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BusinessisBlooming

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Game of the Year 2023

Word on the street is 2023 is one of the best years for video games ever. I'm not that interested in doing the math, but I don't usually play enough new games to pad out a top 10 list full of newly released games. Not only did I play 10 such games, but I had to make hard choices about games that wouldn't make the list. I don't even have to tell you which old games I played this year.

A lot of good remasters/ports came out this year too and I'm working my way through. Metroid Prime, Metal Gear Solid Collection, Pikmin, Persona 3 & 4, Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters on Switch.

List items

  • Nothing was funnier in video games this year than when the warp staff users in the Byleth paralogue made their move. First, they warped 2 scary-ish enemies in my direction. Then, Byleth used Dance of the Goddess to give extra turns to the warpers. Next, one warper warped the other so he could then further warp one of those scary enemies at me. This was a crazy level of movement that the AI either never has or takes advantage of in Fire Emblem. My eyes grew wide, thinking that I’d have to use a charge of the time crystal to salvage this inevitable mess. The Falcon Knight that has moved 10 spaces without even using their own movement then proceeds to attack a disposable resource on the map for ⅔ of its health. All that crazy movement tech to make me piss myself over nothing. Byleth is a brilliant tactician.

    The Sigurd map jumpscaring you with lines of paladins, and Ike demolishing a giant fort that did not present as destructible are the second and third funniest things in video games this year.

  • The enemy death animations are so extra. When you kill the floating coffin ghost, its spectral hands scrape at the exterior of the coffin, desperately trying to free itself as it fades. There’s an old lady who commands birds to attack you, and when you deplete her health, two ravens surround and peck at her until she disintegrates in a gory mess. These kill animations take like 2 seconds and it’s not like you have to stop and watch them all, but they’re so detailed. How could you not watch the ravens massacre their master? The characters you meet have that same level of immaculately detailed horror going on. The pious lady who boosts your flask efficacy has her skin gradually removed each time you go back. They didn’t have to do that.

  • Every video game franchise that has at least solid music should just shamelessly rip off Theatrhythm. Nintendo, Falcom, miHoYo, you guys are blowing it! According to this Polygon article I just looked up, the figure I’m looking for is 385. 385 playable tracks from the Final Fantasy series. That’s not even counting the DLC from some of Square’s other games, including Octopath and the NieR games.

    I had only played 3 numbered Final Fantasy games before this, so I wasn’t sure that I’d get much out of Theatrhythm. I thought I’d just play the tracks from 4, 7 and 15 that I remembered enjoying and then move on with my life. It ended up being a fun way to sample the rest of the series. Now I’ve heard some great FF14 tracks I was missing out on without having to pay the asking price of (according to howlongtobeat) 103 - 3,611 hours. Now, I’ve beaten 16 and 6, and I’m a good chunk of the way through 10. Now, I want to play Mystic Quest, and I don’t even know what that is. Apparently it’s a Super Nintendo game?

  • This thing really took the world by storm, huh? Went from not knowing what it was one week to counting the days for the Playstation release. I started co-op with a buddy and then we both quietly made solo characters that we ended up playing way more of. The specific DnD format of the game was something to adjust to, but it did hook its tentacles in me for a good few weeks there. Definitely played this game for so long a few nights that I saw sunlight peek through my window.

    I made a berserker drow lady and I’m all about chucking every weapon in my inventory at fools. Got a ring that adds an extra d4 damage. I think there was a necklace or something else that also added damage. Activate frenzy to get some bonus actions and then I just start tossing 3-4 things in one turn from mid-range and sometimes I knock guys prone. I’m basically playing Hitman. One time, I accidentally looted a dead body. As in, I put the entire dead body in my video game pocket. A few encounters later, I saw it show up as an improvised thrown weapon, and then threw it at the forge robot I was fighting. You gotta give it up for a game that lets you walk around with a dead body in your pants.

  • This has become my ideal way to play F-Zero SNES, which is a game I liked a lot to begin with. The battle royale format fits F-Zero like a glove, and they made some good, smart changes like a proper bump/spin attack, 4 laps instead of 5, and W I D E S C R E E N. The added Skyway is the real secret sauce, and making sure you’ve got enough yellow meter to skip difficult parts of some tracks is really satisfying when it all comes together.

    I do worry that F-Zero 99’s best days are behind it, which is a tragedy because it hasn’t had thaaat many days. I can only hope this game has a brighter future than Mario 35 or Pac-Man 99.

  • It’s hard to talk about this game without drawing comparisons to Breath of the Wild. There’s a lot of shared DNA which I think makes both games harder to stand apart in the grand pantheon of Zelda games. That said, both of these games hover somewhere in the lofty 5-7 spots on that ranking, which is a pretty good spot to be in for one of my favorite series.

    I liked that the dungeons in Tears were more visually distinct, had music that evolved as the dungeon went on, and had bosses that weren’t all named ‘___blight Ganon.’ The sequence that begins after collecting the final dragon tear is my favorite of the year. Once I realized that Zelda was the dragon, I immediately started racing after her. Other dragons in these games tend to just go in a direction and they don’t care whether you interact with them or not. Thinking that Zelda would get away greatly enhanced the tension, and the payoff when I retrieved the Master Sword was immense. And everything with Ganondorf at the end is just as good. God, this game's final hours kick ass.

  • This game was a must-play for me from the moment a trailer informed me that the combat director from Devil May Cry 5 was on this game. You totally feel it in the character movement, and the early cadence of punctuating sword swings with spell casts has the same controller-feel as revving Nero’s sword that makes motorcycle noises.

    My prevailing memory from my time with FF16 is using the Bahamut eikon and charging up a level 4 Gigaflare. Clive just screams at the sky and then blasts of energy rain from the sky for like a minute. That’s this game in a nutshell. It’s a game about making Clive shout, and then something cool happens. When you’re fighting, anyway.

  • Mario Maker needs to learn lessons from this ahead of its next entry. Namely, watching replays of invaders beefing it in your level from their perspective is several levels more satisfying than pinning an ‘X’ over a death pit. The co-op is also more fun, even if it seems like it breaks the difficulty of the game when your buddy can revive you endlessly .

    There’s a red pulpy mass in a jar that welcomes you home after a long day of brutal violence. When my levels are doing well, it exclaims “You’ve created a death trap!” And yes, I do want this character in the next Mario Maker.

  • Have you ever enjoyed a game so much that you’ve played less of it? In Trails to Zero (this game’s prequel), you’re a new kid in a new neighborhood and you’re learning the ropes of your highly-specific cop-mercenary job. And all the characters, even the ones that borderline ‘wouldn’t have a name’ in a different game, evolve and have relationships throughout and help to make Crossbell feel like one of the most lived-in towns in video games.

    That continues in Azure, and I don’t want to be done with Crossbell. At least, that’s my excuse for only being in Chapter 4 despite starting this game in May.

  • I haven’t played Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Its reputation precedes it as the hardest game in From Software’s recent output of ‘punishing action games,’ and I just don’t know if I have the sauce. Wo Long is Sekiro for babies (me). The parry window is generous. You play almost every level with a historical, sweaty boyfriend that draws enemy aggression and sometimes does damage. Leveling your gear grants bigger advantages than any FromSoft game I’ve played. The game still throws hard fights at you, but aside from the level that doesn’t give you a buddy, I felt up for the challenge.

    There’s also a neat hub level that… doesn’t have much to do in it, but I like just hanging out there? It’s a bunch of high mountains in the clouds connected by vines that you can platform on with a peaceful track over it. There’s NPCs to give collectibles to, the respec guy, the armorer lady, yadda yadda yadda. It doesn’t sound that special when I describe it, but for some reason, the Hidden Village is the first thing I think about when I reflect on my time with the game.
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