0. Super Smash Bros. Melee: Slippi Online: Okay, so this can't actually count as a game released this year. It's a fork of an emulator designed to be used on a video game released in 2001. But it's my favorite gaming thing of the year. It allowed us to continue to play the best game ever in a competitively viable environment during a global pandemic and revolutionized the competitive scene for one of the biggest fighting games in the world. I have never in my life played a fighting game with online as seemless as this. Just hop on and you can find a match with anyone. Feels nearly lagless if you have a good connection. The community's relatively good too. This turns your computer into an endless friendlies session, like the friendlies CRT section at Genesis suddenly became nonstop, 365 days a year 24/7. And Melee's well...Melee. It has the greatest movement, character designs, combo system, and gamefeel of any game ever made. And now it's online. Praise be to Fizzi.
1. Streets of Rage 4 - I like the Streets of Rage games, but I don't think about them much. I didn't play them when they were originally released on the Genesis; during the early days of the Wii I tried out various Virtual Console games and the entire trilogy were some of the standouts of the games I played in that time period. SoR2 in particular is one of my favorite beat em ups, but I don't remember much about it or think about it. When I realized Streets of Rage 4 was coming out this year, I said "that's cool," didn't think much of it, and impulsively ordered a physical copy on Limited Run Games a little while later. I accidentally ordered it with a couple other things that got delayed, so I didn't get my copy until December. When it finally came in I went in with no real expectations and an open mind. But I don't think I was expecting Game of the Year, especially since I wasn't a huge fan of the Wonder Boy remake Lizardcube did.
Streets of Rage 4 is a goddamn masterpiece. It's the perfect beat em up, the game I didn't think could be possibly designed. It has one of the most ingenious difficulty systems ever. You take point penalties for needing extra lives on stages. With the max penalties, even people unfamiliar with the genre could probably finish this, but they'll get the nagging feeling that they need to get better. It silently communicates to unskilled players that the way they play the game is okay, but that you're not exploring the full extent of the game's mechanics by doing so. It's the little things with this game that count; the food placements that feel perfectly tuned to be just frequent enough. The later, more bulky enemies that take a lot of hits, but not
too many hits. It's a game that feels like it was finely and perfectly tuned in every respect, to create an experience that feels fair and balanced.
The combat is the epitome of "easy to learn, difficult to master". This isn't a fighting game with explicitly complex combo trees to remember, but it is something where you have to learnt he nuances of your character's movement and frame data to succeed. This is also a game that masters the simple act of stringing together attacks, which feels simply delightful.
I also just have to say, in a year as shitty as 2020, beating up cops as a punk woman of color with a guitar felt sick as hell. This was the game I needed at the end of this trashfire year.
2. Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Megamix - When the split Joycons on the original Switch were originally unveiled, my first thought was "that seems fucking annoying for most games, but it would rule to have proper buttons for your left hand for a Project Diva game". Now we have one and I was 100% right. Megamix is really just a remixed version of Future Tone with a tweaked songlist and a couple extra features that don't actually entice me that much (the motion controls mode kinda sucks tbh), but playing this game on the Switch is perfect. Now I can use my left hand for buttons! Huzzah! It's also great to have Project Diva back on a portable, which is where the franchise belongs, at least to me.
Otherwise not much to say. Some of the new tracks are fuckin bangers though. Alien Alien and Music 39s rule and I listen to them a lot outside of this game now. It's just really solid Miku gameplay; not much else to say here other than that I had a lot of fun with this one.
3. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX - I've been kinda down in the dumps about Pokemon these days, but I have a huge soft spot for the original Mystery Dungeon games. I know most people prefer the sequel, especially Explorers of Sky which is a legitimately great game, but the originals just had this wholesome, homely vibe that none of the others in the franchise captured. Rescue Team DX takes that base game and adds a fuckton of quality of life improvements on top of it, including making the movesets of your Pokemon much more customizable and making ranged attacks properly ranged. The ends result is a game that's, at least to me, the definitive Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game. I don't usually include remakes of this stature in my year end list, but I just had so much fun with this one that I felt inclined to.
4. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 - Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 is really just more of the same, with the core gameplay from the first largely unchanged. But the first was an extremely solid game, and the sequel provides an even more expansive adventure mode and wacky bonus modes to mess around with. If Sega keeps making these games without touching the formula, I'll keep putting them on my lists year after year because they'll never stop being excellent. The Tetris gameplay here specifically really is some of the strongest in any Tetris game since the Grandmaster series. After playing both the original's Japanese and English release I didn't expect to get into PPT again, and yet I have. Though the online base is uh....way better than it was when I played the original on the Vita, and I can't keep up at all. Oh well.
5. Trials of Mana - If I'd have to describe Trials of Mana in one sentence, it'd be that it's "a game that knows how to show restraint". This isn't a game with big, flashy, showy visuals, nor is it a game very expansive in scope. But it is a game that never steps out of the boundaries of what it's supposed to be. It's a reimagining of an SNES classic on a budget, reimagined in 3D with revamped combat and quality of life improvements. So many other RPGs (I'm looking at you Final Fantasy VII Remake) seem to shoot for the moon and miss their mark. While I respect that ambition, Trials of Mana ends up being an excellently paced little RPG with consistently enjoyable, consumable dungeons and combat segments that never draw on for too long. The bosses here are especially intelligently devised, with attack patterns that are challenging to deal with but completely readable. Also, I have to shout out the "shadows on the ground indicating where attacks will be" system, which is a) genius, b) works perfectly as intended, and c) something that needs to be adopted by more RPGs.
I also just have to say that I really enjoyed playing a Mana game after all of these years? I was too young to have known about the series in its peak. When Sword of Mana came out everyone called it a disappointing remake of the first game. But "disappointing" was also a descriptor I heard about seemingly every subsequent entry in the series, so I never picked one up. Even when Secret came out on the Wii Virtual Console I heard lots saying it didn't age well. It's finally nice to have a game in the series that's well received after all these years. I almost didn't think to pick it up because I've always been put off the Mana series, but then I remembered that the reason for that is literally just because of the fan reception to every single game prior to this one.
Trials isn't perfect. The story is some cliched stuff, and the combat is a bit too floaty. But if both of those things were fixed this absolutely would have been an all-timer.
6. Kingdom Hearts: Memory of Melody - How is Theatrhythm: Kingdom Hearts? The answer is "pretty damn good"! I don't have as much fondness for Kingdom Hearts music as I do Final Fantasy music (though I do prefer the KH soundtracks to Dragon Quest, so that aspect of it was better than the Theatrhythm Dragon Quest game), and I missed the touch screen controls of the DS games, but otherwise this was super solid. Has all of the memorable KH tunes and covers the games' stories in a way that's surprisingly digestible. It also gets harder on higher difficulties than I expected, which was a nice surprise. Otherwise there's not much to say. It really is just another Theatrhythm game, which is good with me.
7. Among Us - I think that when people look back on 2020, more than anything they're going to think of the three games that went viral last year: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Fall Guys, and Among Us. One of those games was a game that stripped all of the remaining heart and soul out of a long running franchise and turned it into a skinner box where the player was just motivated merely by crafting things and decorating their island. One of those was another battle royale game, this time a platformer, but one with kinda janky physics and a sense of humor that loses its appeal an hour in.
And then there was Among Us. To be honest I didn't "get" Among Us at first; as far as party games go I didn't get why you'd play it instead of Mafia. The tasks just seemed like a superfluous addition to the formula. Eventually I started watching more streams where they'd play it and eventually it clicked. Even though every aspect of Among Us doesn't play well together, it works because they're all fun. The tasks are superfluous, but they're fun little minigames that give players something extra to observe and give those who have been knocked out of the game something to do. The fact of being the imposter turns the game into a stealth game that's simple but deviously fun in a way that stealth games rarely are for me.
Unfortunately, I don't have friends, so I couldn't put a ton of time into Among Us. But I did have fun smashing the dumb kids in the lobbies and either tricking them or figuring them out. Take that, 12 year olds!
8. Paradise Killer - When I was playing Paradise Killer and sorting my thoughts about this game out, a lot of negative things came up. It's a game with a dogshit map system that doesn't give you nearly enough information. It's a game with characters that are interesting, but feel so removed from our reality that they're hard to relate to. I was also told this is a DanganRonpa-esque game, which it is in terms of the aesthetic I guess, but in terms of gameplay it's sort of like Myst meets the investigation sections in Ace Attorney I suppose. But even in those terms it's not that great; the game's "puzzles" are mostly solved by just wandering around the island and finding the right thing by happenstance. And you don't do a whole lot of logical inferring, at least until the very end of the game kind of.
And yet, despite all of these negative thoughts, I couldn't put the game down. When I did, I couldn't stop thinking about it until I finished it.
So why is that? Well, the game has a fucking incredible aesthetic, one that kicks so much ass it's almost unfair. A "vaporwave demonic DanganRonpa-esque HP Lovecraft-inspired" aesthetic just sounds like a salad of words thrown together at complete random, but it miraculously comes together and creates something cohesive and mesmerizing. I never got tired of looking at the island this game takes place on. And the soundtrack....it's the best soundtrack in a video game since Persona 5 and I have absolutely no qualifiers. I listen to it all the time when working now. I've probably listened to every song in this game dozens if not hundreds of times now and
I'm still in awe of how good this shit sounds. That saxophone player is a fucking legend.
I never thought I'd compare a game inspired by Ace Attorney/DanganRonpa to Breath of the Wild of all things, but that's what exploring the island in Paradise Killer reminded me of. Finding all of the blood vials and collectables on the island never got tiring, and the only other game to make me feel that way is BotW. It's something where the mere act of exploring is just inherently joyful and fun. There's a lot of platforming in here and while it's not amazing platforming, Love Dies is a fun enough character to move around with that it works well. The island is also small enough to never feel overwhelmed, which is usually a big problem for me and open world exploration-focused games.
And even though I have my qualms with the story....idk, something nebulous about it works for me. It's never surprising but the lore is consistently interesting to learn about, though it's a bit convoluted in some needless ways. The game also depicts some surprisingly adult relationships and subjects in a way I just haven't seen much of.
Paradise Killer is just a crazy game. It's one I have a lot of issues with but if I had to pick a most memorable game of the year I'd choose it fairly confidently.
9. Granblue Fantasy Versus - Forgot this game came out this year? I did too honestly, until I relooked over a list of 2020 games. It's from that bizarre pre-pandemic period of 2020. DBFV melds the fast paced action of a airdash fighter with a more footsies-focused Street Fighter game pretty seemlessly. It has a lot of new mechanics that make the game pretty approachable for newcomers but never dumb it down, including an input system that I think works pretty intelligently. The game has a really robust single player with RPG mechanics that are a lot more solid than I'd expect out of a game like this. Really just a complete and satisfying package. Unfortunately one that never really got to develop much because it released without rollback netcode in a world that was about to go into a global pandemic. There may never be a true Granblue Fantasy Versus competitive scene, which is really unfortunate, because it's one of ASW's better fighting games in a while.
Also, I have to say, a lot of people probably don't care about this but it felt really special to see a trans woman who ISN'T on HRT and still "presents" male in a video game. I never in a million years would have expected to see that in an Arc System Works fighting game but it's here and it owns. I first picked Ladiva because she was the character who fit the style I wanted to play with (grappler) and I literally said to myself "man, now that I know I'm probably trans it feels a little weird to play masc characters in games like this". Then someone used she/her pronouns to refer to her on a win screen, I looked her up on the GBF Wiki, and I immediately felt like a fool, one who couldn't believe that a character like this actually exists. Of course she's not perfect representation but I mean....that moment of realizing just how wrong I was when I incorrectly assumed her gender, and that she's literally a character who is like me, felt awesome.
10. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 - I loved the first Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon. It was one of the biggest surprises of 2018, a return to the classic Castlevania style that felt completely faithful to that type of game. I wasn't sure how to feel about the new character switching mechanic; it made the stages feel less perfect in their simplicity, since they were no longer tailored for specific hitboxes/hurtboxes. But otherwise the game was pitch perfect Classicvania.
I straight up forgot Curse of the Moon 2 existed, and found out about it when reading over a list of 2020 games. I must have read about it in a news article or something, but it slipped my mind. It seemed no one was talking about it. I figured it was a disappointment that might be worth skipping, but I checked the reviews and they were fairly positive. So a several days ago I decided to take the plunge and buy it.
Well it's......no Curse of the Moon 1. The less balanced stage designs are even more of an issue here. The characters just feel so different and large swaths of the game feel "wrong" if you're not using a specific one. The game just feels less well balanced and well tuned. It's definitely flawed. And yet, it has some moments that are pretty damn incredible. Mostly the bosses, which are a really dope spectacle and remind me of the best Treasure games in how dynamic their animations and attack patterns are. Some of the characters are also just a lot of fun to play around with (using a gun in a classic style Castlevania is way more fun than it has any right to be). So yeah, just barely good enough to make my list.
X. A Short Hike - When I finished A Short Hike I was incredibly positive on it. It's a game with fantastic game feel, good vibes, and a heartfelt little story. It's a game that doesn't waste the player's time; it shows its cards and then leaves. It's also a game that borrows the iconography of the Animal Crossing series to make something that's full of more soul than the actual Animal Crossing game that released last year. I wanted to call it the best 1 hour of gameplay all year. And yet....it's faded from memory remarkably quickly. It just hasn't stuck with me at all. It was too lacking in substance to strike any kind of a longterm chord for me. Maybe putting Curse of the Moon 2 over this is recency bias, but we'll see.
X. Fuser - Fuser fuckin' rules! It's a game about mashing up All-Star with the Sign with Rock the Casbah with Better Now with Never Gonna Give You Up with Blinding Lights. Harmonix really hit on something worth while here. Unfortunately the core gameplay in the campaign is a bit too strict and not freeform enough, but I'm not really creative enough for using this game just purely as a mashup creator. If it wasn't for that though this would have ranked relatively highly, it's just bananas and a lot of fun. Probably my favorite non-Rock Band thing Harmonix has done.
X. Super Mario 3D All-Stars - I'm going to go on record and say I don't think this game is the rip-off everyone else seems to think it is. SM64 is 10$ on all Virtual Console services and SMS/SMG are more than 20$ second hand. It's not a steal or anything but I was willing to pay full price to get these all on a portable system.
I'm not ranking it because it didn't come out this year, but finally getting 120 stars in Super Mario 64 after having watched dozens and dozens of 120 star speedruns and never being able to do it as a kid was one of my favorite gaming experiences of the year. That game's movement mechanics are still a blast and the objectives are excellently well thought out. It's even better than I remember in some respects. Rainbow Ride 100 coin star can fuck off forever though.
- [Switch] [Beat 'em up] [DotEmu] Streets of Rage 4
- [Switch] [Rhythm] [Sega] Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Mega Mix
- [Switch] [Roguelike] [Spike Chunsoft] Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX
- [Switch] [Puzzle] [Sega] Puyo Puyo Tetris 2
- [Switch] [Action RPG] [Square Enix] Trials of Mana
- [Switch] [Rhythm] [Square Enix] Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory
- [PC] [Party] [Innersloth] Among Us
- [PC] [Adventure] [Kaizen Game Works] Paradise Killer
- [PS4] [Fighting] [Arc System Works] Granblue Fantasy Versus
- [Switch] [Platformer] [Inti Creates] Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2
- [Switch] [Adventure] [adamgryu] A Short Hike
- [PC] [Rhythm] [Harmonix] Fuser
- [Switch] [Platformer] [Nintendo] Super Mario 3D All-Stars
