2024 was a wild year in gaming for me, with so many games I loved which could have made my top 10. In fact, I wrote up blurbs for around 50 more games that came out, which were eventually moved off my list when I realized “Oh yeah, that game did come out in 2024.” It was almost funny, at one point or another I had included Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, Persona 3 Reload, Tekken 8, Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Balatro, Helldivers 2, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Nine Sols, and the much better action game than Black Myth Wukong Stellar Blade. 2024 was a fantastic year for video games that were right up my alley, and while so many great games failed to make the list, you’ll never guess where Game of the Generation Nioh 2 falls this year with it’s 280 more hours.
Dishonorable Mention: Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth
When I was initially compiling my list I had this game at number 4, but I can’t justify giving a place on my list to a game that features multiple substories where sexual assault is treated as a funny haha just because it happens to a dude. Yes it’s so funny you raped Ichiban in a dark alley, twice. This single aspect took what would have been one of my favorite games of the year and made it one I have no interest in ever touching it again, despite how much fun I had with it as a game overall. My completionism truly got the worst of me with this one because if I hadn’t been trying to 100% the game, I wouldn’t have maxed the friendships out with the person running the travel agency or the school and I wouldn’t have had the game completely ruined for me. The more I tried to write about how this was going to slot into my list, the more this criticism gnawed at me until I realized that no, I couldn’t have it on my list despite how good it is overall, because this shit isn’t funny, and should never be treated as such.
Honorable Mention: Hades II
I can’t really bring myself to include an early access game on my full list, but Hades II has been a phenomenal time. Its excellence was to the point where it almost got me to break that rule, considering just how much fun I’ve had with it. It’s a game I’ve been enjoying alongside my girlfriend with her having her own save on my Steam Deck and me playing through on my PC. Funnily enough, she’s significantly further along than I am but it’s been fun to be able to play a new version of a game like this that has so much promise coming into its full release whenever that might be. The characterization continues to be fantastic, the mechanics incredibly rewarding, and the art design is second to none. I can not wait to see where this game goes in the future.
10: Earth Defense Force 6
What can I say about Earth Defense Force? It’s absolute dogshit and I love it. It’s the most perfect distillation of something that is so bad it’s good where it knows exactly what it is and it doesn’t pretend to be anything but that. You fly or run around shooting bugs, sometimes you pilot a giant mech, you blow things up and slowly upgrade yourself by picking up giant boxes from the ground labeled Weapon and Armor in the most basic of fonts. It’s EDF, either you love it or you hate it and I am one who loves it. It really doesn’t do much of anything new, it’s just more stages, more funny singing, and a hell of a lot more fun.
9: Dragon Age: The Veilguard
When I first went through this I did not think it would make my list. I enjoyed it, yes, but there was a point towards the end of the game where it would make or break its overall standing, and I had to be sure of my feelings. So I immediately went back in for a second playthrough and somehow managed to enjoy myself more that second time than the first. I think this game is an accomplishment. A team took what would have been a pretty dogwater live service game and turned it around into an experience with a really good overall story that suffers predominately from zones that feel a little bit off and a team dynamic that has absolutely no friction whatsoever. I would have appreciated pushback when I’m choosing all the asshole options. Overall though, the fact that they got me with their twist, along with every class you can play feeling really good, locks this in the top 10 for me.
8: Unicorn Overlord
You know what’s really good? Ogre Battle. You know what’s also really good? Unicorn Overlord. I came into this expecting something pretty good and ended up with one of the best strategy RPGs in a very long time. While the story isn’t anything to really write home about, the strategic gameplay was immaculate. Being able to see the outcome of a fight that was about to initiate and change gear and use items to try to turn the tide if it looked like you were going to lose led me to constantly have a little bit extra on me weapon-wise so I could shift out skills, and while it didn’t always save the day, the amount of times I was able to turn a guaranteed death into a tactical retreat was nice. It’s also just absolutely gorgeous to look at, which isn’t a surprise being a Vanillaware joint, but this one for me is an absolute standout.
7: Dungeons of Hinterberg
Have you ever played a game that is exactly what it says on the tin? I usually avoid calling a game a comfy game, but there is something about this that just hit in the right way for me. It was comfortable, as comfortable as the jacket the main character wears. It’s got a day and night system like a Persona where you decide what to do every day. Do you tackle one of the many dungeons on every map biome? Or do you spend the day relaxing in the zone you chose to travel to? When you get home at night, do you spend it hanging out with a specific friend? Or do you maybe head to the campfire to listen to the other slayers talk and get a little friendship boost with all of them? The nice thing about the game having no time deadline meant I was able to see everything it had to offer in one playthrough. The difficulty is never really a huge challenge but there were more than a few creative boss fights and puzzles in the dungeons that I had a lot of fun deciphering my way through. Every biome having its own set of magic also made each area feel completely different. The snowy mountain being a highlight, where your secondary spell is just a snowboard and you shred through levels, do slalom, and just really have a lot of goofy fun. Overall, Dungeons of Hinterberg is just a pleasantly fun experience that came at a time when I really needed it and is well worth the time you put into it.
6: Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance
SMTV is a game I have a weird relationship with. I loved it when I first played, giving it my #2 game of 2021 and called it the perfect SMT game for newcomers. However, the more I thought about it over the years the more I realized that I never wanted to revisit it, unlike Nocturne and other games in the series I’d replayed multiple times. I take back everything I said about the original release of Shin Megami Tensei V. It’s been completely ruined for me now that this is out. Every decision they made in Vengeance makes it a significantly better game than V was on release. From being able to hang out with your demons to the new characters and more focus on your friends it improves every single aspect of the game. The characters matter more, I care about everyone more, and even the original routes were drastically improved by the changes to the game. It’s rare that what could have just been a basic re-release with some tweaks and a little more story ends up being this much of an improvement over the original, but it truly is worth the full cost of the game and ended up sucking up a lot more of my life than I expected.
5: Metaphor: Refantazio
Hey, hey you there, did you know it’s possible for the Persona team to not completely contradict their main arc and characterization in their social links? Because holy shit they finally actually accomplished this incredible feat. Metaphor is a fantastic game from start to finish with a pacing that doesn’t completely ruin the experience. That’s been my problem with Persona for so long, feeling like if I want to see everything I have to do every new big task as efficiently as possible. Here, I finally got a game where I didn’t need a guide to make sure I made all the right choices to not lock myself out of seeing all the game had to offer. I was just able to do it all which left the only place that felt like it dragged a longer period towards the end of the game where it’s all dedicated to giving you enough time and resources to max out all of your stats and do sidequests. Having not finished every dungeon in a single run, this meant I had things left to do so it didn’t drag for me, but I can 100% understand the people I talked to who just wanted to finish the damn game and having such a huge span of time where there weren’t any ways to progress the main story led to it feeling like a slog for them since if you had just efficiently nailed your way through everything, you were just sitting there spamming to make the days go forward.
From a battle system standpoint I really feel like they nailed it as well, fun classes, fun animations to the attacks, and an emphasis on buffs and debuffs actually mattering unlike what they had done in Persona really made me feel like I was using my whole brain for a decent amount of the fights. Not to mention some of the best super boss encounters they’ve ever put together. I really appreciated what they did with the game this time around. Overall, I think its biggest accomplishment was in making me excited for whatever this team has lined up for the future rather than fearing it.
4: FANTASIAN Neo Dimension
The biggest celebration of the year for me was this game finally being freed from iOS. I had already played through the first half of the game on my phone but there was no way I was going to pay a monthly fee for ONE GAME. So I never really went in to try the second half when it was released. What an incredible game. The first half already had an incredible amount of depth to it, but like the classic Final Fantasy VI you’re left scouring the world, rebuilding your party for the second half. This time, like the World of Ruin, you can go about it in any order, doing tons of new sidequests along the way as you find where all your friends are. Not to mention a spike in difficulty, I can see why now when you finish part one you unlock a completely different leveling system and get access to super moves tied to a bar that builds. You need them and you need them strategically. There was one set of bosses that you had to kill in one big burst or they would fully heal themselves as they swap positions. It was an incredible fight that took me multiple tries to figure out and that just felt good. The whole game has some of the best uses of strategic thinking I’ve seen in a JRPG battle system with its use of a funny temporal prison to trap random battles in. So instead of taking on 2 or 3 enemies at once, you can take on 30-50 while random power ups flood the battlefield. It really adds thought to a lot of what I am doing. Plain and simple, it’s one of the best JRPG battle systems I’ve ever experienced and I am so glad that it’s freed from its Apple Arcade prison.
3: Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail
Wow, it feels good to feel good about Final Fantasy XIV again. There was a long period of time where I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep playing or not, and I think it took finding a healthier balance with the game than I had before. Towards the end of Endwalker I was doing so much that I wasn’t enjoying just to keep going. Fight design was boring, job design was boring, and a lot of the extra stuff I just wasn’t enjoying. I was logging in when I had no real reason to log in and it burned me out. Dawntrail came out and it’s given me hope for the future of the game. It still suffers from the issue of the 2 minute meta that plagued Endwalker, but the fight design is about as night and day of an improvement as you can get. Even dungeon bosses have me engaged, something that was not true at all of Endwalker where everything in the game was like playing a nap.
The MSQ was really something else as well. For me I found it fantastic, it was something I really wanted from the game and its more emotional beats really connected with me. The final zone had me in tears the whole time and took me multiple sessions to get through just so I could sit with it. It really was something special for me. You take an MSQ I enjoyed with the best combat design since Stormblood and you have an expansion for me that is miles away a better experience than the last one. As much as the community around the game doom posting constantly, please ignore them and jump in because this is honestly the best the game has been in a long time when it comes to actual dungeon and trial design. I went from wondering if this is going to be my last expansion, to extremely excited about the future of the game.
2: Rise of the Ronin
Hey, notice something missing from the top ten this year? That’s right, for the first time since I hopped aboard the Video Game Choo Choo running down the Gamesline tracks, Game of the Generation Nioh 2 is not on my list. The itch has finally been scratched and it feels nice. Does Rise of the Ronin have issues? Yes, it really does, and it all stems from the open world. I enjoy a good open world game, and the challenges in here are fun, but they really do just feel like an afterthought until you unlock Midnight difficulty. I didn’t even know if this game was fully going to make the top 5 until I jumped back into Midnight difficulty that unlocks after you beat the game. Suddenly the open world is exciting, with all the areas suddenly having multiple ranking officers you need to take out, replaced with both Ronin, which are other players characters, and named officers which act like super bosses. Suddenly the open world isn’t a chore, it’s a highlight with incredibly tense and nail biting fights as you strategically try to isolate one of the named characters while you desperately try to take them down. Suddenly that weakness from your initial playthrough becomes the game’s strength as you truly are tested in your knowledge of your weapons and the game’s systems. It feels incredible and it finally scratched that Nioh 2 itch hard enough that the meme has officially been put to rest.
1: Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes
Look, I’m incapable of being subjective here, this is miles away my game of the year, it’s something that truly means everything to me. It’s the final work of a man who really did change my life for the better, and it’s good. Is it the best game in the Suikoden style? No, no it’s not, but it truly does hit all the notes I would want from a game like this. If anything, my only real big complaint is that it plays it far too safe. I never really felt jeopardy for the characters and god were there a lot of them. And shockingly, every line of dialogue is voiced. Normally a game like this would have only the important stuff voiced, but here it’s everything and every character is given enough time and lines of dialogue that you get a feeling for all of them, something I really appreciated. You get just enough to know who they are as a person, but not so much that you’re locked in 100% and can still have enough of the personal interpretation that made Suikoden so special for me as a franchise. When they call this game Hundred Heroes, you can be rest assured of one thing, the title is a complete lie. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred and Twenty Heroes doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue as well. Overall the flow of the game is really good, with only two missable characters and even then the only reason you can miss them is that you spent no time recruiting and completely ignored the very clear sign that you’re at the point of no return.
The game does pretty much everything I would want from a game like this, I get to delight in one of the better war battle systems I’ve seen in one of these games and the duels, which have been a highlight of Suikoden since the first, continue to shine. I love hearing a line of dialogue and extrapolating what they are going to do to choose the proper counter. I love the fact that it matters again and there also not being as many forced losses also feels a lot better than some Suikoden games where you were forced to lose a significant amount of battles. I felt so much delight watching my town open up and grow, with new shops and areas opening up as I recruited members to fill those spaces. While it’s not my favorite castle and town to watch build up in one of these games, it’s definitely up there and filled a hole that had been missing for a long time for me.
The art and music design in the game absolutely shines with every character being incredibly expressive thanks to the amazing sprite work and portraits from Junko Kawano, and the music from Motoi Sakuraba absolutely kills it, and some of the moments where everything all comes together are truly spectacular. The final war battle is a moment of pure bliss with everything you’ve learned and seen in the game coming together for moment after moment of triumph as you push forward, all seeming lost as the music swells heroically as more and more allies show up to help you push forward, making what seemed insurmountable feel impossible to lose as the theme continues to swell, eventually bringing in the vocals as you make a final push to victory. While I have complaints about the game, they pale in comparison to the emotions I felt when the game really hit, and there were a lot of moments when the game hit and hit hard. I am, to this day, sad that Murayama died before his final work could be released, as I think for those of us who truly did care about his work, he would be happy to see the reactions we had to his goofy crew of misfits trying to save their nation.
