2024 Retrospect

Note: My opinions are subject to change, but I'm not gonna bother updating this tier list.

Going into this year, I figured AntonBlast would be my game of the year when only counting new releases, and I wasn't really sure what to expect beyond that. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was pretty locked in as my overall favorite once I played it, it was such a particularly excellent experience, I could see myself calling it one of my favorite games of all-time. When it comes to new game releases though, Shadow Generations really appeared out of nowhere and swept the competition.

Under Night 2 is also higher than AntonBlast, but in all honesty I haven't really given that game a ton of thought. Under Night's the kinda thing I just gotta be playing to remember how good it is. If it was an option, I would've voted for it over MultiVersus at The Game Awards, because while I quite like it, MultiVersus is extremely flawed and already won Fighting Game Of 2022.

Both Alan Wake games were really cool. I haven't really seen or played much like 'em so they were very fresh experiences for me. I'd say they had the most engaging plot out of any media I consumed in 2024.

Slay The Princess feels like it'll become more special to me in the future. I think I ended up undercutting its novelty by watching 2 playthroughs of it, and by completing it twice. Experiencing the game 4 times wasn't even squeezed into like a month or so, it was stretched across most of the year.

I don't know if Celeste was lucky, or unlucky with its placement. Playing through it, I flip-flopped a lot between "this game feels really special" and "this game's decent, but not my style". I put it in the middle of those 2 feelings I guess.

It's hard to really declare a favorite thing I watched since there were so many different formats to them. Equestria Girls is at the top, but that's counting a lot of separate pieces of media, including books, as one whole. Ollie & Scoops was really nice, I look forward to seeing more of the series. For years I didn't figure I'd like Coraline or The Iron Giant, so it was nice watching them on my own terms when I finally became interested enough; they're both movies I could've seen myself watching as a kid and not enjoying. Ruby Gillman is one I'm still not too sure about, I like to like it, but I don't know how much I like to look past my issues with it.

When it comes to things I read, the one I'm most willing to disclose is Equestria Girls: Rainbow Dash Brings The Blitz, but my favorite is actually an MLP fanfiction. I've thought a lot about whether or not I wanna talk about fanfiction, but at the moment I unfortunately just find it embarrassing. The only other detail I'll disclose about it for now is that it's a romance fic, because I pretty much only read romance fics. Anyways, Rainbow Dash Brings The Blitz was pretty solid two. Part of me wants to put 1999 higher on the tier list, but then I remember that I didn't like most of it.

I think Equestria Girls deserves its own paragraph here. It feels like it's been a while since I've seen something just so comforting. The process of writing my post about it though was both arduous, and accomplishing. On Twitter you might've seen me lose it when I lost 8 days of progress due a glitch on Blogger (it's the reason a Back Up Your Work post is on my To Do List). The final post really embodies both what I love and what I hate about doing this blog. I'm glad I pushed myself to talk about so much about the series, even if a lot of it was just me listing things I liked, but creating the post felt like a burden that was ate up my free time, and held me back from moving onto enjoying more media.

Perhaps for 2025 I won't push myself to post about every piece of media I consume. Technically I never posted about every piece of media I consumed, but it's still a lot for me. In case you haven't noticed, this post, and the last 10 posts were delayed to February 2025. The really short posts, while not always, can sometimes be pretty tough to write so simplifying them into just shout-outs could be nice. Even though they're the toughest one's, I don't wanna cut down on the long posts, because they're the most accomplishing ones, and I make them long in the first place because I wanna talk a lot about their topics.

Wrapping back to The Game Awards, I was actually initially going to make a whole separate post about those, but a lot of my thoughts on it were just "oh that's neat". Unfortunately the only thing I voted for, Sonic X Shadow Generations, didn't win the one category it was nominated in. The show itself had some pleasant, and some weird surprises. Having Statler and Waldorf parrot people's complaints from last year was pretty weird. I really didn't think they'd address the layoffs any more than another brief statement, but there ended up being a whole section showing off people helping others land jobs within the industry, which yeah still doesn't really call out the issues as directly as people want, but I think it's productive to spotlight stuff like that (if you can't tell, I totally forgot what the name of the thing I'm talking about is called, and I'm not productive enough to bother looking it up). Some announcements I'm interested in, Shadow Labyrinth, I probably wouldn't care if it didn't have Pac-Man, but it sure has edgy Pac-Man, Virtua Fighter whatever it's gonna be called, Dispatch, and Sonic Racing Cross Worlds. I've seen a bit of apprehension over that last one, but I thought Team Sonic Racing was great so I'm looking forward to it, I'm disappointed Shadow's still using a car instead of a bike like in the original Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing.

Other games I'm interested in releasing, Streets Of Rage 2 (the sequel to my favorite Rogue-Like), Clown Meat (a cool looking platformer), Byte Breakers (trust me fellas, this'll be "The Smash Killer", or y'know, it could just be a good, unique take on the fighting game genre), and 2XKO (some people say BBTAG could make people good at this game, but I've been thinking about how 2XKO could make people good at BBTAG).

To end off, here's some highlights to my Nintendo and PlayStation year in reviews (or whatever they're called):