Games of 2013
Migrated from another site that's giving up the ghost, here's my GOTY list from last year.
List items
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"Hey guys, we’re making a sequel to A Link to the Past” is probably one of the sentences I thought myself least likely to hear from a video game company in my lifetime. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is one of those games that is held so sacrosanct by the video gaming public at large that I thought it largely untouchable, an achievement that couldn’t really be built upon without welcoming nothing but disappointment. It’s because of this that I expected even less to find myself saying that A Link Between Worlds is not only an honorable treatment of the legacy of that SNES classic, but a worthy followup. This game treads the line of calling back to the old game in ways that poke at the nostalgia-related pleasure-centers of your brain in ways that only Nintendo can while also reinventing the Zelda formula like fans have been requesting for years. That it’s successful at both is the reason you’re seeing it at the top of my list right now. The music, first and foremost, accomplishes both goals at once, with beautifully-orchestrated re-imaginings of classic tunes from the first game which call back positive memories from my childhood while also being great to listen to on their own. The only video game moment that emotionally competes with those in Gone Home this year is my first experience with this game’s title screen, which made my heart jump with positive memories of my favorite era of games and made me ready for what was to come. Honestly, if this game were nothing but a nostalgia trip, though, I don’t think it’d be topping this list. Instead, the Zelda formula was taken for a spin in ALBW, finally opening up the play experience from the guided tours of Hyrule that had me getting bored with the last few games. A Link Between Worlds doles out objectives in chunks, opting to say “here’s a bunch of things you could go do right now” instead of “hey, go do this,” allowing me to just explore the world and take on dungeons as I found them. Further enabling this exploration is the item rental system, which is a great step towards breaking the ancient Zelda mold of “one dungeon, one item” that needs to go away. I appreciated being able to collect all of the traversal items into my inventory very early in the game rather than waiting for the game to give them to me piecemeal when it felt like it. The fact that the items would be taken away from me upon death finally put a price on dying beyond pride, which made the game actually feel like it had consequence. Honestly, it wasn’t an incredibly difficult game, but that one time that I died was a damned bummer, which is more than I can say for any other Zelda that I’ve played. I could go on, but I think you get the point. With The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Nintendo accepted what I thought was an impossible challenge and met it with flying colors. As a new generation is beginning and I’m excited to find out what the future of video games holds, leave it to the company that got me into video games in the first place to remind me that, sometimes, the secret lies in just executing well. When Nintendo is being Nintendo, nobody else quite compares.
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I’m not entirely sure what I expected going into Tales of Xillia. I have been a fan of the Tales series for many years, starting with Phantasia on the SNES and with the games in the PS2/Gamecube era being my favorites. However, the most recent entries in the series on the following generation of consoles, Tales of Graces f and (to a lesser extent) Tales of Vesperia didn’t exactly resonate as strongly with me. While the games remained well-made, neither the characters nor the combat worked quite as well as some of the older entries. It’s with great pleasure, then, that I’m able to report that Tales of Xillia is now my favorite game in this long-running series. While it doesn’t necessarily reinvent the mechanics for which the series has become known, the LMBS system of RPG combat especially, some tweaks to the core gameplay make the experience more interesting than its predecessors. The ability to link with different party members in combat to both gain abilities and enable special attacks unique to each pairing adds a cool dimension to battles and encourages players to switch up the way they fight depending on the enemies they’re facing, which helped me keep from falling into a rut where the combat felt the same throughout the game. Beyond this, the game offered a story that was well-told if not entirely brand-new (some thematic and plot elements are Tales staples for sure) and a cast of characters that are nuanced and interesting in addition to being fun to play. The dialogue throughout the game is excellent, with the English writing continuing to make me glad that I live in a world where companies actually give a damn about the localization of their Japanese RPGs to America. In all, Xillia stands as a high-water-mark for the series and has me more excited than I care to admit for the localization of the sequel already released in Japan. It can’t come out soon enough.
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Gone Home is a relatively simple game from a gameplay standpoint, but what it brings to the table with its story grabbed me early and never let go. The setup is simple: you play as a twenty-something girl named Kaitlin Greenbriar who returns to her family’s home from a trip abroad to find that nobody is home and a great deal has happened in your absence. From there, your quest becomes to explore the house and sift through the bits and pieces of several intertwining lives scattered about to find out just what has gone on. In doing so, the player is exposed to the travails of Katie’s family as they try to deal with various difficult crossroads of their lives. Her parents’ stories are interesting, as her father struggles to find inspiration in his writing and break out of his slump as an author, perhaps stooping lower than he’d originally prefer, and her mother has to deal with the fact that her advancement at work seems to be coming along with some undesired adulterous feelings towards a new coworker, leading to her questioning what love is left in her marriage. These plots are delivered well through found notes and other bits and pieces throughout the house, which are written well enough to feel very human and believable, but the strongest story work in Gone Home revolves around the tale of Katie’s younger sister Sam. While the specifics may differ, Sam’s story is one of self-discovery in a world that’s hard to understand and not very friendly which can pretty easily resonate with almost any player. As we come to understand from a host of narrated journal entries and context provided from countless little details strewn about the house, Sam finds herself in a new school without any friends and struggling to fit in until she meets a girl named Lonnie and begins a whirlwind tour through young love and coming to terms with who she is and dealing with a family that doesn’t understand. The feelings expressed through Sam’s journal entries managed to ring true with me even if I don’t share the experiences, and the game managed to evoke emotion from me like no other this year. An achievement in video game storytelling.
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While some may rightly comment that Nintendo’s state as a console manufacturer might be on the ropes these days, it’s hard to deny that their company houses some of the most talented development teams on the planet. I bought a WiiU knowing that I would most likely only play some quantity of first-party Nintendo games and enjoy them a great deal, and Super Mario 3D World has made me feel good about my console purchase almost all on its own. Especially after recent Mario games which didn’t exactly bring the A-game I tend to expect and fell into the trap of feeling pretty dry and repetitive, 3D World is the best kind of breath of fresh air. The level designs are varied, awash with personality and color, and rife with hidden items to find, everything that a good modern platformer needs. I enjoyed being in the many environments the game offered so much that I tracked down every last green star, secret stamp, and yellow flag so that I could unlock the secret final stage. Further, the game’s difficulty is no slouch; I found the stages in the later worlds to be a stiff challenge, and I still haven’t finished the final stage despite a great deal of effort. The decision to make a Mario game into a multiplayer experience has taken some time to hit its stride, but this game’s design finally makes it work by making each character distinct in a way that both makes each interesting to play and offer a specialized experience and scratches a nice nostalgia itch for Super Mario Bros. 2 along the way. In all, this proves that the minds behind Super Mario Galaxy haven’t lost their touch, and I eagerly await what they make next. Also, the cat suit powerup is pretty easily my favorite Mario powerup in years. It’s so damned fun to use.
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Gunpoint is a marvel for a lot of reasons, and stands as a great example of the wave of quality indie content that, in some ways, defined this generation. A fusion of several genres, Gunpoint feels at times like a stealth game, a platformer, a puzzle game, an action game, in all feeling like an interesting pastiche of all of the above. Much like last year’s Mark of the Ninja, the game takes elements from stealth games of the past while discarding the bulk of the frustration that comes with them. With a simple color change of a cursor, the player can tell immediately if an action is going to place them in the line of sight of a guard, so planning out one’s next action is easy and trial-and-error is largely avoided. Further, a quick roll of the mousewheel reveals all of the electrical devices in the level that can be fiddled with and reconnected in order to give the player a path to the objective. However, my favorite part is what the game doesn’t show: in each stage, the player isn’t told exactly what to do, just given a general problem and an open set of tools that can be used to solve it. Each player may well come up with a totally different series of connections between switches, lights, and doors to finish a stage, and each is equally valid, something that puzzle and stealth games don’t often manage. In addition to the gameplay’s strength, Gunpoint brings some excellent writing and storytelling to the party, offering some solid future-corporation intrigue with your character, Conway, and his awesome jump-trenchcoat, right in the middle of it all. An added bonus manifests in the form of some wonderful moments of writing such as the game’s reaction to a player repeatedly punching an already-dead guard. Wrap all this up with the fact that a single person made this game almost in its entirety in his spare time as a writer for PC Gamer, and Gunpoint is one hell of an achievement.
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To be completely honest, I didn’t expect much of anything from this game. The sound of a reboot of Tomb Raider, a series I had little-to-no love for in the past, wasn’t exactly the most exciting thing to me, but the more I heard about the game as it approached release, the more I became convinced that it might actually be worth a damn. Choosing to go with a prequel setup gave the team free rein to discard the old Tomb Raider ways of shooting pirates and dinosaurs and dinosaur pirates in favor of a slightly more grounded setting, though the game sure finds its fair share of otherworldly nonsense by the time it’s over. In addition to the change in setting, Crystal Dynamics took the chance to inject some fresh mechanics into the formula, bringing to the table an open world with lots of secrets to find and an almost-Metroidvania-like system of upgrades which allow traversal to new areas. These additions make the game a very impressive package, and the multiplayer mode wasn’t too bad either. That it managed to get me interested in what’s next for Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider franchise is merit enough to earn this reboot a spot on my list.
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I was interested in Ni No Kuni from the instant I first heard the general pitch. A Japanese RPG with a bit of a Pokémon bent developed by Level-5, the developers of Dark Cloud 2 and Rogue Galaxy, a pair of RPGs that I loved in the past, with the visual design muscle of Studio Ghibli along to help? How could I lose? Unsurprisingly, I thoroughly enjoyed this game and found exploring its world to be a beautiful experience both in sights and sounds. The cast of characters is endearing, the world is full of quests to take on and monsters to collect, and I seriously can’t put a fine enough point on how much of an audio-visual achievement this game is. Ghibli certainly held up their end of the bargain here, and it’s fortunate that the game is no slouch to play either. I’ve been a classic JRPG nut for about as long as I can remember, and this year felt like a wonderful return to form for the genre I love so much. Also, Drippy is a fantastic character and deserves special mention, and who can’t love a game that lets you have a cat-pirate named Whiskers?
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The original Bioshock is a game that has achieved near-legendary status amongst games of the past generation because of its achievements in world-building and storytelling paired with at-least-serviceable gameplay. After a sequel from another team that never really felt like a true follow-up to the original, this year saw the release of the true successor to the Bioshock name, Infinite. Though I loved its predecessor, I believe that Infinite managed to surpass that game in just about every way, leading to a very impressive package. The world of Columbia is incredibly well-realized, both in subtle details from ambient dialogue and details from the background and in broad strokes from the events of the story, providing an incredible backdrop in which to meet some amazing characters, Booker DeWitt and Elizabeth Comstock. The development of these characters over the course of the game had me captivated, and I actually found the action, which was maligned by some, to be a fun time as well. The combination of upgradeable weapons and vigors with ability-modifying equipment allowed me to define a style of combat that was both enjoyable and effective, so I wasn’t just dragging along in search of the next story event. Of course, I’d be lying if I said that the story wasn’t the main attraction for me, and the reason why Bioshock Infinite has stuck with me so strongly. Few games attempt story developments and twists so bold, and even fewer actually pull them off so well. It really has to be seen to be believed.
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I bought The Stanley Parable on Steam without too much knowledge of what I was getting into. I had heard from some trusted sources that the game was something worth getting excited over, which was enough to make me give it a shot without doing any research into the game. In the end, I’m extremely glad that I chose that approach, as it left me open to be struck dumb by the realization of what this game actually is. What starts as a walk through an unassuming office following the directions of an invisible narrator turns rapidly into a whirlwind sprint through a wealth of video game tropes, knowingly lampooning traditional game design and player expectations at every turn with hilarious results. It’s not an easy task to make a game funny, and it’s even more difficult to make it funny in a way of which only video games are capable. The Stanley Parable accomplishes this with aplomb, with the narrator reacting hilariously to your every move, getting more and more worked up the further you stray from his intended path. I only played this game for one sitting in total, but that one sitting involved me wringing every ending I could find from it, laughing pretty much all the way through.
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While it’s easy to dismiss the Pokémon series as a bunch of games that never really change, I’ve found myself increasingly impressed by recent entries, and I found the first 3DS offering, Pokémon Y, to be among the series’ best. The game features the most radical reinvention of the formula in over a decade, bringing new types to the mix and finally shaking up the paradigms of imaginary monster battling that have been in place for far too long. Beyond this, the total visual overhaul was really appealing, giving life to the world and the Pokémon in a very impressive way, and the game’s designers made a very clear decision to expedite the player’s navigation of the world and access to useful items, which removed a bunch of annoying barriers from older games in the series that forced players to spend more time grinding to achieve the same ends. I’m sure some might have called it “dumbing down,” but I found that streamlining to make the experience far more enjoyable overall. It speaks to the game’s quality that I eagerly await the release of the Pokémon Bank so I can store my much-loved Pokémon from my first playthrough and start another.
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