The Damage Control Staff’s Favorite Games of 2019

The year 2019 was another busy one for video game releases, another one where it was tough to either afford all the good software that released or hard to find the time to play them all. The staff here at Damage Control played, uh, some of them, and we’d like to talk about our favorite games.

 

Geoffrey Barnes, Damage Control’s News Editor Picks:

 

I’ve played through several games in 2019, though most of them didn’t release this year. It feels like I’ll have a perpetual backlog to wade through, given the never-ending rate in which games continue to release, and how longer individual titles are these days. But I played a few great games that did release this year, and among those, I didn’t enjoy one more than Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 remake.

Like the original, the RE2 remake is a survival horror experience that takes place within the fictional midwestern American metropolis known as Raccoon City. It again features Leon Scott Kennedy and Claire Redfield as the main characters, who wade through a segment of the city to discover why zombies and other creatures have feasted on its citizens. The overall concept is identical to the original game, along with the types of locations explored and the non-linear structure. It’s the combination of the more modern gameplay and exploration elements with the old school aspects that make it memorable.

Capcom could have stuck with the classic title’s isometric adventure game-style point of view along with the visual upgrade, similar to the Resident Evil remake and Resident Evil 0. This project was green lit after the HD remasters of those titles sold so well. But they instead opted for the over-the-shoulder view from Resident Evil 4 and its progeny, and adjusted parts of the game to suit that view. The result worked out well. For instance, the characters can now aim and shoot at zombies, but as compensation, the zombies themselves are far more resilient compared to the original game. Even better: They can also wander between rooms. It was more practical to shoot them in the legs, but I still shot them in the head because I refused to break out of my old habit. The number of options available to the player works to its benefit.

The best survival horror games tend to have limited ammo, to force players to conserve resources to make the environment feel formidable. It works, because I really felt it when I missed a shot on an enemy.

I can’t talk about RE2’s enemies without discussing Mr. X. The big, hulking Tyrant was a threat in the original game, but he’s a much larger one here thanks to how indestructible he is. He’s reminiscent of the Terminator, with a similar theme to boot. This remake was more frightening than the original before he came on the scene, with the thankfully-diminished reliance on played-out jump scares. But he takes it to a different level.

I’ve wanted a Resident Evil game that fused the old school and new school RE flavors for a good while. Resident Evil 7 came close, but its first-person view and the need for its gameplay segments and enemy encounters to be designed around that made it a very different experience. This game, however, represents that fusion, with a more actionized approach through its enemy encounters while keeping the adventure game inspirations like puzzle solving and reading notes and news articles to help piece the overall story together. It also keeps the nonlinear Metroidvania-ish structure for the entire duration, maintaining the sense of exploration the original game included despite its locations being small in size.

It feels like I can’t praise the game enough here, but I did have a couple of problems with it. It’s a bummer the development team felt the need to cut some enemies from the original game, like the giant spiders. The game’s A and B scenarios, where one character could ideally explore a location after the previous character ventured through it depending on whether Leon or Claire were played first, is more inconsistent and illogical here compared to the original RE2. But I enjoyed the game enough that I didn’t care too much by the time I finished it.

It might sound like a damning indictment of 2019’s video game lineup that my favorite experience (and others who called it their game of the year) was a remake of a 1998 title. But it’s just that good. It’s also good to replay thanks to it not overstaying its welcome like other modern AAA game, and the slightly different paths characters can take. I can only hope that the Resident Evil 3 remake will live up to this.

Honorable Mentions: I said I played a “few games” from 2019 in the first paragraph, which I should also mention. I also enjoyed Devil May Cry V, which showed how there’s still life left in the franchise and these types of stylish action games as a whole. There was also Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, the crowdfunded successor to the Metroidvania Castlevania games (especially Symphony of the Night), which turned out to be the game in the non-linear platforming subgenre I’d been waiting for since Konami killed the series.

Maybe I’ll play more 2020 games in 2020, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my end-year tally consists of several 2019 games. We’ll see.

 

Angela Moseley, Damage Control’s Executive Editor Picks:

2019 was a fantastic year for video games. We had highly-anticipated, long-awaited hits such as Kingdom Hearts III, Death Stranding, and Borderlands 3. We had breakout releases like Apex Legends and Cadence of Hyrule. The 3DS had swansong titles in the form of Etrian Odyssey Nexus and Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to play lots of new titles from this year, as I worked my way through my backlog (occasionally on Twitch). All is not lost, because I did play a few 2019 games. As the year draws to a close, I’m going to talk about my absolute favorite game of 2019 and a few honorable mentions.

Monster Hunter World: Iceborne was my game of 2019. Monster Hunter World easily became my favorite game of 2018 as I played it almost every weekend with friends. Playing a full expansion that added new regions, new monsters, new weapons, new armor, a new difficulty, and new game mechanics was a no-brainer. The story in Iceborne picks up right after World. Unsurprisingly, a new disturbance has been discovered causing new monster variants, new monsters, and older monsters never before seen to appear in the New World. As one of the best hunters in the Fifth Fleet, you’re tasked with investigating and hunting these new monsters. The story is that simple and largely serves as a vehicle to hunt monsters, craft gear from their parts, hunt stronger monsters, and repeat the cycle.

Hunting with friends online and with random players is still the best aspect of the game. If one hunt presents too much a challenge you can always call for help. Likewise, you can always take time out to help others hunt. Parties consist as a duo or with up to four players. In Iceborne the difficulty scaling has been improved. Previously, Monster Hunter World made no distinction between hunting in a party of two or a party of four. A monster’s health was always ramped up to meet the challenge of four players. With this expansion, the game distinguishes between a party of two, and three or more which makes hunts a bit easier.

Other quality of life improvements include the ability to craft all of your items at once while out on a hunt instead just one-by-one. For example, if you’re a bowgun user and need more ammo you can now craft all you can carry out in the field all at one time instead of a single bullet at a time. The harvest box (where you can grow items to craft) is nearly double the size. The main base of Selina is smaller than Astera and everything is on one floor instead spread out between four floors. Personal room features can also be accessed in the main base instead of having to go into your room. Speaking of your room, it’s now connected to the Gathering Hub (where everyone in an online session can meet) and you never have to leave this area if you choose. Again, all of this on the old base at Astera was spread out over multiple floors.

Monster Hunter World: Iceborne is about more than small quality changes. The biggest draws are the various new monsters. Some of them are returning from World and have been beefed up for Master Rank with more health and new move sets. Others are variants or subspecies of existing monsters. For example, Anjanath is a fire breathing t-rex like dinosaur who has been given an electricity shooting counterpart named Fulgur Anjanath. These variants aren’t simple reskins as they have entirely new moves, weaknesses, and drop different types of material. Other monsters have returned from older games and some are fan favorites such as the saber-toothed cat Barioth or another t-rex type named Tigrex. Some of these beasts also have their own variants as well. The brand new monsters such as the elegant icy dragon Velkhana or the game’s rock solid final boss, Shara Isvalda are also great additions. All of these new and returning monsters bring another major change in Iceborne– namely a desperately needed increase in ice, water, electric, and dragon types to balance out all of the fire types in the base game.

Hunting monsters and grinding gear is a blast, but events are what keep players coming back. During these festivities all event quests are unlocked to give players the chance to grab armor, weapons, or items they may have missed. In addition to that, each event brings its own goodies. As of this writing, the Holiday Joy Fest is currently running which brings Chinese New Year themed armor and a specially decorated Gathering Hub. If that weren’t enough, Safi’Jiiva a new siege event monster is out, along with the collaboration event quests from Zero Dawn Horizon (PS4 players only). While the big events are seasonal, smaller event quests run throughout the year.

Monster Hunter World was already a fantastic game, but Iceborne has made it even better. There’s always something to do and the game feels like playing an MMO. One can easily sink hundreds of hours into it and I can see why World helped bring Capcom back into mainstream gaming relevance. I’m sure the next Monster Hunter installment they’re planning is already in the works. Given how much fun I had with this game in 2019, sign me up for future installments.

Honorable mentions:

Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Had I not been tangled up with Iceborne, Three Houses probably would have been my game of the year. This game on Switch strikes the perfect balance between Fire Emblem on handhelds and on console. While I’m finding the school life elements to occasionally drag on for too long, battling is where the game really shines. The removal of the weapons triangle takes some getting used to, but new elements such as combat battalions and super moves are well worth the trade-off. My only regret is not getting deeper into Fire Emblem: Three Houses or finishing it in 2019.

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator: I Love You, Colonel Sanders! also makes my list because this free game (and it is truly free) was so damned weird. It is obviously a promotion for KFC, but getting to try and romance Colonel Sanders was quite the experience. This was enhanced by streaming it on Twitch and having the chat help me with choices. I had fun with this game even if I can’t really recommend it as a good game.

 

Joseph Daniels, Damage Control’s Panthera Editus Picks:

2019 was a good year for games. Many of the titles I’ve been anticipating were finally released, including a pair of indie games where you play as a fox (Spirit of the North) and a wolf (Lost Ember) and explore nature in the service of the main story. Of course, one can’t bring up anticipated games from 2019 without bringing up the biggest one of them all, Kingdom Hearts III; the several years of waiting for Tetsuya Nomura to finally deliver the conclusion to his magnum opus trilogy was mostly worth it.

Compared to those games, good ones all of them, my game of the year is one that I was only feeling cautiously optimistic about, right up until it was released: Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers. To put this into perspective, when Stormblood came out in 2017, I was somewhat disappointed. The story didn’t feel as satisfying to play as Heavensward did and the final boss didn’t work for me. Compared to Heavensward, which hyped itself by making you a refugee from the authorities for a crime you didn’t commit, Stormblood hyped you by showing you a battle between the suddenly awakened Omega and the newly created Shinryu. They shouldn’t have been able to mess that up, but Shinryu promptly vanished from the story until it was time to fight the final boss and Omega turned out to be Stormblood‘s three tiers of raid bosses, so it didn’t return to the main story. Showing an Omega vs. Shinryu smackdown in the main story right before releasing Stormblood, and then having Shinryu not show up again until the very end of the game was like if Star Trek: The Next Generation still aired “The Best of Both Worlds, Part I” at the end of the third season, promising an epic showdown with the Borg in season four… then did an entire season of exploration before using “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II” as the season four finale instead of the season four premiere.

So as you can imagine, I was cautiously optimistic about Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers and in hindsight, although I did have a good reason to worry, I ultimately didn’t have to. The lead-up to the expansion saw several of my allies suddenly fall unconscious through a very violent-looking and mysterious phenomena starting about half a year prior to the expansion’s release. Although this phenomena didn’t have quite the same effect as losing all my allies all at once while fleeing the authorities right before the beginning of Heavensward, the beginning of Shadowbringers gave me the same isolated and lonely feeling as I felt in Heavensward as I ventured into a new land for the first time.

I don’t know if the same writers who wrote Stormblood wrote Shadowbringers, but the two expansions felt different. For one thing, the writing in Shadowbringers put greater focus on the feelings of the Warrior of Light at various points of the story and did a very good job of making me feel her worries. Although let’s be fair, the game being what it is, the Warrior of Light will always win, but Shadowbringers sure put her in a tough situation. One of my favourite parts of the game came when the Warrior of Light had defeated all the Light Wardens, but rather than returning night to the world, the sky suddenly returned to its original state of eternal light for some reason. Meanwhile, all the cursed light that she’d been trying to rid the world of had been stored inside of her and was threatening to rip her apart and turn her into a new Light Warden. The Warrior of Light took all of this very personally and went off on her own for a while in the game’s starting city, the Crystarium. After talking with a couple of her newest allies (one, the ghost of one of the world’s most triumphant heroes whom only she can see and the other, the ruler of the fairies), she decides to go off on her own to where Shadowbringers‘ villain was hiding in order to take on the burden of fixing the world herself.

When she was about to leave, her main allies, the characters who had been by her side since A Realm Reborn, found her and chastised her a little for going off on her own. They reminded her that she had allies and friends willing to help. Before they could finish, the entire population of the Crystarium showed up to voice their support as well. This was a place that had been introduced to me as somewhere that “had its fill of heroes”, but instead of shunning me for trying to save the world, as I had come to expect from trying to help both the people of Ala Mhigo and Doma in Stormblood, the people of the Crystarium rallied to my cause and voiced their support. I admit, I nearly cried at that point, and thus with the reassurances that the people of this world were behind our cause, the Warrior of Light and her friends found a giant slumbering whale, asked the ruler of the fairies for help (something which she’d been practically begging the Warrior of Light to do for the majority of the story) in order to wake him up, then rode him down to the bottom of the ocean.

Shadowbringers is full of scenes like this that are so over the top, the only way to really describe it is: yes, this is classic Final Fantasy. This is a worthy addition to the franchise whose heroes had to ride a giant space whale to the moon and sing opera to advance the plot, and whose villains are a giant evil tree who can disguise himself as a splinter or a woman who can disguise herself as the savior of the world so that she can hold a pop concert.

Oh, and the main villain of Shadowbringers is a hundred times better than the one from Stormblood. Just saying.