by dk3691
I'm going to rank every single game I play from now (01/20/2019) on.
Ground rules: if single player, I need to beat the main campaign. For single player games that don't have a clear end - certain roguelikes for example - it will be a judgement call based on when I feel I've put enough time into it. Multiplayer games will follow these same rules. For both of these, I will note an estimated hour count. Early Access games are not eligible for this list, even if I've put a bunch of time into them - I'll just add them when I feel I've played the final version long enough. I will also note the date that I added the game to the list, in the hopes that this will reflect my inevitably changing tastes.
Obviously, this list is entirely subjective and nothing on it is permanent. The main thing I'm thinking about is memorability. There are so many times on Giant Bomb's GOTY for example, the games that make it on are undoubtedly good, but then the next year rolls around and some (even the Best Game) have had virtually no long-term impact. I'm trying to think about which games I'll be talking about for a while, and what reflects my taste. Often I play a lauded game that's understandably likeable, but that has virtually no personal impact; I'm trying to fight the inclination to order things based on community-wide likeability, and instead get to the heart of what speaks to me personally.
A NOTE ON SPOILERS: they'll be here. Sorry.
Showing 1-10 of 101 items
Added: 10/21/2019 An all-timer. Outer Wilds feels of a kind with Breath of the Wild in some ways - a game about seeing something vast ahead of you, and slowly chipping away at it until it becomes familiar. But where Breath of the Wild was (reductively) a refinement of and reckoning with many trends of the 2010s - open-world gameplay, survival mechanics, crafting - Outer Wilds feels like a prototype for what games can be. You can reduce it down to an equation of games it's sort of like, but it fails to capture what makes it so exciting. It is minimalist beauty and organic, player-driven gameplay by way of smart UI and painstaking level design. It is both cosmic in scale and intimate in feel, making incredible use of its odd cozy spaces and ramshackle tech design. It is the most I've leapt out of my chair from DISCOVERIES in a game, even moreso than explicit detective games like Obra Dinn or Her Story. And by the end of it, I was both deeply touched by its warmth and incredibly excited for the future of games influenced by it. UPDATE 11/18/2020: Well, I ended up having the wonderful experience of watching my friends struggling through this game and got to see its many joys once again. After being able to see and reflect on it, this is a number 1 that feels more true to me, much as I love the other games hovering around this spot. It's just incredible, and I'll be hard-pressed to find a game that can unseat it.
Added: 01/20/2019 Estimated playtime: 200 hours and counting. I've never played a fighting game this much; I've never had a competitive game last me this long. It's been almost a year and I still play this game nearly every day. This is the best Dragon Ball game of all-time by a wide margin; it is also my favourite fighting game of all-time, to the point where I don't see how anything other than a direct sequel could even come close. If Toei prevents a sequel from being made, or the competitive scene from flourishing past this first year, I'm going to be sad about videogames in a way I haven't been since the Dreamcast closed up shop when I was 11 (I cried, lol).
Added: 2021/09/04 I’ve been putting off writing about FFX for months. It’s the first game that I’ve added to this list that is both not new to me and a childhood favourite - that brings a lot of baggage with it, and it’s hard to pick through and elucidate those feelings. I have a built-up significance for this game in my head that is impossible to shake, which I can only hope adds value to the critique. Let me first start with the game-y parts. As the first JRPG I played, it created a lot of frankly unrealistic expectations that I still carry with me. In further attempts to play JRPGs, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to use every member of my party and swap between them at will, why the members of my party seemed so interchangeable, or why sometimes the game didn’t even show them attacking enemies in any meaningful way. I certainly didn’t understand why ATB was a thing (honestly, it’s still not a combat system I gravitate towards), or why I wasn’t planning 3 moves ahead the way FFX sometimes expects you to do. I would read game reviews for other JRPGs where the writers complained about how linear they were, and couldn’t figure out why they cared - is non-linearity what people come to these games for? Because FFX certainly isn’t that (and while I understand the desire for some amount of exploration in games like this, it’s still not one I share - it is not the strength of JRPGs). The Caribbean and Southeast Asian flavour of FFX’s world design is so unique and its combination of fully 3D graphics and pre-rendered backgrounds is vibrant and lived-in; Squaresoft in a short-lived technical transitional period that sadly could’ve never lasted. The soundtrack is maybe not quite FF7 level, but it’s pretty damn close. This is simply, at a base level, a good game to hang around in. When it comes to its personal significance, I should start with the most exaggerated thought I have possible - I’m pretty sure there’s a version of me that, at the age of 12, gets GTA3 instead of this as my second PS2 game and turns into a different person. I don’t want to put too much significance in media and how it shapes a person; certainly there’s a balance to hold between the ideas that 1) art is significant, more than simple entertainment, and can affect real change in the world and 2) there are many more factors than “what videogames a person played” that colours their viewpoint and overall personality. But FFX opened doors to me in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, or at least would’ve happened later in my life. It was not the type of game people around me were playing, which were primarily the major Nintendo games of the day, sports games of both the sim and arcade variety, and as mentioned, Grand Theft Auto. It was not only the first non-Pokemon JRPG I’d ever played, but the first one I’d ever seen. Perhaps more importantly, it was a game with an honest-to-god story, a long one that you followed over a span of several hours, with themes at its core and characters to fall in love with. And those themes are important ones. It’s a meme that at the end of every JRPG you and your ragtag party attack and dethrone god. Strangely, in most JRPGs this is a twist that happens at the end, often removed from the core conflict of the game, and that is ignored or unknown by the populace of the world. FFX is the only JRPG I know of that is explicitly about this, that builds a world around religion and has every major and minor character relate to it in some way. The player characters, too, have various levels of investment in this religion and how it has shaped their world; their development into a group of pariahs has a wide range of reactions both internally - Tidus, the outsider with no real investment other than the friends he’s met, is all-too-happy to tear down a nakedly unjust system, while the true believer Wakka hems and haws even though he knows you're doing the right thing - and externally, with the party treated with scorn by assorted corners of the world. In short, FFX is often a game about how for all the good religion can bring, it is perverted by its institutions and the individual desires of the people who run them. It does this elegantly and sympathetically, understanding that religion can be truly valuable and that when people come to it honestly, it’s because it gives them something - hope, community, belonging - and not because they’re uneducated yokels. This is the rare JRPG that ends with the state of the world being significantly changed rather than returned to the status quo; it’s telling that this is the first Final Fantasy game with a direct sequel, because there really is so much ground to explore by the end of it. To a kid who had been in the private Jewish education system for 7 years at that point, this was mind-blowing stuff. I was not a particularly religious kid, and had already been questioning the things I was taught (The Matrix had hit a year or two prior) but this was primarily out of annoyance rather than any sort of moral stance - I hated bible study, didn’t much care for learning Hebrew, and DEFINITELY did not see why I had to spend my Friday mornings in school praying. FFX captured and cemented so much about how I related to my Judaism, and turned what was a nagging feeling into something I could hold onto and develop. FFX has also been a white whale for me because I never beat it despite my love for it. I didn’t know how to approach games like this yet and it’s got a couple pretty nasty difficulty spikes that still messed me up even after becoming more familiar with the genre over the past decade and a half. But this also cemented the game as an important moment in my longest-lasting friendship, as it led to me trading off the game with said friend, passing it back and forth with new, better-spec'd save files and so on. I bought the same friend a little 500 yen figure of Yuna when I went to Japan 3 years ago. I gave it to him at his bachelor party. He was so excited about it; it sits on a shelf in the family room that he now shares with his wife. We still hang out all the time. I think the thing with games is that I care about them a lot as a general thing, but that there are very few individual ones that are important to me. FFX is one of the rare ones. It’s such a delight to reevaluate a piece of media that was momentous to your youth and know that you were really onto something, even back then.
Added: 01/24/2019 Estimated playtime: 20 hours, one 4-hour island victory under my belt. Strategic perfection, and the only reason I haven't played it more is because it stresses me out. UPDATE 03/30/2019: Have now put probably 20-30 more hours into it, and what really strikes me about it is its incredibly smart progression system, where new squads beget new ways of thinking beget a more full understanding of the game's possibility space for all squads. The game is just so tight, and the more I play it, the more I adore it.
Added: 01/24/2019 The greatest co-op game controlled by a single player ever made. Supremely clever on its own, but working through it with my partner was the truly unforgettable experience. On my original 2018 GOTY list tweet (https://twitter.com/AmateurDan/status/1077417769371688960), this was lower down by a few spots, but since then, it's been the 2018 game I've thought about the most and I'll likely continue to do so.
Added: 01/27/2019 Estimated playtime: 13 hours in Early Access, 7 on 1.0, one victory each with 2 of the 3 classes. This and Into the Breach are a toss-up, which is appropriate because they're very similar games. The only reason Slay the Spire is higher on the list at the moment is because it's easier to play casually, and thus easier to fit into my life whenever the mood strikes. Contradictorily, everything that I like more about Into the Breach is the reason I'm more likely to play Spire. Its audio is weaker, which means I feel more comfortable listening to other music while playing. Its unlock system isn't as well-considered as Breach's, so I can boot it up whenever and not worry about my individual run performance too much. Into the Breach is a tighter, sharper, deeper experience, and that's exactly why I boot up Spire more often. UPDATE 03/30/2019: I got heavily back into Into the Breach and I can't in good conscience put this above that anymore. Change places!
Added: 02/08/2019 I completed this game in April 2017, and my HowLongToBeat record shows my playtime as 50 hours, completing roughly half the shrines. It is now two years later and my Switch reads my playtime as "80 hours or more". This is not to fawn over the length of the game - which is substantial - as length does not equal quality. Rather, this is to illustrate that despite beating this game near when it released, I've continued to peck away at it since. This is very rare for me; typically when I've completed a game, it gets put away, never to be touched again. But BotW wriggled its way into my mind and hasn't left since - it occupies a tiny room up there, refusing to be evicted, ready to venture out into the world when the mood strikes. It will stay up there at least until I find all the shrines, and probably for longer afterwards. It might never leave. The reason I've allowed myself to put it on this list despite "completing" it a while ago is that I finally got around to playing through the Champion's Ballad DLC (which is excellent, and lengthy - a microcosmic version of the base game that simultaneously gives you reason to explore more of that base). UPDATE 11/18/2020: Moved this down a couple slots because some of the other choices at the top feel more personal to me. It's possible I just need to go back and play some more of it honestly. Open up the doors of that room again. We'll see.
Added: 06/13/2020 Taps into such a personally significant childhood camping nostalgia that it's hard for me to shake. The game adeptly recognizes the camping experience as one whose absence of activities allows you to focus harder on the relationships around you; it crystallizes pre-existing bonds and allows you to form new ones. The quartet of characters are so well-realized with so many small parts that relate to me - Ben's reluctant emergence to a brand new hobby, Mord's hyperactive imagination, Cloanne's need for social isolation, Brad's desire to be the Cool Uncle. Every character is likeable and generous in their own way, and the slice-of-life aspect of it means we can recognize this as just one moment - a significant one, perhaps, but not THE significant moment of any of their lives. In that way it's free to just be chill and funny and show a bunch of nice intimate conversations. I don't think I've played a game with more grins-per-capita.
Added: 01/24/2019 So specifically tied to the feature set of the Nintendo DS that there is simply no way the Switch version could ever capture what makes it so brilliant. Still fresh after all these years.
Added: 05/24/2021 Astounding game that burns with righteous anger at the comfort-inducing, capitalist-apologist, class warfare ideology of neoliberalism and the rich warmongers that throw gobs of money at the army to solve every problem from their shelters while everyone else is dying. It does this with class and elegance, using its core photography mechanic and incredible set design to present a clear narrative and ideology without any narration or character dialogue. That it also values player expression and teaches the basics of photography in such a way that I'm flirting with the idea of developing it as a hobby is just icing on the cake.