Like many recent years there wasn’t a lot of game playing going on for me in 2017. It was however a very strange year in one respect: all five of these games are in fact 2017 releases. Guess the backlog will just have to suffer another year.
Presented now in rough ranking format.
5. Sonic Mania (PS4, 2017)
So I didn’t actually play this until about October, and I find myself almost forgetting I played it this year. Which is sad, it’s really a striking game when it wants to be, with super vivid backgrounds and some pretty great level gimmicks.
Actually shoot, starting over. So Sonic Mania is part of Sega’s next milestone year for Sonic, a sort of prelude to the main Sonic Team game, done by essentially an indie-style team of really dedicated fans headed up by the guy that created the PC ports for Sonic CD.
So yeah, 100% a Sonic game in the Genesis mold. Except made by fans who’ve had 20-odd years to think of things they could do with 16-bit layouts that fit Sonic’s Gotta Go Fast attitude. There’s a lot of love here.
The main trouble is the game gets pretty rude at points. Last level I think I had to play like 10 times to various degrees to figure out the boss at the end, and not every attempt got that far. I suppose maybe that’s a core appeal thing for some platformers but… as much as I’ve played me some Sonic games that probably shouldn’t come up.
6/10
4. Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep A Fragmentary Passage (PS4, 2017)
I am in love with the backgrounds in this game. I don’t want to diminish the overall aesthetic value of a later game on the list, but well this is the only high budget big presentation game I played this year and Kingdom Hearts has always excelled at capturing the look of the constituent Disney bits and it’s the first KH game on a console in ten years and oh yeah this is the prologue to Kingdom Hearts III so yeah.
There’s uh. Not a whole lot else going on in this game. It did away with the command deck for… some reason? Probably trying to be more like KHII, but in that event it does smooth out some of the dumb rough edges with it and carried over some of the command change mechanics from BbS, so that’s promising. And they do get to do some stuff with Aqua since it’s basically 2 hours of her slowly losing her mind due to unknowably long periods of time in isolation followed by a kinda great retcon of KH1. It’s cute.
But sure it’s fairly disposable, but can’t hate on it.
7/10
3. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia (3DS, 2017)
Normally I find that games tend to have strong climaxes (if not always great endings, endings are hard y’all) but take quite a while to get going. Of course I also play the jRPGs. Anyway, FE15 has a pretty great opening. I immediately got Alm, Celica, and the bond between them. And the pacing of the first chapter for each of them was pretty nice. Made a point of doing all the side content, almost always a sign that it’s doing a lot right.
It loses the thread about halfway through. Part of this is leftover dumb decisions from the original NES FE2: the main big bad for most of the game is presented entirely positively for no real reason, and in a way that kinda betrays a lot of the stuff they were trying to do with Alm. And y’know the bit where the heroine has to spend the last chapter locked up and then is suddenly dumped on the final map without a chance to do last minute leveling or what have you. Bleh.
But more than that the basic gameplay gimmick boils down to “Dungeons? In my Fire Emblems? It’s more likely than you think.” And it’s kinda neat for a while during the early game dungeons which are a couple of rooms and you can hunt loot. Everyone loves loot. But once they get to be actually involved in the vein of a regular jRPG dungeon? Well, no game has ever managed to make an encounter that lasts over 5 minutes not disorienting and a complete momentum killer and that trend remains unbroken.
There’s a bunch of minutia I could get into with the rest of this but I’m not sure it’d be meaningful to a general audience. It’s pretty fun if you know your Fire Emblem but not a great entry point to the series and not necessarily compelling without that contrast to the rest of it.
7/10
2. Night in the Woods (Steam, 2017)
The main writer on this is a fellow from rural Pennsylvania. The middle bits of Pennsylvania are mostly mining or steel mill towns separated by large mixes of fields and mountains. Put in auto parts plants and remove the mountains, and you have just described the rural bits of Michigan.
Night in the Woods is about the antics of one girl with some really fucked up issues, her much more normal friends, and the strains she’s managed to put between all of them, but it’s equally about the harsh realities of the world around them. The reality of the world is inseparable from the themes of the story, and the themes of the story are inseparable from the characters and how they try to live. They can only be who they are, and they can only do what they do, because that’s just the world. There’s an uncomfortable amount of “It Me” in this game, but simultaneously Mae is incredibly distinct; I’ve never done most of the things she’s done but I instantly recognize how she decided to do them all. So maybe it’s not me, but it could have been perhaps.
But I think what I’m feeling from the game, sitting on it for a few months? It’s a game that’s willing to sit down, breathe, and ask the hardest question: is there a future?
And it’s willing to give an honest answer: I don’t know. And it’s okay to live accordingly.
Um/10
1. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky The 3rd (Steam, 2017)
So after that philosophical comment you’d think there wouldn’t be another game above it, but here we are. There’s a few special factors here:
The Trails series has become really the last video games I’m well and truly excited about. I absolutely still play the remaining touchstones from the golden ages of jRPGs. Or if not play, intend to play. Fire Emblem still exists, I’ll get to FFXV… y’know, someday, I should probably pick up the newest Pokémon game. But the knowledge there’s three of this series out there I can’t play because I foolishly didn’t spend the last 15 years studiously studying Japanese gnaws at me sometimes, and I feel a little jolt when the XSeed twitter account makes jokes.
It’s a thing.
This particular game is a sort of combination of two things, an epilogue to the preceeding Trails in the Sky game and extensive foreshadowing and lore building for future entries in the series. Which doesn’t sound like GotY material, and probably isn’t, for all the main plot here is fine, the new lead character is interesting and has a couple real gut-wrenchers in his backstory, and… god damned if some of the goodbyes in the finale didn’t get me.
Every Trails game has reminded me strongly of all the things I’ve always stayed with this genre for, so even if 3rd was kinda average as a Trails game it’d score quite highly.
But there’s really two specific parts of the game that put it on top.
The first Trails in the Sky opens with Estelle and Joshua first meeting, but here in 3rd, now that we know Josh’s full backstory and have the full sense of the characters, they show us the rest, the moments that broke down Josh’s walls and… well, the game’s main theme is called Whereabouts of Light. It’s a song that Joshua plays on ocarina in-universe. Guess what it ends up referring to. And it works. And… Estelle got more nuanced and capable as she grew up, but y’know what? This younger Estelle is a lot more… her. Estelle concentrate. This is a girl that converts supervillains, bends stubborn fools to the light, and if it comes down to it, the gods will answer to HER. And it’s on full display here and I love it.
The other is… just art. The way they managed to present Dissociative Identity Disorder by switching to a format a bit like a visual novel was incredibly effective, beautifully captures the unreality of it. Using that as a way to show the sheer crushing horror of the story, while not delving into detail, and also showing deftly how the character came out the other side alive and even remotely functional? It’s haunting, but my faith in Falcom to pull off storytelling shot right the hell up.
But yeah, where NitW gave me complex things to much over in between and after playing the game and generated a lot of feels and respect after the fact and in conversation with others (not unlike Undertale in that respect, although I think I lilke NitW more just as a game), 3rd got me in the moment, with some actual tearbending. That’ll almost always win the year.
9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment