I almost always try to make an effort to recap my games of the year in some way. It all started in 2014 with a gargantuan post complete with hastily Photoshopped banners for each and every game I had finished that year.
is really fun because it serves not only as a snapshot of the games I played that year, but of what was going on in my life too. Because I tend to spend most of my free time on games, reviewing those games at the end of year serves as an apt encapsulation of my thoughts and feelings throughout that year. The past two of these retrospectives have been much more pared down in nature, serving as a list of statistics more than anything else. What this post serves to do is return in some small way to the vision I had of what I wanted these retrospectives to be in 2014.
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| Finished on February 11th on PlayStation 4. |
This year wasn't the first time I'd played through and finished
Evoland, a very short video game that bridges together a series of different genres from top-down action-adventure
à la The Legend of Zelda to turn-based RPGs more in the vein of
Final Fantasy and even a segment that directly channels
Diablo II. Truth be told, I only played it again on PS4 because I was looking forward to playing
Evoland II again, which is bundled in with this game in a collection and delivers on concepts explored by its predecessor in a much more satisfying and mature way. Unfortunately, I never actually ended up doing that! With the avalanche of games I tackled afterward, it seems unlikely I'll return to it at this point–which is sad, because although
Evoland can be safely skipped over,
Evoland II is an underrated gem that I've never had the opportunity to write about. Maybe one day.
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| Finished on February 17th on PlayStation 4. |
Hollow Knight was almost a direct inspiration for trying
Dead Cells, which I guess you could
loosely describe as a Metroidvania, but it's definitely more of a hybrid roguelike since it features procedurally generated levels. Still, I found
Dead Cells extremely addictive in almost entirely different ways from
Hollow Knight. The challenge was still certainly there, but a large part of what made
Dead Cells fun was the randomness inherent to finding weapons and abilities. Every run of
Dead Cells is different and it's up to the player to make choices based on what weapons they happen to find. And like with any roguelike, every death contributes toward adding more variety to future runs. The pattern of repeatedly unlocking new things as I went gave the game a lot of longevity for me, even long after I'd beaten the final boss. There were always new weapons to uncover, alternate paths to explore, and even traversal abilities to unlock, the one weird Metroidvania quirk that differentiated it for me from a lot of other games with similar themes.
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| Finished February 27th on Nintendo Switch. |
Looking back on it now, I really wish I'd played
Into the Breach a lot more than I did because I really love the concept and I didn't give it the same love as I did
Dead Cells, which still got a lot of my time even after I finished it. I mean, not only do I love the idea, but the game is developed by the same guys as
FTL, another game I loved but never managed to finish. I have to imagine my anxiety at the difficulty of completing future runs of
Into the Breach must have contributed to why I played it as little as I did.
FTL sucked up a lot of my time and I always felt frustrated that I never actually completed a single run. So, after I finished a run of
Into the Breach, something in my brain snapped and I just thought "okay, we're done here. I did it." But
Into the Breach deserves more than that. It's an absurdly clever turn-based strategy game in which the player battles aliens with a variety of different unique mechs. The important twist is that all enemy actions are broadcast, meaning you have the ability to respond to opponents' actions before they even perform them. This might make it seem as if it makes things easy, but even with this trump card at your disposal, the odds are always stacked against you.
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| Finished on March 10th on PlayStation 4. |
It might seem completely off the wall for me to play
Destiny 2 of all things considering my track record for the year so far–and let's be honest, for the majority of the last five years. I have to admit, though, when the hosts of a certain podcast I frequently listen to discussed this game, the adulation they showed for it really made me want to give it a try. Honestly, the gameplay of
Destiny 2 is a blast. Before the last couple of years, I really hadn't played a lot of shooters, but
Destiny 2 is among the smoothest I've ever played–and it has enough RPG features and customization to keep me interested for the long haul. On the other hand, the MMO aspects of the game didn't draw me in. Once I'd played through all the story material up to
Forsaken, I decided I'd had enough and called it quits. It doesn't work for me as a game I pour thousands of hours into, but I did enjoy playing through the story, even if that story was almost completely incomprehensible to me. Like a few other of the games I played early in this year,
Destiny 2 ended up influencing a few of the games that I tried later on.
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| Finished on March 20th on Nintendo Switch. |
Despite having played some of the most popular and important games in the
Legend of Zelda series, I've never been a card-carrying
Zelda fan. I like the games I've played and recognize and appreciate the impact and influence they've had on other games I enjoy, but they're not usually games I specifically seek out. As of this writing, the only other
Zelda game I've actually finished is
Ocarina of Time, although I've gotten close on
Link to the Past and
Majora's Mask. When I finally played through
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild this year, it made me feel differently about
Zelda. It is a game that's such a departure from the series as a whole while still playing homage to the building blocks that came before it. Although
Zelda doesn't hold the same importance to me as it does to a lot of people, I still thoroughly enjoyed my time with
Breath of the Wild and feel that it's a special game that really differentiates itself from its predecessors. The exploration and the puzzles (of which there are
many) are top-notch and I even found myself becoming invested in more mundane activities like cooking meals and crafting potions for use in my travels. These are activities that I might find tedious in other games but found endlessly engaging in
Breath of the Wild. All of these positives are more than enough for me to forgive the combat that I found a little dull or the areas in which there are endless expanses of nothing. I can only imagine what Nintendo can accomplish in
Breath of the Wild 2.
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Finished on April 16th on PlayStation 4.
Legacy of the First Blade DLC finished on
April 30th.
The Fate of Atlantis Episode 1 finished on April 30th.
The Fate of Atlantis Episode 2 finished on June 7th. |
The amount of time I spent this year on
Assassin's Creed Odyssey is astounding. I'm not even really sure what convinced me to play it in the first place but I'm sure it had something to do with hearing about how much the two recent games had delved into RPG mechanics. It's the first
Assassin's Creed game I've played and it was a damn good one. The amount of content in this game is just overwhelming. There's so much that I
wrote about how I had to learn how to let things go so I could even make progress. I'd thought that
Horizon Zero Dawn had a large world, but after having explored the various islands of Ancient Greece in
Odyssey, I felt like I'd entered an entirely new level in terms of scope. And every nook and cranny of
Odyssey is covered in sidequests with their own stories full of memorable characters. On top of that, there are three main narrative threads that all come to separate conclusions that are all important for the game as a whole. There are twists and turns everywhere, cultists to kill, family members to unite, mythical beasts to uncover, and important choices to make. There's too much in the game to even summarize it in a paragraph but suffice it to say that
Odyssey was one of the best games I played this year. The DLC content adds a huge amount of extra narrative to the game as well, but I will say it's somewhat less consistent in quality. After having spent so much time on the game overall including the vast majority of the DLC, I'm somewhat reluctant to return to the game's final DLC episode, but it almost feels like I'm missing out since I've done absolutely everything else. We'll see!
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| Finished on May 19th on PlayStation 4. |
I'm almost still in disbelief that 2019 is the year that I finally beat
Bloodborne. On top of that, I even finished
The Old Hunters DLC! I can't count the number of times that I've started games like
Dark Souls, Demons' Souls, Nioh, and
Bloodborne and then quit in frustration because of how mercilessly difficult and repetitive they can be. This year,
Bloodborne finally clicked for me. It's one of a number of games I played this year that really inspired me to write. It is a very good and interesting game but it took me a long time to figure that out. I was so preoccupied with how difficult the first section of the game was that I didn't put myself in the right mindset to have the patience to unlock a very rewarding experience. This year, I wrote a three-part (
1,
2,
3) narrative while I played through the game and even a
lengthy article on the comparison I drew between my love of extreme metal and the journey of immersing myself in
Bloodborne. As I mentioned earlier, it was really the satisfaction I got from the difficult combat of
Hollow Knight that encouraged me to give
Bloodborne another try so I'm doubly grateful to that game for inspiring two really great experiences.
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| Finished May 29th on PlayStation 4. |
Another game I'd been putting off finishing for a long time was
Yakuza 0. My original plan to get into
Yakuza was to play through
Yakuza Kiwami (which I did) and then follow it up with
Yakuza 0, even though chronologically,
Yakuza 0 comes first. My reasoning at the time was that I really wanted to have the context of having played the game that was the very first release for the series, even if this particular version of it was a remake. At the end of the day, it didn't really matter, but I will say that I was hesitant to start
Yakuza 0 at first because the gameplay was
so similar to
Kiwami which I had recently played at the time I purchased
0. At the end of the day, what I enjoyed about
Yakuza 0 had almost nothing to do with the combat and much more to do with the incredible masculine soap opera of a plot, the ridiculous minigames, and even in its more reined-in moments, genuinely emotive and sympathetic characters. I absolutely loved
Yakuza 0. Playing it ensured that I would eventually play through the entire series. That will happen–one of these days.
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| Finished June 3rd on Nintendo 3DS. |
I have slavishly played through every single entry of the
Etrian Odyssey series barring remakes of the first two games. When I heard that yes, in fact, one more
Etrian Odyssey game was coming, I took my 3DS out of retirement and booted it up–only to take many months to actually finish the game. I
noted back in June that the 90 hours I spent with
Etrian Odyssey Nexus felt interminably longer than the similar amount of time I spent on
Yakuza 0. Nexus cobbled together features from all previous
Etrian Odyssey games to create a pastiche. Almost every single dungeon in the game is reused and the same goes for the available character classes. On the surface, this sounded pretty incredible to me because well, it's a crossover and as I've said on numerous occasions, I love those–but in practice, assembling a new party felt repetitive because these were all classes I had used before save for the new Hero class, which mostly bored me. Similarly, the fact that every single one of the
many dungeons you traverse in the game is a repeat of the past and features no new mechanics to differentiate them made me feel as if I was listening to a Greatest Hits album. I've never liked those. If
Nexus had somehow taken elements of the past and elevated them and built on them, I think it could have been very successful. What happened instead is that I spent an eternity stubbornly finishing a game that I never ended up particularly enjoying.
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Finished June 6th on PlayStation 4.
Finished The Knife of Dunwall on June 16th.
Finished The Brighmore Witches on June 17th. |
What I
did enjoy playing through, however, was
Dishonored, which is the oldest game on this list so far. A very large chunk of games that I end up playing come as a result of making connections from previous games. In this case, I craved more stealth gameplay because of the taste
Assassin's Creed Odyssey had given me. I
wrote about how stealth tended to frustrate me when it was the only option so I decided, perhaps masochistically, to play
Dishonored while pretending that stealth
was the only option. Interestingly, I enjoyed playing this way a lot. I guess it makes a big difference when the game in question is built entirely around stealth instead of playing through a stealth sequence in a game in which that's not the primary focus. Blinking around environments in
Dishonored was immensely satisfying and not at one moment did I regret that I never had the option to take lives. Admittedly, once I assumed the role of Daud in the DLC to the game, I started murdering people left and right, seemingly as a catharsis to assuage the tension of restraining myself all throughout the base game. This was sometimes more fun on a minute-to-minute basis, but the guilt I felt upon reaching the endgame was immeasurable.
Dishonored 2 hasn't quite clicked for me yet, so maybe I need to revisit my original pacifist approach.
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| Finished June 10th on Nintendo Switch. |
Remember when I said this year started with a desire to play more Metroidvanias? I was still feeling that way in June when I played what is quite possibly the most adorable game of the year,
Gato Roboto. I really enjoyed this game for a number of reasons, but I think it served as a really nice palate cleanser for me because it was cute, accessible, not very long, and not extremely difficult. After playing some really tough games, it was nice to play something I could just relax with. It's a game about a cat in a mech suit exploring some interconnected passageways? What's not to love? Sure, it's basically
Super Metroid but with cats yet its tone and simple visual style definitely worked for me. The black-and-white aesthetic reminded me a lot of
Downwell, which is also an incredible game from the same publisher.
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| Finished June 15th on PlayStation 4. |
I am an unabashed and lifelong fan of
Final Fantasy Tactics and my ears will always perk up when games release that compare themselves to that title. However, I'm often disappointed by these games that draw the comparison, even when the games themselves are perfectly serviceable games on their own.
Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark is a pretty good example of this in that it could comfortably be described as a clone of
Final Fantasy Tactics. A lot of the specifics are different, but the structure of the game is close to identical. I understand it's extremely difficult for an independent developer to measure up to such a lauded classic, but I can't help but be a little disappointed when "successors" like this come out.
Fell Seal is a fine game, but its primary strength is its gameplay, which is copied almost entirely from
Final Fantasy Tactics. There's really nothing about it that has an identity. I could definitely forgive borrowing
FFT's gameplay if it also had a really engrossing story or even just really well-composed music, but neither of those things are true and it also has some really frustratingly designed missions on top of that. I discussed in detail my mixed feelings on the game
here.
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| Finished June 24 on Nintendo Switch. |
It turns out that
Breath of the Wild wasn't the only
Zelda game that I finished this year! I've mentioned before that I really enjoy rhythm games. I also enjoy roguelikes! Although combining the two seems an unlikely feat,
Crypt of the Necrodancer did just that in 2015 and although the game is extremely difficult and frustrating, it's also very satisfying. Building on that absurd premise is the equally absurd idea that Nintendo would partner with a third-party developer to bring us
Cadence of Hyrule, a
Zelda-themed take on the
Crypt of the Necrodancer formula. The gameplay is just as engaging as ever, but because this is a Nintendo game, I assumed Brace Yourself Games wanted to appeal to a slightly broader audience, so the difficulty is noticeably reduced compared to the first title. Although I've played all the way through
Necrodancer the hard way, I definitely feel this was a good move.
Necrodancer was hard to the point of being frustrating.
Cadence of Hyrule is challenging but never suffocating. As before, Danny Baranowsky's dance-inflected soundtrack is incredible and he does classic
Zelda tunes a lot of justice. I really enjoyed this one.
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| Finished July 10th on PlayStation 4. |
Although I don't necessarily treat it with the same gravity as
Bloodborne, Pillars of Eternity is another game that completing was a
long time in coming. I started it originally back in 2015 on PC if I recall correctly and managed to make it through probably 90% of the game, including a big chunk of the expansion content. For whatever reason, while tackling some of the tougher enemies in The White March, I completely bounced off the game. The poor framerate on my PC certainly didn't help things. I always considered it a shame because I
love Pillars of Eternity. This is exactly the kind of "love-letter to a classic" that I enjoy. It takes the formula from
Baldur's Gate and expands and improves upon it in a number of important ways. It never feels like a straight copy of that game and has its own identity entirely separate from it. Granted, the combat can seem a little chaotic and sometimes it's not clear what each spell does in comparison to any other, but the level of customization, experimentation, and sheer breadth of options in the combat and character creation is fantastic. The plot is deep and multi-layered, the music is rich and orchestral, the characters are complex and interesting–it's just a great game. It is a great game that I have played through essentially twice, since I really was very far in the game the first time I played it. Unfortunately, the PS4 version has its share of bugs and my experience was significantly worsed in the latter parts of the game by
extremely long load times. I would never recommend anyone play the PS4 version over the PC version if you had the option.
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Finished on July 26th on PlayStation 4.
Heavensward finished on August 19th. |
It was at this point of the year that I really settled in for the long haul with
Final Fantasy XIV. I hadn't seriously played it since 2014 and at that point it had been on PC. I jumped in on PS4 and relearned the control scheme entirely. I toyed around with my old dragoon but eventually settled into playing a rogue with aspirations of becoming a ninja. I realized at that point that I hadn't even technically finished the main campaign of
A Realm Reborn when I'd played it on PC, despite reaching the level cap of 50 at the time. I played all the way up to 50 as a ninja and finally picked up where I'd left off, at which point I spent a very long time doing very little else but playing
Final Fantasy XIV. I can't help but recall a similar time in 2014 when my progress on games in general halted at around the same time of the year. I followed up my
FFXIV obsession at that time by revisiting
WoW. That didn't happen this time. I just kept playing
Final Fantasy XIV.
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Stormblood finished on August 30th.
Shadowbringers finished on September 23rd. |
I've played a few MMOs in my time, but the ones I've spent the most time with by far are
Final Fantasy XIV and
World of Warcraft. I've never had anything more than a passing interest in the lore or story of
WoW, but the plot of
Final Fantasy XIV drew me in in a big way. It is a game that has characters I care about, sidequests that flesh out the world, political machinations that disrupt the peace of the realm, all on top of the crunchy, grindy MMO gameplay that keeps me engaged. Like any MMO,
FFXIV is a game in which you repeat the same actions over and over for many, many hours. In my case, I seldom grew tired of playing ninja, a class that has a lot of tools and can do some really interesting things. Combining different mudras (symbols made through hand gestures) to cast spells while weaving in spinny-ninja combos was always fun to me and I always kept it interesting by constantly working to improve the efficiency of my rotation.
There's a lot more I could say about the three months that I played
Final Fantasy XIV constantly, but this entry is going to be long enough as it is. Besides, I've already written plenty about it. The last few entries of this blog before I went on an unintentional hiatus all concern
Final Fantasy XIV. Until now, I didn't recover. I guess I didn't feel as if writing about an MMO every day for months sounded very exciting.
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| Finished September 29th on PlayStation 4. |
Although I'd been working on a few things off-and-on while playing
Final Fantasy XIV, the first game to break the streak was
Borderlands 3, a game that now, only a few months later, has faded almost entirely from my memory. After playing
Destiny 2 earlier in the year, the gunplay felt clunky and imprecise. The mountains of loot I collected never felt exciting because I could never connect with what made any particular gun better than another, other than synergizing with the build I was going for. The game was also very buggy. A critical part of the build I had on Amara, the character I played, simply didn't work when I was playing multiplayer. Since the whole reason I wanted to play it was for co-op, this definitely left a bad taste in my mouth. This was also a melee-centric build, which never felt as smooth as I wanted it to. On top of everything else, the humor in the game felt alarmingly tone-deaf and juvenile. The game was fun on the most basic level and I don't regret finishing it, but its a game that is definitely stuck in the past and seems to even have regressed to something even less than its predecessors.
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| Finished on October 12th on Nintendo Switch. |
The mixed feelings I have about
Astral Chain have almost nothing to do with the game itself and more to do with the fact that my Switch stopped working in the middle of playing it! I ended up finishing it sometime after getting a replacement unit but the loss of momentum from switching from one console to another damaged my impression of the game somewhat. Honestly, the game is really good action game from Platinum, who have made some of my favorite action games. I absolutely love
Bayonetta and I was expecting something along those lines when I played
Astral Chain. It is that, but it's also a lot more. There are investigative portions in which you collect information and talk to NPCs, there are exploration sections, and a couple of spots where you ride around on a motorcycle. Those parts are cool, but I found I was having the most fun when I was roaming around wrecking enemy robots by throwing other robots at them. The combat system in this game is wild and it took me a long time to get a grasp on it. I didn't feel like I was
really enjoying myself until about three-quarters into the game just because I couldn't totally grasp how to be successful at the combat system. As soon as I looked up some tips and found out that I should be regularly switching between weird robot slave weapon companion things to defeat enemies, I started consistently getting S-ranks and really enjoying myself. It's a great game for which I'd love to see a follow-up.
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| Finished on October 14th on PlayStation 4. |
Apparently, I had decided after finishing
Pillars of Eternity and forcing myself to deal with abysmally long loading times, I should follow that up with another very long PC-style Western RPG. And here's the kicker, it's one that I'd already played. I decided to play
Divinity: Original Sin because although yes, I had played the game before on PC, I'd never played the Enhanced Edition and I wanted a refresher before playing
Divinity: Original Sin 2 (which as of this writing I have barely played). My biggest takeaway from replaying
Divinity: Original Sin is that the combat system is incredible and I will agree with opinions I've heard online that it improves on the other common combat style in isometric RPGs (like
Baldur's Gate and
Pillars of Eternity) by turning real-time combat with the ability to pause into straight-up turn-based strategy. What I didn't enjoy as much this time around is the story. This is partially because I've seen it before–but because I didn't have a similar problem with
Pillars which I'd also already played, I think the writing just isn't as good. It's serviceable and definitely gets the job done, but I definitely didn't feel invested in any of the characters of the game. The murder mystery plot in Act 1 is really good, but it understandably loses a lot of its punch when you know the resolution of the mystery in advance.
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| Finished October 17th on Nintendo Switch. |
I'm not entirely sure why I decided to revisit
Mighty Gunvolt Burst other than an inkling that I was taking a look at the games installed on my Switch to see if there were games I still had yet to complete. This was one such example! I'm also not sure why I didn't play through it the first time since it's another Inti Creates game, the company responsible for some of my favorite
Mega Man titles (primarily
Mega Man Zero). Mighty Gunvolt Burst differentiates itself by giving you a lot of control over customizing what kind of shots your blaster can fire. Do you want to fire five projectiles in a fan pattern than all ricochet and then explode? Sure, you can do that! I had a lot of fun with it and it directly inspired me to play another Inti Creates game.
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| Finished Ace Attorney on October 23rd on Nintendo Switch. |
I don't remember the first time I played
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney but I've certainly played through the DS version more than once. I've played every (English) entry in the series so far, but the one that's most ingrained in my brain is this first one. In a lot of ways it's the most basic and lacking in mechanics, but it has a lot of charm. Despite being very familiar with the plot of this game, it felt very refreshing and comforting to return to it again. One of these days I might even play through the second and third games again too, especially since I'm curious if my lukewarm opinion of
Trials and Tribulations will have changed since the first time I played it many years ago.
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| Finished October 25 on Nintendo Switch. |
Now that I'm thinking about it, I was definitely in the mindset of finishing games that I'd bounced off of around this time, because the next game I finished was
The Messenger, a game I'd started many months earlier in the year. I'd keep revisiting it, get lost, and lose interest. This was also another of those games that came about as a reaction to my renewed interest in Metroidvanias–but this one is interesting in particular because it certainly doesn't start as that kind of game at all. At first, it's a straightforward
Ninja Gaiden-style action game separated into levels. Of course, after you progress through those levels, the world opens up, you unlock time travel to traverse between the 8-bit past and the 16-bit future. All of these elements are really good and I enjoyed the game overall, but I found the lack of direction the game gives you sometimes to be very frustrating. Even when getting hints from the shopkeeper, I frequently found myself with no idea of where to go. In the end, relying on guides got me through it and I enjoyed the game more as a result.
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| Finished October 27 on Nintendo Switch. |
I originally wanted to try
SteamWorld Dig in anticipation of tackling its sequel, since it was yet another title thrown into the ring when people discussed good Metroidvanias. I imagine the sequel must be a bit different, because this game reminds me more of something like Super Motherlode than Metroid or Castlevania. The primary gameplay element, as one might guess, is digging. Dig down, find minerals, bring them back, sell them, and then upgrade your equipment to become better at doing those things. Now, some of the upgrades you unlock do give you traversal abilities, so I could definitely see the sequel expanding on that. Overall, this was a fun playthrough and it only took me a couple hours to finish.
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| Finished October 27th on Nintendo Switch. |
The other Inti Creates game I played through was
Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX, an unfortunately-titled game in which players assume the role of Copen, the alternate playable character from the excellent
Azure Striker Gunvolt 2. I recall that when I played that game, I felt like Copen was pretty overpowered. The gameplay seems more balanced around him this time but I still didn't feel particularly challenged throughout the game–at least until the final boss which took me several tries. I think what frustrated me about this game is that it never felt crucial to vary up your strategy in order to progress. For the most part, I stuck with the same weapons throughout the game. Not a bad game, but one that I find myself forgetting even now.
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| Finished on November 4th on Nintendo Switch. |
Another game that took me a very long time to follow up on was
Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I'd felt confident that when it came out, I'd start focusing on it and completely lose interest in
Final Fantasy XIV, but that's definitely not what happened. I kept playing and
Three Houses fell by the wayside. When I take some time to examine why that is, I realize it's less about my obsession with
Final Fantasy XIV and more about how I feel about
Three Houses. I want to like it more than I actually do. Of course, I had mixed feelings about
Fates as well and I can comfortably say this is a step up from those games–but there's still something missing here. The gameplay is not at all challenging and doesn't fill me with the same sense of accomplishment that
Fire Emblem typically does. I also don't feel particularly invested in the characters. There are characters I like, certainly, but none that
really stand out to me. I enjoy the conversations these characters have and the paths they take, but none of them really
land in the way that I want them to. I was always expecting more from the game than what it gave me. It might just be that I've played far too many of these
Fire Emblem games at this point.
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| Finished on November 11th on PlayStation 4. |
Way back when I played
Dishonored, I started thinking about how often I heard good things about other Bethesda-published games like
Wolfenstein and
Doom, but I'd never actually gotten around to playing those games, primarily because I just don't play a lot of shooters in general. However, I did play all the way through
Wolfenstein: The New Order and found I thoroughly enjoyed it. The gameplay itself is solid, although frequently more challenging than I'm used to since it seems like a few stray shots are enough to take me down. I found myself fairly invested in the story too, even though a lot of the scenes were violent enough to make me a little uncomfortable. I have plans to follow this up with this game's standalone DLC prequel as well as
Wolfenstein II, but so far, that has not happened.
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| Finished December 8th on PlayStation 4. |
I'm actually shocked at how quickly I finished
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III. When I was originally thinking of making this list, it was easy for me to forget that I fit a 120-hour RPG in at the end of the year somehow. This game took me just as much time to finish as did
Persona 5, but I guess I played in such long sessions that it seemed like it went by a lot faster. I really enjoyed this game because again, it has a lot of crossover in it since it features characters from
Trails in the Sky, the Crossbell games, and of course, all of the playable characters from the first two
Cold Steel games. My issues with
Cold Steel III are the same as the issues I had with the first in this series in that it features a lot of lazy anime tropes and casual sexism. However, classic turn-based JRPG combat and giant robots are fun things and the bananas interconnected plot still has my attention, so I'll still be on board if NISA actually decides to localize
Cold Steel IV.
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| Finished December 16th on Nintendo 3DS. |
I've mentioned on a few occasions throughout this entry that it took me a long time to come back and finish some of these games. Another great example is what I consider to be the swan song of my 3DS,
Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth. So, I loved the first
Persona Q and way back in the beginning of 2015, I wrote
a lengthy review of it. It was what sparked my interest in the
Etrian Odyssey series in the first place and I was eagerly awaiting this sequel to recapture that magic. At first, I got nerd chills even playing the game because it brought together characters from
Persona 3, 4, and
5 this time as well as going the extra mile and including the female protagonist from
Persona 3 Portable. All the classic battle themes were there and I was loving it. I was so excited and felt like I'd devour the game in weeks. That didn't happen. Repeatedly, I'd go through a dungeon and the same exact themes would be explored. Embrace your individuality. Don't just go with the crowd. This would have been a fine theme to explore but the game literally does so for each of the game's five main dungeons. In addition to that, each dungeon is very light on mechanics. Any puzzles included are very simple and serve as temporary obstacles instead of an element of gameplay to be interacted with. This is pretty disappointing since the puzzles in
Persona Q were pretty clever. On top of that, the gameplay is very repetitive. I think I went through basically the same actions for every single boss in the game–and when you spread that out over 80 hours, the fun really starts to ebb away. I'm glad I finished it just so I can say that I did and I don't break my streak of finishing
Persona spinoffs, but I really have to say it's a disappointing farewell to a cherished handheld.
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| Finished December 28th on PlayStation 4. |
As it turns out, I did get around to playing the 2016 reboot of
Doom and although I've played no other
Doom game for more than a few minutes, I really enjoyed this one! The gameplay is extremely fast-paced and satisfying. There's a good variety of weapons that have a great tactile feel and there's very little downtime between fights. On the other hand, I found myself paying very little attention to the story itself other than y'know, typical
Doom stuff. You're on Mars, there's a portal to Hell. You're going to go there and you're going to fight demons. I'm on board with that. After having played through this game, I'm pretty excited for
Doom Eternal.
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| Finished December 28th on Xbox One (!) |
I find that
Slay the Spire gives me a feeling of satisfaction very similar to
Dead Cells even though it's a turn-based card game. The gameplay loop of
Dead Cells was based around the luck of finding different weapons and how you adapt based on that.
Slay the Spire is very similar except in this case you're building a deck as you progress further through a series of levels and enemies. I love this game and before recently, I didn't even know that it came out this year (edit: for consoles)! The wide variety of cards, relics, enemy types, and challenges is more than satisfying enough to keep me coming back over and over again. I've unlocked the majority of the content this game has to offer but I'll be eagerly awaiting the news of more–or even better, news of a sequel.
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| Finished on December 30th on Nintendo Switch. |
I just had to get one more game in before the year was done, so I powered through the very last segments of
Steamworld Heist, a game I've had on the backburner for some time. I really enjoy the concept of this game because it's essentially a 2D
XCOM where your squad consists of different steambot archetypes. You've got your sniper bot, assault bot, artillery, etc. The first two acts of the game were a lot of fun, but as soon as I started getting to enemies in act 3 that teleport around and put up shields that make them invulnerable, I started to really dislike what I was playing. Even so, I love the concept of the game. I just didn't love some of the enemy designs.
WHEW. That was a lot of typing.
I tend to play a lot of games that didn't necessarily come out in the year I'm playing them. This is partially out of necessity since buying a lot of new games isn't really an option for me, but also because I go on tangents with wanting to explore games that are related to each other. Having said that, these are my favorite games of 2019 (of those I've played):
5. Slay the Spire
4. Astral Chain
3. Fire Emblem: Three Houses
2. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III
1. Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers
On the other hand, there are games I know I'd like that I just haven't gotten around to playing yet and therefore must reserve judgment. I plan on playing Control, Death Stranding, maybe The Outer Wilds (and The Outer Worlds?), potentially Baba Is You. I haven't even played Pokemon Sword or Shield! There'll be plenty of time for that in 2020.
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