And you thought 2020 was a weird year to try and write an introductory paragraph for.

Games were still working as heavy-duty distractions for me in 2021, although things improved enough that I didn’t play quite as many as last year. After 8 years at *that place* I switched jobs! Moving into a completely new role with a lovely bunch of people, leaving some toxic management behind and moving house has turned out to be such a positive and I’m eternally lucky that it’s worked out the way it has.

Anyway, onto the list.

Shoutouts I didn’t get chance to finish

Opus: Echo of Starsong

I’ve only managed a few hours in it, but so far it’s a very charming adventure-novel game that I get the feeling is absolutely going to have me emotionally ruined by the end of it, meaning it probably would’ve ended up high on my list.

It reminds me of 80 Days in terms of writing and decision making, with a little bit of resource management making you commit to where you’re going to explore, layered under a lovely soundtrack.

Special Nier Replicant Section

I decided not to include Nier Replicant on my list even though it has some (incredibly good!) additional story content because it feels like cheating. I have such an attachment to the original in nearly all aspects there’s no way it’d couldn’t be my number 1, so in the interests of every other game on this list it gets its own section instead.

It’s still amazing, except this time it’s much less of a chore to play (even if the “of-an-era” quest design is what it is) and I remembered all over again why I burst into tears at the Concert within seconds of that first track. The new Ending E hit really well, and underscored that it’s Kainé who is the strength of that game, not the protagonist.

No.12: Loop Hero

Loop Hero seemed to come and go very quickly for me, but it was one of those games that grabbed me pretty hard for the week or so I played it.

I’ve never been great at games that require using limited resources actively as part of the game flow, such as buying units in Advance Wars/Wargoove, because ultimately I am bad at that kind of decision making – meaning I managed to screw up quite a number of good runs by thinking I was in a good position to handle the Vampire + Village combo for 3 turns when I was…definitely not.

However when I wasn’t playing so terribly, I got a lot of satisfaction in trying out the different combinations of tiles and coming up with more and more optimal ways to streamline each loop the Hero had to traverse. Like a good deckbuilding game, it’s very fun to just click into a routine and watch my guy demolish anything put in front of him.

One of the other huge positives is the presentation of the game, having some truly fantastic pixel art & animations alongside a chiptune/synth/metal soundtrack that manages to put out the appropriate vibes depending on whether you’re resting at camp, traversing the loop or having a desperate confrontation with the boss where you’re willing your slowly-dropping health to hold out long enough to win.

That 45 seconds into Star Judgment is just perfect.

Soundtrack Highlights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3kriBoJA9I - Empty Ocean (intro)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hj9vra5-pc Star Judgment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRM_iYhi14 - Universe's Storm

No. 11: Fights in Tight Spaces

Ah, the Deckbuilder. Scourge of my work career long before the trend popped up in video games and another of those games where I tend to make bad decisions which tend to scupper my runs. The difference in my time with Fights in Tight Spaces is that the focus is arguably more on the grid-based combat, which I am much less terrible at.

The combat works in a similar fashion to Into the Breach, with your actions either doing damage or shifting character positions on a grid while the game overlays all the moves your enemies will take during the turn, letting you manipulate things to your advantage. This also lets you have that same endorphin rush of feeling like a genius when you set things up well enough to watch your opponents take each other out while you neatly slip out of the way.

Fights in Tight Spaces doesn’t do anything particularly ground-breaking, but it does provide a very clever concept that has been fine-tuned and lovingly worked on throughout Early Access along with a very striking (ha), minimalist art style, which the soundtrack does a good job of supporting without being too overbearing.

Deckbuilders have to have something really about them to get me into them nowadays, so it says something that I spent a very fun 30 hours playing and also managed to beat the final boss.

No. 10: Scarlet Nexus

Scarlet Nexus is my first game in the very specific “Anime-styled game by Bandai Namco that had multiple ‘Tales of’ staff work on it that reviewed really well in the mainstream and I don’t fully understand why…” category this year.

Which isn’t to say I disliked it - I enjoyed it enough for it to make this list - but after playing these kinds of games year-in-year-out and usually enjoying them much more than the review scores tend to indicate, experiencing this weird kind of role-reversal was new to me. Which made it even weirder when it happened again later in the year for my Number 3.

Honestly, I think this feeling probably stems from an overdue piece about how the mainstream press perceives JRPGs. For the vast majority of RPGs I check out I know which outlets’ opinions align most with mine, so caring about the overall metacritic or whatever doesn’t factor into my purchase, but I’m usually the one looking past all the faults and defending the janky games I love - being on the other side of this fence twice this year just really threw me off!

Anyway, for the actual game itself, a lot of the positives people speak about when praising Scarlet Nexus are spot on. The characters are enjoyable, have distinct personalities and don't (for the most part) boil down into one-note tropes, which makes it all the more obvious there's some Tales influence in here as character work has always been that series’ strength.

I found the combat a little clunky to begin with, but as it opened up it became a lot of fun layering all my Teammate's powers on top of each other and I had fun using them in various combinations to take advantage of the status effects.

The story is kind of...there, but does a serviceable job pushing the plot along even if there are a lot of nonsensical moments that likely suffered due to different information being dished out on the separate Yuito/Kasane routes. That's not even counting the bizarre justifications they need to invent so you can meet up with members of the other team for your 'Social Links' (which themselves are pretty solid) - One minute they're trying to kill you and the next they're inviting me for coffee to chat about cooking??

Despite that, the general style of the world kept me interested and the soundtrack shined in its dungeon/area themes, shifting surprisingly well between orchestral and electronic tracks that stuck with me a little more than I thought they would. Considering it’s Hayata Takeda’s debut soundtrack it’s even more impressive.

I'm still pleasantly surprised Scarlet Nexus reviewed so well, which is only a good thing as I'm all for more games like this being made.

Soundtrack Highlights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxuai5FaacE - A Hidden Taboo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ogwl1tpD4 - Grab your power by yourself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X844XfSLMZ4 - My Sweet Hideout

No. 9: Cyber Shadow

The first of many games I tried out this year thanks to Game Pass, which turned out to be one I easily would’ve bought outright if I had to.

Cyber Shadow wears it’s inspiration on its sleeve, with comparisons to the original Ninja Gaiden coming up pretty often in reviews and while it’s difficult not to reduce it to just a modern version of that game, Mechanical Head Studios have made an excellent modern version of that game and then some.

Other than the initial stages being the weakest couple of levels, once I got into it I found it hard to put down. The difficulty was just the right level of challenge for me, having some tough sections that rewarded player skill but also utilising a neat checkpoint system where you could spend currency to revive with bonuses if you needed to.

It does gradually get more difficult as you go though, and as you gain more abilities the level design ramps up to accommodate. The boss fights were the standouts in terms of design and complexity, but I had a really fun time with them despite the repeated deaths. Well, except for the one where the optional challenge is to not touch the water because…oof that took a lot of tries.

Like Loop Hero, it’s another game with impressive pixel art, pulling again from the 8-bit era style of single-frame cutscenes with some animation and camera panning to pull it all together, which is also backed by a very catchy soundtrack. If you’re going to one-up Ninja Gaiden in everything else then you have to bring the music too, and Pentadrangle delivers with what was almost my favourite OST of the whole year.

Cyber Shadow surprised me with how invested I got into it, enough to pick it up again immediately after beating the final boss and take on all the optional challenges. Calling it a modern Ninja Gaiden might seem to be a bit reductive, but I think it’s pretty accurate – and hey, Ninja Gaiden is a damn good game!

Soundtrack Highlights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiP7tVkYQ34&t=446s - Stage 1 | Geothermal Towers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiP7tVkYQ34&t=1808s - Mekacity Ruins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiP7tVkYQ34&t=7888s - Apparitor v2

No. 8: Hitman 3

It’s Hitman again, you know what it is. The previous two games were a whole bunch of dumb fun and the third manages to continue that tradition while also coming up with a couple of the best levels in the whole series.

While there are some additions that didn’t really work for me (such as using the camera accessory), the Berlin and Dartmoor levels are probably the two peaks of the game for wildly different reasons.

The first is a great twist on the formula, where for once you don’t know anything about the targets, or even how many there are, which provides a markedly different feel to the game. The way that level also starts with a very minimalist approach adds to the tension, and it showcases how IO have improved their storytelling over the series by weaving in these narrative moments without detracting too much from the gameplay you’re mostly there for.

Dartmoor’s strength on the other hand is the exact opposite, leaning fully into their very self-aware storytelling enough that they crafted an entire murder mystery for the player to engage with – if they choose to – where you can literally play a detective and figure out the circumstances of what ends up being quite a decent plot.

In some ways I feel happy that IO will move onto a new title, with Hitman 3 feeling like the most they could get out of the trilogy with Agent 47 and the engine they’re using, as it’s a very satisfying ending to this current run of games - I even really liked the final level that divided a lot of people.

No. 7: Ys IX: Monstrum Nox

Ys IX was always going to suffer from not being Ys VIII, which came out of nowhere that year and was a game I ended up absolutely adoring, but it’s still a solid entry in the series that I enjoyed quite a bit.

IX still has a lot of the usual Ys trappings that make the games so fun - Violin & synth focused power metal, extremely fluid combat and just a sheer sense of speed, whether you’re bouncing around in a combat encounter or racing around town – which makes it hard for me not to enjoy.

The traversal mechanics added in IX are very fun to use, even if they’re hamstrung a little by the game design in order to stop you fully breaking their environments. Being able to run up walls to the top of a building, jump off and then glide through the sky feels extremely liberating when you aren’t encountering lipped roofs every 2 minutes to stop you doing exactly that.

The town setting and environment is probably the heart of why IX didn’t hit as well as VIII for me, due to the aforementioned clunkiness of the traversal and overall more claustrophobic feeling to the place compared to the Island setting of the previous game.

I found the story serviceable, with a couple of standout characters (though none on the level of Dana in VIII) and appreciated a lot of the surprising callbacks to older Ys games, which did a lot to get me playing through the games I’ve missed previously.

All that said though, the music still kicks ass in the way Falcom does and man is it still fun to zip around doing perfect dodges and guards in combat. Any game that gives a good Witch Time equivalent when you time a dodge correctly is great in my book.

Soundtrack Highlights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTJNYniviRw - Norse Wind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-IUKWVP5DA - The Cave of Groan

No. 6: Persona 5 Strikers

I wasn’t sure initially if I was going to like Persona 5 Strikers, having little experience or love for Musou games, but it turns out spending 120+ hours with a bunch of likeable characters in the past and then playing a game that has much better writing than Persona 5 goes a long way. I did struggle initially with the combat and had to spend a little more time than I liked finding some tips on how to play, but I did eventually get the hang of it (and never went above Normal difficulty…).

Strikers is for intents and purposes a straight up sequel to P5 and benefits greatly from having an already established cast and no social links, which enables it to give a lot of time to characters that didn’t get as much focus in their debut game, which was one of my main criticisms at the time.

The initial design to focus on 1 specific character in each of the opening 3 levels was a smart choice. Yusuke and Haru especially benefit from getting a lot more characterisation this time around, and both of their stories in particular I thought were handled really well.

An even smarter choice was to veer away from the character-per-level formula just as I started to think “oh the structure is just like P4 and P5 I see how this will go” and then drop me into one of the most creepy/tense dungeons I think I’ve played in a modern Persona game. Maybe because they weren’t restricted by the ‘Persona Formula’ of storytelling but with Strikers they managed to tell a surprisingly tight and emotional story in a way that, alongside the new semester content in Royal, continues to give me hope that they’ll be able to bring some solid writing into P6.

It’s not just expanding on the original cast that’s enjoyable though, both of the two new characters are fantastic, from Sophia’s childlike optimism and energy to Zenkichi’s development from world-weary (very relatable) adult to a renewed man. Heck, they not only made me like a cop in this game, but made him into one of the best characters, which is no small feat.

I haven’t even mentioned the soundtrack, but it goes without saying it’s fantastic. The remixes and variations on the original P5 music are well-done and a lot of the new music holds up just as well, especially the themes that provide a bit more of a subdued atmosphere to the latter dungeons where everything isn’t quite as “upbeat heist movie” as it is in P5.

Musou games still aren’t my thing, but if a game is as enjoyable as this then I’ll give it a shot no matter the genre.

Soundtrack Highlights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4c-FrJGEHI - Singularity

This plays during the creepy/tense dungeon mentioned earlier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fmmAUbJkMo - Jail in Abyss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6anN6B2sVCY - Demiurge I: Exodus

No. 5: Psychonauts 2

Nostalgia goggles for video games are a hell of thing, I think even more so for the ones we played at certain times of our lives. For me there’s a period from being at Uni through to my mid-20s where I played a few games that really stuck with me thanks to where I was in life - Tales of Symphonia and Persona 3 are the two big examples, and the 3^rd is the original Psychonauts. Heck, my Xbox username is literally one of the characters from it.

I’ve found with games that I’m attached to, the longer it goes without a sequel the less chance any subsequent follow-up is going to live up to my nostalgia-fuelled expectations – so given everything Psychonauts 2 has gone through to even get made, including 15 years of my own life happening in the meantime, I was fully prepared for it to be fine if not amazing and just be grateful it came out at all.

Turns out, Psychonauts 2 is wonderful, and lives up to exactly what I wanted from a second game. I genuinely spent the majority of my time with a massive smile on my face thinking I’m so glad this got made and on top of that, Double Fine not only managed to get the game out but also improved on the original in nearly every way.

The creativity of the level designs are once again spectacular in both their appearance and imagination, pushing forward the very personal themes of the mind you’re exploring. The bowling alley, PSI-King’s concert, Fatherland Follies and Compton’s mind are all inventive and yet very different from each other, with Compton’s 80s themed gameshow probably being my favourite, complete with snazzy theme tune and “fabulous prizes”. There’s so many small touches in each area I found myself stopping and deliberately looking at even the smallest parts of the environments.

One thing I appreciated was that Psychonauts 2 also manages to tell a very touching story around both trauma and mental health, whilst also navigating those topics with a lot of care and not devolving into tired tropes, which is most definitely helped by the strength in writing and stellar voice acting. Peter McConnell’s soundtrack also does an excellent job fitting the mood to whatever is going on, from light-hearted exploring of the campgrounds to moody, spy thriller-esque guitar tones, to the bombastic fight scenes.

I initially approached the game with some trepidation, wondering whether those characters I loved from 15 years ago would still be interesting. 5 minutes in and the whole set-up in the introduction had me burst out laughing once I realised what was going on; It was like I was just picking up where I left off so many years ago. They really nailed it.

Soundtrack Highlights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNfVrsh-Kr4&t=1088s - Intern Hazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNfVrsh-Kr4&t=2747s - Introducing Gristol’s Mind

No. 4: Lost Judgment

Whenever I think about this game, I literally have to stop myself from playing 2 very specific tracks from the Lost Judgment soundtrack because they’re incredible. I don’t think the OST is even in the top-end of Ryu Ga Gotoku games overall, but man if it doesn’t have some moments of pure HYPE, which in a way rather sums up the game as a whole.

(And while writing that paragraph, yes, I immediately put those two tracks on…)

I enjoyed Lost Judgment a lot, but I’m still undecided whether I prefer it to the original. Mechanically it’s an improvement over the previous game, with the addition of the Snake style finally letting me truly enjoy the combat in these games and not feel like I’m actively fighting against the controls or cheesing EX move strategies to take down the bosses.

There’s still the usual wacky sidequests and trappings to go along with the main plot, though much of that was put into the school sections rather than out in the world, which work to varying effectiveness. The Dance Club and Skateboarding portions were both fun and had some interesting story beats, while the Robotics Club and Biker Gang portions I found were narratively quite appealing but a bit of a slog to get through.

That said, the entire Professor storyline I felt was really strong, with Amasawa the Schoolgirl Detective being a legitimately fun character and the two main arcs involving her had a very satisfying conclusion.

Where the original Judgment had a more interesting Main Story to me, reaching a level of intrigue and tension that its sequel doesn’t quite hit, Lost Judgment has some superb moments and individual characters that leave an impression. Plus, it has a much more morally ambiguous antagonist, which makes the fights involving them take on a much more nuanced tone than just beating the crap out of the bad guy (although there’s plenty of that too for your catharsis).

That’s not to say the overall story isn’t compelling, there’s some good writing around the parallel cases and for the most part the game handles some of the potentially sensitive stuff with enough grace that it doesn’t lose its effectiveness, covering things like sexual assault, suicide and bullying without falling too badly into dangerous stereotypes.

Like the last few RGG games, I have to give another shoutout to the localisation – the effort put into the translation and voice acting is once again excellent, enough where I’m all-in on the English voices for the Judgment series. Scott Strichart and the team putting in some work there.

I could probably write another 3 paragraphs just on the characters alone. Kaito is the best ex-Yakuza buddy I never had, they do a good job of fleshing out Tsukumo a bit more and did I mention the antagonist is great? It says something when I’m nearly at the end of the game and I’m still not exactly sure they’re completely in the wrong.

Even if I think Lost Judgment barely falls short of the original, an average RGG game is still a great game.

Soundtrack Highlights

Spoilers in the Youtube comments!

HYPE track 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-1tRRnBmpc - Dig in Your Heels

“Stop them?”

“Nah, they’ll tire out eventually. Think of it as another means of communication, y’know?”

The second fight with your rival and the first real one where you know their intentions and more about them. After many hours of petty back and forth and build-up between the two characters this is the first direct confrontation where you both decide to throw down and holy shit does the intro to this track set you up for what’s coming.

HYPE track 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH76mSTOCc8 - Final Destination

Unlike the Yakuza series, Yagami isn’t a near-unstoppable powerhouse like Kiryu, so while you go through a lot of fights he doesn’t tend to go through lots of foes at once.

During the finale, the only way to reach the final boss is through all of his goons, where you roll up with your 3 buddies, in the pouring rain and systematically fight your way through virtually every single thug left in the game while this absolute banger of a track plays.

It’s even better that it’s a remix of a track from the original Judgment, which played when you ran a similar gauntlet in the finale of that game fighting your way through the police.

HYPE track 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzqx7Dp3a8Y - Unwavering Belief

The second, and final fight with your rival mentioned above. The culmination of everything that went before, using the leitmotif from ‘Dig in Your Heels’ to set up a sombre but emotional fight, which somehow manages to kick up a notch halfway through the track as you reach the final phase of the fight. I love me violins, guitars and a good leitmotif.

No. 3: Tales of Arise

Taaaaaaaaaaaales!!

There’s no denying I love these games to death, despite their shortcomings, so regardless of quality I’m still grateful we’re past that mid 2000s period where some titles didn’t get English localisations and even if they did, they didn’t make it outside of North America (such as the best one, which eventually got here via the 3DS five years later).

Arise is a landmark title for Tales in a lot of ways, being the first simultaneous Worldwide release in the series, the first to use an external engine (Unreal) and probably the first that had an actual marketing budget attached to the project, which was a very nice surprise leading up to release - presumably Bandai Namco noticed that Scarlet Nexus sold quite well after they dabbled in a bit of advertisement there.

So how much did I enjoy Arise? Quite a lot! Enough to put it at number 3 here, but with the caveat that like Scarlet Nexus, it’s very weird to be on the other side of the mainstream review zeitgeist. This game is the second one in the very specific “Anime-styled game by Bandai Namco that had multiple ‘Tales of’ staff work on it that reviewed really well in the mainstream and I don’t fully understand why…” category.

For some context, the PS5 version of Arise is currently sitting at an 87 Metacritic from 75 reviews. Let alone there’s the fact that 75 outlets reviewed a Tales game, an 87 makes it the best reviewed Tales game ever, even ahead of fandom-favourite Tales of Symphonia. Yes, yes, like I said before, the Metacritic numbers don’t affect my purchasing decisions, but for a long-time fan who thinks Arise is maybe Top 5 in the series at best, it’s a bit weird to take in!

Anyway, my existential review-dissonance crisis aside, despite some balancing issues with the boss encounters and some very wonky pacing in the back third of the game – which to be fair, is very much a Tales staple – Arise is a huge step up from many of the previous games.

First off, it’s gorgeous. The change to Unreal has obviously helped but I’ve never stopped this many times in a Tales game to stare at the view, and that’s saying nothing about the spell animations. Even the detail on the costumes and lighting effects on the weapons look stunning, which appear even better in motion.

The combat too feels extremely fun, even if you stick to Alphen for the whole game and it clearly takes some inspiration from Graces, which has the most popular battle system within the hardcore fans. If I’m being critical, it would be nice to have a way to cancel out of some of the lengthier animations, but honestly I had so much fun dodging around, teleporting to the next enemy and calling in Boost Strikes it kept me going all the way to the end of the game.

Characters have always been the Tales series’ strong point and Arise has some pretty good ones in the playable cast. Alphen is one of the more memorable protagonists that doesn’t just tick the “earnest hero” box and Dohalim is just a delight in every sense, where I feel he really shines in the (slightly too infrequent) comedic skits and more light-hearted side content.

Looking back, that’s one of the few disappointments I had with Arise compared to previous games, in that there’s not really a lot of chance for the cast to breathe. The plot moves at such a breakneck speed through the first 2/3rds of the game that on one hand it does a very good job driving the cast forward, keeping you engaged with the story much earlier and harder than in other Tales games. On the other though, there’s so little downtime the cast have few opportunities to interact without it directly involving the main story – leaving the group camaraderie feel a bit less natural compared to other Tales games.

Whenever they do get to relax and add some humour to the game though, I found myself laughing a lot more than I thought I would. The “owl translation” conversations between Alphen and Shionne may be one of the funniest skits in the whole series, helped out by an exceptional localisation and voice acting (Ray Chase and Erica Lindbeck in particular). Oh and speaking of owls, Hootle is the best mascot in the series and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

I have to stop writing, because otherwise this will continue for another twenty paragraphs, but some other positives I had:

• The soundtrack is solid! Sakuraba doesn’t hit the heights of some of his previous work but Arise is one of his better efforts and it does have one of the catchier standard battle themes in the series.
• The post-game cameos are always fun nods to the fans in Tales games and without spoiling who it is in this one, I genuinely teared up seeing 2 characters interact and find some closure that they weren’t allowed to have in their own game. They got me good.

Anyway, my weird fandom-feelings on the series aside where I can’t help mentally comparing Arise against the 16 prior games, I’m extremely happy to see a Tales game get some critical acclaim and sell so well. It’s an earned reward that’s been a long time coming and knowing that they’ll likely get more development support from Bandai Namco is the best thing that could happen. Even if the next title doesn’t live up to Arise with the next set of reviews, just seeing the leaps and bounds they made here is enough to give me confidence in the series continuing and honestly, that’s all I need.

Soundtrack Highlights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OQZxp0LMcg&t=109s -Flame of Hope

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OQZxp0LMcg&t=1724s - Ice Moon (Scar)

No.2: Death's Door

Before Death’s Door, I’d only played 2 games that included a track titled “Grandma” on their respective soundtracks - NieR and NieR: Automata – and if that information doesn’t immediately tell you how much I enjoyed Death’s Door and how much influence the soundtrack had on my experience with it, then read on.

On it’s face Death’s Door is a rather charming isometric action-adventure game, with a little bit of Zelda (exploring, dungeons and getting new abilities) and a little bit of Souls without the penalty for dying (slashing + dodging gameplay, asks the player to explore on their own initiative, a bit of environmental storytelling). However, the game really carves out its own personality that really grabbed early into my time with it.

There’s a both a wonderful melancholic vibe to the experience and some surprisingly joyous bits of humour peppered throughout the game, which come together really well without feeling tonally disparate. It’s hard to understate how much I enjoyed the tone of Death’s Door - it’s warm, it’s funny and it’s sad in all the best ways and the music is just as important to evoking those feelings as anything else.

It’s a beautiful soundtrack, playing wistful melodies as you explore crumbling ruins, to sharp orchestral tracks while fighting bosses, to airy piano themes while high up in the sky. All the tracks just fit their environments so well and it really ties you in emotionally. Even the smaller touches and music stings are effective, such as every boss fight having a ‘title card’ introduction with a audio flourish before breaking out into their individual combat themes.

Speaking of which, in a Dark Souls comparison that isn’t just ‘Game = Hard’, there are some boss fights that are surprisingly touching - especially if you take the time to inspect certain items and let yourself get invested with their arcs. My favourite fight was an optional, post-game encounter that would be massive spoiler territory to talk about, but their character, build-up to the fight and resolution was just…incredibly moving.

Right from the start Death’s Door does a really good job giving some personality to its characters, even if over the course of the game they don’t get tons of dialogue, such as the NPCs in your office. There’s the rather lax head of security “Baul Plart”, Agatha who just *loves* typing, Chandler the Handler who hates paperwork with a passion and that’s not even getting into the characters you meet out in the world – the bosses being the most memorable, who get a lot more dialogue and backstory than you’d expect.

I haven’t even spoke about the combat, a deliberate but effective slash-and-dodge system that provided just the right amount of challenge without being punishing when you die, besides going back to your last checkpoint, with some of the optional fights upping the difficulty to really test your skills.

Death’s Door was a wonderful 14ish hours and one I 100%ed, immediately dropping back in after the final boss and collecting the rest of the items, completing the post-game and getting the true ending, purely because I was so invested in the world, I wanted to know about every last bit of it. After doing some reading about it afterwards I can only imagine how this game blew the minds of the audience that played Titan Souls, the developer’s previous game.

Maybe the exploration of death and acceptance in this game hit me harder due to everything that’s been going on currently, but it left me feeling really positive afterwards. What a lovely game.

Soundtrack Highlights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABXm4F0G2G8 - The Gravedigger’s Heart

Steadhone the Gravedigger is such a lovely character, one who performs eulogies for the deceased yet feels his own sorrow at being unable to die himself. He’s such a calm and kind person, and his theme captures that so well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu5ZGrijwAM - The Old Watchtowers

Traversing through an old settlement high up in the mountains, nearing the end of your journey as the wind rushes past and you zip through the air. At this point in the story there’s been a change in tone for your journey, with more of a focus on freedom and this is another track that just nails that feeling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOYgn46rvEY - Avarice

On the opposite end of the spectrum, this is a Boss theme for going through a gauntlet of enemies and I looked forward to this track every time.

No. 1: The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles

In 2019 I put the excellent Scarlet Study fan-translation of the first Great Ace Attorney on my list because I and most of the fanbase had accepted the chances of it getting an official translation were slim to none. I even said at the time, “this one is never getting an official English release”.

Well, something good did happen in 2021 after all. We not only got an official translation, but got both parts of the duology, letting me finally find out all the things they left on a cliff-hanger in that first game. And you know what? I think The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles gives the original trilogy a real run for its money as my favourite in the series.

I replayed through the first game again as a refresher on all the little plot details and references these games love to utilise later down the line, and to familiarise myself with the official translation, and looking at what I wrote back then it all still holds up.

The characters are superb, it’s funny, it has revelatory plot twists and all-in-all has a lot of the traditional strengths of the series. Susato remained my favourite character, and favourite assistant in the series, with her intelligence and composed demeanour being a great counterpart to Ryuunosuke's jitteriness. She also repeatedly stands up for her beliefs and becomes a strong female character in one of the more hostile settings these games have had.

Holmes Scholmes is a joy every time he’s on screen, the dance of deductions are fun to go through and each of the cases are solid, both in their self-contained plots and their references to the overarching narrative that comes together nicely by the end of this first game.

I’m always cautious about my expectations of games in a series that have been Japan-only for so long, as the circles I run in tend to hype them up quite a lot. With Trails it was the Crossbell saga, for Tales it’s been Tales of Rebirth and even previously with Ace Attorney it was Gyakuten Kenji 2.

As it turns out, Gyakuten Kenji 2 really is a great game, so moving into GAA 2 I was optimistic that the fan-opinion wouldn’t let me down and they were not wrong.

It’s so good!

GAA2 hits all the usual Ace Attorney strengths, turns them all to 11 and then decides to subvert some for the long-term fans just to keep you guessing. It really felt like a lot of Shu Takumi’s best work, while bringing inspiration from the original trilogy with some freshness to it.

So much of the enjoyment I had with the game came down to those story moments that writing them here would be huge spoilers, but the greatest feeling for me in an AA game is being oblivious enough not to spot the twist until right before it happens, and oh boy did the game do that, no more so than the final case.

It’s also a game where I enjoyed every case, even if the 4^th one is basically the preamble to the 5^th one and there’s so many amazing character moments, I felt like I was hitting the screenshot button every 5 minutes because I’d be giggling at whatever was happening on screen or going “I get that reference!” to a callback to any of the previous games.

That’s only the side characters too - Hosonaga, Soseki, Shamspeare, Professor Harebrayne and so many others were great additions around the core cast, who also got a lot of development in the second game. It was satisfying seeing Van Zieks get his character fleshed out more, especially with the revelations in the last case (moment of the game for me) and he’s another where he’s up there as one of the best prosecutors in the series.

Staying with the core cast, I am a sucker for the ‘goofy/lazy/dumb genius finally gets serious’ trope whenever it comes up in media, and one of my favourite parts of the game is watching Holmes taking off the kid gloves for his final dance of deduction, with the music becoming a more triumphant version of the original dance theme and you suddenly realise what he’s been doing all along. What a guy.

Music does this a lot throughout the game, building on themes from the 1^st game and adapting or building on them for the second as a character’s motivations or circumstances change. It’s a really clever and effective thing for those who catch those references, although sadly spoiler territory again for the best examples.

I mentioned subverting some of the usual AA tropes earlier and they also do an incredible twist with the music too. In all the games so far there’s a ‘Pursuit’ theme, which is usually the “I’ve got you now” heart-pumping music where you’re making progress on the villain.

In Case 3 of the second game, 8 cases into the duology and never done before in the entire series, they play a variation of the game’s pursuit theme as a prelude, right as you realise one of the cases’s big twists, giving a lead-up to the ‘gotcha’ moment with the full-on triumphant main theme. It sounds like such a small thing, but it caught me completely off guard, and got me so hyped up knowing that ‘gotcha’ moment was coming. And then they did it again in the final case!

You don’t get the same feeling in these games without the music, it’s so good.

This is another game where I could write another 1000 words without trying, but suffice to say it’s the best 70 hours I spent this year, not even including the lengthy back and forth I had with a good friend where we traded stories of our favourite parts.

It’s the very best of that ‘classic style’ of Ace Attorney, with humour, tension, tears and “oh shit” moments galore and it’s the game on this list I just could not stop playing in order to see what was going to happen next.

Soundtrack Highlights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smtc8Sucfm8 - Sherlock Holmes ~ Great Detective of the Foggy Town

Sherlock’s main theme, a jaunty violin melody

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWicR0c7sv8 – Prelude to Pursuit

The prelude theme I mentioned earlier, before it kicks into the full theme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAtJnMEUkQs - Great Pursuit - The Resolve of Ryunosuke Naruhodo

The big, final “gotcha” track of the game, using all of the AA bonkers powers of lawyering to take down the antagonist.

Is there even much point doing an intro to describe 2020? Lockdowns, the literal plague and a never before seen level of mismanagement from people that are supposed to make the 'big decisions'?

Because, due to and in spite of this year, I played so many games. So many games. I even had enough to make a top 10 list of not-2020 games (including the great Visual Novel marathon I pulled off somewhere in the middle of it), but for now, here are my faves of the ones that came out in this hell-forsaken year.

The top 3 might as well be interchangeable, given the number of times I kept swapping their positions around between each other right up until posting this, they're all great in very different ways.

Annual “Tales of” mention

We Tales of fans are still waiting for the next mainline game with both excitement and trepidation, thanks to the lack of news lately, but I'd rather they take longer and avoid another Zestiria situation so for now I'm happy to sit around.

In the meantime, we got another gacha mobile title in Tales of Crestoria and oddly enough the setting, characters and story are all pretty great! Interacting with the Tales of Eternia crew even gave me the incentive to finally go finish that game, which still holds up really well.

While it does a good job of being friendly to free players, you hit the below-average gacha game problem that after a certain point it's really easy to burn out. Events never end, and when they do they're immediately replaced with the same kind of event with a new coat of paint. As I only really have time for 1 mobile game at a time, Fire Emblem Heroes still keeps me entertained but I'll come back to Crestoria to check in on the story at some point.

No. 12: XCOM: Chimera Squad

As a fairly casual fan of the previous two modern XCOM games, I was looking forward to Chimera Squad to play a lite version of XCOM without all of the base management that tends to consume and overwhelm the part of my brain that wants to optimise every single facet of it.

I ended up having a fun time, even if it didn't quite grab me as much as I hoped it would. The breach mechanic is a neat addition to the start of combat, giving you even more chances to miss three 90% shots in a row before the enemy rips into you, and the class design works well (at least with the combination of characters I got) enough to let me have a lot of fun using Torque to zip people across the map for whatever reason I needed.

Having set characters and personalities is a big departure from the mainline series, so I was hoping it would give a chance for the writing and plot to shine, but while the overall story is serviceable there's nothing really there that endeared me to the cast or provide any real tension for whichever of the antagonists you're going up against during the three main acts.

That said, I was after a little bit more XCOM and was happy Firaxis could experiment with the formula. I'm looking forward to an XCOM 3 that takes the best of the new bits of Chimera Squad.

Soundtrack highlight:

Final Mission of the Sacred Coil Investigation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azm1fFltHPA (Take Down Sacred Coil)

No. 11: Persona 5: Royal

I don't normally include upgraded versions of games to throw onto my end-of-year list, but considering I decided not only to play through this game despite beating the original version in 2017, I ended up spending 120 hours and Platinum-ed the darn thing so it earned its way into a mention.

P5R is a great game, pretty much improving on every aspect of the original while adding some of my favourite content in a Persona game to date. All of the dungeons have been tweaked, with a shortening of some of the tedious navigation and puzzle sections (looking at you stupid airlock and cruise ship parts), re-balancing of enemies and completely revamping the boss fights to be more involved.

The mechanical additions are all excellent, giving more benefits for Technical knockdowns, making the Baton Pass system more powerful, fusion alarms enabling completely ludicrous set-ups and overall letting you annihilate the game with only a tiny bit of planning.

This does mean the difficulty gets completely tanked, I beat the entire game on Merciless, but as someone who already beat the original this just made my enhanced victory lap fun as hell.

The new story stuff is very well done, even if it's mostly backloaded, and dealt with a much more interesting premise than the eventual finale of the original game, making the last boss a much more satisfying experience. Characters were given a lot more time to breathe throughout the whole game with new dialogue sprinkled in, and there are one or two new scenes in particular in the endgame that make me believe the team still does have the chops to come up with an effective plot, they're very well done.

One absolutely shocking downside to P5R is the soundtrack.

No, it's still amazing and the new dungeon theme is one of my favourites in the series, but they hid an absolute banger of a track behind an optional fight mode so barely anyone will hear it! Come on, it's so good!

Soundtrack highlights:

FYI There's probably spoilers in the comments for these.

One of the final dungeon themes, chilled out piano

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kexqSlkVTf0 (Gentle Madman)

Velvet Room challenge music, one of those with a long build-up, but such a fun chorus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZBctlmOUZE (Prison Labor)

No. 10: Murder by Numbers

The first 2020 game I played this year, way back in the before-times of March, really tried to be the antithesis of everything going on by being a delightfully zany game about Picross, a jolly robot companion, Picross, an upbeat Masakazu Sugimori soundtrack, a murder mystery visual plot and a lot of Picross.

I love quirky Visual Novels and I love Masakazu Sugimori tracks. On top of that, I love Picross so this one was always going to end up being a good time for my extremely specific tastes.

Murder by Numbers has a likeable cast and a solid story, even with the limited interactivity outside of the puzzles, and overall I had a great time following Honor, SCOUT and a very colourful cast of characters figure out the mystery. There's genuinely some tense moments during the plot and the writing is overall very good, by the end of the game I was definitely invested in what happened to a number of the characters.

The only minor quibble I really have is that there's not a lot of Quality-of-Life features in there if you're using to playing Picross, making it a tiny bit frustrating to recover from mistakes if you screw up - which I did quite a bit.

I also played on normal and avoiding using hints as much as possible because I am a stubborn idiot, so ymmv.

Soundtrack highlights:

"I want to bounce up and down while I play Picross"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=072q39pBToA (Puzzle ~ The Digital Detective)

If Pursuit Cornered was instead a funky character theme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygsw_EtH1JU (Becky ~ Center of Attention)

No. 9: Ori and the Will of the Wisps

I only played Ori and the Blind Forest at the very start of this year, partly as I had a month of Game Pass and partly because I missed it the first time around. It's a surprisingly difficult platformer with a very tender story, looks gorgeous and has some of the most beautiful orchestral music tracks I've heard in a game. Seriously, those people complaining it got robbed in this site's Best Music category in 2015 might have a point.

So, following on from that I was excited to play Will of the Wisps pretty much because Gareth Coker would be returning for the soundtrack and knowing very little else.

Turns out they made another difficult platformer with a very tender story, that looks gorgeous and has more beautiful music tracks, which was totally fine by me.

I found the gameplay in Will of the Wisps slightly improved over Blind Forest, giving Ori more combat options to take out the enemies dotted around the levels, which removed one of the main issues I had with the first game where it was sometimes finicky to take out some of the creatures inbetween the platforming itself.

Overall though it's very similar in tone to Blind Forest, with a mix of touching story moments and deceitfully tricky platforming sections, taking some notes from other Metroidvania-style games like Hollow Knight along the way. The movement and flow throughout the map is probably my favourite part, as Ori flies across the screen with a very gratifying sense of fluidity, even before getting the genre-staple double jump upgrade, which is only a testament to how enjoyable it is to move around.

Oh and add it to the list of games that made me tear up this year, I blame the music.

Soundtrack highlights:

The Main Ori theme, utilised as a leitmotif to crushing effect in the previous game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3qnOh4yOq4 (Main Theme)

This one isn't even from Will of the Wisps, but it's amazing so I'm putting it here anyway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN_LvY97Rco (Light of Nibel)

No. 8: Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children

If Chimera Squad was aiming to be a slimmed down version of XCOM, then Troubleshooter is an XCOM core, a cast of over-the-top characters, a story that includes a gang that worships spoons (yes really) that has a charmingly sketchy localisation made by a tiny Korean development team, all surrounded by a quite frankly obscene amount of additional game mechanics to make the management in XCOM look downright mindless in comparison.

At the base level the combat plays like XCOM and other grid-based SRPGs, with characters having skills, percentages to hit and the environment proving terrain advantages plus a cover system. On top of that however, lies the Mastery system, which are effectively talents you can equip to your characters that range from simple bonuses that increase attack power, to allowing you additional attacks when an ally strikes an opponent near you, or even causing status effects on enemies within a certain number of tiles whenever you one-shot somebody.

It's hard to understate the sheer amount of crazy customisation and builds you can create. Even laying out the main types of systems involved would take forever but just for some scope here, there are over 500 masteries when I last checked and that's not even all. Specific combinations of masteries will give additional boosts, there's a crafting system to make them, you can raise Pets (with their own masteries), build and level-up Robots (that have their own masteries), there's a relationship system and even a 'city status' overview that you need to keep an eye on. Oh and each character has 2 classes which have completely different uses!

Calling it ambitious is probably the understatement of the year, as there's a whole load of small nitpicks. The localisation definitely needs a few touch ups (which is being helped by their community) and the levels can be long - taking upwards of 45 mins a time.

But even with all the finicky parts and varying quality of systems, there's a real charm to the ridiculous story and the experience overall. It helps that the devs are constantly on the steam forums reading pretty much every single comment from what I can tell, and come across extremely likeable and wholesome, even offering in-game compensation for things way out of their control despite their community protesting that they don't need to do so. It's telling when the community complains that there's too much free DLC and not enough paid content, because they want to support the studio.

I've spent hours and hours playing with character builds and running through the story - I even started doing a mission every other day on my lunch breaks from work. Steam says I've put in 65 hours and I'm honestly not surprised - it turns out when you mix OTT strategy with OTT storylines, especially on top of a upbeat, bombastic soundtrack, I like that very much.

Soundtrack highlights:

Trumpets, Guitars and then a Violin lead? Hype.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=245qAOIPQvs (We are 'Troubleshooter')

Let's have the Guitarist take the lead this time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd9Z0QtP3Nc (Remember Me)

No. 7: Final Fantasy VII Remake

I have a confession to make.

I have never owned a PS1, and in fact, didn't even play Final Fantasy VII until somewhere at the start of '08 when I eventually picked up a PS2 and decided I should probably give it a go. In the end, I got right up to the final Sephiroth battle and...never actually finished the game. I can't even remember why I stopped, because I was having a lot of fun, but if I had to guess I'd blame Persona 3 coming out.

Anyway. The condensed version of that preamble is that I guess I'm in the camp of playing through the FF:VII Remake with all the awareness and appreciation of the original as a JRPG, but without any real specific nostalgia for it.

With all that in mind, I still can't believe this game came out and managed not only to avoid being crushed by the weight of expectations, but come out the other side with a really impressive showing.

Sure, looking at it critically it has some obvious downsides, such as the claustrophobic map design and silly amount of squeezing-between-walls sections that seem to punctuate most encounters (I reckon I spent about half an hour in this game climbing ladders and squeezing through things alone), but overall this game wins out thanks to its core systems, engaging combat and an honestly spectacular amount of effort taken into fleshing out even such a small part of the original.

I still don't know how they did it, it's like they tapped into the combined fanbase's hopes, dreams and fanfiction to not only expand the personalities and motivations of its cast, but the entire city of Midgar itself with an absolute laser-focused dedication.

I mean, we not only got the scene with Cloud in a dress, but it became an exorbitant dancing sequence complete with the customary FFVII minigame attached.

I can't say it was my top JRPG of the year but from the soundtrack, to environments, to characters I was constantly in awe that they managed to not just make a pretty remake of VII, but a remake that makes you feel how I reckon everyone imagined VII to be way back in 1997, and that deserves a lot of credit.

As a final note, I loved the implications of the ending and honestly have no idea what the heck they're going to do to figure out the next part, but I'm very much looking forward to that in 2030.

Soundtrack highlights:

The soundtrack is 7 discs or something, there's a lot, but it's pretty great all over, especially the variants of 'Let the Battles Begin!'

Probably my favourite version of the above

https://soundcloud.com/kakyoin-dies-566727774/ff7-remake-ost-let-the-1 (Let The Battles Begin! - A Merc's Job)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnSBqSp0iKg (Colosseum Death Match)

No. 6: Paradise Killer

Some games invoke strong feelings and memories whenever I think about them, and as I sat down to write about this game I'd not even finished this sentence before I had the soundtrack booming along in the back of my mind and the bizarre scenes of Paradise Island all come flooding back to me.

The reason it comes back to me so clearly, probably more than any other game this year, is that my god does Paradise Killer have a vibe. Everything including the Island architechture, character designs, the glorious Synthwave soundtrack and audio cues all fit together perfectly making the game just...flow. Although wildly different in terms of being a game, it reminds me of Hotline Miami, though not just because of the 80s stylings, but of how well you deposit yourself into the groove of playing.

Precise, urgent murder execution in Hotline and chilled exploring in Paradise Killer.

I also got extreme Danganronpa 2 flashbacks, doing my first person head-bobbing around the island to chill beats, which was a very good feeling to have.

I found the murder mystery really enjoyable particurly as the initial crime spirals into multiple incidents, leaving me to sort out which are actually relevant (or even important at all), characters with contradicting alibis, personal and petty squabbles and, because the game will never give you confirmation whether your theory is correct, keeping my own personal biases from condeming Yuri Night to death on the spot just because the guy is an infuriating dickhead.

Probably because of the overall tone of the game I had the most fun in those investgiation sections and exploring the island, and my hatred of Yuri Night just shows how well-written the characters are, without even bringing up their wildly impressive art design. The voice acting is decent overall but has some great standouts and gets eternal props for including a vareity of accents - Doctor Doom Jazz alone might win the award for most perfect character:

Cool name? Check. He's called Doctor Doom Jazz.

Accent? Check. Scottish

Design? CHECK. I mean just look at this guy...

The trial in the finale didn't quite live up to my expectations, which to be fair had grown very highly the more I played, but by the end of the game I left the Island satisfied I had figured out the truth of everything that went on and everyone got what they deserved.

Checking in with a friend who also played the game had us pretty much aligned.

The other downside I had with the game is that I want more backstory! The whole concept of that world is extremely interesting, with the idea of Gods & immortality, how they're all absolutely terrible beings and the intermission-like bar scenes on a different island being really intriguing.

Ultimately with the game never confirming or denying your reasoning, your satisfaction on solving the mystery will come down to you, but I came out of it having really enjoyed flexing my brain on a well-crafted mystery and another great soundtrack to add to the rotation.

Soundtrack highlights:

I could list the entire soundtrack here honestly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHnJEsNkUbQ (Knife & Crystal)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfgbb0uXH4s (House of Bliss)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5TyfId_hSI (Breeze With U)

No. 5: Eiyuu Densetsu: Zero no Kiseki / Trails from Zero

Those who remember last year's list will see I am on my bullshit again by including an old game - This time it's a 2010 Japan-only PSP release!

Second only to the Tales of series, one of my favourite set of games is everything in the Trails universe, and it just so happened that early this year Trails from Zero received an exceptional fan translation that brought it to the west in the most polished state it was likely to get. https://geofront.esterior.net/

Without deep diving too hard, the Trails games currently have 3 major story arcs in the released games (Sky, Zero+Azure, Cold Steel) but they all share a massively fleshed out universe where character storylines from one might even conclude in a game from a separate story arc.

Trails from Zero released in Japan between Sky and Cold Steel, those two having both been released in English, and the character crossover is immense, particularly in the latter Cold Steel games. I actually held off on playing the last two Cold Steel titles just so I could play this first and I'm so glad I did.

There's also not much point only commenting on Trails from Zero without it's direct sequel Trails to Azure, so I'm overall going to include them as one entity, and despite the fact the polished translation of Azure isn't out yet, the one kicking around did the job well enough to make consider that these 2 might actually one of my favourites in the series.

So, with all that background information done, Zero+Azure carry on from Trails in the Sky by being a slow-paced JRPG with a ludicrous amount of world building and character dialogue. I sometimes remember more about side characters and NPCs in these games than actual main characters in other RPGs, there's that much personality to them. After even minor storyline events, characters will move around and have new dialogue, giving them their actual own lives to lead. It all sounds like a very basic thing, but it made me keep checking in on them to see how they were doing.

The main cast this time is focused on a small group, unlike the framerate-dropping amount of party characters in Cold Steel, which gave me a lot of opportunity to get attached to them and their struggles to provide some legitimacy of their operation to help the public.

Another of the Trails' series strengths is the political backdrop to the world in-game, and Zero+Azure play with this well by showing a small city thriving as a trade hub + technological powerhouse, but caught inbetween a power struggle of 2 giant nations.

Like the Sky games, the story takes its time setting the scene with the overall plot very slowly building up in the background until all hell breaks loose and it's 3am and I just need to know what will happen next.

Zero+Azure are slow, wordy, slightly clunky jrpgs that you really shouldn't play without at least playing 2 of the previous entries in the series but I absolutely love them. They deal with political themes and keep them interesting, have some intense set pieces (including still the most shocking one I've seen in Trails to date), throw in an amazing late-game twist that genuninely blew my mind and also made me tear up at least twice.

I haven't even mentioned that Falcom make probably my overall favourite game music?

This series rules.

Soundtrack Highlights:

The "they're throwing everything they have at us and we need to make it through" boss music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XUzvISRwUQ (Inevitable Struggle)

Seriously their battle themes are so good, and the remixed version for a final fight in Azure is even better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-azjB3lsUTU (Get Over The Barrier!)

Even their dungeon themes are great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERABt0Qx0ss (A Light Illuminating The Depths)

No. 4: The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV

Ahaha you thought I was done, but they released Trails of Cold Steel IV this year.

The 4th game in the Cold Steel storyline, and the 9th release in the Trails universe, that ties the main story arcs all together in a series I have literally put over 600 hours into before this point (I counted...). The only reason I didn't make this number 1 is because I try to have at least some semblency of professionalism in this list, you know?

The short summary of Cold Steel IV is that it's the Avengers: Endgame of the series.

You have a plotline that's been building over multiple games with characters showing up from all the previous entries, who all come together for one big bombastic finale after literal years of run-up. The Japanese subtitle for this game is "End of Saga" and it's very much that.

So after eight games and the giant what-the-fuck cliffhanger ending of Cold Steel III, do they manage to pull off a good finale? Despite it probably being impossible to satisfy all the fans out there, I think they managed it, delivering in equal parts storytelling and flamboyant fan references alike.

Of course, all of this is me through a lens of putting days of my life into a story and their characters. Despite some of the obvious faults regarding the pacing, some more egregious fan service moments and the absolute inability of Falcom to kill off characters and make them stay dead, there are some truely stellar moments, fights and callbacks which left me grinning like an idiot whenever they happened.

The small touches and callbacks are so good - During your team's assault on a specific fortress partway through the game, the background music blasts out an orchestral remix of the track used in the Prologue of the very first Cold Steel game, which your team attacked this exact same fortress.

Continuing on with the music theme, there's a very late-game boss fight against one of the most feared members of the antagonist organisation, Ouroboros, who usually has the "this fight is tough as hell" battle theme. After games of build up and actual apprehension every time you have to take on the guy, when you finally fight him at his full power you instead get this incredible remix of the Ouroboros theme that comes from way back in Sky's second game in 2006!

Did I already mention Falcom's music is great?

Another part I loved is that there's also an NPC that has appeared in every single game so far, a hopeless romantic that has been wandering through the continent with his best friend looking for love, who I genuinely cheered out loud for when he showed up in this one. Bless you Anton, you deserve it.

It's not just the fan references and callbacks though, Juna was one of my favourite characters introduced in the latter games and Altina went from a fairly boring character to maybe having the most development across the entire Cold Steel series.

By the time the final credits rolled, complete with montage of all the characters and emotional vocal track kicking out, I was both happy and sad that this wild ride was at an end.

Then they did that epilogue scene.

I'm pretty sure I shouted out "Whaaaaaaatttt?!"

Oh and there's another game coming out that acts as an expanded epilogue to all the previous games....

This series rules.

Laura is still the best.

Soundtrack Highlights:

"I know, what if we go a bit Touhou with the boss music?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nomkiBN3Y2k (Seductive Shudder)

Where the heck did this electronica come from?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfnuvsJBfB8 (Synchronicity #23)

The usual music for the Antagonist fight I mentioned

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkjFKwZ1WQs (Deep Carnival)

The aforementioned Ourboros Remix for his full power fight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnu-mwwTE1c (The Enforcers)

No. 3: Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Not many studios would be partway through development of a 7th game in their long-running adored series, show an April Fools joke video with a totally different battle system for shits and giggles, then be like

"Haha just kidding...unless?"

Those crazy people at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio made Yakuza a turn-based RPG. A series where you fight in real time with all sorts of punches, kicks, combo attacks, stances and literally grabbing items off the street.

Then they not only made it turn-based, but also wrote the fact that it is turn-based into the story in a way that's believable (or at least within the constraints of this series' beliavability) and you know what? It's my favourite JRPG this year.

I'm going to need to be upfront here, because if my Final Fantasy VII confession didn't raise any eyebrows this one probably will. Yes, yes, revoke my gaming license, send me off to the purist gallows, prescribe me 5,000 hours community service for crimes against authenticity - I chose the dub.

I remember finishing up their previous title, Judgment, and thinking the English localisation was exceptional in both the translation and voice acting. Honestly, I love how Sega are approaching the localisation of these games and the effort they put into them, there's so much more to an effective localisation than straight up translation and I kinda wanted to acknowledge that by playing Like a Dragon in English.

That being said, I kept myself completely spoiler free so if I'd known about some serious cameos from previous games beforehand that decision would've been a lot harder, but overall the English dub is very good and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it.

It definitely helps that Kaiji Tang utterly nails it as Ichiban, drawing out the absolute Big-Dumb-Goku energy of the character when necessary but also having the range to carry a lot of the touching moments of the story.

One of the final scenes had me bawling my eyes out, largely in part due to his delivery, carrying on the fine tradition of these games emotionally gut punching me. Robbie Daymond also shows his range as Zhao - I can't even describe what he does with his voice, some kind of combination of smooth + sinister that suits that character perfectly.

Despite the massive shift in style the battle system translates surprisingly well into the regular Yakuza world, though some may feel a little iffy about the character movement and almost randomness of the positioning, and after a little while it all clicked for me in a way where I could set up my area/range attacks to hit whoever I was intending to. That movement and knockdown system also kept the combat ever so slightly more dynamic, as rather than characters standing still and just going through the regular motions of Dragon Quest, I found myself always keeping an eye out for slight changes in enemy formation for the opportune time to just swing a baseball bat really, really hard.

I found other systems meshed really well with the usual Yakuza world too, like Ichiban's personality traits, where the usual list of in-game accomplishments gained a lot of value by boosting those stats, and the party confidant system gave some specific story focus between Ichiban and the rest of the team, fleshing them and their backstories out a little more.

Like a Dragon also finds time to fit in the series staples including things like the surprisingly addictive Mario Kart mini-game, business side activity (of course I'm putting the chicken on my board of directors), bonkers side quests and a main story that has twists, turns, genuinely intimidating villains and as many "hell yeah" moments as it does "oh shit" ones.

Considering this is their first crack at a JRPG, it's an amazing effort.

There's a few niggles here and there regarding the game balance, where they expect you to run an optional dungeon to boost your stats immediately after it opens, lest you be 10 levels below the upcoming boss fight, and small quality-of-life issues like areas with long stretches between save points, plus needing to travel all the way to a specific place to change jobs.

Though even then I suppose when you're idolising Dragon Quest you could say they got it spot on in that regard...

If they wanted to keep the mainline Yakuza games as turn-based, and Judgment as the action series then I would be more than happy with that. I just want to keep playing more with these characters in this world. It's a game with a lot of heart, and I like it a whole bunch.

Oh, and not to mention it wins the "Most Conveniently-Placed Tensabarriers in a Video Game" award hands-down.

Soundtrack highlights:

I wrote all that and didn't even touch the soundtrack, which is easily my favourite in the entire series. Pretty much all the battle themes in the game are fantastic and the heavy guitar/dubstep/synth/electronic/dance combination of whatever the heck they're doing makes it an absolute crime there's no way to buy the OST currently.

Spoilers in there for certain characters appearing in the game from previous entries.

Even the standard battle theme slaps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHuRaPrFozc (Yokohama Battle Theme)

Special battles get this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chd-oN7g7Hs (Scenario Battle Theme)

Have a dungeon theme just to mix it up a bit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yl9kpnQGNY (Milennium Tower Dungeon)

And the violins kick in for one of the more emotional fights in the game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIkQ6yAfVgg ([spoiler] Theme)

Actually screw it, the whole soundtrack is great.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqB3HAKIygF4691GMMzeqL0aHY1fJxiMu

No. 2: Hades

Supergiant might actually be my favourite developer for a whole host of reasons, not just the fact that I've enjoyed every single game they've put out, so when Hades was announced as Early Access I was surprised (as this was coming from a studio that made very story-driven, complete games) but was fairly confident they'd make it work.

Turns out they not only managed to hit my expectations, but blow all other roguelikes completely out of the water and then some. I adore Bastion and loved the narrative & characters in Pyre, but Hades combines those strengths with an exceptionally fun combat system and a downright ingenious use of the roguelike genre itself.

It's easily their best title so far.

Roguelikes aren't usually my jam. Not so much that I dislike the cyclical format of repeating runs, but it's because whenever I beat the final boss for the first time in these games I lose all incentive to ever play again, if I haven't burnt out and got bored before then by feeling a lack of progression.

Hades basically straight up removes my entire issue with the genre, by making the repeated runs part of the story in a way that makes sense for the core narrative and from a mechanical sense. It also helps that the story is absurdly compelling - every time I died I was racing to go back and try to get further, sharing in Zagreus' stubborn determination.

The way plot elements are meted out through character moments, short cutscenes and boss dialogue every time you return to the house keeps the motivation going to learn more, and anticipation for the final boss only gets higher and higher the more you have to deal with your big grumpy dad.

Then you beat the final boss, return to the house and...immediately set off back through hell again because oh man that's a clever way to keep things moving the first time you complete a run.

It's a Supergiant game, so alongside the writing being top notch you also get spectacular art design and it's another thing that Hades lends itself so well to. While the environments, animations and overall style are great as is, the character designs (especially the Olympians) are amazing - there's no wonder I've seen more fan art for this game than pretty much anything else on my list.

They just evoke so much style, from Dusa being a loveable, nervous wreck to Astreus having possibly the most punchable 2D face in history. Oh and as much as I love Meg (in many ways...), I was never more happy than when Artemis showed up.

Like the art design, spending less than 3 paragraphs gushing about the music feels far too short for any game Darren Korb composes and Hades is another soundtrack where I slam the purchase button the second I feel I've played enough of the game to listen to it.

Once again it's an overall fantastic soundtrack, though on a personal note I love the metal influences that came to the front on this one, with one particular track taking that to such a ludicrous extreme I must have had it on repeat for days afterwards.

This blurb is already so long and I haven't even talked about the most improved thing compared to their back catalogue, which is that the combat is fun as hell. It's sharp, snappy and people can do a better explanation of it than I can, but it's yet another incentive to keep playing as when certain things click, wow do they click.

The really impressive thing, and I mean the really, really impressive thing about Hades isn't just the sum of all the parts, but the amount of care and cohesiveness put into every facet of the game.

Everything is tied into everything, thought out fully and polished to an extreme. Such small, but clever touches include things like:

• Characters not only commenting on specific things that happened during your previous run, but keeping count of events over multiple runs just to bring it up later down the line.
• Zagreus fighting an unamed boss so many times he eventually gives it a nickname somewhere down the line, which consequently updates the Health Bar of the boss itself with the new name.
• Using the Heat Mechanic to make some of the boss fights harder has the Bosses themselves comment on their 'upgrades', to the point where they'll reference it if you lose to them. There's even new dialogue from Zagreus and bosses after you turn off the feature, specifically mentioning that!

I have no idea how the hell Supergiant keep managing to put out games this good, but I'm so glad they do.

Soundtrack highlights:

Hades had tracks that flow between the 'quiet' versions when you're not in combat, to the 'louder' ones when you're fighting. They're great on their own, but even better to experience them in game.

Working your way through Tartarus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GRKJ87S5cI&t=438s (Out of Tartarus)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GRKJ87S5cI&t=3466s (Scourge of the Furies)

"Optional Phase 3 Final Boss aka We need even more metal"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GRKJ87S5cI&t=8546s (The Unseen Ones (ft. Masahiro Aoki and Daisuke Kurosawa))

No. 1: 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

Where do I even start with this one, other than to say 13 Sentinels was definitely the most surprising game I played this year. I spent some time reading around the desciption of the game, looking at screenshots of the combat and I still wasn't entirely sure whether I'd be into it, so in the end I took a bit of a leap and checked it out.

Do you like Sci-Fi?

Do you like Good Video Games?

Because yeah you should definitely play 13 Sentinels.

After completing the prologue, you have the choice of choosing between following each of the 13 protagonists and their individual stories, or working through the combat missions, and you can bounce back and forward between these at your leisure for the most part. Eventually you'll run into character sections that need you to complete another character's chapter, or a specific combat mission, to give some kind of pacing to the overall plot, but that freedom in tackling character chapters in any order really lends itself well to the absolutely absurd twists and revelations that happen in the story on top of you jumping around between timelines and perspectives.

And those revelations really are something, it's a wild time from start to finish, which makes it difficult to speak about the best bits of this game because most of my praise is inherently focused on the story structure, the reveals and the sheer amount of sci-fi influences. Given that it pulls references from an astonishing amount of sources (including Macross, The Terminator, E.T., Total Recall, War of the Worlds, Short Circuit and even freaking Fantavision, on top of loads more) and you're following 13 different stories it's incredible that it not only provides numerous "what the hell" scenes but it actually manages to tie everything together by the end.

Switching between characters/combat will likely give everyone a slightly different flow to the whole experience, but for me it hit everything almost perfectly. I even read every single entry in the game's glossary, it's crazy stuff.

Which isn't to say the story is the only positive, the battle system got surprisingly fun the more I played of it and the visual style, which looked fairly unappealing in screenshots, rapidly grew on me as I saw it in motion. I found something profoundly satisfying launching a bazillion missiles into a fleet of enemies and seeing a explosion of pixel-looking...well, explosions everywhere. My endgame tactic of ALL THE SENTRY GUNS made this even more fun. I mean, if you're playing a game with Mechs in it then the more giant, pulse lasers the better right?

Even the little metagame touches of swapping pilots around for the optional challenges, keeping your combo multiplier up and being forced to use the different pilots and styles had me playing numerous combat missions in a row because of how fun it was, despite wanting to know the details behind whatever shocking event just happened in the story.

While the artwork is phenominal, as always with Vanillaware games, another huge surprise to me is that the soundtrack is a genuine delight. The music in the character sections suits the mood depending on the scene, varying between the lighthearted school sections and not-so-lighthearted bits as it goes, but it's the battle tracks where it really shines.

Part electronic, part orchestral with different composers for many of the main battles, it contributes to the fantastic atmosphere and overall tone of the game, from the quiet build-up before the kaiju attack to the headbanging beats while you're desperately trying to fight off swarms and swarms of enemies. It's synth-JRPG-Tower Defense-Boss music and it's awesome.

Like with all the sci-fi references in the story, and in another area of wearing its influences less on its sleeve and more being decked out entirely in them, there's an End of Chapter battle that pulls out the most extreme of Macross vibes as a vocal track layers on top as the clock ticks down on your objective. It's definitely my favourite soundtrack of the year and I'm getting that remix album as soon as it drops.

I had a really difficult time separating my top 3 this year, as they all could've been my top choice in years gone past, but I keep remembering my reaction to the first big plot twist, the frantic battle with the vocals blasting out and Hijiyama's absolute dedication to Yakisoba Pan, and I had to put 13 Sentinels at number one.

It's the first Vanillaware game I've felt compelled to complete, with a top-notch localisation, and I hope more people give it a shot because what a fun, strange ride it is.

Soundtrack Highlights:

All the battle tracks.

That build up to 1:58...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDdJvfvdcUA (-(DEOXYRIBOSE)-)

The violins at 3:51! That entire Outro...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMT8BA73B0Y (-(PHENYLALANINE)-)

A non-battle theme, to mix things up a bit, especially at 0:45

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkghXw64KO (A Cruel Thesis)

The whole thing:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1rY59ZRV0lhys2xF_IiqNy9NlYxtum3B

2019 started rough for me and ended up being one hell of a year, but it at least had a few positives in there somewhere and once again let me dive into the escapism of games.

I played a lot of games that didn't release this year, especially in those first couple of months, and went through a solid month of playing nothing at all, yet I somehow ended up with about 14 titles on my initial list so I clearly have no idea what goes on with my time.

My two main thoughts for the year:

• Music! I felt 2017 was the strongest year for game music in a long while, but 2019 arrived with a vengeance. So many times this year I finished a game and immediately hunted for the soundtrack, it's been fantastic.
• I played two wildly different games with Greg Chun-voiced protagonists that dealt with the topic of dementia back to back. Like, 2 in a year would be weird enough, but back to back? (they're both on this list)

I will avoid explicit spoilers, but tonal stuff can't be helped.

Shoutouts

Games that I enjoyed a bunch this year that either didn’t come out in 2019, weren’t exactly ‘new’, or I wasn’t able to put much time into before making this list:

Iconoclasts

Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition

Cytus II

CrossCode

Slay the Spire

"Elephant in the Room" Award

I haven’t been able to play this yet, and I’m fairly sure it would’ve been up there on my list, but somebody convinced me that I should play the two Crossbell games before taking this on and seeing as the good fan-translation is being released "soon"…well, I will continue to show restraint.

Joint No. 11: Link's Awakening | WorldEnd Syndrome

It’s a very strange world where these two games are seen together on a list, let alone share a position, but that’s just how 2019 has ended up.

Link’s Awakening is a beautiful recreation of the Gameboy game, with some delightfully remixed music and animations that made me remember how much I hold that original in high regard. It’s obtuse and finicky in all the ways early 90s design could be, but playing the remake brought forth some deeply hidden knowledge within my 10-year old self and it was satisfying to always have this vague intuition of what to do next turn out to be correct.

Well, ignoring the fact I had to google how to actually damage one of the phases of the final boss…

Soundtrack highlight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usa4iG1Lhqw – Tal Tal Heights (endgame version)

WorldEnd Syndrome was a combination of needing to spend some store credit, and remembering how great Steins;Gate is, leading me to scratch the Visual Novel itch and check this one out.

It’s nowhere near Steins;Gate (not much is), but WorldEnd Syndrome has a very neat premise, some strong character writing and a satisfying payoff – even if it takes way too long to get there.

It’s a shame the supernatural elements of the plot are focused at the very beginning and end of the game, as the in-between is full of the usual harem-anime tropes, including excuses to have each of the main women in a swimsuit at least once and the most eye rolling plot contrivances to have girls literally fall into the protagonists lap.

If you can stomach/ignore the most egregious of those scenes, I found some of the plot beats genuinely heart-warming and the overall presentation (which had some of the more impressive backgrounds I’ve seen in this style of game) was great, soundtrack included.

In the end it left me a little emotionally drained afterwards, which for a Visual Novel is a compliment.

Soundtrack highlight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6o8ynnWGy8 – Main Theme

No. 10: Astral Chain

Astral Chain is a weird one, as I can reel off a list of things that I really, really enjoyed about the game yet I somehow came out of the other end of it feeling that it was solid, but not spectacular.

The visual aesthetic is stellar, from the overall design of the world through the characters, legions and enemy designs and the combat was snappy and varied enough to keep me having fun through the 26 hours I took to beat it.

The story didn’t quite get there as a whole but it’s propped up by a few excellent characters (Marie being a highlight) and a wonderful soundtrack from Satoshi Igarashi, varying from electronica, to acoustic chill-out, to a big dollop of video game metal in the boss fights – which is always something that’s going to score points with me.

All in all, Astral Chain is stylish, cheesy (oh those opening and ending themes!) and a fun time spent having your enslaved demon pal fight monsters while you pick up litter, save cats and look for toilet paper. Did I mention Astral Chain is a weird one?

Soundtrack highlights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEH9fcAEZ6k – Task Force Neuron

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlcZmA7aEJc – Fragments of Hope

No. 9: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

It's been a long road for Bloodstained, and as someone who has never really had quite the same reverence for Symphony of the Night as my friends, or most other metroidvanias really, everything I saw of the game really didn't generate much interest for me.

Up until release I honestly thought we were on for another Mighty No. 9 situation and had planned to give it a miss, but the reviews convinced me otherwise and I'm glad I gave it a shot, because it's amazing that Bloodstained came together in the way it did to go from 'an homage to one of those games' to 'an excellent one of those games'.

It's a fun, quality Castlevania-in-all-but-name and for every subtle reference to SotN you find one that's about as subtle as a brick, but it's just so damn enjoyable. And there's so much stuff, like far too much stuff! There's a crafting system, cooking, ability upgrade system (with two ways to upgrade), weapon techniques, cosmetic armour, haircuts, lightsabers, skills that can stop time and that's barely scratching the surface.

There's a story in there too, which is endearing in a way much like watching a school play and the kids wrote all their own character scenes, where you can’t help but laugh at what bonkers thing is going to happen next but they’re having so much fun you’re happy to roll with it.

The soundtrack hits that same Castlevania tone as well, which is unsurprising as Michiru Yamane is the main source, hitting those sweet Violin & Guitar combinations that remind me of the Ys series.

Bloodstained the game is a pure, distilled version of IGA the man.

A man who wears his cowboy hat & whip with an honest joy, making him all the more endearing.

Soundtrack highlights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg8damWdjR0 – Gears of Fortune

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WBrkm-zGm8 – Silent Howling

No. 8: Pokémon Sword

Beyond all the internet furore about the National Dex, animations and how Gamefreak devours cute puppies, as this latest mainline Pokémon game released I just wanted a fun romp around the UK with my Pokébuddies and also to beat the everliving snot out of all the trainers with the magnificent specimen above.

I’m happy to report I got what I wanted.

While a few of the complaints prior to release were overblown, it's quite easy to tell there was a lot of time pressure in getting this out on time. Some of the environments are a bit sparse, the towns in the back half of the game are barely populated (Spikemuth and Ballonlea in particular, with the latter being a huge shame because it's so darn pretty) and the story was completely non existent, even for a series that's aimed at kids.

In counter to that though, there are so many amazing little touches dotted throughout the game you can tell there was still a lot of care put in to it. The gym battles are the most atmospheric in the franchise, with crowds chanting along with the music when down to the last Pokémon and there are moments like when your character comes out of the registration place and there's a crowd of NPCs that appear cheering you on. Little things like that made me smile on my journey of Koffing vs The World, and I can imagine any kid playing it feeling the same.

So many of the character designs are fantastic, with Piers & Marnie being standouts, the former channeling the most ridiculous hairstyle that I would kill for to somehow make work in real life. Outside of those, the localisation has an obscene amount of fun with the 'British' dialogue and the game easily has my favourite soundtrack of the most recent entries (that Gym Battle Theme in particular is quality).

I had a lot of fun with Pokémon Sword, found the wild area great and really appreciated all of the quality-of-life touches they added for oldies like me.

Sure, it could’ve been bigger and better, but I enjoyed what we got. Plus the main villains told me to "jog on, mate", so what else could I really ask for?

Soundtrack highlights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcV6xVukj60 - Gym Leader Battle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HVNcmQd6RY - Battle! (Battle Tower Trainer)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0HuqoKre3Y - Hop Battle Theme

No. 7: Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda

Mashing together one of my favourite roguelike/rhythm games with one of my favourite game series was something I was definitely not expecting to see, probably garnering my biggest "oh hell yes" reaction to a game announcement this year. On top of that, knowing Zelda music has no end of catchy melodies that work brilliantly with this style of game, and hearing that Danny B was composing, only heightened my anticipation.

By the time I had finished downloading it my expectations were absurdly high, and Cadence managed to get pretty darn close to meeting them.

For a game like this, the quality of the soundtrack was always going to drive my enjoyment of it and on that front it delivers wholeheartedly. The Death Mountain & Gerudo Valley remixes had me immediately searching for a way to buy the OST and the shifting between combat + peaceful versions of the tracks set up a really satisfying structure to the game of alternating between being amped up in combat and relaxed while exploring. Even the tutorial music is amazing, mashing up Crypt's first level music with the iconic Zelda theme.

Outside of the music, the world and artwork does a great job of carving it's own identity as a LttP-style Zelda game. You can tell there's a lot of care gone into the little things with the world, and also subtle mechanical features like a clever decision to remove the beat-pacing when all enemies are defeated. Options to remove the beat timer completely are great for those who didn't put a lot of time into Crypt like myself.

Maybe I hadn't quite switched my mind over from Crypt's roguelike background to a one-and-done playthrough, but I initially felt a tiny bit bummed out on the length, though in part because I wanted to just keep playing. Those expectations and how you basically become an absolute powerhouse past the initial difficulty curve (I think I died maybe 2 times in total), were the only major negatives I could really come up with.

Cadence is a fantastic advocate for Nintendo to lend out their IPs to studios like this, and if we can get more quality on this level in the future I'll be extremely happy.

Soundtrack highlights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfapwlTYlRc - Kakariko Crypt/Tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwSW_RhNFH8 - Lost Woods (Combat)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHciXAVWUnQ - Death Mountain (Combat)

If you like Zelda music, listen to the entire thing.

No. 6: Judgment

Talking about Judgment is always going to end up with the inevitable comparisons to the Yakuza series, and as much I love the ludicrous plot twists and hijinks of those games, the (slightly) more grounded tone of Judgment's main story really hooked me.

Ok sure you can still beat the hell out of the guy wearing only a fig leaf, cosplay as a vampire, and parkour your way across the city chasing a dude's wig but...well, you know what I mean.

Before going into the anything else, I wanted to highlight the localisation because it's worth singling out. I debated for a quite a while before starting whether to choose the English dub, having been so familiar playing Yakuza with the original voices and it fitting more with the setting. In the end I went with the English voices and after a little bit of getting my head around it I never looked back, with nothing ever feeling particularly stilted, which is always difficult in games that handle a ton of honorifics and how much of the Japanese culture is baked in.

Part of that was also helped by the Voice work being exceptional, especially Fred Tatasciore as Hamura, who definitely contributed to my increasing desire to punch that guy in the face the more I had to deal with him.

When I wasn't trying to punch that guy in the face, I enjoyed how the city is well-realised and provides a great backdrop for running around doing your detective stuff or helping a myriad of people find cats, sort out their relationship problems and win book publishing deals via logic puzzles in the side quests.

The combat comes over from Yakuza, remains competent and just about doesn't wear out it's welcome - even if I had more than enough of the Keihin gang and their forced battles by the time the end of the game rolled around.

Some of the tailing and chase sequences are a little overused, especially in the sidequests, but the Phoenix Wright-style scouring the environment was a neat addition, and lead me to playing my own determined mini game of finding every freakin' cat that kept meowing during those scenes, which made me feel triumphant when a trophy popped up in the last one for finding them all.

Judgment probably has fewer dramatic set pieces than each of the Yakuza titles, but what it lacks in quantity it more than makes up for with it's pacing & build up, making those scenes really hit. The game does a great job building up the mystery, not just with the core thread of the murders, but with the drip-feeding of character traits that makes the payoffs much more effective.

One of my favourite scenes came after hours and hours of stories, whispers and quiet buildup about 'The Mole' . Despite being central to the plot as it's developing, they're never seen directly and even the most sadistic antagonist you encounter up to that point is actively frightened of them. When they do finally appear, it's in one of the most intense scenes I've played this year and the game is great at making you feel complete, pure menace.

There's one character in that scene that mirrored my reaction perfectly..."Oh fuck".

I had a great time playing Judgment and only stopped shy of the platinum due to lack of time for it's most hardcore side quests. The story wraps up well and even though I was satisifed how it all ended, I'll be right there if they ever make a sequel.

Soundtrack Highlights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBcLs8EozCc - 13 Λ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcM-v-o4N4o - Penumbra

No. 5: Control

Full disclosure, I am good friends with one of the Senior Game Designers at Remedy, and as handsome and lovely as I told him he was, he still didn't give me a free copy of the game - so you can take any of my following bias with that in mind...

Where Judgment had a solid world design with strong set pieces, Control has solid set pieces (with an amazing one in particular) but takes the environment and world design to another level. No other game on my list, barring my number 1 for slightly different reasons, led me to scavenge for every single piece of background and flavour text purely because of my own curiousity.

The modern day Twin Peaks/Paranormal concept is intriguing enough on it's own, with the idea of a secret bureau dedicated to cataloguing and investigating all these bizarre items, but what makes Control striking to me is how it manages to apply a set of rules to all this otherworldly activity that still sounds very believable.

Mundane yet everyday things like petty office politics, bickering over budgets and internal pranks make the world retain it's plausibility even though it all has a supernatural edge, because everyone who has worked in an office knows that even in this world with it's portals, parasitic mold and cursed objects it is 100% assured there'd be that one jackass berating the maintainence team to find where his executive bathroom went after the building layout shifted again because he is a Manager.

Control's world building is in some ways similar to Mass Effect and the Witcher, where they create believable worlds by having you interact with their environments indirectly, having a set of things happen all around you through codexes/npc conversations/the environment where it just feels like it's 'right'.

The live action videos were another huge part of that, and I found myself looking forward to finding a new Dr. Darling clip whenever I explored a new area. Piecing together what goes on with him and his lab assistants was arguably more interesting to me than the main plot, such is how interesting he is as a character.

Overall the core story is engaging and even though I fell off a little bit towards the end, the game does a good job of explaining what the heck happened with the director and how the hiss came to be. That said, some of the moment to moment sequences were much stronger, in particular the Ashtray Maze, which had just the right does of cheesiness, music and adrenaline to have me going "fuck yeah!" after I finished it.

I found the combat oddly difficult to begin with, which became easier once I wrapped my head around the lack of cover and unlocked some of the abilities, plus some optional bosses became frustrating due to the checkpointing as well, but man if it wasn't fun to blast into the air and float around the room, raining down chunks of debris onto the Hiss below.

Control is creepy, curious and mystifying where I found myself enraptured by the entire setting of The Oldest House. I don't go back to very many games after I've finished them, but I'll be right back there for any DLC they put out.

Soundtrack Highlights:

Control has a very unsettling and soundtrack to go along with the themes of the game, so it's hard to choose a standalone track as a 'good' one to listen to, beyond a specific theme being a massive spoiler, which you should definitely experience in context.

No. 4: Dai Gyakuten Saiban / The Great Ace Attorney

"But wait", I hear you say, "Dai Gyakuten Saiban: Naruhodou Ryuunosuke no Bouken came out in 2016!". Well first of all, you have excellent Japanese pronunciation, but secondly this one is never getting an official English release, but an extremely high-quality fan translation was released this year by Scarlet Study (https://scarletstudy.gq/) which joins a very small group of fan projects that a) are incredibly good and b) actually got released.

Also, it's my list so I can do what I want.

I've played every Ace Attorney title up until this point, barring this game's sequel, and DGS is high up there as one of my favourites. It has all the traditional strengths of the series, with an array of superb characters, humour, revelatory plot twists and enough plot threads just to keep you guessing up until the twist dawns on you usually right before it happens.

The supporting cast is strong and up there with the original trilogy, despite not having the luxury of multiple game appearances to get attached to them. Holmes is a quirky, delightful character who provides much of the humour without ever overstepping too far into complete wackiness, and Barok van Zieks is an genuinely threatening prosecutor with arguably the best 'bench slam' animation of them all. If slamming your boot down onto the bench in front of you isn't the biggest Prosecutor Power Move I don't know what is.

Despite the eccentricity of those two, my favourite character by far ended up being Susato who right now might even be one of my favourite characters in the series. Her intelligence and composed demeanor is a great counterpart to Ryuunosuke's jitteriness (in a reversal to most of the other assistants), she repeatedly stands up for her beliefs and becomes a strong female character in one of the more hostile settings these games have had.

The development of her relationship with Ryuunosuke is well-written and touching and the 'thing' in the final case only made me more interested in where her storyline ends up.

The new gameplay feature this time around is the Joint Reasoning mechanic, which is both stylish (with some joint pirouetting ) and clever, not to mention hilarious as Holmes comes up with his increasingly baffling 'Great Deductions' to an often confused witness. All this is accompanied by one of the gems of the soundtrack, a jaunty violin theme as you go back and forward with the detective correcting and amending his theories.

Speaking of the music, The Great Ace Attorney continues the series tradition of having a wonderful soundtrack, carrying on with the more orchestral oomph used in the Layton crossover game and using a lot of violins, flutes and brass instruments which work very well in matching with the different setting.

I briefly mentioned the pirouetting, but the animations (following from the Layton crossover) are again top notch with Sōseki's manic posing being a consistent favourite and the scene transitions + presentation overall are a step up.

For the story, each of the cases are solid, both in their self contained plots and their references to the overarching narrative that finally comes together nicely by the end of it. I'm always happy when I figure out a twist just barely before it happens, and the game blended it's pacing and my natural obliviousness pretty well.

The worst part is that the post credits scene ends hinting towards a greater conspiracy, which is apparently wrapped up in the sequel and will completely drive me mad until I can play it, though if it's a choice between waiting for Scarlet Study to decide to work on that, or learn Japanese myself, I'm more than happy to choose the former.

Soundtrack Highlights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smtc8Sucfm8 - Sherlock Holmes ~ Great Detective of the Foggy Town

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSc8DjFr6M8 - Joint Reasoning (TYPE B)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4r2AE6CKe0 - Trial in Disorder

No. 3: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Due to never really clicking with SRPGs until my later life I am admittedly a more recent fan of Fire Emblem, starting with Awakening and then eventually working my way backwards, but the whole 'Harry Potter Time Management' style of Three Houses really appealed to me and I doubt it's going to leave the cartridge slot of my Switch in the near future.

The monastery sections with their teaching schedules, daily life and activities were exactly what I needed to break up the feeling of constant battles in the previous games, and I had a great deal of fun chatting to my students and preparing before leading them into battle at the end of the month. Adding the life-sim aspect to Fire Emblem seems like a no brainer in retrospect, giving you a really good feeling of actually helping this bunch of kids progress and learn while simultaneously getting you attached to each of them.

Making the class system a lot more flexible both gave me freedom to mold my squad into my preferred set-up, and yet also multiply my usual Fire Emblem anxiety of "ok here's my end goal so I need to train this, then this, then that". Even if I am a coward and have the kids lean into their suggested classes, I appreciate the option to make the 15-year old girl into a fist fighting menace.

While the series has always had pretty good music, this time around they've really outdone themselves with the soundtrack. The battle themes are striking and grand, the monastery theme is wistful and relaxing, the music around Sothis has this kinda of ethereal charm, and even the little touches like the school bell chime being the original Fire Emblem theme really makes the whole thing a joy to listen to.

My main criticism of the game weirdly enough is that it's maybe too ambitious, and it's quite obvious there were some cuts made for time. Things such as the overall plot, despite being actually quite clever in the way it splits up information between all the routes, ends up a little fractured with the information you do know, especially depending which route you chose.

Even now, 95 hours in, I can't feel like I can give a qualified verdict on the overall 'story' as I'm only just coming to the end of the Golden Deer route (after finishing Edelgard's). I still found the end of the Black Eagles route enjoyable, but if you are the type of person who doesn't like unanswered questions then you'll need to do them all.

While having a silent protagonist is a choice which I feel lets down the main narrative and character interactions with Byleth, especially coming off the back of Echoes having two of the best main character performances, the supporting cast very much makes up for it.

The character writing + interactions are excellent and infinitely more fleshed out than the mishmash of personalities in Fates, thanks to the impressive voice acting helping this greatly with a lot of my joy found in the support conversations between the students.

Those little interactions like Raphael helping Flayn to improve her battle cry and Bernie bringing out Hubert's softer side provide a lot of depth, and even with a massive cast I found myself liking the vast, vast majority of them.

I could probably spend a paragraph on nearly everyone, but Raphael is an absolute treasure, Petra is honest and kind, Seteth is genuinely caring underneath a hard-ass exterior and if anyone hurts precious Marianne again there'll be hell to pay.

Three Houses is an ambitious Fire Emblem game with a decent plot, an excellent soundtrack, made me care a lot about it's characters and it's my favourite of the series so far.

PS. Edelgard did nothing wrong.

Soundtrack highlights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHut5jj4sxI - Fodlan Winds (Rain)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE4P5XVWfy0 - Blue Skies and a Battle (Rain)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPrxg_hqBCo - Chasing Daybreak (Rain)

No. 2: AI: The Somnium Files

I'm always going to give Uchikoshi games a look, after the clever timeline-hopping shenanigans of 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, but I wasn't expecting to like this one as much as I did.

The gameplay moves away slightly from his past work, replacing the logic challenges with a sort of adventure game style of puzzle, with a time challenge. These puzzles consist of you delving into the psyche of various people to get information from them, ala a detective version of Psychonauts, but are primarily there as fleshed out visual flavour and provide a neat backdrop of something to do between the story scenes, aside from two I speak about a bit later on.

The story itself is an engaging mystery, with some very satisfying "ohhh now I get it" twists without it ever descending too far into the technobabble seen in the Zero Escape series and as much as I love those games, the more straight-forward Sci Fi vibe of AI: The Somnium Files works to it's benefit, allowing more focus on the characters and their personalities.

That's not to say there isn't some science to be explained, and there's even a knowing nod to anyone who played the Zero Escape series with a fun little fake out, but I appreciated giving my brain a rest from figuring out parallel universes again.

Even though there are no major swings into time travel and shocking twists this time around, the game does do a good job at playing with your expectations enough to keep the intrigue up and it kept me invested the whole way through.

One thing that does return, this time in a much more overt manner, is the slapstick humour and while it never veers into fanservice territory the hard swing from serious, tense shootout to 'using a porno mag to give you bullet time through the power of sheer horniness' can be a little jarring if you weren't familiar with this kind of tonal shift.

Still, those scenes are few & far between and don't detract from the grander plot, which includes some incredibly touching character moments once again brought to life by some fantastic voice acting. The game tackles some heavy themes, including dementia, parental abuse and trauma, yet manages to handle them with a lot of grace and does a great job of getting you to care about its cast.

I bawled my eyes out twice playing through this, in no small part to the writing and performances from Corina Boettger and Philece Sampler in their respective endings. The way those two specific puzzles work with the plot are where the game is at it's strongest too, marrying the visual aesthetics a lot more closely with the concept of going inside their minds.

After my 25 hours or so, I feel it's Uchikoshi's most well-rounded game so far and impressed me enough that it may knock off 999 as my favourite of his. It didn't have the "oh shiiiiit" moments of that game, but there's something to be said for a fun mystery, strong characters and an ending that wraps up nicely.

It's also yet another game on my list with a strong soundtrack, doing a great job of setting the mood across the various threads of the story and in the different psyches of people.

Soundtrack highlights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPT55-5AMvw - kokkAI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS0HZcUurhY - syuurAI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzi0P8ZdiSk - tekitAI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwcub26LKs - Armed Insurgents

No. 1: Outer Wilds

I'm not sure if it's possible for me to deep dive into why I love this game so much without talking about specific moments, revelations or discoveries and robbing you of the best part of it, experiencing it first hand.

Because that is the game; A journey powered by the purest form of discovery and exploration, without any major hand holding or 'video game' incentives like XP or equipment. There's no motivation to explore the universe outside of your own curiosity and desire to find out the thing that's set-up in the opening section of the game - what exactly happened to this past civilization, the Nomai?

Games that are freeform in how you progress need to have a suitable hook to drive you forward, to keep searching out what it wants you to find. Outer Wilds balances its distribution of information brilliantly, having you maybe come across some writings that lead you to a new area or contain knowledge to operate a piece of machinery on another planet, giving you "Oh so now I wonder what happens if I do this!", sending you off to your next location.

But it's still freeform, there's no main quest line or defined order you need to see the vast majority of the story in. At any time you can jet off to a different planet and pick up a different trail there, and the game will eventually connect it all up by the end. It's almost like a jigsaw puzzle, where you can start anywhere and find pieces that connect to your current one, or decide you'll look for a completely different piece on the other side of the picture and build it up from the other side.

There's no primary 'route' to get through the game, but from the experiences of people I've spoken to who've played it, even though they found things at different times to me (or things I completely missed!) it all sounded very natural.

Without going into detail on the overall story, one of things I really enjoyed was the quality of the writing and how it takes your initial thoughts of what's going on and then makes you reevaluate them every time you find something that doesn't quite fit with your assumptions.

The game does a wonderful job of subverting expectations, you'll come across something that gives you a theory, then something else slightly changes it so you adapt the theory, then another bit of data supports it, and then one bit completely nullifies it into a "holy shit, it's actually this". It's such a cool feeling.

The quality of the writing really drove me along, and I found myself caring about all these specific Nomai, despite them being long gone, purely due to the strength of the personalities that came through in the texts they left behind. There's a moment in the game that hit me really emotionally for someone my character had never once interacted with.

It's not just the good writing that makes the exploration interesting, each of the planets are crafted in different ways like the one where a black hole slowly rips pieces of it apart, the twin bodies who funnel sand between them and a creepy tangle of vines and fog. Each one deliberately is set-up to explore, with plenty of passages and jumps to hidden shortcuts, and I even started taking notes about specific landmarks to prepare for my next expedition, making me feel like a proper adventurer.

I know I can bang on about good soundtracks but while Outer Wilds has some solid individual tracks, it has some atmospheric themes that really nail the mood, especially in a certain scene towards the end and the most lovely & apt use of a leitmotif that I can remember in recent memory.

This thing is long enough already, and I could go on for an age if I talked about all the moments I loved, but if you've even got the slightest interest in playing it you're better off knowing as little as possible.

Soundtrack Highlight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0NWCrn5l5A - Main Title

If 2017 was the year of back-to-back incredible games, then 2018 has one of the more diverse selections in recent memory. There’s not been a year in quite a while that has so much variety in the GotY lists of the people I follow, where my main takeaway has been either “oh I’ve not had chance to play that” or “oh I’ve not even heard of that”.

My list of favourite games this year isn’t exactly full of obscure, indie bangers but there was a good 4/5 month chunk where I blitzed through my backlog (Hollow Knight, Yakuza 0, Tokyo Xanadu Ex+, Rise of the Tomb Raider) and this year finally managed to finish off some titles in long-running series’ that I never got around to earlier. I’ll probably end up writing a bunch about that latter group specifically, but a lot of time went into Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, Everybody's Golf, Gyakuten Kenji 2, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC, Steins;Gate 0, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3^rd and Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia.

Oh, and on the mobile side, since Tales of Link was shut down…a lot of Fire Emblem Heroes has been played.

As for games that actually came out this year, here we are:

"Didn't quite make it" Shoutouts

Pokémon Let’s Go: Eevee

I only got this for Christmas, but anyone who knows me knows how ingrained Pokémon got into my life back when Red came out and it’s never really gone away since. Seeing Kanto in all its 3D glory is a nostalgia hit that’s so, so cool.

Atelier Lydie & Suelle: The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings

This was the first Atelier game I’ve played and it’s just a wholesome, chill game about two anime-sisters mixing potions, exploring colourful worlds and basically just trying to get by as alchemists.

The World Ends with You -Final Remix-

It’s TWEWY on Switch, it’s great. Ok the controls are a little more futzy using your finger instead of the DS stylus, and losing the dual screen combat makes it a little less hectic, but it’s still a great game.

Sea of Thieves

Sea of Thieves is very much a ‘make your own fun’ game, especially so at launch, and I enjoyed playing this with friends just sailing around and doing very little.

No. 10: Burnout Paradise: Remastered

This was the first game for me that got 5 or 6 people together on a regular basis just to spend hours on Xbox Live playing it, trying to do all the multiplayer challenges and generally having a great time just chatting. The even more amazing thing about it was these weren’t even gaming friends - they were people from work, overcoming the fact we already spend 8 hours a day together just to spend even more on the evenings.

Still my favourite racing game ever, and only Forza Horizon even remotely scratches that itch now, but memories of 2008 came flooding back as did the layout of Paradise City which will forever be burning into my brain.

I was never able to get the full 1000 on Xbox at the time.

I platinum-ed the Remaster.

No. 9: Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age

For someone that loves JRPGs, I have an uncommon experience with DQ games in that I’ve never really liked any of the ones I’ve played. The last one I tried was VIII back upon its release over here, due to the huge critical reception and for some reason I found it mind-numbingly slow and put it down pretty quickly.

Dragon Quest XI is slightly less mind-numbingly slow and I think it’s pretty good!

The visuals are a great representation of the Toriyama-aesthetic, I’ve enjoyed the voicework and general whimsy of a super traditional JRPG and it has kept my interest enough to keep going along to see where the story goes.

As it is, I’m 30 hours in and (apparently) nowhere near finishing it, but I was really itching for an RPG towards the end of the year and this worked well.

No. 8: Monster Hunter: World

There’s something very neat about being into games and watching a long-running niche series suddenly explode in popularity and hit the mainstream, and that’s coming from someone who had only heard about the…intricacies of MH while never actually playing one.

I can’t imagine what this has been like for series’ vets to see this game become Capcom’s best-selling game ever.

MHW is still full of weird quirks and bizarre menus, but some smart quality of life changes, satisfying skill-based combat, equipment crafting loop and just enough accessibility to bring you into its gorgeous world of giant creatures really hooked me for my 50ish hours playing it.

Like Burnout, it’s another of those rare games that got me playing with people from work because we really wanted to take down that Nergigante jerk!

To summarise, the Meowscular Chef is a treasure in both name and soul, and any game that lets me listen to Jamieson Price in any capacity gets props from me.

No. 7: Into the Breach

Sometimes I will watch a Quick Look of a game and stop the video 5 minutes in to immediately go buy it, which is exactly what happened with Into the Breach.

While it didn’t keep me hooked as long-term as it has for others, it’s a very smart tactics game with a great aesthetic and another stellar soundtrack by Ben Prunty. Although there isn’t a huge amount of ‘content’, the variety of each of the different squads did a great job making replays feel very different. In addition, having a tactics game where you got all the information up-front about your potential moves (how much damage you would do, where the enemy would get knocked back to, which tiles enemy will attack) sometimes had me taking 10 minutes trying all different permutations to come up with just the right moves to stop my citizens dying.

If I had waited for the Switch release it would’ve probably still been my mainstay for travel, but as it is it gave me a very satisfying time on PC.

No. 6: Valkyria Chronicles 4

Between this, Into the Breach, Fire Emblem and Radiant Historia (kinda) I ended up playing a lot of tactics games this year! This was one I was looking forward to, as it has been long enough since I played (and loved) VC1 and hearing the vibe of this game was much more similar to that than it was the two sequels.

VC4 gave me exactly what I was expecting and in turn I had a lot of fun with it. The gameplay is still solid and they made some clever improvements to make the game less reliant on the scout-rush strategy of the original. The Grenadier class was well designed and they finally made Tanks more viable by lowering their cost to use.

The story is, typically for VC, all over the place but overall enjoyable. There are hard swings from uplifting team camaraderie, to emotional death scenes and the horrors of war, to one of the cast sexually harassing another (and getting punched for it), to having a mock battle in a town immediately after you’ve literally just liberated it because your army is arguing about bread.

All-in-all it kept me going through a fairly lengthy campaign (30+ hours) and despite some difficulty spikes, I had fun and got attached to my ragtag bunch of anime characters. There’s some great voice acting in there, Erica Mendez as Kai specifically, and the watercolour/drawn/comic design looks great on modern consoles.

No. 5: Return of the Obra Dinn

Where the heck did the idea for this one come from?

A 1-bit monochrome, “Murder Mystery Sudoku”-game where you hop back in time ala Ghost Trick by examining corpses. Also you’re an insurance assessor.

Obra Dinn is above all, really clever and effective. Trying to determine exactly who everyone is and what happened to them initially feels a bit daunting, but the more you play you realise there’s so many subtle clues in the environment to help you along – most of which I missed initially because of how fascinating the story was as it was slowly revealed.

The ‘audio only, then cut to freeze frame visual’ was not only a cool artistic choice but both added to the complication of identifying everyone and also the drama of the story by encouraging you to imagine what’s happening before suddenly flashing on screen what’s actually happening – and that story goes places I didn’t expect.

The sound design is on point, the voice acting feels genuine & faithful and when you manage to confirm a batch of correct answers the game makes you feel like an absolute genius.

There are minor gameplay annoyances like having to traverse back to specific corpses to rewatch scenes, which can get tiresome when you’re at the end of the game trying to work out the final few characters, and a lack of direct explanation (or one that’s easily missed) for some of the quirks of the log book, like knowing specific lines in the audio cue have a mark next to them if it’s the deceased talking.

Other than those slight negatives, Return of the Obra Dinn is super cool and I couldn’t put it down after I started, finishing my 10 hours with it in about 3 sittings.

No. 4: God of War

I wasn’t really fussed about buying God of War initially, having only played 1 entry in The Adventures of Angry Man™ back on the PS2, and I thought they’d probably do a good job with a reboot and let that be that.

Then that all changed as soon as the review embargoes lifted and I figured I should probably give it a look.

After playing GoW2 way back when, I never thought I’d be saying this but God of War does a fantastic job with its characters, bolstered by the fact there’s not really very many, where they and the story benefit by being much more at the forefront compared to the combat.

Kratos and the dynamic with Atreus is very compelling, despite a slow and fairly cliché start, and they’ve managed to turn him into a much more interesting character than before. Brok and Sindri are delightful and Mimir is a solid ‘sarcastic narrator’ character without ever delving too far into that stereotype.

Alongside the characters, the world as a whole is very well realised and they did a great job building their version of Norse mythology and integrating Kratos into it. It was refreshing to see the assertion that all Gods are dicks, rather than some benevolent saviours of mankind and piecing together tales of terrible stuff they’ve done in the past – leaving the world in the state that it’s in today – was made more effective when you do finally meet one or two of them.

For me, the overall mood of the game was its greatest strength, with the high point being the amazing riverboat sequence about halfway through the game. The storm, the music and the eternally slow-spinning camera on Kratos made that whole sequence very impactful and it gave me a real “ohhh shiiiit” moment that doesn’t happen too often in AAA games.

It’s a shame the very end of the game dampened my enjoyment of it a little, one of the main characters ends up being tragically wasted and the story doesn’t quite stick the emotional landing that I had admittedly been a bit hyped up for thanks to reviews, but the end sequence into credits is genuinely touching.

As a whole though, it’s got an impressive bunch of characters, an enjoyable story and the combat is solid (bringing the axe back is oddly satisfying). Also it’s very, very pretty. Some of the lighting in Alfheim is astonishing in HDR.

No. 3: Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology

This was something that flew under a lot of radars this year, being a remaster of Radiant Historia, which came out in 2010 in the US (but never in Europe) and even though I imported it at the time, I dropped off it and never finished it.

I’m glad I grabbed this and finished it, because it really is an inventive and original JRPG.

The combat setup is clever, setting up enemies on a grid where you can then manipulate their positions using your attacks. This lets you send enemies to the backrow where they do less damage, bunch them together in order to hit many foes at once or even deploy traps to the field to knock them into.

On top of that you can freely swap your parties turn order, even with the enemies, to set up a sequence of attacks that can end up moving 5 or 6 enemies around to the board to all align in one square where they’re promptly nuked by your spellcaster. Setting up those attack chains is especially satisfying throughout most of the game, outside of a few boss fights that don’t play nice.

Although the combat is great, the premise and story is very well done. The world is a very grounded version of the tech+magic fantasy scenario and never flies off the deep end. In fact there’s a very sullen tone to a lot of the proceedings, helped along by one of the more maturely-written protagonists I’ve played in a JRPG (voiced amazingly by Xander Mobus).

The time-travel aspect isn’t over the top and fits in with the narrative very effectively, letting you jump between timelines for information and/or items, and the conclusion to the whole thing is a very solid finale.

The soundtrack helps the tone and story immensely as well, though unsurprising being composed by Yoko Shimomura.

I ended up finishing all the sidequests and timelines, got the True Ending and then spent a few days afterwards looking up fan-art. Definitely one of the better JRPGs I’ve played.

No. 2: Celeste

Celeste came almost at the perfect moment for me, when work was getting quite stressful and needing a Switch title to play over a few long upcoming trips. That combined with a strong recommendation of tough platforming got me to purchase it on release, staving off the allure of Monster Hunter for a week or two longer than most of my friends group.

Despite expecting to enjoy this in the same vein I did with Super Meat Boy, Celeste surprised me how really touching it is, and it hit me a little more than I expected. To cover the platforming part first, it’s challenging, controls well and encourages a good amount of exploration on Madeline’s journey up the mountain, urging you to look around the environment a lot instead of just going screen-to-screen, left-to-right.

And while the platforming has great design and difficulty, and really pushed my video-gaming buttons, I found myself mostly remembering the story and moments more than anything else.

The interactions with Theo are very heartfelt and all of the writing felt very genuine, and following the journey of Madeline with her inner struggle really resonated with me. The micro-stories on the way are also really moving, dealing with a number of topics from anxiety & depression, to what it feels like trying to help someone that doesn’t want help (and your own selfish reasoning for it). The game deals with mental health in a very dignified way, and it made the payoff at the end a very personal, happy moment.

With all that said, none of the above is ever handled bluntly or put directly in your face. You can approach it as a difficult platformer have a lot of fun trying to beat it + grab the collectables, and come away content. If you identify with the additional themes as well as I did, you come out with a really heartfelt experience.

Before wrapping this up I’d be remiss not to talk about the soundtrack, which is easily my favourite of the year. Lena Raine does a wonderful job expressing the mood of traversing the mountain and all the various places in-between.

My pick of the OST is Scattered and Lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0etenwnI1wo

No. 1: Hitman 2

It sometimes feels like a bit of a cheat putting this at the top of my list, as it’s not doing anything spectacularly different to Hitman (2016) and is a fairly known quantity, but I’ve had so much pure fun sauntering my way through this theatrical, ludicrous, juxtaposition of a Rube Goldberg video game.

Hitman is one of those titles that can be described to someone who doesn’t play games as “you go around killing people”, and it will immediately bring forward that conversation-stopping face and a swift “oh. ok.” However, despite just looking like a flashy murder simulator there’s so much going on underneath in terms of systems and quirks it’s just enjoyable to mess around in its world.

The combination of goofy, self-aware humour, mechanical systems + AI logic to manipulate, and run-based attempts really appeals to me and turns this bunch of sometimes clunky parts into a very cool whole.

The main story is complete over-the-top nonsense, but almost in a way where I’m writing my own Jason Bourne fanfiction and know fine well its cheesy but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to enjoy myself. The writing in the middle of the levels though is no-joke wonderful, the areas are filled with so much incidental dialogue and smart conversations I spent a lot of time just hanging around listening to it instead of actually doing my job and…hitmanning people. And when you do get around to hitmanning people, the targets are so cartoonishly evil it’s pleasing to take them out in sometimes the most ridiculous way. (Taking out the business guy who refuses to pay an artist in anything but ‘exposure’ was great).

You can tell the staff developing Hitman are having fun coming up with these caricatures of life, such as American Suburbia with its friendly cupcake-baking neighbour, open house BBQ party and citizens filing lawsuits on each other. While the level design in Hitman 2 is fantastic, with lots of creative opportunities and big, dense areas to investigate, the small touches and environmental details really make them gratifying to play.

I could go on for ages about all the small things that keep me coming back to the game. The Elusive Targets being great, one-chance events, all the different challenges and opportunities, discovering the secret exits and gimmicks and finding something I’d never seen before nearly every time I start up a level.

Hitman 2 is a really dumb, fun video game that I like a lot.

I keep an ongoing list of games that I play throughout the year, mostly to aide my failing memory around the end of it when I do these write-ups. Sometime around March I added a comment of “I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to pick a GotY this time”, and by December that’s ended up still being a huge understatement.

This year has been incredible for games; there hasn’t been a 12 month period this consistently strong and varied for at least 10 years, and 7 or 8 items on my list could’ve topped my previous years’ lists easily.

Also, as someone with a huge boner for great soundtracks, I’m happy so many of the 2017 releases had killer music & sound design. I could try to write up a top 10 alone of amazing tracks this year and still run into the same problem of trying to cut it down to ten.

Games that came out this year that I literally did not have time to play much of:

Nioh

Danganronpa V3

Games I literally did not have time to play even though trusted friends said they were great:

What Remains of Edith Finch, Night in the Woods, Gorogoa, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, Steamworld Dig 2, Yakuza 0, Divinity: Original Sin II

No seriously, this year was crazy.

I’m making a top 14.

Joint 12^th

Dead Cells

It’s early access, but I was itching for a rogue-like and the art style + difficulty sold me on at least giving this a try.

Fire Emblem Heroes

I really like Fire Emblem games, but when I play them I go into spreadsheet mode and have to pre-plan my teams, what weapons I want to give everyone, who to pair off to optimise their offspring and generally become that Math Lady meme.

Heroes put that on mobile, simplified the combat while still keeping a degree of tactics to it and let me occasionally press a button to try and pull as many versions of Tharja as possible.

Joint 11^th

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

I am very bad at this game. Everything is kind of clunky and weird, the frame rate is tsundere as hell towards me and I don’t generally like shooters, let alone online-only ones.

I’ve played 40+ hours of this, purely as a medium to chat and play with a couple of friends and it’s been one of the most fun (and heart-pounding) things I’ve done all year.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

OST Highlight:

Roaming the Wastes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc92Kphmsrs

I am the anime JRPG lunatic in my friends group, finished this with nearly 80 hours into it and the fact it still couldn’t crack my top 10 is purely down to the quality of the stuff above it.

XC2 is a smorgasbord of design decisions that varied from ‘very clever’ to ‘have you even played a video game before’, with an anime aesthetic that goes between slapstick, great dialogue, bad dialogue and some genuinely touching scenes at the drop of a hat.

I could list a whole number of things that irritated, confused or bemused me but despite all these niggles the game somehow manages to be a lot more than the sum of its parts.

The battle system becomes rewarding once you get your head around it, and the world they’ve built is genuinely fun to explore. The voice acting I will maintain is generally good, though sometimes lacking in direction, but I’m happy to give a slight pass to a game that has a main cast with Yorkshire, Scottish and Welsh accents. Also they swear a lot, which to me is hilarious. I took more screenshots of that than anything else.

One part with no real complaints is the music. Like XC1, the OST is fantastic.

No. 10: The Sexy Brutale

OST Highlight:

The Sexy Brutale Main Theme - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpUHtDBZWyQ

The Sexy Brutale is one of those games I recommend to people and usually have to follow up with an explanation of why the heck it’s called that.

Don’t let the name put you off, it’s an excellent little isometric puzzle game where you’re trying to stop a bunch of guests being murdered by following them and observing their stories, then rewinding time to start the day again and stop whatever malady affected them.

All of this is wrapped up in a really solid aesthetic, a combination of a masquerade and casino motif, set in this grand mansion with some neat gothic overtones, all while the soundtrack pumps out a variety of swing/electroswing music that times perfectly to capture a sense of dread for each murder that occurs.

It’s a really neat 3/4 hour murder-mystery game.

No. 9: Horizon Zero Dawn

OST Highlight:

Aloy's Theme - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w9B7uwLZeI

One of the big ones that came out early in the year, HZD hits a lot of great world-building notes and looks gorgeous while doing it. Aloy is a fantastic lead character (Ashly Burch does a great job as usual) and following her discovery of how humanity managed to Fuck It Up™ this time, was the most engrossing part of the game for me.

I really enjoyed that sense of mystery surrounding how humanity fell, having it uncovered bit-by-bit and it was one of those few games where we could share theories about how it was going to end as we were playing.

The actual combat and world traversing was pretty solid, but wore out its welcome for me about halfway through the game – I felt like running past most of the new machines and eventually just mainlined the story because I really wanted to see how it would end.

Saying that, the story payoff is very well done, and hits some very good emotional moments and it’s well worth finishing. Also Lance Reddick’s voice is dope as hell and the only reason I could stand listening to Sylens for any stretch of time.

The soundtrack is another that’s excellent, not quite having the pomp and thunder of something like Xenoblade, but it has a very suitable score that enhances a lot of the story scenes in the background.

No. 8: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

OST Highlight:

Menu Theme - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_XTdmiz4pE

I don’t tend to play shooters unless there’s a good story/hook attached, but after so many people spoke about ‘moments’ in Wolfenstein II I figured I should probably give it a go. Melting Nazis with a giant laser was also a pretty big draw, mind.

Mechanically, it’s a fairly standard FPS, and I found most of the levels where you’re doing actual shooting just a vehicle to go from one story moment to the next. If you asked me whether I enjoyed playing Wolfenstein I’d probably shrug my shoulders – it has some odd difficulty spikes, and a lot of the levels are fairly confusing and uninteresting to navigate.

However, if you asked me whether I enjoyed the characters and/or story of Wolfenstein then holy shit does that game go places.

All of the little conversations and details between the shooting sections are really well-done, I wanted to talk to every member of my submarine family and read all of the newspapers/journals I came across. A lot of thought went into the world-building and coming up with a believable alternate history, Roswell being the highlight (the KKK guys learning German, the US woman slagging off Austrians for not being ‘pure’).

It’s hard to talk about moments in Wolfenstein vaguely, because there’s so many amazing bits in that game which somehow manage to flow between hyper-violence and brutality, to heart-wrenching flashbacks, to wandering around the old farm house, to the audition etc, and it does it all with some of the slickest cinematography and camera work I’ve seen in a game (The ‘debate and drink’ with Horton especially).

I would wax on about the moments in this game for ages, it’s just got so many good ones.

Here’s a spoilered list of things I just need to shout about:

Rolling around in a wheelchair shooting Nazis

Exploring the old farm house, killing the hell out of your horrible dad and then being lifted into the sky

Being executed and them CATCHING YOUR HEAD AND PUTTING IT ON A NEW BODY AND WTF!!

The entire Birthday party

The Audition on Venus, a 10 minute scene where you AUDITION TO HITLER, ON ANOTHER PLANET while he’s a paranoid, senile old man. BJ’s amazingly-bad acting is also amazing.

Oh and I know musical taste is subjective and all that, but the credits song might just be the biggest wtf of the whole game.

No. 7: Pyre

OST Highlights:

Path to Glory - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQhbktFT7HI

The Herald -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMPFutkr_-g

After the announcement of Pyre I didn’t know whether I’d really like it, but at this point in time I’d try anything that Supergiant puts out as I thought Bastion was incredible and enjoyed my time with Transistor.

As it happens, I really like Fantasy Basketball Visual Novels.

The gameplay of the Rites is a cool idea, and one that only wore out its welcome for me right as I was finishing the game, but it’s everything else around it that really stands out.

One of the things I appreciated the most after finishing the game was this story felt very well-tailored to my personal playthrough. I chose which characters to speak more often to, who left at the end of each cycle and the fact there’s no ‘perfect playthrough’ really pushed the idea in the ending that the combination of events that occurred were entirely because of my agency as a player.

The fact it never really surfaced to me as any set of mechanical choices only spoke to the strength of the writing, and when I finished the final rite all I wanted to know was what happened to all of my favourite characters, which was the vast majority of them.

I praised Trails of Cold Steel last year for having such strong character writing that I could remember many of the details of even the NPCs. Pyre is just as strong, and I can remember more names and personalities from this game than probably any other game I played this year.

The soundtrack. I don’t really know how Darren Korb keeps doing it. I’m going to keep running out of ways to say ‘it’s very good’, but the background tracks suit the vastness of the Downside, the vocal tracks give a great personal lift to the specific character moments and all of the various Team tracks fit so well with each of their vibes.

No. 6: Super Mario Odyssey

OST Highlights:

Steam Garden Theme - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFecEIv5TEw

Pre-Final Boss Level - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBZPSjF982E

Super Mario Odyssey is just pure, distilled fun. I can’t really describe it in any other way.

Each of the levels are so varied, the things you possess mix-up the gameplay in some really creative ways and it’s so difficult to stop when you’re falling over ways to get moons.

Odyssey met the bar of my expectations after seeing all the reveal footage, and the contained level designs are peppered with small nods and references which feel specifically aimed at people like me, who’ve been playing these games for 25+ years.

The combination of the new style of levels and also call-backs to older Mario games were some of my favourite parts of the game. New Donk City sums this up overall, from the finding all the band members to come together to play the original Mario theme, controlling an RC car while a remix of the SNES Mario Kart music plays, having Pauline be the mayor, and then finally building up to this festival where you play 2D Mario and beat Donkey Kong.

The end of the game made me break into the biggest smile - Possessing Bowser and watching all the past versions of him, from SMB, SMB3, SMW etc, fly through the air before you run around smashing walls and breathing fire.

No. 5: Persona 5

OST Highlights:

Life Will Change (when you're about to pull off your heist) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAFc2VzZXU0

Life Goes On (the school exams theme) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKGvl9fVnmk

While I’m used to ignoring information on games that have already released in Japan, Persona 5 was on some mass level of hype that I’m honestly amazed I managed to avoid any spoilers for it prior to release.

I don’t need to speak too much about the menus and vibe of that game, it wins ‘Most Stylish UI’ for me hands down and even after 100 hours with it I still didn’t get tired of the battle cycle – which is almost entirely down to the music.

The dungeon designs are mostly excellent and they do a good job filling out the personalities of a lot of the characters, even if a lot of it is buried behind the confidants and some of the main cast are given the short end of the stick because they’re introduced way too late (looking at you Haru).

Sojiro and Ryuji turn into some of the most solid characters in the game, the interactions with Futaba and her dungeon were genuinely touching and when the game catches up to the intro it honestly did fool me for a few seconds whether I’d cocked up the choices.

On reflection, P5 doesn’t quite top P4 or P3 for me overall, but I had a lot of fun playing through it and at the end you get to shoot a god in the face so I mean that’s rad.

Makoto best girl.

No. 4: Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana

OST Highlights:

Crimson Fighter (The Ancient Species battle theme) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuRpYFwMzHw

A-to-Z (True final boss theme) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz9yQ-qzWiM

As the aforementioned JRPG lunatic, I have been an actual lunatic to not get around to playing most of Falcom’s catalogue until last year, including Ys.

Other than The Sexy Brutale, this is the only other game on the list where I didn’t know whether it would be for me and decided to take a punt anyway. It ended up easily being the most pleasant surprise of the year.

Ys VIII is one of the snappiest and most fluid action RPGs I’ve ever played, and there’s an amazing sense of flow and speed the entire time whether you’re in combat, running around the island chopping your way through monsters or even just traversing the environment. There’s no real ‘walk’ speed in Ys, you race around the town and overworld at the same pace you fight and it’s strangely liberating to just…not stop.

The soundtrack only accentuates this with some delightfully fast-paced guitar tracks, where some of the overworld themes are so awesome they’d easily fit in as boss music in other games, which only makes the boss themes in Ys even better when they do show up.

The first track I linked has jumped into one of my favourite battle themes in an RPG. I’m a sucker for fast metal for boss themes, but throw in violins and that relentless drum beat and I’m sold. That’s not to say there aren’t quieter moments in the soundtrack and the game as a whole, the OST overall would be my favourite of the year if not for my number 1.

I was told prior to playing it that Ys was more focused on action, with the story taking a back seat, yet I think they did a really great job with the intertwining narratives and Dana is probably the most likeable, well-rounded character in the whole game. For someone that could come across as the ‘naive maiden in a skimpy costume’, she’s smart, dedicated and incredibly endearing.

The only negative on the experience was the clunky localisation. It ended up not affecting me a huge deal, as I can forgive a whole host of mechanical/dialogue problems with a game if I’m really enjoying it, but it’s rough in spots and can bring you out of the experience at a few points. It really felt like there wasn’t anyone in charge of keeping the localisation together, instead having multiple translators just literally translate texts without a lot of context.

Apparently they’re completely redoing it as a free patch, which in itself is kind of bonkers, but I’d honestly recommend it regardless.

THAT BATTLE MUSIC THOUGH SERIOUSLY.

No. 3: Tales of Berseria

OST Highlight:

True Will (Pretty much Velvet's theme) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXNe_nwqlak

Hey, it’s Tales! Anyone who knows me has heard me go on at length about how this is my favourite series, warts and all, and I’m still so happy to see it’s doing well enough in the west that they keep making (and localising) them.

After a host of in-drama, the fan-base panning of the last entry and the old producer leaving, this is the first Tales headed by Yasuhiro Fukaya and came with the uncertainty of whether they could deliver on ‘fixing the faults’ of the last entry.

Berseria is the best Tales game they’ve made in years.

For its negatives you can tell they’re still working on a budget, as the dungeons are generally linear/uninspired and the equipment management is still fairly convoluted (though still miles ahead of Zestiria).

The main draw of the Tales games are their character interactions and personalities, particularly between all the party members. Tales games have ‘skits’, which are overworld conversations between characters that occur while you’re playing that really add to the flavour and dynamics of the cast.

Thankfully, Berseria has one of the best main casts in the series with the standout being the protagonist, Velvet, which makes it even better than this is the first Tales game with a solo Female lead.

Part of what makes the cast and story so refreshing is that you’re not playing the noble heroes out to stop the bad guy. Velvet’s motivation of just really, really wanting to kill Artorius begins from what happens to her at the start of the game, and while it falters and bends slightly as the story progresses ultimately that drive carries its way through the entire game.

I also don’t want to sell her motivations short as a simple ‘revenge’ plan though; there’s a hugely pivotal moment about 2/3rds through the game where her thinking is completely turned on its head, which culminates in an absolutely fantastic and emotional scene to carry the plot on.

The Voice Acting in the game and the dub is actually pretty stellar, and Cristina Valenzuela nails the voice of Velvet in that scene particularly.

I’ve only covered Velvet and I could rave about the characters all day, Laphicet has a wonderful growth through the game, Eizen is an excellent ‘cool older-brother’ figure with very dorky interests and Magilou is Magilou. The crew come across as this ragtag family and it's super endearing to follow them.

No.2: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

OST Highlight:

The Cooking Jingle! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X49Xn8KI70w

After writing a thesis on Berseria, writing less about Breath of the Wild is less about the quality of the game and more that it’s a known factor why this game has really clicked with me.

Skyward Sword was the first Zelda I played but never finished, and after putting in 100 hours into Breath of the Wild it’s clear that the change of direction was exactly what I needed.

Sure the story is piecemeal and not great, the VA is all over the place (Sean Chiplock and some others being the exceptions) and the difficulty spikes of the rain do nothing to temper the sheer awe and wonder of exploring the world.

I struggle with some open world games that have lots of side quests/points of interest, because I want to meticulously go through the environments area-by-area to make sure I don’t miss anything. Breath of the Wild let me completely break free of that mind-set and just…go somewhere and explore.

Being able to climb anything sounds simple, but is so empowering and it just let me forget about the rest of the actual world for the entire time I played.

No.1: NieR: Automata

OST Highlight:

The entire Soundtrack.

Copied City - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOU7ZuSJBh0

Vague Hope - Cold Rain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT2wfhCCpRo

A Beautiful Song (The Opera House boss theme) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMKskuvJTcs

NieR: Automata is equally very hard to recommend to people, and one of my favourite games of all time.

You can deconstruct NieR down to its mechanics and find a relatively decent game.

The combat is a satisfactory Platinum offering, boosted by the customisation + flexibility of the chip system, but was never especially difficult or engaging outside the optional fights. The environments are solid, though not spectacular.

The thing is, you really have to play it all the way through to the end.

30+ hours, with one of the playthroughs being very similar to the first. It’s a caveat that usually brings a lot of scorn, I mean if a game can’t keep your attention to get all the way to the ‘good part’ then is it even any good? I think bouncing off NieR because of this is completely understandable, I enjoyed my entire time with it but there’s a lot that won’t click with people.

With that said, NieR really hit me in a way that very few games have, and I still think about the experience of playing it long after I completed it. It’s almost impossible for me to cover everything I like about it, and my best attempts have been 20 minute rambling sessions because there’s so much to talk about.

The thing I think of most when going back to the game are the character moments and little stories that exist all over the world. You see themes that are dealt with as you play the game like religion, sex, pacifism and the nature of humanity – it all sounds pretentious as hell but it’s handled really well, and the majority of it comes through all of the different robots, androids and communities that you encounter in the game.

All these little stories prop up the entire atmosphere and feel of the game - you find robots struggling with why they even exist, imitating various aspects of humanity in their search for meaning to their lives. Some form religious cults, some choose to fight, some form communities and try to live as ‘families’ and it’s just fascinating seeing all these different ethoses that are manifested in these little talking bits of metal.

I haven’t even mentioned the soundtrack so far, but as someone who rates the OST for the original NieR as one of my favourites I wasn’t disappointed. It’s beautiful, I regularly listen to it and I really can’t say enough good things about it.

On top of that, they created an entire fake language to sing in!

There are seamless 8-bit versions of nearly every track!

The end of the game ties into the soundtrack in a spoilery way that really shows they paid attention to the music!

While actually going through the game, the structure of the game itself and the way the larger plot plays out is also fascinating. The ‘multiple playthroughs’ part sounds daunting but is vital to the pay off at the very end (and it’s effectively just new chapters of a single story anyway, with one exception).

Going through that world and all those moments with the main characters, repeating sections of the game from a different perspective with additional context giving you more information about the grander picture is incredibly satisfying.

All while this somewhat depressing and thoughtful story is playing out, the game messes with you in how it even presents itself as a game. You switch from character action sequences to a vertical scrolling shoot-em-up, you hack into robots while the soundtrack seamlessly shifts into an 8-bit rendition of whatever was playing, you have bullet-hell sequences, twin-stick shooter segments, and there is literally a part in the game where they play back a recording of something you did 10 hours earlier. It’s just super cool.

There are big moments that are really affecting, and I can point to a number of story beats that were really emotional, but the final ending feels like a culmination of everything you did to get to that point.

It’s in all a very touching moment for the plot of the game, a clever usurping of game mechanics, and a thought-provoking question about people that makes you think there might just be some good in the world.

One of the best parts about the final ending of the game is that it does things that only a video game can do. There’s no equivalent with films, comics or other media, and I find doing something this unique and personal with my hobby something that’s really, really amazing.

It won’t click with everyone, but I absolutely love NieR: Automata.