The Nesta’s Games of the Year 2018 Edition
2018.
I feel like I’ve said this every year for the past several years, but the world at large continues to be a shitty place. However 2018 was a huge year for me personally. Probably the biggest year of my entire life. Back in March I moved away from my home of Las Vegas that I’ve lived in for 32 years, and moved all the way across the country to Pennsylvania to be with my fiancee Zara.
I say fiancee, but she’s basically my wife at this point. Even if a legally binding contract hasn’t been made, and probably never will for financial reasons, sadly. And before I get into the meat of this year’s list, or even explaining what “changes” I’ve come up with this time. I’d just like to take a moment to talk about my special lady.
Zara is as much a fan of gaming as I am. When she was a child she got into the same sorts of games I did. One of her favorite games of all time is Final Fantasy IV, a personal favorite of mine as well. Shortly after I moved in, Zara showed me a bunch of her old sketch books.
The oldest ones were filled with a child’s interpretation of what Final Fantasy IV looked like to her. She has pages, and pages full of drawings of characters, monsters, weapons, spells, basically anything you can find in that game. She has dozens of original characters she made up too, back before the term “OC” was even coined.
I originally met Zara online back in 2003. The reason for our meeting is still a unique one.
The reason? Ragnarok Online hentai. As I mentioned, Zara is an artist, and back in the day she was doing a bunch of lewd fanart for a game she was obsessed with at the time (arguably still is obsessed with). I also had a deep love for both things as I was discovering in the tender years of my teens.
I don’t think either of us could have imagined the trajectory our relationship would take. I’m not going to go into the finer details, but the two of us weren’t incredibly “close” until many years later. By 2009 we would spend hours talking over services like Skype. Hours. Everyday.
I visited her multiple times throughout the years, and we were like best friends. I wanted to be more than that though, because I fell in love with her a long time ago. But it took her just a little bit longer to realize she felt the same way.
July 28th 2017, that’s the day things changed. Zara admitted to me that she might actually have fallen in love with me after so long. I don’t know what changed in her. We had gone about our business the same as always up to that point. She said she had a dream a couple days before she confessed that all but confirmed her feelings were genuine. In the end, I guess it ultimately doesn’t matter how or why it happened. It just did.
In the months that followed, her and I made plans for me to move out here and be with her. It wasn’t even that long until she tossed around the idea of marriage. Everything seemingly happened so fast, but can you even say that after being so close with someone for a decade and change?
So I moved out here, as I said previously. We’ve had our fair share of problems since I’ve gotten here. But we’ve also shared a lot of amazing moments with each other. And it didn’t take long for the two of us to realize that all of this was well and truly real. That we both loved each other more than anything else in our lives.
My living situation changed drastically when I moved in with Zara. It meant less time for doing things on my own, which obviously took it’s toll when it came to gaming. 2018, in addition to being, in my opinion, not as poppin’ as last year, was also a weird year in gaming for me personally.
I had very little time to invest much into many of this year’s releases. Especially longer ones. There were many games I would pick up, and if they didn’t click with me after a couple hours I’d just drop them.
The exception to this though, oddly enough, is that I’m playing games more often than ever before. That’s thanks to Zara. For whatever reason, god bless her soul, my loving wife loves nothing more than to watch me play games for her, just so long as she finds them interesting.
So, this gave me huge chunks of time this year to dedicate to a few new releases. But also I spent large portions of the year either replaying games for her benefit, or catching up on older games that I didn’t spend much, or any time with originally.
What I’m trying to say with all of this is, my game of the year list is very different this year. I still have a top 10 games of 2018, but there’s less emphasis on the bottom half of the list. In addition to that I’ve also included five “old” games that meant a lot to Zara and I this year.
But in either case, I spend a large portion of this list recounting moments I shared with my wife while gaming this year.
These lists are always personal to me. Even though I spend the entire year tweeting about games, I still feel like I get to the end of the year and just have so much I want to say about not only the games I played that year, but also what’s been going on in my life.
And there’s never been a more perfect example of that than this year’s list.
So with that introduction to the “Introduction” out of the way. I’ll quickly make note of the changes I’ve made to the list this year.
Here’s the breakdown:
Five Older Games I played with Zara
Bottom half of the Top Ten list for this year, games 10–6
Finally, my Top Five Games of The Year, games 5–1
Alright, a few last things to keep in mind:
1. There will be SPOILERS for any and all games on this list. And since I’m still doing this on Medium this year I still don’t have a good way to hide spoilers. So read at your own peril. You’ve been warned!
2. Every year that I sit down to write one of these lists, I try to tell myself “Don’t write so many god damn words this time.” I went into this year’s list knowing that I would be talking about more games than usual, but held out hope that I could get it done in less time. Nope! So yeah, fair warning, if you couldn’t already tell: this is a very long game of the year list. I’m sorry, I guess that’s just the way I am!
3. That said, I’ve made an earnest attempt to cut down on the additional media I include in these lists, as if you go read one of my older lists you’ll notice it takes forever for the page to load. This means gifs are (almost) out, and less images in general. I still have a few surprises that I’m trying this year though.
4. The last thing I’m toying with this year is my whole dumb “accolades” system. Previously I would include additional sections when talking about each game to hand out little awards like “Best Multiplayer” and what not. This year I’ve decided to just award each game on the list with a different accolade and leave it at that. I admittedly had a little fun with some of them, but I guess if you want some awards, look no further!
That’s it. I’m sorry for spending so much time introducing the list. Talk about some pretentious nonsense, right? Still, I love doing these lists every year. Even if no one else appreciates them, I still find some small amount of peace in getting my thoughts out there for this sort of end of year evaluation. But also, in recent years, I seem to have picked up a few fans of these lists. So, I’ll just say: Hey, Thanks!
Seriously, if you take the time to look at these lists, even a little bit, it means a lot to me. I might not be a great writer, I might not have the best tastes, but I do have a ton of passion for these games. And my only hope is that my passion comes across, and maybe influences some people to check out a game they wouldn’t have otherwise. Or at the very least make you feel good that more people love a game that you’re really sweet on.
Either way. Thank you all for putting up with my bullshit. And I’ll see you all in the Outro.
NieR / NieR Automata (Best Game Developer: Yoko Taro)
I spent the first week here with almost nothing to do but talk with Zara and look at my phone. I won’t say that week was bad, because it definitely wasn’t. We spent a lot of time feeling each other out in terms of what it’s like to live with one another. And it was nice to just get here and relax after the big move.
The stuff that I shipped across the country started to show up the next week. The first being a very important box that contained my PC, PS4, and whatever other expensive tech I couldn’t bring with me on the plane.
We kind of hemmed and hawed about what our setup would be like. The big TV was in the living room, which we barely spent any time in as it was. Also I had no idea that Zara would find so much joy in just sitting there watching me play games for her.
But there was one game that we both knew we wanted to tackle first, and that was last year’s game of the year, NieR Automata. Zara had a passing interest in the original NieR back when I wouldn’t shut up about it. But she seemed far more interested in Automata, which turned out to be the case for a majority of people.
I spent entirely too long talking about the sensation that was Automata last year, as it graced the top of my list. So I won’t go into the finer details of it here. But I will say that our first playthrough of Automata proved to be an interesting one.
It was the first game I tried playing for her. And she was into it, but not completely comfortable with our setup yet. It wasn’t that she wasn’t into the game. After all, she was an emotional wreck by the end of the prologue. Which caused me to caution her repeatedly that “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
In addition to that, I was playing my NG+ file. As I covered last year, I never pulled the trigger on Ending “E” (a mistake to be sure!), so I was using a completely decked out save file. However this meant that none of the side quests were available either.
So I was essentially speedrunning the story for her. Whatever the case, it worked out in more ways than one. Not only did Automata become an important game for her. But it also helped establish the ground rules for how we’d go about playing games for the rest of the year.
My dynamic with Zara over the years is that we play off each other with things that we both like and dislike. Our love or hatred for something helps unite us. It’s one of the main reasons that I spent years (and dollars) trying to make it so that she could play a lot of the same games I did.
Sometimes that worked out incredibly well, in the case of Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy XIV. In other cases it was an exercise in frustration when she would quickly lose interest in something because it wasn’t accessible enough for her.
The way we do it now works out perfectly then. So long as Zara finds either the story, or the act of watching me play a game enjoyable, it’s something we can share together. I don’t think that she needs to have any hands-on time with a game in order to be a fan of it. As her fervor for some of the series we played this year surpassed even my own affinity for them.
So yeah, NieR. We played Automata, then a little while later played NieR, then shortly after that restarted Automata from scratch. Zara has similar tastes to me in a lot of ways, so it wasn’t all that surprising that she took to Yoko Taro’s stories.
It was cool to play both games back-to-back(to-back) and further connect the dots. It also helped me get a firmer understanding on which of the two games I prefer.
So, which one do I like better? It’s still a tricky question, but if I were to make a list of my favorite games of all time (which I have) I would rank the original NieR slightly above Automata.
There are things that Automata undoubtedly does better. Side Quests in Automata, for example, are much more satisfying and varied than those in NieR. The combat is miles better too. And of course even though Automata was also produced on a small budget, the difference in production values is readily apparent when compared to NieR or Drakengard 3.
But, actually, that’s kind of where I stop thinking Automata is better. And maybe it’s because it’s impossible for me to separate my feelings of playing NieR for the first time. Thus some of the things that people love about Automata feel a little less special to me.
People love Automata’s soundtrack. I do too! It won soundtrack of the year from me last year. NieR’s soundtrack though? It’s better. People love 2B, 9S, and A2. So do I! 9S won my best new character of the year award last year. But I can’t say I like them more than Weiss, Kaine, or Emil from NieR. Especially Kaine… especially Kaine. Sigh.
Automata hits a lot of the same notes the original does. The huge twists, and things like your “sacrifice” in Automata’s Ending E are directly comparable to things that happen in NieR. There’s also the fact that a lot of my favorite things about Automata trace back to stuff from NieR, or the Drakengard series in general.
Automata was a lot of people’s first Yoko Taro game. The original NieR was mine. And I guess when it comes down to it, my first time with NieR trumps my first time with Automata. However that doesn’t mean Automata is bad, far from it! In a list of my top ten games of all time, NieR could be #7, and Automata would be #8.
With that out of the way, the only other thing I have to say about these two games is that it made both Zara and I a believer in Yoko Taro. It is no exaggeration for me to say that he is my personal “industry icon”. His games have touched me in a profound way. The messages they bring, his personal outlook on life. The fact that he persevered through critical and commercial failure, one after another, to get to this point? Inspirational.
Automata, and obviously NieR are both games very near and dear to my heart. And I’m so glad that I was able to share them with my wife. We even bought figures of 2B, and Kaine. As well as a book for the game. And we’re already planning on getting even more merch. We’re both excited to check out SINoALICE when it comes out here (hopefully Nexon doesn’t fuck it up). And god knows the day they reveal Yoko Taro’s next big project, the two of us will be in tears.
Thank you Yoko Taro.
Final Fantasy XV (Best Road Trip)
Another game I previously featured on my game of the year lists is Final Fantasy XV, another game that I played for Zara earlier in the year. To summarize my feelings on FFXV, at the time when it released I thought extremely highly of the game. The game was (is) a mess, but it has a heart. While I never really clicked with the open-world nature of the game, it was the crazy incoherent story, and the extremely lovable characters that made that game so special for me.
I’m happy to say that my wife feels the same way about it! As a lapsed Final Fantasy fan, it was the first non-MMO Final Fantasy since X that interested her. Similar to my initial NieR Automata playthrough, I was quickly running through a NG+ of FFXV. It surprisingly only took us a week to complete the story. And since I bought the Royal Edition, we were able to play (most) of the DLC that will ever be released for that game.
Speaking of the Royal Edition, two years removed from the game’s 2016 launch. I feel like FFXV in its current state is dramatically improved over the original vanilla release. In addition to some of the earlier changes they made to fix the dreadful Chapter 13, going a step further to make each one of the boys a playable character, as well as including additional mechanics to clobber your way through the game. I think that Final Fantasy XV is just straight up a better game than what people played in 2016.
The DLC is quite good too! It was my first time playing any of it, and I was mostly impressed with it. Episode Gladiolus is easily the weakest of the bunch in terms of, well, everything. But I will say the final confrontation with Gilgamesh was satisfying.
Episode Prompto is somewhere in the middle. While I don’t feel like adding a bunch of optional “open world” content was what I was looking for out of these expansions, the story was a dramatic improvement over “Gladio and Cor eat Cup Noodles in a cave”.
Finally, there’s Episode Ignis which is outstanding. Not only is the entire sequence of the DLC incredible. But the truth about what happened to Ignis’ eyes is heartbreaking, and completely unexpected. It’s really, really awesome!
Seeing the story of FFXV unfold was just as impactful a second time, as it was the first. Maybe even more so because now Zara and I will just start crying if we hear “Stand By Me” start to play on her Pandora station.
I think FFXV takes a few (dozen) hours to get its story moving, but by the time they railroad you into the linear progression of the last half of the game I feel like it creates an incredibly effective narrative that punches you in the gut with its phenomenal ending.
Oh yeah, another thing they added in the Royal Edition were a bunch of boss fights with former Kings of Insomnia at the end of the game. Which feels slightly more climatic than just climbing some stairs or riding an elevator to the final boss encounter.
Of course, just recently there was the incredibly strange live stream event that Square Enix thought was a good idea somehow, where the game’s director, Hajime Tabata announced he was leaving the company, and then they proceeded to announce the cancellation of almost all of the future DLC that was planned.
Strange as that was, I think it’s in step with what Final Fantasy XV is. A weird game that shouldn’t work half as well as it does. And all I can say is that I’m equally as excited for whatever Final Fantasy XVI ends up being, as whatever Tabata’s new studio does. But only time will tell!
Overwatch (Best Paladins Clone)
So, there’s this game called Overwatch. It’s kind of like Paladins, but with a much bigger budget. It’s okay, I guess.
In addition to digging deep into some lengthy single player games this year, Zara also spent a decent amount of time watching me play some competitive multiplayer games oddly enough. I think it’s easy for someone to look at games like NieR Automata, and Final Fantasy XV and think “I can see how someone would enjoy watching this.” But I don’t think there are too many people who can say “Yeah, my wife likes to watch me play Overwatch for some strange reason.”
Strange as it may be, it isn’t entirely unfounded I suppose. After all, Zara spent a year obsessing over Team Fortress 2, which she actually played with a group of friends. And both her and I spent some amount of time playing Overwatch together on PC before I moved here.
During a PSN Flash Sale one week, Zara urged me to buy Overwatch for PS4 for reasons that will become more apparent later on (much later). Even though we both owned it on PC, she was interested in watching me play it on the big screen from the comfort of our couch.
So, I bought it. Not without complaints, mind you. I had a chip on my shoulder about Overwatch, and I wasn’t too pleased about buying it again, and even less enthused by the idea of playing it more often. However as luck would have it, we both found a greater appreciation for Blizzard’s hero shooter.
Overwatch is a phenom, right? It went from being a popular game from a well established studio, to a mega franchise within a few short years. This was an especially big year for Overwatch as well. The Overwatch League happened for one, which as I hear is quite popular.
But maybe more surprising to me is just how “on lockdown” Blizzard has been when it comes to merchandise for this game. At first it was just crazy to me to see Overwatch getting actual quality figures. No, I’m not talking about those god awful Funko Pops, but figmas and Nendoroids from Japanese toy giant GoodSmile.
But not as crazy as NERF replicas of Overwatch guns. Or entire LEGO sets for Overwatch maps.
It’s honestly nuts how big this thing has become. And is it really any wonder? Blizzard has a knack for drawing people into their games. Look no further than World of Warcraft, which was one of the biggest things in video games until a few years ago.
I think it’s a combination of borrowing ideas from other games and applying them in an extremely accessible, and polished way that just “works”. As well as Blizzard’s perchance for creating extremely endearing characters and worlds. Thanks in no small part to their charming art style. There’s been so much fan art for Overwatch. And I’m not even just talking about the copious amounts of Source Film Maker porn that’s out there.
People love these characters. And Blizzard fosters that love by giving these characters memorable personalities, snd putting them in worlds with rich lore that comes across in every map and gorgeous cinematic that they produce. Overwatch has succeed where other games have failed by not only making an extremely well made competitive shooter, but also by capitalizing on Blizzard’s strength to get people invested in their universes.
But all of this speaks nothing of my experience of actually playing the game. To be honest with you, it’s good! But not my favorite…
I really warmed up to Overwatch when I switched to playing it on PS4. It’s more laid back. Not only because of “comfy couch gaming”, but also the competition just isn’t as fierce on consoles. I’ve never even touched competitive play, but I kind of migrated from Quick Play into the Arcade hoppers where I love to play modes like Mystery Heroes, No Limits, Mayhem, and even the occasional Death Match.
I figured out which characters I’m “good” at and prioritize them when I can, but I play more Mystery Heroes than anything else, so it’s kind of luck of the draw! Zara has her favorite characters, she’s also familiar enough with the game to follow what’s going on at any given time. She’s a major “backseat gamer”, but I have to say the help is always appreciated as she just sees things that I don’t.
There’s also no shortage of fun moments when ridiculous shit happens on screen. And a decent amount of the time is spent having conversations like “On a scale of 1–10, how badly would you fuck Soldier 76?” (10, by the way).
I never expected we would connect over something as absurd as playing a couple hours of a team based shooter every day. But that’s been our daily routine going all the way back to April. I guess it’s just too bad that Overwatch isn’t usually the hero shooter we’re playing…
Kingdom Hearts (Best Use of Belts & Zippers)
In the months leading up to June I had to remind Zara several times that E3 was going to be a thing in this apartment. If you follow me on Twitter, then you know I love to join in on the snarkfest and hype that can be found in people’s timelines during an E3 press conference.
Oddly enough, I don’t know how many more years E3 will be a thing, seeing as how there’s already some major shakeups prepared for next year’s expo. But amazingly enough, Zara also ended up having a (mostly) good time putting up with my bullshit, and watching the show with me.
By far, the strangest thing to come out of us watching that event was a newly revitalized interest in Kingdom Hearts. Kingdom Hearts is a series that both of us loved initially. But Zara ended up hating, and not even finishing KH2. And I checked out shortly after enjoying my playthrough of KH2.
People love to make fun of Kingdom Hearts, and its fans. Hell, my dumb little accolade for this entry is a well worn joke about series creator Tetsuya Nomura’s passion for belts and zippers in his character designs. We’ve both made fun of this series for many years.
Anyway, we’ve had our fair share of fun running through the same tired complaints people have about the series. It’s convoluted. It’s corny and embarrassing. Nomura can’t be trusted to release a game.
Well, that last one might be true, but that’s another story.
Point is, it was really unexpected when we walked away from E3 being super interested in playing Kingdom Hearts 3 when it comes out next year. We ended up watching the two E3 trailers multiple times that month. And later on many, many more times. Each time getting progressively more emotional about them.
Before the end of June we both decided that we wanted to play through all of the Kingdom Hearts games before 3 came out. And in July we splurged and bought the huge “Here’s Everything Kingdom Hearts + a pre-order for Kingdom Hearts 3” digital bundle on PS4.
And then we spent most of #JRPGJuly, and some of #ARPGAugust playing through that entire series. From start, to finish. And I don’t think we could have ever imagined how attached we would become to it.
Like I said previously, we both had a fondness, and understanding of Kingdom Hearts at some point in the distant past. But seeing these games back-to-back really paints a fascinating picture of Nomura’s ambitious little series.
I’ll quickly offer some thoughts on this games as I played many of them for the first time this year.
Kingdom Hearts: The first game is a nice proof of concept. It has less to do with “Kingdom Hearts” as it would later become, and leans more into that original concept of “Disney meets Final Fantasy”. It’s probably the game I enjoyed the least this time around due to its reliance on traversal puzzles.
Chain of Memories: We tried to play Chain of Memories, but gave up pretty quickly. Just didn’t enjoy the card based combat. Instead we opted to watch a YouTube “Movie” version of the game’s cutscenes. I don’t think it can be understated how important it is to see this stuff before Kingdon Hearts 2. Which I think is something a lot of people, myself included, didn’t do back in the day. And is probably the origin of all the ridicule for this series being too confusing. It is, if you miss a chunk of it.
While on the subject of “movies”. We watched all of the ones included in these HD Collections. I don’t think most of them are all that important. Coded seems like a terrible game, and it really doesn’t add anything of note to the series. The mobile game is also so far removed that, while interesting, is as of yet incomplete and probably not that vital.
358/2 Days, while still an absurd name is probably the only one worth watching for sure. It adds even more context for a few key characters. Namely Roxas, and Axel. And to a lesser extent the other members of Organization XIII. Including the “14th” member Xion.
Kingdom Hearts 2: I think this is pretty much where everything began in a lot of ways. Kingdom Hearts 2 ups the ante by going hard into the lore of Kingdom Hearts. It’s also still one of the most impressive PS2 games, with some incredible production values. The size and scope of the game compared to the original is crazy. In some ways I still think this is the game in the series to beat, even if it isn’t my personal favorite.
Birth By Sleep: This is the one Kingdom Hearts game I hadn’t played that I heard people talk about with any regularity. It’s a good game! In retrospect it played a vital role in paving the way to Kingdom Hearts 3, and I think the new characters introduced are all great, especially Aqua. I also really liked the combat system in this one a lot, still probably my favorite in the series. I’m not as impressed with the horrible selection of Disney worlds, and the repetitive nature of the game. Which I’m sure is due to the limitations of the PSP. Which ultimately make the game feel “cheaper” than the spectacle that was Kingdom Hearts 2.
Dream Drop Distance: Dream Drop Distance is a really strange game. It seems like a spin-off, especially considering the radically different gameplay mechanics introduced in the game such as the whole Pokemon style party members. However the events of the story ultimately feel like they’re incredibly important for setting up the “finale” we’ll get with Kingdom Hearts 3. This game is certainly a wild one, but honestly? It might be my favorite one??
Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Lastly we have this glorified tech demo. A decent showcase of what the team was planning to do with Unreal 4 for Kingdom Hearts 3. But also a nice little bridge between the events of Birth By Sleep and Kingdom Hearts. It’s short, but fun. And I liked dressing up Aqua.
And that brings us to Kingdom Hearts III, which comes out in a matter of weeks! Exciting!
So there are your outdated hot takes for games that are in some cases a decade or more old. We had a great time revisiting this series though. And playing it like this gave us a deeper appreciation for Nomura’s vision for the series.
Yes, it’s a little convoluted, but it’s not that hard to understand if you’re paying attention. Yes. Some parts of it are extremely corny, and don’t hold up well this many years later. But I think these games are sincere and earnest in a way that makes it easy to overlook that. Characters like Riku go through a tremendous character arc that has him going from one of my least favorite characters, to probably my favorite character in the series. Hell, we even got real hyped up about watching a bunch of Disney movies, although that has still yet to happen as of my writing this.
Kingdom Hearts is a beloved series in gaming. It’s one that has no shortage of diehard fans, or bitter critics. But I think it’s an important one, and one that I’m very much interested in seeing where it goes next.
Devil May Cry (Best Reminder Of The 00s)
The last game on our little trip through the backlog was also inspired by this year’s E3. The rumor of a “proper” Devil May Cry 5 was seeded well before the big conference, but actually seeing it announced on Microsoft’s stage still managed to make for a nice big, exciting surprise.
Okay, for starters. Zara and I played through DmC, Devil May Cry 1–3, and started Devil May Cry 4 but got distracted and need to go back to it before V releases in March. Another little helpful background tidbit is that I loved the Devil May Cry series, and Zara very much appreciated Dante, but never got to see much of them before I played them recently.
The other thing I want, no, need to get out of the way is this whole DMC vs. “DmC” thing. Look, I don’t want to point any fingers here, but chances are if you use the name “Donte” unironically? You’re probably an asshole.
Look, here’s the thing. Devil May Cry, 1, the original. I was in love with that game. The original DMC is arguably responsible for the character action genre. And that includes everything from God of War to Bayonetta. When DMC1 came out, it was like anime had come to life, and you could play it.
I remember playing the demo at a kiosk in the mall at EB Games, before GameStop had consumed everything. I thought it was the coolest fucking thing I had ever seen. So I went ahead and bought a copy of Resident Evil Code Veronica X. A PS2 port of a Dreamcast game I already owned. For the sole reason of playing the included Devil May Cry demo from the comfort of my bedroom.
In retrospect though? The first Devil May Cry is a great proof of concept. But it doesn’t hold up so well anymore. Devil May Cry 2? That game is a fucking travesty. Replaying it in the HD Collection made me finally realize that there’s a worse game I forced myself to finish than Too Human.
Devil May Cry 3 though? That’s the sweet spot. That might actually be the best game in this entire genre. Everything from it’s tightly expanded combat, to it’s over-the-top story, and it’s really fucking impressive graphics for a PS2 game. That game is a god damn masterpiece, and I will not hear otherwise.
Devil May Cry 4? Not the best. Not the worst. I really need to play more of it to comment more on that though. But I remember being disappointed with it at the time of its release.
That leaves us with the elephant in the room, DmC. Capcom’s reboot of the Devil May Cry series with western developer Ninja Theory. Ninja Theory… I thought Heavenly Sword was overrated. But I really loved Enslaved. Enough for me to say “Sure!” when they announced DmC.
Unfortunately this is where the problems arise within the Devil May Cry “fandom”.
I don’t have a fact sheet in front of me or anything. But here’s my basic understanding of the situation. Many Devil May Cry fans were pissed off about DmC because it’s tonally a very different game than “Devil May Cry”. Devil May Cry is the gaming equivalent of shooting the entire decade of the 00’s straight into your veins. It’s the kind of “stylish action” that is embarrassingly adolescent in nature. And sometimes that works against it in the case of Devil May Cry 2 which comes across as “Ow! The edge!”
And at other times you get Devil May Cry 3 which is so self aware that the absurd “anime bullshit” (I hate this terminology, for the record) becomes so over-the-top that it wraps around to being genuinely fucking badass?
DmC on the other hand is… not that. DmC is a game that tries to appeal to a different generation of gamers, the “extremely online” variety. The humor is very much a take it or leave it thing, sometimes it works extremely well, in other cases it can be terrible. The game is also really disgusting for some reason too? Like all the enemies are gross instead of “puppets and killer helicopter bosses”?
Also Dante doesn’t have white hair, which I guess was the final nail in the coffin for some people.
It’s just a very different feeling game than those old ones. People also don’t like the combat as much, I guess? But honestly I think this game blows 1 & 2 out of the water in terms of “games I actually want to play in 2018”.
On the other side of things, the game was critically well received. With some outlets saying it was the best Devil May Cry had ever been. And obviously that didn’t sit well with long time fans of the series who were already offended by this different take on their favorite series.
So, my take is thus: DmC is fine. It’s a fine game. I like it more than at least half of the series, not including 5 right now. However I will admit it’s not “Devil May Cry”. It’s a different thing. A different take. And you either like it or you don’t.
What I’m tied of seeing though is the completely irrational hatred that some Devil May Cry fans have for DmC. It’s only slightly more understandable if you go back to a time when you might be under the impression that there would be a DmC 2, and not a DMC 5.
But now that you’re getting what you want? Why y’all still being pissy about this? You “won” right?
And yes, I know that there are some people that think DmC is the only good Devil May Cry game. Those people aren’t any better though. I mean, it’s well within their right to think that, but I just don’t see that same kind of vitriol from that side, and they actually have a reason to be bummed out!
Sorry, I just needed to get that off my chest. I honestly don’t have much more to add about DMC than what I’ve already said. I do think that out of the games Zara and I played, it’s the “least loved” one, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t enjoy it. Whether it was that stupid fucking helicopter fight in 2, or yelling about how fucking cool any given moment was in 3, we had fun playing these games.
Can’t wait for March!
10. Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna — The Golden Country (Best Game That Should Have Been on 2017’s List)
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 came out at the beginning of December last year, which didn’t leave me with nearly enough time to play enough of it for the purposes of writing my game of the year list, let alone finish it. And unlike Xenoblade X, and a handful of other games that made my list a few years ago despite being woefully underplayed, last year was just too damn good to give props to “It might be great”.
I finished Xenoblade 2 early this year before I moved and I can safely say with confidence that if given the chance to go back and change my 2017 list, I would have put that game high on the list. Xenogears is one of my top 5 games of all time. Xenosaga Episodes 1 & 3 (fuck 2) aren’t far behind. However I straight up dislike Xenoblade 1, and only liked X a bit.
Xenoblade 2 is a game that I love. It’s not a perfect game. It has many, many issues that I won’t get into here. But its story and characters are the first time in a long while that I feel live up to the series legacy.
So the expansion Torna — The Golden Country came out this year, and I actually just finished playing through it recently. I’d be lying if I said wanting to give props to Xenoblade 2 wasn’t a big reason for including Torna on this list, because, honestly I’m not in love with it, but it does some things very well that I did enjoy.
Torna should have been a slam dunk though. It covers a point in the story that is teased throughout the main game. It does a great job of tying the events of this expansion into the flashback scenes we see in the main game. It features some of my favorite characters from Xenoblade 2. It introduces some really great ones like Addam (like, for real though), and the underappreciated cat boy Milton. It’s a better playing game, with better combat, and reigned in menu management that isn’t nearly as tedious with a much smaller party. And also it’s a lot shorter than the main game because it doesn’t need to be a 200 hour long epic. And the ending is savage, even though you know it’s coming.
So where did it go wrong? On the minor side of things, some of those favorite characters I mentioned are somehow worse. While Brighid and Aegaeon are simply under utilized, Mythra is actually just worse. She’s just a bitch here, and loses a lot of her charm that made me love her originally. But that’s excusable.
The real problem lies in the fact that this should have just been a 10–12 hour story, but instead the mandatory “side” quests pad the thing out so that it ends up being more like a 25 hour long slog. They had an opportunity to make a nice, tightly paced game, but then they decided to fuck it up and double down on the worst parts of the main game. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I feel like I still would have gladly paid $40 for a shorter game, and probably would have enjoyed it more than what I got here.
Kind of weird that this is on the list then, I guess. But like I said, it does some things quite well, and Xenoblade 2 is a GOAT. So I felt it was appropriate to give it its due. In a roundabout way.
9. SoulCalibur VI (Best “Fighting Game”)
SoulCalibur is my favorite traditional fighting game series. Period. No, I sadly missed out on Soul Edge/Blade back in the day, but SoulCalibur was the reason I bought a Dreamcast at launch. It was the best looking game I had ever seen in my life, the graphics blew my mind. It was the first time that a console version of an Arcade game looked better.
Also, SoulCalibur was extremely accessible. It was one of those “dorm games” that you’d hear about. Something that everyone, no matter how much experience they had with video games, could just pick up and play, and more importantly have a good time with. Mashers rejoice!
But there was a depth to it too, and SoulCalibur was doing some really innovative things with it’s lauded “8-Way Run” system, and extremely robust for the time (hell, even by today’s standards actually) single player content. You could also make the opening movie replace every character with Lizardman, including the scene where Sophitia is in a field of pretty flowers. So yeah, basically it owned.
It was enough to push me to import SoulCalibur 2 for GameCube, along with a fucking GameCube arcade stick that I only ever used for that one game. I even found a SoulCalibur 2 arcade cabinet at my local movie theater and play it obsessively there too. When it finally came out in the states I bought another copy for GameCube, and another for Xbox (I liked Spawn, I’m really sorry.) As well as attempting to purchase an entire series of McFarlane mini statues from GameStop’s website. But they sent me two Nightmares, A Voldo, and four Necrids instead of the other figures. And when I emailed them about this, they apologized. Would not actually send me what I ordered, but offered to send me a huge figure of Spawn riding a horse that was of equal value to my order, which I think my Dad still has in his collection of Spawn action figures. Yeah…
Anyway. I love SoulCalibur. 3 was kind of disappointing. But it has the best single player mode in the series, as well as KOS-MOS, and introduced the create-a-character feature that would become standard. 4 kind of sucked because it’s single player content was terrible, and its guest characters were even worse. But the actual guest designs by famous Mangaka for what were essentially Smash’s Echo Fighters were incredible. I sometimes forget that Soul Calibur 5 exists because of how little I played it. Kratos was in that PSP game, I guess. Eh.
Anyway, SoulCalibur VI was an exciting announcement for Zara and I, as we are both big fans of the series. So we picked it up when it came out a few months ago. I’ll say it’s the best SoulCalibur in a very long time. And I probably would only rank it below 1 and 2.
There’s a ton of good single player content to be had here. The roster is what you want, and not… SoulCalibur 5. The new additions, few as they may be are both solid. The guest character game is on point, Geralt is a husband who fits right in, but the newly added 2B probably beats out everyone for me except KOS-MOS.
The multiplayer is fantastic, as it should be. I had a lot of fun playing it with Zara, even though she kicked my ass more often than not. I’m not the biggest fan of Reversal Edges, but they come up so infrequently for me that it’s only a nit to pick at most.
But damn, the character creator in this game is maybe the best part? Currently there are less “parts” than I would like, but the things you can do with those parts? Amazing. I’ve seen some incredibly creative people put stuff together like a functionally “Splash”ing Magikarp. You can give characters BIG DICKS. You can make thicc girls. Zara has been making all of her OCs for her game that we’re going to make any day now… Yeah, it’s aweomse.
I’m really curious to see who the other DLC fighters are going to be, and I can’t wait to try out 2B when sI get a chance to nab the season pass. It’s been a damn good year for fighting games, but this one’s king. Sort of.
8. God of War — 2018 (Best and Honestly Only AAA Western Game I Cared About)
I didn’t consider myself a “fan” of God of War. But I enjoyed those games. If Devil May Cry was Japan’s take on the 00’s. God of War was the western take on it. I ultimately didn’t enjoy it as much, which, yeah, I know, big surprise. The combat was much more basic, the mature content was “cool” as long as you were a dumb teenager, and Kratos was a terrible character.
Still, those first three games really knew how to present the player with some incredible set pieces. People always talk about how big the bosses were in those games. They were big! They did feel epic! But sadly, time marches on, and shortly after God of War 3 came out, that series kind of shit the bed.
So along comes this God of War “reboot”? I mean, it’s a continuation of that original story, but both tonally and mechanically this game promised to be very different than the ones that came before it. It looked good honestly, even from that first reveal. I know some people started to get wary of… the boy, pre-release, but Atreus ended up being one of the best parts of the game for a multitude of reasons.
However, God of War was the first game that came out while I was living here where my wife half-jokingly said “You’re not playing that shit in my apartment.” I’m not sure how I eventually won her over, but by the end of our first evening with the game, she was intrigued.
God of War is not my favorite game on this list, obviously, I mean it’s number 8, right? But make no mistake, it is a very good game. It has a few things going for it that really make it impressive to me.
One is that it’s a big budget western game. I don’t typically like a lot of those, and even when I do it’s usually not enough to include on a game of the year list. But this one works. You can appreciate the craftsmanship (and the money) that went into making this game, but also like, enjoy playing it unlike “detail porn” over there.
The other truly incredible thing is that somehow, someway, against all odds, a God of War game ended up having one of the most compelling stories of the year. Look, I get it. I run in circles where people openly mock the game for either treading on the “father, son” trope. Or people that outright refuse to look pasts Kratos’s past iterations to see that this new Kratos is actually a very well written, and funny(!) character.
The game has a solid combat system too, but I admittedly turned it down to easy. I’m not going to make excuses for myself, because honestly, I fucking hate to be challenged most of the time, so opt for the path of least resistance whenever I can. But it was my wife who made this decision early on when she wanted to just see the story, and not me dying repeatedly.
But perhaps the highest praise I can sing for this game is that it’s open-world done right. I know some people probably don’t consider this game “true open-world”, but that’s part of the problem! I don’t need a fucking virtual landscape that’s the sized of the United States, populated with an infestation of things to do and collect ad nauseam.
I felt like God of War provided just enough side content, that was smartly distributed in pace with the game’s story that I felt like I went on an adventure and left feeling fulfilled. And that’s really already more than I could have ever dreamed to ask from this game. Both me and my wife were very impressed with it. And I can’t wait to see what comes next.
7. Pokemon: Let’s Go Eevee (Best Childhood Obsession Remake)
I feel like I have so many reasons to wax nostalgic while writing this list. Pokemon is another such reason. Pokemon came out when I was the target demographic for it. Before then I loved Ghosterbusters, Ninja Turtles, and Power Rangers. But Pokemon was my first “This is all I care about” obsession.
I remember reading Nintendo Power’s mini-strategy guide that was included in every issue leading up to the release of the games. When I randomly found the anime already airing on Kids WB before school one morning I nearly shat myself in excitement.
Is it any wonder Pokemon is the most profitable media franchise in the world? Their marketing was so on point. It continues to be on point decades later. You thought Pokemon was big in the 90’s? Try Pokemon GO.
At one point in time I fell off the wagon. It was during the GBA era oddly enough. I loved the GBA, it was the first handheld I really loved. Previously I had a GameBoy, and GameBoy Color, but preferred playing those games on the Super GameBoy add-on for Super Nintendo. Yet somehow, I burnt out on Pokemon so hard that I skipped that entire generation of games. I still haven’t played them. I only experienced Ruby/Sapphire a few years ago with ORAS.
Thankfully when Gen 4 came out, I was back in. And I’ve been back ever since. I still love Pokemon. It frequently makes my game of the year lists. I have “opinions” about the best and worst gens. And obviously an affinity for Gen 1. But I was never one of those people who were like “Original 151 or GTFO”.
It was weird then when Nintendo announced Pokemon Let’s Go earlier this year. I remember people getting hyped up for a Pokemon announcement. But then the subtitles got out there and people were not happy. And then when they officially announced the games it seemed fans were pretty split down the middle. Some people thought Let’s Go looked charming, and nostalgic going back to the original 151 only. Essentially being a remake of Red/Blue/Green/Yellow/Fire Red/Leaf Green whatever the fuck you want to call them. Other people were fucking pissed that this wasn’t Gen 8, and thought this just looked like mainstream fluff to appeal to Pokemon GO fans.
Well it certainly is trying to appeal to that huge, huge market. Which makes sense, but I considered myself in the latter camp. That was until a couple months before release. I went most of the year feeling pretty negative about Let’s Go. But somewhere along the line my opinion shifted, and I started to look forward to it. By the time it came out I was cursing the fact that my Left Joy Con broke, because I thought I wouldn’t be able to play it with only one Joy Con, since the Pro Controller isn’t supported.
While Nintendo’s flippant nature on allowing players the choice of what controllers they can use is larger issues than just Pokemon Let’s Go, it’s still shitty that the Pro Controller I bought a month before the game came out wasn’t supported simply because they wanted to push sales of the Pokeball Controller. But that’s really the only major complaint I have about this game.
Once I found out that I could use just my right Joy Con to play, I got a copy and started playing it with Zara (who is an even bigger Pokemon fan than me).
Here’s what Pokemon Let’s Go isn’t, or at least what I hope it isn’t: It’s not Gen 8. It’s not indicative of what Gen 8 will be, especially when it comes to the method of capturing Pokemon in this game.
Here’s what Pokemon Let’s Go is: A great fucking time. If you have any affinity for Pokemon. Whether you were first introduced to it in the 90s, or with Pokemon GO, you should check out this game. The game isn’t “babby mode”, it’s “streamlined”.
No, there aren’t any random encounters. No, you don’t catch Pokemon by weakening them, you just flick balls at them until they get caught. Yes, trainers typically have far fewer Pokemon than they used to. Yes, a lot of traditional things have been removed, like only getting EXP on one Pokemon at a time, or TMs being a one use item, and HMs entirely. But these are all positive quality of life improvements. Some of which are from recent mainline entries in the series.
Make no mistake though, this game can get tough at times. It’s still a Pokemon game, so unless you’re doing postgame stuff, or battling competitively you probably won’t be too challenged by it. But I’ve frequently had to make use of my entire team of Pokemon, and I’m even a little bit over leveled.
Pokemon Let’s Go is just a fun nostalgia trip, mainly for fans of the original Pokemon. But hey there’s probably some people out there holding a candle for “Vanilla Pokemon GO, man!” too who are just as attached to that original batch of ‘mons. I unfortunately haven’t finished the game yet (I just got to Cinnabar Island). But my wife and I have both loved taking this trip down memory lane together.
6. The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (Best Indie Game)
There is an argument for this being “Best Surprise” too, but I decided to give that to something else.
It’s strange though, I feel like so many people were going crazy about indie games this year. Especially Switch owners. I played a little bit of Celeste, Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, you know, all the popular ones. None of them really stuck with me though, for various reasons. (Okay, I know all of those games are fairly similar gameplay wise, but you have to admit they’re among the most prolific indies this year.) And here I am with one indie game on my list. But it’s a dozy!
I’m familiar with The Missing’s creator, Swery’s work. I have an appreciation for Deadly Premonition that doesn’t necessarily extend to “I enjoy playing this”. As for D4, between its initial Xbox exclusive status, combined with the fact that well, he’s never going to finish it, I just kind of stayed away from it. I’d seen… something about what Swery was doing after he went indie, but it never really registered. Wasn’t there something about cats or dogs? I don’t know.
So it was really surprising when The Missing came out a few months ago. My first exposure to it was the name. Which I immediately tweeted something along the lines of “This is the best name for a video game I’ve ever seen.” It really is an incredible name!
Then I started to see buzz build up around the game after it had been out for a week or so. People were quietly whispering about how great it was, and there was clearly something about it that they didn’t want to express out of fear of spoiling it for others, but I got the impression it was an “important” game. Finally somewhere along the way I learned that this was a Swery game, and suddenly the name made sense.
Those were the only three things I knew about the game. But I was curious, so I went and bought it and gave it a shot one night. It didn’t take me long to start formulating why I thought people were saying this game was important “Oh, it’s about a gay relationship, cool. Swery’s take on Gone Home”. (I liked Gone Home, for the record). Then I realized what kind of game it actually was. A puzzle platformer very similar to games like Limbo and Inside. (Still waiting to see what kind of Real Doll fuck apparatus is inside that Inside Collector’s Edition by the way. Please, I need to know!)
So I thought “Cool, this seems promising.” Then I played up until you see the (somewhat) late title card. “OH SHIT! This is a Swery game!” I thought as some sort of Moose Man Doctor appeared over my body repeating the same phrase over and over again.
So there’s like, three things I really like about The Missing, and one major thing I kinda dislike. Let’s start with the things I like:
1. It’s fucking weird. I’m at the point in my life where a lot of “weird” stuff isn’t actually that weird to me. But Swery is a weird fucking dude, and it shows here just as well as it always has.
2. The game’s “hook” is better than anything found in games similar to it. Essentially killing and mutilating your character in increasingly horrific ways to solve some ingeniously creative puzzles.
3. BIG SPOILERS for the game here, so avoid if you don’t want to be spoiled: Thanks to my wife, and the internet, I’ve realized in the past couple years that I identify as pansexual. However I’m still not the best person to ask when it comes to LGBTQ stuff. So forgive me as I speak about something I might be misinformed about. During a later section in the game, a small clue given in a text conversation with J.J.’s mother gave away the true nature of the game. The Missing is a game about a transwoman struggling with the hardships of transitioning, and dealing with people that simply don’t understand here, and in some cases torment her for it. I feel like that’s enough to make the game important for that very reason, but beyond the game’s message, I also felt that particular twist was incredibly effective from a narrative standpoint too. And really made me rethink the events that come before that point. And I think that’s awesome.
As for the one thing I disliked about the game. As brilliant as some of these puzzles were, my enjoyment of playing the game gradually went down a hill the further I went into the game. I liked Limbo, and Inside. They’re great games. But I would take almost anything in The Missing over them in a heartbeat. Except for the way the game plays. I don’t know if it’s a combination of Swery games being… flawed. Or if there’s just a more subtle focus on platforming than puzzling. But later in the game I started to get really frustrated with the execution that was required of the player. I just don’t think the controls are tight enough for that sort of thing.
But that’s really the only complaint I have about The Missing. This is a fantastic game that anyone should check out. It’s not too long, it took me a little under 6 hours to finish. Though I didn’t get all of the collectible donuts. If you were somehow able to see this game on the list, but not read what I said about it and just got in blind, then that’s even better. But even if you know what you’re getting into, it’s still worth it. And I know this game will get lost in the shuffle. But keep it in the back of your mind at the very least.
5. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Best Soundtrack)
I’ll let you in on a little secret. I basically reserved a space for Smash in the top 5 for almost the entire year. And after having played close to 25 hours of it, unlocking all of the characters, playing a grip of the Adventure mode, and actually bothered to spend a decent amount of time setting up rule sets and customizing stage music… I can confidently say that Smash is totally deserving of a spot on this list.
Shocking no one who actually knows me, I’m sure, I like a Smash Bros game. I remember seeing previews for the original Nintendo 64 game way back in the day and it blew my mind. All of my favorite Nintendo characters coming together for some sort of crazy crossover fighting game? Sign me the hell up!
I went on to play that game for hundreds of hours with my little sister, and close friends. And then probably thousands of hours of Melee. Significantly less of Brawl, but still a ton of that too. And finally only a little bit of Smash 4. Regardless though, I loved all of those games, and the two that came out after I started writing game of the year lists both made my number one spot.
So maybe it’s a little surprising that Ultimate is all the way back here at number 5 then. Do I think Brawl and 4 are better games? No, not at all from what I’ve played of Ultimate so far. But I think there are two things holding Ultimate back on this list.
One, circumstances have changed. I don’t have a steady group to dig into this game with. I didn’t really with 4 either, but the 3DS version came out when I was visiting Zara and that’s basically all we did for the week that I was here. So it was special to me.
With Ultimate, things have been kind of rough in our lives right now. And we haven’t gotten to play as much of it as we’d like to. In addition to that, I just think I enjoyed my time more with the other four games ahead of it on this list. But, make no mistake, Smash Ultimate is one hell of a game.
Where to start?
For one, I feel that the “Ultimate” name is extremely apt. “Everyone is here!” has been the tagline for this game, and I think that’s its strongest selling point. Aside from adding some exciting newcomers, as well as some equally exciting DLC on the horizon. Ultimate brought back every fighter that has appeared in Smash up to this point. Including characters like Snake and Ice Climbers who were cut in 4 for various reasons, and seemed unlikely to return.
This is great for hardcore and casual Smash fans alike. I’m sure some of these characters were people’s mains that got lost in the shuffle. Even if some of these characters were just clones of other characters, like Pichu, Wolf, and Young Link. However unique or popular your favorite character was doesn’t matter though, because…
Everyone is here.
And that’s great! But that’s not all. Aside from a staggering roster of 74 characters, there are 103 stages, over 850 (!) music tracks, a ton of new Assist Trophies, and much more besides. If we’re talking raw numbers here, Smash Ultimate easily dwarfs most any other fighting game when it comes to the amount of content in it.
With all this talk of “Most Ambitious Crossover Ever” you really have to wonder if Smash is the truest definition of that. No longer is Smash just a vehicle for Nintendo nostalgia. But for video games in general. Some of the biggest names in gaming are here, and there’s even a decent number of “out of left field” picks that just go to show the level of craft and affection that was put into making this game.
If I had any complaint about the term “Ultimate” being applied to this game, it’s that even though 103 is a ridiculously impressive number of stages. It’s not all stages. Everyone is here, but not Everywhere. And that’s a little disappointing, as there’s at least a couple stages I assumed would be in here that aren’t. But that just goes to show you how much has been put into this entire series over the years.
I want to call special attention to the music in particular, because it’s honestly absurd. I went through the majority of this year being mostly unimpressed with game soundtracks in comparison to previous years. But throughout the year Nintendo kept teasing various remixes of songs for classic games that would be in Ultimate.
This isn’t anything new to Smash, but it’s still crazy that the Smash team was able to get a bunch of extremely talented video game composers together to contribute such a huge number of songs to the game. It’s not just Nintendo games either. With games like Street Fighter, Mega Man, and Castlevania getting dozens of tracks on the soundtrack.
It then sucks when you look at what Square Enix contributed here with Final Fantasy, and it’s literally: Cloud (with only 2 costumes as opposed to everyone else’s 8), one stage, two music tracks, and zero spirits. Like, I don’t know what the fuck their deal was, but then again Square Enix is going through a weird midlife crisis right now, so who knows?
It’s another example that shows just how much the people behind this game wanted to make it a celebration of the very same games they themselves grew up playing. This becomes especially apparent in the game’s new Spirits mode. Particularly the World of Light. There must be hundreds of fights in this mode, each with a Spirit from some classic game. And in every instance the developers got really creative to try and emulate the character you’re fighting. For example, there’s one for Fire Emblem 8’s L’Arachel that has her fighting alongside stand-ins for her traveling companions Dozla and Rennac. And that’s just fucking amazing!
There’s been a lot of discourse around the decision to make players unlock all but the original 8 characters you start with. And considering there’s 74 characters in this game, that’s a lot to unlock! For my part, I’m not the biggest fan of that idea — but I will say that I see the argument in that it makes for a more compelling reward for those looking to play this game mostly solo.
I was unable to unlock all of the characters simply by just playing the game. I didn’t set out to grind for them or anything. I was just unlocking them as I went. The pace that the characters are dolled out was just enough so that I got a chance to actually try the new characters I’d unlocked before the character select was full of 10–20 fighters I hadn’t had a chance to try yet.
Between Classic mode, World of Light, and a handful of other things you can do by yourself, Smash Ultimate has one of the richer single player experiences in the series history. I know some people actually liked Sub Space Emissary for some reason (besides the amazing cutscenes of course), and no, this still isn’t that. But it’s better than the entire rest of the series in that department.
There are a few issues that I will admit Ultimate has, even though none of them are hugely relevant to me personally. The online could be better, a lot better. The netcode is terrible, and no, I don’t think asking everyone to buy LAN Adapters is a “solution”. Also the choice to purposely make it so that you can’t definitvely select what kind of rule set you’ll be playing when you queue up to play online is an odd one that I don’t personally agree with.
Nintendo also continues to waffle back and fourth on what it wants Smash to be. They’ve made concessions for people who only like to play on Battlefield or Final Destination by including Battlefield and Omega variants for every map. (Even though the Pro scene still only has a handful of stages they consider “tournament legal”.) But then they purposely obfuscate what balance changes are made to the game by simply listing “Adjustments were made” in the patch notes. That stuff still seems like kind of a mess.
Like I said though, most of that doesn’t apply to so much, so. for what I want out of a Smash game, Ultimate is it. And while it has become much more difficult for me to keep up with the frantic action of a 4+ player battle with all items and stage hazards on — it’s still a damn fun time. And the Smash series itself has just been such a lovely tribute to games I loved growing up and beyond.
Thank You, Sakurai. Now you and your team should go get some rest. Y’all deserve it.
4. Monster Hunter World (Best Surprise)
Now here’s a shocker.
Oh, MonHun. How you have eluded me for so many years, despite my best efforts.
I remember giving Monster Hunter Freedom 2 a try on the PSP back in the day. Monster Hunter had been making waves in Japan, and for the few people in the west that had caught onto it, there were rumblings of Phantasy Star Online.
So I tried, and tried, and tried to get into that game, but to no avail. Everything just felt bad, at the time I couldn’t understand why anyone would find it appealing. This was before Hunting games really became a genre. This was before Dark Souls was ever a thing.
And yet, even though I had such a terrible experience with that game, I still tried to “get” Monster Hunter over the years. I think I must have played three or four other Monster Hunter games before World came out. Only to have similar results as to when I tried Freedom 2.
It just wasn’t working. I didn’t click with MonHun.
Fast-forward to E3 2017 when Capcom announced Monster Hunter World. It was an announcement that got a lot of people talking. Here, we finally had a Monster Hunter game on powerful consoles. Yes, there were games on the Wii, Wii U, and even the Switch. But they weren’t the same.
And it wasn’t just a matter of making a “pretty” Monster Hunter game with advanced hardware. Capcom went into development on World with an entirely different philosophy over previous games. Thanks to the added power they were able to make each environment a big open area, without loading in-between each part of the map. In World you eventually get to a point where it’s not uncommon to see several gigantic monsters battling it out with one another in a crazy turf war.
In addition to these changes were a bunch of quality of life improvements. Like the Scout Flies which make it easy to track your prey, as well as various other things on the map. There’s no longer a need to carry around consumable whetstones to sharpen your weapons. Ranged weapons used the same armor sets as melee weapons, which is a change that probably only has meaning if you’ve actually played the older Monster Hunter games.
Capcom must have had one thing in mind when coming up with all these changes: Appeal to a wider audience. Even though Monster Hunter has been a phenom in Japanese culture for years, and years. The series never penetrated the western market in nearly the same way.
Sure, over the years English speaking Monster Hunter communities popped up and became very tight knit. The people that loved these games, really, really loved them. And in almost every case, the people who loved these games wanted nothing more than to help other people understand their love.
On the other hand, there were a fair number of series veterans who looked at all these changes and scoffed. “This isn’t Monster Hunter” they’d say. All the charm is gone from it with this new art style. All of these changes were being made to dumb down the game. And even a year into the game’s release there are still a number of fans who would gladly take another “Old” Monster Hunter game like Generations Ultimate which boasts an embarrassing amount of content when compared to World.
So with all that said, did this approach work for Capcom?
Oh yeah. It sure fucking did.
Monster Hunter World has gone on to become THE most successful game Capcom has ever put out. Period. More than any Mega Man, Street Fighter, or Resident Evil. A fucking MONSTER HUNTER game is the most successful Capcom game of all time.
And it’s fucking amazing.
If it wasn’t apparent by now, Monster Hunter World is finally the game that got me. I finally, at long last, understood Monster Hunter. A combination of playing Soulslike games for the past several years, and just the right amount of quality of life changes came together to make Monster Hunter World one of my absolute favorite games of the year. And let me tell you, it’s been fucking magical.
If I’m being completely honest with you, I was sold on the game last year when the beta came out. I sat down with that beta and tried every one of the game’s 14 weapons, and made note of which ones I liked the most. I hunted everything in that beta solo except for Nergigante. And even teamed up with strangers online for my first cooperative MonHun experience.
I was sold. And pre-ordered the game on PSN as soon as possible. When the game came out in January of this year I immediately dove in for some more. I made a character that I eventually decided I wasn’t happy with. And then sat down and streamed the game for Zara as we made a new character together… that bore a striking resemblance as well as um, having the same name as my wife.
I then proceeded to play that character for about 300 hours over the course of this year. I played through most of the game’s “story” by myself. Only dipping into co-op a few times with a close friend of mine. It wasn’t until much later when I decided to try playing the game with strangers again — and man, that was another huge revelation.
I went from struggling to fight these Elder Dragons, to just putting the mother fuckers on farm status as I attempted to strip them of anything that wasn’t nailed down in an attempt to make the various endgame gear I wanted.
I know this is all old hat for Monster Hunter veterans. But for what is essentially a newcomer like myself, I got so wrapped up in the game’s progression and gameplay loop. That drive to make better gear is real addicting. Whether you’re trying to get a piece to complete your perfectly tuned skill set, or you just love the way the Odogaron set looks. The loot lust was real.
But if that’s all there was to the game, it wouldn’t really be any different than games like Diablo or Phantasy Star Online.
Instead you have the game’s weapon system. Each one of the game’s 14 weapons can essentially be compared to a character in a fighting game. Some of them are similar, but none of them are exactly the same. And maybe this is just something that I benefited from as a relative newbie. But the hunt for the right weapon was a huge part of the appeal of World for me.
Out of the 300 hours I spent in the game, I probably spent a good 75% of the time just trying out different weapons as I progressed through the game. Originally, from the beta, the Long Sword, and Insect Glaive seemed really promising. But in practice I just wasn’t very good with them. So I tried out the Hammer and had some luck with that. But, oh wait, this Switch Axe seems cool. Wait, you can do that with this weapon? Well that has to be the one for me! But actually, Dual Swords are fast and easy to use! But… nah, the range is too small. Let’s try the Long Sword again just in case!
On, and on it went. I tried every weapon, multiple times. I watched dozens of hours of YouTube videos that explained the weapons and how to use them. I read hundreds of replies on reddit, even steeled myself long enough to browse the GameFAQs forums. Anywhere I could find information about this game.
And besides the playstyle of each weapon, which version of each weapon was the right one for each situation? What sort of armor should I get to compliment my weapon with skills? Okay, this piece is ugly, maybe I can go full on Fashion Hunter and wear something pretty, instead getting that skill from an amulet or gem?
People like to compare Monster Hunter to Dark Souls because of the deliberate combat. That rings true for myself as well. Monster Hunter World captures the same feeling I get when I sit down with a Souls game. I get obsessed about game mechanics in a way that I just don’t do with other games. I devote precious time into doing copious amounts of research to find out how to get an advantage in the challenges to come.
For a good chunk of the year, Monster Hunter World just devoured a bunch of my free time. It’s the one game on this list that Zara wasn’t really interested in beyond helping me make a character. It’s the only “long” game that I made sure to put the hours in by myself.
Monster Hunter World is fucking fantastic!
There are a lot of other things to love about the game too. All of the monsters look amazing. There’s a lot of equally impressive looking gear. Despite going with a more realistic art style, there’s still plenty of charm, and traditional Monster Hunter style humor thrown in there. There have been various crossover events with other games that have done a wonderful job of paying tribute to the series in question.
You can play the game solo, or with friends, or with strangers. The online could be better, but for the most part it works just fine and makes it easy to actually team up with people and get shit done. I’ve already talked up the quality of life stuff, but it just can’t be understated how much more approachable these changes made World than other games in the series.
At the end of the day, I only have a few minor complaints with the game. First, and foremost for me, at least, is that this game’s story is rotten garbage. All of the characters suck, the actual narrative is something I never once gave a shit about. I think your Handler is gross. If anything, the main story of the game was just a mild annoyance the entire time. And arguably the best parts of the game come in with the endgame — after the credits roll, and you aren’t subjected to having to deal with these bland pieces of cardboard anymore.
In addition to that, I mentioned that the online isn’t perfect. It’s not! And unfortunately I think this will be the kind of thing that keeps some people from giving this game its proper due. In reality the online system isn’t too bad, but I can’t in good faith argue that it’s great.
Going back to that shitty story, one of the worst things about online in World is that there’s some convoluted bullshit about playing through story missions for your first time with other players. For some reason the developers thought it would be a good idea to make the player see each monster’s intro cinematic before you’re able to bring people in to help you.
I experienced this annoyance firsthand, several times, when my friend was trying to help me catch up to him in the story. I’d have to go in, find the monster, send up a signal flare, and only then could he join.
Does it ruin the game? No, of course not. But why is it like that? It sucks!
That said, there’s not much else I can think to complain about with the game. In a lot of ways, this was the best video game I played this year, strictly from a mechanics based perspective. There are very few games that were more rewarding to play than this. And even though I have some minor gripes with it, I think this game is more than deserving of the success it has seen.
Can’t wait for Iceborne!
3. Yakuza (Best Story)
The entire series actually, but if you want to get technical about it then I guess I’m giving the nod to Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, which was one of two (three?) Yakuza games that came out in the west this year.
Oh boy. Where do I even begin with Yakuza?
I’ve been a fan of Sega’s part serious crime drama, slash, part extremely attractive Japanese men making a complete ass of themselves series ever since the original game was released in the west back in 2006 for the PS2.
Looking back on it, it’s amazing that I stuck with the series. Not because Yakuza isn’t one of my favorite game series, it totally is — but holy shit, has anyone gone back to look at what “Yakuza (1)” was? The game’s dub and localization are absolutely fucking atrocious and betray what the series is really about.
One of my favorite things to do this year was go back and show my wife videos on YouTube of the original game’s English dub. Wherein “Kazuma” is portrayed NOTHING at all like Kiryu. And Majima is voiced by Mark Hamill and constantly screams out shrill “MOTHERFUCKER!”s throughout the entire game. WOOF.
Still, there was something there with that original game that had me coming back for more when Yakuza 2 was eventually released. Despite Sega completely giving up on trying to make the game appeal to a western audience (they opted to go with a slightly more literal localization, but this time without any English dub to speak of, and just anime style English subtitles to get you through the game’s narrative) I think Yakuza 2 was the game that really made a lot of long time western fans resonate with the series.
I purchased, and played every one of those games to completion. And I enjoyed the hell out of them. And even though Yakuza has become quite the beloved series around the world, it wasn’t always like that.
Yakuza 3 saw some baffling changes made to the localization, where chunks of content were cut straight out of the game. Yakuza 4 came over in tact, as well as the stupendously awful Dead Souls, but for a long time after that, Yakuza was just dead in the west.
It wasn’t until late 2015 when Sega decided to take a gamble with the series again, and released a digital only version of Yakuza 5 on PS3. That’s when things slightly started to turn around for the series. The decision to make it kind of a budget release was ultimately a smart one, because it generated enough buzz for the series for Sega to decide to go back to releasing games in the west.
But it wasn’t until last year’s stellar Yakuza 0 that the series really made the impact that put it on the map. Thanks to Sega (wisely) putting in the resources to make sure that Yakuza 0 received an incredible localization, and probably thanks to the fact that it provided such a good jumping on point for such a long running series — Yakuza 0 was finally the game that made a lot more people pay attention to the series.
From there, they basically lined up a slam dunk. They used the momentum from 0 to get everyone in the west caught up on the mainline Yakuza games. Later that year Yakuza Kiwami, a remake of the first game came out that closely followed the events of Yakuza 0. This year we saw the sequel to that, Kiwami 2 continue Kiryu’s story, and made it a little easier to bridge the gap to the “old-modern” games in the series. Especially since Sega is now going back and doing enhanced ports of 3, 4, and 5 for PS4.
We even got the Yakuza team’s Fist of the North Star game to come out here, complete with an English dub. And now we’re even at the point where the next proper game from that studio, Judge Eyes, or Judgment as it’s now known in the West, will release a few months apart from its Japanese release. With the localization team even going as far with that game to not only provide an English dub for it, but two entirely separate subtitle tracks, one for the dub, and one for a more “traditional” Yakuza feel if you’re playing the game in Japanese.
But before all that, earlier on in the year we saw the release of Yakuza 6, which marks the end of series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu’s story.
Before I get to that, I have to talk about something else. So strap in folks, it’s gonna be a long one!
Last year with the release of Yakuza 0, I finally got Zara interested in this little known series I had been obsessing over for years. One of the things that really worked to Yakuza 0’s advantage, was just how outrageous a lot of the sub stories were. And I think this was they key to getting a lot of people, including my wife, invested in the series. I specifically showed her entire side quests, like “How To Train Your Dominatrix” to entice her to check out these series. Her interest was definitely piqued, but playing through all of these games would be a tall order for her.
However, when it became apparent that I would be moving in with her, one of the earliest ideas that got tossed around for stuff to do together was for me to play the entire Yakuza series for her. Now, if I’m being honest with you, I thought this whole process would take a couple years. The Yakuza games aren’t the absolute longest games out there, but if you’re doing enough of the side content they are on the longer side of things.
When I sat down to play Yakuza 0 for her, nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.
As I’m sure I talked about last year, the brilliance of Yakuza 0 is two-fold. You can either appreciate this game as a total newcomer to the series, or as a series veteran. And in either scenario you end up appreciating it for different reasons.
For newbies, it’s the perfect starting point for the series. Chronologically it takes place before the events of the other games. So for a newcomer, you’re being introduced to characters like Kiryu and Majima for the first time. And once again, Sega very smartly capitalized on this by making Yakuza Kiwami, which is a direct continuation of that story, and makes for a much better “second game” to play than jumping into vanilla Yakuza 1.
On the other hand, for series veterans Yakuza 0 brilliantly redefines the character of Majima Goro. Originally a psychotic villain in the first game, Majima went onto become one of, if not the most popular character in the series.
Over the years, the Yakuza team took Majima in a different direction than from when he was first introduced. But admittedly, and especially, if your introduction to him was Mark Hamill’s portrayal of him, it’s maybe a little bit of a stretch to go from “Motherfucker! Motherfucker!” to the charming and tragic character that Majima turned out to be.
So 0 flips the script. Provides an excellent explanation of who Majima really is, and why he becomes the way that he is in the “later” games. And then once again, even for series vets’, Kiwami keeps the ball rolling with the hilarious “Majima Everywhere” mode.
That’s a lot of talk about Majima. But honestly he’s such an important part of this series now, that I think it’s appropriate to make it a focal point. Oh, also my wife wants to marry him.
Zara went into Yakuza knowing that Kiryu was one of my favorite characters. She even bought me the Kiryu figma when it came out a while ago. So she had some expectations for him. Of course she loves Kiryu too, how could you not? But he’s not her main Yakuza husband.
No, that honor very clearly goes to Majima Fucking Goro. Between Yakuza 0 and Kiwami 1, Zara became absolutely obsessed with the one-eyed Yakuza. How obsessed? We own a foot tall statue of Majima that she begged me to get her for her birthday. It was originally an expensive statue to begin with, but I paid double for it, because that’s just how exclusive Japanese figures go.
Zara’s phone has been decorated with a Majima wallpaper, and lockscreen for months. Her ringtone is the opening to Yakuza 0. And her notification sound, much to many, many people’s surprise, is a sound clip of Majima laughing in Kiwami 1.
HER Engagement Ring that I gave her is a silver ring with the design of Majima’s eye patch on it. And I proposed to her in our living room while a YouTube video of Majima singing 24 Hour Cinderella played in the background. And this was all according to her wishes!
My wife loves Majima Goro more than she loves me.
Not really, but I think it’s close.
And this was just the beginning of her eventual fanaticism for the Yakuza series. Starting in April we played through roughly two Yakuza games a month until we caught up with 6 by July. Once we started, she did not want me to stop.
Every day for hours and hours I replayed all of these games. Which was more than fine, because most of them I haven’t played in years and years. 0 was a little rough because I literally just spent all of last year trying to finish it, and also it was kind of a case of “testing the waters” with her. But after that was the first time I cracked into Kiwami 1, and that was a hell of a lot of fun too.
We didn’t do everything there is to see in these games. But we did a lot. It was fun reliving the entire series leading up to the events of its finale. And for Zara it was a new obsession for her. Not since Fire Emblem had I converted her to something so hard as with Yakuza.
We even went as far as to play fucking Dead Souls (which she inexplicably loves) and even Binary Doman, which maybe doesn’t hold up quite as well as I remember! We also grabbed Fist of the North Star, but to be honest neither of us are too thrilled with that game, and haven’t made it very far into it.
Still, the core Yakuza series is something I think I can safely say has become one of my wife’s favorite series of all time. And of course we’re very excited for Judgment to come out next year. We’re even dying for Sega to announce that they’re bringing the other Yakuza spin-off games here, the ones set In Feudal Japan. That would be amazing by the way Sega, please do it!
When it comes down to it, it’s easy to see why Yakuza has become one of Sega’s most beloved franchises in recent years. For a long time it was hard to sell people on Yakuza. The original western release was actually pitched as “Japanese Grand Theft Auto” which it very much isn’t. For a long time I think people also just assumed Yakuza was just a very cut and dry crime drama. While it’s true that Yakuza’s main story is often very much all about “that drama”, I think people often didn’t realize that the game also featured a much more laid-back, often hilarious side to it that you get with the game’s various sub stories and mini-games.
For some people we basically knew what Yakuza was from the beginning. It’s essentially a spiritual successor to another infamous Sega series — Shenmue. The similarities are there to be sure. But what separates one from the other is that Yakuza is intentionally hilarious, Shenmue is accidentally hilarious.
Well, that and a couple of other things. But you get the idea.
So, Yakuza 6…
I gave Yakuza, the series as a whole, the award for “Best Story” this year. And when taken as a whole (maybe a little unfair, but eh) there’s really nothing else I’ve played this year that comes close. The story of Yakuza starts in the 80s and spans across 3+ decades. With Yakuza 0 we see the humble beginnings of the Dragon of Dojima. But by the time we get to Yakuza 6 we’ve practically seen every major event in Kiryu’s life.
Yakuza, the series, is about more than just Kiryu. It’s also about the people around him, be they friend or foe. We obviously have Majima who shares the spotlight with Kiryu in Yakuza 0, but becomes less of a focus later on, though he still remains a very important player in this story.
Starting with Yakuza 4, the series introduced other playable characters besides Kiryu. Shun Akiyama, and Saejima Taiga become two other pillars of the series going forward. We also get one-off characters like Masayoshi Tanamura in 4, and Tatsuo Shinada in 5. We even see Kiryu’s adopted daughter Haruka Sawamura grow up to eventually become one of the five playable characters in Yakuza 5.
There are plenty of other fan favorite returning characters, as well as memorable characters that only show up for one game. There are also an abundance of very minor characters that you might just remember because they were part of one of your favorite sub stories. The point is, the entire Yakuza story touches on a lot of different lives. And you get the benefit of seeing a lot of these characters grow over the span of such a long time.
At the center of it all is Kiryu though, and Yakuza 6 is very much the conclusion of Kiryu’s story.
One of the unfortunate things about Yakuza 0, in my opinion, is that it’s “the” Yakuza game for a lot of people. While 0 helped popularize the series, and inspired a ton of people to take a deeper dive into the games that came before (and after) it. Some people just.. stopped.
And as big of a Kiryu fan as I am, even I have to admit, Kiryu’s story in Yakuza 0 is the “B plot”, and Majima is the real spotlight. So a lot of these Yakuza 0 only people probably don’t even think that much of Kiryu. He’s just “the other guy you play as”.
But for those in the know, we know that Kiryu goes on to be much more than what we see in that game. I don’t really begrudge anyone for liking Majima more. Hell, the woman I love does. But even she adamantly agrees with me on this: You need to see the rest of Kiryu’s story to truly understand who he is, and what he’s about.
Kiryu starts out as a rank and file member of one of the largest families in his organization. He then goes on to defy everyone’s expectations and make a name for himself, only to later take the blame for a crime he didn’t commit. The end of the first game see’s Kiryu not only become the Fourth Chairman of the Tojo Clan, but more importantly a father.
By the time we get to Yakuza 3, Kiryu is well and fully done with this whole “yakuza” business. He opens up an orphanage far away from the city of Kamurocho, but as is always the case gets drawn back into conflict.
In Yakuza 4, Kiryu kind of takes a back seat to let the newcomers shine. But he comes in at the end to prove that he’s truly the legend that others make him out to be. Only to find himself down and out, driving a taxi far from home at the beginning of Yakuza 5.
The end of Yakuza 5 leaves Kiryu in another dire situation as the credits roll, and it isn’t until Yakuza 6 that we finally get to see what becomes of him.
Yakuza 6 is a throwback to the older games in the series, where Kiryu is the only protagonist. The game even goes so far as to promptly see every other major player in the series out, only to return a matter of minutes before the end of the game.
This is Kazuma Kiryu’s story, or to be more accurate the end of it. And the end of the Yakuza series really. In a lot of ways.
I could talk about how Yakuza 6 is an incredibly good looking game in the new Dragon Engine. Or how it has some of the best optional content in the series, including my new favorite karaoke song for that series that I still blows my mind every time I watch it on YouTube. It has great combat, and an excellent progression system. It has great moments like Kiryu punching a fucking shark in the face.
But honestly, it’s not “the best” Yakuza game. I like it a whole lot for what it is, but it also suffers from removing those other long time characters just as much as it benefits from going back to the basics to tell this one last story. The villains are forgettable for the most part, and the game feels a little more somber than some of the other recent games which just go off the walls crazy. It works sometimes, and it feels a little empty at other parts.
None of that really matters though, because the end of this game more than makes up for any shortcomings it may or may not have. I don’t need to spoil the ending exactly. But I will say, when the shocking thing happens this time, considering this is “the end”, it feels real. And it hit us like a ton of bricks. Zara and I both started crying in disbelief.
Only for moments later to find the ending go in a different direction, that ultimately hit even harder than what we assumed to be the case before. The final moments of Yakuza 6 had both of us holding each other and loudly sobbing as we finally reached the end of our journey together.
Sure, we had Kiwami 2 to play a few months later. And while that game is great, I don’t think it honestly comes close to the impact the Yakuza 6 ending had on us.
Judgment appears to be set in the very same Kamurocho that the Yakuza games take place in. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see more than a few cameos in there, but I also think that if you’re looking for more of the mainline Yakuza characters, you’d have to go play that new mobile game. I don’t think we’ll really see them in Judgment.
And that’s sad in a way, but also exciting in some ways too. I feel like Kiryu and crew had their due. From 2006–2018, I spent 12 years following their story. And now I’m ready for something new.
But I don’t think I’d ever truly turn down a return to Yakuza, even if I feel like that series had the perfect conclusion.
2. Paladins (Best Multiplayer)
Paladins is my game of the year.
I really wish it were, it’s not, but it’s close!
No, this isn’t a joke. I mean, it started as a joke, and I like to joke about it, but… I’m completely 100% sincere when I say that Paladins is easily the second best time I’ve had with a game all year. And the only reason it’s not number one, is that miraculously another game finally came along to dethrone it near the end of the year.
But man… it was so close. And how funny would that have been, huh?!
Honestly, this preamble is all a bit too mean spirited. I’m of course poking fun at Paladins, a game that by all accounts shouldn’t be as good as it is. A game that I’m sure a lot of people just quickly dismiss as an Overwatch clone.
I was one such person, once. Hell, there’s a part of me even now that will go from playing this to Overwatch, or from Overwatch to this and frequently makes comments along the lines of “Paladins is terrible.”
But, I love it. I fucking love Paladins. It was, and continues to be such a huge part of my year. And it’s easily the game that I’ve put the most time into this year. As of writing this I’ve put 15 DAYS worth of actual playtime into Paladins. With over 500 wins (and just as many losses). I’ve dumped hundreds of dollars into buying cosmetics, which is something I usually avoid at all cost. My wife and I sit down almost every single morning to play a few hours of Paladins to start the day.
And to think, all of that started because of something I liked to call “Shitty Games Time”.
Back at the end of March, early April, when I first moved in with Zara. We were looking for something to do in the mornings. At the time, I had a few free-to-play games installed on my PS4. Fortnite (lol), Smite, and Hi-Rez’s other game Paladins.
Smite was the least popular of the bunch. As my wife did not particularly care to watch me play MOBAs. Fortnite was in the middle, because I hated playing Fortnite, because I was bad at it, but she found it amusing to watch the rest of the match play out.
Paladins… well.
As I mentioned much, much earlier. My wife is a fan of Overwatch. So when I showed her Paladins here immediate reaction was just to scoff at it and call it a shitty Overwatch knockoff. But I insisted that there was something to it, even though I was only half serious about that statement.
Paladins qualifies for this list because it actually exited beta, and officially came out around the time we started playing it in March/April. I had briefly messed around with it back when it came out on Steam and thought it was better than I expected it to be. But still didn’t have much interest in it beyond that.
Paladins is, to this day, a janky ass game. It is not uncommon to login to that game and see any number of reacquiring, or entirely new ways that Evil Mojo has fucked up the game with an update. There were times where none of the music worked properly. There were times when characters had to be disabled because there were horrible audio bugs that plagued the entire rest of the match when a certain skill was used. Characters will still repeat their lines over each other with a split second of a delay. For a majority of the year when you were loading into a match there was no art for the character you had chosen. Now there’s art for most of the characters and skins, but there are still times when there’s no art, in which case you just see an incredibly shitty looking render of the skin.
There’s a “play of the game” system in the game called “Top Play” that isn’t nearly as well designed as Overwatch’s in a lot of cases, but it gets the job done… sometimes. Sometimes you’ll be in a match and there will just be a constant, unending sound of gunfire. No, it’s not because this is a shooter and people are always shooting at each other. It’s just that the sound effect broke and couldn’t stop looping. There are mounts in this game, and most of the time when you launch the game it will revert back to the default brown horse for the first match.
There are sprays in this game. But for a while there if you put a single spray down, it broke sprays on your character for the entire rest of the match. Whenever you get a cosmetic item for a character, the notification that you have a new item will not go away until you restart the game. This has never once been fixed.
There’s a character named Terminus who is completely fucking broken on certain maps because he has a “leap up into the air” attack, and if the ceiling is too low he’ll get caught in his landing animation, and you can no longer swing his axe around — your primary method of attacking!
Can you imagine if any of this stuff was present at pretty much all times in Overwatch? People would become un-fucking-glued.
Paladins is fucking terrible.
Paladins is also the best competitive multiplayer game I’ve ever played in my life, somehow?
For all the shit that Paladins gets wrong, which is almost always technical. It does a lot of stuff right. It might not always be something that you might think is right, but for me I actually appreciate the ways in which it is different than Overwatch.
The most obvious difference between these two similar games, aside from the amount of polish one has over the other, is that Paladins has a slightly different approach to the “hero shooter” genre. In Overwatch, you pick a character, and that’s it. That character is the same for everyone else who plays that character, at least from what that character’s “kit” is.
Not so In Paladins. Paladins, being true to its fantasy aesthetic, decides to give the player a little freedom in how they want to build their champion. Each character in Paladins has four different “talents” you can pick from at the start of a match. These talents are the basis for what your character “build” will be. These talents often change one of the character’s core skills in a way to either give them different active or passive functionality.
In addition to that, players can build a “deck”, or multiple decks for each champion. In the deck creator you select a number of cards that affect your character in a similar way as the talents do, but to a much lesser degree. You can distribute more points into any given card to make the effect more dramatic though. Just so long as you don’t use up your allowance of “points” when building your deck.
This actually causes Paladins to fundamentally be different than Overwatch in that the game actually kind of has a strong RPG element to it in a way? It’s something that can similarly be found in most MOBAs as well. This results in there being a ton of different ways you can play each of the games nearly 40 characters. And even though there’s still a lot of people using cookie cutter builds, it allows for far more variety than Overwatch does by default.
Paladins has a few different modes too. Team Deathmatch, Onslaught, and Siege. TDM is self-explanatory. Onslaught is basically “king of the hill” or “capture the point” or whatever the fuck you want to call it. And Siege is a fucking nightmare.
Siege is your standard “push the payload” mode that Team Fortress 2 initially popularized. And it is by far my least favorite mode in the game. It’s not that I think the mode is poorly designed, or that the maps are bad, or anything like that. It’s that the random people I play with are fucking stupid, and do not understand how to play this mode at all. TDM, and Onslaught matches are fine almost all the time. But Siege matches are usually an exercise in frustration.
The people I get teamed up with will frequently avoid capturing, let alone pushing the payload. Instead opting to run around and try to get kills, or jerk off, or whatever the fuck it is that they’re doing instead of actually playing Siege properly.
It sucks so bad.
But sometimes you get a good match here and there, and also the game’s “competitive” mode is just Siege but with picks and bans, and rank, and those matches seem much better in general. They just take much longer to get going.
But, man, for every negative thing I can come up with about Paladins, there’s like a dozen other positive things I can say.
After playing the game as a goof for a few weeks, my wife and I started to realize something. We actually really liked the game. I loved to play it, and she loved to watch it. Paladins lore is almost nonexistent outside of digging into the wiki, but somehow we ended up getting super invested in it.
We started to really warm up to the roster of characters, and get excited about trying out character builds for them. And of course that went hand in hand with the skins. To Hi-Rez/Evil Mojo’s credit, both of us feel like Paladins does cosmetic character skins much, much better than Overwatch does. Sure, Overwatch is still going to be the technically more impressive looking game. But artistically, and creatively a lot of the Paladins skins are superior, in my opinion.
That’s not to say Overwatch skins are bad. There are some really, really fantastic ones. But a lot of them feel “samey” or are just straight up pallet swaps of another skin. That happens in Paladins too, but there aren’t nearly as many of them. Most every skin for a character in Paladins is unique. They can completely change the look of the character, which is something I feel like Blizzard intentionally stays away from, and maybe for good reason.
But with Paladins being unafraid to shake things up, you have some skins that make the character wildly different. And with the more recent skins, it’s usually a lot more than just a costume change. New skins often consist of new weapons, special effects on skills, and completely different voice lines — a lot of the time sounding nothing like the original character.
Speaking of the characters. There’s something I prefer about Paladins characters that’s a little difficult to explain. But essentially I just like that Paladins character designs can be very horny. I know that’s a weird thing to suggest Paladin does better than Blizzard, considering the crazy amount of Source Film Maker porn out there. And that isn’t to say Blizzard never puts any fanservice into their Overwatch character designs. But Overwatch by nature tries to be inclusive in a way that sometimes makes it hard for Blizzard to really capatlize on the fact that people want to fuck their characters.
That’s simply not the case in Paladins. While I don’t think Evil Mojo is going out there to subreddits and encourgaging people to look up rule 34 for Paladins, I do think that they “get” their fanbase. You have characters like Seris and Skye who are made to be titalizing. But it’s not just the girls, as my wife likes to point out. There’s no small amount of fan service when it comes to the male characters as well. Koga is 75% man tiddy, and Lex has a pair of swim trunks with a tight ass for one of his skins.
Does it make the game feel more “trashy”? Not anymore than any of its technical shortcomings already do. But, hey, it’s 2018, being horny on main is popular. So why not embrace that?
These skins are a lot of fun, and it’s really no wonder we’ve spent so much money on them. In addition to all the extra work Evil Mojo does on making these skins, the business model for obtaining them is also much, much, MUCH better than Overwatch’s loot box shenanigans.
Paladins is free-to-play, unlike Overwatch which has a retail price. Paladins also doesn’t require a subscription service on consoles to play. I feel like these things are important to note, because after all, Paladins does still have loot boxes. And yes there are tons of cosmetics in them.
But that’s not the only way to acquire cosmetics. In fact it’s probably the least popular way of obtaining skins. Instead there are things like the deal of the day, which offers up three different cosmetics that you can buy with the game’s premium currency. I should also note that you can (slowly) obtain this currency as login rewards, but that’s not realistic for the majority of purchases.
Sure, there are a lot of repeats in those deals, but sometimes you can find really rare stuff. Stuff that hasn’t been available for a long time. And the deals are always around the same price. So it’s a nice incentive to login and see if there’s anything you’re dying to get.
In addition that that, the past few major events in the game have offered up a way to purchase the really impressive shiny new skins. And you can either do that piecemeal, or in a bundle. And that’s a really nice way to expand your selection of cosmetics.
There’s also the game’s Battle Pass. Which when purchases allows you to earn experience to level up your battle pass, and when you reach certain levels you get up to three premium skins from that season of the pass.
That’s a lot of different ways you can spend money, but I think, at least for me. It beats gambling, like, by a lot. I much prefer being able to see a skin that I like and decide “I’m going to just buy that”, then try to get lucky with a loot box. But, you know, your mileage may vary.
I tried to get away from just basically explaining or “reviewing” games in my game of the year list. And I know that as I’m writing this bit about Paladins, I’ve failed here. However, even if it comes off as a glorified ad, I really sincerely do want people to learn about Paladins, because it’s an awesome, awesome game. It’s also terrible.
I’ve played so much Paladins this year for me and my wife that we kind of just let the game take over our lives to some extent. We’d love to buy some Paladins merch, but there’s not a lot of it out there. And even less of it that’s actually “good”. Zara has drawn four NSFW Paladins pictures for me, including one of her OC, and will probably draw more in the future. I wrote an erotic Paladins fanfic for her for Christmas, as per her request. Another husband of Zara’s this year is Koga. She goes crazy for him. She actually tries to make sure that I play him, as well as a few other characters we both like every day.
The craziest thing of all though is probably that we both ended up watching Paladins eSports, and, uh, really liked it? A few weeks ago at Hi-Rez Expo there was a Paladins tournament that was being streamed on Mixer all weekend long. Initially, and for most of the weekend, I just had the stream on in the background to try and collect those sweet, sweet rewards as part of Mixer’s whole “gamification” of streaming. That whole thing ended up being a shit show and most people didn’t even get their rewards until just recently (Paladins is terrible), but we got them none the less.
Something weird happened during the finals though, in that both of us stopped doing whatever else it was we were doing at the time, and just… watched the finals. I, myself, can barely be bothered to give half of a fuck about eSports, let alone my wife who would probably rather claw her eyes out than have to sit through an event like this. Somehow though, we just, wanted to watch it? And then we started getting super into it. We picked our team (Team Envy) and rooted for them. There were crazy upsets, and a lot of excitement. And finally Team Envy won. And it was amazing! But… we spent a few hours watching eSports. Whoops.
Look, I don’t know what to tell you. In recent years I’ve come to have an affinity for those kinds of “B-Tier” games that we don’t really get anymore. Something like Paladins, which is like the scrappy underdog to Overwatch’s worldwide phenomenon is just endearing in a way that I can’t rightfully explain. I went through a good chunk of this year, earnestly believing that Paladins would be my game of the year. We spent so much time playing it, we got so much joy out of it, it basically revitalized my interest in competitive games.
Paladins is terrible. But it’s also one of 2018’s best games. Don’t sleep on it, please!
Bonus: The Nesta’s Unofficial “Official” Paladins Tier List
As if this section wasn’t already long enough, I deiced it would be fun to include a “tier list” for Paladins characters based off my personal opinion of them and how well I am with them. I’m by no means a pro player by any means, and I’m not trying to say this is any sort of definitive ranking. It’s just what has worked for me.
1. Koga: Sure to piss off my best friend, but Koga is my #1 character. Does that mean he’s overpowered? Hm. I dunno. Maybe he is in a casual setting. But he doesn’t seem to get much play in strictly competitive games. Koga is interesting because he’s simultaneously easy and hard to play. His energy mechanic is interesting, if not a little finicky. If you’re trying to make effective use of your claws, especially if you’re using lunge that energy goes poof. If you save your energy for dashing and just use your SMGs. Well, it looks impressive, and it is kinda, but it is admittedly a lot easier. My wife wants to fuck Koga.
2. Talus: Talus was one of my least favorite characters for a good while. But Zara ended up making her OC a Ska’drin, so I guess that kind of made me soften up on him a bit more. Plus, I dunno if this is due to a recent change or not, but I’m really fucking good with him. Koga is my “go-to” for TDM. And I always play him once a day. But after that I usually go for Talus.
3. Khan: Once I discovered that you could spend gold to level up characters (I literally only discovered this a couple months ago) I finally got all the “new” characters to 12 so I could unlock all their talents. At that time I made a Khan “support tank” build that buffs his rally ability. And you know what? It fucking owns. If I’m going to do a Siege match for real, I’m usually going for Khan. Him and Lian are also my OTP of the game.
4. Jenos: Paladins is a game that has absurdly powerful healers for some reason. Not that I’m complaining. And I know Jenos isn’t like, a big competitive pick. For me though, he’s probably the best healer I can think of. There are other healers like Seris that will run circles around him when it comes to straight up healing. But it’s easy for him to throw a HoT on someone, then just unleash fucking mayhem with his gun. And his Ult? Christ man. We established pretty early on that whenever Trade District comes up I pick Jenos. Because I usually get Top Play on him there and just fuck people up.
5. Strix: Strix is an interesting one, because as I became “better” at the game, and even technically “better” at playing Strix, I also somehow got worse with him? I’m usually terrible with snipers in any game, and Paladins wasn’t any different. At first. So one day I was playing Magistrate’s Archives and just decided to play “Pistol Strix”. Eventually creating a build around only using the pistol. The entire match. Never switching to the rifle. And you know what? I fucking tore shit up with Pistol Strix. His reign of terror went on for months. Every time Magistrate’s Archives came up — pop, pop, pop, like 15 kills in an Onslaught game with Strix using only a Pistol. Must have driven people insane. Eventually I put Strix down for a while, but when I finally got a good skin for him, Pistol Strix returned from retirement. But only briefly. After that I started getting pretty decent at using his other dumb gun, and, sniping… yawn. I miss Pistol Strix.
6. Vivian: Whenever a new major patch comes around I’ll go hunt for some new builds for characters that are under performing for me. I can’t remember the last time that was the case with Vivian. I’m sure it’s a pretty common one, but my build just turns her into a living turret and she mows motherfuckers down. Moves like a tank though. I started playing Vivian a lot more when I got her Halloween skins though.
7. Seris: Seris is our favorite girl in the game, and probably my favorite character in general. She’s another character that I used to play in a slightly unorthodox way and had a lot more fun with. “Damage Seris” was very much a thing for a while, and that got even better once we realized how good the “Agony” talent was. Unfortunately I haven’t had much luck playing like that for a while, so I usually just play pure support Seris. She unloads healing juice at an alarming rate if you take the “chain heal” talent. You can’t really out heal Seris most of the time. But it’s kinda… boring to be honest. A character I like to play when I’m feeling sleepy cause it’s pretty mindless. Seris has some of the best skins in the game though, and I own like all of them, so it’s always nice to look at her before a match begins.
8. Viktor: Viktor is the “every man” character. Do you know how to play a FPS? Pick Viktor and forgot about all this other confusing shit! I know Viktor is a very noob friendly character, but he still preforms really well for considerably little effort. He’s got some great talents, his Ult is aces. And he finally got a good skin recently with Wolfman Viktor.
9. Fernando: It’s Fernando! Ahhhhhhh!! Fernando is a character I’ve come to appreciate much more recently. His Gundam skin is hilarious. And his Halloween skins are really cool. He’s also got that rad Surf emote now. When making this list, I noticed I’m pretty good with a lot of the tanks. But Fernando is probably my runner-up besides Khan. I don’t like his shield nearly as much, but he’s a powerhouse. Really offensive tank for when you need to get shit done.
10. Terminus: Terminus is almost unplayable on Primal Court due to the previously mentioned bug. But that still doesn’t stop me from picking him there because… I hate myself, I guess? Terminus can either be really good, or really bad depending on what map you’re on, and what the enemy team makeup is. You can always see the map beforehand, but not the enemy team if you’re not playing competitive. So it’s kind of luck of the draw in most cases. His up close and personal style can make your life a living hell, or he’s just kind of a useless sack of shit that gets slaughtered from far away. His “shield/counter” mechanic is strong as hell though in the right circumstances. And it’s not unusual for me to completely shred someone apart with it. He kinda looks like Star Platinum.
11. Furia: When Furia came out I was pretty sure that the developers were not so subtly making the new characters overpowered as shit. Furia was a god damn monster when she was originally released. She had the most powerful single-target heal in the game, and it was instant. Her weapon eviscerated people. She could easily retreat. And you could turn one of her attacks into a god damn orbital cannon. Furia has since been nerfed pretty heavily, but still manages to be one of the best active healers in the game. She’s also gotten some pretty good new skins lately. Rise of Furia was the worst event that I’ve played in this game though. So. Guess I’m gonna dock points for that one. Sorry Furia.
12. Torvald: Thanks, Grandpa. Torvald seemed like one of the worst characters in the game for me for the longest time. Turns out I just didn’t know how to use him right. Winner of the best talent name in the entire game goes to “Thanks, Grandpa” which is a pretty stellar talent for him that turns him into a real nuisance for the enemy team when he’s tossing on shields left and right. Torvald needs his own shield to survive though, so if you lose that, you’re fucked. Also, was there ever a point where his Ult wasn’t good for maps where you can knock me off the edge?
13. Skye: Skye is my other favorite girl in the game. The recent redesign is… very good. And I love her Valentine’s skin. As for how she actually plays? Aw, alright. Skye recently has become pretty OP. Whenever she’s picked she’s sure to rack up a huge kill count. And her Bomb can still be one of the best Ults in the game, especially at really inopportune times on Siege matches. I’ve gone back and fourth on Skye all year, but I think I finally have a build that I like, and right now especially it’s easy to excel with her. Ass.
14. Grover: Grover has some of the best voice lines in the game, and is pretty hilarious in general. He’s also a damn good healer. It’s easy to pick up some Overwatch parallels with a lot of the characters, but it’s really funny that Grover is basically the Lucio of this game. I don’t always have the best luck throwing his axes, but they’re very powerful, and when it works, it works. His passive AoE heal makes him easy to do his job on a basic level. But if you’re combining that with his active heal, his axes, and smart use of his vines, you’re in a pretty good spot.
15. Makoa: Makoa also has some really good voice lines, and one of the best skins in the game with Plushy-Makoa. Just not that dreadful dog one. I’ve had some good matches as Makoa, but he’s kind of tapered off for me a bit in recent months. His hook can be kind of a crap shoot, but if you can make it work, and line up his powerful cannon balls he can wreck shop. He’s also really, really hard to kill.
16. Inara: Inara is the best tank that nobody plays. Including me most of the time. I know this about her, but for some reason I still don’t pick her too often. In my opinion she’s the hardest tank to kill in the game, and just soaks up damage like crazy. But it’s hard to get kills with her a lot of the time. Her wall can be tricky to use right. And, I dunno, she’s not as exciting as some characters. I usually do quite well with her though.
17. Maeve: Maeve has the best skin in the game. Period. And even though it’s been deluded a little due to three other characters have a similar skin, it’s still fucking cool and a great example of the devs putting a lot of work into their skins. Aside from that, I think Maeve is one of the harder characters to play well. She’s super fast paced, and takes a lot of precision on top of that. A tricky combination. But when you’re on point with her, you can be deadly. My favorite use of Maeve was winning this Dragon’s Call match by myself pretty much.
18. Lian: Lian also has strong waifu potential. I do ship her with Khan though, as they make a hilariously adorable couple. Khan even has an emote that interacts with a hologram of Lian and it’s probably my favorite emote in the game. Lian also has some of the best skins in the game, all of them which I own. As it turns out she’s also a really good character to play! But sometimes I find myself just flailing at the buttons and hoping cool shit happens. Her interesting mix of fast paced, always moving ranged attacks is a lot of fun though.
19. Cassie: I think Cassie is generally considered to be one of the best characters on a “real” tier list. And I can see why, she’s really powerful. She has the benefit of having extremely long sniper-like range, but needing very little of the actual skill to make those long distance shots connect, and also her crossbow fires extremely fast. I’ve had some pretty good matches with Cassie. I guess I just don’t like her that much though.
20. Ruckus: Ruckus is probably the tank I see get played the most in the entire game. He’s a good mix of offense and defense, and has great mobility. Pretty much a noob friendly character like Viktor. He also frequently does quite well for himself in most matches. But I dunno, I guess I’m not the biggest fan of playing him most of the time. I do however love to zoom in on his face before a match starts with Strix’s scope.
21. Dredge: They call me A-d-m-i-r-a-l D-r-e-d-g-e, now baby tell me what you want to do with me. Little inside joke for everyone there. Anyway, Dredge is still the newest hero until Imanji comes out, and he’s kind of middle of the road. I like him a lot as a character, but his gameplay feels a little flawed. He’s excellent as a backline offensive support. But in almost any other scenario? He’s bad. Also I don’t like his worm hole ability and always forget to use it.
22. Androxous: Androxous is another one of Zara’s favorite characters. She also has a OT3 of Androxous, Seris, and Strix for reasons I can’t quite remember at this time. Anyway, Androxous is basically your Reaper stand in for this game, at least in terms of looks. He’s a tricky character to actually play though, unlike Reaper. I’ve never been good with Revolvers, and that’s not any different here either. But recently I’ve been getting used to properly using his “counter” ability, and a little better about landing shots. I still try to fly around and do cool shit, but I’m mostly bad at that. And if I actually remembered to use his melee attack, which is a hilarious donkey punch, more often I’d probably do a lot better on him too. I like him, I’m just not great with him. Some people are scary with him though.
23. Pip: While I’m personally alright at Pip, he happens to be the one character that I see other people play poorly more than any other character in the game. Pip is a healer, and he can do some decent damage. People totally disregard that bit about healing, and just try to play Damage Pip. Before a match starts, if we see someone pick Pip, we still need a healer on the team. I don’t know what it is about him that drives people to do what they do. And also I’m kind of uncomfortable about the Pepper skin. Yikes.
24. Zhin: The first time I played Zhin I thought he was a melee character, and obviously I played like shit. Following attempts to play Zhin proved more fruitful. Much more fruitful. He was one of my best characters in the beginning. His Smolder talent made him nearly invincible. I’m not quit sure what happened, but somewhere along the way I just stopped playing Zhin. And whenever I go back to try and play him again, he just doesn’t do it like he used to. Also they clearly nerfed Zhin from when I first started playing the game, because originally right before joining a match he would say “Zhin. Let the slaughter begin.” Which was the dopest shit, but they “fixed” that. Lame.
25. Ash: Not my worst tank, but close. I’m honestly not that good at Ash, but some people are annoyingly good at her. Similar to how troublesome Skye’s Bomb can be, I’ve seen Ash’s win a Siege match just by using their knockback. And it’s infuriating. I’m also just not a big fan of any of her skins, and I dunno. Kinda just indifferent about her in general.
26. Buck: We like to consider Buck the “off-tank” character. For a non-Frontline Champion, Buck can take a decent amount of punishment, and recover it too. I’ve had a couple of really good matches as Buck, but more often than not I’m not getting much accomplished on him. Also he’s pretty… dumb.
27. Bomb King: BK is one of my favorite characters in the game. He’s such a unique concept for a character, and he’s hilarious. At some point we got the Bomb King announcer pack, and have never taken it off since. The reason Bomb King is so far down this list though is that he’s impossible for me to play. There are maybe one or two matches where I somehow got lucky and did some cool shit with Bomb King, but most of the time I’m just dead weight for my team. He’s got some great skins though too.
28. Barik: Here he is. My worst Frontline. It’s not even that I’m always terrible at Barik, sometimes I do alright as him. But he still never seems as good as the other tanks, you know? I’ve seen some annoying ass Bariks in my time though. So I know it’s possible to play him well. But yeah, I’d just rather play someone else most of the time. Also it sucks (even though it makes perfect sense) that his best skin is Steam exclusive. Since I play on the PS4.
29. Ying: Ying is probably the most interesting character in Paladins from a gameplay perspective. I can’t say I’ve seen another character like her in another game. She creates illusions of herself that give off a passive heal, but they can be detonated to do damage, or do more healing, depending on how you spec her. She can also warp around from illusion to illusion and is just a weird character in general. Ying is an amazing healer, and I’ve done pretty alright with her in the past. The problem is mainly that I just don’t feel like I have much… control over what I’m doing when I play her. So I mostly avoid her. Some great skins though!
30. Moji: Once upon a time Moji seemed OP. That time is not now, nor has it been for a very long time. There’s not actually a whole lot to like about Moji. For one, she’s weird looking. Two, her Ult is among one of the worst in the game in my opinion. Three, she dies almost instantly unless you have your shield up. Four, the shield doesn’t last very long at all. Five, well, okay I guess it’s cool that she can just keep dumping. Moji sucks.
31. Tyra: Tyra is Zara’s least favorite character in the game by far. She gets irrationally angry about Tyra players. It’s not that I don’t see where she’s coming from. Tyra is another one of those newbie friendly “shooty, shoot” characters. And her fire bomb is one of the most annoying attacks in the game. I feel like the game will go through phases where I see a ton of Tyra players getting Top Play left and right, and other times where she does okay at best. Personally I’ve never really been that good at her, and I don’t like her as a character either. I also don’t like her “Hunter’s Mark” skill. And yeah, I dunno. She sucks.
32. Lex: I actually like Lex, the character a lot. But maybe not for the right reasons. I’m sure some people like him unironically and think he’s a real cool dude. But to that I say, half the time he says anything it sounds like he’s got a mouth full of marbles. And his only good skin is his Surfer skin because it sucks so bad that it wraps back around to being kind of brilliant. My only real problem with Lex though is that I have no idea how to play him. A lot of people just fucking tear it up with him. Every time I’ve tried to play Lex I just eat shit. George or be Georged, know what I’m sayin’?
33. Evie: Evie is a mixed bag. Love her design, her voice? Not so much. She has a ton of really great skins too. Playing Evie? Also a mixed bag. Her kit seems really… underwhelming at a glance. In reality though it’s just a simple one. If you don’t know how to play Evie, you will just bring your team down entirely. If you do know how to play Evie, you can have some fun with her. If you do know how to play Evie, but you’re not necessarily good at actually executing on that, well then… she’s not a great character to play. Guess which one I am.
34. Mal’Damba: Mal’Damba is damn close to being the worst healer in the game (for me), and I used to consider him to be the worst character in general. But I’ve since figured out how he works, and honestly, if you’re a really good Mal’Damba player, he becomes one of the best healers in the game. The problem is that he’s very difficult to play. And when so many of the other characters can excel with a fraction of the effort required to play Mal’Damba, I just have to wonder “why?”
35. Sha Lin: Sha Lin is among the worst characters in the game. I don’t mean his gameplay, he’s just a dipshit. Actually playing Sha Lin though? It can be a lot of fun! Usually I’m pretty bad at it, and I usually only bring him out on Trade District if I’ve already played Jenos for the day. And usually it sucks, but there are times when it works. Like just recently. I got a call from my doctor just as the match started. I had my head tilted to hold the phone to my ear, and the TV on mute. But somehow I fucking destroyed everyone in that match while talking on the phone. And that’s great. Right?
36. Grohk: Grohk is the worst healer in the game. I don’t really know what else to add. Some people can be good at Grohk. But usually they aren’t. I certainly never am. He seems shitty in almost every way. And he’s basically just a wanna-be Thrall from Warcraft. Grohk sucks shit.
37. Kinessa: There are two snipers in the game. One of them is good. The other one is Kinessa. There’s nothing good about Kinessa. All of her skins look like shit. Her voice is terrible. The way she plays sucks. People who like to play her often camp out at thier spawn and waste the entire match trying to snipe people, then duck back into their spawn point. Which is annoying at best, but actually harmful to your team if she’s on it at worst. Why would I ever play Kinessa when there’s Strix? There’s literally no reason.
38. Willo: Willo is my most hated character in the game. She looks like fucking trash. She uses internet/dudebro speak when she talks in her default skin. Her abilities all suck. Her Ult is the worst Ult in the entire game. I can’t think of a single redeeming thing to say about Willo. She fucking sucks!
39. Drogoz: Now, why is ol’ Drogoz all the way in last place? After all, I like Drogoz! He’s a cool dragon man with a jet pack. Also his Rise of Furia skin is among one of the coolest skins in the game. I certainly like him more than Grohk, Kinessa, and Willo. So what’s the deal? There doesn’t exist a character in Paladins that I am worse at than Drogoz. He has a rocket launcher. I want to play him. His jet pack controls like shit though, and has next to no fuel. Drogoz can barely every get two feet off the ground. His rockets never hit. I always fuck up his fireball. I don’t think I’ve ever successfully landed his Ult, and if I have it was a complete accident. He also has an awesome Unreal Tournament style “Shock Combo”. I’ve never killed anyone with it. Let’s face it, I’ve never done anything good or cool with Drogoz. Not once in the 15 days of playtime I’ve put into Paladins. Do not let me play Drogoz. Do not.
1. Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age (Game of the Year 2018)
Dragon Quest XI is almost the perfect game. It’s the best Dragon Quest game. It’s one of the best JRPGs of all time. It’s my game of the year this year. It’s also probably pretty high on my favorite games of all time list. This game is so god damn close to being perfect… but the music… sigh.
That’s my one real complaint. The music. In a way, it’s always been my complaint about Dragon Quest. Aside from the original Dragon Quest, or Dragon Warrior as I knew it as, I don’t have any sort of affinity for the music in this series. It’s tolerable at the best of times, and down right nauseating at worst.
You also have the series composer, Koichi Sugiyama, who in addition to being bad at his job, is also an actual piece of human shit. Not like in a slight “Oh, he makes bad music sort of way”, but in an actual racist, homophobic, transphobic sort of way. This guy openly preaches his shitty beliefs for all to see, but I guess Square Enix can’t be bothered to find a decent human being to fill that role. Or even someone that can make appealing sounding music.
I will admit, that by the end of my 200 hour long playthrough, the music had grown on me a bit. Not because I think it’s “good”, but probably because I associated it with this game.
Why did I start with this rant about the music? Because I felt it was appropriate to air my grievances about the soundtrack, and the person who composed it. Not only is it a blight on an otherwise perfect game, but there’s a small part of me that feels somewhat guilty for giving this game top honors when such a foul person worked on it.
But at the end of the day, these two things are true:
One, You sometimes have to separate the art from the artist. Not only is it not fair to punish everyone else who worked on Dragon Quest XI, but also Sugiyama is very public and vocal. I’m sure there are equally terrible people who work on our favorite games from the shadows. And while Square Enix should be held accountable for still employing this douche bag, he’s also not solely responsible for this game. In fact the only thing he had to do with it was work on the one single thing that sucks about this game.
Two, Holy fucking shit you guys, Dragon Quest XI is one of the greatest games of all time. And I’m just going to gush about it non-stop for a few pages.
Like many games on my lists, there’s a story behind Dragon Quest XI, as well as the series itself.
Dragon Quest 1, or Dragon Warrior as we knew it in the states back then was such a huge, life altering game for me. I was only four years old when we received our free copy of the game from Nintendo Power. The original NES game checks off a lot of “firsts” for me.
While it wasn’t the first video game I played, it was among the first. It was my first JRPG, hell, it was my first exposure to RPGs period. It was the first time I can remember seeing a fantasy setting. And maybe most important of all, it was how I first learned to read.
You read that right. I learned to read when I was four years old by playing Dragon Warrior with my mom. In a lot of ways this game is important to me. It literally helped define who I am today. Aside from actually learning to read from it (which is funny because how the game is localized). It also turned me onto JRPGs from the very beginning. My favorite genre.
It also turned me into a huge fantasy nerd. I spent a lot of my childhood being obsessed with knights, swords, armor, dragons, stuff like that. Fantasy is still my favorite genre of fiction to this day.
It’s also a great memory I have of my mother, who passed away when I was 13 years old. Between us playing Dragon Warrior together, and up until her death we shared our love of the JRPG genre with each other. I specifically remember moments like making a hand written strategy guide for Final Fantasy VII for her. And also getting stuck in Tales of Destiny, only for my mom to start playing it and easily get way further than me.
So, Dragon Quest. I went onto play a little bit of Dragon Quest 2, skipped 3, but then fell completely in-love with 4 which was previously my favorite DQ game, and still one of my favorite games of all time. Many, many years later I got to play 5 and 6 and I really like both of those games too.
But that’s pretty much where the buck stops with Dragon Quest and me.
I got Dragon Warrior 7 for PS1. The last Dragon Warrior game to ever be released (we finally got the original Dragon Quest name afterwards). But that game just didn’t do it for me. It was entirely too long, and much harder to appreciate in the PS1 era.
Then Dragon Quest 8, which is everyone’s sweetheart. The main reason I bought it was for the Final Fantasy XII demo (another game I don’t particularly care for as it turns out) but never got too far into it because… I dunno. I just didn’t like it.
Dragon Quest 9 is actually a pretty good game, but it has two major problems that drove me away. One, the generic create-a-character party members are not nearly as appealing as the established characters in the other games. And two, the conditions for unlocking a lot of the vocations in the game are god awful trash and it drove me to hate the game. The second reason is the bigger problem, obviously.
Dragon Quest 10… I would love to play someday!
But yeah… Dragon Quest. It kind of stopped being one of my favorite series with the later games. And yet, somewhere inside me, I still had a fondness for Dragon Quest that I just couldn’t shake.
So, fast-forward to Dragon Quest XI. When it was originally revealed I was actually pretty stoked, but not for the PS4 version (which is the one we eventually got here), but for the 3DS version. If you’re unfamiliar, there are three completely different versions of Dragon Quest XI.
The first one, the one I’m talking about on this list, is the PS4 versions which was made on the Unreal 4 engine and looks absolutely gorgeous. The other two versions are both actually part of the 3DS version of the game.
They did a neat gimmick with DQXI on 3DS. The top screen was a 3DS style 3D version of the game. Very similar to how Dragon Quest 9 looked on DS. The bottom screen, however, was an old school 16bit, Super Famicom looking version of the game. Needless to say it was nostalgic as hell seeing that bottom screen version of the game. Sadly, we didn’t get that here, and I doubt we ever will. Unless all three of these versions are somehow incorporated into the Switch version of the game that has yet to come out in any territory, let alone here. But I’m pretty doubtful of that.
Still, it got me excited about Dragon Quest again for the first time in a very long time. But then we didn’t hear about it for a little while, and of course Square Enix hadn’t said a word about an English release of the game. Eventually though, the game came out. Last year in Japan to be precise. And by that time I was a little cold on the game since it had been so long. That soon changed when I started seeing people rave about the Japanese versions of the game. Including a good friend of mine who I trust to have very good taste in gaming.
After seeing all that praise, I started to get excited again. But there was still no sign of a western release, so I kind of just tucked it away into a corner of my mind. Eventually after even more time had passed, we finally got an announcement about a western release. And yes, I was very disappointed to learn it was just going to be the PS4 version of the game. As the months went on leading up to the release of the game though, the hype started to get to me. It seemed like Square Enix was taking its time to do right by this localization. Not only did they write a fantastic script for the game, but the localization team also went out of their way to add an entirely new feature to the game: voice acting! I’ll tell you right now, considering the quality of the voice acting in this game, I think it was more than a fair trade off for the MIDI soundtrack.
It was all very exciting, and when the months turned into weeks before release I started to get thirsty for the game in a major way. When preview coverage started coming out, I thought it looked amazing. And when reviews hit I was basically going crazy waiting for my pre-loaded copy of the game to unlock on PS4. There was one small catch though. I had heard Dragon Quest XI was a long game. Like, really, really long. And up to that point Zara didn’t seem all that interested in watching me play it. Which posed a huge problem for me, because if I were to play this game by myself during my free time alone on nights where I stay up later than her, I probably would have given up on the game. There just wouldn’t be enough time to juggle that and everything else I want to do on a given night. And do that for like… months.
So it was especially heartbreaking when I started playing the game the day it released and Zara did not like the game at all. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sold on it at first either.
Another interesting problem that I think the Dragon Quest series has, that I know myself and some other people I know have with it is: they’re hard to get into. Not mechanically or anything like that, but there’s a certain… sense of humor, and tone to those games that can be pretty off-putting. I think a large part of that has to do with the music honestly. But also like, the extremely quirky European accents? That… style the series has that’s kind of hard to put a finger on, but it makes it feel… lame? I don’t know, it’s hard to describe. But I was definitely feeling that from the outset.
The first night I ended up playing up to when you leave Cobblestone, which isn’t very far at all, but it wasn’t doing anything for us. Later, on my own, I went forward with the game until you get thrown in prison. A that point, the game introduces Erik, and I thought Zara might like him. So I reloaded an old save, and quickly got up to that point again. She was admittedly a little bit more interested in the game, so we finished playing that section together. Though I can’t say she had any interest in the game beyond the story at that point.
For the next few days, I followed a similar pattern of playing through the exploration and dungeons by myself, only to later reload an older save and speed through to show Zara the story progression. Things continued like this until we got to the point that a certain character joins the party.
Oh, Sylvando.
Best New Character: Sylvando
Okay, I had to make an exception for one of these accolades. The rest are all baked into the game’s entry on the list, but this one needs some special attention. Sylvando is not only the best character of the year, but the best part of Dragon Quest XI, and ultimately the reason that Zara and I fell in love with the game.
If you look at Sylvando, he’s the perfect character to get the point of this game across. He’s eccentric in the way that Dragon Quest can be at times. He’s endlessly optimistic, and earnest, which is 1000% the message behind this game specifically. He’s hilarious, and charming, much like the game itself. And also there are some really emotional character moments with Sylvando which is the nice balance the game strikes with its usually silly, lighthearted nature.
Sylvando is also an example of a character trait that I love, and for the most part this sentiment applies to the entire cast of the game. When I first saw Sylvando;’s design, I didn’t think I’d like him at all. He’s the kind of overly flamboyant character that one of my good friend adores. Me though? Nah, hate em’.
And when you meet him, he’s totally like that. But I want to say within a matter of seconds he won me over. There’s so much more to Sylvando than a silly character design. And like I said, this applies to all of the characters in this game (except Jade). While I don’t think all of the characters looked silly, I also wasn’t drawn in by any of them (except Jade). They looked boring and plain, and just not attractive to me (except Jade).
But much like Dragon Quest itself, once you push past that sort initially off-putting exterior, and see what’s on the inside, well it doesn’t take long to fall in love with this game and its characters.
It was at that point that Zara slowly started wanting to watch more and more of the game. But she still wasn’t 100% completely sold on it all. Then one night, she came home from a doctor’s appointment after getting into an argument with her father. She was on edge, to the point that she even preemptively got offended by the idea of Italian stereotypes in Gondolia (my wife is Italian by the way). Once I managed to calm her down, and we both had a laugh about how ridiculous that was. I started playing the game for her.
The end of that section of the game has your party getting on the Salty Stallion for the first time, and pretty much the entire sequence leading up to, and including that were fucking phenomenal. And that was it. That’s all it took. She was completely hooked. She did not want me to play a second of this game without her around to watch it anymore.
And for those of you who don’t know, that’s probably only 20 or so hours into the game. And like I said before, my playtime clocked in at just shy of 200 hours. So… yeah. We were all in.
Which I am so thankful for, because we both walked away from that game feeling like it was game of the year. And this amidst the 15 days of Paladins, and the Yakuza obsession. We both came to an agreement on this game, somehow, someway.
It’s just that fucking good.
Oh yeah, there’s just going to be a lot of spoilers now. So, SPOILER WARNING. You’ve been warned. Spoilers! As I eluded to before, the cast of characters in this game are incredible. I have very little complaints about any of them.
Erik is kind of a tragic character, but he’s the cool one, and is the typical sort of suave rogue character that my wife just melts for. Veronica, or “Ronnie” is a real firecracker of a character. At a glance she’s typical lolibait, but she’s actually the older sister of the two. She still has the appearance of a child though, so yeah, but she has a maturity that her sister is sorely lacking in. Also the big twist with her would usually be the most surprising thing in the game, but there’s at least 3 other moments that are somehow ever crazier than the death of a party member.
Sylvando, I’ve talked about. But he’s really the standout here. I have a friend who’s hesitant to pick up the game because he’s wary of the characters, Sylvando being the most egregious offender, but bar none he is the best character. Everything from his manner of speaking, this his eccentric attacks in battle, and his limitless positivity that’s contagious. Rab is maybe one of the best “old man” characters in a JRPG? I mean, for one, he’s actually old and not like, in his 30’s, or some shit. And while he does have the pervy old man trope, I think it’s used to great effect here, and his character is never really “about” that.
The 8th party member… was spoiled for me by RPGSite! What the fuck!? I was seriously just looking up character build guides, and theirs just spoiled what would have been another crazy surprise in the game. Hendrik is presented as a villain through the first third of the game, and even though he starts to show signs of redemption as you get closer and closer to the end of the first act, it still feels like it would have been a big surprise when he joins you. Which is made even more evident by the fact that Zara wasn’t spoiled on it, and she was incredibly surprised. And then furious and in disbelief that it had been spoiled for me.
Anyway Hendrik is a shining example of great character development. Initially he seems like a bad guy, but throughout that first act you see his true colors. But even when you do partner up with him the first couple times (before he joins you for real) he still seems like a real stoic asshole. But by the time he’s your lone traveling companion as you go around the world to reunite your party members, he shows a side to him that is goofy and lovable. And he honestly ended up being a favorite of mine.
You’ll notice there’s three characters I avoided bringing up. So let’s get to them.
First there’s Serena. Serena is my least favorite of the bunch, and it’s only thanks to the game’s second act that she even redeemed herself enough for me to be like, “Alright, she’s fine.” The major problem with Serena is that for a majority of the game she’s just kind of… there. All the other characters stand out in some way, but she’s always just… the classic definition of a boring JRPG healer.
It’s in the latter half of act 2 that she finds some redemption. After you discover that Veronica didn’t make it, Serena not only inherits her power, temporarily making her one of the best party members in the game, but she also inherits some her older sister’s spunk. She’s still the least interesting of the bunch, but I feel like she has a good character arc here that pushes her up a bit. Unfortunately she kind of takes a backseat in act 3 again, which just further proves my point that she’s the least interesting character of the bunch.
And then there’s Jade. Oh… Jade. Yeah, she’s super hot. And on that note, let me just say I’m not typically the biggest fan of Akira Toriyama’s female designs (with the exception of Dragon Quest 3 and 4), but between Android 21 in Dragon Ball FighterZ and a lot of the girls in this game. God damn, make a man die of thirst!
I love Jade, not only is she super sexy, but she kicks a lot of ass, and is cool as hell. But there’s a glaring problem with Jade that kind of drags down her character. Out of all the characters in the game, Jade is arguably utilized the least in the story.
If you’ve played the game, think about it. The Hero (we’ll get to him soon, promise) is the center of attention obviously. Erik is your first party member, and his backstory is probably one of the most memorable. The sisters are direct descendants of the Sage Serenica, and obviously play a huge, huge role in the story. Sylvando steals the entire fucking show. Rab is the old king of Dundrasil, the Hero’s grandfather, and one of the first characters you get in the second act. Hendrik has an amazing character arc.
What does Jade have? She’s the princess of Heliodor, sure. And they should have played that up a bit more or something. As it is, she’s always the least likely to chime in on what’s going on in the story, with anything meaningful anyway. And while literally every other party member’s storyline when they rejoin you in act 2 is a significant part of their character development, or has something to do with their backstory. Jade gets… a doujin story.
Like, literally. And don’t get me wrong, I thought the scene was funny, especially Jade’s back and fourth with Hendrik. And I also happen to like the doujins that obviously sprung from this particular sequence! However… the big thing going on in Jade’s story when you reunite with her is that she’s essentially been drugged into being a big ugly pervert monster’s sex toy,
I think there’s a time and a place they could have made this work within the context of the game. But even then the whole thing starts to raise some questions about the true nature of Jade’s character. Is she a calm and collected marital arts master, or is she the bunny girl with the slut attacks? I mean, I like both of those things! And they could have made the Allure tree of attacks make sense if she was written that way at any point in the game other than the point where she is mind controlled into being a horny bunny.
When this criticism was first brought to my attention, my knee jerk reaction was just “This is the same bullshit people always say about “sexy” characters.” But when I thought about it more, they could have actually made Jade a sexy character. And this would have all made sense, and at that point there would be literally no reason to complain about it. But… they don’t. And it’s just a tacked on part of her character that’s a part of the series tradition at this point.
Anyway, finally we get to The Hero, or as I like to call him by his totally canonical name…
Randy.
Randy might seem like the infallible, omnipotent Luminary of legend now, but it wasn’t always so!
Early on in the game, before I think either of us really clicked with it. I made a tweet asking people what they named their boring silent protagonist. I can count on one hand the number of silent heroes that I felt were truly memorable, and two of those games have the word “Chrono” in the title.
By the way, as for why he’s named Randy. When I started the game I went to enter my usual “Nesta” for the character name, but Zara stopped me asking me why I’d want to name “this asshole” after myself. So I asked her what she wanted to name him. And she lazily listed off a bunch of names, clearly not giving a shit about any of this. When she got to Randy, I don’t know, it just felt right. I thought “Randy” would be a funny name for a Dragon Quest character. So I went with that, and the rest is history.
Randy played the part of the boring ass mute pretty well at first. Like most of the characters, I didn’t particularly care for his character design at first. But as I went through the opening hours of the game I noticed a few things that made Randy a little more interesting.
Sure, he’s “the good guy” through, and through. And that doesn’t change, and that’s not always the most exciting thing. But it fits the theme and feeling of this game perfectly. Also he’s a good guy through adversity. Because some truly fucked up stuff happens to Randy throughout his adventure, but dude is always just willing to keep pushing forward and being a BAMF.
Then I started to notice Randy had some “quirks”. None of them more obvious or hilarious then when he gets close to pumpkins. Now, I don’t know why the developers of this game decided“pumpkins” should be a common item that you find alongside boxes and barrels to break, but they sure as fuck are. And it was never ever, not even once NOT absolutely fucking hysterical when Randy would stomp through a bunch of fucking gourds like a crazed fiend. Props to the designers for making those things explode in such an unrealistically hilarious way, and the sounds when you’re squashing them! Oh god, it’s too fucking funny!
So clearly Randy has a thing against gourds. What else? Another thing I loved in this game is its crafting system which is borrowed whole cloth from Final Fantasy XIV’s “active” crafting system. The crafting in this game is a mini-game that has Randy using a number of skills while trying to maintain not only his ability to use said skills, but also to fill delicate meters to try and succeed at making the items in general, or making them high quality.
The crafting in this game was somehow always satisfying. I loved doing it. Zara loved watching it. It’s one of the only crafting systems in a game I can say I honestly looked forward to doing. And I got real good at it too, so that by the end of the game I was pretty easily getting +3 on everything.
So in turn, our Luminary, the man of the hour — RANDY, is also the world’s greatest blacksmith? Randy spent so much time at that fucking forge when the world was in peril. All of his fellow companions would be wondering “Why the fuck are we at the Sniflheim Camp right outside the city again? God dammit Randy, are you really going to stand there crafting for another eight hours?” And Randy would just be like “I got you fam” and make some artisan quality cravat for Sylvando or some shit.
He wants his people to save the world, but look good while they’re doing it!
Admittedly a lot of the “legend” of Randy were observations like this that my wife and I ran wild with in our imaginations, but the game does a pretty damn good job of setting Randy up as a badass.
If I were to give out a “Best Moment” award this year, I’d be hard pressed between the ending of Yakuza 6, and the beginning of Act 3 of DQ11. Maybe the most surprising, and radical thing about the game is when you hit Act 3, and before long Randy fucking travels back in time before the moment where everything went to shit.
He bet the world he saved with his friends to go back in time to save another friend. And when he came back, he had not forgotten any of the experience he gained in his journey. My wife was a little quicker on the uptake here than I was, and when she wondered aloud “Is Randy going to go one-shot Mordegon?” right before we had to quit playing for the night, I nearly jumped out of my chair in excitement with how fucking awesome that idea was, and realizing that, yes, that’s pretty much what was about to go down.
The main reason I went on and on about the characters is because they’re the real highlight here. The story itself takes some very interesting turns along the way, and I was more than happy with it, but for the most part it is kind of a standard “save the world” plot.
But that’s another staple of the Dragon Quest series. If you look at a series like Final Fantasy, which is essentially as old, if not even more storied than Dragon Quest. And you think about how much those games change from game to game. It’s really quite surprising then to consider what Dragon Quest is.
This is a series steeped in tradition. Some things change, but a lot of it stays the same from game to game. You’re still playing a good old fashioned turn-based JRPG. Sometimes there are job classes, sometimes not. The later games introduced crafting, but that’s one of the only “big” changes that have been made to the formula. Cause if there’s not job classes, then there’s certainly been character building.
All of the Dragon Quest games share that same “save the world” motif. It never strays from that. Sometimes they get creative with how they go about doing that, and those moments are great. But they’ve really established a mold for these games. Which is an especially great thing once we start talking about the battle system.
Oh man, I just. Like, I’ve already gushed about this game so much. And it feels like each thing I bring up is better than the last. But I have got to talk about Dragon Quest XI’s battle system. Holy shit.
So first off, this is as traditional as you get with turn-based battles. You and the enemy take turns going at it with each other. You pick commands from a simple menu, and then you execute on them. And that’s it as far as mechanics go.
There’s no crazy fucking tacked on system where you have to take the enemies position into account so you have to pull them towards you, or push them away from you. Then charge up for a turn to build up a gauge so that you can repeatedly dump on an enemy, but watch out because they can sometimes do critical damage to you if it’s a foggy day during the weekend. So you better socket a bunch of elemental resist gear into your rectangular grid to get the right synergies to align to min/max your 85 hit combo attack.
JRPGs got fucking dumb at some point in time for a while, and I hated it.
No, it’s really just as simple as “Wait your turn, pick a command, go.” While that sounds simple, and it is, there’s obviously some additional depth to the combat that comes in the form of smartly utilizing your abilities in the right situations, managing a sort of random “limit break” system with powerful, but unrequired team-up attacks. And actually a lot of the combat’s depth comes from how you build and outfit your characters.
It’s more in-line with what Dragon Quest originally was, A Japanese take on role playing games. A… JRPG.
This is all well and good, and I can tell you right now there are some amazingly tense boss battles in the game that force you to plan carefully to come out ahead. But if you’re playing the game on the “Normal” difficulty than it’s never too crazy. But wait, you ask, what about random battles? That’s the best part! I’m very much of the opinion that boss battles should feel challenging, but fair, and ultimately feel very rewarding when your triumph. But I usually don’t even want to have to think as I’m churning through trash mobs.
There are some JRPGs that have the mentality that “every battle should be a challenge!” which to that I say “fuck that!”. Dragon Quest XI is not one of those games.
DQ11 features one of the greatest “auto-battle” systems I’ve seen in a JRPG. For the vast majority of this game I had my entire party setup so that the AI would control them and “Fight Wisely” and it worked for almost every single trash encounter in the game. But it wouldn’t work on more challenging battles where I felt it was only appropriate that I would have to stop and actually, you know, work for it. The auto-battle is so smartly designed that almost all of the time my team was fighting efficiently without me having to lift a finger. This made the already tremendous pacing of the game feel even better because I never felt like I was being slogged down by battles.
This was especially important in some of the later dungeons, which can sometimes go on for literal hours. But thankfully most of the rest of the game is delivered in almost bite sized chunks so you always feel like you have a good stopping point for the night.
God that’s a lot of words about Dragon Quest XI.
Um, so before I wrap this up. Clearly you can see my enthusiasm for the game. It’s fucking incredible. It’s a game that my wife and I put 200 hours into within the span of a single month. Once we really got rolling on the game, we were dedicating large chunks of our days just to playing through this game. We’re both completely in love with this game. It’s like a love letter to the classic JRPGs of yore. And while I still wish I had the option of playing the 3DS version of the game, the fact that the PS4 version is so fucking gorgeous certainly did its fair share of selling us on this game.
One last, spoilery tidbit before I go. There’s actually a third moment I would consider for “Best Moment” and that’s the very end of this game. Once you defeat Calamos and save the world again, and all the fighting is done. Randy meets up with Serena and Veronica, and the three of them go to seal away the Sword of Light once more.
Now, this was something I had heard a bit of beforehand, but I vaguely knew that Dragon Quest XI was tied into the first three Dragon Quest games. In fact in the Japanese PS4 release, it comes with ports of the three Super Famicom remakes of those games, and there’s some sort of connectivity that they have with DQ11.
What I was not expecting, was for the World Dragon to deliver this rousing speech about the importance of the Luminary in the history that was to come, and the sword of light to fly up into the air, and for the camera to pan out revealing the hero of Dragon Quest 1, rendered in PS4 level graphics, gripping the sword before he goes to fight the Dragon Lord.
Then the credits kick into a song I know so well from my childhood. An actual bit of Dragon Quest music that I have genuine love and nostalgia for. And little windows pop up to show every mainline Dragon Quest game throughout the ages.
In the past few years, my “tolerance” before I go “Oh, this video game is just going to make me start crying now” has been lowered seemingly as far as it can go, I’ll cry at the drop of a hat. But there are still only a handful of times I’ve had a full on “uncontrollable sobbing for several minutes” moment. Both Steins;Gate games. The ending of Rakuen. The ending of Yakuza 6. And finally… the ending to Dragon Quest XI?
It’s a cool “Oh shit!” moment to be sure, one that I already was expecting in some way, shape, or form. But the sudden swelling of “Oh god, this is one of my earliest memories in life” nostalgia rushing out me was way more than I could handle and I just started bawling. I know this game means a lot to Zara, as well as other people I’ve talked to, but this particular part was for me. The kid who learned to read when my mom and I played Dragon Warrior together.
In closing. Dragon Quest XI is a magical fucking game. It’s a time investment to be sure, but it’s well worth it. Even if you’re a newcomer to the series. In a time where Square Enix comes across as a company on the brink of destruction, there are a few beacons of light… Final Fantasy XIV, NieR, and now Dragon Quest XI that I think is holding that god damn company together. And all I can say, is that I really hope there’s more stuff like this in the future. And less stuff like… The Quiet Man.
Outro
Oh God. Is it over? Did I make it to the end? Certainly seems that way!
I have to say this is the most work I’ve put into anything… ever? Not only is it the longest thing I’ve ever written, but I put so much time into collecting a ton of my own images, and videos to use in this list. Zara even spent a few hours making the banners as well as all the “cover images” for each game. And the ShareFactory stuff was extremely time consuming.
Hopefully all of it was worth it though! I honestly can never tell myself. At first I feel really proud of all the work I put into stuff like this, but I inevitably start to like it less and less as time goes on. It’s hard for me to ever look back on something I’ve done and feel 100% satisfied with it. Plus I’m just so sick of working on this year’s list at this point, hahaha.
Anyway, if you made it all the way to the end of that behemoth, than wow, you must have a ton of free time on your hands! I can’t thank you enough though for giving me your time though. Really, I appreciate it so much.
2018 was a huge year for me, and I’ve been happier living here with Zara than I probably have been in my entire life. But that doesn’t mean things haven’t been rough. We’ve been challenged so many times this year by so many things. And a majority of this list was actually written while my wife was away for a week. I was worried about her constantly, and missed her terribly. Still, we pushed through it, and I think we’re stronger for it.
I also just wanted to take a quick moment to thank Zara, and tell her I love her dearly. She put up with all of this bullshit, actively encouraged it in some cases. It’s been so much damn fun to have someone to play all these games with. And I just wouldn’t be complete without her.
2019 is looking like it will be a fantastic year for games. 2018 had some great stuff, but it was also a very weird year where I felt like there wasn’t a ton of stuff that appealed to me beyond what I could find to write about for this list.
But next year already looks stacked with sequels to Devil May Cry, Fire Emblem, Kingdom Hearts, and new games like Sekiro, and Judgment all fighting for that top spot. Which one will it be? What if it isn’t any of them and another game takes me by complete surprise? It’s really exciting to consider the possibilities of the future.
I’ve got some cool stuff coming up in my life too. And hell, maybe 2019 will be the year where the world gets back on track? Probably not, but I can dream. Anyway. That’s it from me for this year everyone. Hope you enjoyed the list. Until next year!
