My Favourites of 2022 (Part 2)

Hello los and beholds (Part 2)! I initially wrote this as part of the December 2022 newsletter, but it would have made it too long so I decided to split the posts up. So without any other preamble, here is part 2, my favourite comics and games I read/played in 2022.

The Videogames Zone

Marvel's Midnight Suns

The best description of Marvel's Midnight Suns I've heard for it is from the headline of this review: A 2005 Masterpiece Stuck in 2022. It's ambitious and janky and specific and almost perfectly tuned to draw me in. It's a tactical card game that has a 3D exploration and puzzle solving element with crafting and a relationship sim where you get to spend time with your favourite Marvel Superheroes. It's essentially Fire Emblem: Three Houses but with superheroes and a tactical combat card game. And boy, do I fucking love tactical combat card games. The only thing that would make it better is if it had a proper fishing minigame and a golf minigame and a photo-taking minigame and a town-building minigame like Dark Cloud 2/Dark Chronicle.

One of the reasons Midnight Suns was such a surprise is because I expected Firaxis to make Marvel X-COM and they wisely realised that while that was a solid way to go (Freedom Force says hi!), that didn't really deliver what was fun and unique about using superheroes rather than XCOM soldiers. Also it's really funny to me that Firaxis ended up making a Tactics JRPG, which makes me super excited for what they have in store for XCOM 3 as I also really loved the narrative and gameplay direction they explored with XCOM: Chimera Squad.

I'm glad they took the time to develop the card combat system that they ended up with because it is super satisfying and brings an interesting lens to how you design for spacing and randomness in a tactical combat game. There's this interview with designer Jake Solomon on Waypoint where he talks about how the card system allows the combats to have a different type of randomness than the action points + chance-to-hit system in XCOM, since the superhero fantasy would break if they just kept missing attacks against random mooks. As much as I love cards, the part of the changes they've made to the typical tactical combat formula that I'm most interested in is actually in movement and spacing. It also plays a role in adding randomness to the proceedings while also still feeding into the superheroic fantasy, and allowing the card system to do its thing.

You have no movement or range limits, your character just moves to whatever position they need to to execute whatever card action you've chosen. However, you don't get to fine tune where they end up, which is actually pretty important if you want to chain certain actions together or gain bonus actions through using environmental attacks. You get one free move per turn, but that's it, you have to decide which character gets to use that free move and what for. Obviously being a game about cool card combos, there are also other ways to gain bonus moves or fine tune some of your movement, and it's done in ways that represent character quirks and powers. It's such a cool little system, with a nice mix of restrictions and affordances, that really works so well to make the game sing.

Aaaaanyway, that's enough on one cool system I love from one game, I've got other games to talk about!

Elden Ring

There's already been a lot said and written about why Elden Ring is good and successful, so I'll try and keep this short. This was my first foray into any Souls-like game, and I fell in love. I'm not sure if and when I'll ever go back and try the other games in its lineage, but I think I get it now. As much as I enjoyed the combat and exploration, the thing that really got its hooks into me is the approach to lore, narrative and community.

It's a game that treats its lore and story as if it's another game. It knows how weird it is to try and "play a story" just by puppeting a character that basically wields violence as their primary interaction with the world, so it decides to just split the "story of you playing the game" and the "story in the game" and let you play with both parts how you like. It doesn't just "tell" or "show" you the story, but invites you to play with it; to dig for it, hold up pieces to the light, see how the pieces might connect, imagine the connections and fill in the empty spaces with your own input, and crucially, the input of others.

It was really fun watching lore videos or reading theories about how different pieces of writing were connected to each other or given context by their placement or subtle changes in phrasing. The sense of togetherness that occurred playing Elden Ring during the release window was quite something, even if the experience of "playing" the game was often quite solitary. It's incredibly funny to see where others died, based on their bloodstains and ghosts, and not feel so bad about your own deaths because hey, you're playing together and it's more fun to suffer together than alone. As much as the game is quite demanding, it isn't demanding of personal skill, as it is the skill of working with and learning from others. The online message system "breaks the artifice of the game world", but so does the controller, the screen, the urge to take a break and go pee; but what you gain is the perspective of "playing a game", and "playing with others", and that's quite special.

Anyway, Elden Ring good.

Switch Sports

In the same way that the Jackbox games were often top of my game of the year lists when I regularly had friends over in Melbourne, I have to give kudos to Switch Sports this year for being such a strong connector to my nephew and my dad. Incredibly funny to see my nephew trash talking my dad about badminton ("I'm very good, you know, I can make the ball go pink."), or ganging up with Jeannie against me and the poor PC player in volleyball, or lamenting why the scoring in tennis make no sense. To me, games are most important as ways to connect with others, and that context will always colour what I think of as "great games". Games are bridges (sometimes games are even bridge).

Honourable Mentions: Citizen Sleeper, Pokemon Legends: Arceus, Marvel Snap, Night of the Full Moon - Memory In The Mirror, Into the Breach: Enhanced Edition, Slice and Dice

The Comics Zone

Blue Flag

I binged this entire series in one night (well, early, early morning lol). It's a really sweet and earnest story about a guy who tries to help a timid girl change her image and ask out another guy who he's friends with, and whoops they end up liking each other, but also whoops turns out this guy actually also likes him and it gets complicated. It handles its queer themes really deftly, and ties them really strongly to the overarching themes of figuring out your own identity and navigating the expectations of others, which resonates through all the other characters too.  While the relationships between the core 3-4 characters are really well done and obviously key to the story, I also really loved the supporting cast.

I love how the series tries its best to show all its characters as well-rounded, flawed, striving, changing people. I also loved how the ending emphasized that the series has been focusing on a short, intense period of youth for all these characters, but they'll continue to grow and change in the future too. Not all loves last forever, and not all answers are found immediately, and so it goes.

Goodbye, Eri

Tatsuki Fujimoto's work has always reflected a keen interest in cinema. Characters often end up connecting to each other over movies, and the ways stories are conveyed. There's a fascination with the act of movie-making as well: the artifice of acting and editing around things that seem to happen "in real life" to become something that happens "in the movies", and yet somehow feeling truer than real. It was hugely important in the middle sections of Fire Punch, which is tricky to recommend but is a work I still find incredibly compelling, when Togata is trying to build up the movie, the myth of The Flame-Covered Man.

Goodbye, Eri similarly takes a look at the artifice of movie-making and storytelling, and plays around with it. It feels to me like a spiritual successor of sorts to parts of Fire Punch, and refines the ideas there into something much sharper and funnier. It's pretty funny to make essentially a movie about making movies, in the form of a comic, and have it work so well because of the different affordances you have in the comic form. You can play with time more and make it more rubbery in between frames in ways that you could never do in film.

And so, a comic about a movie about making movies that's also about how we think of stories in larger ways. While Look Back might be the Fujimoto one-shot with more "heart", Goodbye, Eri is the one that reminds me why I'm so drawn to Fujimoto's particular brand of bullshit in the first place.

Himawari House

Himawari House is a comic about three women from different places who live in a share house in Japan for a while, and it hits on so many themes that I care about. I'm going to repeat my trick with Everything Everywhere All At Once and link you straight to my Tweets about Himawari House because that kinda covers it and I've still got the tabletop games section to finish up!

Honourable Mentions: Kaijumax finale, Ao Ashi, You And I Are Polar Opposites, Witch Watch, Astra: Lost in Space, Elden Ring: The Road to the Erdtree, Witch Hat Atelier

The Tabletop Games Zone

Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands - Violence Erupts

I wrote about playing a one-shot of Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands and trying out the new Violence Erupts minigame in a previous issue of the newsletter. Then, I used it more as a jumping off point to muse about directions to push the Blood mechanic in Spectres of Brocken and about providing scaffolding for play.

However, now I just want to gush about how I really, really love Firebrands and the new minigame slots right in so perfectly and plays expertly with the themes that I love in mecha fiction, of the outsize reach that mechs, that technology, allows you and the tragedies that ensue. It also helped me push through some design ideas in Spectres of Brocken, and that's the best thing a game could do for a game designer. I've seen some more previews of updates to Firebrands through Vincent Baker's Patreon and that has me really excited for the new edition, so there's a high chance (pretty much a lock, tbh) Firebrands will return again on another end of year favourites list.

Wingspan

I finally played Wingspan this year lol. It had a lot of buzz when it released in 2019 and I figured I would eventually play it at one of the many boardgame meetups that I attended but I somehow managed to always find something else new and exciting to play and put off Wingspan because Wingspan would still be there for me, since it was so popular. Well, I managed to put it all off until 2022 and yeah it's pretty good! Jeannie loves birds a lot, so it was the perfect game for us to play together, and she's the undisputed Queen of Birds.

Reach of the Roach God

Someone could accuse me of bias since I was paid to help out with playtesting a couple of adventures for Reach of the Roach God (City of Peace and Spider Mountain Temple), and to that someone I would say, tough shit - the adventures are really, really good regardless.

It's also been quite a while since I've run fantasy adventures as I've been running a Beam Saber campaign since 2020 and I've been playtesting a mecha game, and it was just really nice to get back into that mode. I felt incredibly comfortable and supported doing it with the Reach of the Roach God adventures as it drew upon a lot of folklore that we were already familiar with, and the various random generators and bits of writing did so much to make the places and people feel so alive. I'm incredibly excited to see the final book and run the adventures again once they've gone through the refinement process.

Spectres of Brocken

Well, well, well. If you read my December newsletter reflecting on 2022 you already knew this was coming. I love Spectres of Brocken so much. I feel so lucky I get to "playtest" this game, which is just an excuse to play this game over and over with cool people. It's not a perfect game, to be sure, but it feels like the perfect game for me. It's got all the weird little mechanical toggles I like playing with, the types of scenes I like playing with, and all the themes and timeskips and tragedy and mechs that I could want.

Honourable Mentions: Mr. Face, Parks: Nightfall, Crisis, A Worried Guest, Stand Up! Hero!!!, Oldhome: Children Chasing Giants, Oldhome: Trip to Turtle City, Iseguy, DaDaGang, Depths Unfathomable, For The Other City, Corps a Corps, Meanwhile, In the Subway..., Da Xia, Stealing The Throne