Squidge Rugby's Games Of 2022 | Winter Spectacular 2022

2022, to me, will always be the year I finally stopped sticking out the little finger on my left hand when I play video games. A hangover from how I’d hold a Nintendo DS, I’d often end a session with one finger freezing and the others comfortably wrapped, my hand undone by some sort of unbreakable psychological loyalty to a handheld from almost two decades ago. After twenty years of trying, it’s amazing how simple it was in the end to break the habit: All I had to do was spend more time with games this year than any since the DS was in its’ Elite Beat Agents-era pomp.

Hear me out Nintendo… What if you made another Elite Beat Agents?

There are definitely worse ways to spend your time recovering from Covid.

When it comes to discussing the games of that year, it would be daft of me to pretend I’m a comprehensive expert (I watched 181 films released in 2022, but only played around 30 games). The best game I played in 2022 was very comfortably Metroid Dread; I spent ten straight days recovering from Covid, hyper-fixated on escaping ZDR, the atmosphere somehow crawling from a 2D world to multiply across my entire system. I’d pause to assess the map, pacing back and forth, making plans out loud, fever and fervour interchangeable. So there’s a decent chance the best game of 2022 is one I won’t get to for some time (Immortality looks extremely up my alley but sometimes your brain is weeping and just wants to play Pokémon), but 100 percenting Dread left me just wanting more. And so I began to stretch my horizons, and retract my little finger.

Pretty sure one of these fellas will be Warren Gatland’s Defense Coach.

My Switch library in the last twelve months has ballooned, with as many new additions as in the previous four years before it. A huge percentage of this were games I’d never have even thought of playing at the start of the year. When last February’s Nintendo Direct lifted the lid on Live A Live and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, I found myself thinking “That’s cool, but those are for someone else”. Yet because unfortunately there’s only so much Kirby to go around, here I am, eleven months later, with JRPGs back on the brain.  If somebody in 2021 had asked me “What’s your favourite Klonoa?”, I would have panicked and told them the one I saw once at Bristol Zoo. With a year of learnings, it turns out, not only is a Klonoa not a rare type of exotic bird with the ability to grow tentacles and plumage that changes colour when it eats, I’ve never been to Bristol Zoo. But I have now been immensely charmed by both Klonoa games, locking the Switch in handheld mode and embracing them like shiny versions of the ambitious DS & GBA platformers I used to love.

When Queen Elizabeth II died on Thursday the 8th of September, I had never played a Splatoon game. By her funeral a few weeks later, I’d poured 30+ hours into turf wars, just like she would have wanted. Her Majesty passed on having only completed six of the character stories in Live A Live, but whilst I’m still catching up to that figure, to have even played the obscure JRPG is so much more than I ever expected. 

To be fair Lizzie would have loved to seen a three way Splatfest.

Yet it’s the other RPG from that livestream that really defined my year. Because if that same person were to corner me now and ask about a different mascot platformer from the early noughties, I’d only be able to reply one way. With a loud, and definitive, scream: “EAR THAT NOAAH? LANZ WONTS SOMETHIN A BIT MEA’TIER”.

Editors note: Robbie, I know the Xenoblade series can be overwhelming but what if I told you there were separate but kinda connected series called Xenogears and Xenosaga?

Last year, Nintendo published a game about a Welsh girl contemplating death, so obviously no other game stood a chance. I was someone who played a lot of JRPGs as a teenager but fell off them completely once I had to start roleplaying myself as an adult, but the genius of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is how much it embraces those like me. To read about the development of the first two games suggests a lot of push and pull; Nintendo fighting to make it more accessible, and series creator Tetsuya Takahashi insisting the game won’t work unless there’s a compulsory 60-hour sidequest where you teach a mouse in human form how to play chess. Entering number three as a Xeno-novice, however, it feels as though the balance was not only found but always meant to be. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is an epic that wants you to see its every grand vista. And where many RPGs have lost me with endless early tutorial screens, Xenoblade gifts even inexperienced players its entire scope through miraculous pacing.

The only thing more complex than Xenoblade 3’s combat is the rules of the scrum.

The game starts with a lengthy cutscene, but the moment you pick back up the control, you’re thrown into battle. Steadily over that opening fight, the most satisfying 20 percent of the game’s core mechanics are introduced. Changing character, timing your attacks, and the unique hybrid of turn-based and real-time combat. After four or five hours of just enjoying fighting, the system opens up twice the possibilities. Around an hour after that, the game contrives story reasons to explain its class system, which is almost as deep-rooted as the UK’s. The battle system continues adding mechanics slowly for another fifty-odd hours, with characters, weapons and classes dotted amongst to keep everything fresh. Instead of “Right, okay, I need to pay attention and learn this”, every new mechanic is introduced in a manner that makes you side with Lanz, ready for something a bit meatier. It’s exciting power-ups that feel like a boost, or systems that open up possibilities. Dynamic new options to be tactically deployed during troubling boss fights. Building combat that remains exciting throughout a 100-hour playthrough is a challenge. Monolith Soft made the rare decision to use the game’s runtime to its own advantage. 

It also helps that as those hours roll on, you only become deeper invested in all six of the game’s main characters. I think it’s probably a truth for any of us. Look back on your favourite RPGs, and it’s rarely the ones with the strongest story, it’s those with the stand-out characters. Maybe I’m biased because it’s so rare to hear Welsh accents in games (Let alone Nintendo games), but I fell so deeply into caring about this rag-tag band of funny little survivors. Normally, if you heard “I’M THE GIRL WITH THE GAUL” for the eight-hundredth time that hour, you’d be annoyed with the game. Not only did I scarcely care, but on the odd occasion I did, it was the character repeating the phrase I’d get annoyed with, not the software itself. The game’s lowest points only serve to illustrate how well-drawn and instantly easy to ‘get’ its entire cast is.

How could you not love this gang?!

There’s plenty more I played, but I don’t think anything quite landed with me like Xenoblade. It’s the deepest I’ve sunk into a game since Breath of the Wild, and it’s a title I looked at initially with tired eyes. Yet it’s been a year where I let those eyes widen. Biases against, “That’s not for me”, and any hold fifteen years of never playing as much as I did on the Nintendo DS faded away. My list, my takes, and my catalogue of 2022 may not be exhaustive, but they’re ones belonging to a person falling deeper into games than ever before. Finally fully embracing a wider world of experiences that keeps their brain engaged, and every finger wrapped, tight, and warm.

Robbie somehow fell into covering sports after eighteen junior years wasted writing about Mario. They currently run the YouTube channel Squidge Rugby, which even more inexplicably attracts over 200,000 subscribers, and has managed to bring up the game Elite Beat Agents for Nintendo DS on rugby podcasts far more often than you’d think possible. Their thoughts can be found on Twitter in two flavours- @SquidgyGoat (Not about rugby), or @SquidgeRugby (About rugby).