It's a thread! (Games discussion, etc.)

[Moge]

E3 Top 5
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5. Panzer Dragoon -- Having only played Orta and Saga, i'm glad Sega is willing to give this series another shot, because there's nothing else quite like it. A sweeping fantasy aesthethic combined with on-rails shooting action? Count me in.

4. Link's Awakening -- Eager to dive back to basics after playing so many 3D entries. Love that the visual style is reminiscent of Yoshi's Story.

3. Luigi's Mansion 3 -- Very happy to see this franchise return to form on a big boy system. The lighting sold me on it.

2. Final Fantasy VII -- The production values for this game are absolutely insane. I can't believe how different that first boss battle was compared to the original. If Squeenix can maintain that quality throughout... then wow.

1. Trials of Mana -- One of my dream games from my childhood was to see Secret of Mana in 3D. Well that came out last year and hardly anyone was impressed with the low budget graphics. So to my surprise they announce not only an official localization to 1995's Seiken Densetsu 3 after many gave up hope, but they also announce a 3D remake that gasp, doesn't look low budget at all!

[JG]

Mine:

Dishonorable Mention: Battletoads (Xbox One) -- This should probably go to Halo Infinite, but I'll give it a pass until next year despite the concerns over delay and the likely requirement of an X or Scarlett to play it. Final Fantasy VII almost belongs here for missing yet another calendar year, despite being in development twice as long as Halo 6, but it looked solid so its spared. Ultimately, its the gameplay in Battletoads that has me most worried as ruining something I was previously very interested in. I liked the cartoony look and feel of Battletoads, but on some of the gameplay scenes (and there weren't enough of them) just too much stuff was happening on screen at the same time to figure out what was going on. And the racing sequences look to be just as hard as the originals, but now viewed from behind the player instead of side, making it even harder to see and dodge the obstacles. So while its visual appeal is an A+, the rest is kind of a mess and I'm not so sure I want spend my money on it anymore. FF7 and Halo have better chances at my wallet. This doesn't mean Battletoads is the least likely E3 game I'd buy (Daemon X Machina fits that bill), but the one that suffered the most loss of interest for me (whereas games like Daemon X Machina and Cadence of Hyrule had little to start with.)

Honorable Mention: Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory (PC/Steam) -- I don't expect this to be particularly good, but it'll bring back some fond memories and a few laughs so I might give it a chance if its priced right and a void opens up in my gaming schedule.

5. Luigi's Mansion 3 (Switch) -- LM is a great series and surprised its been a franchise for 18 years and only on the third game. The first two have very poor replay value though so the Scarescraper mode helps a lot. Still, as a mostly solo player I can't expect much replay once completed so I can't mark it very high. The new slam technique to weaken the ghosts seemed very overused to me during the gameplay videos.

4. Gears 5 (Xbox One, and PC) -- Returning to the Locust's mountain fortress the guys raided in an earlier game (#2 I think) makes for an interesting storyline connection. I really would have liked to have seen gameplay in the video, particularly any new weapons or grenades. If you get to shoot at and dodge baddies during that wind-sailing sequence though...

3. Link's Awakening (Switch) -- This looks even better than I expected, but I'm not sure if I'm sold on the blurriness at the screen edges (hope that is an option in menu.) The Treehouse: Live video pointed out a lot of things like how the insides of each house sport different things on the walls so they all feel a little different. And replacing the Camera Shop with Dampe's build-your-own-dungeon segment gives a bit of Mario Maker feel to it too. Funny bit of the Treehouse video where creator had built a dungeon and then challenged Aonuma-san to play it (which would be like asking George R. R. Martin or J.K. Rowling to proofread your novel.) Yet Aonuma took up the challenge, and then proceeded to crush the creators own playthrough time by nearly half. The master at work.

2. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics (Switch, and others) -- I've been waiting a long time for a Final Fantasy Tactics-style game that doesn't require super-micromanagement of forces (see Fire Emblem) and sad Square hasn't revisited this, as Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift was great. I have a soft heart for the The Dark Crystal, and seeing the TreeHouse: Live video this afternoon showed me the gameplay is indeed of the classic Tactics style without overcomplicating it, so it has me quite excited. I wish they showed some non-battle mission gameplay, but the developers said it does have sidequests and a world map, so it seems to be lining up well as a modern incarnation of a FFT series game.

1. Trials of Mana (Switch) -- Moge and I are in (rare) agreement that this is the sleeper hit of E3. While the graphics don't look cheap, I don't think they were all that special either: the trees were quite basic spheroid shape and everything still looks to be aligned to a grid pattern but if I can accept that for Link's Awakening then I can for Trials as well. I'd expect the story and enemy fights to be the real strength, as Secret of Mana was awesome in these regards. I loved how they kept things like the ring-shaped command menu, too. They said it would be fully voiced, like the Secret of Mana remake, but the Treehouse playthough of the first 20 minutes was subtitled only. Unlike the SOM remake, they gave more expression to characters during cutscenes - the opening bridge scene of the SOM remake was an absolute fail because of the unchanging facial expressions. The battles are also viewed from behind player instead of overhead, which looks better for a 3D game. So while the Secret of Mana remake looked like original game with 3D graphics and bad cutscenes - this looks much more polished and as a new story to most (including me) it will be more enjoyable. The only bummer is that we have to wait until to next year to play it.


I really wasn't expecting much this year beyond Gears 5, Halo 6 (which didn't even show up), and Battletoads (which underwhlemed) for Xbox, Sony's near complete absence outside of FF7, and Nintendo bringing what I thought was weak sauce in the form of Luigi's Mansion and Pokémon, but was pleased with the overall outcome thanks to NOA being much better at marketing and promotion than the other guys. Next year could be outstanding though, with Halo 6 back and Nintendo bringing perhaps both their new project and Metroid Prime to the party, plus several things we don't know about yet. (Doesn't it feel like about time for a new Donkey Kong Country or Mario RPG game? And where's Grezzo been since 2017's Ever Oasis?)

[JG]

And where's Grezzo been since 2017's Ever Oasis?

Read an article this morning that had a translation from an interview Aonuma-san gave during E3 last week.  Nintendo handed off Link's Awakening to Grezzo mid-way so his team could focus on Breath of the Wild 2. Makes sense; after all Grezzo did the Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask remakes, so Nintendo trusts them with Zelda IP.  Still seems like Grezzo should have more than just this game on the way though. They should have had most of 2017 and maybe early 2018 to be working on their own project(s)

[JG]

Unknown how long it will last, but Amazon is offering preorders of Final Fantasy VII Remake for an impressive 30% off. Check the checkbox, and then when you go to checkout its $18 off the regular edition, or $24 off the deluxe.  Can't beat those prices even with the Best Buy Gamers Club discount (which will have expired for most by then anyway.) Still get the Chocobo Chick Materia as preorder DLC, too.

[Moge]

Playing Trials of Mana currently has gotten me interested in Grezzo's output. Ever Oasis in particular interests me given your favorable review and the hearsay that it's a spiritual sequel to the series.

I have a far wider variety of games i want to play at the moment than in the past 5 years. Surprisingly i haven't touch Splatoon 2 competitive in the past few weeks. That's a new record since the game's launch.

[JG]

Finished the Dragon Quest Builders 2 main story yesterday. Some good and some bad in comparison to DQB1. Total main game time averages maybe 50-60 hours, after which you're free to continue building for as long as you want.

Good:

• A more consistent storyline start-to-finish. DQB1 is broken up into four chapters, and they don't rejoin until very late in the last chapter. Unless you're committed to it, I suspect many casual players give up on DQB1 early in the very hard second chapter, after investing so much in the first and then basically having to start over in a new town.
• There's a lot more materials with which to build, with many more colors available. Some things like roofing only had one option in DQB1, but DQB2 offers a several different types and colors. There's also more doors sizes, so you aren't stuck with only 2x2 doors. And fencing, so you can make parks, paddocks and fields.
• Bigger rooms and a taller building space, increasing from 100 tiles to 143 and a high of 24 (16 in shared areas) to now 48.
• Better integration with your main island. DQB1 has it distinct and it doesn't impact the main story chapters in any way.
• Rewards for building different types of rooms, other than just the ones required by the storyline.
• Your townsfolk will build the mega structures for you, though sometimes it requires you doing the first 5-10%. This saves a lot of effort and lets you focus on smaller, more manageable items (like housing or adventuring outside the town.)
• Townsfolk have professions and building rooms they want (like a cookroom for a cook or fields for a farmers) makes them happy and increases the amount of gratitude hearts they periodically produce.
• Late in the game, building rooms to exactly fit townsfolk preferences becomes a matter, encouraging creation of different rooms with different sizes, decorations, colors, and styles instead of everything looking the same.
• There's a snapshot mode to take photos, but it isn't apparently useful until you get the photo framing decoration, which lets you make wall art or a gallery of the photos you (or others) have taken on your adventures.
• Puns are still a part of the game, keeping it line with the excellent naming features of the later DQ games. (SquareEnix has hands-down the best English localization department.) Unfortunately, a lot of these are lost on enemy attacks or death phrases, like a skeleton saying "I broke a rib!" or a cyclops saying "I blinked..."
• Likewise, the residents of the three major areas all speak with different accents and mannerisms. The farmers have a country side drawl (slurring vowels), the miners are Australian (dropped Hs), and the castle guards speak high English (no dropped letters and exclamations like "By Jove!")  The later DQ games always make you feel the world is vast and filled with different people, unlike other games where everyone mostly speaks the same. A few characters have additional accents of their own, like a hilarious soldier girl who speaks Californian Valley.
• So far, no one's mentioned a room count limit on their home island. If there is one, its sufficiently high to continue encouraging building. DQB1 had a limit of 100 rooms, after which no new rooms would be counted unless some existing ones were destroyed - forcing you to either scour the island for "useless" rooms like hallways for which you could remove the lighting fixtures to regain a spot in your room limit count, demolish buildings you spent time making, or start a new island to build something entirely new. I went through four islands of designing in DQB1 thanks to this limit, and probably didn't use more than 20% of the island's territory to make any of the four. In other words, the island in DQB1 is much too large to fully utilize (especially outside that southern harbor area) while DQB2 seems to make better use of more of your island (the mountains seem to limit you to about 60% though)

Bad:

• The story only loosely follows the DQ2 events. DQB1 was highly integrated with the towns, events, and histories of the first DQ game, but this one only slightly. There's Malroth, and the big baddie Hargon, and a few tie-ins (such as Castle Moonbrooke) but for the most part its independent. I was hoping for something as integrated as the first game. (Part of it might be due to SquareEnix entirely developing the first game, while Koei-Tecmo's Omega-Force team - the same group that did the DQ Heroes games - took the engine and updated it for the sequel, with less input from SquareEnix.)
• The button layout is worse than DQB1. Its hard to get used to after playing DQB1 so much, and some of the buttons, particularly switching tools and talking to people, collide if someone's nearby.  Too often you have to leave the room and get Malroth behind you instead of in front or to the side to enable tool selection.
• I wish the room size was bigger still. 143 doesn't even let you get a 15x10 room, so rooms you want to be big (like a throne room or castle foyer) still feel cramped. (Why 143? It's twelve times twelve minus one. The maximum tile count for different room sizes follows this n-squared-minus-one pattern, for the numbers 2, 4, 6, 9, and 12.)
• In the first three areas, at one point some of the townsfolk will run off and immediately come back with practically all of the materials needed for your megastructures. Only the fourth area makes the scavenger hunts your responsibility. I don't think they needed to gift the player quite so much, or at least, not all at once. (Maybe if they'd given you 5% per game day, and you could speed up the process by supplying your own material.)
• Your base upgraded by making the rooms fancier with decorations in the first game. This one upgrades by collecting enough gratitude hearts. Maybe a little more realistic, but the first game required some scavenging to find those items, while in the sequel you can just sit in the town and eventually the populace will create enough to enable the upgrade.
• Enemies are too tough and there's too many of them. I don't expect every enemy, especially later in the game to go down with one swing, but even your basic enemies late in the game are taking 30-50 hits to kill. Its wearing out the Triangle button on my controller hitting it a hundred times or more consecutively for a 45 to 60 seconds trying to kill a mob of monsters.  Too often you just need to run away to get away from the mob and regroup so you can face one or two monsters instead of a half dozen or more. Which coincides with...
• There's too many "Get off my ass!" moments. Not just the mob of monsters spawning as quickly as you can kill them off, but enemies will also attack you on your home island right in the middle of trying to do something important when you just wish they'd leave you alone for a minute and let you do your designing. (Post-game gives you a way to turn off enemy spawning, but its a little late by then.) Malroth is around to help do your fighting, but he usually doesn't do anything until you've taken the first hit. If he was more proactive in keeping you safe when occupied with building tasks, it wouldn't be as frustrating getting knocked off a ledge or having to stop what you're doing to tackle a monster. (Particularly ghosts at night.)
• After returning to your home island following completion of the first major game area, you need to a build a little village with some farms and a cookhouse near a river you create.  All of which seems like a fun idea, but the area is hilly and full of rocks you won't be able to bust until after the third major area. It really needed to be flatter and less rocky to encourage better development for farmland. (The second and third areas are much flatter and would have made better areas to get a player's feet wet in designing their own town.)
• Too many Animal Houses needed (and lights around them) to safely secure your livestock from ghost attacks at night. This is not explained in any way until you suddenly discover all your cows and sheep are dead and need replacing from another island because they aren't fast enough to escape the ghost attacks or strong enough to take a beating all night.
• Nothing was done to fix the "window facing problem" of the first game. When you place a window, the outside always faces you. This requires you to build high ledges on the outside of buildings to put windows above ground floors, when all the designers had to do was turn it around so you could set the window in place from the inside or give some option to change orientation/rotate the tile. Getting windows and a few other tiles like them into proper facing was a headache in the first game, and downright mean in the second with enemy attacks added.
• Little need to revisit the major islands after you've completed them. You can mine a few items and maybe learn a recipe or two from the townsfolk, but I would have preferred an in-story reason to return.
• Lights still shine through solid tiles at corners. Ay nighttime, this can cause strange highlights along exterior walls or floors from a light placed on the other side and should have been a fix from the first's game engine.

So while DQB2 will certainly offer a lot more in the post-game than DQB1 did, I'm doubtful that its a better game. Its good, just not as good as the first (assuming you can overcome the difficulty hurdle early in DQB1's second chapter.) I gave DQB1 my game-of-the-year award last year, but DQB2 isn't going to make it two in a row - its just left too much to be desired to put it heads and shoulders above the first game. (And DQB2 has tougher competition this year. Leader in the clubhouse right now is the excellent Spider-Man.)


On a side note, Best Buy still hasn't sent out the pre-order redemption codes and is starting to take public heat for it. Amazon and Gamestop both did it release day or by the day after, but BB is on day 10 without any full response on their forum (only a "We're looking into it" message a week ago.) For many years Best Buy has been my preferred and recommended place to get video games, but since dropping their Gamers Club Unlocked discount program and now fouling up two order bonuses its becoming questionable that they're the best place to go now except for the few games with a $10 rewards bonus. (I never got my Ring of Power collectible for Shadow of War and was simply told they ran out by the time my order was fulfilled without ever offering any substitute to make up for it.) I've already ordered the FF7 remake from Amazon thanks to their limited time pre-order deal during E3 week since my Gamers Club discount will have expired by then and if Best Buy drops the ball on the DQB2 preorder (which is digital and costs them nothing but happy customers) than I'll be changing my preference away from Best Buy. Except for Black Friday deals and the rare pre-owned thing I stopped buying from Gamestop for similar bait-and-switch concerns (receiving opened and possibly preplayed games instead of sealed copies when buying "New") and I won't hesitate to move off of Best Buy for similar reasons if the bottomline price is going to be the same.

[Moge]

Need to get around to trying the DQB2 demo. I played about 30 mins of the DQXI S demo and i really liked what i played. Before that though i want to finish DQ4 - the first and only DQ game i've sunk a lot of time into. I was about 10 hrs in i think and dropped it for another game.

Link's Awakening is out next week. Looks damn good but i'll hold off for a holiday sale since it's not too far. Think i put Link's Awakening in my top 3 Zeldas awhile back. Need to dig thru this thread and find where i placed it.

River City Girls is really darn good. I'm already liking it much more than Scott Pilgrim (the last big budget RCR style game). One big change: food items to not raise stats and instead just restore health; you beat enemies to gain levels like a normal RPG, which isn't too different from Wayforward's last beat em up, Double Dragon Neon. Highly recommend playing that game too if anyone hasn't yet.

[JG]

DQ4 so badly needs a modernization remake. I still think its the finest in the series (and only bested by Skies of Arcadia and maybe Xenoblade Chronicles on my all time list.)  DQ8 comes close, but I think DQ4 is a deeper, more solid game. Modernized with improved character graphics like we see in the DQ Heroes games and voice acting to match would put it over the top. DQ11 is pretty good though and comes in third place in the series for me.  I liked these three more than DQ5 which a lot of people name as their favorite. (DQ5 does offer the best replay based on marriage choice - I'll give it that.)

I actually think Link's Awakening is one of the worst in the Zelda series.  Not Tri-Force Heroes silly-bad, but its surprisingly short and I don't think its aged well. I would have much rather seen an Oracle of Ages+Seasons or Minish Cap remake, as these are much longer. It's been about 19 or 20 years since I last played Link's Awakening DX, and remembering little about it, I still finished the first two dungeons in the hour and a half I played earlier tonight - that's too much progress in too little time these days. Its also got that damned blurry haze on the overworld screen, and that's given me a headache.

The DQB2 demo is.. well it sucks. I found it very boring, filled with tedious tasks and not enough building, which is what the game is really about. It got good once you leave the island at the end of the demo, but I fear the demo probably turns people off more than it turns people on.  Play both the DQB1 demo and DQB2 demo. I've been told there's more building tasks in the DQB1 demo.
If you want to see what's possible, you can view the photos I've taken in-game at https://en.dragonquest-builders.com/detail/?c=nsANdr6AWK Most are the buildings and scenery I've made, but a few are visits to other peoples islands or just funny photos or things I liked.

[JG]

Those with a mild interest in Dragon Quest Builders 2 (or want a grown-up version of Minecraft) and haven't been bit by the bug yet can now really enjoy what the game is fully about in the new "Jumbo" demo.  The first demo covered about an hour to hour and a half of the game, didn't give you much to do other than introductory tasks a single time, and overall is quite boring and made for a poor demo in my opinion. Well, apparently SquareEnix finally caught on and released a new demo today that provides the entire(?) first main story island as well, upping it to about the first 12-15 hours of gameplay. The Furrowfield island has some real tasks, exploration, and building activities to perform as you rebuild a ruined farm town and bring green life back to a swampy, soiled land. Save files carryover from demo to full game, too, so recommend giving it a shot before Black Friday when its likely to be on discount.

EDIT: Target's Black Friday ad has PS4 version going at $29.99, and likely Switch version at same price (along with Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild, if you haven't found a way to buy these yet.)  Likely to see Gamestop and Best Buy match or better.

EDIT #2: Best Buy will have same at just $24.99.  (Target mysteriously still beats them on some of the other video games like Super Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, and Super Mario Aces Tennis, despite Best Buy having 24 hours heads-up on what their competitor was doing.)

[Moge]

Beat the new Link's Awakening a couple weeks ago. Still a wonderful game after all these years that's made even better. Short, sweet, and best of all has challenging puzzles that aren't too hand holdy.

Another game i beat recently was Dragon Quest 1 (the SNES version). Kinda was taken back at how short the game was. Happy to have finally beaten my first DQ game.

[JG]

Beat the new Link's Awakening a couple weeks ago. Still a wonderful game after all these years that's made even better. Short, sweet, and best of all has challenging puzzles that aren't too hand holdy.

Another game i beat recently was Dragon Quest 1 (the SNES version). Kinda was taken back at how short the game was. Happy to have finally beaten my first DQ game.

I found Link's Awakening to be a let down because it was so short.  Even with all of Dampe's challenges, it came in at a mere 13 hours of gameplay for me. I didn't mind the original being that brief, but these days that's pitiful. It's ranked right up there with Mega Man 3 and Star Fox Assault as the most disappointingly short games I've ever bought. I'm still of the opinion a port of Oracle of Seasons + Oracle of Ages would have made for not just a better overall game, but a longer, more enjoyable experience more worth the money. Frankly I'd rather see original games instead - the new Breath of the Wild sequel of course, but a new Toon Link game would be nice too as its nearly 10 years since Spirit Tracks and over four since the much less impressive TriForce Heroes.

That said, I did like the new make-your-own dungeon bits Dampe provided, but they were just too easy to solve. The only challenge came in the very large ones like the original LOZ Level 8 / Skull shape that made you plan out how to use your limited connecting pieces to completely fill out the entire area.


Speaking of short, Luigi's Mansion 3 isn't quite as long as I'd hoped for either. Its only in the 20 hour range for the solo campaign (including finding all gems and Boos) and doesn't offer much replay value. Probably better value with multiplayer added, but I don't judge games on that aspect. The controls are pretty weak, as well. Too often I felt like I needed an extra thumb to control the right trigger, a right hand side button, and right hand side joystick all the same time.


You'll have to forgive how simplistic Dragon Quest 1 was compared to more modern RPGs. Its 33 years old after all. But outside of Super Mario Bros, and possibly Legend of Zelda, its arguably the most important game made for the NES. Its one of those games that sets the standard by which others in its genre are measured.

Now you've got a choice. You can either move forward to tackle Dragon Quest II, which is longer and certainly harder (hardest of all of them) but has a deeper story, or you can try your hand at Dragon Quest Builders and see how wonderfully it integrates to the DQ1 story.  If DQ1 is too basic of a story, then you could also jump forward to DQ4. The first three form a trilogy but have little character development, while DQ4 really hit the character aspect hard and makes you want to see how their stories unfold - its one of my favorites of the series.

[Arizona]

Speaking of short, Luigi's Mansion 3 isn't quite as long as I'd hoped for either. Its only in the 20 hour range for the solo campaign (including finding all gems and Boos) and doesn't offer much replay value. Probably better value with multiplayer added, but I don't judge games on that aspect. The controls are pretty weak, as well. Too often I felt like I needed an extra thumb to control the right trigger, a right hand side button, and right hand side joystick all the same time

Fun fact there: You can use the shoulder bumpers to do all the important face button actions. L for plunger, R for flashlight, L + R for dark light.

Yeah, I don't know why they don't just tell you that at some point either.

[Moge]

Can't say i'm a fan of unnecessary padding in games. With so much to play these days i rarely clamor for lengthier games.

20 hrs sounds like the ideal game length for the kind of game Luigi's Mansion 3 is. Haven't gotten around to trying 2 (and probably never will), but i've heard so many complaints that the game overstays its welcome.

I've decided i'll play the DQ games in order alghough i'm playing Octopath currently so it'll be a while before i play the next game. I was really taken back by how good the writing is for such a simple game. Puts Final Fantasy to shame actually.

[JG]

I still like the original Luigi's Mansion's mechanics. It was simplier to control and better used both vacuum and blow to uncover the hidden location of ghosts, some of which were quite well hidden. Dark Moon and 3 are basically just walk around, ghost appears without much effort needed to find them, vacuum it up and continue. 3 is certainly better than Dark Moon but I feel it could be so much better than it is. It could certainly offer better single player replay value, of which is has very little since its pretty easy to 100% the solo stuff. Neither Link's Awakening or Luigi's Mansion have really made much of a dent in my DQB2 playtime - they both hung around 5 or 6 days and then got out of the way. At $50+ I need Nintendo to give more fairly deep games like BOTW and Mario Odyssey. I don't think Link's Awakening or Luigi's Mansion 3 are really worth full price as short as they are. Don't get me wrong, I don't want 200+ hour Xenoblade 2s. I just don't want these little 10-15 hour adventures.

Dragon Quest has always bested Final Fantasy for story.  FF4 and FF5 are quite good, and FF6 isn't as good but passable. But the writing gets lame again by FF7 - and FF8 is well.. rediculous. Even the less well written DQs (3, 6, and 9 in my opinion) stand up well to FF4 or 5.

Let me know if Octopath Traveler is worth it or not. I'm still on the fence but if its cheap at Black Friday I might jump for it.

[Moge]

Not sure if i'll continue playing Octopath. I'm put 16 hrs into the game, but i'm finding the lack of any party interaction and the constant character introductory stories to be killing my motivation for playing more. The character stories and the overarching story about the world and big baddie aren't terribly interesting. It's a very pretty game no doubt and the soundtrack is wonderful, but i don't think that's enough to carry the game for me.

For exceptional stories in the Final Fantasy series i would look to the Matsuno directed titles: FF Tactics, FF XII (half of if anyway before Matsuno left), and Vagrant Story (secretly an FF game with ties to XII).

I'm quite eager to see DQ4 mobile ported to Switch someday. I've heard the 1-3 DQ ports on Switch have sold quite well in Japan, so 4-6 are bound to arrive at some point.

[JG]

Something new this year. As we close out the 2010s I'll count down my Top 25 Games of the Decade. Today I start with the Honorable Mention, and places 25-21. This is my own personal preference and does not necessarily reflect my year-end assessments of years past. Perhaps I replayed a game later or gave more thought to it after the fact to deserve a higher or lower grade than I gave it at the time. Perhaps a sequel appeared to diminish the first in some way. But ultimately, games that have either been replayed or warrant a replay became the deciding factor in how I'd order this list.  I'll still give a Top 10 Games of the Year on the 31st, as I always do, along with my Most Anticipated Titles of 2020 and a Top Consoles of the Decade list as well.


Honorable Mention: Plants vs Zombies 2
2013 - Android, IOS
This was a fun little game for a while. It tended to go on and on though and didn't move the needle as much as the wonderful first title which you could sense you were coming to the end and provided some closure. I really wanted to add this to the top 25 though but just couldn't justify dropping any of them out.  I don't know what #27 might have been but nothing comes to mind as belonging in the same class as the top 26.

25: Halo 4
2012 - Xbox 360
While not big on FPSs, I though this one was solid, and the graphics (especially Cortana) were a major step up from Halo 3. It barely makes the list though on the strengths of cooperative multiplayer scenarios. I don't want to compete and lose to other players all the time, but I don't mind joining a squad and playing a part. The fact it was a totally free DLC add-on, with no "Season Pass" cost, and only the basic Xbox Live required to play made it one of the very few multiplayer games I played (and enjoyed) of the last decade. It did have problems with the Forerunners being a little too tough (their shields would recharge faster than yours) and the awards thresholds for the dog-like enemies being far extremely too high (you'd need to play about 20,000 matches to complete the target.)  I was sorely disappointed they stripped all this fun(ctionality) out of Halo 5 in favor of more competitive modes, and tying multiplayer only into the campaign mode which was always designed for single player, not multiplayer.

24: Star Control: Origins
2018 - PC
I was rather hyped for this, as it had been 22 years since the previous Star Control (3), and Star Control 2 (or now its more modernized, open-source port, Ur-Quan Masters) still sits with arguably the highest honors in my All-Time Hall of Fame (with FlatOut II/Ultimate Carnage being its only real competition for the top spot.)  The game was kind of a disappointment though.  It followed a little too closely to Star Control II's story, including reusing some of the same jokes and events. And despite being billed as a prequel, trademark restrictions prevented them from reusing any of the alien races from the "true" Star Control history, which made it less of a prequel than an alternate universe, for which the application of the "Star Control" name in the title seems forced and only meant to generate sales from people like me who were fond of the original series. But those of us that are fond it, would have disliked how overtly similar the story is to SC2.  (It's a similar complaint people have with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, being much too similar to A New Hope.)  It's a decent game on its own though. Wonderful, fully voiced dialogue like Ur-Quan Masters, with each alien race having some quirk and difficulty that it seems only humans can solve for them. And the 3D rendered planetary exploration was fantastic, but only for a while. You spend too much of the game in this mode though and the game slows to a crawl too much as you grind for materials to upgrade your fleet or satisfy some objective. And I never got the sense that humans would be exterminated if I failed, like you do in UQM. So for all the grand aspirations Origins has, Ur-Quan Masters still stands as the best space opera game ever developed.

23: Gears of War 3
2011 - Xbox 360
Probably the best game of the Gears series thus far.  The story is engaging, with humor (Baird), loss (Dom), and that unspoken love interest between Marcus and Anya that's been building for three games.  It has well-paced battles and the vehicle sequences are great. Unlike Halo, in which you always seem to be on offense, breaking further and further into enemy lines, Gears  of War 3 had a very early "defend the base" stage which really sets the mood and gives you that feeling of desperation that humanity is on the verge of losing the war. But then a candle in the dark and an assault on the Locust stronghold to end the game, with an exhausted Marcus finally removing his do-rag at the end. An appropriate end to the original trilogy. Bravo. If I was bigger into FPSs I'd have probably ranked this higher but I'm not so it gets a (perhaps undeservingly) low placement on the list.

22: Xenoblade Chronicles 2
2017 - Switch
I was a little worried this would follow the disastrous, MMO-style path taken by Xenoblade Chronicles X but thankfully it returned to a story-driven format closer to the first. Its a really great RPG, except for the fact that you wish you could upgrade peoples' skills earlier (especially Poppi's) and the randomness of the mechanics to unlock rare Blades rather ruins the fun.  Some of the Blades are so incredibly rare that you can literally spend dozens of hours just trying to grind for that one Blade rather than moving the story along.  It thus takes a long game that should fit in the 100-120 hour timeframe and extends it well past the 200 hour mark, into "too long" territory. Some way to fix this by trading your unwanted materials for higher chances to get the Blades you need to complete the set was needed and not present, which sours the overall impression of the game.

21: Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle
2017 - Switch
This is a truly fun little strategy game.  Its a little odd seeing Mario and crew run around toting guns, but its handled well, applying Mario-series Toadstool Kingdom themes to the weapons. The Rabbids really steal the show though, especially Rabbid Peach and Rabbid Mario, which are hilarious throughout the story. If you like games that require a little bit of thought and planning, but want something lighthearted, this is it. We really need a sequel. (For a game that got such good reviews and remains one of the best selling third-party titles for the Switch, its amazing we haven't heard of a sequel yet.)

[JG]

20: Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam
2015 - 3DS
Sadly, the last of the Mario & Luigi series is perhaps best or second best (I personally think Partners in Time was the best.) Its a pretty good mini-RPG, and bridges the gap well between the M&L series and the Paper Mario series, with Paper Mario able to do his "flat" things in the otherwise normal Mario & Luigi world.  This was a little worrisome prospect after how awful the previous Paper Mario entry, Sticker Star, was in 2012, but Alphadream really did it better than Nintendo themselves. Of course, Alphadream made some serious errors afterwards and went with remaking not-so-old games rather than advancing to a Mario & Luigi 6, and found their way into bankruptcy, carrying much too large of a develop staff for only producing a new game every several years.  Now if only Nintendo would get Paper Mario back to how it used to be, closer to what Mario & Luigi was than the Sticker Star type of nonsense its become. It's a shame the wrong series of the two is the one to end.

19: BATTLETECH
2018 - PC
Since Microsoft has utterly ignored its ownership of the BattleTech/MechWarrior IP it bought about two decades ago, we'd gone a very long time with a new video game in the BattleTech universe.  Thankfully the creators of the original board game and the late-90s Microsoft-developed MechCommander series got together, started a new company, and gave us this wonderful gem under license.  It's "close enough" to the board game, without getting bogged down in some of the rule minutia, albeit there's some tactics that work in the video game that don't in the board game and vice versa, and due to copyrights some of the "facts" about the universe had to be changed to fit the license, but its good enough. MechWarrior 5 just launched this month, making it two years in a row with a non-Microsoft-developed BattleTech title, after going 16 without under Microsoft's careless watch. Even if you don't know anything about the BattleTech universe, but like big mecha and turn-based strategy, BATTLETECH can give you want you want.

18: Mario Kart Tour
2019 - Android, iOS
As you'll later read in my 2019 review, this had real potential to be a big star, but Nintendo nerfed it too much to force people to spend real money to make the game winnable at a consistent rate.  Even as a free-to-play its not bad. Not Mario Kart 8 quality, but for less powerful phones and at zero investment cost, we can tolerate it. And "tolerating" it is sadly the best you can hope for. Its just very frustrating to be sliding all over the tracks and getting hit by objects while watching yours go right through the AI-controlled karts. You can outdrive the computer, but the poor controls will get you facing somewhere you don't want to go, take a corner way too wide, or screw you over with enemy attacks. Mario Kart 8 was much more balanced (though still very prone to "screw you right before the finish line" moments.) The Multiplayer mode has been very slow to come along (only in beta now) and we also haven't seen characters from outside the Mario and Donkey Kong series yet, which may indicate the roster will remain small but with lots of "outfits" for each character (Peach already has 4 or 5).  If you want something close to Mario Kart 8 but want it to on the go (without taking your Switch), MKT might fit the bill. But it could have, and should have, been a lot better.

17: Ever Oasis
2017 - 3DS
Grezzo had made a business of remaking Zelda games from earlier consoles for the 3DS series (though they co-developed TriForce Heroes.)  Embarking on their first unique title, they gave us this wonderful little game that reminds us a lot of Zelda and Square's Mana series, among other things. Being a tiny bug-size creature has nods to Pikmin, and the ancient Egypt art style is enticing. It's cute, its fun, it's unique. If you've played out the Zelda series, consider Ever Oasis as a next-best thing. And now that Grezzo is past the Link's Awakening remake, I hope they're given a chance to show us what they can do with a full fledged Switch game, whether its an Ever Oasis 2 or something new.

16: Super Mario 3D World
2013 - Wii U
I really like playing Mario games in this third person view. It's not quite side-view ala original NES/GB/SNES games, but also not the odd camera angles of the 3D games (64,Galaxy,etc.) And it's significantly less difficult than the "New" Mario series, which kind of drummed all the fun out of it by demanding too many hard challenges to open up all the pathways. This game is more lighthearted and has a lot of really fun bits. The new catsuit is a riot. It's not going to wow you with replay value, but its comparable to Super Mario World. Given the lackluster sales of the Wii U, this is probably the mainline Mario game the fewest people have played (excepting GameBoy games), which is a shame. I'm kind of surprised this hasn't made it to a Switch remake yet. Its certainly good enough to deserve one.

[JG]

15: Super Mario Odyssey
2017 - Switch
Moving on to another Super Mario mainline title, this one narrow edges the previous entry in the series. The good is that it feels like Super Mario 64 did - with a lot of hidden Power Moons and none of the wonky gravity effects in Galaxy games, which I felt were too unfamiliar to the classic Mario gameplay. The bad is that there's too many of the dang moons (880) and many of them are simply unfeasible to get without becoming a video gaming ninja master. I don't like games that can't be 100-percented by regular players though a reasonable amount of playtime, and that's what knocks an otherwise fantastic game down several notches on this list. It also suffers from poor replay value (though many Mario games do) and some really ridiculous minibosses in the form of rabbit-like Broodals (when the Koopalings would have made better choices.) But the absolute worst feature is Amiibo breaking - many of the Amiibo reveal too many of the secrets, spoiling the game quite a bit. Its a very good Mario game, but we've seen better, both in previous decades, and this one...  On the bright side, Super Mario Odyssey carried my Moment of the Decade: The 2D tour-de-force that is the New Donk City Festival, a highly enjoyable oil-can jumping stage leading to an arcade-style Donkey Kong level map at the end while "Jump Up, Super Star!" plays in the background. Definitely the single best level in the game. Maybe the best in any game. (Discussion for another time.)

14: BioShock Infinite
2013 - Xbox 360, PS3, Windows
As I said, FPSs aren't my forte, but you wrap a good story around it, I can get on board. An hoo boy does this one deliver on story. As a game its nothing special, but the story works out like a mystery, with the pieces only coming together at the very end in one of the greatest twists even seen in a video game. As good as the stories for the first two BioShocks were, this one even exceeds them. For me, it was easily the most well written video game story of the decade (better than any RPG or Last of Us, which I only though was 'meh'.)  If only the gameplay was more like the first BioShock it would have been truly stellar.

13: Dragon Age: Inquisition
2014 - Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, Windows
I didn't know what to think of this at first. A buddy had gotten two through some kind of Groupon deal and offered me one for free. Though I eventually settled on a "I'll try it and if I like it I'll pay for it" deal with him. He ended up getting $20 for it because it was so wonderful I thought free was too much of a ripoff.  I'd sort of known about the first two games, which were nothing particularly special, but this one had a whole new style of gameplay, mixing a tactical battle system with hack-and-slash surprisingly well.  Its story wasn't too bad either, though some of it might have been better with a recap of the earlier two Dragon Age games for those of us that had not played them. The world was incredibly large and its story had multiple branches, so it had high replay value. It's really quite good and garnered a lot of GOTY attention in 2014, then basically disappeared from store shelves by the end of 2015. Its shocking that BioWare still hasn't brought a fourth chapter of the Dragon Age series to market after 5 years. GOTYs usually don't wait 5 years for a sequel unless something horrible has gone wrong in development. I hope not.

12: Spider-Man
2018 - PS4
Superhero video games usually aren't up to snuff (Superman 64 being notoriously bad) but this one is excellent, easily superior to Batman's very-average Arkham series. It's a lot of fun swinging around a recreated Manhattan Island and Queens, seeing the sights of a lot of famous structures like Central Park and Grand Central Station, but also some Marvel-infused locations like Avenger's Tower or the Sanctum Sanctorum of Doctor Strange. The story is entirely unique, but reuses all the things we expect from Peter Parker/Spider-Mans life: a job working for Dr Otto Octavius, who goes mad, helping out Aunt May at her homeless shelter, sharing his grief with a teenage Miles Morales, a devious mayor Norman Osborn, and crime all over the city that only Spider-Man can stop. The bad guys are all onboard too, from the little known ones like Hammerhead and Silver Sable up to the more familiar Doc Oc, Vulture, and Electro. You really get the sense that you have to play both parts - Peter Parker's seemingly uninteresting domestic life and the vigilante superhero of Spider-Man. You don't even really need to know much about Spider-Man's backstory other than the obvious stuff gleaned from the movies to enjoy it. Its so good I'd recently bough the GOTY edition just for the added DLC (cheaper than buying the DLC alone.)  Without Spider-Man, the upcoming Iron Man and Avengers games probably wouldn't be generating as much noise as they are.

11: Bravely Default
2012 - 3DS
Best classic turn-based RPG of the decade - that I've played (maybe Octopath Traveller is better, but haven't played it yet.) It feels like Final Fantasy V did, with job classes for each character, but they did it right and didn't allow skills learned in one class to carryover such that you end up with super characters capable of doing anything. A nice story that seems rather basic for the first half of the game, but gets deeper as the mystery unravels in the second half. They also kept the team to the same four characters thoughout the game, instead of expanding the cast to include too many extras (which most RPGs stumble on and ruin by trying to either balance averaging experience for all members or concentrating only on the powerhouses.)  It is a little on the long side, but has really good graphics for a 3DS game and has just the right difficulty and intrique. If you like the classic RPGs, especially of the mid-Final Fantasies (4-9) this one should appeal to you as an alternative.

[JG]

10: Hyrule Warriors
2014 - Wii U, 3DS, Switch
There was something very pleasant about this game. Like a Zelda game that doesn't behave like a Zelda game, but a hack-and-slasher. It worked in all the favorite characters from Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess pretty well, too, giving something of an explanation for how and why there's so many Hyrules that all look different but have common elements between them. But the gameplay is solid and rather challenging, with good replay value to retry levels with a different hero (or different weapon for the same heroes) to earn different rewards. And the Adventure Mode gave hundreds of hours of extra content, reminiscent of classic Zelda 1 Hyrule maps letting you navigate your way to the hidden items and final battle on each map though more than one path. Of the Dynasty Warriors crossovers, it wasn't just the first, but clearly the best as neither Dragon Quest Heroes or Fire Emblem Warriors match up well against it. And that blue scarf of Link's was an epic design choice - I so wanted an outfit in Breath of the Wild to give me a Blue Scarfed Link.

9: Dragon Quest Builders
2016 - PS4, Switch
"Minecraft, but better" is how most sum up this game. Its got a similar open world and building block quests, but give it better graphics and wrap an alternate history Dragon Quest story around it, paying homage to a 30 year old fan favorite and you've got a hit. I could not put this game down for months. The PS4 version is also rather hard to complete all five challenges in each of the four chapters (though the later Switch version softened it up significantly, so its not as good.)  If you enjoyed the first Dragon Quest, this is a must to have seen how things may have gone differently had the hero had not been as virtuous as the normal DQ1 ending presented him to be. This certainly would have been considered for the top 5 had Dragon Quest Builders 2 not one-upped many of its features this year. Of the two, DQB1 pays greater homage to its namesake title than DQB2 does though, and is sufficiently difficult to better please veteran gamers (of whom most DQ1 players are)

8: Dragon Quest XI
2018 - PS4, PC, Switch
While I said Bravely Default was best classic turn-based style RPG of the decade, its beaten out the wonderfully deep DQ11, being a more modern tennis-style RPG (where each character responds at a different rate rather than all at once.) Since IX was for a handheld it didn't feel like a mainstream Dragon Quest, and since X was never localized, fans like me had been waiting for 13 years for a "proper" mainline Dragon Quest game. And it delivers in a big way. A bit slow to start, but after 5 or 6 hours it gets moving at a good pace and keeps the interest up. And just when you think its over it starts a whole new adventure. And just when you think that's over, it does it again! (At least you could see it coming the second time around in Bravely Default.) The cast of characters is wonderful, the story is well written, and its adopted the same humor, localized speech, and naming puns that proper Dragon Quest games should always have. It feels like a proper sequel to 2005's excellent Dragon Quest VIII. Truly an epic game, that belongs right up there with numbers 4, 5, and 8 in the series as the best of the bunch.  If looking to play, get the S version for Switch which incorporates the classic overhead 2D mode (of the 3DS version in Japan) and a lot of new features that aren't present on the PS4 and PC versions.

7: Kid Icarus: Uprising
2012 - 3DS
Best tunnel shooter Nintendo's ever made? Its not Star Fox. Nor Star Fox 64. It's this masterpiece. Its got everything Star Fox has, but many more monsters per level, more intriguing bosses, a wide array of weapons to choose from, and a much deeper story. Plus an 89-point sliding difficulty scale (from 1.0 to 9.0) for high replayability. As well as true internet competitive multiplayer, beating games like Mario Kart 8 by over two years. Perhaps it just came out too early in the 3DS lifetime to gain the attention and accolades it deserves as one of the best games on the system. And while Pit, Dark Pit, and Palutena continue to appear in Smash Bros games, I keep holding out hope every year for an announcement of a sequel at E3.  Given the excellence of Uprising versus the rather mundane Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (or Other M), I'd honestly rather see a new Kid Icarus than Metroid Prime 4, especially with the Star Fox series taking a nose dive into Corneria's oceans over the last several outings. We need a proper tunnel shooter on the Switch and its time to give the Pit Crew another chance to shine.

6: Super Mario 3D Land
2011 - 3DS
Another early 3DS title, this is the Mario game that holds the crown of best in series for the decade, far superior to the two "New" Super Mario games that preceded and followed it. It has the right amount of difficulty, in line with the original SMB or SMB3, slightly tougher than Super Mario World, but not as fargone as NSMB, or as weakly easy as New 2 or New Wii. Being able to reserve a powerup item made for good use of backup items for the tough areas, return of the Tanooki Suit, and new powerups like the Boomerang Flower (which is now a staple in Mario Kart) made this a wonderful entry in the series.  And when you finally do complete all the stages with Mario, you unlock Luigi, who handles a little differently, and you must replay all the stages again with him to fully complete the game. It also makes good use of the 3D mode of the 3DS, making it appear more realistic than Super Mario 64, or the Galaxy games, despite the stages being more linearly designed like the classic NES levels. It perfectly matches the best of both worlds (despite being a Land title and not a World title)

[JG]

Before counting down the final five of the decade, these are my top 10 of 2019.  Some of these games came out in prior years but first played this year. I also indicate my platform played, but some are available on other platforms.

10: God of War (PS4)
D-. God of something alright. What a mess. I really can't understand how it was garnering game of the year honors last year. Maybe if you'd played the original trilogy and knew the full backstory and how to use Kratos's attacks, it would be better, but the game practically throws you right into combat, with no recap of earlier events or decent tutorial on how to use your axe.  The targeting reticle is tiny and doesn't home in on enemies well. Too many of the puzzles and even the very first mini-boss require near perfect control to succeed. There's no cue of where to go next if you get stuck - I'd spend several minutes looking around for hidden switches or just the right position to stand at to the trigger the next sequence. And just when I thought we'd finally start ascending the mountain instead of just talking about it as we got closer, we end up at some lake and portals to different worlds that it wants me to clear before going up the mountain.  It has very pretty terrain graphics, the voice acting is good, and the developing story between father and son seems very intriguing, but the game itself is a hard pass.

9: Wreckfest (PC)
D. Finally, FINALLY after 11 years Bugbear returns with what was billed as proper sequel to FlatOut 2, aka FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage (my obvious choice for game of the decade for 2000s), since FlatOut 3 and 4 produced by other developers didn't live up to the hype. Balloon busted. Bugbear spent so much effort on making the most realistic game they could, focusing on gravity, acceleration, and vehicle damage that they completely sucked the fun out it. What's worse, despite the name, wrecking is very, very bad in Wreckfest - almost certainly costing you a chance to win the race.  This is contrary to FlatOut games, which would reward you for crashing if you happened to take someone out with you. The end result is basically just another racing game, with a little bit of goofiness in the form of things like lawnmower destruction derbies and rocket couch races. But its not laugh out loud off the wall bonkers like FlatOut 2/UC was. Even Burnout Paradise comes closer to a proper FlatOut 2 sequel than BugBear could do.

8: Paper Mario: Color Splash (Wii U)
C-. I'd been wanting to play this for a few years and finally broke down to buy a copy. Its not all that great. Not nearly as bad as Sticker Star, but the battles are with a similar enough mechanic, often requiring your powerful stickerscards for bosses and refraining from using them for the normal weenies, which demands too much inventory management for a game that should just get on with it.  The Rock-Paper-Scissors games also kill the flow, by requiring you to wait a day before you can try them again.

7. Hey! Pikmin (3DS)
C. This got some bad reviews for breaking the mechanics of the first three games, but I kind of rather like it. You can't just build up a huge Pikmin army in the early stages and use them to coast to the end anymore and no need to manage them or split them into groups anymore thanks to some touchscreen buttons to select the right color. And frankly, the 2D gameplay is just easier - you're not throwing Pikmin where you don't mean to so much. On the flip side, its incredibly easy and so far the puzzles haven't been all that hard. But for a simple, lighthearted game to play for a half hour, its pretty good.  I'm not so fond of the control scheme through, having to hold my 3DS in left hand and use stylus with right.  I was able to do that with for the Zelda games on my old DS/3DS, but the much heavier New 3DS XL makes this a stamina challenge. And the game would have greatly benefited from using the 3D features of the system, instead of a strict 2D-only mode.

6. Luigi's Mansion 3 (Switch)
B-. Not bad but not all that great.  The different floors kept things interesting but there's only so much you can do in the game and once you've done it, there's no more reason to play except multiplayer competitive modes. I'm not sure it gives $60 worth of gameplay content compared to its peers.

5. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Switch)
B-. A faithful remake, but perhaps a little too faithful. They did good things like simplify the Shield (instead of having to swap it into and out of inventory all the time), and of course prettier graphics, but the game itself isn't much changed, meaning it fits into a very short 10-15 hour timeframe.  The new feature to build your own dungeon with Dampe adds some fun, but only a few hours worth. (And a far superior building game available for play at the same time.)  it most certainly doesn't give $60 worth of gameplay, but I can recommend it when it comes down a good bit in price, especially if you haven't played this Zelda entry before. if you have mild interest, consider looking for it Black Friday next year. The blurry effect on the overworld still gives me headaches thinking about it though.

4. Mario Kart Tour (Android)
B-. A reasonable facsimile of Mario Kart 8, but fraught with problems that aren't easily solved except by paying for upgrade packs. The demo early in the year showed a lot of promise as potential game of the year, but the finished product lacked the same level of control and basically cheats to ensure you don't win in certain races regardless of how proficient you are. And over the last two months Nintendo's realized a significant problem: they've made some stages too easy for those that have bought the right packs for that level (right driver/kart combo), but much too hard for those that haven't and they can't seem to find a balance to please either crowd. At least this one was free so I can't feel ripped off by it.

3. Gears 5 (Xbox One)
B+. Now to the three good games. I haven't finished this yet, but its a pretty good Gears game so far.  Better than 4 anyway. I do wish there was some combat where you're riding a vehicle - so far I haven't encountered any - just vehicles to roam around the level maps (which are quite large by the way and help make the game feel bigger than it is.) It's also nice to see the Xbox One be able to brush some of its dust off after hardly any use the last three years.

2. Spider-Man (PS4)
A. As I'd said before, this is a really wonderful game. Its fun, not overly hard (but some bits are certainly a fair challenge), it handles "Spidey Sense" well by going into a slow motion mode, Spider-Man's attacks and acrobatics seem natural, and its got a very good story worthy of a Spider-Man movie. I've bought the DLC to give it a go, but after the main game, I sort of put it aside and haven't touched it since, which is why such a good game really didn't make it to my the top spot.  Definitely worth the money and as much a must-play for the PS4 as Last of Us.

1. Dragon Quest Builders 2 (PS4) - GAME OF THE YEAR
I know. I was hard on it in my post-game review and said Spider-Man was better. And at first blush, it was. But after replaying it a second time (and then a third, and then a fourth, which is almost unheard of since I was a teenager) I kept noticing little things that paid subtle homage to events in earlier Dragon Quest games (usually DQ2, but sometimes others.)  DQ1 was very obvious in how it paid homage, and maybe why I feel in love with it and subsequently gave DQB2 a tough review. But DQB2 has some true-fan jokes about cursed headgear, being afraid of being turned into a dog, and extremely obscure connections such as the location of Ra's Mirror appearing in exactly the same map square in both games, despite absolutely no need for it to be so except to pay homage to the earlier game. All the little tie-ins add up to a wonderful experience for a big DQ fan like myself. That and excellent post-game freebuild content that took a major step fromward from DQB1 in the form of online sharing, photo posting, and photo contests run by Square for special trophy prizes. (If curious, these are pictures I've posted from within the game, either on my island or visiting others' - some are photos of my buildings while others are for the photo contests.) After five and half months I'm still playing this 10 hours a week. Few games can claim that kind of hold on a player. Given I spent at least 10 times as many hours playing this as any other game this year (except maybe DQB1 early in the year), it's just too hard to keep it out of the #1 spot, despite Spider-Man's overall excellence. My biggest complaint is the artificial locations they added when they could have reused actual DQ2 locations like DQB1 did.



And before the games, let's talk consoles and gaming platforms, too. These are the systems we saw come out in the 2010s and how they stack up to each other. I'm not counting the also-rans Ouya, Nvidia Shield, or Google Stadia. Nor am I considering mini-consoles like the "<insert name here> Classic".  Remodels (slim versions) don't count differently that original model.

7: Sony Playstation TV
Well it was a nice idea. A dirt cheap home console to play Vita games, that allowed remote play for PS4. But that's about it. Even Sony didn't think much of it, selling as more of an add-on like the Eye camera or Move controllers than a dedicated console. They didn't even include a controller with it. And naturally, it didn't appeal to hardly anyone and Sony pulled the plug after only a few months on market.  But they got very cheap, very fast, and I picked up mine, brand new, for just $19.99. I've hardly used it, but its nice to have a PS4 downstairs and a second device upstairs capable of playing it if I so desired (but the need to re-pair controllers between the two consoles all the time rather stopped me from doing it much.)

6: Microsoft Xbox One
What a complete disaster.  Xbox 360 was probably right up there with Wii for tops in the 2000s but so much has gone wrong with the Xbox One. It was priced too high to start, Microsoft made a very unwise decision to first drop the inclusion of Kinect (despite planning the entire experience around it) and then entirely removed functionality for it from the S series, relegating voice and motion play to Nintendo and Sony, and giving up any chance of competing with Sony for VR gaming. Removing the optical drive for the All Digital Edition had me very worried this was the path they'd take with the Series X, but so far this doesn't seem to be the case. (But watch out - if the Series X doesn't sell they'll drop the drive.) A lousy game library has hurt it too. Most of its "popular" games are also on PS4, and the few uniques its had are often regarded as significantly worse than earlier games in the same series (Exhibit A, Halo 5.)  With the (confusingly named) Series X on the horizon and Halo 6 almost being bumped off Xbox One in favor of the Series X, there's really nothing left to look forward to for the Xbox One. It's been a $500 paperweight most of its life.

5: Phones/Tablets (of more modern variety)
Mobile gaming continues to grow. Its not there yet but making big progress. It rather hurts that the games developed for Windows (or Mac) don't translate well to phones/tablets though or else they'd be moving along faster (and something like the Switch would have a more serious time competing.)  That Windows Phone way back seemed like the possible answer, but it flopped. I anticipated seeing some answer to the barrier between PCs/Macs at home and Android/iOS on phones, but so far nothing of note. So we're still seeing small, cutesy games on phones and tablets, or remakes of things 20+ years old, and all the new stuff still to consoles and PC. And until new stuff consistently launches to phones/tablets same day as consoles, they're still second class gaming devices. Unsure if the 2020s will bring that day or not. (Or if we'll even be carrying phones and tablets around anymore.)

4: Nintendo Wii U
I rather liked the Wii U. I thought it was a solid gaming platform. Just poorly named. (Exhibit B, Xbox 360 One One S One X Series X) The gamepad felt like it bridged the gap between 3DS and home console better than anything since the GameCube/GameBoy Player device years earlier, though I'm sad to see there weren't more games that did a GamePad + TV combo to simulate dual screens like the 3DS had.  It had some solid first-party titles too (like the aforementioned Super Mario 3D World) and being backwards compatible with most Wii games helped keep it played every so often, relegating the Wii itself to the closet.

3: Nintendo 3DS
Quite a long run the 3DS had. It came out in early 2011 and I'm still playing one (my New model XL, with Hey! Pikmin) this last week of the decade. Its had its swan song and has officially turned over the reigns to the Switch now, but its a been a wonderful little system. Of my top 25, eight of the games are available on the 3DS, a testament to its solid performance and longevity.

2: Nintendo Switch
If this came out earlier in the decade it might have been #1. It had quite a launch year though, with both a Mario game (Odyssey) and Zelda game (Breath of the Wild) blowing the competition out the water. All you need to know is how my local best Buy was organized in 2016 versus today. In late 2016, Nintendo occupied three racks in a five rack row, split almost evenly between Wii U, 3DS, and Amiibo. PlayStation and XBox One each had 6 or 7 racks. By early 2018, The Switch was running 5 racks to Xbox's 4. Now its 6 to 4 in favor of the Switch, with about half of the Xbox's rack space devoted to all the extra controller garbage and superfluous need to explain 3 different hardware models. (PlayStation has mostly stayed about the same, at 5 or 6 racks depending on season.) Things have kind of cooled off of late, as fewer blockbuster games have come along. (Pokémon being the biggest in a while.) Solid second tier games like Luigi's Mansion 3, Link's Awakening and the upcoming Trials of Mana for sure, but Switch could use that Metroid Prime 4 or Breath of the Wild sequel soon to really set themselves up as solid competition for the very powerful Series X and Playstation 5.

1. Sony Playstation 4
This was Sony's decade (again) - a lot of it has to do with timing, as they've had over twice as long at market than the Switch. And where the Xbox One looks like yesterday's news, the PS4 is still going strong with anticipated titles like Last of Us 2 on the way. And while many of my favorite games have since been ported to Switch, PS4 got things like Dragon Quest XI and Dragon Quest Builders first. PS4 may not have had the number of megahits that Switch and 3DS had, but its lineup was solid for me, producing a lot of good-not-great games (and baring God of War, no disappointments that I can think of.)  It's Blu-Ray player software is also more intuitive than the Xbox One and it won't turn the controllers off after 5 minutes like Microsoft does, so it plays all the movies now.  The run on the pair of DQB games over the last 13 months of the decade really settled this as the system I not only played the most, but enjoyed playing the most.



My most anticipated titles of 2020:

1. Trials of Mana (Switch, PS4, PC) - April 20 Yes.

2. Final Fantasy VII Remake (PS4) - March 3 I really don't like the FF7 story much, but this looks so good and has so much hype I really can't help myself. I just hope its not glorified graphics on top of the same weak story the second time around. More side quests and subplots needed than just chasing Sephiroth around the globe while the Turks watch.

3. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics (Switch, PS4, Xbox One, PC) - February 4 A proper FF Tactics style game has been long needed. I want to see a demo first to be sure its got it right. It seems unlikely I'll be able to see the TV show before the game comes out though which may hurt it a bit.

4. Halo Infinite (Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PC) - November-December? - If only to see how it ends. If it ends. I'm less interested to know what happens to Master Chief than I am Cortana and the crew of the UNSCS Infinity.

5. Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory (PC) - unknown I'm worried a release date still hasn't been set, or any more significant news since E3, but I'm keeping an eye on it, if only for the sake of humor.

6. Bravely Default 2 (Switch) - unknown I do not like the look of the graphics from the trailer. That would pass muster on the 3DS, but not on Switch. Also, count to three please.

Metroid Prime 4 or Breath of the Wild sequel if they make it to 2020 (unlikely) Either would jump to top of list. But also no chance we hear about them until E3 or shortly prior.




And with no further things to discuss, the final five. Truly the best games of the decade in the opinion of yours truly.

5. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
2017 - Switch
I'm sure some people would consider this their Game of the Decade. It's good, its fun. And I really like how they put so much focus into the bow to reinvent the game from just a sword hacking adventure that so many other games have now copied. I sorely missed Kojo Kondo's musical score though. And too many of the dang Koroks. 900 is too much - they sidetrack you from the quest at hand. I did appreciate being able to tackle the Divine Beasts in a different order on a replay though.

4. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
2011 - Wii
The better Zelda game of the two actually. The Wii Motionplus sword fighting is okay, but far from great, but it really shines when controlling the Beetle. Its got an actual recurring villain in the form of Ghirahim instead of just an undefined evil swirl surrounding the castle, a deeper story, and a wonderful fully orchestrated musical score which makes the too quiet Breath of the Wild seem absent. I consider Skyward Sword, Wind Waker, and Ocarina of Time my favorites of the series. Breath of the Wild slots in after those three.  It doesn't offer quite as much replay as BOTW, but the New Game+ feature eliminates hearts from appearing anywhere in the game, requiring healing potions and the like to replenish health, making it a very difficult "master quest" of sorts - on par with the two NES games for difficulty.

3. Xenoblade Chronicles
2010 - Wii, 3DS
Wonderful from start to finish. Its really raised the bar for what a Chrono Trigger style of game should be, with more emphasis on teamwork than many other similar games. Fully voiced and epic background music. Romance and intrigue. Frustrations and elations. Its got it all. And the fact they took a gigantic Wii game and squeezed it down to fit into to 3DS cart, without losing anything but some graphics quality was very impressive (especially retaining all the voice tracks.) It's lone drawback is that its way too heavy on loot from monster drops. Too many times you have to stop and spend an hour or two refining crystals, because you've got too many and its inefficient to just discard them.  It's being republished for Switch with a release planned for the second half of 2020 - if you missed it early in the decade, consider it if it comes with any new content and/or a simplification to the loot/refining problem.

2. Dragon Quest Builders 2
2019 - PS4, Switch, PC
See above. It knocked the original DQB several spots down because its overall just a lot better for the free build stuff and contests that keep things fresh every few weeks. I wish it was a little more overt in its tie-ins to Dragon Quest 2 and didn't create things we haven't seen in Dragon Quest before, but it fits at #2 simply because I've poured a good 400-500 hours into it in a half a year. It's got me hooked. And I don't think I'll be able to free myself until a DQB3 comes along circa 2021.

1. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag - GAME OF THE DECADE
2013 - Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, Wii U, PC, Switch
Surprised? I was too when I started putting this list together and giving serious thought to what was the best game I'd played in ten years. And when it came down to it, every other game on this list had something I sorely disliked about it, while AC4 simply rose to the top by being the closest to perfection and satisfying a near requirement of the top ten to be played through at least twice (DQ11 being the only one that has not.) Sure, I don't care much for the present day Abstergo Industries subplot, but the quests for that plot are all pretty easy and don't consume a lot of time, letting you get back to the Golden Age of Piracy and return to being a rotten scallywag. Maybe it has to do with playing the role of a bad guy. I tried Assassin's Creed Unity (the 5th game in the series) and found it to be quite boring (and some sections too unforgiving after setting up them up for half an hour - feeling like a waste of time when you fail.) But being a pirate is fun. You can break the rules and sink boats and kill discriminately if you want, and not have any serious consequences for it. I think that's why the first two Assassin Creed games (which I've not played) were popular, and why AC4 is so much fun. When you play a hero, whether its an American Revolutionary War spy, or a French Revolution patriot, or Spartan soldier, you're expected to perform a certain way, with honor and dignity. Screw that and embrace being the badass for a change. The combat by either sword or flintlock was pleasant, and the parkour/freerunning bits were exciting, with just the right amount of pedestrians and not so many to be annoying as in Unity. The shipping contract fulfillment subquests are also satisfying as a bit of a resource management strategy game-within-a-game. But of course the high seas ship-to-ship combat and boarding actions steal the show. And it all melds with a nice story mixing both fictional and real pirates into a mystery. Of all the games on this list, I came to the conclusion that this was the one I'd be most likely to pick up and play again in 2029, as several are likely to be superceded by sequels to come, while this one has already proven to be the peak of its series. If you haven't tried it, give a shot. Except for the brand new Switch port, you should be able to find it relatively cheap.