2017 Shit That Was Cool, Part Two: Best Games of the Year #10-6

Without further ado, here's my top ten games of the year. At least, the first half of them; I have loads more to say about the top five than I do these ones, so those will take a little longer.

#10: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Mario Kart needs to take a break. It's not like the games are getting bad or anything like that, but ever since Mario Kart DS (the last entry that truly felt like a big jump for the series), every consequent game has begun to feel more and more like the sum of its parts. Each Mario Kart game looks and plays better than the last, but the feature set is woefully inconsistent, with beloved modes, characters, weapons, and mechanics coming and going as they please with little rhyme or reason. They're still a great deal of fun, but in the decade-plus since MKDS, Mario Kart hasn't really had a sense of direction, instead coming off almost as a series of greatest-hits compilations.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, a souped-up version of the original and one of the earlier examples of Nintendo's ongoing campaign to make Wii U owners feel like complete suckers, isn't quite spared from the same "Now That's What I Call Mario Kart" vibe. Take the dual item slots, for example: the mechanic returns from Mario Kart: Double Dash, but it doesn't land as smoothly as it did on the GameCube. Unlike in Double Dash, you're unable to swap items at will, removing some of the strategy it added to the mix. It also leads to things sometimes getting to be a little too "Mario Kart," as this is the first game with both double items and 12 racers on a track at once. It can lead to some great moments in races, but I can't shake the feeling that it was added to the game in part because of the need for a back-of-the-box bullet point, with the developers never fully understanding why it was a great mechanic to begin with.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe doesn't allay my long-standing concerns with the series, but this is still a damn fine kart racer. The roster of tracks is the largest and perhaps the best in the series, and the thrill of racing with a group of friends is simply undeniable. The future of the series is even given a glimmer of hope from outside of the Mushroom Kingdom, with characters like Link and those dumb little squid things from Splatoon bridging the gap between Super Mario Bros. and the rest of Nintendo's franchises. It's been long overdue, and if we're lucky, the game's crossover additions are just the beginning, as it's easy to imagine a follow-up that takes things even further. Ideally, Nintendo gives the series some time to breathe and comes back with a reinvention of the series akin to Super Smash Brothers. It'd certainly go a long way towards giving the series the kick in the ass I think it needs at this point.

Then again, the next game could just as quickly remove the Mario-adjacent characters for no reason, because Mario Kart is like that.

#9: Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap

Despite enjoying a lot of Metroid and Castlevania games, metroidvanias* aren't really my thing. The kind of exploration that the genre deals in usually means you're told "you can't get here yet" just a little too often for my tastes, and the amount of backtracking can take a toll depending on how big a game is. The metroidvanias that slip through the cracks and pique my interest tend to be the shorter ones along the lines of 2014's Strider, which can be completed or even 100%'d in a few sittings, and the Wonder Boy series fits that bill pretty well. Similar to the Ys series (which ironically comes from the developers of my favorite metroidvania, the Wonder Boy-esque Popful Mail), Wonder Boy games usually cut down on the bullshit, providing a concise metroidvania experience with a smattering of RPG mechanics for good measure.

Far and away the best Wonder Boy game is Wonder Boy III: the Dragon's Trap (although some will go to bat for Monster World IV), which is the only game in the series to feature a novel transformation mechanic. The titular trap (or curse, in the TurboGrafx-16 port) turns your character into an animal, forcing you to change between various forms throughout the course of the game to proceed. It's a great system, keeping the path to progression from being too obtuse (if something's inaccessible, it's usually obvious what form you need for it) and keeping gameplay fresh thanks to the various forms' differing combat and platforming prowess. It's a fun game that doesn't outstay its welcome or particularly fall victim to the ravages of time.

I suppose the perennial qualities make it a questionable candidate for a remake, but the folks at Lizardcube really did a number on the 1989 Master System game. As a remake, Dragon's Trap's is the best of both worlds: painstakingly accurate, yet aware of the original's faults. One of the best examples of this is the charm stone system: instead of having to grind these items to have the requisite charisma to purchase certain equipment (?), it's been changed entirely, with six unique stones granting access to the game's best weapon, each located in a endgame series of brand-new challenge rooms that push each individual player form to its limits. It's a smart solution to the game's biggest issue and a testament to the love the team has for the game, but let's be real: one look at the game is enough to know how much was put into this remake. A certain other game with hand-drawn art certainly ate its lunch quite a bit, but Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap looks incredible, which is all the more impressive when you consider that the game is running on an engine that is as close to the original game's as possible.

Made with both reverence for and scrutiny of the source material, Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap is a model remake, and a perfect primer for the series' heir apparent, Monster Boy.

*Look, you can say "pathfinder" or any other name all you want, but this battle was lost ages ago. If I have to call 3D beat 'em ups "character action games," then you fuckers are stuck with "metroidvania." Learn to let go.

#8: Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy

Those first three (alright, two) Crash Bandicoot games are good. They've always been good. The original Crash Bandicoot is one of the purest, most challenging platformers out there, reminiscent of a Donkey Kong Country game given a third dimension, but it was held back from being one of the all-time greats because of how it saved your progress. The game's dated-on-release save system forced you to make it to specific points to be able to save (which would be fine if many individual levels weren't often so arduous), but perhaps more damning is how progression in the levels themselves worked: if you died at all, any crates you broke are lost, demanding perfect runs through every single level for 100% completion. It was just a bit too much, frustrating the completionists out there in the wrong way and making what should have been my favorite in the series a bit of a hassle to get through.

The N. Sane Trilogy version fixes every issue I had with the original game. The checkpoints are now like later games in the series, where deaths don't reset any progress you made before your most recent checkpoint, and you can just save whenever you want. Deathless runs are still something you're going to want to do for 100%, but instead of doing it for the secret ending, you're going through a new Time Trial mode taken wholesale from Crash Bandicoot: Warped (in perhaps the game's lone positive contribution to the series). Having the loss of an entire level's worth of progress transplanted to a speedrun mode instead of a methodical 100% run is a hell of a smart decision, turning what was once outright frustration into more of a "just one more run" kind of feeling.

Crash Bandicoot 2 sees similar additions (alongside the inclusion of Warped's sprinting mechanic) and each of the three games has been remade wonderfully, but the N. Sane Trilogy is special because it retroactively makes the original Crash Bandicoot my new favorite in the series. I mean, shit, they even added a level that was cut from the game for being too difficult as optional DLC. Where remakes like Yakuza Kiwami falter, the N. Sane Trilogy gives a flawed classic just what it needs. Including two sequels may as well be a bonus.

#7: Puyo Puyo Tetris

Puyo Puyo Tetris is cool because it manages to dick with veterans of both Puyo Puyo and the Soviet mind game. I'm pretty good at Tetris and I can make stairs with the best of them, but Puyo Puyo Tetris still has some genuine surprises in how they blend both games together.

It's one thing for the game's Swap Mode to alternate between the two games in tandem, but the Fusion Mode, where both game pieces are dropped together on a single huge field, managed to rattle me beyond the expected hurdle of managing both sets of pieces at once. The mode is an absolute frenzy not only because of the aforementioned fusion, but because it's the most active gameplay either series has ever seen. There's still a focus on building up huge combos, but it's much faster and more improvisational because you're able to continue placing pieces as chain reactions are still going off, and there's even a bit of leeway in the amount of time before a combo is dropped, letting you keep a chain alive for a second or two after things have settled down. It's an entirely different beast from the rest of the game, and the high-level play is just bonkers.

Of course, you still have Puyo Puyo and Tetris proper, and I probably don't have to explain how God damn good those are. Multiplayer is the star of the show, giving you the excitement had in games like Tetris DS and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine (and then some) all at once, but the single-player is a surprisingly fun time, as well. The adventure mode gives you a healthy mix of all of the various modes the game offers, but the real highlight is when the story takes a detour to bask in the greatness of Suketoudara, Puyo Puyo's resident fish man thing. The localization team takes some real liberties with the character, interpreting him as a pun-slinging goofball by way of James Brown. I've never been one for Puyo Puyo's eye-roll inducing anime antics, but Suketoudara provides genuine laughs, in addition to some clever writing scattered throughout.

I could go on, but you get it. It's Puyo Puyo and Tetris together, and it's as good as you think that'd be.

#6: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

I'm really divided on Wolfenstein II. On one hand, its highs are among the highest of 2017: the New Colossus is packed full of incredible moments both in-game and in its story. There are some absolutely brilliant gameplay sequences (the introduction of the game's shotgun is Doom levels of cathartic), and the writing lives up to the reputation the team at MachineGames has earned with games like the Darkness and the previous Wolfenstein. They've made one hell of a memorable campaign, here, but I'm getting the feeling that their take on the classic series is starting to become a victim of its own ambition.

Funny enough, even though I easily finished the game within a Redbox rental period, I came away from it feeling that it was just a little too big, stretching itself thin with a grander scope than it could handle. The New Colossus sees B.J. Blazkowicz' world get larger, taking him to various cities across a Nazi-run America and introducing him to a bevy of new characters along the way. It's a great setup, but TNC doesn't get as much out of it as you'd want. B.J.'s trip to a nuke-stricken Manhattan starts off pretty poorly, as the convoluted level design makes navigating the ruins of the city an outright chore. Fortunately, this doesn't last long as you're soon introduced to the delightful Grace Walker and the stage layouts begin to tighten up, facilitating the kind of manic Nazi purgation that made me fall in love with the series to begin with. Ironically enough, however, the character work begins to falter right around the time the level design gets back on track, as you're introduced to a group of rebels in New Orleans that are never really given a chance to stand out compared to the rest of the cast, ending up coming across as half-baked caricatures. It's like the video game equivalent of an ornate light display you'd see in some hacky Christmas comedy: it offers some of the most charmingly brazen shit you've ever seen, but then a light goes out. As soon as that light's fixed, another goes out, and you never get to see it all come together at once.

The frustration of the game's more scattershot tendencies reached a head well after the credits rolled, however. It wasn't until I had watched others play the game that I realized that I had not only missed an entire arc between two characters that developed throughout the course of the game, but also never learned a vital stealth mechanic only ever mentioned in a loading screen tip. Then again, even if I had known that shooting walls is Wolfenstein II's stealth equivalent of throwing rocks, I would still likely feel that the game's stealth was a step back from what was seen in the New Order and the Old Blood, feeling like an afterthought included because it was in the last game.

Wolfenstein II tries to pull off one hell of a juggling act, and while it largely succeeds, the moments where it doesn't stick out just as much as the moments that are too batshit for me to spoil for you right now. If I was a betting man, I would put everything on WolfensteIIIn being an uneven open world game that would've been better off linear. You can see the team planting the roots for it in the mediocre side-quests they spring on you halfway through the game, as well as the inexplicably large hub between missions.

But enough hemming and hawing about how conflicted I am with the game (it's not like this is going up on Waypoint, after all). For as many issues as I have with Wolfenstein II and the series' trajectory, one thought remains in my head: you absolutely have to see some of the shit this game pulls.