Bugsnax the end of the Snorpy quest line
where he works up the courage, confessing his love to Chandlo and asks him out then Chandlo is just like āBro, weāve been dating for years what are you talking about you doof?ā
Just adorable, cute and funny in a game filled with great moments.
So Chimera Squad.
I got one of those Austin Walker emergent storytelling where you have to fill in the gaps of character nuance and detail yourself moments.
I had the resident snake cop (Torque, snake of the year?) in a Viper on Viper fight that started with the enemy snake spitting a pool of acid on her but wouldnāt you know, I picked the immunity to poison skill for Torque. The immune tag popped up and she ran one of her got attacked animations. In this case, flaring her hood and hissing at the other Viper. Her ābring itā was then made absolutely perfect with her raring up as Torqueās aforementioned skill also made her heal in pools of poison. ā+2 HP.ā
And youād think thatād be enough of a moment but can you believe it, Torque was next in the turn order. Iāve got a fiery young snake whoās already declared who sheās after next. Iām not gonna have her go shoot someone else. This is happening mano a mano. We of course all know the trademark move of an XCOM Viper. Torque reels in the other snake and, if I recall correctly, they got hoisted by their own petard as they didnāt have immunity to poison and had just landed in their own poison pool. So they took damage and itās Torqueās fight to win.
And she closes it.
Snake of the year.
Rain World - There are several moments from this game that are incredible so Iāll just make a big oldā list
GIANT DEER THAT YOU CAN RIDE
I know most of this is spoilers, but hopefully 2021 will be The Year Everyone Plays And Loves Rain World cause the game is a treat
So many moments in FFVII Remake. The opening cinematic which is literally just the same as the original game but oh boyā¦ still gave me goosebumps. When Cloud gets all dressed up. When you have to fight Hell House. When the Jenovah Synths came in, I was so happy.
I still love the bit in Doom Eternal, when you walk into the base above Mars and everyone just stops in their tracks as you walk on through. I think they mishandled parts of the story and the lore surrounding Doom guy himself. Turns out heās a gamer badass like you or me. But I loved those āoh shitā moments.
The Last Of Us 2: Part 2 parts of this game were problematic. The game left me feeling hollow. Iām left wondering whether this was the point? Having said that, whilst the latter stages of that game sucks, I loved the flashback sequence in the museum. I liked how all of Joelās dinosaur knowledge came from Jurassic Park. I didnāt like how he dissed The Lost World which is a far better sequel than people give it credit. The Last Of Us Part 2 wishes it was as good as The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
entering Liyue for the first time in Genshin Impact was really really memorable to me. all the quests for the first 20-odd hours stay within the first big area, with the brilliant green vistas and fantasy town in a lot of the key art. i refused to fast-travel, because i wanted the ~vibes~, so i actually got really familiar with most of the (quite large) map.
then you get a random side quest to go to Liyue. just, go there, no pressure! and you hit the view map button and you gotta scroll like, twice the size of the initial area on your map to see where that is. okay. cool. i started across the bounds of where iād previously been, and somehow missed that there is a clearly marked path by which the game wants you to enter Liyue.
instead, i did a classic open world hop awkwardly up some cliffs near the edge of the playable area. this meant i missed the really lovely scripted walk into Liyue, but it did make cresting some random hill genuinely stunning. the music still swells, as if i were on that scenic route, but its for a view that felt entirely accidental, full of jagged cliffs that truly donāt look like youāre meant to be able to cross them. at the edges of your vision, some kind of city in a giant tree(???) pokes out of the fog. while the critical path frames this as a setpiece moment, it felt mystifying in that moment. i donāt usually get struck by āyou can climb that mountainā moments so much. but here, i absolutely lost it.
the restraint the game shows of making you get deeply familiar with an (in fairness, still Very Big) space, before letting you literally stumble into learning just how incredibly tiny you are, just blew me away. i actually, uh, stopped playing the game soon after, because of that! i never even made it to the city, which people really love! it was all so much. my determination to walk everywhere and enjoy those ~vibes~ started chaffing with the gameās long-term loop of warping around to do daily quests in a real frustrating way. but god what a good moment.
Iāve been playing a lot more Spelunky 2 lately and I really love some of the things you have to do to achieve the āsecretā ending. Depending on which path you take, the way you die with the ankh is so much more imaginative than it was in Spelunky 1. Either you sacrifice yourself on an altar in the City of Gold or you go through a one-way door in Tide Pools to drain lava to reveal a secret door. Then later when you want to get the Qilin, you have to get a tablet to identify one specific Ushabti and then carry it to the next level. When you pick up the tablet, its description in your journal changes so you have to actually go in and check it on each run. Itās a really clever use of the journal as a mechanic that I like a whole lot.
Hello, I am here today to argue that Yakuza: Like a Dragon has damn-near perfect ending. I may need to explainā¦
Okay. So:
Ichiban is an odd protagonist. He is not Kiryu. He is, by all diegetic accounts, a dreg of society raised in equal parts by a brothelās various employees, the Arakawa yakuza family, and his Super Famicom. As an adult, he has a wild naivete that is wholly informed by the basic morality lessons imparted by the Dragon Quest games. His chosen family brother, Masato Arakawa, despite being born in extremely similar circumstances ā down to them both being abandoned and found in coin lockers on the exact same night (this game operates on Parasite levels of ānot subtleā) ā not only got everything he could have possibly wanted from his patriarch father, but grew up to be a raging asshole/governor of Tokyo/chair of Japanās liberal party. Essentially, he had everything Ichi was denied. But despite the sheer, Absurdist forces pushing against him, Ichiban remains steadfast as Camusās āHappy Sisyphusā through every trial given to him before and during the course of this game.
Whatās more is that at every point where these two intersect throughout the gameās plot, I ā as the player ā wanted nothing more than to get clean and simple revenge on this dude. Heās justā¦so incredibly dislikable that itās honestly impressive. But Ichiban never does. He only continues to love this person who has always shown nothing but contempt and disdain toward him. Even by the very end, when you and your crew definitively ruin his ambitions to become the de facto dictator of Japan, Ichiās goal was never to destroy the person himself ā only his abhorrent intentions. Before you can detain him at the scene of the gameās final fight though, he runs off. Where else, but back to the place where both of their respective stories began. At that bank of coin lockers, Masato and Ichiban finally have their real one-on-one conversation that the former had been avoiding the whole time. Abjectly ruined in every possible way, all he has left is his pride and gun with enough bullets left to do something with. Ichi doesnāt buck though. He brings all of that naieve worldview heās carried with him for 40+ years of his life and steps toward Masato, wanting nothing more than to talk him down from his ledge and see that there is a life ā a good life ā waiting for him after he accepts his due punishment and plummets to rock bottom. And Masato, as you would expect, calls out Ichiās proclomations as nothing but bullshit idealist bullshit (honestly, like I did). But Ichiban still holds steadfast. He breaks down every last cubic inch of Masatoās cultivated persona: he reminds him of how the people Masato had killed loved him more than anyone; how Ichi himself ā despite being left to die, despite being left to cover for Masatoās own murder ā wants nothing more than to show his own love for him as an honest to God brother for him. Ichi, through sheer force of will and emotional fortitude, convinces him that that hypothetical good life can be attained. Because if nothing else, he will at least have Ichiās genuine love and affection toward him there as he works his way out of the hole he dug for himself. Masato lowers his gun. Him and Ichiban embrace. Masato opens the very same coin locker he was found in so, so long ago and leaves his revolver inside. He makes a quick call to settle his affairs and truly accepts what lies in wait for him. Ichiban could not be happier.
But then the world that was on pause for this encounter suddenly resumed, and the next thing Masato realizes is that a knife is now in his belly. Its handle is held by a man named Sota Kume, a member of the non-profit activist group formerly run by Masato, Bleach Japan. In cultivating his persona as Governor Ryo Aoki, Masato gave birth to an organization that vaguely resembles something like the Proud Boys ā fervent, angry, and active in their desire to āclean up Japanā, however that mission statement might be read. Upon being revealed as someone who conspired to commit murder, Masatoās former follower ā a very simple man who knows only that his desire is to pursue the aims of Bleach Japan by whatever means necessary ā couldnāt accept this. He finds Masato. He approaches with conviction, and stabs his former role model without hesitation. Ichiban and Masato are left confused, unable to react to what had just happened. The former governorās body is left lying on the ground, barely clinging on to life. And like Masatoās father did 40 years prior, Ichiban carries him, dashing as fast as he could away from the lockers and toward the nearest person who could do anything for him. But unlike 40 years earlier, this time Masato isnāt so lucky.
But even if the world threw another tragically fated curve ball against Ichiban and his family, what matters most is that despite his own, deep-seated cynicism, Masato was finally able to believe in Ichiās love. Just like I was.
The thing that makes talking about this scene so difficult ā besides the mountain of necessary exposition that led up to this encounter ā is the way that the writing, voice acting, visual direction, and motion capture all come together to all reach their own respective climaxes at the exact same time. After a 60-70 hour storyline, this game managed to save all of its raw strength of pathos until the very last minute, and used it to show ten minutes of two extremely similar-yet-different people rediscover each other and the bond that had always been lost to them. I donāt even care that Yakuza 7 doesnāt end with some spectacular bombast like previous Yakuzas reified just before the denouement. Kazuhiro Nakaya and Kosuke Toriumiās performances are so good on their own here, that Iād feel selfish to ask anything else of this game.
Two games:
Scripted moment: Kentucky Route Zero. Burying the horses. Repairing whatās broken. Finding a way to move on. To build something new on top of it.
Emergent moments: Spelunky 2. Not a moment in particular, but many. This game is a silent movie comedy come to life, with somehow perfect comedic timing. Things enter and exit the screen in the most amazing ways. Iāve laughed, cried, then laughed again at my own undoings. Itās an amazing game.
Spelunky 2 is full of great moments! The expressive character design turns little emergent quirks into tiny tragedies. I always got a little twinge of sadness coming upon one of the demons trapped in a room alone, or a caveman eternally pounded by one of the punch traps.
Obviously all games with emergent and semi-random world generation have āgreat momentsā - be that Spelunky 2 or Noita [although many of Noitaās, for me, have involved cascading death spirals, or wands which prove a little tooā¦ spicy. Still, the Noita subreddit is about 70% people posting clips of āgreat momentsā.]
Noita was definitely a better emergent silly moment generator for me than Spelunky if only because it was so much easier to parse how things would happen, spelunky can happen so fast and Iām dead in less than a second or two without a good grasp on what happened to me
100% on Spelunky 2 being so full of āa grenade rolls down the hillā moments. Austin and Patrickās playthrough during Savepoint was a lot fun and showcase how hilarious this game can be, and this thread by Tom Francis is also fantastic:
Saying goodbye to Astrid in Spiritfarer.
Diablerizing Reremouse in Vampire: The Masquerade: Night Road
Astrid is an A+ hugger and it makes that part all the better
the moment that bassline kicks in for the intro to Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1
itās justā¦ cool
I just remembered one of my favorite series of moments this year: teaching my mom how to play Animal Crossing!
Once the pandemic started and my siblings and I knew we wouldnāt be seeing my parents, we chipped in to get my mother a switch lite and new horizons. I was the person unofficially decided on to teach my mother how to play it, and video games in general.
There are so many things we take for granted in video games. How to navigate a menu with an analog stick, how reward systems work, inventories, how selected items are indicated etc. It was eye opening to see what needed to be taught from the ground up. We had some very long calls from the get-go to figure out how to get through the on ramp.
She has thankfully learned a lot. She loves the game and plays daily, usually starts very late, often missing the stores being open. One of the key points was catching the first shark:
I recently learned she ended up making close to 11 million over the summer. I keep telling her she could make bridges and infrastructure and such, but sheās been focused on removing the summer flowers and putting down shooting star rocks to light up the town. Iām just delighted she has learned the game as she has
The briefing for this mission in Project Wingman ends with saying it might be āthe largest furball in historyā and it delivers on that from the jump.
Not sure if this counts as a spoiler so if it needs to be blurred I will but navigating the canyon for lack of a more accurate word in mission 14 of ace combat 7. Maybe the closest Iāve felt to being in my teens again and flying in that canyon in ac 5
I think the greatest game moments I had in 2020 were mostly outside of games themselves. The charity streams and bundles from this year were wonderful to participate in. Savepoint, AGDQ, the ranged touch Marrowind stream, and the recent Polygon stream were all fun, funny, and inspiring and it means a lot to see these small communities be able to accomplish so much! Also a shout out to the Hallowstream which fosters an amazing community and offers some of my favorite games analysis.
Within games themselves tho my two fav moments were
Cloud catching his hugeass sword on a hotel door frame and
Lil Nas Xās Roblox concert
