The RPG Duelling League
Social Forums => Discussion => Topic started by: Cmdr_King on January 01, 2015, 11:16:34 AM
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So that took like three hours. But, hey, here we go, on January First as dog intended.
22. Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland [PS3, 2010]
Oh Rorona. There’s not anything specifically that Rorona does wrong beyond being a bit lethargic, but it does few things right either. To be sure, it’s one of the more stable and Gust productions and there’s some room to play around, but compared to any other Atelier game in my experience it just doesn’t have enough personality. The event flags don’t have much to really bridge them together and weave them into anything coherent and the cast gets shockingly few opportunities to really do anything interesting. Aside from a few quotable sequences re: pie Rorona herself is a very bland heroine and the only member of her supporting cast who gets any real limelight to speak of is Astrid. Who is primarily defined by her inactivity and thus doesn’t do much. The sudden difficulty spikes between new areas and the simplicity of the battle system mean that you’re essentially required to cart around large explosives to do anything meaningful and combat-related quests are a waste just for being so dull. There’s enough charm here to keep it from being wholly mediocre, but that’s about it; just barely adequate enough to be average. 5/10
21. Romancing SaGa [PS2, 2005]
Nearly a year later my parting impression of Romancing SaGa remains the one I remember; it’s really quite brilliant at what it does but what it does pushes a lot of my punch-kitten buttons. Oddly it’s the parts that betray its SFC heritage that are the most striking. One of the few bits of plot I remember is the quest where you find the statues of the Sea God’s daughters, and then at the very end after two of the three brothers are dead, the third gives his up… only for his mother to run out of their home shouting “OH GOD IT’S WORTH A FORTUNE” only to trip over the set off a cliff into the sea to her doom. Kinda perfect in its silliness. Still, we’re talking about a game I was half-convinced I had rendered unwinnable. Not a good thing. 5/10
20. Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors [DS, 2010]
999 is more interesting in concept that execution. The trouble I have with it is that the execution involves a lot of dead time and impatiently tapping through text. I don’t know what exactly is off about the text speed but there it is. Maybe there’s just so much and a lot of it is incidental? I dunno. Still, in a VN/Adventure game I should have that problem, but there it is. 5/10
19. Dragon Quest III: The Seeds of Salvation [iOS, 2014]
DQIII is hard to think of objectively because, despite being a fresh port and largely based on a later edition of the game (FAQs for the GBC edition were completely accurate for dungeon layouts and treasure locations for example), it’s really an NES game at heart. An advanced NES game with many ideas that were lifted straight into DQIX in 2009 without seeming particularly archaic to be sure, but it still gives off that impression of being a historical study rather than a game I’m playing. Still, as the last DQ game in the upper half I hadn’t played, could have been a lot worse methinks. 5/10
18. Legaia 2: Duel Saga [PS2, 2002]
Legaia 2, even more than DQIII, is stomped all over with ‘product of its time’ issues. The game is almost SaGa-esque in the degree it turns into rocket tag, and battles rarely go out past the second turn, yet a single encounter will frequently run 3 or more minutes in real time simply because it takes that long for those two turns to animate out and fully resolve. It’s a bit of a catch 22 thing, because what makes Legaia 2’s system interesting is chaining together attacks, but that same feature means that aside from the very early game each character will take well over 15 seconds to animate their attack. While a little bit of dead time exists for spell animations and the like, on the whole there’s just no way to make the system work without having just entirely too much wasted time in fights. Otherwise, it’s a rather obviously bad game but bad the way a 70s kung fu flick is bad. I’m pretty sure they knew the limits of their programming skill and writing ability and just shot for maximum cheese. Even if that wasn’t the original intent, the English VAs were definitely going for that, hence shit like “ha ha ha you’re making me thirsty”. It’s pretty cute, and I feel like if I’d finished the game in 2003 when I first played it I’d score it a bit higher, but still, it’s definitely alright. 6/10
17. Star Ocean: The Last Hope –International- [PS3, 2010]
SO4 is tri-Ace trying to make a stereotypically tri-Ace game. Loaded down with mechanics that are poorly documented and needlessly complicated, self-referential to the point that it’s alienating if you haven’t played every single tri-Ace game made to that point (although I guess I have actually so that’s something), an ambitious plot without a fraction of the talent needed to pull it off and bunches of hidden scenes and alternate endings hidden behind mechanics that the average player won’t even find, and exposition dumps that surpass even the likes of Xenosaga, except with far simpler subject matter that actually makes the whole thing seem somewhat insulting. My impression after playing SO4 is that the entire project was done under protest, either fulfilling some contractual obligation to make another game for Square-Enix they didn’t really want to or some sudden financial hiccup meaning they had to fall back on their flagship franchise for quick cash, because what isn’t here is the love tri-Ace clearly poured into stuff like the original Valkyrie Profile. That said, the system is pretty functional, and a bit simpler and more enjoyable than SO3’s, though this is marred a bit by the usual Star Ocean difficulty wonkiness. And in between all the facepalm in the plot there are also some good character bits to be sure. And hey, Laura Bailey. Can’t go wrong with that. 6/10
16. Earthbound [SNES (WiiU VC), 1995]
Really there’s one thing that stands out about Earthbound some six months later. When we set aside that it’s basically a skin on top of a Dragon Quest game, Earthbound isn’t really much like any other game. It’s not really comedic, the way something like Disgaea is. It’s not built on whimsy or a sense of adventure. It’s not really even like a lot of the Dragon Quest games or modern indy/pseudo-indy products where it’s meant to invoke fairy tales or bedtime stories. It rather uniquely (well, ignoring its own series or later games that are directly and overtly inspired by Earthbound itself) reflects its actual origin; an art project from a guy who likes video games but doesn’t design them. It uses a functional base from a known game and builds an artistic expression on top of it. Probably the biggest issue with Earthbound as a whole is it doesn’t really express a consistent emotion or message if we evaluate it as a bit of art. Neither Pokey nor Giygas really make sense as villains of the piece, because when you include them it comes across as a misanthropic downer but the rest of it seems like it takes a certain joy in just how strange the world is when you stop and really look at all the weird shit in it. I don’t think that contrast is really intentional even, so the whole thing just feels muddled in the end. Still, it’s interesting, and interesting is worth something. 6/10
15. Lost Odyssey [360, 2008]
So someone who I presume to be Hironobu Sakaguchi said “let’s hire a dude to do a bunch of short stories about immortality, then write an RPG assuming the viewpoint character in them is the same dude”. Phase One turned out pretty beautifully at least. And it must be said, the way they’re presented in game is honestly really great. But they ended up with a problem they didn’t have a very good solution to. If we have the Kaim in all the stories actually be the lead, logically he should never have any issues whatsoever in video game-y terms. So the whole amnesiac immortals plot crops up and… it’s just not very interesting. And the actual game world in the present feels so much SMALLER than the one in the Thousand Years of Dreams. I mean, basically every story has a unique village and describes wars between nations that are clearly not any of the world powers in the present day, but when you look at the map there’s not even a logical place for most of those to be. I get that empires rise and fall a lot over the course of a millennium but generally there’s no description of a major depopulation event and technology as a whole seems to have improved in that time, so there should be more places with people in them, not less.
The other thing was Jansen antics the whole time of course. 7/10.
14. Disgaea D2: A Brighter Darkness [PS3, 2013]
Disgaea D2 just seems like a lazy game. I don’t think that’s actual true, because I’m pretty sure they had to make all kinds of new sprites for this and the hybridized D1+D4 systems probably took surprising effort to make work, but that’s the impression it gives. They wanted an anniversary game and squeezed it in between their late-gen PS3 stuff and gearing up to put D5 on PS4 (at least I think that’s what’s happening over in N1 land right now). Regardless of how much work the gameplay end required though, the plot is lazy as fuck. Long lost siblings! Reunite with the original trio (but only add one new character of any plot relevance)! Something something THE NETHERWORLD IS BECOMING CELESTIA OH NOES ANGELSSSSSS. Blah. Still, it’s… y’know, fun? And Etna does the Next Episode previews. That’s enough I guess. 7/10
13. Child of Light [PS3, 2014]
Not too much to say about this. It’s a pseudo-indy game so it’s a bit short. The gameplay arc felt like it was meant to have one more dungeon that just wasn’t there, and while the setting and verse was a neat enough idea it never quite meshed together into something really memorable. A very pretty and interesting distraction (holy shit people remember Grandia existed) but just a smidge lacking in substance. 7/10
12. Persona 4 Arena Ultimax [PS3, 2014]
So much disappoint. Spoiler, it wasn’t fucking Nyarlathotep. Why do you do this to me Atlus. Do you have any goddamned idea how pumped I was for this game, how much I wanted to see you seriously bring the two halves of the Persona series together into one cohesive canon? Look, Labby as one of the protagonist was great. I am always going to be down for more Labrys. But teasing Nyarlie and giving us the fire god whose birth killed Izanami, ie the root cause of most Japanese mythology, is a cop out. There’s not even anything specifically wrong with how Kagutsuchi is portrayed, it’s just immensely disappointing for you to backpedal so hard from continuity. Nevermind that the ending to this game basically closes out both Persona 3 and 4’s casts and seems badly to want to be a final epilogue to both games. I basically decided to just add this to my headcanon about Nyarlie splitting into pieces and look, give me my fucking continuity Atlus. 7/10
11. Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney [3DS, 2014]
Replace the vs with a X and this game sure is exactly what it says it is. I’ve only played one other Layton game, and I guess this is a better Layton game than that one. As a PW game it’s middle of the road, not as good as Edgeworth or Dual Destinies (and yeah the game suffers for coming out over here after that one despite being made a year and change earlier) but certainly better than Apollo. Not bunches to say. 7/10.
10. Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4 [PC, 2013]
Another game I have astoundingly little to say about. It’s grandia-y, it’s Zeboyd, it’s Penny Arcade. It’s not quite as good as PA3. It just didn’t leave a lasting impression as a game, which is too bad, but so goes. 7/10.
9. Pokémon Omega Ruby [3DS, 2014]
ORAS commits one major sin; it’s Ruby and Sapphire instead of Emerald. Episode Delta is nice and all, but fundamentally it’s the earlier version of gen 3, and comes out as a bit worst-of-both-worlds between being Gen 3 and Gen 6. One of the things that made XY interesting was standard trainers being reasonably competent throughout the game. Being based pretty thoroughly on its original release, that is not true in ORAS. However, because it’s Ruby/Sapphire and not Emerald, aside from Normal the gym battles are pretty tame as well. Between that as the predictability of the Magma admins (really guys, you ALL use Camerupt?) there’s just not many fun battles to be had, which is sad. Doesn’t really feel fundamentally different from Ruby/Sapphire, which were decent enough games and all, but aside from the general tech improvement not adding much to 10 year old GBA games is a bit of a letdown. 7/10
8. Super Smash Bros. For Wii U [WiiU, 2014]
Lucina is great. Fundamentally I didn’t find the new modes for smash 4 all that interesting, but the roster is damned fun to play around with, generally feels more robust than Brawl’s despite not being that much larger of a cast. At least I don’t think it is. 7/10
7. Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier [DS, 2009]
Very fun and I couldn’t even tell you what it is about it that appealed to me so. I mean, it’s Valkyrie Profile-ish, which is good, but certainly not as intuitive as that game and I’m not convinced the added complexity of building your chains is actually a net positive for the game. Then again it’s better not to have straight clones of games in other series I suppose. I do like me some SRW, but aside from liberal use of references it’s not actually an SRW game in any meaningful sense. I guess maybe I’m a sucker for overt anime cheese? Could be. 8/10
6. Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten [PS3, 2011]
Uniquely among Disgaea games, in D4 it’s the team that matters. Soloing the game is a bad idea! And a chunk of the party has abilities that encourages group tactics! And this even carries through to the plot and no member of the core cast feels like they get the shaft. Val, Fenrick, Emizel Desco, Fuka, Artina, they all have a clear role and vital function in the plot as well as a good team dynamic. One or two serious bullshit maps are the main thing that keep me from declaring it unambiguously the best Disgaea game, but hey, still pretty good. 8/10
5. NieR [PS3, 2010]
NieR is a bit less than the sum of its parts. Still, it has some fantastic parts. Laura Bailey for the win as always. *cough* Anyway part of what makes NieR interesting is how it contrasts with Drakengard. Where that game was basically a shining penis-shaped monument to nihilism, starkly creating the ugliest and most pointless world they could, NieR is sorta about… the beauty in ugliness. Life is short and brutal and meaningless, and that’s what makes it beautiful, y’know? Fleeting moments of joy, never fully tangible, but they exist nonetheless. The daughter you’ll always lose, the girl too far gone to save, the living weapon who’s lost nearly all his humanity, the guardians who’ve given up all hope, these are the companions Nier’s fighting so hard for. Even though it will ultimately doom humanity, and… even if he knew, he’d probably do it all over again, because those ephemeral moments are worth it. At least for someone as beaten down and on the cusps of despair as him. I dunno why I get so into that, but that’s my best attempt to put into words why NieR works. 8/10
4. Bravely Default [3DS, 2014]
I missed games like this. Which is fucking weird because I played Blue Dragon and Final Fantasy Dimensions last year, meaning I essentially played three versions of FFV within a six month period, but really I mean that I missed games that were so straightforwardly cast-driven, plot heavy games. The combination of that with a turn-based RPG thing, especially with so many FFV notes… I play RPGs all the time, and due to the backlog of doom all across the timeline since the PS1 days, and still I don’t get too many straight RPGs with effort in the plot and character departments. And I got admit, as repetitive as shit got going for the true finale, the presentation conceit they make really made me smile. 8/10
3. Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call [3DS, 2014]
Well, it's more Theatrhythm. It's a bit smoother than the other one. And it's getting more DLC now. It's good, it's good for the reasons the original was good, but more. So y'know, chibis. 8/10
2. South Park: The Stick of Truth [PS3, 2014]
It’s like Paper Mario with fart jokes and an 8 bit Canada. Actually that’s pretty much exactly what it is. Being as people are still kinda dinking their way through it I’ll keep this one short. Everything here is largely pretty good, a few flat jokes aside, but the gameplay arc is a bit flat (in particular you max levels like 80% through the game, it seems weirdly planned out in general) and in general once you really dig down aside from junk items there’s very little content beyond the main plot despite large segments of game where you’re just wandering around town. 8/10. I guess that also makes it the best 2014 game among what I played, but I dunno how much that means really.
1. Fate/EXTRA [PSP, 2011]
So for the second year in a row, we top out at an 8/10. Obviously the lack of new Kingdom Hearts games is a detriment to my scoring range. Anyways, So the main thing keeping /EXTRA back is that several segments of the game, even on the easiest difficulty, turn into coinflippy matches. Never a good thing. But damn the game is satisfying when it wants to be. Like… there’s this scene where Caster narrates her backstory. And she’s described as being completely emotionless and matter of fact about it, and it’s the PC whose actually feeling all the emotional beats that go with the story, and I don’t know what it is but it’s so effective. And like… half the major scenes in the game are like that. And the other half tend to be somewhat expository, and set up the other ones for more punch. I feel like I should go through the other two Servants, but ain’t no CK got time for replays so… dunno. Still, this and SP were the only games to get real emotional response (as opposed to intellectual appreciation) outta me this year, and /EXTRA did it for stuff that wasn’t laughing, the hardest kind. So y’know, pretty great.
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29. Baldur's Gate - PC
Admittedly, I didn't play this very long before dropping it. I think you had to have been there to appreciate this game. The interface is puzzling, and I already am not big on D&D mechanics so I couldn't really get invested.
28. Soul Sacrifice - Vita
This game was being hyped up as one of the best titles on Vita, and it looked like it had some similarities to games I liked, so I gave it a try. What I got was an obvious Grimoire Weiss (from NIER) ripoff, generic action game combat, and a putrid atmosphere that probably appeals to some people but not me. Apparently the game is similar to Monster Hunter, which I have no experience with. Soul Sacrifice didn't sell me on MH or its own gameplay.
27. Spelunky - PC
Seems like a really dull arcade game from what I can tell. It didn't offend me or anything, but I couldn't see myself playing it a lot.
26. Tokyo Jungle - PS3
Conceptually, I think this game is great. You control an animal in post-apocalypse Tokyo and try to reach the top of the food chain. The problem is that the game is so graphic and cruel in its depiction of violence that I was deeply shocked, even as a guy who thinks PETA is nuts. It doesn't help that you start out playing as a Pomeranian (I have one of these) and are likely to be viciously murdered within 10 minutes. I'm not saying games have to sugar-coat violence, but I also don't have to play games that are this graphic and tasteless if I don't want to.
25. Deadly Premonition - PC
I can't get this game to run worth anything, but the beginning is so intriguing that I'm ranking it above the last few choices. Kooky atmosphere, what appears to be a mystery game. I'm willing to try it again if I can get it to run decently some day.
24. Ecco the Dolphin - Genesis
It has a nice atmosphere, much spookier than I expected. I may go back to it in the future. The gameplay itself is sort of bland, though. Probably appeals more to people who enjoy exploration above all else in games.
23. Ys - PC
This is an action RPG so generic and straightforward that you don't even have to hit buttons to attack your enemies! I made it to near the end of this game, but ran in to a boss that requires pixel-perfect precision to defeat. I got bored trying to win the coin flip and moved on. Ys is an enjoyable game most of the way, but only really in a passive sense. There's no content you won't be expecting or anything like that, and it didn't give me the slightest motivation to play the other games in the series.
22. Dragon Quest II (SFC version)
The first half of Dragon Quest II is great. You're just three inexperienced warriors exploring a vast map and trying to put the pieces together in order to access the final area. I enjoyed how free-form the game was; you get a ship very early and can travel to most of the towns available, finding keys and such. It reminded me of the (good parts of the) original Legend of Zelda. Where Dragon Quest II becomes the awful game I have always been told of is the final two dungeons, which are a huge kick in the crotch. There is no gradual increase in difficulty; the monsters simply become capable of wiping out your entire party with no effort. I muscled through all that and made it to the final boss, only to find myself completely walled. Even with savestate abuse, I simply lacked the stats to fight it, even with all the best gear and a proper strategy. People complain about Dragon Quest games being grindy a lot, and they are wrong about every game except this and the original. You can finish Dragon Quest III and all its sequels without fighting a single unnecessary battle as long as you don't run from every encounter like a coward. In the first two, though? Brute force is the only way forward, and brute force is the most boring method of doing anything in a game.
21. Professor Layton VS Phoenix Wright - 3DS
Disappointment of the year! I was never a big fan of Layton, and unfortunately this game, even in its court sequences, feels much more like Layton than Phoenix. Don't expect any complexity to the characters, just get ready for some bland puzzles. Cross-examining multiple witnesses is a pretty neat addition to the trials, but it's implemented in a way that makes the answers obvious in every single scenario, so it never has time to shine. Oh, and spoiler: in the end, nothing the characters did here had any real consequences. It enraged me that I slogged through this game only to be smacked in the head with "congratulations, you just wasted all that time!" If you like Professor Layton, I would say just stick to the main Layton games over this; none of the puzzles here are that engaging and you don't learn anything new about the characters from that series. If you're strictly an Ace Attorney fan, stay far away.
20. Live-a-Live - SFC
Another neat game conceptually, but it's plagued by poor battle mechanics. You choose from a list of characters (and they are all cool things like robots and cowboys) and play a unique scenario about them, then they all meet up at the end or something. I didn't finish all the scenarios because I ran in to a weird stalemate at the end of a really long scenario and didn't feel like redoing it, but I got my fill of the game regardless. It's great that Squaresoft was willing to pump out quirky games like this one back in the day, and I wish they were as open-minded nowadays.
19. Rogue Legacy - PC
Rogue Legacy isn't really bad, but it's also not as exciting as it initially seems. It's a platformer with randomized dungeons. When you die, your descendant gives the dungeon another shot with different abilities. My biggest problem with the game was that the abilities descendants have seemed to have nothing to do with their ancestors. As far as I could tell, the choices seemed random, so what was the point of framing the game this way? You could have just had it been a bunch of clones and made the same concept. The gameplay itself feels like a number of old 2D platformers, mainly Castlevania, and didn't seem to bring anything new to the table (nor did it seem to do anything particularly well). I dunno, I think this game is pretty average. Not bad for the price, but not fantastic either.
18. Tsukihime - PC
Visual novel about vampires. The story was all right, though not remarkable. Selling point of the game was its atmosphere, especially a very unsettling soundtrack. I would not particularly recommend this game other over romance VNs.
17. The Walking Dead: Season Two - PC
A pretty big disappointment after the original, and it even managed to make me like the original less somehow. Clementine was a good character in the first game, but all this game did was try and destroy her, almost in a creepy fetishized way. Of course, because she's a little girl and a main character they wouldn't actually go through with anything permanent happening to her, so you knew she'd be fine by the end of the game, removing any and all tension. I didn't like any of the new characters much, and found myself disliking the one that came back by the end of the game. A different team made this season and it shows. There were a couple of powerful moments and the visual style of the game is still very good, but I am in no rush to see Season 3.
16. Final Fantasy Dimensions - Android
This game was sort of overshadowed by Bravely Default, but I'll give Square-Enix some points here. Making a brand new game with an improved version of FF5's job/ability mechanics was a lot better than just remaking FF5. For the most part, FF Dimensions works, but between terrible encounter rates, enemies that take forever to beat, and extremely formulaic dungeon design, it got exasperating quickly. The story and characters are basically non-existent, so the gameplay really has to pull through, and it would have if it were less of a slog. I want to defend this game more, but it feels a little pointless to recommend, especially since Bravely Default exists and basically does the same thing better, which is to say nothing of FF5, which I think is a better game than both in the end.
15. Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft - PC
As a former CCG enthusiast and Dominion nut, I was pretty excited to play me some card games. Hearthstone is a neat variant on the Magic: The Gathering formula, taking advantage of the computer medium to make some cards that make use of RNGs and other effects you can't replicate well with real cards. The presentation of the game is top-notch; it looks great, it plays fast, and there's little ambiguity about what's going on, which is something that a lot of computer board game implementations struggle with. I stopped playing Hearthstone because I wasn't interested in pursuing it competitively and I also didn't want to spend money getting good cards. One thing I dislike about games like this is that it taunts you by being free then requires you to pay bank if you want to compete. The nice thing about games like Dominion is that the same cards are available to everyone anyway. In short, if you enjoy CCGs, Hearthstone is a neat game to try. There's a reason it's been so successful.
14. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - PC
An adventure game where you control two brothers, one with each analog stick, and try to make your way through the environment to find a cure for your father. Brothers has a few cool things going on, mainly its lack of language, which means anyone around the world can play the game and enjoy it. That's neat, though it's an obvious homage to ICO (like almost everything in the game). The main thing that bothered me about this game was how the world is laid out perfectly for the brothers' limited abilities to allow them to progress. There are questionable locations of switches, arrows sticking out of giant corpses in really convenient places, that kind of thing. It took me out of what was otherwise a pretty immersive experience. I think this game is worth playing through since it's short and relatively inexpensive, but I didn't leave it thinking it was a masterpiece or anything.
13. Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call - 3DS
In this game you hit buttons in time to Final Fantasy songs and collect chibi characters. It's a sequel to the original and it's basically the same game but better. The new controls are better, but some songs are still borderline impossible without basically cheating or being a god of timing. It's good stuff.
12. Suikoden 2 - PS1
It's about as good as Suikoden, which is to say it's a fun RPG, but plagued by aging problems, especially insane encounter rates. Like Suikoden 1, I enjoyed recruiting new characters and building up my castle, even if the rest of the gameplay wasn't up to snuff. The game looks as bland as the original, and the story was pretty average, though it started out exciting when the first villain, Luca Blight, was still wrecking villages and being a jerk. I feel like the game thought I was more attached to the characters than I actually was--there were several moments that seemed to be trying to tug at heartstrings, but I didn't care much about Jowy, Namami, or Ridley. I'm sure Suikoden 2 was a lot better back when it was a new game.
11. Bravely Default - 3DS
I would not have been disappointed if Square-Enix had called this 'Final Fantasy 15,' but alas. Bravely Default is the game a lot of us veteran fans were looking for: 2D, turn-based Final Fantasy style game with a more developed version of the battle system seen in previous FF games. Between that and the excellent soundtrack, BD works well. The improvements made to the game from its original release, chief among them the ability to select encounter frequency and game difficulty at will, polish things further. BD's greatest flaw, the one that kept me from getting fully invested and ranking this higher, is that the second half of the game involves a time loop that you have to actually play through several times, and it literally just has the same bosses and content X times in a row. It's one of the worst moments of padding I have ever seen in a video game, and it really did sour the experience. Nonetheless, Bravely Default is a must-own for fans of JRPGs. You will probably have a good time; just don't be surprised when the game makes this awful decision later on.
10. Super Smash Bros for 3DS
In this game you beat up Nintendo characters with Nintendo characters on your portable system. The controls are bad, but that's ok because you can make Wario fart on Rosalina.
9. Super Mario 3D World - WiiU
In this game, you play a 3D Mario game with the characters from SMBUSA (Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad). There, that's what you need to know. Also, the co-op is fun even if it makes a lot of levels harder than they should be. I could not finish the final two levels; they are super frustrating. The rest of the game was pretty good on the level of previous 3D Mario games. It was great to have power-ups that can be used EVERYWHERE again instead of being context-based like in 64/Sunshine/Galaxy. Side note: Captain Toad is a terrible mini-game that uses bad camera controls as its gimmick (somehow Nintendo thought this was a neat innovation, and their fans are totally buying it for $40).
8. Dangan-Ronpa - Vita version
A Visual novel/mystery game that is a pastiche of Zero Escape, Ace Attorney, and the social links in Persona 4. If you enjoy all of those games, then great, get this one. if you dislike any of them, you should not play Dangan-Ronpa. It's a very strange little game, one that is dark and grim, but also doesn't take itself seriously and constantly tells jokes. You're playing a student in a "who will kill who" contest inside a boarded-up high school, run by a deranged robot teddy bear. Like in other games of this type, you'll discover the secrets of the setting as the game goes, and to Dangan-Ronpa's credit, it gets to the revelations in a quick enough fashion that the game doesn't have time to get dull. The game has court sequences like Ace Attorney, but they involve shooting words on the screen by tapping them and reloading your bullets; it's very confusing and I didn't get the hang of it for a while. If this blurb sounds intriguing to you, you are probably the kind of person who'd like Dangan-Ronpa, otherwise probably not.
7. Super Smash Bros for WiiU
In this game you- OK you know what it is. It's great, buy a WiiU. The online works great once you get it working! Custom stages! CUSTOM STAGES!
6. Hanabi - Tabletop
A card game where you can't see your hand but everyone else can. The goal is to put down colored, numbered cards, in the correct sequence using teamwork and limited hints. It makes for a very interesting, unusual experience. It's pretty satisfying to get a good score, but some players might not like how it's cooperative instead of competitive. Personally, I think it's a very cleanly, cleverly designed game that does a lot with just a few components. Highly recommend playing this with some friends who dig board games, and it's really cheap. You can also play it for free on Board Game Arena.
5. Dark Souls 2 - PS3 and PC (PC is vastly better)
It feels weird placing Dark Souls 2 this high on the list because it's a pretty disappointing game. It's Dark Souls only more manufactured and with less care for the setting and less respect for the player. Drangleic is a painfully dull world compared to Lordran and Boletaria, and with all the patches that took place this year, only a few builds are even viable anymore online. The boss designs are bad, which is sad because they were a high point of the last two souls games. There are too many sequences of the game that rely on having tons of enemies instead of a legitimate challenge, too. In spite of all this, I can't deny that Dark Souls 2 is a fantastic game in its own right. If I had not played the other Souls games, I would think it might be a second coming of action RPGs. Believe me, I say this in praise of the last two Souls games: Dark Souls 2 only feels bad to me because I love the other ones so much. The main thing Dark Souls 2 has going for it is quality of life improvements, like extra rolling directions, quicker menus/item usage, and fast travel via bonfires. None of that is good enough to make up for what it lacks, but it still shows that polish could have made the previous games even better, which is a little scary considering how good they are. I played through Dark Souls 2 approximately seven times this year, so hopefully that gets across the fact that I think it's a great game in spite of its problems.
4. Temporum - Tabletop
A new game by Donald X, the creator of Dominion. This time, you travel along timelines, change the direction time is heading, earn money and try to rule the current age while the other players are trying to do the same thing. I will have to play this hundreds of times to come close to knowing it as well as Dominion, which shows not only how much depth Temporum has, but how much mileage you can get by adding random set ups to board games. I am very excited about this game, and like that it plays very swiftly, but I'm worried it will be swept under the rug too soon since it didn't get a lot of initial buzz upon release. That is death in the board game industry, even moreso than the computer game industry.
3. South Park: The Stick of Truth - PC
JSH's Game of the Year 2014!
I almost didn't get to playing South Park this year, but a timely Steam sale got it to me just in time to round out the year, and man, I saved the best for last. Now, obviously, if you aren't a fan of South Park you aren't going to get much out of this game, but for those of us who are, I can say without hesitation this is the best licensed game I have played, even better than The Walking Dead. The amount of love for the source material without pandering in a bad way is staggering. Having the original creators on board not just for voice acting but for PLANNING worked wonders. Stick of Truth feels like South Park, looks like South Park, and most importantly SOUNDS like South Park. Matt and Trey's voice acting was just instrumental in making the whole thing work. I should warn anyone going in that there are some parts of this game that are R-rated even by South Park standards (the less spoken of the abortion clinic segment the better), and those parts did harm my enjoyment of the game, but not nearly enough to knock it down too hard. The developers of the game show a lot of love not just for the show, but the classic games they are imitating. The battle system is a nicely done Paper Mario clone, and there are shades of various RPGs, including Earthbound that got a smile out of me. I don't want to spoil too much out of the game since surprises improved the humor a lot, but needless to say, any fan of South Park owes it to himself to get this game. It's pretty short, and it's well worth your time.
2. Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Path - DS
I was not a fan of the first Ace Attorney Investigations game, so I went in to this one with lowered expectations. What I got was perhaps the best game in the series, though there's still room for debate on that. One thing that a story-heavy game like Ace Attorney needs is for its main character to have an arc that feels meaningful, and while most of the Ace Attorney games have done this, AAI2 does it particularly well. It is a story about Edgeworth questioning whether walking the path of a prosecutor is helping him find true justice. This was a dilemma brought up in past games of the series, but here you face it head on. Edgeworth solves five cases where his position either gives him an advantage or gets in the way, and the final resolution of the game, while predictable, feels earned. I can't get too much in to the complexity of the characters (If there's one fanbase not to spoil it's AA fans), but rest assured AAI2 has some of the most satisfying villains the series has seen as well. This game is also quite funny, and the fan translators did a great job matching the style of the other games' US localization. In fact, they wrote Gumshoe better than the real team did in the first AAI. If this game has passed under your radar as an Ace Attorney fan or you didn't even know it was translated, you should give it a whirl. Just download a completed save file so you can get through the text boxes faster. They are mighty slow.
1. Dark Souls - PC, PS3
I talked about this game plenty at the start of the year. I have played it at least ten times this year (I lost count) and enjoyed myself during most of that time. Lordran is a fantastic setting, the characters are interesting, the combat is great, the bosses are tough and unforgettable, and almost everyone bothering to read this post all the way already knows this. I like Demon's Souls a little bit more, but the two are so close it almost doesn't matter. Dark Souls is a deep game. You are meant to play it multiple times, taking different approaches as you get more skilled and discover new things. Not a lot of games take this approach to design anymore, and bless FromSoftware for fighting the good fight in an era of games that are slowly resembling one another more and more each year. I paid $5 for this game in a sale. $5 for one of the greatest computer games ever made. Umbasa.
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This feels like a short list, but there's kind of a reason for that and that reason is in fact present on the list. There's some other games that I played little bits of this year but don't really feel qualified to comment on. This is generally stuff I finished or just played enough to feel like I'm done with it.
12: Drakengard 3 (PS3): I picked this up because Nier was an interesting if flawed game with outstanding music. Unfortunately, only that middle qualifier can apply to Drakengard 3 in any measure. I thought it possible that the same designers might be capable of giving us another interestingly flawed product, but they didn't appear to be much interested in doing that at all. Every character in this game has one dimension and that dimension is Asshat. The environments are dull and at least as repetitive as Nier's, and the soundtrack does nothing special at all. Combat's maybe more varied (still not great) but this doesn't remotely outweigh anything else for me. Because I hate myself I played through two of the endings and the DLC anyway (latter I for some reason picked up before starting the game), and somehow playing as the other sisters does absolutely nothing to make them seem like less horrible people or add depth. The next time an especially powerful fit of self-loathing ambushes me I might knock through the remaining endings, but since it sounds like they decided to play Drakengard 1's RHYTHM BATTLE FINALE card again, I'm skeptical whether even I aspire to this degree of masochism. [Please note that any responses by Niu stating that the game is deliberately trolling through crap quality will be as summarily ignored as they always are.]
11: Wings of Vi (PC): Take VVVVVV and strip away the exploration and retro charm. What's left? You die over and over again trying to traverse the same room. I only got past the first boss but might not bother coming back.
10: Torchlight 2 (PC): You left-click on things and they explode. Not a bad game, per se, just mindnumbingly simplistic. That's fine once in a while but it doesn't leave me with anything I want to come back to once the game officially declares Mission Accomplished. Also you proceed through a series of overworld areas this time, which honestly feels less like significant progression to me than does descending successively deeper through layers of one huge subterranean dungeon. There's a feeling of immensity and oppression there that's somewhat lost.
9: Dungeons and Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara (PC): Basically see above except beat 'em up instead of point 'n' kill. That plays a little better for me. Old-timey arcade action, no depth but diverting enough for a slow afternoon. Would probably be more worthwhile with other people, though.
8: Divinity: Original Sin (PC): I didn't finish this and have increasingly less interest in actually doing so. It's decent but really doesn't have much to say for an RPG of its length (I put in 40+ hours and FAQs suggest I'm maybe 2/3 in). Combat's alright in a vaguely SRPG-ish sort of way but I feel like I've had enough of it. But hey, there was a boss named Pontius Pirate, so that's something.
7: Wasteland 2 (PC): I'm predisposed toward post-nuke environments, but the story here often feels very shallow and too many of the roleplay choices that might otherwise feel consequential boil down to picking which gang of irredeemable douches to support. But combat reminds me a lot of what I played of X-Com, which is perfectly fine. It's not necessarily hard, but the game will punish you for making stupid decisions, and at least early on resource management feels as tight as it should be in a post-war desert. You have a fair amount of character-building options and pretty much have to put together a diverse team in order to succeed, which is an approach I approve of. Overall it's an okay game that just feels a little empty.
NR: Enola (PC): I'm not entirely sure where to place this because it's really an amateur production. I guess in the middle works because it's really rough (unlike everything past this) but at least clearly had things on its mind (unlike everything before it). Anyway, I grabbed this during random Steam browsing based purely on the synopsis that the player character is a girl haunted by her girlfriend's ghost or something (it turns out to be more like or something, but that's fairly academic). I shouldn't need to elaborate by now why this premise interests me. This is pretty obviously novice work and from writing alone I would guess the creator is college-aged at most, but I can respect it as a first-time, solo production that wants to address themes which games usually won't approach. Graphical detail is of a fairly antiquated caliber but the actual visual design is often nicely surreal, which it really needs to be for what's basically first-person survival horror (this is definitely NSFW gaming though--one later area has some rooms that are basically straight-up guro, although that isn't consistently the game's preferred approach). I'm comfortable with this balance (a professional budget might improve resolutions, but not necessarily ideas). Actual hostiles are quite rare, but to the game's credit it's capable of fostering paranoia anyway. Narratively it addresses the past rape of a character completely unflinchingly and outlines the development of a lesbian relationship with obvious respect and affection. The final encounter is just a mess in every possible way, but overall I feel like I saw something different so I didn't waste my time.
6: Abyss Odyssey (PC): It's a pretty platformer and you play as a swordgirl. Do I need to draw you guys a map here? Anyway, I'm not a fan of procedurally-generated environments, but it plays well and looks nice. Haven't messed around with the third playable character at all yet. May or may not get around to that eventually, but my computer's decided to stop recognizing that my gamepad is a thing which exists (and this is the second one I've tried, the first one no games acknowledged at all. Grr!)
5: Child of Light (PS3): Looks fantastic and copies the Grandia battle system (while actually giving you a hard mode so you don't just steamroll everything because Grandia difficulty). Pretty winning combination. Downsides? It's pretty clearly unfinished (there obviously needed to be a proper dungeon before the final boss) and the story's a little thin (I'm not all that clear on why anybody was doing anything). But it's got flair and that counts for a lot with me.
4: Shadowrun: Dragonfall (PC): This is a pretty big improvement over the original campaign. You have companions with actual backstories and opinions that are worth listening to, your adversary actually has a face and sounds scary, your mission objectives are more varied and you have choices of actual consequence. I enabled a rogue AI to commit genocide because the game actually presented arguments that it was the right thing to do (this is exactly as fucked up as it sounds). This is a much smarter product than I expected after Dead Man's Switch, which is functional but really not excellent in any way at all.
3: Final Fantasy X (PS3): Not quite finished with this, but close enough to include it. HD version! I haven't played the original in like ten years so memory on graphics is hazy and I can't really confirm whether HD improves anything at all. The significant thing for me is just that I can play a PS2 game again without it looking like shit (there's a long list of them I want to replay but can't bear to look at on an HDTV). Anyway, it's still FFX, and this is probably the peak of JRPG combat. It's CTB, every PC has a unique role but you have the capacity to branch out too, and boss designs are consistently inventive. Spira is also the only (numbered) FF world that actually feels like a world to me. All their older games had a tendency to populate the world with a string of towns I guess standing in for nations that mostly had no tangible connection to one another. Spira's actually unified enough culturally to feel like a place. I'm not exactly sure what happened to Square after this. It's the last game of theirs I played that was any damn good.
2: Dark Souls 2 (PS3): It's not as good as Dark Souls. There's no way around that, but it's definitely much better than my initial disappointment led me to accept and still leagues more fun than Demon's Souls in my estimation. I'm sort of personally predisposed to start reviews with "This is everything that's horribly wrong with this product but that's kind of okay because it also does X/Y/Z right," so let's just break it down like that. The downsides? The world itself has almost no personality, even by Souls standards consequential story information is thin on the ground and feels straightjacketed by an apparent need to follow too closely the themes of its predecessor without having anything new to say about them, music and sound took a huge step down in memorability, and boss design is often trash. Dark Souls 2 has a lot of shitty bosses, you guys. Like, a lot. But it's this high in the list anyway because it's still a Souls game and hits all the right notes for me in letting players explore at their own pace and figure things out for themselves. And it's so much more user-friendly that I have a little trouble going back to the earlier games. The inventory management in Dark Souls, oh my god, so painful in comparison. Readily available fast travel is also a plus, as is a streamlined weapon improvement system, summons being able to heal on their own, freer dodging, and I'm pretty well convinced at this point that weapon balance is superior. Dark Souls 1 had plenty of weapons that were outright crap, but after way too many runs through Dark Souls 2 I think there's almost nothing outside a couple obvious joke weapons that you can't make work for you somehow. So I'm sort of coming around to the opinion that it might be superior mechanically (if weapons didn't break so fucking fast at least), I just wish it had more personality. Like, any at all. Oh well. Despite my initial disappointment, I've still got way more mileage out of trying a million crazy builds and probably spent more time running NG+ and co-op than could possibly be healthy, and will definitely pick up the rerelease on one platform or another. [I should note that DLC is a significant factor in improving my opinion of the game. The new environments and bosses are much cooler than almost everything the base game offered.]
1: Fallout: New Vegas (PC): Went through most of a Legion run back in January, before I started feeling like too much of a horrible person to continue. I guess I should finish because I've just got the last plot missions left. (And then the only trophies remaining will be the gambling ones, so maybe LUCK mode is go next?) Anyway huge shock but it's still one of my favorite games and definitely has the most fleshed out, best written setting I've encountered in a game.
Also at some point I nabbed the last couple trophies for Harmony of Despair. I'm especially surprised that the "Beat a boss with five players dead" achievement happened at all, moreso that it was in a random online match, and utmost surprised that it was chapter 10 hard and most of the skeletons were stuck in the boss room. Thanks, random dude playing boxer Alucard!
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I'm still working on these. Going to post these three at a time this year.
17. Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii, Nintendo/Monolith, 2012)
My not finishing a game pretty much guarantees it is going to bottom out my games list at the end of the year, and Xenoblade Chronicles continues that trend. In its defence, it is the best of the three games I have failed to finish (the other two were Dragon Quest IX and Project X Zone). And I did end up watching the game to completion at least, so I do have plenty to say about it.
It's a game which largely seems to sell itself on the player exploring a big, expansive world, set on two moon-sized humanoid lifeforms (it's best not to think too hard about the physics of this). The environments are reasonably varied and decent-looking by Wii graphical standards. This doesn't really do much for me, though, which leaves me to examine its plot and gameplay, neither of which is especially capable of carrying the game.
Of the two the writing is the stronger element. The game's cast is rather bland but doesn't do anything horribly wrong, outside of Riki rubbing me the wrong way with the game trying far too hard to remind me he is the joke character!!! instead of trying to make him actually funny. The plot takes a while to get moving (it certainly hadn't hooked me by the time I personally put it down), but once the party reaches the High Entia city and then later moves from their homeworld Bionis to the "enemy" world Mechonis, things get notably better, as allignments and morality become somewhat greyed compared to the "humans good, robots bad" paradigm which sums up the first 20 hours. This is pretty cool, and while the game is never really able to turn it into a great story (both the protagonsts and villains are ultimately rather bland, and there are far too many scenes which are stupid in that anime way), it shows some potential and is enjoyable enough. It's certainly serviceable if you're playing the game primarily for other things.
Unfortunately I certainly don't think the gameplay is worth primarily playing the game for. It's a battle system in which you only control one person, and the control of that one person is largely limited to managing their special moves, which all have cooldowns so the way to use them ends up fairly algorithmic, at least as far as I played (have a shot at the enemy's back? Back Slash!) These two effects combine to make me feel not really in control of battles. Adding to this problem is the overimportance of level. More than once when I played the game, I lost a boss fight, came back 1-2 levels higher, and crushed it with exactly the same tactics. The problem seems to get worse as the game goes on, as the game actually changes enemy stats if you're too low-levelled, so that your accuracy drops dramatically. Who thought this was a good idea?
The gameplay's other issue is the "visions" which slow it down far too much. At periodic intervals you get a "vision" of a coming attack which is a huge timesink. The gameplay of this isn't terrible (depending on the type of attack you can use defensive tricks to counter it, for instance), but it taking 10 seconds to show the vision in overdramatic fashion gets annoying fast. It's extra annoying when the "dangerous attack" the game is warning you about is a 10HKO or something. Seriously, what?
I dunno. It's a game whose weaknesses weigh more on me than its strengths, probably because its strengths just aren't that strong. The game doesn't play to my biases at all - it's too long, it's too exploration-focused - and what it does otherwise is bland at best. I don't think it's a bad game, but I don't really regret not finishing it, either.
Rating: 4/10
16. Suikoden Tactics (PlayStation 2, Konami, 2005)
I passed on this game when it first came out, nearly a decade ago now. It's not hard to see why: it's a direct sequel to Suikoden IV, which was and remains easily the most disappointing game in its series. I wasn't excited about seeing more of its world or story, and Suikoden isn't really a series well-known for gameplay. Still, after a few years of the RPG backlog easing up, I did get around to this one.
The gameplay is, unusually for the series, actually pretty good. The game features a unique mechanic involving elemental panels which reward some units who stand on them while punishing others, and which can be created/changed by various effects on both the PC and enemy side. It's not super-deep but does add a new layer of strategy to contend with. Besides that the gameplay is solid enough: it has damage projections, battles generally feel reasonably balanced (it's not a terribly difficult game, but it's rarely too easy, either), and it has a simple skill system which is probably best described as a clear upgrade over not having any such system at all.
The one really bizarre choice on the gameplay front is the decision to make some characters die permanently when killed, but not others. Since there are a large number of plot-important, unkillable PCs, and most of them are actually really good, character balance gets completely thrown out the window as there's really little reason to use more than a small number of mortal PCs, and the perma-death mechanic just makes the game balance strange rather than something which forces careful play.
By contrast the writing is weak for a Suikoden (although no weaker than its immediate predecessor). The game didn't do too much to get me terribly invested in the playable cast, nor the Kooluk antagonists who all feel like shallow imitations of previous Suikoden tropes. The voice acting is largely terrible which also doesn't do the characters any favours, with the main exceptions being the female lead, Seneca and the main villain, Iskas. The latter is fortunate, as it lends the character a level of raw charisma it sorely needs, and helps offset how ridiculous the character's plans are (cannons that turn people into fish!).
The game does do a pretty good job of tidying up a few big question marks coming out of Suikoden 4, such as the nature of rune cannons and what the hell that giant tree was. It also gives a much-needed insight into Kooluk itself, which was bizarrely absent from Suikoden 4. Unfortunately, this isn't really enough to say that Suikoden Tactics, itself, has good writing.
What else is there to cover? The graphics look dated but are functional. The music is okay. The sidequests are kinda terrible; they remind me of FFT's propositions in terms of how opaque they are, except recruits are hidden behind them? That's pretty terrible but fortunately it is easy to ignore, and anyway all those recruits would be pretty useless because of that whole unequal perma-death thing mentioned above.
An was enjoyable enough, certainly, just not a game which leaves much of a lasting impact.
Rating: 5/10
15. Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII (XBox 360, Square Enix, 2014)
Final Fantasy XIII is surely one of the most polarising games released this century. I’ve never made any secret of the fact that it was a game I loved; it is still my favourite game on the system, so I was pretty much guaranteed to pick up the final game in the trilogy it started, despite the mediocre track record of Final Fantasy sequels. From friends who played the game, I got two reviews: one really good and one really bad, and I was curious to see how I’d feel. Turns out the game ended up somewhere in the middle.
The gameplay has its share of interesting ideas. RPGs which take the standard paradigm of battles/rewards and mess with it are few and far between, but this one does just that. Gone is gaining Exp from fights; instead you gain EP, and the main value of EP is to extend the amount of time you have in a game which limits it. Thus, fights become an engine to buy yourself time to complete quests, and it is from quests and only quests where your levels come (not to mention your plot advancement). Healing is a limited resource, in a marked departure from previous games, so only fighting that enemies whose gold and time payouts justify the HP you will lose is a consideration. It’s quite cool, actually.
It also helps disguise the fact that solo RPG combat isn’t that great. Oh, the game tries to make it work, and honestly I think it succeeds about as well as a solo RPG can… it cheats by having three paradigms with separate ATB gauges (kinda like having multiple PCs), and adding defensive ARPG elements to keep you engaged. I can’t really say they did a bad job of the system, but still, it doesn’t really help support a game of LR’s length.
Length is honestly also another problem for the game. The balance of fights and game time is an interesting one for a while but by the time you’re 20 plus hours into the game you either have a handle on it, or things are spinning out of control. A shorter, more replayable game would have kept things in the sweet spot more. The large number of quests can also get tiresome, but since there’s no way to know in advance how nasty the final boss will be I was quite incentivised to do a lot of them. Fortunately some are pretty amusing, and the gameplay along the way may occasionally get a bit stale but is never bad.
So my overall opinion of the game’s gameplay is… reasonably positive, but certainly not without reservations. This is a problem because the first two FFXIII games had such great battle systems, so Lightning Returns represents a step back. If it was going to really distinguish itself it was going to have to make up ground elsewhere. It clearly wasn’t up to this task on graphics or music (largely reusing assets from the previous games), so writing was its only hope!
I will give the game’s writing this: it was certainly an improvement on XIII-2’s! But unfortunately, that’s not a compliment. The pacing kinda makes a mess of a lot of what’s there, and what’s there is often a bit too heavy-handed. It also immensely suffers from a near-complete inability to create new characters worth caring about (Lumina is the only exception), so instead it tries to lean on old characters, and it has only mixed success, which is perhaps unsurprising seeing as some of those characters are bad to start with, and some others didn’t feel like they have much room to develop further. There’s plenty of potential in the plot and even more in the setting, which has to be one of the most intriguing settings in the genre (featuring a world in which everyone is immortal and unaging, but nobody can reproduce and the malaise of immortality is very much setting in). The writing, however, isn’t nearly good enough to carry it.
The Final Fantasy direct sequels have always had their share of warts. I do have to give Lightning Returns some credit in that it is the most creative game to share that label, but unfortunately creativity doesn't count for as much as execution in my books.
Rating: 5/10
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26. Tokyo Jungle - PS3
Conceptually, I think this game is great. You control an animal in post-apocalypse Tokyo and try to reach the top of the food chain. The problem is that the game is so graphic and cruel in its depiction of violence that I was deeply shocked, even as a guy who thinks PETA is nuts. It doesn't help that you start out playing as a Pomeranian (I have one of these) and are likely to be viciously murdered within 10 minutes. I'm not saying games have to sugar-coat violence, but I also don't have to play games that are this graphic and tasteless if I don't want to.
Hmm. Honestly I found the game pretty tame to me in its violence, especially compared to most AAA games nowadays. Or documentaries about wild life. It even got a T rating.
Cruel seems like a weird word to use since it's about animals fighting for survival. (and there's no cat torturing a mouse or anything) Animals don't appear weak at low HP like Sif ( :( ) they just go from healthy looking to dead in one animation.
It might have just been too close to home?
22. Dragon Quest II (SFC version)
The first half of Dragon Quest II is great. You're just three inexperienced warriors exploring a vast map and trying to put the pieces together in order to access the final area. I enjoyed how free-form the game was; you get a ship very early and can travel to most of the towns available, finding keys and such. It reminded me of the (good parts of the) original Legend of Zelda. Where Dragon Quest II becomes the awful game I have always been told of is the final two dungeons, which are a huge kick in the crotch. There is no gradual increase in difficulty; the monsters simply become capable of wiping out your entire party with no effort. I muscled through all that and made it to the final boss, only to find myself completely walled. Even with savestate abuse, I simply lacked the stats to fight it, even with all the best gear and a proper strategy. People complain about Dragon Quest games being grindy a lot, and they are wrong about every game except this and the original. You can finish Dragon Quest III and all its sequels without fighting a single unnecessary battle as long as you don't run from every encounter like a coward. In the first two, though? Brute force is the only way forward, and brute force is the most boring method of doing anything in a game.
I remember not having to grind despite being fully prepared for the DQ2 final boss, but having to grind for the DQ5/6 final bosses. And these are almost the only times I had to grind to beat a boss in an RPG (not including post game content here)
The DQ final bosses are always pretty much the same fight so I don't think my strategy was a problem. I didn't use savestates though.
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DQV has a lot of variance because monsters, is probably the difference. That and I think only Parry learns Insulate which makes a definite difference.
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Oh yeah that's true. I didn't really bother with monsters much.
And I guess this could apply to 6 if 6 had monsters and they were good? I can't remember if it did.
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Slightly disappointing year in terms of average score, especially once I realized that Phoenix Wright Dual Destinies was apparently last year. I thought it was January of this year. Oh well. I'd have been inclined to 9/10 it in retrospect, which is honor that isn't really getting spread around among this crop! Oh well.
Anyway, I played a lot more games in 2014 than 2013 (http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php/topic,6461.msg162525.html#msg162525) apparently, probably due to not sinking all my time into straight Fire Emblem Awakening replays.
Unfinished / not enough played to accurately rate:
*Dreamfall Chapters - Well I finished the part you can play so far and liked it!
*Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem: Heroes of Light & Shadow: We Really Like Subtitles - This is my "kill time on my laptop while travelling" game ATM. It is definitely somewhere in-between Shadow Dragon & Awakening, which is not shocking..
*Heroes of the Storm alpha - Probably not as good as League long-term, but interesting for what it is.
*Faster Than Light - I really suck at this game.
*Endless Legend - Too soon to say, but a tad underwhelmed at first.
Disappointing (5/10)
19. Transistor (PC)
I just didn't like this game. (Except the music.)
Gameplay: Turn() is just too broken. Introducing it at the start of the game is fine, but it means the game should be built around it to a degree. Maybe I should have just ignored Turn() (barring enemies with fast regen) and played it like Bastion? Dunno if that'd have helped. Anyway, the game felt too easy, but I didn't want to enable the difficulty boosters because more critically, the gameplay wasn't *fun*, so I didn't want to stretch the combat out.
Plot: Here's the real problem. For whatever reason, the slightly desolate style of Bastion, which worked well enough there, really didn't feel at home here. Later on, when the whole city starts getting Processed, it hits some right notes, but meh. The main is mute, I don't like the narrator, and the villain plot is uninteresting. I'm basically the anti-Grefter here - if they're trying to tell some kind of noir revenge plot, they utterly failed at it for me. For that matter, they failed at one-woman army saves the city, too. It just didn't click.
Okay (6/10)
XX. League of Legends S4 with random people on the Internet
I did a little of this, but I'm not sure why. Sadly even 15-25 games is enough to finish plenty of other games. Sometimes it's fun, but sometimes you get flamed on by random people, and sometimes you get frustrated due to lack of coordination. Alas. Why?!
18. Super Smash Bros. 3DS
It's Smash Brothers. Except with some differences. Anyway, this is a game made to be played multiplayer, and I've only played it MP once and it was a tad laggy. There's only so far you can get with the single-player, although Master Core was pretty fun. Smash Run is *this* close to being awesome, but it's not, and is actually kind of lame. Alas. Anyway, unlocked all the single-player characters and moved on.
Needless to say, this is only so low due to mostly having to stand on its single-player!
17. Civilization: Beyond Earth (PC)
What a disappointment. It's not a *bad* game, and indeed I might cautiously recommend it, especially if the patches keep coming or there's an expansion, but yeesh at the number of unforced errors here. Beyond Earth could have done one of three things, and I'd have been fine with it:
* Civ5 in space, unabashadly. Port all those Civ5 mechanics, put a new splash of paint on 'em, vary up the abilities. It'd be like playing a ROMhack of Civ5, and Civ5 is such a great game that's just fine, same as FFT/FF6.
* SMAC spiritual sequel. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is one of the best games of all time, so this is what I'd really hope for, but it's a bit more dangerous than the above.
* Its own crazy thing. Be some bold new game not beholden to anything else and if you make mistakes, well, they're new/interesting mistakes.
BE ends up being closest to "Civ5 in space", except they removed some of the mechanics that'd fit a sci-fi setting the most (UN/World Council), and kept some of the Civ5 mechanics which makes absolutely 0 sense in a sci-fi colonization setting (hidden map, city-states, culture increases border spread). The balance is all out-of-whack, suggesting the game wasn't playtested by top-tier Civ players. (AI player says I want some more food, builds a Vivarium for +3 food. Human player wants more food, builds an internal trade route for +10 food / +5 production in one city, +5 food / +3 production in the other. Trade routes pre-patch were GRATUITOUSLY OP and the designers clearly simply weren't using them.)
Additionally, the worst thing is that BE doesn't really differentiate its 3 Affinities in gameplay. What *should* be happening is you grow into a StarCraft type race with advantages & disadvantages. What actually happens is that advancing along all 3 Affinities gives you bigger numbers and very similar buildings that just happen to require a different resource by Affinity. Yawn. Let's see some replay value here.
Firaxis seems to have some real turnover issues. The people who worked on Civ5 aren't the people who worked on Brave New World who aren't the people who worked on Beyond Earth. BNW at least has a "stone soup" effect of everyone adding their own cool spice in, but BE's designers couldn't even just wildly steal from Civ5 properly. Sigh.
16. Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls (PC)
It's more Diablo 3. I really loved D3 on release, but I guess I really am Diablo'd out now? Also everyone wants to run Rifts rather than grind Act V which is too bad, as Act V has some cool bosses in it. If you've never played D3 this'd rank higher of course, this is simply reflecting that I didn't play THAT much RoS, and when I did it sometimes felt like a friendship obligatory sure-I'll-run-a-rift-with-you thing. Compared with D3, where I was into the game enough to be attempting to achievement grind the wheel-of-fortune, I played shockingly little RoS.
XX. Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade (Emulator)
I listed this in the 2013 list where it was incomplete, mentioning I finished it here for the record.
15. Muramasa Rebirth (PSN/Vita)
Fun but a tad insubstantial. Learning the boss fights on Legend mode was fun enough. Only finished Momohime's story though, don't feel particularly inclined to go through Kisuke's.
I whined about this in WGAYP, but the narrative tone of the game treats Jinkuro with a bit too much kid gloves for my taste. Villain protagonist is great, fine, run with it, and when the game does, it's fine ("invade Heaven and become an evil god", sweet, I'm there.) Just sometimes the game seems to be under the misapprehension that Jinkuro is some kind of anti-hero or remotely sympathetic, and, uh, he can be a villain with positive qualities, but he ain't a hero, guys. He's a creep at best.
Also, insert usual "Vanillaware artists are a bunch of perverts" whine here. Some really amazing character designs mixed in with some really ugh designs. The backgrounds were also quite beautiful, and this was certainly a game where simply traveling from point A to point B was pretty.
Good (7/10)
14. Ducktales Remastered (PC)
Never played the NES Ducktales. Anyway… it's a solid platformer with slightly erratic difficulty. Short, though, and I feel no particular need to replay it on harder difficulties, which are apparently the same thing except with less error tolerance.
13. Bastion (PC)
Cool for what it is. Nice soundtrack. Some diverting action-RPGing a tad on the easy side, but it works, and you have ways to adjust the difficulty upward. The setting is acceptable; it shoots lower than Transistor but hits the mark, while Transistor taunts me with a setting I might have loved, then refused to do what I'd have wanted with it.
One quick complaint: Why on earth did the designers decide to make the grind zones the most challenging part of the game?! Grumble grumble 18/20 waves in with 5 gods turned on & wrong equipment and die and lose all my grind progress. Oh well.
12. Jeanne d'Arc (PSN/Vita)
"Objectively" speaking, this game should probably be lower, but strat RPGs are inherently awesome, so it's a tad higher for me. Anyway. Slightly bland strat-RPG that for the most part doesn't really use the great idea for a setting well, but manages to have its moments anyway. Somewhat screwy difficulty curve, but it wasn't TOO easy, so there's that. (I've shied away from the likes of Suikoden Tactics because it's supposed to be a ROFLstomp.) I eventually upgraded from "tolerating" to legitimately enjoying the game, so yay. Now to set all the non-Roger/Liane characters on fire...
11. The Banner Saga (PC)
This is a very unique game, and gripping in its own way. I'm glad it exists. A lot of the side characters are kinda blah, but whatever, that's to be expected I suppose. The battle system is really wonky, but like I said, unique, it's interesting to play even if I wouldn't want to see it copied elsewhere much.
The final sequence was interesting. I like the strategy for the final boss, and the final plot twist was… unexpected. Damnit, game. Pretty tough gameplay-wise, too. So yeah, memorable certainly.
10. Ys: Memories of Celceta (Vita)
More Ys 7 goodness. Great Falcom soundtrack as usual. So… why isn't this rated higher, when I really liked Ys 7? Well, for all that there's some nice quality-of-life improvements over Ys 7, it really does feel like "more Ys 7", too much so. A few more unique twists would have been appreciated. And, like Ys 7, the dodge button is just overcentralizing. It's too much a get-out-of-jail-free card against anything. Origin & Oath are both more punishing here. And the plot & villains are… disappointing. No, I don't expect Ys plot to be "good", but I do expect it to be super anime melodramatic as all hell, and Celceta is just lame here. I think the original versions of Ys 4 actually sound better in some ways, which is depressing. Anyway… good, especially if you haven't played Ys 7, but let's see some new stuff next time, Falcom.
9. Cave Story+ (PC)
It's a Metroidvania. I love Metroidvanias. Controls are a bit spazzy at times (intentionally?), and it's a bit linear (a la Order of Ecclesia / Metroid Fusion), but still, good times, even if also FAQ-baity in parts. Well, it's usually optional / second playthrough type stuff, so that's not too bad. The plot is weird but cool in its own way. Final boss sequence (yes, not the frue final, I know) was suitably epic, too.
Great (8/10)
8. Love Live The Queen (PC)
An interesting take on the princess-maker type genre. The thing I like the best about this game is that the plot of what's going on is basically the same every time, but which parts of it Elodie discovers and can grapple with are different by where you place her attentions. That's very interesting. That and the writing is just plain funny at times. So lots of reason to give this a few replays and see more interesting death possibilities and the like. The actual situation is quite interesting & gripping, and I buy it.
On the downside, this is definitely a game where checking a FAQ / walkthrough can remove the 'gameplay' to a large degree, as everything is based on knowing which skill checks you need to pass, by how much, etc. Oh well. But you will want to check a FAQ by your second or third playthrough so you don't waste a bunch of time aiming for one ending only to realize your Falconry skill was insufficient or something.
Plus, you can be anime princess Richard III, where you order the murder of some noble's mother then marry him. How often can you do this elsewhere?!
7. Hearthstone (PC)
Great random time-killer. Not quite as 'deep' as Magic Online, but plays faster & more easily, and with funny sound effects. I'm the kind of person who loves just making decks even if I don't play them, so this game is up my alley.
As a side note, HS gets the award for "most expensive" game in this list, at least if you aren't hardc0re like Otter and grind out a zillion gold. Like… it's not exactly a COMPLAINT, I don't feel I wasted my money, but while everything else is in the 0-50 dollar range, this game costs like 200 bucks, and will cost more when the next expansion comes out.
6. Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten (PC)
Now THIS is an indie game. Fast & fun tower defense where you have a variety of interesting options & build paths. Boss fights are well done, which is hard in tower defense. Surprisingly amusing writing & plot, too; just dramatic enough to make it feel like you're accomplishing something, but realizing it's a tower defense game and not taking itself TOO seriously. ("Written by an English major" as advertised indeed.) Also, the soundtrack is way too catchy for something clearly commissioned on the cheap. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLcxEVOdCA )
Now, I doubt I'll ever play through NG+ (especially since I think I might have lost my save?), as the game doesn't scale particularly well late - interesting options are lessened when you can just deploy a horde of dudes and there's too much spam to follow what's going on - but whatever, the normal game was fine. A slightly larger concern is that level / equipment are a bit god-staty - there's a somewhat narrow range where fights are interesting but winnable. It's quite possible to have a fight that's basically impossible due to not enough DPS if you're underlevel, or to grind a tad too much such that you can drop some archers, hit 4x speed, then tune out. But whatever, it makes it up to you if you want to be challenged, or grind a tad more and not really be challenged.
5. Corpse Party (PSN/Vita)
Ah, the RPGmaker Japanese schoolchildren in peril genre. This gets the obligatory giant weeaboo warning label, and for real, as some of the pathetic anime tropes / fetish-catering here are really, really bad. The gameplay is also not much for the most part, although I suppose forcing you to solve brain-bending puzzles all the time would break the mood, so it's fine to keep the focus on stumbling around in the dark looking for clues.
So why is this scoring so highly despite those issues? Well. This is the scariest game I have ever played. Holy shit. Rarely is climbing a staircase so unsettling. I played Ib & Witch's House after midnight with the lights off for full effect; this game I tried avoid playing before going to sleep. Eternal Darkness has some good scares, and Heavy Rain has the Trial of the Scorpion, but I think they both lose out. Corpse Party is supremely horrible at times and has some utterly awful moments. Maybe I'm just a squeamish coward, but it definitely takes the cake for me.
Also worth mentioning that the music & audio effects were surprisingly great, very important for scaring SnowFires.
Anyway, it's nice to play a game like this every once in awhile. You get used to defeating awful abominations with super-badasses and having millions of nameless people die in the background in other games. It's good to have games about running away and having really really horrible things happen to a smaller number of people who have name tags. It's also probably for the best the gameplay is on the easy side, and usually of the visual novel choice type way of screwing up - it'd kill the mood to have to replay sections too much, while it's plenty gripping your first time through a chase or a decision tree.
4. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (3DS)
This game is hard to rate accurately. Link to the Past is one of the all-time greats IMHO and I played it eleventy billion times; this is more LttP, which is fine by me, after so many Zeldas advertising themselves as "more Ocarina of Time." Let's call it an 8/10, still good & nostalgia bait, but not getting innovation points really.
Also, game. You totally robbed us of an awesome boss fight at the end. You know with who. I'll allow it, but NEXT TIME.
3. Child of Light (PC)
In terms of sheer pure enjoyment-per-hour, Child of Light is the best here. It's kind of the reverse of Bravely Default; while BD overstays its welcome a tad dragging things out, Child of Light departs too soon when there's clearly more gameplay to be had. I want more! But that's a good feeling to end with.
Anyway, I wish some of the side characters had a bit more to do in the plot. And I wish the backstory of the realm had been expanded on a little more directly rather than going for Dark Souls-esque hints in the background. BUT. The music is amazing, the scenery is amazing, and it truly has some touching moments in it. And I admire the gameplay, which is in some ways more Grandia than Grandia; by reducing the number of participants in the battle, and making absolutely everything cancel / be cancelable, it enabled a much sharper focus on initiative juggling than Grandia itself. Igniculus was a cool idea, too.
Anyway, this is probably not for everybody - I can see complaints about part of the plot being a tad too twee, and this is definitely a pretentious English major smoking a cigarette in a French cafe while sipping coffee game to enjoy as an adult. But hey, I'm up for that kinda stuff myself, so works for me. It's not often I can say a game is "moving" or even trying to be it, so despite a few slip-ups, the strong parts of this game really shine.
Excellent (9/10)
2. League of Legends S4 w/ other people (PC)
Okay, yes, I mentioned this in 2013 too. But dang if League isn't way better when playing as a team. I played a looot of League this year with people from work tournaments, and wow is it more fun when you can reliably hit 5 people with some sort of coordination among people who aren't jerks. Anyway. Games with a multiplayer focus are hard to rate, but considering how much I played of this and how little I played of Smash, it seems fair to honor League. The game has a learning cliff of doom, but that's because there's so many options and pretty amazing depth; balancing taking enemy objectives, defending your own, awareness of who counters who and where people might be, etc. is all pretty hardcore, but makes for a very deep game that can be replayed a lot. That's a great quality for an MP game to have. And then you can cool off with a silly mode that Riot throws out every once in awhile like Legend of the Poro King. Cool. It's enough of a different game now that I'm fine with mentioning it again.
1. Bravely Default (3DS)
What is there to say? There's certainly plenty of potential complaints about Bravely Default. Most of the Tales-esque skit character conversations fall flat, some of the scenario design is a bit wonky, C5-C8 have some issues in where they were going in the plot and drag things out a bit past their expiration date. It's a game I took a reasonably long break from due to its extreme length even with skipping encounters.
But there's so much right, too. Encounter control is the biggest one. This game would drop to a 6/10 instantly if I'd had to hack through all those dungeons, and I'd probably never have gotten to the second ending. A detailed encyclopedia & the ability to replay plot scenes. The Brave / Default system, which was an interesting & intuitive twist. Extremely memorable villains for the boss battles. Neat music. A great jobs system. Ability to switch from Easy / Normal / Hard on a whim & adjust XP gains.
Most of all, this game just feels epic & ambitious & fun, like the creators put some passion into the game. It shows. Part of this is that we in the US got the version with the For The Sequel quality of life improvements, of course. That passion allows me to overlook some of the ideas that didn't quite work and focus on the grand adventure they did make. Anyway, this game definitely honors the old Final Fantasy line, and that is awesome, because it turns out we still like those games. Make more games like this, Square!
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Oh yeah that's true. I didn't really bother with monsters much.
And I guess this could apply to 6 if 6 had monsters and they were good? I can't remember if it did.
DQ6 did have monsters, though most were pretty blech. There was however a fair amount of variance in the characters, the Job system exists, etc. DQ2 didn't have any of that; you had equipment which caps out, and levels, so it's "Grind or die."
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14. DmC: Devil May Cry (XBox 360, Capcom/Ninja Theory, 2013)
It’s a game from the proven Devil May Cry franchise and it doesn’t have a 2 in the title, how bad could it be? Some of the fanbase would answer “very bad indeed”, but personally I thought it was a respectable entry.. It is immediately obvious, however, that a different studio worked on it: Ninja Theory made a bunch of changes to the formula. Some were good, some were bad, and some just make you scratch your head a bit.
Let’s talk about the good, first. The DMC games have often done decently with their weapons, but this game took that a step further. Not only are the weapons easy to access (you can switch just by holding down a trigger, instead of entering a menu or requiring to set up your options between stages), but the core gimmicks of two of them - pulling enemies towards you, and pulling yourself towards your enemies - make for engaging gameplay and some very fun combos. This is probably the first Devil May Cry game where I’ve cared about combos for their own sake; they’re just so darn fun, and they really reward having a good sense of the battlefield with the way you can move your enemies, or yourself, around.
Randoms end up pretty fun, as a result. While perhaps a few too many randoms force the use of certain weapons in a blunt manner, this is ultimately very forgivable. The game is good at mixing up its more interesting randoms in new and exciting ways, and there are enough good ones to maintain interest. Between the fun weapon system and the decent encounter design, this is one of, if not the best game in the series for mook combat.
Unfortunately this doesn’t really carry over into bosses. First, there aren’t very many of them. Secondly, most of them are on the easy side, or a bit of a mess, or too filled with cinematic events, or any number of combinations of the above. Special bonus demerits are awarded for a relatively underwhelming fight with the main villain, and, because that wasn’t bad enough to end the game on, following it up with a derpy plot fight to finish things off. Sigh.
I’m not sure how I feel about the game’s plot. On the one hand, it probably has a more coherent attempt at one than any previous game, so that’s something. On the other hand, it still seems like a very stock effort, wasting some of the opportunities for campy comedy the previous games revelled in. I was also disappointed in the way Vergil was ultimately handled, and sequences where characters swear far too much, or where the camera decides we really need to pay attention to some pole dancers, makes me feel like the game was designed by 15-year-olds.
Finally there are the decisions which are just questionable, like the strange title or the fact that Dante was redesigned as an “emo teenager”, which feels like a bit of a slap in the face to the fans and I am quite sympathetic to the outrage it generated even if I’m relatively accepting of it myself.
Still, it’s a fun game in its own right, and at the end of the day that’s what matters.
Rating: 5.5/10
13. Child of Light (Wii U, Ubisoft, 2014)
Child of Light is a strange little game, which feels more like an indie RPG than one made by a well-known studio (as it in fact is). It does a lot of things that play to my biases, such as not overstaying its welcome and having a solid battle system with reasonably balanced game. And, like the small-budget indie game that it isn't, it falls predictably short of taking that next step to becoming a great all-around experience.
The gameplay is solid, to be sure. It cribs straight off the Grandia system (minus the position aspects), which is a good start. The game is, on the harder difficulty mode I played on, solidly balanced and makes you feel like your decisions matter. And there's a new ripple, your firefly ally Igniculus, who can slow down enemies and thus can help you get even more use out of the cancel system (which some enemies have counters for, to keep this from getting too out of hand). There is also PC switching, like in FFX, and each PC has a distinct skillset - a skillset which you have some control over developing via the game's skill trees. I have little bad to say about the core gameplay; it's a very solid game on this front.
Past its gameplay the game seeks out to set up a strong, fairytale atmosphere. It does so reasonably successfully. The artstyle is very distinct, and certainly does a good job of evoking the feeling of childhood imagination as is its intention. Everyone speaking in rhyme is amusing, and is used for some quite effective jokes, although the slavish devotion to it does at times feel forced. I generally am not one to be especially moved by a game's atmosphere, which perhaps reflects on the fact that I've become slightly jaded with the medium after playing hundreds of games, but I can still appreciate that this game set out to have one.
Unfortunately, an atmosphere without a plot isn't going to go very far, and Child of Light's plot ultimately failed to engage me. The cast is populated by flat, static characters who additionally don't connect very well to the main character Aurora's main journey, and said journey follows a pretty straightforward path. The presentation maintains my attention well enough, but at the end I had to question if it had deserved my attention. About the only thing that is at all unusual about the game's writing is a bunch of cryptic messages you find scattered throughout the world, but the game never really convinced me why I should care about puzzling them out.
As a gameplay game, well, flaws exist there too. The game kind of drops the ball on how out-of-battle HP is handled. Using your pet firefly, it is possible to regenerate all your HP between fights, but doing so is slow. Unfortunately there is no other free way at all: items (and on-map healing flowers) exist in finite supply, MP will of course run out, and the game doesn't even have inns, which feels like a baffling oversight. This essentially means healing between fights comes down to nothing more than how patient you are, which is silly. Fortunately it's not ultimately that big a deal for a few reasons, but it still makes a good case for a Saga Fronter- or FFXIII-style system where healing between fights was automatic. Perhaps the bigger flaw in the game is that it feels limited: with only two PCs on the field at a time, the number of strategies available to you feels very narrow, and the game limits things further by largely recycling the same design of "main boss with two weaker support enemies/parts" for pretty much every boss fight past a certain point. While the fights are enjoyable, this kind of limited design makes me very grateful the game ended when it did.
It was an enjoyable little romp of an RPG, but I can't help but compare it to Paper Mario, another mechanically tight game with only two PCs, and feel that the other executed itself more solidly thanks to more creative fight design and better design decisions despite the weaker core battle system. This doesn't mean Child of Light isn't a good game, though.
Rating: 6/10
12. Super Mario 3D Land (Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo, 2011)
The 2D Super Mario games are some of the greatest, most important video games. The 3D games, of which there are only four, are certainly successful games in their own right, but in my estimation only one of them really measures up to the original series (the first Galaxy game, for those keeping track). Super Mario 3D Land represents something new, however: a marriage between the 2D and 3D games, the result being something in the middle. Is it a success? Kinda.
3D Land pulls most of its mechanics from the 3D Mario games (it is, as the name suggests, a 3D game). The main thing which it draws from 2D Mario is the latter's stage design; its stages are tighter and more linear, feeling more like tricky obstacle courses rather than open environments. This is, I would argue, a good thing; it keeps the focus on Mario running, jumping, and bouncing his way past various challenges, which is where it should be. The game also borrows the "three star coins per stage" idea seen in the various New Super Mario Bros. games, which provide some extra challenge to track down while not feeling like a grindy sidequest, and in general remains one of the most fun style of platformer collectables. The powerups are mostly things we've seen before, although the boomerang suit's ability to pick up items is a fun new twist.
However, although the stage design is closer to where I feel it should be stylistically, the quality isn't always there. Oh, it's good enough, certainly, and I could see myself praising it a fair bit more had I not also watched Super Mario 3D World this year, which combines the same engine with clearly more ingenious and engaging stage design. Playing 3D Land after seeing that, I can't help but be aware of the potential the game has to be better than it is. Not that 3D Land is bad, just it's obvious that it could be better!
It's a Mario, so there isn't too much else to say that you probably can't already predict. It knows its aesthetics and nails them well for what they are, while its writing, in which Peach is some sort of weird prize in the rivalry between Mario and Bowser yet again, is getting more tiring every year they trot it out.
In the end, Marios are all about their stellar stage design. 3D Land sets out to experiment with translating the 2D successes into a 3D environment, and the result is good, but not yet great, which keeps this game out of the upper echelon of Mario games... but there's no shame in that.
Rating: 6/10
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First note: Thanks to Snowfire for making me aware of Defender's Quest - I'd been looking for a new Tower Defense game with some actual characters in it!
LISA (Steam)
CK talked about how Earthbound is a game that has its own unique atmosphere that only really appears in the other games in its series and in games that directly try to evoke Earthbound. LISA is a game that directly evokes Earthbound, and that alone would be enough to sell me on it as an interesting experience. But the game goes on to be dark in very peculiar ways... it is an uncomfortable game, wrapped in an Earthbound veneer. Which sells me on it even more. It's part horror-game, part slapstick, and it occupies a unique place among RPGs to be sure.
It is not, however, fun to play, which brings me to the question of whether games-as-art need to be fun to play? Certainly the battles themselves are functional as challenges, so it's not the worst game-as-art in this regard either, but it makes it hard to give it a numerical ranking to compare with the rest of the games I played this year. So it's getting a split ranking: Gameplay: 2/10; Non-gameplay aspects: 8/10; Overall: 6/10?
Megaman Legends (PS)
Played this for the first time after seeing one of my friends recently who was enamored with it for over a decade. It is a fun and easy Ocarina of Time clone (that came out before Ocarina of Time), and is solidly my favorite plot-interpretation of Megaman ever. Short, but I like short. 6/10
Wonderful 101 (WiiU)
Disclaimer: W101's balls-crushingly difficult action-platformer-style gameplay is completely not in my wheelhouse of preferred gaming genres. I sucked hard at playing this game and only got through it because one of my gamer friends here in Japan actually beat portions of the game for me. That said, I fucking love this game. It is over-the-top action/comedy/power-rangers-ness to the extreme and I had fun just experiencing it even when I wasn't playing. The game starts out over-the-top and yet somehow manages to climb to greater and greater heights with each passing mission. If you have a WiiU, you owe it to yourself to play this game, ESPECIALLY if you are in any way a fan of the genre.
8.5/10
Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey (NDS)
I really like the Shin Megami Tensei series. I endeavor to complete each and every game in the series because I like its themes, aesthetics, setting, and metaplot. I also usually really like its gameplay - demon fusing, collecting, emphasis on elemental systems. It really is like cyberpunk mythology pokemon. Strange Journey has some good things going on in its plot/characters/art design, but all of it outweighed by how much I hate Etrian Odyssey-style dungeon crawling. And Strange Journey's dungeon crawling is actually significantly worse than EO's. I played a good portion of EO, and at least that had a certain simplicity that made the dungeon crawling brisk and focused. SJ is just -plodding- all the way through. It took me 4 years to get to the end of this game, and half of that was spent following alongside an LP to keep me engaged, give me tips for getting through the game, and for having people to remind me what was going on in the story. I actually still kind of like the story and I really liked the character of Jimenez despite how awful he was in the beginning... But dear god this game is awful and I'm glad I can take it off my list and move onto to -any other SMT game-.
3/10
Tales of Graces f (PS3)
The Tales games hold less and less appeal for me as I get less and less able to invest in anime-style stories and characters. Despite still being a fan of the large-eyed expressive and colorful aesthetic, the tropes wear thin as I get older and more jaded. But fuck that, Tales of Graces has one of the fastest and most fun ARPG battle systems ever. It takes the basic idea from Tales of Destiny Director's Cut's battle system of "screw TP as a limited resource" and streamlines it, all while making every PC a viable main all with a unique playstyle in a 3D plane with Free Run as a default movement option. Also, it is the best multiplayer RPG experience ever. When there are tough battles going on and you've got 4 skilled players yelling to eachother how to work together to defeat a big boss or even a rough random encounter, it's magical. Battle system alone? 10/10 game.
The other gameplay aspects are less perfect. It's easy to overlevel, even with the 5 difficulty options that you can freely switch between. The AI still isn't as good as human players. The gem-mixing system was arcane but kind of necessary to get higher CC, which was sooooo necessary to make the battle system as balls-to-the-wall awesome as it was. Dungeons and map-traversing was still slow-paced and the puzzles were boring. But those are honestly minor complaints.
The story was more hit-or-miss. The incredibly slow opening prologue was key to whether you buy into the narrative or not. I admit that it was difficult getting my friends to play this one with me at first because I tried to get them to play from the beginning. That is a mistake. If you want friends to play with you, get four adult party members first, then just explain the backstory when the cutscenes are over. If they care, they'll play the beginning later. Apart from the slow start, the story itself is serviceable, and the characters are generally good. Malik and Sophie being the outstanding characters that just work well with the whole cast and don't fall quite so heavily into designated anime tropes. I personally managed to get quite invested in the plight of the main party, even Asbel, though the f Arc plot was really... >.>;;
Overall, it was one of my favorite gaming experiences to finally finish this year, despite not even being my favorite Tales game (still Vesperia). But it -does- have my favorite Tales battle system, even after playing the latest entries.
9/10
Earthbound (SNES)
A replay after roughly 15 years. It almost felt like a new game it had been so long. It was a lot less difficult as an adult, but a lot of the more quirky things about the game's story/setting stood out. In particular, Jeff's relationship with Dr. Andonuts still makes me kind of uncomfortable for all that it gets maybe 4 lines of dialogue dedicated to it throughout the whole game. Still, I definitely get a 'games-as-art' feeling from the game that I don't see in a lot of games. Just little things like how status effects are described in the battle dialogue or random actions that temp party members can take are what gradually build the game world into something that feels alive, despite being one of the most abstract stories I've seen. It's an interesting experience to revisit.
8/10
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS2) (8/10)
Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2) (6/10)
Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes (GCN) (6/10)
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (PC) (3/10)
Metal Gear (PC) (3/10)
Djinn is giving other genres a chance. This series got played solely because Snake was in Brawl and Smash 4 came out this year. The fact that I actually rather enjoy the crazy of this series is unrelated. Honestly, these game are all very dated, and it's hard for me to enjoy them as they were probably -meant- to be enjoyed. Instead, because of their extreme effect on the industry, playing them feels like studying gaming history. I'm more familiar with the memes and jokes of the series than I was with the actually content of the gameplay and story. As such, seeing how the series evolved over time was really fascinating, and at times, hilarious. I imagine most people who played MGS2 didn't do so shortly after playing the original Metal Gear or MG2, because the inconsistencies between the games and the tone are so striking it's hard to believe they are in any way related to eachother. I intend to catch up with the series to its current iteration, so I suppose that's as glowing a review I can give it as someone playing them for their historical value?
Super Smash Bros for 3DS (3DS)
Fuck it, I love Smash too much to be objective. Has Palutena and Shulk and Little Mac and Robin 11/10, would play forever.
Hyrule Warriors (WiiU)
Zelda, on the other hand, I am actively not a fan of. I liked LttP and that's about it. For what it's worth, LttP is still like 10/10 game for me, so I guess I'm not a Zelda hater, but I never really enjoyed Ocarina of Time and got the hype. I suppose I should go finish it someday because Holy Crap I love Hyrule Warriors. Seriously, I think what's missing from the Zelda franchise is the ability to play as someone besides Link McBlanderson. I got kind of tired of HW's Dynasty Warriors gameplay after a while, but I seriously put about 5x as many hours into Hyrule Warriors than any Zelda OR Dynasty Warriors game I've ever played.
8/10
Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (Wii)
That said, I finally played Majora's Mask this year, and despite its similarities to OoT, it is a game that actually held my attention long enough to complete it despite the hate I had for its general gameplay style that basically forms the core of the action-puzzle-platforming-adventure genre (otherwise known in my head as "the OoT clone genre"). I'm attributing this 100% to the fact that this is the only Zelda game where you have more than just Link as your playable character (okay, yeah, technically they are all Link, but they are close enough). Atmosphere is also awesome, in lieu of actually having much story.
9/10
More later, I beat too many games this year...
The Witch and the Hundred Knight (PS3)
Legasista (PS3)
Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (PSP)
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13-3 (PS3)
Bastion (Steam)
Rondo of Swords (NDS)
This is probably my JRPG of the year. It's certainly the game I least expected to fall in love with, and the one I spent the most time playing and researching. It's not a great game, it's an incredibly flawed game with sparks of greatness in it. And I love it. It has a great story with some seriously interesting exploration of the repercussion of a tough choice, with themes of forgiveness and whether that's something a person should ever be able to earn. The story really stuck with me despite this coming off as a 'throwaway SRPG' in most regards.
The battle system's main feature of 'running through a line of enemies to attack' rather than point-and-attack made for a surprisingly rich amount of novel changes to the standard SRPG gameplay. It has flaws, so many flaws. But most of them can be mitigated with a mechanics guide, so in hindsight they don't actually bother me. The core gameplay is really fun, but the game is just awful at explaining its mechanics.
Not a 10/10 game, but one of -my- 10/10 games. Objectively it's probably like 4/10 because not explaining your mechanics to this degree is terrible and makes your game fail commercially. Only play if you're willing to research how to play...
Ys 1 & 2 (NDS)
Pokemon Platinum (NDS)
Child of Light (PS3)
Pokemon Y (3DS)
Bravely Default (3DS)
Pokemon Emerald (GBA)
Guided Fate Paradox (PS3)
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (PSP) (not completed)
Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)
Disgaea Dimension 2 (PS3)
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Might as well. Games I played this year were overall good, just nothing amazing.
Games I Finished
Ys: Memories of Celcetta
I came away with this in general with the same feelings as Snowfire, but without having played Ys7 first, it comes off as overall better probably. On the whole, Ys games are about setting and exploration/sense of adventure moreso than exploring the intricacies of their characters, much less the main. Game excels here, but plot fails as Snowfire also pointed out. But watching the Ys OVA sort of bought me in wholesale to the Ys universe and enhanced the experience in ways that I didn't get while playing Napishtim, and the wonderful supplementary artbook that came with the LE also helped the game. Gameplay was fun, the game (or at least the difficulty I played on) didn't make the characters too radically different. Different enough to warrant switching for extended periods though, so there's that. 7/10.
South Park: Stick of Truth
Like playing a South Park episode. While not spectacular on most metrics I rate games on, it was everything I wanted, really. Could it have done more? Of course, but I was wholly satisfied. Some of the flaws that hold it back have been pointed out, but on the whole I just sort of chuckle at people who are going into a South Park game and getting offended by... pretty much anything it does. 7/10
Tales of Vesperia
Was in the running for my favorite Tales game. While it's still up there, standard Tales thing of falling apart at the end. Characters really work well together, Yuri is a great protag. The game flowed sort of organically at first (if only maintaining cohesion at times by coincidence), then the coincidences pile up too much and by the time the villain reveal is done it's just arrrrgh. Also sort of amusing how the first time I wanted Tales leads to get together, it doesn't really happen. Still, good times. 7/10.
Dragon Age: Origins
Just posted about this in the Games topic, won't go into it again. Fun times. 7/10.
Radiant Historia
There's soooooo many story reasons I wanted to love this game more. But the game played like a glacier. The battle system is great! For bosses. For randoms, not so much. Just felt like a slog. I nearly fell asleep after about an hour several times playing this, but the story kept me coming back. 6/10
Atelier Escha & Logy
Always one step forward and two steps back... Synthing and gameplay took a step forward for the series, story and characterwise it took two huge steps back. After Ayesha, this was really disappointing. Even the music was absolutely nothing to write home about. Back to the Assignment system again, but they're super easy and there's way too much goddamn time in between so it just feels like there are these huge tracts of nothing in the game. Doesn't do a whole lot to add to the Dusk mythos either. Still, when you could do stuff it was fun to play, at least. 5/10.
Games I played but didn't finish/aren't the kinds of games you can finish
Poker Night 2
Super fun, if buggy. Got it off PS+. Nothing like playing poker with Brock Samson, Ash, Claptrap, and Sam with GlaDOS as the dealer.
DuckTales Remastered
Hee. Fun. Only poked at it a bit though. Played half the levels, put it down, will probably wrap it up soon.
Brave Story
Sooooooooooooo booooooooooooooooooooring
Hearthstone
Puttered around mostly. Earned only like, one card back? Still no legendaries. Best arena is still 7-3. Halfway to being okay at the game though.
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11. Soul Nomad & the World Eaters (PlayStation 2, Nippon Ichi, 2007)
Before this year I had played only one previous Nippon Ichi game, and it disappointed me so much that I avoided the developer for a good decade thereafter. But I had heard intriguing things about the highly unique Soul Nomad, so it was really only a matter of time before I gave N1 a second shot.
One way in which Disgaea had not disappointed me was its humour, so I was pleased to discover that Soul Nomad, although quite different in its plot conceit and style of humour, was also an extremely funny game. At the core of the humour is the character Gig, a sealed demon who possesses the main character, who can talk (and does so, rather a lot) and try to goad the main into doing evil actions, but beyond that is rather powerless. Gig is acidic, crude, and downright hilarious, and he bounces off his fellow castmates extremely well, even the silent main (who, it must be noted, has quite a lot of "forced" choices and thus isn't that silent). The game twists his exact relationship with the main character as the game goes on, and also reveals more of his backstory, which keeps the character fresh throughout the game. To top it off, Gig's voice acting is absolutely fantastic, which absolutely helps sell some of the character's darkly comic scenes which could easily have been botched.
The rest of the game's writing is solid enough as well. In particular, the playable cast is quite endearing. Some are actually a bit morally complex, most are well voice-acted, and they bounce off each other pretty well. A few of the villains are quite good too. The core plot that binds them together is a bit less intriguing, and in particular doesn't hold interest well at the end as the final standing villains lack the screentime or stage presence to really be effective. There's also a second path, a "what-if" scenario in which the main character is just as morally repulsive as Gig (actually, moreso). It's a fun thought experiment and has some good humour of its own, although I wouldn't really call it an improvement on the rest of the writing, and its gameplay balance is horrendous.
Speaking more generally of the gameplay, it's... interesting. Setup is a bit needlessly convoluted (mechanics such as "room locks" add nothing to the game), but the core idea's not a bad one, a strategy RPG featuring squads of soldiers complete with what is essentially a much more complicated version of the Fire Emblem weapon triangle. It's actually not a bad system when the balance is there, but that doesn't happen often enough. The game is a bit unbalanced (often too easy but with occasional challenge spikes) but provides a few ways to mitigate that between decors (essentially one-use squad accessories which are quite powerful) and easy ways to grind if you do get stuck, so there's that.
Aesthetically, it's got some pretty nice music, although you can tell that voice acting is about the only budget luxury the game had, as the graphics look dated for a PlayStation 2 game, let alone a late one. I can't complain too much since hey they spent that budget well.
It's certainly not the best SRPG ever, or even close; the gameplay isn't polished or balanced enough for that, and the serious plot does not impress to the point it would need for this to be a Suikoden V-style "play this for writing only" game. Still, the humour is great, and the rest of the package isn't bad, so it was an enjoyable experience.
Rating: 6/10
10. Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D (Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo/Retro, 2013)
I remember very well how the original Donkey Kong Country was one of the games for the SNES. I enjoyed it well enough, but it's fair to say that don't think it lived up to its hype. I played a bit of its sequel but lost interest, and then didn't touch the series for a decade and a half, more or less ignoring any hype for the series assuming it was just the product of gamers younger than me who had far more nostalgia than I for the SNES titles. I'm glad I gave Returns a try, though, as it proves the series has made improvements over the years.
The original DKC was a pretty game without much of an identity. DKCR, however, very much has an identity, and that is to be the bright, colourful platformer's answer to a horror movie. Many of the game's most memorable stages involve our poor ape protagonist being chased by a horde of spiders, a giant bat, a large kraken whose tentacles attack from various stage crannies, and more. When he isn't dealing with some raging mind-controlled wildlife, Donkey Kong may find himself in a rickety minecart or rocket-barrel where one moving along at breakneck speeds where one false move means death. The game seems designed to murder the player at every second turn and I love it. Checkpoints are placed appropriately; there is usually one or two a stage which keeps any given section from feeling too long and thus frustrating, but there is still some definite cost to death. Lives are easy to rack up, like in Mario games, but unlike many of those, easy to burn through as well.
The game's main failing as a platformer is one it shares with the original: there just isn't enough Donkey Kong can do. He can jump and roll, and that's about it. There are no powerups like Mario, or weapons like Mega Man, or even various neat platforming tricks such as stomping, doublejumping, or airdashing, beyond the awkward "jump out of a roll" which doesn't see much use. In theory this limitation should be fine if the stage design can make up the difference (see Super Mario Bros. 3, although even that had powerups), but outside the crazier chase and vehicle stages, I don't feel DKCR's more pedestrian stages are capable of doing that. The result is that some of the "normal" stages just feel like bland filler which I complete while waiting for the next evil, crazy stage which will wreck my life total and challenge my reflexes.
Still, it's certainly my favourite game in its series and has rekindled my interest in a Nintendo IP which I had mostly forgotten about, and I very much look forward to playing its well-respected sequel Tropical Freeze next year, and seeing what improvements it has made.
Rating: 6.5/10
9. Tomb Raider (XBox 360, Square Enix/Crystal Dynamics, 2013)
It's no secret that I don't play many Western games, and the few I do play tend to be in genres I'm a big fan of: RPGs, strategy games, and platformers. In general I don't like the style of gameplay most other western games go for. What made me decide to try and make an exception for Tomb Raider, then? I'm not really certain. Some combination of the well-established brand name and the rather unique conceit its reboot sported, probably.
Like Child of Light, Tomb Raider is a game which knows its atmosphere and goes for it. Aside from the fact that they both star female characters, though, they could scarcely be less alike. Tomb Raider is oppressive; Lara Croft has been placed in a terrifying, oppressing environment, and her goal is just to survive. Nowhere is this more effective than in the first few hours. Lara is shipwrecked on an island, attacked by a crazed man who seems to be some sort of cultist, must escape from his underground lair, and navigate the island wilderness in hopes of finding her friends. Through effective cinematography and events which engage the player (I used to think quick-time events were always a questionable idea, but this game uses them beautifully), the game really sold me on Lara's struggle and got me into the role in a way few games can dream of. The game is occasionally gruesome, especially if Lara is killed due to a player mistake, and occasionally visceral, as when Lara eventually has to make her first kill, but it's usually pretty effective. It perhaps loses some of this as the game goes on, as Lara becomes increasingly capable of fighting off her enemies (and perhaps more importantly, I believed in her capability), but Lara's ultimate goal being to survive, escape the island, and save her friends never really changes, and is easy to relate to thanks to the game's good storytelling work.
To be quite honest the game is worth playing for that alone. Tomb Raider is not a power fantasy; the game is as much about Lara's weaknesses as it is her strengths, and though she eventually kills plenty of men in her quest for survival, the game doesn't really shy away from the chilling effect the murder and trauma is having on her. Nor is it a horror game, that genre which is so often conflated with survival, and one which I don't care for. It's something in between, something awfully real, and awfully effective. The prominent placement of the game's female cast in the story also is something I found appealing, and does still more to distinguish the game from its fellows.
Beyond that, the gameplay is an effective enough vehicle when it's called upon to be. It's a simple enough third-person action game, in which Lara has acquires various weapons and can use them on her enemies, with an emphasis on stealth and a simple, visual health system which pretty much translates the "healing between fights" I clamour for in RPGs into an action game. It's not a game I would play for gameplay, but it doesn't embarrass itself and I will say I prefer it to the game it most reminds me of, that being Batman: Arkham Asylum.
The core plot isn't anything too special. Most of the characters are straightforward enough, resembling something out of an Indiana Jones movie, but the game made me feel connected enough to care about them. But the game doesn't do a bad job, either; I still remember the cast well, nearly a year later. One thing that helps is that each cast member (along with members of several previous expeditions to the island) has diary entries scattered throughout the island for the player to find, which both is a reasonably fun exploration exercise and sheds a fair bit of light on their characters and the setting.
After writing this I realise I have remarkably little overtly negative to say about the game, which is a rather nice feeling. The game doesn't get a higher score because, really, I'm a gameplay nerd at heart and Tomb Raider is unexceptional on that front. But damned if this isn't a well-put-together game.
Rating: 6.5/10
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8. Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth 2 (Nintendo DS, Capcom, 2011)
I was very disappointed when American video game companies passed over this game for localisation. The Ace Attorney series is one which has produced several of my favourite games, this game's immediate predecessor being one (it was #2 on my 2010 game reviews list). Fortunately, where companies fail, fans so often fill the void, and an unofficial translation was released this year.
Edgeworth 2 is an interesting addition to the Ace Attorney canon for a few reasons. One is that, more than any game previous, it is not at all designed for series newcomers (which is no doubt part of why it wasn't localised). Not only is it one of the more difficult games in the series, but it's straight-up the most complex. Cases are longer (even the first case is several hours), with more characters, more evidence, and more red herrings. Series veterans may appreciate that the game has a lot for them to think through... or they may find it a bit overwhelming. I'm not even certain what I think of it myself.
For things I can add value judgement about though, I will say that I generally approve of the direction the game's gameplay has gone. When early Ace Attorney games were challenging, I sometimes found myself at a complete loss for what logic leaps I was intended to take. By contast, Dual Destinies went too far in the other direction, often making it too obvious what the logic leaps were before the player was expected to come up with them. Edgeworth 2 finds a happy medium which I hope to see in future games: while the player is given ample opportunity to figure things out for herself, the game will throw in a Dual Destinies-style hint after a wrong guess, which can prompt the player to think along the same lines as the writer if he previously wasn't. Most of these hints which I ran into were done well, and they usually don't fully give away the answer to boot.
But ultimately writing is what the series is about. Let's start with the cast: Edgeworth 2 is a direct sequel to the first and pretty much all of the non-villain cast returns, and is still mostly solid. Of particular note is Miles Edgeworth himself, whose biting sarcastic inner monologue contrasting his refined and pompous exterious continues to make him one of my favourite protagonists. The new cast includes Justine Courtney, an effective and stylish antagonist, and Sebastian Debeste, the hilariously inept comic relief villain who manages to have some decent character growth. The game also features plenty of cameos from previous games, which are well-handled without threatening to overwhelm the new stories.
The game also adds a fair bit to the Ace Attorney setting. A look inside the prison system is long overdue, and the case there is one of the game's best. Fleshing out the character of Gregory Edgeworth and his role in the games' backstory is also welcome.
The cases themselves are... an interesting and experimental bunch. To say they are convoluted would be an understatement. In an attempt to make things difficult for veterans to see through immediately, most are built on a chain of incredibly unlikely events. This serves what I assume is the intended purpose well enough, but unfortunately it is also the game's greatest failing. It's simply less satisfying to puzzle out something so completely unbelievable as it is something simpler and more elegant, so the game actually ends up lacking in brilliant "aha!" moments which are one of the series' best points. Also, some of the narrative convolutions rely on very forced storytelling. Perhaps the worst and most egregious example is when a knowledgeable witness breaks out of prison for no other reason than to share information with you... and at the perfect time! The final case is sadly the worst about this, and also where the game's length and slower pacing catches up with it, and it's a sad thing to end an Ace Attorney game on a relatively unimpressive case (although it does have one amazing sequence which pretty much saves it, which I don't want to spoil).
It's a game I have to give a lot of credit to: the Ace Attorney series isn't getting any younger and Edgeworth 2 takes steps to both avoid being stale while respecting its playerbase. It doesn't always work out as well as I'd like, which keeps it from being one of the better games in the series, but with a series as good as this one, there's no shame in that.
Rating: 7/10
7. New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U, Nintendo, 2012)
I loved the first two New Super Mario Bros. games (for the DS and Wii), but the third one, for the 3DS, ranks as one of my least favourite Mario games. It caused me to question whether the series' creators were losing their way, or just if I was losing patience with the series' recent trend towards releases every year or two. The latest game in the series, though, makes it look like there wasn't too much cause for concern.
The 2D Mario formula remains a good one, and this game puts it to good use. Mario's physics remain a joy, while the stage design is some of the best its ever been (in particular, the game makes some great use out of various rotating and moving platforms). Boss design has never been a strength of the series but for what it's worth the re-imagined koopalings very much provide a step in the right direction, and again push the series to arguably a new height. Only with new powerups is there any real disappointment to be had, as the flying squirrel suit is pretty much just another, more balanced take on the leaf/cape, but to be honest getting rid of the overpowered copter-shroom from Wii (this game's most obvious point of comparison) is addition by subtraction. Star coins are back and remain a fun secondary objective.
The local multiplayer which was one of NSMB Wii's best features is back as well, and still a lot of fun. Actually, my only playthrough of this game so far was with two others, and it was an absolute blast. One thing I do appreciate about the multiplayer is how it doesn't just make the game strictly easier or harder; the challenge is lateral. On the one hand, you only lose if everyone is defeated at once and can pull off platforming tricks (such as bouncing off each other's heads) to get past challenges in ways which are easier than intended, but on the other hand, the unpredictability of your allies (as well as the space they occupy) adds a fair bit of challenge to certain sections.
The game also adds a few other elements to shake things up a bit; the mini-games are actually kind of enjoyable now, and speedrun-like stages where you chase the thief character Nabbit are good fun indeed. Apparently there is also a Challenge Mode which sounds potentially interesting, but I haven't yet tried that myself.
The game is probably the best Mario since Galaxy (with the possible exception of the only one I haven't played, 3D World), and the most creative as well. That said, it still isn't creative enough, as evidenced by a lack of any truly exciting new powerups, abilities, or mechanical innovations. Nintendo played it safe with this one and did about as good a job as they probably could have, given that decision, but for the game to be greater still they needed to push outside their comfort zone.
There's also the issue that the game's visuals and music are merely acceptable, and that the writing is still embarrassing. The maingame challenge is also a bit easier than I'd like. At this point these things are expected from Mario, but that shouldn't be taken as some sort of excuse.
But overall, the Wii U's launch title is a clear success, and on this list is both clearly the stronger of the two Mario games, and also the first truly great game I've played this year.
Rating: 8/10
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6. (See below)
5. Rayman Origins (XBox 360, Ubisoft, 2011)
I played four platformers this year; I can't say I expected the only non-Nintendo one to be the best.
But Rayman Origins is an extremely enjoyable game and one of the best overall platformers I've played in the past few years. It's got just enough control options (jump, attack, run, float, stomp, walljump) to give the player a feel of having real options but not enough to overwhelm. The game doesn't do powerups (beyond unlocking certain abilities as the game goes on, for all that the important ones are unlocked quickly) but it doesn't really need them. The controls are pretty excellent - I was able to get the hang of doing different sizes of jumps pretty quickly - with perhaps the only hiccup being that running up walls (while fun) is something that it took a fair bit of practice to do reliably.
Stage design is good, certainly. The game gets off to a bit of a bland start which had me worried, but looking back it feels like a soft tutorial so that you can learn the controls; as the game goes on there's a whole host of interesting stage design. The individual worlds are memorable, and the game even manages to make its swimming stages fun, no mean feat in a platformer. There are some side-scrolling shooter stages which work well as a change of pace although I'm pretty neutral about their execution, as well as some speedrun-like chase stages which are tough and extremely fun, though most of them are optional. The game's stages have an excellent challenge curve, generally getting tougher as they go on and topping out an extremely pleasantly tough but fair level.
The game also features a collectable system in which you get electoons (star coins, essentially) in two ways: from the number of lums (coins) you collect in each stage (which are finite), and from secret areas. Secret areas are always pointed by a helpful voice clip, which is nice
The graphical style is certainly unique; it reminds me of 90's young adult cartoons. I'm not sure how much I actually care for this. The backgrounds are certainly stunning, though. The music is also a very unique style which fits the game's aesthetic, although most of it would be unlistenable outside the game. The plot is sparse and still manages to feel incomplete, which is kind of amazing.
The game takes after modern Mario in that it allows for multiple people to play at once, though I haven't yet tried that out. It also has a short aftergame which again I haven't gotten around to. Still, I'm glad these things exist.
There's nothing really exceptional about Rayman Origins. If you don't like 2D platformers, it won't change your mind. It's not a Kid Icarus: Uprising, which does non-core-gameplay stuff so well to go beyond its genre, and it's not an Order of Ecclesia or high-end Mega Man, with their amazingly fun weapons and boss fights (Rayman Origins' boss fights are actually kinda lame; some rely too much on you having to memorise the boss' movements so it doesn't instantly kill you). But it's still an extremely solidly-executed 2D platformer, and obviously that was going to impress me.
Rating: 8/10
6. Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS (Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo, 2014)
4. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (Wii U, Nintendo, 2014)
I'm grouping these two together because they're pretty much the same game. While one of them is better than the other, the gap isn't terribly large and most comments which apply to one apply to the other.
Everyone is familiar with the Smash Bros. series at this point. Along with Mario Kart, it's the series I've put in the most time into as a multiplayer experience. The games are a fun fighting game in their own right, but when you consider their immensely fanservicy roster featuring the stars of every major Nintendo franchise (and a few more!), it's easy to see why they've become such a hit. Obviously, the newest games are no exception. In fact, from my perspective, the roster took a large step forward. Mega Man and Palutena were pretty much the two characters (with actual realistic chances) I wanted most for the game and I got them, and plenty of others I wanted besides. And Elecman as an assist trophy! I like to joke that I paid off the creator of the game to get the additions I wanted, because it feels like it.
Otherwise, it's a fighting game. It's fun. Not really sure what to say about it. There are lots of stages you can play on which are varied enough to add to the experience (and if when you find some you don't like, you can remove them from the random stage select). Items similarly can help freshen up the experience, although I do find many of them too powerful... but again, you can turn off those individually. The whole experience is very customisable and it's easy to tune it to what works best for you and your friends.
As a single-player experience, the games are obviously going to be lacking. For what it's worth, this is one place where the Wii U version pulls ahead of the 3DS, thanks in no small part to the Event matches, where you can play pre-defined "scenario" matches (often with cute tie-ins to the games they reference) on three different difficulties. There are a whole host of other single-player modes, some of which are pretty fun (All-star mode pits you against the entire cast by order of their origin date, Master Orders/Crazy Orders feature a choice of randomly-generated event matches you with various prizes), some of them are not so fun (home run contest and target blast aren't really Smash Bros., and the "feature" one-player modes of Smash Tour and especially Smash Run also are kinda misfires). There are plenty of challenges to complete and stuff to collect, too.
One other cool addition to the game is custom moves, in which each character can swap in four of up to twelve different special moves (though you have to collect them). This is cool and adds a definite ripple to the characters which weren't there before. Less successful is the addition of "equipment" which can often have overpowred effects. The implementation is also a bit wonky as several game modes just ban all the customisations entirely (which is understandable given equpment, but throwing out moves as well is annoying).
The Wii U version of the game looks absolutely gorgeous (Nintendo's aesthetic flair in HD? Sign me up) and there's loads of good music in the game (and you can even choose which tracks play most often!). There's no plot and that's very much fine by me.
As mentioned, the Wii U version is the better game. Some of this is predictable: graphics, music, and a certain amount of extra content is to be expected with the greater power and larger storage space of the home version. I could forgive those omissions from the portable version well enough, but some of the portable version's omissions are just inexplicable. For instance, you can't modify the rate of item spawning (a big deal for me, as I like to lower it), and the lack of one-player modes like event matches is also pretty indefensible, especially since you'd think the portable version would be in greater need of such things. Also you can't pause multiplayer matches on the 3DS version which is very annoying and pretty much requires throwing the whole match if there's an interruption.
Smash is not a perfect game by any means, neither these new entries nor any previous one. Flaws in the series which keep them from being personal all-time favourites persist, such as the fact that it's controls just aren't very good; the difference between "tilt" and "smash" attacks are a subtle control difference but crucial in execution, and even after over a decade of practice I still have trouble reliably doing one over the other. And the number of moves which involve holding left and right means it's extremely easy to face the wrong direction before doing a move which doesn't require that. And seriously how is there no button for picking up items, accidentally attacking instead is terrible. There are also some weird barriers to entry for new players like how recovery works, but at least I'm personally well past that.
Still, Smash 4, particularly the Wii U version, is pretty much the perfect Smash Bros. game. While minor improvements are always possible, I have no idea how they'll improve it significantly from here without a major overhaul, and I don't ever expect that to happen. I'm pretty sure we're stuck with the Smash Bros. series we have. But there are worse fates.
Rating: 8/10
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I'm too lazy at the moment go through every game I played but I can say a few quick things I suppose:
Game of the Year: Bayonetta 2. It's Bayonetta but better, not a hard decision!
Worst Game of the Year:Kirby's Dreamland 2. Look, I like Kirby games, but this game pretty much removed most of the improvements from Adventure and barely resembles Kirby on anything beyond a superficial level, and has really bad stage design...also TOO MANY FREAKING GORDOS!
Other Notables:
Lightning Returns: Did not enjoy this game much at all. Game's too long, plot's not thought out at all, character work isn't good, and combat really just gets dull after a point.
Chibirhythm Curtain Call: Theatrhythm was already good, then they went and added a crap load more content and Medlies replaced Dark Notes, which is a plus.
Bravely Default: Square-enix remembered how to make a traditional turn based RPG and it is quite good!
Super Smash Bros. 3DS/Wii U: It's Smash. If you played one, you know what to expect, and you know it's good stuff, and I will stab the first person who says othewrise!
Pokemon Alpha Sapphire: Hoenn with an XY coat of paint, yay!
Belmont of War: Dracula of the Colossus aka Castlevania: Lords of Shadows: A decent attempt at a 3D Castlevania but way too rough around the edges to be considered a good game.
Wonderful 101: I think this game was this year? Honestly can't remember, but either way...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1Y_bGyck1E (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1Y_bGyck1E)
Shovel Knight: Congratulations Dean Stark, you are now completely obsoleted and have no reason to exist. We now have a REAL hero worthy of the shovel! ...also it's a good game.
Mario Kart 8: The first Mario kart game I played since Mario Kart 64; it's fun!
A Bunch of Kirby Games: If they have the word"Dreamland" without the words "Return to" in the title, then they basically suck. Otherwise, they're varying shades of good! Note that this list does not include "Nightmare In Dreamland."
Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze:
(http://static.squarespace.com/static/520984abe4b0734e32de308a/t/53239669e4b0214c49766076/1394841195974/Rocket+Barrel.jpg)
(http://www.justpushstart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Donkey-Kong-Country-Tropical-Freeze-5.jpg)
(http://cdn2.gamefront.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Image-130.jpg)
(https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT-sV5wogwIAfWS1xuD2MHfwUneTWog_Oe2urR7g9nnZ5t7TVBW)
(http://i.imgur.com/sz8uylY.png)
(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tmSCEycXWho/hqdefault.jpg)
...yeah, that's the only accurate way to describe this game...
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3. Mario Kart 8 (Wii U, Nintendo, 2014)
It's more Mario Kart, so it was a slam-dunk for game of the year contender for me... is what I'd like to say, but actually, I'd never before found two consecutive Mario Karts to be great games. The duo of uninspired titles, Mario Kart 7 and Mario Kart 8, has put an end to that.
For the most part, MK8 just continues the good things MK7 did. Track design remains pretty solid, with sixteen new tracks in addition to sixteen refurbished old ones. The really broken items of Mario Kart Wii remain gone, and the new additions (the blue-shell killing super horn, the hilarious and slightly unpredictable piranha plant, and the boomerang projectile) are all positive. Coins return and again make for fun secondary objectives while racing, and beyond that, it's just a very fun racing game with creative track design, items in the mix to spice things up, and multiplayer which never seems to get old.
Speaking of track design, one notable change is the addition of "antigravity mode", sections of tracks where karts hug the track and ignore the effects of gravity, similar to the later F-Zero. This allows for some neat track gimmicks although in practice their effect on the game is smaller than you might expect. The other effect of such sections is that for whatever physics-defying reason, running into other drivers gives you a speed boost while in them, which changes how you normally play the game.
One other welcome thing is the multiplayer options of Mario Kart Wii which make their return, and appear for only the second time in the series. The ability to change item distribution is a welcome one, even if I find myself fairly content with the default settings. Still, this has long been one place where Smash Bros. has had a notable edge as a multiplayer game, so it's nice to see that gap closing.
The other significant change to the game is that you can no longer drag and item and pick up another. Add in the fact that it's almost impossible to lose an item while carrying it (but easy once you drag it) and there's less incentive to drag items, which is wonderful (I'd still like to see that mechanic gone entirely, as it was in my two favourite Mario Karts). On the other hand, the strategy with item management which was present in some of the recent games is now gone; you can only have one, so fishing for a better item is rarely a good idea and you're more at the mercy of repeated item attacks from behind. Also, the mini-map present in the 3DS version is gone (even on the GamePad, sadly) which was definitely a cool feature of that game, as it helped keep completely unseen shell hits at bay.
It's a pretty game, certainly, though there isn't much to say about its music.
Overall I didn't enjoy MK8 quite as much as MK7. It's a better multiplayer game due to the splitscreen, but probably not as good a singleplayer game because you're just more at the mercy of items due to only being able to carry one item yourself and a lack of mini-map, combined with the fact that 12 racers instead of 8 is more potential to be hit by random crap outside your control. But ultimately these are minor quibbles; the games are very close, and both very good.
Rating: 8.5/10
2. Bravely Default (Nintendo 3DS, Square Enix, 2014)
An easy choice for RPG of the year.
A good job system game is always a treasure; they are both intuitive and fun ways to build characters. Bravely Default has a great system where you can learn skills from jobs and take them over to another job, equipping one out-of-job skillset and anywhere from 1 to 5 passive abilities, depending on your point in the game and the point cost of said abilities. The game balances your JP gains well so that some diversification is encouraged, and the way JP gains grow exponentially as the game goes on allows some of the more potent abilities to be soft-gated into the mid- or lategame where they belong. It's a lot of fun to play with.
But the good doesn't end with the character building; the actual battle system is fun too! While it apes the classic Dragon Quest model, the twist of storing and releasing actions with the Brave/Default system puts a welcome new spin on the system. It's more balanced for long fights than it is for short (where you're expected to just spam all your extra actions), but it doesn't make for horrible short fights either, because the randoms are reasonably balanced around the system, which is nice.
And of course, as is widely-known, the game just does such a good job on all its polish options. Adjustable difficulty, adjustable encounter rate, frequent auto-save checkpoints, scene skip, the ability to look over your actions each round and change them individually, solid documentation (all equipment information is public, all enemy stats show up via scan)... the list goes on. While at times the game seems to be channelling an older style of RPG (especially the turn system), it has pretty much all the modern sensibilities you could ask for.
Writing-wise, the game is less of a success, but certainly has its bright points. While it has a weak main character, the rest of the playable cast is quite good (my favourite being Edea, whose love of justice is exceeded only by her love for snarking). The villain cast has some standouts for being memorable scumbags, and the main villain is the subject of an absolutely delightful plot twist which is deftly handled. The plot the characters themselves go through isn't too notable one way or another. My biggest objection to the plot is that the "sympathetic" antagonist only remotely works if you believe he is so stupid as to border on brain-damaged, and most of the plot involving two Stu-like immortal protectors which dominates the later stages of the game is yawn-inducing.
The game's biggest flaw, of course, lies in its pacing. While the prologue and first four chapters make for a stellar game, it derails pretty hard after that. While it has a cool story concept for the lategame, its execution even on writing leaves much to be desired, and its execution gameplaywise is terrifyingly boring, as you have to fight certain bosses five times to get the best ending. It's not as bad as it could be due to encounter control and said boss fights being pretty fun at base, but the game was already long before that point so this creates a lot of burnout. It's a shame, because there is some good stuff at the end; the penultimate boss fight is one of my favourites and a great test of your team's composition (and if that isn't enough, then there are a bunch of cool optional fights too!).
The music is also stellar, probably my favourite soundtrack from a game I've played this year. I don't have much to say about the in-game graphics - they're functional enough - but I do like some of the character design quite well, so overall it is quite a solid game aesthetically.
And indeed, a solid game on most other fronts too. It's a real shame about the pacing and the second-half derail, since this game would be in the conversation for the best game of the past few years if those issues had only been addressed. But it's still an amazing game.
Rating: 8.5/10
1. Hyrule Warriors (Wii U, Nintendo/Koei Tecmo, 2014)
I have no idea what this game is doing here. I wasn't too impressed with my brief brush with Dynasty Warriors, and the only Zelda I particularly enjoy is Zelda II, which is a sure sign that one is not a Zelda fan. But Hyrule Warriors, the odd love-child of the two, is simply the most fun game I played this year.
The game, has, of course, a strong 3D action component, and I'm certainly a pretty big fan of those when done well. Hyrule Warriors isn't the best at the business at this - it doesn't really have randoms, and its monster bosses, while reasonably fun in their own way, are a bit gimmicky due to their weakness to certain items. But fighting officers and human bosses is good fun, and better yet, the combination of many of them, possibly with a giant boss as well, makes for some hectic and very fun gameplay. It wouldn't be the best the genre has to offer, of course... but that's not all Hyrule Warriors offers, by a longshot.
What really completes the game is that the action coexists with a kind of strategy level, in which enemy castles need to be taken and held, allied characters need to be kept alive, and your own base needs to be protected. It's not a strategy game, per se, and nor should it be, as the hectic action would leave little time for deep plotting. However, the combination of objectives can leave the player scrambling to complete them all while executing the required combat, and this is pretty much where the game is at its most fun. The pressure of protecting a base or ally means that you often can't just turtle in combat (which is good, because without this mechanic HW would probably reward defence too much compared to many other action games; dodging is powerful), but have to find a balance between aggressive and safe play. Many of the game's story maps are designed to come down to epic finishes, the way the objectives work, which is great.
And the game has crazy, crazy amounts of content. First and foremost, there are 16 playable characters and 23 completely distinct weapon styles (before any paid DLC), which is both very refreshing from a flavour standpoint and wonderful for gameplay, especially long-term value. Learning and mastering the various different styles in different situations is great fun. But that's far from the only thing that keeps up the game's replay value... if replay value is even the right term. The game has an "Adventure Mode" map modelled off the map of the original Legend of Zelda, where each square is a distinct (and very non-canon) battle, with plenty of things to acquire (mostly new weapons, costumes, and gallery images) and some very difficult challenges. I've put over 110 hours into the game so far, before deciding to take a break and play other things, which by my standards is an extremely high number, and that's enough to do most everything in the maingame, but the DLC stretches that out ridiculously further.
Plot's not a reason to play the game, but is exists, and it's actually rather nice to see it not embarrass itself. Link manages a shred of character depth, Zelda manages to avoid being damselfied, and there are a few touching and somewhat unexpected plot developments. The characters themselves stand out a lot with their vivid and varied designs, and immensely stylish combat styles, which makes picking up and playing each one that much more of a joy.
The game's environmental graphics are whatever, but its character designs are great, and the soundtrack is terrific, featuring both remixes of classic Zelda tunes and some excellent new tracks. There's a lot of Zelda series fanservice in the game, particularly for the flagship 3D titles. Obviously this isn't of much direct value to me, but I figured it's a pretty good kind of fanservice if it left me wanting to know more about these games instead of being put off by it, despite not playing most of them.
The game deserves a special shout-out for allowing its (particularly playable) cast to be dominated by women, and the game's writing respecting them a fair deal. The game shouldn't get points for this, because it shouldn't be such a rarity. But the game industry is what it is, and Hyrule Warriors stands out all the more for bucking the trend.
There are certainly places the game could have been better. Voice acting would have been great for it, especially given all the mid-battle dialog which is hard to pay attention to sometimes, but the Zelda fanbase has a stick up their collective ass about this issue, so I get why it was done. It's a bit annoying having to go into the menu to check the allied base's health (at least allies' health is visible on the GamePad), and switching items can be a bit cumbersome if you're in the middle of a hectic situation. I'm not really a big fan of some of the musical effects; they can be a bit jarring. And while the plot exceeded my expectations it could obviously have been better.
But none of the criticisms are large. And there's just no escaping the fact that this game, more than any other this year, held my attention and didn't want to let go. Whereas Mario Kart 8 needed multiplayer to stretch itself anywhere near as many hours (did I mention Hyrule Warriors has multiplayer too?), and Bravely Default had me burned out pretty badly by around hour 60, I pretty much had to force myself to move on from the neverending adventures of Link, Zelda, and their allies and enemies. As such, I feel pretty confident saying it was my favourite game of 2014.
Rating: 9/10
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26. Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (incomplete) (PSP, 2011)
I start this list with the only game I didn’t finish this year, primarily due to a combination of sheer apathy and a simmering hatred of one particularly character. The game, sadly, was pretty close to dead on arrival after its strange and unfortunately quite bad Prologue chapter, where we meet the protagonist and her family. Essentially, the game surrounds its incompetent female main (Estelle) with two Gary Stu characters, her dad (Cassius) and her adoptive brother / love interest (Joshua), and the relationship between these characters is very bizarre. There is one particular scene in the prologue where the dad spends the entire scene talking down / insulting the intelligence of the main character in a way that made me feel really uncomfortable because it’s a bit too reminiscent of classic abuse patterns. Best not to think about that too hard.
So your main character is a Bracer, which is kind of like a combination of a mercenary and a ranger, I guess? Anyway, there’s another scene later in the prologue where Estelle, while on an assignment, starts yelling at some child that they rescue in a tower infested with monsters, and they get ganged up on because she’s an idiot but don’t worry the Gary Stu dad shows up to save the day.
I was tempted to stop playing after the prologue, but I was told the game gets better (which is true). Chapter 1 gives you two other party members, Scherazard, who is one of Dad Stu’s old students, and Olivier, who is this silly foppish bisexual spy. These are definitely the two best members of the cast from what I played. We get a bit more into the meat of the gameplay and it’s pretty easy and not that great, reminds me a lot of Grandia 1, a system with the potential to be interesting but is mostly wasted on the tiny amount of thought you have to put into beating enemies. The shadow of Cassius, unfortunately for the game, seems to haunt us. First, an airline is hijacked by a terrorist organization that supposedly had Cassius on it, but we are told that there is no way that Cassius could be on it because he is such a badass that he could singlehandedly stop terrorism. Then we meet General Morgan, who hates the Bracers, but later we find out it’s because Cassie Sue was once part of the military and he was best military member ever but he left the military to become a Bracer. This is such a stupid plot point that I just laughed out loud when I saw it.
Okay, this Cassius hero worship is getting a little ridiculous even by the standards of such things, but at least we have some cool party members now. Well, did, because they leave at the end of Chapter 1. Which makes a lot of sense plotwise but leaves us with Estelle and Joshua, who are not particularly great. Chapter 2 is kinda boring. We get to hang out with the token hot-blooded anime rival Agate and Kloe, who is kind of the generically nice but unexciting PC. Because so much of the chapter is spent at Kloe’s school without combat or plot progression, a lot of the chapter doesn’t really shed light on the story, which is a bit of a strange choice. The story doesn’t really change in any meaningful way from the beginning to the end of it. At the end of the chapter we are greeted with, predictably, Agate’s backstory of how he was rescued from a life of crime by Cassius. Again, I laughed out loud at this. The boat chase scene is pretty awesome to cap off the chapter, at least.
Chapter 3 has the token child character join you in the beginning, and you go to the quirky scientist/technology town. I stopped playing when arriving in the town after going through another really boring dungeon. After deciding to quit the game, I was greeted with the knowledge that Cassius plot kills the final boss. I laughed again.
25. Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (GB, 1993)
One of my primary goals of the year was to delve into game series that I’d never played before to diversify a bit. One of the first things I did during this idea was to look at Smash’s roster and grab a few games from series I had never played. Zelda was one of the things I was more skeptical about, because I know that the series is exploration focused rather than story or character or gameplay focused. This is a trait which a lot of people really like, the ability to traverse a world, to feel independent. But it’s never really been my cup of tea. The decision to try LA was based on its portability and its price, which I believe was 4 dollars.
If I said I believed I would love this game when I started it, I would be lying. I think the game is pretty much what I thought it would be, except for one thing that drove me a bit crazy. I often found that the plot triggers for the next event or events occurring were quite random, and often it felt like you had to basically just talk to everyone all the time and a bunch of guesswork to figure out WTF you were supposed to do next. I tried to indulge in the true experience without FAQing, but I ended up FAQing it anyway because I got bored with the monotony of trying to figure out what to do next all of the time.
The best part of the game is clearly the pet Chain Chomp. Why don’t I have a pet chain chomp?
I’m going to try 3D Zelda next year. I think having a more immersive / realistic looking world might help me enjoy the experience of exploration a bit more, but we’ll see.
24. Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice (DS, 2007)
After playing Dual Destinies in December of last year, I decided I was interested in seeing Apollo Justice in his own game, so this was the first game I beat this year. The game is often considered to be the ugly duckling of the series, which is why it took me so long to play it. The game has its bright spots; in particular, the game shines when Apollo, Trucy, and Ema interact. Ema is a hilarious contrast to the positive and upbeat Apollo and Trucy, and they bounce off each other quite well. Klavier is not my all-time favorite prosecutor, but I think he acquits himself respectably and is an enjoyable if shallow character. So the game’s main lawyer, assistant, detective, and prosecutor are all pretty cool. So why is the game so low, then?
The answer is “pretty much everything else”. In two cases, the game seems to push aside the dynamic between Apollo and other people for Emo Phoenix vs. Kristoph, and the game generally suffers for this. I enjoyed the first case pretty well, and it’s one of my favorite first cases because it has a bit more meat than a lot of them, but the subsequent cases aren’t really as good. 4-2 is an okay filler case, Plum Kitaki amuses me and the murder is interesting enough to unravel. Its big comedic character falls flat for a North American audience, I think, which doesn’t really help the case’s comedy credentials. I don’t think I’d really call it an all-time favorite but I wouldn’t dock the game points for it either.
The last two cases aren’t really very enjoyable though. The third case has the weird problem of the character who orchestrates a murder based on a song, and framing a child for murdering and dragging a very tall, stout guy across a stage feels like a really stupid thing to do. And the person who lies in court to cover up ACTING SECRETS. I hate you so much. The fourth case is just a clusterfuck because it has you convicting someone who is already in prison, which is extremely anticlimactic, and the whole time travel thing where you unravel the mysteries of the unsympathetic-as-fuck Gramaryes is actually extremely boring. Kristoff having his weird meltdown about letting plebs be involved in the court system just comes off as whiny and weird, and is a bit of a sour note to end the game on. The case does teach us the value of peddling your children to help you partake in illegal activity, though, and what could be a better lesson than that?
23. Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii, 2012)
This is probably the game on this list that I have the most conflicted feelings about. I borrowed it from Meeple, which I greatly appreciate BTW since I know the game is quite expensive, and had it for a few months before finally deciding to sit down to play it. It has an interesting setting idea, this kind of friendly post-apocalyptic setting where people are just trying to stay happy and trying to get by through the bad times. It worked pretty well for me overall. The earlygame does a good job of developing that setting, and the three party members in that arc are pleasantly enjoyable. The gameplay isn’t very good at first, but a lot of games have pretty bad gameplay earlygame because you’re getting used to the system still.
The game’s core problem writing wise is that is doesn’t do a good job of character development over its 65 hours. Most of the characters who join you don’t really have character growth, and the one character who does, Shulk, seems to grow into a stereotype and a bit of an idiot. Xenoblade’s best characters are the generically likable/amusing best friend character Reyn, and the just and strong-willed Melia. Neither are great, though. I’m not as big of a fan of Dunban (he’s a very stock male badass mentor character) and Riki (not a very funny comedic character, Reyn does his job way better!), and Seven is a bit on the damsel side of the force for me. Sharla is okay but has a very predictable, paint-by-numbers character arc.
The villains range from baby eating to mega baby eating, which is a bit disappointing compared to Xenogears or even Xenosaga (which the game does seem to draw upon somewhat). Mumkar is a hilariously bad character, with his buildup being the weird intro sequence, where he reveals that he is evil, and then the game tries to treat the fact that a character you met for one second is alive is really a strange choice. The ending of the character is pretty unsatisfying as well; you beat him in battle, and you have this scene where Shulk refuses to kill him even though he’s a homicidal maniac. But don’t worry, he dies when he is hit with falling debris (I think?) and falls into oblivion, so any moral conundrum that could have been set up was invalidated by this lazy piece of writing. The characters in the game generally love yelling a lot, particularly at robots, and often scenes are filled with the hot-blooded rage of MEN WHO WANT TO FIGHT ROBOTS! They also like running at robots, and usually being ineffective at fighting after running at them. I found it rather comical, but the game seems to want you to take it seriously, which is unfortunate.
Plotwise the game doesn’t shit itself or anything, but I found it not to be the strong point of the game either. It has some interesting ideas, but not great execution of those ideas. A science-y setting complaint – there is a fight between giant robots that people live on during the course of the game. I was willing to stomach the idea that people live on these giant non-radial beings without problems with gravity because whatever video games. The ramifications of the two robots that people live on fighting each other doesn’t really seem to be comprehended or cared about by the writers. Because it’s cooooool.
Gameplaywise the game is very weird, and one of the rare games that I think has way more enjoyable random encounters than bosses. At the game’s best, the gameplay is engaging and fun and keeps you on your toes, timing which moves you use by enemy. The very little control you have over your allies and the inability to switch between characters in battle hurts, though. I would say about half of the game’s areas have enjoyable and thoughtful random encounters, and the other half tend to be quite easy and brainless but not offensive.
The game’s bosses, on the other hand, are generally pretty terrible. They decided to implement a hard level cap where if you were not at least five levels within the boss’s level, you would be unable to beat the boss (unless you are like a speedrunner of the game, which obviously on a first playthrough I was not). Some casual experimentation told me that if I was six levels below the boss, my hit rates were under 5%, and at five levels it was around 70-80%. I am fine with a game being harder when you are underlevelled, obviously, as I chose to be underlevelled in this game, but it feels needlessly punitive to punish people additionally for choosing to play the game in a certain way. I ended up reaching the final boss sequence about seven levels underlevelled despite fighting almost everything in the final dungeon, and many enemies I fought multiple times. The game has a quest system, which it expects you to use to gain these additional levels. I would be fine with this in principle if it didn’t scale the lategame bosses to impossible without it! So I ended up grinding for about 3 hours before finally being only four levels under the final boss (just because I didn’t want to go through the final boss sequence a third time). Oh, did I mention that I had to FAQ the final boss’s level because the game hides it? Bad design decision on top of a bad design decision. The reason I dwell on the level thing is not only does it have this goofy system with level scaling, the bosses’ challenge seems to be almost all derived from what level you are because the most interesting options you have in randoms (status) is not applicable to them.
Aesthetically, the game is quite appealing, with both nice music and very beautiful graphics; I really like the High Entia city because it feels like what a palace should look like. I also enjoy the different outfits you can give characters based on their armor, even if Reyn in full plate armor seems super silly for the setting (and you don’t get to see his sexy bod as much).
It’s an interesting mess of a game, and as much as the endgame gameplay issues tried to piss me off, I’m still glad I played and beat it.
22. Kirby: Triple Deluxe (3DS, 2014)
The worst Kirby I played this year because Hypernova is a degenerate and boring superpower.
21. Kirby’s Adventure (NES, 1993)
This game is similar to RotD except older and uglier. Has the amazing King Dedede plot twist though!
20. Kirby’s Return to Dreamland (Wii, 2011)
So Kirby is the second series I decided to try on my Nintendo kick: mostly motivated by my love of King Dedede in Smash Bros., a general love for cute things, the hole in my game playing experience, and the fact that Kirby’s Adventure was free through the Club Nintendo stuff. The game is clearly designed for children, difficulty wise, and that’s fine, so it mostly coasts on being really adorable and being part of a genre I rather enjoy. I think it’s interesting what effect having infinite floating power has on a platformer – it mostly makes the game not about its platforming, but occasionally the game can challenge you on that front. I like the different powerups – Sword, Spear, Needle, etc. – and Return to Dreamland has the special versions of several of the powerups that you use to solve puzzles. Kirby is just so darn cute in all of the outfits, too. :) The game does periodically have some interesting bosses, but most of them are braindead easy. I do feel like none of the games outstay their welcome length-wise – KA is about 4 hours, and the other two were around 7-8 hours.
So yeah, I consider all three of them fine games but I don’t think I’m going to seek out many more Kirby games unless they sound notably different than these. I may play Kirby Super Star!
19. Super Mario 3D Land (3DS, 2011)
This game is pleasantly breezy, a fun mix of 2D Mario level design and 3D Mario graphical style. It has some reasonably inspired stage design, especially late in the game. I found myself quite challenged by the last couple of worlds. The final stage is utter douchebaggery and a complete delight to play. Bowser is a pretty fulfilling boss to beat in this game relative to many other Mario games, where you either fight a pretty easy boss or do some kind of gimmick. Overall, though, the game feels like a beta game for another game on this list, Super Mario 3D World, which excels over it in pretty much every way.
18. Mana Khemia: The Fall of Alchemy (PS2, 2008)
This game is definitely an odd duck, for better or for worse. The most notable thing about the game in general is its cast, which is a wild mess of silly, off the wall, and often deranged individuals. How well this assortment of madmen works depends on the player’s disposition (how much you like playing as good / realistic people vs. how much you revel in silliness) and how good each individual character is. I’d say Lily is the most successful character of the story; she reflects a realistic trope (spoiled rich girl) taken to a rather ridiculous extreme.
I also enjoyed Raze and Chloe well as the person who makes sarcastic remarks and snarks from the side. Et and Enna make an interesting pair and you can’t help but feel really really sorry for Enna. Puniyo is a character that is totally silly and unrealistic and the game is utterly fine with it, and I think she works pretty well as the 5 year old slime mob boss or whatever she is. I think Yun and Pepperoni are less successful characters overall, as they are both a little bit dull, and Goto is an utter mess of a character partially saved by his amazing, amazing voice actor. The villain cast is pretty enjoyable; Reicher is of course creepy and fabulous, but the person who I really enjoyed is Tetri, possibly because she reminds me a bit of myself. She loooves cute things but also loves logic / science. :) FLAY is back as a hammy supervillain / teacher at the school and it’s pretty great.
Plotwise the game is fairly generic, you have some mystery to unravel but it never hooked me much. For the most part the dialogue is character interaction and silly shenanigans, which is fine by me. The game’s serious plot isn’t horrid but not really why you’d play it.
Gameplaywise the game is mostly a breeze, it’s too easy even on hard mode and the Common Skills are a little too overpowered relative to the regular skillsets. It is worse than the first game for most things related to gameplay, which is a bit of a strange step back. The one thing that it does better than the first game (which is a big deal) is that you get a full party way sooner, allowing you to utilize the switching system more quickly. Since it feels like a core mechanic of the series, I think this is a pretty big improvement. The game feels like it is at its worst when it meanders too long in its boring dungeons, and at its best when it’s throwing jerkass bosses at you.
It has the nuisances of the first game reduced, especially the item creation because it’s all in the same room and you can go to a sub-menu to make something you need. It still takes too much time and annoys me, but it’s better than the first game’s at least.
Is it better than MK1? Yeah, I’d say so, but not by enough that I would be surprised to hear someone say it wasn’t or anything. MK1’s plot doesn’t do too much for me, and the gameplay differences are not very drastic. I’m much more satisfied with MK2’s cast than MK1’s, overall, which is the deciding factor for me, as well as the decrease in the clunkiness of the item forging system.
17. Super Mario World 2 (SNES, 1995)
I had wanted to play SMW2 for a long time. It was the sequel to a game that I loved very much as a kid, but my brother sold my SNES around the time it came out. For whatever reason I missed the fact that the game had a GBA port, possibly because of the stupid titles that the ports gave all of the games. My interest renewed in the game a couple years ago while watching it, but I generally don’t like playing games on the PC so I waited for it to be released for the Virtual Console. And then finally, in 2014, it was.
The game is quite interesting, it’s a platformer where the character you control is very wobbly and hard to control relative to the precision of Mario and Megaman. Overall I find it a bit weird that they chose such a strange control scheme, but whatever. The graphics are quite nice for an SNES game. The stage design is pretty creative but overall not that great, I enjoy the gimmicks but often the game doesn’t implement them in as interesting ways as it could. And the final boss is just a mess. But the game is still fun! Just not an all-time great.
16. Megaman 10 (WiiWare, 2010)
I decided to play Megaman 10 a rather long time after Megaman 9, and I’m not sure exactly why. I watched it played by Grefter and Magey, but for whatever reason it didn’t hook me the way MM9 did. And when I played it that mostly bore itself out. I’d say MM9 is a gem partially because it tries to be MM2 and does it even better than MM2 did, with excellent stage design and overpowered weapons that you need to beat the difficult levels. MM10 is definitely a less inspired game, with weak stage design and not as cool weapon choice, but it’s not a bad game or anything. Just not one I have the desire to replay a bunch of times, unlike 1/2/3/8/9. I think its robot master stages in particular are some of the weakest in the series, but the game does make up for it with having good stages at the end of the game. Some of the weapons are pretty nifty once you get used to using them, but none of them are great. Overall, if you’re a Megaman fan, I’d say this game is worth picking up, it’s cheap and pretty fun. But I’d expect a game close in quality to MM4/MM5 rather than the greats.
15. Zelda II: Adventure of Link (NES, 1988)
So after my experiment playing Link’s Awakening, I decided to try a different 2D Zelda, but this time one that was part of a genre I enjoy a bit more than the top-down style of regular 2D Zelda for combat. So I dug into the archives for a game that was released in Japan a few months before I was born.
The game is not for the faint of heart in the style of most NES games, due to its brutal difficulty and occasional confusion for what to do next. Much like LA, there are times when you just don’t know what the fuck you’re supposed to be doing. I will say that Zelda II’s couple of really bad instances (Bagu and the hidden city) are worse than anything LA pulls, but on the other hand it pulls way less of them and I generally found myself able to play the game pleasantly without a guide. One thing that Zelda II does on this front that I vastly prefer over LA is that it generally won’t make you backtrack to areas you’ve already completed to find people, so generally your proximity to whatever person you are trying to find is much shorter than LA, where I often found myself trekking all over the world to find things.
Aside from this, though, Zelda II has a pretty cool battle system. You have often interesting resource management that is dynamic and changes throughout the game, the levelling system which I found quite thought-provoking and interesting, and the high/low system allows you to have more options with fighting than the top-down system of the other games. The game reminds me most of a proto-Metroidvania, which is generally a good thing in my eyes. The up and down stab add extra things to your arsenal later as well, which is quite nice. My biggest problem with the game battle system wise is that it sometimes is a bit too challenging, particularly at points where you have to do a long overworld trek back to the place you needed to go.
The game is very different than other Zeldas, so I can see why fans of Zelda may not always care for it. But I think if you can appreciate it for what it is – rather than hating what it isn’t – it’s an enjoyable enough game.
14. Super Smash Bros 3DS (3DS, 2014)
Smash 3DS is a fun portable experience, but it’s mostly the same as the Wii U version.
13. Super Smash Bros Wii U (Wii U, 2014)
A Smash Bros. with two of my favorite female characters added in? A Smash Bros. with Megaman? A Smash Bros. with a Bowser that isn’t an embarrassment to Bowsers? I’m so in. I mostly play the multiplayer so I dunno much about the singleplayer modes, but the multiplayer feels better than Brawl’s. Maybe it’s the better roster, maybe it’s the lack of tripping mechanics, but I definitely like it more.
I can’t believe it made Riki and Dunban the characters in Shulk’s Final Smash. I like to yell at anyone who hits me with it because of that. Jerks.
12. Donkey Kong Country Returns (3DS, 2013)
This game hates you and all you stand for. Fun little platformer, but doesn’t have the variety in stage design necessary to be a fantastic one. I do quite enjoy the rocket barrels and minecart stages though. I am hyped for Tropical Freeze.
11. New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U, 2012)
I really enjoy the colorful stages and the fun multiplayer in this game. It’s a well-designed game, and I feel like it is better at making the stages multiplayer and singleplayer friendly than the Wii version. Pretty cool game, much like the Wii game. Honestly, I had a blast laughing with my friends while playing it when we’d run into each other at bad times. The unpredictability of allies that Elfboy talked about is basically me and our other friend being incompetent and jumping on each other’s heads and running into each other. Don’t judge me.
10. Bravely Default: Where the Fairy Flies (3DS, 2014)
This game was the highest RPG on the list until late December, and it’s a pretty good one. While the plot is a bit weak, I quite enjoyed the character work with Edea/Agnes/Ringabel. The game’s character work becomes a little less good later, emphasizing its pretty bad plot instead, but I forgave it for that. Even for Braev Lee, who in the face of being able to make you understand what he is doing, instead blubbers mysteriously and fights you with honor, and still doesn’t tell you the truth even when you beat him. What a dick. DeRosso and Yulyana are two other failed characters, and they command enough of the game’s later plot to be a drag, but…
What I found less forgivable is the end of the game and its repetitive boss fights and the characters’ facepalming-worthy inability to figure out what the player knew. I thought it would be one of my favorite games of the year for sure in the first few chapters, but it’s held back by its major lategame plot issues which bleed into the gameplay.
Speaking of gameplay, I think this game has one of the best job systems I’ve ever seen, allowing you to mix and match classes in awesome ways. It feels like you have so many different avenues for making distinct characters, and a lot of the classes are pretty good. I also like that it doesn’t have the stupid thing with Freelancer like FF5 – I always got annoyed that Freelancer/Mime was the superior choice in FF5 lategame. I also love the cute little outfits that all the people wear. ^_^
Overall I think it’s a pretty cool game. It is the FF5 spiritual successor that I always needed in my life, but the game is derailed by its lategame problems.
9. Pokemon Omega Ruby (3DS, 2014)
There’s not a lot to say about this game. It’s Pokemon, and probably one of my favorite installments to date, as a combination of Gen 3 ad Gen 6. Its plotting isn’t a complete mess like Gen 6 and it has more challenging gyms than it as well, although the trainers are worse. And it has PokeAmie, which allowed me to pet things for hours, especially since I brought a Piplup into the game. :D
8. Devil May Cry (PS2, 2001)
I decided to try my hand at Devil May Cry, partially in preparation for playing the controversial Bayonetta series, but also because people had said it was fun. It is fun. At first I was not sold on the game because the camera drives me absolutely crazy, but as time went on I began to have a greater appreciation for the game’s interesting gameplay ideas and fun bosses. Also, Dante is a total babe and I want to play as him again. Its plot is hilariously bad, and it has the scene of ridiculousness, but fortunately it doesn’t consume very much of your time. I think the game does a decent job with atmosphere? I feel like the best way to make a game seem scary is to make enemies difficult so you are actually scared of them, so bonus points for that.
7. Kid Icarus: Uprising (3DS, 2012)
3D action games are all the rage in this segment of the ratings. The game’s a fun little combination of rail shooter and action game, and it’s an enjoyable romp. The cast of Viridi, Hades, Pit, and Palutena is great for laughs, and the game amused the hell out of me with its bizarre, off-the-wall humor. I also really love its character portraits. I think it’s a weaker action game than Devil May Cry and I found the shooter gameplay a bit tedious, and the game is hell on my hands, but it’s still worth playing and is quite fun.
6. Theatrhythm: Curtain Call (3DS, 2014)
This sequel to Theathrythm is basically the same game with a couple of improvements, primarily that it has way more songs and allows access to the characters you want quicker. In the original TR, you had to go to great lengths to collect specific shard for every character and without doing the random, annoying Dark Notes, you wouldn’t get the characters you wanted. In this game, you get characters by just playing normally, and you can choose between five characters or so from every shard, which gives you a lot more options to customize your experience. I like a lot of the added characters, including Barret, Edgar, and Vanille, as well as people that were only in the iOS version like Tifa, Serah, Ramza, and Hope.
They also tried to make the FMS stages more challenging, which is definitely a nice improvement, although they are still easier than BMS stages. The imbalance feels less extreme now, though, which is good. I actually feel like I can die on FMS even when I am fully practiced if I run into a difficult song.
I also love that they added in some music from other Square games, including Bravely Default and Chrono Trigger, for DLC. Thumbs up. You can argue that this sequel is a bit too much like the original, but I like the original so I really can’t say I care. But if you’ve never played either, I’d recommend just playing this one.
5. Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (DS, 2008)
Order of Eccelsia is a game that coasts solely on gameplay. It has to, because its plot is dumb, its cast is beyond bland, and it has the fine Castlevania tradition of making the true ending unlockable (for all that it’s less difficult than average to access). Fortunately, because of the well-designed bosses (except the crab, but fuck that guy) and the interesting weapon system which gives you pros and cons to everything and you really have to change your stuff based on situation, it succeeds at offering a very enjoyable gameplay experience.
4. Super Metroid (SNES, 1994)
This was the third game series I dragged out of the archives to play, and it’s my favorite. It’s a very atmospheric game with a space thriller feel, and the gameplay is quite solid as well. The non-linearity is in a way that generally works, although occasionally I found myself a bit stumped by some of its weirder things. There’s a few things about the game that expose its age – the strange, unexplained (except by gesture) wall jumping mechanics and a couple of odd, poorly designed bosses, but overall the game is quite good.
3. Mario Kart 8 (Wii U, 2014)
I defended my thesis after a horrific graduate school experience on May 26th, and decided that my pining after a Wii U because of adesperate need to play the new Mario Kart was sufficiently pathetic, so I bought it for myself for a graduation present.
What can I say? It’s console Mario Kart. It’s amazingly great for multiplayer for players of varied skill levels. The game, much like Hyrule Warriors, is beautiful and bright and cheerful and makes me happy. I also love its jazzy tracks; a step above the corny music from old Mario Karts, IMO. The tracks are amazingly fun, the DLC is fabulous, and I love the F-Zero and Zelda adapted stages.
I generally give this game the nod over MK7 because playing multiplayer all on the same screen just feels more fun, somehow. That’s basically it. Both games bring back the coin system and have better stage design than Wii, and the games feel like two halves of a whole.
2. Hyrule Warriors (Wii U, 2014)
Meeple often tries to whip me into watching videos of stuff, and usually I ignore him because I am too lazy to listen to other people talk. But on the day of the Nintendo E3 stream, I decided, okay, fine, I’ll watch it. I had just bought the Wii U a few days ago and I was interested in seeing what kind of stuff I could look forward to playing on my shiny new system (if anything).
The game that really caught my eye was Hyrule Warriors, a gorgeous Zelda and DW crossover. While I have never been a Zelda fan, I was immediately excited about the game, between all of the playable female characters, the great art and graphics, and the varied fighting styles. So I preordered it, and prepared to play as Zelda, who is a badass motherfucker AND girly AND stylish in pink so fuck you.
Gameplaywise, the game is like a 3D action game, with a lot of bosses and sub-bosses, but it also has the strategy elements of taking and giving up keeps. Mooks mostly exist to interfere with your ability to manage bases rather than being an individual threat, but it works pretty well. I think the game is at its best when you have to juggle different objectives while trying not to die, either via health or by losing your base.
So I played the Legend Mode, which is decent but does not have quite enough Zelda playing for my liking, although it is cool in that it tries to get you to play as different people, even featuring a section where you play as Ganondorf conquering Hyrule. The story is pretty stock but has some sweet moments. I like how the story portrays Link and Zelda as partners and allies rather than love interest or damsel and hero. And the game tries to give Link a character flaw! Crazy! I’m pretty fond of the female villain Cia as well; she’s not a good person nor is she particularly redeemable, which is actually kind of nice to see in a female villain! Impa’s pretty cool as well as the general of the military, and I love her badass new redesign. Also I like to ship her and Zelda because they start the game together in Zelda’s bedroom. OTP, obviously. The game shoehorns in crossover Zelda characters by having a small time travel plot. A free DLC lets you play as the villains, and Cia is pretty broken.
But the Adventure Mode is where you get full reign to let hijinks begin and play as Zelda as much as your fangirl heart desires. And I did. There are tons of different map conceits, all with objectives that you often need to balance to win. The 3D action game elements and the DW elements combine together to make it a pleasant experience. And with so many weapons to experiment with, I never got bored. I even downloaded all of the DLC, giving the Nintendo Overlords all of my money. I finally stopped playing when I went to Oklahoma, but I am getting twitchy thinking about all the incomplete stuff…
The music in this game is pretty great; heavier, more rock versions of Zelda music is generally up my alley. I love both the environments (Skyloft is a particular favorite) and the character designs are great as I mentioned. I also love all of the victory scenes and stylish boss intros. It’s so bright and cheerful, a contrast to the drabness of the average ‘realistic’ looking game. And now I am motivated to play Twilight Princess thanks to this game. :D
1. Super Mario 3D World (Wii U, 2013)
This is probably my favorite Mario game since the NES days. It combines the strength of Super Mario Bros. 2 (the ability to switch between characters based on which stage you are doing) with more modern punishment for death and level design. The game brings in the wall jumping mechanics from the New Super Mario Bros. series and brings the 3D Mario feel to a 2D level design. Playing it, I was immediately surprised by how much the game blends all of those elements so nicely.
It adds a major outfit in the Cat Suit, which is quite potent on many levels and very useful for nabbing some Green Stars but it is hardly in the Shroomcoptor / Cape tier of silly items. You can skip some things but it doesn’t help with platforming at all, and you need to be at short range to kill enemies and you can’t just float above them. Leaf is back in this game (as well as in 3D Land) but doesn’t have flying so it is reduced to a short range killing and platforming item. Flower is back in its traditional role, and Peach looks so cute with her ponytail in the flower outfit. :) There’s also a Hammer Bros. suit which is pretty cool, but again not super potent.
The game has a pretty nice difficulty curve; the first few worlds are a little too easy for me, but I understand that a lot of people playing the game may not be that experienced at the genre. By the time you get into the meat of the game, though, the challenge is quite nice, and the aftergame levels are quite challenging. The game throws a variety of creative stages at you, and most of them are successful. The bosses are colorful and fun, even if they aren’t always the most challenging. The later stages of the game tend to have fairly consistently good stage design in particular.
The aftergame is 3 worlds plus an extra secret world for collecting all of the stamps / green stars / goalposts. The first aftergame world is just a Super Mario Galaxy-themed world, with Rosalina joining as a PC after the second stage. Most of the stages are quite tricky and challenging. The second two aftergame worlds are primarily difficult remixes of earlier stages, often either imposing major time limits or putting them in the dark or making the platforming harder in some way. The stages don’t feel all that similar to the original ones usually, and the stages often take advantage of your previous knowledge of the old stages. After collecting the ton of items, you get to the mega aftergame. One of the stages is a 30 room marathon of these 10-second-time-limit puzzles, which you have to succeed at all of them in a row to beat. That was quite challenging. The second is a Captain Toad stage which is pretty tricky, and the third is a hellish nightmare of a stage, with all of the most annoying stuff in the world smashed into one stage.
Captain Toad stages I enjoyed for what they were, although I’m not sure how it will translate into a full game. I mostly loved their music and their cuteness.
I think the game is quite a success aesthetically, with both crisp and colorful graphics and awesome, mood-setting music.
I mostly played this game on single-player, although I did a few stages on multiplayer with my friend. It was fairly enjoyable, although I’d say the game is less optimized for it than NSMBU.
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A great year for gaming, my dears! Hope the next year is just as fab. <3
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23. Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii, 2012)
This is probably the game on this list that I have the most conflicted feelings about. I borrowed it from Meeple, which I greatly appreciate BTW since I know the game is quite expensive, and had it for a few months before finally deciding to sit down to play it. It has an interesting setting idea, this kind of friendly post-apocalyptic setting where people are just trying to stay happy and trying to get by through the bad times. It worked pretty well for me overall. The earlygame does a good job of developing that setting, and the three party members in that arc are pleasantly enjoyable. The gameplay isn’t very good at first, but a lot of games have pretty bad gameplay earlygame because you’re getting used to the system still.
This may literally be the nicest thing that anyone has written about Xenoblade ever. I thought that especially the first part was written by robots badly attempting to mimic humans because there is a 0% chance that humanity would build at minimum 9 colonies, have at least seven be destroyed, and still call the place where they live...Colony 9. Seven destroyed colonies literally enshrined in the name of their town, but no one seems to realize or think on this at all. It's too bad, because I agree that the other stuff was solid early, but that just took me way too far out of the game.
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Maybe they really liked Babylon 5.
"Hey, the first four stations either failed, exploded violently, or vanished from time for no good reason, killing thousands upon thousands of people. Maybe we should at least start calling them something else? No? Okay, whatever."
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You don't even need to go into fiction for cases of this happening...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
So yeah, don't think the naming of Colony 9 is a big deal. (Although the other Apollo astronauts were damn well aware of what happened there, so if XBC makes it a "plot twist" that everyone knows the other 7 colonies were blown up but nobody thinks too hard about why or what could be done to prevent it happening again, then that'd be an issue.)
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1. Defense Grid 2- (9/10). Sequel to Defense Grid. I don't like it as much as defense grid 1, but it's a fantastic tower defense game and a sequel to one of my all time favorite games. Defense Grid was such a complete games in terms of game engine and challenge that it makes it extremely difficult to improve upon it. Unlike OMD1-->2, the changes to the system were a mixed bag. Still, it's a great tower defense game, goregous to watch and a ton of fun to play.
2. Mana Khemia 2- (6/10). Total opposite of Bravely Default. The start is absolutely horrendous, but it picks up as the game goes on. Some good character work (Lily, Raze, even Whim) and excellent writing covers up for a really bad plot. Gameplay is bubblegum. It's tasty and consumable but nothing more than that. The usual MK issues apply here (Too anime at points, creepy characters, IC issues) but I still enjoyed the game quite a bit by the end. It's overall rating was helped a ton by finishing strong, which is hard for RPGs to do with me.
3. Bravely Default (6/10). Fantastic start for the first four chapters. After that, *flush*. There are flashes of good writing here (Edea and Ringabel, the plot twist) with a ton of bad (Tiz, Agnes, BRAEV FUCKING LEE, everything after C5). Where my issue with the game lies isn't that, but in how boring and repetitive the last chapters are. It absolutely kills any interest in replaying it or doing side stuff. There's just too much pointless filler. It's too bad, as this had potential to be one of the best games Square had released since Front Mission 4.
4. Fire Emblem 13 (5/10). It's FE with a bunch of cool polish and a couple design choices I hated (Ninja reinforcements is a killer in this game). The issues I had with game balance were enough to put it below FE7/8. Nowi's repulsive too.
I am bad about playing new games nowadays.
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I did not play many games this year, and a few of them got stymied by the theft of all my consoles (e.g. I'm probably never going to finish Tomb Raider).
Final Fantasy Theatrhythm: Curtain Call
This scratched a rhythm-game itch that I'd had for a while, and with familiar music that I like. So that's good. The gameplay is easy to get into and mostly lets you feel your way through the song, which is key for the genre. And it's tough to overstate the initial “oh, that's neat” factor of playing The Decisive Battle, Prelude, etc., in a music game. On the whole I kept wanting it to be better than it was, though. The RPG elements just kind of exist in their own world separate from the actual gameplay; aside from a very small number of bonus songs, you're just unlocking different sprites that can dance around in the background while you hit notes. (Another thing that bugged me: All the art is in the same hyper-SD style when they could have had such a wide variety of looks for the characters. Missed opportunity.) And speaking of unlocks, the fact that there's a disgusting amount of DLC is even more annoying given the paucity of in-game song unlocks. I bite my thumb at you, Square.
Tomb Raider
This one's tough for me to rate because I didn't finish it and probably never will. (Thanks, burglars! Enjoy prison!) What I played was alternately engrossing and frustrating – in many of the pitched combat or sneaking scenarios, a wrong turn or a bit of bad luck with an enemy seeing you can equal instant death. But when it's clicking it's a very pretty game with good exploration and probably the best story treatment Lara Croft has ever gotten.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
One of those high-concept indie games that have gotten so thick on the ground lately, but a really good example of the genre. The controls take some time to pick up, but it's a rewarding process and the world has solid exploration opportunities. The storytelling is blatant heartstring-tugging, but what the hell, it works. The last sequence worked really well on me, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
New Super Mario Bros. 2
Basically the definition of a filler Mario game, which means it's still fun to play from beginning to end. The lesson here is that NSMB formula had enough life in it to wring out another nine worlds, even though the game doesn't do anything new. It's Lost Levels without the difficulty, and there are worse ways to pass the time than that.
FF Dimensions
One of two new takes on FFV I played last year, and on balance I think it's the more successful of the two. (Although I haven't actually finished Bravely Default, so mastering classes may change that assessment; you'll note BD isn't ranked here). It has the conceit of handing you control of two teams – the Light Warriors and the Dark Warriors – and dividing the available jobs depending on whether a character is Light or Dark. So you're building two groups of PCs simultaneously, and you have to go in different directions with them. Lategame jobs are distinct enough that even if you go with a basic bruiser/bruiser/spellcaster/utility team composition on both sides, you'll end up with characters that behave notably differently in those roles. Plotwise, while the game quickly falls into a procedural pattern, it serves its purpose well enough.
The Banner Saga
It doesn't do anything perfectly but it does a lot of interesting things well enough to be engaging. The art is absolutely gorgeous, the battle system has some interesting wrinkles, and the whole Oregon Trail-ness of the main game is...well, it's a lushly illustrated 2014 Oregon Trail clone. How often do you see that? There's a definite tendency for bad luck to spiral out of control in both the combat and the caravan modes (I have to assume that was deliberate; they linked your characters' health and attack power, which means that when things go bad in a fight they get worse fast) which can get demoralizing over a long play session, but if you don't mind that kind of thing I highly recommend it.
Super Smash Bros. U
HD Smash with a great roster and solid controls. What's not to like?
SRW Z3.1
Holy shit, I liked a console SRW?! ALERT THE MEDIA. Seriously, Z3 is a friggin' amazing-looking game that throws some new curveballs in the gameplay department. It's not actually challenging to finish, but there are new and entertaining ways to control fights thanks to the tag tension system, and SR points are generally set at a good point for being non-frustrating but challenging. The ability to set your own music as a unit's theme song is very welcome and I look forward to it staying a fixture on every SRW for systems that allow such things.
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Guys! I'm in panel 4 of this comic!
(http://drmcninja.com/comics/2010-09-17-20p17.jpg)
Not going too much into detail because with some exceptions you've already heard of and formed opinions about these games, and I'm not passionate enough about the subject to pontificate at length about it.
#FuckIsWrongWithMe. Cookie Clicker and assorted idling games - Guys these games all suck. But I played them. Oh boy did I play them. I need to never go to a casino goddamn. I played a lot of them. I felt really, really ashamed after.
14. Breath of Death 7 - Not bad by any means but easily the weakest game I played that wasn't clicker games. Really needs a difficulty between medium and hard, because it actually has a neat twists on the DQ style of gameplay. Fluffy and by no means bad, just nothing special.
13. LISA - It is despicable and horrifying and wastes your time and frequently gives the player the middle finger and I think I may have really enjoyed it.
I want to hate this game, I really do. But I can't. It does what it set out to do very well.
I want to have this game up higher, I really do. But I can't. It does what it set out to do too well. It is a chore to play. If you have interest in the game, I'll likely replay it to find all the sekretz and characters I missed in LP format so you don't actually have to PLAY the goddamn thing.
Come next year I'll still viscerally remember it which is more than I can probably say for any other game on this end of the list.
12. Brothers, A Tale of Two Sons - Neat little puzzler with a cool gimmick that ends before it gets boring. Fluffy plot but hey. Worth the 10 bucks, definitely recommend it if you see it on sale.
11. Hearthstone - Card game. More fun than it ought to be. Very, very boring to watch though (sorry Otter).
10. Random Horror Games! - The three I played this year all occupy a similar space in my head. Amnesia is a great atmospherically driven game with decent stealth gameplay and good puzzles. The Witch's House is great for all the ways that you can die fantastically. Ib probably had the best character work of them all, and had great endings, even if Gary is literally the worst thing ever. Probably Amnesia > WH > Ib but meh they're so close together anyway.
9. Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm - Unfinished, still good. So out of practice so playing it is actively stressful but it's still fun. Haven't played multiplayer since WoL but I spend a fair amount of time watching tournament matches and a far as a spectator sport goes it's more satisfying than even WoL was.
8. FTL Faster Than Light - This game is punishing but a whole lot of fun to play. Someday I'll beat the game with a ship that isn't Super EZ Mode. Someday.
7. LFT - Sorry, Laggy, but if it's any consolation everything that beat this is really, really, really good. Great hack, got to show Laggy how bad I am at tactixx. Still need to do the Colliary but meh.
6. Starbound - 2D Minecraft Beta with exploration and a whole shitton of content. Played this on the cusp of the New Year with Laggy and it had me for a good two weeks before it let go. Recently booted it up again and there is so much more content now that it's ridiculous. If spelunking to the core of a planet, mining out its resources, crafting weapons and armor from said resources then high-tailing it out to go explore dungeons or beat up penguins sounds even a little bit interesting I recommend checking it out. It's still in beta but it promises to be an amazing game when they hit full release.
5. Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Project M. - One of the teachers that lives a couple hours away wanted to get together for Smash and insists on playing this. I'm one of the few people who thinks that Brawl was an improvement upon Melee in almost every single way, but I'm the only person who plays well that I know of who holds this opinion. In any case, I like it well enough, it's Smash. The best part about it, though, is that Zelda is the best character. As someone who insisted on trying to be good with Zelda (NOT Sheik) in SSBM this is enough to make it good.
4. Super Smash Brothers WiiU/3DS - I've only played this a handful of times but it's good. Feelings about removing Lucas but having a roster of 4.5 goddamn Fire Emblem scrubs aside, it's pretty great. Any game that makes Zelda good makes me happy. Also, Wii Fit Trainer is hilarious and kind of stupidly good. Only higher than Project M due to Project M being a product of neckbeard tears.
3. Guacamelee - Guys, if you want a new Metroidvania go play this NOW. This game is excellent, and fairly funny. Great combat, neat platforming, and while the tricks you need to sequence break and give the middle finger to the game's linearity are obscure as hell, they are there if that's your bag.
2. Civ 5 - I think that was this year that I started playing, anyway. Addictive as hell. It becomes a little too trivial by the time you get mortars, since you're either so far behind that you can't catch up or you are so far ahead that the AI is just screwed, but fortunately the fun part of the game is the early game anyway. I play like a warmongering asshole because the other options are pretty boring and if I wanted to play sim city I'd just go play sim city. Should be noted that I haven't toyed around much with Brave New World, which I've heard makes culture victories way more interesting. I'll probably get around to it someday.
1. Dark Souls - This comes as a surprise to nobody. This game is one of the best I've played, ever, much less this year. It's not without its flaws (holy hell, that broken [as in, doesn't work] multiplayer system. At least the PC version has a patch that lets you play with other people, which added an enormous amount of value to the game), but despite that it has me coming back for more punishment even after I've gotten sick of it for a while. I only wish that I had the chance to play this sooner. Mad propss to Cid and Fenrir for getting me interested in the game.
I believe that's all I played this year. Except for the skinner boxes, though, I can at least say that I enjoyed every game that I played, so hey. Good for me. And Good for You, too. It really says something about how much I enjoyed my games this year that LFT is somewhere toward the middle of the list.
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So, some people bugged me to post here. I'm really not sure why, given that my gaming habits have fallen so far out of sync with most of the rest of the DL, but I will do my best. Frankly I didn't play and don't remember much from the first half of the year. <boring life drama>I spent most of Dec '13/Jan '14 being horribly sick and dealing with a good friendship falling apart, and the next few months being horribly stressed out about my brother's wedding, and then most of May juggling paperwork and housework as the rest of the family jetted to Hawaii.</drama>
From those months, I do remember Minesweeper. Lots and lots of Minesweeper and Freecell, because they were available in one click and just short enough to occupy a brain madly running in circles. Expert, no flags/right click usage, 451 seconds. Not impressive but whatever.
Magic: The Gathering is assuredly the game I spent the most time on over the year, between watching, reading articles, podcasts and playing myself. Probably the rest of this first post will be about Magic.
Theros block, Magic's journey into Greek mythology and the themes of "Heroes, Gods and Monsters"... well, let's hit the elephant in the room first. I don't think Theros block Magic was a very good game. It was a resounding "meh" and the closest thing to a bad set (or sets) that the game has seen in several years. I think a majority of the pro players and critical perspectives I've seen share this view. No, it wasn't absolutely unplayably terrible, and yes, Theros was the best selling set of all time until Khans. That doesn't say much, though: Magic's playerbase in general has followed a steady growth curve, and EVERY new fall set has been the new best selling set of all time since at least Scars block, and probably further back. Taking absolute sales in a vacuum to mean that every successive block has had inherently better design and fewer flaws is quite laughable.
I'm already slipping at ways to organize talking about Theros block, because one of its central flaws is that none of its three sets feel or play differently from one another. Born of the Gods and Journey Into Nyx both, even more than most small sets, feel like they lack any inherent identity. They're just "more Theros," filling out the rest of the pantheon, filling out the rest of the Temple lands cycle (whose idea was it to split them 5-3-2 over the sets?!), and playing out incredibly minor and unsupported versions on the already established themes. Quick, how many Tribute or Inspiration cards have you (hypothetical loyal reader who cares about the same games I do) thought about or seen played lately, say after the release of M15? Zero? Yeah, me neither. I had to think for a moment to even remember the name of the Tribute mechanic, and I can't honestly recall if it's Inspired or Inspiration. Constellation, on the other hand, is THE block mechanic, the enchantments matter theme that a huge portion of the audience was looking forward to... and it was held back to the last set in the block, and even there restricted to only a couple of remotely playable cards.
Maro (Mark Rosewater, head of Magic Design and semi-official general spokesman for the game's internal workings) has spoken at some length in his articles, podcasts and blog about why this happened: their design philosophy not only upholds holding back as a virtue, but is based upon a perceived NEED to hold some juicy things back. To not give the audience everything they want at once, in order to spread the demand for a block's concepts out over its component sets. To conserve ideas, to conserve design space, so that mechanics can be reused and revisited years and decades down the line in future sets. Restrictions breed creativity, he's fond of saying, and any given set only has so many "complexity points" it can allocate to various concepts and mechanics. Not enough restraint, too much complexity, too many risks at once, leads to overstimulation, confusion and oversaturation among the audience, ideas being played out, and that's why they try to drip feed new concepts and mechanics.
He has a point. That's all fine and good. But as Theros block demonstrates, there's also such a thing as showing too much restraint. At the end of the day, the name of the game in making Magic isn't "restrictions breed creativity" or "manage your design space carefully." The name of the game, the real central tenet that needs to be kept in mind, is exactly the same as it is in every other entertainment industry: "Give the audience what they want."
Example: Maro says Constellation was held back because their plan was that Theros was "a block about enchantments," not "an enchantment block"? Well, too bad, they darn well should have found a way to make it an enchantment block, because that's what a ton of people have been clamoring for since freakin' Mirrodin a decade ago! But no, far from being an enchantment block, or even a block about enchantments, the block is actually the opposite - there are NO global enchantments! Except for one flaccid cycle in Journey, and, of course, the Gods.
Ah. The Gods.
The Gods... ... suck. They're terrible. Worse, they're obviously terrible, and don't do anything cool. Maybe a third of them, generously, are playable at all in any format. Not even Limited. Only one out of all fifteen (Athreos) does something outside the normal stable of card abilities to set people's Johnny senses tingling. One of the mechanically decent ones (Erebos) isn't even an original card, it's decent because it's a direct reprint of Greed, with some extra text that's meaningless 90% of the time. Another (Pharika) has almost the exact same ability as a marquee card in the concurrent core set (Scavenging Ooze)... except that Pharika's version is far worse and more limited in scope.
I think the Gods, above all else, are the root of most of the problems with Theros block. Enchantments were held back to make the Gods special, creatures were held back to make the Gods dominate the battlefield, removal was held back so the Gods wouldn't be too hard or too easy to deal with, mechanics and complexity were held back because such a large share was allocated to the Gods... and then the Gods themselves were held back and designed to be as safe and underwhelmingly conservative as possible. As far as I'm aware, they didn't even have pull with new or casual players after the brief spurts of release hype.
Enough about that though, I don't even play Standard or anything, what about Limited? Well. Limited is more centered around the Heroic and Bestow mechanics, and by centered, I mean that the more of the format people played, the more obvious it became that UW Heroic was The Deck To Be In and you either had Wingsteed Riders or a way to kill them or you were dead. Surprisingly enough (sarcasm), Auras are really, really strong when you can't get 2 for 1'd on them, and in fact often score a 2 for 1 by playing them yourself on the right targets. And a format where you can voltron up a huge thing so easily, and removal is deliberately held back to avoid feelbads from people's voltron attempts getting knocked down... well, then it's all down to who assembles voltron first, eh?
Ok, I'm oversimplifying there, but... not by much. I did, I dunno, let's check... around 80 drafts/sealed pools logged, over the course of the format, and some more I didn't log, and I watched a lot more in videos and streams. And I never want to play it or watch it again. It wasn't unfun. Just... limited. Restricted. It wasn't unfun, but it also wasn't fun, in any permutation. Got boring. I guess I can at least say that Journey is the best set for limited, for what that's worth, and the full block format or unofficial J/J/T or J/T/T were way better than anything involving Born of the Gods.
Augh I knew this would happen and I'd write a million words. Theros is done. Let's put it behind and move on.
Conspiracy! It happened. I didn't get to play it, because it was paper only, somewhat expensive, not replayable or internet playable or even recordable for videos or streams, and came out at the worst time of the year for me. So I have nothing really to say about it. By all accounts, though, it's super cool and fun and I hope someone cooks a special draft sim for it sometime in the future.
Vintage Masters! This on the other hand came out exclusively online, and while the real MTGO version was wayyy too rich for my blood, there was a lot of free sim action. Cool format, extremely well designed and manages to find and pull together a lot of old cards that fit modern design sensibilities astonishingly well. Goblins! Krosan Tusker! Storm! Dink Fandaygo, Greatest Thief in the Multiverse! ... Storm? Wait, no, not storm, don't draft storm...
After a moderate amount of play, the seams do start to show through, though. RW Astral Slide/Lightning Rift is the clear best archetype, Battle Screech is super busted and shouldn't be a common, Storm has maybe a 5% chance to get the magical christmas land packs that make it playable (but when the stars do align it's unbeatable)... Most of all, there are way too many rares that had to be included in the set for distribution purposes, but aren't balanced for limited in any way, shape or form. Too many unplayables, and then a few ludicrous "you win the draft!" bombs like Magister of Worth. It can't really be helped given the constraints of the set development. (but would it have killed them to make Magister a mythic?)
Final verdict: fun, unique, and an above average if swingy environment. If you want this sort of crafted half-cubelike experience on the regular, Modern Masters still exists as a better execution of the concept. Here's hoping MMA2 lives up to the high bars they're setting with these special sets!
Magic 2015: Penultimate Core Set Edition, now with Super Ugly Borders! Like seriously. Retch. Barf. The bottom of the new frame looks abysmal, and the holograms look super tacky. Really disappointing.
Oh yeah, uh, there's a set there too. It's kind of boring. The special invite cards are all very cool and a neat idea that I hope they reuse (with less tacky credits, though) but... http://magiccards.info/m15/en/40.html Draft this card and win. I know I just got done knocking on Wingsteed Rider and Battle Screech, but Triple Trouble here is like Battle Screech in a format that's even LESS prepared to combat it, and this time I'm not exaggerating about how it centralizes the format. Least staying power of any core set in recent memory. Thankfully VMA ran alongside its whole tenure online, so everyone had better things to play after giving M15 a... token draft or three. *rimshot*
Vintage Rotisserie Draft is not a common or Wizards of the Coast Officially Supported Format, but hey, this is ostensibly about games *I* played and I played in one of these. Eight players assemble, and open a single virtual pack consisting of one copy of every Vintage legal Magic card ever printed. Pick a card. What's taken is taken, no one else can have it. Go in order using a snake format (1->8, 8->1, 1->8 again and so on with seats 1 and 8 getting two cards in a row on their wheels) and draft 45 cards per person. Build a 40 card deck, with infinite basic land allowed as usual for limited formats. Fight round robin.
It takes a lot of time, but is INCREDIBLY fun and engaging. The draft portion, running spreadsheets and lists and cutthroat mindgames about who will take what when, is easily half or more of the fun, but it's hard not to end up with something crazy and fun. Everything is dangerous, and with awareness of some other people who run VRD regularly, a metagame forms around some very unexpected archetypes like infect aggro and Splinter Twin combo.
The one I was in died due to scheduling. I had the best record when it died though! I win? Sort of? Reanimator/Oath of Druids, Griselbrand and Iona, and a discard and storm package. Wanna do that again sometime.
Cube is Cube. There are many forms of Cube. WOTC official Cube is kind of lame, although better than it used to be. I have determined that yes, I am one of those degenerates who does indeed prefer high powered Cube. Not necessarily Powered Cube, but complex and powerful cards enabling a wide variety of strategies are my jam. Peasant/pauper cubes don't do it for me, I want to exercise my Timmy and Johnny sides, and get completely blown out by others doing the same. Cube is the best! The only difficulty is finding a good one to run, but even a bad cube is better than most things.
Khans of Tarkir is a really cool set, especially standing in stark contrast to the mistakes of Theros. It has its own flaws, to be sure. Delve spells are crazy broken. Jeskai Ascendency, part of a cycle of interesting, powerful, flavorful global enchantments that were barred from Theros by design, unintentionally enabled a filthy combo deck. Siege Rhino continues the highly unfortunate trend of constructed cards being intentionally pushed via stupidly under curve mana costs rather than interesting effects.
BUT MORPH IS BACK!
AND IT'S A WEDGE SET!
They gave the people what they wanted. It's great. Morph plays as great as ever, wedges and actual fixing support create interesting limited dynamics, the flavor is super good, and the cards in general aren't afraid to take risks and push boundaries (even if there are a suspicious number of cards aping specific Hearthstone cards, for the first Magic set to come out that would have been in design when Hearthstone first hit. cough cough.)
Khans is ... you know what, it's not even that good, it's no Innistrad or Modern Masters, but it's super fun and I'll take it any day. So let's end this overly long post that is really about one "game" on a highish note.
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Honestly I kind of dug Theros a bit, but I still agree with your assessment. It is crazy insular and didn't move far with its concepts. I think a lot of its flaws come from both the conservative approach to use of design space and a fear of strong enchantments warping the the game outside of the block. A hard push in some Enchantments could do some damage to R/B that would require them to find answers where they classically don't have direct ones.
Is it worth sacrificing an entire block at the altar of fear for colour pie and and long term design? I personally don't think so, but I dip in and out of Magic enough and play casually enough that I wouldn't see the damage. It certainly does fit into a neat oversimplified profile of Maro's psychology though.
I think the gods are honestly built more for Commander, which is Johnny and Timmy safe haven from Spike (it doesn't work until Spikes get bored though). They aren't great but they are low power Mythics so once the block is out of rotation they will be affordable and you only need one. I don't mean to make that sound calculated and cynical, but that is how I read it. I do also worry about that becoming a design crutch as well though. "It is fine in draft" comes up a lot and is pretty valid, but slippery slopes and all that.
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Caverna: The Cave Farmers: I was somewhat unsure about this game initially, given my dislike of Agricola. However, on the whole, I find the experience way more enjoyable than expected. The number of options, the available engines, and the fact that you can feed your family without an agonizing struggle makes the game far more appealing to me.
Still have some problems trying to play (learning how often to have children and when you should do it is hard =( ), as is figuring out optimal point generation. But hey. It created my group's new favorite game: Cow or Stick!
Glass Road: Seriously. I disliked Agricola so much that I continue to be astounded I apparently like most of Uwe Rosenberg's games. Glass Road is great. The resource wheel is surprisingly slick and the level of interaction provided through the card play simultaneously makes you feel super intelligent and super dumb. The 4 round limit is pretty intense, but, if you're smart, you can do quite a bit in that time.
Keyflower: Need to play this more. Clever worker placement game where the workers are legitimate resources that can move between players. Not quite sure I actually understand how to win the game, though. Fills a wonder niche of being a 6 player, shorter strategy game.
Smash Up: Silly little game. Plays quite similarly to a CCG, without the whole first C.
Tragedy Looper: Wins my award for coolest game idea of the year. Have not played it enough to actually decide if it is that amazingly good, but the concept and execution is damn slick.
Castles of Mad King von Ludwig: You know what is an awesome game concept? Building a fantastic castle that has the throne room through the guest bedroom and a set of stairs leading right to a bottomless pit. Removed Suburbia from my wishlist. Similar concept, but better player interaction and a shaped castle > hexagonal city.
Splendor: Fairly light game, but enjoyable. The poker chip weighted gems are great. More games need legit poker chips as components.
(More to come)
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Final thoughts on Theros - I didn't even mention the flavor. http://magiccards.info/jou/en/74.html Check that out. Notice the "may" in the ability. This card was designed to evoke and reference a specific myth, and was so close to succeeding, but then somehow, somewhere, it ran into a bizarre design woodchipper of "we shouldn't make mandatory abilities that might hurt their own player and cause feelbads!" ... and the result completely destroyed the entire point of the mythological reference. It turned a flavor success into a flavor fail and reversed any goodwill that mythology fans had for them printing the concept in the first place. Somewhere in the halls of Wizards, things went horribly wrong with Theros block.
... relatively speaking of course. It is still Magic, Magic is still laying an increasingly strong critical claim to being the best game in human history. Also want to note that "Maro" the public persona is a constructed corporate spokesvoice, and things as presented by Maro are absolutely not an accurate picture of what actually happens in Magic R&D. In fact they are not even a particularly accurate portrayal of Mark Rosewater the real person - google anecdotal accounts from people who have worked with him and you will find impressions of a quite different person than the diplomatic, family friendly Maro. When I talk about the oversimplified persona there, I am referring to the presentation WOTC gives us, which is deliberately simplified and sanitized on their end. The realities behind the scenes are surely considerably more complex than "Rosewater believes this so we do things this way."
A N Y W A Y let's go out of order and talk about some good video games.
FTL: Faster Than Light (Advanced Edition) is a game that I knew about for quite a while, and knew it was "good," but never could work up an actual interest to investigate it. It seemed impenetrable, hidden behind an arcane and painful looking interface and who knows what sort of gameplay actually lay beneath. Finally Laggy beat me into playing it.
It is, in fact, a very hard to penetrate game with an arcane and painful interface. I will go so far as to say that the interface is outright bad. It expects you to heavily micromanage some things, yet makes other things impossible to micro. Sometimes it automatically restores power to systems that had been unpowered for some reason, other times it does not, and if you don't notice the difference you can find that your oxygen was knocked out and not restored and your entire crew will suddenly asphyxiate with no warning except a tiny 4 point font blinking box that you never normally look at. Some actions can be queued and adjusted during a pause, other actions can be queued but cannot be taken back even if you haven't unpaused yet, and still others cannot be queued at all. You can box select multiple crew members and tell them all to go to a room, but if there is not enough space in the room for all of them, unlike every other RTS style game EVER, only a random selection of crew that will fit will move there and the others will not move AT ALL rather than trying to get as close as they can. Whenever you are free of danger, the FTL drive automatically charges to full and your teleporters have no cooldown, but there is no command for "everyone wounded go to medbay and heal up." You can rename everything, but the hangar doesn't save any of your renames, ever. The interface sucks and nearly stopped me from playing it.
But I kept playing it, perversely, and discovered that the game is... superlative. Incredible. Can't put it down. Most of all, it's unique. There is nothing else like FTL out there, not even remotely. Playing it is like stepping into a completely alien world, a parallel universe of gaming as though kickstarter funds had been diverted through some sort of time portal, and the strange intelligences there crafted a human vidsoft and sent it back.
http://listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=KDH8iYSeTU0#7._FTL_soundtrack-Mantis_Explore
Put this on. Go ahead.
That's the theme music for the Mantis, the hyper aggressive razor clawed insectile alien race.
Think about how any other video game would portray that, what sort of music it would use.
There is nothing else like this game.
Ben Prunty's incredible soundtrack is one of the game's key elements. There's no voice acting, limited text, and minimal sound effects. Only the soundtrack is the player's constant companion through the void, and it quietly impresses upon you that space is a void, that even though you're finding encounters and plotlines and occasionally spewing lasers, you are alone in a universe that is above all else space.
For all the flaws of the interface, it is intensely immersive. The tiny sprites of your crew members feel invested with agency beyond being stupid video game units. Some of the ships are bad, a lot of the ships are bad, but the worse a ship is, the more story it can have if you let it. FTL is a better horror game than most horror games and a better role playing game than any title that has ever been ranked in the DL. Yes, including Planescape: Torment - and speaking of that, did I mention Chris Avellone wrote for this game? Because Chris Avellone wrote for this game, and his touch makes the dialogue boxes a joy to read even when I've seen them a hundred times.
The gameplay is flexible. It's probably too hard, and some things are unbalanced, and there's a lot of RNG involved. But you can run quite a lot of things outside of the optimal path, and continue to find new combinations and uses for "useless" items and upgrades. The mandatory final boss fight is stupid, I thought at first... but only in context of thinking of the game like a normal roguelike. The more I play the more I appreciate it, even if it does force certain paths of play.
I wish there was more. More sectors, more growth, more options, more ships, more endings. More everything. But what exists is already so transportive that I am thankful just for that. Playing FTL is simply an unforgettable experience. This game is absolutely going to stick with me more than anything else from 2014. There is nothing else like it, and it is thing of simplicity and understated beauty. I wish I could make games like this.