My Favorite Games of 2021 — Dinaburg Writes

Mid 2022 is a great time to list out all the games you liked best in 2021. The most wild facet of this list is realizing that the Nintendo Switch was the most ‘powerful’ piece of hardware I was playing on, because my other option was a base-model launch PS4.

5. Bravely Default 2

The only type of job I want is a fantasy-themed job system.

Yes, I sank a lot of time into this game. No, I did not finish it. Part of the reason I probably burned out is structural: the Bravely games that I’ve played all seem to love the “cyclical convergence” theme, which is neat but having to repeat the same landscapes in a jRPG is deflates the exploration part, which is my favorite aspect of games like this. The other reason is because there was an option to change the difficulty. Being a weirdo, I set it to Hard because I figured having a strong team wouldn’t feel very fun if there was nothing challenging to pit them against. The regrets hit me once I hit the repeat bosses that let you uncap your class levels. Yikes, that difficulty curve was steep. So I put the game down then and haven’t been back.

If you don’t know Bravely Default 2, the series is basically 4 Heroes of Light. All clear?

Oh, I’m one of the four people on the planet that really Iiked 4 Heroes of Light? And I got chased off NeoGAF for my “bad opinion” about how good it was? Whatever.

For the slightly less nerdcore, it’s kind of like Final Fantasy 5. I refuse to pretend anyone reading this doesn’t know what “like Final Fantasy 5” means.

But…maybe you’re reading this in the very far in the future. Maybe all references to FF5 or “job systems” have been swept away. Maybe you’re simply too young to understand that there was a time where someone could reasonably play every new videogame that was released—it was expected for the “gamer” to be conversant in all games. Which, as of 2022, is certainly no longer the case.

Or maybe it’s a broader issue of general knowledge: people might not know what a classic jRPG looks like. The plot—mostly made up of vignettes—is pure melodrama. A soap opera, if you will. There’s a team of weird little people, and they stand on one edge of the screen and wave weapons and flash blinky lights at other weird little people on the other edge. In this particular jRPG, your squad of creeps can change “jobs”— by which I mean they change outfits, which is very fun—which gives them access to skills and abilities (the aforementioned “blinky lights”). Some of the abilities carry over into different jobs, so you can customize your thief to also shoot arrows, or your witch to be able to dodge all incoming attacks. This mix-and-match approach lets you build four relatively unique characters, and seeing them in their goofy little outfits during scene-chewing cutscenes is really enjoyable. I love wearing footie pajamas and ninja robes while I find out that the art-themed boss is turning the townspeople’s blood into magic paint. Gimme your beret, you psycho, I wanna wear it!

It was very fun, but I will probably never go back to it. Still, number five on the year is no slouch.

When you see a guy in a weird outfit, you know you’re going to beat him up and wear his clothes

4. Ender lilies: quietus of the knights

Super Metroid and that Nintendo Power Samus comic still make this cool. Why can’t I like any Metroid games????

I feel like this spot should have been Metroid Dread. At first, 2021’s Metroid kind of hooked me, but it quickly felt so much like work and so little like fun that I completely stopped playing.

But I had a taste for that sweet sweet explorer-y sidescroll, and I wanted more. So I went digging: Ender Lilies is perhaps obscure, but it shouldn’t be. It’s a refinement on a lot of other games that I have played, which I will now list for your convenience: Salt & Sanctuary + Hollow Knight (for gameplay); Valkyrie Profile + ICO (for vibes); Lost Odyssey ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) . I feel like it has a touch of the Nier Automata, too, because I got “Ending A” after my first playthrough, and I know there are more areas and story beats left to find. But…I’m good. I got what I wanted from this game: Mysterious and varied backgrounds over which to whack enemies with a big club.

It’s an easy recommend for anyone that found any amount of joy in Hollow Knight.

Always sense of lovely mystery, the whole way through the game.

3. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

Yeah, remember when used twitch? Me too…

Five Months, baby! I played 13 Sentinels for about one hour on Saturday mornings, nearly every week, from January 2021 till June 2021. It turned the game into a real event. 13 Sentinels lends itself so well to this type of long chew—the game is split into lots of little segments, with asychronous individual storylines across—you guessed it—thirteen selectable protagonists. The tales can be done in any order, but they are gated at various points—you can’t go further down Megumi’s line, for example, until you’ve done the first couple of scenes for a specific number of other people. But…what is up with that demon cat that she is talking to?? Gotta keep playing to find out.

More than once, a red herring suckered me in as I followed a particular character for a little bit longer than I planned. The little hints that tie into another player’s storyline can sometimes lead you astray, and the constant and ever-changing of cliffhangers coupled with the knowledge that I’d have to wait at least a week to find out some more really upped the ante every time something wild happened.

Functionally, I feel that the type of structuring and flexible pacing found in 13 Sentinels could only be done in a game; you’re choosing where and how the story unfolds, so some things will make less sense to one player than someone else whenever either of them encounter it. If this were a movie, the director has final say over when and where the audience is looking at all times. Even how long you spend seeing something. With most media, everyone is presented with the same content, in the same order (barring the theatrical release of 1985’s Clue, where the ending could be one of the three different versions, depending on where you saw it!). Even a small amount of agency opens up a cascade of wonder in player—the route my narrative took through the game was mine, even if all the constituent parts were identical to anyone else who played it.

The weirdness lasts through the ultimate conclusion, which was more satisfying than I expected. And! Even though the real-time strategy bits are really abstracted, they’re still really fun! The game has a lot going for it: the gorgeous art; the awesome English-language dubbing; the complexity of a plot that is elevated by the intentional and player-directed pacing. It’s an experience that really resists reduction—summing up why it was one of the best games of last year is hard! Additionally, I think might fall a bit flat if one were to gobble up the content in a week or less. But all experience is reflection of time and place of encounter; 13 Sentinels’ varied structure reminds us of that. For me, it hit just right.

I cannot believe my launch PS4 didn’t catch fire during my many MISSILE RAINs

2. “Modern” Infinity Engine Games

(Divinity: Original Sin 2, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker)

Why yes, I did kill Fane. Why do you ask?

A podcast brought me back to these games, and another podcast freed me from their grasp.

I replayed Divinity: Original Sin 2 because Watch Out for Fireballs! did. And then I got hung up on the same exact spot I did when the game originally released.

See, what is magical about this game is how it is set up not to have “lose” conditions—when things go pear-shaped, things get interesting. But I have a personal problem: once I’ve gotten really and truly invested in a game, I want what is “best”. I want maximum returns. It’s a sickness.

So once I was a few dozen hours in, and I couldn’t save some dumb-dumb on top of a burning pyre (again, as this is the exact place where I quit the first time I played) even after about 5 hour-long tries, I put it down.

But I still wanted more Baldur’s Gate-esque isometic cRPG action. So I went on to Pathfinder: Kingmaker, a game that I simply could not get running on my laptop when it released. I knew nothing about the Pathfinder system, but it’s basically AD&D 2nd, which I know from my time in the Baldur’s Gate mines, so I just kind of went for it.

It’s really good.

My main character felt like a full person, to me, very fast. Her little halo-glow that I could toggle on and off obviated torches (fun!) and punching and kicking my way through bandits and wolves looked neat (wow!). Basically, I had a lot of fun. But…the loading. This is a computer game. not a PS4 game. Remember, all through 2021 I was still playing on a launch PS4 console. Seriously, everything took forever. I’m glad I got to try it, but I just didn’t have it in me to keep watching the tip screens for 2 minutes whenever I needed to go back to the throne to make decisions. What year does Namco’s patent on mini-games during loading screens end, again?

Oh, and Pillars of Eternity was in there, too. I kept hearing that Pillars 2 was really fun, but I couldn’t remember anything from my old playthrough of Pillars 1 except that I somehow missed recruiting the cleric so I had very little healing for a very long time. So I restarted it. But after dozens of hours with Divinity and Pathfinder, I burned out on shepherding another six person adventuring team through an isometric fantasy world. Expect Pillars 2 somewhere on the 2023 list.

As for my hunger for infinity engine content? Mages and Murderdads has me covered, and I don’t even need to gather my party before venturing forth.

This game did well at capturing the 1998 BG1 vibe of “stuff you don’t understand undergirds this experience”

1. Final fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn

1.0 me would be so proud to have unlocked paladin.

So. It’s come to this.

I’ve played so many MMOs.

Including this one.

More than once.

I’ve never made it very far. I like to try all the classes too much, remaking my character and starting afresh over and over. Alt-itis.

But FF14 thwarts me there, because your single player character can be all the classes.

What happened this time was: There I was, plugging my way through Bravely Default 2, having a great time switching classes on my little weirdos, when all of a sudden I remembered how much I like the Final Fantasy job systems. So I thought—hey, everyone is real psyched for this Endwalker thing, and I never make it past like level 25 in any MMO—I should play the free trial of FF14 again.

And so I did. But what I found, after not really enjoying the archer class, was that Monk was so insanely fun to play that I was level 50 before I knew it.

And then, I went back and tried some more classes.

And again.

And all of a sudden, I was through the main story quest. I had leveled past 50 on four classes and had admitted to myself I was, indeed, a dragoon main. Never would I have expected that I, the person who tapped out of EverQuest at lvl 14, WoW at 24, and Age of Conan somewhere in the teens would ever make it this far. Then I found myself doing something I even less expected—I was running end game content.

Granted, this was endgame from three expansions prior, so it was substantially easier for me than it would have been for someone playing it when it was new—power creep made my items better than the best items available back then, and I had surpassed what the level cap used to be pretty quickly. But after clearing Relic weapons for both Dragoon and Paladin and starting in on Summoner, I realized I was being completely insane. Who cares if I’m friends with the Pixies? I needed to stop.

I have heard, time and again, that the story only gets better across the four expansions of Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker. I know they’re out there, haunting me; four 100-hour spectres ready to claim my free time. But for now, I am free. FF14 may exist as my favorite game of 2021, but I honestly hope that I play not a minute of it in 2022.