My Favorite Games of 2019 — Dinaburg Writes

Five games stood out to me in 2019, and I’m going to list them out for you. Why? No reason, really. I do think a lot of “best of” lists are purposefully obscure or weird—this one is no exception with regards to “weird”—but I’m not trying to garner loads of pageviews or blow minds. I sincerely thought about the games I enjoyed engaging with the most this year, and I thought it would be fun to write about them.

I suppose it is a bit of a catch-22: if you prefer vanilla ice cream, you don’t need to spend a dozen paragraphs evangelizing to others why vanilla is good. It’s pretty known. So lists with bizarre claims about why melon rind is actually the tasty part will catch attention more easily. I mean, it isn’t, but I would rather read about someone’s loose framework of rind-rationalizing than further entrenchment of the vanilla oligarchy, so I guess I’m part of the problem. But this list isn’t designed to be “You’re eating your apple WRONG” clickbait—not that anyone admits when it is—and I don’t think I was counterculture for the sake of standing out.

I did have time to play more than five games, though. There were some games that I almost squeezed onto the list: Bloodstained. Trials of Mana. Age of Wonders: Planetfall. I am Setsuna.

Then there are some games that bounced off, hard: The Outer Worlds. And some games I tried to buy—Outer Wilds—but accidentally ended up with something that had an entirely too similar name.

And don’t count out the 2020 Contenders: Steins;Gate, SaGa: Scarlet Grace, and Pokémon Sword I’ve either been playing too slowly or not had enough time with yet. A pokémon game is something I haven’t played since OG Gameboy Red edition last c̶e̶n̶t̶u̶r̶y̶ millennium and I am shocked that I love it. Maybe next year, pokés.

Anyway, onto the list!

5. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

This is me playing! Don’t watch my twitch channel.

Any list with Sekiro on it should make a joke about how long ago January 2019 felt. (Forever ago.)

Sekiro would have lost to Dragon Quest 11 for the fifth spot except I cannot handle how bad DQ’s music was. I heard it is better in the Switch remake, but, well, I didn’t play that one. So let’s talk about Sekiro and not Dragon Quest.

The gameplay was an absolute blast, and throwing myself against Lady Butterfly for three straight days was how I learned the parry system: the only way I probably would have ever bothered to actually learn such exact timing. Which you eventually need, as far as I can tell. Beating her—I only got hit once the time I succeeded—was a triumph, and I probably could have retired from the game at that point; to me, it never got better than that moment.

The first time you face most of the bosses in this game feels like a battle you are scripted to lose. Most of the regular enemies will just murder you, too. But once you know what you’re doing and hit a good stride, it’s like nothing else.

Sekiro is slightly too light on exploration for me to like as much as I do Dark Souls, but the weirdness of poking through each level was very fun. My only other Twitch video ever is also from this game: making that kite go up, and come back. Go up, and come back. Curiouser and curiouser. This type of obtuse mystery is why I like the FROM Software style of game, all the way back to King’s Field. It was, to me—and I make “to me” as explicit as possible because I know people will disagree—much, much better than Bloodborne.

It was a fast and joyful experience, which is a surprising statement if you’re used to the methodical sweat-inducing terror of the other FROM games. And the story was cool enough to hook me—if you played it, I’ll tell you that I obeyed the Iron Code. Which felt like the wrong choice videogame-wise but the right choice for the character. And hey, after I skeletoned out my top five, Sekiro won some sort of game of the year award. So I guess my list isn’t that obscure.

4. Phantasy Star 4

Phantasy Star 4 is a game a I spent a lot more time thinking about than actually playing. Back in the 90s, I was never lucky enough to subscribe to videogame magazines, but I did sometimes get them as a gift. I recall a reviewer doing a little screen-cap comic about how he was trying to get to the town to buy diamate—the healing item—and he kept getting into random battles every other step. I still think about it when I end up hitting a lot of random battles I don’t want to fight. Just let me explore, please!

I also watched my childhood best friend play this game a lot. We rented it often, and I thought we did pretty well! But if you know much about game rentals in the mid 1990s, you know that it was a rare day when your save file was still around the next time you could scrape together the cash for a weekend rental. So I saw Cecil’s journey to become a Paladin more times than most people, and I spent more time with Alys than the game probably expected me to.

I picked Phantasy Star 4 back up when it was available on the Wii in 2009, but I got stuck at Gryz’s village—that dungeon kept wiping me out. This time, on the Switch Sega Genesis Classics, I realized there was a little market booth in his town that sold weapons and armor and I blitzed my way through the dungeon and kept going all the way to Zio. And guess what? There is a lot of game after Zio! You go to an ice planet! This is amazing to me. I certainly never saw an ice planet before.

I imagine there is a whole lot left of this game to sustain me in 2020, but defeating Zio felt like righting a childhood wrong, so it makes the 2019 list.

3. Final Fantasy Free Enterprise

Speaking of Cecil’s journey in Final Fantasy IV (née II), there is a community of people which has seen the trek up Mt. Ordeals even more than rental-happy I have.

The list is getting weird, now. And this is a game I watched other people play!

Free Enterprise is a mod of the first Final Fantasy for Super Nintendo. It takes the trappings of the modern open-world RPG—go anywhere at any time, do quests in any order you like—and appliqués it to the skeleton of an extremely linear 16bit RPG. Or, more directly, it breaks apart all the story beats of Final Fantasy IV, remixes who you fight and what you get as a reward, and sends you out into the world with an airship and a pat on the back. “Have at it, whatever random character you are.”

Oops! All Cids.I think their “No Country for Old Cids” is a better joke. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ — Oops! All Cids.
I think their “No Country for Old Cids” is a better joke. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And while the key items and bosses have been randomized, the original checkpoints and gated content means you have to fight SOME boss or receive SOME key item. You need the Magma Key to open the path to the dwarf-filled Underground, unless you find the Hook to move the hovercraft to Eblan cave—a “secondary” route to the Underground that has a story trigger with a bonus character pickup.

Perhaps another example will help you understand: the Antlion cave is an early dungeon with a low-level boss: the Antlion “spot” doesn’t have many Hit Points, but you might not see the Antlion there: instead, it may be—as it was during the first game I watched—the Wyvern, a late-game boss in the vanilla version that starts the battle with MegaFlare. Which will kill you. Perhaps the “first” boss isn’t somewhere to go first. Perhaps the key item it is holding—in the non-randomized game, it’s the Sand Ruby—isn’t all that useful. You won’t know! And deciding to skip it might come back to haunt you, because this game is a race!

That’s right, the way the Free Enterprise twitch channel is set up pits four players against each other, so routing is essential. Sure, you could do the key item check in the village of Mist as soon as you defeated the Mist Dragon, but maybe you want to bring the Package with you so you only have to visit Mist once to trigger both cutscenes—clever timesaving. But, well, you have to find the Mist Dragon or the Package! By this point, you’ve probably figured that the runners need a pretty good understanding of Final Fantasy 4 to be competitive; luckily for the viewers, there are usually two announcers that make watching really comprehensible even if you don’t know why an early Rosa with a Heroine Robe is a great pickup.

Things stayed really fresh, too, because even beyond the random characters, bosses, and item locations, the current ruleset changed constantly. Sometimes endgame was “Defeat the Final Boss” but you needed to forge together two key items together to do so—sometimes it was a scavenger hunt of bosses to defeat, characters to recruit, and items to find. Maybe you could only find Cids. Maybe FuSoYa started with all his spells! Maybe Tellah could get more than 90 MP! Endless permutations layered across one of the best sprite-based games to exist, run by one of the friendliest communities in gaming. Just writing about FF:FE makes me want to move it higher up the list. Cannot wait to hear the pun for season three of the Expert League!

2. Magic: The Gathering

Check this shit out. I never got a chance to play Magic: The Gathering as a kid, and somehow, I’ve wormed my way into a weekly group. It is extremely fun! I don’t know how to review Magic, but I will say that thank goodness there is a person there that knows all the rules, even if his intimate knowledge of the cards means that asking about a rule gives away your hand instantly. And then you lose.

I can’t figure out what color I like best, either. Definitely Red, but maybe Red/Green? Maybe Red/Blue? Seriously, I feel like I have learned a new language of fantasy nerd, and it is very exciting for me.

One thing I definitely do incorrectly is be thematically consistent, even if it costs my deck some power. I won’t mix, say, dinosaurs with goblins. Because that is just gauche.

1. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Hilda: so odious, so wonderful. She defected from the Golden Deer with very little prompting.

Yes, the tiny amount of pre-standing relationships between the Blue Lions is why I chose them first.

This is from my second playthrough, where all the Blue Lions have joined the Black Eagles. Leonie, too!

Go Blue Lions!

Legitimately Fire Emblem: Three House is one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played in years—I’m halfway through a second playthrough with a different house (there are, uh, three). And that first time took me months.

I really loved the Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn Fire Emblems, but wasn’t super into Awakening and quit Fates after five or so missions. Because I don’t mind losing a teammate and marching onward to avenge them, I started this game on Hard difficulty and Classic mode—where if a character dies during the fanciful Chess battles that make up most of the gameplay, they’re out of the story for good—and it kept me from just steamrolling through every encounter. Even with the challenge set to max, I rarely lost anyone, and none in a way that they couldn’t be rescued through use of the exceedingly clever—and thematically appropriate—time reversal mechanic.

Short version: You’re a teacher at a military academy, and you choose which group of students you lead. Inevitably, war breaks out. The three different factions fight each other, and your old classmates become your new enemies. It is really quite sad to spent fifty hours at a school chatting and fishing and eating with people and then be forced to straight murder them in battle.

Which I guess is the point. But the Blue Lions needed to be triumphant, so, sorry other squads.

When I selected the Black Eagles for my second go-round, I had rarely interacted with them outside of the “straight murder” part. I figured I wouldn’t care about them nearly as much as my Blue Lion besties, but even before the momentous time-skip at the midpoint of the game, I love them already.

I’ll still be playing Fire Emblem throughout 2020 even after it was—by far—my most played game of 2019.

How could it be less than number one?