Top Ten Games of 2014

Since I've started this blog I've posted my top ten games of the year in text format. I'm going to continue doing that, but this year I also recorded a podcast where I discuss each choice a little more in-depth.

Keep in mind that these are my personal opinions, which may differ greatly from your own top ten picks for 2014. As usual I will start with the number ten game on my list and work my way to what I thought. If you want to read some more in depth thoughts on each game just click its name.

Let's this list going!

10. Transistor

The second game coming out of SuperGiant games, which shows they know how to make a good game. You play as Red, a singer who has lost her voice in a cyberpunk world. Armed only with a talking sword she must travel through the deserted city in order to find out what's going on.

The soundtrack, atmosphere, and combat blend together to create an unforgettable experience. I can't wait to see where SuperGiant goes from here.




9. Mario Kart 8


Mario Kart games don't really change much from year to year, but it's easy to tell when one is a quality product. Mario Kart 8 is certainly a quality product. It's the first HD iteration of the series and it looks beautiful. Nintendo has proven time and time again that they have the best art direction around.

On top of it looking beautiful it plays well. The karts have weight to them, and you actually have to slide in order to succeed. The game wasn't super surprising to me, since Nintendo knows how to make a solid kart racer. If you like Mario Kart, it's more of that!


8. Dark Souls 2

I got into the Souls franchise this year, and while the original Dark Souls is my favorite the sequel is pretty good too. It's more Dark Souls, but not necessarily as well thought out as the first. Still, you travel through numerous environment types and meet with infuriatingly difficult challenges.

With new mechanics it differentiates itself from the original, while keeping the experience fresh.




7. Rayman Legends

Rock solid platformers are getting increasingly hard to come by. Lucky for me Rayman Legends came out on current generation consoles, so I could take a crack at it. The Ubiart engine renders a beautiful world, that is backed up by some incredible platforming.

Rayman feels weighty, but glides through the air just right. More platformers should feel as tight as this does. It helps that there are a ton of unlockable stages and characters to boot!



6. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

This game made the list predicated entirely on the nemesis system. The Lord of the Rings elements
are completely ancillary to the experience. The nemesis system allows for you to make your own enemies and rivals. You get into fights with unique enemies who will remember you and react with tons of unique dialogue depending on the situation.

Rarely do I hope that developers directly steal from other games, but in this case I do. The nemesis system is super cool and I'd really like to see it in more games.

5. Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-

Guilty Gear has finally made its return. It looks incredible and is super fun to play. The story mode is like watching an anime, and more fighting games should follow its lead.

Very rarely do I go into training mode and practice combos in a fighting game, but with this I have. The combat system has been brought back down to a level that the average person has a chance of breaking in to. I'm not saying I'm going to get good at Guilty Gear, but I'm sure as hell going to try.


4. Super Smash Bros. for Wii-U

Smash is back. I love Melee, and what Project M is trying to do is admirable. I think that I enjoy
playing the new smash more than a mod though. The speed is the right distance between the slow motion of Brawl and the hyper speed of melee. It's a perfect blend of what makes smash very accessible and competitive.

The game is so jam packed with content it's hard to see it all. Out of all the games I played this year this one had the most fun multiplayer by a mile. Smash continues to be one of my favorite franchises of all time.


3. Theatrhythm Final Fantasy Curtain Call

Curtain Call brings back everything I loved about the original Theatrhythm, but adds the ability to
play multiplayer, and use the buttons as inputs. I still love to use the stylus, but it's cool that there is another option now.

The amount of music in this game is staggering. It has all the songs from the original, plus all of the DLC from that game. They then decided to add around one hundred more songs, and continue to throw out DLC. If you like rhythm games, and Final Fantasy you need to play this game.


2. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

Initially I wrote this game off as being another dumb visual novel. I saw some footage of the game and decided to try it out. It's a visual novel, where you go into Phoenix Wright style trials, play insane
mini-games, and forge relationships. It mixes so many elements I love.

The main character is a talking bear, who wants high school kids to murder each other! It's over the top in a way that I can really get behind, but is appropriately grounded when it needs to be. The sequel somehow came out this year as well, and I'm chomping at the bit to play it.


1. Inazuma Eleven

I don't have the appropriate words to describe how much I love Inazuma Eleven. It's anime soccer on the DS. This year it finally got released in the U.S. on the 3DS Eshop. I bought it on a whim and couldn't put it down. Shortly afterwards my obsession with the game spiraled out of control and now I've beaten every game released in English and imported a European 3DS.

It's an appropriate mix of action, strategy, fun characters, and cool moves. There's a lot of content in Inazuma Eleven, and it's fun to find all of it. You put eleven players on the field and draw lines with the stylus to lead them, or tap the screen to have them pass/shoot. If they intersect with someone, or shoot on the goal they have the opportunity to use a special move, most of which are amazing. Axel Blaze catches the ball ON FIRE!

Inazuma Eleven grabbed me in a way that a game hasn't in a very long time. You could say I became obsessed with it. It was consuming every ounce of my free time for around three months until I had completed all four of the games released in English currently. It's a blast to play, and I'm glad I found it.

     -Manny

GOTY 2014 Podcast

2014 has come to a close, which means that Game of the Year is upon us. As usual I have selected my top ten games. For a change of pace I got together with Noukeo and we recorded our talk about what we believe to be the top ten games of 2014. Our lists are both quite different but share many similarities.

The audio is a little weird for some inexplicable reason. At random intervals my mic will echo for a few seconds. It seems to be some kind of feedback from when Nouk and I talk at the same time. *Shrugs* It's not too bad, but it was enough for me to notice it.

I hope that you enjoy our discussion! If you're not a fan of Podcasts I will be posting a text version of my list within the next few days.

Game Time - April 2014

This past month I played a whole ton of Dark Souls 2, and I was finally able to complete it. I haven't written anything on it yet, because I've been debating whether or not I want to do a new game plus run. Turns out I've had my fill of Dark Souls 2, so I can lay it to rest for a little bit. Sometime within the next week or so I'll definitely try to write something about it. I really liked it, but not nearly as much as I liked the original.

Going against my predictions Namco Bandai localized Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, which was released here in the U.S. last week. I don't know why, but even after playing the Japanese version for a ridiculous amount of time and buying all the DLC I'm more than happy to go through it all again now that I can actually read what everything is saying.

The other two games I played were both oddly enough made by Ubisoft. I finally broke down and bought the PS4 version of Rayman Legends, which I absolutely love. Ubisoft Montreal's weird JRPG inspired RPG child of light came out as well, which is not so amazing, but I am enjoying it.

In terms of reading this month's edition may be a bit light. I need to pace myself if I want to write about the insane amount of games coming out in the next two months. It's game time!

Rayman Legends

I always wanted to buy Rayman Origins, but I never got around to it. Then when the sequel Rayman Legends came out I passed that up as well. Back in February Ubisoft decided to use Snoop Dogg to announce a PS4 and Xbox One version of Rayman Origins. It took me a while, but I finally decided to buy it, and I'm angry I didn't buy it sooner. It's legitimately amazing.

I like platformers that give you unparalleled control over the character and Rayman Legends certainly brings that to the table. The last game that felt like this to me was probably Super Meat Boy, which is still one of my favorite platformers. There's something about the way Rayman moves that just feels right. When running and jumping he gains momentum as you'd expect, and actually feels heavy. It's ironic, because he can hover with his hair and has no limbs. He just has his floating hands and legs.

I wish more than anything that this was in the game.

The game starts with this weird alien looking dude waking Rayman up from a long slumber. The dark teensies are causing trouble and they need to be stopped. Rayman begrudgingly wakes up and then you're in the game. That's the whole story. You're thrown into a hub area with a whole bunch of paintings. You jump into a world painting and you're taken to a separate room with a whole bunch more paintings for levels. There are a ridiculous amount of levels in this game. It helps that at least half of the levels from Rayman Origins make an appearance, which is cool because I never played it.

The game overall just has a ton of content and replayability. Every standard level has ten teensies to rescue. Each level also has a bronze, silver, and gold trophy. In order to get the gold trophy you need to have 600 lums at the end, which are the Rayman universe's equivalent of coins. Upon completing levels you earn scratch-off tickets, which can get you lum spawning creatures, Rayman Origins levels, lums, and extra teensies.

Even without limbs Rayman kicks ass.

The replayability in my eyes mainly comes from the challenges. There are daily and weekly challenges, and extreme daily and weekly challenges. These have you fulfilling various tasks to see how you rank against everyone else in the world playing the game. There are two variations. One has you trying to get as far as you can in an endless level, and the other has you collecting a set amount of lums as fast as you can. Every day I end up playing these challenges over and over until I get the best possible score I can. When you start playing there are five or six ghosts of other characters on your screen as well so you have something to compare yourself to. At the end of the day you'll either be ranked bronze, silver, gold, or platinum depending on how well you did in comparison to everyone else. You might stop playing when you have a silver medal, but if more people play you could go down to bronze.

The next day the game pops up a message saying what you won and how many lums you were awarded. The lums are added to your running total. Various lum milestones will unlock new characters for you to play as. Sadly there is so Snoop Dogg character.

You have to rescue all the Teensies!

There's something special about Rayman Legends. It has a crazy amount of charm and I hope that they continue to make these types of games. Rayman took a long break, but he's back and better than ever now.

Child of Light

Child of Light has grand ambitions, but in the five hours I've played it hasn't fully realized them. As you may have heard I like my JRPGs to be grandiose and filled to the brim with side content and unlockables. I personally play RPGs for their story though. Generally they are able to build a very well realized world. While a large part of that comes from the writing, the ridiculous play times they tend to have help as well. The more time you spend in a world the easier it is to throw out more bits of story and information to help build that world. Sadly Child of Light falls short in both of these departments so far.

The exact time the game takes place is never said, but we can assume it's in the Victorian era. A young princess Aurora falls ill and is transported to a magical world, which she must save from the evil witch who is terrorizing the land. She finds out that the plight of this new world she finds herself in is having adverse effects on the real world. In order to help out and eventually get home she embarks on a grand quest filled with whimsy and adventure. All of this is well and good, but so far the story seems like nothing more than a bare outline used to throw the player into this world.

Child of Light looks like a watercolor painting.

All of the characters talk in Rhyme, which is cute at first, but quickly becomes annoying. It seems to me that the quality of the writing was sacrificed in order to have all the lines rhyme. Very little information is given and a lot of lines seem to be spoken just so that there is something to rhyme with. That alone wouldn't be terrible, but the characters don't really interact with each other often either. There are a ton of characters that can join your party, but they don't really have outstanding personalities. Your party members only interact with each other once, which happens after the first battle they've joined the party. You fight five or six battles in order to see the characters interact for about three lines and it never really has any meaningful impact. It's just things like "Oh damn, you're good with a bow. Is it true that your name is Moe?", and other such idiocy (That's not an actual rhyme from the game).

The gameplay itself is pretty mediocre as well. It's a turned based system very similar to Grandia for the original PlayStation. Your character's heads are all on a line. The first 70% of the bar is blue, and the remaining 30% is red. When they get to the line 70% through the bar you get to choose their actions. Once you do that, it takes the remainder of the bar for them to complete their action. The enemies are shown on the bar as well. If you attack them while they're trying to complete an action they'll get interrupted and have to start over. There's an added strategy element to the battles as well. Aurora has a little sprite that follows her around, which you can control with the right stick in battle. If you send him over an enemy you can puff him up with L2, which will slow them down so you have more chances to attack and interrupt them. It works well, but there's very little challenge to the battles, so it gets stale quickly.

Ughhhhh.

Most of the time games like this can fall back on their shortcomings with loot, but Child of Light doesn't have that to fall back on. You don't get new weapons, or armor. Yes, you can collect gems that give minuscule stat buffs, but if you never equipped any of them it wouldn't really matter. Maybe later on everything gets much more challenging, but judging by the way I steamroll everything it probably won't. I'm already five hours through what is supposed to be a ten hour game.

The thing the game does have going for it though is that it looks amazing. The entire world looks like a watercolor painting. If I had to guess this game is a proof of concept for Ubisoft's Ubi Art Engine that Rayman runs on as well. They originally announced it as an open source engine that people will be able to use to create games, but prior to this only Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends have used it. Now they've shown that any type of game can be made with the engine, so perhaps we'll get to see a bunch of cool smaller games coming out of Ubisoft. Child of Light is interesting, but it could have been so much more. It just doesn't reach its full potential, which is a shame.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle

I finally decided to import a Japanese game and then it ends up coming out in the U.S. To be fair I think my reasons for doubting a localization were sound, which you can read all about in the piece I wrote when I initially imported the game. As I predicted they changed almost all the names that would cause them legal issues. The work they had to do for that was minimal though, because they left all the spoken dialogue in Japanese and just translated all the text.

I tend to only play as a character who doesn't have any musical references associated with him, so I don't know if Akira Otoishi still screams Red Hot Chili Pepper every time he summons his stand. It definitely doesn't say it in the text though. Once of the more annoying name changes is to one of my favorite characters. His name is Jean Pierre Polnareff, and that was also his name in the English translation of the part 3 Jojo's manga. For some reason they changes his name to Jean Pierre Eiffel, which just doesn't seem right at all. These are just name changes though, which is a small price to pay for the game actually getting a release outside of Japan.

This is the majesty that is Jojo's Bizarre Adventure!

There is one major thing I don't like about it though, and that's the way the English text looks. The font of the Japanese text is very obviously stylized to be exactly like the text in the manga. The English font looks super boilerplate and out of place almost everywhere it's shown. It's weirdly large and doesn't look good at all in contrast to everything else. I don't know if they even tried to stylize it, but it certainly doesn't look like it. Other than that though the game only has one difference from its Japanese counterpart.

They added arcade mode, so if you want to fight against terrible AI opponents for little to no reward you're more than welcome to do so. If you don't have the Japanese version of the game and you like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure then you should definitely pick this up. Getting a physical copy might be rough, because you can only get them from Amazon and Namco Bandai's store. There's always the chance to snag a digital copy off the PlayStation store though, which I highly recommend. Also, if you want a much more in depth look at the game check out the article I wrote when I initially imported it, which can be found here.

It's heating up!

At the end of May a bunch of stuff I want to play is coming out. Watch Dogs will finally be released, which should prove to be very exciting. It could be amazing, or the more likely scenario is that it will be super average. Transistor comes out as well, which looks incredible. I'm on board with anything Super Giant Games is going to put out there.

Then in June Tomodatchi Life will be dropping for the 3DS. Murdered: Soul Suspect the weird murder mystery game being published by Square Enix will be hitting the PS4. Then of course E3 will be happening the second week in June, which is always great.

Look forward to a whole lot of awesome stuff coming up. See you next time.

     -Manny