December 2023

Square Enix has announced that it will terminate its operation services for Engage Kill on Thursday, March 21, 2024, at noon JST. It has also immediately ceased in-app purchases that let players purchase the in-game premium currency Orgonium with real money.

The developers cited difficulty in providing services that could satisfy players as the primary reason for shutting down the mobile game. Engage Kill is part of Project Engage, a joint mixed-media project set up by Aniplex in 2022. The first part of the project features the anime and manga title Engage Kiss.

A-1 Pictures produced the anime version of Engage Kiss, and it completed a single-season run from July 2022 to September 2022 with 13 episodes. The manga serialization also launched on Square Enix's Manga UP! platform, and the company also published its first tankobon volume in February 2023.

Nintendo published the Japanese Nintendo Switch yearly download ranking for 2023, revealing that Suika Game was in first place. The viral game managed to overtake even Nintendo's blockbusters like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Pikmin 4 to get the top spot.

Nintendo combined the download numbers for each title from both individual and bundle purchases made from January 1, 2023, to December 20, 2023. However, it only considered titles with a CERO rating in Japan, so games with only an IARC rating were not included here.

Here is the complete top 30 list from the Japanese Nintendo Switch 2023 download ranking:

1. Suika Game
2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
3. Pikmin 4
4. Super Mario Bros. Wonder
5. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince

Valve have put together their "Best Of 2023" lists on Steam. This is different from the Steam Awards, voting for which is ongoing, and instead is built from Steam data like revenue, peak concurrent players, and so on. It's interesting every year as older games or indie obscurities do better than you expect.

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I keep an eye out for games I can use to introduce my young son to new genres. Cat Quest fit the bill last year. It's a straightforward action RPG with cute, clean art about a cat slicing up a world of hedgehogs, foxes and, of course, dogs.

It's currently free to keep from the Epic Games Store.

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This year's Game Awards ceremony garnered a lot of justified criticism for the way it rushed winning developers off stage in favour of adverts, rambling conversations with Hideo Kojima, and celebrity cameos from the likes of Timothée Chalamet.

Obsidian's Josh Sawyer was right when he called it an "embarrassing indictment of a segment of the industry desperate for validation via star power". Yet I still can't help but also see the Game Awards as something else: a sign of progress. That's because I remember the Spike Video Game Awards from 2007, which remains the nadir of both the games industry specifically and popular culture in general.

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Cor, there's been a lot of games this year, haven't there? While I've only slapped one Bestest Best badge down in 2023 (woe is me), our lovely freelancers, current RPSers, and former RPSers have done a whole lot more badge-slapping. A grand total of 26 Bestest Bests have graced our monitors this year, which makes it three more than last year's Bestest Best round-up. And I'd say it's a nice mixture of big budget open worlders, puzzle gems, and indie delights that make up our roster for 2023, too.

So yeah, I'd encourage you to have a flick through the list below and see if there's anything you can add to the wishlist. Even as the person with "Reviews" in their job title, I can confirm I literally have loads of these Bestest Bests in my backlog. I will endeavour to play a handful over this Christmas break on my Steam Deck, maybe combining the experience with a nibble on a mince pie. Anyway, enjoy! And Merry Reviewsmas!

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When you accomplish something big, like winning a major tournament, how do you celebrate? Maybe you jump around in excitement, salty rivulets streaming down your face in a rush of emotions. Maybe you pop a bottle of champagne and spray it around like an NFL player after the Super Bowl. Or, if you’re a 48-year-old…

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Pokémon’s profit margins probably don’t reflect it, but the franchise had a rough year in 2023. Without a new mainline role-playing game to dominate the series’ headlines, Pikachu and friends were, instead, shrouded in controversies throughout the past 12 months. Between Pokémon Go angering swaths of its community,…

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The design of the video game controller as we’ve known it has largely remained the same for the last 20 years: a d-pad, two analog sticks, four face buttons, and four shoulder buttons. It persists from the first PlayStation’s DualShock, all the way through to the modern PS5’s DualSense, as well as various Xbox and…

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More than six years after the original Persona 5 arrived on U.S. store shelves, the RPG is still spitting out successors and spin-offs that capitalize on how beloved that title is to this day. The 2020 update, Persona 5 Royal, is the best-received successor, but both 2021 Musou hybrid Persona 5 Strikers and the recently released turn-based strategy RPG Persona 5 Tactica gave players plenty to love.

Mary Kish is the Director of Community Marketing & Production at Twitch and one third of the Fire Escape podcast with Dan Ryckert and Mike Mahardy. You may also remember her as the world's #1 Downwell player during her time at Gamespot.

Weird! I'm writing into a CMS. I haven't done that in a while, and now that I'm doing it -- well, I probably won't have time to do it more often going forward. I do like it, though.

I played a lot of games in 2023. Like normal, I did a ton of dabbling. The thing with ADHD is that you're never doing the thing you're supposed to be doing. That causes me to frequently bounce off of games if I get to a point where I "get it." That's how I know 2023 was such a good year because I actually completed so many games. Not enough for Bailey to not make fun of me on the Bombcast, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

But for me, a year of gaming is not really about a list of games that I finished. That is nice, but I'm more interested in the moments and the stories I can take away from them. So with that in mind, let's talk about some of my highlights and lowlights before we get to my top 10.

Most games these days appear on the PC, but to be a truly great PC game, it really has to take advantage of what the platform can do. That’s been a tougher task than ever in 2023, with the rise of handhelds like the Steam Deck challenging the expectations of how a PC game should look, control and perform. These three games, though, stood above the rest.

These awards represent the consensus of the Siliconera staff. For more of the year’s award selections, check out our Game of the Year 2023 archive.

Star Ocean: The Second Story R

This remake of an RPG classic puts its own spin on the “HD-2D” idea, retaining the nostalgia of tri-Ace’s PS1 original but with a new sort of look. And if you know, you know, but The Second Story R is a great opportunity for the tons of players who missed the game the first two times to see what makes it so special. After the last, you know, decade or two that the franchise has had, it’s refreshing to see it revisit its more successful past.

Fate/Samurai Remnant

Selen Tatsuki will take a break from streaming for a while due to a medical situation. The Nijisanji English VTuber broke the news on her own X account after a brief period of silence since her previous post.

The social media post revealed that the person behind the VTuber had an accident, and she had to be brought to a hospital. She regained access to her phone the day before the announcement, but she will have to stay under supervision for a few more days to make sure that her injuries are healing.

Selen's announcement tweet is also available to view right below:

The recently published demo version of Tekken 8 includes optional Color Support accessibility settings to support players with visual impairments, such as color blindness. The game's director, Katsuhiro Harada, also joined the conversation on X by mentioning details behind the new implementation.

Harada revealed that he and his team had previously developed a test build of Tekken 7 with accessibility settings. However, the team never implemented the new settings to the public releases. They instead opted to polish the features further to be implemented well in Tekken 8.

Harada's tweet, which also quotes the user-uploaded footage of the accessibility mode in Tekken 8, is available to view below. The quoted post also contains a thread showing screenshots of various accessibility settings from the game:

I’m a fairly recent convert to PC gaming. In 2016, I spontaneously picked up a Steam Machine, Valve’s early attempt to fuse Steam with a more console-like experience. It was my first real introduction to the breadth of the Steam library and performance that outpaced my PS4. I was hooked, so I got my hands on a Dell…

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Xbox’s first-party studio lineup in 2017 consisted of five studios and a publishing arm: Rare, Turn 10, 343 Industries, The Coalition, Mojang Studios, and Xbox Game Studios Publishing. Today, six years later, Microsoft owns more than 50 studios, thanks to various acquisitions over the years.

Microsoft announced in January of 2022 that it was acquiring Call of Duty and Diablo maker Activision Blizzard for a colossal $68.7 billion, the largest video game acquisition ever. After nearly two years of Stateside court cases with the federal government, appeals and appeasements across the pond, unprecedented document leaks, direct arguments from rivals like PlayStation, and more, the deal is complete: Xbox is home to all 19 of Activision Blizzard’s studios (and King’s 11 mobile game development studios as well, since Activision Blizzard purchased the company in 2016).

Grand Ambition

Following the official announcement of the acquisition, lawyers and analysts were quick to bring up the U.S. Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Microsoft in 1999, in which the regulatory agency argued that Microsoft was monopolizing the PC home market with its proprietary software and technology restrictions. Microsoft lost that case, with a judge ruling it violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. But an appeals court overturned it, and Microsoft and the FTC settled, which Lee Law founding partner Michael Lee says is typical.

While most of the major gaming companies released player-specific wrap-up stats earlier this month, today Valve decided to share some platform-wide statistics, highlighting the most played Steam games of the year. To avoid divulging specifics, the entries are not ranked individually but by category. The top twelve games are in the platinum section, the next 13 are in the gold section, the next 25 are in the silver section, and the last 50 are in bronze. Within those categories, however, entries are "randomly sorted," so it's unclear which specific game came out at the top of the heap in any specific category.

Still, it's interesting data. Hogwarts Legacy, Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield, and Sons of the Forest each make the platinum category of almost every list they qualify for. Baldur's Gate 3 nearly completes a full sweep, but it doesn't quite make the cut for the controller platinum category, and there isn't a VR version. It's also interesting to see The Witcher 3, a nearly nine-year-old game, reach the top of the Steam Deck charts, but maybe not as impressive as Half-Life, released in 1998, which has a spot on that same list.

Here are the categories, their sorting criteria, and the games that made the top 12.

After a one-year hiatus, guest lists are back and so is the Giant Bomb Moderator team. We started using cold, hard math to determine the Game of the Year long before the staff did, so it's good to see them come to the correct side of history!

We currently have twelve members on the mod team. Two of our #1 picks didn't even make into the top ten. And two of us didn't play anything new this year. So, as I (Marino) started tabulating the results over the course of several days, our list was briefly, very, very odd. In the end, I feel like it's a mostly normal list, but it came down to the wire. Our first and second place games were only separated by a single point. Anyway, let's get to the list!

10. Marvel's Spider-Man 2

From @marino (#5)

Adam Cole is a professional wrestler working for All Elite Wrestling. This past August in London at Wembley Stadium, he main evented the highest paid attendance show in pro wrestling history. You can often find him playing games on Twitch where he goes by TheCHUGS.

10. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

Insomniac has knocked it out of the park on every entry of Spider Man, & Spider Man 2 is no different! I LOVE what they have done with this entry, and I’ve never had more fun not using fast travel!

Hey, it’s ya boy, Jesse Vitelli, A.K.A Young Elmo. I’m here to run down my top ten games of the year, but I’d like to say a few words before we do that.

While it’s been an excellent year for video games, it’s also been an incredibly stressful and difficult one for the people who make them. My heart goes out to all the developers who were laid off, treated unfairly by their corporate overlords, or never saw their incredible project cross the finish line. As much as we celebrate the games of the year, we celebrate your hard work and dedication despite insurmountable odds.

Thanks to the GB Staff for having me and welcoming me into their slice of the internet, my friends for helping me through a tough year, and to all the weird little freakos in games this year that I will also celebrate below.

There is a possibility that if you have heard of accessibility in games, you might have a picture in your mind that equates somehow to “easy mode,” something that makes the game less difficult to those with disabilities so they can play games like Elden Ring or Lies of P. But what if I told you that is not true, and some games that came out in 2023 prove that wrong?

I am Steve Saylor, an accessibility consultant and content creator in the video game space. I’ve been honored to work with amazing studios such as Naughty Dog, Ubisoft, and Xbox. You might have seen me on the GB Couch once or twice. The fine folks at Giant Bomb have asked me to give them a Game Of The Year List, and their instruction was, “Make it whatever you want.” So my list is not necessarily the accessible game of the year for 2023, but the “Challenge Accepted” Accessible Game Of The Year List in 2023.

Meet Julie Muncy, former contributor at Wired.com and present video game and narrative design consultant working for firms like Hit Detection. We were asked to tell you that she is, in fact, very charming and pretty.

Well, haven't done this in a while. Thanks to Giant Bomb, I am making my triumphant (?) return to Game of the Year lists after a several year absence from video game writing. As such, please bear with me, as I no longer understand where I am or what I'm doing. What year is this?

Okay. Okay. I can do this. Let's go.

You've probably already seen Eurogamer's top 50 games of 2023, but we didn't leave our end of year thoughts there. Big lists can sometimes feel impersonal, and as you know, individual tastes in games are anything but. So, we wanted to cobble together our collected thoughts on the games we felt shaped 2023.

This brief series of articles will, then, collect the top fives of a handful of different Eurogamer writers each day, and run for four days. The top fives aren't ordered because ordering is not what's important here - it's seeing which games were special to people this year, and hearing about why. And please, feel free to share yours.

I've been playing video games since the tape-loading days of the ZX Spectrum so it takes a special kind of game wow me nowadays. One little wow moment is good enough but then, at an age where I feel like I've seen it all, Alan Wake 2 comes along and oozes originality out of the screen. I've not even completed the game yet - I've been taking it slow, drinking it in and savouring every unexpected surprise, be it story-based, a piece of mend-bending visual trickery or even a whole damn [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS]. Sure, it's a bit slow for some people, but it's worth playing just for the way that it plays with you. I doubt we'll see a game this inventive and well-produced for a long time to come.

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Promise you won't tell the other children, but the RPS staff are actually complex magical spells cast by the Sugar Plum Fairy, as part of an age old pact with the ents of the forest where the RPS treehouse was built hundreds of years ago. Each year the Sugar Plum Fairy has to collect more wishes to power the spells every year (you can help to make the spells more powerful by joining the RPS supporter program). While she's out wish-hunting, here are some Christmas Crackers to distract you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What do you hang above the fireplace in a cyberpunk space station controlled by a malevolent AI?

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I've mentioned elsewhere that I played a lot of huge games this year, both literally referring to their size, and metaphorically referring to their brand name awareness (I had great intentions of doing a long-running Starfield diary, where I visited every planet I could until I got demoralised by the project, but unfortunately that turned out to be the length of one entry). I didn't play quite as many small, odd things as I would have liked in 2023. I am very pleased with the shape of our Advent Calendar this year, though, especially the mid-table, which has some good weirdo entries and some surprises there.

So I thought I'd struggle to come up with three reminders for you for the Selection Box. And yet I didn't! They're also very on brand. Words and murder you say? Maybe in 2024 I should make a resolution to switch things up a bit. Gotta keep you guessing, dear readers...

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Astlibra Revision a surprising indie action-RPG developed by a single person for over 15 years. It is also simultaneously the most and least fun I’ve had playing a game this year. I jumped into it not sure what to expect. After a powerful first half introducing a fun combat system and engaging plot that kept upping the tempo, the writing started to lose gas at a pretty alarming pace. While the game makes efforts to make up for it, it never fully recovered from the blow.

Astlibra Revision follows an unnamed protagonist fleeing from a horde of demons attacking his hometown. After running away, he finds himself trapped in one of the vast uninhabited Frontier lands of the world, with the raven Karon as his only companion. The protagonist then embarks in an eight year journey with Karon to find his hometown and his childhood friend Anulis. As part of their journey, the duo finds the Libra scales, an artifact said to be able to change the past, and finally reach civilization. This is simply the introduction to the world of Astlibra though, as the main duo is shortly after joined by a cast of interesting characters and the story expands into an odyssey that defies time and fate.

From a secret Santa at Valve making one user’s day to a look at what how an upcoming Star Wars game could fulfill our Han Solo dreams, here are some of the best news stories from the past week.

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Whether you’re new to the scene or you’ve been rolling dice and crafting adventures for years, 2023 had no shortage of wonderful games to pull you into other worlds. It’s an excellent time to get together with friends, gather around the table, and tell a story together, and each of the games that follow will take your group to surprising new destinations.

The Final Fantasy series isn't a stranger to sequels, as Final Fantasy X, VII, and XIII each received numerous follow-up entries in their respective franchises. Here are the Final Fantasy games we would like to see get sequels.

Final Fantasy games that deserve sequels

While some of the Final Fantasy games in this list do officially have sequels, it'd be nice to see more entries in these individual series. You can check out our small but compact list of FF games we'd love to see sequels, or more entries for, below.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles

Yuffie will appear as a boss in Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis as part of the The Wily Hunter event. It’ll start on January 1, 2024, at 12:00 AM JST.

For reference, 12:00 AM JST in Japan would be 7:00 AM PT/10:00 AM ET. It would also be on December 31, 2023, rather than January 1, 2024. So Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis players overseas will, technically speaking, be able to access this content while it’s still 2023.

There is a short trailer for the Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis The Wily Hunter event, with Yuffie making a brief appearance. You can watch it here:

VShojo has announced that as of December 31, 2023, Amemiya Nazuna will no longer be part of the company. This looks to be a cordial departure, as both sides decided to end their contractual arrangement.

The company posted a statement on its Twitter (X) account. Aside from her last day and the fact that this was a mutual decision, the statement says that Nazuna will retain ownership of her intellectual properties and assets. In other words, she will be able to continue her VTuber activities under the Amemiya Nazuna persona. VShojo ends the statement by hoping that Nazuna’s fans continue to support her endeavors. The personality behind Nazuna is also a VTuber with Voice-Ore as Mikeneko, or Koito Ria.

"2023 was a crazy year for gaming". I'm sure at this point, you're tired of that phrase and its infinite variations. So let me spice up this intro a bit:

Man, 2023 was a crazy year for me to start working in games media.

Back in January, I was putting most of my efforts into Twitch streams that were lucky to get a dozen viewers (shoutouts to anyone who showed up for Mario Mondays) and making silly YouTube videos with a certain Frequent Leaker and his Disney-loving cohost. Now, I'm... Well, working alongside said Frequent Leaker, his Disney-loving cohost, and a whole team of absolutely incredible people. Hell, I even put this article into Giant Bomb's content management system myself because, to quote one of the biggest duds of the year that won't make it anywhere near this list, "that is something I do now".

One last sappy thing before we begin:

Thank you.

You, reading this right now. If my saccharine introduction hasn't driven you away yet, it means you care at least some amount about what I have to say. That's still wild to me. I can't believe that I'll put out a goofy edit for socials and people will tell me that they loved it, or that I'll be chilling in a Twitch chat I've frequented for years and someone will identify me as "TurboShawn from Giant Bomb". Seriously: Words can't express how much it means to me that people like what I do.

Love y'all. Now, let's talk about some games.

At the end of every year, gamers are faced with an undeniable fact: far too many video games are released in a 12-month span for anyone to reasonably play them all. It's literally my job to play video games and I bet someone could fill a reasonable top ten this year of titles I didn't even get time to touch. But even as it's a universal, undeniable truth, the revelation that you missed out on something popular is always met with the same incredulous statement.

“You've never played this?”

I understand the impulse. For instance, Baldur's Gate 3 took up so many hours of my 2023 that it's hard to fathom what the year would be like without it. This sentiment extends well beyond GOTY talks, though – some games are so fundamental to our taste or upbringing that it can be hard to process that people who did it differently exist. There are people who have never played a Zelda game or a Halo game, and I bet if you asked a middle school crowd, plenty of them have never played Wii Sports. But personally, any shock I experience is quickly overwritten by excitement. If someone I'm close to has never played one of my favorite games, then I get to do something even better than replaying it; I get to watch them experience it for the first time.

With the year almost behind us, it's hard not to look back at 2023 with conflicted feelings. It was a fantastic year for gamers at home with great tentpole releases from PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo, and some excellent indies, too. For years to come, we will all likely argue that 2023 was one of the best – if not the best – year for games. But it was also a terrible year for the people who make games, with more than 10,000 developers laid off, studios closed, and more. 

Between big video game releases, a heartbreaking amount of layoffs, record-breaking acquisitions and box office reports, and more, 2023 contained plenty of news stories that had us talking for weeks, speculating on the future of the industry, and reshaping how we view game development. Here are the 10 biggest gaming news stories of 2023.

All five Vtuber group Hololive English Advent members will receive new outfits for the 2024 new year. Their new outfits will be themed after the New Year’s celebration and will debut on each member’s official YouTube channel.

The announcement revealing the decision for Hololive English Advent to receive New Year’s outfits was posted on the official Hololive English Twitter (X) account. A teaser video showcasing each new style's silhouettes was released, along with the dates and times for each reveal stream. Each stream is scheduled to go live on January 1, 2024.

See the official announcement and teaser video in the post below:

[embed]https://twitter.com/hololive_en/status/1740583446140027322[/embed]

Here is the complete schedule for Hololive English Advent’s New Year’s outfit streams:

• January 1, 2024, 5:00PM PST, 8:00PM EST: Shiori Novella.
• January 1, 2024, 5:30PM PST, 8:30PM EST: Koseki Bijou.
• January 1, 2024, 6:00PM PST, 9:00PM EST: Nerissa Ravencroft.
• January 1, 2024, 6:30PM PST, 9:30PM EST: Fuwawa and Mococo Abyssgard.
• January 1, 2024, 7:00PM PST, 10:00PM EST: Collaboration Stream.

The members of Hololive English Advent will receive their new New Year’s styles on January 1, 2024.

Ahead of the official launch of Zenless Zone Zero, HoYoVerse has shared some wallpapers of the various factions from the game. They are all only available in one resolution.

According to a post shared on Twitter (X), this is to alleviate players’ longing for New Eridu. Now that the Equalizing Test server shut down, not even the beta testers can get their hack ‘n’ slash fix. In total, there are five wallpapers to download, and you can check them out here:

And thus, we arrive at the end of another year. A year filled with some very excellent games, and some very not excellent games. And through it all, the RPS guides team has been quietly toiling away, appeasing The Beast That Is Google with medium-rare slabs of SEO meat, and providing the answers to oft-asked gaming questions.

It's important to me to have a moment in the year where we can step into the light for a little bit and celebrate everything the guides team has accomplished this year. Usually we stay well out of the spotlight, because people only like seeing guides if they're actively searching for it. But today, we're staging a coup. We're taking centre stage, and threatening the lighting technician with all manner of disagreeable bodily experiences unless they keep the spotlight fixed firmly on us for the duration of this post.

2023 has been an amazing standout year for guides. Let's take a look at the games that have defined the year for us, and celebrate some of the fantastic work our team has published.

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*Portions of Jeff Bakalar’s list were outsourced to his next of kin.

**While it didn’t come anywhere close to making my list this year, I just wish to say “Atomic Heart” out loud.

🎶 Mike Minotti... Mike Mike Minotti... 🎶

10. Cocoon

Cocoon reminds me of those indie games from the Xbox Live Arcade days. It has a simple idea that it adds complexity to throughout a short, well-paced journey. And even though this is a game all about puzzles, it somehow also has some of the best boss fights of the year.

I played this on my Switch when I was feeling a bit of handheld RPG fatigue, and it hit the spot better than a Diet Dr. Pepper from the Arby’s soda fountain.