Meester's "Games" of the "Year" 20"18"

Another year it has been...

Another year where I just didn't muster up the strength to do what I want to do, and that is write about videogames. Yet at the end of they year is when I make the exception, even if I myself personally didn't actually play too many new releases this year. 2018 was... a year for me in the space of games. I saw myself bouncing off of AAA titles left and right (bouncing being my wallet taking the hits while I 80% of the time felt disappointed). I saw more comfort in the mobile space, and somewhat saw some interesting things in the indie scene even if I didn't go out of my way to complete the games I wanted to before the year finished out.

I'm going to be completely blunt here. Theres more games that I just didn't finish than completed. I'm not making any sort of top anything list, this is awards I'm giving to games that I either managed to enjoy from start to finish, or shellack for... not in a sense wasting my time, but... I guess in my mind practicing bad game design? I'm not an expert or pretending to be one, and I'm definitely not going to tell people how they should make games with this, but man, holy shit, were there a ton of games that had so much crap systems that did not fit in with the game they were trying to make. Does it hurt the games that practice this? Yes, and we'll get into that when the time is right but for now let's start off with some positive categories. Starting with...

Gacha of the Year:

What started as a simple Chinese bootleg of the original anthropomorphic ship game Kantai Collection by Kadokawa, eventually sporadically turned into one of the biggest names in the genre itself (with the help of Kadokawa's poor business sense and as well the... Kemono Friends incident), Azur Lane made its way Stateside unlike its counterpart and quickly made it clear that... PEOPLE WANTED THIS, I WANTED THIS. I am a sucker for anime girls that are also WW2 warships, and when this game launched out of the CBT in late August I just had to get my grubby little hands all over it.

At its core Azur Lane is a very competent and somewhat laid back Shmup that is easy to get into. It starts off very easy with the first couple of chapters before eventually scaling the difficulty of the missions on the back half. Events have varied in difficulty from being somewhat of a pushover to actually needing to pay attention to what is coming at your characters. While in battle you control the Vanguard fleet while the ships you pick to back you up in the main fleet offer artillery support and or bombing runs via aircraft carriers. Most of the time you can mix and match boats of your liking to fit any team composition, with some higher difficulties limiting your fleets to have mandatory Cruisers, Destroyers, Carriers and whatnot.

The game is probably... the most friendly gacha game I have ever played. This is coming from someone who will tell you that Granblue if you work hard enough you can succeed in anything you put your mind to. Azur Lane is very much a game about picking the right boats for the right jobs, but it's not the lengthy time commitment that Granblue, and the rest of its ilk require. Common rarity boats can be upgraded to higher rarities via the Retrofit system, and can see the same use as higher rarity ships, and even outperform them. Some of the best ships start off as Blues and end up becoming complete powerhouses after being retrofit (if they have one available that is). The best part of all of this is that the game doesn't require you to spend hours grinding these boats to the level they need to be to do their jobs, you can take your time, playing even just 30 minutes a day can accomplish a lot.

Not only that... even though I don't recommend it because the game is super generous with its gacha rolling currency, Wisdom Cubes, it is actually the most affordable gacha game on the market. Heck a hard 10 roll in any other game will cost you upwards of 30 dollars, which is... insane. While it's very easy to get cubes passively without spending money, the barrier to do a hard 10 roll in Azur Lane is literally a fraction of that original cost, with 11 cubes costing you around five american dollars. Yes, I'm very much aware that I'm still defending gambling by telling you that this is basically penny slots compared to high stakes texas hold'em, but in the grand scheme of things the goal of Azur Lane is to eventually collect all the boats, and I feel like Yongshi understands this to a degree and doesn't... overexert your wallet to reach this goal at all. My own collection has been hovering around the 79% mark after nearly every event.

The game gets updated almost on a weekly basis with new story content, events to participate in, and new ships to construct. It is a never ending treadmill of good times for myself. I should also mention that there IS PvP in this game... but we won't talk about the PvP, the picture provided next to these words pretty much sums up one half of the current meta game until the US version catches up with the Chinese client. If you yourself are interested in the fantastical world of anthropomorphic boat girls, I would recommend this game as the entry point. It's free to check out and doesn't cost you a dime to stay committed... until you run out of dock space for your ships because you've literally collected 150 unique ships and have no where else to put them.

Honorable Mention: Dragalia Lost

Dragalia is basically the spiritual successor to Granblue Fantasy, made by the people who brought you Granblue Fantasy, with the artist originally on the relatively unknown gacha game Last Period, all the while being licensed by our uncle at Nintendo. It is by far the BEST playing gacha game on the market, and the only reason why it doesn't beat out Azur Lane is... they are constantly fucking up design decisions, event modes, and also the endgame bosses currently require you to be SUPER LUCKY and pull mandatory Dragons and Characters to even participate in them. This game has the stuff to be the next BIG thing, but they're still figuring it out. Atleast with every fuck up, we get free shit. I've gotten so lucky with this game though I'm heavily invested in all the elements at the moment.

"Game" of the Year 2018

My own love for Monster Hunter comes from the Wii entry of the series, Tri. I loved Tri so much, I loved the underwater combat, the flagship monster of Tri, and of course everyones original shithead Deviljho made his first appearance in it. When Monster Hunter World first made its appearance at E3 2016... I was excited for a videogame, that doesn't really happen anymore. Everything about Monster Hunter back onto a flagship console with proper controller support. Heck even when the demo came out I made it a personal mission with my friends to take down the Nergigante in the demo before we even fought him in the main game. Everything about Monster Hunter World feel so much better than it has ever been, the game is definitely not without its own shortcomings, which we will cover but this game was so good to me I bought it twice, once it hit PC I put the console version away and started fresh.

I just don't know where to begin with this game honestly, There's just so much good and so much bad that I don't think I have enough time to cover all of it. The game on PC looks and runs so much better than I would have ever imagined a Monster Hunter to ever be. All the changes to the verticality, mounting monsters has never been easier to do outside of insect glaive. Almost all of the combo string changes made to each and every weapon, with the clear winner coming out of those updates being the Bow, this game was the adrenaline shot the bow originally needed, it is so much... better than it was in previous versions of the game thanks to quick charging on dodges so bows don't lose precious uptime trying to reposition mid fight. From the ground up Monster Hunter World was built to be the best feeling game in the franchise, and it definitely shows in spades.

Yet with the improvements with just overall gameplay, online is... still a nightmare. Monster Hunter World arguably has the WORST online out of the entirety of the series, with the early server traffic making the game hard to connect to like its DS counterparts, it really didn't help that co-op wasn't at all seamless. Since Monster Hunter was used to splitting the single player and multiplayer missions up, when it came to make a game that combined both... it made this clunky mess of people trying to join their friends to play but couldn't until the leader of the quest had watched the cutscene, along with everyone else trying to participate in the quest as well. Which led to you and your friends, starting the same mission, progressing to the parts to the monster introduction, abandoning the mission, and then reposting the mission on the board once everyone was out and saw what they needed to see. It should just be a minor gripe but holy shit did this really break the flow of the game. I ended up soloing every story related quest, and only decided to hunt monsters with friends on optional quests if we were looking to get the same monster hunts in. Despite its co-op shortcomings, this is probably the first Monster Hunter where I myself just enjoyed playing the game solo, and learning all the fights on my own, rather than just waiting for friends to show up and or randoms to three cart on missions leading to failure.

With the expansion and new content on the horizon, there hasn't been a better time to get back into the game. As a wise man once said, there has never been a better time to hunt monsters.

Honorable Mention: Warhammer: Vermintide II

I really liked the first game and never really got the chance to play it mostly due to people just didn't want to take a new person through the levels and have them not know where all the stuff is. Vermintide II fixed that problem for me with the different difficulty modes and actual functional gear score system that feels like it actually belongs in the game. More of the same with much more Warhammer than I could ever hope to kill. It doesn't take top honors simply because I failed to reach the endgame and fell off of it for a while. Yet I did rebuy it just a bit ago on PS4 with some friends so... heres hoping!

Best Game As A Service (Ongoing Game):

I don't know how we got here. This game, while last year during my lists, was rightfully robbed by Danganronpa V3 as the most disappointing game to come out in that year of 2017. What ended up happening post disappointment ended up snowballing into me full-on quitting the game, with a friend of mine who was part of my raid group ended up getting banned for running a virtual machine at the same time as the game being open. I didn't even want to do Osiris, Warmind was a joke, I had no group to go back to, my clan was still rooted on the PC. The game was dead for me, and none of it was even close to what the game used to be.

Forsaken would come out, and I would just sit there and wait. "The grind is back" I was told, "There was a reason to log in and play every week". I didn't buy it, I didn't want to. It seems like out of principle, nobody should buy Forsaken, because this is the mirror image of Destiny. Bungie shouldn't have been awarded a pass for repeating the same play out of the same book... Then the expansion went on sale and I was like why not... atleast it wasn't the worst thing to be playing in November. I treked through Warmind begrudgingly holding onto my character boost for... whatever reason. I made it to the prison of elders to watch a character I didn't really like actually meet his end. I traveled to the Tangled Shore and killed all of the guys. Beat up the man responsible for all of the bad things happening... a Beholder showed up for some reason but hey, I actually had a pretty good time for once in a Destiny story so there's that.

Though what awaited me after the story was... man, a grind. The process of getting geared up took time again. The process of infusing gear got expensive again. Former farmable materials that you just traded in for pointless rep had uses again. Things that made the game fun to play, the things that gave me a daily objective and goal were in the game again. I should be mad it took so long for it to be added, but in the end I can't really be that upset, because they legitimately fixed the game for the better and I honestly didn't expect that somehow? I eventually was able to get to the Dreaming City which was by far the most surprising addition, I wasn't expecting an entire playable zone after The Tangled Shore. The amount of content coming out on a weekly basis as well... Destiny 2 is finally the game that I wanted the first one to be, a live game, with constant events and a stream of meaningful content coming into the game at a reasonable pace. They figured it out... but for how long?

I bet whoever is thinking about the next thing in the Destiny franchise is thinking hard about what needs to happen. Will Destiny 3 fall to the same fate as 2 and be stripped down to its barren bones state? Who knows, I don't, but I know that... I should just wait and see. For now though, good job Bungie, you... did good, real good.

Honorable Mention: Granblue Fantasy

... Okay it was a down year for the game i'm trapped in a hyperbolic time chamber for the rest of eternity. Yet even though NEW content wasn't really... good. Old content was still done and achieved. The game received alot of QoL updates, a UI makeover. Enough for it to be mentioned based off of the fact it was a very new player friendly year for the game. It keeps getting bigger, and some might even say... it's not stopping anytime soon.

Best Game I didn't finish this year (but definitely next year)

Hell, I should just wrap this up as the Best Surprise category as well but the runner up isn't really a surprise for me. Cross Code is for all intensive purposes, an isekai. Isekai is the the genre of anime currently taking the world by storm, it's when the characters of said show are transported to a different world, ideally a fantasy or sci-fi roleplaying game-like world. I normally actually do not like this trope. I only enjoy it in small doses, even though two of my favorite shows in the last year and a half do use this trope, ONE of them a spawn from the property that has us stuck in this hellhole of a setting. YET THIS IS A LIST ABOUT GAMES NOT ANIME (even though most of the list is anime inspired games...).

Cross Code is this weird mishmash of puzzle platformer, with real time action combat with rpg mechanics... which actually doesn't sound too weird since most games tend to either do colum a and c... or b and c.... or just c with some other stupid bullshit. Yet the way Cross Code sets it up in this pseudo MMO world... kinda took me by surprise. It is a combat system that rewards you for killing as much shit as possible and doing it as fast as possible as the kill combo chains the more EXP you get the more EXP you get the more you can bully around the trash mobs in the area. I really have to hammer this point home though, it pretends to be an MMO, like a real old MMO... so you actually start off pretty understated compared to alot of the trash you see in the first area of the game... and i fucking loved that. I love how evocative this game is of its source material. It doesn't nail everything I mean, its not going to its a single player game. Yet the fact that this simple touch of detail was added in, and keeps being a relevant detail as you go through the zones is... kind of heartwarming.

The story itself, I haven't gotten past the second dungeon I guess is what you could consider my progress but, so far I love the characters, the party system seems rad, while the game itself can be a bit corny at times (I mean all the classes are related to geometric shapes), its charming. It's crazy that a game like this can be so massive in meaningful ways as we keep running into AAA games that continue to fail at extending the lengths of their worlds with... really boring collectathon or sidequest shit. I will get back to this, I promise, it's just been a... gacha year.

Honorable Mention: Dragon Quest XI

HEY TURNS OUT PEOPLE STILL WANT JRPG ASS JRPGS. I got past the first act, and I really REALLY need to get back to this game. The only reason why it's not THE winner is mostly due to the fact that, its less interesting? Not in a bad way, this is actually my first DQ game, but I absolutely LOVE the simplicity of the world and the terminology in said world. That being said, the game is definitely able to deliver certain depths of complexity with it. This is a good mindless game as well, it reminds me alot of Granblue Fantasy with its combat and how its just... fun to beat up stuff, and then you super overlevel that stuff, then you just instantly kill that stuff... AND THE MONSTER DESIGN IS THE BEST.

Old Game of 2018:

This was the only game I wrote about in 2018, and I very much wanted to turn the start of this into something I could work on throughout the year... it kinda fell through but hey, new year anything is possible. I digress, Lisa was a game that was in my backlog for so long after falling in love with it longer than when I owned the actual game. Finally playing the game to completion for myself put it into perspective for me why I enjoy the game for what it is... It helped me close out a chapter of my life when I originally bought the game when it first came out... and why I stayed away from it for so long. To finally get that closure and experience one of... if not the best narrative I've ever experienced in a game to date, was nothing short of amazing.

Like I said in the review... Lisa, is a bad game... but it's supposed to be. It uses that to really send it home that this is a game about suffering in every sense of the word. I don't think this game is for everyone... but if I ever had to recommend a game for anyone to play, it would be this one.

Honorable Mention: Path of Exile

I watched a meme review and was introduced to the Toucan. In all seriousness I tried this game way back and stopped in early beta due to memory leaks. Now the game works just fine and i'm currently trying to work my way through act 7 with a build i'm making on the fly. This is a fantastic game, really deserves to win something...

Best Moment or Sequence:

THE HELLSHAKE YANO SKIT FROM POP TEAM EPIC. YES I REALLY MEAN THIS. IT TRANSCENDS ALL MEDIA (I COULDN'T FIND THE ENGLISH ONE ANYMORE, SORRY)

Honorable Mention: None.

LISA of the Year:

Okay so... when I mean LISA of the year, I'm not giving the game the privilege of being called "the best narrative" or "a game that was important to me". I am playing this game, and suffering. The game on its own terms is... fun. The game has a good "story"... after you get past the opening chapters... like chapter 6 is where it starts to get good (I did enjoy London though). Yet... This goddamn game, I have done ten rolls with all the quartz they have given me. like 15 rolls this year alone, countless summon tickets, and I still haven't naturally picked up a 5* servant that I didn't have to fucking pay for to guarantee to drop. I want to enjoy my time with this game, and I do to an extent the events are fun and the game is pretty self aware of all its problems (jokingly) but man holy fucking shit I can't help but be a pillar of salt with this game.

IF you were to compare this game with any of the other gacha accounts I have: Azur Lane, Granblue Fantasy, Dragalia Lost. You wouldn't even think that I actually own this account by comparison with the amount of luck I actually have in those respective games.

The only bright side to my bad luck in this game is that I'm not... overly punished in the sense I can't progress through the game... It's only a bummer that I just don't have any rare servants... outside of the 1* avenger that apparently is rarer to get than a 5* so... take that as you will. I was unlucky enough to roll Stheno during the Merlin rate up banner, if that wasn't a kick to my dick then I don't know what is anymore. That was basically Lisa in a nutshell right there. Game is still fine, I enjoy it... I just don't ever think I will see a return on it. 8.8/10.

Honorable Mention: World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth

I transferred my one 110 character I wanted to play on the most to another server to maybe raid with a group that I was told did heroic progression in legion. They did not, the guild collapsed mid Uldir... normal progression... four weeks in. Things I do to play with friends.

Hottest Mess:

... I didn't even play this game, don't buy asset flips people. Stop giving Todd Howard the benefit of the doubt, stop giving Bethesda money. This is the worst fear for the franchise finally realized for even people who didn't play the originals. Even worse, is that they continue to use the good name of the first games to try and bail themselves out.

I think the worst part of this fucking game is... they probably made their money back and this game was probably a commercial success for them. 100 more years of misguided Fallout I guess.

Biggest Disappointment:

I'm just going to be completely honest, and upfront with an opinion that probably is going to sound ridiculous and incredibly unpopular... Red Dead Redemption 2, from top to bottom, left to right, northwest to to southeast, and northeast to southwest a downgrade of the original game. In almost every aspect Red Dead 1 is a superior product, and knowing the amount of time the team at Rockstar spent on Red Dead 2 to make it the way it is so jam packed with easter eggs, events, NPCs, and landscapes... They forgot to actually make the game fun.

The cores are a really bad idea that already replaced a working resource system. The whole survival lite aspect of the game where you "need" to "eat, drink, and stay warm" is so... artificial that it honestly doesn't belong anywhere in the game. Hunting animals now have the unskippable skinning animations that were eventually just sped through in the first game. What the fuck is gun oil really... I just don't get it.

On top of the very questionable gameplay designs and systems, the story has never been so ridiculous. Dutch... is not a human being, he is an alien trying to get back to his home planet. Arthur is just in the same roll as John was in the first game. He is the only sane man in a world filled with insane people, and he has to solve ALL of their problems because it's a videogame. Even John has been downgraded to one of those readily insane people, and hes the fucking guy you do that with 10 years later in the games world. I recently uninstalled the game, I'm no longer going to bother.

(Dis)Honorable Mention: God of War

God of War is a much better game than Red Dead in alot of aspects. What I don't understand though, which actually was the contributing factor of why I just stopped mid game in the first place, is why there's a fake ass gear score/leveling/rpg-lite system in this game, that actually would function better without it even has it in the first place. Which actually brings me to the next category

PLEASE, STOP.

AAA GAMES WITH BULLSHIT RPG-LITE MECHANICS.

Look, I get it, people love to see the numbers rise up, and work towards a game that has a protagonist gain power throughout the course of the game like they are earning something. Yet... Aside from Assassins' Creed which I have not played either Odyssey and or Origins, all of these games, at least in my mind, would function either the same and or better if they didn't have these fluff progression mechanics.

God of War's whole "tie the character level exactly to the level of the pieces of gear you equip", made me drop that game in a serious manner. Especially when you play on higher difficulties, and every enemy you eventually run into no matter what you do are perpetually scaled higher than you significantly throughout the course of the game. At no point in the time that I played did I actually feel like I was ever going to get one up on enemies eventually by overpowering them. Then when it came to Muspelheim and its challenge tower format... it just broke for me. There is no issue with throwing a challenge like "Kill 100 enemies", sure okay you did that all the time in the old games... except now those enemies drip out... one by one, and every 10th enemy ended up being a Traveller, those mysterious really tanky enemies sewn throughout the game akin to Dark Soul's Black Knights. New God of War showed me it can do things the old games could never do, but when it came to emulating the old games like Muspelheim, God of War couldn't do that.

Red Dead 2's leveling of Arthur's cores are a neat idea, you know back when on the PS2 CJ had all these mundane stats that you could level up just by using stuff for long periods of time. This system when put in comparison to Red Dead's lax character progression where you just kinda unlocked new stuff as you went though the story made a whole lot more sense in the game as a whole than when Red Dead requires you to get into fist fights to level up your maximum health. Because of the limitations on Dead Eye with its core I just stopped using it, its not like Arthur even needs it in the first place the game already lets you snap onto targets, and with a minor movement upwards on the stick always leads to a headshot.

Far Cry hasn't needed skill trees, hunting animals for crafting materials, or any of that nonsense that got introduced in 3 since... well 3. I still feel like a ton of what people liked about Far Cry 3 in terms of its character progression... wasn't actually fitting the game at all. Why limit the rate of which I can get these skill points if it doesn't matter what I pick if I can literally get all the skill points. Why craft bag space when you never need bag space. If you don't need bag space why do you need to hunt. If you don't need money for anything in the game then why have money. Theres like a ton of shit that doesn't need to be in Far Cry, would it make the game worse if they weren't in the game at all? I couldn't tell you, but I know for a fact they don't make the game better. It's almost like they could have done something else with their time making something that would fit a First Person Shooter than to just tack on all these systems. Far Cry 5 kind of even proves that point a bit since now, hunting is still in the game, but its purely for getting more perks on that worthless skill tree.

Like I said, I really can't speak for Assassins Creed since I have heavily said no to playing it. Seeing the character gear screen, the new format in which the game plays, the obvious borrowing of mechanics from The Witcher... I remember when this was a pseudo stealth game with minor character upgrades, but at the same time I remember being very sick of those by the time Black Flag came out. Yes the series needed some change... but for me I don't think doing the thing every other RPG did over the course of the last 8 years... aka taking design tips from The Witcher, wasn't for me at all.

Because of the big games taking all of these maneuvers to increase player investment/player time with the game... I've just stopped playing them all together. I have... literally three games on my phone, that do character progression much better in an environment where it makes sense, all the while STILL managing to be more complex than the game I would pay 60 dollars for. Maybe I would have stuck with God of War if it was more akin to a character action game, maybe I would have tried out Odyssey if it wasn't a 60 hour game of side quests and gear progression, maybe I would like to shoot things in the ridiculous setting of Far Cry if I just... got all of those abilities off the bat.

(Dis)Honorable Mention: Trading Fun game design for Realism

This is pretty much just another shot at Red Dead 2. Gun Oil is unnecessary, being unable to skip skinning animations is unnecessary, having a one way only fast travel system is unnecessary, brushing your horse cause its dirty and doesn't regenerate health is unnecessary, low stakes poker is unnecessary, having to pump your repeater carbine manually everytime you want to shoot is unnecessary. There is just... so much unnecessary shit in this game, and it makes me wonder WHY Marston so much further down this timeline, never has to deal with any of this unnecessary bullshit.

(Dis)Honorable Mention Runner Up: Fortnite

This game is literally the fake game someone would come up with for a TV show. When all the content creation for The Game Awards was Fortnite content creators... we have a serious problem on our hands... and it's not stopping anytime soon.

Final Singularity: Endless Wall of Text, MeesterO's 2018 - END

So there you have it, this year I've officially fallen off of AAA titles, and I've fully embraced the actual future of our medium as a whole, the gacha hell. The only thing left for us to do is pray that, one of these games that gets turned into Granblue Fantasy doesn't try to hold us up at gunpoint for our bank accounts. 2019 is full of great unknowns, will Battle Royales finally go out of style? Will kids still be able to learn dance moves from Fortnite? Can I ever not play more than atleast 5 japanese mobile games at a time and get my free time to play video games again? WILL I EVER ROLL A 5* SERVANT?! Only time will tell, and in the meantime, I'm gonna try and play this Spiderman game, and finish the two JRPGs that I promised to finish on this list. I might bang out a proper top ten list this year, but I don't know quite yet, I might have actually not played 10 games from this year... or ten games at all this year. Stay tuned.