List items
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An indie game with a retro 8-bit art style without the pretension. Nostalgic, accessible, and just a ton of fun. There's nothing bad I can say about Shovel Knight. All in all it's a Mega Man game I never asked for or expected but didn't realize I needed. Especially with what Mighty No. 9 has been looking like...
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I had no problem with the recent influx of Persona 3/4 spinoffs. I put both Persona 4 Arena and Golden on Game of the Year list in 2012. However, when this Scooby-Doo font-ass game was announced during the special Persona live stream last year (alongside yet another Arena and even a dancing game) I started feeling myself fall into the camp of people who just wanted Atlus to move on to Persona 5. Of course, that camp was appeased by the end of the stream and this game ended up blowing me away! I expected Shadow of the Labyrinth to be decent but this is some of the most addictive fun I've had all year and like Arena, it shows itself to be more than just a bit of silly fanservice.
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Hey, it's this series again. Danganronpa 2 manages to improve on almost everything from the first game (Hangman's Gambit is still pretty wack) while being twice as nuts (and twice as long). The first game set a high bar for lunacy and this game only raised it even further thanks in no small part to its insane (in some cases literally so) cast of characters, particularly Nagito Komaeda, one of my favorites of the year.
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A good licensed game is already uncommon but a good South Park game is even rarer. To top it all off, The Stick of Truth is a genuinely good RPG. It’s filled to the brim with South Park fanservice and shocked me as to what an M-rated game can get away with (in a good way).
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I'm a sucker for these The Man in the High Castle post-World War II alternate history stories. Plus, there haven’t been many shooters that I’ve played in recent years that had a consistently great story the entire way through so a thrilling, brutal journey through 1960 Nazi-controlled Europe was a welcome treat.
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Many people are probably familiar with Steins;Gate thanks to its phenomenal anime adaptation. Sure, this was originally released in Japan five years ago and even had a fan translation not long after but this is the year North America saw an official-ESRB-Rated-M-for-Mad-Scientist release. Featuring a cast of unforgettable characters, this story is about a group of friends just hanging out, cracking wise, and doing cool science experiments but eventually becomes an emotional time travel rollercoaster that will fucking wreck you. Moral of the story: never microwave bananas.
(While I was writing this, Steins;Gate was announced for an English release on PS3, Vita, and iOS in 2015. If for some reason you can't play it on PC, check it out!)
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I'm not gonna sit here and ramble like an autist with 500 hours logged about why this is inferior to Dark Souls or Demon’s Souls and I'm not gonna get all pompous about game design and why these games are so brilliant. It's more solid Souls fun.
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Many people are probably familiar with Danganronpa thanks to its mediocre anime adaptation. An over 20 hour long game adapted into 12 twenty minute episodes unsurprisingly didn’t turn out well. For example, the class trials, the most memorable portions of the game which can take an hour or more to finish, ended up being rushed through in mere minutes. But I digress. The game is fantastic. The “it’s like Zero Escape and Ace Attorney combined” statements are totally accurate except with more murder and less quantum physics than Zero Escape.
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It seems to be an unpopular opinion but I’ve always felt that Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald were the best Pokémon games. I loved the geography of the Hoenn region and all the neat secrets it held. In terms of gameplay, I felt the Generation III games added a lot of great changes helping to bring the series to today’s standards. So recreating the entirety of those games in the style of X/Y naturally earns Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire a spot on this list.
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While people were busy bitching about being able to finish the main mission in an hour I was enjoying every bit of this thrilling taste of the next generation of Metal Gear. It being the nicest looking and best playing Metal Gear, along with the story setup, has made The Phantom Pain the most excited for a game I’ve been in a long time.
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