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fujisyusuke808

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FujiSyusuke808's Top Ten Games of 2015

Year to year, games tend to wax and wane. There have been years that have been rife with excellent video games. There have been other years comparatively deplete of high-quality games. This year, I wager, will come out looking quite well. 2015 was a very strong year, with many high profile announcements and releases. I’m -still- reeling from that Shenmue 3 announcement. Just as I’m still stunned by the Final Fantasy 7 remake announcement. Lets hope those actually get released.

I didn’t get a chance to play many games this year, but of what I played, I had quite a difficult time narrowing down my list to just ten. When I first made this list, I had sixteen games on here. That’s a good year! Hell, there’s evidence I struggled to get ten on my list last year. (Valiant Hearts is on there, but not Shovel Knight? REALLY?!)

Mostly, I would owe the higher quality of games this year to better familiarity with the newer generation of consoles. Developers understood what they were actually working with, and thus were able to create better quality products. Lets hope, then, that this trend continues and that we see even better games next year.

My list is, again, pretty weird this year; a healthy mix of big name publishers, smaller indie projects, and a #1 that, again, shakes things up.

List items

  • (Seeing Undertale as The Game of the Year fills you with determination.)

    Undertale, developed and published by a single goddamn guy named tobyfox, is a game that goes beyond what video games are traditionally allowed to do. As a traditional role-playing game with barely animated 2D sprite art and chiptune music, it creates commentary on traditional role-playing games with barely animated 2D sprite and chiptune music. The characters are endearing, the music is incredible, the writing is clever and funny, the combat…

    Okay, let me get this out of the way right now.

    I ain’t never had fuck all anything to do, nor any interest in, any Earthbound or Mother or whatever-the-fuck.

    I would look at Ness and Lucas and whoever goddamn from Earthbound/Mother/Whatever in Super Smash Bros. and ask myself, what goddamn interest or passion is there for this franchise? This franchise that has, for all intents and purposes, had a grand total of three games released over twelve years? Of which, by the way, only ONE of which has ever officially been released outside of Japan?

    Now, more than ever, I am interested.

    Undertale is a commentary on classic role-playing games. It’s also a commentary on video games as a whole. Undertale would never be released on consoles because it would never pass certification; it breaks so many rules of how a game works and is played to ever be allowed for mass market video game consoles with such strict certification requirements.

    To talk about the details of Undertale would be to spoil the surprise of what it is and how it is played. Every player should go into Undertale knowing NOTHING. The only expectations should be to find the writing witty, the characters infinitely charming, and the chiptune soundtrack to be world class.

    Don’t look up video footage of the game. Don’t read about how it is played. Don’t think about how to play it. Just play it. Just play it and be amazed at how the game reacts to how you play it, and how the game continuously shatters virtually every established trope of an established genre, and be awestruck at just what a mindfuck of a game it is.

    Undertale isn’t just a game that feels good to play. Undertale can also be a game that is uplifting to who you are as a person.

    Never give up.

    Find the good in life.

    Be filled with determination.

  • Who knew a soccer game with RC cars could be so goddamn good?

    Rocket League, developed and published by Psyonix, is a physics-based driving sports game. It’s also probably the best sports game to be released this year. Remote control cars rocket-boost, jump, flip, and drive along walls and ceilings to kick an oversized soccer ball along a long field, ever closer to the opponents goal. Whether you prefer big team games of 4v4 or a more personal showdown of 1v1, Rocket League is a blast to play.

    I make no bones about having this be the second best game of the year. Rocket League is good. Damn good. No action game this year offers anything more satisfying than getting that perfect angle on your car directly into the ball to nail it right towards the goal. Nothing feels better than being in the right spot at the right time for that perfect shot, that perfect save, that perfect pass to the perfect play. And best of all, the community is well alive and seemingly always active.

    What’s crazy is how this game is actually not the first in the franchise. Who the hell has ever heard of Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars? Certainly not I, though I feel rather silly that I haven’t given the frankly amazing title it has.

    There’s really not much else to say. It’s a soccer game played by RC cars. It controls really well. Flipping your car around to kick the ball with your tires into the goal, maybe even away from your own goal, feels really good. The controls are tight and responsive, and the action is easy to follow once you’ve gotten your bearings. Play aggressive and chase the ball, maybe even crash into opposing ball carrier to knock them away from the ball. Play defensive and hang out by your own goal to keep your opponents from scoring. Play as a team and conquer your enemies on the pitch.

    This game is insanely fun to play, especially with friends. Buy a copy for yourself, gift some copies to your friends, and head out to the field. It’s time to take it up to the big leagues: the Rocket League.

  • If Bloodborne is about surviving the derelict darkness alone, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is about battling the lush wilderness amongst friends.

    Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, developed and published by Capcom, is actually my first ever venture into the Monster Hunter franchise. Packed with an impressive roster of monsters to hunt and an ever-expanding variety of weapons, this may have been the best time for me to get in. Giant monsters roam the world, and it’s up to you to battle them, carve their hides, and make new weapons and armor from the monsters you defeat to go out and fight even bigger and badder monsters.

    Combat is fast-paced and unforgiving, with monsters that are always bigger and tougher than you are. It’s up to you to use your wits, reflexes and skills to their full potential and beat the crap out of every giant monster in the wild. Giant lizards, giant birds, giant snakes, giant apes, giant bugs, giant goddamned everything. They all gotta go. Dodge, block, slash, bash, cut, slam, jump, roll, evade! Let it all out on the field of battle against an even bigger monster than the last one! It’s fun to play on your own. It’s even better with friends.

    Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is the perfect game for four buddies to just sit down, flick open their 3DS’s, and slap some monsters around until everyone is decked out in the pelts and scales of their enemies. And with such a healthy roster of monsters to fight, there’s always more to do. Just when the game starts to get stale? Switch to a new kind of weapon to play with; each weapon changes the way you have to play in such drastic ways, it can even feel like a totally new experience.

    If you own a 3DS and like intense action games, there’s no reason not to get this game. It’s a gem. Don’t miss it.

  • War never changes.

    Franchises certainly do, though.

    Fallout 4, developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks, is the sequel to Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It’s about as much a sequel to Fallout 3 as you can get in terms of gameplay expectations; you explore a massive post-apocalyptic world, fight raiders and irradiated creatures, and pick up every loose goddamn thing you can find to lug all the way back to home base, be it weapons or clothing or food or just random crap. Kleptomaniacs familiar to Bethesda games like Oblivion and Skyrim will feel right back at home in Fallout 4. This time, though, all that random crap at least has -some- use; after all, someone has to rebuild society. Who better than you, some rando who was frozen for about 200 years, to build new settlements throughout the wasteland?

    The shooting has greatly improved since the previous games, with better gunplay and modernized controls that help Fallout 4 feel much better to play as an action game than ever before. Skills are long gone; perks are all that remain, allowing players to wield and fire any weapon with no fear of random number generators robbing them of accuracy. VATS has also changed; the action does not freeze, but instead goes to extreme slow-mo, making the action feel like it’s always in motion.

    However, Fallout 4 exchanges the greater emphasis on action and gunplay with weaker roleplaying elements. Dialogue has been greatly narrowed to a mandatory four options for every single dialogue choice, and the history and backstory of your character is much more established. In the pursuit of a much more personal story, Fallout 4 feels less customizable. A SPECIAL stat of 1 no longer leaves a character completely defective in that statistic; instead, a character is merely adequate. Characters don’t feel ‘created’, as much as they are ‘built’. With enough leveling up, players will go from being adequate to godlike. Fun for action, but not so great for roleplaying.

    Fallout 4 feels like a fun, open-world action game with a good loot loop and semi-decent, if not considerably diminished, roleplaying elements. Still, as a longtime fan of the Fallout franchise dating back to Fallout 1 and a fan of action games, I still feel like this is a great entry to the franchise and a fantastic game to come out this year. Just… beware of the bugs. This game has bugs. And I’m not just talking about the bloatflies.

  • You’re face to face with the man who sold the world.

    Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is developed by Kojima Productions, though it seems publisher Konami would like you to forget about that as soon as possible. Hideo Kojima brings us what is likely to be his very last entry to the Metal Gear Solid franchise we’ve grown to love since the incredible year of gaming that is 1998. Metal Gear Solid games became synonymous with the idea of long-winded cutscenes briefly interrupted with gameplay as the series went longer and longer in the tooth. With Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the series goes in full reverse. Hard. Narrative and dialogue is now buried in tapes to be listened to at the players leisure as they participate in some of the finest third-person stealth action gameplay to come along in the past decade.

    The way this game is laid out flies in the face of the Metal Gear Solid tradition: Linear hallways and narrow jungles are replaced by a sprawling open world; the nature of stealth action is widened enough to allow ‘nobody left alive to tell the tale’ as an avenue of ‘stealth’; awkward, finger-bending controls finally step into the new millennium to be modernized; slow and methodical gameplay has given way to fast-paced action.

    It’s unsurprising, then, to understand why so many don’t consider The Phantom Pain to be a true Metal Gear Solid game. They may be right. The Phantom Pain may not be a very good Metal Gear Solid game. It is, however, a fucking phenomenal action game mired in an awkward story and a general feeling of a lack of polish. Simply put, the game feels unfinished, a rush job that was pressured onto a development studio that is slowly being squeezed to death by a publisher uninterested in the video games that helped give them worldwide acclaim. Yet, for anyone who loves action games, it’s easy to lose dozens upon dozens of hours to The Phantom Pain. Just try not to be too surprised if the ending feels… abrupt.

    Now go! Let the legend come back to life!

  • Dark Souls II can piss right off; the true sequel to the Souls franchise is finally here.

    Bloodborne is an action RPG brought to us by developer From Software and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. On the Night of the Hunt, as a nameless Hunter, scour the euro-Gothic desolate streets of Yharnem in search of the Paleblood and seek the end of the endless Hunters Dream.

    Yeah, I don’t get it either. It sounds cool, though.

    Bloodborne is a spiritual successor to the Souls franchise in everything but name: slow and methodical combat, brutal difficulty, exploration of the dark unknown, and a world fraught with danger and intrigue. Enemies are dangerous yet predictable, while bosses are even more-so in both categories.

    Drawing inspiration from Cthulhu mythos and eldritch Gothic horror, players brawl in dusty streets and deadly castles. Death awaits just around every corner, but fear not! Players have access to an array of trick weapons, which transform at a press of a single button. A war axe extends at the shaft to become a halberd. A scimitar is jammed at the pommel into an unfolding pole into a reaper’s scythe. The blade of a long sword is slammed into a headstone to become a massive hammer. And it’s all as goddamn fucking cool as it sounds.

    Bloodborne is a game of patience; those who wish to rush are quickly punished for their childish petulance. Those unprepared for a challenge will be swiftly turned away from Yharnem. Those who are ready to fight, ready to fall, and ready to get back up again… welcome to The Hunt. Fear the Old Blood.

  • Activision Killed The Rhythm Game Star

    Activision Killed The Rhythm Game Star

    Kotick came and broke your heart

    Oh-a-a-a, oh

    Apparently, the only way to bring rhythm games back at all is to remove the elements of rhythm games we’ve become so trained to understand about the genre. Then you swap in stuff that’s nothing at all related to the rhythm genre. Goodbye plastic instruments, hello dungeon crawling!

    Crypt of the Necrodancer is a rhythm roguelike dungeon crawler action RPG from developer Brace Yourself Games and publisher Klei Entertainment, and if the description of the game is confusing, don’t worry. So is the game. Players are dropped into randomly generated dungeons and tasked to explore as deep as possible without dying. Death is permanent; when you die, you start from the beginning all over again.

    Exploring, fighting, looting, moving, everything is played to the beat of the Danny Baranowsky chiptune soundtrack. You are likely to die many, many times as you come to learn the various kinds of loot you’ll find and the multitude of enemies to fight. The good news is that the game is ultimately fun to play and enjoy for players who are into rhythm games and randomized dungeons; the bad news is that getting to that point is layered underneath the frustration of not knowing what to do for the first few hours. Stick with it long enough, and this game becomes really engrossing to play.

  • Adventure games are back in a pretty big way. Nobody could have expected it. Point-and-click adventure games were always destined to die as Sierra’s classic franchises each died shrieking, horrible deaths. King’s Quest decided to become an action game; it didn’t work. Leisure Suit Larry decided to switch gears towards a college bro demographic; it didn’t work. And that’s it because literally nobody cares about Space Quest. Years pass. Roberta Williams includes a rape scene in Phantasmagoria. Rob Lowe becomes a jazz musician (which is too perfect). And Tim Schafer… well, he did alright for himself.

    Then Telltale Games comes along and resurrects the adventure game genre.

    Telltale Games have pretty much owned the adventure game genre for a few years now. It’s just perfect, then, that the best adventure game of the year would come from an even newer development studio.

    Life Is Strange is an adventure game that comes to us from developer DONTNOD, who previously brought us Remember Me, and publisher Square Enix. Similar to Remember Me, Life is Strange is ambitious in scope and impressive in design; dissimilar, however, is how Life is Strange is actually as good, if not slightly better, than it’s recent predecessors in the genre.

    Teen drama, photography, a murder mystery, and time travel all mix together into the cohesive Life is Strange. After a terrible nightmare, Max Caulfield wakes up in class to what will be the worst week of her life. While the tween dialogue can sometimes be insufferable, attention and care are given to the characters to help give them impressive depth and dimensions; even villains seem to have more going on beneath the surface than expected. Well-rounded characters are written into thoughtful scenarios to help flesh out an interesting story. Too bad about that dialogue, though… it’s hella tryhard sometimes, bro.

  • About ten years ago, there came along a budget title out of Japan named Katamari Damacy. In the tiny feet of a diminutive prince, players were tasked with picking up whatever random crap was strewn around a room/house/neighborhood/city/planet as fast as you can. It was strange, yet strangely compelling; an oddity of video games that came out of nowhere and has since been milked dry as a concept; even the original creator has distanced himself from the series. Weird games slowly drift by the wayside as video games break way into the mainstream, and things become normal.

    Then, in 2015, players were tasked with playing as a slice of bread.

    Bossa Studios, the creators of Surgeon Simulator 2013, bring us yet another bizarro creation. As a single slice of bread, your mission in I am Bread is to get toasted by any means necessary. Gripping the surfaces and objects around you with the corners of your bread slice (somehow…), you must traverse the various rooms of a house to find that sweet embrace of heat that will get you nice and crispy. But don’t land anywhere gross or linty! Otherwise you’ll end up inedible, and what will even be the point of being toasted? The horror of such a thought!

    I am Bread is utter nonsense baked into a bizarre, fluffy bun. Yet the gameplay is so fun and goofy, oftentimes creating some of the best accidentally funniest moments of any game released this year. Purposefully frustrating controls leave the player pulling out their hair one moment and laughing the next. There’s no escaping it. You are bread. And you will be toast, one way or another. Delightful music, fun gameplay, funky concept, all worthy of a top ten contender.

  • December 7, 2015fujisyusuke8082015, game of the year, game review, Gaming, gaming culture, indie games, video games Leave a comment Edit

    ((Please like, comment, and share! I’d love to get some feedback and have a dialogue of my list this year!))

    Year to year, games tend to wax and wane. There have been years that have been rife with excellent video games. There have been other years comparatively deplete of high-quality games. This year, I wager, will come out looking quite well. 2015 was a very strong year, with many high profile announcements and releases. I’m -still- reeling from that Shenmue 3 announcement. Just as I’m still stunned by the Final Fantasy 7 remake announcement. Lets hope those actually get released.

    I didn’t get a chance to play many games this year, but of what I played, I had quite a difficult time narrowing down my list to just ten. When I first made this list, I had sixteen games on here. That’s a good year! Hell, there’s evidence I struggled to get ten on my list last year. (Valiant Hearts is on there, but not Shovel Knight? REALLY?!)

    Mostly, I would owe the higher quality of games this year to better familiarity with the newer generation of consoles. Developers understood what they were actually working with, and thus were able to create better quality products. Lets hope, then, that this trend continues and that we see even better games next year.

    My list is, again, pretty weird this year; a healthy mix of big name publishers, smaller indie projects, and a #1 that, again, shakes things up. Let’s see if anybody loses their minds in the comments and replies.

    #10: Grow Home

    10 grow home

    A darling little game from Ubisoft, you play as Bud as he works to grow a massive plant by riding growing vines to energy-laden stones in the sky. The flat-shading and bright colors help make the game stand out graphically as the intrepid Bud just keeps climbing and climbing. Jump, climb, float and fly, until finally you Grow Home.

    Grow Home is a little Shadow of the Colossus, a little Tail of the Sun, and a whole lotta heart. Bright colors and lovely vistas keep your rapt attention as you climb higher and higher, collecting gadgets to help you raise this little sapling into a plant that stretches out into the stratosphere.

    While the game is relatively short (ironic given the insane heights you eventually climb to), this helps the game in the long run; rather than let the game run its course and go stale as it drags on and on, the game ends pretty swiftly. It can be tough to buy into a game that generally lasts about three hours without collectables, but so long as you’re aware of what you pay for, I think it’s easy to find a lot of enjoyment in this fun adventure.
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