GOTY 2018 - NUMBER FIVE
Video version

Right, this is something of a technicality. The qualifier for getting on one of these lists is that a game couldn’t have been released in Europe before the year it’s contending for. Remasters are the same game, and proper remakes are new games. I know full well that the original Katamari Damacy had never come out in Europe before the Switch “Reroll” release. I read the previews, watched the gameplay videos and begged for it to come over before eventually buying a Japanese copy. The ability to finally honour the game with an entry on a GOTY list feels massively cathartic.

Katamari Damacy is the zenith of what made the PS2’s library so fantastic. It was a time when Japanese publishers just weren’t paying attention. The era of games like Under the Skin, Gregory Horror Show and Kuma Uta. Katamari Damacy is the king of those games (ironically, not Ribbit King). It isn’t just a stupid skin on a well-worn concept; it’s daft to its core. But on top of that is a game idea that’s entirely unique.

If there’s one person in the industry who always has my back, it’s Keita Takahashi. This is a guy who thinks the vast majority of videogames are boring. He likes Balloon Fight and ICO, but pretty much everything else is tired, nasty or not worth paying attention to. Somewhat paradoxically though, he’s the self-titled “video game romantic”. He thinks everything can be a game, and should be a game. One of my favourite periods of his career was when he wasn’t making videogames at all, and instead musing on how pavements could be more fun or how playparks should have special slides for dogs and employees who would ride down them afterwards, dressed in bristly outfits to clean the slides. He’s an oddball artist and inventor who’s only making videogames because he wants to make fun stuff that people all over the world can enjoy. He expects nothing of his audience, but if you’re susceptible to his thinking, you’ll find your way to his stuff.

I’ve loved all his stuff, but Katamari Damacy is the closest thing he’s made to a proper videogame. It’s the only one with clear goals, and is designed in a way that rewards practice and skill. You’re rolling a big ball through open levels, trying to pick up as many objects as you can. As your katamari rolls, it picks up everything smaller it touches, slowly growing with all the clutter. Do that a few dozen times with different goals and time limits and that’s your game. It’s everything it needs to be.

Katamari Damacy’s levels are covered with beautiful, stupid clutter. Statues, wrestlers, islands, stacks of matchboxes, anything. Everything has been modelled and textured to keep in the game’s weird boxy style, contrasting with the big round alien ball that’s crashing into it all. It’s not a game that benefits massively from an HD upscaling, but the additional effort to remaster this game without touching the source assets is greatly appreciated.

The controls are unique, and almost comparable to some of the more eccentric stuff Treasure have came up with, except much more relatable and easy to get your head around. Each analogue stick mimics how The Prince rolls either side of the ball. Two sticks forward to move forward, two stick back to roll back, and variations of back and forth on either stick to turn around. It’s an easy concept to grasp, but there’s great freedom to develop techniques for turning corners of different degrees, or moving at specific speeds. Unfortunately, this is one aspect of the game that doesn’t translate perfectly to the Switch. Ideally, the analogue sticks should be symmetrical on the controller to get a balanced feel for rolling, and that’s something Nintendo’s controllers don’t offer. I know you can get 8bitdo controllers with symmetrical sticks, but I haven’t had the opportunity to try them with the game. It shouldn’t put you off, as the game’s still quite playable as is, but if you’re looking for the definitive release of Katamari Damacy, this is a factor.

I also have to mention the music. I might have to think a little harder before hitting out with this stuff, but Katamari Damacy might be my favourite video game soundtrack. On first listen, it sounds weird and funny, but underneath lies a deep exploration of the game’s core concept and setting. Some of it is frantic and bizarre, but it also presents romantic ideas of being rolled up in a big ball with everything and explores the underlying eroticism of such a surreal concept. It could play as a joke, but it comes across as sincere and celebratory. It’s little wonder to me that Keita Takahashi ended up marrying one of the game’s composers. The music believes in his ideas even more than he does. It’s one of the loveliest things in video games.

For most, Reroll is just about the ability to play a Katamari game on a modern platform. For dedicated European fans of the series, it’s about getting to play the original title that they were once denied.

That’s why I feel duty-bound to celebrate this release. In this modern era of regionless consoles, we’ve kind of forgotten how things were back in the PS2 days, when it took a minor miracle or a first-party publisher to release something as weird as this in our continent. We didn’t even start getting anime licences until the terrible PS1 Dragon Ball games came out around 2000. In my eyes, Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum ‘n’ Fun and Katamari Damacy Reroll have put the last nail in the coffin of that awful era. And they’re both Bandai Namco games. So is Dragon Ball FighterZ; another game that’s made it onto this list, and another that may have skipped a PAL release a few console generations ago. I’ve got to tip my hat to them, this year. Without wanting to spoil anything, they’ve got more games on this list than Nintendo. How the fuck do you do that?

I don’t think Katamari Damacy is quite as varied or slick as its PS2 sequel, but I still think it might be the most charming entry in the series. If you’re into this stuff and you live in this continent, I think you really owe it to yourself to pick it up.

GOTY 2018 - NUMBER FOUR
Video version

I’ve been looking forward to doing this for a long time.

Let me open this by clarifying why the Nintendo Switch release of Go Vacation is a suitable candidate for one of my GOTY lists. Go Vacation is a sequel to the Wii’s Family Ski series. These are very iterative titles, and much of Go Vacation’s Snow Resort is pulled straight from that original Family Ski game. It doesn’t matter that a good 95% of the Switch Go Vacation’s content is taken straight from a Wii game I played the best part of a decade ago – By this series’ criteria, Switch Go Vacation is a new game. And what a game it is.

Think of your most personally fulfilling moments in some of your favourite open world games. I bet they weren’t about beating up pedestrians or unlocking some trophy. I bet your best moments were taking in golden sunsets and feeling entirely at peace with the world presented to you. That’s what Go Vacation’s about.

For a game easily dismissed as a third-party Wii Sports knock-off, the content on offer is refreshingly open to what a wildly diverse playerbase would want to focus on. You can play Go Vacation solely as a four-player minigame collection and get more than your money’s worth. For me, Go Vacation is mostly a relaxing open-world game with deviously hidden secrets, skateboarding, horse riding, nature photography and Ridge Racer. It’s no wonder I’m so enamored with the thing, but the range of content is so wide that I’m sure most people could find content that seems uniquely appealing to them and just focus on that. Did you find Red Dead Redemption II too tedious and repetitive? Step away from the crowd and get your head in some Go Vacation.

All of this was true for the Wii game too, but the biggest difference in the Switch release is the controls. Wii Go Vacation was still very tied to its roots as a light-hearted skiing game, which had overriding influence on how you controlled most of its vehicles. There was also mandatory motion-controls spread all over the game. The Switch game hasn’t gone fully towards the core market and ditched them entirely, but when using a pair of joycon or a Pro Controller, motion controls are typically limited to doing a quick shake to perform moves on skateboards and the like. It’s still not 100% ideal for the audience approaching this as a peaceful alternative to GTA rather than a more fleshed-out alternative to Wii Sports, but it’s a giant leap in the right direction.

I think the thing I like most about Go Vacation is how lovingly crafted its locations are. They’re full of hidden secrets and areas that seem completely locked-off at first, but with thorough exploration and experimentation, are entirely accessible. It’s something that made GTA3 and Vice City so compelling to pick apart, but the focus on this aspect has more in common with classic N64 platformers and Tony Hawk’s before it got too user-friendly. It’s something of a bygone concept in modern games design, but Go Vacation made me realise how much I missed it. If you want something that makes you feel like you did when you started to go wild over videogames, I think there’s a strong case that Go Vacation could be that precise thing.

It’s something that made me feel like I’d never played enough of the game, back on the Wii, but on the Switch, with its lack of set up, instant accessibility and more sensible controls, I feel like I’ve finally been able to explore the game fully. It’s been a real treat for me.

That’s just speaking in relative terms, of course, because the game is huge. Almost every activity has several levels within them, and though not every one of them is a winner, there’s plenty that I like quite a bit and haven’t really played much of. A lot of them are secret low-key remakes of unique games like GTI Club and FourTrax. This is a family game at it’s core, but they’ve paid as much attention to keeping dad entertained as Sonny Jim.

I recommended Go Vacation when it was an eccentric, hard-to-play Wii game. Now it’s expanded on the Switch, I can’t bang on about it enough. Just make sure you really give it the attention it deserves. It’s a secret classic.

GOTY 2018 - NUMBER THREE
Video version

The road for western Yakuza fans to catch up with Japanese releases has been frantic. As such, it’s a little tough to keep track of what’s significant about each game. Make no mistake though. 6 is one of the biggest and most important entries in the series, and one of the biggest shake-ups it’s had for years.

Yakuza 6 follows directly after the ending of 5, with Kazuma on the brink of death and Haruka sacrificing her career by announcing she was raised by a yakuza. In 6, she’s been made a target. By the time Kazuma finds her, she’s lying unconscious on a hospital bed. And, surprise, she has a new baby and no dad in sight. I was rubbing my hands together in glee thinking about how furious Kazuma was going to get in the game.

What follows is a game that understands all the things players have experienced with the series, and doesn’t necessarily focus on making something more frantic and bombastic, but often seems more interested in letting us see Kazuma grow into middle-age with dignity. For a game largely about punching guys, it’s refreshingly sweet. While the tangled web of betrayals and power struggles in Kamurocho is as big a part of the game as fans would expect, much of the game is spent wandering the quiet, sunny streets of Onomichi. Meeting new people, helping old friends and looking after Haruka’s son, Haruto. There’s a sense of peace in it, and it’s a really lovely direction for what’s intended to be Kazuma’s last game in the series.

It can seem mawkish to say you’re going to miss a videogame character, but Kazuma Kiryu is a rare one. We’ve lived alongside him for years. We’ve sat with him through all his highs and lows, we’ve made friends with his friends, and we’ve gone back and learned more about where he came from. As Kamurocho has existed as a very real, subtly changing place in the heart of Yakuza fans, Kazuma has felt real to us, growing older, weirder and kinder with us. He’s the guy we always meet up with when we visit, and now that’s not going to happen anymore. I think we’re all going to miss him. I’m glad that Sega gave him the respect of a proper send-off rather than dragging him out every year, looking more and more tired of the ever-raised stakes. I’m glad these games will always exist, as a wee capsule of those years.

After 0, it seemed clear that a reworking of Yakuza’s underpinning systems were welcome. 6 has learned this lesson. Now, most activities will earn you points to upgrade specific stats, concerning attack strength, health, evasion and so on. Not only does this let you target activities that will help you in specific ways, it adds a sense of value to every activity you engage in. Nothing is a waste of time. Even darts and arcade games add to your experience. It’s a system that makes you more eager to dip into side activities and enjoy the game at a more relaxed pace, which is welcome considering the significance of this entry in the series.

There’s also a focus on making the world a more active, interesting place. There’s now no distinction between the overworld and indoor environments, allowing you to bring fights into convenience stores and restaurants. The new engine also makes fights feel much more freeform. Yakuza 6 establishes the feeling of fighting a big group of enemies in an open environment better than any of the previous games. Enemies will chase you through the city if you don’t get too far from them, sending pedestrians fleeing the danger. There’s a lot of peripheral baddies accidentally getting hit or tripping over the set dressing. There’s a kind of weird bounce to the physics, but that’s part of the charm for me.

I don’t think the game comes close to the fantastic pacing and systems of Yakuza 0, and it dials back on the fights, but I think that kind of suits 6’s more reflective focus. The Onomichi sections call back to the relatively peaceful Ryukyu from 3, and in turn, the relaxing atmosphere of Shenmue. When the game wants to raise the stakes and focus on prepostorous action, it can do so better than almost every other game in the series, but there are quiet, peaceful moments too. Onomichi makes for an incredibly believable Japanese resort town. There’s a real attention to detail, with the dusty shop displays that aren’t really advertising anything, and the charming messiness of the seaside fishmonger’s. The team shows a great fondness and insight into the atmosphere of these kinds of locations, and it resonates, even if you haven’t visited anywhere like Onomichi in real life.

Yakuza 6’s closing hours are some of the best in the series, paying off on exactly the level of melodrama you’d hope for. Again, with the frantic schedule of the Yakuza series’ western releases recently, it’s going to be difficult remembering what was so good about each title. When I think back on Yakuza 6, I’ll be thinking of those last few hours. Kazuma has never been pushed this far before, and seeing him let loose is enough to get you out of your seat cheering.

It’s rare to have a game that makes you care so much about its characters, but Yakuza is a series that has progressed along with our lives. Each year, we’d find out what everyone had been up to, and how Kamurocho had changed. MGS4’s ending felt terribly poignant when we first played it, but by that point, the tone and setting of Metal Gear had shifted dramatically since the early games, and most players had only played one proper Solid Snake Metal Gear game prior to its release. Kazuma Kiryu is a guy who’s been through every Yakuza game with us, with each game reflecting how our world had changed alongside the releases. Saying goodbye to Kazuma Kiryu is closing a door on what those years were for us fans. Replaying Yakuza games will be inherently nostalgic, not just for thinking back to how we felt when we first played them, but for remembering the years they represent. That’s what I’ll take from the games, moving forward. I’m thankful that they ended like this.

GOTY 2018 - SPECIAL AWARD
Video version

If I had to summarise this year’s list with a theme, I might say it was about nostalgia. The bulk of it has been sequels, remakes and genre revivals. They’re things that got nominated for trying to do nothing but appeal to what I already liked. In the wake of all of this was a seemingly modest release that made me excited for how things could change in the years to come.

I didn’t know what I was going to do for GOTY when this came out. I don’t want to bend the rules and call Octo Expansion a new game, because it isn’t. Unlike Shovel Knight: Spectre of Torment last year, or Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s Torna DLC this year, it isn’t sold as a stand-alone game, and that’s not just some technicality that keeps it from eligibility – Octo Expansion is designed solely for Splatoon’s biggest, most established fans. It’s the hardest single-player content the series has put out so far by miles. And in its best moments, it was easily the most I’ve enjoyed a game this year.

Octo Expansion dives deep into each of Splatoon’s established mechanics, its characters and its lore, and presents it in a way that happily rivals Nintendo’s best work. I think its closing hours are Mario or Zelda good, but in a way that fully reflects how fresh, wild and exciting Splatoon can be. This is a look into the future of a mega-franchise.

A few years ago, if you’d asked me to sum up everything I was into, I don’t think what I’d tell you would sound anything like Splatoon, but I don’t think I’d be right either. Splatoon is an exciting, innovative, deeply skill-based game, full of respect for Nintendo’s history of fun ideas, swamped with peppy, experimental music, wild visual design and a secret, eerily cynical, pro-nature, post-apocalyptic setting. That seems like everything. I don’t know if there’s anything else I love in this world that wasn’t on that list. Unlike hacky theories about the ethics of Pokémon or the politics of Mario, Splatoon’s setting isn’t a matter of twisting designers’ intentions or attempting to dig out something salacious from a naive cartoon setting. Like Pikmin, its dark side is something intentional, and presented subtly enough to engage older players and bypass innocent audiences who just enjoy the colourful fun. Octo Expansion features each of these attributes in the most exciting way the fledgling series has done so far.

Though I insist Octo Expansion is very focused on what could be done for the future of the series, much of it is very reflective of the nineties aesthetic that onlookers have been so keen to point out. There’s references to pop songs in level names, and there’s sometimes old gadgets and Nintendo consoles floating around in the backgrounds, but it also establishes that the game is willing to play around with the ideas of other games. Through the game, I noticed ideas I suspect were influenced by Frogger, Jet Set Radio, Resident Evil 4, Portal 2 and Metal Gear Solid: Special Missions. It never feels lazily derivative though. If it knocks off someone’s idea, it’s got enough of a twist on it to justify the decision. The cute surface-level references are there to open up players’ minds to a tone of reverence, and in turn stops the designers from limiting themselves to strictly Nintendo-feeling ideas. They’re free to let loose within Splatoon, and they show that they really know their stuff.

I don’t want to get too specific about the game’s events, as the surprise is a big part of the fun, but it’s impossible to properly highlight how good Octo Expansion is without at least hinting towards some of the things that happen. After players plow through the series of segmented challenges, the structure changes to something new for Splatoon, and something I’d hope the series will stick with in future entries. At this point, you’re actively infiltrating an established environment, with connected level design and narrative stings to compliment it. It’s something more in line with Portal or Titanfall 2 than anything Nintendo’s put out before, and the ways that Splatoon’s mechanical underpinnings are explored prove that it’s easily as clever as either of those games.

Splatoon is a franchise born out of daring innovation, and I’ve loved how unpredictably it’s grown from that over the years. From the success of the early Splatfests to its mainstream acceptance in Japan and the real-life Squid Sisters and Off the Hook concerts, I’ve loved every big step the games have taken, and Octo Expansion feels like one of the boldest shifts in the series so far. Octo Expansion is a move that shows Nintendo are willing to treat Splatoon with the same level of ambition as a Mario or Zelda game. For a series with so much energy, creativity and excitement, that’s a really thrilling prospect. If you want a preview of that, it’s here, and it’s excellent.

GOTY 2018 - NUMBER TWO
Video version

Open-world games have made some notable progress in the last few years. Through big western hits like Horizon: Zero Dawn and Spider-Man, and huge Japanese titles like Breath of the Wild and MGSV, the genre isn’t what it was even a single console generation ago. Through all of this, it’s been worth wondering how Rockstar would react to it all. They’re generally accepted to be the fathers of the genre, through pioneering titles like GTA3 and Body Harvest. Red Dead Redemption II is a remarkably contemporary game. I wouldn’t typically use that in a positive sense, but RDR2 chooses what it pulls from quite adeptly. There’s a lot of the previous game and GTAV, of course, but there’s hints of Telltale Games and The Last of Us in its storytelling. Even some of the better stuff from LA Noire has been salvaged and utilised appropriately. Red Dead Redemption II isn’t quite the game I wanted to be, but it’s excellent at being something else.

For me, Red Dead Redemption 1 was a game about survival and the cut-throat measures that required. Its old west desert setting was the perfect place for it. If you lost your horse, you were fucked. Completely at the mercy of the bandits and coyotes. I loved it, and I approached Red Dead Redemption II entirely as a sequel to that. It doesn’t have the same focus though. RDR2’s drama and tension are more human and interpersonal. The bulk of the game is set in relatively lush territory, with less desperate people. It doesn’t translate into gameplay so directly. The lengths Rockstar have went to in order to match how interesting the original was, with such a shift in focus, are unreasonable and excessive. Taking it in solely as an audience member though, it’s hard to deny how good it is.

It seems there’s a complex system or mechanic running behind every element of the game. Random encounters seem rich and exciting. Every building is distinct and lushly decorated. Commit a crime in town, and the reaction will be realistically hostile and frantic. Even the flight patterns of birds and the weather cycle have been meticulously slaved over in the name of convincing detail. Red Dead Redemption II is a game the Houser Brothers made to satisfy their busy, rich friends, and it’s engineered with all the precision and attention to detail as a private jet.

That whole survival aspect of the game is still here, and just as rich as it was in the previous title, but unless you go searching for hostile environments, you’re unlikely to see much of it. That just goes to illustrate how densely designed the game is, and even if you’re strictly sticking to the main story missions, it’s something that will play into your thinking. Whether you loot every corpse after a savage shoot-out, risking an encounter with investigators, or flee as soon as you can, leaving your camp short on resources.

I often shy away from discussing story in games, but there’s little avoiding it in Red Dead Redemption II. It’s a prequel, and it does a fantastic job of both building upon the world, and setting up the desperate events of the original. You play as a member of Dutch’s gang – the ruthless crew that John Marston was ordered to assassinate in return for his freedom in the previous game. Red Dead Redemption II makes you intimately familiar with how the gang operated, what made them stick together, and ultimately, what tore them apart. As the story continues, it seems the modernising world is folding upon itself to kill them off. Red Dead Redemption II is a game designed for the Netflix era, with complicated plot threads unraveling in the background before tightening into dramatic twists. The story goes places I never anticipated, but in ways that seem entirely natural, given the characters and the setting. When Rockstar’s settings are at their best, they serve as loose history lessons, and capsules of a bygone era, making you care about what happened in a world you never encountered.

Throughout all of the betrayals and dilemmas, you have one constant, loyal companion. At this point, you should know how much I love a good videogame horse, and Red Dead Redemption II’s horses are excellent. You can pet them, brush them, feed them hay and fruit, and once you’ve bonded enough, they’ll become more loyal, standing by you within hectic gunfire, and learning new tricks. Playing Red Dead Redemption II means you need a horse, so the story gives you one, but there’s little to compete with the satisfaction of taming a wild mare or stallion, and becoming best friends with them over the course of your adventure. My horse was an ongoing source of wholesome joy within a bloody and violent game, and I’d be remiss not to talk about him when discussing why I enjoyed the game so much. He was what kept me coming back, and if you intend to play Red Dead Redemption II, I hope you’ll treat your horses with the same level of care I tried to.

Red Dead Redemption II isn’t a terribly cool game to be into. It’s about as mainstream as you can get within modern games, and the irresponsible treatment of Rockstar’s staff during its development has been a concern for many. It would be dishonest of me to say I didn’t love the end product though. It’s a game that isn’t ashamed of its mechanical underpinnings, but they blend together so seamlessly, you might not realise how abstractly you’re making decisions as you play it. It’s an incredibly realised vision of a bygone era, and a remarkably tight story to base its diverse missions around. It’s top tier stuff, and I’m blown away by how well it’s come out. You may not want it to be, but I can absolutely appreciate how it could be someone’s favourite game.

GOTY 2018 - NUMBER ONE
Video version

Nothing loves videogames as much as Super Smash Bros. As inscrutable as its tightly-tuned controls and movesets are, the real draw of Smash Bros is the celebration, and no entry in the series has ever celebrated games so much as Ultimate does. Every bit of its aesthetic, its characters, its settings is a celebration of videogames. Ultimate knows how much we love all this stuff and goes the extra mile to make sure each fan of every wildly distinct property is completely satisfied.

It’s not just its massive character roster. Ultimate explores everything with ridiculous depth. The most obvious part to point to here is the new Spirits system. Hundreds of obscure characters and items from everything Nintendo could access are embodied as equippable stat-boosts, based on their unique characteristics. To unlock them, you’ll need to fight a character that represents them in some way, with witty, loving choices made in terms of costume, music, stage and items. I was never let down by how a beloved character’s Spirit was represented by the game’s roster, and again, it’s ridiculous how obscure some of the Spirits are. There’s characters from FlingSmash, Looksley’s Look Up and the Famicom Disk System Volleyball, and if I was a massive fan of any of those properties, I’m confident I’d love how their characters were translated into the forms of Smash Bros event fights. It’s clear how much fun the team must have had putting this stuff together, and how eager they were to tribute forgotten projects they’d worked on or been a fan of.

That’s the thing with Ultimate. The fan service is so great, you almost forget about the game itself. And the game’s terrific. To me, Smash Bros is a very natural form for this big meet-up to take. It’s a fighting game, yes, but you’re not really thinking about hurting your opponents. You’re just knocking them off the platform. There’s a sense of innocence and fun to it, like a playground game. I’m very much of the opinion that Smash Bros is less Mortal Kombat and more Duck Duck Goose. It feels like the perfect way to make a game where Princess Daisy from Super Mario Land can high-kick Dracula.

Ultimate is also an attempt to summarise the 20 years of incredibly ambitious Smash Bros titles in one game, and whether you’ve been playing from the start, or there’s entries you missed, that’s a real thrill. If you’ve got strong memories of something from the series, there’s about a 98% chance you’ll be able to recreate it here. If you’re not such a dedicated follower, you might get several games worth of content that’s completely new to you. There’s a lot to like about the arrangement.

Here’s something I didn’t anticipate – in the process of making this GOTY content, I’ve started playing Smash Bros online in times I’d usually play Splatoon. I don’t want to think it’s replaced it, but it’s now pretty common for me to end my nights with half an hour of Smash Bros online. It’s just fun, and I’m actually interested in whether my player ranking is going up or down. I want to make sure I’m doing best with my favourite characters, and bullying those I don’t like. I thought I knew Smash Bros fairly well, but it’s managed to surprise me.

Ultimate is such an overwhelming treat for long-time fans of games, and the more you’re interested in games, the more you’re likely to get out of it. Being able to play as Inklings, Snake and Isabelle in one game is a really big deal for me. I couldn’t ask for more. If Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was the last game ever made, I think I’d be okay with that. Where could you possibly go from here?

GOTY 2019 - NUMBER TEN
Video version

It’s really difficult to know where Wattam belongs on this list, or even if it really belongs on it at all. I just know that this is my list, and I’m more interested in talking about it than Judgment or Cadence of Hyrule.

Wattam is a uniquely personal game, so if you’re an adult, it helps to know who Keita Takahashi is if you’re going to try to understand it. He’s a game creator who doesn’t play games. He’s a designer, but his primary interest is in making fun, useless stuff, and making video games is simply the easiest way to present that to a global audience. After somehow convincing Namco to fund and release his oddball, surreal sandbox toy thing, Noby Noby Boy (which one could easily speculate lead to a lot of arguments and frustration), Takahashi left his job and his home country, unsure what he should be doing.

Wattam’s concept came from Takahashi watching his young sons doodle and play with building blocks, coming up with mad wee stories and laughing. He decided that if he was going to make videogames, they should be those kinds of videogames.

If you played Noby Noby Boy, you might have some idea of what to expect, but there’s a little more to it. Wattam is a bit more of a game. There’s wee puzzles, progression and even a bit of a story. It’s less of a toy, though the intention is to have you pair different things together and see if something fun comes out of it.

Wattam feels like playing with a toddler, and following their logic. Seeing what stupid things cause them to errupt in fits of laughter. You can make your wee guy take off his hat and explode at any time, or decide you’re going to play as a mouth instead; eating everybody and turning them into poop. It’s stupid nonsense, and it barely holds together as a game, but it’s all very charming.

The game might come off as complete nonsense. Dancing scribbles. Takahashi is one of the most unguarded auteurs in the industry though, and his values and beliefs shine through all the noise and clutter. Broadly speaking, Wattam is about relationships, the way different things give each other purpose, and forms of universal communication shared between people who speak different languages. It’s also about valuing everyday trinkets that get taken for granted.

As the credits roll, you see the names of Keita Takahashi’s sons, who inspired the game, and of his composer wife, Asuka, who fans ought to know from her excellent contributions to Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy’s soundtracks. The song that plays over it honours the experience they’ve shared over the six long years of Wattam’s development, their love and their eager commitment to each other. At this point, it seems clear that Wattam is a tribute to those years of early parenthood, and who their children were during the game’s development. Wattam is a capsule of what was fun about the Takahashi family’s shared experience of those years. The game is rough and unsteady, but it gives the impression of an honest representation.

Six years is a long time. Maybe that’s worth remembering.

GOTY 2019 - NUMBER NINE
Video version

It’s finally over. Five years after the initial release, and six-and-a-half years after the initial Kickstarter campaign, every promised goal has been delivered and the best indie platformer ever is complete. But it’s not fair to say that Shovel Knight wasn’t a complete game back in 2014. Each campaign can be purchased individually, and they entirely justify their existence as separate games. It’s a welcome surprise that King of Cards might be the richest and most fully-featured entry yet.

King of Cards feels like a nice balance of each of the previous campaigns – with the original Shovel Knight’s bounce and weight, Plague of Shadows’ technical and tactical level traversal, and Specter of Torment’s opportunities for flowing combo-style mastery of each sequence of obstacles. It also seems to borrow a little more heavily from Super Mario Bros. 3, with a greater number of short, punchy levels and hidden exits that offer alternate routes through the world map. There’s also the excellent card game, Joustus which is easy to understand, but develops fantastic complexities over the course of the campaign.

It’s a great summary of what’s so good about Shovel Knight, as well as a broadly representative tribute to the best games on the NES. Lessons have been learned from Mega Man, Ducktales, Zelda II, Castlevania and Mario to deliver something that works with their strengths and develops something unique and satisfying. King of Cards almost has that Flashback thing, where you analyse the layout of a room and its threats before you jump in and attempt to pull off your strategy as slickly as possible. It does a lot of unique and new things, but the gameplay in King of Cards is the closest to the original Shovel Knight of all the new campaigns so far.

There’s a story here, but like the new Doom, the game casts an impatient and frustrated protagonist who holds no interest the interpersonal dynamics that have lead to the situations he finds himself in. King Knight wants to be king, and doesn’t care about anything else. He’s an arsehole, and you’re rewarded for playing with that mentality. It’s fun. His personality also cleverly informs his moveset – charging bullishly through the sky, to take out anything in his way, and flamboyantly twirling in the air between the heads of his lessers. There’s an air of pompous idiocy, self-interpreted as elegance. Plague Knight and Specter Knight were baddies, or at least antiheroes, but they were figures of disease and death. King Knight is all about arrogance, greed and delusion. He’s the Wario to Shovel Knight’s Mario. He’s a great platforming character.

Shovel Knight has always had great music and pixel art design, but four games into reusing the same levels, there’s a risk of stretching the material too far. While some locations and tracks lack the impact they once had, they do deepen your relationship with the world and its characters, and there are impactful new elements throughout the game. It compares favourably to how long-running platforming series like Sonic the Hedgehog will reuse iconic locations and enemies, and have you approach them in exactly the same way throughout multiple games. Playing as an entirely different kind of character in King of Cards changes your approach to each task, and takes advantage of every surface in a level’s design. It’s clear that they’re running out of new ways to utilise these familiar layouts and structures, but it’s lead to some really innovative approaches before they closed the door on them.

In essence, that’s what King of Cards really is – a way to round out the best original 2D platformer in 20 years before they call it finished. It can be difficult to know what to do with the challenge of creating a unique campaign comprised of elements that have already been used and reused three times before, but it’s a bit like writing an 800 word piece on a game that could possibly be better served by a simple “it’s fun- play it”. You struggle to know what to add, but by picking apart each element, you gain a deeper appreciation for what’s been done, and why it works. King of Cards proves how good the core elements of Shovel Knight are by repurposing them in a familiar, but undeniably different format. It’s a testament to how good a developer Yacht Club are, how enthusiastically and innovatively they can push on with the same material for years, and how much potential there is in any piece of great game design. My hope now is that they’re very, very tired of Shovel Knight and can’t wait to bring us something completely different. I think it has every chance of being even better.

GOTY 2019 - NUMBER EIGHT
Video version

Fire Emblem sits just on the periphery of stuff I’m into. Strategy games, RPGs, anime; it’s all stuff I like every once in a while. It’s rare that I get into a new one, but when it happens, they have a tendency to capture my attention completely. Even within Fire Emblem it’s been tough. I loved Awakening, but Fates and Warriors really struggled to hold my interest. With this in mind, it’s a relief how little effort I’ve had to put into enjoying Three Houses.

One thing I go on all the time when it comes to this stuff is pacing. Nothing can make me drop out of one of these things harder than a mislaid bit of filler, a long, meandering grindy bit that loses focus, or a plot revelation that fell flat. This is what Three Houses excels at. There’s freedom within the structure. The story is broken up into in-game months, and you’re given the flexibility to focus on what you like. There are routes through the campaign almost entirely focused on maintaining strong relationships with your team and developing their potential in battle, or you can ignore the school drama and push on through the series of traditional, time-tested turn-based strategy challenges. You’re rarely forced to do something that will test your patience, but there’s layers upon layers of depth if you want to dig into that stuff. Its scenarios present intense situations and conflicts, but it’s quite easy-going with how players take them on. What I like about Three Houses might be completely different from what anybody else does, but we both might like the game just as much, and our appreciation will be just as valid.

What I’ve always seen as unique and compelling about Fire Emblem is that it’s a strategy series that’s about the people. No unit is expendable, and you’ll be rewarded for finding characters you like and bonding with them. If that means some weird sex thing for you – fine – again, that’s a totally valid reason to play these games, and all kinds of players are catered for. It’s an aspect of Fire Emblem that has given a lot of potential players the wrong impression though. Three Houses’ cast are fun, charismatic, flawed and admirable. You’re almost certain to start caring how your favourite students are faring in each fight, and that affects how defensively you approach high-risk situations. You’ll go in knowing that at some point, war will break out, and those who haven’t sided with your faction will become enemies, so you’re going to have to find out who these people are, and decide which ones you like the most.

What sets Three Houses apart from previous entries is the depth of your interaction with each party member. Each in-game week, you’ll be given the opportunity to explore the school grounds, chatting to all the students, giving them gifts and even inviting them over for tea once they’re comfortable enough with you. You can find out who these people are, what they’re interested in, and what they’re scared of. If you’re looking at it from a romantic perspective, it’s nice to know who everyone is, but it also helps in how you approach training them for battle. You might find out someone in your class is getting tired of the job you’ve been giving them, and would rather train in a different style of combat. Maybe that would fuck up the balance of your team, and you can insist they stick with their role, but maybe you adapt your strategies for the sake of their interests. It’s the kind of thought you’d never have in a traditional strategy game, and it’s a really compelling wee hook. Something that gives you an emotional attachment to seeing each unit in your command survive.

Strategy games are typically something you’ll return to if you’re looking for a very specific experience. If I load up Command & Conquer, I know exactly what’s in store. Three Houses has far more to it, and you often change your focus multiple times during any given play session. Three Houses is so rich with variety, but none of it overwhelms or detracts from the strategy gameplay. Looking at it in a strict, logical way, it’s all just boosting stats before you get into the next traditional battle, but Three Houses has a tendency to suck you into its setting and view things from the perspective of its characters. Once you start to like the people you’re fighting alongside, it’s not difficult to start to care about all the wee systems.

It might sound overwhelming, but again, it’s that freedom within the structure that makes it all work so well. If you’re interested enough to buy it, you’re almost certainly going to enjoy something in it.

GOTY 2019 - NUMBER SEVEN
Video version

Something I want to tell you about Tetris 99 is how difficult it’s made compiling this list.

First day it was out, I was bowled over by how well the format worked. How it took this young upstart of a battle royale genre and showed it how much it needed focused, foundational video game structure. How it needed to force conflict. Tetris is the game we’ve all been playing, secretly, on the sidelines for decades. It’s not talked about. It’s taken for granted. It’s like talking about putting on your trousers. And now we’ve all been squashed in a wee room to show who’s the best at putting on trousers. Stepping on everyone else’s feet and grabbing their arses so they fuck up.

First time I won a game, the illusion had shattered. It hadn’t felt earned. It wasn’t about being the best at Tetris. It was about luck. Often, strategically targeting opponents, lining up combos and playing blisteringly fast games wouldn’t help you. You had better chances if you played conservatively, but that wasn’t a reliable strategy either. My heart sank. There was surely no greater crime than to take Tetris – the most solid, logical, universally understandable game in history – and lay on a bunch of trendy shit that ruined the dynamics.

It was still free Tetris on the Switch though. I kept playing.

Months later, and after hours and hours of play, I finally started to believe I understood Tetris 99. Victory isn’t what it’s about. It’s the wee, blessed moments of pure Tetris elation. Those moments where you’re totally up against it, with a shite, messy board, half a dozen guys all chucking blocks at you, and a massive tower of dummy blocks waiting to push the screen up— and you turn it around. Those wee moments that seem to justify the hundreds, or thousands of hours you’ve spent in your life, putting these blocks in the right spots. Coming in number 1 at the end of the game is nice, but those moments are where the game is. Tetris 99 is a chance for all my efforts to mean something to a big group, if only for a moment. But those moments are fucking beautiful.

GOTY 2019 - NUMBER SIX
Video version

Taito are back! And they’ve come up with a fool-proof new business model: Make games that cost more to purchase than produce. As long as I’m around, it’s a winning strategy.

Bubble Bobble is a very simple game, where you catch enemies in bubbles and pop them, but 4 Friends plays around with the fundamental mechanics in some creative and interesting ways. You could always bounce on bubbles to reach higher platforms, but now you might have to blow a series of bubbles to create a path. You’ll sometimes have to use the air flow to turn your bubbles into moving platforms. You’ll need to consider semi-solid platforms and enemy attack patterns. Some of these levels are tricky just to navigate your way through, but if you want to get a decent score, you’ll need to play with strategy and finesse.

What makes this attractive is how the game is broken up. Bubble Memories and Bubble Symphony both presented themselves as a relentless series of levels, growing more repetitive and meaningless as you pumped more credits in to charge your way through. 4 Friends breaks each set of 10 levels into its own world that you can replay at any point. There’s a boss at the end of each world, and you’ll get a ranking based on your score afterwards.

The game is also heavily marketed as a multiplayer co-op experience. Playing in multiplayer dramatically changes the levels, making them more forgiving, but also more casually fun. Borrowing from New Super Mario Bros. Wii, if you get hurt by an enemy, you’ll float in a bubble for a while before you actually lose a life. This allows teammates to rush over and rescue you. There’s also a couple of bosses in the game that spawn enemies all over the board. They’re shockingly tough to fight in single-player, but with a well-organized team of players, you can camp in each corner of the level and quickly neutralise each threat that appears. Some might call it unbalanced, but it changes the atmosphere from a tough series of platforming challenges, on par with Umihara Kawase, to a fun party platformer that’s welcoming to all ages. I think it nails what you’d want from the game in both scenarios.

As you progress through the levels, you’ll develop a better understanding and appreciation for the game’s simple mechanics. There might be spaces you need to crawl through, but you can’t blow bubbles whilst crawling. If you hold jump while bouncing on a bubble, you’ll jump higher, but letting go of jump will let you blow bubbles that you can reach more easily. The game really explores the potential of Bubble Bobble’s gameplay fundamentals, but doesn’t take away from the core appeal of these fun bouncing bubble dragons.

I’ve spent so much time talking about how good the game is, and how well it works, I’ve barely had time to talk about how charming it is, and how well it nails the atmosphere of lower-budget Japanese media from the mid-nineties. This stuff feels so much like 1996 Japan-only Saturn shit, man. The soundtrack carries all that Zuntata arranged soundtrack synthy bounce and weirdness. The CG intro and ending feature only two moving characters, using their in-game models and inhibiting some weird animation quirks that remind me of OVA credit sequences and Japanese advertisements for bicycle repair shops. Like Shenmue III, this doesn’t so much feel like Taito are going out of their way to represent the quirks of a bygone era – it’s so authentic, it feels like the developers never left it.

For a very, very specific audience, Bubble Bobble 4 Friends is an incredible treat, but it works so well for kids and casual players in multiplayer too. It’s accidental, unrepeatable perfection. Making any aspect slicker, or more contemporary would have taken away from how rich its appeal is. It’s the Taitoest shit around. Ludicrous that it exists.

GOTY 2019 - NUMBER FIVE
Video version

This is a choice that might seem like one based solely on charm. It’s a funny game about an irritating goose. It’s not hard to like that. I’m going to try and make the claim that it’s far more than that, though. My takeaway is that it’s probably the most successful attempt at a comedy game ever made.

It kind of seems like people gave up trying to make “the funny game” after point n click was invented. Point-and-click – possibly the driest way you could ever ask someone to interact with a computer. There have been silly games, and games plastered with one-liners and puns, but they’re never really their own thing. They’re silly versions of established concepts. Duke Nukem’s like a parody of Doom. Saints Row is a parody of GTA (and let’s not get into GTA’s attempts at comedy). They’re comedy versions of games. Untitled Goose Game is a comedy game, through and through.

One of my go-to fuckabout activities in a game is to see how much I can wind-up the NPCs without causing them any serious, long-term harm. There’s always something a little ill at odds about it though. Playing as some over-privileged tough guy fucking around with those with less power or confidence. I mean, in a lot of these games it’s an alternative to playing the game properly and straight-up murdering them, so it doesn’t seem so bad, but the balance is never totally comfortable.

Nobody can be taken seriously for getting annoyed with a goose. Nothing makes a mockery of humanity’s pompousness quite like a big goose running around with someone’s prized possession. This is the brilliance of Untitled Goose Game.

Untitled Goose Game almost seems like an accident. There’s no way someone could consciously conjure up a dynamic this good. You’re a goose who really bothers a village full of the English middle-class. There’s a button to honk. You can grab things in your beak and run away with them, and then drop them in the wrong place. And this is the whole focus of the game. You can nick someone’s Sunday paper (probably The Mail), and drop it in the pond. In fact, this is what you’re supposed to do. It’s a primary goal in the game. You can waddle about and honk as they fish it out, in frustration. There’s no reasoning with a wild goose. You can’t tell it off or effectively intimidate it. If there’s a particularly malicious one about, you can’t even hope for mercy. Your best course of action is to ignore it and hope it gets bored, but these villagers seem incapable of that. In fact, it’s against their programming.

The dynamic of “pompous man gets frustrated with funny goose” has universal appeal. There’s no barrier of age or language or culture. It’s made the game a massive hit with non-gamers. The fact that serious gamers are now frustrated with its popularity kind of mirrors that dynamic- the funny goose is messing up this thing they walled-off, cultivated and took as their own. It’s almost as if it was designed to remedy what’s wrong with games culture. But no. It’s nothing as lofty as that. It’s a funny goose that everyone wants to play with. It doesn’t even have a name. Pure, unrepeatable genius.

GOTY 2019 - NUMBER FOUR
Video version

I went into this year’s GOTY coverage thinking it would be pretty easy. There’s no 3DS games, no mobile games, no Switch games that don’t support the system’s built-in video capture. So many of these games are so meaningful to me, personally, that it’s been really difficult to know how to cover them. With that in mind, let’s spend a couple minutes on Shenmue-fucking-Three.

It’s barely worth identifying each entry in the series as a separate game. They’re just parts of one story. Its mechanics, tone, presentation and quirks are just the same as they were twenty years ago, and I really wouldn’t have it any other way.

Shenmue tends to be thought of as a more archaic Yakuza, but that really overlooks what’s so special about the series. They’re gentle, simple games. Sweeping scope, but the player’s approach is in any moment always small and modest. There was a subsection of its audience who played it solely because it was a massive technical achievement for the Dreamcast, but I don’t believe those were the ones who stuck with it. The persistent fans were the ones who fell in love with the quirks and eccentricities of its cast, the intricate detail of its recreation of south-east Asia in the eighties, and its approach to dutifully acting out the minute tasks of Ryo Hazuki’s life. Shenmue is about the small things, and Ys Net have never forgotten that.

Shenmue has always felt nostalgic. They’re games about a very specific point in history. Before the internet and mobile phones. A time where the young still stayed in their parents’ small towns, and could help operate their little businesses. Playing a new entry in the series, nearly two decades after where it last left off, adds to that feeling of nostalgia intensely. Not just getting sucked into that setting again, but being challenged to work with Dreamcast-era gameplay loops and structure. This is Pokémon Red, Donkey Kong 64, Tomb Raider III stuff. Things you’d never freely think you’d ever feel nostalgic for, but being brought back into that way of thinking can be a powerful reminder of what life was 20 years ago.

I don’t want to make it sound like Shenmue III is a backwards-facing game though. This is definitely the next part of the story, and it feels really good to finally be able to push it forward. The first two games were largely about the struggle to travel to Guilin – the Chinese village that was such a crucial part of Iwao Hazuki’s life and the mystery of the Phoenix and Dragon Mirrors. In this entry, we finally arrive there and start to understand what was going on.

Some of my favourite parts of the game were the conversations between Ryo and Shenhua, as they discuss their lives, and begin to relate to each other more deeply. They’re stiff, wooden conversations, but I wouldn’t appreciate them if they weren’t. It feels like we’re still travelling with those old Dreamcast characters, and only now getting to know who they really are. It’s another meaningful, intimate, step on the journey.

GOTY 2019 - NUMBER THREE
Video version

Resident Evil is one of most confusing brands out there. I mean, fucking, what is it? The big brass-balled action games of the 2000s? The slow, rigid processes of micromanagement and backtracking of the 90s games? The fucking rubbish films? What is it?

Capcom have been attempting to answer this question after reeling back from the messy, obnoxious (mildly underrated) Resi 6 threatened to lose every bit of goodwill players had for the series. There’s been mixed success in the Revelations games and 7, but nothing that really nailed what made Resident Evil so memorable, charming and vital. With this in mind, it makes so much sense to summarise the best qualities of the full series in a Resi 2 remake.

Like the series in general, Resi 2 is often mischaracterised by many. It’s uncontroversial to say that it’s the Judgment Day or Aliens to Resi 1’s The Teminator or Alien. These days, a lot gets made out of the fact that it was directed by action game superstar, Hideki Kamiya. But there’s far more Resi 1 and Mikami to it than those things suggest. It’s very much a game of managing your inventory, planning the most viable routes through large buildings, and enjoying hammy dialogue being laughably read by characters who feel far too wholesome to be blasting deformed nightmare creatures with acid rounds. Resi 2 is Resi 1 in a frayed leather jacket.

It has a little more edge and intrigue to it. There’s more players in the story. The sight of a city overrun with zombies feels far less controlled than some lone mansion out in the wilderness. The monster designs are wilder, and the progression of William Burkin’s mutation from a scientist in a lab coat to a shapeless mass of bleeding eyes and teeth consumed my 12 year-old imagination far more than The Tyrant ever did.

Resi 2 is a perfect middle ground between what Resident Evil was, and what it became (before it became terrible). If you’re revisiting its characters, settings, story and structure, you can pull material from all over the series without taking away from it.

The crux of my pessimism for the future of Resident Evil was always pinned on how Capcom started pishing out all their key talent when they closed Clover and started outsourcing. They lost everyone who understood what made the games work, and focused solely on what made them marketable. Now, it seems they’ve figured out how to foster their new creative talent, and identify how the designers of their old hits were thinking. Devil May Cry, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter, Mega Man and, now, Resident Evil, are all exciting, daring franchises again, and they all reflect what made them big names in the first place.

The Resi 2 remake borrows a lot from 4 and the action games that followed it, and crucially, the big takeaway from 7 seems to be that exploration, richly decorated rooms and inventory management were central to what made the survival horror games work well, but there’s also a healthy dose of classic Resi shit in this. Lavishly decorated foyers and libraries, ludicrously specific puzzle pieces, and chatty idiot heroes that I absolutely adore. My mind was made up that this was proper Resi when Leon and Claire shared a sweet, breezy conversation, entirely aware of the undead that were falling through the foliage that surrounded them.

They haven’t forgotten that weird, corny charm that makes me want to cuddle up with Resident Evil, but they haven’t forgotten the dread and regret either. In fact, that’s possibly the richest it’s ever been. You’re constantly pushed into scenarios where careful planning and skillful gameplay could cut out up to two thirds of the dangers around you, but you’re always going to have to deal with that last third. And then there’s unpredictable nature of Mr X to factor in to it all. It’s beautifully balanced. You’re handed situations that make you feel so clever and capable, and then something bursts in that turns you into a panicking idiot in an instant. So much of what I love about game design is in Resident Evil, but so many of the games have lost sight of it. It’s in full focus in here.

There’s also a lot learned from the Resi 1 remake, even if it feels completely different when applied to this game. The self-defense items are back, rounding out the combat and inviting you to attempt to recover knives from the things that slipped you up. More crucial than that is how it taught the team how to make an effective horror remake. It knows where to shift things around, which iconic environments and moments to bring back, and how to keep both new and old audiences on edge. I’d worried that you could only do an effective Resident Evil remake once, but the Resi 2 Remake shows me that it just takes a little finesse and careful consideration to play around with the familiar in a compelling way.

Let’s talk about what’s unique to it though. The gunplay is really excellent. The misguided demands for the series to adopt more contemporary controls has been a massive factor in what took away from the weight and satisfaction of more recent entries. You can move in all directions while aiming in this game, but your shots will be more effective if you stand still for a second and line-up your aim. Monsters move much less consistently here. Zombies feel like piles of rotting flesh and organs struggling to hold together, approaching you on instinct alone. Their heads are never at a constant height. You can’t aim in one spot and wait for them to line up with it. You have to react dynamically to their movement, and thanks to the cramped corridors, you rarely feel like you’re given enough space to feel comfortable that you’re going to get the most out of a shot. You’re scrambling, and firing shots out of panic. You’re making more of those crucial, exciting regrets.

I don’t want to give the remake too easy a time. There’s elements of it that feel a little fluffy and uneven. I’m devastated that the alligator fight is now a fucking rubbish Crash Bandicoot-style chase sequence, and it only illustrates how well Resi 4 adopted QTE sequences for dynamic action setpieces that its core gameplay couldn’t capture. It’s all to be expected when making such a radically different adaptation that still leans so hard on memorable locations and moments though.

The RCPD station is now one continuous environment. There’s no loading sequences between rooms. Everything feels far more physical and connected, and with monsters now having the ability to follow you between rooms, you’re robbed of the relief you once felt from escaping a dangerous corridor. It’s risky to change the dynamics of comfort in an established Resi game, but it really complements the scrambling feel of the new controls and gameplay. It feels like the right approach. This is what a 2019 Resident Evil game fucking should be, and I’m elated that they’ve got it so right.

GOTY 2019 - NUMBER TWO
Video version

It’s difficult to know where to place Super Mario Maker 2 on a list like this. It doesn’t feel so much like a game in its own right. It’s more like an app. Something that takes a very natural spot in your life, and you don’t want to go without now that you have it. It’s an acceptance of how important a part of our lives Mario is. Sometimes you just want to play Mario, and Super Mario Maker 2 is the best thing to turn to when that happens.

This is Mario. Everything you want when that “I want to play Mario” feeling hits you. Mario is fun. Mario is varied. Mario has charm and personality. Mario lets you slide on your bum down hills into Koopa Troopas and ride a Yoshi that eats Cheep Cheeps. Mario Maker 2 is Mario.

The main thing that Mario Maker 2 improves upon from the Wii U game is how well it represents each game style. Super Mario Bros. 3 levels feel fast and focused, while New Super Mario Bros. levels are full of bounce and puzzles, and 3D World levels feel grand, slick and celebratory. They share level components, but the different physics and movesets inform how every designer builds their stages. Super Mario World style-levels feel like Super Mario World levels now, and that’s a massive statement. It’s not just different skins placed on top of Super Mario Bros 1 levels anymore. You can do big vertically stacked levels and big mazey caverns now. You can indulge in all the reasons Super Mario Bros 3 and World are so enduringly compelling. It’s here. The proper Mario.

There has been some disappointment that some of Mario Maker’s personality has been toned-down in the sequel. It’s an understandable concern, but it’s one that I feel represents a change in focus. The personality now comes from each of the old games represented, and because they feel so authentic, you’re reminded of why you love each individual entry.

Even in a glowing, positive piece like this, I’m not going to pretend that the loss of the Wii U’s GamePad doesn’t make the process of building new levels much less attractive, but I’ve found myself far more interested in playing Mario Maker 2 levels. Search options and curation are still fairly hands-off, so it’s curious that the average Mario Maker 2 level tends to be much more fun and representative of good Mario design than they were in the Wii U game. Maybe people have just got bored of auto-Mario and game-breaking levels? I don’t know, but even if you’re letting the game load up levels randomly from the pool of user-made entries, the results tend to be far more fun and interesting. Maybe it’s the fact that Nintendo have given their audience the ability to call out bullshit levels? Yeah, probably. Nobody’s going to play through a scribble of stacked enemies and ground pieces and upvote it.

One of the new features that I didn’t have a lot of hope for actually turned out to be one of the most attractive reasons to choose Mario Maker 2 when selecting which Mario game you’d like to play- competitive multiplayer. Again, a controversial opinion given the game’s shaky online performance, but finding yourself alongside a room of similarly-skilled Mario players and attempting to overcome levels you’ve never seen before, with sometimes dubious design, is one of the most fun ways to approach the game. In straightforward levels, it’s a pure test of skill as you each race to the flagpole. In trickier, or less well-engineered levels, it can be a lot of fun to see an opponent fall victim to a trap that might have taken you in, if not for their example. Sometimes I might not be in the mood for the kinds of levels you end up on in Mario Maker, but the idea of playing them competitively changes the dynamic so richly, I’ve often found myself coming back for a few after burning out on other games.

It’s why I’d seriously recommend getting Mario Maker 2 digitally. Just every now and then. One level, two level, three levels, four, Mario Maker, Mario Maker, Mario Maker more. It’s a lovely thing to pop on every now and then. Maybe you’ll actually come back to finish some of those mad complicated level projects you started. The Switch needed a good Mario to turn to when you’ve got that urge. Don’t get me wrong – This is no Odyssey, but Odyssey isn’t even nearly as replayable either. This is such a lovely antidote to the problem. You might not play it for weeks on end, but every now and then, this is such a good package. If you own a Switch, you owe it to yourself to get stuck into this big Mario buffet. Nintendo consoles are devices designed to play Mario. You should let them. Your Switch will never truly love you if you don’t.