“Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun”
-“Time,” Pink Floyd

The above lyrics hit me like a sack of bricks to the face when I was sitting in my former coworker’s apartment and down two stocks against his Pikachu on Mushroom Kingdom. A few months prior, we were both college students working a shitty job in our campus IT department. We became friends over two years of making fun of the snobby parents and demanding faculty who called in looking for our assistance yet talked to us like we were a nuisance. Today, he’s a programmer working for a nearby hospital and I’m an employee of a digital presence consulting firm. While my mind was dwelling on the oddity of finally being able to say that I was a working man and my college years were behind me, my friend took the game with a side throw. Asshole.

2017 felt like a radical shift in my way of life happened every few months. It was a fucking rollercoaster. I graduated, The GOP’s constant bullshit kept me anxious, I found a job pretty quickly, I went through a painful marketing certification course, I made a lot of new friends, my aunt finally died from a terrible two-year fight with cancer, I made progress on living a healthy life despite my mental illnesses, my grandma died and my other grandma is in poor health, I bought a bunch of expensive stuff that I couldn’t have even dreamed of affording last year, the person I loved cheated on me.

Yeah. Ups and downs, for sure.

But at least there was a lot of EXCELLENT games this year, right? Movies too! You couldn’t go a day without discovering something in entertainment that looked cool and worth engaging with… and, fuck me, I didn’t spend as much time as I wanted to playing games this year, huh?

Prey, Horizon, Yakuza 0, Battlezone, Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 2, Armored Core, Resident Evil 7, Dark Souls 2, Bravely Default, Dead Cells… So many games that I have in the library that I simply haven’t gotten around to yet. Part of that has been work – After long days both in the office and in my certification classes, there were a lot of days where it was just so much easier to get home and browse YouTube and Twitter. Part of that was, well, all of this – Starting this site, putting out more YouTube videos this year than any of my previous years, and figuring out how to make new types of content. Games have been there my entire life, but I wanted to expand my horizons a bit, too – I messed around with more tabletop gaming stuff and found out that building gunpla is more fun that I thought it would be.

So I hope you all forgive me when I say I had to scrounge and struggle to find 10 games for this list. A lot of my time was spent on specific games this year, or revisiting games that I’d played previously. But… here’s the Top 10 Games I Played In 2017.

10 – Final Fantasy Adventure

Looking for RPGs to play for my video series RPG Rewind, I thought that it might be fun to go back and explore the origins of the Mana/Seiken Densetsu series. I’m glad I did! I didn’t realize how Zelda-esque this game was, and as a big fan of Link’s Awakening and the Oracle games I was all over it. I’m a bit bummed I never played this as a kid, honestly. I would have loved it.

A variety of weapons and spells made adventuring and puzzle-solving a pleasant experience. “Pleasant” is a great word for this game. I wouldn’t say Final Fantasy Adventure does anything exceedingly well, especially with a few design choices that haven’t aged gracefully, but the overall journey is… good. It’s good. The story also goes places I didn’t expect a gameboy JRPG of the time to go.

If you want to hear me yak on more about FFA, check out my RPG Rewind episode on it, which just went up earlier today.

9 – Melty Blood: Actress Again: Current Code

Not even going to bullshit, I didn’t spend much time with this game. Steam has me clocking in at only a mean four hours. Earlier in the year, I discovered Under Night In-Birth, which is also by the same developer, French-Bread. I spent even less time with that game, but I quickly realized that at a surface level, it had my favorite “feel” of any anime fighter I’ve played. Everything just feels so slick and right – the hits feel impactful, the movement feels agile, and the animations flow elegantly.

Melty Blood is a great fighting game, and I spent a bit of time messing around in it with Zach, but what it really represents is my 2017 dive into the works of Type-Moon. It’s a wonderful thing when you see a cool character in a fighter and you find that their playstyle jives with you, and that’s exactly what happened with Kara no Kyoukai protagonist Shiki Ryougi. She’s great.

I’m hoping to send a bit more love French-Bread’s way next year with the new Under Night In-Birth update on PS4, but no promises, especially with Dragon Ball Fighterz right around the corner.

8 – Puyo Puyo Tetris

Honestly? Not the biggest puzzle game guy. I think it’s a testament to Puyo Puyo Tetris’ quality that it managed to suck me in and put in around 30 hours of playtime throughout the year. Part of that is the convenience of having an easy to pick-up-and-play game like this portably. Thank God for the Switch.

I barely played a Puyo Puyo game prior to this, but I have to say out of the three game modes available (Puyo Puyo, Tetris, and the combination mode) I probably sunk the most time into just Puyo Puyo. Part of it might just be that I’ve dabbled in Tetris all my life, but learning the strategies and exploring the high-level play possibilities of a game I barely knew existed was quite the delight. I’m still not very good at it, but seeing myself improve slowly but surely was good fun.

7 – Persona 5

God, I feel so fucking weird about this game. It’s, on paper, fantastic. It’s gorgeous, it’s polished, it’s… creatively bankrupt and honestly disappointing.

I think it’s a testament to the sheer quality of the game itself that it made it this high up, but in an alternate timeline where I just had more free time to play more of the allegedly-amazing games that came out in 2017 I wouldn’t be shocked if this wouldn’t have made the cut.

The plot completely blows its load with the first palace. I got past the third palace and watched the rest (don’t worry kiddos, I plan on finishing my plate. Eventually.) and I don’t fucking get what people are saying when they say the end of the game is incredible. We’ve seen all this shit before.

Same with all the characters. I really struggled to feel attached to the cast when it was so obvious they just cut apart and duct-taped together the party members of P3 and P4 to make a new cast. It gets worse when you go through the available interviews and commentaries and slowly realize that whenever the potential for taking the series in an exciting new direction presented itself, the dev team chickened out and played it safe. Yawn.

But that music though. But that combat system though. THE MENUS THOUGH. All of that stuff is great, and I love it. I really, really love parts of this game… but… this is Persona 5. I wanted this game to be way higher up on this list, but I just can’t get rid of this feeling deep in my heart that we waited all these years for a game that had a lack of meaningful vision.

Some of P4’s late game dramatic beats felt like the team wanted to have their cake and eat it too – They wanted to evoke certain responses without any real narrative consequence or actually putting in the legwork to make those moments truly work. P5 has this in spades. They want you to think Kamoshida is a rapist, but the script goes out of its way to NEVER explicitly say it, even when faced with awkward dialogue. The game wants you to feel for Anne as she struggles against the sexualization forced upon her, yet fetishizes it when the heroes do it. The game wants you to believe it’s about empowering the oppressed, and then treats gay people horribly.

Yet, I’ve seen with my own eyes the tears of people who could relate to the power dynamics and systems of abuse the game tackles. For truly, sincerely, getting it and understanding how abuse works and how victims struggle finding an escape. I found some of myself in Ryuji, or at least, his backstory. AND THE PLOT TWIST, THOUGH!!!

Fuck. I hate this. I very clearly have a lot to say about this game. I want to type so much more right now, but I really should cut myself off. Whenever I go back to finish the game proper, I have a very, very long blog post to write.

6 – Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle

BWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!!

XCOM is fun as hell. Mario is fun as hell. The rabbids kinda suck, but 2/3 ain’t bad. With some character progression systems lifted from other Strategy RPGs and combat encounters that often feel like a shifting board of puzzle pieces, this crossover ended up being a lot more fun than it had any right to be.

A lot of people in their 2017 GOTY lists will surely marvel over Zelda, Mario, and Xenoblade, and how revolutionary this year was for Nintendo. I hope this game doesn’t get forgotten. I want to see Nintendo hand over the reigns a bit more moving forward, just like with this game. There’s a lot of non-Nintendo-isms in here, and while they don’t all pay off, there’s too much potential in letting other developers play around with Nintendo IPs that I’d hate to see wasted.

Yeah. I think the rabbids game is better than Persona 5. Unironically. Fucking come at me, nerds.

5 – Super Mario Odyssey

Mario almost never disappoints. Mario is the embodiment of pure joy and optimism in video games. The only complaints I could ever throw at this game are the absurd number of collectable moons being a little tiring past a point (You stumble on way too many too fast, they start to lose impact) and some of the hat powers weren’t as fun as others.

But the jumping? The level design? The outfits? The stupidly enjoyable cutscenes? Love it all! Cappy is a great addition to Mario’s toolset. The possession mechanic is an obvious thing to point to, but the extra mobility options he provides should not be ignored. I have to also congratulate Nintendo on finally figuring out how to make Mario boss fights more exciting than they have any right to be.

As a side note, this game just looks really good. I used the wonderful photo mode more than I anticipated (Note: Photo modes are the new hot trend in games it seems, and I hope it never ends. They’re great!) and I credit that to each of the worlds looking beautiful in their own distinctive way.

4 – PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds

This game is rough around the edges, but the impact this game will have on multiplayer games for years to come should not be ignored. I’ve always loved games like ARMA and Operation Flashpoint, so to have a game with some of that blood become a worldwide phenomenon was a blast. Sure, it’s a lot more arcade-y, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.

I’ve struggled to stick with any multiplayer game in recent years, and it’s because I simply don’t have the time or energy to keep up with the communities around them. PUBG is different. PUBG is competitive, but it also isn’t. PUBG is bullshit. PUBG is harsh. PUBG is as much a thinking man’s game as it is a test of reflexes. There’s a hundred motherfuckers on this island… You’re telling me that you have the guts to think that you (and possibly your friends) are going to be the last one(s) standing?

Prove it. (I did.)

3 – Heat Signaure

The indie game scene never ceases to amaze me in regards to scratching itches I never even knew I had in the first place. Heat Signature is the ultimate spaceship infiltration game. There’s always something left to learn in Heat Signature.

Need to assassinate a guy in a room full of other guys, but there’s a room between you? Use the temporary five second teleporter to slit his throat and vanish. Maybe when they go to investigate, hack into their ship’s turret defense system and watch the mayhem as it unloads on your unsuspecting, confused prey.

Oh! You missed the guy with the reflective bubble shield coming up from behind you with a shotgun! Maybe you hack into that shield so that when he pulls the trigger, his burst of bullets goes right back in his face. Turns out more guards are coming down the hallway. Who knew that gunfire could draw so much attention? Shoot the fuel tank in the hallway, watch the line of guards get flung into space as it explodes.

Shit, that doesn’t account for the other hallway though, does it? Damn. Time to bail. Guess it’s time for you to shoot out the window of the room you’re in and have your remote control spacepod catch you once you get sucked out into space.

Time to fly back to base and move on to the next mission.

2 – The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Breath of the Wild is the greatest open world video game ever created. The sense of exploration and adventure is unparalleled. There’s so much to find, there’s so much to do, and there’s so much to mess around with. This game has a lot of problems… The dungeons are subpar at best, some discoveries become tedious once mystifying wonder gives way to mechanical reality, and the story is awful. Major step down in the weird/creepy/wacky NPC department, too.

But all those mistakes, all those disappointments, were worthy sacrifices on Nintendo’s path to making a masterpiece worthy of being Ocarina of Time’s successor. Whereas PUBG’s influence will be felt on sandbox games for years to come, BOTW will inspire the world design of singleplayer games moving forward.

I’m excited to see what happens with Zelda moving forward, which is something I haven’t been able to say since I was a kid. This was the reminder I needed as to why I loved this series, and Nintendo as a whole. There’s a gigantic pile of minor grievances that add up over time to drag this game away from being my number 1, but this is easily one of the most groundbreaking reinventions of a game series I’ve ever seen.

I also recorded a Let’s Play of it with my friend Zach, and that was pretty neato too. You can find it here, and a blog post I wrote about it here. We’re currently going through the DLC right now!

1 – NieR: Automata

NieR: Automata was the game that 2017 needed. This is the spark of hope and love I needed in a world of darkness and hatred. Not since Persona 3 have I made a game make such a strong case for making the choice to live, even when challenged by dread, misery, and nihilism. For a lot of people, 2017 was a year of brutal clarity when it came to seeing the evil that man can do. Automata doesn’t shy away from the pain of living, but rejects wholly the notion that life is worthless.

It doesn’t shy away from the absolute horrors our societies have systemically repeated over and over. Zooming in further, it doesn’t shy away from the difficulties, anxieties, awkwardness, and dangers of establishing relationships with the people around you. Even further, it doesn’t shy away from the total feeling of despair and disgust individuals face just by simply existing in this world and being trapped in your own thoughts.

But fuck all that. Even when everything seems shattered and broken, there are precious miracles to find and live for. Nothing in this world is inherently meaningful or meaningless. You have to be around and able to care or not care about things in order to say that.

Life is hard. Life can fucking suck. As long as humanity lives, it will continue to harm itself over and over. But through all that pain – you have the choice to keep on living in this world and finding the things that make you and the ones you love happy.

And in a world where I frequently wake up, stare at the ceiling and struggle to justify why the fuck I’m even here, that meant everything.