Game #40: Undertale

Undertale
Platform: PC
Duration: 8 Hours

What a unique, charming little game. The combat mechanics are very cool and the game keeps coming up with new challenges and twists. This title bleeds personality from every screen. I really don't want to go much into it because it will spoil things, but I completed the "True Pacifist" ending and was thoroughly entertained. By the way, this game is pretty damn funny. Something I think is hard in this medium.

It's ten bucks, and you can beat it in a few sittings. I hate "artsy" game critics who scoff at AAA titles and just praise indy games to no end that are filled with design issues. This though, this is a great game that really impressed me and I don't typically like indy titles.

Oh, this game is challenging as shit too. Hope you are good at bullet hells.

Game #39: Rise of the Tomb Raider

Rise of the Tomb Raider
Platform: Xbox One
Duration: 15 Hours

There were multiple moments in this game where I felt it was just yelling "GRAPHICS" at me. Like, this is a beautiful game, particle effects everywhere, physics objects, solid 30 FPS, but I would be lying if I didn't think it felt excessive at times.

Seriously though, this was a very fun game. Story starts a little too fast but quickly slows down and hits a good stride. Pacing felt very solid between exploration, puzzles, stealth, action, and "run motherfucker!" segments.

Oh, and it has Tombs! That you raid! Actual clever puzzles!

I really like the direction the rebooted franchise has taken, and I genuinely believe they're better games than Uncharted. This one is definitely worth your time, but aside from your first playthrough you probably won't get much out of it. Grab it when it goes on sale.

Game #38: Xenoblade Chronicles X

Xenoblade Chronicles X
Platform: Wii U
Duration: 76 Hours

Probably my #2 game this year. This game did more to move the JRPG genre forward than any title I've played in years. I was talking a lot to Erika about this, and so many JRPGs just feel...like the same game. The past 3 "Tales" games have been mechanically very identical. Final Fantasy feels like it has been running in circles trying to find something new. Xenoblade though...they took inspiration from the Skyrims and Baldur's Gates out there. Hundreds of quests, and honestly the "filler" collect/kill missions are not the majority of the things you do in this game.

You explore, for hours upon hours this gigantic beautiful world. Exploration feels great, you constantly get rewarded with materials, money, map progress, experience. Story progress rewards you eventually with this badass giant robot, then suddenly even more of the map opens up to you. And then you hit that moment where you unlock the ability to fly with your robot and everything just feels...open. There are few games that can nail meaningful exploration but this one absolutely does.

Story wise, it is a very concise tale for a JRPG. It presents a very clear goal early on that you work to achieve throughout the twelve story missions. There are some great revelations, a few twists, but was ultimately very satisfying. The bulk of the missions in the game though either flesh out the backstories of your party members, or the citizens of the town. Some of them are very fucking cool though, and a few get really dark. Honestly I was very impressed with the quality of storytelling presented in the side quests.

As far as gameplay mechanics, combat was very fun. My robot was a fucking monster by endgame and on foot I was a badass Sniper. There were a few clunky systems like the sheer amount of crafting items and the awkward way you have to manage adding and removing people from your party, but as a full package I was happy. Online was also cleverly integrated into the game. Shared worldwide missions that everyone got rewarded for as well as some co-op raids. It was very clever.

This was a great game. After the letdown that was the Xenosaga games, I am happy the creator of one of my favorite game of all time has hit is old stride again.

Game #37: Magical Diary

Magical Diary
Platform: PC
Duration: 3 Hours

Was looking for something quick to beat while we had free play at work the other day. Decided to boot up this random dating sim I got in a humble bundle a while back.

Essentially, it's an anime dating sim in a knockoff Hogwarts. I ended up in an abusive relationship with a Demon who tried to take my soul. I kept trusting him though and eventually my roommates kicked me out and made us fail our group final because I wouldn't give up seeing him. I ran away from school to be his Queen in the underworld.

This game is weird. Here is my prom photo.

Game #36: Sword Art Online Lost Song

Sword Art Online: Lost Song
Platform: PS4
Duration: 32 Hours

The Sword Art games have nailed one thing, they portray the characters very accurately. In the absence of the show, they're a great fix for my SAO addiction. Game wise though they are just decent. Nothing particularly revolutionary, but solid game play that stays faithful to the show's mechanics.

I don't think I can look at this objectively since I like the show so much, but I enjoyed my time.

Game #35: Fallout 4

Fallout 4
Platform: PC
Duration: 69 Hours

Fallout 4 is a good game. I think with a few more months of development and some further iteration on some systems it could have been a great game, but that just isn't what was presented with the final product. What we got was a story that ends an entire act before the game does, an abysmal UI, a serious hit to player choice, and the trivialization of a number of classic Fallout themes. In short, it felt like a simplification of something who's complexity used to bring me a lot of enjoyment.

But I still had fun.

I've been trying to distill down why I still enjoyed my time with the game. I think the core gameplay is so familiar to me at this point that it is hard not to enjoy getting progressively stronger and blowing the crap out of mutants with my laser rifle. V.A.T.S is a fun system, that gets more rewarding as you invest perks in it. Crafting was interesting too, and it was cool putting the junk items to use. I mean, I don't think there has ever been a video game that made me excited to find an aluminium tray factory before.

I think this is like when I watched Star Wars Episode 1 as a kid for the first time. I enjoyed it, but I felt something was off. It was only later that I sat down and pieced together everything that was bothering me. Fallout 4 is the same. Well, not as bad as Jar-Jar of course, but still.

I think what bugs me is how this just doesn't feel like a Fallout game to me anymore. There's no way to play an evil character, just a sarcastic asshole. Power Armor, which took a herculean effort to earn in previous games, is now just given to you before the two hour mark and is just a glorified vehicle. Even joining the Brotherhood of Steel, which again took a lot of effort in previous games is now accomplished after completing a single mission and you get fast tracked through promotions constantly. Skills are gone. Creative solutions to problems are gone. The whole game just feels...simple.

It feels as if it was designed peacemeal across numerous developers and then just thrown together into one whole right at the end without a lot of integration testing. I'm sure the designer working on the Railroad quests thought it would be awesome to add in the ability to modify your clothes and hat slots as a quest reward, but I don't think anyone stopped to think if it would be a good idea to gate an upgrade that effectively triples your defense behind doing two side quests for an optional faction.

I mentioned it earlier, but the story? Ugh. It resolves way too quickly, the individual faction stories are incredibly weak, and the ending is a huge letdown. It completely killed my desire to replay this game.

Game #34: Call of Duty Black Ops 3

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3
Platform: PS4
Duration: 7 Hours

So some people still call me a masochist, but I continue to play through the campaign for every Call of Duty. It's a franchise I have worked personally on, so I feel it almost as an obligation to see how my kid has grown up. I touch base every year to see what sort of life choices it has been making for itself. Well if Black Ops 3 was my son, he would be a 19 year old wandering around Europe for a summer, trying to find itself. I hope my boy gains a sense of identity soon, because I had precisely zero fucking clue what was happening.

I don't know who I work for. I don't know who I am fighting. The game throws acronyms for organizations at me left and right without explaining what they mean or why I should care. It seriously got to the point where I was making up my own names and backstory. There was one group called the "Winslow Accord" that I was convinced was just a peace treaty brokered by the actor that played Carl Winslow in Family Matters.

One minute it's all future battlefields with robots and smart weapons, then I'm inside my own head, then someone else's head, then it's fucking World War 2 because we haven't done that in a while, then it's the original zombies level in the middle of a campaign mission. Like, please CoD, stop for a second. Breathe. Figure out what story you want to tell instead of vomiting visuals at me. This didn't even feel like a Black Ops campaign. I counted, there were precisely two connections to the previous games that I came across:

The badguy from BO2 was mentioned in passing once.
NOVA6 gas shows up and the threat is removed TWO MINUTES after it appears.

That's it. No Mason. No numbers. Just some snowy forest and robots.

Me ranting about the story aside (sorry, Black Ops 1 was my favorite campaign and I was disappointed to see it fall so hard) I did want to mention the gameplay itself. Gunplay is still top notch, and I enjoyed the addition of a custom character and the level up system in single player. The cybernetic abilities were overpowered to shit though. Those silly fire bees pretty much won me every encounter. It was by far the easiest Hardened playthrough I've done.

There is a lot of game in this box, and while MP isn't my thing, Zombies was still fun to dick around in and I did enjoy shooting things with my robot arms in campaign. I just might be the only person in the world who still hopes for a good CoD story. If you just want to fight off waves of enemies until you move forward to trigger the script to spawn the next wave, you will still have fun.

Game #33: Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

Game #33

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

Platform: PS4

Duration: 68 Hours

(SPOILER FREE, as I would never take the joy of experiencing this game away from anyone)

Let me paint you a picture.

This is a game where I was able to do something as stupid as this:
https://www.facebook.com/trevor.page.90/videos/1128693890493326/
...and then turn around and bawl like a child 10 hours later and one of the saddest things I have ever seen.

A game where I can literally suck a donkey through a wormhole...

...and be absolutely terrified and on the edge of my seat as the world crashes down around me during the same play session.

This game is beautiful. Not in the visual sense (though it is a beauty in that department) but in the sense that it gives me great pleasure to see, hear, think about, and experience. This is what I hope for every time I launch a title, the thing that drives me to be a part of this industry. Let me come right out and say it. This is the best game I played all year, and is one of my top five games of all time.

I have played dozens of games this year which have felt somehow incomplete to me. Games that could have used more time to really refine and close the loop on some systems, or maybe clean up the UI just a tad (or at all, Fallout 4). Metal Gear felt FINISHED. Complete. Polished to a level I have scarcely seen. Everything you did in this game had a purpose and resulted in an increase in player power or was just plain fun. It presented a world where every situation was a puzzle and it was up to me to figure out the correct tool for the job. If I failed, I knew it was my fault and I just had to approach the scenario a different way. I learned from every mistake, every incorrect loadout, every triggered alarm. I got better because the game challenged me to do so without ever feeling unfair.

Success felt wonderful, and was incredibly rewarding. I still don't know how they managed to pull off providing such an amazing sense of increasing your player power while making sure I never felt overpowered. The game was just as balanced if I tried to complete Mission 2 after only a few hours of play as it was if I did side quests for 40 hours before starting it, yet in both scenarios I felt powerful in different ways. I can look back at the start of the game and think "Man, I am a badass." and have that same thought loading up my save now. Every system in this game feeds into a perfect progression loop, hell even the goddamn MAIN THEME of the game has different meanings depending on how far through the story you are.

Through the gameplay and your management of Mother Base, I essentially felt like I had created my own world. This was MY base. These were MY recruits. MY Snake was silent and brutal. MY helicopter played MY theme when I deployed. The whole game felt personal, which I think just served to pull me in even deeper to this experience.

Speaking of pulling me in, the story was incredibly satisfying to me, hitting some great highs and some incredibly saddening lows. I don't think I have ever experienced a game that tied the story in so well to game systems either. Sure some games may unlock new systems after progressing, but Metal Gear intertwines them so much that they never feel separate. I wish I could go into detail, but explaining it any more would give things away. Gameplay was not sacrificed for story, and story was not sacrificed for gameplay. They were both part of the same whole.

Look, if you're reading this you probably know me pretty well. I am a hard person to please with games and I really don't like riding hype trains. This is genuine, unbiased respect and admiration for the game. If it was shit, I would call it out, and being popular wouldn't save it (just wait for the Fallout 4 post.) If you have a love for games, you need to play this. It's that simple.

After beating this game, I felt a number of things. Pride in myself for finishing the journey. Satisfaction with what the last moments presented. But more than anything, I was sad. Like, REALLY sad, because I knew this was the end and I wouldn't get to experience anything like this again. I will miss Metal Gear terribly, but even through the sadness I was glad I went along for the ride.

Thank you, Snake.
https://gifsound.com/?gif=i.imgur.com/yUlM6WD.jpg&v=QiPon8lr48U&s=161