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AggroCraig

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Best of 2019

Another heavily delayed list, a busy end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 kept me from writing this up as early as I would have liked. It's still one of my favorite ways to look back on the year, so I'm not gonna miss it. A pretty fun year overall, there were a bunch of things that didn't quite make the cut, whittling down to just 10 was tricky. I'm giving a huge honorable mention to Monster Hunter World: Iceborne as being left off the list because it's technically an add-on, but was some of the most fun I had with a game this year. That game is still great.

List items

  • There's a recurring theme in 2019's list that boils down to "I was interested in this game from the first trailer," and Control is another example of that. After loving the Max Payne games and having a good time with Alan Wake, I remember buying Quantum Break and being hugely disappointed by the promise of "a Remedy shooter with some cool powers" whiffing so completely. Whether because of that disappointment or in spite of it, the Control reveal trailer at E3 2018 got its hooks in me right away. It introduced the concept of The Oldest House, a constantly-shifting place full of mystery to be uncovered, which turns out to be one of Control's greatest strengths. The aesthetic of Control exists at the intersection of the mundane and the unreal, where bureaucracy tries to put labels on the incomprehensible, and I found this combination enthralling. From the moment Jesse Faden walked into an office building with nobody at the front desk and went down a hallway just to emerge back out the way she'd come, I was all the way in for all the game had to offer. Lucky for me, it never stopped building on these core concepts in new and interesting ways, and it had pitch-perfect gameplay to match.

    The way that Remedy designed the interplay between third person shooting and the various powers Jesse has made encounters dynamic, requiring everything to be used in concert to really hit stride with the combat, is masterful. The Service Weapon, your transforming handgun, is one of my favorite shooter weapons in history, unlocking new forms as the game went on to let further playstyles develop based on which forms any given player focused on. Control has great character work across the board, but I have to give extra credit to Jesse, a well-acted protagonist who reacts to new revelations and awesome new powers alongside the player in a way that made me feel like we were on this ride together, and Casper Darling, a scientist from the more functional days of the Federal Bureau of Control (seriously) whose performance in various video diaries does a wonderful job of expressing just how wild of a place the Oldest House was even before it got infested by beings from another dimension. When everything comes together just right, uniting the game's incredible world design with its action, like during the Ashtray Maze, there is nothing that I played this year that approaches its level.

    If I had to sum it up with a silly reference, and everyone knows I do: "they all know Control is dyna-mite, they're right." Welcome back to the top, Remedy. I can't wait to see what's next.

  • This entry is somewhat of a stand-in for the entire Trails of Cold Steel series, which I played from 1-3 entirely in 2019 as they were released on PS4. This is probably going to be the most difficult of my recommendations to check out, as it amounts to some 200-odd hours of Japanese RPGs I worked my way through bit by bit over the years, but these are some of the finest games in the genre I've ever played. It's another of those games that's tough to really talk about, because it'll just feel like going down the design doc point by point and saying they nailed it all. Combat with a wealth of options and interesting factors to consider and play to your advantage, characters that are endearing in the ways they either lean into or mess with the typical tropes of RPG cast members, all of that is top-level stuff.

    Really, though, the thing that I keep coming back to when I try to express why Cold Steel has stuck with me so much is the design of the world and the grand story that's told within it. I'm not even really referring to specific plot points here, as many of the most climactic moments can only be described as "anime as hell." The world of this series is full of different factions vying for political/military power, working in the shadows until it's their time to make their big move, with characters you meet having motivations that make sense and feel logical in the context of the way they relate to these different groups. Following one class full of anime weirdos from a military academy as they go about their various lessons and field studies while all of these chess pieces are moved about the board of war around them is a compelling setup, and as the series progresses and the factions in power shift back and forth as the plot moves along, I couldn't help but be engrossed. There are plenty of times where the game gets too trope-y for its own good, and there's one specific relationship the series constantly gestures towards that I could absolutely do without, but my appreciation for Class VII and the rest of the Cold Steel cast outweighs any complaints. I finally understand why I heard so many good things about these games back when the series was on the PSP/Vita.

  • Oh boy, Sayonara Wild Hearts. This game is difficult for me to describe because it's such a singular experience, but this is one of the most confident damn games I can remember. Every bit of this game works together. The visuals, the music, the storytelling and themes, the gameplay, it's all 100% working together to maximize the impact on the player, and it all works. I listen to this soundtrack regularly even months after playing the game, and one of my favorite gaming memories from 2019 was actually watching a friend play through this game from beginning to end. It's a special experience to play it and feel my button presses hitting just right with the music for each stage, but watching someone else and picking up the little visual details you might miss while being too focused on playing is its own wonderful thing. The closest comparison I've seen someone make to this game is Rez, which interweaves soundtrack and gameplay with a similar level of skill, but Sayonara worked just a bit better for me, by some combination of its pop music bent, the wild and colorful visual design, and the story of love, loss, forgiveness, and growth.

    Sayonara Wild Hearts is a beautiful piece from beginning to end, and you can see the whole thing through in an hour or two. Please, if you take one thing away from reading this, play it.

  • The latest from Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, Judgment came along just as I had fallen in love with the Yakuza games and played four of them in two years, giving me a chance to play something with a similar spirit but take a break from those characters and their particular stories at the same time. Right from the game's opening credits scene which is absolutely as "police procedural" as you can get, featuring "Arpeggio" by ALEXANDROS which is an absolute banger, the tone is set. You play as Takayuki Yagami, a former lawyer turned private investigator. Yagami resigned from his law office in disgrace after a man he'd gotten acquitted was arrested for murder not long after. His life as a PI sets him on the trail of a serial killer who leaves dead bodies with their eyes removed, getting involved in a grander investigation due to his past ties both to his former law office and the yakuza family whose orbit he grew up in. As always happens with the games this studio makes, the story twists and turns as Yagami chases down the killer and the bigger picture of what is really going on and how connected everything actually is comes into focus. The characters are endearing (especially Kaito, he's a delight,) and the story builds to what I considered a fantastic conclusion. The combat is up to the standards set by the modern Yakuza games, but some of the detective work could stand to have been jazzed up a bit. My one real beef with Judgment is how often I had to go through the game's dull "tail this guy" minigame whether in story missions or side stories, but it wasn't bad enough to ruin anything.

    If getting into the Yakuza series is intimidating because of how many games there are to catch up on, Judgment is a perfect way to see what makes this studio so awesome without having to worry about the whole lineage.

  • I spent the bulk of 2017 and 2018 feeling like an absolute old man with regards to the "next big thing" in multiplayer video games, the battle royale shooter. I didn't care for PUBG, I never got into Fortnite, none of it ever really made sense to me. Leave it to Respawn to surprise-announce and then immediately release their own battle royale shooter, which distinguishes itself with unique characters/abilities and a focus on team play, which turned out to be exactly what I needed to get all the way invested. Friends and I have played a whole bunch of this game together, coming back every time a new season started and brought new characters, new maps, any changes that we could mess with to get more fun out of Apex. As we all learned from Titanfall (and especially from Titanfall 2,) there's nobody quite like Respawn when it comes to making first-person shooters that are purely fun to play, which is the other huge distinguishing factor that made Apex feel special to me. The characters' different abilities are very cool, and I certainly have my favorite (Lifeline, naturally,) but that wouldn't matter if the game weren't a blast to play moment-to-moment, with a whole arsenal of cool weaponry to find, strap cool upgrade bits to, and kill everyone else on the map until your team is all that's left. I was surprised by how much I was swept up by this game after how completely I was missed by the games that popularized the genre, but I can't fathom needing another battle royale as long as Apex keeps going strong.

  • Another long-awaited crowd-funded game, I've been waiting for Indivisible to release ever since its first trailer released. As someone who respected the hell out of the artistic and mechanical execution of Skullgirls but just couldn't jive with its style, I was looking forward to a chance to see all of that skill applied to another world and another genre. It's not a surprise coming from folks that made a fighting game like Skullgirls, but the battle system in Indivisible is constantly impressive with the intricacy of the combos it allows you to perform, juggling enemies between party members for huge damage. Speaking of party members, the game's cast is one of its greatest strength, both in the vastly different fighting styles that can be mixed and matched to find interesting synergies and whole new ways to approach battle, and the charming writing that made me want to spend all the time I could hanging out with this motley crew. The story is a relatively straightforward coming-of-age RPG tale, with the protagonist Ajna dealing with loss, learning about the world and her place in it, and getting caught up in existence-altering event where she's more important than she expected, you know the deal. It would be easy for it to come off as rote, but the writing and voice acting of the characters make the experience greater than the summary suggests. I'd rattle off my favorite characters, but it would take too long. It's a pretty short run for an RPG, but I had a hell of a time the whole way.

  • It's odd, I had a great time with Bloodstained and think it's a fantastic game, but I don't really have a ton to say about it. Right from the initial Kickstarter pitch, it claimed to be a successor to the lineage of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and its various followups, and though it took quite a few years to release, it delivered on that promise 100%. The world and monster design fits right in with the series it's clearly drawing from, and the shard system is a good development on what was basically the soul system from Aria/Dawn of Sorrow. Since those games are old favorites of mine, I was happy to see their DNA factor in so significantly. The package is brought together by an unexpected willingness to be silly and lean into the more ridiculous parts of Igarashi's past work, and I think it's better off for it.

    Footnote: This would have probably been several spots higher if the Switch version hadn't released as a technical disaster, and only reached "playable, I guess" by the time I actually played through it. Oh well.

  • I picked up Eliza after hearing a bit of buzz on Twitter, and it turned out to be one of my favorite bits of game writing of the year. Eliza takes place in a near future setting where a company has developed an app that claims to have "solved" psychiatry with data and machine learning, rendering the only human element in a therapy setting a "proxy" who says exactly what the AI dictates. The story deals with people's increasing willingness to give ourselves over to algorithms as a way to find some kind of objective truth, in an era where it's too easy to forget about the biases of the people who write the logic and maintain the data, and the effects that these decisions have on real people who really need help. The player character signs up to be an Eliza proxy, the general flow goes back and forth between proctoring therapy sessions with various patients and interacting with coworkers, higher-ups in the company, and other acquaintances. The game is functionally a visual novel, so I can't say much without going too far into specifics, but if the basic concept sounds interesting, the execution won't disappoint. Also, Nora rules.

  • When I first saw the reveal for Ring Fit Adventure, I didn't really know what to make of it. Another of Nintendo's efforts to mash together fitness and video games, as they've been doing for years, which have never really connected with me. However, once I started hearing some positive rumblings about Ring Fit near its release, I had to give it a shot. It's basically just a pilates ring that you put one controller in and a leg strap that holds the other, but the magic comes with the variety of things Ring Fit lets you do with it. The workouts themselves are well-presented, with the on-screen guide both showing you what your form should look like and also what muscles are being targeted, which helped me tweak my form until I felt it in what seemed like the right places. I've always been looking for something to supplement my normal cardio routine, and this has been just the thing. Beyond being a nice addition to a workout regimen, it's also a fun video game, with the RPG-style quest taking you through a set of courses that has proven way longer than I expected, with a full-on progression system that lets you unlock new workouts that attack enemies in different ways, which you can then use to fight monsters weak to workouts using the legs/arms/core/etc. Everything works together well, with the encounter designs doing a good job of guiding you towards a varied workout. On top of that, there are fun little minigames that serve as a nice warmup or cooldown, using some basic workouts in fun ways to let you smash robots or make some lovely pottery. Really. Maybe I just appreciate what Ring Fit has done for me as a supplement to my regular workouts, but I have nothing but good feelings about my time with it.

  • I'm one of those people who defends DmC: Devil May Cry as a well-done and fun game that is willing to be different enough from the "traditional" DMC games to be appreciated on its own. However, that doesn't mean there is no room in my heart for the series' roots, and I also had a ton of fun going back to them here. The stark differences between the three playable characters, from Nero's focus on charging Exceed and swapping in new robo-arms to V's summon manipulation and Dante's varied arsenal and style changes, along with the game skipping around between the three as you progress through the story, kept me excited for what was gonna come next. Even if I think that V's combat felt a bit lacking in depth compared to the other two, it was so different that it was still a fresh experience when I got to mess with it. The game's willingness to bounce between total seriousness and wild silliness is welcome, with moments that work on both ends of the spectrum. I enjoyed the new characters, Nico is a fun sidekick, and "Devil Trigger" is an actual banger. This game ruled, I'm interested to see if the wait for 6 will be anywhere near as long with the success of 5.
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