The Tomo Awards 2021 — Gamer Edition
My Top 5 Video Games Of 2021
Note: haven’t proofread or formatted yet. I’ll get around to it, just wanted to get this thing published already cause I’ve been sitting on it for weeks in a mostly completed state.
Rather than have a huge exposition, let me just give you guys the cliff notes of my assorted non-2021 gaming experiences this year.
I finally played Arkane Studios’ Prey (2017) this year, and it’s become one of my favorite games of all time since. I actually just started a New Game+ file last week to experience the “bad endings” of the game as there are a ton.
I also finally played Titanfall 2 and demand the immediate cease of development on Apex Legends and all power rerouted to developing the next 8 Titanfall games, or at least a spinoff of Titanfall using the Gundam IP.
I also replayed the Mass Effect Trilogy via the Legendary Edition remaster, however despite that collection releasing this year, I don’t want to consider that a single 2021 game — on that note, I also finally finished the criminally overhated Mass Effect: Andromeda which is the second best game in the entire series if I’m being honest. The gameplay itself is the best it’s ever been and some of the game’s best squadmastes like Drack, Vetra, Jaal, and of course Peebee (I am not immune to blue lady) could go toe-to-toe with some of the original trilogy’s most beloved companions.
Played a shitload of iRacing this year too, and I am now a converted believer of iRacing as the most superior of racing simulations.
Sorry, I’m not playing Deltarune until the full game is out in 20 years.
Hope you guys are ready to hear me complain more than praise. Let’s just get right into my top 10 favorite video games of 2021.
10. Hitman 3
Hitman 3 almost takes all of the things that the first two games in the reboot trilogy did right and doubles down on it, though its final level manages to bring back the similarly baffling linear game design that Hitman Absolution, the game that temporary killed the series, made. Despite this final level, the rest of Hitman 3 is an absolute treat, albeit a shorter one that demonstrates a trend that many of the other games I’ll soon be talking about also clearly put on display: the limitations of developing a video game during the pandemic are very apparent. Hitman 3 has a lot less challenges and a few less levels than the other two. The first level in Hitman 3, the stunningly beautiful skyscraper in Dubai, features a measly 15 assassination challenges (the core replay value of the Hitman reboot trilogy) compared to Hitman 2’s opener, the Le Mans-inspired Miami grand prix mission which has 42 assassination challenges.
Despite this, the levels in Hitman 3 are still the same gorgeous and varied environments we’ve come to know and level the series for, and some of them could easily go toe-to-toe with some of the overall series’ best levels, let alone the other two games in this new trilogy. The coincidentally Knives Out-themed (though IO Interactive acknowledges the similarities but denies the inspiration) second mission which plays out like a murder mystery at a family mansion in Dartmoor, England is one of such missions.
What stood out most to me in Hitman 3 however was the third mission in Berlin. It’s another level clearly inspired by a real world concept, this time the legendary German techno nightclub Berghain, and it plays unlike any mission we’ve ever experienced in the series to this point. Rather than being contracted to take out any specific target, our anti-hero protagonist Agent 47 is left alone, betrayed by his contracting agency. In Berlin, 47 starts alone on a dark wooded street lit only by the dim neon glow of a close gas station in the distance. This is the first time the Hitman games have ever made me truly scared (though the meatpacking plant mission from the original Hitman 3: Contracts really disturbed me as a kid, but I wouldn’t call it “fear”). It’s a mission that starts off almost like a horror movie, with this forboding and lonely atmosphere leading us through this terrifying setpiece where it feels like something may jump out at you at any moment; though nothing does, there are certainly a few moments where the player may get jump scared by a woodland creature dashing through the bushes.
As 47 works his way down through a clearing in the woods, lit only by the still-working headlights of a car crashed through the road barrier, we notice the lights of the city of Berlin in the distance and a glowing factory on the outskirts, with a massive crowd of hundreds lined up outside and the muffled and distant sound of techno music ever so audible. It’s within this not-so-faithful “recreation” of the mysterious Berghain nightclub that we the player are tasked with eliminating an unknown number of sleeper agents disguised and working throughout the nightclub ‘s massive 4 floor layout as well as the sprawling outskirts. We don’t know how many targets we need to eliminate, all we know is that we need to kill enough to “send a message” to our pursuers. It’s a drastic difference to the usual format of Hitman missions but an incredibly welcome one at that.
One change to the Hitman format that isn’t quite so welcome however is the final mission, where an unarmed Agent 47 has to make his way to the front of a moving train in the snowy mountains of Romania to defeat the trilogy’s primary antagonist at the front. This mission goes against the freeform, open world gameplay that people come to the Hitman games for, and feels like a total waste of a level, time, and opportunity to go deeper with the last level of the entire trilogy. It’s proof that just because you can do a train level in your video game doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. I just frankly think it’s too tired of a trope and many levels like the train missions in the Uncharted game series as well are too long for how little variety they offer, as iconic as the results of Uncharted 2’s train mission may be.
All that being said though, the missions in Hitman 3 are otherwise fantastic additions to what feels like one massive game over the course of three.
Speaking of games about assassinating targets…
9. DEATHLOOP
I’m just gonna outright say it: Deathloop is Arkane Studios’ worst game of the modern era. However, a comment like that is like saying “The King Of Limbs is Radiohead’s worst modern album”. Like yeah, The King Of Limbs is absolutely the worst Radiohead album if we’re gonna stop pretending that Pablo Honey doesn’t exist, but by what margin? It’s still an album that’s a cut above a vast majority of the other albums that released in 2011 and still adds to a fantastic legacy. Similarly, DEATHLOOP is another fantastic addition to Arkane Studios’ gameography, though I’d still openly admit I prefer Arkane’s prior game, 2017’s Prey to it. I’d honestly go as far as saying Prey might be my second or third favorite game of the 2010s, right behind NieR:Automata and maybe Dragon’s Dogma.
DEATHLOOP doesn’t have the massively impactful brain punch twist that Prey does, nor is the gameplay nearly as open-ended as you’d expect, though there is still a great deal of freedom to be had in the way you approach the ending. The core focus of DEATHLOOP is that you’re stuck on an island where the same day repeats itself infinitely, and the only way to break this timeloop is to assassinate 8 targets within that one day. The game is made up of 4 small open-world levels that subtly change depending on which of the game’s 4 times of day it is, morning, noon, evening, and night. For instance, the main “town” district has a LARP (live action roleplay) area set up in the afternoon where the nerdiest of the 8 targets is constantly reliving his alien invasion roleplaying game every day without realizing it. However, at night time, this same district becomes a massive masquerade party at a mansion that opens up on the other side of town. The target from each of these events only appears at those specific times and places, though events that the player can carry out in other levels can effect them. For instance, if you sneak into the LARP area in the morning and tell the target, Charlie, that his girlfriend who is normally found in the afternoon at the island’s reactor core wants to have a romantic rendezvous him at their secret bunker in another area in the afternoon, it will lure them both to that area, where you can kill both.
The ultimate goal of DEATHLOOP’s early-mid game is all about finding these exact ways to bring multiple targets together to pick them all off in one go. The problem however, is that despite this freedom of gathering intel and taking out targets individually throughout much of the game, there’s only one specific way to actually do the “perfect” run of defeating all 8 targets in one day. There’s only one way to do it. And with a game that seems so free, much like Hitman, it’s unfortunately a lot less creative than it sounds on paper. But with great gunplay, charming writing, and a world that strangely resembles Arkane’s previous Dishonored games, it’s hard to not still love.
The gameplay is some of Arkane’s best to date, with a much larger focus on gunplay than any of their previous games under Bethesda Softworks’ publishing. The kind of time-and-space manipulation superpowers we’ve come to know and love from Arkane games like Dishonored and Prey are also present here, feeling very similar to how they did in the Dishonored games. I’m honestly a little convinced that Arkane had developed about 4 or 5 levels for a hypothetical Dishonored 3 before Bethesda told them that they have to make a new IP instead; that’s how closely the gameplay and world resembles Dishonored, with a more “modern” look to it sort of pasted on as opposed to Dishonored’s industrial revolution themes.
One of DEATHLOOP’s more unique mechanics that also can’t help but make the game feel a little more underachieved is the online multiplayer. DEATHLOOP features an asynchronous online multiplayer experience similar to the Dark Souls games where your world can be invaded at any time by another player, who takes on the role of Julianna, the game’s eighth and final target, though for story reasons eliminating this other person playing as Julianna doesn’t actually count as killing Julianna for the main 8 targets. The issue with the online multiplayer in this game is that it doesn’t give you any incentive to actually do it as Julianna. There’s no unique story campaign for her. You simply invade other players who are trying to progress their story and you either win or lose and that’s it. You’ll level up as Julianna to gain stronger weapons, but you only gain them as Julianna and don’t get to carry them over to Colt, the main protagonist. Oh did I forget to mention that? The main character is a dude named Colt and he has some pretty funny banter over the radio with Julianna throughout the game.
The worst part of this online mode however is the truly awful netcode. You’ll often see the other player seemingly teleporting several steps away from where you last saw them because the network connection is just that bad. It makes me incredibly worried for Arkane’s already-announced next game, Redfall, which is set to drop in the fall of 2022 (I bet it’ll get delayed though) and is supposed to be an entirely online player-versus-player game. With netcode this genuinely awful, it’s not a good sign, and the idea of Redfall reads more like Bethesda trying to force Arkane to make a “trendy” game as opposed to the usual “immersive sim” genre that they’ve become known as the key innovators for. I would much rather a Prey 2 or Dishonored 3 than an online multiplayer game which is already looking awful based on DEATHLOOP’s online performance.
Speaking of netcode…
8. GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE-
This intro is going to sound like a regurgitation of what everybody else has said at the end of the year about GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE-, but I am going to say it too because it’s worth saying. The pandemic absolutely ravaged the FGC (that’s “fighting game community” for you dummies out there). Without being able to play in-person, any fighting game with a weak online server structure absolutely crumbled. ArcSystem Works’ previous game before STRIVE, Granblue Fantasy Versus, didn’t even have a single month before the pandemic hit and essentially killed the game on arrival due to its notoriously awful “netcode” as we call it. Meanwhile, games like 2013’s Killer Instinct reboot saw a sudden resurgence in players due to it — a game from nearly a decade ago — having what we call “rollback netcode” which offers a near-perfect connection regardless of how far apart you are in the world; playing Killer Instinct online is like playing it next to somebody on a couch.
GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE- marked ArcSys’ and the overall FGC’s triumphant return as it was the first major new fighting game to feature rollback netcode since the pandemic hit, and being an already well-respected cult series, managed to propel it from cult status to worldwide phenomenon, eclipsing the boundaries of the FGC. I have friends that have time and again not wanted to try out other fighting games give Guilty Gear a shot because of its colorful cast of characters and intense visual aesthetic. It’s a 3D game designed to look as if it were drawn by hand. While it might have felt like a complete slap in the face to fans of the notoriously difficulty and time-consuming older Guilty Gear games like Xrd Revelator 2 and Accent Core Plus R, the much more simply named “GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE-” follows in that simplicity, offering a much more beginner-friendly combat system that still has layers upon layers of depth for those that wish to find it.
It also found itself the subject of many memes, particularly over the game’s network connection, hilariously hard rocking soundtrack, and of course…May and her dolphin attacks. Don’t really need to say too much more about that, everyone on the internet saw all the totsugeki posts.
And while the gameplay and character roster of STRIVE still isn’t necessarily my cup of tea — I’ve always preferred either something more methodical like Samurai Shodown or Street Fighter and freeform like Dead Or Alive, Virtua Fighter, or Killer Instinct — it’s still a damn good game that got me hours and hours of online play. I remember upon release, I ran sets for about 2 hours with my team leader Maimai, who was currently living in Japan at the time, while both connected to a server in Russia which we deduced as the halfway point between our locations and it ran smoother than any online fighting game I’ve ever played before, including with other people from the US.
STRIVE did something amazing for the FGC and fighting games as a whole. And speaking of games that did something amazing for its genre as a whole…
7. Forza Horizon 5
I only recently became acquainted with the Forza series, playing its previous iteration Forza Horizon 4 for the first time towards the beginning of quarantine. I think back fondly of that time, listening to NAV’s Good Intentions album on release night while driving around in a car painted like Lightning McQueen. There’s a certain absurdity to the Forza games that really elevates it to be the king of open world arcade racing, watching as your character loses to a guy in the shittiest outfit you’ve ever seen doing the nae nae to Anderson .Paak’s ‘Bubblin’ after they smoked your shit in a car with a Minion from the movie Minions getting its cheeks clapped by Shrek from the movie Shrek painted on the side of a Hummer.
Forza Horizon 5 is more or less the same exact game, even reintegrating and carrying over previous player-created paint designs like the aforementioned from Horizon 4, which is a good thing because somebody likely spent hundreds of hours making that Minions x Shrek smut by carefully resizing, recoloring, and placing tiny little shapes with an Xbox controller one by one until it looks like a Minion getting its back blown out by Shrek. It uses the same shitty menus as Horizon 4, it’s got the same wonky physics and force feedback issues that basically make playing the game with a steering wheel controller all but impossible without binning it into the first corner. But despite all of that, it’s also got a level of open world freedom and insanity that other open world racing games like The Crew have been missing, something that Midnight Club LA back in 2008 had that only this series has been able to do since — that thing is “fun”. Forza Horizon 5 is pure fun…when it works.
My only major gripe about Forza Horizon 5 is just how difficult it is to play online with others. You’d think that in the age of “live service” always-online games that it would be a no brainer for the game to just seamlessly drop you into the same online session as all of your online friends, but it doesn’t, instead putting you in a session with a bunch of random people that you do not and never will care about. It’s a deliberate feeling too, as the random people it puts you into the game with are “ghosts” by default, meaning you can see them driving around but they’re slightly see-through and can’t hit your car or disrupt your game unless you turn on the option to. Why would a game that’s all about cruising around a big open world with your friends opt to not put you into the world with your friends by default?
Instead, there’s an arbitrary menu that requires you to link to Microsoft’s terrible Xbox app (if you’re playing on PC) and add your friends via a different app than the game, wait for them to get the invite, and then wait for them to join your game at a seemingly random location nearby as opposed to just…letting you get right into the action. It’s just mind boggling how a game in this day and age with such a heavy focus on cooperative friendly action just doesn’t seem to want to make it easy for you to do just that. I spent about half an hour at release week trying to get two friends into my game session. After they finally got in, we only ended up racing for 20 minutes before we all got tired of it and signed off anyway.
But down to the actual game, Forza Horizon 5 takes place in a massive open world based on Mexico, with biomes ranging from arid deserts of sand and rock to lush jungles, gorgeous beaches, and active volcanoes. And while it doesn’t necessarily have a dedicated in-game Mexican radio station playing latin trap and reggaeton hits, there is a solid representation of Mexican producers and artists littered in with the game’s other numerous radio stations, offering a variety from hip-hop to rock to the surprising and straight up drum n bass radio station licensed by the real life Hospital Records record label renowned for their importance to the genre.
The very first thing I did in Horizon 5 was immediately purchase the first car I could find that somebody had made an Usada Pekora paintjob for. Thankfully, after downloading that car, the creator made the Pekora drawing they drew available to apply to any car you’d like, so I made my own custom Usada Pekora car out of some convertible and wrote “KonPeko” (her famous greeting) on the trunk and “Adeios” (one of her many famous misspelled quotables, fitting since Forza Horizon 5 takes place in Mexico) on the back. Adding to the absurdity, I also made my car’s horn blare out the Killer Instinct theme song whenever I honk, so that’s also a thing that this game will let you do. I would tell you what the car is but I frankly don’t remember because I’m really not much of a “car person” despite my love for motorsports like Formula One, WRC, IndyCar, and W Series — in fairness, of the 4, WRC is the only one that uses like…actual cars that weren’t built specifically for the race; modified, sure, but not built from scratch specifically to race its series. My biggest problem with the Horizon games is that they don’t actually have any open-wheeled cars, so that excludes my passion for F1, Indy, and W Series and driving an Audi Quatro S1 is the closest I can get in Horizon to a motorsport I enjoy.
I see in nearly every review and year-end list about Horizon, people can’t seem to refrain from referring to the game as a “sim”, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. There is nothing even remotely sim-like about Horizon and developers Playground Games know that. The only time Forza has ever been even close to “sim-like” is in the mainline Forza Motorsport series — Horizon is the purposely “arcadey” subseries in the Forza franchise. Sure, you can tune your cars in Horizon, but it does fuckall to it besides making it drive faster and turn easier, and it certainly isn’t realistic despite the confusing real world terms they use in the tuning menus. As an actual sim racer — and believe me, I’ve tried all of the actual racing simulators — Forza frankly just is not one, nor does it even scratch that itch. If I want to play a sim, I play iRacing. If I want to drive in an open world in a sim, I’ll play that Tokyo highway mod for Assetto Corsa. And let me tell you — I play a lot of fucking iRacing.
And speaking of games that require a subscription to play…
6. Final Fantasy XIV Online: Endwalker
It might seem crazy, what I’m about to say. But Endwalker is no Shadowbringers. I can’t necessarily blame the development team —the bulk of Endwalker was likely developed post-pandemic, and it shows. There’s a lot of padding throughout Endwalker, and a start that feels both slow and underwhelming for what should be a fantastic story moment, traveling to the until-now unseen home island of many of our character’s closest companions. It certainly picks up, but it takes until about halfway through level 81 (the expansion starts at level 80 and goes to 90) before anything of interest really happens, and with such a high-stakes story revolving around a happening that the game has been building up and alluding to since 2013, this is inexcusable.
Endwalker is a series of sky highs and hellish lows. At level 83, something happens that you were expecting to happen at level 90. It’s a massive high, bringing together the event that you were expecting to be the climax of the expansion so early that it leaves you in shock, subverting your expectations as these last few expansions have become so beloved for. The story feels like it could only go up from there, subverting your expectations and doing “the big thing” stupidly early, but instead, it slows down to a near-crawl a little after the expansion’s third dungeon, with meaningless fetch quests that give you the runaround and harkening back to the time-wasting days of FFXIV’s 2.0 campaign. It’s a point in the game where it feels like everything should be moving at a blisteringly fast pace story-wise, meanwhile you’re left to waltz around from fetch quest marker to fetch quest marker doing chores that do nothing to progress the story as the entire world of the game quite literally burns all around you.
As much as it pains me to say it, Endwalker should have taken the World Of Warcraft approach to its later expansions and followed in suit by making Endwalker only 5 levels, with a level cap of 85 rather than 90. It’s an experience that feels far too padded out; and again, I can’t completely blame the team; this padding was likely due to the troubles of developing the expansion during the height of the pandemic, so much so that the expansion was delayed from its usual summer release window to mid-November and again to early December to polish a few final things off.
One of the things that Endwalker does exceptionally well however is the introduction of the Sage job. I’m a healer main by trade — I first started off my healing journey with the Scholar class during the early days of the game’s first expansion in 2015, Heavensward, and stuck with it as my main job, while leveling up the other two healer jobs White Mage and Astrologian, all the way up until 2019’s Shadowbringers expansion all but ruined any fun to be had with Scholar. It was at that point that I switched to the Astrologian class and I haven’t turned back since, falling in love with its blend of Scholar-type shield healing and White Mage-esque “pure healing”. And while Endwalker’s changes to Astrologian have since made it more of a “pure healer” with a few auxiliary shield abilities, Sage is a lot more in line with the level of engaging fun that the Scholar class of old used to be.
My particularly favorite part of the Sage class is how clearly inspired by the Gundam series it is, a franchise I’ve been particularly in love with this year, binge watching absolutely every part of it worthwhile all the way from 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam up until 2019’s Gundam Build Divers ReRise and everything in between (well, not everything; it’s better we forget things like MS IGLOO and SEED Destiny happened). The Sage’s primary weapon is based on the “funnels” from the Gundam series, essentially mind-controlled drones that swarm around from behind you shooting laser beams. I mean, the NPC who you unlock the class from is named “Lalah” for crying out loud, could it be more obvious? Sage is the most well-designed healing class I think I’ve ever seen in an MMORPG — it can best be boiled down to a “aggressive, predictive healer”, rewarding players for casting a multitude of shielding abilities to mitigate damage before it happens and dealing additional healing to a marked ally whenever the player deals damage to enemies. It’s an incredibly well designed class that pays homage to an incredibly legendary franchise.
Aside from the Sage class, Endwalker also adds the brand new Reaper DPS (damage-per-second) class. I admittedly haven’t dabbled in the class at all yet, I haven’t even unlocked it, though I’m sure I might give it a whirl sooner than later. I just gravitate more towards healing than damage-dealing, and seeing as it’s taking me so long to even finish Endwalker’s story due to the game’s insanely congested servers that require you to sit in a virtual queue for hours just to log in during peak time, I barely have the time to do anything but progress the main story. That being said, I’m hearing some great things about it from many of my friends who had somehow beaten Endwalker a few short days after its release (which I still insist they’re pulling my leg about). As I approach the end and start seeing things come together within the game’s colossal story, I can’t help but look back fondly seeing just how interwoven the narrative threads are. So many tiny little things from patches that released nearly a decade ago are coming back into play, characters that you thought you knew are revealed to be entirely different people who began assuming their identity during the events of an expansion that released 5 years ago, characters you thought once dead are somehow thrust back into the narrative in the most bonkers ways, not relying on the overly cliché ideas of resurrection and the like.
Endwalker is the culmination of almost ten years and hundreds of hours worth of story content and world building, one singular saga that is unparalleled in scale by any other medium of storytelling, and Endwalker finally brings closure to nearly every single tiny detail brought up since the release of even the original disastrous Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 from 2010 as well as the hard 2.0 reboot A Realm Reborn in 2013. It is a fantastic expansion to the world’s greatest online game, and despite its lows, it has more than enough quality content and a powerful and complex story building on over a decade of exposition to otherwise make up for it.
5. Densha De GO!! Hashirou Yamanote-sen
One series that I’m fairly new to and am lucky enough to just be getting into is the wonderful Japanese-exclusive Densha De GO!! franchise. A name that literally means “GO!! By Train” in English, Densha De GO!! — we’ll just call it DDG from here on — is a series about, well, driving trains. That’s it, that’s all you do. And you might think that sounds like a simple premise, but the reality of it is, driving trains is a real job for real actual people. It’s something that requires the utmost precision, as there are millions of people who commute by the titular Yamanote train line in Japan every single day, needing to board and get to their destinations on time with the utmost consistency. It’s a societal norm, you don’t even have to think if the train will run late because it won’t. Trains in Japan are not Amtrak. They are not late — ever.
The latest in the DDG series is decades in the making, with the most recent major DDG release being Densha De GO! Final, a compilation released in 2004. In 2017, the backbone of the latest game was released in Japanese arcades to celebrate the series’ 20th anniversary, a simulation of the Yamanote train line which travels a loop all the way around the greater Tokyo area. In December 2020, a PS4 port was released featuring many new lines and trains including the Keihin-Touhoku, connecting Tokyo, Kawasaki, Saitama, Kawaguchi, and Yokohama. But I don’t play PS4 games anymore. I do play Nintendo Switch games however, and DDG Hashirou Yamanote-sen was released for the Nintendo Switch in March 2021, therefore, it is a 2021 game.
And man, for a Nintendo Switch port, this game looks fantastic. Sure, there’s some pop-in and the textures have been downscaled a little bit, but when this game looks good, it looks damn good. A realistic recreation of each train line, the game requires you to arrive at each station with the utmost precision, with extra points awarded for how close to the arrival time you actually arrive as well as how closely you line the train up to the platform, down to the exact centimeter. I’ve only ever been within 1cm once or twice of my odd-30 hours (yes, 30 hours) with this game. I do get less than 50 consistently though, which is still pretty good. The controls are fairly simple, and there’s even a more advanced controls scheme that works best with the official train controller for the game that I want really badly but can’t justify importing for $200.
The game is a perfect level of escapism, letting you experience a beautifully recreated segment of Japan in a time where leaving the house is a difficult concept, let alone going to another country. It’s also a beautifully colorful game, with happy-go-lucky menu music, a funny little anime conductor girl named Futaba, and a gorgeous interface that only takes a few glances at a translation guide to navigate — and mind you, the game is only available in Japan, so you will have download it from the Japanese eShop or import it to play.
It’s a really simple premise that proves to be quite challenging, especially on the higher difficulties. You need to make sure you dim your lights when another train passes by or you lose points, you need to honk as you pass intersections, you need to close the doors and make the announcements, you need to make sure you don’t accelerate or brake too quickly. And most importantly, you get bonus points for honking the horn at eager onlooking railfans and friendly railroad workers. It’s this easy yet involved pick-up-and-play gameplay that’s kept me coming back to DDG all year, more than any other game on this list. Games with strong narratives and a clear beginning and ending are great, but sometimes it’s nice to have a game like this with no clear goal — or rather, a lot of goals to clear off an expansive checklist. There’s the “GO!! From Home” mode that takes you through a pretty sizable campaign that takes you across maybe 3–6 stops per stage, with secret stages that unlock new trains for Free Play mode. And then there’s that: the Free Play mode, that just lets you pick your route and drive, with no need to worry about failing objectives. There’s also the faster-paced Arcade Mode, where you drive until you fail I think, I actually haven’t played much of it because the main GO!! By Home mode is already so full of content, so even a year later if I finish the main campaign, I still have Arcade mode to look forward to.
Densha De GO!! is truly such a simple pleasure to play, a great little form of escapism or a quick thing to play when need to kill 5 or 10 minutes, but it somehow managed to work its way above massive AAA experiences to be one of my favorite games of the entire year.
And speaking of another unlikely and smaller game beating out massive AAA games this year…
4. NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to include this on my list this year due it’s status as a remake/remaster (no one is quite sure which it is, even the developers themselves), but I ultimately decided that it’s such a drastic difference from the original 2010 version that it might as well be a brand new game. This one might be the longest of all of the games I’m writing about today, because I could talk for hours and hours about how in love I am with this series and all the little intricate bits of lore and even the history of its development involved with it. I’ll try to trim it down, but NieR is a series very close to my heart so apologies if this one rambles for a bit longer than the rest. Anyway.
I’ve been fairly vocal about how I believe 2017’s NieR:Automata, a sequel to 2010’s NIER, is the single greatest video game of all time, full stop. It’s an absolute masterclass in storytelling, a story that could only be told through the medium of video games; NieR:Automata simply wouldn’t work as a movie, as a TV series, as a book, as anything but a video game, due to its revolutionary style of delivering a metanarrative over the course of several “playthroughs” of the first half of the game and changing the perspective of the events between its two initial main characters, before thrusting it over to a third protagonist during its second half and offering two other canon endings based on which of the two surviving protagonists you choose to see the ending as and then a final canon ending which sees the narrative breaking the fourth wall and requiring input from you — the player — to delete your entire save data that you spent dozens of hours playing the game on as a sacrifice to assist other players during the final “boss fight” of the game and unlocking the final ending of 25 other possible endings.
So was that confusing for you, dear reader? Good. Strap the fuck in then because we are about to go for a wild ride.
NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139 is a remake of the 2010 video game NIER, which was either known as either just “NIER” or “NIER Gestalt” in the west and known as “NieR:Replicant” in Japan. Depending on whether you played the western or Japanese version of the game, you played as an entirely different main character. In NIER Gestalt, you played as Nier, who was a middle-aged father attempting to cure his sick daughter. In NieR:Replicant, you played as also Nier, who was a young orphaned teenage boy attempting to cure his sick sister. NieR:Replicant ver.1.22474487139 sees you playing as strictly the latter version, which mad genius mastermind directory Yoko Taro considers the canon Nier. The older “Dad Nier” as the fandom has grown to call him makes a cameo playable appearance during a nightmare sequence in the remake. This nightmare sequence is actually the DLC from the original 2010 release of the game. Otherwise, you’re the teenage boy Nier throughout most of this adventure.
So rather than typing out those numbers every time I talk about it, we’re just going to refer to this game as NieR from here on out. So the NieR remake does a lot of things different from the original — for instance, the oft-maligned and archaic combat system of the original 2010 game has been completely reworked from the ground up to feel a lot more similar to 2017’s NieR:Automata, which itself was developed by PlatinumGames, best known for their work on the Bayonetta series which Automata’s combat system felt a lot like. On top of that, there’s been an entirely new section to the game added in the back half which finds Nier in a twisted version of The Little Mermaid (many of the original NIER’s storylines were even more twisted versions of fairytales), leading to a brand new boss fight, one of the game’s biggest highlights. One thing you’ll notice however is that NieR:Replicant isn’t the prettiest game; this is half-remake, half-remaster after all, and the DNA of a game released in 2010 is still present. It’s not nearly as butt-ugly as the original version of the game thankfully, as even the original game was pretty ugly for its time — just look up screenshots from BioShock, a game from 2007, and compare it to the original NIER Gestalt.
Nier’s major shortcoming however is that despite all of the quality of life changes, the original game’s biggest flaw remained: you need to replay the entire second half of the game two and a half times in order to unlock the final sequence of the game and see the true ending. Automata handled this whole “replay the game” thing a lot more carefully than the original NIER did by shifting the perspective of the game to show you an entirely new side of things from a different viewpoint, often changing things that happened to fit the other character’s side. Unfortunately, the remake of NieR doesn’t have that luxury — when you replay NieR, you replay NieR the same exact way you did the first two times. Once you beat it for a second time and see its “B Ending”, you begin it again from the halfway point for a third time. This time, before you reach the final area, you must collect every single weapon in the game in order to unlock the final 3 secret endings. You can save right before this thankfully, saving you from a 4th and 5th torturous playthrough, to choose between endings C and D. And remember when I said 4th torturous playthrough? Guessssss whaaaaaaaat!! Once you unlock endings C and D, there’s a brand new Ending E exclusive to the remake of NieR. To unlock this ending, you have to start an entirely new save file and play through the first half of the game for the 2nd time. About 15% of the way through however, something entirely different in the story you thought you knew to this point happens yet again.
Ending E finally puts you in control of the fan-favorite character Kainé, one of Nier’s companions throughout the game, who finds herself in a brand new story with loads of references to NieR:Automata, showcasing the series’ confusingly deep timeline connections in ways I just couldn’t bring myself to spoil for you — these games are some of my favorite stories of all time, and I think they’re something everybody who loves a complex narrative deserves to experience for themselves.
Nier is a depressing game, I’ll just say it outright. Always has been. Automata is the same way, these games are not happy stories, though some of their lighter or more absurd moments might make you think otherwise. This doesn’t hinder their enjoyment however; if anything, it makes their emotional and heartbreaking stories that much more touching. The endings themselves aren’t the kind of crushing doom and gloom endings you’d find in something like Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam for instance, where lead character Kamille Bidan’s trauma finally catches up to him, leaving his brain to regress into childhood at the end of the series and eventually leading him to a vegetative state in the sorely overhated sequel Gundam ZZ. And mind you these shows are running on their 40th anniversaries soon, so if you just got spoiled, that’s your fault for having not seen such incredible classic masterpieces. Darth Vader is Luke’s father. Kristin shot JR. But no, the NieR series isn’t nearly as oppressive as many of the Gundam series find themselves to be; their endings are often bittersweet, with most characters surviving if not in ways that might not resemble who they were in the first place, but still surviving and persevering with positive outlooks nonetheless.
One of the most highly regarded pieces of the original NIER’s legacy is its rare inclusion of several canon LGBTQ+ characters at the forefront of it. This is something that many major video games still struggle with to this day, wanting to include queer characters but not really knowing how to do it and either forcing that narrative way too hard in ways that real queer people never would (see: The Last Of Us 2’s Lev and the way in which he unrealistically explains his transness and basically the same shit in Dragon Age: Inquisition with Krem). I hate even saying shit like “forcing that narrative” because it’s something that a lot of transphobic gamers often say about pretty much any LGBT representation in games regardless of whether or not it was handled well. Representation and tastefully handling LGBT characters is something that Japanese games in particular have struggled with due, with the recent rerelease of the cult classic Catherine coming under some heat for still having the same transphobic bits the original game had. But, as a queer writer, seeing great representation as in NieR:Replicant is something that really compels me.
NieR:Replicant features two LGBT characters, though you wouldn’t even know if you didn’t really dig or think much deeper. The wonderful thing about this, is that they’re you’re only two companions throughout the entire game, save for the talking book that’s always floating over Nier’s shoulder. The first one, Emil, you meet as a young boy early on in the game during a sequence that takes place in his spooky mansion, a clear reference to the original Resident Evil with its muted colors, splotchy textures, fixed camera angles, as well as the sinister laboratory hidden underneath it. Emil, a timid and blindfolded young boy — we find out later that he’s kind of like Medusa so he blindfolds himself — in the second half of the game becomes an all-powerful sorcerer after revealing his tragic backstory and suffering even more emotional trauma in the process of gaining these new power.
His appearance changes drastically, becoming nothing more than a skeleton with a terrifying and spherical mask fused over his skull, ruining his handsome boyish appearance much to his dismay (this is the mask series director Yoko Taro wears in interviews as he himself is also quite self-conscious of his appearance). Emil proceeds to cry in Nier’s arms, who tells him that it doesn’t matter how he looks and reassures him that it’ll never change the way the group feels about him. Previously, Emil and Kainé would stay outside of the villages Nier visits, in reality out of technical limitations for a game coded in 2010, but with the story reason to make up for this that Kainé has a distaste for strangers after growing up persecuted in her own hometown (we’ll get to that soon). After his transformation though, Emil stays out of the villages for the same reasons as Kainé.
Emil was so distraught over his appearance however, because he has a crush on Nier. Yoko Taro has confirmed this as well as the fact that Emil is gay in various interviews since 2010. There’s a scene later on in NieR where the party is attending a wedding in the desert kingdom of Facade. Nier catches Emil up late the night before, where he flamboyantly explains how excited he is for the wedding in great details. Nier assures him he’ll find himself his own bride some day to which Emil nervously laughs, and as he leaves the room, Emil is left alone, sighing wistfully and briefly stating to himself that a bride isn’t exactly what he wants. It’s the kind of subtle reveal that feels all too realistic and close to home for so many LGBT people, and doesn’t feel as thrown directly in your face or fetishistic as a male character in any BioWare game being like “Oh em gee hayyyy guysssss who wants to kisssss?” (no shade, I actually really liked Dorian as a character in Dragon Age but thought his being an openly gay character was a little too on the nose to be believable).
I’m not saying or speculating anything about Yoko Taro here either, but I find that his choice to wear Emil’s iconic mask in real life just adds to the fascination of Yoko Taro as a person, as he would be the very person to worry that others may see this choice as a statement related to Emil as a character. To me, it’s just what makes Yoko Taro such a special anomaly in the Japanese game sphere, someone who is so unabashedly weird and unique and unafraid, talking shit about his own publisher Square Enix’s move to include t-shirts with the preorder of Automata, his request for fans to send him pornography of Automata’s main character Unit 2B once a month, and admitting that he and the team wrote the entirety of the game while drunk.
Kainé herself is the game’s other known LGBT character. Without getting too deep into the complexities of the game’s lore, Kainé at the point which we meet her, is a half human and half “shade” which are basically like shadow people but way more intricate than that, just play the game if you wanna know. Anyways, Kainé keeps the shade-infested half of her body bandaged up, something that you wouldn’t noticed if it weren’t for the revealing way which she dresses. We first meet Kainé as an outcast of her own village, living in the valley near its gates in seclusion from the others. Even before she became a half-shade in her adult life though, she was ostracized in her home village of The Aerie as a youth for being “different” as she describes it. We find out later through text-based flashbacks of her childhood experiences that she was born intersex, neither a man nor a woman. However, she herself identifies as a woman, and wants to be seen that way, which is why she dresses as explicitly as she does. It’s a really unique thing for a character to be designed this way; we often see scantily-clad characters in Japanese games that were designed for pure sex appeal to the game’s audience and tacked on with bullshit “story reasons” later on in a poor attempt to justify that (see: Metal Gear Solid V’s character Quiet) instead of just outright letting it be (see: every character in Dead Or Alive Xtreme). Instead, Taro opted to write a deeply compelling and tortured character who instead uses sex appeal to justify their identity and assure that everyone around them wouldn’t think to misgender them.
Another thing that makes the NieR series as beloved as it is would be the music. There is something downright ethereal about Keiichi Okabe’s brilliant soundtracks for both NieR:Replicant and NieR:Automata. His choices of instrumentation for the games’ subtler pieces is idiosyncratic; I actually had to look up if he was a guest composer for Final Fantasy XIV’s latest expansion Endwalker, as the music in the expansion’s main city of Old Sharlayan bared a deep resemblance to the style found in many of the NieR soundtracks like Devola’s version of ‘Song Of The Ancients’ from Replicant or ‘Peaceful Sleep’ from Automata, both each game’s respective main village theme. He was not. Anyways, another part of what makes the NieR soundtracks as special as they are as well is Okabe’s choice in vocalists, often with light, airy, wispy voices singing haunting and nostalgic melodies, sometimes contrasting these with more full-bodied voices on the game’s climactic piece like Automata’s fabulously powerful final boss and credits theme ‘Weight Of The World’ (side-note: just pulling this song up to link here brought me to tears again, it’s just that spectacularly written, without a doubt in my mind the greatest video game song of all time).
With the NieR games, Okabe takes special care when composing his music to have it separable on multiple tracks to blend each one in depending on the context of the gameplay. As a simple example, when wandering around Nier’s village in Replicant, an instrumental version of ‘Song Of The Ancients’ will play. At the middle of the village is a fountain which the character Devola sits upon while playing an instrument and singing. When Nier approaches her, the sound of her voice begins to fade in seamlessly with the song playing all around the village. If you pan the camera away from her, you’ll be able to hear her singing louder in the speaker on the side closest to whichever side you panned from. When you enter the library sitting atop the hill at the back of the village, the song seamlessly changes all of its instruments mid-note but without a hitch to a more subdued version of the song with ambient swelling bells instead of stringed instruments. I have this transition example timestamped in this embedded link if you click here. If it doesn’t work, just skip to 39:57 in that video and watch for about 10 seconds or so to hear the song transition from the village version to the library version. Another transition of the song happens upon completing an optional sidequest, which sees Devola and her twin sister Popola sitting in the village’s tavern singing the song together, a unique duet that can only be heard here as a reward for the sidequest.
The music will also reprise, as ‘Song Of The Ancients’ is something of a main musical motif for the game. The second to last boss fight in the game features an intense orchestral arrangement of ‘Song Of The Ancients’ fitting for an emotional twist of a boss fight (if you click the link there are no spoilers, I promise). The song even appears in another form in NieR:Automata, which takes place a little less than 10,000 years after the events of Replicant.
The NieR series itself is a spinoff of the worst possible ending you can achieve in the first Drakengard game from 2003. During this ending of the first Drakengard, the player — who lived in a fantasy world prior — is cast through a portal while following the final boss, which leads them to a modern-day Tokyo. The boss herself, planned to be modeled after legendary J-pop singer Ayumi Hamasaki, then engages in a rhythm game with the player, ultimately destroying the entire earth, leading to the post-apocalyptic world of the NieR series. You literally can not make this shit up, Yoko Taro is insane and needs to be stopped. But this is the level of absurdity these series’ are known for, and what makes the NieR games more than just a depressing slog about sad robots fighting other sad robots on behalf of humans who have already been — unbeknownst to the robots — dead for thousands of years.
Yeah, you have to replay the NieR remake a few times to get to the final ending, and yeah, that takes…way longer than I’d care to admit because of the amount of time you just spend running between the same few locations over and over again, but what the NieR remake still offers is an incredibly fun gameplay experience that the original didn’t, while still managing to deliver the same compelling narrative of the original with even more tragic, heartfelt content and a brand new segment that serves as a brilliant companion piece to its sequel that technically came out first. Yoko Taro is known for crafting these confusing landscapes of metanarratives, and it ties down to the fact that he’s not Hideo Kojima or Neil Druckmann who publishers will throw millions of dollars at to create beautiful sprawling AAA games. Yoko Taro is a C-lister who scratches by and makes the stories that he can make with his limited budget and dedicated fandom. He’s not Steven Spielberg, he’s Tommy Wiseau. Actually forget I said that.
And speaking of sad but compelling games…
3. ENDER LILIES: Quietus Of The Knights
Despite being a gibberishy mouthful of a name, Ender Lilies (as I’ll refer to it from here on) is simply the greatest Metroidvania game outside of the genre’s namesake games since Hollow Knight. A true joy to play inside and out, Ender Lilies takes the classic Metroidvania formula and throws it for a loop. Rather than starting the game as a powerless warrior who just needs to find better armor and weapons to take on the world’s challenges, you instead play as nothing more than a little girl named Lily. While games like Metroid see Samus just finding upgrades for her already powerful suit to progress through the world, Lily instead finds spirits to guide her throughout the world. In Metroid, Samus can jump high and deftly roll around of her own volition. Lily isn’t a trained warrior, she’s like 8 — she can clumsily dive out of harms way, taking a moment after the impact of the fall to recover and get back up. It’s something you very rarely see in games, and something that could very easily get annoying and feel like time-wasting nonsense to justify a game’s bizarre choice to have you play as a child instead of a burly Rambo-ass dude.
This is where Ender Lilies gets fascinating — the early game is designed around this idea that Lily is a clumsy little girl who can only dive head first out of the way at first. But how does she attack? Well, Lily isn’t just any girl, she ties into the story of a world dying from a mysterious blight which has already ravaged most everything, with Lily waking up after everything has already happened. Lily is a “white priestess” within the game’s lore, tasked to purify and contain the blight. Because of this, she has been assigned protectors, who now exist as guardian spirits after the blight had consumed their physical forms (could be wrong, I played this back in like June when it came out and I kind of forget already cause it’s a fairly short game with a more subtle form of storytelling as this genre of games usually is). These guardian spirits function similarly to the systems in the later Castlevania games like Order Of Ecclesia, where your enemies become your weapons after being defeated. Every boss you defeat becomes a guardian spirit for Lily, allowing her to do more things and traverse the world more easily. You can only equip 6 of these spirits at a time, which is reduced down to 5 when you consider how essential the starting spirit is, which is basically just an unlimited-use sword attack. Almost every other spirit has a finite number of times you can attack with it until you reach a save point (think bonfires in Dark Souls or benches in Hollow Knight).
Lily’s clumsy dive becomes later assisted by the wings of a guardian spirit who allows her to instead gracefully glide a few inches off the ground to dodge enemy attacks, akin to the dodging in Hollow Knight. With this comes a more aggressive change in pace when it comes to the games enemies, who begin to require more nimble movement to avoid attacks from. It’s a brilliant little bait-and-switch mechanic that can’t help but feel charming in the how both ways of dodging still feel polished and fun. As Lily beats more bosses, purifying them into new guardian spirits, it becomes apparent that this isn’t something that Lily can do without paying a price, as her body — originally just a pale girl with snow white hair in a snow white dress — becomes more and more corrupted after each boss fight, slowly growing blood-red tentacles from her body, her hair turning from white to black, her bare feet turning red and growing up her legs, her dress becoming almost veiny-looking. It’s the type of trope I absolutely adore in games, seeing the character progress from a clean to filthy state — I’ll never forget how amazed I was in 2009 while playing Batman: Arkham Asylum for the first time and seeing just how beat up Batman began to look as he suffered through the game’s one incredibly long night’s stay at the famous prison for the most unstable of supervillains.
Lily’s corruption throughout the game (don’t worry, it has a happy ending) fits in like a glove to the game’s gorgeously detailed gothic art style. With how popular games like Hollow Knight have become, it’s frankly mindboggling that Ender Lilies hasn’t become a massive sensation, a critically acclaimed darling of a game for being on par with Hollow Knight in every single department — gameplay, art style, story, sound, music…oh god, the music. Despite only being my #3 game of 2021, I’d like to take this moment to offer Ender Lilies: Quietus Of The Knights the 2021 Tomo Award for Best Soundtrack and Sound Design. What’s a Metroidvania game without a brilliant soundtrack? Ender Lilies offers a superb and memorable soundtrack with a heavy emphasis on melancholy pianos and light string arrangements often taking a backseat as mere atmosphere behind these brilliant romantic piano solos. As Lily descends deeper and deeper into the subterranean world however, the pianos grow more sparse and give way to frankly off-putting pulsating atmospheres and synthesizers as she discovers the secret underbelly beneath the tarnished kingdom. Ender Lilies’ final two areas (or more one final area, as the last area is only a few short rooms leading to the final boss) resemble the mass of fleshy, red tentacles that have overtaken Lily’s body by this point, being the source of the kingdom’s blight.
These final areas are what take Ender Lilies from otherwise being a 10/10 game to a 7/10. I’ll be forthright and honest with you — I did not beat Ender Lilies: Quietus Of The Knights. I was realistically about 20 minutes away from beating it, however. I got to the final area and just could not do it any longer. It’s the game’s one fatal flaw, and it’s one that felt like an absolute betrayal of my trust and praise for what was for 9 hours up to this point the third greatest Metroidvania I had ever played. Do you guys remember Dark Souls 2, the much-abhorred 2014 sequel to the original Dark Souls? Do you remember the ways in which the game would place multiple spongey and hard-hitting enemies next to each other just for the sake of being hard, rather than carefully place enemies to strategically overcome instead? This is my problem with Ender Lilies’ penultimate level, The Verboten Domain. I’m all for a challenge in video games, but I want that challenge to be a challenge, not a punishment. Dark Souls 2 wasn’t challenging, it was punishing, for no reason other than to simply frustrate the player. This isn’t something I will argue with anybody about; Dark Souls 2’s developers even became self-aware of this frustration with the game, opting to release a “remixed” version of the game in 2015, called Dark Souls 2: Scholar Of The First Sin, and while its redesign of the game is still highly debated, it shows a self-awareness that many dedicated fans found the original version just too objectively unfair.
Ender Lilies’ final area is frankly unfair and juxtaposes the brutally challenging but still-fair high difficulty of the preceding 9 or so hours of gameplay that Ender Lilies has settled you into by this point. The Verboten Domain is an area that’s already difficult to traverse due to its story relation as the near-source of the blight. Simply existing in the area causes constant damage to your character. If you stand still for a minute or so, Lily will die. You don’t even have to do anything, you don’t have to be hit by enemies, you simply have to stand still and you will die within a minute or two from the toxins in the air. There are no (or only a small few, again, it’s been half a year and the game is short) points or respite from this constant damage over time, and the area is incredibly large, samey-looking, has no clear path forward, with the area’s final safe point being very far away from the objective, and is full of enemies that will kill you in one to two hits depending on how much backtracking you’ve done at this point to gain all the health upgrades which frankly should not be a necessity in a game like this — just look at how many speedrunners have beaten Super Metroid, regarded as the pinnacle of the genre, without a single energy tank upgrade. What’s worse than all of this constant damage is that you can only heal 3 or 4 times until you reach another save point, and without specific upgrades, these healing charges only heal a small portion of your health bar and take a few precious seconds of standing still to use in the first place.
The thing that made me stop playing the game and watch the last few minutes on YouTube however was one specific enemy, a large blob-like monster that I would argue is one of the most infuriating obstacles I’ve ever occurred in a video game. On top of these blob-like enemies’ size, which are massive and require near perfect timing to jump over as they’re only a few pixels shorter than Lily’s maximum jump height and almost as wide as her maximum dash width, it’s the fact that jumping over them proves just as dangerous as actually fighting them as they have a great deal of too much health regardless of which spirit you use to fight them, whether they’re fully upgraded or not. But what makes this area so frustrating is just how constant this exact enemy is. I had a great deal of difficulty facing just the first one which spawns just one room after the area’s final save room, but that wasn’t enough to stop me as I eventually found a fairly consistent method of just jumping over it and making a beeline to the objective. What finally did me in however, was a room where you find yourself face to face with several of them one after the other. This was too much, I was simply just trying to find where to go. After looking up where to go, I still realized I had to trudge through these rooms just to get there and I all but gave up, exhausted from the thought that a game I was so thoroughly enjoying to this point would betray my expectations like this.
Am I overreacting? Yes, very likely. I honestly want to give this another shot now that I’ve taken so much time off of Ender Lilies, but at the time it just nearly broke me. It’s one thing for a game to have an enemy like this, say, maybe earlier on in the game. Maybe then I would have just come to expect something like this to happen and been fine with it, but after 9 hours of pure Metroidvania joy, an obstacle that felt this punishing for no reason other than to frustrate or bog down the difficulty, it just felt like too much. So why, then, would I give Ender Lilies the spot as my #3 favorite game of 2021 if I just spent 75% of this blurb complaining about it? Well, I think that’s the point. There’s not much else to say about how brilliant the rest of the game is. And hey, I suck at video games, I’m a bit autistic and get frustrated pretty easily at obstacles that appear out of nowhere like this in video games fairly often; that’s why I just wrote hundreds of words to otherwise say “I suck at this part of the game” instead of just outright saying that and moving on. Maybe this whole complaint of mine might not even occur for the average neurotypical gamer.
But all of this is just to say that despite this one seemingly subjective fatal flaw, Ender Lilies is an otherwise master class in game design up to that point, and it’s one that’s worth of so much more attention and praise than it’s gotten this year — this is the only list I’ve seen thus far that so much as even mentions this brilliant little hidden gem of a game, and that’s frankly a damn crime in my eyes. Ender Lilies is mostly an absolute treat for anybody who has been lucky enough to happen upon it this year, with a brilliant twist on the Metroidvania formula, a melancholy story about a decaying kingdom, a soundtrack to die for, and a dramatic hand-painted gothic art style.
And speaking of crimes and eyes, my #2 favorite game of 2021 is…
2. Lost Judgment
Following in suit with my choice last year of putting Yakuza: Like A Dragon as my top game of 2020, Lost Judgment happens to be one of my favorite games of 2021. Lost Judgment is something of a side-series to the greater Yakuza series as a whole, following a shamed ex-lawyer and current-detective’s story on the side of the law rather than a shamed ex-yakuza against the law. A sequel to 2018’s wildly ambitious Judgment (known as Judge Eyes in Japan), Lost Judgment continues the story of protagonist Takayuki Yagami — played by SMAP’s eternal idol Takuya Kimura, the main reason these games haven’t come out on PC yet, but we’ll get into that a bit later — three years after the events of the first game come to a close, as Yagami and his sidekick Masaharu Kaito briefly relocate to Yokohama’s Ijinchou (based on the real life district of Isezakichou) to assist in a case that their collaborators from the first game are working on with their newly founded detective agency. It’s the same Ijinchou that Yakuza: Like A Dragon took place in, featuring a handful of new sights as well as many reprising locations from Yakuza, like the Survive Bar that the gang used as their hideout — strangely familiar bartender and everything (I only recently made the connection that the bartender in Yakuza: Like A Dragon is Osamu Kashiwagi, a mainstay character from the first 4 chronological Yakuza games whom was presumed to be dead after the events of Yakuza 3).
While Judgment’s story focused on a national-scale big pharma conspiracy, Lost Judgment instead feels a great deal more grounded (again, only on chapter 6 of I believe 13) right off the bat, focusing on a mysterious murder case that finds itself tied to some particularly brutal bullying at a local high school — a subject that can’t help but feel topical in 2021’s Japan, with the game releasing just a few short months after Shibuya-kei legend CORNELIUS’ resignation from the creative team at the Tokyo Olympics after a magazine interview resurfaced of CORNELIUS detailing the shockingly inhumane ways he and his peers allegedly bullied their classmates in high school. It’s a particularly heavy story nestled alongside the game’s lighter moments that can’t help but feel as potent as it does in today’s climate.
But what Lost Judgment has aside from a heavy story is a fantastic refinement of the previous games’ (including Yakuza) systems. One of Judgment’s most frustrating shortcomings was the way it placed quest objectives on nearly opposite sides of the map from each other. While it wasn’t a huge deal, if you’ve been binging the Yakuza series (like most do, they’re just that fucking addictive) it can be quite tedious. Lost Judgment’s solution to this is equal parts ridiculous as it is brilliant — you get a skateboard. Yeah, like you get to play as a 50 year old motion-captured Takuya Kimura from the best-selling boyband SMAP playing a 35 year old man skating around the city in tight jeans and a leather jacket. And you know what? It’s fantastic. I need this in every new Yakuza game from now on. Can I imagine Kazuma Kiryu riding a skateboard? Not at all. Do I want to see it? Oh god, please, I want to see that more than anything in the world.
It’s a simple refinement, but Lost Judgment is full of these kinds of little changes: Yagami gets a pet dog named Ranpo who helps him solve cases and find hidden items throughout the city, Yagami now has a third martial arts style to utilize in combat based on Aikido which now allows him to easily disarm enemies of their lethal weapons, Yagami mentors a handful of high school clubs which see him doing things like dancing (Lost Judgment’s answer to Judgment’s missing karaoke rhythm minigame from the greater Yakuza series), skateboarding, and racing motorcycles in a minigame that feels just as ridiculously fun as Yakuza 5’s taxi drifting minigame. Rather than constantly fighting burly yakuza thugs and mad scientists, you often find yourself fighting high school students instead, something that a few reviewers have taken slight issue with if not for the absurdity of it, but frankly, when you look at the types of things these (very likely of-age) kids in the game are doing, these ones deserved it; an early scene in the game sees a group of hoodlums attempt to stab Yagami to death with box cutters after he stops the group from bullying a girl in their class.
Part of what makes these most recent Yakuza titles on RGG Studio’s new and improved “Dragon Engine” is just how immersive they are. Starting with 2016’s Yakuza 6: The Song Of Life and carrying forward into the following Yakuza Kiwami 2 (itself a remake of 2006's Yakuza 2), Judgment, Yakuza 7: Like A Dragon, and now Lost Judgment, these games are as close as you’re going to get to walking through the streets of Kabukichou, Dotonbori, or Isezakichou as you’re going to get without flying to Japan. The attention to detail from huge things like the games’ reflective neon lighting at night to the half-peeled stickers plastered on electrical posts and alleyway walls is unparalleled in any other game. The often misguidedly compared Grand Theft Auto series doesn’t even scratch the attention to detail and realism that these latest Yakuza games offer, and much like the previously mentioned Densha De GO!! games, the Yakuza series has offered me a brief escape from the confines of my home during a global pandemic to experience a realistic simulation of places I’ve had on my bucket list for a long time now and can no longer safely get to in the near future.
Unfortunately, Lost Judgment isn’t available on PC due to lead actor Takuya Kimura’s agency Johnny & Associates’ inability to keep up with the times. They don’t want their talents’ likenesses delivered by any hands but their own. To put it bluntly, they’re afraid that people are going to extract Yagami’s model from the game’s files and use it to make animated pornography, which will look like Takuya Kimura blowing out Rachel from Ninja Gaiden’s back. The problem is, that shit already exists (NSFW link, you’ve been warned), because you can rip models out of console game files too. This dispute over Kimura’s likeness has lead to RGG Studios’ apparent claiming that they may never make another Judgment game again, which I find to frankly be bullshit. So here’s my pitch for Judgment 3: Yagami steps out of town for a while to go undercover for a case abroad. Who cares where, we’re not gonna see or hear about him ever again anyway. Kaito then takes over Yagami Detective Agency in Yagami’s absence and brings on Saori as an assistant, functioning as a second playable character (with a much bigger role than her brief playable role in the first Judgment game). Boom. Judgment 3. Eat my ass, Johnny’s.
So anyways, I almost didn’t play Judgment or Lost Judgment because of this. I wouldn’t consider myself one of those gatekeepy “PC only, PC master race!!” people, but I do prefer to play my games on PC for a few reasons. Number 1, I’m almost legally blind now and can not sit on the couch in the living room and look at a TV nearly 15 feet away from me and expect to be able to tell what the hell is going on. Number 2, I spent a lot of goddamn money to build this PC which I use for my day job of producing music; I was given my first graphics card for free from my neighbor, so this PC also just so happened to be able to run games too. That was all it took, playing games at a clean 60 FPS and 1080p back in like 2016 was enough to sell me on PC games — it halts my blindness and it’s much prettier to look at anyway. I frankly find it hilarious that a computer that can do 100 other things runs games better than a console that’s completely dedicated to playing games. Besides, my PS4 is a base model from 2014. It runs both Judgment games like absolute sub-30 FPS 900p shit, so I sat down one day during a Walmart restock of the PS5 and Xbox Series X (what an awful name) with every computer in the house opened up with tabs and managed to get my hands on an Xbox Series X. It’s honestly a very nice small little box that sits vertically on my nightstand and doesn’t get in the way for now. I’m using it to play both Judgment games, and as soon as I’m finished with The Kaito Files DLC which will release this spring, I will be selling it back at MSRP to any friend of mine who wants it, as I hear these things are pretty hard to come by.
Unfortunately, I haven’t finished Lost Judgment yet. As a matter of fact, I’m only 6 chapters into the game, but I feel that that’s far more than enough to justify it as my second favorite game of the year at the very least. Were I further along, I think it possibly could stick the landing and be my favorite game of 2021, but for now I think this spot is just fine. I already have 40 hours of playtime on file with Lost Judgment, which is equivalent to about 4 full playthroughs of the game that made the #1 spot on this year’s list (maybe even 5, as it’s the kind of game that you get quicker at the more you beat it).
And speaking of short games that I’ve played 4 or 5 times already…
1. Metroid Dread
Metroid Dread is one for the books. I won’t mince words, it’s an outright masterpiece, building upon one of gaming’s simultaneously oldest and smallest legacies. The original Metroid released in 1986 on the original Nintendo Entertainment System and revolutionized gaming as we know it, being one of the first non-linear open world exploration games ever. Its tense moment-to-moment action paired with an eerily dark world with only flat black backgrounds the whole way through, a stark contrast to the bright blue skies of the far more popular Super Mario Bros. games. Right away the Metroid series began to carve its legacy of making fans wait long patient waits for more installments, with the far more claustrophobic and colorless Metroid II: Return Of Samus releasing on the GameBoy a full 5 years later in 1991. While Metroid 2 didn’t make any greater advancements for the series due to the limited hardware, it did still capture the terrifying atmosphere of the original if not even more due to said hardware limitations; the camera was zoomed in closer creating a much more claustrophobic feeling, the game finally featured save rooms which made the game both simultaneously a little easier and more tense, with long stretches between save rooms becoming all the more tense when you’re low on health and lost in the game’s massive world.
But it would be over 8 years since the original Metroid before a more proper home console sequel would come along and not just revitalize the series, but gaming as a whole, with Super Metroid, the third mainline installment in the series releasing in 1994. To be frank, Super Metroid is in my opinion the single greatest video game of all time. Sure, it might have a slightly awkward method of switching between your weapons, but that’s not nearly enough to even scratch the massive trophy that game deserved. The advent of Super Metroid alongside 1997’s Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night together coined the entire genre known as “Metroidvania”, being so definitive of this style of game that certainly existed before then, but were never quite as idiosyncratic and well-executed until these two masterpieces either.
It would be another 8 years before the fourth title in the series, Metroid Fusion released in 2002. While Fusion wasn’t the massive leap for gaming that Super Metroid was and followed a far more linear route, the one thing it did manage to do for the series was establish what we’d all been feeling for a while — Metroid is a glorified horror game. Metroid Fusion featured a returning plot element from the obscure Metroid 2 as its central plot, a parasite which takes on the appearance of series protagonist Samus Aran, stalking her around the recently abandoned BSL space station in albeit scripted sequences that nevertheless felt terrifying for little 7 year old me playing it on my GameBoy Advance in the car.
And then there was silence. Sure, we got a handful of spinoffs including the higher-selling 3D first person shooter sub-series Metroid Prime, as well as a few spinoffs of varying quality. The real kicker however was the 2010 nightmare, Metroid: Other M, a disaster of a game for the Nintendo Wii that’s built up a reputation of its own of all the things not to do with a beloved video game series. It’s a game with a plethora of issues that I’d rather not go over as it’d be more words than you’ve read up to this point. What I will say is this was all it took — a series with a sporadic release schedule only needed one bad game for it to fall out of heaven.
It took another 6 years before we even saw the series name again in the form of Metroid Prime Federation Force, a multiplayer spinoff for the Nintendo 3DS that neither features Samus nor was the game anybody wanted after such a long hiatus (the last “good” Metroid game was Metroid Prime 3 in 2007). While I hear Federation Force is actually quite a solid game, it was just a poor read of the room on Nintendo’s part. Thankfully, it was only a year later for Nintendo to outsource developer MercurySteam to unveil Metroid: Samus Returns in 2017, a remake of Metroid 2. Even Samus Returns had a small issue however — the Nintendo Switch had just released in March of that same year, becoming the dominant current platform, hurting Samus Returns all the more due to the Switch being half-handheld/half-console and essentially ending the 3DS’ lifespan a little bit earlier than expected.
Another 5 years passed with the series’ future still in jeopardy. We’ve known that there will be a Metroid Prime 4 eventually for quite a few years now, with Nintendo announcing the game alongside Samus Returns in 2017, but letting everyone down at the beginning of 2019 with news that they’ve completely scrapped Prime 4 and restarted development entirely with a new team, as the game seemingly hadn’t been up to Nintendo’s high standard of quality. Finally, at E3 in 2021, the most unexpected thing possible happened: Nintendo out of the blue announced that the fifth mainline Metroid would be releasing in October of the same year. Not only that, but it would carry the title Metroid Dread, a name that had been floating around since 2005 when it was originally announced and then went silent for nearly 16 years.
To say I’ve waited my entire life for this game, I don’t exactly mean my entire life — just most of my childhood, my entire adolescence, teenage years, and my entire adulthood. It has been 19 years since the last mainline Metroid game — Metroid Fusion — graced our backlightless GameBoy Advances all the way back in 2002. The entire Metroid Prime subseries has happened since then, another part of the Metroid series that has its own set of fans impatiently awaiting its own latest installment going on some 12 years and counting since its own previous entry. Metroid Dread is something I’ve wanted for so long it still feels surreal saying it exists now. I was a 7 year old child when the last Metroid game came out. I’m now going to be turning 27 this year.
So, then. Here we are. Metroid Dread is real, and it is marvelous. That’s the review. It’s a modern marvel of a game, and while it doesn’t necessarily make innovations the way Metroid games like Hollow Knight, Ender Lilies, or Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night have, it’s far and away one of the best-feeling games in the genre, showing these new kids in town exactly how the old dogs bark and bite, and goddamn does it bite. Metroid Dread is smooth as butter, save for a slightly inconsistent framerate. It’s the kind of game that were there an updated “Switch Pro” with stronger hardware than the base Nintendo Switch, I would buy one in a heartbeat just for this game.
Metroid Dread absolutely oozes in a foreboding and melancholy atmosphere, living up to its name of Dread. There’s never a dull moment in Metroid Dread, and there are plenty of little upgrades and hidden passageways along the way as well as the much beloved “sequence breaking”, playing the game out of order, that has gone on to make Super Metroid one of the most popular games to “speedrun” (or play as fast as possible with a running timer, for all you dummies out there). Metroid Fusion’s linear world was sorely missing this, and it seems MercurySteam — who Nintendo allowed to return to fulfill the Dread vision — knows this as well, going as far as to add scripted cutscenes for certain sequence breaks. The areas in Metroid Dread — 9 of them, a stark improvement from the original Metroid’s 3 — are drop dead gorgeous. The backgrounds are so detailed, the lighting is moody and beautiful, Samus herself always looks great in her brand new armor after the events of Metroid Fusion left much of her human body mutilated and melded permanently into her power suit, a fantastic new redesign utilizing the classic orange hues of Samus is iconic for with the light blues associate with Fusion as well as a white trim new to Dread.
Part of the main criticism of 2010’s Metroid: Other M comes from a poor characterization of Samus, often monologuing for minutes on end about her past experiences and relationships, using a the character of Adam Malkovich, her former superior in the Galactic Federation Military, as a sort of male savior, despite Metroid Fusion characterizing Adam more as a respected rival of sorts, going as far as to name her spaceship’s AI after him when she noted a similar condescension to Adam in the way the AI spoke to her. Of course, as Fusion would reveal towards the end that the AI actually was a backup of Adam’s mind uploaded to a computer. This computerized ADAM (capitalized when referring to the AI version) carries over into Dread as a key story component, advising Samus towards the beginning of the story as she arrives on the planet ZDR where a mysterious signal broadcasts that the X parasite that mutilated Samus’ body and DNA before seemingly wiping it out at the end of Fusion, isn’t extinct after all.
The Galactic Federation sent a team of robotic extractors known as the E.M.M.I. to investigate ZDR and eliminate any X parasite on sight. However, because Samus was infected with the X parasite and cured with a vaccine made from the DNA of Metroids, the X parasite’s only known natural predator, the E.M.M.I. attack and kill her on sight as well. On ZDR, Samus finds herself wrapped into an even bigger conspiracy that brings her all the way back to her childhood roots. As opposed to Metroid: Other M’s torturous monologuing, Samus is a woman of no words throughout the rest of the series. However, Dread features a moment where things get really personal for her, and she speaks a few simple sentences in the language of the Chozo people, the race of spacefaring aliens who raised her as a human orphan. It’s a bold moment that came so out of left field, so in direct contrast of Other M’s loathed narrative, that it just left me stunned, and it was handled perfectly and so true to the character of Samus we’ve come to know and love.
Dread does a lot like this to earn back the fans’ trust in the narrative department after Other M completely derailed everything we knew about Samus and attempted to turn her into a whiney damsel as opposed to the silent and powerful warrior we’ve come to know her for. While it would be very easy to go over the top with edgy “wow, look at how cool she is” fan service to atone, Dread rather handles this with grace, with many of the cutscenes outright referencing some of Other M’s most embarrassing moments to show that they understand what went wrong. For instance, there’s a scene early on in the game where Samus encounters an enemy she had seen before in the original Metroid and again in Super Metroid. In Metroid: Other M, when Samus encounters a different enemy she had previously faced in those games as well, she has a highly unrealistic anxiety attack, a moment which has faced a decade of scrutiny from fans and critics alike.
In Dread however, when Samus finds another old foe seemingly chained up over a pit of lava, it roars in her unflinching face, standing deathly still as its restraints hold it back. Samus then — still standing in place — begins to charge up her power beam and calmy raises it to fire at its old weak point to see if her past experience still holds up. This is far more true to the character of Samus, one of the galaxy’s most powerful and well-traveled bounty hunters, one that would use her previously gained knowledge to face adversity head on, rather than randomly regressing into a childlike state of helplessness when she encounters an enemy she’s just as effortlessly defeated thrice before.
Among everything, Metroid Dread simply feels fantastic to control despite a few minor tweaks I would personally like as a series veteran. To a newcomer though or maybe even somebody who hasn’t played a Metroid game since 2002, these control issues I have simply wouldn’t exist. But for me, as much as I appreciate Dread’s new 360 aiming (first seen in Samus Returns), I also happen to play Super Metroid in its entirety at least once or twice per year so I sincerely miss being able to just press one of the controller triggers and have it automatically aim up or down at a 45 degree angle. Dread on the other hand essentially let’s you aim in any direction at all by simply holding down a button; the tradeoff however is that you can’t move while doing this, unlike the aiming in prior games. This makes Dread’s noted emphasis on speed and fluidity feel a bit stifled as you have to constantly stop to aim, rather than just being able to press a button to aim at a fixed angle and lining up the shot like in the old games. Why they didn’t just add a fixed angle show or even map the 360 aiming to the completely unused right analog stick is beyond me, but it takes nothing away from the game at all, its inclusion would only add to it.
Another small control issue I had as a Metroid veteran was the game’s insistence on using the analog stick as opposed to the d-pad, a first for the series which has only ever been on consoles that only have a d-pad. Frankly as a competitive fighting game player, I can vouch for the fact that d-pads will always have more accuracy and consistency than analog sticks. That being said, it’s again not that big of a deal especially if you’re not a purist who replays Super Metroid several times a year like some kind of insane person. The only other tiny control issue I have is again a legacy thing: the speedbooster upgrade requires you to only down the analog stick as you run (and let me tell you, it’s not comfortable to do this on any first-party Nintendo Switch controller) to activate it, as opposed to it just activating automatically when you run a far enough distance uninterrupted like the old games. And for the thousandth time, you get used to it; it’s not a big deal and there are a lot of fun new strategies that the speedbooster creates opportunities for in Dread that simply don’t exist in the old games.
Similarly to Fusion, Dread’s musical soundtrack is handled with the utmost subtlety. While the first three Metroid games have among the most recognizable soundtracks in video game history, the series began stripping back the melodies for a more atmospheric sound starting with Fusion. In Dread, this holds true as well with plenty of eerie synths and low strings merely accentuating the sounds of water flowing in the background, lava boiling, wind blowing through the rocks, et cetera. There are certainly a few more traditionally musical moments, like the game’s rearrangement of Samus’ timeless synthy theme song from Super Metroid, or the hauntingly gorgeous area music that plays throughout Burenia, the game’s “water level”. However, other pieces eschew melody altogether like the music that plays in the E.M.M.I. Zones, which feels like more of a generative synth patch playing out the menacing bleep-bloops you’d expect these killing machines to make.
Those are my only gripes about the game though, just some minor control issues. Everything else about Metroid Dread is as close to perfection as possible from front to back. It’s a game that just feels like a pure joy to experience. One of Dread’s finest features is the inclusion of subtle elements of horror by way of the game’s recurring E.M.M.I. enemies, robotic creatures that kill Samus in one scripted hit upon contact. This might sound like a burden — and believe me, the timing required to escape this scripted one hit kill sequence is so slim that I’d believe you if you told me the game’s code actually has the timing randomized — but it somehow isn’t, it merely adds some tension and uhhh…dread, to the game. These E.M.M.I.’s only appear in certain areas of the map and are completely restricted to them, but Samus can enter and exit these zones at will, and constantly finds herself weaving through them from top to bottom and side to side to progress through the game. Each E.M.M.I. zone features a mini boss fight strangely reminiscent of Mother Brain at the end of each one, and upon beating this mini boss, Samus is given the means to permanently defeat the area’s E.M.M.I. — you can’t damage them through conventional means — and unlock a power related to them that opens up new paths and areas to explore.
And on the topic of bosses, Metroid Dread has some of the finest in the entire series. I won’t get into it too much as some of them can be rather spoilery, but let’s just say that the game’s final boss fight is among one of the most satisfying I’ve ever experienced in a game. It’s a fair challenge and a climactic, and gigantic narrative moment for the entire series as a whole, only adding to the grandiose feeling of it all. It’s an incredibly difficult fight, but one that feels fair the entire way through, and once you really get the attack patterns down and how to react to each situation each of the boss’ 3 phases puts you in, it brings every gameplay element together for an unforgettable ending to the fifth mainline Metroid game.
Now again, without spoiling anything, Metroid Dread does of course feature an escape sequence after the final boss, a trademark of the franchise as a whole — even the Prime series and the much abhorred Other M feature them — and I’d go as far as saying it’s the best the series has ever seen and again, features another insanely unseen story moment that quite literally changes both the entire direction of the series going forward as well as the perception of what the series and its main character are as a whole. All I’ll say is that if Metroid Prime 4 doesn’t take place after Metroid Dread within the timeline, I will be very, very upset. Frankly, I’m a little disappointed that there isn’t some secret game mode that allows you to play the entire game in this special new way similar to the Castlevania series offering bonus modes upon completing them.
Metroid Dread is far and away the best game of 2021 and with time and (hopefully) a few more control options, could go down as being the best game in the entire Metroid franchise and the Metroidvania genre as a whole, towering above legends new and old like Super Metroid, Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night, Hollow Knight, and Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night. If you own a Nintendo Switch and aren’t planning on picking up Metroid Dread, what’s wrong with you?
Honorable Mention:
- Resident Evil: Village
Two words: Big. Lady. Resident Evil: Village (the first 3 letters of Village are highlighted to look like the roman numeral VII), the eighth installment in the longrunning horror franchise, feels spiritually more like a followup to 2005’s brilliant Resident Evil 4 rather than the canonically previous Resident Evil 7. Resident Evil 4 is pretty widely regarded as the series’ highest point and for good reason, changing the pace of the series from claustrophobic, dimly lit indoor corridors to a more open creepy village in some impoverished country and the equally creepy castle which looms over it. Similarly, Resident Evil: Village…also takes place in a village, but this time, the creepy castle is only the first of four main locations around the village, with a sort of “monster of the week” kind of gameplay loop, each location featuring their own spooky overlord who serves as the boss character for each.
Of course, we didn’t know this leading up to the game’s release, so it was both a blessing and a curse to find out that the very, very, very, very, very tall and big lady from the trailers that everyone loved wasn’t a persistent threat stalking you throughout the entire game, but rather merely the very first boss character who lives in the castle above the village. Lady Dimitrescu (I played the game and still don’t really know how to pronounce it, most people just call her Lady D, Dommy Mommy, or…y’know, “Big Lady”) was a key factor in the game’s marketing, creating an insatiable thirst for horny internet users around the world for a murderous lady standing like ten feet tall with insanely large…alright, you get it. But this was a huge factor in generating hype for the game, whether intentional or not.
Incredibly however, the big lady’s segment only lasts for a few short hour before the game puts you into another environment. Frankly her section of the game could be an entire game in its own right, but thankfully it isn’t, as we wouldn’t have gotten the following House Beneviento, which I and many others seem to agree might be among the most truly terrifying, scariest pieces of horror media every created. It’s not exactly the kind of over-the-top gory jumpscare-filled edgy bullshit that many of the “scariest” horror experiences offer, rather it’s a deeply unsettling slowburn of a drug-fueled crawl through the basement of the titular House Beneviento. And this time, rather than being stalked by an attractive 10 foot vampire woman, you’re pursued at its tail end by a massive, living fetus, representative of the game’s narrative involving its protagonist Ethan Winters coming to the village in the first place to search for his mysteriously kidnapped infant daughter. There’s even a dummy of his also-missing wife that you need to dissect for a few key items. Great stuff.
Unfortunately, this is where the game kind of takes a dive. The next two areas feel rushed in different ways; the third one just feels like an unfinished idea revolving around a creepy fish-man throughout, and the final is a repetitive series of metal hallways through a mad scientist’s mechanical cyborg supersoldier laboratory. This entire half of the game is what makes me not want to include Village on my list in proper, as its nearly half of the game that just feels not worth playing. That first half is an absolute marvel, but after that it’s all downhill.
- Monster Hunter Rise
And speaking of downhill, let’s talk about Capcom’s other flagship series’ latest release, Monster Hunter: Rise. Most of the Monster Hunter fandom came about through 2017’s accessible and unbelievably flawed Monster Hunter: World, a game that at the time I lauded as both the best and worst game in the series. I am in constant controversy for my opinions on the Monster Hunter series as a veteran who has been playing these games since it had you using the right analog stick to attack in the very first game on PS2, something I’ve never seen another game do before and has not aged very well. That being said, some of the sequels that came of this, including the eternally fantastic PlayStation Portable game Monster Hunter: Freedom Unite as well as the Nintendo 3DS’s enhanced version of the third game, Monster Hunter 3: Ultimate, are among my favorite games of all time.
These games had previously never been very popular in the west despite being among the biggest franchises in Japan, and I’m frankly surprised that they’ve been getting localized since the beginning in the first place. Monster Hunter: World attempted to capitalize on the west’s renewed interest in the fantasy genre however after the success of shows like Game Of Thrones and other video games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. In doing this however, it traded the game’s identity of a goofy world where you hunt massive boss monsters with pun-loving talking cat sidekicks for a more gruff and serious tone. Sure, some of the hallmarks are still there, but they otherwise take a backseat for a more ironclad and “realistic” look, something I hated at the time.
On top of this, the weapon design also felt uninspired and the upgrade trees, the core gameplay loop of the series, left much to be desired; Monster Hunter weapons again used to be goofy — you would turn the bones and fur of slain monsters into a fucking guitar that you wield like an axe or a gigantic knife and fork to use as dual-blades. World also featured an irritating mechanic that used to be reserved as a signature ability for certain monsters like Khezu (my favorite, I’m the world’s only Khezu fan) and Tigrex who would roar so loud that it would stun your character and require you to use a consumable earplug item to bear with it. In World however, every creature had the ability to roar like this and stun your character, often doing it several times in a row leading to many unavoidable deaths as the earplug item was completely removed from the game and delegated to an upgrade for armor. And as someone who’s been a proponent of “Fashion Hunter”, where you wear armor that looks cool even if it’s statistically shitty, this felt like a huge blow to the “no wrong way to play” mindset.
So…did the followup to World, Monster Hunter: Rise fix any of this? You’re goddamn right it did. While the roar issue is still there (though toned down a bit from World), much of the game’s signature identity and charm has returned, including the emphasis on silly characters and cats and wacky weapons. There’s also far more monster variety like the older games — World’s monster roster was primarily made up of just dragons and quadrupeds — bringing back Tomo favorites like the Khezu as well as reintroducing the spider-type monsters previously seen in the fourth generation MonHun games among others. Above all else, Rise introduces some massive leaps in gameplay design including the ability to ride mounts into battle, an absolute gamechanger for traversing the map, as the series has switched to an open-world design ever since Monster Hunter: World, and even better than the mounts is the new “wirebug” system, which is essentially the game’s unique way of saying “Spider-Man”. Yeah, you can just sling around the map and even use the wirebugs to grapple onto monsters as well as do more acrobatic attacks first hinted at in Monster Hunter: Generations for the 3DS.
So why then doesn’t Monster Hunter: Rise make my list? Well, to put it frankly, I’m burnt out on MonHun. Maybe it’s the price of being a series veteran, but these games are quite literally an endless loop of “fight monster, use its parts to upgrade your equipment, fight stronger monster, repeat”, and after nearly 15 years of doing this, I’m tired. It was also one of the earliest releases of 2021 and I thus barely remember exactly what my gripes were, but I certainly remember having them. Moreso, I remember the good more than the bad — the online features were fantastic, the gameplay was as fluid as ever, and being able to play a Monster Hunter game on a portable system again was nostalgic bliss, as Rise was a Nintendo Switch exclusive for its first year having only just released on PC this month and World was originally exclusive to the PS4. My earliest experiences with staying up past midnight are fond memories of playing Monster Hunter: Freedom Unite on the couch at 2am with my brother and his wife, and this to me is the true definitive way Monster Hunter should be played.
I’ve been debating on going back to Rise soon in preparation for its first expansion, Sunbreak, releasing this spring. Hopefully taking a full year off from the franchise will be refreshing enough for me to enjoy it again as there was still plenty for me to do in Rise.
- New Pokémon Snap
Speaking of sequels to beloved games, New Pokémon Snap is the very first sequel to the original Pokémon Snap released on the Nintendo 64 all the way back in 1999. Correct me if I’m wrong (don’t), but I believe the original Pokémon Snap was the very first time we ever saw Pokémon rendered in 3D, and it was a huge achievement for its time. While New Pokémon Snap isn’t necessarily the revolution the original game was, it’s nevertheless a lovely return to the quirky take on the rail-shooter genre that the first Pokémon Snap was. It doesn’t do much new, it just simply does more, and that’s all we’ve been asking for, especially since the number of Pokémon are now barreling towards the 1000 mark from the original 150 Pokémon of the 1990s. This adds a huge roster of Pokémon to select from for New Pokémon Snap, and I’m personally satisfied, having seen most of my favorite Pokémon within the game like Wooper, Pichu, and Slowpoke. Not sure if Alcremie is in the game though, as I haven’t seen one yet nor have I finished the game.
This fact, combined with being such a simple “turn the light switch off on the brain” kind of game is why New Pokémon Snap hasn’t broken the top 10 list this year for me. Despite all of this however, it’s still a charming and frankly beautiful game that would make any fan of the series happy, especially those who played the original. The premise really is quite as simple as “you ride through nature and take pictures of Pokémon in their natural habitat”. That’s really it, that’s all you do, and it’s a pure joy.
- Chivalry II
And speaking of great little “turn the brain off” kind of games, Chivalry II has been another fantastic one of those for me this year. The premise is really quiet simple: it’s a true medieval battlefield game. It’s an entirely online multiplayer game that pits teams of 32 players against another team of 32 to hack and slash away at each other in all out medieval war. There’s no magic, no dragons, just steel and chainmail. Again, that’s it. It’s that simple. Just go on the battlefield and clash steel away at each other. You level up and unlock some different weapon types and some currency to lightly customize your characters (though it all mostly looks the same) and then do battle. That’s pretty much it. Too simple to make the list, but a damn good time.
- Splitgate
And speaking of a damn good multiplayer arena game, Splitgate is the best Halo game of 2021. Truly, Splitgate made me feel closer to that feeling I had playing Halo Reach on the Xbox 360 with my friends as kids than the new Halo — Halo Infinite — did this year. It takes the gunplay and gamefeel of Halo and combines it with the titular portals from the Portal series, also landmarks of the Xbox 360 era, and throws them together. This opens up some insane opportunities for clever kills through blind spots and momentum-based physics that Halo Infinite just doesn’t offer. It just feels like an overall more satisfying game to play. Unlike Halo, it doesn’t have a campaign, but apparently the campaign in Halo Infinite kind of sucked anyway so who cares. I’ve certainly never cared about the Halo story, I just liked screwing around with my friends or playing online, and that’s exactly the kind of good fun Splitgate offers. Again, too simple to make the list, but goddamn what an incredibly good game that unfortunately lost much of its initial hype as Halo Infinite released. For me, though? I played a few rounds of Halo Infinite’s online beta and said “Well, back to Splitgate then” after getting bored almost immediately.
