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Top Ten Games of 2020

This year being the shitshow that it was, I ended up playing quite a few games I missed out on last year! First though, my lists from the previous years:

2015 - 2016 - 2017 - 2018 - 2019

I like having my actual top ten being games that came out the year of but here's a few games that would have been on my list last year if I had played them:

Control

Really fun gameplay and a great weird world to play around in that scratched that weird cryptid/scp itch in a really satisfying way. I still have the final DLC left but I'm excited to do a full replay of the game at some point down the line

Outer Wilds

This game was worthy of all the praise it got last year and more. Amazingly crafted clockwork world with great lore and characters and an absolute blast to explore and get lost in- and then explore and get lost in- and then explore and get lost in- and then explore and get lost in- and then explore and oh damn is that a singularity cool I wonder what happens if I- and then explore and get lost WOAH there's two of me now!

I wish I could forget this game and play it for the first time all over again.

Honorable Mention:

Ghost of Tsushima

This game is an absolute blast to play and has some of the best seamless open world navigation I’ve experienced in the genre. How much I love playing the game is however at odds with how much I LOATHE its absolute horseshit main story. Might check out the multiplayer mode some time since it’s all the stuff I liked and none of the bad stuff.

Now for the actual list:

10. Man Eater

This game scratched a deep PS2/PS3 B game itch that I've had since probably the last Saint's Row game came out. It's nothing special but I had a really fun time with this weird, bite-sized(heh) comedy game.

9. Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Ori 2 is in every way a massive improvement from the first game. The mechanics feel tighter, the level design is a lot more open and freeform, the writing feels sharper and the addition of tons of new characters with lots of dialogue helps flesh out this very beautiful world the designers at Moon Studio have crafted. I played this game on Switch and it played pretty smoothly though it was extremely jarring seeing XBOX GAME STUDIOS upon loading the game up on a Nintendo console.

8. The House in Fata Morgana: Reincarnation

This epilogue to the previous two visual novels did a fantastic job of closing out all the characters personal arcs and rounded out the story in a really good way that didn't choke me up at all, shut up.

7. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

Now here's one I didn't expect to get sucked into as much as I did. There are a lot of plot expectations coming into this game from Breath of the Wild and it takes no time at all for HW2 to subvert the shit out of them. It toes the line really well between being both a prequel and a pseudo sequel really well and the combat is that good chunky big musou stuff I love. It also doesn't have any Imprisoned fights so it's immediately better than HW1.

6. Final Fantasy 7 Remake

Speaking of pseudo sequels... This game was just an absolute blast. The combat is hectic and strategic in a really satisfying way. The way it fleshes out all the characters from the early parts of FF7 while also having kicking rad world building and a few(not enough) new areas entirely ruled and much like HW2 it absolutely loves to set up expectations from the original game and flip them on their heads. I can't wait to see this shit go off the rails in the eventual sequel.

5. Animal Crossing: New Horizons

I have like 300 hours logged into this game at this point. I've never been much of an AC guy but boy did this game luck out by coming out just in time for me quarantining at home for 7 weeks. I don't really have a lot to say about the game itself, I'm just glad I had it to occupy my time during the start of this hellshow.

4. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 4

This game has some of the highest highs in the Trails series along with some of the absolute lowest lows. It's an absolute mess especially on the romance side of things but CS4 also wraps up longstanding plot threads from like 7 games prior with surprising amounts of finesse so the pros ended up outweighing the cons for me overall. This series was a core example of scope getting out of hand over and over. In a world where these games are tighter paced and end up being the 2 games they planned instead of 4 I could see this being a top contender. Sadly that wasn't the case. 

Now that the arc of these games is over I'm excited to see if they can return to form with the next one.

3. Hades

Amazing combat, amazing writing, well integrated roguelite elements and plot, dope ass music, this game's got it all baby. The amount of variety and build potential on hand makes me constantly excited to hit up a new run.

2. The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero

Take all my complaints out of the CS4 blurb and this (finally) fan-translated version of the first game in the second Trails arc is what you get. This game had some of the best worldbuilding in the series due to it taking place entirely in one huge Hong Kong style city. It closed out a major and extremely emotionally satisfying plot thread from the first 3 games and ends on such a fantastic high note of a finale. Trails fans who haven't touched Crossbell yet, don't miss out!

1. Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Why is Yakuza 7 my favorite game of the year? It’s not the brand new, huge city to explore filled with stuff to do. It’s not the shift to JRPG combat that works extremely well in context and gets really fun by the end of the game. It’s not the fact that this is easily the funniest game I’ve played all year, and hell, maybe ever. It’s also not the way the game perfectly closes out the Era of the last seven games while ushering in a new, extremely exciting one.

It’s because the new protagonist, Kasuga Ichiban, is not Kazuma Kiryu.

Let me back-up for a sec. This game’s biggest change above all else is the shift to a new protagonist. Now, for a Yakuza game, having a different protagonist isn’t normally a huge deal; we had new guys in 4, 5 and Judgement. But they all functioned within the narrative framework established by Kiryu.

Kiryu is a character whose core philosophy I feel can be broken down into one sentence: Don’t let anyone stand in the way of you living your life the way you want to live it. Every main story in Yakuza 0-6 revolves around this philosophy, as do most of the substories. Kiryu only gets involved in a game’s main story when he has no choice, because something is threatening the life he wishes he could be living. Hell, if anything, you could argue his ending in 6 is him finally accepting he can’t have the life he wants if he wants the people in it to be safe.

So when RGG studios created a new protagonist, built around a whole new combat style, they also had to change the philosophy behind their storytelling.

Kasuga Ichiban is a character who, after this first game at least, to me has a core philosophy of: Everybody deserves to be alive, to be seen, to be helped and to be understood. The changes this brings to the story are incredible and lead to one of the most emotionally satisfying games I’ve ever played. 

Sure, this is a Yakuza game, with it’s typical conspiracies and crime melodrama, but it’s also a game about the dehumanization of homeless people and sex workers. A game about the rampat mistreatment of immigrants and elderly people. A game about the dangers of rampant puritanical nationalism.

That it manages to be all those things so loudly and proudly is something that could only happen with a loud, rambunctious, heart on his sleeve type of guy like Kasuga Ichiban driving it.

Also the reason it’s a JRPG now is because he’s a huge Dragon Quest nerd, and you get to summon a crawfish named Nancy to kill people. Game of the Year.

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1.07 / 4.13

THE GOOD PLACE (2016 — 2020)

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My Games of the Year 2019

2019! Pretty dang good year personally, pretty dang garbage globally. Semi decent in terms of games? I feel like there were some hot bangers but they were all pretty spread out and far between. It probably doesn’t help that I worked a LOT this year, which means I ended up playing I think the least amount of new games in this year since I started making these lists. 2020 looks to have an even slower start but I know there’s new consoles on the way, E3 is gonna be a wild ride y’all.

As previously stated, I did not play a lot of games this year, but the ones I did I think were pretty good.

First off, I figured I’d list my games of the year for the past decade(links to the respective lists provided onnce I started doing them.): 2010: Super Mario Galaxy 2 2011: Dark Souls 2012: La-Mulana 2013: Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds 2014: Bayonetta 2 2015: Trails in the Sky SC 2016: Trails of Cold Steel 2 2017: Trails in the Sky The 3rd 2018: Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age And now 2019:

10. Pokemon Sword It's that classic Pokemon formula only streamlined to take merely half the time(and half the Pokemon oops!!) In all honesty I really enjoyed my time with this game and the fact that it tried to be as tight as possible and didn’t waste your time felt really refreshing. I just wish it had a meatier postgame. I don’t mind the reduced dex but the lack of legendaries to hunt really sucked any wanting to play more out of me after seeing the credits.

9. Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening It's that classic weird Zelda game, only prettier and with even better music. The touched and fixes to the gameplay alongside the amazing atmosphere provided by the new graphics and revamped sound track make this the definitive version of a true classic.

8. Resident Evil 2

Mr X is literally the scariest thing I've had to deal with in a game in years and I twitch uncontrollably whenever i hear loud footsteps heading my way in real life now. I still need to sneak back in and do a second playthrough before RE3make hits next year(????fuck yes????)

7. Devil May Cry 5

It only took like 15 years but we finally got a new genuine Devil May Cry game and its the best one yet??? It capped off a lot of the plot threads from 4 and felt like a complete game with tons of love put into it and I'm so glad Capcom is having this renaissance the past couple of years if this kind of stuff is what we have to look forward to.

6. Judgement Fantastic spinoff to the Yakuza games, same great setting, amazing new cast of characters. Probably would have been higher on the list if it didn't give me cat noise ptsd from having to find all the hidden cats during investigations.

5. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Score another win for people getting to revive genres/series they used to be huge players in. Playing this game feels like being pulled right back into the mid 00s and I mean that in the best way possible. 

It oozes so much mechanical personality out of every poor, the soundtrack rules and it scratches that 100% completionist itch the way only a true IGAvania can.

4. Fire Emblem: Three Houses I only played Blue Lions but this is already my favorite fire emblem I've ever played. There's basically not a single character I didn't like and I found the Blue Lions plot to be extremely emotionally gripping and satisfying overall. 

The exploration of its themes of ptsd, growing up in war times, racism, classism and all the social struggles that come with these things is second to none when it comes to this series, and I can’t wait to dive back in for another playthrough soon.

3. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice This game fucking rules as hard as it is hard. I love From Soft's version of feudal Japan and I really hope they get some dlc or a sequel to flesh some of their ideas out because they are super fascinating.

I try to be very thoughtful about why I like the games I like but man this game is just plain old rad and fun and hard and some guy cuts a portal to hell out of his neck and you fight his super powered grandpa after he climbs out of the portal. It’s a good video game.

2. Trails of Cold Steel 3 Basically any other year this would have been my go to number one contender. I love this game and this series to bits but i think it spends a little too much time backpedaling on its payoffs in order to keep all the reveals for the final act which, while incredible, is pretty exhausting by the time you get there. 

New Class VII are some of my fave characters in the series, Ash and Altina especially. I really loved them pulling back plot threads like Hamel that have been simmering in the background for almost two decades now. The music as always is fucking incredible. By the end of the game it truly feels like the beginning of a culmination for so many years of built up plotlines and then oops it cuts to black.

Well, I guess I’m really looking forward to CS4 then!!

1. Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers I always enjoyed this game in the past mostly as a side game to kill time but the beauty of having a game run this long means that it has just as much time to get you invested in its world and its characters. The fact that this expansion starts by taking all of that away and throwing you and your band of misfit allies into completely uncharted territory, devoid of all resources and external allies, is just the faintest tease at how spectacularly bold this expansion is.

Despite the fact that this game takes place in a whole new world mostly divorced from the main political arcs established so far, it goes maybe the furthest in terms of huge metaplot shattering and affecting reveals. By the end of this game I sympathized and understood the villains of this game in a way I never imagine I would be able to.

The character writing is superb, the menagerie of side characters you’ve come to know over the past three games finally get a chance to shine as they are stranded in the strange alternate universe mirror of the main game. Before this game I liked one or two of the Scions quite a bit but found the rest of the team to be pretty forgettable. By the end of Shadowbringers each and everyone one of them stand as some of my favorites in any jrpg I’ve ever played.

The villain of this expansion is just straight up the best most well written, sympathetic and relate-able foe from any FF game so far. Hell, even outside of Final Fantasy I have trouble thinking of another villain who I shed legit tears for when they finally passed on.

The game’s music is incredible and otherwordly, the changes they made to the classes (that I play) were all rad and Ardbert is my Husband of the Year all Years.

I’ve always played this game pretty casually without massive investment but I'm here for the long haul after this expansion.

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“Professional Environment”

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GUYS. PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE WATCH THE TICK

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My Top Ten Video Games of 2018

Well, here were are again, my friends. After the non stop roller coaster thrillride of VIDEO GAMES 2017, can 2018 live up to the hype??? I’m gonna go ahead and say no right off the bat, but while every single week wasn’t filled with a new incredible genre defining experience like last year, we still had some genuine certified bangers in the mix, many of which I think will remain important to me as the years go by. It should be noted this is the first year since 2014 where a Trails game hasn’t hit the market, so for the first time ever since I started writing these lists, a Trails game will not reign victorious at the end. Scandalous! Impossible!! Shit year tbh, but we’ll get by.

Outside of games this year is maybe the best year of my entire life?? I got out of a years long slump, started an actual genuine career path, and then somehow managed to fenegle falling in love into the whole mix. These lists have always come from some greater sense of yearning to reach out and communicating how I feel about things I love to anyone who will listen, but right now all I can think of is about how happy and lucky I am for my life to have taken the turns it did this year. 2019 is gonna have to try real hard to break my stride.

If you’d like to read my previous rambly lists, here they are:

2015

2016

2017

Anyway without further ado, here’s ten games that aren’t Trails of Cold Steel 3(WHEN??):

10. Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

This one is only at the bottom of the list because I didn’t have time to finish it. I loved getting to jump into the world of the witcher again. The world is dark and gritty and the choice are morally grey and the writing is impeccable and gwent is even more fun to play as a main mechanic than it was in the Witcher 3 as a minigame. I can’t wait to dive back into this one come the new year.

9. Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology

One of the most well written and executed time-travel-based JRPGs I’ve ever played. It’s a story about trying to fix mistakes, about different perspectives trying to understand each other instead of fighting over differences.

It’s got an overall theme of realizing how important you can be to the world around you despite seeming insignificant that really resonated with me, an amazing cast of characters and it also just happens?? To be really fun to play??

8. The House in Fata Morgana: A Requiem for Innocence

That I didn’t play the first game the year it came out is a damn crime, this series of gothic tragedies has such special, meaningful and important themes of redemption and sacrifice and finding the people who will survive the world with you no matter what. It tackles mental illness, lgbt topics with an immense amount of respect and tells some of the most heart wrenchingly real and gutting stories, but it all culminates in the most viscerally satisfying way.

This sequel delves into one of the most unspoken parts of the original while also offering promising and hopeful glimpses into the future. It’s absolutely a must play if you in anyway liked the original.

7. Wandersong

Now here’s one that came absolutely out of nowhere. This game just oozes joy out of every pore. You play as a dandy bard who can only interact with the world via music trying to save it from being destroyed. Heavy themes of pacifism and the internal struggle of doing your best when you know for a fact your best won’t be good enough cover this thing like sprinkles on the most delicious and colorful donut.

Another thing I love is how every single chapter of this game plays differently, one will be a pirate adventure where you steer a ship with pirate shanties, the other will be a Majora's Mask still town sim, it goes on like this, and it never once gets boring. This game will make you smile the biggest smile from start to finish.

6. God of War

Remember Kratos?? He’s back, in open world action-RPG form. I sort of grew up with the original GoW trilogy and am of the opinion that they aged about as well as I did(which is fuckin not gracefully, teenager me was a fuckin mess). God of War is out of its edgy teenager phase now, and just barely squeaking out of its holier than thou college student phase into a game that actually has a few things to say, fun characters, an amazing world, and a paternal relationship that is kind of actually a joy to watch unfold despite everyone making fun of the game for it.

This game is like twice, maybe three times as long as the original trilogy which hilariously kind of makes those games feel like a prologue to this one. I suppose the real ironic thing is they kind of are?? They were shallow angry games with nothing to say but their existence created a character that, under the right light, under THIS light, could actually be extremely compelling and fun to watch grow alongside his boy. This series went from one I was glad to see gone to one I can’t wait to get more of.

5. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life/Yakuza Kiwami 2

It’s absolutely insane that Yakuza is popular now. I got into this series 10 years ago and at the time every single new yakuza release was a blessing and a curse; blessed because holy shit they actually put out a new Yakuza game and cursed because oh god it sold like shit and they probably won’t localize the next one why did they localize the zombie spin-off it almost killed the series nooooo don’t localize that give us the samurai games instead.

So anyway, this year I finally finished my journey playing through all 7 mainline Yakuza games. The journey of Kiryu Kazuma has come to an end and I have seen every step he’s taken. Yakuza 6 itself had kind of a really rough new engine that Kiwami 2 ended up refining, and from a gameplay perspective these games are basically the same, for the most part(Kiwami 2 is just better). Neither of these games come close to touching the masterful highs of Yakuza 0 but from a story perspective I think the respect and love this series has for its protagonist is unmatched, and while I was sad to see him go, I will never forget that big good crime boy and his whacky antics.

Ganbare, Kiryu-san...sayonara!!!!

4. The Messenger

This game fucking rules, I really don’t know how to do it justice, I played it on a whim and fell in love with it for the time it took me to beat it in a way that I haven’t done with a game in a long time. The gameplay is fluid and fun, the writing is charming and legit hilarious at times and the soundtrack, oh baby the soundtrack, if this wasn’t a year where Celeste came out this game would win every single award for OST of the year, I would fight anyone who disagreed.

The main gimmick of this game once you reach the halfway point is being able to shift between the 8 bit past and the 16 bit future, and every time you do the music will warp to fit those aesthetics and the game does this so freaking seamlessly, it’s amazing. The final level in particular meshed the music so well with the narrative that I was like fist pumping the whole way through the final sequence of the game.

It rules extremely hard, play it. Yes, you, you reading this right now, play this game so these people will make more for me. Please?

3. La-Mulana 2: The 0th Body, The 9th Spirit

Chalk this one up for game of 2018 I most can’t wait to replay and do a bunch of quick runs of. The original La Mulana is one of my favorite games of all time and this sequel delivers more of all the stuff I love while streamlining a lot of the more obscure and obtuse solutions. The music, the bosses, the world, all of the best things about the first game were all just as on point in this one.

The game evokes a sense of mystery you can only really achieve in a sequel to a game like the original La Mulana by constantly making you question the lore you already knew from the original. This all culminates in a sidequest that for a game as inscrutable as opaque as LM2, I still ended up getting really really emotionally invested in.

I don’t think there will ever be a La Mulana 3, and if that’s the case I’ll be able to leave this series happy, these two games complete each other in such a huge way, and will remain some of my favorites for years to come.

2. Celeste

I swear to god, this game was my Game of the Year for 9 whole months. I have never in my life played a game with this much precision perfect game design. This is maybe the tightest most consistent feeling platformer of all time. It’s like basically perfect on a gameplay level. That it meshes it’s gameplay with it’s themes so well is what truly makes it stand out and transforms it into not only a viscerally satisfying, tough but fair game, but an emotionally resonant masterpiece that will stick with me for years to come.

Celeste is a game about climbing a mountain. Celeste is a game about overcoming depression and anxiety and learning to cope and better yourself. These things are not interchangeable, the challenges you face as a player in this game all tie in perfectly to the main character, Madeline’s struggle to just fight through her self doubt and self loathing. It’s an extremely real tale, despite how fantastical the visuals are. It’s a game about fighting and screaming and clawing at that fucking Mountain to give you a way to have your heart again, and it’s absolutely wonderful.

The game is difficult, but every personal triumph accompanies one in game, and it lets you truly feel the feelings the game is trying to evoke alongside it. This is the kind of game that only comes once or twice a decade. I’d be extremely surprised to see anything hit this level any time soon.

1. Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age

This is the gold standard for all JRPGs now as far as I'm concerned. There are series that go deeper, that go harder, that go all the way in with their music but no game out there exists that is so confidently just the classic all encompassing idea of a JRPG like this one. This game is pure comfort food, it knows exactly what it is and what it is is a fun heartwarming and charming classic JRPG “chosen one gets the cool sword and fights the dark lord” tale and damn it if it hasn’t been a while since we had just a good one of those.

Haha, just kidding.

A third of the way through, this game takes a dramatic shift and flips everything on its head in a way that hasn’t been really seen or executed this well since FF6. Suddenly the comfortable is taken away, the world is scary, bleak, and the themes you missed, that were simmering in the background since the start of the game start to boil over to the surface. The world is darker but the people in it are warmer, they hold themselves together until the day comes, and the game will find ways to make you cry you would never expect from a series this traditional. These themes all culminate in a super satisfying finale that, while not entirely happy, at least leaves the world in a better place than it was before, with it’s people that much closer.

Now what if I just didn’t write any of that and told you why I really love the game.

Credits roll, and the post game, that is to say, the final third of the game, begins. What if the shift never came, how would the world be different? How would these characters acrs resolved? Who would live? Who would die instead? What does this happening mean to the world? What does this new future hold?

In one simple moment, you answer all of those questions, and Dragon Quest XI becomes a prequel to Dragon Quest III (which was a prequel to DQ1 but that’s less important).

All of a sudden this entire series has lore, everything is connected in a way it had never been for 30 years, and it fits so seamlessly and perfectly that it could only have happened in a series like Dragon Quest, which has had the same writer across all 11 games. As a fan who had played all the available english games this was such an insane rewarding moment. I struggle to really compare it to anything else outside of maybe like…

Oh shit.

OH SHIT.

Outside of goddamn Trails.

Ya’ll know what that means right?

That’s right, Trails wins game of the year once again. STILL THE KING BABYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

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Castlevania S2 | Ep 4 | Trevor Sharing a blanket with Sypha 

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i ghostwrote this line

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The legendary Belmont clan in action.

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From a commercial for a chain of family clinics in Houston, Texas. (Source)

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