My Personal Top 10 Games of 2019
Without wasting any time, lets get into my Top 10 for the year.
List items
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This is sort of a proxy entry for the Cold Steel series and just the Trails series in general. PlayStation Vita fans have talked about the Cold Steel games for a while now, and when they announced they were coming to PlayStation 4 I decided to try them out, and I fell in love.
This series is great at building a world, and seeding it with interesting NPCs that go about their lives, allowing for interesting dialogue even if it’s not important. The politics and technology is this world is great and give a great backdrop to the story going on.
The 3rd Cold Steel game is amazing, just like all the others, its starts off in a similar way to the first Cold Steel game, and feels good about it. This whole game feels like a culmination of both the previous 2 Cold Steel games and the previous 7 games in the Trails series, characters, plot points and even just the history of the continent all come together in what feels like a final act for this world. The new characters are all well written and given interesting arcs that make them feel like actual people and not just characters, as well as an interesting battle system that has been slowly updated and improved since the very first game Trails in The Sky.
My only real complaint (and it’s a pretty big one honestly) is that this game doesn’t end, this game cuts to credits in what feels like the middle of a sentence, in a really frustrating way, very clearly signalling that there is a next game (which is already out in Japan).
Overall, I have spent a lot of time in the Trails series this year, and this game feels like the culmination of that time. I feel like I have found a new game for my favorite games of all time list and that means a lot to me.
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I never thought I would enjoy an Atelier game as much as I did with this one. For context I have played for about 5 hours of Atelier Sophie and finished Atelier Lydie & Suelle. I originally wasn’t super excited to start playing this, I had finished Lydie & Suelle earlier this year and felt like it was too long and tedious, and Atelier Ryza fixed all my problems I had with the other games I had played in this series.
The game has a pretty good story, nothing groundbreaking but interesting enough to push me from one point to another, the story starts with Ryza being bored and not being an alchemist, meets a group of travelling merchants and learns about alchemy from one of them, and starts out on a journey to become an Alchemist, also while exploring the secret areas of her island and exposing the corrupt island leaders. The game is well done for a slice of life RPG story.
They changed up both the crafting and battle mechanics, making both more interesting and fun overall. The battle mechanics have changed to be an Action Time Battle system, where each attack that lands filling a gauge and allowing to “level up” in order to attack more than once per turn allows for more interesting strategy and this gauge also allows you to use skills in battle. Most of the game is spent crafting and the new system is great, it’s more fun and easier to use, and personally I just like the system better than the previous system.
Overall I really enjoyed my time with this game, and had next to no expectations with this game.
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I enjoyed everything about this game. I really enjoyed spending time with the characters of th Black Eagles, each student had their own story that felt thought out and interesting enough to keep me going. The overall story is good and the multiple different perspectives makes for a cool idea.
This game feels really good to play, in a way that most Fire Emblem games do, a ton of different classes, and weapon types. The ability to change characters weapon affinities and classes allows for a ton of customization in a game that encourages it.
Overall I have really enjoyed playing through it, I really want to go back to it and play through the different routes.
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Pokemon Sword and Shield, despite the shortcomings of the game, is still a fantastic game. The game’s story leaves a lot to be desired, the story happens to someone else, while you wander around this world gaining badges. Overall there is not a ton to say about Pokemon; the battle mechanics are just as good as they always were, they made making pokemon competitive easier, with the ability to change abilities, and now natures. This game for the better, takes a lot of the grindy, time wasting aspects of older Pokemon, and makes them easier.
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This game is a great action adventure game with an interesting murder mystery story. I don;t really have a ton to say about this game other than just I really enjoyed my time with this game. From the interesting main story, the characters that kept me interested in all their personal stories and the generally fun gameplay. Also I spent way too much time just playing Virtua Fighter 5, which is always fun.
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I could talk for a long time on my thoughts about Kingdom Hearts 3, but ultimately despite enjoying my time with this game, it was also super disappointing for me. This game was set up to finish the story that all the previous games had lead up to. This game was set up to allow characters like Axel (Lea) and Kairi to flourish and matter in a way they hadn’t before. The game was set up to wrap up the wild mess that they had created and yet, the end of the game leaves multiple options open for a sequel. And with all that being said, the game was really easy on most difficulties, making the game slightly boring to play. This game was set up to be my favourite game of the year, by a large margin and yet with the stuff they did, I’m not even excited for the DLC coming out soon.
**UPDATE: The DLC did not affect my opinion one way or another.
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This game falls short of its predecessors, the Zero Escape series, and while the two shouldn’t be compared as they are doing different things I couldn’t help wishing I enjoyed it more. Everything from this game is interesting, from the main plot line, to the world they create and even the character’s backstories and slightly different personalities in the different timelines.
The game spends its multiple timelines focusing on different key characters. And while I enjoyed the stories told, somewhere better and more thought out than others.
The main problem I had with the game was the puzzles, the structure of the puzzles seem just a little bit unpredictable. For context each section follows a set of rules and allows you to puzzle out solutions to the problem, but from each section of puzzles, you have to start back from position 1 each time.
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This game had a fantastic trailer, enough so that it got me to play through Gears of War 4 in preparation of this game. For a little background, I don’t play a ton of shooters, I never really enjoyed them, mixed with my vision issues making it hard for me to follow with what’s going on, on screen. Despite that I really love what I’ve played in the Gears franchise, the new characters and story in Gear 4 led up to a really interesting story in Gears 5. One with a ton of interesting character development and hints at the bigger world around the main characters. Kait is an interesting character that is given an arc that allows for a complex character where there isn’t just a right or wrong answer.
The game features a pseudo open world, which I personally didn’t enjoy and don’t think worked super well, the areas were big and fully explorable but for the most part were empty. With that being said you can completely ignore the open world stuff and go from point to point and have a great time.
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I only played Castlevania Symphony of the Night last year, and while enjoying it, I didn’t fall in love with it. That is why Bloodstained Ritual of the Night caught me off guard, I really enjoyed playing through this. The platforming felt great, all the enemy designs were great, if not a little weird, and the boss fights were all super fun. I’m not the biggest fan of Metroidvania’s as a genre, I tend to enjoy just straight action platformers as opposed to the open world aspect of Metroidvanias. With that being said, I really enjoyed exploring the castle and trying to find and explore as much as possible. The powers are all reminiscent of abilities from other games, but different enough to be new and exciting.
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The original Life is Strange was a fantastic game that took an interesting idea and turned it into a worthwhile game and I would consider it the game that got me back into gaming as a whole. The 2nd game took an interesting arc for me, the game is intense in themes, and while I started out wishing for more of the teenage drama bullshit of the first game. With that being said, by the end of the game, I really changed my mind, the game was set up really well to slowly showcase the characters personality.
Originally I thought the game felt disjointed, each chapter started in a new place and ended with Sean and Daniel leaving said place, there was never a sense of place, the same way the first game did. The first game had a few sets that I grew to know, The Diner, Chloes House, the Junkyard etc.The second game doesn’t really have those recurring settings, and while there are nice locations in the second game, where my mind goes to when I think about this game. Locations such as the Woods from Chapter 3 and even Away from Chapter 5. This makes sense with the themes of the game though, Sean always runs away, that is who he is, right from the beginning the whole game is based off Sean selfishly running away from his problems constantly, and only at the end did I come to realize this.
This game was good, and I’m excited to see what Dontnod does with their next games.
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