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For someone who's never really played a visual novel like this before, DanganRonpa is a slow start. The setting seems a little contrived, the characters seem a bit one-note. But once the bodies start hitting the floor, oh man. Easily the most memorable gaming experience I had this year, so much so that once I was done it was a no-brainer to just keep going...
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On some level, this feels like cheating. In terms of pure gameplay, DR2 isn't really that different from DR1, and they came out close enough to each other that you could almost consider them two parts of a suite. But they are two separate games and two separate stories. And ultimately, DR2's appeal lies in how it takes what became a familiar formula with DR1 and twisted it. Goodbye Despair managed to surprise not in spite of its similarities to DR1, but because of them. And it still has the best murder case in the series thus far, hands down, no question.
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I played a bunch of RPGs this year, but none felt as complete a package as South Park did. As an encapsulation of the show's ethos, it was perfect, playing to the South Park fanbase without pandering or relying too much on obscure inside jokes. As a game, it was full of neat surprises; Terence and Philip in particular is the sort of genre-bending exercise I wish more games did. About the only criticisms I can level at the game is a) anal probe jokes are still juvenile and dumb, and b) it's extremely linear.
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When I first heard about The New Order, it sounded like yet another forgettable attempt to resurrect a long-dead franchise (the Return to Castle Wolfenstein-based offshoots always felt like their own thing). Pulpy sci-fi elements aside, there was precious little to indicate The New Order would be such a good game. As a shooter, Wolfenstein falls squarely into Half-Life territory, and unlike most entries in the genre it seems unusually invested in proper narrative pacing. The moments where you get to breathe and reflect on your predicament make the big setpieces all the more effective. The game secretly also has one of the best story reveals ever, and that's all I'll say about that.
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I backed this game on Kickstarter, but I have to admit that between its mid-December release date and the unfortunate decision to remove the offline mode from the game (which is still kind of shitty FYI), I was not expecting to like this game as much as I have over the past week. I now know why people call Euro Truck Simulator 2 the Elite of truck sims. Trying to eke out a living amongst the stars is strangely compelling, even though all I've done so far is truck commodities back and forth. It's (nearly) everything I wanted from Eve Online.
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After two Infamous games with major flaws, Sucker Punch has finally nailed the basic formula. The open-world gameplay provides just enough to do to give you reasons to stray from the critical path, but not so much that you constantly feel overwhelmed by dumb collect-a-thons or meaningless fetch quests. Speaking of Fetch (see what I did there), Second Son also has the most likable cast of characters in an Infamous game yet. After the insult that was the ongoing catfight between two characters in Infamous 2, Second Son was a breath of fresh air.
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Atelier games are my comfort food the way other people have Call of Duty or Madden. Every year, the formula gets tweaked in ways that don't seem that significant to outsiders but mean a lot to series veterans, and part of the joy is figuring out how to break each new Atelier game to your will. Escha & Logy's plot pacing is a little odd, so the game falls short of the heights Ayesha reached, but the alchemy system is somehow even more addictive. Maybe one day I'll experience Atelier fatigue, but it doesn't look like it'll happen anytime soon.
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The way Platinum and Nintendo tell it, this game basically wouldn't exist had Nintendo not thrown money at it. I'm glad Nintendo did, because the world can always use more stylish action games from Platinum. Something about the way Bayonetta 2 plays just feels right; it's a game that gently discourages from me from my predilection for button-mashing, forcing me to become a better player but not slapping me in the face with overwhelming difficulty.
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Comedy games had a great year, thanks in large part to South Park, but we can't forget this gem. Completely absurd, faintly psychedelic, and oftentimes baffling, the only way to play Jazzpunk is to hold on tight and go with the flow. Proving the dictum that some comedy is great because of the lengths someone will go for a good joke, one of my favourite bits is the surprisingly involved Quake parody, Wedding Qake. (One of these days I'm gonna win, goddammit.)
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Oh hey, it's an Etrian Odyssey game I didn't drop within the first few hours because it couldn't keep my attention for some reason. Putting the Persona 3 and 4 casts in something has been a great recipe for getting me to play genres I'm not normally into (though I have enjoyed dungeon crawlers before so whatever). Persona Q is the most successful of these offshoots so far, though. It helps that the game contains eerie echoes of past Persona games--not 3 and 4, but the lost universe of 1 and 2. The five-player setup and the return of multiple physical damage types reminds me a lot of Persona 2: Innocent Sin, making Persona Q a surprisingly good amalgamation of Persona and Etrian Odyssey games through the ages.
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