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GOTY 2021

Better late than never, right? Many of the below were added in the eleventh hour (well, technically the thirteenth hour, also known as January 2022) but I figured I needed a top ten for my records. After all, I've been doing these Best Of Year lists for, what, twelve years straight now? For deeper dives on most of the following, be sure to check the 2021 edition of Go! Go! GOTY! by clicking the links in the bottom table.

Anyway, here are the top ten games out of the ten games I played from 2021 (it was so brutal cutting this list down, lemme tell ya):

List items

  • To no surprise to myself at least, my favorite active RPG franchise from my favorite RPG developer put out a banger in 2021. Monstrum Nox builds upon many of the mechanics introduced in Ys Seven (a three-member party with different weapon "types" that are important for exploiting enemy weaknesses) and Ys: Memories of Celceta (creating a huge open world and encouraging its thorough exploration with milestone rewards) with a few innovations of its own, particularly a more superhero "open-world-y" set of traversal upgrades where you can run up the sides of buildings and teleport around for all the valuables people inexplicably keep on their rooftops - these mechanics are also incorporated into dungeons, creating dynamic environments with a lot of verticality and platforming to them. Subsequently, the massive prison city of Balduq has been a joy to explore as it is incrementally unveiled as the game progresses, and though the game world looks to be smaller than Ys VIII's overall it makes its content a bit more rationally compact and lived-in to compensate.

    Another factor adding to my enjoyment is something I probably should've done earlier in the series: played the game on a much higher difficulty setting. On the Nightmare setting, which is still somehow only the third highest, I have to be very careful of those larger, telegraphed enemy attacks and not just mash away haphazardly, and it's adding so much more to the boss fights: I actually have to pay attention to patterns and utilize my team as best as I am able, ensuring to fill up on limited-use curatives every opportunity I get. The game is, fortunately, extremely accommodating when it comes to this and other conveniences: you can warp back to town for healing at almost any point, can restart from the beginning of boss fights and most of the regular tougher encounters, and your home base - the bar Dandelion - fills up with super useful NPC services almost immediately. There's also the OP Flash Move and Flash Guard returning from Ys VIII, both of which make the higher difficulties considerably more manageable provided you can regularly get the timing down on them.

    The game's one downside is its renewed focus on the tower defense battles from Ys VIII, now necessary for unlocking new areas of the overworld map, but device upgrades can mitigate some of its annoyances and it's less to do with strategically placing shit than it is killing everything as quickly as possible, which is already 80% of what the Ys experience entails. That other 20% is jamming out to the soundtrack, and I'm happy to say that Ys IX's OST is very good - as expected of Falcom - if not quite reaching the same heights as Ys VIII or Ys: The Oath in Felghana. When I eventually dig deeper into the myriad delights of 2021 I'm not sure Ys IX will necessarily hang in the pole position forever, since it is a little weaker than its immediate predecessor, but if we're picking the game I had the most fun with from that year then Ys IX is easily leading the pack so far.

  • I can't say I have too much experience with Bandai-Namco's various RPG-adjacent anime adaptations for Naruto and One Piece, but I half-wonder if they contributed as much to this game's combat feel as its more obvious inspirations: their own bespoke RPG franchise Tales and Remedy's Control (and Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy before that). Running around a world dilapidated by a mostly unexplained cosmic event that created and continues to create an endless number of bizarre mutant creatures called Others, the protagonist protects themselves and their team with their prodigious psychic talents, using their own telekinesis to slam debris around or borrowing their companions' various other psychic abilities in short bursts, tying them all together in elaborate chains meant to keep the enemy occupied and unable to retaliate. The last part of that run-on sentence is where the game hews closest to Tales, being that its combo-heavy LMB System starts not-so-simple and continues to complicate itself, but the visceral act of stopping a rampaging monster in its tracks by hurling a bus at it is a step above the regular flashy spell effects and katana flourishes, and thus never loses its sheen.

    Despite an interesting premise the story and characters are as generic as they come, with an oddly perfunctory emotional frankness to the various social-link-esque scenes where everyone always states how they're feeling in any given moment, and the game fruitlessly brings back the dual protagonist idea from Tales of Xillia where you need to see both routes to get the full story even though a considerable portion of them overlap. The game is ultimately one that rewards you more the more you invest in it, whether that's trying to get to grips with all its proper nouns or taking full advantage of the half-dozen anime fighter gauges and techniques it tosses your way: mashing your way through every fight and every cutscene alike is just going to lead to a disappointing time. I can always be down for an unnecessarily complicated RPG if it makes it worth my while, and Scarlet Nexus just about delivers.

  • Reports suggest that 2021 was a very strong year for the humble explormer, and while Ender Lilies has an incredible sense of atmosphere and style I'm curious how well it'll hold up against some its contemporaries once I get around to them. One downside to trying to shine in an overabundant market is being forced to innovate, and that's difficult when you're invoking an older format with very codified rules and mechanics. Ender Lilies does its best to bridge a gap between the deliberate combat of a Souls game (not to mention the general presentation and tone of same) with the versatile soul system of Aria of Sorrow (and its successors Order of Ecclesia and more recently Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night) which allows for a great number of synergistic unisons of primary and sub-skills, each obtained from fallen foes. Ender Lilies is also very generous with its explormer-focused aspects, eliminating the corpse run mechanic, adding universal fast travel, and adapting the newer Resident Evil games' map system where rooms are highlighted if you still have items to find in there as well as clearly marking exits that have yet to be, well, exited.

    Ultimately, Ender Lilies is a very attractive amalgam of several exploration-heavy games of recent years but nothing wholly distinct in and of itself. It plays well enough and despite its many boons I still found myself running into trouble with its challenging boss fights, many of which had multiple stages to contend with, and I still derived plenty of joy exploring its environments and backtracking with the right upgrades to bulk myself up for the travails ahead as well as find those tantalizing snippets of lore that elaborates more on the kingdom setting's tragic and sudden demise due to an enigmatic ancient "blight." It can be a bit drab and sullen, given its desaturated color scheme and weepy story beats, though I suppose you get what you pay for with an acolyte of the Church of Soulslikes.

  • I've grown less fond of the grind of run-based games as I edge ever closer to my own permadeath, but an occasional highlight breaks through my resistance to impress me with its clever notions. Loop Hero was that for me, taking the simple premise of an idle game where combat and exploration is automatic and the player's involvement instead boils down to complicating that cyclical path and micromanaging their equipment loadout in ways that are ideally fruitful for the little hero marching around in circles. Placing monster spawners for higher XP yields per cycle, placing resource cards to generate goods, figuring out ways cards can interact with one another for potential gains (or once-off "OK, not doing that again" undesirable mutants) injects a lot of life into what might be an overly repetitive structure, as does having those same resources contribute to some permanent boosts which makes all subsequent runs that much more successful. Or rather, that much more likely to be successful, as luck still plays a major role in any expedition.

    I even turned around on its graphics eventually. It has a sort of grainy early DOS/PC98 quality to its various tile and monster designs and it has some gnarly atmospheric Gravis Ultrasound music that starts to pick up once the boss eventually summons itself and ensures the current loop may well be the last, one way or the other. It's not a presentational style I see invoked too often and reminded me of that mucky vector look of Return of the Obra Dinn, if not in the sense that they resemble one another but that they both invoke a fairly obscure antiquated visual style based on older PCs. I usually despair of the preponderance of procgen "roguelites" in the Indie sphere as an excuse to avoid the lengthy development time added by well-considered level design, but it's evident that Loop Hero put a lot of thought into other aspects of its design to compensate.

  • Deltarune Chapter 1 and its stealth launch felt like something of a nebulous surprise: a fleeting notion Undertale creator Toby Fox decided to turn into reality on an apparent whim, rather than something that would eventually coalesce into a solid successor for one of the more beloved RPGs of recent years. With Chapter 2, for better or worse, you have a clearer vision Fox has for Deltarune going forward with its many iterative chapters yet to transpire. As "Lightners" Kris and Susie, so named for being part of the normal or "light" world, with their Darkner buddy Ralsei, the game aims to explore a series of themed Dark Worlds built around rooms found around the otherwise normal everytown in which Kris and Susie live. The second chapter in particular moves from the chessboard/cards toy theme of the first to a "cyber"-themed world of computers and the internet, introducing characters like the mercurial antagonist Queen - fond of tossing down wineglasses full of battery acid - and the troubled mercantile whiz Spamton.

    Its combat system continues to see improvements also, adapting Undertale's reflexes-intensive bullet hell evasion into a more traditional party-based RPG system and adding the ability for your companions to also "act": ideal for those trying to avoid solving conflicts through violence alone. The next installment sounds to be a ways off, as Fox and the development team he's hired intend to publish the next three chapters in one fell swoop, but even as standalone products the first two chapters of Deltarune have the same humor, empathy, and quality music as its predecessor ready to win you over if you were one of the many touched by Undertale's charms. Plus, they're completely free and available on everything, so there's no impediment to enjoying them at present.

  • Tiny Lands belongs to a small but growing subset of puzzle and casual games that look to take something that has existed in pen-and-paper form for decades and find ways that the video game medium alone can enhance them. With Tiny Lands, that's taking the "Spot the Difference" puzzles that often pepper the kids' section of local newspapers and adapting them into lush 3D dioramas that the player can explore from every nook and cranny with the camera. Sometimes this is necessary, as the two items that are different may well be hidden behind a wall or inside an open container. Owing to its status as a casual game, Tiny Lands has a very calming vibe to its presentation and does all it can to make the frustrating process of scanning the image closely for that one final pair of differences as amenable as possible. As with Hidden Folks, the strength of puzzle games like this is gently subsuming the player in good time vibes as they unhurriedly take in attractive, busy scenes for specific targets, and there are some stressful days (especially of late) where that change of pace is welcome. (I suspect the same will be true of Unpacking, which I'm hoping to play soon.)

  • I'm not about to jump on this Super Auto Pets fad, but Luck Be a Landlord gave me a small taste of the tactical gambling aspect inherent to games of that very specific type. The goal of Luck Be a Landlord is, naturally, to pay your exorbitant rental fees as they continue to balloon month after month. This particular apartment complex installs slot machines in every unit however, allowing you to gamble your way to enough cash to pay off the vulture standing outside your door ready to hammer up an eviction notice. The slot machine pays out more based on what symbols you have, with new ones unlocked after every spin, but the goal isn't to go all in on the high earners but figure out the ways that symbols interact with one another should they appear together and finding the best combos from those synergies, excising the less lucrative chaff as you go. With many symbols and synergies to discover, and more being added with every content update, the game has some legs to it and may well be the sort of thing to capture your attention for weeks on end. I was happy with my singular successful attempt to not become homeless, but I can certainly picture a less busy time of my life taken up with pulling that lever all day every day like an old lady vacationing in Vegas.

  • StarBoy has a single gimmick and pursues it as far as it will go in this bite-sized monochromatic platformer released on Itch.io, and is subsequently a wisp of a 2D platformer compared to many others released that year. I didn't play those, though. Fortunately, StarBoy has some inventive ideas beyond using light as a temporary means to walk across thin air, finding as many avenues for this conceit as it can and taking elements from Celeste (the idea that you can only "bank" collectibles once you're standing on safe ground) and Gato Roboto (the whole black-and-white, crisp pixel aesthetic) to just about push it into full game status. Also, it was just cute and dinky and almost certainly destined to fall from 8th place to 50th once I get all caught up with all the year's offerings, and I just wanted to give it its underappreciated due here and now.

  • Melancholy games often put me in an odd mood, but after some distance I've come to appreciate the modest charms of No Longer Home a little more. An ode to leaving a relatively comfortable stage of one's life to enter the scary unknown next, No Longer Home is a semi-autobiographical tale of being a perennially broke creative in love with another one who must return to their home country for legal reasons, saying goodbye to their shared apartment and life in the process. At times lugubrious, introspective, grateful, and anxious, No Longer Home gives players time to absorb its lived-in environments until they're ready to move time forward closer to the eviction deadline. The game also knowingly incorporates some Kentucky Route Zero magical realism here and there: the game is heavily influenced by KR0, as evinced by its lo-fi cel-shaded polygonal presentation and a dialogue branching system that inexorably leads to the next scene regardless of the topic. It's a short, sweet, sad story about growing older and figuring out what you want from life, or at the very least realizing that nothing lasts forever.

  • Talking of laid-back games, Cloud Gardens is a neat little botanical puzzle sim about plants retaking the planet from its former human caretakers, all now mercifully extinct due to some unexplained mishap. Players take in these little diorama scenes and place seeds where they're most likely to thrive, encouraging them to bloom by tossing garbage at their approximate direction (which I'm sure is how it works). It's another game like Tiny Lands where the puzzle gameplay feels like the icing on the cake that is having all these intricate little scenes to poke around at and view from various angles, and the game uses these PS1-era polygonal graphics for its props and a contemporaneous N64-era fog to add a sense of atmosphere to these petite landscapes of ruin. I wasn't ready for the game's long haul - it's much longer than you'd expect - but I could appreciate the vibe it was going for, covering ugly ruined cars and trash with beautiful blooming plants of various genuses. If there was one silver lining to take away from 2021, it's that nature will probably survive all the awful stuff happening to us on a regular basis even if we won't.
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