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Superkenon

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Games of the Year - Marvelous 2013 Edition!

It's that time of year again, folksy folks! Time to semi-arbitarily take my favorite things and pit them against each other in a listed format! There are no losers here, because everything's great! I should probably mention a few noteworthy games I never got around to playing. Saints Row IV, I didn't finish. Grand Theft Auto V, I barely even started. Kinda speaks to my own enthusiasm with open world games right now that I didn't get to them, so maybe they wouldn't have ended up in the list anyway? Meh, I probably would've liked them anyway. I didn't hit up Devil (m)ay Cry, Rogue Legacy, Metal Gear Rising, or Ni no Kuni either, which are of my particular shame, nor Dragon's Crown. Those I hope to rectify before long. Also I don't own a WiiU yet, so Mario's still out of reach.

Then there's Papers, Please, which I have. That game is completely beautiful in every single way, but I can't put it on my list because A: it's too hard to compare to anything else, and B: I haven't finished it! That game crushes my soul and stresses me out, resulting in very short sessions with it. Normally I would think that's a bad sign, yet I can't help but completely adore that game for being something completely unlike anything else, and doing it WELL. It's great gameplay! It's fun! This decision's a toughy! So it's a good thing I created that rule about only listing games I've beaten!

But, despite those glaring omissions, I couldn't be happier with my list! Everything below is completely fantastic! 2013 was a pretty righteous year for video games! And most of them are on the 3DS! Go figure!

List items

  • Okay, I actually just sat down and wrote a review's worth of me doing nothing but gushing over Fire Emblem. Then I scrapped it all because it was just a big frothy ramble with no real anchor, and was probably more boring than my usual fare, so I'll try to contain myself here. Fire Emblem Awakening is a great game, you guys. Strategy RPG action that's tough but fair, with all relevant information surfaced for you at all times. Outstanding orchestral music (I daresay the best of the year), with layered tracks that cue appropriately between thinky-time and fighty-time. A crazy cast of unassuming archetypes that come alive over a long slew of clever, quippy dialogue. And, why not, one of the most responsive, things-happen-as-fast-as-you-can-hit-buttons interfaces I've seen for a turn-based strategy game. Even though the action moves fast, it ain't a short game. I clocked over 80 hours in Awakening just getting through the main scenario, and there's still a bunch of bonus missions left to do (not to mention a whole host of DLC that nearly doubles the mission count, which is already the longest of any Fire Emblem thus far). What I'm sayin' is, there's a lot here, and I like it all. It rocks the value proposition hard, and keeps on going, because between army and class combinations, and the mind-bogglingly-huge amount of support conversations to be had between the characters, I'm definitely playing through this game again. And again. And again. Much like the Fire Emblems before it.

    This may just be my favorite franchise in gaming, and I'm happy to see it going strong.

  • The series looks like a chintzy trifle at a glance, I admit, but there were some damn geniuses at work behind the scenes here. If anyone listens to me on a regular basis (haha, I know the answer to that), they'll know a big sticking point for me in games is when there's lots of padding, or when regular actions just take too long for no good reason. Rune Factory 4, despite being a Harvest Moon spinoff, suffers none of that. I'll just make a quick comparison: your tomatoes have grown. In the average Harvest Moon, you go to your field, pluck one, put it in your backpack, and repeat nine times for the full patch all while watching a half-second animation for every single lift and stow. Then you walk over to your shipping bin, open your backpack menu, select the stack of tomatoes, exit, and place them in the bin. In Rune Factory 4, you run to your field, pick up every tomato in quick succession (piling them on top of each other in your hands), go part-way to the shipping bin, and THROW THE WHOLE STACK, and run off in the other direction as the tomato-stack bounces into the bin without you. Your chore is complete while Harvest Moon-guy is probably still picking up his third tomato.

    Basically, you start off able to do everything fast, and it only gets faster. You can get anywhere from anywhere else in a snap. This game wastes your time never, and I love it for that.

    Sure, that's not a selling point in itself. Let me back up a bit, I guess. Rune Factory is a game where you simulate farm life. Y'know, things like raising plants and animals, fishing, cooking, buying furniture, going into dungeons, fighting monsters, forging weapons, leveling up, slaying dragons, wooing anime ladies, riding golems, taming ghosts, and other such agricultural exploits. Oh, by the way, you're a farmer who also happens to fight monsters.

    There's a lot of goofy goings-on in this goofy game (and like, all of it great), and my earlier point about its expeditious nature just enhances the whole thing and drives you to keep on digging through RF4's shockingly-manifold layers, and never tiring of it. Hell, I've already played this game almost as long as Fire Emblem, and I'm still finding out about new things to do.

    Also, I have a dragon working my field.

    Because why not.

  • Good golly jeepers they made a sequel to A Link to the Past, and instead of being a crass cash-in, it feels like a complete labor of love. (Okay, AND it's probably a cash-in. But it's a beautiful one, dammit!)

    Honestly though, it feels like it was made by people who had great reverence for AlttP. They take all sorts of cues from it and never miss a chance to hit a nostalgic note, yet it somehow manages to have so much of its own identity. The fact that the two games share an identical overworld is shockingly incidental, because the majority of the game is spent in new areas, and even the old ones they took a number of liberties with so that you weren't just repeating what you had done years before. It's one of the smartest ways to lean on nostalgia I've seen.

    Continuing the common theme of my top 3 here, A Link Between Worlds doesn't have any kind of padding in it, nor does anything (say it with me, folks!) waste your time when it shouldn't. There's no fairy here telling you why you should probably step on switches, or any lengthy tutorial sequence keeping you at arm's length. Nope, it's just WELCOME TO HYRULE. GO WRECK SHIT.

    It wasn't an especially long game, maybe something like 20 hours by the time I was finished with it. But those 20 hours were solid me-playing-game hours, and were fun enough that I see myself coming back to it as often as I come back to ALttP (which is at least a yearly affair). Just from casually going back to that game so often, I've gotten to the point where I clear the thing in a couple of hours. And I'm strangely excited at the prospect of whittling down this new game to fast, efficient runs too.

  • Sittin' here, holding the line as one of the last proper dungeon crawlers. Etrian Odyssey is another one of those series I've hitched my wagon to, because I'm all for everything they dish out. It takes a lot of familiar ingredients from the likes of the old Wizardry games, or NES Dragon Quests, and serves them up with enough modern spices to make them actually digestable. Old-school but not archaic. It's definitely one of those gameplay-first JRPG's, with your entire party being comprised of create-a-characters who never speak a word (aside from dialogue options), so it's almost surprising to me that it holds my attention for so long -- because, I admit, I'm definitely a guy who likes my games yapping at me constantly. But it's just fun enough all by itself, go figure, and something about the design gets me attached to my cast of generic classes every time. As the adventure goes on and we trudge through forests, labyrinths, and deal with horrible monsters, I realize I'm imagining the personalities of the party and how they're reacting to things, and I start to think of them as full-blown characters all with their own unique experiences, even though really, they're nothing but art and stats. Maybe I'm a crazy person and this is all in my head, but it still stands that I get really invested in each entry of the series, and Etrian Odyssey 4 was no exception.

    Also the music is killer. YUZO KOSHIRO, YOU GUYS.

  • This really is the year of my favorite franchises pumping out gold, isn't it? After a fairly long hiatus, I was a little unsure of how this revival was going to work out. Fortunately, it was all good. My trepidation over them trading out their beautiful sprites for polygonal models quickly passed as it became readily apparent that their artists still knew what they were doing. Amazingly, they still look and act like sprites, but with all the advantages of being 3D -- meaning smoother frames, more room for subtle variations, and the occasional camera tilt for dramatic effect. Presentation aside, I'm happy with the rest of the handling too. They've shaken up the usual lawyer + sidekick dynamic by making all three of the main characters the lawyers, and cycling out the lead case by case. A lot was done with Apollo Justice to not only differentiate him from Phoenix, but make him a character you care about even when he's not your avatar. Athena is very much in the same vein as Maya, Trucy or Kay, but has enough of her own moments that she stands out by the end of things. Basically, they've prepared a crack team of goofy litigators that I'm excited to see the further adventures of. So I hope, hope, HOPE this game is doing well, because damn if this game didn't make me hungry for another trilogy.

  • The Yearly Tales cometh! Yeah, Tales is almost the JRPG-equivalent of a corny action flick or some brand of comfort food. Whatever, I like that shit. I'll apologize for it not! ...even though the fact that I'm even writing these sentences at all right now kinda reeks of an apologetic tone in itself. Hey. Stop judging me, you jerks.

    But seriously folks, Tales is great. My love of fighting games translates directly into a love of the battle system here, and really, Tales could literally be nothing but the battles and I'd still play it. It's definitely a main draw, if not THE main draw for me. Worth mentioning that I ritualistically crank the difficulty to Hard (or Mania, or whever they feel like calling it), because it's when EVERYTHING CAN KILL YOU EASY that the systems really shine, whereas on Normal you're pretty much free to mash buttons, or ignore a lot of nuance. Hard makes even getting through regular encounters a good test of your mettle, and boss battles become some of the most intense shit around. I can't get enough of it. Just givin' my recommendation on that, folks. You'll thank me later. Or the opposite. Whatever.

  • Hell of a game, you guys. Also there's a lot of Hell in this game, you guys. Truth be told, it's the first proper Shin Megami game I've played, since I'm a bloke who got inducted through Persona 3, and haven't yet dug backwards. That said, a fan of Persona is right at home in this game. In a lot of ways, SMT4's battle system just seems like a better, more-interesting version of what I'm familiar with in P3 and P4 (though I assume it's a progression of what was in SMT3). All the fusing and element-centric mechanics are there, and this is the most fun they've been to engage with yet. And you MUST engage with the systems, or else you'll get flattened, because this is a pretty high-stakes affair. If you're not killin' fools fast, you're probably dead instead. And it's not a matter of levels, since your actual stats are almost peripheral. It's about making the most of each precious turn you get, and exploiting the system as hard as you can -- because the enemies'll sure make you pay if you don't.

    I haven't really said anything about the story, and that's because I'd rather not spoil it for you if you've made it this far without hearing anything about it. Personally, I went into the game dark, even missing some early revelations that were in promotional materials. And it was great, because I like where it goes. Some of it we've all seen before, but it's mixed up in such a way that it ends up refreshingly unique. And kinda wild.

    Just play it.

  • It's a video game about nothing. I've already backspaced this sentence like ten times, because explaining -- and then justifying -- Animal Crossing is a kind of difficult, surreal affair. Hell if I know why I like it so much. Scratch that, I DO know why I like it so much, because it strikes at some key elements that people come back to video games over and over for: character progression and loot. Only in this case, your character progression is in the form of upgrades to your house, filling out the museum, and additions to your town, and the loot is in the form of the thousands of furniture items, clothes and swag for your dude. And coffee. I guess I'm a pretty simple guy, because if I find the perfect couch for my little virtual Animal Crossing house, I'm as happy as if I killed a boss in Zelda. There's no goals in Animal Crossing, or particular direction for me to go in, yet I always have something to do, because there's always something I WANT to do. I WANT to plant that perfect orchard on the west side of town. I WANT to build that solar panel in that squirrel's backyard. I WANT to buy that fake Galaga cocktail table to put in my office next to my samurai sword and my drinking fountain. I WANT to go to the club on saturday night and listen to that naked dog play guitar and sing with his bad synth voice.

    It's all simple, pointless fun, but that's video games, right? Right?

  • X and Y! Don't worry, they'll make good on the 3D joke and release a Z eventually. But until then, we've got this! I'm a pretty tepid fan of Pokemon, for the most part. I was there for Blue, loved it, happily got Gold, then kinda fell out of interest with it when Ruby/Sapphire came along. And I probably wouldn't have come back, except that my sisters got into Pokemon in the interim, so I got Diamond to play with them, and that kinda rekindled my affection for it, leading me onwards to Black, Black 2, and now X. I make a point to mention I have people to play with, because having a little group along with you for the ride is pretty key, I think, as a lot of Pokemon's surrounding features emphasize connectivity.

    This is a series fraught with tradition and dated mechanics, plenty of stuff for me to generally gripe about, but there's no denying that it's a fun game, and really, there's nothing else quite like it. Especially now, with lots of RPG's getting streamlined and becoming 'corridor adventures', it's nice that Pokemon is still rocking towns hard, goofy NPCs galore, and the large paths full of nooks to explore and secrets to find. Pokemon gives me that classical JRPG experience I want, and is something fun to play with the family too.

  • I'm not a big FPS guy, or rather, I'm not a big what-FPS-games-have-become guy, so immediately I was just fine to see that Bioshock Infinite played like one of the ol' "outdated" shooters. Now we're in my wheelhouse, brah! For serious, I like how it all feels, and just where the gameplay goes in general. And yes, please put hidden shit all over my shooter game. Thinking about my GOTY stuff has made me want to play through the game again, so that's gotta mean something, right?

    The setting is great, and looks beautiful pretty much wherever you go. Some parts of the story feel like incomplete thoughts, but I thought the main arc was rather enjoyable. I can embrace abstract weirdness wherever I find it. It's certainly not without its faults, and it almost didn't make this list, but... you know what? It's a great game. Tenth-best game of the year I played, to be exact.

  • AND A SPECIAL MENTION FOR 2013'S 2012 GAME OF THE YEAR.

    I loved it when it came out, but this is the year I really got into it, and started playing with a friend regularly. And super regularly, at that. There's not a lot of competitive games I've ever gotten excited to play each and every night, but P4A became one of them, as part of a new ongoing struggle called "SLEEP, OR PERSONA?"

    P4A strikes what I think is the perfect balance between universal and unique character properties, where every single character has completely different traits and playstyles, but with enough common inputs that it doesn't become a nightmare to learn how to play more than one character. That's probably just speaks to my tendencies as a character grazer, but, hey. Every character is nonetheless deep, as hard to master as they are easy to learn, and I've found fun in every match-up we've tried out (well, Kanji VS Mitsuru can be a bummer).

    I'm on the brink of starting a pointless ramble about the mechanics I love, but I'll stop myself.

    Persona 4 Arena is great, I'ma keep playing it, and I'm anticipating the sequel like you can't believe.
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