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Well, that was 2022. Don't even think about how much money your government has printed recently and how worthless that makes the money you've been saving up. Sure, the world's gonna get crazy but the vidyagames are pretty dang nice right now, not gonna lie. I played some great old stuff too like Dark Souls - yes, again! But this time I played through the whole game with a level 1 character to prepare for Elden Ring. Spoiler alert: it did not prepare me for Elden Ring.
1. Elden Ring - [PS5] I got my first taste of massive open worlds with Daggerfall in '96. I got bitten and somehow later on turned into a vampire! This totally blew my mind and I suspect the excitement I felt in that one moment of surprise was the driving force that kept me playing its huge but shallow world with bland towns and identical NPCs for much longer than was sensible. Fallout 3 was similar. Backed into a corner where I found my first laser pistol, I felt a thrill as I blasted my way out of there, disintegrating raiders in slow-mo. I actually think open world games are generally like this, where in some perfect moment the promise of massive open worlds, that promise of endless freedom, adventure and discovery, actually seems true and sets the player's heart ablaze. Of course, that illusion is inevitably shattered later, but that treasured memory sticks with you. That's why we keep coming back to open world games when we could be playing games that are more focused, detailed and refined. We want to feel that feeling again, like we're chasing a high.
That gamer's high, that we all had in some cherished open world memory, Elden Ring gives you that feeling A LOT. Stepping out into Limgrave for the first time and seeing the intimidating Tree Sentinel patrolling up ahead, with the gargantuan ruined bridge on the horizon. Looking around and seeing castles, caves, catacombs and camps all just beckoning you towards them. And then you look up and there's the ghostly golden glow of the sky scraping erdtree hanging there above you. It all fills you with awe and you get that high. Then when you encounter your first troll, and you’re trading blows and he suddenly gets serious and draws his sword and the earth shakes as he’s charging around waving it everywhere, but you decide to try a jumping 2-handed R2 to his face, and he falls to his knees giving you the riposte opening, you get that high.
When you’re fighting your first crucible knight for the seventh time and you can never quite seem to get out of the way of his attacks fast enough, and then he goes for his devastating earthquake stomp and suddenly you just know. Like you’re Neo at the end of the matrix realizing he can see all the code, you’re no longer afraid. You avoid the knight’s quake stomp damage by jumping straight up in the air and then parry his slash as you land and suddenly the tables have turned and you feel empowered - that’s when you feel that high.
When you’ve well and truly conquered the incredible Stormveil, and you step out onto the cliffs above Liurna of the lakes and see its vastness stretching out before you and realize after all the amazing things you saw in Limgrave you’re likely just getting started, you get that high. And when you’re exploring the spooky depths at the bottom of a well, making your way past harpoon happy mudmen and giant enemy crabs to a vast cavern with a ceiling so high, the glintstone twinkles like distant stars, and then you’re attacked by freakin’ giant ghost Vikings, of all things, and in that moment it hits you: “wait a minute! this amazing world and its massive map...does it really have an underworld map about the same size as its overworld map?! Meaning it’s roughly double the impressive size I thought it was?!?” Well, yeah...in that moment you are most definitely feeling that gamer's high.
Of course haters can never understand. “The Lands Between? More like 'The Lands between the crack o' my ass!' The world is EMPTY!” Lol. There’s an avalanche of things to see and do, but can you imagine how dumb it would be if they were all right next to each other with no traversal at all? First off it’s immersion breaking, since IRL space exists between objects. Furthermore, there’s no joy of investigation, no thrill of discovery if you can’t wander off the beaten path and find things on your own. Or how about this one? “They recycle bosses!” Well, that kinda is true. There are almost no boss fights in this game that are not repeated in some form. Usually with some kind of variation, like the boss has a new weapon or is paired up with another boss, but it’s still the same boss. Although this isn’t really a problem. The bosses in this game are so good that I’d be pissed if I didn’t get to fight any of them at least a couple more times and show off that I mastered them. What matters is there is a ton of boss variety. The game is just so massive and has so many boss battles that even with a huge stable of bosses, they end up repeating. If there’s really something you can’t stand about fighting a twist on an awesome boss you already saw, all I can say to you is “gg” and I don’t mean “good game.”
Then there’s the hater’s coup de grâce. “They just keep making the same game over and over again! This is just open world dark souls!” Ding ding ding! You are correct. Somehow, some way, Elden Ring takes the stellar level design and excellent action combat of the souls games and makes an entire, enormous open world odyssey using them, and it's glorious. How glorious? Each dark, spooky cave and creepy catacomb is legitimately designed with thought and care, filled with booty, beasties and bosses for maximum fun. None of that randomized dungeon crap, and no half-assed copy-pasta dungeons either. This absurdly large game has enough legit content for 10 dark souls games at once. And that is precisely why it's easy peezy lemon squeezy game of the yeezy for ole Ebeneezy. For reezy. Everything is the dark souls of this and the dark souls of that. Well now we got the dark souls of open world games.
While masterpiece is an accurate description, Elden Ring has real flaws. The first half of the game just seems to have much better designed areas overall compared to the later game. I'm not talking Izalith lava lake headless chicken dinosaurs, but there is a noticeable decrease in quality. Consider for example, entering Castle Morne with its corpses piled like mountains, creepy disfigured misgotten guarding its paths and climactic beautiful beach battle with a lion man monster, and compare that to say... being in a snow storm where you can't see anything. Or take the winding ways and secret segments of the sublime castle Stormveil, and compare it to something like Deeproot Depths, where a bunch of ruins are just spaced out from each other with 50 annoying basilisks waiting in the bushes. There are still great areas in the late game, but it's a much more uneven experience compared to Elden Ring's frontloaded fabulousness. The late game enemies are so ludicrously tanky as well. I don't know why, but From decided to give late game giant bears and crows enough HP to make the regular game feel like new game++. It's as if they're scared their game might not be hard enough for veteran players, but they can't be assed to come up with a new challenge.
Anyway, I don't wanna bring the party down. Elden Ring is still Dark Souls Christmas, with wonderful weapons, superb spells, and an entire squadron of lore waifus. And while it may not be the greatest game ever made, it is the greatest first half of any game ever made, which is still reason enough to call your mom and start hyperventilating. And this isn't even its final form. Nobody remembers a Dark Souls without Artorias. So as for what Elden Ring will be once all is said and done, with massive DLC the size of a whole normal game added? Well, no one knows for sure, but "Game of the Generation" has a nice, elden ring to it.
2. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - [Switch] The worlds of Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 collide in this game, literally. But they also collide in the sense that their races, places and faces appear. Sometimes the way they're included is disappointingly superficial. Party members like Lanz may look like a Machina, and Eunie may look like a High Entia, but neither know anything of the history and culture of the XC1 races they appear to represent, anymore than Sena and Taion's XC2 core crystals serve a non-cosmetic purpose. Likewise, locations like the distant fingertip and Urayan titan, where I experienced powerful story beats in those first 2 games, now pop up as ruins for environments to be built around in XC3, and while the game has a logical explanation for why all these sentimental sections of the previous Xenoblades appear, it kind of amounts to them not actually being the real versions of those places. Don't get me wrong. These characters end up being great anyway, and the environments have all the delicious diversions and secret summits that Xenoblade is known for, it's definitely level design worthy of the series. But I enjoy myself even more when I'm playing a completely new Xenoblade with a completely original setting, the way I got to in the last 3 games.
There's other times where XC3 ties XC1 and XC2 together perfectly. The battle system is bliss, featuring strengths from both games, and allowing any character to learn any class and mix XC1 cool down battle arts together with XC2 auto-attack recharged arts on the battlefield. Plus there's evasion arts like in XC2, where a button press with precise timing can avoid a powerful enemy attack. It also retains XC2's ability to cancel arts into other arts for increased effect, along with that game's excellent "overkill" system, wherein you get bonus XP and treasure for doing as much damage as possible to an enemy after you've already killed them during a chain attack, so you always have a good reason to do the best chain attack you can.
Speaking of chain attacks, it's not just combining great stuff from the older games that makes XC3's combat so glorious - it has plenty of new things to offer as well, including what is probably the best version of chain attacks ever. Chain attacks are like your team super move, and while I love each game's different version of this mechanic for what they offer, XC3's version has the perfect amount of risk vs reward vs luck vs skill. It feels so great to pull off an excellent chain attack and turn a battle around.
There's much more to praise about the combat than that though. For the first time you can dash around the battlefield quickly! There's "Elites" now, stronger versions of regular monsters that are perfect for when regular enemies seem too weak but uniques seem too strong. And there are unique bosses that fight in teams, so you can fight 2, 3, even 4 bosses at once! Also, aquatically this game is on a whole other level. Every Xenoblade fan knows what it's like to be in a battle on the shore and move too close to the water and suddenly they're swimming like a useless idiot instead of fighting. Well in Xenoblade 3 you can fight whole battles while swimming, and there's a bunch of badass new aquatic monsters to tussle with also.
If you're on the fence about Xenoblade 3, I got 2 words for ya. PIRATE. CATGIRLS.
Really there's so much going on with the combat. The large roster of hero characters who fight alongside you, the huge amount of customization, your Ouroboros transformation where you become a big purple killing machine for a bit... and don't even get me started on my favourite, Noah's late game talent art where he draws his world breaking sword, Lucky 7. That thing is so badass that a power-charged "Gravity Blow" to a launched enemy in the later rounds of a chain attack smashes for millions and can really wreck a boss's HP, even on hard mode.
Graphically, this is the first Xenoblade game since XCX on the WiiU to not constantly be blurry to look at. Thanks to something Digital Foundry calls "temporal upsampling" XC3 finds a way to at least be smooth when it can't be sharp. Voice acting is also excellent, with the exception of Ghondor, who has the most cringe-tastic Australian accent since FFXIII's resident bush-pig Fang. Then there's the music, which has been consistently phenomenal throughout the series. Battle themes were particularly strong in this game. I don't think I could ever see any boss battle theme actually surpassing the legendary energy of "You Will Know Our Names" from the first Xenoblade, but XC3's "You Will Know Our Names Finale" is SO good, I have to consider them equal. The Moebius battle theme is also pretty hype.
The story is good too for what it is. There's dramatic set pieces, big twists and thought provoking themes. But there's a kind of implied promise in setting the game in the combined futures of XC1 and XC2 that you're going to meaningfully connect those futures, and this game didn't really do that in a way that satisfied me. But just like Elden Ring, this isn't even XC3's final form. There's a Torna sized follow up game coming by the end of this year. Maybe it will answer all my burning questions, but then that game really IS Xenoblade 3's final form. It's probably Monolift soft's last Xenoblade game ever.
What a gloomy thought. I love Xenoblade so much that a future without nopon and chain attacks sounds like a dark and scary place where I don't wanna live. But moving on is part of life. We can't just freeze time like some kind of Moebius pussy to avoid moving forward. We gotta be chads and brave the unknown, or we won't get to see Monolift soft's awesome unannounced action rpg!
3. Tunic - [Switch] Tunic is a magical experience. The beauty of indies like this is how a creator's clear artistic vision can be realized without corpo nonsense homogenizing everything to the point where video games all start to feel the same. Which isn't to say Tunic doesn't feel like any other game. Quite the opposite. Tunic is very deliberately designed to make you feel the sense of wonderment and mystery you'd experience as a kid playing The Legend of Zelda in the 80's. Exploring a dark cave and not knowing what you'll find. Coming across a big monster and having to run away. Finding a treasure chest with some exciting new weapon in it...that kind of exploration and discovery is what the game is all about.
Tunic's Nintendo nostalgia is brought to life with visual presentation that's as simplistic as it is stylish. You're looking through a locked isometric window into world of clean, clear fields, forests and ruins, which have treasures and secrets atop beautifully blurred, out of reach cliffs in the foreground. There's deep blue waterfalls, pointy polygonal grass, and long, lingering shadows. Maybe these things wouldn't add up to ooze so much atmosphere if it weren't for the game's incredible soundtrack that accompanies your wanderings, but those chill beats further enhance this isometric indie's immersiveness.
No elaboration on Tunic's artistic pleasures would be complete without mentioning one of the game's ingenious meta mechanics. As you explore Tunic's mysterious map you'll find the scattered pages of what turns out to be the instruction booklet for the very game you are currently playing. Each page is mostly written in a made-up gobbeldygook language, but still provides invaluable hints on where to go and what to do because of the coloured drawings of your little fox character that are copying the charming illustrations of Link in the Zelda manual from the NES days, right down to the golden cover. Zoom in close and you can even see the printer's dots! There's still more to it though, because this is a pre-loved manual, with the coffee stains and frayed edges to prove it, along with helpful notes and doodles that show secret doors scribbled in blue pen. It really is a splendid homage to one of the lost joys of video games, the instruction booklet.
This game is flirting with a Nintendo lawsuit so hard that its nipples are showing, but there's another strong influence on Tunic's design, and that's Fromsoft's sensational souls series. Obviously souls owes a lot to Zelda in the 1st place, but to the extent that souls built on that Zelda template and defined its own path, many of the things that the series is famous for are in this game. You chug health potions like they're estus, resting at bonfire-like shrines allows you to do upgrades but also respawns all the enemies you've defeated, trekking back to your corpse after dying means you can loot treasure from it, you can even parry your enemy's attacks. Most importantly, the game seeks to provide challenging combat, so if you're intrigued by how atmospheric and stylish Tunic sounds but don't like dying a lot the way you do in souls games, just be aware.
For my part I loved the combat, especially the boss fights, as much as I loved wandering about lost pondering the manual and listening to trippy music. But while I had a ton of fun with Tunic, the game did eventually lose me about 75% of the way through. There's another meta mechanic in the late game that had me completely baffled. With some vague help from the manual you're supposed to see "Konami code" style combinations in the environment. For example, in a field with flowerbeds on it, you're meant to observe a pattern from the flower arrangement and enter something like ↑, ←, ↓, ←, ↓, ←, ↓, ←, ↑, →, ↓, →, →, ↓, → on the d-pad. I found this way too obtuse and had to give up doing everything in the game by myself, but even when I cheated and looked things up I still found these puzzles a pain. So Tunic did really put me off at this point, however this is late game optional stuff for completionists, keep in mind. Despite that quibble I still liked Tunic a lot and highly recommend it, especially to those with nostalgia for retro gaming.
4. Bayonetta 3 - [Switch] Bayonetta kind of perfected the action game. Well there's always your Sekiros and Bloodbornes and whatnot, but Bayo perfected a kind of feverishly frantic combo frenzy dodge 'em up that solidified Platinum as the No.1 name in character action games. Everybody from God of War to Kirby copies witch time because everybody wants to be Bayonetta. Even Platinum's other great action games all kind of have that feeling of "it's a bit like Bayonetta, but with x." Revengeance is a bit like Bayonetta with chopping stuff. Wonderful 101 is kinda like Bayonetta with sentai. Well Bayonetta 3 is exactly like Bayonetta, except it's not, because it's Bayonetta... with Kaiju.
All of Bayonetta's classic gameplay elements are here, but there's much ado about these building sized behemoths that you can summon at any time to join in the battle. When you do so, Bayonetta stops moving and does a sexy stripper dance while her giant scorpion or infernal spider trades blows with equally massive enemy monsters. Some people couldn't dig this and it killed their enjoyment of the game. It did bother me at first, mainly because the monsters lurch about so slowly in such a fast paced game, but once Bayo 3 started introducing mechanics that activate monster attacks instantly, like a monster counter button or sudden monster summons during witch time, I warmed up to them real fast and eventually saw Bayonetta's rolodex of kaiju as just another great part of a great game.
Firing up Bayonetta 3 for the 1st time, I was more worried about the new character, Viola. At 1st glance she made me think of the type of character you see in modern movies and tv who shows up to replace the star everyone loves in a politically correct bait-and-switch. I half expected her to turn to the screen and lecture us about how Bayonetta being sexy is wrong and we all need to "do better" while we were forced to play as Viola for most of the game. Fortunately, Viola does not take over the game - she's Bayonetta's goofy sidekick who gets caught in slapstick accidents like tripping over, losing her weapon and even having her pants catch on fire. Gameplay-wise she has her own style based around parrying with her katana rather than dodging. Along with Jeanne's "elevator action meets metal gear solid" 2D levels, Viola's gameplay sections compliment Bayonetta's core missions with just the right amount of variety, and I actually ended up liking the character. Hell, I even found her girly pop punk battle music embarrassingly catchy.
The real problem is that the game can get a bit framey at times. And it's not a looker. I would constantly pause the action during some awesome monster match-up to try and take a cool screenshot, but no matter which way I rotate the camera, everything just looks blobby and grimey. Just to make sure I wasn't crazy I fired up Bayonetta 2 again and sure enough, Bayo 2 is a pretty game. It's obvious what's going on though. I never thought I would ever describe Bayonetta 2 as "sensible" but its levels are mostly combat corridors and appropriate arenas. Bayo 3's ambitiously large levels where you can instantly summon multiple massive monsters are comparatively coo-coo, so it's no surprise the game makes whatever dorito chip the Switch uses for a GPU overclock so hard salsa is leaking out the sides. The prudent gamer might wait and make sure this excellent game is definitely on your list as a top priority for when it gets ported to Nintendo's next system, similarly to how Bayo 2, a Wii U game, is best enjoyed on the Switch.
But even on this hardware it's an awesome game. From Gojira battles to swinging over a huge city like Spiderman, to turning into a train to an astonishing battle where a giant toad demon becomes a gothic popstar princess, this action packed, setpiece stacked combo-gasm IS a must play. Bayonetta 3 has all the wonderful weapons, all the killer combat and all the satisfying scoreboards it needs for its madcap multiverse story to be everything everywhere all at once plus kaijus minus some frames here and there.
5. Tactics Ogre Reborn - [Switch] From humble beginnings in a small village in Niigata prefecture, Yasumi Matsuno somehow ended up directing Ogre battle, FF Tactics, Vagrant Story and a good chunk of FFXII before he’d had enough of Square's BS and jumped ship. If I recall correctly Matsuno wanted, amongst other things, for the stoic warrior Basch to be the protagonist of FFXII while Square wanted it to be the vest flaunting, shirt rejecting sissy boy Vaan. It reminds me of when Raiden was added to MGS2. Konami conducted some market research and found Snake wasn’t appealing to women and thus Raiden, the hero who appeals to everyone, was born. Ahh, the deadly dance of soulless suits vs crazy creatives, with our entertainment lives hanging in the balance.
Tactics Ogre is Matsuno doing whatever he wants, which it turns out is ball busting strategy combat and an eloquently told mature political drama in a fantasy setting. If you've played FF Tactics or seen the empire in FFXII, the immersive, medieval sounding dialogue should be familiar. But now, When heroes are ardently affirming their convictions and villains are jeeringly rehearsing their exposition, each character's lines are enriched by right proper fancy English voice acting that really makes the story cling together.
"I will become a sort of tactical ogre." "That's... not a thing." "Just work with me here."
As obviously similar as Tactics Ogre is to the FF Tactics games, with its isometric pixel platoons and dual wielding ninjas and the whatnot, it has a lot to distinguish it as well. There’s the time turner that lets you undo multiple turns, which you badly need to be honest. There’s also cards that appear on the battle field that give combat bonuses. Collecting a good set of 4 cards can greatly strengthen a unit and really impact the outcome of the fight, but it’s no little thing to spend all those turns chasing cards down when there’s a battle raging. You can also recruit dragons, cockatrices and even octopuses (octopi?) to wage war with you. If you never played it and you like the genre, Tactics Ogre is a legit classic that’s perfect for the switch.
1. Elden Ring - [PS5] I got my first taste of massive open worlds with Daggerfall in '96. I got bitten and somehow later on turned into a vampire! This totally blew my mind and I suspect the excitement I felt in that one moment of surprise was the driving force that kept me playing its huge but shallow world with bland towns and identical NPCs for much longer than was sensible. Fallout 3 was similar. Backed into a corner where I found my first laser pistol, I felt a thrill as I blasted my way out of there, disintegrating raiders in slow-mo. I actually think open world games are generally like this, where in some perfect moment the promise of massive open worlds, that promise of endless freedom, adventure and discovery, actually seems true and sets the player's heart ablaze. Of course, that illusion is inevitably shattered later, but that treasured memory sticks with you. That's why we keep coming back to open world games when we could be playing games that are more focused, detailed and refined. We want to feel that feeling again, like we're chasing a high.
That gamer's high, that we all had in some cherished open world memory, Elden Ring gives you that feeling A LOT. Stepping out into Limgrave for the first time and seeing the intimidating Tree Sentinel patrolling up ahead, with the gargantuan ruined bridge on the horizon. Looking around and seeing castles, caves, catacombs and camps all just beckoning you towards them. And then you look up and there's the ghostly golden glow of the sky scraping erdtree hanging there above you. It all fills you with awe and you get that high. Then when you encounter your first troll, and you’re trading blows and he suddenly gets serious and draws his sword and the earth shakes as he’s charging around waving it everywhere, but you decide to try a jumping 2-handed R2 to his face, and he falls to his knees giving you the riposte opening, you get that high.
When you’re fighting your first crucible knight for the seventh time and you can never quite seem to get out of the way of his attacks fast enough, and then he goes for his devastating earthquake stomp and suddenly you just know. Like you’re Neo at the end of the matrix realizing he can see all the code, you’re no longer afraid. You avoid the knight’s quake stomp damage by jumping straight up in the air and then parry his slash as you land and suddenly the tables have turned and you feel empowered - that’s when you feel that high.
When you’ve well and truly conquered the incredible Stormveil, and you step out onto the cliffs above Liurna of the lakes and see its vastness stretching out before you and realize after all the amazing things you saw in Limgrave you’re likely just getting started, you get that high. And when you’re exploring the spooky depths at the bottom of a well, making your way past harpoon happy mudmen and giant enemy crabs to a vast cavern with a ceiling so high, the glintstone twinkles like distant stars, and then you’re attacked by freakin’ giant ghost Vikings, of all things, and in that moment it hits you: “wait a minute! this amazing world and its massive map...does it really have an underworld map about the same size as its overworld map?! Meaning it’s roughly double the impressive size I thought it was?!?” Well, yeah...in that moment you are most definitely feeling that gamer's high.
Of course haters can never understand. “The Lands Between? More like 'The Lands between the crack o' my ass!' The world is EMPTY!” Lol. There’s an avalanche of things to see and do, but can you imagine how dumb it would be if they were all right next to each other with no traversal at all? First off it’s immersion breaking, since IRL space exists between objects. Furthermore, there’s no joy of investigation, no thrill of discovery if you can’t wander off the beaten path and find things on your own. Or how about this one? “They recycle bosses!” Well, that kinda is true. There are almost no boss fights in this game that are not repeated in some form. Usually with some kind of variation, like the boss has a new weapon or is paired up with another boss, but it’s still the same boss. Although this isn’t really a problem. The bosses in this game are so good that I’d be pissed if I didn’t get to fight any of them at least a couple more times and show off that I mastered them. What matters is there is a ton of boss variety. The game is just so massive and has so many boss battles that even with a huge stable of bosses, they end up repeating. If there’s really something you can’t stand about fighting a twist on an awesome boss you already saw, all I can say to you is “gg” and I don’t mean “good game.”
Then there’s the hater’s coup de grâce. “They just keep making the same game over and over again! This is just open world dark souls!” Ding ding ding! You are correct. Somehow, some way, Elden Ring takes the stellar level design and excellent action combat of the souls games and makes an entire, enormous open world odyssey using them, and it's glorious. How glorious? Each dark, spooky cave and creepy catacomb is legitimately designed with thought and care, filled with booty, beasties and bosses for maximum fun. None of that randomized dungeon crap, and no half-assed copy-pasta dungeons either. This absurdly large game has enough legit content for 10 dark souls games at once. And that is precisely why it's easy peezy lemon squeezy game of the yeezy for ole Ebeneezy. For reezy. Everything is the dark souls of this and the dark souls of that. Well now we got the dark souls of open world games.
While masterpiece is an accurate description, Elden Ring has real flaws. The first half of the game just seems to have much better designed areas overall compared to the later game. I'm not talking Izalith lava lake headless chicken dinosaurs, but there is a noticeable decrease in quality. Consider for example, entering Castle Morne with its corpses piled like mountains, creepy disfigured misgotten guarding its paths and climactic beautiful beach battle with a lion man monster, and compare that to say... being in a snow storm where you can't see anything. Or take the winding ways and secret segments of the sublime castle Stormveil, and compare it to something like Deeproot Depths, where a bunch of ruins are just spaced out from each other with 50 annoying basilisks waiting in the bushes. There are still great areas in the late game, but it's a much more uneven experience compared to Elden Ring's frontloaded fabulousness. The late game enemies are so ludicrously tanky as well. I don't know why, but From decided to give late game giant bears and crows enough HP to make the regular game feel like new game++. It's as if they're scared their game might not be hard enough for veteran players, but they can't be assed to come up with a new challenge.
Anyway, I don't wanna bring the party down. Elden Ring is still Dark Souls Christmas, with wonderful weapons, superb spells, and an entire squadron of lore waifus. And while it may not be the greatest game ever made, it is the greatest first half of any game ever made, which is still reason enough to call your mom and start hyperventilating. And this isn't even its final form. Nobody remembers a Dark Souls without Artorias. So as for what Elden Ring will be once all is said and done, with massive DLC the size of a whole normal game added? Well, no one knows for sure, but "Game of the Generation" has a nice, elden ring to it.
2. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - [Switch] The worlds of Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 collide in this game, literally. But they also collide in the sense that their races, places and faces appear. Sometimes the way they're included is disappointingly superficial. Party members like Lanz may look like a Machina, and Eunie may look like a High Entia, but neither know anything of the history and culture of the XC1 races they appear to represent, anymore than Sena and Taion's XC2 core crystals serve a non-cosmetic purpose. Likewise, locations like the distant fingertip and Urayan titan, where I experienced powerful story beats in those first 2 games, now pop up as ruins for environments to be built around in XC3, and while the game has a logical explanation for why all these sentimental sections of the previous Xenoblades appear, it kind of amounts to them not actually being the real versions of those places. Don't get me wrong. These characters end up being great anyway, and the environments have all the delicious diversions and secret summits that Xenoblade is known for, it's definitely level design worthy of the series. But I enjoy myself even more when I'm playing a completely new Xenoblade with a completely original setting, the way I got to in the last 3 games.
There's other times where XC3 ties XC1 and XC2 together perfectly. The battle system is bliss, featuring strengths from both games, and allowing any character to learn any class and mix XC1 cool down battle arts together with XC2 auto-attack recharged arts on the battlefield. Plus there's evasion arts like in XC2, where a button press with precise timing can avoid a powerful enemy attack. It also retains XC2's ability to cancel arts into other arts for increased effect, along with that game's excellent "overkill" system, wherein you get bonus XP and treasure for doing as much damage as possible to an enemy after you've already killed them during a chain attack, so you always have a good reason to do the best chain attack you can.
Speaking of chain attacks, it's not just combining great stuff from the older games that makes XC3's combat so glorious - it has plenty of new things to offer as well, including what is probably the best version of chain attacks ever. Chain attacks are like your team super move, and while I love each game's different version of this mechanic for what they offer, XC3's version has the perfect amount of risk vs reward vs luck vs skill. It feels so great to pull off an excellent chain attack and turn a battle around.
There's much more to praise about the combat than that though. For the first time you can dash around the battlefield quickly! There's "Elites" now, stronger versions of regular monsters that are perfect for when regular enemies seem too weak but uniques seem too strong. And there are unique bosses that fight in teams, so you can fight 2, 3, even 4 bosses at once! Also, aquatically this game is on a whole other level. Every Xenoblade fan knows what it's like to be in a battle on the shore and move too close to the water and suddenly they're swimming like a useless idiot instead of fighting. Well in Xenoblade 3 you can fight whole battles while swimming, and there's a bunch of badass new aquatic monsters to tussle with also.
If you're on the fence about Xenoblade 3, I got 2 words for ya. PIRATE. CATGIRLS.
Really there's so much going on with the combat. The large roster of hero characters who fight alongside you, the huge amount of customization, your Ouroboros transformation where you become a big purple killing machine for a bit... and don't even get me started on my favourite, Noah's late game talent art where he draws his world breaking sword, Lucky 7. That thing is so badass that a power-charged "Gravity Blow" to a launched enemy in the later rounds of a chain attack smashes for millions and can really wreck a boss's HP, even on hard mode.
Graphically, this is the first Xenoblade game since XCX on the WiiU to not constantly be blurry to look at. Thanks to something Digital Foundry calls "temporal upsampling" XC3 finds a way to at least be smooth when it can't be sharp. Voice acting is also excellent, with the exception of Ghondor, who has the most cringe-tastic Australian accent since FFXIII's resident bush-pig Fang. Then there's the music, which has been consistently phenomenal throughout the series. Battle themes were particularly strong in this game. I don't think I could ever see any boss battle theme actually surpassing the legendary energy of "You Will Know Our Names" from the first Xenoblade, but XC3's "You Will Know Our Names Finale" is SO good, I have to consider them equal. The Moebius battle theme is also pretty hype.
The story is good too for what it is. There's dramatic set pieces, big twists and thought provoking themes. But there's a kind of implied promise in setting the game in the combined futures of XC1 and XC2 that you're going to meaningfully connect those futures, and this game didn't really do that in a way that satisfied me. But just like Elden Ring, this isn't even XC3's final form. There's a Torna sized follow up game coming by the end of this year. Maybe it will answer all my burning questions, but then that game really IS Xenoblade 3's final form. It's probably Monolift soft's last Xenoblade game ever.
What a gloomy thought. I love Xenoblade so much that a future without nopon and chain attacks sounds like a dark and scary place where I don't wanna live. But moving on is part of life. We can't just freeze time like some kind of Moebius pussy to avoid moving forward. We gotta be chads and brave the unknown, or we won't get to see Monolift soft's awesome unannounced action rpg!
3. Tunic - [Switch] Tunic is a magical experience. The beauty of indies like this is how a creator's clear artistic vision can be realized without corpo nonsense homogenizing everything to the point where video games all start to feel the same. Which isn't to say Tunic doesn't feel like any other game. Quite the opposite. Tunic is very deliberately designed to make you feel the sense of wonderment and mystery you'd experience as a kid playing The Legend of Zelda in the 80's. Exploring a dark cave and not knowing what you'll find. Coming across a big monster and having to run away. Finding a treasure chest with some exciting new weapon in it...that kind of exploration and discovery is what the game is all about.
Tunic's Nintendo nostalgia is brought to life with visual presentation that's as simplistic as it is stylish. You're looking through a locked isometric window into world of clean, clear fields, forests and ruins, which have treasures and secrets atop beautifully blurred, out of reach cliffs in the foreground. There's deep blue waterfalls, pointy polygonal grass, and long, lingering shadows. Maybe these things wouldn't add up to ooze so much atmosphere if it weren't for the game's incredible soundtrack that accompanies your wanderings, but those chill beats further enhance this isometric indie's immersiveness.
No elaboration on Tunic's artistic pleasures would be complete without mentioning one of the game's ingenious meta mechanics. As you explore Tunic's mysterious map you'll find the scattered pages of what turns out to be the instruction booklet for the very game you are currently playing. Each page is mostly written in a made-up gobbeldygook language, but still provides invaluable hints on where to go and what to do because of the coloured drawings of your little fox character that are copying the charming illustrations of Link in the Zelda manual from the NES days, right down to the golden cover. Zoom in close and you can even see the printer's dots! There's still more to it though, because this is a pre-loved manual, with the coffee stains and frayed edges to prove it, along with helpful notes and doodles that show secret doors scribbled in blue pen. It really is a splendid homage to one of the lost joys of video games, the instruction booklet.
This game is flirting with a Nintendo lawsuit so hard that its nipples are showing, but there's another strong influence on Tunic's design, and that's Fromsoft's sensational souls series. Obviously souls owes a lot to Zelda in the 1st place, but to the extent that souls built on that Zelda template and defined its own path, many of the things that the series is famous for are in this game. You chug health potions like they're estus, resting at bonfire-like shrines allows you to do upgrades but also respawns all the enemies you've defeated, trekking back to your corpse after dying means you can loot treasure from it, you can even parry your enemy's attacks. Most importantly, the game seeks to provide challenging combat, so if you're intrigued by how atmospheric and stylish Tunic sounds but don't like dying a lot the way you do in souls games, just be aware.
For my part I loved the combat, especially the boss fights, as much as I loved wandering about lost pondering the manual and listening to trippy music. But while I had a ton of fun with Tunic, the game did eventually lose me about 75% of the way through. There's another meta mechanic in the late game that had me completely baffled. With some vague help from the manual you're supposed to see "Konami code" style combinations in the environment. For example, in a field with flowerbeds on it, you're meant to observe a pattern from the flower arrangement and enter something like ↑, ←, ↓, ←, ↓, ←, ↓, ←, ↑, →, ↓, →, →, ↓, → on the d-pad. I found this way too obtuse and had to give up doing everything in the game by myself, but even when I cheated and looked things up I still found these puzzles a pain. So Tunic did really put me off at this point, however this is late game optional stuff for completionists, keep in mind. Despite that quibble I still liked Tunic a lot and highly recommend it, especially to those with nostalgia for retro gaming.
4. Bayonetta 3 - [Switch] Bayonetta kind of perfected the action game. Well there's always your Sekiros and Bloodbornes and whatnot, but Bayo perfected a kind of feverishly frantic combo frenzy dodge 'em up that solidified Platinum as the No.1 name in character action games. Everybody from God of War to Kirby copies witch time because everybody wants to be Bayonetta. Even Platinum's other great action games all kind of have that feeling of "it's a bit like Bayonetta, but with x." Revengeance is a bit like Bayonetta with chopping stuff. Wonderful 101 is kinda like Bayonetta with sentai. Well Bayonetta 3 is exactly like Bayonetta, except it's not, because it's Bayonetta... with Kaiju.
All of Bayonetta's classic gameplay elements are here, but there's much ado about these building sized behemoths that you can summon at any time to join in the battle. When you do so, Bayonetta stops moving and does a sexy stripper dance while her giant scorpion or infernal spider trades blows with equally massive enemy monsters. Some people couldn't dig this and it killed their enjoyment of the game. It did bother me at first, mainly because the monsters lurch about so slowly in such a fast paced game, but once Bayo 3 started introducing mechanics that activate monster attacks instantly, like a monster counter button or sudden monster summons during witch time, I warmed up to them real fast and eventually saw Bayonetta's rolodex of kaiju as just another great part of a great game.
Firing up Bayonetta 3 for the 1st time, I was more worried about the new character, Viola. At 1st glance she made me think of the type of character you see in modern movies and tv who shows up to replace the star everyone loves in a politically correct bait-and-switch. I half expected her to turn to the screen and lecture us about how Bayonetta being sexy is wrong and we all need to "do better" while we were forced to play as Viola for most of the game. Fortunately, Viola does not take over the game - she's Bayonetta's goofy sidekick who gets caught in slapstick accidents like tripping over, losing her weapon and even having her pants catch on fire. Gameplay-wise she has her own style based around parrying with her katana rather than dodging. Along with Jeanne's "elevator action meets metal gear solid" 2D levels, Viola's gameplay sections compliment Bayonetta's core missions with just the right amount of variety, and I actually ended up liking the character. Hell, I even found her girly pop punk battle music embarrassingly catchy.
The real problem is that the game can get a bit framey at times. And it's not a looker. I would constantly pause the action during some awesome monster match-up to try and take a cool screenshot, but no matter which way I rotate the camera, everything just looks blobby and grimey. Just to make sure I wasn't crazy I fired up Bayonetta 2 again and sure enough, Bayo 2 is a pretty game. It's obvious what's going on though. I never thought I would ever describe Bayonetta 2 as "sensible" but its levels are mostly combat corridors and appropriate arenas. Bayo 3's ambitiously large levels where you can instantly summon multiple massive monsters are comparatively coo-coo, so it's no surprise the game makes whatever dorito chip the Switch uses for a GPU overclock so hard salsa is leaking out the sides. The prudent gamer might wait and make sure this excellent game is definitely on your list as a top priority for when it gets ported to Nintendo's next system, similarly to how Bayo 2, a Wii U game, is best enjoyed on the Switch.
But even on this hardware it's an awesome game. From Gojira battles to swinging over a huge city like Spiderman, to turning into a train to an astonishing battle where a giant toad demon becomes a gothic popstar princess, this action packed, setpiece stacked combo-gasm IS a must play. Bayonetta 3 has all the wonderful weapons, all the killer combat and all the satisfying scoreboards it needs for its madcap multiverse story to be everything everywhere all at once plus kaijus minus some frames here and there.
5. Tactics Ogre Reborn - [Switch] From humble beginnings in a small village in Niigata prefecture, Yasumi Matsuno somehow ended up directing Ogre battle, FF Tactics, Vagrant Story and a good chunk of FFXII before he’d had enough of Square's BS and jumped ship. If I recall correctly Matsuno wanted, amongst other things, for the stoic warrior Basch to be the protagonist of FFXII while Square wanted it to be the vest flaunting, shirt rejecting sissy boy Vaan. It reminds me of when Raiden was added to MGS2. Konami conducted some market research and found Snake wasn’t appealing to women and thus Raiden, the hero who appeals to everyone, was born. Ahh, the deadly dance of soulless suits vs crazy creatives, with our entertainment lives hanging in the balance.
Tactics Ogre is Matsuno doing whatever he wants, which it turns out is ball busting strategy combat and an eloquently told mature political drama in a fantasy setting. If you've played FF Tactics or seen the empire in FFXII, the immersive, medieval sounding dialogue should be familiar. But now, When heroes are ardently affirming their convictions and villains are jeeringly rehearsing their exposition, each character's lines are enriched by right proper fancy English voice acting that really makes the story cling together.
"I will become a sort of tactical ogre." "That's... not a thing." "Just work with me here."
As obviously similar as Tactics Ogre is to the FF Tactics games, with its isometric pixel platoons and dual wielding ninjas and the whatnot, it has a lot to distinguish it as well. There’s the time turner that lets you undo multiple turns, which you badly need to be honest. There’s also cards that appear on the battle field that give combat bonuses. Collecting a good set of 4 cards can greatly strengthen a unit and really impact the outcome of the fight, but it’s no little thing to spend all those turns chasing cards down when there’s a battle raging. You can also recruit dragons, cockatrices and even octopuses (octopi?) to wage war with you. If you never played it and you like the genre, Tactics Ogre is a legit classic that’s perfect for the switch.
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. I also didn't get to play Mario + Rabies 2. 
