What an appalling year. I am not looking forward to things getting even worse than this. I know I said last year that as the world keeps getting crazier we should hope for the Tracer Tong ending, but my gut tells me we're getting the Bob Page ending. Looming apocalypses aside, it was an okay year for games depending on your tastes. A lot of the major stuff this year really wasn't up my alley, which means I got to catch up on some awesome stuff in my backlog, like
Xenoblade 2. I loved it! Well, I loved
Xenoblade 1 and
Xenoblade X as well, so I guess it's not
that surprising, but these games are so weirdly different from each other despite their similarities that I didn't know what to expect. 3 months of my life to disappear, that's what! I also played a lot of the original
Diablo II since I got caught up in the hype for the remaster, but didn't want to give Blizzard money to fund the redecorating of the Cosby Suite.
As for the cool stuff that came out in 2021, let's take a look.
1. Metroid Dread - [Switch] I love me a good
Metroidvania. But I went into
Metroid Dread with a sense of dread. Okay, no dread, but like, zero hype.
Samus Returns on 3DS, while solid, did not set my world on fire... and when I saw early trailers for Dread, showing the 2 games sharing the same parry mechanic, I rather got the feeling that playing
Dread would be a lot like playing
Samus Returns. Well I wasn't really looking for a merely "solid" Metroid game. I like my Metroid games to ooze style
and substance, like the Prime games on the Gamecube. The seemingly competent 3D visuals displayed from a 2D angle shown in the trailers were fine but not thrilling, and as for style, well...It appeared to me that Samus's powersuit had been replaced by a much lamer suit featuring mismatched colours and a white robo-diaper. Furthermore, stealth stuff is just not my bag, baby. I don't really hate it but neither am I thrilled about the idea of being hunted by some kind of unbeatable terminator while I'm trying to explore nooks and crannies for hidden missile upgrades.
So yeah. I had my reasons for starting
Metroid Dread with minimal enthusiasm. And nothing in the first hour really changed my attitude, but it only took another hour beyond that for my expectations to be completely blown up. I might have inserted the cartridge wanting to explore a mysterious alien planet while getting immersed in atmospheric music, like
Metroid Prime, but what
Dread offers instead is fast, frantic action. This is a kick-ass Metroidvania with smooth, responsive controls, a ton of hectic, dramatic boss fights, and power-ups and secrets galore. Ya gotta love it.
The visuals gradually grow on you from seeming completely competent at the start, as you explore caves and corridors, to looking pretty dang awesome later when you find yourself in underwater bases bustling with marine life in the background, or when the camera pulls way way back to frame an awesome shot of you dashing towards an enormous, ancient fortress. Even Samus's new suit looks cool once it gets a few upgrades happening. But the real standout in the visual department is the exciting cutscenes that contextualize the appearance of each monstrous boss. Samus ducks and dashes and dives as gigantic screaming beasties swing their claws or flail their tentacles, and then control is handed back to you for the intense confrontation - this is some beautiful cinematography.
These cutscenes are also used to tell a pretty significant story. It's one that may have some crazy ramifications depending if developers want to treat it as canon or not, but just know that stuff does happen to Samus in this game beyond her powering up and kicking ass. And the tale is conveyed efficiently without dragging things out and being overly chatty like a lesser Metroid game...or one of my top 10 lists. It's a different kind of story, one where Ridley is a no-show and there is narry a space pirate in sight. And you know what that means! No Space Pirate theme music! YAYYYYYYY! As relieved as I am to not have to hear the grating Space Pirate music, that's the most noteworthy thing I can say about the soundtrack. It isn't bad or anything, it just doesn't stand out the way the
incredible soundtracks of legendary past Metroid games have.
But what about these robot stalkers that bring stealth elements into the game? It totally works. Stealth sections are confined to specific zones that the robot has a patrol route in, and even those zones are free to be explored at your own pace later once your deadly cat and mouse game is over. If your hunter does corner you, you get a chance to parry its attack and escape through its legs. I smugly thought as a Dark Souls guy I could do this whenever, but parrying one robot fairly consistently doesn't seem to translate into parrying the others. They may all have different attack timings or something. That's not a big deal though because as Samus explores and discovers new powers and upgrades she will be better equipped to out-sneak, or failing that outrun, her pursuers. In the end, the stealth sections add to the Metroidvania platforming without taking away from it.
Where does all that leave us? To summarize...
Metroid Dread is an ice missile blastin', wave beam weavin', air teleport dashin', shinespark soarin', secret sniffin', screw attack slicin', lock-on multitargetin', big boss parryin' videogamey ass videogame that I'd recommend highly to anyone who likes 2D platformers in the Metroidvania style or anyone who just likes 2D action games in general.
A short, sweet,
classic.
2. Lost Judgement - [PS4] I'd gone quite a few years between Yakuza games before I played the first
Judgement title. I love the series dearly, but that love somehow coexists alongside a strong sense of fatigue. You end up doing a lot of the same things over and over in these games, and while I wouldn't describe many of the minigames or the combat as bad exactly, they aren't endlessly compelling either. The same can't be said for the Yakuza storylines and protagonists, however. We're living in a topsy turvy world where the people regarded as heroes are the whiniest weiners, and people who shoulder life's burdens and keep moving forward aren't the ones we look up to, but the ones we want to tear down to our level. Seeing heroes just actually
be heroic, instead of getting deconstructed so they can be "updated" to conform to an alarmingly glossy, shallow, corporate moral order feels so increasingly rare that it's something precious. Disney "updated"
Star Wars from an evergreen multi-billion dollar money printer to an irrelevant franchise with their sanctimonious superiority, and Amazon is spending a cool half-bill to completely erase the value of the mammoth
Lord of the Rings franchise by updating it to get rid of the ideas of that pesky Tolkien guy. You can tell from his stories about dwarves and elves overcoming their hatred and becoming friends that he's an oppressive patriarch. Besides, he's an old white guy, and that makes him super racist. That's not true of our elite class though. They may be mostly old white guys too, but they're rich assholes in suits who control everything, so you know whatever divisive, group identity based message they have to force into every classic story in place of that story's original, unique message must be totally wholesome and not at all evil.
Shinra and Umbrella should be taking notes.
This is a role model
While the West seems poised to completely lose its way, with every icon of heroism from every story being subverted and deconstructed in this race to the empty, soulless, corporate bottom, Japan seems largely untouched. There are some cracks showing, but right now you can play a random game or watch a random anime and not expect any preposterous preaching or pandering. And in the Yakuza series, you're likely to encounter righteous heroes who set a shining example for all with their stoicism, bravery, and compassion. If you're a kid who doesn't have a father figure, there's still a chance you'll turn out okay if you play enough games starring a great role model like violent gangster Kazuma Kiryu. I'm being serious by the way.
Yakuza tends to develop figures from the criminal underworld into holy, pure-hearted apostles on the regular, and it's especially refreshing in this day and age to see such uplifting heroism. But Takayuki Yagami, the protagonist of 2019's
Judgement, is a bit different. He was never a gangster in the first place, but a lawyer turned detective who grew up surrounded by a Yakuza family. As a result the tone of that first game was not a highly personal mobster drama, but something more akin to a mystery thriller combined with an 80's action movie, and it was a pleasure to play through that story, balancing intriguing revelations with high intensity action set pieces. Why yes, Alzheimer's is an escalating problem that the world must take seriously. I am very interested in what lengths we can go to in order to combat this disease. Or, we could throw each other through the windows of a high rise building while doing kung fu moves. Also good.
While it generally has a similar feel and provides mostly more of the same, I Honestly didn't enjoy
Lost Judgement quite as much as the first
Judgement, which nails that vibe of mystery thriller meets old fashioned action movie perfectly. Nor did I enjoy it as much as
Yakuza: Like a Dragon, where
Ichiban Kasuga's heroic journey reveals a heart so trusting and pure that the collector's edition should have come with jumbo sized pocket tissues. I think either of those games would have beat
Metroid Dread for my GotY if I had played them this year. While this is still a game that can hang alongside those titles, it just doesn't come together quite as well for me. I'd say part of this is because of the school angle. A ton of this game's content, especially its sidequests, takes place in a school environment, and it just wasn't that appealing to me for a Yakuza game's setting. They still did a great job with it for what they had, weaving a tale of school bullying, suicide and revenge into the central mystery of the main quest, but of all the situations to put a kung fu detective in for an action packed adventure, high school dance club advisor is one that really clashes with the crime story vibe.
You may find these methods harsh, but you can't argue with Japanese test scores
Yes, you really join the dancing club and do a rhythm game where you teach kids how to dance. Of course, that kind of silly nonsense is in every Yakuza game, it's all part of the fun, but it's about balance and quantity. There's not enough cool kung fu detective action movie and too much tutoring kids at school for my taste, and it hurt my experience somewhat compared to other recent Yakuza titles. Aside from the classic minigames that always show up, and the drone and VR minigames from Yagami's first game, all the minigames in
Lost Judgement are related to school clubs and activities. If you play Yakuza, you can probably guess how it will go down: you're gonna love a few of the minigames, some others are gonna be okay, and a couple will feel like a chore. I personally took a shine to the robotics club and skateboard missions while finding the biker gang and photography club missions tedious.
As for the battles, Yagami can still alternate between Tiger style for 1-on-1 scuffles and Crane style for crowd control, but his repertoire is now enhanced by a 3rd discipline:
Snake style. It's pretty great. Snake style allows you to parry attacks from all sides, sending your assailant stumbling past you, disoriented. It also expands your range of throw options. Perhaps best of all, it has multiple moves designed to disarm any attackers wielding weapons, which is both useful and extremely cool looking in execution. A lot has been done to refresh the battle system, it's fun, and the combat is one of the few things that I can clearly point to as being superior to the first game. But fundamentally, it's still that same Yakuza combat underneath that we've seen so many times. It's Good, but not addictive enough that the endless barrage of random battles doesn't become tedious before the end of the game.
What is addictive enough to carry the game is the fusion of intriguing murder mystery and martial arts action movie. As revelation after revelation gradually paint a picture that makes an impossible murder finally make perfect sense, every rain soaked alley and dusk coloured classroom out there are teeming with thugs out to erase any snoops who get too close to the truth. Perfectly creepy villains exchange
unpleasantries building up to inevitable, epic confrontations as the story climaxes, and you just know the cool friends you made in the last game are gonna show up to have your back right when you need them the most.
And so the never ending Yakuza cycle continues. A refined but repetitive battle system and a showbag of hit and miss minigames combine with lovely but well trod recreations of prominent Japanese locales and an earnestly crafted, passionately told story of heroism to provide an experience that is truly special. But...
that's every Yakuza, innit. Even though I don't think it's quite as good as other recent Yakuza titles,
Lost Judgement is still a great game and I'm looking forward to whatever the developers have for us next.
3. Super Mario 3D world + Bowser's Fury - [Switch] Well don't I just love me some Mario. The pudgy plumber's platforming proficiency has seen him dominate and define the genre since
Donkey Kong in '81, until now, 40 years of electric ecstasy later. 2013's then WiiU exclusive
Super Mario 3D World is another classic, but it's an 8 year old title at this point, so unless you're a man of culture like me, and have to own the shiny new version just so you have an excuse to find every secret star and touch the top of every flagpole with all 5 characters in order to collect every single sticker all over again, your main reason not to miss this masterpiece is that you missed it the first time, since nobody owned a WiiU and everybody owns a Switch. Of course, even a lazy glance at the game's box art, with its fat-ass plus symbol suffixed to the title, reveals I'm omitting something, but we'll solve the equation
(MARIO 3D WORLD) + (BOWSER'S FURY) = ??? later on.
Let me start by saying
I hope you're not allergic to cats. The new power-up in
SM3DW is the cat bell, transforming you into a fierce feline who can climb walls, do diagonal pouncing attacks, and my favourite, a sliding claw dash that mows through blocks and enemies. The other big selling point is that this game is made to be enjoyed alone or on a packed couch of 4, sort of like the zany "co-operative" multiplayer of the
New Super Mario Bros. games, where 4 players are all on the screen at once, stepping on each other while trying to leap over lava, and accidentally throwing each other down bottomless pits...and maybe doing it on purpose. Sometimes.
Fortunately, there's a lot more room to move compared to those games now that the platforms are in 3D. Little Kevin doesn't have to bounce repeatedly on Sarah's head over and over until she scratches him in real life and then suddenly they're both trying to choke each other and they yank the controller so hard they pull the console over and you're yelling
"will you kids friggin' stop it already!? This is supposed to be fun!" Uh... what I mean is, hypothetically - a scenario like that, uh, imaginary one would be less likely to happen. Partly because the space you're sharing has depth now and partly because a lot of character abilities and power-ups help mitigate such problems. You can also play online or locally across multiple Switches now, too. The game does incentivize friendly fire to an extent though, awarding a crown to the player with the most points, so you're never completely free of the joy of finding out which kid has the most realistic IRL cat scratch attack.
My pro-tip for maximum multiplayer enjoyment is that when you play with others, just play to make it to the flagpole together. Don't pursue secrets or stars, and focus your skill on helping other players by giving them your power-ups or carrying them sometimes if need be. Then revisit each course in single player later that night and satisfy your urge to perfect the level by collecting its green stars and stamps, amassing 1-ups as you do so, so you'll have a stack of lives ready to expend on multiplayer the next day. It's also good to advise players having trouble judging depth to look at the shadow underneath their character to help them understand their position when jumping across platforms.
Yes, multiplayer can get crazy, but don't
Doki Doki Panic, because the roster is
awesome. In a loving callback to
Super Mario Bros. 2, Mario, Luigi, Toad and Peach all handle a little bit differently, like how Toad is a little speedster, or Peach has a floaty jump. It's been 8 years, so I'll just spoil it for you: Rosalina is in this game too, and she's great. That's just one of many joyful surprises. Things really start to get hype at world 3-1, where you're introduced to helicopter blocks, snow balls, Kuribo's ice skate, and the glorious Tanooki suit all at the same time. You'll be throwing boomerangs, eating multiplication cherries, shooting cannonballs and zipping around in
Futurama tubes. You'll see Captain Toad's dioramas and Savannah deserts and Japanese castles and even a secret Zelda level as you play through multiple post game worlds.
SM3DW is full of great content.
And
SM3DW is so pretty, sometimes I wonder if the game somehow invented new colours. Peach's perfect pink is present in her cat suit and her boomerang bro costume, but she opts for a red and white number with her hair tied back in a sporty ponytail when she's using the fire flower to incinerate goombas. When Luigi puts on his boomerang bro costume, his shiny shell is such a glossy green that it gives me flashbacks of the Game & Watch
Greenhouse game, with its unforgettable green clamshell design. Rosalina's deep turquoise is carried over from her dress to her boomerang costume, but when she dons a catsuit she's a slinky black cat, aloof and cool. So many gorgeous graphical touches shine through in this game, it really is a work of art.
Pictured: Nintendo execs with their cashcow. Uh, cashcat.
As for
Bowser's Fury, it's a bit of a weird thing to judge. If the cat-o-meter is at 11/10 for
SM3DW, then Bowser's Fury clocks in at about 9001
Neco Conecos. There's cat trees, cat mountains, cat koopas, cat kameks, actual cats...it's bonkers. Felines aside, it's a kind of awesome fully 3D platformer, set on a huge lake filled with islands that hold lots of cool challenges. But all the while that you're scoping out those challenges, Bowser's shell spins and grows in the background somewhere as he gradually masses up to a huge size and hulks out, coming at you in full
Gojira mode, crushing islands beneath his feet, raining fire and breathing brimstone.
At this point, you can dismiss him back to his shell by quickly collecting 1 of the 100 collectable "cat shines" in the game before he immolates you, or avoiding his furious onslaught for a certain amount of time will also make him retract to his shell. But the best way of dealing with him is to grab a gigabell and transform into the looming titan that is Lion Mario, complete with shaggy Super Saiyan mane. This way, you can challenge Bowser on equal footing, matching each other blow for blow as millions of innocent lives get caught in the crossfire, probably. But even when you overthrow Bowzilla this way, it's still just a temporary dismissal, and he begins charging up to interrupt your exploration all over again.
Nintendo developers would describe this as "a pleasant feeling of tension." They aren't wrong exactly. It's fun, and the urgency Bowser brings to the game is part of that, even if it can be annoying at times as well. In fact, the whole time I was playing I was thinking "don't enjoy it too much, because it will end soon." But at 100 shines,
BF actually adds up to almost a whole game, albeit a small one. And the Bowser transforming into Godzilla gimmick doesn't wear out its welcome.
But it would.
This a cool concept executed well, and, I feel, to its maximum potential. You cannot make a full triple A Mario game in the league of something like
Super Mario Odyssey with this premise. It just doesn't have the legs. Nintendo probably saw they were onto something good with this concept, so they just kept building on it until they hit wall and realised it couldn't go any further. Not wanting their work to go to waste, they tossed some cats in and packaged it with
SM3DW as a bonus. That was a good decision. If you see yourself playing
SM3DW again for any reason, then
Bowser's Fury makes it an even better buy. Maybe you know someone who never played
SM3DW, and you'd like to play through it with them in co-op mode, or something. As a free add-on,
Bowser's Fury is great. Cool concept, Fully 3D, 100 shines, more than enough cats. But by itself, it's
almost a game.
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