I need to say a massive, massive thank you to everyone here who has shared with us all their lists. I love each iteration of this thread and it is wholly down to everyone sharing their honest loves. Some posts here push games straight into my horizon from nothing but the sheer positivty . This whole venture is a lot of time and effort but so worth it and could not be successful without your words and I am entirely grateful for them!

You all rock! 😀

However, I gotta post a list as well.
It is a bit of a running joke that my username VideoGames is a misnomer because of the amount of classic games that I have never made my way through or have any semblance of a clue about. All these criticisms are valid and I have been attempting to rectify this these last three years with a routine stream three times a week. As such, another huge thanks to everyone who has chosen to spend time with me laughing at my incompetence and then sudden extreme luck in a ton of the games on the list below.

Without the stream keeping me on track and helping me finish games, I probably would have stopped playing them altogether. The whole thing properly rejuvenated me and my love of this hobby and I know I am going to eventually have played everything in existence. The sheer amount of gaming ambrosia I have absorbed these last 36 months are making me powerful beyond belief, however, and I will consume the world. Keeping it real. 😎

This year I played a ton of Wintendo games (and checking my schedule for next year looks like I will be playing even more GOATs than before but not as much Nintendo) and due to my top ten music list you might see some familiar faces. You might also see some entries in strange places and some weird write ups.

This list is, as always, based on my vibes and my feelings after the fact.

I connect to games, as we all do, on a unique level based on everything that has happened in my life up to that point and with whatever emotional state I am in. A moment of greatness may not land or may land harder due to an infinite number of variables happening within my brain. This is true for all of us and why I enjoy the discussions on what makes a game so good, so good. If I can align myself for even a moment with someone elses thoughts on a game then it enhances my own thoughts and feelings and helps me better understand myself and the game. Time changes all and these current standings are how I personally feel at this moment in time because lord knows looking back at 2022 and 2021 I could reorder those lists slightly as present me but that would not reflect the me of those years.

There will be spelling mistakes galore.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

These appear here due to not completing them. I only like to put games I have finished in my list otherwise it feels rude.

Starfield: I spent over 100 hours in this game and I think I am the only person on the forums who had a thorouhgly wonderful time with it. I wanted the ability to just travel between planets and scan and build bases and be a lone explorer and I got it. I know mods and DLC will probably improve it further, but this was my most played game of the year. I just never started the main storyline so I did not ‘complete’ it and thus it is ineligible.

Wo Long: I am currently stuck on a boss (the lightning guy who makes a million copies of himself) but what I have played has been fluid and frenetic and a great souls like. I could not progress in Nioh 1 or 2 but this works for me. Especially the cool deflecting system. I know I will eventually beat that boss and keep going, just need to find the time.

Frozen Wilds: DLC for HZD and in keeping with my own imposed restrictions, like Echoes of the Eye last year this does not count for a full entry. It had some unbelievably good side quests and new characters and got me stoked for my eventual playthrough of the sequel. Great DLC!

TheatreRhythmn Final Bar Line: This is a game I love but am atrocious at. I made it a point to only play those games I know and have heard the music from, which means I could (thus far) only play six of the FFs and the Xenogears, Nier Automata and Chronotrigger track listing. There are still hundreds of songs to go and so I have barely scratched the tip of this game. Also I am REALLY bad at it.

Bowser’s Fury: I was told I had to count this seperately and yes, I know I am the rulesmaster of the thread but it kind of makes sense. This reminded me of Sunshine and definitely had roots based in that style of Mario game. It was a wonderful epilogue to the main SM3DWorld game and took everything from the main game and moved it across with some modern nostalgia. It being DLC of a sort means I will not include it in the main list.

Quake II: Nightdive released an updated version with the same level of care they did to Doom and Quake with full expansions, a mod list, some QOL features and full bot match. Considering I have played it multiple times to completion before this year and I had tens of thousands of hours in the multiplayer from back in the day, it did not feel right picking it for this list. It is still the best Quake and works amazingly on Steam Deck.

Metroid Prime Remastered: Still playing it, loving it. It is not finished yet.

THE RUNNERS UPS:

16: Super Metroid

Castlevania Symphony of the Night last year made me want to visit some of the other classics of that genre. So earlier in the year I played through Zero Mission and had a thouroughly good time, and then tried Super Metroid which people say is the best one.

It is fantastic. I never felt lost in the game and going back and forth felt relatively speedy.
The grappling was a bit tough to control is really the only negative I have. I was spoiled by how swiftly the movement in Dread work, and that is still my favourite metroid, but this is a close second. It also has the bleeps and brinstar music which absolutely slaps.

15: Phoenix Wright: Justice For All

The last case in this game is probably the joint best case of the two Phoenix Wright games I have played. However, this reason does not feature higher because of the cases before it not quite being as engrossing. Especially the circus one.

That last case though is just phenomenal and the resolution retroactively raised my enjoyment of the game as a whole. The main characters remain as wild and wacky as the first time I met them and Maya Fey remains the best. I await to see how she manages to find trouble in the third game when I play it next year.

14: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

This is one of the oldest games on my list and it has lost nothing in the decades it has been out. It feels just as huge as any modern Zelda, even if it is confined entirely to 2 megabytes of space. I am incredibly impressed by just how much the SNES can do in this game and the point where the map doubled by introducing the dark world totally got me.

The music whips so much, as does most Zelda music, and each of the dungeons felt proper beef and gave me some cool powers. My second favourite power has got to be the big hands and I would love to see them back. Nothing quite like using big hands to chuck rocks!

13: Okami

Inside you there are two wolves and they are literally the same wolf. I did not realise that Amaterasu and Shiranui were the same and stream chat had a field day with that one. Sometimes I get lost playing games and miss stuff, but that is one thing I will not live down.

I adore games where they go for a distinct and different art style that has never been seen before and Okami, like Cuphead, has one of the greatest styles I have witnessed. It feels like playing a living painting and is one of the biggest games I have played.

There are three games worth all stuffed into here and they are all captivating. I knew very little about the legend/history that formed the foundations of the storyline but it never lost me (aside from the two wolves thing) and I emotionally connected to every last one. Issun is a menace, but a menace with a big heart and he was one of my favourite of the many in game companions that this years games brought me.

I would love to play another game in this art style.

12: Super Mario Galaxy

Playing Super Mario Galaxy is like being transported to a dimension where the only beings are pure and good. I am not fully sure if that describes it well enough, but the combination of a fully orchestral sound track, the incredibly starkly coloured art style, the simple movement style compared to the complexities of Sunshine and the fairly linear but not visually levels constructs a game that is easy to see why it is so beloved by so many people.

I had a smile over my face the whole time I was playing this game. It was not the smile you get when laughing at something, but the kind of grin you get from a memory of an earlier time in your childhood before the grind of daily life gets you. I was reminded of the simplistic purity of just liking something without caveats.

This was not a tough game, certainly not daily tough like Sunshine or last level tough like 3D World, but I get the feeling they did not want it to be. This was the Wii’s Mario game and the console had crossed generational boundaries more than any other console so it needed to be more accessible than ever before and it clearly is.

I sailed through this game with more ease than 64 or Sunshine before it, which I believe is due to the levels being incedibly straight forward and much more like a ride at a theme park. And what a theme park it is! All of the individual galaxies make up a cornucopia of sights and sounds and gimmicks that translate into one of the best games from the Wii era. I have heard the sequel is just as good but sadly no idea how I will play it unless Nintendo release another limited time digital copy.

11: Banjo-Kazooie

Yeah I went 3D platforming wild this year! Banjo Kazooie being my first non Mario 3D platformer that I attempted to complete and boy what a fun and silly exprience it was. This being a non Mario game meant getting to grips with an entirely different team’s idea of how to control a character in a 3D space, but also an older one without any of the QOL upgrades we have learnt in the intervening decades.

I never needed to worry. This plays just as well today as I am sure it felt back then. I sailed through this game having the sort of grand fun I know younger me would have felt had he gone the Nintendo64 route rather than the PlayStation 1 route. I am a sucker for games where the levels are preset and you enter them over and over and Click Clack Wood is by far the greatest level in this game. The idea of it being split into four seasons and each having such a drastically different style of play while being the same basic level works perfectly. If I ever make a game myself I would want to do this kind of thing.

Banjo and Kazooie are a really fun combination even if Kazooie is one of the rudest characters in video games. She is so mean to everyone but that did not stop me laughing a ton at their antics. All their movesets where appropriate for the stages and it really moved the needle forward for what a 3D gaming world could be at the time.

I got all the musics, all the jigsaws, all the jingos, everything. I had a blast doing so and despite some bad gameplay from me trying to best Gruntilda at the end and messing up royally managed to get the full ending. Banjo Tooie is definitely on my upcoming list! Also apparently I have to 100% DK64 or something?

The Top Ten:

10: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I am not entirely sure what to write about Breath of the Wild. This is a game I had started twice before – once in 2017 when I got my switch, and once again 3 years later when I wanted to give it another try. Both times I completed the great plateua and then was so overwhelmed that I fizzled out. It is something that occurs a lot during open world gaming to me. The sense of scope and hugeness of the map overtakes me and I wander and do my own thing. I struggle to stay on track with storylines because I am more concerned about what I might miss during my travels and so I make my own path.

I streamed this game, which was an absolute godsend for making me stick to the storylines. I need that focus to help me, I need the eyes and people teasing and suggesting because I am a terrible solo game player. I have hundreds of hours in openworld games purely because I stroll about and then I put them down due to burnout or not really connecting with the scope in front of me. Having an audience helped me so much and I finally got to experience what occurs to me to be one of the most divisive of the Zelda games I have witnessed posting about.

I know the arguments against it such as the durability mechanic and there are no real beefy dungeons so to speak, but as I was playing it I did not care. The durability mechanic never affected me because there was so much to pick up. I thought I would get stuck with weaker weapons due to them breaking but the game is tailored so that wherever you are things are on par with you and those new drops match what broke. It causes you to have to mix it up and play around and I liked being forced into playing in a way I would not have before.

I like to meet games on what they are asking me to do more than what I think I want (despite me occasionally misunderstanding a game and inventing my own rules and them adhering to them until told by chat that I am being ridiculous again and there is no consequence for reading people’s diaries even though Purah asked me politely not to!!)

The dungeons were kind of there, just seperated out into tens of shrines all bitesized and breezy. Not going to lie, I wanted the shrines to go on for ages. They are phenomenal but always end too soon. I think my exact desire would be for there to be 10 mega shrines each 14 shrines long and each concerned with one of the gimmicks, but then someone pointed out that that is basically asked for dungeons and even though that is not quite what I mean in my head, no one can see in my noggin so it does not really matter.

Talking about this game feels as overwhelming as playing it. There is so much here despite the fact that you feel so lonely most of the time. The lack of music during the walking portions helps increase the sensation of isolation that someone who had been dead for 100 years must have felt upon returning to a world so utterly changed. I am conflicted. I really loved it, but yet I did not love it the way I feel I should have and I cannot articulate why.

The controls and abilities were grand and gave to so much invention (that I discovered after the fact) my mind was not so imaginative when playing. The side quests were full of cool characters and fun things to do and I became super invested in a number of them, like Tarrytown being built up. As well as travelling muscian Kass who led me on a grand tour of the world and his accordion is burned into my ears.
The divine beasts were fiendish and required me to properly think how to use each ability to change the internals to reach my little podiums.
I gained some super cool abilities too (no big hands though) and met some of the best characters in all of the Zelda games; Urbosa, Mipha (who I accidentally called Mipfa for a time), Daruk and Revali were all top notch and the quest reward for finishing all the memories had me tear up at the resolution.
And finally the end Ganon fight was a spectacle I had seen earlier in the year in a different but still just as awesome to see here and one of my favourite moments in a Zelda game – even though I messed up for a bit and did not quite attack the right areas. I loved it and the ending.

There is just something missing from my heart about the game and I cannot put my finger on it.

It might be the fact that they would not let me stable the Bones Horse. 🙁

09: Xenogears

I played 80+ hours of this and I still struggle to articulate what actually happened. I did call a number of things out but also got SO much wrong. There are ambitious games, and then there is Xenogears, which takes that word and wrings out every last drop. This game takes preconceptions of what it might be and throws them out the window every step.

There are so many unique mechanics and fully fleshed out fighting minigame that it is literally bursting at the seams. It felt as though I was playing a game where they threw everything at the wall to see what would stick and everything did and they ran with it. Well I ran with them and had an incredibly good time.

The combat style is up there with FFVIIIs of a type I would love to see elsewhere. Using points tactically to eventually pull off double moves or more powerful moves or the ability based on health to be super powerful is just great and unique. It also moves across to the mech battles. I think I liked the party on the ground stuff just slightly more, but it was a wonderful experience none the less. Figuring out how to bump up my moves and when to store power when some battles could last a while and the game sending me between each of them was part of the fun.

Someone posted in reply to me to not hold the second half of the game against the first and I can safely say I did not. I know it becomes a bit of a rush, and you can see where they had all these elaborate set pieces planned that become nothing more than our characters sat in a chair describing how cool the events were. I completely give this a pass just because of how dense the rest of everything else is.

I am not just easy to please, I give a ton of leeway to ambition and experimentation – even if it does not quite match the vision. I have explained before why I love FFVIII, Majora’s Mask and DSII so much. All three followed games often seen as the greatest in their field. All critically lauded and beloved and none of them played it safe. They did their own thing. Xenogears is the very definition of doing its own thing, only it is doing about 60 own things and all of them are struggling to work in tandem and mostly working out.

I will always look fondly on this often baffling and beautiful mess and I am incredibly glad that even if I only experienced three (classic) RPGs from Japan that this was one of them.

Except for spending an hour to do a small jumping section in a tower. A whole hour. 60 minutes. Also Saitan allowed two main characters to [spoiler]conduct cannabalism[/spoiler] and that makes him evil. Also the end credits saying End of Episode V had my eyes popping out. Also there were secret doors and I figured that out.

08: Super Mario 3D World

Of the three 3D Mario platformers I played this year, this was the most sprawling. I genuinely cannot believe the amount of content within this game. It harkens back to the SMB3/SMW/NSMB style of Mario with a large overworld map that you wander through full of themed sections, sometimes gimmicky.

The main game is already the longest and most varied Mario I have played, and the addition of Bowser’s Fury made it even more jam packed. There is so much Mario here and I am here for it. I love platformers and last yeaer Mario 64 showed me that I can platform in the 3rd Dimension…eventually. By the time I had reached this game, the embarassing deaths and silly mishaps were way less and I felt more confident in my abilities to make it through the game.

This, of course, all dashed by the final world. With a lot of encouraging I did not only play the main game, but I collected every gold flag and every green star from all levels to unlock the final, final challenging world.

For those not in the know, the final final world has 3 levels. One is a fairly long Captain Toad level but by far the simplest of the three. The other two are university level tests of skill, proving to everyone how you reached this point in the first place. One is a series of 30 mini challenges in a row. Each challenge has a time limit of ten seconds and you must do them consecutively each time you attempt it. Fail on challenge 24? Too bad! Start from 1 again and make your way through. That took me about 1 and a half hours.

The ultimate, however, is a long level of 400 seconds with no checkpoints, 3 green stars and the most devious setups of the skills you should now have as second nature. It took me just over 6 hours to beat it. 6 whole hours of replaying the same level and getting slightly farther just for a new setup to demolish me and then attempting to get back to the spot I needed to practice. It was an ordeal, but not a bad one.

Before Mario 64 I struggling greatly with 3D platforming. I have depth perception issues so where I am in a 3D plain is not what I see and 2D is where I find comfort. I whiff jumps, I whiff attacks, I genuinely mess up greatly because I cannot convert those 3D images on a 2D screen into spatial awareness. (This happens in real life too but real life is not a game, just a sequence of embarassment).

Mario 64 and getting all 120 stars is one of my greatest achievements because it meant I could platform in 3D and I was able to overcome my inabilities.
I treated this last challenge in this world the exact same way. I knew I could complete it, despite however long it would take me. I had the confidence to not give up thanks to Mario 64 and finally finishing this last level gave me a kind of elation I had only felt during besting FromSoft bosses.

It was the kind of win that only few games can make you appreciate and I surely do.

Also Bowser world music slaps uncontrollably!!

07: Horizon Forbidden West & Burning Shores

I go into almost all games with no real knowledge because I am pretty good at keeping myself spoiler free. I do not really watch video game trailers and I love surprises. Horizon Zero Dawn was one such surprise where I discovered a story full of intrigue and heartbreak. I was glued to that game and I just had to see the full outcome and what had happened to the world to leave it in the state we found it.

The sequel had a ton to live up to, but also faced the problem of the biggest mystery and greatest hook of the first game being revealed. Can you even recapture the magic again without it as it truly was such an integral part to my enjoyment of the first?

Well. I think they did. I think the sequel capitalises on all the strengths of the first and enhances and evolves the world in which we live while creating new struggles for us to deal with that would exist as a result of what we did in the first game.

Aloy is a truly well acted and developed character. Her growth and choices in this game are more important than anything else going on within (and yes, I know the world is ending) but this is the flavour for our journey on understanding why Aloy is and how Aloy chooses to be.

I am a sucker for great stories and the writers of Forbidden West captivated me again; though I will say you definitely need the Burning Shores DLC added to experience what I feel is the actual full story of the game. It twists and turns much like the first and we visit so many places hinted at and learn even more just how much this current world is messing up the future. Aloy gets more room to be herself and not just who she is supposed to be and it leads to a lot of early friction but for good reason. She experiences certain events that allow her to properly self examine why she is the wya she is and how she can be better, and in the Burning Shores we finally see a more in touch and confident in her own self worth Aloy and it is a real joy to experience that fun with her.

The gameplay is way more complex and requires a lot more control over the radial menus and knowing what to do and I was quite rubbish. The amount of deaths to the raptor bots was staggering and I crouched so much by mistake to then get hit by something that I was properly annoyed with my own ability to use a controller.

The very end boss of the Burning Shores was not just spectacle, but spectacle not for the sake of it. We see these instruments of destruction all over the world, these Behemoths that brought the downfall of everything, lying dormant. Our bad guy starts one up and we have to face off with it. We are terrified of doing so because basically all we have are bow and arrow style weapons and all the amazing future tech of the past could not doing anything against them, so how on earth would we. And they handle it magnificently. It does not feel contrived or weak or convenient. It feels like we just got lucky enough to scrape through another potentially apocalyptic event with no recourse and is the ending that this game deserves.

I am so sad about the loss of Lance Reddick and he felt so absent in this game, I almost wonder if he was supposed to have a much larger part in 3 to make up for it. He was one of the best. In fact all the acting and voice work in this game is stellar and we meet a whole new cast of really great folks and new tribes with new customs and beliefs.

The world of Horizon is really one of my most favourite and a third game is a hands down own as soon as it is released.

06: Super Mario Brothers Wonder

A 2D platformer that is brand new and Mario? This is my heaven. This is how I was introduced to the world of video games via the original Super Mario Brothers. This is the best of the 2023 games that I have played (and I have played a few current releases unlike previous years) quite easily and is my favourite 2D mario game, surpassing SMB3. There is only one negative about the entire game: there is not more of it.

Every level, every power up, every wonder raddish, every last bit of this game shows a Wintendo who wanted to make a 2D Mario game that took the formula into a new and improved evolution the same way we went from SMB1 to SMB3. The NSMB games were really just slightly updated SMW games and they are solid and fun but they never really lived up to their legacy the way the 3D games were doing so.

Super Mario Wonder is a concerted effort to rectify that and show everyone that 2D Mario has not only been a powerhouse but can become one again and it shows. It feels dynamite to control just from moving and jumping, but then we have new power ups AND badges that slightly change the way we can traverse. Some badges cause the game to be drastically different and some make things a bit easier. Each one of these badges has two seperate levels proving you can use them in both beginner and advanced sections.

Every level in this game is made with the utmost confidence and knowledge that you will have a fun time going through. Especially the way the wonder radishes affect a certain aspect. There are moments of real wonder while playing and if this the first in a new line of 2D mario games then we are in for a treat. Mario Maker 3 with a Wonder skin? Oh dear. I would not be able to contain myself!

05: Final Fantasy X-2

FFX was my GOTY last year. I re-read what I wrote about it as well as FFVIII. To be honest either one could have been my GOTY. They both called to my heart and grabbed me. If I look back at this year FFVIII has been the game I have thought about the most so perhaps it should have taken the number 1 spot, but then again FFX had the Besaid Island theme and that floored me and still does. The piano and violins in that piece open my heart so wide that nothing remains of me and I am absorbed by the music and then I think about everything I did and even with the Birds it really was just an amazing time of all so yeah, #1 spot for FFX.

FFX-2 had a ton to live up to for me. The end of FFX and where our characters were left worked so hard for me. I loved it and I think Tidus is really the greatest FF protagonist of the games I have played so far. A beautiful happy go luck himbo is a character we should see in more games. No more dark, brooding, misunderstood reluctant heroes please – I want a guy who bumbles from place to place, helping out because it is his nature while he barely has any clue what is happening around him.

In that sense, and like I said last year, we may play as Tidus but Yuna is the hero and the one with the standard hero’s journey. She is also the emotional core of the game and everything we feel is a result of how events affect her and the relationships with the rest of the cast.

FFX-2 being about Yuna and her new journey through the consequences of the previous game is handled so very well and I was relieved. She was well written previously, but this game stood even taller. Her acceptance of the way Spira is now and how she deals with her grief and loss, and the potential of a new way forward is engrossing and entertaining and believable in a world as weird as Spira.

The cast is almost all still there, but now instead of party members with specific abilities you dress up the three main characters in different outfits that do different things and you can do it mid battle and depending on how the outfits are laid out in your inventory grid system they can be super powerful! Basically this is like FFVIII in so much as it is a combat system I have never seen before and does everything right for me. I had a whale of a time attempting to learn how it worked and how I could make it sing.

Revisiting every location from the previous game also really worked for me and originally I was a bit sad that the entirity of the sound track was different but really in the context of the story it needed to be. The world underwent such a drastic change and all the music is way more upbeat to match that.

Rikku and Paine as companions are very much the good angel and the bad devil on Yuna’s shoulders and the three of them as a trio are just fantastic to listen to and play with. That we merely change their outfits to match the battle rather than swap in other characters means the whole story is tailored to just these three rather than having to account for any random party make up. We get to spend all our time with them and watch them grow and reveal their pasts and their wants and their friendship. They truly work so well a a group that I wanted to keep the story flowing constantly and learn about all these weird memories and events that kept our team on the tips of their toes.

The ending that I got did make me tear up. It might feel like a sort of ‘everyone wins just undo the previous game’ but I think that is not quite the point. Yuna not only saved the world twice but she grew to the point where she was happy and content and was rewarded for it and she deserved that.

If the rumours of an FFX-3 are true, then I am so ready for YRP to be in position and ready to rock more concerts!

04: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

The Von Karma case.

If you know, you know. If you do not, and have never played a Phoenix Wright game, then I really recommend you do so. I was enjoying the game. It is sort of a really complex visual novel with a life system. That feels a bit reductive on all the stuff at work within the game itself but it is ultimately a game where you play a lawyer who defends the innocent from serious outcomes of trials.

You get to investigate, collect evidence and make deductions. Then in court you get to cross examine witnesses and object to testimony and see if you deductions are correct. For such a simple way of playing it really is thrilling to hope that you were correct and you are looking at the evidence the correct way and that you can help save your client.

A puzzle game through and through with an incredible series of cases all designed to push my brain to the edge. It was everything I never knew I wanted from a game where you could be a lawyer. I had so much joy trying to figure things out before the game revealed them to me that I got completely and utterly stuck into each case. One such wacky theory were the red bushes theory.

So there is a death at a movie lot and there are these bushes that are red. No other bushes are red. There is also a ton of paint cans around the area in all different screens of the movie lot. Only one can is open and it is the red paint can.

I theorised that someone had been killed near these bushes, their blood had leaked all over part of the bushes and that red paint had been used across all of the bushes there to cover it up. I told LVG this theory that I was so excited about and had been stating throughout the case and she asked one question that demolished it: Why not paint them green?

So yes, it was a bad theory. The fun of coming up with them and the fact that the cases in these games are wild and out there, as shown by the incredible Von Karma case, meant that this was in line with the sort of results you can expect to see and that I will bad theory again and again! And also be chastised for them but you cannot stop me and my brain.

There were some cases where I figured things out but was too eager and kept trying to prove something before it was even ready and while that is a shame, it does make you feel pretty amazing to have unravelled the story in your head before hand. This is one of the few games I feel I could enjoy solo.

I am going through the whole trilogy and was hoping to get to the third one this year, but time ran out a little. Plus, there are another couple of trilogies to play and you bet I am going to devour them.

Phoenix, Miles, Maya, Pearls, and Mia are the toppest and my future time with them all shall surely include many more objections!

03: Super Mario Sunshine

I have the softest spot in my heart for Mario Sunshine. It sits between Super Mario 64 – a literal game changer and Super Mario Galaxy – a revered classic that is joyfully lauded by almost the whole world. How is any game supposed to compare to them?

It absolutely does some wild things that make no sense – such as killing you if you lose a race against another character. It decided that making a movement system around water jets would be the way to follow up from Mario 64, and if you read earlier entries then you know I am here for mixing it up and I stayed for as much as I could. I grabbed all the shines I could possibly manage excluding the blue coin ones.

I super dig the approach to levels in this game the way Mario 64 did them. Yeah the world approach of SMB3/SMW is great, but a single level that changes every time you enter it and requires you to be observant and complete the new goal is the absolute best. Sunshine does that with the added bonus that the whole game feels like one big level sliced up. Isle of Delfino is the level and you keep checking out small corners of it and doing your thing.

It is certainly the most cohesive Mario game but I could see someone thinking that everything is a bit samey due to it. There is no, for instance, change from a grassworld to a desert world like you see in SMB3. There IS however, a change from a small town on the island with a fair bit of grass to a beach level which is a bit cheeky, but it feels like just an extension of the land outside the town. I think the world is very smartly put together and really enjoyed getting to grips with going through everything.

I did every one of the special stages and then the redo of the special stages (I will have nightmares of the Upchuck one) and I made my way to the end and experienced everything. I had the most wonderful and funny time in this game but not because of the game, but because of the audience while playing it. I love playing games with friends – I have always beleived the best console to get is the one you can play with your friends and the best way to play games is ones you can share and I played this on stream and it was more of a mess than the story of Xenogears.

Mario Sunshine is all the things in terms of movement that I cannot deal with appropriately so the numbers of failures within the game were immense and ludicrous. I died to misjumps, to misplaced confidence, to slipping on walls and floors, to my depth being drastically over estimated or under estimated, from pressing the wrong buttons and having to redo entire sections and running out of time, to just plain VG incompetence.

And it was glorious.

I could not get mad because I was laughing so hard and I was encouraged because everyone in chat was laughing with me and at me and it felt like being back on my sofa when growing up and my friends and I would tease as we failed in Sonic 1 and Streets of Rage and Magical Flying Hat Turbo Adventures. The atmosphere of playing the game overruled how it did not quite match up to the reputation of 64 and Galaxy but it does not matter. I had so much fun. Even the frustrations with any loss being a death, or some FLUDD jumps requiring a kind of spatial vision that I genetically lack and precision found in the fingers of a younger more dexterous me, it was not enough to colour how great of a time I had playing it.

It is one of two games I would consider speedrunning if I ever got into that arena.

Yeah, I have an incredible soft spot for this game and I will say it; I had more fun playing Sunshine than any other 3D Mario.

02: Chronotrigger

Chronotrigger is one of the games I played these last few years with a reputation that dwarfs it. Almost everyone knows of Chronotrigger and how adored it is. This is the game responsible, my darling, for the existence of the Zybourne Clock!

Another marvel of the SNES, Chronotrigger is a game I can say did not just live up to that reputation but shattered it. So often you hear of something mega loved and hyped up and you go in a tad wary. Oh yeah, they say it is this good but can it really be? Yes. Yes it can. And then it can demolish you.

Every single area of this game is operating at an 11 out of 10.

• The spritework across the whole game is big and gorgeous. Every character is distinct and colourful and expressive, which means a lot in a pixel based game in the resolution the SNES output.
• The combat is not too involved but not at all basic. It has simple turn based action choices but augments it with a party based modifier. Basically, whoever you have running around with you can alter the moves of another member to perform some super powerful combos! This means that it is always fun to battle and they are not random either – you can see the enemies who are going to fight you on screen all the time and can choose to engage!
• The soundtrack goes all in and is up there in the greatest of all time list. Chrono’s theme, Schala’s theme, Corridors of Time, Frog’s Theme, Memories of Green, Robbo’s Theme, Secrets of the Forest…goodness me the SNES has never sounded SO good.
• The story and characters are some of the best of all time. Every single one of your party shines throughout and you are given enough time with all to form proper connections to them and their arcs. Some might be your favourite, but there is no one who is left by the wayside.
• Difficulty is perfectly balanced and I mean perfectly. The game is never too hard and never too easy. So many times I would get through a hairy situation by the skin of my teeth and waiting for me would be a save point so that I always had a reward at the right time. It never felt like I was breezing through and also never felt like I would be roadblocked by any big boss.
• The driving minigame was a ton of fun!

Going back to the story, the whole thing had me from start to end. I loved the unveiling of every event and the changing of the map due to the different time zones and how going back and forth made alterations. I forgot that I was playing a SNES game!

It really cannot be stated enough just how incredible it is to see a game come together with such effortless grace and make it appear as though making a game can be easy. I would not change a single thing about it, and the future refused to anyway!

01: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Between this year and last year, I have now played six of the most recent mainline Zelda games. Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Windwaker, This and Breath of the Wild. I feel like I understand what people say when they mean ‘a Zelda game’ and I am here to say that I do not think there really is such a thing as a Zelda game.

One of the things I have been most impressed on playing all of these, is the way each new entry reinvents itself. We take our hero Link out on an adventure is the only constant between them all but the structure and decision making in each game is as varied as the one before it.

To go from Link to the Past to Ocarina of time is more than just a shift to 3D. To then go to Majora’s Mask from Ocarina and then from Majora to Wind Waker is showing a level of comfort in trying new things within the structure of an adventure game that I can safely say that I love. I dig changing things up and not repeating oneself over and over. Give me sequels that want to do things differently and I will give you a fan.

I heard how Wind Waker’s reveal after Majora did not go down well while I was playing it. I still think that is ridiculous and that Wind Waker is easily the third best Zelda game after Majora’s Mask and now this one.

Twilight Princess was apparently the ‘dark and gritty’ Zelda that people thought they wanted but when they got it they still were not impressed.

I went into this game with the knowledge only that it was a darker Zelda game and nothing else. I did not need anything else, partially because of my spoiler views but also because I had been conditioned to arrive at each Zelda game with the preconception that it would be completely different to the one previous one.

Boy did this one go in a tone I completely unexpected.

This is a darker Zelda, for sure, but not in the gritty reboot imagining kind of way. No, this is a game built around the same terror and dread that you last experienced on the DAWN OF THE FINAL DAY and looked up to see that moon staring at you so very closely. This game built the entirety of its story around that feeling and this is its super power.

From the very moment the twilight theme played and the world was a strange mix of digital pixels and dark shadow creatures I wanted out (in the good way where I wanted to save the video game world).

The largest part of my reasoning to put this in first place is Midna.

Up until this point, with the exception of Link to the Past, I had played Zelda games with an ingame companion. There had been Navi, Tatl and King of Red Lions and each one had been a great help in keeping me updated with knowledge and guidance (when I remembered to use them.)

It was almost as if Nintendo saw me playing and made a companion WAY more suited for how I bumble through games than any other. Midna is dismissive and sarcastic and unimpressed and completely done with my tomfoolery. She was the absolute perfect foil for how I play a video game and I found it hilarious.

Then the story began to move on and truths became revealed and my feelings for Midna and the situation she was stuck in grew alongside it. I truly wanted to help her out despite the ever increasing dread at what I might be doing. I could not tell if she was one of the good guys to start with and all I had to go on was vibes and princess Zelda assuring me Midna was on the level while the world was all messed up by Zant.

It was a really, really great story with a spectacular end boss. [spoiler]Gannon and I ending it all with swords in the middle of a lightning storm and his final end being met with the sunrise[/spoiler] and easily my favourite final Zelda boss thus far. Then the end which was sweet and complete and followed by the credits. I was feeling pretty great about what had happened…then the actual ending and my heart was ripped from my chest. That has stuck with me ever since I saw it.

The very real, bond and connection that Link and Midna had felt real. And she chose to keep Hyrule safe by breaking the only way she had to see Link, a man I think she fell in love with. That is the choice a real ruler has to make.

Other things I could not get enough of:

• The dungeons are the best! Yeah, you might not use the abilities you get from each one that much outside of them but when you are in that dungeon and messing with stuff it feels great! The big hands analogue was a very funny reveal (the statue grabbing one that jumps everywhere). Goron Mines, Lakebed Temple, Arbiter’s Grounds, Snowpeak, Forest Temple, Palace of Twilight and Ooccoo City were all brilliant. Not a bad dungeon among them!
• The fidget spinner. This is the dungeon ability where you stand on a cog and go spinning around bumping into stuff. Not only was this the best dungeon of all but it also has my all time favourite Zelda boss battle. Going around the outside of that cylinder chasing him on your fidget spinner was exhilerating and cinematic!
• The catching of the insects mini quest. I love nature (bees are an all timer in terms of cool animals) and this was one of the best ways to pass the time doing mini sidequests.
• The twilight world itself. I said up above, but the way the music becomes this haunting and hollow ambience with occasional spikes of sound makes it so other wordly but not evil or bad. Just different. It captures that dread you feel when walking out in pitch black even though you walk down those same places in the light any other time.
• The music! What is a Zelda game without great music? A zelda game that does not exist. Every single Zelda game sounds great and this one is no exception. I love the contrasting in the tracks when we are in light world compared to twilight world and the Hyrule field theme in this game matches the grand scale of the field as we ride across the whole thing.
• The ball rolling minigame in the fishing centre. I love games like that and blasted through so fast. I wish there had been a thousand boards!
• The snowboarding in Snowpeak. Just grand fun!
• The Wolf changing. I actually really liked being forced to use a different toolset while in this form. It made the scope feel even larger and it was fun to talk to the cats! 🙂

Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess are basically level in my eyes. Majora has the song of storms, AKA the best bit of Zelda music, but Twilight Princess has Midna and her story. Either can be my all time favourite but as I played Twilight Princess this year, it is hands down my GOTY.