Annual Summary 2022

Didn’t I just do 1 of these things?  Jesus time starts going fast when you get old.  Just 1 of the many things that gets away from you, like your memory, or your ability not to say the exact same goddamn things about aging that your parents did.

2022!  I was inclined to believe this would be a great year for The RPGenius.  Not because I expected the world’s situation to improve, of course, because who the hell would at this point, but because 22 is a palindrome, and I like those.  Also, I was determined to get some hard playing done this year.  After a mere 13 games played in 2021, I was ready to get back in the saddle and properly return to the RPG scene with a vengeance!

Then my 3DS crapped out which meant no more playing during the off-hours at work, understaffing for the second half of the year guaranteed there wouldn’t have been a chance to do that anyway and also killed my time and energy for doing anything but recuperating on my days off, Tales of Vesperia took forever to finish, and Shin Megami Tensei 5 took forever to finish (still haven’t fully, in fact) AND temporarily killed my enthusiasm for gaming in the process.  So as a result, as you can see, I’ve played 1 LESS RPG than last year!  Seriously, count’em!



Ara Fell
Boyfriend Dungeon
Disco Elysium
Dragon Lapis
Dragon Sinker
Faxanadu
Golf Story
Little Hearts
Machine Knight
Pyre
Saturday Morning RPG
Tales of Vesperia
Ys 2



Yeah.  That’s pathetic.  If I don’t turn this shit around and hit 20 titles next year, I might just hang up my mantle as The RPGenius and start finding something productive to do with my time instead!

...Yeah, it didn’t sound likely to me as I typed it, either.

HOWEVER.  With all of this said, it was still 1 of the best years for me as The RPGenius of all time.  Because I played Disco Elysium.  I could’ve played no other game but that, and I’d have called 2022 a success.  Every other game I played this year could have been like if the pompous confusion of Xenogears had been mixed with the anti-character development of Chrono Cross, the carelessness of Pokemon Generation 8’s narrative, and the sheer stupidity of Wild Arms 4, with Suikoden 4’s Sailing, a silent protagonist as dull as Shin Megami Tensei 5’s, and a villain like Fire Emblem 16’s Edelgard all mixed in, and I’d STILL feel pretty good about the year.  Because Disco Elysium is incredible.

Anyway, there’s been plenty of other stuff I’ve been doing this year besides the stuff I claim to be most fixated on.  I guess I have to accept the fact that when you’re damn tired all the time, it’s a lot easier to just let something play and watch it than to engage with it yourself.  Ah, well.  Let’s see what I got up to when I wasn’t up to much.


Anime: After enjoying Studio Trigger’s Kill La Kill well enough last year, I decided to give another of their most well-known works a try, and watched Little Witch Academia.  It’s, uh...well, it’s alright.  Not as alright as Kill La Kill, but more alright than something that is...not alright.  I gotta be honest, I just never got caught up in it.  But it was cute and nice enough, and with the exception of continuing Harry Potter’s trope that no fantasy-ish magical boarding school can employ anyone on its staff possessing anything even remotely close to competence, there was nothing I disliked about it.

I liked Pui Pui Molcar a lot more, though.  It’s funny, cute as hell, and an easy crowd-pleaser.  And speaking of crowd-pleasers, this year I went on 1 of my periodic pilgrimages through the glory that is Ghost Stories’s English dub, and dragged my sister along for the journey.

Finally, I found out that the Revolutionary Girl Utena guy made another anime called Yuri Kuma Arashi, and so I decided to see what I’d think of that one.  It is...good.  Very good.  I think.  I mean...it’s intelligent, it’s extremely artful, it’s quite surreal, it’s enthralled with the female condition and what it is to be a young woman and a gay one at that, it’s got a lot of insight to share about shame and internalized gender prejudice and the pain of exclusion and all kinds of other stuff.  It’s good!  I like it!  But...I don’t know if it’s great.  I don’t know if I love it.  But that’s actually really encouraging, because the first time I watched Utena, I freaking hated it and didn’t get any of it at all.  It was only on my second and third watchings that I came to realize what a truly brilliant work it was.  So I’m already starting way ahead with Yuri Kuma Arashi--by this time next year, after I’ve rewatched it with my sister, I might very well think it’s the best damn anime of all time!

I also might still not just get it as much as I should.  Who knows.

Books: I actually am pleased to report that I’ve still managed to mostly stay astride the Proper Book Reading Horse’s back, so the last couple years weren’t just a fluke.  I read a few short story collections this year, because short stories are a woefully underrated form of writing that’s actually 1 of the USA’s greatest claims to literary fame.  Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall and Other Stories had a good handful of tales that really show off his unparalleled prowess as a science fiction writer (even if it had a couple of duds, too; “Sally” was shockingly enough just outright a bad story), and while they weren’t all as great as I remember, it’s easy to see how William Gibson became the father of cyberpunk with works like you can find in his collection Burning Chrome.  I did also read another collection of short stories by Asimov, Asimov’s Mysteries, and that one I have to admit didn’t do much for me--it’s mostly fine, an achievement in the fact that science fiction mystery is a very difficult genre to grapple with, but definitely not up to his general standards.  With the exception of “Obituary” and “The Billiard Ball,” that is, those ones are solid, especially the latter.

I read a couple of young adult books, too.  Greenglass House, by Kate Milford, was an all-around good take on a mystery adventure with some neat characters, twists, and world-building.  I’ll almost surely be visiting its sequel someday.  It was quite neat to read Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Shining Company--I’m fairly sure I’ve never encountered a historical fiction dramatizing such a niche (although greatly interesting and worthy of being retold) moment of history aimed specifically at an audience of young people.  It’s a fine story, one that I enjoyed but which didn’t have a great hold on me, but I definitely like exploring new literary territory that way.  Last of the young adult works was Catherynne Valente’s The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in 2, which was enjoyable, but doesn’t really live up to its predecessors.  Still, I liked it well enough that I’m planning to keep on going with the series.

Agatha Christie makes her typical strong showing in Towards 0, although I do think it’s not 1 of her best because there are certain aspects of the killer’s psychology that really are just too intangible for the audience to have been capable of deducing.  Good nonetheless, though!  At my mother’s recommendation, I read O Pioneers, by Willa Cather, which was pretty decent, although there are certain mindsets regarding love, marriage, and women’s capabilities that are frustrating to read, both from a modern perspective and, I can’t help but feel, probably even from a contemporary one too, to some degree.  Still, it’s well-written, a nice tribute to the land and growers of the midwest, and I get why people consider works like these great, even if they aren’t my kind of story.  Lastly, I read John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down, and it’s definitely, easily my favorite book of his now.  Sorry, The Pearl.

Non-RPG Video Games: I played Kingdom’s Item Shop this year, because I thought from appearances that it would count as an RPG, but it doesn’t quite meet even my lax standards for the genre.  It’s no great loss for RPGs, trust me.  Also, and way, way more significantly, I played Metroid Dread, and that is pretty goddamn awesome.  I know this is gonna be a hot-ass take, but I think it might just be the best Metroid game, period.  I know that makes me a traitor to my generation and the SNES, but the damn game is nearly as perfect a machine of gameplay as Super Metroid, with a far more present narrative, and a small but actually involved cast.  This is how you walk the line between Samus as an icon, and Samus having an actual character.  Damn great game, well worth the wait since Fusion for a new installment in the Metroid series.

TV and the Like: I watched some good shit this year.  For starters, Altered Carbon’s first season?  Crazily awesome and interesting.  Loved almost every damn moment of it.  Excellent gritty creative science fiction!  Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts was a solidly good cartoon, fun from start to finish, and I think that Amazon’s second season of The Tick was a worthy successor to its awesome initial run--what a shame they’ve canceled it.  Seems like The Tick just never gets the recognition and longevity that he deserves.  Cuphead’s first season was very fun, and it’s really cool to see a show made in the style of old-timey cartoons--and they do a darned good job with the mimicry, too!  The pace and gags and movements make it clear that the team behind the show did their homework and cared about representing the source material well.

That's certainly something you can’t say about Netflix’s The Witcher.  While there were some good moments and portrayals of the books in Season 1, overall it was pretty meh, and Season 2 just stopped even pretending that it gave a shit about the lore and characters of the series and just started doing whatever the hell it felt like.  And as it turned out, most of the time what it felt like doing was telling a bad story badly.  Not surprising, as what I’ve read indicates that Henry Cavill was just about the only thing keeping the show on course from the start, and the morons writing and directing it eventually just started ignoring him.  Too bad, but as Halo and especially Star Trek prove, we’re currently in an age in which scorning and knowing fuck-all about your source material is inexplicably a point of pride in the people being paid to work with it.

While we’re on the subject of shows that weren’t as good as they could be, I gotta say, Queen’s Gambit is okay, but that’s about it, and I think it would have been really nice if I could have had some chess in my show about a chess player.  Additionally, while I still enjoyed The Flash’s fifth and sixth seasons as a guilty pleasure, Season 7 often got to the point where it was just too poorly executed for even my simplistic “see red man run fast” joy to balance out.

Also, hotter take even than my Metroid one a moment ago?  I didn’t really enjoy watching Arcane.  I mean, I know it’s great, and I get why it is, but it’s tiring to watch.  After a point--a point that doesn’t take long to get to--it’s just a long sequence of downer moments that keep getting a little more intense each time.  There’s only so long I can really maintain an interest in watching something, even something that’s clearly genuinely good, when the situations of its world and characters only ever steadily get worse and worse.  Give me a few ups to contrast those downs, would ya?

Let’s see, what else did I watch...The Ghost and Molly McGee has good energy, is very fun and clever, and I relate strongly with and dearly adore Libby.  Great News is very funny, another classic Tina Fey comedy.  It trades some of its uniqueness and charm after the first season for a heavier laugh quota in Season 2 (I suspect this is when Fey takes a more involved role in it?), but I’m unsure of whether that’s a net negative or positive.  I mean, I missed its more individual personality as a show from Season 1 as I watched the second, but on the other hand, it’s hard to argue that a comedy becoming funnier isn’t a good thing, right?  Lastly, I rewatched Steven Universe Future, and was reminded of just what an excellent and worthy add-on it is to the greatest cartoon of all time.

Other Crap: I worked full time and then some, I wrote a bunch of rants, I spent quality time with my family and my pet, and I even got very slightly kind of actually social to a limited degree.  The latter does work out to be a decent time sink, though, because part of it is hanging out with my coworker and friend Angel Adonis a few times a month and curating a tour through United States and RPG culture that he, as a strapping young lad in his early 20s born in a different country, was not exposed to previously.  So far I’ve foisted Tales of Berseria, Robocop 1, Terminator 1, and Terminator 2 on him, with an on-going look at Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Right now we’re finishing up Chrono Trigger.  Also, if you call interacting with a friend as he does a game-playing livestream as being social, then I spent a good bit of time watching Icy Brian play through some of Final Fantasy Tactics and 9 this year, too.*


Okay, that self-indulgent nonsense about stuff that isn’t RPGs is finally done with.  Let’s get to the real meat of our yearly rant: the self-indulgent nonsense that IS about RPGs!



RPG Moments of Interest in 2022

1. The soundtrack for the Pokemon Generation 4 remake that released this year was amazingly disappointing--I genuinely did not think that the original GameBoy music was going to remain the better version of the themes I liked from the game, but not a single change to my Music Lists had to be made.  Mt. Coronet at least got kinda close, but it still didn’t quite surpass the original.  I know that “effort” and “Pokemon” are 2 things that Nintendo prefers to keep segregated from 1 another, but come on, they couldn’t manage to improve a single tune of a soundtrack that’s still got the fuzz of GameBoy audio quality clinging to it?

2. I played my 404th RPG this year!  Almost halfway to my goal of playing 888 RPGs before I finally kick it.  But given that I wasted a few years on being alive before the genre had really been established, I think I’m making decent progress.

3. This year, a sidequest in a Kemco RPG had me helping a soldier with his PTSD after he survived an attack on his castle.  How cool is that?  I mean, I’m not sure it balances out last year, when Unlucky Mage had me delivering mail-order-brides to an NPC and oh also the brides turned out to be sheep, but...

4. Actually, since we’re on the subject, Disco Elysium wasn’t the only truly momentous RPG I experienced.  Because, you see, this year, 2022 AD, I played a...

...I’m sorry, I seem to be having trouble typing this.  I played a gOUCH what the hell my fingers just cramped up, Jesus that hurts!

Okay, okay, cramps gone, let’s try this again.  I played a g
g
gggg
dammit why can’t I
I played a g
Try harder, dammit, try harder, you can do this
This year I played a gggggGGGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGS:SDSDFALKESLESLDKDSF

...

I PLAYED A G--

5. I can’t help but feel that it is an odd decision that 1 of the choices for literally the first dialogue option in the entire game for Boyfriend Dungeon is to ask your cousin Jesse whether he’s hitting on you.  I don’t know what Kitfox Games’s huge goddamn rush was to reassure us that this isn’t Fire Emblem; it wasn’t on my mind until THEY mentioned it.  Then the guy acts all appalled that you’d make such an accusation.  Excuse me, Boyfriend Dungeon, don’t you go getting all high-and-mighty and disgusted with ME about this, YOU’RE the one that brought it up to start with!

They pull a similar move a couple minutes later when he tells you that dungeons are the latest dating craze in the area, then hurries to clarify that he’s not talking about sex dungeons, then muses that there are parallels, and finally ends with, “...never mind.  Don’t think about that.”  I WASN’T thinking about it until YOU brought it up, jackass!

6. Of course it just figures that the 1 guy in Ara Fell who actually objects to the RPG hero breaking into his home and attempting to rob him as he watches you turns out to be a villain.  Gotta enforce those RPG standards, I guess.

7. I played 2 different Sports RPGs this year (Golf Quest and Pyre).  Wasn’t intentional, just kind of happened.  Funny how things work out that waaaaayyyyyIPLAYEDAGOODKEMCOGAME!!!  I PLAYED A KEMCO RPG THAT WAS GOOD.  Jesus that was hard to get out!

Yeah, against all odds, contrary to every expectation that their entire catalog would instill in an audience, Kemco actually made an RPG that is good.  Not just halfway decent if you kinda squint a little like Infinite Dunamis.  An actually, honestly, objectively pretty good game.  By Kemco.  Not amazing, not great, not even really good--but still safely, securely, earnestly good, nonetheless.  The dialogue is written well enough, the characters have both personality and decent depth, the story isn’t just a paint-by-numbers RPG adventure and has a couple twists...Kemco’s Machine Knight is an actually legitimate title.  Who could have even imagined such a thing possible?

...What was I talking about here, again?  Oh, right, sports RPGs.  Golf and made-up Prison Soul Basketball.  They happened.

8. In the recent Neverwinter Nights 1 DLC, Tyrants of the Moonsea, villain Maganus says that he has “no fear of death, only what comes after.”  Uhhh...what the hell would the difference be?  I mean I get that in his case he’s stupidly promised his soul to a demon lord for eternity, but, like, fundamentally, anyone who fears death is effectively afraid of what comes after it.


Quote of the Year
“Your hand on my hilt is as good a handshake as any, after all.”
  --Isaac, Boyfriend Dungeon


Best Prequel/Sequel of 2022
Winner: Ys 2
Ys 2 successfully continues and concludes the adventure that Ys 1 began, satisfactorily advancing the plot, expanding the story, and adding to the cast.  It does what it needs to do as a sequel and as a conclusion to a previously incomplete tale, and that’s really all there is to it.

Runner-Up: NA


Biggest Disappointment of 2022
Loser: Tales of Vesperia
I don’t even know why I expected anything more from Tales of Vesperia.  I’ve been on the Tales of merry-go-round more than once before, I should know the damn score by this point--the series has a roughly 1 in 3 chance of producing anything actually worth playing.  It’s the lingering influence of that damned Tales of Berseria, that’s what it is.  ToB is so great that it overrides 20 years’ worth of experience and makes me think every game in the series is gonna be something comparably great.  So even though it shouldn’t have surprised me at all that Tales of Vesperia ended up being the typical low-quality time-waster that Tales of is so damn fond of, it managed to anyway.

Almost as Bad: Boyfriend Dungeon; Faxanadu; Saturday Morning RPG
Although I do think Boyfriend Dungeon is a good RPG, it doesn’t live up to itself in a few fairly key areas, which I’ve discussed previously.  As for Faxanadu, well, I know it’s an 8-bit era RPG, but it’s a title that’s been mentioned many times by many people as something that stood out, and a few readers have even recommended it to me before, so I did kinda expect that it’d be, I dunno...okay?  But there’s nothing to it; there’s barely any kind of story, even by the era’s standards, and what’s there is generic and shallow, again, even by the era’s standards.  There’s a more present narrative in freaking Fester’s Quest.  Wasn’t expecting much, but I got quite a bit less than even that.

Saturday Morning RPG ends on a cliffhanger.  Now, its stopping point does still feel about right as a transition point from 1 game to another, with the discovery of the Financier’s true intentions and his end, the realization that Commander Hood actually IS the real deal villain, Samantha’s revelation, Billy’s vow of vengeance, etc.  It’s not like Squid Story just stopping out of nowhere.  Still, it’s disappointing that we don’t have closure, because it’s not like this game couldn’t have stood to keep going (it’s not really long or anything).  If there were a sequel in the works to end the tale, it’d be fine.  Unfortunately, and part of the disappointment, there is not, as I understand it, anything currently planned to conclude it.  It doesn’t sting as hard as Mark Leung: Revenge of the Bitch or Celestian Tales, but the likelihood that Saturday Morning RPG will never have its story completed with a sequel is still disappointing.


Best Finale of 2022
Winner: Disco Elysium
It’s Disco Elysium.  The finale of this game, in which the mystery is finally solved, the apricot-scented one is finally confronted (in a way) and, if not overcome, then at least now honestly faced, a miracle is both witnessed and realized, and Harry’s place on the force is determined, is as excellent as the rest of the game has been from the moment it started.  Perhaps even more so--the game has gone all-out in its final moments to truly reach into the player’s heart and make them understand, on a level of empathy and shared suffering, the truth of what Harry has been and now is, and the scene in which he and Kim witness the miracle is...well, it’s breathtaking.  1 of the greatest moments in all of RPGs, easily, prose that holds you, captivates you, makes you understand the joy, beauty, and grand tragedy of we the finite.  The solution to the game’s murder mystery is both a creative shock and thematically inescapable, the summary of Harry’s work and the contributions made by his companion on the matter are satisfying...Disco Elysium has a terrific finale; its only flaw is that the game has to end at all.

Runners-Up: Machine Knight; Pyre; Ys 2
There’s not much I have to say about the finales to Machine Knight or Ys 2, really, besides the fact that they satisfactorily bring their tales to a close with the expected grandiose panache of an RPG.  As for Pyre’s conclusion...the culmination of The Plan, a chance for both vindication and redemption of a previous champion, a last opportunity for the unjustly imprisoned to find freedom, and a moment upon which the future of a nation--not just what it is, but what its heart is, a question of how it shall be born informing everything it shall grow to become--and a summary of the future lives of those who fought on the fields of both ritual and philosophy, Pyre’s conclusion is everything it needs and should be.  As with every other part of this excellent game, the finale is thoughtful, artful, and heavy with significance.


Worst RPG of 2022
Loser: Dragon La...no, you know what?  Screw it.  Faxanadu!
I’m not gonna make excuses for the game just because it came out on the NES.  Excuses are for games who earn it, Faxanadu!  There were 8-bit RPGs that knew how to tell a story, even a simple one, back in the day.  Faxanadu came out in 1987.  You know what else came out that exact same damn year?  Phantasy Star 1, Ys 1, and The Magic of Scheherazade.  Not only could an RPG of that day and age competently tell a damn story with a consistent narrative presence if it had a mind to, it could do so with some notable twists and elements of creativity along the way.  Faxanadu just sends us on a generic fantasy quest against what amounts to aliens (the NES era’s favorite go-to villain) through a couple barebones lines of text from a king, throws a few NPCs in with dialogue so blunt and sparse that they make the original Legend of Zelda NPCs look verbose, and calls it a day on the writing so it can focus all its attentions on the gameplay.  Gameplay which somehow sucks worse than you’d expect from both an RPG and a game on the NES.**  Go ahead, connect your rose-tinted nostalgia gas mask up to your tank of copium if you want, but as far as I’m concerned, Faxanadu is crap.

Almost as Bad: Dragon Lapis; Dragon Sinker; Tales of Vesperia
Machine Knight was a wonderful, shocking breath of fresh air, but with Dragon Sinker and its sequel, Kemco was back to its usual tired, unimaginative phoned-in pile of blah.  The same things are wrong with Dragon Lapis and Sinker as are wrong with every...er, almost every other Kemco game (gonna be hard to get used to accounting for that exception).  Each is a boring, dime-a-dozen fantasy story driven by shallow characters, most of whom are exhausted cliches, whose only goal is to kill time until the next game on the Kemco assembly line comes along.

Tales of Vesperia set out to be a thoughtful, insightful look into the darker side of justice, establishing oneself in an imperfect world, and walking the fine line between vigilantism and heroism with one’s balance only maintained through the support of one’s loved ones.  What it actually is, however, is a long, winding, generic fantasy trek with a subpar cast who relentlessly try to glorify the faux-depth of its 9th Grade Introduction to Philosophy musings.  I mean, yeah, Yuri is very complex and deep, if you’re a moody adolescent that wants to feel intellectual but isn’t ambitious enough to try Kingdom Hearts, and wicked cool if you’re incapable of questioning what animes designed to impress 11-year-olds tell you, but for my part, it’s hard to think of a vigilante who isn’t substantially his superior in every conceivable way.  And if we put aside the game’s incompetent pretension, tons of it makes little to no sense, characters frequently act irrationally just for the sake of greasing the plot’s wheels, its villains are garbage, and its precious edgy little protagonist’s character development is perpetually stuck Telling rather than Showing.  ToV’s not without some minor redeeming qualities (unlike Faxanadu), but it’s a solid, straightforward bad game.


Most Creative of 2022
Winner: Disco Elysium
It’s...It’s just Disco Elysium.  I don’t know what else to say.  The world is unique yet recognizable, the characters singular yet extraordinarily familiar and relatable, the plot and its twists form an exceptional, graceful web of intricacies of which you can somehow easily trace every path...it’s a 70s cop murder mystery RPG in a world as defined in its body by evanescence as ours is in its heart.  Every detail of Disco Elysium is a lovingly crafted set piece of its world and lore--as much creative energy is employed in molding its setting and factions and character histories, as there is in establishing and bringing to life the history of details like its most popular pinball machines, its candies’ most ubiquitous flavor profiles, and regional lingo.  There is a level of raw creative power mixed with a ferocious worth ethic to weave it seamlessly into every facet of Disco Elysium that puts the game on creative par with Planescape: Torment, and even PT might pale in that comparison, because PT already had much of the groundwork of its creativity set by Dungeons and Dragons lore.  Disco Elysium is creatively amazing.

Runners-Up: Ara Fell; Golf Story; Pyre
A golf RPG?  Okay, Steven Universe already came up with the concept, granted, but it still takes an inventive and spry mind to make it as fun and cute as Golf Story winds up being, and they manage with amusing and interesting situations and antics to keep the concept fresh long after it should have gotten stale. Ara Fell, meanwhile, creates a setting, plot, and cast which are all pleasantly in-tune with the general RPG modus operandi, yet all contain interesting and signature traits and details which set the game apart.  It’s 1 of those games that reminds you that the standard bread-and-butter RPG doesn’t HAVE to look like Dragon Lapis/Sinker or (almost) any other Kemco game; you can have floating continents and quests to stop ancient evils and classic hero bands but nonetheless instill enough personality in and different takes on them to be fresh and interesting.

As for Pyre...well, it came pretty close to winning here, and you could compellingly argue that it deserves the victory.  The premise of Pyre’s rituals, readings, rewards, and revolutions is entrancing and unique, its cast are a memorable and singular bunch of rogues, its presentation and aesthetic are all its own...it’s both unmistakably a Supergiant Games title and also somehow entirely unlike anything you’ve seen.  

Oh yeah, did I mention that this tale about prison reform, corrupt and tyrannical systems of law related to prison, and the tragedy of limited opportunity, is also basically a basketball game?  Yeah, using a sports RPG in this manner is by itself probably creative enough to be noteworthy.


Best Romance of 2022
Winner: Lena x Morell (Disco Elysium)
This year we have a very unusual winner--not only a romance between NPCs rather than party members, but a depiction of an existing, well-established love story in the form of a marriage that’s lasted many years.  And it’s really great--the comfortable, adoring fondness that Lena and Morell have for one another is so present that you can almost see it take tangible shape when Harry speaks to them in each other’s presence.  Their recollections of how they met and fell in love are sweet, the level of support they have for one another is touching, the loyalty and care is just...they’re a heartwarming glimpse of love that’s been through the long haul and is still going strong.  And it’s not even like it’s a static romance being portrayed, either, because there is a doubt in Lena’s heart that threatens what they have, so there’s a dynamic element to the romance even now.  It’s a great, real, and touching example of love, refreshing in its form and state in a genre that, let’s face it, is almost always only interested in portraying the early getting-together parts of a romantic love’s lifespan.

Runners-Up: Adrian x Lita (Ara Fell); Leah x Protagonist (Boyfriend Dungeon); Reader x Sandra (Pyre)
Actually, most of the Boyfriend Dungeon romances are at least fairly decent, and personal taste is probably going to play the biggest part in determining which the “best” is.  For me, though, it’s Leah; just feels like the best example of having formed a connection to the protagonist that has a relevant part in her overall character arc.  Adrian and Lita have a typical but nice little RPG love subplot that makes effective use of their friendly chemistry as its basis (and I notably like that Lita is mature enough that she pumps the brakes a bit as it starts to take off, with the desire not to rush into a relationship that might be strongly influenced by their life-and-death circumstances--you certainly don’t see that bit of emotional common sense in RPG love stories very often).  As for Pyre...I mean, how can you not find Sandra’s reluctantly growing affections for the Reader adorable, touching, and by its end, kind of epic?  I don’t usually have a lot of love for tsundere types--Severa/Selena from Fire Emblem is the only one I can immediately think of that I like, and even she’s still a relatively recent development--but I nonetheless delight in this grumpy blind tutorial ghost who’s wryly distraught at how much she likes her Reader, and to be able to join them together in the game’s ending is a shippy joy.


Best Voice Acting of 2022
Winner: Disco Elysium
When the text of your game is so extensive and dense that it’s comparable in scope to Planescape: Torment, it’s pretty darned important to get a narrator that can handle not just the sheer size of the task before him, but manage to bring those volumes and volumes of sentiments to life well enough, interestingly enough, that the 100,000th word is just as absorbing as the first.  Lenval Brown is unexpectedly equal to this task, considering this was his first role.  Although it took me a little time to really settle into the narrator’s voice in Disco Elysium and fully appreciate it, once I did, it became apparent just how great a job he does in enhancing the game’s spectacular prose with a tone that is somehow compellingly fluid and intriguing with its accent and emphasis, yet necessarily understated, interesting the player while never reaching past its role as a narrator, not an impassioned actor.  Brown does a laudable job of hitting the tone of one who is educating, dictating, reciting, remembering, and describing that which is both distant and personal to him.  Dunno how to describe it, but it really works.

And the rest of the cast holds up their end, too.  Some shine brighter than the rest (Titus and Klaasje are standouts, and Cuno’s actor delivers so perfect a performance that I want to reach into the screen and strangle the obnoxious little shit) and there are some moments where I feel that familiar old feeling of voice actors delivering lines in a vacuum rather than as a cohesive part of a dialogue sequence, but there’s few poor performances to be found in the entire game.  A game which is, I’ll remind you, entirely driven forward by its narration and dialogue.  Literally!  Time only progresses, events only occur, when speaking to or about people and stuff in Disco Elysium.  So the cast nailing their performances this consistently in a game like that is a huge achievement.

Runners-Up: Boyfriend Dungeon; Pyre; Tales of Vesperia
Logan Cunningham’s performance as The Voice in Pyre isn’t as iconic or powerful as it was as Bastion’s Narrator or Transistor’s Subject 0, but it’s still darned good, and the rest of the voice work is done well for Pyre’s very diverse and colorful band of rogues and misfits.  Honestly, if the game were straight-out voice acted for all of its characters instead of just The Voice and some bits of otherworldly language, there’s every chance Pyre would’ve taken the crown from Disco Elysium.

Boyfriend Dungeon’s voice acting was fine, got the job done, no complaints (besides that a little more of it would have been nice).  As for Tales of Vesperia...yeah, I obviously enjoy ragging on this game, but the voice work for it was largely competent.  I mean, I don’t think Estelle’s vocals ever quite fit her right, but nothing’s outright bad, and there are even a few performances that are really good--Judy’s voice actress, Alison Lees-Taylor, did a wonderful job of bringing to life the unique character’s intangible oddity and rare, airy self-assurance and femininity, for example.


Funniest of 2022
Winner: Golf Story
Understated, tongue-in-cheek humor defines Golf Story, and it’s clever and amusing enough that even I, a man who thinks that golf is boring even by sports standards, was compelled to keep going through to its end, and disappointed when that end came.  There’s not a lot of laugh-out-loud moments in this silly tale (although the rap battle between golf generations was pretty great), but it’s still darned funny.  Probably even better for players who know the first thing about the sport, too.

Runners-Up: Ara Fell; Saturday Morning RPG
Ara Fell is ultimately a serious RPG, but its protagonist does like to crack wise and make dry, witty observations frequently, and with her at the helm, there’s plenty of RPG meta-humor to go around, which you know I’m very fond of.  Non-80s kids will get much less out of Saturday Morning RPG’s largely referential humor, and I think it’s fair to say that it requires a lot more love of the 1980s than I myself possess to get the most enjoyment out of it, but it’s still unequivocally fun.  Call me a sucker for obvious jokes, but I genuinely laughed aloud at the Decoder Ring item.


Best Villain of 2022
Winner: Eric (Boyfriend Dungeon)
...This seems like a really, really weird decision, and yet I keep arriving at it.  I really do think that Eric is the best villain of the games I played this year, better than even those fielded by Pyre and Disco Elysium.  It’s INSANE, but...yeah, I think it’s true.  I mean...he kinda checks a lot of the right boxes.  He’s an arrogant, antagonistic prick (but intended to be; unlike so many intolerable dickweeds in the RPG villain ranks, you’re not supposed to view him sympathetically) who butts into other people’s affairs and relationships when he’s not wanted, engaging with him proves to just be a frustrating experience as he close-mindedly and egotistically shuts down everything others like and want, he’s haughty, he’s distinctly prejudiced, he’s a creepy and possessive person towards anyone he’s interested in from the word go...Eric is a solid depiction of a lot of the behaviors of a toxic human being.  And maybe that doesn’t sound like it should be able to trump murderers and disgraced, destructive anarchists and dogmatic tyrants and ancient vampire lords committing genocide in a selfish pursuit of immortality, but in a game all about making meaningful emotional connections that better both yourself and the person you’re with, and a game about accepting and finding things to love in oneself and others, Eric’s exactly the villain he should be.  And frankly...for a lot of us, a sniveling, toxic asswipe is a villain that will hit a lot closer to home than the more grandiose RPG baddies.

Eric also has at least a little depth and development as a character, too.  There’s a reason for his villainy, one that’s rooted in insecurities and intolerances of himself.  It makes him a decent mirror-to-the-hero kind of villain (or it would, if the game did a better job of characterizing the protagonist the way it wants to), and a thematically perfect antagonist in the kind of story that Boyfriend Dungeon wishes to tell.  So yeah, I’m calling it.  Eric’s the best villain this year.  Suck it, Disco Elysium and Pyre!

Runners-Up: The Killer (Disco Elysium); Oralech (Pyre); The Voice (Pyre)
For real, though, Pyre and Disco Elysium did do a great job in this category.  Oralech is a great fallen hero, The Voice is perfect as the oppressive, haughty embodiment of The System who can sneer down at the condemned seemingly without their being able to strike out against him, Disco Elysium’s Killer as an unexpected avatar of the city’s tormented past lashing out at its present...they’re all quite good.  It’s just that none of them are quite as complete a villainous package as Eric, I guess.  But definitely solid villains nonetheless!


Best Character of 2022
Winner: Disco Elysium’s Cast
Look, it’s not gonna be fair to the rest of the RPGs I played this year if we count Disco Elysium’s stable of strikingly singular, nuanced personalities and entities as anything but a lump sum.  Hell, I don’t even know how I’d manage to select 4 final contenders as the best characters from the game; there’s a hell of a lot of truly astounding NPCs in this game who in about 5 minutes of interaction manage to shame the entire arc of character development for most RPG main characters and party members.  So we’re just gonna say that Disco Elysium, as a whole, is the best character of 2022, and leave it at that.

Runners-Up: Gilman (Pyre); Lita (Ara Fell); Pamitha (Pyre)
Pyre’s Sandra was so close.  God it kills me not to put her up here.  But objectively, I have to accept that the upbeat Sir Gilman’s story of seeking honor, having to turn against its trappings to find its truth, and the complexity of Pamitha’s story as the willing, loving, and silently hurting villain of her sister’s unfortunate tale, are greater still.  As for Lita, she’s a spunky, well-characterized young woman with some solid emotional growth, who lightly intrigues me for how well she walks the line between natural heroism and a terrified, morose regret at having to be witness and party and prey to the terrible events around her.  The fact that she can refuse to forgive the ancient wise guide type character who put her into this role is interestingly off-script for an RPG but very real, and the fact that Lita can still weep for and honor her nonetheless is compelling to me.  Good stuff.


Best RPG of 2022
Look by now you know it’s Disco Elysium
Best RPG I’ve played this year.  Best RPG I’ve played this decade.  I can’t be entirely sure that it’s not the Best RPG I’ve played, period.  Like...I think that Grandia 2 and Planescape: Torment are better than it, but the edge of PT’s victory is so razor-thin that I’m not sure I’m not just deluding myself with the comfort of familiarity.  Whichever way you slice it, though, Disco Elysium is amazing.

Runners-Up: Ara Fell; Boyfriend Dungeon; Pyre
Pyre was fucking robbed.  By all rights, 2022 should have continued 2017’s winning streak with Pyre sitting at the top of this year’s list.***  It’s only pure, bad luck for it that this is the year I finally got around to seeing what all the fuss was about with Disco Elysium, because the soulful, intriguing, creative, aesthetically powerful, rich, rewarding, and inspiring Pyre is the best Supergiant Games title I’ve played to date--a shock in itself, because I did not expect things would get better than Transistor.  Pyre is a game with weight, a creation which is inescapably, obviously a work of art, and I love it to pieces.

While I’m annoyed that I didn’t play more RPGs this year which might instead have taken this spot, I’m pleased that Boyfriend Dungeon made it on here, because even though I’ve tried to temper my critiques of the game with insistences that it’s still a good title, it’s hard for a couple sentences of reassurance to stand against a couple dozen paragraphs of complaints.  But it IS a good RPG, it does what it wants to adequately well and what it wants to do is good, and it deserves recognition as a decent endeavor.  As for Ara Fell, it’s a solid, really good RPG.  Engaging story, fun and well-written characters.  I don’t know what else to say about it (which made writing the usual recommendation rant I do for most Indie titles rather tricky).  Some games are just good RPGs, not for any specific virtue and not in any specific way beyond just being a pleasing example of the genre.


List Changes
Greatest RPGs: Disco Elysium and Pyre have been added; Shadow Hearts 2 and Mother 3 have been removed.  Sorry Shadow Hearts 2, you great, gloomy game about a guy’s grief, and sorry Mother 3, you...great, gloomy game about a guy’s grief.  Huh.


Music Additions

Them’s Fightin’ Chords
Symphony of Eternity Final Boss Battle (Final Boss Battle)

Hither, Thither, and Song
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Collapsed Expressway (Miscellaneous Setting)
Machine Knight Shaft’s Airship (Final Dungeon)
Tales of Vesperia Aspio (Specific Town)
Tales of Vesperia Yormgen (Specific Town)
Ys 2 Cavern of Rasteenie (Cave)
Ys 2 Ice Ridge of Noltia (Cold)

Chime Really Feeling it!
Disco Elysium The Phasmid (Spiritual)

See You Bass Cowboy
Disco Elysium Debriefing (Conclusion)
Disco Elysium Mercenary Tribunal (Miscellaneous)
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Roche’s Defeat (Cutscene)
The Outer Worlds Ending (Ending)

All That and a Bag of Chiptunes
Chrono Trigger Rising Beast Remix (General Remixes)



2022, over and done with.  I’m REALLY hoping that next year will be one in which I make a proper, solid return to the RPG scene in not just quality but quantity, but I suppose we’ll see how it goes.  At the very least, it ought to have some great highlights--my intention is to get Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Hades, and another Large Battleship Studios title in there, and maybe I’ll give 2017 another crack at topping the list by finally getting around to Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5.  Unfortunately, 2023’s gonna have some low points, too, and as I’m almost finished with Shin Megami Tensei Not Persona Just Plain 5, 1 of its down moments is also gonna be its opener.  Ah, well, that’s life.

Naturally, I want to end this year’s summary with some appreciative words.  As ever, my sister deserves a tremendous amount of gratitude and recognition for being the first and last line of defense when it comes to these rants’ quality--if you think they’re bad now, you should see these things before she patiently listens to them and helps me fix’em up all proper nice.  The same can be said of my ever-faithful buddy and reader Ecclesiastes, who takes up my sister’s beta-reader mantle whenever she’s not able (or permitted, for spoiler reasons) to give a rant a pass-by.  They let me bounce ideas off of them, they patiently endure my occasional bouts of mini-rants as I get interested and start blathering on about an RPG topic that happened to come up in conversation, and frankly they should be sainted for indulging my deranged preoccupation with wording RPG Valentines perfectly.  My friend Angel Adonis likewise deserves some heartfelt thanks, as he, too, has acted multiple times this year as back-up editor for rants that spoil too much to pass by my sister.  Muchas gracias, mi amigo.

Some major thanks as well to my patrons, Ecclesiastes and Toasterdog.  That you’re willing to put your money where my big mouth is encourages me to no end, and your gracious generosity is a monthly pick-me-up beyond my ability to convey.  Seriously, thank you.

And of course, thank you to each and every 1 of you who read these rants of mine.  Nigh the sum total of human knowledge and culture is easily and readily available to you in this modern age of marvels at any and all times, and the fact that you choose to set the myriad wonders that humanity can produce aside thrice a month to instead take in the ravings of this deranged nit-picker is remarkable to me.  Your readership is ever appreciated, your comments greatly valued.****  Happy holidays to you, and best wishes for us all come 2023!
















* Surprise surprise, this is why we saw some ToB and FFT rants pop up out of the blue this past year, and you’ll be seeing some for Chrono Trigger next year for the same reason.  Apparently I’ve been doing the rant blog thing the hard way for the past 16 years by being largely a solo act; the way to really get my Nitpicky RPG Nerd writing juices flowing is just to watch someone else play a game and be reminded of all the stupid shit in it that annoys me and all the equally stupid shit in it that I like.


** Don’t you give me that fucking look.  You go ahead and remember the gems of the NES as much as you like, but it was not all Metroid and Mario and Mega Man.  For every game with tight, well-packaged gameplay like Contra or Little Nemo, there were another 2 titles with clunky, barely functional controls and mechanics.  Hell, even some of the “good” ones kinda sucked--no one will ever convince me that the Castlevania series was all that well put together until at least the SNES.


*** Reader Adam E noted last year that a 2017 RPG has won this category every time since the year in question.  Torment: Tides of Numenera was the best RPG I played in 2017, Nier: Automata the best in 2018, Tales of Berseria in 2019, Rakuen 2020, and 2021 went to Horizon 0 Dawn--and all of them were games that came out in 2017.  Pyre, too, originates from this same year.  I don’t know what the hell was going on 5 years ago but it was a hell of a time for RPGs!


**** ...Within reason.  I ain’t prostrating myself in gratitude to the spam bots who pop up here and there.

Ara Fell

Holy crap, it’s been over a year since I last played and recommended a quality Indie RPG.  Well that certainly won’t stand!  Admittedly, some of that has to do with the Indie RPGs I’ve played in 2022 being so famously excellent (Disco Elysium) or having been made by a studio that’s famously excellent (Pyre) that they really just don’t need the “publicity” of a rant.  But still.

So, usually when I write these Indie RPG recommendation rants, I try to call special attention to the great qualities that set the game apart and make it unique.  Stuff like the themes of class divide and revenge in Children of Zodiarcs, the poignance of Rakuen, the ambiance and love for Africa in Beautiful Desolation, the use of Norse mythology and portrayal of a prolonged end-of-the-world scenario in The Banner Saga, the simple fun factor of Cosmic Star Heroine, and so on.  This stuff is rarely the only admirable trait of the game, of course, but qualities like these are easy signatures to identify and laud, the characteristics that both set them apart from their peers and make them more interesting and attractive to prospective players.

There is, however, a type of RPG that I typically think of as a “Final Fantasy 4” kind of game.  Essentially, it’s an RPG that is simply, straightforwardly good from essentially all angles, and one that just about everyone can agree they liked.  It somehow stands out and is memorable, in spite of the fact that it’s kind of hard to point to any particular facet of its whole as being especially impressive.  It’s a genre crowd-pleaser, an RPG that tells an RPG story and does a good job of it, with fantasy and emotion and purpose and character development and twists and victory and defeat and villainy and heroism, the whole standard RPG experience.  The kind of game that represents the backbone of a positive experience with the genre as a whole.  And it’s this solid all-arounder category of RPG that Ara Fell falls into.

Ara Fell is the story of a free-spirited, snarky young woman named Lita discovering a magical relic, resulting in her getting caught up in a great quest to save the land of Ara Fell, a giant island which floats in the sky.  Over the course of this adventure, she’ll recruit allies, face grand monsters, be guided by visions of a magical elf lady, explore every corner of her world, grow as a person, discover the secrets of the ancient race that inhabited the lands before humanity, and contend with the evil machinations of villains.  It’s an RPG, and it does RPG things, and that’s...sort of it.

And that’s certainly no bad thing.  RPGs in the last 10 years have seemed to be increasingly interested in being unique entities with designs and shticks that make them works unto themselves, less and less confined within the classic identity of the genre.  Even the Tales of series, reigning king of the “business as usual” RPG ever since SquareEnix lost its fucking mind 2 decades ago, broke out of its colorfully generic and usually mediocre shell in 2017 to deliver the artful, powerful Tales of Berseria.  That’s a title which gives RPG tradition the middle finger by making its arguably biggest message the idea that there’s value and importance in the negative emotions of humanity!  The story and ideas of RPGs have been increasingly breaking out of the shell of genre-defining characteristics as time goes on.*  This does NOT displease me, mind you--the more Tales of Berserias and Undertales and Disco Elysiums and West of Loathings and Pathfinder: Kingmakers and Quantum Entanglements and Shin Megami Tensei: Persona Qs and Nier: Automatas and Supergiant Games and so on, the better!  But I also don’t want to completely lose the classic Final Fantasy 4/Lufia 2/Secret of Mana/Breath of Fire 1 type of RPG, either.*

So it’s really great, to me, when an RPG like Ara Fell comes along.  One that’s got a well-developed, likable, and distinctive cast who engage well with the events and world before them.  One that has a solid, enjoyable story with the right number of twists and turns and ups and downs.  One with fresh and relatable writing and dialogue, and a well-utilized sense of humor (Lita’s fond of poking fun at RPG conventions now and then, and you all know how I like that).  One possessing competent pacing, a good narrative voice, a great soundtrack, adequately evil villains, and a classic JRPG setting and approach.  It’s just the kind of game that satisfies my need for quality RPG comfort food before my next foray into more exotic samples of the genre’s cuisine.

And that’s my recommendation for Ara Fell, basically.  Do you want to play a good RPG, and enjoy the genre for its own sake as you do?  Then Ara Fell’s a reliable option.  Lita’s story is fun, engaging, even moving at times, and if you need a reminder of the ways a basic specimen of its family can stand out and please, then it’s sure to perk you up.













* Well, okay, the traditional genre-defining RPG is in no danger of disappearing so long as Kemco and Dragon Quest continue to churn out games.  But Torag forbid those ever become one’s only options for the basic bread-and-butter RPG.  Best to put the whole genre out of its misery at that point.  Hell, I’ll go Old Yeller on it myself if I have to.