Going off of what I wrote last week when I said that I constantly try and experience new things, there are several games that I play every year. They’re like my comfort food. Games that I’ve loved forever. Most of them are JRPGs and old school in general. Sometimes it just feels nice to think that you can go home again. Here are the four games that I play every year.

1. Shovel Knight- What if your knight didn’t have a sword but instead a shovel? What if the damsel in distress was the equal to the hero? What if a company made one of the best old school platformers that ever was. Those are the questions that this game asks. The game is about the titular Shovel Knight trying to save his partner, Shield Knight from someone named the Sorceress and her villainess group of knights called the Order of No Quarter. The gameplay is reminiscent of Duck Tales with you slashing and pogoing with your shovel. Shovel Knight is funny, well made, colorful, has great music and is all around a masterpiece. It is such a joy to play. It takes about four hours to beat but those four hours are joyful. You can feel the love in every moment of this game. The team that made these are experts at fun and have done their homework five times over.

2. Final Fantasy X- I have bought this game on every new system that it becomes available on. I played this game religiously when I was younger and had it on my PS2. I never wanted to be that far away from it. The game is such a departure from the other Final Fantasy iterations. You play as Tidus who arrives in a tropical paradise that is stuck in a continual cycle of death because of a giant Kaiju-size monster known as Sin. He becomes a guardian of a woman named Yuna who is learning how to summon creatures known as aeons, once she completes her journey of learning how to summon all of them, she will face Sin. And that’s about all I can say without spoiling. The game is bright and colorful much like Shovel Knight, has a wonderful battle system that makes gameplay fun and addictive. It has it’s moments that are less than stellar, see the Tidus laugh moment below but the journey is one that I go on every year just to remember how good it is.

3. Bioshock- Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow? That’s the question that Andrew Ryan asks you as you unwillingly enter the city of Rapture. You play as Jack a man that is just having the worst day. He gets into a plane crash and swimming to safety, he finds a lighthouse. He goes inside and takes a bathysphere down to this city. He finds a fallen utopia, the aforementioned Rapture, that was based on the concept that there were no restraints on scientists, inventors and artists. They found a substance called ADAM that allowed them to change their DNA. This allowed them to throw fireballs and lightning and do all kinds of other things. But the substance had two downsides, it took genetically altered little girls known as little sisters to harvest it and it was highly addictive creating violent monsters called splicers. You have to learn how to survive in this world and then escape from it. You need ADAM to live and you need to decide if your survival is worth murder of children or if you’re willing to make the game harder by letting them liven when you take the ADAM from them. It’s a first person shooter and probably the darkest game on this list in terms of visuals and subject matter. It’s another masterpiece that doesn’t take too long to play. Or maybe I’ve just gotten that good at it.

4. Chrono Trigger- Another JRPG of the old school SNES variety. You play as Crono and after a festival experiment goes wrong and sends you back in time, you find that you have to stop a disaster that is going to take place and destroy the world. You collect people from the various time periods that you visit to help you and include, a chivalrous man sized frog knight, a polite robot, a sorcerer that looks like Vegeta and a cave woman. Then you have your two bros from the present, a princess in hiding and your female inventor friend. The game despite its age jam packs so much into it. There are over thirteen endings in the game depending on when you fight the final boss who becomes available about a quarter way through the game and even sooner if you know how to get there. The game was as far as I know the first game to issue a new game plus mode where you were able to restart the game with all your weapons, experience and abilities from your last beaten save. That meant that you could start just romping all the first area enemies with your ultimate abilities the minute you hit the street. This game continues my love of color, great stories and music. Starting to see a theme emerge.