i finished 42 games in 2024 while i worked on a couple others. here’s what i thought about the ones i finished

2024 was a particularly difficult year. I lost two people I cared about in very different ways, and I wasn’t able to attend either funeral. My health has taken a bit of a decline in the back half of the year, and there’s a lot more.

It’s not all bad. Waifu Death Squad is still coming along — that’s the codename for my next game — and I should be able to show it off real soon. We’re also putting together some pitches for new games; we don’t want to have to wait a really long time trying to get something new funded like we did between Adios’ 2021 release and Waifu Death Squad getting funded just over two years later in 2023.

But, given the amount of work we put in on the game — the main script alone is 328,000 words long, or about a third the size of Disco Elysium — and our cast is in the dozens of characters. We’re working on the biomes and game tuning right now, implementing quests (there are like… 150) right now.

I really hope you enjoy it. It should be out sooner than you think.

Because of all this work — and me playing some utterly gargantuan games, like Persona 3 Reload, which I finished about fifteen minutes ago as of the time of writing this sentence (at 1/5/2025 at 3:49 AM) — and some of my game completions in 2024 being utterly massive.

Looking at you, 80+ hours of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and 72 hours of Borderlands 3, including DLC, as well as 40+ hours of Yakuza Infinite Wealth (I needed to take a break from it for personal reasons), 15+ hours of Metaphor: ReFantazio (between the demo, which has a save transfer to the final game, and the final game), 17 hours of Iron Harvest, 50 hours of Starfield, 20 hours of Persona 5 Tactica, and so on. I start a lot of games but can sometimes struggle to stick with them, or, in the case of Ratchet & Clank, my PS3 fuckin died.

All my saves, lost.

Plus, I’ve been playing Zenless Zone Zero (caught up through act 5! amazing stuff), Honkai Star Rail, Girls Frontline 2, and Genshin Impact. Zenless and Genshin are the standsouts here; Honkai’s Penacony arc just wasn’t that interesting, and Girls Frontline 2’s story runs into the Arknights problem of everyone just talks too much for the amount of story actually being conveyed.

And I’ve been building — and flying — rockets a lot more. You can occasionally see me mention the hobby in the past, but I’ve been a lot more open about it in the past year, posting my builds over on bluesky.

I got my L1 cert flying this 4" SBR Diablo.

Here was my 2023 wrapup:

In it, I described what I wanted to play in 2024:

• Deathloop — I did not complete this.
• Final Fantasy IX — because I lost all my saves, I was bummed at the thought of picking it back up.
• Final Fantasy XII — I streamed Rebirth instead.
• Digital Devil Saga — well, I played Persona 3 Reload, Shin Megami Tensei Vengeance, and started Metaphor: ReFantazio. So I kinda had my hands full. Also I finished Persona 4.
• God of War 2 — see the dead Playstation 3 problem. I need $500 to fix it, according to a professional who will do it for $500.
• Persona 4 Golden — YUP! WE DID IT!
• Dragon’s Dogma — YUP!
• Dark Souls 2 — YUP!
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3 — Interestingly, in the 2023 piece, I said I wanted to do Torna AND XC3. I did Torna.
• Persona 3 Reload — I said I’d do it and I did. Originally, I was gonna do Persona 3 Portable on Steam, but then Reload got announced so I held off and focused on 4. I finished 4!

Okay, so, uh, well, pretty good, to be honest.

Next up, these were games I was looking forward to trying that I’d started. How’d I do?

• The Bookwalker — finished! Read about it below!
• Starfield — 50 hours in and I decided I wanted to keep playing and spent time with games I could finish.
• Etrian Odyssey — I’m struggling a bit to summon the drive to play this.
• Like A Dragon: Ishin! — Well, this was a bit weird. I finished Man Who Erased His Name, so I was a bit tired of Yakuza, and then Infinite Wealth came out, but it was about some stuff that hit too close to home, so I put it on ice and only just picked it back up again (I began, and finished, all the Dondoko island stuff in the past two weeks).
• Planescape: Torment — I know, the game sucks, but I’ll finish it and write about it. Just… give me some time.
• Persona 5 Tactica — Still playing it! Still liking it, but it’s a bit repetitive now.
• Naissance — I played another hour of it. I like it, but… it takes a lot of motivation.
• Armored Core VI — Still playing it.
• Voice of Cards 3 — I originally wrote “the final game I’m gonna play” in the 2023 article, but what I meant was “the final Yoko Taro game I’m going to play before I finish my Nier article.” I finished it. You can read a review below.
• Several other games I’ve been commissioned to write about that I’m not gonna spoil — well, one of them you can read about here. I decided to delay Prey because Arkane Austin got shut down and out of respect for the team I figured we could give ’em some distance.

So… not as good as I’d like, honestly. Some of these are only a few hours away from completion. I just need to dig in. Ishin’s gonna depend on whether or not I want to go back to it or if I want to pick up the new pirate Like a Dragon Game. I generally only play one of those games at a time, so we’ll see.

Persona 5 Tactica is my current Atlus game; I’m gonna try to finish it before jumping back into Metaphor in earnest. Armored Core is… very tiring to play, and I don’t often have the kind of energy to play a game quite so intense.

Starfield went on the back burner cause I don’t really care about finishing it, I just love exploring planets. Naissance I can finish pretty quickly; I like it, but the drive isn’t where I want it to be. Planescape and Etrian are both a bit… not feeling it.

Up next were the games I hoped to begin:

• Baldur’s Gate — I said I’d finish Planescape first, and, well, I didn’t.
• STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl — this is one of the best video games ever made. I gave it 65.8 hours of my time and loved a whole lot of it.
• Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth — Hmm. Particularly when dealing with some of the story beats that were hitting too close to home, I just… needed to put it down. I am playing it again and am doing much better, so this has been fun.

So… I started 2 of the 3, I finished 1, and I had a perfectly good set of reasons for needing to take some time to deal with the other.

I’m going to do something new this year and list hours played, though it’s going to be the Steam count for the most part, rather than the game save, simply because game saves don’t count times you died and had to replay the game and stuff like that. Of course, sometimes you pause the game and leave it running overnight, so nothing’s perfectly accurate, but, hey. We’ll do our best.

• 2016: 52 games completed, 6 DLC completed, 100 games abandoned
• 2017 (unwritten. i should write it this year. like. 2025. might be fun): 52 games completed, 8 DLC completed, 180 games abandoned
• 2018: 65 games completed, 12 DLC finished, 235 games abandoned
• 2019: 57 games completed, 0 DLC finished, 227 games abandoned
• 2020: 73 games completed, 11 DLC finished, 55 games abandoned
• 2021: 79 games completed, 3 DLC finished, 0 games abandoned, 1 game SHIPPED
• 2022: 74 games completed, 0 DLC finished, 1 game abandoned
• 2023: 39 games completed, 3 DLC finished, 2 games abandoned.
• 2024: 42 games completed, 6 DLC finished, 6 games abandoned

I really need to abandon more games. I do that with Bundle Cruft Death Match.

Before we continue the article: Hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.

I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.

I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.

So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.

paypal.me/stompsite

ko-fi.com/stompsite

@forgetamnesia on venmo

$docseuss on cashapp

1. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (PC — 37.8 hours)

Yakuza is a series of brawlers about a guy named Kazuma Kiryu, who is ostensibly a Yakuza, and says he’s a Yakuza, but is largely taking actions when not functioning as a Yakuza (though he is briefly the chairman of the Tojo clan). I had picked up Yakuza Zero, and later Kiwami, to play on PS4, because while I’d heard of the series, I didn’t play many games on my PS3 because of the yellow light of death (that ultimately happened to me, RIP), so I hadn’t picked up the previous games in the series. I just wasn’t that interested, especially in the awful marketing.

“these guys are nasty, bad, bad, people.”

I mean, what a terrible fuckin trailer. Honestly.

But, hey, life got in the way, I got into making games, I wanted to play other games (I often feel guilty about starting new things when I haven’t finished other things, even if they’ve lost my interest, hence the “ten games on a whiteboard” strategy I employ now), and I never really got started on the series. Then, one by one, the games started coming to PC.

So I got started with Yakuza: Like a Dragon, a series that stars Ichiban Kasuga, the series’ new protagonist. At the time of writing, 4:06 PM (I jump around a lot in this draft, and thought it was really funny to have a couple different ‘at the time of writing’ timestamps in here, even though there’s stuff I wrote below this that I wrote days and weeks ago, haha) on January 26, 2025, I have just finished Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the eighth mainline Yakuza game, and Ichiban’s second.

Between then, I’ve played Yakuza Zero, Kiwami, Kiwami 2, Yakuza 6, and The Man Who Erased His Name, in that order. I also played Judgement and Lost Judgement, and I’m knee-deep in Yakuza Ishin! I’m becoming increasingly familiar with the series, and I fuckin love all of the games in it so far. I know that Yakuza 3, 4, and 5 are the ‘oldest’ games in the series mechanically, but Ishin/Zero/Kiwami have given me a pretty good idea of what to expect in terms of how they play, so I’m not too worried about going back to them.

Yakuza 6 was the first game on the Dragon Engine, as I recall, and man, it feels way better than Yakuza Zero and Kiwami.

We start off strong with the end to the Kiryu Saga (who then cameos in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, as the protagonist in Like a Dragon: The Man Who Erased His Name, and as a main character in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth), a game that got increasingly, hilariously bullshit by the end, but had Beat Takeshi kicking ass as one of the baddest dudes to ever do it.

It set up why Kiryu had to fake his death, it took us to one of the coolest cities in the series… like… I liked a lot about it, but it also felt way leaner than some of the other games. It wasn’t a disappointment like Lost Judgement, a game that got to Chapter 9 so quickly, I thought I was still in the beginning, but it also doesn’t feel huge in the way that some of the other Yakuza games do. Heck, I’m nearly a hundred hours into Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (Yakuza 8) and I’m not done yet; that’s way, way more than the meagre 37.8 of Yakuza 6.

It’s the game that forces protagonist Kazuma Kiryu to fake his death, a decision I’m not sure I love; while it complicates the series a bit… I dunno, I haven’t really been fond of many of the story decisions that came after. I just don’t care about the Daidoji faction. It felt like an idea to sideline Kiryu, and then… well, Kiryu just kept coming back, starring in The Man Who Erased His Name, costarring in Infinite Wealth… you get the idea.

A touching story, and it was great to see Kiryu doing his best to help some scrappy young Yakuza from the sleepy seaside town of Onomichi. Plus, it felt fantastic to play (though Judgement, and then Lost Judgement, take that even further).

Ultimately, I really liked it, even though it felt somewhat constrained — and I mean, Steam says I spent 37.8 hours in the game. Steam says I spent nearly 120 (though my save file says 103) in Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

2. Epic Astro Story (PC — 11.9 hours)

Man, I fuckin love Kairosoft games. I don’t really know what to say about them; they’re economy-em-ups about managing the needs of your people as you watch numbers go up. They’re like eating nuts or something; there’s a sense pleasure to the experience that I really, really love.

In this one, you land on a planet, send people on adventures, meet aliens, and gradually grow your town over time.

Not much to say about it. I turn it on, I grind it up, I shut it down. Always a fun time, the Doritos of video games.

3. Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name (PC — 35.2 hours)

What can I possibly say about The Man Who Erased His Name? I wish it balanced its time between other maps a bit better. I didn’t mind that it was shorter than a lot of the other games because of the purpose it serves in the overall narrative, but I think it is an absolutely essential game to play if you want to play the Yakuza series. I thought the ‘level up the town’ system was pretty cool, but it’s my least favorite town in the Yakuza series: Sotenbori, a town that shows up a lot but doesn’t have much going on because of how small it is.

The density means that the space ends up feeling way more repetitive than it needs to, which bummed me out. I get that the story doesn’t really take Kiryu anywhere else, but I’m not gonna lie: I wish it gave me an excuse to go somewhere — anywhere else.

That said? The ending brought me to fucking tears. What a strong, strong video game. I just couldn’t, man. Fuck. What a great lead-in to Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. It needs to be played right after Yakuza: Like a Dragon and before Infinite Wealth; it feels like a full game in its own right, barely smaller than Yakuza 6.

I don’t really even know what else to say about it. It’s a classic Yakuza game, just… pared down a bit, but still beefy enough to feel worth it. As you’ll notice, my playtime was very similar to the playtime for Yakuza 6, but Yakuza 6 let me spend way more time between Kamurocho and Onomichi.

That was one hell of an ending, though. Perfection.

4. Steamworld Build (PC — 14.2 hours)

Steamworld Build is an Anno-like city builder, which is a formula that, if tuned right, is a really fun time.

Basically, there are two kinds of city builder: you’ve got the zoning kind (you set up a zone, and buildings get built within that zone), and the building placement kind (where you place individual buildings, ultimately building a functioning economy). I like building placement games, because I like building all the little cogs that make the machine that is the city whirr. Games like Tropico 4 (my favorite city builder) or Ixion are great examples of this.

Anno-likes are building placement games, but they add a specific wrinkle: you need different kinds of workers for different kinds of jobs in order to grow, which means satisfying needs in an area. The needs can be seen by inspecting housing; you might click on a house and see that the simplest workers only need two or three different things, like food and clothing. A more advanced style of worker might need better supplies, like, say, sausages.

To get sausages, you’d need a farm, to raise pigs, and you’d need a butcher’s shop, to make the sausage. Combine these two things, and you get sausage. Have enough sausages in range of the house, and the house’s needs are met. Then you can click “upgrade,” and now the house will pay you better taxes, which means you can build more expensive buildings, to level up the houses further, and so on.

It’s a nice loop, but so predictable that it can run out of steam (haha) pretty quickly, which is why games like Anno work to add other systems to make these things really gel.

Steamworld build is tuned very well, though maybe not quite as perfectly as Anno. Or maybe Anno just gives you enough landmass to not have to optimize quite as well. I’m not sure.

Either way, it was a fun little game.

5. The Banner Saga 2 (PC — 23.6 hours)

I like The Oregon Trail. I like it a lot. In fact, I grew up with a box set that included every single one of these. I tried to find a picture of the box they all came in, but couldn’t, so here’s a picture I found on the internet of the exact style of CDs they came on.

I liked ’em all; Mayaquest is probably the most advanced. I remember Dad making us get rid of the Amazon Trail because he didn’t like the ghost panther guy at the end and had religious objections to it. The Yukon Trail was way better than it had any right to be. Africa Trail had some fun biking but didn’t feel quite as in-depth as the others. It was in a weird middle ground with no minigames that I recall (like Amazon Trail’s fishing or photography or Yukon Trail’s gold panning stuff), just a lot of biking.

I didn’t really get to play games growing up, but I did get to play educational ones. I can still remember telling my friend Callum that I wasn’t allowed to play games unless they were Oregon Trail or Flight Simulator, and my dad, somehow hearing from the other room, shouting “it’s a simulator, not a game!” because he really, really didn’t want us playing games.

Thanks to these educational experiences, I really, really like road trip games, but I feel like very few games have actually pulled that sense off well.

Then there’s The Banner Saga.

I like it. You’re taking a band of people somewhere to get away from the end of the world, things are bad, you’ve got to maintain morale and stuff to keep things going.

I love the Eyvind Earle-inspired art.

actual eyvind earle art

But… I dunno. I kind of checked out of the narrative part way through. A big part of the problem I felt the second installment lacked is… the emotions feel largely one-note. Everyone’s all the same sort of grim or grim-in-the-face of hope. I need more tenderness, more anger, more joy, more things in the face of the apocalyptic in order to really care about it. Without it… I just kind of checked out.

It’s a serviceable tactics game, but one that needed some extra axis to the combat. Way back in the day, I pitched an article to Kotaku that got the rare rejection (I’ve only had three pitches rejected my entire career as a freelance journalist that I can recall, two of which I’ve posted on this blog, and the XCOM piece) because it wasn’t particularly strong; I had this half-formed theory that XCOM succeeded where most tactical games failed in part because the cover system pushed players to really think about the map more than the average “walk to the tile next to the guy and whack him until he dies.”

That was, of course, not the only reason why XCOM works, but The Banner Saga 2 sure tends to feel like a “walk up to a guy to whack him until he dies” game. If you’re fighting on a grid, then positioning should really feel meaningful, right?

Ultimately, it’s a beautiful game, the story gets me trying to figure out what, exactly, is going on, but I didn’t feel quite as sucked into it as I did the first installment, and it’s hard to tell you why. As I recall, I played the first game in a single sitting, utterly engrossed by what was happening. The second game… not so much. It’s just kind of grim.

Nearly a year out, I don’t remember much of what I liked about it, and that’s a damn shame.

I should finish the final installment this year. Maybe I’ll like it more! Hopefully, The Banner Saga 2 simply suffers from middle child syndrome.

6. Persona 4 Golden (PC — 102 hours)

Oh, man. So! I bought Persona 5 because it looked cool. I’d heard a lot about Persona 3 over the years — I’d started talking to people about video games around 2006, when it first came out, and everyone was in awe of “the game where you shoot yourself in the head to summon demons to fight god.” I was still growing up in a super religious environment at the time, so it sounded cool to my 17 year old brain, but also something I probably shouldn’t touch.

Probably.

But hey, I’m only here because of Digimon. Y’see, when I was a kid, I hung out with my friend Hyrum a lot. As you can probably guess, he was a Mormon, because only Mormons name their kids “Hyrum.” Seriously, I googled the name, checked the first result, and yup, that guy was a Mormon too.

I’m the second oldest of eight homeschooled kids, and Hyrum was too. Both our families had kids roughly every two years, so I guess our parents thought it was natural that we’d want to hang out, being homeschooled kids who had the same age. That… was about it. But sometimes, we’d get to hang out, and I’d watch cartoons or hear about games (their family mostly just had Warcraft III, Starcraft, and Diablo IIas I recall). While hanging out there, I got to watch some Magic School Bus, and one day, as Magic School Bus was wrapping up, I saw a teaser for Digimon.

It looked like this: you’d have the credits on the right side, and a bumper with this neat y2k aesthetic on the left. The specific episode I saw was for Digimon Adventure, Episode 27, The Gateway to Home, which featured a Devidramon, which is one of the best Digimon designs out there.

Eventually, I managed to work out how to get the TV that I used to watch homeschooling video tapes to watch Digimon when it aired in the afternoons, and sometimes on Saturday mornings, and I watched Digimon Adventure, Adventure 02, Tamers, and Frontier that way (Frontier moved to UPN — channel 36 — in the mornings after Fox Kids — which was on channel 24 — got shut down).

A lot of the reason I am the way I am is because of this secretive cartoon-watching. It was basically the only contact I had with pop culture outside of Boy Scouts, and we left that by 2003 or so. My mom really, really wanted us to learn instruments (even though I preferred visual arts), and none of the band kids were kids I enjoyed hanging out with, so eventually I just… kinda withdrew. But, hey, at least I had cartoons, and Digimon was my favorite.

After Digimon went off the air, I’d use my parents’ little old black and white portable tv to watch cartoons, because I found out that the local channel, 53, would air TechTV, and they played Anime Unleashed, which is where I discovered things like Last Exile and Crest of the Stars/Banner of the Stars.

It looked kinda like this:

So, a couple years away from the Boy Scouts, and I started taking college courses while in high school at Friends University. Well, I realized I could use the internet to download cartoons instead of just watching whatever was on. That eventually led me to IRC, where I could download all the Digimon I wanted, and that made me realize I could probably find all the anime I’d been watching on anime unleashed.

So I did.

Eventually, I got into fansubbing stuff.

But my love of Digimon never died. I got into writing that way too — like, the reason I do fiction writing now is because I used to be on Digimon forum RPs, then Naruto, and so on, until I stopped around 2011, as my health started really declining and I had to drop out of school, pay off my loans, get my health in order, and go back to school.

Lotta stuff happened back then. It was a huge chunk of my life.

From the forum RPs, I ended up being introduced to Kotaku, where I started commenting a bunch, and, yeah, eventually Simon Parkin saw some of my work over on The Verge’s forums, said I should try being a freelance writer, helped me polish a pitch, and tried to pitch me to Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I think it was John Walker who turned me down, haha. Ultimately, I went to Kotaku, where Stephen Totilo had given me a star, twice, and where the staff had been putting my speakup comments (basically, before Gawker had the kinja system, it had an old school comment system with hashtags, and when you participated in #speakup, the Kotaku staff would sometimes frontpage your stuff. I got frontpaged more than anyone else by like… three times or something).

So I said something to Totilo like “hey, you already think my work’s front page material, because you keep putting it up there, so why not take the next step and let me freelance?” in an email, he said sure, and on December 19, 2012, I got my first freelance piece published.

Over the years, people have tried to cozy up to me to ask me how to get a job at Kotaku, and I’m like “man, my story’s really weird,” and, well, here you go. You can see it’s weird as shit.

Well, if you look at my Kotaku pieces, you’ll mostly see I was into writing about shooters; the reason was simple: I was really good at it, and also, shooters had a bunch of individual levels you could write about. It got harder as linear shooters went by the wayside and people started moving to open world design. Eventually, Hulk Hogan sued Gawker, and I went from twice-monthly to once a month pieces, and then some really godawful editors took over for Totilo, so gradually I stopped writing for them.

Anywho, in 2015, I was playing a lot of Destiny with my friends, but then Digimon Cyber Sleuth released. I played that thing obsessively, and then some people said “oh, that’s like Shin Megami Tensei” when I was describing it to them, so I looked up SMT… and wouldn’t you know it, there was Persona 5, staring me in the face. I bought it, but had other games to play, so loaned it to a friend, who said he fucking hated it, and that just made me more interested in trying it out, but then Royal came out.

…and then I streamed Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

Somehow, between two Digimon Cybersleuth games (Hacker’s Memory is the… takes-place-at-the-same-time-but-is-a-different-story game, so not a sequel or prequel or interquel. Sidequel?) and Final Fantasy 7 Remake, something in my brain finally clicked, and I was able to get into JRPGs.

I then proceeded to play one hundred and forty-six hours of Persona 5 Royal.

And I fucking loved it.

Going backwards for a moment — between 2009 and 2011, I spent a great deal of time living with family in the Kansas City area getting treated at the University of Kansas hospital in KC. There was a research division that specifically opened up a slot to let me in ’cause a distant family member (who had been my doctor as a kid) was getting studied, his genetics were interesting to them, and he recommended they look into my health as well.

I had managed to get myself an Xbox 360, but I couldn’t afford many games, what with all the hospital time (nobody wanted to hire someone who had to be in the hospital three days a week getting their brain hooked up to an EEG). I downloaded the demo for Catherine. I fell in love with the demo’s whole “people get to hang out together” stuff. I’d never seen games do anything like that before. Even games like The Oregon Trail didn’t really have anything like that. I was entranced.

(other games that heavily influenced me around this period: Dragon Age Awakening, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker — I fucking loved my PSP and hate myself for having to sell it to buy food, but, hey, I needed food)

Fast forward to 2020, when I started playing Persona 5 Royal, and I got to see what Atlus, the makers of Catherine, really cooked with when they had social systems going. I fucking loved it. I loved that whole damn game.

Because I loved my PSP, and I loved Digimon Cybersleuth, and I really loved the ability to transfer my saves between the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation Vita, I got really into Vitas for a while. I still own twenty of them, and hacking them has been a fun, peaceful hobby. I bought Persona 4 for the Vita, thinking I might enjoy it, and then…

Well, look, I start a lot of games, then I feel guilty about not finishing other games, so I go back and play other games instead. So I didn’t play much Persona 4 Golden. And I felt like I should really play Persona 3 first. When my Vita’s memory card got corrupted as I was traveling through the airport at GDC 2019 (yes, I had imported a 128gb card from Japan. My saves just… fuckin died. 255 hours of Digimon, gone), I decided to learn how to hack Vitas so I could get Micro SD cards working on them.

I managed to get my Vita set up to play Persona 3 Portable — the idea of playing as a female protagonist sounded more fun since I’d just finished playing the male protagonist of Joker… but then Persona 4 Golden for PC got announced.

And, well…

I decided to go ahead and play that. I got a ways in… and then Persona 3 Portable came out for PC. So I decided to start playing that. But then Persona 3 Reload got announced, so I decided, hey, fuck it, I’m going to just play Persona 4 Golden, then Persona 3 Reload.

So that is an extremely long way of explaining how I got to Persona 4— but I mean, hey, these pieces are meant to be entertaining reads that you’ll find interesting; I’m not writing at Kotaku now, I don’t need to stay focused, especially not in a piece that’s meant to be 42 completely different articles stapled together. The goal here is to have fun, and this is fun as hell to talk about.

I should probably, like, tell you about the game, huh?

Okay, so, you’re a kid who’s sent off to a small town in Japan to live with his uncle. Your uncle is a single father who is very busy investigating a series of bizarre murders. Persona has moved further and further from its roots of early-aughts Japanese horror culture and urban legends (it’s why Hitler is in Persona 2. Long story.); Persona 1 and 2 have some heavy Boogiepop Phantom and Serial Experiments Lain (both of which were on Anime Unleashed, and yes, I watched them back then on that old black and white TV I was telling you about!) vibes, and Persona 3, which I just finished, has those as well.

Persona 4 leans more towards the urban legend side but pulls back a bit on the horror angle. You end up getting sucked into a television because of one of these urban legends, where you meet a living mascot suit teddy bear, named Teddie, who gives you glasses (Persona 3 uses the gun metaphor, Persona 5 uses masks, and Persona 4 uses… glasses, which I don’t think works as well as the other two) that help you navigate this place.

It’s the same Jungian exploration of character archetypes that you’ll see from the other games, but it was also my first experience with shadows, as opposed to the SMT-style demon negotiation from Persona 5 (and the SMT series).

Between Persona 5 and Persona 4, I managed to finish Soul Hackers, Soul Hackers 2, Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne, and Shin Megami Tensei V, so I’m a much more seasoned SMT player, but I had never encountered Shadows before… and, honestly, they suck. They have no personality. They’re just little monsters with no personality.

Persona 4 is a good game with great characters and the most boring dungeons on earth (until I played Persona 3 Reload, which is about the same), and I think the Persona series got a huge upgrade when it came to the fixed level design of the palaces in Persona 5 Royale.

Ultimately, I liked it a fuckin lot. Just not as much as 5.

I think there’s gotta be a way to get past the “don’t forget to max out your social links by doing x, y, and z every day,” though I heard the original Persona 3 games could go backwards on social links if you did things wrong. I modded the game to help me with some of the decisions and UI (thanks, Persona modders!)

7. Dragon’s Dogma (360, PC — no idea how many hours this was, for reasons you’ll understand below)

Oh. Oh, buddy.

This is a story that starts all the way back on my Xbox 360. I bought the game dirt cheap and used at a Gamestop somewhere, but then shortly after I got started, they announced Dark Arisen, which I believe had a save transfer function, so I went back, bought Dark Arisen, and continued my journey.

The premise is simple: you get your heart ripped out by a dragon, but that won’t stop you, which is why you come back to life. This means you’re The Arisen, a Chosen One character who is supposed to kill the dragon, ostensibly to get your heart back. Yeah, I don’t know how you’re supposed to be alive. There’s a bunch of other stuff happening in the plot, but honestly… it’s not… great. The game does not have an exciting story, but, honestly, it doesn’t need one. I mean, it might benefit from that, but if that’s why you came to Dragon’s Dogma, you’re missing the point.

Series director Hideaki Itsuno (you know, the guy who gave us the best Devil May Cry games and also Rival Schools, one of the greatest game directors of all time) had an idea a long time ago for ‘pawns,’ which are like, soulless, extremely agreeable, deeply loyal weirdoes that aren’t entirely human but look human and can be hired at various monoliths called “riftstones” to do things for you. Like, hey, here’s some robots that look like people.

On a game level, this is actually extremely cool, because you can trade and share pawns, which is how I ended up with an Xbox 360 friend’s pawn in my save. When I transferred that save to PC, Catrin came with, and I had a level 90-something pawn with me right up until the end. When she died. Horribly. That kind of bummed me out. I’d had her for 31.2 hours on the PC, and god knows how many on the Xbox 360 version of the game. Digging up my 360 save and converting it to PC, then replaying 31.2 hours of game, just to bring her back to life… that seemed like a lot. So I didn’t.

Pawns will ‘learn’ things as they play the game, either with you or with their respective players. If my pawn shows up in your game, and she and I did some quests together, she will know where objectives are, and can tell you.

Think about that: a lot of games have map markers, or they have annoying clues you’re supposed to figure out yourself by taking notes or trying to understand (often poorly written) instructions in the quest text. Dragon’s Dogma’s pawns will be like “oh, I’ve actually done this mission in another dimension and I can tell you where this thing is.”

If they fight certain enemies, they’ll learn their weaknesses. They’ll give you advice. This is all extremely cool on a systemic level, even if it is a bit… weird. Honestly, if they weren’t so human-looking, and were instead, I dunno, weird little gremlins or something, I’d feel better about it. But it is hard not to see them as pals during your adventure.

Except when you meet a dragon.

See, dragons have this annoying ability to take over a pawn’s will and make them turn on you, the player. Which means that as I approached a dragon at level 40-something, and it took my friend’s level 90-something pawn Catrin and directed her to kill me, I died a very horrible death.

That was really funny.

And that’s the thing about Dragon’s Dogma — it’s a game that’s trying, in a way, to situate you in a reality, a lot like an immersive sim. My buddy Phil’s been doing a lot of research on immersive sims, and as you probably know, I did a lot as well. A lot of the research I did was between about 2008 and 2017 or so, when I was doing a lot of journalism, so I was a bit rusty, and did a quick dive back into it for my piece. Phil had managed to find a bunch of stuff I’d forgotten, and even some incredible stuff I’d never found myself on Usenet groups and in interviews I’d never located.

One of the most important things to understand about the immersive sim is that Looking Glass is trying to approach the tabletop genre as “what would this tabletop experience be like if you were actually there,” as opposed to Obsidian/Black Isle’s “how can we translate a tabletop experience to the medium of video games?” They’re very different approaches (and Dark Souls is yet another version of this) to thinking about TTRPGs as video games, and I certainly think Looking Glass’ method is my favorite.

Dragon’s Dogma is… a lot like that. They built a world that operates on a fluid, real time, simulated-as-best-as-possible logic. One of the sources Phil shared with me was one of the Looking Glass devs (I want to say Marc Leblanc) pointing out that they don’t make simulations exactly — that is, a toilet might flush, but you’re pressing a button and watching an animation play while a sound plays; an immersive sim wouldn’t actually simulate the plumbing of a building.

Likewise, things happen in Dragon’s Dogma in a way that feels fluid and natural in the moment — you can pick up objects and throw them. Therefore, you can pick up a goblin and throw it off a cliff. Or, maybe, in combat, you will find that a hobgoblin is just as willing to pick up a goblin and throw it at you.

These surprises, these strange, weird, wonderful moments happen all the time in Dragon’s Dogma, and that makes it special.

Then there’s some story thing about how the dragon’s blah blah blah your heart blah blah seneschal blah blah whatever. No one cares about that.

For a while, your One True Love was the person you spoke with the most in the game (see? cool idea) but since most people spoke to the shopkeeper the most, well, players ended up with him as the soul mate a lot. Other people got Fournival a bunch, which led to a very funny webcomic.

They removed this feature in Dark Arisen.

That’s what makes Dragon’s Dogma special: fuckin around in the world and goin on wild adventures where the systems clash in incredible ways. If you’re short, you can travel through small holes. If you’re tall, you can climb things that short people can’t. Funny, weird shit makes that game rule.

8. Crossfire: Legion (PC — 14.7 hours)

I loved working for Blackbird on Hardspace: Shipbreaker. The people there were wonderful, kind, and supportive and gave me a lot of room to do cool stuff.

Crossfire: Legion was them taking their RTS expertise and making a Crossfire spinoff, but… how to put this… none of the Crossfire spinoffs have been particularly good, despite coming from amazing studios (Remedy build the two FPS campaigns, for instance, and Remedy, like Blackbird, made exclusively bangers before Crossfire). I suspect they did it because they needed the pay. It’s a licensed game that I’m guessing did not get the support it needed.

The cutscenes look great, the game feels pretty good, though I had some issues with the AI and pathing and stuff. I dunno; I’d rather you went and played their utterly amazing Homeworld game Deserts of Kharak instead.

Also, and this is just me: I personally dislike “you don’t have a way to build more units” RTS missions. I don’t like having to micro that much. That’s just a me thing.

9: Unicorn Overlord (Switch — 53 hours)

When I started playing Unicorn Overlord, I didn’t touch anything else. I think it was literally all I played for like… two whole weeks? I couldn’t get enough of it.

There’s only one criticism I have about Vanillaware, and that’s that they won’t put their games on PC, which is literally all I want them to do, because they’d make a trillion fuckin dollars if they did. I’m tired of hearing “we went balls to the wall on this game and nearly went bankrupt” when they could be rolling in dough if they’d just. Come. To. The. PC.

As you probably know, I loved 13 Sentinels, and I loved Unicorn Overlord even more. While the story’s not nearly as interesting as 13 Sentinels (though that game, once it started explaining things, got a bit boring, since it turned out it was all basically VR stuff and not actually happening for real, killing any sense of stakes it might have had, and robbing it of a sense of wonder), and is a basic “prince escapes death as a child and returns to reclaim his kingdom from the Evil Wizard Who Deposed Him” story, the characters are fun, the quests are neat, and there’s just something fuckin perfect about the game loop.

The game has… I’d say three layers. You’ve got the overworld, which looks like this:

You can talk to people, gather resources, buy stuff at shops, you know, the usual.

Then you go into missions, which use the same assets as the overworld, but have you selecting a unit and a destination. The unit will then approach that destination. Enemies might run into them (and then combat begins), or they might run into enemies (same thing), or they’ll capture a point, or use a gizmo (like a catapult) and so on and so forth. You basically say “go here, capture this, do shit for me,” and they do it.

Someone told me it’s a lot like one of the Ogre Battle games, so now I have to check out the Ogre Battle series. The flow here is so fuckin’ good.

Then you’ve got a gambit system — like Final Fantasy XII’s ‘program your little guys do to things depending on various statuses in combat’ or Dragon Age Origins’ similar version — and you’ll need it, because the third layer is combat. Thing is, you don’t actually control the combat, you just set the team and their tactics and gear and watch it play out. I really, really like that. It can be tedious to control everyone in a turn-based battle. In this, you’re managing the basic tactics, but leaving decisions up to the units.

I fuckin loved it. The demo is huge, so you should definitely check it out (it’s only on consoles, sadly).

10: Dark Souls 2: Elden Ring: Origins (PC — 81.2 hours; this includes all the DLC)

It’s the best one.

The name Elden Ring: Origins is a joke my buddy Phil often makes, because Yui Tanimura, who was hired to salvage Dark Souls 2 from its previous director, co-directed Elden Ring with Hidetaka Miyazaki. Tanimura is an extremely cool director who brings a fuckin amazing balance to Miyazaki’s design. You ever had a really, really good dish that just feels like it’s missing something?

Tanimura’s whole deal is adding just a little funk to that dish, and he’s amazing at it.

Dark Souls 2 has some of the most memorable, interesting, wonderful things in the Souls series; it’s got some of the highest highs in the series, and never has the lowest lows.

People who hate Dark Souls 2 always seem like people who wanted more of the same; people who just want to bang their heads against hard stuff over and over again, wasting their time, just so they can say “look at me, ma! I beat the hard game!” as if wasting your time repeating content until you get past it makes you a skilled gamer, and not merely a persistent one.

People who like Dark Souls 2 seem to get what Miyazaki and Tanimura go for in all their games; they’re here for the surprise, the weirdness, the cool, wild, interesting shit, like killing a bunch of skeletons with a giant snowball.

Fuck yeah, I loved Dark Souls 2.

Just wish the series had drop in, drop out co-op.

11: I Was a Teenage Exocolonist (PC — 12.9 hours)

I wrote an article on it here. It ended up being one of my most successful articles, at a brisk 47-minute read, so you should just read that.

12: Dune: Spice Wars (PC — 31.4 hours)

I read Dune for a class where I had to read like 32 books in 16 weeks, so I don’t remember much. What I do know is that I get bored of both movie adaptations in the same place (right after everyone gets killed and Tim Dune and his mom have to escape into the Dunes to find a Giant Dune Worm so they can get back to dune what they love: being colonizers), but David Lynch’s version is more visually interesting and the other guy’s is just kind of boring all the time (though I like his sense of scale). David Lynch’s looks as wild as the books as I saw them in my head. Villeneuve’s looks like the Apple Store designers got to design sci-fi. No sense of grandeur. I would literally rather watch Flash Gordon.

Shiro Games makes cool games, and Northgard is one of the best games I have ever played. It follows a weird mini-4X combined with RTS gameplay that can best be described as The Settlers 7, Specifically (which is my favorite Settlers game, being designed in part by Bruce Shelley, one of the greatest game designers of all time — you know him for his work on the Age of Empires games).

Dune: Spice Wars leans more towards the 4X side of things.

13: Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery (PC — 3.5 hours)

This was a cute little adventure game. It was very sweet. I got lost in a couple puzzles.

There’s not a lot to say here; the first adventure game I ever saw anyone play was Putt Putt goes to the moon. My buddy Aaron Curry loves adventure games, and I love watching him play them, but I kind of struggle with most of them. I was able to get through this and was touched by the ending.

14: Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden (PC — 25.6 hours)

AH, SHIT, I FORGOT I HAVE TO FINISH THAT ARTICLE WHERE I REVIEW EVERY ENDING OF NIER AUTOMATA

Voice of Cards is not a card game. Yes, it has the aesthetics of a card game, but it’s actually just like… a very… very basic JRPG. Like, you’ve got turn-based combat. You’ve got an overworld, and every step you take could lead to a random encounter. You’ve got some movement turn-based puzzles that kinda suck (I don’t think I’ve ever liked PS1-style JRPG with a puzzle, like… ever?).

But Yoko Taro wrote it.

And uh, the story is really interesting.

I liked the first one a lot, despite the downer ending (but that’s what Taro’s known for, right? I think he’s more interesting than that — he’s not trying to depress you, he’s trying to communicate something more, and I need to get into that). It’s a really, really good tragic tale.

The second one? I didn’t like that as much, because it was “you need to go to four places,” and I did, and each one followed a story that was predictably-structured and roughly the same size/scale/number of decisions, and then there was a conclusion, and it was over. So I didn’t like it all that much.

The third one? Oh, it’s way better. It has an interesting mystery, some really surprising twists and turns; it might actually be the best one.

And the ending?

Oh, that ending was made for me. I loved it.

But, and I cannot stress this enough, it’s not actually a card game. Everything just looks like cards, like someone is using cards to tell you a story. Even the combat is cards.

15: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch — 120+ hours)

I am not a Zelda-head. I did not grow up with console games, as you can probably guess based on the above. Other than the aforementioned edugames (also GeoSafari, Number Maze, stuff like that) and flight simulators, I mostly didn’t start playing games until I started playing game demos in 2003 thanks to Maximum PC:

This was actually the first Maximum PC issue I ever bought; I wanted to get the August issue, but by the time I biked over to Leeker’s, my local grocery store, to check it out, well… yeah. So I ended up with Chaser and Ghost Master instead; Chaser got me into shooters, even though it was only a multiplayer demo. I destroyed my younger siblings playing that multiplayer a bunch.

Anyways, I’ve tried playing Zelda over the years, but it’s never really clicked with me. I dunno why, but I’ve got no nostalgia for the series. So, when I played Breath of the Wild, I played it in fits and spurts; it was hard for me to really get into the zone, you know? And then I wrote about it for USGamer.

Here’s what someone on Resetera said about my article:

With Tears of the Kingdom, I was playing it with a friend, and then for a bunch of complicated reasons I won’t go into, that stopped. It made me sad, and I miss them every day.

So, for me, picking up Tears of the Kingdom and finishing it in 2024 was closure. I sat down, I booted it up, and I played through it.

Do I think it’s as revelatory as other people say? No. I think it brings Nintendo’s sense of playfulness to the Ubisoft model; a lot of people loved to go “it’s not like Ubisoft at all,” but nah, it is. You still have all the things a Ubisoft game would do — you’ve got towers, you’ve got repeatable minigames all over the map — it just doesn’t, you know, dot the map with them as soon as you climb up a tower, filling you with analysis paralysis. People love to say Nintendo’s doing its own thing… but honestly, with these games, I don’t think that’s really the case.

It’s not as braindead as people who copy that formula directly — instead, they took that basic formula, changed some things, and then focused on the moment to moment play, excelling where Ubisoft fails — and they made something that’s genuinely fun to play. I think it’s a big upgrade over the last game, even though there are times where it feels like the Banjo & Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts gameplay might detract from the experience. At other times, figuring out how to do cool stuff by moving things around the environment to build things to solve puzzles makes you feel like a genius.

The Switch says I have “over 120 hours” in it. I, uh. I did a lot.

Some people say it’s an immersive sim because of the environment interactions; I don’t think it is. The seams are too visible, the game too much of a toybox to be a simulation. But it is really cool and once I got in the groove, I got in the fuckin groove.

Way better final boss than the last one.

16: Homeworld 3 (PC — 7.3 hours)

Homeworld 2’s demo was in the November 2003 demo disc from Maximum PC, and man, I played that obsessively. I also played the full game when it came out; I know, I know, a lot of people prefer the first, but Homeworld 2 was the one for me. When the Bentusi sacrificed themselves… man, that gave me chills.

Homeworld 3’s story doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t work for me at all. The game is fuckin gorgeous, though, but it feels like going from a series with two brilliant games told on an epic scale down to a sort of sci-fi monster-of-the-week style story. I found a few of the fights a little too frustrating.

I get it; it’s hard to make a game in zero G, adding that vertical axis to the gameplay. I just… I dunno. I come to these games for the story, and I didn’t feel that this story understood what made the previous stories so brilliant.

17: A Place, Forbidden (PC — definitely not the 6.8 hours Steam says I played it for; I bet I ran it on idle master to get trading cards or something)

It’s a neat little PS1 horror game.

As one of the people who worked on one of the first PS1 horror games, I check in on PS1 horror games from time to time, and there’s some really neat ones out there. I’d like to do another myself, but I got my hands full right now.

This was one of those games. It’s doing something different from what I was thinking; it’s a game where you go on a loop through a library that might actually just be an eldritch monster, which is a very neat idea (I’m a sucker for horror involving books). Some of the puzzles, I had to look up a guide to figure out, but I’m not much of a puzzle guy. Neat little experience.

18: Hot Springs Story 2 (PC — 17.9 hours)

This time, it’s a Kairosoft game where you run a hot spring. I had fun.

19: Shin Megami Tensei: Vengeance (PC — 59.8 hours)

So, I played the original Shin Megami Tensei V for like, I dunno, 80-some hours, I think, on the Nintendo Switch. Couldn’t put it down. Loved it to pieces, though, admittedly, I did use the “use a spyglass to determine the weakness of the XP magatama DLC guys and use them to get DLC stuff so you don’t have to grind” tactic part way through because the grind is not why I play these games.

I did the same thing here. I think it’s an essential way to play, because, honestly, grinding just isn’t fun. It’s just playing the combat over and over again to get XP to beat an arbitrary gate, and who wants to do that? I wanna do quests and story and the fun fights.

And man, let me tell you, I absolutely did beat Shiva on Switch. That was fuckin nuts.

This time, I played Vengeance, which is a similar story — you hear about montsers in Tokyo, you go into a tunnel and emerge into Tokyo in what seems to be the future, but is the actual real Tokyo, which has been destroyed in an unspecified event (that might be the events of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne). You are saved by Aogami, who’s like… Ultraman, kind of. If he was normal sized. Fused, the two of you and your glorious hair run around fighting monsters, trying to save your missing friends and kill demons. Then you find out Tokyo was actually destroyed and the Tokyo you’ve been living in is a miracle pocket reality created by God, who was recently killed by Lucifer, which sucks. So you go kill Lucifer and save the world by remaking it.

In Vengeance, new characters are added, like Agrat, who is fuckin awesome:

This time, there’s a new character in the main plot (who I won’t spoil), and instead of going to Chiyoda, you go to Shinjuku, which has a ton of new quests and demons to meet. It’s a slight retelling, a different story worth playing on its own, not quite as drastic as I understand SMTIV: Apocalypse to be from SMTIV, but still worth playing.

Plus, it’s just insanely fun to run around that world playing Ultraman with pretty hair.

I didn’t touch anything else until I finished SMTVengeance. What a fuckin banger.

20: Indika (PC — 3.5 hours)

Indika is a miracle of a game. Utterly wonderful, doing things with its camera and level design that are meant to be impressionistic as much as anything. It’s a fascinating story, has the best kiss in a video game, and is an intriguing look into the life of an Orthodox nun who gets kicked out. The way it grapples with faith and meaning is spectacular. I highly urge you to play it.

21: The Bookwalker (PC — 7.5 hours)

Okay, imagine Disco Elysium but with the magical realism cranked up crazy hard. It’s an isometric adventure game with some RPG elements — though it’s got combat, not just dialogue, just like Disco Elysium, and just as clever but with an even more intriguing world.

I loved the developer’s last game — The Final Station — despite it being a sidescroller, a genre I normally don’t like, for its beautiful mood. This is an even more impressive piece of art, and I loved every second of it. Highly recommended, with a beautiful ending.

I don’t want to say much because I really want you to jump in, play it, and have your mind blown.

22: Dark Souls III (PC, including all DLC)

A fitting end to a series of games I started playing with some friends in co-op a few years back. I really liked it; it’s definitely the best-playing game in the series.

I’m not sure what else there is to say: it’s more Dark Souls, it’s got no real story of which to speak. It has some amazing bits, some infuriating fights (looking at YOU, basement dragon of the dlc castle who lost your soul to madness), getting invaded is annoying when you’re just trying to dick around with your pals and people specifically built to kill you are coming in while you’re being specifically built to have fun dicking around killing monsters.

It’s fun to do wild shit, run away from monsters. The series is still funny, because of the amount of snakes-in-a-can design. It always feels like Miyazaki is laughing and wants you to laugh along with him at how silly, how fun, how weird everything else.

Also, saying goodbye to Patches was… weirdly touching, and the best possible way you could say goodbye.

It was the end of a long journey.

Then me and the boys fired up Stranger of Paradise so we could keep having fun dicking around in co-op dungeons together.

23: Borderlands 3 (PC, some of the DLC, 71.5 hours)

One day, Anthony Burch tweeted that he wanted to co-op the first Borderlands with some people. I said “sure, I’ll play it with you.” At the time, he was known for Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin, a comedy show with his sister, and his Destructoid criticism pieces, which were quite good. Dude was actually a pretty good critic, which was why I followed him.

He didn’t respond within a couple hours, so I fell asleep, and woke up to a message from him asking if I was still good — buuuuut I’d slept like 12 hours, cause of the chronic fatigue stuff, and missed out.

The next time we interacted, he had been a writer on Borderlands 2 and The Pre-Sequel, which had The Left 4 Dead 2 problem of “we know why people liked this game, and it was the standout character, so let’s do more of that.” He was upset that people didn’t like the woman who kept sexually harassing other women in the game, suggesting that people might be homophobic for not liking her. My response was “I played as Athena, who repeatedly indicated in the script that she didn’t like Janey. And Moxxi constantly talked shit about her… everybody did. Honestly, all the characters we know we like told us not to like this person, and playing as Athena, I felt kinda harassed by her attention. It wasn’t homophobia — the game itself told everyone nobody liked her.”

His response, as I recall, was “huh.”

Then for some reason, she was like, Athena’s wife in Tales From the Borderlands, which sucked.

I do not think Burch worked on Borderlands 3, but it did feel a bit like the people who picked up Borderlands 3 had some more of the “let’s do more of what made Borderlands 2 work,” except the villains are now streamers, but they feel like they’re written by people who do not watch or like streamers, finding them annoying (because so many of them are) without finding why people like them, so they end up just… not being people you actually like hating.

So Borderlands 3 feels like it exists not because some people came in with fresh new ideas to make something interesting, it feels like it exists because it’s a series that made money. Everything I’ve heard about Gearbox sounds like it’s a neat place to work and people enjoy working there, which is cool, despite Randy Pitchford’s general weirdness overall (and the USB drive incident), but the game, I dunno, man.

The levels kinda suck compared to the previous ones. The quests had way more poop jokes than I remember. This game just… I mean, other than the combat feeling fucking great (it was like they played Destiny and realized they had to get better, and it shows), Borderlands 3 just did not need to exist.

But it was also a COVID casualty, and honestly, yeah, that’s gonna fuck up your games (look at Lost Judgement).

I think the reason the levels suck is because the Borderlands 2 levels, much like Destiny’s best levels, are donuts, as opposed to spoke and hub levels, which was the issue Destiny 2 ran into, and the issue that Borderlands 3 runs into. They’re annoying to navigate, with hardly any fast travel points, so you end up just… wasting time moving around. I want more purpose, you know?

Yeah, I dunno, Borderlands 3 had gameplay so fun that I tuned out the rest of the game and just ran around blowing shit up. And then I played the DLC, and let me tell you: of the ones I have played to completion, the Bounty of Blood DLC is fucking incredible. Krieg’s DLC is… okay, but floating rocks in someone’s dreamscape is something I find boring. Had some great storytelling and quests in it, just boring environments.

I’m gonna finish the other DLC with a friend this year; our schedules just don’t mesh that well. Love the Tentacles DLC so far. Not really wild about the Casino, but Casino Themed Levels always annoy the shit out of me. I don’t know why, I just hate the aesthetic. My friend swears that DLC gets better, though. But yeah, I’d say Tentacles and Cowboys are fantastic DLCs that make the whole thing worth it.

Killing off Yet Another Character just felt like repeating Roland’s death. I dunno. Creatively, I hope the people in charge of the DLCs I liked get more power over Borderlands 4.

24: Atomic Heart (PC, including the Annihilation Instinct DLC — 32.1 hours)

I forgot I preordered this on Gamersgate like one trillion years ago, but then I got an email letting me know my preorder was ready, so uh, well, uh, cool I guess.

When the game first came out, a lot of people said “don’t buy this, you’re somehow supporting the Russian government in its fight against Ukraine.” Since I’d bought it literally years before the invasion and couldn’t verify how this was allegedly supporting the government, I figured I might check it out.

One of the other accusations I heard was that this game was “incredibly” Pro-Russian. That ended up being bullshit — this game is one of many games in Eastern European science fiction that deal with the idea of a scientist who builds a machine to get everyone thinking along the same lines, and why that’s really bad. In the process, it utterly skewers the Russian government and criticizes it thoroughly for both the way it demands compliance and insists on imperialism. The entire game is about the protagonist being too stupid to realize blind patriotism will only lead to disaster, until he realizes just how much his patriotism has cost him.

I suspect that the criticism was less of a truthful evaluation of the game and more of a “we banned Russian dressing in our restaurant because it has Russia in the name” type of thing (that actually happened, by the way. Utterly wild). Someone wanted to do something and that was the best they had. I spoke with some people who worked on the game who indicated the experience was… kind of a clusterfuck.

It’s… an okay shooter. I get the Bioshock comparisons, which is weird, because I still struggle to articulate what makes a game a Bioshock as opposed to an open world shooter. Cyberpunk is not a Bioshock, but Atomic Heart is. Why? I dunno. Maybe it’s the way it handles interactibles in the environment, maybe it’s the way the environment is a theme park that’s falling apart, I’m not sure. There’s an article there.

The enemies are too spongey and fall prey to the “robots aren’t people so they don’t react, which, of course, makes them boring to fight” problem. The game spawns infinite waves of enemies, which is annoying. It loves knocking the player down, which is. not. fun. I heard there’s more DLC coming, but I don’t feel any particular pull to play them, which should tell you how I felt about Atomic Heart.

Fun at times, interesting and pretty, but ultimately… it had way too many unpleasant elements in the gameplay that hurt it.

Great soundtrack, though.

25: Trepang2 (PC — 10.3 hours)

FEAR is the best combat a shooter has ever had in a number of ways — hit feedback, enemy AI, level design (but not level art). At the time, it was also one of the most visually impressive games ever (again, not because of the level art) thanks to the way it handled particles and lighting. In 2005, that was the best games had ever looked; an absolute miracle of a thing.

The story wasn’t… quite there, the fusion of J-horror and Hong Kong action was interesting but not super successful. I remember exactly two characters from that game: Norton Mapes and Paxton Fettel.

Paxton was your generic, like, “i’m the evil version of you… i work for mother… i eat the brains of people… and command super soldiers…” But it didn’t really work out in a very interesting way in the gameplay. He said he did that, but when you were fighting the dudes, it felt like you were just fighting regular dudes. The true horror of a hive mind never quite came out in the game.

And Norton? Well, he was a No One Lives Forever 2 character stuck in FEAR somehow.

Right. So. Trepang2 is like… it’s got some “oh god what the fuck is that” horror that I think is actually better than what FEAR is doing, though without the budget, it can’t pull off the kind of characterization and voice acting Monolith could.

This is an impressive game in a lot of ways. Rather than a linear shooter, it has a series of linear missions (and some combat sandboxes to stretch your fighting muscles) combined with side missions you can pick up from the world map. The plot goes about how you’d expect it to go — the organization you work for was using you and they were actually the bad guys — but like… we play these games for the combat, y’know?

And the combat sings. The sound mix doesn’t quite capture the emphasis on enemy soldiers telling you what they’re doing so you have combat awareness at all times, which is the secret sauce that makes FEAR work, but man, the guns feel amazing to shoot, they sound amazing, everything about them is amazing. This game fuckin rules, man.

It plays a bit better than FEAR at times, though it doesn’t quite have the same focus on emphasizing particles or enemy ragdolls, so while the guns feel better, the impact doesn’t always feel quite as good. But, again, this game’s team was a fraction of the size and budget of FEAR’s, so I’d say they did amazing work.

The only thing I didn’t like was the final boss. I could not process how to fight him effectively; everything I knew about how to play the game felt like it went out the window. The best bosses are final exams, and I didn’t quite feel like that with him.

I fuckin loved Trepang2.

26: Dark Pictures: Little Hope (PC)

This might be one of the stupidest fucking games I have ever played. In the end it was all a dream, or some shit. Apparently, it started life as a Silent Hill pitch, but… ugh. God. Look, I rarely dislike a game this much, but I disliked the shit out of this one.

That monster? Just a guy on a bike. THAT monster? Didn’t exist. The actual story? All in the head of a bus driver? Whose… passengers died in the crash? And you were playing as those passengers?

Never before have I left a game as aggressively as this one going “then what was it all for?”

Until Dawn was one of my favorite games; it feels like nearly everything the studio made after copies the template — the butterfly effect system, the clues that give you brief clips of ways people die (but not enough clues to understand what killed them, so I guess it’s more of a peek into an alternate history, or a premonition of what happens — it’s information you receive). The characters have become archetypes — people who fight over the dumbest shit, personalities that the game seems to think you should be okay with dying, rather than building tension by making you feel “I like these characters so I don’t want them to die.”

The result is a game where you don’t care whether anyone lives or dies, and then you find out the game didn’t either, because they never lived or died to begin with. They were just… all in the head of a bus driver who felt guilty, I guess.

The best game the studio made aside from Until Dawn is the murder house one. I liked that one.

27: Astro Bot (PS5 — no idea how much I played it, no idea how to find out)

This is a game that put a smile on my face except for those challenge missions. It’s one of the best 3D platformers in years, just an utter joy to play.

I saw some people posting some weird takes about how the game’s love for PlayStation is bad because, like, corporations are bad, but this strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of how humans function. These games entertained us, they were part of us, they influenced us. To express love for that isn’t a bad thing.

It’s really no different than playing Mario, which is just Nintendo’s Brand. The Mario games are always kind of, like, narratively empty, simplistic little things. They’re fun, excellently-executed platformers that reuse the same little fellas (to the point where, for a while there, Nintendo wanted you to buy toys to get content in the game! DLC but worse!). There’s really no difference.

I liked the game a lot because it was fun and cute and hilarious and a great time except for those STUPID HARD FUCKING LEVELS THAT TRICKED ME REPEATEDLY!!! AAAARGH

(the real issue is that because of how astro bot works, the controls can be a bit mushy and that’s frustrating in the levels that require ultra-precision)

28: Star Wars: Jedi Survivor (PC — 40.8 hours)

This game had awful microstuttering problems, which sucked, so I put in a mod to fix it, which worked, until they patched the game, which broke it, but then I uninstalled the game and it worked.

I liked it. I mean, look, fuck the Jedi. They’re the least interesting thing about Star Wars. People who like Jedi are people who like playing Wizards in games — they don’t want characters who struggle or have to try or anything, they want to be Part of Something, they want to have The Cool Laser Sword, they want to be Born With Special Powers. I fuckin hate the Jedi, which is why The Last Jedi was one of my favorite Star Wars movies.

Also Cal just… kind of sucks. Like… he feels very… corporate. He has vague hero qualities — let’s help people, let’s ‘inspire’ courage and hope — but these are all ill-defined things.

GOOD THING RESPAWN MADE THIS GAME, THEN!!

Gone is the floaty bullshit of the last Jedi game, Fallen Order. This shit plays way more tightly, though still not as beautifully tight as Titanfall 2 or Ninja Gaiden Black. It’s fun. It’s got that oh-so-soothing “oh! I can go to this or that thing!”

It’s got… kind of a shit map that’s hard to actually process, but I’m not sure if that’s implementation or just the basic nature of having to try to make a map work with level design this tight. Honestly, I wish I could mark a location on a map, tell the game to take me there, and then just follow the markers, ’cause man, sometimes this shit is hard to remember which specific door I need to go through. At the same time, I appreciate how it highlighted doors I hadn’t or couldn’t open yet, which made it easier to remember “oh, right, I can progress now because I got the thing to unlock the other thing!”

Basically, I shut my brain off and had a great time. I didn’t care for the story — though at times it was touching and good — because that ending was so goddamn fucking stupid (man so desperate to save his daughter, he takes her to a mysterious planet that is on the other side (which means, in space, you could go around) some anomalous thing). I thought there would be this whole big act revealing that the planet was making people act weird (everyone who wants to go there except Cal and company gets really possessive over it, it’s weird), but that didn’t pay off.

Seriously, the story is like “a jedi finds a planet that’s a pain in the ass to get to. He makes it a sanctuary. He has to abandon it and goes fucking psychotic for some reason. There’s these weird black crystal growths everywhere throughout the story that imply some kind of weird shit is happening. That never goes anywhere. Eventually, you kill his ass. But then your best bud, who’s actually an imperial spy, goes “I am going to go to this planet with my daughter! The Empire can’t get to her!” even though he seems to be living a nice, cushy life with her just fine inside the Empire (he was a spy). Then you go to the planet and he literally nearly kills his own daughter with his obsession over living on the planet with her to keep her safe.”

What are the weird black crystal growths? IDK. Why do people get weirdly, like, psychotically, Treasure of the Sierra Madre obsessed with this planet? I do not fucking know. Why couldn’t people just go around the anomaly to get to the planet? This is never explained.

The game is fuckin great when you’re meeting weird little dudes who have fun stories to tell you. It’s one of the only sci-fi games that understands what space should feel like (big and old and remote and wild west-y). It has a ton of different aliens rather than just Star Trek People With Weird Funny Bits Attached; they feel really Henson company, which is awesome.

I loved the fucking hilarious boss who died in one hit (it’s a gag, you’ll know when you encounter it). I loved playing a lot of it (after the opening chapters where you’re weak as shit).

But, like, dude, why would you go to a remote planet that doesn’t have running water or a toilet or food or anything? How are you gonna live? And like, Cal’s literally saying “we also want to live free of the empire. What if we joined forces, bro?” and for some reason he’s like “NO! I WILL LITERALLY MURDER YOU!!! AND MY OWN DAUGHTER!! TO KEEP THIS PLANET SAFE! FOR MY DAUGHTER!”

It’s like they had a whole act planned for the planet, got told “wrap it up,” and had to ship without the, like, important payoff.

29: Chiaroscuro Imago (PC — probably 45 minutes)

If you’ve noticed, the shorter a game is, the less I say, because I can tell you lots about a 40 hour game without ruining the experience for you; I have a wealth of choices and moments to choose from that I can tell you about.

Chiaroscuro Imago is neat. I think you should play it. I’m grateful to my friend Joe Wintergreen for mentioning it. What I think this game does well is the build and payoff. That’s all I’ll say. You should buy it and then play it and then tell other people to buy it and play it.

30: Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna: The Golden Country (Switch, about 28 hours)

This is an expandalone so I consider it a full game.

Xenoblade Chronicles is a series of loosely connected games that play like MMOs, but are actually singleplayer JRPGs. I like each and every one of them a great deal, and always find them immensely satisfying to play, even though I think they can often be stupid as shit at times.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a game where you have people called drivers, and people-who-aren’t-people called blades. Blades are basically Pawns from Dragon’s Dogma but instead of being helpful or useful, they do a bunch of fighting alongside you, and you can switch between them and the driver in combat. They’re the ones with the cool flashy powers and stuff. For whatever reason, they’re like… people, but bound to the driver somehow.

Pyra is the blade, Rex is the driver. But Pyra is actually Mythra, who’s like a super special driver, and she has a rivalry with two dudes who were designed by Tetsuya Nomura, of Kingdom Hearts fame. Also there was this kid she knew who became a kind of blade-human hybrid who shows up in Xenoblade Chronicles 2. That’s a whole other thing. All of these characters, minus Rex, show up in Torna: The Golden Country, which is a prequel, about how they all knew each other before Rex was born.

Xenoblade Chronicles was really good. The remake was even better, thanks to the power of Quality of Life fixes. Xenoblade Chronicles X was a sprawling hellscape mess that I loved anyways, because how could anyone not? Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has fewer quality of life elements as Xenoblade Chronicles’ remake for Switch, but it’s still really fun to play, despite how annoying Rex, the player character is.

I like the grand, sprawling epics of these stories, though the character beats never quite work. Do I buy Pyra and Rex falling for each other? No. There’s zero chemistry there, even though there’s some really fuckin great moments throughout Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

Torna tells us the story of why the hot dudes Nomura designed used to hate each other, and why they now work together (because you get to play as one guy’s driver, who got put on ice). Also, it tells us why Mythra becomes Pyra.

Thing is, much like Yakuza 0, which was allegedly gonna show us how Majima became the crazy Majima we all knew and loved, it… kind of doesn’t do a great job showing why Mythra becomes Pyra. She goes a bit nuts one time someone is in danger and is like “welp, time to lock myself into a box.” It doesn’t match with Mythra’s personality, which is way more, uh, “I know I’m basically a god and I don’t care what you think about me” characterization for… the entirety of Torna.

There’s nowhere near enough character development, is what I’m saying. Ideas show up in one game or the other, never to be answered. With Xenoblade 2, I’m left wondering “they knew going into Torna that these hooks were left open, so why didn’t they answer them?” With Torna, I’m left going “why would you introduce things you knew wouldn’t show up in Xenoblade 2?”

But… they’re still grand, sprawling epics that are deeply fun to just run around and do shit in. Torna’s much more streamlined than the 100+ hour Xenoblade.

It’s just… lots of ideas, some of which don’t work. Like, there’s a community system. You become friends with people by doing their quests, and they join. Except it’s so weirdly paced, rather than consistent growth, it takes forever to do anything, and when it does, uh… I’m not actually sure what it does as a function. Why does that system exist? What does it do? What does bringing people into my community accomplish? It just seems like a list of people I have finished quests with?

So, I dunno. It’s weird. I liked it a lot. It was a bit of a hot mess, but like, you ever just really like a hot mess?

31: How Fish is Made (PC, 35 minutes)

Surreal. Weird. Short. Free. Play it.

32: The Quarry (PC, 17.6 hours)

“Doc, you are normally very favorable toward video games, and have repeatedly stated that you love games on the whole and want them to all be good, and you’re sad when they’re bad. But then you had some harsh things to say about

The Quarry is like that but with more money. Also, Justice Smith feels like he only got one draft or received bad direction or had never done motion capture before, ’cause he’s fuckin great in everything he’s in except this; some of the other characters emote way better, do more, share more.

But the whole “characters falling into archetypes, systems being repeated because they were in previous games.” It’s like they’re afraid to do anything to change the formula that made one of their games work, without realizing it was never the formula, it was the genuinely varied and interesting characters with strong motivations that drove their actions and made the plot interesting.

Peter Stormare as your psychologist ostensibly helping treat you after the events of the game (leading to a sense of “wait, who am I? who is the survivor?”) was fun. It… made a little sense to have The Dark Pictures guy function a lot like Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone. But by The Quarry? Man, what are you even doing. The ghost of the mom talking to the player to suggest she’ll haunt you if you don’t do what she wants? Lame.

It has a better plot than most of The Dark Pictures games, but the characters are… ehnh.

Thing is, I actually wanted to play this one, like, immediately upon its release. I was so excited for it because I’d just played Until Dawn and was excited for more of that.

…and then it ate my saves, despite advertising cloud saving on the Steam store. It actually didn’t have cloud saves. I thought maybe it was an error and tried again. I lost them for a second time. So I told myself “fuck it, I can’t replay up to where I was, I’ll come back later.” And I did. I did not love The Quarry.

33: STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl (PC, 65.8 hours)

Worth the wait.

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (with the AMK mod) is my favorite game. I love Clear Sky just as much. Call of Pripyat? Ehnh. Not so much.

Why? The simplest answer is that Clear Sky and Shadow of Chernobyl are the best immersive sims ever made, games that place you in a world and do everything in their power to create a reality so logically coherent that if you think you ought to be able to do something within the specific fantasy, you can. It is a holodeck adventure where you are a Stalker, doing Stalker things, in the Stalker place, known as the Zone.

Call of Pripyat is a traditional RPG in a difficult environment, which brings it more in line with a lot of the mods that tried to ‘improve’ on STALKER. Gamers fuckin hated that Clear Sky’s world was so alive, missions could pop up and then fail when monsters killed the guy who gave the mission to you, which was weird, since so many of those same gamers would crank the difficulty to max, get ganked by a monster, die themselves, and say “such is life in the zone.” That’s the thing about STALKER; the Zone is a harsh place to everyone living within it, not just you. I get it: when you want the world to revolve around you, and you get “mission failed” because some boars killed a guy begging for grenades, it makes you feel bad, but such is life in The Zone, motherfucker.

STALKER 2 tries to file off some of the harsher edges of the first two games while keeping the simulation intact. It fails at some of this, in part because the team was making the game while a war was on, and if there’s one thing I know about war, it’s that it makes it hard to do things you’d be doing if there wasn’t a war on. Every game ever made is a miracle; STALKER 2’s existence, is thus a double miracle, because it’s a game made during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s a shame that the credits had a section dedicated to people who died in the war. Fuckin christ.

A couple people I know have shared stories about how, after STALKER got popular, people would flock to the company, work for a bit, then leave, so they could claim to have credits working on STALKER. In the fourteen years since Call of Pripyat (has it really been that long? wow), STALKER lay dormant. Now, it seems, the people who worked on it are people who wanted to work on it.

This is a game that is rich with love for what STALKER is; while I am sad some of the maps have changed and are no longer recognizable from how they used to be, I was delighted by the places I did remember. The PDA sound design is still the same; the characters that return include some really fun deep cuts.

Not everything is perfect — as expect of a STALKER game, particularly one this complex, I did have to do some modding to fix some broken quests and continue with the game, and found other bugs that confuse me (like the invulnerable soldiers outside of one specific location that made it impossible to return to easily).

Redditors tried to claim A-Life wasn’t in the game; GSC made it clear that it was, but not working properly, and they’ve worked hard to improve it. It’s not often you can see this kind of passion in a game — and trust me, most devs I know are deeply passionate about the projects they work on, even (contrary to what streamers out for clicks might tell you) on AAA projects. But this? This is on a whole other level. This is people who understand STALKER at a very deep level putting every ounce of pride and joy into it.

What a wonderful fucking game.

And yes.

Insofar as I ever pick a Game of the Year, STALKER 2 is it.

34: Arctic Eggs (PC, 1.8 hours)

Gorgeous and weird, Arctic Eggs is a puzzle game where you have to fry objects in a pan until they are done frying. You have to do this by moving the pan. The objects are physics objects.

Sometimes they are bullets.

Yeah.

35: Babbdi (PC, 30 minutes)

This feels like an art project more than anything. Just some brothers showing you what they can do. Some of the signs made me wonder if they were made with AI art or something, cause the way they handle words feels less like actual words and more like the way AI will generate word-shaped objects. But… the fonts seem consistent, so it seems more like they were just doing something weird. Like, in the picture above, it says “Destrarant” which is something you’d see in AI art, you know? But with font consistency like that, and the fact it was made in 2022, I doubt it.

I thought it was visually pretty interesting and free, and I like games like this, games that put you in a weird place and let you dick around. Reminded me of Bernband, which is pretty high praise coming from me.

36: Kinki Spiritual Affairs Bureau (PC, 6.4 hours)

Kinki Spiritual Affairs Bureau is a weirdly smart third person J-horror game that might be one of the fucking funniest things I have ever played in my life. It had me and the people I was streaming to in stitches. In a way, it’s Call of Duty lite, but rather than a bad Call of Duty lite, like Duty Calls (the Bulletstorm free tie-in game that makes fun of Call of Duty), it was more like… well, remember what I said about Borderlands not getting why people liked streamers?

KSAB feels like it was made by someone who legit enjoys Call of Duty, knows exactly why it’s fun, and made a game that lovingly parodies the genre conventions while also being a story that takes Japan to task for war crimes it has committed for the sake of national pride. It feels like someone who’s both an adept comedian, literate game designer, and insightful political voice angry at the world they got and determined to build a better one.

I fuckin loved it. This is also my game of the year, tied with STALKER 2.

37: Sprawl (PC, 7.4 hours)

It could be a little bit too challenging at times, and I was not a fan of the voice acting, but Sprawl was fun as fuck, a game with both modern movement sensibilities and a very late-90s/early-aughts combat flair.

There isn’t a lot to say other than: this is literally the best boomer shooter there is, and the soundtrack is divine. It got a bit much for me at times in terms of raw intensity, and it runs into the weird issue that most boomer shooters have where, for some reason, they insist on not having quicksave even though literally all the good PC shooters did back in the day. That meant I had to stop playing frequently, sometimes for weeks at a time, before coming back to it.

Really good shooter, though. Some fucking phenomenal art and level design, though sometimes I wasn’t quite sure where I was supposed to go. Better checkpointing and having quicksave would’ve made this a masterpiece.

38: Dungeon Village 2 (PC, 97.4 hours)

This is my favorite Kairosoft game. I beat it on Android before, but decided I wanted another Kairosoft game and didn’t quite gel with the others I tried (I wanted a city builder specific Kairosoft game, and decided to try this again on PC).

The 97.4 hours are because I left it running while I was asleep a couple times. Oops.

39: Minami Lane (PC, 2.3 hours)

A cute little puzzler game. Just the right amount of “you gotta pay attention” to “you can relax,” I felt.

40: Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth (PS5, but here’s the Steam link; 89 hours and 53 minutes, which I pulled directly from the save data, which is why it’s not a decimal like Steam)

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is a game that had me in tears (on stream, no less, but I wasn’t on camera so nobody could tell) by the end. It’s also one of the worst designed AAA games I have ever played, an uneven mess that doesn’t know what it wants to be, or does know what it wants to be, but is afraid to say no.

This is a game that feels the need to show you an animation of cloud turning on a tower, and then showing the tower lighting up the environment, and then having an annoying character Chadley pop up on your communication device to tell you that he’s acknowledged you have done this and there’s totally things to do (every single time), and then you return to regular camera mode, but first, a little user interface bit pops up, and you watch it slowly fill up the pips in a bar to let you know you’ve done something, and then you regain control.

I would rather climb every single Assassin’s Creed tower and get rewarded — because in Assassin’s Creed, it’s a reward of an amazing scenic vista! The towers are literally put in places designed to emphasize various areas of the game! they’re just haphazardly there in Final Fantasy 7— than I would have to ever unlock any of the towers in Rebirth.

I played it a lot. I loved playing it. I looked forward to talking to my friend Laur about it, but it was during that first stream when I got the call saying she’d passed away. That… made it hard to play for a while, but I got back to it. That’s also what made the ending hit that hard. It’s why I’m tearing up right now, just thinking about it. I miss her. I miss her so much.

When it comes to Rebirth… I dunno, man. You build ATB — the thing that lets you do moves — by hitting enemies, but a bunch of enemies are not meant to be hit. Sometimes you’re put in fights with a combination of characters that do not work with the combination of enemies provided.

Good game design is not design-by-spreadsheet. Years ago, a buddy of mine talked with me about how you could design guns by breaking it into component bits — does the player click the trigger or hold it, for instance, or what kind of elemental damage could it do? — and then you could build a big spreadsheet of all possibilities and design weapons from that. He and I had been thinking about the same thing, so it was a really fun conversation to have.

The problem with this is, that’s a great way to build ideas, but not all of the ideas work together. You might invent novel combinations, but just because something is novel doesn’t mean it’s good. Novel good and novel bad both exist; you want your game to have novel good combinations.

So when you have a character who is more about supporting other characters (hi, Aerith), and you put her in a solo fight with an enemy that wants to be hit in melee a lot and fast, well, you’re gonna run into a bit of a problem. This is definitely not just an Aerith problem. Don’t put Barret in a fight where he has to fucking dodge, the man is designed as a tank. All of his abilities make him a tank! That’s what he does!!!

Other enemies seem designed with stuff like “hit me in the back to stagger me,” but then they constantly turn to face you like all the other enemies in the game, so of course you don’t build that up enough. Combine that with a really annoying, feels-like-biting-a-metal-fork-and-wincing “oh, you struck me and your sword bounced off!” animation/sound effect, and it can be an exercise in frustration.

There are a lot of sidequests; some of them are delightful, others not so much. The game has multiple deserts, because they expanded a big chunk of the game here, to make it worth the wait. Each game in this trilogy is roughly one disk of Final Fantasy 7, a game that was about 35 hours long originally — this middle installment alone was nearly 90 hours long in my playthrough, and I didn’t even do every minigame. I think I left one quest undone.

It feels like the game was designed on paper, with every single possible permutation of encounter design written down, then dutifully put into the game so they could have everything, but it also feels like most of the actual systems were designed that way as well. You see, the game prioritizes animations over game feel, which means being annoyed as fuck by the weirdly complicated “make your chocobo sniff out treasure by pressing buttons on the d-pad” stuff, or the aforementioned “trying to unlock a tower” stuff. You’re constantly sitting there waiting for animations to play out, or having to deal with fiddly controls in 3D because the game wants to look amazing, and it seems like no one ever considered how it might feel.

It feels like Rebirth needed people on board the team who could actually sit there and tell people how 3D games ought to feel. The last mainline game in the series, Final Fantasy XVI, despite its failure as a narrative, and despite its atrocious pacing, felt really good to fucking play (because, of course, Dragon’s Dogma’s combat designer was also the combat designer on XVI). Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth… not so much.

Just a big goddamn fucking mess of a game, with some fucking amazing character interactions, jawdropping set pieces, hilarious “why the fuck did they do this? I love it” sequences. I loved playing it half the time, but the longer I got, the worse its lack of flow got to me, and the more annoying some of its encounters got.

This game needed focus.

There’s a bit near the end where you can tell Aerith is saying goodbye to Cloud, because she knows what’s gonna happen. It’s beautiful, it’s heartrending. It’s powerful.

Then she rejoins you for a boss battle a few minutes later against Sephiroth, because of course she does.

And then Zack does a weird exit that undercuts everything — the best way I can describe it is Kingdom Hearts style “bye! see you later! I have a big smile on my face and am leaving on a silly slide” ending I’ve ever seen in a fucking game.

Rebirth could more effectively communicate some of its concepts. It could do more with what it had. It could explore more possibilities — it could be a better game. They just… tried to do fucking everything, and it hurt the experience. This could have been my game of the year if it had been focused.

I’m so glad it was brave enough to try lots of cool, silly, fantastic shit. I just… wish it was better.

Also, what was the story even about? Several people I trust have said similar things. Sephiroth is, like… dead. But also, you’re trying to stop him? You go through a series of encounters, but because the game is still beholden to what the original was doing, it doesn’t have much of a story. It feels like a filler arc. The characters are just waiting around before finally figuring out they should go stop Sephiroth from getting the black materia, which they do by… taking actions that give him the black materia. Beyond that, they’re just following Organization 13 — er, the Sephiroth clones — around.

I was so excited going into this with Intergrade — I loved playing as Yuffie, and her story was genuinely touching. There’s a bit where we get to witness Aerith as a child that’s literally heartbreaking. There are some fucking masterful, god tier moments in this. And the card game is incredible.

The last game was too linear. This one was too unfocused.

Let’s hope the next one is too fuckin good.

It sounds like I’m complaining a lot about this one, but it’s… I’m frustrated because it was so close to being a masterpiece. But, well, death by a thousand cuts.

41: Mouthwashing (PC, 2.1 hours)

Fantastic art direction, incredible character piece. There is a question I’d like to ask the dev team about the narrative if I ever get the chance, because a friend and I have very different interpretations of the game, and I’d really like to know what the team wanted to do with that. I think the game views a character one way, my friend another. Based on the excellent Washington Post article, I think I get it, but I’m not positive. I don’t know how I felt about one specific gameplay segment, but overall, liked the adventure game angle.

Impeccable goddamn art and sound, though. Fuck yeah.

42: Donut County (PC, 2.9 hours)

A funny cute little puzzle game that I cleared fast as fuck. It was just a nice, chill little time, a great way to close out 2024. I could have played another short game and bumped my number a bit, but you know what? Nah. This was a good, nice, simple little game to end on.

It’s possible that I could have finished more games in 2024 if I hadn’t spent so much time playing (and loving) Zenless Zone Zero, Honkai: Star Rail, and Genshin Impact. I like what Mihoyo does; I think their games are beautifully designed and fun as fuck, with some genuinely impressive storytelling (even though the moment to moment dialogue can be a bit too much exposition).

I don’t want to recommend these games if you’re susceptible to gambling, because they are gacha games, but if you don’t have a problem with that, they’re wonderful. I am kind of mad that ZZZ did multiple things I was planning for Waifu Death Squad 2, but, hell, if anything, they prove I was right to want to design games this way.

So what’s next? What am I looking forward to in 2025?

Well, I do this thing to help me focus on games. I kinda fell off of using it. Here’s how it works: I write down 10 games on a whiteboard. These are the games I am actively playing .When I finish one, I erase it and replace it with a different color — if I start off with blue marker, then I switch to pink, and so on.

So, let’s say that going into the new year, the board’s gonna look like this:

• Dragon’s Dogma 2
• Planescape: Torment
• Persona 5: Tactica
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
• Project Wingman
• Iron Harvest
• Granblue Fantasy Relink
• Indiana Jones and The Great Circle
• Battletech
• Axon TD

And that other games I’m looking forward to finishing — games I’ve already started — are: Super Mario RPG, Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle (it’s… got some issues), Gunman Chronicles, Monster Hunter Stories (they actually put it on PC!), Like a Dragon: Ishin! (to replace Infinite Wealth when finished), Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE, Metaphor: ReFantazio (as soon as Tactica is done), Star Wars Outlaws (I need me a big Ubisoft open world adventure, and Star Wars is always a fun time), Starfield (which I’ll probably not put on the list as I’m not driven to complete it, just to hang out in it), Deathloop, Final Fantasy IX or XII, Etrian Odyssey, Battletech, Fuga: Melodies of Steel, Hitman trilogy, Various Daylife, Remnant 2, The Saboteur, Threshold, Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi, and The Thaumaturge.

OOPS, back when I wrote the above paragraph, I had not yet finished Infinite Wealth. Now that I have (103 hours!), I’m putting Ishin on the board. But, hey, that’s what I started the year with. Let’s see if I get all of them done.

I’d like to start and finish the final Phoenix Wright game from the original trilogy collection, 1000xRESIST, Akimbot, Amnesia: The Bunker, Bravely Default II, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, Diofield Chronicle, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, Lorn’s Lure, Marvel’s Midnight Suns…

And that’s just stuff I already have.

Really looking forward to The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, Death Stranding 2, Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Avowed, Monster Hunter Wilds, Suikoden I and II Remaster, Anno 117: Pax Romana, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Crimson Desert, Dead Static Drive, Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake (I also need to get Dragon Quest III HD-2D remake), Elden Ring: Nightrein, Ghost of Yotei, Mafia: The Old Country, Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, The Outer Worlds 2, The Sinking City 2, South of Midnight, and I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting, and others to be announced.

Oh. Yeah. And I’ve been commissioned to write about Morrowind. So I’ll be playing that for the first time.

There’s no way I can play all of these and the things I’ve been commissioned to write about (and am working on right now).

But.

I’m gonna try.

The truth is, shit’s gonna be hard. Real hard. Harder than you know. My life would be a whole lot better if I could raise a few grand to take care of a few things. If I can find a publisher to sign us and keep us going, even better. But man, I’m at a low point. I’ve been at a low point for a while. I’m fighting a couple different battles, including battles that I shouldn’t have to be fighting, in order to survive.

I deleted the section I typed here, because there is no way for me to talk about it without details I don’t want to talk about yet. So let’s just say I lost two people I loved at a time when I couldn’t lose anyone, and that I am dealing with some other stuff, and it’s really, really fucking hard, and I am alone right now. And then, this morning (it’s 10:19 PM on January 26, 2025), I finished Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and I sat there, and that ending broke me. Kasuga can be forgiving. He can take repeated blows to the fucking face. So I will too.

Kasuga tells the guy to accept what he did, and the guy will go to prison to pay for his crimes — because he should, because he did those crimes, and he can’t take them back — but Kasuga will be there waiting for him when he gets out, because he remembered the good times.

I remembered the good times too. I remembered them while I was writing this piece.

You might not be able to take back what you did, but if you accept it, you can move forward. I’ll be waiting. You might want to burn that bridge, bro, but I never did. We can rebuild it together.

Games are lifesaving. It was Death Stranding that kept me going when I didn’t think I could. STALKER had done so a few years prior. I’m trying, you know? I really am. I just got out of one hell and now I’m in another. I have to keep going. It’s impossible, but I have to keep going.

So I play games, and I think about them, and I write about them, and I hope maybe, somehow, they’ll leave an impact. I want this work to benefit you, even after I am gone.

But I wish it were easier.

I might release a game in 2025. Let’s hope.

Hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.

I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.

I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.

So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.

paypal.me/stompsite

ko-fi.com/stompsite

@forgetamnesia on venmo

$docseuss on cashapp