Ria Tee’s Top 5 Games In 2017

Sometimes you use games to get through the bullshit

As it has been for everyone, 2017 was a wild ride of a year. Thankfully though, it was an amazing year for video games despite it all. 2017 was the year of the platformer, the year of the JRPG, the year of the MOBA, the year of literally every single genre. It was a triumphant return for Nintendo with the release of the Switch. Sega acquired Atlus, announced Megaman X, and, while they didn’t make Sonic Mania, there was restored faith in the Sonic franchise that came with the game. Square Enix began to come out of a many-year slump in North America with the release of valuable DLCs to Final Fantasy XV, actually giving news related to Kingdom Hearts 3 at D23, releasing a remaster of the much-beloved Final Fantasy XII, and made Project Octopath Traveler available for demo play. PUBG broke the record for most players online at a single time while it was still in early access. Indie developers defeated some of the most well known AAA franchises at the Video Games Awards.

So much shit happened in video games that I can’t even begin to list it all. 2017 solidified video games and the industry as a staple in the entertainment industry, a valuable resource for education, and, surprisingly enough, a viable career option. This year more than any other year before it was the Year of the Video Game.

Video games are a security blanket for many of us to deal with the absolute shitstorm of news updates, horribly toxic tweets, and click-bait listcles that we’re bombarded with constantly. Video games provide us with a form of escapism which allows us to feel accomplished when we complete in-game tasks. We can feel like the hero of our own story even when it feels near-impossible to make to a positive difference in the real world. And boy howdy hoo did I fucking escape from pretty much everything using video games this year.

This is not meant to be a list of the best games of 2017, simply because I didn’t have enough money nor the time to actually keep up with all the games that came out this year that I wanted to play (here’s looking at you Wolfenstein II, NieR:Automata, and Night In The Woods). This is a list of games that had a positive impact on me and those I had a great time playing, not a list of games that are critically acclaimed or have a numerical value attached to how good they are. So this is entirely subjective and kind of all over the place. 2017 was a big deal year for me. Things were going really badly for me and then they started going really well for me. So many goddamn things happened to me this year that I feel as if I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes in just 365 days.

I hope my little personal tidbits and, frankly, incredibly biased reviews of the following games inspire you to pick any of them up and play them for yourself in the new year.

TL;DR — This behemoth clocks in at approximately 9,000 words. I know some of y’all don’t have time for that. The games I played this year helped me through a lot of bullshit. I talk about that bullshit and also try to drop some wisdom on you. I also kinda sorta give reviews of the games. If you stick around for all of it, I hope you enjoy.

SECRET OF MANA — What You Love Is Impacted By Who You Love, So Get Your Shit Together And Appreciate Them

Now here’s the thing, you’re probably saying “But Ria, this game came out more than twenty years ago, why play this game for the millionth time when, I dunno, you could be playing Breath of the Wild or something?” And that’s a really good question my guy and the answer is that I’m super fucking poor and I also really fucking love Secret of Mana.

If you’ve read my two thousand word tirade about how good Super Mario Sunshine is, you’d know that Secret of Mana was my first video game ever. Period. Legitimately, one of my earliest memories is of playing this game with my mom and my brother when I didn’t know how to use a SNES controller properly yet. They made me play as the Sprite Kid because, spoiler alert, he canonically dies in game, which meant they didn’t have to deal with me playing for all that long. In retrospect, it’s completely justifiable.

More important than my childhood memories, is the fact that 2017 was a good year for an IP that predates Square Enix’s merger and hasn’t been touched in North America except to port it multiple times over the past decade or so. Arguably, the most important port of Secret of Mana was for the SNES Classic.

The SNES Classic was announced after the wild success, or failure depending on whether or not you got one, of the NES Classic. The SNES Classic put 21 beloved games that I’m sure a lot of you grew up with and made them accessible to those who are looking to reclaim a degree of nostalgia. Or those who’s parents got rid of their SNESs without them knowing. Or those who never had the privilege and honor of playing anything on an actual SNES. I’m lucky enough to own not one, but two SNESs and probably around 30-ish games, so I didn’t feel the need to go out of my way to buy the SNES classic. Included on the SNES Classic and in my personal collection is one of the great ancestors of RPGs: Secret of Mana. Square Enix must’ve predicted the market’s response when people saw that the game was going to be ported onto the SNES Classic and promptly announced a remake of the game slated for February 2018.

I’m gonna get sappy here so please bear with me. Secret of Mana was the game that made me fall in love with games in the first place. My brother, who was my favorite person and personal hero all throughout my childhood, allowed me to play it with him. I cherished those moments. There’s a seven years age difference between us. We have the same mom but not the same dad, so to say that we had our differences when we were growing up is putting it lightly. Thankfully, Secret of Mana bridged that gap.

Fast forward from 1999 to 2017. My brother and I are both in our twenties (you’re welcome Brendan, I didn’t say you were almost thirty yet) now. Our mom decided to move to Colorado last Fall and we’re pretty much the only immediate family either of us have in New Jersey besides our respective fathers. We’re both less resentful towards each other, he’s realized that I’m like an actual human rather than just an annoying little sister (not meant to be a callout, but it’s true), and we’ve started legitimately hanging out regularly. We order food from some trendy place in the city he lives in, drink way too much Yuengling, and yell about The Lucksmiths and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. It’s nice and it’s the relationship I always wished we had when I was a kid, just with more alcohol than previously anticipated.

The SNES Classic came out, he bought the European version off of French Amazon, and we decided to play Secret of Mana for old time’s sake. It’s one of my favorite memories from all of 2017. Here we were, getting along better than ever, sixteen years later playing the same game that we played when we were kids. We called our mom and frantically and very loudly asked her how to get to the Water Palace without having to fight Dyluck and the Pandoran soldiers. We forgot, so surely mom had the answer. We then held the phone up to the TV so she could hear the Dwarf Village tune with us, all three of us together, for the first time in over a decade. The game guide he has for the game doesn’t even actually tell you what to do. It’s just a summary with some monster stats thrown in there, which actually proved to be helpful with fighting Mantis Ant. But the game guide truly doesn’t do shit to help you! Regardless of the fact that it has supposed insider secrets from Square Soft!

Secret of Mana has brought my brother and I closer than ever before, simply by the virtue of it being a really good game that we both spent a lot of time playing together. It was also the realization that my brother was the one who made me love games in the first place. Yes, he was the one that begrudgingly let me play with him when I was just an impressionable kid with no hand-eye coordination yet. I love Final Fantasy because of him. I love Mario games because of him. Fucking hell, I love my favorite bands because of him. I owe my brother so much, and I’ve never really bothered to tell him. Maybe when I hang out with him next weekend, I’ll tell him. Or he’ll read this thing! Hi Brendan.

I was fortunate enough to spend about five minutes with the remake at Square Enix’s booth at New York Comic Con this past October. I couldn’t stop grinning the entire time. Here I was, playing a remake of the game that made me fall in love with games in the first place. This year I came to the conclusion that I was passionate enough about video games that I knew that I had to do something with them as a career. Playing it at the booth, career path in mind, I felt a part of the video game industry for the first time as silly as it sounds. It was as if all the pieces were falling into place.

For the record, it was really fun to play and I know a bunch of publications are saying that it doesn’t need a remake. But like, how many people who didn’t grow up with it or don’t care about RPGs, let alone JRPGs, have had any exposure to it besides its listing in generic “Best RPGs of All Time” lists where it’s inevitably somewhere in the top twenty? I hope the remake exposes a lot of people to play this game I hold so dearly.

Secret of Mana is a transitory game for me. It represents my childhood and my adulthood. It represents my burgeoning love for games and the later actualization of a career. It’s rather poetic in the way that this game has followed me throughout my entire life, morphing into different metaphors for the twists and turns my life has taken.

This is ultimately a thank you and a love letter to the game rather than an actual review, which is that it’s really fucking good and you’re a goddamn fool if you decide to skip over it while still claiming to be a fan of Square Enix or JRPGs. I will personally come to your home with my SNES and cartridge in tow and bring your mother a bottle of wine just so you play this game.

That aside, I want to thank the Square Soft team that made this game happen. Thank you for bringing my brother and I closer than ever before, thank you for helping me figure out what the hell I want to do with my life, and thank you for being an amazing gaming experience that I can come back to over and over again and never get bored of.

I wish I could give you a proper review of this game, but I simply have too much to say about it. I can wax poetic about how it helped established some of the most well known RPG tropes and its glitches that make you skip over entire plot points and how good Hirō Isono’s cover art is and oh! how bright and colorful it is for a SNES game and how amazing the Ring Command system is and how it was one of the first instances of AI being used in a video game and how hearing the soundtrack immediately makes me happy. Oop, there I go. I’ll stop.

But just trust me on this one, okay?

So dear reader, I implore you to get two of your friends, hook up a SNES or SNES classic (or y’know wait for February if you have a PS4), make a gin and tonic (my new found drink of choice for playing SNES games), and experience one of the greatest games of all time. You won’t regret it.

PERSONA 5 — Care About Shit And Your Actions Can Actually Have An Impact On This Bitch Of An Earth

When people mention Persona 5 to me now, my immediate reaction is “MY KIDS!!!!” and then proceed to babble incessantly about Just How Good All My Kids Are. And then I turn into Lucille Bluth and go “I love all my children equally… I don’t care for Akechi.”

Persona 5 was my first foray in to the Persona series. My entire knowledge of the franchise up until now was that sometimes teenagers shot themselves in the heads to summon these supernatural entities called personas. Also, there are characters that should be gay but aren’t? I think? I had watched the fandom ebb and flow on Tumblr and Twitter and DeviantArt for years. My online friends were genuinely surprised that I had never played a Persona game before since it’s totally My Type of game (meaning turn-based, anime as fuck, narrative-drive, and did I mention anime as fuck?).

Persona 5’s plot revolves around a bunch of teenagers who’ve been fucked over by society one too many times at the hands awful adults. These adults control their education, their socio-economic positions, their mental and physical wellbeing, as well as the politics of Japan. One by one the protagonist, named Akira Kurusu in the manga adaptation, gains more friends over the course of the game. Every friend has a specific adult who did them dirty. So your rag-tag group of friends called the Phantom Thieves (even though in my NG+ I named them weedboizz69) infiltrate Palaces, the cognitive manifestations of these adults’ true thoughts about who they are and how they view others. These adults range from a sexual predator to a slimy yakuza leader to an artist stealing artwork to claim it as his own.

Now for the actual sorta kinda game review part: With Persona 5, I felt that I couldn’t play any other games at the same time as this one. If I was going to be playing a game, it was gonna be Persona 5. It completely demands your attention. I found myself getting so absorbed by remembering answers to in class trivia questions so I could pass my exams, making an absurd amount of coffee to make my surrogate father figure proud of me, hanging out with my boyfr- AHEM I mean my best friend Ryuji, oh and y’know little teenager things like (spoiler alert) uncovering a huge government conspiracy, fighting a literal god the size of a skyscraper, and avoiding being killed in the midst of police questioning.

I loved the aesthetic of the game which is totally what made me want to play it in the first place. I loved how the Palaces (which are really just dungeon levels) were genuinely fun to fight my way through. I loved how combat worked. As is apparent, I come from a JRPG background. I’m used to turn-based combat and I much prefer it to real-time combat. I like to take my time and strategize instead of trying to remember which combination of button smashing does a thing I need my dumb player character to do. I’m also used the Final Fantasy style of classes, magic systems, and the same combat format for nearly every game.

P5 felt refreshing to me because it broke the mold (at least to me because this was my first Persona game) and I looked forward to combat because it LOOKED SO COOL. Hold-ups, high-fiving my friends in a baton pass, and critical hit sequences mixed up combat in a neat way. I loved outfitting my party with the best and strongest weapons (and in P5, sometimes things that are expensive are worse). I loved making Haru my tank when the game leads you to make Yusuke and Ryuji your tanks.

Yes, there are problems with the game. Mostly the ultimate Top Ten Anime Betrayal moment. If you played the game, you will know EXACTLY whomst I’m talking about. I got really mad that Morgana made me go to bed after making one (1) infiltration tool. Some parts felt incredibly tedious like trying to increase your stats in a reasonable amount of time because time management (a thing I’m like incredibly bad at in real life because ADHD is a bitch) is one of the primary mechanics of the game. The translation and localization of the game is so bad at times that it made me want to find who the translator was so I could slap them upside the head. Localization and translation is a common problem with JRPGs so I’m not surprised at all, I just want and deserve better that’s all.

Atlus had the opportunity to make the protagonist queer and one of your pals to be canonically queer too so you could date him, but they didn’t. They made Ann’s storyline about exposing sexual predators who prey on young girls and ending the sexualization and objectification of women, and yet they made her the default “sexy” character. I mean you could argue that even though she’s the “sexy” character her whole Phantom Thieves schtick is a dominatrix and there’s something to be said about that. I digress. Ryuji is supposed to be a part of Ann’s narrative, hating her abuser for what he did to her, her best friend Shiho, the school’s volleyball team, and to him. Yet he constantly hits on Ann and makes skeevy comments towards her. It’s a game about subverting society and its expectations, and yet the writers couldn’t even live up to that with the characters.

It captivated me in a way that games even inside the JRPG genre typically don’t. I like games that have a linear plot. I like when the game decides when and how it’s gonna reveal its secrets to you. Mostly, this is due to me finding open-world games entirely too overwhelming and frankly anxiety-inducing. I like single-player games because I like that intimate experience that has a definitive ending. It’s why I like RPGs, specifically JRPGs, so much. I like games that have a concrete story, games that make you feel something and make you think, games that force you to have an experience rather than just passively play it. I like games that make you want to play all the way to end because the plot is that compelling. P5 does that. Persona 5 does have some degree of a non-linear narrative in the way in which you decide to advance your social links. Who you prioritize determines which parts of the plot and certain game mechanics you gain access too. If you’ve never played a JRPG before or haven’t found anything in the genre that makes you like them yet, play Persona 5. It’ll change your perspective forever.

Persona 5 was an Experience to say the least. Like I mentioned before, when I played this game I played no other games at the same time. I sunk approximately 115 hours in my first playthrough alone and immediately had the need to play it again. I’m not a completionist by any means, but I didn’t want to say goodbye to these kids just yet and there was more story I hadn’t seen yet. I loved these kids so much that they eventually felt like my actual friends. I became so invested in their successes and their failures, I wanted them to get the justice they deserved. Akira, Morgana, Ryuji, Ann, Yusuke, Makoto, Futaba, and Haru became friends to me and I spent so much time getting these characters to like me. These kids alone are enough to make you fall in love with Persona 5.

In 2017, I was so consumed by issues going on in my personal life. Stuff that ranged from mental health issues to desperately trying to move out to getting accepted back into school to the point where I barely had any time to properly process what the hell was going on politically, socially, and economically whether it be on a domestic scale or on a global scale. I was very narcissistic this year. I was very much caught up in my own bullshit and had barely any time to spare on anyone else. Yet, I absorbed news like a sponge, I had MSNBC or WNYC FM on in the background at all times, and every other tweet on my feed was about what a goddamn disaster the world is right now, but my reactions were dull. I was unsurprised by literally everything.

Where was my outrage? Where did it go? I spent the later half of my high school experience and first half of my college career actively participating in social justice. A lot of my activism took place online, but I was also a part of tangible efforts to make the world a safer place for marginalized people, even if it was confined to my local communities. Maybe I burned myself out caring So Much and by Caring All The Time for So Long. I feel genuinely guilty about it.

Meanwhile, in real life and not in this aestheticized version of Tokyo, I think all of us are wishing we had some Phantom Thieves to steal the hearts of the politicians and world leaders, A-list celebrities and Hollywood execs, and more because the list is never ending. I know I feel like we need some Robin Hood-esque masked vigilantes enacting revenge for the betterment of society.

I don’t think I need to detail the ways our current political climate mirrors some of the plot in Persona 5 because, well, we all lived it this year. I assume most of you paid attention to what the hell is going on around us. There are a bunch of round-up posts being published everyday and news programs have their countdown specials of the most significant events of 2017, so go there if you want actual journalistic integrity and details regarding the state of the world right now. I’m here for games and oversharing a little bit too much.

I felt powerless this year. I felt like I couldn’t make a difference in anyway shape or form in what’s been going on on a broader scale. All I could do was do things to help myself. Persona 5 gave me a way to feel like I was making some sort of impact, even though it was just a game. It reignited that part of me that hasn’t had the energy to make a positive impact in my communities no matter how big or how small my actions are in a long time.

These kids, The Phantom Theives, showed me that you, yes you person who’s reading this, have the power to enact change. That may not have been the point of the game, but that’s what I got from it. All you have to do is try. Try, try, try, TRY. Even if you fail at first, even if you make mistakes. Make friends along the way who care about the same things you do.

Care again. Make 2018 the year you care again.

TEARAWAY: UNFOLDED — You Are The Creator Of Your Own Destiny And Sometimes No One Can Help You But Yourself

A toi means yours.

And “yours” is an incredibly powerful word when it comes to Tearaway: Unfolded.

The game originally came out for the PS Vita in 2013 and the expanded PS4 version came out in 2015. It took me until 2017 to play this game, not only because I didn’t know it existed until last year but also because I’m incredibly lazy and stubborn when it comes to people telling me “You will like this thing please do the thing.” Meanwhile, I do the exact same thing to my friends and get mad when they don’t do the thing. This is a personality flaw I’m working on. Look at me go, first resolution for 2018 made. My boyfriend got me this game as a Christmas present last year because “it looks really cute and fun and you really like cute and fun things!” Correct! I do like really cute and fun things, it’s kinda my whole thing. And I am a bad girlfriend who doesn’t properly appreciate the things that he tries to show me, especially when I end up loving them (I’m really sorry Tom).

I didn’t play it until May of this year, and honestly I’m kind of glad I waited. You know when you inexplicably do things at exactly the right time just when you need them but don’t realize it yet? And that if you did it before or after it wouldn’t have had the same effect? That’s what Tearaway was for me.

Tearaway’s whole premise is that there is a world entirely made of paper and suddenly there is a hole in the sky that’s letting in creatures called Scraps who are trying to destroy the world! The player, or The You, becomes a character in the game. You’re addressed as such and you guide a messenger named Atoi (or Iota if you pick the boy option) who has been tasked to go through the hole in the sky to deliver a very important message. But it’s so much more than that.

The gameplay is spectacular. The environments and aesthetic of the game is gorgeous and truly genius. The story is simple, yet completely and totally complex. It’s incredibly self-aware, with levels like Between The Pages and The Tear. In my eyes, it’s almost a perfect game. It’s by the same studio who did Little Big Planet, so if you loved that game you will love this game even more.

Before I start talking about all the personal shit and my Quasi-Deep Analysis of Tearaway, I wanna talk about how the gameplay was one of the most refreshing takes on gameplay I’ve ever come across. I don’t think any other PS4 title compares to how much Tearaway takes advantage of all the features of the DualShock 4 controller.

The touchpad is one of the most important tools in the game. Swipe on the touchpad and it blows wind to reveal different pathways in the environment and a way to combat those pesky Scraps. You also draw things that become a part of the game’s environment and narrative. You design the Squirrel King a crown! And he loves it! He’s very dapper and you’re partly responsible for that. I truly cannot think of another game that uses the touchpad as an actual touchpad. The lightbar on the front of the controller is used as a flashlight in dark parts of the game and reveals new platforms and pathways. The gyroscope is used to tilt platforms that are suspended or turn platforms right side up so you can continue with your mission to deliver the message.

The environmental storytelling in Tearaway should be the gold-standard in games. Atoi starts of the main part her journey in Wassail Orchard (which like the amount of references to Paganism and Arthurian legend are out of this world and I’m mad no one else has bothered to talk about them). It’s a lively and jovial forest community where the Mummers love their apples and are so worried about the Scraps ruining their party! The palette is warm oranges and mustards, lush forest green trees and beautiful reds that make the paper apples look deliciously crisp.

Gradually the palette becomes cool toned the more you advance in the game. The levels become less crowded with stuff. There are less and less Mummers and NPCs to talk to. Eventually, Atoi’s paper world becomes abstract. And empty. And bleak. And lonely. The You begins to wonder if there was a point to the mission at all. Is this bleak and empty and abstract world that bears no resemblance to anything in reality worth saving? Was it worth the countless deaths (which the game tells you how many times you died in the credits)?

The game is ultimately about The You and Atoi, the player and your messenger, you and this paper thing you guide through this delightful yet scary world, you and you.

Tearaway made me come to the conclusion that in the end, it’s you. It’s yourself and your spirit and your will against the world. You are the causation for the things that happen in your life. You decide which opportunities to take, which path to go down, which things you say yes to and which things you say no to. You are responsible. Not anyone else. Things in life may seem like luck or divine intervention coming in to throw your life in a different direction, but what makes those things happen is what you decide to do with them. Atoi is just an extension of The You. Atoi is yours and The You is Atoi’s.

After reaching the hole in the sky, there is a celebration. Atoi made it, The You made, YOU made it. The world is colorful and tangible again. Atoi visits every Mummer, every creature, every friend who helped along the way on a path that takes Atoi through capsule versions of each world she visited. It’s almost like how people say when you die you see your whole life flash before your eyes. Atoi made it through the abstraction, she made it through the hole in the sky, the penultimate goal. Is Atoi’s success in completing her mission symbolic of death?And is this party just the highlight reel you see before dying? Who knows. But the end celebration made me realize that yes, it’s you who decides what you do in life, but you have to thank the people who helped you along the way. Thank and appreciate the sacrifices people make for you.

Thank your best friend for the 5am pep talks and late-night Taco Bell runs and the fishbowls in Austin and the plane tickets so you can see everyone you love and the times she let you lay on her floor huddled under a duvet because you’re sick and the endless packets of Dayquil and the laughs until you both cry and the drives where you listen to 80s music with the windows down and the concerts where you cling to each other screaming the words to Saturday along with Patrick.

Thank your boyfriend who’s the love of your life for the kisses shared when you least expected it and the reassuring hugs through panic attacks and the stupid dumb inside jokes about orbs and the feeling of wind in your hair as you speed across a lake and the weird beers you two try and the way too intense Smash matches between Lucario and Young Link and the three moves he helped you with and the Magic deck disguised as a gesture of love and the times he talked sense into you because you were being ridiculous and the out-of-breath singalong to Streetlight Manifesto when you’re both too tired to stay in the crowd and the sore feet after shuffling around all day at six NYCCs and and the hands held while you cry during One Day More because you finally got to see Les Mis in person and most of all thank him for loving me. I know I’m a difficult person to love. So thank you. Thank you for the good, the ugly, the silly, the everything. Five years worth of thank yous with a lifetime of thank yous ahead of me.

I played this game after everything seemed hopeless and bleak and empty just like The Tear, when there was nothing ahead of me worth looking forward too. I played this game when I was figuring out who I was again. I played this game when I was looking for answers. I played this game when I needed to do things for myself. I played this game and realized that it’s me who decides things for myself. I’m in control of my own life and that I have to take it back. I have to be responsible.

But I also have to do things for others. Be kind and be good. Reciprocate. Be better. Be willing to deliver the message to the hole in the sky not just for myself, but for others as well. Be the Atoi for other people.

Tearaway is a game about self-discovery. I don’t think the creators intended for it to be that way, but that’s what it ended up being for me. The credits rolled and I was sobbing. I was sobbing because Atoi and The You, Atoi and me really, completed her mission. I helped her complete her mission and she helped me. In the face of abstraction made up of ripped pieces of paper and losing a sense of yourself, everything was okay in the end.

Everything was gonna be okay.

SUPER MARIO ODYSSEY — Feel Like A Kid Again And Maybe Also Call Your Father

Super Mario Odyssey reignited my love for Mario games. Odyssey breathed a new life into the Mario franchise. It brought the whimsy back.

Admittedly, Super Mario Odyssey is the most fun I’ve had with a core Mario game since Super Mario Sunshine. My favorite thing about Mario games is that you can keep going back to the worlds and levels over and over again and find some new unexplored part of the game or find out a new and easier way of getting to a hard to reach place, and it never gets boring. Sometimes it’s just relaxing to wander around a little world you’ve already spent hours in before. I’ve had Super Mario Sunshine since it came out, and a sense of calm still washes over me when I mosey around an episode I’ve already beaten and just fuck around in Pinna Park by trying to actually ride pirate ships and ferris wheel. Odyssey achieves that feeling again for me.

Odyssey is like if you let a child blurt out ideas for Cool Video Game levels and a bunch of established professional game developers were like “Yeah that sounds fucking rad!” and then they actually made it. Wanna turn into a fucking dinosaur? Shit yeah, kid, go for it. Wanna save a pot of Some Real Good Stew from an evil chicken so the fork people won’t be sad anymore? Fuck it, yeah, I don’t wanna have a bunch of sad chef-fork-creatures to be bummed about how they can’t eat their stew! How about racing some arctic seals in what is the cutest mini-game I think I’ve played in recent memory? Fuck yeah. And there goes Nintendo again trying to imbue some sagely advice regarding Earth’s environment again, subtly talking about deforestation and the depletion of natural resources in one of the kingdoms.

Kingdoms that are incredibly small are still so rich in detail that I wanted to explore them for hours. And the developers reward you when you do that. They want you to take in every detail by rewarding you with huge piles of coins, purple coins, and moons when you go somewhere other players might not think of going to. Platformers always end up being the most frustrating games for me to play (and yet I end up playing them all the time). I’m always so close to reaching to the goal and then I screw up a triple jump and I throw my controller down and don’t touch it for months on end. But, Odyssey doesn’t make me do that. It just makes me want to keep trying.

Odyssey doesn’t hold your hand, but the game over issue isn’t frustrating because it respawns you in the last spot you saved in (which are these little flags that are peppered all over the kingdoms). I like that Nintendo switched (HA, I make myself laugh with my unintentional puns. I’m horrible. I know.) it up a bit and determined that “dying” makes you lose coins instead of using a 1-up. It got rid of the anxiety of not having enough 1-ups to keep trying to beat a certain boss or make your way through a teetering platform puzzle. I will say though that I was betrayed when I found out that getting coins do NOT give you health. Another Top Ten Anime Betrayal: Nintendo Doesn’t Let Coins Give Back Health.

Flat out, Odyssey is fun. It’s engaging. It’s magical. It makes you feel like a kid again. Which I think is a thing we forget about in playing games nowadays. I like nostalgia driven remakes and rereleases as much as the next game playing person, but every once in a while I want to play a new game that makes me feel like a kid again. A game that at its core is about having fun, not about having an immersive gaming experience with guns a-blazing or one that doesn’t have some sort of intense social commentary. Odyssey achieves that for me.

As is very apparent with other titles in this list: I get very emotionally attached to things and they somehow always relate to larger parts of my life. I cannot detach my emotions from a gaming experience, which is probably a good thing! A game’s goal should be to incite some sort of emotional response in the player, whether it be melancholy or frustration or pure unadulterated joy. Sometimes games help you sort through some personal shit.

Speaking of emotional attachments, Mario games remain one of those Things I Did With My Dad things. He and I spent hours upon hours playing Sunshine together before my relationship with him took a turn for the worse and I ended up being mostly estranged from him. I just finished up my first semester back at school after a year and half of working on my mental health. My dad’s kind of figured out that what I care about more than anything else on this planet (besides like Duchamp’s LHOOQ) is video games and he’s also figured out that I’m probably not gonna get a museum job as initially planned, and will likely end up trying to do some sort of bullshit in the gaming industry. I came home one weekend in November because If I Had To Talk About Jackson Pollock And Gestural Paintings One More Time I Was Gonna Explode (I’m an art history major, can you tell). He surprised me with a Mario Odyssey edition Switch the same exact way he surprised me with the Super Mario Sunshine Gamecube bundle fourteen years ago.

I’ve had a really rocky relationship with my dad for the past ten or so years. Blow up fights followed by months of no communication. I have no idea if I can chalk it up to teenage angst or other underlying issues. To be completely honest, I don’t care enough to try to figure out why the fuck I was doing certain things as a teenager. I worked through that stuff in therapy and it’s gonna remain in my therapist’s office. I’m also at the age now where high school doesn’t consume my thoughts anymore in this post-graduation world. I’m starting to forget the last names of people I spent twelve years of my life with. All I can do now is love the people who bothered to stick around and allow myself to love the things that shaped me when I was a teenager without shame and without guilt. That was a complete and total deviation from the point I was trying to make, but it’s important regardless. ANYWAY.

My dad kind of rescued me this year. I was living in Colorado, not on my own volition, hating my life and resigned myself to a life of unemployment based on mental illness and never seeing my boyfriend or friends unless any of us had the money to buy a plane ticket. It was a year and half since I had been in school. I had accepted the fact that I would never get my degree and never figure out a good career for myself. In the beginning of April I got an email from my dad telling me to move in with him and I was desperate enough that I said yes. At that point we hadn’t spoken in about six months and I was like “welp I guess I don’t have a dad anymore.” Within two weeks, the longest two weeks of my life, I was back home in New Jersey with all of my earthly possessions in a moving truck that was gonna meet me across the country.

It was weird being back and living with him. But we’ve been repairing our relationship slowly but surely. There’s some stuff I won’t forgive him for, but since moving back he’s been the one supporting me every step of the way. I told him I got back into school and he said “Okay, when is the first installment of tuition due?” I told him, meekly and slightly ashamed, that I wanted to write about video games for a living, that I wanted to do literally ANYTHING in the video game industry, because it was one of the the only things I had an immense passion for anymore. And he said “Okay, what tools do you need in order to achieve that?” Sometimes we still fight and at least once a week I get so frustrated that I want to scream and tear my hair out. But I can’t resent him anymore because he’s done so much for me in these past nine months. I wouldn’t have my normal life back or any prospects for the future without him.

So, what does Super Mario Odyssey have anything to do with this? Well, my dude, Odyssey kind of represents the rekindling of my relationship with my dad. He bought me my first Mario game when I was seven and he bought me my newest Mario game when I was twenty-two. It’s a symbol of him supporting my career path. He wanted to play games with me again and I was thrown back to being seven playing Super Mario Sunshine for the first time.

Life works in weird ways, really really weird ways. And sometimes it takes a Mario game to make you realize that.

DREAM DADDY: A DAD DATING SIMULATOR — Lessons About Love Come From A Lot Of Different Places And This Lesson Comes From A Dating Sim

To say that I lost my whole goddamn mind when Dream Daddy was announced is a little bit of an understatement. First off, I was so psyched to find out that the Game Grumps were attached to the project. Secondly, when it was confirmed that these were all gay (I use the term very loosely, please know that I’m using it as a generic umbrella term) dads and the player makes their own dadsona to date these other dads, I had to message everyone I knew about it.

I’m sure you, my dear reader, have heard all about Dream Daddy.

Everyone thought it was going to be a jokey and hokey game, filled with cringe-worthy moments and maybe some really out of taste jokes (knowing the Game Grumps’ history made some people nervous about the whole thing). What we received was an incredibly heartfelt and genuine game. The jokes were never at the expense of others, instead the jokes revolved around millennial-branded humor and well-meaning dad jokes of the pun-like variety. Game Grumps just supplied the means to publish a game this risky. Vernon Shaw and Leighton Grey created a game that is so unique and so special that I find it hard to believe that it exists. It’s a first of its kind.

It’s an unfortunate truth that most (operative word being most) dating sims that feature gay relationships of any kind end up being fetishizing. They’re not meant for people seeking representation, very frequently end up doing more harm than good, and LGBTQ people who are desperate for any shred of representation flock to them because something is better than nothing. Dream Daddy is not that thing. It’s another beast entirely.

In case you live under a rock or haven’t played Dream Daddy, you start off by creating a dadsona. This dadsona can be thin or he can be bulky, he can be cis or he can be trans (which like!!! is amazing!!!), he can be super hipster or he can be a grill-master supreme kinda dad. My first playthrough I unintentionally made my dadsona Viktor Nikiforov from critically acclaimed sports anime spectacular Yuri!!! On Ice, so thus I named him Viktor. Whatever, he’s my dadsona. Your dadsona and his daughter Amanda have just moved into a cul de sac in the sleepy waterside town of Maple Bay where there are a ton of dads, seven of them in fact, who are all (well minus one) eligible bachelors. Your dadsona’s goal is to woo one of these hot dads. Well, woo is a strong word because your dadsona is kinda awkward but well meaning and has social anxiety and frequently puts his foot in his mouth.

I put so much faith in this game. I was so excited it about. I immediately followed their twitter, nearly preordered myself a physical cartridge copy (alas I am really broke), and watched the release day stream. Which. Uh. It didn’t come out the day it was planned to. In fact it got pushed back like five days. A lot of people were upset about this, because it wasn’t delivered on time, it wasn’t professional yadda yadda yadda. The game dev team, Vernon, and Leighton all clearly cared so much about Dream Daddy that they didn’t want to release a game that didn’t deliver and would need a patch almost immediately. They wanted it to be perfect for us and I certainly didn’t care how long I had to wait for this game as long as we got it eventually. Incidentally, it ended up, finally, being released on my twenty-second birthday. So like, it was one of the best birthday gifts I could’ve received. I spent all day playing it. I haven’t a followed a game’s production so closely in a very long time (because I gave up trying to pretend that Kingdom Hearts 3 was ever going to have any real sort of updates and the Final Fantasy VII remake hasn’t had news in a year).

I first tried to romance Mat. Beautiful and perfect Mat who made Tegan & Sara and Belle & Sebastian puns at his coffee shop and invited me to a show and we bought weed from Damien’s son which ended up being oregano. We could’ve had it all, but he rejected me in the end. I was devastated. I went for my college bro Craig with my second dadsona. I went to the gym for him! I picked up jogging for him! We went camping and skinny dipped together for goodness sake! And yet I got friendzoned in the end.

And then with my third dadsona, I decided to try to date Damien. Sweet and perfect Damien who was the goth man of my dreams. We made My Chemical Romance jokes (which is my favorite band but is tied with The Decemberists for the number one spot. This explains entirely too much about the kind of person I am). He emphatically explained to me the difference between the Gothic aesthetic and the Victorian aesthetic and I ate up every word. He opened up to me. He revealed who he was behind the white cake makeup and cloaks. He was a gentle IT worker, he loved animals, he was trans, and he was perfect. I finally wooed him in the end and his son Lucien accepted me into the family at a barbecue.

I am not a gay man, but I am a queer woman. I came to terms with my sexuality long ago, but consuming fan-created content featuring MLM (men loving men) helped foster that acceptance (because when I was figuring this shit out when the most common examples of gay relationships in media were Brokeback Mountain and Queer As Folk). It was easier to interact with transformative works that were mostly MLM focused and not about WLW (women loving women). Seeing myself in fictional women who had relationships with other women felt off, which I think stemmed from being unable to actually confront sexual interactions that mirrored my body. It felt weird and dirty and I think that’s because my exposure to WLW relationships in media up until that point were made for the male gaze not for actual WLW. That is an entirely different issue, but what I’m trying to get at is that MLM content still feels like representation to me. And Dream Daddy does it so well.

Dream Daddy does not revolve around dating the entire time, it’s also a story of your dadsona’s relationship with his teen daughter Amanda. You have the chance to decide if Amanda was adopted (meaning your previous spouse was a man) or not (meaning your previous spouse was a woman). That simple choice is symbolic of how sexuality changes over time, how it’s not a stagnant thing, and how determining your sexual orientation can be a lifelong process. In addition, it shows that both paths are totally normal and neither is treated with disdain. It shows how multifaceted and how special the gay parent experience can be. Your dadsona and Amanda go through a lot together, and you have to make difficult parenting choices that can impede your relationship with her or make it better.

Amanda is about to graduate from high school, she has a passion for photography, is applying to colleges, and has a ton of problems with her friend group. I saw myself represented not just in my dadsona, but also in Amanda. I went through the same exact shit that Amanda went through my senior year of high school. I gained friends but also lost a lot of them due to petty nonsense (which ended up ultimately being for the better), I also was gonna go to school for photography (but I changed my mind in the end unlike her), and I moved around a lot. I’m lucky enough to relate to this game in more ways than one.

I don’t have a ton of deep or overshare-y things to say about this game other than it’s really good, it’s positive representation, it’s fun, and that everyone (no matter gay, straight or bi, lesbian or transgender life) should play it. It’s delightful and I played it for hours. I even made my friends play it at parties where they decided to romance the bad boy Robert. I want more games like this. I hope Dream Daddy is a catalyst for more people, indie developers or hobbyists or big name studios, to take the leap and make games that are as vulnerable, touching, and flat-out brilliant as this game is.

It’s reassuring to know that out there exists an accessible game at a relatively low price point that runs on most operating systems, a popular game at that, where sexuality isn’t a plot point but is still integral to the game. It’s funny and witty, it’s tender and sweet, it’s honest and sincere. In the end, Dream Daddy is about love, finding it and accepting it. It’s incredibly easy to fall in love, but it takes hard work and dedication to keep it alive. Familial love is just as important as romantic love and sometimes love should stay platonic. Regardless, love is fragile and something that needs to be taken care of. Hundreds of writers before me have written about love that’s a hell of a lot more eloquent than my pitiful take on it, so I’m just gonna leave it at that. Dream Daddy just happens to use gay dads and a hip teenage daughter to impart that.

Amazing! You made it through my tirade. Congratulations, lovely reader. Your reward for making it this far is my list of runner up games. I’m not gonna actually write anything about these games because I love you and your eyes are probably tired from getting through my nonsense. But know that I want to. So without further ado here they are:

1. ARMS
2. FIRE EMBLEM: HEROES
3. KINGDOM HEARTS 2.8
4. PUYO PUYO TETRIS
5. SUPER MARIO SUNSHINE

Incredibly, you did it. You made it to the end of this. You also survived to see the end of 2017: The Year From Hell (when it that game going to be made). Maybe you also played games that hit you like a punch to the chest and games that were the equivalent of a warm hug at the end of shitty day. Video games mean something different to all of us. Maybe as escapes, maybe as lifelong lessons, maybe as the integral parts to your childhood and adulthood, maybe they’re the reason why your friends gather together. Video games are meant to be experiences and they’re meant to be shared with others.

So this is the actual end of this monster of a listicle. Here’s to more games, more joy, and more fun in 2018.

Let’s try to make it a good one. I’ll be there right along with you.