“But Ryan!” you shout, incredulously “Where was Part 3??”
I’ll tell you where Part 3 is. It’s here. I just didn’t add it to the post title, because I didn’t want to. There you go. There’s no lost chapter or anything. Just me being silly and inconsistent.
Anyway, just for kicks, here is the list of video games that I had considered for my 2021 Top 10 list, but didn’t quite make the cut. I think that these are all great games, but they just didn’t affect me the same way that the winners did. I would absolutely recommend any game from this list.
Downfall (PC)
Ys Origin (Switch)
Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished ~ Omen (PC)
Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished ~ The Final Chapter (PC)
Kathy Rain: the Director’s Cut (PC) – Probably my favourite point-and-click adventure game of all time, and there’s some tough competition! Features a good story, great characters, very good voice acting, and a complete lack of nonsense puzzle solutions. I think it says a lot that I had watched an LP of this one, yet still felt it necessary to play it myself.
Mega Man X (SNES) – Tradition demands it!
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana (PS4) – This is a Very Good Action RPG. It builds on the foundation laid by SEVEN and Memories of Celceta, and really did a great job of refining what made those games good. It also adds a number of quality-of-life features, a player-controlled camera, and a fishing mini-game! My only major beef is that the broken equipment that powers up for every so many monsters you kill was nerfed in this one.
Pokémon Shining Pearl (Switch) – Pokédex completed.
~ Progress Notes ~
Cyberpunk 2077 (PC) – *shrug emoticon*
Pokémon Legends: Arceus (Switch) – Unlocked third area.
I’ve been playing a lot of Pokémon Shining Pearl lately, in an effort to complete the game’s Pokédex. Because going through all that trouble once for the original game just wasn’t enough for me, I suppose. Gotta do it all again!
And as I sat on my couch a few nights ago, grinding away countless hours to complete my checklist of digital creatures, it dawned on me that Sinnoh is not the worst region in the Pokémon series because of its HMs, or its confusing and inconvenient map. No, Sinnoh is a pain in the butt because it has, by volume, the highest number of stupid gimmicks for finding pokémon.
Well, my friends, I’ve done it. Throughout the course of 2021, I played every “core” Legend of Zelda video game (and one spin-off). It was a fun “project”, and I finally played/finished the few titles that I’d never gotten around to before.
What everyone is dying to know, I’m sure, is where Breath of the Wild is going to fit on my ranking list. And I’m finding it incredibly difficult to place it! Honestly, BotW is such a radical departure from the typical Zelda formula that it feels like comparing a papaya to oranges. So I think that finding a place for it will require me to stop and really consider why I’ve placed each game as I have.
I like that Nintendo sends out little summaries of your gaming statistics at the end of each year now. Well, I don’t like seeing the actual figure of hours I’ve wasted on video games, but I’m a big fan of data! Unfortunately, their 2021 website is a little less printscreen-friendly than it was in 2020, so you only get to see the highlights:
Keeping in mind that this is only effective as of December 14, so we can probably add another 10 hours of Breath of the Wild on there (nice).
Otherwise… shocking revelations! 48 hours of Fitness Boxing 2 is fine, but it should have been double that, in my opinion. I’ve really been slacking off as far as exercise goes, but it’s just so hard to care, you know? 47 hours in Monster Hunter Rise is nigh unbelievable to me. I typically log between 200-300 hours in any given MH game, and for my money, Rise is the most fun game in the series to date. So what gives? Probably too much Zelda.
The January spike would have been due mostly to Picross S4. March was when Monster Hunter hit, but I also spent what felt like forever playing Pixel Puzzle Makeout League. April was all about Ys Origin and Picross S5. August saw high numbers thanks to the plodding The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. I spent a lot of time in October playing all of the games in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, and it’s safe to say that November and December were split between Breath of the Wild and Pokémon Shining Pearl.
How many of those would I have remembered if not for my handy-dandy month end posts? Fewer than you might think!
Metroid Dread was probably my most anticipated game of 2021, and it absolutely delivered. It was exciting and fun from start to finish, and very immaculately polished. A truly excellent video game.
To contrast, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach would have been my second-most anticipated game of the year, and it was… well, it was botched. While I did have a great time playing it, and I think there’s a good game in there, it is so broken and bugged that I wouldn’t fault you for calling it unplayable.
Ys Seven (PC) – I wrote about how I was struggling a bit near the halfway point, but the difficulty of Nightmare mode kind of cleared up after that. At least until the final bosses, which required a heck of a lot of grinding to beat. Still a very good game, just not one you should play on the hardest difficulty setting.
The Room (PC) – Having no relation to the infamous movie of the same name, this is a game about solving a series of puzzle boxes. It was a lot of fun, though the puzzles were maybe a little bit on the easy side. Took less than two hours to complete all five chapters, and I look forward to playing the sequels.
I know that I already did a Cap’n Crunch post, but it’s Xmas Eve and I wanted to do an entry that’s specifically related to the holiday(s). There honestly aren’t too many Xmas-related things that I want, so we’ll have to swallow our pride and go for the low-hanging fruit: seasonal cereal.
I guess there are a lot to choose from, when it comes to cereals that get a red-and-green-coloured rebrand ’round December. Or, at least, there’s a lot to choose from if you’re an American. I went looking for any sort of holiday-flavoured cereals against my better judgement (to stay out of stores because COVID) and found squat for my troubles.
It seems like there was a very long time where VR was just something I’d never be able to have for myself. It needs a huge room, an expensive headset, an even more expensive computer… There were just so many barriers to entry that I just ignored VR as a thing that existed.
Then Facebook started bombarding me with Oculus Quest 2 ads, and at some point I decided to see what it was all about. Now here we are a year later, and I’m enjoying a… fairly limited library of VR games. There just aren’t all that many games available for Quest 2. But that actually doesn’t matter, because it has the best game of them all: Resident Evil 4.
