2017 was, in my personal opinion, the best year ever in the history of this medium.
The Switch: The most famous hallmark thereof, of course, was the launch of Nintendo's best-selling, and also just plain best, home gaming system ever. For me, that's not really because the big N has offered up their best ever lineup of first-party originals this generation (nope, I still liked the GameCube-era Nintendo games somewhat better overall, sorry!), though first-party support has been strong. I bought a Switch in the summer of '17 for Metroid Prime 4 shortly after it was announced at E3. Well that didn't happen, but you know what did? The most expansive library of indie games ever released for any gaming system ever, I'm pretty sure, and you know that was bound to be of high appeal to the likes of me! Best of all, I can take them anywhere I go too! Building a system that's both a home gaming console and a fully functioning handheld of the highest quality was no mere gimmick, but a stroke of pure genius. Absolute fucking genius!! Lesser support from entrenched third-party publishers? *shrugs* The truth is I barely care. With the Switch, Nintendo built a machine for the rest of us and brought a whole new generation of players into gaming in the process. Overall, over the years I've probably spent more time with the Switch than with any other game system, and that's coming from someone who isn't a dogged Nintendo brand loyalist.
The Games: 2017 saw the launch of more games I fell in love with than any other year in gaming history by a good margin. To give you a taste of what I mean, here's a non-comprehensive list of some of my '17 favorites:
1. Butterfly Soup
2. What Remains of Edith Finch
3. Night in the Woods
4. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
5. Nier: Automata
6. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy*
7. Pyre
8. The Shrouded Isle
9. Cosmic Star Heroine
10. Hollow Knight
11. Cuphead
12. Little Nightmares
13. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
14. Persona 5**
15. Sonic Mania
16. Star Fox 2 <-- Actually my favorite Star Fox game. 
17. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
18. Super Mario Odyssey
19. Tales of Berseria**
20. Horizon Zero Dawn <-- Of note: has proven the best-selling video game ever to star a solo female character.
21. Metroid: Samus Returns
22. Splatoon 2
23. A Hat in Time
24. Dream Daddy
25. Alwa's Awakening
*Alright, so I'm biased. 
**As we know, these two games were originally released the year prior in Japan. They came out in '17 here in the U.S. though, so I'm including them on this list as well to more fully capture the way I actually experienced the year. Tales of Berseria is obviously a more flawed game than Persona 5, with a highly uninspired landscape, but I really liked the underlying storyline and characters Berseria had to offer a lot. Just to note that.
To a few specifics...
Butterfly Soup is my third-favorite video game of all time and my absolute favorite that doesn't have "The Last of Us" in its name. It's very humble game. It was created by one person, Brianna Lei, who offers it for free here. (I recommend you be polite and voluntarily pay her something for it though because she's earned it.) It's not available on Steam. It's a pretty linear visual novel, so don't expect a lot of interactivity either. Player actions exist simply to keep you attentive and involved and add to your perspective on the lives of the game's characters, not to offer up multiple endgame scenarios or serious customizability. Why in the fucking hell would I rank something created on a shoestring budget that's designed in such a straightforward way that does almost nothing to take advantage of the greatest strength of gaming as a medium (interactivity) my third-favorite gaming experience of all time? Because it's the best visual novel title I've ever played before! And while it's greatest strengths aren't medium-specific, the existence of interactive elements does enhance the experience.
Where Butterfly Soup succeeds the most is in its writing. Which is a damn good strength for a visual novel to have!! It's kinda the whole ball game really, so to speak. Writing quality makes or breaks entries in this particular genre by definition. The landslide success thereof here with me is owed to its story structure. You proceed through key life experiences of four gay, Asian-American teenage girls living in Freemont, California, first as their elementary school selves, then as their current 9th-grader selves in 2008. First you'll see life through the eyes of Diya, a paralyzingly shy jock type of Tamil descent (I'm mentioning their ancestries here because it's relevant to their narratives); then as her over-achieving, Chinese-American best friend Noelle; third as the Indian-American class clown type, Akarsha; and finally as the Korean-American, highly assertive delinquent type, Min-seo (or Min for short). You're not re-experiencing the same events several times through different eyes though. Instead, events in the main narrative keep progressing forward in chapters, with each new perspective adding more dynamism to all the other character arcs and fresh context for previous scenes that enriches the player's understanding thereof through the steady addition of more layers. It works brilliantly!
Enough about the design though because what you're really here for is the story itself. Yes, as you may have guessed, this is a yuri novel. The best yuri novel I've ever played. The dif? This one was created by an actual Asian-American lesbian whose characters are inspired by people she has actually met and known. To these ends, you won't be surprised to learn that there are none of the tired fetish elements this genre is frankly best known for here. But neither is there the same tone that Gone Home or many other lesbian stories features. Butterfly Soup's vibe is mainly positive and upbeat! Which is...you know, not the rule when it comes to lesbian period pieces in any medium. Make no mistake: the game is not only completely, brutally honest about the struggles its leading young ladies are navigating, but genuinely enlightening thereabout. Those struggles range, in various cases, from period-specific varieties of homophobia (like the whole battle over California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage the same year that the same electorate voted in Obama) to the sort of cultural expectations that commonly get placed on Asian-American kids, especially from immigrant families (like the concept of "Asian failing", which means scoring less than a 90% on something) to experiences with racism to the idiotic cultural double-standards that are often placed on girls to straight-up child abuse. But where other lesbian period pieces might get bogged down in these troubles, Butterfly Soup puts them in perspective and revolves centrally instead around moments of camaraderie through sport (specifically baseball, which makes it just that much more relatable to me), growth, love, and humor...lots and lots of humor, in fact...that outweigh these problems for our protagonists. I can't help wishing that more stories about lesbian characters chose to emphasize things like humor, hope, and happiness over pain and narrowly avoiding suicide sometimes. It just gets depressing.
Speaking of humor, if you could classify Butterfly Soup as a kind of romantic comedy, then it's primarily comedy and secondarily a romance. And it's the flat-out funniest game I've ever played, no exaggeration! You will laugh. Out loud. A lot.
What Remains of Edith Finch is an environment exploration game (or "walking sim" if you prefer the pejorative) that revolves around the mystery of a supposedly cursed family whose members all die strange and early deaths save for one in each generation. The meaning of it all is rather subjective, but to me it proved an invaluable experience that I've revisited many times since and still regard as one of my favorite games ever. Unfortunately, losing loved ones in a way that's felt premature has been a feature of my existence. My mom passed away that summer and someone recommended this game to me a short while after learning the news. It felt very therapeutic in a way that's hard to capture in words.
Without spoiling any specifics, what it feels like happens to me is that each generation of Finches sees one family member die a random, bizarre death and most prove ultimately unable to survive their grief. It leads them to dangerous mindstates that in turn lead to their own deaths in a recurring pattern. My takeaway from it has been that death and loss are inevitable parts of life that you have to accept. For as dark as the subject matter is and macabre as its sense of humor can often be, there's tremendous life, beauty, and even poetry to the way it celebrates the lives of the Finches through their deaths. There's just something oddly comforting about its highly inventive and loving array of vignettes dedicated to the memory of each member of the family tree. It's about reaching a place of peace with loss. It's just a lovely and special game. It helped me.
Night in the Woods also gets special credit here not only for being adorable (you play as a cat, after all 
), but also for being a socialist game that genuinely concerns itself with the plight of small town America and, on a deeper level, with those who struggle to find a place therein. Things I can relate to a lot. And I stress the term "genuinely" here because there are other choose-your-own-adventures games that, you know, have tried something vaguely like this (probably inspired by this game on some level), but their efforts feel more superficial to me. It's really not difficult to tell when the people behind such a game are just like a group of urban liberals who don't live here, have an idyllic view of small town life as a kind of romantic getaway for tourists, and don't actually care about the poverty here or understand the local culture much at all (like the fact that people go to church whether they're religious or not) or frankly want to. That is not the case here. Night in the Woods launching right at the start of the Trump presidency was so appropriate. A game like this will help you figure out how that happened, even if it's not really the game's intent or point. Alright, my preach is over.
I could go on about 2017 in gaming forever, but I won't. I just wanted to throw out there a few things and titles that meant the most to me.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 22 December 2023
