ZenaxPure

Eh only two things I've played that are new this year are FF13-2 and Xenoblade. Put almost 70 hours into 13-2 in less than a week (gogo unemployment) and only 60 with a week and half of Xenoblade so I have to go with 13-2. Also Caius.

@Contrarian: I am not sure if port is the best way to describe it. The little king story wiki describes it as a re-imagining with an entirely brand new story and brand new gameplay mechanics... Butttt I never played the first (yes I know I am a bad person) so I don't have a huge knowledge base of the game.

But uh yeah, Pikmin! That's cool. I never played the second game (because I am a bad person again) but I would totally buy a Pikmin 3.

@Hizang: The vita.

No gathr'n dust joke yet? Come on people, making me sad here.

I have no idea, but I never realized it was spelled foetus in other countries.

The more you know I guess.

@AdzPearson said:

I also loved the music.

Hands down one of my favorite video game soundtracks ever. Dream of the shore near another world pretty much holds the record for being the oldest song on my MP3 players without me ever getting tired and deleting it like I do with songs every so often. Time's Scar is also absolutely amazing and I recently stumbled across this VGO version of it a few weeks ago and have since been listening to it multiple times per day.

Sad thing is I don't really even have fond memories of the game overall. Played it when I was like 13 or 14 and had absolutely no idea what was going on in the story or battle mechanics. I really need to get around to replaying it someday since I hope 10 years later I would actually be able to follow it.

@SkyTown_Drifts said:

gameplay or visually?

This is what I want to know as well. If we're talking about pure gameplay I am just going to throw out Gunstar Heroes. I played it for the first time in my life last year as part of a sega collection I bought on Steam and was absolutely blown away by it. The controls were perfect and the difficulty was paced well, and even when you died the checkpoint system was very nice so you didn't lose much progress. I pretty much refuse to believe that game is nearly 20 years old given how good it plays. It really puts to shame a lot of similar games around the same age.

You people hatin' on FF9 are killing me a little on the inside!

Anyway, I don't generally set up ridiculous expectations for games when going into them so I am rarely disappointed but I will say the more time I spend with Xenoblade I am slowly becoming disappointed by the combat. People often compare the game to FF12 which is a very fair comparison in a lot of ways. It's like a natural evolution of what 12 set out to do nearly 10 years ago at this point (speaking all the way back to it's announcement) with positioning based attacks, combos, etc. However sitting around 60 hours into Xenoblade now I sorely miss the ability to pause combat and dish out commands on my own. The ally AI, specifically the tanks, are just absolutely awful. They rarely ever use lock on auras (even if it's the ONLY aura you put on their active commands) and they make no distinction in attack priority for multiple mobs (basically using their aoe attacks before single target abilities. This is especially a problem with Dunban and his combos).

Pretty much all of it could of been solved if they would of taken the FF12/DA:O route and let me pause combat and give out commands on my own. There is nothing more frustrating then going into a fight with 3+ mobs and the tank AI refusing to use their aoe before 2-3 single target abilities.

Pretty sure it was one of the bosses you could just cheese with poison + Sen/Sen/Sen if you want. That said I never really had a ton of trouble with it either. I believe I had a accessory for debuff protection on though, so I could just toss esuna out on everyone and go about my business as normal. It's just a pretty long fight is all.

@GunslingerPanda: Last Remnant, Last Remnant, Last Remnant! GOOOOOOOOOO

No, seriously though. Last Remnant is one of, if not my favorite, JRPG of the entire generation and supposedly the PC version is even better than the 360 one was (I know just from playing the demo it at least runs infinitely better even on my crap PC). Fairly open world with tons of good sidequests, classic turn based combat but with a modern enough feel to force you into using strategy to win any fight, and a decent enough story I guess (certainly not the highlight of the game though).

The only annoyance with it really is the leveling system scales enemies stats based on your "battle rank"(level) and not your actual stats(stats are gained separately from your level... yes it's kind of a mess) so there was a lot of cases where people can't figure that out and then go to grind to beat a boss but only end up making the boss even harder than it already was. But that aside I fucking loved the 100 or so hours I dumped into the game.

Now I want to go play through it again >_<