Tag: 2018

Game of the Year 2018: 1st Place

(You can read 2nd & 3rd place here, and 4th and 5th place here)

NOTE: This review will only contain some minor story spoilers from the Chapter 1 stories.

Where to begin with Octopath Traveler? I suppose since it’s a game about lots of different people’s stories, I should tell my own story about my experience with Octopath Traveler.

I normally wouldn’t go into why I bought a game when talking about it, mostly because the answer is usually that I saw it on the new releases list, thought: “Sure, why not” and that was that, but Octopath had a very different feel to it than most games. I’d seen it briefly advertised in a few Nintendo Direct streams, and while I thought it looked interesting, it wasn’t really something I was into since old-school hardcore JRPG’s typically aren’t my thing.

In the build up to it’s release however, I kept hearing about it more and more, but not in the way I usually hear about games in their build up. I had a couple of friends who were really looking forward to it and they would often retweet art and other content related to the game long before it had even come out. While the demo definitely aided this, I’d never really seen such a dedicated group of people so into a game before it had even been released. Normally, when I see people anticipating a game that much – especially a new IP – it’s on a huge scale, like with No Man’s Sky; but this wasn’t like that. It was such a niche title with such a dedicated fanbase, I couldn’t help but be intrigued, so I bought it.

Instantly upon beginning the game, it became clear to me just what was going to be unique about this game….It’s uniqueness. It sounds stupid, I know, but stick with me. While, yes, the cutscenes are all scripted and you can’t make choices to influence what happens, everyone’s journey through Octopath Traveler will be a unique one, and all the systems in the game are setup to aid that feeling.

You have to pick what character you want to start your journey with, which determines two main things. One, the character you pick as your starting character can’t be removed from your party until their story has ended, meaning they’ll be with you for pretty much your entire journey. Two, it determines what other characters are closest to you. While you can technically get them in whatever order you like, you can’t fast travel at the start of the game, so you automatically pick a direction to go in and get all of the characters in that order. So what does this achieve?

Well, the order I encountered all of the characters really did affect how much I connected with each of them. I started at H’aanit and went round the map clockwise, and sure enough by the end of the game, my main team was, H’aanit, Ophilia, Cyrus and Tressa, who were the first four characters I encountered. It goes without saying that very few people are likely to take the exact same path as you, meaning everyone who plays the game will connect with different characters in different ways, so everyone really does have an experience that feels unique.

So that’s what drew me into the game in the first place, but I don’t stick with just any old game for 5 months, so why didn’t I get bored and start playing something else? This is where we get to the meat of exactly why this game has such a hardcore fanbase, why I’ve ended up buying art and charms based on this game; it’s the characters.

If you take each of the character’s stories at face value, there isn’t really anything unique about them. A woman aims to kill the men who murdered her father; A man seeks vengeance on the man who betrayed him; A young girl seeks to travel and see the world against the wishes of her parents; and so on. While those stories aren’t that special, when you take these carefully created and extremely nuanced characters and drop them into those stories, suddenly it begins to feel like something new, and I become invested in a way that I never would’ve without those characters.

The idea of each character having their own “chapters” in their stories that are all separate is something that I wasn’t too sure on at the start, but I realised it was exactly the kind of storytelling that was needed to make sure that all of these characters got time to form and grow without it feeling like a big entangled mess; not to mention it’s a type of storytelling that is only really possible in a video game.

By the end of each character’s first chapter, I felt I knew exactly who they are, what their goals are and most importantly, why they’re going on this journey. The game took as much time as it needed to make sure that I was fully behind every single character and wanted to see them succeed in their quest.

Octopath Traveller, is much more than just a set of stories however, there’s a hell of a lot of “game” to this game as well.

Before I start talking about the mechanics, I should mention that I haven’t played many old-school JRPG’s like this one, and as such I don’t really know what aspects of the mechanics are unique to this game and what’s come before, so i’m just going to talk about what I did and didn’t like about it.

It’s a turn-based combat system, which has always been my preference to real-time since I like being able to take the time to think and strategize, and a turn-based system is best to allow me to do that. Each of the characters has a “job” which determines what weapons they have by default and their special skills, additionally, further down the line in the game you can unlock a secondary job for each of the characters. All of this allows for a massive range of different team compositions and strategies, all of which adds to the uniqueness that I’ve been talking about.

The boost system is also a very good idea. Boost Points build up every turn, unless you use boost points that turn, and depending on the type of ability, they can increase damage, or cause an attack to occur multiple times. This combines well with the “Break” system, where each enemy will have weaknesses to certain weapon types or magical elements and exploiting their weaknesses enough will break them, making them lose a turn and take 50% more damage than normal.

These two simple concepts add a whole new layer of complexity to the combat, it means you have to pick your spots carefully and plan several turns in advance to get the most damage possible out of your characters. This is especially important later on in the game, where you unlock “Divine Skills” that only work when a character has been boosted to maximum.

While you won’t need to use this deep level of strategy for every random encounter, where it really shines is the boss fights. The bosses are deliberately designed to be seemingly overpowered, with a large amount of health and high damage attack, in order to force you think about this tactically. It can be quite the shock at first, when you wander into the boss fight and it wipes the floor with you, but once you get the hang of the way you’re supposed to think, it’s a thrilling experience, with many of the late game bosses bringing extremely tense scenarios, leading to some of the most satisfying victories and most crushing defeats.

Perhaps the biggest indicator of just how much I love this game, is the fact that I’ve scoured the web to find as much merchandise and art that I can, and bought way too much of it. Charms, art prints, t-shirts, I’ve bought so much stuff related to this game, and the only other game I’ve ever done that with is Pokemon. Even the soundtrack is absolutely brilliant, if I’d have wrote my “Music in Video Games” list now, “Battle at Journey’s End” would absolutely be on there as one of my favourites.

Octopath Traveller is an absolute triumph in game design and storytelling, it takes something truly special to occupy my mind for as long as Octopath has, and I still haven’t seen everything it has to offer. It is far-and-away my favourite game of the year and I am certain that this will stand for many years as one of my favourite games of all time.

And there you have it! Thank you very much for taking the time out to read this, if you’re looking for more then follow me on Twitter @10ryawoo to know when new stuff is posted, and make sure you also follow @lauren_cmonster who edited this article.

Thanks again for reading and I’ll see you soon!

Game of the Year 2018: 2nd & 3rd Place

As we move another day closer to 2019, it’s time to continue looking back on the year that was and talk about another two awesome games from 2018.

If you haven’t read my 4th and 5th place picks then make sure you check them out here before reading these ones!

As with yesterday, I’ve only played games on PC, HTC Vive and Nintendo Switch, so I haven’t played anything that wasn’t on those platforms, and I won’t be covering early access games since they’re not finished.

There’s no more time to waste, so let’s get to it.

3 – Omensight

With most of the games on this list, I end up talking a lot about one thing in particular that stood out to me and made it worthy of being on a Game of the Year list; this isn’t the case with Omensight. There isn’t one thing that stands out to me when I play Omensight, because it’s just all really well designed and so much fun.

The basics of the game are that the world has ended and you, the Harbinger – a deity like being whose job it is to stop the world from ending, have to relive the final day of the world over and over again to work out how to stop it. You can’t just do whatever you like however, you play through each day by following around one of four characters that are related to how the world ended.

Each character has very different personalities and for the most part are at each other’s throats the whole time. The game makes sure to not frame anyone as the bad guy at any point, but at the same time does point you towards a few assumptions early on, which get subverted later down the line. The writing forces you to see the complexities of the land from every angle, to the point that you find yourself naturally distrusting certain characters, which can affect your actions and decisions in the short-term, to both your advantage and detriment.

While the levels are mostly linear there are various points where you can branch off and explore, and the game encourages this, as pretty much everything in the world gives you further understanding of the story you’re caught up in.

The story also scales quite nicely, but with every new discovery, the threat of whatever is causing the apocalypse closes in more and more. While you’re never actually under any real-time pressure, the game does a good job of keeping you on edge towards the later half and you’re never truly safe, which is quite hard to achieve when you’re literally playing as an immortal ancient spirit.

That said you’re not immortal in battle, and for me this is what brings the game up from a great game, to one of the best of 2018. So much attention to detail went into the story, and in a game like this, I often go in expecting the gameplay to not be anything special in order to flesh out the story; but that’s not the case here.

A lot of time and attention was clearly put into making the combat and platforming mechanics of the game feel great. While the camera could be a bit more cooperative, every jump and swing of the blade feels important in this system. While most fights aren’t particularly challenging, you can’t just sit there and mash the attack button to progress.

The different abilities and attack types that you can unlock add just enough complexity to the hack-and-slash combat to stop it being boring, while not so much as to overwhelm you. I’m generally not massively into a hack-and-slash combat system, but here everything flows so well and feels impactful that I can’t help but have tonnes of fun playing it. Whether I’m hacking through waves of enemies or a single boss, there was never a boring fight.

Omensight is an extremely well-rounded game, with a compelling and popular story with a unique style of telling it, gameplay that matches up with that story perfectly and it never stops being fun to play at any point. I look forward to going back to this one at some point next year to experience it all again.

2 – Pokemon Let’s Go! Pikachu/Eevee

What? A Pokemon Game on my game of the year list? No way.

To the surprise of precisely no-one, I really enjoyed this year’s addition to the Pokemon franchise. I’d never played a game set in the Kanto region before, so this was also a brand new Pokemon experience for me and I was very happy with it indeed.

I’m not going to sit here and review the core Pokemon mechanics, because I’m sure you know whether or not you like them by now, so let’s just look at what’s new.

First of all, I think this was a great insight as to what the Nintendo Switch can do for the Pokemon franchise. Pokemon games always seem to be the ones that push the hardware to their limits and you can tell Sun and Moon were desperate to break free of the shackles the 3DS had them in. While it wasn’t the huge leap that we got from DS to 3DS, you can see that the developers were getting used to using this new hardware and this will have certainly given them the experience they need to make next year’s games look stunning.

I loved having Pokemon run around in the overworld in order to encounter them. It adds so much liveliness to the world, that the older games now look sparse in comparison. The new catching mechanics are something that seem to have split most people right down the middle, and I don’t really know which camp I fall into if I’m honest. I had a lot of fun with the new level of interactivity that this system provides, however being unable to battle a Pokemon, and thus having very little control over the catch rate, was rather frustrating. Moving forward I’d like to see some sort of hybrid of the two systems, or at least the option to choose.

The integration with Pokemon GO seems to be a fairly welcome feature as a whole, and as someone who didn’t use it at all during my main play through, it isn’t something that will hinder you should you choose to ignore it. Similarly the Pokeball Plus is a nice little peripheral that is a cool add-on for any big Pokemon fans, but I found the regular Switch joycons to be just as good to play the game with.

The game was also filled with lots of little easter eggs and subtle nods to earlier games in the franchise, this kind of stuff was really nice to see as a fairly long-term fan of the franchise, and seeing Jesse and James in an actual game for the first time in forever was a fun little thing to see.

Aside from the new stuff, this game is still filled to the brim with all the Pokemon flavoured goodness that has been in the franchise forever. I felt that just enough was shaken up to justify these remakes, but not so much as to completely suck the identity of the franchise out of them.

As a whole, the Let’s Go! games were a very faithful recreation of Kanto, which makes use of all of the lessons we’ve learnt in game design since the originals launched. I feel like this was another great outing for the Pokemon franchise, and seeing how the developers have been able to use the hardware has got me extremely excited for when Generation 8 is launched in 2019.

So there’s 2nd and 3rd place! Share this around on social media if you enjoyed it, thanks to @magiclollyl on Twitter and make sure to follow me on Twitter @10ryawoo where it’ll be really obvious what game I’m going to talk about tomorrow for my Number 1 pick and favourite game of 2018! I’ll see you there.

 

Game of the Year 2018: 4th & 5th Place

This one was really hard to organise.

As where with pro-wrestling, it’s fairly easy for me to pick one match over another, and thus rank them quite quickly, I find it much harder to do with games. Since games have so much variety to them, almost all of my favourite games every year appeal to me in different ways which makes it much harder to just plainly rank them based on enjoyment.

Add to that the fact that I played more games in 2018 that ever before and you’ve got yourself a rather tricky task when it comes to picking out the best. That said, I’ve mulled it over for pretty much all of December and I’ve got a top 5 that I’m happy with.

Since I have a lot more to say about games than I do about wrestling matches, I’ve decided to split this up into three posts, with 4th and 5th today, 2nd and 3rd coming tomorrow and finally number 1 will be revealed the day after.

I should also mention that the only platforms I own are PC, HTC Vive and Nintendo Switch, so if a game didn’t release on any of those, then I haven’t played it and won’t be ranking it. Additionally, if a game is still in early access, then I also won’t be considering it, since I don’t think it’s fair to review an unfinished game, I will instead rank those games in the year they eventually release.

Finally, before I get started I’d like to mention the other games I loved this year, but didn’t quite crack the top five, so: Dead Cells; Two Point Hospital; Into the Breach; Super Smash Brothers Ultimate and Return of the Obra Dinn, were all great games that I had considered for this top 5 at some point.

Now, let’s get onto what did make the top five, starting with….

 5 – Moonlighter

This was a game that, despite its May release, I didn’t find this one until a couple of weeks ago. However, once I started playing it, I played it every single day until I had completed it, and boy was it a fun time.

The basic premise of the game is that you play as Will, a simple young man who runs a shop called Moonlighter, and he lives in a town that was built around a series of mysterious dungeons full of weird and wonderful artefacts and treasures.

There are two different sides to the core gameplay, the first is the dungeon crawling. This has the many rougelike elements you’ve come to expect from games such as these, with random generation of rooms and progression through “floors” of a dungeon to progress. However, in this game your goal is slightly different. In most games of this genre, such as Dead Cells or Binding of Isaac, your goal is to collect upgrades and items along the way to eventually get to a boss and kill it to beat the dungeon, but that isn’t really your goal here.

There is a boss at the end of each dungeon (more on that in a bit), none of the items you pick up along the way will actually make you stronger or better in any way, instead your goal is to collect as many of these items as you can, and then escape the dungeon to use these items in the second side to the game.

The combat really feels nice, and with a variety of different weapon classes to choose from, you really can play the game whichever way you feel best. It follows the rules which I think all roguelikes should follow: Every enemy is easily killable on its own, however if you fill a room with them in a balanced way then it’s a difficult but fair challenge to clear every single room.

The boss fights are in a similar vein, it’s a fair challenge because I know all of their attacks are easily dogable, I’m just not good enough to dodge them. It’s that kind of game design that makes me determined to keep trying over and over when I die, and not just get frustrated and give up.

That second side of the game is where you manage your shop. You put out your items you retrieved from the dungeon on display in your shop, and then during the day people will come in and buy the items from you. As simple as that sounds, the developers were very clever in the way they implemented it.

See, instead of just slapping the item out and letting people pay the price for themselves, you have to be a proper merchant and assign every item a price. Of course, people won’t just pay whatever price you put on it and you have to gauge the reactions of your customers to work out if you’re undercharging or overcharging for an item. In addition to this, an item’s popularity in the town will fluctuate depending on how much of it you’re selling, and how much you’re selling it for. If an item isn’t in very high demand people won’t pay all that much for it, however if an item is extremely popular in town, you can bump the price up a bit and no-one will mind paying the extra coins.

This side of the game has a really nice level of strategy to it, since you can use the prices of items you already know to work out what a good price for a new item would be. It also means that during the day, you’re not just sitting there waiting for the cash to roll in, you’ve got to be paying attention to your customers to work out your prices and also make sure no-one tries to steal anything…

Of course, you don’t just earn money for the sake of it, so what is there to spend that money on? The spending of money is pretty well split in this game between three things: buying better gear for your character; buying upgrades for your shop and buying new facilities for the town, which will provide services to you, such as weapon enchantments and money investments.

These kinds of games that essentially work as one big loop of tasks that all feed into each other, is one that can often get quite tiring after being done for too long, so Moonlighter gets around this by giving you an endgame goal right at the start.

The town has four main dungeons just outside it, however at the start of the game three of them are closed. In order to unlock each dungeon, you have to defeat the boss of the previous one. Every new dungeon you unlock will have tougher enemies and deadlier traps, but will also provide much more valuable treasures.

Your main goal however, is to unlock “the 5th door” which is a final dungeon which has remained locked for centuries and you want to see what’s behind it. Each of the four dungeon bosses holds a key, so you need to defeat them all, this makes sure you feel like everything you’re doing has a sense of purpose to it, and it’s that exact driving force that kept me involved in the game the whole way through.

This game comes together beautifully, with both sides to the game stopping the other one from getting too tedious, and a main quest that really drives you achieve and see everything the game has to offer. If you’re a fan of dungeon crawlers, but also want something a bit new from the genre, then this is absolutely one you should check out.

4 – Quarantine Circular

This is a much harder one to talk about.

Quarantine Circular is a game made by the wonderful Mike Bithel, who made one of my favourite ever games in Thomas Was Alone. Bithel’s games are always so masterful in how they tell their stories, and since that is what drives the entire game, it’s hard to talk about it as a reviewer, since I don’t want to spoil a moment of it.

I’m going to try my best to do it without spoiling things, but anything I do spoil will be from the first chapter only so I can illustrate some of my points.

The game tells it’s story mostly through the dialogue between characters, although there are visuals on the screen whilst it’s going on to draw you in to the feel of the world. The basics of the story is that, the world has been almost wiped out by a disease unknown to the human race, and the military has captured an alien that they suspect might be to blame.

Most games at this point would drop you right into things, with the important military people interrogating the alien to try to get information out of it. That doesn’t happen though, instead the first two chapters you play as a low ranking engineer on the military ship with the simple job of installing a translator so the alien can understand humans and vice-versa.

This is a great way to introduce the player to the world, since you spend the whole of the first two chapters playing as a character who doesn’t really have much idea of what’s going on. It allows the game to explain things to you in its dialogue without it sounding like it’s solely for the audience. It also makes sure that it doesn’t present the alien as an antagonist in the first two chapters. While you do have the option to be mean to it, the game encourages you to simply listen and learn about what this alien is like from a personality perspective, which is very important for later chapters.

In Bithel’s previous game, Subsurface Circular, which was made in a similar style to this game, you played as one person the whole time which worked really well as you were solving a mystery. However in Quarantine Circular, you play as almost every character involved in the story at some point. While this could’ve taken away from the luster and mystery a little bit, it’s written in such a way that all it really serves to do is allow you to understand each of the characters as the story progresses. In order to make some important decisions later in the story, you need to understand exactly what every single character is thinking, and this is perhaps the best way to achieve that.

Oh, and did I mention, you get all of this for less than £5?

When it comes to pure story based games, I don’t think there was anything that drew me in or left a greater impression on me looking back on it now. Bithel always seems to knock it out of the park with these games, and if we get more of these in the coming years from him I’ll be very happy.

So that’s 4th and 5th place in my game of the year rankings! If you enjoyed it then please share it around. As always, you can follow me on Twitter @10ryawoo for more impressions on games as they come out through 2019, and @magiclollyl for editing this. Lastly, make sure to come back at the same time tomorrow for my 2nd and 3rd place picks!

WWE Match of the Year 2018

Surely I don’t need to explain this one do I? It’s the end of the year and you know what happens on blogs like this one at the end of the year. We compulsively rank everything that happened in the year in the hopes that someone somewhere will scroll through it all and agree with us.

So here’s me throwing my hat into the ring, and we’re starting off with the best matches that took place in WWE/NXT in 2018. I’m just doing WWE because, although I did watch a bunch of other promotions this year, it wasn’t nearly enough to be able to fairly judge what was the best. I did watch a lot of WWE however, so let’s go.

10 – Brock Lesnar vs Daniel Bryan – Survivor Series

I know, it’s a Brock Lesnar match on a best of the year list, miracles do happen people.

Over twenty minutes, these two men were able to craft such a unique story that could only happen in a Brock Lesnar match. Though it has been chipped away at year by year, Lesnar still has this aura of being completely unstoppable, regardless of context you always feel like he’s going to win unless he’s fighting Roman Reigns.

Bryan was able to use this aura to his advantage, with the first 8-10 minutes of the match being your standard affair when it comes to a Brock Lesnar match. He throws his opponent around and stands there smiling like the prick that he is, but all it takes it one second to make us believe.

I remember watching that moment, when Bryan had Brock in the Yes Lock, and of course, in the rational part of my brain I know there’s not a chance in hell Brock is tapping out to Daniel Bryan, but in that moment we were all absolutely certain that Brock was about to tap. It’s the kind of match that shows exactly why pro-wrestling is so fascinating, because for even just a split second, it can make us believe that the impossible is about to happen.

9 – Shayna Baszler vs Kairi Sane – Evolution

This year is arguably the best year for women’s wrestling ever.

There wasn’t a great deal in terms of the women’s wrestling scene being revolutionised this year, and there was no major ground broken all things considered, but the quality of women’s wrestling matches has never been consistently higher than they have been this year if you ask me.

One such example is this match, there’s no massive game changing style or story being told here, there’s just a lot of really freaking great wrestling. Kairi Sane is perhaps the most adorable human to ever exist and kicks ass like no-one else, and Shayna Baszler may be the best heel in WWE right now, so these two colliding was always going to be amazing.

There was worry that being on a main roster show would mean they couldn’t do the amazing things they did at Takeover: Brooklyn 4, but they quickly put those fears to rest when the match started. The chemistry these two have in the ring is brilliant and that’s clear with every single spot that happens during the match.

It was also one of those rare matches that manages to use the outside interference to its advantage instead of its detriment. Jessamyn Duke and Marina Shafir getting involved just seemed to add to Baszler’s aura of this mega heel that can put anyone away, no matter how anime you are. Kairi fought back against the interference in a way the didn’t make it feel like she lost directly because of it, and when Shayna had her in the choke hold, Sane held on just long enough to make us all think she was going to turn it around before finally passing out.

Both these women feel destined for great things in their careers, and this match here and a major WWE show was them proving that fact to the whole world.

8 – Aleister Black vs Adam Cole – Extreme Rules –
NXT Takeover: Philladelplia

This was a 20 minute long weapons based match, and I liked it; that should tell you everything you need to know.

This match didn’t really try to subvert any of the tropes in weapons matches, instead the two men in this match used the tropes in a way that added to the match instead of subtracting from it. There’s a bit of slowness to it in the first half when the weapons are first coming out, but apart from that, this match is all action.

Black spending the first 5 minutes or so refusing to use weapons because he can take Cole on without them was some great character work, and Adam Cole jumping on that complacency was such a fun character interaction to watch.

The second half of the match, there’s pretty much no stopping at all, we got the most brutal chair spot I think I’ve ever seen as Cole when back first onto the top of one, which is going to hurt no matter how you take it. Then the Undisputed Era and Sanity got involved to create chaos around ringside as both men recovered in the ring.

Ultimately, this is the kind of match that proves to me that weapons matches can be awesome if they’re performed correctly, then add on two of my favourite wrestlers right now and you’ve got a winning formula.

7 – Becky Lynch vs Charlotte Flair vs Asuka –        TLC Match – WWE TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs

I’ve talked about this match very recently, but I really did think it was just that good.

This match was able to house the pure chaos and destruction that a TLC match needs to have, in with solid pure wrestling and great character work and interactions, and it takes a lot to achieve that. It was able to play off the drama that had been built up around Becky and Charlotte over the past few months and throw Asuka into the mix so seamlessly that it felt like she’d been a part of the story the whole time.

The action was fast paced and fun to watch, with every spot feeling high impact as the match slowly built to a climax. If you ever wanted to see just how far women’s wrestling in WWE has come since 2015, then this is the match to watch, because I’m pretty confident that this match wouldn’t look any different if it was men performing it, and that’s something we haven’t been able to say very often for many years.

It’s a great lasting image for the final big WWE show of 2018 and set up so much to look forward to going into the new year.

6 – Ronda Rousey vs Charlotte Flair –
Survivor Series

Now to talk about one of this year’s biggest success stories: Ronda Rousey.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that when she came into the WWE at the 2018 Royal Rumble, most of us weren’t expecting much, she was just another big name that WWE were going shove down our throats whether we liked it or not. Then she had her first match at Wrestlemania and boy, did we all look stupid.

Ronda ended up being the biggest part in the best match of a Wrestlemania that included AJ Styles vs Shinsuke Nakamura and if that isn’t a statement to how good Ronda is at wrestling, then I don’t know what is. Over the rest of the year, she would continue to put on great matches almost ever month, with even her worst matches being ok.

So naturally, when you take someone who’s taken to wrestling as quickly as Ronda has, and put her against the best female wrestler (in terms of ability) in WWE right now, it was always going to be great. This was a vicious match, which managed to tell a great story using such simple maneuvers, that it really was a show in just how effective even the basics in wrestling can be.

Charlotte spent most of the first half of the match on top, trying every trick in the book to out wrestle Ronda, but every single manuever Charlotte would attempt, it seemed Ronda had an answer for, this slowly built into the second half of the match which slowly got more and more brutal until it felt more like a fight than a wrestling match

When it came to the finish, we got to see a rarity in WWE using a sudden and disappointing DQ finish to its advantage. The story felt like it had been building the whole time to one of the women snapping and going mental on the other, so that’s exactly what happened. Charlotte’s beat down of Ronda set in motion the events are currently unfolding week to week on WWE TV, and it’s made it feel like the women’s division has had a long-term story crafted, lasting from November all the way through to April 2019 and this match is what we have to thank for that.

5 – Andrade “Cien” Almas vs Johnny Gargano –
NXT Takeover: Philadelphia

Brace yourselves, there’s a lot more NXT to come.

I think Almas might go down as one of the most underrated NXT Champions ever, his run was fairly short and nothing major happened during it, but he had some killer matches with top NXT stars, case in point, this match right here.

There wasn’t any amazing story to be told here, or anything ground-breaking, it was just 32 minutes of amazing wrestling. It moved from mat-based to technical to high-flying styles of wrestling so seamlessly that everything flowed so beautifully into one contest. Andrade and Vega were able to heelish in just the right way, to get us to root for Gargano without it ruining the match.

The crowd also added to the match in quite a big way for this one, their reactions to every single kickout and comeback from Gargano really helped draw me into the emotion behind this one.

The two of them were able to build the drama to the point where even the simplest of moves seemed high impact and dripping with drama, to the point where, by the end of it at least, it was the match I was most emotionally invested in all year.

I could sit here and list all of the cool moments that happened during it, but really, only watching it will do it justice, so go watch it……after reading the rest of this article of course.

4 – Dolph Ziggler & Drew Mcintyre vs Seth Rollins & Dean Ambrose – Hell in a Cell

I’ve talked a lot about the type of wrestling I hate, but I don’t often mention the types of wrestling that I love, and Tag Team wrestling is a type of wrestling I love very much indeed, and this match is the perfect example of why.

Much like the last match, there wasn’t really much story or character work here, it was just balls-to-the-walls action from the word go. I could talk about all the awesome spots and moments in the match, but quite frankly there just isn’t enough time to go through them all, so here are some of the highlights.

Dean Ambrose continues to adapt his wrestling style since his return, he’s mostly been working a pretty stiff and slow pace so far that’s been fun to watch, but here he incorporated that with some of his old, face paced flailing about the place style and it worked brilliantly.

Dolph Ziggler, reminding us all why we should still care about him, this man works a fever pitch the whole time, this is why he’s generally just better as a face, he brings the kind of energy to his better performances, that not a lot of other wrestlers can.

Seth Rollins is still the best wrestler in the world, like seriously, he’s been in someway involved in the best match of very nearly every PPV this year and I really hope he continues that next year as Univeral Champion (pleasepleasepleaseplease).

Drew Mcintyre…just Drew Mcintyre man, the dude’s an absolute monster who shouldn’t really have to sell for anyone, but boy does he do an amazing job of it. He’s able to pick his spots and make his presence felt in the match, even though he didn’t do as much as the other three.

Then there’s the finish, which was absolutely perfect, Seth uses the last ounce of energy he has left to hit Dolph with the Falcon Arrow, but while he’s mid move, Drew runs in and boots his face off, causing an unconscious Dolph Ziggler to fall onto Seth and win the match for their team. Combine that with four lunatics flying all around the ring for twenty minutes and just so damn many false finishes and kickouts, and you’ve got one of the best pure tag team matches I’ve ever seen.

3 – Men’s Royal Rumble – Royal Rumble

I know it’s not really conventional to put a Royal Rumble match in a “Match of the Year” list, but then again, it’s been a long time since we’ve had a Rumble even nearly as good as this one.

It’s a near impossible task to have a match that lasts over an hour, even a Rumble, and have every minute be entertaining, but I really feel they accomplished that here. There really wasn’t a dull moment from bell to bell in this one, there was just so many great moments the whole way through to keep you going.

Finn Balor was really the MVP here, lasting very nearly an hour and I’ll be honest, as irrational as it was when I heard his music hit at number 2, I thought he was going to win the thing. Then you had Elias coming out while everyone’s been taken out to sing a song, the usual New Day shenanigans, Heath Slater trying to get in the damn ring and so much more.

There were also some really great surprise entrants, with Almas, Cole, The Hurricane and a returning Rey Mysterio bringing some great memorable moments and making their mark in the match.

Most importantly, the drama was really there this time, in every rumble since 2010, there’s been something to ruin the moment towards the end. Be it, Roman Reigns entering at Number 30 in 2017; Cena’s win feeling inevitable in 2013; or the fact Sheamus existed in 2012. This didn’t have any of that, it put Shinsuke Nakamura against two people no-one wanted to see win (but quite easily could’ve) in John Cena and Roman Reigns.

That feeling of elation when Nakamura dispatched Reigns to win the match is still a vivid memory in my mind and perhaps the biggest positive reactions I’ve had to any moment in WWE this year.

You can debate whether or not this is the “best” Royal Rumble ever till the cows come home, but this will certainly stand for a long time as my favourite.

2 – Johnny Gargano vs Tommaso Ciampa –              NXT Takeover: New Orleans

I can FEEL that image, that’s how powerful this story was.

It was always going to be a challenge to pick a favourite of the Gargano vs Ciampa saga. All of the Gargano vs Ciampa matches were special in their own way and I could’ve believably put all three of them on this list without any complaints, but in the end I had to go with their first encounter as my favourite of the trilogy.

This match really felt like the bridging point between the two major phases of this feud. It was the end of the #DIY saga, where two best friends rose to the highest heights, only for one to betray the other. We had a whole year to let that story brew while Ciampa recovered from a knee injury to the anticipation was high to finally see it end.

However, as that story ended a new one began, the story being the one we’re still seeing today which is the descent into madness of Johnny Gargano, we’ll talk more on that in a little bit, but it’s important to note that this is where it started, not with a loss to Ciampa, but with a victory over him.

That’s really what elevated this match from a fantastic match to one of the all time great NXT main events. These two men had the most seemless of chemistry in the ring – as can be expected from two men who teamed for over a year – and there wasn’t a single beat missed in this one. While weapons were legal they were used quite sparingly, which only added to the impact when they eventually were used.

The moment when Gargano is about to use Ciampa’s own steel crutch to put him away for good, only to fall to his knees and realise what Ciampa’s driven him to is something you’d expect to see in a Hollywood drama, but it was played to perfection here. All that gets topped off with a triumphant win for the hero Gargano, although little did we know the story that was about to begin….

1 – Aleister Black vs Johnny Gargano –                    NXT Takeover: Wargames II

“Johnny Gargano, I absolve you of your sins”, haunting.

You could make a case for a few other wrestlers, but 2018 really has been Johnny Gargano’s year. Not only has he been putting on amazing matches one after another, he’s also been a part of the longest and most compelling story to take place all year.

It’s often cited by people who analyse this story that it was Gargano constantly failing to defeat Ciampa that turned him into the broken man we see on NXT today, but people often neglect to mention his initial victory over Ciampa. It’s the fact that Gargano feels like his one big win was a total fluke, since he’s never been able to replicate it since, and maybe if he’d have just used that crutch instead of throwing it to one side, he’d be NXT Champion right now instead of Ciampa.

It all felt like that came to a head in this match here, despite not being the conclusion to the story, not by a long shot, it was a firm bullet point and the key moment to take place at the end of the penultimate act.

This is the perhaps the closest thing I’ve seen in WWE to my “ideal” style of wrestling, because this thing didn’t let up for a second. They did some of the character work and taunts that we’ve come to expect from any Aleister Black match (and are still cool as fuck), but once that was out of the way these guys were running at full speed right until the finish.

Things were going back and forth so fast it became impossible to analyse, all you could do was just sit back and be blown away by the best wrestlers doing the best wrestling. The speed didn’t take away from the impact of the moves either, with one of the most brutal dives I’ve ever seen when Gargano leapt face first into Black’s knee at full speed.

It’s this style of wrestling that makes me totally enthralled in a match. Seriously, while I was watching this in my living room, people were having conversations right across me and I didn’t hear a word any of them said because I was so into the amazing action that was on the screen.

I have no idea how either of these men’s stories in NXT is going to end, but if it’s even half as good as this match right here was, then I’m all in the whole way, because wrestling WWE this year did not get better than this.

Thank you very much for reading this, if you are feeling so kind then please share this around. If you want to tell me why my opinions are wrong, then you can let me know on Twitter @10ryawoo.

Finally, make sure to come back this weekend where I’ll be talking about my favourite video games of 2018!