by mento
Showing 1-10 of 10 items
Yeah, I'm going to put a Ys game at the top spot. Who's going to stop me? Who can, even? No-one, that's who. They gave me back all my moderator privileges. I'm flush with power right now. Anyway, using the bump system as a reviewing metric, Nordics is a slight bump up from IX and a slight bump down from VIII. Its new feature, the way you control two characters at once by holding a button and using your combined might for high-level offensive techniques as well as clutch defensive moves, really shone on Nightmare difficulty where blocking hits was downright essential to the game-wide goal of not dying. Add to that the usual modern Ys package of excellent music, acrobatic dungeon-crawling and tense boss fights that neither fuck around nor wait around, some of that Ys 8 hub-populating goodness, and the newly added ship combat that might be my favorite of its type since maybe Rebel Galaxy or all the way back to Skies of Arcadia. It's a fine ol' time playing Viking pirates and this series has yet to steer me wrong.
A real close second place is Pinocchisouls, the closest a game of this type has come to matching both the presentational might, subtle contextual lore, and deeply layered combat of From's own games. They really went all out here between the multiple music tracks (with lyrics!), the fancy 19th century metropolis ravaged by murderous animatronics and something much more terrifying behind the scenes, the many allusions to the original Pinocchio story (like a literal gold coin tree; a prank in the book), and some seriously tough opponents that required you carefully consider all your combat options, from your main weapon and subweapon down to your consumables and buffs. The core of the Souls experience is to draw from some hidden well to reach what feels like an impossible victory: not just in the sense of your own skill but rummaging through everything your inventory when planning your preparation. Lies of P understands that as well as any game I've played that started with "from the twisted mind of Hidetaka Miyazaki".
(This is actually for Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven, which the new list tools doesn't recognize quite yet.) A CRPG paragon, starting a new and improved era of Might and Magic that forwent the 2D dungeon navigation for the sake of 3D environments that felt all the more real (well, at the time) and moved away from the abstract stacks of monster units for an accurate representation by stuffing its rooms with dozens of separate if mostly identical creatures, tasking you with how best to whittle that number down with archery and AoE spells before they could reach your party and tear you apart. I'd already played VII and VIII prior to this, both of which were very much building from the foundation this one created to marginally better effect, though VI still has a surprising amount of depth for such an old game and a vast amount of open-world RPG exploration and story/optional content to match. I even liked its slightly awkward visual style, combining pre-rendered sprites of actors in goofy outfits with crude monster designs and some very basic geometric 3D landscapes. Seeing the revamped skill system in its inchoate form here was a treat also, back when it was still rife with exploitation if you knew what you were doing. One of the bigger blind spots I managed to cross off the list this year and I'm so glad I did.
2017 has quickly faded into memory for most—no-one wants to relive that terror of being one year into a Trump presidency wondering how things could get any worse, after all—but it was an astounding year for games and I've made it my mission, for whatever reason, to plumb its immense depths through projects like forming a Top 100 2017 GOTY list or this year's return of the Dredge of Seventeen, which covered this Dragon Quest musou sequel along with other outstanding (as in, I hadn't played them yet) stand-outs (as in, they're good) like Dishonored: Death of the Outsider and Metroid: Samus Returns. Musou is definitely an acquired taste due to its typical thin spreading of some very basic combat over 50 hours of frantic fracas but with the DQ license it finds the proverbial peanut butter to its jelly by having you complete a series of open-world missions while also working towards farming gear and gold, earning XP, and long-term goals like monster elimination milestones in a way that feels entirely germane to that occasionally very grindy Enix series. For me, this is as close to action-RPG nirvana as any game outside of Ys or Souls has reached, even if it can feel like the RPG equivalent of filling up on empty carbs. (Man, so many food analogies, I should stop writing these things just before lunch.)
The biggest surprise for me this year was discovering the SNES Ganbare Goemon games that didn't make their way over, having recently found themselves with fan translations and RetroAchievement support. That includes the second game, which introduced Goemon's robot buddy Impact and the first-person Punch-Out!! mecha duels that became his domain, and the third brought in the biggest change to the series as it went from a linear series of top-down exploration stages interlaced with 2D platforming action stages to a more Zeldersatz open-world model complete with a tilted Mode 7 map right out of A Link to the Past, all couched within a bizarre post-apocalyptic "Fist of the North Star" type of setting. Both the platforming action and its many little secret mini-games provide an excellent gameplay foundation for all the jokes and visual goofs that make the series stand out and it really is one of the finest Konami series to ever exist, and a damn shame they couldn't figure out a way to translate a lot of that Japanese humor and jidaigeki cultural touchstones to something an English audience could find palatable. Ganbare Goemon 3 is one of the finest SNES games I'd ever played and it's criminal it took this long to discover it.
I'm a sucker for a good Zeldersatz in most situations though when they're able to effortlessly merge it with another genre like this, and have it work due to some subtle shared mechanics between Zeldersatzes and shoot 'em ups like strafing around for crowd control and bouncing shots off walls to hit switches, you get something truly special. One of my favorite Indie chimeras to come around in a while, Minishoot' (that apostrophe is the only thing I don't care for about this game) has a pleasingly simple aesthetic but expounds on its central idea of a tiny Vic Viper-like navigating a world of similar basic spaceship characters and an invasive corruption that you work on eradicating from your neck of the woods, opening new paths in its expansive overworld map to reach new destinations, dungeons, and collectibles. Just the sort of game you could lose entire afternoons to as you juggle a bunch of possible routes to finish exploring now that you have the right upgrades.
Logic puzzle adventure games are starting to find great traction of late and though the Babel Tower-ascending Chants of Sennaar is a far cry from rebuilding your own home every day in Blue Prince or poking your compass at corpses to see how they died in Return of the Obra Dinn there's still something in its language deciphering puzzles that requires a similar mental discipline. By figuring out what people are trying to tell you, you're able to conquer every floor with some simple adventure gaming puzzles and exploration—simpler when you can read anything, at least—and find a whole new civilization based around music or warfare or piety or what have you. The aesthetic is real strong here, providing a sort of minimalist look of harsh angles and simple palettes that stick out all the more with the game's inventive use of abstract camera angles that might follow you on ground level in one room and then projected from the rafters in the next. Stylish and imaginative and utterly unique.
Jupiter's 3D Picross series for DS and 3DS was, to me, a "close but no cigar" attempt to take my favorite puzzle format to the next dimension. That was largely due to the limitations of its tiny-screened platform bashing up against a punitive error system that meant a single misclick could give any puzzle attempt a black mark until you redid it over. Voxelgram not only evades the tiny resolution issue by being available on PC (and possibly other systems) but forgoes the punishment system too, reaching a chill compromise that finally made this particular picross variant click for me. As a guy who's played way too many of these "pictures by numbers" games over the years—my RA mastery chart is filled with the things—to find one that I can feasibly argue as the best picross game of all time is a very rare and precious thing. Definitely has me waiting on tenterhooks for that new sequel to go on sale.
Like Minishoot', Cryptmaster is an exercise in finding two disparate genres and figuring out a way they can not only work together but sort of elevate their respective formats by bringing out the best in each other. Here, it's first-person dungeon-crawling meshed with a typing game, offering word puzzles and riddles to solve in addition to what most typing games eventually become: frantically typing out words in real-time battles before the monster up in your grill can finish beating you to a pulp. Not only did this game hit all my buttons with its silly wordplay, its blobber RPG affectations, and a murky monochrome aesthetic but I really enjoyed the humor as well, particularly those sequences where your long-dead master attempts to recall/bullshit the name and purpose of an item found in a chest like the seagull from A Little Mermaid. Sometimes you come across a game and wonder if it was made specifically for you and your esoteric interests.
Real hard to narrow down what I wanted to cap off this list with, since I had so many "4 out of 5" type of games I could've put in this slot instead, but I'll have to go with the visually and viscerally intense Ghostrunner sequel as a game that stuck with me long after the credits rolled. The crux of these games is rapidly moving around an area taking down armed guards where a single shot could immediately void your attempt by leaving a void where the bullet passed through your body, and a combination of wall-runs and blade deflections and cooldown-based abilities are your only defense against a whole platoon of cyberpunk corporate heavies. It's more than just that though: the storytelling ratchets up here as a new gang of runners like yourself are fixing to take over the newly liberated multi-tiered metropolis you call home and the world expands unexpectedly when you're tasked with leaving the city for the desolate wastes that the lands outside have become. There are very few games that make you feel as cool as this series does, albeit after many minutes and attempts of getting gunned down in a very uncool way.
