I played a lot of good stuff in 2017. Much better than 2016, which had 2 standout games and then a big falloff.
The list, the short version for people not up for extended ranting about Trails:
14. The Bottom of the Well
13. Chase: Cold Case Investigations - Distant Memories
12. Fire Emblem Heroes
11. Her Story
10. AM2R
9. A Rose in the Twilight
8. Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor: Overclocked
7. Shantae and the Pirate's Curse
6. Shovel Knight
5. Fire Emblem Echoes
4. Trails of Cold Steel II
3. Undertale
2. Persona 5
1. Trails of Cold Steel
Full writeups:
Okay (6/10)14. The Bottom of the Well (PC)Short, free visual novel off Steam that it reminds me I played at the beginning of this year. It's a vaguely Alice & Wonderland themed nuclear apocalypse where you get to experiment with various different survival strategies. There's a bit of a 999-esque metaplot to explain why you're playing the game multiple times, but the actual final "puzzle" is both lame and doesn't really have a payoff (not even a BAD one, just the equivalent of "Congratulations, you did the thing!"). That said, it's not bad or anything.
13. Chase: Cold Case Investigations - Distant Memories (3DS)Another short visual novel, though this one is 3DS eShop. It's a police procedural from the team that did Hotel Dusk, Last Window, & Trace Memory. It is good! Gameplay is strictly "did you pick the right conversation dialogue option", which half the time is just reciting back what you just learned, but there are a few good prompts, and they wrote unique dialogue for every wrong answer, which I appreciate. It's got a good plot and good characters and good dialogue.
So why this low? It's just too short and unfinished (but it is cheap as a result). They clearly ran out of money and shoved what they'd finished out the door before the 3DS dried up. Alas.
12. Fire Emblem Heroes (Mobile)It's a shockingly excellent take on Fire Emblem on mobile. And there's a good mix of carefully designed challenge maps made by designers, and endless challenge from PvP in Arena maps against other player teams. Great UI and great art too - well, the chibi art at least, the full-art is annoyingly modern "waifu" style. Oh well.
So why so low? This is, hands down, the most expensive game I have ever played, with some of the worst marginal return on investment ever. It's playable with just freely available units, sure, but if you want a specific character you like or who has a useful skill you want, hoo boy. I would consider a reasonable "Getting started" pack for this game to run around 120 dollars, and if you have any limited-time units that catch your fancy that you don't get lucky on, prepare to open your wallet to the tune of 40-160 bucks. Each time. And not even any guarantee you'll get it! The only game even in consideration for competition is Magic: The Gathering Online, and it isn't, because that gave me many more hours of (voluntary, high-quality) play for the investment, and hell, I could even still cash out if I really wanted to. And... I'm not even an actual "whale"! But it's not just expensive in money; it's expensive in TIME. On one hand, it's great that there's an incentive to constantly release new content, but on the other hand, all of the BS activity bonuses mean that there's a strong incentive to just play even if it isn't fun. And some of the content is just plain grindy as all hell, but offers some substantial rewards, making skipping it awkward. (Still the correct thing to do skip it though, of course.) On release, the game was also just way too stingy with XP and SP for improving characters for various reasons, although the game has gotten considerably better about this since, at least.
Good (7/10)11. Her Story (PC)It's short and interesting. Yes, it's a tad pretentious, but you really DO feel like a detective in this game, puzzling together a story out-of-order and on your own terms. That's not a common feeling in games, so I respect the game for doing something off-beat.
As for the story… well, they clearly intentionally wanted a story that has multiple potential interpretations for players to argue about, but it doesn't quite work as some of the bait thrown in for explanation X contradicts explanation Y. And I don't mean "unreliable narrator" type info, that's par for the course, I mean "easily checkable by the police factual claims that should take an hour to conclusively prove or disprove." But… said claims can't ALL be true, so bah. Yeah this is real vague, but spoilers. Play the game and see yourself.
10. AM2R (PC)It's Metroid 2 except if it controlled like Super Metroid and had modern quality-of-life features. This is a good formula. There's just about the right amount of optional exploration, too - not TOO much, but some. The game also wisely keeps the amount of chattiness to a minimum, after the opening, a trap recent Metroids have tripped up on - but this is a remake of an old Metroid, so hey.
The main thing of note about this game is that the difficulty curve is wacky. I'm not sure this is even a complaint, really. But the game starts off really easy, gets really hard to the point of being a tad frustrating, then gets really easy again. Some of this is intentional in that they want to let Samus feel awesome when she gets her final upgrades, so they don't throw hordes of Screw-Attack immune enemies at you or anything; some of this is honoring the original Metroid 2 design (where the play control was much clunkier and slower, so Samus was a bit less agile & powerful inherently); but... it's a little TOO much. The final sections and final boss are basically target practice. Oh well.
9. A Rose in the Twilight (PS Vita)Creepy, atmospheric puzzle game. I liked it. It's got horror in it but it isn't a horror game, if that makes any sense - this isn't Resident Evil. Certainly establishing your protagonist as flat immortal from the start helps defang the impact of the various horrible ways to die there are in the castle. There are parts that are a bit twitchy - whoops Rose fell 3 pixels too far and died - but you lose very little progress until the very end of the game. There's only 2 bosses, but they're very memorable and tough puzzle fights in a good way.
Anyway, it's good, but the puzzles in the final section are too hard, and the plot doesn't even attempt to go into too much detail about WTF is "really" going on.
Great (8/10)8. Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor: Overclocked (3DS)Well, the strategy RPG is basically the greatest of all genres, and this is a strategy RPG. I liked Devil Survivor 2's remake, and Devil Survivor 1 is almost the same damn system. Harshly restricting skill loadouts makes SMT's love of elemental weakness slightly more interesting; it's difficult to create squads that crush everything, which encourages specialization.
The plot is totally insane and crammed with tons of just random stuff. Oh by the way we have an oracular email service and this is a footnote, it's a stocking stuffer for our demon summoning app which harnesses angry people on the Internet to summon demons and also give you super-strength. But it's mostly insane in a good way. And for all the craziness, it's oddly sensible at times… Devil Survivor 1 is weirdly better than DS2 at acknowledging that random civilians exist and are probably panicing, while DS2 has literally EVERYONE DYING and yet far less screentime or player-character acknowledgement of this. All that said, I think I prefer DS2 more still, but DS1 is solid.
7. Shantae and the Pirate's Curse (3DS) A charming and zany Metroidvania. Like... really zany. This is a game that has PLOT you are going to watch and it is going to be insane. Luckily the core idea of "no cheaty magic powerz, but gotta save the day anyway" is actually a good one to make a game around.
The combat is too easy if you use items (much like C:SOTN), but is engaging enough and fun, so sure. It's really about platforming & exploration anyway. If I had to complain, there's an obligatory "captured and must do a stealth section with a limited skillset!" section (seen before in Metroid Zero Mission and other areas), but it's kinda BS unfair and doesn't explain its own rules very well. Oh well. One annoying level isn't so bad.
6. Shovel Knight (PS Vita)Others have written more about this than me. This is NES nostalgia with all the good parts kept and all the bad parts removed. Infinite continues that don't cost you progress means that there's a cap on how frustrating any section can get (damn you, Propeller Knight!). Just very charming.
I played both the original & the spinoffs of Plague Knight & Spectre Knight's campaign. Those were both fun as well. If I had to complain, I think the team overcorrected a little in Spectre Knight's campaign… they realized that Plague Knight was a little too intimidating to people who are bad, so they made Spectre Knight a little too easy. Yeah yeah there's the tower of doom and the various challenges, which if anything are too hard, but I kinda wish there was some more content in the "middle" that was harder than the base game but not as restricted as the challenges.
5. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia (3DS)Well, I liked this one a lot. It's a solid update of an old NES game as far as keeping some wacky old-skool mechanics but chucking various anti-fun features and adding in modern Quality of Life features. If nothing else, it is a different and unique spin on Fire Emblem, so even to the extent I wouldn't want some of its design decisions in other FEs, I appreciate them getting a chance to shine again here. (Like, a LITTLE dungeon crawling is fine. I am fine with that not coming back though considering that it becomes annoying if the dungeon is any large at all, that is, the final dungeon & postgame dungeon.) I especially liked the various maps that were a little "gamier" and less "realistic" - massive mono-typed enemies, ridiculous fortress designs that are interesting, etc.
I also like that all the love triangle intrigues have canonical end pairs that are set in Echoes - allows them to actually write around it in the plot, rather than have no idea who's dating who (an issue in recent Fire Emblems).
The villainy, well, others have talked about it already. There's some good work, but also some bad work. Berkut and Fernand are largely well-done; both are a bit over-the-top at times, but they're solid foils. Emperor Rudolf & Jedah have issues though. (Spoilers!)
Basically, they needed to swap slants: Jedah needed to be the Sympathetic Villain With an Extreme Plan But For Good Reasons, while Rudolf needed to be an insane tyrant. Hell, if they REALLY wanted a sympathetic Rudolf, this is a rare case where having him be mind-controlled or possessed would have been preferable. And Jedah, well, the germ of a good plan is sometimes there, but he lapses into "har har I am a baby-eater" too much if we are expected to take Celica going along with his plan *willingly* seriously, especially since he uses "har har I will kill Alm mwahaha" as the reason to convince her. That said, despite all this, Echoes is solidly top tier within recent Fire Emblems as far as its villainy, which I suppose says something about the crappy quality of FE11/12/14 villains. (At least Fates's straight-up villains like Garon, Iago, & Hans - excluding "the other cast" for BR/CQ.)
Also, unlike many other FEs, you get to deploy your whole team most of Echoes, and the game has revival fountains to ensure you didn't ENTIRELY shoot yourself in the foot with perma-deaths. I like that as far as balancing around a smaller team - a character might be "bad" but still better than nothing, and thus gets to see use. It does compromise the replay value a little, no "let me try a different team" option, but eh, this is the only game (barring Undertale, which doesn't really count) that I did a replay of this year, so clearly it doesn't hurt replay value that badly.
4. Trails of Cold Steel II (PS Vita)Well, it's more Trails. If you take an insulin shot to get past the anime shmaltz, this is good stuff for the most part. There's still, as usual, a ton of stuff to love: great UI, great fast-travel features, great in-game documentation, well-written and extensive dialogue, secondary characters who actually have names, and a for-the-most-part sympathetic and cool cast. Picking up immediately where ToCS1 left off without any sort of mysterious gameplay abilities reset is also cool. And while the battle system is busted (more on this below), it's for the most part a fun kind of busted: your characters feel appropriately powerful, and battles are generally fun. The prologue, Act I, and some of Act 3 are generally interesting plotwise, too. And this game is huge, with just tons and tons of charming content to explore.
The downsides in CS2 compared to CS1 are pretty notable, though. Game drops the ball on its own plot. It's weird, because if you asked 2016 SnowFire, epic civil war sounds way more interesting than high school anime drama. I can think of several ways to take CS2's plot, and the game picks an arc that is simultaneously lame AND nonsensical. Act 2, where the civil war is basically fought and takes center stage (rather than the Mass Effect 2 "rebuild your team" plot of Act 1), is annoyingly nonsensical entirely too often.
- CS2 does not want to take its own plot seriously, ever. This is a game about a civil war, but it blatantly doesn't actually want to be about a civil war; nobody dies and nothing bad happens and the bad things that do happen and people whine about are almost offensively minor (yay side 1 repealed the war taxes side 2 raised! Wait what, doesn't side 1 need supplies & shit too? This seems doubtful). Now, a little of this is fine in that Our Heroes are generally high schoolers, and I guess the game doesn't want to traumatize them by having them directly participate in the war? But it's not even seriously happening in the background either. There are more deaths in the first 10 minutes of ToCS 1 than in the ENTIRE GAME of Trails of Cold Steel 2. Chew on that. The problem isn't just at a macro level; it's at a micro level, too, with characters inexplicably claiming that nothing bad will happen and people's lives aren't really in danger even if they're being held by a desperate losing side in a civil war, which is completely insane. As a note, a plot element in Act 3 could, maybe, kind of justify the idea that this is a "fake" civil war; problem is, if so, Our Heroes / civilians / canny generals portrayed as smart should really have dialogue indicating that something fishy is going on, almost as if one side isn't even trying to win. But there isn't.
- Related to the above, since you're not supposed to be fighting the civil war directly, instead you get to fight eccentric superboss squad who, with maybe one exception, aren't even interested in defeating you and either have Allegedly Sympathetic Goals or are outright traitors to their own side, but are fighting you anyway because ??? (training?). There's something to be said for having villains who aren't all HURT KILL DESTROY, but CS2 goes too far on this, and this idea isn't THAT interesting per Sopko anyway. It also totally forgets about anything bad that happened in CS1, so certain characters get sympathetic get-out-of-jail free passes because they're secretly on your side or something. I dunno.
- And ranted about this in WGAYP, but god damn does CS2 abuse the "win battle fight, look exhausted afterward, have NPC make dramatic appearance to save the day" schtick. Every! Single! Time! And your characters are Pretty Badass by this point in the plot, and it's often not even named enemy baddies that get this treatment, but totally random nameless mercenaries!
- I played CS2 on Nightmare, and it was easier than Hard mode of ToCS1 or Trails in the Sky SC. Falcom fix your shit. That said, this is a fixable problem; just don't abuse the most broken of the mechanics, and the battles go back to being pretty awesome, and the optional superbosses if you fight them as soon as possible are pretty tricky. (I'll add that it's one thing in games that let you totally break them, but it requires lategame equips / figuring out some degenerate setup. The biggest offender in CS2, Delay, is directly built into the main character's skillset and utterly breaks the game. How they could have not noticed that the ability they hand to you = instant win, I'm not sure.)
- Divine Knight battles and plot aren't really my thing, but I guess they are for others who are mech fans. They're harmless I guess, except when they bail the party out of interesting jam by going "eh I have a magic robot I win." (And everyone is too polite to attack Rean while summoning said robot.)
- As usual, Elise & Angelica are terrible characters. Let me add another personal rant. Elise is a miserable character so I'm happy for any excuse to sideline her, and so the game does; she promptly gets kidnapped (for dopey reasons). Fine. But... everybody seemingly forgets about this? Having a loved one kidnapped is an almost cliche hero motivation plot point used to rouse ambivalent or less violent characters into action. But nobody cares; Rean & his parents hardly have any lines about this. It's *weird*! It'd be okay if they actually owned this directly as a plot point: that Rean & his parents don't actually care that much about Elise. But the writers don't do that. You'd think from the soundtrack art that this is a game about a clash between a passionate, Fire-Dark aligned character (Rean) and his cooly rational Water-aligned foil (Spoilerz), so Rean would have plenty of opportunities to get MAD about the various indiginities the Other Side subjects him to (like, an arrest warrant for him, attack his hometown, and kidnapping his sister for starters). But Rean doesn't seem to ever get particularly upset, and isn't even explaining how he really cares about XYZ, but knows that the best thing is to be merciful. About the only thing that does get Rean upset is things like rare enemy deaths, which could work if they wanted to portray pacifist angel Rean, but they kinda don't do that either.
- The timeframe for the game is weirdly fast as well. This is more of a nitpick, and goes with "is it intentional that this civil war is 'fake'" question, but after establishing just how vast Erebonia is quite well in CS1, CS2 is determined to have characters flying around and doing multiple sidequests across a continent in a single morning.
That said, I don't want to come across as too harsh. This is a huge, huge game that is eminently playable and gripping, so the highlights outweigh the lowlights, but sheesh. The plot is just so strangely off in Act 2 & most of 3. To the game's credit, I do like one character heaping crap on the Chief Villainess for having her stupid plans entirely go down in flames due to her own idiocy. He's like the only guy tuned in to how bad the enemy's plan is, and ends up maybe more sympathetic than expected as a result!
3. Undertale (PS Vita)Well, metric reams of ink have been spilled on this one elsewhere on the Internet, and I guess I'm still not technically finished with everything. Suffice to say that while some of the humor is a miss for me, the dramatic side was shockingly good.
Excellent (9/10)2. Persona 5 (PS4)Another game that others have talked about way more than me. I'm not even a modern Persona fan by default - P3 has enough creepy aspects to seriously put me off from attempting to play it, and while P4 seems better, it still didn't quite seem my cup of tea. P5, however, was pretty great. This is definitely a game where its unique design sensibilities and sense of style really show - they thought about the style they wanted and hit it really hard. You are the red white & black rebels against the system, and they own it in every element of the plot and design. The plot is built around the same, and works out quite well for the most part. I didn't even think the end was as bad as others did; maybe not as high as some of the other parts of the game, but it's perfectly workable. Also, the game was not nearly as "creepy" as some other Japanese properties can be; I found it was considerably less fanservicey than I feared. It helps that while the main character is still a bit of a Gary Stu, he's one that has to earn his way up; he starts at the bottom of the totem pole, brutally, with everyone and society hating him other than outcast Ryuji. And he gets knocked back to Square One in various ways, so it feels like he merits some pats on the back after he fights through anyway.
Anyway. Complaints, which are more like nitpicks: The difficulty curve is too hard early, too easy late, as usual for SMT. I generally played on Hard, and Adjustable difficulty helps a lot - just change the difficulty if you want. While that deals with Palace 1 being insanely brutal (crank it back to Normal, although this is where I brag I beat Kamoshida on Hard anyway), there isn't really a way to fix the overly easy second half of the game. Oh well. Money is too short unless you confuse-grind Mementos bosses, which is boring and lame. Palace 5 is lame both design-wise and plot-wise, where it's a little too transparent the party is getting played in a fashion that should be clear to them, and the internal PARTY DRAMA feels a little forced / nonsensical. Doing the game "properly" (well, properly for SnowFire) requires researching a bit on obscure Optimal Time Spending mechanics so that you can see most of the content without need for multiple playthroughs. (having a Persona of that tarot card massively speeds your affection gain, maxing Temperance early gives you extra actions, etc.) None of these are a big deal, though. A massively enjoyable time, and a rare case of gaming that has a point that isn't uncontroversial pablum like "destroying the world is bad."
1. Trails of Cold Steel (PS Vita)I waited awhile to play this one, despite some trusted recommendations. Only so much anime you can safely ingest at a time, after all. I was a bit skeptical: high school is a massively overdone setting, some of the anime characters seem to veer into the "bad" anime tropes rather than the good ones, Rean seemed a little bland. What a pleasant surprise that these concerns, while real, were far less bad than I feared, and that the good parts were so strong. This is modern JRPG done right, with a battle system that's my style, characters which are simultaneously unique and customizable, great Falcom music, and tons of quality-of-life features that make doing side quests and getting around a joy while somehow still selling the size of the country at the same time. The high school parts are reasonably well-done when they exist, but they end up only ~30-40% of the content anyway; most of your time is spent ignoring the high school thing and going on interesting adventures anyway. The main class VII cast, while they start off slightly "anime trope"y (especially the females), all get developed so that they stand on their own with their own quirks and personalities. The gameplay is pretty fun, and puts up a reasonably good fight on Hard, albeit more in the first third of the game and maybe the final quarter, with the midgame being pretty easy.
Anyway, a few plot points don't make tons of sense if you think about them, but it's not too big a deal. The final dungeon, despite having great music, is weirdly underwhelming, with it both being over-large as well as having a nonexistent-to-terrible excuse to hike through it, unlike the reasonably well-established dungeons elsewhere. Some of the later deck of characters that come in halfway through the game start anime tropes and stay that way and are meh: Elise, Angelica, Sharon, and Millium notably, although the last two eventually get mildly better. Still, these are pretty minor complaints ultimately. This was definitely the pleasant surprise of 2017 for me, and CS1's strength helps carry into CS2 to make me care about what happened to the characters even in CS2's weaker troughs.
Not ranked:
Final Fantasy XV: Not far enough in. It was okay, and I eventually got around to liking the characters, and Shimomura's music is pretty good, but the gameplay… ugh.
X-COM2: Not far enough in, either. I like the plot hook and how adding time limits instantly spices up a fight, though.
Laggy Fantasy Tactics (LFT): Pretty fun. My spirit got crushed at Doguola Pass (the first battle of Chapter 4), of all things, which killed me like 8 times in a row, way more than Golgorand / Izlude / Velius / Roof / etc.. I still need to summon up the nerve to go back there. Dragoons jumping on my head for massive damage, noooo.
