The retro Games of the Year of 2021

Obviously a retro video game publication is going to focus on the best games from the past, played in the present.

It’s the end of 2021, so game(s) of the year posts abound. I’ll write up a look at my favorite games from 2021, too, but, since this is a newsletter with the word “retro” in the title, I also want to look at the best games I played in 2021 that released before then — sometimes well, well before the present year, and other times, ones from the past couple of years that I’m just getting around to playing.

Now, this isn’t a ranked list, but it also isn’t everything I played from Not 2021, either: a much larger sample has been reduced to the 15 best of the bunch. And the list is not every non-2021 game I played during the year: it’s just meant to be the ones I played for the very first time in 2021, with one exception that will get its exceptional nature explained when I get to it.

I’ll include developer, publisher, platform, and release year info for each game, too, but I’m restricting all of that to just the actual version I played instead of trying to be all-encompassing. And if I already wrote about the game here, I’m going to share a key section and link to my full write-up. Let’s get to it.

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Snatcher

Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Sega CD
1994

From June 16’s “It’s new to me” entry on Snatcher:

It’s great and all to get a glimpse at what was going on in Kojima’s brain before the days of Metal Gear Solid — the love for films and philosophy were already there, as well as what we can see by this time is also a clear love of redheads — but Snatcher, on its own merits, is worth playing. It’s just a damn good cyberpunk world and mystery, with a future version of Japan worth exploring and a foe worth both figuring out and defeating. The voice acting can be a little off at times, sure, but it’s mostly endearing, and helps build out the world and characters, and the soundtrack is as vital to the experience as the animation and art style. Like with the best graphic adventures and visual novels out there, I’ll be revisiting Snatcher somewhere down the line, once I forget the finer points of its plot. If you want to find an excuse to replay a mystery you already know the solution to, well, that’s a game that is built on a much stronger foundation than just that solution, isn’t it?

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Ys: Oath in Felghana

Developer: Nihon Falcom
Publisher: Xseed Games
Playstation Portable
2010

From August 11’s “It’s new to me” entry on Oath in Felghana (and Ys III: Wanderers from Ys):

Oath in Felghana managed to expand upon the original conception of Ys III, bringing in quality of life updates, additional gameplay, a revised story that is able to better set the stage for the game and make it memorable, more reasons to interact with the residents of the village and learn about them and their own tales, and a wholly revamped combat system, all without losing what made Wanderers of Ys work in the first place. It’s still Ys III, to the point that Oath in Felghana isn’t the definitive Ys III just because it’s nicer to look at. Falcom built a killer brand new game on top of an already solid foundation, and it’s impressive how well they captured everything notable about the original without losing any of what made it notable to begin with in the process. Wanderers from Ys is good: The Oath in Felghana is essential if you have even the slightest interest in action RPGs.

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Ys: Memories of Celceta

Developer: Nihon Falcom
Publisher: Xseed Games
Playstation 4
2020

From the November 29 “It’s new to me” on Memories of Celceta:

Memories of Celceta’s soundtrack, which is comprised of new arrangements from the original Ys IV(s), manages to keep players really feeling the necessary vibes, even in the switch from bump combat to a more traditional button-based hack-and-slash setup. The more subdued songs, with string arrangements or a focus on mood-setting drums and synths, are certainly lovely, but the most consistent successes in the soundtrack are those driving tracks, where the drums are leading the charge for guitar solos and violins and synthesizers to tear through the song like Adol Christin’s sword through his foes. I don’t know who originated the idea of synths and electric guitars and violins and pianos all living together in harmony, but I want to kiss them on the lips.

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Yakuza (series)

Developer: Ryu Go Gotoku Studio
Publisher: Sega
Xbox Series X, Playstation 4
2010-2018

Yes, I’m putting the seven (7) Yakuza games I played in 2021 as one entry, what of it? I had never played Yakuza before buying an Xbox Series X back in March of this year — I wanted to, but just had not gotten around to it for one reason or another. You would think “oh, all of the Yakuza games are on Game Pass, and I have Game Pass” would have been enough motivation, but no, my route to finally convincing myself to play these games came from a different direction. You can thank my deciding to play Monolith Soft’s and Namco’s Project X Zone 2 earlier this year for my finally dipping into the Yakuza waters, as Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima are a paired unit in that crossover tactical RPG that featured characters from Namco, Sega, Capcom, and Nintendo games. I will not apologize for who or how I am.

I was immediately drawn in by the world of Yakuza Kiwami, an enhanced remake of the original Yakuza that released way back in 2006 on the Playstation 2, and by the end it was my least favorite of the entire bunch despite me still loving it. The stories and the world these games inhabit are small, but are made to seem large, and much of that has to do with how personal all of it is made to feel. The growth of the Kamurochō district over the life of the series is central to this, to the point where it just doesn’t quite feel like the place Kiryu spent so much of his life and bled so much of his blood by the time Yakuza 6 rolls around, but it’s not supposed, either. It feels like a real, vibrant city, in a way open-world games that focus on more, more, more and bigger, bigger, bigger simply cannot manage. What Kamurochō lacks in sheer size, it makes up for in depth of character, and that pertains to both its citizenry and the space itself.

The games know when to be serious. They know when to be weird. They know when to be funny, when to make you feel sadness, when to pull the rug out from under you. They’re really masterclasses in world- and character-building, and the storytelling is top notch, too. There is basically no end to what you can spend time doing in the games, but they’re tremendously paced despite being these potentially massive adventures. If you want to spend 15-20 hours in total on the game because you’re more interested in pushing the main narrative along than doing every mission you could, the game is not going to feel light. If you want to spend 50 hours getting to know every nook and cranny of where you are and all of its people, letting the story progress as it may, then you can do that, too. The Yakuza games, at their best (Yakuza 5) are right up there with Breath of the Wild for me in terms of their ability to pace the player through these huge worlds without ever making them feel overwhelmed.

This image is not just an example of Yakuza’s humor, but is also the inspiration for one of the greatest game criticism tweets we’ve got.

I might never play Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey again, for instance, even though I loved it, as its sheer size and scope and the way it went about its world-building burned me out on the entire conception of that kind of game. Breath of the Wild and Yakuza, though? I’ve already played the former three times, and I went out and purchased all of the Yakuza games I played on Game Pass whenever I found them on sale, so that I know I’ll have access to them for next time. Because, as good as Game Pass is, nothing there will last forever.

I’m not ranking this list, as said, but I’ll at least leave you with my 2021 Yakuza rankings:

Yakuza 5
Yakuza 0
Yakuza Kiwami 2
Yakuza 3
Yakuza 4
Yakuza 6
Yakuza Kiwami

I’ll get to Yakuza: Like a Dragon sometime in 2022, I’m sure, but this year was all about Kazuma Kiryu.

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Judgment

Developer: Ryu Go Gotoku Studio
Publisher: Sega
Xbox Series X
2021

The Xbox Series X version of Judgment released in 2021, yes, it’s from 2019, so no, I’m not breaking the central rule of this feature by including it. I mentioned in the Yakuza section that Kamurochō no longer felt like Kiryu’s in Yakuza 6, which was intentional for narrative purposes and as a way to put a bow on his arc. It was basically the runway to get you to the Kamurochō of Takayuki Yagami, a former defense attorney and current private investigator who lives in a different version of the district than Kiryu ever did, both because Kiryu is no longer a part of the city at this point, and because their careers were ever so slightly different.

The only issue I have with Judgment is that the combat happens far too often and does not feel as natural from a narrative perspective as it did in the Yakuza games. The combat system isn’t quite as fun, either, and that you need to engage in it often is to the game’s detriment. With that being said, though, everything else about the game is just so, so good, that you can forgive that, even knowing that it would be an even better experience if Ryu Go Gotoku could maybe ease up on the action a bit so we could spend more time just hanging out and getting to know the city the way Yagami really does.

Playing Yakuza was enough reason to get me to jump over to its spinoff series and the successor to its action gameplay, but Dia Lacina’s review on it for Paste from 2019 — Judgment Knows the Heart of a City Is Its People — is what pushed me to go out and spend the $40 right then on release day so I could do that. Really a tremendous game even with its not insignificant flaw, and I’m excited to dive into the second one sometime in 2022, probably around the same time I play Like a Dragon.

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Return of the Obra Dinn

Developer: Lucas Pope
Publisher: 3909 LLC
Nintendo Switch
2019

Now, here is an old-school game. Not just because of its visuals or that it lets you change the game’s color schemes to match those of various gaming PCs of the past, but also because it just hands you some basic tools and an ability, and tells you to get to work. There aren’t a lot of clues as to how you’re supposed to achieve your goal, but each little discovery is a pull on the thread that you’ll eventually unravel completely.

You work in insurance, and it is your task to figure out the fate of every member of the crew of the Obra Dinn, which is sitting out in the water without a single member of its crew left alive on it. The menus you use to track all of this are basically the Pepe Silvia meme in video game form: you’ll see flashbacks to what happened from the eyes of specific crew members, and it’s up to you to identify in your little insurance book whose view you’re seeing, who they’re seeing end up dead in these scenes, who else is around, who is responsible for the death, and the nature of said death. Sometimes it’s a blow to the head from a fellow member of the crew. Sometimes it’s an execution. Sometimes it’s a mutiny. And sometimes it’s a giant sea creature coming to… well, I’ll leave that for you to figure out.

You don’t have to solve for the fate of every member of the crew, but the game is designed so that you won’t get the true ending if you skip out on figuring out the entire mystery. It’s certainly worth it to, as you will have unanswered questions as to the fate of a few crew members if you duck out at the first available opportunity. If you have the patience and don’t mind a game that isn’t going to outright tell you what you need to do, ever, then Return of the Obra Dinn is a real gem.

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Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Playstation 4
2017

I love — love — the Resident Evil series. To the point that, for all of its problems, I’ve still spent just under 69 hours with Resident Evil 5, and that was just from replaying the campaign on every difficulty and also in co-op, not because of multiplayer. The reviews for Resident Evil 6 kind of pushed me away from the series for a bit, though, and this ended up resulting in me missing out on Resident Evil 7 when it first arrived: that it was a first-person adventure didn’t help, either.

While I wasn’t necessarily wrong to avoid Resident Evil 6 — I enjoyed the campaigns I played in it well enough, but you aren’t going to find it on this list even though it qualifies as something I played for the first time in 2021 — its sequel and series revamp, RE7, is another matter entirely. It is genuinely terrifying. The first-person nature of it is used to great, horrific effect. It is a return to the more personal, small-scale horror of the earliest entries in the franchise, and it is masterful.

Everything about it is just so unsettling. There is action, but it is rarely the point of the experience. You are meant to feel scared, to feel unsettled, to wonder why, and that’s all you can focus on the whole time. You might not see the face of new protagonist Ethan Winters, but the game ensures you always know exactly how he feels: terrified, and confused. It’s just a tremendous step forward for the series that had kind of lost its way: video games are better when Resident Evil is on track, and Biohazard put it the series back where it belongs.

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Trails of Cold Steel I-IV

Developer: Nihon Falcom
Publisher: Xseed Games, NIS America
Playstation 3, Nintendo Switch
2015, 2016, 2020, 2021

I love the ambition of the Trails games. They are the complete opposite of Falcom’s Ys series, which is kind of a present-day analogue for mythological stories — Adol Christin and his pals are just Jason and the Argonauts or something like that, you know, going from place to place and solving local troubles, then setting sail once more for parts unknown. The Trails games, though, are one larger series made up of subseries, with each subseries focused heavily on a specific region or country, and they’re all interconnected and vital to each other in a way that the Ys games are not.

For instance, Trails of Cold Steel IV is the ninth entry in the larger Trails series: it is the first time, as far as I can tell, that you get to hear the voice of the character that leads the series’ central antagonists. You still don’t know who they are or what their actual goals are, but little bits of both keep spilling out of each Trails title. We’ll get there someday, and you better have played everything that came before if you hope to understand what’s going on by then.

Some outlets see it as a negative that you can’t jump into Trails of Cold Steel III, well, cold, and get the intended enjoyment out of it. I don’t quite get that argument, since it’s like reviewing the eighth entry in a long-running series of interconnected novels and complaining that it’s inscrutable to newcomers, but you see it sometimes. I respect the hyperfocus that the Trails games bring, and love Falcom’s commitment to giving you an incredibly rich world full of depth to explore.

I spent 300 hours on the entire Trails of Cold Steel subseries this summer, basically in a row. The games gets a little too wishy washy on occasion with regards to whether the nobility is bad or not, and that can be annoying even though it is partially to due with the fact that these games take place in the seat of empire featuring citizens of that empire who are often themselves nobles, but otherwise, I have no complaints. Great cast, fascinating world, excellent balance of real-world issues and the kind of magical fantasy elements that can further exacerbate those issues. Can’t wait for the duology that occurs in between Trails in the Sky and Cold Steel to drop over the next two years.

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Kirby Star Allies

Developer: Hal Laboratory Inc.
Publisher: Nintendo
Nintendo Switch
2018

No, no, 2021 was not the first time I played Kirby Star Allies: I got that when it first released, and played through it in co-op immediately. It was good, but generally a mediocre entry in the series, with much of what made it great not the gameplay itself, but how it served as something of a celebration of the pink puffball and his past. There are no bad Kirby games, just better and worse ones, and Star Allies kind of sat in the middle of that pile.

I’m including it in this list, though, despite having played it before, because of the transformation the game has undergone since it first released. Kirby Star Allies received multiple free updates well after release, and they were not small. They were entire new game modes, new difficulty levels, and entire batches of new playable characters. It turns out that the initial campaign for Kirby Star Allies was basically an extended tutorial, and that the real game just didn’t ship with it. The version of Kirby Star Allies I played in 2021 was significantly different than the one I “completed” back in 2018, and it’s now moved up from mediocre entry to one of the very best the series has produced in its nearly 30 years.

The Heroes in Another Dimension mode is the real star of this revamped version of the game, as it introduced legitimate platform puzzle elements that take some thinking and a complete understanding of the powers of Kirby and his various friends in order to complete. They test your thinking, your reflexes, your combat abilities, all of it: if an entire game was built out of this particular mode, it’d likely have an argument as the best Kirby game. That you don’t just utilize Kirby but get a chance to play as basically every major character from nearly 30 years of the series, whether they were initially friend or foe at the time they were introduced, only adds to the enjoyment of the whole thing. It’s not “just” fanservice, as entire levels have been designed around the abilities of these specific characters, and those abilities are often unique ones!

Sickos.kirby

The arena mode where you fight wave after wave of boss characters, too, got a reboot, with a brand new difficulty unlocked that I am still yet to complete. I’m going to do it, though: I’m ever so close. I just have to basically get to the point where I never ever take any damage against bosses who are stronger and have more health than they used to while you have less in order to do it.

Star Allies might have had a kind of weird launch where it released in what seemed like an unfinished form without Nintendo explicitly saying that there was more to come, but at least the end result of this experiment is one of the best Kirby games going.

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Rocket: Robot on Wheels

Developer: Sucker Punch
Publisher: Ubisoft
Nintendo 64
1999

From the “25 years of the N64” series, here’s Rocket: Robot on Wheels:

One of the great strengths of this game is that it compels me to want to complete it in full. I do not say that very often about early 3D platformers, which often suffer from a similar disease to some of today’s massive open-world games, in which an enormous checklist of shit to do is created with more emphasis put on the existence of said enormous checklist than whether or not the things on said checklist are even enjoyable. So, yeah, there are tickets to collect in Rocket, as well as tokens of various worth, but the tickets are usually hidden in a way that rewards your curiosity, or only available by solving puzzles of some kind or conquering a challenge. The tokens are sometimes out in the open, but often are more like bread crumbs leading you to your next discovery, with the more valuable ones forcing you to apply your knowledge and/or skill of how the game works in order to acquire them. And that’s it: there aren’t a slew of additional collectibles of questionable worth scattered about in addition to these, which helps with the pacing, with not feeling overwhelmed, and with making Robot feel satisfying and engaging throughout.

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Space Station Silicon Valley

Developer: DMA Design
Publisher: Take-Two Interactive
Nintendo 64
1998

Another from the “25 years of the N64” series, here’s Space Station Silicon Valley:

Space Station Silicon Valley might have received two ports of extremely varying quality, but it has otherwise been forgotten about as far as subsequent releases go. It never received a release on either the Wii or Wii U Virtual Consoles, and it hasn’t been in the group of games that Rockstar throws together in compilations of their past, either. It’s one of the better N64 games going, though, with a concept that still feels fresh today given it hasn’t been utilized again and again in subsequent years, despite all the critical praise heaped onto it. You’re going to have to either cough up somewhere between $40 and $90 for an original cartridge on Ebay, emulate it, or hope that it somehow ends up on the Switch’s newly announced lineup of N64 games playable on Nintendo’s modern console. It’s absolutely worth playing, so find a way to do so if you never have, and for reasons way beyond it being a fascinating slice of Rockstar’s past.

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G-Darius HD

Developer: Taito (M2 for HD)
Publisher: Taito (ININ for HD)
Nintendo Switch
2021

G-Darius HD might have released on the Nintendo Switch and Playstation 4 in 2021, but it is simply an HD port with a few modern upgrades of the 1997 original: a brand new game this is not, regardless of what the release date implies. Here’s what I wrote about G-Darius HD in a “Past meets present” entry earlier in December:

There is far more to G-Darius than just its enemy inspirations and environments, though. It has a capture mechanic, wherein you fire off a capture ball at enemy ships in order to bring them to your side and have them help you fight off the horde. You can capture the most basic enemies with just the ball itself, but tougher enemies might need you to do some damage to them first: you can even capture the stage’s mid-boss ships if you put enough of a hurting on them first. You can sit there flying around with your new partner, satisfied with the upgrade, or you can detonate the captured ship with a blast that will damage any enemies within range, and then capture a new ship. It’s a mechanic that adds all kinds of strategy and chaos, too, to the proceedings of Darius, especially since, as you get deeper into the game, the screen is going to be full of tons of enemies that you’ll need a hand mowing down.

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The Legend of Valkyrie

Developer: Namco
Publisher: Namco
Playstation
1997

The Legend of Valkyrie is a Japanese arcade game from 1989 that has just one North American release that is also in English, with that coming by way of the Playstation’s Namco Museum Vol. 5 from 1997. It’s no wonder The Legend of Valkyrie was my first “Re-release this” subject, considering, and also the second game on this list I played because of Project X Zone 2:

Check out that scaling effect with the ground well below the platforms Valkyrie is traversing: can you believe that’s featured in a game from 1989? That effect isn’t just used to add some depth to background graphics, though, as the entire screen zooms out for a massive scorpion boss later on, and the quality of what you’re seeing holds up, while also giving this giant foe the sense of scale the effect intended. It’s also used in the other direction, and in the foreground, to increase the size of foes you’re familiar with later on in the game, so that you know that you’re facing a more dangerous and difficult to defeat version of a monster you’re used to. Yes, they’re a bit more pixelated han their standard look, but the effect worked as intended all the same. It’s really impressive stuff, and not just for 1989: these would all be neat effects to deploy in a retro-style game in 2021, too.

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Ys Books I & II

Developer: Nihon Falcom (Alfa System for TGCD)
Publisher: Hudson Soft (TGCD)
Turbografx-CD
1990

Sorry to make you think I was done praising Ys, but I was not done praising Ys. From the “It’s new to me” entry of July 21, it’s the Turbografx CD repackaging of Ys Books I & II:

I’m not saying Ys is single-handedly responsible for how Japanese games sound or anything, nothing to that hyperbolic degree, but it’s hard to deny that other developers and composers did anything besides absorb the sound of Ys Books I & II and then utilize the lessons learned in their own works. No different than how Squaresoft’s gameplay and narrative influence from Final Fantasy impacted contemporary JRPG developers, or how Nintendo’s work on The Legend of Zelda helped define the action-adventure genre for years to come. Ys, and developer Nihon Falcom, play a massive role in the development and refinement of the action RPG, but they’re also responsible for helping to chart the course of sound in video games from the 80s, 90s, and beyond.

Why such influence? The way Ys sounds is part of what makes it feel so good to play, its harmonious marriage between its action and its sound is one that was and should be the envy of everyone else in the same business.

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Gravity Rush Remastered

Developer: Japan Studio
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Playstation 4
2016

What a cool game. It’s visually appealing, with an art style that is very much its own, and conceptually, it’s brilliant. It’s a 3D platformer, sort of, one where you basically ignore many of the laws of gravity in order to fling yourself to and fro, in order to dropkick monsters in the face with a flying start from a football field away. It takes some getting used to — even when I thought I was doing alright, I stood no chance on any of the time trial-y challenges with escalating rewards and medal thresholds, which made me realize I sure was not doing alright after all — but once you get a feel for a very different kind of game that lets you go anywhere and everywhere so long as you’re pointed in the right direction… it rules.

I cannot speak for whether it is as good as Gravity Rush 2, as that’s on my soon-to-play list, but from what I can gather, Gravity Rush is mostly an enticing appetizer for the full meal to come. Sadly I cannot talk about Gravity Rush without being angry about Sony closing down Japan Studio in order to focus more of their development and publishing energies on blockbuster titles that are great, sure, but why isn’t there room any longer in Sony’s heart for the Gravity Rushes and Patapons of the world, you know? Hopefully those kinds of things aren’t vanishing from Sony’s release schedule in favor of remastering every Naughty Dog game into Slightly More HD each generation, on consoles that can already play the Already Plenty HD versions of those games that already exist.

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And a few honorable mentions on the way out:

Gears of War 5: Great game, engaging story, but the game just doesn’t feel as good as the Gears games from Epic’s heyday, and the decision to switch which button starts up the chainsaw bayonet continues to confound me. Not as much as the decision to make portions of a Gears of War game open-world — you know, the franchise known for its small-form set pieces, deliberate in-level progression, and claustrophobic level design — but still. Good game.

Sakura Wars (1996): The actual first game in the long-running (and now rebooted) franchise, only recently fan translated so that those with a modded Sega Saturn or a Saturn emulator can play it. As I did.

Blaster Master Zero 2: The highlight of the reboot trilogy, as it ironed out the wrinkles in the first game while making itself feel that much better to play in the process. I haven’t finished the third and final entry just yet, despite the momentum the second one gave me, which also just goes to show how good this one is.

Goemon’s Great Adventure: Another from the 25th anniversary celebration of the N64, it might very well be the best side-scrolling platformer on the system, depending on how you feel about Mischief Makers.

ESP Ra.De. Psi: The only reason this isn’t on the actual list is because I haven’t spent enough time with it to say either way, but it’s a bullet hell shooter from Cave, who have certainly mastered that genre, and is considered one of their finest efforts in that space, too. I bothered to make a Japanese Switch account and buy a Japanese Switch eshop gift card from Play Asia so I could download the game from that digital storefront, so that should give you some indication of how I feel about “Cave bullet hell shooters” just generally speaking. I don’t even care that half of my Switch news updates are now in a language I can’t read. Here’s Nintendo Life’s review of the game itself, if I’ve piqued your curiosity or you are just now realizing that the Switch is region-free and want to take advantage of that fact.

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