My Favorite Games of 2023 — Dinaburg Writes

2023 was an amazing year for video games, reaching up to the heights of 1998 (Baldur’s Gate; Metal Gear Solid; Ocarina of Time) and 2011 (Dark Souls; Skyrim; do you need anything else?). Juggernaut sequels absolutely crushed my spare time but also rekindled my desire to actually play games for longer than a smattering.

My list will not be much of a surprise to anyone that has even a passing interest in video games, but I did have a few bits pop up in the first half of the year, before the combination of Baldur’s Gate 3 & Zelda absorbed 90% of my gaming time.

I believe I started the year with Link’s Awakening, which I loved on OG Game Boy. But as the Wind Fish says in the image above, finding fun in the remake “is but an illusion.” It is not like Link Between Worlds, which was like my memory of being eleven and playing Link to the Past; the new Link’s Awakening is just kind of there. Too bad. Great overworld theme, though.

Other sequels infiltrated 2023—Final Fantasy 16 came out this year. It was, to me, completely forgettable. If it had come out in, say, 2021? Or if 2023 hadn’t been so very, very stacked? Or if I had more spare time to play games throughout the year? One or a combination of these hypotheticals might have seen FF16 successfully sneak onto a list; I’m sure there is some spectacle in the game that is worth the time spent, but the combat was boring, the character customization non-existent (see: Proc Gen book for my ideas on the importance of even cursory player impact), and the skill system pointless. I just didn’t like playing it, even if I was vaguely interested in seeing what might happen next. I did appreciate the character sprites on the save screen though. That’s nostalgia, baby.

gorgeous cannot help you if I don’t want to turn it on.

I actually liked Forspoken more than FF16, which feels illegal. I was bizarrely hyped for Forspoken since it was announced a very long while ago. I rarely make time for barren-world check-listy games, so the whole bland presentation was enjoyably novel to me. I only stopped playing because I got Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for my birthday. Sorry, Forspoken, I probably won’t be going back.

Midnight Suns got boring—the balance of combat vs. not-combat was way off, and this from a person that liked the monastery exploration parts. The game itself is simply too long. Harvestella was bizarrely intriguing but I think I got enough flavor from it after four-ish hours, and Xenoblade 3, well, I don’t know. I loved Xeno 2 but something just wasn’t hitting for me. It also looked a little muddy. It was hard to jump between it and Forspoken, to be honest.

I don’t think I played any other games that aren’t on my top 5, and without screenshot folders that I made months ago, I wouldn’t have remembered that I played most of them this year. I don’t even have a fifth place entry as of this writing, but I don’t want to put any of these games up there. Maybe Forspoken, if I didn’t play it just before Zelda; in explorer-y open world vibes, it simply got obliterated from my mind.

5. Game Sale Hunt, feat. Unplayed Desires

Wow, have I ever been waiting for Picross Genesis & Master System Edition to drop below $5. Or maybe I need Star Ocean Second Story R to hit something that approaches reasonable. Ditto Octopath Traveler 2, Diablo 4, Cyberpunk 2077 after Phantom Liberty came out. Refreshing the Nintendo eShop is pretty fun, thinking about playing lots of games is very fun, and actually buying things I know I won’t play for a year or two is…incredibly not fun. Unless the sale is comically good—Jedi Fallen Order for 12$ [which, as an edited note from February of 2024, is a really fun game that would have taken spot 5 if I played it in 2023]—I’m not biting. I learned from 2022 that even Live-A-Live level games will sit in my pile for months, but I will snap up a game I really want to play at whatever price it happens to be if I have the time to play it right then and there. Ah, a perils of adulthood.

So this time-to-money ration is flopped from childhood—that is not a revelation. The way I play video games now means that looking at deals is, in fact, superfluous. Shopping has its own ups and downs, it’s own little plotlines. I had a lot of fun trying in 2023 waiting for Diablo 4 to make me buy it. We’ll have to see what 2024 brings.

Shopping for video game deals? I’ll keep playing that every year.

4. AstLibra

AstLibra embodies the gameplay of my childhood desires: Faxanadu and CastleQuest and the weird stories that I believed in my heart only benefited from their impenetrable translations (in fact, clarity of translation allows comprehension of the underlying subtleties—see Aeris. and how she was unintentionally super bland in the 1998 version of FF7 but fun and cool in REmake).

The writing of AstLibra is bonkers clunky, but the stories are surprisingly great. The gameplay is the sidescrolling action-adventure we’ve all known since the NES days, but the vast array of weapon and armor sprites for your character give a little Diablo-loot flair that keeps things moving. As a side note, I have a special place in my heart for the weaponry sprites of the original Diablo because the websites that categorized the MUD I played as a teen employed them as spinning .gifs to help you know if a stiletto would meet your light edged weapon requirement.

AstLibra is such an easy game to pick up and play, never daunting like the larger names on this list. There is a lot of talking—it’s not voice acted, which I kind of love because reading silly dialogue makes it more personal than hearing it—but I have never predicted where the larger story is going, nor any of the morals that each individual vignette is going to convey. Every chapter replays the opening cutscene like it’s a television series, and it has the peculiar melancholia of Dragon Quest 7 (the best Dragon Quest) on lock. For that alone, I wish I could bring this game higher on the list. 2023 is really really ridiculously stacked, though. Fourth in 2023 is first in almost any other year of the last decade.

3. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

I wouldn’t mind playing this right now. Sincerely. Just looking at it makes me want to clear my schedule.

What’s left to say? They made the dungeons more fun. The exploration is the same, which is to say, awesome. It’s a bigger version of BotW, which is basically playground-imagination NES Zelda. I like this more than BotW because it’s got a bit more going on and it’s a more fun to play.

You are not reading a list of games from 2023 without having played either this or its immediate precursor, unless you’re perhaps a contemporary of mine and don’t play video games and want to figure out what to buy your pre-teen for their birthday?

i should have followed the storyline for a least a little while, i guess.

If you’ve never played a video game, the conceit of The Legend of Zelda is that you’re Link, a woodland elf-guy swordsman, and you’re running around the world, finding neat new things around every corner. There’s just stuff everywhere. In this game, there is a new three-level overworld—floating islands, huge underground caverns, and a reworked topographical map of the landmass from the earlier game. Intentionally finding things you’re looking for is fun; accidentally stumbling across things is fun; chasing down rumors or hints is fun. There is a whole “the outfits of past franchise games” thing that surprised me—getting a treasure map is a hoot, and finding a way to the ‘X’ can be fun, too, and all of a sudden I’m in Skyward Sword pants (that game did not seem fun, but the pants are nice).

I remain a fan of how the weapons break—it makes finding new weapons actually useful, and forces we “horde every megalixer” RPG players to actually use our consumables.

The game is great fun, in the same way Breath of the Wild was. It’s pretty. It makes time move seamlessly from in front of you to behind you, which is a blessing and a curse, because it also makes me want to go outside and walk around in some trees.

I would have been happy if this was the only game I got to play in 2023.

2. Baldur’s Gate 3

always been a sucker for Alaundo’s prophecy

It is the itemization, I think, that really pushes BG3 past Zelda for me. I’ll circle back to this, but know that on any given day these two could have switched places.

As for bona fides, I had the five-CD folding triptych for the original Baldur’s Gate. I used to pick up Minsc and Dynaheir and let a bunch of gnolls kill off Dynaheir (you cannot get just Minsc alone—if you boot Dynaheir from the party he leaves too) because wizards were simply too useless in BG1 and Minsc had 18/00 strength. Also, I learned what 18/00 strength was because of the BG1 instruction manual [note to self: it was 18/93, which I guess I am sort of glad I didn’t remember exactly].

1998 was the 2023 of video games for the 90s.

As for BG2, it was my favorite game in college. I know, for a fact, that if you’re a bard and you’re romancing Aerie (which I always did) and Haer’dalis is with you (which he never was again, after) they will run away together. I was…heartbroken? Irritated? Something. Anyway, it and CounterStrike were all I played. And I typically played BG2’s Chapter 2, over and over. That’s all you need, after the first time—the quests and exploration, and forget the main narrative.

That is kind of how I feel about BG3—not that Act 2 is the best, but that the the overarching story is kind of *shrug*. It’s interesting enough, and gives room for roleplay in that you can do what the plot makes you do but for whatever reasons you cooked up in your head. But it’s really not, like, astounding.

Speaking of role-play, however…my character was a half-elf wild-magic sorcerer, and the first things he tried in any given scenario were the intellect-based skills of a wizard—arcana; history—even though he stunk at them. I had him functionally want to be a calm, studied wizard, jealous of their supposed composure, and it was fun to have the game seem to play along. He occasionally got to sass a wizard with a labeled “sorcerer only” line like, “I thought wizards were supposed to be smart?” Coming from him, that line had more jealous melancholia than snark.

wizard robes as fast as they could be found.

I found it reasonably easy to not be a straight-up goody-goody, which made following the whims of this self-serving but not selfish wannabe scholar pretty fun. His main goal, I had decided, was to get rid of the tadpole, never using it if possible (I remember what activating The Slayer did to you in BG2!). I had the combat on the hardest of the three settings and found the challenge to be near-perfect: for the first 2/3rds of the game, I was almost always winning by the skin of my teeth, with no battles being a route near the halfway point. Then Jahiera hit level 7 Druid / 5 Warrior, and the challenge was functionally over. Did I mention Jahiera is back? It’s not Baldur’s Gate without Jahiera.

As for the other characters, I quite liked them. I started the game choosing people based on mechanics I wanted for the team: I kept Shadowheart around because cleric, and I moved Astarion out because I wanted more of an off-tank and not rogue in the actually quite difficult combat. But I dropped Karlach and brought Astarion back after about eight hours because I liked him as a character so much, which was doubly surprising to me because I was constantly doing things he disliked and saying things to him that were not my standard RPG companion “choose what you think they want to hear” responses. Fuck Astarion, seriously, for a while, until you see him be a little vulnerable and you’re like, “Oh, buddy, I’m sorry, you’re extremely traumatized. I will support you a bit more, I guess.” And then I let him become a Vampire Lord. Seems only fair.

More words have been spilled on BG3 this year than most subjects, I’m sure, but I have two final points: The itemization, and the scariest moment in the whole game for me.

First, scary. Shadowheart became my Aerie—aka my instant special little guy. Everyone in BG3 is so horned up for your main character but pass pass pass because I got Bed-Stuy bangs as my bestie, and also she wasn’t particularly gross about digital make-outs. So she’s always around as I flounce about the world, being adventurers and trying really hard to get the worm out of my skull.

Structurally—for me anyway—Chapter One of BG3 never felt solved: I couldn’t see what my actions would do, and sometimes I wouldn’t understand why I was doing something other than just being dragged along with the current. It was refreshing to just sort of wander around and take things as they were. However, Act 2 felt video game normal. Gotta clear the Shadowcurse. Gotta help Shadowheart realize she’s a Selunite (this is not a spoiler unless you’ve never engaged with fantasy writing before). Gotta find the Nightsong. These were clear goals.

i liked her less when her hair changed. Because I am shallow.

However, when you do find the Nightsong, you are presented with a choice. And Shadowheart had this Big Spear and she’s about to do something drastic that neither I nor my character want her to do. But she’s legit my favorite, and if I pick for her she might, I don’t know, resent me? Or ignore me? I’ve got that Aerie+Haer’dalis trauma kicking around in my head, so I chose, in dialogue, to do nothing. I wanted a particular outcome. Credit to the directors—it did not look like she was going to choose it. But she was my best in-game friend and romance option—I couldn’t coerce her. I had to stand by her choice. I really, really didn’t want her to stick that spear into the Nightsong. When she threw the spear into a chasm, I don’t think I exhaled with more relief since beating M. Bison in Street Fighter 2 Turbo.

I’m impressed that a dialogue scene was the most exciting thing in the game for me, and I think it gets to the very heart of BG3’s success—you can fail forward. Outside of combat, of course, because hostile encounters remain coded as videogame skill-checks: if you die, you just reload. You could treat the dialogue choices the same way—fail a roll, reload. But why would you, when the game lets you fail and still move forward, often shunting you down a different path? So any part of the non-combat gameplay is basically a free-for-all, letting you do whatever you want and functionally allowing space for it.

The combat itself is also no slouch, and a lot of that relies on how well the items are designed. There is no linear trajectory of bronze sword —> steel sword —> crystal sword. You don’t find new slightly stronger items at ever turn. Sometimes things are worse in general but really really good for the particular way you play. It astounds me how much of an event finding a new weapon was, how enjoyable it was to pick through a weapon shop, even at the end of the game. And how that was still balanced with one or two incredibly useful artifacts that you may have picked up while, say, solving riddles in a monastery 60 hours earlier. Equipment from the beginning was still useful at the end? That’s true magic!

The game is great.

1. Final Fantasy Theatrhythm Final Bar Line

I did not care about taking screenshots while playing, so here is one that the PS5 thought was notable.

I have wanted to play the 3DS Theatrhythm games for a decade. I never did, because a) money was tight and b) I was too fearful that the constant tapping would absolutely destroyed my DS screen, and I could not afford to replace it.

So when Final Bar Line released its demo—just it’s demo, mind you—I unintentionally woke up at 2am, adrenaline coursing through my body like I was an eight-year-old on Christmas, and started playing. I shelved Disco Elysium because I lost my save file after 8 hours—I wouldn’t mind everything in Theatrhythm was lost, because I would happily just start playing again. Perfect mix of music I love, challenging controller inputs, and number-go-up RPG progression.

Similarly to how I played video games as a kid, I just boot this up without considering what new thing I have and “want to finish.” Theatrhythm elides the late-middle-age always-on acknowledgement that mortality is finite, and if I want to see a lot of games I can’t replay Final Fantasy III six or eight times, or get all my weapon skills in Secret of Mana to eight. It makes me not care that I only played four notable games in 2023, could not “create content” for my third hobby of writing about stuff that I played.

It’s a rhythm game—you’re tapping buttons or moving the control sticks in time to music from the Final Fantasy oeuvre—so if you don’t have a history of playing these games or downloading the midis or buying the Final Fantasy Piano Collections cd or playing FF14 off and on for a decade, maybe it won’t hit the same way. But if you like game music (I am in a constant state of distress when I hear people mute their games and play, like, a podcast or something) and you played a bunch of Squaresoft RPGs, go on and treat yourself.

Spending time writing about Final Bar Line makes me want to spend my time playing Final Bar Line. I can’t recommend anything else more highly.