GOTOYS 2023
My favorite games I played in 2023, not from 2023
I thought GOTOYs would be a fleeting joke.
The initially divisive acronym, Games of the Other Years, had its debut on our 2021 GOTY episode of Into the Aether. My co-host and close friend, Brendon Bigley, thought it would be fun to highlight games we had played that year that were exclusively from the past. We had just explored the bulk of the Game Boy Advance library and revisited the Mass Effect trilogy, it almost felt wrong to ignore those experiences simply because they weren’t from 2021.
Since then, we’ve seen the idea of GOTOYs resonate with our audience. We’ve even been encouraged to spend more time covering them on our yearly GOTY episodes.
With that enthusiasm in the air, I’ve decided to (hopefully) start an annual tradition where I write out my GOTOY list from that year. I see it as a chance to explore my relationship with these games that all found me at the right time– despite the year.
Thanks for listening, thanks for reading, and here’s to a good 2024 where I’m sure I’ll play even more bizarre games from the early 2000’s.
Shenmue II (2002)
*Light spoilers for Shenmue I and Shenmue II
In the summer of 2014, I moved from New Jersey to Chicago. I had no job lined up and no plan. For my going away party, my mom bought me a cake that had the phrase “Sure, why not?” written in the icing.
The prospect of Chicago was enticing. I could finally begin my adult life and cut my teeth as a performer and writer. And I think there was part of me that was intrigued by the prospect of a total reset. To leave everything, and everyone, in the past.
I don’t mean to completely equate my leap to the midwest to Ryo Hazuki’s (literally) never-ending quest for revenge, but I do think at the heart of the Shenmue series is the idea of home and what it means to leave it behind.
Now, before I praise the thematic cohesion of the narrative and mechanics, it’s important to point out how obtuse, bizarre, and uncanny this series can be. In Shenmue, characters will tell you to go talk to someone without saying who that person is or where they are. When you want to look at a map, you have to switch to a first-person perspective and look at that map. Infamously, later in the game, you get a mandatory job driving a forklift. You can also go to the arcade in town and play video games, in case you forgot that you were already playing one.
Despite their eccentricities, I find both Shenmue I & II extremely immersive. While many elements can be tedious, both games show the emotional power that can be found in routine. About halfway through the game, you’ll know the roads, the points of interest, and the people. Ryo’s schedule begins to feel less like a chore and more like a view into his day-to-day life.
Shenmue II begins with Ryo arriving at Hong Kong, fresh off the boat. It’s a shock to Ryo and a shock to us. Yokosuka was a place that mourned the loss of Ryo, and Hong Kong doesn’t care that he’s made the trip or the sacrifice.
When I first arrived in Chicago, I don’t think I realized what a huge decision I had made until I sat in my empty apartment. I spent the first month in the city applying for jobs all day in a café and doing stand-up at night. At my first open mic, someone in the crowd nicknamed me “nips.” A month or so later, I got a job downtown as a waiter and was given the somehow-even-worse nickname “funny guy.”
Ryo is immediately scammed, intimidated, and taken advantage of. But over time, he makes a new home in Hong Kong. There are people that genuinely wish to help him, and meaningful connections made through moments of kindness and a shared reverence for martial arts. In my own lower-stakes journey, I also eventually started to feel less like a Chicago tourist and more like a person blessed with two places to confidently call home.
Tragically, Shenmue is an unfinished series and Ryo’s story will never be officially complete. But I’d like to think that he would’ve come to a similar realization: that “home” is not a place, but a feeling we create for ourselves when we meaningfully connect to those around us.
Sonic Mania (2017)
Despite everything, it's a good time for Sonic the Hedgehog.
I mention this caveat because I don’t know of any other intellectual property that has been more thoroughly mocked over the last twenty years. The fun fact that googling any name plus “the hedgehog” results in dozens of fan-made OCs has become so common knowledge, it’s nearly the equivalent of office small talk. For some generations, laughing at the ancient deviant art pages that result from your name has effectively replaced “how about them yankees?”
I’ve always felt bad for Sonic, and even worse for Sonic fans. It feels like the entire series and its fandom became a punching bag for the internet – especially in the era of the late 2000s / early 2010’s. This stretch of years was a time where a lot of video game related conversations were dominated by theatrically negative and critical youtube personalities, and no other game was a juicier target than Sonic ‘06 – the death rattle of the scorned hedgehog.
Now, we can often learn the most from failure. If The Phantom Menace accidentally taught us the importance of editing and pacing for storytelling, Sonic ‘06 is a masterclass in understanding cringe. To truly make one cringe, a piece of media can’t simply be bad. It needs to be something you see yourself in. Here is a character you used to love, glitching out of loop-de-loops and kissing a human girl, making you wish to exit your current reality. It’s an experience that makes you embarrassed to be yourself.
It’s here I reveal that I’ve never been that big of a Sonic fan. The marketing of the 90’s sought to divide children into fandom camps. I was a Nintendo and Nickelodeon kid. I played Super Mario World and watched Hey Arnold. I had Pokémon Red. I didn’t get around to the competitor Sonic until he was cast out of Sega exclusivity and ported to the Gamecube. I never truly understood the reverence for Sonic, and passively joined in on the bashing in the years that followed.
But here we are in 2024! Sonic has had two successful feature films, modestly entered the open world genre with Sonic Frontiers, starred in the surprisingly excellent visual novel The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, and people still want more. Through all the debasement and ironic deflections, there has been a persistent and genuine love for the Sonic series that has begun to visibly shine again. And in my opinion, this new era began with 2017’s Sonic Mania: an homage to the early era of Sonic made by lifelong fans of the series.
Seeing all this renewed and genuine interest in Sonic, I can’t help but feel that maybe we were rooting for him all along.
Final Fantasy V Advance (2006)
Every Final Fantasy is a do-over. Other than some recurring easter eggs and musical cues, one would struggle to connect the brooding and modern world of Final Fantasy VII with the Charlie’s Angels inspired Final Fantasy X-2. Let’s also not dwell too much on the numbered sequels to numbered titles.
But the earlier games were a little different. The first six mainline entries of Final Fantasy do feel more similar to one another. Each game features a similar presentation with similar combat, and a plot that revolves around magical crystals in a medieval-to-steampunk setting, usually ending in a fight against a delusional god.
This plot structure feels like a placeholder in the first three games, but that changed pretty quickly. Final Fantasy IV takes a bold step forward by being both a deconstruction and interrogation of the archetypes set in place, and Final Fantasy VI raised the standard for storytelling in RPGs with its incredible ensemble, chillingly evil villain, and a mid-game twist that is still shocking to experience.
The middle child of these ambitious entries is, of course, Final Fantasy V. While FFIV and FFVI sought to invest in narrative, FFV is very comfortable prioritizing gameplay over story– accidentally proving that sometimes lower stakes can hit just as hard.
The best modern parallel to FFV would be Octopath Traveler II (one of my favorite games from 2023, as fate would have it!). Both games present the player with an open world to explore, and characters united solely by the desire to help one another. The player is motivated by their own curiosity and rewarded for experimentation. We can equip each of the four characters with any number of jobs, ranging from classic roles like Knight and Thief, to more creative ones like Necromancer and Chemist. Establishing the loop of games like Octopath Traveler and Bravely Default, characters can learn skills from leveling up one job that they can equip while wielding another– also resulting in dozens of different outfits. The possibilities feel endless, and it creates a reason for grinding and exploration past simply hitting the next story beat.
While discussions about FFV aren’t nearly as common these days, its impact can be seen everywhere. And as Final Fantasy continues to evolve and redefine itself, FFV quietly reminds us that the spirit of adventure can be summoned from very simple places.
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (2005)
Broadly speaking, there are two types of Fire Emblem fans.
In one camp, you have the tactics fans. These Fire Emblem players are here to make Excel spreadsheets out of the anime chess pieces and tell you why the girl with the bluish-green hair you had a formative childhood crush on is useless after the third chapter of the game.
The opposing faction are the people who are playing for the narrative– or more specifically– the character support scenes. Fire Emblem is famous for letting players pair up the cast on the battlefield, which results in friendships and romance blossoming throughout the ensemble. For the fans in this camp, the battles might just be the thing you have to put up with so you can make your favorite ships canon.
I find myself uncomfortably in the middle. I love the strategy involved with the tactics, and I have Google Docs and notes on my phone that list my class plans for every character. But I find my motivation for playing most video games will almost always be the cast.
Path of Radiance proves that these two camps need not be mutually exclusive, and that the best Fire Emblem games can do both.
In almost all ways, Path of Radiance is about being in the middle. The game represents a halfway point between the two styles of Fire Emblem, and the cast themselves begin the game as a neutral party. In this entry, our hero is Ike: a blue-haired boy with a red cape and a heart of gold. Ike is surrounded by an ever-growing group of mercenaries who travel the land as a force of good in a world scarred by war.
Ike, the son of a legendary mercenary, is inexperienced at being a leader. His advisors are Titania, a powerful knight with a strong sense of chivalry and honor, and Soren, a pragmatic and seemingly cold mage who prioritizes caution and survival. Ike cherishes his relationship with both and seeks their individual points of view consistently throughout the game.
My favorite aspect of Ike’s character is that he is usually powerless. Most Fire Emblem protagonists are chosen ones: nobles who possess unparalleled skill with the blade, and may or may not also be dragons. The game makes it clear Ike is not ready to lead, but circumstances demand he take on the role. In combat, he starts the game noticeably weak and never really improves. Much like how he seeks Soren and Titania’s advice, he must also rely on others in the battlefield.
I often wondered during my playthrough if making Ike underwhelming as a unit was intentional or not, but Path of Radiance seems to consistently defy tradition. There are a number of character archetypes that appear throughout the Fire Emblem series. For example: usually if a character is noticeably underpowered early on, they can become one of the strongest units in the game if the player invests in their growth. Alternatively, units that start off stronger are usually there to help out in the early game and then be benched later on.
In Path of Radiance, the bad characters often stay bad and the good characters get stronger. Titania is always great and can be thrown into any corner of the map and hold her own. Meanwhile, Ike will always need to charge in with a group. Perhaps fitting, given his victory quote in Super Smash Bros.
Ike and friends are often put in impossible scenarios where doing the “right” thing is painted as the foolish choice. But what the narrative makes clear is that there is a danger and false comfort in neutrality, and that it’s always worth fighting for peace and equality– regardless of the power you yield.
Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward (2015)
MMOs as a genre have never fully worked for me. World of Warcraft consumed the lives of most of my friends in high school, but while I enjoyed making characters and seeing different parts of the world (of warcraft), the need to catch up to my friends’ levels always felt more like work than fantasy.
Final Fantasy XIV, despite having many thriving social elements, is largely a narrative-driven, single player experience. While each of its individual expansions are arguably their own game, the cumulative story that unfolds for your custom-made protagonist is an experience unique to video games and specifically unique to FFXIV. While there’s plenty of bizarre stuff to spend real money on, the primary draw of FFXIV is getting to exist in a living breathing fantasy world where you are genuinely part of its history.
At the end of last year, I completed A Realm Reborn. I watched with proud and weary eyes as my player-character, Zoe Bahamut, entered the cold, cobblestone streets of Ishgard– the main setting for Heavensward. I was immediately gripped by the city’s tragic history and the new tarot card themed healing class. I’m still fairly early on in this beloved expansion, but the reason it makes my list is ironically more for the payoff of having finished A Realm Reborn.
There is a commonly spoken cursed phrase that exists amongst fans of the RPG genre: that a game “gets good after the opening ten hours.”
Final Fantasy XIV fans, an otherwise positive bunch, have the absolute gall to say that their beloved MMO gets good after 150 hours. More specifically, most FFXIV players agree that the game’s narrative and gameplay skyrocket in quality once you finish the first campaign: A Realm Reborn. The worst part is they’re right.
I can’t believe it’s only started to get good.
Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht (2002)
*Spoiler warning for some plot beats of Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille Zur Macht
*CW mention of plot beats that involve child abuse and implied assault
When we recorded our Dreamcast episode, I made up the acronym BAD. This stands for Beautiful Ambitious Disasters, a term I use to describe games that are objectively messy, but have such wildly ambitious ideas that it’s hard not to root for them. These are the kind of games that are maybe more fun to discuss and write about than to actually play.
Xenosaga Episode 1: Der Wille zur Macht is the definition of BAD. It opens in media res at a present day archeological excavation in Kenya, then does a 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque cut to the far future. The opening credits then begin over imagery of spaceships and the construction of robots, making parallel the ambition of the game with the ambition of humanity–and perhaps its hubris.
This opening gripped me right away. Honestly, for all the flak Xenosaga gets for being almost entirely cutscenes, the cutscenes are great! Tetsuya Takahashi, Kaori Tanaka (credited then as her pen name: Soraya Saga) and team clearly understand the storytelling potential that is unique to cinema. Every cutscene is wonderfully framed and edited, and the voice acting is shockingly good for the time of this game’s release. The graphics also hold up for the most part, though sometimes the character design is inconsistent. Leads like Shion and KOS-MOS look great in 3D, but characters with less exaggerated features tend to look more uncanny. Poor Allen (the voice of reason, comic relief, and unrequited admirer of Shion’s) looks a bit like he’s one of the puppets in Team America: World Police.
Any shortcomings in presentation are made up for by the strength of the narrative and the cast. While the plot eventually morphs into an ensemble story, for the bulk of the game, our playable protagonist is Shion. While she’s sometimes treated a bit poorly by the weaker moments of the script, I really love her as the lead. In a genre full of “chosen ones,” it’s refreshing that our hero is a human scientist driven by empathy and optimism, two aspects of her character that are constantly challenged by a nihilistic world and her own inner demons. I’ve played enough RPGs to suspect that she may become a chosen one later in the trilogy, but I think her introduction is strong and the audience can easily relate to many aspects of her character.
Shion shares the spotlight with KOS-MOS, the blue-haired android on the cover of the game. While the Xenosaga trilogy has been a bit eclipsed in memory by the original Xenogears and the infinitely more popular Xenoblade series, KOS-MOS remains visible in the Xeno canon through cameos, crossovers, and even the aesthetic of certain characters.
While KOS-MOS’ enduring legacy could be attributed to her iconic character design, it’s also fair to say she steals the show. She is equal parts T-1000 as she is Sleeping Beauty. We see scenes of her cold brutality and glimmers of her humanity while she’s studied in hibernation. Shion seems to believe that KOS-MOS is capable of gaining her own sense of individuality despite KOS-MOS casually protesting that she’s just a weapon. The intrigue and mystery of KOS-MOS’ identity is the main pull of the game, and I imagine the entire trilogy. It’s at least, for me, the reason I’ve already purchased Episodes II and III for my somehow-still-working PS2.
But the D in BAD stands for “disaster” for a reason. I praised the cutscenes, but the sheer number of them makes it hard to want to play this game over just watching it on Youtube. The battles, though stylish and interesting, are often sluggish and tedious. And while the cast are all endearing and layered, the game’s treatment of its female characters is often questionable at best and inexcusable at worst.
The element of the game that still gives me serious reservations about recommending it at all is the treatment of MOMO, a robotic child that wishes to be human. Her story is meaningful and she is a likable character. Her relationship with Ziggy is especially strong, as they’re both robotic beings discarded by society. Through a strong platonic relationship, they help remind the other of their individual humanity.
But while Ziggy and the main cast treat MOMO as a child, the camera sometimes leers at her at unfortunate angles, with the same gaze it often uses for adult female characters like Shion and KOS-MOS. This all reaches a boiling point with the villain, Albedo. He consistently refers to MOMO as “Ma Bella Pêche,” and in an infamous scene later in the story, he psychologically tortures her in an attempt to download her memories. I’m usually in favor of challenging material in art, but what is being implied in this scene personally crosses a line for me, and I don’t think the game pulled off having such horrifying material. In my opinion, the game could’ve accomplished establishing the urgency of MOMO’s rescue without relying on such intense and traumatic shock value.
As much as I want to champion Xenosaga, it is clear why it failed. It’s often too disturbing and too confusing. It’s not as iconic or revolutionary as Xenogears and doesn’t have the warmth and broader appeal of Xenoblade.
But as troubled as I am by the negatives I have mentioned, I’m also still enamored by the positives. I think of the quiet moments between Shion and KOS-MOS. Ziggy remembering his family before his life as a cyborg. MOMO reckoning with the origins of her artificial existence. Allen showing genuine concern for Shion and crew, despite constantly being taken for granted. Even some of the smaller characters are all given huge amounts of depth and meaning. This cast of imperfect characters are all bonded through their shared trauma, and it’s beautiful to see them navigate through it, despite all odds.
While this game has been forgotten by many, there’s also a reason why it’s stuck in the hearts and minds of so many dedicated fans for over two decades. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it’s almost like the game itself has a soul, and like Shion with KOS-MOS, we engage with it with that same mix of admiration, fear, and confusion. We love it, despite everything.
I’m not confident if I’ll like the trilogy more or less by the time I’m done. But I’m tempted to try anyway. That illogical drive to accomplish something with no clear knowledge of what the result will bring. Isn’t that what being human is all about?
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (2004)
While it might sound like a backhanded compliment, one of the best things I can say about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is that it feels like sanctioned fanfiction.
This game’s predecessors, the beloved Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario, also succeed as both RPGs and combinations no one knew they wanted. But The Thousand-Year Door goes beyond the simple proof of concept. It uses the world of Super Mario as the narrative blank canvas it is and tells a story full of irreverence and originality.
I often couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The first setting is a pirate town full of graffiti with a noose openly displayed in the central area. Our first companion is a sassy goomba who spews vicious insults about every NPC in the game. Mario teams up with a ghost and listens to crows talk about their SAT scores. And about halfway through, Mario becomes the de facto parent of a baby yoshi who is born on a sky island where the only nourishment is hotdogs and the only thing to do is join a corrupt wrestling league.
Yes, I love the absurdity and dark comedy. But even moreso, I admire this game because it’s so confident in its original elements, it’s easy to forget it’s related to the Super Mario franchise in any way.
Making such an ambitious RPG using Super Mario as a base creates this special feeling of fantasy. When you write a story based on the foundation of a series that famously doesn’t have one, it really feels like anything can happen.
A close friend once shared with me that she thinks people (specifically fandoms) would be happier if they wrote fanfiction. The Thousand-Year Door is the type of experience that inspires you to think about what other stories could be possible in fictional worlds left unexplored. If corporations are too precious with their IP to have that kind of fun, maybe the best stories are up to us.
Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale (2013)
As a kid, summer was the only season that felt real to me. The school year was simply a facade and an endurance test. Once it ended, summer broke free and we all got a chance to be our real selves.
Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale brings me back to this time in my childhood where the moments that felt the most real were when my imagination was given the most agency. It’s a game where you play as a kid who is new to town, and monsters may or may not be attacking. Dad may or may not be a superhero. And that weird guy at the laundromat is quite possibly from space.
The story is told simply through interactions with the other characters who live in this 1971 fictitious version of Fuji no Hana. The game only takes a few hours to complete, but will transport you back to a time where your imagination filled in the gaps of a world you had yet to fully understand.
As an adult, we can maybe reflect on the experience and spot what was real and what wasn’t. But back then, maybe it was all real to us. Just for the summer, at least.
Metroid Prime Remastered (2002, 2023)
We recorded a bonus episode about our time with Metroid Prime, so this is the one game on this list where I find myself at a loss for additional words. It’s funny that sometimes a game can be so successful at what it is trying to accomplish, all that can be said about it is “it’s good?”
Metroid as a series missed the 64 treatment many other Nintendo franchises received at the dawn of 3D, but even though it had to wait until the Gamecube, Metroid Prime feels just as pivotal of an entry in the beginnings of the third dimension.
If Ocarina of Time tutorialized fighting and navigating within a 3D space with its debut Deku Tree dungeon, Metroid Prime still feels like the gold standard for fully utilizing a first-person perspective.
In terms of pure atmosphere, the player sharing Samus’ exact point of view literally puts us in her exact position. We share feelings of claustrophobia, panic, and fear. We share fleeting blindness from the visor fogging up near environmental hazards. This connection is magnified by the game’s various visors that include thermal and x-ray vision. A detail that still impresses in 2024 is seeing Samus’ skeletal hand have dedicated movements tied to each of her various arm cannon abilities.
When people ask me what my favorite stories in games are, it often leads me to wonder what constitutes a narrative within a video game. We have experiences like The Last of Us that contain a concrete story which emulates the thrills of cinema. But I think moments spent wandering around Metroid Prime’s masterfully designed Tallon IV tells an equally powerful story told purely through atmosphere and the emotional state of the player.
Metroid games are usually about unlocking a tangled knot of a world by upgrading Samus into the best version of herself. Progress through locked doors and unattainable areas is made with various suit upgrades and abilities. But the best Metroid games also allow the player’s own creativity and curiosity to be an equally important ability. By fusing our perspectives, Metroid Prime successfully combines intrinsic and extrinsic motivation so that by the end of the game, we also leave the experience feeling a little stronger and wiser for it.
Skies of Arcadia (2000)
I consider myself an optimistic person, but there have been times over the last decade that I’ve felt genuine societal dread. In the darkest of these moments, I start to think it’s almost irresponsible to have hope– as if believing in the possibility of a better world is blatantly ignoring the facts.
Skies of Arcadia is a game about how optimism is not a fantasy to cloak the perils of the world, it is a choice to make in efforts to overcome them.
Despite being a cheerful and heartwarming game about sky pirates who are great friends and have incredible secret handshakes, Skies of Arcadia shows many scenes of harrowing loss. Early on, we see the character’s home and hideout after a brutal attack. We explore a city ravaged by economic imbalance. Even the surreal sky islands seem to imply the world might already be over and humanity is just stylishly picking up the scraps before it destroys itself again.
It is not uncommon for protagonists of RPGs to be scrappy rebels who laugh in the face of danger. But Skies of Arcadia is a rare treat of a game where the characters recognize the flawed state of the world and their own limitations, but try their best anyway. There is a scene where a lost soul confronts protagonist Vyse about the foolishness of his optimism. Vyse recognizes that he might die trying, but at least he cared enough to try at all.
I love Skies of Arcadia for many reasons: its ageless aesthetic, sweeping score, clever turn based combat, and unparalleled spirit of adventure. But the reason it’ll stick with me forever is its counterargument to pessimism: to doubt the authenticity of your hope is to let the bad guys win.