This was my first full year back playing games in a big way. Games have always been something I go in and out of. After taking a break of several years from serious gaming, during which I bought a Switch and played a grand total of two games on it, something flipped a switch (pun not intended) for me in September of 2023, and for the first time since I was in elementary school, video games became my main hobby again. I had something like a gamer’s mid-life crisis, where I realized that if I didn’t start playing through them soon, I’d probably die before getting to most of the games on my mental list of things I “always wanted to play.” So I hunkered down and started clearing games. This culminated this year with me starting the NTSC Dreams project, where I plan on trying to play every game that was released during my youth. But that doesn’t mean I stopped playing modern games, or games from other eras. In 2024, I completed 35 games from the fourth generation of video games or newer. Here’s what they were:
January: Ar tonelico: Sekai no Owari de Utaitsuzukeru Shoujo (PS2)
My New Year’s resolution for games this year was to get through as much of the Gust back catalog as possible. This ended up not happening to the extent I hoped for a variety of reasons, but I did get to a few of their games this year. Gust have been one of my favorite developers for a while, and are in fact the reason I got into Japanese RPGs in the first place: Mana Khemia on the PSP was the first RPG to ever really hook me, and it was all downhill from there. They’re mostly known for their extremely successful Atelier series of alchemy-and-cute-girl-themed crafting-focused RPGs. The Ar tonelico series is a now-defunct collaboration with Banpresto to create more grand scale, story-focused RPGs, particularly with a strong focus on and theming around music. This was a game I had meant to play for many years—in fact, I owned English copies of both of the first two games, even when Ar tonelico II was quite difficult to come by, but never played them. I was, however, already familiar with the music, particularly that composed by Shikata Akiko, who is really a virtuosic genius. Gust Sound Team makes great music in general, but Shikata’s compositions for Ar tonelico are otherworldly. It’s just a shame that there aren’t too many of them actually in the game, especially considering your characters literally fight by singing. Ar tonelico has a great aesthetic and fascinating, unique setting, but as an RPG it kind of comes up lacking. The game never really rises to the point of being difficult to force you to engage with its systems, and you can win everything by just slapping “good stuff” on your characters and spamming your strongest attack. I have heard that Ar tonelico II is a more complete game in that respect, so I’m still looking forward to getting to it one day.
January: Assassin’s Creed II (PS4)
And now for something completely different. This is actually a replay: I played both AC2 and Brotherhood on the PS3 back in the day, but I had always wanted to progress further in the series than that. In 2023, I played through the original Assassin’s Creed for the first time, so next up was to play through the entries in the Ezio saga that I already completed ten years ago. This series is much maligned in the modern day, and I don’t really know how bad they’ve gotten or not because I’ve never played a modern AC game, but I still have a soft spot for these entries. I don’t find the typical Ubisoft game design as annoying as a lot of people seem to do, and as someone who loves slow-walking and taking in environments in video games, the recreations of Renaissance-era Italy, even at PS3 levels of fidelity, are a pleasure to explore. The story is, honestly, even at this point, kind of stupid, revolving as it does around an evil cabal that has existed since time immemorial and been the direct cause of everything bad to ever happen in the world, but it has the kinetic drive of a “stupid but enjoyable” Hollywood blockbuster, and I find myself getting engaged with it nevertheless. Plus, Ezio is just a great protagonist. You gotta love that guy.
January: Zelda no Densetsu: Breath of the Wild (Switch)
It’s kind of wild (no pun intended) to think that Breath of the Wild was already seven years old by the time I finally got around to beating it. I’m not really the biggest Zelda fan, not because I don’t like the games but just because I’ve never really played anything that came out after Majora’s Mask. The N64 duology are some of my favorite games of all time, though, and when I heard that BOTW was tangentially related to those games around its release, it definitely piqued my interest. This only really extends as far as some place names in the new Hyrule world map, though—Breath of the Wild is emphatically its own thing, and at risk of being assassinated in my sleep by Zelda fanboys, I don’t really like it that much. I mentioned above that I don’t mind Ubisoft-style open world game design that much, but given how much some people seem to revile it, it’s funny that BOTW gets a pass despite aping it so heavily. The weapon durability that was maligned by some critics does indeed turn out to suck the fun out of the game, the cooking system is absolutely miserable to engage with so I just avoided areas that might require me to use it, the open world is big and empty (yes, there are Korok puzzles everywhere, but there’s also very little reason to solve more than a few dozen of them) and when you find a shrine, they’re all the same, and some even feature motion control physics puzzles which I’m pretty sure are crimes against humanity. You can’t climb shit in the overworld when it’s raining. The four proper dungeons in the game are lame. I was excited for Hyrule Castle, but I ended up just being able to make a beeline for the top and cleared it in about 20 minutes. It’s not to say there aren’t memorable or enjoyable parts of the game—I did play it for 40 hours in the process of clearing it, after all—like the trip to visit the Great Deku Tree, or some of the boss battles which were pretty cool, but it’s the negatives that really stick in my memory from my time with the game, and I can say I have no interest in playing Tears of the Kingdom at this point. Dare I say it? This game is overrated.
January: Death Stranding (PS5)
There were three big games I had in mind that I needed to play once I made the jump to current-gen hardware. Final Fantasy VII Remake and Armored Core VI were two, and Kojima’s latest opus was the third. It’s really amazing how completely absorbing this walking simulator is. The first time the camera pulls back and you’re controlling Norman Reedus as a speck, wandering through this windswept, hostile wasteland, while one of Kojima’s hand-picked indie jams comes on to punctuate the long, unbroken silence before it, it’s genuinely breathtaking. Much has been said about how wild and wacky the story is, and it is that, but I’d take that over some kind of safe Hollywood blockbuster plot any day. For God’s sake, there’s a guy called Die Hardman in the story and he made me cry. He made me Cry Hardman. But ultimately the enduring pleasure of Death Stranding is simply how fun it is to play, somehow, despite the fact that it ultimate boils down to an endless succession of fetch quests (sidebar: I kind of hate how “fetch quest” is used as a shorthand for “bad objective design” in pop games criticism) interrupted by occasional clunky combat. You start off barely being able to walk over rocks and by the end of the game you’ve built a zipline network that can take you from any destination on the map to any other in luxurious comfort—immensely satisfying. I cannot wait for the sequel, which looks like it’s going to be about ten times more insane.
February: Ryu ga Gotoku & Ryu ga Gotoku 2 (PS3)
This series is one of the big reasons I didn’t get to as many Gust games as I originally intended to. My only prior experience with RGG was Yakuza 3—yes, the cursed English localization of the PS3 game where they cut a ton of content—but I always intended to go back and play through the series, especially once I learned Japanese and could play them properly. Yakuza 3 is fun, having all the side quests and distractions the series is now famous for, but it’s also well-known even among series fans for having kind of a stupid story. So imagine my surprise when I got so absorbed in the original duology that I did something I almost never do and started the second game the day after completing the first. I played the HD remasters of the PS2 games on the PS3 instead of the Kiwami remakes, and these are still brilliant games today. These are some of my favorite video game stories of all time now, thanks to famed crime novelist Hase Seishu being brought in to work as head writer. I have so many thoughts about the writing in these games that I have like 10,000 words written about them in a document somewhere that I never published. Maybe one day I’ll put that up on this site. Needless to say, it’s good. I played the games on Easy because as brawlers they are middling, but it’s all about the characters and being immersed in the beautifully rendered criminal underworlds of Tokyo and Osaka. While they do have their over-the-top elements, like all the time bombs exploding all the time or the secret NSA-level surveillance center run by Kamurocho’s homeless, they are still more grounded than later entries in the series, which really veer into straight up silliness at times. After playing these two, I declared 2024 to be the “Year of Yakuza” and committed to getting to as many of the games as possible, which kind of stepped all over the “Year of Gust.” Alas.
February: Crisis Core -Final Fantasy VII- Reunion (PS5)
The only game I preordered this year, and indeed the first game I’d preordered in something like ten years, was Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Remake was the first game I played on my PS5, and I was unbelievably hyped for the sequel, so with everyone’s favorite idiot twink from Gongaga making his return in Rebirth, Crisis Core became required reading. I came ever so close to playing the original PSP version right after I originally beat Final Fantasy VII several years ago, but I’m glad I ended up waiting for this HD remake, because I understand that the gameplay has been significantly polished, and the game was also fully voiced to fit more nicely into the Remake saga. Zack is really a great character, and it’s worth playing through Crisis Core to experience his story, but whether or not Crisis Core is a good game is an entirely different question. The game design is clearly that of a portable game, with dozens if not hundreds of highly repetitive missions. I played the game for almost 30 hours and only did like a quarter of them. They’re quite tiresome when playing on your couch, but make sense as a pick-up-and-play feature for when you’re playing your PSP on the train ride to work. Given that, it’s hard to hold it against the game, but it definitely doesn’t count as a plus for the experience, either. The story also has its highs and lows—the stuff involving Gackt’s scenery-chewing performance as the villainous Genesis is typical Nomura gobbledegook and doesn’t really land, but the more character-focused stuff, particularly with Zack and Aerith (the bit that will become important in Rebirth) is good. If you’ve played FF7, you know how Zack’s story ends, and they also nailed that aspect of it.
February: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS4)
Even though my first console was the Nintendo 64 and I came up playing GameCube and PS2, it was the PS3 era where I got the deepest into games that I ever had, thanks to a combination of having some spending money for the first time in my life, and communities like Justin.tv opening up new spaces and ways to enjoy video games. So as the Sony fanboy that I was, Uncharted was a pretty important series. I was a relatively early adopter of the PS3 (2008; I had a Fat, but not a backwards-compatible model) and the PlayStation-exclusive Uncharted and particularly 2 when it dropped in ’09 were huge rebuttals to the “PS3 has no games” argument. I never got to play 3 back in the day (a story for when we get to that game’s entry) so I decided to pick up the HD collection off PS Plus and work my way through Drake’s adventures again. So, the first Uncharted was one of my favorite games on the PS3, and including my replay of it in 2023 I’ve played all the way through it something like five times. It doesn’t have the cinematic flair or over-the-top story of the sequels, but it’s a tight little game with a small scope adventure that doesn’t go overboard. Going overboard became the slogan of the series with Among Thieves, and although it’s a good game, I always felt that I liked the original more. This game goes from set piece to crazy set piece, but when I played the original I always felt like the difficulty wasn’t well-tuned, and the set pieces immediately lose their appeal when you’re dying over and over and have to see the same scripted event happen multiple times. The first Uncharted had its challenging parts, too (the fucking Customs House), but the game was more subdued. Bluepoint’s HD remasters apparently tighten up the combat mechanics and unify them with the later games, but it’s been long enough that I can’t tell if they’re actually improved or not. Still, Uncharted 2 nails that tone of a slightly stupid, but still fun Hollywood blockbuster, and it’s not so long that you get sick of it. But I still hate the part where you have to fight a tank.
February: Maneater (PS5)
I think this was probably my big surprise of the year. Two weeks out from the release of Rebirth and with all my calendar cleared, I was looking through the PS Plus catalog for something short to play in the meantime and happened upon this. Maneater is the kind of AA game that reminds me of the PS2 era in the best way. It’s like what if GTA, but it took place in the ocean and you were a shark—particularly with respect to the writing, which is both genuinely funny and contains some biting (no pun intended) political satire. As the shark, you terrorize an extravagant, consumerist community set in a non-specific area of the Gulf of Mexico, and even as you literally climb up on land to eat hundreds of innocent people, the game pretty much just says “Yeah, those people deserved to die.” It is deeply cynical in that sense but really captures a kind of zeitgeisty mood around environmental destruction that is way more effective, to me, than works that try to have environmental themes and get all sappy about it. It makes great use of a frame narrative (something I think games should do more) of a reality show about shark hunters in the Gulf, and an ever-present voice of God is constantly narrating, Attenborough-style, your exploits as a rapidly-evolving shark of death. I enjoyed this game so much that it ended up being the first game I ever earned the Platinum trophy for, and I was on PS3 when they first implemented them. It does have a very easy Platinum, which is why I did it, but still.
March: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (PS5)
When I saw my copy of Rebirth had been delivered to my doorstep on Amazon’s tracking site, I actually took a half-day of paid time off so I could go home early and start playing it. That’s how hyped up I was for this game, and amazingly, it lived up to it. I honestly don’t know the last time I was so fully absorbed, really obsessed, with a game. My final clock on my save was around 95 hours and I never felt like I wanted it to be over. The characters are brilliant and as we move into the world map of FF7, it really feels like a road trip with the bros. As someone who actually enjoys open world busywork to an extent, especially when it’s in a world as beautiful and immersive as Rebirth’s, the game design didn’t bother me at all, though it is all truly optional and you can play the game as a linear adventure if you want. That also extends to the minigames, which are copious, but I enjoyed most of them, especially the card game. The combat, which was already great in Remake, is even better here, with the addition of Chrono Trigger-style combination attacks that encourage you to switch characters and swap up your party more often. Whether I vibe with what Nomura and pals do with the story in the last five hours is a different question, but I’m reserving final judgment on that aspect until we get the third entry in the trilogy. Overall, I think Rebirth is a towering achievement and the fusion of RPG and open world gameplay is an interesting way forward for Japanese RPGs, bringing the adventure and wonder of the world map into the 4K era.
March: God of War (PS3)
I needed something small scale and linear to play after Rebirth and God of War fit the bill. This technically falls into the category of “games from PS3 days I replayed” which is a surprisingly big bucket this year; I owned the PSN release of God of War HD on the PS3, but only got about a third of the way through the game before I stopped playing it. With how much of a critical darling the recent, Nordic-themed God of War titles have been, I always meant to go back to the original trilogy, and I actually happened across a used copy of the American release of the God of War HD Collection at just the right time. I played Devil May Cry, the original, in 2023 and it’s clear that God of War owes a lot to that title. I mean, the power-up items are even called “red orbs” in this game, too, and that’s not exactly a generic name. Thankfully, the game never gets as unreasonably difficult as DMC could, and it’s a fun AAA action romp all the way through.
April: Ryu ga Gotoku Kenzan! (PS3)
With Rebirth safely out of the way, I returned to the “Year of Yakuza” with the third game in the series, which for reasons not entirely clear is a spinoff featuring Kiryu in the role of Miyamoto Musashi in Edo-period Kyoto. This really feels like the kind of thing you’d do with a more established property (like, it wouldn’t be out of character for 2024 RGG at all) but to do it as just the third game in the series, and the first in HD on the new PS3 platform, is kind of insane. The game opens like a Kojima wet dream with something like three hours of cutscenes (not even an exaggeration) but once you get into the gameplay loop it really is just Ryu ga Gotoku but in a different setting. Unfortunately we do start to see some of the side activity bloat creeping in already here and I ended up getting kind of burnt out on it around the 50 hour mark. I had to abandon dating all the courtesans because the dates had been locked behind some truly terrible minigames, which scale in difficulty so crazily that for the final courtesan, the only realistic way to beat it is to use pause buffering. This isn’t a speedrun strat, just the only way to beat the damn minigame. As a period piece it’s a pretty memorable game, there just doesn’t feel like a whole lot of reason for Kiryu to be there, you know?
April: A Plague Tale: Innocence (PS5)
At some point, the sequel to this game was one of the free games on PS Plus, so when I saw the first title go on deep discount, I picked it up. I went into A Plague Tale knowing almost nothing about it, other than it was set in early modern Europe and was a AAA action game of some kind. I actually really liked this game for about 95% of it. The setting and concept are a lot different from the kinds of games I usually play, and although you escort the little boy for a lot of it, it doesn’t have any real escort mission kind of bullshit in it. The swarms of rats that harass you, and that you eventually harness as a weapon, are very memorable (my partner remembers this one as “the rat game”). The female protagonist has a lot of the tiresome “me strong woman” vibe going on that is terribly predictable from Western developers, but I didn’t dislike any of the characters. So what was the other five percent? Well, there is exactly one scripted sequence in the game—the cart pushing sequence, and if you’ve played the game you immediately know what I’m talking about—that is one of the worst gameplay experiences I’ve had in a game in a long time. You have to slowly hide behind a moving cart while enemies attack you from both sides, which wouldn’t be so bad except the enemies move up and down stairs during this in a way that the auto-targeting reticle used for your main weapon cannot cope with. Playing the game how you have for the whole previous 12 hours doesn’t work. The aiming just doesn’t work when enemies are moving vertically, and you’ll miss even when the reticle is locked on. Your character generally dies in one hit in this game, so if any one of them gets by, you have to start the whole (miserably long) sequence over again. I came very, very close to fully dropping the game because of this sequence, but finally got through it after about 30 minutes of trying. The worst part? This scene actually features one of the more likable characters in the story nobly sacrificing his life so the protagonists can go on… But I was so pissed at the gameplay that I didn’t give a rat’s ass (no pun intended) about it.
May: Dangan Ronpa: Kibou no Gakuen to Zetsubou no Koukousei (Switch)
The popularity of Dangan Ronpa in the West charted a really weird trajectory that turned me off of it for a while, but I finally took the jump into the series this year. If you aren’t aware, Dangan Ronpa was originally not localized for English audiences, but garnered a fanbase entirely through this one guy who posted a Let’s Play of the game on Something Awful where he translated the story. The idea of these people (who I saw on Tumblr a lot) calling themselves Dangan Ronpa fans despite having only read one dude’s (let’s be honest, probably badly translated) forum Let’s Play was so bizarre to me I took to ignoring the series. It’s not the game’s fault, though, and after finally finishing AI: Somnium Files last year, I decided to take on another mystery ADV. Dangan Ronpa is genius primarily in that it takes the fundamental game design of a Gyakuten Saiban game and turns “arguing” into an action game. You still use snippets of evidence to break down contradictions in testimony, but unlike Gyakuten Saiban, this takes place in real time and you have to “shoot” the contradictions with the evidence as the characters bicker around you. It’s very engaging and the trials are a lot of fun, since the mystery writing is also solid. The first case has a great misdirection that really threw me for a loop and got me fully invested, and you’re usually able to deduce the culprit yourself. Also, Doraemon is there for some reason. The overarching story had me pretty involved until the final reveal, which I’m not sure I like, but I do plan on playing the sequel, so I kind of want to wait to see how it’s treated there before drawing my final conclusions.
May: Escha to Logy no Atelier: Tasogare no Sora no Renkinjutsushi (Switch)
It took me like two years to finally beat Ayesha no Atelier, with a total break from video games or two during the time I was technically “in progress” on that game. I bought all three Tasogare games when I first got my Switch in 2021, but it took me until this year to finally get to Escha to Logy. This was the first Atelier game to get turned into an anime, which I watched when it aired, so I was kind of spoiled on the overarching story, but thankfully that’s not really what you play these games for anyway. Escha has the most streamlined systems of any Atelier game I’ve played so far, and it really alleviates many of the pain points from earlier games. Being able to duplicate items when you’re one or two short for an important recipe eliminates a lot of frustration, and the way battle items automatically replenish every time you go out cuts down significantly on tedium. After the slightly overwhelming quest book in Ayesha, which could have leftover objectives from literally 30 gameplay hours ago clogging it up (that was me in my playthrough), we get the bingo-style quest board, which is immensely satisfying to fill out every chapter. And yeah, this game is divided into chapters again, much like Rorona (the structure of which I loved) which lowers the mental load and lets you focus on one thing at a time. This game has my outright favorite alchemy system in the series so far; although I still look up guides for ultimate equipment, this is the first time I felt I was able to wrap my head around it enough that I could have potentially made them myself, and there were a lot of times where I had to improvise in a recipe and actually managed to pull it off, unlike prior games where the finer points of trait inheritance and parameter-boosting felt totally opaque to me. Outside of pure gameplay, Escha has the same wonderful “twilight” atmosphere as the first game, and brings back some of my favorite characters (Maron, Wilbel) from the first game, but Escha is way more fun as a protagonist than Ayesha was, and though many chafed at the idea of having a male Atelier protagonist again, Logy is a pretty cool bro, too. I did ultimately only do one run through the game, eschewing a Logy playthrough for the “true” ending… I never do like replaying games just for endings.
June: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (PS4)
The next AC game was good old Bro-hood, as we called it, remembered quite fondly as many people’s favorite game in the series. The series moves to Rome and while I do enjoy many of the famous Roman landmarks that I’m given to climb here, something about the map in this game just doesn’t sit right with me. Unlike Venice or Florence in II, I kind of feel like I never know where I am or which way I need to go to get somewhere in this game, which is not helped by how many impassable cliffs there are dotted around the Roman countryside. The titular Assassin’s Brotherhood appears primarily as a text-based minigame where you have to dispatch your Assassins around Europe to level them up, which I honestly don’t entirely hate, though it does get tiresome after a while. Getting to call in your ass bros from the shadows to assassinate dudes was always satisfying. The other aspect of the minigame, rebuilding Rome by buying random properties all over the place, was a lot more annoying, primarily because every property you buy gives you notoriety with the guards, which you then have to go burn off before you can buy more properties, turning it into an exercise in tedium. Despite having played this game back in the day, I had totally forgotten the twist at the end, and the Hollywood-thriller-style sci fi story is as decent as it’s ever been. On to part three.
June: Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (PS4)
Speaking of part three… I actually owned this game for the PS3 back in the day, and tried to play it, but my copy was somehow broken. I don’t know if my disc had a bad sector or what, but at some point early on in the game, the level would stop loading and Drake would fall into a bottomless void to his death. It was a used copy from Gamestop, but I was well outside the return window, so I just kinda sucked it up and resigned myself to never playing Uncharted 3. Until now! The start of this game is quite strong with the slinking around London and the flashbacks to Drake’s childhood (I normally hate flashbacks as a storytelling device, but it was a nice change in pace here since kiddie Drake doesn’t murder anyone) but it eventually devolves into the same Uncharted bullshit, culminating as the previous game did with some supernatural enemies that absolutely suck to fight against. Naughty Dog are nothing if not consistent. This game has some fantastically frustrating bullshit arenas with endlessly-spawning enemies, too. It’s been five months since I played this at time of writing and I’ve mostly forgotten what the story was about, which tells me everything I need to know about it. I will say, the fake out at the end where pretended to kill Sully actually kinda got me. I kind of wish they did kill Sully, because then at least something memorable would have happened in this game. These games sold like gangbusters and were huge for Sony in the PS3 era, but after all is said and done, I still like that first game the most…
July: Ryu ga Gotoku 3 (PS4)
Yet another part three, although this is the fourth game in the series, it was time to return to the adventures of everyone’s favorite suspicious-looking ojisan, Kiryu Kazuma. This is the only game in the series I had prior experience with, having played Yakuza 3 in its neutered, English-localized form back on the PS3. At the time, I loved it, but for some reason never went on to play more games in the series, perhaps annoyed at the fact that the first game in the series was “not available” to me at the time due to only being sold in English-dubbed form. Now, having come off the absolute masterpieces that were the first two games, Ryu ga Gotoku 3 kind of swings and misses. Without Hase Seishu’s golden touch, we somehow end up with an absolutely cockamamie plot about CIA secret agents trying to steal Kiryu’s orphanage to build a Navy airbase, or something. It doesn’t really rise to the level of “enjoyably silly,” just dumb, and the mystery of “a shadowy man who looks just like Kiryu’s adoptive dad” paying off as “its his long-lost twin that works for the CIA” is just… Come on, man. We can do better than that. Some of the problems with this game can also be laid at the feet of the PS4 conversion, though. This game was never intended to run at 60 FPS, and in doing the conversion, some framerate-bound mechanics, particularly enemies’ reblock timers, were not modified, leading to easily the worst combat in the series. Everyone just blocks all the time. The side stories are as enjoyable as ever, but again in the conversion, Sega lost the rights to a lot of the licensed content that appeared in the game, so you can no longer read Friday magazine, and most egregiously, all the Club Ageha cabaret girls have been excised, so for the first time in the series I just didn’t bother with the cabaret clubs. I do really like Okinawa as a location, as it provides a nice contrast to Kamurocho, and for that matter, getting to see Kamurocho in HD with a free look camera for the first time is quite an experience. I just hope the next game has a slightly less dumbass story.
July: Bayonetta 2 (Switch)
If you ask me my favorite games of the seventh console generation, I’ve always had the following answer at the ready: number one is Nier, and number two is Bayonetta. I’ve never really thought about what the third would be, but those two games were head and shoulders above the rest. Bayonetta is one of the very few games I’ve gone out of my way to clear on higher difficulties just for the challenge, and I loved the music, aesthetic, and that snarky witch bitch. So when Sega cast the series to the winds and its sequel somehow ended up on the Wii U, I took solace in the fact that everyone said the second game wasn’t as good as the first, though deep down it really pained me that I couldn’t play it. Well, it turns out everyone was right about the second game not being as good as the first. This is still a competent action game—Platinum Games don’t miss on that front—but it doesn’t really deliver the same level of highly-tuned challenge that the first game did under Kamiya Hideki’s watchful eye. Another big issue with the game is that the story is just godawful. Bayonetta was not a game you played for the story per se, but it provided a framework for Bayonetta herself to be Bayonetta, which is one of the main attractions, so you don’t want it to be actively bad. The story here is actively bad, with the addition of some stupid little boy literally wearing Yu-Gi-Oh‘s Millenium Puzzle and sporting genuinely some of the worst voice acting I have ever heard in a game. Like, we’re talking “Jill sandwich” level voice acting here. I played the game in English as that seems to be the “intended” experience, but I was seriously regretting it after a while. For some reason, Bayonetta spends the entire game intensely concerned about this kid’s welfare while the player spends the entire game wishing he would fucking die. With a downgrade in the gameplay and a shitgrade in the story, my long-awaited playthrough of Bayonetta 2 ended in disappointment.
August: Alan Wake Remastered (PS4)
I actually remember exactly when Alan Wake first came out in 2010. This was right around when I was super into watching the 4PlayerPodcast guys stream on Justin.tv (talk about a throwback) and, as someone who never owned an Xbox and never planned to own one either, this 360 exclusive was an interesting one to watch on the stream. I didn’t see too much of the game, ultimately, but it was enough that the game felt really familiar when I booted up its remaster this year. The main thing that drove me to play this wasn’t nostalgia for a 360-exclusive horror game, but the torrent of praise I saw for Alan Wake II. Being the freak I am, I knew I had to play the first one first, so I picked it up on sale. There’s a lot to like about Alan Wake. The story is honestly pretty good, even if tonally it is very much a “2010s video game” if you get my drift. It primarily has the issue of over-explaining itself, with Alan’s incessant narration constantly explaining the mechanics behind the weird supernatural stuff happening. Of course Alan knows how it works, since he’s the one who wrote the evil magical book (?) causing everything, but it would still be more fun for us as a player to be left in the dark to some degree. The gameplay is also tight and enjoyable, a well-constructed arcade-style shoot-’em-up, and the unique flashlight mechanic is certainly memorable. I would say that some of the action sections go on for a bit too long, and I found myself saying “are we there yet?” because I mostly just wanted to get to the next story interlude. I did enjoy my time with the game, ultimately, but I also don’t think I would have gone out of my way to play this if it didn’t have a critically-acclaimed sequel that I wanted to play.
August: Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin (PS5)
I had Stranger of Paradise on my radar for a while, so when it popped up on PS Plus, I figured it was time to kill Chaos. I think this is actually my first Team Ninja game ever, but I certainly liked what I saw here and am open to more of it. The one thing everyone knows about Stranger of Paradise is that “the story is dumb,” with the constant references to killing Chaos and the protag listening to Linkin Park on his iPod. That is all really there, of course, but while I went in expecting some kind of intentionally funny satire, the game’s story ends up being a wholly sincere narrative about Jack and his friends forming a team of outcasts in a world that they can’t understand, and doesn’t understand them. The big non-twist, which is given away from the opening cutscenes, is that Jack is Garland and therefore Chaos, and his solution to kill Chaos is to become him and find the Warriors of Light who will eventually kill him. These weird time travel shenanigans are right in line with the original Final Fantasy, to which this game serves as a sort of fanfiction prequel, and includes a lot of fun callbacks to that game, locations based on dungeons on it, remixed music tracks, et cetera, but ultimately it’s just a badass action game. The various job classes present all kinds of varied playstyles, and it’s very fun to experiment with them and find a style that jives with you. I ended up loving the javelin-throw of one of the lower-tier classes so much that I stuck with it the whole game, even though there were “better” classes available. If there’s one thing that’s a shame, it’s that the gear progression is designed around multiple playthroughs and online co-op grinding, so if you’re just in it for a single run through the campaign, the gear system can be completely ignored and you just press the “optimize” button every so often. I don’t really like micromanaging gear, though, and this game’s gear really wants to be micromanaged, so that’s a net neutral for me. Amazingly satisfying combat, awesome boss fights, great music… This one’s a banger and kind of makes me curious about Team Ninja’s famous ball-eviscerator Nioh. But I’m not sure I hate myself that much yet.
August: Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (PS4)
And so all these years later, I finally finished the Ezio trilogy. I actually owned this game on PS3 back in the day (with the installable copy of the first Assassin’s Creed on the disk!) but, as ever, just didn’t get around to it. You can really start to feel the speed of the development cycle for these games with this entry, as a lot of mechanics are recycled from the prior two, merely plopping us into a new location. The one wholly-new element developed for this game, the assassin hideout tower defense minigame (God, “tower defense” was so the buzzword in the early 2010s) absolutely sucks and can be entirely circumvented by just making sure your notoriety never rises high enough to get one of your hideouts attacked, which is pretty trivial to do. Ezio and Desmond also get a new face for some reason, and I couldn’t find any concrete answer for why this is online. He goes from one of the sexiest bad boys in games to looking like fucking Adam Sandler in this game. I saw one theory that the model for the original character demanded a higher fee for image rights so they had to change his face, but no idea if it’s true. Ubisoft had some excuse about “technology” that rings totally hollow. Either way, it’s really jarring that Ezio/Desmond is ugly now. In Revelations, Ezio is old, so you can kinda just imagine he got ugly, but you can’t do that with Desmond. Anyway, the game is more of the Ass Creed formula, and Constantinople is a really fun location that offers a nice change of pace from the previous two Italian games. The overarching story is mostly in standstill here, and it feels like they didn’t really know what to do with it next; Desmond is in a coma the entire game and the frame narrative deals with him arguing with a ghost in his brain. It’s fine: this is a shorter game than either of the previous two, so it doesn’t wear out its welcome.
August: Eiyuu Densetsu: Sora no Kiseki SC (PSP)
Now here’s a real masterpiece. I beat this in August but I think I was playing this over three months of real time, which is not surprising since my final save clocks in at 80 hours. After intending to check it out for years, last year I finally dove into Falcom’s decade-spanning RPG magnum opus, the Kiseki series, with Sora no Kiseki FC. That game ruled, and ended on a massive cliffhanger, so it didn’t take long for me to dive into the second part. With pretty much the entirely of that 60 hour first game being dedicated to worldbuilding and setting up the characters, the payoffs (one after another) in SC are huge and fully earned. After spending one game getting to know the Kingdom of Liberl inside and out, we’re sent again on a whirlwind nation-spanning quest to stop an insurgency, solve a mystery of ancient technology, track down a secret death cult, and eventually—of course—save the world. This is easily one of the best-written RPGs I’ve ever played, not just because of its broad cast of memorable characters or its interesting themes about the theory of history, but thanks to its full commitment to the bit of trying to be the most fleshed-out RPG world ever made. It’s always the first thing anyone mentions about the Kiseki series, but the fact that every NPC in the world has unique dialogue for every scene in the game really makes the game world feel full of life in a way I’ve not experienced in any other game. Even if you don’t talk to everyone, every time, you will recognize familiar faces and get a sense of the lives of everyone going on around you as you go about your job solving mysteries and saving the world, which ultimately actually makes you feel like you saved a world, much more than many other games can say. Liberl is genuinely full of people you can get to know and places you can fall in love with (even at PSP levels of fidelity) and it makes the journey that much more engaging. I think the Kiseki series has stretched out to 14 games at this point, each of them direct sequels to the preceding ones, and I can’t wait to keep going.
September: Kenka Banchou (PS2)
The Kenka Banchou series first caught my eye back in the PSP days, which Kenka Banchou 3 had just released. I had a hacked PSP and no money at the time and, as a fledgling weeaboo (it’s crazy to think about now, but when that game released, I had only been into Japanese stuff for like, three years) the intensely Japan-themedness of the game piqued my interest. I remember downloading Kenka Banchou 3 and having no idea what to do with my at-the-time N69 level Japanese, and putting it down pretty quick, but my recent forays into the Ryu ga Gotoku series reminded me of this game’s existence. It doesn’t really have the kind of open world experience of Ryu ga Gotoku, but Kenka Banchou nevertheless does kind of feel like a “high school turf war” version of those games. The title theme literally being the theme from 1973’s Jingi Naki Tatakai really sets you up for what kind of game this is going to be: it’s an intensely, deliberately cheesy paean to Showa-era badasses in gakuran with dumb haircuts and manly friendship. It’s great. The game itself is a brawler, and the combat is honestly pretty bad, but I just love the tone of this game so much. It’s just a shame that it’s such a pain to unlock the bonus story where you play as the main chararacter’s girlfriend: even with a guide I somehow screwed up the flags and missed it.
September: Blue Reflection (PS4)
At some point I remembered I was supposed to be playing Gust games this year, so I pulled this one off my shelf. Blue Reflection is a game that I knew as having been rather maligned when it released, but the magical girl aesthetic and Kishida Mel character designs just called to me, and it was a Gust game so I was always going to play it anyway. The recent release of a much better received sequel provided even more of an excuse. Indeed, it turns out, this is a game carried entirely by its aesthetics, and the player’s enjoyment is going to depend on how much they like seeing cute high school girls talk about cute things and running around a pastel-colored high school listening to tinkly piano music. The game’s saving grace is that it is only about 25 hours long; if this was a 40+ hour RPG I may have genuinely come to dislike it, but it’s just right. There’s only the school overworld and literally four small zones to explore for RPG gameplay, and while they have concepts of an interesting battle system, ultimately the game is really easy and doesn’t require you to think too hard about it. But I love the aesthetic going on here so much, and the story is just the kind of pitch-perfect Sunday-morning-cartoon magical girl thing, that I came away from this one enjoying it overall.
September: Ys VI: Napishtim no Hako (PC)
There’s obviously a big numerical gap between the last Ys game I played (Ys I) and this one, but the early history of the Ys series is kind of a clusterfuck, with Falcom having outsourced production of some games, some games being considered non-canon to the series… There are literally two games called Ys IV, neither of which was developed by Falcom. So Ys VI is the first “modern” entry in the series, when Falcom took back ownership of the title and started regularly producing new entries in it themselves that have all basically followed the general pattern of this one: it’s a hack-and-slash action RPG, that’s unforgivingly hard, and feels good as all hell to play. This game was originally released for Windows PC in 2003, right around the Sora no Kiseki games, and there are a lot of visual and even story similarities. I mean, nothing beats a mystery about ancient technology for an RPG story, I guess. You don’t play this for the story, though, you play it for the fast-paced action gameplay, and the dungeons in this game sometimes go hard as hell. Like, it feels like playing a twitch-based platformer as opposed to a RPG. Much like the early bump combat Ys games, it does regularly require grinding to get strong enough to damage the bosses at all (like, I was literally doing 0’s to the first boss the first time I fought it) but since the combat feels so good, it never feels totally onerous to have to grind, and the next level is never more than a few minutes away at any rate. As an aside, I had to get this game in Japanese on Steam “unofficially” by renaming some files in the game, and while that works, I realized after finishing the game that this breaks the fast travel mechanic, so I spent way more time backtracking during my grinding that I needed to. Can we not just release the Japanese version?
September: Boku no Natsuyasumi (PS)
This is the kind of game that really deserves its own entire post. I genuinely think Boku no Natsuyasumi may be one of the best video games and one of the best works of interactive fiction ever made. If you want to know why, you can’t go wrong with Tim Rogers’s six hour mega review of it on YouTube: he can tell you about the sheer transcendent beauty of this game more eloquently than I ever could. Even if you didn’t grow up in the Showa era, going to your uncle’s house in the inaka, collecting bugs and drawing your picture diary for the second term at elementary school, this game will break your heart like no other. The pathos of childhood is here, distilled, perfectly, into one ten hour long video game. You can never go back to that summer.
October: Juusan Kihei Boueiken (Switch)
After planning to play this on PS Plus for months (it was installed on my PS5 for like half a year) I went to boot it up only to find that it was leaving PS Plus in a week, so I ended up buying the Switch port instead. Somewhere I heard that the Switch version was better optimized and didn’t have slowdown in the battle portions like the PS4 version. That was a lie, the performance is ass. Thankfully, this isn’t a game you play for the pseudo-real time SRPG battles. It’s a story-driven adventure game first and foremost. The story is quite good and very competently written, although I wouldn’t call it revelatory or “one of the best science fiction stories ever,” which is a slightly unbelievable line I have seen online a few times discussing this game. The interactive, non-linear nature of how the story is told does a lot of the heavy lifting, since having to piece it together through fragments (where you choose which fragment to reveal next) makes the central mysteries much more compelling than if it was just a linear narrative. Even so, everything’s foreshadowed pretty clearly and I had all the big twists sussed out before the game clearly revealed them. Honestly, the most memorable part of this game to me is the visuals: this was my first-ever Vanillaware game and their take on high definition, 2D sprite-based visuals is spectacular, proving that 2D doesn’t have to be dead in the era of high fidelity.
October: Chrono Trigger (Super Famicom)
This was one I always needed to tick off the list, and I finally did it this year. I finished this in October but it was a work in progress throughout the year. I originally loaded it up on my Miyoo Mini as a way of giving myself something to play on the go, but I struggled to find time for it (or focus on such a narrative-driven game while on the train) so I eventually moved it back to the PC emulator and powered through the last 20 or so hours at home. Chrono Trigger is a game whose legacy precedes it, for better or worse. It seems like we can’t go more than a month without another slightly-embarassing Western indie developer announcing their “love letter to Chrono Trigger.” This is a game that’s still held up as an ideal that RPGs should strive toward, and it’s hard not to think about that when you play it. For a game on the Super Famicom, it’s a towering achievement in terms of presentation: the environments, music, and storytelling are all top-notch, although there isn’t really much depth in terms of the narrative or characters. As far as systems, though, the game is kind of boring. Much is made of the fact that your characters get different “combination moves” depending on your party composition, but out of something like 96 combinations only 4 give an effect other than “elemental damage,” so they are largely interchangeable and you end up settling on just a few anyway. I’m definitely glad I played Chrono Trigger, since it’s such an important part of video game history, but it hardly changed my life.
October: God of War II (PS2)
I sat down to play God of War II HD on my PS3, quite hyped to play it in fact, only find out that my PS3 doesn’t want to read to the disk anymore. It will read other disks, but in all likelihood the disk drive is on the fritz. Alas. So I had to play the PS2 version in an emulator at basically native resolution (God of War II and its gorgeous 60 FPS visuals is one of the hardest PS2 games to emulate) but thankfully, the game is so damn good that eventually I got over the less-than-ideal situation. God of War II is very much just more of the first game, with the graphics and presentation turned up to 11. Everything’s bigger and more badass on Kratos’s quest to kill Zeus, although it is actually hilarious how often the narrator has to chime in to remind you exactly what you’re doing. Like literally every time you go into a new area, Gaia has to tell you that you are on the way “find the Fates so you can travel back in time to the moment Zeus betrayed you.” I get it! If I have one complaint it’s that you actually don’t get to kill Zeus, and the game ends on a huge cliffhanger, with Kratos charging Mount Olympus on the back of a Titan. It sure sets up for a titanic opening to God of War III, which I’ve already got installed on my PS5.
November: Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne (PS4)
Back in high school, I had friends who were into Shin Megami Tensei, and I specifically remember seeing some gameplay of Nocturne on the PS2 and primarily being told that the game was bullshit. The game has a reputation for “unfair” difficulty that is mostly undeserved, although it is certainly most testing than most RPGs. For that reason I avoided the game for many years, even after finally diving into the series with the original Shin Megami Tensei on the PlayStation (it didn’t help that I found that game exceptionally difficult and often frustrating), but I finally sucked it up and took the plunge into III this year. The game has another reputation besides its difficulty: that of being one of the best Japanese RPGs of all time, and that one is earned. This is what I call a “systems game” in that the main reason you are going to be enjoying it is the gameplay mechanics. The change to 3D here had me getting way more into the Pokemon-esque monster collecting and teambuilding aspect than I ever did in the first game, and it’s consistently fun to work on upgrading to a new demon or thinking about what skills you need to fuse into your team to take down the upcoming bosses. This is all dressed up with a brilliantly dark, sort of Buddhist apocalyptic aesthetic and story that is way unique for a Japanese RPG and, while the story is far from being the focus, seeing what kind of weird god or fucked up environment would come up next was always fun. You end up having to fight through the National Diet Building towards the end of the game, to find the ultimate demons inside… Real subtle, guys!
November: Zero ~Akai Chou~ (PS2)
For Halloween, I wanted to play a spooky game, and there’s scarcely any horror game series better than Zero (Fatal Frame in the West), at least as far as I’m concerned. You got the cerebral style of Japanese horror, Juon– and Ringu-style mystery, unique gameplay, and importantly, the protagonists of the games are always cute Japanese girls. It’s like it’s made for me. This game is a real throwback for me because way, way back in the day, a friend and I tried to play through the PS2 Fatal Frame trilogy because we had been made fans of it by watching 4PlayerPodcast. We completed the first game (with the godawful English dub, which turned it into more of a comedy than anything) and started working through Crimson Butterfly, but ended up giving up part way through. I always resolved to eventually play these games properly, though, once I could understand Japanese and wouldn’t have to play the shitty English versions. Truthfully, the game isn’t that scary, although it did spook me a few times—it really is that kind of creeping Japanese horror where you just slowly realize that shit is fucked up. There are multiple endings to this game and all of them are fucked up. The “true” ending can only be seen by beating the game on the highest difficulty, so I watched that one on YouTube, but it’s arguably more fucked than the normal ending, which to keep the spoilers to a minimum, sees some people die who we would rather have live. There’s no really good ending for our cutie protagonists here, and that’s the best way to end a horror story in my book. Coming to this village was a bad idea.
November: Utawarerumono ~Chiriyuku Mono e no Komoriuta~ (PS4)
Ah, Underwater Ray Romano. It’s quite popular in the offline Australian anime scene, you know. Even though I’ve known about the Utawarerumono game since the original anime aired in 2006, it was never really on my radar as something to play. I don’t like SRPGs that much, and while this game is primarily an ADV more than an SRPG, none of the characters really speak to me either. In recent years, though, I’ve heard a lot of praise for the recent sequel duology (which have characters I find more appealing) and so when the first Utawarerumono popped up as one of the free PS Plus games for the month, I decided it was time to play it. I’d love to say it was worth the wait but this game is pretty middling—how much you get out of it is probably going to depend entirely on how much you like the heroines, and unfortunately I don’t really like any of them very much. Bumbling idiot Touka (man, I really do always fall for the comic relief chan-nees, don’t I?) is probably my favorite, but she barely gets any scenes. The core war story with Hakuoro (who is a great protagonist and ultimate bro, with a typically fantastic performance from Koyama Rikiya) is enjoyable, but half of the runtime or more is taken up by silly comedy vignettes with the various heroines, so if you don’t like these girls, the game can get pretty boring. The SRPG part isn’t even a saving grace, either, because while the game starts somewhat on the easier side, the battles only get more trivial as the game goes on (particularly if you make Dori and Gura, who love their young master’s sperm, into overpowered death turrets) and some battles that are supposed to be “epic boss encounters” literally end in two turns. It took me 45 hours to clear, which was about 15 more than I would have liked. I’m still open to playing those sequels, but I need a long break from this series first.
December: Astro Bot (PS5)
Initially, Astro Bot wasn’t really on my radar as something to play this year. I enjoyed Astro’s Playroom as much as the next guy who bought a PS5, but that was mostly because of the nostalgia jolt of collecting old Sony gaming hardware, and most importantly, it came free with the console. Playroom plays well enough but some of the DualSense gimmicks in that one are not the best. But when Astro Bot started garnering effervescent reviews from everyone from legacy outlets to Dunkey (it would eventually win The Game Awards’ big prize, as well) positioning it as a genuine competitor to Mario and the kind of game that “reminds you why you like games in the first place,” I had to take notice. The PlayStation brand was celebrating its 30th anniversary in December, too, and I wanted to play something special to mark it: Astro Bot was perfect. This game is basically a masterpiece and has deserved every bit of praise its gotten. I’m not a platformer guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I do like the 3D Mario games, and Astro Bot really does reach the rarefied air of those titles. I can’t remember the last time I played a game so totally bubbling over with childlike joy and wonder. The game works just as well for six year olds as it does for manchildren like me who want to remember what it felt like to be six again. It’s fun as a celebration of 30 years of PS history (even if I think current Sony first-party Western AAA titles are given too much pride of place in the game, which I can only slightly forgive because they gave us a fricking Loco Roco level in there, too) but it would also be a brilliant game without any of that. It’s really refreshing to play (one comment called it a “game from a parallel universe where game developers didn’t forget games were supposed to be fun”) and the fact that a game like this can be so successful in 2024 makes you feel better about the whole future of our medium.
December: Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)
I was itching for another big AAA open world to run around and tick off map items in, and it felt way too early for another Assassin’s Creed title, so I took a risk on jumping into the enhanced PS5 version of Ghost of Tsushima despite the fact that I thought this game looked incredibly cringe when it came out. To mitigate that cringe, I did something I never have before: I played the Japanese localization of a Western game. The main thing that made me curious about Ghost of Tsushima is how the game was so warmly received in Japan, and of course, most Japanese people would have played the Japanese localization, so that was the version I wanted to play. Although I haven’t played the English version to compare it against, the loc seems to be very high quality, which is probably why the loc team were featured in so many interviews about the game in the Japanese press. They do their best to clean up some of the weird things about the script and make it feel appropriate to the setting, like changing the haiku to be proper waka, as the haiku form wasn’t invented in the time period the game takes place in. I would still say overall, though, that the story in Ghost of Tsushima is mostly bad, it’s just that the Japanese loc makes the writing tolerable on a micro scale. Even though the first Mongol invasion of Japan is a period incredibly ripe for drama, Ghost insists on focusing its narrative time on Jin helping to solve the individual, personal problems of a motley crew of characters who I could not have cared less about. The central conflict between Jin and his adoptive father, revolving around whether it’s okay to stab people in the neck from the shadows, was more entertaining, but it takes a back seat for most of the game. There was only one character besides the protagonist I would say I really enjoyed, and she only appears for a grand total of about an hour at the end of a single quest line. Where Ghost really shines is in its open world, which is good, because that’s why I played it. It’s so varied and colorful that it really is a joy to run around and just look at stuff, and the combat systems are also very satisfying to play with, even if the game is not remotely challenging on its default difficulty. I would say this game did enough for me to eventually play the planned sequel Ghost of Yotei, but I’m not gonna be preordering it or anything.
So that was my 2024, quite possibly the biggest year I’ve ever had in terms of games completed. For all of this year, I operated under a two-simultaneous-game strategy: I’d have one RPG going, and one “other” game, which was usually a big budget action game of some kind. For 2025, I’m attempting to expand my horizons by adding a third category of “small/indie game” (which is more of a vibe than actually meaning ‘independently published’) so hopefully next year there will be even more variety for me to report on.
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