Look, I don’t always make bulletproof decisions on these lists that I don’t regret later. Maybe Slay the Princess should’ve appeared on last year's list instead of Trails to Azure. Who’s to say? I’d edit the list if only I could.
This is year 2 of being a zeitgeisty boy with my game playing this year. I’m filling out a whole top 9 of games I liked this year. Now that I’m further away from it, I think 2023 was a fantastic year for games. I was a coward last year and didn’t call it. In comparison, I think 2024 was more average. Still had some great games to be sure, but I wasn’t blown away by the volume of awesome games like last year.
Still playing a lot of Theatrhythm and F-Zero 99 from last year. I was under the impression that those two games were the main reasons (aside from 2 games on this GOTY list) that my Switch got used this year, but my Nintendo Switch Year in Review begged to differ. Meanwhile, my Playstation Wrap-Up seems to think I’ve put in 249 hours in a game called Genshin Impact and 182 hours in one called The First Descendant. Crazy stuff.
On this year's Pile of Shame, we’ve got Nine Sols, Infinity Nikki, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess and UFO 50. At least I knocked Like a Dragon: Gaiden off of last year's Pile of Shame? And discovered I don’t like 9 Years of Shadow.
Also, I can’t spoiler block my writeups with the list format, so tread lightly for entries 1, 4, 7 and 8.
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I think this might be my favorite turn-based rpg ever. The characters are extremely customizable while also retaining their own identities as units. The normal mode has been exactly the right level of challenging. All the dungeons are fully crafted things; gone are the randomly generated dungeons like Tartarus and Mementos. I haven’t beaten this game at the time of writing, making this my first time picking an unfinished game as my GOTY, so I don’t really know how it ends yet. For reference, I’m wrapping up quests in the fourth town. But I’ve greatly enjoyed the story and the world that Atlus has built. For the first time in one of these games, there are no characters in the social link roster who I don’t want to spend time with. The state of the world is in peril due to the existence of “humans” and an uncertain change in leadership, but I also got this sense of naive hope from the NPCs. They were used to a monarchy where they didn’t have a say in their government, and all of a sudden, it’s all in their hands. There’s plenty of dumb candidates that are fighting for things like ‘abolish all taxes,’ and ‘only old people will have rights,’ and whatever strength-take-all world Louis seems to want. But they draw crowds. It’s fun! There’s a town crier and the people are participating. It can feel more like a roving festival than an election. It was refreshing to see a cast that’s so excited about the future. Also, this game's just really fucking cool in it's imagery. The "humans" that make up most of the boss roster, which are based on paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, are nightmare-fuel. Everywhere my eyes wander, I see some new facet of their design that elicits a spoken ‘Jesus Christ!’ There’s also a Majora’s Mask rock in the sky with a face except this one oversees that the election candidates aren’t assassinated and shows how successful they are in its eye. You skateboard around on a sword, and your “gauntlet runner” that you travel between big towns on has actual legs and runs and has an actual heart. This game is so metal.
I have an inner dialogue with Astro Bot whenever I boot it up. The title screen explodes with bright colors and he starts explaining, “I am Astro Bot!” I think “who is that?” He replies “Astro. Bot.” “Astro Bot, huh?” “I am Astro Bot!” “Yeah, you are!” “Astro. Bot.” I’m glad we understand each other. One of my actual favorite aspects of the Smash Bros. series is its dedication to being this exhibit of Nintendo’s past. Smash offers a large playable roster, items, the trophies/spirits, the collection and rearrangement of music which all pay homage to one source material or another. Astros offerings are more limited by comparison, but those bots are so dang expressive. Whacking them in the overworld always pays off with some type of silly reference, and every unique bot has something you can get them in the gacha lab, like Raidens watermelon, or Lara Croft's angry dinosaur. The levels in Asto are great, but the real carrot on the stick was finding all the bots and seeing which franchise got represented this time. And four fifths of the final levels were excellent for similar reasons. I have to point out how great the speedrunning levels were. Specifically ‘Building Speed’ which cost me another 10-20 hours. And that’s a 28 second level.
This is a really goddamn good metroid game. The combat is tight, the platforming is fluid, the levels are very tightly designed, the upgrades are a good mix of inventive and traditional. The boss fights are fantastic. They’re challenging, but the game is well designed enough to not be bullshit. There was almost always something in my moveset that would turn a punishing attack into a non-issue, and for the few instances where I didn’t find one, I’m sure the solution exists. The DLC, Mask of Darkness, was also excellent, and it served as a good reminder of what was awesome about The Lost Crown. This game has a cool feature that I’ve never seen before where you get a limited resource that lets you take a screenshot of the room you’re in, and that gets posted on the map screen. This helps keep track of obstructions in rooms you’re in so that later, you can tell at a glance if you have the power that’ll help you get past that obstruction or not. I didn’t use this feature enough to run out of screenshots, but it really contributed to the feeling that I was mapping Mount Qaf out, and I retroactively wish that all metroid games had a mechanic like this. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed the story too. Sargon has a Zagreus-like, quiet swagger to him and his relationship to the rest of the immortals never felt boring. He gets to have a band of people to riff off of, while also not compromising on the solitary exploration and loneliness that this genre excels at.
In year end predictions from 2023, I guessed Infinite Wealth would be my game of the year this year. I wasn’t too far off the mark. Ryu Ga Gotoku refined their acceptable combat from the now confusingly-named Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and created something exceptional. During your turn, you have some limited movement in a radius to better position the trajectory of your attacks, and skills are more clear about what causes knockback. The skill inheritance makes more sense than the last games. Lastly, this game doesn’t really have a point of ‘you gotta go grind 10 levels,’ which is another point in favor of Infinite Wealth compared to its predecessor. The substories meet the bar of quality for the rest of the series, which is to say, it’s head and shoulders above the side quests of most other video games. There’s a lady whose pet chicken was abducted by a UFO, and her only proof is a spontaneous selfie. Orlando’s quest to get his sick wife to see snow one last time is in the running for best side quest I’ve ever played. The Drink Links with your party are also extremely worth seeing. I think I like the main story of this game, but I do think it’s the weakest out of the ones I’ve played (0, Gaiden, 7 and this). It takes a few chapters before the story began to hook, and it ends up juggling a lot of threads that don’t all feel like they conclude nicely. Still, it does right by newcomers like Chitose, Tomizawa, Yamai and Ebina, and without explicitly spoiling the ending, Ichiban’s good nature shines through in a scene that makes me think “What if Bastian had RGG’s production budget?”
The idea of distilling 1000xResist down to 2-3 paragraphs is intimidating, especially for someone who played it once, six months ago, and wasn’t taking notes. All I can really say is that it’s awesome and it’s gripping. If you’re reading this and are disappointed that I didn’t have a more compelling thing to say that’d make you go play 1000xResist, so am I. But you should go play it anyway. It’s one of those games where the less you know going into it, the better it is.
After the first trailer for Project Eve came out, I visited a video titled “That one song from the Project EVE trailer..” like every month for half a year. Eventually, Project EVE became Stellar Blade, and that song from the trailer became “Escape!” I had my eyes on this game for a while. And then it came out and it was solid. And everyone was very normal about it. As my story above probably tells you, I really liked the soundtrack for this game. “The Song of the Traveler,” “Oasis,” and “Great Desert Part B” are great. If you ask me, “Lily’s Atelier” is the standout. It’s so goddamn beautiful. Infinity Nikki is a pile-of-shamer for me this year, so this ended up being my dress-up game of the year. There’s a plethora of outfits, hair options, glasses and earrings to mix and match, and changing Eve’s look throughout the game was a fun diversion when I wanted some downtime from the action. The fishing minigame was also there to divert me from the action. It was cool because I got to listen to more “Oasis.”
I kept myself in the dark about Persona 3 spoilers for years in anticipation of this game. The concept of a “Persona 3 Remake” had been through the weeb rumor mill for many years before it finally manifested itself. In some sense, it took too long, seeing as how I’ve really soured on the idea of video game remakes in recent years. But I made an exception for this after the decade of ‘not playing Persona 3’ I went through. I love how all of the teachers at Gekkoukan High School are just the worst teachers ever. They’re rude, they’re asking you material you’ve never read, the history teacher ONLY wants to teach about Samurais and the rest of the curriculum is an obstacle to him. I’m convinced that the school nurse doesn’t actually work there, and is just some guy who dares you to drink his mystery concoctions for courage points. And I like how many of the social links leave after you’ve completed them. In Persona 5, for example, almost everyone stays in town and hangs around you and you have to turn them down or ignore them after you’ve finished their links if you want to spend your time productively. In Persona 3, everyone who isn’t a classmate or a party member becomes unavailable as they go about putting their life back in order. It’s bittersweet and it lets me believe they have lives outside of waiting for me at the cafe. Or maybe I want to believe you can keep rank 10 relationships past the point where seeing each other regularly is feasible.
The Link's Awakening Remake art style was too good to only be used for one game, and I love that Grezzo finally got a chance to make a mainline Zelda title after a decade plus of making great Zelda remakes. Changing Zelda’s toolset from boomerangs and fire wands to conjuring enemies that throw boomerangs and, are just fireballs, led to a pretty novel experience. The early game is especially tense. Navigating rooms of enemies while learning how best to command your zombies is unlike anything else in the series. Shoutout to my boy, Peahat. Echoes of Wisdom’s problems start to pile on the further the game goes. The echoes menu gets cramped. The same cloud spam and top tier monsters trivialize traversal and combat. Most rewards don't feel rewarding. There’s a lot of blah blah between dungeons that tell a Dora the Explorer-depth story. (The deku scrubs and their spider web addiction get a pass from me.) I like Tri though. They’re a little cutie-patootie, and I like the scenes at the end of rifts when there’s just a confetti of Tri on screen. Their theme is nice, and I generally enjoy how the music is done. They recall previous iterations of Zora Village or Hyrule Ranch in their instrumentation or early notes, and then they go a different direction.
This is a deckbuilder rogue game using the Fairy Tail license. I’m so used to arena fighters being the norm for anime games, and half-baked rpg being the second norm. This is a weird product, right? I haven’t played very many deckbuilders, but they seem great. Getting new cards in your deck while you thin the garbage out of yours is satisfying. In this case, the familiar creatures and characters of Fairy Tail eased me through the process. The pixel art was pleasant to look at and the music sounded like it could’ve come straight out of the anime, but it’s new. What a neat little thing.