Keep in mind my end of year game opinions are hardly based on what came out this year, just what I experienced for the first time this year. I really do not play recent things because I'm a bad gamer who doesn't keep up with the times. Also, no spoilers for anything in this entire list.
Without further ado, here are some goodass games I played this year (with GOTY at the end):
Buried Stars
If you think a survival mystery game can be stressful, Buried Stars’s stakes are made all the more insane by the fact that half of it takes place on Kpoptwit. You have gay people, drama starters, haters, and the people who @ companies telling them to take care of their idols better all arguing with each other. It felt like going on the TL on the last day of Queendom 2.
I realize I have probably alienated 95% of readers by mentioning Kpop, but Buried Stars is about exactly that— a game about Kpop idols in a life-or-death scenario, trapped in an entertainment venue that's falling apart and awaiting rescue. This puts the group in a lot of immediate danger in that any point a support beam or the roof itself could crumble and Fucking Kill Them, but it's not nearly the only thing they have to worry about as the night goes on.
Going into more detail would spoil some of the fun, so I'll stop there. Aside from being an interesting survival mystery game, Buried Stars also sheds light on a topic I think is fun to explore— that is, fame and how it affects people/the people around them, how stardom alters people, how TV will change things about idols to make them more appealing and hide their real selves away. It's not something new, but it's something that I think is done really well here, especially in such a unique setting. [pretentious asshole voice] In a way the crumbling entertainment venue is a lot like the crumbling facades of some of the idols blahblahblah.
I don't actually play a lot of Korean games so I really enjoyed the voice acting in this, which is in Korean. It's stupid but because I couldn't recognize any of the voices (much less speak the language) I got more invested in the story because it felt more real, whereas if I played in JP I would go, "Oh great here's Hiro Shimono in his 597438468734th role can we get new voice actors to voice annoying twinks PLEASE".
There's a Japanese language option you can switch to, but the Japanese
dub alters all character names to be Japanese and doesn't change the
names you see in the ingame text. So you'll see a character call someone
else one name, but the text says something else entirely. I understand
why they did this in the Japanese version of the game (need to appeal to
Japan by making them not Korean, and in the Japanese version the text
does have the names changed) but it's very clunky in English. Overall, just stick to the Korean voices.
The only struggle with this game is it's a beast to 100%. You can't just put it on auto and make a few choices to get whatever ending you want, you have to pay attention to each conversation and answer correctly or you're screwed. There are tons of variables you have to keep track of.
I don't want that to discourage you from even trying to 100% this though, because there's some awesome stuff to be found here. I recommend sticking to a guide after your first playthrough, it all comes down to just needing a lot of free time. Coincidentally, I played this game while unemployed!
Also, just like real life Kpop idols, the gaybaiting in this game goes crazy as hell. Big shoutouts to the small but dedicated fandom of Buried Stars that almost exclusively makes yaoi content of the two most important guys. Stronger than the marines.
Witch on the Holy Night / Mahoyo
Mahoyo is probably the most polished sound novel I've ever had the pleasure of reading. The art is stunning, the animations are just to die for, the music is superb. It is unreal how they weave together every pixel and soundbite so masterfully to create such a fun story about magic and mages in the modern day— their ambitions, their power struggles, their abilities, their daily lives. A story so good that it forgets it's a story sometimes, even! You'll just go a long stretch of slice of life nonsense before they suddenly realize "Oh, yeah, we have a plot we need to focus on, let's go do that" and that sounds like a complaint from me, but I could not possibly love this more than I already do!
I know I'm not alone in this because one of the most universally praised moments of the story is a side story about everyone thinking one character entered an mlm (multilevel marketing, but i think soujyurou should kiss men too if he wants) and freaking out that they need to get him out of it. Mahoyo is at its absolute best when it's just characters existing, and that's a really high achievement.
It definitely helps if you've played other Type Moon games, but Mahoyo has a larger lack of explanations of its world than other entries. For example, in Fate Stay Night, I think things were very well explained to Shirou, either before he encountered an issue or during it. Mahoyo takes a sort of hands off approach, where they say a lot about magic or magical societies but don't go into detail— sometimes they explain what they mean, sometimes they explain hours later, and sometimes they don't explain anything at all. We learn along with Soujyuro as the plot expands, yet never get a full grasp on everything. I feel like there’s so much that’s fuzzy detail-wise or not expanded upon.
At the same time, this is fucking awesome, and I love it. Who needs a full explanation of anything? This is Aoko’s world and we’re just living in it. It’s a single drop from the river that encompasses these kids' lives. It's perfect. It makes you feel like this is real, not that it's a video game.
This is probably my favorite Type Moon work. Granted all I’ve played is FSN & FHA and some of Tsukihime (there is legit too much tasteless sexual assault/abuse in Tsukihime for me to want to finish it), but the vibes here are so chill and fun that I would want to spend forever in this universe. I practically fell to my knees in despair when I found out this was supposed to be a three part series— not because this does impact some of the pacing toward the end (you can really feel that there's supposed to be more than this), but because I know damn well Type Moon is never gonna finish this thing and I have to live the rest of my life knowing I would not get to experience two more installments of Mahoyo goodness.
Please don't let the large amount of words on the screen intimidate you
and just give this one a shot if you have some time to spare. Especially if magic and slice of life kind of stories are your thing.
Another Code: R - A Journey Into Lost Memories
Alright I have to be real half of the reason I'm even putting this in this post is because I need to remind everyone the remake of both this and its previous game is dropping January 19th. Pyoro leaked that a trailer and demo is coming out for it soon and let me, Lone, the person you can trust, be the first to tell you this game is full of Soul. I'm not sure how drastically the remake will change this, because 20% of this Soul is dependent on the gimmick motion control puzzles, but regardless, I very much love this game.
Does Another Code R do anything that'll blow you away? Absolutely not. This game is in a genre I call the "fuck around" genre, where half the time you're just walking around alone, talking to people occasionally, and solving a puzzle here and there. Going with the flow, not really doing anything that will blow your mind. But that isn't bad. There's something so charming in the simplicity of it all, of having your task for a chapter be something like "hey can you get this kid some medicine he's not feelin' too good". Like with Mahoyo, this slice of life stuff, of just seeing characters exist, is truly where Another Code R shines.
The stakes do raise as the plot progresses, and the last handful of hours are wild, but I think the simpler moments of the game outshine the ending honestly. Maybe I'm just a simple girl.
I hope sincerely that the remake beefs up the writing for both this and the previous game, just to make them feel a little more consistent with each other (that and the first game is roughly 20 seconds long so man I hope they add some stuff there). I definitely recommend trying this out or its remake next month.
This puzzle sucked ass tho LOLLLLL
Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed
If you follow me and haven't played Xenoblade Chronicles 3, I'm very impressed you've stuck around, god damn. But also, please go play XBC3, which was my GOTY last year (non spoiler thought post linked). And then go play this.
I don't have anything revolutionary to say about Future Redeemed aside from the fact that I liked it a lot. Especially everything it did with the Trinity Processor, and how it altered Alvis as a character (or at least gave us a deeper understanding of him). You probably already knew I liked this a lot if you played the Bladeingtons game this year. I actually 100%ed this DLC, which is something I don't think I've ever done for any game like this. Granted, when I was playing it I was battling my depression demons like crazy, so I was hyperfocusing on this a lot.
I really feel like this is a solid conclusion to the Xenoblade series, and I really do not want a XBC4 that undermines the struggles of the characters here. It's very Star Wars-ish where it feels like we have to keep making these characters and these worlds fight/can't let them have peace because without that we can't milk the series more. I think you could make an endless now connection to this kind of feeling. Give me a new Xeno- game and let Shulk rest.
This is also one of the top reviews for this DLC on Backloggd right now
Metroid Prime Remastered
This game sucked me silly. Go play it.
Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk
I think it's a shame how lesser appreciated Otome games are, at least compared to other games in the adventure/visual novel genre. I get that some guys probably don't want to pretend to be a girl and date guys even if it means seeing a really good plot, but I had to play as Stupid Fuckass Rintaro the entire time I read Steins;Gate and if I could make that immense sacrifice you can kiss a man.
In Ashen Hawk, you play as a girl who has the mark of a witch, and has to hide her true identity and gender to protect herself from being persecuted by other people in her snowy village— as any girl born with said mark is a bad omen. The village is split into two factions, and though it would be ideal to unite them both rather than have them pitted against each other day in and day out, events begin to unfold that shake the entire basis of their community.
Ashen Hawk has a pretty beefy plot, tons of side stories that flesh out the world and characters, and the romance mostly takes a backseat until the middle-end. I ended up liking pretty much every candidate and there wasn't any route that put me off. I was engaged with this the entire time, and what especially helped was the fact that the protagonist is really likeable! She's spunky, she gets shit done, she's funny! She was definitely an active character in this story and probably the best developed. I like tomboyish protagonists, we should have 5000 more of these.
The art in this is also just stunning. The color palette of the whole game is mainly browns/white/blues/yellows, which really help accentuate that cold, isolated feeling of the village the protagonist lives in (honestly people sleep on how uses of certain colors can affect the way you feel about an environment, characters, even a moment in a scene). Not to mention the style the characters are drawn in is so soft and gentle looking. I adore the textures they use as well.
Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk is probably in my Otome game top 3 (I think the top 3 would be Amnesia, Cupid Parasite, then this), with its previous game, Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly falling somewhere in the top 15. You don't have to play Black Butterfly to play this, but I would recommend it as there are tons of little links to it in Ashen Hawk that make the game feel even better to me.
Bonus points to this for having very little typos, which is unfortunately very common in Otome game translations nowadays.
Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo
To be perfectly honest, I think Paranormasight is just alright.
I love the art direction, the vibes, the fun fourth wall breaks, the setup. All of that is golden. But Paranormasight is very style over substance, and toward the back half of the game they start doing a Mom Needs To Get A Nintendo DS For Her Kid On Black Friday esque mad dash toward the finish line when the story could have easily been dragged out for another 2-4 hours and been much better for it. I found myself wishing characters were better fleshed out and scenes were more expanded upon over and over again as the characters sprinted through the climax. It’s a shame, maybe I’m only picky about this because I’ve played so many reading games, but there was real potential for this to be something fantastic. Of course, your mileage may vary, you will probably end up liking this game, most people have.
The real reason I’m putting Paranormasight on this list is for one thing and one thing only. And that thing is a girl. And that girl is Mio Kurosuzu, who wins the Best Character Of The Year award.
CONGRATULATIONS MIO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mio rules. She’s extremely important to the story, a vital piece in getting shit done, she’s kind of a loser but in a loveable way, and she’s chubby. In a world where I barely see any chubby girl characters get to take an active role in stories (especially in Japanese games), much less in a “if this character wasn’t here the story could not happen” way, this is peak. This game did what 13 Fraudentinels couldn’t and made the narrative require the chubby girl!! And they actually make merch of Mio too! I gotta get that Mio shirt they were selling!!! I love Mio!!!!!!
I would really like to see another game in a similar vein as this with some better story writing and pacing. Hopefully all of that was a side effect of being a new game and this particular team at Squeenix got enough cash from Paranormasight to make something a little more fleshed out on their next bout.
Screw Richter he’s overrated as hell! Mio is where it’s at!!
A Hat In Time
This bricked my Steam Deck when I first tried playing it wtf I had to buy a USB-C to USB adapter and everything to reset it why did Hat Kid do that to my Steam Deck
A Hat In Time follows Hat Kid as she adventures to collect Time Pieces (hourglasses) that she's lost so she can use them to fuel her spaceship back home. As she visits different levels (which all have extremely different gimmicks, keeping gameplay fresh and creative, seriously the worlds and levels are just bursting with SOUL and creativity) she encounters all kinds of wacky characters, including Xander Mobus doing a very over the top Scottish accent in his Satan Puyo Puyo voice. This game is basically peak.
On the topic of the fantastic gimmicks for each level, the voice acting in this game was just out of the park fantastic. Everyone was putting their all into their roles, I always let each voice line play out in full which is actually a rarity from me— I tend to speed read and if I don't feel compelled by a voice cast I have a tendency to skip through voice lines to continue reading. I'm glad that wasn't the case here. It helps that the jokes were also really solidly done (both in voice lines and the physical comedy throughout the game, too). Jontron was here for some reason also.
I don’t play a lot of 3D platformers like A Hat In Time because my childhood was spent in rhythm and fashion games more than anything else, so I can’t say if this is better or worse than [insert your favorite 3D platformer here]. I just know that I loved it, to the point where… I do not know what else to say about it? You ever like something enough where you are just completely satisfied and have no deeper thoughts than “Damn, that was good”? That’s me right now writing this blog post. I can't tell you in 5 separate paragraphs that A Hat In Time was a Kafkaesque subversion of Mario Sunshine but I can tell you I think you should play it.
This is definitely in my Top 3 games I played this year. I'm not sure how much I'll talk about this game going forward because sometimes I just... don't talk about some things even if I really like them, I dunno. I really love Psychonauts and I maybe talk about it once every 10 months online, I do not know why. That and for some reason people with Hat Kid icons are weird. Leave her alone... get a job!!!!
..
.....
........
[microphone turns on]
"Wow, what a year for gaming. Especially for a majority of games that didn't even come out in 2023, and especially for games that were just visual novels and contained little to no gameplay. Thank you to all the nominees, and congrats to all the winners, including the winner of the 'Lone Didn't Play This One Herself, She Just Watched Her Friends Play It, But She Really Liked It A Lot' award sponsored our friends over at Samsung— Resident Evil 8!"
"Now, with all other game categories settled, it's time to get on to Game of The Year, presented by Lone."
[an epic symphony starts playing]
[I get onstage]
[There is literally only one nominee]
GAME OF THE YEAR: Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin
Some critics have called Stranger of Paradise "So bad, it's good". Those people are stupid. SOP is a good game and that is that.
Now, am I the most qualified person to say this about SOP? Probably not. Despite completing SOP myself, I actively cheesed through all of the DLC because I don't even like playing video games. I was even pissed off at the gameplay at some points. A gamer with more knowledge could tell you how cool it all is, how you can do wicked combos or optimize your classes or whatever people do in a game like this. I know that most of the fandom that exists around SOP really cares about this aspect of the game, and this alone could be worth the title of GOTY.
But I was not here for the gameplay. I was here for the maybe collective 30 minutes of story SOP had to offer and the fact that Emperor Mateus was in the DLC.
And, yeah, Jack is quirky. He brushes off enemies and tells everyone to fuck off. People love joking on him. But if you PLAY this game, you will understand that underneath these surface level observations about Jack, you will find a story that has wormed its way into staying in my head for the entire year. You will go from thinking "Jack is so weird lol" to thinking "Jack and all of his friends are my best friends, I would die for him if he needed me to".
I think this outcome is largely because for the majority of the game, not much is said. There's a basic plot that advances, and there are tons of in-universe lore bits you can find either laying around or blasted at you from the longass loading screens. Jack and his friends go to one place and do a thing, and you learn some small bit of the world. Jack and his friends go to another place and do a thing, and you fight a boss and see a cutscene where one of the characters saves another. This stuff is dripfed to the player as SOP goes on.
And then, at a point toward the end, shit starts getting real. Things matter. There are new revelations, tangible deaths, and there is a point where Jack is at an unbelievable low (I'm trying not to spoil this dawg just play the game) that changes how we see him and everyone else who was in his group. Jack turns from the quirky dude to a sad wet cat and later to a very angry feral cat, and this had me gripped. I cried. I cheered. I had my head in my hands. And when everything came to a close, after all the DLCs, I could only sit there and think, "Jesus, I love SOP".
A lot of what contributes to how good the story is is the relationship between Jack and Astos, which makes up a bulk of the writing of SOP. I cannot expand upon this without spoilers but they are sucking each other dry and I am so serious about this
I did say there's a collective 30 minutes of story (slight hyperbole, it's probably like 2 hours maximum), so SOP does have its shortcomings— I know nothing about Sophia other than that she's hot (SHE'S ALSO 37 YEARS OLD SHE'S LEGALLY IN MILF TERRITORY) because she's so underwritten— but I also lowkey do not care about this at the end of the day. I can just make stuff up if I wanna. I always do. The story that was there was enthralling, enough so that this is my GOTY.
Please play Stranger of Paradise. You can play any game on this list and I'd be happy but I need to expand the SOP fandom in any way I possibly can for the slight chance of getting more fan content.
The post is over now
...And thus concludes The Lone Game Awards. Aside from Another Code Recollection I don't believe there's any 2024 releases I'm super looking forward to at the moment. That isn't necessarily a bad thing because it gives me more time to play through my insanely long backlog.
If there's any particular game you really want me to play you can always enter me into a blood pact by buying me a game (I will feel extremely bad about this and finish the game because I don't want you to have wasted your money). Please don't actually do this . Unless it's for Pikmin 4. Holy shit can someone buy me pikmin 4 i seriously keep forgetting to buy it
Here is a list of every game I played this year (most not included in this post) if you want to see what I thought of Katamari Damacy Reroll for some reason.
Thank you and goodnight. I need to finish reading another fuckin visual novel now.
Get flashbanged by gay crows.
Comments
Post a Comment