Artix

Well, it seems unlikely that I'm going to finish anything in the next week, and of all the major GOTY candidates, I've played, uh... checks notes literally none of them! Well that's gonna make this list more interesting. Also making things interesting is that I don't think I've played anything that really wow'd me this year. Even the games I did love come with some pretty huge caveats or are otherwise smaller games that aren't really competing in that same arena anyway. So with that said:

1. P4G
2. Master Quest
3. Theatrhythm
4. Paranormasight
5. Baten Kaitos Origins
6. Zelda: The Minish Cap
7. aneSDK2
8. Aspire: Ina's Tale
9. CotGI: The Spider of Lanka / The Lemurian Vampire
10. XC3: Future Redeemed
11. MDA: Rain Code
12. Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals
13. Trails into Reverie
14. Fire Emblem: Engage
15. The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails
16. Eternights
17. Super Mario Wonder
18. Astlibra Revision

Boy, where do we even start with Astlibra? Similar to Eternights, Astlibra is largely the product of one guy and a handful of collaborators near the end, this time over the span of 15 years of on-and-off development. As with Eternights, this makes the final product quite impressive regardless of the actual quality of the game; anything that makes it to the finish line in those circumstances should be celebrated. Also, as with Eternights, that's about the point where we're going to stop being nice to the game.

1. P4G
2. Master Quest
3. Theatrhythm
4. Paranormasight
5. Baten Kaitos Origins
6. Minish Cap
7. aneSDK2
8. Aspire: Ina's Tale
9. CotGI: Spider of Lanka
10. XC3: Future Redeemed
11. MDA: Rain Code
12. Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals
13. Trails into Reverie
14. Fire Emblem: Engage
15. The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails

Nayuta is an interesting entry in Falcom's catalog. It's a standalone remaster of a PSP original game that isn't quite Trails or Ys (though it NISA ostensibly calls it a Trails spinoff), with its closest DNA match probably being the Zwei games. I've never played those, but if you imagine a more platforming-focused and stage-based Ys Seven, you're about 80% of the way there, so that's what we're gonna go with. Anyway, in a similar manner to Tokyo Xanadu, Nayuta attempts to blend the action combat of Ys with a Trails-like home town where you do quests and follow around NPCs. But where Tokyo Xanadu was a Cold Steel game with action combat, Nayuta is very much on the other side of the coin; an action platformer where you occasionally come back to town to see your friends and get a meal from your sister before heading back out into combat.

Mechanically, it's...fine? It's not going to win any GOTY awards or anything, but the platforming is largely passable and outside of some really weird combat decisions, the action bits are solid enough. I'm not a big fan of the decision to not have any i-frames after taking damage, and some of the bosses are absolutely dreadful (looking squarely at you, Fire Temple), but by and large nothing is really going to ruin your day here. If you've played Ys Seven, you'll be right at home, seeing as it's built on the same engine. As for the plot...well, it sure has one. Like most Ys games, you'll be able to spot the twists from a mile away and both the characters and the storytelling are largely paper thin. If you go in expecting a Trails-level narrative, you will undoubtedly be disappointed, but what's there is executed well. It's just not very interesting.

And at the end of the day, the question I have trouble answering is "Who is this for?" I don't know if Falcom originally sold it as a Trails spinoff (although the title being Nayuta no Kiseki probably indicates that it was), but there are absolutely no relations to the larger series here, so anyone looking for that came up shorthanded. If you were looking for a more action-oriented title then you came out a bit better, but Ys blows it out of the water on multiple levels. The decision to break everything into 3-5 minute distinct levels works, but it doesn't really let you get into a groove when you're playing, and leads to the designers reusing a bunch of them in lieu of actual new levels - "Oh, it's Dragon's Graveyard but in the SUMMER instead of the Fall. Now the platforms are slightly different!"

I guess the actual answer is "People like me who have already played all of Falcom's other games", huh? $40 will buy you a lot of Ys and Trails games, so anyone who isn't in that boat should probably look elsewhere first.

16. Eternights

Eternights is...a lot. It ostensibly is trying to be an action game fused with a dating sim, half Devil May Cry, half Persona, but it's honestly not very good at either? The action half is just plain bad; the lighting is awful and most stages blend into color soup or are too dark to see anything, enemies constantly attack from off-screen, you can barely get a combo string off without being in a perfect dodge... It just feels terrible to play, all around.

The social side fares better in comparison, although it's still not really good per se. It is a functional, if not particularly interesting, clone of Persona's S-Links. You spend time with them, you rank up and unlock new stat boosts and abilities, pass a stat check near the end, and kiss them if you so desire. There's a lot more of a romantic bent to it, considering that this half of the game is a dating sim, but it mostly accomplishes what it sets out to do, in stark contrast to the action side of things. My favorite little touch here is that you can go out and scavenge at night, in an attempt to pick up supplies and get some minor stat boosts with a character, and there are some deep cuts once you get far enough into these item lists. It's genuinely quite funny when an otherwise demure and sweet girl tells you "Oh good, that's the kind of whip I was looking for" or you get back and half the porn mags you picked up are missing.

For a three-man production, Eternights is genuinely quite impressive. It's not gonna win any awards or anything, but it looks fine on a technical level and for the most part it's a pretty polished experience. I just wish some of that time went into making the bit of it you have to actually play fun.

17. Super Mario Wonder

Before I dive into this, I want to delineate between Mario Wonder: The Game That You Play and Mario Wonder: The Concept, because those are two very different things for me.

Mario Wonder: The Game is a very well made platformer with solid level design, a fresh aesthetic, and generally an apology for everything in the NSMB era. They do a lot of really cool stuff with Wonder Flowers, the badge system is neat, and it's really fun to just play. It is arguably a little easy; even accounting for Special World levels, I don't think anything took me more than about 20 lives to clear, but Mario is a game for children and it's hard to be too disappointed here. Admittedly, I did not clear the super secret final level because I could not be assed to go do all the search levels, but I assume it is as difficult as Champion Road levels tend to be, so maybe there's something there. I've seen a take that calls Wonder "the real Super Mario Bros 5" and while I think that discards NSMB Wii and U unfairly (U especially), it's not really wrong.

Mario Wonder: The Concept fares a little less well. For a game that is so bursting with ideas, remarkably few of them are actually new ideas. The game's primary inspiration was clearly Rayman Legends, but almost everywhere you look, you see something done first (and a lot of times done better) elsewhere. You like music levels? Boy do we have some music levels, both in the Rayman variety and the "jump to the beat" Galaxy variety. There's silhouette levels from modern DK (and that one level from DKCR where you ride the giant egg and then have to jump inside it once it breaks comes back like, twice), a ton of stuff from Galaxy including where the floor falls out and you walk on the background, a badge that is functionally Spring Mario, speedrun levels, Shadow Mario levels, etc etc. And to be clear, this isn't a bad thing - almost all of these gimmicks are well executed and play well. It just feels less like "look at all our wild ideas!" and more like "Mario is playing catch-up to what the rest of the industry has done with platformers since 2012 or so."

Wonder is a solid 8/10 game on its own merits. Add a point if you hated the NSMB games because it genuinely does feel like an apology for that era, take half a point off if you played Rayman Legends specifically, and a quarter point for every other major platformer released since like, DKC Returns.

1. P4G
2. Master Quest
3. Theatrhythm
4. Paranormasight
5. Baten Kaitos Origins
6. Minish Cap
7. aneSDK2
8. Aspire: Ina's Tale
9. CotGI: Spider of Lanka
10. XC3: Future Redeemed
11. MDA: Rain Code
12. Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals
13. Trails into Reverie
14. Fire Emblem: Engage
15. The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails

Nayuta is an interesting entry in Falcom's catalog. It's a standalone remaster of a PSP original game that isn't quite Trails or Ys (though it NISA ostensibly calls it a Trails spinoff), with its closest DNA match probably being the Zwei games. I've never played those, but if you imagine a more platforming-focused and stage-based Ys Seven, you're about 80% of the way there, so that's what we're gonna go with. Anyway, in a similar manner to Tokyo Xanadu, Nayuta attempts to blend the action combat of Ys with a Trails-like home town where you do quests and follow around NPCs. But where Tokyo Xanadu was a Cold Steel game with action combat, Nayuta is very much on the other side of the coin; an action platformer where you occasionally come back to town to see your friends and get a meal from your sister before heading back out into combat.

Mechanically, it's...fine? It's not going to win any GOTY awards or anything, but the platforming is largely passable and outside of some really weird combat decisions, the action bits are solid enough. I'm not a big fan of the decision to not have any i-frames after taking damage, and some of the bosses are absolutely dreadful (looking squarely at you, Fire Temple), but by and large nothing is really going to ruin your day here. If you've played Ys Seven, you'll be right at home, seeing as it's built on the same engine. As for the plot...well, it sure has one. Like most Ys games, you'll be able to spot the twists from a mile away and both the characters and the storytelling are largely paper thin. If you go in expecting a Trails-level narrative, you will undoubtedly be disappointed, but what's there is executed well. It's just not very interesting.

And at the end of the day, the question I have trouble answering is "Who is this for?" I don't know if Falcom originally sold it as a Trails spinoff (although the title being Nayuta no Kiseki probably indicates that it was), but there are absolutely no relations to the larger series here, so anyone looking for that came up shorthanded. If you were looking for a more action-oriented title then you came out a bit better, but Ys blows it out of the water on multiple levels. The decision to break everything into 3-5 minute distinct levels works, but it doesn't really let you get into a groove when you're playing, and leads to the designers reusing a bunch of them in lieu of actual new levels - "Oh, it's Dragon's Graveyard but in the SUMMER instead of the Fall. Now the platforms are slightly different!"

I guess the actual answer is "People like me who have already played all of Falcom's other games", huh? $40 will buy you a lot of Ys and Trails games, so anyone who isn't in that boat should probably look elsewhere first.

16. Eternights

Eternights is...a lot. It ostensibly is trying to be an action game fused with a dating sim, half Devil May Cry, half Persona, but it's honestly not very good at either? The action half is just plain bad; the lighting is awful and most stages blend into color soup or are too dark to see anything, enemies constantly attack from off-screen, you can barely get a combo string off without being in a perfect dodge... It just feels terrible to play, all around.

The social side fares better in comparison, although it's still not really good per se. It is a functional, if not particularly interesting, clone of Persona's S-Links. You spend time with them, you rank up and unlock new stat boosts and abilities, pass a stat check near the end, and kiss them if you so desire. There's a lot more of a romantic bent to it, considering that this half of the game is a dating sim, but it mostly accomplishes what it sets out to do, in stark contrast to the action side of things. My favorite little touch here is that you can go out and scavenge at night, in an attempt to pick up supplies and get some minor stat boosts with a character, and there are some deep cuts once you get far enough into these item lists. It's genuinely quite funny when an otherwise demure and sweet girl tells you "Oh good, that's the kind of whip I was looking for" or you get back and half the porn mags you picked up are missing.

For a three-man production, Eternights is genuinely quite impressive. It's not gonna win any awards or anything, but it looks fine on a technical level and for the most part it's a pretty polished experience. I just wish some of that time went into making the bit of it you have to actually play fun.