[Question] The Gamingforce Game of the Year 2015: Too many massive RPGs - voting edition

20 Points - 3D After Burner II
The only objectively flawless game of 2015. It's a portable, arcade-perfect port of After Burner, which is already enough to achieve the title of Game of the Year in any year, but then they also added Climax Mode to the original game. GET IN THE COCKPIT


25 Points - Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate
My first Monster Hunter game and a thoroughly frustrating experience. I don't know what I would've done if I didn't have Skills answering my hundreds of questions as I started out, because the in-game documentation, manual, and tools are woefully inadequate. I'm still learning details that it might have been nice to know 300 hours ago, like how your attack animation is slightly slower when you hit an enemy's weak point. There are so many barriers to understanding what you're doing and what's going on, some clearly vestigial and others just baffling, that I found myself not having a great time when I was doing anything besides chopping a dinosaur's face off with an axe the size of a car.

Oh yeah, and I've played this game for more than 300 hours because you can chop a dinosaur's face off with an axe the size of a car. Figuring out the movement and attack capabilities of your weapon, figuring out the patterns of a monster, and putting them together into a dance of pain and suffering is so good, and so polished, and so satisfying. If fun were mathematically quantifiable, I guarantee I would have had more of it by volume in MH4U than in any other game I played from 2015.


25 Points - Xenoblade Chronicles X
One of my favorite things about the original Xenoblade Chronicles was the setting. The backstory of the game is a pretty run-of-the-mill creation myth: two gods fought to a standstill, and the world as we know it grew from their bodies. That myth, though, is literally true. You follow the titans' anatomies as you climb up one and then the other, and each body is clearly visible from the other as they remain locked in combat. It's wild and memorable.

Xenoblade Chronicles X's setting is much more mundane: it's just a world, the planet Mira.

Except, it's a world of unparalleled scale and true geography.

A world that, despite all its convenient paths and tree branches and outcroppings you can use to climb things, still truly does not care that you exist.

A world of people and non-people, where a hundred stories are chaotically woven into the frayed fabric of a desperate, yet optimistic, city.

Mira is just a world: the biggest, most actualized world there's ever been in a video game.


30 Points - Undertale
For three months I've had ten thousand words about this game swirling in my head, never coalescing into anything other than an incoherent sludge. So what I'm going to try to do here is extract the most well-formed lumps, stack them on top of each other, and pretend they form a complete series of thoughts.

Undertale is far from a perfect game. The pacing and writing are uneven; my favorite example of the latter is New Home, which combines some of the most stunning environmental storytelling I've ever seen in a game with the bluntest exposition dump in the game. The puzzles largely end up being uninteresting time wasters. The messaging about choices and consequences is a bit inconsistent with how the game encourages, discourages, and even directly hints you to make certain choices. And even though Undertale makes jolly fun of JRPGs throughout, there's still enough of one at its core to be tedious, depending on your tolerance for that kind of thing.

But the fiction, when it's on point, is outstanding; besides New Home's Spoiler: beautifully spare depiction of a broken marriage, I really enjoyed how Waterfall's atmosphere and dialogue come together as the game's main exploration of loneliness and isolation. The prose, at its peak, also excels; the density of the line "despite everything, it's still you" continues to stagger me. And in its deconstruction of JRPGs, it manages to be one of the best games I've ever played about what it means to be a player of a game.

None of that is why Undertale has stuck with me the way it has. Parts of it, sure, but not the whole experience.

Undertale, at once both naively and maturely, expresses the idea that love and peace are always a solution. Always, always always always always always.

Naively, because you Spoiler: hug the evil out of an omnipotent god-monster. It's not exactly a nuanced or pragmatic take.

And yet, maturely, because it is nuanced and pragmatic in a different way. Because there isn't a hug button whereby everyone's problems go away.

You need to be observant and empathetic. To listen, to believe, to care. To console, to compliment, to cheer.

You can't talk your way out of every situation. You need to be the better person. To turn the other cheek and to forgive, even to those who have done you great harm. You need to be selfless.

The feelings of other people are ultimately their own, and no matter how much you may want to, you can't control or change them. All you can do is speak with your actions: help them if they need it, be there if they want you to, don't be there if they don't. It's not always fair, but feelings aren't an argument that can be won or lost.

This core of Undertale isn't a simplistic statement to be excellent to each other; it's a treatise on communication and relationships, almost unprecedented in the medium. In the journey you take, the friendships you make and the ones you find in others, and the people you help, it's the most unflaggingly optimistic game of the year.

Undertale is my favorite game of 2015.


=Oh God There's More=

Code Name: S.T.E.A.M.: It's a quality X-COM by Intelligent Systems where steampunk Abraham Lincoln and fictional American characters fight aliens, with a soundtrack by the Advance Wars guy. Why didn't any of you buy this game? If you have a 3DS, buy this game right now.

FAST Racing NEO: VROOM VROOM. Shin'en is awesome. The FAST series is awesome. Do you like going fast? Well then, I have a video game entertainment product you just might be interested in.

Gravity Ghost: A game where you joyfully fly around in graceful arcs and hug zombie space animals. The physics in this game can get a little finicky in a bad way, but the level design is decent enough to minimize that most of the time. There's a surprisingly good metaphor at the core of this game that sneaks up on you before you realize it's happening.

Pillars of Eternity: It's the HD Baldur's Gate everyone wanted. I liked how there are two party members whose character quests are entirely "talk to them hundreds of times and read thirty thousand words" and they ended up being the two characters written by Chris Avellone.

Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows: Plague Knight's movement tech is really, really awesome. It's kind of cool that the levels are mostly still balanced for Shovel Knight's movement abilities, so you can blast around them in unusual ways and feel like you're breaking the game, but that's probably the biggest flaw too; the difficulty and level flow are really bumpy. I'd love to see a full pack of original levels designed specifically for Plague Knight.

Splatoon: I am garbage at every single shooter that has ever existed, but thankfully this has objectives besides kill everyone so I'm only a useless lump like 95% of the time instead of 100%. Possibly my favorite soundtrack of 2015, but I don't really have a strong preference this year.

Didn't Play : Axiom Verge, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, Super Mario Maker, Yoshi's Woolly World
Couldn't Play : Ori and the Blind Forest, Rocket League, Transformers: Devastation
Best Game of 2014 I Played in 2015: Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

Jam it back in, in the dark.