Things about Unicorn Overlord

If you've been reading here for a while, you know that I sooner, or later, I will always come back to talking about  Ogre Battle 64. You'll also know that while I think it has a lot of flaws, I love it deeply. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how, if I were to get serious making video games, I'd love to make Ogre Battle 65. (You know, Ogre Battle 64, but one better...)

I was neither surprised nor excited when I first saw Unicorn Overlord in a Nintendo Direct. I wasn't paying that much attention and the name is dumb. So it was only later when I saw someone call it an Ogre-Battle-alike that I actually went to take a look.

It turns out, it's a modern Ogre Battle. It sands off most of the things I think make Ogre Battle flawed and plays up the things I really liked. It has some flaws of its own, but I am very happy when I'm playing it.

I have a few things I've thought about Unicorn Overlord (and some of them aren't even about how like Ogre Battle it is) and I've written them up below. Beware spoilers for the whole of Unicorn Overlord, and Ogre Battle too — really a warning about Ogre Battle spoilers should just be part of the header of the blog.

Things I Liked

The first thing I like about Unicorn Overlord, is that it *is* Ogre Battle and it works really well. One of my complaints about Ogre Battle is that it involves a lot of the computer walking while you sit around. You give a unit an order and then check Twitter and then a while later they show up where you wanted and a fight starts, and then if you set things up right, you win and go on to the next thing, which is maybe fighting the same unit again.

Clive and friends are going to kick ass.

In Unicorn Overlord, they've fixed that. Mostly through the magic of making the maps smaller and the units faster. I just started a second play through and they told me about the fast forward button, which is great, but I almost never wanted to speed up because I was already making decisions as fast as I could. If you're looking for Sid Meier's rule that "a game is made up of interesting decisions", having the game go faster means more interesting decisions.

The stamina system they chosen also works quite nicely with the smaller maps. A stronger unit might light out in front of everyone, but after five or six good fights, they'll need a rest and if someone isn't there to cover for them they'll get their buts kicked. It makes the system from Ogre Battle more discrete, less chaotic and once you understand it, easier to plan around. Also when you get tired you can eat hot cross buns and get 3 stamina back, and that's got to be better than eating energy fruit.

Unicorn Overlord also has a streamlined  unit set up compared to Ogre Battle. You still put together soldiers into units, but the positioning matters much less. For one thing, your front always faces the enemy, as opposed to all of the side and back attacks that you had in Ogre Battle. This does reduce a bit of the fun of catching someone from behind and routing them, but it also makes the game much easier to understand. Units are organized into just a front row and a back row and there are a few benefits to each, but the overall complication is very low, while still being satisfying.

The Knights of the Rose are also going to kick ass.

The difficulty is still refined through solider placement. One of the first things the tutorial tells you is never to place a back-line unit directly behind a front-line unit because of the attacks that go straight through the front-line unit and hit whatever's behind them. Then they give you a spear that gives you that exact ability, and all of the enemy units line up in nice attack-throughable columns.

There is also a difficulty slider, and I'm not that sure what it does. I played on a lower difficulty to get started, and now I'm playing on a higher one and the difficulty has always felt good. As I often mention here, I'm not nearly as good at strategy games as my love of them would suggest, and I've been right in my happy place all along.

One other delightful thing I really appreciate is that you don't have to keep your hero alive. Prince Alain is welcome to be on the front lines and if you oops, that's great he can get resurrected just like every other solider in the game. That opens up your options and gives you more interesting ways to play.

All that being said, the best thing the Unicorn Overlord developers have done, is look at other strategy games and find the cruft they can remove. One example of this is in levelling. If you've played any Fire Emblem, you know that there are often promoted units hanging out with you low level units and stealing their experience points. If you're really familiar with the mechanics you can see that because they're so much stronger, they're taking the XP that lower level units need, but the first time out you often end up with a harder time later because you couldn't level up your units.

Clive and friends win their fight.

Here, all the soldiers in a unit share XP and if a soldier is above a threshold it just doesn't get XP (which is clearly marked in red) and the other soldiers get their regular allotment. Often, it's beneficial to send along a higher level unit to lift up lower level ones. There's still a bit of a problem, but over all as long as all the units are more or less in the right range, other mechanics determine if a unit will be good or bad in a fight rather than just the level. There's also enough XP sitting around that you can (more or less) level up any unit you think would be interesting.

The other thing that's great is that there are no tricks. Again in Fire Emblem or a lot of other games, they'll give you a special item to promote your soldier and make them super great, except that if you use the item it turns out they'll miss out on the thing that will actually make them powerful in the late game. Here, promotion just makes your solider better, more stats, more actions. Promote as soon as you can, at the many helpful forts scattered around the map.

They've also done a great job of organizing the types of units and basically, they're all bangers (if you'll forgive me for saying that as a person who played Ogre Battle when it came out). As you liberate more and more places, more types of soldiers join you and there's always an interesting niche you can use them in.

There's also a lot of fun in having units fit together. So having a fighter and a gryphon rider work together can make a fun unit because the fighter can stop all of the arrows which would kill the gryphon rider and then the rider can quickly wipe out the enemy. I veered a little conservative, with a lot of healing in my first playthrough, but now that I'm on my second I'm having a lot of fun figuring out ways just to avoid damage. Again, both are fun and that's why I wrote 1300 words on how much I like this game!

Managing your army in Ogre Battle was also a lot of fun -- at least fun for me. Again, Unicorn Overlord is more fun out of battle too. For one thing you rip around the world, with an easy fast travel system and with a very fast moving hero. This makes it easy to explore, which nets you a lot of good items and equipment, and also lets you see the quests which are good for the world building and also are fun.

You also get to rebuild all of the towns in the world. They'll ask for deliveries (can we have some of your stuff) and once you give them the stuff they need, and station a guard there, they'll pump out the stuff you'll need for deliveries for other towns. This is a simple satisfying system, that gives you something different to do in between the main combat parts of the game.

They also have optional "Liberation" quests where you reclaim a part of the map, and fairly often get a new recruit for your army. I think they're optional, but I did all of them because they were fun and often a nice place to try out a new unit or new set up.

There's an economy of "Honour" which you get for completing quests which you can use to make your army stronger, add more units, or increase their size or promote units. You can also use honour to add mercenaries to you army, which is great because then you can set them to guard towns and get more honour. It's a nice way to organize and rate limit the game and make you make choices that are more interesting throughout.

I really enjoyed Unicorn Overlord in just about every way and found it to fill both the "I want something to do with my hands" itch you feel some times as well as the "I'd like to play a serious RPG" itch as well.

Prince Alain marches on the Capitol

Things I Didn't Like

The biggest thing I did not like is that I'm reading glasses old. More generally, the user interface on the game is not great and it's hard to read thing. Not impossible, just squinty. So it's hard to tell units apart on the map, and it's hard to see what a weapon does, and just generally I felt a little bit like I couldn't figure out what I was doing for a lot of my first play through.

The primary force is large, kinda grey and teeny tiny, to my old eyes.

The menus are also not lined up the way my brain wants them so every time I wanted to use a item on a unit, I opened the wrong menu first and then every time I wanted to change a soldiers equipment I made them unit commander. These were things that just never really clicked in a way where I felt competent, even after 80 hours of playing.

The maps were generally hard to navigate and it was often difficult to see what types of units you were fighting. It all felt a bit like a mass of grey running around. I ended up relying a lot on the game's "here's how the fight will work" mechanic rather than really carefully choosing which of my units fought which enemy units. A little extra zoom in on the map would have been nice.

The last thing I did not like was the unit design. Too many chainmail bikinis, or just bikinis. The female characters are over sexualized, not universally, but enough that I found it frustrating. It's one of the things I really appreciated about Ogre Battle was that it was fairly egalitarian when it came to gender and while Unicorn Overlord isn't awful, quite a few characters did decide to put on their frilliest bikini and go to the battle field. 

The archery, healing and distraction unit did well.

Also the main female character's legs are animated in a very inhuman way. They shouldn't point at each other like that. It's weird.

 

Scarlett and Alain, confess. Mostly to strange anatomy.

Things I Noticed

I think the story in Unicorn Overlord is interesting from the perspective that it's the minimum viable story. It's exactly as much story as the game needs to make the mechanics flow together and then not much more. You, the prince, need to fight back at the amazingly persuasive bad guy who dethroned your Mother the Queen. Every fight you win gets you a little bit of land back and also maybe helps someone out. There are a few decisions, but they're pretty limited.

Renault, solves problems by being mind controlled and then contrite.

There's almost no twist. Lex, your best friend since you fled the capitol with your mentor, is by your side. The whole way. The first time I saw Lex, I went he's going to betray you, but he doesn't, he's just cheerful and climbs tall things to bring you treasure. Your mentor, the aged knight who raises you, lives. He's a viable character throughout the game. There's just nothing in the story that takes you out of the game play.

I like that, I think there's a tendency in a lot of games to use the mystery box and surprise twist to keep you engaged, but here it's just here to make a nice smooth path between story elements. I like the characters, they're written to be likeable. I like the world, it's written to be likeable. If you were looking for something deep or cutting edge, that's not here, but there's nothing to dislike.

Romance is here, barely. At one point you need to activate the power ring that matches your's as the Unicorn Overlord and you have to do that with the person who's most important to you. I did that with Prince Alain's in text beloved (the one who's legs point the wrong ways) and my other option was the plucky girl who keeps the Prince organized. As it turns out looking online you can "romance" with practically anyone, including Lex and your mentor. I don't know how it all works, but with the textual relationship between the prince and the childhood friend / heir to the Pope, they find someone to take on her role as Pope and she comes to hang out with you in your shiny white castle.

Scarlett chooses Queen over Pope.

The game has a good system for explaining how the combat is going to work. When you point one of your units at the enemy it will show how much of each unit's HP is going to get lost (or gained). The game's fairly deterministic so these estimates are right, how ever the game is also very sensitive to conditions, so it's easy to send a unit off for what seems like a route only to have them completely smashed. The mechanism is good, and since you can swap with another unit near by it's usually fine, but especially when I was playing fast it was sometimes a little frustrating.


As an extension of this and of the issue with the UI -- and of my own over expansion in my first play through -- it would be nice to have a system of Quarter Masters. There are a lot of items in the game at a lot of characters and if you aren't paying good attention then it's easy to hit a wall in the game because people aren't using the gear that you already have, let alone the gear you could go and buy at one of the hundred towns you've fixed up.

In my second play through, I've kept my army much smaller and I've been more careful with equipment and it's working out fine. There is a lot of fun in figuring out how to set Lex up to be the bad ass he deserves to be, but I think having a system where I *could* let the game do it form me if I wanted would make this a little easier to take on.

The game is very good about explaining all the bits too, but it has a lot of bits. There's a whole Unicornipedia (it's not called that, but you know) about every person in the world, every country, the last ten thousand years of history, every type of unit, every game mechanic and all of the tips and tricks you need to succeed. It's a lot, so much that I totally ignored it. The story stuff isn't terribly necessary, and I picked up most of the combat things on my own eventually. Now on my second play through, I'm finding things that I struggled with are much easier.

One thing I think the game could have used is some kind of unit rater. The enemy units are usually not great models for your units (since you need to be better than them). The enemy can give you hints about what might be helpful, but they're not great. Having an optional in game tool that goes "This unit is going to lose a lot because it doesn't have anyone doing direct damage" or "This unit is going to get wrecked by anyone with a horse", would have been a nice addition. Maybe coupled into the estimate systems, "Lex should be excellent in that fight, but there are a lot of horses around who are going to trample him." 

 

Things I'd Include In a Game

I've though making an Ogre Battle clone would be fun. Now I don't have to because this game exists and it's great. Having spent a long time looking at all of the issues with Ogre Battle, I can say that Unicorn Overlord solves practically all of them in wonderful was, is a great game in it's own right and just makes a ton of sense.

Alain kicks ass in a nice friendly swamp.

If I were still going to make my own Ogre Battle, I think the attention to the interactions between classes in units would be the best thing to take from Unicorn Overlord. It's a lot of fun to put units together that either solve a specific problem or are just really nice wrecking balls.

Last Things

I'm delighted that Unicorn Overlord exists. It's fun, and fast, and light and gets rid of so much cruft that slows games down or makes them not be fun. I don't know that it would be everyone's cup of tea, but it is mine and I think that it's really likeable in a lot of ways. 

 

 

Things about Sea of Stars

When I saw the first trailer for Sea of Stars, I thought, “That looks like they were thinking about Chrono Trigger”. Having now played a few dozen hours of Sea of Stars, i can tell you that the creators were thinking about Chrono Trigger and a lot of other SNES era games as well.



I’ve talked about this a bit in my Games of 2023 post, but when Chrono Cross came out, I was always disappointed that it didn’t expand the things I loved about Chrono Trigger. Sea of Stars plays pretty much like how I wish a 1997 sequel to Chrono Trigger would have played. The world is beautiful it’s fun to run around in, the combos and the combat make sense and you get to root for your heroes to succeed in an easy, uncomplicated way.

I really recommend Sea of Stars to anyone with SNES nostalgia, but I think anyone can love the game and it seems to me like it’s a pretty good game for a younger person, although it does touch on things like death and loss.

Here are a few things I thought about Sea of Stars. Please beware of spoilers, both for the whole of this game and for a little bit of “The Messenger” as well.

Things I Liked

I’ve mentioned that Sea of Stars is a Chrono Trigger tribute, but moving through the world actually feels like an evolution of "Illusion of Gaia". You get to move fast, drop long distances, mantle up cliffs and hookshot (sorry, “graplou”) across bottomless pits. Just moving around feels really good and traversal is always interesting.

The puzzles in the game aren’t particularly taxing, but they feel like just the right amount of challenge. You almost never have to stop moving forward, but there’s enough resistance that you always feel accomplished as you run. The challenges always felt fresh and I didn’t feel like there was much that was reused from other games. They use a lot of block pushing puzzles, but these feel the same way, interesting, not too hard, and always clever.

The combat in Sea of Stars really shines. In a lot of turn based RPGs it can be easy to develop a strategy that’s good enough for most of the fights and spam that over and over, at least until you get to a boss. Things like attack type or conditions aren’t often worth factoring in, but in Sea of Stars they really shake things up and make each fight in the game interesting.

The game uses “locks”, which are stronger enemy attacks, that you can stop by hitting the enemy with the right combination of damage. You might have sharp and blunt, or lunar and poison or three sharp, three blunt a solar and an arcane. If you hit all the types of the locks, then the enemy doesn’t attack that round. At the same time, other enemies are just counting down to their turn to attack and you can’t stop them.

This makes the combat decisions important. Do I hit the lock and stop the big attack or go for the weaker enemy and get it out for future rounds, do I go for the one that’s about to hit us next. There’s also a well designed push-pull between using your regular attacks to charge up your special attacks and keeping resources in reserve so that you can hit the locks.

I was pretty much never bored in combat and this system made it so that fights with mobs in the middle of the world need as much attention as the boss fights (and are sometimes harder). Different combinations make different fights feel different, and when a boss trots out a 10 point lock you really feel like you’re about the get crushed.



Combat also serves to reinforce the characters in the game. Garl, who is your heart and plot driver, is a “Warrior Cook” and he loves to meet people and feed them. In combat, he’ll heal you with a snack or if he has to fight he’ll whack them with his pot lid or a pressure cooker bomb.

Overall I find the characters quite likeable, one of your team is hoping that you’ll come back to her planet and save them -- which turns out to be what you need to do to to beat the big bad. Another from that other planet is basically the kool-aid man and he’s here to punch things as hard as possible.

You have two playable protagonists Valare and Zale and you can choose which one of them you run around as in the world -- although you control everyone directly in combat and they’re both present in all of the cut scenes. They’re both good and good people, but they tend to have the same emotions at the same time and while not, silent protagonists, a lot of the feeling of adventure and travelling the world is left to the rest of the playable party (especially Garl).

In your party you also have a ninja/pirate/cyborg from another planet, who is often the character who has the knowledge necessary to save the world that Valare and Zale lack. You also have the soul in an unbreakable glass body (named B’st) and The Alchemist, who has lived so long as to be basically god, and is the brother to the big bad “Fleshmancer”. The Alchemist despite having made the world -- at least I think he made the world -- has to limit himself to your level for story reasons and later on has to step out and leaves you with an identical puppet of himself.

Still they’re an interesting group and they’re surrounded by a good group of people, such as the non-ninja pirates, some of whom are ghosts, and who are in every tavern in the game playing music from around the game -- because this is an indie game you can collect and give them more. You also have a travelling historian, who is able to tell you stories when you find significant artifacts. One of the moments of the game I found touching was very late in the game where she asks you to record your histories.



The game is also really beautiful. The backdrops are lush pixel art and feel like the perfect successor to SNES games. I don’t know that I love the style, but I appreciate the style and I really like the way the world feels and how everything works together. They also play a lot with lighting and that just serves to make the game look even better.

Things I Didn’t Like

To be totally honest there’s not much I don’t like about Sea of Stars. It took me a while to compile this list, but I found a few things that I didn’t really like.

The first is that there’s no fast travel. The world is small and you eventually get the ability to traverse it very quickly, but if you are standing in one town and you want to be in another town you have to leave town, fly across the world, land, walk into town, and go to where you needed to be. If you need to switch worlds you also have to land on your ship, travel in to the wormhole, travel out of the wormhole, and fly again.

I’m usually a happy proponent of having the travel be as authentic in world as possible -- especially if it’s interesting, but there are some treasure hunting things they want you to do in the late game and it really became a slog to get anywhere, especially if you had to travel back and for several times, and especially especially if you didn’t quite do the thing you had to do, so you don’t even get what you’d expected.



That has a very silly additional point in that when you are on the world map, you walk *very very slowly*. I don’t know why, in the dungeons and towns you get to dash around and the movement feels awesome, but on the world map you trudge along. They’re trying to call back to the world map of Chrono Trigger, which is cute, but for some reason it’s just slow. The map is pretty though...

The last thing I didn’t like is that the townie non-playable characters don’t get much personality or even names. When your heroes leave town, Villager 1, Villager 2, and Villager 3 tell them how loved they are and that everyone in town -- basically identical clones of each other, of course -- will miss them.

I know the developers had a lot to do, but having a little more personality in the background characters would have helped make the world feel bigger and richer and also maybe helped make the story feel a little stronger and more connected.

Things I Noticed

I found the story of the game interesting, I didn’t love it, but it has a lot of appealing qualities. In short it’s a good fit for a game version of a Young Adult novel, which again if you look at the SNES games it reminds me of seems right. Chrono Trigger, Illusion of Gaia, Secret of Mana and even the Final Fantasies have stories that are meant more for younger people. So  I think this is a great game for a younger person to play and it’s a lot more upbeat than “Eastward” even if they have some similar vibes and influences.

Where I think there are a few more problems is that the game is also tied into its predecessor “The Messenger”, which is set in the same world (more-or-less) but thousands of years into the future. A character goes in exile so as to avoid the problems of the world, they’re not forgotten, they’re in “The Messenger”. On the other hand, Valere and Zale are forced to learn to weave (or sew?) at the beginning and that’s just never mentioned again. I’d rather figured there’d be a part of the final boss fight, or the real final boss fight where weaving turned out to be key, but it’s just a “miserable thing we had to learn in magic warrior school” that’s out of the plot a few hours in.

(Spoilers intensify)

Where I think the creators of Sea of Stars really got things right is the death of Garl. In a Chrono Trigger reminiscent scene Garl sacrifices himself to protect Valare and Zale and he dies. And he stays dead. Until the ending. Valare and Zale mourn and the world mourns, everybody loves Garl, and the game lets you sit with that sadness.



I find that unusual, there’s a lot of games where they do a “Haha, only kidding” death, and your character pops back up an hour later and who are you to have even worried about it. Here they stick with it, they make it meaning full and I appreciate that.

I also really appreciated that they gave a lot of warning in the story. There’s a cloud … mist .. which can tell the future and he warns Garl and tells him what he needs to do get more time. There are other things as well, but once Garl realises its the moment he’s able to ask The Alchemist who’s there with them for more time, from then on for as long as Garl has purpose he will remain in the world, but he’ll pass away as soon as his mission is accomplished. Garl uses that time well and intentionally and with his usual charm and grace, but then job finished, he dies and Valare and Zale take him back home and bury him under his favourite tree.

You then travel on, meet new people and sometimes talk about Garl and they say they’d like to have met him. You finish the game and Valare and Zale go off to protect the universe, but they come back home once a year to visit Garl’s grave. The ending feels satisfying, but definitely sad.

(SPOILERS INTENSIFY)

Then, as you start thinking about New Game+, the game challenges you to finish up. You don’t have to complete everything, but there are a bunch of important side quests and collectibles that you need to go find and if you finish all of the objectives you get the option to open up a hole time in and space. Valare and Zale and their unbreakable glass buddy B’st, end up right back at the moment of Garl’s death. B’st trades places with Garl, but being unbreakable just pretends to die. Garl returns with Valare and Zale and they go and dig up B’st from Garl’s grave. And now Garl joins the whole party as a Warrior Cook who really kicks ass -- seriously he’s functionally more powerful than everyone else in the game. Like when Garl died, the game gives you a moment to absorb and celebrate, and then you get to go wrap things up again.

Now when you get to the end of the game, rather than letting the big bad wander off. Garl gets in his face and you fight the true boss and get the true ending. It’s a hard fight -- although I may just be bad at it -- but very fulfilling, plus there’s just something very funny about Garl being able to just toss this guy who’s been an existential menace for the whole game.

So it might feel like an ass pull, but for me, especially the extra work they make you do and the fact that you have to finish the game once without Garl really made the story feel right to me. Now when you see the guardians return on Garl’s birthday, Garl gets to enjoy it too.



The other thing I’ve thought about a lot is the designer’s choice to use timed hits -- did I mention they called back to SNES RPGs?. They open saying that the timed hits are totally optional, but they’re not quite. I found that if I missed the block or the bonus damage, or primarily the extra hit to the lock, it was a big deal. I think they’re a good choice, but I wish they’d be acknowledged more and the optionalness been managed in a different way.



I have some concerns about choosing the difficulty generally. As I said, I found the game to be just a little easy, except for the bits that were hard. I’m 40-something now and my hands don’t work as good as they once did, disability is a changing thing and I’d like to see that acknowledged by more software. I think there are parts of the games that other people might have found harder or easier.

The developers address this, in a way I almost like. You can buy or find “relics” which allow you to turn things on and off, so you can turn on a relic that automatically allows you to do the timed hits, or you can get one that makes the enemies significantly tougher. Those are great, and they have quite a few, but they’re found in the game and I feel like those need to be in the hands of the player up front, or when the game says, there are timed hits, but they’re optional, display a list of options for how you can modify them. Finding them in shops, even if they’re cheap might make sense from the perspective of story telling or immersion, but I think we need to put all of the game play options we have in the hands of the player and trust them to make the right choices from the start.

This feels a bit low, but I’ll also point out that they wouldn’t need a relic to tell you if you got the hits right if the sprites animations read just a little bit more clearly.

Things I’d Include in a Game

 

The biggest thing I’d be influenced by in Sea of Stars is just how great the traversal is. Playing games like Hollow Knight or Super Mario Odyssey always make movement a joy, but it’s not a thing that I’d thought about in conjunction with RPGs before. Sea of Stars is just a really fun to run around and they do a good job of giving you interesting places to run through the whole game.

The other thing from Sea of Stars is just how great a great typed combat system can be. I’ve written about how much I like the way conditions work in Secret of Mana and how typed combat has always been a bit of an after thought, or something that’s included in a game because it’s expected not because it makes it more fun. The typed combat is one of the things that makes the combat in Final Fantasy X so good. Most designers have left it out of newer games or minimised it, but I absolutely love the way the Sea of Stars team pushed it to the fore and used it to make every moment of combat meaningful.

Final Things

I really appreciate Sea of Stars, it hits all of my nostalgia buttons and I think it’s a great game on its own. I also love that it feels like an entry point to games and RPGs that echos the early / mid 90s games that I entered games with. I really appreciate the time and the effort that the team has put in, they’ve made a game that fits together perfectly and I appreciate that the size is just right to appreciate how the game fits together.

2023 in Games

I've been tracking the games I play for a long time now and partly that's so that I can write a post that looks at how I played from a ten-thousand foot view. I've reached a point where that's less important to me than it was and my priorities have changed. I'm going to keep tracking in a way, but I think that's going to look a little more like what I'm doing with books now. I've written a bit more about that in an update earlier in December. but my longer term goal is to make sure that everything I'm producing is fun to make and makes me happy, so that's going to inform how I capture playing data going forward.

I also got very clobbered by COVID in November so my tracking, which has been spotty all year got even worse and I haven't written down a single game I've played since December 10.  That really helped me see what was and wasn't important to me. Earlier having very detailed information mattered to me, but now it's just not a priority for when I play or what I do. If I'd finished that software to track playing time, that might be different, but I haven't, I don't really want to and I'm looking to focus my time differently going forward.

That being said, I do know a few things about the games I played this year, so here they are.

I played 31 games this year for approximately 500 hours. That's slightly fewer games and significantly fewer hours than the last few years. My gaming PC broke a while back and between pandemic and other things fixing it was never my priority. Mostly I've been playing on the switch, but that's felt a little less fulfilling this year so I've started to broaden out again, finding the things I can play on my ancient Mac Book Pro and since my birthday on SteamDeck.

Fortunately the Switch and Tears of the Kingdom, which is a great game, even if you play Tears of the Kingdom on your Switch in the game!

 

Important Games

The five games I think were really important to me this year were:

1. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
2. Tactics Ogre: Reborn
3. Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age
4. Pikmin 4
5. Sea of Stars
   

I also played a lot of Mario Kart 8, Dicey Dungeons and Into the Breach, but in less intentional / important ways. 

I've merged time and favouritness this year, at least partly because I haven't tracked well and as I'm looking forward, I'm thinking a lot about what I play for the experience of the game and what I play for managing the moment.

I will say that Tears of the Kingdom is a masterpiece and I've love it to bits. It builds beautifully on everything in Breath of the Wild and is just in general a great game to play. Pikmin 4 is also really good and honestly fills in almost every need I've had in terms of a Pikmin game.

I'm also deeply in love with Sea of Stars, although because it is very much an homage to Chrono Trigger it may not be as great an experience for someone without my rose colour glasses. Still if a modern polish of 90s RPGs is something you want in your life, there's really nothing better.

Sea of Stars, home to every thing I've kinda wished SNES RPGs would do, and more.

 

Finishing Games

I didn't finish any games this year. There are a bunch of games which I've started and which I think I will finish with soon, but soon is as good as it gets.

Again with my overall change in how I'm going to track things and think about game playing generally, I'm much less interested in what I've finished. I may keep track, but honestly looking at a lot of the games that have come out in the last few years few of them really even have definitive endings, where you aren't encouraged to go back and play. Even if there's not a New Game + mode, for me the space ending a game leaves in my head often leaves me going back to play a game over again right after I finish until my attention shifts to somewhere else.

Finding What Works on The Mac

Since I did open Steam again for the first time in a year or more, I thought I'd mention what out of the games I like worked well and what didn't. Overall, Steam and most video games don't work well on an 8 year old Mac (Steam has stolen focus from me 8 times writing this paragraph so far, just for example).

Smaller windowed games have been great, so I've played a good chunk of Dicey Dungeons and Into the Breach and a bit of FTL: Faster Than Light. I tried some Civilization VI and some Stardew Valley, but neither was a huge technical success. 

Invisible Inc. was probably my favourite Steam game this year (obviously not from this year). It worked well on the Mac and had the right amount of tactical thinking for me.

Getting some desktop gaming back was nice, but I want to play with a lot more intention next year.

Into The Breach, because throwing giant bugs into lakes (sometimes of acid) is a good way to relax.

 

Cataloguing Screen Shots

This is probably dumb, but I learned the correct way to get screenshots off of the Switch this year. You may recall that in past years, I very slowly passed them out via Twitter. That was a slow and laborious process, but I wanted to make sure that I had a lot of screen shots of a game in case I wanted to write about it later. As it turns out you can hook your Switch up to your computer and so long as you have a manageable number of images you can just copy them over. So I now have a fairly good archive of screenshots that I found interesting this year.

Because some day I might need this...

2022 in Games

 One of the benefits of tracking what I play is that I get to make a little post at the end of the year talking about what I played and how my year was in video games. While 2022 was not a great year in a lot of ways, it did have a lot of pretty good video games in it.

Time Spent

I played 33 games for 600 hours in 2022. That's about the same amount of time as last year, but with fewer games. It was a pretty tactics / RPG heavy year, so had quite a few games that took a lot of time and then a few games trailing along at the end.

Overall my top 10 games by time played where:

1. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - 158 hours
2. Dragon Quest Builders 2 - 74 hours
3. Triangle Strategy - 64 hours
4. Hollow Knight - 49 hours
5. Tactics Ogre: Reborn - 43 hours
6. Ogre Battle 64 - 35 hours
7. Mario Kart 8: Deluxe - 28 hours
8. Loop Hero - 27 hours
9. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 23 hours
10. Eastward - 22 hours

Xenoblade was an absolute joy to look at. Good in a lot of other ways, but Monolithsoft know pretty games.

Finished Games

Last year I started tracking games I finished. The list is pretty short this year, but mostly the games I finished were the ones that took the longest to play.

• Dragon Quest Builders 2
• Triangle Strategy
• Eastward
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3

Building myself a farmstead.

Favourite Games

I've recorded how I felt about the new games I played this year, but overall my favourites for 2022 were:

• Eastward
• Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• Ogre Battle 64
• Super Mario Odyssey
• Tactics Ogre: Reborn
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3

Nothing really surprising on there. The one game that *maybe* should be included is Dragon Quest Builders 2, but I'm not sure I loved it so much as got obsessed with it.

If you haven't played Eastward I would suggest you look it up and spend some time with it. I think it's an absolute gem of a game and a wonderful example of a really well designed and built game. Especially if you loved 16-bit era games, there's a lot there for to feel nostalgic about but in a new and well thought through way.

The whole game is beautiful and rundown and messy and sharp all at once.

Things about Games in 2022

My PC broke in late 2021 and I spent all year meaning to get it fixed, (or replaced) but never really got around to it. There are a whole mix of factors into why, but the outcome is that I spent all of my game time on the Switch, which worked out well with a number of big RPGs and some really strong tactics games.

I'm utterly in love with Tactics Ogre: Reborn. I'm not quite sure why that series gets to live in my head so deeply, but I love them and Reborn has been a lot of fun. Sparks of Hope is also really good and just below that "Favourite" threshold, but certainly fun to play. I've grumbled a lot about Triangle Strategy, but it is a really strong take on the Tactics Ogre / Final Fantasy Tactics model. Other than my complains about slowness, I think the other reason Tactics Ogre wins for me is that it gives you so much more flexibility in how you want to take down problems.

2022 was a good, stable year over all (as far as games go). Beyond getting a little taken away by Dragon Quest Builders, I was pretty intentional with what I played and I played a lot of good games. 

Eunie's the boss.

2021 in Games

I've now spend 5 years keeping track of the video games I've played and I've found it lets me play more and play more intentionally. Plus it's nice to be able to write a post like this where I can look back over what I played, what I enjoyed and how the year went.

Yes, it was mostly Battle Brothers

Time Spent

I played 49 games for 600 hours in 2021. That's much less time than I've spent on games for the last few years. I guess that makes sense working full time and (slowly) starting to build up my creative career. My PC also broke a little and I think that cut down on some of what I played, and it also forced me to be more intentional with what I play. I also dedicated a lot of my playing time this year to trying out games from the cellar that I hadn't played for one reason or another.

The curve on how long I played games is pretty sharp. I played 150 hours of Battle Brothers and would have played more if the PC hadn't started to fall apart. I feel like I spend a lot of time here writing about I like tactics games but I'm not good at them. Battle Brother's hasn't really changed that for me, but it has been really fun to play.

Everything else topped out at around 50 hours, so overall my top 10 games by time played where:

1. Battle Brothers - 150 hours
2. Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn - 59 hours
3. Chrono Cross - 47 hours
4. Trials of Mana (Remake) - 41 hours
5. Mario Golf: Super Rush - 40 hours
6. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity - 37 hours
7. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance - 36 hours
8. Trials of Mana (Collection of Mana) - 32 hours
9. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - 24 hours
10. Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana) - 22 hours

After that everything flattens out into pretty small chunks.

I really wanted to *finish* a lot of games this year, and I did, but I think I really want to *experience* a lot of games for 2022 and also focus on having as much fun when I'm playing video games as possible.

I love a good end screen.

Finished Games

I haven't kept track of the games I've finished before, but having spent more time in and around ProtonJon's community I thought it would be interesting to see what I've finished. As I said, I already thing my goal of 2022 isn't to finish as much as it is to play, but it's still interesting to see what I played to the end.

I'm counting finished as reaching the credits at the end of the story, although for practically all of these games there's a lot more to play at that point. More or less in the order I finished them, I played:

• Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity
• Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury
• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
• Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
• Trials of Mana (Remake)
• Trials of Mana (Collection of Mana)
• Celeste
• Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
• Super Mario Odyssey
• Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana)
• Chrono Cross

The only game I really completed was Bowser's Fury. It was really well designed to make it easy to pick up and play for a few minutes and get a few stars. For the others it was mostly nice to see the end of the story.

If you want a game full of cat's Cat World certainly is. Still not sure why they write it Bowser's Fury.

Favourite Games

Every game

I think the games I liked the most were (listed alphabetically):

• Battle Brothers
• Hades
• Super Mario Odyssey
• XCOM: Chimera Squad

When you do a thing right, Battle Brothers feels pretty good.

Things About Games in 2021

As I said in my Games of 2021 post, everything I played was good, but I don't think 2021 really hit the heights of 2020. I spent a lot of time trying to get really deep with a lot of the games I played and I'm not sure it was really worth while. I'm glad I played the games I did this year, but looking back on what where my favourites out of what I played, the list is weird. I only played a few minutes of Hades and Chimera Squad and not that many hours of Odyssey.

Battle Brothers is great and if I can manage the multi-headed hydra of fixing my PC (or more accurately, figuring out *how* I want to fix my PC) I'll be back to it. I think it's a great game where commitment, to characters and attempts, is really well balanced with interesting outcomes. I *like* Dwarf Fortress, but it always feels like it takes too much commitment for the "things went really sideways" fun to kick in. With Battle Brothers I've screwed something up in an interesting way after a few hours, or if things get boring, it's easy to jump out and start again.

I also like that I get a little better every time I play. I keep an eye on the Battle Brothers Reddit and sometimes I feel like I'm not getting enough from the game, or playing it right, but I'm having fun and that's really all that matters.

I'm trying to "Do" more in 2022 and I think that's going to apply to games as well. I've said it a few times, but I'd like to play more games and play more types of games. 2021 was a little bit stayed and I think I forgot to have as much fun as I can.

I recently read a tweet about how you shouldn't consider games you want to play but haven't a "pile of shame" so much as the video game equivalent of a wine cellar, where you're waiting to find the right moment and mood to open something up and I like the reframing. I think I can add that games don't go off after your start them, so there's no worry about putting stuff down and picking them up again later and you may as well have as many open games in your cellar so you can find everything you enjoy.

Blog: 2020 in Games

It's time to take a quick look at my yearly gaming wrap up for 2020, wrapping up what I played the most (and least) and what I enjoyed the most. 

Top Games by Time Played

I don't think it's too much of a surprise that my most played game of 2020 was Animal Crossing: New Horizons at 205 hours. Animal Crossing was exactly the right fit for a year where we avoided contact with other people and mostly stayed home. In a lot of my recent monthly tracking posts, I've mentioned that this particular Animal Crossing feels a little hollow compared to some of the ones that come before (I'm a relatively recent convert, but Tama Hero has a video on what changed). I'm not sure as things stand AC:NH will be that high on my 2021 list, but it was certainly a pleasant way to spend the year.

Following up AC:NH, we have Europa Universalis 4 at 84 hours and Dragon Quest XI S at 83 hours. EU4 filled a lot of my time in the first half of the year. It's enjoyable and has the right amount of challenge that I'm engaged without being too frustrated. I'm not exactly good at it, but it's also not a game you really need to be good at, it's just interesting to see slightly different ahistorical version of Europe turn out.

Dragon Quest XI was also a lot of fun. It is Dragon Quest, so if you're not interested in straight ahead JRPGs you're apt to not enjoy it too much, but it's a nice addition to the series. I found it a little bit longer than I'd really have enjoyed but the late game had the right level of challenge and fun.

My two least played games of the year were Bloons and Space Hulk Tactics at roughly 6 minutes each. Bloons is (was) a free flash game so that's no great loss. Space Hulk Tactics was pretty wildly disappointing and I wish it had the Warhammer 40K name on it because I probably wouldn't have tried it.

For the record the "middlest" game I played was Risk II. This was a version of Risk (the board game) produced in the early 2000s published by Hasbro/Mircroprose. It's abandonware and my PC did not enjoy trying to play it (even with windows XP compatibility turned on). It's an ok version of classic risk, but it has a fun construction of "Same Time Risk" where you put in your orders and then the game reveals everyone's orders at once, so you can have armies clashing over boarders if two players decide to attack each other. It's unbalanced and honestly has some problems, but it's a game that has really stuck with me. It also has the mechanic that bigger armies get bigger dice so if you do it right you can role a d20 against your enemies d4 (that's not quite how it's implemented but that's the idea). Kinda odd for a thing I didn't download until after Christmas (and can't switch away from once it's started).

In total I played 799 hours of games in 2020. This is a bit up from previous years, but given the nature of 2020 I don't think that's a surprise.

For fun, I also keep track of how often games appeared in the games of the month. So in case you were curious here's how often each game appeared in the lists:

Top Games by My Rating

My favourite games that I played this year are (in alphabetical order):

• Chrono Trigger
• Hades
• Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• Super Mario Odyssey
• XCOM: Chimera Squad

I never look back at previous rankings, so this is my subjective list from late 2020. I think it's a solid list of games. Chrono Trigger is a classic and Breath of the Wild will be too. Hades is seriously one of the best games I've ever played. After feeling ambivalent about most of the XCOM reboot, Chimera Squad is a breath of fresh air and a total blast to play. Odyssey is maybe the game that's most on the bubble in this list, but it's an absolute tour de force in how to put fun movement mechanics into a game that easy to pick up an play for a minute or an hour.

Thoughts on Games in 2020

I'm pretty happy with a lot of what I played in 2020. Ending the year with Hades was a delight and it topped off a year with a lot of other things that I was pretty glad to play. I was pretty intentional with what I played (especially considering there was a pandemic on) and generally I didn't feel like I was supposed to be doing something else for a lot of my play time.

Beyond Hades, I also really enjoyed starting the year with Chrono Trigger and then Dragon Quest XI. I also really enjoyed XCOM Chimera Squad, Golf Story, Mario 35 and ending the year off replaying Illusion of Gaia. 

I did end up feeling uncomfortable towards the end of the year. I wasn't as good as I should have been about being intentional and additionally I found myself very tired, so I was doing less and playing more. I'd like in 2021 to be a little better about getting things done outside of playing games. In particular I'd like to actually *make* some games, so that's a thing I'm going to try to focus on.

The other thing I found towards the end of the year is that it was hard to really get engrossed in a game. That's a thing that's hard to control, but I think it's worth it to try to push myself through a couple of games that I haven't stuck with so that I can see them and feel done about them.

I also want to find some quick-fun games that I can play in 5-15 minute chunks when I need a break from getting stuff done.