What a season, what a season.
I like to think I come by my “doomer” label honestly. It’s not fun for me, I don’t revel in it, but when I look outside and it’s pitch black I’m not gonna lie and say the sun is up. And listen: 2024 was worse than 2023, and 2025 looks to be worse still. A trajectory we’ve been on for a while. But all the more reason to appreciate the things we can, right?
As far as things we cover around here, 2024 actually wasn’t bad at all. The year started out early with some pretty excellent games and anime, and continued to supply winners throughout, albeit at a less than exciting pace. And though I do have two games returning from previous lists on here, that I managed to find eight things from this year I was particularly fond of is remarkable.
Returnees
Touhou Mystia’s Izakaya
If you say “best cooking game,” that’s still Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!, as its cooking mechanics are supremely compelling and deep while still being very accessible. But if you say “best restaurant game,” in that case Touhou Mystia’s Izakaya takes it. Far from the frantic panic of CSD, Mystia’s focus on omakase separates it from the pack. Cooking is great, but to cook for cooking’s sake is soulless. We cook for people, and that’s where Mystia’s shines, making a game about your regulars, your suppliers, and the rare VIP.
This is probably my last chance to say it: don’t sleep on this one, gang. It’s really something special.
Pokémon Unite
I’m essentially an Ex-Wife Guy for Dota 2. I don’t play it anymore, I haven’t for a handful of years, and I have no interest in going back (though convincing Nick of this is impossible, because he can’t escape himself). But I do reminisce nostalgically about the game. I see great matches, big new patches, I smile. “That’s not me anymore, but… we did have something special.”
Where, then, is a former Dota player to go? Someone who doesn’t have the time or dedication for it anymore? Pokémon. I’ve given the pitch often enough, but Pokémon Unite feels like a combination “introduction to MOBAs” for some folks, and a “MOBA retirement home” for others. In a good way! Matches are shorter, the community is less toxic, there’s less to learn but there’s still depth to explore.
I play Pokémon Unite with my big sister whenever opportunity allows. For that alone, it deserves a mention. But it’s also really good, which is fortunate.
Newcomers
Dragon’s Dogma 2
Ever since The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I have had a particular tktktk. I call them “wandering swordsman games.” They’re fantasy games about being an independent fighter dealing with comparatively mundane problems. In a wandering swordsman game, a session might just be walking from one town to the next, fighting a few bandits or monsters that interfere. No epic scale, no huge powers, just the ground level of adventurer life.
It doesn’t have to be the whole game, which is a relief, because it basically never is. Even Breath of the Wild has its massive Divine Beasts and the big showdown with Ganon looming… but the ability to put that big scope out of your head and simply worry about food and Bokoblins for hours is what I crave.
And y’know? These games are actually damned rare. Even BotW’s sequel Tears of the Kingdom screwed it up by making Link & Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts instead of a friggin’ adventure. But the times I actually get that ground floor adventure, I’m happy as a clam. Dragon’s Dogma 2 gives me exactly what I’m looking for: my first journey to the capital saw my three Pawns dead and gone from a fight with an ogre, and me limping into town battered and bruised. Yes. Ideal! The bumps in the road are the point. That’s why I’m here.
Chants of Sennaar
Inevitably, Smart Games get the better of me. Myst did, back in its heyday. Pushmo did, once I got far into that game. Hack ‘n’ Slash did, when the strings of code it was asking me to write became long enough that I couldn’t comprehend them. I’m smart-adjacent, but I’m not actually smart smart. And eventually, Smart Games will get too hard for me. It’s just a question of how much I got out of the game to that point.
Chants of Sennaar has gotten there. I can no longer keep up with the number of variables it’s asking me to track. But god, what a journey to get to this point. Its striking brutalist art style gets your attention, but from there, it’s all the mechanics and flow of learning a language. And then learning another. And then learning another. Climb enough floors of this Tower of Babel, and I lose the thread, but that’s ok. I accept my limits and am happy with what I got.
BanG Dream: It’s MyGO!!!!!!
Six exclamation marks, the number is important. Do you remember back in the early days of Oops All Anime, when Jen had us watch Hypnosis Mic? Boy, that show was terrible. When I saw the buzz around BanG Dream: It’s MyGO!!!!!!, another anime adaptation of a gacha game… wait from the same developers?! Absolutely not, get out of here. No interest.
But then a patron requested it, and you know how we are with patron requests. We gave it a look, and were very surprised to find the best anime of the year. The emotional threads and confrontations, the payoffs, the relationships between these unusually relatable characters, MyGO!!!!! has it all.
Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising
Listen, we’ve talked plenty about GBVSR around here. By now you know how we feel, especially Kyrie and I. It’s my favorite fighting game. And I am looking forward to entering my first ever tournament at Combo Breaker this year (the tiny tournament held at a GameStop while waiting for Marvel vs Capcom 3 to come out does not count).
Ranma ½ (2024)
I’ll spare you the story of how I discovered Ranma ½ back in the day- you may not have heard my version, but you’ve heard the story, my experience was like so many others. In short, it was a cute, fun show that made me ask questions about gender I’d never considered before. Artist Rumiko Takahashi has a mixed interest in the subject matter- by her own admission, she wasn’t trying to make a story about gender. And sometimes this couldn’t be more clear, as Ranma gets caught up dealing with a panty-stealing martial arts master, goes Cat Mode, and learns figure skating combat. In case you’re wondering: no, that first one isn’t better in context. It’s not great.
But the beginning of the story leans on gender hard, on how Ranma’s different sides, and what sides he chooses to show people, change situations. That’s the part of the story that studio MAPPA’s 2024 remake has covered thus far (and the figure skating, but listen). Ranma is at its best when Ranma himself voluntarily plays with gender, transforming into a girl to manipulate a stupid high school boy, or framing the two sides of himself as entirely different people.
For not getting to the parts I am less fond of yet, and being a truly gorgeously produced show, it gets a spot on my list.
Zenless Zone Zero
Time to give the devil their due. Zenless Zone Zero hovers uncomfortably over my year. When I first tried it, I had some fun but ultimately concluded it wasn’t for me. The team building mechanics were unclear, the character toolkits were too minimal, the element system wasn’t explained. I was interested by HoYoverse’s games, for my sins, but ZZZ wasn’t it. I played Honkai Star Rail for a while instead.
My frustration with Star Rail hit a fever pitch before too long. The story’s pace was too slow for me. The combat was boring. I thought the toolkits in ZZZ were too simple? Boy howdy was Star Rail worse. And of course, crucially… I didn’t get a single character I cared about in the gacha. I uninstalled the game, and was ready to delete the launcher… but Zenless had just shipped a big update, and I still had it on my hard drive. Why not try it one more time?
It clicked, of course. That’s why we’re here now. And I know I should walk away, like I should walk away from all gacha games: it is an evil format of game designed to exploit the human psyche to rob them of money. When humans were built, there were some defects, and gacha leans as hard as it can on some of those design flaws to make us do things that are bad for us. They should, in no uncertain terms, be illegal, just like all other forms of gambling. That’s my opinion, and I am pretty secure in it.
But. But! But. When that combat hits, it hits. The tornado tag character action is lovingly animated and delightfully explosive, with cool character designs doing rad shit with good game feel the whole time. The setting is surprisingly compelling, the story is fun, the character interactions are a delight. And anecdotally, the gacha is less expensive and has a better drop rate than the other two ongoing HoYo games. …Which, I know. Is like saying “it tastes great, and doesn’t even have that much broken glass in it!”
It’s a very flawed world we live in. I am not recommending this game, because it’s a gacha. But I play it a lot and enjoy it a lot.
Turn A Gundam
I haven’t watched the absolute last Gundam project series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino headed, Gundam Reconguista in G, but Turn A Gundam is the second-to-last, and it’s a wonderful feel-good ending. …Oh, not the show, it’s pretty depressing and things end pretty sadly. But for the quirks and flaws of Tomino as a storyteller, it’s a revelation. I’ve always appreciated his leftist tendencies, and his unflinching realism about human potential. “A better world is possible, but we humans won’t be able to win out over our worse natures to reach it.” That’s a lot of what Tomino wants to say with Gundam, though of course there’s a lot more than that going on.
That’s still here in Turn A, perhaps stronger than ever. But the real surprise is how he suddenly addresses his shortcomings. Tomino’s writing of women is infamously bad. There are some great characters, absolutely, but he broadly devolves into showing them as illogical beings tugged hither and yon by emotion and patriarchy. The patriarchy part, well yeah. Our society is hella misogynist and forces that on women. But when Reccoa Londe explains that she defected to the fascists because there are only two genders, it’s very yikes. When Sayla is told she can’t possibly pilot the Gundam because women are too weak, and then she tries and the shows that this is true, it’s very very bad. Let’s not get into Victory Gundam please, that show’s wild opinions on women would keep us here all day.
And yet somehow at the end, Tomino writes an anime full of incredible female characters, with complex yet clear motivations, and more empathy and humanity than the majority of the men. The show isn’t without issues, but… well, it almost is? It’s a magnetic tale of amazing characters, a fascinating setting, magical art, and the closest Tomino can come to optimism: we’re standing on a razor’s edge, and any wrong move sends humanity into a self-destructive spiral. But there might actually be a way out- if not for the whole species, at least for some individuals.
Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery
It’s funny, picking a game I haven’t finished and am not sure I want to go back to. Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery’s shared DNA with the gacha game I once loved, Girls Frontline, is clear: it’s near future tactics with mostly modern weapons, among the ruins of a world we’ve ruined. But since it’s not a gacha game, Reverse Collapse can take the fine-tuned level design that Girls Frontline always wanted several steps further. One wrong play can snowball into the death of your entire team like that. Bullets don’t accept apologies.
That sort of explosive, live fast die fast tactics is really exhilarating when it’s working. The problem is when it isn’t. The developers have some… interesting ideas on how to create difficulty, let’s say. The game makes me mad often, and in many of those cases, with a little distance I can appreciate their design and why a level is so hard. But sometimes it’s just… bullshit. It’s just wildly unfair level design that expects you to read the designer’s mind, or die in a hail of fire, losing an hour of progress. And while I value the highs I had, I am not sure I’m gonna go back to see the late-game lows.