Mamba219

@jonny_anonymous: I wish he would just switch to some traditional wrestling attire. It's hard for me to take him seriously as the top guy when he dresses like a SWAT guy instead of an athlete.

Despite the clear explanation in the OP's thread title, I don't think the majority of people here know what innovative is and how it differs from influential, or well-designed. Even the OP's examples are the opposite of what he was asking for!

The Souls series game are some of my favorites of all time - but they weren't THAT innovative. They were just masterfully crafted action-rpgs with a somewhat-open world - they just happened to be the best of their kind, and had that hard to describe or grasp "X" factor. Actually, I take that back partially... the multiplayer was very innovative, but also very flawed (especially in the first few games... until Bloodborne or DS3, and even they had serious issues at launch with the MP specifically, which mostly got fixed)... the innovative parts were neat and I'd say the game as a whole was masterfully crafted, but still quite similar to many other games and really, the whole action-RPG genre, in their basic makeup. They were just the best example of a game with extremely good environmental/world design, art & enemy design, "Very fair" difficulty that was truly rewarding in a time when most games had removed challenge entirely, and a mysterious and hauntingly vague story that you could sort of make up the meaning of yourself as you went.

I think most innovative has to go to one of the VR games... maybe Superhot's VR version? Or something like that. The things the devs had to come up with to reduce motion sickness, add immersion, handle movement without breaking their motion sickness rules, use of controllers like hands for totally unique, new ways of interaction... all those things are the truly innovative things that have been going on!

I've dug myself a hole where i'm playing about 6 or 7 games at the same time, but most notably i'm playing Vagrant Story through for the first time and really liking it, it has a lot of annoyances but we won't talk about those :P. The cutscenes are very cinematic for a PS1 game with no spoken dialogue, very cool to see.

Incase anyone is interested, my local news did a story/30 minute interview with Lex Luger (hes from western NY) and posted all of the interview online, they couldnt post the story because WWE reasons.

Link to story... I would of just embeded the videos but GB dosnt seem to like my local news players embeds

NBA 2K12 had a mode where you played a single game as a historical team against another one i.e. Bird's Celtics vs Dominique's Hawks or Wilt's Lakers vs Frazier's Knicks. The mode was cool since it would change the broadcast style to match the era but it didn't have any context for why you were playing the games. It was just "go play a game with these two teams and be done".

Since then they has kept most of the historical teams but some years players disappear from them and there aren't any sort of historical modes any more. I remember Kareem being in 2K12 and then disappearing for a few years but they kept his old teams in there. Who would want to play as the '71 Bucks without Kareem? I think one year they added the '02 Sacramento Kings but didn't have Chris Weber. The games have also never added any classic Barkley or Reggie Miller teams.

I wasn't going to bring up Fire Emblem, but the player avatar in the 3DS games have kinda split the fanbase. The game mechanics in those games make the Avatar (who's the only one who can use all classes) overpowered as all get out. In Awakening the avatar arguably swoops in and steals the show from Chrom in the last act. Fates takes it one step further by making the avatar the center of the in-game universe (and arguably an intolerable Mary Sue). The fans even have a word for characters that can only S-rank (marry and have kids) with the avatar: Corrin-sexuals. There's that many.

Fire Emblem is an interesting case, though, because it's the only JPRG series I can think of that went from not having a player created character to then having one, without changing genre.

How in the holy fuck did this make it into the final game. They take away your weapons, warping, magic, and party members. You can't sprint. There's awful stealth. About 30 jump "scares" that are the same two things every time. You're fetching keycards. It lasts like two fucking hours. The whole slog feels it's out of a PS2 game and antithetical to the rest of the game, which would all be fine if it were 10 minutes and not two hours.

I feel like I should mention the completely useless information that Prompto is an MP, but there was absolutely no context, meaning, or consequences to that reveal. Maybe I'm not paying attention, but that kind of describes the whole story for me. Did this kill the game for anyone else?