I have been writing the Highlights and Disappointments features as annual projects since 2015, and for the past 2 or 3 years I have been grappling with a weakness of the format I’ve chosen: That I have only ever counted full retail releases that have occurred in the year of a given piece. Occasionally, I’ll fudge it with justifications like a new Yakuza or Ace Attorney game hooking me into the rest of the games in the franchise, but I’ve always stuck to that general rule.
And thus, I decided after writing up the pieces last year that I would do something more this time. Often, people who play the sheer volume of games that I do will go back to titles that came out in prior years, but either came out at a bad time or otherwise got lost in the shuffle at the time of release. Or maybe there was an update that added a cool new feature. Hell, maybe it just had a positive impact on us still after the discourse™ had settled down.
I wanted a space to talk about those games, and so I decided to create one. Here’s to the games that I played in 2020, but weren’t released in 2020.
Starting with:
Final Fantasy XIV (And All Expansions)
For what feels like years now, I have had numerous people in several different friend groups tell me that Final Fantasy XIV had some of the best writing and world-building in the entire Final Fantasy franchise. Unfortunately for my friends, there is no earthly way they could ever convince me any story in all of video games outclasses Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions...
...but Final Fantasy XIV gets closer than any other game in the franchise has, and I truly mean that. It delves into the kind of deep political intrigue that would be right at home in my beloved Ivalice. No matter how straightforward a situation might seem, there is always another side to it that might add color to the black and white. Having fully caught up with current content, I can safely say that the fanbase is attached to Eorzea and the people who live there with good reason.
Yet, none of that would have been worth a damn if the community was toxic or the game itself wasn’t fun. And while I must say that I do have the occasional annoying party member, the vast majority of the time I’ve paired with people who are either completely silent or fun to chat with for the brief 15-30 minute span our paths intersect. That said, it probably also helps that the moment I announced I was playing, at least 2 dozen people on my friends list were immediately eager to help me get started and comfortable.
I can think of no more ringing endorsement other than the fact that I started in August and continue to login almost daily because I genuinely enjoy running the Duty Roulette. If you knew me, and specifically how much I despise “lifestyle games,” then you’d understand exactly how big a deal that is.
Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath //
SoulCalibur VI DLC
As one of the six people on Earth with an almost encyclopedic understanding of the SoulCalibur lore, I am ever eager to learn more about the backstories of the various cast members and how they intersect. Since SoulCalibur VI is a rough retelling of the events of the first two SoulCalibur games, each of the DLC characters come with a storyline that explains what they were doing during this time. For characters like Hilde and Setsuka, who were introduced in “future” games, this gave the development team a chance to better fill out how they got involved in the fight over Soul Edge. It might seem small, but that's more than enough reason to dive back into a tale eternally retold.
And the Aftermath expansion to Mortal Kombat 11’s campaign did an even better version of that, by creating a much-appreciated epilogue chapter that seamlessly incorporated all of the characters that had been introduced as DLC up until that point. Netherrealm continues to put more thought and care behind what was once seen as a flimsy excuse for buff people to beat the crap out of each other is reasonably, and it shows.
It used to be a truism that nobody played fighting games for their story, but thankfully both of these prove otherwise.
Tekken 7 // Dragonball FighterZ
If the past couple of years represent a growing interest in fighting games for me, 2020 might mark how I’ve begun to grow disinterested. And since both of these games were the ones I had fallen most for, they were the ones hardest hit by that.
In hindsight, this was probably inevitable. I have a good chunk of my friend group who gets together to play both of these games, but particularly Dragonball FighterZ, regularly. Because I have so many diverse interests, not just in gaming but in my real life, it feels bad to dedicate so much time to practice any one game. I started to fall behind as everyone else’s skill grew and mine began to stagnate and eventually recede. With that, a vicious cycle kicked off that only further alienated me from games that I otherwise still liked.
I hope that I can someday bounce back, take my lumps, and dive back into both of these games whole-heartedly. But for now, I think whatever is keeping me from them still needs to run its course.
Ring Fit Adventure
In the middle of lockdown, many people around the world had difficulty finding ways to keep active. For me, I was more than happy that I snagged Ring Fit Adventure well before then. It feels good to see the numbers go up in response to your exercising. That extrinsic motivation can be extremely valuable to people like me because it gives us a material reason to keep pushing.
Beyond that though, something about my relationship with the game changed as the months wore on, for the better. Minor spoilers: Once I beat the main campaign the first time, I unlocked New Game+ mode, where the main villain Dragaux was freed of the dark influence and took it upon himself to be my personal trainer. The Four Masters, who serve as his lieutenants, were also on hand to help him assist in my training.
While the actual campaign was more or less the same in terms of what each level was and what exercises I was doing, I found myself looking forward to each interaction with these characters on the path. It was fun to watch Dragaux and Ring go back and forth like old friends and massive dorks, or watching Dragaux deal with the fact that he has a crush on the Leg Master, Allegra. Eventually, the vignettes became my primary motivation for coming back to the game four times a week. It felt like working out with friends that I had slowly grown to know over the past year.
And I’m not going to lie, another driving factor was that Dragaux is hot. There is pretty much a 100% chance that whatever team worked on his design was horny-on-main.
Life is Strange 2
Life is Strange 2 hit me so much harder than the first game did, in a way I was not expecting it too. A large part of that is due to the era into which it was spawned and which I played.
Without spoiling too much, Life is Strange 2 is a tale about people who live on the fringes of society, though no fault of their own. As a game with a Latino-American teenage protagonist in the Trump era, difficult and painful subjects like racism, police violence, parental abandonment, and religious cults. Many of the characters we get to know throughout the game are people who are genuinely just trying to do the best they can but have been failed by the systems that make up American society. While I’ve never personally had to deal with circumstances that intense in my own life, I couldn’t help but feel for the two lead characters as they struggled to pick up the pieces of their broken lives in a cruel and unforgiving world.
I’ve also had the pleasure of watching my friend Novra stream this game immediately after playing through the first Life is Strange, and when played side by side the improvements in writing and animation are stark. Where a lot of the conversations in the first game fall flat in the way that one might expect of adults writing dialogue for teenagers, this script feels much more natural: Voice actors creating believable performances with the material given.
More than that though, while attending Novra’s streams, all of us started to use the game as a jumping-off point to have serious and earnest conversations about the topics being brought up and how they touched our lives in personal ways, or the lives of people we cared about. I have no idea if Dontnod ever intended to serve as a facilitator of discourse, but that’s exactly what they were.
Even if it was just a brief moment of catharsis, that was an invaluable outlet for me.
Sea of Thieves
Sea of Thieves served as an excellent excuse for my friends and I to casually chill together in the same virtual space for a few hours. It’s the perfect combination of exciting activities to do as a team, like raiding a zombie pirate ship or uncovering a box of buried treasure, and minimal stakes to lower the severity of losses.
Credit should also go to Rare for continuing to love and care for this game well after its initial release. Features like fishing, cooking, and bringing pets onto the ship add just that extra sense of life to an already entertaining pirate fantasy. And that’s before we get to the new Tall Tales, which serve as a form of campaign that players can tackle together to uncover the myths and legends of the high seas.
When I needed something to do with a small group, this was almost always on hand to give us a reason to get together.
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishment
// Sherlock Holmes and the Devil’s Daughter
As someone who adores detective fiction, particularly the Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie stories, I’m shocked it took me so long to play these games from developer Frogware.
The thing both of these games excel at more than anything else is selling the fantasy of being the world’s most famous fictional detective. As the player, we’re the ones using his sense of perception and analysis to soak in details like the stained cufflink or old watch on a suspect, to draw conclusions about the kind of person they are before we’ve even asked a single question.
Once we’re established the facts relevant to our mystery, the deduction board, which would be later brought into The Sinking City as the “Mind Palace” mechanic, is where most of the big choices are made. Basically, by looking at what we know, we’re able to form deductions about what could have happened during the commission of a crime. And when a series of deductions are linked together, they form one possible conclusion to explain the circumstances at hand.
The trick here is that it is up to us, and our interpretation of the data, to decide which possible conclusion is the correct one. In most cases, I spent a good chunk of time on this menu agonizing over the many choices at my disposal, second-guessing myself over and over until I eventually arrived at a case I was willing to stand behind.
But of course, we’re not the police. We’re Sherlock Holmes. And the tale doesn’t necessarily end just because we’ve found a culprit. Perhaps our killer only acted in self-defense, or they otherwise had no choice in the matter. We can certainly turn them over to the authorities, or we can absolve them of their guilt, and give the police an alternate satisfactory conclusion to let them live out their life in peace. It makes us question whether or not the case “should” be solved in the first place, and I like that the game asked me to look inward to see if I believed that justice was being served by “solving” the case.
Not many detective games give you that choice, and it added so much more to what could’ve been just another adventure game in a sea full of them.
No More Heroes
Friends have recommended this game to me so many times over the years that I couldn’t help but be curious about it, especially since it was released on the Switch at a time where I needed something to play.
I’m told that in playing with a Pro Controller, I did so “incorrectly”, but despite that I had a blast. The protagonist, Travis Touchdown, is an idiot loser who thinks he’s tough shit, and it’s fun to watch the world around him treat him like the scumbag he is. Normally, I’d be stone-faced for a game with a “wacky” sense of humor, but I found myself genuinely laughing at many of the gags and jokes present throughout the story. Moreover, there was an honest good-nature to the game’s sense of humor. It never felt like it was punching down.
And while I’m reluctant to read too much into it beyond that, I’m fascinated by some of the readings and analysis that people have made on No More Heroes.
“Trust your force, and head to the garden of madness” (but not the sequel. That game sucks.)
No Man's Sky
This one has been on my wishlist ever since the game was released back in 2016. I’m no stranger to the many controversies of No Man’s Sky, but I figured it would be worth trying if it ever went on sale for a deep enough discount. Thanks to a friend who bought it for me as a Christmas present I no longer had to wait. When the Covid crisis started to break in March, and I found myself in need of ways to pass the time, this was the game that kept me company.
I don’t have a frame of reference for what No Man’s Sky was like at the time it launched, so I can only judge it by the state it was in when I played it. From that perspective, it’s exactly what I needed it to be at the time. More than anything, NMS captures the idea of learning about other people, cultures, histories, and how they shape the world we occupy.
It’s the combination of interactions that together form a tapestry of experiences. I would relish landing at a new space station in an unknown solar system because I knew it afforded me a chance to talk to the locals. Every new person met was an opportunity to further my understanding of their language, and the more I explored the easier it became to communicate with those who I encountered on the path.
And tempering my curiosity were the dangers that lurked on my way. On an oceanic planet with few solid landmasses protruding above sea level, my mining laser accidentally awoke a horror that had been disguised itself as a valuable treasure for the taking. It’s one thing for that to be an expected story beat in the campaign, but this was a wholly organic encounter. As I realized what I had done, a combination of panic and thrill permeated my being as I frantically ordered my avatar to swim as far and fast as they could, shooting their weaponry back at the monster before it was able to kill us. I failed, costing us hours of valuable progress as the materials we scavenged were lost and I had forgotten to save for some time, but that too was a learning experience.
Topping it off with a story that kept enticing me with the promise of intrigue and mystery in the throws of deep space; Whatever problems that might have been around at the time of release appear to be naught but a distant memory.
Halo 1 + 2
As you might know, I’ve been streaming my blind playthroughs of the Halo campaigns. So far, we’ve only done Halo 1 and Halo 2, but the experience has been a nostalgic one for me.
I might not have played the campaigns, but I have vivid memories of going to my elementary school friend’s house and spending hours playing splitscreen Halo 2 on their Xbox. We would often compete over the Energy Sword because that was the favorite among all of the weapons on offer. And once it got into my hands, that forward charge as I rammed into the back of my unsuspecting opponents never grew old.
More than that mechanical nostalgia, these Halo remakes, courtesy of the Master Chief Collection, brought me back to that era of video games; The early 2000s first-person shooter design that experimented with all sorts of different weapons, vehicles, and enemy types. The kind of game that offered large rooms with varied terrain that players could use to their advantage, never truly staying in one spot for very long.
Even, and maybe especially today, these games feel great in my hands. And at least as far as Halo 2 goes, there’s some nuance and intrigue to the campaign that kept my attention throughout. If anything, I’m looking forward to continuing onward to Halo 3.
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And that’s about it for 2020. It may have been a terrible year for the world at large, but that gave me plenty of time to dive into games and projects that I otherwise would have kept putting off.
May the next year afford me this same amount of free time without prolonging the pandemic that’s affected so many of us.
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