My Top 15 Games of 2024 (part 1)

It is time for my annual post discussing all the games I've played this year, ranking them, and reflecting on the year in general. The second half of this year was very busy for me, which is why this blog has been so quiet, sorry about that. I will continue to be busy during the first half of 2025, but I'd like to at least make this post, as I was surprised to find I had played 15 games in 2024. With such a neat number, please enjoy this look back at the video games I played in 2024. Spoiler, I didn't play any of the games in the image above, so they won't be here, sorry!

But first, a quick explanation of the list. This is not a list of my favorite games I played that released in 2024, this is a list of my favorite games I played in 2024, regardless of what year they released in. For this reason 2024 games are rare. I made rules for which games qualify, and I'd like to quickly go over them, because I'm breaking one:

• I cannot have played this game extensively in a previous year*
  
• I must be finished with the game**
• My final play time for the game must be 5 hours or more
• *The following can be overridden if the game has new content added, and my playtime with the game is focused on this new content 
• *The following can be overridden if the game is a remake or I deem it worthy of being in my ranking. My list, my rules.
  
• **The following can be overridden if the game has future content coming that I intend to play

These were the rules I used in 2023, and I am breaking the second one. I will be placing two games on this list that I have not finished and am in the process of playing: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and Mario & Luigi: Brothership. The reason for this is that, while ideally all games on this list are those I have completed, reality makes this difficult. As I said above, I am living a very busy life, and my time for video games is low. I will eventually beat both Zelda and Mario & Luigi, but it might take a while, and I've played enough of them that I have a solid opinion on them, and don't see it changing much if I were to continue playing them to completion. This does not mean my opinion on them won't change. It might, and if it does change significantly, I will make note of it in my game of the year post for the end of 2025. However, for the sake of having 15 games, and wanting to have at least a couple games from 2024, I will be placing both on the list, despite not having completed either. I am close to the end of Mario & Luigi, but Zelda I am only halfway through. Keep this in mind as we go through the list.

Finally, I've also decided to split this list into two parts, because as I wrote it, it ended up being much longer than I anticipated. It turns out I have a lot to say about the games I played this year.

With all that out of the way, let's start with the Honorable mentions. These are old games I replayed this year, but were not significant enough to warrant being on the list:

Animal Crossing: New Horizons - The funny story of me and this game is that I did not buy and play it until 2022, two years after its explosion of a release. This meant I was largely playing on my own, since most people had moved on, but I still had a great time with it. My girlfriend at the time got really into the DLC this year, which spurred me to continue playing the game every now and then. It was fun, a nice rhythm to have each day, and it's nice to spend time with your villagers and enjoy events as they come. It is a lovely game overall.

Civilization V - What's kept my life so busy recently is that I have quit my job and am in school, studying to get my master's degree in history. It has been rewarding and enjoyable. It has got me in a history mood and encouraged me to think about history more. When I first studied history and got my bachelor's degree, I played certain games to satisfy these cravings. One of them was Civilization V. It was a lot of fun to return to this game. While it's a lot more simple than the next game, I enjoy the process of slowly settling and building up cities, connecting them, and creating a growing prosperous empire. It was fun to revisit.

Europa Universalis IV - Like Civilization V, Europa Universalis IV is my big history game. It is Civilization but far more complex, features tons of systems, random events that can occur, and more, all while trying to create a game that is more historically accurate. It is an incredibly fun experience, and I see myself continuing to play this in 2025. Given I am currently immersed in Canadian history, my current game has me playing as France, and I have just started colonizing North America to create the colony of Canada. I am having fun with it. I was worried of returning after so long, because the game constantly receives new DLC, but was happy to find that the game still largely resembled what I remembered.

With that, let's move on. Here are the 15 games I played this year, from order of least favourite to favourite:

Coming in at number 15 is Genshin Impact, and how the mighty have fallen. Being number 4 in my 2022 ranking, not appearing at all in my 2023 ranking, it finds itself at the bottom here in 2024. All four gacha games I played this year fill the bottom of this ranking. I don't like the gacha aspect of these games, it will always be a large mark against them. Yet, I wanted to place them here because I did play them all for a set amount of time, and despite their many shortcomings, there were parts of them I enjoyed. What's more, I don't see myself entirely giving up on them, and they will continue to be a part of my gaming experience for the following years, for better or worse.

Moving on, why have I placed Genshin Impact last between the four gachas? Well, Genshin Impact generally releases one new region a year. 2020 saw the game's release, 2021 saw Inazuma, 2022 Sumeru, and in 2023 the Fontaine region released. I hadn't played it, as I largely skipped out on playing Genshin in 2023. However, I was curious, so during one summer week, I decided to play the game non stop, playing through the entire Fontaine storyline and explore much of it, or at least as much as I could in one week, to see how I find it. I gotta say, I enjoyed it overall. It was nice to be back, and swimming was actually really fun, and made exploring feel new and interesting again. It was a fun week.

That being said, my main problem with Fontaine was that I could not shake this massive feeling of "been there, done that." Exploring Fontaine was fun at first, but it didn't take long for me to see I was fighting similar enemies and completing similar puzzles to those I had in the other regions of Genshin. I rolled for a new character, and was once again grinding bosses and domains and searching for materials, just as I had in every previous region.

But the story was my greatest disappointment. Before it I viewed the four story arcs of Genshin's main storyline as generally distinct. But Fontaine's storyline was so predictable, so similar to what came before, that I realized there is a formula that the story arcs of Genshin's main story have followed consistently since Inazuma. Inazuma laid the groundwork, Sumeru expanded on it, and Fontaine had all the similar story beats of the previous two arcs, in ways that I found generally worse than those previous story arcs. It was difficult to view the main characters as their own and not character archetypes that I had already seen in previous storylines. For this reason I struggled to connect with any character in Fontaine and found the overall story quite boring and forgettable.

That's not to say it was totally devoid of value. Navia was easily my favorite part. She was the one character I rolled, and she had such a compelling storyline and felt so distinct from any previous Genshin character that I completely fell for her. She saved Fontaine for me, and is why for all its faults, I can't call it my least favorite of the Genshin story arcs.

Weirdly, even though I was generally disappointed with Fontaine, I feel some excitement towards the next region: Natlan. I'm not sure why, perhaps it's the fact that it is inspired by African and Native American cultures, which I rarely see in games, and the latter of which I'm studying through Canadian history. Or, maybe it's the fact that I've befriended multiple people at school that are regular players of Genshin, and I could now discuss the game with them. That darn massive community, for whatever reason, I can't seem to stop playing Genshin. And hey, the lantern rite event is coming up, and I'm excited to grab the new character releasing in it. I'm not done with it, so here's hoping next year it ends up at a higher spot on my ranking, if at all.

Number 14 is Wuthering Waves, one of two new gacha games I played this year. Where Genshin was the same old game I'd grown used to, Wuthering Waves was a brand new adventure. Set in a new world full of a massive cast of characters, it was fun to once again experience the start of a new gacha game. I found characters I liked, rolled for and got them, and had a fun time exploring its vast world and following its story. The many free goodies also helped a lot, giving me continued reasons to play.

Unfortunately, that is the end of the good things I can say for Wuthering Waves. While at first it felt like a new experience, the more I played, the more I realized just how similar Wutheirng Waves is to Genshin Impact, a game I put over two years into and, as said above, am rather bored of. Sure, it wasn't entirely similar, just as Genshin's new region wasn't entire similar to previous regions. But the similarities were there, and to me, they stood out far more than the differences did. I was still grinding for characters, still exploring and completing basic puzzles, still clearing out groups of enemies with characters I switch between, still following a simple linear story told through cutscenes, etc.

What really drove the nail in the coffin for me though, was its story. Despite my many issues with the other gacha games on this list, I can at least say that their stories, while not particularly special, are enjoyable enough to get through and want to discuss with someone. Not Wuthering Waves, its story is much weaker, with the main reason being that it takes the overpowered ever loved main character trope, one that annoys me to no end in anime, and dials it up to eleven. Every character you encounter in Wuthering Waves loves you, I kept up with the game's new characters, and could not believe how many said it was their destiny to meet you or that they wanted nothing more than to spend time with you. I'm all for characters that take a liking to the main character, provided the main character isn't a blank self insert character that has no personality, but Wuthering Waves leans into this trope so much, and it really turned me off the game

What also didn't help, and was the real final nail in the coffin for me, was the goodies. I loved how generous Wuthering Waves was at launch, and hoped with the release of its big version 2.0, there would be some generous reward. Alas, the rewards for version 2.0 are a mere 20 wishes. Where Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail recently gave out a free standard 5 star character of your choosing, and Zenless Zone Zero recently gave out a free limited 5 star character, I was surprised to find Wuthering Waves, a game I loved for its generosity, didn't keep up with them. That was what I needed to jump ship, and so, I've uninstalled the game. Thanks for the fun times Wuthering Waves, I enjoyed the first couple of weeks I played with you, at least more than I did the week I spent playing Genshin. But alas, the end is here, and it's time to move on to other games.

Speaking of gachas that released in 2024, let's talk about number 13: Zenless Zone Zero. I played Zenless at launch for a time, similar to Wuthering Waves. But unlike Wuthering, over my Christmas break, I spent a week playing Zenless quite a bit, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. What I really love about Zenless, is that unlike Wuthering, it really differentiates itself from the other two big Mihoyo games. Where those are about exploring new regions or planets and meeting new faces, Zenless takes a more intimate approach. You have your video store, and befriend more residents as they visit your shop. You do venture to new areas, but there is much less emphasis on exploring, rather, the focus is on spending time with its many interesting characters and enjoying the world before you. I especially love that the game has a system that allows you to hang out with and get to know its characters, the sort of thing I've desperately wanted in Mihoyo's other games.

Furthermore, I just love the vibe of Zenless Zone Zero. Something about the music, the way NPCs move around and talk, the dialogue, it's all so enjoyable to be in. I believe Zenless has the strongest writing of Mihoyo's three games, and I'm always impressed at how charming it is. Cutscenes are so much more enjoyable when characters face the screen, jump in and out, and can react and show emotions as dialogue progresses. The manga like style used for certain cutscenes also keeps the linear storytelling much more engaging. I only progressed the main story a bit, I've just finished the Chapter 2 intermission, meaning I still haven't finished all the story content that released at launch. But I am loving what I play of Zenless Zone Zero, it's great fun.

Another feature I have to shout out, part of Zenless's emphasis on your tiny intimate world over a grand adventure, is that you can grind for all the materials you need in your little home town. Character materials, weapon materials, skill materials, artifacts, you can grind all of them in the hub world, without having to search around the world for the right materials, and you can now label a certain character to focus on, and the game will tell you exactly what to grind. One major issue I have with gacha games is how much grinding you have to do, and how boring that gets. So, Zenless going out of its way to make grinding as easy as possible really helped me. I also loved getting to build and experiment with the new characters I'd gotten, and I really enjoy the combat of Zenless. It's fun, and I've had a great time with the game overall. I am hoping to play more of it in 2025, and I cannot wait to see where it takes me.

My favorite gacha I played in 2024 was, coming in at number 12, Honkai Star Rail. Similar to Genshin, in its second year of release, Star Rail saw the addition of its first new world: Penacony. And my god, what a world it was. Penacony has gone down as my favorite region of any mihoyo game I've had the fortune of experiencing. The cast was varied and complex, with tons of morally grey characters you wouldn't see in a typical gacha game, the storyline was tense, throwing all sorts of twists at you as everyone backstabbed each other in a game of thrones like sequence, the storyline also switches viewpoints constantly to show other perspectives in interesting ways, and the world itself was a joy to be in, having a wholly distinct atmosphere I can't say I have felt in a gacha. Penacony is the definition of what I want from these gacha worlds. It's exciting, full of surprises, and feels so different from what came before, and what will come after. In many ways it feels like opposite of the Fontaine region and its storyline in Genshin. Where that felt so safe, so predictable and by the books, Penacony had an ambition that kept me on the edge of my seat, and it left such an impression that I'll be talking about it for a long long time.

It's ironic then that after Penacony, I completely fell off of Honkai Star Rail and have hardly played it since. Maybe it's because of my unbelievably terrible luck in that game, maybe it's because it ended shortly before Wuthering Waves and Zenless Zone Zero released, maybe I simply lost interest, but I have stayed far away from Star Rail for a while now. It's big 3.0 patch is just around the corner, so it might be time for me to finally return. I'm curious to see how it is, how it has changed, and how I will like the new region and its cast. Here's hoping it continues to grab me even some small way, like Penacony did, in 2025.

Moving past the gacha games, coming in at number 11 is Final Fantasy IX. I had long wanted to play Final Fantasy IX, and in 2024 I finally got the motivation to do so. It is the only mainline Final Fantasy game I have some sort of nostalgia for, having played the first 10 hours years ago from a friend's PS1. What finally got me to commit was NeverKnowsBest. He is a youtuber I adore, perhaps my favorite this year, because he has influenced my gaming habits, with this being one example of that. In September of 2023 he released a five hour and 40 minute video on the entire history of the mainline Final Fantasy games. I finally got around to watching it in 2024, and it got me interested in the series. I have prided myself as a lover of JRPGs after all, so why not finally take the plunge and play the most well known JRPG series: Final Fantasy? I could finally achieve a gamer goal of mine in being able to complete one game in the series, so why not? Let's do it.

Alas I...technically did not complete Final Fantasy IX, which also explains why, despite my initial excitement, it finds itself so low on this list. I got around 30 hours into it, and I had roughly 10 hours left. But I just couldn't finish it, I had so many other games tugging at me, and frankly, by that point I was so bored with the game I couldn't work up the motivation to finish it. I went ahead and watched a shortened version of someone else completing the game, and called that enough.

So what happened? How could I, a JRPG fan, grow so bored of Final Fantasy IX, a game I even had nostalgia for? Similar to Persona 5 Royal, and I'm planning to write about this more in another blog post, I've discovered my love for JRPGs has limits. It's sad, I was really into Final Fantasy IX for the first 10 hours, I was so into it that I couldn't stop thinking about it. Those first 10 hours were amazing, the characters were fun and lovable, the story was interesting, and the gameplay was addicting.

However, after the 10 hour mark, I liked the story less and less, and by the 30 hour mark, I had no interest in where it was going or its characters. What happened? Well, a big part of it was that, from my previous playtime and simple knowledge of the game, I expected something different then what the final product was. I thought Final Fantasy IX was a throwback to the original games, a simpler time that was about characters going on a fun adventure, encountering interesting locations, and bantering while slowly learning to put aside their differences and be friends. And the game is this for the first 10 hours. It's so fun and exciting and I loved the characters.

However, after the 10 hour mark, the story introduces more and more characters, and the story gets dark, like, really really dark. I'm talking genocide, human trafficking, the cruelest of wars, and suffering everywhere. This is where the story started to lose me because I...well...I don't think the setting, the main cast, the vibe of the game, really suits a dark story exploring pain, suffering, loss, and death. I found this progression to be a tonal whiplash of sorts, and the farther I got in, the more I found it hard to side with the main characters as they foolishly continued to try saving themselves, trying to fight enemies that were clearly way stronger then them, and continued moving forward while they continued losing everything. I don't think Zidane, the happy go lucky friendly main character, really works in such a dark story, and he felt out of place the farther I progressed. If anything, I think someone like Vivi, with his innocent yet sad and melancholic personality, would have been a better star for the game.

This tonal whiplash wasn't my only issue. The more characters that were introduced, the more I found the four main characters, who I found so fun and interesting at first, were being pushed aside for characters that were fine, but I didn't think were all that interesting. Really, I think Vivi was a far more interesting character than anyone else in the game, and I wish either he did more throughout the game, or other characters were as compelling as him. Everyone else felt rather simple, and I just couldn't get invested in these characters and their struggles, because they never received huge focus, largely because there was so many of them.

Finally, the further I got in, the more the gameplay started to bug me. Final Fantasy IX has a unique ability system, in which characters learn abilities from having certain equipment equipped, and once mastered, can equip the ability whenever, provided they have the ability points for it. It's a neat system. My problem is that because the obvious best strategy is to have your party members master as many abilities as possible, you will constantly be changing the equipment of your characters after they master an ability. This meant that after basically every other battle, I would have to open up the menu, go to the character that mastered the ability, go through all my equipment to find a new one for them to equip to learn an ability, and then go into the ability menu to see if this new ability they were learning was worth equipping, or not. It was a lot of menuing, and it got tedious and frustrating after a while. It made battles, which are already so slow in this game, feel even more tedious thanks to all the menuing I had to do after battle. I did not like this system by the end of my playtime.

And so, I leave Final Fantasy IX sad, sad that I didn't love it the way so many others do. When I watched the ending of this game from a youtuber, they were genuinely so happy and thought it was such a great happy ending and what a beautiful game it was. I wish I could enjoy the game the way that guy did. Unfortunately, it was hard for me to enjoy that happy ending given how incredibly dark the story gets. I just think that sort of story could have been told a lot better with a different cast of characters in a different setting, but I didn't think it worked for Final Fantasy IX.

Coming in at number 10 is Fire Emblem Engage. I was kind enough to receive this at the start of 2024, and it was one of the first games I completed in 2024. Perhaps because it has been so long, I've not a lot to say about Engage. It was exactly as I had heard it to be: the story and general writing is terrible, a massive step down from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. But on the other hand, the gameplay is much better, and to that I agree. The engage system is a much better form of the battalion system from Three Houses, and the maps are generally more interesting.

That being said, I didn't find the gameplay of Engage to be a huge step up from Three Houses, and in some ways I found it to be a downgrade. The freedom of progression in Three Houses is gone in Engage, with characters now having simple pre set class paths, which disappointed me. There's also a lot of other systems you can engage with, but they seemed complicated to understand and I wasn't quite sure how to go about them, so I barely engaged with them. There's also a gacha system where you can roll for equipment based on characters from previous Fire Emblem games which...yeah...I didn't find the gameplay to be that impressive.

That being said, one thing I will say about Engage is that, even if the writing isn't great, there's a real charm to this game and its characters that I appreciated. I love that when you are going to attack an enemy with a character, your character does a little animation showing themselves off, and these animations do a great job at showing some of the personality of the character, while also being a lot of fun to watch in general. Even if the characters and the supports are simple, they were still fun and I had some nice moments with them. I married Ivy because that's who I am as a person, but there were many other characters I enjoyed getting to know, and I loved seeing the little fun moments characters had together. While it was incredibly disappointing to learn that you can't marry characters in this game, only yourself (I really hope that isn't in the next Fire Emblem), I still enjoyed getting to know them. They were a fun bunch.

As I said at the start of this write up, I only made it halfway through The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. But I think I got far enough to have an impression of where I would place it and how I found it. Echoes of Wisdom is a really cool game. It's great to finally have Zelda in a starring role, wonderful to see a new 2D Zelda for the first time in over 10 years, and the echo system you use to solve puzzles and battle enemies is really cool. Solving puzzles in Echoes of Wisdom reminded me of playing Scribblenauts, one of the coolest games to release on the Nintendo DS. Having access to so many different objects means you can be really creative in figuring out solutions, and it was a lot of fun to explore Hyrule again with this system.

I didn't find Echoes of Wisdom to have any significant flaw, aside from navigating the menus constantly to change echoes. If there's any reason it's this low on the list, that I didn't finish it, it's that it didn't do more. I only did the first three or four dungeons, and while they were all fine, none of them really impressed me. The puzzles and battles are fun enough, but once you devise a good strategy to counter them, they become somewhat simple and straightforward. I've enjoyed the game, but I guess I hoped for more from it, something that would make it really stick with me. Maybe that will come in the second half of the game, but for now, it falls here, at number 9.

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And that's a wrap for Part 1! Thank you so much for reading, and here is the link for part 2 if you wish to continue:

https://johnnyappleshy.blogspot.com/2025/01/my-top-15-games-of-2024-part-2.html