NOTE: Unordered list, goes from 10 to 1.
Is it almost October of 2020? Yeah, but it might as well be March 200+. Time is no longer real, I had an iced coffee at 11:22 PM last night. Whatever. Here's my top 10 games of 2019
The Outer Wilds starts like an absolute banger, but it ends with a fizzle, and its middle section is a slow, descending slope of mediocrity.
That might be a bit harsh, but it's not too harsh. The first planet of Outer Worlds really gets you thinking back into your Fallout: New Vegas days, and it shows a tremendous amount of promise that I can only hope will lead to the sequel being the game we all wanted this one to be.
The gun-play is just a couple notches above New Vegas, but what was clunky and unresponsive in 2010 is an outright bore in 2019. The corporations ruining your life gimmick is fun (but also hits a bit too close to home), but it really wears out its welcome without any new fresh ideas by the midway point, and it doesn't really get any better.
The ending is as limp-dick as any of the Fallout games too. Why, oh why, can't anyone figure out how to make one of these types of games end?
I still enjoyed my time, and at the time of writing this game is on Game Pass, so you should give it a go. There's a couple characters that I really grew to love, like Parvati, but to be a spiritual success to New Vegas you need to do a few things great, not just a couple things well.
Hey, EA made a good Star Wars game that didn't launch as a burning trash fire. Neat!
I've resigned myself to the fact that the Star Wars franchise of games may never be what I used to love. Am I ever going to get KOTOR 3? Probably not! Even if I do get it, it seems the design philosophies at EA are at complete odds with what I enjoy from those games.
KOTOR aside, Fallen Order is an Uncharted Star-Wars game with Sekiro-style combat. I don't particularly care for Uncharted, but boy am I down for some stupid Star Wars scenery because I'm a sheep.
The combat is fine, but I grew pretty tired of in the latter half. The story at some points feels really disjointed (seriously, what the hell was the point of that entire Bounty Hunter section?), and the game really wants to rely on the Dark Side's ability to lure in Jedis but, like almost every Star Wars game/movie ever, they do a REALLY bad job giving any sort of motivation for why someone would go from a beacon of hope to a complete psychopath in a couple days.
I hope there's a sequel to Fallen Order. Cal is a fun enough, if a bit boring, protagonist, and I'd just like to engage with something story-driven with Star Wars that is actually passable in quality.
Confession Time: As a wee-lad, I once posted on a Sonic AOL hangout page about Shadow the Hedgehog. I was banned for that post.
Hypnospace Outlaw is an incredible piece of nostalgia and just NAILING a very specific tone. The game sees you playing internet moderator in searching for content deemed to be against the Hypnospace TOS, and it can lead to some hilarious morally dubious actions like taking down a teacher's website because she dared to use a copyrighted character.
The actual playing of Hypnospace is not the draw for me, but just exploring the Netscape era pages, all blaring out some horrible garage high-school grunge band's newest track at you, transported me back to a time that was equally as horrible as the time now, but at least I didn't know it back then.
Not a ton to say about Resident Evil 2 remake. It's Resident Evil 2, but really pretty and behind the shoulder.
If The Outer Worlds was a slow descent in quality, Resident Evil 2 is a sheer cliff hanging over jagged rocks covered in poison.
Okay, okay, maybe too harsh. The RCPD station is Resident Evil at its absolute finest and Mr. X really brings a sense of tension no matter where you go. It's backtracking and puzzle solving galore as you piece together your way out of the station.
Issue is, once you leave the station you go to the sewers which is abjectly terrible and drops the game from a 9.5 to an 8. The lab at the end is a slight return to form, but the sewers really did ruin the game for me in a lot of respects.
The plot is stupid, but it's a PS1 resident evil plot, so whatever. I cannot understate just how much I enjoyed the first area of this game, and that alone brings it up a few spots on this list.
Apex Legends is probably the best playing battle royale ever release, and it very well should be seeing as how it was made by the Titanfall devs.
The mix of class-based abilities, weapons that are just so satisfying to dump on people, and that sweet, sweet Respawn gameplay make Apex Legends an absolute titan within the genre (pun FULLY intended) and if it weren't for a couple baffling decisions in the game's development it very well could have topped this list.
How in the world did it take Apex as long as it did to get something as simple as Solos and Duos into the game? I eventually stopped playing Apex when my friends did because I couldn't hop into a game on my own without being paired with two randoms and being at a massive disadvantage against every pre-made group in the match. It's absolutely bonkers to me how long it took for them to FINALLY add something as basic as that.
In addition to that stupid shit, the first few battlepasses really were lacking when compared to something like Fortnite and it pushed me away quicker than I really would have liked to with Apex. One day I'll return and it'll be the game I really wanted to be. But seriously, what the hell was all that about, EA?
Where Wii-Fit failed, Ring Fit reigns supreme.
Ring Fit can, and will, kick the ever-living shit out of you until you perform some form of movement that is good for your body, and even then it'll still kick the shit out of you. Everything in Ring Fit is designed around getting you to perform exercises and to perform them correctly.
The included Ring-con is an absolutely amazing fitness tool as it allows you so many different ways to work different parts of your body. The leg strap, however, not quite as great as it often would not read my posture correctly forcing me to reset the device to get it calibrated.
Regardless of mild technical issues, Ring Fit does a great job at pushing you forward in a story that is juuuuuust engaging enough to make you want to kick the shit out of a buff dragon. My only gripe is sometimes the game expects so much of you that it makes it easy to lose motivation and fall off playing for awhile, but it's a fitness video game that actually works so it's an outstanding achievement.
Outer Wilds is well, wild.
There was no game released in 2019 that engaged me more with its world(s) than Outer Wilds, and the clockwork nature of all the moving pieces kept me wondering and wandering for answers to questions I didn't even know I had.
When people question the concept of video games as art Outer Wilds should be among the chief games brought up for an argument in the affirmative. It's absolutely spectacular and can get surprisingly emotional for a game about silly looking aliens trying to not blow themselves up.
In the end, I wasn't smart or patient enough to see Outer Wilds through to the end, and the ability to get truly stuck without knowing where to go next makes it a bit difficult to recommend to everyone, but for those it does click with Outer Wilds is simply unforgettable.
Most days I think I don't like anime. I'm immediately affronted by the overacting and the in-your-face nature that the medium usually entails. Then something like Persona, or in this case Fire Emblem, comes about and I realize, "fuck, I kinda like anime, huh?"
Fire Emblem: Three Houses is AGGRESIVELY anime, but it's merely the backdrop to a tight battling system and some truly fun characters. It really kind of is the Persona of Fire Emblems with a heavier focus on effectively social links between major story events, and that was all I needed to get invested in a Fire Emblem game for the first time in my life.
The story is ... well, anime. Got a main character with amnesia, something about inner potential, something about going super saiyan. It's all in there, but the actual strategy gameplay is an absolute joy and marrying it with some downtime to just hang out with your students sure is a good way to break up the monotony of battle after battle.
If the franchise continues in this direction, I'll surely be there on day one every step of the way.
God, I fucking love Yakuza.
The prospect of playing an entire "Yakuza" style game without even a sliver of Kiryu or Majima was enough to make me side eye Judgment. Those are my boys? Who the hell is Yagami?
As it turns out, Yagami is great. In my experience with the Yakuza series, it tends to be the plots that largely stand on their own that reign supreme over the franchise, and Judgment is yet another example of that being the case.
The combat and gameplay is largely what you come to expect from the series, but the introduction of side cases and the overall investigatory nature of the story is what really drew me into the dark mire surrounding some precarious murders in the old stomping grounds of Kamurocho. It's gripping and introduces a ton of new characters to get attached to (shoutout to my boy Kaito), even if it does suffer from pacing issues that plague the rest of the franchise.
There's negatives about Judgment for sure, the tailing missions are boring and break up some excellent tension that the game manages to develop, but honestly those complaints fall by the wayside when I think about just how much fun I had unraveling the mysteries behind Judgment.
More of this please, SEGA.
PS: That opening cinematic absolutely SLAPS
I get the feeling that Sekiro will be forgotten when discussing From Software's legendary run of games they've had going for the last decade+. It's a weirdly out of place game when putting it up against the Souls series and Bloodborne, but it's also absolutely phenomenal.
Eschewing the typical "circle strafe and hit when they don't hit" gameplay from the prior Soulsborne titles, Sekiro instead goes for a more active combat system in which you'll be parrying and whittling down stamina instead of health pools to land that final deathblow.
It doesn't sound like a dramatic change, but it lends itself so well to the samurai movie roots of Sekiro and leads to some of the best boss battles in the series, bar none. It's also RIDICULOUSLY HARD and is to date the only Soulsborne game I haven't been able to beat. That final boss sure is something else.
In a stronger year, it's possible Sekiro would land in the 4-2ish area, but it's absolutely deserving of my 2019 game of the year, and I look forward to diving back in to finally finish this masterpiece.
