[Awards] Old Games of the Year 2020

Welcome all, to the Old Games of the Year post! As usual, I played more old games than new ones this year, so let's go over some of them shall we? So, what did I play this year? 

Stuff I've played before:

I replayed several games this year because, you know I like doing that. I'm somewhere inbetween those nintendrones who haven't played their supposed favorites and proclaimed best game evers since they came out, and the people who play them bi-monthly.

 

Musashi: Samurai Legend(Musashiden 2)

Samurai Legend is PS2 sequel to the PS1's Brave Fencer Musashi(Musashiden), and sadly unlike that game doesn't seem to be as fondly remembered by the niche crowd. At least, I see the first game brought up a lot more. This game was mostly written off as shovelware to hold people over until the next Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts title came out(it doesn't help that KH2 released later that year), it even has character designs by Tetsuya Nomura and boy are they Nomura-y. It's basically peak nomura, highly stylized in a way he clearly always wants to do but usually can't make work for the games he's making; everyone is more lanky and weirdly proportioned than normal, hair is fuckin huge, bodies are more angular, clothes are weirder and more over designed. It's a real good mix between anime and cartoon, I think the designs are fuckin great. Especially the ninjas and robots you fight. This game is also an action RPG, though a much less mobile one than even the first KH. You're fairly slow and don't jump fast or high, but I think it's still a really fun and cool game. It's absolutely a B-game, the combat system is simple. However it has a fun move-copying mechanic and several of them can be used to slice your foes into pieces or poke massive holes in them, revealing either their cartoon-y green insides or their robotic circuitry. It's very shounen anime and simple in it's plot, you're Musashi Miyamoto from before he was legendary, warped to another world by a priested of a city on the back of like a flying whale, brought there to fight the big bad evil coporation with a group of, of course, seven top executives each doing bad things in 7 different regions. There are no real surprises in the plot, aside from right near the end when you learn who the big bad really is and also there's some kind of evil god force of nature kinda behind everything but not really... which is just par for the course. That said? I think it's a charming game with some fun characters, cool designs, neat mechanics, and it's kinda fun! 

Xenosaga Series

Well, actually I only played 1 and 3 and just watched the cutscenes of 2. I love Xenosaga but god, I just don't like the combat of 2. It's this very obtuse thing, which is essentially a precursor to FF13's "break their guard then air juggle them until you win" mechanics. See different attacks attack different zones, high middle and low, and different enemies are weak to these attacks. You hit them there, they can enter a "break" state, this leaves them susceptible to attacks that knock into the air or knock them down. From the air, you can chain together multiple attacks from different characters by using the boost function, where you can force it to be another party member's turn(just like 1). Since it's still your turn, you can continue to hit them in the air. As long as you have boost, it keeps going. There are two issues with this: 1. It's not intuitive to figure out how to do this, even after the tutorial explained it and made me do it I couldn't figure out how to do it again. It's too tricky to pull off, attack weak zone until break, attack with knock up attack, boost other party member, attack in the air. Sounds simple, but the way these things are achieved makes it confusing. I would always end up knocking a dude in the air and then my guy would stop, the dude would fall, and then it'd be the turn of the guy I boosted. 2. It is required to win the game, doing the unenending attack chain, because several of the end game bosses will destroy you unless you combo them to death before they can. The ES combat is good at least because there's none of that bullshit. The story also has a lot of good and important shit, as well as really big and honestly important events, yet it feels like the plot was barely advances... cuz of course this was meant to be part 2 of 6 and that didn't work out. Xenosaga 1 and 3 are great though, even if 3 shoves too much plot in to get as much of it covered as it can, has some weird character retcons and inconsistences, requires reading a japan exclusive like flash web comic to understand some things, and reverts to a simpler menu based system instead of the dial-a-combo system of 1 and 2. 

Spryo 2: Rypto's Rage

I decided to replay this one even tho I did in the Reignited Trilogy released I believe last year, because while these games are still fun I really do miss the graphics and voice work from the originals. This game is still fun and still looks good, and the voice work is for sure better here. 

Sonic Generations

I replayed this because it's a great game. Sonic can be good, 3D Sonic can be good, FUCK you

Onimusha 3: Demon Siege

This game is still good and my favorite Onimusha. I love playing as Jean Reno with a whip. It's real fun I mean if you know what Onimusha is like, it's like that, though with some fun time travel based puzzles(do a thing in the past, it effects the future). I like the story I think it's fun and cool, the combat is refined, it looks great for a PS2 game, it's good.

Chrono Trigger

I also played this again, because with how short it is it's great for when you want some of that JRPG but don't wanna spend the 30+ hours it normally takes. I did NG+ and got some of the alternate endings, including the Dev Room ending which is really fun. In it, NPCs each represent a member of the team and have something to say. Nomura's makes the screen cut to black like the game reset or something. That bastard, he was always at his shenanigans. I think this also proves I'm good as shit at this game(though it's pretty easy), because I was able to beat Lavos with a bunch of different party setups that I wasn't familiar with. 

Star Fox Assault

I played this again cuz I felt like it. I like this game, the on foot stuff is a little rough and the on rails flying is the best part but I dunno I still think it's pretty cool. It's very anime and the final boss is cool as fuck. 

Chef Boyardee Presents: Tale's of Games Barkley, Shut Up and Jam!: Gaiden: Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa

Quite possibly the greatest game ever made. It is a shitpost in game form, and yet it takes itself and it's premise seriously enough that you can actually get invested in and feel the tension of the story. It's also got sweet ass combat mechanics. Play it yourself, learn the tale of Charles Barkley, the greatest B-Baller that ever lived. 

Lisa, The Painful RPG

I also replayed Lisa, which is a very good indie RPG that intentionally bucks the conventions of one in both gameplay and narrative respects. One might call Lisa fairly edgy, and it kinda is, but I feel like the more you give it a chance and think about it's story and setting, piecing together the puzzle, the more engrossing it and it's characters are. This game might not be for everyone, the humor is often meant to lessen the oppressive feeling of the overly dark story, but it could just make it come off as tryhard. This seems like a game I normally wouldn't enjoy but I do, not only because of it's interesting under-expositioned story which relies on you finding it's secrets and creating mental notes to really understand but because of it's survival mechanics. It's almost more of a suvival game then it is an RPG. Reminds me of what I like about Resident Evil, the non-linear way hub areas can be tackled and the necessity of preparation and resource management. I played it on Pain Mode this time, which is the hard mode that limits saving to once per save point, as well as gives you a bunch of new bosses to fight. I beat it completing all side quests including beating the super boss, without letting a single party member that I recruited die. Bow to my skill. 

Asura's Wrath

I also replayed Asura's Wrath, and sadly the effect has started to wear off. It's still real cool, especially because each time I play it I notice more and more classic anime references due to having learned more by then. However, it does lose some impact the 4th or 5th time you've seen it, even the absolutely amazing True End battles that you havetopayforfuckyoucapcomjesuschristwhatwaswrongwithyouinthe7thgen.

But still, it's a good game and everyone should pay it. Make sure you buy that final part DLC before you just can't anymore.

Silent Hill 4

I replayed SH4, as I've recently replayed SH1, 2, and 3, I felt I should do 4 as well. 4 was always rather divisive amongst SH fans, some saying it was where the series went wrong. These people are full of beans, however, as SH4 is great. Not nearly as good as the first 3, but still very good. I like how different narratively and mechanically it is from the others, while still keeping the spirit of what a Silent Hill game is. If you think it doesn't then you only understand surface level qualities of what a good SH game is, and you're ungrateful because the western SH games couldn't get either right. Anyway, yeah sure half this game is a not very well programed escort mission but fuck, it has some of the best monster design, atmosphere, and imagery that the series has had. 

The Evil Within 2

I played this game again because it's just a pretty good game, it's actually a survival horror game for the most part and pretty well done. I think I talked about it before so I mean I guess you can go find that, but I like this one, unlike the original.

Spec Ops: The Line

Not gonna talk your ear off about this one, it's Spec Ops: The Line, and I'm pretty sure I've already talked about it. It's a good game, or rather a good story, and I like it a lot. I'll say though, I'd like to say the story is good from a different angle other than the "war is bad" and violent videogame metanarrative one people talk about, since I've been seeing more and more people push back against that as something heavy handed and lame and they just don't care. I've seen people who say they think Yager doesn't want them to play this game because the message is "don't play war games" so they don't play it. 

So the angle I wanna hype the narrative up from is this one: It's a story about a well meaning soldier who wanted to be a hero but instead made everything worse, and lost his mind. The story is about the horrors of war, especially when the boundaries of ethics and morals have broken down, and how that effected him. It's about what he chooses to do and how he lives with it, more than anything else. Especially if you subscribe to the theory that everything after the intro helicopter scene is him reliving the events that had happened up until then, which explains some things that don't add up and all the odd symbolism that shows up. The developers have said when the game fades to black what you see happened as you saw it, but when it fades to white it happened differently; how can that even be if we aren't seeing things that are being recalled? It's likely that the game's story is him torturing himself for what he did, and what we see after the crash isn't something that happened(which explains things like how there are still so fucking many more of the 33rd to attack you at the end despite having killed most of them already, as well as the weird sequence where you see Lugo as a heavy trooper and it doesn't happen again upon death). Normally I don't like "it was all a dream" type theories but it makes sense, and it's not saying none of it happened just that we're seeing it after it already has, and only how he remembers it. There are other pieces of evidence, such as how you can see a silhouette of Lugo hanging as he does later in the game before the "choose who lives or dies" segment which happens well before, and the fact the insurgents you fight near the beginning are speaking Farsi... which people don't speak in Dubai, though they do in Afganistan where Walker fought before. Essentially what I wanna do is stress that it can simply be seen as taking a journey through a damaged soldier's mind and seeing the events that broke him, and for that it's a really good one. You can even interpret the loading screen stuff that mocks you as him mocking himself instead, so if you find it preachy just look at it a different way. 

You should play this, you should experience the story. 

The Matrix: Path of Neo

Well I also played some of Enter the Matrix but weeeeeew lad it's bad. Now, PON is a really great, actually. Well, no I mean it's busted and janky, but once you figure out how to make it work it's a really fun time, and it goes bonkers. If you don't know, it's a PS2 game which goes over the events of the Matrix trilogy, and you play as Neo and do bullet time and crazy kung fu moves and shit. The combat system is really great, it combines hand to hand, melee, and shooting all into one. You can shoot a guy in slow mo, run out of ammo and drop your guns, do a cool jump move til you're next to a wall, then do a wall run and jump off it to kick him in the face, then just take the sword he had and finish him off. It's so fuckin cool when you get it to work right, the combos are cool and it's almost as complex a DMC or the like though it controls way different. It also expands lots of bits of the movies while cutting out less interesting parts, including a tutorial level for guns which is LITERALLY THE OPENING SCENE FROM HARD BOILED and god damn does it feel good to go all John Woo on dudes, and adds in weird shit like fighting giant ants in the MC Escher painting inside of an S&M club. It's fuckin weird and doesn't take the Matrix seriously at all, which is for the best. A fun game you should play. 

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter

Nothin' much to say here, just still a really good game that more people need to play or give a second chance. 

Stuff I haven't played before:

Now, here's some stuff that New To Me

Breath of Fire 3

And people say oh 5 was so bad it ruined the series it doesn't deserve to be with such titans as 3! Yeah, okay, whatever. This game's alright. The best thing about it is the presentation; fantastic music, atmosphere, graphics, animation, all that stuff. But the story is meanderingly paced, character development is very "and now their arc is done", the gameplay is pretty tedious and bosses are just kind of annoyingly hard. Like once you figure out what to do/what works it's fine but it's just not very fun. the whole plot is also very abrupt, like I feel like the story really only starts when you're already 3/4s done with it. The characters are good but the storyline feels so slapdash, like you don't even really learn about the main antagonist until you go to the final dungeon where there's a bunch of exposition and it's just kinda lame. Breath of Fire 4, which I've heard some people say is the badly told and boring story, is a much better game and story, play that instead. It also has amazing 2D sprite animation. And yeah I know all the dragon forms look the same, yeah the dragon forms in 3 look great but it's not worth it. 3 isn't bad but I dunno, the more I played it the less I felt like I could call it good.

Star Fox 1, 2, and 64

Star Fox is Star Fox, Star Fox 64 is what it is as well, and but Star Fox 2 is so fucking rad. I'm so sad this didn't come out in favor of focusing on 64. That's so lame, that game's mediocre. I mean yeah I like the whole do different stuff in each level to go to a different level and get the true end, reminds me of Melty Blood, but still. It's just... ehhh??? SF2 is fucking GOOD though, it's got this weird strategy element, there are stages where you transform into a walker mode like it's fucking Macross, there's boss fights with Star Wolf, the music is great, there's more characters, more ship types, it's super cool and a good game.

Evil Within + DLC

I decided I would replay the first Evil Within and it's DLC cuz I dunno I'm an idiot I guess. I had actually never finished this before because I just didn't like it. I got tired of it, it was boring. It's still boring, and I do not understand what people see in it. Not even when I watch videos specifically telling me what they see it in it, it just feels like we've played a different game. This is a horror action game like RE4 and Dead Space, very linear with little exploration and no real puzzles. To be a survival horror game you need a limited inventory(more than TEW's is, at least), winding and looping areas and/or big areas to explore and find things and get puzzle items, as well puzzles more complicated than "put thing in another thing in the same room", not to mention ammo that doesn't come out of dead enemies and is finite. It takes more than spooky enemies and a guy who can die really easy. It's also not very hard? Why do people keep saying it's so hard? I'd really rather play RE4, 5, or Dead Space 2 than TEW, it's a boring game. I mean I like some of it, I think it's OKAY, but there are just so much better games of this vein out there and I don't see how it's supposed to be some return to form for the genre that people acted like it is. It was literally like the games we were getting just a few years prior, just cuz it wasn't a walking sim with a sinister atmosphere doesn't make it unique. The story is also not good, people act like it's great but they're being fooled. Yes, the story is a puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle that reveals a note that says "the villagers persecuted him and burned his sister alive now he's evil" and a littler one at the side going "also not-umbrella put you in his brain". Fucking Inception is deeper than this, and it's not actually very deep.

The DLC is better, cuz it's directed by the same guy who did the second game, tho it's too "modern horror has to have no combat" for me.

Uncharted 4

This one's easy to talk about; it's just Uncharted. It's a movie game, you shoot stuff, you do set pieces, you climb around on things, you watch a cutscene. Now, to be fair, I think the story and presentation is way better this time around. I think too the more serious nature of the story is better too, like it's nothing amazing but it has a strong theme and is done well. The antagonist is great and he works well to help push the theme and serve as a contrast to Drake; he's jealous of Drake and wants to find a big treasure just like him, is obsessed with like Drake's brother was, while Drake just wants to give this up and go home because family is more important and all that. It feels like a more mature story than 2 did to me and I enjoyed that more, it's still just a globetrotting treasure hunting adventure but it has a little bit to say and the characters feel like they've got a bit more depth this time. I like it, and it makes participating in the big action stuff feel more important. 

And well, that's about it. Not sure I'll do a regular game of the year post for 2020 but we'll see.