This year for whatever reason, I ended up playing a lot more of the 'mainstream' games than in year's past and spent a bit more time on my back catalogue, which left me in the slightly unfamiliar position of not having to cut many games from my initial list.
I've a feeling that next year will be crammed with most of the games featured in other 2015 GoTY lists (Undertale, Invisible Inc, Grow Home...)
Anyway, list below!
As I mention in my blurb about The Phantom Pain, I'm a guy that if a story/characters/cutscenes/soundtrack really sucks me into a game, I can overlook no amount of bad design and really enjoy myself.
The Witcher 3 is the anti-Metal Gear.
I played without most of the quality-of-life improvements they added with the patches, so endured a reeeally terrible inventory system, very weighty walking & riding animations and slightly sluggish combat. (Seriously that inventory system is a blight on mankind).
BUT!
The world is phenominal. The setting, the environments, the NPCS, the dialogue - everything is so believable and it becomes captivating.
Nearly all the main characters have solid backstories, motivations and personalities. There was not a *single* sidequest in that game that I felt was phoned in - no 'kill 10 rats' or 'get 5 bear asses' for me that feels like busywork in a thousand other open-world games.
Also while the world is so well-realised, on top of that there's a surreal humour and playfulness - one of the sidequests had me investigate the secret stronghold of a Cheesemancer and in another...well you've probably all seen the unicorn scene by now.
Geralt is a wonderful character, who isn't just this heroic, nice-guy badass. I could list how great nearly every primary (and secondary) character is but it would take too long and honestly they're all pretty damn good. Also a positive is while the game lets you have moments of 'hey everything worked out fine', there's plenty of moral choices that sit on that fence throughout.
The Bloody Baron questline was fantastic and emotional, finding Ciri after all that searching almost brought me to tears and the ending I got made me so happy for everyone involved - I sat there so pleased that I was able to give these characters a happy ending.
If I had to give an objective review, there are lots of little niggles in the gameplay that will be frustrating for some and the fantasy setting isn't for everyone.
For me though, the Witcher 3 is freakin' incredible.
Rocket Leeeeeeeeeeague!!
I maintain this is the most accurate football sim released this year and also manages to be incredibly fun. Take a hint Fifa!
The controls are great, the customisation options and artistic designs are great and the gameplay concept is so simple yet refined, we played this for hours each night.
And it was free on PS Plus!!
It makes me so happy to have a Tales game on this list every year, and until they start getting bad I'll probably keep putting one on for the foreseeable future.
I could write a huge effortpost on Zestiria, but it screams of a game that needed just an extra 6 months to polish some of the great ideas in there (the skill system!!!)
The characters are great, it looks gorgeous in spots and it has some of the best music ever in a Tales game (Go Shiina is amazing).
On the other side, the camera is atrocious and the story never really gets filled out with anything interesting in the latter half of the game.
Still, it's a solid Tales game.
Just pure *fun*. As someone that doesn't really have any connection to the MGS series, the story and subsequent twist didn't really disappoint or elate me in any extreme sense, but man was it fun as hell to sneak into a base, strap balloons to people and tell my pet wolf to go electrocute a dude all while wearing the dumbest MS Paint logo I could design on my sleeve. Oh and then my helicopter arrives blaring 'Take on Me'.
As for the non-gameplay parts, my notes under this game only say "Mission 43...Jesus". As someone that really buys into cutscenes/characters/story in such a deep way (hence why I put Witcher 3 that high), that was one hell of an emotional ride. Probably one of the more powerful sections of a game I've ever played, in a game with so few story beats at all.
Weird, inconsistent, but bonkers in a good way.
I am *this* close to finishing Steins;Gate but I don't think I'm going to manage it before the end of the year. That said, I'm really digging the Time-Travel, conspiracy theory story (and the insane effort it must've taken to localise all that stuff...).
It's already kicked me in the balls once, and I have a horrible feeling I know where the ending is heading, but I really want to find out what happens.
Tutturu! ♪
I was very on-and-off with Bloodborne when I started the game. I really loved the faster pace over Dark Souls, but wasn't getting hooked into it as much and the gothic environments (while amazing) aren't my favourite design asthetic.
However, like Dark Souls, somewhere about halfway through I couldn't put it down.
This was a pretty successful year for free PS Plus games. OlliOlli2 combined that addictive 'one more try' part of my brain with the 'I AM GOING TO NAIL THIS COMBO OR DIE TRYING' bit. Somewhere in there I lost my lunch hours for a couple of weeks.
I don't really need to wax lyrical about this, as others have done a much better job, but if I owned this game for more than 4 days it would certainly be higher in the list. Mario is rad.
SimCity was so disappointing, and Skylines came along with enough about it to get me to enjoy myself messing around with a city builder again.
Fifa makes a return after a 5-year absense! It's still rage-inducing, it's still capable of the most monumental AI fuckups and it's still using the same damn engine but they finally were able to make a game that didn't rely on pace pace pace.
Maybe there's some Stockholm Syndrome going on here, but this year my captor only kept me in the basement for 23 hours a day instead of 24, so I'm thankful...
