The Best Games I Played in 2021

2021 was the year I delved back in to gaming hardcore and reconnected with (and grew) my love of fighting games.

I’ve had a Switch for years and they do have some classics and modern fighting games available there but I knew I’d have to go in on a Playstation if I wanted to play the current crop of fighting games, a device I haven’t owned since PS2 was fresh and mostly all I did with that was question why I spent so much time playing Final Fantasy sequels.

Since everybody wanted these elusive PS5s in 2021, my buddy who conjured some sort of arcane magic to acquire one awesomely offered to sell me his PS4 on the cheap, so I fucking sprung like Blanka’s Jungle Wheel, ferocious and green, at the chance. I brought that system home, plugged the ever-loving shit out of it into the tv and instantly downloaded Street Fighter 5 and I was off to the fucking races.

Fighting games (and others) and access to them helped lift the crushing weight of 2021 from me a bit.

THE BEST GAMES I PLAYED IN 2021

POWER RANGERS: BATTLE FOR THE GRID

Never having been a fan of Power Rangers, and only owning a Switch at the time, I was so desperate for new and awesome fighting games I went all in on Battle for the Grid and have not once regretted it. I couldn’t give two shits about what a Megazord is or how it relates to morphin’ or whatnot but the game is fucking enthralling and they keep updating it and adding in new characters. In 2021 they even added Power-Ranger-ed-up versions of Ryu and Chun-li, who kept their same move set from Street Fighter but got awesome morphin’ outfits. You can’t fucking beat that.

HADES

There’s was (is), seemingly to me, a ton of fucking hype around these “rogue-like” type of dungeon crawler games and the idea never really appealed to me until I saw the art for Hades, a super stylistic reimagining of the Greek gods and environments, couple with the gameplay premise, that being you die and start over but each time get a little more experience and gain a little more ground to eventually escape the titular Hades.

The addiction is real on this. Just hacking and slashing through Hades trying so hard to escape, making a little progress, then killed, back to do it again with glee.

SAMURAI SHODOWN

The first two Samurai Shodown games are some of the fondest memories I have of wasting my dads quarters in a smoky, dingy, bowling alley arcade while he league bowled his night away, and I learned how to get my ass kicked by pixelated samurai. So, obvs, when this new one came out, and came out on fucking Switch, I snagged the shit out of it, as well as the amazing collection of the first five games.

Technically this shit came out in 2020 (maybe 2019) but like Power Rangers, they keep adding new DLC characters, like, fucking finally, Cham Cham from SS2 and cross-over characters from the criminally underrated Last Blade series and oh-so-fan-favorite Baiken from Guilty Gear, who by the way, fits in perfectly in the modern Samurai Shodown.

DOOM: ETERNAL

The revamped and rebooted DOOM game from a few years ago became one of my all time favorite games. It’s such a simple concept, to make a game that features all the things that made your game great and turn that shit up to 11 that it’s almost stupid, which is exactly what DOOM did then, and then did again with DOOM: Eternal. There’s no game more metal than a doom game.

castlevania: Advance collection

There are those that swear by the first four, platforming, linear style, classic Castlevania games, and those are all well and good, but for me, where the series truly shines, is when they turned into the exploratory, deep-diving, wandering in circles, gaining super abilities type of games that the masterfully beautiful Symphony of the Night ushered in. Come to find out there were even more of those style of Castlevania games, from the same creator, but on Gameboy Advance, which I’ve never even looked at, until October of 2021 when I wanted to play some horror games, found this, and subsequently had my mind blown all over again by Castlevania.

Blasphemous

Speaking of Metroidvania games, Blasphemous comes as close to perfecting the formula as any game in the genre has. Blisteringly difficult and beautifully created, if you can’t handle the struggle then at least admire the pixel art because it is top notch, dare I say, the best I’ve ever seen. The blood-soaked, fantasy world of religious fanaticism taken to its extreme is both poignant and fodder for brilliant gameplay.

Guilty Gear: Strive

While I mostly wanted the PS4 so I could fucking finally play Street Fighter 4 & 5, the arrival of the device in my home just so happened to correspond with peak Guilty Gear: Strive hype, a game series I was only just becoming familiar with and struggling with early versions on my Switch.

But what the fuck, you know, I bought Strive, expecting to be intimidated by this weird Anime style fighter known for weird, complicated characters and game mechanics, but found an accessible and down right gorgeous game experience. Strive cracked the code for me on Anime style fighters and other kinds of off-kilter fighters and it’s one of the best gaming experiences of the year.

STREET FIGHTER 5

My fighting games of choice are the Street Fighter games. They have been ever since I peeped an original Street Fighter 2 arcade cabinet at my local Circle K when I road my bike there to get Sour Warheads or some shit in the 90s. So, being mainly a Nintendo mark, and not having any of the next gen systems, I never got to play SF 4, and subsequently SF5, until summer of 2021 when a PS4 made its way into my basement.

I jumped right to SFV and dove in and it was like riding a fucking bike, albeit one that spontaneously electrocuted you, or kicked you in the face with spinning feet of fury, but all the things I love about Street Fighter were there and accounted for. How I missed it.

GAROU: MARK OF THE WOLVES

Garou, which has the audacity to not tell you it’s a Fatal Fury game, was completely new to me, despite its being a thing for decades now. I think it’s actual Fatal Fury 3, a series I was into playing at the arcade when Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Samurai Shodown, were being hogged.

When it comes to Fatal Fury, I’m pretty basic, and loves me some Terry Bogart, perhaps the most satisfying fighting game character to play, ever, who is at peak satisfaction in Garou, also accompanied by the most righteous design of the character ever, that if we’re being honest, I wish was the standard instead of the red and white hat ensemble.

Oh, and it’s one of the best fighting games of ever.

BLAZBLUE: CENTRAL FICTION

When I got the Switch I pretty much bought as many of the mainstream and popular developer fighting games I could and among that horde was Blazblue: Central Fiction, an Anime fighter with it’s intense speed and combos and technical characters that intimidated the fuck out of me at first, so I quit playing. That is until Guilty Gear: Strive opened me up to the possibilities of what fighters outside of Capcom and SNK had to offer and upon revisiting which my newfound appreciation and middling skills, Blazblue opened up to me and I to it and while I’m a struggling novice at best at this game it doesn’t fucking matter because it’s just so fun to whack people with giant fucking swords.