PS4 – Delfeir vs. the Backlog

The Trouble With Critiquing Endwalker

This is not a critique of Endwalker, this is just a tribute.

This is a fairly unstructured and unfiltered blog post, like some of the earlier pieces on this site. I’ve mostly used it to sort through my mental processes and just touch on a few things to whoever cares to listen. As such, it’s not been closely edited and I’ve not put the usual formatting into it. In short, there’s a wall of text ahead.

Allow me to assuage this by providing a soundtrack for your reading, courtesy of the actual best thing to come out of Endwalker.

You’re welcome.

As I said repeatedly in covering the games I liked of 2021, Endwalker was not among them. While the gameplay and mechanical changes remain as solid and enjoyable to play as ever, the core of Final Fantasy 14’s appeal has long been its quality story. As such, even the strengths of its latest expansion were increasingly hard to just simply enjoy for me, built as they are on a foundation of sand and rot. There are better games that I’ll just play for the sake of play; what makes Final Fantasy 14 (and particularly the Shadowbringers expansion) one of my all time favourites is that it transcends the sum of its parts. I fully intend to go through and do a thorough breakdown of Endwalker’s narrative flaws in an article.

This is not that article. This is an article that I am largely using to get my thoughts in order and put a voice to why this process has been such a struggle for me.

The Delfies 2021: Some Other Games I Liked This Year

You might actually find a western triple A game in here… but that’s unlikely.

If you haven’t read my Delfies 2021 Top 10 yet, you can find that here.

I found myself in the interesting place of having too many games and struggling to cut them down to a top 10 this year. At the same time, it felt like nothing in my top 10 could really compete with the top four or so from 2020, so it was harder still to make the selection. I’m ultimately satisfied with the placement of where everything ended up, but there were more games that I feel I could shine a light on. Some of them are the more mainstream triple A games that I enjoyed but ultimately washed over; some are indie games that were really charming in their own right but just couldn’t quite make the mark.

But hey, I’ve got a platform and time, so it’s only right that I spare some words for those as well.

With that sentiment in mind, I ended up ballooning this list even further. Many of these didn’t make the top 10 candidate list, and a few I’ve yet to finish at all (or they themselves are in early access, thus proving ineligible for now). Some I’ll get to in full later on, with any luck. This is more of a quantity over quality lightning round, but I’ll try to give them all a fair shake, and none of these are in any particular order.

Before we proceed, there’s a few games I also want to mention that interest me, but I’ve yet to actually start playing them properly or else they’d likely be here too. Those are: Everhood, Tales of Arise, Death’s Door, Psychonauts 2, FIST: Forged in Shadow Touch, The Forgotten City and Outer Wilds’s DLC Echoes of the Eye. I just haven’t had the chance to tackle them for more than an hour if at all yet, but they’re all in my immediate future. So now let’s cover the ones I actually did get to.

The Delfies 2021: Top 10

Objectively the only correct choices on the internet. That’s totally what this means.

2021 wasn’t a bad year for games, but it also didn’t feel like a particularly inspiring one. There wasn’t really any single game that absolutely blew me away or changed my perspectives on the hobby like 2020 did. In fact, the opposite happened: the one game that I dared to let my guard down and hype up for myself ended up disappointing me beyond what I thought possible. You will not be seeing Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker expansion on this list; that gets its own article later on, and it’ll be far less celebratory.

Still, let’s not be a total downer on what’s meant to highlight the best of the year. Not until the end of the article, anyway. So, I’m going to split this into two articles. The one you’re reading now is what I personally consider my top 10 for the year. There’ll be a follow up article not long after to cover other games I enjoyed this year that didn’t make the cut, either because I didn’t finish them or didn’t find them quite as complete. I’ll also mention what systems I played them on specifically.

Without further ado, the Delfies of 2021!

Outriders Demo Impressions — [Screen Shake Intensifies]

Surprising no-one except games industry management, looter/shooters are better when you actually make a complete product from the start.

This week has seen me playing a staggering amount of Bravely Default 2. Releasing in the same week as Persona 5 Strikers is always a ballsy proposition, yet my Bravely playtime is something like triple that of Strikers right now. And I don’t even think it’s as good as Persona! It just… has its hooks in me. I’m fully intending to do bigger write ups on both these games and my opinions on them, but I’m probably going to save it until I’ve progressed further in both.

So instead, let’s talk about the three hour break I took to play the Outriders demo.

Outriders is an upcoming third person looter/shooter by People Can Fly. It can be played with up to four people in co-op, has four different classes, and- hey, hold on a second, don’t leave. Yes, it sounds like the now officially dead Anthem, not to mention every other looter shooter on the planet. This one is showing signs of being different though. By different, I mean actually completed, functional, and competent. It’s got a story, it’s got good systems and progression, it’s got interesting loot, and it promises to be a reasonably sized game that happens to have endgame and co-op support.

There’s a demo on Steam right now, and it comes out in April. You can blow through most of the content they have there in a couple hours, but it’s the full start of the game and progress does carry over to the final release. It’s a good chance to try out the different classes and abilities to see what gels. Currently there’s mixed opinions, but early consensus on Outriders seems to be leaning towards more positive than anything. I’m definitely more positive about it.

I will not be buying Outriders — despite liking it — until a specific change is made.

Delf Discovers Yakuza

I have been meaning to talk about this topic for quite some time… and yet, it’s really not all that long a span of time in the grand scheme of things. That just makes it all the more important and astonishing, though!

There are very few topics in the gaming world I can discuss at length without stretching at least somewhere back in my long history with the medium for reference. Being able to discuss my experience with a series in entirety from only the last two years and change? That’s a rare gift.

So, after months of mulling it over, let’s talk about the Yakuza series.

I hadn’t originally planned to go too intently over every game I’d played — and indeed, there’s still quite a lot more I could write about each — but instead just give a rough write-up of how I got into the series and what hooked me. But once I started writing it up, the words just kept on coming until I’d gone through the entire series. It’s certainly not in-depth and the coverage of each varies, but there’s a lot here to talk about.

As such, the final word count on this behemoth of a piece is the longest I’ve written for any blog post or published article but a considerable margin. I’ve broken the text up with images, gifs, and video clips to hopefully give you some breathing room. So buckle up, and come with me on a whirlwind tour of the streets of Tokyo.

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Planning A Kamurocho Vacation

In August of 2017, I purchased a copy of Yakuza Kiwami, the remake of the first game. This is the first chance I’d had to pick up and play a Yakuza game, but my story doesn’t exactly begin there just yet. Why did I purchase that game, after all?

In truth, I knew practically nothing about the Yakuza series going into it. Sure, there were probably references to it, glances at the titles on store shelves, or some kind of subconscious understanding of the series existing. That said, I had never really given any serious thought into the games and what they were, or had a chat with anyone who had played enough to fill me in. I was going in largely blind, and that lack of knowledge is actually what drew me to it in the first place.

See, I distinctly remember reading a gaming website (I believe it was Eurogamer, for context) and glancing at an article that featured newly revealed details on Yakuza 6. Something about this stuck out to me, because I remember thinking “there’s a big news article about a 6th game here, and yet I know nothing about the series”. That lack of knowledge stood out to me, and my curiosity lead me to glancing at the article.

I understood nothing, of course, but what I did understand was a link to their Yakuza 0 review. So I clicked on that, and came away very curious about what was being described. I wanted to know more, but at the time I didn’t act on it.

This knowledge eventually bore fruit when I saw an article about the upcoming release of Yakuza Kiwami. Taking the same engine from Yakuza 0, it aimed to be a full reconstruction and remake of the original game, retaining all the same story and cutscenes but modernising the combat and graphical fidelity. There we go: that’s my starting point into this mythical series of which I knew nothing. Course laid in, calendar date set, Yakuza Kiwami purchased in August 2017 when it showed up on my local store shelves. At last, I would get to play Yakuza!

I played for three hours and then put it down for four months.

…Anticlimactic, no?

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Death Stranding: My Brief Impressions, and Long-Winded Statements on Tangentially Connected Subjects

So. I’ve been playing Death Stranding. How to describe how it plays…

Well, you basically run from point to point in a series of missions with occasional combat. You’ll be surrounded by a variety of interesting characters and a pretty intense story, wherein you become the Warrior of Darkness and save the First-

Wait, sorry, my mistake. That describes FF14’s expansion Shadowbringers.

Well, you basically have to move in such a way to maximise the terrain, make sure you don’t lose your footing or become unsteady, juggle all the resources you can acquire out in the field to upgrade your Mech Warriors-

Hold on, that’s Battletech. Sorry, back to Death Stranding.

Well, you basically roam around a big open world, surviving all sorts of weird creatures and threats while you scavenge the materials necessary to build structures, improve your power base, and eventually make a Nether Portal-

Ahh, never mind, that’s Minecraft.

…Do you see the point I’m making, though?

Continue reading “Death Stranding: My Brief Impressions, and Long-Winded Statements on Tangentially Connected Subjects”

Atelier Ayesha Review/Discussion: Atelier Hwhat, Bobby

An atelier is a workshop usually associated with artists or designers. Just putting that there for reference, because I’ve had to define it for at least one person before. Got it? Good.

The Atelier series is a long-running development project and the primary flagship series of Gust, one of the more prolific and constant mid-tier JRPG developers. The core concept behind them is that of alchemy; you gather materials either through exploration or combat, use that to craft items, and then utilise these in battles or for quests and such. While many RPGs contain some kind of crafting or material system as a secondary feature, the Atelier series focuses on it as the primary strength, with everything else being secondary.

With this slightly difference focus, one may wonder: just who is this kind of game for? It’s a question a friend has, in fact, asked off-handedly before. Atelier games lack or have reduced focus on the usual strengths and highlights of the more notable JRPGs; the battles are more about what you bring into them than how you execute strategies with the party on hand. The stories and characters don’t tend to stand out among the bigwigs of Persona or Legend of Heroes, often leaning to fairly plain designs and personalities highlighted from a stock standard list of anime tropes.

Yet the games continue to be made and continue to maintain a decent following. So it was that, during my never ending search, I dug up an Atelier game or two that I had picked it up mostly out of curiosity at the time but had never fully invested myself in: Atelier Ayesha most notably. I started it pretty much the moment the new year began, and then finished it in rapid succession, making it the first game I played to completion in 2019. Now I have quite a few thoughts about both Ayesha, and the series as a whole.

So who is this game for? Turns out it might just be me.

Continue reading “Atelier Ayesha Review/Discussion: Atelier Hwhat, Bobby”

Some Games I Liked From 2018’s Second Half

For the games I liked from the first half, here’s a link to the post. Assuming you don’t want to scroll down a screen’s length, anyway. Don’t say I don’t look out for you~

Just as I am somehow delivering another (hopefully) great post within a week of the last one, so too did it seem that the second half of 2018 was dropping an intriguing title in our laps at much the same pace. This breakneck schedule seemed to continue pretty much until the first week of December, whereupon it took a quite breather for the holiday season and then is slated to get right back to it in just a few days.

Looking at you, Tales of Vesperia. Can’t even give me time to fully digest the FF14 patch updating as I write, can you?

So let’s get right back to it then. First, a couple of footnotes of sorts that I could have included from the first half, then right back to the second half of 2018, culminating in a quick talk about my favourite game of the year at the end. I’ll have plenty more to say about Yakuza Kiwami 2 than what’s here, but keeping to the 2-3 paragraphs trend for this article seems to suit me well.

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Some Games I Liked From 2018’s First Half

My personal favourite game of the year for 2018 was Yakuza Kiwami 2.

Amazing how short this can be when I skip all the preamble, huh?

Regardless, welcome one and all to the other side of 2018. Love it or hate it, it was an interesting year for video games. There was a slew of stellar indie titles, some absolutely incredible high budget games from big triple A studios that were purely single player or console exclusives… and there was a continuing, unrelenting downwards spiral into a late-stage capitalist hellscape which saw more backlash and discussion from gamers than I’ve ever witnessed before despite all that.

Single player games got better, multiplayer games didn’t (for the most part), fan-favourite company goodwill was squandered, burned, and ultimately lost, and we’re all starting to feel quite bitter and jaded of the whole hobby.

With all of that in mind, I’d still like to draw attention to some of the games that I quite enjoyed throughout 2018, which I’ve picked from a list of game releases I found on Wikipedia. The list proved too long and unwieldy to fit in one article, so I’ve split it based on the first half of the year with the latter to come around Soon™.

I don’t plan to draw it out or make a spectacle of it like the hideously late Delfies, though I will draw special attention to and write at length about my favourite game that I mentioned up there afterwards. Instead, I’m going with the abridged format: no more than 2 or 3 paragraphs on each game, and the only criteria was that they released from January to June and I played and enjoyed them. Let’s begin.

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The Delfies 2017 Abridged

It’s about the time of the year when one would start considering contenders for their game of the year selections. Many strong titles have released already, there’s a few right around the corner, and the big release season is about to kick off and continue pretty much until the end of November. A good chunk of the games that might be considered are already out and being thoroughly digested already.

…And then there’s me, still not writing up his picks for 2017. Go figure.

I said a couple of months back that I was going to do an abridged version of the remaining Delfies, and I genuinely did attempt to do so. Only issue is that, in true Delf fashion, it took me no time at all to continue rambling until the abridged versions… weren’t so abridged. When there was always something more to say, I wanted to make sure I was saying as much of it as possible, and as I got closer to #1 it only got more unwieldy.

Now, it’s August. I should have had this up in January. At this point, it’s nothing but a mental thorn in my side that’s serving as a writing block that keeps me from wanting to put to paper any other topics on video games and utilising this blog as intended. I’m going to fix that here and now, and get the Delfies out of the way so it no longer weighs me down.

So: a single paragraph! That’s what each of the remaining seven games is getting, no more and no less. You know where to find me if you want to hear more in-depth thoughts on each of the games, and no doubt I’ll have plenty to say about them in future discussions. For now though… let’s just get this over with at long last, shall we?

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