GOTY 2018.

It's been a terrible year in many ways, but for games, it's only been mediocre. I had a hard time coming up with ten games that came out in 2018 that I cared enough about to put on a list, and in several cases I just ended up thinking, "I spent a lot of time playing this, so I guess I should put it on there." This was a year in which I wondered if maybe I'm just kinda over video games, both as a career (because the studio I was working for shut down) and as a hobby (because I didn't get a whole lot of enjoyment out of them). But here we are at the end of the year and I'm still making and playing video games, so clearly I'm full of shit. Without further ado, here's some rambling about ten games that I played and also thought about over the course of this year.

10. Octopath Traveler

Most of my memories of this game are of sitting on the floor of a hot closet playing it while my cat sat on my lap with a cone around his neck. He had to get bowel obstruction surgery in July because he ate some fabric, and while he was recovering, he wasn't allowed to climb or jump on anything, so we had to remove a bunch of shelves from the closet and keep him confined in there. So I brought my Switch in there and played Octopath Traveler whilst keeping him company, and now that's what I think of when I think of this game. I'm not even close to finishing it, but I have all eight characters and feel like I have a pretty good idea of what the game is. I enjoyed my time with it, but I hit a wall at a boss that was significantly more difficult than the ones I'd encountered up to that point, and by now it seems fairly unlikely that I'll go back to it. I appreciated the way the battle system required me to actually think and plan ahead, but that was also sometimes more mental energy than I was willing to expend.

9. Exapunks

This followed the same trajectory for me as every Zachtronics game: I got through the first few puzzles and enjoyed them a lot, then eventually hit a point where I just felt like an idiot with no chance of ever figuring out how to solve the rest. I love the idea of these games and I wish I were smart enough to play them.

8. Celeste

I liked Celeste, but not as much as most people. Difficult platformers have never really been my thing, but this is the closest I've come to getting into one (that is: almost finishing the main story, not worrying about collectibles at all). The general consensus seems to be that the story is what sets this game apart from similar ones; I thought it was fine, but I have perhaps unreasonably high standards for games that try to deal with mental illness-related topics and I can't say I was particularly impressed with this treatment (not to say that it's handled poorly, just that it didn't really make much of an impression on me). But I like the way it looks, sounds, and feels, so that's still pretty good.

7. Persona 5 Dancing in Starlight

I like Persona music and I like rhythm games, so I like this. I bought this together with Persona 3 Dancing in Moonlight, but I greatly prefer the remixes in this one; the Persona 3 mixes seem a lot heavier on weird dubstep and hip-hop sort of stuff that just didn't really work as well for me. Both of these games play pretty much the same as Persona 4 Dancing All Night, except there's no story mode, which is kind of a bummer -- instead, you just unlock "social events" by hitting milestones as you play. These are very light and fluffy character interactions that ultimately don't add up to much, kind of like the "stroll" events from Persona Q, except this isn't a crossover so you don't have the novelty of seeing the characters from different games interacting with each other. It's just kind of hanging out with characters from Persona 5 while they chit-chat, which is fine, but something a little more substantial would have been nice. Ultimately though, I'm here for the songs, and those are good, so I'm happy.

6. Picross S2

It's more Picross! I don't have a lot to say about this, but I like Picross because it's a puzzle game that involves no guesswork or random chance. Every time you start a puzzle, you have all the information you need to solve it. It's just a matter of figuring out how to untangle the knot, and doing so is immensely satisfying.

5. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

I am at best a casual Super Smash Bros. fan; I've bought all of them since Melee but this is easily the one I've enjoyed the most since then. I'm no longer at a point in my life where I can play it with other people more than once in a blue moon, so I probably would have skipped this if it didn't have a good single-player mode, but the World of Light game is doing a good job of holding my interest (although I've just unlocked all the characters, so it remains to be seen how long I'll end up sticking with it after that). It's fun to see how all the spirits from across decades of video games are interpreted as Smash Bros. special rules matches and stat boosts, and they do a surprisingly good job of evoking the, well, spirit of the characters. "Ultimate" is a good title for this game as it really does feel like the culmination of all the previous ones, apart from a few baffling omissions like the home run contest.

4. Hitman 2

This has everything I liked about Hitman 1 (literally, since all the old levels carry over), plus some really well designed new levels and some nice quality-of-life improvements. For example, you can now start with a fish equipped as a melee weapon.

3. Dragon Quest XI

I feel kind of ambivalent about Dragon Quest in general. I never played them as a kid, so I have no nostalgia for them. I did get really into Dragon Quest IX on the DS several years back, mostly because I liked how much freedom it gave me to customize basically every aspect of my party, creating characters that were blank slates and then training them in different jobs that they could swap between at will. Dragon Quest XI doesn't do that (or if it does, I haven't gotten that far yet), having a more traditional party of characters with actual designs and unique attributes and dialogue. That was a little bit of a disappointment to me, to be honest, but fortunately the characters are pretty likable and well-written, even if the plot is pretty generic. Mainly, it's just nice to have a huge RPG I can soak myself in with no end in sight, although at times that can be a little overwhelming -- I wasn't really a fan of the way I spent a couple dozen hours assembling my party only to hit a story event that separated us all and told me, "hey, now go find them again." That same event also took the story down a grimmer path than I was expecting, which was honestly kind of a bummer because I was enjoying just running around having whimsical adventures. So that took away a lot of momentum and while I'm still occasionally dipping into the game, it's probably going to be a while before I get back into the groove. Nevertheless, I've spent a lot of time playing this game and a lot of it was with a smile on my face, which is more than I can say for most games lately.

2. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux

Now here's an RPG that's more in line with my typical world view. It's hard to believe this came out in 2018; I feel like I've been playing it for years. It's a game that I kind of have to take in small doses, chipping away a little bit and then coming back later. But it lends itself pretty well to that approach. Compared to Shin Megami Tensei IV, Strange Journey is a bit less plot-driven and more of a dungeon crawl. I can drop in for a couple of play sessions and make some progress filling in my map of the Schwarzwelt. Eventually I'll probably hit a point where I feel like I need to fuse my demons into better ones, but I'll end up with decision paralysis about which ones to fuse and just step away from the game for a while. But I always come back, because I find the exploration so satisfying. It's first-person, grid-based, and heavily map-oriented, almost like Etrian Odyssey except that you don't manually draw the map; it just fills itself in as you progress through areas (which is actually kind of annoying sometimes because you have no way of marking traps etc. on your map without walking into them). Along the way, you're collecting materials of various types which you can take back to your base and combine into new equipment, expendables, or abilities, and also recruiting demons to join your posse. But recruiting them will only get you so far; if you want better demons, you'll have to fuse them yourself.

Demon fusion in this game is fairly different from the other Shin Megami Tensei-adjacent games I've played. Demons can level up, but separate from that, each type of demon also has an "analysis level" that gets filled in either by using them in your party or fighting against them in battle. Once a demon that's in your party has been fully analyzed, it will give you a "source" of itself. These demon sources are basically containers for skills that you can then use when fusing ANY demon, to give it additional skills that it wouldn't normally be able to learn or inherit. But you only get one for analyzing the demon, and once you've used it, it's gone, so you have to be careful about where you use it (this is where the decision paralysis comes in). It's an interesting system that allows for a lot of possibilities in making demons, but for someone like me who didn't like to play with my toys because I was afraid of running down the batteries, it can be kind of a lot to deal with. So to take some of the pressure off, I'm playing it on easy like a baby, so even if I don't make the absolute optimal choices, I should still be able to get by.

Ultimately, I'm playing this as a stopgap because what I really want is an English localization of Persona Q2. But in the meantime, this is doing a good job of scratching that "kind of like Etrian Odyssey but with more demon summoning" itch.

1. The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories

When I think about games that stood out to me this year, this is literally the only one that comes to mind. It's a game where you must repeatedly tear apart your own body to progress, mostly through light physics-based puzzles and a bit of platforming, while collecting doughnuts and getting text messages from a stuffed animal. But while some of it may seem like "weird for weird's sake," there's a surprisingly personal story that gets revealed through retroactive text messages over the course of the game, touching on some fairly weighty subject matter and handling it well (at least in my uninformed estimation). There are certainly things about the game that are a bit clunky and awkward, but it just manages to hang together in a way that I found very memorable and ultimately genuinely moving. I wish there were more games like this.