Now that we’re at the end of 2022, I’m taking some time to look back on the year and figure out what the theme was — and how we’ll remember this year in gaming when it’s long gone.
If you look at the GOTY lists of many sites, you will see that it dominates all of them An older ring and God of War Ragnarok, but here at Nintendo Life, we had a very different year. Two Pokémon games, a new 3D Kirby, Splatoon 3, Bayonetta 3, and Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope kept the exclusives and first-party fire going on the old Switch, although we didn’t get a full Mario or Zelda release this year, we have Enough news of Tears of the Kingdom and Movie Super Mario Bros to overwhelm us.
Personally, I’m more of an indie girl when it comes to this, and this year didn’t disappoint, even though many of the best indies on Switch were ports from previous years. I like to think that 2022 will be remembered as the year of strange but beautiful genre-defying narrative games like Neon White, Cult of the Lamb, Citizen Sleeper, and Card Shark, and even if we didn’t get other games in the same category — Immortality, Repentanceand The case of the Golden Idol comes to mind — I still think the Switch had a pretty fantastic year for indies.
Still, if I had to guess what 2022 will be remembered for, I think I’ve already answered the question: two Pokémon games, which effectively closed the year, with Legends: Arceus at the beginning and Scarlet and Violet at the end. Both were varying degrees of chunky, but both took the series to new heights at the same time, and in a year without Mario and Zelda, it makes sense that another of the big dogs would take the spotlight.
These two games, for me at least, were a real homecoming moment — the first time in a long time that I actually wanted to play a Pokémon game all the way through. For so long, the series has been about the same thing with different flavors; Arceus and ScarVi finally dared to take big steps into the great unknown, and despite numerous technical flaws, the series is better for it.
And given the themes of both of these giant Pokémon games, I guess I could argue that 2022, five years after Breath of the Wild, is all about freedom. The freedom to roam in ScarVi and Elden Ring, the freedom to explore in Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and even the non-linearity of Sonic Frontiers — I think we’re still seeing ripples in game design that come from the huge splash that Breath of Wild made in 2017, and I don’t mind it at all. A lot of games, especially AAA, have benefited from open worlds this year, and if the studios continue to fix that, the games will only get better.
But there could be a bigger, grander theme that I’m just not seeing, so I’m turning to you, dear readers. What do you think will be the “theme” of 2022? Is it different on Switch than other platforms? And what do you think next year will be about, besides Zelda? Tell me in the comments!
