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alexissara · 4 months

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What A Year For Games! Top 10 Games of 2023 For Little Lesbians Like me!

I am on and off again with video games often switching between years where I am really into games and years where I am snoozing but I started to dedicate myself to finding and sharing more sapphic art so people can stop saying it doesn't exist lead me to playing tons more games and wow I played so many fucking amazing games this year it was an extremally hard year to pick a top 10 games. Now these aren't a top 10 sapphic games, it's just the best 10 games of the year, on an objective scale because I am the goddess of this world and there for right. Not all of these games will have come out in 2023, it's games I played in 2023 why limit ones self?

These games are roughly in order by how confident I am to put them on this list but each of these games did something different than me so I wouldn't say that a game is "better" rather than what I got out of it at the end of playing felt biggest.

Stray Gods

It's a musical, it's a video game, it's Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical. This game is a really fun little Greek myth story telling experience with an neat interoperation of myth and the characters to provide a fun experience to people with or without attachment to the stories. The dynamic music changing to your choices is a really cool concept although I wish more of the songs were a bop. I also wish the game explored the idea of polyamory like the Greek gods were not monogamous and I see no reason I can't kiss Freddie and Persephone in the same playthrough. What is there though is still compelling, fun, and engaging with a great set of characters across the board romanceable and not.

Pokémon Emerald Rouge

Pokabbie's amazing Pokemon Rom Hack that shows the utterly wild shit possible for Pokemon experiences we could get. It's amazingly fun to do runs of Pokemon where you catch new pokemon, fight trainers and get to then recatch that species to use in later runs. It's a really great gameplay loop that really just uses what's fun about pokemon and allows for a lot of different run customization which leads to the loop not getting stale and makes it easier to find particular pokemon you want. This was my favorite Pokémon experience this year.

Street Fighter 6

Street Fighter 6 has some of the worst monetization to date in fighting games. However, despite that it provided a lot of fun to me this year playing the base game's amazing World Tour mode and in enjoying the greatly designed new characters who I hope become Street Fighter staples. All while making my favorite SF character Juri even better with new interactions, a little bit of progress to her story and more. I hope that World Tour mode encourages a lot of other fighting game devs to step up the single player experiences in Fighting games and I also hope [as seems to be the industry trend] that "modern" controls take over. It was so nice to be able to do all the special moves consistently and more easily feel like I was in control of the game rather than feeling light I was fighting my hands to move out an input.

Drums Of War

I sure do wish a Fire Emblem game came out in 2023, it's been so long since Three Houses and Hopes is amazing but not the SRPG gameplay I came to love. Well if there was a Fire Emblem game I am sure it would have ENGAGED me, wait, there was the amazing Fire Emblem rom hack Drums Of War. Parrhesia utterly killed it with this take on Fire Emblem. The heart of the story being an emotionally damaged lesbian and the dancer with a big secret who fell for her makes for an utterly captivating romance paired with a real "war is hell" story that really does it's best to show you how fucked all sides of this conflict are until the player finally gets to forge their own path forward. Roxelana and Calista would be among my most favorite Fire Emblem lords if I was ranking them alongside all the lords of the series with both characters being utterly delightful and some charming side characters too like Estrelle. The gameplay itself aired a bit on the harder side to what I like but regardless I had a great time with the majority of maps and by the end of it I think I finally managed to get with the curve of the difficulty even if I wish there was an easier mode.

Cassette Beasts

The soundtrack alone would put this game on this list but luckily it has even more than a soundtrack. The whole cast are really charming, I totally fell for Viola and the other characters all have their own special charms. The game has plenty of faults I talked about in my review of it but despite the flaws of the game basically right until the very end where it massively declined for me this was one of the best games in all of monster tamers for me. The DLC was sadly not so great that came out later in the year but I didn't mind giving the extra money to the devs when the core game was so good. The monster taming is fun, the gameplay feels flexible enough for you to find the niche you like to play in and become really good at that niche, it allows for a lot of flexibility from folks who wanna swap partners all the time to people who will find their favorite characters and monsters and stick with them. I really hope the developers keep moving forward with Cassette Beasts and making new strives forward with their concepts because of all the indie monster tamers I've played this is leaps and strides above the rest.

En Garde!

This extremally short little romp is a compelling experience that is just a little bit longer than your average modern block buster. It's a simple and sweet swash buckling game where you play as a bisexual vigilante woman with a big crush on a sexy pirate woman trying to stop the oppressor of the people's evil schemes. Each chapter is like another adventure of Zoro short and puppy, fun and with ever so slight tension but you know the hero will come up on top. It's a really good experience and it has some great accessibility features for folks with reflex issues like me to still be able to enjoy it. The music is staller, the voice acting is fantastic, it's a great package that instead of padding itself out fills every second with greatness.

Luxaren Allure

I am a massive fan of turn based RPGs, I love getting to look at menus and think about my actions, being able to multitask while I play, enjoy a big juicy narrative and so I was very happy to play a JRPG style experience that's all about lesbians. An amazingly fun concept for a JRPG plot where one woman's beloved whom she chickened out of confessing too gets corrupted by an evil power and she is tasked with being the hero to take her out. This gives the interactions and the end goal a sense of uncertainty, will this be a sad case of tragic yuri, will she find joy with someone else, will she be able to save the woman she loves from this evil power, will she submit to the evil herself to be by her side? Everything feels uncertain with just this little angle added to a fairly typical JRPG formula. All while on the side having an adorable romance between a naga and a human girl giving us the good good lesbian sweetness between the dramatic tension.

Baldur's Gate 3

I am so often the contain, the noted hater but not on this day, nay I say, it was pretty fucking fun. The game is flawed, pretty flawed, like it's got a lot or fantasy racism shit I hate, it's tied to an IP I hate, it's got so many bugs that happened on my own run but if there is one game from this list I will probably think of the most and play the most in 2024 and beyond from this year it's probably this game. The games depth of interactivity, the wide breath of options, and the mods, oh the mods, the many many many mods, this game has so much to do and will for a very long time. It's rare to get a truly great multiplayer game and this game also provides that, this is a fantastic experience for playing online with others and makes for really great runs. Then there is the romances, oh the romances are really great, the girls are all fantastic and the side queers are super brilliant too. It's just a really fun video game and it does a good job exploring trauma and different takes on abusive relationships and overcoming [or succumbing] to them.

Thirsty Suitors

What a fucking great game, while the gameplay is mostly quick time events it does an amazing job of making each aspect of the game feel distinct from each other. While skateboarding in general kinda sucks in this game the combat and cooking all feels really great. Then there is the vocal performances and writing which are all fucking stellar. It's really great to see a fully fleshed out and fully real feeling queer woman who has had messy exes of all genders and has done a lot of fucked up things in her time. Jala's road to redemption with her family and exes all feels really great and this is a special story and I realized sometime after there is some level of variance too that I could have seen if I made some different choices. It's really great and even if it's not a dating sim like I thought it might be it's still a really great little thing. Then you factor in all the cool queer brown people in this game and wow, like I felt so scene by this game like the angry mess Tyler is speaks to my little transbian heart, the high fem lesbian struggle with family that Diya has I could feel echoed in my own life, I just, wow, it was great. I am so happy this game exists and I will likely always see this among the best narratives in all video games.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood

My game of the year, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood fucking blew me away. In a shocking twist of fate while I complained about a lot of endings this year I didn't like my original ending for The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood either but then that drove me to go from liking the game to loving it as I ran the game again in spite of it, fueled by spite alone I felt a sense of determination, I would change my fate! This thematic fortune telling game where you make your own cards, help people or end up seeing a fate that only hurts them, I knew how to play it, I knew the systems now, I understood how the cards worked, the truth of my powers and the price I agreed to pay and I'd use all of that to make the happiest fucking story possible for Fortuna aka ME. So I dart through the game, I help the trans woman be herself and happy, I get my hot butch girlfriend, I help everyone out with their life problems crafting only the best cards possible to make sure I can give the best fates possible and then I hit the end point, the time to pay the price. I say no, the game says, you have to, I keep saying no, and then I draw my cards again and shape fate and in that I defied fate, made an ending I could be happy with, a better world for all my fellow witches, and so my story ends with my friends back by my side [probably gonna be a polycule] and a whole lot to look forward to. What a fucking experience, what a cool fucking game.

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