The RPG Duelling League
Social Forums => Discussion => Topic started by: SnowFire on December 29, 2012, 06:24:27 AM
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What games did everyone play in 2012? Pretty much the followup to the 2010 (http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php/topic,5579.0.html) & 2011 (http://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php/topic,5905.0.html) topics...
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A very consistent set of games in 2012 for overall quality for me, even if the reason it came out such was wildly different. I played a whole ton of 8/10 games by my own personal scale, but finished fairly few games flawed enough to qualify for worse than an 8/10. (In my 2011 recap, which I never posted because Captain K jumped the gun and started the topic way too early in December, I have 4 9/10 games, all better than the low 9 here, two 5s, two 4s, and a mighty 3... I'll post that later, perhaps.)
Also, as per usual, this was a season of portable gaming with some Steam on the side. 5.5 PSP-on-Vita-via-PSN games, 1 DS game, 3 PC games, 1.5 PS3 games, and 1.5 Wii games.
Notable unfinished games
Final Fantasy 13-2, The Last Story, & Growlanser: The Wayfarer of Time. All are currently cruising for a 7/10 - FF13-2, I don't like how they changed the battle system (leader death != game over aside) and the game isn't quite as compelling as FF13; "fugitives on the run" makes me want to see what happens next more than "timeline bullshit problems, let's, uh, hurry up and solve them?" Serah is decent at least even if Noel is lame. The Last Story, well, that score can change a lot based on how the Story which is last turns out. Gameplay is clunky and awkward but still enjoyable so far. Growlanser WOT is a potentially 9/10 game with both a solid overall plot & battle system that loses massive points for pathetic otaku pandering like whoa. Bayonetta is literally aiming higher in the "games to be embarrassed to play" category.
In dramatic reverse order:
Decent but flawed
Ys I & II Chronicles
Boring combat, bad dungeon design, level is the god stat, plot that focuses in on the latest "get this magical item which will allow you to proceed" and ignores things like character development for either heroes or villain, add in a dash of old-school trolling in scenario design & hidden items... yet, all-in-all, I liked Ys I & II and would recommend it (as a 6/10, granted). Why? Well, the music is awesome. The plot, while BAD, is something to bounce off of, more so than average Zelda-esque minimalist plots. Some of the boss fights are interesting, like the Ys I final. It's reasonably short and doesn't outstay its welcome. Did I mention the music was great? And finally, the games just have charm. Hard to express but despite all the terrible, outdated ideas, the game clearly got some love, and it shines through. I'm willing to overlook some flaws for that.
Good
Catherine
Played on Easy because Undo! Undo! Undo! is so sanity-preserving. I usually preferred the game when it was heavier on time pressure than on perfect block manipulation / puzzling. Anyway... I'm glad that Japan was willing to make a game about late-twentysomethings in awkward relationships, even if it ended up melodramatic as all hell (as might be expected). Actual sinister plot reveal was pretty hilarious, I'll grant.
Puzzle Agent 2
A very high 7. Don't care about the puzzles, but actual plot resolution! Minnesota accents! Short & sweet! Docked half a point for blatantly rushing the ending, again, but at least the mysteries of Scoggings are mostly cleared up. Sort of.
Great
Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together PSP
Biggest upgrade ever, since TO PSX is so god-awful. Anyway, I love strat-RPGs on a map, and the larger party sizes of TOLUCTPSP help it stand out from the crowd. Some interesting twists too - I liked how "deaths" were handled, different schools of magic was a neat idea, game shows damage projections against anything, take-backs, etc. And of course for every neat idea there was a flawed idea - item crafting, skill progression, new classes starting at level 1, level being so godlike due to subtractive defense, some of the whole class-progresses-as-a-whole balance issues, hiding so many classes in the late game after it's inconvenient to experiment... but whatever. The plot has its low points (Catiua!) and its weird parts (the suicidal Galgastani commander who betrays his own troops and gets them killed so as not to sully his own honor as a traitor or something), but it's very ambitious and I love the script, so I'll focus on the positive here.
Ranks below the next games because despite having 3 pathways, I really don't feel a compelling need to replay the game, since adjusting the difficulty I'd face is so awkward with the whole classes-level-together thing.
Ys Origin
Hey it's more Ys. Great music. Idiotic plot... but at least the two mains in Hugo & Yunica are decently written as they ram into the stupidity that surrounds them. More importantly the gameplay is great, if you're willing to compenstate for the usual flaw that the bosses are balanced so much harder than the randoms such that the randoms are basically irrelevant and harmless if it's reasonably possible to take the boss on. (And the whole Ys level = god stat thing.) Ranks slightly below Oath because A) the art is worse in Origin, and B) Adol's swordplay feels more relevant there. Maybe Toal will be better on this, but Hugo is more about positioning + pew pew (Which is fine), while Yunica's specials kind of overwhelm any trickiness you can do with her axe in general.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
More Deus Ex, updated for modern sensibilities. I'll take it! Villainy could have been better - needed a screen-stealer like Bob Page - but it's Deus Ex gameplay with the ability to skip it and do constant takedowns from hiding if you want. I'm one of the people who *liked* the boss fights, too. Plot basically worked for me as well.
Portal 2
The first third of Portal 2 is fantastic, 9/10 territory. Falls off a tad in the middle, though, and the twist in your helper for the last third was a bit awkward. Oh well. Fun puzzling at least, and some reasonably awesome lines as expected.
Ys: The Oath in Felghana PSP
Yet more Ys. See Ys Origin, except plot & gameplay are slightly better, albeit replays don't get to change up to a new character like Origin. 2 and a half playthroughs of each game shows they did something right - it's not quite portable Devil May Cry, but close enough, good fun. Insert obligatory music hype as well.
Ys 7
Secret of Mana+. Works for me. The gameplay is actually worse than Origin & Oath IMHO - items are too easy a safety valve for the bosses (although it does make long boss fights more sane), and while the special move selection is cool, ultimately winning fights comes down to spamming the dodge button a lot. That said, I will give it an ever-so-mild overall edge on Oath because the plot doesn't fail as usual, but is actually sort of decent. Uber-generic in parts, yes (take a pilgrimage to THREE SHRINES, then complete FIVE DRAGON TRIALS, then COOK SEVEN EGGS etc.), but the game is so very close to an actually decent Ys villain. The endgame does its best to undermine the potential villains by suddenly deciding everyone is awesome despite all the muder & such, but oh well, there's clearly something to work with here.
Last Window: The Secret of Cape West
If Oath is all gameplay no plot, Last Window is the reverse, since the gameplay is practically nonexistent. Plot takes its freaking time to get into gear with Kyle Hyde, apartment busybody for the first half of the game, but when it eventually does, it's solid. As in Hotel Dusk, your reward at the end of the game is the truth and nothing more... but it's enough.
Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
It's a Fire Emblem game, I like the gameplay, and now I'm not limited to 1 forge per mission. Cool, we're already 8/10. RD certainly could have been a 9/10 game... it's got an epic plot, which I like. Big, sweeping, touches both the lowliest and highest born of Tellius... but dang if it doesn't derail in Chapter 3. My dislike of the general idea of Chapter 3 is strong enough to counteract my general liking of Chapter 1 & Chapter 2. And Chapter 4... okay, there are some really cool ideas here, and I certainly was not expecting the goddess of chaos & destruction to be on OUR side. Lehran's plot is also reasonably neat. But Chapter 4 also includes some of the stupidest plot twists (Micaiah's lineage, Ike understanding that Mr. Black Knight is a noble dude after all because murdering a single father out of some petty anime PROVE MYSELF THE BEST rivalry actually makes perfect sense) once again undercutting itself some. I personally would have liked it more had the plot not decided Yune was just really misunderstood or something too, and given her some entirely merited scariness. And lastly, have more darn 1-star flavor conversations! It's a good thing FE9 exists, because otherwise the number of lines some characters get borders on Shadow Dragon levels, which is not a good place to be. Bah. If I cared more about replays I suppose RD might have made 9/10 anyway since it's good for that, but there's a big difference between a 6-hour replay of Oath in Felghana and a 60 hour replay of Radiant Dawn.
Diablo 3
I thought I was Diablo-d out. I was wrong; Diablo 3 is different enough from D2 that it was worth hiking through Inferno, and I'm sure I'll eventually do more off-class playthroughs as well. The gameplay is smooth and better than "stand still while drinking health potions and clicking the left mouse button;" I got to feel like a badass Vaulting out of the way as a Demon Hunter before dropping some Caltrops and unloading arrowy death into monsters. The skillset switching means you can play around with different builds and abilities. The multiplayer integration is second-to-none - it's amazingly easy to walk into a friend's game or see who's on.
Oh yeah, I guess there's DIABLO PLOT too. Well. The animation is great, and there are some decent twists, but overall, yeah, DIABLO PLOT. But when the game is fun to play, who cares?
Excellent
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
Trails plays to my biases. It's an RPG with a setting that feels like an actual entity, and furthermore an actual entity at peacetime, that nevertheless never gets boring and yet never feels like it's breaking the supposed calm of "yup, everyday normal stuff here, the drastic emergencies are along the lines of arson rather than world-deverouing snake." Well, in the first 3/4 of the game at least. There's a metric ton of script in conversations that constantly update to feed your OCD if you want, but it's eminently skippable along with the more fetch-questy side missions if bored, so perfect. The battle system is mostly straight RPG with some minor positioning to care about, but it's fun, there's customization, you can steal bonus rounds with a special meter, etc. It's also nice to have an FFX-esque constantly updating initative track. The characters, while anime tropetastic as all hell at times, are charming and distinctive and humanized. The plot is a decent excuse to watch characters meet & grow & laugh & fight, and it has its own interesting bits, but this is most definitely a game that is carried by its localization & writing, which are just damn good.
Really, my only complaints are that the game is a tad on the easy side (the option to choose Hard mode before a complete runtrhough would have been nice...) and that this is very much an incomplete story on its own - if Trails Second Chapter turns out to be really stupid in its plot (if it ever gets to North America!) then that can retroactively push Trails First Chapter down some. This is a borderline 8-9/10, but I'll be generous for now.
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And oh yes. The strategy annex, which feels different enough to not be on the list. I played eighty bazillion hours of single-player strategy games growing up (Civ, Civ2, HoMM2, HoMM3, MOO2, SMAC, etc.), so yes I like them, but my patience for bad ones is kinda gone, I've played enough. Kinda hard for me to rate them now, actually. I've played 2 good strategy games but neither enough to know a score for sure, and briefly played 4 other Steam-maybes that sucked. I guess these are incomplete too?
Good-recurring-but-not-new:
StarCraft II, Magic: The Gathering Online. Nothing much to be said here, though I didn't play nearly as much SC2 as in 2011.
Good-but-not-enough-playthroughs:
Civilization V, w/ Gods & Kings: Fun stuff. I do like the new army combat a lot; far less tedious, more interesting things to do, etc. I like the tradeoffs they added to combat ICS; culture is really good, happiness is a big problem, so just the standard ooze-across-the-map approach has some huge drawbacks. I just need to, um, finish a game.
Endless Space: MOO2 with less insane micromanagement, and more epic space battle rock-paper-scissors. Sold. Although MOO2's allegedly branching tech choices were totally broken, I do wish the various races played a little bit more differently - the race-specific tech picks don't have quite as great an impact as they "should" it feels like. That and there are some beyond worthless buildings that seem to exist only to clutter up the build options.
Meh:
Spellforce 2 The Order of Dawn - The artwork made this seem like "for RTS fans who want more naked dark elves in their game" and playing the first hour or so of the campaign confirmed it. I was hoping for a WarCraft III variant, and I guess it is, but StarCraft II has spoiled me on older RTSes.
Suck:
Disciples 3 Renaissance - The most boring possible battle system you can imagine for a Heroes of Might & Magic esque game. You have a whole level-up system for your characters... that makes them switch from "hit" to "hit harder" by and large. WTF. How about some relevant special abilities?
Hearts of Iron III - Looked at the interface and the amount to keep track of for 2 minutes. Walked away. No, I am not going to play the Fuhrer's logistics ubermensch juggling individual tank divisions.
King Arthur - Boring combat that is a chore. Theoretically possible it improves when your heroes have more relevant things to do than chill & chop stuff up, but I doubt it.
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I'll put my recaps in their separate topic as usual because I'm an attention whore, but for now I'm amused at how well you encapsulate in one sentence how I feel about FF13-2.
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Hearts of Iron 3 is garbage, play HoI2 instead.
Just listing the new games I played that I remember. I don't think I am forgetting anything.
Orcs Must Die 2- Sequel to OMD,which I loved. It makes Nightmare mode much more playable, adds coop, and gives you more options in how to play the game. I approve.
Tales of Graces- Hit all the right notes with me. Fully adjustable challenge? Check. Unique growth system that rewards side questing and using different moves without being grindy? Check. Good character work? Check. Best game in the Tales series.
Final Fantasy 13-2- A massive step down from FF13 in terms of gameplay. Plot is like FF13's (real bad). The game does a decent job on character work. That and the ending save it from being a waste of time,but ugh. This should have been a 10/10 title. They already had an amazing battle system from 13, and fucked it up royally with screwing up class balance and adding monsters to the mix.
Tactics Ogre PSP- Unfinished and likely to stay that way. TO's combat system just does not catch my attention at all. Oh boy, let me wait for my mages to slowly gather MP while my fighters toddle into front lin combat! (Thank goodness for Archers) I think some of the remake changes are baffling as well- the marks system encourages the player to stay in a few classes for the entire game, and really hurts special characters.
I did very little in the way of playing new games this year. Travelling abroad is a culprit there, but nothing really caught my eye even before that.
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I'll give a legit post when the year actually ends, because I'm trying to squeeze finishing two last games in the next few days!
...I did the exact same thing last year with Sonic Adventure 1, where I think I literally finished it on December 31st, but could be mistaking.
Though, that does make it easy to remember what game I started this year with! Yeah, I intend to view each game in order I played them, roughly, and give an outline, because I had an...interesting and varied year? Yeah, let's go with that.
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Meanwhilst I'll just spam up this topic because reasons.
14. Sonic Generations (3DS)
Sonic Generations drops the ball even straight out of the gate. First thing you realize is that you're playing Green Hill Act 1... and it's literally the same stage copied over note for note into the 3DS engine. This is also true of Casino Night and Mushroom Hill. Well okay, but the modern stages are fine and Sonic controls really well and the game looks good, so maybe it was just a little homage to ease fans in?
Then you hit the first rival battle and it's basically just a doppleganger race. Those were bad enough in the good Generations when they were optional fluffy bits. Required 'boss' fights where the rival can actually interfere with you and basically cheat their way to always be ahead? c'mon. Silver mixes things up but not just being a straight clone of Sonic, but in the worst way possible and the stage basically requires perfect execution to complete.
You get through the Dreamcast stages and finally get something a little different, only to see the third bit of the game is only two zones. The best you can say for the game is that they shipped it 6 months early and they just patched the game over so it functioned. The equally likely scenario though is that this is a lazy cash in with just enough differences to sucker people into thinking it's good because the Sonic fandom is the worst.
On the upshot Dimps' love of Sonic 2's special stages finally produced a good variant where the goal is to maintain a continuous Boost, ie what you're probably doing anyway. So maybe they really did just not get a chance to finish it.
4/10. It never really produces a real antipathy despite having little good to say about it.
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Games I beat in 2012 listed from least favorite to favorite.
36.) Jaws
35.) Final Fantasy II
34.) BIT.TRIP VOID
33.) Onimusha: Warlords
32.) BIT.TRIP CORE
31.) Professor Layton’s London Life
30.) Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny
29.) Muramasa: The Demon Blade
28.) The Simpsons Arcade Game
27.) Mega Man 7
26.) Mega Man 8
25.) Yume Nikki
24.) Punch-Out!!
23.) Mega Man 5
22.) BIT.TRIP BEAT
21.) Onimusha 3: Demon Siege
20.) Mega Man 3
19.) VolChaos
18.) BIT.TRIP FLUX
17.) Skullgirls
16.) Abobo’s Big Adventure
15.) Mega Man
14.) Mega Man 4
13.) Super Mario World
12.) Mega Man 6
11.) Professor Layton and the Last Specter
10.) Seiken Densetsu 3
9.) BIT.TRIP RUNNER
8.) The TEMPURA of the DEAD
7.) Final Fantasy XIII
6.) Mega Man 2
5.) BIT.TRIP FATE
4.) Greed Corp
3.) Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
2.) Borderlands 2
1.) Katawa Shoujo
Plus a replay of Persona 4. I was a busy boy this year.
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13. Final Fantasy XIII (360)
I debated really adding this, because I finished it mid-January so it's hard to be sure now if I really played a meaningful amount this year or if it mostly carryover, but eh, whatever.
So this game. It should either have been way better or quite a bit worse than it was. The battle system has no right to work at all on paper, considering it's a system where class roles are rigidly defined, battles are so fast paced it's actually more efficient to let the game play itself, you can only control one character, that character cannot die without provoking game over, the system is built around changing classes on the fly but you can only do so if you determine before hand which ones you're going to use AND actually changing classes lets enemies get the jump on you, abilities are stipped down to bare essentials, and teh only meaningful way to get stronger involves a complete money sink in making weapons in a game where enemies do not actually drop money.
Yet the game gets away with it because every enemy is very tightly designed. There's two or three good ways to tackle any given enemy and careful observation and playing smartly will let you pick up on them and gives every fight a distinct flow and nuance to it. Well. That's not true. Every enemy once the game actually starts is that good. Up until chapter 9, or roughly 2/3rds of the game, enemies are complete jokes because surprise, 20 hours of the game are basically tutorial.
On the opposite end, the story should have been good. Cocoon is an interesting setting, the fal'cie have potential as the force of magic in the world, nevermind the deeper goddess stuff, and the premise gives us a good dynamic for character growth and a compelling narrative. None of which ever comes into a coherent whole because Toriyama cannot write his way out of a paper bag. All the elements are there but it's like someone went through and left the plot on a the cutting room floor... in a fucking video game, which can be as long as you fucking need it to be to tell the fucking story you're telling if you take the time to find the right order and manner to present it. People like to complain about Square since the merger, but it's bullshit. It's not that they don't care, or that they're shovelling whatever out the door, or that they're just pandering to the crowd in the lamest way possible. No, it's that nobody they've got left on staff has a fucking clue how to correctly use the medium to convey a story. And I don't mean arbitrary bullshit 'choices' or some indie stupidity about not using dialog at all because the entire story has to be told by gameplay. I mean using all the tools you have to enrich, enhance, and tie together the story you want to tell. Sometimes that's a boss fight, sometimes that's a cutscene, sometimes that's even just literally putting text on the screen to pretty music. But nobody who worked on this game knew any of those things.
For all that though, the thing is I was well into the game before I realized that they hadn't thought this shit out. And by that point actual gameplay actually worth my time came along. So it's not really a bad game. Just one with more wasted potential than I even want to think about. 5/10.
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In no order...
Ys: Ark of the Napishtim- Not bad. I can see why people would like Ys games from it, even if it wasn't entirely entralling. Simple, fun, but just a little bit lacking in every department that doesn't quite bring it up to average.
Growlanser 2- Another game which doesn't quite live up to the sum of its parts. I can't point out serious flaws other than a lack of depth- gameplay and storywise. But I can see why they do that here for the latter, with the sheer amount of branching story paths. Just doesn't work for a single-playthrough guy like me.
Atelier Rorona- Fun, fluffy, another game with the same problems as above. The characters and dialogue can be entertaining at least.
Enchanted Arms- A game that does average right! For whatever that means... despite cribbing a little bit from Narutoplot, I actually enjoyed this game. Doesn't try to do too much, manages some genuinely good moments, but just suffers from the effort and budget that went into it.
Persona 4: The Golden- Sits somewhere in between a straight port and top-down remake like WA:F, a lot of effort was put into it and it shows. The graphical details are enhanced, gameplay issues were addressed, some decent new content. It's absolutely worth playing even if you've played P4 vanilla a lot. Not quite happy with the nerfbat to Yukiko and Kanji's dungeons/bosses, but eh. The new content is also infected with some of the anime's influence, which makes it kinda funny most times but you cringe all the same.
Persona 4: Arena- Totally a good side-storyesqe sequel to P4. Story mode was really good, if a bit repetitive. It was interesting getting a feel for events and characters through characters other than Souji, even if said anime influence reared it's ugly head sometimes. Labrys' story alone is worth the price of admission. Game also introduces concepts that will hopefully be explored down the line. Oh, and it's a fun fighter too.
El Shaddai- Preeeeeeetty. But... shallow. But preeeeeeetty. And batshit crazy at times too. It just never lives up to anything it tries to be.
Dark Souls- Everything advertised. A bit easier to get into than Demon's Souls, to me. Having fun with it though even if it's been put down for the moment in favor of P4:G.
Heavy Rain- At times, accomplishes exactly what it means to and does it damn well, at others entirely frustrating and shits the bed. Just not enough was done to make the story gripping enough to contend with the system. A great first attempt at something like it though. Would really like to see the genre developed, even if it seems like it won't be.
Persona- The first Persona. It's uh. A thing. Flawed, not too great but manages to keep me playing.
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12. Sonic Colors (DS)
I can't bring up much to say about this one. It's... competent. The levels are a bit braindead, you can really just run your way to the goal without particular thought or creativity in it. But not really because the levels are predictable or badly done, they're just... breezy. The whatchacallit gimmick is okay, there's a good balance between levels built around it and just straight Sonic levels.
The last two stages of the game do introduce VOID, and VOID is an amazingly terrible idea, especially for a Sonic game. the first instance is pretty short and you can muscle through it, but the last stage of the game is just suffering. it's a stark contrast to the rest of the game and I really considered giving up on it, but many continues later that was done. Fortunately the final boss is actually quite fun and cancelled that out more or less, so we're left with just a fluffy timekill of a game. 5/10.
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11. Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War
I've come to the conclusion that some folks don't really play games that exist. Well, consume media that exists. But games. Anyway, if you present them with a game, when they play it they aren't playing the same game you would. They're playing the idea of the game.
Like, here's an example. In one of the Discworld books, they mention Vetinari does not listen to music. He instead sits in his office and reads sheet music. He refuses to listen to the music played because, he claims, that would introduce flaws and diminish the music. What he hears in his head reading the music is the only proper way to enjoy it.
FE4 is a game that inspires a lot of these sorts of people. They aren't really playing this game where every map takes 4 hours, where the inherent map design makes every unit that's not mounted functionally useless, where every battle eventually boils down to "point divine weapon at it, win", where each mission boils down to capture castle, fight enemies that spawn from next castle, repeat. They're playing a game they imagine, an epic tale that shows you fighting your way across the continent, of love and betrayal down the generations, a story between battles of characters building lives for themselves and laughing together. A game where thinking carefully about your units and how work together is rewarded, where the scope of fighting an entire army across a nation is realized. A game where each character is their own and has their own story waiting to be told.
So, y'know, it's an SNES game. One whose ideas were largely left fallow for nearly 10 years and 4 entries in the series. I'd really like to see a remake of this with more modern sensibilities, but seems unlikely. Ah well. 6/10.
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Hmm. Interesting review!
The big maps don't bother me since you can permasave everywhere, but that's the boring answer. They also don't bother me because they give the game an amazing scope? Between battles, you see the usual SRPG "world map with a lot of arrows showing which side is fighting which and where". But in the real game you actually explore a very large portion of that world map, and at the end of the game you will have explored pretty much all of it!
I just did an Internet search and found this:
http://fcfantasy.cn/sprays/fire_emblem_4/sfc_fire_emblem_4_world_map_of_jugdral.jpg
It is the best part of the game (gameplay sure isn't), but in the end, it is completely shallow and fits with everything you just said. But don't a hell of a lot of videogames artificially add grandeur in such ways to immerse the player more / add grandeur to the game? (when everything is just made of pixels anyway) And is it really a bad thing?
I feel that people fell from Red Dead Redemption (GotY everywhere) for that very same reason. Awfully boring gameplay, but riding into the sunset on your horse is cool. The game's charm has never worked on me though, unlike FE4's.
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Yeah. Despite the negative tone of the review, I do like the game overall and that's really why; it tried to be big and, while it fell short, I can still see the game it wanted to be and respect it for that. Which is weird for me, but whatever, sometimes games like that click and sometimes they don't.
10. Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor
This is a game I more just finished this year than played, since I was up to Day 5 the year it came out, but I played enough this year to have something to talk about at least. So... I think if I had finished this in 2009, it'd have been higher on that year's list. the basic premise is fascinating and the approach really sells the atmosphere, and limits the ways SMT Bullshit can really intrude on the game. The core gameplay is simple but with room for variation. The problem is I buzzsawed the sequel and thought "well shit, I should finish up the first rather than do half a replay of the second" and holy crap I didn't remember how just slow and bogged down and obtuse the original could be.
The last bit is really a shame too. I was shooting for the most neutral ending (Gin), and despite hanging out with him every time he came up I must have missed a few things because by the end my only ending options were Ayame and Yuzu, one which is intentionally designed as a Bad End and the other which is highly contrary to my own views. The trouble is there's nothing, mechanically, in the game to let you know how you're doing with each character and what events to prioritize. Goofy and abstract as it is, bringing in SOCIAL LINK GO in the form of Fate levels in the sequel was a complete godsend, and that game isn't nearly as complex in terms of endings.
Anyway. On its own Devil Survivor is a neat experiment that I'd really recommend to anyone just to see how they like it. But like so many games of that series, it has a lot of throwback appeal (it's probably most reminiscent of a PS1 game) and those factors keep me from really embracing it. It's an intellectual curiosity far more than a truly good game. 6/10.
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9. Sands of Destruction
Sands of Destruction is an amazingly unmemorable game. ANd really it relates back to the main problem with it. Nothing in this game is really taken and developed beyond a bare outline. It's really goddamned weird to actually play through, because it's like... it's almost like reading a story board to an unfinished movie more than playing a video game.
The thing of it is, I can't tell based on that if it's a good story or not. Like, it's really more.... weird than anything else. You're out to destroy the world because... Morte is fucked in the head. Except nothing we see actually shows her being fucked in the head. So apparently wanting to destroy this world is a completely rational response to this world. What the fuck man.
The gameplay is one of those fun little things where it was balance around the player having no goddamned idea what they were doing. I mean, maybe not actually balanced, but it SEEMS balanced right up until that point you realize how... uh damn I'm forgetting my terminology. But once you start linking together flurry attacks the game falls apart entirely. Nothing else is worth doing, and characters are easily ranked based on how many flurry attacks they can pull off without being stuck with a finisher.
And yet, it has a weird charm. There's just this little hook that jumps out at me and says "Look at me, I'm trying to be a magical Xenogears equivelent! See my desert craft and jesus main!?" I know, that sounds really shallow, but I'm not sure I can put it any more coherently. Beyond that, well, I am a sucker for games that break themselves for you, gotta admit. 6/10.
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8. Z.H.P.: Unlosing Ranger vs Darkdeath Evilman
So this game I completely ignored on release. Despite not really being let down by any NIS mainline games, what amounts to a Disgaea-flavored Roguelike just seemed so far removed from my tastes it was silly. What I hadn't considered is that this is a PSP game where you always get ahead. So by whatever whim I picked it up at all, once I started playing progress was pretty steady because picking it up and playing for half an hour, even if I completely botched whatever the active dungeon gimmick was, still meant I picked up a few levels and maybe snagged another base power levelup.
More than that though ZHP just has a good sense of what it is, and how to pace itself. The individual dungeons aren't really that long once you're sufficiently powerful for them, there's never an area that's just straight slugging your way through, which would get boring fast in a game with no skillset, the game keeps itself short but still has a full arc in both gameplay and story, it's just really well thought out.
The plot rides the line between being too obvious and being genuine, and by that I mean less that it stays on the line and more that it rapidly hops between the two most of the time. So a lot of times the more effective moments are undercut a bit by the next scene, both in serious and humorous moments.
It's not really something I'd ever play again, but it works for what it is and has a general fluffy enjoyability factor. 6/10.
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Get to the moneyshot already, CK.
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(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_QPtcDL7J5yA/TUBT1lISWEI/AAAAAAAAAYw/LB_2yoamYsk/s1600/dollarbill%255B1%255D.jpg)
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7. Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2
So I spent half the DS1 review talking about why this game makes it look worse. Still, in a lot of ways this game is cliche as hell. You could run down the list of Persona cast members and pick out which one the DS2 character is mimicking, and it's really prone to random anime cliche bullshit. but in a way this works to its advantage. Monster of the Week anime, and that's what this is (well specifically it's most closely related to Evangelion, but anyway), translates well to video games. The battles, while they can really tease you at times, are fun to play with and generally speaking you can muscle through if you want to just level a bit, rather than just blasting you in the face until you work out the gimmick, always a plus in an RPG because otherwise what's the fucking point. What's nice is that they give us a very self-contained continuity, but still present the usual SMT tropes. Because by not being burdened with the usual characters and traits of SMT's big figures, but having the same core philosophies, they can actually put each one in an interesting light that works well with the more Persona-inspired cast. It's telling that, presenting this game for the first time to most people, the most common ending they pick AO's, functionally the Lucifer equivalent.
There's not a whole lot of meat to the game, but what's here is quite enjoyable and you have some wiggle room to really gnaw on it if you so desire. Pretty much all I can reasonable ask of a DS game. 7/10.
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6. Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
I can think of nothing meaningful to add for this one. 7/10.
5. Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy
So this is the first time I've really played a Rhythm game. The bulk of them depend on either using special multi-button add ons that make no sense to me, or depend on positioning in addition to timing, meaning I completely suck at it. This game is a bit more like timed hits, but more than that it's music that I actually know and can find the beats in from memory without much reinforcement.
So y'know, it's basically completely awesome. The addition of level up systems to a rhythm game makes a lot of sense, but what they really are is a safety valve, a buffer between you and failure. Being able to alter that in such a minute way works really well, surprisingly enough. Beyond that, with one exception the song selection is pretty great, the different alternate modes make perfect sense in context of the game, and I would buy the shit out of DLC for this except I can't.
Seriously, just go try this out. 8/10.
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4. Tales of Hearts
So back in 2010, when it became clear that Namco had decided to abandon their faithful few and ignore the Tales series, I got a fever and had run out of the only cure. So I paid like double retail for a DS RPG I couldn't read. Good life decisions I know. Anyway, being a Tales game how much reading actually matters is kinda debatable to start with. I mean, sure, Skits, but other than that the plot's pretty easy to follow. Until I got to the point where I couldn't just follow the obvious pathways to my next destination and had to figure out where I was supposed to go on the world map. So then I stopped playing it for two years.
After a good hatbotting, I poked around at it for a bit and realized that what I took to be a sign saying "here is port for the sailing on boats" was actually a giant golden "go here you idiot" marker! And there was much rejoicing.
So... despite not actually knowing a damn thing that's going on, I find myself really enjoying this cast. Hisui's a bit of a wash I guess? And Kunzite's a lamer. But Shing brings a lot of energy to his role, the plot setup basically rigs the game in terms of liking Kohaku, and regardless of anything else about her, I did a double take when I looked it up and Beryl was not, in fact, voiced by Megumi Hayashibara. I swear the woman is actively doing a Lina Inverse impression. And when you remind me of Lina Inverse the rest is sorta irrelevant. Creed's a total wanker, but shock, awe, Tales villain fails.
So shallow praise for a plot I can't even freaking read aside, there's something about the combat that hooks me in a way most Tales games don't. Like... in most of the series, I generally set a short term combat goal (1 more level, learn this ability, etc) and then avoid enemies as much as possible and wait for boss battle. For about 90% of ToH I was actively seekign out enemies. Some of this is just the level up system; it's this weird thing where you collect items and use them to buy stats and skills, like some sort of bizarro world item crafting system. So you have to kill stuff to get items to keep that up to date obviously. But even without that, there was something viscerally satisfying about learning the correct juggles on enemies to keep them tied up, even though due to lack of reading I was using the same two or three moves for the whole game. I don't get it either.
But yeah, once I figured out enough of the system to actually progress I was glued to this thing. I'm told they're making a Vita update. If that actually comes over, Sony has sold me a goddamned Vita. 8/10.
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3. Persona 4 Arena
I suck at fighting games. I have no internet connection worth mentioning in context of video games. Repeatedly playing a fighting game has never given me an appreciable increase in skill at fighting games. So when I talk about P4A, I don't mean the fighting game by Arc System Works, I mean the visual novel by Atlus.
So there are problems with this, which I've probably gone over a few times. Yosuke, Yukiko, and Chie retread far too heavily, both in that their stories in this game are mostly the same and in that their character work is way too similar to their P4 arcs. Once you get past them and being kinda lame, this is a really great story. It plays out a lot like one dungeon would in Persona 4 proper, but the bad ends are a lot of fun, the little memetic character moments are delightful, and I find myself really caring about Labrys and helping her, which is always the mark of doing something right in this kind of story. Nevermind the way endgame resolves works me up about anticipating a game in a way that hasn't happened in a long, long time. Not just fun, but highly nostalgic. Crazy feeling to get considering we're talking Persona 4.
Dreams are Awesome. 8/10
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one sentence reviews the only reviews
BEEP - bad indie game
EDGE - bad indie game
Critical Mass - bad indie game
Lucid - bad indie game
Disney: Epic Mickey - bad Wii platformer with Pete so it's better than bad indie game
Half-Life: Blue Shift - 4 hours of some random dude FPS, at least it didn't glitch on me like the other HLs
Mister Mosquito - Infinitely more hilarious than everything else but too short and bad
Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker - the easiest game ever, unironically, then it goes on forever
El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron - Pretty and drug-filled then it ends instantly
Half-Life: Opposing Force - Glitching through the elevator, the game
Assassin's Creed - so you do the same thing 9 times but at least that thing is fun the first couple of times
Half-Life - this is cool until you have to noclip yourself out of a pipe, literally, the polish overwhelms me
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - the most average 10/10 game ever
Persona 4 Arena - less bad fighting game plot, decent gameplay, but hacking PS3 gives it CK syndrome
Yakuza 3 - play as yakuza, solve childrens problem for first 25% of game
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2. Tales of Graces f
If I didn't make it clear, I am all about the Tales series. Graces is very much a Tales game on the whole, but approaches the usual tropes in an odd way that helps it stand out a bit. Where most of the series feels like they plotted out the world and character arcs and just hope they find a good place for them in the finished game. ToG is much more deliberately constructed and makes a real effort to ensure everything they're doing makes sense in respect to the story so far. It's sorta like a reconstruction, except none of the Tales games (or none of the available ones) really deconstruct the series. Weird.
The biggest problem (... well, second, the return of Tales Series Fails At Villains pushes every other issue down a notch) is some key storylines are dropped midway when there was really some potential there. One of the things this game really banks on is the first chapter selling you on the characters while the next several take them some really dark places before going back to traditional Tales lightheartedness, and when you look at how Cheria and Hubert's plots resolve it feels like a damn waste because they set up the conflict between each of them and Asbel then... just... hit a peak and completely forget about it, never showing the rebuilding of relationship that really pays everything off.
But really, that's just the game could have been better. It still has the usual perks. Pascal is a delight, the way Sophie plays off the rest of the cast is great, the Malik and Richard Trolling Hour is amazing. There's still good character moments. Just... y'know, could have been better.
I feel like I didn't play the same game as everyone else at times. Most of the time there didn't seem to be a real logic on how to combo and what moves to set, you just tossed on whatever had the sort of movement/AoE you wanted and spammed the fuck out of it. If there was a natural progression to how you were supposed to exploit enemy weaknesses it soooo didn't matter on Normal. Decent enough playthrough, and there's something absolutely addictive about Titles as the levelup mechanic, but I'm just not seeing this as some grand evolution of the Tales battle system.
Definitely the best PS3 game I've got my hands on. Whatever that says. 8/10.
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Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice - who needs real SRPGs when you have ridiculous melodrama and lift/throw
World of Goo - a good indie puzzle game, the world must have ended
Yazuka: Dead Souls - play as yakuza, shoot zombies for 100% of the game
Pokemon White Ver. 2 - notably good pokemon single player, now let me talk about competitive or i could kill myself
Brave Fencer Musashi - Laggy approved gaming, with cheese
Serious Sam TFE - good oldstyle fps, although the skeleton bulls will rampage over me forever
Vanquish - move really fast and shoot people, when everyone else plays take cover and shoot people
Ib - good survival horror, though bitch ate my candy
Assassin's Creed Brotherhood - Ubisoft actually adding polish to a series, amazing
Assassin's Creed II - See above, except AC1 is awful so it looks much better, plus Ezio is swagtastic
Hatoful Boyfriend - I loved the birds, and the birds loved me, tenderly
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow - Good CV is fun, random drops less fun
Ys: The Oath in Felghana - It's so hard, and so satisfying, and so pretty
SaGa 2: Goddess of Destiny - The real best SaGa game, what is this SaGa Frontier nonsense I keep hearing
Shadows of the Damned - Garcia Fucking Hotspur and the dick jokes adventures, it ends up pretty awesome
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Posting mine in rough order of games played, because ordering them in terms of quality would drive me...I'd say insane but I'm already there but you get the idea!
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle: I finished 2011 playing Sonic Adventure 1, 4 days until I left for Israel, I played this one quickly! I found it aged notably better than it's predecessor, because ripping out the time wasting Hub World and Sonic/Shadow Stages were nothing short of great. Eggman/Tails stages felt like improvements of E-102's stages in SA1's, and Knuckle/Rouge...um, ok, those kind of sucked, but at least Knuckles had cheesy rap to bring a smile to my face.
Best part of the game of course is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9zZus_1_ag
Metal Gear Solid: Wait, Metal Gear Rising is being made by Platinum games and looks like a DMC game? CRAP! I have to care about the series now! Oh look, the game is $10 on PSn and can be played on my PSP, lets get started!
This is a very "For it's time" game. The stealth works, just anything outside of Stealth is...kind of bad. Avoiding combat is of course promoted, but then you go into a forced combat area like, say, a boss fight and the game sort of becomes unfun. The plot is interesting enough, I suppose. Still, the gameplay just isn't there for a modern game.
I will say this now: DLChat recently had a discussion that that PS1 games that generally aged best are the ones that were 2D. MGS just helps further prove this, as it's a 3D game and didn't do particularly well. Could be linked entirely to the 3D Graphics thing and not knowing how to utilize them to fullest, and yeah, you get the idea. Granted, sounds like MGS1 got a MGS2/3 Style remake on the Gamecube, so at least there's that.
That said, game isn't awful, just...didn't live up to the expectations really at all.
Sonic Heroes: I didn't want to play this, but Xer insisted just so I could see how things went downhill so fast after Sonic Adventure 2. He wasn't kidding; the concepts are all there, but there's a clear lack of any sort of quality assurance. Stages take 10 minutes on average, which is unheard of in a Sonic game, platforming is slippery and enemies sometimes take forever to kill. And to think the game basically asks you to play through it 4 separate times, and only one of them (Team Chaotix) actually shows a semblance of originality in it's level format (and really, it's "Same stage, but now you have a condition to fulfill!")...there's a reason I only played this game on the Hero side.
One of the worst games of the year I played, no questions asked...but not the flat out worst game.
Sonic the Hedgehog CD: Finally had a chance to play this in a legitimate fashion, it's...about what you'd expect from a genesis Sonic game. The gimmicks are neat, but not really game-breaking one way or another, and the added ability to play as Tails in the XBL version was a cute gimmick. Just nice to play something retro that I always kind of wanted to play, but nothing special beyond that.
And while I can understand the S3&K being "BEST SONIC GAME EVER!" hype, I will not get those that hype this one as the best. Comes off as total Sega CD Hipster Elitism.
Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes if Light: This is a game where they couldn't have gotten things more wrong. No, this is not what most Final Fantasy fans want...or more accurately, it isn't anything like a Final Fantasy. Oh sure, has some spell and item names, and I think White Mages look like their classic selves (Not Black Mages though), but everything else that defines a Final fantasy isn't there. Heck, the game even goes out of it's way to avoid like all the standard Job names. Instead of Thief, it's Bandit, instead of using the term Knight, it's Fencer. But that's minor...
Game is unpolished, has clunky interface, and doesn't even let you target enemies on battle; yes, you rely entirely on Auto Battle. The Job System wastes everything a Job system should have, and the game even has some really dumb mechanic ideas and a lot of hidden undocumented facts (like, say, Weapon and Magic Proficiency for jobs...yes, we're back to Suikoden 2/4 standards guys!)
And it doesn't even have legitimate plot. It's just run around the world doing odd jobs. To add to this, it keeps the team split for half the game; would be fine if it consistently handed you temps (like the game seems like it'll do) but they don't. So you consistently have 2 PC parties...sometimes solo arcs half way through the game. THIS IS NOT FUN!!!
In the end, when you look at the game, it's not a Final Fantasy at all. It's a Dragon Quest with a Final Fantasy paint job. Heck, the most basic of enemies are even SLIMES in this game, only they are modeled to look like Flans because Final Fantasy. Speaking of which, Flans are the only FF mainstays to appear; no Cactuars, Tonberries, Behemoths, Marlboros, etc. It really strikes me that they were making a Dragon Quest, then realized "wait, this will sell much better in the west with Final Fantasy in the name!" then shifted to that, because just about everything this game does is stuff that screams "Anti-Final Fantasy" yet is par for the course in a "Classic" Dragon Quest.
Another one of the worst games I played this year. To think that some people hyped this as "Great game to go back to the routes of jRPGs!" No, if anything, this is a game that illustrates just why these conventions are dropped, and why the "Good Old Days" are just a nostalgic rose colored glasses moment.
Shadow the Hedgehog: If there's one way to sum up this game, it's "Guilty Pleasure." The game isn't good, it's mediocre at best, yet...somehow I managed to get all 10 endings (this was tedious and annoying), and see the FRUE ENDING. It doesn't futz up details the way Sonic Heroes does, but it doesn't really do anything right. Again, I cannot really defend this game; it's playable sure, and while people slammed the game for "OMG GUNZ NO :(", that's actually one of it's charms, because it's *Gasp* ANOTHER FACET OF GAMEPLAY, and you can often ignore it since Shadow still has all of what he did in SA2.
Again, it's not a good game, but I still enjoyed it, so yeah, "Guilty Pleasure."
Ninja Gaiden 2: Technically started in 2011, but when I realized I wasn't going to finish it when I thought, I put it on hiatus. Got serious in 2012. Ninja Gaiden 2 is a fine case of 1 step forward, 2 steps back. It does a bunch of neat and cool ideas relative to the first (slicing off enemy limbs without killing them and it having an impact on gameplay, the Red Health idea was neat as well), while hurting in a bunch of other ways (Camera Angles, not showing restraint on balance in some areas, and stages are way too long for their own good, with too many poorly designed bosses and poorly handled checkpoints.) It's not awful, but it is disappointing. The game does still have a lot of what made the first game good, but still feels like a downgrade overall, and is more frustrating at times than fun.
Final Fantasy 13-2: I liked FF13 a fair amount, and FF13-2 based on what little I knew was keeping itself more in-tune with FF13 than FF10-2 did for FF10...and it did! It held FF13's battle system, Serah is a genuine extension of her character in FF13, and an actually likable protagonist, and it doesn't seem to actually spit on FF13 the way FF10-2 did for FF10. It also kept itself it's own unique game by implementing time travel mechanics, a totally different plot (thus not being a rehash), and the Pokemon element to make gameplay not just a carbon copy. Also fixed 2 issues with FF13's battle system (Leader DIes = Game Over is gone, and you can swap leaders Mid-battle, letting you handle more advance strategies.) Music is also good, as it feels like songs that could fit into FF13, while still having a slightly different feel to them to illustrate the game's changed tone.
...however, the game is not without problems. First off, battles are lazily handled relative to FF13. FF13 clearly put effort into every fight, and charging in with all Commandos and Ravagers doesn't work always, and often gets you killed...FF13-2? There's little reason not to open fights with this, and swapping only occurs if things go down hill or you're fighting a boss. Role balance is worse too; removing Slow and Haste really hurts Synergists and Saboteurs, only further encouraging just slugging things out. The plot is also just...kind of bland. Once you remove the time travel, it's really just fetch quests after fetch quests...and this is something FF13 basically avoided entirely. Also Caius is a case of huge wasted potential, as he could have worked, but the game took a completely bad angle with him.
I still 100% this game (got all Fragments, basically), and did most of the DLC, and enjoyed this game, but it's a clear downgrade from the original. The game shows more effort than FF10-2, at least, but there's definitely a smaller budget and less resources to work with, and it shows. I feel it could have been a great game with maybe a longer development time, but alas, so it goes.
Kid Icarus Uprising: Best game of 2012. This is a game I impulsively bought because it was a Buy 2, get 1 Free, and Mandy was only getting 2 so I bought this for myself, because why not? I do not regret this at all, as game more than exceeded expectations. It's writing is absolutely hilarious, completely blowing Star Fox 64 out of the water for quotability, gameplay is new and original and fun. The game seems flawed at first with it's controls, but once you get over that hurdle, there's really little to complain about. There's also a lot in the game for you to do once you finish the Main Campaign, between Intensity levels, the Achievements system, Multiplayer, what have you.
I was expecting a decent game, but this game was so much better than I could have thought. Easily the best game of the year, in any event.
Kid Icarus (3D): After KIU, I decided to finally play the original game to see some of the ground work it was referencing, and bought the HD KID ICARUS FOR THE 3DS!! ...which is the same game only now with pre-rendered backgrounds instead of black ones, just to make it prettier. Anyway, not much to say; it's an old NES game and it shows, but it's not awful or anything.
Sonic Generations: This...is probably the #2 game of the year. Sonic Fanbase can bite me; this is the best Sonic Game ever. The Classic Stages are the best designed the series has to offer, with the best handled physics, and all that, and some great nods and moments scattered about (the Crisis City stunt is nothing short of amazing.) Modern Stages are a blast too, really illustrating how the series has evolved. It's a game that isn't afraid to acknowledge the bad of the series as well as the good, and generally covers it's bases extremely well. It's one flaw is that it's a little too short, and some of the boss fights (Like the final) are kind of dull, though there's a lot of little extra content to do, and all 3 Rival Fights are just great, and fun to replay over and over again.
Not much to say really, just a damn good Sonic game, and if this doesn't prove "Sonic is fun again guys, no seriously", then...well...screw you!
NieR: I think people overlove this game a tad too much. Maybe it's because I played a lot of action games and found the combat dull in comparison to the likes of Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, but the gameplay just didn't really click. Felt too spam happy. Especially in the first half, as at least the second half has multiple weapon styles that offers some variety. I only played one ending and intend on getting B Ending eventually (already saw D Ending, I can deduce what happens in C Ending), and the story was decent, but not the WOMG MOST AMAZING THING that some people hype.
No, game isn't bad, but I didn't fall in love with it the way some people do. It's merely a decent game, not an amazing one.
Asura's Wrath: I'm...not sure how to respond to this. THis is more an interactive Shonen Anime DBZ Homage thing than an actual game, given a large part of the gameplay is QTEs. I mean, it's fun and all in that 'Turn your brain off and enjoy the explosions" kind of way, but I really don't know how to assess it. It's not really comparable to any other game I've played, is what I'm getting at. I enjoyed it, but I still question if it qualifies as a game.
Oh well, as least the game lets you PUNCH GOD IN THE FACE or something, and really, is that ever a bad thing?
...don't answer that.
Pokemon Conquest: Nice little filler game but nothing else. The game has a lot of campaigns and what not but the problem is that it's just too simplistic to care beyond the first one. The premise of "Famous Japanese Samurai using Pokemon to WAGE WAR" is hilarious, of course, and game is nice enough to downplay the plot for the most part. Just...yeah, with a series with as much depth as Pokemon, the fact that Conquest is so simplified does kind of feel irksome.
Still fun, but not something I ever feel like going back too; obviously a game targeting a younger demographic I feel, as opposed to Mainstream titles which aim more for "general audience."
Sonic 4 Episode 2: This took all the qualities of episode 1 and basically fixed up it's issues, resulting in a rather fine classic 2D Sonic game. The Tails Buddy gimmick was of course neat for expanding some gameplay ideas, Boss Design was a notable step up compared to Sonic 4, and the bonus stages being a far better handled version of Sonic 2's never hurts. Good game, if you like Sonic and aren't an old school elitist, I highly recommend getting this because it's a DLC game, it's not too expensive, and it's fun.
I got all Chaos Emeralds and Red Rings in this for the record, so yeah, 100% run and all that.
Metal Gear Solid 2: See the MGS1 reason for why I played this? replace the PSN thing with "Hey, $40 HD Collection with 3 games I haven't played!" Ok, that's out of the way...since I didn't play MGS in it's hayday, the "Play as Raiden" thing didn't bother me at all, so let's get that out of the way! That said...I feel this game aged better than MGS1, simply because the gameplay is a dramatic step up. Actual aiming, more interesting gimmick sections, what have you, the game just has so much more in this regard.
What are it's problems? The plot. Starts off fine, but then becomes a convoluted mess that doesn't know when to stop, when you already know the plot twist is "The Not!Illuminati is behind everything!" as soon as they are mentioned. It even has philosophical nonsense and at times feels confused what it wants you to think, what it wants to display, and...yeah. Feels like the game was trying to one up MGS1 in this regard, and instead just sort of collapsed on itself.
Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy: I don't give a shit about Rhythm games...at all. Yet somehow, I found this game quite enjoyable. Chibis + Final Fantasy Music + lots of little nostalgic nods is just great, and the game has a way to make you care about replaying things over and over again. Just a simple little concept that was pulled off really well.
Metal Gear Solid 3: After the disappointment of MGS1 and the headache inducing plot of MGS2, I didn't know what to expect in MGS3, outside of "This is claimed to be the best game in the series, hands down." I ended up thinking "wow, the game was as good as hyped for the most part!" Were it not for KIU being so damned good, this would be a contender with 2 other games for "best Game I played in 2012." Just seems to have nailed what the series was actually trying for. The plot was basic but well executed (outside of me not liking how they tried to make The Boss the ultimate Mary Sue; really wish they just kept the whole "She defected DEAL WITH IT" plot, also makes Snake's beating her in a duel come off as a more genuine "Student surpasses the master" moment to boot), game takes everything MGS2 did for gameplay and improves upon those, and adds even more. The things I was worried about like lack of a radar or the food system both ended up being well handled, what have you.
Game isn't perfect as there are little gripes I have (mainly the entire end game stuff between Shagohad Fight and the Duel needs to be cut out entirely, worthless gameplay padding on an already long end game arc), but as I said, it's a game that actually lived up to the hype for the most part, and the one game in the series I'm likely to go back and actually replay.
FOR THE RECORD, I don't have a PS3, so I can't play MGS4. I did however watch all the cutscenes from the game and apparently, that's pretty much equivalent to playing the game from my understanding!
Tactics Ogre PSP: The original Tactics Ogre was a bad game. Yes, it was proto-FFT and first of it's kind, yada yada, but it's still a bad game and it's only saving grace was it's plot. This remake addresses a lot of the original's problems and is a huge step up as a result...I can actually say I had fun playing it!
The game still has one big problem and that is it seems they didn't do any polishing at all. A bunch of little design decisions really hurt like "All new jobs start at level 1", and some really wonky mechanics. It's a decent game that could have been a great game if they just spent a little more time banging out the kinks, I feel.
Kirby's Epic Yarn: I like Kirby games a decent amount. I find them fun, simple platformers with a sense of charm. Kirby's Epic Yarn...is easily the worst Kirby game I played. The game feels like it was made for a very young demographic, as opposed to "Fun for all ages, if aimed at younger players!" like other games, to the point where dying is close to impossible. I get they were trying for a cute, happy game but...it's just so dull and boring. Also forced Wii Motion controls at some really dumb moments (THE TRAIN CAN DO DIE.) One of the bigger disappointments. I'll play Return To Dreamland at some point, and I can already tell that's a better game.
Resident Evil 5: I went into this game with low expectations, mostly getting it because of a good RE6 related deal. The demo of it is what turned me off. I ended up thinking the game was actually kind of alright. A notable step down from RE4, make no mistake, for a bunch of reasons I won't get into, but it's not as bad as the demo made it seem. The main things that saved it were:
A. Having a control scheme reminiscent of RE4's (which is...control scheme #1. Control scheme #4 is the default one for some reason, and that's what the demo forces, and it's AWKWARD)
B. The demo showed off literally the worst part of the game (the beginning) and the game picks up significantly once you get past that early portion failure.
As I said, though, it's not RE4's level...not even close, but sure as hell is a step up compared to the earlier RE games I found borderline unplayable in my limited experience. Game is even self aware with one of it's DLCs how silly some of those games were (noting, for example, the obsession with cranks)
Pokemon Black 2: Mainstream Pokemon regularly delivers a strong, fun experience and this game is no exception...heck, I'm often considering calling it the best game the series has to date. It takes all the good stuff the predecessor had, combines in a few more extra little polish things, some you wouldn't even think of (Free Space idea is an absolutely brilliant idea once I discovered what it was), and then expands the Pokemon Options to incorporate a lot of older generation Pokemon, to yield probably the single best main game selection ever. Also legitimately new Gyms, bosses, etc., so it's not just a "Pokemon Grey, but two versions to account for two versions of Kyurem!" but a legitimate sequel and new game, just uses an expanded version of the Unova Region.
If there's a flaw the game has, it's that I find it easy by Pokemon standards (the E4 has only 4 Pokemon each the fuck? Champion at least has the usual 6), but Challenge Mode that Black 2 has on replays helps offset this...and heck, sounds like you can start the game on Challenge Mode if you find someone with a completed version of the game!
In short, this is the 3rd game that "would be in running for best game I played of 2012 if not for KIU", alongside MGS3 and Sonic Generations.
Resident Evil 6: This game had high expectations for itself, and was extremely ambitious. It's problem is that it was announced and released too quickly. You can tell because the announcement of the game came out of nowhere and it was released in the same year, with the release date pushed UP a month (from November to October), you get a strong sense of "Capcom really wanted a strong AAA title out in 2012 after SFxT had disappointing sales!"
I keep wanting to like this game...I really do...but it keeps doing little things that piss me off. It shows all signs of being rushed, like lack of playtesting, some really poor design quirks, what have you...basically everything but glitches that make the game unplayable. The plot...well...it's typical RE fare and sort of embraces the over the topness, so I'm fine with that, and Ada Wong is pretty fun in her whole BEING A COMPETENT RE FEMALE PROTAGONIST WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED.
But really, this is a game that needed like an extra 6 months before it was released. By Comparison, DmC was announced like 2 years earlier, and has still yet to come out, and has shown a lot of it's development along the way, combined with multiple chances for people to play the demo at cons, for them to show off the game, etc. and get feedback from fans, it really contrasts how quickly RE6 came out, where it was announced, then announced with an earlier release date, and very little chance for fans and critics alike to play the demo and comment on thoughts.
Sonic the Hedgehog (2006): Worst Game of the Year? Worst game of the year. I only played Shadow's section which is the only one that's actually tolerable (no physics puzzles OR Mach Speed sections! And the 3 best PCs in the game hands down) and yeah, it's as bad as advertised...well, no, I played the 360 version so it's like 10% better but...come on, IT'S SONIC 2k6! That's like saying "Hoshi is 10% better than advertised!"
For why I played it...there's a bit of a complicated reason that I won't get into; in short, I was roped into it for charity.
Final Fantasy 4:Interlude: Don't think this counts as a game, but whatever, mentioning it anyway. It's basically "FF4 if you wanted like 3 hours more story and nothing else." The story has nothing really happen and is meant to tie-in with FF4TAY, but doesn't really do anything for the game...really comes off as an advertisement ploy for "hey, reason to buy FF4PSP if you played FF4 and FF4TAY!" Basically, more like a DLC Campaign akin to stuff found in FF13-2 than a game.
Street Fighter x Megaman: Am 8 Bit Megaman game out of nowhere with a lot of Street Fighter fanservice, what's not to love? Well, there's some obvious little things that could have been improved upon but then, THE GAME IS FREE so there's really little to complain about. Interesting weapons, fun boss and stage design, and great nods to Street Fighter across the board, while still feeling like a Megaman game. If you haven't played this yet and like Megaman...WHY AREN'T YOU PLAYING THIS GAME IT'S FREE!?
Final Fantasy 4:The After Years: Very bipolar experience. First half of the game is attrocious. Rehash of FF4's plot in bad ways with a god awful villain and KAIN FANSERVICE, there's very little good to come out of it, but you need to grit your teeth and bare with it. Then you get to Golbez's story and the game actually starts going "right, there's gameplay, maybe we should emphasize on that and cut down on the plot a lot" and well, things pick up. It's a better game than the original overall, partially because there's actual reasons to care about replays...at least in the 2nd half where you can actually customize your team, and get interesting equips and what not.
X-Com: Enemy Unknown: So here I am going "Alright, you western strategy game that everyone is hyping, COME ON! IMPRESS ME! I DARE YOU!"
...and then it did, and I felt like an idiot. You know how I said TO PSP was a decent game with a lot of issues that prevented it from being great? X-com is very similar, except the issues aren't nearly as dramatic and offputting, and there's less of them, so it's a lot closer to greatness than TO PSP. I'd say this game is in running for #5 this year, Theatrhythm being it's main contention for that spot and given how many games I played this year, that's not a bad thing at all. Well played, X-com, well played.
Medievil: Impulsively got this game because Playstation All-Stars made me realize this guy has an awesome design and the game is cheap on PSN, so why not? Plus gave me something else to play on my Vita. That said...another example of how the 3D games of the PS1 era haven't really aged that well. I can see why it was somewhat of a sleeper hit but by today's standards, it's got a lot of unforgivable issues, most notably the camera is like the worst thing I've ever seen. Not a good game, sad to say, and certainly doesn't make me want to consider playing it's sequel.
And...that's it for 2012!
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Magicka - The important thing is that I got to kill Richard many, many times
Witch's House - Ib except with gory deaths that entertain me signficantly, taste poison
Catherine - this game made me a member of the block pushing club, the best club, and I was already gonna like everything else
Deus Ex - I know a game is awesome when it describes the future accurately
Yakuza 4 - Play as yakuza, be awesome 100% of the game, now with less censored content
Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shoujo - The animest, but the main character and villain are awesome and schoolgirl life problems are 2/3rds good (richard plz read up to and including c4)
NiER - I can go with X X triangle the whole game if the rest of it is that good, I can even still listen to Wretched Automatons without feeling intense pain
Super Mario Galaxy 2 - Super solid 3D Mario, don't mind if I do
G-Senjou no Maou - I could read C4 and the last half of C5 forever, and then the rest was largely awesome
Xenoblade Chronicles - This is how you make a game super awesome at mostly everything except face textures
Saints Row: The 3rd - This game makes the most sense and fits with my perception of reality
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Man, I was all ready to talk about how I barely played games this year and then I write three pages about all the games I played this year. Memory is weird, you guys.
WRPGs, Guys Who Made Torment Division
Fallout New Vegas: Hey, a WRPG I like is made by Obsidian. Shock and amazement. The game is glitchy as fuck but still lots of fun, with a good world to explore and equal parts good character writing and sharp humor. I'm not a fan of RPGs turning into first-person shooters, but New Vegas manages to handle that aspect more or less painlessly. I haven't finished it yet, but it's not for lack of effort – there really is a ton of stuff to do.
Alpha Protocol: Another WRPG I like that's made by Obsidian! I've barely played it though, too much Steam Sale.
WRPGs, Click On Stuff Until It Dies Division
Diablo III: A solid game that I eventually lost interest in thanks to its lag-tastic online infrastructure and relentless downtime. I wouldn't mind having to play online if the online were like Diablo II instead of WoW. Maybe I'll head back to it at some point, although I don't expect the endgame to have the kind of viability D2 did, even without the server issues, because the loot is so generic. Extra damage! Bonus to your primary stat! HP! Elemental resistance! And that's all you look for, on every item. I miss +1 To All Skill Levels. But it doesn't matter as much, because I'm still playing...
Torchlight II: Just like Torchlight was Diablo 1.5, this is Diablo 2-and-a-quarter. But it's a lot of fun, and the new classes are nicely differentiated from the others in the genre. Like its predecessor, it rips off a bit too much from Blizzard to be entirely comfortable, but there's worse things in the world.
Path of Exile: A promising entry in the “rip off Diablo II until it cries” genre, from what little I've played of it. The gameplay is incredibly blatant about being D2 meets FF7, but that doesn't mean it's not fun to play. Plus the game's free.
DeathSpank: Sadly not that funny for a Ron Gilbert game, but quite playable. In a rarity for the genre, it's not even a little randomized.
WRPGs, JRPG Parody Division
Cthulhu Saves The World: A fun, mostly funny game, and a worthy successor to Breath of Death VII in the gameplay department. I still need to beat the Cthulhu's Angels mode, which has all the humor the main game promised but frequently dropped the ball on.
Penny Arcade Adventures Parts I and II: The Penny Arcade guys make a console-style RPG about Lovecraftian monsters attacking a steampunk version of 1920s suburbia. It's pretty much what you'd expect from that description. The games aren't balanced well at all, the experience curve is wonky and the sidequests are just strange, but they're short enough that the fun of running around and killing hobos with a rake doesn't have time to get old. Well, not by much. And it uses my favorite variant of ATB, the Panzer Dragoon Saga system. So that's a plus.
Penny Arcade 3: The first two games in the series are 3D point-and-click affairs with Panzer Dragoon combat. This is all Zeboyd, with a Grandia battle system that works really well. Zeboyd's usual “enemies get stronger every turn” schtick works well with the ATB elements, and the class system provides a lot of chances to find power combos. Problem is the clunky interface makes it a giant pain in the ass to actually see what your options are with each class, which discourages experimentation. Luckily this only impedes the fun, as opposed to killing it entirely. Also there's free DLC that is generally worth your time – one that's oriented entirely around playing with the class abilities, and another that has a lot of fun with the first games' blank-slate, make-your-own-character protagonist.
Robot Division
Super Robot Wars Z2 Saisei-Hen: Part 2 of the reason I bought a PSP fixes a lot of the problems with its first installment. Mission objectives are more varied and creative, difficulty is more balanced and the game doesn't throw the same three enemies at you over and over for the whole thing. Sadly it still ditches the squad system of the original Z, which was fantastic, and the difficulty also falls short of the sweet spot that game hit. In many ways, while the improvements over Z2.1 are appreciated, after SRWZ there was no excuse for those rough patches to exist in the first place.
The 2nd Super Robot Wars Original Generation(s): Episode 3: THE GAIA SAVIOUR (the ninth game in the OG series): The most confusingly-named video game since they announced a Hoopz Barkley sequel is shiny as all hell and builds on its PS2 predecessors in many ways, most of them incremental. You can deploy pre-formed squads of robots instead of assembling them during a fight, you can use a (clunky, counter-intuitive) skill system to customize the bonuses robots give their squad-mates, and you can finally upgrade all of a robot's weapons at once. None of this is earth-shattering, but they're good to have. The lowest point, halfway through the game, is the pacing; you spend 17 stages doing nothing but running around La Gias fighting a very small mix of enemies and recruiting maybe four newcomers to the OG series, before returning to Earth proper and seeing a ton of new characters and plotlines arrive all at once. Wouldn't it be better to take that detour after recruiting the newbies?
Blue Hedgehog Division
Sonic Generations: The best Sonic game in ages. Pure Unleashed/Colors-style gameplay for modern Sonic, good 2D level design for the classics, a great assortment of bonus missions and a (mostly) awesome soundtrack. More, please.
Sonic 4 Episode 2: An immense improvement on Part 1, if still not up to Genesis standards. Better level design, some actual new gameplay twists, big stages, great special stages. Worth fifteen bucks, at least.
Non-Traditional Open World Division
LA Noire: Holy shit this game is awesome. Grand Theft Auto with the style and story of LA Confidential and the questioning scenes of a Phoenix Wright game? Uh, yes, thanks.
Infamous: A surprisingly polished and engaging game about shooting people in the crotch with lightning bolts. Doing the open-world thing as a superhero is a nice twist on the genre and using Cole's superpowers to get around the good-sized city is a lot of fun. I'll be playing both the sequel and fellow superpowered-GTA-clone Prototype (which I've owned since I got the 360 but never started) sometime soonish.
Making Zombies' Heads Explode Division
Resident Evil 4: I bought this for PS2 years ago but never played it (I got hooked on Romancing SaGa instead), and figured I'd take a crack at it on the 360 when it went on sale. It's a surprisingly great game, largely because of the way the camera works. Instead of a fixed perspective, it's now over-the-shoulder, which makes the RE series' trademark tank controls actually intuitive. The focus on action instead of survival is almost minor by comparison. Although that the action is done really well sure doesn't hurt.
Resident Evil 5: Grabbed this for free on a Playstation Plus trial, got up to the first boss, hated it. Forced co-op play with a computer moron player is a manifestly terrible idea and the actual gameplay is a step down from RE4 even without taking that into account. Also, there's a multi-second load time before the Game Over screen, on a game that runs entirely off my hard drive. What.
Atom Zombie Smasher: An odd little RTS where you have to use a very few defensive placements and the layout of a small city to save civilians from the ravening zombie horde. Challenge is all over the place and by default the game sticks you with a totally random selection of defenders every turn, which is incredibly stupid, but it's a fun time-waster. Or was until it started crashing my computer every time I try to play it. Weird.
Tower Defense That May Or May Not Involve Towers Or Defense Division
Orcs Must Die! and Orcs Must Die! 2: The first tower-defense game I've seriously played, and still my favorite. OMD is a fusion of the more typical “set up and maintain traps” gameplay with twitchy action, and they combine into a very engaging whole. There's always something you need to do NOW NOW NOW, and when you lose there's always a reason, and a way you can fix it for next time. Even in the total bullshit maps.
Defense Grid: The Awakening: A more traditional defense game, but a very well-honed one that packs a surprising amount of variety into its stages despite the small number of tools you get to attack them with. Add in a whole bunch of challenge modes for each map and you have a long-lived game.
Anomaly: Warzone Earth: This is more of a tower offense game – your enemy has set up a bunch of towers, you send a strike team of vehicles to navigate through the defenses, working your way from blind spot to blind spot and blowing them up. Some of the stages get distinctly cheap but it poses a decidedly different sort of brain teaser than other games in the genre, and in a good way.
Ripped From The Foil-Embossed Cover Of a 1995 Image Comic Division
Darkstalkers: It’s a Zelda game that looks like an issue of Spawn and plays like the love-child of God of War and Devil May Cry. And yet it’s good. I don’t get it either. Well, I get part of it, Mark Hamill is involved. The rest comes from the combat system being eminently playable, if not especially deep, and the game’s sheer commitment to its style. It’s not tongue-in-cheek, exactly, but it knows precisely what it’s doing and doesn’t care how dumb it looks. They just revel in the 90s-ness of it.
Darksiders II: Better at action-y bits than the first – the combat is legitimately good now, and there are Prince of Persia-ish parkour elements done pretty well – but worse at everything else. Exploration is still a big part of the game, but it’s much less rewarding because instead of collecting health upgrades or weapon upgrades or “souls” that you can use to buy new abilities, you’re gathering randomized loot. So solving a puzzle or navigating a tricky platforming area gets you a new weapon or piece of armor that is very likely to be nothing but vendor trash. Most of the time all you get for hunting down that elusive treasure chest – or even clearing out an option dungeon — is the satisfaction of solving a puzzle for its own sake. And the setting goes from over-the-top post-apocalyptic gothic insanity to generic fantasyland populated by generic questgivers and generic random monsters with nary a Mark Hamill (or even a speaking antagonist, for most of the game) in sight.
Random PC Games From Steam And/Or Indie Bundles Division
Jamestown: A danmaku shoot-em-up in which you play a British settler in 17th-century Mars, battling an alliance of betentacled War Of The Worlds monsters and the diabolical Spanish. It's a short game – just six levels, which you can do one at a time – but loads of fun to play and I love the premise SO MUCH.
Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble: This game is strange.
Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga: this game is generic.
Assassin's Creed: The most engaging climbing-up-stuff-and-doing-the-same-three-tasks-over-and-over simulator you ever saw.
Half-Minute Hero Super Mega Ultimate Etc.: There's not much to it, but at 30 to 90 seconds a pop there doesn't really need to be. It's good fun, the constant countdown keeps the pressure on and exploring a map in those 30 seconds provides a nice challenge factor.
Portal 2: Loads of fun, but still serves as proof that the original game is as short as it is for a reason. By the third collection of test rooms the gameplay has started to wear out its welcome – but even then, there's still Wheatley and GlaDOS to make it worth coming back to.
Bejeweled 3: Sometimes you just want to match three things together and make them disappear. This game does that quite nicely.
Serious Sam BFE: SHOOT EVERYTHING. Serious Sam, as always, is what an FPS ought to be.
Random Games From Xbox Live Division
Dust: An Elysian Tale: A nifty little Metroidvania thing sadly contaminated with bad furry art. Kinda like the side-scrolling American version of Higurashi. Still worth playing; the gameplay is solid, the writing is often funny and there's a good amount of stuff to find and do.
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX: It’s mission-oriented Pac-Man. This is oddly fun.
Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo: Still fun after all these years. Default mode is still a pain in the ass, though. Match 3 for life!
NiGHTS Into Dreams: Such an odd little game. And HD graphics really aren’t doing it any favors. I’ve still got a soft spot for it, though.
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My, that is a lot of games for the Shale.
Jamestown! <3
I find it to be a pretty standard danmaku, except that it is a four-player co-op game, which I've never seen before. And which is the best idea ever. Surely other danmaku have tried this before?
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I actually didn't play a lot of new games this year due to becoming reobsessed with Perfect World. So, I will talk about Perfect World at length.
Perfect World. Overall, this was a very good year for an aged MMO. The year started out with the Descent expansion, which brought a whole new area of pve gameplay. This was a nice nod to the free-to-play players. They could now obtain gear that was good for PVE (and not terrible for PVP) at a low cost. And there were lots of fun and useful new skills added for all classes. And new instances that required *gasp* teamwork rather than just sins APSing things to death repeatedly.
The middle of the year brought the third tier of nirvana gear (and third tier of rank 9, but only the super-rich could afford that so not an issue) which let the farming players be comparable to the cash-shoppers. And it was good.
Then the end of the year brought Nation Wars, which threw everything into disarray (in a good way). A ridiculously fun PVP instance that made endgame gear ridiculously cheap to get and destroyed the economy literally overnight. Merchanting players were destroyed by this and cash-shoppers got a bit of their edge back (since they can now obtain that previously referenced rank 9 tier 3). Still these were minor problems when put up against the light of how damn fun NW is. Oh and there was some long overdue (four years overdue) skill rebalancing for the older classes which helped them out considerably.
And you can't talk about a free-to-play MMO without talking about the things that aren't free. Perfect World's staff went in a complete opposite direction from last year. The previous year featured ridiculously deep discounts on items (30 cent items as low as 4.5 cents). This year, not a single such sale was used. More modest sales were the mainstay, although featuring freebie items added on (buy this, get this). I think this was a wise marketing decision for them in the context of extending the life of the game. Although it confused the hell out of the players who kept waiting for deep discount sales that never appeared. All in all, the game seems primed to stick around for a couple more years. Woo.
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Okay I did play some other games this year besides Perfect World.
FF13-2: I liked this overall. It was pleasant and the pokemon thing was pretty good. I did not however finish it as I eventually got lost on where the hell I was supposed to go. All the jumping around in time is confusing and the game doesn't do anything to point you in the right direction. So I stopped looking and just went back to Perfect World.
Witcher 2: This was shit. The story was dull (at least through Chapter 2, it certainly didn't interest me enough to keep playing) and the writing juvenile. I could forgive this if the gameplay was good, but it wasn't. All sword and sorcery games of this type will forever after be compared to Dark Souls gameplay, and this is laughably bad in comparison. Terrible controls, terrible combat system.
Street Fighter III Third Strike: Download fighter #1. It was a bad game 10 years ago, still is. It's only popular because there was literally nothing else new in fighting games for people to play at that time.
Skullgirls: Download fighter #2. Well the gameplay was there, but the rest of the game was horribly rushed/unfinished. Game tries too hard to be MvC2, might as well just play MvC2 instead.
Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown: Download fighter #3. Didn't engage me like VF4 did. Nothing wrong with it, just not exciting.
P4Arena: Ah now this was a great game, and the best I played this year. Great as a fighter, great as a sequel to P4.
Pokemon Conquest: This is a hard game to rate. As a strategy game, it's terrible. It's pretty clear the Koei half of the team phoned it in. But as a Pokemon game, it's really very good. Has all the elements that make Pokemon fun, and a lot of depth and detail that shows the Pokemon guys really put effort into it. Great little time-waster, probably spent more time playing this than anything else besides Perfect World.
Pokemon Black 2: I never got into Black 1, as it felt like a step down from HG/SS in many respects. But this feels like a real modern Pokemon game. It's very very good. The little convenience things they added everywhere are wonderful (hey, I can just call the Professor on the phone if I can't remember how obscure Pokemon #1263 evolves!). Thumbs up.
EDIT: Forgot to mention Lollipop Chainsaw. This was exactly what it purported to be: a sexy high-school cheerleader killing zombies to good music. What it failed to do is surprise me in any way. It delivered on its promise but didn't go above and beyond that.
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1. Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance
So this game largely reaffirmed things we already knew. For example.
- The less Sora's involved in a Kingdom Hearts plot, the better. So in this game, where he spends the whole time fucking up but the game makes fun of him for it then you go play as Riku and do awesome shit for an hour, it works out pretty good.
- Leonard Nimoy is just delightful.
- Music makes everything better.
We also learned new things.
- Belly rubs giving you power ups is pretty awesome.
- It is in fact possible to make Paris seem more dead than it was in that terrible direct-to-video sequel.
- When you throw enough ridiculousness at it, the time-space continuum gives up and pretty much lets you do whatever the fuck you want.
Yeah I'm not going to talk that much about this. Y'all had to know at the start of the year what game I'd rank #1 at the end of it, or certainly at the start of this list. 9/10
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Man for reals? You should play some Civ 4 then dude. It is like a Kingdom Hearts game with no Sora at all and endless Leonard Nimoy.
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So I wrote up most of this list last year but the 2011 thread lived and died way too early (early December) and I didn't feel like vanity-spamming Elf's 2011 vanity thread, but hey posting it now & finishing off the game mini reviews I missed because better late than never. 2 years worth of SnowFire ramblings for the price of 1.
Excellent9/10
The World Ends With You
This gets "surprise of the year" from me, as I was expecting to laugh *at* this game, not with it. Glad I eventually was curious enough to play it from the good reviews. Basically... this game just rules. The gameplay is authentically something different and interesting that really makes use of the DS's stylus. I got to actually like the cast of characters a bunch, too. Sure there's melodrama, but hey, that just livens things up. The plot is weird, and makes a few odd steps, but on the whole takes a ludicrous situation and makes it awesome. There's just enough gravitas to care about the fate of Shibuya, but not too much to make the wackier parts of the setting seem out of place.
A lot of the features that sounded incredibly lame are actually irrelevant. Setting fashion trends doesn't matter, you aren't forced to constantly swap your 'equipment' based on the region, pin evolution will at best get you a little ahead of the pin quality you're 'supposed' to have but you won't really miss out since enemies will eventually drop the later and better pins anyway. That said, I totally did use my large Bose QuietComfort® 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® headphones when I could for playing this game, even when I'd normally use earbud headphones. Those pricy brands, they improve your stats! Check it out at: http://www.bose.com/controller?url=/shop_online/headphones/noise_cancelling_headphones/quietcomfort_15/index.jsp&perfsourceid=K9677&src=K9677&kw=%7Bkeyword%7D&adtype=pla
Just the thing to prove your niche in Shibuya as they block out the rest of the world for surprisingly catchy J-Pop.
I wish there'd been a bit more 'gameplay' in the essentially plot-heavy interactions with the normal world, a la an adventure game - more useless commands to imprint on people and more complex interactions, say, where you have to get people to do things in the right order. But whatever. It's fun anyway for all that it's not really a big part of the game. But yeah. WTF. Game I played for the novelty factor delivers on a truly unique gameplay style and builds its own bizarre, internally-consistent world, and even has me tapping my foot to J-Pop like a godforsaken weeaboo. Damn it.
999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
Nooot really a lot I can say about this game without spoiling it! Suffice to say the plot started off gripping-but-okay and ended up pretty awesome. It has the great benefit of constantly building on itself - I felt like I was learning new things as I advanced through the plot and constantly coming up with new & improved theories about what was going on. Great stuff. The plot doesn't quiiiiiiiite hold together if you think about a few of the seams, but whatever, it mostly does and I appreciate the ambitiousness. Also, while all of the 9/10s have great soundtracks in their own way, I wasn’t really expecting much from Shinji Hosoe, but while his soundtrack is not great outside of game, it certainly works very well in it.
Ghost Trick
I don't care that the puzzles were on the easy side and I didn't find them TOO illogical. Awesome writing, solid music, awesome writing, neat art style, and awesome writing.
Radiant Historia
Just a really solid RPG. Felt like one of the classics from the SNES era, really, but a good one that's held up. This is not to say the game doesn't have flaws, but it was a ton of fun to play, it has its own cool ideas (positioning, its interpretation of time travel), and while the villainous plot doesn't ENTIRELY hold together, it's better than average.
Mass Effect 2
Hmm. ME2 is a game I can either say very little or far too much on, but I’ll stick to little since rambling about the individual character quests would take too long. Shepard is pretty much the Western main character archetype done right - you still have a decent amount of control of what he or she does, but they exist as a character too, and will be awesome no matter what. I do wish that the Paragon/Renegade triggers weren’t always so reliably among the best options in conversation trees - that did feel a bit like the game making choices for me, since if a Blue/Red option was available, it was almost always guaranteed to be at least equal to the talky options, usually better.
The gameplay is solid, if a bit too one-noted. I liked some of the light vehicle exploration in the DLC, but in general you will be doing a cover shooter all the time, and there will always be that cover to use. I’m fine with that as the base gameplay, but I do wish they tried to vary things a bit more - the biggest variant they tried was the occasional defend-the-base type setup (a la the Legion loyalty mission), and, my favorite, actually having time pressure on your cover shooting in the pipes part of the final mission. (Time pressure more often would have been great.) But really, there’s lots of things they could have done - have a huge plain, have little direct cover but lots of corners to run around in a maze, fight in a forested hillside, etc. which didn’t really happen often enough. Oh, well. Also I can’t say I’m tremendously interested in ever doing a biotics playthrough - it seemed to randomly get blocked by obstructions a lot, and I never developed a feel for when I had a clear attack and when I didn’t, unlike a gun. I was playing a Soldier anyway so it was fine.
If I have a complaint about ME2, it’s that some of the character recruitments & quests didn’t really make tons of sense, and when that is your game that’s an issue. Wish they’d sold me on why Cerberus cares about recruiting Jack, Samara, & Thane a bit more for example, and some of the loyalty quests were a bit off - Archangel’s recruitment was great, but his loyalty was meh. Mining was lame but not too huge a time-waster. That said, the game makes up for it with an awesome final mission, and I generally liked the awkward feel of working for Cerberus. It’s on the 8/9 border, certainly, I had it marked as an 8 before in 2011 but think I will mark it up a tad thinking back on it.
Great 8/10
Castlevania: Harmony of Despair (PS3)
Multiplayer Castlevania what. Fun as heck, IF done with a group all experiencing the game at roughly the same time (such as the DL). I don’t think I would have enjoyed this playing with random dudes on the Internet who roflstomped everything instantly with maxed Soma. Anyway, Shanoa was tons of fun, Kung-fu Alucard was amusing, and occasional screwing around with Yoko & Jonathan was also decent. I wish the boss balance was a little bit better in late Hard Mode - can’t complain TOO much, Hard Mode Dracula was perfect, but Retro Count / Ryukutski were clearly balanced for both having uber drops AND memorizing their improved patterns, so bah. Still, whatever, the game was “only” amusing for 20 hours, that’s still pretty neat since sanely multiplayer Castlevania stages are hard to design.
Final Fantasy 12: Revenant Wings
This game is a bit hard to rate, since the replay value is nil and objectively speaking the plot is your average stop magical madman / mad villain. And while the gameplay was enjoyable enough for one playthrough, I really don't want to do a RTS ever again on the DS. But... the journey is the destination in this one, like Grandia 1. FF12 is perhaps more interesting to think about, but dang if FF12RW wasn't more fun to actually play through, since the plot actually kept moving. It's amazing what giving people lines and characterization will do. So yeah, fun writing, passable gameplay that’s something different, decent challenge level, some nice remixes of FF12 tunes, doesn’t overstay its welcome... surprisingly good.
Good 7/10
Alpha Protocol
Fun fact: Spy fiction makes no damn sense if you examine at the plot even SLIGHTLY critically. In fact who needs the word critically, just "think about the plot." Metal Gear Solid games at least embrace the sci-fi/fantasy elements a little more strongly to help get the suspension of disbelief going. AP has some pretensions of seriousness - raiding Al-Qaeda Al-Samad bases in Saudi Arabia - that then go into hot redhead journalists with a sniper rifle assassinating dudes in Taipei (yeah she wouldn’t stand out at all, right) while Our Hero gets accused of the crime despite being buddy-buddy with the head of the secret police who has the perfect alibi for him (we were bro fighting at the time with guns & crap until my HP bar ran out). Or the time where you get your mission briefing via zooming in on targets with a sniper-rifle camera. How about we establish whether we want to kill people first, not as we’re lying in wait with a highly illegal weapon?
Okay that’s enough rambling. The RPG character growth + conversation branch things are cool. I especially like the achievement-esque bonuses based off how you deal with opponents that’s independent of your skill allocation - beat the snot out of everyone with your fists, get a stamina bonus; always be professional, get a discount, etc. The plot’s presentation is cool and stylish at least. So why is this only a 7/10? Gameplay is kind of broken. If you play AP as a murder simulator, it’s not a particularly amazing shooter. If you want to be sneaky, it’s a tad on the frustrating side early since you don’t have things like reliable always-on radar, then it becomes way too easy later as you get spammable INVISIBILITY. In a game with a regenerating stamina meter, that allows out-of-flavor strategies like saying “who cares if I get shot a bit as a I run up and punch you 3 guards all so long as the shooting doesn’t reduce my stamina to 0, toss in invisibility for even more time.” Of course the stealth stuff is nigh-worthless in the boss fights, which I guess is how it was supposed to be balanced, but still.
Seems like it’s super-replayable though which is cool, lots of personal story options for if you can turn character X to your side in the end, etc.
Final Fantasy 13
This game. This game. I think I ranted enough about it last year. Short version: if the plot’s ending had been very formulaic - think Grandia II’s last half, the fal’Cie are evil gods, let’s kill them all in awesome boss battles - the game could have been 8/10. If the game had delivered on some of its grander ambitions and done something really neat in the endgame, of which several possibilities presented themselves anyway, I might have even gone to 9/10 despite all the hiding of plot in help files. Of course this is all hypothetical because instead the last quarter of the game is more amazing for having possibly the highest fail : writing ratio I’ve ever seen. Chapters 10-13 are simultaneously UNDERWRITTEN and TERRIBLE, undercutting every theme established before. It’s quite an achievement, one only made possible by having good potential to ruin.
Lots of the other complaints people have on FF13 I’m fine with - linearity is not a big deal, sidequests would be inappropriate and kill the urgency in the first half (for all that the game later retroactively undermines it with the whole I INTENTIONALLY LET YOU ESCAPE SO YOU COULD KILL ME stuff), Snow is fine, Hope is a wanker but the writers at least sort of realized it and worked with it, the battle system was still interesting despite being too auto-piloty at times. But. The plot from Chapter 10 onward. What.
Metroid Fusion
It’s the action Metroid. Unfortunately, I’m not that huge a fan of the action in Metroid games...? I mean it’s not bad or anything, but it’s not really the point. Some of the boss battles were pretty cool, but others were just frustrating slugfests. (Yes, I know that some people can perfectly evade everything and do a 1% playthrough, I am not one of them.)
Metroid Fusion wins the ball = dropped award on plot. Metroid games aren’t usually really about plot, and more about atmosphere; but I’ve nothing against them trying to do a plot. Unfortunately, the writing does its best to derail the pretty awesome basis for the plot. This is a game that could literally have gained a point if it cut out every single line of dialogue after the opening, and made it so that all of Samus’s powers came from X parasites. But nooooo we get boring rambles about what we’re doing right now and how door B is locked for our own safety, and generally drawing attention to the irrelevant gameplay hurdles rather than anything interesting. If the goal was to build Adam up as a GlaDOS like villain where you got to feel awesome when Samus started ignoring his ramblings and smashing into unauthorized sectors, it might have been great, but no, Adam is not a Federation stooge and will continue to feed you nonsense about how the Federation doesn’t trust Samus but has decided to entrust her with ultra missiles to clear the blockage anyway. ‘k.
New Super Mario Bros. DS
More Mario stages? Cool. (Never did manage to unlock Stage 6 or whatever though, the ones that requires you to beat a boss as Micro Mario...)
BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift
I’m not sure I would call BlazBlue plot “decent” but it is certainly INTERESTING in its own way. Time loops do let you explore a whole bunch of crazy ideas and let actions have consequences that can then be reset for the next go-round. Some solid humor too, it wasn’t all anime self-reference. Anyway, I enjoyed Calamity Trigger the visual novel, for all that I wasn’t as taken by Continuum Shift’s plotlines and got bored and stopped.
Gameplay was reasonably decent in CT; I can’t do anything more complicated than a quarter-turn consistently, but CT has a nice auto-complete difficult moves button for beginners which was awesome and made it more Smash-like. CS manages to totally screw this up by inexplicably REMOVING the ability to auto-complete special moves, but then adding a beginner mode that controls totally different from normal mode (thus isn’t helpful for learning how to use a character) but is so good that button mashing combos kills everything without any feeling of accomplishment on the player’s part. Bizarre.
I wasn’t much good against the DL online in multiplayer, but c’est le vie, too lazy to memorize combos & interrupts & and all.
And oh yes. The music was pretty sweet, as expected, since that’s kind of why I bought the game anyway.
Cthulhu Saves The World
So it turns out that I still can be entranced by classic DQ dungeon crawlin'. Huh. Major props to CSTW for cutting the BS. And... sometimes the writing is okay! Sometimes it's lame, though. I do have to note that I only really played this on my laptop while travelling and the like, but hey, it was good for that purpose. Still haven’t finished Cthulhu’s Angels (as of January 2013) but the writing was definitely funnier in it so far.
Decent but flawed 6/10
Castlevania Bloodlines
Harmony of Despair got me in a Castlevania mood as noted, so emulated the old Genesis Castlevania. I didn't beat this and only played it at a relative's house ages ago where I stopped at stage 3 or so, so it was pretty much a new experience. Stage 5, Versailles, would have been nightmarish without save states, I'm sure. I tried not to abuse save states too much, though. Anyway... it's good. But I don't particularly feel a need to go back and replay it as Eric the spear dude, so eh.
Meh 5/10
The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition
Honestly? Doesn't really hold up by modern standards. It was cool to go back and see what the later Monkey Island games were referencing, and I still intend to beat Monkey Island 2 sometime as well, and I have no doubt that I would say that the game would have been amazing by 1990 standards. Oh well. The voice-acting was neat, at least. (Liquid Snake is Meathook?!)
Spectromancer
Hey it's Astral Tournament. With the same cards they had in 2002. Still, fun for an alternate take on Magic: The Gathering, I suppose.
Bad 4/10
The ABC Murders
I'm not sorry at all that I 'read' an abridged famous Christie novel on my DS but with more pictures. Christie's plot is actually pretty good. I'd have liked the game better if it didn't even pretend to have gameplay, though, since the gameplay was of the 'utterly irrelevant riddle' variety. ("Well then, before I can trust you Inspector Hastings, let's see if you can solve this puzzle. A man leaves Brighton at 8:00 AM on a train going 20mph....") There’s exactly one true puzzle in the game, and that’s guessing the killer at the very end, but Poirot gives a few too many hints in his recap before letting the player guess. Ah well.
Greed Corp
I got this for 2.50, in fairness. Solid idea for a quick strategy game! However the endgame sucks. And the "endgame" drags and is like 75% the actual length of a game. Basically, you have factories that trade more income / production for permanently lowering the landmass, and eventually sending it crashing down from the sky. Cool idea, you're trading time for money basically. And that paradigm sort of works in the earlygame where building factories will hurt you later, but if you don't build them now you might just be plain conquered because you don't have enough stuff; the short-term gain vs. long-term gain is sort of there. It utterly falls apart afterward, as income just soars upward removing the incentive to build factories except as a griefing measure and removing the incentive to conquer, because everyone’s income is just pouring in from some magical sky font. Yeah, fail, the endgame is basically just kingmaking since everyone will have roughly equal income and who do you want to slooooowly grief with a carrier.
Sucks 2/10
Trauma
Another mini-Steam game I got for 1.25. Except it's nice production quality for meaningless blather that goes nowhere.
Notable 2011 replays:
StarCraft II
I played it a lot more the first half of the year, I feel like, but obligatory multiplayer goodness mention here.
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia Hard Mode
Harmony of Despair reminded me to go finish this. I got halfway through a Shanoa Hard playthrough years ago then stopped around Giant's mansion for whatever reason. Drac's castle didn't change too much, since the damage boost was static and there aren't that many multi-hit enemies there. Sure if you get hit by a Nova Skeleton you die really fast but just don't do that. Death, Eligor, & Blackmore were reasonably tough; Drac himself was a bit disappointing, not very much changed at all.
Castlevania Chronicles (PSX-over-PSN-on-PS3)
Harmony of Despair really did get me in a Castlevania mood. Got it off PSN since I'd only borrowed it from a friend before. Fun game, for all that random subweapon drops is a bit swingy when there’s an uber-broken healing herb subweapon. The werewolf boss is pretty epic in this one, and Drac’s decent too.
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Hard Mode Dracula was perfect, but Retro Count / Ryukutski were clearly balanced for both having uber drops AND memorizing their improved patterns, so bah. Still, whatever, the game was “only” amusing for 20 hours, that’s still pretty neat since sanely multiplayer Castlevania stages are hard to design.
Retro count is straight up pattern memorization. Shanoa is one of the characters who really needs some rare gear there (Either Luminato, Acerbatus or the doggy heads). Most characters do okay with some strong holy damage and dodging. I think the harder part is clearing the goddamn stage, you go so long without a book and the retro reaper is tough. Ryu has really bad HP (His first two forms are a joke), it keeps him sane.
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I think Luminato is the only worthwhile one, and it isn't what you really want to be using if it wasn't for the damage. Holy's the only weakness, right? Doggy heads are elemental fire/ice, Acerbatus is Dark IIRC.
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I can't even remember most of the games I've played this year. Honestly it was a slow year for me and gaming. Social life and job and responsibilities and all that.
Ace Attourney Edgeworth Investigations: Best AA game yet. Edgeworth? Edgeworth.
AAEI2: The same game but in Japanese. I haven't touched it since I first bought it; text adventures in your second language are a pain in the ass. Maybe I could pull through it now though.
Deus Ex: After trying for a few years to get past the first stage, I did. Like cracking a coconut, it was amazing. The gameplay did not age well, but the scripting and storyline were great even though at this point in time you can see every single one of them coming. The multiple ways to get through areas and solve puzzles retroactively makes Bioshock a lot less impressive to me, and honestly I don't think I can name another series that bases its storyline around 1990s era Conspiracy Theory. At least in such a way that Deus Ex deals with it.
Deus Ex Human Revolution: One step back in storyline, 10 steps forward in gameplay. My favorite part of the game was the conversation battles, which makes me think I'd really enjoy... fuck, whatever the 1940s Detective Game is called. LA Noir? Anyway, I loved this game up until the extremely disappointing ending. If I played Deus Ex closer to its release I'd probably like it more, but with no nostalgia goggles Human Revolution surpasses it easily.
Diablo 3: My first foray into the Diablo series. Enjoyed it quite a bit until I got to Inferno mode, then it became a retarded grindfest. I've heard that the patches have changed this, but I haven't had the interest to really check it out again.
Legend of Zelda, Skyward Sword: I'm a shameless Zelda fanboy, and this game didn't disappoint. I enjoyed the gimmick it used, and I played it in Japanese, so it was good practice. I now know how to say Blessed and a number of words for sword in Japanese, so, I guess I studied. Honestly, though, thinking on this, my English literacy developed in a big way thanks to English RPGs, so if I play enough then my Japanese will get better, yeah?
Mother 2: I got up through Twoson before I gave up. Playing in Japanese. Reading Hiragana with no Kanji is INFURIATING at this point, and moreover, my SNES copy will glitch out if the SNES is moved at ALL when I play it. I haven't touched it recently, but I'm in a position where that will be less of an issue, so maybe I'll continue it.
Minecraft: I'm still playing this. The updates keep making it better. Blah blah blah blah blah blah words.
SC2: With moving in 2011 my interest in SC2 took a complete nosedive, perhaps for the best. I play every now and then, but really I've basically lost all interest in the game. I barely watch GSL anymore, even. Perhaps the expansion release will reignite something, but maybe it's better for me that it doesn't. I got addicted to the game in a bad way when I first got it...
I probably played other games but eat me I'm done.
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Mother 2: I got up through Twoson before I gave up. Playing in Japanese. Reading Hiragana with no Kanji is INFURIATING at this point, and moreover, my SNES copy will glitch out if the SNES is moved at ALL when I play it. I haven't touched it recently, but I'm in a position where that will be less of an issue, so maybe I'll continue it.
According to legend, Itoi did that because he wanted people to read it aloud and make up voices for characters like he did for NES games, like a sports play-by-play dude for the combat scroll and such.
Anyway the best game this year is The Walking Dead. I didn't hate the child character, which I don't think has ever happened in a game before. The ending made me unable to feel anything for three days. Every one of you who didn't buy it when it was $12.50 should be ashamed of yourselves, even if I have already told you that you clearly are incapable of shame or you wouldn't act the way you do. The close second is X-COM. Would have won most other years but TWD was an experience. X-COM is still better than whatever stupid animu think you liked though.
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According to legend, Itoi did that because he wanted people to read it aloud and make up voices for characters like he did for NES games, like a sports play-by-play dude for the combat scroll and such.
That seems unlikely. Most NES and SNES games are all in Hiragana, since kids don't know any Kanji until they're in school, and why would you want to lose out on that potential market share? The only reason games don't do this nowadays is because it's easy to put both the Kanji and the hiragana/katakana into the text at the same time. Besides, the reading of Kanji come naturally after a few years of study, and I'm sure that's true even moreso for Japanese kids.
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I've always been told reading an uninterrupted string of kana without kanji is much easier if done aloud, because it looks kinda like alphabet soup otherwise. My Japanese is fairly mediocre but I've always felt that way at least.
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Hmm, can I recall everything I played in 2012? I'll see if I can remember anything later and update it.
Final Fantasy X-III-2:
I wanted to give this game a chance, since despite how so many things were wrong with FFXIII, fast-paced gameplay was the only thing they got right. Sadly with XIII-2 they made the game too easy to overlevel and general dumbed down difficulty. I had to take in all the silly time travel plot, but there's enough plot summary I didn't get lost on where to go and do next. It's an okay sequel, and I would have been interested in the finale if they didn't turn Lightning Returns into Assassin's Creed Lite (psst Assassin's Creed sucks). Rating: 6/10
Hyperdimension Neptunia MKII:
In my ongoing library to play RPGs Niu won't play, naturally I had to play the sequel to another bad Compile Heart game. Surprise! The game doesn't completely suck. It's easily the best title Compile Heart/Idea Factory put out to date, and I've played quite a few of them. The biggest improvement over the others is the good and accessible battle system. Plays a lot like BoFV, no random encounters, and short brief dungeon slogs. Of course, you had to get over the fact that all the characters in the game are half naked anime girls who are actually videogame consoles. handhelds and companies, but honestly my tolerance for that stuff is fine. Rating: 7/10
Tales of Gracis F:
Battle system was the best ever with multiplayer with my 2 friends, but we all thought that outside of that it was completely inferior to Veserpia. Asbel was the biggest loser in recent memory. Malik and Richard saved the cast in my opinion. The biggest improvement from the last few Tales games was sidequest availability. I can easily put things off and still get every single optional weapon and ability without missing a stupid 1 hour time window. That shit needed to die fast. Rating: 8/10
Fire Emblem: Heroes of Light and Shadow:
Better than Shadow Dragon, but not much more than that. The addition of My Unit gives you a more interactive self-insertion than the stupid tactican of the first GBA Fire Emblem. Map design is average and challenge is fair but I couldn't give any fucks about Marth and his army. Supports were uninteresting and please why do they make Marth do everything? Village opposite site of the capture point! I hope you gave Marth the boots. Warp staff and dancing shenanagins made sped up the lategame so I could finish the game before I grew tired of it. Oh and fuck Astram, asshole got two lucky 1% crits in a row. Rating: 5/10
Atelier Meruru:
Not as a big of a jump of here from Totori as I thought but it's still the best of the trilogy. Better graphical polish, gameplay improvements and large cast with lots of endings. Using Achelemy this time to improve Meruru's kingdom instead of just dicking around for 5 years like Totori gave the game more meaning. Voiced Barrel~ gived the game another point. Rating: 6/10
Record of the Agarest War 2:
Played 2 hours of it. Got bored. They somehow made standard turn based gameplay more stupidly complicated than the other games. Why?! Oh and bullshit true ending requirements that you can miss within the first 5 minutes? I got more used of the wash cloth (with a half-naked elfgirl on it!) that came with it than the actual game itself. Rating: Didn'tbother/10
Deus Ex: Human Revolution:
At this point I finally upgraded my PC, so it's time to finish the steam backlog. First, the adventures of Adam Jenson punching the shit out of the Detroit police department. Seriously, I spent more time trying to silently kill everyone in the building. Once I got down to the last few troopers I ate candy bars and violently punched more dudes. Took all the upgrades that let me keep punching people. Sadly I had to play on the second easiest difficulty because it seems anything higher and Adam can't take more than 2 bullets before dying. Fuck that shit. I'm playing this game like I did Fallout: asking questions, then punching them in the face. Boss fights were the worst aspect of the game. Either know the gimmick or die 50 times before figuring it out. Oh and you can't punch them, but they can punch you. Fucking sucks. Rating: 7/10
Bastion:
Play it. Nothing else needs to be said. I was not expecting to live up to the hype of a game well done for costing 5 bucks but it does. Rating: 9/10
Fortune Summoners:
Take Zelda 2, add in 3rd grade girls with a little bit of sidescroller beat-em-ups with a party. Holy shit it's balls hard though. A little bit unpolished, considering its a japanese indie game and a bit overpriced (worth maybe $7.50 at most, spent $15). Rating: 4/10
Natural Selection 2:
Laggy peer pressure. It's too strong. Anways, it a FPS with heavy emphmass on real time strategy elements like capturing bases and collecting resources. The community is nice but it take a long time to get good at the game, something I don't want to do. Since Trips died, Laggy doesn't want to play the game anymore so I lost interest as well. Rating: Laggy/10
Infamous 2:
Picked it up at a 10 dollar used sale. Nice sequel to a pretty average game. I went with Good over Bad so I could shoot ICE ROCKETS. That's a superpower I'll never get to play with again. Other than that, standard sandbox game. The last 2 hours of the game were intense and the final boss lived up to his name. Ending was too cliché. Rating: 6/10
X-Com: Enemy Unknown:
I was too intimated to play the other X-com games. Seemed to me I had to read 3 pages of FAQs to understand how to play the game otherwise I would get fucked. I gave the new on a shot though. Game was way too buggy to finish. Half the time aliens would spawn right on top of me, then I would move and spawn another group. What's that around the corner? Two cyberdiscs and 9 chryssalids? I'm replaying the game with some community patches and see if things change for the better. Rating: Buggyamericangames/10
Skyrim:
Number of game crashes: 0. Good job Bethesda! Number of times I had the screen saver pop up: 20. Holy shit I didn't think they could put so many things in the game for you to do you couldn't make up your mind and thus do nothing. The game is saved with the Macho Man Randy Savage Dragon/Chicken mod. I did managed to do the bare minimum and finish the story thanks to Grefter's advice and play on a easy difficulty setting. Rating 4/10
Super Robot Wars Z-2 part 2:
Code Geass Plot Code Geass Plot Code Geass Plot Code Geass Plot Code Geass Plot Code Geass Plot Code Geass Plot. Other than that, same fun I have with other japanese SRW games. I really want to understand what goes on in these games without having to read a damn notepad. Rating: 7/10
Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time
I wanted to finish this game, as I generally enjoyed it. However, my PSP finally perished when the triangle button malfunctioned. I need that button to access the menu goddamn it. RIP in peace PSP.
Virtue's Last Reward
999 sequel. Play that first. I had to stop the first hour of VLR to play 999 when someone told me it was a direct sequel. Anyways, it's a little bit less intense than 999 but the addition of voiceovers and a branching plot chart makes it better than the first game. As for the story, well, it's like 999 and fucked up beyond belief. Rating: 7/10
Persona 4: The Golden
A excellent port of one of my favorite PS2 games. Unfortunally, it's on system with absolutely no other games besides this one. Already regretting purchasing a Vita for this game. A lot of people here already played this game on the PS2. Don't bother with this port. Save $199 and rescue a puppy instead. Rating: 9/10
Playstation All-stars Battle Royale:
I got this free with my Vita. I loved Brawl and Melee but I don't give a ratass about Sony's mascot characters to get into this game. Is it bad that I don't know what Parappa the Rapper is from? A lot of people are making fun of me for this. Rating: freegame/10
Star Fox 3DS:
3DS game to dick around with until Fire Emblem Awakening came out. It's pretty much the same game but with inferior voiceovers. I'm still replay it from time to time, too cumbersome to play around with N64 emulators to get the original to work. Rating: 8/10
League of Legends
This is the only game my best friend plays anymore. All he does is troll. Of course he gets banned but makes another account and trolls. Anyways, got peer pressured into joining him on breaking the meta. The community is completely toxic and no other game will people call you a stupid noob faggot piece of shit than this game. Somehow I got actually good at the game and got up to 1600 elo/Platinum so I just keep playing it without hating or loving the game. Maybe it's just I can play a bear that's sole purpose is to flip people and roar. Masochism/10
Dota 2:
Laggy's friend (Sphen) made me download this. After realizing there are no bears that flip people, anime girls that shoot rainbow lazer beams, or bomb throwing rats there's no reason to play this over LoL. People are just as likely to call you a stupid noob faggot piece of shit but with VOICE chat. Great. Uninstall/10.
Worst game Ephraim played in 2012: Final Fantasy Tactics 1.3:
Doesn't have me in the game. LFT superior master FFT hacking race.
#1 Game released in 2012 that Ephraim will never play ever: Diablo III:
Suck my cock Blizzard.
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The only reason to make fun of you about it is because Parrapa the Rapper comes from the game of the same name. Otherwise cult PSX game that people love and assume everyone else has played it and loves it because that is what happens. You play a game and then absolutely everyone on the planet has played it what do you mean you aren't obsessive about a game that is about a cartoon dog that raps.
Actually what the fuck Eph why aren't you obsessive about a game with a cartoon dog that raps?
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I've always been told reading an uninterrupted string of kana without kanji is much easier if done aloud, because it looks kinda like alphabet soup otherwise. My Japanese is fairly mediocre but I've always felt that way at least.
Oh, that's definitely true. Figuring out long strings of kana without sounding them out is dumb. However, I doubt that this was the driving force behind having the game be entirely in Kana.
Also, Eph played a lot of games I don't have any interest in except for Deus Ex: HR, and I am with him 100%. Punch some dudes.
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You never know why Itoi does anything. He is a madman.