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willin

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Game of the Year 2023

It was the best year for video games; it was the worst year for games. The year 2023 will be remembered with joyful glee or utter misery, depending on which side of the video game you are on. Game developers probably had the worst year I’ve ever seen. Studio closures, layoffs, excessive crunch, and that’s on top of the other bullshit they usually have to deal with. Conversely, video game players had perhaps one of the best years in recent memory, so I believe this year was fantastic for playing games. I finally managed to get a PlayStation 5 and had enough time in the year to play some missed classics and old favourites. However, despite having the time to play through Ape Escape on a whim, there were some games I missed, so apologies to Pizza Tower, Octopath Traveller II, Tron: Identity, Dead Island 2, Street Fighter 6, AEW Fight Forever, Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition, Armored Core VI, Making of Karateka, System Shock, Robocop Rogue City, Fashion Dreamer and Chants of Sennaar. Maybe I’ll have time next year.

List items

  • I have never played a video game like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which is a funny thing to say, considering that it’s basically a glorified Breath of the Wild expansion.

    There is this thing in video games that you often see where an increase in scope comes with an increase in rough edges. You see it all the time in open-world games: you get stuck in level geometry, you fall through the environment, NPCs are floating in the air, two trees are clipping into each other. It is something you just have to accept. Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most open video games I have ever played, and it did not do anything like that in the 70 hours I played. Despite being able to go anywhere, stick any random thing to any other random thing, or do any objective in any order, it all just works. Games with half this scope fall apart at the seams, but Nintendo has done the seemingly impossible and made a flawless massive open world with player mechanics that would wreck any other game, all while running on 7-year-old hardware that was underpowered at launch. It honestly made most other developers look like absolute clowns.

    They made a vastly improved sequel to a game that, let me remind you, was Breath of the Wild, one of the best video games ever made. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is my Game of the Year for 2023.

  • Who would have seen this coming? Baldur’s Gate III is easily the best fantasy RPG I have ever played and I have played a lot. It is the perfect blend of complex game systems with a triple-A presentation. It has a fantastic complex but versatile combat system; it has an environment design that is both detailed and vast, it has the best overall voice acting this year; it has so many ways to complete objectives that it is mindblowing that it came out as functional as it did. Baldur’s Gate III was my most anticipated game last year, and it well earned that accomplishment. It will be a game I will keep coming back to repeatedly.

  • If the human emotion of joy could be pressed onto a Nintendo Switch cartridge, Super Mario Bros Wonder would pop out. I struggle to write something about this game without resorting to the most obvious thing in the world, but I cannot help it: it is a wonderful game. Everything in this game bleeds that sense of wonder, from the colourful graphics, incredible music, perfect controls, and wonder seed effects. Everything in this game just makes me happy during a period of hardship as we are currently in. It made me have a big stupid smile on my face the entire time I was playing, and I cannot say that about anything else that came out this year.

  • Final Fantasy XVI is that big, mainstream, stupidly expensive RPG that has been missing from the industry for the last few decades. It is a huge and narratively complex game that takes dozens of hours to complete and it has been the kind of game I have been yearning for years. That spectacle is the reason I bought a Playstation 5 so it had a lot of live up for and it met those expectations. A twisting narrative that makes you sit at the edge of your sit, fantastic characters and featuring some of the people acting I have seen in a game, from multiple characters. It has a lore codex system that completely blows away everything else. Final Fantasy XVI is a game well worth buying a console for.

  • Fire Emblem Engage is basically a Saturday morning cartoon masquerading as a tactics game. It is so goddamn goofy and delightful that I just cannot help myself. All the characters are loveable dorks, the plot is filled with tropes to the point of absurdity, and the dialogue has that earnest cringe that just somehow works. But Nintendo couldn’t just stop there, so they made one of the best tactical battle systems ever made. Three Houses had an unexpectedly profound effect on me, and while Engage did not reach quite that high, it is still a fantastic tactics game. It also has Yunaka in it, pushing it up like 4 spaces.

  • I love the Persona games, but not all the Persona spinoffs have hit, even if you ignore Persona 5 fatigue. But what makes Persona 5 Tactica different is that this is not some other video game with a Persona skin slapped on it as it was with Persona 5 Strikers and Persona Q2, but an entirely original and relatively better-than-expected Tactics game. It is one of those games where you need to have 5 moves ahead already planned out and when you execute those plans, oh how it’s satisfying. It just has the flow to it that makes the game feel so much better than it has any right to be. On top of the series' standard best-in-the-world graphic design and killer soundtrack, they went out with a bang if this is Phantom Thieves swan song.

  • Tchia is the best example I can think of a developer taking an entire culture and transporting it into a video game. Every little piece of these game feels authentic and genuine, that it is almost scary that it was done with a small team. Everything from the clothes, the way people speak, and the music, to the environment design just radiates New Caledonia. But it’s not just a fantastic environment to walk around, but an excellent adventure and exploring game that’s basically a mini Breath of the Wild. It's easily the most impressive indie game I have played in a while; you all owe it to yourself to play Tchia.

  • A fully completed English translation patch for Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 was released this year, so I am considering it a 2023 game. Boku 2 is basically a developer taking the summer vacation experience of a Japanese grade-schooler in the 70s and transporting players to that time. It’s probably the closest thing to an autobiographical game ever released. It invokes that scene of place and time so masterfully that it honestly feels that this was a real place with real people. While most of the credit has to go to Millennium Kitchen, the excellent translation work by Hilltop must be mentioned, for without it, no one outside of Japanese-speaking people would get to experience such a joyful video game.

  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3 was my Game of the Year last year, so I was pretty hyped to see the DLC continue that with an all-new story. What I wasn’t expecting was such an excellent blend of the narrative and mechanics of all three Xenoblade games. The series has always had an issue with an over-bloated length, so having what is, in my eyes, a trimmed Xenoblade experience made an already enjoyable game more so. Add to that the series trademark combat systems and excellent music; you got quite the excellent experience in Future Redeemed.

  • For many, including myself, Starfield wasn’t the game everyone hoped for. After waiting so long for Bethesda’s first original game in 25 years, I hoped for something better than ‘It’s good’. With that said, I still enjoyed my time with Starfield. It is still that immersive and detailed Bethesda-style RPG that I love that I cannot get anywhere else. I am hoping that with patches and the promised DLC, Starfield will have a Cyberpunk 2077 moment where, after a while, everything realigns and clicks together.
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