Yeah I would give it to Stellar Blade, lots of great exploration in guided areas with branching paths and more large open areas as well, and both have lots of secrets and upgrades to find/backtrack to when you have more abilities later
We could add other categories besides "best level design." I would like "best DLC" and "best strategy game."
Btw the hardest category to pick this year is the best remake. All of them are fantastic and deserve a vote and i couldn't decide honestly but i ended up going with dragon quest cause i do love me some dragon quest.
My selections are warped by the fact I won't play most of these games for a year or two so my picks are PC gamepass heavy.
Also I put Black Myth Wukong as the game I bought but didn't play, when it is actually the game I bought the themed controller for but didn't buy the game (yet).
My selections are warped by the fact I won't play most of these games for a year or two so my picks are PC gamepass heavy.
Also I put Black Myth Wukong as the game I bought but didn't play, when it is actually the game I bought the themed controller for but didn't buy the game (yet).
yeah I voted for it as well, I'm thinking wukong will win 'bought but didn't play.' I've been waiting for PS5pro patch but it didn't drop until the end of the year and I didn't get time to play it yet.
I get to see all the categories and "Click to vote" links, but as soon as I hit any of those links, the browser heads into https://www.neogaf.com/finalvote/genre/goty (or any of the other categories, like /character) as a new page and throws that error.
I get to see all the categories and "Click to vote" links, but as soon as I hit any of those links, the browser heads into https://www.neogaf.com/finalvote/genre/goty (or any of the other categories, like /character) as a new page and throws that error.
What? Nah... Dragons dogma 2, stalker 2 (my goty), unicorn overlord, FF 7 rebirth, Balatro, Indiana jones, silent hill 2, astrobot, rise of ronin, steam world heist 2, Y's X, dq3 HD, sonic x shadow, smt5 vengeance, edf6, castlevania ds collection, wizardry 1 remake, Drova, starcom unknown space, stellar blade. A lot of cool games, some new ups, and games that haven't had sequels or remakes before.
These are just ones I bought. Missing all the multiplayer games that I don't play. So to me it was an amazing year.
Wish I would of seen this sooner for voting. Stalker 2 should of been in more categories. It's my goty.
Another great year! For all my doomsaying, it's kinda hard not to feel jubilant about vidyagames right now. Sure, everything I've been trippin' about really is happening, with economic woes increasingly breaking our balls and power crazed ideologues hijacking our entertainment and turning it into their radical political platform.
But gamers really fought back this year. Voting with their wallets and expressing themselves through their keyboard karate chops, they condemned everything that looked even slightly anti-entertainment as woke and were right more than half the time. And if you were actually hoping to have some fun playing games while Western AAA set itself on fire, all you had to do was cast your eyes eastward to see a great bounty of titles boasting adventure and escapism. Nippon ichi, just as sure as my balls, too, wuz itchy.
1. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth - [PS5] For a while I kind of felt like FFXII was the last "real" Final Fantasy game. I've played most of 'em (but not FFVII lol) so I can confidently say that FFXIII and FFXVI ain't it. I dropped FFXV too quick to give an informed opinion on it but my take is that the series doesn't strictly need to be turn-based or have a story that makes any sense. If you ask me, Final Fantasy at its peak was about a combination of not just having insanely polished production values boasting astounding art and moving music, but also having the biggest, grandest adventures filled with wondrous things to see and do, to the point where you weren't even mad about inserting the 2nd, 3rd or even 4th disc. In other words, an excess of quality AND quantity - that's the moogle magic that made FF stand tall. Being able to go your own way and explore this or that cave or forest and being rewarded with a cool new summon or weapon or uncovering a crazy minigame where you play ping-pong with a dinosaur or whatever is what made the experience feel like an adventure.
Which is why FFXIII felt like such a kick in the old tonberries. The awful cast obviously didn't help, but the extreme linearity of spending 90% of your "exploration" in confining combat corridors was insulting to franchise fans. And I like FFXVI, but that's a lean character action game in reality pretending like its some huge rpg - exploring its open areas felt hollow and empty when the only gameplay in that game that was really cooked was the combat system. It actually would have been better off as a more guided, linear experience with development time put into providing more challenging and satisfying encounters, but while that would have made it a better game, it still wouldn't feel like a Final Fantasy game. Even FFXIII could be a good game despite being linear and constraining if it had better combat, fun characters and an enjoyable story, because that's what 2020's FFVII Remake was.
Having not played the original FFVII I brought no baggage to playing FFVII Remake. I didn't really need the combat to be turn-based or the characters to get out of Midgar in part 1 or even for the story to make any damn sense, lucky me - I could just take the game as it was. And man, it was freakin' fun. Midgar was totally engrossing - a beautifully bleak cyberpunk world where the glossy corpo castle that is the Shinra building contrasts starkly with the garbage dump your party lives in. And what a crew! I'm used to hating most characters in modern FF games so a game where nearly all the cast are fun and likeable was shocking. Sure, it had Chadley and Roche, but normally Square would have made them the main characters or something so this was a huge improvement. Even supporting characters like the Avalanche gang were great. Flirting on midnight motorcycle rides, blowing up reactors and hang gliding home, Avalanche are a shining model of the fun way to be an eco-terrorist. Every time these "Just stop oil" assholes defile some priceless art or block traffic when I'm trying to get to work, they make me want to take a piss in the lifestream.
Meet Elena. She likes to play hacky sack with grenades and pouts and stamps her foot over the blandness of vanilla ice cream. She's a minor supporting character, but this short list of trivia alone makes her more fun and charming than the entire cast of any original FF game released in the last 20 years
With its awesome boss battles, hype action sequences, character moments and humour that actually hit home, Remake was great... even with all the crazy meta multiverse mumbo jumbo. But. It doesn't capture that classic feeling of a grand adventure bursting with goodies I've been talking about. I love the gritty green glow of Midgar, but the devs really had to stretch its sewers and tunnels and slums kinda thin to turn Remake into a whole game.
Well that ain't a problem with FFVII Rebirth. It's a monster of a game that doesn't need that sort of padding any more than Tifa's bra does. We got an epic card minigame that leaves Triple Triad and Tetra Master for dead, full-on chocobo racing tournaments like a wannabe Mario Kart, a larger roster of playable characters with their own unique combat styles, many huge open areas filled with Ubi-towers, side quests, side bosses, crafting, combat challenges, dayum! Rebirth has the BEST stuff and the MOST stuff. But it is kind of a mess with plenty of bad stuff also mixed in there. On the base PS5 it's a rougher looking game than FFVII Remake, you need a PS5Pro to lock down the eye candy. And as great as most characters are, there are still some unbearable current day Squeenix characters like Chadley who has an expanded role in Rebirth and made a female clone of himself so they can both endlessly chatter at you. More importantly, while there is a ton of love for FFVII on display in this game, it is not properly respectful to the source material and uses it as a springboard to tell a different kind of story and, well... I just don't think Square are the genius storytellers that they think they are.
Okay so, the story then. it's bad. And good. Actually very bad. And very good. How do I put this. Everything that's dramatic, or serious, or supposedly meaningful is awful. Just awful. Barrett's thing with his hometown is stupid. Everyone acts like he sold out the town but he never betrayed them and was just one of a majority who were incorrect at worst, leading to a pretty cringey melodramatic fatal encounter with his ex-bestie. Cloud was just barely a likeable hero in the previous game despite being a mopey mophead thanks to his reliable habit of hitting bad guys with a giant sword while yelling "let's dance, asshole!" But Cloud's arc in Rebirth is that he's going insane, becoming unreliable and turning on his friends. He got dat mako poisoning. Or Sephiroth is mind controlling him, who knows? The real question is, why make Cloud even harder to like? He has an earring. An earring, for goodness sake! He's a grown man. Don't even get me started on Red XIII's heel turn. What happened to you Red? You were muh boi! The Red I knew was a mad lad lab rat dog chad, a moonwalking Queen's Blood card shark dropping mad planetology knowledge. Someone who would roll up to Tifa all smoov and straight tell her she had the fly curves of a dolphin. But it was all a lie. Red faked not just his voice but his entire personality, and in reality he's teenage Simba, hanging out with Timon and Pumbaa eating bugs just like the world economic forum wants him to. As for Smirk-iropth and Zack and the Gi and the macguffin-teria I have no idea where it's going, but it feels like silly pretentious meta nonsense.
But you know, story isn't all just dramatic pay-offs and character arcs. One might also say that a group of friends setting off on a big adventure and the fun events that transpire along the way is the story, and from that perspective Rebirth is peak vidyagames. There's an awesome sequence early on in Junon where you infiltrate the Shinra military in disguise, with Tifa and Aerith giggling like school girls and having a great time pretending to be soldiers. Hijinks ensue to say the least and Cloud ends up the captain of an infantry unit in a spectacular, lavishly produced marching parade minigame. You build so much loyalty with your troops in such a short time that they aid your daring escape and see you off on your next zany adventure where you board a cruise ship with a hype Queen's Blood tournament being held on board.
But Red XIII isn't allowed to compete in the card battles because of a "humans only" rule, so now it's his turn to disguise himself as a soldier. Red can move bipedally, but only by incorporating freaky dances into his movements, and his bizarre lurching about while he's all "how do you do fellow humans" brings a little kid to tears, making their mother whisper "don't worry, it can't hurt you." From there it's fun in the sun at a beach resort with more minigame magic like bikini piano recitals and a rad target shooting minigame where you get a precious time materia as a prize. Journey some more and things really get insane at The Gold Saucer amusement park, where a feast of fun side content is prefaced by a cutscene with some sort of spontaneous dance battle. The park director, Dio, is a beef-cake muscle man, and Yuffie has an awakening as she watches his hairy pecs dance and flex. Knowing she shouldn't look, she covers her eyes, but then she opens her fingers to get a better peek at those mesmerizing muscles and swoons! This cast is just sooo fun and funny, and the hits just keep coming. Gilgamesh actually says "It's morphin' time!" Ya gotta love it.
But if you just wanna see fun characters having crazy adventures, you could watch an anime or something. Gameplay is king, and I'm happy to say I'm in love with the battle system that is the backbone of Rebirth's gameplay, which richly adds to the foundation laid by Remake with excellent new abilities, materias and mechanics like the synergy system. Synergy moves are co-op attacks that come in two flavours: synergy skills and synergy abilities. Synergy skills are handy moves you can perform with a partner without cost, like Tifa's "Soaring Flurry," where she jumps on Cloud's Sword for a lift up so she can do aerial combat, or Yuffie's "Ninja Bazooka" where she evades an enemy attack and her partner flings her back at the enemy in a counterattack. Then there's my favourite, Cloud's "Counterfire" where he parries an enemy's ranged attack, even one as powerful as firaga, and sends a blast back at them with his partner. Despite their usefulness, these moves cost no ATB meter and are often good at building meter!
Synergy abilities, on the other hand, need a lot of ATB. Each time a character spends ATB they get one synergy point, and two characters both need to have three synergy points each to execute a synergy ability, which is a powerful team attack that unlocks a useful bonus effect like increasing the power of their limit breaks or granting them infinite MP for a time. Synergy is the right word alright, as all these mechanics share synergy with each other, ensuring the optimal way to play is to regularly switch between party members so you can use enough ATB to earn synergy points to unlock synergy abilities. SYNERGY. Sorry. I checked the thesaurus and it really is the only word that means that.
As much as I love this combat, I didn't even notice it was good on my first playthrough of Remake. I had to replay it on hard before everything clicked and I appreciated its depth. While combat is even better in Rebirth, hard mode is still gated behind completing a playthrough, and normal difficulty is still balanced so I could beat the game without understanding the combat system, which is surely gonna lead some players to dismiss it as trash. There are a few challenges you can face to help you "git gud" though, like battling VR summons at their full power.
In fact, the Odin VR battle might even be the best showcase of what's great about the combat system. Odin is like the predator. He hunts for sport, so you need to entertain him and keep the fight interesting. If you just block and chip away at him, he gets bored and obliterates you with Zantetsuken, but keep evading his attacks while damaging him and he gets excited and enters his pressured state so you can work his stagger bar and get that massive damage. To beat him using a developing party that hasn't leveled up their materia yet, you've gotta understand how battle works and combine the strategy and planning of turn based combat with the reflexes and rhythm of action combat in a kind of beautiful gaming synergy.
Well that was a lot of ranting to barely begin to describe all the fun things that are in this game. It's true - Rebirth isn't Final Fantasy VII, regrettably for many. But unlike other recent series entries it IS a real Final Fantasy game, as it's a behemoth of an rpg overflowing with fun things to see and do. If you missed out, lucky you. Now you can play it looking pretty like it always should have on the Pro or PC. Saddle up, choco-bros. The fantasy ain't over just yet.
2. Stellar Blade - [PS5] We live in interesting times. 20 years ago, the default female videogame character design was "sexy babe." And now just look at us. Western AAA gaming is imploding under the weight of its own insanity, as developers don't seek to serve their customers by providing them entertainment and fun but to make those pesky gamers take their medicine with a corpo funded DEI quota of manly lesbian generals and African shinobis. But what happens when developers in a sane country that didn't get the memo make a game?
Eve happens. The design of her starting green outfit is superb, with pleasing features like its flowing translucent wings and a tiny work tie, along with obviously, Eve's shiny heinie. It's such a well crafted look that it could easily be famous as the iconic signature costume of everyone's new favourite action heroine. But instead of that, Eve has like 50 costumes, including pop-star outfits and Kill Bill tracksuits, and almost all of them are amazing.
It was difficult, but I was able to pick out an absolute favourite costume. It's a cute outfit that's half swimsuit, half maid uniform you can unlock by mastering Stellar Blade's fun fishing minigame
As refreshing as it is to see a new heroine who is a beautiful female feminine girly woman, boobs and all, a good character design alone is not a good game. Fortunately, the effort that went into Eve's appearance is indicative of the effort that went into the rest of the game, resulting in gorgeous environments that are a joy to explore and the most enchanting soundtrack of the entire year. After crash landing on earth and seeing your squad wiped out, you quickly find yourself in a beautiful, lonely, rain-soaked city overgrown with nature where chill music completes its haunting atmosphere. In minutes you're picking out and testing cool combat upgrades, parrying cloaked squid monsters and sniffing out secret treasures down intriguing side paths. This first area climaxes with a big boss battle on the roof of a parking lot during a storm set to blood pumping music.Now that's a great opening hour!
The atmosphere and immersion in this game are masterful. After that rainy ruin, the next area is a flooded plaza bathed in twilight. And of course its sun-dappled desolation is accompanied by perfectly moody, melancholy music. Which isn't to say that "lonely post apocalypse" is the only feeling the game can evoke. There are times the soundtrack takes on the spirit of a catchy Sonic the Hedgehog level or a groovy Persona track. But this IS a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, and Stellar Blade really nails it when it comes to transporting you to and immersing you in such a world with its sights and sounds. The game's main hub area, Xion, is an especially amazing representation of this. It's a desperate and dusty skeleton of a city where the last of humanity hold on against the odds without daring to hope, all of which is perfectly bottled by Xion's theme music, which is beautiful, sad, and totally chill AF all at once.
If there's one thing I love even more than a good cyberpunk dystopia, it's parryin'. And just like last year's GotY, Lies of P, you are parrying fools all day in Stellar Blade. Unlike LoP however, it's not really a souls game though, despite all the parries. It's ultimately more of a character action game. The type of game where you're unlocking double jumps and double dodges, you're slow-mo dodging attacks and counterattacking, You're zipping around doing crazy somersaults on the ceiling, that kind of thing. As enjoyable as the combat is, gameplay is also quite varied with a good amount of good quality puzzles and platforming elements. The excellent level design has a mixture of somewhat linear levels with branching paths and larger, open areas, both of which are bursting with secrets and loot waiting to be discovered. The game even just straight up changes genre sometimes! When Eve finds herself in locations where she can't bring her sword, gameplay takes on a creepy survival horror flavour. It's never as rad as the game's combat climaxes where you're parrying badass robo-monster bosses to bangin' music on space stations. But the variety is welcome.
Remember when journalists and their ilk tried to manufacture a scandal, claiming that the South Koreans who made Stellar Blade wanted to secretly put an American naughty word in their game by having the word "hard" graffittied next to the letter "R?" Why would journos try to hurt Eve's game like that? The only explanation is that they HATE WOMEN. Nah. That's the kind of ridiculous lie journos say about gamers. Game journalists don't hate women. They just hate women with gym memberships
I really enjoyed the story. I agree with criticisms that there are some really stiff line reads in the dialogue and some dumb coincidences like how all the most important people in the universe are the small group you meet on your travels. But I can't not love this story with its pressing subject matter like mankind's hubris with technology and transhumanism. Transhumanism is nothing to do with the Dragon Age: Veilguard character creator, it's the idea of humans grasping at immortality by transferring their consciousness into machines. This leads naturally to all sorts of fascinating questions, like if you uploaded yourself into a machine, can that really be called you? It's a copy of you at best. But even then, are you really nothing more than the sum of your memories and knowledge? To the characters in Stellar Blade, people really are data, and they'll take great risks to recover someone's memory stick, as if it was their soul. Biblical parallels are constant in this game, and it's quite interesting how closely spiritual concepts map to rapidly advancing technology, with people putting their hope of salvation in an all powerful AI called Mother Sphere. It gets even weirder when you look in the book of Revelation and its prophecies about the Anti-Christ. "And it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain." A living image, huh? That kinda sounds like a freakin' AI. Wild.
If you enjoy parryin' giant monsters in intense boss fights, chilling to atmospheric music while exploring an immersive cyberpunk dystopia, and pondering deep questions like "what makes us human?" and how technology is changing that, then you'll have a great time with Stellar Blade. But think it over. Because our moral betters, the great ones who show us the way, that holy priesthood class we call videogame journalists...well, once you pick up that controller they will no longer be able to protect you from the unthinkable evil that is a beautiful woman with a nice butt. You've been warned.
3. Metaphor Re:Fantazio - [PS5] Finally, the talented devs at Atlus break free of the shackles of Persona to create something completely different "Persona: High Fantasy Edition." I was ready for the game to have overlap with SMT's spin-off waifu/high schoo'/life-fu simulator but this is pretty much Persona 6 guys. Well, it's 85% Persona, 10% Ghibli flick and 5% Attack on Titan. In Metaphor You live your life by a calendar, choosing between leveling up your combat stats in dungeons or leveling up your personal stats like wisdom and courage by spending your time reading books and the like. Or you could spend that time leveling up your bond with one of your friends to unlock various bonuses. Sound familiar? This feels so much like persona that a cat might as well be forcing you to go to bed early.
The combat and setting are the big differences I suppose. Combat is very much a traditional turn-based SMT-ish Jrpg, but not exactly the Persona kind. There's no demon fusion for example, which I was pretty happy about. Look, I love SMT, I played 2 games where I got my fuse on this year and loved them both! But how many times in the next 10 years am I gonna fuse Pixie with frickin' Slime so that Jack Frost can inherit zio or whatever the hell it is? This game has a horde of totally new, imaginative monsters and its own job system where you can mix mastered abilities together to create powerful builds. Each job or "archetype" as they're called, is attached to one of your 14 social link relationships, so pumping up that god killing power we call "friendship" over a cup of tea leads to powerful class promotions and even more fun skills to play around with.
Maria approaches Nanako levels of adorableness
The game also handles difficulty really well. I had a great time playing through SMTV: Vengeance this year, but hard mode on that game is kinda crazy. All of your best attacks basically do chip damage on bosses, so you need to charge your magatama meter for a special attack just to do a decent dent in their huge lifebar. Meanwhile, your carefully fused demons that absorb or repel their elemental attacks like wind or fire are invalidated by the boss's "almighty wind" and "almighty fire" attacks that penetrate resistance. It is challenging, yeah, but why am I even fusing these abilities if the game is gonna erase its own systems?
In Metaphor, hard mode means the enemy gets an extra turn every round. That's it. This is still a big deal, and enemies can still wipe your party if you get ambushed or make a mistake. But this way the game can feel challenging AND you can feel powerful at the same time. I was able to come up with a build for my samurai that was one-shotting some of the bosses, which felt really satisfying. Resistances too, are handled better. They rarely go as far as nullifying or absorbing damage, so the game usually doesn't turn its own mechanics inside out trying to beat you.
Soejima is an all time great among art directors and he just went ham on this one with a lot artistic flourishes. There's skylines that look a bit like Van Gogh paintings, bosses that look like humanoid surrealist art pieces, and steampunky vehicles like something from a Miyazaki film. And the map! The map is gorgeous, with a narrator describing your journey as you trek through forests to fortresses. There's so many nice touches like a mouse hole in your local tavern with 4 glowing eyes staring at you, which by the end of the game has more tiny eyes as baby mice are added to the family. You'll surf around on your sword and make friends with bat people. It's all delightfully fantastic. Music is great too, with a very memorable battle theme. Tracks tend to have a sort of regal flair, which is very appropriate for Metaphor's story. But if I'm honest, I prefer the groovy, funky, catchiness that Meguro brings to Persona's modern settings.
The race to be king is a pretty wild set up, and the game's opening 10 or so hours are quite gripping, but ultimately I didn't feel like the story was saying something that connected with me in any kind of powerful way. But that's fine. Videogames almost never do that. If a game can make me think about something interesting like Stellar Blade or has fun characters on an eventful adventure like FFVII Rebirth, that's enough for the story to be enjoyable for me. Persona games tend to be good at the latter, and Metaphor is no exception with its quirky cast of anime pals exploring an imaginative fantasy land. Bonus points anytime a Jrpg isn't about a kid with impossible hair and a sword using friendship to kill god, and I guess Metaphor just barely gets a pass since you're using friendship to defeat a villain with a god complex, which is totally different.
If you thought Persona 5 Royal was the king of Persona games, get ready to coronate the new monarch, because Metaphor is Re: Fwd: Fantastic, bro. Provided you can love dragons and castles as much as you love school life and ramen, that is.
4. UNICORN OVERLORD - [PS5] A fantasy world of tactical combat brought to life by the eye-buggingly excellent art style of Vanillaware, Unicorn Overlord is a huge adventure filled with satisfying character building, map exploration, and combat scenarios. The visuals really are absolutely spectacular. It never gets old looking at all the charming details on the screen, like the wind violently blowing long grass in the background, or your soldier Chloe's scale armour gleaming in the moonlight. Stopping by a tavern for a meal shows close ups of pizzas and pastas so pretty, you'll want to lick the screen! But it's not just presentation Unicorn Overlord excels at. Its massive map portraying misty swamps, harsh deserts and lush elven forests rewards exploration with all manner of hidden treasure and secrets. You'll often backtrack to an area to collect some resource or check in at a shop and find some intriguing opening as you poke about. I was still uncovering little secrets late in my long adventure.
Exploration is great, but the meatier gameplay is the game's tactical combat, which overflows with an abundance of classes, abilities and team compositions to play with. When I say there's a lot of classes, I mean A LOT. You will still be recruiting new classes to play with almost all the way up to the end of this long game, although many of them are variations on existing ones. Except for moving your teams around on the map and choosing their engagements, you don't make many decisions during battle. Instead, every fight is won or lost in the planning stage, where you choose team composition and program each unit's behaviour. The most well known point of comparison might be FFXII's gambit system, as each character will have an If > Then > Else kind of setup. For example your fencer might have it as their first priority to target any thieves, since thieves are agility tanks who will just artfully dodge most attacks, so you need special units with accuracy bonuses to counter them, like fencers or archers. If there are no thieves, then the fencer's next line of programming will come into play instead, which might be to target the enemy with the least HP or something like that. You'll continue tweaking and optimizing these settings as you observe their effectiveness and unlock powerful new abilities to use.
The story is fine. There are some good moments that are comedic or thought provoking, but it generally plays out how you'd expect. It's an enjoyable enough ride when such an awesome art style is bringing to life a creepy necromancer villain and a huge harem of warrior waifus for your hero to choose from to be his literal actual waifu. If you ever liked games like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics, be sure to check it out. Don't feel bad lording it over those all those unicorns. They had it coming.
5. Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth - [PS5] Like many a Yakuza game, Yakuza 7 swept me off my feet. A funny, yet moving adventure filled with great characters, addictive minigames and memorable setpieces, Like a Dragon really struck a chord with me. And at the center of it all was new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga. He was a different kind of hero from legendary series main man Kazuma Kiryu. A different kind of hero, but still a good one. Kasuga was kind of a loser, kind of a badass, kinda dumb but also street smart, kinda homeless yet running for political office, he's just that kinda guy. Someone who would leap in to save his friends when they're in trouble, yeah, but then he'd piss them off by showboating and dragging out the rescue much longer than necessary.
Like every great Yakuza protagonist, Kasuga was not a conformist, but had his own beliefs and convictions that he adhered to at great cost to himself. He had a firey loyalty to his family and friends, and gritty determination when others would lose all hope. And the dude had a heart the size of a frickin' watermelon. One so big he could talk down the villain holding him at gunpoint in the game's dramatic climax, bringing them both to tears with his sincere, earnest speech. And, yeah, he was also a goofball. Big time. Like, maybe even 50% goofball.
But In Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, it feels closer to 90%. It's not like he doesn't still have moments where he seems cool or badass. But I really feel like they lost the nuance of this once intriguing character. In Like a Dragon, Kasuga would trust people he really shouldn't and take a big risk because of some long history they share. But in Infinite Wealth, he will trust people he barely knows unconditionally, and gets punished for it repeatedly. Sometimes the game will try to offer some reason, like this guy has a wheelchair and Kasuga knew another guy with a wheelchair, but usually they don't even bother with that. Kasuga's just a goofy naive guy despite all the times he's been shot and gone to prison, loudly playing the fool more often than not. Maybe it's because I felt like the hero turned into a different person, but the story did not grip me the way Kasuga's debut game did. It's fine I guess. There's fights and fires and cult leaders and something about nuclear waste disposal. There's V-tubers and giant sharks and krakens. There's plenty of "Yakuza stuff" happening in the main story, I just didn't have strong feelings about it is all.
Story aside, there IS a ton of amazing stuff here. There's a whole new location to explore in Hawaii, more fun karaoke songs for all the characters to perform, and challenging post game dungeons. Kazuma plays dual protagonist, leading a Japan team of your friends from the previous game while Kasuga handles things with a new posse in Hawaii - it almost feels like you get to play two Yakuza games at once! Kazuma's dying from cancer, so he's working through a bucket list that leads to cameos from nearly every Yakuza character, and I enjoyed these side stories more than the main plot. But the "story" that I really enjoyed was short conversations with your party you can trigger by walking through certain areas or dining at restaurants together. It's silly, but these quirky little chats about aliens or Sega games they used to play or whatever were often funny or thoughtful, and they pulled me into the game's world when the plot's twists and turns didn't.
The minigames are totally off the charts. It doesn't reach Rebirth's level of overwhelming you with elaborate, high production minigames, but this is the next closest thing. There's a hilarious dating app minigame, and a crazy "Sujimon" minigame where you basically round up vagrants and have them battle each other in tournaments so you can collect gym badges in an over the top Pokémon parody. The business building simulator I loved from the previous game is gone, but in its place is an entire Animal Crossing island to get lost in for days. Infinite Wealth even has my favourite minigame of the whole year. Personal tastes and all that but I can't get enough of Crazy Delivery, a Crazy Taxi like game where Kasuga zips around on his bicycle delivering people their uber meals. Every time I was playing through the story and walked near the Crazy Delivery game, I would swing by just to play through it and S rank it again, it really worked for me.
The combat also works. It's largely the same - you're still unlocking comical job classes like chef and breakdancer and using them against enemies with funny pun names like the blowtorch wielding "Crafterburner." It's improved a bit from the previous game though with nice touches like how adjusting your angle and hitting an enemy so they fly into one of your friends will make that friend do a follow-up attack. There are also some great new jobs like my favourite, the desperado - a cowboy with a lasso, revolver and... giant laser canon.
There seems to be a running theme in this top 10 where I'm just taking for granted that videogame stories are dumb 99% of the time, so the real story is the fun characters and the fun things that happen to them along the way. Infinite Wealth is a great game when held to such a standard. The problem is that Yakuza as a series is one of very few that often does provide some substance, making inspirational heroes out of its characters in a time where that is increasingly missing from our stories. When cancer finally slays the dragon and Sega actually stops milking Kazuma's legacy, how will Kasuga fare in his long shadow? He can't just become a super nice guy anime goofball. He needs to be more complex and layered than that, or such a manly mantle just won't fit.
6. Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree - [PS5] Can a DLC win game of the year? Gee, I dunno. A DLC isn't a game, right? Or is it? It's a bit like that other age old question: is Diehard a Christmas movie?
At first I was all like "of course not. It's an action movie with Christmas as a backdrop." And so, the arguments begin. There's a song talking about Christmas both at the start and the end of the movie. the hero writes a message saying "Now I have a machine gun ho ho ho." It's snowing, there's Christmas decorations everywhere, etc, etc. So I'm like "but the movie still isn't actually ABOUT Christmas." And the retort will be "Christmas is about being with your family. And John McClane is trying to reunite with his family for Christmas." The mind reels. Was everything I believed a lie? IS Diehard actually a Christmas movie after all? Maybe the same way that God gifted humanity with baby Jesus on the first Christmas that he might save the world from their own sins, John McClane is giving us the gift of entertainment by shooting terrorists and jumping out of exploding buildings. There's even a Christmas miracle where the FBI only aids terrorists accidentally instead of their usual on purpose. All the pieces are starting to fit. Surely now only the most diehard of holiday hating pedants would try to push back any further.
But Ho Ho Hold up. What's this "being with your family" nonsense? Christmas being about family is arbitrary criteria you're using to win the argument. I don't have to go along with that. What if I insist back that there's no Christmas movie without a certain jolly fat man or trio of ghosts? "But-but-but that would mean Home Alone isn't a Christmas movie either!" Great. Fine. Good. If you really think about it, Home Alone is a movie about a child occupying their legal place of residence in the absence of that dwelling's other usual denizens.
But why bother? Thing is, if you want Diehard to be a Christmas movie because you like watching it at Christmas and it has some Christmas stuff in the background, no one can really take that away from you. If you want to say a DLC is a game, you just gotta keep insisting on it until those of us who prefer to apply consistent, measurable standards realize this argument will go on forever. Is a DLC a game? Well you're holding controller, ain'tcha? Sounds like a game to me!
Fortunately, we don't have to agonize about whether or not Shadow of the Erdtree is eligible for game of the year because it's just not the best gaming experience to be had this year.
Wait...WHAT?
But I ALWAYS give Fromsoft Game of the Year. Bloodborne, Dark Souls III, Sekiro... whatever masterpiece From bestows upon us invariably goes to the top of my list. Am I saying then, that Erdtree is not a masterpiece? Kinda, yeah.
I mean, it IS fricking awesome. A massive DLC far bigger than we were led to believe, filled with sensational new weapon classes like colossal katanas, "graceful" greatswords and martial arts moves, all to be used in delicious new dungeons and crazy ass catacombs on a buttload of big bad bawses. I had a great time playing it. But I guess I've come to expect even better software from From Software. I appreciate how difficult it is to expand on Elden Ring, which is a massive open world souls game. They gotta make a DLC as big as a whole regular game, and find a way to make it challenging even though players are already high level with overpowered builds and they already know every little detail about how Elden Ring works and how to exploit its mechanics before they even start playing the DLC. Amazingly, From actually did make it challenging under those constraints, but the things they had to do to achieve that were kinda stupid.
Like the scadutree fragments. Regardless of your level, everyone playing Erdtree is weak in both offense and defense until they collect 20 magic hidden power pellets scattered throughout the DLC. Honestly, this actually sorta works, but it has problems. I play with multiple characters/builds, so sometimes I'm near the end of the DLC and find I'm missing some fragments. There's no way to track them! I just have to backtrack and fight my way to ALL 20 LOCATIONS and check if I have them or not, which is super tedious. But even aside from that, it's just not as good a leveling system as starting fresh in a new game and allocating stats as you level up.
It feels like Fromsoft finally jumped the Shark with their boss design, I'm sad to say. I still had a lot of fun fighting these bosses and have fond memories like bringing down fire golems and jumping on the spot to avoid Rellana's triple moon dunk attack. But I hold From to the highest standard, and I feel they wanted Erdtree to be difficult too much, to the point where they were making choices that are simply bad design. In the DLC, after a boss does a big attack and is in their recovery frames so they can't hit you, that's when you NOW can't hit them, and attempting to act on such a logical visual cue will see you on the receiving end of a triple hit combo, after which, when you see another opening as they're floating back down to the ground, that's when you also still can't hit them as they'll do a huge explosion move or something. It's not enough to git gud anymore. You're gonna have to memorize every little detail about a boss like homework, look up a guide, or get cheesy.
The final boss is the worst example of this. He's either the most difficult and frustrating boss you've ever fought if you try to fight him fair, stay on your toes, and react to what he's doing, or he's easy and cheesy when you give up doing that and just shield poke him through a massive greatshield. What the hell, From? Have Miyazaki's mad lads finally lost their touch?
I don't think so. These problems all come from trying to make a huge DLC for a massive game and wanting it to present a challenge despite everyone having already played that game inside-out and over analyzed what's effective in obsessive detail. And the solution is OBVIOUS. All these amazing new weapons and spells and other cool stuff should have gone into Elden Ring 2. A brand new standalone release has no need of power pellets or broken bosses, From can just do their thing. Which I guess just proves a DLC can't be Game of the Year after all. Thankfully, Nightreign WILL be a standalone release, and were I to find it under the shadow of my Christmas tree... well, I can go right back to giving Fromsoft GotY every time they release a game. Since I'm such a diehard souls fan and all that.
7. Persona 3 Reload - [PS5] An excellent remake of a Jrpg classic, Reload very faithfully updates P3 with gorgeous 4K visuals that still match the original's style, as well as modern conveniences and gameplay enhancements. I wouldn't hesitate to say this is definitely the best way to play Persona 3. It's not perfect, however. "Theurgy" skills are powerful new super moves your characters can perform. They're fun, but they're a bit too powerful, trivialising some of the game's challenge even on hard mode. More importantly however, the music is... different.
I'm not saying it's bad, there are great songs here, but the OG Persona 3 soundtrack was one of the bangers of ALL TIME. Sometimes I would get to a place in Reload where I remember a hype AF song used to kick in, but now a new song or a remixed version that doesn't have as much FUNK would play in its stead. I don't want to be too picky but it kinda bummed me out. What's weirder is that the way the DLC works, I can listen to P4 and P5 music when I'm playing P3 Reload if I want to. I just can't listen to the OG P3 music! At least this helps me appreciate the plight of OG FFVII fans more, since the devs got loosey goosey with more than just the music in the remake trilogy. Which is why even though FFVII Rebirth is game of the year, this mostly faithful remake of Persona 3 deserves the title of remake of the year.
8. Astro bot - [PS5] I kinda hate funkopops you guys. Something about their generic, factory churned, one-size-fits-all appearance has me scowling almost as much as the neutral expression of a western female videogame protagonist. So when I took my first glance at Astro bot and saw all these little identical Playstation goobers looking like the digital equivalent of funkopops, I was planning to just skip it. But the praise for this game was so extreme that I had to give it a go.
Aaaaand I almost didn't make it past the first level. You see, aside from funkopops, the other thing I hate is the minions, with their squeaky munchkin voices. It's kinda like... remember when Yoshi was new in Super Mario World, and whenever you jumped on his back there was this cool BA-BAWMP sound effect? Somehow over the time "the Yoshi sound" changed from that cool BA-BAWMP sound to a kind of slobbering slimy spray of saliva. And I HATE it. Well anyway, all these Sony munchkins have that annoying squeaky minion voice. And then when I walk up to a robopop to save him, the dude wiggles his butt. IN. MY. FACE. WTF bro? You wanna get saved or not?
So yeah, I really struggled with the game's aesthetic choices, including anthropomorphic triangles and squares with eyeballs like Clippy from frickin' Microsoft Word. I'm honestly okay with all the little munchkins being game commercials, I do love a bunch of Playstation games after all. I just don't love the ones Sony wants me to love, which is first party American movie games for the most part. I've done my time with Uncharted's quippy adventuring and God of War Ragnarök's conversation corridors with the occasional bit of combat. I much prefer awesome Sony games like Demon's Souls. When I realised Astro Bot had entire levels based around Sony games I dared to hope there might be a Bloodborne level, which was very foolish. But at least there is a Bloodborne costume, and some of the little funkobots represent great third party Playstation games like Yakuza or Persona... although heavy hitters like Cloud Strife are shockingly absent.
Get in losers! Bloodborne is gonna show you how to make a good game! Not you Ape Escape, you're ok
Once I got over all the funkopop stuff, the game is a fun platformer in the Mario Galaxy style, where various power ups transform gameplay level by level. There's some imaginative areas I really enjoyed like a level where the world transforms around you as you shrink down to mouse size, and an underwater level I found fun because it was a bit bigger and more explorable than the other areas. It's a bit too easy even compared to Mario though, and I wish this little dude could do more platforming moves besides his hovering jumps - Mario has been backflipping and bouncing off walls and all kinds of tricky cool stuff for yonks. Then again, back in the 2D days, Nintendo held focus groups to try and understand why some people preferred Sonic over Mario, and they found many players enjoyed the simplicity of only needing to press one button in Sonic. So maybe that's the appeal.
Forget your Ratchet and Daxters or whatever, Sony now has their own "Mario like" in 4K, an undeniably fun game that deserves a spot on people's top 10 lists for the year. And if you're Mario malnourished, got funkopops on the shelf, and have a fond nostalgia for Sony's gaming library, then maybe it'll change your life and you'll be glazing it like a crispy kreme on forums 'til the end of days.
9. Balatro - [Switch] Balatro is the crack bro. You don't need to know how to play poker or anything like that. You'll quickly pick up the basics after a short game or two, and from there the "non-basics" will slowly and delightfully unravel before you as a clean, balanced game of poker turns into a zany, crazy game where skill and luck weave together artfully. A game with boss battles and enhanced foiled cards like they were rare baseball cards or something... I mean, dude. There's even freakin' tarot cards in play in this compelling roguelike.
Each round, you're playing a few hands and trying to reach a certain score. As you progress that score gets higher and higher, so that the only way you can meet it is by shopping between rounds for joker cards that provide special bonuses. One joker will increase your hand size, while another joker might provide extra chips or multiply your score when you meet certain requirements, that sort of thing. There's even rare legendary jokers that do handy things like disable the boss's powers that you can find... if you're lucky.
Even though luck is always a crucial factor in the outcome, you can't help but feel smug each time you win as you devise all matter of little tricks to optimize your chances. Whenever you put together a great combination of jokers that have a powerful synergy with each other, or think of an unorthodox way to make a card you have useful, you find yourself thinking "am I maybe like the smartest person in the world?" But then when you realize that Balatro was deliberately designed to make everyone playing it think that to themselves, you get a little creeped out. A little. Not so much you're gonna stop playing or anything. Just remember, kids. Don't gamble, okay? It's addictive. Like, really really addictive.
10. The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom - [Switch] The legendary lady herself takes center stage in a charming adventure with the adorable visuals of 2019's Link's Awakening remake. It's a cuter, smaller, chiller Zelda game and a somewhat refreshing change from the new standard of massive open worlds everywhere you look.
The central mechanic that sets Zelly's game apart is using her magic rod to make copies of useful objects to solve puzzles, and also of useful enemies to fight her battles for her. It works quite well. You'll find yourself crossing chasms by swimming through floating cubes of water that you placed, or xeroxing wizzrobes to deal with darknuts. The game also has funny dialogue and silly quests like acquiring a cat suit so you can speak to your feline friends, but the tone can get dark and eerie too when dealing with the main plot. Sometimes you get a glimpse into how Link is fairing as your quest progresses, like seeing him dash about fending off nightmares in a demon dimension with only a stick as a weapon. Badass. Actually, we've all been there thanks to Breath of the Wild's weapon breakage mechanics am I rite.
I enjoyed the game a lot but I think they played things a bit too safe by allowing Zelda to spend a bit of meter and transform into a ghostly version of link temporarily. I'd rather they'd taken a risk and committed fully to the concept of Zelda facing all her problems with her magic. There's no need to chin scratch about whether a Lizalfos or a ReDead would be more useful in a tough fight when you can just turn into Link and have at them with your sword, bow and bombs. Nintendo might have been onto something here with a whole new type of Zelda game, but they decided to keep one foot linked to the past.
Honourable Mentions:
x. Metal Slug Tactics - [Switch] When I first heard about a tactical Metal Slug game I was over the moon, and this is ultimately a pretty good execution of that winning concept. Not the type of turn based game you endlessly come back to but one that is fun for multiple runs as you unlock and play around with new characters and gear. But this tactical roguelike has shocking frame rate issues for a pixel art game. And if this really is a Metal Slug game, why am I not hearing "HEAVY MACHINE GUN!" every ten seconds?
x. Final Fantasy XVI The Rising Tide - [PS5] The Rising Tide should be in discussions for DLC of the year, but unfortunately it has to live in the literal figurative Shadow of the Erdtree. This DLC is a self contained story in a beautiful new location with no awful purple sky filter. Clive, the FF protagonist who is NOT an emo pretty boy, is back! With his cool, raspy voice, facial scar and manly stubble, Clive is just like me... If I was a body building super model vampire. You'll get to fight a bunch more cool boss battles in this DLC, including against the Tonberry King, but more importantly Clive gets two whole new power sets to play around with, Leviathan's water powers and Ultima's uber powers. They're really fun, I just wish I could have had them to play with sooner during my playthrough of the base game.
x. Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door - [Switch] This timeless Gamecube masterpiece of humour and imagination can't be ruined by localization "updates."
x. Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance - [Switch] Enhanced version of the hardcore post-apocalyptic turn based demon/waifu fuser.
That's that. Hope you all play a lot of games you love in 2025.
I feel you, Fuzzy (pun intended). I can’t wait for the whole anti/pro-woke debate to fade away like disco music. But I’d be naïve to think some other nonsense won’t take its place.
