My Top Twenty Favorite Games I've Played This Year

This doesn't necessarily mean it was released this year, just to be clear.

After constructing this list, I have a few notes I'd like to add:

1. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is a game that I just started playing very recently and it will probably move up the list as the year goes on. I'm really digging it so far. I could see it eventually making it's way to number one as I get deeper into it. For now it makes it into my top 10.

2. Final Fantasy VII Remake is a game that I started years ago when it first became available on PC and I can't remember why it was that I started getting back into it again but I really loved it. Actually I guess it was the announcement and release date of Final Fantasy VII Revelations as well as Rebirth no longer being exclusive to the one console I don't own that prompted me.

3. Fields of MIstria is a truly incredible game and finally made it into it's full release this year. I've mentioned on forum posts that it takes pretty much everything I loved about Stardew Valley and greatly improved or added onto that great game. If it were on Switch 2 or XBox...sorry, XBOX, I likely would have put even more time into F.O.M. I just really don't generally like sitting at my PC because my desk chair is not the best. And my PC is not the best. But I still have to project that if it were available on other platforms I could have easily have put at least 100 hours into it.

4. Infinite Wealth is a game that I truly did not expect to be so completely enamored with. I always believed it to be a game I might be interested in from everything I had read or seen about it but it wasn't until it came to GamePass that I was finally able to take a more risk-free look at it and boy...what a game! I've dipped my toes into almost all of the Yakuza games over the years and even played a pretty fair amount of Like A Dragon as well. However, there was always something about that games that I eventually grew weary of and Infinite Wealth bucked that trend big time. I put 130 hours into it and even just thinking about it again now makes me want to go back to it!

5. I put Outbound pretty high on the list because it is just the ultimately positive vibes/fun gameplay loop I've experienced in a while and it also came to me at a time when I was dealing with being fired from the job I had for 23 years. I was in need of something to help ease my mind and lift my spirits and Outbound was there for me.

6. Some of the more unusual aspects of my list would be the late inclusion of Scattergories and Cluedo as I sort of randomly discovered/remembered that I can access games through Amazon Luna on my PC and my Smart TV AND use phones to play the aforementioned games with my family. They're a great time! Metaphor and Cyberpunk are the two games that I would probably put an asterisk next to them because I understand that if I were to play more of them they would surely be higher up on my list. Hades II probably deserves to be up higher on the list but the frustration or not being able to defeat that second phase of Cronos and my inability to even recognize at all his instakill patterns pisses me off so much that I had to stop playing.

7. Games on my list that have/had potential to be higher on the list are Vampire Crawlers and Tomodachi Life Living The Dream for similar reasons. Vampire Crawlers is very fun but there's just not much content there when it boils down to it. I would like to play it more but it's not like things were with Vampire Survivors where they quickly kept adding more and more and more. Tomodachi Life is a fucking joyful, if repetitive experience. In a perfect world, Nintendo would do anything at all to I don't know? Like give us some fucking updates or include some of the things that are missing from the original? I feel like it could be a top five game for me if things like the various ranking lists and forming bands/singing were in this game. It is rather perplexing that there were key features from the original not included in this new game. Really, Nintendo? I still have it pretty high on the list because I am just happy that it even exists!

8. I added Unicorn Overlord to this list as I've really enjoyed playing it after waiting for a while. It's a wonderful game that's a great combination of Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics. It might climb up higher on my list as well.