The Best Thing I Played In 2015

Dragon Age: Inquisition

You know when a studio seems to be chasing a certain ideal, and never quite nails it? You love what their games promise, what they try to accomplish, and they get close enough that you're very much satisfied with their results, to the point where they're some of your favorite games anyway?

That's, to me, what BioWare has been doing since KotOR. Their games have always been trying to achieve a certain something, and I think that most people misconstrue what BioWare games are about. "They're great, in-depth RPGs" people say, but that really hasn't been true. KotOR was pretty complicated, but it was pretty much a port of DnD in terms of combat. Something similar is true about Neverwinter Nights After that, every BioWare game has actually been pretty simple, with not many stats to dump points in. They're not really about being in-depth RPGs.

"They've got great stories", people say. Once again, I beg to differ. KotOR and Jade Empire had memorable, great twists, and that's about it. Everything else was pretty cookie-cutter. Hell, even KotOR and Jade Empire were a simple McGuffin hunt and a quest for revenge, respectively. And, as much as I like the Mass Effect series, if you look at its story with even a tiny bit of skepticism, everything falls apart massively a couple minutes into the second game and keeps crumbling on and on.

What keeps people coming back to BioWare are two things: the worlds they set up, which are usually full of interesting lore and fascinating conflicts, and the main cast of characters, who are there as much to provide interesting arcs as an inside (and often different) perspective on this great world.

KotOR didn't nail it. I love Star Wars, and have read too many of the novels to be comfortable quoting a number, but it's not a universe that holds up when explored. Characters were also somewhat too one-note to really be that interesting. I still fail to remember a moment when I found Juhani anything but dull.

Jade Empire felt too short to nail it. This was an interesting world, with the best story BioWare had done since Baldur's Gate, and a fantastic (by BioWare standards) combat system, but it didn't feel like I had the time to really explore it before the game was over. A cast of blandish characters, and a weird reluctance to return to the universe sealed the coffin on it.

The Mass Effect series was probably the closest the studio had come. The first game had a really good story, unfortunately ruined by the following two entries. They were set in a sci-fi universe that was absolutely fascinating, with its past reflecting on modern-day politics and even events in the story. The cast of characters was definitely the best BioWare had done. They were endearing, fun to be around, and usually provided great perspectives on the world that you wouldn't really understand without them around. Unfortunately, the weak story in the later two games, as well as just clunky, not particularly fun gameplay the entire way through weakens the series, and the ending... well, that was definitely a massive clusterfuck.

The Dragon Age series was cool. Pretty good combat, and a world rivaling Tolkien in detail and just weird little details, but considerably more interesting. The stories in the two first games were pretty cool, with plenty of political intrigue in the first one, and an unusually personal, small-scale story in the second. Both games were also blessed with great casts of characters: people who were more than they seemed, people with unique perspectives, funny people, scary people... But still, something felt like it was missing. After all, Dragon Age II ended on a weird sort of cliffhanger, and the tension between Mages and Templars that both games had expertly built up was never really satisfactorily addressed.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is not only the perfect culmination to that storyline, but also the best individual game in that series. It's fun to play, and explores the world much more in-depth than the previous installments, looking at the existent lore from  new perspectives and adding interesting new tidbits here and there. Most importantly, it's got the best damn cast of party members that any BioWare game has had. It is, in every sense of the word, a masterpiece. This is the game that I feel BioWare has been trying to make for over a decade, and they finally succeeded. Dragon Age: Inquisistion has me ecstatic every time I play it, every time a new conflict of opinions comes up, with no clear correct answer, every time I have a philosophical conversation about whether one of my decisions was right or wrong with one of my friends, and every time I sneak around my fortress with my weirdo of a girlfriend planting buckets of water on top of doors to important dignitaries offices.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is a game I've wanted to play since I've been into videogames. You can play it right now.

The 2nd Best Thing I Played In 2015

Dark Souls

For the longest time, Dark Souls seemed incomprehensible to me. All the talk about how hard and brutal and how hardcore it is and how much you will suffer and die die die over and over made it seem like the most unappealing thing you could possibly pitch to me.

Somehow, though, I ended up playing it. And I finally got it. The main issue is the fanbase, which is awful at presenting why Dark Souls is a fantastic, phenomenal, absolute classic of a game. This is a game that presents a dark, desperate world. This world is hard to live in. It's full of things that are bigger, smarter, and more dangerous than you. You are an Undead, bound to resurrect if you die. If you give up, if you loose hope in this harsh, harsh world, you will go Hollow, you will become a mindless husk that just wants to kill to steal people's souls.

Dark Souls wants you to understand how hard it isn't to not go Hollow. It wants to put you through the ordeals of your character. It creates a magnificently fair, absolutely beautiful combat system, and subjects you to challenges that are difficult, but they're not difficult to be difficult, they're difficult because this is the way the world of Dark Souls is. Dark Souls encourages you to throw yourself at the rocks, and be frustrated, and it wants you to loose hope. It also wants you to persevere, to overcome these hardships, to push forward, to prove that you are human, and that humanity will not be broken by mindless beasts. We have POWER OF WILL, AND HOPE, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THIS FROM US. WE WILL PERSEVERE, BECAUSE WE ARE HUMAN, AND HUMANITY PERSEVERES, NO MATTER THE ODDS.

It's also simply enjoyable as hell to play, has an incredible world with phenomenal lore told in a way that puts the onus on the player. But what's important is that it's neither as difficult as it claims to be, nor about its difficulty. It's about the triumph of the will, the ability to persevere in the face of despair. The universe of Dark Souls is one that's dying, with existential dread creeping it, but the actual experience of playing Dark Souls is actually one of the most engrossing uplifting gaming experiences I've ever had. It's a testament to the quality of the games I've treated myself to this year that this is not number one. Dark Souls is easily in my top 10 games of all time.

It's prettyyyyy goooood.

The 3rd Best Thing I Played In 2015

Life is Strange

Life is Strange takes a different approach to episodic adventure games than TellTale does. Instead of constant story beats and at least some form of tension, Life is Strange chooses to focus on creating an atmosphere. This happens to be a very relaxing, very calm, mellow one. This helps you simply soak in the small town of Arcadia Bay and just revel in all the complex relationships between the different characters who subvert stereotypes.

Add to this a story that really goes dark, dark places and handles them surprisingly well for a medium as immature as video games are often seen as, as well as just a fantastic relationship between player character Max and her best friend Chloe. Life is Strange has a lot of flaws: the end is pretty crap, the writing is occasionally stilted, plus a lot of petty little things. That said, Life is Strange has heart. Everything feels heartfelt, and even if it didn't, the sweet little moments, and the relationship with Chloe would definitely be good enough to put Life is Strange on this list.

The 4th Best Thing I Played In 2015

Tales from the Borderlands

When I bought every TellTale games since The Walking Dead that I didn't own this year, the one that I was a bit iffy on was Tales from the Borderlands. It's based on a property whose writing I've always found to be irritating garbage, and appeared to me to be mostly a game born from a weird contract that neither side could possibly have been passionate about, right?

Wrong.

Tales from the Borderlands is funny, it's insightful, and it's got an absolutely terrific cast of characters. Playing Tales from the Borderlands is an absolutely great experience, and it got me everywhere, from genuinely laughing out loud, to sadness to anger. The characters are unforgettable, it looks great, and I'm comfortable in saying this is the best game TellTale has put out yet. 

The 5th Best Thing I Played In 2015

Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies

Ace Attorney is one of me favorite series of all time. It's funny, it's moving, and most importantly, it makes me feel like a damn detective, something that's guaranteed to make something a hit with me. I was worried sick that this new installment wasn't going to be up to par to some of the amazing previous games. Having finally gotten a 3DS, I jumped at the opportunity to play the newest installment in my favorite handheld series. Fortunately, Dual Destinies is not disappointing, with some great new mechanics put in there for variety, a gripping story and fantastic visuals, with the newly introduced character of Athena Cykes quickly grabbing a spot in my heart close to the classics that are Phoenix Wright himself and Apollo Justice. If only the prosecutor, Blackquill, had been less mediocre, this might have easily made top 3.

The 6th Best Thing I Played In 2015

The Banner Saga

The fact that this is at number 6 is a testament to how many fantastic games I've played this year. I absolutely adored The Banner Saga when I played it very, very recently. It's one of the most effective games at creating atmosphere I've ever had the pleasure of playing, thanks to a mixture of some clever mechanical trickery, ridiculously gorgeous visuals, and a phenomenon of a soundtrack and plays well to boot. It's ridiculous that this ended up not even in my top 5, but there were just games and games and games that I kept coming up with that I liked slightly better than this. Any other year, this would have easily made my top 2.

The 7th Best Thing I Played In 2015

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

This shooter was just solid, simple fun throughout. In a list with so many games with clever twists, big statements or huge stories, it's nice to have a fun stomp centered around just shooting guys and having a really, really solid story. Whilst there's flaws in this game, the central gimmick of the game (where what you're playing through is a story that the narrator misremembers, changes, and is willing to hear out other versions of, thereby changing what you play) is a joy, and the fact that shooting a guy in the head is just plain fun makes Gunslinger a fantastic experience.

The 8th Best Thing I Played In 2015

Risk of Rain

Among all the games that I like to play with their interesting systems and weird combinations of genres and strange twists, it's good to play just a straight-up solid, fun game. Risk of Rain is just a generally solid, enjoyable rogue-like action-platformer. It plays great, with plenty of challenge and an absolutely rocking soundtrack. There's very little to say here other than Risk of Rain is tonnes of elegantly simple fun, and I've spent many hours shooting weird crab things and stone golems, and look forward to spending many more. 

The 9th Best Thing I Played 2015

Black Closet

Black Closet is a strange game. This is a game produced by Hanako Games, whose most well-known thing is probably Long Live the Queen, the getting-poisoned-by-chocolates-because-you-don't-have-enough-dogs-skill simulator.

Black Closet doesn't feel quite as strange to play as Long Live the Queen, but it definitely isn't a normal game. You're Elsa Jackson, the newly appointed student council president at a prestigious all-girls school. There's something weird going on, with lots of trouble starting, and since you're new money, if the student council appears to react badly, you'll be kicked out of school as a scapegoat. As such, it's up to you to send out the other members of the student council to weed out trouble-makers via stat comparisons and dice rolls. This is very intentionally made to seem harsh and disturbing, with words such as "Harass", "Intimidate" or "Stalk" used to describe the actions you take. Be too harsh, and the student council will appear to be too authoritarian. Be too soft, and trouble-makers will cause the school's reputation to plummet.

Add to this the fact that you're locked into a VN style story with a council member of your choosing in between telling people to harass someone with a baseball bat, which can range everywhere from a touching romance to using someone as your weirdly emotionless servant, and you've got yourself a really bizarre, dark, unpleasant, whimsical, funny, disturbing game that is one of the most unique things I've experienced in years. I look forward to Hanako Games' next game.

The 10th Best Thing I Played In 2015

Pokemon Y

I like Pokemon. Simple as that. It's a fun, simple RPG to play. With my brand spanking new 3DS, I decided to pick up the fairly acclaimed 6th Generation of games with X and Y.

Unfortunately, after the truly brilliant Black & White, I found Y somewhat disappointing. The story is decidedly a step down. The new polygon-based visuals were exciting to me pre-release, but when seeing them in action they look a lot worse than the beautiful sprite-based battles of the previous generation game.

All that aside, Pokemon Y is a Pokemon game, and that means it's creative, and a whole lot of fun. It may be a step down from its immediate predecessors, but I still loved playing through this thing. 

The Best I Played - 2015 - Intro and Honourable Mentions

Another year, another silly list to make. 2015 was a great game for gamers, with tonnes of quality and interesting products coming out.

Unfortunately, I played next to none of them, instead playing a tonne of old games that I then proceeded to not write about, or not to publish my reviews of. I also finally got a 3DS, opening myself to a whole new avenue of games to also not publish my reviews of. As such, there's going to be a tonne of games here that I haven't actually published anything on the blog about. That said, being included on this list does mean I liked them. This is also the year that I've played most games in for a while, so I think I'm going to go ahead and make this list a top 10 for once. Keep in mind that, despite the title, I'm ordering these by how much I liked them not by which I think are the best games. I've also got a one game per franchise rule, and count TellTale games as one franchise, because otherwise a third of the list would be TellTale simply because I played stupid amounts of TellTale this year. Games that made the list in previous years are also excluded.

But because of rules like this, and the fact that 10 is not 20, or 30, or 40, there are some games that I wish had made the list that I simply had to cut. This is where they get their fair dues, their

Honourable Mentions:

Heh, that was clever, wasn't it? I'm a clever boy. Good, clever Rariow. Note to self: have a biscuit.

Hearthstone: League of Explorers & That One Patch That Nerfed Warsong Commander

Yes, I'm still playing the deceptively simply card battler by Blizzard, and I'm still as in love with it as I was before its release. Unfortunately, the meta fell onto some hard times, with the extremely uninteractive Patron Warrior dominating for ages, and making the people among us who didn't want to get killed from over max health from an empty board somewhat annoyed. The The Grand Tournament expansion barely helped, weakly trying to introduce tools against the deck that proved not powerful enough, and which makes TGT the least important expansion to date. Fortunately, Blizzard got their ass in gear and nerfed the shit out of Patron Warrior. Despite cries that they were killing the deck, they didn't, and it remains competitively viable, whilst no longer being as infuriating to play against. This was soon followed up by the release of the League of Explorers adventure (a mini expansion with some single player content), which did everything I hoped The Grand Tournament would achieve, and created some of the most interesting deck archetypes in the history of Hearthstone. Everyone get outta here, because we're gonna be rich!

Game of Thrones (and pretty much every other post-Walking Dead TellTale game)

I bought and played pretty every single post-Walking Dead TellTale game, and played through them in the course of the past year, and I loved them. Almost all of them. Walking Dead Season 2 was alright I guess.

Ahem.

Still, the great majority of the TellTale library is extremely enjoyable, cool story-based content. The choices you have to make are consistently interesting, and difficult. The first season of Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us are both as good as I remembered them.There's just a lot of good stuff that TellTale puts out, and I recommend all of it.

Even Walking Dead Season 2.

Ironcast

This is one that I genuinely wish there'd been space for on the list, and very nearly edged out the game that ended up on number 10. The weird little turn-based combat match-three rogue-like thing is tonnes of fun to play, and difficult as all heck. The steampunk aesthetic works fantastically, the sound assets are terrific, and the gameplay systems work surprisingly well for something so strange. Plus you get to control a steampunk mech, so that's pretty fucking cool.


Dice Masters

The first physical game that I've put on one of these lists, woo!

I won't lie, I don't think Wizkids' Dice Masters is a great game. It comes up with a concept that sounds cool on paper: it creates a deckbuilding game where, instead of putting cards in your deck you put dice in your bag from said cards. From that point it plays out fairly similarly to Magic the Gathering. Unfortunately, this concept doesn't work all that well, since the dice add another unnecessary layer of randomness on top of the randomness I already see as the biggest issue of card games.

The smaller amount of variables you put in your deck (or "team" as the game insists you call it), a pitiful 8 where even the really simple Hearthstone allows you 30, means deckbuilding has a lot less depth than I'd like it to. Combine that with some blatantly unbalanced cards and stupid amounts of power creep, where certain cards come out that are just simply better than pre-existing cards (Lord of D is blank, has the same stats, and costs the same as Green Goblin, but Green Goblin has an insanely powerful upside, for instance), as well as some pretty atrocious quality control (card wordings are often inconsistent, make little sense, or are counter-intuitive), and you've got yourself a deeply flawed game.

Yet Dice Masters has been a lot of fun for the past half year. I've been playing the shit out of it with my flatmates at uni, and been having a veritable whale of a time. I love the Marvel, DC, Yu-gi-oh! and DnD flavor of the different sets, and Dice Masters has proven both a good passtime and a cool thing to chat about with people I like who don't really care about games otherwise.