Musings from Lythos

A Quick and Dirty List of Games I Beat in 2022

  1. Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden - An interesting follow up to Isle Dragon that I felt was too punishing and limited you in ways that made the game tedious and unfun rather than interesting. Wish the story came together better, but damn if I didn't almost cry at the end anyway.

  2. The Great Ace Attorney
  3. The Great Ace Attorney 2 - I'm lumping them together here because frankly, they're one game and it's super obvious where they had to be cut and padded out to sell each of the parts individually. It's a really good Ace Attorney game, Dual Destinies being the only one that even comes close imo, but that also comes with all the standard caveats about an AA game. I enjoyed it a lot, but also play with a guide because lmao AA logic.

  4. Banjo-Tooie - A childhood replay that I still really like and frankly, probably like better than Kazooie. That said, when it's bad, it's REALLY bad (looking squarely at you Terrydactyland) and it's a shame that so many of the new moves are glorified keys. Split up is really cool at least!

  5. Tunic - Looks like Zelda, plays like Dark Souls. The manual gimmick is fantastic, and while I wish it used the Zelda inspiration as more than set-dressing, it was still quite enjoyable for what it was. Some day I'll go back and get the true ending, but I feel like I'm gonna be saying that about this entire list.

  6. Robotics;Notes DaSH - Attempts to be both a serious sequel and an emotional send-off to Robotics;Notes at the same time, and really only accomplishes the latter. If the Daru Route/True Ending was longer, maybe closer to what the "intro" section is, then maybe it would have been better.

  7. Somnium Files: Nirvana Initiative - Really enjoyed the plot right up until the finale, but as a game it's pretty mediocre. The Somnia are better than in AI 1, but still not very good overall, and the QTE combat is trash. Really cool secret for getting the true ending, for what that's worth.

  8. Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil - Wish I had more to say about it than "That sure is a game that exists." Maybe the remake isn't very good? I've never played the original, but the version in the Phantomile Collection or whatever it's called wasn't a great time.

  9. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - I absolutely adore the plot and characters, had a great time exploring its world, and hated most of the mechanical systems of the game. Music is great, but largely unremarkable because the only song anyone will ever remember when they're done with the game is the Chain Attack song.

  10. Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden - The first Voice of Cards to really forge its own identity aside from "Yoko Taro's Discount D&D Campaign", the Drakengard influence is very strong, very obvious, and very welcome. The Blue Mage mechanism for getting new attacks is pretty whatever, but I definitely enjoyed this one the most of the trio.

  11. Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight - Can you really "finish" a rhythm game? I guess this one at least has the assorted S-Links to follow in lieu of an actual plot, so there's that metric, but frankly I kinda hate the Persona rhythm game mechanics so I never saw the end-end. I did appreciate seeing all the P3 characters in HD though.

  12. Case of the Golden Idol - A relatively short but fantastic mystery game, tasking you with exploring the end result of a scene, and then filling out scrolls to figure out who's there, how they got there, and what the hell happened. A very...unique art style, we'll say, but I really enjoyed it.

  13. Pokemon Scarlet - The bad is obvious if you pay literally any attention to the internet; it's full of bugs, drops framerate for literally any reason, and doesn't even look very good. Granted, Monolith Soft is full of wizards who made the Switch do absolutely unholy things, but the fact that this came out four months after Xenoblade 3 is absolutely embarrassing for Pokemon, considering how much better X3 looks AND runs. Some patches will hopefully help fix the framerate and bugs, but even beyond that the art just doesn't look very good.

    That said, Scarlet is also by far my favorite Pokemon game now, and if we operate solely on the principle of how much fun I had with it, probably the frontrunner for my GOTY. The three plot lines are all straightforward and play out more or less how you expect, but they're all well done and I enjoyed all the characters involved. The music is good, if somewhat forgettable, but the real star of the show is the world itself. There's a lot of Xenoblade and Breath of the Wild here, and it shows because simply exploring everywhere is a treat. No matter where you go, there's always SOMETHING to find, and where BotW fell short (because the only thing it really had to offer was breakable equipment and shrines/korok seeds), Pokemon can offer just about anything and make it worth your time. That weird hill in the middle of the plateau? That's where the Energy Ball TM is. Did you accidentally go down the back side of the mountain? You found the small patch of grass where Dragonite spawns!

    Plus, the game brings in a bunch of nice QoL stuff, such as having your entire box of Pokemon available at all times, letting you swap out at will and rewarding you for catching everything you see. The game also goes the extra mile of giving you shit for every 10 Pokemon you catch, so you're encouraged to do so on multiple levels. I'm told there's some stuff missing from Legends Arceus, but I never played that or Sword/Shield so a lot of this stuff was new to me and I loved it.

  14. Witch on the Holy Night - In comparison to a lot of stuff I played this year, Mahoyo is definitely one of the most limited games in the sense that it is purely a visual novel with no choices or branches - it's 20 or so hours of reading while nice music and fancy animations play out in front of you. Furthermore, the game feels very...limited, as if it's only part of a complete story. As if Fate/Stay Night was just the Fate route and didn't have Unlimited Blade Works or Heaven's Feel attached. Most notably, this comes in the form of limited characterization of Alice, but the game only really has two or three major setpieces up its sleeve. And to be clear, they are very well done setpieces, it's just hard to not get a feeling of "...That's it?" when things come to a close. That said, there is a fairly lengthy epilogue to play through afterwards so there's a least a little something extra to sink your teeth into.

    I'll spare the spoilers, but I do appreciate how Soujyuro does not care or understand anything about the girls' magic technobabble that makes up the backbone of the Grand Nasu Lore™ (just like me!) and while there isn't any actual romance to be had, I appreciate the fucked up love triangle where Aoko is clearly slowly learning to like Soujyuro, but it's really obvious how much more he likes Alice. And for what it's worth, they're supposed to make sequels to Mahoyo whenever Type-Moon finally gets around to finishing The Far Side of Red Garden. Considering that Nasu wrote a canonical sequel(?) to the events of Mahoyo 2 and 3(???) for the crossover event in F/GO, it's the least they can do, really.