MezZa's Top 10 Game of the Year 2020
Consolidating my favorite games of 2020 for GotY counting and all that good stuff.
List items
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I had a lot of debate in my head about whether I would be putting Ghost at the top of my list or Hades. Eventually, I decided on Ghost.
I waited until I had my PS5 to try playing this game and it paid off greatly. Seeing this game run at 60 fps has been a treat and just highlights how gorgeous this game can look.
Their use of the environment creates amazing spectacles more times that I can even count. Just running around feels like if I look off a cliff or over towards a forest I'm going to see a landscape that screams "photo me now". And if you told me that heavy use of wind effects and putting leaves and other wind swept effects everywhere would create such beautiful scenery I'd be skeptical, but here we are.
While this does feel mechanically like a fairly standard open world game as we would expect it today, I do enjoy how they tried the Breath of the Wild approach of guiding you to things intuitively as opposed to just slapping an icon and a GPS arrow to take you there. There are still plenty of icons on the map (nowhere near the level of like, Assassins Creed or Cyberpunk) and plenty of activities to do, but it never felt overwhelming or like I was bothered to go do them. The events felt intuitive enough, short enough, and beneficial enough that even if I was running to a main mission I'd stop the second I heard a fox or saw the golden bird directing me somewhere else.
The combat is fun if a bit mechanical in the way that you'll always switch to the stance that counters the guy you're up against. Combat isn't very inventive in challenging you to think outside the box, its more just asking you to understand what counters what. Which is fine. In the end it makes for a fun fight scene even if it isn't treading new ground.
One of the strengths of the game comes from its use of the setting and the strength of its atmosphere. The music hits home and hones in the scenes from peacefully riding through a rice field to charging a beach horseback with your fellow samurai. This has been one of the OSTs that I've been playing often on Spotify just to have some background music while working at home and whatnot.
What I wasn't expecting was to like the characters as much as I did. Don't get me wrong, they aren't telling an intricately woven story or anything like that. But my time spent with them endeared me to them. It was another case where I just liked doing the side missions. I sought them out pretty often over the main story beats. Not because I felt that I had to in order to unlock something or earn some reward, but because I wanted to see what happened next.
If I had to give the game one knock against it, it'd be that I'd be interested in seeing what story they could tell if they really honed in more on the conflict that Jin is supposed to be experiencing throughout the story. He's been taught his entire life a code of honor and yet is walking a path that breaks that code out of necessity. We see him switch from "I'd never do that" to "its how we must fight the mongols" but we don't really see him personally struggle with it or even the more honorable npcs care that much outside of warning him not to stray from the path of the samurai.
Part of me feels like there could be more there and that the duality of these two parts of Jin's struggle against the mongols could have been explored better. It feels as if this was the intended to be the crux of the games story, but then they just scratch the surface of it and call it good.
On the other hand, I am grateful that they don't hamper the gameplay or penalize you overtly for breaking the samurai's honor or anything like that. If I want to run around stabbing guys in the shadows I can do that and succeed even if I'm running around with an npc that's telling me not to become a monster.
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This year Hades was one of two games that managed to absolutely capture my attention and felt like a joy every time I picked up my switch to play it. I'm usually not into roguelikes or I don't pay much attention to them, but Hades is a game that has me thinking that maybe I do like roguelikes.
The most unique parts of this game for me are the characterization, artwork, story telling technique, and music. Don't get me wrong, the gameplay is fun and truly shines. But if it were the only thing worth writing home about I don't know that I'd be as hooked.
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I'm trying to avoid harping too much on what a crazy year 2020 had been because I think we all know and understand that at this point, but I do have to mention that Animal Crossing New Horizons felt like a breath of fresh air at a time when it quickly became sorely needed.
Island life with the animal crossing folk never felt more relaxing and therapeutic.
They make a lot of smart changes to the formula with this game, but its not without its faults. I enjoy the terraforming aspect of the game a lot and a lot of the quality of life features they've added. But I've found myself disliking the crafting system overall for what it has done to the overall feel of the game as well as disliking just how shallow the game can be on some of the most charming aspects, those being the guests/store owners/event npcs.
Its crazy to me that we're almost one year our from this game and we have major characters nowhere in this game. It almost feels like content has been held back to give them the ability to release new feature in year 2 once we've all seen the holiday events in year 1. I'm fully expecting that while we're all seeing repeats of cherry blossoms and bunny day they'll be advertising the return of The Roost or something as the big content update of the month. And I'm not sure how I feel about that considering past games just had that stuff in it to begin with.
My other criticism here is that crafting has made the furniture system feel soul-less. There are a lot of missing furniture sets from past games and a lot of the most unique and "fun" furniture pieces aren't around. The emphasis is heavily on realistic furniture that you can either craft or would expect to see in a high end furniture store (instead being sold here at Nooks for big money). Part of the fun of animal crossing was seeing the store each day. In this game it feels like I'm always expecting repeats of the same couple dozen furniture pieces and am never proven wrong. It feels like the game is telling me "I don't know, man, go craft something instead" when I walk into Nooks.
To be honest, if this game didn't have terraforming and the quality of life chances I don't know that I'd enjoy it as much. But it does, and I do get a lot of enjoyment out of it for those factors. It makes me hope that maybe we'll see some return to form while still keeping the best parts of New Horizons.
Ultimately, while I feel like while New Horizons has been a great gaming experience, I wouldn't say its better than New Leaf definitively. It feels like a situation where I want to keep both games around to satisfy different needs.
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Ah, here's my other technically allowed pick. Royal released this year as an enhanced version with additional content on top of an already great game. Honestly I could throw this at the top of my list as number 1 and I wouldn't really be lying. I love Persona 5, enough so that my wife and I built up a Joker and Violet cosplay for halloween this year just for funsies.
But I do want to be fair to other amazing games that came out this year, so I've weighed it a little less heavily given its status as a re-release rather than a fully new release.
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I've played each of the "Until Dawn" style of choose your own adventure/horror games that this developer has putout and I'd put Little Hope as my second favorite of the three. With Until Dawn being number one. I typically play these as a Halloween game around October with friends or with my wife. Although she's made the habit of just watching as actually being in control of the control is too scary.
I really enjoyed the story in this one and while the mystery doesn't lend itself to being fully supernatural as it was with Until Dawn, it felt more satisfying to see what was really going on than it did in Man of Medan.
With Man of Medan I was left kind of frustrated that the situation was so easy to solve and that the stakes were so easily explained. The only real difficulty of Man of Medan to me was that the quick time events felt like they turned the difficulty up to 11 making it incredibly likely for me to kill a character with a missed button rather than a misguided character decision.
With Little Hope, I felt like I had control and as long as I was digging into the mystery I felt like I could keep everybody alive during the tense action moments. I never felt like the scene cheated me with an impossibly fast button prompt or anything of the sort. It also didn't have as many "you died, but psych you didn't!" as Man of Medan did. Likely due to the overall cause of the story.
I guess, what I'm saying, is that Little Hope feels like a rise back to a peak that Until Dawn hit while Man of Medan felt more like a valley to me.
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Monster Hunter: World Iceborne hits that "technically it can be on my list" range because the PC version released this year and I did play a lot on PC. Enough to run a character through the base game and expansion despite already having a good save file on the ps4.
Monster Hunter World has been my go to loot game since its release. If I'm feeling that itch, it scratches it. And it does so while providing a gorgeous world and challenging monsters to fight. I really look forward to seeing what the team does for the next "World" styled release, whatever that may be.
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Mastery of Nioh 2 still evades me, and one day I hope to fully get there. It's a mechanically dense game and I love the loot elements that come meshed in with it. I can play well enough to get by luckily, but one thing that I love about this game is that it brings a unique challenge that feels different from something like a Bloodborne or a Dark Souls. Or a Sekiro if you want to make a comparison with a similar aesthetic at the least.
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I don't have a ton to say about Spiderman Miles Morales other than its a great open world game that helps you capture the feeling of being Spiderman, which is pretty great as it is. Its nice that it feels like a more condensed experience of the previous Spiderman and has a lot of the fat cut out so that you can get straight to the good stuff.
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The remaster provides me with an opportunity to play the one From Souls game I never played at its launch. And I'd say it still holds up very well. It doesn't climb to the top as my favorite From game, that title still belongs to Bloodborne, but it does well to make you remember its existence after a lot of people jumped into the style of game with Dark Souls.
With that in mind, it does still show its age at times. The combat feels even more stiff than one might expect from the style, and variety is somewhat lacking. But that's understandable considering that a number of From games have now built on this game so there are bound to be things that feel lessened here.
It is still a great game and graphically it looks awesome on the PS5. It feels like one that is a good game to have out in the relatively quiet launch window, as I may not have prioritized it as highly to play if there were a lot of other games competing for my attention.
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Astro's Playroom doesn't only represent just the game itself to me, but the moment of getting a PS5 when I was losing hope that I'd be able to find one this year. Don't get me wrong, I was ultimately fine with waiting, but I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't extremely anxious to see that PS direct shipment arrive at my door after a few days of hitting that queue.
Astro's Playroom feels like the perfect introduction to the console in a way that I haven't experienced with Sony before. It feels like the kind of pack-in I'd expect from Nintendo. It has a very wii-sports vibe of effectively showing off what kinds of things they expect this controller to be able to enable for your games in the future. And it does so in a charming and fun way that also manages to pay some love to past franchises and PlayStation history.
Its not a long experience, but its free and its fun. Definitely worth checking out after booting up the PS5 for the first time.
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