My Top 10 of 2019

ForceCommander does Let's Plays on Youtube on a almost daily basis and streams on Twitch on the regular.

A lot of the games on this list were recorded and can be found on the Youtube and Twitch channels.If the german language doesn't intimidate you and want to know more about the games and ForceCommander, feel free to take a look!

Also, this Top 10 list also exists in video format on my Youtube channel. Where as this post exclusively lists Honorable Mentions, the Video features my Flops of the year!

I return to present to you my favorite games I PLAYED this year. Across all platforms, it have roughly played 150 games and I must say: This year hasn't been that exciting to me compared to the previous two (Last year's Top 10 can be found on GiantBomb!)

There are multiple reasons as to why thats the case. As this is a hobby, not my profession, I just can't buy and play all the games. Also, when I am looking at other people's Top 10, I see a lot of games I couldn't give my support just yet. I understand the maker's decisions in general, but if it result in them lying, talking down and/or breaking promises, it doesn't feel right to me to then reward them for their behaviour.

Honorable Mentions

• Stardew Valley - This is the type of game I wanted to get into for a very long time. Since the Harvest Moon games, to be precise. Sadly back then I just couldn't. The second the game let you loose to start tending to your farm, I just got bored from doing the same action over and over again.
  Even when Rune Factory came along, a game that also offered a dungeon crawling aspect, the farming was still too monotonous to keep my interest. Yet with the release of Stardew Valley, I got hooked and don't really know why.
  It actually managed to grab me twice. Once during its release in 2016 and once again this year. Maybe its charm spoke more to me, maybe the routines feel more rewarding, maybe its because of mod support, or maybe I started treating it more as a "Podcast Game" (A game you play alongside listening or watching something else.)
  Maybe its a combination from all of them. Stardew Valley is the Euro Truck Simulator in a Slice of Life, Farming and Dungeon Crawling setting.
• Watch_Dogs 2 - Holy smokes was the first one bad. A mess in so many different aspects. But as in Ubisoft tradition (at least until Breakpoint came out), the second attempt was once again a huge improvement. A more colorful and lively location, more interesting and enjoyable characters, new gadget that created new and cool playstyles, as well as a general improvement of its presentation.
  The game allowed itself to have a bit more fun without crossing the Borderlands-stupid line or losing their original message / focus. The meme / shitposting and more millenial-orientated setting wasn't entirely to my liking, but I take it over the mess Aiden Pearce and his "The Vigilante" and "The Fox" personas.

10 - Remnant: From the Ashes

Most souls-like games are frustrating to me. They often times feel unfair and intentionally annoying. I never could enjoy the tTriumph of a successful Boss take-down as it was always overshadowed by the bullshit I had to endure.

Remnant: From the Ashes managed to be a souls-like that I actually enjoyed. It looked at what made these kind of games fun and what didn't, to then created an overall far more enjoyable experience.

The first important point is the focus on guns. It allowed a more varied approach. It felt far more manageable to fight these enormous Monstrosities as you weren't forced to engage with them in close combat anymore.

Ranged combat also added an additional element you have to learn. Ammunition is limited. Bonfires restore them, but being too trigger-happy in between them will punish you. So melee weapons aren't entirely superfluous, you have to incorporate them into your fights, but they aren't your only option.

But it also brings a negative aspect: Boss Fights always take time to beat. Even when you play conservatively, you will run out of ammo at some point. There are Ammo Boxes that restore some amount, but since its a consumable you might not have, Bosses regularly spawn additional minions to give the player a chance of regaining some ammunition.

Means a lot of Bosses have phases where they spawn new guys, which can be a bit boring and can lead to being overwhelmed by them.

What Remnant: From the Ashes realized is that a lot of mechanics in these games are actually bad. They added Quality of Life Improvements like: Bonfires are close to fog doors / boss fights, allowing re-fights far more quickly. No punishments like loss of currency after a death. Co-op simply being an option and not reduced to a random summoning. Also everyone gets the dropped loot in co-op.

Especially the first two points made fighting bosses fun. No more stretching of time where you have to dodge your way through all of these trash mobs that now have respawned. No more fear of losing all your stuff just because the boss dared to use some bullshit you might not have been prepared for.

Another great idea are Traits. A RPG-like mechanic that allows to allocate points into categories like more Stamina or Health whenever you reach a level up. At least in the beginning.

You will quickly realize that the game tracks a lot of hidden statistics which can also lead to gaining more Trait points.

The same goes to unlocking more trait categorizes. Most of them can be unlocked by beating bosses.

Now we immediately go to the next point: Every created character generates its own world. Or rather: Which bosses you encounter. While the words stay the same, two player might encounter two different Bosses at the same location. Which can drop different equipment and traits.

Here is where a lot of interesting things come into play. Like coop: Now there is a(nother) reason why you should play with someone else. To get the stuff from their bosses. It will also lead to entirely different build and maybe even playstyles, since the traits you can acquire allow for some pretty substantial buffs. It almost feels like a rogue-like.

But its important to note: You can generate a new world with your existing character. You aren't required to start a new one or play with someone else in coop. Another great addition!

Since I mentioned worlds: They are bad. You start in a ruined town, go into the sewers, followed by a desert (I hate deserts in Videogames) and other pretty standard, if not boring, settings. They aren't pretty, they aren't exciting. Maybe something to improve upon in the future.

Even though its a laughable subject in these games, lets talk about it anyway. Story. There is one, just they decided to keep this odd way of telling it. To the point that I just didn't bother. I remember a point where you encountered a diary filled with 10-15 pages full of exposition. You can't bring a game to such a full stop. Thats boring.

Overall this was a big surprise to me, as I had already given up on a genre that is filled with gate-keeping elitists that don't allow innovation or fun and engaging gameplay.

I hope that we will see more games like Remnant: From the Ashes in the future.

09 - Supraland

A visually stunning first person metroidvania , exploration, puzzle game that sucked me into its charming world from the get go. Its a game where you constantly question yourself "Is something hidden here?" or "Can I actually go there?" to then being greeted by a message that you found a secret.

Early on, secrets are chest that can contain Power-Ups, but later its mostly coins, which can be used to buy even more Power-Ups. These Power-Ups allow you to reach and do challenges you couldn't before. And thats basically the game. Explore, do puzzles, aquire Power-Ups to reach new places you couldn't before.

It has enthralled me to the point where I didn't just finish it in a few days, I played through it to 100%. Even late into the game I kept asking myself these two questions mentioned at the beginning and the game kept on delivering. But let it be said that the later hidden chests and secrets can be truly challenging.

The only somewhat negative point is the humor. Most of it is okay, but there are a handful of "geeky references" as well as some internet memes.

Otherwise I can only recommend to give this game a try for yourself. Its a game that is easily descripted, yet I feel you have to experience it to fully understand where it is or isn't for you.

08 - Return of the Obra Dinn

The next game of Lucas Pope, the maker of Papers, Please. Once again, we got a game that sounds incredibly boring on paper: You work for an insurance company and have to documents damages in a book.

In reality we got a eerie mystery where you have to make use of a magic pocketwatch that allows to travel to a fixed point in time of the past to learn about the situation of the long lost ship named Obra Dinn.

What stays the same is that you have to take notes in your book. You start with a list of the crew, a handful of photos and that pocketwatch. With each jump you have to make use of the the few lines of dialogues you can hear and the limited area you can move around in to complete your damage assessment.

The magic of this game simply lies in watching the scenes, unlocking more and more of the ship's areas as well as more points you can jump to with the pocketwatch and slowly but surely figuring it all out.

Its a game where you can logically figure out the fates of each and every person on board of the ship without having to rely on randomly guessing. You just have to pay attention. A lot of attention. Almost no jump will easily tell you the person's name, or even sometimes the fate. You will have to look at many different jumps mulitiple times, check the pictures over and over and watch for every little detail to finally reach the right solution.

What made the game a bit more challenging are two points: The graphics, which are intentionally kept monochromatic. You can choose between a couple of them in the options menu, but even with the ones you tolerate, the graphics are strenuous and can be obfuscating. Not ideal if you are looking for details

As well as: Whenever you jump back to a certain moment in time, you only have a small area to move around. There is one situation in particular where your movement is limited and have to look through a hole in the wall.

This was a thrilling experience since the game goes to places you initially won't expect. This is another game where you have to just give it a try, only this time to mainly figure out whether or not you can get along with the graphics. Its not everyone's cup of tea.

07 - Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition

Whenever I hear people talk about their favorite Tales JRPGs, they mention three games. Symphonia 1, Abyss and Vesperia. I played all three of them as well and never understood how you could mention Vesperia alongside the other two. The first two were excellent and Vesperia just wasn't.

Let me go back in time and go into detail. I initially played Tales of Vesperia on the Xbox 360. The incomplete version, as the later released PS3 version had more content.

While playing, I encountered three problems.

1) Certain characters where either insufferable or acted hilariously stupid

2) The way the story played out was incredibly stupid

3) The game flip-flopped between being incredibly easy in random encounters and stupidly impossible during boss fights.

After multiple tries of advancing the game and getting more and more frustrated, I stopped playing and declared the game as bad.

But after learning, years later, that so many people spoke positively about the game, it started to nag me. "Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong."With the release of the Definitive Edition, I finally had the opportunity to look at the game again and prove them all wrong!

Oh boy were they right.

With roughly 120 hours of playtime, I saw not everything, but still a lot of the game and can clearly see why the game is so beloved. Yet I question why I disliked it so heavily back then.

Where certain characters truly that bad? Actually. Yes. But only one in particular. Carol. He is a whiny dumb baby that, even after a lot of character development, seemingly is stick in being the annoying brat that always just cries and acts like a coward. But there is an excuse: He is like 5 years old.

Is the story really that stupid? Back then, my gripe was that the person everyone was trying to kidnap always declined the smartest option, only for them be kidnapped again only a handful of realtime minutes later. Now I understand that there is a reason to why this option was never taken. Also that it wasn't the smartest one.

Was the game truly that difficult? I still am not sure what happened back then: I remember having to turn down the difficulty and even having to rely on two players kiting the bosses back and forth to beat them. As I have now played this game again, the problem must have been that I was simply underleveled. Yet even at the time, this wasn't my first JRPG. So at some point I should have realized that this is the problem.

But there is more, another problem thats connected to the story: The always kidnapped person was my only healer.

If you just hear this: "Only having one healer that regularely isn't in your party because of story reasons" should , even if you ignore maybe being underleveled, be indeed a be a problem. The truth is that a lot more characters can heal, maybe not to the same extent, but for some reason I never unlocked their healing capabilities? Could be another sign of being underleveled.

But thats still not all: I also remember that the Healer would regularely die. The more modern Tales games allow you to customize your party's behaviour by setting simple commands beforehand. Like "Only attack with magic", "Only use heal items when under X Health" and so on. I am pretty sure I have played around with these options back then, yet it never worked. So my guess is: Either I was too stupid or it didn't work correctly with the Xbox Version (I lean torwards the first option)

Yes this game is great. Entertaining story, interesting characters, a lot to explore and do. My favorite little part: Skits. Whenever something happens, regardless of how important, a skit can trigger. In a somewhat simple, yet fully voiced scene, pictures of the characters talk to each other over all kinds of topics. Hearing them talk about what food and the like isn't the most thrilling, yet it helped immensly fleshing out the characters.

If you like JRPGs and for some reason haven't played that one yet. The Definitive Edition is the ideal version to give it a try. Its truly one of the best Tales games!

06 - RimWorld

RimWorld is the perfect combination of survival, base building, and colonist management. The game was released as an Early Access title in 2013 and was one of the few games that felt like a full experience from day one. They used the five years in Early Access to add more and more content, improving an already impressive game.

What makes many survival games annoying to me is how frequently you have to take care of it. No five minutes can go by without you having to stuff your face with multiple full-course meals or else you get punished for not tending to it.

With base building games, they often suffer from having no way to figure out how to make stuff. And the only way to get these information: look it up in a wiki. This is bad game design. Either make the required materials visable or add a way to learn receipes. But just not doing anything and hoping for players to figure it out themself, is lazy.

Management aspects often times can't find the balance between being too complex or too simple.

RimWorld tackles all these three tasks to my liking. Its not about finding enough bear asses so you can avoid starving for five minutes. Its all about what your colonists are capable of. Your colonists have different skills, traits and backgrounds. Skills determine how good they are at things like fighting, cooking or socializing. The better the level in each category, the faster and better they can execute their task. There is technically no limit to how many skills one colonist can have. If you want to, you can let someone work as a Farmer until he masters it.

Traits and backgrounds influence basically every aspect of a colonists life. It might make them a better cook, but they get hungry more often. Or you have a pacifist that won't fight, even if they are about to be mauled to death. Or you get someone that just likes to set fire to all and everything.

Solving the hunger problem for your colonists depend on whether or not they are skilled enough. If they are, let your farmer plow fields and harvest food like rice and potatoes, haulers transport the goods to a chef who cooks them into meals. Hunger problem solved.

Obviously I am skipping a few steps here, like building a stove, having an area where you can store your meals without it all rotting away after a few hours etc., but once you understand and set up the neccessary tasks, Hunger is neither the problem nor focus anymore in any normal situation.

Base building isn't without its tricks, but just being able to look at the build menu and seeing all the currently avaiable options and what you need to craft them makes the start a bit more convenient.

The challenge comes later on. Most likely when others attack you. There are factions on this planet and they all operate a bit differently. Tribe factions are often only equipped with bows and wooden spears, which feel adorable compared to your hunting rifles, pistols and shotguns. But they come in numbers. Even these simple folks can destroy you if your base isn't build with ways to defend yourself.

Now if you think that applying your Tower Defense skills by building chokepoints and placing traps would help you, then you are right. Until the next faction's attack isn't an Assault but a Siege.

Now the management aspect is most likely the more difficult one to learn at first, but it offers a simple and complex setting, which allows to get started even if you don't understand all of it at the beginning.

You manage your colony routines by setting priorities. While something like sleep, injury and fires should always be the highest regardless of skill, you appoint your colonists to what they are good at.

If someone is good at building your furniture and you want that person to do that whenever possible, give them a high priority in construction. Now when there is nothing to construct, you define the next priority, just a bit lower. Just don't let them do everything. Space it out to all colonists as good as possible.

Might sound tedious, but its a task you do once at the start of a new game and whenever a new person joins your colony.

What a lot of these games have a problem with is that once you know what to do, the game is basically solved and can run without your input.

Good luck with that in RimWorld. Because Storytellers exist. They are like Left 4 Dead's AI Director. Depending on which one you choose, alongside a diffculty, different events can trigger. Some start it nice and slow, only to ramp it up once you are settled in. Or you go pure chaos and let Randy Random do its thing.

The Director has a lot of influence. How about a raid when you are barely ready to defend yourself? Or a lovely blight that will destroy your crops, coupled with a Solar Flare and a pack of manhunting donkeys?

Setting up a base is easily done but what the game throws at you makes it challenging and difficult to manage. Once shit hit the fan, your colonists die and your supplies are running low, it all can easily spiral out of control. Because your colonists' needs need to be satisfied. When the situation is dire, you can't have your chef go on a food binge, eating away the remaining meals. You also can't have two people get into in argument that can only be settled by fists, which might lead to heavy injured or even death. Or that damn Pyromanic feeling like setting it all ablaze. Again.

Now is there something that you don't like? There is most likely a mod for that. The community has added a lot of new or different modifications that can improve the game to your liking.

I have played a total of 440 hours so far, roughly 200 of them this year and I can already tell you: At somepoint next year I will get the desire to start a new colony and will easily add another 200 hours to the game, if not more.

Its such a fantastic game.

05 - Hearthstone

Hearthstone has its problems. For a long time they were deadily afraid of balancing cards. In a digital card game. Or the recent Blitzchung scandal, which Blizzard has handled poorly through and through. Also like almost every other Trading Card Game, the pricing model is horrendous.

Why this game is in this list is because of two reasons: The presentation is still the best and the Dungeon Run singleplayer mode exists.

No other TCG managed to make its cards come to life when played, as well as how easy it is to watch someone stream the game and learn everything you need to know as it displays every neccessary information.

The singleplayer mode doesn't require paying multiple hundred of dollars with each new release to be able to keep up. You have an upfront cost of roughly $15. After that, the whole mode is unlocked to you.

This mode is now in its fifth iteration. Each of them managed to improve on the formular, with a few caveats. The game mode is basically a Roguelike. You choose your Hero, a Hero Power and a deck with a small amount of cards. You fight a total of 8 AI enemies and whenever you beat one, you add more cards to your deck.

What makes this a Roguelike isn't just that your deck is growing in size. You also add extra play conditions through Anomalies before starting the game and treasures during your run.

An Anomaly affects both players and, at least with Tomb of Terror, can make it quite a bit more diffcult. Like summoning minions for your opponent whenever you play one or the game deals damage to all minions at the end of each player's turn.

Treasures, both available as passives and actives, influence only the one who has or plays them. A Treasure could be a minion that can steal cards upon its demise, or a passive that heals you and your minions at the end of your turn.

Then they added Bob the Bartender with the previous update. Its a friendly encounter that allows to tweak your existing deck / cards by either improving or even removing them or adding a little batch of new ones with a little buff like increased stats or decreased mana costs.

The Dungeon Run mode is Hearthstone turned to 11. Every run is different and sometimes a bit whacky, but you still have to play it smart, as the enemy also gets stronger with each victory in a run.

The only negative point with the current version of this game mode are sadly the Bosses. They gave them a ton of health (300) and whenever they lose 100 HP, they start a new phase. This results in them getting a new Hero Power, a new deck and to draw a few cards.

The idea is that you aren't supposed to beat them in one run, but rather multiple. They keep their current Health and phase upon defeat.

Its a neat idea but it just doesn't feel good. Even really strong decks can easily be destroyed by them, as they don't have to worry about playing smart. So something like a burn deck simply doesn't work.

But otherwise its a game mode I just love. I play it everyday and will only stop when they release the next version of it.

04 - Baba Is You

Baba Is You is the most innovative puzzle game I've ever played.

What makes this game so impressive is how it presents its puzzle and how different it is to solve them. In Baba Is You, every map spells out the conditions of the elements present. At first you might think that this isn't neccessary. If you play first person shooter and run into a wall, you are fully aware that you can not get past it by running directly into it.

Baba Is You will spell that out for you. WALL IS STOP. Now whats important is the next point: If you can reach those words, you can interact with them. So if a wall is in your way and you can easy reach the condition WALL IS STOP, then you maybe could push the STOP word out/away and the condition is lifted. Now you can just walk through every wall in that level.

Zhe main point of this game is to manipulate these words and learn what each of them is capable of doing. The game will gradually introduce more words and ways in how you can use them. A simple example would be that you can use a single IS word for two conditions. One horizontal, one vertical.

Is this game difficult? Yes and no. It certainly can be a game in which you breeze through a couple of levels in a row, only to be stuck for half an hour on the next one. I played through the game plus a few "post game" levels in less than 40 hours and the main things you have to remind yourself: "Do I know what each word is capable of?" and "Why are these words/conditions in this level?"

This is a game where you have to be willing to be open about trying things you learned and things you suspect might be possible.

If you like Puzzle games, you have to give this game a try. The game manages to make so much out of what feels like so little.

03 - Yakuza Kiwami 2

There was a little bit of fear in me after witnessing the catastrophe that was the story of Yakuza Kiwami 1. As a big fan of Yakuza Zero, even now I am hurt about the events that transpired.

Luckily, the second game (third if you count Zero) is such a great game in almost every aspect. The story is fantastic and reached Yakuza Zero levels at times, the sidestories are varied, wacky and hilarious just like in the previous two games, we learned more about Kazama's past and meet new good people like Kaoru Sayama as well as bad ones like Ryuji Goda. Majima and Sotenbori are back. Goro Majima gets a goofy sidestory and minigame as well as a more serious standalone one! Kamurocho looks better then ever with the graphical update used in Yakuza 6. Its amazing how much better it even looks compared to Yakuza Zero and Kiwami 1. Random encounters now transition instantly, now more loading times, which also means you can just run away from them and the game resumes as normal afterwards.

If you loved Yakuza Zero, you will love this game. If you were a bit disappointed by Kiwami 1, you will be blown away by this one.

Yet there is one red mark I have to give this wonderful game. Sadly its a big one. The fighting feels bad. Important: Feels! If Kiryu slam some lackey against a wall and he follows it up with a fist to the face, the previous two games made that look impactful, at times even unpleasant. Seeing this happen in Kiwami 2 looks two bodies made out of jelly colliding. In 0 and Kiwami 1, I had absolutely no problem fighting one random encounter after another. It just looked and felt so good to fight them. I don't think there are many, if any, games that have reached that level of satisfaction for me. Kiwami 2 simply missed this perfect mix. There is no magic. Even the ragdoll physics don't help. Which says a lot. Ragdoll physics are great in most games.

Otherwise I can't really say much more of it. Its another great Yakuza game. If you are interested, start with Zero, then endure Kiwami 1 as much as you can, then go over to another good game in the series with Kiwami 2.

02 - Pokemon Sword & Shield

Pokemon finally reached the consoles. Everyone was waiting for this moment. The moment we leave the handhelds behind and aren't shackled by their limitations anymore. We have seen what this magic could look like with games like Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Yet as we came closer and closer to the release of Sword and Shield, more and more worrying details came to surface. Graphics, performance, the complete disregard of the "Gotta catch 'em all" ideology, reusing of animations despite claiming otherwise, and many, many more. I struggled for a long time with my decision on whether or not I should buy/support this game. In the end, I did, because I like Pokemon.

Now that the game is out and we played it: Were these concerns and rumours true and really that bad? YES THEY WERE. Yet here we are. Pokemon at nummber 2. Why? Because its Pokemon.

The game looks like a handheld game. The performance is already capped to 30 FPS and tanks in the new wild areas easily into the single digits, not being able to catch/get all pokemon isn't the biggest problem to most, me included, but its still the motto of the game. It also doesn't help that people found a lot of animations being reused or new ones being way to lackluster to accept their excuses.

Now while all of these are big negative points, the Pokemon formula of catching creatures, creating teams and traveling with them through a new regions is just so strong, it overshadows them.

Obviously there are many more points you can/have to mention:

• Most routes are pathetically short and dungeons are hilariously straightforward. Its nice not getting lost in a huge dungeon like Mt. Moon or Mt. Coronet, but the mines, as pretty as they are, in the Galar Region are nothing more than indoor routes.
• The wild zones are a nice idea: Big open zones where you can encounter a lot of Pokemon, depending on time, weather, and the area of the wild zone you are in. Some are even too strong for you to handle early on. Sadly they screwed up that idea by limiting what Pokemon you can catch. If you don't have enough gym badges, a creature with a too high level is simply uncatchable. Even if you manage to beat it.
• Next, raids are a nice new feature. Inside the Wild Zones, you can find Pokemon nests. If they are glowing, four player can fights against one big and strong Pokemon. Beating them gives you rewards like TMs and items, as well as the chance to catch them. Yet again, they borked it by not being able to make a decent online system and hiding one of their other new features behind this one.
• The new curry dex is a nice looking but totally unneccessary feature. I maybe used this a total of three times and its benefits aren't worth the effort.
• The music is amazing. It features some of the best songs ever in a Pokemon game.
• Your companions/rivals are horrendous. Hop is Sun/Moon's Hau, down to having the same animations, Bede is a criminal that needs to be thrown into prison and Marnie would be great if they hadn't added that annoying fan club. Not truly her fault, but you encounter these fanaticals everywhere. Also Team Yell is nothing compared to the other "Team Bad Guys" from previous games. It may be intentional, but that doesn't excuse how useless this team is.
• The total amount of Pokemon may be reduced, but at least there is still a bigger selection then in previous games. This might just me accepting this disappointing situation, but it felt great how varied your team can be. You aren't forced to have the typical "starter bird" and "starter rodent" pokemon in your team. From the get go you can find a lot of different creatures.
• Gym Battles taking place in huge football/soccer stadiums. It gave this journey a much more serious and professional vibe. Now if only there would be an endless mode where you can join a team and fight in a league system against other real and/or AI controlled trainers/teams...
• I like the Gym leaders. They have signs of personality and, even though not truly difficult to beat, try to make use of strategies. The only baffling decision was to have exclusive Gym leaders depending on your sword or shield version. Each version has one leader that is pretty obviously out of place.
• I like that they removed Mega Evolutions and Z Moves. Gamefreak only ever played favorites with this. Dynamax as a new feature sounded brilliant, as it added some tactical depth and wasn't limited to a handful of Pokemon... and then they added Gigantamax that is the exact same situation as with Mega Evolutions. 26 of the 400 something Pokemon can use Gigantamax, including community favorites like Pikachu and Charizard (by the way, the only starter from previous generations that was allowed entrance into the Galar region)
  Also to Gigantamax a Pokemon, you need to catch a raid version. Means a Pokemon caught on a route doesn't count and you need to rely on RNG for the pokemon spawn in a nest.
• The starter pokemon are pretty disappointing. The water starter, what I would normally choose, is a whiny baby. The grass starter is an adorable chimp with a stick.. but it a grass type, so pass. The fire pokemon, also known as the Pikachu of this generation, is a rabbit. Easily the best option, but even with their evolutions, they all stay somewhat mediocre.
• There is an attempt to tell a story but for some reason, everyone tries to push you away from it. Its understandable that a ten-year-old kid shouldn't take care of it when there are professionals around, but its still odd to just focus on the gym challenge when you can see the catastrophe looming in the distance.
  Also people really neeed to stop mentioning that the protagonist got a recommendation by the League Champ. You have to read that way too often.
• I wanted to say "hear" instead of "read" in my last sentence but THE GAME HAS NO VOICE ACTING. Especially silly if one of your gym leaders is a singer.
• You can learn old moves for your pokemon without having to farm for an item. Congratulations, you made something less annoying that should have been changed many generations ago.
• PokeJobs are a nice new feature to send out your creatures on missions to let them earn EXP. Only sucks that they won't remember their place in the storage box and just forget old moves for new ones. Since we can just learn old ones for free, there is no reason to do that.

There are many more points but I wanted to highlight just how rough this game is. What a missed opportunity this game is as the basic formula of Pokemon still works. This could have been another Breath of the Wild. Yet its just another handheld Pokemon game, only released on a console.

If there were a Most Disappointing Game of the Year Award, Pokemon Sword & Shield had easily won it.

It might be odd to see this one higher than Kiwami 2, but with both games' strong and weak points, this was a really tough and close decision.

01 - Fire Emblem: Three Houses

With Three Houses, the series finally returns to a Nintendo console and delivers an incredibly extensive game. Instead of commanding a group of mercenaries that added more people along the way, Three Houses takes place at school / monastery, where your own character starts to teach one of the three classes.

The game starts with a quick tutorial fight alongside the leaders of each house. As I tried to keep spoilers to a minimum (before launch), this was the first time I could get an impression of the three most important characters for each house. Initially, I was intrigued by the Black Eagles, as their leader, Edelgard, was a Woman. Something rather unusual for a Fire Emblem game. Dimitri, Leader of the Blue Lions, gave the impression of the stereotypical, self-absorbed Noble and Claude from the Golden Deer came across as a mix of an aloof, trickster, womanizer and backstabber.

Thankfully, before making your choice, you are allowed to meet the other students. Before going into this topic deeper, I want to mention that almost EVERYTHING in this game is voice acted.

Something Pokemon completely ignored, a game that is nothing in scale compared to Fire Emblem. Pokemon feels like a small indie studio game in comparison.

Talking, or rather, listening to your potential students gave you such a good first impression and it helped immensely on make my final decision. Such a stellar job.

After the Meet and Greet, my decision to join the Black Eagles quickly changed. Edelgard's first impression as a strong and capable person felt more like noble arrogance afterwards and her second in command, Hubert, is a beacon of creepy and eerie energy. Along with the other Blue Eagle students not impressing me much, I moved on.

Claude and the Golden Deer felt odd. Maybe fitting to their leader, but my first impression had not changed much.

As you can see in the way I odered this, the Blue Lions just blew me away. While all three Leaders hinted at hiding something, Dimitri showed such a humble and honest side. It really surprised me. Dedue, the gentle giant. Felix, the Sasuke from Naruto that still tried to care for his companions. Ashe, the always help- and cheerful knight-to-be. The Womanizer Sylvain, that switches back and forth between his womanizing and complex hatred for how society treats people. Mercedes, the caring and loveable big sister. Annette, the clumsy but adorable girl, plagued with the decisions of her horrible father and Ingrid, a tough and just person that wishes to be more then what her family wishes of her.

The Blue Lions immediately felt like a big family with great chemistry.

The decision of which house to teach is the biggest one in the game. The game's story is split into two parts. During the first half, the story of the houses are mostly the same, but with the start of the second half, every house gets their own story. Having so far only finished the Blue Lions route with a playtime of 100 hours, its impressive that you can have more than 300 hours of meaningful content.

A lot of gameplay aspects are mostly like you know them from the previous games, only that you now also can explore a huge monastery. The story advances not from mission to mission, but from day to day, month to month. During school time, you as a teacher give instructions to your student. This allows for a lot of freedom and choice. You decide how they develop. If you have a strong person like Dedue, you can focus on Armor and Axes and make him into a strong frontline unit that can take a lot of punishment. Or you can go a completely different direction and turn him into a Mage or a Wyvern Rider. It wouldn't be the most optimal choice, but its yours to make.

There are also small events here and there, like Birthdays you can celebrate. But the most important time each week is the weekend. Here you have to decide what to do. You can freely roam the monastery, allowing to interact with your students, which give you a little bit of insight about certain, often times story relevant, topics. You can go fishing, gardening, cooking, shopping. It sounds like small stuff, but its important to take care of these things.

A staple of the Fire Emblem games is the support system. When two units interact with each other, be it by metting in the monastery or fighting on the battlefield, they earn (hidden) points in form of Hearts. When a certain threshold is reached and the two people can support each other, a dialogue can be initiated. In these, sadly hideously looking, in-engine cutscene, you can learn more about your students. They can range from silly, serious, as well as rather depressing.

Unlike other Fire Emblem games, Three Houses is mostly limited to the students, but choosing one house doesn't mean that you are locked out from the other ones. Reaching certain conditions and/or support ranks can give you the possibilty to recruit a person to your house / side.

The other big option during the Weekend is going on missions. During a month, you can get side missions that can go into more detail about certain topics, or you just go into random missions that serve as a way to get money, items or experience points.

What I always liked about the Fire Emblem games is the Level Up systems. Every character has the same type of stats, like Strength, Magic, etc. But every one of them has a unique growth allocated to it. Means someone like Dedue has a higher focus on stats like Strength, where as Mercedes excels at Magic.

Means that whenever there is a level up, the character has a chance to receive a point in each stat. This leads to every playthrough being differnt. I saw people praising their growth of the Archer Bernadetta, where as my Bernadetta was the weakest of the bunch as she had multiple weak level ups.

At the same time, it allows to make the game more difficult if you choose not to go for the recommended classes. Like I mentioned, Dedue is destined to become a frontline tank, so turning him into a Mage will make things far more difficult, as you now don't have this HP & Defense Juggernaut but rather a Mage with low Magic stats.

At the end of each month, the story advances and that always happens through fighting. Interestingly enough, some random missions require a higher level to complete than story missions.

Fights are turn-based and mostly the same as in previous games. What they changed, or rather kept since Awakening, is the options of difficulty and perma-death. In the old Fire Emblem games, you had one difficulty and a defeated friendly unit meant the end of it. The character died and can not be used anymore for the rest of the game! I like the idea but most people seem to have realized that this just leads to endless restarts or save scumming. So having the option to (de)activate this is great.

Sadly, the difficulty balancing is a bit off in Three Houses. Normal is a bit too easy, to the point where even misplays are rarely punished. I can't comment on the other options, but the post-launch added difficulty "Maddening" seems to be truly challenging.

While I haven't played all routes yet, I can already talk a bit about the story. Every House advances its story in a different direction, to the point that you will miss certain aspects. In the Blue Lions playthrough, the Church of Seiros units kept talking about a certain topic, only for that topic never truly being resolved. So as great as the idea of different storylines sound, not only do you know that they all can't happen at the same time (means no/only one story can be canon), they also leave things out, even if they could be neccessary.

Since we already started talking about the more negative aspects of this otherwise great game: Your own character has, outside of a few leve ups lines, no voice. An odd decision when everything else is voice acted, as well as your character being a Teacher that talks a lot.

There is one more negative point about the story I would like to address. I am not going into to much detail, but while the focus of the story shifts, what you do during that second part isn't all that different from the first one. I hoped for more fights, a different location, maybe even new mechanics and units. Yet it all stayed the same.

Fire Emblem Three Houses managed to be even better then Awakening. The world is bigger, the characters became more interesting and loveable, the story has moments that genunine surprised me and I have yet to play the other two routes.

Even though there are some weaknesses and the year 2019 felt in general like a weaker year, Fire Emblem Three Houses is still a worthy #1.