by barrabas
Another year where there were a lot of games I haven't gotten around to playing that I wanted to. Metaphor Refantazio and FF7: Rebirth are at the top of my to-do list, along with Spider-man 2 from last year, which I still haven't somehow played.
A couple of notable older games I really got into this year were Persona 5 Royal and Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising. GBFV: Rising was in my top 5 last year despite coming out in just December of 2023. It's now December 2024, and I'm still playing it as my primary fighting game. If I had known I'd end up liking this game this much it would have been my #1 game for 2023.
Anyway, below are my top 10 games for 2024 that I actually got around to playing.
Showing 1-10 of 10 items
It was really hard choosing between this and Balatro as my #1 game of the year. Both games are amazing, and so incredibly different from each other they are almost impossible to compare. The reason I ended up going with Astro Bot as my #1 game is that literally every second of playing this game just made me smile.
I can't believe we got a spiritual successor to the Ogre Battle series made by Vanillaware of all people. Ogre Battle 64 is one of my favorite N64 games, and they just don't normally make games like it. We get a ton of games like the Tactic Ogre games, but almost nothing like Ogre Battle. I also can't believe that this game isn't somehow in my top 3. It was a really good year for games.
I've dabbled in the Hoyoverse games before but this is the first one that really grabbed me. The combat, while not that complicated, is very fun. However, I think people who compare this game to DMC are setting some people up for disappointment. This is definitely more of an action RPG than a character action game. Also, the people animating the cutscenes for this do an amazing job.
I can't express how happy it makes me that I could finally buy MvC2 again. I can't wait for CvS2 in the collection coming out in 2025.
Dawntrail is definitely a weaker expansion compared to the last two, but as one that's building up a story rather than paying off on things previous expansions had built up, that's not too surprising. The biggest issue the game has is pacing. It's a two-act expansion, and they tried to split those acts into each having roughly 50% of the expansion when it should have been closer to one-third and two-thirds of the expansion respectively. That being said, I still enjoyed my time with it enough for it to get into my top 10 games of the year. They've really upped the bar on encounter design, and I'm still very excited for the future of this game.
Some day people will learn that they should try their best to avoid standing in the enemy team's Peni Parker's webs, and I'm going to have a lot less fun with this game. Until then, I will continue enjoying watching people try to charge at me and then just getting exploded by a bunch of mines.
It's rare for a game to feel genuinely very funny, but this one nails it. Everyone should give it a chance, even if adventure games normally aren't your thing.
