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RoyalGhost

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My Game of the Year: 2020 (11 Games because I forgot about 1 until I read some other gotys)

I played a lot of video games this year. I played a lot of them last year too. I find myself growing less and less interested in playing the next big thing unless it's something I'm already invested in. I know where my interests lie and have regretted more of those big purchases in recent years than not. That’s not to say I’m free of big video games. I just have my flavour of them, I suppose. With that in mind, I’m going to talk just a little bit of shit about some games that came out this year. Sorry if you liked them, nothing against you. I promise you I love some games you think are absolute garbage. My top ten eleven games I played this year. Counting down from 10 11.

List items

  • 11. I liked this game more than a lot of people, and yet it still makes number 10 (11) more because I didn’t have something better to fit the position than because I feel very strongly about it. X-Com Chimera Squad is an interesting spin on the once new, now kind of standardized, X-Com tactics games. While in the last two X-Com games you were dropping a squad into a map and moving across it til you finish your objective, in Chimera Squad you are clearing maps between rounds where you breach to enter into new maps. It is turn based in the style of Final Fantasy X where you are looking at whose turn is next and responding accordingly. This conceit does a lot for me, as Final Fantasy X is one of my favourite games of all time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t keep its momentum. I think this game drags on just a bit too long as encounters start to feel wrote toward the end.

    This year, I also played X-Com 2: War of the Chosen for the first time. This was a good 6 months after Chimera Squad came out and wasn’t really influenced by that I just kind of settled on playing it. What Chimera Squad is missing, to supplement its length maybe is the depth of X-Com 2. Obviously it’s unreasonable to expect this experimental side game to have that depth but the difference between them became very stark to me. If this was a list of games I played this year and not released this year War of the Chosen might be number 1.

    That said it is doing interesting things. Pre-made characters for your squads with whole backstories and you built the squad as you went. You would end up with most of them eventually but your team dynamic would be mostly decided by then I think and it meant there was some variation in how anyone was playing it. I found the X-Com lore more interesting than I have before honestly and I think it did affect how closely I paid attention when I played X-Com 2. Overall I think this game is worth checking out, though I think if you are an X-Com purist you probably won’t like it. Lastly, unrelated to Chimera Squad but in a better world Dragon Ball Z Kakarot wouldn’t have been terrible and Ghost of Tsushima wouldn’t have been boring and they would be on this list somewhere instead. So congrats Chimera Squad.

  • 10. This game makes number 10 for two reasons. For one, I forgot about it when I was writing this list. I wrote a whole thing for X-Com Chimera Squad and that game is going to be number 11 because fuck it. The other is that while this game is cool It's also kind of shallow. Maybe Tony Hawk always was and our standards are just different now. It's still a cool game I had a lot of fun playing.

    See, my Tony Hawk game was a bit of 2 on the ps1, a lot of it on the gba and then straight to Tony Hawk 4. I played more Pro Skater 4 than any other Tony Hawk by a wide margin. I found myself missing the way it made free skate more interesting than 1 and 2 just kind of dropping you into the level and going for it. for two minutes

    Enough of that though this game is better than it has any right to be despite my weird feelings about which Tony Hawk game I played when I was a kid. It plays exactly how you remember it to with maybe a few minor differences that ultimately don't matter. It's not particularly buggy or janky feeling. The environments look really good, the soundtrack is solid and the new songs they picked fit in pretty seamlessly with the old tracks.

    All in all I had a good time with this game I just kind of wish there was more for me to do with it than chase high scores. It's a stark reminder of how different video games are today. It's been a fine year for remakes/remasters I think and Tony Hawk is definitely among the best of them.

  • 9. What can I say other than I found this game incredibly sweet and refreshing. The thing it most reminds me of is your artist friend’s two ocs they are always shipping together. It's just this very cute sci-fi story about a couple who found love and refuse to be paired off by "The Matchmaker" who runs the galaxy spanning empire that they lived in. But it's not a story about standing up to those forces. It doesn't believe that two people in love are going to change that, because realistically they just won't.

    This game is just as its name says, It's about a Haven. These two lovers crashed on this planet that had long been abandoned by a colonization effort. Here they can be truly alone and get to know each other. I am impressed by how frank and realistic the way their relationship is portrayed. They fight, laugh, they say corny shit you might say to your partner and laugh about, express fears and doubts and insecurities. They even get sexual without it ever feeling like it’s trying to be gross. It's a nice little slice of life I have not seen in many games.

    And that's not even touching on the gameplay which is not bad at all. It feels fun to glide around and clean up "rust". You can do very limited tricks when you go off jumps and fly on trails of light up into the sky or across shattered bits of this seemingly uninhabited planet you crashed on. The combat is probably my biggest complaint. It feels kind of clunky. It’s not very important so it’s not a huge deal but you can get caught in an annoying loop sometimes that just comes down to character animations not finishing and that never feels great in this kind of active turn battle thing. If nothing else it is an interesting spin on it where the left side of the controller controls one character and the right controls the other. What this amounts to is just holding left + circle or right + square etc. but I think it does what it’s going for.

    It is not very long, it is on gamepass and it is very pretty. I recommend checking this game out if you haven’t yet. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it.

  • 8. I wish that I had more games actually released this year that I felt strongly enough about to write a whole thing for. Sadly the video game hype machine was not for me this year. Between Ubisofts consistent dump of the same fucking games every year, Sony’s very pretentious first party I wasn’t sold on at the end of the PS3’s life either, Ghost of Tsushima being ultimately a disappointment from one of my favourite game studios, and Cyberpunk being CDPR, and my overall dislike for the Witcher 3 leaves me with no interest in playing it, especially with how busted it seems now that it’s out. If I had any money I might have played Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Demon’s Souls or Yakuza 7 and enjoyed them. But I don’t have any money and so they did not make this list.

    Instead I want to talk about a game that does, even beating out two other games! Rune Factory 4 Special is a remaster of a 3DS game from 2012 with some extra stuff. It’s probably the best of its type of game that I’ve ever played. Certainly better than any Harvest Moon I’ve played and honestly I enjoyed it even more than Stardew Valley. It blends a lot of rpg mechanics with the farming stuff and the world is like a big map you can travel across while delving into dungeons as you progress the story and collect monster friends to fill your party with. The writing is mostly some bog standard jrpg stuff but nothing really egregious about it either. Mostly it’s just cute and charming.

    Rune Factory 4 Special has a very satisfying loop where grinding is easy enough to not take too much effort and does not take long enough to be tedious. You’re really watching the numbers go up a lot throughout your play time in the way you want them to. Each new day you could ask a townsperson to come along adventuring with you to build friendship with them. It was an extremely cozy game to play in the early part of March when shit was really starting to hit the fan but had not quite reached the global pandemic stage. I would recommend this game to anyone who has a penchant for jrpg nonsense and farming games.

  • 7. Honestly, this game should be higher. It had the potential to be. It might have been number 1 even in comparison to the games above it back in March and April. I also think it should be lower. There are some serious problems with this game that seem like the culmination of Nintendo being on their bullshit. That’s a whole other discussion though.

    When the pandemic hit maximum panic. I got sick and spent 14 days in quarantine. It was before they were testing most people, I still don’t know if I had covid but it was the most sick I’d ever been. Animal Crossing was the one ray of hope in a dark world. I crawled into the tightest ball I could and absorbed whatever thin rays that came off of it I could.

    But getting passed when it came out, as we became used to the new normal and I started to play the game more regularly like it was intended I found myself unsatisfied. This was the next Animal Crossing? It’s fine. It’s more Animal Crossing. It does some very smart things for quality of life and the task list thing keeps gameplay moving at a steady pace however long you want to play it. And yet it’s still missing things. It feels like an offshoot more than a natural progression. I know some people are still playing it and loving it and I wish I was there. Between March and June I put 300 hours into it which is more than I usually put into AC in a span like that for sure. Usually it’s a lot less hours but for two or three years. And I played that much because I could really. That's the fundamental thing I think this game missed about Animal Crossing. The crafting is just bloat.

    There’s a better game there if less changed from the previous if they had stuck to what they always did. Still, I think of this game fondly. It is a wonder for anxiety. I don’t go back to it more out of guilt for my poor town than ill will for it. It claims number 7 in a year where I wasn’t thrilled with too much.

  • 6. This game is so much fun. For starters, I have never been very into shooter games. Third person, first person, dual joystick, shmups w/e. Just never been my thing. I have fallen for shooting games before but it is not the kind of games I want to play. However, when I was in the 9th grade I made friends with a guy in Computer Science class who showed me PC games. I was a console kid my whole life and so there were a lot of games I hadn’t played. Around this time the Orange Box came out and that was my ticket into the world of PC fps. I played the Half Lifes and thought they were cool, I played Portal and agreed it was a piece of art. But then I found Team Fortress 2.

    God what a game Team Fortress 2 was. So bright and colourful and bombastic! Things were just popping off constantly. It was the most fun I’d had with an online game before and I wracked up a few hundred hours in it before Valve had finished mucking it up. Apex Legends scratches that same itch for me in a way. That’s not to say it’s really much like Team Fortress 2 at all beyond the hero stuff and maybe just in the same spirit of nonsense. Maybe it’s just the source engine but then that’s not really how that stuff works either. Overwatch never did it for me and that is much closer to what TF2 was so what is it about Apex Legends I like so much? Well mostly everything I guess.

    I love the way Apex feels to play. It’s precise with a sense of momentum you don’t get in a lot of first person games. Respawn really knows what they’re doing in regards to making it feel good to move around the environment. Character abilities cover a wide range of situations and figuring out cool ways to use them is a blast. Learning how to respond to a situation became important. I was thinking tactically in a way I just don’t in most fps games. Third party attacking? Throw down a jump pad and everyone bounces free, disengaging safely while the new party clashes with the one you just fought. It doesn’t always go well but it feels so good when it does.

    Season 5’s introduction of Loba and shaking up of the map really just hooked me in and that was it. I played Apex Legends more than most games this year. More than games at the top of this list. If it weren’t for Season 6 and 7 being much less exciting I think it would be higher. This game is a blast and it’s free to play. I hope everyone tries it.

  • 5. So here’s where the anime goes. This is going to be a long one. Seriously feel free to skip this if you don’t care about my anime watching this year. TLDR; game good arcade soccer fun spirit tiger anime friendship.

    This year I dived deep into anime in a way I haven’t since I was a teenager. Like a lot of things this year I’m finding as I write this list, this goes back to March. Well maybe more to February and earlier. My best friend was watching a lot of Dragon Ball and telling me about it for months as I am a huge fan of the franchise and wanted to hear his reactions. Finally in March I decided I wanted to rewatch Hunter x Hunter for the first time in a few years because talking with him had kind of given me the itch and I was not due for another Dragon Ball rewatch really. I started and just kind of fell into binging it. I moved to watching it on the train on the way to work and was surprised by how much I liked doing this.

    I am an essential worker, and I don’t drive. So when I got through my initial quarantine I was right back to work. We didn’t know exactly how the virus spread so I was afraid to really touch anything and always wore gloves. Watching anime turned into the perfect transit activity. It was super passive and I could keep myself occupied without taking my gloves off. I finished HxH and moved onto YuYu Hakusho. Then I wanted a project. Rewatching anime seemed like such a waste when I had so much I haven’t seen. I had never been into mecha so I decided to finally give Gundam a good honest try. This became a journey through Gundam and then mecha anime that has spanned for 8 months now.

    This brings me to the release of Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions. I was picking through 80s anime to watch. Captain Tsubasa is definitely the kind of old anime you haven't seen but have heard about, which is why it is even getting a release over here I would think? But then I saw a trailer for this game. It looked like my kind of nonsense so I watched Captain Tsubasa, the anime which I had always heard good things about. It is of the same era as a lot of what I’d been watching.

    And then the game came out. And it’s just like a really good Arcade Soccer game. I forgot how much I could enjoy a game like that. The anime trappings only made it better. Charging up a shot where a Spirit Tiger appears behind the player and fires it in like a bullet and the goalie catches it but the force is too much so he’s knocked backwards into the net and that’s a goal, like, it’s too good. I played so much of this game. It’s even got its own create a player mode where you pick up actual characters special moves and play a little career. This game was such a good time and I don’t know if I would have found my way here if I wasn’t on this weird anime journey for most of the year. It earned its place on my list no doubt. And also, Captain Tsubasa is a pretty good anime. Y’all should watch it.

  • 4. Now this is a fucking video game. Literally a fucking video game. You’re gonna fuck a lot. Hopefully you’re gonna have kids too cause if you don’t you’re going to lose your land! Crusader Kings 3 is a really ridiculous time. It is a game that lends itself to making stories as you go along.

    An excerpt from a discord chat I had with my friend while we were playing multiplayer and working our way into conquering the Byzantine emprire.

    “and then I went cringing and begging to the Byzantine emperor while scheming behind his back and he fucked me up so hard” I had been very aggressively trying to seize power while my friend played the long game. I did eventually manage to become the Emperor but I was basically just my friend's puppet. They had the real power built up through alliances and resources. I was the face while they were the power behind it. Because this is what Crusader Kings is. There’s not really anything else like it.

    I have tried to play CK2 before and found it impenetrable. This game does not have that problem. Beyond the obvious quality of life stuff, it really feels like they went into this game with the intention of making it as new user friendly as they possibly could. And yet it still feels like a very deep game. The simulation never really plays out quite the same and every few hundred years I am surprised at how big some country has gotten while I wasn’t paying attention.

    The different events add personality and build on your story telling. The stress meter is a neat little mechanic that means you sort of have to play in character or be penalized for it. You could keep being a tyrant but if you are a generous person you’re going to suffer mental breaks from the guilt. Because CK3 is a game that lives and dies on its diplomacy options; it’s all about court intrigue and land claims and seducing the right person and making powerful alliances that could help you through marrying various relatives and court members off to other rulers. Bread and circuses to keep the people happy you know, king shit.

    I played a lot of this game multiplayer as well and it only made the game more fun. I could play off of my friend and even do plots against him. I’ll never forget when I died a mysterious death when at the height of civil unrest in the empire I commanded. I am still pretty sure my friend is the one who killed me and I think it's fantastic. War needed to be reworked and they did in a recent update so now it is much less fiddly. I think this game is brilliant. More people need to play it. Don’t be intimidated I promise you it is not as complicated as you think.

  • 3. *Warning Final Fantasy 7 for the ps1 spoilers* So I’ve definitely got a history with this game though it’s not the 1997 one. In 1997 I was 3 years old. My first Final Fantasy was Final Fantasy X and as I said lower on the list, it remains one of my favourite games ever. Final Fantasy 7 is a game I played for the first time on a PC. When I was in early middle school I learned about emulators. There were a lot of games I missed but that dominated video games discussion somehow even when I was just a kid. I got to experience those games even using my shitty family computer thanks to emulators. Learning about emulation turned into other things. This was my first time actually on the internet with some sort of freedom, I even joined a Sonic the Hedgehog forum where I made a friend who remains my best friend today. Some 12-13 years later. Unfortunately, Sonic did not remain my friend though.

    And then I wanted to play Final Fantasy 7. It was all over the internet. I had already played Kingdom Hearts at this point. I had seen Cloud and Sephiroth and stuff like that. So I played the shitty PC port, pirated from somewhere who knows at this point. And I had an awesome time. Piecing together what I already had heard about the story over the years with what was actually there I really just fell in love with that game. Crisis Core came out not too long after and that only really added to it for me. I even liked Advent Children mostly at the time.

    I’ve revisited Final Fantasy 7 a few times over the years. It’s got its issues and you can’t help but notice them as you get older. Still I had such a solid characterization for the characters in my head that only really got confirmed for me in the remake. Cloud is just awkward as hell so he covers it with a rough personality. You really see that textualized in Remake and the party breaking him out of his shell. Aerith is a mischievous character in some ways that I think a lot of people didn’t realize until remake, because let’s face it you just can’t portray the character the same in a PS1 rpg and all anyone thinks about is that she dies.

    One issue a lot of people, myself included really, have with FF7 proper is the Materia system. The way the remake works that out is so good in that each character now feels really unique to play. Tifa punches so quick hits and building up dps might be a more standard build for her. Barett has a gun so you’re going to focus on ranged stuff, etc. You can still kind of slot what you want in materia but there’s basically different builds you can make. Weapons don’t upgrade straight up, it's more sideways. You can use the Buster Sword all game just fine if you want. You better believe I switched to the Buster Sword to fight Rufus. Because that’s the kind of game this is. It’s this game from when I was basically still just a kid made to look like it did in my head.

    I do think the changes to the story are more interesting than just making FF7 again. But I also don’t have a problem with Nomura’s nonsense exactly, especially when obviously so many hands are touching this. Barett is still a problem but at least it’s not as bad as that OG translation. It has renewed my interest in Final Fantasy as a whole, and while I still have my issues with Square-Enix maybe made me think there’s still hope for their games. The age of the all encompassing jrpg machine is long over but this game is a callback to them, almost a love letter to the style of game where you run around some closed environments fighting monsters and enjoying dialogue. Those games haven’t gone away but they sure haven’t been mainstream like this in a long time.

  • 2. This game fucking owns. The music is just slapping the whole way through. You like slay the spire? Here it is horizontally. How about Megaman Battle Network? That was a cool combat system right? Well here it is in a deck building roguelite and ITS SO GOOD. I love this game. It is using understated storytelling in the way of a Souls game where it’s not really important and more for the atmosphere while also being an engaging experience to play. It remains challenging even when you do have it figured out. One of the things this game has over Hades, is that I still don’t feel like I have mastered it.

    I played this game right after Animal Crossing when I needed a video game ass video game and it delivered. This combat system is really something special, and while a little overwhelming at first I think it is an improvement on those old Battle Network games in most ways. The field is larger and things like panel destruction and stacking effects become far more of a thing.

    The elements are interesting with game effects that work together in surprising ways. There is usually a bridge to combine suits together you can pick up through the “Artifacts” you pick up that basically stack on traits and regular cards that give you attacks/abilities you can use in battle. So for example there is a character called Selicy, and she uses ice stuff in her basic deck. You might focus on getting “flow” attributed cards as well as ice stuff and they stack together. Maybe something like “casting frost effect on an enemy also gives you 1 flow”. Flow is an ability that would stack on your character as you play through various cards so you might find yourself building like 30 of them and then using a card that turns all those flow stacks into powerful attacks. I have one shot a huge chunk of a boss’ HP with a build like that and it was an incredible feeling.

    Each character plays very uniquely and you really have to learn how those abilities work with certain cards. There are also a few routes you can go to clear the game and they will unlock different things as you go that are based around sparing bosses. You could spare a boss and get 400 hp back or you can kill the boss and increase your luck. (Luck and Difficulty are directly related higher your luck the harder the game gets the better your rewards are.) You can even kill the shopkeeper and unlock her to play.

    What’s really impressive to me is that this game is made by one person. I understand that he also got a ton of community help as he went on, but it is still extremely impressive work. This game has Steam Workshop support as well so if you really want Megaman Battle Network, you can put him in the game. I will probably keep returning to this game for longer than Hades, despite Hades being kind of a superior game because of what this game offers me in the form of a challenge and a straight run where I can focus down and kill a half an hour. I hope to see more from this developer.

  • 1. This is an extremely well made video game. When it was announced a few years ago, I kind of wrote it off. The isometric almost diablo-y kinda rpg was never really for me and I wasn’t entirely sure what Hades was. I don’t play Early Access games anyway so I said I’d wait and see. Fast forward to this year. My friend started playing it, people were talking about it, but I was in no rush really. Payday came around, I saw it was like 10 dollars off on Nintendo Switch and that was kind of that.

    I didn’t know what I expected at first but the game was very good looking. The title screen is snappy, the art style is something that I’ve always admired about Supergiant games. Then it started and the writing had me hooked immediately. The voice acting is the exact kind of dramatic hamminess I am looking for from my Greek mythology. Zagreus is a charming and likable character and his issues with his father are the kind of thing that comes with the territory of a Greek epic.

    This game’s story really understands how all in the family that kind of thing is. These fantastically portrayed versions of Greek gods that at this point I am already so familiar with made every interaction with them an absolute delight. I was chasing the next bit of dialogue more than anything else at first, but then the gameplay is also just so tight.

    Each god appears to Zagreus in the form of a Boon you can take to add abilities to your build as you fight your way up out of Hades. Spoiler alert: so that you can fight Hades at the top where he’s guarding the entrance. And that makes runs so compelling. You have a clear defined goal you are working towards and every run you get just a little bit closer. Or you get a build that carries you so far but you still aren’t quite where you need to be at the game so you fuck up and uughh you were so close! One more run! This game is the most one more run. Where in Eden sometimes losing a run was too devastating to go back to right away, Hades thrives on you diving back in.

    I love all these characters and want them to be happy. The story was touching even if nothing particularly new. To get such good writing in this kind of game is not something you see very often, if ever. Supergiant has really come into their own as they’ve developed more and more games and this really feels like the culmination of all their hard work. I can’t stress enough how good this game is, even if this year hadn’t been kind of iffy it would be sitting very high on my list. Go play Hades, it’s the best game of 2020.
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