Cole Carver’s Game of the Year 2022

I played a lot fewer games this year, and I upped the amount of books I read. However, there’s still a large chunk of games on my list, and I’m happy to share my favorites of 2022! As always, these are not necessarily games that were released in 2022, but games that I played for the first time this year.

#10 - Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions (PSP - with Slowdown Fix Mod)

This is a game that has been recommended to me for years, both as an entry in the Final Fantasy catalog and as a stellar tactical rpg, and boy did it deliver in both aspects. It’s no surprise that Final Fantasy is my favorite series in games, and part of the reason is the magic of the Job System. Final Fantasy Tactics takes the Job System and applies it in a way that offers dynamic customization for all of your (non-story) units and branching paths of growth. This is paired well with the game being harshly difficult, where I had to change my party setup drastically on a per mission basis to reflect interesting factors such as “what enemies am I fighting?” or “what does the elevation in this battle look like?” However, while I praise the difficulty as an asset here, I will note that the difficulty almost caused me to stop playing several times over the course of this game. I’m glad I stuck it out though!

Because the star of the show is the plot. Set in the world of Ivalice, which is either the same or incredibly similar to, the world of Final Fantasy XII. Final Fantasy Tactics boasts a political thriller set between, and into, two wars between well developed nations. There is all the questioning philosophy of warring countries and religious leaders, an oppressed lower class, and “powers we don’t understand.” I’m glad I have finally pushed through the difficulty and seen this excellent story play out - I definitely think it was way ahead of its time in tackling a Game of Thrones style story.

Note: The War of the Lions is a PSP remaster of the PS1 classic. There is an unfortunate side effect in this port where casting a spell really slows the whole game down. I found a mod online that took care of this issue and made it buttery smooth!

#9 - Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (PS5)

I guess I actually really like Lego games!

As much as I love a retro collect-a-thon game, I normally bounce of the Lego games pretty quickly once I realize how similar every puzzle can be solved, or how repetitious it is to replay levels multiple times to get hidden bricks, but this time it all clicked together. Meg and I played this game entirely with Split Screen Co-Op, and we had an absolute blast. It is a never-ending source of enjoyment to unlock niche characters like Willrow Hood and hear Meg respond “Oh shit it’s Glup Shitto!”.

Seriously though, we had a blast. The game gives you an option of which Trilogy you want to start with, and you can work your way through the main nine episodes.  With fun story levels, massive planet areas to explore, and actually super fun short-form puzzles to solve -in a lot of ways, this game is the Mario Odyssey of Star Wars, and it’s full of love. There are large variety of puzzles to solve, and some have strict requirements on specific classes of characters. For example, Meg and I started with the prequel trilogy and worked chronologically through the story, so we had plenty of Jedi characters to solve puzzles with, but we didn’t get our first Scavenger until Yub Nub in Episode VI! At that point we could finally hop on back to Tatooine and unlock some bricks that have been just out of reach the entire game!

It’s Star Wars, It’s Lego, it’s got the goofs and humor of your regular lego games, but with a polish and shine that adds so much life, and of course the Star Wars IP we all know and love. My one criticism is that I found the prequel trilogy levels to be a bit lackluster compared to the other trilogies. There was a noticeable jump in quality of the levels the moment we hit Episode IV. Positively, I’d like to note that this game has no reason to have a combat engine as dynamic as it does. Every character has some kind of special move combo. It’s strangely advanced for something traditionally so simple. I hope all Lego games going forward can have this much love packed in, but in the meantime Meg and I still have plenty of bricks to find - and we definitely will.

#8 - Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy (PS5)

This game was meme’d to death the moment it was revealed, with the main character, Jack, your early 2000’s edgelord in a henley, and his insatiable lust for murdering Chaos. It looked like it was going to be the dumbest thing around, but with great combat because Team Ninja…

…and it freakin’ ruled.

The characters and story go so purposefully hard in the edgy, angry, limp-bizkit-loving direction that it wraps all the way back around to great. It’s fully aware of the presentation and what it’s trying to do, and gives narrative reason for the choices they made, and the reasons are, extremely shockingly, good.

But even if you don’t care at all about the characters or the narrative, the gameplay delivers in spades. It’s a level-based souls-like in nature, where each level is in a “Dimension” that reflects environments and music from that Dimensions’ numbered Final Fantasy title. You are progressing forward through dungeons to cubes (darksouls::bonfires) to restore your potions (darksouls::estus) in order to fight the big boss (darksouls::also boss) at the end. And just like I mentioned earlier, the magic of Final Fantasy’s Job System is ever-present here. You can switch between many different jobs, each with their own Tech Trees, gear sets, and playstyles to find what works for you. I ended up leveling every job (in the base playthrough) to max before the end of the game, and loved how dynamic the whole system was. My two favorite Jobs ended up being Sage, where I used the tricky-to-pull-off-spell Ultima to kill the final boss, and Tyrant, where I could put elements on my fist weapons and go spell-punching!

The whole thing is a goofy love letter to Final Fantasy fans, and I really need to pick up the DLC and see where else this I-can’t-believe-they-pulled-it-off narrative goes!

#7 - Final Fantasy XIV: Before the Fall (PS5 & PC)

I’ve mentioned Final Fantasy XIV back in 2021, but this is my list so I get to make the rules. I’m including individual expansions, or between expansion segments, as their own games up for consideration - and this one delivered.

FFXIV is a great game. There is an astounding amount of content (even for free players, mind you!) and an incredible world to dive into. Now according to the internet, “Before the Fall” spanning patches 2.1 through 2.55, everything between the base game story and the first expansion, is the absolute worst part of the game. That it’s the lull between a fine story and the exceptional story (which I haven’t gotten to yet!). And if that’s the case I’m going to have a bonkers good time with the first expansion because I had a blast with this section of the game.

Sure the ‘plot’ of this section leads much to be desired, it’s more about dealing with some aftermath of the base game story and setting up the supposed amazingness to come, but I had a very memorable time as I played through this section. Between picking up Red Mage as a new job (Job System! Ahh!) that I sunk several hours into, really getting my feet wet in some of the hardmode dungeons from the basegame (which change! And have lore implications!), putting together groups to take on some of the early Extreme Trials (Shiva!) and hanging out with the dumb but lovable Hildebrand (a dumb-luck Sherlock Holmes type), I look back at this section fondly. And despite being a somewhat lackluster story for the whole segment, there are still some incredible highs that will stick with me for a long time. The Crystal Tower (and the soundtrack to it I listen to all the time) was incredibly memorable, and the ending of this plotline leading into the first expansion was incredibly dramatic and took me by a huge surprise.

I cannot wait to jump back in this year and see what Heavensward is all about!

#6 - Marvel Snap (Android)

I have never been one for mobile games. There’s been a few here or there that I’ve gotten into over the years, but for the most part, I try something out and then put it down pretty quickly. 

Marvel Snap changed the game. I’ve been playing this game almost every day since July, where I received a closed beta invite. I am technically not a free-to-play player anymore, as I have started picking up the Monthly “battle passes”, but I have never felt the need to purchase credits or gold from the shop. Outside of a couple missteps that have been rolled back, and some pretty gnarly priced bundles (of cosmetics), I must applaud the Marvel Snap team for making a non-predatory game that’s both incredibly fun and has great progression.

The game is a one on one card game, where you each have a deck of twelve cards. Each card is a unique hero, villain, character, or object from the Marvel Comics or Cinematic Universe. Each turn, of 6, you gain one energy that can be used to spend on playing your cards out into 3 different (and randomly selected each game!) lanes. Each card has abilities, some On Reveal, some Ongoing, and some other edge cases, as well as Power. At the end of 6 turns, the player who has the most power in two locations wins! Easy enough to understand!

The magic of the metagame comes from the desire to get Cubes via your wins. Each game is worth 1 Cube, but when you enter the final tally of scores phase, the Cube pool doubles. The neat trick is that when you think you are going to win, you want to Snap! (That’s the name of the game!) Snapping doubles your wager in the Cube pool, and each player can get one Snap per game. So if both of you are confident, and you ride out to the end of the game, there’s a total of 8 Cubes on the line! Winner takes all, and loser loses that many cubes. But at any point during the game (provided you have not snapped on that turn) you can choose to cut your losses and retreat, ending the game prematurely with a loss. And this is the magic of the game - will I draw my Onslaught on Turn 6 to boost my Iron Man lane astronomically, or should I just cut now and lose the 2 Cubes? Is my opponents’ Snap a bluff? Do they really have Hela in their hand? The gamble is what makes this game different from any other collectable card game I’ve played.

But I want to talk about what makes this game the most fun for me, outside of raw Game Design. Unlocking cards is fun. Seeing your favorite Marvel Heroes and what their abilities are in the context of this card game is great. Seeing how Spider-Man webs up a lane so the opponent can’t play there next turn makes sense. Mr. Fantastic stretches his arms out and give power to adjacent lanes, as well as his own. It’s so delightful to see the creativity of Marvel character use in this game. And that doesn’t even inch on the brilliance of card art, and the ability to collect Variants for these cards. All characters behave exactly the same way. My Invisible Woman functions the same as everyone elses’ Invisible Woman, but I love that my deck has Artgerm’s beautiful card art, while someone else could have art that they adore equally! Like a lot of card games, collecting variants and skins and new designs is fun, but it’s got a certain beauty to it to recognize distinct comic artists and panels within the cards.

Marvel Snap is a great game, and I hope they keep the trajectory they are on, because I can see myself playing this one for a long time.

#5 - Tunic (Switch)

Tunic is one of those “it’s hard to talk about Tunic without ruining Tunic” games. A brilliant isometric Zelda-like game where you play as a cute Fox going on a cute adventure! There’s an incredible art style on display here, a fantastic soundtrack, neat enemies, challenging bosses, and lots of fun items to discover! 

However the magic of Tunic is in what you “don’t know”. Sure, there’s items to unlock and health upgrades to get, but the most important “unlockables” in Tunic are the things that you, the player, learn about the game. I’ve praised games in the past, like Outer Wilds, for being a game that “teaches” the player core mechanics, and Tunic falls directly into that genre. The game has an old retro-style instruction manual, but digitally included and opened with a button press. As the game progresses you will find more pages of the instruction manual, which, with some careful studying of images, intuition, and maybe some foreign language parsing, will slowly teach you things you had no idea you could do.

I don’t want to say too much more, because the experience and realization is the magic of the game, but I’m proud to say I 100%’d it, sans the very last puzzle in the game - I made a lot of progress but couldn’t quite grasp the language on my own. I highly recommend Tunic to anyone and everyone, especially those who like to discover and learn. I would implore any players to not look things up, and let the game teach you what you need to know - I’ll never forget how my brain popped open once I discovered the location of the Holy Cross.

#4 - Horizon Forbidden West (PS5)

Aloy’s back and she’s kicking ass harder than ever, and it's about damn time.

Horizon Zero Dawn was one of my favorite games of 2017 (before I started recording these!). It’s a brilliant post-post-apocalyptic sci-fi story involving an orphaned woman who is built a little different and trying to find her place in the world. Zero Dawn had an incredible narrative and gameplay that was super exciting. I 100%’d that on launch and couldn’t wait for more, and it finally came!

Forbidden West picks up right where Zero Dawn left off. Her confrontation with the villain of the first game (avoiding some spoilers here!) led to some lasting consequences, and she has to do something about that, so she heads into the Forbidden West to save the world yet again. The narrative is fun, it leads you to some amazing new locations, well thought-out new factions and peoples, as well as introduces some excellent new characters to Aloys’ world-saving party - which is enhanced by an overarching theme of Aloy learning that it’s okay to ask people for help, especially in this wild new world for her. While I think the way this narrative weaves and brings you to amazing characters, setpieces, and super high highs of storytelling, it definitely feels like a middle chapter in a longer story, and I personally felt like the ending fell a little flat, with a “well, I guess that’s it ‘til the next one.”

In terms of Gameplay, it’s better than ever. Horizon tickles a Monster Hunter itch in me, with the hunting, tracking, dismemberment, and murder of large metallic beasts in an effort to craft those removed pieces into new armor or weapon upgrades. It feels good to fight these large monsters, learn how to tackle each different “breed”, and execute on brutal plans to bring down your foes. The enemy variety is great, the weapons types are diverse and fun to use, and the sound of removing a Slitherfang’s poison capsule under its mouth with an exploding javelin rules. 

I want to note specifically one of the locations in the game that sticks with me still. Plainsong, once you find it, is such an incredible location. There’s lore for how it got set up hidden in text files around the world, there’s logical reasoning for some of the religious influence in the area, and when you finish a quest that helps their “gods” - Meg and I both had our jaws on the floor. We stuck around in the area just to experience the beauty of it for a long while, not wanting to progress for fear it would stop. And the music of this area - just absolutely stunning. Plainsong, and the Forbidden West as a whole, is so incredibly beautiful and memorable. I’m pulling up Plainsong ambiance videos on Youtube right now.

I had such a blast with this game I 100%’d it with no effort, even though I was bummed with the conclusion on this entry’s narrative.

#3 - Pokemon Legends Arceus (Switch)

Oh boy, this is what I always wanted from Pokemon, even way back in the Gameboy Color days! This is the best Pokemon game I’ve ever played, hands down. The locations are great, Jubilife Village is rad, the characters are fun and goofy (and full of references to Diamond & Pearl), and for the first time ever you can just walk up to a pokemon and throw a ball at it to capture it! Genius!

Among the obvious changes in pokemon capture, there’s a lot of charm in this game. The Feudal Japan setting is very fun and narratively justified. The villagers growing to no longer fear pokemon, but appreciate their company, is cute and fun to (paradoxically?) contribute to. The big bad of the story was super neat - and I can’t say too much more than that. The pokemon variety for this game is also a really great selection! I’ve said for years that I’ve wanted to play a game top to bottom with just a team of Eevees, and I got to do that for maybe 80% of this one. 

There are a whole suite of quality of life changes in this game that I want to touch on that help make it the incredible advancement in Pokemon that it is. These may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but these things all worked perfectly for me, and I wish them to be mainstays in every Pokemon game going forward:

• You can move your trainer around in battles. This is mostly goofy, but when you are finishing a battle and pokemon are going through the fainting and victory animations, you can begin moving towards your next destination. It just adds to a smoother in-and-out-of-battle experience.

• The EXP gains are a sidebar pop-in, showing you which pokemon got how much exp, level ups, new moves to learn, and new evolutions available.

• Similar to the above, it does not interrupt you to learn new moves or Evolve a pokemon. You are simply alerted that a new move is available, or that a pokemon can evolve, and you can choose when to handle doing that! Brilliant!

• You can go back and relearn old moves in the menus! You still have you traditionally slotted 4 moves, but can swap them as long as they’ve met the requirements to learn them.

• Battles are no longer a My-Turn-Your-Turn First-Move-Determined-By-Speed format. They introduced a Final Fantasy X style Turn Order, where faster pokemon may be able to move twice before a slow pokemon moves once. I adore this battle style. Along with this comes the ability to do moves quicker (less damage for quicker turns on the turnlist) or stronger (higher damage for high turn time.)

• You can throw out pokemon to gather items in the distance, or up on ledges, for you. I didn’t realize how much I loved this until playing a later pokemon release, more on that later.

• Catching Pokemon out in the wild just by sneaking up and throwing a ball at them is just plain fun.

Pokemon Legends Arceus isn’t a perfect game. I would love it if it had a fully open world instead of the instanced zones. I would love it if an even wider range of pokemon for the pokedex was available. I would love it if my pokemon could follow me around outside of their pokeball. All that said, I am currently dipping my feet into Pokemon Violet (maybe to be seen on 2023’s list?) and it is easy to say that Pokemon Legends Arceus is the best Pokemon game. Sure I have this wishlist of what I want a Pokemon game like this to be, and as I said this isn’t perfect, but it’s a damn great foundation and I cannot wait for the next iteration of this style.

#2 - Elden Ring (PS5)

I really don’t know what to say here.
I mean really, I feel like you know if you like this type of game or not.
And then you know if you do like this type of game that Elden Ring is one of the best there is.
How do I talk about it without saying anything everyone has already said?

I’ll try. Which, I guess, is also the mentality of every single moment in Elden Ring.

This is definitely “the best one of these” from a gameplay perspective. It’s got all the refined care of the Fromsoft Soulsbourne games, but with a new twist of being completely open world - and that changes the game for casual and serious players alike. It’s no secret that these games are hard. Very hard. But Elden Ring offers something that no other Fromsoft game has offered - instead of being stuck at a boss and throwing yourself at it over and over again until you get it, becoming sad or frustrated in the process, you can just go somewhere else. Upon realizing I just was not ready to head into Stormveil Castle, I just packed up and went south to the peninsula and tackled the countless things to do down there. By the time I came back to Stormveil Castle, it was still a fun and tough dungeon, but not a vertical wall of difficulty.

I think I can case-in-point this one by talking about Meg’s experience with the game. She has never once shown interest in a Fromsoft game before - the idea of throwing herself at difficult bosses repeatedly did not interest her. And yet, Elden Ring hooked her. The exploration, the ability to grow in different ways, and the tools provided to her let her make her way through the Lands Between and enjoy the process. I think that’s a thing worth celebrating with Elden Ring.

There’s also all kinds of fun new mechanics that Elden Ring offers that are different from the Soulsborne games that I’ve played. Elden Ring boasts the most interesting magic system by far, I actually enjoyed my entire first playthrough as a caster, while in other games the only choice felt like melee-focused builds. There are neat weapon skills, and tons of them, that can be swapped in and out of weapons. I admittedly, as a caster, did not interact with many of them, but I got to watch Meg equip cooler and flashier abilities as she progressed. And of course, the contentious Summoning mechanic, where you can level up and bring in monsters to help you fight. The internet will tell you that it’s for “casuals” and “babygamers” but I’m telling you that my three ghosty dog friends rule.

And as always there’s tons of great bosses with great names. Whether you’re killing some huge, disgusting beast named Margaret the Piss Drinker or just The Watchdog, it usually is some really cool fight to learn, and always set to some fantastic music. Notable mentions for some of my favorite bosses would be “Malekith, the Black Blade” and definitely “Hoarah Loux”, and of course there’s the infamously difficult “Melenia, Blade of Miquella”. 

Similarly, there are always cool NPCs to interact with in a Fromsoft game. I’m not sure I want to say the narrative is anything particularly stunning, and the hype of George R.R. Martin didn’t really make itself especially well-known to me, the character interactions you get are always steeped in mystery and fun to unravel. I, of course, love my good friend Blaidd, and I’m glad I saw his story to completion. There are some cool “narrative” moments in the game for sure, such as a neat reveal about Radagon pretty late into the game, but ultimately the narrative can be entirely ignored in favor of a game that plays incredibly well.

Elden Ring is superb, and I’m really looking forward to whatever’s next. And maybe another play through this year as a big sword boy.

#1 - God of War: Ragnarok (PS5)

God of War: Ragnarok is the follow-up to my 2018 Game of the Year, God of War - and how fitting is it that they’re each the best games I’ve played in their respective years.

God of War (2018) was a story about Kratos coming into being a father for his child, and what that means for him while they go on a journey together. God of War: Ragnarok is a story about Kratos learning to grow with a son who is chasing individualism, being better than the person you’ve been before, and the nature of things. This is the game, this year, that had a beautiful story to tell and moved me to tears in doing so.

The gameplay is very similar to God of War (2018) but cleaned up and fleshed out in more ways. There’s some excellent new traversal options using the Blades of Chaos, there are excellent combos and abilities to unlock on the tech tree, and lots of choices for building your customized loadouts. I think the combat is very fun, brutal, and provides you with some excellent late-game challenges with this game’s “Valkyrie” equivalent - but it is a very smooth evolution of what came before. You still have your weapons, your runic spells, and your relics - as well as your bow-wielding companion. There is not much more to say about it.

The magic for me is the narrative. I, of course, would be loath to spoil it for anyone else, so I won’t speak too much on the individual segments of the game, but I will highlight the delightful cast of characters. The return characters from the first game are stellar as always: of course you have Atreus as a major character, but also the vengeful Freya, the hilarious Brok and Sindri, the incredible performances of both Odin and Thor, the sophisticated Ratotoskr, the delightful and lore-spouting Mimir, and of course The God of War himself. “Performance” is absolutely the right word to describe the showpieces of dialogue and acting, as they wring out every bit of emotion than can with these motion captured characters, from the small facial changes in Kratos to the threatening movements of the God of Thunder. Every single little detail is worth looking at.

I’d also like to take a minute to appreciate this adaptation of Norse Mythology. Obviously they took some creative liberties in order to make it work into a story of Kratos and Atreus, but some of the choices they made to make the actual mythos fit into their story is absolutely brilliant. And there are so many references to so many of the wonderful Norse Mythology stories, that it’s astounding they captured so much of it within one game. And I can’t go into too much detail without revealing anything! You’ll just have to take my word on it! It’s amazing!

One of the big selling points of this game was that we would get to visit each of the Nine Realms, unlike the restrictive seven, I believe, in its predecessor. Each of the realms have a distinct beauty to it, while offering different types of biomes and environments to play in while staying true to the story of myth. I have a particular attachment to Vanaheim and how much I enjoyed my time in that Realm, from both a gameplay and a narrative perspective. Each realm feels worth going to, and none feel particularly shoe-horned in. They managed to keep things fresh through the entire ride.

I wish I could talk more about the story. I want to talk more about the story! But it really is something beautiful in its own right, and it stands even higher on the shoulders of the giants that came before. The amount of times Meg and I said aloud “this is the best game I’ve ever played.” If there is one game that I recommend for anyone and everyone to play this year, it’s God of War: Ragnarok. And please Santa Monica, I am absolutely begging, please bring us more. I don’t know in what world, I don’t know in what fashion, but I will be first in line to see what is next for this story. I’m ready to weep again.

Additional Games I Played This Year:

The Grace Ace Attorney Chronicles
Dark Souls Remastered
Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix
Halo Infinite
Splatoon 3
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Slay the Spire
Fortnite: No Build
Overwatch 2
Final Fantasy X: HD Remaster