Last year I made a series of posts for my favourite things in several categories, and I wanna do it again! These thing did not necessarily come out in 2023 and many of them didn't because I tend to catch up to things late. All that matter is they were part of my 2023. Also I will arbitrate on categories however I feel like it.
First up:
My Favourite Books of 2023
It's been a hell of a year for reading. I set an ambitious reading goal of 40 books, not too concerned with whether or not I actually hit it. I'm currently at 61 books, and likely to finish another one before the week's end. This doesn't even include manga because there's no real sensible way to "count" those. That said, these are some of my stand out picks:
Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun
Important note that I read this alongside @RangedTouch's Shelved By Genre podcast which I highly recommend (they're about to start covering the Earthsea series, 2 recommendation in one). Their discussion digging into elements is an immense part of what I enjoyed.
But I also really just enjoyed the meandering prose, swerving worldbuilding and Severian being a little weirdo. I have plenty of issues with the book as a whole, but it hit a real sweet spot for me. The one where I go "I like this with caveat... what if I made something inspired by it without those caveat". Thing are cooking, we'll see if fruit is borne of it. Because the conclusion of New Sun did not satisfy me. But the journey! It was something.
Martha Wells's All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy
These 4 novellas are included as one entry because each just felt like one particularly long podcast episode I slammed through in a short space of time. They're not dense or complicated stories, but Murderbot is a fun relateable character for someone who likes engaging with non humans grappling with whether they count as people, or if that's even what they want. I have not yet read on to the next installment, but I am looking forward to it.
Babel or the Necessity of Violence
This is just a great book. I went in with the barest of a pitch about linguistic silverwork evoking magic by incantation, with imperialim happening too. The route the book then takes is unexpected and fun, with a good core cast. Another case of an ending that didn't wow me, but it felt like it couldn't have done much else to maneuver around the way everything had been built up.
The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
I read this as part of a murder mystery book club, and it was a surprise in that context. Operating within the framework of a murder mystery story with some weird layers on top of it. The point of view character is dumped in a strange place and time, trying to get his bearings as he is tasked with solving a murder in a tense game where the rule themselves are obfuscated. I fully recommend checking it out if you like the mechanics of mystery plots and seeing it come together. This book has such ambitious moving parts, I can't vouch for the mystery being fully coherent as much as it does some interesting maneuvers within the set up.
I'm mixing movies and shows here, because the lines of most here get a little blurry. None of these are new for 2023 at all, they're probably not even particularly unexpected picks. But I got to them all this year, and each of them still hit for me.
Mobile Suit Gundam 00 (Season 1)
I've been watching Gundam along with the Great Gundam Project for years now. Production order Gundam really peaked thus far with Turn A, but I was still having fun with (some) other shows. 00 is the first time in a while where fingers crossed it's been firing on multiple cylinders. It has a wide cast that actually gets balanced well and plays off each other in fun ways. I am only one season in, so we'll see what happens in the back half, but it's riding high currently, as long as it can avoid crashing and burning (like certain other shows).
Kara no Kyoukai
Another one I followed along with a podcast, for Fate Moon Archive a podcast about wading through 20 years of Type Moon. The journey has been up and down, even the popular hits are sometimes things I'm mixed on (Fate Stay/Night will never live up to the high points of Tsukihime).
Kara no Kyoukai is a series of movies about a weird knife girl and her bizarrely normal pet boy solving monster of the week cases while a hot milf smokes and explains the monster's backstory in voiceover. It's fantastic.
Putting Nasu's inventive worldbuilding into this structure is genius. I want a full procedural show in the vein of Angel about Shiki stabbing her way through a new problem every week. I fully believe Nasu would have a whole stack of ideas for this set up. Not every one of these was great but it was consistently a good time, with some fun highs and even enjoyable in the baffling lower moments.
PSYCHO PASS: Season 1 + The Movie
Psycho Pass the show is about a world where everyone has a score of their likelihood to perform criminal activity, and it's this level that leads people to be criminalised and punished accordingly. It's a good cop procedural with themes and sci fi ideas sprinkled throughout. The main character is technically a rookie new cop who had good enough scores she could've done anything but chose to be a cop. However for a good chunk of the show, the other protagonist, a gruff jaded veteran, starts to take over the spotlight.
The movie is an absolute banger. It's the stuff mentioned above, but it takes the conclusion of the first series further. The rookie protagonist I mentioned above gets a great arc and conclusion by the end of the movie. There's a cyborg mercenary who quotes Fanon. It has everything you could want from this movie.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Show + Rebellion
Madoka can be a victim of its own reputation, where some people (erroneously) try to say it's a magical girl show but dark. The real way to sell Madoka is that it's a magical girl show you can watch in 12 episodes + a movie. Probably 6 hours total, give or take. There's also a great aesthetic for how the witch fights look.
I otherwise can't truly say anything unique about Madoka, it's just good. A solid cast of girls struggling with monsters and self actualisation. Y'know, a magical girl show. If you haven't seen it, just pick it up and run. You truly can't undervalue a show being just 12 episodes long.
This is the non anime category. I could have counted anime here but the picks just happen to all be live action ones. I'm honestly touch and go with TV. Love some of it, but am not a big fan of long stretches of shows, especially very episodic ones. All of the picks here are very serial, and 2 are quite short all told. But the lengthier ones did enough to stick out, though one of them I watched most of before) this year.
The other note I'll make is that for every one of these, I watched at least some of them with another person. That's my favourite mode of engaging with shows in general. Even if not literally every episode, it's fun to have a bit of a watch along to talk about it with.
Fleabag
My favourite way to watch something is to be recommended it with very little context and dive right in. Fleabag was a great experience for that because of how strong and unique a voice it has. You live in the head of a woman as she slides through her life making jokes as she avoids engaging with it. It also has a great second season that works through a changed status quo that still has difficulties to be addressed. It's also just very quick and witty, there's some great bits in it that will stick with me for a long time.
Succession
Me and everyone else watched Succession this year. Though I only started season 1 this year too, and I did prefer blasting through at my own pace without being concurrent with takes as the show developed. Ultimately, this is a show that hits one of the platonic ideals of TV. You establish a set of characters and their relationships, then shake the box around a bunch so they do surprising things that make perfect sense for them.
I am a person who enjoys watching shitty rich people vie with each other for their petty gains. And that's all this show is. You never truly root for any particular person, because you don't want anyone to win. But it is fun when you want a particular person to take a loss, and see that unfold in front of you. And it just kept happening with this show.
Riverdale
So I make no claims about everything in this post being 'good'. Or I should say, I will emphatically say that Riverdale as a whole is not good. I don't mean in a guilty pleasure/trash TV sense. Eating a show like it's popcorn can be good. Riverdale is just not. It's a slow trainwreck of unconfident, meandering plot arcs, characters that bounce from one reality to another and baffling choices where you'll be surprised anyone could have pitched them, let alone a whole creative team would nod and agree to. You've no doubt heard plenty of examples, even so many of the most memed ones are from the earlier seasons of this show that increasingly went off the rails until the season that had a parallel dark universe and gave the characters superpowers. Both of these things happened in the reality of the show, but as entirely independent arcs.
Riverdale is only here as the epitome of "better watching with a friend." I started watching Riverdale with my now roommate back when season 3 was airing. We independently binged through to get current, and already the show was making such strange choices we decided to watch together. We forged the unbreakable pact then, and kept with it through every season since. There are moments we shared and still reference that only have that retention because we were sitting on the couch together. I don't particularly endorse Riverdale itself, but this spot is me telling you to find some show, and a friend, and work through it over time. It doesn't need to be good, and you can take as long as you need. As long as it can be something you both experience the beats of and can refer back to.
The Bear (Seasons 1+2)
Another one that I'm sure many have watched, and I only started this year. In some ways similar to Succession's draw of, throwing people together and watching them react, this one leans a little more into fun episodic conceits and constraints. Like an episode that's just one hectic night of work as simmering tensions boil over. Or a flashback to the most stressful Christmas I've ever seen. The Bear has a bit more of a planned intention with how its characters develop. I have no doubt it's still somewhat organically determined, but there's a stronger guiding hand with how characters unfold.
Season 2 saw a lot of characters get some good growth and development, while others floundered and failed entirely to address what has consistently been holding them back. I know a season 3 is on the way, and I don't know what shape yet it will take but I know that there will be great set pieces as people care way too much about food because it's the thing that they love, possibly to the detriment of all else.
Some of these DID in fact come out in 2023! A shocking thing for me, I've also been playing more games big and small in the past year. Some are exclusions from this list, because being a Final Fantasy is just cheating and means you really don't need to be shouted out.
I also played a lot of small games that are Good, but couldn't necessarily pick out to spotlight. So I will just endorse browsing itch.io in general, pick out small weird stuff, then rate it, comment, share it with others etc. I want to be better about that myself this year, without making a whole pressure or project around it.
BOSSGAME: The Final Boss Is My Heart
BOSSGAME is a fuckin video game. I have a tendancy to split pretty cleanly between games I play for mechanics and ones I play for a narrative. I love visual novels, the less mechanics the better typically. If I want a story, I want a story. If I want fun mechanics, I want to play in that space for some time, but probably won't work round to actually finishing the whole thing, because I really just want to prod at the mechanics til I get tired of it. Especially because, typically I only like bits and pieces of mechanics. I don't want to have to do all of the other chaff around the part of the game that stands out to me.
BOSSGAME hits both pillars. The game is a stripped done boss rush/rhythm game. It's a very cleanly designed loop where you do just a short run at a boss, cutting straight to the actual challenge of the game without a bunch of mook fights along the way. Fights are quick to win or lose and retry. The incredibly simple controls and mechanics build over time and get shaken up as the co-op team changes at times to give you a fresh approach.
All of this hooks perfectly too into a tightly paced story of the main characters and an extended cast. The conversations are fun and unfold engaging character arcs, without ever feeling like they're getting in the way of me wanting to try my next level. Stories in video games have a habit of being a bit too pat and simple, or lengthy to try and get complex enough to stand out. BOSSGAME hits a good stride to deliver something fresh within its length.
Misericorde: Volume One
Now let me tell you about a game that has no mechanics. Misericorde is a visual novel where you 'just' button through the dialogue. The interactivity in Misericorde is the dense amount of speculation you can engage in while trying to solve the mystery and figure out what's going on with the wide cast of rich, complex characters.
It shares some lineage with Umineko, which (glancing at my profile picture) I should trace theage line of. xeecee, the dev of Misericorde, also has a podcast called the Shrieking Shack. It's a great podcast that used to be a critical Harry Potter re-read and now digs through other fiction in a similar genre space. On their patreon show, they discussed Umineko. Something I'd otherwise never heard of, played for the podcast and utterly fell in love with, which is an immense part of why I'm actively making visual novels myself now. All this to say, you can see some of the DNA of Umineko in Misericorde. Crucially, the fact that the writing is absolutely leaving space for the reader to dig into. This is a mystery where even if you don't necessarily solve it outright yourself, there's a lot more to experience by turning over the things people say and do, to ferret out more than the direct text is telling you.
If you are curious, I also did an LP of the initial demo release of Misericorde. The actual release has tightened up some of the graphics since, but the text is largely the same if you want to get a peek at it:
He Fucked The Girl Out Of Me
If you can't judge by the title of this one, there are some content warnings you'd want to be aware of. But the game itself contains all of them, so I'd recommend checking it out and seeing if you feel comfortable engaging.
Because if you can, this is just a powerhouse demonstration of how personal and striking a game can be. It uses gameboy style controls where you just walk around and hit a, moving through textboxes. Simple sprites and low pixel count art evoke images and imagination that lend a lot of power to some very raw writing. I'm a strong believer in the power of making a game that is predominantly text but accented with additional touches, especially as a way for a single person to convey something from deep within them. HFTGOOM goes for the jugular in demonstrating that, in a way that is deeply moving and an inspiration to me reaching deep for my own work.
The Banished Vault
Once more, it's time for video games. It would be disingenuous to say The Banished Vault isn't a narrative game. There's an immense vibe and implicit storytelling happening between the UI, soundscape and the way you move through the universe and what you can interact with. Not to mention the gorgeous manual that is the first time I've really felt like I'm missing out by not having a physical copy (I keep eyeing the "Buy now" button and cursing the shipping).
The best gameplay systems offer you the slim chance of mastery while offering you many ways to hoist yourself outright. I want to play more and get further in the game, but my games thus far have been exercises in making sand castles as I proudly gather some resources. Entirely unaware of the huge wave about to hit me and my castle, because I've been ignoring key gameplay systems that were clearly laid out for me. The failure teaches me how to play and re-approach the game anew, no longer ignoring the corner of the UI that before was an opaque number. I balance one more plate, getting ready to find out what else I have been neglecting this whole time.
Flower, Sun, & Rain
My list, my rules. So it doesn't matter that all I did was press play and watch Dia Lacina's Let's Play of this game, with Em from Abnormal Mapping as cohost. There are some games where I think it's more fun watching a let's play than I'd have directly engaging with it myself. The experience of vicariously exploring the space, seeing the weird and wacky levels, the twists and turns. All of it is better to have with the commentary of other people equally enchanted or bemused by the ways it meanders.
Flower Sun and Rain is a game that isn't afraid to make bold and sometimes very clunky choices, because ultimately it knows that it's worth it for the bit if the bit is good. It's not a game of constant hits but consistent enough ones that I looked forward to tuning into a new episode of the adventures every week.
Check out Dia and Em's playthrough for yourself, it's a good time. Dia has covered plenty of other games too (with Em, other cohosts or solo):
