Board 8 > transience's top 100 games -- 2023 edition.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I feel like I must have asked this before, but have you played any FF5 hacks that you liked?

yeah! Ancient Cave. Ancient Cave turns FF5 into a roguelike, where you go into a 100 floor dungeon and find all items in the game, including jobs, in treasure chests. you start out as freelancers and maybe on floor 3 you'll find Ninja, and then you can class change into them. enemies get progressively harder and each run is its own unique thing. lots of fun.

#12. Xenosaga 3

I think most, if not all of my top games are absolute masterpieces in design, storytelling or what have you. Xenosaga 3? Man, that's just technobabble and power space anime. I just love it though. It's nonsense but it sets a damn tone and Xenosaga's tone is incredibly up my alley. I also weirdly love the combat system in this game - it's my favourite of all the Xeno games. It's simple but super effective.

#11. Metroid Dread

It'll probably take me years to get a solid read on how I feel about this game. The exploration is weirdly limited for such an open environment, locking you into areas until you find the way out. It's shockingly linear in its design choices, a weird illusion of choice that isn't actually there if you peek behind the hood and realize that you're locked in a space. Item hunting isn't all that great either since the rewards aren't that interesting - you don't really need more weaponry. The metroidvania parts of Dread aren't its strongest elements, let's say. The long load times between zones is the best indicator of that. I mean, all of that stuff is good! But it's not on par with other Metroids.

But man, the movement and the speed and the aggressive design of this game. It's intense. It's got a great compliment of boss fights too. It almost blinds you into loving it by just throwing interesting combat design at you over and over. On the right day, this is the greatest Metroid game ever made and at other times, I just get butchered by the EMMI and want to curl up into a ball. I love this game because Metroid is the GOAT series, but I never love it unconditionally. It's still a top 10ish kinda game despite those reservations.

I loved Dread. Not sure entirely how much, but I guess I need to make a list sometime to figure it out for myself!

get on it!

#10. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is my go-to for aimless 3d adventure game. I love just wandering in this world. I'm really worried that the new Zelda is going to be mechanics heavy or more traditional in its structure, or worse yet, that it'll be a mechanical improvement on Zelda but loses the magic of this beautiful game. I love the music and how fleeting it is, or how I can just happen upon the most enjoyable things.

I'm really looking forward to the next iteration but it's going to be kinda hard to meet my expectations, because my only hope is that it's still delightful to come around the corner and find something special. That's a really hard ask, to be surprised again.

#9. Banished

An absolutely lovely little village builder with survival elements. This game is all about trying to make it through the winter with limited resources. There's something organic and warm about this game that just resonates. It's such a happy experience for me, until my people die and I feel heartbroken about it.

I like this game's limited scope -- you're not just building endlessly -- and for when those limitations get a little boring, the community has built tons of mods to play it all sorts of ways. Banished is a palette through which you can do a ton.

It's kind of wild (no pun intended) that BotW2 is one of my most anticipated games. I've never been this excited about a Zelda game before.

#8. Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Contrasting this with Metroid Dread is fun. Dread is an aggressive, hostile game while Ori is the most serene thing on the planet. Instead of focusing on combat, Ori wants you to fly. Its traversal is so good that you get into this flow state where you just don't touch the ground for minutes at a time. The platforming takes some execution to get right but it's not overly hard to get from point a to point b, and it feels so good in the process.

This game introduces direct combat and autosaves and all the things the original was missing, plus several more movement tech powerups that has you chaining abilities to just soar. The music? God damn. What a game.

#7. Spelunky

I just love tiptoeing down Spelunky's depths, trying to survive whatever each run is going to throw at me. There's always something that kills me and my success rate is like .1% or something stupid. I'm good enough to get to the end consistently but I always screw something small up, and the smallest of errors can be game ending with the right combination of factors. Spelunky is fun to just scurry around and try to survive the endless amount of BS that the game wants to kill you with.

#6. Super Metroid

The best designed Metroid game - just a ton of great level design and interesting traps set for the player. The music and atmosphere are kind of untouchable. The controls of Super Metroid are an acquired taste, and when you compare it to something like Zero Mission, it falls just barely short.

#5. Metroid: Zero Mission

The best controlling game out there. Samus is a dream to control. Zero Mission doesn't touch the sky like Super Metroid does, but just moving around with all of Samus's powerups feels so damn good. I've beaten this game an uncountable number of times and know every room inside and out, and it's still a joy to move through this game world.

#4. Slay the Spire

I apparently have 1164:30:05 clocked on the mobile version of this game, and I own it on two other platforms as well. I am just always playing this game. STS has amazing balance and I'm always learning new things about it despite my huge clock time. I'm really looking forward to the board game which is out at the end of this year!

#3. N++

One thing that amazes me is how I can pick up N++ after being away for several months and not miss a single beat. There's no learning curve to picking up its very nuanced control after a long break. You're just back in it. N++ has what feels like infinite levels due to the sheer amount of content packed into this one screen platformer. It ends up giving you that feeling of endless replay value that a roguelite would give you, only every screen is hand crafted. What a damn game.

#2. Celeste

Happy 5th birthday to Celeste, the best designed video game of all time. I just adore how well this thing plays. The high level content in this game pushes you to the absolute brink and gives me the most rewarding feeling I've had in video games when I finally clear it. Celeste expects a lot of you but man does it make you feel good when you nail it. Oh, and the story is awesome and the music is top tier too.

#1. Xenogears

I just love this stupid game, way more than I should. Last year I made a top 100 cutscenes list for Xenogears and cut up video clips for youtube just because I wanted to re-experience the game a new way. Xenogears's story and cutscene direction and sound design and characters and whatever else are just way way beyond how I feel about any other game. There's other RPGs, and then there's Xenogears, a game that I hope never gets remade because they will screw it up and I will revolt.

transience posted...

#1. Xenogears

Aw yeah!

I wish I could like Metroid Dread. It's a good game on its own merits but it has absolutely none of the elements I want from a Metroid game. I've really gotta play AM2R, I feel like that one will be more my speed.

Thanks for writing this, I had a good time reading it

Cool list! I'm wishlisting Nobody Saves the World, Triangle Strategy, Chained Echoes, and Slay the Spire.

Gorogoa is an awesome concept but I got stuck at the clocks-puzzle and haven't gone back.

Glad I'm not the only one who's got LoZ > LoZ:LttP for the 2D LoZ-games! A lot of it is familiarity, but I did recently go back to LoZ:LttP and it just doesn't scratch the same itch the same way. You also got LoZ:BotW as the best 3D LoZ-game like I do. Did you give LoZ:LBW a try?

Surprised you have the Castlevania games so far apart! I know Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin have different philosophies but they are still very similar-feeling games to me. Maybe I'm alone there though -- I also feel similarly about the Ori games.

Portal's timeless, yeah, although Portal 2 is just too polished and its world is impressively alive so I side with the sequel.

Bleed 1+2 are legit. Try 'em out people! When I had Bleed 2 as #3 in my top ten games I played in the past two years recently, I think only one person sounded like they had played the Bleed games.

I never replay Outland but I often think about it. It just worked well to combine those elements.

Aero GPX does look legit. I'll wait for it to release and see how it lands, but there's been a demand for that style to come back for a long time and a Kickstarter's appropriate to help that.

AM2R really was legit. Amazing what a fan-game could do there. It and MD are on very similar tiers for me too.

Celeste is very good, I just think the learning curve is too sharp shortly after starting the extra levels. Shorten some screens and let me ease into them a little more!

transience posted...

#75: Mega Man 11

They made a new Mega Man, it was good, it sold well

Just adding that it is now the best-selling MM game to date. No excuses on a sequel Capcom!

And you got the right MM game on top -- MM9 was masterful.

yeah I've played Link Between Worlds. if this list expanded to 150 I'd probably consider it, but to be honest, I beat it in 2011 and never really thought about going back. like it's good and all, but I could just play LTTP and if I was going to get another Zelda game on the list it'd probably be Majora. I might get Ocarina in above it too, but Zelda games are kinda fleeting to me with the exception of the original, LTTP and BOTW.

I actually find Portrait to be a good distance above Dawn, if only because Dawn has the DS gimmicks and it's a lot easier to stay on task in Portrait because of the individual levels. the map isn't as sprawling and it's easier to go from point A to point B. Dawn is good though. if you're talking about just playing a single screen or area then I would agree, they're pretty interchangeable, but when you take the larger picture into view then I find them to diverge a bit more. the same is true of Ori, I guess, since the level designs are obviously different but if you were just look at moving from screen to screen it's a pretty close approximation.

try Career Day sometime

What do you think of Metroid: Samus Returns?

hated it. okay, I actually liked it because I love Metroid and I'll play anything that has that style to it. but the choices they made are just bad, it ran poorly on the DS, and the ending is one of the most tone deaf things I've ever seen. my feelings on Samus Returns made Dread all the more impressive.

Since were all old lets just reflect on XBCX reveal being ten years old this week
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6GxUMMGyZcM

What in the world were they planning to do with Shulk in that game.

I don't think that's Shulk. that's just the create a character that ends up being your playable character