My Favorite Video Games of 2023
It’s been a great year for video games. In 2023, we saw the release of the Resident Evil 4 Remake, Baldur’s Gate 3, Final Fantasy XVI, Armored Core 6, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Pizza Tower, and more.
I haven’t played any of those. I’m cheap, and my video game backlog is long.
So for me, this has been a year of trying classic turn-based role playing games for the first time, as well as revisiting a few old favorites. I also got married this year, so in between wedding planning, my year was largely spent breaking my old 3DS out of storage and catching up on portable titles that are easy to pick up and put down in short bursts. I also tried most of the the main Final Fantasy titles in chronological order for the first time.
So here are my thoughts on the games I played in 2023, most of which didn’t come out in 2023.
In alphabetical order:
My Favorite Video Games of 2023
Essential titles that belong in anyone’s library
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest. Really, I want to nominate the whole Donkey Kong Country series on the Super Nintendo, but I’m going to single out DKC2 as the best one all-around.
The Donkey Kong Country series was a bit before my time, generationally speaking. Donkey Kong 64 was my first Donkey Kong entry, and the prior games passed me by, even though side-scrolling platformers have traditionally been a huge staple of my gaming diet. I’d heard their soundtracks were god-tier, and sure enough, they were. Each and every game featured their own share of musical bangers, and they really were a delight to listen to.
And as I’ve always heard, the first three DKC games were terrific. Mechanically, they’re really fun to play, they’re challenging in ways that feel fair (mostly), and each one iterates on the last in interesting and satisfying ways. DKC2 introduces new animals you can ride on, increases the type and variety of levels, and foregrounds more environmental challenges. It also subtly features a wider screen that allows you to see slightly farther to the right and left, which really helps in certain difficult platforming sections. DKC3 pushes the series formula to its limit, introducing levels that utilize both the foreground and background, a hub world that you can backtrack around, and the ability to save at any time.
I found these games all quite hard, with each game featuring rapid difficulty spikes in places (such as Mine Cart Madness), or sudden escalations where things become nearly unbearable. Still, when I beat those nightmarish levels, I felt a great deal of accomplishment. Difficulty is a tough needle to thread, because I think people want a game that is challenging, but doesn’t make them want to quit out of anger and spike their console through the window. DKC1 has its insanely tough segments, and DKC3 is markedly easier than the first two games. DKC2 seemed to strike the balance well, though its last level was absurdly difficult. You can really tell how accessibility and video game difficulty has changed over the past 30 years, because I really don’t think I would have been able to complete these games without the use of save states. Whew.
Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D. In a word, DKCR3D is charming. It looks charming, sounds charming, feels charming to play, and is an all-around pleasant, enjoyable experience.
Released over a decade after DKC3, Returns 3D immediately sets itself apart from the series’ older titles with a new variety of enemies and abilities, including the hover, roll, vine climbing, and the ability to breathe on enemies and items. I love the new rocket levels where you have to keep Donkey Kong suspended in the air, bobbing and weaving around obstacles. The levels where you play against the sunset, with the characters in silhouette, are also inspired. It doesn’t seem revolutionary, but it’s a welcome addition. You’re still just controlling Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong, but it’s quite cute to see their tie and hat be lit up. The animations broadly look great, even if the 3DS sometimes struggles to maintain a constant 30 FPS.
The orchestrations of the original DKC soundtrack go a long way to establishing that this is a capital-D Donkey Kong Country game. The music has slightly different instrumentation depending on if you’re viewing the broad world map vs. the smaller sections, which is a detail I’d love to see in games more often. The fact that it’s just David Wise’s music in the beginning makes it feel like a bit of a retread, but there’s far worse games you could blatantly ape (sorry).
There’s a few other minor iterations found in the game that make it an enjoyable experience, even devoid of the first three DKC games for context. Having a health meter makes this game feel less life-and-death, and hearts are generally plentiful. This is a good way to balance difficulty and challenge in a platformer. There’s a reasonable amount of collectibles, which encourages replayability and discovery. That much has definitely been pared back from DK64. The autosave is also a welcome feature, although it does remove any need to visit Wrinkly Kong so she can manually save your progress. I guess she just up and died in the late 90s. Pour one out.
Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of An Elusive Age — Definitive Edition. It was around the 50th hour of gameplay that I realized something important: Dragon Quest XI S is the best turn-based RPG I’ve ever played.
Dragon Quest games are not ones to rock the boat. Most follow the standard-issue RPG formula. You assemble a party of swordsmen or magic users and explore the world, taking turns bonking enemies on the head until they die and give you experience points, so that you can continue bonking more powerful enemies on the head. Along the way, you’ll meet groups of people who need your help and who will assign you smaller quests. Eventually your group will destroy the big boss, usually God/the Devil/the personification of evil itself.
The thing about Dragon Quest XI is that it does all this stuff so well, and in such a charming way, that it’s impossible to put down. It’s addicting because everything is refined and beautiful, and I’m not just talking about the gorgeously animated and expressive artwork by Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball fame. There was a week that I put a straight-up alarming amount of hours into it — nearly 25 hours in less than 5 days.
The world itself is a series of intricately laid out multi-layered cities that resemble puzzle boxes. These delicately designed locales reward exploration, chilling out, and seeing what everyone does or has to say. Every location has nooks, crannies, buildings, and alleys to look through, and every one is unique and different from the next. Every new place has its own regional dialect and accent, with one town featuring Italian speakers, the next Spanish, the next French, and so on. Even the NPCs are rewarding to talk to, doling out important lore and hints for later quests and story beats. Your party members are all distinct and have such personality that I simply want to hear what they have to say after each and every single story beat. And they often have a lot to say.
The combat isn’t flashy, but it’s engaging, and at higher levels, often requires thought, delivering on the steady dopamine drip that you need from a turn-based RPG. Bosses can be tough, but are rarely unfair — it just requires attention be paid. Your squad levels up, encounters newer enemies, explores new places, equips new items, etc. all relatively quickly, and it never feels like a chore.
Dragon Quest games get a reputation for requiring unrealistic levels of grind. “You’ll have to bonk guys on the head for hours in order to get to the next stage” is a common complaint. Yet I never felt that to be the case with XI. In my travels, if I stopped to fight a few enemies on my path to the next dungeon or inn, that was usually sufficient. My characters were always around the place where they needed to be (maybe I needed one level more here, or one level less there). But battles never felt like a waste of time just to get strong enough to bonk one specific enemy on the head.
DQ games also have a reputation for being long — longer than a lot of other RPGs. XI is a long game, with some estimates that it could take players upwards of 140 hours to get through everything. In terms of sheer number of hours, it’s the longest game I’ve played all year, and it’s not even close. By the time the 30 hour mark rolled around (roughly the amount of time required to beat the average Final Fantasy), I was still in Dragon Quest XI’s first act. At 70 hours, I was still in the middle of the second act. Yet I didn’t mind at all. I wanted to keep playing, and not just because of the potential to win it big at the in-game casino. I beat the true final boss at the 100 hour mark, although I had taken a lot of detours to collect items, complete sidequests, level up, and hit the jackpot at the casino.
It’s an easy game to relax with for a half hour here or an hour there. It is an ideal RPG for the Nintendo Switch for that reason. It’s a nice warm bath of a video game — a title I can see myself easily sinking 100 hours into without a care in the world. And then I can see myself sinking dozens of hours into every other game in the series. Whom amongst us doesn’t love a warm bath?
The music is pretty bad, though.
Final Fantasy IV (DS). This game represents everything that a sequel should be. Everything from Final Fantasies I-III that could be improved, iterated upon, and made better, has been. It’s no wonder the original Super Nintendo game is viewed as one of the best RPGs ever.
Instead of using four party characters that are either stuck in their classes or semi-regularly change jobs, Final Fantasy IV has a rotating cast of 12 that maxes out to five players in the party. All are characterized well, with varying personalities, type advantages, different skills and equipment needs. The player is naturally encouraged to mix it up with them and see what works best for their play style.
The story is the best in the series up to this point — the Dark Knight Cecil has reservations about what his King is commanding him to do, but to try to get back into the King’s good graces, he accepts a new assignment, and it all falls apart from there. No orphans in this one, unlike I-III, though there are crystals and a chosen one. Among the way, the people Cecil meets are wildly different, fun to converse with, and are all very memorable. The plot twists and machinations are fun and exciting, and the story blows FFIII’s out of the water, though ultimately it does fulfill the trope of a group of teens coming together to defeat God and/or the personification of evil.
The game is made easier than FF3, without much grinding required — though I’m told the DS version is, in fact, noticeably more difficult than the SNES original. I got my ass handed to me more than a few times for not paying attention, and the endgame required a lot of grinding on my part because I didn’t know to use the DS version’s new augment system to get through the final dungeon.
The introduction of the Active Time Battle system is a revelatory game changer. Instead of going in order by character (or, as in III, a wildly unpredictable order), IV’s pace of combat is a mix of turn-based and real-time, with actions and character movements based on that party member’s speed. It’s such a step towards the future that it’s no surprise that the developers at Square used some variation of it for years across multiple series. Though the DS version’s animations and frame rate are still fairly slow, the game doesn’t feel as lethargic as III sometimes did, because the player has to manage so much. There are scripted combat encounters too, which represents its own huge leap forward for the story and intertwines story and combat well.
The game also utilizes the DS’s two screens far more effectively than the DS remake of III did. The top screen is now used for movement, displaying characters during combat, and dialogue, and the bottom screen is often used for menus, displaying character health/statuses, deciding combat choices, and displaying a map inside of dungeons/towns. No longer is one screen turned off for the majority of gameplay. It seems like such a small thing, but it’s a massive improvement and really shows how great turn-based RPGs could be on the DS family of systems.
Final Fantasy V Advance. The Final Fantasy series is often one of incremental iteration, building upon the ones that came before it, with very few total departures in tone, style, or mechanics. FFV will not be an unfamiliar game for anyone who played I, III, or IV, but it does represent an apex for a certain kind of FF entry. V took a while for me to warm up to, but once everything clicked into place, it was a terrifically rewarding game, one of the best 16-bit RPGs around.
My route to V is circuitous — I played I and II via the Dawn of Souls re-release on Game Boy Advance, then played the more sophisticated DS versions of III and IV, and then went back to the primitive GBA for the release of V. I expected that I’d never be able to get over the visual step backwards from the look of III and IV on the DS. Not just in their use of full 3D models, but how maps and other relevant information was displayed on the bottom screen, leaving the top screen uncluttered. Most of my fears were allayed.
The transition back to a single screen is eased by the return of the crisp, dynamic Dawn of Souls art style. The 16-bit GBA graphics are very expressive, and the world is clearly visually defined. With new character animations previously never found in the two-dimensional titles, it’s a treat to look at and observe.
The biggest way that V iterates over IV is in the use of a job system — much like III, each character you control can choose to play as different jobs as your party progresses through the game. However, instead of being stuck as one job, improving a limited set of skills, you can take certain qualities, traits, attacks, and skills from other jobs with you as you move through the extensive list. It’s really quite fun to experiment with what classes yield what skills, and the player is encouraged to stack, mix and match abilities to create deadly combinations. I was a big fan of one character, Bartz, who, by the end of the game, was a ridiculously powerful two-handed Mystic Knight who could also cast level 4 black magic spells.
It’s mostly an easy game, pretty friendly to new RPG players yet challenging enough for series veterans. Because V has an absurdly high encounter rate, at no point was I under-leveled. You can hardly get through a single room without running into at least 3 or 4 enemies. This is good for leveling up your classes fast, but I actually found myself skipping encounters towards the end because I wanted to beat the game, and I didn’t need the extra experience. I died a few times throughout my adventure, but it never required extensive grinding to get past bosses as IV (or especially III) did.
As much as I enjoyed V (and I played the hell out of it), it did feel like a bit of a step down from IV in terms of story richness and music. Though there are standout tracks (I prefer V’s Battle theme over IV’s, and the ending montage is terrific), the score often lacks leitmotifs that are as catchy, iconic, or memorable. The story is also more simplistic, at least at first — the story centers around four warriors of light who have to save the world’s elemental crystals before everything is destroyed. This is nothing we haven’t seen before, and it lacks the twists of IV, but it’s a different type of story — one that’s far more lighthearted in tone.
V also lacks the massive number of cast members that IV does — only 5 main characters compared to 12. But because the story is so centered on the five, I found myself getting very attached to Bartz and the gang, and I didn’t want their story to end. They are given more character development because they are given more focus. They’re more humorous and expressive than the occasionally dour ones in IV. Without any spoilers, one lovely, meaningful twist of the knife is that if you beat the final boss with one (or more) of your party members being fainted, the story’s coda reflects that status in a very touching way.
Here’s an interesting problem I encountered: how the overworld navigation is depicted on the GBA. You can open the map revealing what the world looks like, where points of interest are on the map, and your location — but there is no legend telling you what points are where. In fact, none of the games on the portable Nintendo systems had one. I got lost quite often and had to consult more than one map just to find out where to go next, or to make sure I was returning to the right town.
The recent Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series has a legend in their map views, so this is specifically a problem with the older releases that has since been iterated out. If you’re going to play V (and you should), play the Pixel Remaster version. Every other version has been rendered obsolete.
Even if FFV may not be as monumentally important to the RPG genre as IV, I still really enjoyed my time with it, and couldn’t put it down. I’m still thinking about it months later, and despite my small quibbles with it, I ultimately have come to prefer it over IV. It’s also my favorite Final Fantasy title thus far.
Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory. I’m just going to show my ass here: no one is more surprised than me that I’m including this game so high on this list.
When I heard that the next Kingdom Hearts game was going to be a music-based rhythm game in which players experience the previous games’ plots from another character’s perspective, AND it was going to have its own new story beats that would be central to the overarching story, AND it was going to be $60, I laughed. I chortled. I guffawed. Tetsuya Nomura can’t keep getting away with it, I thought!
And yet, I have to hand it to him—damn it, it’s fun. He’s done it again.
I can see the logic behind the pitch. Genre experimentation is no stranger to this series. The Kingdom Hearts series has occasionally strayed from its traditional action RPG roots, such as the card-battler Chain of Memories. And the franchise’s music has always been a high point of the entire RPG genre, just as it has in its sister franchise Final Fantasy. That series even has its own respective rhythm game offshoot series, Final Fantasy Theatrhythm. This formula seems plausible on paper.
Mechanically, the game’s rhythm gameplay is kind of…odd. As you hear the music, rather than tapping icons or mashing buttons as the music plays, you hit enemies in time. It also incorporates casting magic spells and jumping to dodge projectiles. It’s hard to get used to initially, because I found myself wanting to attack the enemies far before they got so close as to be in time with the music. Eventually, something clicked with me, and this bizarre process became quite enjoyable.
As your characters are running, jumping, and fighting on a sheet music-esque track, you fly by the levels and areas found in the worlds of the previous games. The game’s style fits with the series’ visual aesthetic surprisingly well, and the music is, of course, excellent.
As a music game itself, I’m not sure how it fares. Compared to rhythm games like Rock Band where you’re listening for one specific instrument in the mix, in KH:MOM, you hit the notes associated with several different instruments in the same song. The notes you hit often switch between strings, wind instruments, and percussion, which can be disorienting. On higher difficulties, it can be tough to tell what instruments the notes you hit are or will be referring to. Sometimes the notes correspond to the dominant instrument in the song’s mix, but at other times, they just don’t.
As your character runs across the levels from the previous games, battling enemies from throughout the series, you see quick vignettes that attempt to explain the franchise history up to now. It’s hilarious that Square promoted this as the first KH game available on the Nintendo Switch, and I’m so amused thinking of someone whose introduction to this wildly convoluted franchise is this game. I’m really not sure what they’d get out of it, plot-wise.
The last hour brings in new plot developments, and it’s kind of a hilarious car crash. You’re abruptly introduced to why this game is happening, there is a feeble attempt at rationalizing the final “boss fight”, and you’re left with a cliffhanger that sets up Kingdom Hearts IV. It’s awful in the same way that the plot of Kingdom Hearts III was awful, and the writing is, of course, as bad as ever, giving me no hope that IV will be any less disappointing than III was.
I love the franchise, and was really pleased with Melody of Memory, but good god, someone needs to take away Nomura’s keyboard. He can’t keep getting away with this.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. Come on, man. You don’t need me to tell you about Ocarina of Time.
The 3DS re-release from 2011 incorporates a few quality of life updates, makes switching items easier, and has a more steady frame rate. The 3D effects often look stunning, though not as eye-popping as those in Super Mario 3D Land. The upgraded textures look great, and the UI on the second screen makes dungeons a breeze. It’s the canonical way to play a canonical game.
It’s an era-defining classic, it’s the game of the Nintendo 64 to me, and it’s held up beautifully. Ocarina of Time is my childhood, and when I play it, I’m reminded of how vast and expansive it felt at 5 years old. Hyrule Field stretched on forever, and in my memory, it always will.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD. You also don’t need me to tell you about Wind Waker. It’s the other titanic Zelda title of my youth, with one of the greatest soundtracks in the entire medium.
The upscaled version of Wind Waker that was originally on the WiiU presents players with some valuable quality of life improvements. The old soundtrack made up of tinny MIDI files has now been fully orchestrated. The game is now in native widescreen and HD, and it appears the cel-shaded graphics have been touched up. The game always looked beautiful because it didn’t strive for realism, but there is distinctly more bloom in the HD re-release. It works most of the time.
It appears Nintendo really took the criticism of the game’s initial release to heart, particularly when it came to the story’s pacing. You can acquire a faster sail reasonably quickly, making traveling the wide open ocean even breezier (sorry). To be honest, I never thought the sequences of sailing across the open ocean were that monotonous to begin with — I enjoyed the brief respites from fighting monsters to meditate on your adventures and enjoy the game’s vibes. But it does undeniably help move things along.
There are some smaller adjustments, too, that also work to speed the game along. Text boxes go by much faster, occasionally beating music cues to the punch. The grappling hook animation is significantly sped up. These aren’t things that someone new to the game would notice, and all of these improvements make for an experience that you can finish in about 20 hours if you don’t go for a completionist playthrough.
It’s beyond me as to why Wind Waker isn’t on the Nintendo Switch. I can safely say that it never once required the use of the WiiU’s touch-pad; the entire game can be safely played on a traditional controller. Maybe the Miiverse stuff is too deeply woven into the tapestry of the re-release, but I doubt it.
Metroid Prime Remastered. “Hey, wait a minute. That game came out this year. Spencer, you hack,” I hear. Somehow it’s the only game that came out in 2023 to appear here.
There’s two elements of Metroid Prime Remastered that need to be talked about: how beautifully the original Metroid Prime has aged, and how impressive the remaster quality is.
Metroid Prime is still incredibly polished and well-realized, and would easily stand among the most satisfying games released in 2023, if it hadn’t already come out twenty-one years prior. The music is the best in the franchise, and the vibes are second-to-none. It’s an extremely atmospheric game, and the different parts and subsections of Tallon IV are all incredibly unique and memorable. Metroid Prime is a sticky game, in that it’s very easy to recall. I could remember exactly where I was, where hidden items were, what was coming next, and generally what I needed to do, even though I hadn’t played this game in more than half a decade.
If you know what you’re doing, the game is surprisingly linear, but if you lose your step once or forget where you’re going, you’ll soon find yourself backtracking. I’ve beaten this game before, and on one or two occasions, I got distracted and lost enough that the game had to point me in the right direction. I’m thankful for those hints, but it does get a bit tedious. They still come up at times when I’m already making my way over to where they would point me.
In terms of actual structure and design, the game’s biggest problem to me is that there’s five sections of the world, and there’s no way to go from section A to E. You have to go through B or C in order to get there, and it’s often very tedious, especially in the late game. In my opinion, this is what people complain about when they talk about Prime’s backtracking. If there was one more elevator to take you from A to E, it would alleviate a ton of annoyance.
The game’s story is brief and can be easily missed, but it’s surprisingly funny, especially as you access more Space Pirate log entries. If you actually read the non-essential documents you can scan, you come across a lot of Space Pirate bureaucracy, with pirates in the C-suite threatening their underlings if they get out of line, if they let Metroids out of line, or if they bring the Metroids to work. That’s a great joke.
As far as the remaster goes, it’s among the best we’ve seen yet, as it retains the spirit of the original game while making slight tweaks and improvements everywhere. The new twin sticks control scheme was a necessary step forward, compared to the awkward still-trying-to-figure-console-shooters control scheme of the 2002 original. It’s nice that Retro Studios left it in as an option (although I never used it). The game has also included a gyro mode akin to the extremely polished Metroid Prime Trilogy release on the Wii, which was always my favorite way to navigate these games.
The visual overhauls look extremely polished, accentuating the depth and vibes of the world and its levels. Textures look authentic and subtle, and never draw attention to themselves, and nothing looks out of place. The new lighting looks great, and I especially love the new dynamic lighting that comes off of Samus’s arm cannon as it pulsates. It’s a shame that they got rid of how your aimed shots and beams dynamically light a hallway, elements that were in all previous re-releases, although that seems like a sacrifice to maintain a constant 60 frames per second on the Switch.
You owe it to yourself to pick this one up if you haven’t already. The remaster is the canonical way to enjoy a game that’s aged like wine.
Super Mario 3D Land. I owe you an apology, Super Mario 3D Land. I wasn’t really familiar with your game.
I unfairly tagged 3D Land as mid when I first played it — fine, but short and unremarkable, and not nearly as memorable a game as Super Mario Sunshine. 3D Land tries for something different: a brisk, concise evolution of the formula established in Super Mario Galaxy 2 and New Super Mario Bros. There are hub worlds containing levels, which themselves contain challenges and collectibles, and that’s it. Because it forsakes a larger overworld and extra mini-games found in Super Mario 64 DS, the levels are the best they could possibly be, with focus on quality above all else. There is no extraneous meat on this bone. The game is short, but it’s high-quality, feeling like a natural extension of the best levels found in the two Galaxy games.
The changes it makes to the Mario formula are noticeable. The triple jump is gone, though this is probably for the best, as it would completely break most levels and render an easy game even easier. The game is easy, but it’s never insulting.
That is, until World 8 and the post-Bowser special worlds, at which point the game says, “alright, you’ve had your fun, now square up,” and ramps up the difficulty. Some of these special worlds contain challenges that focus on the time limit, turning something that has historically only been a minor nuisance into a genuine threat, in a way that revitalizes having to revisit older levels. It’s very clever, and it’s really fun to see how this game influenced the later Mario titles, including Super Mario Odyssey and even Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker.
It also ends up possibly being the best use case for the stereoscopic 3D on the entire 3DS. It’s often subtle but occasionally is extremely effective at creating a depth of field, particularly in the water levels. The backgrounds really do look as if they’re far away, and particle effects such as vapor trails and water bubbles also look spectacular. It’s the same reason that 3D was effective in the Avatar movies.
Team Fortress 2. Between many high school afternoons, summer evenings, and college late nights, Team Fortress 2 is the video game I’ve put the most time into by far: over 26 days’ worth. And by 2013, I was done with it; I’d done my tour of duty and that part of my life was over.
Until this summer, when a substantial new update came out that piqued my interest enough to play TF2 despite not having touched it in nearly a decade.
It’s been really delightful to come back to after all this time. The combat and team mechanics are still solid as a rock. You pick one of 9 classes of character and work with your team to capture the flag, capture control points, or push a bomb to its destination. It’s intensely satisfying when all goes right and you and a bunch of strangers work together to accomplish a shared objective. Some of the maps (Steel, Dustbowl) are the most tightly constructed of any multiplayer game in history. It simply feels good to play together as a cohesive team, and even smaller objectives have weight to them — it’s a great feeling to deflect a rocket, blow someone up, pop an uber as a medic and lead your team to capping a point, etc.
It’s got a very low barrier to entry, it’s pretty accessible for beginners, and it’s got a very high skill ceiling. Plus, since it’s free and fifteen years old, it’s almost guaranteed to play on any machine, so there will probably always be new players. It runs terrifically on the Steam Deck as well, and you can very easily make a competent controller configuration on it. This is the best-case scenario for a team-based multiplayer shooter.
I struggled for a long time with other squad-based shooters (I found Overwatch 2 underwhelming), in part because at one point, TF2 was ubiquitous and was so self-evidently the greatest team multiplayer shooter ever. What a joy to find out that it still is.
Honorable Mentions
Games I would recommend if you enjoy the genre or franchise
Downwell. In Downwell, you fall down a well. There are procedurally generated obstacles and enemies that impede your progress in falling down the well. You can keep yourself afloat with gun-boots that allow you to dodge obstacles or defeat enemies. You can periodically find and buy powerups to assist your falling. You will fall further and further down the well in your attempts, until you eventually beat the big boss at the bottom of the well.
That’s all well and good, but what that description doesn’t tell you is that this game is hard as shit. Very likely the hardest game I’ve played all year. It’s really fun, and does reward the player for getting farther along, but it is tough. A friend of mine wisely said it was like chess — easy to pick up, but nearly impossible to master.
The enemies get more ferocious as time goes by, the obstacles get more dangerous, and health becomes very hard to find. Getting from the beginning to the end doesn’t actually take that long — around a half hour — but it requires intense focus, lightning-fast reflexes, and also a fair bit of very good luck. I was able to get to the end boss several times, but could never beat it because some minute projectile always got me when I wasn’t looking. Whether it’s an unfair game is debatable, but I don’t think it is. It does feel certainly more luck-based than other roguelikes such as The Binding of Isaac.
Even if I didn’t beat the game, I picked it up on a Steam sale for a dollar, and I put around ten hours into it. I got my money’s worth.
Metroid Dread. The original Metroid was inspired by the original Alien movie, and Metroid Dread returns to that spirit of extraterrestrial horror in a way I haven’t experienced in any other Metroid titles.
The EMMIs, fierce and terrifying robotic enemies, are this game’s new addition to the franchise. They are both infuriating and terrifying, much like the Xenomorph. In the beginning, you are absolutely helpless against them, and are only barely able to escape them. You cannot kill them without the occasional powerup, which harkens back to the original Metroid, where it feels like everything can and will kill you, without provocation. Thankfully, the game’s map and overworld is a lot more varied and fun to explore than that of original NES game. Gradually, as Samus explores, she gets those necessary powerups and becomes a real force to be reckoned with.
The game is hard, and I died a lot. But it almost always felt fair. There were very few times that I felt that the game was being cheap, or that my death was unearned. I either wasn’t good enough, or I hadn’t learned what to expect or hadn’t learned how to counter moves. Countering is extremely satisfying when you can pull it off.
The game can be beaten in a reasonable amount of time without feeling like there was too much time spent backtracking. I completed it in about 10 hours, having spent a few of those exploring for additional equipment, which proved necessary for the final boss. Unfortunately, by the time Samus is decked out with all the bells and whistles, and can annihilate everything in her path, the EMMIs feel like more of a nuisance than an actual problem to be dealt with. It’s a shame that there’s about two more of them than there needs to be. But the final boss is tremendous, and it’s so nice that it’s not just Ridley or a Mother Brain again, when we had already gotten a Kraid retread (to be fair, a good one).
The music is fairly anonymous. I can’t recall a single track or leitmotif, unlike the earlier Metroid, Super Metroid, or Primes. Still, if that’s my biggest complaint, it’s a good one to have.
Rogue Legacy 2. I don’t have much to say here, surprisingly. The original Rogue Legacy is my favorite roguelike, and 2 is a classically great one.
It creates randomly-generated dungeons that you venture through, defeating enemies so that you can power up and defeat bosses. You will die a bunch, but that’s okay, because your next character inherits a number of items from the one who just died, such as bountiful EXP, and plenty of gold, powerups, and accessories which help a lot.
You can technically breeze through the game from the beginning if you’re good enough, collecting power-ups and defeating every enemy in your path. The game teaches you how to do this, and allows you to do so. You probably won’t be able to, though. If you died, it’s presented as a skill issue rather than an issue of your being under-leveled and under-powered. This isn’t necessarily as frustrating as it sounds, and despite a lot of deaths, incremental improvements are easy to see and keep track of. The game rewards exploration, continued play, and doesn’t punish you unnecessarily for dying.
The improvements you get feel quantifiable and real, the world is expanded with new classes, new power-ups, and new enemies to fight, and the writing is charming and oftentimes pretty funny.
Rogue Legacy 2 is simply a great roguelike.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I also don’t have a lot to say about Spider-Man: Miles Morales, other than that it’s a worthy interquel to the original Spider-Man from 2018.
I don’t have a lot to say because the game is simply fun. I enjoy web-slinging around Manhattan. I like beating bad guys up. I like going through the challenges, some of which are based on web swinging agility, and some which are based on tool usage and combat. The different variety of side missions around the city are welcome, and the stealth/traversal/combat challenges are a nice way to spice things up.
Much of the game, like its music, art direction, and dialogue, is directly linked to and influenced by Miles being raised in Harlem. It feels very lived-in, and is an excellent way of showing personality without necessarily having to tell it.
Maybe more than anything, I like how short and concise this game is. It gives players a lot to do in a little bit of time. The main story can be completed in about 4 hours, and the whole game can be 100%’d in about 15. It’s nice, short, sweet, and never wears out its welcome.
This might sound like an overly negative positive review, but it’s a breath of fresh air when compared to a number of other games this year (keep reading) that offered a lot to do with very little variety or substance.
Slightly Less Honorable Mentions
Games with a few things holding them back from being all-time classics
Final Fantasy III (DS). Let’s say you hypothetically work at Square Enix in the early 2000s, and you have to design a turn-based RPG that can work on a device with two screens.
You know players can’t look at two things at the same time. Maybe you think to put the action on the top screen. That way, maps, menus, and combat commands can go on the bottom screen, to try to make a clean display. Maybe cutscenes can be cropped vertically, so that someone on the bottom screen can look up to the top screen and see something happening above them. Now you’re really cooking with gas.
Instead, in Final Fantasy III on the DS, the top screen is often simply blacked out for long stretches of time, with your movement, combat, and HUD all squished together on the bottom screen. The top screen only comes back to life when you’re on the overworld, where it displays a map with no legend.
When you pause the game, it moves your characters up to the top screen, only because it couldn’t fit everything, everyone, AND the menus on the bottom screen. When you’re inside a dungeon or in a battle, the top screen is blacked out. The opening FMV utilizes both screens to show something moving on a vertical plane, and this is the only time it happens. It’s so disorienting, and having one screen blacked out for extended periods is never not weird. It irrevocably mars what is otherwise a fun game.
I bounced off of Final Fantasy II hard, and the traditional combat in III is more enjoyable. It doesn’t necessarily innovate the formula established in I until it introduces the job system. Characters select one job out of a list, level up that class for a while, and can then select another one. Most of them are worthwhile, useful, and very few are simply superior to another, although you will have to stick with a dedicated healer for the majority of the game. The story is very reminiscent of I, at least initially — four chosen ones are told they have to go on a quest in which they encounter crystals, visit various townsfolk, and beat bad guys. It’s not bad — just not refined. Final Fantasy V really commits to this job system, bringing it to its apex.
III is simple, but it’s a fun, addictive RPG — another one I couldn’t put down. The combat was enjoyable and made me think. I felt there wasn’t much artificial grind, and the difficulty was appropriate enough.
At least, until the ending, which is a death march. The game’s final sequence is a series of mini-bosses and later regular bosses that lasts between 2 and 3 hours, in which you are unable to save during that time. If you die, you start all the way at the beginning of the gauntlet. I beat it, but only barely at times. I felt very satisfied in beating the game, but it didn’t surprise me to hear that professional critics put the game down after dying in the final boss rush. I can’t blame them.
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. I really wanted to love this one, because I really did enjoy the first Lego Star Wars way back on the GameCube. But this one kept me at a distance.
Mechanically, it’s quite solid, with more powers and ways to hack and slash than in the original game. The colors and character models look vibrant, particularly in 4K HDR, and everyone is very expressive.
But the pacing is a mess. Starting in chronological order, so much of the prequel trilogy’s missions involve walking to a place, talking with someone, following them to another location, embarking on a quick mission that also involves talking or following, and repeat. Because this game is fully voice-acted, the first 3 episodes feel sluggish, unlike the GameCube game, which had to get by on silent characters acting out quick pantomime. That old method actually worked far better because they were just Lego figurines.
There’s not actually that much mission variety until far later in the series, around A New Hope, but by then, you’ve sunk several to a dozen hours into it. When the game actually lets you off the hook and gives you missions with more variety to them, it’s fun, and there’s some very inspired stuff here. And once you’re finished with the movie content, the free roam can be a blast because you’re given a lot of choice, and a ton of stuff to do and collect.
But it’s too much. There are way too many collectibles — something like 1,200 LEGO bricks to collect, hundreds of characters and dozens of ships to buy, and around 20 planets, all of which have interior and exterior areas. If you enable the power that allows you to see collectibles that you haven’t picked up yet (a necessity in some levels), your on-screen display becomes a noisy, incomprehensible disaster.
If you have hundreds of hours to sink into it, it may be a worthwhile investment, because there’s certainly a lot to do. But there’s also a hundred hours worth of content in the aforementioned Dragon Quest XI, which wasn’t a sluggish, noisy mess at times.
Lego Star Wars seems designed for play on the Nintendo Switch where you can pick it up and play it for 5–10 minutes at a time; ideal for a game like this. I enjoyed it, and beat all the episodes, and collected around 500 of the bricks, but my god, it’s big. Too big.
Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga (3DS). There’s a lot to like about this remake of the Game Boy Advance classic, but ultimately it’s a mile wide and an inch deep.
Instead of being a full-fledged RPG, the appeal of Superstar Saga was that it tried to toe the line between being a platformer and an RPG inside the Mario universe. Your “party” consists of Mario and Luigi, who each excel at different things, and your powers in combat are stronger if you jump or use their special abilities in the right time frame or in the right order. The story isn’t very sophisticated (look, nobody goes to a Mario game for the story) but it’s got enough twists and turns to keep things interesting. The dialogue is often very funny, and the writing is far better than a Mario game would demand.
The remastered visuals for the 3DS look astonishingly good — everything is full of life and the animations look great. But as was usual with 3DS games released late in the system’s lifespan, well after the Switch had even come out, the 3D wasn’t utilized at all. Once again, one of the best benefits to having an RPG on the 3DS is being able to relegate menus and UI elements to the second screen. It’s not really possible to do that on the Switch, and it’s used to great effect here.
The different types of stages and enemies are initially fun (there’s the obligatory Mario water world and desert land), but it does get repetitive towards the end, because the RPG party mechanics are not terribly deep. The combat also becomes stale by the end of the game because there’s just not a ton of depth to it.
The last act is when all my issues are put under intense scrutiny. The story runs out of gas somewhere around the 12 hour mark. At that point, the game introduces a series of small collectathons in which you have to run around the world one more time to find four objects. Two of these objects include smaller collectathons inside of those collectathons. It’s quite tedious to begin with and seems to never let up.
On top of that, in what had otherwise been a leisurely game, the last level contains a rapid-fire series of seven increasingly tough boss fights, culminating in maybe one of the most artificially difficult final bosses I’ve ever experienced. I was tired of the game and wanted it to be over, but it required yet more grinding.
What could have been a great 12 hours dragged out to almost 20.
Dishonorable Mentions
Underwhelming games that I would discourage from playing or revisiting
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD. This game vexes me because it can be good, it should be good, and oftentimes is good. But in equal measure, it is frustrating, tedious, mechanically unsound, and is occasionally one of the least-functional games I’ve ever played. It is often a brutal test of patience with sometimes frighteningly little reward.
Zelda games are generally uncomplicated. In most entries, Link acquires items, solves puzzles using those items, and beats up monsters found in dungeons in an attempt to save Princess Zelda and/or the world. That’s no different here.
The gimmick of Skyward Sword upon its release in 2011 was that the player would be dependent on the Wii remote to use items, swing your sword, and solve puzzles. Ideally, the player would have a 1:1 parity with Link — when you swing the Wii remote left, Link swings his sword to the left. When it came out, I was so over the Wii and its motion controls that I didn’t give it the time of day. In the decade since, the game has developed a polarized reputation for being too handhold-y and slow, and for interrupting the flow of things too much with dialogue boxes explaining self-evident gameplay elements — so I decided it wasn’t going to be worth my time.
That was a bad call on my end. At times, it’s brilliant, with some very inspired puzzles and sequences, incorporating weapons and tools from older games in new and interesting ways. I love the way the game looks, with Cezanne-inspired landscapes that are simply pleasing to take in. The story that frames Link and Zelda’s relationship as a mock high school romance for the ages is a genuinely new take on established canon, and the character arc of their classmate Groose is a very funny one.
The high-definition remaster for the Nintendo Switch gives you the option to fast-forward or skip most dialogue boxes, it cuts back on repetitive interruptions and hints, speeds up the pace of conversation in general, and also presents an alternate control setup that allows use of a traditional controller rather than the motion control method transposed onto the Switch Joy-Con. These are all positives.
I wanted to use the motion controls — that’s the gimmick of the game, right? And when it worked, it was mostly fun. You swing the Joy-Con, and Link swings his sword in a corresponding direction. It’s satisfying….when it works. But I found it incredibly unreliable, to say the least. It was too wonky for me to stick with for more than a few hours. There’s a button to press that calibrates the control to the middle of the screen, but it’s not flawless. The act of flying with motion controls was a particular nightmare, as it requires you to move your wrist in unnatural ways for extended periods of time, as was using an item that required flying to catch and move objects.
Similarly, the combat showed promise that it couldn’t deliver upon. It was designed as a showcase for the Wii Motion Plus, which was supposed to give 1:1 parity between the player and Link. That sounds really fun in theory. But in practice, every enemy has a gimmick to beat them — you have to swing the sword one specific way in order to do damage. And that’s fun. Once. And then every time after, when you encounter that same enemy, there is no strategy — just rote memorization.
If you don’t do the “puzzle” to beat the enemy correctly, your sword swings are either blocked or you lose health in a way that feels unfair beyond the feeling of “I should have been paying attention, the enemy got one over on me.” Some enemies can be defeated with other items or methods, but not all of them. Skyward Sword discourages improvisation in a way that older Zelda titles, particularly 2003’s Wind Waker, welcomed. I don’t believe this is a skill issue — for most low-level enemies, there is only one way to get rid of them.
In the way its world is structured, Skyward Sword opens itself up to other uncomfortable comparisons with Wind Waker. Instead of taking place on a big sea containing many different little islands, this one takes place high above the earth in a sky complete with floating landmasses. Despite being far smaller in terms of pure distances between landmarks, it feels so much emptier than the Great Sea. A significant portion of Skyward Sword’s islands simply have nothing to do — they’re seemingly there for decoration. Both games have their fair share of tiny islands dotting the map, but I can’t recall many in Wind Waker that simply had no objects of interest on them, or nothing to interact with until the story dictates. If you went off course and explored the sea, you may not be able to get into every dungeon, but there were people to see on the way, things to encounter, enemies to battle, or something to investigate. Even if you were locked out beyond a certain point because you don’t have a given item or haven’t triggered a story event, exploring the wide-open ocean was still more satisfying than having a blank space that presents you with nothing to do.
I’ll conclude by saying that it’s very rare that I have nothing good to say about a new gameplay mechanic, but the stamina meter as it’s represented here is something I have nothing but contempt for. To say I was frustrated by it is an understatement for the ages. Traditionally, Link has had one running speed, or can go slightly faster via rolling. In Skyward Sword, Link can sprint for about 5 seconds before he gets too tired to move, attack, or run, at which point you have to wait for the meter to recharge.
You are vulnerable in every way if this meter runs out. At certain places throughout the levels, you can collect a small fruit which will replenish the meter to 100%. But there’s no way to permanently improve or extend this meter beyond the use of temporary potions, which last a few minutes at most. This represents a serious, inconsistent break with how your other in-game items can be improved, such as bows and shields. If you collect a certain number of crafting requirements, you can upgrade the number of arrows you can fire, or your shield’s resilience, for example.
It’s not an exaggeration to say the game is built around this artificially low stamina meter — entire puzzles are crafted around making you almost deplete the meter, stop at the last second and save yourself from depleting it, and wait for it to regenerate. It stalls the level’s momentum, forces the player to wait, and limits motion and behavior in a way that isn’t offset by any benefit to the character. If you run out the meter, you don’t receive a boost to any other attribute — it simply makes the player a sitting duck until it refills again. One specific boss battle is structured around Link running up to it while it ambles away, and Link is never naturally fast enough for long enough to catch up to it. It is a total failure, and it’s obviously something that Nintendo learned from and iterated upon in 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, because you can expand and improve your stamina meter in that game.
It really blows me away that Skyward Sword got a ton of perfect, 10/10, A++ reviews back in the day. For me, it was often hanging out in C+ territory. Shows promise, needed work.
Red Dead Redemption. I liked this take on the Wild West well enough when it came out, but didn’t love it. Going back to it years later, it was immediately apparent to me why: the mission design is one-note.
You ride your horse to the market or a similar location, listen to somebody talk at length, ride with him to a second location while he continues to chatter, shoot some guys, and the mission is complete. Every single mission is like this.
Actually, that’s not entirely true — initially, there are some missions that involve rasslin’ up some horses, guiding cows back into the herd, and other non-firearm-related activities. But these appear in hour 1, and then re-appear in hour 30, well into the epilogue, after hours and hours of chatter and murder. If you’ve spent dozens of hours riding around, hunting the local wildlife, playing darts, or tying up damsels to the railroad tracks, it’s entirely possible you’d have forgotten about the game’s elements that didn’t involve blowing somebody’s brains out.
Unfortunately, the story is pretty dull here as well. Retired outlaw John Marston sees his family captured by the government, and he’s gotta track down and bring in some outlaws whom he used to run with in order to get his family back. That’s a decent enough story, one you can easily imagine a 1970's Clint Eastwood being the protagonist of.
Except Marston is an empty vessel — emptier than any Eastwood character — with surprisingly little interiority. Marston is no Josey Wales or William Munny (Unforgiven). Marston is a character that people talk at, and not with.
For the first ten hours or so, he experiences no real character growth, and appears to not really understand anything about the larger world. He rides from place to place, and growls at the local townsfolk that he’s gotta get his family back. That’s the extent of things, and ten hours is a long time to spend with a dopey protagonist. The only real texture in the world comes from everyone else who yammers on in his general direction. The world contains some genuinely memorable characters, setpieces, and environments — it creates a stark contrast with the utter void of charisma at the center of the story.
Let me use an example. In the story’s second act, Marston is driven south to Mexico, and in searching for his former band of outlaws, chooses to work for both the local state’s authoritarian ruler and the rebels in opposition. Marston doesn’t have the upper hand on either side — he’s not working towards a goal to play one side against the other. Not really. He simply bumbles into conversations and quests supporting both groups at the same time. He defends himself in several conversations, telling the rebels that he isn’t working for the army, but this comes after he has blown away dozens of rebels in a row. It’s inherently contradictory, and the lack of immediate consequences for working both sides actually makes him appear witless, as if he doesn’t know what’s going on. Rather than a cunning hero, he’s a rube American, who invaded another country with a six-shooter.
It’s a good thing that riding around and mowing down people is fun, because the story can be a real slog. Locomotion and movement is always something that Rockstar Games excels at, even when their stories falter. I also thought the story of Red Dead Redemption 2 was repetitive and tedious, but the sequel’s gameplay was varied enough to keep me interested. There was a lot to do, a lot to see in a grand and expansive world, and a large variety of side quests. It’s just too bad I can’t say the same about the first game.
My Favorite Game That Actually Came Out in 2023
Pikmin 4. It is one of the best strategy games of all time, full stop. If you like cute little guys, if you like solving puzzles, if you like micro-management and multi-tasking, or if you like watching little animals battle larger animals, you must play Pikmin 4.
Your character crash lands on a strange planet, and soon commands and controls a rapidly-growing army of Pikmin, cute flower-like creatures that can pick up objects, fight larger enemies, and solve puzzles. Some Pikmin can be used to traverse through water, others are fireproof, others can be thrown farther, others can pick up heavier objects, and some are more useful for combat.
Pikmin 4 trades in the previous games’ winding, linear levels densely packed with goodies. Instead, players explore sprawling, wide-open, moderately-packed vistas that contain caverns that themselves are densely packed. The Pikmin that you command are smarter, the challenges require more strategy, and with the previous games’ arbitrary time limit removed, the player is given greater leeway in how to beat the game’s challenges, which they can later replay to improve their times or scores.
The game introduces new Pikmin types and brings back all the older ones. There’s a new night mode that comes with its own combat-oriented challenges that test the player’s strategic thinking apart from collecting treasure. There’s also indoor environments, and replayable treasure-hunting “Dandori” challenges that encourage the player to come back and improve their skills so that they can collect items faster, lose fewer Pikmin, and be the best task manager that they can be. The postgame is also worth your time, reimagining challenges found earlier in the series with an added layer of difficulty.
It’s also maybe the most beautiful Nintendo Switch game out right now. The art style is iconic and easy to parse even with a lot of action happening on-screen. You will never lose track of where you are in a haze of particle effects, Pikmin, and monsters, and your Pikmin all look distinct amidst the chaos of combat. There is more ambient noise because of the Switch’s improved specs over previous systems, but it’s never noisy or confusing. The cute characters are more expressive than ever, and the vistas have massive draw distances that somehow never come at the expense of frame rate or fidelity. It all simply looks good.
Mechanically, it’s the best that a Pikmin game has ever played. It’s as close to the perfect Pikmin experience that money can buy. Pikmin 4 is a hands-down recommend from me. It’s got anything and everything a franchise newbie or a long-time fan could ever want. Now if only we don’t have to wait another ten years for a sequel.
But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my big gripe with this game—truly, my only gripe — the only thing that keeps it from being an all-time classic:
Nintendo removed the couch co-op mode that was in Pikmin 3 Deluxe.
Gone are the days in which two characters can run around, commanding their own separate Pikmin squads, working together to collect oversized knick-knacks. Instead, Pikmin 4 has a limited co-operative mode that is much more akin to the one found in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, where one person controls the main character, and the other person has a reticule with which they can point and throw pebbles at monsters, chipping away their health. Rather than it being a helpful way of assisting my wife in taking down bad guys, I found it distracting. The second player’s reticule doesn’t disappear during cutscenes (a real confusing choice) and it creates another visual element that the player has to look past in the course of collecting goodies.
Still, I’m hoping that Pikmin 4 is such a runaway success (it’s the most successful entry in the franchise already), that Nintendo adds an update that includes real co-op. If that happens, I’m gonna start buying copies and showing up at people’s houses, shoving it in their faces.
