This year I played many many more games than last year, so instead of describing all of them and what I liked or disliked about them I’m going to select just a few out of the all the games or I’d be here for another year just to finish this. Also I ended last year but saying I was going to try only getting games I’d truly like but that was a lie, I bought a bunch of games that I hate.
Donut County
Speaking about games I shouldn’t have bought because I disliked them. Donut County is a game where you control a hole in the ground. You move it around an area swallowing as many objects as you can, as you do the hole grows bigger allowing it to swallow more and more things. This Katamari-esque game had be very excited at first but I was severely letdown by the rude characters, boring story, and wonky physics.
DEEMO
DEEMO is a rhythm game. One that I’m bad at it because despite having been musically trained for several years of my life. The game, like all good rhythm games, features a wide range of music genres to pick from. The controls are simple enough on the Switch version, there’s three different types of prompts that fall down the screen at you. These are Red, Blue, and Yellow notes. The Red and Blue notes can be played by pressing any button on the corresponding joycon; blue for left, red for right. The Yellow notes can only be played by using the touchscreen on the Switch. what really drew me to this game though is that it included a selection of songs that you can play on the Nintendo Labo Piano. Having an actual, albeit tiny, piano to play the game on may have just been a gimmick but it’s one I feel for hard and I loved it despite having big sausage fingers that made playing songs on it very difficult. The game also had a story which I think was about a young girl dealing with the loss of her older brother but I don’t actually know because I skipped almost all of the cutscenes.
The Return of the Obra Dinn
Before I get into an specific about this I just want to make one thing clear, this game is fun. A lot of fun. The Return of the Obra Dinn is unique puzzle game. From it’s style to the core mechanics everything about this game makes it stand apart from others in it’s genre.
Unlike other puzzle games it’s not a series of small puzzles but rather one giant puzzle. That puzzle being, “Who are the crew members on the Obra Dinn, what happened to them, and where has the ship been?”. To figure this out you are sent to the Obra Dinn, a ghost ship that was recently found after being lost at sea for several years. As you board the ship you are given a special pocket watch and the ship’s manifest. The pocket watch allows you to rewind time to moments when someone, or something, aboard the ship dies. These moments you rewind to are frozen in time not allowing you to interact with anyone or anything on the ship. This make identification difficult. To figure out who everyone is you must rely on as many visual and sometimes audio clues as possible. These clues can be accents you hear in the short audio clips that play as you rewind time or things like tattoos, facial hair, and clothing. These are however not the only clues you receive, as stated before you are given the ships manifest as you board. Along with the manifest are several depictions of the crew by an in-world artist that was aboard the ship and a listing of many nautical terms to help you out along with a map of the route traveled by the ship. All of these details are easily overlooked early in the game or the first time you see them, simply because you don’t realize that it’s what you’re looking for.
The second thing that helps set this game apart from others is it’s visual presentation. Everything in this game is highly detailed but shown in a monochromatic palette. this can sometimes make it hard to read what some objects are though on the whole it’s fairly unobtrusive.
Outside of the sometimes difficult to read visuals I only really have one other problem with this game. In-between the moments when you’re reliving past events you are sometimes lead around parts of the ship by a trail of smoke. This smoke leads you from one moment to the next helping you figure out what happened, By itself there’s no problem with this, the problem comes from the way it travels. The smoke will snake it’s way around many things on it’s way to the next area which wastes a lot of time. This is made worse by the game showing you where the smoke will go to next before it happens. The reason this these are issues is that the smoke will not advance unless you are near it so you have to walk along with it instead of going straight to the next area and moment. This is a very minor problem but it’s still a problem and tarnishes would I would otherwise consider to be a perfect game.
Layton Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy — Deluxe Edition
Katrielle and The Millionaire’s Conspiracy is a sequel to the long running Professor Layton series of games. In it you play as Katrielle Layton the daughter of the great Hershel Layton. Much like it’s parent series this game has you solving small individual puzzles as you progress through the story. The similarities however end there.
Where the previous Layton games have been about uncovering the explanations to impossible situations The Millionaires’ Conspiracy takes a different approach. In the game you are tasked with solving fairly mundane problems for the people of London, or more accurately the rich and influential people of London. These problems range from finding a missing pet to figuring out that a bird shit on a movie.
Helping solve these cases are Katrielle’s two assistants, a talking dog named Sherl O.C. Kholmes and a young man named Ernest Greeves. I despise all thee of them. Sherl is a cynical and rude asshole, Ernest is a weirdly possessive creep in love with Kat, and Kat herself is highly rude and dismissive of others. What would normally save this would be interesting and challenging puzzles or bright and colorful side characters and interesting stories, but this game has neither of them.
The puzzles being lackluster isn’t their only problem, multiple times there are spelling errors or typos that make solving them difficult. Adding on to this is the way the puzzles feel almost wholly disconnected from the rest of the game. An example of this is in fourth case you visit a house that is filled with cat merchandise. When examining a picture of a cat you discover a puzzle behind it, the subject of the puzzle are robots working in a cake factory.
There’s only a few things I like about this game. The first is that you can buy a bunch of different outfits for Katrielle to wear throughout the game, the second is the daily puzzles. Every day a new puzzle is released and while they’re all very basic having a puzzle delivered to me daily is nice and I enjoy it a great deal.
The Last Remnant Remastered
I’ve still yet to beat this game I this is a review in progress. Though chances of me returning to it after all the time I spent away from it are slim.
The Last Remnant is a turn-based jrpg originally created by Square Enix for the Xbox 360, it has since been remastered and released on different platforms. You play as Rush Sykes, the son of two scientists, on his journey to rescue his missing sister. Along the way you met up with many people and become involved in the politics of the countries you explore.
First things first, this game has some incredible comedic moments and I’m unsure if they were intentional or not. A prime example of this is when Rush first meets Lord David. David is the lord of land you’re currently in and he introduces himself as such. But as soon as he does Rush looks at him and says “Hi Dave.” and then the game cuts back to David making a face because of the way he was addressed. There’s a lot of little things like this throughout the game so I have to assume it was on purpose.
The combat system is where this game really shines though. As you explore dungeons or fields in the wild you can come into contact with monsters roaming them. When you do you are transitioned to a separate area where the battles take place. All of this is fairly standard for jrpgs but where it gets unique is how combat happens. When you enter combat the teams you create of your party members are each given vague commands like “All out attack” or “Use magic”. Which commands appear for each team are affected by many things; such as who is in the team, who’s leading the team, what their tactical formation is, how close they are to the enemy, and what the status of your other teams are. All of this leads to a very complex system that allows for a lot of customization.
The other thing that makes combat interesting is the way it rewards encounters. To explain that I must first talk about a special ability Rush has. Early in the game you are given the ability to slow down time in the exploration areas. Doing so allows you to mark multiple enemies at once. Marking multiple enemies allows you to start a battle with them all at once, if you do this the rewards you can gain multiply with the difficulty of the encounter. This of course raises the stake however, do you want to gather a swarm of 8 teams of spiders to fight to gain more treasure or do you want to take it a little more safely and aim for 4? It also means that instead of running head first into battle you’ll want to plan out a route ahead of time that will let you tag as many monsters as you feel like you can take on. This single feature makes me enjoy combat more in this game than most other jrpgs I've played.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
For a simple srpg FE3H has a lot going for it that makes me love it. The new way it handles classes and skills, the themes it has, and the way it lets you walk around and explore an area. Really this game was so close to being my game of the year that it’s honestly very frustrating to me that it isn’t.
One of my favorite things about this game is the way it shows that the main three characters are flawed in their approaches to uniting the country. Claude breaks the law and invites in foreign troops to help him fight his war(though because of his background it’s a little complicated). He’s also willing to surrender and turn tail if he believes there’s no way for him to win, satisfied that he tried. Edelgard resorts to more drastic measures, becominga tyrant and allying herself with war criminals thinking that the ends will justify the means. And Sad Sack Dimitri is just a ball of rage and hatred that self destructs at the first chance he has because he has no way to control his emotions. But giving these characters flaws helps make them feel more real.
These flaws aren’t unique to just these three though as there’s a “secret” fourth path you can take that allows you to team up with the Church of Seiros. The Anime Mom Pope that leads the church is Rhea, who has gone to great lengths to restore the people she loves to life and who herself has become a tyrant. The lose of her loved ones has turned her cold, and the power she has allows her to mete out whatever punishment, including death, that she feels people who turn against the church deserve.
The other thing I enjoyed was the new way the game handled classes and skills. Before weapons were tied to classes, now any character can learn how to use any weapon no matter what class they are. This single small change allows for so much customization of the kinds of troops you have, it’s just amazing. Of course certain abilities are still tied to classes, though mastering that class will sometimes allow the character to carry a skill from it into other classes. Magic is the most restricted as only certain classes are able to use it even if the character already knows it from another class. Also because of the school setting that the game has in the first half of it the classes are a little more literal and I really like that.
Now these things don’t mean that the game is perfect because it’s still very flawed. The first of which is that many of the final classes you are able to unlock are Mounted classes. This means that you’ll either have to spend a lot of time suddenly trying to teach people how to ride horses or you’ll had to of spent the time throughout the game teaching them to. They also don’t have many romance options for mlm. This by itself is a problem but it’s made worse by the fact that there are several S Rank relationships you can have as a man with other men that are not romances but rather “Just really close friendships”, but because this is the first time they’ve done that it feels bad. If they had instead somehow shown that they relationships weren’t romantic but instead completely platonic by either making them just an A+ or giving them some other designation I think it would have been much better. They’ve also yet to make Supports between characters feel important to the story.
Also Claude should be bi.
Link’s Awakening
Link’s Awakening is a remake of the classic Game Boy(Color) game The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening(DX). The game was remade from the ground up with entirely new visuals and music. I have a lot of nostalgia for Link’s Awakening as it was my first ever Zelda game and maybe because of that it’s by far my favorite in the series.
The updated visuals, music, and controls turn what was originally a great game into one bordering on perfect. The new style, which makes everything look like a toy diorama, is both extremely adorable and also incredibly fitting for a game that takes place in the dreams of a young boy and a giant sky whale. Somehow the game manages to retain the exact feeling of the original while also feeling fresh and exciting. This game was able to bring back all of the feelings and memories I had when I played the original and DX versions as a child.
The developers changed very little when they remade this game, the biggest change is the Chamber Dungeon which replaces the Photographer. The Chamber Dungeon is a very simplified dungeon maker that allows you to take rooms from dungeons you’ve beat and create your own dungeon in a 7x7 grid. The main focus of this are challenge stages where you are given certain requirements that you must complete in your building and adventuring of the dungeons. These can range from more simple requirements as “You need to have 3 rooms with chests” to “You cannot use your sword at all in this dungeon”. These serve as one of many small diversions from the main story, the other is the new focus on the Trendy Game, a crane game operated by one of the islanders. It was originally just a place to grab a heart piece and the Yoshi doll to begin the trading quest, but now it contains many things; heart pieces, seashells, figurines to decorate people’s houses with, and rooms for the chamber dungeon. This makes it more important to return to and another welcome diversion from the otherwise fairly short story.
Because I’ve mentioned it several times I’ll address the game’s shortcoming, the story. The story in this game, while fairly unique and interesting is very short and pretty bare bones. Link wakes on a strange island having been shipwrecked and is told by a mysterious owl that the only way to leave the island is to wake the Windfish, a giant rainbow whale with wings that is currently sleeping inside of a large egg on the top of a mountain. As strange as this sounds it only gets weirder as the further you progress in the game the more it becomes apparent that the island and everyone on it are just figments of the Windfish’s dreams. And as soon as the Windfish wakes the island and everything on it will cease to exist. I think the biggest downfall of this game is that it never really follows up on how big that is, for Link to escape and return to his life and world he must destroy the island and all the people on it by waking the Windfish.
The changes in this game are minor and I’m happy about that as it retains everything I loved about the original without adding a bunch of unneeded things just to say they have bonus content.
Astral Chain
KYLE
Nintendo Switch Online — Nintendo Entertainment System
My call from last year was answered almost immediately. January 16th saw the addition of Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link to the service. And while I loved that I could finally play this game again I was let down at the same time. In January it was also announced that Japan would be receiving more or different games than the rest of the world. Which at this time amounts to 8 games, 6 different and 2 more, not a whole lot but still worth mentioning. Other more troubling news however came much later in the year, in September, Nintendo announced that games would no longer be added to the service monthly so that they are ensure that the games that are added are more popular and well received.
Nintendo Switch Online — Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Along with the announcement that they’d no longer be publishing games monthly to the NES app came the reveal that we’ve all been expecting since this time last year, a SNES app. The starting selection of this was a lot stronger than that of the NES app. It included games like Breath of Fire, F-Zero, Kirby’s Dream Land, Super Mario Bros 3, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Like the NES app it is also not going to receive monthly updates instead getting largely more irregular ones. The selection also varies slightly by region but so far no region has more games than the others, just alternative ones.
Some Closing Thoughts
I know I played a lot more games this year, and while I feel like I did try to make sure I didn’t play or buy games I wouldn’t like it still ended up happening at about the same rate really. I guess no matter what I’m just gonna end up getting some bad along with the good and I’ll just have to accept that or hope that something changes and allows me to return digital games for store credit on the Switch. I also realized that keeping very detailed notes didn’t really help me because my opinion on the games I played changed over time, so in the future I’ll probably just write down more vague notes or something.
