2021's Games of the Year, Part 2
This is a retro video game newsletter, but I still play new ones, you know. Part 2.
I introduced the idea behind this two parter (not that “these are the best games of the year” takes much introducing) as well as the rules for eligibility in the first Games of the Year entry — check up on that if you need a reminder or missed the first five games out of 10. All I’ll repeat this time is that if a game you love from 2021 isn’t here or there, I probably just didn’t play it yet. It turns out there are lots of video games released like, every week. And many of them are great.
Let’s dive right in and see what’s left after part one’s RPG-heavy start to the list.
Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights
Developer: Adglobe and Live Wire
Publisher: Binary Haze Interactive
Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows
June 22, 2021
I’m not sure Ender Lilies actually does anything new or unique. That’s fine, though, sometimes we give a little too much credit to the idea of New! when it’s perfectly fine to also just be meshing a bunch of old together in a way that makes the old feel both familiar and new. The most important thing, really, is that it’s enjoyable, and Ender Lilies passes that bar with ease. In a modern day video game landscape that is basically drowning in Metroidvania-style games, Ender Lilies still managed to stand out to me.
You’ll notice that it borrows, to one degree or another, from games like Hollow Knight, Castlevania, and even the Souls games, that it bears a visual resemblance to the stunningly detailed 2D works of Vanillaware, and so on. The Hollow Knight resemblance is mostly in traversing a world that is already poisoned and dead, though, combat is part of this, too; the Castlevania bit is in the general travel and world design, as well as the pacing of the platforming; the Souls connection is in how the world and its narrative slowly reveals itself to you through discovery and exploration, and also in how its combat requires you be patient and learn patterns instead of rushing in like this is an action RPG. And the Vanillaware bit, well, just look:
This isn’t quite as detailed as the work of the developer behind 13 Sentinels and Odin Sphere, but also, no one’s 2D work is quite as detailed as Vanillaware’s: that’s why I said that it “bears a visual resemblance,” because I know when to couch.
You play as a young priestess, Lily, who doesn’t actually wield any weapons herself. Instead, she finds potential allies who have had their bodies — but vitally, not their minds — taken by the Blight, and she purifies them. This kills the afflicted person in question, but it’s a welcome death, as their mind and spirit are now free from the prison this sickness held them captive within. As thanks, they’ll join Lily in her quest to attempt to purify as much of the afflicted populace as she can.
Some, like the Umbral Knight, have unlimited uses and limited range, because it’s just a basic attack and slashing sword combo. Others, like the nun with a flail, can basically be dropped off in front of a foe while you scurry to safety, or you can use them for a climbing mid-air attack in conjunction with the Umbral Knight’s slashing. There are a whole bunch of spirits to collect, and you’ll mostly do so after fighting the afflicted potential ally in a boss fight. Poisonous clouds, energy tornadoes, a weird slime guy you can throw from a distance who will explode and cause splash damage: there’s a lot of variety here, and you can equip six of these spirits at a time, switching between the two sets of button assignments at any time by pressing the right shoulder button.
The world feels appropriately somber and sad, with it looking for sure like a dying land, and the heavily piano-driven soundtrack helps with this feeling, too. It’s really quite a lovely little game, and also a challenge: boss fights are no joke, especially the deeper you get into the game, and even just staying alive in between the various checkpoints can be tough depending on how effectively you’re deploying your spirits, or utilizing your dodge maneuver.
Resident Evil Village
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Playstation 4/5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Stadia
May 7, 2021
Village isn’t quite as good as Biohazard, and it’s because there is a bit more emphasis on action here. At the very beginning of the game, the action is a bit horrifying, because you simply do not have enough knowledge of your enemies or bullets to stop them, and you are swarmed by lycans. However, you learn in a hurry that you can take these guys down with just your knife — it’ll take some effort, but you can do it, conserving ammunition and timing everything so you rarely take damage in the process, too. It’s a little too clinical and efficient to still be horror, but it’s also about the only complaint I have with Village, which otherwise continues right on the path of actual horror that Resident Evil 7 brought the series back to in 2017.
Yeah, the lycan are more annoying and filler than anything, a substitute to make up for a general lack of scares in the more open section of the titular village, but there are plenty of wholly unnerving scenarios and setpieces within the game as a whole. Castle Dimistrescu is a whole lot more than just a tall vampire lady Twitter wanted to have sex with all spring: it’s an excellently designed dungeon with multiple boss fights, fantastic design that has you feeling jumpy and just wrong whether you’re wading in blood or checking out the stunning staircase that winds through the main hall.
And the game even completely removes action from the equation in another dungeon, where your weapons and items are removed, and you are forced to endure a very P.T.-like experience that involves the literal stuff of nightmares. Everything about it is terrifying, especially since it’s very unclear what is real and what is not, and you know deep down it is not worth figuring out if the stuff that might not be real is still capable of hurting you. No, it’s best to just run and hide from [redacted], and also to try not to think about it. Or play this section before bed, unless you want to have some real fucked up dreams.
I missed this version of Resident Evil, despite my love for much of the more action-oriented bits. More games like Biohazard and Village and the remake of Resident Evil 2, please: let’s leave the yes, sir military counter-terrorism shit in the aughts where it belongs, forever.
I will say, though, that protagonist Ethan Winters is just… he is such a dingus. Pure incredulousness, distilled, he never knows what’s going on and mostly complains that it’s happening to him, and his zingers are bad — not good bad, but sad bad. He is the preeminent wife guy of the series, though, I’ll give him that. Even if it’s only because Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine aren’t married. And his regeneration ability makes it so that someone at Capcom is able to work through their hand trauma fetish. That’s something, right?
Mushihimesama
Developer: Cave
Publisher: Live Wire
Nintendo Switch
June 15, 2021
Mushihimesama is a shoot-em-up from Cave, and it’s one of their specialties: bullet hell. It also isn’t a brand new game by any means, as it released in arcades way back in 2004. Here is why it’s in a 2021 Game of the Year list, however: it did not, until June of this year, get a worldwide console release. It showed up on iOS a decade ago, and it’s been on Windows since the middle of last decade, but by the rules of this list, PC release dates don’t count, so you can bet that I’m not counting mobile, either. Mushihimesama is new to North American consoles as of 2021, and on the non-technicality side, it plays as fresh as if that’s when it first released, too.
It’s meant to be more of a starter bullet hell experience than some of Cave’s other works, and it is — this one features unlimited continues, for instance, while another Cave danmaku, ESP Ra.De Psi caps you at two credits per play. The thing about an easier bullet hell from Cave, though, is that it still inevitably looks like this screenshot on normal difficulty:
And Mushihimesama has an ultra difficulty that starts to look like that a whole lot earlier in the game, to boot. The game even asks you if you really want to be playing that mode when you attempt to.
Now, Mushihimesama is extremely forgiving in some respects, at least for the genre. You are the Bug Princess (that’s actually what the game’s title translates to), riding on a giant flying beetle, and you only lose a life if one of the game’s many, many bullets touches the very center of your “ship.” So, you can have close call after close call and still get by: I actually managed to take the above screenshot while my ship was in the bottom portion of the screen, and then survive that absolute purple mess afterward. You can complete the game even if you continually falter thanks to unlimited continues, but you’ll get a Game Over screen when it’s done: you really want to complete it on one credit, which is how a game that is all of five stages long gets you to invest tons and tons of time into it. And there is always topping your previous high scores while you work on that ultimate goal, too.
For a general sense of how it plays. You have loads of tokens worth different point values to pick up as you defeat enemies. Simply firing on enemies, even before defeating them, will rack up points. You have multiple firing modes, including an auto rapid fire that has your little option ships firing in a bit of a spread pattern across the screen, or, if you hold down the B button, they’ll come together to focus fire on one specific point/foe, causing them to explode a whole lot faster. This can be vital for a number of reasons, one of them being that, upon defeat, a foe’s many bullets vanish from the screen. “Why not always use this focused beam, then?” You don’t always want to put the bug princess directly in front of what you’re firing at, and holding down the B button also slows you down considerably, which makes dodging either easier or tougher, depending on what you’re dodging. Mushihimesama is one of those shmups where the technical limitations slowdown was kept in even on more powerful hardware, because you need it in order to effectively dodge.
Thanks to re-releases over the years in Japan, including its first foray into HD on the Xbox 360, Mushihimesama has had multiple modes added since its original arcade release. The arcade version is included in the Switch release, and includes a novice mode for beginners with far more forgiving bullet spreads. There is the standard mode, as well, which is considered the “normal” version of Mushihimesama, and there is an extremely score-based Arrange mode that fully equips you and ramps up the multipliers from the start, as well as a 1.5 mode which has significant differences from the more standard editions of the game, even in the game’s soundtrack.
It’s really a great game, with an emphasis on bugs and nature that gives it a very distinct look for the genre, and the art all made the transition to HD very well. It also has a TATE mode, so you don’t have to play in the way I did mostly for the sake of that screenshot that also shows off one of the game’s wallpapers: you can flip your Switch vertically and plug in a Flip Grip — highly recommended for shmup enthusiasts with a Switch, and all of $12 — or you can be slightly deranged like me and hang an HD set from a rotating wall mount so you can play vertical shmups the way they were meant to be played whenever you want.
Scarlet Nexus
Developer: Tose, Bandai Namco Studios
Publisher: Bando Namco Entertainment
Playstation 4/5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows
June 25, 2021
A Tose game we actually know was developed by Tose, that they actually put their name on, and it’s not a Starfy title? That is a legitimate rarity in the industry: Tose intentionally obscures their output, for some reason, so they have developed something like 1,000 games in their over 40 years of existence, but we only know for sure about a relative handful of those as being their doing. No, really. Their Wikipedia page even has this note on it:
Some of these titles are merely believed or assumed to be developed by Tose, due to information compiled by various amateur and professional journalists. Most have not been officially confirmed as Tose-developed products by any of the games' publishers, co-developers, or Tose themselves.
This is just conjecture, but I wonder if the reason Tose’s name is on Scarlet Nexus is because Namco planned on making it into a larger franchise (there is also an anime), and not just a video game series: so, like with Starfy, which is half-owned by Nintendo and half-owned by Tose, they couldn’t simply hide their contributions on this one.
Anyway! Scarlet Nexus. It’s a fast-paced action game with some RPG elements, with the kind of party relationship/growth you often see in modern RPGs — little breaks in between chapters where you can hang out with your allies, talk to them, do their personal missions, etc. I found that the story merited the idea of making an anime out of it, too — regardless of what the quality of said anime ended up being, the game’s story was worth expanding upon in other media. Scarlet Nexus made me reminisce about how, not all that long ago, a concern among game’s journalists was how Japanese developers were going to adjust to having to make bigger budget games in the HD era. Titles like Scarlet Nexus are a reminder that Japan’s developers adjusted just fine, thank you very much.
The combat is great, and is focused around psychokinesis. There are two campaigns, one with Kasane and her more long-range psychokinesis, and the other with Yuito and his closer, melee-focused mind powers. You effectively borrow the abilities of your companions in combat in order to enhance your own, which makes for some situational quick thinking in an action game where things can go south in a hurry if you don’t react properly or quickly, and also lets you tinker with your lineup and experiment throughout the entirety of the game’s campaign(s). You won’t know the full, full story of Scarlet Nexus unless you play both campaigns, as, while the two protagonists intermingle and interact quite regularly in the game, the campaigns aren’t simply you doing the same thing, but with someone else. You have different companions, are handling different portions of stages, have your own goals and missions, and so on. Not to mention the more personal narrative differences stemming from the characters’ own backgrounds and relationships, and how the game impacts those with its narrative.
Tales of Arise got all the credit this year as far as Namco Bandai games go, likely thanks to its major revisions to the long-running Tales series, but Scarlet Nexus was more enjoyable for me, with more to offer, and I’m going to be thinking about it for much longer.
Metroid Dread
Developer: MercurySteam, Nintendo EPD
Publisher: Nintendo
Nintendo Switch
October 8, 2021
Metroid Dread was something of a surprise drop for 2021, but it was a welcome one. And it did not disappoint, either: it’s not quite clear to me after a single playthrough where it ranks among all Metroids, but it’s easily ahead of most of them. The modernization of Samus’ movements combined with a refinement of the kind of boss encounters MercurySteam introduced in their remake of Metroid II on the 3DS made for a very hard to ignore reminder that one of the companies behind the creation of the Metroidvania experience are still one of the very best at that kind of game. It’s kind of stunning, really, that so much of Dread can be simply a refinement of what already existed, and yet, it all feels so fresh, so inviting, so essential. It helps that the game’s that its based on and preceded are still, to this day, some of the very best Nintendo has ever made, of course.
Let’s just start running through assorted things I loved. The dynamic camera work of Dread is wonderful: that the game can make you feel insignificant in one frame and claustrophobic in another helps with the mood, and as anyone who has played a Metroid before knows, mood is vital to the experience. MercurySteam understanding Samus is also key to the whole experience, and maybe best understood through a couple of images of her reacting to finding old nemesis Kraid hanging out where she did not expect to bump into him. Check out this stance that screams and sighs, “This shit again?”
And, of course, the followup screen, where Samus does not move an inch, but simply begins to charge up her power beam to respond to Kraid’s scream with violence:
Beautiful, and, unlike with what Team Ninja (and Nintendo! I will not let Yoshio Sakamoto off the hook for this!) did when Samus saw old foe Ridley in Other M, it all makes sense in character, too.
Samus is not always in control of the situation in Dread, though, or else the game’s title wouldn’t be of much use. No, no, there are plenty of moments for Samus to feel… well, not powerless, necessarily, but like she’d be much better of running until she can figure something out, because the alternative is dying in vain. The EMMI robots give chase through certain sections of the game’s planet that you explore, and you do not want to be caught by them. The game even warns you that you can escape from their clutches with a perfectly timed button press, but that your chances of successfully doing so are pretty low, and you don’t want to rely on it working. There was little more satisfying in 2021’s video games than successfully timing that button press and escaping Samus’ doom. Doing it multiple times in a row was like, a Vince McMahon falling off his chair meme level experience.
I started to get the Dead Space and (early) Resident Evil vibes from finding item caches and supplies, where instead of relief all I felt was… well, dread. “Oh no, what’s coming after me now?” you know? There was loads of difficulty discourse surrounding Dread, too — some of which has already been addressed here, thanks to Trevor Strunk and I chatting — but it is hard to overstate how incredible it felt to have a boss just absolutely wipe the floor with you in your first meeting, and then, a couple of tries later, you’ve learned what you need to do and can basically take them down without getting hit. Then you feel invincible, like nothing could possibly stop you or Samus. At least until the next boss stomps all over your neck, I mean.
My favorite boss battle from the entire year, and one of the finest Metroid as a series has ever produced, is within Dread, too. And it’s not even the last boss, which absolutely ruled on its own merits, too. What a game. The one letdown is that the soundtrack is merely pretty good instead of stellar: it’s very atmospheric, and works well within the game itself and for the reasons it needs to, but isn’t quite as good for listening to outside of the game. That’s some like, expanded enjoyment stuff, though. It does the job it needs to do while it’s clocked in.
I didn’t rank the year’s games 1-10 and instead just threw them out there as equals, but yeah, Dread, the last one I’m writing about here, was my favorite from 2021. I cannot wait to play it again. And this time on hard, where the difficulty discourse is terrified to tread.
Honorable Mentions
Alright, five more games for the road, but not with the level of detail as the top 10. I should point out that New Pokémon Snap and WarioWare: Get It Together! would have been honorable mentions for me, but my five-year-old daughter already covered them back in part one, so I’ll let her have the shine there and use that as an excuse to include two more games to this two-part project.
Actraiser Renaissance: A full remake, not just a remaster, of a classic SNES title. I covered it in a Past Meets Present back in October, so I’ll leave you with that if you want to know more about why it’s great.
Cruis’n Blast: I was genuinely shocked at how much I am enjoying Cruis’n Blast, but it’s just pure, nonstop thrills for somewhere between 45 and 90 seconds, with a massive expansion of courses compared to the original arcade version. You start in last place on every course, and your goal is basically to try to get into first place with almost no track left remaining: this is not a game where you sit in first place and stay there for the duration. You’ve got your work cut out for you every single time thanks to extremely aggressive rubber banding, but again, the courses are so short and so fast that you don’t mind: that’s the entire point, this barely managing to pull it out feel. Also there are dinosaurs and aliens and tracks falling apart from underneath you.
Doki Doki Literature Club: Probably not the kind of visual novel that you can play again and enjoy in the same way, but its one-time trick is a good one. Don’t forget to keep playing beyond the game’s behind-the-curtain reveals, either, as that’s the only way to see all of the backstory and get the good ending.
Great Ace Attorney Chronicles: I think I like this game less than literally everyone else who played it — it’s just not quite as good, as clever, as funny, as effortlessly outrageous as the other Ace Attorney titles set in the present-day, and as I am typing this while a cat named Miles Edgeworth naps in my lap, you know I am serious about my Ace Attorney. With that being said, this is (these are, really, since both are in one package) still an Ace Attorney game(s), and the baseline enjoyment for that is very high. High enough that it can be my least-favorite of the long-running series and still crack an honorable mentions for Game of the Year.
Unsighted: If I had been able to spend more time with Unsighted, I think it might have been able to crack the top 10. Maybe. It released pretty late into the year and ran into the buzz saw of me catching up on Neo: The World Ends With You and the release of Shin Megami Tensei V, though, so it never stood a chance in that regard. Still, what I’ve played is great, even if I genuinely do not understand any review of it that says it’s a Metroidvania. It’s a top-down Zelda if it’s any kind of identifying shortcut. You have a little creature flying around your head giving you advice! Your first dungeon has a mine cart puzzle! There is a fishing minigame! The mid-boss of that dungeon are a bunch of jumping statues spinning in a circle!
Anyway, the mechanic where you have to pick and choose what missions and story you want to complete and expand upon based entirely on an ever-ticking clock that will see NPCs become “unsighted” and therefore your mindless, robotic foes over time, is pretty great. The resource that will extend their life is finite, and you have to think about who to give it to — including if you should give any to yourself, as well, as you have your own clock that’s ticking to consider. I made it far enough into Unsighted to give it this treatment here, but I’ll be glad when I can get back to see the rest of what it has to offer.
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