Board 8 > Para's top 100 games of the decade, 2010-2019

(+) Yeah! (+)

Lopen posted...

I think so too. Maybe you're just better at Mega Man games than when you played MM3, Leonhart, if it's been a while.

I've been replaying them all recently on the Legacy Collection. I think 9 might be more difficult overall, but it's not cheap difficulty like 3 is. It feels good to get past a hard part in 9.

Also I would argue MM2 isn't any harder overall than DKC2! But generally I would say out of the ones I've played (haven't gotten to 10 or 11 yet), only 1, 3, 9, and maybe 7 are hard. I don't think it's just the charged Buster either. They don't have very many difficult platforming segments. The games kind of transitioned into being more focused on the combat, which is why 9 is a breath of fresh air

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Yeah I tend to agree that only the platforming tends to be terribly difficult in the Mega Man series. The health bars are a little forgiving for death by damage to be a huge concern, especially with E-Tanks.

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I have some strong feelings about CrossCode. I absolutely adore the premise, aesthetics, and gameplay.

The puzzles are good and the boss fights rewarding. The platforming and exploration is complex, if infuriating- as you mentioned.

The reason why I abandoned the game after maybe 20 hours was because of the pacing. Both in story and gameplay loop.

The overworld grinding and exploring and dungeon puzzling and boss fights are all good to great, but once you start a dungeon, you're stuck in there for the next few hours. Once you're done with a dungeon, you're not going to see another one for even longer. When you want to explore a new area, you'd better kill robot rabbits for 30 minutes first and maybe craft some armor

I didn't like the dungeon vs sleep time mechanic in the persona series- it was always to your advantage to burn through a dungeon in a single game night- but it at least gave you a choice

There are about three or four different games in cross code (grinding and crafting, dungeon puzzles, dungeon bosses, exploration "puzzles") , and I don't get to choose which to play when I boot it up

Lastly, and this is a design choice meant to simulate the doldrums of mmo play, the story is just too slow moving for me.

Everything is pretty interesting for the first few hours. It sets up a premise and a lot of mysteries. The organization of the theme park's history vs the real planet's history vs all the players' real lives vs the protagonist's predicament is intriguing.

But at about 2 hours they dump you in the mmo and say "play", and nothing related to the main plot happens for the following 15.

Maybe I quit at just the wrong time, or I'm at the wrong stage of life to get sucked into such an involved game, but I felt like the game was not respectful of my time and agency

Man, I want to love the game. It gets a lot right and is rough in these few ways. I'm really glad it exists. It's the modern adaptation of getting lost in a SNES fever dream where you're six years old and only allowed to play an hour a day and the game just goes on forever and you wish you could burn through the game faster because you like the characters and world and want to see where they go.

This is the risk of big, complex games like this. Pacing is the easiest thing to sacrifice.

I will probably go back to the game someday and hack my save file to skip the grinding and crafting. I'm just not ready yet

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One of the main appeals to SNES JRPGs to me is that they're often short and sweet; Chrono Trigger being one of the best examples of that. CrossCode sounds like the opposite.
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Apparently it only takes 30 to beat, which isn't too bad, so what do I know. I was probably playing inefficiently


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I had never given Darkest Dungeon much of a look but holy balls this looks right up my alley !

Switch version is hopefully fine that's the route I'm going to go.

banananor posted...

When you want to explore a new area, you'd better kill robot rabbits for 30 minutes first and maybe craft some armor

Only if you want to

and you wish you could burn through the game faster because you like the characters and world and want to see where they go.

You can. The game gives youna good number if settings to make the game go by faster if that's what you want

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banananor posted...

I have some strong feelings about CrossCode. I absolutely adore the premise, aesthetics, and gameplay.

The puzzles are good and the boss fights rewarding. The platforming and exploration is complex, if infuriating- as you mentioned.

The reason why I abandoned the game after maybe 20 hours was because of the pacing. Both in story and gameplay loop.

The overworld grinding and exploring and dungeon puzzling and boss fights are all good to great, but once you start a dungeon, you're stuck in there for the next few hours. Once you're done with a dungeon, you're not going to see another one for even longer. When you want to explore a new area, you'd better kill robot rabbits for 30 minutes first and maybe craft some armor

I didn't like the dungeon vs sleep time mechanic in the persona series- it was always to your advantage to burn through a dungeon in a single game night- but it at least gave you a choice

There are about three or four different games in cross code (grinding and crafting, dungeon puzzles, dungeon bosses, exploration "puzzles") , and I don't get to choose which to play when I boot it up

Lastly, and this is a design choice meant to simulate the doldrums of mmo play, the story is just too slow moving for me.

Everything is pretty interesting for the first few hours. It sets up a premise and a lot of mysteries. The organization of the theme park's history vs the real planet's history vs all the players' real lives vs the protagonist's predicament is intriguing.

But at about 2 hours they dump you in the mmo and say "play", and nothing related to the main plot happens for the following 15.

Maybe I quit at just the wrong time, or I'm at the wrong stage of life to get sucked into such an involved game, but I felt like the game was not respectful of my time and agency

Man, I want to love the game. It gets a lot right and is rough in these few ways. I'm really glad it exists. It's the modern adaptation of getting lost in a SNES fever dream where you're six years old and only allowed to play an hour a day and the game just goes on forever and you wish you could burn through the game faster because you like the characters and world and want to see where they go.

This is the risk of big, complex games like this. Pacing is the easiest thing to sacrifice.

I will probably go back to the game someday and hack my save file to skip the grinding and crafting. I'm just not ready yet

If you're in the desert area I will say that that is the slowest part of the game and you're not far from some really major stuff going down. Plot-wise, everything is a pretty slow burn from the start of Bergen Trail through the end of Autumn's Fall, but after that it really kicks into high gear and I don't think lets up very much afterwards (aside from one very long segment of dungeoning).

I do think these complaints are valid - I spent 60 hours on this game but I generally will do every optional thing I can see available to me before continuing on with the main thread of the game, and this was one where I WANTED to spend 60 hours. I think you could do it much faster if you rush through it, I'm not sure how much grinding is necessary (and if it is you can just drop the difficulty slider, there's no shame in doing this imo)

I do think the game's pacing is a bit weird because while I did enjoy the dungeons and the puzzles, they're a lot. I fortunately really enjoyed every phase of this game (except perhaps the exploration puzzles) so it didn't bother me too much, but I did put the game down once or twice because I just wasn't mentally prepared to take on the dungeons. Once I actually took them on though I enjoyed the hell out of them.

linid0t posted...

I had never given Darkest Dungeon much of a look but holy balls this looks right up my alley !

Switch version is hopefully fine that's the route I'm going to go.

Hopefully the controls are better, because theyre abysmal on Vita

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I haven't been keeping up I'm slowly getting there, has Dead Cells made an appearance >_>

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Hopefully the controls are better, because theyre abysmal on Vita

You more or less have to use the touchscreen, but the Switch screen being decently sized helps. I gave up on the Vita version pretty quickly, but I enjoyed playing the Switch version.

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TheArkOfTurus posted...

You more or less have to use the touchscreen, but the Switch screen being decently sized helps. I gave up on the Vita version pretty quickly, but I enjoyed playing the Switch version.

I legitimately forgot my switch was even touch screen...

... the switch has a touch screen!?

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I forget I can play it docked, sometimes.

Dunno how Darkest Dungeon would work like that. Maybe it supports motion controls?

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I typed Darkest Dungeon vita controls into Google and apparently they released a patch for the controls specifically.

Thats good

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Whew, finally caught up! I didn't read every thing but I've enjoyed your list.

Out of everything the one question I have, or more just thing I don't get, is as someone is seems huge into indie games and Nintendo, why would you not be interested in watching the Nindies/Indie World showcase?? For some reason that just stuck out as super odd lol.

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LadyVyxx posted...

I haven't been keeping up I'm slowly getting there, has Dead Cells made an appearance >_>

Yes, somewhere in the 40's

Waluigi1 posted...

Whew, finally caught up! I didn't read every thing but I've enjoyed your list.

Out of everything the one question I have, or more just thing I don't get, is as someone is seems huge into indie games and Nintendo, why would you not be interested in watching the Nindies/Indie World showcase?? For some reason that just stuck out as super odd lol.

Didn't expect them to show anything new; most of the indie games that come out on the Switch have already been on Steam for months or years. This, combined with it happening in the morning in my time, makes it a highly skippable event. I could not have predicted that something like Cadence of Hyrule would be announced during it - even very-good case scenarios for what they could have announced would have been something I would be happy to catch the news of afterwards, it would have taken a beyond-my-wildest-dreams scenario to make me want to tune in as it was happening, and it just so happened that a beyond-my-wildest-dreams scenario occurred.

I'm gonna try to finish this list soon I promise

Now I'm playing Mega Man 10. I've beaten all the Robot Masters. I think 9 is better so far, and I don't think 10 has been particularly difficult. I do appreciate some of the quality of life upgrades, even minor ones, and Strike Man might be one of my favorite stages ever.

We'll see what I think after the Wily stages!

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#5





Years of release: Oh, god, hahaha. Like, 2013-present (PC early access)? I picked it up in 2016 and it came out on Steam early access in 2018 but it's still not finished
Beaten?: N/A

It's SpyParty! The best new eSport you've never heard of!

SpyParty is a deception game that is played 1v1 between two human players. In it, one player takes the role of the 'spy' at a fancy party full of AI-controlled guests - the human player infiltrates this party, milling about, drinking and schmoozing with other guests, pretending to be an AI themselves. The other player, the 'sniper', must watch the party carefully, trying to pick out the spy in the group - they have only one bullet, and they have to pick the spy correctly, or they lose. The twist is that the spy has objectives they must complete to win - they have to do small, subtle things such as quickly planting a bug on someone unseen, stealing a statue and putting a different one in its place, taking a microfilm out of a book, getting in contact with a double agent, etc. All of these actions are things only the spy can do, and the sniper has to watch this busy party to find the person trying to complete these objectives right in plain sight before they complete all their objectives.

I love deception games - games like Mafia and Resistance that are all about hiding in plain sight, trying to sneak things past the other player or players undetected. While those are social deception games, in which you have to talk and lie your way through the game, this is something more akin to a puzzle game, in which you have to move around at the party and get the other player to think that you aren't the human-controlled character, then sneakily do something right under their noses when they're not looking. Both players have an intense challenge in front of them - the spy has to figure out exactly when the sniper won't be looking or what they're not paying attention to to try to complete a mission, and the sniper has to be tracking everything at the party carefully, figuring out who could be suspicious, who possibly has missions completed, and not make the wrong shot.

I was going to say there is no gaming experience anything like this, but there is one on my list - Game & Wario's Fruit, which is like a heavily simplified version of this game. This is a very grown-up version of Fruit, several orders of magnitude more complicated - Fruit is a game you play for an hour with friends for fun, SpyParty is a game that it takes hundreds, if not thousands, of hours to master. There are so many subtle little things to figure out in this game, so many ways as the spy that you can fool the sniper, so many ways as the sniper to better lock down your ability to catch the spy in the act.

This game has been in development for over 10 years now, and in public beta for about 7 years, and I think it'll probably be released for real sometime in the next 2-3 years or so, but I'm counting this as a 10's game because it's been in a highly playable and mostly polished state since about 2016 or so, which is when I picked it up. The detail that's put into the game by the dev, Chris Hecker, is impressive, as he's basically developing this game as a labor of love and has invested a lot of time into fine-tuning the game exactly the way he wants it instead of rushing it out the door.

At first, it seemed like a fun little game, but once I found out about the competitive SpyParty community in 2018, I realized just the insane depth of this game - people spend time researching the habits of other players and attempt to counter their play specifically, and they know the game inside and out, utilizing tricks and methods that I didn't even know existed until I came around to their streams. It really opened up a whole new world to me and I've been kind of off-and-on obsessed about improving my play ever since, although that comes with long periods of burnout where I just can't see myself improving that much anymore past a certain ceiling. Still, I'm involved in the community and have done streams of competitive games from time to time - this game is just fascinating to watch be played, the experts at this game are so good at disguising their actions and so good at spotting spies doing things and making the correct shot. I'm never at a loss for things to talk about and I could commentate over these games for hours.

It's hard for me to recommend this game to other people, because you have to find human partners to play with, and it's hard to play with people who don't have the same skill level as you. If you do pick it up, I recommend as much as possible picking it up with someone else and learning the game together - but if that's not possible, and this seems like it's up your alley anyway, give it a try. It's really one of the most interesting competitive experiences I've ever experienced in a video game, and I don't think that my writeup here can do justice to how much depth there is. I ended up not writing about this one for a day because I couldn't figure out how to start describing why I love it so much. I took like a year off between finding this game for the first time and coming back to it and really trying to hone my skills, and during that year, I just couldn't stop thinking about the game concept here; there's so much about the game mechanics that made me come back and think "wow, SpyParty is such a cleverly designed game." It's still a pretty small community of players at the moment, but I do hope that more people pick this one up.

I feel like I heard of spy party as a concept back in like 08 even, man it's been so long and they've stayed that committed

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Fastbreak posted...

I feel like I heard of spy party as a concept back in like 08 even, man it's been so long and they've stayed that committed

2008 is when it began development, and, yeah, it's turned into a really good game with a pretty dedicated community.

i remember hearing about spy party. it sounds utterly fascinating. i also think there's absolutely no way i'd be able to succeed at either role.
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#4





Years of release: 2016 (PC/PS4/XB1), 2017 (iOS/...what in the FUCK is an Nvidia Shield, wikipedia?)
Beaten?: 100%

I am in absolute awe of The Witness and what I think it accomplished to a degree that it is difficult to talk about this game without going into superlatives and pretentiousness, and yet somehow I only ranked this game #4. #4! It's an insult to a game that I loved so much that I don't know if I'll ever love a puzzle game this much again.

I have a lot of puzzle games on this list, and I think the reason is that I love those "a-ha" moments. They're everywhere in games, not just puzzle games; moments when you realize a new strategy that can be employed, moments when you find the last collectable you were looking for, moments when you finally get the hang of some skill or move that you couldn't pull off, those are all "a-ha" moments to me and they're the sort of things I live for in video games. But puzzle games in particular deliver some of the most truly breathtaking a-ha moments for me, the ones where you sit and look at a puzzle for a while, not understanding, not figuring out the key behind it, and then when it all clicks together, that satisfaction of suddenly seeing what you weren't able to see before. It's something that games like Baba Is You and Portal excel at, and I think The Witness delivered this for me more than most games I've ever played.

It's kinda hard to talk about The Witness in words, because the game certainly doesn't use any, and the things I could describe could potentially ruin the experience of seeing them for the first time and having to reckon with them yourself, which I think is a really critical element of this game, even if it's not the sort of game that could traditionally be "spoiled." But also, if I were to describe it in the most basic words possible, it would sound really basic. You wake up on a beautiful, deserted island and there's mazelike puzzles everywhere that you can solve. There are no explanations. Not your reason for being there, and not for how any of the puzzles work. That's the beauty of this game - the only way you can learn the rules of the puzzles is by playing them and trying to understand the way the puzzles are teaching you how to do them.

It's a simple enough concept but the way the puzzles build on themselves, adding new elements to the core basics and previously-understood rules, playing with the different possible ways that you could solve these puzzles, that's what led to all these a-ha moments for me - there's a great deal of satisfaction in coming to understand, without being told, how to solve a new type of puzzle element, simply through inferrence, by testing what works and what doesn't. It's all very simple and intuitive and the end but the journey of getting there isn't simple, and the various different ways the game introduces new challenges to its puzzles are consistently surprising right to the very end.

I played this game over screenshare with Dels, who I hope won't be too annoyed that I shouted him out again - we play a lot of games co-op together. I think that playing this game with an engaged co-op partner really added a lot to this experience for me - the two of us were able to act as two pairs of eyes and two brains, looking for things the other missed, bouncing ideas around that the other didn't think of, and when one of us got tired or frustrated, the other one could instantly take over and have a crack at it, totally fresh. I do think it's important to mention this, because it made me realize that I might have had a different experience playing it alone, and others migth have had a VERY different experience playing it alone - this is why this list is my list! Even working at it together the game was not easy; wouldn't call it one of the world's hardest puzzle games, it seems designed to be relatively intuitive (I'd put it roughly on the level of a Baba Is You but FIRMLY below The Fool And His Money or the horrifying abomination that is Snakebird), but it was challenging, and for me just the right level of a brain workout. I liked the variety - some puzzles require you to think out of the box and examine new possibilities, while others are just the type where you need to crunch to find the answer. I like both, and the game swapped between the two styles pleasingly often. That's about the most that I'm willing to say about how this game operates.

Also, I just adore how this game looks. The world is nothing short of gorgeous to look at, and similar to how I was talking about how much I love the outdoors in my Firewatch writeup (remember like three weeks ago? jeez I've been putting these last writeups off because I didn't have the words for them) I found myself just kind of wishing I could find a hammock in this game and chill out in it. There's no music (not much, anyway), just a lot of very pleasing ambiance and the occasional sound effect when you activate a puzzle, and the soothing atmosphere really enhanced the experience of walking around, exploring, deciding which puzzles to do next. Puzzle games have a slight tendency to be clinical and dry, so I found the warmth of this one welcoming.

A lot of people on the internet seem to prefer to talk about this game's themes and what it all means, and while I certainly think there are interesting philosophical topics to plumb here, that conversation doesn't interest me too much, not with this game - I don't think there's that much here. But this game as an instruction on game design is a topic I could talk about pretty much forever. I've always been fascinated by how puzzle games are designed and this along with Baba are maybe the two I find the absolute most fascinating - trying to imagine how this game was built kind of blows my mind, and trying to imagine how carefully it was fine-tuned blows my mind twice over. It all comes together so ridiculously seamlessly that I'm not sure how this game could ever be repeated, and I feel a great urge to celebrate it while I can. I can't believe I only ranked this game #4 but here we are, games are really good nowadays I guess.

This was the last unpredictable game on my list by the way. Anyone who's read my list so far, even if they don't know me, could infer the top 3 games - they're all easy.

SeabassDebeste posted...

i remember hearing about spy party. it sounds utterly fascinating. i also think there's absolutely no way i'd be able to succeed at either role.

Yeah, this is why I wish SpyParty had an option to buy it as a 2-pack - I think it's best to try to learn this game with another player so you can grow and learn at the same time, because that kind of helps preserve the early learning and discovering phase of the game, which I think kind of has its own joy to it, I liked the early part of this game when I didn't know what was going on and I was basically just making my best guesses at who the spy was, without thinking about all the super complicated ins-and-outs. I'm very happy to teach SpyParty to new players, but it's tough because it's like stepping onto a tennis court with Serena Williams when you don't know anything about tennis - your only hope to score a point on her is to hope she double faults for no reason, at least at first. I do think that it's not too hard to learn this game though, I think you can begin to play it as a reasonably competent level after a couple of hours. At first, playing sniper is befuddling because there's so much going on and playing spy is tricky because you don't really know how to act properly, but I think it comes naturally pretty fast. But learning from a veteran is hard as spy (it's not too bad as sniper, since there's only so much I can do as a spy and you can still catch me, since there'll be some handicaps).

I have another question. You mentioned in your Smash Ultimate right up that you don't play as much as you would like because you don't have people to play with, but most of your list are party or co-op games, so do the people you play these other games with just not like smash?

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The witness lead me to my favorite let's player. It was a great experience to watch. It was also one of those games that cemented the idea that "maybe I wont ever be good at a game again" because even watching it I wasnt getting some of the more difficult stuff

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So Spy Party is like Werewolves but with 2 players?

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my Mega Man inequality after finishing MM10

9 > 2 > 10 > 3 >= 4 > 7 > 6 > 1 > 8 > 5

not sure when I'll pick up 11 and play it

I didn't really try playing as Protoman or Bass this time around but maybe another time

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#3





Years of release: 2015 (PC), 2017 (PS4/Vita), 2018 (Switch)
Beaten?: Yes

(You're going to have to excuse me for my over-the-top sentimentality. This is where I'm about to be ridiculously enthusiastic about a five-hour game about skeletons and goats.)

Sometimes, when I'm lying awake at night and alone with my thoughts, I like to peer past the space of things that exist and imagine the infinite worlds of things that don't exist. It fucks with my head a little to imagine just how limited our exploration of all the possible games that could exist actually is - all of the ones that have been created are a particular creative expression of one person or a few people or a few hundred people, but for every such expression that does take the shape of a finished game, there are thousands, millions, countless numbers of creative expressions and possible cerative expressions that have never seen the light of day. When I hit a stumbling block in my own artistic endeavors, either due to challenges or a lack of motivation, this is something that keeps me going; knowing that if I don't create the thing I'm setting out to create, nobody will. If I get very lucky, some of my dream projects might get made by someone else (hi, Cadence of Hyrule), but no project will ever be made that is exactly the way I would have made it, had I seen it to the end, and I feel a little bit of a sense of duty tugging at me to see that project given birth and expressed to the world.

This decade, for me, is split neatly into two halves: pre-Undertale, and post-Undertale. Everything before Undertale might as well be ancient, a relic of a long-past generation. Everything after Undertale is basically current. And then Undertale itself somehow seems to exist in a timeless place - it both feels like it must've been there my whole life, and at the same time I feel like I played it just yesterday. In reality, Undertale a little over 4 years old, and that fact manages to blow my mind from both angles; how can it be that recent, how can it be that old? I still feel a little bit like I'm basking in the afterglow of having just played it for the first time, and at the same time, it is really bizarre to imagine a world in which this game didn't exist, in which Toby Fox never made this project and never introduced it to our culture. A little superlative, sure, but I don't care. Undertale is GameFAQs's greatest game of all time, isn't it? I happen to think that pick has aged pretty well!

I think pretty much everyone is at least basically familiar with Undertale at this point and won't be surprised to learn I'm among the throngs who considered it, if not a life-changing experience, at least something relatively profound. Among cute, narratively-driven games with adorable characters, simple but clever gameplay mechanics, and a few really good twists and gimmicks, Undertale knows no peer. The characters aren't just memorable; they're iconic. The music isn't just good; it's a video game music staple. The gameplay isn't just fun; it does a few things that change how I think about games. The game isn't just good, it's woven into the fabric of gaming's canon. Yeah, that's a lot to put on this short little indie title and I know that overhyping it really doesn't do the game any favors, but I don't care, this is my list and this is how I feel about it.

Sometimes I wonder what Toby Fox was thinking when he made this game. Did he know that everyone was gonna love it or did he think that was he was making was completely a personal pet project that would only ever matter to him? I'm always kind of fascinated by games that are the visions of a single developer, which is a category the last two games on my list also fall into. I dunno, there's just something so damn pure about Undertale, the way it so effortlessly carries the unique voice of the single person who wrote it - well, ok, there's two, since there was an artist, but it still feels very much like something nobody but they could have created.

I don't even know what's so damn good about it. I mean, if I tried to describe the game it would probably sound pretty lame. But everything about it just landed so well for me. Everything about it was just so damn charming and clever in a way that I just don't see very often. I talked about a-ha moments in puzzle games, but this game has a lot of similar sort of moments - in this case, the a-ha moments were as simple as jokes that landed really well, details or secrets hidden in surprising places, events in the game's absurd plot that made me go 'oh wow, so that's what they decided to do next.'

I talked about my concept of the easter egg hunt with Stanley Parable - games where the primary purpose of the gameplay is to have a playful conversation with the devs themselves, trying to uncover fun, irrelevant secrets hidden in the game's most obscure corners, looking for different ways to make the game respond to your actions, taking delight when you realize that the dev thought that you might do that and included a unique response. The old masters of this genre, for me, are Super Mario RPG and the first two Paper Mario games, which are teeming with bizarre easter eggs in just about every possible nook and cranny - Undertale is the new master. Every time I play the game or see it played, and it's been a few times now, I learn something new about the game I didn't know before - some dialog option I hadn't considered, some action during an event I hadn't tried, some secret buried way deep in the furthest possible spots. Out of all the things I like about Undertale, and there's a lot of things to like about Undertale, this is probably my favorite part.

But, also, I love the characters, I love the music, I love the gameplay even if it's very simple and leaves a lot of unexplored space. I love the stuff that happens in this game, which I dare not spoil; yes, even now I still care about not spoiling Undertale! The less said about it, the better, really. And yet I still can't help but overhype it. It's hard, okay? I've spent the last four years not wanting to express how much I love this game too much to avoid giving people the wrong impression about how good it is (in reality, your mileage may vary, and it's better if you think this game sucks and you're surprised). But now that I'm writing this list I don't feel like doing that anymore, so suck it. You've probably made up your mind one way or the other, but I do really hope that if you're still feeling sore about Undertale winning the games contest that you'll be able to look past that and appreciate the game for what it is. It's a beautiful, lovingly-crafted piece of work and it doesn't deserve to have

But Para, aren't you forgetting something? What about -

(slaps Deltarune hastily out of your hands) NO! It's not out yet, damnit! I want to bank this one for the 2020's! Okay, so, I did play Deltarune and it was really great - even the "demo" itself feels like a complete enough experience that it could have ranked in like, the 30's of this list. It's just enough to feel kind of like a full game experience, like playing a one-shot session of Dungeons & Dragons - a few hours long, wraps up in one sitting, still pretty satisfying. Nontheless, I'm gonna wait, even though I guess you could say it was one of my top 100 gaming experiences of the decade. Deltarune is a game I look forward to having it compete for a spot on my 20's list. See you in ten years to blather on about how awesome it was.

predix: next two games are skyward sword and slime rancher

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Ugh, am I really going to reinstall crosscode? I think I quit just before the good part.

I like your writing style. 100% going to make my friend play spy party now

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Undertale is pretty much amazing. It has individually good aspects, but taken together it's so much greater than the sum of its parts.

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banananor posted...

Ugh, am I really going to reinstall crosscode? I think I quit just before the good part.

I like your writing style. 100% going to make my friend play spy party now

I can't guarantee that CrossCode won't remain an issue for you or that stuff coming up is going to turn you around on it so I don't want to get your hopes up, but I will say that from the sound of it, you're at the part of the game that I considered to be its lowest point in terms of my own personal energy playing the game. So it might change.

Thanks for the compliment! I'm mostly writing these just to amuse myself, but it's really nice if other people enjoy reading it.

Undertale is maybe the only game I've ever played that I can't think of a single thing I would change to make the game better. Everything is crafted so thoroughly and flawlessly that nothing comes to mind. Every minute of this game has something funny or great. I swear Toby Fox had to have spent like a good two years sitting there with a basically finished game, wondering what else he could add or implement, because it's way too fucking good for one person to have made it.

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MrSmartGuy posted...

Undertale is maybe the only game I've ever played that I can't think of a single thing I would change to make the game better. Everything is crafted so thoroughly and flawlessly that nothing comes to mind. Every minute of this game has something funny or great. I swear Toby Fox had to have spent like a good two years sitting there with a basically finished game, wondering what else he could add or implement, because it's way too fucking good for one person to have made it.

Alphys calls in Hotland. Consistent art. STMPWYFS not being ingame.

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The Alphys segment of Hotland is one of my favorite parts of the game and I don't know why everyone hates it

The only part of the game that I would describe as slightly weak is the Core, but I don't mind that since it's the one and only time the game takes a break from goofiness and decides to play being an RPG straight, and it's not that long and it has great music, so it's fine.

The walk through the house at the end of the first run might be a top 10 scene in gaming. The way the music builds and the narrative is told through the "battles" could one day be looked at as an artistic turning point in the medium.

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I think Mettaton's section as a whole takes too long. Could've done with one less random minigame. The payoff is more than worth it though.

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didn't know this was on switch, i think i'll get it
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SeabassDebeste posted...

didn't know this was on switch, i think i'll get it

You can even buy the physical version!

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i need to play undertale. someday!

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Naye745 posted...

i need to play undertale. someday!

it's okay. you might like it

(this is how i talk about undertale when I don't want peoples' expectations raised)

Undertale actually lead me to gamegrumps also, so 2 pretty big ones for me personally there with that and witness

I feel like Deltarune is going to be the better experience but it's one that hinges on having the experience of undertale first

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Might get CrossCode when it gets a console release since I see that's supposed to happen this year

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#2





Years of release: 2017 (Wii U/Switch)
Beaten?: Surprisingly, no, but I'll get to that

Including this game at the top of my game of the decade list is probably the most cliche thing I could have done, but look. It's cliche for a reason. This game is going to win the GotD2 contest for a reason; gaming publications are naming this their game of the decade for a reason. My opinions can only go against the grain so much. I'm human.

It is important to note that, while I do consider the Zelda series perhaps my favorite series of games, it's front-loaded. For quite a while, the Zelda series has been kind of dead to me;

2003: Wind Waker. AMAZING game. No complaints. Zelda still going extremely strong at this point.
2004: Minish Cap. It was okay, but it didn't really capture the magic of the previous Game Boy games for me. Not a bad game by any means but not an unforgettable one.
2006: Twilight Princess. Don't really love it. It has its upsides (turning into a wolf being ridden by a hot furry imp is always gonna have its upsides for me let's be real about this), but the color palette is so washed out and the game so dour and depressing that I just can't really get into it. At best, it's trying to be Ocarina of Time, but worse. Disappointing.
2007: Phantom Hourglass. Hated it. It felt so barebones in every way, I found no joy at all in exploring the world or the dungeons. It was a cheap imitation of Wind Waker and I detested it.
2009: Spirit Tracks. Hated it more. It was even more empty than PH, and I eventually got sick of this game and didn't even finish it.
2011: Skyward Sword. To be honest, I just haven't been able to get into this one. I don't think it's terrible - the color palette is certainly an improvement on TP! - but I find the game just doesn't make me that enthusiastic about exploring it, for some reason. SS never caught on as much as some other Zeldas so I don't think I'm alone here. I want to go back and give this game another chance someday.
2013: A Link Between Worlds. Ten years since WW and finally another Zelda that really hit the mark for me. It's still kind of in remake-territory though, and it isn't a 3D Zelda, so we're still in a drought on those at this point.

And then another four years and all we got was Triforce Heroes, which I didn't play. Also, Four Swords Adventures happened at some point in the mid-00's and I forgot to list it, it was great but I don't really consider it a standard Zelda game.

And then Breath of the Wild comes along, and oh no, it's one of those dreaded open-world games. I said this a while ago, but I tried to get into open-world games a few times and it just didn't click for me. I don't know why - the thought of a big expansive world to explore, where your options are seemingly limitless and the game doesn't tell you what to do, it carries obvious appeal, but games like Skyrim and Fallout 3 just never managed to charm me enough to keep me wanting to be within that world. It kinda tricked me into thinking that I just wasn't into open world games. Oh, I was, but I was just waiting for the right one.

I wasn't even that excited for Breath of the Wild. My expectations were really low - the idea of an open-world Zelda did not appeal, and the Zelda series had been largely dormant as far as my tastes were concerned for 14 years aside from one really good remake. I'm not even the one who bought the game - at this point in my life, I still live with my parents, but I was temporarily displaced to my grandparents' house while they were at their winter home due to a plumbing incident that flooded my bathroom and part of my bedroom. Too long a story to get into for this writeup, but while I was away, it was actually my mom and my younger brother who got the Switch and the game, and it's kinda their console and game and not mine. My mom played this game for a solid hundred hours and told me that I needed to come over and play it, so I did, expectations still thoroughly whelmed. Well, she was right. I did need to come over and play it.

It's hard to know where to begin. I think this Awkward Zombie comic kind of sums it up:

http://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/wild-streak

As the description for the comic says, I, too, walked out of the starting cave, turned around and immediately tried to do anything but what the game told me to. And the game's response, in turn, was "ok." There were no artificial boundaries to stop me, at least not until I wanted to get off the great plateau. You can just... run everywhere. Climb on everything. Every object and every surface is something that can be interacted with. Every place is a place that is meant for you to go. The old man can wait, if you feel like just kind of fucking off for a while in some bushes hunting for bugs.

I'm immediately reminded of way back in the way when I played Super Mario 64 with one of my friends when I was a kid - we both loved Super Mario 64, but while I wanted to go into all the levels and you know, play the game, my friend got hours of entertainment just out of running around the starting area outside of the castle. This kind of baffled me a little bit, but thinking back on it now I get it - there is just a sort of inherent fun about running around and jumping on everything, even if you're not really doing anything in particular. No surprise, that same friend of mine loves Breath of the Wild, a game that I think perfectly understood this exact appeal. It just feels great to go anywhere and do anything in this world, anything at all. Running on stuff, jumping on stuff, climbing on stuff, even if it doesn't really meet any particular goal except to see what's over there, it just always feels good. All I need is to think "hey, I wonder if there's anything at the top of that mountain in the distance", and that's a good enough motivation for a hike that can take up to 20 minutes to get all the way over there in which the journey is more than the destination.

There's something so emergent about this game's sense of fun. I'm reminded of how, in Terraria, I enjoyed the idea of sort of creating my own adventure by having a general destination in mind but leaving it completely up to myself to decide what route I wanted to take. BotW has this, too; I'll often know the general place that I need to get to, but there's no specific route to get there. Sometimes the game suggests a route by providing a trail; sometimes it doesn't. There's so many places to go and so many ways to do it that no one person is likely to go in the same exact direction the first time they

I'm also reminded of how I said I loved beautiful outdoors environments in Firewatch and The Witness, and that's probably the biggest thing that keeps me in this game. I never want to leave. I think Breath of the Wild actually helps cure my seasonal depression a little bit; I'd really like to be outside and hiking around right now, but when I'm too cold and sad to do that, BotW is particularly soothing; the world is just so goddamn beautiful. I'd snap my fingers and transport myself to this world and live there forever if I could, even accepting the lack of modern convenience, video games, and not having Ganon trying to destroy the world. Uggggh I just wanna live in this world so damn badly. It's outrageously pleasant and idyllic and doing anything in it is enjoyable, and while it's not a replacement for real life, it does kind of beat it in some ways, because in real life I can't climb on and jump off of steep cliffs without consequence and I don't have a magic parachute that I can use to glide over valleys.

The gameplay is also quite an exciting evolution over previous Zelda games, I think. I've always loved exploring Zelda's worlds to find hidden secrets and boy, does BotW have those! You don't have to search the world for everything - the game is surprisingly short, actually, if you just get straight to the point - but if you do you can hardly walk five feet without stumbling over something of interest, and just about nearly inch of the game is worth exploring for some reason or another - and there's a lot of game to cover. So Zelda exploration, check. What about dungeons? I feel like a lot of people are kind of turned off by the way BotW handles these, but I'm not. I've never been that in love with the standard style of Zelda dungeon in use since LttP, anyway; the puzzles tend to be far too tame and the dungeon layouts too linear and easy to figure out (some Zeldas are better than others - LA, MM, and ALBW all do pretty well in their own ways), and I'm just not really that sad to miss them. BotW went for what I think is a much more natural and interesting approach for its main dungeons, throwing out the idea of series of rooms and having just these big mechanical beasts that have a series of puzzles inside them to work out - I spent a lot more time figuring these out than most Zelda dungeons, honestly, and figuring out how the spaces worked when you rotated them around was a real joy. The shrines are pretty decent, too, I really like how a lot of them can be solved through clever uses of the game's awesome magnesis and stasis tools - this game has a lot of uses for them that aren't always entirely intended but can be used anyway. Again, the puzzle-solving aspects of this game feel very emergent, where different elements of the game interact in unexpected ways and puzzles don't always need to be solved in the most obvious way. My only complaint is that the shrines can get a little repetitive and the way they all look the same makes them feel very... well, samey. But it's a minor complaint, I don't expect them to all look unique; it'd just be nice if they changed up the color palette sometimes, I guess.

Combat's great too! Look, I know that people are really bothered by the weapon durability system, and I get it - it's just a generally bad feeling to have weapons break on you and to always be worrying about managing your inventory and saving your best weapons for later. This bugged me at first, but then I just... let go. I embraced the zen art of just using my weapons as I felt appropriate, letting them break once they had served their purpose, then picking up some new weapon to bash a lizalfos over the head with. I found a real joy in always needing to explore to find new weapons and being able to just pick up any old crap off the ground and use it in a pinch. Eventually the whole weapon durability thing started to feel like a plus - I think the game would be stale if you could just find the most awesome weapons and keep them forever and never need to find new ones. The fact that they break means strong weapons always remain rewarding to find, and I like that. I don't mind that this game has an uneven character progression or anything like that, I think it suits the game just fine. You can really sort of beat this game as fast or as slow as you want, and that's great. This game's even kind of difficult if you don't get yourself fully geared up - for a long time I wasn't able to find the armor upgrades I needed and I was taking a lot of damage and had to just eat food to get through fights, but as a result I learned to get better at this almost Dark Souls-like combat system - I almost started to get good at it, I daresay. I really suck at this type of game, but regardless, combat always felt intuitive and exciting.

I haven't actually beaten this game yet. I've done most of the major quests of this game, and I watched my mom play the final area and boss, so I know what's there and I haven't felt a need to tackle it yet. I've just wanted to try to complete as many sidequests and find as many things as I can before I complete the game, because... I don't want it to be over, I guess. I've spent a long time playing now and I just kinda don't want to go to the end because I'm not done fucking around with everything else. Of course, Breath of the Wild 2 is coming soon, so I guess it's time I probably finally got around to wrapping this up. But uh, wow, I could probably think of more topics to cover about this game but... yeah I think I got most of it. It's just kind of a perfect video game? Yeah. Pretty much a perfect video game.

I'm just fucking with you all though. The real reason I love this game so much is that I get to dress Link up in a cute girl's outfit and then go hang out with very attractive bird and fish people. If it wasn't enough to already be a perfect video game, damn. Kass is my new husband now. It's like they created him for me specifically. It's like Nintendo knew that my specific tastes are beautiful video games with lots of exploration + hot bird people.

If they knew that they made this game for me, they'd probably be really mad that my heart belongs to one other game in particular. My pulsing, rhythmically beating heart.

Damn, I thought BotW would be #1.

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ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Also I hope its not too presumptuous to predict necrodancer for Top 3 if not 1.

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