I’ve managed to stick to a nice, predictable routine for most of this year – setting aside a little time each morning to keep up with daily quests and the like in various live games, and then maybe giving myself a few hours in the evening to unpack a more narrative-based game. There isn’t much of a moral to this story, just that I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on the time requirements of some games – thinking about how much of your life a game can justify taking up.
I suppose a lot of the big news in videogames came from mergers and acquisitions? I’ve started listening to the Virtual Economy podcast this year, and it’s been a good way of keeping on top of things like the ongoing Microsoft-Activision court cases and the latest events around unionisation.
Oh, and – hey! – while I’m recommending things, I’ll give a fistful of thumbs up to Tim Rogers’ ongoing series of video essays on YouTube. I spent a week watching his review of Boku no Natsuyasumi in hour-long chunks and I thought it was wonderful.
For me personally, the biggest event of 2022 was that I moved house. This should have no bearing on you, dear reader, except that at some point during the move – and I think the emotionally healthy course of action is to not dwell on the details – my Raspberry Pi disappeared, and I lost what would have been a nice and convenient emulator box to set up in my new living room. As a result, this year’s list does not include a bunch of obscure arcade games and fan-translations of PS1 games, which I would otherwise have been playing.
Yakuza 6
Yakuza 6 feels like another attempt at telling the same sort of “Kiryu retires” story that the previous four or five games have tried to tell, but this time it feels like it has a lot more weight behind. There are two big threads running through the main plot, one of which is on par with Yakuza 2’s ‘solid gold replica of Osaka castle filled with ninjas and tigers’ in terms of silliness, but aside from that I think it lands a very solid story of a middle-aged man reassessing his life and values.
There are a few key elements working together that really hit the mark for me. The other core plot thread is about Haruka becoming an adult and Kiryu realising their relationship has changed over the years, and the minigames are much more squarely focused on realistic middle-aged man-of-leisure activities like fishing, chatting with the regulars at your local bar, and joining an amateur sports team – it all stacks up to paint a picture of a guy who finally feels ready to commit to retirement. It also feels a lot more generally scaled-back compared to the densely overstuffed Yakuza 5 – which I suspect relates to the transition to a new game engine, but in the context of a story about settling down and living a more peaceful life just seems to support the theme further.
I started (and have yet to finish) writing a post to help new players decide which Yakuza game to play first, and one thing I want to make clear is that the story of Yakuza 6 means it’s probably the worst choice for your first Yakuza game – I’d suggest playing at least one of the early games (eg. Yakuza Kiwami 2) and Yakuza 5 before you start this one, so you have time to familiarise yourself with Kiryu’s life and relationships before seeing how things change in the final game.
Pokémon Unite
I played a little Pokémon Unite on and off all year, but I also splashed out some gems on the Season 4 reward pass and played it quite heavily for that month.
I still enjoy this game, but they’ve been introducing new Pokémon at a rapid rate this year, and for someone like me who plays quite casually it means I’ll log in and get ripped apart by a handful of new characters I have no understanding of (eg. Buzzswole has been my nemesis this year – a sort of melee tank with lifesteal, who just seems to dash in through my attacks, pummels me to death in a matter of seconds and heals any damage I did in the process). I find that very off-putting! I also think the number of events and metagame systems at play are a bit dizzying – I’m prepared to take a moment to dig through it all for the sake of research, but I don’t think I would bother if I was just playing for fun.
It feels like it has become a game which is designed for dedicated players, rather than attracting new and casual players. I don’t love that, but I can also see why it might be the rational thing to do at this stage in the game’s lifecycle.
Shenmue 3
I joined the Kickstarter for this many years ago, and now that I’ve finally played through Shenmue 2 I felt ready to dive in. It reminds me of Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection in a roundabout way – the C&C remasters purposefully stayed true to the design of the original games (with only a few modern fixes and tweaks) and it feels great – it’s an ‘honest’ representation of what those games were actually like. Shenmue 3 on the other hand seems to purposefully stay true to the design of the earlier games in the series, but… because this is a wholly new sequel rather than a remake, it just doesn’t feel right to me.
I should highlight some good things. It often looks beautiful, and the Shenmue style of adventure – walking around, talking to people, and doing menial jobs to earn money and then spending it on collecting capsule toys is still good, chill fun. The story picks up where we left off in rural China, and then moves to a lively riverside city in the second half of the game. It fulfilled my need for some virtual tourism, which has been a running theme in my game choices during the Covid pandemic.
Most of my problems lie with the control scheme and UI – the whole game feels very slow and clunky by modern standards, and it is an authentic recreation of the kind of slow clunkyness that the original games had, but they had the excuse of being new experiments in making a fully 3D RPG and that just isn’t the situation anymore. Also, the combat controls feel worse than ever, somehow – which feels particularly jarring when the Yakuza games have been refining this sort of thing for decades now.
In short, it feels like Yu Suzuki has made a fan sequel to his own game – it sticks slavishly to Dreamcast-era design decisions, seemingly for the sake of continuity, and ignores 20 intervening years of collective learning. Nevertheless I have no regrets about funding it, and would throw money at Shenmue 4 as soon as the opportunity arises.
Fire Emblem: Conquest
With some new Fire Emblem games being announced, I started to feel the itch to push some moody teenagers around on a grid, and it occurred to me that I had an unfinished game of Fire Emblem: Conquest sitting in my 3DS.
I didn’t enjoy it so much! The whole reason I bounced off it a few years ago was that the story is packed full of fantasy anime nonsense – you have a maid who is secretly a dragon in human form; your character was born to one royal family but then kidnapped and raised by another royal family, and now everyone on both sides of the war keep yelling emotionally about how you are family, etc etc.
In contrast with Fire Emblem: Awakenings, I didn’t like many of the characters either. One of the royal families is just comically sadistic and evil, while the other are supposed to be good, honest nobles who have sadly been pushed too far and now seem dedicated to genociding their enemies in retaliation. None of it really landed well for me – it all feels very cartoonish and silly. Two thumbs up for Effie the armour knight lady though.
Nevertheless, I slogged through to the end and then bought a cheap-ish copy of Fire Emblem: Three Houses – although I think that was mostly just to give myself a newer Fire Emblem to play instead of this.
Wordle
I don’t really have a lot to say about this (especially after I wrote about it on last year’s list). I don’t think Wordle is a particularly interesting game, but I do think it joins Flappy Bird as a good case study in how a small, simple game can make an astonishing amount of money, if you stumble upon the right combination of taste and luck. I am doggedly sticking with it until I complete a whole year’s worth of games and I kinda wish I had stopped 11 months ago.
Total War: Warhammer III
This was my first big ‘new’ game of the year, and I liked it! I’ve read a lot of criticism of this game online, and I think most of it stems from the design of the core ‘Realms of Chaos’ campaign, so mostly I want to talk about that.
The Total War games are a sort of grand strategy series where you jump between two distinct modes of play – a turn-based empire management mode that plays out on a giant world map, and a realtime battle mode where you command a single army of troops fighting for control of a particular location.
The problem is – as with most big, long strategy games – in competitive multiplayer campaigns, the players tend to separate out into winners and losers long before the end of the campaign. There are positive feedback loops to reward players for their successes, so players who do well in the early stages of the campaign can snowball their advantage through the rest of the game, while players who do badly can find themselves at a miserable disadvantage that they simply can’t recover from. This then pushes the losing players towards quitting the game early, which is usually a bad experience for everyone.
So, in Warhammer III, the main campaign features an unusual victory condition where players must send an army into the Realms of Chaos – a sort of twisting, unstable hell-dimension filled with demons drawn from your nightmares – and complete a series of metagame challenges themed around Warhammer’s four main Chaos Gods. The key thing here is that each faction can only send one army to complete these challenges, so the advantages to having a huge empire are mostly nullified – it’s perfectly viable to hold a small, tightly defended territory in the corner of the map and maintain just one good army to send through the portals.
In my opinion, this is good! It makes the campaign flow more like a Eurogame, in that it keeps players engaged even if they are losing the race to build their empire – it is still possible to find yourself in an unwinnable situation, but it’s a lot harder to reach that state. It feels to me like it was designed with this kind of PvP campaign experience in mind, and I think it works… but…. I think most Total War fans expected the game to be designed with a single-player experience in mind, and those players want the positive feedback loops and escalating power imbalance that come with a traditional grand strategy game. There are mods (which may have become official campaign options by now) which simply turn off the Realms of Chaos challenges completely and force the game into being a traditional longwinded slugfest, and I think it’s definitely good to provide that option but in my opinion it sounds less fun as far as the multiplayer game goes.
Post-release they’ve added some more content and refined the new siege mechanics (Warhammer III introduces a new system where you can build and repair defensive structures during a real-time battle, and basically nobody likes the feeling of cannon towers suddenly popping into existence in an otherwise ‘realistic’ battle simulator) and the much-anticipated ‘Immortal Empires’ campaign – a globe-spanning mega-campaign that is available as free DLC for players who own all three Total War: Warhammer games. I’ve only played a few single-player games of Immortal Empires so far, and I did enjoy myself, but it also felt a bit less sophisticated to simply swallow up territory and grind down my computer-controlled neighbours. I think it’s a mode best suited to the kind of competitive strategy fans who disliked the ‘Realms of Chaos’ campaign.
If you’re curious about this series, I’d probably recommend buying the second game to try it out, then the first game, and then Warhammer III – the first two games usually sell for £10 or less in the sales, and if you’ve never played one before then it’s probably worth testing the water rather than diving straight into the most expensive option. If you’ve got a friend who wants to play Warhammer III, then start there instead and consider buying the earlier games to pad it out. I think the product strategy of this series is a work of genius – each game contains a different set of four playable races with around three distinct leaders per race, and each game in the series is backwards-compatible with all the previous races and leaders you own, so even though you might never play the earlier games, they still hold value as a kind of premium-size DLC pack for the later games. I am frequently astonished that other developers aren’t trying to copy this model!
There’s also dozens of smaller DLC packs which add more races and leaders, but I would suggest trying a few different base characters and developing a sense of what playstyles you’re interested in before deciding which ones to buy.
Destiny 2: The Witch Queen
I’m having an ‘off’ year from Destiny, by which I mean I bought and completed the new campaign and only progressed through each season pass up to rank 35 (the point at which you unlock the season-exclusive Exotic weapon).
I didn’t enjoy the Witch Queen campaign very much, largely because of the amount of grind involved in some of the quests – the lowest point being having to replay the new Wellspring activity maybe five or six times to get a particular random loot drop, twice per week, each week, for four weeks. I’ve also just never been a huge fan of the Hive in general (the Hive being Destiny’s spooky, necromancy-themed aliens – purveyors of shrieking and bone armour and ‘magic’) and this was a strictly Hive-themed story. I did like the overall structure of the campaign though, and I feel like Bungie have made some good improvements in how they present different difficulty modes and rotating activities.
I didn’t buy any season passes, so I wasn’t really allowed to engage in the seasonal content very much. The only time I felt any regrets about this was during the Season of Plunder – I really liked the sound of doing some silly space-pirate nonsense, boarding enemy ships and levelling up my crew and so on, but not so much that I was willing to pay more money for it.
ActRaiser
ActRaiser is a game that I used to see a lot of screenshots of as a youth reading early-90’s games magazines, but it is a lot more interesting and weird than I realised. Not unlike Total War, it’s a game that jumps between two different modes of play – a sort of arcade hack-and-slash platform game that sits alongside games like Rastan or the early Castlevania games, and a combined city-building god sim and top-down shooter mode which plays a bit like a fusion of Black & White and Gauntlet (??!)
To try and explain that a bit more clearly: In the city-building stages you control an angel who flies around in the sky above an classical-era city. Monsters spawn from nests that are hidden around the map and move in to attack the city, and your primary job is to fly around and kill the monsters to protect the people who live there. However, you also have a secondary job in steering the city’s development – like choosing which map tile the city should expand onto next, and clearing out land so that there’s room to do so. There are even some little story quests to dip into, which play out as realtime scripted sequences on the map – like helping a villager build a boat and go on a little adventure to rescue their missing brother. It’s an unusual fusion of gameplay styles even before you consider that it comes sandwiched in between hack-and-slash platform game stages.
They just don’t make ’em like this any more! At least not with this kind of budget – this kind of relative position in the market, for something so weird (this may be an appropriate place to note that Yuzo Koshiro worked on the soundtrack). I sat down to play it out of curiosity one evening and became so hooked that I stayed up hours later than usual to finish it. Was it good? Maybe not. But I found it very interesting, and that’s something I place a lot of value in.
And in case you’re curious, people do still make ’em exactly like this any more – I looked around and found SolSeraph, which seems to be a sort of modern fan sequel, although it looks like it maybe has the same issues as Shenmue 3 in sticking a bit too closely to its source inspiration.
I suppose what I’m saying is that people shouldn’t make ’em like this any more, but the “city-building god sim slash little guy action game” concept deserves to be explored in more depth. Or that they should make ’em like this any more, but in the sense of cobbling together bits of other games in strange new combinations – ActRaiser is interesting precisely because it isn’t taking all its cues from a previously established game, but making another game in exactly the same style loses a lot of the magic.
Advance Wars By Web
A friend and I have played a string of Advance Wars By Web games for most of the year. We ended with a running score of about 10 – 12 in his favour.
I love Advance Wars, but I don’t feel like it’s very well balanced as a multiplayer game. I don’t think it’s trying to be – AWBW is kind of a weird, unintended implementation of the Advance Wars experience, which (I would guess) normally only envisions PvP battles as a one-off ‘local play’ match between friends. The character abilities are hugely imbalanced, and I think you need to make good use of AWBW‘s options for banning and restricting units to make the game feel good.
I want to focus this analysis on Advance Wars By Web specifically rather than Advance Wars generally, so I think my main thought is that they should take all the basic rules and gameplay and develop their own set of characters and units based on making a better PvP experience. Make Neotanks worse. Let Airports produce Parachute infantry that can be transported by planes. Change terrain tiles under certain conditions. Let players customise their CO in some ways. Create semi-randomised map playlists so players don’t always know what to prepare for. Add mission sub-objectives that provide little bonuses during a battle, or a whole new victory condition system that prevents games from getting stuck in long, dull stalemates. These are just random ideas off the top of my head, but there are lots of things in Advance Wars that could stand to be experimented with and improved.
People are drawn to AWBW because they want to play Advance Wars, so there are obvious reasons not to mess with that formula. But Advance Wars is not a series that has been designed with this mode of play in mind, and maybe if someone dug around in that space they might end up making something better?
To Be Or Not To Be
I’m a fan of Ryan North’s writing and I wanted a simple, funny Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style of game to play with a friend one afternoon in the summer, so we tried To Be or Not To Be – a sort of postmodern reimagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
We finished the game quite quickly, mostly because we were drawn towards choosing the silliest options available, which is why we ended up playing as the ghost of Hamlet’s father and went around blowing people up by manifesting inside their bodies.
I feel like that was kind of a bad experience? Maybe it would be better to force the player into playing a more straight-laced route through the story on their first attempt, and then offer this kind of path later once they’ve already explored the other routes a little? But I think this game is a digital recreation of a printed book, and adding that sort of logic would mean moving away from the original structure, which opens up numerous cans of worms.
It was funny, but we also ran through it too quickly for it to leave a thorough impression.
Blood Bowl III (Beta)
I played one match in the Blood Bowl III beta and it was the opposite of ‘running through it too quickly’.
It’s Blood Bowl. It’s fine. I still feel like I’d prefer a FUMBBL style view that shows a simple 2D board with icons for players and skips all the animations – I want something like a Clubhouse Games version of Blood Bowl where I can focus on making tactical decisions at high speed, rather than having a spectator-friendly experience. My single match seemed to stretch on for far too long, in spite of the fact that I often ran out of time to make all my moves.
The initial list of teams feels disappointingly short, and it just makes me want to wait a few years and pick up the ‘final’ edition of the game with all the DLC content, in some future Steam sale. On a related topic… I am very curious to see how the new season pass fares! It lands a bit too close to my professional functions for me to share my thoughts at length, but it seems like they may be asking players to play a lot more Blood Bowl than I expect they would enjoy.
As for myself: Rather than play Blood Bowl III, I’ll be using the time to paint up some teams for the tabletop game.
Yakuza Zero
After finishing Yakuza 6 I spent some time working on a post to help new players decide which Yakuza game to play first, and somewhere in the middle of writing that I realised that I did own a copy of Yakuza Zero that I had not played. So after suitably cleansing my palette, I made a return trip to Kamurocho and ticked this one off the list.
Yakuza Zero seems to be a favourite among newer fans, but I actually thought it was one of the weaker games in the series. I can see that it maybe came along in the right place at the right time to ride the wave of the new popularity the series has enjoyed in the PS4 era, but it feels less innovative than each the PS3 Yakuza games.
It is still a good game. It sticks out from the other games thanks to it being set during the 1980’s bubble economy, and the concept of ‘wealth’ runs right through every branch of the game design. Basically everyone in the game seems incredibly rich, including you – it basically has the same sort of economy design as other Yakuza games, where you beat up ruffians in the street, take their money and use it to buy bento boxes and bottled energy drinks at convenience stores, except you very quickly become so rich that item prices no longer have any real meaning. Your attacks are accompanied by a new VFX effect that sprays fistfuls of cash money into the air whenever you strike an opponent. Kiryu’s main side-quest involves buying up trillions of yen worth of real estate around the city, and nobody finds this strange.
All in all, it feels like a sort of fan-service game designed to give players a fresh slice of Yakuza without needing any prior knowledge. Maybe that player is you! It’s a perfect valid choice to be your first Yakuza game, but I would advise against it being your only Yakuza game.
Splatoon 3
The most common criticism I’ve heard about Splatoon 3 is that it’s fundamentally very similar to Splatoon 2. Speaking as someone who never played Splatoon 2, I didn’t have a problem with that. I’ve been playing this quite a lot since it came out – partly just to give it a fair shake and chew through its oddly unmonetised season pass, and partly so I can build a wardrobe of good equipment I can use when the time comes to play with my Splatoon-obsessed Nephew.
The core game is still fun, but I feel like there’s still a lot of weakness around the character loadout and metagame systems. There are more tools to refine your skills now – if you are willing to put in a lot of time to grind for skill fragments – but the weapon and equipment kits still feel restrictive. I’ve mostly settled into using the Dapple Dualies, because the superjump beacon and the Tacticooler makes it as much of a ‘support’ class kit as you’re going to find. They seem to be carefully rationing out a few new kits each season, so perhaps more interesting options will pop up over the coming years.
I played through the single-player adventure (although I draw the line at replaying every level with every available weapon option) and mostly had a good time, except for a few key levels where you have to zip along grind rails and shoot floating targets within strict time windows. I liked the final boss, which brought back memories of the ending of Bayonetta. I think the co-op horde mode (Salmon Run) is probably the thing I would be most interested in – shades of the old Mass Effect 3 multiplayer mode – except for the fact that it randomises your equipment during each game, which I despise.
I think a lot of my complaints about the game can be excused on the grounds of it being a simplified team shooter aimed at kids, and that’s good and fine and I don’t think they should drastically change it, but that doesn’t really get away from the fact that I’m an old man who is used to playing team-based shooters with more depth. I guess I’m saying I’m glad it exists but it’s still not really for me. Is there a gap in the market for a sort of Team Fortress Babies game? Or is that, perhaps… Overwatch?
New Horizons (Uncharted Waters II)
Similar to ActRaiser, I kicked this off on a whim while looking for something unusual to play on my SNES Mini. I do remember trying it before many years ago and bouncing straight off within a few minutes, but this time I dug deeper – once I got over the initial hump and figured out the basics of sailing and trading, I was away.
Basically what you’ve got here is a freelance trading-and-piracy simulator set during the Age of Discovery. You can buy ships, customise them a little, hire a crew, perhaps build a fleet, load them up with guns, vittles and trade goods, and then sail around looking for exotic markets, lost villages, or stray ships to prey upon. There are a number of interesting game systems running in parallel, and it’s mostly just left up to you to decide how you want to play the game.
I say “mostly” because you have to play as one of six main characters, and each character has their own particular storyline and skillset which skews them towards a particular style of play. I was playing as the young merchant Ali Vezas of the Ottoman Empire, who has a natural aptitude for haggling that made it a lot easier to buy low and sell high. I found the trading mechanics very easy to get to grips with… perhaps a little too easy – I never really felt challenged by the game, I merely had to sink enough time into running my little trade route (coffee and carpets around the Mediterranean, silver and ginger around Asia, and always investing money in West Africa markets on my way past until I unlocked cheap sources of gold) and make sure I had enough supplies to survive the long journeys.
The other characters include a treasure hunter, a British naval officer who is sent to drive the Spanish out of the Caribbean, a cartographer who wants to produce the first complete map of the world, a pirate lady seeking revenge for the death of her brother, and a gambler desperate to pay off his overwhelming debts. I thought it was very good that they all engage in all the same overlapping game systems, but with unique strengths and weaknesses that change the tone of the game completely.
It’s a bit like if you started a game of Skyrim, but where each of the player races came with preset skill packages and their own unique core quest – if you’re a Nord, you’re the Dragonborn and you’re going to kill that bad dragon dude; if you’re an Imperial, you’re a soldier who is destined to rise through the ranks and win the war; if you’re an Altmer, you are specifically there to take part in that weird subplot about the Thalmor embassy trying to stir up civil discontent in the region (etc). Stamping these unique stories onto specific characters means you can replay the same game through these different lenses, settle into different balances between the various gameplay systems, and come away at the end with different experiences of the same game.
Pokémon Violet
I wasn’t planning to buy into the new Pokémon game so soon, except that I happened to find myself with a little store credit just a few weeks before it came out, so I ended up pre-ordering it.
It’s received a lot of criticism online, and I think much of it is overstated. There are a lot of graphical glitches out in the world – geometry flickering or popping in unexpectedly, low frame rate animations, and so on – but I don’t feel like these are game-breaking problems. It does often look quite ugly compared to games like Breath of the Wild or Xenoblade Chronicles 3, but it isn’t always fair to compare different games made by different developers with different budgets. I do share the feeling that it would look a lot better if they’d left it in in the oven for a few months to polish the textures and lighting, and do more optimisation, but… well, who are we to judge the decisions people make when we don’t understand the circumstances they were in?
Personally, I’m looking at this game in the context of the evolution of the series. If you consider the world of Sword & Shield there was a messy structural divide between a traditional kind of Pokémon map (following a linear path from town to town along corridor-like nature trails – as was the situation in every prior Pokémon game) and the wide-open space of the Wild Area. The two expansion packs that followed put a heavier focus on more Wild Area style gameplay, and now Scarlet & Violet has come out featuring nothing but a Wild Area style open world.
Game Freak have been designing Pokémon games within a well-established framework for decades now, and I think Scarlet & Violet represent the biggest swing at reinventing the series since at least X & Y. I like that you can freely explore the world, and see Pokémon bumbling through the fields around you. There’s a lot of scope for weird little discoveries and Pokémon Snap-like secret events that would fit the spirit of the series perfectly, but – as far as I can tell – the game doesn’t really take advantage of.
The single worst thing about this game in my opinion is the legendary flying motorbike Pokémon that you receive right at the start of the game. You need to progress through one of the game’s three main questlines to unlock all of your mount’s traversal abilities, but it’s very clear that the game world is designed with those abilities in mind – essentially, they turn the world map into something more like a platform game. The width of every river, the height of every cliff, the location of key items, are all defined by your mount’s movement speed, jump height, glide range, and so on. People complain about how weird and unnatural the cliffs look, but it seems to me that they’ve been unavoidably designed that way because otherwise you could jump over many more barriers, earlier in the game.
What’s more, I think a lot of the complaints about the visual quality of the map are related to the fact that you are usually looking down at the world while gliding through the air at high speed. If you just make a personal vow to not summon your mount and walk from town to town on foot – in the traditional manner of a Pokémon Master – I think the game world actually starts to improve a lot! Trees and buildings become much more effective at blocking your line of sight, wild Pokémon look larger and more charismatic, and the sheer fact you are moving so much more slowly means that the pop-in issues are less obvious.
I know this might sound like I’m saying “you can improve the visual experience by choosing not to use a core feature” but I also happen to think that it gets closer to the spirit of the series. Moving to an open world map allows for a much better sense of exploration and being immersed in the wonders of the natural world – consider the young Satoshi Tajiri, scurrying through the forests near his home in search of insects to catch – but being able to fly around on a rocket-powered motorbike horse feels like kinda the opposite of that?? I feel like it would be much more appropriate to stick to walking around, using eco-friendly public transport to fast-travel between towns, eventually unlocking a bicycle or a folding canoe or something to broaden your options, and riding around on Pokémon only as a late-game replacement for other tools you already have access to.
I think these games represent a worthy milestone on how the Pokémon games are evolving. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to adapting the series for an open world – I think the overall model should be that there’s a network of relatively safe paths that lead from town to town, but if you venture off the paths there are dark forests and caves and suchlike where stronger, rarer Pokémon can be found (as opposed to the current model, which seems to divide the map into a series of large regions, and each region having a fairly uniform power level). Nothing in this game hits the same sensation of wonder and discovery that Mewtwo’s cave held in Pokémon Red & Blue, or piecing together gossip and rumours to discover the secret Clefairy ritual on Mt Moon in Pokémon Gold & Silver.
At their core, Pokémon games should be easy, gentle games with optimistic, blue-skied stories about being a small child in a rural town, catching the bus on your own for the first time, or poking around in forests in search of weird-looking bugs. They can also be games about resurrecting a Tyrannosaurus from a fossil you found at the bottom of a cave, or climbing to the top of an ancient mountain to battle God and capture her in a plastic ball. Structuring the map so it supports these different kinds of experience with a sensible gradient running between them sounds difficult! I felt satisfied with Pokémon Violet, but I also choose to hope that they improve on the formula a lot in the next game.
FFXIV: Endwalker
I noticed a free play event was scheduled just before Christmas, so somewhere between finishing work and going off to visit family and friends I squeezed in one intense weekend fighting (*checks notes*) interdimensional wizards from the past who are using a colony of rabbits on the moon to summon a god and destroy reality (?)
I have almost no idea what is happening in Final Fantasy XIV any more, but I do know that I got about 60% of the way through this expansion in four days, and that’s not bad.
I didn’t really have a problem with the new system of using AI bots to instantly fill out a party to tackle dungeons, but in comparison to that, the wait to fill out an 8-player Trials party seemed excruciating at times. I remember spending over an hour in a queue to fight Zodiark one morning – walking round other areas of the game to collect aether currents while I waited – and ended up quitting the game before it was finished. Basically there are certain moments in the main quest where you can only progress if you jump in the matchmaker at certain times of day, and that’s very inconvenient when you’re trying to be a freeloader and finish the game within a four-day window.
I didn’t enjoy the new map environments as much as I did in Shadowbringers, but perhaps it just set a high bar with its weird negative-world aesthetic. I did enjoy visiting the moon, although looking across the lunar landscape stirs up a distractingly thick haze of memories of Mass Effect and Super Mario Odyssey. I thought the dog was silly. I liked the rabbits. My favourite new guys were the Lunar Sabotenders – tall, spindly, Slenderman-like Cactuars that amble around and do yoga on the moon.
I don’t like that they changed my Ninja class actions a little, again. I feel like the changes themselves were probably inevitable and for the best, but… I just think it would be nice to have some sort of playable patch notes tutorial system that helps you understand what has changed and how that will impact your rotations and stuff. It was a lot less disruptive than my experience last year, at least.
Oh, and – yet again – the worst moments in this expansion are the bits where you have to do a solo duty as a different character, and often (for me, at least) a totally unfamiliar class. If it’s really crucially important to the narrative that I see Thancred go on a secret mission, or watch Alphinaud lose a fight against a giant robot or whatever, I wish the developers would just make it a CGI cutscene (which I would skip).
Maybe at some point I should just stop playing this game? I suppose I’ll wrap up Endwalker during the next free play event and then we’ll see what the next expansion looks like.
Onwards to 2023
My new years resolutions for this year include going out for more walks, reading more books and getting more sleep. I’m not sure if this will mean less time to play games, but it probably will mean less time to lie on my sofa and stream repeats of 90’s TV shows.
Looking at the list of games I’ve bought but not played yet, I think Dwarf Fortress, Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak and Like a Dragon jump out as obvious candidates. I’ve also got a PC gamepass subscription somehow, so I could give Age of Empires IV a whirl, the Halo Infinite campaign, and Pentiment. I’ve been thinking about playing Persona 4 Portable on the Vita, although I really did have such a miserable time playing Persona 3 FES that I maybe might never go back to the series.
Scanning through the list of upcoming releases, I’m seeing Company of Heroes 3, some sort of Settlers reboot and Destiny 2: Lightfall landing within the next few months. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Street Fighter 6, Diablo IV and Final Fantasy XVI are all due out within a few weeks of each other in the summer, and if they actually stick to those dates I’ll be looking closely for reasons not to buy three of them – I think the smart choice would probably be to get Street Fighter on day 1, and leave Zelda to be a nice treat over the Christmas holidays.
One of the weirdest mental blocks I’m dealing with right now is that I keep putting off buying PS4 games because I’d rather wait until I have a PS5 and can get shinier versions of the same games; at the same time I’m struggling to motivate myself to buy a PS5 because most of the games I want to play are available on my already-existing PS4. I’ve been thinking about buying the Final Fantasy 7 Remake for at least six months now, and I don’t think I’m really any closer to doing it.
Is this going to be the year that I start posting more regularly to the site? Might I finish writing my guide to deciding which Yakuza game to play first? Does anybody read this stuff anyway? The answer to all of these questions is “No”.
