Game of the Year time! Woohoo! Let’s get that 52 minute article read time!

It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to do writeups going over every game I’ve played in a year – though I’m new to Gamesline, it’s a yearly trend among my friends (my list for 2024 was one of the submissions for my Gamesline application), and it seems like this is the first year we’ll be skipping out on it, so this is well enough a place as any to continue the trend. This is, admittedly, an incomplete list—some games where I don’t have anything of note to write down aren’t included, though the entire actual “Top 10” games are present—but it should hopefully suffice. Admittedly, it goes the other way, too: Technically, not every game here is one I played for the first time this year, but they’re unique cases, cases of, “The last time I played this I was 10 years old playing this on an iPad”. I don’t think those opinions count anymore. And just remember: If you disagree with any of the opinions I have on videogames made for children, it is because you are a fundamentally weaker person than me. Get pwned, noob.

26. Sonic Forces

Sonic Forces is such a laughably miserable game that it’s almost entrancing. It’s Sonic at his worst in almost every category: it’s aesthetically dull, every environment sanitized and every model as cardboard as possible (though a contentious topic, I do feel this is easily one of – if not outright – the worst showings for every single modern character model). It’s a mechanical disaster, levels either a horrendously underbaked imitation of its 6-years-removed predecessor’s 2D style, mindless runs down a pathway that provides the illusion of 3D, or the rare genuine 3D section that only serves to reveal the controls are so horrendous that the prior 2 gameplay styles far outrank it, all of which beg for a speedrunning focus in a game so short and linear you won’t feel any time saved or improvement made in all but a small handful of levels. Narratively, it’s a game with really no investment in anything – the prompt ‘Eggman won and you have to fight back against a world you’ve lost in’ is as far as anything gets, the game often ascribing itself intensity and grandeur it is far too sardonic to provide – that honestly really could not care less about any other aspect of itself, but, ultimately, it’s Sonic Forces. We all know why this game is bad and how phenomenally bad this game is. This paragraph is about as much as I need to write because you’ve absolutely seen hundreds more of them online. Government-mandated bottom entry.

25. Persona 5 Tactica

This might be the easiest and most basic you can make a tactics game before it can’t actually be considered a tactics game. There are so many tools at your disposal to shred maps and decimate enemies that all only do one thing and – as a result of the game’s ‘Once More’ tools that mandate every nearly every enemy has some scripted way for you to steal free turns from them – don’t even do that thing well. I lost a single mission in this entire game and it wasn’t because a map was challenging or something, it was because I was just straight up going the complete opposite direction than intended. The unit customization is extremely simple and linear: weapons are flat stat increases, skill tree is a straight shot up, Personas give units at most 2 new moves, and these systems all require 2 entire menus each at minimum because this game has such anxiety over matching the aesthetic Persona 5 had while operating completely as style over substance.

The UI’s bloat in particular is massively annoying for a tactics game where enemy information needs to be made immediately and consistently evident, because so often instead of doing something like showing, “This is the enemy you are targeting with an AoE shotgun spread” it has to go, “Here’s every enemy’s burning heart icon all taking damage with no indication of which one you’re attacking! We angled them all 30 degrees! Isn’t this UI design unique!?”, making it needlessly difficult to understand what you’re actually doing sometimes. If you want a new Persona to give someone a new move, you have to go through 3 separate menus making that Persona, get right up to the final confirmation step, and only then see if you’re actually getting the move you wanted. It’s so obnoxious.

There isn’t really anything positive to note outside that core gameplay either. The music feels abysmally tired, confusing consistently too quiet audio-mixing and subdued instrumentation for the relaxed and freeform jazz style Persona 5 is known for, almost like the vocalist was falling asleep for every single song in the soundtrack. The aesthetics – when they’re not getting in the way of playing the game to look cool – look standard at best. The writing feels immensely frustrating, written like a schoolteacher trying to explain what ‘oppression’ is. There’s a scene where the leader of a surveillance state sends two of his citizens to labor camps, pretending it’s a reward to silence them, a scene that obviously communicates intent to anyone watching it… and then the party immediately explains this, beat for beat, despite said scene being the most obvious thing in existence. It is genuinely embarrassing that they chose to make this a story about governmental oppression and rebellion when they are this bad at conveying anything interesting regarding the topic. Every character is a charisma and interaction vacuum and on the whole it’s just an immensely boring and miserable story.

Just play Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle if you want a tactics shooter that goes on sale constantly. This game is a complete copycat of that game: same gameplay style with bloated mechanics, same map design and pacing, hell, almost identical enemy types, but hey, at least Tactica also makes every single one of the menus worse and also has a story, and the story sucks. I bought this for 8 bucks at a local Gamestop, the box had 2 different discount stickers on it, and I saw the cashier make an ‘oh thank fuck someone finally bought this’ expression when I put it in front of him.

24. Nubby’s Number Factory

fifth monitor content

23. Balatro

third monitor content

I can see the appeal of these kinds of ‘number go up’ roguelikes, it is kind of the coolest thing ever when numbers go up, but this format doesn’t do it for me at all. See, what you do is you make a JRPG where these sorts of numbers shenanigans happen, when one of those lets me get these numbers I’m forcibly gifting it to people on Steam at 3 AM because they mentioned it while half asleep. 

I’ll give Balatro points for having very strong sound design and aesthetics for what it wants to do – they’re good on their own, but especially phenomenal at suckering you in and getting you to go just another round – but I don’t like going another round. I don’t like games where I’m shown three cards and then I pick one of the cards. That’s not my kind of game.

Hey! That image of Balatro on a Gamesline GOTY list looks kind of familiar!

22. MOTHER 3

MOTHER 3 is a great game for encompassing what gets under my skin with so many RPGs. Two things, in particular: a complete disinterest for their combat or mechanics in favor of the story – an understandable concession, though one that always confuses and infuriates me, when such a core concession is made it leads me to wonder why not leave the genre altogether – and a fear of its peers. A fear that it will be like them, other games that shoot for the moon in earnest, so it must either turn the other way and shoot for the sun, or shoot for the moon and insist it loathes that it is doing so.

This is a preamble that will matter for other games this year, too, but I bring these points up for MOTHER 3 because this game is one so viciously ravaged by both. In regards to the former, it is massively done in by how mindless its combat is. The rhythm mechanic – hit A in time with the music when attacking – accounts for so much of your damage output and combat is so basic (I presume to make sure the gameplay being difficult or confusing or the like doesn’t get in the way of people enjoying the narrative, which the game is so clearly focused on) that it’s just completely mindless. You so rarely fight more than one enemy at a time, so few enemies actually demand anything from you, and the rhythm mechanic is such a massive boost to your damage once you learn it that the game just becomes ‘learn the rhythm to each battle song, mash the confirm button in time with that, and just let everyone rhythm combo everything in the game to death and heal up after every few battles’. All bosses ask of you is that you spend the first few turns of battle debuffing their offense and buffing your defense because nothing but some of the game’s final bosses will ever resist or undo those abilities. You do not need to think or plan for all but a single boss in this game (which, after doing some minor research, is basically trivialized if you just buy some special armor for it anyways, and I elected not to) and it’s so uniquely infuriating how hollow it is mechanically. There’s almost never a moment where a combat encounter is fun in this RPG.

But MOTHER 3 is a game about its narrative, of course, that’s what everyone says and discounting it entirely solely to complain about its extremely substandard gameplay would be unfair, but it’s one that I can’t really find myself invested in. Maybe it’s a sense of disillusionment, maybe it’s unfair standards, but it’s so hard to find the way this game approaches grief, loss, the irrevocable and immediate changes in the world that it forces onto you, when it’s so disinterested in anything but that. Its characters, the people affected by this grief, the outlets for this messaging that would make it valuable, fall by the wayside, for the sake of its world, a place that wants to be wild and surreal and confusing and hilarious. And such intent is understandable: Tazmily’s devolution is by far the most compelling narrative element of the game because it is the only place the game’s focus on worldbuilding and the consistent inconsistency of it matters. It is where the game’s world is visibly destroyed and distorted into an Americana so similar to, but so much more sinister and destructive, than the one the MOTHER series is built on. It is easily the game’s strongest narrative element to me. But abandoning the vehicles for that concept—leaving the characters it affects as so basic their personalities can accurately be explained in about a sentence—makes it hard to resonate with any of the grief the world, the part that can approach engaging, is forcing upon them. 

MOTHER 3 is a game that, in effect, released much later than it was intended to, a story made for the Nintendo 64, a new console generation that it would’ve been one of extremely few RPGs for, that persisted until the era of the Game Boy Advance, and I think that’s what killed it for me. Its surrealism, its humor, its themes, everything, they had all become passe by the time it entered the world. A world that communicates grief and despair through absurdism and its rejection, a world that exists to create the feeling of going home after a funeral and getting a spread of restaurant coupons in the mail but not a single letter of empathy or emotion, is the world the genre lives in. It is a world the genre built itself on in the years MOTHER 3 missed out on and—to me, at least—it is why RPGs are fun. It is a game that wishes it had the novelty of its earlier peers and suffers endlessly for it because it must exist in a world with games that possess such things as hell houses and ragtime mouses that purely want those things to exist in earnest, and their stories and worlds are made stronger for it. It is punching air because someone picked up the sandbag it plastered a picture of a platypunk onto and threw it out a decade ago.

21. FNaF World

he’s joking right. spot directly above it, too. this is a comedy routine right. survey says fuck no

FNaF World is the aforementioned—or more accurately aforeskipped—fourth monitor content. It is a mindnumbing mash of colors and effects and, wow, this game would love nothing more than to give you a seizure. The battles are pure adrenaline and noise, and their technical simplicity makes it impossible for them to be so in a particularly good way. CocoMelon meets Chrono Trigger is the description I’ve most often heard, but at least that crossover would probably enable you to rationally think about its operation.

Despite it, the game manages to ride up here entirely off of its playground rumor-esque design. It is a game that encourages clipping into random objects, into searching for weird things hidden in corners, finding superbosses in pitch black darkness, yes, Mew is under the truck, yes, you can save Aeris, yes, if you keep the console on for a week and eat a lightbulb you will unlock Sonic. FNaF World thrives when recreating the insanity of those rumors, it is a game built on the misheard and poorly remembered rumors that another, older, more typical FNaF World may have inspired, and it thrives genuinely and it thrives immensely in the moments it does so, it emulates such moments in a way that feels organic to the series while paying homage to something of genuine interest to RPG culture in a unique and fun way, but it only thrives in those short late-game moments. 

Every other moment I feel like I’m gonna fall over and die from sensory overload, vomiting out a rainbow as I go.

20. Donkey Kong Country

It’s really hard to talk about a game like Donkey Kong Country because a Donkey Kong Country kind of starts and ends at just being that, at least for someone like me who has no real attachment to the character or series. I like this game fine enough, barring some of its levels just feeling like absolute bullshit and the concessions the gameplay makes for its aesthetics being consistently apparent (such as a way too zoomed in camera), but the technical novelty is at least a worthwhile excuse, I feel, and it does look and sound sufficiently impressive and atmospheric. It’ll come up again, but comparison is the thief of joy, and DKC has a really hard time comparing to so many of the ilk it shares its name with. It’s still a good platformer, just one that happens to share the family name with a series of truly excellent ones.

I must be honest, however, this game does serve a unique function to this list, mostly a benchmark game. Everything including and beyond this point are games I like well enough, and it would be a disservice to the remainder of the list to give an implication there is not a gulf of quality between them and a Persona 5 Tactica.

19. Trails in the Sky FC

there will probably be a pod specifically for this game where i will give more extensive thoughts. for now i will leave it at “not enough olivier”

18. RWBY: Arrowfell

RWBY is a series I absolutely adore. It isn’t perfect, it is riddled with holes and problems every which way, every volume has at least 3 things wrong with it—but I overwhelmingly find that I simply don’t care. It is a series I find beautiful and inspiring and every day I live in the same world as RWBY, the people that created it, and what the people who are no longer with them left behind, it makes me want to be better. It makes me want to achieve even a microscopic portion of their boundless creativity and drive – something I know I will never attain and yet the knowledge of that never upsets me because it means I have something to move towards every single day—ffddand it gets me out of bed in the morning. Because if they could do it? They could fight past their own limitations and make something so awesome and beautiful and inspiring in such earnest? I can do it too.

It is a shame that I have to admit such a personal love on such a milquetoast and basic game. Arrowfell is a licensed WayForward platformer, not their strongest by any measure, but the picture painted is immediate: it is sufficient.

Nothing here is bad and nothing here is standout. It works. It is playable and it is a “small smile creeping across my face” level of fun. I can’t really be disappointed by it: While a 2D platformer isn’t a genre I would ever imagine RWBY touching, nor is it a genre I would ever want it to touch over the dozens and dozens of better options (RWBY fighting game. RWBY fighting game. RWBY FIGHTING GAME), it works relatively well, if slow at times. Not much to say, really. It’s standard—above average for a licensed game, really, though WayForward is at least good at breaking that barrier—and it’s… standard. A real “get it on sale, but only on sale” kind of game.

17. Guilty as Sock!

“Friendslop” is an often used term, one that I find equal parts disparaging insult and legitimate descriptor—I use it myself as the latter because it’s so immediately evocative of the kind of game it’s focusing on; the fun part is you play it with friends specifically. It’s funny to laugh at these games. That’s the point. The gameplay mechanics are an afterthought.

I am not one to deny a game what it intends to be, such an idea displeases me, but that intent turns me off from so many games that often use this descriptor. More specifically, their insistence on the mechanics they do have to permit their interactions. Lethal Company is a well-enough made game, but it feels like a slog to me because monsters and treasures are so uncommon whenever I play that nothing really happens – the entire game’s premise is built on things that exist so rarely, they can’t be common because then the novelty that they must subsist off of is diluted, that the intended engagement and humor exists so rarely. Wormtown makes it annoying to play as the worm by design, it is an asymmetrical predator and prey game where the worm’s power is offset by limitations of player knowledge, and immensely slow to play as a human who must account for the theoretically immensely powerful worm. These games are framing devices, ultimately, for social interaction, almost nobody plays these games for their mechanical depth and they’re not designed for that—again, not a note I make disparagingly whatsoever—but I feel the ugly middle ground between ‘no mechanics at all’ and ‘enough mechanics to feel like they service consistent humor’ isn’t one a lot of them manage to avoid.

Guilty as Sock! manages the former. It’s an entirely improv-based game, every player given a role in a courthouse—attorney, prosecutor, judge, journalist, witness, so on—and must simply deduce whether the defendant present is guilty of some made-up crime or not. There’s no ruleset past the foundations upon which its improv is built there is no ‘objective’ past guilty or not guilty, a decision made entirely by the judge player, and only the attorney and prosecutor ever care about it – and in turn, it allows for about as pure an experience in this genre as possible. By shedding any actual mechanical depth at all, Guilty as Sock! is able to consistently be funny so long as you’re playing with funny people, which most of these games live and die by.

This does lead to the trade-off, though, that it is immensely hard to “quantify”, if such a thing makes sense. It’s the video game equivalent of a tiny board game manual in terms of depth, there’s very little the game can do strong or poor—its aesthetic is chipper, the customization is nice, the game runs steadily, it’s just kind of hard to discuss against the strengths and weaknesses of other games when there’s little I can compare it to in terms of what it does or does not do. It’s a very basic framing device for a game, not a complaint when it’s just 5 dollars, and it’s good at it, but it’s hard to place alongside things such as Trails in the Sky or Donkey Kong Country. You could probably debate me into putting it anywhere outside of the top or bottom five of this list. I like this spot fine enough for it, though.

16. Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade

I’ve never had a happy history with Fire Emblem. Years ago, the first game I played was one Genealogy of the Holy War, at the recommendation of a friend who has it as their personal favorite. I did not have any fun with it, it sucked, and I hated it. A while later, on scouring for other recommendations, I found a 100% fully legally obtained copy of Three Houses, and played it with some friends. I did not have any fun with it, I spent an hour listening to them yell at what house I should pick, gave in, picked one I had no interest in, and then was slapped in the face with a calendar system, it sucked, and I hated it. Early in 2025, I gave Conquest a shot on hearing it was one of the best designed games in the series in regards to its maps, a topic I was interested in for my own personal studies on developing my own tactics RPG. I don’t think it sucked, truly, it was easily the best time I had with any of them, it was just too difficult a game to go into with the experience of only 2 early games – an intentional design decision as far as I’m aware, but not a design decision that made it a good first (third?) try.

But it didn’t suck and I didn’t hate it. At the time, I gave up, frustrated, but of course, this was a matter of studying, of improving my own skill as a developer by learning things from a game I had both heard was well-designed and was legitimately challenging me, even if most of it was due to a lack of knowledge. It would do me best that I come to understand how this game operated, and so it follows that it would do me best that I come to understand how Fire Emblem operated. Video games as homework! Woohoo!

So, one last chance. It would not be worth it for me to try it a fifth time, there is no reason I should’ve even bashed my head into this brick wall a fourth time, but I got a recommendation from a friend that this game would do it, a friend who has, over the 4 years I’ve known him, predicted my opinion on every single game I have told him I would play… absolutely correctly.

Sunk cost prophecy.

The Blazing Blade was one of the final chances the series had to win me over at all, and while I don’t find it a fascinating or immaculate or wonderful game, it did succeed in showing me the appeal of the games and winning me over just fine. It’s a fun time, with alright characters (generally: having a tactician you just throw your name onto and they’re you is just such an annoying atmosphere killer that makes the game impossible to take seriously whenever they’re brought up), fun aesthetic, really campy presentation of its story that seems to revel in its simplicity and scoots itself along, comfortably, into the map-to-map gameplay. The core gameplay is a step too linear for me – any amount of customization or passive abilities or anything in that field would have probably gotten me singing this game’s praises much more strongly, as without it so many characters feel almost superfluous (I get this series is Horse Emblem and mounted units are great but I don’t need 4 horse guys in a game that’s either ‘every enemy is baby hitting me with sticks’ or ‘Oswin and Marcus play every map by themselves’ difficulty-wise), though I also accept that isn’t the kind of game that this era of Fire Emblem was interested in being – but it’s fun and breezy in a moment-to-moment manner that said simplicity enables. 

A friend of mine mailed me his old copy of Three Houses about a week or two before this article gets posted. As of writing I have stayed up until 4 AM playing it at least 5 times. The return to Conquest is imminent.

I will meet Peri soon enough. Peri will show up on this site’s main page soon enough.

#15: Disgaea: Hour of Darkness

I quite like the Disgaea series, if only because I love ruining every single game by breaking it into pieces. You may be surprised, given the low placement of Balatro, but I will destroy any game if given the opportunity. I don’t think this is any objective measure of game quality, but I also don’t think I would love the games I love if they didn’t have those small little holes in them that allow for stupid shit. Disgaea is the poster child for that idea, a tactics series designed to constantly make you feel like you are cheating, getting one up on the game, before it flexes its arms, showing you it has more than enough muscles to kick your ass right back, and then those grow and start flexing their own arms.

The first Disgaea game is a tricky one to approach, as the series has an extremely widespread availability – if you can buy Hour of Darkness on something, you can probably buy at least 3 others for about the same price – that I must confess make it difficult to judge on the independent merits that I should, or from what groundwork it laid, especially in comparison to its direct successor Disgaea 2. It, as a game that precedes the rest of the series, obviously does a lot of things mechanically worse than them. It simply hasn’t gotten there yet, and that’s totally fine, but this feature is, in and of itself, a matter of comparison and ranking. Hour of Darkness just suffers the hardest for it.

Worse Item World generation with way fewer features is a MASSIVE hit to a Disgaea game. It is very easy to find yourself in floor layouts you just cannot beat and must either use limited resources to escape – I have no issue whatsoever with the Gency system, I should note, I just find the first Disgaea’s lack of guarantee you can clear a floor makes the Gency you’d rather be carrying much less a tactical decision and much more a ‘ah, great, game fucked up, hang on’ one. You’re never not carrying a Gency, but it feels much less engaging to carry in 1 – or just turn the game off and lose the progress you’ve made on the Item World grind, a process that’s lengthy early on and shortened only once the game’s poor generation likely isn’t an issue. And these Item Worlds still have so little to do or search for that they pale in comparison to any half-decent system in the series’ other entries. There’s a few other issues – worse monster weapon diversity, inconsistent passive abilities, an “ultimate” class, so on – but the Item World being as simple and shoddy as it is is by far the game’s greatest weak spot gameplay-wise. It’s a randomized endless mode where every randomized endless level either feels the exact same or is the game having a mental breakdown trying to generate it.

The game’s narrative is typically considered its strongest feature – if someone in the modern era is recommending this game for any reason, it’s the story – and while I’d say this game’s writing is extremely strong in comparison to a game like Disgaea 2, it’s an extremely standard affair on the whole. There’s also the matter that very little of a Disgaea game is spent on their narratives, these are multi-hundred hour grindfests by design and the story is a relatively short typical RPG runtime within it. A vast number of the 100+ hours you’ll probably end up spending on this game if you like it do not involve ‘character’ or ‘narrative’ at all, they’re all gameplay, and again, in such a category is where Hour of Darkness scrapes by with a ‘pretty good’. It’s not bad, it’s classic Disgaea, but again: in an exercise such as this, one based around comparison, it’s hard to not look at this game and make comparisons. 

Would I recommend Hour of Darkness? Absolutely. It’s a fun time, it’s a strategy game made to make you constantly feel like you’re cheating or snapping the game in half, with endless tools and options to spare, the characters can be fun if a bit obnoxious or trope-y (though such a thing is a Disgaea game’s bread and butter), and it’s not like it’s a bad entry point to the series. If any of this sounds interesting, you should play it. It rules. Its sequels just tend to rule more, and one of those sequels is even on this list.

#14: Mouthwashing

I feel bad writing mostly negative entries for more popular and well-acclaimed games like this or Disgaea because I feel their praises are more consistently understood. If you like Mouthwashing in earnest, it makes sense why. I don’t need to sing the praises this game’s already gotten, it’s a compelling story, it’s got an aesthetic that although popular is extremely striking, the atmosphere is constantly tense, I just don’t have much unique or worthwhile to say about it barring a negative personal note.

Said note is that it’s got a relatively low placement because the gameplay segments—as minor as they generally are—rarely are servicing the game, they’re typically either extremely simplistic and generic horror chase segments or very basic puzzles that feel designed to burn time. The game is thick with tension as is, oppressive, demoralizing, haunting, all that good stuff. It doesn’t need an invisible horse monster chasing you through a cargo hold for 15 minutes to try scaring you because it has way better ways to do that. Overall a really strong experience, I just wish it did away with most of the more typical horror game elements that seem to exist purely to remind you of what genre it wants to be and went more “3D visual novel” with itself.

13. The House in Fata Morgana

I wish I could write out my deeper thoughts on this game but it’s really hard for me to mentally quantify what is and what is not a massive spoiler for this game. Even if I have some issues with it, I like The House in Fata Morgana quite a bit, I just have no clue how best to write about it in a list like this.

michel kinda bad though

#12: Undertale Yellow

I don’t really care for Undertale, partially for gameplay reasons—combat just isn’t engaging either peacefully (sparing puzzles are way too simple all game to the point Deltarune solved the issue by basically becoming WarioWare in an RPG skin) or violently (which is obviously by intent, it’s not a decision I’ll fault the game for) – but a big part of it is that I find its meta-commentary on how we engage with RPGs doesn’t really click with me, for a lot of reasons that Deltarune seems insistent on fixing (Mainly a bunch of factors that amalgamate into ‘the genocide route’s narrative is really lame when genocide is the most obvious thing someone would ever do on a second playthrough’). I don’t find it a bad game, I just don’t really enjoy it a ton. It’s just a good one.

Undertale Yellow nixes basically all of that meta-commentary, and while it doesn’t solve the issue of combat depth, it keeps the mind off of it, setpieces coming at a pace even Deltarune would have trouble keeping up with at times. The game’s core cast of characters that keep popping up helps make the world feel more engaging – the worldbuilding, too, is especially strong, it’s an earnest attempt at expanding the universe of Undertale in a way that feels natural and thoughtful. It’s got to twist a couple narrative knobs to do it, there are certainly a couple rips in the thread that ties it to Undertale, but I really cannot be assed to care and I really cannot understand people who discount this game because of those inconsistencies.

What Undertale does right, like its style of soundtrack, it keeps or, like some of its final bosses, even outdoes, and what Undertale doesn’t do right, it fixes, nixes, or has a backup plan for. It’s a great fangame – probably the shining example of a fangame – and it’s one I can’t recommend enough for anyone who even has a cursory appreciation of Undertale.

11. Sheep, Dog ‘n’ Wolf (Looney Tunes: Sheep Raider)

This game almost entirely sells itself off of its premise: what if we made a puzzle/stealth game operating off of Looney Tunes logic? A lot of puzzles in this game sound extremely absurd when worked through mentally, and there’s an immense amount of interactivity between the different elements you’re provided with that seems designed to make you catch yourself in the middle of your own thoughts and just start laughing about how absurd something like, “Hmmm… the bull will chase me if I wave the red flag in front of him, but he won’t run into the wall the piano is teetering on the side of. If I paint a tunnel underneath it… will that be what tricks him?” sounds. Every level is a comedy of errors (though some better than others) that you’re so rarely allowed to laugh at because you’re treating sneaking around in a bush so you can order a sheep costume from ACME catalogue as the life-threatening danger it is in this game. 

The game’s aesthetic is bouncy, angular, vertex animation very few games on the PS1 even come close to – it’s not a perfect representation of Looney Tunes, but for a game of this low fidelity, it’s an amazing interpretation, especially considering how snappy the animations permit the actual platforming controls to feel. The jazzy, laidback soundtrack almost exists purely to emphasize how stupid and meandering it all is, and yet, it is that meandering stupidity that makes it engaging. There simply is no puzzle too stupid for Sheep, Dog ‘n’ Wolf.

10. Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc

There’s a constant, flowing, boundless creative energy in every pore of Rayman 3. It’s not as directed as the prior entry, rather the opposite: there’s an energy of ‘we can do whatever the hell we want, so let’s do it’ running through this game’s veins. Single levels will contain gorgeous ethereal towers made of stars, adjacent to bumper car games with shoes followed by the game’s only swimming segment, dedicated solely to a single boss battle. The game’s sense of humor is dry, snappy, off-beat in the way so many games of that era were, but the mechanical and designed zaniness of the gameplay, the frenetic combat and score system that encompass the world, a beautifully lackadaisical world, complements it in a way that I can only think of a single peer in Crash Twinsanity doing with its own gameplay. It’s also backed up by extremely solid performances from its vocal cast, with special shoutouts to John Leguizamo and Ken Starcevic.

The gameplay is arcade-y, the aforementioned scoring system incentivizing you to treat what could otherwise be a relatively typical 3D platformer as a series of arcade levels, each their own mini Rayman 3 games. Route what you plan to do and where to go, nab high scores, platform smart; it’s surprisingly in-depth stuff for a feature you could just as easily write off that asks a lot of you in terms of engagement. Collecting the crystal items laid around the world, combating enemies, using the game’s first person camera feature to spot little secrets laid about its gorgeous world; it coalesces into an experience that wants you to love and understand Rayman 3. There are some slightly weaker spots: combat isn’t phenomenal, it so rarely is in these kinds of games, but it’s never frustrating, just another tool the game has in its arsenal. Done with one setpiece and onto the next, and servicing that, Rayman controls extremely nicely, and the vast array of power-ups helps a simple kit for a short game avoid feeling too bare.

Rayman is a series that is very consistently inconsistent, at least until they settled on using Origins’ engine for Legends (as well as an endless cavalcade of mobile games) and such a style finds its payoff in Rayman 3, a game not beholden to anything but its current whims. There’s a horror level. There’s acid trip railgrinding segments. One of the bosses is just the Micolash fight. It’s a game that expects you to roll with the punches, and if you can get in its rhythm, punch back in a very uniquely strong platformer for the time.

9. Sonic CD

oh my god it’s a sonic game where i have to actually think about how my speed interacts with the level design and there’s legitimate punishment for not thinking things through holy fucking shit no wonder why sonic fans don’t like this one

8. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

This one was going to get a full feature about how the passage of time can be more or less favorable to games, how I was affected by it (this is a game I played endlessly as a young child into my teenage years, then came back to as an adult to see how it would compare with my modern opinions and tastes), about the depths of freedom offered by this game in comparison to its predecessors, how it approached the formula the original games laid out, there was like a 4 page opener about Final Fantasy X and Tidus in there, yadda yadda yadda, a bunch of cool sounding stuff, and then one of the endless straws broke the camel’s back and I stopped writing about a Microsoft game.

But I feel I should give Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts its due here, at least, because it’s a really great experience. It’s a continuation of the original series’ sardonic humor, it goes for a unique aesthetic made to compliment the boxy constructions the game is designed around (though I will also admit: some of these character models are pretty wretched), has massive worlds that—despite a relatively empty appearance—are well-suited to a surprising diverse set of challenges and puzzles, and enables a massive amount of creativity and depth, both intentional and unintentional.

The game’s physics engine and vehicle design rules are a particularly… odd point. I have no idea where the creative solutions the game wants you to come up with begin, and where glitches the game has no idea should happen end. One of the challenges forces you to pilot a plane through a series of extremely tiny hoops—is the game asking precision of you, or is it asking you to make a tiny cube plane by just stapling the “plane” elements together into a cube that the game still technically registers as a plane? Is the pizza delivery mission expecting you to just rip off the giant ‘pizza’ sign stapled onto the vehicle that’s weighing it down, or did they not think of that and just put the giant ‘pizza’ sign on there to be cute? I have no idea, I don’t know if the game does either, and I love it all the more for it. I have managed to anger many a friend by asking if this one counts as an immersive sim, a friend count only beaten out by Bugsnax.

nintendo ripped this off for a zelda game btw never forget that

7. BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle

I fucking hate this game.

6. Labyrinth of Touhou – Gensokyo and the Heaven-Piercing Tree

As mentioned prior in my Disgaea entry, I love whenever a game lets you get real stupid. Enter Labyrinth of Touhou, a dungeon crawler that spares no expense at making that extremely easy for you. There’s very little sense of punishment in this game, and while I definitely see it as a flaw for some people (and my biggest complaint with it is, ultimately, while it’s not hard for this game to be hard, it can feel really toothless. Also, some of these floor gimmicks were so bad I saw what they were and just turned the game off for the entire next week), I think the degree to which it enables customization without punishment for investment is nice. It’s its own style, it’s a game where you can do whatever whenever, and while I wouldn’t want every game to be like it, I enjoy Labyrinth of Touhou well enough for it – it’s a game entirely dedicated to RPG teambuilding and synergizing, so, they made a game that’s a teambuilder’s dream.

My favorite Touhous are Mamizou and Aya. 

By the way.

5. Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten

And so we come to one of our aforementioned “later Disgaea games”, A Promise Unforgotten. Playing the first Disgaea got me in a mood for more, as any ‘good but not the best’ game from a great series will do, and so, my eyes landed on Disgaea 4, a game that I often saw get the reception 2 did – strong gameplay, horrendous story, generally one of the stronger entries, so on – and while I quite like the series on the whole, 4 impressed me in a lot of ways I didn’t really expect it to.

The narratives of these games, again, don’t matter all that much, a Disgaea story is effectively a Disgaea tutorial, but A Promise Unforgotten seemed a lot more interested in it than it tends to be. Its characters and world feel suited to the series’ goals, everyone’s morals just so off-center, everyone’s core concepts – Fuka, a high schooler who died young and refuses to believe she’s in hell, or Desco, a weird monster girl who thinks she’s supposed to be the game’s final boss, but gets fought in Chapter 3 and spends the rest of the game in the main party so she can train herself up for when the final stage comes – so just weird enough they can hold their own as personalities while still staying in style, and the entire cast feels like they have a reason to be in the game as opposed to cases like the first Disgaea’s Flash Gordon parodies or Disgaea 2 throwing Adell’s siblings at you. 4’s cast is goofy, they’re weird, they can hold a funny conversation, they can be monumentally grating if you spend too much time around them, but that’s all Disgaea really wants.

It’s a surprisingly politically-focused game, so many of the series’ staple mechanics either reworked or have an emphasis put on the inane morally-reversed politics of the demonic underworld, where corruption and under-the-table deals earn you more votes, and actual policies are a surefire way to come out on bottom, and how that ties into the political stances of the ‘real’ human world. It infects the dark assembly, now a political map where you dispatch senators to different territories to build different government stations. It infects the online functionality, where you can send your own party members out into other people’s games to vote on what they can and can’t do. It’s an old game, the online isn’t particularly active, but it’s a game that very clearly wants and allows you to actually be a piece of shit demon – to other people, too – instead of just saying that’s what you’re doing like in the other games.

Mechanically, it’s more of the same, never a bad thing with a Disgaea game. Monster Fusion is the biggest in-battle change, another attempt to give monster classes more functionality (though I feel it pales in comparison to the game just making Magichange functional), the item and chara worlds are as extensive as ever, with the path system introducing a grander sense of choice and exploration that feels fitting for a mechanic you’ll be spending so much time on, it’s generally just another strong entry in the Disgaea series. I do take issue with its decision to postpone some things until late-game—trading off most worthwhile innocents, weapon mastery, and so on for post-game equivalents is really annoying, and it makes the grind to get to the grind feel uniquely slow for a Disgaea game.

Ultimately, I find A Promise Unforgotten to be the Disgaea that gets across what Disgaea wants to be the best: It’s irreverent, it’s deranged, every character is off their rocker in one way or another, and you can play it forever and ever and ever. Go play it.

4. Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds

oh my god he put a game from 2025 on his 2025 games list

CrossWorlds is just a super fun time. It’s a kart racer with great music, extremely fun drifting mechanics, and the gadget system is a great way to customize your playstyle without ever feeling like it’s just throwing the actual intended gameplay depths into the grinder. While I’ve a few misgivings—the game tries a little bit but really doesn’t play around enough with the fact it’s got so many Sonic characters freely interacting with one another, the jukebox is overall good but I wish it didn’t feel as restrictive as it is, and on the whole I’m not a crossover guy so the “CrossWorlds” aspect doesn’t really do anything for me – they’re all more minor elements of a game that’s very functionally sound and stylish. I’ve gotta hop on this one more often.

3. No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

No More Heroes II: Desperate Struggle is a fun, short, arcade-style romp through a bunch of cool boss fights and setpieces. You gotta love setpieces. It’s nowhere as deep or thought-provoking as the first game (I have played the first one, I promise, it’s just not on this list), but it’s a fun and short time. It’s, keyly, a really fun and really short time.

Originally I had written something here about the differences the first and second game have in how they commit to their themes and ideas that, ultimately, read like it argued No More Heroes was kinda total dogshit at it. I got rid of it because every time I read it back I was extremely embarrassed at how amateurish it was, most of it operating under the assumption of ‘I think I’m trying to justify a weak game as having thematic intent’ as opposed to just taking the game’s intent on its face. It was super unfair to No More Heroes as a piece of art and I’m not happy with it. During my latest replay of it I’ve realized I respect No More Heroes a lot more than I do Desperate Struggle (which has, in turn, given me a bit of a dislike for the latter’s more serious narrative elements), and a lot more than I remembered respecting it last time I played in general, but I find the latter more blanketly fun. I’d give the award of ‘game with stronger artistic merit that I respect more’ to No More Heroes and the award of ‘game I’d rather spend an afternoon replaying’ to Desperate Struggle, and this game makes it up here on merit of how much I needed more of the latter considering my JRPG-addled brain. Maybe I’ll become a Sudahead someday and look back at this placement and cringe so hard my brain implodes.

When focusing on the gameplay itself, Desperate Struggle is, at its core, a boss gauntlet with levels inserted into it to hide that fact, a gauntlet that features a massive amount of distinct encounters that almost all demand different styles of play. ‘A game with a lot of bosses in a row’ is about all you have to do with a game for it to hook me. Nathan Copeland, the first real boss of the game, is a fight based almost entirely around spatial awareness and overwhelming your senses way more than any reasonable first boss would. Margaret Moonlight, an atmospheric duel with a sniper that chases you across rooftops. Matt Helms, an extremely destructive heavyweight that destroys the arena and mandates constantly updating and checking your surroundings as the fight goes. The list really does go on, to the point where I don’t think there’s a single fight I dislike. Ryuji, Vladimir, hell, I’ll go up to bat for the final boss having an instant-kill if he punches you when you’re on the wrong side of him. That’s awesome. I’ll even go up to bat for Million Gunman. I’m one of those disgusting freaks who likes playing the Shinobu levels. You give me a character that jumps into the air like I’m flinging a pickup truck around with a phys gun in Garry’s Mod, I’ll ask ‘how many obnoxiously mobile bosses do I get to fight with this thing’. I love Kingdom Hearts 1 platforming. That is my answer to that statement.

The soundtrack is great (a trait shared with the first game), the harsh visual style is great, every idea Desperate Struggle has is wilder than the last, the breakneck pace of the game compared to the first one helps set itself apart (and is instrumental to its fun factor, I feel), all in all, it’s a phenomenal quick, fast, fun experience to knock out in a day.

2. OMORI

the particularly astute twitter gamer might be looking at OMORI in the top 2 and MOTHER 3 in the bottom 5 and be wondering if i was dropped on my head as a child

This is probably a really odd game to see placed this high up considering the notes I’ve shared on some games prior, but I quite like OMORI. The gameplay manages to avoid a lot of common RPG pitfalls—a lot of ability/”spell” equivalents are situational tools, their use cases made much more interesting via the emotions system that turns a seemingly rigid party setup into something more flexible, allowing the game to constantly demand more of you than just turning into a “press every character’s best button over and over” simulator as so many RPGs can. The combat system is simple on the surface, but has a lot of strengths in execution, and is very willing to let you challenge things you shouldn’t, laying encounter upon encounter of weirdly difficult or uniquely designed enemies in places you might not even think to go. The biggest complaint I have with combat is that you’re limited to just one accessory on every character, because being able to synergize abilities from those together would’ve been a really great way to hit a balance of making character building exponentially more fun while still retaining the system’s intended simplicity.

As for the world the gameplay takes place in, it’s aesthetically very pleasing, the pastel and childish colors selling an extremely earnest story and being surprisingly adept at becoming moody and emotional (the entire final dungeon and its buildup are one of the strongest portions of any game I’ve ever played in terms of its music and visuals). When it tries to be haunting and esoteric in a dream-like quality, the game manages to feel distinct from its inspirations while very obviously pulling from them – it does feel a little too Yume Nikki-esque at the breaking point, but I can give it the short timeframe to go nuts considering how strong the rest of the game’s identity is. It’s also surprisingly restrained: I massively appreciate that there were maybe a handful of actual “scares” while still being content to constantly fake you out with them. A tease of a game, OMORI is.

The main cast is extremely well-rounded, and there are small glimmers of an impressive level of humanity in the characters that make it impossible for me to not love any of them, and the game’s core themes are ones that it expresses in a very strong and thoughtful way. I really love and respect that the game ends like it does. My only major complaint with the narrative is that I think the game signals the ‘main’ twist too hard to the point where I was second-guessing myself on if something else was supposed to be a twist. It’s not a case like Fata Morgana where it feels like it’s doing it out of obligation (“If you can correctly guess what the main twists are, you will also know exactly when they will happen and what other narrative events will also happen to facilitate the twist happening/being revealed there, so you figure out nearly the entire rest of the narrative by the halfway point of the game”), but it was a shame to be going into the big twist segment and basically already know what it was going to be. I’m not going to hold it against the game, but I do feel like it plays its hand a bit too early.

Ultimately, I find OMORI to be a really fun and enjoyable game, managing to get the core of what makes an RPG good – fun gameplay, atmospheric world, good characters, engaging story—across in an extremely compact experience that blends it with the horror genre in a way that gives it a unique flavor without ever feeling obnoxious, and it is easily my favorite of the indie RPGs it is often associated with. I didn’t expect to go in liking it as much as I did, but it’s always a pleasant surprise when that sort of thing happens.

let’s get down to busine

1. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

darumi is going to say either “hawk tuah” or “67” in the dlc screencap this

GAMES I DIDN’T FINISH BUT WANT TO MENTION OR I DID FINISH BUT I DON’T HAVE A LOT TO SAY OR I DI

Patrick’s Parabox

This is an extremely strong and mechanically sound Sokoban game. I cannot recommend it enough to someone who has an interest in the genre for both its breadth and its depth, it’s just kind of hard to write anything interesting on this game because it is the purest ideal of a puzzle game. It’s a really great game you should play when you get the chance but I could also just review it in its entirety in a Bluesky post.

Gore Screaming Show

I was on track to finish it last year but then the laptop I was reading it on killed itself. It saw one too many of the CGs, I guess.

It’s a lot better than what I expected when someone told me to read a visual novel called ‘Gore Screaming Show’. My standards were admittedly not super high initially, but I like denpa, I like the fantastical set against the natural, the disconcerting reality and disconnect from reality they bring. It’s fun and it’s nice to read something that does so while also just being gory and disgusting as fuck sometimes. I can see what Darumi Amemiya sees in this stuff. 

I gotta hop on more eroge, he said, and then they dragged him away from the Gamesline website kicking and screaming

Oh… Sir!!: The Insult Simulator

you can play as/against hp lovecraft in this game and while that would normally be kinda lame you deal critical hit damage to him if you call him a racist which means it actually fucking rocks

The post Nikolas’ BADASS and GENIUS and CORRECT Videogame Rankings for 2025 appeared first on Gamesline.

John is joined this week by Rose, Lorelai, and Nikolas to talk about how few games they’ve been playing. John’s been playing the Pikmin 2 romhack Pecan 2 and Lorelai was on the road for 3 weeks for a stop at San Diego Comic-Con before arriving home to dive into the new Final Fantasy XIV patch and First Berserker Khazan. Rose has been digging into all of her Gatcha games while Nikolas on the other hand has been playing a whole bunch of Sonic Forces while the crew tries to sell him on the glory of Xenoblade Chronicles X.

In the news, the developers of Wuchang Fallen Feathers caved to right wing trolling and kind of ruined their game, Christian Whitehead teased that a sequel to Sonic Mania was nixed, Arkane’s union is demanding that Microsoft stop supporting Israel, and we touch more on the payment processor news.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Social Media @TheGamesline, John, Rose, Lorelai, and Nikolas.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited and Produced by Lorelai.

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 63: Conventional Robots appeared first on Gamesline.

Day two’s winners include the “What the fuck” award, Best writing, and Best anthropomorphic character

What the fuck: Lootboxes

In theory lootboxes are mostly harmless, something you pay a couple dollars for and in return you get something small that adds to your game. In practice however, lootboxes have become something more akin to lottery tickets. You pick some up, hope for a big prize and, in many cases, end up buying more when you don’t win. It’s a slippery slope for a lot of people, and has caused very real damage to those who deal with gambling and addiction problems. With legislation being introduced in several nations across the world, it’s looking like 2018 will either be the year publishers find new ways to monetize games post-release, or the year they double down on a business practice that’s morally grey at best and predatory at worst.

Runners-up:

Pewdiepie’s Racism

Felix “Pewdiepie” Kjellberg went from Youtube’s biggest LP channel to total pariah seemingly overnight when he paid a couple of men on Fiverr to hold up an anti-semitic sign, and then again when he got caught on stream dropping the n-word. With fascism rearing its ugly head in 2017, it’s hard not to see such a public figure use hate speech and feel despondent, especially when that person has such easy access to an audience of children.

Sakura Devs Mistreating Workers

Many people see the Sakura games on Steam and brush them off as cheap, smutty shovelware that nobody should pay attention to. But human beings work on those games, and after a report dropped that the developers were being treated inhumanely so the publisher could make a quick buck, we were reminded that yes, even dumb anime titty games can have a dark side to them.

Best Writing: NieR Automata

Yoko Taro’s games have always been layered works of satire, analysis and philosophy, but NieR: Automata is not only his best work, but one of the best written games of all time. Automata’s is a story that works not only traditionally, not only allegorically, but also as one of the most effective and fascinating metanarrative experiences in any form of media. Automata’s writing proves why it needs to be a game, it shows us why it’s okay to need help, and it shows us that even in the darkest periods of our lives if we find the strength to go on, everything can change. Every interaction between 9S, 2B, and the world around them can be recontextualized in so many different ways with so many different meanings, that it almost feels like Automata is several stories on top of each other. Video games will be better off if they’re written even half as well as NieR: Automata, because its is a story that is truly unforgettable.

Runners-up:

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus

With the way the past few years have gone it’s (unfortunately) not shocking that the latest installment in the Wolfenstein series is more relevant than ever. Not just for the catharsis of mowing your way through swaths of Nazis but with the way The New Colossus presents it’s world and the members of the Kreisau circle. Managing to inject enough levity into it’s bleak world with characters like Super Spesh, sneak some incredible satire into the world through incidental writing and tie it all together with a story about fighting for a better future when it seems almost impossible.

Emily is Away Too

Being a game that takes place entirely via an instant messenger, Emily Too’s writing is critical to the game working at all, and it delivers in spades. Emily does a tremendous job of fleshing out not just its characters and world, but also in capturing a moment in internet history just before social media became an unstoppable monolith.

Best Anthropomorphic Character: Bea (Night in the Woods)

Bea has an exceptional character arc, as she comes into the game as a (now cynical) friend from Mae’s childhood. Mae desperately tries to rekindle what they had, and if you choose to follow
Bea’s path, you watch as she slowly begins to drop her walls. Bea’s story is astoundingly real, from her hesitations toward opening back up to someone who used to know her so well, to her struggles and personal hardships that made her so bitter toward the world around her. Occasionally, she shows sparks of positivity, but upon catching herself she retreats back to her cold safety net of a shell. Bea’s progression back into becoming one of Mae’s closest friends again is a bumpy one, although mid-story she has quite an emotional breakthrough and spills her thoughts and feelings to the protagonist after running away. Her journey is incredible and exceptionally relatable, especially for a colorful alligator.

Runners-up:

Sir Gilman (Pyre)

It’s easy to dismiss Sir Gilman as a campy comic relief clown upon his first appearance, but it doesn’t take long to reveal his core as a deeply passionate and incredibly lonely soul searching for meaning and a place to call home. He’s also easily the most versatile character when it comes to the Rites, thanks to his blistering speed and strong defensive abilities.

The Sonic Forces OC

Sonic Forces finally delivered on many a Sonic fan’s long held dream: to be right there with their spiked blue buddy as he races along to some really good bad music. Thanks to a vast slew of customization options ranging from Gamer Hats to Robot Bodies, Sonic Forces’ original character manages to live up to some, if not all, of our wildest dreams.

The post Game of the Year Awards 2017: Day Two appeared first on Gamesline.

My favorite part of meeting new people is discovering and falling in love with what makes them unique, and with games it’s no different. For this list, I’ve written about one specific aspect of a game that I loved this year, and what immediately springs to mind when they cross my mind. Whatever games you enjoyed, I hope you all have a wonderful and safe holiday season, and a happy hopeful new year.

10. Night In The Woods

Night in the Woods is a game that takes relatability to the next level. Every character I met throughout Possum Springs echoed someone I knew in real life, and seeing the vague deepness of everyone really helped sell each of their places in that world. As someone who’s struggled with abuse and dealing with expectations and forced obligations, Angus and Bea’s storylines resonated with me so deeply that I found myself trying to talk to them any chance I got (while ignoring Gregg. Sorry Gregg…). There are definitely problems to be found in NITW’s relatability- the game suffers from the same over exaggerated dialogue disease that a certain other narrative driven game starring teens does, but for me these never got in the way of the legitimately earnest and rare portrayals of (most) mental illnesses and societal problems. Night in the Woods is the embodiment of “same.”

9. Nioh

Nioh is a game that really understands the concept of mythology. Nearly every character in Nioh is based on real historical figures from Japan’s Sengoku Period, and while there are inklings of what we historically know of them, there are just enough sprinkled embellishments to make Nioh really feel like a long forgotten bedtime story. Based off of an unfinished Akira Kurosawa script (which I didn’t know until finishing the second DLC, and feel extremely stupid for not thinking about in hindsight) Nioh doesn’t just feel like a classic Samurai story, it feels like an homage to old Japanese culture at large. There are dozens of Yokai scattered throughout each region of this colorful rendition of Japan, and each has their own interesting and fun take on their classic folklore basics. I dumped over a hundred hours into Nioh, and while that may have a lot to do with my weird katana fetish, it had just as much to do with my engrossment in the rich and mythical world Team Ninja painted for me.

8. Fire Emblem Heroes

Fire Emblem Heroes has spent this year as the definition of comfort for me. Sure there’s the stress associated with any gacha game (why wouldn’t you just give me Summer Corrin you bastards why! why!!!!!!), but I’ve yet to play a mobage that makes it easier to play a whole bunch without ever spending a dime. FEH takes the already reasonably streamlined combat of the more recent mainline Fire Emblem titles and distills it down into fun bite-sized puzzles. With classic FE tunes to scratch all of the nostalgic nerves in my brain, and adorable art of all my favorite characters from dozens of artists, I’ve never really seen a mobile side game to a major series that feels like it treats its source material with equal amounts reverence and fun poking. Every update has been helping make FEH better and better, and I hope that come this time next year I still find myself logging in each day as I wind down for bed to look at my beautiful teams of Lucinas and Lyns.

7. Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood

It’s a weird thing to consider a particular point of praise but Stormblood really hammered home how much I love the consistency of Final Fantasy XIV. Stormblood suffers in a lot of important areas, but for each misstep comes a huge step forward in Quality of Life, art design, engaging new features, and just overall options for fun. I may be upset at how some of my favorite classes ended up in the overall re-balancing shuffle, and I’m still praying everyday that Dark Knight will somehow get fixed in a magic patch, but I’m now able to take a million screenshots of my self insert dragon girl holding a katana and goddamn what else do you need? Stormblood will no doubt get better as new patches come and go, but for now it’s managed to keep my heart in the game, and knowing I’ll always have FFXIV and the people in it to come back to sets my mind at ease.

6. Sonic Forces

This is the most wish fulfillment i’ve ever hadhttps://t.co/hAAnlMJTaq pic.twitter.com/aSYrpZMjG1

— ❄Winter’s Rose❄ (@horngal) November 7, 2017

Sonic Forces understands what it’s like to have dreams. Sonic Forces isn’t a perfect game, but I doubt anyone who earnestly enjoys it would ever argue that. Clunkiness abounds, though Forces has ended up to possibly be the most playable 3D Sonic game ever released. The gameplay isn’t what matters though; what matters is just how well Sega has evaluated and provided for the Sonic community’s long held pillar of cringe and care. I’m speaking of course of Original Characters, and just how incredible it is that so many people are able to live out their childhood wishes this far down the line. Sonic Forces knows exactly what you want to do with your original character- it presents you with plenty of the options integral to OC design: heterochromia, bandage gloves, torn scarves. If you think of it, Sonic Forces probably has it and is all too ready to give you the keys and run wild. It’s impossible for me to describe how I felt when I found the pink recolors of Shadow the Hedgehog’s shoes and gloves, sitting there as if perfectly designed for his now-canon girlfriend Roxanne Maria. Sonic Forces wants you to feel like it cares, and it knows that somehow throughout all of these years, you still care too.

5. Persona 5

How can you describe Persona 5 as anything without mentioning how hella stylish it is. The fifth Persona is beautiful on all fronts- whether it’s the gorgeous soundtrack that fluctuates between soft and proud, the stunning character designs that really feel like the ultimate nailing of the series style, or even just all of the little touches like how your main character jumps onto enemies during sneak attacks. This is all amazingly complemented by hands down the best User Interface that neither JRPGS or gaming at large has ever seen. Persona 5 does what seems like the impossible and makes navigating menus actually feel punchy and cool. I could praise things like the stylized character portraits or the fantastic evolution of all out attacks from goofy 3D models into beautiful 2D panels all day, but what has stuck out to me after all this time is how good it feels to finish a battle. Whether it’s through those all out attacks, or just the run Joker and friends do past loot and level up screens, Persona 5 makes the random encounters in a JRPG really feel exciting. When the man behind the great UIs of games like Kirby Air Ride and Super Smash Bros. is going crazy over your work, you know you did good.

4. Tales of Berseria

Tales of Berseria has what might be my favorite cast of characters in any form of media. Every member of the Berseria crew feels like they could’ve been a side character in an entirely different JRPG, but instead here they all are being big dumb idiots at each other. I had never played a Tales game properly before this, and I’m honestly disappointed now that I haven’t. The “Skits” system is one of the greatest ideas for a JRPG, that I’m shocked more games haven’t picked up on it. Whether it’s seeing Rokurou and Eizen feud like parents over what life lessons Laphicet should learn, or watching Velvet be an overly aggressive straightman to Magilou’s stand up comedy routines, every new moment endeared me more and more. The fact that there are only a couple dozen end-battle skits was barely even a disappointment, because of just how funny and cute almost all of them were. I went into Berseria expecting to just end up with a surface level love of Velvet, but what I ended up for was an endearment to Eizen, a respect for Rokurou, and a whole mess of things for Magilou. It might not be the best game to “play” but damn, am I glad I played it.

3. Yakuza 0

I don’t think there’s a better poster child for just how important and good side content in games can be than the Yakuza series. Before this year, I had always put the Yakuza series on the back burner because of how intimidating the idea of purchasing a medley of assorted PS2 and PS3 games had seemed, but with the no strings attached promise of a prequel, I finally had my chance to jump in. Now when I praise how amazing the side content in Yakuza 0 is, I am by no means trying to do the big meat of the game a disservice, it’s fantastic in its own right. What goes great with meat, though? All sorts of side dishes, and 0 delivers in spades. There are all sorts of ridiculous side stories ranging from Kiryu helping a shy back alley shiitake mushroom salesman become a world famous chef, to Majima unwittingly writing the future tax code of Japan, and each one is so heartwarming and humorous you’d swear you’d just watched an episode of some sort of sitcom.

Where Yakuza 0 REALLY shines for me personally, however, is Majima’s motherfucking cabaret club Sunshine. I spent hour after hour perfecting my establishment, doing each night flawlessly and customizing all of my girls into the absolutely beautiful and perfect squad of white haired goddesses Sotenbori had ever seen. Everything about this game is great; it plays like a less stressful diner dash, it oozes presentation, and most importantly, I get to see Majima fight absurdist characters and do all sorts of ridiculous bullshit in the name of Respecting Women. Everytime Majima would go to one of his platinum hostesses with drinks or towels, and leave with a respectable thumbs up I couldn’t help but match him with one of my own in real life. Kiryu’s real estate management simulation is fine, but god dammit, I spent hours and hours and ended up 100%ing my Sunshine by chapter 8, and I will always remember my time there.

2. Hollow Knight

Nioh took plenty of lessons from Dark Souls for its mythology but Hollow Knight also took those lessons and basically everything else, while still managing to cultivate its own unique atmosphere. Almost all of Hollow Knight takes place in a massive series of underground tunnels, and despite how boring that sounds as a premise, Team Cherry managed to not only make each area look and feel diverse, but also keep it grounded in common sense. The bright grassy caves fall down into a bright swamp- the city where it’s always raining lies underneath a massive lake, and above a winding series of waterways. Throughout this large and interesting world are plenty of characters: some friend, some foe, and some just completely insignificant. Hollow Knight manages to legitimately understand the fun of Dark Souls NPCs; when you never really know whether you’ll ever see each other again, or if there’s a greater purpose to their words at all. When I actually resolved my first NPC subplot I was surprised at how it evolved and where it went, and actually found myself laughing in a game that can often times feel oppressive and dreary.

The mere fact that Hollow Knight feels oppressive and dreary is amazing in its own right, considering its cutesy near-chibi art style, but it’s never trying to trick you or subvert you. Hollow Knight never jumps into hyper-realism or out of place art styles other “cute” games like Undertale do; just like its world, it has a cohesive style throughout. This is what makes endgame areas with walls of skull and bone, or endless caverns where dead bodies fall perpetually still have impact- you’re drawn into this world, you know what it’s like, and its continuing to immerse you and stay true to itself. Before I played Hollow Knight I had felt like the closest thing we were going to get to the immersive worlds found in the Souls games were half-baked games like Lords of the Fallen or The Surge, but now I know that not only is it possible to match that level of intrigue and mystique, but it’s possible to take it and craft a wholly new and original experience. I loved watching my completion percentage go up, I loved finding new areas, and I loved every second that I played Hollow Knight.

1. NieR: Automata

Before this year, I had never played any of Yoko Taro’s games, and I had only the vaguest of ideas regarding just how much he wanted to break the boundaries of what it meant to be a game. Everytime NieR: Automata shifts its camera, everytime it changes the type of game it is, everytime its story changes completely on a dime, it felt incredible to me. This game isn’t one satisfied with just being a character action game, it’s not satisfied with just being a shmup hybrid- it tries to be everything it can, and everything it has to be. Throughout its narrative,  Automata teaches its players that everything can change as long as you keep going, for better or worse, and that’s reflected in nearly everything around it. Its predecessor NieR: Gestalt was a game plagued with development issues, ranging from its low budget to the team’s overall inexperience. Despite these problems, Gestalt still tried to do a lot of what Automata did- it managed to have shmup elements, it managed to be a halfway competent action game, it managed to be a text adventure.

Even with all it was trying and its cult of fans adamantly supporting it, Gestalt failed commercially, and the fact that there was even a second NieR game feels like a miracle in its own right. After the failure and hardship of Gestalt, it’s hard to believe that the development team themselves would even want to make a new NieR, and yet, they persisted. Not only did they manage to start work on Automata, they also worked towards curbing the mistakes of the past by asking Platinum Games to design the gameplay side of things, to more than make up for their inexperience with action titles. This tangent might seem unrelated, but it’s actually the main reason I love Automata, and what its narrative can represent.

NieR: Automata is a tale of cooperation, inside the game, and out. While Ending E is the obvious culmination of all this, it echoes constantly throughout the events of every aspect of the game. 2B couldn’t do all she does without 9S, 9S couldn’t do anything he does without Devola and Popola, or Pod 153, and A2 couldn’t do anything without the memories of the people she loved. The same goes for the real world; Automata couldn’t have existed and be the incredible work of art it is without the partnership of Square Enix and Platinum Games, and we the players couldn’t have finished our story without the help of the other people who loved the game as much as we did. I’ve been struggling here to say things I haven’t said before about Automata but I have to finish with my truest and deepest feelings.

NieR: Automata isn’t just my favorite game of 2017, it’s my favorite game of all time, and I’ll never forget what it made me feel, or what it makes me feel, even today.

The post Rose’s Top 10 Games of 2017 appeared first on Gamesline.

Sonic Forces was announced alongside the recently released Sonic Mania at last year’s Sonic 25th Anniversary party. For many, Mania took the limelight: a brand new 2D Sonic game made by fan programmers who had already made a name for themselves with impressive modern ports of Sonic 2 and Sonic CD.  For me, however, as someone who prefers my Sonic with one extra dimension, my heart was set on this next game from the Generations team.

Sonic Forces is a game that feels aimed at people like myself, who enthusiastically prefer Sonic’s more modern iterations. Working off the boost style of gameplay pioneered by Sonic Rush and improved upon in Generations, Forces takes the game a step further by letting you create your own original character for the first time in series history. Your new character joins the ranks of Sonic and company (though Big the Cat is conspicuously absent) as they fight against a world completely overtaken by Dr. Eggman.

On the surface, the narrative of Sonic Forces sounds fairly trite. Though the game starts out strong, with standout moments like Knuckles the Echidna reading reports of Sonic being tortured, and Silver the Hedgehog musing poetically on the value of despair, the game quickly falls into the type of story you’d expect out of a Sonic game. Eggman has this buddy who’s super strong, Sonic has trouble fighting this new buddy, Sonic uses the power of friendship or raw strength, Sonic wins and saves the day.

The main draw of both the narrative and the game itself is that ability to make an original character. Players can choose from a handful of races like Dog, Cat, Bird, or, of course, Hedgehog, and make their own original Sonic-themed animal. When this feature was announced. I was actually kind of floored: the Sonic fandom has long been an infamous, near-infinite source of fanworks ranging from endearing to embarrassing, so to see that aspect of the game’s community brought into the game itself is really neat. When I started the game, I decided to pull out an old friend: a Sonic OC from my tweenage years, Roxanne Maria, who is Shadow the Hedgehog’s girlfriend. While I was initially disappointed by the lack of customization options (a few colors, a handful of clothes, and a single weapon), when I finally got a few missions into the game proper I found myself drowning in accessories. Forces constantly provides you with a stream of new unlockables, with four to five clothing items or weapons being unlocked any time you complete an in-game “Mission.” By the time the credits rolled on Sonic Forces, I found myself with over 300 different clothing options for my OC, and a lot of them felt too perfect for what I wanted.

Customizing my OC was absolutely the most fun I had in the game outside of seeing her in action with Sonic and friends. Going from a pretty basic black and pink hedgehog to a red-eyed gang leader with a hat that says “GAMER” was incredibly satisfying, and knowing that I could just as easily make ten more outfits that perfectly suited my desires was a big plus. From crocs to robot legs and bandanas, to full-on cosplay, the variety of options might seem overwhelming, but the way they’re trickled down to you means that your perfect outfit is gradually built over time, rather than intimidatingly dumped on you from the start.

The Mission system that unlocks all this is one of the best features of the game. While past Sonic titles have attempted to give incentive to replay, rewards of concept art and sound room bonuses only go so far. In Forces, every mission has a well-defined goal. You want to clear level 16 in under 60 seconds, not just because you have an itch to, but because you’ll get a shot at a whole bunch of new clothes for your OC. That’s why I really loved the system: it incentivized and rewarded behavior a lot of players might have already leant towards, and encourages further exploration of the game by those who previously mightn’t have. The way each mission’s reward is diverse and hidden might be frustrating for some, but for me the surprise of each reward encouraged me to keep on going to find out what crazy stuff I might get next.

When it comes to the gameplay structure of Sonic Forces, you’ll be playing through a 30 mission campaign with three different play-styles. There are the now-standard “Boost” style 3D levels with Modern Sonic, there’s 2D side-scrolling levels with Classic Sonic, and there’s the gadget themed/grapple hook heavy OC levels. While the Classic Sonic levels aren’t that bad, they pale in comparison to what the other two types have to offer, and are tough to get used to after how good Mania felt.

The Modern Sonic levels are fun and fast, averaging a playtime of around three minutes per level if you’re just rushing through, though a search for collectibles will bump that time right up. The OC levels are a fantastic change of pace that really let the game’s focus on speed translate into mediums other than just plain old running. It’s fun to swing from point to point, or enemy to enemy. It’s fun to just blaze through dozens of robots with a flamethrower, or slam them all apart with a big hammer. An unfortunate downfall of the OC levels is that because you can customize your character with a bunch of different weapons, with their own unique traversal modes, the levels’ attempts to cater to each weapon can end up feeling cluttered or disjointed.

While the level “Arsenal Pyramid” is incredibly fun when you use the lightning whip weapon that lets you dash along lines of rings and enemies, playing it with something like the hammer ends up making you feel like you just missed a huge chunk of the level. Ultimately this doesn’t matter, since the things hidden behind these paths are rarely more than fun distractions, but it still sucks to have no idea what weapon is helpful for a specific level until you’ve already finished it.

All three stage types feature the same three collectibles in the form of Red Star Rings, Number Rings, and Silver Moon Rings. Red Rings are easy: just find them hidden in each level and you’ll gradually unlock extra bonus stages for every few you get. Number Rings require you to gather them in numerical order counting down, and the game does a decent job of making these pretty fun puzzles to get, if not a little easy. At their simplest you’ll be running in a straight line on a hidden path, and at their hardest you’ll be haphazardly jumping across falling platforms back and forth to get the right order. The most annoying collectibles by far are the Silver Moon Rings. Gathering these rings in every level was a challenge that really, for the first time, laid how rough the game can control out in the open.

You have to gather all five of these rings within a short amount of time, or they completely disappear. For some rings this is fairly easy: just time some homing attacks right or boost fast enough that the time limit isn’t a concern. Unfortunately for most of these, they’re placed in gimmicky locations that make it tough not only to grab them fast, but to do so at all. The most infuriating are placed on things like water slides or rails, where your control is already loose enough that any sort of fancy movement risks either death or an agitating restart to try again. While I appreciate that these collectibles try to feed into the core focus on speed that Sonic is famous for, they felt more like a fight with the controls and blind luck than actual skill.

While the handling can be a struggle in parts, this is probably the most playable a 3D Sonic game has ever been. 2013’s Sonic Lost World wasn’t necessarily bad, but it felt more like a Mario game than a proper Sonic game, so I was thankful that Forces tried harder to match the style of 2011’s Generations. Blasting through levels with boost feels less like a risk and more like just part of the fun, and anytime the game expects more methodical platforming, the camera switches to a more comfortable side-scrolling perspective, regardless of the character. The only time I ran into any consistent issues with controls outside of the Silver Ring sequences was when I was expected to use the shoulder buttons to quickly push Sonic or my OC from left to right. When this happens you rarely go where you expect, and can sometimes push yourself too far, right into an enemy or environmental hazard.

In most Sonic games, these bad controls are often on full display in the boss fights. Sega has never been quite so good at designing bosses that are as fun to fight as they are to look at. Fights like the Biolizard in Sonic Adventure 2 are a fun spectacle, but often feel like a slog to play. Surprisingly, I enjoyed every single boss fight in the game, even if I ended up wishing they were a little longer. Each character fights bosses in their own style, and only the OC really struggles with their bosses, though that comes more from the same issues with weapon variety that I mentioned earlier.

Though you can just play through OC boss fights using only the homing attack, you can also weirdly use weapons like the flamethrower or lightning whip to deal more damage, albeit much more clunkily, and the game only vaguely tries to support you in this. For Classic Sonic and Modern Sonic, the fights follow a pretty simple jumping and racing style respectively. It feels slightly disappointing to say that the best fight in the game is probably actually the first boss fight against Lost World’s Zavok; a fight that has both interesting mechanics, and requires a tangible degree of skill. That’s not to say other boss fights aren’t good, but it does feel weird to go from a fight with actual depth, to what ends up feeling like a series of simple mini-games.

In terms of presentation, Sonic Forces has really nailed what one would expect out of a series so focused on speed. The visuals are vibrant and busy, levels are constantly filled with things in the background moving like flames, animals, or Eggman’s robots wreaking havoc. The music is punchy and fun, ranging from the standard Crush 40 guitars of Modern Sonic, the chiptuney Classic Sonic, and the weird, almost Persona-esque vocalized tracks of the OC levels. It feels really satisfying when you’re playing as Modern Sonic and you boost, only to have the music and world distort with you, or when you’re Classic Sonic and you pick up the speed shoes, and the music speeds up with you. The soundtrack isn’t what I’d necessarily call “good;” for example, the OC stages’ lyrics seem to just be a literal statement of what’s happening (e.g. “here comes the enemy mess them up” or “now’s the time of reckoning, the final battle has begun”), but they still feel just as fast and fun as the levels themselves. Also, hey! This is the first Sonic game where I can unabashedly say grinding on rails owns without a hint of reservation.

When Forces is at its best, you’re cruising along right there next to Sonic as he does his thing and it feels amazing. There’s always been this part of me that wanted this, but I never really knew it until I heard Hoobastank’s lead singer belt out the title track, “Fist Bump,” while Sonic and my OC raced through a level hand in hand. It’s hard to put into words how happy I was to have a character as invested and personal as a Sonic OC physically represented in a series that meant so much to me, and I hope that Sega brings back this option in future games. I S-ranked every mission in Sonic Forces, and if Sonic’s next outing keeps the pace, I could see myself doing it all over again.

This is the most wish fulfillment i’ve ever hadhttps://t.co/hAAnlMJTaq pic.twitter.com/aSYrpZMjG1

— Rosie the Rascal (@horngal) November 7, 2017

Sonic Mania was a love letter to the classic 2D Sonic of old, and Sonic Forces acts in a similar, if less overt way for 3D Sonic. Though it may not be as elaborate or cohesive as Mania was with features and aesthetics (bring back the Chao Garden, damn it!), it’s still neat to hear things like “All Hail Shadow,” or hell, to see characters like Shadow done right for the first time in years. Sonic Forces may not be a game on par with big hitters like Super Mario Odyssey, but it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be, either. Sonic Forces is what Sonic has always been for me, a feel-good experience, and this time around, it really does feel good.

The post Sonic Forces (PS4) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

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From the gameplay trailer above it’s pretty easy to see that this is pretty much just another iteration in the Sonic Generations format. While we’ve only been shown a modern Sonic level, it’s probably safe to say from the initial reveal trailer that classic Sonic will be well represented too.

The current line of questioning in my mind is now twofold. Firstly, just how well will a new Sonic Generations game resonate with an audience, if the original’s gimmick of revisited and remixed worlds from Sonic past is gone? A lot of the charm of the original release was seeing places like Angel Island blasted through in no time at all by modern Sonic, or set-pieces like Escape from the City methodically platformed through as classic Sonic. While the Generations team has proved they are capable of making a quintessential Sonic game, I’m left wondering just how much of an effect the nostalgia may have ultimately had.

My second question is what does the title of Sonic Forces mean? Does it mean that Sonic is going to raise forces? Possibly with the help of a darker hedgehog? Huh? You see where I’m going with this right? Right?

Give Shadow the gun again.

Sonic Forces is set to release this holiday on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC.

The post Sonic Project 2017 is now Sonic Forces appeared first on Gamesline.