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« on: January 02, 2025, 09:04:46 AM »
Eiyuden Chronicles
This is my lowest-rate game of this year. Which feels wrong since I like this game quite a bit despite the Switch optimization for it being laggy and awful.
But this year pretty much ruled when it came to all the games I personally played, and SOMETHING has to be last place, and Eiyuden definitely just feels "good" instead of "Great".
Some of the recruits in this game genuinely made me burst out laughing despite myself though, and I REALLY got invested in the major players, so it is certainly doing something right.
Cooking Fighter Hao
This is Nippon Ichi's first non-puzzle game from like 1998 or whatever. It's a high-octane Cooking Battle "game" that is barely distinguishable from a Visual Novel apart from its lovingly-sprite-animated but incredibly janky cooking 'fights' that mostly involve two Battle Chef characters running around a small field hunting animals and living vegetable ingredients while also throwing cookware knives and ninja-magic at eachother.
It's hilarious. It's janky. It's Nippon-Ichi before Disgaea in a way that I love, but I can't possibly recommend for more than novelty enjoyment.
Fantasian: NEO Dimension
Sakaguchi's last hurrah certainly feels comforting to play. Something about the map design, or boss battle balance, or skillset choices, or party composition, side quest design... All the little things that make up a JRPG... it just FEELS like Final Fantasy TM.
I can't quite describe it, but it's just instantly familiar and engaging in the same way that FF6-10 are. Fantasian is definitely the game that FF would have produced as its next mainline title if the corporate shift that caused FF11-16 had never occurred.
There is an alternate timeline out there where Sakaguchi maintained the rights to the FF name, and stuff like Lost Odyssey, Bravely Default, Octopath, and Fantasian were FFs 11-16 instead.
It is worth playing this game just to get a glimpse at that timeline.
SaGa Emerald Beyond
I haven't dug into this game as much as I wanted to. It's fantastic, let's get that out of the way. It has the same basic battle system as SaGa Scarlet Grace, my contender for Best JRPG Battle System Of All Time. Only somewhat more polished.
The issue is that it has some janky presentation issues that make the whole game feel cheaper than it should. Character models don't animate nicely, there's not enough voice acting, too many non-main-character designs are bland and/or reused. It's just kind of unrewarding, visually.
There's some really cool ideas for how the different types of units gain skills and progress, which is one of my favorite ideas in ANY JRPG that uses it, but it feels like this game needed to give it another pass for balance. An issue in MANY SaGa games, but it feels more egregious in this one since it otherwise has a lot more polish than the Gameboy/SNES/PSX games. And knowing how well those games cleaned up with their remakes, you'd expect that same level of quality out of SaGa's big new title.
It is still AMAZING, and I know I'm going to continue falling in love with it as I do more playthroughs, but my first run just didn't wow me as much as I thought it would, and it's got some incredibly tough competition this year.
Metal Slug Tactics
An SRPG Roguelite about Run-and-Gun Tactics? What crazy mind came up with this? And why is it so addictive? The plot is nothing, but it's kinda charmingly goofy. The real meat of the game is just how diverse and interesting the character skillsets can get in such a short runtime. And how varied the mission objectives can be to keep things fresh over multiple runs.
Fio is broken good, and really... what else do you need to know to give this game a try?
Metaphor: ReFantazio
Persona 6 in all but name. It manages to be the best version of the SMT/Persona formula while also sprinkling in some of the more interesting bits from Etrian Odyssey too.
I can't stand its creator Hashino, but it seems all of his worst impulses have been reigned in for this outing. And admittedly, it is hard to imagine a more timely release window for this game about Magically-Enforced Democratic Election than the political-cultural landscape we find ourselves in now.
Easily a Game of the Year contender despite not being anywhere close to it for me in this amazing year for games.
Vampire Survivors: Castlevania Edition
There is nothing deep going on here, but Vampire Survivors remains a pure kinetic joy of a popcorn/party game. Adding in what is essentially an entire sequel's worth of content revolving around the most beautiful love letter to one of my favorite vampire-killing franchises on the planet is just a treat that feels tailor-made for me.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
I don't think there was any doubt this was going to be GotY... Except somehow it's not. It is the absolute most engaging ARPG battle system I've ever played. I love the way team dynamics are incentivized by this system while still maintaining that kinetic fun that ARPG systems are good at. It has almost a Valkyrie Profile-esque fluidity in how easy it is to control multiple characters despite being a MUCH more complex game overall. It's a treat.
It cheats a bit narratively in that FF7 has unquestionably already proven itself an enduring story over the years, so it merely has to polish and flesh out the solid foundation in a way that few other AAA games can afford to do.
That said, boy did it pay off. I laughed, I cried, and I cried some more. There's too much side cruft to do all of it and maintain a good pace, but if you ignore all of that until a second playthrough, this is JRPG gold.
Unicorn Overlord
I have a hard time deciding between this game and the next for which was my favorite Game this year, so I'm just calling it a tie.
Unicorn Overlord is a shockingly engaging game on the gameplay level. The joy of teambuilding your squads is addictive. The moment-to-moment decision-making in the longer battles is incredibly engaging. It's the kind of game that had me dreaming about it after being forced to put it down for the night by the sheer lack of hours in a day.
I wish its story was better. What's there is *fine*. Serviceable. But I generally find narrative sticks with me far longer than good gameplay. That said, for gameplay this good that it overcame my inherent bias towards a good story, it HAS to rank this highly. I hope UniLord's success in general signals a new wave of Squad-based SRPG/RTSes in the future.
Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven
So I wasn't the biggest fan of RS2 in its original format. The concept is really clunky and unfriendly to players who are coming in with any prior knowledge of how JRPGs work. It was always fascinating, but such an experimental game was extremely hampered by SaGa jank in a way that the FFLs, RS3, and SaGa Frontier just didn't have to deal with. Whereas the other SaGas were primarily being weird and SaGa-y in their own unique ways, they still had the basic anchor of JRPG progression before the inherent budget-induced jank of the franchise made them feel weird.
Now, almost 30 years after RS2 broke the mold but was (rightfully) seen as both too weird and too jank for a western release, Xeen has remade the game almost one-for-one in all the ways that made it great, right down to its dialogue, quest design, even damage formulas.
But it's so, SO polished.
I think for a lot of remakes, there's this sense that the original game had a lot of things that needed to changed to make it truly great, and the PROMISE of a game getting that exact set of changes needed is always more exciting than the finished product. And indeed, over time, my expectations for The Great Remake have gone down significantly.
RS2 Revenge is the Remake that makes me believe Truly Great Remakes that can fix everything that was wrong with the original CAN exist!
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