1999 - Final Fantasy VIII
When I was a kid, in the late 90s, I rented Final Fantasy VII and it was like a revelation to me at the time. So, of course, for Christmas, I asked for a copy of it. I never got it. Instead, in what must've been Christmas 1999, my brother got me Final Fantasy VIII. I remember being like "I asked for seven" and he said "it's 8, so it's gotta be better, right?" Now, obviously, I was kind of an ungrateful cretin for this, but, I can now see what my brother was thinking. In general, sequels are much better and more polished for video games. Not always and Final Fantasy is a notable exception.
And it turns out, he was right in this case. Probably not for the reasons he thought he was. But, I'm willing to always die on the hill that Final Fantasy VIII is a good fucking game. Many will disagree and that's their wrong opinion to have. But, in the decades since, I have seen FFVII receive accolades and adulation from every gamer who never played any other FF game and FFVIII be massively derided as the unwanted child of the series following the golden boy. And that's a load of horse shit. FFVII was good and fine back in the day, but if you go back and play that shit now, nostalgia will do more to carry you through than the game itself. Barrett in the Remake games is an incredible character, but his concept in the original was just "It'd be really funny to put Mr. T in our game" and that's all he is in OG FFVII. I'm not bitter, why would you ask?
So, enough hating. What makes FFVIII my pick for this year? Well, there's a lot, from the characters, to the story, to the fact that I actually love the GF system, as a whole. Don't get me wrong, I see how the junction system is confusing and the associated Draw function is a bit annoying, but bare with me.
If you're unfamiliar, FFVIII functions on a system of "junctioning"; just think of it as equipping spells because there is only one "equipment" slot for each character and that's their weapon, which minimally impacts Attack damage and gives you access to different Limit Breaks. Each character can have one Guardian Force (GF) junctioned--GFs are just summons in any other game, but here, they are vitally important, in a way somewhat similar to FFVI. What GF you have Junctioned determines what other junctions you have access to: so, for example, Shiva--one of the first GFs you have access to--has STR-J, which means you can equip a spell to your strength stat and increase it. As you fight, your GFs gain AP and access to new abilities like junction options, but also actions you can take in and out of battle, in addition passive abilities for the character, GF, or even the party. Where it gets a little wonky is when you get to Stat and Elem--you can equip spells to your Elemental attack and defense and Status spells to your Status attack and defense. So, it works like this: you can equip Silence to your Stat-Atk and Sleep to your Stat-Def meaning you're less likely to be affected by a Sleep spell and you have a chance to Silence an enemy when you use your physical attack. Similarly, if you equip Ultima to your Elem-Def, you have a strong base resistance to EVERY TYPE OF ELEMENTAL DAMAGE. It can get wild when you get something like Elem-Def-Jx4, which allows you to equip four different spells to your elemental defense.
Now we get into the second part which is where it can get a bit tedious--the Draw system. See, unlike other FF games, you don't learn spells passively, you have to acquire them. The primary method of doing this is taking the "Draw" action in combat, initially. When you do, it will tell you what spells the enemy can cast and you acquire a number between 1 and 9. The more you have, the more powerful the associated Junction. So, 100 Sleeps is better than 50 Sleeps. So, you have to sit there and Draw spells from enemies until you have 100 of each one they have? I mean, you can do that and it's a good idea at the very start of the game. But, as you play more, you'll learn that you can sort of get around what would otherwise be an incredibly tedious system. Here, we get into the other abilities that GFs have that make this game well-tuned; Refine abilities. Many GFs learn an ability to "Refine" magic from an item. Shiva, of course, can turn different items into Ice elemental magic. So, instead of having to draw 100 Blizzagas from an enemy, if you get 5 North Wind items, you can refine those into 100 Blizzagas. Add to this that Mid-Mage and High-Mag RF, which lets you convert lower-level spells into higher level spells: 5 Fire = 1 Fira, 5 Blizzards = 1 Blizzara, etc. These refining systems are what makes this potentially obnoxious system much more bearable. When I figured all of this out, it blew my little mind.
Now, that's all the mechanic shit out of the way, which I guarantee is one of the things people harp on (the other is the trick of keeping an unconscious party member on hand at all times, but that's a different question). What about the story and characters? The story is a bit convoluted, I won't lie to you. But, take it more as this: all your characters are under the age of 20. They are also, with one exception, orphans and have been trained to be soldiers from a young age. What's revealed later in the game is that all but that one exception character were in the same orphanage and buddies as kids. None of them remember this until that point in the game. The game suggests that this is part of the bond of the GF; by having a GF junctioned to yourself, you are making a bargain to give up something of yourself to become more powerful. And it makes sense when you consider how drastically shitter your stats are without magic junctioned to them. When elements start flying at you left and right and thanks to your Elem-Def-Jx4, you just eat them, you feel like some kind of god. But that power comes at a cost. The central metaphor of this is that in order to be a good soldier, to be able to fight and kill efficiently, you must carve out some of your humanity. To an extent, each of the characters in the game responds differently: Squall, our main character, is an emotionally distant loner, afraid of genuine connection; Quistis, the hot for teacher gal, tries to maintain a serious demeanor and act like she's much older than she is; Irvine is your classic wannabe ladykiller. And again, these are kids. You don't feel it when you're newly 19 or 20, but you're very much still a kid. I look at my students in their mid-20s and think "god, they're still so young." These characters are all 17-20, would be fresh out of high school. And while they've been trained to be soldiers, and good ones at that, they haven't been trained for the psychological toll of that weight. Why would they? A soldier that thinks is not a good one. A good soldier follows orders without questioning them.
There's more sort of going on in this game and I really have only scratched the barest surface of this game's plot, which involves time-traveling, weird memory journeys, and the actual moon (is it a fantasy world if the moon ain't a little fucked up). If this has scared you, I'm sorry and consider this, which should entice your further: our friend El the Eligator once described the game aptly as "What if a Kpop group had to save the world."
ETA: Triple Triad still goes hard and the music is way too hype for a side quest card game.