Game Of The Year 2020

Wow, 2020 has been a year to say the least, but hey we’ve got games to play to keep us busy right? So let’s highlight some of my top games from one hell of a year.

Bronze: Superliminal

If nothing else Superliminal is a technical achievement with the it handles physics scaling and transforming objects. The heart of its puzzles is how it plays with perspectives, as an example for some of the basic early puzzles you might need to grab an object and move it close to you at your feet to shrink the object essentially scaling it directly to your perspective. It’s an interesting experiment with the unique experience of games.

I got some additional enjoyment from it as during the brief period where indoor socialising was permitted, got to witness a friend going through it and trying to piece together how the perspective puzzles worked.

Silver: Final Fantasy 7 Remake

Many years after the PS3 tech demo dazzled everybody we have an actual HD Final Fantasy 7. Well kind of it isn’t a remake of the full Final Fantasy 7 instead being a part one focusing on just Midgar. If I’m honest this had me nervous expecting an open world experience with icons vomited over the map but I was pleased to see it was a more linear experience that didn’t feel padded.

It is a game of 2 halves it has some really cool moments and the way it’s adapted the turn based ATB from the original to a more action style is impressive. But on the other side the plot starts to go a bit off the rails later. Clearly, they didn’t want to just directly remake FF7 and wanted to do some of there own stuff, and that includes modern Nomura’s tendency to want to keep setting up stuff that will “definitely” pay off in later games.

Gold: Animal Crossing New Horizons

I feel you’ve got to take the context of the year when considering the game of the year, and well Animal Crossing New Horizons could not have timed it’s release better if Nintendo themselves had engineered the virus.

In a year where we’ve been trapped inside and life has been put on hold for a lot of us it was the perfect, the chance to go out, socialise and work towards goals. On a personal note I’d been planning on house hunting during 2020 and getting my own place which has obviously been paused so decorating rooms has been something I’ve really enjoyed.

Games of 2020

2019 is starting to draw to a close, personally it has been a shit year so I’m looking forward to seeing the back of it and looking forward to seeing what 2020 will bring. As part of this today I’m going to talk about some games that I have my eye on for the upcoming year.

Cyberpunk 2077

The Witcher 3 was the end of a series of work from CD Projekt Red that saw it grew into one of the most popular RPGs of recent years, despite coming from the niche source of a Polish book series it went to obtain masses of praise from players and critics alike. With Cyberpunk 2077 we’ll be able to see if lighting strikes twice and they are able to match that success within a very different setting. Hopefully like Keanu Reeves it will be breath taking.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake

Whether it is your favourite of the series or not it’s hard to argue that 7 is not the most iconic entry in the series. There was the infamous PS3 tech demo showing off what a HD remake would be like, and now many years later that potential will finally be realised… kind of. In a controversial move it is being split into multiple games with this first one just being based in the Midgar section. Honestly I have worries that expanding just a small part of the game into a full game by itself will just leave it feeling bloated and inconsequential, but I am very curious to watch it and see if they can pull it off.

No More Heroes 3

The Wii was known as a console for the casuals and the kids. In amongst all the games designed to appeal to that marker there were Suda 51s two No More Heroes titles, action games about slaughtering your way through ridiculous and fantastic bosses as you vie to reach the top ranking in the league of assassins. With the recent ridiculous 5 minutes long ET style trailer we got confirmation that series’ return will be out in 2020, along with confirmation that the bosses to fight through are the next logical step after assassins; Alien superheroes.

Psychonauts 2

Psychonauts was the brain child of Tim Schafer; a weird 3D platformer with levels built around entering the minds of some mentally unstable characters. On release it suffered from poor sales but over the years it grew sizable fan base as a cult classic title and now is finally getting a sequel. As the likes of Mighty Number 9 have shown there is a danger with creators returning to their old games that the magic is lost and the new game ends up as a disappointment. Hopefully Psychonauts 2 will end up as another cult classic rather than a cautionary tale.

Animal Crossing New Horizons

Before the first games release who would have thought a game where on its main mechanics is paying off a loan would become such a big success? Animal Crossing is such a relaxing game and after a stressful game I think exactly what I need is a game where I can just wake up in the morning and just go fishing or dig up fossils. The new thing I’m most looking forward to with this entry is how they’ll improve the multiplayer functionality with the Switch online service.

As the year ends I’m looking forward to a new year, a new decade and of course new games.

Dissidia NT Strange Story Mode

Final Fantasy is one of the biggest series in gaming but unusually each numbered game is disconnected from the rest of the series. This sets the series up perfectly for crossover games, Nintendo got the Theatrhythm games for the 3DS while Sony got the Dissidia games for the PSP. They were fun titles with 2 characters fighting it out in 3D arena that they dash and clash around in an attempt to recreate the action of the Final Fantasy 7 Advent Children film. It actually kept a good chunk of RPG mechanics and surprisingly lengthy single player campaign. Following these there was a new entry in the series made for Japanese arcades that proved very popular so it inevitably got a home console version and that is Dissidia NT.

With its arcade origins a lot of the RPG elements have been stripped back, but since it is not a console game they’ve added in a brand new story mode to the experience. And to be fair to them it’s actually a fairly enjoyable experience, it’s not an amazing stand alone story but like you’d expect it is made up of more fun fan service (not the sexy kind) interactions and even some pretty cool unique boss battles. However everything they’ve done to handle and present this story mode is bizarre and baffling.

If you are after a single player experience chances are the first thing you will do is boot up the story mode, so you watch the first cutscene and then you are immediately stopped, see the story mode is laid out as a grid path made up of many nodes with each of these nodes requiring an item called memoria to unlock. To get this memoria you have to increase your player level which can be done by completing fights either offline or online, I’m assuming if you are after a single player experience you’ll be doing this offline (you’ll want to do it offline for reasons I’ll get to later).

The main offline mode is gauntlet mode where you go through a set of 6 fights with whatever 3 characters you want (one you control and 2 AI controlled). You’ll play through this to build up memoria and unlock story mode nodes and you’ll notice that when you unlock the top branch this path restricts you to battles that are just 2 v 2 (and doing these unlocks a gauntley variation that is also 2 v 2). Given the previous PSP games were 1 v 1 these fights would be a great way of easing players into the new games battle system, but you’ll have to do a bunch of the 3 v 3 fights to unlock this totally negating that benefit.

As you go through the story mode you’ll unlock some pretty cool boss fights where you face off against Final Fantasy summons, but when you first come to these they are brutal. Thankfully one thing they’ve changed for these fights is that if the AI characters are incapacitated this does not decrease your teams lives, only your own defeats do this. However for now the AI are pretty useless and just end up being bravery fodder for the boss. (Side note for people who haven’t played Dissidia you have bravery points and health points, bravery attacks decrease the enemies bp and increase you own, hp attacks use all your bravery points to decrease the enemies hp and as per tradition 0 hp means defeat). I say for now because each characters has an offline rank (E to A for each rank level bronze, silver etc). The higher the rank/rank level the better the AI plays that character, to increase the rank you have to use that character (or have them as the AI controlled characters) for offline play or they’ll also be automatically raised to Rank E of whatever rank level the player is. The gist of this is that if you don’t want the AI teammates to be a liability you have to be playing with them in the offline modes.

One other elements that helps make the story mode levels and bosses manageable is that for every 5 player levels you’ll increase your story mode bonus level with this bonus dictating the amount of health you have, it’s pretty noticeable that the game is balancing the story mode on the basis of you gaining these bonuses since you might run into some of the regular 3 on 3 fights where the enemies have more health than you until you bump up that bonus level.

What this all adds up to is a story mode that has mandatory grinding every single step of the way. Given that the game did strip back on a lot of the RPG elements to make it more arcade friendly it’s strange that the one thing they’d choose to keep from RPG’s is grinding.