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JTHomeslice

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Game of the Year 2015 y'all!

You know what? Screw the preamble BS. This was a hell of a year for games no matter where you played them. Let's celebrate that.

Honorable mentions - BOXBOY, Grim Fandango Remastered, Broken Age, Final Fantasy Record Keeper, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Westerado: Double Barreled, OlliOlli 2, Huniepop (really), Neptunia U, Contradiction, Duck Game, Grow Home, Until Dawn, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, Borderlands Handsome Collection, Pokemon Picross, Nintendo Badge Arcade, Persona 4 Dancing All Night, Rocket League

Old games - 999, VLR, Binary Domain, School Idol Festival, Earthbound

I also recorded a GB deliberations type thing where I talk through ordering my list. You can check that out here if you like. I talk about the honorable mentions and go a little more in depth with some of the games on the list too.

(Also I'm kind of not sure if the top 2 should stay or if I should swap them. THEY'RE BOTH SO GOOD I CAN'T DECIDE)

List items

  • I was feeling kind of over Telltale’s work last year. The Wolf Among Us ended up on my list last year, but it still didn’t blow me away like The Walking Dead. (And let’s not even talk about the second season of that…) So I didn’t have super high hopes going into Life is Strange. What I saw in the quick look intrigued me, but I was not expecting the fucking intense emotional rollercoaster this game put me through.

    I’ve lived in a small town with an undercurrent of dark shit for a good chunk of time and they nailed the feel of that. Arcadia Bay is fucked up in so many ways that don’t even include Max’s time travel shenanigans. Drug problems, broken families, veterans with PTSD, police being in the pockets of the rich, issues with mental health, there’s a lot of parallels to things that have happened in my town. On that same token, the characters are very relatable, for the most part. They can be cartoonishly over the top and some are not portrayed super well. (David Madson in particular) But I think a lot of us can see a little of ourselves in an adorably awkward dork like Max. Chloe can be divisive, but I think she is handled well. The trauma of losing your father at a young age and your mother marrying someone you hate would absolutely take a toll on someone. The rest of the cast fall into character archetypes but they get fleshed out well enough to make the world feel more real.

    A lot of my favorite moments in the story were the more quiet bits. Things like exploring the campus and looking at the graffiti and fliers or having a heart to heart with Chloe while in the pool late at night. Of course, the aforementioned time travel shenanigans lead to great moments. Fun moments like kissing Chloe and then rewinding to mess with head by not kissing her (or in my case, rewinding to kiss her again) make the heavier moments later hit really hard. How bout that end of episode 3! It’s hard to discuss why the story really got to me without getting into specifics, but I’ll say this. There are very, very few games that got me as emotional as this one. Happiness, sadness, anger, just all over the spectrum. It was very genuine and that means a lot to me.

    I don’t know if I explained my feelings on the game very well, but Life is Strange basically came out of nowhere and hit me in a huge way. It’s a little like The Walking Dead in that regard. It’s not perfect, but they aimed really high and hit most of the marks. Max & Chloe forever.

  • I guess I’m not over Telltale. I’m a big fan of Borderlands. I’ve generally liked the story stuff they’ve tried to do (though looking back, the stuff in Borderlands 2 is not so great), but it’s really hard to do story in a loot-n-shoot type game. So taking the cool story elements from those games and using them in a more story focused kind of game seems a good idea. As it turns out, it was!

    One of the biggest things that makes Tales so great is how different the main characters are from the vault hunters in Borderlands proper. The whole point of Borderlands is to become an unstoppable killing machine. Rhys and Fiona are… not that. They have think and talk through their actions. As it turns out, that’s not really how things are done on Pandora. This disconnect makes for many funny, ridiculous, and even emotional moments. The characters have well defined personalities and actually grow over the course of the series. I found myself really attached to them, from our heroes to their robot buddies. Loader Bot and Gortys are a hell of a lot cooler than certain other robots in the series. This is all helped by the fantastic writing. The writing in the mainline games is mixed, to be kind. Telltale, along with folks from Gearbox, really bring out the best parts of the lore around Borderlands and expand on it in good ways.

    Above everything else, Tales from the Borderlands is fun. It’s really nice to see Telltale make a funny game again. Tales is my favorite Borderlands game and my favorite Telltale game, both of which are really saying something. It is an absolute blast and I hope to see the gang come back soon.

  • For the first couple weeks I had MGSV, it was absolutely my game of the year. I don’t want to reiterate points other people have been making for months, but I guess I will. It absolutely peters out in the second chapter, though there’s still fun to be had. Pretty much all the post game changes are terrible. It’s clearly not finished. But in spite of all that, I can’t deny that this is most fun I’ve had with a game this year. Taking the Metal Gear weirdness and putting it in the gameplay rather than the story really gave this game life. No other game has made the ridiculous ideas I get for missions work as much as MGSV. And fultoning Wild Ass never gets old. For me, this was a very satisfying end to Kojima’s Metal Gear.

  • Leave it to Nintendo to make me care about a multiplayer shooter. I think the last time that happened was Halo Reach. It’s hard to not just intelligibly gush about this game. The mechanic of spraying ink to cover the ground is so smart. Diminishing the importance of kills/splats makes the game way more accessible, especially for people who are terrible like me. They somehow made it easy to coordinate with your team with zero voice chat. The constant updates with new maps, weapons, gear, and modes keeps you coming back. They made a deep sense of community with the great Miiverse integration and the Splatfests, which gives everyone a theme to pick sides in and then defend their position in combat. It’s gorgeous. The music is great. Everything about this game was made with the utmost care. Even my minor quibbles with certain aspects of the online don’t matter when the rest of the game is so fucking good. I see myself playing Splatoon for a hell of a long time. Stay fresh!

  • Even if I didn’t pick up the game, Mario Maker would probably end up on this list. What a brilliant idea. Here’s a super intuitive way to build Mario levels AND it’s an official thing from Nintendo. People are thinking up so much wild shit that you would never to see in a Mario game. Hell, sometimes weird things just happen while you’re playing and then you can spin those ideas off into new levels. The amount of creativity that these tools bring out of people is incredible. The only real downside is that 99% of the levels are total garbage. But, hey, that’s what you get with the masses making content.

    It’s also made Jeff Gerstmann the happiest I have ever seen him playing or watching a game, and I think that’s worth praising.

  • Man, I don’t know what to say about Undertale. It’s incredibly charming, has a great story, unique combat, super endearing characters, fantastic music, let’s you date a skeleton, hang out with an anime obsessed fish lady, star in a cooking show, eat food made out of spiders, and is basically about being nice to people. Well, I guess I was wrong!

  • Bloodborne took a while to click with me. Like many others, I’ve always played them Souls games with a shield, trading blows with the enemies. Because of this I got hung up on some early enemies since I couldn’t get my head around the faster combat. But, man, once I did this game became ridiculously fun. Sure, it’s still hard as hell, but zooming around and slashing dudes feels exhilarating. The art direction and level design are fantastic too. It’s nice to see something different than the typical Souls trappings. I’m really happy I ended up coming around on Bloodborne.

  • I love Danganronpa. (Technically) Both games ended up on my list last year. Not to get into the story of the series, but I was very happy with the mysteries the first game left. That said, it is nice to see more of what’s going on in that world. You may think going from a visual novel to a shooter is a bit of a leap, but they made it work. You use a megaphone to shoot lines of code to destroy mechanical killer teddy bears. Yeah, this series is weird. There’s a lot of variety in the “truth bullets” you’re given. You could just shoot regular break bullets to destroy the Monokumas coming for you, or you could use a dance bullet to make him shake that fluffy ass. The character work is just as great as the other games too. I particularly liked the interactions between Komaru, sister of the protagonist of the first game, and Toko, the weirdo ultimate novelist also from the first game. It’s very worthy addition to the series and has me very interested in the new projects coming up.

  • Hyperdimension Neptunia has become a favorite series of mine. They are light, silly RPGs with really solid combat. This spinoff focuses on the Playstation themed goddess Noire (who is the best goddess btw) and a group of new characters based on other popular vidjo games. It’s a solid tactical RPG that I had a lot of fun with. In true Neptunia fashion, the game based characters provide a lot of jokes about the games industry that even extend to the combat. I mean, the Resident Evil girl’s super attack turns enemies into tofu! Come on!

  • I think the biggest thing I can say about Hotline Miami 2 is that I finished it. I loved the first game but kind of got my fill of it about halfway through. The variety in characters in 2 really helped. It’s fun to have to change up your playstyle between levels. From just using your fists to controlling 2 people at once to being a pacifist, it all kept the game fresh. I do agree that the levels can be too big, leading to frustrations and unfair deaths, but overall I ended up liking this one more than the original. And it even had a better soundtrack, which is a hell of a monumental task. Roller Mobster, y’all.
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