Games of the Year 2023

Hey guys. I’m not dead!

Just haven’t really had the inspiration strike to continue my big Moby Dick project lately. A lot of my energy has been consumed by looking for a new apartment, I am positively desperate to move out of Auburn. I finally resolved that this week, moving to Tacoma in April this year, it’s gonna be much better, as a person who doesn’t drive.

What little writing I have done is just some mundane posts over on cohost. I still feel a bit at-sea when it comes to being online, I’ve never been able to get used to discord, and twitter continues to flame out spectacularly. It’s a bit depressing.

Anyway, that’s the life update, things are good, let’s get into those video games! In chronological order of when I played them:

Pentiment

I was such a fool.

I started this game last fall, and then didn’t finish it before the end of the year. It’s so good, you guys. It’s fuckin’ incredible. A magnum opus. I’ve been mulling over writing something about it on this blog, but I simply don’t have the vocabulary to express my admiration for it and what it’s doing with its writing and art.

Also, as a fan of Umberto Eco and specifically The Name of the Rose, this game was like laser-targeted to me. An absolute joy to play, though it did have a few flaws. There was a lot of running back and forth around the town that could’ve been cut down, and it would’ve been nice to have more characters to talk to in the end, about some of the big events in the third act. But otherwise? An absolute gem.

Octopath Traveler II

This is probably the game I enjoyed playing the most this year. I’m just glad they do, in fact, still make ’em like this, y’know. It’s an improvement on the first one in every possible way: plot, characters, graphics, battle mechanics, pacing, etc. It’s very rare to have a sequel that truly feels like an iteration on the original, in a completely positive way, but they managed it.

In a way, it feels like they are reinventing the JRPG from the ground up. This is also kind of happening with the Like a Dragon/Yakuza series turning into Dragon Quest, it’s very exciting. That genre really needs some new blood.

There has been some Discourse about JRPGs this year, most of it very tiresome. There is apparently a whole group of people who only ever meant it as a term of racist derision? Which was news to me. I mean, I knew the ’90s and ’00s were a racist time, of course, but c’mon, who doesn’t like a Final Fantasy now and then. And then, more recently, some game design dude on twitter wrote some big thread about “fixing” the genre with a bunch of stuff that’s been done already, decades ago.

It’s a genre that has bloomed and exploded out into a million different sub-genres of its own in the past *checks watch* four decades. Some o’ them, I like more than others. There’s a particular style that was in vogue in the late ’90s that was my particular favorite, and I’m glad we’re getting so many remakes of those games, but it would be nice to see more relatively new blood like Octopath 2 as well.

Final Fantasy XVI

I already wrote about this one, somewhat clumsily, over the summer. Here’s what happened with that: I got COVID, and basically played all of this game while sick as a dog and hopped up on cold medicine. Thus I was able to overlook some of its flaws, shall we saw.

But also, I am just a person who makes an effort to read things in the most generous possible light, and was charmed by this game. I like the characters. I did not applying my critical lens to it at all, really. It does commit the sin that all fantasy slavery stories do, in a bit of side lore, but it does do it. It loses focus in the second half and isn’t paced very well, overall. The boss battles are a neat gimmick, but in the end aren’t really much more than spectacle.

That said, I think a lot of the backlash came from people who wanted something more like Octopath 2, in the end. People were complaining about it not being turn-based, and there has not been a turn-based mainline Final Fantasy game in literally 20 years (ish, one could argue about FFXIII, but I think it’s something different).

My opinion was also definitely colored by my many, many hours spent playing Final Fantasy XIV, which was created by essentially the same team (Creative Business Unit 3 (ugh)). Some of the… quirks of XVI are straight from that game, and it doesn’t really excuse them, it just didn’t bother me as much because I’m used to it.

Anyway, I still think it was good, and would recommend playing it if you need to convalesce.

Baldur’s Gate 3

I was basically not interested in this game at all right up until it came out. A couple weeks before, actually, I saw a gameplay video that looked good, and caught some rumbling about people worrying it would set unreasonably expectations for future RPGs. I bought it and played the open access demo, and loved it.

When the full thing came out, it consumed me for about a month, and then I felt completely done with it. I’ve seen what it has to show, and I’m finished. I like CRPGs, exploring the world, but I’m not a person who obsessively replays to see every possibility for every choice. I like to just kinda roll with things that happen, y’know. Which works especially well in this game, it’s very easy to just sort of roll with things.

I found the combat pretty breezey. Maybe it’s just my old experience with tactics games coming back in handy, but I never really struggled with any fights except one puzzle boss (which turned out to be easier to fight in a non-puzzle manner). I actually started over on normal after getting way too bored of how easy combat was on the easier difficulty. It’s a system that really lets you improvise and scrape by with whatever resources you have, which I like.

If I have a major complaint about this and FFXVI, it’s that they’re too photorealistic. Needs to be more stylized. Modern graphics capabilities are being exploited by people to make the most boring-looking games imaginable. Heck, most of Square’s modern games look like shit, and will only continue to age worse and worse because they’re chasing that photoreal aesthetic. It sucks.

The worst example was FFVII Remake, where it was actually kind of nice and stylized, and then with the PS5/PC upgrade they made everything more photoreal and bland. Ugh, I swear, every comparison screenshot looked worse! It was unbelievable.

Anyway, yeah this game’s pretty good. I wasn’t like blown away, but it was pretty solid. I always feel like the tone of Larian’s games are a bit too grimdark for me, it gets a bit grating. This one wasn’t as bad as Divinity Original Sin 2, but it does get a bit exhausting towards the end. They seem to not like the idea of a fantasy world being normal and stable, they only want something fucked up and horrible going on. They should make a proper post-apocalyptic game sometime, really.

Super Mario RPG

I almost forgot about this one, even though I was looking forward to it all year.

This was just a purestrain hit of nostalgia for me. I absolutely adore the original game on the Super Nintendo, it was the first RPG I (properly) played. It taught me what the term “RPG” means! They did this remake absolutely perfectly. Kept all the weirdness, presumably because it was easier than negotiating a bunch of changes with Square-Enix.

I blew through this game in one weekend. It was a pure and simple joy. I have absolutely no idea if it holds up at all to anyone who it was not a seminal piece of art for, but it worked for me! The additional mechanics really just serve to make the game easier, and it wasn’t particularly punishing to being with.

It’s very kind of Nintendo to make precisely one game every year that is for me, specifically. I hope they keep it up.

Misericorde Volume 1

This is one I’d been looking forward to for a while. Another story-based mystery set in medieval europe, involving a monastery! And an anchorite! It’s Pentiment all over again, and made by one of the beloved hosts of the Shrieking Shack podcast, to boot.

Again, I didn’t finish it when it came out, but had to be dragged back to it by a friend playing it, and wanting to talk to me about it. I’m glad I did, it’s great! A really fun, twisty mystery story, not yet resolved. It’s very inspired by Umineko, there are a few references, and I feel like there are going to be some similar big twists down the road.

It has a fantastic atmosphere. Feels simultaneously relaxed and yet suffocating. Trying to find your way in a labyrinth on a rainy day. I had a lot of fun discussing theories with a friend, I want to go and write a proper post about them. Probably something more for tumblr than here, though.

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince

They finally made a third Dragon Warrior Monsters game! Ha ha, I joke, though it is funny that people are just calling this “DQM3”. Like, I guess none of the others have been numbered… but neither is this one.

Anyway, it’s really scratching a specific itch for me. I absolutely adored the original on the Gameboy back in the day, and the sequel, and lamented all the ones in between that were never released here. This is a return to form, has some nice systems going on for breeding (or now just “synthesizing”) monsters. Really, it’s mostly an extremely relaxed JRPG, even by Dragon Quest standards. You don’t need to micromanage battles, just let your team go and run roughshod over the enemy, unless it’s a boss fight.

Dragon Quest is funny because like… it is not a nostalgic series for me, really. I never got into them besides the monsters spinoff. I came into it as a fully grown adult, but I still love it. There’s like a whole trendy idea that people only like games like this or Pokemon because they liked them as a kid. The old “your favorite pokemon generation is the first one you played” thing (which is simply not true for me, my first was Red and my favorite is X).

I suppose people don’t have respect for this genre. It’s so odd to me, having been a fan of them my whole life. The whole idea of “video games” as a singular hobby has been ridiculous for a while now, there are a dozen different things people treat as “gaming”, as if it were interchangeable. I play games while listening to podcasts to relax. I have nothing in common with a kid playing Fortnite or a grown adult playing Forza Horizon or a college student playing Dota 2.

It’s something so simple, and yet people get all bent out of shape trying to fit everything into one bucket. Games are not unique and special and different from every form of human expression that has ever existed, they’re the same. People come to them for different things, and subsequently get different things from them. That’s all totally fine, and is the only way it could be.

Uhh, right, DQM3, it’s a good time. Definitely play in portable mode though, the graphics and performance are kinda rough.

In Conclusion

I had a pretty good year of games. A couple false starts, I never did really get into Wo Long (which I bought a PS5 for) or Armored Core 6. They sure did make a new Armored Core game, I thought I might like it (having never played one before), but I didn’t. C’est la vie!

In terms of reading, I actually did some outside of Moby Dick this year. I read all of The Book of the New Sun for another Ranged Touch podcast, Shelved by Genre. I read another Stephen King book… and hated it. I’ve found more space for it in my life, mostly by tossing on some music or some Columbo on the TV, and just sitting down and doing it. Writing? Not so much.

Oh come to think of it, I should post my Book of the New Sun thoughts on here too, maybe I’ll do that… or write a new thing, now that it’s all fully finished. There was a fifth book, released years later, that I did not read, but listened to a podcast about, which made me glad I skipped it.

I will write some more posts on here this year. That much I will say. How many, or how frequently, well… I’m not making any promises.