17. Rhapsody III: Memories of Marl Kingdom (Switch, 2023 (as part of Rhapsody: Marl Kingdom Chronicles))
I feel a bit bad that this ended up at the bottom of the annual roundup, because it's such a "this game shouldn't even exist in this form" and it feels bad to not hype those kinda games up! Like, fundamentally this is a fresh localization of a game from like 2001 or some shit! NISA doing this is wild! And really even in its day it's nuts to me that they actually made a third Rhapsody game that exists basically to tell Cherie's story, even if they make you work to get there.
And when it is doing that it's fine, like... if you played Rhapsody in the first place you knew what you were getting there in terms of play experience, and it delivers. The main trouble, aside from being too light on the music, is you have to play the other parts to get to that stuff and most of those... suck. They are annoyingly grindy and needlessly lethal. It's just not fun to sit through them even if conceptually a series of micro-RPGs with wacky core concepts ala SaGa is something I wish more games did. It's a crying shame.
16. Princess Peach Showtime! (Switch, 2024)
Easily the least substantial game I played this year. The new Peach designs are truly some A+++ work, absolutely no notes except to bring them back, but this is very much designed as babby's first platformer except for the parts that are instead babby's first room search and it just doesn't really have much meat on the bone beyond the sheer aesthetic appeal. Which was enough to get me through the entire game quite easily, to be clear. Let's not discount the fact that it's a game I largely enjoyed playing. And I'm not sure how you make it a bigger and better experience? But I know that what's here is just not really doing enough.
15. Tales of Hearts R (Vita, 2014)
I played the original version of this back in, what, 2010 or something? Well, started it, then finished a few years later. And I rated that version pretty highly as these things go, but... well, two things.
- A bunch more Tales games have since come out and, divorced from that sense that Tales was dying and I needed to love this one extra hard, it feels a lot more mid in retrospect and that carries over to this remake. Doubly so now that I can read it.
- Honestly I... kinda think the DS version benefited from the fact it couldn't have full Tales dungeons? Dungeoneering has never been that series strong suit and yeah, despite the fact it was kinda hard to navigate at times because copy pasted hallways it also didn't have stupid doors and shit. Or if it did I COMPLETELY memory holed it. But probably the first thing.
So yeah, I had a decent time and I played a version I could read now, but it's just kinda there among Tales games.
14. Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition (Switch, 2020)
Gosh, hi, after completely failing to play this in 2012 or whatever it was I sure chewed through its remaster really fast. So... mm.
Like, there's good stuff in here but I gotta admit that, between all the stuff that's come since this game, and my deep familiarity with Takahashi's prior works, a lot of this feels like a watered down version of things that have come before. It's not fair to the game in its own right of course, but at the same time it's pervasive. Like, they go for some big emotional swings, but not as big of them as you might expect if you're coming here from Xenogears. And I do appreciate them, the game definitely has some forward momentum if you aren't getting caught up hunting level 'fuck off' beasties, but yeah, it does feel like it doesn't have the same impact it had on the gaming world as a whole for me.
13. Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster (Switch, 2023)
It was neat to revisit this, I haven't played FFV in like 20 years and played the worst version of it even then.
What really stands out here is I think the original FFV gets the appeal of this kind of game in a way many of its successors do not, despite some mechanical limitations that later FFV-likes don't have. Like, you can only really equip one ability from another job, two as you start to master them and three if you're feeling frisky, and very few games in this mold (or FFT's, which is probably the most restrictive job-based game besides FFV I can think of) is quite so restrictive when it comes to that. But the core jobs themselves are shockingly... balanced isn't the right word, there's a lot of very clear winners and losers, BUT every job does have its moments to shine if you understand where to look for them. And as I've often noted for games like Fell Seal, FFV wasn't afraid to just go "yeah this job is cracked right now, good for you, you found it! Enjoy!" And that's just nice to return to once in a while.
I have to admit that the plot of FFV was more maudlin than I remember? It actually goes for a lot more death and tragedy than I thought it did, because honestly the bits where Bartz is just straight out of an anime really drown those out. Krile in particular actually gets a lot of scenes about her kinda struggling with losing Galuf, and having to put on a brave face. Now, I'm not gonna say the other more dramatic scenes in the game are especially good but... I think the game has the right amount of restraint between dwelling on her sadness but also making if very present, which is something most games of this vintage really struggle with at times. So yeah, that was a good time. Been a while since I played a game I was fundamentally familiar with like that.
12. Atelier Sophie (Playstation 4, 2015)
Honestly the first half or so of Sophie landed weird for me. Like, I dunno, the church being so important is just sorta off-putting for me in a setting at this stage, at least one that's not doing a whole lotta legwork to not be like one of our Earth churches. Doubly noticeable because the designated best friend character is decidedly not into the heroine! Game's still good at all the normal Atelier things, and the book format mostly works.
Then they go ahead and say "actually I'm just gonna make Platcha a whole new body!" and the game goes places. I honestly barely even remember most of what happens after that point, because now in my memory it's just a haze of sapphic affection.
I am okay with this.
11. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising (Switch, 2022)
So I dunno that this game accomplishes its original task of enticing people to play the main Eiyuden Chronicle, which hadn't come out at the time. It does establish a bit about the setting, and introduces a bunch of characters who obviously are going to be Stars of Destiny in the big game, but most of it comes across as having a bit less mystique than Suikoden did with many very similar elements.
But it's also just a very pleasant, breezy little game. It has that energy that a lot of PSP games did where it was just endlessly easy to pick it up and play for like 15 or 20 minutes to do a quest or the next leg of the story. And I think it'll set me up to have some cool "point and snap" moments for the core cast, because honestly they're pretty good. Not deep characters, but developed enough to sustain the game for its runtime.
10. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV (Playstation 4 2018)
The second half of the Erebonia Arc is... fraught. Because there is so, so much good stuff in them, the core of what I like about Trails that's gotten me to play 10 and counting of the damn things comes through strong. The entire first act of this game in particular is probably the best sustained stretch of any Cold Steel game, with an excellent tension where you're fighting things above your weight class but you don't have to win, just hold out. And Altina makes a surprisingly compelling main character.
But inevitably once Rean comes back you have to deal with the fallout of Osborne's master plan. And while there's definitely good moments in the remainder of the game, the constant reminder of the tumor at the heart of it really holds it back. The game is just categorically unwilling to let Osborne be a monster, even one who's just convinced he's doing the right thing, and the contortions it goes through to achieve that torpedo so much of the core plot here. So for instance, it's cool to see how many people Musse brings together as part of her "how to win a world war when only the other side has Gundams" plan, and I love her arc running parallel to it, but fundamentally the cause of that war is so fucking stupid. So here it sits, middle of the list.
9. Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless (Switch, 2023)
Disgaea has really rebounded a bit after losing steam in the mid-00s I think. Like, DD2 and D5? Meh. D6 for its flaws really has that return to form shine, and Disgaea 7 continues that. There's not the sort of full cast dynamic that D4 had, but you do buy into the idea that everyone is willing to go along with Pirilika's mad plan, and from there that everyone is looking out for Fuji. It lacks that parodic spark of the original or D6, but the core story being a thorough ribbing of weebs that's also about how fucking boneheaded old school Japanese values are feels right at home in the series.
Surprisingly there's not a whole lot of overambitious geopanel setups in this one, which I always appreciate. Like, I get the appeal as a designer but honestly most of the time when you layer on multiple enemy boosts at the far end of the map you get the delightful choice of fighting enemies who are effectively double your level or spreading your squad so thin that they all get to face 3 to 1 odds and die after your throw chain is finished. D7 just... only does that like once or twice, which is great. Very restrained. It invents whole new bullshit through the magic of "if I hit you you lose your entire next turn and also my basic attack hits for an entire 3 panel spread in front of me", but that's just the one boss even if you fight him three times. Still balances out to a bit less frustration than several prior games. Still annoying enough to land the game firmly in the "good but" category but I'm not nearly as angry at it as I remember being at, say, Disgaea 3.
8. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Switch, 2017)
In part, I ended up liking Xenoblade 2 more because, thanks to picking up the DLC, I was able to just nerf the difficulty into the ground and breeze through this game in unfathomably short amounts of time, and that let me get the best parts of the game concentrated. A mere 40 hours!
And as a consequence that also means several of the game's biggest shortcomings were stuff that just kinda didn't matter to me. I do think the handling of skills was a bit much, like the game doesn't do a great job of explaining how to hit benchmarks and has a couple of fairly stiff ones to meet if you don't understand how that works, which sucks. But once you do, the fact you don't really have to engage that much with the gacha or go out grinding or can just do the quests that look interesting instead of having to be a completionist about the game really helps mitigate the fact that the game's handling of all those elements is not so good.
But the much larger part is just... I think the game put a lot more thought into trying to explore new territory. This game has a handling of alters that I don't normally see outside of fanfic written by trans ladies. The way it presents the big endgame twists has that feel of explaining why the game's world ended up like it did where you go "oh! Yes, this is it, this is that weirdness that was underneath everything!" Secondary cast could use some time to shine, but what's there is nice. But the main trio is so good, I can forgive that.
7. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III (Playstation 4, 2017)
I'm not sure how much I can say about CS3 that hasn't been said before. Game would have benefited from placing Juna more firmly in the main character role and letting Rean step back to do important stuff in the background more. They get just a bit too low brow with the school tropes. Fuck the entire concept of the Curse of Erebonia. All that stuff is true but also, well, obvious. I said it before, most fans of Trails have said it before, it stays true.
But everything around that stuff is really good, honestly the best Cold Steel gets. New Class VII are just stronger characters up and down the roster than the original, Rean himself aside. I adore watching Musse at work, and honestly she's even better when you know the core twists and the basics of what she's gonna get up to in CS4 ahead of time. Even Kurt, the token boring guy, still gets stuff to do in a way that the guys among Rean's classmates really didn't. And I didn't talk about gameplay in CS4 but CS3 is a whole lotta fun to play because you get some SHIT you can do. Musse spell cannon goes brrrrrrrrrrrr. So I do like this quite a bit, just... gah it could have been so much better.
6. NEO: The World Ends with You (Switch, 2021)
This game is much more my jam than the original TWEWY, just by virtue of having a growing but stable cast of core party members rather than swapping out your second party member every few hours. There's also a bunch of small but very welcome improvements to the underlying mechanics, I like how this game handles fashion a lot more in particular. I really like Shoko, the way they handle her trying to help the main crew without stepping over the line before it becomes clear the whole game is rigged even more than the game is expected to be.
I do think that like... Rindo is just kinda there as a main character, which isn't unusual for a main character but the game is drawing such a strong comparison to the original TWEWY that it's hard not to notice that he's no Neku. So while the supporting cast is more than strong enough to carry the game, it does kinda stand out for the comparison. And it's not like Rindo is bad, he's just not the most interesting guy here.
5. Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutors Gambit (Switch, 2024 (as part of Ace Attorney Investigations Collection))
Gosh, so. This game took me forever in real time to play, but not really from any cause within the game itself. I just got distracted because it was the peak busy time at work when it came out and I wasn't fully able to switch to gaming mindset for it, then I got ~mysteriously depressed~ in November and didn't actually finish it until quite recently. But! But. None of that is the game's fault. I just am bad at things sometimes.
So the thing that stands out about Edgeworth 2 here is that, Great Ace Attorney aside, it feels the most thematically cohesive across all of its cases. This is something that normally just doesn't fully work in Ace Attorney's format, sometimes you just gotta roll with a funny case idea you had, but AAI2's cases were by their nature fairly interconnected and thus actually all touch on the same basic themes and plotline. Now, GAA is better at it, but hey, it's cool that Edgeworth gots that treatment first!
Now, within that there's definitely some messiness here, but like AAI1 before it I feel like this game is less weird and frustrating about what evidence is the right pick in a given situation, partially because only a few presentations are really as technical as some of the mainline games can get, and in part because some of the gameplay is instead done with Mind Chess.
And gosh what a fun mechanic that leads to some really great moments. Most especially the one against Eustace (nee Sebastian) in case 5. Like phewww, god, what a *moment* for all his his big-little brother instincts to manifest in such a [/i]him[/i] way. Honestly as much as you can definitely complain about some of the cameos in this, that's the real thing that I loved about this. It's not just a good showcase of Edgeworth as a prosecutor, building upon the conclusion he came to in Trials and Tribulations, it's a showcase of him as a character, and despite some retread ground it's really great to see in motion. And REALLY sets up his return to the main series in Dual Destinies, now 20% gayer and rocking hot gay nerd glasses.
4. Super Mario RPG (Switch, 2023)
I feel kinda bad that this is so high because it's... very much just SMRPG in all its glory. I can't say for sure but the underlying math and even the timing of attacks seems spot on 1 for 1 with the original game. There is new stuff but I honestly didn't do any of it, I just wanted something light and fluffy to kick off the year with and it delivered. And y'know, I played SMRPG many years ago, feels weird to hype it up! But... it was good, it'd be dishonest to not put it pretty high. I guess I could separate it out, I've done that before, but... seeing as its just really good, not "literally the best game I played this year", I think it can stay here.
But yeah, no, if you wanted a reason to revisit SMRPG, by all means this is an excellent version of SMRPG. But it very much is just SMRPG in its soul.
3. Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna- The Golden Country (Switch, 2018)
At some level I do think XB2 itself has a stronger story, like the interplay between Pyra and Mythra and how Rex impacts their lives is really the heart of that game. And by necessity you can't have any of that in "the story babby Mythra and how Pyra came to be born", but apart from babby Mythra being interesting in her own right, what's in this game instead is the full tragic backstory for the primary villains! And honestly they were already pretty neat in that story, definitely kinda basic but with a lot of personality. Seeing them in their prime here, if on opposite sides, gives this plot a lot more focus and forward momentum than XB2, even above and beyond the obvious perks of this being a literally smaller game. On top of that, the smaller core cast gives them a good amount of character despite having a lot less runway to fit it in with, and I think making most of the zones of the game part of Torna gives the region a lot of personality. Also means that the focus on its internal politics feels relevant throughout, where in XB2 they kinda set up that sort of story but ultimately abandoned it.
The smaller cast also means that the game had to color within certain lines in terms of using field abilities, which is a major boon to basic playability. It's a much smoother playthrough all around for it.
2. The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie (Playstation 4, 2020)
This is what happens when you give me a Trails game where I don't spend a bunch of time cussing out the inexplicable writing decisions.
Okay so there's plenty of good stuff in this game in its own right. Rufus' Quattro arc is interesting to see start because unlike the original, he didn't just fuck off after the war, dude was in prison and did the "ahh fuck I gotta go take care of this don't I" maneuver. And the characters introduced to be his crew are established quickly and efficiently. I think the endgame brings Rean's character arc home a lot more effectively than CS4 did, and that's not a diss on the end of CS4. The Crossbell crew does feel a smidged obligatory at times, but they do have a good energy with some of the rest of the cast. It's also nice to see some of these characters in relative peacetime here and there, like I wish Alisa got a bit more here but what she does get is really cool because she's just a natural fit for rebuilding. Like, yeah, this is exactly where she should be.
They actually toned down a few things but this game is also a lot easier to appreciate on a gameplay level, partially because they give you a lot more stuff to do with a properly twinked out party due to unlocking stuff earlier and then getting better versions of it as you go, and partially because it fights back a little more. And also just well. The true final boss was those rare moments where I just fucking cranked up the volume and rocked it, because they brought back goddamned Azure Arbitrator. Fuck yeah.
1. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (Playstation 5, 2024)
It feels weird to me to put this game at the top of my ratings for the year, and I was glad last year when something displaced Remake. Like, as much as I adore the cast of FFVII, and love how much these games add to them while understanding the core of who they are in a way a lot of the expanded material doesn't, it's strange to say "this overly produced remake of a game from 25 years ago is better than everything else that I played this year." And that's probably the part to point out, even more than Remake, Rebirth indulges in a lot of trends that I find broadly off-putting in modern game design. Not as egregiously as many other games, but it absolutely does. And it definitely indulges in a lot of fanbait kinda behavior, probably a bit more than Remake if I'm honest.
But...
Y'all... fuck. The moments that hit just fucking hit. Corel Prison is just so fucking raw in this version of the game. They invest so hard in having these subtle tweaks to parts of the story that not only answer potential questions that might have cropped up in the original telling, but actually create new opportunities to enrich the story that they recognize and take advantage of. For one that's pretty early and has a lot of recurring impact, in Kalm Tifa and Aerith are sharing a room, and Tifa just... tells her that the version of Nibelheim Cloud told all of them isn't what she remembers. Just confides this deep rooted fear she has because she doesn't think Cloud is lying, but she doesn't know why he knows so much he shouldn't yet still gets a bunch of very important details wrong. And this informs so many things going forward for both how a lot of later scenes play out, creates multiple new scenes later, and massively changes a lot of the dynamic between Tifa and Aerith themselves, all in ways that are frequently much more interesting than the tension Tifa expresses but doesn't explain until after the fact.
So... yeah. I didn't expect it when I finished the game, but honestly nothing quite beat out FFVII Rebirth as my favorite game I played this year. The feels were too strong and I just didn't play anything that really hit hard. Weird year!
