Using 10 to 1 order since I got the go-ahead! Worst to best but my worst is still the best. That make any sense? PM me if there's anything wrong with the formatting or if any ballots are invalid.
10. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance ; I had an awful start with this game. Platinum Games really sucks at explanining stuff or maybe I'm just an idiot. I think it's the latter. Had to bench this game for a while because I wasn't making any progress but I came back months later. This game is fun. The soundtrack is incredible and it gets my blood moving. I don't think the normal enemies and the bosses are anything special but the whole game just comes together.
9. Ys: Memories of Celceta ; It plays like Ys Seven which means this game has always had a guaranteed spot on here. Soundtrack is obviously awesome. Karna is the best.
8. Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk ; Gust really screwed up the alchemy system they've established in Totori and Meruru. We got something messed up in its place and I don't like it all. Nevertheless I enjoyed this game immensely thanks to the characters (hai Linca!) and got the Platinum for it.
7. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies ; Like Ys: MoC, I don't have much to say. An established series brim with quality and the newest entry does not disappoint. Has the second best case out of the localized games in its DLC.
6. Shin Megami Tensei IV ; The first couple hours of this game is so brutal but it balances out as it goes on. I was never bored for even a second thanks to great pacing. Blazing fast battle system is icing on the cake. Would have been nice if the non-neutral endings were better.
5. The Wonderful 101 ; My favorite action game ever, dethroning Bayonetta... also by Platinum Games. I did have another awful start with this game but I had to stick with it with WWHD coming days later on the eShop. My love for this game grew as my team started getting permanent members. It's all relative. The more I could string combos of sword, whips, guns, bombs, the more I was having fun. I seriously have to do another run.
4. Pikmin 3 ; The best game in the series and Pikmin 1 and 2 are so good it's kinda hard to imagine it'd be top with another entry. It happened though and I'm so glad Pikmin 3 exists and is in my hands. I miss Pikmin 1's time limit and Pikmin 2's caves but when everything about the gameplay is as solid as a Rock Pikmin, it's all good.
3. Fire Emblem Awakening ; Anyone worth their lick in the OTs know I love this game. Really wish the mission objectives changed every chapter. Would it have killed Intelligent Systems to include a "Defend Princess Blah for X turns"? Map designs suck for the most part. As far as I know, this game deserves top billing for letting me build a Bride Army. I'm prepared for the responses sure to come.
2. Super Mario 3D World ; Not as good as Galaxy 1 and 2 but hey at least it's better than the rest of the 3D Mario games. Love this game and I love it dearly. You just have to play this to understand. Words don't do this game justice.
1. Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan ; The finest game I've had the pleasure of playing this year. Easily my GotY and nothing else comes close.
My experience with this game isn't like anything else I've ever played. It's kinda like you're those fruity kids from those Narnia books and you enter that closet and find yourself in a vastly different world. That's what happened with EOIV and myself. The game isn't saddled with cutscenes and it wouldn't fit with the artstyle and the theme the game's got going on anyway so it's like a stroke of luck. Basically you get called into this city out in the middle of nowhere and the big cheese tells you "hey we need people out there mapping this area so get cracking." Upon hearing that, you make the rest of your party and the rest is history.
When you enter any area, the map in the bottom screen is blank. It's got nothing on it. It's up to you to fill it up by drawing the walls, mark the hazards, note any interesting areas. It's a great feeling to have when you've reached the ending of a floor and look at your creation. But it ain't so fun when you make a mistake on your map. You might have blocked a completely new area on the map, just because you put a wall there!
Within each world map and there's a couple of them, there's a bunch of little areas with only a floor's worth of exploring and then there's the big area called a Stratum and they have multiple floors. What's cool to me is that every Stratum is different from the rest. The first one is a jungle and while the enviroments are plastered on walls making them look flat (it's still a first person dungeon crawler), this game makes me feel like I'm actually in a peaceful forest. It's probably because I have to use my imagination instead of relying on another person's vision on what this forest should look like. I say peaceful partly because some of the backgrounds look like they have sunlight going through the thicket. The other is because of the song the plays. It fits so darn well. The other Stratums include a ravine, a cave of some yellow rock guess I'll take a shot in the dark and say limestone, even a library. There are more but they're kinda spoilers so I'll leave it at that. This game tickles the right areas of my brain and stimulates it. Minimal presentation resulted in the most vivid images in my head, who woulda thunk?
So we got these great cool areas to explore, that's cool right? Should make the mapping a breeze. Wrong. It ain't all sunshines, unicorns and rainbows up in here. The game does have random battles as you walk but there's an encounter radar-thingy on the side so you can better prepare yourself when it turns red. The real danger comes from the FOEs. Stands for some kinda Latin thing. These monsters are much stronger than the random enemies you face. When you move a tile, they move a tile. Sometimes two. If you ain't careful, they can wipe you clean and you'll have to restart from your last savepoint and you lose all newly gained experience and loot if you're playing on the standard setting. If you aren't cool with that, you can play the casual option where you'll be sent back to the city after dying. What I really like is how the FOEs interact with the environment. In the 1st Stratum, you have to lure the Cutter (scary looking bear, one of the first FOEs you'll see) around to break obstacles that you can't break yourself. It makes you feel that the atmosphere in the dungeon is authentic and that your party aren't the only living beings around. Another is when you kill some harmless looking deer FOEs but after you're done, the big bad mama FOE is out for your blood. There are consequences for everything you do, you just never know until it's too late. Yet another is in another Stratum where freezing the water to walk across on is the key to progress. When you freeze the water, turtle FOEs will slide across to match the change in the environment, ignoring the usual 1 or 2 movement. Stuff like that really shows you have just as much of an impact on the environment as the FOEs do.
Team building and skills are hands down my favorite parts. There are a bunch of different classes and they all function differently. Fortress is your tank, Medic is your healer, Nightseeker is your status inflicter, Runemasters cover your elemental coverage, and more. Obviously certain set ups will see more success than others but there isn't a really bad way to build a team. This is where the game shines. It opens up different ways to approach enemies. Take the Cutter, it mainly uses its arms to attack. Bring a Sniper to binds its arms, rendering its attacks useless for a bit. If you don't want one, bring a Fortress and use Taunt to draw attacks. Or you can bring both to make your life even easier. Eventually you unlock subclassing and you can effectively use two classes on one unit. Make a Runemaster your main class and subclass Medic into it so you can have a healer just in case. There's a ton of freedom EOIV gives you in team building and I can't praise it enough.
Seriously I got no words man I really, truly, madly do love this game. I rambled on and on so sorry about that. EOIV pushes boundaries, turns the medium an artform, a once-in-a-lifetime miracle in video games, all that cheesy stuff that pervades a whole bunch of posts in this here GotY thread. All of that applies to EOIV. 100 hours well spent. Atlus, you da best!
Or if you didn't bother reading my awful writing (cuz I don't blame ya), Wynne says what I want to say in the most eloquent way possible. Minus the lady boner since I'm a dude and EOIV instead of weapons.
x. Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millenium Girl ; EO with a story. The story is decent enough but lack of good skills to use in story mode is a letdown. What we get as a substitute in gems is a joke. Still a great game, though.
x. Pokémon X/Y ; Customizing my playable character is so fun. Game Freak did well with the latest installment of pokeymanz. Too bad about the framerate.
x. Grand Theft Auto V ; controls with the helicopter or anything that flies is so bad. Has A+ certified Rockstar writing. Best game to fool around in.
x. Senran Kagura Burst ; Forget the well endowed chicks, the gameplay is pretty legit.
x. Rayman Legends ; not too big of 2D platformers but I liked this enough.
x. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD ; My favorite game, period.
2012. Persona 4 Golden ; Terrible dungeon design and battle system and this is coming from the same people that made SMTIV and EOIV. Just like with Persona 3, the social links save this game from utter suck and that's enough for me to forgive this game in its entirety. 10/10 will play again for harem ending. Should be okay here since I'm in NA.
2013 is one my favorite years of gaming ever. Bought tons of games from this year alone. Most I've ever spent in a year. I won't forget it. Kinda hard not to when this is the year I've also bought a Wii U, Vita and Animal Crossing 3DS XL. Gaming goodnessssss. Oh and I used the Vita camera for the pics. Sorry for the quality.
10. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance ; I had an awful start with this game. Platinum Games really sucks at explanining stuff or maybe I'm just an idiot. I think it's the latter. Had to bench this game for a while because I wasn't making any progress but I came back months later. This game is fun. The soundtrack is incredible and it gets my blood moving. I don't think the normal enemies and the bosses are anything special but the whole game just comes together.
9. Ys: Memories of Celceta ; It plays like Ys Seven which means this game has always had a guaranteed spot on here. Soundtrack is obviously awesome. Karna is the best.
8. Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk ; Gust really screwed up the alchemy system they've established in Totori and Meruru. We got something messed up in its place and I don't like it all. Nevertheless I enjoyed this game immensely thanks to the characters (hai Linca!) and got the Platinum for it.
7. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies ; Like Ys: MoC, I don't have much to say. An established series brim with quality and the newest entry does not disappoint. Has the second best case out of the localized games in its DLC.
6. Shin Megami Tensei IV ; The first couple hours of this game is so brutal but it balances out as it goes on. I was never bored for even a second thanks to great pacing. Blazing fast battle system is icing on the cake. Would have been nice if the non-neutral endings were better.
5. The Wonderful 101 ; My favorite action game ever, dethroning Bayonetta... also by Platinum Games. I did have another awful start with this game but I had to stick with it with WWHD coming days later on the eShop. My love for this game grew as my team started getting permanent members. It's all relative. The more I could string combos of sword, whips, guns, bombs, the more I was having fun. I seriously have to do another run.
4. Pikmin 3 ; The best game in the series and Pikmin 1 and 2 are so good it's kinda hard to imagine it'd be top with another entry. It happened though and I'm so glad Pikmin 3 exists and is in my hands. I miss Pikmin 1's time limit and Pikmin 2's caves but when everything about the gameplay is as solid as a Rock Pikmin, it's all good.
3. Fire Emblem Awakening ; Anyone worth their lick in the OTs know I love this game. Really wish the mission objectives changed every chapter. Would it have killed Intelligent Systems to include a "Defend Princess Blah for X turns"? Map designs suck for the most part. As far as I know, this game deserves top billing for letting me build a Bride Army. I'm prepared for the responses sure to come.
2. Super Mario 3D World ; Not as good as Galaxy 1 and 2 but hey at least it's better than the rest of the 3D Mario games. Love this game and I love it dearly. You just have to play this to understand. Words don't do this game justice.
1. Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan ; The finest game I've had the pleasure of playing this year. Easily my GotY and nothing else comes close.
My experience with this game isn't like anything else I've ever played. It's kinda like you're those fruity kids from those Narnia books and you enter that closet and find yourself in a vastly different world. That's what happened with EOIV and myself. The game isn't saddled with cutscenes and it wouldn't fit with the artstyle and the theme the game's got going on anyway so it's like a stroke of luck. Basically you get called into this city out in the middle of nowhere and the big cheese tells you "hey we need people out there mapping this area so get cracking." Upon hearing that, you make the rest of your party and the rest is history.
When you enter any area, the map in the bottom screen is blank. It's got nothing on it. It's up to you to fill it up by drawing the walls, mark the hazards, note any interesting areas. It's a great feeling to have when you've reached the ending of a floor and look at your creation. But it ain't so fun when you make a mistake on your map. You might have blocked a completely new area on the map, just because you put a wall there!
Within each world map and there's a couple of them, there's a bunch of little areas with only a floor's worth of exploring and then there's the big area called a Stratum and they have multiple floors. What's cool to me is that every Stratum is different from the rest. The first one is a jungle and while the enviroments are plastered on walls making them look flat (it's still a first person dungeon crawler), this game makes me feel like I'm actually in a peaceful forest. It's probably because I have to use my imagination instead of relying on another person's vision on what this forest should look like. I say peaceful partly because some of the backgrounds look like they have sunlight going through the thicket. The other is because of the song the plays. It fits so darn well. The other Stratums include a ravine, a cave of some yellow rock guess I'll take a shot in the dark and say limestone, even a library. There are more but they're kinda spoilers so I'll leave it at that. This game tickles the right areas of my brain and stimulates it. Minimal presentation resulted in the most vivid images in my head, who woulda thunk?
So we got these great cool areas to explore, that's cool right? Should make the mapping a breeze. Wrong. It ain't all sunshines, unicorns and rainbows up in here. The game does have random battles as you walk but there's an encounter radar-thingy on the side so you can better prepare yourself when it turns red. The real danger comes from the FOEs. Stands for some kinda Latin thing. These monsters are much stronger than the random enemies you face. When you move a tile, they move a tile. Sometimes two. If you ain't careful, they can wipe you clean and you'll have to restart from your last savepoint and you lose all newly gained experience and loot if you're playing on the standard setting. If you aren't cool with that, you can play the casual option where you'll be sent back to the city after dying. What I really like is how the FOEs interact with the environment. In the 1st Stratum, you have to lure the Cutter (scary looking bear, one of the first FOEs you'll see) around to break obstacles that you can't break yourself. It makes you feel that the atmosphere in the dungeon is authentic and that your party aren't the only living beings around. Another is when you kill some harmless looking deer FOEs but after you're done, the big bad mama FOE is out for your blood. There are consequences for everything you do, you just never know until it's too late. Yet another is in another Stratum where freezing the water to walk across on is the key to progress. When you freeze the water, turtle FOEs will slide across to match the change in the environment, ignoring the usual 1 or 2 movement. Stuff like that really shows you have just as much of an impact on the environment as the FOEs do.
Team building and skills are hands down my favorite parts. There are a bunch of different classes and they all function differently. Fortress is your tank, Medic is your healer, Nightseeker is your status inflicter, Runemasters cover your elemental coverage, and more. Obviously certain set ups will see more success than others but there isn't a really bad way to build a team. This is where the game shines. It opens up different ways to approach enemies. Take the Cutter, it mainly uses its arms to attack. Bring a Sniper to binds its arms, rendering its attacks useless for a bit. If you don't want one, bring a Fortress and use Taunt to draw attacks. Or you can bring both to make your life even easier. Eventually you unlock subclassing and you can effectively use two classes on one unit. Make a Runemaster your main class and subclass Medic into it so you can have a healer just in case. There's a ton of freedom EOIV gives you in team building and I can't praise it enough.
Seriously I got no words man I really, truly, madly do love this game. I rambled on and on so sorry about that. EOIV pushes boundaries, turns the medium an artform, a once-in-a-lifetime miracle in video games, all that cheesy stuff that pervades a whole bunch of posts in this here GotY thread. All of that applies to EOIV. 100 hours well spent. Atlus, you da best!
Or if you didn't bother reading my awful writing (cuz I don't blame ya), Wynne says what I want to say in the most eloquent way possible. Minus the lady boner since I'm a dude and EOIV instead of weapons.
x. Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millenium Girl ; EO with a story. The story is decent enough but lack of good skills to use in story mode is a letdown. What we get as a substitute in gems is a joke. Still a great game, though.
x. Pokémon X/Y ; Customizing my playable character is so fun. Game Freak did well with the latest installment of pokeymanz. Too bad about the framerate.
x. Grand Theft Auto V ; controls with the helicopter or anything that flies is so bad. Has A+ certified Rockstar writing. Best game to fool around in.
x. Senran Kagura Burst ; Forget the well endowed chicks, the gameplay is pretty legit.
x. Rayman Legends ; not too big of 2D platformers but I liked this enough.
x. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD ; My favorite game, period.
2012. Persona 4 Golden ; Terrible dungeon design and battle system and this is coming from the same people that made SMTIV and EOIV. Just like with Persona 3, the social links save this game from utter suck and that's enough for me to forgive this game in its entirety. 10/10 will play again for harem ending. Should be okay here since I'm in NA.
2013 is one my favorite years of gaming ever. Bought tons of games from this year alone. Most I've ever spent in a year. I won't forget it. Kinda hard not to when this is the year I've also bought a Wii U, Vita and Animal Crossing 3DS XL. Gaming goodnessssss. Oh and I used the Vita camera for the pics. Sorry for the quality.
.
But yeah, the timing is a little sad in hindsight.
But I definitely recommend it in that case as it serves basically as a full retelling. Be warned there is some extreme vulgarity; not to be played around impressionable youngsters.
