1997 Ranked
This is maybe the weirdest top 10 from any year I've ranked.
List items
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Like a lot of Millennials who play video games, I don't think I'll ever *quite* get past Final Fantasy VII. Too grand and progressive for other mega-huge games of the time but too roughly sketched and unforgiving to neatly fit alongside contemporary design trends, Final Fantasy VII was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience. You really had to be there to get it.
I'm just kidding, of course - I don't think FF7 is so singular that you'd need to bend time and space to comprehend it. It's just - no other games, not at this scale, were really *going for it*, really putting their all into both the play *and* the narrative experience at once. And it's a game that has something to say, something that feels true, about capitalism, global warming, the tabula rasa inherent to any true individualist, the things we have to do to cope when the things we need to flourish are taken from us - these were big thoughts, exquisitely developed, all delivered within the narrow, mathematical language of the Japanese role playing game.
Final Fantasy VII might be the Final Fantasy game with the *most* Final Fantasy in it, Final Fantasy IV might be the *truest* expression of the Final Fantasy conceit and Final Fantasy VI might be the series' most divergent adaptation of itself, but no Final Fantasy game is quite as complete, or singular, as Final Fantasy VII. It's a hell of an epic.
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When I think about the aesthetics of video games in the 1990s, no game more positively embodies those qualities than Tekken 3. There's that weird, asynchronous quality to the blocky PS1 graphics and the high fidelity character animations. There's the shifty, pseudo-purgatorial combat arenas which are nevertheless vibrant and evocative. It's just...*cool,* man. I mean, compare Tekken 3 to the angular, statuesque Virtua Fighter character models, the way that game's characters move with comparative ceremony, as if underwater, against Tekken's snappy, colorful, impractical, *impactful* animation-style. There's something just *captivating* about the way Tekken 3 looks and feels.
Of course, a big part of this is art design. Tekken 3's cast is multi-national in the same mode of stereotyping that the Street Fighter games are, but national stereotypes are only one foundational aspect to each characters' look and feel. There's also the appreciation for *fashion*, for iconic looks that evoke more than 'I am a person who fist fights.' I mean, King's grey mask and sweatpants combo is maybe the greatest fit in the history of video games. Just...straight up, maybe the strongest costume design I've ever seen in a video game.
I'm a big Tekken fan, and the 3rd game is far and away my favorite. It's got *just enough* complexity to the fighting mechanics to guarantee a wide variety of outcomes in a match without giving way to 30-hit combo strings from the later games. The additional modes and features of the home version of the game are all fun and memorable. It's a perfect little video game, this Tekken 3!
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To call Fallout a foundational video game text would be an understatement. At the time of its release, there were few expansive RPGs, and *very* few expansive RPGs which weren't either an approximation of Tolkein-ian fantasy or enmeshed within a wider multimedia franchise poorly suited for video game storytelling. Fallout, regardless of how liberally it stole from Mad Max or A Canticle for Liebowitz, was very much its own, unique narrative built from the ground up for simulated role playing. During its best moments, Fallout is a wonderful, dynamic narrative machine designed to reward the player's creativity.
It's also - and I'm not throwing out a hot take here, just stating a plain fact - only *partially* complete as a narrative. It's a pseudo-satirical joke at the expense of American nationalism about 15% of the time and a straight up parade of tired genre tropes the other 85% of the time. For all the powerful iconography and dynamism of that great 15%, the other 85% casts a long shadow.
See, at its foundation, Fallout has some big ideas: the Old World, old America, lied to its people with such regularity that even the liars started to believe their own bullshit. Nationalism and capitalism subsequently escalated, leading to all kinds of horrible stuff: consumer robotic servants are weaponized, automobiles filled to the brim with nuclear power cause a minor environmental disaster in the event of an accident, summary executions of enemy combatants of The Great War become a part of your regularly scheduled TV news broadcast, and American nationalism is *everywhere.* The war escalates, and nuclear armageddon is unleashed. The world ends, rich suburbanites survive the apocalypse within underground vaults, and you, the player, are their descendant, set upon the world as a pilgrim to scavenge supplies from the wreckage of the United States.
And that's a *great* concept for a role playing game! The problem is, *way* too many of the people you meet and the places you go in the wasteland are creatively innert inventions, politically unimaginative, regurgitated pulp. In fact, the scale of the roleplaying experience in Fallout is small enough that I can very easily list half the spaces, the important players, and the major outcomes of player choices here. The places, the people, and the outcomes of the player's actions are dead simple:
- In Arradesh, a calm and empathetic figure leads a populace beset by monsters and one (1) gang. You either help out and the town flourishes or you don't and the town fails.
- In Shady Sands, a corrupt mafia boss and an old-fashioned 'shoot first, ask questions later' sheriff battle for political control. After you take a side Shady Sands is either a drug-infested gambling den or the kind of town that revolves entirely around a movie set saloon.
- In The Hub, political control is divided between the police, big business and organized crime, all of which are in *some* level of conflict with one another. No matter what you do, the side with the remaining money and gunpower wins.
See, there *is* a big idea here structurally, but the individual pieces used to explain it are too flimsy and trope-ified for any of it to really linger. In the language of Fallout, the bigger a settlement, the fewer number of 'good' outcomes exist for that settlement. If you interfere with things in the village of Arradesh, Arradesh either becomes a utopia or fails completely, but no good outcome exists for Fallout's urban areas, in which murder will always be the standard. This is transparently ideological and absurd, but I digress. You can even see Fallout's cynicism in Shady Sands, a settlement which is just *one* step bigger than the smallest community possible - a town instead of a village - and the best case scenario is...people are find, but the society is inherently morally compromised.
That's the *mode* of Fallout's storytelling, but here's what I mean by Fallout being 'incomplete' as a narrative. As I played through Fallout, I frequently found myself asking "OK, but why?" Fallout offers no answers. Why do extreme poverty conditions exist in The Boneyard but not Shady Sands? How can drug addiction be a major factor in a world without an industry to make drugs? Capitalism is alive and well, but how can a widely recognized currency exist in a world in which all trade occurs via people who do manual labor and barter goods? I brought old-fashioned justice to Shady Sands, but...so what? How much emotional energy can I possibly invest in a story in which the only named characters are the ones exercising power but not the ones who have power exercised upon them?
Are these big questions to ask of an RPG from 1997? Sure! But this is *Fallout,* the game most frequently referenced as 'complex' and 'adult' in distinction from other games, even other contemporary games. If it's not worth it to interrogate a work like this, then video games wouldn't be much worth thinking about at all. And when you think about the original Fallout, the narrative is pretty damn flimsy.
Anyway, I digress. Fallout *is* quite the achievement, most especially in comparison with other games of the era. But it's a *flawed* game that makes a lot of big, bold claims about people and war and poverty that it never bothers to illustrate or depict. Fallout is a game that's got stuff to chew on, but it's also not a game that an entire industry should place on a pedestal, either, however foundational it may have been.
...and don't get me started on the final act of this game, which is a *brutal* marathon of terrible combat, or the *companions,* GOD the fucking companions. I'll miss you Ian, but you were a son of a bitch and I was glad when you died.
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Of the original Tomb Raider series, it's the original which stands out the most, with its brilliant set pieces and memorable puzzle sequences. Still, Tomb Raider II has its own set of series high watermarks. This might be an odd compliment to give to a series infamous for its PS1-era, graphical...angularity, but for my money, Tomb Raider II's dynamic lighting and expansive environments make it the best *looking* Tomb Raider game. Additionally, Tomb Raider II's shift in tone from creepy horror stuff to out-and-out Indiana Jones action is a welcome change from the original, which was admittedly a bit same-y throughout.
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Symphony of the Night is an unkillable video game. It solidified and greatly expanded the core design tropes in 1994's Super Metroid and is partially responsible for an entire genre of video games, influencing the design of many other genres along the way. Like Super Metroid, it has such a singular place in the pantheon of Influential Video Games that it's reputation, along with the bits of it you can see in so many games that took inspiration from it, dominate all discussion around it. When we talk about Symphony of the Night, we're always talking about what Symphony of the Night did to the industry, and only very rarely about what Symphony of the Night actually is.
Playing through both Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night for the first time in 2022, a couple things become apparent: while both games are timeless, Super Metroid is the more elegant of the two. Castlevania has a wealth of options available to the player and a surprisingly expansive experience point-based RPG system pumping away under the hood, but it's also filled with *stuff,* and by this I mean it's *over-filled* with stuff.
Super Metroid's open world is filled with arbitrarily locked doors/walls/crevices the player can unlock only after discovering the necessary item or upgrade to proceed, making it a kind-of linear non-linear open world game. In Super Metroid, the player is free to explore at their leisure, but they're ultimately prevented from, say, battling with Ridley until after they've already collected every possible weapon and tool. The non-linear aspect of the game comes into play with regards to all the hidden weapon and health upgrades. Super Metroid never truly capitalizes on its open design concept, but the benefit of the game's heavy direction of the player is that each new area makes intuitive sense in comparison to the last. The game world feels logistically coherent from both a narrative and a player perspective.
Symphony of the Night is anything but logistically coherent. It also uses arbitrarily locked doors/walls/crevices to block the players progress, but along the way the player has the opportunity to either find or completely miss all kinds of weapons, armor, combat items, spells, and companions. Weighing which option works best in what scenario is one of the game's greatest weaknesses, because there is no rhyme or reason to what enemies are placed in what area. In Super Metroid, I intiuitively understand that when I enter the fire level, ice-based attacks are going to be potentially useful, or when I enter the crashed spaceship area, the grappling hook might come in handy considering all the hanging girders and broken machinery scattered at the top of each ceiling. In Symphony of the Night, you might enter a dining hall only to find that it's populated by medieval knights riding magical wolves. You might enter a library only to find it's full of flying witches. And even once you realize what enemies belong where, it's extremely difficult to gauge which weapon or armor best fits the situation considering, at the end of the day, you're going to spend the entire game winning or losing thanks to whatever your current attack output or damage resistance are. If I walk into a central hall and find it full of lightning users, should I bother to go into the equip screen and choose between the armor with lightening resistance but low defense or the armor with high defense but no special resistance?
I completed the game without ever learning the answer to those kinds of questions. Without any special effort on my part, the final boss had become trivial thanks to my high defense and offense stats. I got there partially because I spent so much of this game simply wandering back and forth through areas I'd already been through just to see if whatever new ability or armor I had acquired allowed me to pass through whatever locked door/wall/crevice I'd been unable to before. And this is probably the worst part about Symphony of the Night, and Metroidvanias generally - without a sufficient map which automatically alerts the player to what ability goes with what blockade, an enormous amount of playtime is inevitably dedicated towards rehashing old areas again and again.
Symphony of the Night's perpetual repetition might not be so bad if its world or narrative came together, but rather infamously, this is not the case. While I'm tempted to point out Super Metroid's comparatively subtler yet cleaner marriage of mechanics, level design and narrative conceit, I think the real missing link here is actually better explained via a Dark Souls comparison. There are a few discrete areas in Symphony of the Night in which the game's baroque, anime-gothic art design really shines, demonstrating a cohesion in visual and game mechanic the game rarely is interested in.
One chamber in particular that I loved appears in the first section of the game. After surviving yet another horde of generic skeletons, sexy demon ladies and bastardized depictions of mythological creatures, I arrived in what appeared to be an intact dining hall. Sat at the far end of the dining table was a bald man in a robe. He gestured for me to sit at the far end of the table. The game actually would've let me sat there, but I didn't. The man rose from the table and a boss fight ensued. After smacking the dude around for a while, he began clutching at his chest, writhing in pain. His flesh began to stretch and tear, and he grew to about 300% of his original size, turning into a kind of...skeletal The Hulk. It was a terrific, memorable multi-stage boss fight, and it made me actually start to think about the game's world and it's plot.
This is the kind of thing Dark Souls does so well. It presents the player with a confusing labyrinth of seemingly incoherent yet interconnected chambers, but it invents an internal logic that the player can begin to grasp at as they uncover more and more of the world. This deeper consideration of the 'why' of the world is the missing component in Symphony of the Night. Without that care for cohesion or the legible establishing of a coherent internal logic, traipsing through Dracula's castle is a lot of fun, but it ultimately doesn't leave you with much to really care about. Despite the fact that it technically has more upfront plot than, say, Super Metroid, it's lacking that narrative follow-through to really elevate it beyond what amounts to a big weird video game maze with video game stuff in it.
Symphony of the Night is a classic, for sure, and (of course) there's a great reason for its continual place in what we might loosely contrive as the 'video game canon.' However, the reason why it's historical import is more often the focus of conversation around the game rather than the actual components of the game is because it the components of the game don't actually cohere into an emotionally, intellectually - or, honestly, even a mechanically complete experience. As if to prove my point, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, a spiritual sequel directed by Symphony of the Night's original creative lead, doubled down on the number-crunching combat and haphazard mish-mash of enemy designs and abandoned the aesthetic and narrative stuff behind almost entirely.
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Look, GoldenEye is a stone-cold classic, no doubt about it. It established a working FPS formula on consoles, added some goofiness back to the Bond franchise just when it was getting too self-serious, and created the high watermark of casual local FPS multiplayer.
All that being said, the GoldenEye team would go on to develop at least four similarly-styled FPS titles which are all more impressive than GoldenEye in both scope and quality. The TimeSplitters series is an all-timer B-game trilogy, but even just sticking to their work during the N64 era, Perfect Dark is smarter, prettier, and more dynamic than GoldenEye in just about every way that matters. TimeSplitters and Perfect Dark feature quite a bit of variety from level to level, but GoldenEye's campaign is a marathon of generic military bunkers and warehouses.
In conclusion: GoldenEye is a great game! It's just the least great version of itself.
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Star Fox 64, like Crash Bandicoot 2, is a perfect example of a 'inter-generational' game. Structurally, Star Fox 64 works like an arcade title: gameplay takes place basically on rails, and unlocking new levels depends entirely on discovering hidden paths in linear stages. There's a big emphasis on spectacle and gameplay legibility. Additionally, dynamic gameplay *does not exist* in Star Fox, so stages will always operate exactly the same, every time. In other words, Star Fox 64 has the *feel* of the classic era, but styles itself in the manner of the 'modern' era.
This was how Star Fox for the SNES worked as well, but the SNES' comparatively meager technical power reduced an otherwise engaging experience to a weirdly abstract one; the core gameplay functions were there, but the graphics mostly consisted of hard-edged polygons emitting smaller, similarly hard-edged projectiles.
Star Fox for the SNES, in other words, was ahead of its time, a futuristic space shooter developed too early. By contrast, Star Fox 64 - with one hand in the SNES-style, arcade-y school of game design and another in the fantastical expanse of three-dimensional digital worldbuilding - is retrograde. Star Fox 64 is a linear, score-tallying romp through gaming's most ancient of play-languages but with all the majesty and splendor of 'modern' gaming aesthetics.
And that's fuckin' *cool as hell*.
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Despite its popularity and positive critical reception, Crash Bandicoot 2 is underappreciated. Or, maybe a better way to put it: what Crash Bandicoot 2 *did* is underappreciated. This is a platformer that's more interesting now than it likely was at release, a game that's much closer to, say, Super Mario Bros. 3 than Super Mario 64 was. While other big budget platformer titles were seeking to expand beyond the constraints of the platformer genre by using this newfangled third dimension, the Crash Bandicoot series took the core design tenets of 2D platformers and asked, "how can we expand on the 2D platformer obstacle course concept without shifting to action-adventure exploration stuff?"
The first three Crash Bandicoot titles didn't re-invent the platforming genre. Instead, they *refined* it. While Mario 64 and Spyro the Dragon were taking 2D platformers' wide range of motion applying these traits to a *wider* play space than the typical platformerm the Crash Bandicoot games were platformer-ass platformers.
To put it more contemporaneously: Spyro the Dragon was Super Mario Odyssey, and Crash Bandicoot was Celeste. Older platformers were difficult, and *arbitrarily* so, but the significant escalation of difficulty in games like Mega Man was an essential component to the longevity of the genre. There's something to be said for the snappy and mean style of platformer - after all, there's nothing inherently interesting about running an easy obstacle course. The more challenging the difficulty and/or the flashier the obstacles, the better.
Crash Bandicoot 2 is the best of the Crash titles, because it pairs a steady difficulty curve with maximalist spectacle. The end-game stuff gets tough - maybe not Super Mario Bros. 2 tough, but tough - and the early goings are enough of a breeze to welcome players of any skill. There is a wide enough variety in stage types that none of the stage-specific gimmicks slow things down, a perfect sweet spot between the first game's too-brutalizing linear progression and the third game's constant divergences into lesser mini game challenges.
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Mischief Makers is an extremely idiosyncratic game. While it might be a fairly basic 2D platformer at a glance, it's got one weird hook: this is a grappling and shaking-based 2D platformer. I realize out of context those descriptors make no sense, but trust me, it's intuitive when you play it.
What 'grappling and shaking-based platformer' means in practice is that 'combat' in Mischief Makers consists of directional throws and 'platforming' consists of flinging your body from fixture to fixture like a pinball. To make things even weirder, this game has all kinds of diversions from the vanilla experience: LEGO-stylized mechs, jet-booster footraces, a grade schooler's idea of the Olympics...it's pretty weird! The music's great, too. Underrated.
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Genuinely wish games like Blast Corps came out more frequently. The conceit is classic arcade game nonsense: there is a runaway truck with nuclear explosives on it, and you need to use construction vehicle mechas (yes, construction vehicle mechas) to demolish entire cityscapes so that the runaway truck won't crash into anything, preventing the nuclear explosion from...uh...demolishing entire cityscapes. Th entire game is nonsensical and I like Blast Corps all the better for it.
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Unlike the early Capcom Vs. games, this era of KoF, despite being produced annually, wasn't *quite* interchangeable from title to title. The dynamics of team-building and the supplemental mechanical elements change somewhat frequently.
To my memory, '97 was not one of the remarkable KoF games, though. Truth be told: I can't remember a *thing* about what differentiates '97 from '96 except that I enjoyed playing it. The '90s KoFs are good games! Annualization did not produce consistently *great* games, but it did produce some pretty good ones.
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Nintendo attempted to revive some of its Game & Watch titles with these Mario-themed remake collections for the GameBoy. The two things to know about these Game & Watch remakes is that they're A. *painfully* small anthologies and B. actually really good.
I realize the power of GameBoy cartridges was probably limited, but if Game & Watch Gallery was a comprehensive collection of every Game & Watch remake - I think there were maybe three of these games total, which would mean there were 12 total remakes - this would be an A-tier GameBoy title.
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Something that's always been funny to me about the Capcom Vs. games is that sometimes the sides seem unbalanced. In this case, I'm gonna call it for Marvel. Like...X-Men Vs. Street Fighter? I can see that! Storm v. Chun-Li, Colossus v. Zangief? Those are some good matchups. The entire Marvel roster vs. the twenty or so members of the Street Fighter cast? Feels wrong. The numbers don't add up.
Anyway, the Vs. games are largely interchangeable up until you hit the first Marvel Vs. Capcom, and this one's no different - I can't imagine there's anyone who, like, LOVES this game but hates Marvel Super Heroes or X-Men: Children of the Atom. If I was writing this in the '90s and had to drop a cool $50 for a compromised version of this game on the PS1, maybe I'd place this lower, but playing it archivally is perfectly fine. The pixel art is fantastic and the games play well.
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Turok is a clunky, delerious game about a man who shoots velociraptors to death with an assault rifle. I'd take Turok over Duke Nukem any day, but it's no less hilariously '90s. The worst part of Turok was that most of the levels by the end-game devolved into complex video game hedge mazes that lacked any internal logic whatsoever.
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The Mega Man X series was losing steam by the time it hit PS1. I love the way the X games play, but they can be too punishing. I feel like you need some inspired stage design, or at least some memorable visuals to get a player to push through that. The latter X games just don't have it.
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There's a lot of (rightful) hate for the Mario Party series out there, but the Mario Kart series is only *slightly* less egregious. Mario Kart 64, in particular, features *brutal* rubberband A.I. that artificially skyrockets a random A.I. opponent into first place once the player takes the lead to keep races feeling competitive. That *sucks,* because Mario Kart games are not the type of racing games that you can enjoy regardless of how you place, the way that Forza or Gran Turismo games can be. Losing a Mario Kart game is *misery.* Losing a Mario Kart game is getting whacked in the head with a turtle shell by your loudest friend at the worst house party you've ever been to. It's misery.
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Fighting Force was a *terrible* beat 'em up. There were *so many* terrible beat 'em ups in the '90s. No one has nostalgia for them anymore, and people have nostalgia for *fucking everything.* That's how bad a lot of them were.
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Diddy Kong Racing superseded innovations in other cart racers by quite a bit. It wouldn't be 'till, like, what, Mario Kart 8? Until the Mario Kart series featured karts that could drive, fly and jet ski all in one track?
Still, Diddy Kong Racing lacked two essential ingredients for a good cart racer: memorable courses and a sense of speed. Unlike Mario Kart, Crash Team Racing, or even some of the really shitty Mario Kart knockoffs, driving in Diddy Kong Racing has the adrenaline of driving ice rink zamboni. Well...I mean, I guess driving a zamboni would be fun in real life. But you get the idea,
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Masters of Teras Kasi is only remembered because of how disliked it was, but honestly, it's not that remarkable as far as bad games go. You can pick up on why it doesn't work pretty much right away: it's a slippery 3D fighter, characters are difficult to handle, and it's obtuse considering how simple its mechanics are. Even speaking conceptually Masters of Teras Kasi doesn't make much sense; does anyone really want to play as Boba Fett the cage fighter as opposed to Boba Fett the bounty hunter? Or Tekken Han Solo, or Virtua Fighter Leia? These characters just aren't built for fighting games, and the whole project just feels...off, thanks in no small part to its cast.
I will at least say - playing it, you can kinda see how Masters of Teras Kasi *might* have worked. Make it a Jedi dueling game if you need to feature the primary cast, or better yet, just grab some characters from the extended universe and go full-hog on the Star Wars Cage Fighter concept. Either way, it's a moot point - I don't think there's much risk of another studio attempting to build a Star Wars Tekken-like anytime soon.
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Weirdly terrifying artifact of the '90s. I played this game quite a bit at a Fuddrucker's when I was a kid. Kinda fucked up product to make! "Here kids, learn the fine art of police murder at this hamburger joint. It'll be fun." I would still rather play this game's sterile target practice mini-games than shoot turds in The Lost World, though.
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A sloppy, oddly crass light gun shooter, The Lost World: Jurassic Park is one of the first video games I remember playing as a kid and thinking "WOW this game is *awful*!" The Lost World's one interesting quality is that it sets such a weird fucking tone for a Jurassic Park adaptation, even in a genre as silly as the light gun shooter. The only possible circumstances in which I'd play this would be at a barcade or some other horrible place just to show people the scene where you have to shoot down torpedo turds to avoid damage.
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