The 2024 RPG I Played in 2024 Award: Unicorn Overlord
The Ogre Battle series, particularly Person of Lordly Caliber, is a series that has moved and inspired me more than most. The notion of a similar game, given Vanillaware’s signature treatment, is quite a nice prospect.
Unicorn Overlord does not quite manage to achieve the beauty and economy of the narrative of its inspiration, and in terms of gameplay, I miss flanking being a tactical concern, but its additions, like expanded unit customization and the field support abilities, are great. It’s a fun game that tells a fun story, so you can’t go wrong.
The Other Good RPG I Played This Year Award: Phantasy Star
No, not Phantasy Star IV, or the recent Phantasy Star Online 2. Just Phantasy Star. This early 8-bit sci-fi JRPG succeeds at everything it attempts. It has good characters, a fun plot, and a cute alien cat.
It was an absolute delight to pick up and play through. It’s beautiful, it sounds great, and it’s snappy fun. Having played it for the first time, I can finally say I’ve played the best JRPG on 8-bit consoles.
Best Sports/Racing Game Award: Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
I dare you to try. I dare you to try Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and wipe the smile off your face.
This homage to Jet Set Radio is a super concentrated, evaporated, distilled solution of pure joy. The story is ridiculous, the music is great, and it’s a smooth-playing graffiti-em-up. As you grind through the city, cloaked snipers harass you and mecha-cops will try to shackle you with chains attached to missiles.
The music doesn’t reach the singular status of the legendary Jet Set Radio soundtrack, and it wears its homage status on its sleeve, but it’s nonetheless a beautiful and highly successful work.
The “Sorry, Does This Sky Belong to Anyone?” Award: No Man’s Sky
One of the priorities I look for in games other than JRPG is some aspect or another of simulation. Armor penetration and critical hits in a MechWarrior game, the trained and coordinated soldiers in Half-Life or F.E.A.R., physical interaction in Deus Ex, or a rainstorm filling a small trough in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild are all things that connect me profoundly to a video game.
At first, I felt that No Man’s Sky failed to offer almost everything I seek in an open-ended space game that Frontier: Elite II for MS-DOS spoiled me with, namely: Newtonian physics, accurate scale, distance, and orbital patterns of celestial objects, and appropriate simulation of gravity and relativity. In short, strange though it may seem, it was disappointing that the spectacular sky under which I built my first base in No Man’s Sky never changed. The star lives in a skybox, and the smoke marries the mirrors.
I got over it and began enjoying it for what it is. I appreciate the survival aspects (the closest thing to a sim this game appears to have), the flora and fauna generation is cool, and the vistas it produces are nearly unmatched in other games. Also, the way Hello Games has supported and updated it is the video game turnaround of the generation. As I’ve gone deeper, I’ve encountered many of these updates, which carry the game far. However, after years of playing it off and on, I finally noticed something that changed my view of it completely.
I was soaking in a beautiful view of a dusty planet, marveling at an impressive swarm of flying creatures above me. I scanned one of them, and my visor readout stated that it eats a species of cactus and that it sings at dusk. I thought, “No way these things actually sing at dusk; this is just flavor text.” But I waited for the night anyway, risking another disappointment, petty though it may have been.
To my honest surprise and delight, these babies opened up and sang all night. I couldn’t help but stand there and listen to this natural digital wonder. When the day finally broke, they stopped singing. Walking closer, I noticed they were directly over a patch of their favorite food, the cactus.
No Man’s Sky is not the type of game we cover at RPGFan, but this small experience on a tiny dust ball in a nearly infinite universe utterly won me over beyond just being a pretty and pleasurable survival game. It restored my faith in the awe a video game can inspire. Since I’ve played it most this year out of any other, and this is the year I fell out of “like” and into love with it, it is my game of the year with a bullet.
