It's the not-too-distant future. A new technology has been developed that allows you to selectively wipe certain memories from your mind. People use it to erase bad relationships, traumatizing events, and the like from their minds. Some use it for far stupider, less complex reasons: to experience a beloved piece of entertainment again with fresh eyes. A favourite video game, perhaps?
Okay, it's a stupid setup, but a nice hypothetical to think about. If you could play a game again for the first time, what would it be? What aspects of the game make it so special the first time you play it? And if you played it again at that time in your life, would it hold up? Or would the problems in the game that you were so eager to overlook the first time through end up ruining your experience?
These are mostly safe choices based on my tastes, but they're the best 25 games that I can think of.
Edit: Spelling & Grammar.
Showing 1-10 of 25 items
This is the perfect game for this list. 999 has an excellent story that immediately clicked with me and kept me engaged until the very end. It also had fantastic adventure game style puzzles, a genre near and dear to my heart. The problem with both of these things is that once you've opened the box, you can't really close it again. Once you know the solution to a puzzle or the twists and turns of a story, going back to it just won't be satisfying. Which is why everyone should play 999 before Virtue's Last Reward (though obviously I would love to go back and experience VLR fresh again too).
I tried to play Bastion again, but it's just way too easy to ignore a lot of what made this game so special. You know how to play the game, what gameplay elements will be added as you progress. You'll never go through the experimentation with each new weapon and special you pick up, fiddling around with the idols to get the perfect difficulty, or adapting to the constantly improving qualities of your chosen arsenal. What's worse is that you're no longer hanging on every word of the fantastic narration as it just fades into the background once you've played through the game.
This is the only game that would require me to leave a note behind, Momento style. Except instead of "Don't believe his lies" it would be "4 player co-op only, subtitles off, voice volume set to 0, Skip all text and cutscenes." Most of the reason I didn't enjoy this game as much as the original is that the game lulled me into thinking it would be an okay single player experience and that the story was so insultingly terrible that it left a sour taste in my mouth whenever I had to listen to a line of dialogue. I tried playing it again after beating it, doing everything in my power not to absorb any of the story and only play the game multiplayer, and I had a lot of fun with the title. But I could never let go of that initial playthrough.
Just a badass action platformer with a ton of little secrets to uncover, like how to unlock the hidden ending and how to unlock the other guns. It'd just be great to play this game again without knowing it like the back of my hand.
Speaking of knowing a game like the back of my hand, I've lost track of how many times I have played through Chrono Trigger. Hell, I've played through it so many times I can't even remember when I first played the game. It almost feels like I've never had a fresh look at this game as I've just been playing it consistently since early childhood.
Just an incredible JRPG. The way it progresses through the Hero's life is sort of contrived, as you skip decades at seemingly random intervals, but not knowing the mechanics driving the story make the experience better going in. It's a fantastic JRPG with the solid Dragon Quest foundation and a story that later entrants still haven't matched.
Yes, I know Danganronpa 2 is coming out in English soon enough so I'm not quite through with the high school deathmatch yet, but you kind of know the rules at this point. Sure, the game will no doubt play around with that, but going into Hope's Peak Academy for the first time left this cloud of dread hanging over you as you progressed. The game does an excellent job in just training you to believe that anything could happen at any moment. Anyone could be murdered. Anyone could be a murderer. Anything could happen. Experiencing that dread again, that nagging feeling that you don't really want to look around that corner but you're going to be forced to eventually, is just as stressful as it is rewarding.
Fire Emblem: Awakening was the best recieved and most popular entrant in the series in no small part due to the concessions the game made to ease players into the experience. The game doesn't exactly hold your hand, but it never puts you in a position where you can't complete the game (unless you're playing on Lunatic). Fire Emblem 7 doesn't work like that. Fire Emblem 7 is a straight shot from start to finish, with no option to choose the content you're tackling next (unless you fulfill the requirements to divert your route temporarily into one of the few very challenging optional chapters). That means that if your archer that you've been training since the beginning takes a deadly critical blow to the face, you have no way of getting that experience back. Experience is a limited resource that you must consciously divvy up between your units effectively. Have one unit hog all the glory in battle and the rest of your team will fall behind. Switch units from chapter to chapter too often and your entire army will suffer. Sure, there are strategies to game the system so you can get way more experience than you should (arenas come to mind), but the natural progression of the game makes every turn, every attack, every decision, every experience point have an impact on your ability to tackle the harder and harder challenges that await you. When I first played this game, I got to the final chapter and stopped. The poor choices I made 3, 5, 10 hours prior had caught up to me at the very end. The final battle was too much, but it made me think about my choices throughout the entire game. Which characters were under developed? Which characters had I relied on too heavily? Was I even using the right team? What could I have done better? A lesser game would have made this experience feel like a 30 hour waste of time, but Fire Emblem made it a fascinating opportunity to analyze my play, plan a strategy for the next run, and make the most of my upcoming opportunities. It was one of the most rewarding experiences I've had in games. Sure, it's a risk that I would be too impatient to go through with that if this little thought experiment were to occur, but I think it would be worth it.
Again, much like 999, this is a perfect example for this list. A narrative of mystery, twists, and turns wrapped around inventive puzzles that are full of "Aha!" moments of discovery. All of that lose its potency on a second playthrough.
I played Grim Fandango well over a decade after it came out, yet I was still enamored by its atmosphere and setting. With the HD remake coming out soon that fixes the tank control and blurry, outdated graphics, I feel hopping into the Land of the Dead fresh with this new upcoming version would have smoothed over a lot of the rougher parts of the game.