Our Personal Games of the Year

[RenzokukenZ]

So we've survived our supposed Mayan fates and have neared the end of the year 2012, and since most of us here are gamers, I figure we could do a bit of sharing of our personal game of the year nominations. 2012 had a lot of games, and a lot of feelings are held to certain ones. So I'll list 4 categories that should be able to fill the desired feelings of interest. They are;

Game of the Year, which is the game you had the most enjoyment and you feel is the best,

Surprise of the Year, where a game came out of nowhere and turned out to be fun,

Disappointment of the Year, which a game you were looking forward to failed to deliver,

and Worst Game of the Year, where the game was utter crap and the cons greatly outweight the pros.

I'll kick it off;

Game of the Year: Torchlight 2 - Whether I'm running around as an old tinkerer with a huge cannon, a spear-totting raging bitch of a woman, A dashing ronin armed with a crossbow and has a pet hawk, or whatever combination I want to make, its always full of loot, fights, explosions, loot, danger, exploration, loot, variety, and of course loot. Looked forward to it ever since the first one and I wasn't disappoint. It may not have brought anything new to the ARPG formula, but it definitely left its mark in the genre.

Surprise of the Year: XCOM-Enemy Unknown - Now I'm not one for unfairly hard games with permadeath, but for some reason I became strangely infatuated with this title. I've only played the demo, but I know this is the one game I'll get once some spare change comes my way. Something about the idea of training your own crew of badass soldiers, decking them out with various abilities, and sending them to battle with the chance that they won't make it out alive seems interesting to me. Probably because it reminded me of Final Fantasy Tactics and D&D, which is fitting since thanks to XCOM I've gained a resurgence for Tactical RPGs and started playing some, like Fallout Tactics, Avernum, and even a D&D campaign.

Disappointment of the Year: Soul Calibur 5 - While I did enjoy the game for what it was, and the character creator was always my favorite part, it felt greatly lacking in the offline department compared to past titles. Yes, they put more emphasis on the fight mechanics and online play, but it failed in really getting you to appreciate the new characters that replaced the old ones, and failed harder in letting you know who they are due to the removal of the traditional arcade story mode.

Worst Game of the Year: Since FF13, I've been making sure not to get shafted on my game time with bad games, so I haven't played anything this year that I would consider utter crap. But from personal observations and reactions from others, I would pick one of the Resident Evil games, either ORC or 6.

[Blastifyys]

Blade & Soul Is my game of the year i Like the areas they are visual appealing to me and the combat of the game And last but not least you can run on walls Glide and fly There are alot of games where you can fly in it but the flying in this game is amazing (how its Used) Im not sure if you can do 2 Games of the year but PSO2 is one of them to.

DC Universe- A very Good Game AT the most i have got addicted to it i like how they have a wide combination of abilitys to have

Planet Side 2- That Game is wack as Fuck Im nt even going to go into details The trailer looked Nice but When i Played it NOOOOOOOOOOO NOOOOOOOOO!

ANd agian Planet Side 2-Meets the list 2 times sad

[Ceresa]

Game of the Year: Tales of Graces F.

The battle system is just so good. The best in RPG history. Throwing out the TP system of previous games for the CC system gives you a game from early on that feels like battles in the late-game of Tales. No crap regular attacks, all combos, all the time. The difficulty slider actually gives fantastic rewards, more xp/loot/money and between that and the combat was the first time in a Tales game I felt like turning it up on a first playthrough. I probably spent more time intentionally running into enemies on the map for fights than any RPG in the last 25 years. Main story was the traditional Tales awful, but the skits between characters make up for it.

Surprise of the Year: Final Fantasy 13-2

FF13 was awful, and I was getting a serious FFX-2 Girl Power vibe with Sarah (who was a retard in the first game) taking the lead character role. So I planned to shrug off the sequel but the LE was excellent so I caved. Luckily the paradigm system, which was the only thing I enjoyed from 13, was brought back beautifully with the ability to recruit and use your favorite/coolest monsters in your deck. No more 15 hours of super limited tutorial and forced party structure with characters I despised. Behemoths and chocobos, and even Omega take the third slot. I found myself constantly looking for fights to power/recruit up new monsters. Story was also nonsensical, a huge improvement over 13. Throw in Hope being reduced to a minor character and Vanille's absence and you've got a good game. Bit on the easy side though.

Disappointment of the Year: PSO2.

So many reskins. Three months in and they unleash a wave of reskins that are the new best to replace the last best. Unbelievable. I expected and was annoyed by the fact that we'd be replacing shit monthly but this really takes it to a new low. Playing to get the same weapon in a different color scheme with slightly higher stats is retarded. Month 2: Get Garland to +10! Month 3: Get Lambda Garland to +10! Month 4: Get your rares to +10 multiple times! Fuck all that.

Gachas.

Skill trees are pointless. Adding primary stats and a bunch of +1% shit is fucking boring. There's a few gems in there, like automate halfline, or charge pp revival or weak bullet. But most of it is just trash that should be scrapped and replaced. But it won't happen. Any spirit, any creativity that Sega once had, is as dead as the Shining Force 3 / Holy Ark videos on youtube that Sega forced to take down for their latest Shining Rape.

And really, this game, genre really, doesn't interest me enough to play every goddamn day until it dies. PSO didn't, PSU didn't, even Diablo 2 didn't. But they were all able to accommodate playing a few months, then quitting for a few months. For PSO2 I want the costumes. If I quit a few months and come back, how far behind on the cute costumes and accessories am I? I can deal with playing catch-up on levels, client orders, whatever. I'll bang that out in a week. If I miss out on weapons, no big deal I'll aim for the new hotness / get cheaper old ones. But costumes only go up once the gacha is gone. Grinding out meseta for inflated costumes doesn't have much appeal. Playing while unsatisfied with my appearance has even less appeal.

At least I'll always have Infinity.

Worst Game of the Year: Guild Wars 2. ;; ;; ;; ;; ;; ;;

Where do you even begin with a failure of this magnitude?

Skills dumbed down and traits horribly balanced leading to poor build diversity.

Personal Story sucks. Fuck Trahearne, fuck the Orders, fuck the pact, fuck the Zhaitan "fight". Fuck constantly soloing 6-7 mobs with worthless NPC help. Dungeons are the worst in the genre. Broken dynamic events everywhere. Dynamic events sucked anyways but being cockblocked from Arah because the event to open it was broken for a week is pathetic. Bloated Champion HP. The removal of tank/heal/dps trinity. Other games don't take it out because it fucking works you retards.

Culling in WvWvW. WvWvW only having two maps. No enemy name display, no dialogue with enemy factions. The loot bags, what the fuck is that all about. Why don't we get Valor or Renown or some bullshit from conquering keeps instead of Karma that we can exchange for badges of honor. Why is the only WvWvW gear Soldier status? The complete separation of SPVP and the entire rest of the game world. Like I want to bother farming skins to stand around in the tiny heart of the mists?

The absence of a skin locker for PVE. Woo 119G spent on my T3 cultural. Too bad I can only use it on one armor set, and if I ever switch to another stat set full time, well gotta trash the old stat set to transmute the cultural skin over. Precursor RNG. The bullshit of later making precursors a reward in a one time event after conditioning us with garbage rewards in prior events. Adding a RNG gear grind when exotics were already tedious to get if you want multiple builds or have multiple characters. In a game with a fucking manifesto stating they were against gear grinds. What a betrayal. 250 250 250 250 250. Want a Legendary? Get 250 of everything and anything that only drops 3-4 times an hour. Want a cool exotic weapon to tide you over until Legendary? Get 250 of a bunch of shit also required by the Legendary thus setting you back. 16g Abyss dye because between the big bot banwave and the world agreeing with me and quitting, the dye supply is shit. Not a big deal if we had account based dyes. And what happened to account dyes? Oh right they hired some Nexon cunt to shit up the game and remove that feature when they added dyes to the cash shop.

Ahhhh fuck this game, Guild Wars 1 was so good and they dropped the ball so hard.

Of course, I still played enough for 5 80s and full PVE completion on 4 of them. But most of that was done before the great ascended betrayal which killed any desire to log in.

GW2 would have gone into disappointment, but I didn't really play anything worse so...

Incidentally Diablo 3 really turned around with 1.05, my 1.03 impressions of it would have put it down here, but now I'd rather play it over anything else in the genre barring erasing my memories of Diablo 2 and doing a fresh start on that. Also Xenoblade and Dark Souls, either of those would have been game of the year, but they were last year for me.

[Polly]

Game of the Year - Mark of the Ninja
Though I've enjoyed a great many titles in the stealth genre over the years, Mark of the Ninja is the game I feel that after all this time finally got basically everything right.

Disappointment of the Year - Phantasy Star Online 2
An over-abundance of wasted potential just sitting there begging to be exploited. Instead, it's just a kinda boring hack and slash with a scummy gacha hook and a retread of certain elements that made PSU equally disappointing.

Surprise of the Year - Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward
I'm one of those weirdos that thought 999 was intensely overrated and that it never earned its "what the fuck?" reveals and the moments where you actually "play" it were simply not fun at all. VLR on the other hand earned its craziness and I never once wanted to skip or FAQ any of the room puzzles no matter how difficult they could get at times.

[gigawuts]

I've never been much for these kinds of lists, and I've missed out on a lot of games that I've wanted to play this year, but for sure my game of the year has to be Borderlands 2. It's a great feelgood game, packed with treasures to find everywhere (both in loot drops and pop culture references - which do tend to be hit or miss, mind). Very, very little in BL2 winds up being about making the player feel bad. Everywhere you go is something new that does something different.

Disappointment of the year, yeah, I'll have to go with PSO2. Polly's pretty much said my sentiments on it already. It uses a horrendous RNG and progress-losing mechanics to try to grief the player into just coughing up money for items to pad against the RNG. I've never liked games modeled like this, but have always liked PSO. This creates a bit of a catch-22. Much of what I liked is long-since removed. Droprates so low that a bad streak can result in a several weak dry spell, and weapon improvement rates so low you can literally spend everything you own and wind up with a worse weapon for your efforts. There are other, proven successful ways to make money in an F2P game, and I hope Sega tries them instead some day.

Surprise of the year? Nothing comes to mind, honestly. I've been stingy with my wallet this year, so I've skipped anything that I didn't expect to be good.

[Bomber The Cosmonaut]

Ok, I'll bite.
I'll also be short, blunt, and sweet about it.

Surprise of the year:

Guild Wars 2. I'm not into MMO's. At all. Not only has Guild Wars 2 gotten me to invest almost 90 hours of my time, but it has also warmed me up to the idea of playing other MMO's.

Disappointment of the year: Phantasy Star Online 2. I really don't need to say more. Sure, the combat is rad, but everything else, not so much. Guess thats what happens when it goes completely Free To Play.

Game of the year: This one is tough. If it were based off of playtime, it would be Borderlands 2. If it were based on straight up fun factor, it would definitely be Hotline Miami. Runner up would be Dragons Dogma, though, heh.

[Retehi]

Game of the Year: Borderlands 2. Can tell lots of love went into the games atmosphere. I never played the first BL, and the second makes it feel like you don't have to in order to enjoy it.

Disappointment of the Year: Diablo 3. Thank you Jay Wilson for turning a cherished franchise I grew up on into Auction House Simulator 3. You're also a fuckhead for insulting David Brevik, the maker of the namesake you screwed up.

Surprise of the Year: I don't know what to stick in here to be honest.

[Randomness]

Game of the year: Xenoblade.

Yes, I know this came out quite a while ago in other regions, but it wasn't released until this year stateside. Which is a travesty.

Spoiler!

A strong combat system (easy to understand, easy to use, with enough options to let you experiment - only the MC is in-your-face "this is the best skill combination"... because his skills are few enough to have them all equipped at once ).

Wonderful environments. The entire game takes place on a giant humanoid... well, giant. The music is also good.

The story is solid. The plot twists are (mostly - with the exception of the endgame) easy to see coming (doubly so if you talk to NPCs enough), but the foreshadowing is handled so well it doesn't matter. It's not cliche enough to be boring, but not so crazy that you're left wondering what the hell is going on. Overall, it's very well executed.

The biggest gripe I have with the game is the insane number of sidequests. Many of them are fine, but some of them get silly (collect X of Y that drops sometimes from Z, and the droprate is bad), so going 100% is a pain. On the other hand, there are a lot of em with an underlying story, and others that you're basically guaranteed to clear as you move on. I can't imagine finding all of them without a guide, as there's just so many that have prerequisites. But really, the flaws in the sidequest system aren't going to get to you unless you're going for completion, imo.

Disappointment of the year: Diablo 3. Devolves into grinding far too fast, and the AH is just so superior to all other forms of gear upgrading that it destroys the looting process - the difference between average loot and godly loot is insane.

[darkante]

GOTY: Seems like i can agree that Borderlands 2 strikes out as a crazy loot driven FPS RPG shooter with humours dialogs and bizarre quests at times and got alot of different weapons combos and class builds too try out.
If i have to compare it with the first one, i say this one is a bit harder as the A.I seems better geared (particulary in Hard aka TVH mode) and smarter to dodge bullets.

Jack is an interesting villain that thinks he is the hero and makes fun of every cruel thing he does and he seems to know almost everything. So extra points there.
One of my favorite quotes of his is.."Jack: See, this is what I don't get about you bad guys. You know the hero's gonna win, but you never just die quickly-- man, this one guy in New Haven, right? City's burning, people dying, blah blah blah. This guy rushes me with a spoon. A fricking spoon. And I'm just laughing. So I scoop out his eyeballs with it, and his kids are all, "aghhhhh!,” and, ah...you had to be there. Anyway, the moral is: you're a *****."

Just didn´t like how weak they portrayed the main characters from the first one making fun of them with Vilhelm...seriously they lose to that guy, but had no problem with the ultimate evil from the first one? Wow..massive slap to the face there.


Surprise of the Year: That would be Darksiders 2, a great hack & slash with rpg elements. Very underated, don´t see anyone talk about it really.

Dissapointment of the Year: PSO2, yeah i couldn´t think of anything else right now. But it´s way to driven on buying things since the droprate were very bad when i played which is BS.
Also, the combat isn´t that interesting...there are moves that stinks alot and some are just not that fun to use. And off course in a big party, things will die fast before you get a hit in..which is BS too.

[Sayara]

goty pop'n music fantasia / iidx tricoro
loty: every other game