I've decided to keep track of games I've finished in 2026. I find I'm having to be more thoughtful about my gaming with a small child. It changes what I can play and when.
Dispatch
I picked Dispatch up for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was a small, narrative game I could play on a handheld as and when the opportunity arose. Secondly was the involvement of Critical Role talent which I took as a bit of a seal of quality.
The game isn't perfect by any stretch but I found it entertaining and engaging. Sadly, in terms of the game play, the voice cast is the standout feature of the game.
Clair Obscur Expedition 33
From a small narrative game to a big narrative game. Expedition 33 is, simply, very French. Which is not an insult, I promise. It is simply not the product of American, British or Japanese game studios that are so very common. And, admittedly, mines, striped black and white turtlenecks and the Eiffel Tower push the Frenchness just a liiitle towards the realm of self parody but why not?
I clocked a lot of what this game was doing very early when I turned to my partner and said "Well this one's going to be entirely about grief, then." I laid out my expectations for who The Paintress, the villain literally looming over so much of the game, would turn out to be. Her motives. The surprise reveal of her non-villainous intent... and I was maybe 70% right.
The characters here are captivating. I mean not just the human members of your party, but stranger and more interesting companions like Esquie and Monoco really stand out. Especially when it's finally revealed why they are the way they are.
This was a big commitment with the kind of gaming hours I have available to me now and I probably wouldn't have made it through if I hadn't been able to break the back of it on a business trip with my Steam Deck in my luggage.
Pokemon Emerald
The tonal shifts aren't stopping, I'm afraid.
Last year I rolled credits on a Kanto region Pokemon game for the first time in my life with FireRed. Emerald was the obvious next step.
I started out with the GBA games because going back to actual GameBoy graphics was not something I wanted to do but... well, more on that later.
It's Pokemon. Not a lot more to say on that. I'm currently working through Diamond as my next Pokemon adventure and I do intend to work through them all and catch up on the games in the franchise I bounced off of or missed over the years.
Super Mario Land
So remember that thing I said about not wanting to go back to GameBoy graphics?
That changed.
So much so that I picked up a TimUI Brick to have something closer to the GameBoy experience and am currently playing Pokemon Yellow and Link's Awakening DX on it.
This thing is far from my most powerful gaming device but it really, really brings back that GameBoy vibe and it's small enough to just live in my pocket.
I expect more GameBoy / GameBoy Color era games to go on this list.
As for Super Mario Land itself, well, I have played this game literally countless times. When you're young and you own a console you don't own every game. You own a few games. And you play those games into the ground. I never beat it though. I got to the final boss a handful of times but I never beat it.
Now I have.
I am free.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
More so than my TrimUI Brick and more so even than my PC the majority of this year's gaming has been done on an AYN Thor.
I love this thing. It's a dual screen device running Android 13. As such it supports a broad range of emulators and frontend software that gives it a real console-like feel and gives me access to high quality emulation of platforms up to and beyond the Playstation 2. It can even do some decent emulation of the forbidden console. And light PC gaming too (some of my Dispatch gameplay was played on this thing).
But, mostly, it has two goddamn screens! I owned a DS and a 3DS and they may be my favourite handhelds ever made. True, the Thor doesn't have the 3d display of the 3DS or a camera, which limits what you can play ever so slightly, but it still lets you experience dual screen emulation the way it's meant to be played. That's why Ace Attorney was the NDS version. And I'm about to finish Justice For All very, very soon. Professor Layton and the Curious Village will be on this list shortly as well. And Pokemon Diamond as I already mentioned. Yeah, I'm having a dual screen renaissance and it's great.
As for Ace Attorney? I missed these games the first time around and osmosed everything I know about them through memes. So many memes.
Now I'm playing them I have to admit they're really fun. The two biggest flaws are almost cardinal opposites of each other.
- You have already figured out the twist but don't have the precise sequence of bits and pieces to present to put together the story you have worked out in your head.
- You have no idea what is going on and are reduced to LucasArts levels of combine X with Y until problem goes away.
Both kind of to be expected with the mechanics of the game, sadly and neither is enough to actually kill the fun. I knew the characters were over the top but what I didn't know was how little of the meme culture was exaggerating. It really do be like that, huh?
And the localisation, setting the game in a weird version of America that also has the Japanese legal system, a preponderance of Samurai TV shows, noodles everywhere and shrine villages is ... a lot to deal with? But it feels like they know how ridiculous what they're doing is and lean in to it so I'm just going to go with it.
Phoenix Wright: Justice For All
So funny thing, I genuinely expected Persona 3 to be the next up on this list but it turns out I'm not quite as close to the finish line on that one as I'd thought and closer to the finish on Justice For All than I'd anticipated.
I have to admit I'm really enjoying the Phoenix Wright games and this one just took everything I said about the first game above an amplifies it. The last case especially really goes some places huh?
Oh and speaking of that last case the shipping between Nick and Miles went from 'sure, that makes sense' to 'oooohhhhh. yeah. for sure. 100%'
Pokemon Yellow
Told you there'd be more old school gameboy (color) games on the list.
Man, I'm not sure which was the better quality of life upgrade in The Pokémon franchise, running shoes or a town map with a cursor you can actually move in a direction of your choice, but the absence of both hurt.
Luckily having beaten Fire Red not so long ago I was able to mostly speed run Yellow.
I enjoyed that this was clearly Pokemon: Fan Service Edition. Between Pikachu, Jesse and James getting Koffing, Meowth and Ekans and the gym leader Pokemon lineups all being a bit more anime friendly.
1000xResist
Somehow in 2024 I overlooked the release of 1000xResist. It wasn't until the forthcoming Prove You're Human was described as from the creators of 1000xResist that I went and looked at it again. I'm glad I did! It turns out that this is very much up my alley. Before I say why though let me just drop this:
Worse graphics is not intended to be disparaging here, the graphics fondly remind me of the PS2 or OG Xbox era but in a modern resolution and they more than do the job demanded of them.
Everything is readable and stylised. In some ways the graphics lend themselves to the sterile enclosed environment the game is set in. They certainly don't detract from the experience.
To be clear I can spend 50+ hours playing a new GTA game and come away thinking 'yup that sure was another GTA game' but I play 7 hours of 1000xResist and I come away thinking about intergenerational trauma, how we define ourselves against internal vs external sources of both validation and criticism, how human beings create systems of power and consistently embed oppression into governance, especially how a successful revolution is likely to create an extremist regime that will engender another revolution, about isolation with specific reference to the quarantine period of COVID19, about social isolation outside of an external factor like COVID19, about racial stereotyping and treating people as an indistinguishable mass of similar entities, about identity and role, how someone determines worth in society, about the nature of memory and its reliability, and with a burning desire to learn more about the 1999 Hong Kong protests.
So... yeah. Definitely spoke to me.
Gameplay wise it's a walking simulator (complimentary) with extremely mild puzzle elements. I didn't feel challenged (by the gameplay) at any point. Which is why I think seven hours is a perfect amount of time to not overstay its welcome.
Persona 3
Spoilers for a 20 year old game will follow.
So this was a big one, I've been making my way through Persona 3 for a good long time now. Nearly a year! Parenting a child has definitely interrupted the amount of time I have to sit and play a game that has as much going on as this one but I finally finished.
And found out that apparently there are people who were surprised or disappointed that the protagonist dies at the end? Uhm... were we playing the same game? So Persona 3 is all about time. Immediately it's apparent that it's time management. You have to build multiple friendships while also working on yourself while also paying attention to your studies while also clearing Tartarus all juggled around a schedule of school trips and exams that eat away at that available time.
Then it becomes increasingly clear it isn't just time management it's making the most of the time you have left. That theme of finite time is clear over and over again in Persona 3. From the fact that every day ends in a literal timeline progressing in front of your eyes making you endlessly aware of the irrevocable passage of time to the recurrent themes of running out of time.
We have to make the most use of our time left because...
- Exams are coming
- The season will change soon
- This school trip / holiday will be over soon
- The seniors will graduate and move on with their lives
- We risk our lives daily and never know when the end is coming
- Oh shit we DO know when the end is coming!
And as the story progresses and you find out that the child that visits you in the dark hour is literally death and that death lives inside you because Aigis used you as a vessel to contain him a decade ago...
Really? There are people who are surprised you die at the end of this game? This game where you feel like you're on borrowed time from moment one and there is so much focus on the importance of the social bonds you form with people around you?
OK.
Anyway...
The cast of characters are, for the most part, great. A little on-the-nose anime but that is hardly surprising. It has a lot more in common with Neon Genesis Evangelion than I was expecting.
What I knew (or thought I knew) about Persona 3 going in: Social sim and dungeon crawler, so edgy it'll cut you, fan-service.
What I discovered as I played: Not as edgy as I thought, but still edgy. Not as fan-servicey as I thought (though it looks like that gets increasingly true in later games). Parallels NGE in: child soldiers forced to fight against a sequence of progressively more challenging supernatural invaders, the corruption of the organisation forcing the children to fight, parent issues, especially daddy issues, one of the supernatural invaders being a friend that pops up and hangs out with the children towards the end, the threat of the end of everything and everyone, spiritual imagery, weird-ass enemy designs, weird sexualisation of fragile girls in hospital beds, hormones.
Having played it I do totally get why this franchise is as popular as it is but it is so grindy. Re-running Tartarus over and over again for supplies and XP gets tedious quickly. Thank god the designers were so liberal with the range of enemy and persona designs so at least what you're fighting and your skill set change often enough to keep things at least a little fresh.
So grinding is one of my complaints. My other and much larger complaint is that the game dares force me to wait so long to romance Mitsuru?
Baldur's Gate 3
Not a lot to say about this one. It wasn't my first time playing the game. It won't be my last.
This run was playing as the Karlach origin, because that was the only way I could think of to do something other than romance Karlach again. She's a lot of fun as an origin character and it makes the Gortash fight really cathartic.
Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Another one from the pile of games I played when they first came out but never beat. This is another one I played because of the Thor's dual screen format.
And now I've beaten the game and I know the secret of St Mystere.
What.
The.
Fuck.
Can't say I was expecting that.
Anyway, for the unaware, the Layton games are puzzle games with a framing element of the professor and his protégé Luke travelling around solving mysteries. There's animated sequences and a lot of point and click type exploring and conversation as the story unfolds. It's all quite linear and the focus is very much on the puzzles which vary from obvious gotcha type puzzles that you'll have seen before and sliding block puzzles though to incomplete information logic puzzles and maths problems.
Not a bad game to have on the back burner for when you have a few minutes, you can knock out a puzzle or two and come back to it later confident that you'll never really get too lost having forgotten what your objective was.
Pokemon Platinum
And another Pokemon League championship has been acquired.
I have to say every time I play a Pokemon game I'm struck by how the cute animal-collecting trading card game made fantasy game for kids ends up with world-ending stakes as psychopaths abuse ancient beings to try and end or cataclysmically alter the world.
Did Pokemon create doomerism?
Anyway, onto Heart Gold or Soul Silver. Not sure which yet.
Final Fantasy VII
Spoilers for a 30 year old game throughout.
Alright, the big one. My views on this one have been public knowledge for many years now. In short I was never keen on JRPGs growing up and found Final Fantasy VII to be quite inaccessible the few times I tried to play it over the years. Frequently I'd bounce off the game before even blowing up reactor 1, let alone leaving Midgar. I'm on record as saying it is a technically impressive game and I understand why it has a fandom but that I personally consider it to be overrated. Which is quite a statement when you've never played it.
Well, now I've played it. So the big question is do I still think it's overrated?
Promise to keep reading.
Yes. I do.
OK if you haven't closed the tab, let's continue with the next big question. Was it as bad as I thought?
Not at all. Being overrated when so many people think of it as the finest game ever crafted by mortal hands leaves a lot of room for being an excellent game whilst still being overrated. And it is excellent.
In terms of the graphics this is a mixed bag. The blocky character models are absolutely fine. This game is a peer of Tomb Raider's famous triangular breasts in terms of early 3d graphics, after all. That said I sometimes find the attempt to add a sense of depth to the pre-rendered backdrops is poorly done leaving the path way through a screen very unclear. What is a pillar you can go behind or what is a trench between two raised areas you can traverse is unclear. This is in fact what kicked me off a lot of my early playthroughs. I understand why they did it this way, the pre-rendering lets them put far more fidelity into the image than any attempt at doing a realtime 3d environment like Tomb Raider or Mario 64. Though I must admit I think the highly stylised graphics of Mario 64 have aged far better.
The music slaps. That's it, nothing more to say on that one.
The gameplay is... something I've grown a greater tolerance for. Don't get me wrong the game is hugely grindy and I resent that. It's full of busy work that I don't love either. I get that for people who played this as kids and wanted to inhabit the world having the opportunity to spend so much time catching and training chocobos, playing in the casino, exploring the islands and defending Fort Condor were all wonderful ways to prolong your stay. For me they got in the way of the story. Thank GOD they were largely optional. The grinding, however, is pretty mandatory. And I hate random encounters on the world map. In any game, that's not just a Final Fantasy thing, it's a mechanic I despise. Let me choose when I want to farm and when I want to explore, please. It feels like disrespecting my time.
Now, let's talk characters and narrative.
You might not believe me when I tell you how unspoiled I was going into this game. It's one of the most famous games ever made and I've had 30 years to stumble across spoilers. Thing is it turns out if you're not interested in the game you avoid spoilers relatively easily. Let me detail everything I knew about Final Fantasy VII before sitting down to play.
- Everything up to just after destroying the first Mako reactor.
- Aeris dies.
- Who Sephiroth is. But not what he is.
- I had heard of Cait Sith but didn't know they were from FFVII
- I knew what a Chocobo is and that they were in this game.
That's... honestly that really was the extent of my knowledge of the plot. So this was about as fresh for me as it can be.
So I want to take a moment to think about Final Fantasy VII's peers. Not Tomb Raider or Dark Forces but narrative games of the same vintage. The two that come to mind are Fallout and Blade Runner.
I adore both these games. They were the things I was playing in 1997 that made it so easy for me to skip Final Fantasy VII. I'm not sure I need to go too in depth on the plot of Fallout do I? I mean it's spawned an Amazon Prime show now, it's kind of broken containment. The writing is grim, satirical, hilarious and enjoyable throughout. Blade Runner is a fascinating game in that the order in which you do things really does lead to missing out as events will happen elsewhere, off screen, no matter what you do. So you can have a few very different experiences replaying the same game. Not to mention it's taking heavy influence from what is still to this day my favourite movie of all time. But it is taking heavy influence. I can't rate it on originality.
Blade Runner, though, is short. It's probably a 10 hour game. Good thing it has replay value! Fallout a little longer. You can probably expect to beat it in 15 to 20 hours. They're also both relatively straightforward. They're genre fiction and they're telling you the story you want and expect them to. Sating an appetite.
Final Fantasy, even without the grind, is probably 30 hours minimum? 40 maybe? And it's trying to do a lot narratively in that time. So yes I agree that the Final Fantasy VII story is one of the best narratives of its' era and very likely deserves its reputation for influencing a generation of video game story tellers. I also find it satisfying that if you wait for the post credit scene the rewilded Midgar really feels like you took the very, very long way around but did finally achieve AVALANCHE's goals which brings the game nicely full circle.
The narrative escalates throughout and it is admittedly kind of fun to wonder how they're next going to raise the stakes.
But let's get to what I suspect is my hot take if I have a hot take.
In an alternate 90s game industry that wasn't influenced so heavily by sexism we could have had a better version of Final Fantasy VII where Tifa Lockhart was the main character.
The tl;dr; for anyone who (like me before this play through) has managed to avoid knowing much about Final Fantasy VII.
The protagonist of Final Fantasy VII is Cloud, a suitably stereotypically spiky-haired anime protagonist man. He's mysterious, he's strong, he has a dark past and he's leaving it behind, events are making him turn to doing good. Yeah he's pretty standard RPG hero fare. At first.
I'll grant that they make Cloud interesting and slow play the reveals of the multiple ways in which he's an unreliable witness to the events of his own life and the way they play his loss of agency and helping Sephiroth at a key moment in the narrative is well done. I don't dislike Cloud as a character at all. Which is just the point I'm making. I don't dislike him as a character. As a protagonist? I think a lot of those things play against it. It's hard to invest in the distrust that the game is trying to wrap around him at various points as his secrets are revealed because he is the player's point of view character so you attach yourself to him and find it hard to acknowledge the possibility of him being a villain. This can work great if you actually subvert that reaction (Revan) but when he is going to come through as the hero by the end you're just gutting the emotion of the mystery.
Tifa Lockhart is Cloud's childhood friend who, at the start of the game, has only recently reconnected with him after several years' absence as Cloud left to join SOLDIER, the elite military force of Shinra, the megacorporation that take the role of the first antagonist of the game. It isn't until much, much later in the game that it becomes clear that she has known from the beginning that the story Cloud is telling about his past does not align with her memories of him. In fact one of the reasons she's even brought him into the AVALANCHE mission as a mercenary is to keep an eye on him and study him further.
If the main protagonist of the game were Tifa we could have been playing with those doubts from the first moment of the game. Side conversations with Barret about your fears and concerns. Internal monologue about the inconsistency in Cloud's story. These doubts and fears would have made Cloud's 'betrayal' when he's forced to assist Sephiroth an even greater shock, the trust actually taking time to rebuild afterwards as opposed to putting the player immediately on Cloud's side by making it clear he had no choice.
One of the most compelling scenes in the game, for me, is when Tifa and a catatonic Cloud are trapped in the Lifestream and Tifa is working with Cloud's inner self to reconstruct who he actually is. If the game had let the doubts be genuine doubts, let Tifa's fear that he might not be her childhood friend any more or simply that he was consciously lying to them for nefarious reasons, then this moment would have been a wonderful resolution of a long arc of mystery and mistrust. We would come out the other side with Tifa finally trusting her old childhood friend, finally reassured she can trust him and ready to stand with him in what's to come.
I feel sad that we were denied that version of the story.
Mind you I also think Barret is a much more interesting character than Cloud as well while we're at it so what do I know?
So that's my finished games so far. More to come on this one as I have a lot of games in progress and quite a few of them are very, very close to the finish line.