I don’t believe in picking a single Game of the Year. A year is too much time, games too diverse, and the reasons to play them too varied to name one as better than every other one. Like, who does that? But I am going to write about some games I have thoughts on! Video games are about thoughts and feelings, and the more the merrier.
Tales of Berseria
Technically, Tales of Berseria is a 2016 game, but it was released in English in 2017, and also, I didn’t do one of these last year, and Berseria is that good.
Coming off Tales of Zestiria, with its spotty writing and broken mechanics, all Berseria had to do was assure us that the Tales Studio hadn’t lost its groove for good. And sharing a setting with Zestiria, with its inconsistent metaphysics and disturbing moral framework, didn’t exactly raise expectations. But where Zestiria was choked by a strangely dispassionate approach to analyzing the misfortunes of its relentlessly tragic world rationally, Berseria focused deep on its characters and shattered all doubts.
Berseria breaks with the classic “boy takes up girl’s sword” fantasy. It’s the story of a girl who wants revenge. There’s no special destiny, no love interest, and no lasting softening of the fact that she wants to murder a guy.
But there’s also a boy. Berseria is not the story of the boy fighting for the girl. Berseria is the boy learning from many people, good and bad, and growing up to find out what he wants to be for himself.
Berseria is the story of three girls who have been manipulated and abused and the bond they form that helps them recover. Berseria is the story of two men that know what they want but not how to get it. Berseria is the story of a man who has lost everything over and over again, but still, in a messed up way, wants to make things better. Berseria is the story of real families broken and new families made.
Berseria is special simply because of the way it’s all those things, all at once, every facet supporting the others and weaving into a single story that doesn’t focus too much on one thing, but manages to make everything satisfying.
Please play Tales of Berseria.
Super Robot Wars V
Like Berseria, Super Robot Wars V came off of an overproduced disappointment and impressed everybody simply by being good.
I’m not going to say that V is as deep or as well-crafted as Berseria. What V is is simply nice. The main characters, more than having a grand world-shattering destiny that demands the aid of all your favorite mechanical heroes and Ange, simply nestle into all the fun stuff going on around them. Their low-key friendship quietly grows, spurred on by the childlike war machines of Might Gaine and the array of female relationships in Cross Ange, until it bears gently heartwarming fruit amidst a climactic interstellar siege that takes most of its cues from Space Warship Yamato.
The defining arc of V is a robot trying to understand emotions, and predictably, the hardest one to grasp is love. But instead of this going the way you’d expect, the robot, Nine, is genuinely earnest and curious as she asks every single included character what they think of love and gets a different answer from every one, whether their original story is about heroism, romance, anger, compassion, or any combination of the above. There’s no better way to express how V handles its crossover: by asking all its included works to show their potential, then synthesizing their strengths into its own.
Fucking game made Cross Ange seem good.
Xenoblade 2
I have not finished Xenoblade 2. The thing I want to say about Xenoblade 2 has to do with a specific kind of hope.
When Xenoblade 2 was coming out, I had been thinking a lot about how especially RPGs, as they grew more intricate, became (in some ways rightfully) less interested in breaking rules. As much distaste as I have for the idea of a lost golden age of game design, I find it true that, especially around the first two Playstations, big RPGs were more likely to be dangerous more often. Secret abilities with obscure requirements, characters with bizarre unique mechanics, enemies with puzzle weaknesses that were only obvious once you realized what they meant, segments that changed the game entirely. Things that were frustrating to the extreme in some ways, but stood out and expressed something.
The number of games have been increasing (not all) that are reducible to their base systems. Throughout the game you’ll be using the same kind of points to do the same kind of actions to get the same kinds of things. You’ll get more things — new powers, new items, new combinations — but more rarely will things just be different for a while in a way that adds to the story, the character, or the setting. The gameplay is abstract and the words just have to speak for themselves. And I’m fine with that. Look at what I said about Tales of Berseria.
But when reviews called Xenoblade 2 a modernized SNES or PSX RPG, I was listening. And in many ways, the game is still quite reducible. You’ll fight monsters with a mechanical (but very good) combat system, wander sprawling wildernesses picking up collectibles, and do mostly similar sidequests.
It’s just, there are the Blades.
The Blade characters that form your party are rolled randomly, except the ones who are living their own lives you can recruit, except the one who’s been swallowed by a fish. If you’re lucky enough to roll or find a unique Blade, they have their own set of powers that express their personality. And still, many of them gain new powers in normal ways. But one Blade might still be more combat-focused and another skill-focused, and most of them have at least one trait that demands you use their skills or do something personal, and a few of them have their entire leveling tied to their personal stories.
There’s a mouth monster that just wants to eat various foods (and will make recommendations if you indulge him). A girl with a burgeoning idol career has a bizarre management-sim-lite you play to bring her out of her shell and make her successful, without which she’ll never build the confidence to fight at her full potential. One Blade demands, the instant she pops out of the gacha, that you let her fight powerful enemies, and this is an actual requirement.
There’s an entire character who ignores half of the systems that every other character in the game uses to choose and grow their Blades, and instead forces you to play a strange little arcade game and rack up high scores — but the result is that you can essentially build your own Blade. Because he has literally built his own Blade, and you can tinker with that Blade’s components.
And yes, some of these mechanics are frustrating. Tora! Tora! is… divisive. You can’t use Ursula in battle if she’s practicing her singing and dancing. Less idiosyncratic Blades will gain tiers just by being around you long enough, whereas if you don’t level your army or support local economies or whatever, the Blades that care about that are capped. The very fact that a majority of Blades are random kind of bites.
But you know what? I don’t really care about the fishman who’s just a soldier. (Though he’s also a patissier. We’ll see where that goes. I’m excited!) I remember paying for a strange creature’s food stash, and splitting combat training with glamor training, and fighting inexplicable eight-bit sharks. And I even understand why you can’t really guarantee a specific Blade for most of the game — the game wants each player to meet the Blades they meet, get to know them, and live with them. I have issues with the decision, but I can see what they were going for and respect the attempt.
Xenoblade 2 goes in a direction part of me wanted a game to go, and it goes big. If I had hated the game, I would still be glad that it existed, as proof that someone is willing to throw utter bullshit at the wall in the service of weird details. But as it stands, I’m under halfway through the game and clocked at 60 hours, so it’s doing something right.
