I’ve been writing these lists for a while now, and I always try to sum up how i’m feeling about the game industry at that particular moment in time.
In 2023 I wrote about the industry writ large essentially being a dumpster fire, and basically all of the bad stuff from 2023 got exponentially worse. 2024 was actually the year where I looked at my wife and said “if our children come to us and say they want to make a career in videogaming, it is our duty as their parents to steer them away from that”.
I don’t wanna do that, for the record. It’s a bleak business, but I wanna be positive. Let’s talk about something nice, something pleasant, something awesome — 2024 was the single greatest year the Japanese Role Playing Game ever had.
That’s a big statement considering this is a genre that peaked about 25 years ago, but on top of the four JRPG’s that made my list, we got three exceptional from-the-ground-up remakes in the form of Persona 3: Reload, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, and Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake. We also got a version of Shin Megami Tensei V actually worth playing with SMTV: Vengeance getting that exceptional title off the Switch. Indies bring it with this genre every year, and Bloomtown was a very difficult cut from my list. Hell, we got a new Mana game of all things, and it’s also actually good, which is pretty rare for that franchise.
Were there years with better JRPG’s? Sure, but I cannot recall a year so absolutely loaded with gems from this genre, and it’s truly shocking to see in 2024. Many fans of the genre are worried about keeping momentum going, but honestly I think we all just need to take a step back and appreciate how wonderful this year was for a type of game that was extremely formulative to me loving videogames in the first place.
So with the preamble out of the way, let’s hand out some awards!
2024’s “I ****** Up Last Year’s List” Award: Lies of P
I usually give this award to a game from last year that I didn’t get around to and which also wasn’t up for list consideration. I usually feel pretty good about my lists even after a couple of years, but I very clearly did Lies of P dirty.
I must atone.
When I wrote last year’s list, I had bought Lies of P the week before and was maybe like a third of the way through it. I really was digging what I had played and figured I’d go ahead and slide it into the tenth spot.
What I didn’t know at the time is that Lies of P would continue to get better and better and better as it went along, and it’s become possibly my favorite entry in the entire genre. I liked it so much that I beat it twice (very rare for me) and actually went back to finally play Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, and the entire Dark Souls trilogy. It made the Soulsborne genre go from something I liked on occasion to being a borderline obsession.
I deeply regret last year’s entry on this game focusing so much on Lies of P being “borderline plagiarism”. It isn’t. It stands on its own merits, and can hang with the best of Miyazaki and his team at FROM can produce. If I was re-seeding last year, I don’t see a world in which it’s lower than three, and I might even go higher. I truly cannot wait to play it again when the DLC releases now that it is also PS5 Pro Enhanced.
What a game.
2024’s “I Probably ****** Up This Year’s List” Award: Nine Sols
Speaking of exceptional Souls games, Nine Sols shot to the top of my “must check out” list after my previously mentioned Souls excursion. Everyone I’ve talked to said the same thing — it’s 2D Sekiro with amazing art and a fantastic score, which sounds like a winning combination to me. Unfortunately it was stuck on PC for most of the year, and when it finally arrived on GamePass in the busy holiday stretch, it fell through the cracks. I’m quite certain that I will love the heck out of it whenever it gets pulled from the backlog abyss.
Remaster of the Year: Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered
I was not expecting to, in the middle of the holiday rush, spend two weeks devouring an eight-year-old game. Horizon: Zero Dawn is a title that has sat near the top of my backlog shame pile for many moons, but I finally got around to it and with HZD Remastered being such a exceptional showpiece for the PS5 Pro. While I wouldn’t call it a full-on remake, it’s also significantly above an average remaster in terms of improved visual fidelity and numerous improvements in overall presentation. In-game dialogue cinematics between characters have improved significantly with far more expressive character models and animations. While the gameplay itself didn’t see much upgrading, it turns out hunting robot dinosaurs is still very fun nearly eight years later.
Also noteworthy about this release is that it has achieved a very weird and very telling feat — It’s the only game that’s a killer app launch title for both the PS5 Pro and the PS4 Pro. Poetic, I suppose.
2025’s Story of the Year: How many more studios will be sacrificed at the altar of Live Services?
2024 continued the horrific trend from 2023 of everyone getting fired, and from my vantage point it sure seemed like a lot of the people who got fired were making “live service” titles — constantly evolving games with weekly content updates require both extensive post launch support and a large, captive fanbase. Without both, the game dies, and without the fans it really dies.
This is now “the normal” for the AAA game industry. The ghouls running the show are essentially turning the business into Silicon Valley Unicorn Hunt-style investing. Make ten multiplayer shooters with season passes and purchasable cosmetics, nine of them will fail miserably, but the hope is that the tenth will save the whole company and make it worthwhile. Now that only works if you get to the tenth, and until that point, this system will make the lives of developers absolutely miserable. How many people toiling on abject failures like Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, Foamstars, XDefiant, and a litany of others saw this coming? I could not imagine the soul crushing atmosphere that must have existed at these studios that spend years making games they probably knew were going to flop.
Or maybe these studios were plagued with “toxic positivity”, which leads us to our final award…
Turd of the Year: Concord
I tried to not give this to Concord. I thought about giving it to the director of Black Myth: Wukong for being a world class dingus, but that would’ve gotten very mean very quickly, and I didn’t wanna end up on any list for the CCP. I didn’t play Concord (why would you?) and I had significantly more experience with other industry dumpster fires this year. I beat Suicide Squad Kills The Justice League, for the record.
But you know what the difference is? One can still play Suicide Squad. It didn’t get Thanos’d into the ether after a month.
In the history of this entire medium, there has never been a game released so emblematic of the problems facing an entire industry at the moment of its release than Concord. Apparantly the people at Sony were so impressed with the character art Firewalk Studios spent two years making that Sony spent four HUNDRED million dollars and three more years making a mediocre Overwatch competitor with characters and dialogue so blatantly inspired by the immensely tired Marvel Cinematic Universe that Kevin Feige should consider a lawsuit. It was bland, uninteresting, weirdly focused on characters nobody cared about, and its player base was so embarrassing that it got scrubbed from the Earth even before the accompanying Concord-themed Secret Level episode aired. What a fun time capsule that is!
There’s an argument to be made that this is the single most expensive failure in the history of art. That is a ludicrous statement, but here I am making it. In a year filled with catastrophic decisions, bad/traumatizing management, and some very disappointing games, The Turd Of The Year can only be Concord.
ALL THOSE OTHER 2024 WRAPUP LISTS? TOSS ‘EM. HERE IS THE LIST
Honorable Mention: Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
I think this placement shows what I thought of the whole Erdtree nomination controversy at The Game Awards.
Let it be known that in a year of kick-ass videogames, the absolute best time I had playing videogames this year was Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, which as far as I’m concerned is basically the best bit of DLC ever created. It’s as long as most FROM Souls games, and maintains that same extremely high bar of quality while making huge additions to The Lands Between. Promised Consort Radahn is the greatest challenge they’ve ever come up with in any of these titles, and no game this year even touched the high I got from defeating him after seven or so hours of trying. Shadow of the Erdtree takes one of the greatest games of all time and somehow makes it significantly better.
With that said, no, it shouldn’t qualify for Game of the Year. On top of not being a standalone game, it’s hardly standalone to Elden Ring itself. Like if Erdtree was an option from the main menu, MAYBE I’d consider it, but Shadow of the Erdtree requires players to play 50 hours of another videogame and beat one of the toughest optional bosses in said game to even access it. It directly carries over progress and information from a game that, frankly, already won enough GOTY awards, so I feel no need to include it in 2024’s results.
But I did really, really like it.
10. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Another year, another appearance on this list from the great people at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios. I keep waiting for The World’s Best Game Developer to make a slip-up, and it just doesn’t wanna happen. Infinite Wealth had the danger of being juuuuuuuuuust one too many games taking place on the streets of Japan, so mixing it up with the very cool setting of Hawaii allowed the team to squeeze even more juice out of this Yakuza fruit.
In a series defined by an abnormally large amount of side-quests and things to do, Infinite Wealth turns this up to an absurd degree with multiple optional endeavors taking over a dozen hours each. Sujimon and Dondoku Island could be their own games, and I nearly enjoyed them as much as a main story that continues this series’s amazing ability to make me care about the weirdest, dumbest people in absolutely absurd scenarios. It doesn’t quite stick the landing in the ways I was hoping, but that’s a small hiccup in a overall excellent yarn. While this wacky series continues to march unabashed towards yet even more entries, I continue to be excited for them all.
Bring on the pirates.
9. UFO 50
It took me a little time to warm up to UFO 50. The first couple of times I fired it up, I thought it was very neat and a surprisingly fleshed out gag making fun of the now infamous Action-52. It takes a little while for the game to really open up to what it is, and the metastory of this very odd fictional game developer is drip-fed to the player very slowly while exploring the 50 games on hand. They’re presented in “chronological” order by release date from UFO Soft from 1982-1989, and the most amazing thing to me about UFO 50 is seeing the real-world development acumen necessary to portray a fictional developer growing through the years. The real developers at Mossmouth clearly spent a lot of time thinking about how games changed during the decade of the 80’s, and incorporating that into their compilation of titles is maybe the most impressive thing I saw any videogame do this year.
But it’s not one videogame, it’s fifty!
All this talk of homage and meta would be absolutely meaningless if UFO 50 had an Action-52 level of quality, but there are some legitimate 8-bit bangers on here. Starting with Barbuta was… a choice, but that choice makes a lot more sense as one sees the design ethos and complexity expand with each title. It wasn’t until I got to Mooncat where I realized there’s something really special going on here, and starting each new title is it’s own fun little experience. It’s not the best game of the year, but it’s certainly the best value of 2024, and one of the more memorable experiences I had all year. I have a feeling that, decades from now, I don’t know how much I’m going to want to fire up most of the other games on this list, but I’ll always be down to play some Bushido Ball.
8. Silent Hill 2
I’m still equal parts gobsmacked and pleased that the remake of Silent Hill 2 absolutely deserves to make this list. It is, without question, the most shocked I’ve been to greatly enjoy a videogame in a long time. Literally everything a game could have had going against it, this one did. I trust Konami about as far as I can throw it, they’re remaking one of the most important and beloved videogames of all time, and the people at developer Bloober Team frankly had never shown the emotional maturity necessary to handle the extremely dark subject matter of this legendary horror game.
And wouldn’t you know it? They knocked it out of the park. Silent Hill 2 is an exceptional remake that treats the original with the respect it deserves while also smartly expanding on it without desecrating a truly sacred text. It’s terrifying, it’s beautiful, the audio in general is exemplary, and it is an abject success no matter how one slices it. Sometimes it can do the body & mind good to go into a situation with deep (and deserved) cynicism only to have all wildest expectations blown away, and I couldn’t be more elated that it happened here.
7. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth
The AAA scene is in a rough patch right now. After fifteen years of saying “we have to do something about ballooning budgets, lengthy development times, and a shrinking audience!” all while basically letting all of those problems get even worse, we are very much at a tipping point where I’m starting to wonder if these games are even going to continue to exist. There is no project that exemplifies these issues while also showing the potential of what these games can be quite like the Final Fantasy VII Remake Project…Trilogy…Thing. It’s looking like it’s gonna take Square-Enix twenty years, three games, and $750 million to remake a JRPG where the characters had toasters for hands. We’re all very lucky Final Fantasy XIV has given this company seemingly unlimited money to create such insane vanity projects.
Luckily, Rebirth succeeds in a lot of ways where Remake (thanks Square for continuing to name their products in confusing ways) did not. While Remake recreated Midgar to an amazing scale, it was still only one part in what I knew was a much larger story. Rebirth is essentially the story of The Rest Of Disc One, and while that doesn’t sound impressive, a lot happens in the rest of disc one with a ton of variety and locales, each of which is rendered to a captivating degree in Rebirth. This is a lavish, opulent product that is honoring one of the more beloved titles in gaming history in ways I continue to become more on board with as the trilogy continues. With excellent dialogue among a very likable cast, some outstanding renditions of classic songs, and some rather unexpected diversions in the overarching scenario, one really gets the feeling the team involved with this game are starting to step out of the looming shadow of having to remake Final Fantasy VII while making this project into their own.
For those who still enjoy AAA bombast, this might be the most bombastic of them all, and that is an achievement worth noting. I just hope finishing this trilogy doesn’t sink the entire damn company.
6. Thank Goodness You’re Here!
This has been said by many gaming pundits before me, but humor is a pretty difficult nut to crack in this medium. Thank Goodness You’re Here! Reminded me of classic Lucasarts adventure games not just because all players really do in this game is smack stuff with their hand, but it also captures the exceptional pace at which those games delivered the yuks. Thank Goodness You’re Here! is not only funny, it is consistently funny throughout its entire three-ish hour run time. Gags are aplenty and constantly are thrust at the player in numerous hilarious ways.
It also successfully captures the urban decay of Northern England coal mining towns in a way that rises above the silliness that gushes out of this game. The two person team at Coal Supper saw this first hand growing up, and have done a great job thoughts about the human toll of Neoliberialism while also being side-splittingly hilarious. I don’t want to list any specific gags (like that poor bastard with the chimney) because this is an experience best when going in as cold as possible, so anyone here needing a few good chuckles would do well to check this one out.
5. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle
It is very rare for a licensed title to nail its source material this well, not only in presentation but also in gameplay. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle does a fantastic job of making the player constantly do Indiana Jones shit. Raiding tombs, punching Nazis, working around booby traps, and making the attractive woman tagging along swoon. It tells a great story in this universe, and the entire game is anchored by the best performance of Troy Baker’s career, who does a fantastic job of walking a very fine line between doing an excellent Harrison Ford impression while also sprinkling his own mannerisms in as well. He’s joined by an outstanding cast, including a truly exceptional performance from Marios Gavrilis who is clearly having a ball playing main villain Emmerich Voss.
Placing this game fifth is apt, because the first half of this game would’ve been first while the second half would’ve been tenth. Up through exploring a Nazi battleship (that’s not a spoiler for Indiana Jones), I was absolutely convinced this was my Game of the Year. Unfortunately, there’s a pretty precipitous drop in quality over the last couple of areas, I liked the hand-to-hand combat less and less after every boss fight, and it also seemed significantly buggier the further I got in. I also found the ending slightly underwhelming for reasons I won’t spoil here. Because of all this, it stumbled down the list a bit, but it’s definitely not going to spoil the fun for anyone down to step into the shoes of the worlds most famous archeologist.
4. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Ohh how the failure of this game eats at my soul.
They finally did it. Ubisoft made an interesting, refreshing title while also reviving a long dormant franchise. They did the thing the internet yelled at them to do for years, and then nobody bought it. While it had a decently long sales tail and ended up selling about 1.3 million units as of this writing, that wasn’t enough to save the development team at Ubisoft Montpellier getting split up to go make more side-quests in Far Cry that nobody wants to play. This is profoundly disappointing for a litany of reasons, least of all being how many people missed out on a truly incredible title.
As I said in my review, The Lost Crown is not the most original game, and the metroidvania genre has been absolutely done to death over the past decade or so, but it is just a good ol’ time hopping around as main protagonist Sargon in an expertly crafted, expansive map with a strong focus on platforming. It tells a good story, has top notch art design, and it is beautiful to see in motion, particularly for those with 120hz displays. It’s got some new features patched in since launch, and the Mask of Darkness DLC expansion is both very good while also providing an exceptional value at a whopping five bucks, so I hope these past couple of paragraphs can convince some to give 2024’s most overlooked title another chance.
3. Unicorn Overlord
Vanillaware is a developer I’m always happy to see pop up with a new game whenever they come out of their hole, and Unicorn Overlord is their finest work yet. They’ve consistently made games that were beautiful to look at but with gameplay that was serviceable enough to keep one engaged while they oogled at the art design and sprite work. This is the first time they’ve made a game where their core mechanics match their art, and that made for a truly engaging experience I was not expecting from design steeped in mobile game foundations.
Battles are not controlled directly, but rather battalions are formed and sent in to do combat on the players orders. Unicorn Overlord does a fantastic job of slowly drip feeding mechanics to the player and not overwhelming them at the start, so when the game does build up to a huge scale with tons of decisions to be made in each encounter, I never felt overwhelmed. It’s a shame this game is locked to consoles due to the head of the company having the same fears of PC piracy that developers had in 2005. I feel this game could’ve really found an audience there, but anyone with a box capable of playing Unicorn Overlord very much should.
2. Stellar Blade
I hate what the internet did to this game.
It is profoundly disappointing to me that nearly every time I said to my gamer peeps how much I adored Stellar Blade, their first question was either asking how horny I was or if liking it was somehow me protesting the Woke Mind Virus. If the truly revolting discourse around this title (none of which was fanned by the team at developer Shift Up) kept readers from partaking in the game itself, that is equal parts disappointing and understandable. I’m really not sure why the internet chose this particular hot videogame chick with absurd dimensions to be the cornerstone of arguments over “What We’ve Lost” while idiots decry attempts to make women in videogames look… y’know like a real lady. It’s sick, very weird, and it is a crying shame Stellar Blade got involved in this nonsense because it’s a hell of a videogame.
While i’m sticking with Lies of P for “The best Non-FROM Souls game”, Stellar Blade is a clear #2 in my eyes for its ability to take the principles of the Souls genre and add the complexity of combat found in character action games like Devil May Cry. While the whole ethos of this game borrows extensively from Nier: Automata to the point where they made some Nier DLC to go along with it, the combat, level design, and over world design all ensure it doesn’t sit in another game’s shadow. Last year I shouted out South Korea for making a mark in the AAA games industry with Lies of P, and I’m very excited to see this trend continuing here.
If those reading this are only going to play one 2024 PS5 console exclusive soulslike that the internet got very weird over, definitely make it Stellar Blade. I legitimately have zero clue how anyone could think Black Myth: Wukong is a better game.
1 Metaphor: ReFantazio
Well if one is wondering why it took until February to get this list published, this is the reason. I put about five hours into this game on Series X then dropped it when I got a little distracted by my new PS5 Pro and decided to spend the busy holiday rush playing old Sony exclusives I never got around to finishing. Once I finally got around to playing it around Christmas time, I could not play anything else until it was completed around 75 hours later.
Metaphor: ReFantazio is the best Role Playing Game the nation of Japan has produced this century. Studio Zero has been honing their craft for the past couple decades in the Persona titles, and Metaphor is what happens when a master craftsman is at the top of their game refining their work to an impeccable sheen. I can’t think of many games I’ve spent so much time in that were so polished, so expertly paced, and so respectful of the players time & attention. I can’t remember the last 80 hour game I played that basically had zero lull in the middle of it. I legitimately have no notes. I don’t know how Studio Zero could have possibly made a better JRPG. It somehow “Made Me Feel Like A Kid Again” playing PS1 JRPGs without pandering to nostalgia. It proudly wears the ethos of the past while blazing its own trail forward.
In every single regard, Metaphor: ReFantazio is extraordinary. Its story of uniting a divided people in times of racial and ethnic strife is not only extremely topical, but handled with such care and dignity that I am legitimately shocked that a monoculture such as Japan was able to produce it. The music is incredible, the art is incredible, the overworld design is incredible, hell even the menus are the best they’ve ever made, and that’s saying something considering these are the people that make Persona. It has all the stylish sensibilities of that franchise while remaining very much it’s own thing, which is a very difficult line to walk.
I circle back to my opening statement where I expressed the jubilation I had with the JRPG resurgence. It was a great year in the moment, but it was also a scene dominated by plenty of remakes or remasters. Metaphor: ReFantazio was the game that convinced me that the future of this genre is bright. It made me hopeful for a industry I am very worried about structurally. “Hope even in darkness” is a core theme of Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it represents that in the real world as well. It is not the most original, nor the most innovative, but it is the best game of 2024, it is the best built game of 2024, and it is the one I will forever remember.
The rest of the games on this list I merely recommend you play. I implore you to play Metaphor: ReFantazio.
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He is currently attending graduate school at Pacific University seeking a Master's In Teaching with a focus on secondary social studies. From 2015-2020, Jarrod worked as a school teacher in various countries throughout Asia, and is now seeking certification to teach in his home country so a global pandemic doesn't leave him stranded again.
- The PlayStation 5 Pro Difference: The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Remastered - May 8, 2025
- Jarrod’s 2024 Top Ten Games of the Year and Other Meaningless Awards - February 26, 2025
- The Three Part Questionnaire: A PS5 Pro Review - December 29, 2024
“Metaphor: ReFantazio is the best Role Playing Game the nation of Japan has produced this century.” I 100% agree!! ðŸ‘🼠ðŸ‘🼠🥰