Well well well. It's been a minute, you sexy thing, you. How you doin'? You ready to get your mental guts churned by my sweet, sweet word lovin'? You'd better be, because I'm Sparky_Buzzsaw and you're about to cram a whole bunch of me into your brain cavity.
While Giant Bomb's community-focused side of things is slowly atrophying, I still have a lot of love for this place and the many, many friends I've made here. So here you go, what very well might be one of the last blog blasts from me here, so let's make it a good one. DJ! Give me an intro!
2023 sure was a weird year personally. I wound up with the beetus (honestly, it was a long time coming) but that led to me dropping nearly fifty pounds and now my blood sugar levels and all the other essentials are back in the normal range, so... maybe it was a blessing in disguise? I continue to peck out stories elsehwere, with nearly 900k published words this year, though a lot of it was experimenting with pen names and new genres, so there wasn't a lot of traction. That's all good, though. Forward progress is forward progress, and when it comes to being an indie writer, having a back catalogue is a good thing.
Now, gaming-wise, if you follow me at all, you know I hardly ever buy games in the year they come out, so my end-of-year lists are weird, weird things filled with games from yesteryear. This list will be no different. The most impactful purchase of my year is the new Steam Deck OLED, which was a huge splurge for me but very much worth it. The new screen is fantastic. The little extra room doesn't seem like it would make a huge difference but it really does. Being legally blind and being able to have a screen as close as I need it to be is a godsend, and it continues to be my favorite console thing of all time.
Now let's get to rambling about games, TV shows, and hot sauces, shall we? We shall.
Sparky_Buzzsaw's GOTY 2023
Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
This one probably shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did. Trails in the Sky Second Chapter is one of my favorite RPGs of all time, with one of the best protagonists and a fantastic combat system I still rant and rave about. I love that stupid game. But somehow Trails of Cold Steel manages to nearly rival that game's loftiest heights, sticking to what makes the series work while introducing a fantastic Persona-esque link system with your comrades and side characters, and it somehow managed to survive almost the entirety of 2023 as the game that I loved the most, even if I played it all the way back in January.
Let's get this straight - Reen Schwarzer is no Estelle Bright. The main character is the series' weakest point, a bland, vanilla do-gooder whose personality is hinged upon a dark hidden power that's never really explored in any sort of interesting way, at least in this first game (no spoilers for the last two games in the series, please, I'm still playing through them). There's nothing about him that makes him relatable or human. He's the teacher's pet you kinda wish you could get away with bullying in school. He's the kiss-ass at work who always gets employee of the month. He is Japanese RPG Man, and ugh, he is awful.
But!
A turn-based RPG lives and dies in my mind on two things - the stories the game tells and the characters that make the world a living place. Cold Steel absolutely fucking owns TITS (seriously, that's the acronym, and God bless you for it, Japan) in that regard. Now, there's some serious grossness with the youth of some of the potential love interest characters, because uggggggh fucking JRPGs, but when it comes to character development and personalities, this is one of the most lovable casts of characters I've seen in a JRPG. Every one of them is given the time and love to develop into a fully-fledged character, with enough flavor at the beginning to help you differentiate who you want to focus on straight from the start. It's smart development.
Even the characters who aren't directly involved with you whacking monsters are fantastic. Sure, some of this stuff is wild anime nonsense - there's a famed general who rides around on the battlefield STANDING ON A TANK for fuck's sake - but I can't imagine trying to juggle a cast like this so successfully. It's crammed with quirky people I fell in love with by the game's end.
I liked the game's political intrigue too but be warned - that's a factor that takes a severe downturn by the end of the second game. The complexities of the political infighting largely fall away in favor of nonsensical character intrigue, which as I understand it might have been the result of budgetary issues and thinking there might not be a third game. I'm probably butchering that information but it's clear that the second game does not conclude in a manner that the first game and a half were leading up to, and the third game is so severe a disappointment so far that I haven't wanted to go back to it since June. It drops the entire main cast save for Reen in favor of new students, but it doesn't have the narrative legs to stand by its new cast. Instead, it keeps dropping the characters you wish would hang around from the old crew into a never-ending deluge of cameo roles and it makes me wonder the entire time why the new crew is necessary. They're barely given any time in favor of nostalgia, and if you know me, you know how much I hate nostalgia in modern media. We're drowning in that shit. It's the death of creativity and it kills my love for this series.
That doesn't change the fact that the first Trails of Cold Steel is some kind of magic. It's full of heart and charm and meaty RPG goodness. It scratches (at least temporarily) an political RPG itch while also giving me all the best Persona vibes in its link system. And best of all, it's simply a smart step forward into the realm of 3D RPGs from Trails in the Sky. Highly, highly recommended from me.
And one last thing I'll gush about - any time this song played, I stopped for a moment to listen. It's a gorgeous piece of music, and it's the single most memorable track of the year for me.
The Sauce Boss Returns!
Old El Paso Zesty Ranch Sauce
Usually this award is reserved for the best hot sauce I tried all year, but the only new-to-me hot sauces I tried this year were Cholula Tequila and Lime and Bravado Spice Co.'s Jalapeno and Green Apple. Don't get me wrong, both of those are good and really shine on pork or chicken, but they just aren't good enough to warrant praising them over my other culinary sauce discoveries this year.
This came down to Old El Paso's Zesty Ranch sauce and Taco Bell's Creamy Chipotle sauce. Both of these might strike you as odd choices, especially if you're a food snob, but Taco Bell's hot sauces have always been versatile, especially given the price (try dabbing some on a burger in the last couple minutes before it's done grilling) and its creamy sauces are one of the best bangs for your buck on the shelves. But Old El Paso's Creamy Ranch gets the nod from me. It gives tacos, burritos, tostadas, and nachos something extra, and you can use it as a pretty good dip, though I'd recommend adding it to something like regular ranch, as the bottles are pretty small. In a year that saw me having to switch to no-sodium tostada shells and wheat tortillas, anything new and flavorful helped save my appetite and this was a hgue part of that.
Best Surprise
Jagged Alliance 3
If you're not familiar with the franchise, Jagged Alliance has something of a history of disappointing its fans. Instead of creating decent turn-based tactical RPGs like its earliest iterations, for two decades, fans of the series had to sit through countless twatwaffles' ideas on how to recreate the series as eerything from an action stealth game with superpowers to a fucking dreadful live service game. It's one of the longest-running "what the fuck are you thinking, just give us a good version of the game we like" trainwrecks in gaming franchise history, right up there with the likes of Duke Nukem and Fable's later ill-advised changes to the formula.
Jagged Alliance 3 rectifies that in astonishingly good form.
Other people, namely ArbitraryWater's excellent recent GOTY blog, will tell you in smarter words than I can come up with why JA3's jokes and stereotypes are problematic, and I'm not here to disagree with that. Had that not been a facotr, this probably would have been a serious contender for GOTY for me. It's juvenile writing, but oh my GOD, the gameplay in JA3 is so good, and brings back everything great about JA2 (and maybe more importantly, the fan-made games that immediately followed).
Hireable mercenaries? Check. Creatable custom character with loads of perks? Check. Turn-based combat? Check. Grid-like map overworld structure? Check. Everything that has been missing is here, and it plays just the way you'd want a turn-based squad game to play in 2023.
It's not perfect. There's a central plot point about midway through the game that sends armies against you that seem to be unbeatable unless you've prepared and left your mercs in a special area, and that, frankly made me put the game aside for weeks on end. It is a stupidly jarring move to allow you to set up for such a thing and then have the contests be unwinnable. There's also some jank, like mercenaries I know should be hirable but aren't and some quests that can't be resolved if you do things in a wrong way. It could also use a broader variety of weapon types, but this and most of its problems are thankfully well addressed by the game's support of mods, which includes one of its smartest decisions. See, the game by default doesn't show you the hit percentages, which is something you'll get used to after a handful of missions, but the earliest maps are full of obstacles that look like you should be able to fire through them or you'll think you'll have an enemy flanked but really don't. With mods, you can turn back on those hit percentages. The devs even say, look, this isn't the way we intended for you to play, but we fully support you playing the game how you want to. And that's a really cool thing.
Plus, being able to mod the game and put the Expendables in there is pretty damn funny.
Best Job Simulator
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Speaking of games where the devs clearly say "this isn't the way we intended the game to be played, but here you go," Hardspace Shipbreaker became one of my favorite games of the year when I finally got tired of having to play the game in shifts and turned that off. It leaves Hardspace as something of a Zen-like experience as you slowly dismantle ships and toss the pieces into the requisite space bins. It's an immensely soothing experience, and even when shit goes wrong - which it almost always does for me and my blind butt - you can generally still salvage a win out of the day.
The treadmill of upgrading your equipment is solid but I wouldn't have minded more to it, especially in terms of passie upgrades and abilities. There could also stand to be more of just about everything, as you'll cycle through the ships you can take apart very rapidly and after a while everything starts to look the same internally. This is all stuff that's not a dealbreaker, just something I'd love to see blown out in a future sequel.
This is very much a "put on a podcast, audiobook, or music" game and I love it for that. But it also includes a plot of sorts, played out through radio dialogues that are largely brief and inobtrusive, though the pro-union plot is perhaps a bit heavy-handed. Please don't take that to mean that I don't support unions or anything like that. It's not a political comment. But if you play the game, you'll understand. The anti-union boss is painted in such broad strokes as to be almost a clown, to the detriment of the game. There's just no nuance to it. There isn't supposed to be, I guess, but it's laid on way too thick.
I'm also not overly fond of the music. I think by now we need a serious moratorium on space truckin' cowboy music in sci-fi games, and this continues that trend. But it's easy enough to just turn off and listen to your own thing so it's a very minor quibble.
Best Fightin' Game
Street Fighter VI
Before I get into SFVI, let's talk Mortal Kombat.
I really love the actual fighting aspects in Mortal Kombat 1, especially the faster movement of the characters and moves, but it's a blatantly money-hungry game from top to bottom and suffers a lot from it. The Kameo system too is an annoyance - either give us a big Tekkn Tag Tournament/UMK3-esque game and throw balancing to the wind or focus on the characters available in the roster, but don't half ass it. And that roster is... yeesh. It's a sausage party and I guess Sonya and Cassie weren't invited. I'm as crushes as I'm sure the hentai music video crowd is, but it does feel like the roster is seriously lacking in mainstays. The plot is fine and resets the universe to a less chaotic time where allegiances are clearer and you're not having to refer toa flowchart to know who's dead, undead, or living. I like the early character work, especially with Kung Lao and Johnny Cage, but the story as a whole definitely feels rushed, particularly in its last act, which could have used a few more chapters to really play with its unique "getting the band together" idea. It felt like a project that had a great writer who then had to leave halfway through and his thirteen-year-old fanboy son took over, smashing his favorite characters together. I don't know. Stories about the game's development are weird, and it's hard to piece together what's true and what isn't, especially since video game journalism has become so reliant on following personalities rather than a website.
Ahem.
But the clear-cut fighting game winner for me this year is far and away Street Fighter VI. For starters, the smart introductory combat systems are a blessing for a guy like me who's all thumbs with this kind of game. I felt comfortable with my abilities against the CPU without feeling like I was greatly cheesing the game. And when I took the training wheels off, the friendly in-game guides in the World Tour mode did a wonderful job of teaching me mechanics I wasn't sure about.
It also feels fantastic. I have no particularly strong feelings about the cast, save that the new additions feel inconsequential, but unlike Mortal Kombat 1, pretty much all the characters you'd want to see are here. The create-a-character is delightfully weird, and I love that you can cobble together styles and special moves. That's a really cool feature.
The menus are a mess, and the hub stuff is interesting but largely impractical. That said, the World Tour mode is the best thing to happen to Street Fighter since SFII, and it is a BLAST. It's so gleefully stupid in its plot and characters and it knows it. It never once takes itself too seriously, though I wouldn't have minded more character development or some sort of coherency to its world design. The late-game difficulty is also a head-scratcher, leaving you more reliant on healing items you've earned throughout the game than actual skill because holy shit it gets tough. But it is a thoroughly enjoyable time, and most importantly, it lets me beat up mimes and golden statue men to my Grinchy heart's content.
Best "Real" Survival Game
Grounded
Don't play Grounded the way I did. Solo, the devs give you enough options to turn it into a playable game, but I insisted on not using those and trying to tough it out. That was dumb and I eventually gave up on it. But it's a game I fully intend on returning to in 2024, this time creating a custom game and giving it a real go.
But my solo experience aside, this is a remarkably well-made game that rewards exploration and out-of-the-box thinking. I think like most every survival game you can get yourself into trouble pushing too hard and too fast, and I have little quibbling issues with its base-building, the least mechanically fun aspect of the game. But it is undeniably a top-tier survival game in its moment-to-moment fun, fluid controls, and charming personality.
The Diet Survival Game You Never Heard Of And Which I Love Dearly
Dysmantle
Holy crap, Dysmantle is my Zen.
It's an isometric/top-down survival game without meters and easygoing combat that I deeply, deeply love for its simplicity. The focus is on environmental destructibility, breaking objects to make new tools and upgrades that will allow you to break even more objects and make even more tools. All this, while exploring a surprisingly big world and unraveling a mystery of just what happened to everybody in it.
Like with Street Fighter VI, it in no way takes itself seriously. The plot is light and mostly told over very short radio broadcasts and pop-up comments from the main character. This is not exactly a Richard Matheson novel brought to life. But the gameplay treadmill of unlocking new items and upgrades is so freaking good I don't care about the plot. Other than some late-game slow-down when its high-end resources require time to process, this is a game that shoves resources at you and tells you to have fun, and God bless it for it.
It could probably use a little more variety in all its aspects, particularly its environments. You'll see the same objects and same interiors so often that the destruction starts to feel stale midway through, and the enemy types are severely limited but the combat, again, is not the focus here. It's a really great game and stupid amounts of fun.
Good Vibes Award
Two-Point Campus
I love a good Sims-like builder and Two Point Campus definitely scratched that itch for me in 2023. For starters, unlike Two Point Hospital, it's fairly accessible, though admittedly some of its font work and UI is still a little on the small side. That was the biggest barrier to entry in the first game, and I know I'm not alone in that, especially given the poor contrast of font colors, which thankfully has been rectified here.
The game itself is pretty basic and fun. You're basically taking care of the needs of teachers and students alike, while carefully monitoring your expenses and average grades. Building rooms is a breeze, as is adding objects and moving around your professors. The menus are sharply done, that never sacrifice functionality for form (ahem, looking at you, Street Fighter VI).
It's easy to lose hours to the simple gameplay loop. The soundtrack is endearing and unobtrusive, though I do wish the music, school announcements, and radio DJs didn't repeat as often as they do. Those radio DJs are, generally, pretty delightful though and fit the tone of the game perfectly.
I don't really have any great in-depth analysis on this one. It's simply a good time and a good vibe, and for a game like this, that's more than enough.
The "No, Wait, It's Actually Good" Award
Harvestella
Listen, Harvestella is an impossible sell. With Rune Factory and Stardew out there, it makes zero sense to play this game because both of those do what Harvestella does so much better. It's like being offered up a plain cheese sandwich on Wonderbread when there's a Philly cheesesteak and a lobster roll on the same platter.
The combat is utter shit. It is bafflingly bad. There's no weight to hits - at all - just numbers rising up to indicate you've hit something. You have a limited number of combos and spells and abilities, none of which ever feel good. Grinding makes every combat encounter a cinch, and there's little challenge tot the entirety of the game. The job system is the best part about the combat but honestly it doesn't matter. Every class feels like garbage, just with slightly different skills.
Similarly, the crop raising part of the game is overly simplified to the point of feeling incomplete. You've got a tiny narrow strip of land on which you can plant or build machines that help streamline the process and net you more money by stuffing a crate full of stuff that gets sold automatically at the end of the day, like pretty much every other farm game in existence. There is nothing new here. At all. You have played all of this before.
But goddamn it, I love Harvestella.
A huge part of that is the shockingly good overarching plot. Once every season, a deadly fog rolls over the land and drives people indoors. Your character is basically trying to figure out how he both survived that mist and what causes that. It's a pretty basic setup but the game goes to some really crazy places, things and settings I won't spoil here but which make a deep exploration of the game completely worth it to me. It becomes something of a haunting experience, with some truly horrific implications in its latter half that left me eager to see the ending.
But man, is all that couched in one of the worst farming games I've ever played. I hope there's a Harvestella 2, but if there is, it needs a lot more time in the cooker because a second game with this kind of uninspired and frankly lazy gameplay is going to doom the series. That said, if you're willing to look past its faults (and I know that's not likely), there IS something truly special here. At the very least, this is me on my digital knees, begging you to check out the OST. It's stunning.
The Disgaea Award for the Best Disgaea Game of the Year
Disgaea 7
I like Disgaea 7 a ton, mechanically. I think it's the most streamlined the systems have ever been, mostly to its favor. It's the most forgiving and easiest to understand too, though this I think isn't to its favor. For example, shortening the Item World is a smart idea - no one has time for a hundred levels of those damn things. But by stripping items and Innocents of their abilities, it leaves very little purpose to the whole of the Item World itself, so why would I even bother with that?
It's also fairly grimy in its DLC decisions, making characters that would have been a playable part of the game in previous iterations instead wildly overpriced DLC. This is the way of the world, I guess, but it's pretty shitty nonetheless.
But I guess the most troubling part of Disgaea 7 is that it just doesn't have much of a soul. The characters, like 6, are mostly immediately forgettable and follow similar characteristics of previous games' heroes to a boring degree. It doesn't feel like anyone was invested into the story. It's not a bad game - in fact, if you like SRPGs, I highly recommend it for the mechanics alone. It's that good. But I wish as much care had been poured into giving it heart and charm as much as the mechanics.
Best Thing That Shockingly Didn't Suck
Twisted Metal TV Show
I loved this dorky take on Twisted Metal. It throws logic and sensibility out the window and aims for sheer fun every minute of its runtime. The focus is not on its car combat but on its characters, and at first, that seems like a bizarre choice but it works. Oh my God, does it work. Sweet Tooth is sheer perfection, Thomas Haden Church eats up every scene he's in, and Anthony Mackie and Stephanie Beatriz play off each other delightfully well. It crackles with life and vitality and it cracked me up to no end ("Harold! Did you do this?"). If you love the sort of silly hourlongs Syfy used to make jammed together with surprisingly witty writing, watch this show. It is fantastic.
Jello!
And the rest!
Here are the games I played this year worth mentioning for one reason or another but which didn't really fit into any special awards category. Give them a look!
Spider-Man/Miles Morales - Great games, gorgeously crafted, but bizarrely bereft of actual fun things to do. The lack of a rogues gallery left them feeling more like collectathons than an actual open-world game, which is a bizarre choice for a character with such a wide cast of enemeis. But if you like beating on a sea of endless goons broken up every five or six hours by a simplistic boss fight, these are the games for you. Also, FUCK the Mary-Jane stealth aspects, and what the serious FUCK were they thinking bringing that back for Spider-Man 2? The thing people most complain about and you tout it as being even better? The fuck is wrong with you, game devs?
Arcade Paradise - Another job sim type game that does some really fun things with the idea of owning your own laundromat and arcade by making the arcade games playable. Unforutnately, those are wildly hit and miss, and veer mostly towards the misses, but it's still such a great concept that I definitely recommend giving this at least a look.
Darkside Detective - Adorable bite-sized case files, simple point-and-click adventure gameplay, and a silly pixel aesthetic, what wasn't I going to like about these games? I do think the second game loses something in the way it recycles characters from the first, but both are still remarkably solid adventure games.
Necromunda: Hired Gun - A fascinating, fun idea hindered by a lot of jank, and I mean a lot. The levels needed a lot more polish, and upon revisiting them for future quests, you are sometimes so badly outnumbered and underpowered that the game stops being fun and becomes more of an exercise in trying to find ways of cheesing it. But if you like Shadow Warrior 2, give this one a look. It's the closest thing I can compare it to. Neat idea, generally fun, but goddamn, did it need more time in the oven.
Trails of Cold Steel 2 - A good game, and with some crackling good emotional moments in its first few hours, but overall it's dragged down by a final third that feels frustratingly over the top, unsatisfyingly inconclusive, and nonsensically twisty. Listen up, writers. Twists do not by themselves make your writing better. In fact, it can make it seem like you're farting ideas out instead of putting them to paper. This is a prime example of that. It's a good game, at least overall, but man, that last third was a huge let-down.
At least you can romance your hot-as-balls teacher though. That's something.
* * *
Okay, folks, I think that's going to do it for me for the year. I hope the site sees another year. I hope we get the community features we've been needing for a long, long time. I hope for Demi Rose and Abigail Ratchford to realize their undying love for me. But most of all, I hope you have an amazing 2024, full of health, wealth, and good times. Let's get together this time next year and have a digital beer together, huh?
Until then!
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