Every year I write a list of my favourite video games I’ve played that year. A Game of the Year list, if you will. It eventually turns into a way for me to reflect back on the year, and only partially about the games themselves.
2022 sure has been eventful, at least for me personally. I graduated from college… I think that was supposed to be something to celebrate, but considering that it happened after months of stuck in bureaucracy hell instead of anything to do with my field of study, and that it came after three years of college-from-home without any meaningful interaction with my classmates or professors, it really felt like it just came and went.
What’s more exciting is that I got my first full-time job soon afterwards: a web programmer in a game development company. Somehow that’s exactly how I thought I’d end up being, despite majoring in International Relations or holding on to this dream of working in translation/localization. Not quite a dream come true, then, but it’s my Plan B (webdev) and Plan C (gamedev) mushed together, so it’ll do.
For the rest of the world, well, has there ever been an uneventful year since the advent of modern communication? The pandemic is more-or-less over by this year. Vaccines are widely available and people aren’t too scared to go out anymore. Life has… gone back to normal? It feels callous to say, since people still do get sick and die, but from what I’ve seen, the cases are manageable. It doesn’t feel as much an existential crisis as it used to be. As for the rest of our crises…
Well, I heard Etherium has switched to proof-of-stake so at least cryptocurrency isn’t burning as much of the planet as they did. I’ve heard good things about nuclear technology and how some countries are starting to cut back on fossil fuels, so maybe things won’t be that bad re: climate change. Russia invaded Ukraine early this year, which was shit, but seeing how stoutly Ukraine is fighting back is giving me hope.
More recently there’s the whole thing with machine learning technology and AI-generated text and art pieces; a labour issue that has crisscrossed a lot of fields and, at the very least, open up avenue for a lot of important discussion before they become overdue. Twitter got bought out by a rich CEO but he’s being dunked on so hard you’d think it’s leading up to the French Revolution.
Not a terrible year then, I think. After the last few years, and despite the constant barrage of information I’m subjecting myself to (I can’t not know, I can’t look away, like watching a car crash in slow motion, I’ve taught myself without realising it to pay attention and enjoy the process, instead of looking away), this year has given me a few things to be hopeful about.
Or maybe it’s just because I’m in a decent mood as I’m writing this. Heh. I sure have had a lot of bad days.
I haven’t been playing a lot of games this year. My new job has been keeping me busy and my work/gaming PC broke down back in October and it’s been stuck in the repair shop ever since; that cut down a lot of my opportunities to play games. I had to look at my old notes to remember what the games of this year have been, even. Quite a few surprises in those notes, some games I’ve forgotten but remembering them again resurfaced some nice memories. Sure has been an eventful year.
I usually ordered these list by when I started playing them, but this year’s games are a bit jumbled up in my memory, so this is more ordered by *check notes* “how much thinking about it makes me go bark bark bark”? Sure, let’s go with that.
1. Arknights
I…. I love Arknights. I once said that Genshin Impact was a game tailor-made specifically for me. Well Genshin is that, but in a normal, mass-appeal kind of way. Arknights is a game made specifically for me but in a deranged way.
How to begin. Its central theme of finding home and bearing hope in a world ravaged by societal collapse, racism and xenophobia, civil wars, and constant inevitable environmental disasters. The ridiculous level of detail they build into each factions, each nation, picking up pieces from real life cultures and then reconstructing them into a whole unique country’s worth of history. Its hundreds of characters, each created with so much love and depth and care, you can just tell for every single one of them, there is someone out there pointing at them and going “that’s my wife/husband/son/daughter”.
The actual game itself: hard as hell, unforgiving, something you need to use your actual brainpower to play. Its progression system is time-consuming and probably entirely unacceptable in most “normal” games, but the way I can feel myself getting better, bit by bit, as I play through it for months, it feels good. No spikes of power, only moments where I look back and realise how far I’ve come, and how much I’ve learned to love these characters.
(Because I can’t decide which screenshot to go with this blog post, here’s a collection of random lines that make me go wild. The majority of these are NPCs. Huh)
(the screenshot above, by the way, is of Czerny from the currently-running story, Lingering Echoes. He is a very good man and my brain hasn’t stopped thinking about him)
The music. Have I talked about the music. They have a wholeass music label working with a lot of composers releasing songs for every genre imaginable, all bangers and all tied to the game’s many many many stories. And have I talked about how nerdy this game is. Do you know each character is based on an animal, sometimes down to the specific species? There’s a Japanese spider crab and a weedy sea dragon and a secretary bird and way more creatures than even my nerd ass can pinpoint myself but am very glad to go wikiwalking for.
And have you met my husband Lee. I love him so much, light of my life. I’ve had fictional crushes before, but they’re nothing compared to how much I love this old carp, I don’t even know why. Maybe I just need a man who can hold my hand and tell me to relax and cook me dinner. I love him so much, you guys.
I started playing Arknights in May this year, though it only really clicked with me July. Haven’t left my brain since then and I don’t even mind it’s not paying rent.
2. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
I don’t envy whoever are in charge of marketing this game. It’s so difficult to explain what 13 Sentinels even is, let alone how good it is, how it respectfully takes from the collective wellspring of classic science fiction and builds its own materpiece, how it plays with every notions of what an adventure game could be and ran with it, how it just knows itself so damn well, you really gotta play it to believe it.
The best way to describe it is, I think, not by looking at it as a game, but as a science fiction. It’s got all the best tropes, so much tropes in fact you’ll get headache trying to keep track of them: mecha vs kaijuu, time travel, space travel, aliens, sentient robots, sentient killer robots, doppelgangers, paradoxes, secret agents, shared dreams, mind virus, practical immortality, falling in love with someone from a different timeline and/or lifetime, etc etc etc. There’s also a talking cat and she wants you to shoot your friends.
And yet, it can make all these disparate elements work. And exceptionally bloody well at that. It’s not a traditional mystery story like them Sherlock Holmes stories, but I feel it very definitely is a mystery, in that you as the player is also trying to figure out what the heck is going on, you’re trying to piece things together as the game slowly opens up to you, gives you more and more pieces, until at the end you have this whole finished puzzle you will look at in awe.
I play this game together with my sister and as we play we constantly discuss what’s happening, the pieces we just received and how they fit together. It’s such a joy to be able to do this together, throwing ideas at each other and helping each other keep track of which of them work. Such a joy just guessing what happens next (and we can never really tell because it’s just that wild).
We started playing it when it was released in April and finished it by the end of May. Those are two months I really, truly treasure.
One more thing, I don’t know how to fit this into what I’ve said above, but 13 Sentinels, of all the things it understand about itself, it especially understands that culture is a gradual process, that every story is built from what came before it. It pays homage to so many classic science fiction; I’d say a story like this won’t even be possible without all prior works in the genre. The story it weaves also plays into this theme: that humanity will carry itself on through its culture, the people of the future becoming who they are through understanding of their past, our present.
It’s a pretty hopeful future, even if it starts with strings of tragedies.
3. The Great Ace Attorney 2
Took a while for us to finish this, didn’t it. While 13 Sentinels is two continuous months, this duology was spread out over this year and the last (The Great Ace Attorney 1 was in my list last year!). In the same vein as 13 Sentinels, I played it with my sister, so we shared a lot of moments piecing the mystery together and yelling “NO WAY!!” as things get revealed.
There’s probably a lot that everyone has already said about this game, so I’m just gonna pick at the thing that my sister noticed about the thread that ties the plot together: it’s about continuity between generations, how the student become the teacher, or to put another way, it’s Ace Attorney: Dad Edition.
Almost every character is a protege or have some connection to an older character, inheriting their skills and worldview (this is where I realise I can’t name names because any of this could be spoiler, oh well). When you realise your mentor did some bad things, how do you deal with that? Do you still put them on their pedestal? And what happens when their name is tarnished instead? And as a mentor (or a Dad, if you will) yourself, what can you give to your children?
I also want to give a shout-out to the soundtrack. The way some tracks contain bits from other tracks to denote connection between places and characters, the timing of some tracks to play at very specific moments of a scene. The feelings I got out of it is honestly so amazing I can’t show you my favorite track, because just listening to it feels like a major spoiler.
The Great Ace Attorney is also great fun to talk with other people (who has played the game). I love yelling about anime people who break my hear and/or make it full. Ryunosuke Naruhodo is a very good person and I love seeing how much he grew throughout the game.
4. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
Now here’s a game I’ve waited for years to come out, and when I played it exceeded pretty much all of my expectations.
Exocolonist is an RPG in the classic western style, in that you’re building up a character and making them who they are by the decisions you make: choosing which skill to raise on a given day, which people to hang out with, which decisions to take. Which of these things you can do depends on what stats you’ve raised, and what raised you have depends on all the choices you’ve made before.
It’s… well, it’s a lot like life, really. You make all sorts of little choices everyday and though they might seem like they don’t matter, it all builds up. By the time my character is an adult, I look back and see how far they have come, how differently things could have ended up. This isn’t just my wishful thinking either. On my second playthrough I decided early on to be a different person, and I really did. The same set events happened, but differently, and I responded to them in different ways too. Some people who died in a previous lifetime managed to live this time because I pursued a different path. The game plays into this too: your character has visions of alternate future versions of themself and can take action accordingly.
I got this game about a month after moving to a new city for my job. It wasn’t my first time living alone, but I definitely prefer to, err, not have to do that. Playing the game made me think a lot about my own path too, I suppose. Like in the game, I don’t feel like my life hinge on only one decision point; it’s all built up from what happened before. I don’t think I have any regrets either; to make a different decision, I’d be a totally different person, and I’m relatively happy with who I am now.
Well that ends up being a lot more about me than about the game. The game is excellent science fiction, by the way, looking at the technology and society we have now and interpolating what a future would look like. It’s a pretty blissful future, at first glance, but Exocolonist has no problem showing you that life is not without conflicts and loss and mistakes. The first ending I got was a horrifying one, and it sure looks like there are a lot more of these terrible endings than there are happy ones. Good thing you can start over in the game. In real life… well, I just hope the one life I have is a fulfilling one.
5. Genshin Impact
This is the third year in a row that this game has graced my year-end list? I’m not as obsessed with it as I was last year, but it remains a comfortable place to come back home to.
Hmm. Actually the one thing I can remember about it is how I’m not as into it as I used to be. I don’t play everyday anymore. I don’t wait for every update with bated breath. I’m not as interested in the new characters as I did with last year’s (where’s Baizhu though, where is he, release him from NPC jail, Hoyo). I’m way behind in doing the main story quest and I don’t particularly care that I am. I haven’t even done the current limited-time event yet, and it sure seems like I might just skip it entirely.
It’s definitely not because the game’s quality dropped. In fact, from what I’ve experienced, it’s only getting better and better. The story and writing is better, the open world design is consistently jaw-dropping, the event-specific new gameplay mechanics are always fun and interesting, and the Indonesian localization is only improving with every update, I want to kiss the loc team.
Wait hold up I just checked my notes. This year I released Pradewata and Multilingual Genshin Database! A marriage between two of my passions: localization and programming! I’m not working on either of them anymore (the former because current Indonesian loc is starting to get really good so I feel superfluous, the latter because my usual source get taken down, both because I don’t have the time or passion for them anymore), but it sure is nice to have made them and released them to the wild.
As for Genshin today: I don’t play it as much, but that’s fine. I still love it. I still play occasionally, and it always welcomes me back. A home to come back to, you know. It’s nice to have that.
Also I got really into the new TCG minigame. Cards go brrrrr!
Honourable Mentions
I recently started Chained Echoes, an indie JRPG released just a few days ago (as of writing this). It’s really good, but in a specific comfort-food JRPG sort of way. It has all the classic gameplay mechanics and story tropes, but with their own unique twists while also being comfortably familiar; having the cake and eating it too. The dev (solo?) clearly put thoughts into everything while also being aware of their own limitations. Just really competently made.
Other than Exocolonists, quite a few games released this year that I’ve been looking forward to: Ozymandias, Neon White, Potionomics. My laptop broke around the time of Potionomics’ release, so I haven’t experienced it past the first hour, which was fine. The other two games, though, were exactly as good as I expected them to be.
I already had hours on Ozymandias, so I knew what to expect: just a really good board game, a game of Civilization done in half an hour. As someone who has never managed to finish a grand strategy game but love the genre conceptually, it’s exactly what I need. I occasionally play the game when I’m stressed at work; it’s easy to pick up like that.
Neon White is just a really good speedruning game. I like the vibes, the writing flows really well, it’s funny in a corny sort of way, which is always fun. I haven’t actually beaten it yet; when I moved for my new job it sorta got lost in my brain and now that I don’t have my main PC yet, well, hopefully I can go back to it eventually.
I think I only heard of Citizen Sleeper a few days before its release, but it’s enticing enough I picked it up Day 1. It’s very good, I love combatless RPG. I heard someone saying the writing is excessive, but honestly I feel like it’s just right: not too beefy and snappy when it needs to. “Good game, solid story (stories), doesn’t overstay its welcome, generally excellent narrative RPG”, as my notes say.
I picked up AI: The Somnium Files on a big sale. I’ve never played a Kotaro Uchikoshi game before (i.e. Zero Escape), but I know his stories’ reputation for being, uhh buck wild? Contemporary? In an Extremely Online sort of way? I guess I know what I expected, but I didn’t expect it to be so shitposty. In a good way. But also in a bad way? I don’t know! I’m clearly enjoying the game! I like that it has a lot of superfluous, ridiculous scenes added for the hell of it! I like its sense of humour! But also it sure does take forever getting anywhere (which was the reason I dropped its cousin-game, Danganronpa V3). I got to one ending and it was so ridiculous I couldn’t help cry-laughing, and then I haven’t picked it up since. Maybe one day.
I finally got around to playing Ace Combat 7, after hearing so much about how silly the story gets despite having the surface of a typical super-serious war setting. I’ve never played a plane sim (or whatever this genre is called) before, aside from a vague memory of playing them so often when I was a child that I always have to invert Y-axis in any game ever since. Ace Combat 7 doesn’t quite resurface those old memories, but it sure is really fun. I love flying a plane, the gamefeel is impeccable, the soundtrack is immaculate, the story… Well, clearly my expectation was too high, but it is very silly while putting up a cheekily serious face and that juxtaposition is quite fun. Not much to complain about.
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes was this year, huh. It was very exciting for approximately a month and then I just… I just forgot about it. I haven’t even finished it, despite the story being a wild improvement over Fire Emblem Three Houses (although an improvement that’s impossible to parse unless you’ve played that first game beforehand). Here, just read my previous blog post about it (that’s also a lot of other things).
It’s the gameplay, I think. It gets tiring. I suspect it also makes my chronic headache worse. I hate that feeling. Not even the reward of post-battle excellent writing can tempt me to get through the painful slog that is its battle system. Maybe one day.
Coda: Red Embrace: Hollywood
I forgot this game was this year. How could I forget. I played Red Embrace: Hollywood because I was itching for some tragic love story and someone recommended it for exactly that. I sure got that tragic love story, but I wasn’t expecting to also fall in love for real, and with the most weirdo of the three main love interests too. Look, I’ve played my fair share of otome visual novels (can this even be called that) okay let’s try that again. I’ve played my fair share of visual novels featuring cute boys for me to fall for, but most of them tend to be, yeah he’s cute, yeah he’s cool, yeah this story is so sweet I like seeing him with the protagonist together, now let’s see all the other routes where she’s dating a different boy instead.
But in this one, haha man. I started out thinking “who is this weirdo” but by the end I was genuinely going “I love him and will die for him”. Man, just writing this down makes me miss him already. I still have a few endings I need to chase down in this game but my one playthrough feels so definitive, I feel kind bad playing through it again and choosing different options, choosing a different guy, even though that’s the only way to get the other (possibly happier, very probably more tragic) endings with my man too.
I think he’s also the only character I’ve seen in non-fanmade media that’s explicitly asexual? That’s me too, and it’s nice how it all clicks together when he says it out loud. I’ve never been in a relationship, you know, and I’ve never had a real life crush either (except that one guy in high school… I wonder how he’s doing by now). So fiction, having a crush on fictional people, help me navigate the feelings associated with that. I know I like men. I know I don’t want to live the rest of my life alone. If I can never fall in love for real, at least I can figure out what kind of person I won’t mind spending my life with.
End Notes
I wasn’t planning on making Red Embrace: Hollywood the coda for this year’s list (I genuinely forgot to add it to the list lol), but I think that ties it up pretty nicely. This feels like a silly thing to write on a blog post that any rando can just read, but fuck it, I doubt anyone actually reads all the way here anyway: my genuine actual honest-to-god goal for 2023 is just to get a partner. I’m 25 already! I’m doing pretty decent for myself but the idea of growing old all alone is starting to look very real and that’s terrifying! I can fall in love and take comfort in the existence of fictional men all I want but Mr Lee Arknights is not real, you guys. He can’t actually cook for me. He won’t grow old with me. I can’t split the bills with him.
Aside from that, I hope this webdev/gamedev career path works out. I like making games, apparently. Would love for that to continue. I hope I still get to spend a lot of time with my family. I hope, well, that the world doesn’t go to shit.
We live in truly interesting times. I hope it can bring good tidings to everyone, not just a select few, and that I can help create the rising tide that lifts all the boats, instead of the opposite.
Happy new year, folks.
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