Everybody's favorite time of the year. That time in which one tries to finish all the games you can within the last 2 weeks of the year to compile the best Top 10 (with some honorable mentions) list one can possibly hope to make. Here we go...
I've been playing Zelda games since I first learned to tie my shoes and I can say without a shadow of a doubt, Breath of the Wild is the single greatest Zelda game I've ever played.
What I find so captivating about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is how it manages to be such an incredible amalgamation of nostalgia and modernity. It has all the trappings of earlier Zelda games; Link/Zelda/Ganon strife, familiar races (Deku, Gorons, Zoras, etc), and some classic tunes to whisk you away to when you were a kid exploring Hyrule in previous games. But the way Nintendo was able to seamlessly add this to modern day open world mechanics such as climbing for map synchronization, rogue-like elements, and fast travel (fast travel!!!) is nothing short of incredible.
Now that I'm done waxing poetic, I really just need to stress how much I've enjoyed playing through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. There's always another discovery to make or another secret to unravel. The game's puzzles are fantastic (although the motion control shrines are a nightmare) and the humor abounds in spades.
Anyway you slice or dice it, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was my favorite game of the year and I believe it has surpassed all previous entries in the pantheon of Zelda games.
I haven't played as much of this game as others but I've become obsessed with it just the same. I've never played a game that has made me more paranoid than PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. From start to finish, I'm constantly anxious about when I'm going to encounter someone else. It's not a matter of if but when the shit's gonna pop off.
The script is usually the same, spend the first 5-10 minutes scrounging for whatever resources you can muster and then spending the next 30-45 minutes running like hell from the blue circle of death or trying to murder anybody you come across and doing your utmost to make sure nobody murders you. Rinse and repeat. The open-ended nature of how these scenarios play out is the real star of the show.
This has also been a great game to play with my friends. I've always found cooperative games to be the best games to play with friends and this here is a game that requires constant communication as exemplified on the Murder Island features this year (speaking of, they were the best GB content all year).
I'm glad the game finally came out this year too, so I don't feel guilty about putting an unfinished product on my list. I've yet to win a chicken dinner, but I've been second at least 2-3 times.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is a nail-biting masterpiece and deserving of all the fame and recognition it has received from the gaming community.
I started and stopped paying NieR: Automata three or four times before really getting into it. In the early goings, the constant backtracking involved with completing side quests and relatively easy combat didn't really do much to grab me.
But after completing the game the first time and starting my 2nd playthrough, I had really come to enjoy the story and the interactions between 2B and 9S. By the time I had started my third playthrough, I was enthralled and couldn't wait to see the story through. The story wasn't the only hook either; NieR: Automata does things I have never seen other games do before.
The moment in the 2nd playthrough when you see the options set up from 9s's perspective and realize the game recorded your every input, assuming control of A2 for the first time, buying every achievement with in game currency, all 26 endings, and of course that last and final ending.
What a fantastic experience.
When I saw the first trailer for Horizon: Zero Dawn at E3 2015 I was pleasantly surprised. That surprise then turned to skepticism when I looked back at Guerilla Games track record (not that it was too bad, Killzone 2 and 3 were very well-made games). But after I finished the opening area and fought my first Sawtooth I was hooked. And it didn't just stop there. I found myself extremely engaged with both the state of the robot-run world and the politics of the back-asswards tribes that inhabit it.
To also be able to see this gorgeous world (best looking game of 2017) through Aloy's eyes is what really makes the story-telling so effective. She reminds me quite a bit of Geralt from The Witcher in that no matter who she's speaking to, she's always the smartest one in the room. The amount of close-minded, superstitious bozos she has to suffer throughout her journey is mind boggling.
The game underneath all of this intrigue is just as enthralling. Some of the enemies in this game are the coolest designed creatures I've ever encountered in a video game. The side-quest in which you fight Redmaw in particular was the best quest I played in any game this year. The strategic dismemberment of each type of machine's components goes a long way in making combat encounters feel unique and fresh along with the numerous abilities Aloy gains throughout her adventure as well.
I feel like this game was overlooked by some due to the impending release of the Switch and Zelda the next week and I can't help but feel sorry for those people because they missed out on the coolest Sony IP in decades. First game I S ranked in years.
The Evil Within 1 has to be the worst game I've played in recent memory. I picked it up in a Steam sale after being intrigued by what I had seen in press coverage of The Evil Within 2, and partly due to my love affair with Resident Evil 4, I felt compelled to see its heir apparent through to the end. But by then I had put up with the boring ass combat and incomprehensible story for 25 hours more than I should have. The only saving grace of that game was the DLC in which you finally received what sort of served as answers to earlier questions at the end of the base game.
Then I started playing The Evil Within 2 and realized this was the most incredible 180 turn for a game series I've ever seen.
Within the opening hour, The Evil Within 2 had sucked me in. And things only got better once I reached the open areas in Union. The situations I found myself in were always dynamic and dictated by what few resources I had left from previous encounters with the horrible denizens of STEM. And on top of that, the game was a completely different genre of game each chapter. One chapter was an open world RPG with side quests, the next chapter is a linear action sequence, the next one is a first-person shooter, etc. The Evil Within 2 always has a surprise up its sleeve for the player and isn't afraid to subvert all of their expectations. The enemies are much more agile than you'd expect and you can find yourself completely S.O.L. if you're not paying attention.
What a turnaround. This is RE4's true heir apparent.
In some ways I find Persona 5 to be pretty underwhelming. I think the plot is a bit convoluted (even for a Persona game), there are less interesting party characters than Persona 4, and a waaaay less memorable soundtrack than Persona 4 too. That said, this is still a damn good Persona game and the best JRPG I've played since Persona 4.
I really enjoyed the aesthetic changes made to the UI in Persona 5 and thought the environments felt a lot more varied than in previous games. It was great to finally see all of the persona models in 1080p for the first time too.
And as much as I feel the characters and story are a bit underwhelming compared to its predecessor, the overall experience of building social links has and always will be the highlight of this franchise, with the Temperance and Death arcana being my favorite. Sadayo Kawakami is bae.
I spent around 120 hours with Persona 5 and feel like I got just as much Persona I could have wanted. Here's hoping Persona 6 continues to propagate this cult-series's indelible legacy.
Talk about a come back.
I played so much Resident Evil 4 on the PS2 I'm pretty sure my game disc broke at one point and I had to go buy another. I then played Resident Evil 5 and found myself bored with if after a solid hour. I then played the Resident Evil 6 demo when it came out and felt like the franchise had been modern-day-Capcomed to irrelevance.
In its earliest press footage I found myself a bit upset with Resident Evil 7 because it looked like a deliberate rip of P.T. (not knowing the level designer for both was done by the same person until a few minutes ago), but after playing the demo for RE7 I was hooked.
Resident Evil 7 combines what made RE1 and RE4 so spectacular. The numerous puzzles and backtracking through previously cleared areas to find far worse things waiting for you in RE1 and the adrenaline-inducing boss battles and combat of RE4. I enjoyed this game so much I bought the DLC for both PC and PS4. The only real criticism I could direct at the game is how janky some of the boss battles can be (Daddy Jack I'm looking at you) and the back 3rd of the game is a confusing slog through a boat and a mine which seems completely out of place with the earlier mansion/torture-room sequences. I loved how steadily the game runs at 60 fps and I can't wait to play it using a VR setup once I find the moolah.
I'd really like to take a moment and commend Capcom for creating what might be the best game they've had to offer in almost a decade. Long may this trend continue.
What a ride. What a zany, hilarious, terrifying ride.
I enjoyed my time with Wolfenstein: The New Order but I never thought that the game was all that. I enjoyed the world it had built (if only from a pure entertainment perspective, not the Nazi run planet Earth) and thought it had assembled a very interesting consortium of characters in the Kreisau Circle. I just though the underlying game mechanics and aesthetic choices were a bit too humdrum.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is the very antithesis of humdrum. I'd need more than two hands to count all the holy shit moments that are present within the game. My favorite involving the death and resurrection of a certain American "terrorist". Wolfenstein II is a bonafide roller coaster, and the new id Tech 6 engine does miracles for this game.
That said, I feel like this game wasn't actually finished or was rushed to release. The last 2/3 of the story feels rather abrupt and leaves a lot of things left in the air. What happens now being the biggest among them? I guess we'll have to wait for a 3rd game to find out. I can't see them not developing a third at this point.
Quick shout out to Frau Engel for being the craziest character I've ever seen in a video game. I would have loved to have had a better fight with her at the end.
There's not really much to say about Typeshift. You more or less just move letters around until you finally create a word. The easier puzzles can be solved within a minute and those are great for stroking one's ego.
But the 7-letter puzzles are what separates the wannabe linguists from the doctorates of English literature. You can move letters around all day and not find a correct permutation if you don't concentrate and use the appropriate lexical rules/patterns.
Anytime I was bored this year, Typeshift had my back with both daily challenges and insanely difficult puzzles to occupy my time.
I've never really been a big fan of Metroidvanias (not a fan of the term either), but Hollow Knight is easily the most polished entry in the genre in the past century.
Hollow Knight is a very lonely/somber game. That's not to say you're all alone, because there are numerous other NPC's with quests of their own, but from the word go, you're thrust into this beautiful 2D world to explore at your own leisure with little to no abilities other than a weak needle sword and the ability to jump against crazed monsters in some of the nastiest environments one could think of. However, as you gain more abilities and make new and unique friends, the game opens up quite considerably.
The combat is really just sort of modern-day Ducktales with an emphasis on trial and error like the Souls series (you even lose experience/money like the Souls games too). But once you've acquired a respectable amount of equipment, you're free to approach each skirmish in a variety of ways. The boss bottles are brutal at times hearkening back to NES days of repetition and pixel perfect precision.
Hollow Knight is nothing if not a deliberate game. It will try your patience and frustrate you to no end. Yet, through all this, it manages to capture everything you'd want in a 2D-Platformer while also adding it's own magnificently macabre thumbprint on the genre.
I had never played a Yakuza game before playing Yakuza 0 this year and I really don't know why that is. This game feels like what Shenmue could/should have been when it came out for the Sega Dreamcast.
The main story is extremely serious in tone but the rest of the game manages to be hilariously endearing. The side stories consistently had me in stitches from laughter (some of the phone-sex quests were outrageously hilarious) and exploring the two districts was half of the fun. I loved the late 80's vibe, from nightclubs with cameos from the King of Pop to Sega arcades with Outrun and Space Harrier, I always found myself ignoring the main story to see what else I could do before moving on to the next chapter.
The only caveat I have about this game is how archaic it feels from a technical standpoint. I really dislike how bland the combat is, even with the 3 different styles per character as the basic rush style always seems to be the best choice for each scenario. I'm pretty sure some of the textures used in this game might have been assets from the original Shenmue on the Dreamcast as well.
I don't know that I can play a new Yakuza game every year, but with all the remakes coming down the pipeline, I'll have plenty of opportunities to do so.
I haven't played a Pro-Evo game since the series was called Winning Eleven. I had just been content to keep playing games in the FIFA series since EA had the license for mostly every team in the world.
But after being severely underwhelmed by FIFA 18 this year, I finally decided to see what was going on on the other side of the playground.
What's that? A much better soccer game? Ohhhh yeah.
Pro-Evo might not have all the bells and whistles of the FIFA series, but the game is light years ahead of FIFA in terms of playability. I slept on this series for far too long. I just hope that other FIFA players with their head in the sand take a chance as well.
