Top Games of 2022 - Honorable Mentions and Extras

And now... everything else:

Honorable Mentions: 

Triangle Strategy, dev. Square Enix & Artdink

Triangle Strategy was already barely clinging onto the Top 10 list and then Tactics Ogre: Reborn came out later in the year, and threw it off the list with more brutality than Scar regiciding his brother. Tactics Ogre is simply a better game than Triangle Strategy. One is the nostalgic retread, the other is the real deal, one of the best games ever made, there is no discussion. Still, I do feel bad because I had a great time with Triangle Strategy. This game's reputation seems to have sunk poorly as the year went on due to several issues: too many cutscenes, an awful English dub, and a frustrating morality system screwing you out of plot decisions. But I got a solid strategy RPG campaign out of it. I have favorite units (Anna), favorite battles (Chapter 7 Morality), and favorite moments. Triangle Strategy gave plenty of options to build an army that kicked ass. One late game boss thought charging alone up to a plateau to kill my squishy mages was the right play. He soon learned my units were not stuck up there with him, he was stuck up there with them. He died badly, in great pain, on fire. Glorious.

Bayonetta 3, dev. PlatinumGames

There's many things wrong with this game and this experience - and I'll get to the ending later. Bayonetta 3 is unfortunately a classic case of "Just Another One of Those" Syndrome. It is clearly inferior to the first two. Worse, it looks like shit, it was one of the ugliest games I played last year. Platinum really thought the monster summoning mechanic was what the series needed, and so every environment is enormous and barren. The increasingly ancient Switch hardware does this game no favors. 

However, Bayonetta 3 is an enormously ambitious game with huge scale, the kind of blockbuster that makes the average MCU movie seem restrained and low-key. There's Godzilla, there's a Metal Gear Solid pastiche, and there's a giant lady taking a bubble bath in the clouds. There's the most awesome moment of all, when your giant frog summon Yassifies into a parasol lady and sings the techno opera song from The Fifth Element in a rhythm minigame. I really hope that Bayonetta 3 gets a remake on a stronger system so the environments are not so terribly gray and flat. But no hardware will fix this game's real problems - I'll get to that later.

Sable, dev. Shedworks

Yes, this was a 2021 game. However, Sable did get ported to the PS5 in November, so it just barely makes my ridiculously vague definition of what a year is! Sure, I didn't play Sable on the PS5, I played it on SteamDeck, and sure, it still ran as poorly as it did on release, but I like this game. It's Breath of the Wild with no combat and no stress. You're a young adult released onto a vast alien desert world with no real goal other than self-discovery. The whole planet is a big friendly zone to climb and see. Yeah, I could have used more in the way of friction and story. Worse, the more extreme platforming challenges are certainly possible, but Sable does not really have rewards for the trouble. I spent hours climbing up this vast sea of giant dinosaur bones and huge skyscraper-sized mesas to only find another empty settlement. The view was great, though. Sable is a gorgeous game, even if the splendor will run at remarkably low framerates.

Heaven Will Be Mine, dev. Pillow Fight Games & Worst Girls Games

Okay, this is a not 2022 game. Heaven Will Be Mine was the best old game I played last year. When else am I gonna find time to talk about this? It didn't the 2018 list and that's on me.

Heaven Will Be Mine is every joke that Mobile Suit Gundam has gay subtext made text. It's every queer reading of Shinji Ikari made flesh. It's a mecha visual novel about three ladies, Luna-Terra, Saturn, and Pluto, all representing different factions in solar system-wide war. They all jump into their ridiculously over-powered machines and do battle. Or maybe the dogfights are just them flirting with each other, the metaphor barely remains a metaphor after awhile, these mobile suits might be fucking. Heaven Will Be Mine is not long, each of the three campaigns only takes about an hour, depending on how fast you can read. There's dense lore, Heaven Will Be Mine actually does a very poor job explaining the backstory. Mankind went to space to fight aliens and discovered instead that we were all lesbians, is basically the metaphysics. There are some truly terrifying powers, such as Pluto's robot, the Krun Macula, which is a collapsed star in humanoid form. If this were not a very low-budget visual novel, Heaven Would Be Mine would need a billion dollars to actually animate all of its ideas.

Dishonorable Mentions:

I don't really touch truly bad games so this is all graded on a curve. Please do not murder me for not loving these games:

Stray, dev. BlueTwelve Studio

Okay, the cat is cute. It's really cute. I get it. Even the wacky French animation robots are cute. Cool. Stray is unfortunately limited otherwise. Once you get over the instinctual need to yell "kitty!", you'll realize this is a not great game. Most of Stray involves a terrible stealth system avoiding annoying head crabs that will wipe out your little kitty in one mistake. The rest of the game is fetch quests, Stray feels ancient, despite how good it looks. There's even worse stealth segments later, reaching Hyrule Castle in Ocarina of Time-levels of rote hide-and-seek gameplay. I'm embarrassed for this game that it brought back an idea that stale.

Cyberpunk 2022, dev. CD Projekt Red

I've already written tons about this game and its myriad disappointments. Yeah, I know the Studio Trigger anime on Netflix has people excited about Cyberpunk again. If anything that series made me dislike the game more. Because Edgerunners was the story of a game I wanted to play. You know, with an actual party of memorable characters and real body customization and a sick yellow jacket. There's even cooler powers! Why do I gotta play this awful FPS built around a broken unbalanced RPG when these anime kids get to have fun?

"I Really Want to Stay at Your House" was my favorite last year, on the other hand. I've listened to it 1000 times.

Overwatch 1, dev. Blizzard Entertainment

RIP my GOTY 2016. Blizzard shut it down, and that's it. It's over for me and Overwatch. Everything about the second game looks terrible. F in the chat, bros.

Bayonetta 3's Ending (Spoilers)

The Bayonetta series lead, Hideki Kamiya, went out and said basically "don't touch the series in the future" if you didn't like the ending to the third game. And well, if that's how you feel about it, dude, I won't play Bayonetta 4. Makes it easier for me. This game was getting heat before hand due to labor issues, than Bayonetta's old actress decided to go TERF on us. So the temperature was pretty high in the room before the game decided to kill off everybody's favorite characters, including the title character,  then pair her in her dying moments with the useless chucklefuck dude from the first game, and promise in the sequel a Raiden-like character switch. I actually like Viola, I dig her goth-y vibe, the only problem is her sections of Bayonetta 3 are bad. Her parry is frustrating, I hate her combos, and all the fun of just flipping around and crunching enemies as her mom is gone. I do not want to play a whole game as her. Who would??

Also Bayonetta is not a character that should lose. She basically isn't a character. She's Superman but fetish camp. She's met God before and laughed at him and then basically shoved a stiletto heel up his ass. She is all sexuality but cannot actually have sex, because no living person could ever possibly be her equal. No franchise needed to go turn towards tragic melodrama less than Bayonetta. Who asked for this?

Best Boss Fights of 2023 (More Spoilers!)

5. Mummy from Bayonetta 3 - There were remarkably few encounters in Bayonetta 3's core game that I felt were exceptional. Rosa, your Mummy and Viola's Grandmummy, stands out because in a game full of Bayonettas, she was the only one you actually get to fight. The best fights in any action RPG are against enemies as quick as you and with similar skillsets. The Rose boss fight turns into a awesome rail-shooter segment, because Mummy can also deploy giant kaiju-sized monsters against you. Finally an enemy my equal, versus the villain who is as gray and meaningless as the environments.

4. Siege Engine from Tunic - Usually the bigger the boss, the less interesting it is. They're slow, they're dumb, their patterns are predictable. Not Siege Engine. They are surprisingly nimble for a spider of their size. It can really scurry. It's got about a dozen different attack patterns and many different moves. Maybe this time it wants to summon a lot of drones to pester you, maybe this time it wants to lay mines, maybe they're just going to keeping spinning out of the way. The whole fight is a positioning battle to get behind them and smash their one weakness. Also, the Engine's roar synchs up great with the music and I love that.

3. Purity of Odio from Live a Live - The original final boss on the SNES, now just phase one of three. (Which by the way, really messed me up because I had to take on the true final boss with badly underleveled characters and very nearly softlocked my game when I saved between phases. Getting out of that pickle was my second greatest achievement of 2022.) Purity of Odio is a very impure-looking pile of nasty body horror. This is a really tough fight, because you're fighting four bosses at once: two eyes, a mouth, and a winged bastard in the back who you do not want to wake up early, let me tell you. Your party is split across the field, so the whole thing becomes this epic slug match to keep control of the situation and not get overwhelmed by the many status effects.

2. AI Sada from Pokémon Scarlet - The Champion in this game is an immense disappointment, but do not fret, AI Sada is easily the best final boss fight in Pokémon history. A lot of the encounters in Pokémon Scarlet are surprisingly decent, because even if the game does not give the gym leaders full teams, they do give them good movesets and competitive strategies. Sada comes with a team full of ancient Pokémon, who you're probably unfamiliar with, and also are Pseudo-Legendary levels of strong. It gets even more awesome considering the whole presentation. You're in a freaky diamond disco ball nightmare zone, the opposing trainer is this machine woman glitching uncontrollably on a plateau above you, and the music, as always in Scarlet, slaps hard.

1. The Heir from Tunic - I did not intend this but I realize that three out of these five bosses are evil moms. Because the plot is so vague in Tunic, I'm not sure if The Heir really is your little fox's mom. They have an hourglass figure and they seemed nice when you were praying to them, I just kinda assumed. However, when you reach the end of the game, Mommy has a huge sword and will spank your ass hard. A lot of this battle is about staying in "the spice range". You gotta keep within access of punishing her mistakes. If you run away, she will dominate the field with huge AEO attacks and ranged moves. Her main attack is pretty easy to dodge, until it becomes a three hit combo, and until the second form when it starts hacking away at your max HP bar. This is a really tough fight, I ended up having to spam fire balls to get through the second phase. Fox Mommy is a masterpiece of a great boss fight, the best way to end GOTY 2022.

My Best Party Members of 2023:

5. Tinkaton from Pokémon Scarlet - Fairy/Steel is great typing. Her unique move, Gigaton Hammer has 160 base power, plus STAB. I loved to bring in Tinkaton to finish off battles, since my Clodsire would have already poisoned everybody with Toxic Spikes. Tinkaton's Fake Out is basically a free turn to sap the enemy's energy. Then I'd hit them with the big hammer.

4. Pogo from Live a Live - Pogo is a darling little caveman boy, easily my favorite character from Live a Live. He gets the best moment of the whole game when he gives the final boss a big hug. Also, since he was born before language, Odio's big villain speech meant nothing to Pogo, he did not catch a word of it. As a unit, Pogo is a great tank and hits like a truck. His move Whee Jump throws him right onto of enemies and slams hard, it is great all game long.

3. Skeledirge from Pokémon Scarlet - The final form of my beloved Fuecoco! Playing Skeledirge is real simple: use Torch Song. It's a solid fire attack and boosts your Special Attack one stage, it's ridiculously broken, and only gets more so if you Terastallize to pure Fire. Within a few uses, you'll probably sweep any boss's team... until you reach AI Sada, who actually can overcome this guy. But until then, Skeledirge is an unstoppable avalanche of fire.

2. Sienna from Chained Echoes - Being lesbian Balthier makes Sienna already the best character in the game, but she's also a great fighhter. She's really fast, she can Poison enemies, and she's got the best DPS of any party member in that game. Sienna has very hit Crit rates and many moves that hit multiple times, or the entire enemy party. Her Limit Break is also the most reliable way to hit for four digits of damage, which is a lot in Chained Echoes.

1. Anna from Triangle Strategy - Turns out I like fast ninja girls. Anna has a broken invisibility that the enemy AI cannot break, so she can wall off routes all on her own. She also is fantastic for hitting enemies from behind to set up brutal follow-up attacks. On top of that, se can Poison bosses for you in complete safety, or just assassinate annoying squishy mages. She can do it all, and usually retreat right back into the shadows to hit them again.

Wildly Inaccurate Predictions for 10 Top Games of 2023:

10. Hi-Fi Rush, dev. Tango Gameworks -  Yeah, I know it's out, maybe I can finally play it now that this list is done. I do not foresee a world where this game does not make the 2023 Top 10.

9. Season: A Love Letter to the Future, dev. Scavengers Studio - See above.

8. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, dev. Rocksteady Studios

7. Street Fighter 6, dev. Capcom - I don't even like Street Fighter but this looks amazing.

6. Sea of Stars, dev. Sabotage Studio

5. She Dreams Elsewhere, dev. Studio Zevere

4. Mina the Hollower, dev. Yacht Club Games

3. Hollow Knight: Silksong, dev. Team Cherry - It makes the list every damn year and will continue to do so until it comes out.

2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, dev. Nintendo - Same!

1. Final Fantasy XVI, dev. Square Enix - Honestly if these top 3 games all release this year, I might become depressed because I'll have nothing left to look forward to.

And... that's it. 2022 is done, and it's almost March. I hope to finish up next year's lists in January.

Top Game of 2022: No. 1 - Tunic

1. Tunic, dev. Andrew Shouldice

I got my wish. That doesn't always happen in this life, so we should cherish these moments. 

Tunic was the game I most anticipated back in the beginning of 2022, and now it is my Game of the Year. However, in fairness, my called shot did not come out of nowhere. I did play the Tunic demo back in 2021 and put it down after only a short period. There's two reasons why that happens. Most of the time, the demo has already dissuaded you from continuing with the game. But sometimes you realize this game is going to be so good, so special, that you want to save all your passion and energy for the full experience. That was Tunic. The final complete Tunic was everything I wanted and more.

We basically do not get classic Zelda games anymore. Besides a remake of Link's Awakening, the last fully new one of those was A Link Between Worlds for the 3DS. (Itself largely a remake of A Link to the Past.) The Crypt of the Necrodancer people have more original top-down Zeldas for the Switch than Nintendo has! So I was more than starving for some games of that style. Importantly, Tunic offers a particularly adorable spin on things by transforming Link into the most precious little tiny fox guy.

Aww, look at him yawning on the beach! You can barely hear it in the sound mix, but he makes little cooing sounds! He's the best!

Tunic has the costume, it has a starting weapon in the first cave to your left, and it has a difficult non-linear overworld. You can see a deep reverence for The Legend of Zelda, the O.G. from 1985, even down to recreating the instruction manual. The manual ends up being a very important element to this experience. It is where Tunic becomes more than imitation, into something more meta. I would already love Tunic if it were just a really fun isometric copy-cat with a delightful plastic toy box aesthetic. But this game has much more on its mind.

I still buy physical media. Honestly, I do not why because jewel cases these days are empty, and even the discs/cartridges themselves are basically just download codes. Maybe I just want to keep GameStop in business, I dunno. I already sound old when I talk about "back in my day", but we used to build shit in this country and we used to get things in our games. You had to walk fifteen miles in the snow to go to school, and your games came with beautifully-illustrated companion pieces. This was especially important back in the 8-bit days (pre-Eric, I'm not that old). The first Zelda could only fit 128kbs into its cartridge, so there was not much room for story, and nobody built tutorials into games yet. The only help you got came with the companion booklet, that was essential to the game. Without the pages, you had to reply on magazines, schoolyard rumor, or random chance to play it.

With perfect knowledge, Tunic is a trivial experience, which speedrunners can complete in mere minutes. However, Tunic is all about tricks, all about a puzzle whose pieces you cannot see. So we start with no knowledge, no pages of the instructions. All you have is instinct from Zelda experience, blind luck, and a wooden stick you found in a cave.

Tunic, very cleverly makes the manual part of the game. These pages are items scattered all across the world, all clearly drawn in the style of the Zelda NES instruction booklet. (They went so far as to even imitate the small errors a physically-printed booklet would have in its color illustrations.) This allows for Tunic to control the player's knowledge. Some pages are the map, some tell you important gameplay mechanics such as the exhaustion system, some give you hints as to what the blueberry item might do. Another layer of the puzzle is the script is the manual is written in, which is these complex geometric runes. But like much of this game, it's only a sight-line trick. The script is English but written with a phonetic alphabet. Redditors solved the whole language injust a few weeks (Big Spoilers).

Like the language and the manual pages, Tunic's overworld map is full of things hidden in plain sight. The isometric perspective is not just retro, it's key to the illusion. The camera angle is hiding all kinds of secret passages and short cuts. Some of these are painful to discover, you will have spent an hour fighting through a horde of tough enemies, until you realize that hugging the corner takes you to a passage right to the area with the Shield.

This all opens up another question. What is the game we're playing? Yeah, there is the game of the little furry Link fighting through monsters. But also, Tunic has a metagame occurring with the manual and the very structure of the world. You find a foreboding library tower, now abandoned like most things in this world. Inside, somebody has been fiddling with and experimenting with the core gameplay objects, such as the Save Points and teleportation squares. In most games these would be merely abstract concepts, in the game but not "real" to the characters. Cloud Strife has no knowledge of saving the game when he's in Midgar. But in Tunic these objects have a physical reality now. Somebody is aware of them and their functions and is trying to unlock a deeper truth. During the course of the adventure, Fox-Link goes from a very Hyrulian overworld down into deep horrifying depths. You're literally exploring the mechanical depths of Tunic's interface. This whole world is a construction for a mysterious, nefarious purpose. 

Unfortunately, you never do get the confront the sinister architects of Tunic's universe. What you get instead is several difficult bosses, including a very challenging final boss that pushes your skills to the limit. I've talked a lot about Tunic in the last year, and a lot of people I know had difficulty with the combat. Somebody might say it's "Soulsy", but everything has some Souls DNA now. Tunic punishes your mistakes without much forgiveness. Also, the whole flow is tuned a bit strangely. The rhythms of your actions do not seem connect unless you lock onto enemies, which somehow makes the dodging and countering all connect much better. I love the boss fights, even the final boss, which took me days to beat. That victory was the most satisfying gaming accomplishment of the year for me. But winning is not the whole story. 

As I asked before, what game is Tunic? If you beat the boss, all you've done is complete a sequence of events pre-planned by whatever force has created this world. You can actually go further, you can find another depth to the mystery. I wish I could say I loved that element of Tunic as much as anything else. I greatly cherish the art style, the chill low-fi beats soundtrack, the cycle of exploration, and even growing my skills with the combat. However, once Tunic started moving into Fez or The Witness territory, it lost me. Those puzzles are too abstract for my brain. I would have needed to look online to complete all that.

I also feel like that's defeating the purpose. Tunic gives you all the resources you need to beat it and beat its meta-game. To just run your question by a search engine is destroying the mystery. The game is not merely the buttons you press to complete the mechanical challenge, Tunic is the knowledge you have and the knowledge do not have. I'm usually not a guy who cares at all about spoilers, however, once you're checking Youtube for hints, you're not really playing Tunic anymore. You're only playing half the game now.

(That said, if you need help, go get it. Fuck those "you cheated yourself" people. Tunic includes various accessibility options, including a No Fail mode. If you just want to enjoy the puzzles, you can make your fox invincible and have fun. Nobody is kink-shaming here, there's a reason I played Tunic and not Elden Ring.)

Tunic is the kind of experience that reminds us that games are objects with mass, constructed out of parts, not actually worlds. The magic is all only skin-deep. The illusion of a video game is that you press a button and the little guy in the game moves. You are led to believe the inputs come from you into the game, and you become the master making the decisions. However, what we see on the surface is just a single slice of a vast mechanical apparatus with all sorts of hidden functions and systems. There were decisions made about what you have access to and how you get them. The author's will is always here in the puzzle box they designed. The game was built for a purpose, and you're being guided towards it. Maybe those purposes are high-minded, maybe they're just innocently trying to entertain you, maybe their goals are unspeakable. However, somebody built this thing to do something to you. The final output is never the little guy winning their story. There is no little guy, they do not exist. The only true output is you, changed by the gaming experience.

Keep that in mind when you're playing in 2023. It's embarrassingly late to be saying this, but Happy New Year.

Top Games of 2022: No. 2 - Pokémon Scarlet

2. Pokémon Scarlet, dev. Game Freak

Wait, am I sure about this?

I was not originally to play this game. My feeling about Pokémon has been ambivalence at best for a long time now. I thought Pokémon Sword was extremely boring, and honestly was more more thrilled by Pokémon Moon. Let's Go Eevee was fantastic four years ago, but that almost does not count because it was a remake of Red and Blue. The reviews for the new games, Scarlet and Violet, were also quite poor. On Twitter, these games were receiving Cyberpunk 2077-levels of mockery. You do not need to look hard to find compilation videos of the most hilarious glitches. Really, Pokémon has not felt 100% healthy to me since X and Y on the 3DS almost a decade ago. I skipped the Gen 4 remakes, I skipped the Legends: Arceus game, and was probably going to skip Pokémon Scarlet too until... something happened...

And that something was Fuecoco. Who can say "no" to Fuecoco? It's a little baby gator with a big dumb mouth and a gormless expression indicating no intelligence of any kind. Fuecocos have never had a thought in their lives other than "I will bite you" or "I will give hugs before I bite you". They are wonderful. So Santa Claus brought me Pokémon Scarlet this Christmas because I was a good boy in 2022. Naturally Fuecoco had to be my starter. He is now my perfect first-born. I love my hopeless idiot son.

Fuecoco got me through the door, but if having a cute starter is all a Pokémon game needed, every one of these would be stone-cold classics. Gen 9 has a solid collection of great Pokémon like my chubby whale Clodsire and my hammer death girl Tinkaton. However, so did Gen 8 (I love you, Morepeko). No, something else was working here for me.

It was not even the open world focus this time. Or at least not entirely. Despite the game's reputation, I found that Pokémon Scarlet ran very well. I am not terribly picky about slow-down, and the only glitch I encountered was a single crash. My Switch is never docked anymore, so the handheld experience was more acceptable. Why would I need a turn-based game to run at 60 FPS? Frankly, I'm a bit disappointed, I could have used a laugh.

Still, if the general performance was fine, there were still issues. Scarlet's region, Paldea, is not exactly overflowing with beauty. This game was clearly compromised to fit on the Switch and only a handful of locations actually stand out to me. In addition, the structure is less free than promised. Yeah, you can go anywhere and do anything,, but you're not going to. This is still a stat-heavy RPG, so you're just going to complete the eighteen boss fights (eight gyms, five giant monsters, five Team Star leaders) in the order of their level. No point in skipping straight to the Ice Gym early when Grusha has an unbeatable statistical advantage over your level 6 Fuecoco. It also makes the towns less interesting when they're in no way major landmarks anymore, they lack special events or story moments. The real issue is that Pokémon's battle system feels slow and ancient compared to the attempts at modernity everywhere else. All the vast open adventuring is undercut when every battle has to be this slog of repeated text boxes and frustrating luck-based effects.

What the heck is Pokémon Scarlet doing so high on my list anyway? I had a lot of trouble figuring it out while playing. My argument so far shows why Scarlet should an Honorable Mention and nothing more. Am I sure that this is better than Pentiment?

Well, here's the thing: I beat Pokémon Scarlet and did not want to put it down. I went through all the post-game content I could find: re-beat all the gym leaders, and played two rounds of the bonus tournament arc. I wish they had announced DLC at the Nintendo Direct this past Wednesday so I could be playing more right now. Give me more Paldea!

Pokémon Scarlet feels like a proper adventure in a way the previous games just have not. Even if the open world concepts are undercooked, there is still a grandeur to being here in Paldea. Sword's open world sections were gray foggy emptiness, depressing, almost Stalker-like environment. In Paldea there's a dazzling wonder of just being out in the fields which are teaming with many forms of adorable life. You can march along, riding your living motorcycle, and pass by whole families of Psyducks in the river. Sure, the ecosystems are shallow, the wild Pokémon do not interact with each other, and it's really annoying to be riding along and accidentally touch a tiny nigh-invisible Nymble on the ground and suddenly have to fight an encounter. But... it's Pokémon all around! A splendor of cute little guys in all directions.

What helps too is that I actually came to really like the characters. Many of the side characters and rivals in the past decade have been these awful little brown-nosers who fuse themselves to your hip whether you want them there or not. Hop, leave me the heck alone, you creep me out. Whereas the rivals in Scarlet, other than Nemona, only warm up to you in time as you complete their quests. You're not just handed guys and told they're your best friends, you develop relationships with the rivals over the course of the campaign. You help Arven's dog, you fix Penny's issues with Team Star, and they both prove to be remarkably competent trainers too. The last act of this game sees you and your friends explore this exceptionally creepy deep crater called Area Zero, straight out of the anime Made in Abyss. This time it feels like The Zone intentionally. I was stunned to find I cared about this party of humans around me as much as I cared about the party of monsters. Even Nemona, who is love at first sight with you, has more to her than being too cheery and too supportive. She says she loves battling, she's Pokémon Goku, and she can back up that claim with a solid team. It also helps the story ends on a dramatic and intense final boss. The presentation in that last hour is top-notch.

Finally, Pokémon Scarlet has a ridiculously good soundtrack. Toby Fox helped work on it with GameFreak and the results are jaw-dropping. This is the best soundtrack of the year, maybe the best Pokémon has ever sounded. There are a dozen truly great songs in this score. Area Zero, the gym leader fights, the post-game tournament fights, Cascarrafa Town, Nemona's battle theme, PENNY'S BATTLE THEME, it goes on. It sounds like the Final Fantasy IV battle theme is sampled in the Elite Four music. I'm nerding out so hard about that!

Sure, there's a million more things you could want with Pokémon Scarlet: more interactions with the world, a battle system that does not need to remind you every motherfucking turn that its still raining, better frame rates, whatever. It's always nice to ask for more. But, ultimately, Pokémon Scarlet is the first time since maybe back on the Game Boy that Pokémon has felt like this vast world full of possibility for me. It feels alive again, free from the rigid patterns of structure that had grown stale in the Obama Administration. For the first time in forever, I'm exciting about where this series can go, versus dreading its next release.

Also, you can little picnics with your Pokémon anywhere and that's the best thing ever.

Top Games of 2022: No. 3 - Pentiment

3. Pentiment, dev. Obsidian Entertainment

Turns out Microsoft and their recently-purchased studios can still make games. Halo is a disaster, I don't know if we'll ever see Everwild again, and the jury is out - literally - on whether they'll ever own Call of Duty, but they made this! I'm not even being facetious, Pentiment is a game a giant trillion-dollar conglomerate can be proud of. Between Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush (which I hope to play soon), Microsoft is actually achieving the promises of Xbox Game Pass. It is creating a stable financial foundation in which smaller, more interesting, more artistically daring games can be made. Obsidian's developers confirmed that there was no world Pentiment exists in without Game Pass.

Personally I'm suspicious of Game Pass. A "Netflix for games" sounds great until your remember how the "Netflix for movies" is doing right now. Also, I like to own my games, even if "own" is an increasingly abstract claim since ownership is just a few values in the Steam Cloud code. If you want to not pay for games, visit your local library, you may be surprised how good the selection can be. I honestly am concerned about how long Xbox can continue on this path considering the gruesome, pointlessly self-destructive layoffs we saw just a couple weeks ago. But hey, even if that new Fable game is doomed, people will get their Starfield, and I'll get my Pentiment.

If you have read my GOTY lists in the past, you'll know I'm pretty horny for games like Pentiment. This is typically the kind of thing that wins that much-coveted No. 1 slot. Let us remember such past winners such as Night in the Woods, Disco Elysium, and Kentucky Route Zero. I love a narrative adventure game, especially ones with Big Thoughts that resonate with how I'm feeling at that particular time. However, I can't be boring and predicable, even to myself, and after much painful discussion, I decided there two games I loved more in 2022. Pentiment is an incredible game, exhaustively researched, full of hundreds of unique characters across multiple moments in their lives. It has interesting ideas and questions about the act of deciding one's history. Simply put, it rules hard. Do not think the number in my post title means anything at all.

I'm gonna shift into middle school five paragraph essay mode for a moment here. Merriam-Webster defines "Pentiment" or "Pentimento" as meaning "a reappearance in a painting of an original drawn or painted element which was eventually painted over by the artist". This is useful to me because I had no idea what the title of this game meant. Its title is never used in Pentiment's script, which is pretty hard to do since this game has ten of thousands of lines of dialog and has things to say about a thousand topics.  If you want to get into an argument about the continued relevance of ancient Greco-Roman medical texts, this is your scene. However, the "pentiment" is still a very useful idea to keep in mind when you consider the themes of this project.

Our protagonist is Andreas Maler, an apprentice in 1500s Bavaria, working on his "masterpiece", literally the work that will allow him to enter the guilds as a Master Artist. He is an outsider in this fictional town of Tassing, which is ruled by a grand medieval double monastery, Keirsau Abbey. By 1518, where Pentiment starts, this monastery is already a relic in its time, and your work of illuminated manuscripts is approaching obsolescence thanks to the adoption of the printing press. The game itself takes on that antiquated style, as every character is drawn like the 2D figures of medieval Bibles. However, this is not a game about medieval times, it's about the end of that period. Tassing is a bubble of the past even now, since the Early Modern Era is creeping in on all sides. Martin Luthor is causing a ruckus, proto-scientific ideas are developing, and the old power of the Church over society is breaking down. During the course of the game, set across several decades, you see how the worldview shifts.

This is represented in a million little details, but most prominent is the sense of time. In the early chapters, the parts of the day are measured by the movement of the Sun, and by the traditions of the Abbey, such as midday services. You need to consider such a thing as "Vespers". In the last chapter, Tessing has built itself a large public clock, so characters now imagine their day as we do, in twenty-four uniform divisions of time, "hours".

Andreas is the character we control and the viewpoint through which we discover Tassing. We make our mark on this place and its many petty rural politics and the Europe-wide grievances about religion, governance, and peasant freedom. He's our amateur detective, a learned figure with unique access to the nobles, the monastery, and the villagers. This is a murder-mystery game and through Andreas you must solve multiple cases, trying your best to help as many people as possible. However, Andreas is not really the star of Pentiment. That top billing should really go to Tassing itself.

Many might be disappointed learn that ultimately what you do does not really "matter". As in what you do will not cause the story to move in vastly different ways. A lot of games like this, especially the old Telltale model, really wanted to push the whole fantasy of choose-your-own adventure freedom. (And notably it was all fluff, Telltale never actually achieved that.) Andreas is not going to stop the flow of time to bring illuminations back into popularity, nor will he suddenly turn Tassing into a modern democracy or socialist utopia. He's not Geralt deciding the fate of everybody in The Witcher 3. You're just one guy. I failed practically every dice roll to get people to give up information to me, my Andreas was a dick, yet the story moved on basically the same as if I had charmed them all over. 

For the most part, the cases are unsolvable, any of the suspects could have done the crime, you never find 100% perfect evidence for any murder. I ended up just fingering the biggest asshole in the line-up. If all you want is a puzzle, you will be disappointed. The cases are just methods by which you explore, learn, and develop a relationship with the real star of Pentiment, Tassing itself. By the of the game, in the final "case", you're making a much more profound and meaningful impact on the future than a simple decision of "did the widow, the thief, or the monk do it?"

Tassing is the pentimento of Pentiment. This is a place whose history goes back thousands of years. This is a town whose foundations go back to Antiquity, they're actually building structures on top of Roman stone. You can see the ancient aqueducts in the background. The old men of the village pass down folktales of a pre-Roman era and spit on their memory as violent conquerors. The saints of the local monastery have a mythology suspiciously similar to that of the pagan legends whispered in the woods. This is a place that has been re-imagined a dozen times, and the past has never disappeared. It's always hiding, still visible under the attempts to paint over it. So what really matters? The Germanic story, the Roman story, the Catholic story, whatever is coming next that we call "modern"? We see yet another revolution during the course of Pentiment, and it is a very difficult question who won and who lost. Life is rarely that black and white.

Pentiment ends up not being merely a historical game, it is a game that asks you to do the work of the historian. Historians do not just tell you what happened, they take evidence and sources and build a narrative around it. It is an act of interpretation, argumentation, it is finding values and meaning between what we know or what we think we know. Our knowledge is always going to be insufficient. You'll never know every little detail of what happened in Tassing. But you can decide what it means to you and what is most worthy of celebration.

Top Games of 2022: No. 4 - Live a Live

4. Live a Live, dev. Square Enix & Historia

I've played a JRPG or two in my day. You may have heard this about me. For years now I've heard talk of a legend of a game, Live a Live. This game comes from one of Square's most fruitful moments of creative output, the late-SNES/Super Famicom era. It was one of the unfortunate titles sandwiched between the legendary Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, thus just missed the boat to be released outside of Japan. That made it join other niche titles like Bahamut's Lagoon or Terrangima or for a long time, even Final Fantasy V, as this obscure marvel that only gamers with emulators or working knowledge of Japanese could have access to. Live a Live was compared a lot to Chrono Trigger specifically, since they were both games set across a variety of different eras and different tones. There were not a lot of RPGs in that era to send its players back to Flinstonian Dinosaur Times.

I foolishly never go around to Live a Live until now. I had always assumed that Live a Live was just a curiosity. A truly great game, would have gotten an export. How good could some silly game be with cowboys and whatever? I was wrong. Live a Live is great game, a mini-masterpiece. 1994 lives again on our Nintendo Switch. We're bringing back "Cotton Eye Joe", The Magic School Bus, and Planet Hollywood restaurants. Turns out the Nineties ruled. All we need to relive the Nine Inch Nails era is a new coat of HD-2D paint. Live a Live might now look a lot like Octopath Traveler, but this game is vastly superior.

What I love about the SNES-era in JRPGs is that you can already feel the rumbles of a revolution to come. Square starts out with Final Fantasy I in 1987 as this nearly plotless Dungeons & Dragons campaign on your TV screen. It's a simple crunchy game of simulated fantasy adventuring. The player fills in the story as much the game. There aren't even characters, you just have four blank slates you get to name. But as technology advanced, you can see them growing less and less interested in tabletop modules and more interested in what this system can be as a storytelling engine. Final Fantasy VI was setting the stage for the PS1-era of cinematic adventures. It pushed the SNES to its very technical limits to tell a grand epic. Live a Live feels like another test of what RPGs can be.

Can RPGs be westerns? Can they be Ridley Scott's Alien? Can they be Street Fighter II? Live a Live answers "yes" to all these questions. Therefore, it is not really one game as much as eight or nine short games all with their own unique style and tone, all of which you can finish in a few hours. It does not return to the classic sword and sorcery origins of RPGs until the very final level. And when we finally get there, Live a Live pulls a cruel deconstruction of all the tropes of the genre. It is almost like the game is outright rejecting its roots: "RPGs can be anything now, and we don't need to be that".

The variety is one of the best elements of this experience. Live a Live is eight stories all with different methods of gameplay and focus. Pogo, our darling little caveman boy, has an adventure through an overworld and random encounters. Meanwhile, Cube, a spherical robot in the far future, goes through a horror game, so it is mostly all cutscenes, with only one true RPG encounter at the end. Masaru's chapter is a Fighting Game, so it's just a boss rush. Along the way you'll encounter all sorts of different events. The Wild West level is about preparing ambushes for outlaws. There's a level with psychics in the near-future where you get a giant robot and a fittingly glorious tokusatsu theme song. (Sung by anime opening legend, Hironobu Kageyama, no less!) Then in the final level where all your character team up, there's dungeons and a non-linear world to explore in any order.

Another really awesome thing about Live a Live is the combat. This is not your traditional row of four heroes on the left and monsters on the right. Instead this game uses a psuedo-tactical system, on a 7x7 grid. It is remarkably varied too, with positioning being very important. The martial arts stages are all about swiping at enemies, then moving just out of range. It feels much more like an actual tug-of-war hit-and-run battle than you'd think turn-based tactics can achieve. The big high noon showdown is all about keeping the boss bottled up in the top left corner, knocking him back into place, so he cannot get into position to use his insta-kill Gatling Gun. The Prehistory levels are about controlling the field by dropping poison all over your enemy's feet. Then when we're back in medieval high fantasy, it just feels like a regular RPG battle but on a grid, as the entire level is a return to classic form.

Also, every one of these chapters ends with a huge boss fight with incredible music. "Megalomania" is the track, and I'd share a link to it if Square Enix were not downright fascist when it comes to keeping their music off Youtube lately. You gotta sell Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line copies somehow, I suppose. (I actually might buy that whole game and the DLC just to have "Megalomania" in my house.)

To me, Live a Live just feels like a game that had to be fun to make. It has infinite possibilities to be anything. If you were there in Square Enix offices in the mid-90s, you could pitch anything, any crazy idea at all, they could put it in this game. That's a level of creative freedom I cannot imagine exists anymore when modern games take five years and tens of millions of dollars to produce. We will not get get tokusatsu romps and cowboys in Final Fantasy XVI. Finally, after all these years, Live a Live has regained its place in the great history of RPGs.