Sparky_B's End of the Year Soiree

Hey, hey, you, you, you could be GOTY, hey, hey, you, you, I think you were pretty awesome.

All right, folks, you know how this goes. I, Sparky_Buzzsaw, light of your life, keystone of your heart, irritant to your bowels, master of my domain, tell you the games you should rush out and play while also talking about some gaming misfires. Please bear in mind with my end-of-the-year things I never bother with limiting these things to games released in this year, because I very rarely play enough new games in a year to warrant that. But this year's list has a couple surprises on it I really do hope you'll check out because they're some underappreciated bangers - or at least fascinating enough to give a glance on Steam or whatever console you play.

Also, hey. I know I come across a bit more crass and harsh than I used to on these forums and in chat, and I just want to say a few personal things, things some of you might roll your eyes about so, so if that's you, click that back button. But here goes. The world fucking sucks for a lot of people right now, in the games industry and beyond. Bigotry, hatred, and greed are scoring some pretty big wins in politics, games, and personal lives. But don't give up the good fight. Love those who need love. Love yourself. Find joy in the little things, games, books, movies, music, nature, exercise, good food, whatever. Carve out time to relieve some of the stress, find a new hobby, volunteer at places that need volunteers. Be the person you wish other people could be. Should be, in a better, more caring world. And if you chose your own wants in 2024 at the expense of others, I hope you find your way to a better path. We can do better than the current clown show of the world, and I hope we do. I have to. The alternative is too fucking depressing.

Right. On with it. DJ! We need some music in this bitch!

Sparky Buzzsaw's Game of the Year

Metaphor: Refried... Refine... ReFanta... Refantazio

Listen. The dumbfuck title's so on the nose it's laughable, but this is a banger. It takes the tried-and-true Persona formula of blending visual novel-esque character growth and relations with dungeon crawling and spins it on its ear with a terrific setup for a wild fantasy universe bursting with potential for sequels. It also smartly streamlines most everything and makes it actually possible to see and do most everything the game has to offer without needing to consult a guide every other minute.

The dungeons are overlong or blandly designed, or in the case of a handful, straight up copy and pasted, but the combat has seen some smart upgrades that allow players to slay mobs in the overworld with a well-timed preemptive strike. Usually in JRPGs this only means you get the first blow or two when you do enter combat, but here, once you've beaten a mob often enough, it generally means you can blow right past the fights you've already experienced a dozen times. That helps, especially with some of the game's longer dungeons (eyeing you, Dragon God Temple).

The real highlight for me is the party members you pick up along the way. I don't want to spoil anything here but two of the charactes in particular have such grounded, darker backgrounds that you could nominate either for best party member of all time and I'd nod my head. Please, for the love of God, more grown-up side characters and stories in JRPGs. I'm fucking begging you, Japan. The rest of your party members range from inoffensively bland (the first two permanent party members you get) to untapped potential (the two women). None of them are bad, but none of them quite hit the same highs as the two best characters you'll pick up, which makes me wonder why the game designers opted for them instead of some of the more fascinating side characters you meet and befriend on the way, but who never join your party. It's a misstep, but a small one.

The game's central story itself is marred by some odd pacing issues in its last third. Big revelations about the world and characters come so fast and hard that your party members have no time to react, or places are skipped over in favor of getting to the next big scene (or probably more likely the next game in the series). I'm baffled by a lot of the decisions here to speed things up, but it feels like maybe they had at least one or two more central hub areas planned and ran out of time or budget to execute on them. Whatever happened, the plot is still fascinating in a lot of ways, and has some truly unique moments.

This is all tied together by a terrific art design that is, unfortunately, at its flashiest at the beginning and end of the game. The dungeons are bland, and aside from Grand Trad, the cities feel like your generic fantasy fare. Adding insult to injury, the coolest spots in the game aren't explorable and done with still screens with your characters talking over them. Make those the dungeons instead of the bland caverns and woods, damn it! Let me experience those places.

There are some terrific enemy designs too, but unfortunately the mob types are severely limited and do the old palette-swap a little too often for my liking. The best bosses in the game are recycled too often, and the point of diminishing returns on the mob creativity is reached shockingly fast, but what's here is truly unique. Again, I don't want to spoil anything, but they've taken a really novel world-building element and run hard with the ball while leaving a lot of room for more in future sequels.

And that's really what I want to see from Metaphor in the future. More. More of the amazing archetype job system. More great stories from NPCs and your party members. More mobs, more dungeon types, more of the world. It's a game you need to play if you're a JRPG lover, and if you're not, this very well might be the game to change your mind.

Also, Gallica = best girl.

Best Time Sink

Planet Crafter

Well, slap my ass and call me Chuckles, this game came out of nowhere and dominated a huge chunk of my time this year. Planet Crafter is essentially a baby survival game. You collect resources to build things that allow you to collect more of those resources and explore the world. There's nothing here that breaks the mold but my God is it a finely crafted experience. This was almost certainly a lock for my GOTY until Metaphor came along, and it's still a hell of a close second place.

For starters, everything here is very simplified and easy to understand. The game goes out of its way to make crafting and its UI intuitive. With a minimal amount of meters to worry about - oxygen and water, namely - the focus stays on its baby-Factorio-like gameplay as you build terraforming equipment and suss out the secrets of the world you've been tasked with turning into a paradise. The world is just the right size, with lots of little areas to discover, but never overstays its welcome (as long as you're smart about your upgrades), and they've since added DLC in the form of a new world to explore. I've yet to check that out but I'm excited to.

It's a great podcast game, something to play to while away an hour or two. But be warned, that hour or two is very likely to turn into an all-night session. It's crazy addicting to reach a new stage of terraforming or get some crucial piece of new equipment. Fantastic little game well worth the price of admission.

Best "Huh, I Did Not See That Coming" Surprise

Mining Mechs/Super Mining Mechs

These games are fucking insidious. I bought the first one for a buck during a sale expecting to get an hour or so out of it and it wound up eating better than ten hours of my time as I... dug dirt. Yep. That's pretty much what these games are. They're inspired by Steamworld Dig, though nowhere near as polished as those games are, and still I wound up loving them despite the jankiness. The UI is too tiny by far considering the pixelated graphics, the controls for menus make no goddamn sense, and the gameplay mechanic of "dig deeper" is so thin that I feel almost insane recommending it, and yet these games dug their claws into me.

There is something inherently Zen to digging up ore, upgrading my abilities, and repeatig the process ad nauseum until the story's finished. And there is a story to these games, a pretty silly one that I don't want to spoil. It's light, fun, and pokes fun at the modern world's need for more resources while never being preachy about it. It's more like a backbone for its crazy tone and humor and I appreciate that.

Give them a look. I can't recommend them to anyone looking for deep gameplay mechanics but for what they are, they're great relaxation games.

Best Puzzler

The Talos Principle II

How much enjoyment you get out of Talos Principle II is going to depend a lot on your stomach for RGB puzzles, because whooo boy, this game sure does love its fucking RGB puzzles. I'm colorblind, so this was a problem for me in a lot of situations. Also, I'm dumb, so I had a guide on hand to help me with half the damn puzzles. But none of that changes the fact that this is, essentially, more Talos Principle and that's a good thing.

The world is bigger and more fleshed out, with even more interesting lore. The philosophical meanderings behind the world are the usual modern day pontificating of two sides without ever really committing to either, a frustrating "don't please anyone" take on things that kinda made me roll my eyes at times when the game's smug characters tell me I'm wrong for my philosophical opinions while offering up no right ones of its own. But for what it's worth, I truly enjoyed the interactions of the NPC characters accompanying you on this journey, and the audio and written logs were usually a pleasure to find.

I simultaneously hope there's a Talos Principle III and am completely unsure what I'd actually want out of it. More puzzle variety, certainly, and ones that have fewer visual accessibility issues. More of this terrific world, less philosophical waffling. More NPC interactions, more cats, more beautiful and tragic settings. But I feel like there's still an element missing to this series and I couldn't tell you what that is, except that maybe creativity should factor into the puzzles as much as logic in the games ahead, if there are to be any. And that makes sense to the world too. As these new denizens of this world explore their "humanity" more creativity feels like a natural next step.

The I Don't Have a Category for This but I Want to Talk About It Anyways Game

Ys IX: Monstrum Nox

Ys IX had some impossibly big shoes to fill after the incredible Lacrimosa of Dana, one of my favorite JRPGs of all time. IX takes some steps back, sometimes to its detriment, sometmes to try out some interesting things. I like the smaller scope of the world, though it does feel like the exploration is finished shockingly early in the game, limited to exploring more of what amounts to one very lengthy dungeon as well as a city hub area. Considering the grand scope of Lacrimosa of Dana, that's a surprising move, but I generally like the focus on the politics of the city's tension between its religious and military groups.

That said, Monstrum Nox is maybe a bit too limited. It's padded out by the same horde mode from Dana, but whereas it was more or less an occasional side thing to do in Dana, it becomes a central focus of padding out Nox's runtime. It's never really fun and gates off the world in an irritating way that players should have only had to deal with a few times instead of ten or twelve.

The plot and characters are also never as interesting as Dana's. The party members are okay, for the most part, but never aspire to much more than that. One in particular, a wheelchair-bound boy, is particularly grating to me because his story relies inherently on that time-honored bullshit trope of people with disabilities being inevitably doomed to die in media. This character doesn't, at least not within the game's scope, but the inevitibility of his death becoming the focus of his character rather than giving him any other traits is the fucking wooooooorst. Just fuck off with that shit in movies, books, and games.

It's a fun game but a disappointing one. I never cared much about any of its nonsensical main plot which falls apart with about ten seconds of thought, but thought the ways in which to get around the world were fun, if poorly executed or undercooked. Running up a wall to get to a treasure chest is great in theory but hitting the little ledges with no way around them on a near constant basis could get frustrating, fast. And some of the later traversal abilities are only used in a few spots, so there's not a whole lot of reason to get excited about them.

I say all that, but Monstrum Nox is definitely not a bad game. In fact, it's pretty good. But it never tries to grasp at being anything more than that, and in the end, it kinda disappointed me because of that.

Best Fighting Game and Also The Only Fighting Game I Played in 2024 but It's Still Good Award

Tekken 8

Please, God, let this be the end of the endless Kazuya/Jin story. For fuck's sake, it's been five games now and I'm sick of it. WIth a cast of characters this novel, let's try something different. Please. I'm begging you.

Sigh. Okay.

First off, the fighting mechanics in Tekken 8 are completely solid. I don't think the introduction of "easy mode" controls is as smooth as Street Fighter, which became the gold standard for that, but if you're an old series pro or can pick up fighting games quickly, you're not going to need them anyways. This is more Tekken, and that means memorizing long combos and timing, but you can still get away with cheesing a few more basic combos for most opponents anyways.

The cast of characters is pretty great, though the storyline still emphasizes dipshits I can't imagine anyone caring about at this point in the Tekken series. You've got the bomb head girl, the guy who looks like he has duck feathers on his head, another guy with duck feathers on his head, yet another guy with duck feathers on his head, and Jin and Kazuya, because of fucking course you do. Most the original cast and characters you actually like from this series are pushed into comedy side roles or given bits so small that they become irrelevant in favor of having you fight Kazuya eighty fucking thousand times. It does contain a couple of shocking character deaths in some pretty great moments, deaths I hope stick, but this is a fighting game series, so they'll probably be resurrected when fans bitch enough about it.

I think what's here is completely solid as far as a package is concerned. You've got the main story, arcade endings, some light costume and UI stuff to unlock. None of it is very exciting but there's plenty of it. It's a solid game, but man, it needs a great big dose of heart and originality.

Best Narrative Experience

Season - A Letter to the Future

Season was a strange experience in 2024. Explaining why that is requires me telling you a lot about its world-building, so I want to say this first. If you're a sensitive soul who likes narrative experiences, stop reading here, go wishlist or buy this game, and experience it for yourself. It doesn't nail the gameplay, there's a lot of technical slowdown, and the pacing feels truncated, but when this game works, it works extremely well and I highly recommend it. It would be in my personal Criterion collection of video games, not necessarily my favorite narrative experiences, but ones that should be preserved and experienced by future gaming generations because it's so damned fascinating. Go play it and then come back here and talk to me about it.

Still here? Okay.

Season takes the concept of marked eras in human timelines and makes them a more immediate, cataclysmic world-wide changes. These can happen multiple times in the lives of this world's characters though there is no set amount of time in between these eras. They are marked by sudden shifts in perception and the tone of the world. A season of technological marvels might be followed by a season of war. The world's inhabitants lose who they were and become someone new. It's a wildly fascinating concept steeped in obvious allegories, but one told with a loving, sorrowful and sometimes joyful heart.

The story focuses on Estelle, who wants to leave her home and document her current season right at the cusp of one of these cataclysms. How the inhabitants of this world know there's a cataclysm coming is fringe storytelling- they simply know, and that's good enough. It's the events and characters Estelle meets along the way, as well as her experiences seeing the remains from other seasons before her own, that matter, and it is a remarkably moving and gentle experience. The story is also unique in that almost everything you experience is optional. Stop and take in the documents left by couriers, or don't. Stop to talk to the residents of a valley about to be flooded in preparation of the cataclysm to come, or don't. Discover echoes of past eras, or don't. I think you could probably finish this game in an hour, tops, if you really wanted to, but that would defy the point of the game, the heart of it. Seeing these little moments out of time, having these little experiences with characters about to lose themselves and the world they love and are used to, is genuinely unsettling and moving, made even starker played in a year where it feels like so many have lost themselves with a new era of uncertainty about to be unleashed on us.

I'm also a fan of a central question it asks itself and the player - how involved in this world should a photojournalist be? Because Estelle can get as involved as you want. She can help people pack up and get ready for the new world, or she can simply take everything in without participating. There's a lot to see and do and it imprints that basic question of if you're doing the right thing getting involved or if you should simply document everything for future generations, if there are to be any. None of this is heavy-handed and there are no real wrong answers.

Season has its problems. The bad bike controls have largely been fixed but it's still not ideal. I don't like the map. The story feels truncated in its last act and I think there should have been one or two more major hub areas to explore and experience. There's a lot of stuterring and slowdown, although the world is fucking gorgeous (it deserved some consideration for best style awards). But this is an experience I think every creative soul who likes narrative experiences should play. It's a wonderful game, probably the one that will stick with me most out of every game in this blog.

The "Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen" Award

Trails of Cold Steel IV

I went into a long rant earlier this year (read it here) about my disappointment in the Trails of Cold Steel series after its phenomenal first entry. I don't have anything new to add to that but I'll summarize it here.

Trails of Cold Steel starts off with a terrific focus on a group of misfit students at a military academy. While I think the main character, Reen Schwarzer, is one of the worst, most bland-ass vanilla characters in all RPG history save those that are silent, those initial party members are fully-fleshed terrific characters who I came to truly enjoy, centered by a rich plot of political intrigue and revenge with some anime bullshit sprinkled in to give it some spice. It's terrific stuff and it left me eager to finish the series.

Trails of Cold Steel II returns to those characters with a "get the band back together" backbone I still enjoyed, though the plot twists and giant magical threat that springs up in its last act rendered the experience less enjoyable. I tend to like my RPGs more political than fae and dragon focused, but what was here was still a fun experience.

Trails of Cold Steel III and IV takes all the things I loved about the first two games, the party members, the great political buildup and intrigue, and great settings, and says, "Nah. We're done with all that. Here's a shitty mockery of every minute of that experience."

These games are fucking heartless. I like the idea of Reen becoming a military instructor if the original cast wasn't sidelined and releagted to guest roles in III. Making this even worse is the absolutely horrid cast of new party members, only one of whom has any interesting role to fulfill in Juna, whose hometown Reen was a part of subjugating, an absolutely intriguing plot idea that unfortunately ultimately peters out with a whimper, like everything else about these fucking games.

In lieu of developing the new cast of characters and giving them something to do plotwise, old characters keep popping up like 90s sitcom guest stars, adding nothing to the plot of note except to act as fanservice. Even in the fourth game, when most those characters rejoin Reen for good, there's no hint of the spark of companionship from the first two games. The fourth game's fanservice becomes even more grossly intolerable by turning the first half of the game into a "where are they now?" of EVERY SINGLE SIDE CHARACTER from the first game. I'm not joking in the slightest. The game's plot hinges on these fucking minor-ass two-lines-of-dialogue characters suddenly acting like they're vital to the plot and the world for nearly forty fucking hours.

It's insane. It's a joke. This game has to be a joke.

Gone too is the wonderful music (God, I still love that Mysterious Schoolhouse theme from Trails of Cold Steel I) and in its place is JRPG generica rock and heartless bullshit assaults on my ears. The new and old locations lack the vitality of the first two games, and like its characters, mostly serve as a "hey, do you remember...?" bit of dialogue here and there. Villains who you've been waiting three hundred hours to explain their motives fall spectacularly short in their final moments, particularly McBurn (still the dumbest fucking name) and Jusis's brother, who goes from potential all-time RPG villain greatness to a potential candidate for "most wasted potential" in an RPG.

Ugh. I fucking hate this game and my need to see this story through. I'll pick up the new one someday, but for now I'm still washing the bad taste out of my mouth. And eat a planet made out of dicks, Reen Schwarzer, you miserable sack of shit.

Play the first two games of this series and pretend the last two never happened. Trust me. You'll save yourself a lot of heartbreak.

Best Game that Could Probably Be Played on a Potato

Loop Hero

Loop Hero is a conceptually neat game with a ton of replayability. If you haven't checked it out, it's a run-based game set on a track, essentially. On this track are a few mobs. Defeating the mobs and leveling up means you can place land spaces that give you resources, but also slowly ramp up the difficulty of the loops until it becomes a guessing game of "can I survive this loop or should I stop now?" This is bolstered by an overworld area you can upgrade as well as some permanent unlocks that help you progress faster.

It's a game I'm terrible at, because I've never watched anyone good play it, and I need to. But I enjoyed the hell out of losing repeatedly, and that says something to its charm. It's a "just five more minutes" game, one of the best little indie things I've checked out this year, and highly recommended if you've somehow missed it thus far.

The Rest

I keep trying to think of awards to give Diablo IV and Steamworld Heist 2, both of which I had a lot of fun with. I don't really have much to say about either except that if you like their genre of games (the slash-and-loot and turn-based quirky RPGs of sorts), you'll like these. I want to finish Diablo IV's story sometime but I don't see myself finishing Steamworld Heist II anytime soon. There's just a lot there and I had my fill of it pretty fast.

No new Hot Sauce Boss award this year. Lucky Foods' Seoul Kimchi is probably the most interesting new hot sauce I've tried this year, and Tattoo's garlic hot sauce is pretty great, though not worth the price. I don't really see either as deserving of an award but hey, if you see them, give them a shot. I'm more or less fixated on Cholula, specifically its garlic chili variant but I'm also glad to see Huy Fong back on shelves regularly. For non-hot sauce sauces, I've been liking Chik-Fil-A sauce on sandwiches and chicken, which you can find in grocery stores.

And that's it. I hope 2025 is good to you. I hope it's good to the industry we're both here to talk about. I hope my fears about politics and hatred are unfounded, but if they're not, reach a hand out to wherever you need to. There are those of us in the great void of the Internet listening. We may not be able to do anything but weather this storm together, but you are not alone.

Take care.