IO gets to make more of them.

Dad of War

If you want a case for what big budget, AAA video games are still capable of accomplishing, the God of War soft reboot is a pretty good one. While I didn’t enjoy every little bit of Kratos and Son’s journey, it manages to combine the kind of ridiculous, over-the-top spectacle the series is known for with more intimate, emotional moments. I’m sure you’ve heard that like a thousand times at this point, that’s fair. At least I’m not going to tell you about how the game relates to my own experiences of fatherhood, or whatever. But it works. They manage to make a God of War game that confronts the series legacy without betraying it, which is a tricky needle to thread.

Where God of War falters for me is where a lot of big budget AAA video games falter for me. I got over automatic climbing sequences a long time ago, the boss fights feel a little more flashy than interactive, and I don’t necessarily think the game benefits all that much from RPG-esque progression and loot. Like a lot of modern games, throwing in stats feels a boondoggle most of the time, and while you can kinda, sorta make a Kratos that works for your playstyle, by the end of the game you’re still going to have the same abilities as everyone else.

As a result, I didn’t find the post-game content all that compelling, and in fact I think it kinda reveals the shortcomings in the game’s combat. While the attempt at splitting the difference between a more deliberate, souls-y combat and a character action game works for most of the main story, it starts to fall apart in the challenge arenas and the Valkyrie fights. Between some ridiculous enemy patterns in those Muspelheim arenas and the part where Valkyries just sometimes have super armor, it feels less like you’re applying your mastery of the game’s systems and more that you’ve learned to exploit them. Still, I’m not going to drag any game through the mud too hard for the quality of its optional post-credits content. God of War is good and I enjoyed it quite a bit up to that point.

Valkyria Chronicles 4 is at #2, because I felt like it.

Boy, remember Valkyria Revolution? No you don’t. Don’t be crazy, I’m pretty sure no one played that game. There was definitely a period when I was terrified that was going to be the end of Sega’s premiere “What if World War II, but anime” series, but thankfully Valkyria Chronicles 4 exists and I am better for it. Like Hitman 2, it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but the wheel in this case is Valkyria Chronicles 1, which came out a literal decade ago. In that context, I’m totally okay with VC4 playing it mostly safe, even if I wouldn’t have minded some of the more esoteric classes of the PSP games.

If there is a marked improvement, it’s in the mission design, which feels a lot more resistant to the cheese tactics I employed during my time with the first game. Sure, scouts are still king and I still find engineers borderline-useless, but as a whole the game is a lot better at forcing a variety of tactics from the player. The storytelling is… still very anime, and I’d hesitate to call it “amazing” or anything, but Claude and his crew of doofuses is at the very least more likeable and tolerable than Welkin and Alicia ever were. It has its share of emotional moments that work surprisingly well, which almost compensates for the multiple times I rolled my eyes!

Is this my game of the year? Maybe? Sure. Why not? It was pretty good. To hell with it. This is my Game of the Year: Monster Hunter World

I *only* put around 70 hours into Monster Hunter World, which seems scant compared to the 370 hours I put into MH4 Ultimate, or even the 120 hours I put into MH Generations. In another sense, it didn’t totally tank my grades and consume my life for a period of multiple months, so that’s actually a good thing. It’s still got all of the things that make Monster Hunter appealing, but with HD graphics and quality-of-life improvements that made it accessible to normal humans! While you could honestly put any of the top half of the list in this spot, let’s just say that this is my game of the year.

Honorable Mentions: Into The Breach, Spyro Reignited Trilogy, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

I was obsessed with Into the Breach for the space of about two weeks, and then basically dropped it completely. I think it’s an incredibly well-crafted game that feels like it owes less to turn-based tactics and more to puzzle games. Perhaps unintentionally, It made me come to the realization that I like the chaos and uncertainty of your average grid-based tactics game. I like being able to use random number bullshit to compensate for questionable strategies, and I like being able to use solid strategies to compensate for questionable random number bullshit. Alongside the aforementioned “run-based roguelikelikelike” thing, Into the Breach didn’t really have a ton of staying power for me. It’s good though!

As a Nintendo kid, I still have a soft spot for dumb collectathon 3D platformers, and Spyro is a trilogy of dumb 3D collectathon platformers. It’s a very chill, low-intensity experience and it’s also very, very pretty. Don’t really need to say much more than that.

I really hope the Bloodstained retro demake game doesn’t accidentally end up being better than the actual metroidvania that was kickstarted, but it’s very good. It’s short, sweet, doesn’t overstay its welcome (but still gives the player reasons to replay) and is a kinder, gentler take on those original NES Castlevania games. Also it was $5.

Mention: Battlefield V.

I’ve been playing a lot of Battlefield V with friends, because I couldn’t convince them to play Rainbow Six Siege with me, and it was already half off because holy shit video games barely hold their value anymore. When everything is working perfectly, such as when I have a full squad coordinating over voice chat, it’s a pretty fun multiplayer shooter. When I’m playing alone and everyone on my team is running around like a headless chicken and pretending it’s Call of Duty, things are less fun. It’s also occasionally stupid janky, with things like progression not registering, occasionally kicking me from games just because, and the menus being slow, laggy pieces of shit.

But hey, I’ll still play it, because no one wanted to get good at Siege with me. But really, it’s fine.

The backlog award for games I will totally, definitely get around to playing more of in 2019. Just you wait: The Bard’s Tale IV, Battletech, Forza Horizon 4

Like Pathfinder Kingmaker, The Bard’s Tale IV launched in a pretty rough state with technical optimization issues up the ass. Now that it’s benefitted from months of patching, it’s hopefully better on that front. Even if I feel pretty lukewarm on InXile as a whole, the little I played of BT4 seemed like a decently promising little dungeon crawler, so hopefully it will pan out when I eventually give it a look.

Battletech, also known as “The Most Austin Walker game in existence” features both turn-based tactics and giant-ass robots, which are both things I ostensibly am into. Admittedly, I never got an amazing grasp of Battletech’s various systems when I played it earlier this year, but I’m more than willing to give it another earnest shot.

I don’t actually own Forza Horizon 4, but I did get a month of game pass for $1 at one point to play approximately three hours of Sea of Thieves (oddly enough, we did not want to play more after those three hours.) After that mistake was made, the handful of hours I played of Forza Horizon 4 seemed very good. I’m usually not one for simulation racing games, or really racing games in general that don’t involve go-karts or Burnout Paradise, but I will happily make an exception for this.

Well, that was too long. That’s it for me. You can look forward to my other, far more important Old GOTY Blog and possibly something anime related in the near future. Have a good one.

While the summer slowly creeps to a close, I’ve been slowly creeping my way through a handful of games, as one does when they don't have much of a social life and a fairly large backlog of video games to look at. I could tell you about how I think Dead Cells is pretty good even though I’m sick to death of “run-based games with a similar permanent death structure to the old computer game Rogue and its contemporaries.” That might be something I touch upon near the end of the year, depending on how I feel about it after some more time, so instead how about I talk about the games everyone else isn’t already showering praise upon?

SWAT 4

There’s something really strange and slightly hilarious about SWAT 4 being the direct descendant of Police Quest: SWAT, the game responsible for the infamous “slice the pie” moment during one of Vinny and Dave’s old game streams. (Seriously, if you’re a newer premium subscriber and haven’t watched that video, do so immediately. I’ll wait.) I’m not quite sure how SWAT went from being the worst kind of mid-90s FMV adventure game to a tense squad shooter developed by a pre-Bioshock Irrational Games, but I guess if nothing else there’s still a shared obsession with police procedure and “authenticity.” Regardless of how it happened (I guess SWAT 2 is like… a real-time tactics game where you fight a drug cult?) I found myself surprisingly way into SWAT 4’s brand of slightly pedantic, somewhat punishing squad shooting, to the point where I played the entire game and its expansion with a damn mouse and keyboard despite the whole “chronic repetitive stress injury” thing I have going on with my right arm.

It’s fair to say that one of the biggest reasons SWAT 4 appealed to me in the first place is that I haven’t really played anything else like it. The brief heyday of serious tactical shooters was certainly one that passed me by, and for as many sneer quotes as I’ll throw around the word “authentic” I can’t think of many other shooters that force the player into clearly defined rules of engagement and procedure as strictly and emphatically as SWAT. You can't shoot a suspect with a lethal weapon until they aim their weapon at a police officer or hostage, and there's a button semi-dedicated to yelling at people to get on the ground, which I find hilarious but is also a required part of the procedure. That style of high-lethality tactical shooting alongside a scoring system that emphasizes non-lethal engagement and police busywork (zip-tying everyone, collecting loose weapons, reporting status to the TOC) creates a very unique sort of experience, in which moments of careful planning, scouting, and containment are punctuated with instances of violence and chaos as my (bad) plans inevitably went to hell with spectacular and disastrous results. Also, you can subdue people by tasing them or shooting a bunch of pepper spray in their face, which I will fully admit to enjoying more than is possibly healthy or respectable.

The other thing that stands out for me are the environments these missions take place in. There’s a certain dedication to mundane realism to SWAT 4’s level design that I really appreciate, including a lot of very good fake advertisements and businesses to look at while you’re clearing out buildings one room at a time. Even when you’re clearing out a tenement occupied by an apocalyptic cult, complete with some Bioshock-ass obvious graffiti on the wall* the layout of the rooms in the building itself feels plausible in a way that reminds me Irrational made this game. A self-contained building or series of buildings in each level admittedly isn’t as ambitious or cohesive as something like Rapture (or, more recently, Talos 1) but they exhibit an attention to immersion and detail that betrays the Looking Glass roots of the development studio.

It’s worth mentioning that, for as much as I will sing its praises and was able to see both the base game and expansion to credits, I am pretty bad at SWAT 4. When we talk about the demise of these sorts of hardcore tactical shooters, a phrase that will often get bandied around is “trial-and-error.” It’s not an entirely invalid criticism in any sort of game where one mistake at the wrong time can mean instant death, but I also have an affinity for weird old stealth bullshit and Dark Souls, which I think means I have a higher-than-average tolerance for that stuff. The AI of the squadmates is generally pretty good, but there are sometimes instances where they’ll throw a grenade at a weird angle, or get shotgunned in the face because something about the situation wasn’t checking the boxes for their rules of engagement. More often than not, however, I think the game is well-designed enough that my failings were often my own stupid fault, because I wasn’t patient, didn’t give great orders to the squad, or straight-up missed an important shot. I’d like to think I figured stuff out over the course of my playthrough (hey, you should probably maybe definitely consider wedging doors shut so people can’t get around you) but I managed to slop my way through on Normal difficulty surprisingly well, sometimes accidentally shooting people when I wasn’t supposed to, or watching as my AI squadmates all bit the dust. I can’t imagine getting anywhere on Impossible (where the required score to pass is 95/100) but the original Rainbow Six this is not. I played like half an hour of that thing out of curiosity and I think it might be a tad too old and intentionally inaccessible for me to want to put any more time into it.

By contrast, I think anyone interested should give SWAT 4 a shot. While I don’t have a ton of interest in the entirely unsurprising “improved realism” mods or jumping through half a dozen hoops to play cooperative multiplayer, it’s one of the more novel and exciting things I’ve played this year (which is as much an indictment of how I feel about some of 2018’s hottest releases as it is a reflection of my own weird playing habits.) Honestly, it feels like I would’ve written a blog about this game 5 or 6 years ago if it was legally available back then, though that might just be the Looking Glass-adjacent nature of the whole thing.

*Just a little tangent, but I think “graffiti as environmental storytelling” is one of those things that I find super corny now. I’ll continue to accept, if sort of smirk at, convenient diaries and audiologs with door codes because video games aren’t made of infinite money, but for whatever reason I find the idea of some poor NPC writing ALL IS LOST in blood to be incredibly hokey and kind of hilarious.

Octopath Traveler

60+ hours and 8 completed stories later, I think it’s fair to say I enjoyed my time with Octopath Traveler. That’s probably not a surprise, given my preference toward mechanically dense RPGs is well-known, and there was a period in my life where I’d continually yell that Final Fantasy V was my favorite of the series. It’s why I found Bravely Default as frustrating as I did, because that game was halfway to being the modernized 16 bit RPG successor people wanted. If it had characters who weren’t obnoxious or one-note and didn’t give up around the 2/3rds mark, it probably would’ve been one of my favorite games of the last few years (Bravely Second kinda flew under my radar, and I never got around to playing it.) While I’m not entirely sure on the connection to the Bravely Default team, (I know there was some involvement from them on the Square-Enix side, but the bulk of actual development work was done by (some of) the people responsible for that vampire stripping game) but in a lot of ways Octopath Traveler feels like the modern FF V throwback that I wanted Bravely Default to be, though in other ways it’s… more complicated.

First off, if I haven’t made it evident already, I’m an absolute sucker for in-depth turn-based combat and flexible character building options. With the boost system resembling a less esoteric take on Bravely Default’s turn counting shenanigans, Shin Megami Tensei-esque weakness exploitation, and just a dash of class changing, it’s fair to say that the mechanics and combat in Octopath intersect with all of my Japanese RPG venn diagrams. I wouldn’t call it especially tough, at least if you know what you’re doing, but it’s involved enough that you can’t expect to randomly boost or attack and come out okay. The downside of that is sometimes even mundane random encounters can be a little on the long side, though I’m all for the boss fights being as long and demanding as they are.

Even in the context of it being an intentionally old-school JRPG, Octopath is still a weird game to talk about. Beyond aforementioned turn-based combat, random encounters, etc, I think any given person’s enjoyment of it is almost entirely going to hinge around what they think of its unorthodox structure. While I know the concept of multiple separate stories in a JRPG isn’t a new thing (there are a surprising number of games with a similar idea, but most of them are Japan-only Super Famicom releases) it’s certainly not common. As someone who is occasionally fatigued with the way a lot of RPGs, Western or Japanese, are plotted, I’m very much into the concept of telling a bunch of smaller, more personal stories with lower stakes than your average “save the world from an ancient evil” tale. In practice, I found Octopath’s eight stories to range wildly in quality. While I’d call the prose encompassing all of them to be well-written, or at least well-localized (i.e. tone and characterization are conveyed well, though someone got way too carried away with H’aanit’s Middle English) it’s all in service to earnest, simple stories. I’d say that worked for me half the time, but the other half of the time I was alternating between rolling my eyes at overdone, obvious cliches and tropes (the number of mustache twirling villains who literally go “WAHAHAHAHAHA” is too much) and making depressingly accurate predictions about how any given story was going to proceed. Tressa’s story might as well end with someone saying “The real treasures were the friends we made along the way!” and I think that just about killed me. It probably doesn’t help that I think her VA is trying a little too hard, though I’d say the general quality of the English voice acting is decent, if not outstanding.

I’m of two minds in regards to how Octopath Traveler splits up and structures those eight stories. On one hand, I respect the uncompromising vision of everything being entirely disconnected. One could theoretically play through all four chapters of a single character’s story without ever picking up anyone else. It would be tedious, grindy, and not at all fun, but like fighting Ganon immediately after getting off the plateau in Breath of the Wild, it’s possible. Alongside the way you can perform everyone’s “path action” on almost every NPC, it ties everything together in a systemic, sandbox-y way which fits with the whole diorama aesthetic they have going on.

On the other hand… I kind of do wish they compromised the entirely open structure for the sake of a more interesting story. That would've led to a different game, with different design decisions along the way, but you know how practically everyone who’s played this game has complained about how little the main characters actually interact with each other? I also have that problem! While you do eventually get party banter once everyone’s chapter 2 starts to roll around, that could be a dozen hours into the game, which makes going through all of the chapter 1s a surreal, disconnected experience, especially if you play through multiple of them in one sitting. You need to do some weird party swapping shenanigans if you want to see all of them, and you don’t even start getting conversations with more than two characters until you finish someone’s chapter 4. The conversations themselves are usually charming, and come off like more contextual Fire Emblem supports or Tales skits, but I wouldn’t say any of them are revelatory.

How much that bothers you is going to be a very subjective thing, though for my part it was hardly a deal breaker. For all my talk of involved combat and inconsistent story quality, I think one of my favorite things about Octopath Traveler is how chill it is. I don’t see the repetitive nature of each chapter (around 15 minutes of story, basic dungeon crawl, boss, story, repeat) as a downside, and it works well in short bursts or marathon sessions with as much exploration and side quests as you want in-between. Despite claims to the contrary, I got enough experience just fighting most of the battles I came across and didn’t need to grind all that much outside of specific optional boss fights and the post-game. It doesn’t hurt that it’s really pretty to look at, and the soundtrack is easily my favorite of the year. I’m trying to drift away from saying “It isn’t for everyone” when I talk about anything encompassed by my eclectic weirdo tastes, because that should be self-evident. Instead, I’m going to say that Octopath Traveler actually worked really well for me in spite of quirks and problems others seem to take greater issue with. It’s pretty good! Maybe you should play it!

Random Endorsement

So, originally I was going to finish this blog last Friday but that endeavor was immediately flushed down the toilet by my discovery of various Doom source ports and mods, specifically Brutal Doom, a mod that indulges in the violent, gory, and stupid parts of the original games and amplifies them exponentially. I know it’s been floating around for a while, but I didn’t own Doom on PC until… like 3 days ago, and in the time since I started writing the Octopath Traveler section and the time I finished it, I beat all 4 episodes of Doom 1 in brutal fashion. I don’t know if I need to do the same for Doom 2 (I think I’d rather play that for the first time in a semi-unmodified capacity) but if you have the means and inclination, you should at least give Brutal Doom a look. It's worth at least 15 minutes for a laugh, while still being an entirely viable excuse to replay Doom again if you are willing to put in the time.