Monday, February 12, 2024

Top 10 Games of 2023: Honorable Mentions and Other Stuff

Alright, let's do this. We're wrapping up 2023 forever.

Honorable Mentions:

Venba, dev. Visai Games

I feel bad leaving this off the list for such a petty reason as "length". I am usually of the opinion that games are much too long, meanwhile Venba is the rare exception that I thought was too short. Part of this problem is economic. $15 for seventy minutes of game is a hard sell when most other games offer much more content per dollar. There should be a space for short games, that is in theory the promise of things like Apple Arcade or the Xbox strategy. However, more than the price issue, I think Venba needs more scenes. This is a cooking game set around a South Indian family trying to hold onto their Tamil heritage while living as immigrants in Canada. If you've read my movie reviews, you'd know I'm really taken with stories about immigrant identity. Venba has a lot of heart and emotion despite its cutesy Cartoon Network aesthetic. There is a heartbreaking scene in Venba where you cook a massive meal for your increasingly-distant, more Westernized son, and he completely ghosts you, leaving you with a huge kitchen full of plates. There's was no sadder moment in video games in 2023.

Left me wanting more.

Cocoon, dev. Geometric Interactive

Cocoon is a puzzle game with a fun concept: you're a little bug guy who carries around orbs in a top down Zelda-y adventure. The big gimmick is that your orbs are also worlds that you explore. So you're jumping between multiple realms of reality, while using those very dimensions as tools in the puzzles. The green orb is a swampy environment that also powers the elevators. Cocoon is trying some things I think are good ideas. For one, it is a puzzle game that is very simple, very readable, it wants you finish it. It never gets into the intensely baroque and inscrutable territories of say, The Witness or Baba is You. Another fun thing Cocoon does is create several big boss fights without any combat verbs, and they're good bosses. The problem with Cocoon is that making things so "playable" means that we never get the depth of the concept. It is only towards the end of the game that we can have the surreal dimension bending of get orbs within orbs. Just as the realities are fully confusing and recursive, it ends. I also wanted more from this.

Sea of Stars, dev. Sabotage Studio

A western studio made a great retro pixel art Japanese-style RPG full of reverence and references for the past of the genre. That game is called Chained Echoes by Matthias Linda, which released in 2022, and it is a better game than Sea of Stars. Sea of Stars simply got beaten to the draw. There's still a lot that is really good about Sabotage Studios' version, I do not regret playing it. It's a beautiful game. It's combat is a lot of fun: it does the Mario RPG timing-based combat better than Mario RPG did it. One of my favorite things to do in a game in 2023 was use Sea of Stars' multiple tennis minigame attacks and have a huge combo. Plus the combat has a great rhythm, where you can recover MP with attacks so you're always building up magic attacks, using magic, and dropping limit breaks to keep up the momentum. The bigger problem is that Sea of Stars has a dull story. Every time you think it is finally going to do something interesting, it pulls back.

The ending is awful by the way. I might have been able to forgive it all, but that wet fart of ending cemented how little this entire adventure meant in the end. (The 100% perfect ending is no better, btw.)

Best Party Members of 2023:

Garl, Sea of Stars - Not everything about the story in Sea of Stars was bad. The best part of it was our chubby best friend with a heart of gold. Garl might be one of the weaker party members in this game, actually. But as a person, he's the best thing going around. He's a happy kid who is decisively not chosen by destiny, and still just wants to help out. You meet back up with Garl after years of training and he's brought snacks. Garl rules. Everybody loves him.

Cid, Final Fantasy XVI - There really aren't "party members" in this game, just semi-useful NPCs that follow you around, maybe draw aggro sometimes. However, I need to celebrate the existence of "Hot Cid That Fucks". He's so much cooler than the rest of this cast and story deserve. Ralph Ineson's voice is a special gift to all us children.

Geno, Super Mario RPG - Geno is such a bro. He's the emotional of core of the game. And he's the best black mage, you will never ever need to use the poor cloud kid once Geno comes around. Geno floating around the party in star form is an all-time great moment of friendship in a SNES RPG.

The Hunter, Midnight Suns - It is ridiculous how much stronger your OC is versus all the superheroes in Midnight Suns. They're the best healer on the team, one of their earliest attacks is a whip move that smashes enemies into each other, and eventually you get a monstrously broken sword spin attack that throws enemies in all directions. The rest of the Marvel universe ain't shit. I love chilling with Blade, he's a good guy, I wish him luck with banging Captain Marvel. He still ain't shit.

Best Boss Fights of 2023:

Titan, Final Fantasy XVI - I'm not doing a Dishonorable Mentions because the only game that really disappointed me was FFXVI, and let's be honest, the boss fights ruled. They were cinematic, anime as hell, preposterous in scale, everything you'd want from the Bayonetta-esque game this sorta is. (Since it isn't really an RPG). Titan features a whole Sonic the Hedgehog segment where you are a kaiju running on the tentacles of another kaiju that is kaiju-sized in comparison to you. Titan big.

Bahamut, Final Fantasy XVI - Yeah two from this game, this is the better one. An entire city gets wrecked. You go to freaking space. There's a fusion dance. It is amazing.

Kale, Hi-Fi Rush - The final boss fight of this game, also the best one. You get to start this one off playing as a kitty. That is a good reminder that in spite of everything wrong with the macroeconomics, video games are good sometimes. Kale is a great example of a final exam boss. He's a combination of everything you've learned so far, needing all your buddies to break his shields, real culmination of all your skills

Also shout-outs to the Korsica boss fight, for having the funniest event if you fail a QTE in video game history.

Fallen Hulk, Midnight Suns - Spoilers, sorry. This happens late in Midnight Suns, just when you think you've fully grasped the systems. Oh you think this is all a parade lap to the finish, you're unbeatable? No you're not. Turns out fighting a Hulk is terrifying. All game you've been fighting goons and monsters who mostly have strength in numbers. Not the Hulk. He's just bigger than you. You cannot beat him, you can only make him mad. The game has to write a ridiculous comic book cheat in the second Hulk fight to even allow you to win.

Climb to the Beat, Mario Wonder - I guess not really a boss fight, per se. Mario bosses are rarely very good. But this stage is ridiculously hard. It demands a level of perfection that I rarely care to reach in most games, I'm glad to have been pushed to the limit by this one. Nearly 100 deaths, truly Celeste C-side nightmare vibes.

Wildly Inaccurate Predictions for Top 10 Games of 2024:

Three of these games are already out, so I got work to do. Another will be out by the end of the month.

10. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, dev. Rocksteady Studios - Cannot stop thinking about this game.

9. Earthblade, dev. Extremely OK Games, Ltd.

8. Stellar Blade, dev. Shift Up Second Eve Studios - I am embracing my full dirtbag lifestyle, I like butts and am not afraid to tell you that I like butts.

7. Hades 2, dev. Supergiant Games

6. Hollow Knight: Silksong, dev. Team Cherry - Refusing to give up hope!

5. Metaphor: ReFantazio, dev. Atlus & Studio Zero

4. Mina the Hollower, dev. Yacht Club Games

3. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, dev. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio - I might call this "Yakuza 8" a lot.

2. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, dev. Ubisoft Montpelier - Hell, I'm gonna buy this very game tonight.

1. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, dev. Square Enix Creative Business Unit I - The demo is great, this looks amazing. The trailers have me so hyped. Sephiroth calls Cloud "a puppy" which both very homoerotic and Crisis Core survivors know what we're referencing here.

...

Anyway, I'll be back writing on this blog... at some point. Hopefully I'll have a review out before the October Spooky season.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 1 - Marvel's Midnight Suns

1. Marvel's Midnight Suns, dev. Firaxis Games

Superhero movies are not in a good place. Superhero games are in a much worse place. I've become something of a biographer of all these Marvel disasters over the years. I really like most of these games that nobody wanted to play. That Avengers game from 2020 had a solid single player campaign if you just ignored all the Games as a Service crap. Guardians of the Galaxy from 2021 was a fantastic video game, no caveats needed. Somehow I never find time for the big Sony Spider-Man games, but I found time for Midnight Suns, a game so unsuccessful that 2K fired its director, Jake Solomon, fired Firaxis studio head, Steve Martin, and were not coy in admitting the game flopped.

Clearly I gotta play this Suicide Squad game. That might be GOTY 2024, who knows?

Midnight Suns came out December 2nd, 2022N obody played it in 2022, let's us be honest with ourselves here. Everybody was too busy with Pokemon, God of War, hopefully Pentiment, whatever. Midnight Suns went on sale three months later and that was its real release date. Also, it had DLC support throughout 2023 despite missing its director and 2K asking that everybody forget about this miscalculation. "Let's think instead about that next Civilization game! Investors, money to be made! Do not look at the mountainous piles of your money we set on fire!" Not me though, I wanna talk about goofy superheroes. Because Midnight Suns is the best superhero failure yet.

There was a universe where Firaxis just made XCOM 3 and probably made more money, plus had a more secure future. Instead they did something entirely different. On the surface, every choice they made seems safe. People like(d) Marvel, even if I'm not sure there is a big fanbase for the Midnight Suns team specifically. (Most of the game's cast are not even part of that crew, which makes it more confusing.) Card games are extremely popular, including a successful card games in this very IP, Marvel Champions and Marvel Snap. And while it will never overthrow the mighty FPS, tactical RPGs have been thriving in the last decade. Mixing those three things together, however, was a bold choice and a difficult choice. Nobody has ever made a game like Midnight Suns before. This is not an XCOM game without aliens, if you just want that, you can play the Mario + Rabbids game. No Midnight Suns is the confluence of a deck builder, billiards, chess, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. With cosmetics. Firaxis found themselves creating a whole new genre here, and well, maybe there is not room in the market for new genres. At least not on the investment scale that a AAA game demands.

The first big choice is removing grids and distance entirely as tactical considerations. Your characters can pretty much attack anything from anywhere. Meanwhile, non-combat moves are very much at a premium. We're not slowly pushing our units forward like pawns taking a squares at a time. The arenas are mostly tight, in your face, and everything smashes into everything else. There is a kinetic frenzy to your moveset. You can bonk enemy units into each other, you can smash them into your other heroes, or you drop a freaking street light on their heads. It has the angles of billiard balls colliding. But also, you need to do careful calculations. It is not just that you bonk, but often the order of the bonking. The bad guys are usually much weaker than you, still have numbers on their side, reinforcements are almost always coming. You have a move limit, you have energy points, you have a limited deck of actions, this all requires a lot of thinking and care. Many turns can have huge momentum swings if you just play the cards right.

There is also a huge, terrifyingly complex economy in the background. While you're not bonking enemies, you have a secret club house full of heroes chilling, full of relationship opportunities, and other activities. You and Magik can go painting in the woods. Nearly every superhero has some kind of special task. So between every mission is this cycle of running around talking to the guys. There's the extremely married couple of Tony Stark and Dr. Strange in the basement who upgrade the facilities, there's Blade who does combat training, there's Captain Marvel who assigns units to side missions away from you, Spider-Man is in the shop, etc. etc. You're upgrading your cards, you're picking decks, you're upgrading units, you're optimizing all kinds of details. There's a million ways to decorate your room, there's side quests, there's a huge space to explore, you have a demon dog, you solve puzzles Midnight Suns is daunting. One wishes for a simpler system in the background. But also, I needed to do the loop of tasks every time. It is less chores and more chilling with all my buddies in this Northeast Sleepaway Camp full of heroes.

Just one more mission. That's the goal here: to make you lie to yourself and keep playing. One more task. One more part of the map to unlock.

Now there are flaws. Midnight Suns is very much a PC game in an era where everything has a console polish and finish. You can tell these characters were designed with the intention to be used in combat, not really in cutscenes. Every female character has the exact same body model. The physics of running around are not quite perfect. Sometimes conversations you see on the map will not trigger. Sometimes the specific tasks you need to do to get to the next part of the story are unclear. They ask you to create an OC-character, "The Hunter", who is also the most ridiculously overpowered character in the game. I could never get my Hunter's appearance exactly right, really wanted her to have an Eighties haircut but had to settle for a very Nineties perm.

Still, in an era where Marvel "realism" has become the default aesthetic for all superhero games, I'm glad to see Midnight Suns looking more like a comic book. Wolverine has his big goofy horn-mask complete with yellow spandex costume. All your cards are designed to create these double-page action shots, like Captain America jumping across the city to shield slam a guy in the face. Jake Solomon has admitted in Waypoint interviews that he's a huge Marvel dork, that's why he made this game. He wanted the big goofy set pieces, while also giving careful strategy and depth. Captain Marvel does not need cover, she can just punch things. So the aesthetic and the combat all work together in a really well-made game.

Midnight Suns was the best gaming experience I had in 2023. No game offered more depth in its combat, no game was more rewarding in learning all the depth. No game kept me on my toes, unleashing new challenges and new kinds of tactical puzzles every time I thought I had it all figured out. This game is decently long and fulfilling, plus there's a ton of DLC if you have room for seconds.

It was a big experimental swing, nobody has made a game like Midnight Suns before. And for that, Solomon was rewarded with having to find another job. We'll never get a Midnight Suns 2. In five years, this will be the kind of game that people will suddenly start asking "hey, that was cool, how come we never got another game like that?" The kind of game that podcasters pass around as little hobby horses they love and nobody else cares about. Oh well. If the world is too good to kick Venom in the face and have him smash into two of his goons, too good to hang with an X-Man in a bathing suit, then at least the world is thankfully a more serious and mature place than I thought. Right?

Right?

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 2 - Alan Wake 2

2. Alan Wake 2, dev. Remedy Entertainment

The final choice, as always, was really tough. This year I flipped a coin to decide No. 1 and 2. I agreed with its decision.

Confession: I'm a little coward. Watching a horror movie and living out a horror movie is a huge difference. I know I'm over here in my room and the little guy in the horror movie is in my TV, we are separate entities. But that's the magic of video games, sometimes the distinction doesn't matter. I got so scared of Alien: Isolation that I chickened out and stopped playing before I saw even one xenomorph. I never finished SOMA or Resident Evil 7 or for that matter, Alan Wake 1.The problem is never the actual ghouls or ghosts, in the end, fighting a spooky in a horror game is not fundamentally different than fighting a monster in anything else. Live or die, whatever, a fail state is not scary in of itself. The problem is that I die a million times just walking up to the spooky. Not knowing what's around the corner is infinitely scarier than whatever is there. It takes a lot to actually play the game-part of the game.

Alan Wake 2 is not the scariest game I've ever played. It does have extremely effective jump scares and really freaky death scenes when you do die. But it was most scary not before the horror, rather after. It lingered with me. I could not go out at night, without thinking some wisps would wander by and say "...Alan Wake!". I would take my dog-niece Molly out for a walk and fear the spaces between street lights. She would sit around, oblivious, sniffing, and I would look into the park near my house, covered in darkness, and panic quietly, hoping nothing would grab me while I picked up her shit. In November I went to Niagara Falls and took a nice long hike around the Whirlpool Rapids. And even in the day, traveling the woods, I was terrified, because every trail blaze was marked with a spiral, a key symbol of Alan Wake 2's mysteries. I write horror stories as a hobby, who is to say that this strange, mostly unfinished existence of mine was not just the upper layer of the great metafictional infinity that was Remedy's horror masterpiece? I was writing myself into the story - you do not want to write yourself into the story of Bright Falls, Washington.

The first Alan Wake was an ambitious game, an interesting game, and unfortunately not a fun game to play. Remedy has improved considerably in the past thirteen years. In Alan Wake 2 there's a lot less combat, most encounters feel more meaningful, and even if you do not like the combat, you can often just run away. Also, best of all, for me, you can just set the difficulty down to trivial, which is good because I absolutely suck at this game. I could not beat the very first boss. The dodge move feels like you can never actually outpace enemies and instead get stuck in an infinite check, never able to fight back. I guess the real mark of a horror game is that the combat is "bad" (you could probably beat Super Mario Wonder in the time it takes Mr. Wake to reload). Yet, people celebrate the un-fun-ness with "look how scary it is". As an action game, Alan Wake 2 is barely acceptable - maybe. The best parts of it are when you're not fighting, just exploring its terrifying locations like the haunted theme park and nightmare subway station. There's just a lot more of experience and atmosphere in 2, which is good.

As an interactive experience, Alan Wake 2 is top of the line. Nobody is doing artful cinematic horror as well as Remedy. They've expanded their Northwest spooky towns into a whole universe of oddity. The whole region is Finland without actually being Finland, complete with Norse and Finnish gods hanging around. Remedy are the same guys who made Control, and they do not want you to forget that. Bureau of Control Easter Eggs are floating around in the very first section of the game, and the crossover soon becomes a major plot point. Also, a big point is the increasingly thin difference between our real world and the digital world. Remedy has been mixing live action and graphics for years - this game has a whole movie inside it that even spoils its ending.

In Alan Wake 2, they go much further. The game's director, Sam Lake, casts himself as a character created by the author Alan Wake, who is a character he created. In a horror story all about loops, it is a fittingly surreal choice, fiction and non-fiction blurring until there is no beginning or end. Nothing fully real or unreal.

Where Alan Wake 1 was Stephen King's novel Bag of Bones meets David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks, Alan Wake 2 is their Twin Peaks: The Return. (No good King analog this time that I can see.) Alan himself (Ilkka Villi & Matthew Porretta) is only the protagonist in half the story, with the other half going to FBI agent Saga Anderson (Melanie Liburd). Alan is trying to escape the Dark Place while Saga's investigation into Bright Falls finds herself written more and more into his narrative. Before long, she's a resident of this town, with unpleasant history and cooky relatives. With the series named after him, you'd think a Part 2 would be about the triumphant return of Alan Wake, Writer, where he can finally set everything right. Instead, what we see, is something much darker. Alan just wants to go home, get back to his wife. Instead, maybe that journey back is itself a destructive force. Maybe Alan's flailing desperately to hold onto any reality is not helping anything, just pulling more people down with him.

It is entirely possible we never get an Alan Wake 3. Which would be disappointing if you're looking for a clear conclusion, a clear ending, or even a simple happy one. Twin Peaks Season 3 left us with more questions than answers and you know what? They were right to do it. Alan Wake 2 really only exists as a quirk of bad economics. Epic Games funded this to make the Epic Games Store "a thing". Remedy was more too happy to use their money to make a game with rock opera interludes and metacommentaries on their entire studio history, without really answering anything. Nobody wants the Epic Games Store, exclusives will never solve that problem. I'm not sure the economics of the entire games industry are made on solid ground right now. But I can be glad somebody screwed up on the math enough to let Alan Wake 2 exist.

And if we never get an Alan Wake 3, I can be content remembering that closure and answers are overrated. The mystery is what is compelling, the pieces not fitting is what creates the horror. As long as need to be afraid, as long as we need the world to make a little less sense, Alan Wake will always be stuck in that lake that is an ocean, trapped for us.

Friday, February 9, 2024

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 3 - Inscryption

3. Inscryption, dev. Daniel Mullins Games

I am flexible with the definition of "2023". Technically Inscryption came out in 2021 on the PC. It did ported to the Switch very late in 2022, which rounds up to 2023. And it got an Xbox release last year. I did not play it on Xbox or Switch, still the point stands. By the broadest definition of "game of 20XX", it counts. If you object, pay me $1000 and I'll leave this space blank. Also, didn't we have a game from 1996 on this list the other day?

Inscryption is a card game roguelite, one of many genres I write-off out of disinterest. It is also a metafictional horror experience, a genre I do not write-off easily. The card game element being just the first level of a much larger Creepypasta universe. You're stuck in some kind of Evil Dead cabin, forced to play cards forever. The goal of the roguelite is the escape the roguelite, which is fine by me. Let us totally shatter the run-based systems and take these core mechanics in new and maybe stranger directions. Right from the start, your cards, especially a cute rodent called "the Stoat" are talking to you, giving you hints about how to proceed and break the system. You can definitely trust little cards, right?

The first meta-layer to Inscryption is that you can stand up from the table you're playing cards on and explore. You can fail the card game, and you're going to fail the card game many times. With just the base systems given to you, it is very unlikely that you will ever develop cards strong enough to win the four levels and boss fights. Luckily, there is also a first-person Escape Room element that allows you to cheat.  You can use the card game to gain keys or knowledge in the upper level to truly proceed. For example, the Stoat will drop a hint that leads you to a safe combination, and there you find another talking card, with more knowledge. Later, there is a mechanic where you can rip out an eye for bonus points (it is grisly as it sounds, your POV loses part of its vision), and you can use this to actually see more in the cabin if you play it right. A few more high level mechanics, things just slightly tilted your way to truly win.

It is funny though that Inscryption wants so badly to break the roguelite since in terms of actual quality of "game", that is the best part. There's a lot of tactics, a lot of fun ways of mixing together powers, a lot of unique evolutions, and you can rip out your teeth for bonus points. It was so successful on its own that Daniel Mullins added a mode six months later where Inscryption was just this card game, nothing more. With some careful maneuvering and a little luck, you can snowball your powers into an unstoppable party of fighters. In my image for this post, I have a solid wall of Blues (as in "me", the author in card-form), all with high damage, self-cloning, and they boost each other. Totally unbeatable. Who could stop me? Not even the game itself.

And from there, the game was never as much fun, however, it only got more fascinating.

Once you've broken one system, you find yourself right in another one. We're like Neo escaping the Matrix, only to find out the real world is rigged completely by the machines as well. We're also uncovering a series of live-action FMVs involving a Youtube channel creator, Luke Carder (Kevin Saxby), exploring an obscure card game also called "Inscryption". Carder finds himself more and more drawn into the mystery of this unfinished, unpublished game, getting dangerously close its secrets. As we can see in our own experience, something has gone terribly wrong with this simple card game about animals, going from just a cute adventure into some kind of Sam Raimi nightmare.

If you reach end of Inscryption and then play an ARG game you'll eventually answer as to what mystical nonsense is really running this universe. The answer is as ridiculous as it is unsatisfying. But lore is never the fundamental engine of horror. Answers are not scary, questions are.

Inscryption is terrifying because it feels like a game completely out of control. However, it is always under control, even as it pushes out to surreal Doki Doki Literature Club places. You "beat" it only to find it evolve and transform into another thing entirely, then something else after that. You keep trying to "escape", but can there be an "escape" in video game terms? If you rescue Princess Peach, you've just reached the end of the level set, not defeated the fundamental concept of video game platforming. No matter what, video games have to be a rules-based world of clearly defined success and failure, engineered by some intelligence in control. In Inscryption we find ourselves just spiraling around from one kind of master to another, as long as the game continues, so does the spiral.

Hmmm... spirals, you say...

Thursday, February 8, 2024

Top 10 Games of 2023: No. 4 - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

4. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, dev. Nintendo EPD

I'm going to sound very The Wire Season 2 "We used to make shit in this country" right now: Nintendo used to make Zelda games. 

People got tired of the "Zelda formula". Nobody was more ready than me to burn it all down after Skyward Sword. But remember when we had Zelda games, on the regular? Imagine having a full Zelda game, every two or three years? We did not just have huge console releases, we had the smaller 2D ones on handhelds. Some of the those were fantastic damn games: Minish Cap is a glory, I love riding around in my choo-choo in Spirit Tracks. That's gone now. Indie games fill that space, sometimes great ones. We get one proper Zelda every six years and they are the most enormous experiences imaginable. Things of this magnitude can only take a whole console generation to come out.

I feel like this is a losing proposition no matter how good your game is. Final Fantasy XVI is a perfectly decent product. However, it cannot stand up to the pressure of being the only full Final Fantasy for a decade. Starfield seems to have a similar problem of impossible expectations. Zelda is doing better than most, in fact. Tears of the Kingdom was basically everything everybody wanted from a Breath of the Wild 2 (minus playable Zelda, sadly). And yet, less than a year later, it feels like the temperature on this game is way down. It had a big month of hype as everybody showed off their wild creations with the physics engine toolset, and then people realized the game part of the game was mostly okay. We just had very few opinions about it all.

I had a great time with Tears of the Kingdom. I played this game more than any other game this year. I had whole sessions where I accomplished nothing in particular at all, just had fun exploring the sky islands and the deep underground depths. I just wanted to see where the floating island chains of breadcrumbs led, sometimes somewhere cool, sometimes nowhere. I loved the terror of the darkness, with this running paranoia that you'd run out of light seeds and maybe be lost down there forever. Some people could go out and use the Lego pieces Nintendo gave you and build themselves a fully functional Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II. I could not. But I still enjoyed fitzing around with the rockets and propellers and wings and limited resources. It was fun to fail with those things, to just not be able to reach the enticing floating castles in the sky, that turned out to only have a Shrine in there anyway. There's real magic here in the loop of exploration: getting launched into the sky and doing Link's HALO jumps from low orbit down to find shrines or fun.

And yet... Tears of the Kingdom is the fourth best game of 2024. There's a lot of reasons for that. For one, it is just Breath of the Wild again, even down to the same map. You can't be the grand revolution in open world gaming twice. Heck, BOTW even in 2017 was only my third favorite game of that year. Nintendo brought back everything about BOTW - even most of the flaws. The dungeons this time are better, but I realize now after two 100-hour games of this that the core combat system flatly sucks. I avoided fighting monsters for most of TOTK because it is bad. It is an unfun experience. Nintendo is still terrified of having too much narrative. That was fine last time, when most of it was environmental storytelling in the post-apocalypse. Now that Hyrule has been reborn and is even thriving - a very thrilling narrative concept - we actually do need more meat on the bone. Zelda, and Ganondorf should be more characters in this. I barely know either of them! Nothing of the lore of Tears of the Kingdom makes any sense next to the lore of the last game. It is almost like this should not have been a direct sequel at all.

This is so big. There is no technical achievement in 2023 that was more impressive than Tears of the Kingdom. It is the finest craftsmanship in gaming. The physics engine is unbelievable, flawless. I cannot believe it never glitched out even once. And yet... 

I'm fine with big open world games and the loop of quests and the danger of the physics. I really do like what Tears of the Kingdom is doing. But after awhile, I'm tired of the survival game loot stuff, I'm tired of physics, I'm tired of climbing. I just wann to play a Zelda-ass Zelda game again, like Twilight Princess or Wind Waker, two of the greatest games ever made in my opinion. Nintendo does not make those anymore. The promise with these Switch Zeldas that we can have everything: immense open worlds, survival game friction, and still a Zelda game hiding in the core. I'm not sure that promise holds up. Tears of the Kingdom is a great game, it is not a particularly great Zelda game.