Looking back, it seems I played a lot of games in 2018! Not sure why. Maybe kicking the League of Legends habit freed up more time than I thought. Basically all of them were good, though, I enjoyed 'em all, even the 6/10 ones.
For those interested, I have the same data in Google Doc form here, with slightly fewer "DL"y references:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Eniw2m6HWAqGTfP-lycfvFpcflN8qctBJbJg58UwsV8/edit?usp=sharingShort version, detailed writeups below:
15. Slay the Spire (Steam, 2018)
14. Prismata (Steam, 2018)
13. Jake Hunter Detective Stories (Nintendo DS, 2008)
12. Aviary Attorney (Steam, 2015)
11. Azure Striker Gunvolt 2 (New Nintendo 3DS, 2016)
10. Azure Striker Gunvolt (Nintendo 3DS, 2014)
9. Cosmic Star Heroine (PS Vita, 2018-for-Vita, 2017 for other platforms)
8. Suikoden (PSX via PS Vita over PSN, 1996)
7. Golf Story (Nintendo Switch, 2017)
6. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Steam / PS4, 2018)
5. Dragon Quest XI (Steam, 2018)
4. Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma (Nintendo 3DS, 2017)
3. Octopath Traveler (Nintendo Switch, 2018)
2. Celeste (PS4, 2018)
1. Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward (Nintendo 3DS, 2012)
Okay (6/10)15. Slay the Spire (Steam, 2018)Neat build-your-deck as you play game that combines a dungeon crawler with Dominion & friends. Anyway, it's very cool and clearly has extreme replay value for those who are into it, but a little too stressful for me. I prefer something like Hearthstone Expert Challenges for my single-player CCG challenge: one ludicrously hard battle you can retry with variants as often as you want, not a tense tightrope which might be easier in the abstract, but any single failure ends your run. Anyway, this might be a little unfair; it's a great game, just not for me past my ~5 attempts or so.
14. Prismata (Steam, 2018)An indie attempt to combine StarCraft, Dominion, and Chess, kind of like Puzzle Strike. The result is a consistent base set + a randomized draw of things to build. Like Chess, though, it's perfect information, so there are "openings" and the like to memorize, although the random set helps mix things up from game to game. Anyway, it's good for what it is, but what it is is also a brutal game for casuals in PvP due to the perfect information thing. Similar to chess, this is a game where if you are a bit worse than your opponent, you will lose every game. Tricky learning curve as a result. Of course, there's the single-player campaign as well which is actually decently written if you're up for a far-future transhumanists in space type plotline! It was decent.
13. Jake Hunter Detective Stories (Nintendo DS, 2008)Obscure old original DS visual novel game I got a long time back, and was reminded of because another Jake Hunter game came out in English this year, Ghost of the Dusk. I figured I should finally get around to it. This is actually a compilation / remake of several games originally done for the original Nintendo / NES / Famicom that never made it out of Japan, along with a few new cases and a new overplot wherein the excuse is a new character reading Jake's old files. Anyway, Jake Hunter is the most pulpy private eye ever who does pulp private eye things like investigate mob casinos, tail diplomats, start fist fights in alleys, intimidate bar owners, etc. As a visual novel, I could potentially spill a LOT of ink dissecting the plot and everything for a game I doubt few will ever play, so the somewhat shorter version...
The plots aren't very good, and show their age (e.g. sometimes clearly written before cell phones were everywhere). They do have the virtue of being somewhat simpler / less convoluted than the craziness inherent in Phoenix Wright series plots, but that is at the cost of the gameplay being basically nonexistent. It's all 5th-grade reading comprehension quiz stuff of can you parrot back to the game what it just told you. There's no series of crazy twists or people demanding for the player to point to a specific piece of evidence that supports what they think. I think there's exactly one point in the game where I felt like I had to figure something out based on my current clues and it wasn't told to me directly or easily brute forced by conversation options being limited. The game does improve on this as it goes on, at least. One of the later plots is by far the least realistic, but hey, it's actually interesting, so I'll take it.
Music is nothing special either. There's maybe two good tracks, and there isn't enough music either, so the same pieces repeat a lot. The game also isn't exactly a shining example of women in fiction. Actual 1950s noir ladies might have their appearances commented on constantly ("the sultry redhead", etc.), but they had agency - they did things, they knew things, they helped, they betrayed. This isn't usually true in the game, a few too many are just background damsels in distress or information dumps or the like.
I would be all set to give the game a pretty awful score, BUT! Somehow, the bonus material is legit better than the main game. There's 6+ "Jake Hunter Unleashed" bonus cases where everything is drawn in a chibi style, everything is over-exaggerated, bland characters now have personalities, and there's real gameplay in that you get to see all the facts then make your deductions with tons of wrong answers to pick and not TOO much blatant cluing. Even bonuses-to-the-bonus and a quiz and the like. It really helped save the game.
In the event you want a "serious" mood visual novel thriller on the old Nintendo DS, you should play Hotel Dusk first. And Last Window second. This is third, I guess.
12. Aviary Attorney (Steam, 2015)This is basically a Phoenix Wright clone, except it is set in 1840s France, and also all the characters are French animals. Another Indie studio development that was basically just 2 people as best I can tell. It's very short, but smartly written, and has a decent amount of branching in its 3rd & 4th cases. It actually uses something approaching real court procedures as compared to Phoenix Wright, too, which is super cool.
As for how the dev managed the game on such a tight budget, he cannily uses public domain stuff: free recordings of Claude Debussy, and cartoons made by J. J. Grandville of the era. However, the real 1840s Grandville wasn't writing the French equivalent of Garfield or a newspaper strip that had consistent characters; he was doing something more like The Far Side or editorial cartoons, where each cartoon had its own crazy thing going on. In other words, the dev is kinda stuck with just one piece of art for each character, and that's it. The developer makes a grand show with just that, having the art bounce up and down, be reversed, put on masks, etc., but it does kinda stand out in terms of cheapness. For things like maps, evidence, crime scenes, and so on, the dev took authentic pictures of the era and adds some sepia toning and the like to brush it up.
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Ignace_Isidore_G%C3%A9rard_Grandville if you want to see some examples.)
Anyway, it's good. And fast, and cheap.
11. Azure Striker Gunvolt 2 (New Nintendo 3DS, 2016)
10. Azure Striker Gunvolt (Nintendo 3DS, 2014)An interesting, very shonen anime spin on Mega Man. The stages aren't a big deal (unlike some of the Mega Man games), but the boss showdowns tend to be cool & challenging, and more importantly, stylish & fun. This is good because the plot is not great, so better milk style points for all you got.
The two games are pretty similar. On one hand, I like the 2nd character they added for ASG2 and the general structure of that game. I'm still going to slightly put ASG1 first since the balance is a little less lopsided, and I enjoy taking on a cyberpunk megacorporation more than a nonsensical X-Men Magneto ripoff.
9. Cosmic Star Heroine (PS Vita, 2018-for-Vita, 2017 for other platforms) Zeboyd Games, the makers of Cthulhu Saves The World and some retro sprite-based RPGs other back during the original indie game spread (but before the market was totally flooded), got enough name recognition that they felt like stepping up from comparatively cheap 8-bit homages to more complicated 16-bit homages, specifically Chrono Trigger & Phantasy Star IV. Turns out that this is much, much, much more complicated & labor-intensive, leading to a release date delayed by years and years, and even the first release being pretty buggy (still wasn't perfect on bugs 1 year later when the Vita version came out, but better at least). Still, the fact that they made this at all is quite impressive, and a reminder why we don't see this style all the time.
The good: The battle system. There's a lot of love in all the enemy designs & encounters; lots of unique enemies, not much reuse of them, no color swaps. Characters have interesting and unique skillsets, and the optimal strategy is more about setting up deadly buff'd combos to do a zillion damage then spamming a single move and then sometimes using healing. Freely adjustable difficulty settings so you'll never get stuck nor bored. Dungeon design is okay too, not too big, not too small, not just one straight line corridor.
The bad: The plot. The characters. The dialogue. Ugh. The game has its moments, I guess, and is "charming" at times and has some nice CT callbacks. There's also a few points where it clearly decided to tweak or thumb its nose at a plot cliche, which is cool. But why must the writing be so bad? It seems determined not to even do a simple plot about evil forces mind controlling people well. It has a few too many "witty" lines that fall flat.
This game is TECHNICALLY unfinished but whatever, I only have like the final dungeon left.
Good (7/10)8. Suikoden (PSX via PS Vita over PSN, 1996) Oddly enough, I never played Suikoden I Back In The Day in the PSX JRPG category. It was pretty fun! It's interesting how much the first game "got right" in setting the tone for the later sequels: some sort of clash at a nation-level rather than the world-level, a game structure that's all about recruiting allies and making alliances via some RPG do-gooding, people from all classes of society being involved, at least somewhat sympathetic antagonists who have enough Real Bad People in 'em that you don't feel too bad about fighting 'em. It's also interesting how unashamedly sparse some of the towns & dungeons are: budget, partially, but also not to let things bog down too much. Yeah, there's only 2 houses here, get to the next plot point, presume there's more people elsewhere or something.
Anyway, while the game is pleasantly quick with solid quality-of-life features for the day, there definitely are a few weird sharp edges and FAQ-bait nonsense, too. The difficulty is much better tuned than later Suikodens (which are all too easy), but ultimately the game's system is still pretty darn simple, alternating healing & damage a lot will get you far.
7. Golf Story (Nintendo Switch, 2017)I'm not exactly a huge golf fan, and don't think I've bothered with any other golf game before. Nevertheless, this game was rad! It takes its totally insane premise of being a Golf RPG exactly serious enough to make it work, while still being amusingly zany. Kinda similar to Cosmic Star Heroine in the indie 16-bit esque art & sprite style, but if the writing was much better. Challenge was about perfect too, hard enough to make you pay attention, but forgiving enough to almost never block your path with having to retry an event repeatedly.
Great (8/10)6. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Steam / PS4, 2018) NES Castlevania III but updated to be a "modern" game with less frustrating play control, playing faster, and having modern quality of life features. I did in fact play Castlevania III before and it was good, and this is much better. There's also a ton of replayability - play it on Nightmare mode without Zangetsu and with a new final stage, play it with super-Zangetsu killing everyone, play it on Low% for the ultimate challenge. It's a great platformer.
(Also, don't trust my PSN achievements, stalkers, I played the vast majority of the time on the Steam "preview" version after that launched first.)
5. Dragon Quest XI (Steam, 2018) For whatever weird reason, I got into a Dragon Quest mood in the 4th quarter of 2018 - maybe reading the fine FrankZP LPs of Dragon Quest 2, 3, and 4 on SomethingAwful helped. I also found out that there was an orchestral mod on the Steam version to improve on the music, so I figured why not, let's get our old-RPG nostalgia on.
For what it is, Dragon Quest 11 is extremely good - it is a solid and enjoyable "classic" RPG where you will go from town to town fixing their local problems. The graphics are beautiful, the gameplay is interesting and includes some appreciated difficulty modifiers, you can skip encounters or grind at your pleasure, most of the characters are amusing enough, and the localization of the script is exceedingly well done. It's got that hard-to-define "charm" that helps keeps things sailing forward. And even when the plot is dumb, it's generally compelling: think a trashy page-turner novel or an action movie. How will our heroes get out of this jam next?!
The main complaint about DQ11 is the plot. I generally liked DQ8's various per-town plots; DQ11's per-town plots are unfortunately weaker. As for the overplot.. to be sure, if we're doing a Classic RPG, I am to some extent okay with the villainy being "I AM THE MONSTER LORD AND AM EVIL", but that is indeed about the most we get here, along with some usual gotta power up and find plot coupons or super weapons to break magic barriers filler. Additionally, the main character being silent doesn't really work that well in DQ11. In DQ3/4/8, it was fine because the MC basically does generally heroic things at all points in time; in DQ5, the main has a plot but the game sells you what exactly the main is thinking and what he wants to do at all points. In DQ11, especially the early parts of it, the main gets into several terrible situations and doesn't do some obvious common sense actions nor vanilla heroic actions. It badly requires some dialogue to sell, but we don't get it, and the plot points are often too uninteresting to really sell anyway. (Example: immediately after a terrible event, rather than investigate or respond to said event, Our Hero and Erik decide to basically go treasure-hunting for an object which the game doesn't even tell us why anyone would want it, or why it would be valuable, or why Erik cares about getting it. 50 hours later it explains why Erik cared, but that "explanation" doesn't actually explain anything either.)
The good news is that the plot improves over time. While the various vignettes are of erratic quality and often include giant plot holes or arbitrary nonsense, the second part of the game and the third / postgame section are pretty decent. The sheer size of the world, with tons of towns to explore, characters to meet, and so on also helps out. All in all, it was a grand experience.
4. Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma (Nintendo 3DS, 2016)The third game in the Zero Escape series. As usual, you will solve escape room puzzles while listening to interesting dialogue with a tendency to veer into problems in philosophy; the gimmick in-between for this one is the "Decision Game", different from the Nonary Games of the earlier two games. You get to make a decision! Sometimes a moral choice, sometimes a puzzle-infused-with-randomness (e.g. the Monty Hall problem), sometimes an exercise in pure unadulterated randomness. Most of them are pretty interesting, although the very nature of the game's branching structure somewhat dulls the impact of the "moral" choices - of course you're going to examine both branches, even the evil / dumb ones. The puzzles are in general solid as well.
The mood is a bit darker in ZTD than the other two games. Sometimes it works great, but there's a few times it misfires IMO. I blame the fact that the game was funded only due to fan outcry, which let Kotaro Uchikoshi indulge his auteur side more.
The Zero Escape series is good for its convoluted-but-cool plots, and ZTD largely delivers here. I would say that ZTD is maybe the weakest of the three, but I really like the other two games, so this is hardly an indictment? Basically, the villain's plot is probably the weakest in ZTD, and the game indulges in "narrative cheating" a bit which the other two games were more sparing about. That said, the game has some damn impressive moments none-the-less, and great characters, so this is still definitely reason to play it.
3. Octopath Traveler (Nintendo Switch, 2018)See Dragon Quest XI, but better. It's also a classic RPG, though more patterned after the Final Fantasy 6 World of Ruin than Dragon Quest 3/4, complete with a cool modernized 16-bit sprite style. It also has an excellent localization and a witty script. However, the characters are better, the plots in each town are more interesting, and the game is just "tighter". The weakest 8PT plots tend to feel about equivalent to an average DQ11 plot, e.g. find a legendary treasure that was buried after some sort of sea race that somebody simultaneously won and also died in. And heck, the big evil postgame badguy who sits around doing nothing is somehow better done as well. While there aren't any difficulty settings, it's easy enough to challenge yourself on replays by mixing things up and hard-charging bosses and the like rather than being a completionist.
Excellent (9/10)2. Celeste (PS4, 2018)The pleasantly brutal platformer surprise of the year, kinda like Ori & The Blind Forest for me in 2016. I saw others playing this on streams, thought it looked cool, and it was indeed cool. This game is hard but incredibly rewarding: you will be presented with tough challenges, but the game wants you to succeed. And then after you beat the tough challenges, there are MORE tough challenges in remixes of the stages. Luckily, the game constantly auto-saves, so you can't ever lose your progress; you can try a room as often as you need to beat it. It's also impressively sparse; your tools are your double jump and wall jumps, and that's about it, but it turns out Celeste can make tons of great gameplay and interesting gimmicks from just a few simple ingredients.
The plot was also a very welcome change of pace. It's nice to have a story about overcoming internal demons with the only exterior "opponent" basically being nature. The soundtrack was also really cool and different, doing a fantastic job of fitting mood to the stages. Go play this!
1. Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward (Nintendo 3DS, 2012)For reasons I can't begin to explain, I bought this game when it came out, having totally loved 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and wanting to play its sequel, then proceeded not to play it for 6 years. Why? It is a mystery. That said, it ended up working out, as I was able to leap from this game straight into the sequel with all the plot fresh in my mind.
The general structure is solving puzzles in escape room-esque type environments, then getting to play the Ambidex Game, which is basically the Prisoner's Dilemma. The result is a game that goes "wide" rather than "deep" - in other words, in a normal game like Dragon Quest 11, the plot points are basically sequential, with maybe the occasional swerve at the very end. In VLR, instead the story is constantly branching: which room did you go to? Afterward, did you ally or betray your partner? Any one story might not go too deep, e.g. Lounge -> Ally -> Gaulem Bay -> Ally -> Security, but there's tons of them. And of course, the game really is "deep" as well, as a meta-tale advances looking through the lens of all the stories, since (this is not a spoiler) you eventually start importing information from one parallel "timeline" into others to unlock new possibilities and endings. Think Radiant Historia, I suppose. The plot for this game absolutely and utterly hooked me - it's one of the most interesting, craziest, and yet comprehensible plots I've played. I was constantly updating my guesses on what the hell was going on, constantly being at least somewhat surprised, yet not thinking it was total bullshit or the game had "cheated" (unlike Zero Time Dilemma at its worst). The final plot revelations are great. I loved all of the characters. I can totally see why there's, like, fan-made artzines dedicated to this series.
Bad things? Well, as usual, some of the puzzles a slightly FAQ-bait, and worse, some of the supplementary puzzles even the FAQs note are slightly broken - there doesn't appear to be a clue at all to them, or they involve just being experimentally obscure. (This may have been fixed in the Steam/PS4 re-release.) Also, one particular room is buggy & crashy in the 3DS version and took a few attempts to clear (this was definitely fixed in the re-release). This is all pretty minor ultimately, and more a footnote. Virtue's Last Reward was awesome!
