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- 2024's Games of the Year, Pt. 3
2024's Games of the Year, Pt. 3
Yes, this is a retro video game publication, but I find plenty of time for new stuff, too.
Part one covered the eligibility rules, the first seven (of 20) games of the year as well as some honorable mentions, and part two included another seven and the last batch of honorables. Part three has the last six games of the year for 2024, as well as the favorite games of 2024 from my eight- and five-year-old kids.
And while this is the final part of my games of the year coverage, this isn’t a ranking. However, my very top pick for the year is in here all the same. That’s usually how I handle this, just so it feels like we’re ending in the right place, even if it’s not a countdown.
Devil Blade Reboot
Developer: SHIGATAKE GamesPublisher: SHIGATAKE GamesSteamMay 23
This is a new game, in two ways: for one, the original was an independent release, only in Japan, so it’s new to North America in 2024. And second, Reboot is a pretty apt description of what this version of the game is: it doesn’t have much in common with the original release, as there’s a whole lot more going on in terms of the scoring system and gameplay now than nearly 30 years ago. The most significant change is the Berserk system, which you can read about at length courtesy Kimimi:
This is one of those exciting ideas that encourages me to cause problems for myself. Surrounding my ship is a series of rings, indicating several scoring zones. The closer an enemy of any size is when they blow up, the more points I’ll score and the more energy I’ll add to my berserk gauge. Is this the first shmup to offer greater rewards for point-blanking enemies? No, not by a long shot. But it’s one of a rare few to make the effort to so obviously link cause and effect together, to offer some easily parsed visual indication why one enemy awarded me 100pts and another just a few seconds later gave me 500. It’s these oft-forgotten details that turn an ancient and increasingly opaque genre into something anyone can pick up and master.
Devil Blade Reboot nails its presentation — no surprise, considering the Shigatake of SHIGATAKE Games is an illustrator with Vanillaware — but I can’t emphasize enough how big and beautiful and incessant all of the explosions and weapon blasts and so on are. Devil Blade Reboot is always giving you something to look at, whether it’s blowing up or about to be blown up or the cause of all of these explosions. You can play through the game on its easiest difficulty in one credit without trouble if you’re a genre veteran, and it’s also an excellent way for newer players to get on board with what’s happening here. And there’s a lot happening, so that’s not a bad idea: the scoring system, in addition to the proximity bit, also has you balancing using bombs as bombs or as a way to fuel a scoring multiplier.
If you’re an STG fan, and haven’t played Devil Blade Reboot, you need to fix that. If you’re more in the STG curious camp, it’s an excellent starting point.
Ys X: Nordics
Developer: Nihon FalcomPublisher: NIS AmericaPlaystation 4/5, Switch, SteamOct. 25
Ys IX was great. It also overstayed its welcome a bit, or, at least, didn’t have the pacing necessary to justify its 30-plus-hour length. That’s not especially long for an RPG or anything, but it is pretty long for a Ys — Ys XIII was stellar in a way that made its even longer runtime a non-issue, but I felt it more with Ys IX. Luckily, Ys X: Nordics, despite breaking up some of the pacing caused by incessant running around going from location to location by introducing sailing and naval combat, also made its length a non-issue. You can finish the game in a couple dozen hours if you feel like cutting your time with it short, or, you can end up like me, crossing the 40-hour mark while doing every quest you can find, and feel like you could keep on going if only there was more game left to play.
I’m going to borrow my blurb on Ys X from Paste’s Games of the Year ranking:
Putting Adol Christin on a boat for most of the runtime of a game seemed like a bad idea, considering his lengthy history of accidents at sea, but maybe Ys X being set before most of those incidents occurred saved him from that fate. Adol proved seaworthy, at least here, and Ys X managed to not only change up the setting by having so much of it occur on the water, but the fighting, as well. Ys X’s combat might seem a little slower at first, since it involves more blocking and evading than usual, but don’t confuse this for a Souls-like: once you start learning some skills, you’ll be using those instead of standard attacks for the most part, and basically never stop moving or attacking outside of the occasional block or evade.
This change gives Ys X an energy that Ys IX could never quite capture in its battles, and the tag-team setup that replaced the party format allows you to focus on building these massive, damage-multiplying skill chains that keeps battles moving no matter how many of them you fight. And, unlike with Ys IX, the pacing is tremendous: you can complete the whole game in a couple dozen hours if you want, but if you’d prefer to go 40-plus or beyond, there’s enough Ys and enjoyment for that, as well. It’s one of the greatest Ys games going, which is saying something.
I played Nordics on hard for the first run, and it was the right call: it forced me to have to engage with its battle system on its terms instead of trying to just brute force my way through — I’ll absolutely give it a replay on the next difficulty up, too, because of how good that combat feels.
Pepper Grinder
Developer: Ahr EchPublisher: Devolver DigitalPlaystation 4/5, Switch, Steam, Xbox One/Series S|XMar. 28
If you try to imagine what Ecco the Dolphin x Drill Dozer would look like, you’d probably land on something like Pepper Grinder. You’re drilling through cracked rocks and rock faces, tunneling through softer ground, launching yourself upward and across canyons and through enemies. It’s not water, no, but you still maneuver through it all like you’re swimming, and the physics ended up being comparable, as well.
One of the things that stuck out to me was how Pepper Grinder managed to be designed both for people just trying to get through the base game, and those who wanted to try to unearth every single secret. It’s loaded with some intense platforming challenges that require perfect timing and reactions, but you can move past quite a few of them and just get on with the game, as it were, if completing it 100 percent isn’t something you’re interested in or even capable of doing. It ends up being a fairly short experience if you just go through it, sure, but there’s so much more of it there if you want to try to find everything that’s hidden across its worlds. There are also time trials and loads of unlockables — a whole bunch of those are just costumes, sure, but there are some upgrades for your character, too, and you’ll want those. The boss fights are no joke, especially the last one, which mercifully has a checkpoint for its different phases.
Pepper Grinder feels fairly unique — I know I pulled out a couple of games at the start of this blurb to compare it to, but that’s not wholly reflective of the game, either. It was just to give you a little bit of a grounding in something that feels mostly like itself. I didn’t see it get much attention when it finally landed on consoles in August, but this is one you’ll want to find some time for if you’re into side-scrolling platformers with some challenge.
Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island
Developer: Spike ChunsoftPublisher: Spike ChunsoftSwitch, SteamFeb. 27
What a game. What a game! I loved it back in March shortly after it released, wrote about it for Paste — saying that Shiren had returned to take back the roguelike crown — and now can’t wait for a chance to get to the game’s DLC dungeons.
…it’s the most refined and approachable Shiren to date. Dedicated series veterans might be able to get through the initial 31-floor dungeon with speed and relative ease, but for most players it will take time and experience to learn the ins and outs of the game, its items, its rules, and to build the muscle memory needed to see your way through the scenarios you’ll come across. You can send items back to the initial warehouse by way of a special pot or a merchant who makes that run—both instances being random—either putting an item you don’t need on this run in or attempting to salvage something vital from a doomed run before it ends. The game’s entirety is not revealed to you from the outset: you unlock new special items or features as you go by completing some optional story bits, which will be marked in the areas they’re occurring in with an exclamation point. For instance, if you want a magical staff that turns monsters into peach buns that you can then eat to turn into that monster yourself for the duration of a floor, you need to complete the quest with the Heavenly Maiden. Which will in turn also help you to unlock Asuka the swordswoman as a traveling companion in the dungeons—she really loves peach buns, and won’t be able to rest until she’s got access to a steady stream of them.
Those first 31 dungeons are really just a warm-up for the extremely rude — but fair! — version of Shiren that makes up the postgame. You have to learn all the rules so you know which ones each dungeon is breaking and forcing you to work around in the postgame, and all. And you should! It released on Windows on December 11 after being a Switch exclusive for most of the year, so, get to it one way or another.
Minishoot’ Adventures
Developer: SoulGame StudioPublisher: SoulGame StudioWindows, macOS, Apr. 2
What if a Zelda-style action-adventure game was also a shoot ‘em up? Minishoot’ Adventures has you traveling through a semi-open world — one that unlocks further as you pick up new powers and abilities, a familiar design for topdown action-adventure games — but doing so in a twin-stick shooter rather than a game where you swing a sword. The dungeons aren’t quite as complicated or layered as a Zelda or its closest genre mates, no, but that’s fine. Much of the challenge comes instead from staying alive by avoiding waves of bullets.
Minishoot’ Adventures isn’t a bullet hell game or anything like that, but you will need to stay on the move, and dodge all kinds of bullet patterns all the same, in order to succeed. There’s a ton here that you can find if you want to spend time exploring, too, but like with the non-shooter, classic version of the topdown action-adventure game, you don’t actually need to do all of that to defeat the final boss, either. If you’re the kind of person who finishes a Zelda with all of 13 or 14 hearts instead of the full 20, then you know what’s up here.
It’s great to see a take on the classic Zelda formula that is so very obviously indebted to those games — it has a pieces of heart equivalent for extending your health, and even though you’re a ship firing off blasters there are still pots full of currency for you to collect — that manages to change things up and be its own thing. What an unexpected surprise, to end up with a pair of action-adventure titles in this old style in the same year, when for so long Nintendo and the industry at large seemed more interested in continuing to push the 3D style of action-adventure title. There’s room for both, as Minishoot’ Adventures (and Echoes of Wisdom) reminded.
Dragon’s Dogma 2
Developer: CapcomPublisher: CapcomPlaystation 5, Windows, Xbox Series X Mar. 22
One of my favorite parts of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is that it introduces a whole bunch of little quality of life tools to the experience, and then, after what we’ll call a dramatic moment, just decides that those don’t exist anymore. The world is hard and dark and doomed, and you should feel that with every fiber of your being. You should earn every victory, no matter how small, and also, watch out for the fucking dragons.
Another thing I loved about Dragon’s Dogma 2 was the argument that was going on during its release window, about whether the game just kinds of end unexpectedly or not. The people who felt it did just kind of end out of nowhere and jarringly did experience that, yes, but got to that result by playing one pretty specific way. And the people who said, “it didn’t end jarringly, you basically just started” played a different way — they’re both right, but the true Dragon’s Dogma 2 was experienced by the latter crowd, and we know this for two reasons: their way is the only way you actually see the game’s logo on-screen, even if you’ve already put dozens and dozens and dozens of hours into its world beforehand, and also, that’s where the game’s actual ending lives.
Even though that was all eight or nine months ago, I still don’t want to actually give away the details now. Suffice to say that the moment this particular switch flipped was one of my favorites in a year full of great ones. I didn’t quite “get” the original Dragon’s Dogma, but that had more to do with me giving it a shot at a time when I couldn’t really commit to it. I made a point of making time for the sequel, which is very much a second attempt at the first in a lot of ways, and I love it. It’s a special game, and while it’s not without problems, I’m simply not bothered by those issues in a meaningful way. There’s just too much here that blows me and keeps me invested and unable to turn it off. Another on the short list of modern open-world games where I actually do want to experience what it’s offering up, but also don’t feel like it needs to happen all at once, in one playthrough — there are reasons to go back, reasons to experience it all again, but different this time, reasons to see what I missed the first time. Sometimes you can’t ask for much more than a world you definitely don’t want to live in, but you sure do love spending time there all the same. Dragon’s Dogma 2 fits the bill, there.
I’ve got Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen on my Series X, to give the original a proper go at some point. I’ll be returning to the world of Dragon’s Dogma 2 another time, and sending my pawn off on missions elsewhere once more, to bring back knowledge of the worlds of other players which they can then pass on to me. To fight the dragons I avoided the first time around, to solve some problems I didn’t get around to solving in my first attempt, to see and experience more of this world — to try to make the “end” less jarring, and see if that changes anything about the true ending, or at least how it all plays out.
Oh, and dragonsplague. Dragonsplague! What an idea. To seed destruction in the very system that would draw people to Dragon’s Dogma 2 in the first place. Incredible work. Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn't hate its players, but it does expect them to play by its rules or else suffer for it, and I love that kind of design so much. Especially when it does something as inventive as "crossdimensional plague that births dragons who will kill quest-requirement NPCs if you ignore the signs." Don’t ignore the signs, people. Use campfires if you think one of your pawns has the plague, not inns in populated areas. Unless you want the most chaotic run of Dragon’s Dogma 2 possible, anyway. It’s there for the taking if you do.
Maddie’s Games of the Year
Maddie (8) loves a video game. And, like usual, she’s sharing her five favorites of 2024 with all of us. Now, they didn’t have to be games from 2024, specifically, but they did have to be games that she played for the first time this year. This was her first full year with her own Switch (Lite), which meant she had a bit more freedom than in past years, since she wasn’t as constrained by “what did mom and dad bring into the house for themselves?”
These are her words, brought on by the usual prompt of asking what she liked about the games she mentioned as her favorites.
Super Mario Party Jamboree: I like it because there are new characters and new mini games to play! Imposter Bowser is huge, and makes the games really fun.
Princess Peach: Showtime!: I like the different costumes that Peach wears, and how they give her new powers and ways to play the game. At the end of you game you get to fight a giant witch!
Gunbird: The characters are so funny! They’re all fighting for one magic mirror and one wish, and they argue about it after levels. The bad guys are weird and I like defeating them. The bomb attacks are my favorite because they go [makes big explosion sound] and blow up all the enemies. Playing Gunbird with you is my favorite!
Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Mega Mix: I love the songs, and my favorite is “Cendrillon.” Hatsune Miku’s voice is cool, and I love dressing her up in different outfits.
F-Zero 99: I like the different vehicles, and racing against so many people is great! Driving on the skyway is fun, especially in team battles. I haven’t won a race but I love playing this game anyway.
Finn’s Games of the Year
And hey, now Finn (5) is old enough to take part in this, too. And if I hadn’t already been convinced of this earlier in the year, the moment I realized he’d completed Metroid: Zero Mission without save states or assistance from me on normal in three hours would have done the trick. I have maybe created a monster who chose multiple Metroid games and a roguelike and an action RPG for his favorites of the year.
Super Metroid: I love facing Kraid and Mother Brain. I like the exploring! I love escaping the planet before it blows up!
Metroid: Zero Mission: I love fighting all the bosses, and playing as Zero Suit Samus is great because I have to hide from the Space Pirates. It’s tough but I can do it.
Chicory: I like all of the puzzles, and painting is very fun. The trials are very good, and mommy reads all the words to me. [Oh, right, he can’t read yet, which as you can see did not really stop him from playing and completing games where that would have been a helpful skill.]
Dicey Dungeons: I like attacking all the enemies. I like unlocking the new dice characters! I keep losing but I learn new attacks for next time I play, and then it’s easier.
Cat Quest: I love beating all the dragons and the bosses like Dracoth [the antagonist]. Flying around the world is fun, and so is water walking. I like Mew Game+ because it changes the game for me! [The new game+ mode lets you choose carryovers and modifiers like tougher enemies, or forcing you to complete the game on level 1, and so on, and my challenge-obsessed child is going to spend forever going through them, I already know this.]
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