The End of Bobo Pony

You’re flying now

You see things much more clear than from the ground

It’s all okay, it would be

Were you not now halfway down

Bojack is over. After the crazy 6-season ride, we got our final 8 episodes on January 31st 2020. As you can tell by the date of this post, I didn’t have any initial thoughts - or rather, I did, but I wasn’t jumping to share them with the world. It was a long, drawn out story and it actually feels good to finally put it to rest. Maybe the decision to split this season into two halves helped? The first part built the tension and left us hanging at one of the most suspenseful moments for the series, and then asked us to wait 3 months before finally diffusing it. And that last part has thrown everything it could at us - relapse, redemption, reflection, restarts, literally everything that could go wrong for Bojack did. Meanwhile, his friends slowly started to push their own respective boulders up the hill, proving that it can be done, but leaving their horsefriend behind as a result.

Ending on the 6th season seemed like a good call. The show was in a really good place at this point, hasn’t overstayed its welcome quite yet, but it felt like it already said everything it needed to, and all that remained was to write the closing chapter. But here’s the thing - one of the series’ stronger themes was that real life isn’t like TV, it doesn’t follow storytelling rules, you can’t expect to find meaning or closure in everything. While the show still tried to weave an interesting narrative as a work of fiction, it consistently broke through dramatic structures and subverted the expected tropes to support that message. So you just had to wonder - what would be a proper finish to the Bojack Horseman story? Is there any way it could be satisfying in the classic storytelling sense while staying true to the aforementioned motif?

[Spoiler Warning: I’m gonna talk about a lot of the events from the second half of the season rather specifically, including the last two episodes.]

Top 20 Albums of 2019

According to albumoftheyear.org catalogue, there were over 17.000 EPs and LPs released last year. Out of these, I’ve listened to a laughably small sample size of 300 records. And I’m pretty sure this is the highest number I’ll ever get to for any single year - it was way, way, way too many albums. I managed a good pace until around June, monitoring new releases and checking them out as they came, but then I kinda burned out and wanted to spend more of my listening time on favorites and exploring various artists and genres, and before I noticed it was December and I was binging entries from end-of-year lists to catch up on the last 6 months (as well as stuff that flew under my radar before). And for a long time it seemed like for every album I’d file away, I’d discover two new ones I was interested in.

Spring 2020 anime impressions

As a fair-weather seasonal anime viewer who usually only checks out a few entries here and there, I was suprised to see just how many interesting offerings this Spring had for me. And even after my most anticipated series such as Oregairu or Digimon Adventure: started getting indefinitely delayed thanks to our friend COVID-19, there were still shows abound for me to pick and choose from. I’ve dropped quite a few of them very early, and I still ended with 10 offerings that are way above average of what I’m used to in at least some aspect. I won’t write about the ones I dropped because I don’t think there’s any point in me talking down something that others might be enjoying - instead I want to focus on spreading the good word about just how many joyful shows this crunched industry was able to entertain me with. And to pique your interest a tiny bit, I’m gonna order them ascendingly in just how much I like them, meaning that my top recommendation is awaiting you at the end. And now let’s start with…

[GO10s] #1: Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3

Traditionally, whenever I considered making a top games list, I would ask myself “how do I rank these multiplayer games which I’ve put hundreds or thousands of hours into, where my experience depended on how good I was, who I was playing with, and other community circumstances, rather than just the game itself?” I couldn’t come up with a good answer - I felt like I viewed those competitive titles just completely differently from anything single-player-focused at this point. Not as works of art (or entertainment), but as playing fields, the same way I never thought whether Basketball or Football is a better designed game, I just played whichever one I had the best opportunity to, and I tried my best at it. That’s kind of the thing - when you intentionally try to break the game to get the biggest advantage over your opponent, it’s hard to say whether the manner in which you’re able to do it is “good” or “bad”, I’m thinking in terms of “does it help me win”, not “do I enjoy this”.

The last part is especially crucial when it comes to fighting games in particular, because by design, there are periods of the game you will not enjoy. As the enemy scores a knockdown or otherwise locks you down in their flurry of offense, your gameplay is often limited to testing your reaction time and prediction ability, and if you succeed, then the reward will often be just the return to neutral state, not scoring any “victory points” or gaining any advantage, just denying the opponent theirs. I think Pat Miller put it right when he said that your goal as a fighting game player is to make the game as unpleasant to your opponent as possible, and it’s a tug-of-war where players try to snatch the fun away from one another. As such, your mileage will absolutely vary based on the pool of competitors available to you, your own talent, experience, and willingness to work at getting better.

But in recent years I’ve had plenty of opportunity to look for words to describe what I think makes one fighting game “better” than another, as titles such as Street Fighter V and DragonBall FighterZ have thoroughly disappointed me. It really didn’t feel like matter of personal preference at this point, but of design choices that, in my opinion, significantly reduced the gameplay complexity in crucial areas, allowing for less diversity of playstyles and focusing on just the superficial flair, when the genre’s history is full of titles that were able to achieve both. And one example of such is what I now realize has been my favorite game for many years now, 2011’s Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3.

[GO10s] #2: Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

Ah, here it is, I finally did it - the cardinal sin of arbitrarily deciding to put only one entry out of the series on the list, when if I were to be true to my feelings, then I would probably bump the bottom 2 and just put the three Danganronpa games on #2-#4 spots. But I can’t help it, I just don’t think that would look well - so Danganronpa 2 and V3 get the shaft, and my favorite of the series, the original “Trigger Happy Havoc”, gets the glory of being my second favorite game of the decade.

Danganronpa seems to be the third visual novel-ish series that broke outside the constraints of the genre’s niche audience, at least here in the west. Just like Ace Attorney and Zero Escape, it features other gameplay elements than just making choose-your-adventure selections, which I bet is the actual biggest reason for why people would even check it out. But weirdly enough, it shares a lot more with the previous two series - investigations and court trials from Phoenix Wright’s adventures, and the premise of life-and-death games in enclosed areas, unsure of what the world outside of their confines is like, very much in spirit of 999. However, it’s completely different tonally from the other two, and in fact, it’s quite unlike anything else I know.

[GO10s] #3: The Last Guardian

With most of the games on this list, I initially got into them either excited, or at least with no preconceptions. That would be very hard for The Last Guardian, a game surrounded by controversy, polarizing reviews and near-universal agreement that one of the major functions of the game, commanding your animal companion, is bad, and if anything, the game succeeds despite it, not thanks to. However, a friend’s praises towards it made me decide to check it out for myself, and with each passing minute it became more and more clear that I’m playing an absolute masterpiece.

So this will be a short entry because I already wrote about this game once and I definitely stand up by everything I’ve said back then.

[GO10s] #4: The Last Of Us

Lost Legacy might be the closest entry in the series to recapture Uncharted 2’s lighting in the bottle, but there’s no doubt in my mind that The Last of Us is the best Naughty Dog game of the decade. It’s interesting to see a lineage in their entire studio history - starting with pure platforming games, introducing more action-adventure elements into the Jak series, then focusing on that in Uncharted, and finally cutting back on the large, bombastic action, and giving us a less athletic protagonist who can’t climb and jump quite like Drake, in order to tell a more solemn and human story. And boy did “less is more” work here.

[GO10s] #5: Celeste

Here’s an embarrassing confession - I don’t think I really like difficult, challenging games. Of course this is a subjective topic, I’m sure that some of the games I would consider “easy” are impenetrable for others and vice versa. But I certainly don’t feel the compulsion to finish every game I start, to beat any challenge put in front of me. After too many attempts where I feel like I’ve made no progress, I will give up. And even if I manage to succeed before my patience runs out, I rarely feel satisfied. The type of relief I get from that isn’t particularly enjoyable, I don’t intrinsically feel pride for overcoming an obstacle without proper context. At the same time, I always make sure that the games I play are sufficiently difficult, that they keep me on my toes and actually test my abilities, otherwise I rarely feel a sense of purpose in playing anything. It’s a weird middle ground I find myself in and I sometimes wonder just how much my gaming experiences differ from others because of it.

But one thing I know for sure is that I’m not the target masocore audience - I just don’t feel the type of compulsion and satisfaction they are supposed to elicit. I’m one of those weirdos that think Super Meat Boy is a pretty bad game, I never really enjoyed any of the Mario romhacks I’ve tried, and I don’t even enjoy watching playthroughs of I Wanna Be The Guy-likes, let alone playing any. And part of what makes Celeste so great is that despite the superficial similarities, it’s nothing like those games.

[GO10s] #6: The Talos Principle

There’s something about the existence of The Talos Principle that just brings a smile to my face. Maybe because of how ambitious and well executed it is? Maybe it’s the snob in me that is proud of appreciating a game that, despite it’s quality and high scores, doesn’t get brought up all that often (a quick look at 2014 game of the year lists where it’s nowhere to be found should be quite telling, even if some of it can be chalked up to its middle-of-December release date). Maybe I just really like the game.

In any case, here’s another first person puzzle game created by a studio most famous for their shooters. But unlike Valve giving out early signs that they might be interested in something like this with gravity gun hijinks in Half-Life 2, TTP came completely out of left field, following the release of three Serious Sam games, which themselves were traditional id-style mayhem. Quite frankly, if it weren’t for the company logo, I wouldn’t believe it’s the same people - not only the genre, but themes and aesthetic are just so completely divorced from their previous creations.

[GO10s] #7: Portal 2

Portal 2 is the second best game in the Portal series, and also the only one of the two that got released this decade.

To be fair, it’d be very hard to outdo the original game, because of how fresh and novel it was. It's been pretty much the first of its kind as far as first-person-puzzle-platformers go, it brought something new to the table with the portal gun, had a very unique setting along with unconventional at-the-time storytelling methods (both with the malfunctioning AI and messages hidden in the “cracks”), then there was the story twist half-way through, and finally, the memes. I think it’s pretty undisputable that Portal made a huge impact on the gaming industry and its audience, and it’s hard for me to imagine how a sequel could ever exceed that.

[GO10s] #8: BanG Dream! Girls Band Party

The following is sponsored by recency bias.

I’ve struggled with finding the right mobile rhythm game for quite some time. Ports of arcade franchises like Jubeat and titles with more experimentative control schemes only made me realize that what I want is a simple Guitar Hero/Betmania style “notes slide down the lanes and you must tap the corresponding button once they reach the bottom”. I didn’t find that many of those - I’ve missed out on Tap Tap series’ existence, and the clones I stumbled upon annoyed me with their freemiumness, song selection and being designed to play with more than two fingers. Rayark games' aesthetic never clicked with me, I’ve enjoyed Voez for a short time, but ultimately the quirky controls proved more frustrating than fun, and once again, it just didn’t offer the kind music I’m into.

But there was one title that got advertised somewhere within my sight, at a local anime convention - and that was BanG Dream. I didn’t immediately jump into it, as the cutesy aesthetics like that usually scare me away, but at least it looked polished enough to stay in the back of my mind and eventually I gave it a try. It took some warming up to get used to all the stars and frills, not to mention interface immediately scaring me away with so many menu options that I didn’t even know where to start, including a gigantic “GACHA” button. But eventually I found my way to the song selection and… Yeah, live bands that play vaguely-rock-adjacent music, I finally felt right at home.

[GO10s] #9: Uncharted: Lost Legacy

Like the majority of the industry in 2009, I thought Uncharted 2 was a revolutionary game that finally merged the techniques known from cinema with what we know about how games work and how players interact with them into something absolutely captivating, immersive and spectacular. The first fully successful translation of action-adventure movies into game format and one of the first admirable implementations of film language into interactive video game sections overall. In terms of camera work, level design and animations, Uncharted 2 broke new grounds that very few developers have been able to reach ever since.

Ten years later, like a decent chunk of developers and critics, I still think Uncharted 2 is one of the best games to be ever made, with undisputable qualities and the ability to check all the marks for all sorts of different types of people with varied preferences. And like a somewhat smaller group of gamers, I have very similar feelings towards the two Uncharted sequels. The ability to repeat the same feats, rekindle the same feelings and create something of mostly on-par quality is enough to earn a place in my heart, not to mention the little experimentations and inventions built on top of the U2 foundation.

But because of smaller novelty, slightly less stellar pacing and lack of a game-changer on par with the U2 train sequence, even I have to admit that I would put these titles slightly lower on my top games lists. And yet after all was said and done, Naughty Dog made one more game, a spin-off with Nathan Drake nowhere in sight, instead focusing on Uncharted 2’s Chloe Frazer and Uncharted 4’s Nadine Ross. Uncharted: Lost Legacy was a title I enjoyed so much that unlike its predecessors, it’s on my Games Of The Decade list.

[GO10s] #10: Rhythm Heaven Megamix

Aaand we’re opening the list with a remaster/repackaging. Decade’s looking great so far!

Jokes aside, my only previous experience with the series was the DS “Rhythm Heaven”, and I haven’t played the Japan-only GBA “Rhythm Tengoku”, nor Wii’s “Rhythm Heaven Fever”, so this entry allowed me to catch up on all the great games I’ve missed. Moreover, Megamix has also added as many new minigames as it borrowed from every previous iteration, not to mention the new “Remixes” (songs where player jumps from minigame to minigame), so I think it has enough new content to merit its placement on lists like these.

So what is this whole Rhythm Heaven series all about? Well I’m glad you’ve asked, perhaps you’ve heard of the somewhat-more-popular WarioWare games? The two series share a lot of staff working on them, have a similar aesthetic, and the core game design isn’t entirely alike either. To be specific, Rhythm Heaven asks you to learn a new rhythm game for every song you’re going to play - you have to acquaintance yourself with a unique set of audio-visual cues, remember how to respond to each of them with inputs, and then you play the song with those mechanics. Variety of settings used for them is endless - from a cat and dog playing badminton while flying planes, through a robot factory, to an animated basketball court shooting hoops. Ultimately all you’re doing is either pressing or holding one or two buttons, the rest is the matter of your sense of rhythm.

[GO10s] Intro and Honorable Mentions

It occurs to me that I’ve never actually written a GOTY list. Sure, I’ve posted my “favorite top5” or something along those lines, but I never wrote a long, thought-through article explaining why 10 particular titles from a given year touched me in a way that others haven’t. On one hand, I enjoy this kind of writing and video games have been my primary hobby for the majority of my life. On the other, in the past few years I’ve often joked about “hating video games” or that “all video games are bad”, which were hyperboles, but with a hint of truth within them - especially in that last decade, I’ve definitely struggled with finding titles I’d enjoy.

Without getting too deep into how my gaming habits changed over time, nowadays I’m someone who gets really bothered by cumbersome UI, has no patience for boring pacing and finds bad controls inexcusable. And with endless backlog and tons of interesting titles available for cheap or free at any given moment, the value of “I already bought this game so I’m getting my money’s worth” is already way below the value of my time. Add the fact that I’ve always been hooked to one or more “game as a service” at a time, and that I’ve never really played many of the games that end up on mainstream GOTY lists, and you can probably see why I didn’t feel like my voice in this space was really all that necessary.