Happy New Year! Can you believe the year 2020 is upon us? I remember as a kid thinking 2000 sounded so futuristic. Crazy, isn’t it? When it comes to media, the 2010s certainly had its ups and downs.
Video games got off to a great start with 2010 and 2011 being excellent years for the medium. However, the bottom in the fell out in 2012, and suddenly AAA productions lost their dominance. I’m not sure if it can be attributed to a single incident, but I would probably have to name Mass Effect 3 and the negative reaction to its ending that caused people to be more wary of AAA products. Then there was 2013, which I consider the single weakest year for gaming within this decade, having an inordinate number of hyped games such as Gone Home and Beyond: Two Souls that utterly failed to deliver. While 2014 didn’t have as many bad games, barely anything from that year stood out. Then in 2015, Undertale was released, and that caused a major spike in interest for indie productions, which I think singlehandedly redeemed the medium from the treasure trove of bad games released in 2013. In a twist of irony, fans are now more supportive of independent efforts than the journalists – the exact opposite situation the film industry faces.
Depending on your perspective, the 2010s was either a great or miserable decade for music. While I think it was slightly better than the 2000s, there’s no getting around that the mainstream stuff was fairly weak. Fortunately, like video games, there were plenty of indie artists to pick up the slack.
I think of the 2010s as the decade in which films lost their claim to the artistic high ground to video games. They did get off to a better start than video games, having only a few critical missteps between 2010 and 2017. However, I think the release of The Last Jedi marked the moment film criticism lost its way, leading to the medium being in a bad way for 2018 and, to a lesser extent, 2019. Indeed, I consider 2018 to be the film industry equivalent of 2013 in that there was an inordinate number of films that failed to live up to the hype. However, films are overall worse off than video games ever were because I can safely say the independent game makers are far more ambitious than their filmmaking counterparts. Stuff like OneShot and Undertale are far more innovative than the most acclaimed indie films I’ve seen this decade.
As for other mediums, I can’t claim to be an expert, but from what I’ve seen, it was a great decade for animation – both from the West and the East, though the latter seemed to be more consistently good. Along those lines, it ended up being the decade in which I began seriously pursuing manga and graphic novels, though strangely, despite liking the MCU, I find myself gravitating towards non-superhero stories.
Anyway with that bit of rambling out of the way, let’s dive into the final recap, shall we?
