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The retro Games of the Year of 2022
The best of the games I played for the first time in 2022, that weren't from 2022.
I’ve wrapped on featuring and reviewing retro video games for the rest of 2022, so, it’s time to look at the best of the ones I played for the first time in the last year. Not every one of these entries is necessarily retro: the only qualifications are that they (1) didn’t release in 2022 and (2) I hadn’t played them before, but now I have.
This isn’t a ranked list, but it’s not the entirety of my Not 2022 playing, either: a much larger sample has been reduced to the 15 best of the bunch. And the list is not every non-2022 game I played during the year: it’s just meant to be the ones I played for the very first time in 2022, with one exception that will get its exceptional nature explained when I get to it.
I’ll include developer, publisher, platform, and release year info for each game, too, but I’m restricting all of that to just the actual version I played instead of trying to be all-encompassing. And if I already wrote about the game here, I’m going to share a key section and link to my full write-up. Let’s get to it.
Ys IV: Dawn of Ys
Developer: Hudson SoftPublisher: Hudson SoftPC Engine CD1993
I need to get one thing out of the way at the start here: there will be quite a few Ys titles on this list. The thing in question, though, is that it isn’t all of the Ys games I played for the first time in 2022 that made it here. Just half of them. I might think Ys absolutely rules, but I also know which ones are just alright or good, and which ones rule. The four that you’ll see here in this round-up? The latter.
Anyway, Hudson Soft’s go at developing a Ys game from the ground up since Falcom was understaffed and unable to do it themselves went so well that you could argue it’s the best of the classic bump combat games.
Other than the quality of gameplay itself, the most significant difference between the two Ys IVs is in the story. They hit many of the same beats — the ancient, lost land of Celceta, the lost, winged race of the Eldeel, the conquests of the Romun empire in Ys’ mirror version of the actual world, etc. — but Dawn of Ys is designed as something of a bow with which they could tie up Adol’s PC Engine CD run. He returns to multiple locations from Ys I & II, sees characters from those games in more and in more meaningful ways than in Mask of the Sun’s cameos, and has the main thrust of the story tied into the history of the land of Ys itself in a way that neither of Mask of the Sun nor the eventual Memories of Celceta would.
And that makes a lot of sense for Hudson to do in order to (1) make their version of the game stand out from Tonkin’s and (2) create a scenario in which someone purchasing Dawn of Ys as their first-ever Ys might then go back to buy the other two that were available on Hudson’s console, and also published by them, too. It helps that none of it feels forced or unnecessary, either: it’s all just a seamless way to tie Adol’s and Hudson’s pasts together with their present, and it works for both parties.
The House in Fata Morgana
Developer: NovetaclePublisher: Limited Run GamesNintendo Switch2021
I can’t really discuss the minutiae of The House in Fata Morgana, as it would be a lot like giving you a detailed rundown of a book’s plot in order to convince you to buy it. There are visual novels, and then there are visual novels, and The House in Fata Morgana is very much the latter. There are decisions to be made and gameplay to be had, yeah, but you are going to spend much of the 20-odd hours of the game reading, and thinking about where you can go next to do more reading.
The story is excellent: it’s a mix of horror and romance, and it’s captivating from start to finish. You’ll do a bit of bouncing around various time periods, meeting new characters in each, and everything ends up tying together in ways you won’t have predicted. It’s just a lovely experience, and if you’re a fan of visual novels even a little bit, absolutely worth the time and money you have to invest in it.
You’ll be doing a lot of reading, yes, but also staring at loads of character art and backgrounds while listening to music, and it’s all excellent. What a game, and I’m glad we’ve moved so far beyond “is it even a game?” as a question I have to see posed online whenever something like this comes out.
Layer Section & Galactic Attack S-Tribute
Developer: TaitoPublisher: City ConnectionNintendo Switch1995/2022
Sure, this particular version of the game released in 2022, but Layer Section, Galactic Attack, RayForce, whatever you want to call it, that came out nearly 30 years ago in arcades. While I had played Layer Section prior to this new release thanks to having a Sega Saturn, that also occurred this year — hey, I have a lot of Saturn games to catch up on. So, new release or no, it qualifies as a not really 2022 game that I also hadn’t played yet. Oh yeah, and it’s a true classic shoot-em-up.
At its most basic level, this is an extension of the kind of gameplay that was found in the genre-defining Xevious in the prior decade. That’s not giving RayForce et al enough credit, though: this is the peak of that particular subgenre of shoot-em-up, a far busier, far more dangerous, and far more involved iteration of what Namco introduced to the world in 1982. Xevious had a slow pace, but Layer Section & Galactic Attack is fast. Xevious had a tiny ship and tiny enemies and tiny bullets. These games have a large ship and even larger foes on purpose: you have to focus on what’s in front of you and what’s below you, incessantly taking aim at both, all while dodging and weaving to avoid both collisions and having any of your enemies’ shots find your ship.
I feel it’s worth sharing this tweet again, too, because how critics at the time felt about Layer Section is annoying me all over again.
It's pretty wild how Layer Section/Galactic Attack showed up with this level of intensely fast background scrolling, projectiles, ship speed, etc., and too many critics at the time of the 1995 Saturn port kept wondering why it wasn't on last-gen hardware instead.
— Marc Normandin (@Marc_Normandin)
1:40 AM • May 13, 2022
Rolling Gunner
Developer: MebiusPublisher: ININ GamesNintendo Switch2019
There’s a whole lot of talk about the release of classic, legendary shoot-em-ups in the present, and that’s because (1) we are seeing unprecedented access to them in the present and (2) so many rarities or previously Japan- or arcade-only titles are finally available for you in your North American living room. What gets a little less play is that there are some more modern day STGs coming out that will someday be looked upon with similar reverence when they get a re-release on the Playstation 8 or whatever. Rolling Gunner is one such game: it’s very obviously a future classic for the genre.
Rolling Gunner is a project put together by Daisuke Koizumi, formerly of Cave, and when I say “put together by,” I mean that. Koizumi is listed as the game’s director, designer, programmer, and writer, and he also worked on Rolling Gunner’s graphics and art. It clearly had the hands of experts crafting it, as it feels great to play, and balances between ease of completing a run through its six stages with a need to master its systems in order to one-credit clear it with a high score worthy of the leaderboards.
You don’t need an arcade stick to play it, but I do recommend one. The Y button autofires while keeping your mobile option guns static and firing in the direction they’re currently point. ZR also autofires, but the options shift depending on where you’re moving, as you’re moving. ZL unleashes the bomb, which you have a limited number of, and are more effective both in terms of firepower and in point scoring if you’ve collected a ton of the gold medallions that enemies drop as you fire on them and defeat them: you have to get in close to collect them, however, as they don’t come flying toward you or drop toward you as they would in a vertically oriented STG. Rolling Gunner is horizontal, and you’ll need to keep flying to the left and right of the screen to collect the medallions from ships you defeat both in front of and behind you.
Collecting 1,000 of those medallions without taking damage (getting hit while you have a bomb left uses up bombs rather than killing you, but you really need to use your bombs to survive against bosses, so don’t get hit!) increases your score as well as allows for you to use your more powerful beam (that requires a bomb to fire) for a longer period of time. So you definitely do not want to just let these medallions fall by the wayside: they’re the key to you having your most powerful attacks as well as your highest scores.
Foes come from all directions, which is where using the Y button instead of the ZR configuration comes in handy. With the Y autofire button, you can lock in the firing direction of the mobile cannons, but they’ll point the opposite direction of where you direct the analog stick or joystick. So, if you want to fire at foes coming above and to the right of you while keeping your main guns trained on the larger ship in front of you, you’d quickly move the stick southwest while not pressing any firing buttons, then slam down on that Y to lock in the firing position while you avoid bullets and incoming ships once again.
While Rolling Gunner is definitely a bullet hell shooter, it has various difficulty settings so that those of you who aren’t sadists can enjoy yourself while still feeling like you’ve achieved something in completing it or posting a high score. It also has an Overpower DLC that gives you a regenerating shield and a powerful beam that cuts through enemies, and plays as a twin-stick bullet hell STG, too.
SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash
Developer: SNKPublisher: SNKNintendo Switch1999/2022
Another game that got a re-release in 2022 but is much older than that, Card Fighters’ Clash was a Neo Geo Pocket Color crossover between the deep character rosters of SNK and Capcom, and it’s wonderful. I’m no card battler expert, but this one drew me in.
You will lose in Card Fighters’ Clash, especially at first, and maybe even often deep into it, but you learn something in these losses, at least. And the bouts are often relatively short, especially when they’re just against randoms and not named characters or “boss” ones, so it’s easy enough to just try again and hope for a better shuffle and draw the next time, if not going first or making one big mistake or simply some bad luck in the shuffle is what caused you to lose. It’s cards, you know? These things happen.
Maybe all of this is obvious stuff to people who are super into Magic: The Gathering, or are very experienced at card battle games, but not everyone is one of those people. And even if you do have experience within the genre, there is a charm and joy to be found in Card Fighters’ Clash that makes it worth your time, even if you’re a hardened veteran. I didn’t plow through the game, really, but it’s one I keep going back to when I’m not playing something else, or when I just have 15-20 minutes to spare before my kids wake up or in some kind of pick-up-and-play situation. Given how well it works in these short bursts, it’s no surprise it began it’s life on a handheld, or that sequels eventually made their way to the Nintendo DS, or that there has now been a revival of the series on the dual-mode Switch.
Ys Origin
Developer: Nihon FalcomPublisher: DotemuNintendo Switch2012/2022
The lone Ys game to not feature Adol Christin, but that makes sense, as it’s set centuries before his first adventure. He’s just a regular dude, you know.
Ys Origin uses the same style of play as Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, and the remake of Ys III, The Oath in Felghana. It’s the most fully realized version of this battle system, too: whereas something was still missing from Ys VI, and was absolutely found in time for Oath in Felghana, Origin further refines the battle system, and applies it to three characters who all play quite differently. You have your basic attacks for each character, and you will collect additional (and upgradeable) elemental attacks to be deployed that will deplete your magic meter. These elemental attacks also serve as skills that let you progress through certain obstacles, such as floating for longer jumps, blowing up weakened walls to find the secrets behind them, or lighting braziers. Lastly, you have a boost meter that fills as you take and deliver damage, and when utilized, gives you a damage boost as well as heightened defenses.
If you haven’t tried an Ys game yet, Origin is a great starting point, and not because it’s a prequel. It’s just real easy to get into, and doesn’t take long to complete an arc. You might find yourself hooked in a hurry and looking for more.
3D Super Hang-on
Developer: M2Publisher: SegaNintendo 3DS1987/2013
Completely new to Super Hang-on? No, no. But the fantastic 3DS port that made me change my mind about the whole thing? That’s a much more recent thing that happened after Sega put like, their entire 3DS catalog on a very extreme sale around this time last year. 3D Super Hang-on rules.
The definitive at-home version is the 3DS release, however: it’s part of M2 and Sega’s extensive 3D series on the handheld, which took classic arcade and console titles and added not just 3D elements to them thanks to the portable’s technology, but also myriad options for difficulty, sound, and playstyle. The 3DS has gyroscopic sensors, so you can emulate how the monitor would have looked on the ride-on Super Hang-on game if you want to, with the screen angling itself left or right depending on where you’re turning. You can also turn that function off but keep the gyro motion controls if you prefer, or only use buttons and the analog nub for control of the bike with the standard screen presentation, or pair it with the monitor movement. Give yourself more or less time to work with at the start of a race, increase or decrease the aggressiveness of the other racers… there is endless customization in these M2 ports, and Super Hang-on is no exception to that. Scores are all tracked on separate leaderboards depending on the options you ride with, too, meaning you can always be tracking yourself against past versions of that same self, regardless of what went into making said self.
Bulk Slash
Developer: CAProductionPublisher: Hudson SoftSega Saturn1997
A Japanese-only mech game where you fly around shooting, a lot. It got an unofficial localization in 2021, so I got around to it on my Saturn in 2022. It’s a standout title for an underrated system.
Once you understand what you are capable of, with switching between flying and walking, with homing missiles and changing speeds and how well and smoothly your mech flies, Bulk Slash is going to feel amazing to play. It also looks great, with impressive explosions, and, outside of pop-in and short draw distances, wonderful 3D for the era and the platform, and the soundtrack is a perfect fit, too. You know what you’re getting into from an audio standpoint once the first notes of the opening theme hit:
This soundtrack is so good. It feels great to play and to listen to, and has tons of replayability. I don’t know if you need to get yourself a Saturn to play it, necessarily, but you should find a way to play Bulk Slash.
Ys VIII
Developer: Nihon FalcomPublisher: XseedNintendo Switch2018
The only issue I have with Ys VIII is that, at 50ish hours, it’s so much longer than any other Ys title — length is not why I play these games! However, Falcom did an excellent job of justifying the extra length here, as they gave you two different timelines to play in, with two different lead protagonists. Combat is fast and furious regardless of which you’re using, bosses are huge, and the soundtrack… it’s great even for Ys. Sunshine Coastline might be the most Ys song Falcom Sound Team has ever composed, actually: it’s just stunningly, contextually perfect:
Adol washes up on a deserted island of legend that there is supposedly no escape from, which should be a horrible thing to happen. This is Adol Christin, Adventurer, however, so even as things are looking terrible for he and his fellow castaways, he steps out onto a beach full of new monsters and new places to explore, Sunshine Coastline kicks in with its driving guitars and drums and a sound that wells hope up inside of the listener. Adol, as well as the player controlling him, are at home. Driven forward by those same instruments, in a quest to not just save yourself and the others, but to see what there is to see, discover what there is to discover.
Ys VIII, at launch on the Playstation Vita and Playstation 4, was something of a mess with a lacking localization, but by the time I got around to it in 2022 on the Switch, patches had taken care of all of that. It does take a bit of time to get going, between all the introductory dialogue and the game’s explanations of its systems, but all the delays end up worth it. Plus, the very first fight you have in the game is against a kraken with this theme accompanying it, so Falcom at least lets you know they’ve fully returned to kicking your ass with guitars and drums with this game after taking a couple of Ys entries off from that style:
Right up there with the best Ys games I’ve played, and I’ve now played them all. Just don’t make any more of them 50 hours without a reason as good as what this game provided, yeah?
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd
Developer: Nihon FalcomPublisher: XseedWindows2017
It took until I got a Steam Deck for me to finally sit down and play this game, but it was worth the wait. There’s no reason to play this one until you’ve already played the other two Trails in the Sky titles, but it both rewards your knowledge of the past and love for its characters and sets the entire franchise up for its future, which was a nifty little trick.
If there’s a skippable Trails game, it’s this one, in the sense that it is, at its heart, about revisiting with old friends and old haunts to learn more about them all. Given this is still Trails, however, which focuses so much on the lives and humanity of its subjects even in its ancient big bad plots the destruction/control of the world angles, it still feels necessary. What drives Kevin Graham? What motivates Ries Argent to work for this man who abandoned her as he closed himself off from the world? Why did he close himself off in the first place? These are all questions as vital to Trails’ whole deal as The 3rd’s main thrust of “where the hell are we?", and it’s this combination of character with grander narrative that makes Trails games so hard to put down, and so easy to invest into, in the first place.
Metal Gear: Ghost Babel
Developer: TOSE/KonamiPublisher: KonamiGame Boy Color2000
This game is a stunning achievement, and if it re-released tomorrow on the Switch as is at a discount as an older Game Boy Color title, people would rave and rave about i how incredible it is and how fantastically it’s aged. Hell, that’s what I did when I got a hold of it.
Ghost Babel feels like a game where someone who had played Metal Gear Solid went back in time to the MSX2 days and the origins of Metal Gear to say, "Hey, did you consider this?" Despite existing on the 8-bit Game Boy Color, it’s loaded with the mannerisms of a Playstation game: Solid Snake can now perform wall hugging, shift the view while doing so to see if the coast is clear, rap his knuckles on the wall to draw attention, and perform everything through animations that simply did not exist in the previous top-down, 2D Metal Gear titles on the MSX2. In addition, the kinds of changes to the 2D form that were made in the decade between Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Ghost Babel also make this title feel like more than just a return to an older form. The screen scrolls, instead of each piece of the map being one single screen that flips to the next — especially fascinating to see since that was something of an original Game Boy design staple — and Ghost Babel introduced movement in eight directions as well as diagonal firing. Most impressively, though, all of these changes to the original formula that found their origins in 3D Metal Gear and through advancements in 2D games over the years feel like they always should have been there in top-down Metal Gear to begin with.
What a game.
Titanfall 2
Developer: Respawn EntertainmentPublisher: EAXbox Series X (BC)2016
Remember when you could just fire up a first-person shooter with a nifty gimmick and be done with the thing’s campaign in 5-6 hours, feeling fully satisfied? It feels like those days are very much behind us, as there’s so much focus on multiplayer over campaigns, or live-service games that go on and on, or basically anything besides what I just described as a glorious goal of the genre.
Titanfall 2 is a game I had been meaning to play for some time, and just hadn’t gotten around to it. It was on Game Pass at the very end of last year, though, after I had already written up all of my GOTY stuff, so when fellow critics Dia Lacina and Garrett Martin joined forces to tell me I wouldn’t regret playing it right then and there, I did. And they were right. It kicked so much ass that I went out and bought a used physical copy that same week so that I’d have access to it again if it ever came off of Game Pass or became harder to find.
I never even touched the multiplayer component: I really did walk away satisfied after its literally explosive campaign that I played in one day, which was like… let’s see. Mech Parkour. I described it in a tweet at the time as “Mirror’s Edge with mechs and flawless shooting mechanics” and dear lord I just want to go play Titanfall 2’s campaign again right now. Not everything needs to be made up of completely brand new ideas to be amazing. Titanfall 2 is a bunch of established ideas slapped together in a new form, but baby, Respawn had a stew going.
Bomberman Generation
Developer: Game ArtsPublisher: Hudson/MajescoGameCube2002
There are a whole bunch of platforming Bomberman games, but this GameCube outing is my favorite of the bunch, and I hadn’t gotten a hold of a copy until this year.
Generation plays excellently, but it also looks and sounds wonderful. It released in 2002 in a cel-shaded style, which makes it something of an early adopter there, and it still looks great to this day, whether you play on a CRT monitor as intended or are forced to use an HD set to play. In my recent play of Generation, I used both to see the difference: everything appears to move more smoothly on my CRT, but even without Progressive Mode — which Generation lacks — on a 55-inch HD set, the game still looks good in a way that games from the same era that strove for realism or simply a less age-less style do not. Baten Kaitos, for all its beauty, needs that Progressive Mode enabled if you want it to look good on an HD set. Bomberman Generation looks good regardless of what you play it on; it just looks better in its native resolution and environment.
Yes there are quite a few Hudson games on this list, but if you’ll recall, I put together a month-long retrospective on their decades in the industry back in March, and there would be even more of their games here if not for the rule about needing to not have played the game before. And there will be more new-to-me Hudson games to cover next year, too, as I descend further and further into the Japan-only, unofficially translated abyss.
Ys IX
Developer: Nihon FalcomPublisher: XseedNintendo Switch2021
It actually took me a bit of time to get into Ys IX, as I felt it piled up its various systems and conversations in a way that grated on me a lot more than Ys VIII did, but once I got over that early game hump… well, Nintendo’s 2022 Wrap Up stats described my play of this game as an “Intense Burst,” so, there you go. I made up for lost time.
I’ll spare you the plot details, but Adol now has the ability to transform into a Monstrum, i.e. a person who also has some superpowered, monstrous qualities. He fights in an unseen side dimension on occasion, alongside the other Monstrums, which is the only time Ys has ever had encounters instead of just straight action RPG see an enemy, fight the enemy (or don’t) for its design. This is in part because much of the game, especially early, takes place within a single city before you ever get out to its countryside — it’s a little hard to have monsters running around inside of a “French” city without freaking out all the citizens of it, you know?
Combat is once again fast and fluid, and party-based just like in Ys Seven and VIII. It veers from the Ys formula in the same way VIII did, and successfully so: it’s not the same as the Ys games you’ve played before, but it’s also clearly nothing but Ys. While I prefer VIII and it isn’t particularly close, IX is better than the rest of the original, modern Adol games, so it has plenty going for it even if a few of the classics and the remakes are superior, too.
Metal Slader Glory
Developer: HALPublisher: HALFamicom1991
A visual novel/adventure game that took four years for HAL Laboratory to develop at a time when that sort of thing could spell the end of your studio. Which, it nearly did, before Nintendo swooped in with ideas and checks to keep that from happening and allow HAL to survive long enough to produce the franchise that would turn it into a beloved, enduring studio.
Metal Slader Glory was a real good time to play, and not just because it was wild to stare at what HAL was able to produce on the aging, restrictive Famicom. The story surrounding it, how it was made, and the fallout from its production are all more intriguing, to be honest, but that has more to do with just how good all of that stuff is rather than anything against Metal Slader Glory.
Reviews at the time were middling, but likely stemming from some confusion from the critics, too: while Metal Slader Glory is a visual novel adventure and pretty straightforward about that most of the time, it also features some menu-based “action” segments involving guns and robots, as well as a brief first-person dungeon-crawl. The game did nail these other styles, yes, but take a look back through some old reviews of games that tried to genre-blend like this, and you’ll often find some confusion over not being able to succinctly describe what you can expect.
Now, if only Nintendo and HAL would get around to officially re-releasing this “managerial mistake” in the present. If not, well, you can emulate it with an unofficial translation and see what all the fuss — and advanced tech — were about.
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