Board 8 > Para's Top 50 games from 2020-2021

(+) Yeah! (+)

#10: Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/4/AAA-H0AADthy.jpg

In 2014, a little movie called Guardians of the Galaxy came out. You're probably heard of it! When I heard of it, I didn't really have any idea at the time that it was a Marvel property - the only point at which I was able to make a connection, initially, was that I think I knew that Rocket was in UMvC3 and then he was also in this. When I heard of it, I just thought it sounded like a fun comedy-space opera romp. I don't watch a lot of movies, I had zero familiarity with the MCU, but I just had the feeling like I really wanted to see this one.

It ended up being a breakthrough hit, both in general but also for me. It's totally my jam - it's got fun characters, good gags, and a surprising amount of heart. I laughed, I teared up a little at the end, ended up being a fan of these dumb goofballs. It ended up being my entry point into the MCU mainly because I just wanted to follow the continued adventures of these characters (who got pretty shortchanged in Endgame but that's neither here nor there). Point is, I wasn't really a fan of any superhero-related properties up until this point, but now I've suddenly carrying water for this one in particular. So then there's this video game based on the Guardians, and unlike past games based on comic book characters, this one I've got a vested interest in. And of course, much like the movie, it's way better than it has any right to be.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/5/AAA-H0AADthz.jpg

I guess it shouldn't really be that surprising that a game based on a Marvel property is good. There've been many highly acclaimed Spider-Man games, as well as obviously Marvel vs. Capcom, the X-Men arcade game, etc - they're around. Maybe I have a bad association with superhero games because of Superman 64, but even on the DC side of things there's a long history of good Batman games out there. Or maybe it's a bad association with licensed properties related to movies in general (this isn't movie-based, but it sort of is, I'll get back to that), but hey, even movie-based games gave us Goldeneye, and a few other things. Man, remember movie tie-in games? They used to do that all the time in the 2000's but I guess they stopped because they realized that churning out a bunch of random crap wasn't selling.

Which is what I guess I assumed this was going to be. Can you blame me? Even with all these examples to the contrary, games based on licensed properties just kind of have this stink to them unless they have *very* good pedigrees backing them up, but this is just Eidos Montreal, who made... the Deus Ex sequels, which I guess people liked? But that's about it. I wrote this off when I first heard of it - most attempts to cash in on any Marvel property that isn't Spider-Man haven't produced much. (Was the Telltale GotG game any good? I didn't play it.) But this game got surprisingly good reviews despite poor sales. And because of its poor sales, it went on sale for more than a game of this caliber would normally go on within my window of writing about GotY games. So I took a chance on it. Why not? I took a chance on GotG before, and it was rewarding.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy (its full, official title) is a mostly story-driven game with some generic third-person shooter action thrown in there. When I say this game is better than it has any right to be, I mean it. This is like, the most generic big-budget action game possible, in most ways. It's a clumsy amalgamation of uninspired combat, pointless puzzles, and extremely linear level design. But what it does well, it does so well that it can't be ignored, which is be what a Guardians of the Galaxy game should be - funny, irreverent, heartwarming, surprising, and just kind of fun despites its flaws.

The first thing that stood out to me was the characters. It's the same gang as the one in the films, but it's not the same canon as the films, and these aren't the exact same versions of those characters, though they're recognizable enough despite some offputtingly different looks (especially for Peter Quill, who looks a lot more gangly than Chris Pratt's rendition). But that feeling that I was getting some weird off-brand, Wish.com version of these characters subsided within the first hour of play; by the end of the first chapter, I grew fully attached to this group. These doofuses were my Guardians at that point, not the ones from the film.

If you bought this game hoping for character banter, oh boy, I cannot even begin to tell you that you are going to get more than what you bargained for. This game stretches the limits of good taste and turns the banter knob up to 11 - there's barely a single quiet moment in this game where one of the characters isn't yapping about whatever's going on at that moment. It would be grating, if not for the fact that I love these damn characters so much. They usually hit the same beats - Drax is blunt, Gamora is snarky, Rocket is acerbic, Groot is Groot - but their performances are great, the dialog is sharp, and goddamnit I could just stand there and listen to these assholes all day. Sometimes I did! I stood around and waited for them to exhaust their quips before moving on. It really sort of became my reason to play. It makes the story feel alive to me - I'm not the only one experiencing the events of the story, the characters also are and oh boy do they have opinions about this shit and I'm here for it.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/6/AAA-H0AADth0.jpg

I must have spent like half an hour just chilling on the ship at the start of the game. The environments in this game are great; the Guardians' ship is so cozy and has so many little details crammed into it that I mostly just spent time wandering around the ship and looking at shit while listening to my crew screaming at each other from down the hall. The visuals in this game are a treat throughout - the environments are wild and colorful, a stark repudiation of the usual grays and browns that used to plague these sorts of games at basically every turn, and the urban environments in particular are packed with detail - the chapter that takes place on Knowhere gives the Citadel from Mass Effect a damn run for its money in delivering a living, breathing place full of people and feels way bigger than the map actually is.

I bring up the Citadel on purpose, because this game does feel like it's trying to be a low-rent Mass Effect with more jokes a lot of the time. The combat's pretty simple and gets kind of old pretty fast, lacking the engaging RPG elements and tactics of Mass Effect, but it's got the whole third person shooter with a bunch of squadmates thing going on, it's all set in space, etc. But the great trick this game pulls is that it's not Mass Effect at all - it's actually Life is Strange. The real driver behind this game is its character-driven narrative and the difficult story choices you make along the way. I mention LiS in particular because it's got a particular vibe - the whole 'wandering around rooms and looking at objects and posters on the wall' schtick that Life is Strange has by way of Gone Home, and the way the plot centers around some psychological supernatural shit where the characters have to solve problems by overcoming internal trauma just as much as they have to deal with external problems.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/7/AAA-H0AADth1.jpg

GotG pulls this all off by somehow successfully making a game that manages to match the movies in heart. Make no mistake, although this isn't the film canon, this game is most certainly borrowing all of the best aspects from the movies, and it succeeds. It's got the 80's pop soundtrack, it's got the visual style, all that stuff, but it also has that particular beating heart at the center of it that James Gunn gave to the movies that made me love them so much. Against all odds, they performed a successful heart transplant here, and it works. I'm a fucking *sap* for this game's story and characters, man. The game's actual plot is a pretty surprising gutpunch, and it delivers some genuine emotional catharsis in the end. That's why the game's up here - not the combat or any of that shit. That's just distractions on the way to the real point of the game.

But really this game just shines through all of its stupid little gags and silly setpieces. Yeah, a lot of the chapters of this game rely on some of the same ridiculous cliches; it's almost comical how many times you have to run across a thing that's blowing up and jump at the last minute, or something breaks under you and leads to something where you have to slide down an impossibly long ramp. But stuff like the confrontation with Lady Hellbender, everything on Knowhere, the exceptionally weird chapter that takes place in Drax's mind, all that stuff will stick with me for a long time. Even little stuff like the part where you have to contact the Worldmind and all of the other characters keep trying to press buttons on the console for you, or the absurd shenanigans with the llama when you get trapped on your ship. This game just keeps pulling out these weird little moments throughout the game that delight me. It manages to get through the boredom of the combat via the sheer variety of different events that break up the action.

I got exactly 20 hours of play out of this game, and that felt exactly right. It's somehow way better than the sum of its parts by delivering a satisfying narrative, fun writing, and just having a lot of fun, stupid shit in it. I can't recommend it to everyone - some people are inevitably going to find the endless banter grating - but if you want to play a 20-hour Guardians of the Galaxy movie, this is basically that, and yeah you better believe I am here for that. I'm shocked at how good this game is - it's gonna stick with me for a while.

Next up: I mean, look, obviously. It's a 2020-2021 GOTY list. Come on.

:sus:

#9: Hades

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/5/6/AAA-H0AADtu8.jpg

It's actually annoying to have to talk about Hades on this list. For nearly every game on this list, I get to talk about why I think the game is so great, why it means a lot to me personally, I have some sort of idea or story that I want to share with my audience. For nearly every game on this list, with only a couple of exceptions, it's going to rank higher on my personal list than it would rank on a big, aggregate list of all games ranked by everyone; in other words every entry is a little more personal to me than it would be to someone else. Even for the non-obscure games that people do already know, it still feels like it 'personalizes' my list to rank them where I did.

But Hades? No. Everyone already knows Hades, everyone already loves Hades, and it's probably the #1 most critically acclaimed game from 2020 or 2021. So I've pretty much got nothing to talk about here. You knew this game was going to be on the list somewhere. It's on everyone's list.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/5/7/AAA-H0AADtu9.jpg

I get into this kind of awkward situation sometimes where I like a game - like, really really like a game - and yet everyone else seems just a little more obsessed with it than me, which creates this almost weird, completely undeserved sense of scorn towards it. Link to the Past is a huge example of this, for me. I love Link to the Past, it was one of my favorite games as a kid, but it is also my least favorite of the classic Zeldas, which puts me in an awkward spot when it's everyone else's preferred classic Zelda; LttP randomizer was the Zelda randomizer that took off big, when I was never really into it, and the fact that liking LttP doesn't feel personal to me sort of puts a damper on it. I know this sounds totally unnecessary and petty, and it surely is, but I can't help it, I'm a weird emotional being who struggles with classifying something that I like, but that I also like slightly less than everyone else around me. The fact that I can't muster an equal level of enthusiasm makes it hard to muster enthusiasm at all. It's stupid, but it is what it is.

Which brings me to Hades, a game that I played for about 150 hours and absolutely loved, but that I have largely moved on from, and everyone else hasn't quite moved on from yet, tons of people still discovering it for the first time and getting super into it, and my enthusiasm level has flagged ever so slightly, just enough to the point where ranking it on my list feels like a burden, somehow.

I mean, what am I gonna talk about? You know Hades. It's like, a perfect video game. It looks great. It sounds great. It controls great. It's a roguelike for people who don't like roguelikes, and an indie game for people who don't normally pay attention to indie games. It's critically acclaimed by damn near everyone. Nobody has a bad thing to say about it. That's great! It's a great game.

Seriously, what am I gonna talk about? I could talk about how the game seamlessly weaves a fun and engaging story and great characters into a roguelike structure, something nobody's really managed to do until now. The characters are great! Zagreus is great, Hades is great, all of the supporting characters are great. The story is engaging and the way it incorporates the roguelike elements as diagetic concepts is genius. But you already know that! Everyone already knows that.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/5/8/AAA-H0AADtu-.jpg

I could talk about how well this game's roguelike mechanics are structured to give people of all skill levels a chance at beating the game. Collecting stuff and upgrading your abilities feels fun and provides a consistent feeling of reward for playing each run - you not only get better at the game, but you get a little stronger each time, too. Games like Rogue Legacy have done this, too, but Hades is just way better than Rogue Legacy and handles all of this stuff way better. The weapon concepts are all brilliant, the mirror abilities and the way you can change them to your preference is fun, getting new items by improving your relationship with other characters is a great way to further tie the characters into the game, it's all wonderful. You've probably already played Hades, or at least you've heard someone talk about Hades, and you already know this. Seriously, what's my angle here? What could I possibly have to add to the Hades discourse?

If anything, it almost seems like by only playing it for 150 hours I ran out of steam slightly faster than other people did. I beat the game at a heat 32 rating, felt like that was about where I was going to peak, and I stopped. I wasn't really any good at speedrunning the game, and going any further than 32 heat wasn't gonna be productive, so I kinda called it good there. This game didn't QUITE pass the test of being a truly all-timer roguelike for me - to do that, it'd have to get over 200 hours and still have things I'm learning and new things I haven't seen. Hades doesn't get there - I find that each run just feels a little too samey, there aren't that many runs where you get an ability or combination of abilities that's really unique, so by a certain point I feel like I've seen most of them. There's still a pretty decent repertoire of stuff! I mean, it lasted 150 hours, that's not bad. It's just a high bar to clear.

But I don't want to make it sound like I didn't like Hades. I mean, I ranked it #9. I love Hades! Everything on this list from Ynglet onwards is currently in my top 100 games of all time, and that includes Hades, which is comfortably nestled in the 70's somewhere. What, are you trying to say I don't love this game? Hades is awesome! Fuck you.

Next up: Can you believe there's only two Japanese games in my top 10? One's Nintendo, and one's Capcom. Who will prevail?!

Paratroopa1 posted...

If anything, it almost seems like by only playing it for 150 hours I ran out of steam slightly faster than other people did.

Really? I thought most people played it less than 100 hours. I got all the Steam achievements (only game I've done this with, because I loved it), which took me around 90...

Surprised you didn't talk about any of your personal opinions on the game, like favorite boon/character/weapon to personalize it a little :p

MacArrowny posted...

Surprised you didn't talk about any of your personal opinions on the game, like favorite boon/character/weapon to personalize it a little :p

I don't particularly have a favorite of any of these things, stuff in Hades is generally about equally good and doesn't really lend itself to me having preferences (which may be a slight weakness of the game)

For all its many positives, Hades might be the game with the worst romance options ever. Like ah yes the two people I want to get with: my adoptive brother and my ex.

The romance options may be questionable, but Zagreus is a bisexual, polyamorous king and I stan

Yeah, the goodness of the various weapons is one of the great things about Hades for me. I didn't even like the Spear at first, but I got my first clear with it.

Paratroopa1 posted...

I get into this kind of awkward situation sometimes where I like a game - like, really really like a game - and yet everyone else seems just a little more obsessed with it than me, which creates this almost weird, completely undeserved sense of scorn towards it. Link to the Past is a huge example of this, for me. I love Link to the Past, it was one of my favorite games as a kid, but it is also my least favorite of the classic Zeldas, which puts me in an awkward spot when it's everyone else's preferred classic Zelda; LttP randomizer was the Zelda randomizer that took off big, when I was never really into it, and the fact that liking LttP doesn't feel personal to me sort of puts a damper on it. I know this sounds totally unnecessary and petty, and it surely is, but I can't help it, I'm a weird emotional being who struggles with classifying something that I like, but that I also like slightly less than everyone else around me. The fact that I can't muster an equal level of enthusiasm makes it hard to muster enthusiasm at all. It's stupid, but it is what it is.

I understand where this is coming from, don't worry. There are other games I appreciate, but don't love quite as much as the mainstream. LttP (rando) is weird because I actively didn't play LttP as a kid, beyond getting bullied by green guards and giving up, declaring the game to be stupid. Then I saw a rando race in a GDQ event and thought it was the most awesome thing and learned the game just so I could play randomizer. I would definitely not have done that for other Zelda games. Z1 never interested me in any regard and OoT is too freaking long.

However, to piggyback on what you were saying about Hades...

Paratroopa1 posted...

The characters are great! Zagreus is great, Hades is great, all of the supporting characters are great. The story is engaging and the way it incorporates the roguelike elements as diagetic concepts is genius. But you already know that! Everyone already knows that.

My initial consideration for guru pick (assuming a general character contest) was Lilith from Borderlands, but that was before I played BL3 and saw what an absolute mess they made of her character, and she got kicked to the curb. Without an obvious replacement, for a while, if you had asked me, Zagreus might have been my answer, under the guise that he's a likeable character that could make a dent, and that he's from an indie game but high-profile enough that this wouldn't cost him as much as it would most indie characters.

At this point, I think it's pretty likely he'll make the field without any help, and my appeal to Hades is much the same as yours -- I like it, but not enough to think that giving him a bump in seeding is worth the guru nom to me. I enjoyed Hades, and Zag would be a very respectable and solid pick that I think most people could feel good about, but the game doesn't have enough personal clout for the return on investment.

Who knows. Maybe I'll rediscover the game in a few months and have a Renaissance. I have a very temporary answer for who my current selection is, but my reasons for it will likely be invalidated before a contest gets announced, and I'll be back to searching for an answer...which could be Zagreus. /shrug

I'm not sure I've ever wanted an expansion pack for a game more than I want one for Hades. As everyone already said, it's "perfect" in almost every way that really matters, but it feels entirely too finite in ways that hurt it as a game in its genre. An expansion that greatly increases build variety and adds more bosses and general run variety would go far towards making it a legit all-timer for me.

Xiahou_Shake posted...

I'm not sure I've ever wanted an expansion pack for a game more than I want one for Hades. As everyone already said, it's "perfect" in almost every way that really matters, but it feels entirely too finite in ways that hurt it as a game in its genre. An expansion that greatly increases build variety and adds more bosses and general run variety would go far towards making it a legit all-timer for me.

Yeah, I completely agree with this, 100%. It's basically perfect, but just a little bit too 'finite' for the type of game it is. An expansion that increases the variety of stuff in the game would be huge, and the game really feels like it's demanding it, especially given how popular the game is.

azuarc posted...

At this point, I think it's pretty likely he'll make the field without any help, and my appeal to Hades is much the same as yours -- I like it, but not enough to think that giving him a bump in seeding is worth the guru nom to me. I enjoyed Hades, and Zag would be a very respectable and solid pick that I think most people could feel good about, but the game doesn't have enough personal clout for the return on investment.

Who knows. Maybe I'll rediscover the game in a few months and have a Renaissance. I have a very temporary answer for who my current selection is, but my reasons for it will likely be invalidated before a contest gets announced, and I'll be back to searching for an answer...which could be Zagreus. /shrug

Haha yeah the notion that it doesn't have enough 'personal clout' makes sense to me. Like, I think Zagreus would be a really cool character to see in the character battle, but would he actually be the one choice I would want to force into the contest if I could? I dunno. I am kinda curious to see how he'd do in a character battle - I think he might have been more interesting if we had a character contest in the last year or so, while the iron was still hot, but by the time we get another contest in like 2025 or whatever I kinda doubt he'll be much more than fodder. I don't know if he would have been above the fodder line to begin with but it would have been interesting to find out.

Paratroopa1 posted...

The romance options may be questionable, but Zagreus is a bisexual, polyamorous king and I stan

Oh absolutely

#8: The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/7/2/AAA-H0AADt-0.jpg

For understandable reasons, this thread gets a lot more traffic when I talk about games that people have actually played, vs random garbage that only I care about, so I figure what better way to continue this list than talk about an Ace Attorney game!

Obviously, I've got a long history with the series. I got Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney way back in 2005 when it was all the rage on Board 8, and that ended up being a really excellent recommendation; haven't missed a game in the series since. Talking about an Ace Attorney game in this list is almost weird, given that I could just made a topic talking about Ace Attorney rankings by themselves. I kinda wanted to do a case ranking sometime, but I feel like I'd need to replay some of the games to really do it well and I'm just not there right now, but maybe someday I'll get around to it. Maybe when AA7 comes out?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/7/3/AAA-H0AADt-1.jpg

This game is kind of a big deal. First of all, because it's sort of a minor miracle that it came out at all. I always assumed that localizing these two games was just too much of a pain in the ass to Capcom to be worth it, for what they saw as minimal gains for a niche audience in the west; the fact that they saw fit to localize it with a physical release and everything came as a real shock. It almost felt too good to be true when the leaks came out, but the leaks turned out to be true; maybe they have more faith in the franchise than I initially believed.

And second of all, because for the first time in a very long time, I have officially closed the loop on this series for now. Ever since AAI2 came out in Japan in 2011, there was some form of AA that I hadn't experienced yet. By the time we got the AAI2 fan localization, the first DGS game had come out or was very soon to, and that always kind of floated in the background, reminding me that there was still some form of Ace Attorney left to be experienced even after I'd finished all the others. I can't read Japanese, of course, and even after there was a fan translation for the first DGS game, I didn't get around to playing it, and there was still DGS2 as well. It was a big deal going into GAAC, knowing that this was really it - I'll have played every Ace Attorney game. There's nothing left, not until they make AA7. That's been true in a way of every other AA game I've played, of course, being the only one in english I haven't played, but this still felt kind of different.

I'm glad I was rewarded for my procrastination in dealing with that fan localization, considering we ended up getting the real thing, because I think if I had to wait for the sequel game I would have gone nuts. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is very much a tale of two halves - this is a mediocre Ace Attorney game followed by an excellent Ace Attorney game, and it is largely the latter that earns the distinction of a top 10 ranking on my list. I can appreciate now the fact that the first game starts slow, knowing that it was always their intention to make a trilogy of games with a continuing plot, and it's a real shame that the first game is so disappointing and frustrating in its lack of closure that they ended up shortening the planned trilogy down to just two games instead, because it does make the second game feel a bit rushed as a result. I probably would have been in the same boat in being frustrated by the first DGS game.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/7/4/AAA-H0AADt-2.jpg

I kept calling the first game "Ace Attorney Jr", and I feel like that's apt. I thought the first case actually started out pretty strong with a reasonably compelling mystery, until they spent what felt like an hour at the end on a terrible mystery of a missing coin that felt like it could have been explained in a single line, and the game kind of flagged after that - case 3 was interesting although it felt like it was cut off annoyingly short, but case 2 and 4 both had murder mysteries that just felt far too silly and easy to figure out. It didn't help matters that the characters and the setting were far goofier than the usual fare; the first couple of cases in London made me feel like I was back in Layton vs Wright with its characters who just act like annoiyng caricatures and not people at all. Plus, the lack of cases with a proper investigation-trial structure only added to making the mysteries feel far too simple.

Fortunately, the second game just kind of fixes all that, with properly meaty murder mysteries and characters who are... well, I won't say entirely dialed back because they're still quite goofy a lot of the time, but they feel a little more complex, shall we say. And it answers all the nagging questions that are left after the first game, from unresolved plot threads to 'wait, what the hell happened to this character they teased earlier?' And it's great. Again, I wish it didn't feel quite so rushed to a conclusion, it would have been truly awesome if we had gotten three games out of this deal, but the good part about it is that GAA2 is all thriller and no filler; it's only hits, just the best stuff, and for the most part it nails it and sticks the landing pretty well. I wanna keep this review mostly spoiler free, but I think GAA2 wraps things up nice and properly, and while it could have gone a bit longer at least it doesn't overstay its welcome.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/7/6/AAA-H0AADt-4.jpg

I can see why this game reviewed so well, because the presentation is by far the best we've seen in an Ace Attorney game to date. The character models are well designed and animated so fluidly and lavishly that it makes every other Ace Attorney game look a bit jank by comparison, and the soundtrack is absolutely gorgeous. Ironically, while the mystery plots sometimes make this game feel like a joke, the grandiosity of the game's visuals and music make it feel like the biggest and most important one yet.

All of the key characters in this game are fantastic and really brought to life by the sheer amount of detail put into their character models. Making a main protagonist who's worthy of Phoenix's legacy is a tough ask but Ryunosuke passes the test with flying colors; he might very well be my new favorite main protagonist, and that's saying a lot. He's a surprisingly fresh face and doesn't feel like a retread of Phoenix at all, and it's really fun to watch him grow into the role of defense attorney. Susato as well also doesn't feel like a retread of past sidekicks and makes a great partner for Ryunosuke. Sherlock Herlock Sholmes is an absolute blast and steals the show in every single scene he's in, and keeps some of the slower parts of the game afloat by himself. Even Iris, a character who I expected to be annoying by virtue of being an 8-year-old supergenius scientist, is somehow about as likeable as she could have possibly been in that role. All the secondary characters like Kazuma and Barok van Zieks are also great. Ace Attorney has always been about its characters, and this game continues in that tradition.

The localization is really well done, and it kind of makes me wonder what they were ever afraid of. There's a little bit of awkwardness, of course, in having to deal with the fact that these characters are unavoidably and canonicaly from Japan, and it's clear that the only good choice was to leave the Japanese characters' names in Japanese - it's not 2005 anymore, we've all played Persona and Danganronpa and what have you by now, we can handle it. The localization gets everything right by leaving the names that should be left as is and changing the things that needed to be changed, and the resulting script is as sharp as any Ace Attorney has ever been.

I just can't get over the nagging feeling that for as many things as this game does so incredibly well, it's falling JUST shy of greatness. Maybe if we really got the planned trilogy of games to flesh everything out and give it the proper breathing room. Maybe if a couple of these cases didn't feel like such egregiously annoying filler. There's a few things in the second game that don't quite sit right with me, either, without going into spoiler territory - missed opportunities here and there to do something more interesting that they missed or just didn't have time to do - so this game falls shy of being as good as AA3 or AA6, for me, which is a damn shame, because it's really, really good. I'm really thankful that it ended up getting localized here, because it would have been criminal for a pair of games with this much effort and care and love put into them to not get their shot, and for now, Ace Attorney is a series I can say I've played every game in. We're quite far removed from the failures of AA4 and AAI1 now.

Next up: oh my god. I'm so gay

I'll have to pass on this review. I am slowly, periodically playing the cases in AAI. I've finished 3 so far, when I can find the time and energy to finish an entire case with a friend.

Paratroopa1 posted...

The localization is really well done, and it kind of makes me wonder what they were ever afraid of. There's a little bit of awkwardness, of course, in having to deal with the fact that these characters are unavoidably and canonicaly from Japan, and it's clear that the only good choice was to leave the Japanese characters' names in Japanese - it's not 2005 anymore, we've all played Persona and Danganronpa and what have you by now, we can handle it.

They still changed a bunch of the Japanese names to be puns too, like Iyesa Nosa or Kyurio Korekuta.

Or Menimeno!

I need to replay GAA to solidify my thoughts on it (and finish my stats once and for all until AA7 should it ever come to pass).

#7: Unsighted

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/8/6/AAA-H0AADvIe.jpg

So let me get this straight. There was this great indie game, with beautiful pixel art and a good soundtrack, that perfectly blends Zelda and Metroid elements into its own, unique concept, that has a story that revolves about lesbian robot romance, and I almost didn't fucking play it? I nearly PASSED on this?

When I was snatching up games to play for this list during the last major Steam sale in the spring, I originally passed on this game, and probably would have left it in the 'should've played' list going into this. I felt I'd spent enough money, and this was the next game to play, but for some reason I stopped just shy of buying it. I regretted that decision following the sale, because I felt like this one could be pretty good - but as luck would have it, it went on sale again like a week later. I didn't pass it up this time. Good choice.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/8/7/AAA-H0AADvIf.jpg

I'm not sure why I second-guessed Unsighted at first. I think there were two main reasons. One is that it had that kind of - I don't want to call it Soulslike, but it's got that tricky kind of combat where you have to actually care about reading enemy attack patterns and dodging and occasionally doing blocks with tight timing windows to gain an advantage, and I'm just never good at those. Reason number two has to do with the game's main gimmick.

In Unsighted, you play the role of Alma, an android tasked with saving a dying world. See, the idea in Unsighted is that everyone in the game is an android of some kind, and everyone has a limited time to live before they run out of the energy that makes them sentient, INCLUDING you, rendering them mindless killing robots. This imposes a time limit in the game; take too much time wandering around, searching areas, fighting enemies, and gradually all of the NPCs in the game will die, starting mostly with less important ones, until even important characters start dying off. You can find items that will give people more time, but there is a strictly finite amount in the game, and you don't get much of it - only buying someone another half hour or so in real time. And of course, you may need to buy yourself time, too. But if you help people, they'll be able to reward you by providing services and giving you special items.

It's a really unique, and highly intimidating concept, and while the game does allow you to turn this off if you'd rather play this Zelda-style adventure at a more relaxed pace, I decided to accept that the game had a plan here, and I played it on its normal settings. I needn't have been so worried; after all, I'm a speedrunner at heart, and I like to do things fast. I think if you've ever speedrun a game before at all, you'll be well equipped to play Unsighted. The game's ticking clock element does provide a sense of urgency, and you'll probably be forced to lose a person or two (I only lost one on my first playthrough), and you'll just kind of have to accept that you can't save everyone. But that's the kind of story Unsighted wants to tell and the game it wants you to play. I don't know if it works for everyone, but it worked for me at least - the added sense of urgency that the time hanging over my head gave me made me extra relieved any time I found good equipment upgrades or useful items that would help me make progress faster, and it made me feel accomplished any time I made quick progress through an area.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/8/8/AAA-H0AADvIg.jpg

As for the action, I didn't need to worry about that either, unfortunately due to one of the game's biggest flaws. I started out in this game feeling quite challenged, and maybe a little overwhelmed - the game doesn't give you a lot of health to work with at the start and you really have to learn how to block and dodge enemies' attacks efficiently and play battles smart. That holds true for this game through a fairly challenging early game up through the first boss or so; beyond that point, you can start to get weapons and chips (stat boosts you can equip, basically) that really start to break the game wide open. Some of the stuff in this game is crazy broken, and by the final boss I was nearly invincible to the point that I could basically just mash my face into the boss, attack, and not worry about dying until I eventually won. I can't blame myself for making the strongest character possible, but I sort of wish they hadn't let me.

But I forgive this game's wonky difficulty curve, because it's otherwise just a truly superb action-adventure. Like I said, this game is kind of a mashup of both Zelda and Metroid, but in many ways it meets or even exceeds both series. It probably shares most in common with Zelda, in that it's got top-down action where you go to different dungeons, using keys on key doors and finding a dungeon item that helps you progress. It's all very Zelda, but in a way that doesn't disappoint or feel like a cheap imitation; the level design here is really top-notch and scratches the same itch as any of the best Zelda games do, taking some ideas from those games (mostly Twilight Princess - if you've played the game, you know what I'm talking about) and improving upon them.

But it's a little Metroidy too, and this is where the game really shines. Instead of its dungeons all being separate areas like in a Zelda game, all of the game's areas are intricately woven together into many interconnected routes, and there's plenty of optional areas to explore, shortcuts to take, and alternate routes to use to get where you're going. Not to mention that there's plenty of clever sequence breaking. There are often more than one way to get through an obstacle, or more than one way to find the item that you need to progress, and while the game does have a very obvious suggested path, just a little bit of clever thinking or realization of certain sources will let you go almost anywhere you want. It's not easy, but the game isn't stopping you, either, if you can figure it out.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/8/9/AAA-H0AADvIh.jpg

I complained about Metroid Dread a lot, and it could stand to learn a lot from Unsighted. Where Metroid Dread had a problem in its level design where there were constantly artificial barriers everywhere blocking progress to the game except through the one precise route the game wanted me to take, Unsighted brings things back to more Super Metroidian principles. There are multiple different routes you can take to go to the next place you ened to go, most of the time, and no matter which way you go, the game is well-designed to let you get back on the right track - you'll almost always stumble on a way forward, and if not, you'll probably stumble on some helpful items you wanted anyway. There was only one time in the entire playthrough that I got seriously lost, and it was completely my fault - I missed something that I shouldn't have and got sidetracked, and even then I did find stuff. Other than that, I wasted very little time in this game, and in a game where time is a resource, that was important. This game could have failed very badly in this department if the level design was not very well designed.

I was almost turned off by the dystopian nature of this game, too, as it's a little bit of a crapsack world and kind of a downer, but it's got a lot more light to it than I expected at first; the game's characters are really cute for starters, the world is really pleasant to look at thanks to the gorgeous art, and the ending is a hopeful, rather than depressing, one, which keeps this from being too bleak to suit my tastes. Also, like I said, it's got lesbian romance with cute robot girls in it. Hell yeah.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/9/0/AAA-H0AADvIi.jpg

It's not a very long game, probably about half as long as your average Zelda game, and it left me wanting more after I blew through it - but I can't wait to return to this game, because there's still so much I want to do. I didn't 100% everything in the game, and I could go back and find every secret, or maybe just play an untimed run and take things at my own pace. Or I could play on the hard difficulty, which the game promises is truly challenging, and maybe I won't be able to break the game quite so badly and need to rely on my actual skills. There's also a boss rush mode - I need to try that! This game's just so damn fun that it makes me want to re-experience it in a bunch of different ways, and maybe even try speedrunning it for real.

I feel like this game really slipped under the radar - don't make the mistake of passing this one up like I almost did. If the whole "everyone's slowly dying in real time" aspect of the game stresses you out because you'd rather take things slow and explore at your own pace, the game lets you turn that feature off with no judgment - and take it from me, even if you do play with that mode on, the game gives you more time than you think, gives you a lot more outs than you think, and the NPCs aren't as critical to success as you think either, so it's truly not as scary as it sounds and you can probably do it. I really recommend this one to anyone looking for a solid action-adventure; there haven't been too many 2D Zelda games lately, so I've been looking for stuff to take its place. On that front, Unsighted is easily this year's winner.

Next up: This is a roguelike from 2021, and along with Dum-Dum and Bean and Nothingness, I think it is one of the most obscure games on this entire list. I'd be surprised if more than one person here knows about this game, max. It's only available on itch.io and Google Play - I'm convinced that at least one of you will buy this game after I talk about it.

Thank you for the write-up on Unsighted. That's a game that's lingering on the edge for me, and the idea of being time-restricted is one of the major things that's keeping me from pulling the trigger. There are genres where being time-gated is fine. A game that heavily features exploration isn't one of them. Plus, I think you lose a bunch of time when you die? I don't play games slowly, but I don't go pure speedrunner on them during my first run. I think my first Hollow Knight run took 20-25 hours to get the basic ending. (I did get lost a bunch.) So I doubt I'll have the same experience, but maybe it won't be as bad as I fear.

Paratroopa1 posted...

I'm convinced that at least one of you will buy this game after I talk about it.

The dev is waiting with bated breath for this write-up so they can get a sale.

Every time I play the great ace attorney Chronicles I put it down wishing it was the ace attorney trilogy remastered with a bit more flexibility in court.

It just doesn't quite have the joyful charm to it that the original trilogy had. It feels like the novelty of the setting takes the place of the fun and diverse environments that the originals had. Plus susato and ryunosuke just feel like a poor stand in for Maya and phoenix. A more distinct lead probably would make it feel less lacking.

Always made me sad that Death's Door got way more attention than Unsighted when Unsighted's similar but much better. Cool game.

That writeup does a pretty good job selling Unsighted to me, as someone who was a little turned off by the time mechanic. It sounds kind of like the original Pikmin, where the time limit feels oppressive but you really don't need to worry much about it. Didn't know it was gay either, that's a bonus.

Curious what the next game is! I have no guesses.

Oh yeah, the death mechanic is also good. I enjoyed the sadness each time a character died, and it was easy to keep the ones you actually care about alive.

I like Unsighted but the plot didn't particularly grab me beyond the initial premise and the time mechanic was... alright. Once I got past the initial 'oh god i have to do everything asap' fear I fell into a comfortable rhythm, but losing time on death always pissed me off and at a certain point I realised there was another town with duplicates for every NPC service that had a much longer lifespan so there was really no danger and I feel like that lost a bit of tension for the game. It was a really fun time though, speaking as someone who loves to explore and take my time the game wasn't too rough. The optional superboss in particular was one heck of a challenge tho.

MacArrowny posted...

Always made me sad that Death's Door got way more attention than Unsighted when Unsighted's similar but much better. Cool game.

Unsighted reminded me more of an action-based CrossCode than it did Death's Door, and maybe I'm the only person in the world who thinks this but I really like CC's ridiculously precise puzzles and missed their absence in a more actiony game >_>

Unsighted rocks, I played it at the start of the year and had a total blast. I could not BELIEVE no one was talking about it and made a long (but not this long lol) post on it here. So glad to see other people talking it up. Criminally overlooked sad lesbian robot game.

#6 - Slice & Dice

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/8/6/AAA-H0AADv_K.png

Sometime around late May, I was getting ready to begin this list. I had 50 titles at the time - it was a draft where I still had Metroid Dread, Wildermyth, and Coffee Talk in the top 50 (at 47-49 respectively, Legend of Doom was always gonna be 50 because it's funny), and I still had Super Mario Bros. 35 and CrossCode: A New Home on the list somewhere down the line (in the 30's somewhere), which I'd later give their own entries outside the list. Not quite a perfect list, but it was pretty damn close, and I was happy with it. I wasn't far from bringing it to print.

Then, something terrible happened. A friend of mine said to me, "hey, have you played this dice roguelike? It looks cool." and I was like "do you mean Dicey Dungeons? I played it a while ago, didn't really like it." And he was like "no no, it's something else. It's called Slice & Dice." And I'm a fiend for roguelikes, so sure, I'll give it a look. And that's when I realized that there was a whole layer to the iceberg that I wasn't properly exploring.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/8/7/AAA-H0AADv_L.jpg

If you've never heard of Slice & Dice, I don't blame you - I hadn't either. My friend found out about it through Vinesauce, which is the highest profile look at it I could find on the internet. The other place that came up on a quick google was a site called Buried Treasure, which ended up being the last frontier of my 2020-2021 games hunt - they're a site that does reviews of obscure indie games. *Really* obscure - like, self-published, less than 100 reviews on Steam, stuff you have to dig through itch.io to even find. I used it to pluck a few more titles out to play - this was how I found Dum-Dum way back at #38 for instance. It made me realize how far I still had to go before I really felt like I had plumbed the depths of the internet looking for every game I could play; and even then, I'm still learning about games from 2020-2021 that I've never heard of.

Anyway, that review and a short video of the game convinced me to dive into it. This one wasn't even available on Steam - I had to go onto itch.io (it's also available on android via google play) to find it. And that's how I ended up delaying my list for like over a month, because I got really, really sucked into Slice & Dice.

Slice & Dice is, well, a dice-based roguelite. It's a simple game. You have five heroes, each one of a different class, each of which has their own die to roll. Each side represents a different effect - dealing damage to an enemy, blocking damage from an incoming attack, healing hp, gaining mana to cast spells, as well as other effects. You roll all five of your heroes' dice using Yahtzee rules, where you can keep any number and reroll any number up to twice, and then you use what you have. Enemies roll their attacks first and show you their 'intentions', kind of like Into the Breach, and you get to react accordingly. Along the way, you get choices of class upgrades for all your characters, getting better dice, as well as finding items that modify or improve their dice or give them more hps or immunity to status, etc. You fight through 20 floors, trying not to die along the way. You get the idea.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/8/8/AAA-H0AADv_M.jpg

Ranking roguelikes is really tricky, because they almost always seem the most interesting in the first few hours. It's brand new, you're learning the mechanics, nothing seems old or wearisome yet, you haven't done everything there is to do. Aside from the very best roguelikes, these tend to age badly - I was hesitant to rank games like Iris and the Giant and Ring of Pain as high as I did, because there's a pretty good chance that I won't even remember them in a couple years once the honeymoon period is long over. As a result, I gave Slice & Dice a really modest position on my list at first. I stuck it at #35, figuring that that'd be just fine once I started doing the list. But then I kept playing it. And kept playing it. Over, and over. So I kept moving it up the list. And now it's here.

What really surprised me about Slice & Dice is that while it seems so simple, it has so much depth to it. There's a lot of different class options and they all play differently, and the combinations of items you get are always new and interesting every run. This is a roguelike that has enough different possibilities in it that every run presents the potential of getting some really awesome combo that you haven't seen before, which is for me what really drives a roguelike to be endlessly replayable. The choices of items are always exciting and upgrade your heroes in interesting ways, and the possibility of getting some really good combination of class and item makes the game exciting.

At the same time, it's just incredibly well balanced. I wouldn't say that it's an overly difficult game, but a lot of fights always seem to be won or lost on thin margins, and it always feels like key strategic decisions really matter; where you put your items, what classes you pick, and in each battle, how you decide whether or not to reroll your dice and how you use the resources you wind up with. There's luck involved, of course, as it's a dice rolling game, but there's also a lot of ways to mitigate your luck, and it feels like winning reliably is an achievable goal.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/8/9/AAA-H0AADv_N.jpg

This game is pretty bare bones, and yet there's a lot here. Just a solo dev + one artist made this entire game. There's no music, but the sound design in this game is kind of hilariously charming with its weird beeps and chirps, and the pixel art is really pleasant, with cool hero portraits and expressive enemy sprites; it does just enough presentation-wise to get by. It trades being fancy for having a ton of content. The selection of classes and items is quite wide, and there's tons of modes to play. If you get bored with the standard mode, you can play an endless mode where you keep having curses stacked on you, or set a custom party where you pick your classes. The cursed mode has a ton of different curses and blessings you can get in it, which increases the possibility of putting together a build that's really interesting.

I must have played this for well over 500 hours by now, possibly approaching 1000. I'm still playing it today. Seriously, I'm completely addicted to this dumb game - I've been trying to get a good streak going on hard mode or unfair mode, and it's always such an easy game to just open and play at any time while I'm watching a video or eating dinner or something. It's kind of become my new go-to when I'm just bored and want to busy myself. For a while, I wasn't sure if it would have that staying power where I was obsessed with it for more than a month, but now it's been like, about five? I haven't stopped playing it. I'm always excited to see how my next run will go.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/9/0/AAA-H0AADv_O.jpg

The crazy thing is, this game just got a huge update. That happened in 2022, so I didn't really want to judge this game based on that, but fuck it, I dunno if I'll include this game in a future list anyway just based on that. But just as I was starting to get a little tired of this game, it dropped a brand new, free content update, and just added and rebalanced so many things that the game basically became an entire new game. Double the number of classes, more than double the number of items, tons of new effects and enemies and bosses, a shitload of new modes - the whole thing just got turned completely on its head. I had to adapt to a completely new meta, and that meant sinking in hundreds more hours into this game.

I'm far from done; the 2.0 version of the game is a lot deeper and quite a bit harder and I haven't even seen every item yet, and I've been playing for a while! I don't have time stats on this since it's not on Steam, but the fact that I've probably been playing this for 1000 hours and I still have new stuff to see is absolutely wild. I still have runs where I'm seeing completely new shit that I've never seen before and might not see again.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/9/1/AAA-H0AADv_P.jpg

I can't recommend this game enough. It's 7 bucks, and it's worth your time if you're looking for a quick and easy game to pick up and play. It's pretty much exactly the dice-based roguelike that I wish Dicey Dungeons was, but it wasn't. It's wild to me that this game has gotten basically no attention; the Discord server for it is still pretty small, and the leaderboards for the 2.0 version of the game have like, maybe 50 people on it? I actually held the WR for most hard games won in a row for a while, but I've dropped down to #5, I think. It was a soft record, but the fact that I'm literally one of the only people playing this is completely unacceptable. I NEED people to discover this humble little roguelike with a modest presentation and incredibly tight design. It's easily the best hidden gem of 2021 in my opinion and it was one of the games I was most excited to talk about.

Next up: One of the greatest sequels ever?

That's some serious commitment, even if you're only estimating your playtime and could be way off. I was obscenely addicted to a game that I started playing back in February, and I was averaging over 50 hrs/week for a while -- which is like 7 hours a day! -- and I'm at a total of around 900 now while still playing it actively.

Anyway, Slice and Dice doesn't look like anything special, and I'm usually not big on rogue-likes, especially non -lites, but maybe I'll force myself to give this a shot.

I wouldn't give Slice and Dice a second look if I saw it somewhere, but after your glowing review I'll actively avoid it as I don't want to lose that many hours. It sounds great!

Got to stage 16 on my first run, seems like a neat game. I like that there are truly strange items like the one I got that gives extra max health based on how many consonants are in a character's job name. I actively avoided promoting a character because of how much health they would lose from the name change!

azuarc posted...

That's some serious commitment, even if you're only estimating your playtime and could be way off. I was obscenely addicted to a game that I started playing back in February, and I was averaging over 50 hrs/week for a while -- which is like 7 hours a day! -- and I'm at a total of around 900 now while still playing it actively.

Anyway, Slice and Dice doesn't look like anything special, and I'm usually not big on rogue-likes, especially non -lites, but maybe I'll force myself to give this a shot.

Well, I have hit over 1000 hours in a game that's coming up (spoilers), so I do have a fairly good idea of what playing 1000 hours in a game *feels* like

I'll third Slice & Dice looking very generic, but it definitely sounds like a game I'd enjoy. Also the name pun is incredible.

Paratroopa1 posted...

Next up: One of the greatest sequels ever?

Maybe Pokmon Snap? Can't recall if it's showed up yet or not.

Paratroopa1 posted...

kind of like Into the Breach

I'm sold!

For real that sounds like a lot of fun, I hope it picks up support I don't like seeing good things get ignored like that. And maybe it'll eventually release on consoles and I can give it a go!

Pdix Outer Wilds Echoes

#5 - New Pokemon Snap

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/6/3/AAA-H0AADwa7.jpg

Remember when Pokemon spinoffs used to be bangers? I mean, maybe they weren't actually bangers but I just liked them because I was a kid. But like, Pokemon Puzzle League was good! Pokemon Pinball was good! Pokemon Trading Card Game was good! Okay, maybe Hey You Pikachu was kind of a weird gimmick, but Pokemon was largely a mark of quality. As Pokemon got bigger, though, it became more of a mixed bag, I think. There were still some decent Pokemon spinoffs - Mystery Dungeon was alright, and I think I heard Ranger was ok? - but there was a lot of stuff that was kinda low budget stuff just shoved out there. That's why it was hard for me to be anything but skeptical about New Pokemon Snap.

Pokemon Snap, of course, was kind of the crown jewel of awesome Pokemon spinoffs back in the late 90's/early 00's. I mean, I wouldn't even call the game any sort of a masterpiece, really, but it was fun and unique and made for a really nice companion piece to the Pokemon games. It's got that late 90's Pokemon aesthetic that just hits differently. It's a nice change of pace from the standard Pokemon setting, too - as far as being in the Pokemon world goes, the actual mainline Pokemon games are kinda my least favorite, because I just love the Pokemon in general and capturing and battling them feels strangely kind of perverse compared to just getting to enjoy them in all of their wild glory, in the same sort of way that we don't look kindly on the practices of circuses or early zoos. Pokemon Snap is a nice contrast to that. Again, not a great game, but charming enough to earn its place in my nostalgia banks.

I always felt for a really long time that Pokemon Snap deserved a sequel that had more Pokemon and improved upon the mechanics of the first game. Like, I wanted a Pokemon Snap sequel on Gamecube. That's how long I've been waiting for this! It's amazing that it took this long for them to make another. We went through the GC, the Wii, and the Wii U without any word on a Snap sequel, aside from it being re-released on Wii VC - this is a series that's been dead longer than F-Zero.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/6/4/AAA-H0AADwa8.jpg

When the news finally came that there was gonna be a new one in a Pokemon Direct, I was hesitantly excited. Yeah, it's about damn time that we got a new Pokemon Snap. But was it gonna be any good? By now, Pokemon has a spotty record. Yeah, sometimes Pokemon games are good, but sometimes they're cheap, and Pokemon Snap was a game that easily could have been low effort. I hoped for the best, but braced myself for the worst. But it's Switch-era Nintendo, so I needn't have ever worried. They only release bangers. New Pokemon Snap ended up exceeding my best case scenario. It's not merely as good as I hoped a Pokemon Snap sequel could be - it's better than I thought was possible.

If you're unfamiliar or need a refresher on the concept; New Pokemon Snap is a sort of 'on-rails shooter' where you drive through a nature area full of Pokemon and take photos of them. It sort of feels like a theme park ride; the Pokemon move around, interacting with each other, doing cute stuff, and you're kind of just along for the ride, driving by and looking at them. It's a pretty chill game, but at the same time, it's also surprisingly intense; Pokemon show off their best angles and poses for only the briefest of moments, and only if you know how to coax them out at the right time, and finding the best shots is at times requires extremely good aim and timing.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/6/5/AAA-H0AADwa9.jpg

There was a lot of work to do, considering that not even Gold and Silver got the Pokemon Snap treatment. The original Snap was just gen 1, and now they had to cover all the way up to gen 8. Fortunately, it's immediately obvious that this game was designed by fans, or at least people who love Pokemon. The sheer amount of effort is immediately on display here; there was a lot of love put into this game, and it's immediately obvious that it wasn't cheap. The Pokemon are lovingly modeled and animated with loads of character, which makes this game one of the best possible showcases of the Pokemon themselves; the mainline games focus on the Pokemon as monsters to raise in a game, but Snap focuses on them as living creatures just kinda doing their thing, and it really gives you the chance to appreciate the Pokemon's designs and personalities.

The environments in this game are gorgeous and showcase the Pokemon well. Obviously, since this is on-rails, the areas don't have a real sense of size - like I said, it all still feels like a theme park ride, a sort of miniaturized, sanitized version of the real thing. But that said, all of the areas do a great job of conveying an idea of size; they feel expansive and detailed, giving a lot to look at and a lot of places for Pokemon to hide in nooks and off in the distance. I'm a really big fan of the ocean areas (hey, water levels that don't suck!) and the spooky forest, but even some areas that would be more bland, like the desert and badlands, manage to be awe-inspiring in their own way.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/6/6/AAA-H0AADwa-.jpg

And my god, there's so many areas in this game! The amount of content in this game is staggering. My pessimistic estimate for how many areas there'd be was like, 6, which is how many there was in the original; I figured there wouldn't be many more than 10 at best. Not unreasonable for me to assume, considering Mario Party Superstars ended up on the pessimistic end. But if I counted right there's 15, many of which have day and night variants, and all of which have multiple different possible setups beyond that, as well as like, six boss levels? Three of the areas they added as free DLC after the game was released, which was really nice, because even with just 12 areas this game still felt really packed with things to do and places to go. It took me something like 15-20 hours just to beat the game, much less get every Pokemons' photo and complete all of the (ridiculously hard) challenges, which is way, way more life than I thought a game like this would have.

I haven't really gotten into playing this game for score, but I'm absolutely fascinated by the New Pokemon Snap community, who have assembled a really impressive list of high scores for every possible photo in the game, and since you can get four different photos of each Pokemon, there's like... well over a thousand different photos. Seriously, this game has a lot of content. There's so much strategy and effort that goes into maximizing the score of each shot - the original Pokemon Snap had pretty obvious caps for each shot to hit, making maximizing the score a little bit simpler, but NPS is far more demanding, giving you perfect scores only if your shot is truly as perfect as it can be, and most of the time you can't even maximize every score at once, which leads to some really interesting strategies being used to get the best score on some shots. This makes it really unlikely that the true maximum score for every shot can ever truly be narrowed down, which just makes the prospect of aiming for high scores all the more exciting.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/6/7/AAA-H0AADwa_.jpg

I'm in love with this game. I played it all summer while sitting outside in the hammock - I'm always a real sucker for games that are about exploring really beautiful natural environments, so this game's right up my alley. I'm kinda itching to go back to it, actually, because I never quite 100% completed it. I'm close, but not there yet. Except I'm not close on the challenges - those are so hard that it's insane, and it really shows you how much there is to do. You'd think that it wouldn't be hard to figure out every combination of thing you can do to get Pokemon to respond to you, but there's a surprising number of ways to manipulate them, which makes this a surprisingly potent puzzle game.

By the way, I have to say that I'm shocked that Polygon didn't even include this game in their *top 50* games of 2021. They included a few games in there that I think are kind of duds! Not to mention that they listed some lazy stuff like "Genshin Impact 2.0" and "Animal Crossing 2.0" which really didn't need to be on the list. I know, it's kind of lame to defend a Nintendo game like this because it's not like they need it, but this one really deserves serious critical acclaim; it's not for everyone, but it definitely deserves to be taken seriously on a GOTY shortlist. I'm honestly shocked I'm saying that, because I wouldn't say it about almost any other Pokemon game that's ever been released. A lot of them are fun, and some of them are even good, but something as high quality, high effort, and polished as New Pokemon Snap is nearly unprecedented in the franchise. Seriously, I can't believe how above and beyond they went on this - it actually made the 20+ year wait worth it. They somehow delivered on the best possible version of what this long-awaited sequel could have been.

Next up: If you've been paying attention, I've already said this game is on the list. Are you surprised I put it this high?

Fun fact: New Pokemon Snap is my 3rd most played video game of all time (by hours spent).

Yep good write-up, New Snap is great. By the end I was overly frustrated with how difficult/obtuse some of the puzzles were, after I snapped all species of pokemon I lost motivation for continuing and I never got close to finishing all the quests. But better to be too hard than too easy for that kind of game, and I got dozens of hours of fun out of this anyway so I can't complain too much.

I only wish they let you rewind or drop into a course at different spots so you didn't have to replay 5 minutes to get that one attempt at a rare shot again every time.

The original Snap is my favorite Pokemon game, so it sounds like I should give this a shot.

I have some nits to pick with New Snap but yeah, good game zone.

Next up is maybe Outer Wilds DLC

New Pokemon Snap legit feels like a miracle game, absolutely agree that it's far better than even felt possible at the time of its announcement. I'd honestly go so far as to say it may be the best thing that Pokemon franchise has ever produced, at least insofar as it sells that this is an amazing world full of amazing, personality-packed creatures. While it's not exactly a fair comparison, if the mainline games had even one tenth the beauty, care and flavor of this game I'd say they would deserve their massive success a good bit more.

Also props to them for including a massive variety of pokemon and seeming to choose ones that would work the best in the environments instead of just picking the most popular.

andylt posted...

Also props to them for including a massive variety of pokemon and seeming to choose ones that would work the best in the environments instead of just picking the most popular.

Yeah, this is something I love. There are so many Pokemon in this game - Cradily, Lumineon, Vivillon, just to name a few - which people normally wouldn't give a second thought that are used to great effect in this game.

#4: The Jackbox Party Pack 8

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/6/5/AAA-H0AADwpB.jpg

Like I said in my previous Jackbox writeup, putting Jackbox games onto these GOTY lists feels kind of "free" in a way that feels like cheating. I'm always going to get the chance to play them on my friends' dime with little investment on my part, and there's one of them every single year, so it feels kind of too obvious and lame; each one may be different but none of them are really revolutionizing gaming either. Generally speaking, though, they aren't gonna crack the really high echelons of my lists; the best ones will generally top out at just making the top 10 or so. Until now, I would have considered Pack 3 the best overall, and I included Packs 1-6 as a joint entry at like, I wanna say 19th or 20th on my decades list, partly off the strength of that entry, but also backed up by the other five entries as well. They're all fun, but on their own, they wouldn't rank super highly. They're just stupid fun with friends; they aren't truly revolutionary, life-changing, experiences.

Well, until Jackbox Party Pack 8. Jackbox Party Pack 8 is different.

Because Jackbox Party Pack 8 is the one with Job Job.

Time for another mini-ranking of Jackbox games!

(By the way, I only had a screenshot prepared for Job Job. The rest I didn't save any screenshots from.)

#5 - Weapons Drawn

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/6/6/AAA-H0AADwpC.jpg

I compare Weapons Drawn to Bidiots; it's a game with a really fun premise that ends up taking way too long to play out in satisfying way. I don't really love Bidiots as much as everyone else, to be honest - the concept of drawing stuff that all looks similar and then having to figure out which is which is great, but the bidding format is really long and kind of randomly unfair to certain players. Weapons Drawn is in a similar boat - I like the idea of drawing pictures of weapons that hide a secret letter somewhere, and trying to be clever about the way you hide it, but beyond that initial premise, the way the game plays out just takes waaaaay too long. There's a sort of social deception game happening here where everyone investigates the drawing and the person who drew it has to pretend like they didn't draw it, but it's hard and not really that fun to try to weasel out of it, so it often just turns into a guessing game where one person is kind of quiet. The game has you go through drawings that are actually used to 'kill' people but then you do all the leftover ones anyway, so it doesn't feel like there's much urgency to it. Funnily enough, the best part of the game is the side-game where you have to invent a name for a guest to invite, and then try to kill other peoples' guests by guessing who named who - I could just play that part and be happy! But the rest is a slog. It's a cool idea, but they weren't able to figure out how to make it work, and it ends up being too high concept for its own good. Still, I think it's playable, and it's pretty good as far as worst-game-in-the-packs go, but I suspect we won't return to it much.

#4 - Drawful Animate

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/6/7/AAA-H0AADwpD.jpg

If you told me that I would be ranking JPP8 as high as I did, I would never have guessed that Drawful Animate wasn't part of the reason why. I feel bad that I don't like this game more - Drawful has always been a lot of fun in the past and this game should continue the tradition. The problem is, I've just had horrible luck with getting good prompts in this one. It feels like the prompts that worked in the previous iterations of this game have been taken too far, and half of them feel too much like the Jackbox team trying to be funny and quirky in their own specific way, making the prompts just annoying to draw and guess - a lot of the drawing guesses can be metagamed just by figuring out which answer is the most "Jackboxy." The animation should be fun, but some of these prompts are just too stupid and annoying to draw and that makes it annoying to have to draw out TWO different pictures. When the prompts are good, the game is good, and I'm willing to continue playing it for just that reason, but I'm really tired of getting things to draw where the prompt is too Jackbox-humor and just makes me groan and roll my eyes out of their sockets. As far as "fourth best game in a pack" goes, this one's a keeper, though.

#3 - Wheel of Enormous Proportions

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/6/8/AAA-H0AADwpE.jpg

This one's a modest surprise, and a nice little filler; I'd call it modestly fun in the same sort of way that Guesspionage is, where it won't light the party on fire but it's a nice, cozy game. Really, the secret to this one is that it's probably the most fun pure trivia game in the Jackbox games. Trivia Murder Party is fun, but the trivia questions are mostly meant to be impossibly hard and just exist to kill you (except the final round which is fun), and YDKJ has good trivia but is more reliant on quick, tricky thinking and fast fingers. This one's less gimmicky, and I think in some ways it's more fun for it, actually - picking items that belong to a category from a list, guessing what number of a thing there is, matching two lists of items, there's a lot of variety here and it's a lot of fun because I'm a boring trivia nerd. The actual wheel portion of the game is boring to me, I don't really like roulettes and other games of pure luck, I just kind of zone out and watch the wheel spin around and eventually randomly choose someone the winner, but I don't feel too bad about it really; I just have a fun time solving trivia questions. I'll almost always be happy to play this game even if it's nobody's first pick. Really solid filler.

#2 - Poll Mine

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/6/9/AAA-H0AADwpF.jpg

Poll Mine is incredible, and in almost any other pack it probably would have been my favorite game; Poll Mine is seriously a top 5 game for me. In this one, you get a question with 8 choices, which can range from anything from fairly straightforward like "what's the best bird?" to crazier shit like "which of these gross objects found on the sidewalk would you actually use?" or "which of these presentations would be the worst to give to a kindergarten class?" Then everyone in the group ranks their top 3 (or 4, or 5) favorites, and it's up to two competing groups to debate where each one of them ranks. It's a VERY board 8 game - arguably even more board 8 than bracketeering, in my opinion, since it involves a lot of debating the strength level of each options and how likely each person was to vote for them. Most of the poll questions are REALLY good and fun to answer honestly, and then debating the right answer can be challenging and really fun to do as a group. Some people love this game, others are a bit more lukewarm on it, but I'm firmly within the 'love' camp - I want to play this one every time we play Jackbox because I love trying to guess the ranking of each poll question. It's like a better Guesspionage, really, which is somehow the second time I'm mentioning that game. Poll Mine is great, and it's absolutely part of the reason I ranked this game so high - for me, it's a must-have in the Jackbox pantheon.

But then there's Job Job.

#1 - Job Job

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/7/0/AAA-H0AADwpG.jpg

The act of laughing so hard and uncontrollably that you almost can't breathe can be incredibly cathartic, and it's a feeling rarely experienced - only occasionally is something so surprisingly and profoundly funny that it snaps the wiring in the brain just right to break it momentarily. Job Job, for my money, has been the most reliable generator of this specific emotion in the past year, and it's really hard to put a price on that. This simple game of answering job interview questions basically using magnetic poetry words randomly dealt to you by other players' batshit ramblings is an absolute masterpiece of found comedy, and it so reliably has me in tears that it has immediately usurped any other Jackbox game as the GOAT Jackbox game, without a doubt. I feel like nearly every person who plays Job Job has it as one of their favorites, and even the most Job Job skeptics still tend to enjoy it. Every single time we do a Jackbox session, from now until god knows when, I will always need at least one Job Job. It's supplanted Fibbage and Quiplash as the easiest go-to. Every single session of Job Job has made me, at minimum, smile, and it's so goddamn fun to make prompts for it - it really walks the line nicely between creative participation without feeling required to generate a full joke from your own brain like Quiplash. There's just nothing like it - it's one of the most fun multiplayer gaming experiences I've ever had, and how is that not worth serious GOTY consideration? Job Job and Poll Mine, along with three other decent games, combine to make Jackbox Party Pack 8 the best Jackbox ever, in my opinion, and one of my favorite multiplayer games of all time. It absolutely belongs here.

Next up: My 2020 GOTY, and currently my #2 game in Steam playtime at 1,270 hours.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/0/2/AANxMBAADwpm.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/0/3/AANxMBAADwpn.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/0/4/AANxMBAADwpo.jpg

thank god, I didn't have a screenshot of the cut ted penis one