(Revised) Game of the Year 2014
After looking back without the rose-colored glasses of 2014, here's how I would order my list now.
List items
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I'm still shocked that this game, based on a cartoon series I find intermittently funny and idiotic, is my favorite experience of 2014. The pitch-perfect parodies and nods to games like Skyrim and Call of Duty, the clever writing, the absolute bevy of references hidden across the world, and the best moment of the year - Canada - all packed into one amazingly entertaining role-playing game. It's hard for a game to be so on point for its entire duration, especially one from a studio with such a bad history of lukewarm game endings, but South Park: The Stick of Truth somehow pulls it all off.
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I hope you liked Far Cry 3 (except for its atrocious story), because Far Cry 4 is here to remind you how great that template is on the modern generation of consoles. Iteration aside, this game stands out because it improves dramatically on both the writing and emergent gameplay experiences and somehow presents just enough of a story hook to make all the collectibles worth wasting 20 hours collecting.
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I generally have no interest in the fighting game scene. I love the Persona 3 and Persona 4 games and casts immensely. Somehow, those two opinions collided and found me loving the original Persona 4 Arena as I had never loved a 1v1 fighting game before. P4AU is a great expansion of the original P4A, widening the roster of fighters dramatically while crafting a narrative experience that is entertaining, if short on revelations and story development.
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While I loved the Nemesis system, it's hard to say that Mordor is any more than a sum of its very good parts. Part Assassin's Creed, part Batman, this is a very entertaining open-world experience that spends far too much of its time trying to tell a mediocre narrative.
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The second-best Mario Kart game behind Mario Kart DS, Mario Kart 8 not only presented the most astounding visuals of the year but also showcased my favorite online multiplayer this year (which is shocking because...Nintendo). Though I was often frustrated by the chaos that is created by too many items in the fray, it never kept me from having fun every time I picked up the gamepad.
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Hard to think how I omitted this game in 2014. A pitch-perfect campaign that mixed great action set-pieces with variable mechanics, a solid multiplayer that engaged me more than any Call of Duty game since Modern Warfare 2, and a ton of Troy Baker, this is the best Call of Duty in quite a while.
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Not only is Rogue the best Assassin's Creed game this year, but oddly enough, it's probably the best game since Assassin's Creed II. The mission design is better than ever before, mixing in the right amount of optional objectives with an open-ended design, and the story, while somewhat un-engaging, features some of the most well-realized characters in the broader Assassin's Creed universe. The different areas of the open world really create a sense of variety to the gameplay that embraces much of what made each entry before this one great, and helps alleviate the sameness of the worlds that often made the games a slog after the completion of the main story.
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Emil, you poor soul.
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B-A-N-A-N-A-S.
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