2021 in review: Samus returns, or how double-A games provided some of the year's big showstoppers
Hello! Over the next few days we’re going to be going back over some of our favourite games and moments and themes and whatnot from this very strange year. We hope you enjoy looking back with us!
It has been, the story goes, a quiet sort of year for video games. After the fun and festivities of 2020, which against the backdrop of a pandemic somehow saw two new consoles being released, there’s been a lethargy to 2021 – a Boxing Day fug as we’re caught in the liminal buffer between the big launch year and 2022, where every big release has seemingly been delayed to.
Which is all true enough. There hasn’t been a lightning rod of a release like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, no towering triple-A statements like The Last of Us Part 2 or showstoppers like Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Even the disappointments have been on a lesser scale; we’ve got the reliably unreliable Battlefield doing its best with 2042’s botched launch, but it’s never reached the same drama as Cyberpunk 2077’s own belly-flop.
A low-key kind of year, then, which helps set up some more modest productions providing some of the biggest showstoppers of 2021. If you’ve love for more modest productions of a certain vintage, 2021’s been packed with heartwarming returns: R-Type got an unlikely sequel that felt more like a celebration than the famously fatalistic R-Type Final, Final Fantasy legend Hiroyuki Itoi quietly came back to the director’s chair after some 15 years and delivered the outstanding Dungeon Encounters, and heck you could just about make the case that Virtua Fighter staged its own comeback of sorts.
