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10 Games I Played in 2017, Roughly Ranked

This is wildly long lol so have fun, idiots

#10: DESTINY 2

This is sort of awkward. Destiny 1 was a game I enjoyed with small reservations; it was obvious how hampered they were by their own backend in creating new content and design spaces to explore, prior to The Taken King. Even then, it had shining moments of joy for me. I adored the goofy dead ghost hunting like halo 2/3 skullfinding, using every trick at your dispoaal to find another morsel of insane, well-crafted tidbits of lore for this world that the game itself rarely even touched on, let alone explored. Destiny 2 was supposed to be the "we listened and we're fixing it" for that game, and a needed jump to a new backend that would free them to create the things they dreamed of.

The grimoire was removed wholesale, those bits of lore still true presumably but inaccessible in the game again. Instead of finding ghosts, you examine objects in the world, getting a 2-sentence Nolan North quip that usually is more funny than it is educational about this sprawling world they created. And it doesn't save that anywhere. We actually moved backwards in term of the lore's accessibility to the player, somehow. The game itself is still Destiny, helmet popping and aiming down sights and kicking balls around the tower, and it's storyline was ambitious in a way the original was not, actually making you feel at least a little weak for about 10 minutes before you're back to killing Fallen and then doing donuts on your Sparrow on top of their corpse. The game treats itself as both too serious and totally unserious in the same breath, a monologue of serious consequences punctuated by Cayde cradling a chicken and petting it gently. It's good, but it remains to see if it'll reach the same comfortable spot Destiny 1 got to by the end of it's lifespan.

9: NIOH Here's where I admit that some of these games I've played, in that I played it for a few hours and haven't had time to return to it. I have it on good faith that Nioh is an incredible game, and from the bits I've touched I know that to be at least probably true. I've heard it described more as a Diablo-esque loot-game pretending to be a Dark Souls ball-busting difficulty monster than vice versa. It's something I'm hoping to come back to, and if I'd been able to spend more time with, I likely would have put much further up the list.

8: Dishonored: Death of the Outsider Another game I fuckin' haven't had time to complete, Death of the Outsider is the thing I and several friends have wanted for years; Billie Lurk fucking shit up. And her powerset rules. I'm only like 2 missions in, but I'm looking forward to finishing the rest sometime before Christmas, hopefully. Dishonored 2 was definitely a game I was thrilled to play, and I know this will be more of the same.

7: Resident Evil 7 What could be better than the creeping horror of a deranged family out in the Louisiana Bayou? Resident Evil 7 was honestly so unbelievably effective at learning from the last 5+ years of immersive horror games while still, at it's heart, being a goofy Resident Evil game under that. That style clashes at times; The moment when you go outside to the courtyard of the mansion and find a double-keycard locked door when the most advanced thing in the whole house before now has been the goofy projector-doors that hearken back to the ancient history of the series. I think it sticks it's landing well, with a good lategame twist and plenty of goofy superscience in between. I've been meaning to go back to it for the Chris Redfield DLC, but I don't know if I actually want to, to be honest. That game was a fun ride, and they did their best to add the usual replay stuff like a NG+ gun and such, but I think I'm okay leaving it where I left it, on good terms.

6: Tacoma I bought the hoodie that came with a LUNAR TRANSFER STATION TACOMA patch Fullbright sold long before that game had it's transformation following feedback from beta testers, and I never stopped looking forward to it coming out. Gone Home was like a...I won't say formative, because it isn't true, but it was definitive for me. A story about two girls falling in love together doesn't come around that often, and the attention to the setting and feel of being in this old, deeply lived in house. Tacoma shows that same love of character and place in spades, giving you an even more intimate look at the world the crew of the Tacoma lived in together. I honestly lost it when I noticed during a scene that next door, their cat was asleep on the shelf above the laundry machine. Just the smallest details and love shown for everyone involved broke my heart and put it back together in a different shape. A vision of a world utterly fucked by corporatist greed such that they are essentially their own extragovernmental entities, and people live on anyway, just being people. It's so sad, but still sort of hopeful? Even if the world is garbage, people will keep on living as best as they can. It's very millennial of myself to find solace in that idea, honestly, but that's this game for you, one crafted based on the excesses of the last decade spiraling out of control.

5: Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood In any other year, this game would be #1. You're gonna hear me say that a few more times here before we're done. Final Fantasy 14 has been a constant in my life for the last 3 years, delivering again and again the sort of joy that only comes from a game lovingly made by people dedicated to their own love of the genre, the setting and their playerbase. That's the only way I can describe it, lovingly crafted. Naoki Yoshida loves this game, and so does his team, and every inch of that game radiates this. The storyline itself is a little meandering, jumping from a failed revolution to formenting a successful one, to returning triumphant with new armies and allies at your back. Everyone in that game is, again, a joy to be around. It has a somewhat similar roadtrip feel to Heavensward, but never treads the same ground in the same way. It's more like...taking your friend abroad to another country, while Heavensward was a road trip across a state that stops and starts in fits and spurts. I don't know if this expansion will hold my attention in the same way that Heavensward did, or that A Realm Reborn did. I don't know if I have that part of myself that's willing to ride with an MMO across the lifetime of it's expansion this time. I want to support this game, and the people who make it, and my friends who do still ride with it. But this might be my last expansion.

4: Tales of Berseria If this came out any other year, it might be my game of the year. You'll hear that 2 more times before we're done. I've never been a Tales person. I know people who are, and I understand the mystique, but I never Understood it until repeated praise (and some very cute lesbian ship art) forced my hand into buying it. I don't know if I'm gonna be ok when I finish it. The game is very baldly about doing bad things. The protagonist is a demon on a blatantly self-destructive revenge quest against the self-appointed savior of the world, aided by a demon swordsman who wants to kill his brother, a witch with existentially depressed ennui, a boy who barely knows who he is, a pirate cursed to bring ruin to those around him, and a pure maiden with a tragic backstory trying to do good in the world who has fallen in with them through a series of missteps so comic they're mostly just sad. Together, this totally uncohesive group of misfits abandoned by the world, rejecting it and destroying everything that stands in their way. It crushes my heart on the regular. This is definitely a 60+ hour JRPG because I just got to hour 20 and there's absolutely still so much left to go. They've introed villain after villain, placing the shotgun on the mantelpiece for Velvet to mangle herself with just to kill them in the blast. This game breaks my heart. The world it's in is awful, every party member has been utterly ruined by some facet of it that happened to conflict with a totally normal thing they wanted. They're the devil's rejects. And I love every single one of them.

3: Butterfly Soup Remember all the praise I gave Gone Home back there? This game is like that for me this year. You can just make a game about some queer girls playing baseball and being in love, and I'll love it with all my heart. It's not hard for me to peg why I love it; Akarsha is like a fucking mirror pointed directly at my face with a moustache painted on it, Diya's anxiety and gay panic is so deeply relatable that I very nearly cried the first time she said the word Lesbian to herself and immediately tried to convince herself she's not gay. Brianna Lei's depiction of young, messy, goofy girls living with all the problems that happen to kids their age; insane parents, abuse, self-discovery, a lot of bad jokes and getting all too real at a moment's notice. I honestly cannot wait to see what else she can bring to the table.

1 (TIE): NieR: Automata If this game came out any other year, it would be #1 without effort. The original NieR did something at just the right time, with just the right amount of feeling. A rejection of the trend of father figures rescuing their child and getting the good ending, NieR was a quest to protect a girl to the detriment of everyone around the protagonist, including the girl herself. The final ending of that game ends with you erasing yourself from the world so that you never existed, to save someone who deserves to live and would have if not for you. NieR's destructive quest to protect his daughter literally destroys the world around him, disrupting millennia of careful planning and manipulation by people far smarter than him. All because they took his daughter. Damn the world, he wanted what was his. NieR: Automata follows another 10,000 years after that, in the same world, scarred by a war that broke out centuries ago. The game frequently lies to both you the player and you the protagonist, but the protagonist already knows better, and simply doesn't let on. The game focuses, instead, on the ways that something built by humans craves to become like its long-gone masters. Androids are built to be physically ideal, sexy and at times loving to one another, because that's what humans did. It's unclear if they chose this for themselves or if humans did it to them (and obviously Yoko Taro chose for them to be like this, human choice or no), but it's how they live. The machines they fight do the same, playing a phone game across millennia of what humanity was, trying to fill the holes in their life with gender binaries, sexual intercourse, children and family and love. What separates them from us? Are we any different? Do we deserve to be different? Do they? I don't know how to talk about this game coherently. There's so much there. People recently have been talking about it again, as lists like these come up, and so many bad takes are floating around that it crushes my heart. 2B's sexy, so the game is horny. It's bad because you have to replay it 5 times (no, wrong, bad). It's bad because 9S is a softboy and 2B could have been a lesbian with any of the women throwing themselves at her (come on, dude, at least try). I'm not gonna try to rebut any of these, because the game itself doesn't need my defense. It stands on its own. It's the best game I've played in the last 5 years, in all likelihood. It's definitely my favorite of the last decade.

1 (TIE): Persona 5 If this game came out on any other year, it would be #1 with a bullet. This game had an insanely tortured development cycle. Pushed back again, then again, then again. Remember that February 2012 graphic that used to go around, and likely will right around Valentine's Day? Characters were revamped, removed, redesigned 5 times in the case of Haru (who started out as a boy, somehow). But it's exactly the game I needed in 2017. I was a transplant in Texas in 2004, going into high school in a new state where we knew no-one and nobody. I was quiet, spending most of my time outside class reading the 6th Dark Tower novel, Song of Susannah, a 2 inch thich hardcover beast. Because it's high school, rumors started about whatever they thought I was because I was quiet and wore a hoodie to school regardless of the weather, hiding guns or knives or what have you. Akira's experience touched me, in ways I never thought I would be a decade after graduating. Shit, everyone touched me in some way. Yusuke's quiet acceptance of the abuse and labels applied to him by his teacher and his fellow students. Futaba's isolation in the wake of her mother's death hit me in the heart; I dropped out of college when my own mother had a spinal cord fusion in her lumbar spine that ruined her life, left her with 10% her previous mobility. I mourned for years. Haru's quiet demeanor and the immediate, effusive joy she displayed whenever she could be with her friends, no matter the context. Ryuji's bristling rage at authority that ridicules him. Even the side cast struck me in ways Persona 4 and 3 never did. Kawakami's tiredness with the world, her exploitation she brushes off as a fact of life. Takemi's cool acceptance of being forced from the job of her dreams into treating bruises and being blackballed by the world she worked to survive in. Sojiro's struggles with cruel family that would destroy the daughter he loves as his own. Persona 5 is a game about the ways that society is designed to strike down the odd man out, casting them aside as worthless or ridiculous. The simple girl run into a cult, the daughter of a model forced into a role she never asked for, the typecast and the downtrodden, who deserve so much better than the world they've been given. This is a deeply flawed game. Within hours of Ryuji standing side by side with Ann to defend her from the casual sexism of Kamoshida or any other number of aggressions, he becomes a slavering hound doing the same thing to his best friend. The writing, when it's not inconsistent, simply isn't there; Haru's final and rather grand entrance peters off into maybe a dozen lines she has in the main story following her introduction. 6+ years in development can do some bad stuff to a game. But I love it, despite all of that. I can see what this game could have been, with a less tortured development, with a director who didn't ask the character design to make all of the female confidants "cuter". With a more focused vision, a clearer goal, and a better route there. All of that said, I still love my satanic crime ring. And I probably always will.