If you have not already listened to the podcast of this category, this is the final results, so this will spoil the course of the discussion on that podcast! Be warned!
Sometimes, this can be fun, you know? Sometimes it IS fun to dunk on a game, despite how often critics protest. When a game is just vile, or a complete disaster, it can be nice to just roast it. One of the games on this list, I’m glad to put down. But the other two? This isn’t fun for us. We didn’t want to be here, thinking these things. We really wanted to love these. And yet, these are the biggest disappointments of 2021.
The ?Winner?
Get in the Car, Loser!
None of us are happy to call Christine Love’s latest the year’s Biggest Disappointment. Ladykiller in the Bind had the best dialogue system I’ve ever seen. Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus are all-timers in the visual novel field- brilliant and wonderful games. Don’t Take It Personally Babe is the game that helped Jen realize she was queer! We’re honestly really big fans of her work. But that’s why we’re so disappointed.
We were looking forward to Get in the Car, Loser!, of course. But what we got is a badly written collection of mid Twitter jokes as dialogue, a generic and underconsidered bunch of leftist tropes as a plot, and the most broken and miserable combat system I have literally, honestly ever seen in an RPG. This is the only game we’ve bailed partway through on Novel Not New. It’s just a complete mess. And it hurts to say it, truly. But Get in the Car, Loser! just sucks.
The Runners-Up
Guilty Gear Strive
Since recording this category, I’ve made my peace with Guilty Gear Strive. Even in the pod, I think Kyrie was more disappointed than I was. But Kyrie is one of the biggest Guilty Gear fans I know, and that’s more than enough. And really, even if I’ve learned to have fun with it… it’s still disappointing to me. That they’d take one of the fastest, craziest 1-on-1 fighters around and turn it into such a slow and simple game is really disappointing. That they’d boil off the essence of existing characters and jam their skeletons into the roster is extremely disappointing.
Hopefully they’ll get there with this game, make it something really special. For now, if I’m playing anyone but Nagoriyuki, I just can’t have fun.
The Medium
Yo fuck Bloober Team, and fuck The Medium too. If their bigoted asses weren’t enough excuse to trash this game, it’s not half the game they promised, with their two-dimension mechanics running and looking like crap. What’s more, its writing has the depth of a kiddie pool and the intellect of a moth. This game is garbage. It’s damned lucky Kyrie and I didn’t have any expectations for it, so it couldn’t disappoint us. That’s the only reason it didn’t take home the “win.”
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At least I got to end that by taking some anger out on Bloober Team, fuck those guys. But it’s hard to express just how sad I was to realize that Get in the Car was gonna win this category. I was angry, you can hear that anger in the episode. But most of my anger was confusion. How did we get here? We know Christine Love is more talented and smarter than this. I am ready to love her next game, I am ready to forget this one ever happened.
That was a downer, but our last award category for the day is Movelist of the Year! You’ll get to hear us talk our passion for action and fighting games, it’ll be great!
A big thank you to daanboii (@daanboii on Twitter) for our Game of the Year art!
