Games You Beat in 2023: PXoD Face the Music

[TCP]

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

 

I bought this game when it was released.... 10 years ago (wtf). I remember being really down on Nintendo at the time and not liking the 3DS at all. The resolution was crappy, it was uncomfortable to hold, and the 3D effect never really looked that good. So I played the game, grinded out rupees, bought all the items and then felt unmotivated to keep playing.

 

Fast forward to 2023 and now I have a Steam Deck, which is much more comfortable to hold in my hands than a 3DS. Most 3DS games, including ALBW look really good in HD and the Steam Deck has no issue playing most games at 3x resolution. Well, the game itself looks better but maybe "looks good" is a step too far. The artstyle in this game is atrocious. It's the New Super Mario Bros of Zelda. I'm so glad Link's Awakening got a better art style in the remake than this game did. It's definitely a lowpoint in the series visually. Which is too bad given the whole painting theme with this game, it could have been their excuse to do something really creative and ambitious with the visual style.

 

That said, gameplay is fantastic. I love top down Zelda, but have never really been a huge A Link to the Past fan, I just don't like the way sword combat feels in that game. Fortunately this is much more link Link's Awakening, Oracle games, and Minish Cap. The dungeon design is great, I especially liked Thieves Hideout, Dark Palace, and the Ice Ruins. Lorule, while dumb in concept, feels really fresh. The items you collect compliment the game well and it's focus on layers.

 

You can also see some Breath of the Wild elements in this game. The treasure room challenges are essentially proto-shrines and collecting monster parts to turn into potions is something they'd elaborate on as well.

 

Overall I feel I was too dismissive of this game back in 2013 but I'm glad I could play it now. The Steam Deck is great at breathing second life into some of these 3DS and Wii U games.

 

Grade: A+

[MetalCaveman]

Resident Evil 4 (Wii Version)

 

Controls take a bit of time to get used to, but once you do, it's pretty fun. Aiming is easier, specially with how the reticle changes colours when aiming at enemies or items.

 

Other than that, it's RE4, you already know it's good.

 

Grade: A+

[TheMightyEthan]

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion

 

This game is hard to rate. On the one hand, I found the combat fun, even the weird roulette power-up system that I thought sounded dumb when I heard about it. I also really liked the story, which is pretty compelling if you just accept it's complete anime nonsense. On the other hand, the game really suffers from being a port of a PSP game. The whole game is play for 15 seconds, watch a 30 second cutscene, play for another 20 seconds, watch a 15 second cutscene, on and on and on. It really interrupts the experience. For large parts of the game neither gameplay sections nor the cutscenes are long enough to really get into them before you switch back to the other. There was one point late in the game where literally in a cutscene my character walks out of room helping another character who's injured, I help the character sit down on the floor, it switches to gameplay where I walk 10 feet across the room to a door that is the only interactable object in the room, and as soon as I interact with it it switches back to a cutscene wherein I help the injured character back up and we leave the room together, I put him back down in the next room, where it switches back to gameplay and we repeat the whole process! (The next room was at least bigger, I guess?) Like why? Why not just make it one continuous cutscene?

 

Rant aside, overall I enjoyed it, and I would still recommend it to anyone who wants more FF7 backstory. Just be prepared for it to feel pretty disjointed in its presentation.

 

Grade: C, would have been a B+ if not for the weird structural decisions. 

[TCP]

Super Mario Bros. Wonder

I feel like this is what playing Super Mario World in 1991 would have been like. I mean, I'm pretty sure I did play SMW in 1991 or maybe 1992 at my uncle's house but I was 4 and dumb and didn't understand the difference between an NES and a SNES. So this is what playing Super Mario World would have been like when it was new and you understood the context of what you were playing.

That is to to say, this game is very good. In any other year it would probably be a consensus as GOTY but alas 2023 was crazy.

 

Grade: A++

[TheMightyEthan]

Chants of Sennaar

 

This game is really freakin cool. It's a puzzle game where the puzzle is learning (made up) languages. Basically you wake up in a strange land where you don't understand the language, and you have to figure it out to figure out how to advance. You have a little notebook that records each new word you encounter, and you can make notes about what you think it means, and then periodically there are little puzzles where when you put the right words in it confirms the correct meaning so you can be sure you're right. Initially you start out just doing it based on context clues, but eventually you're also using little Rosetta-stone type inscriptions where you can see the same thing written in two different languages. Each language has its own syntax and grammar though, so it's not simply a 1:1 correlation from one to the next, you still have to work out which word means each thing.

 

It's really neat, and you always have what you need to figure out the next part of the language. Other than a few stealth sections that I didn't particularly like, I enjoyed my whole time through.

 

Grade: A

[MetalCaveman]

Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers

 

Aeons ago I got a game for the 360, got it pretty much just based on the title and cover, Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad. Around the same time, there was another game in the series, this one for the Wii.

 

I didn't have a Wii back then so I didn't play it, and then recently, after finishing RE4 I wanted to play something else while my Wii was still plugged in and in use lol, this one felt like an obvious choice.

 

The English releases were on the same day, which made me think they were different versions of the same game, but as it turns out this is a sequel to BSS on the 360.

 

There are four characters, each with their own story, though one of them is decidedly not canon.

 

Aya is the titular Bikini Zombie Slayer, then you have her younger half-sister Saki, clone soldier Reiko, and Misery, she's just kinda insane and wants to kill everyone lol.

 

The story is not bad actually, sure it won't win any award, but it's enough to keep you interested. Basically, zombies are roaming the land, except they're not all humans turned zombies, instead, it's earth that created humanoid beings to kill humans before humans destroy earth (though a character mentions it might have been a virus in a meteorite), at the same time, people who have Baneful Blood (a sort of curse) have their powers awakened, growing stronger with every zombie they kill though occasionally losing control and going on rampages. Aya and Saki are two such people, trying to live a normal life but unable to do so as they're drawn to kill more and more zombies.

 

Each of the character stories then expands on this stuff, the best one though, was Reiko's, she goes from just mad scientist clone lady who wants to experiment on the main characters, to someone who wants to find a way to stop the zombies and cure the baneful blood curse.

 

Misery's story is just "she kills everyone, the end."

 

Gameplay is pretty simple, but there's some depth if you're the kind of person who wants to land the best combos with the highest hit count, there's even an enemy type that cannot be destroyed unless you use a Cool Combo, which requires some very VERY precise timing. Zombies vary from just shambling corpses to zombie soldiers with gatling guns, and the combat is musou/warriors style, just mowing down hordes of undead, even in the highest difficulty it's hard to get hit, unless you just stand still for a while.

 

Overall, it's a cool game, pretty short, unless you try to 100% all challenges, and obviously the graphics haven't aged that well (even when new, it was a niche, low(ish) budget game), but well worth a play if you're interested in this type of game, though it's also decidedly not for everyone.

 

Main issue is that iirc BSS had some pretty cool boss fights, I remember a zombie whale and other stuff, in this game the only bosses are the other characters, and you can defeat them in 1 or 2 hits of the special skill attack. Except on the highest difficulties. Would have been cool to have some more variety.

 

It has some pretty nice tunes too, spoiler tagging because the thumbnail is about what you'd expect from a game called Bikini Zombie Slayers lol.

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

Grade:  A+

[TheMightyEthan]

Do you just wear bikinis for fun, or is there a plot justification like with Quiet in MGS?

[MetalCaveman]

Just for fun lol, this isn't the kind of series that tries to come up with some self contradicting (remember The End from MGS3? lol) reason to justify one of its main characters wearing a bikini.

[MetalCaveman]

Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad

 

After finishing Zombie Slayers, I wanted to go back and play this one, found out it is backwards compatible so I played on by XOne lol.

 

My first reaction was "this looks way better than I expected" obviously the Wii was never a graphics powerhouse, but I still thought this one would look along those lines, given that the series isn't known for cutting edge graphics, even so, I was pleasantly surprised with how good it has aged.

 

Also, I did remember right, this game has a zombie whale boss.

 

Another thing that surprised me, since I did not remember this one, was Reiko's character arc, in Zombie Slayers she has this redemption arc and acts more calm and more science/research/save the world oriented, while in this one she's just another one of the evil organization's minions.

 

The last boss was also a surprise lol

Spoiler

Is this the part where she transforms into a hideous monster?

Nope, this is the part where she transforms into a super hot demon lady.

 

Overall, it was fun to see this game hold up so well, my biggest issue was that in Zombie Slayers you could use guns to deal with some bosses and enemies that would normally block all sword attacks, while in this one bosses can guard against gun attacks too.

 

Grade: A+

 

Looking at some of the other games I'm playing, I'm fairly sure this will be the last one I finish this year, so, my list for 2023:

 

1. Pokémon Scarlet
2. Ghostbusters: The Videogame Remastered
3. Dragon's Crown Pro
4. Wish: Ishrafil Saga
5. Waifu Uncovered
6. Cyberpunk 2077
7. Moero Crystal H
8. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
9. Seven Pirates H
10. Bioshock Remastered
11. Bioshock 2
12. Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles
13. Resident Evil Darkside Chronicles
14. Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild
15. Seed of the Dead
16. Daemon X Machina
17. Hero by Chance
18. Warlord by Chance
19. Mortal Shell
20. Seed of the Dead Sweet Home
21. Wolfenstein Old Blood
22. Prey (PC)
23. God Eater 3
24. Lords of the Fallen (2014)
25. Alan Wake 2
26. Armored Core 6
27. Resident Evil 4 (Wii)
28. Onechanbara Bikini Zombie Slayers
29. Onechanbara Bikini Samurai Squad

29 Games, not bad! A good mix of new, old and everything in between lol. Looking at my list from last year, I'm up by 14!! Granted, a lot of these were fairly short, but still, a decent list.

[Mister Jack]

Asgard's Wrath II

 

This is it. This is the killer app, the system seller, the reason to buy a Quest. I'm sure a lot of people scoffed at Meta when they tried to enter the gaming space (and don't get me wrong, the Metaverse is still embarrassing), but if Oculus Studios keeps putting out titles of this caliber then Valve and Playstation had better step it up because this surpasses Half-Life: Alyx as the best VR game currently in existence. I don't know where to begin with how much I loved this game. I already thought the first one was really good, but this one is such a leap that it feels like the jump from Half-Life to Half-Life 2. Not only did they fix the few complaints I had with the first game, but they improved things that I didn't even think needed to be improved.

 

Despite the name of the game, this time you're trekking through both the Norse and Egyptian pantheons, with the plot explaining it as Loki's machinations causing the threads of fate to unravel throughout the universe and it falls to you to fix it. The number of animal companions has been reduced to 5, but to make up for it each one can also be used as a mount to traverse the huge open maps. The developers claim this has a 60 hour campaign and yeah, that wasn't a lie. This game is enormous and stuffed with content. 

 

The one major complaint I had in the last game was the divine shield mechanic that required you to parry specific attacks to break the shields before you could do any damage. Divine shields still exist in this game, but they've been improved significantly. For starters, no enemy has more than one shield now, even bosses. Second, you can do chip damage to the shield with regular attacks. Third, there are multiple ways to open up enemy weak points, and if you hit those weak points then it not only does huge damage to their shield but it also refills your own. You never feel like you're just waiting for an opportunity to do damage anymore. Combat is fast, intense, challenging, and responsive. I can easily say this is the best melee combat I've ever experienced in a VR game, and since you're once again playing a god who possesses multiple mortal heroes, that means everyone has a different loadout to play with. Some of them are extremely creative and you would never be able to guess what kind of weapon some of them use. The puzzles are tricky but fair and boss battles are epic. The final boss battle is, once again, the best I've experienced in VR to date. 

 

As if a huge campaign that lasts dozens of hours wasn't enough, they also included a free roguelike mode where you traverse through a dungeon to compete for high scores, farm items for the single-player campaign, and complete challenges to unlock cosmetics for your godly avatar. Oh yeah, almost forgot, you can share your avatar throughout the campaign From Software style to show off your character or give hints to other players. They are also doing seasonal events for the roguelike mode so there will always be new things to unlock. This mode would be the full game for most VR titles and here they just threw it in as a side thing. It's fantastic.

 

If I absolutely had to pick a negative point, and I am loath to do so, it's that it's not a graphical darling compared to the likes of Alyx. It doesn't look ugly, mind you, but as a native Quest game it has to work within the constraints of the hardware. The developers absolutely did the best they could with what they had to work with and what they managed to make is very impressive, but you still shouldn't put this on expecting Alyx level graphics. 

 

That's my only complaint, and it's not even really a complaint, more just me trying to be fair with my assessment. While the game also works on Quest 2, I am so glad I experienced it on the Quest 3, which not only got a graphics patch to take advantage of the extra power but the pancake lenses make it look so damn good. I can't go back to fresnel. Had I beaten this game when we were doing the game of the year poll this one absolutely would have made it onto the list, probably near the top.

Edited December 31, 2023 by Mister Jack

[TheMightyEthan]

3 hours ago, Mister Jack said:

60 hour campaign

 

Well that's me out then. I still haven't gotten through Alyx, which already feels too long for a VR game, and is only like 12 hours.

[TheMightyEthan]

Ghostrunner: Project_HEL

 

Wanted to play this before playing Ghostrunner 2, and it was a pretty cool little DLC for the base game. You play as Hel, one of the bosses from the main game, in the events that occur just before that game starts. Basically you're tasked with taking out the Climbers rebel group, the one the Ghostrunner is tasked with avenging in the main game. It plays more or less the same, but you can jump farther and dash farther, and like Link you can shoot your sword with power if you charge up a meter.

 

All in all I'd say if you liked Ghostrunner you should definitely check this out, but it's not really bringing anything drastically new to the table.

 

Grade: B+

[TheMightyEthan]

Dredge

 

This game is basically a more approachable version of Sunless Sea, which is definitely not a bad thing. You're a fisherman in what at first seems like a fairly idyllic little archipelago, but soon you realize Things Aren't Quite Right (TM). At its core it's what you might expect from a fishing game: you go out and fish, you bring your catch back to sell, you use the money to upgrade your boat, etc. However, at night the ocean is full of monsters that will attack your ship, and you lose sanity while you're sailing in the dark, but there are also valuable fish that are only available at night. You also discover a mystery to unravel that I won't spoil, but it's pretty neat stuff.

 

The trouble is, I think it's simplified a little too much. The characters you encounter are interesting and creepy, and they do a very good job of creating an unsettling atmosphere, but there's just not enough of it. I wish the main quest was longer (I beat the game in just over 10 hours), and that there were more side-quests and characters to engage with. Obviously "I wish there was more" isn't a huge criticism, but it did leave me feeling a little unsatisfied at the end. What's there is good, it's just a little bare-bones.

 

Grade: B+

 

And that's probably the last game I'm gonna get to take off my backlog this year.

[Pojodin]

 

Definitely less gaming this year, but I'm satisfied with what I played.

 

1.       The Outbound Ghost

2.       Vampire Survivors

3.       Psychonauts 2

4.       Dead Space (2023)

5.       Yakuza: Like a Dragon

6.       Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

7.       Resident Evil 4 Remake

8.       Octopath Traveler II

9.       Tails of Iron

10.   Moonscars

11.   Rocky Rodent

12.   The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

13.   Final Fantasy XVI

14.   Record of Lodoss War-Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth

15.   Endling: Extinction is Forever

16.   Street Fighter X Mega Man

17.   U.N. Squadron

18.   Ninja Gaiden (NES)

19.   Chained Echoes

20.   Sea of Stars

21.   Toem

22.   Lies of P

23.   Blasphemous 2

24.   Hime's Quest

25.   A Juggler's Tale

26.   Yarntown

27.   Super Mario RPG (Switch)

28.   Lost in Random

29.   The House of the Dead: Remake

30.   Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

[TCP]

One last game!!!

 

Metroid Prime Remaster

 

Fun fact: I've never finished this game before. I got maybe half way through on the GCN version (playing on a Wii) back in '09 or maybe '10 but stopped somewhere around the part where you see Metroids in tanks and the lights go out. I'm not sure exactly why! I do recall enjoying it. Maybe Uncharted 3 came out and I got distracted?

Anyways, so essentially I've been playing a 20 year old game for the first time. When this game is great it's very great.

Unfortunately it's also very tedious:

• Did you just walk back into a room you were just in? Fuck you! The enemies are all respawned. Seriously though, for a game that wants you to backtrack they sure didn't make it fun.
• Save points are few and far between.
• Defeated enemies will give you bombs when you need health or vice versa.
• The underwater section, without the suit that makes mobility easier, is SO slow. And then when you do get the suit the platforms are all still arranged for the old suit so you can easily over jump an fall all the way to the bottom.
• Speaking of the underwater section, I got about 75% through it and then the game told me I can't progress. Thanks for letting me waste my time!
• Want to get to the ice area from the overworld? Ha fuck you!
• See something cool that you can't get yet so you want to mark it on your map to come back to? Also fuck you!

However, the world design is (mostly) great. The music is great. The power ups are awesome. Most of the bosses are cool (except Thardus who got stuck in a wall which made hitting it's weak spots very annoying. Visually the game is gorgeous Nintendo/Retro did a good job cleaning it up. I just wish they'd put some QOL changes into the game as well. 

 

Score: B+

 

That finalizes my list of games that I've completed this year:

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - 2023-06-21
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D - 2023-06-23
Super Mario 3D Land - 2023-12-03
Starfield - 2023-12-03
The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds - 2023-12-23
Super Mario Bros. Wonder - 2023-12-25
Metroid Prime Remastered - 2023-12-31

 

This is compared to three last year (both Pokemons and New Vegas) so.... I'm basically MetalCaveman or Pojo. Ok maybe not but as you can see I did pretty good in December.

[TheMightyEthan]

Got Starfield in there as a combo-breaker on your Nintendo streak.

[TheMightyEthan]

Alright, the post I know you all wait for all year, TME's gaming summary!

 

First, the full list of games I beat for the first time this year:

 

I beat 55 games this year, up from 48 last year. More than a game a week! I'd say that's pretty respectable. On average each game was 2.5 years old when I finished it, but that's being thrown way off by Final Fantasy VII (OG) and Dino Crisis, both of which are 25 years old. If we look at the median instead then it drops to just under 4 months, which I think is a lot more reasonable and representative.

 

 

Continuing to the platform breakdown, as you can see PC dominated this year, not surprising since I built a new PC in January, though to be fair to Xbox a great many of those PC games are Xbox-published, like Hi-Fi Rush. The two Xbox games I did play I actually could have done on PC, but both of them (Signalis and Venba) due to the art style and 60-fps caps wouldn't have been any better on PC so I played them on Xbox just cause it uses less power. With Playstation and Nintendo the only games I played on those platforms were exclusives. Pokemon really drove up the total hours for Nintendo, which is why it's so disproportionately high, as you can see in the average hours per game.

 

 

Xbox is low mostly because Venba is really short, like 2 hours, and even Signalis (the other game I played on Xbox) is only like 8 hours. It's interesting how close the averages were for PC and Playstation, and how close they both were to the overall average too.

 

And that brings us to the breakdown of the calendar.

 

 

October had the highest number of releases, which I suspect would be true of a lot of people this year, that month was nuts. May was low cause I was playing Tears of the Kingdom, same with October because of Starfield and then Cyberpunk. My highest completion rates were August, which is a bunch of short games I think just by random coincidence, and December, which is because I was trying to clear as much of my backlog as I could before the new year, so I was specifically playing small games. I'm still going into 2024 with 9 games on my backlog though!