March 2017 Catchup

As it turns out, I completely skipped that I happened to finish Mega Man ZX in early February. I'm not surprised I neglected to mention it because it was kind of a forgettable game overall and didn't really mesh cohesively with anything I was playing at the time. I tend to play Mega Man games in batches and in this particular case it was totally isolated. I played through the Mega Man Zero series in 2016 (and in fact it was the original inspiration for making YouTube videos) but never continued on to the Nintendo DS successors until much later. I was lukewarm enough on Mega Man ZX that I didn't play its particular sequel until several months later.

On the surface, ZX was pretty similar to the MMZ games that I liked a lot, but there was something about it that didn't really gel with me like those games did. I'm struggling to remember a lot of the details, but I remember not being a huge fan of much of the powers in the game and the art style seemed noticeably worse as well. There were a few things to like, particularly the dash-suit the main character could don to air-dash wildly around the screen, but a lot of the others suits/powers were pretty forgettable.

Now, what I actually spent the majority of March (and to be fair, a lot of February) on was Horizon Zero Dawn, a sprawling action RPG that I feel pretty comfortable calling the best game of 2017. This is impressive because it's a little outside my typically preferred genres. Sure, it's an RPG, but it's very open-world and mainstream. In a year which also contained Persona 5, it's telling of the quality of this game that I recognize it as the game of the year. I spent countless hours exploring its gorgeous post-apocalyptic reclaimed world, collecting artifacts, hunting dino robos, and taking on odd jobs for the game's tribal populace.

Horizon Zero Dawn is not perfect but because what it does is so exceptional, I'm happy to overlook shallow melee combat and an unexciting skill tree. Its exploration, visual style, and sheer joy of experimentation in combat more than make up for some minor missteps. There is such visceral satisfaction from systematically breaking down rampaging machines with carefully placed shots from a variety of different weaponry. The sound design is excellent as well, with high-pitched whines and whirs, thunderous crashes of metal against metal, and the rumbling cacophony of herds of animalistic machines trampling through verdant environments.

I also made a video review of the game after I finished it. It was one of the last ones I ever made and probably my best. I'm not sure I'll ever do that kind of thing again but it was a fun experience and I liked the creative aspect of putting it together. Those videos were very time-consuming and a surprising amount of work to create! I think it's important in any creative endeavor to consider the process its own reward, but at least in the case of creating videos, the amount of work required to get to that end goal never really paid off for me. I like to go back and watch these videos from time to time, but I'm always hesitant to ever try it again. If I do decide to make another video, it'll be because I have a unique new angle to explore. I doubt I'll ever do straight review videos again.

It turns out Horizon was the only game I finished in March. 2017 was really front-loaded with a lot of long games. I tend to play a lot of those anyway, but that year in particular was an outlier, maybe primarily because I decided to prepare for Persona 5 by playing through part of the series. I know that I was already deep into Persona 4 Golden at this point but I didn't end up finishing it until the next month, just at the last minute before Persona 5 came out. More on that next time!