Part of me wishes my favorites were more diverse, cooler even, but I've kinda learned the things we love in life are ultimately out of our immediate control. Like red flags in a blooming relationship, we might find reasoning that allows us to deflate that subconscious affection through logic, but everything else is at the behest of environmental influence and biological predisposition. But even if we can't choose, I don't think it makes the what and how of our love any less special. When our bodies perish so do our memories, so I find something meaningful in the fact we're all just these pulsing synapses trapped in a prison of flesh, and we should learn to cherish it while it lasts.

Shadow of the Colossus took me 15 years to finally get around to playing, and frankly I hated every second of it. But we're into enemies to lovers stories in this house, and nowadays it's an experience I don't think I could live without. Deprogrammed me from thinking about games in terms of mechanical and ergonomic perfection. Clunky? Is that the name of a clown? I suppose it's maybe overanalyzed and put on too high of a pedestal at times, but to me it's just a cool as hell experience with a deeply pensive and relatable narrative thrust, on top of having the chops to make that adventure feel memorable and worth returning to again and again. Also, Kow Otani's soundtrack here is, so fucking good it almost ruins music in other games for me.

Can't think of a cute way to end this, so I'll leave you all with the final score (for now):

Shadow of the Colossus - 10/10

the real joke? I do actually think most of these games are 8/10 ass video games. except maybe earthbound. there's a lot of other games i wanted to include here as well, but i either couldn't think of what to talk about or i'm not ready to talk about them yet. like pentiment, really wanted to put it on this list, but i literally just reviewed that shit so i'll just put it on here later, maybe. if i still like it when the next solstice comes around. honestly there's probably no way in hell i'll have the patience to stick to that gimmick, but i'll at least try keeping my additions to this list to a minimum this time

TTYD is probably THE formative RPG experience for me? Like it's obviously building off the backs of the thousands of tabletop, computer, and console RPGs that preceded it, but the way it delivers such a simple, formulaic, yet irreverent little experience for all ages without feeling overly sterile in its approach to worldbuilding is something that I don't think we see enough of these days. There's maybe a handful of contemporary "family" media that hits the same vibes, with the first coming to mind for me being Adventure Time and its extended media and Undertale/Deltarune. Some people prefer Paper Mario 64 or Super Paper Mario, but for me TTYD just hits the right amount of novelty and adventure (and of course, fucked up little guys as your party, which is like the entire party this time around).

Mentioned it in my review of the original, but Vivian is also just one of my favorite characters in media, especially after her transness has been made both more textually explicit and tasteful. Just a really important character to myself and other people I know! It's hard to say how I ultimately feel about the pseudo harem vibes that the largely woman cast can kinda give off at times, but it's def smoothed over by the fact that they're all strong and independent actors with their own dreams and desires (Ms. Mowz and Flurrie could def get it tho, and in a very refreshing and positive way that you rarely see in Nintendo games, those bitches are so cool!!).

As of writing this, I haven't gotten around to playing through the entire remake (been reading too much realistically depressing wlw manga, hmu if you want recs), but I've played/seen enough to know it's probably gonna be my go-to for most playthroughs which is saying a lot considering how much of a slut I am for 60 fps in games (in reality I just get a migraine from 30 fps locked titles after playing a bunch of high framerate games). I'll probs write a review for the remake eventually, but my general impression is it being a very charming and loving interpretation of the original that hits a few important marks for me that make me love it even more than the original. But we'll see! Maybe I'll change my mind, I'm not really hung up on remakes as much as most of Backloggd (though I'm gonna be a bitch about Demon's Souls remake and Super Mario 64 DS forever and always for the rest of my life <3).

And well, I guess it didn't need a remake either way! I still love the original game, I've bounced back and forth trying to figure out how that love pans out for me as an adult, but I've been through a lot in the past few months: I've learned to accept the things I love as gift, even if that gift is technically a mass media product made by evil Mario company. I am way not naturally cool enough in my stupid butch-y princess brain to be a constant lover of cool ass independent art, like I love indie and non-traditional art as much as the next burnt out queer, but at the end of the day there's always that autistic girl inside me who unironically has always known way too much Mario lore. Oh, Bobbery could get it too btw.

I don't know how this ended up here, but I kind of don't wanna get rid of it! It might be my favorite go-to for when I just want a seemingly morally dense adventure that is mostly carried in entertainment value by the bonds shared by its cast. That isn't to say it's much more than a Drakengard game with a neat premise, charming characters, and memorable setpieces, but NieR carries its weight where it counts. If I want a Drakengard with good pacing I'll play none of them, if I want a Drakengard with fun combat I'll play none of them, if I want a Drakengard that's actually a good game, I'll play Killer7. NieR is like the video game equivalent of a Transgender Jack Skellington band-aid (don't know what this means).

Okay, I can't do that entire bit for a whole other section; NieR/NieR Replicant ver.1.22 is an important game to me whether I like it or not. I can't say I definitively prefer one over the other: NieR's aesthetic is so much stronger in the original, the more casual script also lends itself better to the riffing between the characters, and it actually has meaningful gameplay interaction that's just missing from the remake. Ver.1.22's combat is somewhat of a homunculus formed from elements of both DoD3 and Automata's systems and animations (mostly just ends up feeling like DoD3 with less end lag tho), but letting the gameplay sink into the back of your mind really helps during the most monotonous parts of NieR's unconventional narrative structure. The voice acting is overall improved as well, but something is lost in a number of scenes, usually something humorous. Ending E is heavy-handed and breaches slightly into fanservice territory, but I fuck with it if only because of how deftly it reiterates the performative selflessness baked into many of Nier's selfish decisions throughout the story.

The real reason we play this game is for the cast though, even if their relationships feel a tad underdeveloped (kinda feels like we get the sparknotes version of their initial bonding) during the first half of the game, everything ends up working perfectly during the much more important "second half", particularly once you start getting the text-based PoV stories. Kainé's backstory obviously resonates with a lot of queer people, but it doesn't make it any less personal for myself as well -- especially because I also had a tough grandma who loved me unconditionally and taught me more about life than my parents ever did. Emil and Kainé's whole queer sisterhood situation also just... it makes me feel insane (in a good, heartwarming way), I would also kill the whole world for them, you can't even blame Nier!!!

I think Ver.1.22 only really becomes annoying once you get to the ship level which like, is really not that great the first time around, becomes better the second time around, but let's be real we didn't need it more than that. OG is also just way funnier, Papa Nier just booking it all over the fucking place, sliding around, digging in the dirt like a hungry bear, and his post-timeskip design is so good. Love that asshole. But I still think I prefer the dynamic between a younger more age appropriate Nier in the context of his friendships with Emil and Kainé, and several actions the character takes outside of the confines of the script itself just make a lot more sense when the character is a teenager. Though we love our big, immature, deeply caring and protective, stupid ass Papa Nier anyways.

NieR/NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139... - 8/10

they really should've figured out a way to do the nier automata different playable characters in each story branch thing for the remake just to set it apart a bit more, but maybe that was outside of the scope. i wish the situation when it comes to the commercial availability of older versions of games wasn't getting so fucking dire, the original should've been like free DLC or some shit at least!!!

I'm counting this for both Final Fantasy VII and the Remake trilogy since playing one of them inadvertently reflects onto the other, like when you watch Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and then go back and read the book(s) -- you're probably gonna accidentally see Frodo as Elijah Wood in your mind. Somebody might prefer one over the other, but the love, or hate, for that work is going to be intertwined with its adapted counterpart whether we like it or not. Especially considering how incensed people can become about remakes (adaptations, reimaginings, reboots -- whatever you want to call them), the refraction of one's values in the face of a piece of art that chooses to neglect your specific form of love for it, it makes sense that their existence becomes the second face of a coin in our memories of said game (or in the case of games that get a ridiculous amount of rereleases of varying quality, an incomprehensible polyhedron of emotion).

My specific form of love for Final Fantasy VII has been neglected by Square Enix not leaving it the fuck alone -- why didn't these bitches just listen to Sakaguchi! Advent Children? Die. Crisis Core? Die. Dirge of Cerberus? Vincent deserved better. Final Fantasy VII Remake announcement made me roll my eyes. What's even the point? We have Final Fantasy VII, and it's perfectly fine as it is. I believe there's a growing sentiment that games don't age, and I agree. Sure, how digestible certain subject matter is changes over time, but if we're being honest even the casual racism and occasionally sexist writing of OG Final Fantasy VII was, you know, always just a Bad Thing About It. Time doesn't do anything to the games we play, but it does change us.

The kicker is, I didn't even know Final Fantasy VII was my favorite game until like, last year, along with the creeping thought that, "Oh, everything else makes SO much fucking sense now". But them's the breaks for those of us that are forced to emotionally repress our sense of self in order to survive, which I guess is just everybody in the scheme of things, but particularly for queer people. Thinking back on how even at a young age I wanted to be like Tifa Lockhart, just a cool, strong pretty lady who mostly had her shit together, at least enough to own and run a small business by herself. Also, you know, everything else about Final Fantasy VII, another person might tell you that they were captivated by any one of the FMVs or maybe the story, but when you're young sometimes it's just enough to find an identity in something, even if you end up burying it for years.

It's funny then that Final Fantasy VII Remake and my own transition ended up coinciding within the same year (started HRT 9/7/2020), and while I wouldn't go as far as to say that my identity is intertwined with what is ostensibly a product made for mass consumption by a multibillion dollar company, I would say there's an almost poetic parallelism between my ability to love Final Fantasy VII Remake and my ability to finally love myself. Specifically, I didn't really like this game when it first came out! It wasn't my Final Fantasy VII, it was something new and scary and something that wasn't quite as smart as whatever ideals I had projected onto the original in both its lower fidelity visuals and its lower fidelity textual depth.

It's crazy to me that I also didn't really fuck with the gameplay at the time when nowadays it's pretty much the most theia-core gameplay you could possibly come up with (at least until Rebirth did it one better by letting Tifa Lockhart slam dunk a cartoon cat AND letting her go full puppy girl in two separate synergy abilities, I'm normal btw). I'm already just mashing the shit out of the button in turn-based RPGs, make it both action RPG and turn-based and suddenly it's just activating all my syndromes at once. Which, really Remake and Rebirth need that because they fail me on two major fronts: OG FF7 has my favorite boss theme from any video game, and we like never get to fuckin' hear it in either of the Remakes so far, and the menus and sound effects of original are just, ooooogh, Final Fantasy VII has my favorite victory screen music and victory screen presentation and I love the models and I love the overworld, I love how fucked up and charming everything is!!! But it's whatever that Remake can't manage to replicate everything, and it gives me even more reason to keep going back to the original.

The biggest, most realest reason I fuck with Final Fantasy VII is it's the only (J)RPG where I actually really love every single party member and every single antagonist. Even the abusive misogynist manages to be a pretty interesting character! Also FF7 just has my favorite assortment of Fucked Up Little Guys this side of Chrono Cross: a talking powers dog who's the goodest boy and only a little bit of a racist caricature for indigenous people of the Americas just don't think about it too much okay, a real estate agent's VRChat avatar that lives in pre-apocalyptic Disneyland, and a bisexual vampire who has the ability to turn into Darkstalkers characters. Also, I guess, I like the main character, and said character MAY or may not be subtextually a trans woman, in my mind. Canon. Maybe I'd kiss Cloud Strife? Maybe that he's fucked up and horrible makes him even hotter? Not for me to say. I am a simple lesbian, I cannot say more.

Shoving this in here to say that people gotta stop doing the historical revision thing when it comes to Tifa in the Remake series because she's effectively just the same character, but written more like a person. I resonate so deeply with how insecure and people pleasing she is; pretransition that's basically all I was. Most of her character development is in the last third of the story in the original game, so it makes a lot of sense that we wouldn't be seeing that quite yet in the Remakes, but I'm pretty fucking excited for Tifa to be the de facto party leader in the first half of Final Fantasy VII Remembrance. Also like, Tifa has such wonderful and loving relationships with the rest of the cast, I've had friendships like Tifa and Barret have, and I don't know man, I'm a sucker for that shit, inject found family among society's rejects trope into my fucking veins... Also they better fucking actually add the triceratops tank next time, they've been really skimping on the dinosaurs in the Remakes, it's really pissing me off.

It's also kinda funny I guess that my official name change (and in a couple weeks my gender marker change) ended up coinciding with Rebirth's release as well. Excited for another major transition milestone to happen the same year as Final Fantasy VII Requiem!! Rebirth is weird because I ended up liking it a lot from the get-go, outside of being really angry at the ending at first. But you know, somehow it ended up clicking for me. I like to think all the cool games I've played in the time between Remake and Rebirth have helped me appreciate the beauty in things that before I might've dismissed due to any number of perceivable flaws. I don't know, maybe I just don't care as much anymore, or maybe I care even more, or maybe I just finally love myself enough to allow myself to have good things. I don't have to ruin things I otherwise like for myself anymore? The real Final Fantasy VII was the one inside of me all along.

As a lil treat, I'll go ahead and give arbitrary scores to all the games I put in this list since I don't do real scores anymore. Unless I can't think of a score for a game, then I'll do a bad joke:

Final Fantasy VII - 8/10
Final Fantasy VII Remake - 8/10
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth - 8/10

not as exciting as you'd think it'd be, huh. tho i'd probably give the remakes the edge just for making tifa and aerith into canon girlfriends. better luck next time original ff7!! maybe instead of being the game of a generation you should've tried having regurgitated NPC side quests and a nauseating amount of identical open world landmarks?

It's all right, I guess:

EarthBound - 8/10
















earthbound was my first "favorite game". now, that's not a particularly unique experience, especially for nintenbabies like myself, but i wouldn't disregard it as an important part of my personal development. that is, i had several games before it that in retrospect weren't so much favorite games, as much as they were formative games. pokémon, kingdom hearts, sonic adventure: they formed the foundation of my tastes, but none of them were really capable of aesthetically and "spiritually" satisfying me to the extent that earthbound eventually would

and you know, earthbound deserves every ounce of praise it gets. now, that's not a particularly unique sentiment, especially for people who, whether they can help it or not, revere shigesato itoi's creative output in video games, but i feel like even if we didn't have countless analyses of this series the games would still speak for themselves well enough. mother and mother 3, despite itoi stepping down from the director's chair for the latter, are games i love equally as much, but you can't really choose which experiences resonate with you the most. mother 2 feels the most personal to the player, and while mother is similar in that regard it focuses more on the external factors affecting ninten and his friends compared to mother 2's focus on the inner journey reflected through absurd external events, with mother 3 being the most directly character and theme-focused of the trilogy -- lucas has an actual character for instance, something both ness and ninten textually lack.

ness's journey is also the player's, and it never fails to move me despite how simple and textually thin the game actually is. i love that jeff has a little boyfriend waiting for him back home, even if paula is kinda shoe-horned in as more of a love interest for ness she's still a character you remember for her boldness and strength, and poo, he's a guy. yeah i mean, there's something there with poo, i love the dismemberment scene you get in his intro too. back half of the game is just so fucking good, like if final fantasy 4 had an actual emotional thrust to it

i'm not sure i'm quite as attached to the trilogy as i once was, but i know that once i play earthbound again, it'll all come flooding back. love can fade, but sometimes it perseveres

Drakengard 3, beneath it all, is a game about the struggles of domestic life in a world where things don't always go as planned. It's hilarious, but it shares a few narrative elements and themes with the film Finding Nemo, albeit with a mother and son rather than a father and a son. There's an implied intimacy between Zero and Michael, his loss devastates her, mentally, physically, and spiritually -- and she's left to take of "their son" Mikhail alone. Zero isn't a particularly good mother, in fact she's undeniably abusive, a fact that's only softened by the fact that Mikhail is a dragon. But it's a story that resonates deeply with my own life experiences on some level, even if not literally.

After a certain point though, it's really not that hard for all that to melt into the back in your mind, and all you're left with is the poopoo peepee cum game, and I can't blame anybody for ending up feeling that way. It's infamously incomplete, not really properly conveying the weight of Zero's history and characterization, making a lot of the underlying themes like ending cycles of generational abuse and fatalistic duty pretty understated until the final ending. That isn't to say it isn't there, every single ending in Drakengard 3 manages to choke me up every time (which is more than any other Taro game ending has done for me beyond a first playthru), but much like its slapped together repeated ad nauseam faux musou structure, the player really has to put in the work to acquire that underlying meaning.

It's also just an unabashedly feminine game. For all the penis vagina balls sex jokes none of them ever really come off as objectifying to any specific gender, outside of maybe how cartoonishly vulgar and buffoonish the Disciples can often be and the way Drakengard 3 intentionally plays with gender roles to highlight the absurdity of society's double standards. There's a scene towards the end of the game that I adore where Zero is giving her Disciples very genuine and meaningful "performance reviews", and it's like, damn I've been on both sides of conversations like this, that's real as fuck!!! It's easy to look at Drakengard 3 and dismiss it as nihilistic or horny, but I feel like that's almost missing the point. Love and meaning through chaos and pain is Taro's whole schtick at this point, and I don't think any of his works get that point across as effectively as this one.

Drakengard 3 - 8/10

the real reason i continue to play this game is because zero's design fucking rules and her fruity little sword is the kind of shit i'll never not autistically* obsess about (i was NOT normal about the kingdom hearts 1 keyblade designs as a child)

*i do actually have autism, i don't think i've ever directly said as much on my backloggd (personally i feel like it's really fucking obvious), but i felt the need to clarify that i'm technically allowed to say that 💕

I don't think I'm really a fan of whatever I said in my review for this game. Yeah yeah yeah, it's the bestest game ever. It shouldn't really matter where an experience lands on some broader scheme of subjective Goodness, I just wanna let things be their own thing and enjoy them on their own given merits. For you see, Disco Elysium and Sonic Adventure 2 Battle? Those are basically the same game to my twisted and crazy mind... If you can't see the vision don't even bother @ing me...

But really Disco Elysium's just a video game for adults that allows itself to be fun and meaningfully game-y without bloating the experience with unnecessary systems and an unmanageable scope. I was pretty much in love with it from the opening dialogue with [redacted]'s inner voices. But then I just kept falling in love with it. Its worldbuilding, its characters, the way it masterfully interweaves even its most serious moments with geniunely great humor. I love that it's undeniably leftist in perspective without being masturbatory or moralizing. I like that it makes me feel smart-girl-brained when I understand the things that are happening in the text. I like that Kim Katsuragi makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, I would do anything for him even he's a lil bit of a centrist. And a cop, I guess. And maybe I also wanna marry that really cool sword lady and take really good care of her and her kids. Also how many games let you be a bisexual communist who can talk to inanimate objects!!!! The answer is three, and all of them are on this list. Stay tuned...

Anyways the moment you've all been waiting for, maybe you even skimmed over everything else just to get to this part (I sure hope you did please don't read any of that above):

Disco Elysium - 8/10

minus two theia dollars (that's what my scoring system is called now) because the boys don't kiss at the end even if you play the game really good

Chrono Cross gets me. Innovative combat system? All of your party members are fucked up guys? Zero hour heady sci-fi fantasy concepts that are bursting out of their overburdened textboxes in their utter incomprehensibility? God, it fucking rules. Kid and Harle easily two of my favorite characters in gaming, not to mention the 40 other little freaks that are hopping and bopping around this stupid ass experience that's ostensibly a "video game".

The combat encounters do overstay their welcome a bit towards the end, but it never truly ceases to be a great battle system in my opinion. I don't know, I feel like trying to either armchair game design or face value literary critique Chrono Cross just saps the enjoyment out of its creative anarchy. I understand that a lot of its spotty plotting is due to time constraints, but it's still a game I wouldn't really change in any sort of way. I find myself a little ambivalent on The Radical Dreamers Edition, but I do appreciate that we finally have an official English release of Radical Dreamers itself.

Still in disbelief that one of the earliest party members that you can recruit is an androgynous visual-kei idol who strums his guitar in order to damage enemies:

Chrono Cross - 8/10

please sign my petition for square enix to patch radical dreamers edition to give lucky dan his real name back in the english localization