The Den of Square

NOT SO PORTABLE AMBITIONS

Tenebrous Isle has enjoyed a great technological advancement due to the construction of six powerful generators spread across the land. Harnessing the very power of the earth itself, Spark, its a time of great prosperity...at least until those generators start to go dark. Mina, a talented hollower who constructed these generators, is dispatched by Baron Lionel to repair them, but it won’t be an easy task. Each generator is guarded by fierce monsters, and at every turn Thorne and his Shock Troopers stand in Mina’s way. The story for Mina the Hollower is pretty straightforward, and gets right into the action, taking on a more gothic atmosphere that stands out from the more upbeat tone of Shovel Knight before it. Now, that’s not to say the story isn’t also loaded with more lighthearted moments, and the Game Boy Color inspired aesthetics ensure the story can’t get TOO graphic or scary, so I think it balances those elements pretty well.

Much like their previous work, Yacht Club wholly commits to this retro aesthetic, with fantastic sprite work that might have been a bit TOO advanced for the likes of the Game Boy Color but certainly evokes the feeling of those old school portable days. While the basic field sprites for characters are pretty simple, but still packed with fun little touches (like Mina pulling out a pair of glasses when writing a letter), you have slightly more detailed sprite work for character portraits, as well as more elaborate stuff whenever you discover a new area, alongside some key story moments. I think the game sets out to do exactly what it intended and while some people might be turned away by “outdated” graphics, I find a lot of charm in the aesthetic, and that’s not just nostalgia talking. Jake Kaufman delivers on some fantastic chiptune beats for the game’s soundtrack, and on the whole the craftsmanship of the sprites really can’t be overstated. This isn’t something that the industry at large does anymore, so only those that really love it stick with it. So many sprite-based games tend to go for more detailed styles akin to the 16 and 32 bit eras, but Yacht Club going back to a more limited style is rarer still, and I think that makes the game stand out in a good way. My only real complaint about the overall presentation here is that a game like this might look strange on a TV screen, all blown up on screens that weren’t even conceivable back when the GBC was new. That said, there are some options you can turn on to try to alleviate this somewhat….or just get this on your Switch or Steam Deck. But overall, Yacht Club’s art direction and overall story telling proves they’ve still got it after Shovel Knight. But what of the core gameplay?

CAN YOU DIG IT?

Early looks at Mina the Hollower had me convinced this game was going for a Link’s Awakening kind of vibe, being a top-down adventure game. But it becomes clear pretty early on that just as much, if not more, inspiration was taken from the classic Castlevania games, with some Soulslike trappings thrown on top. Players take control of Mina from a top-down perspective, yes, but there’s less focus on going through dungeons with dedicated puzzles (and items to solve those puzzles) and way more focus on tricky platforming bits often mixed together with fairly demanding combat. The game throws you into things immediately, barely giving players a chance to come to grips with basic gameplay before you have to fight off a kraken trying to sink the ship Mina is on, and it starts to slowly ramp up from there. Players are free to explore the world in almost any direction they wish, though the way forward isn’t always immediately obvious, and some areas can gate players off with the increasingly stronger enemies you’ll have to contend with.

Early on you realize that Mina’s a fragile little mouse, with a small health bar and fairly slow healing, and most enemies are surprisingly aggressive and can outrun Mina without any issue. So you had better master burrowing before too long. Mina can burrow underground for a short time, and will be immune to most damage while doing so, while also moving at a much higher speed. Emerging out of a burrow also gives her a longer ranged jump, so in the end burrowing is the corner stone of this game’s platforming and defensive mobility, effectively being a jump, dash and dodge all in one. The platforming in this game can be fairly demanding too, with multiple mechanics introduced over time to really push the burrowing mechanic as far as possible. Whether it’s burrowing under bouncy mushrooms to position them just right to get over a pit or wall, or gaining increased momentum after burrowing through ice, there’s always something new to contend with as you explore more and more of the isles. The game is ostensibly open-ended and the game is littered with secrets, but there’s just as much focus on combating various enemies that impede your path.

Mina starts her adventure off having to pick from one of three weapons, and throughout the game tough battles require an ever-expanding arsenal. Each weapon in the game comes with distinct advantages and disadvantages and allow for players to really customize how they play. Maybe the shield weapon with constant parrying will feel right at home for some players, but for others the allure of swinging down a big hammer will be too tough to ignore. On top of that though there’s also a large amount of Sidearms Mina can find as an alternate weapon. Some Sidearms are useful for navigation too, often instrumental in finding some of the harder secrets. The last major piece to Mina’s inventory comes into the form of Trinkets, which come with a wide variety of effects. Some are good for exploration, and others can help with combat. Depending on which ones you equip you might even find some strong synergies that can really transform the way you play. Ultimately, Mina the Hollower is a game filled to the brim with useful tools and power-ups, which it desperately needs because unfortunately...I don’t find the basic moment-to-moment gameplay all that fun.

DEATH OF FUN BY A THOUSAND CUTS

The more I played Mina the Hollower the more frustrated I became. While I can enjoy the game’s overall presentation and think a good chunk of the game is mechanically sound and well crafted...I don’t think it’s a game that I found all that enjoyable to play without a LOT of tweaks. It all starts with Mina’s basic movement being SO reliant on the burrow. In order to burrow, Mina has to perform a jump while you hold the button down, meaning you can’t just burrow on demand; you have to be far more preemptive in its use. If you want to dodge a boss’ attack you almost always have to ALREADY be jumping before the boss even starts winding up for their attack if you want any hope of avoiding damage. Performing the trickier jumps almost always requires having PERFECT timing and spacing or you won’t get the clearance you need. Adding extra steps to such a core mechanic is certainly a bold choice but ultimately I don’t really agree with it. Imagine if Mario’s jumps or a roll in Dark Souls required several seconds of start-up before you actually do them and maybe you’ll see my issues with the burrow here.

This is such a core problem I have with the game that it bleeds through and taints my enjoyment elsewhere throughout the game. Virtually every other enemy or platforming challenge had me sighing or rolling my eyes at what the game wanted me to accomplish. This isn’t simply me disliking the game being difficult, but more so it felt like you can just BARELY clear what the game asks of you and it feels at times clunky or unfair. Compare this to something like Silksong, which is just as, if not more demanding and difficult. A huge difference I have with that game compared to Mina is the fact that Hornet is a dream to control. She feels fast and fluid and the game is SO responsive to your inputs; any time I got hit by a boss I always knew it was on me to avoid it. The game laid out what to do and I just had to raise myself to that level to see it through. I don’t get that same feeling in Mina the Hollower; a lot of the time I feel like I’m succeeding IN SPITE of the game’s best efforts.

There’s so many little things that irked me as I played through the game. Many bosses have HUGE sprites and this game employs contact damage, players lose tons of health from dropping into pits regardless of how much you’ve leveled up your defense or health, many areas are filled with enemies that infinitely respawn as you’re trying to navigate perilous platforming, you barely have any invincibility frames after being hit, you drop Sidearms on death and lose all your ammo, there’s “corpse runs” in this that can potentially have you lose all of your currency….and the healing system. My God the healing system. In order to use Mina’s healing vials players have to first build up plasma by hitting enemies (or finding special flowers), and your vials will only heal up to how much plasma you’ve gained. Now on the one hand, that means that even late into the game with a huge health bar you could restore all the way to full health from just a sliver if you have enough plasma, so you don’t have to worry about upgrading your healing (outside of carrying more vials). However, if you take damage you LOSE plasma, and if you’re in a platforming bit where there’s no enemies to farm for plasma, that means you could keep losing health with no way to heal despite having a full stock of vials. Once again, it’s just adding extra steps to a mechanic that I don’t feel needed to be there….unless of course the game’s true desire was to frustrate and drive players away.

MAKE YOUR OWN FUN….OR ELSE

On some level, I have to assume that Yacht Club Games was aware that this game was going to be divisive. The game itself had a major delay after a demo was released to the public, likely so they could address feedback among other things. When the game launched they were quick to mention that the game also boasted a rather extensive Modifier menu, allowing players to customize and tweak individual elements of the game. Halfway between an options or accessibility menu and a difficulty selector, virtually every single issue I have with the game can be alleviated if I was willing to sift through the seemingly endless options. From giving Mina more airtime with her jump, to lowering damage across the board or even just against bosses, there’s seemingly a mod for every potential issue a player could have. There’s even mods to make the game harder, or to make new game plus runs more interesting with randomizer elements! But here’s the thing….if I have to go through so much trouble to fine tune my game to start having fun, maybe this game wasn’t for me in the first place.

This might be a cynical take, but I look at this huge Modifier list, alongside some of the Trinkets you can equip in the game, and feel like this was just a bandage slapped over larger issues players had with this game. I’m sure it was done with the best of intentions to please the most people possible, but it kind of communicates that the devs didn’t have a clear vision they could stick behind. What is the “intended” experience Yacht Club wants for Mina the Hollower? No Modifiers? Only a select few? The fact that some Modifiers lock you out of achievements seems to imply there’s a few that won’t “legitimize” your playthrough, but that just makes me distrust using them entirely. In the end, I beat the game with no Modifiers active. I wanted to see what a “pure” run of the game was like, to see if I could rise to the occasion without basically folding and throwing on the training wheels. But maybe I should have used them. I would have likely had more fun that way. I did end up using Trinkets more often, and those did help smooth over some rough edges...but only some of them. You both have limited slots for Trinkets, on top of having to find them yourself. Depending on how observant you are or what direction you start your adventure in, you might not find some Trinkets that would be VERY useful until near the end of the game. The Proto Spark, which basically gives you an extra life, never left my side and I’m glad I found it early in, but I would have been miserable if I went through the bulk of the game without it. Really, part of me wishes that some of these Trinkets and Modifiers were just baked into the game outright and it might have made a better first impression on me. I think that’s really the key issue I had; those early hours were rough and while it got better, I never really felt like I was clicking with the game and having fun. I’ve played tough games before, but I found the base controls more fun and was willing to put in the time to get better at them and rise to that challenge. But with Mina the Hollower it was just a case of starting in the negatives and slowly making it less frustrating, rather than being hard but fun at the start and getting better overall.

CONCLUSION

In the end I’m very conflicted. There’s parts of this game I really did enjoy. Some boss fights were tough but felt fair. I felt good when I finally overcame them. I enjoyed combing through areas and discovering secrets. It really did feel like a game that rewarded me for paying attention to things and poking at every nook and cranny. But for every instance that I enjoyed the game, I ran into a platforming room that felt like it stacked way too much against you and was like pulling teeth to get through. There were bosses that felt very over-tuned and I beat them through sheer luck than anything else. Septemburg was a fun, spooky area….but was also filled with annoying wind physics and lighting strikes and an invincible pursuer enemy throughout the bulk of it. I still found a lot of the NPCs and story bits charming, and the atmosphere really helped me along, but I feel like I cheated myself a bit by not using any Modifiers. I certainly didn’t go into this game expecting so much friction which doesn’t help matters, and that long list of Modifiers signals to me that Yacht Club realized there were more people like that biting off more than they intended to chew, so they tried to make it go down a bit smoother.

I greatly enjoyed Shovel Knight and the various expansions it saw over the years and I was eager to see what Yacht Club’s next project would be like. The demo felt a bit off to me, but that’s what demos are for, right? With news that Yacht Club wasn’t doing the best financially, and that they needed this game to be a major hit to stay afloat I went into this game wanting to really like it so I could best support them. Now, the game has clearly found an audience. At the time of writing the game has gained half a million sales (higher than they needed it to be to keep the lights on for a time), and it’s gotten rave reviews and is one of the highest rated games of the year. For some, this is a real Game of the Year candidate, and honestly I wish I could be in that boat too. Part of me wants to try this game again after I get some distance from it, and maybe load up on some Modifiers to see if I can craft this game perfectly to my desires. Or maybe after all those rough edges are smoothed out, I’d be left with something that won’t stand out in my mind at all. It is hard to say. But I think more than anything, Mina the Hollower is a game that’s probably worth experiencing for yourself to see where you fall on it. Maybe learn from my example and don’t let your pride get in the way of a potentially good time. If nothing else, I’m glad Yacht Club is still around after this game and I hope they’ll be around for quite a bit longer. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for what they come up with next.

Until next time,

THE INDUSTRY BIG DOGS

Let’s start with the biggest developers and publishers in the industry and see what they were up to this year. Sony had a bit of an off year, I’d say. Sure, Ghost of Yotei was a solid exclusive, alongside Death Stranding 2, but there’s rather large gaps in releases for the publisher that was likely meant to be filled up by a variety of live-service games that have been cancelled one by one.

Seeing Sony going all-in on this trend only for it to start blowing up in their faces is certainly frustrating and also disheartening for any devs who end up on the chopping block as a result of these cancellations. Let’s not forget the absolute dud that was Concord last year. There were also some legal shenanigans with Tencent this year, Sony suing over a rather blatant copycat of Horizon: Zero Dawn. Outside of that, there’s also quite a bit of news that came about from Bungee which….well let’s just say things haven’t really been looking up for them after Sony bought them up. If we aren’t talking about the lawsuit Bungee is in the middle of regarding all of the content they forcibly got rid of (even after players have bought them) with Destiny 2 , there’s been quite the ongoing development with Bungie’s latest game, Marathon. In April after the game’s playable alpha, it eventually came out that the game had stolen artwork from one Fern “Antireal” Hook. After public backlash reached a fever pitch, the game was delayed and would undergo quite the visual overhaul . Antireal would eventually reach a settlement for the art theft in December, and the game itself is now set to launch in March 2026, though with the crowded “extraction shooter” market, I personally question if we have another Concord on our hands. There’s also the matter of the PS5 seeing a markup in price due to a variety of factors (though Sony isn’t alone in doing so), so I’d argue 2025 was a bit of a rough year for Sony diehards. Just not enough new things coming out to justify an increasingly expensive purchase, though games like the Insomniac Wolverine game and Saros due out next year might help things out. Time will tell.

For Microsoft, or specifically Xbox…well, I won’t lie to you….it kinda feels like we’re in the twilight years for the brand. As far as exclusives go…well, it’s hard to even label ANYTHING as a true exclusive for Xbox these days with pretty much everything on PC day one, and they keep cancelling a number of games like the Perfect Dark and Everwild projects from Rare. In a trend continuing from 2024, more games are appearing on other platforms. That Indiana Jones game from late 2024, or South of Midnight from this year? Just wait a bit and you can pick it up on PS5 or even the new Switch 2 for that matter. Adding to that, the likes of Gears of War and Halo are now heading to Sony’s rival platform, with Gears of War Reloaded releasing this year as an updated remake of the first game, with Halo: Campaign Evolved as a remake of the first game also coming to PS5 when it launches in 2026. This Halo remake is also getting flack for supposed AI generated voice work among other things so….yeah, it’s hard to really feel all that excited to pick up an Xbox.

Apparently, Costco agrees, as they are no longer stocking the console in their stores. And this comes alongside Xbox also raising the price of their consoles so…I can’t imagine that’ll help things. But wait there’s more! Microsoft also had a notable number of layoffs throughout the year, and while not all of them were for the gaming division, a good number of them were. It’s getting to the point where even former developers are speaking out about some of Microsoft’s decisions, particularly with Game Pass. Former Arkane dev  Raphael Colantonio spoke out about Game Pass, calling it unsustainable. If that wasn’t bad enough, seeing some of the expectations executives have of revenue for Xbox it really does hit home how disconnected from reality a lot of these businesspeople can be. I mean, when they’re expecting a 30% profit margin, something close to DOUBLE the industry average…I don’t know if there’s any helping that. Surely running ads on Xbox Cloud Gaming will solve it all! I really don’t mean to be so negative, but the writing seems on the wall here. What is there to be all that excited about? The ROG Xbox Ally? You know, the portable Xbox console that’s basically just a reskinned ROG Ally portable console? Please cough up a grand for the high-end ROG Xbox Ally X please and thank you! I suppose in its own weird way though, Microsoft had one of the biggest video game movie releases of the year with the Minecraft movie which….uh….I didn’t think looked very good and the weird meme culture around it confuses and scares me, so yeah…let’s just move on.

That leaves Nintendo, at least as far as the “Big Three” are concerned. Seeing as they launched a whole new system this year, there was a LOT to talk about for them. The Switch 2, so far, is selling very well with over 10 million copies sold through September, and though it sounds like holiday sales were a bit lower, I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s at 15 million by the end of the fiscal year. With it being seen as the fastest selling console of all time at the moment, it’s a tremendous amount of momentum to start with….not that there aren’t things that could still break that momentum.

For starters, the price of the system itself on top of the games has drawn a lot of ire. I think the asking price for the console itself at $449 isn’t too bad, though with tariffs and other issues affecting electronics pricing, who knows if it’ll stay at that price for too much longer. Really the biggest issue many had was the standalone price of the launch title for the system, Mario Kart World, at a staggering $80. Sure, the bundle with the system basically knocks it down to fifty bucks, but it’s not a great precedent to set. Then there’s the uneven way various upgrades to older Switch 1 games are handled; some, like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are free, allowing the game to actually run well. For other games, however you have a paid update, such as both of the newer 3D Zelda titles. Some games like Kirby and the Forgotten Land lock the enhanced visuals and framerate behind a twenty-dollar DLC campaign that is Switch 2 exclusive as well. So, while Mario Kart World is the only “true” $80 Switch 2 game, many others can cost that much or more with these upgrades. There are also the issues of Game Key Cards, something many third party developers have adopted despite criticism. Essentially, the cartridges either don’t have enough storage or don’t read data fast enough, so devs opt for the Game Key Card which forces a download of the full game. None of the advantages of owning a game physically and all of the drawbacks of owning it digitally, plus being a waste of materials for the cartridge and box. And they didn’t even include more themes for the Home screen! How dare they!

As far as the actual GAMES are concerned, I’d say the Switch 2 has had a solid half year or so at time of writing. Mario Kart World ruffled some feathers with certain design decisions but it’s by all means a fun racing game. Donkey Kong Bananza is a solid Game of the Year contender for sure, and there’s the likes of a new Hyrule Warriors and Pokémon Legends game to round out the year, plus the long-awaited release of Metroid Prime 4. Granted that last one got some controversy surrounding the annoying tagalong characters among other things, and you also have some duds like the overpriced Switch 2 Welcome Tour game that should have been a pack-in, or Drag X Drive, a strange download-only wheelchair basketball….thing that just didn’t have much for fans to latch onto.

As far as some more miscellaneous Nintendo stuff is concerned, there’s hype swirling around the reveal of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, as well as a first look at the live-action Legend of Zelda movie. If nothing else, Nintendo is continuing to expand those Ips but we’ll have to see how well these films continue to do. There’s also the ongoing lawsuit against Palworld that has some interesting developments. While Nintendo has won some patents in American courts which have some bad precedents, Japanese courts are fighting back and some even wonder if Nintendo would be able to recoup the legal costs even if they win. I think from a pure game standpoint Nintendo is in a good spot, coming off of a VERY solid generation with the Switch and having a ton of momentum going into the new year with a new system, but they’re also getting cocky again and throwing their weight around and that could just as easily come back to bite them.

As far as various other publishers, there’s a mix of good and bad. Netease has gotten into some hot water with closing various studios down: Bad Brain, Fantastic Pixel Castle, T-Minus Zero, Jar of Sparks and Worlds Untold all shut down one after another as a result of “shifting strategies” for the publisher. Warner Bros. also has shut down a number of studios this year too, with Monolith Productions (themselves working on a Wonder Woman game), Player First Games (known for MultiVersus) and Warner Bros. San Diego. EA has also seen some very disappointing shake-ups, having cancelled a new Titanfall game and laying off staff at Respawn, not to mention the closing of Cliffhanger studio after cancelling their Black Panther game. EA would later go private following a massive 55 billion dollar deal, with some of the buyers being a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund, which itself is part of a larger strategy of the country as it has been buying up a number of gaming studios over the years. The ongoing saga of Ubisoft’s demise is a slow and painful one, with rumors of Tencent buying them up, all while they were fined for data harvesting this year, on top of former higher ups standing trial for….some incredibly depraved things when they were part of leadership. From tying up employees and sexually harassing them….yeah that entire company’s soul is forfeit as far as I’m concerned.

Gaming journalism hasn’t escaped buyouts and layoffs, with Polygon being sold to Gamerant with layoffs following. On the plus side at least, Giant Bomb is now independent, finally escaping Fandom’s thumb on them, and Game Informer is making a comeback, so there’s that. We’re seeing some attempts at unionization in the industry, such as the Diablo devs under Blizzard forming a union after layoffs and fears over the ongoing “advancements” in AI technology. There’s also the formation of the United Videogame Workers-CWA, a dues-collecting joint organization that aims to fight for video game workers in both the United States and Canada. Steam has also been eying launching a new peripheral in the form of the Steam Machine in 2026, potentially serving as another alternative for consoles, though we’ll have to see how that goes. I wouldn’t say it’s all roses for Steam either, since they got flack for kowtowing to pressure from credit card companies attempts at censorship on the platform (with itch.io also being targeted).

There is an ongoing series of stories regarding the game platform that is Roblox, and none of it is good for the soul. Where do we even start with this? The ongoing problem of children being exposed to absolute creeps online? The fact that various US states are now suing Roblox? Or maybe that disastrous interview where the CEO stated that Roblox being a “pedophile hellscape” was a business opportunity? My personal pick is that he seemingly wants to turn it into a dating site…there’s just no words left so let’s move on.

Closing out this section, let’s chat a bit about Rockstar and their work on Grand Theft Auto 6, where anticipation is reaching an all-time high. Following various leaks and teasers, the game has seen a pretty hefty delay into November of 2026 for starters. There’s been rumors that GTA6 would cost “at least” $80 if not more, with Rockstar clearly testing the waters of how far consumers are willing to open their wallets for them. In October roughly 30 employees were let go for “gross misconduct,” though later reporting suggests this might be a result of union busting following discussions employees had in a shared Discord server. With GTA 6 being one of the most hotly anticipated games of the year, I have no doubt it will be in the news again when I do this wrap-up next year….but time will tell if it will be a mostly positive story or not. With Rockstar’s track record…I wouldn’t hold my breath.

HOT GAMES AND DUDS OF THE YEAR

So that’s….a lot of heavy stuff. Important stuff, but heavy for sure. It’s definitely important to highlight what’s happening to the studios that make games, not to mention the people that make up those studios, but now let’s shift some attention to the hottest games of the year…and maybe highlight a few games that didn’t quite take off for one reason or another.

Far and away one of the most talked about and celebrated games of this year was Clair Obscure: Expedition 33. Developed by Sandfall Interactive, a newly made studio composed of some amateur game devs mixed with former Ubisoft developers, the RPG took the gaming world by storm. Many were charmed by its story and the deep gameplay, but more than anything else…it was a game that felt like it came from a different era. It was a small dev team, with a relatively short development time, and it was investing in a high-fidelity turn-based RPG that has fallen out of favor in the current gaming scene, so for many it was a breath of fresh air. It would go on to sweep a variety of game award outlets, and its clear people will be paying attention to whatever Sandfall makes next.

There was a lot of debate as to whether or not Sandfall would count as an “indie” developer, but to continue the trend of highlighting the works of smaller devs, there were some real winners this year. Dispatch gained a lot of attention in the latter half of the year, being the premiere game from Ad Hoc Studio, composed of former Ubisoft and Telltale Games developers. A superhero game themed around sending out heroes to various jobs best suited to their skills, the game won a lot of fans for the narrative and the player’s ability to influence that narrative with their choices. Despite Telltale Games’ revival a few years ago we haven’t heard much from them, so Dispatch was there to throw fans of narrative-heavy games a bone.

Speaking of bones and throwing them, that devious annoying dog that is Toby Fox released a bit more of his ongoing Deltarune project this year, with chapters 3 and 4 releasing all at once, with chapter 5 confirmed for 2026. While the full game is still a way off, fans have been eating good with the release of these two chapters as they further the core narrative and introduce more beloved characters. And then there’s Silksong. Team Cherry was driving their fans absolutely batty with the lack of news surrounding the Hollow Knight sequel. Right when fans were finally starting to give up, Silksong dropped with barely any heads up and the end result….crashed Steam for a bit. Despite the worries that such a long dev time would result in a poor final product, Team Cherry would state they just had so much fun making the game over the last seven years that they couldn’t stop themselves. The game would go on to sell over 7 million copies by the end of the year, and with DLC planned for the future, it’s clear fans will be able to enjoy Hornet’s new adventure for quite a while yet. Even if it IS really, REALLY hard. I’d also like to shout out Blue Prince, an interesting puzzle game based around constructing various room layouts and attempting to piece together puzzle after puzzle that obscures the game’s core mystery, from Dogubomb. All and all, a standout year for indies.

There was also this trend of games coming out this year that heavily relied on playing with friends. Following the success of games like Lethal Company, one game that got a lot of attention this year was R.E.P.O., a game based around gathering as much stuff as you can from dangerous environments with the intent to sell it….but you have to hope you can survive the various creatures and hazards in your way as hilarity ensues. There was also Peak, a game all about climbing up a procedurally generated mountain with friends. Both games caught on quite well after release, but there’s been this backlash to them to a degree, and the term “friendslop” has been applied to them. Because apparently a game where you have fun with friends is slop….or something.

For whatever reason, there were a lot of games about racing or about ninjas this year too. In addition to Mario Kart World Sonic got in on the action with Sonic Racing Crossworlds. But if that rivalry wasn’t enough, there was the surprise release of Kirby Air Riders near the end of the year, making headlines with Masahiro Sakurai returning to the Kirby series after all this time to direct this title. Outside of Ghost of Yotei, there was the release of updated versions of Ninja Gaiden games this year with a remake of Sigma 2 in Ninja Gaiden 2: Black, as well as Ninja Gaiden 4, which just might be the swansong for co-developer PlatinumGames. But that was just covering the 3D titles, as there was also the 2D Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound this year. And that itself was competing with a brand-new Shinobi game from Sega from out of nowhere too. And closing out the hot titles of the year, Capcom’s fastest selling game ever was Monster Hunter Wilds….at least a first. The game itself got a ton of momentum at the start….only for it to fizzle out as eventually older Monster Hunter titles began overtaking it in sales.

On that note, we had some notable blunders in games this year, and to a degree Monster Hunter Wilds feels like one of the more high-profile ones. On the one hand, the game sold 8 million units in its opening weekend but has since struggled to get past 10 million after the rest of 2025. This was a result of both the game’s lacking difficulty drawing complaints, alongside the game’s horrible optimization and performance on PC in particular. Despite many claims that Capcom would improve the game’s performance…so far, the results haven’t felt too spectacular. That said, it’s not nearly as bad as what’s happened with Splitgate 2. Following a disastrous reveal with director Ian Proulx wearing a “Make FPS Great Again” hat at the 2025 Summer Games Fest drawing criticism and backlash on the game’s incredibly expensive cosmetics and derivative gameplay, the title was pulled from stores and retooled into Splitgate: Arena Reloaded at the end of the year. This comes alongside layoffs at the studio and the shutdown of the first game’s servers on top of it all.

A variety of other titles kind of came and went this year without a ton of fervor too. From the latest Assassin’s Creed and Borderlands titles, to Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2, these were games that might have been bad but didn’t leave a ton of impact. But when I think of games that DID leave an impact that will be hard to forget this year, I look at the likes of Metroid Prime 4’s lackluster reception at launch. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad game, admittedly. In fact I included it in my Top Ten Games of the Year list (which you can find HERE), but it also had some of the most annoying side characters I’ve heard in a game in a long while, on top of a horribly bland desert overworld and more padding than the Triforce piece hunt in Wind Waker. A lot of people focused in on the first of the NPCs Samus encounters, Myles Mackenzie, and how he was such a slap in the face to a series known for exploration and letting players find their own way, as all he does is tell you exactly what to do next with no option to silence him. I think Metroid has had worse games out there, but it’s a bummer to end the year on such a hotly anticipated game floundering like this at times. But hey, it’s not MindsEye. Not even close.

Directed by a former Rockstar developer, and published by IO Interactive, MindsEye felt like it had all the pieces to being a well-received narrative-heavy third person shooter. Instead, it released as an incredibly buggy, incomplete mess of a game with incredibly restrictive mission structures that really miss the point of these more open-ended games. MindsEye is by far the most infamous game to release this year, but hey at least there was a LOT of standouts to distract from it!

MANDATORY FIGHTING GAME TALK

As is tradition, I’d also like to bring up my own personal niche and expose a bit on the state of fighting games in the current year. Some of the bigger titles in the genre continue to truck along with additional content. Street Fighter 6 finished up its second season and got started with season three later on in the year, mostly to fans delight. That said, Capcom has also faced some pretty heavy criticism for the rather slow trickle of updates for both balance and cosmetic items, not to mention the questionable move of making Capcom Cup a pay-per-view event. Tekken 8 completed its second season, and while that included some fan favorites like Anna Williams and Armor King, it got a lot of backlash from fans regarding its core balance changes, to the point where the current balance team was replaced. And at the end of the year, Katsuhiro Harada, long seen as the “face” of the Tekken series, would announce he was leaving Namco at the end of the year. While he's assured us that his successors are up to the task of continuing the series, it’s hard to not feel like this is the end of an era. Granted, Harada’s departure seems more tied to the death of industry legend Tomonobu Itagaki passing away suddenly this year, himself known for his work with the Dead or Alive series among many other games. The passing of the torch is bound to happen at this point in the industry I suppose.

Arc System Works continue to dip their toes into a lot of different pies as various other projects continue onward. Guilty Gear Strive completed its fourth season and teased a massive “2.0” update sometime in 2026 that is seemingly a whole new chapter for the game with some extensive reworking of the game combined with even more characters. Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising continues on with its second season, though as of time of writing there isn’t a confirmed season three. And to close out the year, ArcSys would announce they were working on a 4v4 tag fighter featuring Marvel Comics characters with Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls garnering a ton of hype from the initial trailer. While some fans have some qualms with the gameplay as it’s been shown off so far, many are hoping the game delivers on hype Marvel matches since the brand seems to have had a falling out with Capcom. They’re even suddenly making more content for Dragon Ball FighterZ from out of nowhere, so I’d say they’re doing just fine.

I’d like to highlight some of the smaller fighters out there that continue to fight the good fight. Under Night In-Birth II released the rest of their confirmed DLC throughout the year, though nothing more has been said about future characters. Almost completely out of nowhere a fighting game based on Avatar: The Last Airbender also captured the hearts and minds of gamers with Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game. Despite initial issues with the visuals, the heavy focus on movement and deep character toolkits have really turned reception of the game around as it’s targeting 2026 for a release.  And in the Platform Fighter subgenre, Rivals of Aether II continues to release more free characters alongside their cosmetics, kicking off 2026 with the release of La Reina as a community-created character making her 3D debut. This is alongside the character workshop finally hitting beta, so in due time this game will be flooded with all of the meme characters you could ever ask for. There’s also Saturday AM: Battle Manga, a crossover tag fighter based on somewhat lesser-known manga due out next year that looks pretty neat from what little has been shown. Always glad to see devs big and small pushing the genre forward.

That being said, one of the biggest releases of the year was undoubtedly Riot’s League of Legends fighter, 2XKO. While technically still in early access at time of writing, with both a console launch and version 1.0 hitting in early 2026, Riot is clearly hitting the ground running with constant updates. Which is good, seeing as the game was getting clowned on repeatedly before launch due to the base roster being a paltry ten characters, which is pretty small for a tag fighter. Not helping matters was the slew of other tag games announced this year, which means 2XKO isn’t the only game in town for fans of tag fighters. With Marvel Tokon and Invincible Versus (based on the Robert Kirkman comic book series) due out next year, it’s clear Riot will have some real competition on their hands.

While in many respects this was a solid enough year for fighting games, there were still some real stinkers buried throughout the year. One of the more high-profile blunders was Hunter X Hunter: Nen Impact. It seemed like a recipe for success; you get Eighting involved, known for their work on several beloved fighting games, and take a cult classic IP and make a tag fighter out of it….but this is something that needed more time to cook. Nen Impact launched with a small roster of only 16 (way too small for a 3v3 game), barely any single player content, lacking visuals and shoddy rollback netcode…all for full price. In the end I guess it never had a chance. Then there’s one of the support devs for Skullgirls, Hidden Variable, being screwed over by the game’s publisher and not receiving payment, showcasing that the curse of Skullgirls is still alive and well. I mentioned earlier that Warner Bros. closed down Player First Games, and with it MultiVersus was shut down again….for real this time though. Even though Netherrealm didn’t have a brand-new game release this year, fans of the Mortal Kombat devs still had egg on their face with the rather subpar release of the Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection too. But….we still have to talk about SNK.

To the outside observer, it would seem like SNK had a pretty good year. After a 25 year wait, a brand-new Fatal Fury in City of the Wolves finally released, tying up a narrative that had been left hanging for years. It even went on to win Fighting Game of the Year at the Game Awards! They got Ken and Chun-li from Street Fighter as guest characters, and hey, they’re really churning out updates for that game, releasing five characters in just a few months, with season two promising monthly updates from January through summer 2026. Players also largely like the game; certain top tier characters be damned. However, SNK was purchased by Saudi Arabian prince Mohammad bin Salman’s subsidiary Electronic Gaming Development Company in 2022, and there’s been a lot of moral handwringing ever since the new owners took over, mostly due to the blood on Salman’s hands, and the implications that supporting SNK means supporting a lot of OTHER things the prince does, albeit indirectly. And while the last few SNK releases largely seemed like more of the same with no outside influence, making it easy to ignore, with City of the Wolves, it’s clear that SNK’s been tainted and it’s no longer so easy to look away.

The game launched with two guest fighters included on the base roster. On the one hand we have Salvatore Gannachi, a musician that is apparently one of Salman’s favorites and often does private shows for him. On the other hand, we have Cristiano Ronaldo, a famous football player who played for a team the prince owns. Two characters that have NOTHING to do with fighting games OR SNK for that matter, it was already going to draw in criticism (even if strange crossover characters aren’t rare nowadays in games), but the real issue is Ronaldo’s various legal issues and certain allegations levied at him not making  for a good look for the game. Like…sorry but having an alleged rapist on your roster means a lot of people aren’t gonna touch that game with a ten-foot pole. Let’s also add on the increasingly bizarre advertising for the game, where it was more or less used as fodder to promote some random boxing match going on around the same time as the launch, or even more recently the poorly-received AI-generated trailer for the second season of DLC that was just released at time of writing. Despite the game having a lot going for it and longtime SNK fans really wanting a win here….the vibes are rancid. But this isn’t even a one-game issue, as this year ALSO marked Sony selling off EVO to yet another Saudi Arabian conglomerate. No matter where you go in fighting games blood money is everywhere now and the FGC at large is going to have to reckon with that sooner or later. So much for this being a fun segment.

The AI SLOP APOCALYPSE

This brings us to the final segment to close out the year, and it’s one I have no real pleasure talking about, but it must be done. The last few years there’s been growing talk of generative AI and how it can affect a wide variety of industries, and that includes the gaming industry. Try not to confuse that with “AI” as we’ve known it for years in games like….enemy behavior or things like that though. While it’s true that technology can be used in a wide variety of ways and have all kinds of impacts, both good and bad, I’ll just cut through the fat here and state that I think the ways in which generative AI specifically has been embraced are worrying at best and morally reprehensible at worst. Gen AI has led to rampant art theft, deepfakes for incredibly nefarious purposes, and tons of jobs being lost….all for something that doesn’t work as well as what came before it. And that’s before you even get into the environmental impacts.

But where do we really start here with Gen AI stuff in games? Should we talk about how Fortnite put in an AI Darth Vader, trained on James Earl Jones’ voice and almost immediately started dropping slurs? That lead to it getting into hot water with SAG-AFTRA as AI acting and voice work is still a hot button issue that led to striking very recently. There are also the likes of The Alters using AI generated background text in places, despite not adhering to Steam’s terms to disclose AI usage in games, which lead to some backlash. Even in the case where games DO disclose it, such as with Arc Raiders using AI generated voice work, many people still take issue with its use in general.

Even a game as prolific and successful as Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 isn’t immune from the backlash. After launch it was discovered that the game had some AI textures that were quickly patched out. Statements made by the developers have since clarified that they experimented with the technology as it was emerging but eventually decided against using it further, and this texture is just something that slipped through the cracks. Nevertheless, the game would be stripped of its “Game of the Year” award at the Indie Game Awards as a result of not properly disclosing their AI usage. But then again that game went on to sweep the other major game award shows too, with Arc Raiders also winning Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards, so it was still being rewarded.

Perhaps because of that, various other developers have suddenly gotten a lot more brazen about admitting to using AI in their projects. Right at the start of the year Larian, having gotten so much praise and earned so much good will from their work with Baldur’s Gate 3 just a few years ago would mention going heavy into AI usage with their next major product, which just so happened to also be announced at The Game Awards. Japan developers also seem to be rather keen on the technology at points too. According to the CEO of Level 5, 80-90 % of games today are being made with AI. It’s especially bad when you have studios or developers known for a strong sense of style suddenly adopting this technology, like the recent Let it Die sequel, which at least doesn’t seem to have Suda 51 involved at all. There’s also Krafton Studio, who just recently picked up Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks, becoming an “AI First” studio. Then there’s several people over at King that were laid off and replaced with AI tools….that they themselves helped to make. Talk about a cruel irony.

This rapid adoption is already leading to another tech shortage that will impact more than just video games given enough time. Micron, one of the biggest memory manufacturers for computing,  is leaving customer sales behind to focus on supplying AI datacenters with more memory. Hell, even Samsung is having issues with selling RAM….to themselves! PC gaming is already expensive, but this is going beyond that. We’ll see this affecting all kinds of consumer electronics, since EVERYTHING needs to need a computer in it nowadays. Appliances, cars, hospital equipment. I don’t even want to think of the other knock-on effects of all of this. And this is all in service to what exactly?

Generative AI represents some of the worst of humanity, and if that sounds like a really dramatic and bold declaration, I just ask that you hear me out a minute. This technology allows people to generate images or footage of other people without their consent, and have it depict virtually anything. You can now try to frame people for crimes, you can violate their bodies by turning them into an AI sexdoll….God forbid you have photos of your CHILDREN out there for the real sickos to go to work. You have the likes of Chat GPT actively gaslighting people and saying blatantly incorrect information with total “confidence,” alongside getting people with suicidal tendencies to give into those impulses. Children are becoming more and more reliant and susceptible to it all, not using their own minds to think or challenge themselves. Maybe there is some grand use of this technology that could be truly beneficial to humanity at large, but I just don’t see it, and I don’t think it would be worth….the rest of all this. When we now have to live in a world where you can no longer trust your eyes or ears, where people would rather talk to a character AI chatbot than with real people, and when the arts are under attack and threatening to be taken over by a cold, unfeeling plagiarism machine…well it’s all so bleak. I don’t want to live in a world like that. I just want to be able to play some fun video games with friends and forget my troubles, but we can’t just turn a blind eye to this stuff.

CONCLUSION

So, in the end, while there were certainly some fun video games to be had this year, and plenty of things to look forward to in the future, 2025 leaves me feeling rather concerned about the direction both this industry and the world are going. Unchecked greed leads to people losing their jobs, it leads to the adoption of technology that just allows for even MORE unchecked greed and outright theft. There IS some good in this industry, and I do want to sing the praises where it is justified. Seeing more people unionizing is good! Seeing continued pushbacks against AI technology encroaching everywhere is good! Seeing projects fueled by people that are passionate about what they do and take inspiration from so many other things in the world is both good and incredibly important! Something like Clair Obscure existed because you had talented people making something that they felt inspired to create. To tell a story that tried to connect with people, which was by and large something about the importance and power of art. So many of Nintendo’s own games were influenced by real life experiences, like a young Miyamoto exploring caves, or Ken Sugimori collecting bugs as a kid, and that lead us to series like The Legend of Zelda or Pokémon.

More than anything else, in the last few years as I’ve started doing these year-end round ups, I try to make a point of showing that it is people who make games. Not businesses, and certainly not an algorithm. These last few years have been tough to watch as people lose their livelihoods, and this pastime that I love so much is threatening to go away and turn into something worse. Something that serves up ideas that were generated by a machine, a machine that can only really replicate what came before, and often misses the point of what made it great in the first place. But some of my favorite gaming experiences came from things I didn’t even know I wanted, that I couldn’t imagine until it was laid out in front of me. Gaming, like any form of art, is a window into a person’s soul, a chance to see someone’s own creativity and vision. If you’re lucky, it might just ignite something in you too, and you can go on to make something that could do the same with others. That is what humanity is at its best, and it’s under attack. But people out there in the creative fields will keep fighting that good fight, and I’ll be back again next year to see how this never-ending battle goes.

Happy gaming.

#10: METROID PRIME 4: BEYOND

It has been over 18 years since the sequel hook at the end of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Alongside another tease with the poorly-timed Metroid Prime: Federation Force game, fans FINALLY got thrown a bone with Metroid Prime 4: Beyond releasing. It’s not the most cohesive game out there; anytime you’re in the barren desert on your motorcycle having to grind for green crystals it’s juxtaposed with some fantastic alien environments to explore, with some solid bits of combat and puzzles. I think Prime 4 is one of the most graphically impressive games Nintendo has ever put out, and I feel like were it not for Retro Studios inheriting this project from the prior dev team before Nintendo rebooted development, I think they could have made a really strong Prime game from scratch. Instead, they released a Prime game that’s….about 70% there or so. I just hope we don’t have to wait another 18 years for the next one.

#9: SONIC RACING CROSSWORLDS

I wouldn’t have expected another Sonic spinoff title to get a decent reception but color me surprised. After the more forgettable Team Sonic Racing that dropped the crossover racing appeal in favor of middling team mechanics, Sonic Team is in the driver’s seat for their own competitor in the mascot racing game genre. Overall I’d say Sonic Racing Crossworlds is a pretty solid racer that’s relatively fast and has some really fun ideas. Whether it’s each second lap of a race taking players to a different “crossworld” to shake things up, or the expansive gadget system to customize your item preferences, there’s a lot to like here. Honestly, outside of some jank here or there and the strange focus on third party guest racers for the post-launch support, I don’t have a ton of complaints. But I only recently got the game and haven’t put as much time into it to really get a good feeling for it, so I think its placement here is fair enough. So hey, good on you Sonic. Let’s keep this momentum going.

#8: ABSOLUM

Coming from the people behind the excellent Streets of Rage 4 revival, this original beat’em up throws in some roguelite elements and it turns out these are two tastes that go well together. Now, admittedly I only got this game recently and haven’t fully completed a run at the moment, but I can’t deny it’s been a lot of fun. I love the artstyle of the game, with deep black shadows and outlines that really make everything pop, combined with a snappy but simple combat system that flows together really well. Beat ‘em ups are a genre I’ve had so-so experiences with in the past, but Absolum manages to make it manageable by making my constant deaths just part of the process and always has something new awaiting me so each run is interesting. I wish I had gotten to it earlier in the year and it likely would be higher on my overall list but regardless I’d say this is a pretty easy recommendation.

#7: XENOBLADE CHRONICLES X DEFINITIVE EDITION

Over a decade ago I loved the original Xenoblade Chronicles X. The huge open world and sci-fi aesthetic really grabbed me, and I loved the complete swerve in tone and style compared to the Wii game. But now we’ve had two other mainline Xenoblade titles, and I was starting to lose hope that we’d ever go back to the X side of things and tie up the many, MANY loose ends the original game left us with. So, imagine my surprise when Monolith Soft released a Definitive Edition for Xenoblade Chronicles X that managed to address almost every complaint I had about this entry on TOP of adding in a new epilogue story to try to give the game a bit more closure. This truly is THE definitive way to play a really fun and extremely girthy RPG. I poured way more time into this game than any other this year and I’m really happy to finally get some answers after a decade. Now…I didn’t exactly LIKE a lot of those answers and there’s still some issues from the original game that aren’t really fixed here (and likely weren’t in the budget to fix anyway), but still, I was glad to revisit this old world with some shiny new features that managed to really smooth out some rough edges. And now with the whole franchise on Switch there’s no excuse to not get into the series!

#6: MARIO KART WORLD

I know the Sonic fans might be mad, but I ended up enjoying Mario Kart World a good bit more than the Sonic racer this time around. Despite some mixed reception at the game’s launch, likely fueled by the ridiculous asking price, when I finally got a Switch 2 later on in the year, I really enjoyed my time with this launch title. This is Mario Kart on a grander scale than ever before, with a vast open world to explore that houses all of these tracks. This time around the tracks had to be designed with some level of logic with how they’d fit into a real place, and in the free roam mode there’s SO many little details and nooks and crannies to explore, which serves as a nice palette cleanser after so many hectic races. The improved trick system and ability to ride on walls makes for some cool shortcuts too. Tying it all together are some fantastic musical remixes and an art style that has never made the cast look more alive. Admittedly the game does have some issues, like there not being enough incentive to explore the open world, or the baffling way to unlock characters and costumes in this game, but they’ve slowly been addressing concerns with this game with steady patches and honestly, I view this as a really fun game that looks like it’ll just keep getting better. I know I’ll be playing this game for years to come, so a slight stumble out of the gate isn’t the worst thing.

#5: HOLLOW KNIGHT: SILKSONG

Man, this year really was just full of games releasing after SEVERAL years of anticipation. After many had assumed Team Cherry had forsaken them and the game would never release, Hollow Knight: Silksong finally arrived and….well, it broke Steam for a bit. So, it was a pretty big deal. In many regards this sequel expands on the things that made the original game such a hit. You take a gloomy, atmospheric world (with just the right amount of levity) and pair it with incredibly polished, responsive controls and you get one of the most satisfying 2D action games in recent memory. That is, when the game isn’t pounding you into the dirt and making you question if you’re actually having any fun. Silksong is hard. It’s one of the harder games I’ve played in a good long while, and I had times when I wasn’t sure I’d see it through to the end. Some of that difficulty felt fair, and some of it felt kinda bullshit honestly, but in the end I saw it through to 100% completion and it will stick with me for quite a while. I think some of the rewards for exploration aren’t paced very well and there’s other little issues I have but regardless it’s clear Team Cherry is an incredibly talented group of people, and they used that long dev time well.

#4: DELTARUNE CHAPTERS 3 AND 4

You know, maybe some people would object to putting in two chapters from Deltarune on this list rather than waiting until the whole game is done, but this is MY list and I feel that releasing any new Deltarune chapter is an event similar enough to a game at this point, so I say it counts! Toby Fox and company ended up giving us two chapters to continue the ever growing “parallel story” to Undertale this year, and after waiting so long after Chapter 2’s cliffhanger, I was more than happy to dive right back in. Chapter 3 is loaded with fun gameplay variance and a funny, charming antagonist in Tenna, while Chapter 4 furthers the core narrative and has some really interesting implications for where the rest of the story goes. The Jackenstein and Gerson fights are also some of the best bosses I fought this year for that matter. With Chapter 5 out next year, I fully expect it to make this list again. Really, when you think about it, when even CHUNKS of the full game can stand toe-to-toe with fully complete titles, it really makes you wonder just what the full Deltarune experience will be like in a few years. I can’t wait, but I’ll take these morsels in the meantime.

#3: HADES II

I loved Supergiant’s original Hades game. A mixture of visual novel and action game with roguelite elements to keep me coming back for more, it was my GOTY back in 2020, so you know I was already sold on a sequel. It being the first ever sequel by Supergiant, I’d say it had a lot to live up to. I intentionally didn’t look at anything from the Early Access versions of the game, waiting until I hit the full release so I could go in blind. In many regards, Hades II is just more Hades, which isn’t a bad thing at all. More builds to experiment with, more modifiers for a given run, and SO much dialogue that seemingly adjusts to virtually every little aspect of your run to ensure they almost never run out of things to say. Just as with the previous game, Hades II looks gorgeous in motion. Every menu screen, every dialogue portrait, and especially the backgrounds of the various levels you explore are things of beauty, dripping with detail. And as with the original, the soundtrack is awesome, with plenty of callbacks to the first game but a lot of new stuff to jam out to as you tear through enemies and attempt to get to the end of a given run in one piece. Seriously, the boss fight with Scylla and the Sirens is such a perfect marriage of gameplay and music and it’s done in a way that only a video game can really manage. I am admittedly disappointed in the game’s original ending, or rather the lack of real leadup to it, and even after an extensive patch to add in extra scenes to further make that ending feel earned…I had already beaten the game and didn’t want to suddenly give up on a lot of progress and start again. To a degree I feel like this game can be a bit grindier with things you need to get to further the narrative, and I also might be feeling just a bit of roguelite fatigue at this point, but I still think Hades II is a worthy successor. It just had stiffer competition this year.

#2: KIRBY AIR RIDERS

OK be honest…did ANYONE have a new Kirby Air Ride with Sakurai as the director on their Bingo card this year? A surprise return to a franchise he originally created, it’s always great to see Sakurai honing his craft and get to flex his muscles when he isn’t busy making more Super Smash Bros. titles. Kirby Air Riders is an expansion on the original game in every way, from WAY more playable characters and vehicles, to further fleshing out the three core modes of the game on TOP of adding in a new story mode, this feels like the game Sakurai wishes he could have made back in the day on the Gamecube. The fact he got to basically bookend his career with Kirby in this way is really sweet, and it feels like a final farewell from Kirby’s father, on top of just being a really fun racing game….that is also a whole lot of other games too. While on the surface a simple racing game with only one (or two) buttons and vehicles that automatically accelerate, Air Riders has so much variety in what players can do. From normal races in Air Ride, to a top-down racing mode, the real meat of the experience lies in City Trial. Multiple players are thrown into one big map and get five minutes to collect as many power ups as possible, all while trying to avoid the other players and dealing with any number of random events that can happen. When time is up, everyone competes in one final challenge, which can similarly range from a race to minigames, to a full-blown battle between all of the machines and riders. This gorgeous game allows for some real chaotic bite-size matches that ensures no two Trial runs will be the same, and in the end it boasts that polish Sakurai is known for, and has by far the best customization options of all of the other kart racers released this year. The only real flaw I have with it is somewhat inconsistent matchmaking, but I’m sure the diehards that made the original a cult hit will be enjoying this game for years to come.

#1: DONKEY KONG BANANZA

Back when the Switch launched, it was a tossup for me as to my personal favorite game of that first year. Breath of the Wild took that spot, but it very nearly went to Super Mario Odyssey. A return to the sandbox exploration gameplay that made the first 3D Mario such a hit, I loved that game dearly. And now as the Switch 2 hits its first year, the 3D Mario team is back…with a Donkey Kong game. Yeah, sure, why not? Donkey Kong Bananza is the first 3D Donkey Kong game since the infamous Donkey Kong 64, and I think the 3D Mario team was the perfect fit for revitalizing DK’s platforming in the 3D space. With the ability to destroy almost everything in your path, Bananza  is just pure joy and a constant dopamine hit. There’s a handful of games out there with similar levels of destruction, but they are few and far between. But being able to just make my own path through these large levels and take out my frustrations on the very land itself….it just scratches an itch that has gone un-scratched for far too long. Adding to all of that, Bananza itself is just oozing with charm and reverence for the Donkey Kong series. The story of a young Pauline slowly growing more confident, singing is simple but effective, and I think Jenny Kidd does a fantastic job both as the character and providing the songs she sings throughout the game.

The game pushes forward some ideas that were also in Odyssey and even addresses some of the criticism levied at that game. While there’s even more collectibles in this game, they all serve some kind of purpose and make the player stronger over time. The Banandiem Gems that serve as the Power Star (or moon) equivalent in this game eventually build up to skill points that can give DK some pretty useful tools in his arsenal. And the fossils you collect can buy clothing, which all come with some kind of effect on gameplay. While the game lacks the sheer variety of things Mario could Capture in Odyssey, the Bananza transformations in this game have a lot more things they can do, especially once you dig into that skill tree. The game even manages to have a better finale than Odyssey did and well…if you know, you know. Outside of some overpriced optional DLC that came out a month later, Bananza is a fantastic time that currently serves as probably THE main reason to own a Switch 2 in my humble opinion. I hope to see DK get more love in the coming years after this game’s success but for now he’ll have to be content that he got to be my Game of the Year.

CONCLUSION

And there we have it, another list of games I played in a mostly arbitrary order this year. As far as some honorable mentions, I would say that I really still want to get around to the newest Hyrule Warriors, Age of Imprisonment as well as Pokémon Legends ZA soon. I feel like I’ll simply have to give Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 a go at some point for all the praise heaped onto it too. It seemed like a good year for beat ‘em ups this year too, with Marvel Cosmic Invasion looking pretty fun and is something I plan to pick up soon. For some reason we got a lot of ninja games with TWO new Ninja Gaiden games, a Shinobi game after so long, and Ghost of Yotei too. I’m a big mark for fighting games too, though admittedly I have my qualms with the likes of Fatal Fury City of the Wolves as well as Riot’s 2XKO but it’s looking like 2026 will have some greater fighters to dig into too. There’s plenty of games out there that I also might not have heard of or aren’t my thing that will still make the list for plenty of other people. And really, that’s the best part of games to me; there’s something out there for everyone. I might not resonate with something like Death Stranding 2 or Blue Prince, but I can appreciate that they add to this medium and can be that standout, GOTY experience for others. So, with that said, here’s to another great year of games, and here’s hoping 2026 has some great surprises in store for us!

Happy Gaming,

STILL STUCK ON A DIFFERENT PLANET

The base game is still for the most part in tact in this Definitive Edition, and with it the original story is unchanged. Caught up in a war between two alien factions, humanity is forced to abandon Earth, sending out a variety of ships, or “arks,” in the hope that a new home for humanity can be found. One such ship, the White Whale, serves as the focal point of the story, harassed by one of the alien factions and forced to crash land on the mysterious planet Mira. A world filled with colossal, hostile alien forms and a host of secrets, humanity forms the B.L.A.D.E. organization to find a way to survive this new home. But we have a time limit on our hands; the vast majority of the passengers are in the Lifehold, which separated from the main ship during entry into Mira. It’s up to B.L.A.D.E. to find and secure the Lifehold before the alien forces of the Ganglion Empire can destroy it, or else humanity will be wiped out. What a fun setup!

Xenoblade X has one of the most interesting hooks in the whole series, and for being the first HD entry in the franchise the Definitive Edition really didn’t need to do a lot to bring it up to snuff on Switch. Some character models were updated and while many largely look the same, quite a few characters got a very noticeable glow up. Lin no longer looks like a creepy doll, so that’s a win in my book. There are slight changes to the lightning and overall resolution, but it remains fairly faithful to the Wii U original. This isn’t as drastic a leap as the Definitive Edition for the first game was, but a lot of work was done to smooth out some rougher edges here or there. The UI got a total facelift, the microscopic text from the original redesigned to be readable by humans without use of a magnifying glass for starters, but the game also had to account for no longer having a Wii U Gamepad to display things like the world map. For the most part the game handles everything pretty well and the original game’s sleek sci-fi aesthetic looks great. Both the Wii U and Switch aren’t exactly graphical powerhouses, but I think the game still looks quite nice and it’s a huge technical feat to get this running on a portable system at all. A huge, interconnected world that is largely seamless to explore, the only real issues are bits of pop-in and the occasional stutter. As of time of writing there aren’t any major boosts when playing this on a Switch 2, but even so I think the game still has a fairly stellar presentation.

(New models for Elma and Lin (Left) vs. the Wii U originals (Right))

X stands out from all other games in the series with an English dub handled by Nintendo of America, opting for a mostly LA-based voice cast as opposed to the UK cast in all other entries, which arguably fits the game’s setting a bit more (seeing as the White Whale is repurposed into New Los Angeles as your central hub). The original release’s script and vocal tracks are unchanged, barring a small handful of new quests for brand new party members exclusive to the Definitive Edition, and I was happy to see the vast majority of the voice casts in both languages brought back for the newer content, albeit with some recasts and everyone having to dust off their performances a bit. The game’s original soundtrack was also barely altered, keeping the distinct sound of Hiroyuki Sawano which helps X stand out amongst the rest of the franchise. There’s a handful of new sounds and remixes of some existing songs but it was oddly more restrained than I expected. But then I guess you can’t top perfection! On the whole, the game’s core presentation and story remain faithful, with minor but much appreciated tweaks across the board. In many respects you’re still playing the original game, warts and all, though in terms of gameplay changes I think there are more substantial differences.

SYSTEMS ON TOP OF SYSTEMS

It’s interesting to look back at Xenoblade X now after both 2 and 3. Those games sought to streamline some of the RPG mechanics at times. Going from Xenoblade 3, where characters had only some slots for gems to affect their abilities, and instead relied on class systems and simple skill trees, we step back into the past with this game, with far more options. Each party member has five pieces of armor and two weapons to keep track of, not to mention augments you can craft and slap on for additional effects. Your main player avatar can uniquely change their class to any other in the game, learning additional Arts and Skills that can eventually be mixed and matched to create your own powerful custom builds. But that’s not even getting into your powerful mechanical exoskeletons, the Skells, all of which can be further customized in look and function with their own augments and Arts. Even outside of combat you have the social web from doing various quests with NPCs, there’s the arms manufacturing to fret about, or laying down an efficient probe network to generate resources, on top of things like Skell Insurance and weather effects and the list goes on! In many respects, X is the most RPG-like of the entire series, with so many things you can poke and prod at, even if it means getting lost in the weeds a bit.

The game functions much like the rest of the series. Players can roam around a massive world, seamlessly enter and exit battle and explore around as you complete quests and further advance the story. The MMO-like combat remains, with a focus on proper positioning and managing the cooldowns on your powerful Arts. While initially you’ll be on foot with your various party members, once you obtain your Skell license you can start to fight larger opponents with your own massive mech, and also further explore the land of Mira, especially once you unlock the Skell Flight Module. Even after a decade I really have to praise the game’s sense of scale. Mira is a vast land, larger than several other open world games of the era; even now it’s such a huge place to explore, even after getting your Skell. I appreciate the restraint in that regard; you get so used to seeing things at ground level, that the instant you get the Skell it almost feels like you’ve stepped into a different game. What was once an insurmountable mountain becomes an easily climbable hill. The floating structures and massive waterfalls that remain out of your reach until near the end spur you on to keep getting stronger and eventually take to the sky. This game still has the best exploration in the series, as even without the Skell you can run far faster and jump higher than in other games, all without any fall damage, so I felt encouraged to go anywhere and everywhere.

The Definitive Edition keeps the basic gameplay elements in place, but there are a few good changes overall. The addition of Quick Cooldown allows you to use Arts while they’re still recharging by using a new resource you build up over time. This really helps keep combat flowing, and allows you to respond to your ally’s Soul Voice prompts more often, helping to keep you all topped off with heals and triggering extra effects. Overdrive, the “limit break” mechanic of this game, is the same but is now properly explained with a little guide that can pop up whenever you activate it. For ten years I had no real idea how the mechanic worked in game, but now I know what combination of Arts triggers which effect and how to more efficiently keep it going. For quests, the game gives a bit more guidance as you progress, with a bit more information in your quest log. The game’s Follow Ball feature which leads you to the next major objective got some tweaks allegedly…though in my experience it often gets confused with showing the best way to get to places, and often makes you take the long way around when a shortcut would have sufficed.

By far the biggest changes that I noted were changes to all of the strange restrictions the original game had in regards to your party. In the Wii U release I ultimately never really used the vast majority of the party members because the game really didn’t feel designed to encourage it. Party members would not earn experience if they weren’t in the active party, they would earn affinity (necessary for their unique Affinity Quests) at a glacial pace, many missions placed arbitrary restrictions on who you could or could not have in your active party, and most bafflingly of all, you had to physically track down party members in NLA if you ever wanted to swap them out, rather than do it through a menu. I’m happy to say that the Definitive Edition fixes ALL of these problems. You can change characters basically whenever through a new menu, everyone gains experience regardless of use, and affinity gain is arguably TOO fast now. But being able to more freely pick who is in my active party is my favorite change. While there are SOME restrictions that still remain (your avatar must still always be in the party, for one), most were loosened, and as a result I was able to finally try out all of the characters that I never bothered with beforehand. That’s without even getting into the new party members added to this version of the game too. X started the trend of filling the Xenoblade games with tons of party members and after ten years I feel like I can finally appreciate all of them. Of course, as much as I adored these changes, there was one more aspect I was looking forward to with this Definitive Edition: the new epilogue.

FILLING THE TEN YEAR VOID

There’s something I need you all to understand before I talk about the new epilogue content in this release. The original game’s ending was very abrupt, as I mentioned before, and the lack of closure stuck with me longer than every other aspect of the game. Even with the art book’s release, all I could think about were the unanswered questions and what might have been. For a decade speculation was able to marinate and honestly, that’s too much pressure to put on something to live up to. Seeing as this Definitive Edition wasn’t going to get a separate mini-campaign like all the other games did (be it the prequel DLCs in 2 and 3, or the Future Connected content in the Definitive Edition of the first game), I knew I had to reign in my expectations a bit. Even so, I’m a bit disappointed.

The epilogue content is really just one extra-long story chapter split into thirds. The first two “acts” of this extra chapter are mostly just cutscenes trying desperately to answer questions as fast as they can, but also waste time with a lengthy mission to go around and talk to NPCs in a way that feels like this should have been a sidequest. Only with the final act of the last chapter do we get a new area to explore…not that there’s much to really DO there. Outside of having to track down all of your party members that get scattered it’s really more so of a very quaint “final dungeon” than a new continent, despite what the game says. Really my biggest issue with the epilogue is that it needed more time to properly space these revelations and developments out. Well that, and I don’t really care for a lot of the conclusions the game arrives at.

Despite the epilogue content taking place immediately after the endgame, there was a decade in-between the original X’s release and this Definitive Edition, and somewhere in that ten year span it’s clear that whatever plans the original release had in store, something changed. We got two other Xenoblade games and eventually DLC that helped to tie them all together. Fans had debated for ages on if X was a spinoff with no ties to the core trilogy or not, and I think Monolith Soft really wanted to put that debate to rest. While this epilogue does help to further tie the entire franchise together, it came at the cost of feeling thematically consistent with the original game’s ending.

The finale to X’s base game was humanity learning to live on Mira as their new home, confident that things were finally looking up. And then the epilogue immediately establishes that Mira is being destroyed and there’s no way to save it, so it’s time to uproot ourselves all over again. After spending dozens of hours on this world to just destroy it all of a sudden like this…well, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Now, I’m assuming that any plans for the future of this series probably involves this cast getting off of Mira at some point, but I found it weird they just HAD to do that in this epilogue chapter. It feels like way too big of a shift way too soon.

Outside of that the answers provided for the base game’s cliffhangers are also underwhelming. In the original game’s ending, it was discovered that the Lifehold had actually been destroyed all along when the ship crashed onto Mira. That SHOULD mean that humanity really is wiped out, that their digitized minds should no longer be around and able to pilot their mimeosome bodies. Elma’s only real explanation for this is to mutter out “It must be something about this planet!” And yet the ACTUAL answer is that humanity somehow ACCIDENTALLY stumbled into a way to connect with the Collective Unconscious. Mira itself isn’t seemingly that special at all, despite so much of the original game hinting otherwise. There’s also the matter of Lao, thought to be killed off in the finale, waking up alive on a beach as a cloaked figure approaches him. That cloaked figure, known for years as the “black knight” as per the art book, is actually Alois Bernholt, the fabled “hero of humanity” that seemingly gave his life to protect the White Whale at the game’s start. Turns out Al was actually just sent flying into the connective tissue of the Xenoblade multiverse and only just now gets back in the epilogue. Except before finally reappearing on Mira he somehow barged into Lao’s own personal afterlife and gets to have a conversation with him before passing on. Many were interested in seeing how Lao would factor into the epilogue, hoping he would rejoin the party and help to further redeem himself…but instead he amounts to barely a cameo.

There are all kinds of other loose threads the game never bothers to address. The party member Yelv has quite the confusing stinger at the end of his personal questline that is never followed up on in this Definitive Edition, and then there’s L. Another party member, L is quite the suspicious character. He’s the only alien actually trying to learn how to speak English, while everyone else is being automatically translated (implied to be because of Mira but then again who knows with how the epilogue handles other things). His full name is an anagram of Lucifer and he’s going on and on about wanting to gain knowledge. He has pretty prominent horns and we never get to see other members of his race too. The art book even lists more demonic looks for him that aren’t anywhere in the full release OR the new content. So I’m left to wonder how much of this game was really left on the cutting room floor even with this Definitive Edition attempting to fill in some cracks.

Really, for a so-called Definitive Edition I think this game could have gone a bit further to smooth out these rough edges. Enemy placement is still a fair bit too cluttered and some areas are a PAIN to progress through because you’ll end up fighting too many enemies. Ambush enemies are everywhere and always force a fight regardless of how much you out-level them, which just makes certain areas way more of a pain to explore than they should. I was also shocked to see just how bad the grind is for augments as you go throughout the game. Even with all of the changes and additions, I still find Xenoblade Chronicles X as a game a bit undercooked at times. That said, the Definitive Edition managed to smooth out a lot of rough edges overall, and to a degree I might be asking for too much. If anything, I’m just happy the game got a second chance at all.

CONCLUSION

Up until just a few months ago I had kind of given up hope that Xenoblade X would ever get mentioned again. Maybe a wink and a nod at most in a random title, but clearly Monolith Soft was working hard in the background. We now have the entire franchise all on Switch and this helps to serve as a great swan song for all of the work Monolith Soft put in on the platform. This game is no longer shackled to a failed console and more people can experience it at a time where the franchise is a lot more well-known and has way more fans. I really am glad that this game wasn’t forgotten in the end, and while I might not fully accept the answers provided, I finally have closure after ten long years. Going off of the ending to this game, coupled with the endings to Xenoblade 3 and its DLC, whatever Monolith Soft is cooking up is sure to impress. And now with a much more powerful console at their disposal I am very much looking forward to seeing what they can do when the shackles have been released.

I think having ten years to ruminate and theory craft about what this game COULD have been definitely colors my perception of the new content more than someone who picks this game up for the first time, so some people might be more positive regarding the epilogue than I was. Even outside of that though, Xenoblade X is still a fantastic open world RPG filled with tons of things to do, awesome mechs to pilot and a sleek sci-fi aesthetic paired with a unique soundtrack that makes it well worth experiencing. Whether you’re a longtime Xenoblade fan or open to trying the series out with this entry, even with some lingering issues this is definitely THE way to play Xenoblade Chronicles X.

Until next time,

WHY DO MOTION INPUTS EXIST?

First off, let’s have a quick history lesson. Fighting games got their start in the arcades, and had very specific limitations to consider for their controls. A cabinet could only have so many buttons on it, especially since you might need space for a player two, and so there was a hard cap on how many moves a given fighting game character could have. Most fighters settled on anywhere from four to six buttons, but that was just for the basic punches and kicks and such. In order to execute the so-called “special moves” on a given character, players would have to input specific directions on the control stick in tandem with a button press. Want Ryu to throw out a Hadoken? Input down, then down-forward, and then forward along with a punch. With this ingenious input method developers could end up throwing in tons of extra moves for a given character. Just using Street Fighter as an example, each character could have three different versions of a given special move depending on what attack button they used (light, medium or heavy), on top of being able to use powerful EX versions of specials if you did the input and hit two buttons at once. When you factor in button combos like both light punch and kick for the throw, not to mention “command normal” attacks with a button and a direction (like Ryu’s Collarbone Breaker with forward and medium punch), and suddenly characters had upwards of 40 different attacks…all with just six buttons. If nothing else, you have to admire the ingenuity.

(Goldlewis' Behemoth Typhoon simply doesn't work without motion inputs)

Of course, these inputs affected more than just the size of a character’s move list. It also influenced the character’s overall feel, and even balance of certain things. Take a charge character like Guile as an example. To execute his special moves you have to hold (or charge) a given direction for a second or two, then quickly reverse to the opposite direction in one fluid motion alongside the button press. This automatically makes him feel WAY different to pilot compared to a more traditional character like Ryu. It lends itself to some unique strengths and weaknesses too. Guile can’t walk forward and instantly throw out a projectile like Ryu can, however he can perform his Somersault Kick from a crouch block, whereas for Ryu’s reversal he has to input forward and put himself at more of a risk of getting hit, just for starters. This archetype of character was born out of motion inputs and I can’t think of many other games that have something similar with simpler inputs.

The type of input can also affect how individual moves are balanced. Many grapplers have powerful command grabs that require a full 360 degree motion that is incredibly difficult to do cleanly. Most of the time you get a jump instead, or you have to hide it behind a buffer after doing another attack. Because it’s so tricky to do, these moves tend to do a TON of damage to compensate for the risk you’re putting yourself in getting that close in the first place. Also consider various strategies you can find in fighting games to screw with your opponent’s inputs; crossing them up will reverse inputs, possibly giving them a move they don’t want to do. The difficulty of a motion on top of the time it takes to perform it also impacts how strong jumps can be in a fighting game. It’s VERY difficult to do a dragon punch motion on reaction to an opponent jumping, so you might rely on an anti-air normal attack instead. You get less reward off of that though, which pushes you to get better at your execution to let those Shoryukens fly right when you need them. For as difficult as they can be to do, it’s very clear that these inputs were not just made on accident, they were made with purpose. And yet, many people find issues with them…so what’s the deal there?

MODERN PROBLEMS REQUIRE MODERN SOLUTIONS

While fighting games had explosive popularity in the early days in the arcades, over time they’ve become a lot more niche and have gained a reputation for being a hard genre to get into. While there’s plenty of elements you can point to in regards to that (frame data, matchup knowledge, tight timings, etc.), the inputs required to do all those fancy, flashy moves certainly stand out. No other genre really requires inputs like this, at least for the basic stuff, so newbies enter the scene and are confused as to why they have to perform a small ritual to get Ryu to throw out a fire ball. In a shooter, you just hit the trigger and fire. In a racing game, you have gas and acceleration and you’re good. But in a fighting game you’re making all of these small, extremely precise movements and if you aren’t willing to put in a lot of time to learn all of that, you’re bound to bounce off of them entirely. This was something that some developers were taking note of, and so we got a wide variety of answers to this problem.

Masahiro Sakurai’s Super Smash Bros. series is probably the first and most notable example of a game deliberately designing a simpler control scheme to appeal to more players. Sakurai has even mentioned in his YouTube channel that he noticed fighting games were getting more and more complex and wanted to go against that. So Smash Bros. only has TWO attack buttons and the hardest input to do for a move is, at most, a button and one of the four cardinal directions. Attacks are overall pretty intuitive too. Do I want to hit the enemy above me? I’ll do my Up Attack. Are they below me? I’ll smack them with my Down Air Attack. Obviously the crossover appeal of Smash is THE key reason it’s so huge, but the easy to learn controls certainly didn’t hurt.

Other notable examples include Arc System Works and their various licensed fighting games. The Persona 4 Arena games implemented auto-combos that would let you perform flashy if inefficient combos by just mashing your light attack button, and this would continue to be refined with Dragon Ball FighterZ. That game also kept motion inputs to the minimum, only really doing quarter circle motions and the occasional down-down motion. Then there was the one-two punch with Granblue Fantasy Versus and DNF Duel. Both games have traditional motion inputs AND simple inputs built directly into the game, and attempt to balance this by giving the motion inputs a slight edge. In Granblue’s case, special moves have cooldowns before they can be used again, but that cooldown is slightly faster if you do the harder input for the move. For DNF Duel your special moves require MP to use, and your MP regenerates slightly faster with the traditional input. In those examples, it really does feel like they found a way to have their cake and eat it too. But what happens when you try to adapt this to longer running series, as opposed to a standalone, new thing?

Capcom’s experiments with alternate control schemes have had some ups and downs. Their Versus series of games, specifically Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 had optional Simple Controls that streamlined things down a bit and let players do special and super moves with just a button press, but a lot was lost to make it work. Characters lost a lot of moves in the process under these control schemes, but also had less options with the moves they had remaining. If someone had a projectile that went in different directions or speeds depending on the button strength, then in Simple Controls they couldn’t mix up their zoning and had to stick with just the one version. In particular I think that Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was the worst implementation of it. The moves they assigned characters felt arbitrary and for some characters, they were locked out of their signature moves that made them work. Frank West can’t snap pictures to level up his moveset under Simple Controls, and Phoenix Wright can’t gather evidence or enter his powerful Turnabout Mode, leaving both of these characters at a significant disadvantage in this mode.

Their experiments with the Street Fighter series have also be a bit all over the place. The 3DS port of Street Fighter IV included the ability to map special moves onto buttons on the touch screen. So with just a tap you could do a shoryuken or hadoken or whatever else you wanted. Unfortunately, this was implemented without a lot of care for how it would change the balance of that game. Guile could do instant Somersaults from a standing position and Zangief’s powerful Spinning Pile Driver was just a button press away with no reduction in damage to compensate. That said, I think that served as a good bit of practice in the lead up to Street Fighter 6. In the latest entry we have Classic Controls with the traditional inputs as they always have been, alongside Modern Controls, which allow for specials and supers to be done with a button press. However, there was more work done in an attempt to make it fair, but also viable at higher levels of play. Characters do end up losing a lot of attacks, going from six main attack buttons (three sets of punches and kicks) to just three main attack buttons, alongside a special button, but they also have an auto combo toggle and other useful moves are macroed on controller to make it easier to throw out things like Drive Impacts and the like. Certain charge motions still require a charge to use, so that keeps Guile in check, and all specials and supers do less damage overall, but considering you can just instantly respond with a super or reversal far faster than even pros can, I’d say that’s more than a decent tradeoff. Street Fighter 6 has a lot going for it, and it’s currently enjoying a lot of success, and while it’s impossible to get hard data on the matter, the addition of Modern Controls seems to have gotten people who would otherwise never get into the series the push to try and even compete in it, so I’d say it was a smashing success.

Outside of the larger developers, plenty of other indies have experimented with simpler inputs. From games like Fantasy Strike or Divekick, which basically boil fighting games down to their bare essentials, to other games like Blade Strangers or Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, we’re seeing tons of fighters that manage to have a lot of depth and can be quite fun, all without those pesky DP motions or what have you. Simple controls have clearly caught on, alongside other ways to make games more appealing to casual and newcomers alike, however that brings us to the present day.

ARE QUARTER CIRCLES A LOST ART?

All of a sudden we have four tag fighters coming in one after another, all with simple inputs, and only one with motion inputs as an option. Now, two is coincidence but three or more seems like a pattern, and many longtime fighting game players are worried for the future of this genre.

Currently, people have only had a lot of playtime with 2XKO and Hunter X Hunter: Nen Impact and complaints have arisen about their control schemes. With 2XKO having TWO special buttons, many feel it is a bit hard to keep it all straight. Meanwhile, Nen Impact has drawn ire for its whopping EIGHT (technically seven if you don't count the auto combo) button control scheme. Just like that we’ve run into the same problem developers had during the arcade era: there’s only so many buttons you can use. At the time of writing, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls and Invincible Versus aren’t playable to the public at all, though there’s been a lot of info dropped about the games here or there. Many were thrilled to see that Tokon would still have motion inputs as an option, but were enraged when Invincible Versus confirmed it was simple inputs only. We still don’t know the overall control schemes on either of these games, keep in mind, so there might be more or less problems down the line.

It’s undeniable that fighting games have become somewhat “easier” over the years. Gone are the days of one-frame links like in Street Fighter IV, or the extreme power level of a given character found in the older Guilty Gear games. We have autocombos and simple inputs now, but who is to say future games might go a step further and just play themselves? That being said though, I do doubt that motion inputs will ever fully go away. For as many people that hate them or don’t even attempt to understand them, you have tons of fans and even developers that love doing them and see the value in them. You can fit in so many moves per character without overloading on buttons. You enable archetypes like charge characters to exist. There will always be a place for traditional inputs overall, but I think we really should be asking another question here. Simple inputs were born out of the belief that fighting games are too hard and they need to make them easier to get more people into them, but isn’t there a better way to get new players into the genre?

There’s a lot that can be done to get more eyes on your game. Better presentation, better tutorials and overall feedback in your game, robust single player content…and perhaps most crucial of all….making sure these games work! It took a global pandemic to get most Japanese devs to start paying attention to the quality of their online play, and even then we still have issues with lack of crossplay on some games or strange lobby systems that make it hard to play with other people. Fighting games can do a LOT to get more popular without sacrificing what made people really fall in love with them in the first place. But even so, I think it’s also worth noting that…it’s OK to be niche. Fighting games CAN be hard, and a lot of people will NOT stick with it long term, and that’s perfectly fine. People need to be more open to the idea that not everything has to be for them, and not everything should be twisted into a one-size-fits-all solution. On that same note though, Simple Controls have a right to exist too, and I don’t think games that feature them should be immediately written off.

CONCLUSION

I can see where hardcore players are coming from, fearing that the hobby they’ve loved for so many years is under fire and they might one day not find anything they enjoy in it anymore. But I do think we’re kind of jumping to conclusions here. After all, this year also saw the release of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, a game that despite supporting a “smart style” with simpler inputs (albeit with WAY more restrictions than, say, SF6’s Modern Controls), was still filled with higher execution stuff on both offense AND defense. There’s also the hotly anticipated Virtua Fighter revival sometime in the near future, and that is a series that is often regarded as one of the most complex, demanding fighting games out there. Some people are acting as if fighting games themselves are dying out, but they’ll continue on as they always have. I also just find it amusing that so many in the FGC are stuck in this cycle of bemoaning the new games, only to prop up older games…when in the past the exact same thing happened when those games were new. At one point in time games like Street Fighter IV or Marvel vs. Capcom 3 were derided as “baby games,” because some things were different or a bit easier from past titles, and yet they remain beloved even now. Something tells me that regardless of how these new tag fighters do in the short term, there will be fanbases that will enjoy them for a long time to come, so I’m not particularly worried there.

Really, I think fighting games should be like any other genre, and have a wider range of skill levels and complexities available. On one end of the spectrum, we have simpler titles like Fantasy Strike, while on opposite ends of the spectrum you get your more technical, demanding games like King of Fighters XIII or Virtua Fighter, with plenty of games that can fall somewhere in-between. If platforming fans can have both Super Mario and Super Meat Boy, then I see no reason why fighting games can’t find a way to let simple and traditional inputs coexist. Now all that’s left to do is to sit back and see how well this post ages, I guess.

Until next time.

THE REVAMP’S FAILED REINVENTION

I’ve already written about the relaunch and its many problems (LINK HERE), but let me sum things up again. Upon relaunching back in June in 2024 MultiVersus was found to be a buggy, slow-paced mess that had also doubled down on all of the monetization models that people had already been complaining about back in beta. It was abundantly clear that the year they had spent reworking the game hadn’t yielded that much. We had a swap to Unreal Engine 5 for marginally better lighting, slightly improved (but still spotty) netcode, a few new characters and…that was about it. So right off the bat, the first impression of this full launch was negative, and it would be a herculean effort to right the ship after stumbling out of port like this.

To be fair to Player First Games, there was an attempt to save the game. They didn’t sit idly by and took criticism to heart, but for everything they added or changed, there’d be something else they would break in the process. It was truly one step forward and two steps back. Season two gave us Samurai Jack and Ranked Mode…except Jack was overtuned and annoying to fight, and Ranked had a ton of problems that held it back at launch. Season three had another fan favorite with The Powerpuff Girls…only for them to also be overpowered. They teased the addition of a shield mechanic in season three and fully implemented it in the following season, and while it was often requested from players, just as many hated the mechanic. Even defenders of the shield would largely agree it wasn’t implemented as well as it could have been. And then there was season four, their last big chance to turn things around and they pulled out all the stops. Arena Mode, Raven and Marceline as the new characters, and a new way to unlock fighters with Fighter’s Road. But uh…if you can guess the pattern here, those didn’t go well either. Arena Mode was a slog and barely anyone played it after a while. While Raven was mostly well regarded, Marceline felt super overtuned at launch. And then there was Fighter’s Road…the grind to end all grinds that largely created more problems than it solved.

With all this in mind, it was no surprise that season five would be the final season of the game. What WAS surprising though, is that the final big patch ended up leaving the game in a much better place, to the point people lamented that things were finally turning around…it was just too little, too late. The final patch decreased hitstop across the board and even adjusted the speed of some characters, finally addressing concerns over the game’s speed from the relaunch. Aquaman and Lola Bunny, the final two characters, were shown to be really fun additions just to rub salt in the wound. But for all of the positive changes, as much as hardcore fans might hate to admit it, MultiVersus was still a heavily flawed game, and it just stands to reason that it shouldn’t have relaunched in the state that it had in the first place. These issues were present even during the beta, and if those weren’t addressed with the relaunch, then its fate was sealed.

THE ORIGNAL SINS

For as highly as people speak of the beta version of MultiVersus, let’s not forget that game’s player base cratered well before the announcement it would be shut down for the relaunch a year later. Even in the beginning, this game had massive problems that went unaddressed. Monetization is an easy thing to gripe about, just to start. Having $15 and $20 skins was always gonna shoot this game in the foot. But it might have been easier to take if you didn’t have to buy characters too. There’s a lot of debate on if a free-to-play fighting game can even work with free characters, but I think MultiVersus had a chance to hit the ground running by offering the characters for free and just make the money back on all the skins. Look at the success of a game like Marvel Rivals, having all of the characters available all at once. While Rivals of Aether 2 is a paid game, all post-launch characters are going to be free, and they’ve also been relying on paid cosmetics to bolster development, as another example.

Even if you HAD to make characters paid, there was no reason they had to keep jacking the prices up. Going from $7 to $10, with new characters costing $12.50, this in addition to the skin prices just made this game a massive expense that many couldn’t afford. Really, this game failed one key aspect you see in all of these successful free-to-play games; you can hook the whales but you have to make it fun for everyone else too. The game feels like a massive grind if you don’t spend any money at all, and that just made people like me want to avoid giving it money in the first place. The game itself was shamelessly greedy, most evident with those limited time event skins. If you were willing to grind for hours to get the special currency you could spend ALL of it to get ONE of these skins for “free,” and then have to  buy the others with real money…and all of those skins were roughly $30 each. Some people argued that because you were able to get ONE of them for the low, low price of several hours of grinding, it was OK to price the others that way and…yeah I’m just not buying it. And clearly it didn’t work or this game would still be around. Cuz let’s face it, TONS of free-to-play games are just as, if not more money grubbing than MultiVersus but they’re still kicking. And that’s because getting past monetization….this game just had huge flaws that sucked the fun away.

From the early days of the beta, it was clear MultiVersus left a lot to be desired with balance, hitboxes, and just overall core gameplay mechanics. Hitboxes were awful for most of this game’s life, and even after multiple changes you’ll still see characters phase through attacks that SHOULD hit them, or get tagged by something that was nowhere near them. We’ve had overtuned characters and one trick ponies throughout this game’s life. If it isn’t Samurai Jack, Shaggy or Banana Guard’s side special spam, it’s Taz’s tornado spam from the beta. Wonder Woman, Bugs and Harley barely got touched throughout the betas and full release, allowing them to just utterly dominate and do things so many other characters wished they could do. Velma, Gizmo and so many others got gutted with constant, needless changes, and then you have the gigantic can of worms that is the Iron Giant. All those years when Sakurai was made fun of for saying Ridley was too big for Smash…yeah no, I think he knew what he was talking about. Virtually every major patch required tons of extra work for Iron Giant, and at times he was taken offline entirely due to some exploit being found. He was always hovering over the precipice of being either total trash or completely breaking the game over his knee.

When it comes to mobility and defense, the game largely never sat right with me, or a lot of other people. The beta was too slippery and fast, and the full release was too sluggish. They never found a happy medium. I’m still baffled that they decided to put in a dash attack in a game with no dashing. The dodge serves as the only real burst movement option in the game, when it’s supposed to be a defensive mechanic.  The dodge, as well as the parry added later on, felt finicky to use. Some characters, like Jason, barely moved when dodging and would eat attacks that others could avoid. The parry has so much recovery, even on a successful one, that you often couldn’t get the best punish out of it, and outside of a specific perk, it was detrimental to use against projectiles. Even the addition of shields later didn’t really help. Whether you’re for or against shields, I think we can be in agreement that such a major defensive mechanic shouldn’t have been so hastily added. Many were already used to the game lacking them, pointing to games like Brawlhalla or the first Rivals of Aether games as not having shields but still doing well. But those games had better core movement and just feel better designed in general compared to MultiVersus. The game was fun for a bit but the cracks formed quickly and weren’t being filled in fast enough, and the player base never really recovered. But maybe players would have stuck around with better picks for the roster.

From the jump, the potential that MultiVersus had was huge. Warner Bros. has so many properties that they either own or could get the license for that this could have been a game that celebrated movies and animation the same way that Super Smash Bros. celebrates video games. The original beta’s starting roster had a wide spread of IPs to pull from; Scooby-Doo, Game of Thrones, the various superheroes fromDC Comics…but there were also some rather strange picks that made many scratch their head. We got Shaggy and Velma but not the talking dog that’s the namesake of his series. We had Bugs Bunny and...Taz, but no Daffy in sight. I know there must be diehard fans of Gremlins out there, but did they really need TWO characters on that roster? The addition of Black Adam of all characters to the DC side was a transparent attempt at synergy with his own flop of a film, when there were several other more popular choices. And this is a problem that never really went away.

It was so strange for the relaunch to give us stages themed on Dexter’s Laboratory or The Powerpuff Girls, but no playable characters from those series (at first anyway). And when it came to adding in a new Adventure Time character, they went with…a random banana guard, a poor excuse for a joke character. We also settled into a pattern with these relaunch seasons that got old fast. It was a mixture of cartoon character and DC character after a while, with only Beetlejuice serving as a temporary break from that pattern. While characters like Raven or Marceline were well regarded, they came far too late. And when it finally came time to get another Looney Tunes rep…we got Lola Bunny before Daffy, despite a film starring the duck coming out around that same time. That said, it was Nubia who was criticized the most, a rather unknown DC Comics character that felt like a strange addition. An amazon wielding a spear, she felt a bit redundant when Wonder Woman and Banana Guard were already on the roster. I have no real qualms with the character and I can welcome more unexpected picks at times, but she really did feel like the epitome of “who asked for this?”

There’s rumors that the game’s main director pushed for some of these characters, and various datamines show that there are tons of other characters that were always in various forms of development that’ll never see the light of day. Raven had announcer packs leaked back during the beta, alongside a Wicked Witch of the West announcer pack. The Witch, alongside the likes of Scooby-Doo, also starred in the tie-in comic that was out around the same time as the relaunch. Why was the comic advertising characters that weren’t even in the game? Why all these leaked packs WELL before the character ever came out? Why prioritize someone like Banana Guard or Nubia over safer picks like Raven or The Powerpuff Girls? It just speaks to whoever was in charge being incredibly unorganized, and much like the rest of the game, they seemed ill-equipped to make what had been asked of them. So with all that being said…what can we learn from this?

LEARN FROM THE FLOP OR BE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT

Just a few years ago MultiVersus was being hailed as a shift in how fighting games could market themselves. Alongside the still un-released 2XKO from Riot Games, many argued that this was the beginning of the free-to-play age of fighting games. But I’m not so sure this will really work out. For one, there are simply SO MANY live-service games these days that competition is just too hard. All of these games are “forever games,” designed to take as much of your free time as possible and keep you from booting up anything else. Even with new titles coming out, they often end service within a year because they fail to tear people away from the heavy hitters. Fortnite continues to do well, alongside a few others, but for every success you have a dozen of failures like Foamstars, Concord, Knockout City, Rumbleverse and so on and so on. The live service bubble feels like it’s bursting, and this is a trend that just isn’t worth chasing.

But let’s pretend that isn’t the case. You’re built different, and you can deliver on a fighting game that can manage to get people’s attention and maintain it. You’re that rare confluence of events that leads to a smashing success. How exactly are you going to accomplish that? One of the biggest things successful live-services do is pump out content. You need to keep giving people a reason to boot your game up. So that means new skins or events or in the case of a fighting game, new characters. But right away there’s an issue: a fighting game character is so much more complex than just adding in a new gun or skin in something like Fortnite. It often takes MONTHS for a new character to come out in something like Street Fighter 6 or Tekken 8. Those games are also incredibly visually complex, with so much detail packed into a single character. So many cloth physics and high resolution textures so I can see every individual pore on their skin or hair on their head. Even if you go for a more stylized, less realistic look like the Guilty Gear series, the modern Arc System Works games spent so much time recreating that anime aesthetic, going through every animation frame by frame to adjust it so it looks just right. You’d have to try something different to pump out characters faster.

You’d need something with a simpler art style, that isn’t nearly as detailed or time consuming to make. But there’s also the matter of how complicated a character can be with their moveset and how you’d balance that with the rest of the cast. A gun being added to something like Apex Legends only has so many things it can do by contrast. So let’s trim that moveset down a bit, boiling it down to the bare essentials. You also need to make sure you’re constantly putting out new cosmetics in the meantime between characters. All this requires a TON of work though, and it can get costly, so you’ll have to find a way to price things accordingly. Don’t make players break the bank, but don’t give everything away for free either. Our ideal free-to-play fighter that learns from the mistakes of its predecessors would then have to have a simple art style, simple movesets, and not be too egregious with the monetization. Could such a thing exist? Well yeah…it’s called Brawlhalla.

I’m not even really joking. Brawlhalla is a free-to-play fighting game that has managed to survive for a decade and still maintains a healthy player base. It has collabs with everything from Star Wars to Tekken to wrestlers and more. Now, I can’t speak to the monetization in general, as even in the best case scenario it’s bound to be pretty gross. However, this game also has an option to just buy the whole roster for forty bucks, and that will count for all future characters. It’s a ridiculous deal the longer the game exists. You can even try out every character and skin in training mode to try before you buy individual characters if you want to. It’s been a massive success largely in the background and other games refuse to really learn from it. There’s also 2XKO but that hasn’t launched at time of writing and we’ll have to see if Riot can pump out characters fast enough, and not overcharge for skins. Which uh…knowing Riot that probably will charge hand over fist for all of those Ahri skins. So in the end, the solution is there and everyone refuses to learn.

CONCLUSION

In the end, the writing had been on the wall long before MultiVersus came back from that year hiatus. There was a chance for the game to right itself, but it was a slim chance to fix everything in a year. I think that Player First Games certainly has very talented artists and for all the misfires with some character designs, they also had some really great realized characters. Tom & Jerry were a fantastic take on a duo character, perfectly showcasing their own animosity against each other, with other fighters just caught in the crossfire. Rick was also an inspired design with tons of shenanigans you can get into with his portals and various projectiles. I can give the game credit for attempting to make a 2v2 focused game and emphasizing team work. There are bones of a good game buried deep within MultiVersus but sadly you have to dig too far to get there. Maybe if things had just been a bit different. If anything, I hope this game can be used as an example of what not to do when designing a fighting game or a live service one for that matter. In fact, it seems Riot already took notice, as there are rumors that they had been working on their own platform fighter and it was cancelled after seeing what happened with MultiVersus. I do feel for the fans of this game and I hope that everyone who worked at Player First Games gets on their feet with a new job. Ultimately, a lot of people suffered for the decisions likely made by just a few, which is unfortunately a trend in the gaming industry these days. There will continue to be more flops like MultiVersus for as long as the industry is ruled by greed and hubris. I have my doubts we’ll see those in power learn their lesson, but it doesn’t hurt to hope for the best, right?

Until next time.

THE BIG THREE

As is customary, let’s start off with recapping what the biggest game publishers did with their year. Microsoft had…well, quite the tumultuous year. Following their spending spree of acquisitions over the past few years, we’re starting to see a lot of the negative effects of that. This year alone Microsoft would close down four studios (Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games and Roundhouse Studios), and lay off over 1900 people in total. Tango at least would get picked up by…the developers of PUBG of all things with the Hi-Fi Rush IP intact at least, but that’s about the only silver lining. Even 343 Industries, the ones with the trusted Halo series under their belt, didn’t escape downsizing, with future games likely being outsourced.

Perhaps as a result of these decisions certain developers under Microsoft have fought back a bit. Activision’s QA department formed the largest western video game union this year, with various World of Warcraft devs also forming a union at Blizzard. Toys for Bob, known for working on the most recent Crash Bandicoot games also split from Activision to go independent. It’s honestly hard to not look at Microsoft as a bit of a sinking ship at times, what with their only landmark title for the year in Hellblade II getting a somewhat mixed reception, not to mention this year also saw the release of a few previously exclusive games to other platforms. Coupled with the rather bizarre “This is an Xbox” branding at the end of the year, it feels like in the near future Microsoft might not really be considered a major console developer and instead pivot to software, but we’ll see how much longer they can hold on like this.

For Sony, I think it’s fair to say they had a bit of an off year. Starting off, they were pretty public about not having many major releases for the bulk of the year in their tent pole series, and even mentioned needing more original IPs to leverage. In the realm of hardware this year saw the reveal and release of the PS5 Pro…to a mixed reception. For starters, it’s retailing at $699 USD, and that’s before getting into the optional $80 stand, or the fact it is digital only (but you could buy an optional disc drive for eighty more bucks!), but people are split on the actual value the system has with its upgraded specs. While a big game like Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth does look and perform noticeably better, it isn’t exactly a clear upgrade for most games across the board. Considering just how few games are truly next-gen exclusive at the moment (we still see games releasing on the PS4 even this year), it has been hard to convince people to upgrade and its sales aren’t quite matching the PS4 Pro in the same timeframe. The fact that scalpers are forced to sell at a loss should show that the demand just isn’t there. They weren’t strangers to cutting jobs either, with over 200 people laid off at Bungie.

That said, there’s three big games to talk about for Sony this year and unfortunately most of them don’t have the best stories attached. On the one hand, at the start of the year Helldivers II was a bit of a sleeper hit, selling very well and getting a lot of praise for being a hit multiplayer shooter in a market flooded with them. But that good will was hampered by the decision made by Sony higher-ups to require a PlayStation Network account to play the game even on PC. While they would walk that back a bit due to backlash, in the end 180 countries that have no access to PSN are also effectively locked out of playing Helldivers II. Coupled with some questionable updates and balance adjustments, the game lost a bit of its momentum. But hey, at least it didn’t pull a Concord.

Concord was to be the first title from the freshly-purchased Firewalk Studio, and Sony clearly anticipated it being a major hit. So much so they had commissioned an episode of the video game anthology series, Secret Level, to be about the game. And then with the release, Concord broke records…by becoming perhaps the most high profile video game bomb of all time. Launch numbers seemed dire, the game not even breaking 1000 players on Steam on day one. Within the first two weeks the game was effectively un-launched with all copies refunded and a month later Firewalk Studio was shut down. The game was developed over the course of eight years, well before the Firewalk purchase and was rumored to have a budget of over $400 million. It was lambasted for stale, uninteresting character designs, a kiss of death for a hero shooter, on top of just…not representing anything interesting in the overcrowded live service space. I’m sure retailing at forty bucks didn’t help it, though after Helldivers II’s massive success with a similar price point, no doubt Sony expected lightning to strike twice. While not particularly memorable itself, it has become one of the most infamous bombs in this industry, though time will tell if any lessons are learned here. Seeing that Sony wants to buy Kadokawa, one of the largest media distributors in Japan (not just for games but tons of anime licenses), it seems like Sony is still pretty acquisition hungry, even if a sale isn’t happening…FOR NOW.

The only real bright spot for Sony this year then was found with the surprise hit that was Astro Bot. Despite being around for much of the PS4 generation, Astro Bot finally getting his own standalone non-VR, non-pack-in game had him break out into the big time and was one of the more celebrated games of the year. For one thing, it’s just a high quality 3D platformer, and that’s an endangered species as far as genres go (if your name isn’t Mario or Sonic anyway), but it was also a game that celebrated the 30th anniversary of the PlayStation console in general. Tons of cameos and references to various Sony first party titles were found inside, on top of a lot of notable third party cameos too. Between this and the pack-in Astro’s Playroom on PS5, Team Asobi seem to be one of the few devs that still remember why people fell in love with Playstation in the first place. It ended up winning several awards at The Game Awards, including Game of the Year, so that’s a brighter note for Sony to end on for this year.

And that brings us to Nintendo, who had a fairly quiet year in terms of game releases, though they are not without some controversies. On the one hand, with multiple rumors swelling about the impeding “Switch 2,” that MIGHT come out next year (it will apparently be REVEALED by April 2025 at least), this was a year where games were mostly handled by various smaller dev teams at the behest of Nintendo as their major teams clearly have their hands full. Peach and Zelda got starring roles with Princess Peach Showtime and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom respectively, which is great and long overdue, but there were also smaller series given some spotlight. A new Endless Ocean, remakes of the Another Code series, and a brand new entry in the Famicom Detective Club series shows us that the Switch did so well, Nintendo had to dig deep once all the other bigger series were more or less taken care of. Taking note of that last title, Emio – The Smiling Man got a lot of attention for its mysterious viral marketing…that it was a new Famicom Detective Club game did roll some eyes, but it clearly got more eyes on the game than it would have gotten otherwise. Mario RPG fans ended up eating pretty well too, with the Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door remake hitting in the summer alongside the first brand new Mario & Luigi RPG in more than a decade. All and all, not a bad year for a console that’s been around for over seven years.

That’s just with games though, as Nintendo DID get involved in some more dubious things as the year went on. On the one hand, we have the more zany, left-field Nintendo ideas that were dropped at random points throughout this year like the Nintendo Music app or Alarmo…the digital alarm clock that plays game sounds and music to wake you up. But on the other hand, Nintendo was on a bit of a warpath with lawsuits this year. Notorious Switch emulator Yuzu were sued for over $2.4 million this year, seemingly shutting down by far the most prominent emulator for the system. And then there’s all the stuff related to Pocketpair and Palworld.

Palworld is definitely one of the more infamous games released this year. Developed by Pocketpair, a smaller Japanese dev known for little before this, the game made waves whenever a new trailer was shown off, being known by many as “Pokémon but with guns.” It released early in the year, showcasing a blending of monster catching and survival elements that made it out to be a strange fusion of an open world game similar to Breath of the Wild or Genshin Impact with a side of ARK: Survival Evolved. That said, what caught many people’s attention was just HOW similar a lot of the designs of the Pals were compared to a variety of Pokémon. Some argued that the wire meshes for the models was too similar to be a mere coincidence in some cases, but on the other hand…most Pokémon are based off of animals and mythical figures, so it’s not like THEY are wholly original either. That said, many felt it was just skirting the line and wouldn’t have been surprised if Nintendo or The Pokémon Company retaliated…and they eventually did, though not in the way most expected. Pocketpair would receive a joint lawsuit filed from Nintendo and The Pokémon Company over patent infringement, all relating to mechanics and animations that were present in Pokémon Legends: Arceaus, and while this is ongoing and will likely take some time to fully complete itself, the suit itself doesn’t really set a good precedent. Many would argue that trying to patent rather broad gameplay elements like this is anti-art, and only hurts the industry. But at the same time, Palworld feels like a rather cynical, derivative work that really straddles the line of plagiarism to a degree. It IS worth noting that Sony has a vested interest in the Palworld IP and has even invested some money and wants to go into multi-media so this could also be read as Nintendo and The Pokémon company wanting to snuff out any early competition. Who would have thought a seemingly unreal meme game would eventually lead to all of this?

And while we still have Pokémon on the brain here, we should also bring up the rather massive data leak that came from Game Freak late this year. Following a successful phishing attempt with an email, a reported terabyte of data was stolen from the developer. We’re talking the source code of some games, beta designs from older Pokémon games, potential info on the upcoming Pokémon Legends: Z-A titleamong many other things. The element that probably drove the most engagement in the aftermath of the leak was a lot of alleged old lore entries or stories in the Pokémon world that often had Pokémon engaging in very…graphic acts. At this point though, it’s hard to tell how much of this was actually real, the results of dodgy translation or just a writing exercise as developers tried to hash out what they wanted for the series. All I know is I’ll never look at Typlosion the same way again. That said, the actual worst part of this leak is that this also included employee information. Don’t get me wrong, seeing some of this beta stuff and development notes IS legitimately fascinating, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of real people’s safety and privacy. With all this in mind, it hasn’t been easy to be a Pokémon fan this year.

That’ll cover the big dogs, but there’s still the matter of other assorted industry news to cover and…sadly the trend won’t really improve all that much.

THE LITTLE GUYS LICK THEIR WOUNDS

For starters, we can look at Square Enix. They announced layoffs in their US and Europe offices, and saw a major drop in their stocks. After lacking sales in their most recent Final Fantasy games, Square seems to understand that staying console exclusive isn’t a viable path anymore and will likely be changing course on that in the future. Ubisoft is also not having the best of times at the moment. For one, they were sued over the closure of The Crew, a pretty notable lawsuit regarding how online-only games are allowed to be made worthless with the flip of a switch. They’ve had quite a few gaffs this year, such as trying to tell people that they should just “get used” to not owning the games they buy, and wants Steam to hide player numbers so people aren’t aware of how their games have been failing. One of their most high-profile failures this year was with Star Wars: Outlaws, showcasing that despite the Star Wars branding, people are not totally down with the open world Ubisoft formula anymore. With that in mind, there have been rumors of Tencent buying up Ubisoft.

Speaking of Tencent, they were notable for laying off the staff at Ouka Studios before their latest game, Visions of Mana, could even release. We’re at a point where you don’t even get to see if a game is successful before you get let go anymore it seems. And lastly from Tencent, renowned Capcom developer, Hideaki Itsuno has jumped ship to Tencent, though time will tell if that venture pays off for him. In the realm of game journalism there were quite a few shake ups too. IGN acquired multiple publications from Gamer Network, with perhaps the most notable being Eurogamer. Elsewhere, Gamestop would shut down Game Informer, which is a pretty major loss for gaming news. For over 33 years they were the premiere US-based gaming magazine known for in-depth interviews and looks at games; the void they leave behind is pretty massive.

In April Void Interact suffered a massive 4 terabyte data breach which sadly included source code for their game, Ready or Not, a tactical FPS that had just hit early access late last year. No employee information was seemingly found in the leaks at least, but alongside the Game Freak leak this year its clear security in the video game scene needs a lot of work. Annapurna’s gaming division all resigned en masse this year as well, following disagreements with where to take the company, which certainly calls into question the fate of certain games partnering with them. I suppose it might be better than the alternative of just laying everyone off.

Speaking of even more layoffs though, just to make sure we’re covering our bases, there’s even more jobs lost from the likes of Riot. They cut 530 jobs this year alone. Seeing how they still rake in so much money from the likes of League of Legends it’s frustrating to see that success not equating to job security. Supermassive laid off 90 staff, following the less-than-stellar reception to some of their latest games, including the Until Dawn remake. And perhaps most devastating of all, EA saw 5% of its workforce laid off, so that’s another 670 jobs gone. Grim stuff in general here.

I suppose I should bring up that in the realm of video game adaptations we had some mixed reception to certain new products. On the one hand, the live-action Fallout adaptation was extremely well received and successful, and Arcane mostly seemed to deliver on its final season. However, the Amazon-original Secret Level has been a lot more hit-or-miss. An anthology show depicting a truly random assortment of games, audiences seem split on the quality of many of these episodes. Some, like the Mega Man one, were very short and relatively solid reinterpretations of their origin stories, but some took more creative liberties, such as the Pac-Man episode that seems to have mostly been a stealth ad for the recently revealed Shadow Labyrinth game, a darker and edgier take on Pac-Man similar the reviled Bomberman: Act Zero. And then there was that episode on Concord which uh…need I say more there? Oh and then the Borderlands movie bombed, but at least the Sonic 3 movie seems to be doing well (less said about the Knuckles spin-off the better though).

I also feel I need to at least pay some lip service to the ongoing video game voice actor strike with SAG-AFTRA members. Following ongoing negotiations with the ever-growing threat of generative AI taking over the industry, in July of this year a video game strike was launched against various video game developers and publishers. While some publishers have made interim agreements or side deals with the actor union, many are still on the picket line as they fight for the right to not have their voice thrown up on an AI database and just used without their knowledge or consent. AI is a pretty hot-button issue right now, not just in gaming but everywhere. We’re living in a world where it can be hard to tell what is real and what is being generated by an AI program, where capitalists see this as a way to cut down on costs at the expense of art losing its soul and manmade touch, not to mention the potential environmental impacts. I certainly hope that actors can get the protections they need and eventually this strike can come to an end, but at time of writing it continues onwards. Maybe once that AI bubble pops we can get some GOOD news for once.

Speaking of good news though, I want to switch gears and indulge my own niche interests a bit here, and talk about all the good (and bad) things in the realm of fighting games this year.

LEGENDARY PARTNERSHIPS AND RESURRECTIONS

All things told, this year was pretty good for fighting games, though there’s definitely a few stinkers mixed in here. The year itself started off with the launch of French Bread’s Under Night In-Birth 2: Sys Celes, and despite some launch issues overall it’s a fairly well-regarded release that continues to iterate on the gameplay that makes the Under Night series stand out. SNK also was in the news a lot this year with continued news about their next title, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. They’re received a lot of praise for the game’s visual style, and fans are eagerly awaiting the release early in 2025. But the biggest game release by far this year was Tekken 8. Pretty much the sole big 3D fighter at the moment, the game drew equal amounts praise and criticism for its more aggressive playstyle and changes to older characters, alongside the rather large visual upgrade. The story mode was also praised for being very bombastic, with a very intricate final boss that takes the Tekken story to new heights. Sadly…it couldn’t escape some criticism here or there though. After release the game would suddenly add in a cosmetic shop littered with microtransactions, something that reviews never seemed to get wind of, and later on drew the ire of players with the release of a new stage that was NOT included with the season pass, despite an earlier stage seemingly being included in the pass. They received a lot of flak for some of the DLC choices as well, with the latest character for the season, Clive from Final Fantasy XVI, splitting the fanbase a bit. Despite all of that, the game has clearly done well for itself (taking home Fighting Game of the Year at The Game Awards) and will likely be supported for years to come.

This year also saw a lot of older franchises come back from the dead, and some longstanding partnerships were suddenly highlighted. For starters, a new entry in the Dragon Ball: Budokai Tenkaichi series, Sparking Zero, saw release. This was a bit of a dream come true for longtime Dragon Ball fans who love diving into the virtual toybox that this series supports…though it IS worth noting it was also home to a very embarrassing official tournament that highlighted some fairly terrible balance decisions in the game. Capcom came out of nowhere with the surprise release of a fighting collection of all of the Marvel Comics fighting games they made over the years, especially the iconic Marvel vs. Capcom series. Not to be outdone on that note, they confirmed yet ANOTHER fighting collection, this time being made up of a variety of early 3D titles such as Project Justice or the Power Stone games, alongside the two SNK crossover titles. Capcom and SNK are particularly buddy-buddy this year, as this year also saw that for Street Fighter 6’s second season we would see Fatal Fury’s Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui joining the game, and for City of the Wolves both Ken Masters and Chun-li will also guest star. Adding onto all of that, there was also the finale to the Capcom Cup and the $1 million prize. About the only thing to complain about is a lack of costumes for SF6.

That said, by far the most significant return to fame this year was Sega finally confirming a brand new Virtua Fighter game. With a teaser shown off at The Game Awards, and a massive “Virtua Fighter Direct” detailing things afterward, Sega seems to be committed to reminding people why they were once the kings of the 3D fighter. When you have the president of Nvidia and a Saudi prince singing the praises of the series and seemingly throwing their own support towards this revival, it seems like it might be something special, though we don’t yet know how long we’ll have to wait for the game. In the meantime, there has been yet another re-release of Virtua Fighter 5 on PC that supports proper rollback netcode as well as balance adjustments to sate players for now.

Of course not everything was great in the realm of fighters. Mortal Kombat 1’s first full year was filled with a fair bit of criticism, but the announcement of their second season and major story expansion, Khaos Reigns, didn’t seem to do much better. For starters, it was quite pricy at over fifty dollars for a short story expansion and six characters, with no ability (at least at first) to just buy the characters separately from the pack. There’s also the matter of the character choices; revamped versions of the cyborg ninjas alongside Noob Saibot were a bit disappointing for some but then there’s the guests. Ghostface from the Scream films, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian, and the T-1000 from the Terminator films. Some feel they’re kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel for “fitting” guests, not to mention many are still reeling with the double dose of “evil Superman” characters like Omni Man and Homelander last season. Rumors swirled that the expansion sold poorly and future DLC likely won’t follow. In general it’s hard to feel like MK1 wasn’t a bit of a misstep.

We’re not done talking about Warner Bros. fighters either. After a yearlong slumber, MultiVersus returned. While this free-to-play platform fighter seemed like it was going to be a smash hit during its open beta in 2022, it quickly ran dry of content and then abruptly announced it would be going offline for a year to prepare for the “real” launch. I’ve talked about why this relaunch faltered elsewhere but to sum things up: the game plays substantially differently, it is still loaded with bugs and strange design decisions that were still present in the beta, on top of some of the most aggressive and desperate monetization I’ve seen yet. At one point, WB outright bought the studio behind the game, Player First Games, so it seemed like maybe they were ready to invest more into the game. However, ahead of its fourth season reveal, WB Discovery CEO David Zaslav stated in an investor call that the game, among others, contributed to a $100 million loss so….getting some mixed messages here. That said, the recent release of Rivals of Aether 2 does seem to have given platform fighter fans SOME solace.

Oddly enough, MultiVersus’ failures seemingly scared off Riot and their own attempt at a platform fighter, if rumors are true. Outside of that potential game, Riot finally unveiled a bit more information on their upcoming League of Legends game. Once known as “Project L” for years, it has a new name….2XKO. This name got lambasted pretty quickly, though later on in the year the game got a playable beta that received a lot of feedback from players. Many still seem to be really highlighting this game as being something special, but details are still scarce regarding the release date, so this is far from the last we’ve seen of it.

And lastly, I feel the need to highlight the truly awful hand dealt towards the indie fighter, Them’s Fightin’ Herds. Going from a fan game based off of the Friendship is Magic My Little Pony generation, it eventually became its own title. It was a fairly solid little fighter, even if it never quite got a lot of attention for one reason or another. Sadly, this year the devs, after being purchased by Maximum Entertainment, were abruptly laid off before work on the final two characters of their first (and now only) season pass could be complete. These last two fighters were hastily released and completely broke the game with massive oversights and game breaking bugs that threatened to ruin the game’s small, if dedicated, competitive scene. Later patches would smooth over SOME of these issues but it’s clear that this game was not given the sendoff it deserved. With other fighters in development with Maximum Entertainment, such as Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age, a beat-em up fighting game hybrid that employs controversial fighting game dev Mike Zaimont, as well as a game set in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe, I think audiences should think twice about supporting this publisher. They clearly don’t support their developers.

With that detour out of the way, let’s return to talking about some big titles that hit this year as a way to wrap things up.

THE BIG GAMES OF 2024: MANY HITS AND MISSES

Fans of live-service shooters were spoiled for choice this year, though not all of those experiences are made equal. After all, we already talked about Concord. That said, another failure of sorts in this genre was WB’s own Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. The first brand new (non-VR) game from Rocksteady in almost a decade, the game was sadly dead on arrival and was one of the more notable bombs early in the year. Many felt that it wasn’t the best call to make a game about taking out such beloved heroes in their first major appearance in the Arkham Series. There’s also the fact this came from a studio known for making tight, single-player experiences and suddenly jumping ship to a live-service multiplayer game seemed unwise. Really you could go on with all the ways in which this game failed to be very appealing, but it ultimately lead to poor sales and would barely get out a year’s worth of planned content before effectively wrapping up. In all, it is said to have cost WB $200 million in revenue. With all that being said, a bit of a major shocker at year’s end was the surprise success of Marvel Rivals. While clearly somewhat derivative when compared to Blizzard’s Overwatch, the slick presentation, relatively consumer-friendly microtransactions and generally solid gameplay has led to the game getting a ton of attention, gaining 10 million players within three days of going live. Certainly did better than something like Foamstars, a game clearly aping Splatoon that has fizzled out in the same year it debuted. I guess at the end of the day live-service games can do just fine if you…you know…make it appealing.

We’ve covered most of the bigger games from the major, well-known publishers this year but there are some more notable hits from various developers in Asia. From Korea, we have Shift Up’s Stellar Blade, an action game that managed to be very…eye catching in various ways, seen by many as a solid title that took more than a little inspiration from Nier Automata (even scoring a collab with them). It DID unfortunately get embroiled in some culture war stuff; some feeling it was a game that “destroyed” the West because uh….the main character had a big ass or whatever. There WAS a bit of controversy from this same crowd when some of the costumes in-game seemed to be censored…but honestly it looks like people making a mountain out of a molehill. At the very least, the devs seem to be pretty normal about things…which unfortunately I can’t say for one of China’s biggest success stories this year: Black Myth: Wukong. This title became a true smash hit with over 21 million copies sold and won a variety of awards by the year’s end. But there WAS a lot of controversy regarding the game, with some bizarre streaming guidelines that forbade influencers from talking about “feminist propaganda” among other things. And then there’s the director of the game being more than a little salty that the game didn’t win Game of the Year at The Game Awards. Still, it’s good to see gaming continue to grow throughout the world with a variety of other countries really coming into their own.

And lastly, I want to shed some light on some of the more notable indie games released this year. There’s dozens of titles that deserve some limelight, like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, a visually stunning mystery game from the developers behind the equally visually stunning Sayonara Wild Hearts. Or there’s Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, a game that sets out to emulate the infamous Zelda CDI games…except, you know…good. There’s the adorable platformer The Plucky Squire, or the acclaimed puzzle metroidvania Animal Well too. In sheer variety, UFO 50 has you covered with 50 games from a bunch of different genres in a way that emulates those old retro collections with games of dubious quality. Horror games even got some interesting entries this year with Crow Country as a fun throw-back to PS1 horror similar to Signalis from last year. Mouthwashing also came out of nowhere and ended up becoming a surprise hit for many, as the dark and at times distressing story really connected with people, introducing one of the most hateable characters in gaming (seriously, Jimmy is the worst). But the biggest hit by far this year was Balatro. The Poker roguelite has sailed past 3.5 million sales this year, ending up securing some wins at The Game Awards, and it shows little signs of slowing down. A deceptively simple gameplay loop, themed around gaining special Joker cards that allow you to cheat in increasingly crazy ways at Poker, the game proves hard to put down and even as some were perplexed that it would be nominated for Game of the Year, all it takes is a few games to be converted. Seeing as this was made by one guy, that’s pretty damn impressive. With how bad the industry has been for the top dogs out there, it’s not hard to feel like indies really pick up the slack in many ways.

Ordinarily we’d be done here, but I have one last segment I want to go over….because we’re STILL not done with the rampant layoffs and such that plague the industry, but one company in particular needs to be brought to task.

A DEADLY EMBRACE

So far we’ve covered a variety of layoffs and studio closures from Microsoft, Sony, EA, Riot, Square Enix and more, but there is one company that stands out among all others. An entity that has been putting its fingers in all the pies, and it has basically ruined the entire bakery. I’m talking, of course, about Embracer Group. The last few years have seen Embracer swooping in and grabbing up as many studios as possible. At one point it was easier to think about what they DIDN’T own. However, their spending sprees (and a failed Saudi deal) have had a lot of repercussions this year especially. Let’s take it from the top of the year.

First, Lost Boys Interactive hit layoffs right in January, though an exact number wasn’t given. A second round of layoffs would occur in September, once again being quite significant but no numbers shared. Also in January, 97 jobs were cut from Eidos Montreal, and on top of that work on a new Deus Ex game was halted and cancelled. After Embracer picked up the studio in 2022 they haven’t exactly done much with it and now here we are. We’re STILL in January with more cuts from Black Forest Games losing a whopping 50% of its workforce. With this in mind, by February of this year, taking into account some cuts made at the end of 2023, Embracer was suddenly out nearly 1400 workers. To paraphrase a quote given about these layoffs, their highest priority is their shareholders. These people don’t care about games, or people’s livelihoods…they just want to make sure the line keeps going up. I wish I could say we were done here but we’re still just getting started.

You see, in addition to all of these layoffs, they also sold off a variety of studios that they owned in an attempt to get rid of debts and right their ships. In March, they sold off Saber Interactive for a deal that seems to be valued at around $250 million, with a variety of projects now given ownership to the buyer, Beacon Interactive. At least with this deal jobs seemed to be secured. The same can NOT be said for the sale of Gearbox to Take Two for about $460 million. Shortly afterward Gearbox faced layoffs, though an exact number wasn’t given.

As a result of all of this, in April Embracer would announce plans to split into three different brands: Asmodee (dealing primarily with trading cards, off of a purchase from 2022), Coffee Stain and Friends (focusing on a variety of their smaller gaming IPs) and Middle-earth Representatives and Friends (focusing on bigger powerhouse IP with games as well as the Lords of the Rings franchise). This is being done to allegedly allow all of these different studios and business ventures to run as efficiently as possible but forgive me if I’m not altogether optimistic. To prove my pessimism right, in June Embracer would close down Pieces Interactive, known for the Alone in the Dark franchise. One final blunder to close this section out, also in June Embracer would talk about embracing AI for even more efficiency in their game distribution. Oh sure, they say that AI won’t replace any real human jobs, but I trust them about as far as I can throw them. Then again, if they keep closing down studios and laying people off, they really won’t have any humans left to replace.

Laying it all out here like that, it’s just so…sickening. Somewhere around 1600 people losing their jobs in the span of a year after ONE company went on a spending spree and thought they’d landed a multi-billion dollar deal, on top of riding the highs of inflated spending from the pandemic. Adding to all of the other layoffs and closures this year it’s a wonder the gaming industry is still standing. This isn’t sustainable, and the fact there seems to be next to no protections to keep things from getting to this point, let alone being able to punish the companies that play chicken with people’s jobs is just…well, it’s enough to make me say something that would probably get my Twitter account suspended. The biggest question here is undoubtedly “when will it end?” And how many people’s livelihoods have to suffer while the so-called leaders are mostly unaffected? I wish I had an answer.

CONCLUSION

The gaming industry rode a wave of profits for some time while so many were forced inside. The ones at the top believed that this would last forever and kept spending more and more, blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes. But the common worker is the one who pays the price, and the industry somehow still limps along anyway. Not to be a big downer or anything but…it’s hard to look at all of this information and not feel like things are so utterly bleak. But giving into despair isn’t going to solve anything.

There ARE some bright spots here at least. I’m glad to see a game like Astro Bot win so much acclaim, since it was a title made by some talented, driven people that haven’t forgotten what gaming is SUPPOSED to be about: fun. Or at the very least an engaging experience that isn’t concerned with checking off boxes for focus testing or making sure it maximizes profit about all else. With all of these live-service blunders I can only hope the industry eventually forgoes this model, or at least makes it all less predatory. With a new Nintendo console on the horizon again, I’m also hoping the Big N can bring about some great games that don’t need to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to impress and then barely make any profit back. Indies continue to hold up this industry with some really inventive games that make for pure experiences that can go toe-to-toe with the biggest AAA titles. One last little story that emerged at the end of this year also gives me a bit of hope for the future. Following the turmoil at Platinumgames, Hideki Kamiya has formed a new studio, Clovers, and is working with Capcom once again on a sequel to the Okami game that once made Clover Studio infamous. Kamiya mentioned that had he stayed at Platinum, his creative soul would have died. Seeing that Platinum seems more focused on live-service titles at the moment (despite their previous effort crashing and burning), I take this as a sign that the creatives out there will still fight for the right to make the games they want to make and won’t just roll over and let the greedy executives win without a fight. There are silver linings in these massive clouds over the industry and I think that, if the people will it, brighter days will be ahead. I certainly hope that 2025’s year in review will end on a much happier note.

Happy Gaming.

#6: PRINCESS PEACH SHOWTIME!

It’s been quite a while since Princess Peach got to headline her own game, but the surprise reveal of Princess Peach Showtime last year was a highlight. Compared to Super Princess Peach on the DS, a very by-the-books and easy platformer, Showtime has more going on with it from a mechanical standpoint and has a lot more potential moving forward as a possible franchise. Peach has to save the day by taking on a number of roles in magical plays, and so she’s constantly swapping between being a sword fighter or a superhero, alongside a mermaid or ice skater. Levels are relatively short and straight-forward, with each outfit having its own gameplay style. Admittedly the game is quite easy and a bit on the short side, but it’s a great way to showcase Peach in a way we haven’t seen until now. The developer, Good Feel, managed to make this game a real visual treat…though sadly the performance suffers a bit, like most late-gen Switch titles. On the whole I think this game has a lot of charm and personality, though I do wish it had a bit more meat on its bones. It really feels like a sequel could flesh things out a bit and be really special, but it’s a good foundation for the Mushroom Kingdom Monarch to really strike out on her own.

#5: UNDER NIGHT IN-BIRTH II [Sys: Celes]

I’m on a never ending quest to play as many fighting game franchises as I can, and French Bread’s own Under Night In-Birth series is one I haven’t gotten around to until now. The latest in the series, it furthers the overarching story while serving as the most polished entry yet. The game’s presentation is pretty stellar; with really clean hand-drawn sprites and some colorful, gorgeous backgrounds, coupled with a fantastic sound track to tie it together. Seeing as most fighters these days are fully 3D, it’s good to see French Bread holding down the fort with a 2D title. As far as the gameplay goes, it has an interesting mixture of accessible controls with a lot of hidden depth. There’s the GRD (grid) system that basically acts as a tug-of-war between both players. Every ten seconds or so the game tallies up who has the most GRD filled up and bestows a buff that leads to more damage and a potential combo cancel opportunity, making for an interesting pace where proper offense AND defense is rewarded. You earn GRD by attacking or defending, but can also use GRD as a resource for certain actions, so there’s some interesting risk and reward that takes this concept further than a more traditional super meter (which exists here too). Under Night II is also notable for finally bringing proper rollback netcode to this series, so it can finally have playable online. All things told, there’s a lot to like here, but as I’ve only recently gotten the game and haven’t poured THAT much time into it, I’ll have to leave it here.

#4: SUPER MARIO PARTY JAMBOREE

Party games are often derided as nothing but shovelware, but the Mario Party series has been able to survive for quite a while, so they have to be doing SOMETHING right! The Switch games have seemingly gotten over the slump they originally found themselves in after a few experimental titles from developer ND Cube, with each game getting better overall. Super Mario Party Jamboree combines the newer minigames and partner mechanic of the first Super Mario Party on Switch with the updated online and remastered maps of Mario Party Superstars to make the definitive Mario Party experience. The partner mechanic has been further fleshed out, with partners doubling the effects of pretty much every space or board interaction…but that goes for both good AND bad outcomes. Coupled with partners being easily stolen by other players, there’s a lot more risk and reward with them in this game, so you’ll have to think strategically when it comes to using them. On top of that, this game also has some interesting new modes, including the return of a single player campaign, alongside an 8 player co-op mode AND a 20 player online battle royale race. It’s probably the most ambitious Mario Party in a long while, and it’s been a blast with friends…the only real downside is how long some of these games can last, drawing the parties out. All things told there’s worse problems to have!

#3: RIVALS OF AETHER II

The original Rivals of Aether is one of my favorite fighters out there, and my favorite non-Smash platform fighter, so I was already pretty excited about a full sequel, but Rivals of Aether II has managed to meet all my expectations and then some. The game looks great in 3D with a really flashy style, but the game isn’t content with just a visual upgrade. Rivals II attempts to smooth over some rougher elements of the first game with some new mechanics, like grabable ledges on top of shields and throws, alongside further fleshing out each character’s moveset with even more specials. Being able to do special attacks from ledge, when rising from a knockdown, or during a grab adds a lot to a given character’s kit. Really, the characters themselves are the highlight here. Each fighter feels really unique both from each other and compared to other platform fighters. Kragg is a super heavy character who can alter the terrain of a stage at will, on top of having a solid projectile to dominate in a way most heavies fail to in other games. Newcomers like Fleet or Loxodont also bring some nice variety to the game. Fleet is a very agile zoner, floating through the air as she aims her bow and waits for the perfect shot to snipe her opponents, while Loxodont is like the lovechild of Super Smash Bros. Ganondorf and King Dedede, another heavy character who commands great range and can be a real juggernaut with his magma armor. Rivals II boasts rollback netcode for some great online and has a roadmap with tons of new modes and features planned too, with all post-launch characters being free. I really want to see this game be as successful as possible, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it grows. It would honestly probably be my Game of the Year…if my potato PC could run it better.

#2: PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE LOST CROWN

Earlier this year I played the demo for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and was immediately hooked. It took me longer to get to the full game than I wanted, but it ended up being worth the wait. I’m not really all that familiar with the franchise, but The Lost Crown was a really solid, seemingly standalone adventure that sadly didn’t seem to hit for most. The reveal of the game got a lot of mixed reception and its sales were lackluster, which is a damn shame because it’s one of the better games Ubisoft has put out in years. Considering how bad the company has been doing lately, on top of the toxic culture that enables abusers in high-up positions, I suppose this is just karma. All the same, I do want to highlight what some very talented people did at a company that clearly doesn’t deserve them.

Playing as an elite warrior working for the royal family, Sargon finds himself trapped in a mysterious mountain where time flows all over the place and he’ll have to fight all manner of monsters to get to the bottom of this mountain’s secrets as he attempts to save the kidnapped prince. The Lost Crown ends up being a fun mixture of 2D action game and Metroidvania or “search action” as some call it. My biggest compliment to this game has to be the overall feel of the controls. Sargon feels great whether he’s slicing and dicing foes or performing some tricky jumps. You gain more interesting tools and abilities as the game goes on and they really put you to the test at points. Boss fights are often full of spectacle and really pushed me at times, and I felt compelled to scour every inch of the map until I found everything. It does suffer a bit from the “Ubisoft Bloat” problem that plagues so many of their other titles, but it was a blast from start to finish and was well worth the time I put into it. We’re certainly spoiled for choice with solid Metroidvanias these days but it’s always great to see some AAA efforts sprinkled in with all of those indies.

#1: SPLATOON 3: SIDE ORDER

This year saw the conclusion to Splatoon 3’s planned content, and as I went into with a previous post, one of the highlights of its roadmap was the paid single-player expansion. Side Order had been teased before the original game even released, and it was ultimately worth the wait. Once again starring Agent 8, the protagonist of Splatoon 2’s Octo Expansion campaign, players are trapped in a virtual world and have to repeatedly ascend the Tower of Order in an attempt to save the world from a looming threat.

While Side Order is still a third person shooter like Splatoon games past, it also incorporates rogue lite elements. Each floor is randomized with a number of different objectives, layouts and enemies to deal with. Adding to that, you get different power-ups for each floor and can eventually give yourself some really impressive builds that can bend the game so far in your favor it becomes a real power fantasy. That said, you’re expected to fail quite a lot, so each attempt gives you a currency to spend on permanent upgrades to make sure each future attempt goes by more smoothly than the last. Considering this is Nintendo’s first real take on this genre they did a great job, creating a satisfying loop that kept me coming back for more. I poured SO much time into this game over the year, to the point that my thumbs were hurting, and that’s honestly never happened to me before. I’ve had my qualms with Splatoon 3 proper, but the single player stuff has never been an issue, and Side Order continued that trend. An addictive experience that I couldn’t put down to the end, I’d consider this whole expansion to be my Game of the Year. Is it a little sad that it’s DLC and not a completely new game? Sure, I guess….but tons of people are gonna say that Elden Ring’s DLC counts for this so why not Splatoon?!

CONCLUSION

So here we are, another list of games done for another year! I really do wish I got to play more games this year but sometimes things just don’t really go that way. From indie hits like Balatro or Mouthwashing to other big hits like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, not to mention the Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door remake OR the Mario & Luigi: Brothership Mario RPGs…there was a lot there that I just didn’t have the ability to play this year. Hoping things look up next year because there’s never really been a shortage of great games to play. Obviously you can’t play everything, but it’d be nice to have a bit more variety in my picks for my top games of the year. I still had a lot of fun with what I DID play, at least. Stay tuned for my year-end wrap up for this year in gaming on the whole though!

REWORKS AND ROADMAPS

First off, let’s recap my main complaints from the original post and see just how Splatoon 3 addressed those points: I had issues with the game’s online stability, the seasonal update cycles, Salmon Run’s reward system and the quality of the multiplayer stages. To be honest…very few of these complaints were addressed, though I kind of expected that. The online experience in Splatoon 3 is largely the same now as it was back when I made that post, and any alleged improvements aren’t all that noticeable to me. Rooms still break down at random when matchmaking, and you still see a lot of players disconnecting at all points of a match. There was a patch not too long ago that seemingly tried addressing lag issues in matches, though I can’t say I noticed any major differences. For a while the game seemed to disconnect me and then punish me despite doing everything in my power to stomp out issues, though that did diminish greatly over time. Other than that, it’s the same ol’, same ol’.

I didn’t expect the seasonal content droughts to really be addressed and they also went mostly unchanged. In fact, we got LESS per season near the end with less weapons and stages. There was an attempt to improve the frequency of the various Challenges with wacky rule sets though. I’d still argue they were too infrequent and I was often not able to play even when they were active. There was a fun one where Rollers were super-fast, so that was neat I guess. Salmon Run also received a patch that awards players some silver and gold scales per shift if you do all your rewards, but that’s a bandage being slapped on that game’s horrid economy that comes too little too late. The shop still makes you buy things just to see what else is on sale and the prices are still FAR too high most of the time. There’s only one thing I think this game really did that felt like they were responding to criticism and that was regarding the stages.

For one thing, many of the later stages added post-launch got better with time. Starting with Drizzle Season 2023, I think the devs were finally willing to budge on some of their early design decisions with stages. Crableg Capital had a lot more verticality for starters, with Shipshape Cargo Co. having a lot of wide open space and multiple ways to get around and into the enemy side of the stage. From there Robo ROM-en was a really fun stage with a good theme and an interesting lower route that allowed you to actually flank your opponents. Marlin Airport made use of fans that would move platforms around for an interesting stage gimmick too. Our final brand new stage, Lemuria Hub, was an interesting take on asymmetrical stages with more moving platforms as a hazard to make it stand out. Admittedly, Bluefin Depot’s return was a bit underwhelming but it still has a very unique layout that helps it stand out. But the real talking points here were all of the stage reworks.

Starting with version 5.1 Splatoon 3 would start doing stage reworks as they have done in the past two games. First up was Mahi-Mahi Resort, which ended up addressing a lot of my problems. The stage was made a lot bigger even before the water levels dropped, with the side routes on the left side being made bigger and a better flank route overall. It still doesn’t hold a candle to Splatoon 1’s iteration of the stage but it was a great step forward. That said…I think we kind of peaked there. The subsequent reworks for Mincemeat Metalworks and Undertow Spillway were a lot less impactful. They did make the stages a bit better with extended routes out of spawn or slightly reworking the middle of the stages but they were still largely the same and barely count as a rework in my mind.

(Compare the launch version of Mincemeat Metalworks (LEFT) with the reworked version (RIGHT). Sure they're some changes, but at a glance could you even notice?)

The Version 8.0 update ended up changing MULTIPLE stages at once though. Hammerhead Bridge and Barnacle and Dime would also receive reworks, alongside multiple other stages getting smaller changes across a few of the modes. That said, these final reworks were a bit all over the place. Barnacle and Dime did add a new route on the left of the stage and slightly reworked paths out of spawn which was appreciated, and Hammerhead Bridge did extend the routes out of spawn a bit alongside a one-way drop into the middle of the stage on the right side of the stage…but the stage itself was still a glorified corridor. In the other ranked modes (aside from Splat Zones), these changes were barely notable. When it comes to the other assorted changes, some ended up being more notable than expected. Eeltail Alley added some blocks that allowed you another way to get up to the center bridge (though only in Turf War), and the changes made to the lower flank routes on Museum d’Alfonsio and Brinewater Springs were pretty major changes. Adding a random block here or there on Manta Marina…doesn’t really set the world on fire though. Oddly enough, Um’Ami Ruins received a lot of changes that I count it as an unofficial rework, getting a completely revamped right path out of spawn with a new ink rail to get to the middle of the stage faster. To be honest, this game did end up changing more stages than I thought they would, and we are definitely in a much better place with stages now then at launch or even a year ago. But at the same time, the issues these stages faced are systemic and would take way more time to change than a simple patch would allow. I can only hope that Splatoon 4 isn’t afraid to let players ink walls and have more routes to get around. I feel like making sure stages could be modified for extra modes like Big Run or Tricolor Battles, alongside all of the other ranked modes led to stages feeling less dynamic and interesting across the board. Still, as perhaps my biggest beef with this game, I appreciate the effort. With that said though, let’s talk about some of the NEW stuff the final year of this game’s content cycle would give us.

SPLATOON GOES ROGUE(LITE), WITH A GRAND FINALE

Teased way back before the game even officially launched, the single player expansion was hotly anticipated…and they ended up taking quite a bit of time to release it. That said, I think it ended up being well worth the wait. Side Order ends up serving as a bit of a follow-up to the storyline from Splatoon 2’s Octo Expansion while also being a very experimental side mode. Side Order is a roguelite adventure, with Agent 8 having to scale a tower in a digital world in order to take out the embodiment of order itself to save Pearl and Marina. Players start with a weakened main weapon but each floor they ascend gets them a random power-up that can help turn the tables. For every given “run” of the game, failure or not, you get currency to purchase permanent power-ups to ensure the next run goes smoother. It ended up being a lot of fun with some really addictive gameplay that kept me playing until my thumbs hurt. While maybe not quite as large as Octo Expansion was, it was definitely filled with more than enough to keep me coming back again and again until I cleaned my plate and did everything. All the power-ups cataloged, runs with all the weapons, and even the special run with the Order Octo Shot with no upgrades. For Nintendo’s first crack at a rogue-lite I’m happy that they nailed it so well, and it makes me hopeful future Splatoon games continue to experiment with their single player content. If nothing else, Splatoon seems to always nail their single player modes.

That said, as the end approached it was clear that we’d have to say goodbye…and the game did everything in its power to ensure the final main Splatfest would be one to remember. The Grand Festival didn’t just feel like the finale to Splatoon 3 but a celebration of the entire trilogy. All three main idol groups came together to form the Now or Never Seven, performing for an extra-long Splatfest that lasted three entire days. For this event players were also transferred to a completely different locale this time around, the Grand Festival Grounds near the desert crater where our story first began in this game. It felt like a real full-circle moment, and the fact that the developers went and made a HUGE venue filled to the brim with characters and little details that would only be used for three days was pretty impressive. We live in a world where game devs do everything they can to reuse assets and make sure players see everything they worked hard on, and a lot of this stuff was only available for three days! You know, assuming you don’t own an amiibo of the idols.

Adding to that, prior to this event we got a sneak peak of the final Tricolor map, the Grand Festival Bowl with the final Big Run of the game. Once again, introducing content that wouldn’t be readily available afterward, it was a cool way to tease the stage. The prompt for this final Splatfest was also an interesting one, asking players what they valued most: the Past, the Present, or the Future, with the three idol groups all picking a side to represent them. In the end though…it was a blowout. The power of nostalgia dictates that people value the Past more (or maybe they just like the Squid Sisters the most?), and while Present had a decent showing…in the end Future ended with zero points. How fitting that the final Splatfest of this game would once again demonstrate how hard it is to balance three choices without creating a third wheel that doesn’t really contribute to the greater outcome. That bummer aside, I think the Grand Festival was a really special sendoff for the game on the whole. It’s worth noting we’ll still see reruns of some seasonal Splatfests as time goes on, so it isn’t the TRUE end to the game, but its close enough. That said…as good as this finale was, I do think the true final state of the game does come up a bit short.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

With confirmation that no more major updates were planned for this game, fans will have to more or less accept Splatoon 3 for what it IS rather than what it COULD be. I do find it strange that, for a game as obsessed with the number 3 as Splatoon 3 is, we never did get third kits for weapons at all. It is worth noting Splatoon 3 has more weapons than either Splatoon game before it even WITHOUT third kits though, so I’d argue there is still a lot of variety. That being said, the lack of more options for some weapons can really hurt, especially when you consider the long wait some weapons had to even get their second kit (Bamboozler mains I feel for you!) thanks to the seasonal updates. The fact that we got brand new weapons such as the Decavitator right at the end of the game’s life with both kits at once stings all the more.

Considering how much work this game put into multiple versions of stages for certain modes and events, I am a little shocked a final update didn’t let players do private room Tricolor Battles or even be able to add on the modifiers from the random Challenges. Seeing as Shifty Stations became fair game after the Final Fest of 2¸I don’t see a reason for not implementing something similar for the likes of Tricolor stages, or even Big Run stages. I understand that making something limited-time only makes it feel more special (I even just praised this about the Grand Festival), but considering what past games have done it’s hard to feel like 3 isn’t dropping the ball a little bit.

Just so we’re clear here, I still think Splatoon 3 is a game bursting at the seams with content. Between two solid single-player experiences, by far the most stages and weapons in the series (especially if we’re counting variations for modes like Big Run or Tricolor Battles), a more fleshed-out co-op mode with Salmon Run, it even manages to have smaller stuff like a card game hidden within. Both Splatanas and Stingers are interesting new weapons and some of the other new weapons added later on in the game are pretty interesting. I’ll still hold firm that the Zipcaster is one of the coolest special weapons they’ve ever made. The game has a lot of technical polish and the visuals, even if they aren’t a huge leap from past games, feel all the more refined. I put hundreds of hours into the game across these two years and some change, and I enjoyed the vast majority of it. Playing with friends on the weekend was a pretty common activity, as opposed to the other two games that eventually boiled down to dusting it off every so often for a Splatfest and then turning it off again for months at a time. Splatoon 3 is a great game and in a lot of respects a great finale to the trilogy, but I won’t deny I still feel a little let down.

We have no idea what the future holds for this series now. Final Splatfests have had some impact on the next game in the series. Marie having more of a role in 2’s story, or the entire “chaos” theming for 3 on the whole…so who knows how Past winning will impact the hypothetical Splatoon 4. The devs have mentioned the trilogy closing the chapter on the current plot, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a total clean slate moving forward. Maybe we’ll get a game set in the past to get more of that juicy lore. Maybe we’ll get a game that’s geared more towards design elements from the first game even! One can hope, I guess. The Splatoon trilogy has definitely had its share of ups and downs, so I don’t want to paint this as something that only 3 had going on. The first game was at times an unbalanced mess, since it was a new IP that wasn’t sure what it wanted to be yet. The second game got rushed out the door to hit the launch window of the Switch too, and had its own share of strange design decisions (here’s looking at you, Sting Ray). With 3 I had hopes the devs would finally have the time and resources, not to mention past experiences to draw from, to make the best game in the series and…3 was not that at all. But it was also a game made during a pandemic, with a new Nintendo online infrastructure, on top of being on aging hardware that may or may not have once had a “pro” version in development. All things considered I think Splatoon 3 came out OK. It still delivered on a sense of style that stands out from the rest of Nintendo’s games, and kept me coming back for more even with all of these issues, so clearly they were doing a lot right. Whatever the future holds, I’ll always be down to make a mess with some ink.

Stay fresh.

A REGRESSIVE RE-LAUNCH

In the first ten minutes of me booting up the re-launched MultiVersus, I found myself constantly repeating the same question: why was this feature better in the beta? For starters, the tutorial, while a bit more robust with a true level to run through as you’re taught the basics, lacks the advanced tutorials found in the beta. No more ways to learn about directional influence or how certain moves are meant to function. This is especially puzzling when this re-launch added new mechanics, such as the parry and dash attack, so you’d think they’d want to make sure people know they exist! Following this, I went into training mode, but was dismayed to see that you could no longer go into training with every character regardless of having unlocked them. In a world where every fighting game gets DLC and being able to train against them or even see how they play requires buying in, MultiVersus allowing you to “try before you buy” felt really revolutionary and fairly consumer friendly. The same held true for local play, making it a godsend for offline tournaments that would no longer have to rush to unlock everyone in preparation. That BOTH of these features are gone is troubling on its own, especially when you factor in changes to progression and monetization, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

As I went into training mode I noticed that ranked play was present on the menu, but grayed out with a “coming soon” message. The original beta eventually got some form of ranked play briefly before the beta’s shutdown, and to not see it back again is disappointing. There were also a number of options and settings that were either taken out or adjusted from the beta, such as being able to swap the inputs for your basic three-hit combo and your strong attack. I used that feature since I felt the default was a bit awkward, but now I have no choice but to leave it as it is. Training mode no longer lets you change controls, and it seemingly takes longer to swap characters while in that mode. Another puzzling change is that stats from the end of battle are no longer there, such as listing who got the most ringouts or who did the most damage, making it difficult to tell how effective you really were in a fight. You can’t even see which players agree to or decline a rematch, and there’s no longer an option to “toast back” your opponent if they toast you, making it harder to give them props for a good fight. In general the UI is…different, and while somewhat improved it still feels somewhat lacking. You no longer have to move a very slow cursor for individual menu items on console, but there’s still parts of the UI that make it feel like it was made for a keyboard and mouse first and foremost.

Really, I could list out all of these changes all day, and to be fair most beta versions of a game are going to see changes for the full release. But to see so many changes that are basically just whole features being taken out is a concerning first impression. Now, about a week into the game’s re-launch an update has gone out that now allows everyone to play as every character in training mode, though not in local battle. Player First Games has been quick to respond to feedback and are currently attempting to put back in as many of these features as they can…but that kind of begs the question…what were they doing for a full year if this is the finished result?

SACRIFCED AT THE ALTAR OF GREED

An issue this game has had since day one is that Warner Bros. is the publisher, and they’re among the greediest when it comes to Western game publishers. From prioritizing DLC rather than fixing poor PC versions of various Batman Arkham games, to adding in loot boxes to a single player game like Middle Earth: Shadow of War, I knew things weren’t likely to be great. The beta was rife with terrible monetization. They gave you a fair bit of the free currency for characters right away to trick you into thinking the game will be more generous than it actually is, because after all…the first hit is free but once you’re hooked you have to pay for the rest. We had an abundance of costumes costing twenty dollars or more, with characters at seven dollars a pop. I knew that the chances were slim that the monetization would get any better, but I wasn’t really expecting it to get worse.

For starters, characters now cost ten dollars each…at least for the older beta characters. A new character like Joker costs about $12.50. That’s not even getting into the changes to the free currency. In the beta you had Gold, which could be used for characters, perks and a small handful of cosmetics. For this re-launch, they’ve seen fit to cut Gold entirely, but ADDED three new currencies to replace it. There’s a separate currency for perks and a separate one for fighters, with a new “prestige” currency that you only acquire by…getting cosmetics, which then lets you get a small handful of EXCLUSIVE cosmetics. Speaking frankly, it’s disgusting in just how brazenly greedy it all is. Before, you had options of what to spend your hard earned Gold on, and you’d gain some for every match played. Sure, it was a drop in the bucket, but every bit helped. But with these separate but equal currencies you’re far more limited. Once I’ve bought up all the perks I want that perk currency just sits there, useless and unable to be converted into anything else. Same goes for character currency, which also takes way longer to acquire. You only get it for specific events or character mastery, and even then you’ll get like 100 of it at a time, which doesn’t mean much when every character costs THOUSANDS of the stuff. In the beta, characters cost varying amounts of Gold; easy to use characters like Garnet or Taz were cheaper at 1500 Gold, hard characters like Tom & Jerry were 3000 Gold, and everyone else was at 2000. But now you’ll find EVERY character from the beta is 3000 of the character currency, and a new character like Joker costs 6000 of it. I already disliked the idea of pricing characters differently, since it kind of sets them up to be compared. If Joker costs more than everyone else is he just better? For the record, for the past two weeks or so since release I’ve done all my daily and weekly missions and about as much of the PvE stuff as I can, and that’s netted me a little over 11,000 character currency. I’ve gotten one character from the old beta, as well as Joker, leaving me with roughly 2000 currency I can’t do anything with for some time, and knowing future characters are going to cost more I’m more likely to hoard it than anything else. Adding to this, at launch you only earned battlepass XP by doing your daily and weekly missions, severely curbing just how fast you could advance through it. A later patch granted you a comically small amount of XP for a win and even less for a loss, though those amounts were also increased with yet ANOTHER patch a bit later. Nothing’s been done with character currency, meanwhile, so hoarding continues to be the way to go there.

You’ll see people try to defend this, stating that this is just like the good old days where you’d unlock everyone by playing, but the time investment here isn’t comparable at all. A game like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate infamously locked the bulk of its 70+ character roster away, leaving you with only the first game’s 8 initial fighters, but it took me way less time to unlock the entirety of that game’s roster than it has to get TWO characters in MultiVersus. I have it better than many, as I got to retain anyone I unlocked in that beta period. I have roughly half of the roster at this point, but for anyone starting fresh all you get is Shaggy and four rotating characters every week. I remembered when completing the initial beta’s tutorial got me Wonder Woman for free, thinking it was super generous…little did I know we peaked there. In all honesty, the initial closed beta was even more generous so this is the SECOND time they’ve slowed everything down to a crawl. But nowhere is this horrible, manipulative design more apparent than with the PvE mode added here, the Rift.

At first glance, The Rift seems like a lot of fun. A full on campaign mode with mini-games and boss fights, with plenty of ways to modify fights and give you a lot of things to do cooperatively with friends rather than just fight against each other online. But as with everything else here, fun has been sacrificed at the altar of greed. For starters, to get very far in the mode you’ll need to unlock and level up Gems, power-ups you affix to your characters that can have a range of effects. These help to make you stronger and fight back against increasingly tough missions, but you’ll quickly realize how much they drag things down. You see, there’s multiple difficulties for each campaign in a given Rift, and you are outright gated out of certain difficulties if your Gem level isn’t up to snuff. Even then, some fights get so tough at the higher difficulties you might not be able to win without getting your Gem levels up even higher. You have two options to get stronger: you can either go through every mission and complete the various sub missions within, some of which are fairly tedious to do and might require a character or skin (or a specific skin of a specific character) that you don’t have….or you could just slide them some money to juice the Gems that way. So much of the Rift’s progression is designed around a grind that wears you down so you just shell out and make it stop. It’s all about the path of least resistance, and BOY does this game resist you a lot. If you want full completion on a given Rift you’ll have to do almost every submission in every fight. It’s easier if you have a friend with you, as every fight has a submission for doing it with a co-op partner, but if you don’t have a friend to play with you’ll really struggle to fully complete a Rift. The devs even got into some hot water when it was found that later difficulties would have a limited amount of lives you had to budget each day, with the option to buy more lives with real money. They lie through their teeth that this is some bug, despite this being a part of the in-game shop and has dedicated UI elements for it, but even if it was a bug, it certainly fits in with the manipulative design.

It became pretty clear early on that the Rift mode just wasn’t going to do it for me, but you’re forced to contend with it if you want to progress your daily missions among other things. They even have an event going on that will reward you with the next character, The Matrix’s Agent Smith, if you can defeat 20 bosses in Rifts…but that will require a significant amount of time and effort…or money, of course. That would mean doing pretty much every Rift on every difficulty, and later Rifts actually take away one of the easier difficulties, just outright forcing you to contend with the harder versions of these same handful of missions over and over. This could have been a great contender compared to the Smash Bros. single player experiences, but they’ve only succeeded in making a mode I’m loathe to even look at. But hey, even if the monetization is awful, and the new mode is a grindy slog AND this full release is missing tons of features from the beta, as long as the core gameplay is fun this is all worth putting up with….right?

TOO FAST OR TOO SLOW, NEVER JUST RIGHT

The original beta for MultiVersus was fun, but flawed. It had a lot of interesting ideas, but with some shoddy execution. I had hoped that with a year or more to polish things up, the game could at least come back with some kinks ironed out…but what we got instead is practically a different game in some ways. For starters, the beta was notable for being a bit “slippery” for people. You had a great amount of air control and your dodge was fast and easy to spam over and over. So it was difficult to really catch up with opponents and chase them down. Adding to that, many attacks both came out fast and had barely any recovery, meaning you could just keep swinging away with no one able to punish that behavior. This re-launch has slowed the game down considerably…but now it just feels awful to move around. Some of this might be down to taste, but most players seem to agree that something is OFF about the game now. Some have noticed that the input buffer seems ludicrously high, storing inputs for upwards of 30 frames. For reference, Smash Ultimate has a buffer of around 10 frames, and people haaaaaaate how that feels. To be fair here, I think slowing the game down in some respects actually was the right call. There were too many actions in beta MultiVersus that were basically instant and really hard to punish. Finn could throw out a gem and instantly teleport over to it, as an example. Finn’s infamous backpack spin and Taz's side special spin were also notoriously hard to deal with as if you dodged them they’d recover and be able to do it again before you could stop them. The online for the beta also got…really bad at times, with characters constantly teleporting around and acting weird due to instability. They’ve allegedly upgraded the netcode for this game, and while I still see a fair variety of issues (such as frequent desynchs), the online experience DOES seem better. A slower game makes it easier to deal with stronger moves, while also making the online experience smoother….but the problem is that they didn’t stop there.

(Credit to MadMikeYT on Reddit)

In addition to slowing the game down so much, they also increased the size of every character by a good deal, all without changing the sizes of stages at all. The camera is also zoomed in a lot more than it used to, making things seem even more claustrophobic, especially on certain stages. But I think the single worst change here was the addition of FAR more hitstun to virtually every single move in the game. All of this combined makes for a game that’s incredibly different in feel and pace. Beta MultiVersus was slippery, making it hard to run someone down and start your offensive, but the full release of MultiVersus is a sluggish time where you’re in constant danger of being stuck in a near-infinite loop that’ll lead to your death.  As a result of this, 2v2 matches feel like crapshoots, where you could just constantly get ping ponged around and suddenly have a high damage percentage seconds into a match. 1v1s run the risk of being locked into long combos that can lead to early kills too. With the more recent patches, they have attempted to look into these issues a bit, such as reducing the hitstun in 1v1s only, but also changing a number of moves in an attempt to stop all of the infinite loops and force people to get more creative with combos. That said, they still have a lot of work to do.

On that note with these patches, the balance is clearly lacking this early on. I’m not a competitive player by any means so I can only say so much about it, but the consensus seems to be that the game is still a bit of a mess, not really an improvement from the beta. Certain characters seemingly got touched up and greatly improved like Taz or Black Adam, while characters like Velma got completely gutted. Curiously, some of the reported best characters in the game like Bugs, Harley and Wonder Woman, are barely touched despite so many other characters clearly needing more work to bring them up to par. I’m still baffled at how this game has tried to balance moves with cooldowns in a very uneven way. As an example, Wonder Woman’s lasso had a cooldown in the beta, despite it not being THAT powerful, and then it was removed for the full release….and now it’s back again after the first patch. Which is it? Why does Velma’s down special have a nearly TWO MINUTE cooldown when the buff she achieves with it doesn’t last more than a few seconds? There’s also the matter of the Iron Giant, who was found to have tons of infinites and exploits, leading to him being taken offline for well over a week before returning. Now, I don’t expect any fighting game to ever be perfectly balanced, especially at launch, but for things to be so bad you have to bring an entire character (that people might have paid MONEY for) offline for several days again begs the question…why did this game release in this state?

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

At this point, MultiVersus has been out for a few weeks, with a few patches thrown out to address some issues, with more along the way. I’m sure with time bugs will be addressed and certain features will be added that were missing. Player First Games have been pretty up front that they ran out of time with this re-launch and had to prioritize certain things to meet the deadline. The upgrade from Unreal Engine 4 to 5 is also likely contributing to some of the problems in this game. I’m not a programmer but I can assume performing an engine switch in just a year’s time is a tall order for any studio, let alone a smaller, less experienced one.

I want to make clear that I’m not going after anyone from Player First Games. The ones that are in the trenches doing testing and bug fixing and putting their all into designing characters are just doing their jobs to the best of their ability. I’d never accuse anyone here of being lazy or phoning things in. I truly think this dev team wants to make the best game they can, but they are also saddled with a publisher that is known for screwing over games with their greed, not to mention the whole of Warner Bros./Discovery being on fire right now and having to cancel projects for tax write offs and trying to shake off debt. I can only imagine the issues going on behind the scenes that the devs are forced to endure when they just want to make a fun fighting game. I’m sure that no one is more frustrated with the state of this game than the people working on it day and night.

That all being said though, this is still a game that people have spent money on. A game that people are trying to compete in professionally. Just because I can be understanding of the circumstances surrounding this game that doesn’t really change the fact that this full release is littered with bugs, predatory design and gameplay changes that severely impact my enjoyment. I’m sure others are in a similar boat; I WANT this game to succeed, but I also don’t want to make excuses for it. Time will tell if Player First Games can stomp out some issues and keep a decent content stream going for this game, or if people will get burned out or impatient and just move onto something else. With a new Nintendo system on the horizon, that just means a new Smash Bros. game is a matter of “when” and not “if.” There’s also more competition with games like Nickelodeon All Star Brawl 2 or the upcoming Rivals of Aether 2 that’ll be competing for the attention of platform fighter fans everywhere, so…the clock is ticking. That’s kind of the rub with live service games; you only have so much time you can dedicate to them and there’s SO much competition. If something better comes along, people WILL flock to it. The always-online nature of this game also worries me with the fact that one day Warner Bros. could just flip a switch and take it offline forever. Hell, they’ve already done that once! I think there’s still time to improve this game and maybe down the line they can redeem themselves…but this is already their second chance and I’m not sure they’ve done anything to warrant a third.

Until next time,

#10: F-ZERO 99

F-Zero is a franchise I have limited experience with; I’ve played far more of Captain Falcon in the Smash Bros. series than any other F-Zero game combined. Regardless, the release of a new game after a near 20 year hiatus certainly had my attention. F-Zero 99 is a new take on the original game, after the popularity of Tetris 99 on the Switch. Up to 99 players race together in a battle-royale fashion, aiming to take first place…or at least survive to the finish line. I’ll be up front that I’m terrible at this game and didn’t play that much of it, but I can recognize that it was a fun spin on an old idea, giving players ample ways to try to play catch up in the chaotic, high-speed races, and for those that are more well-versed in F-Zero it served as a way to scratch an itch that has been bugging them for a good long while. Its unclear what the series’ future will be but I’m hopeful that the overall positive reception to this free-to-play title means there might be more to come for F-Zero sometime soon.

#9: ADVANCE WARS 1+2 RE-BOOT CAMP

As long as we’re talking about older, revived Nintendo franchises, we may as well talk about Advance Wars. After Fire Emblem really took off worldwide, this series has been rather dormant over at Intelligence Systems. Due to real world events, this release was delayed by about a year, but I’m glad that the remake of the first two Advance Wars games helmed by Wayforward was able to finally release. Overall, these are very faithful remakes with some great new bits of animation, voice acting and music, with players able to compete in the campaigns or wage war locally or online in the multiplayer modes. Some people weren’t a huge fan of the visual style in this remake, or felt that it could have done more, but ultimately I’m just happy to see this series come back again and I think Wayforward did a great job. The endless horrors of war have never been so fun!

#8: HOLOLIVE FAN GAMES: (HOLOCURE: SAVE THE FANS AND IDOL SHOWDOWN)

You might remember from a while back that I’m a VTuber fan, especially the ones over at Hololive. There’s been a number of really fun fan games that have released over the years but this year we got two of them released that were right up my alley…well, kinda. First off we have Holocure, a “bullet-heaven” game in the same vein as Vampire Survivors starring the Hololive girls. It’s technically still in early-access and has been out for a while…but the STEAM release was in 2023 and that’s when I first played it so it counts. It’s a very fun game with cute pixel art, great remixes of Hololive songs and is filled to bursting with tons of interesting references to these streamers…which makes it almost completely incomprehensible to non-fans, but that’s beside the point.

We also received a Hololive fighting game in Idol Showdown this year, which I also enjoyed for the most part. The character movesets are filled with just as many references, with some very expressive sprite work on both the playable cast and the backgrounds. A rogue like Digital Frontier mode adds to the stuff to do in the game if pure fighting isn’t for you, and it’s even received some free DLC characters as time has gone on. I do wish the game was a bit more optimized in some regards, but it’s otherwise a really fun game that managed to combine two of my interests together into one package. So I’m counting both of these games together under the umbrella of being Hololive fan games. Give them a try….and fall down the rabbit hole.

#7: NICKELODEON ALL STAR BRAWL 2

Speaking of fighting games, I was pleasantly surprised by the reveal and subsequent release of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2. Despite being excited by the prospect of the first game, I wasn’t all that fond of it by the time it released. It was a barebones experience, devoid of any voice work for these iconic characters (often with iconic voices), looked bad, ran worse at times and most of the cast had very same-y, uninspired movesets. So I’m very happy to say that the sequel is everything the original game should have been.

NASB 2 is a gigantic improvement in every way; it looks a lot better, the voices are here from the get-go now, there’s a huge single player campaign and the cast this time around all feel FAR more fleshed out and distinct. I still have some qualms with the roster overall, but I’m glad the team at Fair Play Labs (and the few members of Ludocity on this project) managed to create something that can appeal to both hardcore platform fighter fans and fans of the Nick characters. Sadly, I think a lot of people felt burned by the last game and didn’t even give this one a try, but trust me…this really is one of the more inventive platform fighters out there. The Slime mechanic itself is kind of worth the price of admission, being able to augment your moves, burst out of combos, or spend on a huge super move to send foes flying. The single player is also filled with fun references and a fair bit of things to do as you fight various minor enemies and bosses from across the various Nick shows. While a bit bug-riddled at launch and my potato PC can barely handle it at times, I had a blast with it, and I hope that people can eventually give this game a chance.

#6: BAYONETTA ORIGINS: CEREZA AND THE LOST DEMON

Oh hey and speaking of burning fans with the last installment and giving things a chance…yeah Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon was always going to be a tough sell. Even if Bayonetta 3 had been well-received by fans, taking a series known for its over-the-top arcade action and extremely sexual heroine and pivoting to a fairy-tale aesthetic and relatively simple puzzle solving and exploration wasn’t ever going to have a wide appeal. If you don’t like the other Bayonetta games you might end up enjoying this, but then why would you even be looking in this game’s direction? And conversely, if you love the other games, this one is so completely different there’s no guarantee you’d enjoy it. Truly, Bayonetta Origins is a game for an extremely small niche of players, but I was willing to give it a shot and ended up quite enjoying it. In fact, I think it’s one of the best games Platinum has put out in years.

Taking place when young Cereza was still a witch in training, players have to guide Cereza and her first demonic summon, Cheshire, through a maze-like forest infested with dangerous fairies. The game itself feels inspired by something like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, alongside Platinum’s own Astral Chain. Players control Cereza and Cheshire simultaneously, using each control stick to guide them through puzzles and the occasional combat encounter. Cereza uses her magic to hold enemies in place or manipulate the environment while Cheshire is in charge of tearing enemies apart. The cel-shaded storybook aesthetic is very charming, making for a game that I think is a lot easier on the eyes than Bayonetta 3, and the coming-of-age element of Cereza learning to stick up for herself and get stronger gave us a fairly well-told story (which is kind of a rarity for this franchise). Outside of a map that isn’t all that helpful, and the fact that it’s still connected to Bayonetta 3 in some strange, confusing ways, this is far and away the best Bayonetta game developed for the Switch, and yeah, I’m just as surprised as you are.

#5: STREET FIGHTER 6

Once upon a time Capcom was considered to be the kings of fighting games, but everything changed when Street Fighter V came out in such a barebones, awful state that the FGC at large moved onto other things. But 2023 was the year Capcom returned to take their crown back, and MAN is Street Fighter 6 a massive return to form. Now, I should stress my time with this game has been limited; I’ve played with a friend with their own copy of the game as well as poured over the PS4 demo, but I don’t actually own this game myself yet. If I DID, this would probably be a bit higher on this list honestly.

SF6 took a long hard look at the complaints levied at the previous game and did everything they could to turn things around here. Rather than launching with no arcade mode and later adding a lackluster story mode, 6 launches with a massive World Tour campaign, giving players the ability to create their own character and dive into the world of Street Fighter in what is ostensibly an action RPG hidden within the greater game. Rather than give us the divisive V-System that encouraged passive play and largely locked away each character’s strongest tools, the Drive System in SF6 gives players tons of way to engage with the game right from round start and encourages both aggression and proper resource management. At high-level, SF6 becomes a tug-of-war between players doing everything they can to whittle down their opponent’s Drive Gauge, while holding onto their own, and then place them into checkmate when they go into Burnout. The game’s new, more realistic artstyle took some time to grow on me personally, but I think they ended up making it work, though admittedly I’m with everyone else in stating that the OST for the game is a bit lacking. Thankfully, they nailed it where it really matters: the roster is filled with some awesome new faces (Marisa my beloved) and manages to make the veteran fighters feel fresh, and the cherry on top is an almost impeccable online experience. I’m glad Capcom learned from their mistakes, and the result is one of the best fighting games around.

#4: FIRE EMBLEM: ENGAGE

Releasing right at the start of the year, I’m sure a lot of people forgot about Fire Emblem Engage, though really I think they’re missing out. I’ve been a fan of the series since Awakening, so the gaps in knowledge with the series is vast, but I could still recognize this as a love letter to the entire series. Clearly intended as a celebration of the franchise’s 30th anniversary before a certain pandemic got in the way, Engage is filled to the brim with fanservice…and not just the sexy kind! Truthfully I do feel aspects of this game are at odds with each other; while the overall presentation is great, being the most colorful and flashy game in the series yet, its story is…let’s say lacking. The characters are all fairly one-note and at times lean way more into stock anime archetypes than fully-fleshed out cast members, especially in comparison to the best parts of Three Houses, and there is the odd….otaku-bait stuff for lack of a better term, especially regarding the romance options, but the actual core gameplay is the best in the series.

Fights are fast, ferocious and give players a ton of great new mechanics to sink their teeth into. The star of the show is obviously the various rings characters can equip, which can summon a ghost of a past Fire Emblem hero to help out, giving you a neat little Stand of sorts to augment your abilities for a short time. Adding to that, players can push enemies away, or even break their guard, preventing them from attacking during your turn. I really enjoyed some of the changes to the core weapon triangles of the series, including a new one with archers, mages and bare-handed fighters. Being able to have my healers lay waste to those units with some fisticuffs never got old. Engage might not be the most ambitious game in the series, but at the same time it was a fantastic celebration of how far this series has come and how much more life it still has in it yet. Alear’s hair is still kinda dumb though…

#3: THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TEARS OF THE KINGDOM

Years ago Breath of the Wild not only launched the Switch into immediate sales success, but also started a conversation about how to craft an interesting open world game after years of the genre feeling overdone. And now in the twilight years of the Switch, Tears of the Kingdom returns to that same world with some new tricks. Link’s new abilities give players even more options for engaging in that world, and many of them are true technical marvels. I’ve gone over a lot of this game in a separate blog post, so I won’t try to reiterate what I said there too much, but ultimately I just enjoyed getting to bounce around a familiar world with even more freedom and opportunities to mess around and see how things worked.

I’d argue that TOTK has more in common with a big old box of random Lego pieces than a game at times. Half the fun is reaching inside and seeing what I can create when mixing and matching things together. Using Link’s Ultrahand and Fusion abilities I can craft vehicles and weapons that are often very goofy and don’t always work right…but when you land on something that’s just crazy enough to work it’s magical. In addition to the massive world from BOTW we also have islands in the sky to investigate, alongside the mysterious Depths, so there was always something to poke at and do. You get into a pretty solid gameplay loop of using the sky islands to look for areas of interest down below, then messing around on the ground during quests and visiting towns, before traveling into the Depths to harvest ore that goes towards making a variety of vehicles that can help me get around elsewhere, especially when it comes to getting back into the sky. Your options start out limited, but as you play you get more and more tools to work with and your various mechanisms become that much more complex. This even gets reflected in some of the dungeons you investigate, with one in the Depths in particular being such a programming flex, tons of game developers on Twitter were losing it, just wondering how Nintendo made it happen. For as much as we tout graphical upgrades as true progress in games, Nintendo is doing more interesting things with the very innards of a game using a console that was already out of date when it launched, and that needs to be championed.

For as much time as I poured into this game (probably somewhere close to 200 hours), I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed all of it. With that amount of playtime, you’re bound to notice some cracks. While this game definitely amplified everything I loved about BOTW, it also failed to really address many of the concerns people had with the previous game. Fusion as a mechanic makes ALL weapons feel usable to a degree, but the constant breaking is even MORE frequent. While there IS a way to stop slipping on wet surfaces, it requires a TON of time investment and the potions that give you slip resistance feel like a bandage over the whole annoyance. And then there’s the story being…very repetitive and a bit too much like the previous game in ways. I can see why talk of this game kind of dried up faster compared to BOTW; there was both a lot more competition this year, but also a lot of this game felt too derivative and lost that novelty of the original game. I wouldn’t have poured over 200 hours into the game if I didn’t love it, but there was definitely enough there to hold it back from being my favorite experience of the year.

#2: XENOBLADE CHRONICLES 3: FUTURE REDEEMED

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 was my GOTY last year, and I knew that a beefy DLC campaign was still in the chamber. I was looking forward to Future Redeemed, but it exceeded about all of my expectations. While the core Xenoblade games have their connections, they’ve all been relatively standalone experiences on the whole until now. I had remembered going into Xenoblade 3, curious to see how all of these elements from the first two games would come together, but that game’s story leaned far more on the brand new cast rather than touching on the older characters in the series and I was left with a lack of closure. I should have had more faith in Monolith Soft, as Future Redeemed serves as not just a prequel to the story in Xenoblade 3, but as the glue that ties the entire Xenoblade series together.

Similar to Xenoblade 2’s Torna: The Golden Country DLC campaign, Future Redeemed is about the size of a medium-sized RPG in its own right, even if it never got a standalone release like Torna did. It keeps a lot of the same core systems of the base game here, but with some interesting twists. Whereas base game Xenoblade 3 made use of a class system and the ability for allies to fuse together, Future Redeemed emphasized pairing up different characters so they could cover for each other’s weaknesses or add to their strengths, on top of having some flashy combination attacks. There was a ton of things to do on the world map at any moment, with Monolith Soft making great use of a more limited map compared to the base game. Seriously, grind rails that can go up AND down were about the one thing Xenoblade 3 really needed! There was also just…so much fanservice and real love for this series found throughout. Seeing Shulk and Rex, the protagonists of the past entries, interacting with each other was fantastic, and newcomer Matthew was a great lead in his own right.

Longtime fans of Monolith Soft CEO and overall creator of the Xenoblade series, Tetsuya Takahashi, will know that his vision of a complete story has been a difficult one to see to completion. Starting back with Xenogears and later Xenosaga, it’s here that Xenoblade finally managed to have a satisfying multi-game arc and conclusion that finally answered some burning questions I had from the ending of 3. Somehow Future Redeemed managed to bring it all together in ways that longtime fans had always hoped for, and all in a neat 30-ish hour package. While I had greatly enjoyed Xenoblade 3, it was still missing something and Future Redeemed was that final piece, making me feel really valued as a longtime fan in the series, and also seems to have some nods to fans of the overarching “Xeno metaseries” that makes me extremely interested in seeing just where Takahashi’s Wild Ride takes us. If this DLC was an indication, the future is indeed bright.

#1: SUPER MARIO BROS. WONDER

As long as we’re talking of bright futures…boy is it good to be a Mario fan right now. From a billion dollar box office hit, to remakes of two beloved RPG spinoffs, that alone would have satisfied fans of the plumber, but then we got hit with the first wholly original 2D Mario in almost two decades. While the New Super Mario Bros. games were all mostly well-regarded critically and commercially, they were just as often considered kind of stale. Inoffensive, but not very interesting, and with so many pumped out in such a short time, it was felt that Mario’s 2D outings had lost something. With the Super Mario Maker games, many had felt that Nintendo had done all that they could with the formula and left it in the hands of fans…but boy were we wrong.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is oozing creativity out of every pore. From the stylish art direction that calls back to the older 2D art from the NES and SNES days, to the focus on music found throughout the game, it’s a rare game that made me smile about the whole way through. So much here feels fresh and different, from the litany of brand new enemies and power ups, to the various Wonder effects that often cap off levels and take them off the rails. I’ve gushed about this game enough in a separate blog post, which you can read here, but ultimately it has to be said that Wonder is a fantastic experience from moment to moment.

Not every game needs to be revolutionary or create a whole new industry standard to be recognized as great. Sometimes it just needs to be really fun. But even so, the amount of care that went into Wonder deserves praise. The developers weren’t given a deadline at first and got to really explore ideas before nailing things down. To see so much of the original Mario crew still involved on this project after so many years in the industry also showcases Nintendo’s iterative design that is continually polished to a fine sheen. The simple act of moving around is so smooth and responsive, the level design constantly plays with your expectations and makes hunting for secrets such a blast, and many of the new mechanics are slotted in seamlessly, like they were always there. Why yes, giving Mario a grappling hook makes perfect sense! Of COURSE he can turn into an elephant and put out fires with water shot out of the trunk! Some dislike the changes to multiplayer, no longer having any collision or ways to really screw with other players, but that results in seamless online play that lets players experience the levels together, yet apart, in a way I haven’t seen many other games implement. Being able to guide newer players through levels by giving them hints, or even a power up if they need it, and throwing down a standee sign that can revive them even if I’m not there…it’s really something special, akin to how players of Journey felt back in the day. The one blemish on what is otherwise a perfect experience are the boss fights that are both too few and too same-y, but honestly that’s a nitpick in the grand scheme of things. So yeah, Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the game that probably gave me the most joy this year. Not the longest game or the most technically impressive, but a masterclass in design that deserves every bit of praise.

CONCLUSION

There are tons of games I wish I got to this year. I’m sure this list would look a LOT different if I had a beefier PC to check out certain games with, or a fancy new PS5, but that wasn’t in the cards this year. If anything though that just goes to show how many talented people are in this industry that there are so many finely-crafted experiences, so many ambitious titles that keep pushing the medium forward. It was admittedly a lighter year for Nintendo, which has always been my bias, but I’m glad to see the folks over at Remedy and Larian and so many others pushing the boundaries of what we can expect to see in games. Having a virtual D&D campaign filled with moments where you have to adapt to things on the fly is nothing short of a magical experience, and seeing how Alan Wake 2 fuses together film and video game to create something so unique deserves its roses as well. Ultimately though, this was a year filled with some developers running on all cylinders, truly excelling at their craft. We’re getting fighting games with honest-to-God single player content! Strategy games are alive and well and continue to tease and torment players with tough decisions. All the while smaller developers pump passion into their projects, resulting in some fantastic experiences all their own. It was a good year for games and I look forward to seeing what will make my list next year. Until next time.

Like a lot of 90s kids in the United States, my first exposure with Toriyama’s work was through the Dragon Ball Z anime. Despite the fact that I didn’t even know this was a sequel to a completely different series, and I had no real clue what anime even was at the time, I was captivated. For years I would race home from school and sit glued in front of the TV as Toonami would air the latest episodes. A phenomenon that rippled out across the world for several years in waves, from the original airing of DBZ, to some snippets of the original Dragon Ball and even later on with the anime-only continuation that was Dragon Ball GT, this series had such a hold on me. Friends and I would spend recess trying to recreate the iconic Kamehameha Wave, we’d scream trying to become a Super Saiyan, or take turns fighting each other in one of the MANY different video games based on the series over time. I’ve made friends through my love of Dragon Ball and it would go on to foster a love of anime and later manga. But little did I know just how far Toriyama’s influence would reach.

While I was never all that knowledgeable of his past work, particularly Dr. Slump, so many other series would be inspired by him or have his involvement in some way. Sonic the Hedgehog’s Super Sonic is an easy reference to spot, but less so was Cloud Strife’s garb in Final Fantasy VII being a dead ringer for Gohan’s outfit in the Cell Saga. As long as we’re talking about RPGs, Toriyama’s long history with various properties, from Chrono Trigger to Blue Dragon, and going back to the grandfather of all RPGS in Dragon Quest, it’s safe to say his legacy is felt in multiple mediums rather than just one. This wasn’t even limited to Japanese media either. I would see references to Dragon Ball in things like The Powerpuff Girls or Codename: Kids Next Door. Even well into my 20s, I was still seeing series inspired by him, like the whole fusion concept that made up Steven Universe. His reach was vast and multigenerational.

As I would get older, I would listen to Linkin Park AMVs on YouTube, with songs like Numb or In the End overlaid over the various hypest moments from the Dragon Ball series and its later movies. Even long after the series had finished airing, you’d still see the rare movie or special crop up, alongside an endless series of games trying to capitalize on the success of the Budokai Tenkaichi games. Toriyama was inescapable, and in a way it was comforting. You start to get used to his work being there, whether subtly or overtly. You never think about the day when he’ll be gone.

When first reading the article stating his death, it took a moment to really let it sink in. This man who had been with me, inspiring me throughout my childhood, was gone just like that. Over the past day I’ve seen the greater Internet in mourning, as people share their favorite manga panels, or iconic moments from the various anime interpretations of his work. Outpourings of fanart and inspirational stories from people who grew up with his work just like I did. There are people that got into bodybuilding to be just like Goku, for one. For another, during the finale of Dragon Ball Super there were massive watch parties set up in Mexico and even when authorities tried to stop the events they went forward anyway because they just had to see how Goku could finally defeat Jiren. I remember when Trunks first appeared in the anime, and I thought he was the coolest. I had to try to draw and replicate his first appearance, how he defeated Frieza, the person that took Goku so long to defeat, in a mere instant; I’m realizing now Toriyama might have been my real inspiration to start drawing, alongside who knows how many thousands if not millions of people. As sad as it is to see him go, to see so many people pay tribute and remember him, it really does lay bare just how influential he was, just how powerful art can really be.

It was only in more recent years that I’ve come to really respect Toriyama’s craft. Far beyond the screaming and power ups that many associate with him from Dragon Ball Z this was also a man who valued whimsy. He got his start as a comedy author, and for the longest time the Dragon Ball manga was just a humorous retelling of Journey to the West. The man loved a good bit of toilet humor and the occasional fourth wall break. Looking back at his manga, you can see just how amazing his panel work was, and how it still holds up. The ease at which he guides your eye from panel to panel, the expressiveness of his characters conveyed at all times. Many of his peers have called him a God of Manga, and I think they’re right to do so. The likes of Osamu Tezuka, the creator of manga, had called Toriyama his heir apparent, and stated he was “almost too good.” You can’t get higher praise than that.

Outside of his manga work, just his raw talent at creating iconic character designs needs to be praised. Taking a rather uninteresting mockup of the slime enemy in Dragon Quest, Toriyama would create perhaps the most iconic enemy in all of video games. His enemy designs are often cute and goofy, but occasionally can be quite ferocious. If nothing else, they are eye-catching and never boring. He was also a fan of vehicles and machines, with some really interesting modes of transportation shown off in a lot of his work. And then there’s the fact that so many of his characters have the trademark spikey haircut that has become shorthand for “anime hair,” that is understood to this day. To see him effectively retire after finishing with Dragon Ball back in the 90s, with the occasional contribution here or there, only to get right back to business as usual in the 2010s with amazing designs like Beerus or Android 21, not to mention his continual work on the Dragon Quest series all throughout that time…the man never lost his edge even once.

A sentiment I’ve seen over the last day or so is that Toriyama might, with no exaggeration, have inspired more artists than anyone else in modern history. So many people making their own “Saiyan-sonas” or being inspired to make manga of their own…we may truly never know how far his reach really was at the end of the day. But we do know that the “Big Three” of Shonen Jump throughout the 2000s can be attributed to Toriyama, as the likes of Eiichiro Oda, Masashi Kishimoto and Tite Kubo are all big fans of Toriyama, with Oda in particular worshiping the ground he walks on. Kubo is also on the record for stating that a letter from Toriyama, when his first draft of what would later become BLEACH was rejected, gave him the encouragement to try again and later be accepted into the magazine. And now these authors have gone on to inspire the next generation and so on and so on.

Over the last few years, we’ve lost a lot of creative figures in the manga industry. Toriyama now joins other similar legends, such as Yu-Gi-Oh creator Kazuki Takahashi as well as Berserk author Kentaro Miura. It is the end of an era, arguably of many eras, and it can be hard to imagine the future, but the Earth continues to spin and as Toriyama has inspired and influenced others, we too will inspire future generations with our work. It isn’t enough to call him a legend; he truly was in a league of his own, a legend among legends, and the outpouring of love for him across all manner of social media posts in just a little over a day alone is a testament to his immense talent and reach. I can think of no greater sendoff than the one that Eiichiro Oda gave him: “I pray for his soulful rest in peace. May heaven be the joyous world he envisioned.”

Rest in peace, and thanks for everything, Mr. Toriyama.

THE BIG THREE’S BIG YEAR

We can start by examining the Big Three of the gaming sphere: Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Sony themselves had a somewhat mixed year overall. Certain timed or console exclusives like Forspoken or Final Fantasy XVI had somewhat mixed reception, though the latter at least seemed to sell alright. In the realm of adaptations to their video games, things were somewhat better. While the Gran Turismo movie…exists, and many enjoyed the Twisted Metal series, the real winner here was HBO’s live-action Last of Us series. It won critical acclaim for it’s writing and acting, regarded by many as one of the better game adaptations out there. The biggest first-party release was obviously Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 and while that game did get a fair bit of acclaim and is the fastest selling PS5 exclusive so far…not long afterward Insomniac was hit with a major hack that put a real damper on things. From personal employee information being stolen in this hack, as well as the plans for Insomniac’s next few projects (such as the already-confirmed Wolverine game), there was also a lot of information shared about Insomniac’s difficulties with selling games to appease Sony higher-ups. At one point, one presentation questioned the much larger budget for Spider-Man 2 and how that didn’t seem to translate to higher sales, or even significant recognition for that extra bit of cash injected into things. While Sony seems to be doing fine in some regards, the PS5 having sold over 50 million units, keeping pace with the PS4’s sales along the same time frame, there are signs that the company is having major issues behind the scenes. After the acquisition of Bungie last year, (alongside the Firewalk Studios acquisition this year), Sony has changed course on a number of in-development live-service titles, shelving over half of them. Adding to this, there was the rather strange announcement of the Playstation Portal, a device that lets you stream games to a small screen imbedded in a PS5 Duelsense controller. Many have likened that to the ill-fated Wii U system, and as it stands it feels like a strange project to put money into with an uncertain audience to adopt it. Alongside their continued VR efforts, Sony trudges on, but the cost of these endeavors might be starting to take a toll.

For Microsoft undoubtedly the biggest story this year from them was the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Despite resistance from various government officials, the business deal eventually went through. Along the way some absolutely WILD statements were thrown around by the likes of both Microsoft AND Sony, from downplaying Nintendo’s success in the industry, to Microsoft basically admitting to having failed the entirety of the Xbox One generation and losing customers, feeling that they NEEDED to take steps to become a monopoly to even compete. As talks closed down, Microsoft would promise to keep Call of Duty on Playstation consoles for the immediate future, though other titles are up in the air. Regarding their games this year, I’d say it was also a bit of a mixed bag. Starting the year off strong with the shadow drop of Hi-Fi Rush, a colorful, inventive rhythm action game by Tango Gameworks under Bethesda, we would later see the atrocious reception to Arkane’s Redfall not long afterward. Along with this, we ended the year with Starfield, a supposed “game of the generation” that many hyped up as being the ace in the hole Microsoft needed. That said…the game didn’t quite make the impact many might have wanted. While selling around 12 million copies by the end of the year, the game seemed to vanish from public opinion entirely. No nominations at The Game Awards, and no major impact on the gaming industry compared to the Elder Scrolls entries that came before it. Gamepass still goes on as a subscription service that attempts to bring in more players, but even Phil Spencer knows a lot of work must be done to win over fans again. During an appearance on the Kinda Funny podcast, Spencer was asked some hard questions on Xbox’s fumbles and he was honestly pretty frank, especially an admittance that losing the Xbox One generation was a major mistake that they’re still paying for. Regardless of the money they throw around, it’s clear Xbox is still on the defensive.

Now, I’ll admit I’m probably a bit biased here, but Nintendo had a hell of a year and is the clear “winner” for the Big Three. The launch of Super Nintendo World across various Universal theme parks was mostly well received and I’m sure that will continue to expand as the years go by. Getting in on the trend to have a shadow dropped hit, Metroid Prime Remastered came mostly out of nowhere to tantalize us and whet our appetite for the long-awaited Metroid Prime 4. Pikmin fans were thrown a real bone this year; from the first two games being ported to Switch to the release of the equally long-awaited Pikmin 4, the series feels like it’s experiencing a boom of newer players that could take the series to new highs. Strategy fans saw the release of Fire Emblem Engage, a title celebrating the history of the franchise, alongside the revised released date for the Advance Wars 1+2 Reboot Camp remakes. For the Xenoblade fans this year, the final bit of DLC for Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Future Redeemed served as an amazing sendoff to the trilogy and a way to tie things together in a way many fans had hoped for but figured would never come. One of the absolute biggest games this year was the latest Legend of Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom. Building on what the previous entry, Breath of the Wild started, this was seen by many as a technical marvel. Getting such a massive world to run seamlessly on the Switch’s tech is witchcraft, as is the game’s advanced physics and building mechanics. Engineers were blown away by what this game accomplished, no doubt helped by the game having essentially an entire year of polish. That said, the game didn’t seem to quite hit the mark for some fans and ended up repeating some of the criticisms of Breath of the Wild, somewhat reducing its overall impact. Mario fans had a TON to chew on this year. For starters, there was the smashing success of the Super Mario Bros. Movie, with it becoming a billion-dollar earner for Nintendo and Illumination. While critically it didn’t fare well, it fared well with audiences and was clearly part of a plan to push the plumber this holiday season. The first wholly original 2D platfomer in a long time, Super Mario Bros. Wonder released to critical acclaim at the end of the year, alongside the reveals of remakes for Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, thrilling longtime Mario RPG fans. With a Princess Peach game on the way in early 2024, alongside a remake of the original Mario vs. Donkey Kong game and a Luigi’s Mansion 2 port, Mario fans are eating well. This year also saw us saying goodbye to Charles Martinet as Mario’s voice, taking on the task of being a “Mario ambassador” (whatever that means) as we welcome newcomer Kevin Afghani to this role. With rumors of a new Nintendo console being revealed (and maybe even released) in 2024, Nintendo’s future is looking quite bright as the Switch enters its twilight years with some amazing games. But that’s just the Big Three so…what about everyone else?

OTHER INDUSTRY ILK

One major thing that really stood out this year was the final nail hammered into the coffin that is E3. The Electronic Entertainment Expo seems to be dead and buried, cancelling not just the 2023 venue but the next two years as well. After years of being THE place to get gaming news and reveals, it really is the end of an era. We’re at a point where other developers are using their own digital presentations on their own timetables to great effect, following Nintendo’s lead with their successful “Nintendo Direct” format. While E3 was a great way for fans to play games before anyone else and for some truly legendary on-stage moments to occur, the pandemic clearly sped up the venue’s demise, not helped by longstanding controversy with leaking attendee information and the costs of running these large presentations.

Sega had a particularly interesting year, starting with their acquisition of Angry Birds studio, Rovio which is sure to bring in some money. Following the success that the Sonic the Hedgehog brand has seen this year, Sega also seems poised to carry that momentum into new titles. They revealed several new entries in long-dormant series such as Golden Axe, Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi among others right at the end of the year, and are also apparently hard at work at some extremely expensive “super game,” though seeing as they also cancelled an expensive new IP in Hyenas I’m a little skeptical of how this project will turn out. Sega of America also voted to unionize, which seems like good news, but there have also been apparent threats of layoffs if a union comes to pass which puts a real damper on things.

Square Enix had a somewhat rocky year. Forspoken was one of the more ridiculed games online this year, particularly due to its dialogue, and it failed to earn high sales. The primary team behind this title, Luminous, has since folded back into Square Enix proper and the engine they used for this title (as well as Final Fantasy XV) seems like it might be shelved despite a lot of time and money pumped into it. Square Enix themselves has also stated that they are going to start focusing almost entirely on larger-scale projects and scaling back on smaller games in the near future, likely as a result of several smaller projects released over the last few years not doing very well.

When it comes to larger figures in the industry itself, it’s also been a bit of an off-year. Following the disastrous launch of Babylon’s Fall and the shaky reception of Bayonetta 3, one of the founding members of Platinumgames, Hideki Kamiya, left the company in late 2023. Starting a YouTube channel in his spare time, it’s currently unclear why Kamiya left the company, though leadership apparently going full-steam ahead on live-service titles despite signs of the bubble bursting in the industry is a pretty good guess as to why. Someone of Kamiya’s pedigree would likely be a great asset to any developer…just as soon as his non-compete clause ends. Elsewhere, Yuji Naka, largely viewed as the “creator” of Sonic the Hedgehog, was also sentenced to prison for insider trading during his time at Square Enix. It’s safe to say that Naka’s reputation in the industry is about shot, though it’s sad to see the fall from grace all the same.

Speaking of falls from grace, Unity as a developer tool and engine is likely going to be a thing of the past soon. Following news that Unity would begin charging developers after they’ve past enough sales of titles that use Unity, many have sworn off the engine entirely, or are at least heavily considering it. Konami also continues to lose a lot of goodwill from fans as many Silent Hill fans are forced to watch the quality of the franchise fumble. Silent Hill Ascension is being regarded as one of the most hated games of last year, with some accusations that the game’s writing might be using AI generated scripts, if not voice work. AI has itself become a hot button issue for most of 2023, and the gaming industry isn’t immune to that. Alongside Ascension, Embark Studios’ The Finals was under fire for using AI voices for the game in lieu of paying professional actors, and the most recent entry in the Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm series has been accused of using AI voices for at least the English dub of some lines, though nothing has been officially proven. Of course we also have more old-fashioned scams alive and well with The Day Before, an online shooter accused of asset flipping and misleading marketing that ended up killing its developer, Fntastic, after only being available for purchase for about four days. Scams are eternal.

Leaks are ALSO eternal. Outside of the massive hack and leak of information from Insomniac, Rockstar also suffered various hacks, with the Grand Theft Auto V source code potentially stolen. This comes alongside the source code for League of Legends also being stolen from Riot. A bit of a recurring story throughout 2023 was repeated leaks of military information from forums for the game War Thunder as well; it seems people would risk the wrath of the US Military just to win some online arguments.

To end this segment on some GOOD news in the industry, several sexual assault cases from Riot, Activision and Ubisoft resulted in several victims receiving settlements. Several former members of Ubisoft were even jailed following sexual assault allegations, so there’s at least SOME justice in the world. And for some interesting surprise hits of the year, there were quite a few!

Larian ended up stealing the hearts and minds of gamers in 2023 with the long-awaited release of Baldur’s Gate 3. They would go on to sweep many award shows at the year’s end, enjoying tons of sales success for the title. Effectively letting players enter into the world of Dungeons and Dragons with a moving story filled to the brim with charming characters, it was also considered a marvel at giving players TONS of freedom to explore, fight and progress through the game. In some respects, it’s the next best thing to a real tabletop experience with lot of room for improvisation and countless variables resulting in unique playthroughs for everyone. Remedy also gained a lot of attention for the release of the similarly-long-awaited Alan Wake 2. A survival horror game with an arthouse approach, many praised the game’s presentation and foreboding atmosphere…alongside some dazzling musical numbers thrown in for good measure. After years of hit or miss titles, Remedy seems to have really hit their grove and fans have been enjoying the “Remedyverse” that has been connecting so many of these projects together. From the likes of the Max Payne games to Quantum Break, Control and now Alan Wake, the story goes ever deeper, and many a fan can’t wait to see where it goes next.

On top of the big AAA hits, it’s important to not forget some of the most notable indie hits this year. From RPG throwbacks like Sea of Stars to the colorful, distinctly-animated platformer that is Pizza Tower, there’s too many to list. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a loving spiritual successor to the likes of Jet Set Radio that has been in the works for quite a bit, and for fans of fishing, the horrors of Dredge were sure to delight. While not a 2023 game, this was the year that saw Suika Game gain a huge amount of fans due to various streamers (and Vtubers) playing it, resulting in a worldwide release after previously being only available in Japan. A fruit-based puzzle game, where players try to merge the same types of fruits to make progressively bigger fruits, the simple charm of the game won over millions of new players, having sold over 5 million copies by the end of the year. But if we’re talking big sales success with indies, we have to bring up the sleeper hit that is Lethal Company. Developed by Zeekers, previously an amateur developer using Roblox, Lethal Company came out of nowhere to become one of the biggest hits of the year at over 10 million sales since October of 2023, and this is still as an early access title. A co-op horror experience, players enter into creepy facilities in hopes of finding scrap and spare parts to sell in order to make a profit…but many things lurk in the shadows and players will have to keep their wits about them to survive and meet their quotas. A simple game and certainly a bit crude at points, the game’s success speaks for itself, becoming a gigantic hit especially with streamers. Just goes to show that success can come from anywhere.

While that covers the industry in broad strokes, I’d like to now spend some time investigating some more specific trends that slowly emerged throughout the year. Strap in, because with few exceptions, things start to get a bit bleak.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE A JRPG

With Final Fantasy XVI as one of the most talked about games of 2023, not all of that talk was positive. Playing like a traditional action game was controversial for longtime fans that associate the series more with turn-based affairs, or at least “RPG staples” like multiple party members and gear to collect and swap around to make builds. Many argued it was wrong to call the game an RPG at all. During the various bits of press for this game, as well as the upcoming Final Fantasy VII Rebirth game, Tetsuya Nomura mentioned his own dislike of the term “JRPG,” feeling it was trying to “other” games out of Japan. This kicked off a whole slew of discourse over whether he had a point or not. Some argued it was always said endearingly, or pointing out that design differences between a game like, say, Final Fantasy VII was markedly different from, say, a Fallout or Witcher game. While they are all considered RPGs, the way they are designed and play are so different that the umbrella term ceases to be useful. It did lead to some interesting discussions of game genres and how they’ve evolved over the years, but also a lot of disparaging remarks that seemed to brush off Nomura’s dislike of the term, among other things.

Nomura’s offhand comment on JRPGs would be the catalyst for a greater discussion of how western journalists and gaming pundits would often disparage anything out of Japan in the past decade or so. In some cases these seemed to be tongue-in-cheek digs, but some could be far more unpleasant and looking at them from today’s standards, it led to many a jaw drop. Among all this talk, the game review show, X-Play, was often brought up. So many “jokes” and comments directed at anything outside of Japan were seen as being incredibly racist at worst and just in poor taste and crass at best. From the constant mocking of anime or manga fans, not to mention RPG fans during this era, there was this common belief around the seventh console generation or so that the West was on top and Japan had fallen behind. Certainly Japan did struggle with the switch to HD consoles and certain Western franchises like Call of Duty or Halo found great success around this time, but none of that really excused the venom that was directed at Japan at the time.

While I think you can argue that things have largely improved over the years, that one random comment from Nomura opened up some old wounds and a lot of that xenophobia that had started to fade away during the 2010s came RUSHING back as various game pundits denied any such sentiments had existed. Adam Sessler, one of the former hosts of X-Play, didn’t exactly have the best response to criticisms though. There have also still been some statements made from Western devs in recent years that show these sentiments are still around, such as firing back against Elden Ring’s UI and general UX design among other things. If anything, I think it shows that the gaming industry still has a lot of growing up to do and some skeletons in the closet they keep trying to hide.

CAPCOM RECLAIMS THEIR CROWN

Of my many biases, fighting games are a big one, and this year had a lot to talk about regarding the genre. Let’s start with the bad before we get to the good though. For starters, the winner of “Best Fighting Game” for 2022, Multiversus, ended up being taken offline partway through the year. Having started its second season of content around the holiday season of 2022, updates began slowing down to a crawl with only one new character added during that season amidst some seasonal costumes and events. The developers, Player First Games, would announce that the game’s beta period was ending and we would see the game return…sometime in 2024. This was confusing for many as it felt like the game’s full release had already happened alongside the first season pass. Considering the game’s hefty monetization, it certainly SEEMED like a full release, but as of now it’s as if the game never happened and considering the tumultuous nature of Warner Bros. after the Discovery merger, there is a real fear the game might not actually be brought back. Alongside this, the fighting game battle royale, Rumbleverse also shut down in 2023. Despite its interesting twist on the genre, many fans just didn’t click with it and it was lost in the sea of other live-service titles. Nintendo also ended up turning heads when they revised their tournament guidelines for games like the Super Smash Bros. series. Many are left confused and frustrated with the constant attempts to throttle the competitive scene, though at this point what else is new with Nintendo?

That said, there was a lot of hype this year with a variety of reveals and launches of some greater fighters out there. With more news on SNK’s new fighter in the Garou series, City of the Wolves, fans are looking forward to seeing them continue onwards, on top of them finally adding rollback netcode into the latest Samurai Shodown game. Arc System Works continued to pump out content for Guilty Gear Strive, and despite security issues with hackers affecting some players and lukewarm receptions to much of the season 2 DLC characters, season 3 has been more highly regarded with new mechanics, special moves, characters and modes being added. ArcSys would also throw fans of Granblue Fantasy a bone with an updated pseudo-sequel to the licensed fighting game with Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising, finally giving that series rollback netcode for fans to enjoy. Speaking of rollback, Dragon Ball FighterZ also finally received updates on the rollback to be integrated into the game, making just about every modern ArcSys game in line with online quality. French Bread fully unveiled Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes, a sequel to their original IP, launching right at the start of 2024. Namco’s Tekken 8 is also hotly anticipated, with many fans welcoming the new installment after years of waiting.

When it came to the biggest releases for fighting fans though, Street Fighter 6 and Mortal Kombat 1 were the stars of the show. The former was Capcom’s apology for the previous game’s sorry launch, on top of creating a deeply satisfying set of mechanics and new characters to play with, on top of a significant single player campaign with World Tour Mode, with perhaps the best online experience in a modern fighting game. Capcom also drew attention to their Capcom Cup tournament taking place in 2024, with the winner receiving one million dollars, which certainly helped propel interest in Street Fighter 6. Meanwhile, the latter was the first game set in a brand new universe following the events of the previous Mortal Kombat, and while the assist-based gameplay with the new “Kameo” system was praised, fans had some qualms with the story in this “new” world alongside the game’s DLC characters feeling a tad redundant (both Omni-Man from Invincible and Homelander from The Boys make the cut, both being “evil Superman” archetypes). The game also launched with a number of bugs and many criticized the lack of single player content compared to other entries, but it was still a major sales success.

Seeing new entries in the biggest fighting game series launching within a year of each other, Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat fans are eating well as we enter into a new era of fighting games. With some exceptions and issues here or there, most fighting games have finally embraced rollback netcode, and we’re starting to see more emphasis placed on single player content, resulting in games that feel like full packages. Indie fighters also pop up every so often, pushing boundaries in ways the bigger budget games might not, so no matter where you look there’s something to look forward to. I hope you all enjoyed this brief indulging of my biases and some rare good news in the industry, because our final segment here is going to cover what is easily the most distressing trend about this year in video games.

AN ENDLESS SEA OF LAYOFFS AND CLOSURES

There is no sugarcoating it; 2023 was absolutely awful for many in the industry, as month after month news of layoffs and closures would ripple throughout the industry. Studios big and small have seen massive issues, and as a bit of a spoiler for 2024, that trend isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Where to even begin here? We have the absolute industry giant Epic Games cutting over 16% of its workforce, as reported in September. That’s over 870 jobs gone in the blink of an eye. Despite Fortnite being the biggest thing ever, apparently for years Epic hasn’t been really making much money and these layoffs are an attempt to cushion that blow. It’s hard to really picture the BILLIONS of dollars they rake in between Fortnite, licensing out the Unreal Engine and various other revenue streams still not cutting it, but regardless workers are paying the price.

(from PC Gamer)

Really, September and October were where the floodgates really started to open with closing after closing, layoff after layoff. The QA staff for the upcoming Dragon Age: Dreadwolf game were laid off after being brought on to help out Bioware in late September. Team 17, known for the Worms series of games has laid off much of its QA staff, around 50 jobs on top of the CEO leaving. Following over three different rounds of layoffs, the devs over at CD Projekt Red have started unionizing to protect themselves. That’s over another 100 jobs lost. Things aren’t safe at Bungie either, also reporting layoffs, on top of a “soul-crushing” atmosphere at the studio. That’s about another 100 gone, same with Pokémon GO developer Niantic. These layoffs come at the price of cancelling games and delaying expansions, with employee morale at an all-time low. Even studios that died once and were resurrected, like Telltale Games, have seen layoffs.

Layoffs are already bad enough, but longtime developer Volition shut down in 2023 following several rough years. Once well-known for the Saint’s Row series, things were rocky after the fourth game’s somewhat mixed reception. Following the absolute dud that was Agents of Mayhem, the Saint’s Row reboot failed to perform well. That said, much of the blame for Volition’s demise must be laid at the feet of Embracer Group, their parent company that swiped them up a few years prior. Embracer was on a spending spree for quite some time, snatching up various other studios such as Eidos and Crystal Dynamics from Square Enix, which have also seen better days more recently, but the biggest blow came from a 2 BILLION dollar deal falling through, and as such they have had to do some serious “restructuring.” Considering they’ve snatched up somewhere around 138 different game studios alongside all of the other non-gaming ventures they’ve gone to (such as buying the IP rights to Lord of the Rings), this could wind up being absolutely catastrophic. One really has to question just where this ends, and if we might be brushing up against another gaming crash.

For my own two cents here, this is partially the results of unchecked corporate greed, mixed in with the short-sighted belief that the boom the tech and entertainment sector enjoyed with COVID would go on forever. As much as the pandemic lingers and the world state has changed, things are not like they were for the bulk of 2020 when most people were stuck inside with nothing to do. As the “streaming wars” have raged on with movies and what was once television, games continued to do well and brought in tons of money that is now drying up, at least in comparison to the days of lockdowns. We’re at a point in capitalism where the negative effects are harder and harder to ignore. Studios are bought up and then multiple “redundant” jobs are removed. All in the pursuit of capital. The line must ALWAYS go up, and it doesn’t matter how many people must suffer for that to happen. This year was good for business but don’t ever forget that it came at a very human cost.

CONCLUSION

Alright, let’s take a breath and try to take this all in. It’s kind of crazy what can happen in a year, just looking at one industry. As many were so quick to say throughout the year, it was a GREAT time for video games. Some amazing sequels, sleeper hits and breakthroughs in the industry I hold so dear. I’ve made it no secret that gaming is one of my biggest interests and over the last few years especially, it’s served as an escape from…well, the awfulness that seems to have enveloped the entire world. It’s certainly important to highlight the good in this industry. I’m glad to see a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 resonate with so many people, showing that games like this can find mass appeal and success. It was great to see the Xenoblade series get some closure with the trilogy’s final bit of DLC, which also feels like closure for all of the various projects Monolift Soft have been involved with dating back to the days of Xenogears. Seeing Sega bringing back classic IPs is always good to see, and Remedy finally hitting the big time with Alan Wake 2’s success is heartwarming. There was a time when Sam Lake felt a sequel would never happen, and then this year ended with him performing a song and dance number from the game at The Game Awards. A lot of fantastic games and great memories this year, but we can’t lose sight of the worst aspects of the industry that produces these experiences.

People make games, not corporations. People that work hard for years and often never get even a shred of recognition. And then, when we’re seeing record levels of profits, they can be cut loose. All to please the almighty shareholders. I don’t know how we get better from here; again, going into 2024 we’re still seeing TONS of layoffs that rival 2023 already. This isn’t going to get better anytime soon. It’s worth pointing out that this has been predominantly a Western gaming issue, and Japan has seen little if any layoffs overall. There definitely seems to be much stricter labor lays in Japan comparatively. The legacy of Satoru Iwata during his time at Nintendo is greatly impacted by his repeated reduction of his own salary to prevent layoffs during the tepid Wii U years, and while that is a very noble thing…that also just kind of seems like a cultural norm over there. I’m not saying the answers to our troubles lie solely in the Japanese gaming industry, as they have their own problems, but it’d be great if CEOs worldwide would realize that constant downsizing and expensive acquisitions don’t exactly keep the industry healthy. Because honestly if this continues there won’t really be much of a gaming industry anymore.

So far, roughly a month in, 2024 is already giving us a ton of things to talk about, but I’ll hold out hope that at least some of it will be some positive news for the industry going forward. Rumors have been swelling for a while that Nintendo’s next major console will release in 2024, and with the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles entering into their fourth years on the market, people are looking forward to seeing this new generation really take off. At any rate, I’m sure it will take a great while for things to stabilize. I suppose in the meantime, we still have indies! So that’s something, right? It’s hard to really end things on a positive note when you really look back at all the garbage at the end of the year. But it’s important to not give into despair and just let things go by without comment. As bad as things have been this year, it’s always possible to turn things around. While 2024 still isn’t looking great for employment in the industry, we still have 11 months to go, and I will hold out hope we can see some momentum swing into the other direction. That said, I think that’s about enough for now. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the next time I do one of these, I’ll have some better things to talk about.

Take care out there!

A NEW COAT OF PAINT, AND A FRESH NEW SOUND

The first thing that stuck out to me when first booting up Wonder was just how alive everything felt. The New series after a time felt anything but new, filled with lifeless animations and a bland visual style that was…fine but not exactly exciting. Wonder by contrast is vivid and adorns everything with either a painterly or even clay-like texture. It might not be the most visually striking game ever made, but as far as Mario’s 2D outings go this one really pushed past some boundaries. While in 3D, everything looks a lot more akin to the older 2D art for the Mario cast. Faces are rendered with this 3/4s style, always facing the camera and making sure we can see just how much more expressive each character is. From the determined looks on their faces when dashing about, the way Mario pulls his hat over his eyes when he crouches, or the little flourishes like how the extra-large elephant versions of characters have to squeeze through doorways or pipes, there’s so much attention to detail here.

Adding to that is the sound design and music having a much greater presence here than normal. Over time, we’ve taken for granted how past Mario games have sounded, but Wonder shakes this up a bit. A jump is now the plucking of a string instrument that’s different for every character, while a ground pound is accompanied by a drum roll into a satisfying cymbal hit. Even the iconic sound of entering a pipe has been changed, replicated with a xylophone. The music in general matches the tone of each level well enough. From the early stages and their more laid back tones, to the more sinister themes of the Bowser airships, there are also several stages that feature musical setpieces that really stand out as the most memorable parts of the game. But that’s not all regarding the game’s presentation taking it up another level.

Wonder’s plot is about as simple as we’ve come to expect for the Mario series, and yet there is FAR more voice work and dialogue in this game than you’d think. Mario and friends are visiting Prince Florian of the Flower Kingdom when Bowser crashes their party, stealing one of many powerful Wonder Flowers. Harnessing their power, he merges with Florian’s castle, using his newfound status as…Castle Bowser to build up Wonder energy for…well, something that can’t be good! Florian accompanies the Mario crew in a manner similar to the assistant characters we’ve seen in the older RPG series, having something to say after major levels are beaten or when you enter into a new world. Each world itself also has its own subplot that gives a BIT more context to your platforming fun. In the Sunbaked Desert, we have to track down Bowser. Jr. and take back all the water he’s stolen from the residents. Whereas in the Fungi Mines, players have to investigate several ruins and progress further and further underground to save a group of miners that have been trapped by a cave-in. Even the talking flowers you see throughout the game help the world feel more real, like the adventure is unfolding in real time. At times they can be there for a joke, or as a more diegetic in-game hint, but they also serve as a way to test the waters for more natural voice work in the Mario series after mostly abandoning the prospect with Sunshine. On the note of new voices, this game actually marks quite the shake-up in the voice cast.

After nearly 30 years voicing the plumbers, Charles Martinet is now succeeded by Kevin Afghani. Afgahni’s take on the Mario brothers clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Martinet’s portrayal and in many cases is downright identical. His Luigi sounds uncannily like Martinet, though there are places here or there with Mario where you can hear a bit of a difference, but the transition is largely painless here. Giselle Fernandez also takes over for Daisy after Deanna Mustard’s similarly long tenure with the character, and they really capture the energy Daisy is known for overall. Nabbit is now voiced by Dawn Bennet, while Prince Florian and his Poplin subjects are voiced by Caitlyn Elizabeth and Christine Cabanos respectively. The likes of Peach, the Toads, Bowser and Bowser Jr. are all still done by their longtime actors, but this definitely feels like a new era for the series as the old guard is stepping down. It’s a bit strange to see more professional actors taking on some of these roles, as a good amount of Mario enemies and NPCs are often done by members of the sound team or even the Nintendo Treehouse, but if there was ever going to be a game to swap out a good chunk of the cast, it would have to be this one. The first of MANY changes and surprises in store!

ELEPHANTS AND BADGES AND FLOWERS, OH MY!

Within the first few moments of touching the game, I was reminded of my first impressions with the likes of Super Mario World and how different that game had been from the NES games. Wonder feels like another step forward for the series regarding not just level design and gimmicks, but core gameplay elements that aim to surprise and shatter past conventions. Don’t get me wrong though; this is still a platformer through and through. You run through stages, grabbing the flagpole at the end and gaining collectibles along the way. But each level has something that feels well and truly new and exciting to spice things up. Be it the rather large roster of new enemies, level-specific mechanics like pools of goop you have to slowly push through, or using water to cool down giant superheated platforms, there’s always something around the corner that makes for several standout levels. But the biggest takeaways for a given level will arguably be the various Wonder Flower segments.

Just about every level features a Wonder Flower players can touch, which then triggers a large change to the stage that players will have to navigate in search of a Wonder Seed, which will turn things back to normal. Sometimes the stage itself starts moving like its alive, while at other times enemies might change in size or multiply, and there are even transformations that will affect the Mario crew. While a handful of effects are repeated throughout the game there are a number of completely unique ones that make for a fun climax to the stage. What’s interesting is that the vast majority of these segments are optional, allowing players to skip past them either on replay or when speedrunning, but you’ll be missing a huge part of the game’s charm if you don’t engage with them.

Outside of that, there are also new tools at your disposal to get through these stages. The Elephant Fruit power-up is the most documented part of Wonder in general, letting players become powerful pachyderms as they slam enemies away with a powerful trunk, which can also store and shoot out water. That said, its own uses feel a bit less revolutionary when compared to, say, the Cat Bell from 3D World. Other new power-ups include the Bubble Flower and Drill Mushroom, with the former letting you  bubble up enemies and jump off of them for a boost, while the latter lets you burrow past obstacles and occasionally unearth secrets. Alongside the Super Mushroom and Fire Flower, Wonder uses the power ups smartly, especially with certain timed challenges that task you with taking out enemies as quickly as you can with your arsenal of abilities.

When it comes to character-specific abilities however, some might be a bit disappointed to see the cast is largely homogenous. While it’s great to play as the likes of Daisy and Peach, alongside the Mario Brothers and Toads, everyone is the same (barring the Yoshis and Nabbit, who function as “easy mode,” basically)…so that’s where the Badge system comes in. Players obtain Badges throughout the game, which come with a wide range of effects. From replicating those character-specific abilities (the very first one you get is essentially Peach’s floating from past games), to passive effects like drawing in coins or hinting at secrets, there’s even some Expert Badges that make the game harder on you. You can try out the Jet Run badge to speed through levels but there’s no way to stop running. Or try out the Invisibility Badge to sneak past enemies…just good luck platforming when you can’t see yourself either! Badges are probably my favorite addition to the game, allowing for a degree of customization with exploration and difficulty that really ups the replayability and even accessibility of the game, though I do wish there was a bit more freedom with the system. Only being allowed one Badge, even in multiplayer, is a bit of a shame, but if anything this is a great new system that I’d love to see become a mainstay to the series.

PLAYING “TOGETHER”

Speaking of multiplayer, that’s one facet of Wonder that’s drawn some ire from some circles. Compared to the past few multiplayer Mario platformers, Wonder doesn’t employ collision between players, and also limits the ways players can interact with each other. So this means no more running into people, or picking them up and “accidentally” throwing them to their deaths. This also allows the level design to no longer have to space things out for up to four players, keeping things from feeling too cramped OR too spaced out. It seems perfect and we should all be rejoicing…but for the griefers out there that love to mess with other players this is a dark day and they probably cancelled all of their pre-orders. Now, there is something to be said about being able to physically interact with players and create some spur-of-the-moment plans to grab a collectible or make it through a tough section. If someone plays as Yoshi you have the ability to ride on their backs at least, but otherwise it feels more like you’re playing alongside someone rather than truly together. But perhaps as a result of this, the online experience might be some of the best the Mario games have ever seen.

When connecting online, players will encounter “ghosts” or “shadows” of other players that can be seen but, similar to local play, can’t be interacted with normally. Players can see each other and use little emotes to communicate, but you’re all largely playing your own instance of the level. As a result though, there’s no real input delay or lag to worry about (except when players are loaded into a level you’ve already started) and you can go about your business without worrying about someone messing with you. That said, you can’t, say, ride on another Yoshi player online like you can in local play, but you do gain the ability help out other players. Players can share spare power-ups with other players even online, as well as revive players if they die if you can touch their ghost before a short timer goes down, in a manner somewhat similar to co-op in Cuphead. On top of that, online is where Standees showcase their use. Players can crouch down and press “X” to throw out a standee of their character on the spot, which can serve to either highlight a hidden block or area players can reach, but also serve as a way to revive other ghosts. Throwing down a Standee right before a tough spot can end up really helping other players out, even if it doesn’t do much for you. Players can gain “heart points” by helping other players out and finishing levels with them, which do nothing but give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside. While most online interactions are with random players that can come and go as they please, it IS also possible to make dedicated rooms with friends and engage in races through certain stages too. While the online and even co-op multiplayer might not quite be what every player wanted, I do feel that Wonder found a way to truly innovate after the last several Mario multiplayer experiences were often characterized as being chaotic and frustrating. It feels nice playing through levels and serving as a guide to less experienced players, and being able to race about with friends can be fun in its own way.

THE DIFFICULTY OF CREATING A CHALLENGE

Now, one major aspect of Wonder I was worried about pre-release was the overall challenge the game would pose. Seeing how strong the new power-ups and Badges were, combined with the ways that other players can help in multiplayer, I was worried this wouldn’t be very engaging and you could kind of sleepwalk through it. As subjective as difficulty can be for people, I do think that Wonder largely managed to keep me engaged and offered some real challenges, while also enabling players to really shape the game to their own skill levels. Mario is always going to be a series that appeals to as many people as possible. It doesn’t carry the kind of reputation that, say, the Donkey Kong Country series had regarding difficulty, but Wonder does give players a TON of options to make the game ease up on you and a lot of the difficulty can come from just NOT engaging with these options. Just avoid using Badges, the power-ups or the Yoshis and Nabbit for a more challenging run through the game. That being said, the game does pepper each world with far more challenging levels off the beaten path. Most of the world map actually allows you to tackle levels in any order you want, and levels have individual difficulty ratings so you know which ones to avoid if you want to have a chill time, or indeed which ones to seek out for a real challenge. The game’s final challenge was also suitably hard, so on the whole I was satisfied with my time with the game….with really only one exception.

The vast majority of Wonder is designed around surprising players, constantly doing something unexpected and weird….which makes it all the more disappointing to see them drop the ball with boss battles. Now, this is a platformer and I don’t really ever go into a platformer thinking about the boss fights. If they’re fun, then that’s good enough for me, but they’re often not at the top of the list and I care way more about the levels leading up to them. In Wonder’s case though, not only are the bosses very simple and easy, they’re also infrequent and very same-y. In that regard, it’s the one thing that I think the New series handled better. You fight Bowser Jr. in most of the worlds, with the same overall idea of him attempting to run you over in his shell, with the only difference being a Wonder effect that changes up the arena a bit. But after about three or four jumps on his head the fight is over and they all fail to leave an impact. Not helping matters is that a few worlds just don’t even HAVE boss fights at all, not even minibosses like Boom Boom show up here. While the final boss at least was unique and fun, it still felt like it ended somewhat too soon and I was left underwhelmed by the finale before the post-game challenges. Again, most Mario bosses aren’t much to write home about but with every other aspect of Wonder really going out of its way to impress me, the bosses just stuck out like a sore thumb. Maybe if they had gone for a more setpiece driven platforming challenge for the final level, similar to the finales for 3D Land and 3D World, that would have been better, but at the end of the day I wish the game had just pushed the envelope just a bit further.

That being said, I applaud how accessible the game is overall, and for younger or more inexperienced players they’ll likely have enough to grapple with and be plenty engaged. Multiplayer can be both helpful but also make things a bit more tricky depending on the level, and having some easy-mode characters on top of certain badges SHOULD give everyone a chance at beating this game if they so desire. I do feel that the path to true 100% completion is a bit more fulfilling. Each level has at least two Wonder Seeds to get, one for beating it normally and one for completing the Wonder Flower segment. Some levels have secret exists that bestow another Wonder Seed though, and I had to really keep my eyes peel for hints to find those. Wonder Seeds are the only plot-critical collectible but the game also keeps track of whether or not you got three large purple coins in each level, on top of reaching the top of every flag pole at least once, so I had my hands full getting full completion and felt satisfied enough at the end, so I think they did well enough. Maybe in the future they could use the Badge system to let players tweak the difficulty a bit more minutely. Maybe give us some Badges that make enemies tougher or impose a time limit on stages (something this game notably removed compared to past games), just for some extra spice. Difficulty is always going to be tricky to balance, but for the most part Wonder excelled enough there.

A WONDERFUL START TO A NEW ERA

2023 really does feel like we’re entering into a new era for not just Mario, but Nintendo as well. A new console is all but confirmed to exist within the next year or so, and after the Mario Movie’s smashing success, on top of the debut of the Super Nintendo World theme parks, Nintendo is likely ready to make even bigger moves with their IPs, and that includes Mario. Wonder, at least according to the developers, isn’t necessarily the blueprint for every Mario title to come, but it does at the very least paint a picture that this franchise isn’t anywhere close to running out of steam. Mario’s “dark ages” are still far better than the heights of many other franchises but all the same it’s nice to see the light at the end of the tunnel here. With remakes of beloved RPGs, and games like Wonder and Odyssey taking chances and being real returns to form for both 2D and 3D platformers, the future of the series hasn’t looked this good in a while, and I’m excited to see where it goes next. I don’t know if I could say that Wonder is the best 2D Mario game, but it’s easily the best in a long while and will likely be considered a bit of a swan song for the Switch era. Endlessly creative and boasting some surprisingly novel online elements on top of playing like a dream, Super Mario Bros. Wonder is one of the easiest recommendations I’ve had in a while and even with releasing so late into an utterly packed year of amazing games, it stands on its own as far as being in the Game of the Year conversation.

Until next time,

A FALSE START

Marvel’s Avengers launched in September of 2020, and to say the launch was rough would be an understatement. Broken matchmaking, a litany of bugs and performance issues, and a deeply unsatisfied fanbase. While it’s clear the pandemic had played a huge part in the game’s lackluster release state, the fact it was allowed to release like this at all was worrying. Only a month later player numbers on PC had dropped significantly and the game seemingly was in its death throes. In March of 2021 the next-gen console versions of the game released, and with it a multitude of fixes and additional content. It was clear this was an attempted re-launch of the game, but you know what they say about first impressions…

Now, to give the developers some credit, there were legitimate attempts to improve the game and add more worthwhile content. They didn’t just cut and run and leave players holding the bag. Effort was put in to making the game better and trying to right the ship, though the damage had already been done with the game’s reputation. Even as someone who got the game far after every patch and fix went out, I still encountered a ton of issues and on my last-gen PS4 console the overall experience was still rough. It feels like a game that really should have been next-gen only, but was pushed out to the last-gen systems to get as much profit as possible, in a manner similar to the ill-fated launch of Cyberpunk 2077. The sad truth here is that regardless of patches and additions to the game, no matter how many bugs they fixed and feedback they implemented, there were problems with the very core of the game, and in order to properly address these issues…they would have been better off making a new game from scratch.

THE GEAR SCORE MAKES THE HERO

One of the most hotly debated aspects of Marvel’s Avengers was its status as a live-service game. At a time when the “games as a service” bubble was about to burst, fans had largely grown intolerant of more games coming out competing for their time and money, and if you are going to market yourself as a “forever game” with tons of ways to spend money and get players to log in every day, you have to make it worth it for them and…well, I think the game’s overall reception and failure speaks for itself.

So much of Marvel’s Avengers is grinding for grinding’s sake. Everything takes longer to unlock and build up than it should, clearly designed in such a way to squeeze money out of the playerbase. After a certain point, the goal is no longer to make a satisfying game for players and instead to make it into an infinite revenue machine. At the game’s launch you had TONS of cosmetics that could only be gotten through a tedious grind of in-game currency….or you just pay up with real money. At one point the developers even tried to market an experience boosting item for players, before it was removed due to protest. Keep in mind this was a full-price game. Just a few years prior we had Marvel’s Spider-Man as a solid single-player game that had NO microtransactions at all, and a TON of costumes you could unlock by…playing the game. How novel! Speaking of Spider-Man, let’s not forget that one of the most popular superheroes of all time was made into a PlayStation exclusive for no other reason than greed. Now, I’ve played the game long after the final update just unlocked all cosmetics for players to enjoy for free, and what few things I have to unlock from in-game vendors shows me that this grind must have been awful to live through, and it must be even worse if you HAD paid for stuff without knowing that one day it would be made free with the flip of a switch.

On top of all of this, there was also artificial bloat inserted into the game’s progression systems with the focus on loot and raising your player’s Power Level. Over the last few years I’ve seen a lot of games worship at the altar of “gear score” and I hate it every time. They completely miss the forest for the trees regarding what makes loot and loadouts work in other games. Often times your own abilities as a player are downplayed in favor of forcing you to micromanage your gear, and it unfortunately infects the Avengers experience. Despite the fact that you’re playing as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, you don’t feel all that powerful unless you have the right arbitrary number attached to the endless loot you sift through during missions. Hulk Smash….but only if you put on the wrist guards that give him plus 5% damage when it’s raining outside. Remember how in Spiderman: Homecoming Peter has to grapple with being a hero despite Tony taking away his fancy suit with all those gadgets? Or how this game’s own campaign is constantly touting the platitude that “Good isn’t a thing you are, it’s a thing you do?” Yeah well actually the gear makes the hero, so get to grinding if you want to actually embody these characters!

You constantly have to deal with gear you get from enemy drops, finding them in strong boxes, or completing missions. While you do on occasion find some gear with some tangible effects that you can tuck away for a specific mission, the bulk of gear is garbage and exists almost purely just to sell off to get a pittance of currency in exchange, or later on to feed existing gear and make it stronger. But with each mission you’ll get better and better gear, constantly having to replace what you already had, so don’t get attached. So many of the modifiers and stat bonuses to gear are so minor they don’t even feel noticeable, and what’s more, it’s all there to keep up the illusion of progression.

There’s no actual progression from the gear system; the game automatically scales to whatever your Power Level is when selecting most missions. There are SOME missions that have a higher Power Level by default that you can’t take on until you’re at that level, but they didn’t feel noticeably more challenging than other missions. Now, I never hit the Power Level cap with any character, and I’ve seen evidence that some missions are hidden from view unless your Power Level is high enough, so I can’t quite speak for the pure endgame content, but the bulk of the game showcases just how horrible the gear system is as a progression system. It’s worth noting that there’s also individual levels for each character, which actually works FAR better as a real progression system. Each level up gets you a skill point that can be put towards multiple skill tress that further expand each character’s moveset and allows for experimentation to suit different playstyles and strategies. Gear systems CAN be down well, but it doesn’t work in this game, and I can say with confidence the entire experience would have been better without its inclusion. Getting off of my soapbox then, we should probably discuss the actual contents of the game itself, starting with what many touted as the best part of the whole game….the single-player campaign.

AN INHUMAN CAMPAIGN

A fair bit of the pre-release coverage of this game was focused around the story. Well before we saw any gameplay or even know what type of game Marvel’s Avengers was going to be, they were hyping up the voice cast as if it was a movie. Despite all of that focus, the single-player campaign didn’t exactly live up to my expectations for more than a few reasons, despite a decent start.

The premise is an interesting one for starters. The Avengers are blamed for a tragic accident and forcefully disbanded but years later a superhero fangirl, Kamala Khan, sets out on a journey to help clear their names and get the gang back together. Kamala is one of a few newer Marvel characters that has gotten a fair amount of buzz, similar to the likes of Miles Morales, and it’s undoubtedly great to see her take on a major role in a game like this. The early bits of the game put you in her shoes as she struggles to come to grips with her new found super powers, and the dynamic she has with the Avengers is endearing. That said, over time it started to feel like the story was being stretched thinner and thinner, and more problems started to emerge that sadly weren’t solved by the ending.

For starters, Kamala takes up the bulk of screen time. I don’t mind her being the main focus of the narrative, but for a game named after the Avengers…the team itself actually doesn’t do as much as you’d think. While we get to Hulk and Iron Man early enough, and Black Widow has a decent behind-the-scenes impact on the plot, I really feel like the narrative didn’t know what to do for Thor or Captain America. By the time the whole team is back together the game is about over, and any fun banter or moments they could have had together was mostly relegated to how they all feel about Kamala. There are times when the game’s narrative almost feels like it was written like Kamala’s fan fiction, where she is the center of everything and the other Avengers seem far too trusting and supportive of her right away, not to mention she faces little to no consequences for her actions at times. I want to stress I DO like Kamala and I think Sandra Saad does a good job portraying her, but the game gets awfully close to being a game about Ms. Marvel, featuring the Avengers, and that’s not exactly how the game was advertised.

Outside of that, I take issue with the game’s focus on the Inhumans, or rather, the lack of focus. In the comics, Inhumans are descendants of humans experimented on by the alien race known as the Kree. When exposed to “Terrigen Mist” they develop superhuman abilities, and there’s also a lot of political stuff with a royal family of Inhumans that live on the moon. In this game however, the alien aspects of Inhumans are severely downplayed, and the event that ends up releasing the Terrigen Mist and creating Inhumans here is more or less implied to be completely manmade, with no mentions of the royal family either. While it’s possible the game would have delved into the Inhuman’s alien origins later on (as certain missions do tease the Kree quite a bit in the postgame), all we’re left with in the base game is…effectively bootleg X-Men. There’s this guy, Theo, who can teleport people here and there, and he’s also bright blue…and he kind of just comes across as a less-cool Nightcrawler in every way. When you meet the Inhuman resistance later in the game, they end up being led by…Ant-Man? Because I guess they couldn’t think of or use any other prominent Inhuman character aside from Kamala. For the last few years, as Marvel began really pushing the Inhumans in the comics, TV shows and now games, it was largely as a response to not having the X-Men film rights and not wanting to promote them once the MCU took off. Many fans likewise dislike the Inhumans and view them as poor replacements for the X-Men .While I think both could have their place in the Marvel world and the premise does have potential, this particular game doesn’t really do ANYTHING of note with them.

Then there’s the lack of notable villains. While on the one hand I appreciate that the developers weren’t just reusing villains already seen in the MCU like Loki, Ultron or Thanos, their use of A.I.M. and M.O.D.O.K. leaves a lot to be desired. I’m sorry, but M.O.D.O.K. isn’t a strong enough villain to carry the rest of the game, and while there are a FEW other notable Marvel villains in here, I find they’re not used well. Taskmaster is a tutorial boss fight, and Abomination is fought early on…and then that’s about it in the base game. With both of them copy and pasted into post-game missions with a vague “oh, they’re just clones” justification. It wouldn’t be until the other story expansions that we’d get a few more villains like Maestro, an evil version of the Hulk from the future, or Ulysses Klaue, a notable Black Panther villain, but at that point it felt like too little too late. And that’s not to mention that most of the basic enemies in the game are just robots with no real personality or designs that really pop, or else fighting waves and waves of “guy with gun.” What a notable roster we’re working with here.

For all of the potential that the early hours of the campaign showcased, the cracks started to form quickly and my opinion of the story only went down with time. We started with nice cinematics and character banter, some intrigue with how it was all going to come together…but steadily it became apparent that most of the Avengers were being sidelined, the villains were weak, and the emphasis on hand-crafted single-player levels and setpieces would dwindle with time, revealing the game’s true colors.

AVENGERS: AGE OF REPETITON

For as negative as I’ve been so far, I do want to stress that I DID enjoy the moment-to-moment playing of the game and it’s clear a lot of time and effort was put into making a fun action game with Marvel characters. Now, there IS a certain level of balance here to make sure everyone is equally viable, which leads to some characters not quite living up to the power fantasy. Black Widow can take on enemies just as effectively as Hulk can, while Thor and Iron Man’s flight is slow to keep them from leaving everyone in the dust. Despite that, every character has enough tools to make them pop. Hulk can grab minor enemies and use them as weapons. Kamala’s stretchy attacks let her be a menace from any range. Smacking enemies with Thor’s hammer, or flinging Captain America’s shield at multiple opponents never got old. Even the non-powered characters like both of the Hawkeyes or Black Widow were plenty fun to use, armed with a lot of tools to take on enemies and get around the giant levels. From the intricate takedown animations for each character (Thor having a penchant for wrestling, while Kate Bishop uses teleporting to take out enemies in style) to the heavy amount of customization with everyone’s skill trees, there was a lot to like about the combat…but that can’t save a game that is so dull and repetitive elsewhere.

After the first few hours of the campaign I was suddenly forced to start selecting missions on the War Table and saw the game for what it truly was; the same handful of maps, enemies and objectives repeated over and over and over again. Compared to the curated single-player levels, the main missions, designed around multiplayer, are filled with massive maps that honestly felt way too big for their own good. You have to wander about as you look for small enemy outposts dotted here and there, fighting a pretty pathetic roster of enemies along the way. Not only are most enemies rather uninspired robots, but so many of them are just annoying to fight. Snipers that teleport away from you the instant you get close, endless turrets and drones that are always picking at you from far away, and more “elite” enemies that have tons of health to chew through in lieu of being more challenging to fight most of the time. Bosses are especially bad about this; most are huge damage sponges and play similarly to each other, completely shrugging off any attacks you land and taking forever to take out. I understand they’re balanced around four players but even so they would take so long to defeat and required barely any real engagement. Just dodge the big telegraphed attacks, sneak a few hits in and run, then rinse and repeat for several minutes.

Outside of just fighting enemies, your main mission objectives rarely change up in a meaningful way and just a few hours in I had seen most of what the game had to offer with objectives. Save some Inhuman hostages by opening up their cages, or defend some allies from waves of enemies. Maybe you need to use JARVIS to hack into A.I.M.’s database, so defend those computers from enemy hackers! There is on occasion some “puzzles” that would require a BIT of coordination, hitting switches or stepping on pressure plates to open doors for more loot but ultimately that was about as advanced as it got. Most level design would vary from gigantic open environments to linear corridors that are repeated so often I knew them like the back of my hand after just a handful of missions. Now, again, maybe that endgame stuff does change things up, but I’d rather not wade through so much of the same content over and over to see for myself.

And that’s the real shame here…for all the potential I see in this game, it gets exhausting quickly. It takes so long to actually flesh out your character movesets and try everyone out, but by that point you’ll have done the same handful of missions to the point of getting sick of them. Even with the expansions there just isn’t enough meat here to justify the grind. Sad as it is to say, it was painfully clear just why this game failed after just a few hours of playing.

AN UNENVIABLE LEGACY

The domino effect of Marvel’s Avengers’ failure is arguably just as interesting as the game itself. The poor showing for the game cost Square Enix a LOT of money, and was likely a factor in their decision to sell off their Western developers, including the developers of this game, Crystal Dynamics. The year after this game’s launch, Eidos Montreal’s Guardians of the Galaxy game ended up getting the cold shoulder from fans…despite the fact that it was exactly what many fans had wanted; a solid single-player experience with a great story that had a lot of love for the source material. But fans saw a Marvel game with Square Enix publishing it and assumed it would follow in Avengers’ footsteps. Elsewhere, the frosty reception to DC’s live-service superhero efforts with Gotham Knights and the yet-to-be-released Suicide Squad game can be at least partially attributed to this game’s poor performance. While Gotham Knight’s full release was devoid of microtransactions, the grindy nature of player progression and multiple in-game currencies to juggle points to it possibly being removed later in development. Meanwhile, the instant the word “gear score” was uttered at the gameplay reveal for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League the game was attacked by fans and the game has suffered multiple delays and as of now, it’s not clear what state that game will release in. All due to one poorly-received game!

(One screenshot was all it took for people to turn on this game)

It’s clear that the live service bubble has burst; you can only get so many people to sign up for so many “forever games” before something gives. While your mega hits like Fortnite might continue on, it’s clear by now that you can’t quite compete with that and I wouldn’t be shocked if major game releases start to pivot away from this model. It’s also been argued that the superhero bubble might have burst in mainstream pop culture. Several superhero films over the last few years have not done particularly well with fans OR at the box office. From MCU misses like the third Ant-Man movie, or the latest Thor release, to DC’s extremely costly failure with The Flash, it’s possible that superhero games might also be on the way out. That being said, Marvel does still have SEVERAL other games in the pipeline, such as the next game from Insomniac, Spider-Man 2, so it’s possible this game’s failure wasn’t enough to scare them off.

It’s sad to see how poorly this game performed in the end, even if it’s easy to see why things went this way. In another world, this game could have been a smash hit, creating a platform filled with fun things to do and multiple Marvel heroes added over a very long life. I can only imagine how they might have made certain characters work if they had only gotten the chance. Had the game launched in a better state, or hadn’t gone the live-service route, things might have been very different, but regardless the damage has been done. With Square selling off Crystal Dynamics and Eidos to Embracer, and mass layoffs hitting multiple Embracer entities, Crystal Dynamics included, there’s no hope of a second chance with this title. I can only hope the best for the people involved that they can use their talents on a better game down the line

With Marvel’s Avengers officially delisted from all major storefronts and the future of the game’s online services somewhat uncertain, I thought it important to talk about this game before it is lost to the annals of history. For all the problems I had with the game, I was happy to at least play it before it was too late. I can see that this was far from a cheap cash-in title, and a lot of talented people gave their all on a game that just didn’t work out for a multitude of reasons. I can only hope that someday we can get a more successful spin on Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and game developers can look at this game as a cautionary tale for how to somehow ruin what should have been a guaranteed success.

Excelsior!

THE NETCODE! IT DOES NOTHING!

When it comes to most Nintendo series, online play is an afterthought, if it has it at all. Generally speaking, the company has shown to be laughably out of date regarding their consoles’ online infrastructure and the online experiences of a lot of their big titles. So imagine the problems when it comes to designing a game like Splatoon that is predominantly an online experience. The first two Splatoon games had their share of issues but they were fun enough…but something went wrong with 3.

From day one of release, up until the time of writing, I have suffered countless connection issues and errors in Splatoon 3, far more than I had with the first two games combined. Now, to this game’s credit, there have been attempts to address certain issues that have plagued the series. Matches end in a No Contest ruling if someone disconnects early in a match, you won’t be assigned a loss if someone on your team disconnects, and people that disconnect frequently are not only assigned losses, but also can get penalized and timed out of playing. These are some great improvements…if the infrastructure for the game even worked. Splatoon 3 is one of only a handful of games on Nintendo’s updated in-house server system, and I have to imagine the developers were grappling with issues well into the game’s release and couldn’t quite smooth them out. It was extremely noticeable in the early days of the game’s release, and even after several patches that allegedly helped with matchmaking and connections, I still see issues frequently. I have pretty good Internet, and actually sprung for an Ethernet adaptor to have a wired connection with my Switch. I have rarely had issues in other games and yet I’ll still see random disconnections in this game…and then it has the gall to blame ME for it and put me in time out. Oddly enough, Splatoon 3 is pretty much the ONLY game I play currently that has any kind of punishment system for disconnections…and yet it’s also the most unstable game of the lot. Ironic, really.

Outside of people disconnecting, which isn’t always the game’s fault, there’s also the game’s matchmaking and lobbies. At first I was really thrilled with the game’s overhaul of lobbies and queuing for matches. In the previous games you’d be stuck watching a screen as people slowly filed in for a match, without much to do. Being able to now freely run around in a training room and try out your weapon while the game searches for players in the background is great! What is less great is when the game flashes a “communication error” or “one or more players disconnected” message and completely crashes the room. This happens so frequently that it’s rare I play more than one game with a given group of randoms. I have noticed far less issues when grouping up with friends, and I appreciate that it is far easier to play with friends in general here, but it still ruins the overall pacing of a game session with a lot of starting and stopping of matchmaking, whereas in Splatoon 1 and 2 I could get a faster series of matches after that initial wait.

I understand that online connectivity can have tons of variables in play. In fact, for a time this past April I had a number of online issues that took me quite a bit of time to solve. It wouldn’t be fair to expect a flawless experience every single time I boot up Splatoon 3 but even accounting for other people rage quitting or the Internet in general having some hiccups every now and then, the frequency of issues is still far too high. Even if the rest of the game was flawless, the simple fact that it just doesn’t WORK at times makes for a stain on the rest of the package. But of course there’s more to this game’s problems than this, so let’s move on.

DUDE, WHERE’S MY FLANK ROUTES?

Stage design is important in any shooter, but especially one like Splatoon, a game defined by the ability to ink and swim over any terrain. Each game in the series certainly has its ups and downs with stages, but I’m particularly disappointed with 3’s so far. I think it’s telling that my favorite stages in 3 are actually from the two previous games. There are a number of things at fault here, with the most baffling one to me being the decrease in verticality for most stages. Many stages are flatter, with less ways to get to higher vantage points. There’s also an increase in un-inkable terrain, especially regarding walls. By itself that’s not necessarily a bad decision if the developers just wanted to go into a different direction…but then why did they include new mechanics that are clearly based AROUND having more verticality? The Zipcaster special weapon is supposed to let you grapple around the stage, but on many stages the special barely has any impact. It’s like if you take Spider-Man out of New York City and see that his web swinging is far more ineffective when he doesn’t have giant skyscrapers around him at all times. There’s also the Squid Surge, a universal technique that lets you quickly shoot up inked walls, but most of the time it’s easy to forget it even exists because so few stages feel like they were designed with it in mind. Even the single player largely ignores the mechanic at times, which just makes me question why it was even included at all. It feels like the developers weren’t all on the same page here.

You could also apply that to the lack of alternate routes or flanking options in most stages. Many stages in Splatoon 3 are little more than straight shots to the middle of the stage, with it often becoming a bloodbath with no way to quickly escape. You have forced drops that make it difficult to retreat to higher ground, if not impossible. I think the stage that showcases this the most is Hammerhead Bridge, which is from the first game but has been so heavily altered it’s practically a different stage. The bridge is basically just one straight line, and as a result the stage is one series of chokepoints after another. Once one side breaks past the middle it becomes harder and harder for the defending team to force them out. Having an alternate route to get around this and flank them from behind would help alleviate the spawn camping that usually results on that stage, but they’re gone. With that in mind, Hammerhead is probably my least favorite stage in the game; matches just devolve into being the first team to push past the middle and lock the enemy down for the remainder of the match. Some stages are more open than others, but on the whole it feels like options are limited and more than ever it’s easier to be backed up into a corner. What is especially frustrating is that pre-release footage of stages like Eeltail Alley or Scorch Gorge showcase dramatically different layouts that were more open, and yet the final release leaves us with stages that drastically limit your approach to the other team. Clearly, plans changed during development.

(Stages like Mahi Mahi Resort saw drastic changes from Splatoon 1 (Left) to Splatoon 3 (Right), becoming smaller and flatter)

Now, Splatoon is a live-service game and there are constant changes and additions to be excited for, and to a degree the stage situation has gotten better. Stages like Manta Marina or Flounder Heights offer more vertical options and are mostly untouched from their previous games, though personally I’m not very impressed with most of the new post-launch stages. One aspect the developers seemed to be aware of was the power that certain ranged weapons had on some stages. Eeltail Alley and Mincemeat Metalworks could be completely locked down by a good Charger or Splatling if they claimed the middle bridge. After the 3.0 update though, signs and other objects were added to some stages to provide some cover and keep long-range weapons from having such an advantage though the changes feel more like a bandage over a larger problem with the stage design on the whole. The series has completely renovated older stages in the past and that might still happen with 3, but as it stands we’re nearly a year in without major changes. Time will tell on how well this matter is handled but for the moment there are some days I log in and see the stage rotation and just immediately close the game because I’d rather not deal with certain stages at all.

SALMON RUN: REMEMBER, YOU’RE HERE FOREVER

Salmon Run was one of the best additions to Splatoon 2, a unique co-op experience that clearly had potential to be built on in a future game. 3 definitely makes some good improvements. Having the mode available at all times for starters, and the ability to toss eggs a good distance forward is a game changer that would make it tough to go back to 2’s version of the mode. That said, other changes for the mode haven’t been nearly as welcome I find.

As a live-service game, Splatoon needs to find ways to keep players coming back for more. Players already earn rewards for playing in the mode, though it often only takes a handful of games before your bonus rewards dry up until the next shift starts. In comes the addition of the Xtrawave, and a chance to fight a King Salmonid if you’ve managed to clear all three normal waves. The Xtrawave is itself a fun challenge that can cap off a successful win-streak, without any penalties for losing. That said, the rewards for clearing Xtrawave feel very lacking for the effort you have to put in. Scales are awarded for participating in the Xtrawave, gaining more if you manage to defeat the King, on top of how high the hazard level is when the wave began. While finishing quicker with high hazard levels can net you more scales there is a hard cap on how many you can earn, not to mention good old random chance when it comes to getting the rarer silver and gold scales. In fact, if your hazard level is low enough it’s apparently just straight up impossible to get gold scales. So the mode pushes you to juice up that hazard level and play over and over and over again to get just a handful of the things…and when it comes to what you can trade them in for, you’ll be working your tailfin off to afford anything of value. There are some stickers and figurines for your locker, with cosmetic items like extra slop suit colors and even some gear you can wear in normal multiplayer, but there are some problems here. The prices are pretty absurd for how long it takes to build up any of the rare scales, and what’s more the game’s shop won’t even show you everything you can buy unless you spend some scales to “uncover” more rewards. It already takes forever to earn scales but you might be forced to buy things you don’t want just to uncover stuff you DO want…and then you’re right back to having to grind out and save up for more.

Really, “grind” is the perfect term here. This game expects you to devote a significant amount of playtime to get any form of reward, with very few ways to speed the process along. While it took them a bit to implement it, the new Big Run events do increase your scale rewards which is appreciated…but they are rare, happening at most twice in a season and only for about two days at a time. On that note, Big Run itself is an interesting idea, having the Salminids taking over a multiplayer map and pushing players to get as high of a score as possible to get a trophy. The Eggstra Work mode that was also added recently is somewhat related, having players go through five pre-determined waves in the push to get the highest score. The problem is that both of these modes only really reward the hardcore fans of Salmon Run, giving casual players few incentives to play along. The scores you need to get to even get a bronze trophy are fairly demanding for a more casual fan, and if you don’t care for score at all…there’s not much these can do for you. Splatfests at the very least grant you sea snails to further upgrade your gear, in addition to being a hyped-up event in-game centered on Turf War, the most beginner-friendly mode in the game. To be brutally honest, the continued focus on getting that score higher and higher has turned me off of Salmon Run in general. This, coupled with Salmon Run being just harder in general makes me more frustrated than anything else. Some shifts are just filled to the brim with enemies that start to mesh with one another and at times there’s so much going on the game actually starts to lag and slow down. If their intention was to keep me invested and want to come back to the mode, they managed the opposite, which is a pretty damning issue for a live-service game.

SEASONAL DROUGHTS

The success of Splatoon is largely tied to how Nintendo seemingly understood how to make a live-service continually appealing. While a full-price game, all further updates for multiplayer are free and often go for 1-2 years of the game’s life. Splatfests and other events ensure that there’s always a reason to come back later. The third game tries to change things up a bit regarding rewards and updates and honestly I think it mostly does a good job, though it isn’t without some downsides. In Splatoon 1 and 2 updates were typically weekly; every Friday or so you’d get SOMETHING new. Sometimes that meant a new weapon, or stage. Other times it might mean a completely new mode (more so in the first game). Splatoon 3 has instead adopted the season approach to content updates. Seasons last three months, and on day one of a new season players are given a ton of new things all at once. Roughly 10 new weapons, two new stages (so far the pattern being one returning stage and one brand new one), a balance patch and a new Catalog. Catalogs are effectively this game’s take on the Battle Pass that plagues so many other live-service games, though it’s mostly inoffensive. Catalogs have 100 levels to them, but pointedly cost the same amount of points to level up each time, and you get a huge bonus of points for your first win of the day. I think they serve as a decent, but attainable challenge to complete each season, without too much FOMO attached if you don’t finish them. That said, anyone that plays a lot of ranked tends to complete Catalogs quickly and then they don’t have much left to look forward to for the rest of the season.

Even if you’re not big on the Catalog, a growing sentiment with players is that the seasonal model isn’t enough to keep players coming back. All that new stuff at the start wears off before we’re even halfway through a season and the wait for the next season gets harder and harder to bear. These events like Big Run and Eggstra Work are clearly meant to help with that, though I’ve already detailed why I think these fall short. This game’s iteration of Splatfests have issues too. Going with three teams rather than two, on top of the controversial Tricolor Battles has resulted in a lot of complaints with each Splatfest, rather than excitement. Tricolor Battles were labeled as unfair to Defender players as early as the game’s pre-release beta Splatfest, and even after they were reworked slightly going into the first winter season, there’s been other issues. The Cryptid Splatfest ran into an issue where the vast majority of players picked either the Alien or Loch Ness Monster teams, with only 8% of players picking Team Bigfoot (at least in North America), meaning that the majority of players couldn’t earn points in Tricolor Battles, as they were thrown in with fellow Alien or Nessie players. And then there are the new Challenges, added with this past Sizzle Season.

On paper, Challenges seem like a great idea. Wacky rule sets that give players another reason to turn the game back on, but again the execution is lacking. Challenges themselves occur irregularly with limited time slots. One challenge might start on a Wednesday evening from 10 PM to midnight, and the next time slot would be Thursday morning at 6 AM, as an example. If you aren’t available on that day or that specific time…tough luck. The whole issue of playing the game on its own schedule versus your own has existed since the first game, but stuff like this feels nonsensical. There’s also the fact that the rule sets vary, some being quite interesting, like fog rolling into a stage periodically, while others amount to playing one of the Ranked modes without sub abilities…which doesn’t really feel nearly as fresh. And the rewards for challenges are also fairly minor, getting badges if you place high enough (once again going the score-attack route) and if you get five wins you get…a free roll of the Shell-Out Machine. Yippee. All of this wraps back around to the same core issue in that I don’t think a lot of the content in Splatoon 3 really values the player’s time. Scheduled events are rare and you have little control over actually being able to participate in a lot of them, and the rewards just don’t feel worth the time investment, outside of the Catalog. Despite their best efforts to retain players, I fear they might actually just drive them all away.

CONCLUSION

To wrap things up here, I want to stress that I do often enjoy playing Splatoon 3 and I’m pretty sure I’ve managed to put way more time into it than the first two games combined at this point. The updates to mobility with the Squid Surge and Squid Roll feel great, the new main and special weapons are fun, visually the game continues to be fantastic and its single player campaign was a welcome improvement from the first two games. Splatoon 3 clearly benefitted from the developers having gained more experience with the previous two titles and there’s tons of overall polish and content packed into this game. As a live-service, it will also continue to change and by this time next year when the last of the planned updates will be finished, it very well might be in a better place.

I don’t like to be negative and just rant and rave without any amount of constructive criticism, and ultimately I want this franchise to continue doing well and improving itself. There’s nothing else on the market like this (we’ll see if Foamstars can holds its own I suppose), and as a fresh, new franchise for Nintendo the last thing I want is for it to crash and burn. Splatoon 3 in some respects feels like a worthy successor to the previous titles and does feature a number of positive changes and additions to the core game, but the issues are even more prevalent than ever and I really hope the developers take all of this into account with the next game, whenever that happens. Considering this game was developed at the peak of the COVID 19 pandemic, on an aging console that likely couldn’t match the developer’s ambitions, this could have come out far worse, and despite what the last 3000 words or so might tell you, Splatoon 3 is far from a bad game. It’s a good game, that at times can be great fun, just held back by a number of smaller issues that I’ve love to see addressed so this trilogy can end on a high note. Maybe in a year I’ll do a follow-up and see how things have changed, but for now I guess I’ve said my piece. Thanks for listening.

UPHEAVING THE FAMILIAR

One of the biggest obstacles Nintendo likely faced in development was finding a way to make the world of Hyrule fresh again, despite largely using the same map from BOTW. Their answer is The Upheaval. TOTK opens with Link and Zelda investigating the source of a strange, toxic substance seeping out from deep below Hyrule Castle. The Gloom sickens and weakens anyone that touches it, and eventually they see the source is a decayed, withered body held in place by a strange, glowing arm. Soon enough the body stirs and a torrent of Gloom is unleashed on Hyrule. The Master Sword (and most of Link’s right arm) is destroyed, Hyrule Castle is suspended high in the air and Zelda vanishes after being engulfed by a strange light. In the aftermath Link finds himself on a floating island, one of many now dotting Hyrule’s skies, with the mysterious arm having replaced his corrupted one, and with it he has two goals: stopping the strange figure and finding Zelda.

The structure of TOTK is largely the same as the predecessor, being almost completely open after players complete a lengthy tutorial. For what it’s worth, I find this game’s story a bit more interesting than BOTW, but TOTK still inherits some of that game’s issues when it comes to narrative. When you have a game where 90% of the plot is both optional and can be done in any order, it can be difficult to make things impactful and coherent. As a result, the Zelda team arrived at a solution that is understandable, but a bit grating after a point. Most main missions are largely written as if they could be the player’s FIRST main mission after the tutorial, and the end result is a lot of repetition as the same exposition dump is given to players multiple times over the entire playthrough.

Similar to BOTW, the juiciest bits of this game’s narrative are found in the past. Link can find memories hidden away all over Hyrule, which largely explains the bulk of the game’s backstory concerning the ancient Zonai, a race of beings that were there at Hyrule’s founding but are strangely absent in the present day. This is also how we primarily get the main villain, this game’s incarnation of Ganondorf, fleshed out. As a result of the game’s commitment to nonlinearity it’s possible to skip all of the set up and arrive at the conclusion without any of the build-up, which happened to me. Suddenly I know of the game’s biggest twist and the answer to the game’s main driving question, which made any subsequent plot moment lose a lot of impact. While the game is often very good at acknowledging sequence breaks with certain quests, it was a bit annoying that the game continued to play coy despite having laid out the main answer to me so early on. Admittedly, that won’t be everyone’s experience, but that was a big issue for me that held the narrative back a bit. Well that and some bad audio mixing. It would have been nice to actually hear the sparsely used voice acting over the often booming music!

I do appreciate that this game’s overall tone is a lot more optimistic and focused on unity compared to BOTW’s almost crushing loneliness, serving to give TOTK its own identity. Link has plenty of allies right from the get-go this time around, with a base of operations near Hyrule Castle that slowly expands as the game goes on. It’s pretty rewarding to see the races of Hyrule join together, at least after you help them with their own issues Ganondorf’s revival has caused. As with the previous game, the overall art direction is also fantastic, making for some breathtaking vistas at times. As much as the Switch is really showing its age, the technical aspects of this game are proof that specs aren’t everything. Being able to load up this massive world with almost seamless navigation and juggling of physics objects is nothing short of astounding considering the Switch is little more than an outdated tablet at this point, and it manages to be at a mostly stable 30 FPS, making a marked improvement from BOTW. While I have my misgivings with some of the narrative structure, I was immediately pulled in and think the game has a great start, but there’s plenty to sink your teeth into, as I’ll demonstrate.

TIERS OF THE KINGDOM

BOTW was already a gigantic game, but TOTK pushes to somehow stuff in even more. Broadly speaking, we can look at three different tiers of the kingdom (heh), each with their own distinct feel and gameplay loop. Starting with the sky, there’s this calm, almost ethereal feeling to most of the sky islands found in this game. The Great Sky Island that players start out on definitely paints a good picture of what to expect as they continue exploring…however I found that the sky was far and away the most lacking part of the game’s world.

The Sky Islands are both lacking in size and frequency, a criticism that also plagued Skyward Sword from back in the Wii era. The Great Sky Island really set me up for disappointment, when most other sky structures are barely a fraction of its size and start to feel same-y after a point. You pop up into the sky, find a shrine, maybe a treasure chest…and then you’re done. Only rarely can you find somewhat larger, more interesting structures, but they’re surrounded by a TON of empty space. To a degree this is probably intentional. If the entire skyline was filled with floating islands it wouldn’t look very good from the surface, so having some room to breathe makes sense aesthetically. There’s also the fact that making sure the islands are more spaced out naturally makes it harder to get to them. You end the tutorial without your paraglider, and early in the game your stamina won’t hold out long enough to sail through the massive gaps in the sky to reach another island. That way, there’s this sense of mystery and anticipation when finding the next destination in the sky. I would look up at massive sky labyrinths or floating spheres and wonder both what was in there…but also how I’d even get up there. Even so, the fact that some sky islands are so small you can’t even really spot them on a zoomed-out map is a step too far. I’m shocked at how much they were played up in marketing when they barely factored into my total playtime.

Thankfully, there’s a lot more to this game. The surface is where the bulk of the game’s focus on community really comes into play. You have all the different villages and regions to explore, and it’s where the bulk of vendors and quests will be. Without Guardians roaming around, you notice a LOT more NPCs just out and about in Hyrule, and it was a welcome contrast to the other tiers and their relative isolation. Be it checking in on the latest gossip at stables, or getting my fashion on at Hateno Village, there was always something to do. The bulk of the game’s Shrines of Light are also found here, giving players quick, isolated puzzles that slowly drip feed health and stamina upgrades. Even if you want to go visit the sky, you’re basically required to return to the surface in search of new ways to get up high, such as the Skyview Towers invented by Purah and Robbie. These not only fill in your Purah Pad’s map, but also catapult you high into the air, giving you the chance to reach certain sky islands, or get a different perspective as you plot where to go next. But sometimes you might notice some strange areas on the surface that require…deeper examination.

All over Hyrule players can find massive chasms that are surrounded by Gloom, but if you’re brave enough to head down one you’ll find one of the game’s biggest secrets…the Depths. A gargantuan subterranean region, I found the Depths to be a very interesting inversion of the game’s normal environments in more ways than one. For starters, compared to the boundless freedom found in the surface and the sky, you have to take it slow and steady underground. Most of the Depths are pitch black, and you never know what is lurking just beyond the shadows. Link will either have to use special seeds to create temporary light, or seek out Lightroots that can illuminate larger chunks of the map permanently. Unlike when you use the Skyview Towers to map out the sky and surface, Lightroots only illuminate a small radius around them, causing me to slowly work from root to root, occasionally being sidetracked by various treasures and structures to explore. Eventually, I noticed that Lightroots connect to the Shrines of Light found on the surface and suddenly it all came together: the Depths are just an inverted surface. Every mountain becomes a massive, deep valley. Every body of water turns into an impenetrable wall. Similar to the sky, players will have to leave the depths and find another way back down in order to get to certain areas, but even more than that…being in the Depths for so long can be fatal. Gloom is much more concentrated down in the Depths, and enemies are also infected with it. Taking damage from Gloom goes a step further and effectively “breaks” your heart gauge, requiring special meals made from Sundelion flowers found mostly on the sky in order to heal, that or natural light from the surface or Lightroots. As dangerous as the depths are though, they’re the main source of Zonaite, a special ore that will be incredibly handy when using the wide range of Zonai technology found throughout the game.

THE FUN OF CHEATING

The Skeikiah Slate from BOTW is no more, but Link has arguably better powers to work with this time around with the help of his nifty new arm. During the tutorial, players gain four main powers from the Zonai to help on his adventure and it doesn’t take long to realize that Link is so powerful now that you’re basically playing with cheat codes.

The first and likely most important power is Ultrahand. At first glance it seems like a reskin of Magnesis, letting you pick up and move objects, though this time you aren’t limited to metal. But the real kicker here is the ability to combine objects together with…basically magical glue. Take some wooden boards and glue them together, attach some wheels and BAM…you have a makeshift cart. Or you can use one of the many different ancient Zonai devices by attaching them to a wide variety of things for almost limitless possibilities. Zonai devices often look like modern-day technology, even running off of a battery of sorts that Link can upgrade as he goes through the game. Fans, flamethrowers, steering wheels…the list goes on. Some devices are just strewn about all over the game, but in the sky specifically you can find…basically gatcha machines that dispense TONS of devices in capsule form that you can store and use later on when you need them. What’s more, later in the game you can find the Autobuild power that allows you to save “recipes” of various constructions, and then assemble them quickly, being able to use zonaite if you’re short some parts. What I like about this power is that you can be as simple or as complicated as you want. You COULD just glue some logs together as a makeshift raft…or you could go out of your way to make something far more intricate. For players that’d rather not mess with the ability entirely…while the game is built with it in mind, you can still get by for most of the game without worrying about it as much. Autobuild especially helps cut down on the time spent building things as a really great upgrade too. The entire game could have easily been built around this concept alone, but we still have other powers to cover.

Fuse is effectively a combat-centric take on Ultrahand. Using Fuse, Link can take almost any object and glue it to his weapons. I can put a Zonai spring on a shield, or glue a sword to my sword. I can even put a chunk of meat on my arrowhead if I’m so inclined. Nearly every object or material in the game can be fused to your arsenal, with a variety of great effects that can make weapons stronger, more durable, or given extra attributes. As an early example, I fused a mine cart to my shield, turning my shield into a skateboard that let me grind on rails like I’m in some Sonic game. Getting elemental weapons is as easy as attaching a special fruit or ore to my weapon, and those are way easier to find than elemental weapons ever were in BOTW. Your arrows are also much more versatile now; attach an enemy’s eyeball to an arrow to make it home in on targets, or a bright bloom seed to light up the Depths from afar. Fuse allows even the weakest of weapons to be useful, which is something that just wasn’t possible in BOTW. I can take a stick and fuse a rock to it to make a makeshift hammer that’s great for breaking open ore deposits or brittle walls, so no more stockpiling rare hammer weapons or waiting on my bomb runes to recharge. It also goes a long way towards making battles more worthwhile to even do, as enemies drop horns and claws that can grant HUGE strength increases to weapons. Before, in BOTW I would eventually avoid fighting late-game enemies because they were too beefy to deal with, as you’d lose multiple weapons in the process and any weapons they dropped weren’t as good. It was a net loss. But now even fighting silver enemies isn’t that bad, since that means I can put that silver moblin horn on some middling spear I found and suddenly that is among my strongest weapons. I have my own qualms about combat in general in this game, but Fuse goes a long way towards making it more fun to experiment and stick with than ever before.

Ascend admittedly is a step down in application, but is still quite good. The fact that it was initially a dev tool should be telling enough. With Ascend, Link can jump up through any ceiling and pop out on top of the structure. Sometimes this is just as simple as going up a floor in a house, or being able to explore a deep, expansive cave and then use Ascend to leave, popping out at the very top of the mountain you found the cave in. In the depths there are even some rare structures that lead all the way back up to the surface that Link can use Ascend on. It honestly breaks traditional level design and so the game had to do a lot of careful restructuring to manage but even then with some application of your other powers, it can be pretty easy to Ascend past areas you’re meant to go through normally. But nothing compares to the power of Recall.

Initially, I thought Recall was a very situational puzzle solver. You aim at an object and can rewind it back roughly 30 seconds or so, but further applications showed that it might be the most broken of the lot. Recall has much more range than any other power, and can affect virtually anything you could also use Ultrahand or Fuse on. I’ve had instances where I’ve built a glider, only to go off course or miss my mark, and I would use Recall as basically a reset button to bring it back to a better position. Enemies dying and leaving their valuable collectibles falling off a cliff can be saved with a button press. What’s more, any movement you did with Ultrahand will be replicated with Recall, so I’ve done that to get vehicles aligned or to rise up platforms I would then Ascend onto to get up high. I’ve even completely broken shrine puzzles with Recall, nullifying any challenge they might have otherwise posed. Some might get a kick out of it, but I felt I kind of optimized the fun out of puzzles to a degree. Regardless, these powers are a lot of fun to mess with and even more versatile than BOTW’s power set was. But while we’re kind of bringing up a negative…I may as well get a bit more critical.

TEARS OF THE FANBOY

I want to stress that, despite my complaints here or there, I adored this game and just DEVOURED it over the last month or so. I put over 245 hours into it, doing almost everything of value. Playing the game for long stretches and having it basically absorb an entire month of my life…I’ll be the first to admit my own experiences and annoyances won’t be shared by many, and for normal people that just play in smaller bursts and don’t care about full completion, they likely won’t have nearly as many issues as I did. But…spending that much time with any one game is going to reveal some of the cracks in it, and those did chip away at my enjoyment a bit.

TOTK is a complex game, with a ton of things the player can do at any given moment, but I do think that Nintendo went a bit too hard on filling this game up with actions you can perform, and then realized they ran out of buttons on the controller along the way. Simply put, some actions are far more cumbersome than they should be. Selecting materials to use, either to throw or attach to arrows is tedious. You hold Up on the D-Pad, then use the right stick to find the item you want, but seeing as there are dozens upon dozens of materials you can use throughout the game, eventually that list becomes harder and harder to parse, leading to a lot of wasted time scrolling to find the exact item you need. You can hit Y to sort by different parameters, but if want you want isn’t near the front, then prepare to spend several seconds scrolling down to find it. A “favorites” option would have been a godsend here; just let me label a handful of items for quick reference. Throwing materials is also awkward, having to first throw your weapon, but then selecting an item with Up on the D-Pad as well. While I appreciate having more options for arrows and the like, the elegance of quickly swapping between arrow types in BOTW is missed here.

Speaking of direct comparisons between these two games…let’s talk Sage Powers. Compared to the Champion Powers from BOTW, these are a massive downgrade in both strength and usability. In TOTK if I want to use a Sage’s ability I have to manually walk over to them and ready them with the A button, then usually hit A again to actually use it. In the heat of the moment having to chase down my AI companions gets old fast, and then aside from that there’s the fact that the A button is already pretty multi-contextual as it is. I’ve had tons of experiences mashing A to grab items on the ground, only for Tulin or Yunobo to walk in front of me and have me accidentally activate their power and blow items away. Looking at the four powers in depth, while they have their uses they’re rarely worth the hassle of using them. Sidon’s water shield and attack is very niche, as ice attacks can do the same things as water, with the added benefit of freezing targets. Riju’s lightning arrows take forever to set up, and aiming Yunobo’s fire spin can be tedious. Tulin is about the only Sage that feels well designed, as more often than not I will always have him around to give me a boost of horizontal movement while gliding. I don’t have to worry about tracking him down, or the A button doing something else most of the time. On the ground though, he has the same issues. I enjoy having the Sages around as AI partners to take some of the heat off of fights, but compared to how simple and effective the Champion Powers were in BOTW, all mapped to different buttons and being next to impossible to accidentally do…it’s pretty disappointing.

There are other things to go over too, some of which already existed as problems in BOTW. Just as in the previous game, climbing wet surfaces is torture. TOTK introduces some solutions but they feel poorly implemented. Players can now make tonics that grant “slip resistance” to climb up wet surfaces more easily…but in practice you’ll barely notice the effects. There’s also an armor set that is said to make you immune to slipping entirely, but that is locked behind a quest chain that can take a while to complete…and then once you get the full set you realize that you need to upgrade all three pieces two times to actually unlock the hidden set bonus to make you completely slip immune. On that same note…upgrading armor is still incredibly tedious, especially when it comes to dealing with any pieces you need from dragons. Horses are also still pretty pointless to use after a point. Without even getting into the fact that they can’t be used in huge chunks of the map, like sandy deserts or rocky mountains, not to mention the sky islands or Depths…being able to build vehicles with Ultrahand basically replaces their only real function as transportation. And yet for whatever reason, whistling for your horse is still mapped onto the D-pad. In a game where they’re clearly hurting for more buttons having one relegated to something I barely even considered using is pretty bad.

I have plenty of issues with combat in the game as well. I know Zelda isn’t a series where action is the main event, but even so the action is typically satisfying in its own way. I’d best describe it as tedious here; enemies are damage sponges, your own attacks send them far away and force you to track them down, and after a certain point the difficulty curve falls apart. I know difficulty is subjective, but both BOTW and TOTK are very strange about balance. The beginning of the game is the hardest, as you have almost nothing. But once you stockpile some meals to heal, armor to up your defense, and materials for fusion the game can’t really do anything to you. I once thought Gleeoks or Lynels were to be avoided, but getting my hands on enough Keese eyeballs to make homing arrows means I can stun them easily and melt through their health as they lay down defenseless. Mastering the parry and perfect dodge also eliminates most options enemies can even do to you. But admittedly, not everyone IS always going to be perfectly prepared for any given fight, or know that certain abilities can just render some enemies a joke. I can tell that balancing a game that is so nonlinear and open-ended is no easy task, but I do think they made players a BIT too strong at points and hope later games can find a better balance. But overall, that’ll mostly do it on the nitpicks.

CONCLUSION

When I beat BOTW, I had wished I could play it through again with my memories wiped, just so I could experience it all again for the first time. Tears of the Kingdom is arguably the next best thing. A twist on something familiar, with some curveballs thrown in for good measure. Link’s new abilities do a lot to spice up how you interact with the world, and there have been some noticeable improvements to the original’s issues, even if some still remain. With this likely being the future of the franchise, at least for now, I’m interested in seeing what lessons Nintendo can take from these two entries. For my money, Nintendo has managed to iterate on one of my favorite games out there and have made it hard to go back. I’m hard pressed to think of too many things BOTW did better, outside of the novelty of being the first game in this new style. I liken BOTW’s strength to being the joy of discovery, the appeal of exploring the unknown. While there are elements of that in TOTK, this time around the focus is on experimentation. Like the joys of playing with a tub of random Lego pieces, being able to adapt to any solution with whatever you have around, bending and breaking the rules of the game world, the end result is unrivaled freedom and depth that will keep people busy well until the next main Zelda.

Until next time,