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It’s the Games of the Year 2021 Awards!

I forgot to do this last year to be honest, but it was 2020. Was 2020 even a real year for people? I feel like we all just took a mulligan on 2020.

Not that 2021 was a lot better from a global perspective, or really from an online one, but I at least tried to keep track of what day it was in 2021. I also played some video games. This list will contain no real surprises because it turns out I’m very basic in my old age and mostly liked the things everybody else liked. That said, hit the jump.

I remember being at a game conference – E3 in 2010, if memory serves  – when Final Fantasy XIV Online was announced. My thought at the time was: yikes, actually, that game looks like crap. It turns out my instincts were correct. It was absolutely crap! This resulted in a complete rework of the game. The developers practically destroyed the original FFXIV, subtitled it as A Realm Reborn, and fixing its many problems.

Not many people have good memories of whatever vanilla FFXIV was. But some of my friends have been playing ARR for a long time now, and all of them recommended it to me. It finally became too difficult to resist the temptation when the rabbit-woman Viera race was added to the game. I could ignore the siren song of sexy catgirls, but now I could become an Amazonian warrior bunny? All right, SquareSoft, you finally got me.

This is a review of A Realm Reborn and A Realm Reborn only. This is what it’s like to be me, a noob, playing FFXIV: ARR, in 2019.

I first met Amanda Lange about two years ago – until quite recently, she taught Game Design at the International Academy of Design & Technology in Detroit, Michigan, and I had the honor of being invited to speak with one of her classes. I don’t think Amanda expected me to ramble on for an hour and a half, but then again… she didn’t know me at the time. Now she does and is correspondingly more wary.

A longtime member of the International Game Developers Association and supporter of many local efforts and endeavors, Amanda’s moving to a new state soon on account of getting relocated, so we’ll miss her at the Detroit IGDA meetings. In the interim, though, she kindly offered to put together a Celebrity Guest Editorial on a subject that I think many Tap readers have pondered over the years. Take it away, Amanda!

—S

My schedule over at the IGDA has been a complete mystery. I used to stick very rigidly to a next-month’s-column-is-due-by-the-30th-of-the-previous-and-earlier-if-possible approach, but in the last year it’s been getting harder to do that. Responsibilities pile up and I’m not good at fulfilling them. So it’s nearly the end of April (and entirely my fault), that the April installment of the series is now online. As promised in the previous one, I skip morbid subjects and go for something a little more easy to stomach.

Things have been awfully quiet around here lately; so quiet in fact that if you listen carefully you can hear the muffled staff beatings being issued by our Overlord Steerpike deep within the bowels of the Tap-Repeatedly silo. It’s only right that I distract you from their disparaging (and hopefully short lived) whimperings with the sweet, sweet sound of music…

Review by Steerpike Developer Square-Enix Publisher Square-Enix Released March 9, 2010 Available for PS3 (version played), 360 Time Played 91 hours, 17 minutes, 38 seconds Verdict:  4/5 Thumbs Up “Final Fantasy XIII’s real triumph is its incredibly nuanced, sophisticated battle system. The rest is comparatively standard JRPG fare – not bad, but not to everyone’s taste.”

Square-Enix has a new trailer for the it-seems-like-they’ve-been-working-on-it-forever Final Fantasy XIII on their Japanese website. There’ll be a demo for this RPG with the undoubtedly horrible upcoming CGI fest Final Fantasy Advent Children Blu-Ray disc, but the game itself is not expected outside Japan until 2010 at the earliest, when it should launch for PS3 and 360 simultaneously.