Games I Played in 2023

Last year I wrote about every new (to me) game I played, and I’m doing it again for this year. It was a fun process and its nice to be able to look back and see what I played and what I thought. But one thing bugged me about last year, and that was the rating I gave to the games. While ultimately a simple number between 1 and 10 fails to capture the complexities of a game, it also fails in being critical. I fell into a trap where I started to rate games higher than I probably should have. For me, I think this has to do with having spent so much time in a schooling system where 80% and above is considered good and everything else not so much. This led to me having some bias and placing a lot of games near that range, despite me having more negative views. I failed to take advantage of the whole range of numbers to more accurately describe how I felt about each game. So this year, I would like to take advantage of this range. Scores between 1 and 3 will represent games I thought were bad, while scores between 8 and 10 will represent games I thought were great. This leaves a gray area for “good games”, games that aren’t bad, but also aren’t great. Or something roughly following that outline. Doing so allows for a bit of flexibility in rating them. Hopefully this, combined with a short statement about the game, will paint a better picture of how I felt about each game.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (2017)

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 had a lot to live up to. The first in the series was one of my favorite games I played last year, so I came into this one with some high expectations. And they were not exactly met, but they also weren’t exactly missed either. I think my issue comes with the fact that while this is still a good game, great even, it lives in the shadow of Xenoblade 1.

One of my biggest issues with the game is that it chooses to lean hard into the anime aesthetic. Not that I think its bad because its anime, but rather because how that impacts the rest of the game. Its still a visually striking game, having an anime art style is not a bad thing, but rather its how it writing is impacted by a desire to be more anime like. It ends up having so many tropes and cliches that stick out like crazy. The story involves the rising tensions present in a dying world. Land is not only shown to be a limited resource, but a declining one as well. Its a really bleak situation with great tensions between nations, but it gets ruined whenever the game decides to shoe horn some anime trope into the plot. They’re just so out of place, just like the main character. He’s this happy go lucky guy who wants to save the world with the power of friendship. Now this can be done well, but its not here. Rex, the protagonist, just ends up being a detriment to the overall plot. He constantly fails to read the room, always chiming in with something stupid, gets things just handed to him, and hardly grows as a character. And you’re stuck with him the entire journey. Luckily, the rest of the cast ends up being really engaging, and they have some incredible development and interactions. They are incredibly fleshed out and have engaging and relatable arcs (minus Tora). I honestly like the cast a whole lot, maybe even more than Xenoblade 1. It just sucks that most of the game is completely bogged down by cut scenes that overstay their welcome. That’s not to say they serve no purpose to the plot over all, it just feels like often times its cut scene after cut scene only to have you run for a bit until you hit the next cut scene trigger. Its just a bit frustrating when I want to play a game and end up spending more time watching cut scenes with some questionable voice direction. There is one last thing to mention about the choice of the anime aesthetic, and that is the character design. Nearly every woman in the game is needlessly sexualized. You know its bad when they had to be censored when Pyra and Mythra got put into Smash. I like my Switch, I like the flexibility of being able to take it with me and play a bit when I’m out and about, but this game I would have been embarrassed if people saw me playing it. And the worst part is the game makes sure you see this. So many scenes intentionally have the camera looking up the ass of the female characters. Why? I thought Nintendo games had some decency and wasn’t trying to shill to your stereotypical degenerate weeb. The anime aesthetic visually looks great, but it brings with it some questionable choices that just bog the game down.

This game greatly changes up the combat of 1. It expands and ads great depth to it, which creates a much more engaging battle system. Instead of having a party where each member is defined by the abilities the developers gave them, the party is now made of Drivers and Blades. Blades are the thing that really matter here, as they determine what abilities each Driver can use in combat. Drivers aren’t restricted to what Blades they can use, allowing for great customization. This is furthered by the combo system. Not only do you have the expanded break-topple-launch-smash combo, but elemental combos are introduced. Each Blade has a corresponding element and elemental attack, and stringing together a correct sequence of these elemental attacks leaves an orb on the enemy. When the time comes, a chain attack can be unleashed where these orbs can be broken to unleash some devastating damage. The great party customization combined with the combo system and chain attacks creates some seriously engaging combat, but the game completely ruins it with how its taught and implemented. The tutorials in this game are notoriously bad, so much so that fans recommend ignoring them and consulting external resources. And I have to agree with this sentiment, as I would have struggled much more with the game if a friend hadn’t told me to go watch a tutorial. But I think the worst part about the combat is the Blades, or rather how you obtain them. Some are gotten through story progression and quests, but a large majority are gotten via a gatcha system. You don’t spend any real money, but that doesn’t excuse implementing such a stupid system into the game. Having the customization and diversity of the combat system locked behind a luck based mechanic is just insane to me. Sure, having different blades every play though might add some variety, but I think having player agency is more important. Allowing them to make that decision instead of leaving it to luck makes much more sense, especially in a RPG where battle strategy can make or break the combat. While removing player options has the potential to create some more interesting challenges, it just ends up making experimentation difficult and possibly locks players into play styles they may not enjoy. Players should have the agency to pick and chose how they want to play, and not have pointless roadblocks in the way of accomplishing this. These changes make the combat system over all a bit more subjectively worse than Xenoblade 1, despite Xenoblade 2 having an objectively better system.

Staying on the topic of gameplay, there are a few other baffling decisions. Exploration in this game is hindered due to the introduction of field skills. During exploration, obstacles will be encountered that require certain skills to get past. The issue come from how these skills are acquired. Each blade has a certain set of field skills that can be gained and leveled up by increasing affinity between the blade and driver. If you haven’t been using the correct blades you need, you’ll need to take a detour to gain the required levels. This would be fine if these checks were only for optional areas, but there are several points in the story where you are required to pass these checks to continue. This means if you haven’t been using certain blades, you have to take a detour and grind for a bit which completely kills the pacing of the story. But that is not the only questionable decision, as there is also an annoying decision regarding equipment. Besides there being generally less options for gear compared to Xenoblade 1, there is one character that does not use standard equipment. The way you get equipment for them is by playing a mini game, over and over. You have to go out of your way to go play this random mini game several times over just to get some decent gear. Its completely unrelated to anything else in the game and is just a slog to keep playing over and over again.

I think if you’re a fan of Xenoblade, this game is worth playing. I have a lot of issues with its plot and presentation, but I still thought it was good enough to play all the way though. If you’re looking to get into the series, maybe pass up on this one.

4 / 10

Gunfire Reborn (2021)

Rougelikes are such a fascinating genre to me. A game where you have to fail to succeed? A strange premise, but they can be some of the most gripping and engaging games to play, providing a unique experience each time. Gunfire Reborn falls under this category, for the most part. It has all the core parts of a rougelike, the randomly generated dungeons, the large variety of power ups, a mix of abilities to experiment with. And Gunfire Reborn takes an interesting approach to it all as well, being a FPS instead of a top down action game like Hades or Binding of Issac. It nails the FPS mechanics, shooting feels great and there is a large variety of unique guns to play with, but it also takes queues from games like Borderlands with a robust loot system. Guns will have different modifiers and different effects each time you encounter one, making it compelling to switch things up. It helps keep runs fresh and fun.

But as much as I can praise the game for having interesting systems, in practice they end up falling flat. The gun modifiers end up not mattering a whole lot unless you aim to min max something during a run. The randomness aspect also falls apart pretty quickly. You end up encountering a lot of identical rooms really fast. It feels like by the time you do a handful of runs, you’ve seen about everything the game has to offer, including all the power ups and upgrades and such. Sure, the game locks some stuff behind progression, but its not enough to keep things interesting after your first clear. I feel like the game ends up being repetitive which makes runs feel more like a slog, especially in the early parts. This doesn’t detract from the games great gun play, it just made me want to start another run less and less.

Gunfire Reborn is pretty darn good. It may not be able to stand toe to toe in terms of content to other games in its genre, but it delivers an experience that is just as fun and engaging as the others. It also has four player coop, which not many other rougelikes can say. Maybe give it a go with some friends.

7 / 10

Purrgatory (2021)

Purrgatory is one of those games that is better played than talked about. Sure, I could write something about how cozy and comforting despite its simple sounds and graphics, or write about its charming dialogue and characters, but its a free game that can easily be completed in an afternoon. Given that its a visual novel slash point and click hybrid, there is not much aside from the story to discuss, but its so short I fear spoiling any of it by discussing it here. Its simple, its fun, its well written, and its charming. Go give it a try.

7 / 10

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity (2012)

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is one of my favorite series, more so than its parent series. The first two games are some of my favorites, but I never played the two latest entries. So, I decided to give Gates a go, and Ill say it does not meet expectations.

If you haven’t played a Mystery Dungeon game before, it sees you exploring randomly generated tile based dungeons with various loot and enemies on each floor. Pokemon takes this concept and adds, well, Pokemon. Its this RPG rouge-like hybrid that works surprisingly well. But its not the core gameplay thats the issue I have with this game, rather its the differences between this game and the previous entries that I have issues with.

One of the first differences to note is the dungeons. New to this game is the addition of static floors, or floors without a randomized layout. These are interesting the first time around, but once you go through and see everything they lose their charm. Part of the fun of the series is exploring the randomized dungeons, and this removes that part of it. It makes revisiting dungeons feel much more tedious. That seems to have been a theme with this game, as it removes a lot of quality of life from the previous games. No longer can you take multiple quests at once, only one at a time. You can’t stack multiple for one trip, and you can’t even hold multiple quests at once. It is an undeniable downgrade compared to the previous entries. This compounds with how much longer it takes to go from dungeon completion into the next dungeon. It makes playing the game so much worse when it feels like it doesn’t respect your time, unlike the previous entries. All these changes make the game feel much more tedious.

I couldn’t even be bothered to finish this game. Playing it was incredibly tedious, and the story wasn’t too interesting in the 12 hours I played. I’ve heard Super Mystery Dungeon is better, but I can tell you this is worse than Rescue Team and Explorers. In my opinion, there are much better games to spend your time on. Play literally any other game in this series.

3 / 10

Dragon Quest XI S Definitive Edition (2019)

I would say I like JRPGs. Despite my interest in them, I have yet to investigate some of the classic series the genre has it roots in. That being said, this was my first Dragon Quest game, and I’m not exactly impressed. I knew a bit about the series as a whole going into it. I knew Dragon Quest is a huge deal in Japan. I know that even thirty years later, the games still greatly resemble the original one. What I was not expecting was probably the most mediocre JRPG I have ever played.

Take a moment to imagine the story line of a generic JRPG, minus the part where the heroes kill god at the end. You should be thinking of something like a protagonist is a chosen one who travels around the world, making friends and collecting the magical MacGuffins to defeat the bad guy and save the world. That is almost exactly the plot of Dragon Quest 11. I’m serious, although I will admit it has some interesting twists in it. The story starts out with the hero finding our he is the chosen one. He goes to the nearby kingdom to seek advice from the king, only to be jailed because the existence of the chosen one means the existence of a big evil to defeat. This is interesting, but it quickly falls back into the typical JRPG convention. You meet a party member, escape the prison, then go from place to place solving problems, meeting new friends, and collecting whatever to defeat the big bad. None of it ends up being super interesting. Every party member is practically one dimensional. They can each be described in a few words, and their motivation for doing anything is because they wanna help the chosen one. I’ll go ahead and do it: Dude bro, short and spicy, always positive, flamboyant homosexual, sexy fighter, perverted old man. Out of these, two of them actually stand out and have more interesting character development, but otherwise everyone is pretty much the same all the way through. They just have this over simplified demeanor and end up being boring. I think the most interesting part comes after you collect all the MacGuffins, you go to get the special sword so you can finally defeat the bad guy, except something goes wrong. You don’t get the sword. You get stopped. You lose and the bad guy wins. The world falls into ruin because of this. The game now enters its second act, and its basically the same as the first act. Some of the characters get some development during the second act, but they still end up feeling flat and boring. After repeating basically the same things that happened in the first act of the game, you make your own special sword, and finally go to defeat the bad guy. And you do. The reward? A two minute cut scene where the only thing that happens is the world going back to normal is your reward for beating the game. It was nothing but a generic plot full of tropes and rather flat feeling characters that didn’t even have a satisfying ending.

But I know some readers might be saying, “What about Act 3?” I will admit, I didn’t bother to play this, but I have good reason. Act 3 sees the player going back in time and preventing the bad guy from getting the sword. This ends up changing some other things, but what ends up happening is the party ends up fighting and beating some other secret bad guy and the game ends. While this might be a more happy ending because it avoids a literal apocalypse, it ends up ruining so much. When you go back in time, its only the main character that does so. This is an issue because the party gets actual development during Act 2. This is all completely undone in Act 3. Its just baffling to me that the game ruins the characters in favor of a happier ending. At least long time fans get a Dragon Quest III cameo in a post credits scene.

If the story wasn’t good, how was the gameplay? Well, it was fine. The battle is your typical turn based battle system. You select the commands for each party member as their turn arises. Nothing too special, except for the pep system the game implements. Very rarely, and I mean very rarely, a party member might get pepped up. In this state, they have increased stats for a random amount of time. However, you can use special pep powers, typically requiring multiple pepped up party members, and unleash a powerful attack or buff or whatever which is accompanied with a short animation. This system is cool, if there was any rhyme or reason as to why these things triggered. It was so inconsistent that in my last 5 hours or so of game play none of my party members got pepped up. Sure, there are some ways to increase those odds, but it doesn’t help when they’re so low to begin with and the benefits aren’t even that great. But I don’t think that is the worst part of the game, oh no. For me it has to be how easy it is. Enemies appear in the over world and can be easily avoided. This is a good thing, the game doesn’t need to be padded out with forced encounters and players can choose how many enemies to fight to help control the difficulty of the required fights, except the required fights are easy. So easy, you don’t even need to do anything to beat about 95% of the encounters in this game. That is right, this game has an auto battle feature. You can set the tactics your party members follow during combat, including the main character. So instead of the player making decisions, you can set the AI to do it while you sit and watch. This is great for the common enemies, but when I accidently left it on for a boss fight and let it try to beat it, I was a bit shocked to see it did it successfully. I left it on to see how far I could get in the game without doing the fights, and I managed to get basically to the end of the game before I turned it off so I could actually enjoy the combat the game offered. Its just baffling to me how this game pratically plays itself.

Theres a few other things I want to comment on with the game. First off, the music. I played the definitive edition, so I got to hear the fantasic orchestrated sound track. For some reason, the original version released with a MIDI sountrack with a terrible sound font. Seriosuly, I think GBA games sound better than the MIDI versions of the songs in this game and the GBA is known for having notoriously bad sound. From what I understand, that choice had to do with the composer wanting to release the high quality versions on separate albums to make more money from them. The composer is also the Japanese equalivent of a Holocaust denier, which is already a major red flag. But getting back on track, the OST is great, except in use its not as fantastic. The themes get reused, a lot. Like a lot a lot. Its to the point where the game practically consists of the same three themes: the field theme thats in basically every field, the town theme thats in basically every town, and the battle theme thats in basically every battle. Even the less common songs get reused for everything. Every evil guy has the same theme. Every boss enemy has the same theme. It feels like every single song ends up getting reused somewhere. I got tired of them reusing the same old songs over and over again I ended up just muting the music to play my own music in the background. Thats also not to mention the fact that a lot of the music is reused from older Dragon Quest games. Thats not to say they’re bad songs, its just they were designed with different limitations in mind so reused songs end up being short and repetitive. It doesn’t help that the newer compositions aren’t the best either. Continuing from my complaints on the music, I have to comment on the animations, or rather the lack of it. There were a quite a few moments where it felt like I was playing a Pokemon game. The screen would just fade to black instead of showing an animation. Thats not to say all the animations were bad or poor or lacking, the enemy battle intro animations are so expressive, but I just have to mention that its there and it reminded of Pokemon in a bad way. Continuing on my mention of the monsters, the game has monster recolors. It just ends up feeling lazy that enemies get reused wish just a simple pallet swap. But for some they just added red glowing eyes and called it a new enemy. This laziness continues with the world in the second act. You think what amounts to a post apocalyptic world would have some vast differences, but its just a new dreary skybox combined with a few patches of burning grass in each area. Visually, it feels identical to the first act. But honestly, all of these things are more minor things I just wanted to comment on.

Dragon Quest 11 ends up being a game that is heavily stuck in its roots. It sticks hard to the Dragon Quest traditions, which makes it feel outdated in the modern era. When I was playing, there was a word that kept popping up when I was playing it. Its not good, its not bad, its just mid. And objectively, I think it is, but the issue is, I found myself enjoying the game quite a bit. A bit more than I expected for a game this mid, but I really did like playing it. Something about it was a bit like junk food. Sure, its not the best, but its still decent and you know what your getting into while eating it. I’m still interested in exploring more of this series, but I don’t expect any other of the games to really wow me.

6 / 10

Night in the Woods (2017)

I’ll be honest, this game was disappointing. I like going into games blind, so I really didn’t know what it was about except that a lot of people consider it to have a really good story. This sounded like it would be right up my alley, so I gave it a go. Night in the Woods follows Mae, a college drop out coming home to her small and decaying home town. You play as her as you go around town, hanging out with friends, and trying to find your place in life. But something is afoot as you witness a kidnapping one night. Things are afoot, and its up to you and your friends to figure it out.

And the game gets off to a great start. Running around town, talking to people and hanging out with friends grounds this game and its characters in reality. With each interaction, the characters involved get more and more fleshed out. Everyone has their own ambitions and desires and goals and dreams. And the more time you spend talking with any character, the more you learn about them and the close you grow. And while there are a ton of side characters that could be discussed, the main cast is the most interesting. You end up spending the most time with them, or more specifically, you have to pick which one of your close friends to hang out with each day. It really feels like hanging out with your friends. Messing around, having fun, but also having these very real and intimate moments together. This leads to the player growing closer to one of them and learning out their very real struggles and how they try cope with them and try to lead a better life. It makes you want to see how all of their character arcs get resolved.

But as the game progresses and you learn more about every character, Mae included, the hole situation with the kidnapping comes to light. In the climax of the game, you figure out there is a literal death cult in your small town thats kidnapping and sacrificing people in an effort to revitalize the dying town. They end up admitting to killing several people, including one of your old friends. This still feels incredibly bizarre, even with the game building up to it with the dream sequences that take place every night. You end up trapping the cult in a mine and presumably leave them there to die. A few more things happen but the game basically just ends on you and your friends saying something along the lines of “Thats messed up” and moving on.

To me, this ending completely ruins the game. The entire game is basically spent fleshing out and getting to know these characters. Each one of them has their own personal problems and struggles to try to over come them. And instead of seeing them learn to overcome these adversaries and get better and have their friends come support them, nothing changes and they just get more trauma. And you know, maybe this is just some commentary on the state of the world and how everything is seemingly going downhill, and if that’s the goal, it accomplishes it fantastically. But to me, that isn’t enough. Maybe I’m missing something, but just abruptly ending a game without giving closure to any of the characters that you grew to know for the entire game just killed all my enthusiasm. People say this is a fantastic game, and maybe it is, but with such a jarring and tonally different ending, I cannot recommend playing it.

4 / 10

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky (2009)

I haven’t played this game since 2008. To be more precise, I played Darkness as Sky wasn’t out yet, but they’re basically the same game aside from some extra content. And back then, I loved that game. It was incredible, I easily sunk hundreds of hours into it before restarting the game and sinking another couple hundred hours into it. It was an unforgettable game, but I had never revisited it since. So, what better to do than to revisit it nearly 15 years later to see if it holds up?

I know I talked a little about it, but its basically as close to an official Pokemon rouge-like we’ll ever see. You play as a Pokemon and explore randomly generated dungeons, aiming to complete various objectives while exploring them. I’m having trouble describing it, but the game just makes sense. Exploring dungeons is fun and challenging, the gameplay is great, it has fantastic quality of life. I can’t think of anything to criticize because the game is fun, and it doesn’t do anything annoying to prevent you. The previous game in the series, Rescue Team, is similar, but Explorers does so much to improve on it in all the small ways. Hell, the game plays better than the one next in the series, Gates. Out of the 3 that I’ve played, Explorers is the best one in terms of gameplay.

But I also think it has the best storyline. If you know, you know. If you don’t, play it. Its this emotional rollercoaster with these twists and turns. The basic plot summary is: someone is stealing the time gears, the magic items that keep the flow of time in order. The issue is, my favorite things about the story involves all the plot twists. Its probably nostalgia giving me some more bias, but while playing this time around, the emotional scenes still made me tear up. It is the best plot in a Pokemon game, hands down. Replaying it made me realize it had some tropes I’m not a huge fan of, but surprisingly it was inoffensive and really was only an issue at the end of the post game.

The most notable thing about Sky are the special episodes. They’re 5 short pieces of side content you gain access to throughout playing the main story. They all just add extra background to the world, giving these extra details to the characters and world. Not essential, but if you’re a fan of the game its 100% worth playing. Especially the last one. I can’t really talk about it without spoiling some major plot twist in the game, but if you know, you know.

I hate that my review of this game says so little. I love this game, its such a fantastic game. Is some of that nostalgia talking? Yeah, probably. But I don’t think if it was only nostalgia this game wouldn’t have the cult following it has. If you haven’t already, play any of the Explorers games: time, darkness, sky, whatever. Just play one of them, you won’t regret it.

9 / 10

Salt and Sanctuary (2016)

I feel like the term “souls-like” gets used too much these days. If any game is remotely difficult, it gets used to describe it. But this game? This game deserves the title. It truly is a souls-like game. If you don’t know, Salt and Sanctuary is 2D non-linear action platformer made mostly by one guy, James Silva. It also takes heavy influence from Dark Souls, and I mean heavy. But this isn’t a bad thing. Sure, it borrows ideas straight from Dark Souls, but it implements them in such a way that doesn’t feel like a clone. Like if this was a product of some alternate dimension where FromSoft made 2D games instead of 3D, no one would second guess you. The combat, the environment, the world building, it all rivals that of a Dark Souls game.

But the game isn’t just Dark Souls, no. It has the “non-linear action plaformer” aspect to is. This is to say, its also a Metroidvania. And to me, its a bit of a weaker one. Sure, it has a massive map to explore with tons of secrets to find and pathways to take, but it fails to deliver that core experience I expect from a Metroidvania. To me, exploring in this game is a bit underwhelming. And it primarily has to do with the player’s move set. You only get 5 upgrades that allow for further exploration in the game, and really only two of them effect movement in any meaningful way. This means its pointless to revisit old areas because you can already collect everything on your first go around. And sadly, there aren’t too many interesting things to collect. Because the core part of your power ups come from level ups, the items you find in the open world end up being easily bought consumables or weapons/armor that are only situationally better if at all. On paper, this game is a Metroidvania, and it does a good enough job, just not good enough to stand toe to toe with other “true” Metroidvanias. The focus is really on being souls-like with a Metroidvania flare.

Its not all sunshine and rainbows. The game does a poor job at explaining things, or rather things beyond the very basics. Sure, it teaches what buttons to press to do whatever, but everything beyond that is a bit obtuse and you have to figure it out on your own. Which isn’t the end of the world, I just want to know what something does before I use it. Another issue is the weapon balance. Most weapons play about the same, and the non-melee options end up being clunky. It ends up feeling like there are only a handful of good options and everything should just be ignored unless you need to mix it up for a specific boss. But I think the real worst thing is the lack of a map. Yeah, no map in a Metroidvania. You get to explore this massive sprawling interconnected world, just with no map. You get lost, really easily. And then try using the fast travel system where you have no real idea where it puts you because you have no map to give a frame of reference.

Salt and Sanctuary is a good game. It has its flaws, but delivers a good experience.

6 / 10

Xenoblade Chronicles X (2015)

Xenoblade X was a game I’ve always wanted to play. Ever since I saw it in a Nintendo direct in around 2014, I’ve wanted to play this game. Nearly a decade later, I finally got to give it a try, and needless to say I’m less than impressed. So much so that I don’t even want to finish it.

To explain X in relation to the other games in the series, X is if you took the combat from 1, changed it to mostly focus on the solo player, and all this took place in an open world MMORPG. To some, this might sound fantastic, but to me this the exact opposite of what a Xenoblade game should be. I’ll take my time to explain each of my nitpicks with the game.

I have mixed feelings about the combat. Like I said, the combat is similar to 1. You have your arts pallet which you use during battles, just like 1. But as always, its the small details that make the biggest differences. Something that changes the dynamic of every battle is the removal of a dedicated healer class. Its very interesting to see a game attempt to defy the classic DPS/Tank/Healer trifecta. And in all honesty, the game pulls it off pretty well. While traditional healing arts still exist, the bulk of the healing is done in response to quick time events. Occasionally during battle, a team member will call out for you to accomplish something, and if you achieve whatever the request it, a quick time event will occur and hitting it will heal the entire party a bit. However, this is never communicated to the player in any way, so they end up just seemingly appear at random. These are nice, but the quick time events are actually pretty quick and difficult to hit. Luckily, there are plenty of opportunities during battle, so even if they aren’t hit perfectly you should still be getting good healing. The next change to battles is the removal of chain attacks. Yes, probably one of the most iconic elements of the Xenoblade combat system is removed in X. Instead it gets replaced with Overdrive. This system instead allows for a large amount of arts to be used in a short amount of time. As per usual Xenoblade fashion, its horribly explained. Overdrive can be activated when 3000 TP is accumulated (The TP system is never explained) and gives the player 10 seconds of reduced arts cooldown (plus the addition of a new 3rd cooldown) and increased arts damage. During the Overdrive period, a counter is present. The higher the number, the more damage is output. It goes up every time two yellow or orange arts are used in a row, but using yellow than orange or vice versa will negate any positive bonuses. You can get around this buy using another color art, such as green or blue (which increases the timer) or purple (which increases TP). There are a few other color combinations that can provide beneficial effects, but generally thats all you need to know to effectively use Overdrive. This also means if you have the right combination of arts, you can easily extend the timer for as long as you need which trivializes combat. But the most interesting thing is that this is purely a solo thing. Overdrive is separate of other party members. Of course, this has to do with the game being a MMO which allows player parties, but its an odd choice in a game series where teamwork and the bonds between people is such a major theme. There are more differences to the combat, such as every character having both ranged and melee weapons along side the introduction of Skells (mechs), but these differences are much more minor. Overall, the combat doesn’t fail to please, but the Overdrive system is more than a bit broken, which can be easily exploited to trivialize a lot of the game given the correct build.

But the whole MMO aspect kinda ruins the main story as well. While it has an interesting premise, with the whole Earth being destroyed in an alien conflict and you being some of the few remaining surviving members of the human race, but its just dragged down by all the other elements. I think my biggest annoyance is how absent your player character is in relation to the story. You kinda just get brought along for the ride, you have no personal stake in it (Well, as much as a one of the last surviving humans can have on making sure the human race doesn’t die out). And as the story progresses, this becomes more and more evident. And thats not necessarily a bad thing, the story is interesting enough, the issue is its extremely awkward having you be brought along for the ride.

But the worst part is the whole BLADE thing. Its the organization that is helping colonize the alien planet the games takes place on, but it also forces a bunch of boring MMO tropes into the game. Between each chapter in the story, players are forced to do a bunch of things for BLADE. What this amounts to is a bunch of repetitive quests and boring exploration. The BLADE missions are your typical fodder quests you’d find in any MMO. Go kill X of Y monster type. Go gather Z of item W. Its just boring and nothing. But the part I like the least is the forced exploration. Xenoblade games have never had good exploration. In a sense, they have these big fields with little in them. All items exist as randomly spawning randomly generated items. And they aren’t even things like gear or weapons, its just weird things like “Grinding Squirrel” or “Zedis Twig” or even “Poron Tulip”. Its just this random junk that has no value. So whats the point of going off the main road? There basically is none. Its just, stupid, that such a boring activity is forced upon the player every time they want to progress the story. This was the main reason I dropped the game.

Despite my gripes, I think there still is a good game here. Its just not a game for me. To me, its frustrating, boring, and grindy. I wasn’t having fun with it, and I wasn’t going to keep playing it, but I can still tell that there is something there that is worth playing. I’d say give it a go for yourself, but I don’t think many people still have a Wii U to play it.

3 / 10

Blasphemous (2019)

Wow, another Dark Souls inspired Metroidvania? Crazy, I know, but this game ends up differentiating its self a lot compared to Salt and Sanctuary. While that game was very much a souls-like experience, Blasphemous leans much more into the Metroidvania side and is much better off for it. If you’ve been living under a rock, Metroidvanias are action platformers with a heavy emphasis on exploration and collection. And Blasphemous ends up being a prime example of this. A good sized world to explore, lots of collectables to find, and fun bosses to fight. Its good fun all the way through to the end and always has something interesting to do. Its a good game.

I think the biggest strength in the game comes from its visuals and world building. The pixel art is striking because of its unusual influence. Its heavily inspired by Catholicism, specifically Holy Week in Spain. I’m having trouble putting it into words because I’ve really never seen anything quite like it. But that influence isn’t just left for the visuals, as it also influences the story. Objectively, I wouldn’t say the story is anything spectacular, but a lot of the intrigue comes from piecing it together and understanding your role in the story. Each and every item in the game ends up having a fairly lengthy description to it, which not only helps build the world, but also contributes to the player putting together the story and why they are involved. Its important to the point where paying attention to the right things has an impact as to which ending you get in game. Its these little details having an impact on the game play and how you progress that makes it so fascinating to me.

But other than that, I really don’t have much else to say in terms of the game. There is plenty of interesting stuff to see and do. Its a solid game all around that was a blast to play through. It did nothing wrong, however, it also wasn’t exceptional. Its a fantastic game and one of the better examples in the genre, it just doesn’t have the weight or impact of the best Metroidvanias.

7 / 10

Persona 3 FES (2008)

Persona is a series that many hold in high regard. I’ve known about it for a while, but it wasn’t until recently with Persona 5 getting as big as it did that pushed me towards trying it out. But instead of starting with that one, I decided to go back to its roots, or rather the roots of the more modern incarnations of the series. Persona 1 and 2 are very different in many aspects, it wasn’t until 3 where the games established that formula that players have come to love.

If you somehow haven’t heard, the Persona series focuses on a mix between traditional dungeon crawling game play along with a social simulation aspect. Persona 3 tasks the player with balancing a school and social life by day while also tasking them with exploring a dungeon at night. And I think this premise is great, the fact that the story progresses as the days pass, regardless of what you do with that time, is really fun. It adds this resource management aspect to the game that isn’t found in most other JRPGs.

So by day you focus on your social links. Think of these as a literal manifestation of your relationships with the other characters in game. As they grow, you not only get to know the other characters better and see their stories play out, you also get the ability to create better and stronger Personas. Some of these social link stories are really deep and interesting, getting to see how they grow and change throughout the game is always nice to see. Others are, less stand out, but there are still a ton of good ones its worth trying them all. Sadly, Persona 3 doesn’t make it easy to max out all these social links, so unless you use a guide, your probably won’t see them all in one play though. The player can also spend time working on their various stats, improving social skills like Academics, Courage, or Charm, or improving more combat related stats. Having to manage your time effectively to make the most out of improving social links as well as gaining stat increases is a really fun and engaging process.

However, when night comes around, that is when we get to the part of the game I dislike. The dungeon crawling, Most nights you have the option to go explore the games single dungeon, Tartarus. Now, one dungeon may not seem like a lot, but it is more than enough when you realize its over 250 floors. Luckily you don’t have to do it all in one go, but its still pretty bad. Each floor is randomly generated, which isn’t the end of the world. I like a lot of games that use randomly generated dungeons, rouge-likes being the prime example. But most good rouge-likes have good dungeon generation, Persona 3 does not. Tartarus is the same hallways and corridors and small rooms all the way up. So a lot of it ends up feeling like a repetitive slog while trying to progress in the dungeon.

Now its not all just running around the floors until you find the stairs, there are enemies and combat to be had. And the combat is, err, “good”. Allow me to explain. Combat is straight forward, you have basic attacks, but you also have the ability to call your Persona and have it do something. Basically casting a magic spell, but the Persona system is not just selecting a spell from a menu. Personas can be switched out and changed. Each one has different abilities attached to them, but they also have different strengths and weaknesses. This means having a diverse quantity of Personas available allows for a lot of options and complexity in battle. But its not just finding the Persona and calling it a day, as you can fuse two different Personas to get a new one, and they typically will be stronger and inherit abilities from the two used to create it. But the battles have a bit more than just the Personas to factor in. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, but when you hit those weaknesses it knocks them down. When anyone is knocked down, it takes them a turn to get back up as well as granting the attacker an additional turn. This means by exploiting weaknesses you can deal much more damage on one turn than your would normally be able to do. And on top of that, if all the enemies get knocked down, you can go for an “All Out Attack” and end up doing damage to all enemies at once at the cost of them no longer getting a turn to stand back up. Its an interesting system with a lot of depth to it.

However, you are just one person, but your party is a whole different story. The game only lets you control yourself in battle. Just you, which can lead to some more frustrating situations when in Tartarus. Essentially, its up to the AI to make the right decisions in battle, but you can push them in the right direction. You can assign the AI general tactics to follow, but these are rather limited in ability. Its more akin to “Focus on damage” or “Focus on healing” over anything specific. And while this stuff is fine for normal enemies, it quickly becomes a pain whenever you have to fight anything difficult. I means you are almost completely unable to execute any proper strategy in battles. And this game is not an easy game. And I wouldn’t have a problem with this, but the game prevents you from doing things like grinding to make the game easier. Whenever you go into Tartarus, you risk becoming tired after a while. When any character is tried, they deal less damage and take more, making them nearly useless in battle. So it ends up being something like this: you try to climb Tartarus, your characters get tired along the way, you start avoiding battles in an attempt to get to a checkpoint, you get to a checkpoint, and by the time you arrive everyone is tired and under leveled for the boss/mini-boss that awaits. And because of the time management aspect, you have to be really careful with how you use that time or else its going to backfire on you. And this game is punishing, because you will probably wipe at some point due to its difficultly, you’ll quickly find you have to reload a save whenever you game over. And I found out the hard way. So it doesn’t matter how much progress you make going through Tartarus because if you mess up, have fun doing it all over again. I really do not enjoy this game’s boring dungeon climb, combat with a lack of control, and punishing difficulty.

With that being said, that punishing difficulty really put me off the game. I don’t normally get mad at games, but this one infuriated me. I just couldn’t bring myself to finish it, despite enjoying a good chunk of what I played. The story is good, the music is fun to listen to, and the combat has almost everything it needs to be amazing. Its just that Tartarus hardly feels fun and completely ruins the rest of the game for me. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t recommend not playing. There is still a great game there to play. But its also up for debate what version you play. P3FES is an improved version of the base game, but then theres also the port for the PSP, Persona 3 Portable. P3P adds two notable things, party control (which makes the game much easier given it wasn’t rebalanced for it), and adds a playable female option that has new story content. However, P3P removes the 3D explorable over world in exchange for a visual novel style. I have nothing against this, however it is considered to be a drastic downgrade over both the PS2 versions. Luckily, there is a remake coming out in 2024 that hopefully will have the best of everything, so I might wait for that if your interested in giving the game a go. And frankly, if the remake fixes a lot of my issues with the game, I might give it another try whenever it comes out.

4 / 10

Pokemon Unbound (2022)

Its no surprise that modern Pokemon games have only disappointed me. For me, it was Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon that were the first disappointing games in the series, and Sword and Shield only solidified that as the direction GameFreak was taking the series in. But there was something in the back of my mind, something telling me that there were better Pokemon games out there. Not the spin offs, not the older games, but new, fresh, and exciting games that follow the formula of the main series. And with that, I decided to explore the world of fan games and ROM hacks. While I’ve heard whispers of games like Flora Sky and Light Platinum for years (and I’ve wanted to try them for a while), I wanted to start with something more recent, so I started Pokemon Unbound.

While Unbound may have been based off of Fire Red, its more clear than ever that they are not anywhere near alike. The new graphics and music are apparent right away, but as I started to play I realized there was much more: An updated battle engine, revamped movement options, and tons of quality of life updates. This game is on par with recent releases and even surpasses them in some ways. For starters, it has difficulty options. And its not just like BW2 that makes it a bit harder with higher leveled Pokemon, this game brings carefully crafted boss battles that more so act as puzzles for you to solve. It will really test your resourcefulness on any of the more difficult options, but because it has a difficulty setting, anyone can set it to the lowest and enjoy the game.

While difficulty is nice for people who seek the hardest challenge they can find, I think the biggest appeal is the wealth of new original content this game brings. Gone are the boring hallways and empty fields on the games on the Switch. Routes are full of diverse paths for optional loot and have plenty of areas that are only accessible later in the game which makes the instances of backtracking much more enjoyable. And the locations are diverse, and while not necessarily unique or innovative, the region is memorable and with each route bringing a new batch of Pokemon to catch and train it makes you want to see every corner of what it has to offer. And thats not to mention all the content there is. The missions, mining, DexNav, special battle gimmicks, a new Battle Frontier, new minigames, and so much more. Its a game you can truly sink your teeth into.

Now, with all the new stuff comes the new story, and, well, its a bit edgy. Not that its a bad thing, but often time fan games have a reputation for trying to be more “mature” than the official games only to end up being an edgy, cringey mess. Unbound doesn’t exactly do anything to subvert this trope. Most of the game sees you fighting this evil organization called “The Shadows”. They want to fire the ultimate weapon (from XY). There is a twist about half way through the game thats, well, not exactly executed in the best way. Its interesting enough, and it has quite a bit of fan service that I kinda enjoyed as a long term fan. There is a post game that tries to tie up some loose ends, but fails to really do so. Even in saying all that, I still found the story to be more enjoyable than some of the corny plots GameFreak has recently been cooking up.

I think there is a lot to enjoy with this game. It easily has hundreds of hours of content to enjoy, but even if you aren’t much of a completion, the new content and revamped battle system makes playing through it a blast. If you’re willing to try out something different, this game does not disappoint.

6 / 10

Final Fantasy IV (1991)

To me, Final Fantasy was always the JRPG series. Its something I’ve been wanting to get into for a while, and I finally decided to get into it. Why start with four? Well, while debating where best to start, four kept coming up as one of the best. The first three are considered to be primitive compared to the rest of the series, as four is where a lot of the core elements come together in a Final Fantasy game. The story telling, the gameplay, and the characters are all foundational to the rest of series, or so I’ve been told. So its what I decided to go with, and I can agree with it being “foundational”.

But I think its also important to mention what version I played. This game is over 30 years old and has been re-released and remade across many different consoles and systems. This article by the Mother 3 translator does a good job of comparing various editions, and its what I used to inform my decision. I wanted to play something close to the original experience, but without the horrendous original translation. That led me to the Namingway Edition. After playing it, I’m not exactly sure its the version I’d recommend, but I’ll touch on that at the end.

With that preamble out of the way, I can give my thoughts on the game. To me, the stand out thing was the combat. In a way, it really reminded me of Xenoblade, albeit much simpler. But don’t think its anything like that. It uses the Active Time Battle (ATB) system, a modification on turn based combat. ATB sees characters wait for a meter to fill before they are allowed to act, completely removing the idea of turns. This means battles take place in real time, with both allies and enemies attacking almost whenever. Systems like this tend to feel slow when the number of combatants is few, but when you have a full party and are facing a challenging boss or group of enemies it becomes fast paced and frantic. Having to navigate menus and issue commands while the battle races by and requires you to change your strategy on the fly is very fun. Considering that this system is was uses through IX, I’m excited to see the changes and refinements and tweaks they made to it as the series progressed.

Now, part of the reason I started with IV was because its known for being the first game that really solidified the Final Fantasy emotional storytelling. And, it tries… and fails. That’s not to say it doesn’t have some great moments, there are some strong instances of storytelling through both whats shown and what the player does, but it isn’t enough. Characters have arcs, but when they last maybe 30 minutes at most it feels as if they aren’t even there. Characters end up just doing whatever, especially after the first third of the game. IV also has one of my least favorite tropes in media, not committing to characters death. Nearly every character that “dies” comes back to life in this game. It ruins any tension it would have created because it makes the death meaningless. Aside from the characters, the rest of the story is just, unremarkable. Things seemingly happen just to have an excuse to shuffle the party and characters around. It just feels really awkward most at most points in the story. The rest of the events in the story feel, disjointed. The game takes (some) effort in world building so I can’t say that some of the stuff just blind sides the player, but I can’t help but feel that a lot of it happens for little to no reason except the developers might have thought it was cool. It was really disappointing playing through this game after hearing so much talk and discussion about how good the story was, but it just ended up being disappointing compared to other RPGs that have stories to tell.

As I stated previously, this game has had many versions released, each with their own differences. And while I only played through one and can’t comment on what the definitive version is, I can comment on some deficiencies in the version I played. I know that the most contentious version issue is probably the script. I played a fan translation and only a fan translation, so I can only assume its accurate compared to the other versions. But because I played a fan translation, it also meant I was stuck playing the SNES version. From a raw gameplay perspective, there isn’t anything wrong with that, but it was missing quite a bit that I would have expected. My major issue with it was the lack of information. A lot of things just didn’t have descriptions. Often times items wouldn’t have descriptions, so it was up to trial and error to figure out what they did. This was especially a pain with any equipment. There was no indication anywhere to if it would increase or decrease any stats. It had to be tried on to see if it was beneficial or not. This was terrible when purchasing any because it was unknown if it would be beneficial or a waste of money. The game has the decency to show which party member can equip items when in a shop, but if you pick something up in a dungeon? Have fun guessing. Another thing that just straight up didn’t show information was the spells. Level up messages would tell you if you got a new spell, but you just had to try it out to see what it did. I ended up sticking to a small selection of spells because most had little use anyway as most bosses (where you would want to use them the most) were immune to them. So I ignored so many new spells because using them on standard encounters was a waste of MP and they probably wouldn’t have any impact on boss fights.

To me, these were downsides to the SNES version. A more experienced player might be unphased by these issues, but as a newcomer, I found it quite frustrating. But I think this version also impacted my enjoyment of the story as well. Text boxes appear four lines at a time, and one text box will be shared with many speakers. This means in any given dialogue any sense of conversation pacing is destroyed. Its impossible to tell if characters are taking turns talking or speaking over each other. Frankly, it ruined some of the story moments by having a unclear way of text presentation. In addition to this, a lot of cut scenes had little to no music. This provided no help, as with the ambiguity of the text boxes, the tone was very much unclear. And the moments when it did have some music to bring about emotion, it would often abruptly end because the text box rendering causes dialogue to occur at an accelerated pace.

This is where the other versions of the game come into play. I’ll cut the SNES version some slack, it was one of the first RPGs to release on the console, so much of it was groundbreaking for the time, and it came out in about half a year of the release of the console. The developers had little time to become proficient in programming for the console, so releasing something this impressive for 1991 should be commended. However, these efforts do not hold up today, or even to releases later in the lifespan of the SNES. Good thing the re-releases of this game have improved on it in an iterative manner. I’ve only played the SNES version, so I’m not exactly qualified to tell you the definitive best version, but if I was going for a replay I’d probably spring for the 3D remake. It improves the presentation, it has an accurate translation, and it seems like it would improve the game in all the areas I have issues with (outside the story, you can only do so much to fix that without completely rewriting it). I’ve heard its a much more difficult version of IV, and I found IV to have a fair level of difficulty right until the very end where it ramps up drastically. During my play though, I only had to stop and grind for a bit in two instances, usually because I needed to unlock a spell that enabled me to change my tactics. But even fighting a healthy amount of battles along the way, the end required me to grind for a significant amount of time just to have a fighting chance against the final boss. Then again, I was playing a fan translation that included balance changes, so its hard to say how it stacks up against other releases. The original US SNES release is notorious for being greatly adjusted to the point where grinding is completely optional.

Given all this, I can see why IV gets the praise it does. For 1991, this would have been incredible for a video game. But comparing it to some later SNES titles, it just doesn’t hold up as well. I wouldn’t go as far to say its unlikable or bad, its just not for me. And I think a lot of new players might come into it expecting this grand thing when its only just okay. Give it a try, its worth that much. But don’t sweat it if you never get around to finishing it.

4 / 10

Final Fantasy VIII (1999)

Yeah, more Final Fantasy. I’m trying to play though all of the main line games in the series, so I decided to play a lot more of the, controversial, entries. So, I settled on FF8. Probably because it was the most different compared to the rest. And different it is.

I can’t say how different it is on a story perspective, considering I’ve only played one other Final Fantasy. If you’ve heard anything about it though, its the combat system. FF8 takes a slightly different approach to combat. While it still has the classic ATB system, it completely changes the normal way of thinking about combat with the junction system. What does this mean? Its the the effective removal of equipment and a traditional magic system. Instead of having MP to cast spells, you collect spells from battle, the world, and mini games. These then can be “junctioned” to your stats to improve them and even cause some special effects. Junctioning also allows for giving extra battle commands and other special abilities. This system allows for a lot of customization when it comes to building your party.

And as good as this sounds, its simply isn’t. And it all has to do with those magic spells. Simply put, if you junction a spell to a stat, it causes it to increase. But if you use that spell, your stats go down. So using spells is discouraged. But on top of that, getting the spells in the first place is annoying. There are points where you can get some in the world, but these are few and far between. Most spells with be gathered by drawing them in battle. But this means you end up sitting around during battle just drawing spells. The issue is you have to draw spells for each character, so you end up sitting there just getting hit over and over while you draw tons and tons of spells. Its enough of a grind as is, but its even worse when you consider bosses often have better spells than what you can get at the time. So instead of fighting the boss or actually engaging with the game, you prolong the battle so much longer than it needs to be. Its just no fun spending more time drawing spells than actually playing the game.

But I didn’t mention one method, the mini games. Or rather, mini game. Triple Triad is probably the second most well known thing about this game. And for good reason. Its super simple to get into and super addicting to play. The cards you win from playing the game and be turned into spells with a little bit of work. And this would be a great substitute for grinding, if it wasn’t for the fact that Triple Triad quickly turns into a complete mess of rules. Each new area you go to introduces new rules to the game. While this may seem nice, it quickly becomes messy and confusing, especially when the AI practically cheats and can easily exploit complex rules to destroy you. Its impractical grind for spells this way because Triple Triad ends up being more confusing than enjoyable.

But you know what, there is a way to avoid most of the grinding. This is because the game has scaling difficulty. As you get stronger, so does the world around you. An interesting system for a RPG, usually not having the scaling really lends to a sense of progression. But combining this with the junction system and Triple Triad, it can be abused. It turns out you can get way stronger spells than the game expects you to have at your level with Triple Triad. This allows you to junction your stats to be much higher than they should be, making everything a cakewalk. And while this may seem of limited use, all encounters can easily be avoided and a majority of mandatory fights do not give XP. This means you can get overpowered, and stay overpowered. Its initially fun, but quickly fades as all the challenge of the game disappears. This leaves you with just the story, which is, well, something.

The story is, nonsensical at best. I think its at its best during the first disc. You are a mercenary helping a rebellion take back control from a nation who recently instated an evil witch in a position of power. This is cool, interesting, fun, but when they decide to introduce the fact that the evil witch is actually being possessed by a witch from the far future and all the time travel shenanigans that brings, it just looses its charm. At one point it gets revealed that all the party members grew up in the same orphanage, which I get is supposed to re-enforce the idea of fate that is ever present throughout the game, but it just feels so bizarre and out of left field, especially with the character reactions. The party comes to this realization and then just, shrugs it off. A lot of things in the story feel like that. Bizarre things that lead into a greater purpose, but just feel awkward and stilted in execution.

But I think all of that really ends up being a back drop for a love story between Squall and Rinoa. Except, its kinda poorly executed. Most of the time Squall spends being a quintessential emo teen. He’s distant and a lone wolf. He only is doing what hes doing because of his work. Most of the time his response to the party is “Whatever.” Its refreshing to not have such a lucky go happy protagonist constantly spouting about the power of friendship. Its also nice to see how he reacts to getting put into a position of power. At a point in the game, Squall is asked to lead the entire mercenary school in the fight against the evil witch from the future, and hes confused and upset by this. Rightfully so! He doesn’t want to be thrust into this position, he didn’t ask for this. Hes not a friendly or popular guy, he just wants to keep his head down and do his work, not stand out from the crowd. Its this great bit of characterization that is honestly ruined by the forced romance with Rinoa.

The relationship with Rinoa is very much forced into the plot. At the start Rinoa is this mysterious girl that has some moments with Squall, but he fails to be charmed by these actions. Later, we come to find out that Rinoa is dating Squall’s rival, Seifer. Eventually Seifer is presumed to be dead, and Rinoa is rightfully upset about this, but it feels like she goes from grieving the loss of her boyfriend to hitting up Squall in too short a time. And Squall doesn’t exactly reciprocate these feelings throughout the majority of the game. It doesn’t matter how hard his friends try to push him to do so, he just stays in his anti social ways until near the end of the game where he displays this sudden rush of emotions. I can’t help but wish the execution of this romance was so much better given its the focus of the game. It should have been a much more gradual shift from Squall being cold to him being affectionate.

And the rest of the party feels flat, especially compared to the development those two get. They end up having these basic back stories that have little to do with the story other than the whole being from the same orphanage thing. It doesn’t help that the junction system makes all characters nearly functionally the same. What’s the point of using a different character if everything about them is determined by junctioning? I think my least favorite is Irvine. He just kinda, shows up. He is the only one that can use a gun, so he gets recruited to aid in this assassination mission. It doesn’t work out, and he just ends up sticking around for the rest of the game just because. He doesn’t exactly serve as comic relief, and he doesn’t exactly serve to drive the story forward. He just felt like the least connected character to the rest of the cast, and just like the rest of them all he did was egg Squall on to lead the mercenaries and date Rinoa.

I think that this game has some undeniable charm. I like Squall, maybe if only because he reminds me a bit of myself at that age. I like the setting, this sci-fi set up that still has a ton of fantasy elements. I like the idea behind the junction system, giving the player such control and flexibility in how they play is so enjoyable. I liked the music, the graphics, exploring the world, and playing Triple Triad. There was a lot of fun to be had in my time with this game. I want to like it, I really do, but it just fails me in so many fundamental ways. The core systems and ideas are fantastic in concept, they just have such poor execution. Frankly its a fantastic experience that really only a select few will enjoy. To me, it just didn’t live up to the potential it had.

4 / 10

Pokemon Crystal Clear (2017)

This was one of the first “open world” Pokemon mods. Its just Crystal, but with changes to make it open world. Its probably the best game, given the inclusion of two regions. But if you know me, I’m not a huge fan of open world games. I really only decided to give this game a go because it was so popular, and that must be for a good reason, right?

Well, it is cool. The open world nature of the game is done incredibly. All obstacles are removed so you can truly go anywhere right off the bat. It makes the process much simpler by allowing the player to select things like starter and starting location. It makes sense for an open world game, and really makes it feel like you’re going on your own Pokemon journey. In fact, if you feel so inclined, they even have a tool to inject a custom player sprite of your creation. That is one of the strongest aspects of it, that freedom and control it gives to the player.

But that comes at a cost. It removes everything that makes Crystal unique, at least in my mind. Sure, its open world, but that also means it completely removes the story. No team rocket, no rival, no nothing. Its just a bit, disappointing. By no means am I saying that the plot of Crystal is good, but rather I feel less inclined to play a game that is more straightforward. Running from town to town is much less of an adventure, even if you can ping pong back and forth between regions.

I know a point of contention in wider internet discourse about this game is the new content. I’m not talking about the quality of life features, those are fantastic. They even rival the quality of life added in the modern titles, but its rather the new locations and trainers added. The new locations I don’t have much issue with. I think adding new content to such a well known region is well needed, especially in an open world game. They’re all off to the sides and out of the way. Easy to ignore, but what isn’t easy is the new NPCs. There are a few new NPCs scattered throughout the world, each acting as a mini-boss of sorts. None of them are mandatory, so you can ignore them. That is until you get to the elite four. The old elite four and champion have been removed and replaced with the new original ones. To me, it feels a bit weird. So much is done to keep everything as it was, why change this all of a sudden? Its out of place.

Decisions like this confuse me. So much was added and changed to make it feel like a more modern, definitive version of Crystal, but yet it removes the stuff that makes Crystal worth playing as a game. It doesn’t help that it still has a bad level curve, even with the level scaling the game has. It sits in this weird spot for me. Its not mechanically bad. In fact, its a joy to play, but everything surrounding the gameplay just feels, wrong. And I think thats a good way of putting it. Not bad, just wrong.

4 / 10

Pokemon Glazed (2012)

Back in 2014 or so a young me heard whispers of a new Pokemon game. One not made by Game Freak, but by the fans. This game was Pokemon Glazed, and it wasn’t until nine years later I actually played it. I think back in the day I had no clue how to work an emulator so I ended up watching some lets play of it instead, but now, I’m not so stupid. So, what do I think?

This is a game of all time. The plot? Corny at best. The gameplay? Standard Pokemon Affair. The battles? Trainers have bad AI, poorly created teams, and a horrendous level curve in the worst of times. I still really enjoyed it. I think walking through my experience will paint a good picture of why.

The game holds nothing back. The first battle? Its against a talking Pikachu. Why? Because its “cool” in a “early 2010s edgy Pokemon fan” way. The game does not hold back on this type of fan service thing. All Pokemon talk in this game, directly to the player. Its bizarre and out of place, but it has this “cool” factor to it. Anyway, on your way to the 1st gym, you encounter the evil team doing evil things, and at some point you get transported to an alternate dimension. Why? Honestly I don’t even think the developer knew, because if you keep playing it makes no sense. Later you find out this alternate dimension is actually the real world, the human world, where Pokemon don’t exist. This happens because the evil team wants to catch Mew. I don’t even know what Mew has to do with alternate dimensions, I don’t think the developer knew either. This frankly does nothing for the plot because it makes no sense. It just exists to be “cool”. And I love that. Its bad, but its bad in that good way.

I will admit, running around the Tunod region is actually pretty cool. It has some diverse locations while feeling somewhat cohesive. Or maybe I was too busy enjoying how corny the plot was to really care. But you don’t get to explore the region uninterrupted, oh no. You have a myriad of rivals. Could I name any of them? No. Do they have any plot significance? Also no. Do they have any real character traits? Nope. Like seriously, you have these random rivals that just randomly show up. I swear there are like four or five of them, and I think the developer probably forgot about them for a long period of time before suddenly remembering them and shoving them it. They have no characterization, I couldn’t tell you anything about them except they have different hair color so they’re more important than random trainers. They leave the same way as they appear, sudden and with no explanation.

Anyway, throughout the journey you have more and more run ins with the evil team, Team Fusion. I touched on it earlier, but they are after Mew. Why? To make TMs that can taught to any Pokemon. Honestly cool, I think the idea of having such a benefit from a morally questionable source is cool. Is it right for trainers to capture and exploit these legendary Pokemon? Should we be disrupting the natural order of the world? Except the execution is more “Rahh we’re evil!!!” than “This is a complex moral dilemma”. And like I said earlier, there is zero explanation as to why the hunt for Mew causes some alternate dimension shenanigans. Even worse is that you team up with the Tunod champion to take down Team Fusion, but the champion’s ace is Darkrai. So if the whole thing is about it being wrong to capture legendaries, why does one of the good guys do it? And he is not the only one that has legendaries on their team. Frankly, there are even more glaring continuity errors later in the game, but its pretty clear the developer just wanted to finish it at that point.

Either way, we reach the climax and finally defeat Team Fusion. We get the bad guys to stop being evil, the team disbands, and the leader’s wife divorces him. Is that supposed to be like dark? Its just so out of place, there is nothing tonally like that in the game at all. It just… happens. The weirdest thing is, they have a son that has been helping out and hes just completely unphased by it. Doesn’t care at all. And there is nothing leading off that final fight. Its just you beat the bad guys, he gets divorced, and you move onto the elite four and champion. There is no pacing with anything, no real tension or stakes. Its so corny and cheesy, I just cant help but love it.

But this game has more up its sleeve, becoming champion is no where near the end. Turns out, you can visit Johto! This is cool, I don’t think fan games at the time did something like this, and well who doesn’t like a bit more content to celebrate your victory? I had just played Crystal Clear, so replaying Johto wasn’t at the top of my list. I actually considered stopping then and there, but I’m so glad I continued. After running around a bit and collecting a few badges, it becomes clear that this isn’t the same Johto. Its established pretty quickly that this is a post GSC Johto. The old league is destroyed, new settlements have appeared, gym leaders have shifted around. But don’t get me wrong, all the routes and towns remain largely the same, no major deviations from what you would expect. But Glazed has something up its sleeve, more story. Turns out the wife wasn’t content with giving up, she re-established Team Fusion to do, something. I don’t think its ever made explicit, but shes running around Johto burning forests (literally) and capturing legendaries.

On your quest to stop the evil Team Fusion once again, you find out that Johto now has organized religion. Thats right, there is now a religion dedicated to worshiping Arceus and other legendary Pokemon. Its just bizarre, who thinks of this? And its very ambiguous as to their position. Are they good? They don’t seem to like what Team Fusion is doing. Are they bad? They kidnapped Jasmine and locked her up in a dungeon. Like, why? Its so stupid, but I love it. Its a clear cut attempt at being “edgy” or “dark”, but it ends up being hilarious for how bad it is.

Honestly the Johto plot ends up being entirely nonsense. Remember when I mentioned Team Fusion burning forests? They do so to catch Celebi. Why? No idea. They don’t even use Celebi in any meaningful way. They don’t even use any of the legendary Pokemon they catch. They just cause terror and piss off the local religious group. Its so corny, so stupid, so bad, so “edgy”. I find it hilarious and just ate it up. Eventually you end up causing the wife to give up, or at least force Team Fusion to disband. She disappears on her own quest to do something, and the whole thing with her in Johto served zero purpose. Its dumb and stupid, but some how that made it better than the Tunod arc for me.

Eventually you get to the Johto league. Its been gutted and replaced with some new and returning faces. If theres one thing this Johto stretch has, its fan service, and I enjoyed it. Some of it did feel a bit awkward at times, inserting some weird events that felt out of place/character for Johto and its characters, but I cannot deny I didn’t enjoy it. I liked seeing some more notable minor characters get representation. I did not like the major level spike from last gym to the league. Its close to 10 levels from the last gym leader to the first elite four member. Ugh, not fun.

The game still isn’t over. Oh no, it has one more region for you to run through before its done, the Rankor region. Well, “region”. Its closer to half, more so a collection of 6 island towns you run between. It serves as a final boss rush, going between gym battle, rival battle, fusion wife battle, etc. And I think the developer just kinda, gave up at this point. The plot? Nonsensical. The dialogue is even worse. Slowly throughout the game, more and more swears have been introduced. Before, there was an attempt at avoiding the usage. Safe replacements were often used, but the further and further you get, the more swears work their way into it. Its so corny, its just an attempt at being “dark” and “edgy” and “mature” in such a naive way. I would laugh out loud every time I saw “fuck” or similar be used. And the dialogue from the NPCs just becomes worse. Constant fourth wall breaking, this weird dissonance with characters and the situation, and just a lower quality in general for this filler text. I’m having trouble putting it into words because it was objectively bad, but I loved how bad it was. Like Hawaii gets name dropped. Hawaii, the real world location. There was a whole plot earlier about how the two worlds shouldn’t merge, and some random NPC just casually name drops a place from another world. It such a violent break in continuity, its so stupid and frustrating, but its also hilarious just seeing how little care there is left for the story. Theres a point where the Pope in mentioned. How organized is this Arceus religion that they have a Pope? Are they that wide spread? Why don’t they have any presence in Tunod? This last region is just filled with this kind of dialogue and it was the best because of how dumb it was.

Rankor is more of the same. Like I explained, its really just a boss rush. There are some minor battles, but most of it is just straight line from one major battle to the next. Beat some gym leaders, stop the divorced wife, beat up some guy from the religion, save the day, become the champion for the third and final time. And thats it, you’re done! For real this time, you actually get the hall of fame thing for this Pokemon league, unlike the past two. Unless you want the legendaries, but I had my fill and stopped there.

Overall, this was just really bizarre. Its such a product of its time. This was finished in some capacity in 2014, basically a decade ago. Its rough, it has some bugs (even with later fan patches), it lacks a lot of the modern QOL in newer games, its overly edgy and dumb and stupid, but I just loved my time with it. There was just some simplicity to it, some nostalgia. I can really respect the amount of passion and work that goes into something like this. If you come into this expecting anything near current standards for fan games, don’t even bother. But if you want to relive being a fan in the early 2010s with all its cringe, this is a must play. Frankly, I’d rate it higher if I wasn’t trying to be somewhat objective with this list.

I also cannot forget to mention the incredible work TrainerX493 has done after the completion of the hack. They’ve helped bring it into the modern age with their 9.1 version of it. It may not be the same as a modern hack like Unbound, but hey, that would ruin a lot of the charm it has.

5 / 10

Persona 5 Royal (2019)

People have talked the talk about this game since forever. I’ve heard nothing about how incredible this game was, it was nearly a once in a generation JRPG, one of the best games ever. And I was hearing this ever since 2017. But I wasn’t able to play it until it got ported onto everything else. After sitting around in my backlog for long enough, I finally got to give it a go.

This game is destroyed by its pacing. I want to like this game. I want to enjoy this game. I want to have fun playing this game. But I cant. If you don’t know, Persona splits the players time between dungeon crawling and social simulation. This is an interesting concept, as the time the player spends in the social simulation ends up benefiting in the dungeons in various ways. Given all the deadlines that exist, it adds some strategic depth to how you spend your time. Do you spend time in the dungeon making progress, or do you spend time with friends for buffs, or work a job to afford better gear?

My issue comes from the absolute horrible pacing. Because of how the game rewards good time management, it means players are incentivized to complete dungeons as fast as possible. For example, the game will give you 30 days to complete a dungeon, but to make the most of your time you’ll do it in 2-3 days. This means you’re left with 4 weeks of nothing. Sure, using this time helps with preparing for the next dungeon, but the content becomes a slog. In short bursts its interesting, a majority of what is done are the social links. These are text heavy side stories that give more development to the cast. It gives more depth to the cast and creates a believable world. Not all of them are created equal, especially the main cast. It creates this issue where the main cast has the majority of their development in the main story and all of their social links are meaningless side plots. But even within the average social link, a lot of it feels like filler. A lot of times you’ll do a social link, level it up, but nothing will have happened during that interaction. It just ends up feeling like wasting your time, especially if you aren’t invested with the character’s social link.

Otherwise, I find it hard to complain about this game. Everything about is is great, music, visuals, graphics, gameplay, all fantastic. I enjoyed the combat system quite a bit, but I feel like it was a bit poorly used. For normal encounters it worked fine. Giving extra turns for exploiting enemies weaknesses rewards skilled gameplay and helps weaker encounters go by quickly. It works even better for mini-boss encounters, you can hit them hard, but they won’t hesitate to hit you just as hard. Where it falls apart are the actual bosses. They just act as these massive damage sponges. The game tries to add unique gimmicks to them to add more strategy, but often times they either don’t trigger often enough to create anything interesting or using them is pointless when you can easily do more damage normally.

I will admit, I did not finish this game. For those die hard Persona fans, I made it through Futaba’s palace before dropping it. It just didn’t respect my time, and I gave it a chance. I spent 60 hours in game, and nothing about it made me want to spend another 60 hours or so to finish it. It really is a 100+ hour game, but its bloated and doesn’t respect your time. So many better games to play, and so many better uses of my time.

4 / 10

vivid/stasis (2023)

This was one of the coolest games I played this year. Then again, its also one of the last games I played this year, so there is a bit of recency bias in play. But I think its still worth the praise I give it.

vivid/stasis is primarily a rhythm game, and a pretty good one at that. Its your typical 4 lane rhythm game, the notes scroll down a lane and you hit the right key when it hits the judgment line. Where it gets more interesting is with the “Bumper Notes”. These notes are spread across two lanes, but they can be hit with either key. This adds a lot to how you read and play the chart, as it allows for a lot of diversity in how you play. If there are several bumper notes in a row, do you play them as jacks (the same note over and over) or trills (alternating between two keys)? There are other possible patterns too. It adds quite a lot to the gameplay, making it a lot more interesting to master each chart.

It also has a pretty good song selection. It is a bit annoying as it forces song unlocks, a bit of a pet peeve I have regarding rhythm games. However, I didn’t find it too annoying. The game has two currencies, one for the song shop and the other for the story mode. However, the game makes it very easy to grind these out, as you can increase the difficulty to get more of one or both. It makes it much easier to get large amounts of the currencies, but it also encourages chasing of better and better scores by playing on a more strict difficulty.

But a story mode? In my rhythm game? More likely than you think. The story is presented in a visual novel format. I know a lot of people don’t like this format, but reading isn’t going to kill you. The story is a mystery, and its pretty well written. You can unlock more chapters by paying in game currency, until something strange happens. Not in the story, but rather the game itself presents a puzzle. Puzzle is underselling it, as its actually an ARG. I’m not too huge into ARGs, but I found it pretty fun to solve, especially because it ties into the story. After clearing the ARG portion, its even a bit more exciting because it leads into a boss song that ties into what happened in the story. Its really a cool touch.

To summarize, vivid/stasis is part rhythm game, part visual novel, and part ARG. Its super cool, super awesome, and super worth your time. Its also free! So honestly, go start downloading it, finish reading my post, and then go play it. There is also a fishing minigame, so you know its worth your time.

7 / 10

Honorable Mentions

Not all my gaming experiences this year were wholly new. I spent some time revisiting and replaying some titles. These felt more appropriate to include as an aside instead of letting each get their own dedicated section.

Calamity Mod Infernum Mode is a bit of an interesting case. If you recall, I did play a mod of Terraria called “Calamity Mod” last year. I thought it was an enjoyable experience, but during the spring I wanted to revisit the mod. I thought to my self, “What better way to do it than add more difficulty?” Enter Infernum Mode, a mod of a mod. It adds an additional difficulty setting that revamps all the boss AI in the game. And if you ask me, its alright. I previously stated that I found Calamity to be a bit easy, even on the hardest official difficulty at the time. So I was looking forward to trying a new level of difficulty, but in all honesty, I didn’t find it much harder. Sure, the bosses had different and more unique AI, but each boss took about the same amount of tries as my previous play though. If you’ve played Calamity before and are looking for something different, its worth a try. Just a note, I played this a few months before the final release of the mod. The 1.9 update for Infernum added a ton of content and reworks that I didn’t experience.

What is there to say about Left 4 Dead 2? This game is a classic. Certified banger. If you haven’t heard about it, its a 4 player co-op zombie shooter made by Valve. Just saying that should explain everything you need to know. I had a ton of fun just hopping on with my friends and playing a map or two every now and then. Everything about it is great. The shooting, the graphics, the mechanics, the maps, everything is the of the quality you would expect with a Valve game. The best part to me is the massive modding support this game has. Customize the game to your hearts content, make it the gritty zombie game you want it to be, or change it to be full of memes and laugh at the stupidity. If you haven’t played it, it goes on sale for super cheap all the time. Grab it and grab some friends for a great time.

Now if L4D2 is a classic, Minecraft is a real classic. This game is so hard to write about for me. Its my favorite game of all time, and I should be able to write forever about it, but its such a ubiquitous game that nearly everything has been said about. I love this game, it takes hundreds of hours from me each year. I’ve spent time playing it both alone and with friends this year, it never disappoints.

If you liked Half Life, your gonna like Half Life: Opposing Force. I mean, its literally an expansion to the base game. It give a new short-ish campaign for you to play though. I don’t really have a whole lot to say because its pretty much just more Half Life. If you liked that, your gonna like this. But even then, its not a must play for anyone looking to experience the whole Half Life series.

Playing a MMO is something that I think every gamer should do. As a self proclaimed gamer myself, my MMO of choice is Old School RuneScape. Its quite an interesting game with nearly 20 years of history and updates, but it also as an incredible amount of community involvement. It always makes it fun to come back, see what has changed, what the community is going on about, and to just enjoy the game. And honestly, what a game it is. If you didn’t know, its a revival of the 2007 version of RuneScape, but its taken a different path then the main game has. Content wise, theres a lot, and it can mostly be split into two parts. There is a lot of great content to engage with, questing, bossing, and doing raids are always good fun. But my favorite part of the game comes from its ability to just play it in the background while relaxing and doing something else. This makes grinding a lot more enjoyable compared to other games. OSRS has a ton of content that can be both engaged actively and passively, I always find it to be a great time.

I have a group of friends I often play games with. We typically pick something more action packed to play, games like Terraria or Risk of Rain 2. But we played something unexpected that ended up being really fun. Civilization VI ended up quite a pleasant surprise. The classic turn based strategy game series really proved itself to me in the few games I played with my friends. It has a ton of depth to it and I feel like I barely sunk my teeth into it. Coming up with a strategy, planning your moves, adapting to the events that occur, and watching things develop is incredibly satisfying and fun. And I think to myself, “Man, this is fun, why haven’t I tried something like this earlier?” But then I remember how much of a commitment games like these are. These grand strategy games while having the ability to provide an incredible amount of fun, they also require an incredible amount of commitment. Both in terms of time and learning all the systems.

For about a month this year I had fairly consistent access to an arcade with rhythm games. As a fan of this genre of games, I leapt at the chance to try some of these unique experiences. There are quite a few of them, so I’m going to just group them all together in this short section. Sound Voltex is probably the closest to a traditional rhythm game. Your standard four lanes where you have six buttons and two knobs to hit the oncoming notes. Thats right, this four lane game has 2 extra buttons for some special FX notes, and the two knobs control the lasers in the game. What this ends up doing is creating a fast paced, frantic feeling game as the charting forces you to move your hands all across the controller to hit the notes. Its quite fun, but can also be a bit frustrating to learn because of how different it is. Gitadora, or rather GuitarFreaks and DrumMania, are a duo of games inspired by playing actual instruments. GuitarFreaks is pretty straight forward to understand, if you know Guitar Hero, you know what to expect from this. Sure, there are some differences, but I think the most interesting part is that you also have the option to play the bass part of songs. Very cool, especially when some songs have some fun bass lines. DrumMania is well, a drum simulator. This one is pretty easy to understand when you play on a recreation of a drum set. It took me a bit to get used to it as the layout of drums differs from how they show the notes, which is a physical limitation of having an accurate drum layout. Gitadora fun to play, especially if you want to try drums, play the bass part, or just rock out to some music from Japan. But I know what you’re thinking, when am I going to talk about the quintessential arcade rhythm game, DDR? Well, DDR is kinda lame when compared to Pump It Up*. Pump, at a high level, is just DDR but with 5 panels to hit instead of 4. Where it differs is in its charting. To me at least, Pump’s charting far surpasses that of DDR’s, with more fun foot work, plenty of doubles charts, and even co-op charts, there is a ton to experience. And while Pump and DDR may be “dancing games”, I found myself gravitating towards a few other games that deliver more true dancing experiences. DANCE aROUND delivers a much more real dance experience as you have to follow along with the choregraphy. The game itself is pretty relaxed on how precise you follow it, which I find to be a bit of a let down, but it does allow for a lot of freedom on how you follow the dance. Personally I prefer something a bit more strict, but I still enjoy giving it my all, even if I’m dancing poorly for the whole arcade to see. But there is another dance game I enjoy, and thats Dancerush Stardom. The game focuses only on the player’s feet, making sure their in the right position at the right time. This means there is a huge focus on shuffling. But the game is super easy to pick up, and once you figure out how to do the running man properly, it feels like the game just opens up and you can really start going crazy. Because the game is only focused on the horizontal position of your feet, it really allows for a lot of creativity in your performance. That combined with the flashy dance floor it has makes it a blast regardless of your dancing skills.

There is something to be said about games that you can just, pick up and play. For me, that game was Pokemon Picross. Its a simple puzzle game, just fill in the boxes based on some hints. Its simple, but there is something deeply satisfying about mastering it and effortlessly solving puzzles. The only thing special about this version is the puzzles end up being pictures of Pokemon. If you’re into this type of game, its worth a go.

May as well mention it as I’m not done with it, but I started Xenoblade Chronicles 3 right at the end of the year. I’m enjoying it so far, but my full thoughts will come in next year’s post. Its very interesting to play, especially keeping 1 and 2 in my mind. Sorry to tease something that’s so far away, but I just wanted to mention it here.

Concluding Remarks

I played a lot of games this year. More than last year, but honestly it doesn’t feel like it. If I had to take a guess, its because I didn’t play a ton of good games. If you compare my ratings to any sort of critic ratings, you’ll see they’re much more harsh. And I really do think its because a lot of games get inflated ratings. I don’t think I played any “bad games”, but if you saw some reviewer give a game a 4/10 you would think its terrible, wouldn’t you?

But I don’t think me giving a lot of ratings between 4 and 6 solved anything, because its the same as everything getting a rating between 8 and 10. Sure, when I put everything in the middle region, when something stands out, you know it stands out. But I wrote a lot more about some relatively mediocre games than some games I liked. Trying to sum my thoughts up into a single number doesn’t work.

Rather, I think the biggest issue is me thinking about these as something close to a review. They aren’t. I think most of them end up being ramblings about the vibes I felt playing the game over anything close to a comprehensive review. This is fine, it ends up being more of a gaming journal than anything else. Going forward, I’ll probably end up taking this approach for the next year. But if you (for some reason) like my reviews, I plan on keeping the scores I give to each game.