Year in Review 2019

Yeah I barely played anything. Let's get on with it.

3. Wargroove
I honestly would not fault Intelligent Systems if they wanted to sue over this game. With that said, I'm glad somebody took matters into their own hands and made a new Advance Wars for us. I didn't really have the time or concentration to complete the game, but it's impressively made and has some cool additions to the core gameplay of AW. Fog of War maps suck and are what ultimately made me stop playing. They are the water levels of strategy games, only worse.

I know i'm complaining, but Wargroove is really fun and you should try it if you like this genre or used to play lots of Advance Wars. You'll enjoy it.

2. Dragon Quest XI
Nothing too unexpected for a Dragon Quest game here, though the plot has more twists and turns than usual. It might be the best written game in the series, in fact. I really liked the main cast, and the world was fun to explore. It's interesting how well roaming monsters have integrated into Dragon Quest despite its reputation for sticking to JRPG standards. DQXI is a great game because it gives you so much freedom as to how you want to play. You can stay underleveled and enjoy the struggle, steamroll everything, try weird builds, self-restrict stuff... the team clearly wanted everyone to be able to play Dragon Quest however they wanted. My one main criticism there is that the game is far too easy until Act 3, where it spikes quite unfairly. This invalidates a lot of the choices you are given, at least to an extent.

Visually, the game is incredible; one of the best cartoony anime games out there. Musically, it's one of Sugiyama's worst, though not without some nice songs here and there. Mostly, the ones you hear all the time are for some reason the runts of the litter.

It's really good and you should play it!

1. Fire Emblem 4: Genealogy of the Holy War
Well, dang. This is my new favorite Fire Emblem title. The fun part is that it such a heavily flawed game in so many respects. Yet, it succeeds at something no other game in the franchise has: it actually feels like you're commanding a large army in a large-scale conflict spanning generations. It's pretty impressive how much gameplay-story integration is on display considering this came out in 1996.

The main problem with this game is that it's tedious beyond belief. You'll spend hours in battle preps and arenas, turns take ages, enemy phases are slow, and every map took me about a week to finish in real time since I could only play about a turn per session. I'm telling you that against all odds, I think that made the game better in some ways. You should play FE4 if you want to truly get immersed in the grand scale of fantasy combat the series centers on. Don't expect any of the nice features from later titles. It don't play that way.

Oh yeah, and I loved getting to play as my army's kids in the second half of the game. That was just an incredible, bold idea. Well played, Kaga. Sorry you had to plagiarize your own series after they kicked you out and all. You've earned my respect!