the year's just about over and i'm not getting any more games in so thought i'd write up a little year in review ​:mugistronk:​
i think i miscounted the other day because i'm currently sitting on 105 played. a lot more than i expected to get to when the year began. and that's despite taking a full month to grind through xenoblade 3!
i spent a lot of the year playing through whole series of games. i played through all of kingdom hearts, dead space, bioshock and about half the mainline kirby games. that's 24 games which is right on a quarter of my play count for the year

kingdom hearts had the most ups and downs. kh3 was fucking great, the kh3 dlc was fucking awful. i'm happy to be ready for kh4 when it comes out, just hope it's good

i played through dead space 1 when it came out so i went with the remake this time. what a game. i definitely think the ishimura's one of the all time best videogame spaceships. dead space 2 was fine but 3 sucked, it has more in common with uncharted than dead space. that game deserves its reputation

kirby was fine, i don't love it but the games were short enough that i didn't have to suffer through them for too long. except for kirby 64 which was great. i don't normally like 2.5d platformers but that's my favourite of the series so far by a long shot

i really intended to hit my backlog harder but aside from valkyria chronicles and alan wake (which i've been meaning to get through for 14 and 18 years) just about everything else was either new, or bought as i was about to play it. really surprising, in hindsight

valkyria chronicles was frequently frustrating (lost track of the number of times i had to restart a mission 20 minutes in because a character got stuck running on a pebble or something and died because i couldn't get them into cover in time) but overall i enjoyed it. had fun making all the male recruits kill each other so i could play with just cute girls

alan wake sucked. don't really have much to say except i'm glad to have finally got it off my backlog

the biggest happy surprises of the year were pokemon legends: arceus and journey. two games i didn't really expect to enjoy but ended up falling for them hard

pokemon arceus is probably my favourite of the series since gold and silver. really felt like the game they'd wanted to make from the beginning but didn't have the hardware to make it happen until the switch came along. i'm not one to 100% games but i really wanted to 100% this

journey i'd written off for years as artslop, and it kinda is, it's mechanically barebones but it's crazy how good it feels to just bing bing bong at some guy while you trudge across sand dunes together. i don't think i would've liked it anywhere near as much on my own so it's fortunate people are still playing it

the biggest negative surprises were xenoblade 3 and final fantasy 7 (the original - haven't touched the remake yet)

xenoblade 3 started strong but it just kept going and going and going and the writing just got worse and worse. would have been great if it was half as long and if there weren't so many fakeout deaths. mio and sena are ridiculously cute though so i can't bring myself to hate the game

i can tell how final fantasy 7 was groundbreaking back in 1997 but i was not prepared for how badly it's aged. it looks like shit, plays like shit, the writing is awful. i get why they wanted to remake it. i do really have to admire the sheer ambition of what they were trying to do though and the supersephiroth boss fight was straight kino

my highlights of the year were disco elysium and clair obscur. those were the best games i played by such a large margin that i don't even know what #3 might be but my personal faves aside from those were ai limit, slay the princess and kingdom hearts 3

i don't really have anything to say about disco elysium or clair obscur that hasn't been said before but they both deserve every word of praise they get. truly incredible games

i don't have much to say about ai limit either, i love soulsclones and this is one of the better ones. great level design, great combat, cute girls. the mud mechanic rewards aggression which keeps the pace of combat up. everything i want in a game like this. well worth playing

slay the princess was a bit of a surprise, i didn't know what to expect going in but it wasn't THAT. clever writing, great art, generally pretty good voice acting. one of the most standout visual novels of recent years

kh3 was just bonkers, everything good and everything bad about the series dialed up to 11. there's so much about it i didn't like but the stuff i did like was so hype that it overwrote any negative feelings i have about it. the dlc was straight dog shit though

the lowlights of the year were kh3's dlc, zelda tears of the kingdom, bioshock infinite and ball x pit

KH3's dlc is just the last 3 hours of KH3 again with five minutes of new cutscenes and a godawful boss rush forced in. just awful

zelda totk has about 2 hours of fun game buried under 40 hours of filler. one of the biggest and worst open world games there is, awful weapon degradation, awful combat. immensely unenjoyable game overall. anyone who claims to like this game is not to be trusted

i know i'm 12 years too late to complain about bioshock infinite but it really is just call of duty in the sky. that "revolutionary" ai partner was worthless in 2013 and she's worthless now. its mere existence makes bioshock 1 and 2 worse

ball x pit is a game that presents itself as a roguelike but it's designed to be unbeatable without spending a bunch of time just grinding resources to improve your stats, which is as anti-roguelike as possible

last year's goal was to watch more movies. this year's was to play more videogames. mission well and truly accomplished! now i need to work out what i'm doing next year...