My 2013 in Games / Music Wrap-Up

I highly doubt I'll be finishing Final Fantasy Dimensions by the end of the year, so I'm just going to rank the list of games I've played this year as well as touch on albums. I listen to a lot more music during a year than I do games, so I'm going to restrict that list to just albums released in 2013.  Merry X-Mas everyone.

GAMES

27. Knights in the Nightmare (PSP) - Maybe one of the worst games I've ever played. Holy cow, when the tutorial is better than the game you know there are problems. I still have no idea how I was supposed to play this, it's that confusing. I am hesitant to play another Sting game after this experience.

26. Soma Bringer (DS) - Might be OK with multiplayer, but alone it's really one-dimensional and the story's nothing special. Just play Xenoblade instead--it's clear Monolith was just getting their feet wet with this title and the fact that we didn't get it in the US is no big loss.

25. Great Greed (GB) - It's worth playing for a few minutes to see just how bad an RPG can be if it has no interesting ideas, but there's just nothing to this game. The translation is bad to the point of not even being funny.

24. [2013] Mario & Luigi: Dream Team (3DS) - Let's just rehash the same game again, somehow make dream worlds uninteresting, and have TWO annoying Navi characters to pester the player for the whole adventure. If you haven't played M&L at all you might get a kick out of this, but otherwise I would have to recommend M&L 1 and 3 first, and even those aren't that fantastic.  

23. Shantae (GBC) - Yeah, I'm not feeling this as a lost classic. It LOOKS good, but it suffers from the same problems most Game Boy platformers have. Bad hitboxes on attacks, enemy placement that adds more difficulty than the game should actually have, etc, etc. As someone who grew up with this kind of game, I wasn't impressed by anything here.

22. Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland (Vita) - I'm not going to say this is a bad game, but it's not my cup of tea. Art style is disturbingly overcute and distracting, gameplay seemed to be mostly composed of finding loot, battles are brain dead simple RPG mechanics. Some people like this kind of thing, so more power to you.  

21. Crimson Shroud (3DS) - The board game aesthetic of the game is nice, but it's so short that it doesn't have time to get interesting. In the end, I don't think it's worth the low price even. Kind of a let-down. Solid base, though, I must stress.

20. [2013] Plants vs Zombies 2: It's About Time (Android) - Thanks for ruining one of my favorite games with your greed and ridiculous changes, EA. The day after I reviewed the game, they updated it and completely threw off the mechanics of the game in ridiculous ways.  It's clear the current developers just don't have the heart of the game in them, and it's sad.

19. [2013] Gone Home (PC) - For a two hour game, it's pretty great.  I didn't get invested in the story, but if you don't mind something being more shallow than it initially appears you may enjoy it.  The graphics are wonderful and if it had more to do and more to learn I might rate it higher.

18. Theatrhythm Final Fantasy (3DS) - No matter how much I love Nobuo, I can only tap my screen for so long before it gets old, and this did. I couldn't finish ANY of the battle themes on the hardest difficulty and don't plan on it.  It was fun hearing all of the songs, but I have them all on my phone anyway.

17. Etrian Odyssey 4 (3DS) - I got to the fourth map before getting bored, so it lasted longer than any of the other EO games for me. Like with those, I enjoy the mechanics and the idea of the game, but it's very tedious and doesn't feel worth the investment since the plot is an afterthought. Still, if you like hard dungeon RPGs, it's worth a shot.

16. Donkey Kong Country Returns (3DS) - Decent platformer, lacking compared to other similar games (e.g. Rayman Origins). The controls are terrible in both versions of the game, especially if you are used to the SNES games. I think it's a worthy enough sequel to the original games, but not as fun to play as those.

15. Ni No Kuni (PS3) - Maybe the prettiest game I have ever played, but the gameplay is so easy and at times broken that I have no idea how anyone can think this is a 'great' RPG. The ally AI is so terrible it hurts. Seems like no matter what you give them, they won't use it the way you'd like. I did finish the game and enjoyed a lot of aspects of it, but it needed more QA.

14. Suikoden (PS1) - Great classic RPG, can't believe I never got in to this series. It's showing a lot of age, but wasn't a chore to get through and had some interesting dark story moments. Pulls off the 'tons of characters' thing way better than Chrono Cross.

13. Back to the Future {Telltale} (PC) - Not as good as The Walking Dead, but it feels like a legitimate BTTF4, and is so faithful to the movies that I couldn't help loving it the whole way as I'm a big fan. Controls are an issue, but workable if you love BTTF.

12. Fire Emblem: Awakening (3DS) - The most accessible Fire Emblem game for new players, and in general it's a good one. Pair Up feels extremely broken. I still like Fire Emblem 7 more, but Tharja is my waifu so this is #2.

11. [2013] Ace Attorney 5: Dual Destinies (3DS) - Another great Ace Attorney game. If you've played up to now you know what to expect here. Excellent graphics and music. Case 5 had some real shocking moments, and even the DLC case was good. This was the first AA game since AA3 that I thought had no bad apples as far as cases go. Loved Athena, hope she sticks around.

10. [2013] Pokemon X/Y (3DS) - Solid Pokemon games. I enjoyed Black/White more since the game felt more focused, but the huge variety of available creatures helped to make this game feel open ended. Graphics are amazing, music is the worst in the series, Team Flare plot is terrible, but hey, it's Pokemon.

9. Dragon Quest III (SNES) - The last DQ game I finished, and it was a good one. Love the map design, loved the level of challenge, looking forwarding to replaying it some day.

8. SpaceChem (PC) - Awesome puzzle game, but extremely difficult without any kind of guide. I'm not done with it but take cracks at it now and then. The concept is frankly amazing and keeps me coming back.

7. [2013] Shin Megami Tensei IV (3DS) - Strong RPG for the 3DS. I would rank it about evenly with Nocturne. The world map in the game is among the worst I've ever seen, but doesn't detract enough to make me dislike the game. Good demon pool, being a magical beatstick was fun. The second half of the story was about as poorly conceived as in the other mainline SMT games, but the atmosphere was good and made up for it.

6. Thief 3: Deadly Shadows (PC) - The least good of the Thief games, but that isn't saying a whole lot because I enjoyed it almost as much. The hub area paid off sometimes and didn't other times.

5. Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward (Vita) - Great sequel to 999. Interesting characters, an innovative method of storytelling, and excellent voice acting. 

4. Dishonored (PC) - Felt like a spiritual successor to Thief, which is good for me because I love Thief. Challenging and engaging if you take the nonviolent route, probably fun and more diverse if you go for kills. The world is extremely well thought-out and detailed. It's cheap on Steam sales, so give it a try if you haven't.

3. [2013] The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (3DS) - Total shocker to me. I have hated every Zelda game released post-Minish Cap until now. This game isn't just a good sequel to LTTP, it's a great game in its own right. I love nonlinear Zelda, loved the new stamina bar, loved just feeling like a kid enjoying Zelda again. A must-own for the 3DS. GOTY 2013.

2. Demon's Souls (PS3) - Note: This game has shot up a lot in my estimation since I beat it and reflected on it more.  Tough, rewarding, and with a lot of variety in approaches to enemies. The atmosphere builds and grows on you as the game goes on, and by the end I was floored by how real the world felt. Not many games trust you to get better at them, but Demon's Souls does.

1. The Walking Dead (PC) - GOTY 2012, easily. Maybe the greatest adventure game ever made, with fantastic characterization, a good art style, visceral scenes, and real emotional payoff. It puts the show and the comic book to shame.


MUSIC

11. Julia Holter - Loud City Song: Yawn

10. The Flaming Lips - The Terror: This band has completely lost it over the years.  It's less of a chore than Embryonic, but that's not saying a whole lot.

9. Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest - It cracks me up that people are actually excited about this record.  Middle of the road ambient slosh, nothing special about it whatsoever. People who don't listen to video game music or post-rock seem to have wildly different opinions of instrumental works, I guess.

8. OCRemix - Final Fantasy 6: Balance and Ruin - Incredibly spotty, but it has some songs that are of much higher quality than normally seen on these remix albums. The overabundance of dubstep is really embarrassing. I wish the people organizing these things understood how to make an album flow a little better.

7. Deltron 3030 - Event 2: Man, disappointment of the year.  I don't have much else to say.  Del's flow is tired, the songs aren't as interesting, and it just seems dated.  Maybe if they had released this ten years ago it would have been fresh, but nothing about it excited me.

6. My Bloody Valentine - m b v: While it's nice that MBV finally got it together and released something else, it's also clear their ideas are worn out and they were kind of a one trick pony.  I'd never recommend this over Loveless and it felt gimmicky to me.  Won't be making my collection.

5. Arcade Fire - Reflektor - Hey, it's better than their last two efforts.  Still, I'm thinking Funeral is the only Arcade Fire album I'm going to be hanging on to long-term. I actually liked the new disco sound, but they didn't do enough with it to hold my interest.

4. They Might Be Giants - Nanobots: Has a bunch of dumb filler songs, but the strong material is generally better than on their last album.  I'm a long time fan of this band and their music has had its ups and downs over the years, but it's good enough if you're still in to them.  They need to stop trying to recreate the magic of old stuff that worked and keep pushing forward.

3. The National - Trouble Will Find Me: I think this is their most mediocre album so far (no idea how it's scoring so well on other lists) but again, as a fan of The National, I still enjoyed this.  It's very samey, which works against it. Still, if you wanna feel sad and miserable in 2013, here's your jam.

2. Janelle Monae - The Electric Lady: It's a lot more shamelessly pop than The ArchAndroid, but it's still Janelle Monae, and it's still an awesome record that's grown on me since I first spun it. I am glad she hasn't really blown up on the radio; it's helped to keep her from compromising her wacky personality, I think. The best R&B I've heard since her last album, I guess.

1. Sigur Ros - Kveikur: Easily my favorite album of the year, and the best Sigur Ros has done since 2005. Deliciously dark, moody, and has an energy that's been lacking in them for a while.  I liked last year's Valtari more than the general consensus, but this album is destined to be remembered as one of their best.  Never listened to this band?  Kveikur is a good start.

Gone Home

Gone Home is an indie adventure title that has been gathering a lot of buzz as one of the best games released in 2013. As a fan of the genre, I was curious to give it a try, and in short, my conclusion is that people are easily pleased in this industry. This game doesn't even hold a candle to Ace Attorney 5 (which also came out this year) and doesn't have a whole lot going on to set itself apart. I feel like it would be unfair to trash this game, really, as it's clear tons of work went in to designing the house and making it look good, and for the most part it's well-written (though, who really had this many letters lying around their houses in the mid-90s?). However, the sad thing is a house of this size would normally be a single area in a bigger game and will often have as much detail packed in to the environment. When taken as a short, two hour experience, Gone Home is great. When compared to other games, it feels like a tech demo despite its strengths.

The setup of Gone Home is that a girl (Katie) has returned home after a trip from Europe and nobody's there. To its credit, the game does an excellent job making the house seem mysterious and spooky, which is the high point of the game. Your job is to explore the labyrinthine home and search for clues about what happened. I won't reveal what's been going on, but I will tell you it's unsatisfying because you'll figure out everything that's actually important within an hour. The rest is just following bread crumbs (which are lazily strewn about in letters all over the place) to the end of the game. Again, there's nothing wrong with this being the main gameplay element, but this kind of thing has been done in adventure games since the early 90s, and since Gone Home is so short it feels like a small part of a story that should have been a lot bigger. You can explore the house and find extra details unrelated to the mystery that the game thinks is so important, but none of that matters and the majority does not even tie in to the central conflict. As I said in my Dishonored review, I honestly hate how so many western games are full to the brim with pointless details that exist solely to 'flesh out' a world. It's a tradition that probably harkens back to Tolkien and does nothing for people who prefer a focused narrative.

Furthermore, I take issue with the main 'twist' that is at the core of Gone Home's plot. If you don't want to be spoiled on this one, I suggest you stop reading, but if you weren't interested in Gone Home in the first place, I'll save you an hour. Basically, Katie discovers after a bit of exploration that her sister is a lesbian and has been sneaking around with her girlfriend. It really annoys me when this is used as a 'plot twist' in stories, not because it's implying homosexuals are weird or something, but because it's an incredibly weak thing to hinge interesting narrative on. Imagine if a story was centered on the fact that a dude liked cats more than dogs--it's a nice detail to know, okay, but it's only a supplemental thing. You could make the female lover in this game male and absolutely nothing would change.

One thing I did like about Gone Home was how much it misdirected expectations. In other words, the game makes it look like something is about to occur or creates an assumption in your head, but subverts it later on. That's great, but it's just over way too soon. Being over way too soon is this game's trouble in general, and nobody will remember it at all within two years. Even though I'm preferring games to be shorter these days, sometimes you need a little more to chew on to get any pleasure out of a sandwich.

5.5

Back to the Future: The Game

This year, I finally caught up and finished watching the Back to the Future films.  The trilogy quickly became one of my favorites because of its tight continuity and lovable characters, and I wished I had seen them when I was younger.  However, after playing Telltale's Back to the Future game, I'm actually glad I waited. Having the films fresh in mind made the games a blast to play, and if you're a fan of BTTF who hasn't tried them yet, I suggest doing so when you have time. Without spoiling anything, it's safe to say the game feels like a legitimate continuation of the films' story and the creators put a lot of love and care in to making Hill Valley come alive again. While I do think Telltale knocked The Walking Dead out of the park a bit more, this game was a great warm-up for them, and they didn't repeat the mistakes made in it.

Back to the Future: The Game's greatest flaw is its typical adventure game clunkiness.  Controlling Marty is slow, sometimes unresponsive, and kind of frustrating at times. Many puzzles require traversing maps over and over again, which gets tedious and made me long for the simpler interface of games like King's Quest 6. I'm not sure that 3D graphics are worth sacrificing ease of use, but they do help to make the game feel more like the films, so it's a bit of a trade-off. It's a shame, as the game has a number of interesting puzzles, but they are hampered by odd design decisions. There are also points where I'd get ahead of the characters' logic and try to solve puzzles they weren't ready for yet. It's always annoying when this happens in games, but it's more pronounced in this genre. Sadly, you have to get past nagging issues like this to enjoy the game, but if you can, you're in for a nice ride.

Wisely, the creators focus much of the story on Doc Brown. He was always the most interesting character in the franchise, and it's great to learn about his backstory and see alternate versions of him. Christopher Lloyd graciously reprises the role here and it's as if no time has passed; he's a truly great actor, bringing the same level of goofiness and passion the character is known for. It's remarkable how consistent the other cast members are with their film personalities too, from Biff and his kin to the McFly family and so on. The other major character in the game is the newly introduced Edna, a grouchy woman who is so maniacally against alcoholism that even I (a strict anti-drug dude) was getting sick of her. While she annoyed me, I have to say I loved where the writers took her character later on in the game, and she proved herself a satisfying antagonist by the end. Like in the films, almost all of the introduced characters have some importance to Marty, Doc, or somebody else central to the story.  Too often, games like this will meander with side plots and one-note characters, but Telltale sidesteps that trapping well and shows that (like in The Walking Dead) they have actual writing talent on staff.

If you are a fan of Back to the Future and familiar with all three movies, this is about as close to Back to the Future 4 as you're likely to see, and honestly, I'm okay with considering it that. Enough members of the original staff (including a head writer) are there to make it feel legitimate, and a live action version would have been impossible due to Michael J Fox's health and age. However, if you aren't a fan of Back to the Future, there's really not much to see here. It's a decent adventure game that thrives on being part of a great series.

7.5

Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time (partial)

It feels strange writing about this game because it's strange that Electronic Arts went ahead and released it before it was finished. There are quite obviously several missing levels, and I would have gladly waited and paid for the whole game instead of just playing half of it, but it is what it is. I'm a big fan of the first Plants vs. Zombies.  Popcap produced a casual game that you can enjoy no matter how much you actually play games. I honestly feel like the original was something anyone would like given enough time: it's the most basic defense game from a mechanical stand point, but with its silly premise, charming graphics and light difficulty curve, something about the game was magical.  PvZ was proof that a product aimed at the mass market could be something more: a deep, interesting game that introduced a genre to many without treating them like toddlers.

Needless to say, I was upset that EA ended up creating PvZ2.  When it was released as an IOS exclusive, I was even mad; I refuse to spend any money on Apple products and it felt like a punch in the gut that the sequel to one of my favorite games might not be available to me. Eventually, we got the game on Android, and now I'm kind of wishing it had stayed on IOS, at least until the full game was finished. EA decided to make the game free to play, pushing micro-transactions to either skip ahead to later content (what?) or purchase plants from the first game (huh?). Personally, I would have been fine with spending $20 on a PvZ game, which is beyond what mobile games normally cost in the first place. Instead, whenever I play this game I'm taunted with ads to unlock content for stupid amounts of money. Why buy a chili pepper for $4 when it was free in the original?

I didn't want this obvious money-making scheme to interfere with how I felt about the game, but unfortunately there is not much else to say about it. Since the game isn't complete, new additions barely have any time to shine. Sure, the mine cart idea for moving plants around is neat, but they barely scratched the surface of using it. Some of the new plants are neat (I love the peas that stack if you keep replanting them), some of them are dull (Did we need a punching cabbage when we had one-hit kill plants in the original?), and some are just repeats (The chili bean is just a reworked Hypno shroom). All in all, this game doesn't feel like a proper sequel to Plants vs. Zombies: it feels like a decent set of downloadable content that lacks the same polish.  Plant food is an interesting gimmick, giving your plants a temporary huge boost, but it's nothing revolutionary. The super-powered screen wipes feel like a con to make you buy more coins for them and usually aren't necessary anyway. I can live without everything new added in this game, and I guess in the future I will.

If you're interested at all in Plants vs. Zombies, I'd have to suggest just buying the original game. It's cheap, it will last you a long time, and it's on every platform ever with no bugs and a guaranteed track record.

5.5 (Partial completion.  Because it ISN'T FINISHED)

Demon's Souls

Demon's Souls is a challenging action RPG released by From Software in 2009.  It is popular and notorious for its difficulty, so I probably don't need to actually introduce it. Boletaria, a bleak, barren kingdom that has been razed by demons, immediately sets the mood of the story.  Demon's Souls is reminiscent of other Japanese games like Shin Megami Tensei in that it's set in a world beyond human help where you must pick up the pieces and do what you can.  I have always found it curious that this plot is so popular in Japan, which I suppose makes sense given that the nation has faced massive destruction from atom bombs, tsunamis, and earthquakes, but regardless it's done well here.  The gloomy aesthetics of the game are tough to criticize after finishing it, and aside from a few lazy-looking bosses in the Valley of Defilement, I think Demon's Souls might have one of the most successful looks and feels I've seen in a video game.

Of course, Demon's Souls's greatest strength is its gameplay.  There are so many different way to approach it that I'm not sure how to begin, but I'll just say my personal choice was an archer with a katana, so I got to use most of the combat elements of the game besides attack magic.  Demon's Souls makes many different styles of combat useful, which is quite a feat considering how useless certain classes are in other games. Archers can completely avoid certain dangerous situations by sniping enemies. Melee classes have a much easier time dealing with basic hordes of enemies. Magicians are probably overpowered, but fun to play as. As long as you understand the equipment system, what weapons you need, and all that jazz, you can approach the game how you like and it will still probably be challenging but possible.

This playthrough was my second attempt to get into Demon's Souls.  The first time, I performed the ultimate rage-quit of returning the game and later purchasing it again. While that might make me seem like a wimp, my main criticism of this game now has a lot to do with the reasons I returned it in the first place.  Much has been written about Demon's Soul's difficulty and cruelty to the player, but I think the cruelty isn't so much the fault of the difficulty; rather, it's the fault of the designers for not making the game's mechanics clear. Many important stats are signified with symbols instead of names. The game never tells you how the different weapon upgrade paths differ. Some players may never realize they need to unburden themselves to roll, which is a crucial skill for avoiding certain attacks. The game never tells you that the starting class doesn't affect your stat build except for in very specific cases. World tendency adjusts itself through hidden methods and affects the difficulty of the game. The list goes on and on.  I was only able to enjoy this game after watching informative videos and browsing the wiki.  Now, I realize there are plenty of people who played the game with no outside help, but when you're as bad at action games as I am you need at least some step in the right direction. I think if Demon's Souls had been more up front about certain mechanics I would not have had so much trouble.  Thus, if I had to point out the underlying issue with Demon's Souls it would probably be "polish."  The game actually has a very good tutorial, and I liked that it avoided interrupting the player later on to explain mechanics, but unfortunately some mechanics needed a glossary or some form of in-game explanation to avoid the need for guide-surfing.

The level design may be the most impressive thing about this game.  Each area is completely distinct, not just from a visual standpoint but from its gameplay too.  Boletaria has hordes of human enemies that require some combat finesse; Stonefang is full of precious minerals and slow, powerful enemies; Latria is more terrifying than it is challenging, but has the toughest bosses in the game; The Shrine of Storms has incredibly difficult foes but simple bosses; The Valley of Defilement is slow and grueling, attempting to wear down the player. I wish more games could make each section of them feel this unique and memorable. In most games, I can't remember what certain areas were like years down the line, but I don't think I'll ever forget a single place in Demon's Souls.  It goes to show how good direction in art, programming, and storytelling can come together to make something timeless.

I can't recommend Demon's Souls to most gamers, but if you are up for a challenge give it a try. There were many bosses I found way too frustrating to ever want to face again but I was glad to overcome them.  (If you suck at action games like me, have fun trying to take on Flamelurker or Maneater without cheesing them)  It is worth playing to see the incredible levels and experience a fully realized world, but just know that you will die and die a lot, but that's part of the game.  Demon's Souls trusts the player to improve over time, use resources to improve his chances of victory, and ultimately decide how he wants to see it end.

8

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

It's been ten years since the last Zelda game that I thoroughly enjoyed (Minish Cap) was released. While I respect Nintendo for trying to shake up the formula with weird controls in the last few games, the ones I played left a sour taste in my mouth. I wasn't able to finish Skyward Sword, and Phantom Hourglass had me so bored partway through it that I returned the game without much hesitation. When they announced a sequel to Link to the Past was coming, I didn't think it could do much better. Clearly Nintendo didn't care about their longtime fans and wanted to have the series innovate for the sake of innovation while ignoring glaring issues with the series.  Fortunately, they have proven me wrong this time, and the result is not just a great Zelda game, but one of my new personal favorites.

A Link Between Worlds could be your first 2D Zelda game and I think it would be satisfactory, but it's really a love letter to fans of Link to the Past.  The game takes place in the same version of Hyrule, Dark World and all, but mixes things up.  Some new paths exist between areas, some places have new set pieces, but it's all the same world.  I don't have a problem with this form of recycling, and it's a great way to continue the story of a series and stay true the original.  There are a lot of cute references to the past game: returning characters like Blind the Thief and Sarshalakadingdong, improved ideas from the first game's dungeons, moments put in to trick people who played the first game, and my favorite, a similar fast travel system.  The remixed music, while not totally an improvement, did hit the right buttons and blended well with newer songs added for dungeons and such.  It's impressive that the same enemies from a game made in 1991 still hold up and are interesting with just a few fresh moves added to them. Link Between Worlds feels easier than its father, partially because Link swings the sword faster, but it still plays just as nicely.

This game was promoted as and is indeed nonlinear: Link can beat all of the Lorule dungeons in any order and rents the items needed to progress.  On a bit of a downer note, this makes the dungeons get easier as you go since nothing gained in one is required for another (with one exception), but the upside is worth the trade-off.  You can play the game how I did: explore all of Lorule entirely before entering a single dungeon. You can play the dungeons in the classic order if you want to.  You can roll a die and do them at random as long as you do the Thieves' Hideout before the Sand Temple.  Each dungeon does give you a different reward (better armor, ore for upgrading the sword, and a few other things) so one player's experience may be slightly different from another's.  I loved this approach, which is of course reminiscent of Zelda 1 and 3, and am glad that Nintendo didn't make yet another strictly linear Zelda game.  It's a series that benefits greatly from the player being free to explore and make his own journey.  They even cut down on the text for once, which is a major improvement.

So, do I just want Nintendo to remake old games and avoid trying new things?  At this point, I'm not sure what to say.  I feel like their games have a history of being disappointing when drastic changes happen. Super Mario Sunshine, Skyward Sword, Pokemon Gen 3, and several other games are evidence enough. It's easy to just make changes or add new elements to a series, but it's much more difficult to get them right, especially on the first try.  On the other hand, it's possible to make a game that feels a lot like its predecessor, make a few tweaks and add just a couple of interesting ideas, and have it come out all the better.  A Link Between Worlds is a good example of a game that is strong because it is refining older ideas, and it's certainly a game I'll be replaying before I even consider several of the earlier entries.  If you are a fan or even a former fan of the Zelda franchise, you should play this game.  It's short, fun, and recaptures something the series had lost along the way: that sense of reward in exploration.

8

Dishonored

Dishonored is a stealth assassination game released in 2012.  The player has the option of assassinating targets as intended or seeking non-violent paths to taking out enemies.  As a big fan of the Thief series, it's impossible for me to avoid comparing Dishonored to my favorite stealth titles.  Dishonored isn't just a fan of Thief; it has several direct references to the games, and to my delight, most of them made me smile.  The game has enough innovations and tricks up its sleeve to be its own experience while maintaining a similarity for fans of its grandfather.  What sets Dishonored apart most is the main character Corvo's magical abilities: teleportation, possession, X-ray vision, time freezing, and more.  Using these abilities to assist in stealth missions is both fun and fitting.

The level design in Dishonored is a strong point.  There are fewer maps than in games like Thief and Metal Gear Solid, but the maps are large and have a lot of variety in ways to approach them.  You can travel through mouse holes to sneak in to rooms through possession, try and steal keys from guards, or scale the ceilings of the buildings and search for openings to rooms.  None of these options feel contrived or out of place, and they reward patient, observant players in addition to those who just want to rush in, guns blazing. Even better, the game seems fun to replay not just to take a darker or lighter route, but to find new paths through each stage.  If I have any complaint about the game's level design it's that enemies are so easy to murder that the difficulty seems stacked against nonviolent players, but since I haven't played the game in every possible way, for all I know it compensates in some way.  On the bright side, I definitely will play it again to find out.

Dishonored's plot is about what you'd expect.  Corvo gets framed for a crime and gets revenge by taking out the conspirators involved while learning about a mysterious plague that has overtaken the country.  Some elements of the story feel by the numbers, but it moves at a good pace, so I never found myself getting tired of politics or strategy sessions.  The game can be finished in under 20 hours with little issue, which is a huge plus to me.  I do think some elements of the world could have been fleshed out better during the game's run time, but I didn't read every book on every shelf so I was probably missing a few things.  Dishonored unfortunately makes the mistake many western games do in having so much pointless junk to read that it starts to dilute the stuff that's actually important.  This design decision bothers me in every game it shows up in.

Overall, I find myself with little to say about this game even though I enjoyed it immensely.  The game does what every stealth game should but many don't: it rewards the player for being stealthy.  The only control issue I had was that choking (the nonlethal take-out method) and blocking (which makes noise and can alert someone you are sneaking up on) are mapped to the same button.  Bizarre.  Dishonored is a fun and engaging stealth title that I highly recommend, and probably one of the better games released in 2012.

8

Ace Attorney 5: Dual Destinies

Writing about this game in too much detail would spoil the story, so I'll be brief.  This is the fifth main game in the Ace Attorney series, and if you've played the first four and enjoyed them, you should check it out.  One of the neater aspects of this game is that you control three different lawyers: Phoenix Wright, Apollo Justice, and newcomer Athena Cykes.  Cykes has the ability to read emotions, which meshes well with Phoenix's ability to tell people are hiding things and Apollo's lie detection.  Of course, the gameplay elements don't matter nearly as much as the story in these games.  All five of the cases are good, though not quite on the level of Ace Attorney 3, and the writers did a great job improving on Apollo Justice's character so it's easy to look past some of the bumpy territory from the previous game.  The game now uses 3D characters instead of the traditional sprites, and they look magnificent.  Phoenix & co. still have their classic poses and everything feels more vibrant and fluid than it did before.  The music, while not on the level of the first game, is pleasant enough and has a good mixture of old and new songs.  Ace Attorney 5 stands up well with the previous games even though things have changed so much in the game's world, and I highly recommend it, but if you haven't played the other games you should start from the beginning.

Of course, this is not to say the game is without weaknesses.  While the stories of the cases are solid (e.g. the "how" of the murders), I do feel like the writers are focusing way more on making an interesting case than they are developing the characters.  I didn't understand the motivation behind several of the murders in the game, and while it was a lot of fun putting all the pieces together (and I was always way ahead of the game characters, sadly) I do wish there were more interesting villains that could be seen as sympathetic or at least motivated by something other than greed like in previous games.  Also, the series seems to be bringing back old characters just as token appearances now, and while it did make me smile to see some familiar faces, there are still some I either wish showed up (Gumshoe, seriously!) or thought felt superfluous. (Pearl over Gumshoe?  Really?)  In all honesty, though, these are nitpicky complaints that didn't affect my enjoyment of the story too badly.  The only truly crippling flaws with the game are the poor localization (tons of spelling errors) and incredibly slow text speed.

I'm looking forward to Ace Attorney 6 if it happens, but I could also see the series ending here without too much harm being done.  Some would argue the series has already been run in to the ground, and I can see their point.  However, I'm happy to have what exists in this series, and at this point I'm so attached to the classic characters that I'd be willing to see whatever story comes next for them.  Ace Attorney 5 just adds more fun stuff to the table.

7.5

Pokemon X/Y

Note: I am judging this game almost entirely on the single player mode.  I dabble in competitive/post-E4 Pokemon, but it's not that important to me when looking at the game as a singular experience.  If we're judging by that, then obviously this is the best Pokemon game to date.

This is the sixth generation of Pokemon games, and the series has matured with each entry while staying familiar, becoming more complicated on the gameplay end while maintaining its simple, Dragon Quest-inspired core.  The games are still targeted at children, which is a bit surprising considering that the fanbase of the old games might be out for a little more; I know that at several points playing this game I wished the NPCs inhabiting the world spoke in a way that didn't make them seem like tutorials or that they were insulting my intelligence.  Well, that's Nintendo for you.  And really, it's a point that illustrates many of the problems I had with this game.  Pokemon can't decide if it wants to be mind-numbingly easy and pandering to the youngest players or incredibly complicated.  Up to this point, the games have done a decent job catering to fans of the RPG and fans of the monster collection and battling, but all of that is basically thrown out the window in X/Y.

Pokemon X/Y is mostly a big improvement on the visual end, but the audio leaves much to be desired.  The 3D models for all monsters look great, with only a few showing some laziness.  I have to commend Game Freak for going the extra mile on this front: all of the Pokemon have unique animations and react when attacked and attacking.  The attacks themselves also look great, as does the world of the game, the characters, and basically everything but Lumiose City, which uses a 3D camera inferior to those seen in N64 games.  I have always been a big fan of Pokemon's music, but this game left me cold much of the time.  The battle music is the least memorable it's been since the beginning, and I hate how the gym leader battle music is just a techno track with no sense of tune now.  On that note, I also miss how the music would change in Black/White when you reached the last Pokemon on a gym leader's team or your party was low on HP. The removal of this feature is baffling to me since it worked so well previously; they could have just reused the songs, even.  Most of the field music is good and gives the player a great sense of adventure just like in past games.  Sadly, these songs are the only ones that stand out as strong.  Overall, I think the game works well on the aesthetic side of things, and this is probably the biggest improvement of the generation.

X/Y starts out pretty well on the gameplay end.  This time around, Game Freak capitalized on the huge variety of Pokemon that have become available over the years.  At least in the first half of the game, trainers use a satisfying mix of monsters and the player has tons of options to choose from even before the first gym. While I preferred how Black/White focused only on the new creatures, I enjoyed this approach too.  It helped to make battles less monotonous and showed what a big series this has become in a fun way.  Sadly, midway through the game I noticed trainers using a lot of the same Pokemon over and over, which seemed very odd.  Sawk and Throh, for instance, are very common later on.  Why use those guys so much when there is a wide pool of Fighting types available and they're among the more boring designs?  It seems disjointed.  One thing that truly bothered me was the number of Pokemon trainers used throughout the game. Only one battle, the final, had a trainer with a team of six, and all of the gym leaders only had three monsters. This was disappointing to me as a player who enjoys a good adversary.  Perhaps the designers intended to improve the pace of the game, but I don't think this particular idea worked out well for them.

One of the more controversial additions to the game is the new Experience Share tool.  If this device is left on, the entire team of Pokemon gain experience from every battle (and it's 50% of participators' too).  While I loved that this helps get weaker Pokemon up to speed and encourages some experimentation, it also makes the game insanely easy.  I finished this game with my levels being 10 higher than the final encounter's and I never once stopped to gain levels on purpose.  I'm divided on the Experience Share; I think that the increase of pace it provides is mostly beneficial, but perhaps the developers could have made the game more challenging to combat the boon of bonus experience.  As it is, X/Y is the easiest Pokemon game by a huge margin, and the games weren't that challenging to begin with.

My favorite new gameplay feature is the more streamlined online interface.  If you play the game while online (friend who didn't: why didn't you?  We could have had a great time giving each other powers and stuff.  Oh well)  No longer do you have to travel back to Pokemon Centers to play with your friends.  Trading on the go, having a quick battle that doesn't interrupt the game flow, sending your buddy a boost to his money gain... it's all fun stuff that I highly appreciated.  In ten years, none of this will matter since nobody's playing the game anymore, but I feel these changes were a good addition to help implement online play better.

The new super training feature is another notable addition.  While it involves playing dumb mini-games, I am all for Game Freak cutting the crap and actually showing what is going on behind the scenes with stat growth. For those not in the know, all of the Pokemon games feature a hidden system in which you gain stats by battling certain types of Pokemon.  Since generation 3, you've actually had to do this strategically to make a powerful team member for competitive play.  In X/Y, the game shows you your stat growth in a chart format, which isn't perfect, but might help some players understand how the system works without resorting to guides, and I appreciate this big time.  That said, playing mini-games to increase stats is just stupid and takes forever.  To me, a much better solution would be for the player to gain universal stat points through battling and be able to assign those points at will.  I could say the same thing about almost every tedious aspect of raising Pokemon, but I realize in the end these things are unlikely to be modified significantly.  The post-game will always cater to people who only play Pokemon and leave everyone else in the dust.

Ultimately, the most problematic element of the game to me is its story.  Obviously, I'm not looking for a deep plot or hugely dynamic characters here, but I would appreciate something that gets to the point, doesn't aspire to be what it isn't, and doesn't make me feel stupid for getting invested in it.  More specifically, the characters in this game are garbage.  The player begins by meeting a group of four other kids who kinda-sorta travel throughout the game alongside him or her.  All of the kids have a single character trait that is displayed in the most bland manner possible: a fat guy that loves dancing, a little girl who wants to play nice, a boring rival whose only purpose is to be a rival, and a pointless girl who just wants to fill up the Pokedex and never says anything important.  I appreciate Game Freak attempting to show that kids can travel on the Pokemon journey together, which makes a lot of sense, but if characters like these are going to be present, I'd prefer for them to develop or show some sign that the journey was meaningful.  As they are now, they're just wasting time.  For instance, in once scene you watched a fireworks show with the annoying little girl.  It's meant to be an emotional moment that shows how the two are friends and will always be there for each other, but it's completely meaningless because nothing about the little girl or the hero makes us care about them.  Some might argue that there's no point in complaining about these things, but since the game goes out of the way to show us these scenes while the older entries zipped along and went fine, I think it's worth bringing up.  Pokemon Black/White didn't have a great story, but it attempted to make the rival (N) an interesting character with an arc and that worked out well for the most part.  You can't just increase the amount of scenes side characters are present in to make them more effective--those scenes have to be meaningful, and this is where X/Y drops the ball.

The worst and most blatantly bad element of the story is Team Flare's involvement.  Team Flare's goal is to create a world of only beautiful people, which is a great sinister plan, but runs in to the same problem as the rivals'.  That's all there is to them, and they never show any sort of justification for their actions.  Now, it's not like the teams in previous games were a lot better, but in a game that takes more breaks to show you story scenes, some extra development would have been appreciated.  For all their faults, Team Plasma in B/W were somewhat sympathetic and made you think about the nature of the Pokemon universe.  Team Rocket were out for money and power.  Team Flare say they want to change the world because it's a bad place with all these filthy commoners strolling about, but here's the thing: there's no evidence that they may have some justification for their actions.  For instance, one way the developers could have made Flare's motives understandable would be to have the Kalos region riddled by crime, pollution, or some other widespread issue.  Instead, it seems like the team wants to destroy a world that is practically a utopia with no need for a real economy.  It's madness and truly sours the experience; certainly, making a team that is blatantly evil ensures that the player will want to stop them, but it also prevents their actions from making any sense under scrutiny.

Pokemon X/Y is another Pokemon game.  If you liked the last ones, you'll enjoy it too, and you may entirely disagree with the points I brought up here.  I think this is a significant step back for the series in many ways, but the continued improvements on the mechanical end are noted and appreciated.  It's hard to say where the series will go next (I didn't even touch on Mega Evolutions or the Fairy type.  They're there) but hopefully Game Freak will try and make a game that is more focused next time.

7

Suikoden

I'm nearly 20 years late to the party on this game, but I'm glad I finally gave it a shot.  Suikoden is a traditional turn-based RPG that possesses the infamous gimmick of containing 108 party members (not all of them are used in the party, but they all become part of your forces).  When I've thought about this series in the past, I figured there was no way this could be done adequately.  I like media with ensemble casts, but the idea of 108 characters seemed ridiculous.  Fortunately, I was very pleased with how the developers handled it in this game.  By the end, I didn't feel like too many characters got the short end of the stick.  It's true that a lot of them weren't as important as the principle cast, but what's great about Suikoden is everyone has something to contribute.  The main characters all fight, the innkeeper heals you, the thieves and ninjas are critical to getting information in castle battles, and so on and so on.  Having 108 characters also makes the game great for completionists--there are a lot to people to find, but it's not such a high number that doing so gets tedious, or worse, impossible like in some of the Pokémon games.  Although the game is obviously primitive and some ideas are sure to be improved in sequels, I love what it was going for and think the army aspect of the game is pulled off beautifully.

Some of the game's worst problems come down to poor design decisions.  Obviously, it's hard to conceive of a system with so many options that feels properly tweaked and fine-tuned, and while Suikoden tries its best, it comes short here.  The game is laughably easy; no battle took any kind of planning ahead or tactical know-how to complete.  Status magic is unimportant, and most characters are strong enough to hold their own with the materia-like runes the game gives you.  The duels and castle battles are also not very engaging: the former requires a guide to play without screwing up and the latter just feel like scripted events after a point.  It's great to have the whole army involved in a battle, though, so I can easily look the other way and hope these are improved in the sequels.  In truth, the biggest problem with the game is how clunky the interfaces are for assigning runes and passing equipment around.  In many ways Suikoden was treading new ground for these systems, but that doesn't make it more fun to deal with a primitive menu nowadays.

Suikoden's story is a little on the generic side, but it kept me engaged.  It wisely opens with the introduction of a character (Ted) who is more than he seems and leaves the player wondering about his origins for quite some time.  That, combined with how his special rune is so important to the villains, left me curious to know more as I played.  On a more negative note, the game relies a bit too much on mind control as a plot device to avoid killing too many of the bad guys.  It's nice to add the generals to your entourage after facing them, but it felt pretty cheap from a reader's perspective for them to be forgiven immediately because of magic. The use of this device is a big problem with Final Fantasy IV's story, and it's just as bad here.  Late in the game, the story starts taking a darker turn and poses the question of whether Tir (the main character) is doing the right thing by attacking the empire.  I enjoy developments like this, but the game doesn't go anywhere with it and ends after defeating the emperor anyway.  While that may be addressed in the sequel, I still felt peeved that the plot would bring up an interesting concept and not follow through on it.  I should also note that I greatly enjoyed the game's sense of humor.  I expected the dialogue to be very serious and not have many light moments, but many of the characters' antics really put a smile on my face.  None of the humor felt overdone, just like the kinds of things kids caught up in a war would say.

All in all, I can see why so many think this game is a classic, and it left me wanting to play the rest.  Collecting the characters was fun (though some were near impossible to find without a guide) and the game had enough variety in tone and gameplay to keep me engaged the whole way through.  If you never played Suikoden, I suggest giving it a try.

7.5

Random Game Thoughts Round-up

Man, I have been slacking on blogging since I've been busy working on Motrya. (Download it and play today!)  I figured today would be as good as any to write a bit about some recent games I've played but not had enough to say about.  I do this a lot lately, giving up on things because they're just getting dull to me. When I finish the game I'm playing now I'm sure I'll be able to write on it, but for now, here's what I missed:

WARNING: potential snap judgments ahead!

Knights in the Nightmare: This is a terrible, weird RTS / RPG hybrid that I loathed as soon as I left the tutorial. The gameplay is incredibly hard to describe and do justice: you just kind of stick a unit on the field and wait for enemies to walk in to range then use spells, hoping they work.  It's painfully dull and nothing about it grabbed me at all.  

Mario & Luigi: Dream Team:  I played this for about seven hours before calling it quits.  It's about on the same level as Partners in Time, so if that actually entertained you, by all means give this one a shot.  It's a little better. This time, Mario travels in to Luigi's dreams!  At first, it seems like the developers are going to use this in a novel way by having several series of interesting one-off puzzles and stages.  However, it's the same tired gameplay as ever and without Bowser's snappy dialogue to compensate like in Bowser's Inside Story.  The helper/guide characters are grating and never stop giving tutorials to the point where it's as surreal as an actual nightmare.  I think I am actually done with Mario games after playing this, and I may actually be serious here.  I don't know how you can take a concept as great as traveling through dreams and make it so dull.

Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland - The main draw of these games is supposedly the alchemy system, which you're supposed to master to get better at the game.  I found collecting the items pretty tedious and didn't get far enough to say if it works well.  I'm not a big fan of how time management is such a huge factor in this game, constantly being in fear I won't actually see the end of the story.  Of course, I'm even less of a fan of the story itself--it seems like a steaming pile of fan service without much direction, lending credence to the misinformed idea that all JRPGs are terrible anime garbage (they aren't, but this is).  I understand this series has sort of a cult following, but I think it's going to be contained to that cult as it's just blatantly unapproachable.

Shantae: Sorry, but this isn't a lost classic.  While it looks very impressive for a Game Boy Color game, it has a lot of the same problems platformers of its ilk do.  Bad enemy placement, sprites so big you can barely see anything coming ahead, and hitboxes that are nonsensical and distract from a smooth gameplay experience.  The game looks and sounds great; I'll give it that.  Maybe the sequel is better given it's on a better platform.

Great Greed: I was recommended this game a while back, and I can't understand why.  It might have the strangest battle system I've encountered in an RPG in quite a while--there's almost no interactivity to it.  The story is hilarious levels of stupid, so it might be worth taking a look at to get a chuckle.

Etrian Odyssey IV:  While I like the core gameplay here and am a fan of the big dungeons, EO ultimately falls in to the "too tedious" category for me.  You're never sure how your builds will pay off, and starting up a new character is frustrating.  Almost every boss is trial and error, but without a quick way of taking another shot. Since the game is so lacking in every department other than combat and exploration, there's nothing keeping you going either.  I did make it to the fourth stage of the game, so I got pretty far before quitting, but I can't recommend this game unless you're a lot more patient than me.

Kirby's Dream Land 2

This is a bad game.  I used to like it when I was a kid; I remember begging my grandmother to buy it for me. I remember thinking the new animal buddies were cool, and it was the first Kirby game I played that had the copy ability so that was neat at the time.  Ultimately, I wish I had not revisited this game, as it doesn't hold up at all.  Out of curiosity, I looked it up and found out Masahiro Sakurai, the man behind Kirby and Super Smash Bros, had no involvement with this game or Dream Land 3.  That doesn't surprise me.  I always suspected the Kirby games involving Dark Matter and animal buddies were designed by a different team than the rest, and it's true after all.

Dream Land 2 has a few major problems that really stick out to an aged gamer.  The first is enemy spawning: scroll an enemy off the screen, and it respawns immediately after that part of the screen becomes visible again.  This is unbelievably frustrating in the various water maze puzzles in this game, and punishes you for backtracking to get things you missed.  Another issue I have with the game is that the buddies and copy abilities Kirby uses are so much worse than his generic swallow and spit attacks.  The attacks barely do any damage to bosses, making them take forever to beat.  Even worse, a lot of the abilities will put you in precarious positions when used on bosses anyway.  For instance, if you want to whack one with the parasol, it will take no hit-stun and just walk right in to you, rendering whatever advantage having the skill would give moot.

The animal buddies are a bigger problem.  First, there's Rick the hamster.  Using him is inferior to just using Kirby, as you lose the ability to fly and have a bigger hitbox.  None of the attacks he can use make up for this.  Coo the owl is actually pretty awesome (and has an amazing theme song; actually, all the music in this game is great) but the game doesn't want you to use him!  No!  In almost every stage, you'll be forced to use Kine the fish, who is absolutely terrible out of water but is required in order to collect the rainbow drops you need to finish the game in about half of the game's levels.  It's almost like a cruel joke by the developers. They give you all these potentially neat abilities, then make you use only the worst ones to get anywhere.

The final boss is terrible too, and he's the icing on the crap cake.  To fight Dark Matter, you have to use the new Rainbow sword ability.  Kirby also gets to move freely in all directions... very slowly.  This makes it nearly impossible to avoid Dark Matter's screen-splitting attacks, and since the sword doesn't actually hurt the boss, you have to reflect his attacks with it.  The physics of this are poorly conceived to say the least, so I would not be surprised if many players didn't bother to beat the boss.  I know I save-scummed through it on this playthrough.

I wanted to say some nice things about this game, but apart from the soundtrack (Ando is a genius composer, seriously) there's not much to recommend.  This game is worse than Kirby Super Star in every way, and there's nothing that would encourage a replay.  The level design is poor, the bosses are done better in other Kirby games, and the physics feel stiff and antiquated.   Look elsewhere for your Kirby fix.

4

SpaceChem

SpaceChem is a chemistry-based puzzle game released by Zachtronics Industries in 2011.  In the game, you essentially guide two input circles called "Waldos" along conveyor belt-like lines, grabbing atoms and fusing them, then outputting the needed compounds on the other side of the screen.  It's the most boring-sounding premise ever, but I quickly found myself engaged.  At its core, SpaceChem is more like a set of programming puzzles than anything resembling chemistry.  It's all about figuring out the most efficient way of making sets of data do exactly what you want them to do.  It's fun to look at the leaderboards after every stage and see how well other players did, if they found solutions that took far fewer cycles or used minimal instructions.

What really sets this game apart from other puzzle titles I've played is its difficulty: it's totally brutal, but somehow I didn't mind.  I would spend hours, sometimes entire work days (on and off) on a single puzzle, trying to piece together a feasible path through various stages.

Pictured is the level I essentially have stopped playing the game on, though I plan to dabble with it on and off. Here, I am  trying to make the blue path alternate given its input, then travel to the proper side of the screen and give the correct compound.  (I'm only half-finished here)  One of the things that makes SpaceChem so difficult is the size of the grid.  Often, you will need to make complex paths in only a small 4x4 grid, then you'll test and find out modifications need to be made that destroy your entire framework.  Then, you have to make your path recursive so that it will complete the necessary number of cycles, which is sometimes as hard as making the path in the first place.  And THEN some stages require you to make multiple paths work and then connect to one another.  I have restarted many missions without making any progress, but somehow never actually got frustrated. See, for all the tedium involved in solving the game's puzzles, I feel so satisfied when a complete circuit works that it makes up for all the agony getting there.  You could say SpaceChem is the Demon's Souls of puzzle games.

This game isn't for everyone.  If you don't have any knowledge of programming or computer science, I would stay very far away.  If you do, try this game out, going in as blindly as possible.   The concept is ingenious; simple on the surface but with unfathomable flexibility and surprising replay value for efficiency nuts.  There is some nice music too, for what it's worth, though I stopped playing that early on because of the length of time I'd spend on each level.  I doubt I will ever finish SpaceChem, but I feel totally satisfied with it after only the taste I've had.

8

Shin Megami Tensei IV

As the fifth Shin Megami Tensei title I've finished, the series is starting to feel very familiar to me.  Shin Megami Tensei is one of the bigger RPG series in Japan, and it's pretty easy to see why once you get in to the games.  They are designed like classic RPGs, emphasizing challenge and sometimes frustrating random chance.  They do monster collection effectively, making the player adapt to the changing difficulty curve instead of getting too attached to his team.  They offer the option of changing the game's outcome, even if the choices aren't so hot.  Shin Megami Tensei IV ranks somewhere in the middle of the series to me, but it is a good introduction to mainline SMT for newcomers and probably the best RPG on the 3DS so far.

SMT IV starts out differently than its predecessor, Nocturne.  Instead of a kid in the big city, you're a hopeful samurai candidate in what appears to be a feudal Japanese kingdom called Mikado.  Things seem fishy to the player because the samurai have electronic technology that they regard as mystic relics.  After a quick trial, you explore a strange cave called Naraku that lies beneath your kingdom and is filled with demons.  The game's story doesn't really unfold until you reach the bottom of Naraku, and I don't want to spoil what happens, but needless to say it evolves in to the usual Law vs Chaos story so prevalent in the series.  While I enjoyed the setup of this game, I think the characters don't always show the best motivations or justification for their actions. Like in other SMT titles, only the extremes of each personality type accomplish anything by end-game, and you never feel right about supporting them. The Neutral path makes a decent compromise, but still has a questionable result.  I'm not opposed to a game having nothing but bad endings, but I do feel like SMT games often end on an unnecessarily bleak note, only accentuating the negative.  Fortunately, the story is secondary to gameplay in SMT, so nitpicking it too much doesn't accomplish a whole lot.  One thing the game does really well is creating a sense of dramatic irony: the player is aware that something is wrong with Mikado and the game's world as a whole, but the characters have no clue.  This makes the game's many twists and pokes of humor, especially involving your AI assistant, Burroughs, very effective.

SMT IV's visual style is weird.  For the most part, it looks good.  The demons are well-animated and the 3D environments look beautiful.  It's clear that the game was on a limited budget, though.  Most of its cutscenes are just characters standing and staring at things without moving, leaving one to wonder why the game wasn't just developed in visual novel style like Persona 3 Portable.  Some of the new demons introduced in the game have very odd designs that I didn't think meshed well with the old ones.  Often, they are caricatures of humans or grotesque things with anatomy that makes little sense.  I feel the developers could have done a little better job of hiding the fact that some parts of the game didn't get as much attention as others.  On the other hand, the music is great.  It has a nice mix of electronica, hard rock and even bagpipe music.  I thought I would miss Shoji Meguro, who really made Nocturne and Strange Journey work well on the sound front, but this game's composers are more than worthy to take his reins.

The gameplay is mostly what you'd expect from the main series: the press turn battle system is back.  Hitting weaknesses and not missing is of vital importance, even if you have to burn MP to do it.  I was not sure how I liked this system at first back in Nocturne, but I do like how it encourages using skills instead of conservation, which makes for slow and boring gameplay in many games.  This time, your main character's build is almost completely up to you.  Instead of learning skills from equipment, Flynn gets them from Demon Whispers.  When your party members have learned all of their skills, they can "whisper" them to the hero, letting you basically pick whatever skills you want.  I think this is great for many reasons, but the primary one is that it lets you experiment with skills before committing to them.  Many RPGs force you to go down skill paths without prior knowledge of where you'll end up, but here there's no ambiguity.  Overall, this makes the game engine feel improved from its predecessors, and the typical fast battle speed returns as well, so combat is very streamlined.  As far as battles go, my one real complaint is about ambushes.  If an enemy sneaks up on you, often you are just plain dead.  Getting hit by a weakness, a critical, or status effects often spells the end for your entire party.  Worse, ambushes can happen on reinforcements or even during boss battles.  It just feels cruel and unusual.

On the flip side, the game has a lot of features that make it more newbie-friendly than other entries in the series.  It's very forgiving about game overs, for one.  For a fee of either money or 3DS Play Coins (which I thought was a nice touch as it got me to exercise a bit while playing this, believe it or not) you can get revived right before the battle you died in.  I don't care how hardcore of a gamer you are; this is a good feature that every RPG should have.  The game also does everything it can to make the monster fusion system easier to understand, even to the point of recommending fusions.  These recommendations are usually good choices, so I think new players will be able to pick it up with little problem.

The game's biggest problem is really its overworld map.  Once you reach this area, it's pretty obvious why. You can only travel on small, jagged paths that are maze-like in structure, and you have to do this just to get from town to town.  While it's possible to avoid encounters in the dungeons, you cannot on the world map. You also cannot control whether or not you get ambushed.  The game assumes you have some knowledge of Tokyo's layout, which would probably help in finding areas you need to travel to, but even then it can be hard to remember a certain road is blocked off or you have to take X tunnel to reach Y location.  Add together the dead ends, frequent encounters, and backtracking the game requires and you end up with some ultra tedious exploration.  This problem plagues the game from beginning to end, and even the air travel you eventually find only lets you land in useless spots.  It's a gross stain on a game that easily could have been one of my favorites.

Shin Megami Tensei has gone on for a long time.  Many good games have been released under the brand, and it's gradually becoming one of my favorites.  That said, Atlus really needs to get a clue about certain things.  It's just silly that Persona gets all of the innovation, character development, and fast travel while the mainline series gets the gameplay depth and build options.  These things should not be mutually exclusive. While Shin Megami Tensei IV is a great game, with just a few of the lessons learned from other games in the series, it could really have felt more polished and appealed to more players.  RPG enthusiasts should still enjoy the game if they can get past angels and demons being lumped together as the same thing, but even though it's more accessible, I'm not sure I can recommend this to a player unfamiliar with the genre.

8

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

Ni No Kuni is an RPG that dared to exist, ridden with flaws but somehow coming out a worthwhile experience.  The game was originally released in 2010 for the Nintendo DS in Japan with the subtitle "The Jet-Black Mage."  It told the story of Oliver, our small and frustratingly goody-goody protagonist, who travels to a parallel world after accidentally causing the death of his mother.  In this alternate world, many citizens have been rendered walking vegetables by having their emotions sucked out.  Since the developers had totally never played Kingdom Hearts, they call these folks the Heartbroken.  Our hero must face the wizard behind it all, Shadar, who happens to also be holding the soul of Oliver's mother's alternate self.  It's a good motivation that I think does well in justifying why a little kid would go through all the trouble.  He cares as much about bringing his mother back to life in whatever way possible as he does saving the people of the world.  In the DS version, the story ends after Oliver deals with Shadar.  It's a logical, completed story with some heartwarming moments. Level 5 and Studio Ghibli both worked on this game, and aesthetically it's absolutely breathtaking.  The game looks and sounds like a Ghibli film down to nearly every detail, and the quality never drops.  Joe Hisaishi's music, while certainly not his best effort, fits the trailblazing spirit of the game well.  I never had any complaints about Ni No Kuni from the audio-visual front.

Unfortunately, when the game was re-released for the Playstation 3 as Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, a second layer of the plot got slapped on: after defeating Shadar, Oliver must save the world again from the true villain behind it all, a witch who supposedly has a god-given ability to decide the world's fate. Outside of Japan, this is the only version we got, and oh boy does it sour the experience.  This section is completely disconnected from the main story, and every scene involving the White Witch throughout the game feels tacked on and generic.  Call it padding, DLC, or whatever you like.  At the end of the game, I wished that the story had been allowed to end at its natural stopping point.  While I have my issues with the original ending, at least the final hours of the game didn't involve developing a new character nobody cared about.  George Lucas may have botched up Star Wars over the years, but he didn't add a brand new subplot at the end of any of the films.  

At its heart, Ni No Kuni is supposed to be a big, epic adventure in a mysterious world.  The game accomplishes making the player feel this sometimes, but falls flat quite a bit.  One great moment stands out in particular for me: gaining the ability to fly around on a dragon.  When I first took off and heard the brassy, triumphant remix of the world map theme, I almost shed a tear.  It was as if the game was finally letting me do the exploration I wanted to.  What's more, flying is like flying the airship in Final Fantasy VI.  In so many modern RPGs, airships have just become menus that transport you from one place to another.  Finally, I was able to fly around in one of these modern, humongous worlds like I flew around in RPGs from my childhood. The novelty never wore off, either--I would fly from place to place just to experience doing so at times, even though I had the ability to teleport.  When Ni No Kuni stops holding your hand and feeding you tutorials, which isn't very often, it's honestly perfection.  I loved exploring new areas in the world, discovering items with Oliver's spells, and facing new monsters in strange areas.  Sadly, these moments don't last as the game's world is smaller than it initially appears, but I savored in them as the game unfurled itself.

The main puzzle gimmick in the game is Oliver's magic.  Like in the Golden Sun games, you get a variety of spells that can be used on the map to move statues, burn stuff down, and so on.  This would have been a great feature, except it's lazily implemented and doesn't trust the player to do things on his own.  One of the only good things about Golden Sun was how the map magic worked: you cast the spell, Isaac performed it, you saw the animation, stuff happened.  In Ni No Kuni, you select the spell from a menu, Oliver sits there, no animation usually happens, the screen fades out, and the thing you needed done is done.  It reminded me of working on games with the OHRRPGCE.  Before implementing animations, I'd do a similar fade out routine.  It was meant to be lazy, or a placeholder.  When I cared about making it look good, I'd go through some trouble to do so.  Therefore, it bothers me that Level 5 didn't go through the same trouble.  Oliver's character model had the casting animations from the battle system, so why couldn't he at least look like he was doing something?  Of course, the larger issue is that the game never lets the player solve these puzzles. Your ridiculously annoying fairy companion, Drippy, tells you precisely what spell to use at every roadblock. At this point, I'm almost desensitized to these things happening in games, but it's never going to stop stinging. Challenge me a little, game!

Ni No Kuni's battle system is a mixed bag.  On one hand, it's the real-time action monster battle RPG system Pokémon fans have always dreamed of.  On the other, it almost seems like less work went in to the battles than every other aspect of the game.  The most satisfying quality of the battles is that they are usually simple enough to finish.  Attacking random mobs head on is often a good idea, and finishes them off quickly enough; you'll want to, as the game has way too many random enemies on the maps for its own good, many of them near unavoidable.  The problem is when the system tries to go deeper.  When I noticed how difficult it was to toggle between action commands while moving around and paying attention, I knew I was in for trouble.  In fact, one of the reasons spamming attacks is so good is that selecting from menus is so annoying. The monsters (familiars) that the game gives you, first of all, are basically just three or four types of fighters with different models.  You have your tank attackers, glass cannons, pure tanks, and magicians.  None of the familiars I collected had any unique abilities or special traits.  This is a problem with the game that doesn't become evident until very late in to it.  Unfortunately, it also means that familiars can effectively be distilled down to just the mathematical best choices.  There's no reason to use Familiar A over Familiar B if Familiar A has the same role but worse stats.  For all its faults, Pokémon at least does a good job making the various monsters have unique abilities and moves.  It's a big shame that Ni No Kuni couldn't do the same since the Ghibli art direction makes the monsters look so great.

However, the biggest problem with Ni No Kuni's battle system, and honestly the game as whole, is the ally AI.  Eventually, Oliver will have two party members with three familiars each and it's up to the AI to control them.  The AI doesn't know how to control them.  It tends to throw out the familiar with the highest stat total without any regard to its function in the battle.  I can't count the number of times I wanted the AI to attack, but it sent out a healer and started chipping away instead of using the heavy hitter I had worked so hard to obtain and prepare for battle.  The AI also loves burning through MP.  It will waste loads of MP on spells against weak enemies, or use a healing spell when you take just a scratch of damage. Buffs get used essentially at random. It got to the point where I wanted to just have Oliver solo the entire game, but that's not feasible when your familiar is up against mobs of three enemies until very late in.  You will have to rely on the crappy AI and learn its quirks to finish this game, and it is definitely the one thing, despite every other complaint I have, that prevents me from recommending Ni No Kuni to everyone.

While the battle system is deeply flawed, I should mention that apart from the whole White Witch thing, I think Ni No Kuni's story is well-handled.  As one would expect from a Ghibli production, the world's very whimsical and doesn't get dark in a way that feels unnecessary or grotesque.  For the most part, it's a feel-good adventure.  I like to play games like this from time to time; it's one of the reasons I turn to Dragon Quest so much.  The game has several mysteries involving characters, too.  While it spells them out eventually, it was fun to try and piece them together as the game went on.  I guessed who Shadar really was, but was happy when I learned I was correct.  The story has Oliver return to the real world from time to time, sometimes to figure out what the alternate version of a character is having problems with or to interact with a few of Oliver's real friends. I liked these sections and felt they added a lot to the mythology of the game's universe. I do wish it went all the way and gave Motorville (the city Oliver lives in) some kind of resolution by the end of the game, though.  In fact, until halfway through the game, I (and my friend SDHawk apparently) thought that the alternate world was a figment of Oliver's imagination and he was playing pretend to cope with his mother's death. I'm okay with the game not going that route, but it did feel like a major ball was dropped with regards to Motorville.  Maybe if Oliver had met more parallel versions of characters, it would have felt better fleshed-out.

Oddly, I think my favorite aspect of the game is its sidequests.  The quests themselves are mostly brain-dead: deliver an item, find something on the map, repair people's hearts, catch these familiars, and so on.  Nothing you couldn't think of without playing the game first.  What makes the quests good is that you get rewarded very well for doing them.  The game gives you merit rewards that can be bought after doing lots of quests which do things like increase walking speed, cut the cost of spells in half, increase experience gain, and make familiars easier to catch.  All of these things are simple, but they are nice rewards for the effort you put in. The more subtle benefit of quests is that they make a great substitute for grinding.  Ni No Kuni's difficulty spikes quite a bit in several areas, but as long as you keep up with the sidequests, you won't have too much trouble. I am glad more and more RPGs are using quests in this way, as it helps the player feel like his efforts are worth it no matter how trivial they seem.

Ultimately, Ni No Kuni is a fresh, original RPG that came out when we really needed one.  It has a multitude of problems, but it's a game that deserves to exist and I'm very glad that I played it.  The problems I have are problems I mention because I enjoyed the game and wished those things were fixed before release or avoided entirely in some cases.  You could say that that Ni No Kuni is a strange sort of "licensed" game, where a studio that doesn't make games came in to work with a studio that does.  If this is the kind of quality we can expect from future licensed games, I'd be perfectly okay with it.  My hope is that Level 5 recognizes the mistakes they made in this game's development and improves in the future.  I cannot recommend Ni No Kuni unless the idea of a Ghibli adventure in RPG form with monster collection already appeals to you, but if it does, I think you'll enjoy most of the game; it's not perfect, but it's the kind of game I would have loved to play in my childhood.

7

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages

Oracle of Ages is part of a set of two games released in 2001 for the Game Boy Color.  These two Zelda titles were developed by Capcom instead of Nintendo's normal Zelda team.  This shows, as the more finicky puzzle design and focus on throwing in lots of powerful enemies differ wildly from what one expects to see in the Zelda series.  As a result, the Oracle games feel fairly distinct from other Zelda games, which isn't a bad thing, but it still feels like something is missing.  I guess I just like Zelda games to focus more on exploration than combat, but that's an entirely subjective matter.  I respect what Capcom was going for with the Oracle games.  They wanted to make two Zelda games with a similar vibe but enough differences to feel distinct from one another.  I think they succeeded for the most part, but with the benefit of hindsight, Oracle of Ages doesn't hold up as well as its brother.

The primary difference between the two games, aside from the aesthetic of time travel vs. changing of the seasons is that Ages focuses more on the plot and villain (Veran, who has a pretty cool design, mind) while Seasons really focuses on the gameplay.  This makes a whole lot of sense when you consider that the two N64 Zelda games were about time travel.  Ages wants to be a game that fans of the 3D games will enjoy while Seasons is aimed at lovers of classic Zelda. What holds Ages back in that respect is that the plot's a generic Saturday morning cartoon story: bad guy possesses the girl, you separate the girl from the bad guy, you kill the bad guy.  There's nothing wrong with it, but it's hard to get excited about the new characters and their extended story scenes when you know how it's going to end from the very beginning.

Perhaps more problematic is the fact that Link's quest to get eight Macguffins feels unrelated to the rest of the story.  In the end, the Macguffins are used to show which door of the Black Tower is not an illusion.  It's necessary to finish the game, but it's a major letdown that the entire length of the game was spent essentially solving the equivalent of a single puzzle in a dungeon.  This is entirely transparent: Capcom made up a flimsy excuse for Link to have to travel to eight dungeons. See, it worked in The Legend of Zelda because assembling the Triforce was needed to hurt Ganon.   It worked in Link to the Past because the seven maidens were characters you might have cared about saving. The Macguffins in this game are just "essences of time" that magically make a door reveal itself.  There is no connection between those two things, and it ruins the illusion of narrative that the game tries to set up.  I normally don't nitpick about story in games like this because it's usually not my biggest concern, but I feel like this one is especially hacked together and dumb.

For the most part, the gameplay holds up.  The usual Zelda trappings are there, and they work as well as in any of the other games.  The seeds with different effects are a great upgrade from Link's Awakening's magic powder.  While the Mermaid Suit is hard to control, I like the idea of Link having more freedom in water sections.  The Roc's Feather is always always always a welcome addition, though it's a lot better in Seasons and Minish Cap than in this game.  I did not like how the animal buddies were so underused in Ages, but they were a cool idea nonetheless.  To top it off, the Cane of Somaria (which creates a block) returns in this game, which is probably only second to the Roc's Feather as my favorite Zelda item.  All of the items are used well throughout the game's eight dungeons and overworld.  If it weren't for bad design decisions in other aspects, I'd say the gameplay is just right.

But of course, there are some really questionable design decisions, and they all basically boil down to tedium. The game has two very painful fetch-quest missions.  One involves gathering all of your items on the Tokay Island early in the game.  I like segments where the hero loses his equipment and has to gather it back, but I didn't care for having to trade one for another over and over to enter different parts of the island.  This added a lot of padding to that section of the game that felt hugely artificial.  Later in the game, the player has to solve an elaborate fetch quest chain in the Goron village, which is surprisingly labyrinthine in its design.  I seriously burnt about a week getting through this place on my most recent playthrough, mostly because I got tired of backtracking across the mountains.  The seventh dungeon, Jabu Jabu's Belly, is atrociously designed in a similar manner.  Link has to adjust the water level of the dungeon and traverse sections in different depths. This wouldn't be so bad if the dungeon felt streamlined, but I found myself changing the water setting over and over again, which requires backtracking to a very far corner of the place.  It is needlessly complicated and frustrating, and it's probably the worst water-related dungeon in the entire Zelda series. This is a quite a feat, by the way.

The most tedious aspect of the game is the time travel, though.  Warping between the two eras is basically like warping between the Light and Dark world of Link to the Past since the game only rarely allows you to change something in the past that affects the future.  This saps away most of the fun involved in a game about time travel.  Almost all of the puzzles involving jumping through time are just used to help you get to parts of the map you couldn't reach before.  I was left wanting more, and was even more disappointed that the final dungeon and boss had nothing to do with time travel either.

Oracle of Ages is fun in most of the same ways that Link's Awakening is, but I still think Link's Awakening is a more tightly constructed game.  All of the sections in that game felt like they had a purpose, while Ages feels like it has dungeons and stuff just because it has to.  It's worth a playthrough or several, but it's lacking a cohesive sense of design that would make me put it above most of the other Zelda games.  If you're looking for a Zelda game about time travel, Majora's Mask is the one for you, not this. Of course, Oracle of Seasons is quite a bit more fun and you'll probably want to play the two games together, so if you plan on doing that, Ages is a must-play.  Still, I have to recommend playing with a guide in the tedious sections I outlined above just to save yourself a lot of unneeded frustration.

6