2022

Well… what a year.
Pleased to announce that I actually played some good games this year! And some terrible ones too!
And also… I made a game!
And graduated!
Everything happened all at once, but I at least had the foresight to write down the games I played so I don’t have to stand and look at my bookshelf while trying to remember which games I actually played this year.
Some of the games I played are repeat entries from previous years, however I feel that my experience with the games is different enough to warrant writing about them again, and you’ll see why.
It would be nice to replay a few games and do comparative analysis/reviews based on what I’ve said in previous years, but I can only really do that with one game I played this year, so I’ll tackle re-reviews another time.

As with the others, I’ll try not to completely spoil stuff, but I do want to go in depth with some things- so you have been warned. Click to reveal at your own discretion.

Games Directory

• Spyro 2: Gateway to Glimmer
• Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest
• Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!
• Animal Crossing: Wild World
• Animal Crossing: New Leaf
• Miitopia
• Aragami 2
• Aragami (Reprise)
• Another Eden (Reprise)
• Radical Dreamers HD
• Solitaire
• Tetris Ultimate
• Star Realms
• Bug Fables
• Hitman Trilogy

Spyro 2: Gateway to Glimmer, PS1

I don’t know why I forgot to put this in previous year’s entries, as I usually replay it every summer in Dec/Jan.
Safe to say, I adore this game.

I think it was at the start of this year that I played a private stream in discord with a few friends, it was super fun just chatting on the virtual couch and showing friends how charming the game is. I’m certainly not opposed to streaming on Twitch for my next playthrough of this either :P

Spyro 2 is the best in the og trilogy - it builds upon the foundations laid in the first game, but is an overall tighter and more focused play than the third game. There’s classic characters with incredible (campy/bad/impeccable) voice acting that is just iconic at this point, a simple but effective story, and charming places to visit on your journey to gather all the talismans and complete the collectathon.
I’ve loved this game since I was a kid, so I know this game almost inside and out, and I could hum pretty much the entire soundtrack from memory. I also really love the low poly PS1 era look if I’m being honest, to me it is just as charming as that 16-32 bit pixel art style and deserves to be appreciated in all of its janky glory!

The game starts with Spyro wanting to take a holiday to get away from the doom and gloom of bad weather, but The Professor intercepts you while you are travelling through a portal, sending you to the world of Avalar, and asks for your help!
See, Ripto has recently taken over the place, and the people need your help to kick his butt! They promise that they’ll help you get to Dragon Shores to enjoy your holiday if you help them by collecting enough Talismans and orbs to fight Ripto.

There’s three hub worlds to travel through - all with a variety of levels, a speedway and secret orbs to collect. Each level you play through has a main mission, which is usually very simple and consists of going from point A to point B in order to unlock the exit portal and get the Talisman- but each level also has a side quest or two that provide an opportunity to collect orbs.
Sidequest might be the wrong term for it, as they’re mostly minigame-esque - things like lighting up gem lamps, feeding fish to idols, semi-elaborate fetch quests, stopping a crazed penguin chef from cooking baby turtles, helping children terrorists, playing hockey with some monks, that kind of thing.
Each level and hub world also has a set amount of gems littering the place, and you can collect them all easily with the help of your dragonfly buddy, Sparx. Sparx is a real g, he takes hits for you and changes colour to indicate your health, and not only helps to collect nearby gems as you walk around, but holding the L1+R1 buttons will make him face the direction of the closest gems.
Really helpful for when you’re trying to 100% an area and there’s one pesky gem hidden in a corner that you missed.

The main gameplay for this game is simple 3D platforming, and you have the ability to charge into a run, breathe fire and glide to assist you.
Most enemies are really basic, and can be killed with either fire or a charge attack. Small enemies can usually be taken down with either, but bigger enemies can deflect your charge attacks, and enemies with metal can absorb your flame attacks.
Super simple stuff, you don’t need to think too hard about the enemies in most levels, instead you can spend most of your time exploring levels and seeing what they have to offer.

At the end of each hub world, there is a boss to fight- working your way up from Ripto’s henchmen, Crush and Gulp, until you can fight the villain himself. Upon defeating Ripto in a boss battle that (mostly) tests your skill and understanding of the game mechanics in a final showdown, you’re treated to playing through Dragon Shores!

I love when there’s a bit of fun content after the main plot, it’s hard to say no to a nice reward!

There’s a handful of nice carnival games to play, like a dunk tank, whack a mole type game, a love boat ride, and my personal favourite, the rollercoaster.
If you collect every collectable in the game, there’s also a permanent powerup you can access that allows you to blast through levels.
I do remember the powerup being active when I restarted a save on the reignited trilogy, and I had to toggle it off to play normally- but I can’t recall if that’s the case in the og one.
Either way, it is pretty fun to have a supercharged power up as a reward for completing everything, as is mucking around in dragon shores.

To close, I really love this game, haha.
Although I enjoyed the reignited trilogy, I found that there were too many nitpicky changes that were made for my nostalgic tastes- making me always want to return to the og.
It’s tiny things, like the monks in colossus doing their ‘waiyayaiyaiyum’ chanting being changed to a cliche ‘ooohhmmmm’ that sucks, adjusting/taking out some of the cutscenes at the start and end of levels to omit the implications of casual murder, changing the voice actor for the Romeo+Juliet mission to a female and male voice actor when it used to be two males... nitpicky stuff that if you hadn’t played the originals and don’t care (as I so clearly do) you probably wouldn’t notice.

It’s not a perfect game by any means, but it is in my heart. Love you Spyro 2 <3

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Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, SNES

Ahh, a childhood classic.
I was feeling nostalgic this year - something you’ll note in a lot of my games as you go down the list - and it was nice playing this again.
I also found out that I never finished the game as a kid! There were still like two whole worlds I had never seen before, I have no clue how I missed them but! Yeah! I got a two for one, revisiting an old fave AND new content lmao.

The game still feels tight; I like the way it controls, especially in the later levels where it really pushes your skill level and mastery of its system. Diddy and Dixie are both great to play as, and throughout various stages you get animal companions to either ride or play as.
Not all animal companions are created equally, though, as some are really frustrating to play as. Looking at you, Rattly.

I didn’t 100% this, I’ve decided to put it down and call it a wrap for the year with just the bonus world left.
It’s really hard, and I like that about this game, but I need to call it at some stage so I can write these!
I might continue playing over new years just for my personal satisfaction, but I’m already fine with having gone through the whole thing again and bashing K. Rool (with only one time that I looked up a walkthrough, muscle memory and perseverance through the rest!)

I’m not too sure what else to say if I’m being honest- this was more of a quick playthrough for nostalgia and stress relief while I was in my last weeks of uni. It still holds up to my nostalgic views, the visuals and music are still banging, and I had fun.
There are tiny nitpicks I have, like some of the levels near the end not feeling all that coherent with the rest of the game, and the coins don’t seem to save when you close and reopen the game- grinding to get lives and having 30-something banana coins when I save turning into 0 when I load my file sucked a bit when I wanted to save or hang out with Cranky :/

But I got over it, and I’ll definitely play this again in future lol.

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Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!, SNES

Another childhood classic!
This one I know for a fact that I completed as a kid, multiple times in fact. And I completed it again early this year! Fully too, like all the bonus world and all the banana birds and shit.
Good fun.

This game is interesting, it is so different to the previous two while still being very much a DKC game.
Going from having two light and snappy characters (Dixie and Diddy) in 2 to now having one heavy character (Kiddy) is a bit odd at first, but I have to admit, the level design and character movement felt like the best iteration of the three DKC games.

I don’t usually care if sequels have nice refinements, that’s a given in most cases and doesn’t- or shouldn’t -affect my opinion on the game.

But for this game?

I dunno, it really just feels good when you master it, and I think after playing some form of DKC for most of this year, I enjoyed the levels here the most.
Maybe that is childhood nostalgia, maybe it’s a more objective look during this playthrough- who knows.

What I do know is that this game is super fun, and I felt a much stronger connection to the world as I traversed through it. I think this is in part due to the overworld being more interactive, having a boat to traverse between each section- but I also think the connection with NPCs and the addition of ‘sidequests’ really helped the game feel uniquely like home.
I use the term 'sidequest' loosely here, as its more fetch quests and gathering collectibles that you’ll probably collect anyway, but it’s fun going around and meeting all the bears and talking with them.

I also really enjoyed the bosses in this game- they truly feel like the final evolution of what the previous two games were establishing. The levels and bosses feel so stand-out and memorable to me, and I really enjoyed all the extra little things like the bonus barrels and the circus tent with cranky.
Even smaller details, like each level displaying a flag once you’ve completed it, and it being colour coded to tell you which monkey completed the level and if you got all the bonus content- that's so cool.

This is just gushing, but I can’t help it. I like this game, and it feels so cozy.
I like going through all the worlds and feeling such a clear sense of progression, I like chatting with all the bears and helping/pissing them off, I like the unique bosses, I like seeing Wrinkly Kong chilling in her little cave and seeing it fill up with all the banana birds I rescue, and I LOVE revealing the ‘secret’ on the overworld.
The story and stakes might not have been as drastic as the previous iterations, but there’s just something so appealing about this game. I can’t really articulate it much more than this, but I did see a really interesting video essay about this game a couple of months after I finished it - highly recommend checking it out as it brings up some interesting points in regards to how unique this game is.

As far as nitpicks go, again, I feel some of the later levels near the end game feel a bit out of place, and I do NOT like the rocket level at the end >:(
I can’t remember if it saved lives and coins between saving and reopening or not- if it didn’t that still sucks!
But overall, the changes made here feel fine- it’s a unique game and a nice way to round off the trilogy.

I’ll leave it at that, with the final note of how this game has one really important core memory for me.
When I was around 6-8, I remember struggling to get past the bees to enter the bonus barrel in the first rat warehouse level, and my dad introduced me to the concept of patience.
It’s so simple, but it blew my tiny mind that I could do things differently if I stopped and waited for a moment, and that it might be the best way to do what I want.
To this day, when I’m feeling really impatient and am able to catch myself, I call myself out by mentally replaying that section of the game, and making my way past the bees to get to the bonus barrel.

This game means a lot to me lmao.

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Animal Crossing: Wild World, DS

Guess what? MORE NOSTALGIA!

I played a couple minutes of New Horizons with my sibling here and there at the start of the year when they were staying with me, and I just found myself missing older entries in the series.
I stuck with Wild World for a good couple of months, and didn’t time travel or anything. Just playing raw Animal Crossing: Wild World.
The graphics looked a bit crunchier than I remembered on the ds, but they still have a certain charm that I like.

As soon as I booted up the game for the first time, and heard the title music, a huge wave of nostalgia washed over me - so it’s safe to say this is a really biased look back.
I went with my tradition of naming my town Cessabit, and after exiting my taxi and landing in my new home, I got to work.
I actually really like the early stage where you’re working for Nook, and I will NOT tolerate any slander towards him. He is an earnest and kind tanuki who helps you get your bearings with no time limits, you all wish you had someone like that in your life!

After completing the Nook tutorial, I was on my own, and began doing what I could to earn enough bells and start living that animal crossing life.
I got all my tools, worked towards filling out my encyclopedia and donating everything to the museum, and started breeding lovely flowers to decorate my neighbours houses.
I was very glad that Chief was in my town- he’s one of my favourite villagers, so I’d hang out and make sure to chat with him every day.

One thing I noticed, that was refreshing to see after the sour taste left by NH, was the variety and types of holidays in Wild World. There’s standard ones like the fishing and bug tourney, where you have to try and get the biggest catch of the town by the end of the day- but there are also things like the flower festival, the acorn festival, and other little ones like la-di-day.
I also loved when it was time for the flea market, I’d set up my house like a little shop of second hand furniture ready to go and enjoy selling the stuff I didn’t want so I could afford to buy some stuff from my neighbours. Little things like these were so much fun when I was a kid, and I had so much fun reliving them this time around.
I appreciated the effort the developers went to in making the holidays not culturally or regionally specific, so as not to alienate anyone who isn’t immediately familiar with the celebrations. You as the player get to understand the holidays while the townsfolk share the festivities, it felt nice.

The only thing I couldn’t do to complete this experience was play with others in multiplayer.
When I was younger, my sister and I would stay up late and play under the covers together from our bedrooms, giving each other gifts and mucking around in each other’s towns. It was extra fun when we got to see our cousin, as he also had a copy, and it was really fun to make self imposed challenges for fishing, bug catching and hide and seek, pooling together to give the winner a prize.
I also used to be a bit of a shit and dig holes to make mazes across town and force my sister and cousin to play through a certain set of events before I let them free - this was also something I did when I was younger on my own, I’d trap villagers into little spaces I’d dug and push them together so I could see their conversations/piss them off and watch them stomp in a tiny area.
It was hours worth of effort to dig that much, for such a small ‘reward,’ - but that’s kinda the spirit of animal crossing. You accumulate hours playing in small chunks to only have mundane rewards, but it’s nice.

I stopped playing when I missed two days in a row of playing due to uni work and I opened up to see that Chief had left me, and I was so sad...
That’s another integral part of the Animal Crossing experience - the villagers you wanted to stay would always be trying to leave, and the annoying, ugly, bitch-ass fuckers would never leave!

Overall, I really enjoyed this revisit of Animal Crossing - the term I was going through at the time was the absolute worst one in my entire bachelor's, so playing during class and just before bed was really helping me keep sane.
There’s a whole stack of things that make the game mildly miserable to play, like having to donate each item individually to Blathers in the museum and hearing the whole info dump every time, along with not having any indication that you’ve already donated something... just to name one.

As much as I love this game, I wouldn’t recommend it to newcomers unless I knew for sure they’d be able to understand and appreciate the context of the game.
I have so many childhood memories attached to this game, and just recounting a small handful of the ones that I hold dearly would be a whole separate post that wouldn’t mean much to the rest of you, cause they’re MY nostalgic memories, not yours lmao.
I loved playing again, but did find myself yearning for the few quality of life updates that were added in future instalments.

Overall though, for the second game in the franchise, and the first handheld instalment - great fun!

Plus, it has the best sountrack, and the animated movie is loosely based on this game and is really cute >:)

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Animal Crossing: New Leaf, 3DS

I don’t have as strong a nostalgia for New Leaf if I’m being honest, but damn, what a nice Animal Crossing game.
I remember the first time I played as a teen and having reservations about the changes, especially in the soundtrack and certain game mechanics, but overall it is such a nice Animal Crossing game. THIS is the one I would recommend as an entry point to the series if you’ve never played and want to check it out. The mechanics have been refined, and everything is generally very pleasant to play- it has really boiled down the exact Animal Crossing formula and added a new look and feel to it while still being familiar.

I love the additions to this game as well - though it took me a while to warm up to them as a teen, they really just make the game extra nice. I like that you can stack fruit in your pockets, and that there’s more furniture and clothing to collect, and cycling between tools by pressing the dpad is amazing! There’s new NPCs to fall in love with, and having control of the town via mayoral duties is really nice.
It’s super fun curating the town to look the way you want- I have so much fun putting down tiles and creating nice pathways that lead to nicely placed buildings and bridges. Autism heaven. The only things I really wanna nitpick here are the fact that there’s less pocket space and that new villagers just plop their houses WHEREVER THEY WANT.

Back in the day, I spent real life WEEKS trying to breed blue roses, and finally got one! One single blue rose!
And I was trying to breed it to make more so I could start mass breeding blues and add them to my rainbow of roses!
ALL FOR THAT BITCH ASS CLOWN PIETRO TO PLONK HIS HOUSE DIRECTLY ON THE ONLY FUCKING BLUE ROSE IN TOWN WHICH DESTROYED IT FOR GOOD AND I HAD TO START BREEDING FROM FUCKING SCRATCH. I HATE THAT FUCKING CLOWN SOOOOO MUCH.
Flower breeding is probably the only other real gripe I have- I do not give a flying fuck about flower genetics and needing some arbitrary system that seems as much down to rng as it is to genetics just to get a nice colour.
I want to make a gay town with rainbow roses bordering all my footpaths, just let me have the colours! It only gets worse in NH... I spent actual real life MONTHS slowly trying to breed blue roses as I played NH...
Wild World had it right- just put a black and purple rose together and you’re sure to get blue eventually! It used to be about colour combos, I think in WW it was 3 base colours and 5 hybrid colours for roses, that’s epic! And they made some kind of sense, not this bullshit where you need to have bred the roses from particular flowers over a long system to get a colour… fuck you.

Anyway, back to NL.
As a 3DS game, the graphics held up really well in my opinion. Everything is so cute and having a better depth perception in general is nice (and that’s without the 3D enabled, it’s cool but hurts my eyes so I never really used it).
The big changes for this game are that you are The Mayor and have more direct control over the town, that most of the shops are now in a main street above the town, and the addition of the island.
I already touched on the mayor thing, and if you know NH you know the general deal for it here. The main street is an interesting choice, but it was one of the changes I didn’t immediately turn my nose at when I first played as a teen. That’s because it’s really cool to see your progress as you open more shops and the place gets more lively.
In WW, you only really upgraded Nook’s shop as you progressed, but now you can upgrade Nook’s AND unlock a whole strip of places to shop at and hang out in. The museum is really nice too, they really stepped up in making it an even nicer place to visit. And, with the expanded encyclopedia, there’s plenty to collect and donate.
Unlocking the shops all felt pretty natural and related- there were standard things like ‘when you’ve shopped a certain amount at Nooks, it’ll expand,’ and ‘if you get your fortune enough times, Katrina will open up shop,’ -but there are other things like getting to know Dr Shrunk and having to get villagers to sign a petition to open up a nightclub, and having certain shops opened via fundraising.
It really helped create that community feel that’s important in an Animal Crossing game, a feeling that I think peaked here and was unfortunately lost in NH.
Here, while you are in charge of major decisions for the layout and look of town, and the villagers contribute jack shit to the fundraisers as always, it felt like you were making a town FOR the town.
In NH, having more control is super nice, especially when you want to get creative with it, but due to it having less interaction with the villagers in this manner, it feels disconnected and more like it’s for your benefit only, not the town/island’s.
Plus, the main street being accessible right at the top of your town, only a short walk across the train tracks away is good. A huge improvement to the shopping district in Let’s Go To The City on Wii, which requires you to catch the bus every time you visit :/

The last big addition to this game is the island. I believe there was an earlier iteration of this idea with the GameCube -> GameBoy linking thingy, but I didn’t experience the GameCube era so it was funky fresh to me.
When you unlock it, there’s new fruits and bugs and flowers and fish- even a new tool/ability, diving!
It’s super cool to see things expanded upon this way, and you get an island as a secondary place to curate the way you want. I would always take out all the flowers and shrubs, leaving only the banana trees and placing bananas over every single tile on the island so that it could guarantee a higher spawn rate for bugs and beetles that were mad expensive.
At night on the island, big bugs and sharks can spawn, and defacing the island in the manner I just described makes it so that those tree-bound bugs are pretty much the only things to spawn, apart from one or two other bugs that are super common and spawn regardless.
Spending half an hour or so catching bugs and filling up the max inventory to take home, paired with the bell boom ordinance, means that you can get a solid 200,000-400,000 bells per trip.
Also, the music on the island at night is just gorgeous, so it was really nice to just unwind before bed and hear that calming music while catching bugs and sharks before returning home and saving for the night. When I babysat as a teen, once the kids were in bed I’d stay up late for the parents and grind on the island like that while chatting with friends online- it was super nice.

ANOTHER thing the island added- yes, there’s more -is the inclusion of mini games!
You can play them by yourself or with friends via local/online play. You can do games that are effectively fishing and bug tourneys- but with special rules, mazes where you have to collect certain fruits, a whack a mole type of thing, balloon shooters, hide and seek - there's so much to play!
When you do well, you get a currency that’s only used on the island and the chance to unlock intermediate and expert versions of the same games; higher stakes for higher rewards!
The inclusion of these were super awesome, as when you played with friends, you weren’t limited to making up your own games with your friend until you ran out of things to do- as there are literally built-in games to play on the island!
I didn’t play much online back in the day, and I didn’t at all on this replay, but that was a fun thing worth mentioning from its time.

The last major thing I want to mention, was that this game had a MASSIVE FREE UPDATE, adding the ‘Welcome Amiibo’ subtitle to the game.
I remember when this came out back in the day, it was an unexpected but very pleasant surprise, and expanded on the already large amount of content in the game. You could use amiibo things to do amiibo stuff - I didn’t really play this shit cause I only have a pixel mario amiibo lol.
But when you summon someone, they appear in a little camper van in Harv’s camp, alongside non-villager npcs with unique furniture you can order.
They added another set of in-game currency, used in the shop and campervans at Harv’s, and you can earn currency by doing ‘dailies’ that you were probably already doing.
This was nice, as it was an optional incentive to do things each day/week when you’re feeling a little directionless after having pretty much completed your town aesthetic. Things like picking weeds, sending letters, talking to villagers- the Nook Phone shit from NH originated here!
I can’t remember if there was anything else major with this update- apart from the addition of BEING ABLE TO SIT ON ROCKS AND STUMPS!!! That was a BIG FUCKEN DEAL back in the day, ahah.

Playing again reminded me of why I loved playing AC to begin with, and made my gripes towards NH even stronger. There was just so much missing from the base of NH when it came out, and pairing that with the annoyingly drip fed updates, content that was removed and having to pay for the DLC… Yeowch.
I loved playing NH, but only for a short while. Playing NL, I loved it the whole time. I haven’t checked my NH game in months, but to my understanding, there are STILL things that were present in the base of this 3DS game that are absent in NH- which is very strange considering that game is about living on an island.

Overall, playing this again was so fucking lovely.
Even though I don’t have as strong a nostalgia for this game, I still love it nostalgically and even more after this replay - it is The Quintessential Animal Crossing Experience™ in my opinion.
Although I stand by the fact that the WW soundtrack is better (:P) there are so many lovely songs here, and the general vibe is so uniquely New Leaf- I struggled picking songs so you get 4, with the recommendation of checking out the rest of the ost if you are so inclined >:)

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Miitopia, 3DS

What a strange and funny game.
It’s a weird RPG-lite style game centred around your Miis, and I had a good time. I do think that a massive part of why I enjoyed this was due to having brain rot for Chrono Trigger, so all my characters were Chrono ones + my OC Harland as my main mii man. And all extra npc types were Star Trek characters. Lol.

If you haven’t got funny ideas for friends or blorbos to put in this game, I think a huge part of the charm is lost- however, if you get a kick out of seeing your Miis travelling and fighting monsters and getting to know each other every night when they sleep at the inns- you’re sure to have a great time.

One thing I am surprised by is just how long this game is.
I’ve been playing for most of the year on and off, and I’m STILL not at the end. It feels like an endless game lmao, but that is in part due to me replaying each level over and over until each path has been taken.
I could say it was for the completionist in me, but it was actually about getting more chances for my Miis to get closer at night the more I travelled. Completing the maps was just a nice excuse >:)

The story is very simple. The big baddie (Matt, from Wii Sports in my case) stole a bunch of people’s faces, and you agree to traverse the land, gain party members, and retrieve everyone’s faces!
I think it’s actually a pretty clever way to make the plot revolve around the Miis, and there’s a certain wit and charm to this game that made it super fun.
I loved a lot of the cheeky dialogue, and the little ‘random thoughts’ the party members will have while you’re running across the levels. It was very funny when it was something that a particular character would not say, but even funnier when they totally would say that.

My best example is Magus saying he ‘needs kitty cuddles’ while on a very long adventure, he both would and would not say that. I love it.

As far as gameplay goes, it's super simple, hence why I’d say it's RPG-lite. Classic RPG turn based battle system, it’s very simple and hard to mess up, but it also has an autoplay feature.
I just left the autoplay on during every battle, as I just didn’t feel inspired enough by the simple choices to actually make calculated decisions. It was more fun for me to autoplay and speed it up, paying more attention to the things the Miis were saying and how they were reacting to each other getting hit.
This made it a semi-idle experience for me, not the worst thing in the world, but it meant that I’d only be paying partial attention while playing at work or while watching YouTube video essays in the evenings to unwind.

Because it’s so simple, I don’t have much more to say. It has a certain wit, one that vaguely reminded me of things I liked about Paper Mario, and it was really funny playing with blorbos in this virtual-dollhouse-RPG game.
If this sounds fun, and you have some Mii characters in mind, I’d say check it out!
Just keep in mind that it goes on for a really long time, and you’ll have like 10 party members towards the end + a plethora of npc Miis to make/use. I feel the experience is a bit wasted if you haven’t got some Miis in mind, but it’s still a good time regardless.

I may or may not see it to the end, but for now I’m fine with calling it done while I’m at the ‘final missions from townsfolk’ stage.
Surely I’m just a quest or two away from the real ending, but whatever. I had fun while it lasted.

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Aragami 2, PS4

Whoo boy.
Um, I have a lot to say about this game. I’m also going to go pretty heavy into spoilers for this one cause. I need to talk about this.

As you may or may not remember from a previous goty thingy, I talked about how much I LOVED the first Aragami. This sequel... I knew it was going to be different, but damn, it sucks so much...
And I completed the whole thing...

So, where to begin…

Lets start with visuals.
This one has a more ‘realistic’ look, forgoing the stylisation found in the first game. They made the main Aragami that you play as looks really buff and shit, and they look solid.
As in, solid and not wispy or smokey or shadowy, despite being a vengeful shadow spirit.
They look like a generic buff assassin dude but with grey skin.
I don’t really like it.
The hub world that you can muck around in between missions is pretty I guess, but the levels themselves felt kinda empty and amateurish to me. While some of the later levels were quite elaborate with large city structures to leap across or mining caves and the like- a lot of levels just have an infinite plane of water as far as the horizon.
To me, that took away so much of the atmosphere and made it feel like an ameture attempt at making a level.
Both this and the first Aragami were made in Unity, but this game REALLY felt like it was made in Unity, but, in a bad way.
The new direction just felt so odd, it barely held onto any of the choices or aesthetics that made the first game feel so charming to me in the first place- scrapping it for more ‘realism’ at the expense of character within the environment and models. It makes it look like every other 3D game ever, and makes me disconnect from it.

Another place they lost me was with the level design itself.
I mentioned a hub world earlier, and I hate the hub world if I’m being honest. It’s just huge and feels empty, and when you have to talk with NPCs you need to leap and run across the whole area and it just feels crap.
There’s nothing to really do, just visit a shop or dojo and talk with NPCs.
There are notable ones, who actually have something more than the other copy-pasted background ones have to say- but even they aren’t memorable at all.
You’d think having, like, a million bland Aragami walking around and wailing at how sad and shit it is to be one would make unique characters stand out.
But no, it all just felt to me as though the developers went ‘oh, this worked in [insert almost any other 3D game], let’s do it here’ and fell into all the cliches instead of actually doing what might work better for this game.
Every time you do a mission, you need to go to the mission board and enter the level. And when you complete said level, you’re spat back out into the hub world to chat with the NPCs and unlock the next mission.
Being spat back and forth between levels and hub world like this just made me feel even more disconnected from the game and general plot.
Not to mention, you revisit the same levels over and over, just with different mission parameters - so everything just feels the same! Because it literally is!

The general plot was confusing and not very good as well. The first game’s plot was VERY simple, but there was a clear understanding of where you needed to go, what you needed to do and why during most of the game.
In this one?
I had no clue what was going on for too much of the beginning, and then when I thought I had kinda wrapped my head around it, more convoluted shit started happening and it kept losing me.
I don’t really know what happened or why in Aragami 2, and I played the whole thing. It was more bland and confusing than RE6, and that game also sucks...

Though in general, the plot was shit, there were a few stand out moments that made me really wish there was a better director handling the narrative elements.
As in the previous game, the objective is to be stealthy and traverse through the level, and you can choose whether you aim to be noticed by no one, kill no one, or kill everyone. It gives flexibility, and a fun incentive to try different playstyles for those looking to master the game.
Here, due to the levels being separate missions, you had objectives like killing certain people, smuggling supplies, doing some recon and gathering specific items, ect, ect.
The way most players will go through the levels won’t be a kill everyone route- at least not on the first playthrough -due to you being one hit killed if you get attacked.

One addition to this game is the ability to defend yourself and parry attacks if you play correctly,
A - I disagree on this design choice as it makes it too much of an action game and destroys the stakes in the stealth,
and B - parrying attacks barely works!
I know for a fact I hit the buttons it wanted me to, but it’d behave so poorly and I’d die regardless!
Anyway, you’re not going to be killing everyone, it’s a long and tedious task in most levels, and some have something like 80-100 enemies in the level.

There were so many things that COULD’VE been COOL, but they fell FLAT!!!!!
There's these weird necromancer priest enemies, who are connected to their Aragami soldiers mentally, and will freak out and alert others if you kill/knock out one of the soldiers connected to them. This could’ve been a cool mini boss of sorts, making it nearly impossible to brute force your way through their web of soldiers until you defeat them at the centre of it all, and maybe defeating that priest would make every linked soldier drop dead too, making it a worthwhile challenge for certain areas of the map.
But no, they’re just some dude that looks and fights a bit different, and they’re weak af too. I’d just hit them with a dart and then go slaughter everyone nearby quickly. It sucked.

Another thing that fell flat was this was this strange location...

Near the end, there was this strange underground lab that really made me feel like it turned into Resident Evil. There were bones and shit in the floors, and so many signs pointing to the fact that something bad had happened there, but it’s just set dressing!
One of the only times they do something interesting with the set dressing and it’s barely relevant! AUGH!!!

I have so much more to say, but it’s becoming hard to recall everything. What I do remember very clearly was how glitchy and crap the game was. There were so many times where I wasn’t even trying to and I’d glitch through the level and get stuck in a wall or something, and enemies wouldn’t behave properly and shit like that.
Here's an example I recorded, this shit suckssss!!!!

In the first Aragami, I played through it 4 times before I found a glitch. And I only found that glitch because I was zooming through the level and went too fast, shadow leaping into an area that hadn’t fully loaded cause I covered so much distance in such a short time, and the game didn’t have time to render in the door to block me, so I fell through it and got stuck in the back room of the game.
It was pretty cool tbh, and although I couldn’t find a way back into the level and needed to restart, it was kinda cool.

This game though?
I glitched out so much that it was game breaking, and I needed to restart levels when I was ALMOST FINISHED cause something broke and I just couldn’t progress.

Which brings me to loading times. Fu Ckin G LoADING TIMES.
Most games you can be generous and give it anywhere near 30 seconds to load between levels and still be patient. I like to think I’m generally pretty patient, I play RE and kinda like the door loading screens for fucks sake.
This game had loading times of over a minute. EVERY TIME.
I don’t usually care about this sort of thing, but this was most of the gameplay experience.
Every damn time I needed to be spat into a level it was just a black screen that said ‘Aragami 2’ and it took a little over 30 seconds just for the music to load in.

I’m sitting there with effectively a blank screen in silence for half a minute before some fucking music comes in, and even then, there’s still anywhere between another 30-60 seconds OR MORE to go before I can actually play.
And when I needed to reload a level I was already in?
I’d assume that because all the assets are already loaded it’d take less time, cause it’s just a reset, right?

WRONG!

Another full 60-90+ seconds to reload the whole thing again!
I know a minute or two isn’t really that long, but man.
It is fucking forever in this context.
It makes all the unnecessary shit in BOTW to unlock a shrine, descend into the shrine, and start the shrine feel like speed running...

On a more positive note, Two Feathers are back again with the music and have provided some absolutely gorgeous songs for this game.
I really liked the main theme overture - its equal parts nostalgic and hype with its rearrangement for this game. This reflects how the rest of the soundtrack, and game in general, is for the experience. Bigger, and more.
While the soundtrack is an undeniable highlight for the game, I did find myself missing the more ambient and atmospheric tracks of the first game, as having a constant track playing got repetitive and annoying. It’s a real shame, cause songs like the Kakurega Village theme are very nice, but hearing the same song for it over and over cause I keep having to be in the hub world makes it annoying!

That’s the thing with stealth games, though I’m fairly new to the genre, having big bombastic tracks all the time really deflates the stealthy atmosphere, whereas ambient tracks (and even silence!) can be utilised to get more out of those select few tracks that do have more going on.
I found myself missing the quieter tone of the first game, there was something a little somber about it all, and it really helped me get into the headspace of the game and its story.
Here, while the songs are really good, they just didn’t help set the atmosphere for sneaking around and killing from the shadows. It really highlights the action elements that were introduced to the game, but it just feels off track for what I personally think the game should be.
That’s not to say there aren’t quieter and more ambient tracks at all... Just that in general, the ratio leans more towards these more elaborate songs- which I feel makes the entire soundtrack feel larger and louder if you get what I mean.

I’ve already talked for such a long time on this, and I feel like I have so much more to say, but it’s difficult to articulate everything the way I want...
I wanted to enjoy this game so badly, but there were so many things that were gamebreaking and straight up not what I wanted from a sequel. It really makes me wonder what was going on during development for this game- despite my feelings for this game being rather sour, I did have moments where I genuinely enjoyed it, they were just few and far between.
To my understanding, the first Aragami game was a 7 person team, and they got 3 more people on during development to make it a 10 person team. For Aragami 2, they doubled their team, having around 20 people working on this. Knowing that it was such a small team that made a game I loved so much and have played over and over is really fascinating to me, and it’s a shame they couldn’t capture me with their sequel despite the larger team.
I wonder if there was a situation where it was too many cooks, or if someone new took the game in this new direction. I guess I’m just struggling to understand why they made such drastically different choices in ways that feel like they’re trying to separate themselves from their first game - it was a lovely game that was really creative and fun! Why distance yourself?
Maybe there’s an element here that has gone right over my head, but I would like to know some behind the scenes info for why certain choices were made and what the development process was like.

This game is somewhat of a morbid fascination for me, in the sense that it is kinda painful to think about all the lost and wasted potential, and even more painful to think about replaying.
There’s not much online that I could find for this game, not even a fan wiki to help summarise the plot or anything. I was really hoping there would be some kind of summary or explanation somewhere, because I really want to know what the hell was going on, and to see if a different method of telling, or a recap of the story might help me to better understand.
But no, there’s nothing. At least nothing of substance I could find.

I think I’ll leave it at that. It has been ages since I played, so my memory is a bit hazy- but I think it speaks volumes that I played both Aragami and Aragami 2 around April/May this year, and can remember more about Aragami than it’s sequel.
I don’t think I’ll replay this game any time soon, but I’m not going to shut myself off from it. I did pay for the game after all, I want to get as much as I can out of it.
Maybe it could be something fun to stream for a replay, and maybe a second look while knowing what to expect may help me piece together the plot a little easier. Who knows?

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Aragami, PS4

So, I have already reviewed this, and I didn’t play in the mindset to construct a real counter critique/look back while playing- it was more of a palette cleanser to play before and after it’s sequel. So, this will be brief.
cue 10 paragraphs

I love this game, that’s no secret. While I did praise it’s simple story- that’s what I’d like to talk about for this quick look back.

I played my fifth playthrough of Aragami this year, and in all those playthroughs, I missed that there were lore scrolls hidden away in the menu that detail more of the story and history. Reading through these, I was able to reframe my understanding of the events and in game history leading up to the events I played through.

They were nice little stories- it took a couple of scrolls for it to really click and for me to understand what was going on, but when I did.. Wow.
I won’t say much about what they detail, as there’s a lot of names and places and things that happen that I can’t do justice in a recount; but I feel that they’ve really enhanced my understanding and experience of the game, so it’s a shame they’re hidden away and so easily missed.

It almost makes me want to replay 2 and see if there are any lore notes hidden in menus I didn’t see...
almost.
I might wait a while before tackling that again.

Also, I just wanna boast a little- I completed every level of Aragami on normal difficulty, every play style.
I did a kill everyone route, (which is best attempted after your first playthrough so you can take advantage of all your shadow techniques) a kill no one and never detected playthrough. To challenge myself, I paired the kill no one and not detected and managed to complete all but 2 levels that way.
It was really fun going through and feeling how much I had to change my way of thinking and strategizing depending on what style of gameplay I wanted to tackle, this game both introduced me to and made me really enjoy these kinds of stealth/sneaking games. Hell yeah!

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Another Eden, iPad

I previously spoke about this game, and that the whole reason I started playing was to see the Chrono Cross event- and I didn’t even talk about it lmao. I’m going to talk about it a little, and then this is effectively a pt2 because I played the pt2 of the main story.

So, Chrono Cross event.
I’ve almost 100%ed everything there is to do with the event, just some branching dialogue paths and a Starky fight to do, (and Starky is so OP it’s not funny) so I haven’t attempted to brute force my way through any more of it until I can level up more of my faves.
Overall, this was a really nice little cross(ha)over event, it had a good amount of story to play through with different routes to take, and the world of Another Eden ties into it so believably that it was a great fit to cross over with. I only really cared about Kid and Serge, so I did their routes (good and neutral) as thoroughly as possible.
In classic Kato fashion, I didn’t exactly vibe with the whole story, but it was fun while it lasted, and now I get to keep Kid and Serge in my party permanently. I’ve maxed them both out as well, Radical Dreamer style >:)
Now, they stay in my main party group of faves because they are really strong, and due to all my grinding and the way the event works, they both have heaps of light points so they’re awesome when I grind through dungeons.
That’s all I really care to say about the event, it’s nothing too deep and I finished my grinding sessions on it closer to the start of the year, so it’s a little hazy and I don’t want to recall things incorrectly.

Now, onto the next main story chunk for AE.
Full disclosure, while I enjoyed the most of the main campaign for part one, I found it too closely mirroring JRPG tropes, (and in particular feeling overly familiar to CT without coming close to scratching the itch) so I wasn’t fully engaged the entire time.
I also thought the ending to that section was convoluted bogus, like, just eye-rollingly so. I understand they did that to keep adding campaigns, however, ESPECIALLY after playing this section... yeah I still think it's bogus lol.
This part 2 of the main story focuses on the ogre wars, and it went into the backstory of my favourite character. Turns out, he’s got a pretty tragic backstory! Trust me to latch onto that before it was even revealed lmao.
(The fave in question is Dunarith btw. I like most those beast dudes, and they’re all decent fighters)

Cause this game also has timey-wimey bullshit paired with dimensional fuckery, that’s what leads most of the plot for this section. The ogres that fought themselves to extinction are somehow back, kidnapping the Beast King’s sister, and our main party resolves to put aside their differences and join the beasts to recover the Beast Princess.
It was nice to see more of the beast culture, (trust me to love the boring world building shit) and it was nice to see even more expansions on the map with more places and sidequests to visit. Snake Bone Island was without a doubt the highlight for me. A secluded little island (bet you’ll never guess what it’s built on!) with a bunch of really nice scenery and great music that has that palpable Mitsuda inspiration.

My favourite part was definitely all of the quests that related to Dunarith, as he had so much more going on in his backstory than I initially thought. I was genuinely invested, and looked forward to playing during quiet moments at work and fitting in a quick half hour or so before bed.
I don’t know if I should spoil what goes on in his quests, in case anyone reading would like to play and experience for themselves first, so I won’t say anything.
One thing though, during the climax of the story mission regarding Dunarith, I was a bit :/// at how quickly the ‘issue’ was ‘resolved;’ it was really showing the lite in JRPG-lite to just whip out the tragedy and not let it sink in or breathe because the plot needs to be resolved by the end of the mission so the subsequent ones can follow through.
If you can figure out this attempt at crypticness; it felt like it was trying to set up an event similar to CT’s most memorable moment, but without any of the time left for it to feel real, so the impact was lost. I’m just going to pretend in my mind that the impact was there, because honestly that’s my only real gripe with it, and I recognise that it’s very much an issue born from the fact that this is a lite game designed for mobile/ios.

For the most part, it really felt like the developers of this game really refined things (at least narratively) from the first part, and crafted a plot that I was consistently more interested in! That in and of itself is a feat, as this has just turned into a very casual and almost idle game that I leave to auto play sidequests with minimal input from myself so I can grind and unlock the quests I’m actually interested in.
To have a main story mission that was so consistent and interesting to follow, at least for myself, has me appreciating this game more than I did for prior chunks!

However, there is one thing I want to bring up that’s really left a sour taste on all that goodness.
Right now, I’m soft locked out of progressing in not one, but two quests I REALLY want to see through. The first is the main quest, I believe it’s the part that will wrap up/link to/start part 3 of the main story- so to be soft locked fucking sucks!
There was never any indication that you’d need to upgrade certain party members via tomes (magic bs thingies you have to grind for that are rng drops in the End of Time rip off) and I had been grinding idly for MONTHS trying to get a tome for one character that I never use anymore cause she’s annoying and is not powerful enough to compare with my mains.
just couldn’t progress the story until a character I’ve outgrown was levelled up, and it wasn’t even clear to me how to get the tome in the first place.
And let me tell you, the wikis are confusing and the reddit help threads aren’t all that helpful either lol. All that grinding... to only get through, like, 3 chapters and find out I have to grind more for another character who is even more annoying that I dropped near the start of the game. Like!?
This is a gatcha game, I’ve got like 50+ party members to choose from, and I have around 10 that are really powerful that I swap out, with my main 6 staying very consistent cause they’re so strong.
Why do I give a fuck about some old character that I didn’t even like, and why do I have to grind forever while the game consistently refuses to give me the one tome I need. I have everything else I need to upgrade the shit robot girl. JUST NOT HER TOME. Sighhhhhhhhhhhh...

I’m currently trying to blast through some major side missions/other crossover type thingies because apparently you get a better chance for the tome through that. Fingers crossed, cause idgaf about the really long side mission I’m currently on lmao.

That brings me to the second thing I’m soft locked out of currently- which is this one wild side mission that I at first didn’t care about, but then came to br fairly invested in.
I didn’t care at first because it was about a bunch of religious missionaries from a church who vary in mild to moderate levels of being annoying, and I mainly picked up the quest because it was a great way to get heaps of the in-game currency I was trying to save up.
As I played, there was a guy who fell from the sky, woke with amnesia, and then through some events you find that there’s a cultish group behind the straying church morals, and they try to get rid of the religious missionary figures that I mentioned earlier. In a panic, the guy who fell from the sky somehow uses crazy magical powers through his instinct/muscle memory, and it ends up rewinding time. He uses this to his advantage to save them, and then some stuff happened that I kinda forgot and they go to ‘heaven’ for a bit, where they meet the angels who I’m pretty sure wrote the religious texts the missionaries based their faith on.
Like, it's a bit all over the place but it was pretty cool. I'm a bit of a sucker for fantasy religion vs cult stuff. And I can’t remember most of it because I played it mid last year and got soft locked right as it was getting to new heights of interesting because I haven’t progressed far enough in the main game.
The main game that I can’t make progress in cause I haven’t upgraded a character I don’t give two shits about.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I was going to just play to max out Kid and Serge (and a few other faves like Dunarith) to see their stories to the end and hopefully have a bit of idle fun before putting it down for good, but I found myself pleasantly surprised and drawn in by a few stand out moments, and I look forward to seeing if there’s anything more like that.
I at least want to see the end of that religious mission, but what sucks is that it’s been so long and I’ve done so many other quests and missions that I’m hazy and forgetting so much of it, and it’s REALLY hard to find lore recaps for this game lol. Sucks.
I hope I can at least replay the mission when I’ve finished it, cause I want to pick up on the details now that I know it’s worth slogging through the stuff I didn’t care about in the beginning.

Also, the music and art are consistently really nice, so yee haw.
The game may not be perfectly aligned to all my tastes and preferences, and I often find myself uninterested or eye rolling at some classic Kato choices for story, but the sheer amount of content put into this mobile game is really something!
I haven’t paid a cent and there’s been a good couple hours of genuinely fun and enjoyable moments for me- well worth it!

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Radical Dreamers HD, Switch

Wow! The first Chrono game to make the list since I started doing these!!

In all honesty, I want to play through the Chrono games with these write-ups in mind, and make an attempt of actually articulating what I love (and don’t love) about them in a more in-depth manner, similar to my Resi branches.

I also only played one full go of RD when it came to Switch, so I feel I can’t fully talk about it anyway. So, this will be a shallow gush instead :P

So! Chrono Cross HD with the first official Eng translation of Radical Dreamers!
That was an unexpected surprise!
I never thought we’d be getting new Chrono content after all these years, especially not an official crossover in Another Eden, (that had great voice acting for Serge and Kid btw!) and a full HD rerelease of Chrono Cross and Radical Dreamers!
I’m full autism -mode for Chrono Trigger, and Radical Dreamers (and I guess Cross… it makes me a bit cranky, but now that there’s this shiny new HD release I can dust off my Switch and play with the most neutral-to-positive stance I can manage!)
So let me tell you, it was
soooooo nice to play RD all snuggled up in bed! When the game arrived, it was winter and I had just moved house a month or two prior- and even though uni was really hectic, I played over 2-3 nights to complete the first playthrough.
It was so cosy to play, all wrapped up in bed with a hot chocolate and the nostalgia I had for this game being awakened.

There’s a specific vibe to RD that I really enjoy; it’s just kind of eerie and unsettling, but so full of charm and wit and I fucking adore it.
Although there are honestly a lot of plot points and references that allude to implications that absolutely butcher CT, it is a little easier for me to overlook them in favour of enjoying what this game has to offer.
(I find it much harder to overlook these kinds of narrative choices in CC, because, well… reasons. I’ll go in depth another time)

I love the trio dynamic, Kid is a sassy bogan, Serge is such a loveable denim-dumbass and quintessential Boy™, and Magil is the reluctant adult supervision who barely supervises.
Joking aside, I genuinely do enjoy the way the trio bounce off each other, and it’s great to have it framed through Serge’s point of view.
It makes me so sad that due to the experimental nature of this game, and how short it is, Kato tried to distance himself and overcorrect things that weren’t necessarily issues and went overboard when writing Chrono Cross. There is a certain magic here that captivated me, and despite it definitely not being the sequel I wanted, it’s better than the sequel we ‘got,' (in my opinion) and I’d highly recommend people interested in either CT or CC give RD a fair go.
And go more in depth and try to complete the multiple endings too! I haven’t finished all of them yet, but there are some classic things that happen and gahhh, this game is really fun in spite of and because of it’s weirdness and divergence from CT.

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Solitaire, Mobile

I just have so many hours on this that it deserves a special mention.

Shout out to Solitaire!

No music recs, cause there isn’t a soundtrack… so……. Go listen to your favourite Jazzy album! And if you don’t have one, listen to this or this >:)

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Tetris Ultimate, 3DS

What is there to say? It’s tetris, but on the 3DS.
I think the one I play is something weird like Tetris Ultimate 3D something, but my 3DS is in my room and I’m not getting up from my computer to go check lol.

The controls are refined, it’s nice to be able to slam down the tetrominoes quickly by pressing up, and holding one in reserves is fun and changes the way you strategise.
I don’t really strategise intensely though, I just play this the way I play solitaire.
Brain off, I’m tryna relaaaaxxxxx

I bet you could hum the tetris theme from memory, so go ahead and sing that to yourself as my music rec.

Totally not cause I play the game muted while I’m watching youtube or something. Of course not.

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Star Realms

I played the mobile version of this quite a bit this year, mainly when my dad or sibling are in town. We usually play for a few days online after they’ve gone back home too- but I got busy with uni, so I didn’t play much on my own.

There are campaigns to learn and master the various decks, so it’s interesting trying out the decks I don’t have to see what they’re all about.
I still have no idea how to use the deck my dad likes to play with, but my favourite deck is Colony Wars, and I have a physical copy of it and no one to play with :’’’’(

No music rec for this either cause I play muted… so uhhhhh… listen to the nearest sci-fi sound to you!

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Bug Fables, PS4

Ahh, Bug Fables.
I’ve heard about this game and had it very far in my periphery for years- it’s constantly touted as The Game To Play if you’re a Paper Mario fan who yearns for the style of the earlier entries.
And, well, I saw it on sale on my PS4 and said fuck it. Why not?

Now, I wanna say upfront- I’m a huge fan of the Paper Mario series (despite not having played all the entries...) and I miss playing PM64, so to constantly hear this game as:

‘Oh yeah, it’s got all the things you love from 64/ttyd, and then does it better!’

Now, I did try to go into this game as neutrally as possible, but due to hearing years of this game being built up that way- I did feel a bit disappointed that it didn’t really scratch that PM itch.
Overall, this was a lovely game and I enjoyed myself- and will definitely replay in the future -but I found the lines between inspiration and imitation being blurred a little too frequently for my liking, and there was a certain (subjective) lack of polish that ultimately made me resent the fact that it is so closely tied to the PM games.

The visuals are nice, the animations are good- but I don’t really care about bugs, so there wasn’t really anything that charmed me the same way seeing Mario characters in the 2D paper style did.
The music is generally pretty good, with a few stand out tracks I’ll be linking, but there’s a lot of tracks that sounded annoying and... Kinda bad... At least to me.
I don’t wanna shit on the composer, because in general, this is a really high quality soundtrack and I really do like a lot of the songs! But when the first two or three songs I heard in the game were annoying or sounded discordant in a bad way, I was really hesitant to push through.
That, paired with little nitpicky things and the admittedly unfair comparison to PM64 had me feeling glad that I didn’t pay full price.
The look and soundtrack are also HEAVILY reminiscent of the 64 style and sound, and there were some things that I felt could’ve been changed to better suit the direction they were going to make this an even more unique experience that is undeniably Bug Fables. Little things like the xp symbol being pretty much the same as the xp in 64, but there’s a leaf in it instead of a star...
Things like that - things that felt too heavily lifted from the game it’s inspired by, but choosing to leave it at an imitation because hey, it worked for them!

This game was a chance to take inspiration, learn from, refine upon and build something new from the things we learnt with the PM franchise.
My biggest gripe with this game is that, while they do have some improvements made from systems they pinched from those games- like the side quest board allowing you to just take every open quest and attack them at your leisure instead of ttyd’s way of only letting you do one at a time -I feel a bit burned by the fact that it relies on PM so much.
I really wonder if this game would be half as fun to people who have never played a PM game, and if they’d understand the mechanics and gameplay and such for this game on its own. I often found myself thinking:

'is this really the best decision for this game, or are they banking on my nostalgia for a different game to make me like this game more?'

I know that’s kind of mean and a very harsh critique for an indie game, but I wanted to get that out of the way so I could gush about what I genuinely enjoyed.
Cause this game is great, I just feel it wasn’t the next step for me as a fan of PM, and that it has linked itself too closely with that series for my tastes.

So, onto the nicer stuff.
This game was really fun! I enjoyed that fact that the main party is a trio, and it just stays as that trio for the whole game. It made it so tight in character development, and really allowed me to get to know these characters and enjoy their dynamic.
I loved hearing their thoughts on each area, I loved the moments that revolved around one of the characters and showed how the other two supported them through those points in the story. I also liked seeing the way they interacted with the NPCs you see frequently, the world does have a charm all of it’s own (just not one that I resonated with/felt too deeply)

The party consists of Kabbu, the green one, Vi, the yellow one, and Lief, the blue one.
Ok, there is more to them than just their colours- Kabbu is a classic, kind-hearted and honourable type, Vi is hot headed and has the ego that rebellious young kids/tweens have, and Lief is a little more reserved, but witty and cheeky in his own way.
The point of the game is to journey across the land and gather artifacts for Queen Elizant to reveal the Everlasting Sapling. There are a lot of different bug kingdoms, and a nice amount of side quests to help flesh out said kingdoms. The more you play, the more you gain an understanding of the politics between the kingdoms, and to what lengths various leaders will go to for the sapling.
Lots of stuff happens, I don’t want to go in depth here, because I think the way the game reveals certain plot points was generally paced well. And, if you haven’t played this game for yourself, I’d recommend going in as blind as you can. If you’re hesitant, let me just say: even though I was battling my own snooty bias towards PM, I really loved getting to know all 3 characters as they all have interesting backstories that intertwine with the overall narrative, and the more you dig around and try to find out about the world, the stranger/more fascinating some things seem.

I can totally understand why this game has such high ratings, it is a great game, and not too difficult. I do feel that even if you’re not as familiar with this style of game, you’re sure to get something out of it, and look back on it fondly.
I know I’ll be having fun thinking about certain quests and plot points, and I’ve periodically come back just to play the card game tournaments because they’re simple and fun once you wrap your head around them!

I would just say... I think it was done dirty by comparing/imitating so closely to PM, and that the strong connection to it did deflate some of the experience for me.
Maybe thats a personal thing, due to my love for PM and huge nostalgia for PM64 in particular, but that’s something I’d like other potential players to keep in mind.

It’s a great game, and cause I was pretty harsh, I’m adding twice the song recs >:)

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Hitman Trilogy, PS4

Zayum, I love dress up games!

Haha, for real, this was an unexpected favourite of the year for me. I have had so much fun the past month and a half bingeing this trilogy, and you’d think it being so recent would make it easier to talk about, right? Here’s hoping…

I had never really heard about Hitman until my friend told me about it, saying that she wanted to watch me play and that she thought I’d really enjoy it. She was right, I’ve had a blast.
As I understand, this is a soft reboot for the series, but still has some lore/plot points that build off previous entries in the series. As someone who was freshly dropped into the world of Hitman through this trilogy, I was only mildly confused in the beginning, but once I started playing the campaign missions, it was relatively self contained and easy to follow along.
Any info from previous entries seems to just be nods and references to things I can’t pick up on, which didn’t affect my ability to enjoy what was on offer.

And man, there’s so much here.
There’s an overarching plot across the three game’s campaigns, and I was so pleasantly surprised that not only did the main plot have rippling effects across all the missions- but things like NPC gossip too!
It was fun to sneak around and gather intel or complete the story missions that help to set up opportunities to assassinate your target; I often found myself enjoying the chance to be a nosey cunt and eavesdrop on conversations and follow certain NPCs as they went about their business. The attention to detail really helped to make this world feel large and lived in, and some of the best levels have some really interesting NPC tangents that have absolutely nothing to do with the hit, but are just as memorable- if not more.

In general, the main plot and methods of killing in each level are good fun, and it was interesting to follow along and get to the bottom of everything in each game.
I will say, I think it’s better to look at this as a trilogy, (and this was the way I was playing) as some progressions in the ‘self contained’ game chunk may feel rushed or unexpected if you try to look at it on it’s own. There were even some points when playing that I found some plot points happened or developed very quickly, and I felt a bit lost because they weren’t given enough build up or time in my opinion.
A large part of what lost my ability to hold onto the plot and comprehend it was the discrepancy in the cutscenes across all 3 games. I looked into it briefly, cause halfway through 2 I thought ‘surely it can’t be this bad without reason,’ and sure enough, there was a reason!
Hitman 1 was produced with Square Enix’s support, but due to the original release dropping campaign maps once every few months, it really impacted player’s ability to enjoy it to the fullest. Square pulled out and IOI (who own the Hitman IP) now had to make Hitman 2 with reduced staff and budget, so the nice cinematic cutscenes from 1 were now stills with slight motion graphics animation. Like... Netflix screensaver animation.
I understand that lack of budget and manpower lead to this choice, but it made it incredibly difficult to feel invested or even understand what was going on half the time with the still images - ESPECIALLY when there were more than 2 people talking. There was just no easy way to set that up with the limitation they imposed on themselves for the cutscenes, which is a shame because a lot of important developments happen in them.
IOI did not drip feed the campaign for 2, and when 3 came around they brought back actual cutscenes, just using the in-game engine to do so. I really wish that they just used the in-game engine for all of the cutscenes, because they are very short but often complex and dramatic, so it’s really important to see the acting and body language they want to give the characters.
Obviously, they wouldn’t have had the foresight to know Square would drop them and they’d have to continue making a AAA game as an independent studio/while looking for other publishers, but it just is such a shame that the plot of 2 was quite important, but ultimately feels like a black hole to me because I struggled to understand the cutscenes.
As I understand, there were also issues when 3 launched that made it difficult to link the levels for 1&2 into 3, where they intended for 3 to be the main hub to access the entire trilogy. Shit move, and I won’t really talk about it cause I wasn’t there to experience it, but I suggest looking into it more if you’re so inclined because it is morbidly interesting to see what a mess it was.
What I did experience from this mess was that, when the trilogy pack was on sale on the PS4, I decided to buy it and was so filled with dread to only see Hitman 3 downloading, thinking I clicked the wrong thing or got scammed (cause there are like a bajillion hitman expansions/access passes in the store, it’s so confusing!)
BUT LUCKILY, Hitman 1&2 are treated like access passes and in the game, meaning I only need to select from the hub menu where I'd like to start, and can play the entire campaign of Hitman 1 > 2 > 3 through Hitman 3.

(Also, there was nowhere nice to squeeze this in BUT- even in the big budget cutscenes from 1, there were discrepancies in audio that I noticed. Maybe this is just because I'm a recently graduated Film Bro™, so I'm primed to keep an ear out, but just listen to the last cutscene in Hitman 1. The two voice actors were recorded in different studios and the quality gap is noticeable! Dianna sounds nice and crisp as always, but the constant sounds like he recorded in a make shift booth or was in his wardrobe and the mixers forgot to do dynamics processing!)

Another point of contention, and one that almost made me annoyed enough to not have a good time, is the fact that it requires me to be online. For anything to count, that is. There are offline options for main campaigns, but so much of the peripheral content to play has online as mandatory to even load it - and if you play through a main mission offline, any skills/missions/achievements ect you unlocked DO NOT COUNT and are not saved. Meaning that you effectively played for nothing.
WHAT THE HELL.
This is a single player game, I am alone on my couch playing by myself, and I still need to be consistently online in order to actually play.
It is really fun seeing the end screen after a mission where you are greeted with a whole screen full of achievements and story missions to aim for, and when you’re offline you don’t get that because your progress didn’t count.
THIS is one of the EXACT things that’s made me feel incredibly disillusioned and pretty much loathe the current gaming landscape. Sure, I’ve had my fun with some modern titles, and I really have been enjoying my PS4 these past couple of years, but come onnnnnnnnnn.
Do you remember when you’d get a game, and just put it in? And you could start playing? Stick that cartridge in the console and you’ve got an experience waiting for you? Even moving to bigger games, the most you’re waiting before you can play is just for creating save data so you can record your progress. Modern games requiring you to install a bunch of shit and wait around for sometimes hours to be able to open it and actually start playing, only to then find that the servers are having a tantrum and don’t want to host your game... That kinda shit makes me regret being a gamer in all honesty.
And it feels like the biggest slap to the face when I encounter this kind of thing in a SINGLE PLAYER GAME with MINIMAL TO NO ONLINE ELEMENTS.
If I didn’t have such a great time while playing the Hitman trilogy, this would’ve been a massive deal breaker to me.
And since I'm playing years later, I only seemed to drop from servers when I’d left the game paused for too long - the servers are more stable than they seemed to be at launch. That makes me glad that I generally play behind the curve lmao.

Anyway, those big gripes aside, the actual gameplay of Hitman was fun enough that I was able to put aside what would otherwise be deal breakers for me. The stealth and spy aspects of this game were incredible, and felt rewarding and open enough that it truly felt at times that I could do anything.
It wasn’t often that I felt lost or unsure of what to do, because even when I was lost, I could usually just wander around the level and eavesdrop until I heard something useful, (or entertaining) or saw a new method of getting to where I wanted to go. It felt like a sandbox, a miniature open world for me to do whatever I wanted to; as long as I completed my mission.
As I’ve only really played one other stealth game, and was largely unfamiliar with this style of gameplay, I played through the whole game on the casual mode. However, now that I am more than familiar with how the game plays and starting to challenge my understanding of the mechanics with the escalation contracts, I look forward to the increased difficulty of professional and master mode.

Some of these worlds felt so elaborate and alive, and it scratches a particular kind of itch to go through the entire level and find new shortcuts and paths to places as I get intimate with the area. Levels like Sapienza, Whittlehorn Creek, Isle of Sgail and Dartmoor were personal favourites, though I enjoyed the majority of maps.
Wandering around the city as various types of people, seeing where I could fit in and go unnoticed, and seeing current events based on previous hits I did was fun as fuck. The Dartmoor level, which I suspect is a fan favourite, was a great shake up on the formula as it provides an opportunity for you to disguise yourself as a PI and investigate a murder mystery- interviewing suspects, inspecting crime scenes and suspects’ private rooms, and framing who you want as the culprit was super fun!
So much of this game was just fun!
As serious as some missions are, with eerie tones that really add an unsettling and sometimes downright disturbing implication, there are almost always silly as well for when you just want to have some fun!
Agent 47 didn't really talk much in the first game, but in the second and third he talks a lot more, and it was interesting seeing just how seriously he takes his job - sometimes getting way too into it. Like, dancing in the flamingo mascot costume, stealing the clothes off the lead model and getting your makeup done so you can walk the runway, and giving some of the funniest and strangest dialogue when he is undercover as a real estate agent or giving a tour of a winery.
The possibilities really feel endless, and I'm constantly impressed with the way the developers managed to balance everything for various gameplay styles.

There were, however, some maps that weren’t as fun for me - mainly military heavy ones.
I know that a great deal of what I’ve said I enjoyed about this game is the fact that you can sneak around and snoop, but the sneaking and snooping in military levels (and ones that, while not explicitly military, feel like it with the sheer amount of security guards and their ranks) straight up sucks!
When I was playing, I was often replaying the same level over and over to see all the main story missions, and sometimes just wander around the levels and try to see everything I could. When I first got to a military level, I found myself so bored by it that I did not replay it, and I stopped replaying levels over and over and just played once through to see the story to the end.
I have completed the trilogy, but I feel much closer to 1 at this stage cause I am most familiar with those levels. It’s a shame the military levels affected me in that way, but I’m going to hope that based on my experience enjoying the early levels in 1 the more I played them, that I’ll have just as much fun getting to know the other levels while I keep playing over new years.

Another nitpick I think is worth mentioning, is that sometimes the game glitched out and made certain story missions unplayable for me, which was a shame.
There were multiple times where things just wouldn’t register, or the NPCs would break and just stand still somewhere, or loop in their actions and not give me an opportunity to do what the game wanted me to do.
It really sucked having to try reload saves or even having to restart levels because of glitches like that, but due to the nature of this game having multiple routes to achieve your goals, it wasn’t so bad.
Oh, and while I'm nitpicking - while it was great to be able to adjust the UI so that I could actually see the button prompts in game, I couldn't adjust the font size for the mission briefings while I was planning the missions. You'd think I could read the text on the TV while my couch isn't even that far away from it, but I constantly had to sit up and scootch to the edge of my seat to read. And even then, the text was so small and had barely any spacing between words that I struggled to read anyway.
Makes it apparent that it was made with PC in mind first, as that wouldn't be such an issue when the screen is centimetres away from your face, but zayum I came here to play dress ups and kill people, not strain my eyes :(

Another thing I haven't even touched on yet is the music!
While there's plenty of diegetic music, the soundtrack itself is pretty great. The drawn out sounds of the strings really builds up that slinky mood, and are quite iconic sounding.
A lot of the classical sounds feels like an homage to classic spy movies too, and that's hard to miss when there's a few heavy handed visual allusions drawn as well haha.
One thing I really love in the soundtrack is the choir, the addition of vocals like that makes it sound almost religious at times, which is very dramatic, especially when paired with the strings!
It's quite a beautiful soundtrack, and it feels very cohesive across the trilogy without it taking attention away from the gameplay- which is quite impressive that it was pulled off this way!
A stealth game, by design, requires you to focus more on your mission - and a poor or even mediocre choice in music can ruin the mood and experience. So to have such a classical and dramatic soundtrack NOT feel intrusive to my gameplay was awesome.

I’m finding it really difficult to articulate much more about this trilogy, because I’m still in the high of hyperfixation that’s bringing a lot of subjectivity to this look back (more than I aim for :P)
I enjoyed the plot being connected and overarching even though it wasn't that deep, and there were some absolutely stand out levels that were so interesting in both a gameplay and worldbuilding manner that I enjoyed myself immensely.
I don’t think I can really expand much more on the plot or gameplay, as everything is a jumbled mess in my brain while I’m riding this high - so perhaps after I’ve put this down and come back in a year or two, I can write something better after having some space and this to compare my future thoughts to.

If you’re into stealth games, being a nosey cunt, or being bald - I highly recommend checking this trilogy out.
A great draw to this is that, even if you simply watch a handful of different people playing, you’re sure to have a different experience every time due to the sheer amount of possibilities there are!
I had a great time, and if you choose to look into this game more or play yourself, I hope you have a great time too. I think I just need to wait a while and have some distance from this game before I can say anything more in depth - as if this isn’t already paragraphs long :P

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