Let's see if I can scrounge up some thoughts about 10 video games I played this year. These aren't ranked, I think it's just chronological order for me.
Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin
I had not actually played a souls game, but I was thinking of getting Elden Ring so I could experience playing The New One along with everyone else. Then I found out it wouldn't run on my PC so I got dark souls 2 instead. I don't remember why I picked it over 1 but I'll probably do that one next.
This one was pretty good though. I did end up becoming a heavy strength weapons gamer but I had fun in the world of. Drangleic? Was that the right one?
I've also confirmed for myself that dark souls is in fact Basically Normal in terms of difficulty.
Final Fantasy (NES)
This year a beautiful game called Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin (SOPFFO) came out. Apparently it has a fucked up hell loot system but the actual gameplay is good, and the writing is in fact Pretty Good. I didn't play it though. I played FF1 instead.
You know Final Fantasy for the NES is a real RPG, because the first actual dungeon was a cave full of poison guys that made me have to back out and run back to town twice before I could actually reach the end. It owns. I'd already played the GBA port years ago, but that version's much easier and it also redesigned the floating fortress to not be a sci-fi space station anymore, so it was basically a worse version in every way.
Anyway, I loved reading NPC dialogue, and going through dungeon-ass dungeons, and watching my guys level up and become strong as hell.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land
They looked at the last few main Kirby games, asked "what if we did a 3D one?", and the answer was: "yeah it's pretty good". Adding a Character Action dodge was smart, and you can really tell how excited they were to finally start designing bosses who slam the ground to create shockwaves you have to jump over. My only wish is for them to make another one of these that Goes Hard in the way Planet Robobot did.
Franken
Franken is a small free-to-download RPG you can get here! In the style of For Frogs the Bell Tolls, it's got simple systems and simple stats that mainly serve to explore the world & find stuff and experience various gags. And the gags are good! Extremely inspiring as a person who wants to make small games.
Vampire Survivors
They released the 1.0 version of this and I haven't actually played that! But the early access version I played was good. It's simply a fun time to gain power and kill one million fake castlevania enemies. I do think the 30-minute rounds are probably too long.
I also played a little HoloCure, which is a vtuber fangame based on the same concept. It's got some neat changes to the formula, like a lot more focus on character-specific abilities.
Tokimeki Memorial (Super Famicom)
Tokimeki Memorial is an apparently very popular Japan-only dating sim that only got an English translation this year. I've never really played a dating sim, but after seeing a stream of the PS1 sequel, I realised it looked like a lot of fun actually. Over the course of 3 years, you've gotta manage your boy's schedule (I had some distaste for playing as a boy, but I simply used the power of imagination to pretend he had a lot more gender in him), balancing your different stats and hanging out with different girls, eventually picking one to end the game with.
The part that makes this game really work though is the events: the dates with the girls, school events, festivals, and also just random occurences throughout the year, they do all the work to actually endear you to the characters. They've all got different, fun reactions to the different places you can take them to! One of the girls is an evil mad scientist for some reason! There's one particular event that comes with a gameplay change for the purpose of an extremely good gag.
Remembering this game for the list has really just made me wanna play it more... maybe I'll go for another ending & pray for another one to get translated. Or I guess I could probably just find other franchises that do the same thing.
AI: The Somnium Files
I haven't played the other Uchikoshi games. I appreciate the power of someone just taking all the thoughts they had in their brain, putting them all into one video game and making it work. A good mix of big brain plot twist stuff & character stuff that you actually care about. The ending owns.
Dragon Quest 3
It's really fucked up that the people who invented JRPGs were immediately so good at it. It feels good to level up my guys, but I already talked about that in the FF1 entry. The part that DQ3 does really well is the story stuff. As much as I liked talking to people in FF1, the episodic-style stuff that happens in Dragon Quest 3 really kicks ass. You go to a new town & talk to everyone and find out there's a whole thing going on, and you probably do a dungeon and solve it before moving on. And they're all fun! It works!
I played the switch version which has some ugly remake graphics but whatever. It has the spell names I recognise, even though I've only played a couple other DQs. Guess I gotta do 4 next!
If Found...
This game dealt critical damage to me, by being irish and a game about being trans. its good.
Pokemon Violet/Pokemon Legends Arceus
I think Legends Arceus came out last year so whatever. I'm gonna talk about both. The thing about the Pokemon games is that they're fun. I don't know shit about playing competitively, I just like to play an RPG and form a team of weird animals. These two games did that part well! Violet's open worldification of the story I think didn't work at all, but I liked the story itself. They gave you 3 friends and then had them talk to each other and I cared about it! That's impressive for these games. Legends Arceus, meanwhile, did the whole experimental thing of converting pokemon into an actual fully-singleplayer game, doing some gameplay reworks they would've been to scared to do in a main series game. I missed those reworks in Violet! ...also Arceus was a lot less ugly-looking, comparatively!
Bonus Late Entries
I got Dwarf Fortress a week ago! It's fun so far but I feel like there are limits to the amount of management my brain is willing to do. Excited to check out that adventure mode. I also got Signalis recently but I'm only an hour or two in. You know it's a real survival horror game though because I had to do that puzzle about moving liquid between containers of different sizes.
Some Others
I also played these and they were all good: Groove Coaster, Hypnospace Outlaw, Tower Unite, Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel, Umurangi Generation, Anodyne 2: Return to Dust, Splatoon 3, Gundam Evolution, Sonic Frontiers
The End!