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HONORABLE MENTION: Ok, I know this game came out in 2015, but screw you; it is fantastic. Last year I beat this game's story mode after about 80 hours of gameplay. As of right now, I have about 160 hours in and I am still nowhere close to getting everything done. Xenoblade Chronicles X is by far the best game on the Wii U and it is criminal that so many people haven't played it. Here's hoping for a Switch release.
PS: Xenoblade Chronices X would be #2 if it came out in 2016
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#10:Oh DBX2, you hot mess of a video game, where do I begin... For every step forward you made over last year's entry, it seems you took a sidestep into garbage along the way. While combat is vastly improved, the new online raid missions (a big focus in the game) were bugged and broken for two months after release. The hub world is bigger and has no annoying load times, but the story mode is rushed and lacks payoff at the end. Not to mention translation and dubbing issues, most of the spoken lines don't even match the text on screen, and some lines are put in the wrong spot. DBX2 is an engaging (and enraging) mess, but it held my attention long enough to prevent me from playing FFXV, so good on ya.
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#9: Clearly 2016's best Horse Racing/Solitaire simulator. Pocket Card Jockey front-loads itself with clever, quirky dialogue and fun characters. Had it kept that up, it would be a lot higher up on the list. Once you start the meat of the game, all that fun quirk all but disappears and you are left with a horse racing solitaire game that puts a smile on your face when it works, but most of the time I found myself just getting screwed over. Be it bad hands of solitaire, or the fact the the CPU horses boxed me in, I found that I lost more and more races to be what seemed to be out of my control. Had the game kept up the goofiness, I would have put up with it, but alas, my need to feel good about myself won out and I put Pocket Card Jockey Down.
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#8: Stardew Valley is a good Harvest Moon game. Stardew Valley is a bad Rune Factory game. Now that that's out of the way, Stardew Valley does a lot right, and I hope that the genre learns from this game. Finishing the community center encourages players to try and complete every activity available to them. Automatic sprinklers that water crops and give players time to do the more interesting things in town is a wonderful idea that I am surprised has never been used before. Multiple ways of fast travel are rewards, opening up even more free time.
Stardew's problem lies in what happens WHEN you have that free time: there is nothing to do in this game. Once I had finished the community center and got my farm all set and basically taking care of itself, I had no reason to continue playing, I just stood around and waited to go to bed. Talk to the townsfolk you say? Well I wish I could but there is this weird limit of all characters only have one or two dialogues a day, after which the will ignore you. Add in the fact that most of them are either depressing assholes or motivational posters with legs , I have no interest in getting to know the cast (other than Abigail, she's alright) This is the game that I will be keeping track of updates on the most in 2017, it has potential to be even better, and the developer seems intent on delivering.
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#7: Overwatch is fun Destiny. Great shooting mechanics, great multiplayer, bad single player options, and I have to go to a website to get any of the lore for the game. Could have it been so hard to but character bios in this game, or even those animated shorts? Blizzard has created a cast of characters so likable, and yet given me no meaningful insight into them, leaving them all feeling like generic tropes.
Where the story(?) fails, the game play makes up for it. Matches encourage teamwork and thinking on your feet and it's always positive. The competitive mode isn't for me, but I'm glad there is a spot for the hardcore to go so the casuals can have fun. Truth be told, I haven't played Overwatch since the Halloween event, but I unlocked the witch Mercy skin, so as far as I'm concerned, I have won Overwatch.
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#6: I love me some Monster Hunter, but I don't have the time for Monster Hunter, especially having to start over from scratch (again) to begin a new game of the same old same old. Enter God Eater: Resurrection. It's surprising that the fact that this is a port of a PSP game actually works in the game's favor. Missions are short (the longest one I played took only 15 minutes), maps are small, crafting parts can be bought using other crafting parts. It's like they took Monster Hunter, took out all of the annoying parts, and then dipped it in anime. That being said, I felt perfectly OK shelving this game to play other things. I always wanted to go back to it, but something else always took precedence over poor God Eater. Chances are I play this again before I even start FFXV though.
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#5: THEY FINALLY GOT RID OF HM'S!!! Sorry about that, just the entirety of my childhood screaming out in joy. The Pokemon games get better mechanically every iteration, and Sun/Moon is no different. The Pokemon ride now replaces the aforementioned HM, no longer weighing your team down with 'mon you don't like but need to have for convenience's sake. The designs of the new Pokemon are better than in previous years too (Popplio #1).
If only the story and cast weren't awful. Lillie and Hau are perhaps the worst "friend" characters in a Pokemon game I have encountered, the utter waste of team skull is painful, the professor is chuckle-head who never stops butting into the story, and the villain can be seen from a mile away. Oh, one more thing, if you are going to make the player character an emotionless husk, MAYBE DON'T DO CLOSE UPS ON THEIR FACE IN EVERY CUTSCENE! Sheesh, way to ruin every single scene, me.
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#4: Much like with Pokemon the core game of Fire Emblem was improved: re-balancing team up attacks and letting the opposing army use them was both needed and genius. The changed classes and new weapon styles are well implemented. In past games I always ended up with a few units who would just murder everything, but in Fates I actually had to pick the person for the right situation, with the exception being Birthright's murder machine Ryoma.
Fire Emblem Fates split the story into three alternate realities, did it work? Hahahahaha NO. What we are left with is a by-the-numbers story (Birthright), and poor attempt at gray morality (Conquest), and the most deus-ex machina story of the year (Revelations). After Fire Emblem: Awakening being the best game in the series, my hopes where (possibly too) high. The main characters in each route are either extremely bland/tropes mostly taking about honor, how much they are jealous of the player character, or how much they love the player character, or in the case of the leads Corrin and Azura, the worst protagonists in an RPG I have played for a long time. If I had to pick one version of Fates to play, it would be Conquest. The side characters are by far the most enjoyable among the three and the missions are just plain better, with chapter 10's "hold the line" mission being a standout. Conquest's difficulty is also higher, and there are no characters that can steamroll the entire enemy army like in Birthright (I'm looking at you, Lobster Boy). To sum it up, for maximum enjoyment, play conquest, skip the cutscenes.
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#3: You know, sometimes I just need a guilty pleasure game. 7th Dragon is that game. Did you know Atlantis was real? Or that it was destroyed by dragons? Or that it was inhabited by cat-people? No? Then you should have played 7th Dragon III. From the ridiculous concept of a game company creating a time machine so gamers vetted in their VR games can travel through time to fight dragons, to the amazingly diverse classes (the Duelist class is literally a Yugi-oh player) I just had a lot of fun with this game. Every class in the game has its own niche and yet their skills link up with each other in such satisfying ways, I wanted to start anther play through as soon as I finished.
What does 7th Dragon do wrong? Well there is the weird "dating" mechanic in which I ended up in a relationship with 15 people of varying genders, age,and evolutionary ancestors. As could be expected with a story involving time travel, the ending leaves something to be desired, it has a kind of "rocks fall, everyone dies" feeling to it.The entire went on about 4 hours too long. But hey, you turn an extra-terrestrial stuffed rabbit into a pretty lady, so...yay?
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#2: One word:Style. No, wait: STYYYYYYYYLE. Tokyo Mirage Sessions has got it in spades. Dripping with Japanese weirdness, but with an ATLUS polish, TMS is a delightful little summer anime made into a game. I just felt good playing it. Combat in this game is great, it takes the MegaTen formula and adds the titular "session" mechanic. The end result makes you feel the the characters are actually a team, backing each other up, working together, instead of everyone just bashing monsters to death haphazardly. It gets even better once you unlock special musical performances. Once you unlock a song for use in battle, you not only get a powerful attack, but an amazing song. Music in games is very important to me, and to have an entire RPG based on music was a treat. I would have never expected to have multiple J-pop songs stuck in my head for an entire year, but here I am. The songs in TMS are so damn catchy. Every time you have an opportunity to listen to them in game, you take it. From the opening "Reincarnation", to stupidly amazing "Give Me!" to the freaking J-pop rendition of the Fire Emblem theme, every vocal song in this game deserves an award.
"But this is an RPG! What about the characters?" You may ask, and to he honest, they are just "alright". Most of them never really get the chance to be fully fleshed out due to the pace of the game, which would have been improved my just stealing the Persona 3 & 4 day by day format, instead of the time skips it has. The female character, Tsubasa, is the focus of about half of the story, yet her growth really has no real payoff in the main plot. Another character, Kiria, is built up as the team bad ass during the beginning of the game, but then proceeds to do not much of anything. Other characters are introduced and have no ties to the story other than "you need someone who can use X weapon". TMS seems to be better at putting its characters into amusing situations and creating great moments than it is at creating fully realized characters.
But man, that soundtrack.
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#1: Hitman was one of my favorite franchises from the PS2 era, and I am having a hard time explaining how great it feels to have your childhood favorite return and then blow all of the previous entries out of the water (you know, how everyone feels about DOOM). With new levels monthly, illusive targets, and bonus missions, Hitman just kept getting better and better as the year went on. Every few weeks, I would find myself just playing Hitman for absurdly long periods of time, go to bed, wake up and then play more Hitman. Memories of my friends and I at sleepovers trying to find the best way to complete a mission, laughing at the weird Hitman jank, pulling off impossible hits, 2016's Hitman brings it all back and then does it better.
I am the kind of person who wants to check all of the boxes in games, get all the best stuff. Hitman's episodic nature allowed me to get my completionist fix, and then downtime so I wouldn't burn out. Before, my goal would be to get the best ranking on a particular mission, and then move on. Now, I want to complete every challenge and opportunity. Looking at the various challenges and then planning out how I would get to those conclusions was like the mathematical proofs I loved in college, but with less numbers & theorems and more fire axes & German super models.
Hitman also did something I never thought possible; it made Agent 47 into a likable character. Listening to him converse with his targets while in disguise, being darkly witty with what he has to say to them as both he and the player know what's about to happen is a treat every time. If there not a compilation of 47's pre-kill one-liners there is something wrong with the world. Not to mention he is apparently the true "Most Interesting Man in the World" being a pro drummer, massage therapist, super model, mechanic, ninja, the list goes on and on. Agent 47 has gone from and emotionless player-proxy to the coolest mofo on the planet.
Hitman is my game of the year for 2016, can't wait for season 2.
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