ArbitraryWater's Top 5 Games of 2015 that didn't actually come out in 2015

You can’t start a show with a showstopper, which is why this blog is coming first. Feel free to expect the proper Game of the Year blog thingy in the next day or two. Unfortunately, the side-effect of 2015 being a great year for new games was at the cost of me playing old stuff to completion, which is why this is a top 5 instead of a top 10. There are probably multiple reasons for this, likely involving the purchase of a PS4, computer problems, and the existence of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, but I still think this top 5 is a fairly strong pick of games even from the limited pool of what I played this year.

The “Exactly What I Expected” award for competence and predictability: King’s Bounty: Dark Side

Listen, Heroes of Might and Magic is easily one of my favorite video game series of all time, alongside its RPG counterpart simply known as Might and Magic. It’s also been bad for a while. While I will stridently defend Heroes of Might and Magic V with expansions (the first game made after Ubisoft bought the rights from the corpse of 3DO) as being a fun, well-made installment in the series, I thought Heroes VI wasn’t great and I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Heroes VII, which came out this year and is apparently still a hot smelly garbage fire even after months of patches. I had some optimism for the future of the franchise after enjoying last year’s Might and Magic X: Legacy (likely more than it deserved, but shut up that game was still good), but between that selling poorly and this current fiasco, I think it’s fair to say that the Might and Magic brand might well and truly be put on ice after 8 years of disappointment.

What does that have to do with King’s Bounty? It’s pretty simple. Katauri Interactive’s King’s Bounty is the modern incarnation of an old game from 1990, also called King’s Bounty. King’s Bounty was developed by New World Computing, who 5 years later made a spiritual successor to it with the little name Heroes of Might and Magic. See where I’m going? In essence, KB is Russian bootleg Heroes of Might and Magic, but since the series it “borrows” (the same way every 3D platformer of the 90s “borrowed” some ideas from Mario 64) from has been bad for so long, is has actually become the better series despite iterating from game to game about as much as your average annualized sports franchise. King’s Bounty: Dark Side came out last year and is no different on that front. It’s a game that takes few deviations and zero serious risks from the other 3 King’s Bounty games that came before it and I don’t care because it’s 100% bullshit-free comfort food and doesn’t try any more than that. Sure, you play as an evil character in this one and thus get to use “evil” units far more than you did in the past, but that’s icing. I got distracted and burned out on it before the end, (all of those games are a little too long for their own good) but I’ll have little problem picking my save file back up if/when I need a fix again. Sometimes I want games to surprise me. It’s okay that King’s Bounty is the most unsurprising a series of turn-based tactical fantasy RPGs can possibly be. I’m not going to convince you that these games are actually great, but they’re good enough.

The ZombiePie Memorial Award for Heroism in JRPGs: Final Fantasy XIII-2.

Original Blog

Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes on the entirely unnecessary burden of continuing the story of Final Fantasy XIII via time travel, non-linearity and pokemon-esque monster mechanics. That wouldn’t be so weird if Final Fantasy XIII didn’t already wrap itself up pretty nicely by the end, but I guess Square needed to get some more use out of that engine they spent forever building, and thus XIII-2 exists for all the world to see. It’s alright! While the time-traveling hijinks of Serah Farron and Noel Kriess are ultimately a weird left turn from XIII’s story about cursed individuals fighting against destiny (and ancient computer gods) for the future of a giant floating moon thing, it works out to be enjoyably goofy, complete with an utterly insane ending. I didn’t hate the way FF XIII played, so expanding upon its concepts while (sort of) addressing its weaknesses sounded alright, and yeah, it works out even if it doesn’t go far enough in some areas and its pair of protagonists are a little bland in the way the ensemble cast of XIII wasn’t. But I enjoyed it, even if it was really just pretense for me to play Lightning Returns. I still need to play Lightning Returns.

Best Resident Evil game I played this year (because it sure as heck wasn’t Revelations 2): The Evil Within

Original Review

I can’t think of a recent game I’ve run as hot and cold on as The Evil Within. In some ways, it’s totally the grand return to Survival Horror and true successor to Resident Evil 4 we all wanted it to be, demanding smart ammo conservation, precise aim and constantly being on your toes, all within oppressive, moody environments. In other ways… it’s infuriating, cheap and clumsy, between absurd boss encounters with foes who can one-shot poor Sebastian Castellanos, poorly-designed set pieces (occasionally filled with insta-murder) and a bad rudimentary stealth mechanic. Also the story is bad and not in a funny way, but that’s almost beside the point. It’s a good game when it’s not being bad, essentially. I found the balance to tip slightly more toward the “good” end of the spectrum, though the game is weird enough and range of opinions on it are wide enough that I’d almost recommend anyone with a vague interest play it for themselves.

Most likely to be the product of what a 14-year-old would think is cool but also still kind of cool in spite of that: God of War

Original Blog

God of War is a video game-ass video game and sometimes you want one of those. The decade-old PS2 title is almost refreshingly pretense-free in a way modern games aren’t. Story? What story? I know the series is the poster child for why video game narratives are terrible, but the story in this God of War is “Angry man needs to murder Greek mythology and sometimes push blocks.” It turns out, even with some weird difficulty spikes and reminders that this game is a decade old, both of those things are still pretty good. We’ll see how long these positive feelings last once I get around to playing the rest of the series....

Best thing I imported from another country: Puyo Puyo Tetris

Remember how Giant Bomb was super hot on this game for like a week (before going back to that old mainstay: Tetris Battle Gaiden) and we all imported copies? I sure did that. Puyo Puyo Tetris is great and has made be better at random japanese puzzle games as well as Tetris itself. It also features a story mode that is entertainingly incomprehensible because I can’t speak or read Japanese, and several weird variations on Puyo Puyo-ing and Tetris that allow me to beat my friends when straight Tetris playing doesn’t work out. While it’d probably be lower on a list that had more big games played on it this year, the extremely scientific maths and processes that determine my old game of the year have put Puyo Puyo Tetris at the top.

Honorable Mentions: Fantasy General, Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Hearthstone.

Fantasy General is apparently a re-skinned version of Panzer General, but with Fantasy units. Makes sense, I guess. While I didn’t stick with it for super long (before… playing more Monster Hunter, or something) it was a solid chess-like turn based strategy game about moving dudes on hexes and making them fight other dudes with a rock/paper/scissors setup. Bonus points for having a soundtrack that’s basically just choir music.

Persona Q made it onto the list in an earlier draft, but I eventually cut it because I ultimately don’t think Persona Q is a great dungeon crawler. As an avenue to deliver Persona 3 and 4 fanservice in concentrated amounts, it’s really good even if some of the characterizations are reduced to one-note gimmicks (No, I get it. Chie likes meat.) As a game from the Etrian Odyssey people though, the dungeon crawling in question is a weird half step between that and a regular SMT game, leading to a messy path where you just have Naoto kill everything with Mahamaon or Mamoodon because seemingly 75% of the rabble enemies in the game are weak to Light or Dark. There are also some really obnoxious trial-and-error puzzles in the later dungeons and making a mistake tends to end with you running into a mini-boss F.O.E. and getting half your party murdered before you can escape. I’m close enough to the end that finishing it almost seems like an inevitability, though that’s what I’ve been saying for the last 6 months.

I was seriously into Hearthstone for a period of like two weeks before realizing that if I was going to get anywhere serious with Blizzard’s “Magic the Gathering, but for babies” CCG in any reasonable amount of time, I was going to have to spend real, actual money. And, much like actual Magic the Gathering, I was not going to do that and deleted it off my phone. But those two weeks before I had that realization were alright.

Dishonorable Mentions: Bound by Flame, The Legend of Korra

Original Blog

This is just my continuing reminder that I played through almost the entirety of Bound By Flame, which is best described as what would happen if you let a developer with little money and talent try to make a Bioware-esque RPG. The results are equal parts hilarious and terrible, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t already broken inside.

Original Review

However, I can't really recommend The Legend of Korra to anyone. It might have the tight controls and format of a Platinum character action game but without anything resembling a soul (or a budget) and somehow manages to be exceptionally boring for all of its 3-4 hour runtime. If you want a half-decent Platinum game based on a licensed property, play Transformers Devastation.

Best Game I replayed this year: Fire Emblem Path of Radiance

The catch with my old games blogs is that they focus on the stuff I played this year for the first time, but what about the stuff I replayed this year? Well, I have great news: Fire Emblem is still good. I ended up replaying no less than 4 games in the series this year, and I enjoyed them all to varying degrees. Shadow Dragon, the DS remake of the Famicom original, is the closest a game in the series is to "bad". Despite having a surprisingly well-done localized script courtesy of 8-4, it's still the script for a NES game and the quality of the maps in the game present are a little weak. It's a pity the second DS Fire Emblem never came out over here, because it's much better even if it has some of the same problems. Then I replayed The Sacred Stones, which was the third GBA game in the series and the second to come to the West. It's alright, even if my memories of it being really easy still hold up. Then we come to Path of Radiance, which is just as good as I remember it being. While I could probably go on for far too long on why it's the best game in the series to come out over here, I won't. Because I've probably already written such elsewhere. Its follow-up and direct sequel, Radiant Dawn, could've been a better game but is hindered by its multi-act structure and the way it splits up your armies.

Alright, I got the obligatory Fire Emblem reference in there. It's time to pack up and go ho.... Oh right. There's still one more blog from me coming your way. Expect great things.