2023 was a year I felt unbelievably old. I turned 40 in February and Nintendo released the 20th Zelda game. I was reminded over and over how it’s been a decade since the last Armored Core. 10 years with nothing. Not even bad third-party games on neglected consoles or mobile stores. Just…nothing, for a whole decade. This year we returned to Baldur’s Gate for its 3rd (and most colossal) incarnation. Alan Wake returned, Diablo returned. Resident Evil 4 came back (again), and in preparation for next year’s newest Dragon Quest-like, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio gave us a remastered Like a Dragon: Ishin!. Todd Howard ran out of platforms to put Skyrim on, but we got the distillation of nearly 30 years of Elder Scrolls into Starfield. Final Fantasy released its 16th mainline entry which led me to realizing that I’ve been playing Final Fantasy for 34 years.
Going into this year, I knew this was going to be the way of things. I knew that, for all the new games, 2023 was going to be saturated with new offerings from franchises nearly as old as me. That the first games I played and the games that hit at crucial later milestones in my life, were getting sequels, or spiritual successors, or reboots.
So I did what any beleaguered young woman who spent 40 years staring at glowing rectangles and burning her candle at both ends would do. I looked to the past and played games that were the progenitors to this year’s releases, both in anticipation of, and sometimes in response to them.
And here are the seven best of the games I played revisited this year.
7. Diablo
There are purer distillations of the dungeon crawler roguelike for sure. And yes, the one everyone has big nostalgia for is the second one which dropped when they were in high school or perhaps college. But for me, it has to be the original Diablo. When I pre-gamed Diablo in anticipation of reviewing Diablo IV this year, I didn’t anticipate becoming the progenitor of a meme format, but here we are. This is simply one of the most elemental, primal, and elegant game designs. A town, a man, a dungeon. When they teach you the primary literary conflicts in school they should teach this alongside it. What makes Diablo work is its commitment to specific aesthetics. The murky gloom of VGA is bolstered by Matt Uelmen’s soundtrack that flits between My Bloody Valentine, early Cocteau Twins, and lost Love & Rockets 4-track demos recorded on a week-long bender as produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Imagine packing all that into just six tracks? “Tristram” is an all-time hub song, rivaling even “Majula.” And who could forget Wirt the Peg-legged Boy? Everything you need from Diablo is right there buried in the ridiculous typeface that launched a thousand AIM Away Messages.
6. Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner
I’ll be real with you. I love Armored Core. I love Mechwarrior. I love Virtual-On. I fucking owned the Steel Battalion with the controller. I have big opinions about mech games. I have complex and layered thoughts about every game in the Armored Core franchise that I’ve played. So it’s with all of that history and understanding that I say to you…Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner might be the greatest mech game ever made.
While leading up to Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, I only played Ace Combat 6. It was at the tail end of my time reviewing it that I finally played through the HD remaster of Zone of the Enders 2—just to revisit it for the first time in several console generations.
I honestly couldn’t tell you which one goes harder, but once you push aside the paint-by-numbers post-Gundam Wing anime plot, Ken Marinaris’s absurd torpedo boobs, and Kojima flexing his Kojima Bullshit with Col. Ridley ‘Nohman’ Hardiman. What’s left is a streamlined action game with extremely cool robots, a flexible and enthusiastic special weapons system, and melee combat that rewards motherfucking mech-on-mech jujitsu at breakneck speeds.
5. Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within
The ’90s was a beautiful time for supernatural drama: Twin Peaks, Forever Knight, The X-Files and Millennium, and who could forget Shari Belafonte’s turn as an academic parapsychologist in Beyond Reality? It was in this world that writer and game designer Jane Jensen rose from the rhyming faerie tales of King’s Quest VI and the voice of the predatory lesbian flapper in The Dagger of Amon Ra to give us the gift of Gabriel Knight—a despicable man, a failed writer, and one of God’s chosen soldiers against an endless supernatural onslaught.
Writers in any genre love writing about struggling writers. Sexy, sweaty, struggling writers. Writers who care about the craft so much they shoot themselves in the feet routinely so they can stare extra longingly at a blank sheet of paper in a vintage typewriter. Writers also love imperiling them, giving them context both as metaphor for their writerly difficulties and as means of motivating both titular character and themselves into divine inspiration to just finish the fucking novel/screenplay/DNC fundraising email they themselves are working on.
Gabriel Knight is struggling with a sequel to his first novel based on his first adventure, the Voodoo Murders (which found him necking with and being nearly murdered by the Queen of New Orleans, and discovering he was the heir to a broke-as-fuck dynasty of Catholic demon hunters from Germany) as explored in 1994’s The Sins of the Fathers when he is swept off from his family’s castle to Munich to investigate a werewolf killing that quickly spirals into a a major conspiracy of elite German men in a secret “hunting” club for gentlemen (it’s absolutely a sex thing).
The Beast Within is a dazzling, sometimes obtuse, melodrama that plays out in a digital shadowbox of low resolution scanned photography that has been aggressively processed into JPEGs so surreal they’re the stuff of proto-creepypasta. Of course this is bolstered FMV clips that trigger at the most random times with indeterminate lengths. The acting is often absurd, sometimes there is cinematography (sometimes.), and the audio recording is all over the place (some having been recorded over telephone), but my god, did people believe in this game. There is love and attempts at craft and the maximal execution of the ’90s FMV aesthetic. Every beat feels like it was ripped directly from ’90s TV without even 1/10th the budget of a Canadian supernatural drama series, which is not only appropriate but in 2023 leads the game to feeling even more surreal than the first time I encountered it. The Beast Within is ultimately about desire and relationships and responsibilities. It’s not even cryptically gay. It’s dicks out for Gabe/The Baron from the drop. And everything about their swirling and doomed Teutonic-EvPsych-Manlove relationship makes all the terrible mazes and circuitous dialogue flag triggering worth it. If only they let Grace and Gerde spin up their tempestuous contempt for each other into scorchingly sapphic supernatural investigations of their own. But I guess we have to save something for the fanfic writers.
4. Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation
I still remember the first time I watched the trailer for Ace Combat 6. I had dabbled in the franchise here and there, having a fondness for arcade-style dogfighting games ever since the cruelty of Konami’s Top Gun for the NES and the ample delights of After Burner in the arcade. But when that trailer dropped? I was fully bought in. From the second a staticky voice said “They took out the King’s Bridge!” as Keiki Kobayashi’s “The Liberation of Gracemeria” played, Ace Combat 6 had become why I had fought with multiple failed Xbox 360s. It all came down to this, the day Ace Combat slid right alongside Armored Core and said “Sup, girl?” in my heart.
When Zone of the Enders 2 came out, I invited my father back up to my apartment after our semi-weekly brunch. He had, by this point, gone around the bend of being a videogame hater for most of my life and, just as my star was beginning to wane, he was gamer maxing. Of course, he was fully a Dad about it. Il-2 Sturmovik, Modern Warfare, Age of Empires. Once I had to have a neighbor take me to the ER after I’d sliced the bottom half of my thumb off and couldn’t get hold of him because he was using his one phone line to play multiplayer Red Baron. Also, he was a graphics obsessed, hardware enthusiast, PC only sicko. Truly the worst gaming tendencies that emerged entirely from lurking on forums. So, if I was going to show a game to my dad in an emotional bid for connection, it had to look sick, it had to be sick, and it had to be on some Epic Dad Shit.
He loved it. I loved it. We played through half of the missions on a Sunday afternoon on the hand-me-down couch he gave me in my cramped student apartment.
Ace Combat 6 is a refinement of the gameplay from all the games before it. There’s nothing new to the formula really. The special sauce was always there. Six brings with it the continuation of the saga of Strangereal and the perpetually warring nations. Estovakia (previously decimated by a meteor and plunged into civil war and then taken over by a military junta) invades the nearby prosperous country of Emmeria. Along the way there’s an Estovakian medical student looking for her lost boyfriend, a mother looking for her daughter, a former pilot with a leg that keeps him from flying, and a rebellion of children. It’s treacly, absurd, too much and not enough, and not a single character gets through the cutscenes without saying “go dance with an angel” (don’t believe IGN’s lies, this is perfect and exactly how it should be).
Sure, the narrative may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the flying? The flying is the best you can get on the XBox (give us After Burner: Climax, I’m begging you). With a more balanced plane roster than Ace Combat 7 and with mission structures that branch mid-mission based on which objectives you pursue, Ace Combat 6 still feels every bit as fresh as the day it came out. Okay, the cutscenes definitely look and feel of their era, but that’s definitely part of the charm now.
3. Final Fantasy XV
36 years ago 4 Warriors of Light set out from the town of Cornelia, bearing darkened ORBs, on a wilderness adventure to save the world…
29 years later, Final Fantasy gave us a perfected form of the fantasy adventure road trip with a boy who would be king and his best friends. The fact is, beat for beat, this is a flawless story about a lad embracing his destiny, accepting responsibility in the face of true calamity, saying goodbye. It’s a game that understands “Stand By Me” better than King and Reiner ever did.
It just happens to do all of that in a gap-year adventure in your dad’s convertible BMW 7 series alternating between roadside motels, gas station hovels, campgrounds, and the occasional splurge night in Fantasy Lisbon or Venice. Final Fantasy XV brings it with towns and guys, and commemorates every moment with the Prompto AI photo system—easily the most critical evolution in Final Fantasy (and JRPGs) in twenty years.
Final Fantasy XV is so special because for as arch and grand it’s narrative of saving the universe from a relentless terror, and facing the bigness of being a grown up with responsibilities, it spends the majority of its resources and time on the small details of life—food, friends, going for a walk, taking photos with your squad. It’s all the Slice of Life bits we love to share on anime Twitter, coupled with the classic Final Fantasy Melodrama, but it’s an impeccably mature handling of all of it.
Even if it’s not in my personal Top 3 in the franchise, this might be as close to perfection as Final Fantasy gets, and if you don’t believe me play it, and if you already did, rewatch the after credits sequence. I’m telling you, it’s a perfect Final Fantasy.
2. Flower, Sun, and Rain
Sam Lake really wants you to know just how much he loves Twin Peaks. He will smother your face in a Cherry Pie from Twede’s Cafe while singing “Falling” at you until you appreciate his love for Twin Peaks.
I can’t blame him. I, too, love Twin Peaks. And you know who also loves Twin Peaks? Killer7 and No More Heroes creator Goichi Suda.
Suda51’s loosely connected sequel to the premillennial anxiety-laden visual novel The Silver Case is brighter, weirder, and far more experimental than its precursor. With a cast of weirdos, nerds, and freaks, the game tasks players with guiding professional “searcher” Sumio Mondo with solving quirky puzzles on a Micronesian resort island seemingly stuck in a Groundhog Day scenario with a bomb-happy terrorist on the loose. This is the first game in years where reading the manual was almost as rewarding as playing the game (and it’s crucial to playing the game in that literally every answer to every puzzle is spelled out in its fake tourist brochure pages). If you want to play a weird, quirky game with a twisting, metatextual narrative and inventive mechanics, and no combat, Suda51 has you here.
To delve too deeply into Flower, Sun, and Rain is to give up its beautiful secrets, and I want to save the charms for you. Suffice to say, there’s an absolutely unhinged chiptune arrangement of “Rhapsody in Blue” and at one point you’ll hack the moon, and it won’t even be the most outrageous thing in that chapter.
1. Shenmue
When Shenmue debuted 23 years ago, with a combined production and marketing cost of 70 million dollars, it was the most expensive game ever made. Critics praised its audacity, uniqueness, and innovation. Webcomics were made. Forum posts were made. Awards were given, and history was set.
Grand Theft Auto, Yakuza, even Final Fantasy (among countless others) would all draw from ideas fully laid down by Yu Suzuki in Shenmue. Just as Shenmue doesn’t exist without The Portopia Serial Murder Case, modern gaming doesn’t exist without Shenmue. And while every one of them has their own take on how to include open world, slice of life content in their games with varying degrees of friction, refinement, and mind-bogglingly colossal budgets.
I wasn’t sure Shenmue would hold up, especially given the critical consensus the last time it got remastered. But playing through it with Abnormal Mapping this year made one thing clear. Even where it is rough, this is one of the greatest games of all time.
Shenmue is Shenmue. And for all the talk about it’s wackiness in collecting gashapon toys, drinking thousands of sodas from vending machines, or spending hours playing a port of Space Harrier inside an arcade, Shenmue‘s power is that it contains all of that inside a wonderful, sad, and simple story about making choices in life. There’s a world where Ryo stays at home, works as a forklift driver, marries Nozomi and co-manages a Dojo with Fuku-san. He’s happy and content. He doesn’t need to chase down his father’s murderer, find sailors, or get involved in a mystic quest that will never be finished because revenge is slow and tedious. But the Ryo Hazuki we have to contend with has outgrown his town and his friends and family. Shenmue is the full breadth of sadness and trepidation in this revelation. Where other games work tirelessly to file down the rough edges, knock over invisible walls, and expand the range of expression (I fully admit to being a die-hard advocate for the gustatory experiences that Yakuza brings), Shenmue revels in these palpable marks of handcrafting.
Dia Lacina is a queer indigenous writer and photographer. She tweets too much at @dialacina.