So! About that 2024, huh? A year of difficult (yet fulfilling!) personal change for me was punctuated by one of the all-time best years in RPG history. As I made my way through treacherous personal waters, I found myself further away from the games I love so much until later into the year, when I started to keep up with the deluge. It’s not a year for me that lends itself to a traditional countdown list.
On the plus side, I’ve never leaned too hard on ranked favorites. Instead, we’re gonna hand out some superlatives for some best-in-class entries this year!
Best co-op experience of the year: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate
Here we find an entry that didn’t make the biggest splash this year. But honestly, I think it should have! Splintered Fate may have some baggage associated with its origins as an Apple Arcade game, but it holds up as one of my favorite TMNT experiences in several console generations, fulfilling me in ways even Shredder’s Revenge wasn’t able to.
See, Splintered Fate is Hades by way of our favorite turtles. Sure, everything’s a little shabbier: the gameplay isn’t quite as tight, the story isn’t near as driving, and the soundtrack can’t even begin to reach the same heights. But it has two things Hades lacks: beloved childhood characters and couch co-op.
Those two combined are absolute game-changers. I spent months of this year playing the game with my son: he mastered Donatello while I worked on my Michaelangelo skills. Each turtle plays differently but has access to most of the same upgrades, so we both learned what kinds of builds we preferred. He focused on survivability, while I used Mikey’s huge area of attack to apply status effects to mountains of enemies at once. This led us to the eight playthroughs necessary to hit the true ending… until the brand-new story DLC hits in 2025. If the idea of Hades with a friend is at all exciting, you owe it to yourself to give Splintered Fate a shot.
Best old dog with a few new tricks: Metaphor: ReFantazio
I feel like I don’t need to say much about Metaphor: ReFantazio. We all know it’s amazing by now, right? While many mention the marriage of Persona 5 and Shin Megami Tensei that makes up the lion’s share of the gameplay, believing that’s all there is to Metaphor is a mistake.
The life sim gameplay is streamlined, less concerned with the right decisions for social links and more concerned with how growing your sphere of influence affects your position in the world. Archetypes are a class system that feels distinct from personas, giving you control over your whole party’s individual skill set over time rather than focusing on your main character and sacrificing for the sake of higher powers. And the story trades in personal stakes for an epic fantasy story that never neglects the individual drives of its cast.
Yes, Metaphor is surely the culmination of the developer’s previous works. But it’s tied together to be greater than the sum of its parts.
Best case for the continued existence of a long-running series: Visions of Mana
The Trials of Mana remake was the first truly beloved entry in the decorated series in several console generations, which both excited long-time fans and introduced an amount of pressure for whatever new entry arrived next. While Visions of Mana spent plenty of its pre-release time as an unknown quantity, its full release proved the newest title would stand toe-to-toe with some of the best entries, if not quite reaching their heights. Instead, Visions of Mana seems intent on recreating the feeling of the most experimental era of the PS2 RPG boom.
Classic core gameplay combines with a wealth of entertaining touches that make the game more special. Whether it’s experimenting with a unique job system, adding a wealth of visual progression to your characters, or giving incentive to explore large and vertical areas, there’s always something interesting to do.
Visions of Mana doesn’t reinvent the wheel, nor does it make the series into a new paradigm for a new generation. Instead, it modernizes its most dated elements and polishes what’s left to a brilliant sheen. The series could easily continue along this path, providing an experience closer to a bygone era of RPGs while not forsaking the last 20 years. With any luck, that’s exactly what we’ll see! While news of the studio’s closure was a discouraging moment, news since has helped with the hope that this isn’t the end of the Mana series.
Game of the Year in any year that didn’t include the real Game of the Year: Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Let’s ignore the poisonous Veilguard discourse and focus on the fact that few games in the last several years have gotten their hooks into me like this one. Maybe it’s my love of the world, growing ever since the original launch date of Dragon Age: Origins. Maybe it’s the visuals, which brought me my favorite created character of all time. Maybe it’s simply the entertainment of the moment-to-moment gameplay that left me growing as the result of meaningful specialization choices.
But for me, a good story well told always brings the greatest joy. Veilguard sports my favorite cast in a series packed with memorable characters. It tells a story I’ve been waiting a decade to finish, showing lore reveals clearly telegraphed from the beginning of the series. It rarely undoes what came before, opting to add layers and nuance to previously simple dynamics. Most importantly, it focuses on the very real human elements that comprise an epic tale.
Veilguard fits perfectly into the series for me, giving me an exciting entry to look forward to at the end of a series-long replay. While it’s a shame not to see more impact from choices made in previous games, this story doesn’t need those choices. It’s refreshing to play a game in this world with a relatively clean slate. It’s exciting to see how the world evolves from here. And even now, I’m simply excited to see the world through a new character’s eyes and experience the combat with every different class, species, and build available!
The 100% Undisputed Game of the Year: Unicorn Overlord
I have intentionally avoided getting into detail about the events that formed my year, but their effects were easy to notice. Most notable, in fact, is what a backseat gaming took in my life. My various console wrapups are packed with games my kids played on my account, with small numbers for games I would otherwise love but stopped playing within 20-30 hours.
All of them, that is, except for Unicorn Overlord. The number one title on my Switch wrapup dominated two months of my life. It opened my eyes to a whole new genre. It sparked conversation with friends I never discuss RPGs with. It simply cut through the fog. In a time when nothing felt right, food lost its flavor, and conversation was nigh impossible, I looked forward to sitting down with Unicorn Overlord every single night. I loved it so much that after I beat it, I bought it again on another system to obtain trophies and secure the amazing deck-building game that came with the special edition. I loved it so much I added the Ogre Battle series to my backlog almost instantly. I loved it so much I hosted an entire episode of Retro Encounter dedicated to Vanillaware because my love for that storied developer was rekindled during a dark time in my life.
Unicorn Overlord isn’t just my favorite game of the year; it’s one of my favorite games of all time. It brought me unadulterated joy during one of the darkest times of my life. It literally helped turn me back around before I hit rock bottom. Few games in my life can lay claim to a statement like that.
So in summation, any game of the year awards (regardless of whether or not they originate from this site or any other) that don’t place Unicorn Overlord as game of the year are objectively wrong at best, and wilfully trying to keep you from the most sublime game of the decade at worst. Do not fall for their traps. Play Unicorn Overlord.
