25 games to get to know aurel

was doing a "games to get to know me" thing with friends and i realized i kinda wanna type up a little bit more detail about the choices i made for it, so, here goes :> feel free to imagine me flapping my arms a lot while you read this, because i kept having to take breaks to do that while typing it

i ordered these by cover color, so please ignore how the tone of these blurbs is all over the place as a result lol

final fantasy ix - i've enjoyed most of the ff games i've played, but ix is the one that really spoke to me the most. i'm not even sure what parts i want to highlight because it's just a great blend of just about everything working for me? great cast, great writing, great designs, great music. zero regrets on spending hours of my life on chocobo hot n cold.

harvest moon: animal parade - like with ff, i've enjoyed most of the games in the HM/SoS series, but this is the one i always go back to. it has by far my favorite art style in the series, as well as my favorite characters, and i spent so many hours of my life playing it as an older teen. there's definitely a stronger element of nostalgia to this one than most others (except maybe a wonderful life) but even past that it just has the most elements i like.

the alliance alive - i ran into this one completely by accident on the 3ds and gave it a spin because "well, i love AA jrpgs, so why not" and it was a good call! it's really stuck with me. it has neat mechanics, i quite enjoy it visually, and i enjoyed the writing a lot more than i expected to going in. the characters are really great, and a lot of the designs especially really spoke to me because there's a lot of playing around with androgyny in them. it really felt like finding a diamond in the rough and that somehow gave it a personal spin? like, that's my diamond, i found it all by myself :)

white knight chronicles - this one isn't on here because it's good, or even because i like it (because genuinely, i never want to play it again, it sucks ass to play), but because i've been bizarrely fascinated with it ever since i first played it and i cannot get it out of my mind and that's got to mean something. this game sucks to play. the visuals are generally pretty mid. the writing is god-awful, but in a way that i cannot take my eyes away from, like looking at an exceptionally spectacular trainwreck where the wagons keep crashing and crashing into each other.
you create a custom protagonist only for them to be absent for half the cutscenes because the devs forgot to put them in (the other half is just you going :| in the background of scenes where you're not doing anything). there's dutch angles everywhere for no reason. plot points are brought up as fast as they're forgotten. several characters somehow fail to successfully count to 5. someone's backstory reveal accidentally happens twice. it's mystifying.

harvestella - i love farming games and i love jrpgs and this one has one of the most enjoyable blends of both for my tastes. it also has a completely fucking bonkers plot that i got way too invested in (and am very proud to say i paid so much attention to the foreshadowing that i predicted the big backstory twist several chapters early) that would be genuinely great in any jrpg, farming or no. i also really enjoyed the characters (both design and writing) and a significant number of the side quests in the game made me cry because of how personal they get. just a game that ended up touching me a lot more than i expected.


ever oasis - like alliance alive, i found this one on the 3ds mostly by accident, and it's been one of my favorite games on that console. while the gameplay is a lot like ocarina of time 3ds (owing to sharing a developer) with some extra town building elements, the thing that really grabs me about it is its entire set of design choices/themes. the character designs are quite cute, but more than that, design-wise, it's a game about how sand and deserts and oases and water are fundamentally beautiful and magical things, and it does such a good job of selling that. it's a gorgeous game to look at and nothing has ever made me want to put sand in my mouth this bad. just very very memorable.

sakuna - this might be the autism talking, but there is something truly special to me about a game that wants to simulate something as specific and detailed as all the aspects of growing and harvesting rice while not caring about any other sim elements. it added a dimension that i've never had in a harvest moon game and i don't know quite how to word it. the combat sections are basically fine - i didn't like them quite as much, but the balancing act of the two halves of the gameplay worked together really well. and then add to that that visually the game is so fucking pretty to look at.

picross 3d round 2 - i fucking love picross and i wanted to put a picross game and this is probably my favorite and i have spent SO much time playing it. i've 100%ed the game twice. it's so good. i love picross.

roadwarden - i love interactive fiction, and roadwarden really covered everything i love about that genre, coupled with vibes and a premise that i really enjoyed. it feels like a special little game to run into. and something just really grabs at me in a game about wandering around helping people resolve problems. i'm having trouble getting words for this one. i picked it up while i was still having a rough time with the hurt of having to leave game dev communities and it helped me want to get back to making my own games, and that means a lot.

the missing - i played this one with my best friend on the couch together, and we spent the last two hours of the game both actively sobbing and hugged each other really hard at the end. they described it as "being fed through an emotional woodchipper and then a trash compactor" and honestly, yeah. and it turns out i really needed that to help me sort out through some feelings i was struggling with. it's a very, very raw game. but fuck, it means so much to me.


fantasy life - i remember back when the japanese release of this was announced, i wanted to play it SO fucking bad because it seemed like extremely My Shit. i had to wait a bit to actually try it, but yes, it turns out it's extremely my shit. i don't know where to start with this one. the vibes are great. the gameplay is SO much fun. i love just Doing Everything in a game and the way gathering and crafting feel like really active things on the same level as combat is just great. i got so fucking into it at the time that i contributed over 900 edits to the wiki instead of paying attention in class.

tales of the abyss - like with final fantasy, there's a lot of tales games i like, and this one was a really hard pick between abyss and symphonia. symphonia is the one i grew up with more (presea and zelos obliterated my 12yo brain a really normal amount), but tales of the abyss is the one i end up wanting to go back to more often. visually it's my favorite game in the series, and the writing is just... really, really good. i don't even know where to start with it, all the character arcs in it just slot into place so well. luke's is the most famous one, but honestly there isn't a single party member (plus some major characters) whose arc doesn't make me want to go WAUGH.

star ocean 3 - IT'S MY GIRL. this is my favorite game of all time. is it that good? no <3 but it made a huge impression on 12yo aurel and it means a lot to me. it's silly and campy and i love most of the characters in this game. and i still distinctly remember the way it got gears slowly creaking into movement in my head when i saw albel's design, with my brain slowly starting to piece together "wait, boys can wear skirts? and look cute?" and now, almost 20 years later, albel's still one of the most relatable characters in fiction for me between the gender non-conformity and the ptsd. even past that though, it's a really fun game and i will just never get tired of it. i've played it around 10-15 times now but i've lost the exact count. if my "games to know aurel" list was a single game, it would be this one.

monster hunter stories - i've enjoyed several mainline monster hunter games, and you could argue this game's sequel is better than this one, but for some reason this is the one that i just feel drawn to pick from the series. it has all the elements i like of monhun, and much fewer of the elements i didn't like. and the stylized designs are sooo soo cute. this is the game that finally got me to want to give monster hunter more of a chance (along with gu, to a degree) after having struggled with everything i'd played of the mainline entries.

ace attorney 5 - i've genuinely enjoyed every ace attorney game i've played, so i hesitated a bit on which one to pick for this list. but i think it's most honest to go for aa5, given that none of the subplots have ever blasted me as hard as its last two cases. athena and blackquill might just be my two favorite characters in the series (in a series where i like SO MANY of the characters) and this is the only game where they really get any opportunity to shine, but when they do it's great. case 3 sucks ass though, one of the worst cases in the series.


lost odyssey - it's not officially a final fantasy game so i get to have both this and ffix here despite both having a lot of developers in common. this might be the best jrpg i've ever played, and it's in my top 5 all-time favorite games. the game itself is fantastic - really solid gameplay with really interesting mechanics, good story with some really interesting themes, great characters, great music. but the part where it really stands out is the short stories you get when you unlock characters' memories (mostly kaim's), which are some of my favorite prose i've ever read, full stop.
i didn't get to play this one until 2018 despite having felt drawn to it ever since it released in 2008, and it was everything i'd hoped for and then some more. i don't know how to word just how much this game spoke to me. it's very melancholic and mature and humanist in a way few games are.

touhou mystia's izakaya - okay so, it's touhou diner dash, but there are very few games that have ever polished my brain into a smooth, smooth sphere quite as much as this one. it's so incredibly satisfying and stimmy to play i could play it for days on end if i didn't need to sleep. i made spreadsheets for this it rules. also the art is really cute and you can't really go wrong with touhou.

umineko no naku koro ni - probably the best mystery novel i've ever read, possibly because of its opinion on what a mystery should be in the first place. which is to say that being told "some of these scenes are lies, and some of these scenes are real, and some are true without being strictly real" made it so much more interesting and rewarding than i've ever had from the genre. on a more personal level, the themes and writing hit me like a fuckign truck because it is a capital T Tragedy and if you let love into your heart and care about all the characters as much as the author wants you to, every inch of progress on solving the mystery makes you sadder. i've never been this upset at figuring out who the culprit in a mystery was. and i've never wanted to redefine the concept of what counts as "truth" or "reality" quite this hard. absolutely fantastic.

oneshot - adventure games are fun in general, and it helps that this one is super cute, but the thing that really sticks with me is that i played it with my best friend one time when we were both feeling pretty down and we got so invested in our new child and charge and keeping them healthy and happy. i've never been so paranoid about making sure a video game character was okay. everything about this is really charming and a little sad and it was a really sweet game for us to share as an experience.

dirge of cerberus - okay so i lied when i said only one final fantasy game. but in my defense this is a weird spin-off. is it the game 13yo aurel REALLY wanted to play? yes. is it a good game? absolutely not. i didn't even have that much of a blast with it at the time (it doesn't play great, and i got stuck on one of the difficulty spike bosses and never finished it) but there's a lot i like about the game conceptually and i just kind of love that it exists. im the idiot that came out of ffvii thinking "i wish i was vincent valentine and had a cool gun and a cool claw arm" and you know what? they made a game about that!
the gun customization elements are actually pretty neat and i still have a soft spot for some of its stupid aesthetics but yeah, it's not here because it's good.


planescape: torment - i've enjoyed a lot of crpgs, and this one is probably not one i'm going to go back to given the things that have come out on some of the people who worked on it, but it would feel weird to omit it given how big a deal it was to me when i played it as an older teen. i've always enjoyed the social/narrative aspects of crpgs more than their combat, and torment delivers on that in spades. it's a game that constantly surprised me with what i could do in dialogue and how little i felt constrained to follow a single playstyle.
on the story side, it also does a fantastic job with the premise involving figuring out who you used to be (something it has in common with lost odyssey, but they both have very different tones), and making you question whether you really want to see what's behind the layers you're peeling back. i could say a ton about this game, there's a reason it's a cult classic.

magicka - possibly the funnest multiplayer game i've ever played? i played it a ton back in university, and i've played it a couple times with friends since, and it just doesn't stop being fun. it's technically a co-op game, but in practice will devolve into pvp in a matter of seconds whether you planned to or not. the actual magic system is really inventive and really fun to play with, and you will almost always be using it to kill your friends when they least expect it. and the writing is really stupid but usually pretty fun. just kind of a blast?

process of elimination - another murder mystery vn, but one that's a lot less ambitious than umineko, and instead just feels fantastically well-rounded. the art and music and writing are fantastic, and outside a handful of jokes, everything in this game really worked for me. the tactics gameplay sections are a fun new take on investigation sections (like a weird cross between ace attorney and a tactics rpg), with a lot of flavor.
the actual characters and story are where it shines most for me though, with them taking what seems like fairly simple detective archetypes (to the point where the characters are introduced by their gimmicks and not their names) and fully fleshing them out way past what you'd expect. i got really invested in all the characters, and it gave me the same feeling as in umineko of "i wish no one in this murder mystery died :(" and hit me like a truck on several occasions.

pathfinder: wrath of the righteous - first off this one gets an honorary mention for being the only game in my library where GoG tried to tell me my daily playtime had hit 52 hours. i don't know how i did that. i got really into this one, and just how much feels like can vary in a playthrough. it's a bit less on the personal side compared to something like torment, but it has a really wide breadth of rp options in a way i've seen in fairly few games, where you can just tackle a lot of quests in very different ways, especially given how the mythic paths work. just a really neat crpg, and i enjoyed a lot of the characters, to boot.

resident evil 6 - i wanted to include at least one resident evil game, and i think it's only fair to pick the only one i've finished, re6. which says a lot about me on several levels. i had a blast playing this one with the bestie, and we spent a lot of time goofing around by throwing ourselves to the ground and rolling about. i dunno what else to say about this game, really. it's stupid, it's fun, it's campy, it's a bit of a mess, and you know what? i like that a lot, i had a lot of fun.