1800: Pondering Some Games of the Year

It’s getting to that time of year where it’s time for everyone to start considering their own personal “Games of the Year”, as if someone declaring something their Game of the Year is in any way meaningful or impactful on the experiences of others. Regardless, many of us still do it, if only as a means of celebrating the experiences we’ve found the most memorable over the course of the last twelve months.

This year I don’t really have a single Game of the Year as such, but there are a number of titles I feel are worth making specific mention of. So I’m going to mention them right now.

Steins;Gate

Previously, I knew Steins;Gate was a well-respected visual novel and anime series, but little else about it. When visual novel specialist JAST USA picked it up for localisation and publishing, however, I knew that I should probably to play it, if only to know what it was all about.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Spinning an interesting, exciting but plausible sci-fi tale, Steins;Gate is an unconventional time-travel/parallel dimensions story featuring an extremely memorable cast of characters, a very well-realised setting (Akihabara and the surrounding area in Tokyo) and a compelling story that, although lengthy, certainly didn’t outstay its welcome.

Steins;Gate will likely prove frustrating to some due to its pure visual novel nature, and the fact that the choices you make throughout are handled in a somewhat odd manner by interacting with the protagonist’s phone. If you treat it as a multi-path story rather than a “game” as such, however, you’re in for an absolute treat: it’s one of the most exciting, thrilling and thought-provoking sci-fi stories I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing for quite some time.

To say too much more would be spoileriffic, but suffice it to say that Steins;Gate blends fantasy and (obviously well-researched) reality together to create a very coherent, solid whole that is eminently worth your time.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

This one doesn’t really count as it came out last year, though I have been continually playing it since last summer, which is noteworthy in itself. Moreover, it’s seen four major content patches since its original release, expanding the content on offer to players to nearly twice as much what was in there at launch. Pretty impressive stuff.

The reason why I’m still enamoured with Final Fantasy XIV is the promise for the future. The next major patch promises to wrap up the 2.0 storyline with some sort of Exciting Happenings, then after that it’s into the expansion Heavensward (teased above), which promises all manner of new things going on — most noteworthy among them being whole new zones to explore, because although Final Fantasy XIV’s patches have greatly expanded the number of dungeons and boss fights available for players to take on, the game’s rather small world (by MMO standards, anyway — it’s still pretty sprawling if you go around on foot) has remained the same size throughout, with only the town of Revenant’s Toll in the Mor Dhona region undergoing noticeably significant renovations over time.

It’s been interesting to play a game such as this at high level for such a long period of time. I feel I know the game very well by now, but there are still things I am learning, and the most challenging stuff in the game — we’re currently working through the raid dungeon The Second Coil of Bahamut — is still genuinely challenging, even with high-level gear and a party of players that knows the encounter at least reasonably well. I’m looking forward to seeing what the future holds for Eorzea and its surrounding lands.

Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1

Regular readers will know all about my love for the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, despite its numerous flaws. Re;Birth1 is, to date, the best game in the series, bringing in the solid gameplay of Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory and coupling it with a retelling of the first game’s story.

Neptunia’s core appeal for me is twofold: firstly, it’s simply fun to play. The battle system is hugely enjoyable — if occasionally unbalanced — and it’s that rare thing: an RPG where it’s a pleasure to grind.

The second core appeal element is to do with its cast of characters, all of whom I absolutely adore. Neptune’s hyperactive, childish nature is wonderfully contrasted with the tsundere personality of Noire, the quiet-but-occasionally-prone-to-rage Blanc, the “older sister” Vert and the other supporting characters, and the story, while silly fluff for the most part, is told in such a charming manner — featuring frequent fourth-wall breaking to bring the player into the experience alongside these cute girls — that it’s difficult not to sit there with a huge smile on your face while playing through it.

I’m reliably informed that Re;Birth2 and Re;Birth3 are even better, so I can’t wait to try them for myself: Re;Birth2 is coming West very soon indeed, and Re;Birth3 hit Japan recently, so we can expect it over here sometime soon-ish, hopefully!

Senran Kagura

I first encountered the Senran Kagura series early this year, and I’m absolutely hooked. Burst brought me an updated version of a game genre I’ve always been fond of — the 2D side-scrolling Streets of Rage-style brawler — and combined it with cute anime girls and a surprisingly strong story. Subsequent installment Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus — which also made it out this year — brought the gameplay into 3D fully intact, from what I can tell so far, and has cemented my love of the series. And as for Bon Appetit… well. All I can say is “L-lewd!”

The core appeal of Senran Kagura for me is not the fact that its cast is exclusively attractive women with massive knockers — although I’m certainly not complaining about this. (Aside: I actually rather like the fact that Senran Kagura’s cast is, on the whole, somewhat on the more “curvy” side than many other video game and anime characters — and not just in the boob area.) Rather, it’s about the fact that these characters are actually all very well-defined personalities, and the game explores them in great depth over the course of its unfolding narrative.

Knowing nothing about the game before playing it, I was very surprised to discover numerous levels opening not with short cutscenes then getting straight into the action, but with half-hour-plus visual novel sequences narrated from the perspectives of various different characters. By presenting the story in this manner, the player gets a uniquely personal perspective on the unfolding events as well as the opportunity to “hear” what they’re thinking as well as saying. Normally in visual novels, we only get to hear the innermost thoughts of the protagonist character — normally, though not always, intended to be a self-insert for the player and consequently deliberately rather bland. Here, conversely, we’re not playing “as” the girls; we’re getting the opportunity to learn about them by effectively riding along inside their head as they come to terms with growing up as young shinobi, often on different sides to their friends.

My experiences with the three Senran Kagura games I’ve had the pleasure of playing to date means that this series is now right up there with Hyperdimension Neptunia in terms of games I’ll happily rush out and buy without a second thought the moment they’re released. Not bad for a game best known for T&A.

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These are just a few of the games I’ve had the pleasure of playing this year. They’re mostly games I played recently, I’m aware, so over the next couple of days I’m going to rack my brains a bit and think about some of the other games I’ve played that are particularly noteworthy, and share the joy with you lot a little bit.

That and frantically wrapping presents. It’s nearly Christmas, after all.

1783: Nurse Nep-Nep

I’ve been off work ill for the last three days, and not the fun kind of ill where you can just lie in bed and have people bring you food and drink without really having to “suffer” very much. No, I’ve had a rather unpleasant stomach bug of the — if you’ll pardon the graphic detail for a moment — “I need to go to the toilet roughly every half an hour and now my arse is burning with the fury of a thousand angry suns” variety. And it doesn’t seem to have shifted itself just yet, which means I’m probably in for another rough night if the noises my stomach is currently making are anything to go by.

But I digress somewhat; taking the time off to recover has allowed me to catch up on some handheld gaming, because we all know handheld gaming is the best gaming when you’re ill, because it’s easily portable for those circumstances like, say, when you need to urgently rush to the toilet to fire off another salvo of acidic excrement that would probably make a pretty solid special move in combat were it not for the searing pain it temporarily inflicted on the origin point.

Um. Anyway. Yes. Handheld gaming. Specifically, I took the opportunity to try and beat Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1, which I’ve been playing for a while now. Like most Neptunia games, I found myself not really wanting it to end, but I also eventually reached a point where I was running out of things that it was possible to do in a single playthrough, and so I powered on to the ending, beat the final boss, saw the credits (which, in typical Neptunia tradition, are accompanied by a glorious, lovingly rendered pixel-art, game-style synopsis of what you’ve just played) and promptly started a New Game + with a mind to cleaning up the last few Trophies I hadn’t quite finished off. Specifically, I had four characters to recruit — Nepgear, Uni, Rom and Ram, the four “CPU Candidates” who were originally introduced in Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 — and 100 million Credits to acquire via some means, but I decided to take a momentary detour to the game’s optional “Colosseum” mode to fight some tough battles with the promise of various characters’ ultimate weapons as a reward.

And hoo boy. Ultimate is the word. Rather than the gradual creeping up of stats that most weapons provided over the course of the normal game, the various characters’ ultimate weapons boost their stats by a ridiculous degree, making even the toughest bosses melt like butter beneath your relentless onslaught. Couple this with the Celestia Bangle armour that you get for beating the game with the True ending — only one, sadly; if you want more you need to beat it multiple times — and you have a nigh-unstoppable fighting force.

Or so you’d think, anyway; pleasingly, even when geared up with this array of “best in slot” equipment, there are still plenty of stiff challenges throughout the game — challenges that were simply insurmountable when tackled with regular equipment, but which merely become quite difficult when equipped to the max in this manner. In the meantime, it becomes possible to hack and slash through the main story in a couple of hours (assuming you’re skipping dialogue sequences) rather than the 55 hours or so it took me to beat it the first time — with story bosses that once proved a roadblock to progression falling after just one or two attacks in most cases. Eminently satisfying.

This is something that developer Compile Heart is good at, in my experience; while the difficulty curve throughout the game may be more of a pit of spikes of varying height on your first playthrough, breaking through the initial barrier and coming around for a second pass gives you a glorious feeling of power and supremacy over almost everything in the world — though there’s still the odd enemy here and there that is more than willing to knock that cocky smile off your face if you’re getting a bit too confident.

So far my post-game cleanup is going well; I’ve just unlocked Nepgear and almost have enough MB left to unlock either Uni or Rom and Ram (they come as a pair) by the end of this second playthrough. Then the only thing left is a whole lot of fighting one of the toughest foes in the game in the hope of acquiring 100 million credits. After that, I’ll be happy to add Re;Birth1 to my list of “100% completed” (or at least Platinum trophied) games — a sure sign that I’ve had a blast with it.

Bring on Re;Birth2, then, I’m almost ready!

1688: Rebirth

The nice thing about having an uninterrupted hour for a lunch break — something which I have at my new job (yes, I’m going to keep mentioning it while the novelty is still there), and something which I often did not have when I was working in schools, retail and even games journalism — is that it provides the ideal opportunity to get in a bit of handheld gaming time.

I have quite the backlog on both 3DS (well, DS if we’re being completely honest about it) and Vita, and just recently I added another game to the latter’s collection. I couldn’t not, though; if you’re a regular reader you will, of course, know that I couldn’t possibly let a new Hyperdimension Neptunia game pass by without immediately purchasing it — even if I knew I wouldn’t get to it immediately.

The game in question is Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1, the curiously punctuated remake of the game that started the whole series off. I’ve played a little over an hour so far, and predictably, I’m totally in love with it.

The original Hyperdimension Neptunia was a funny game. I’d be wary of calling it “good” or recommending it even to the most open-minded, fanservice-positive players out there, but despite its many, many flaws I liked it enough to play it all the way through, then move on to its sequels Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 and Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory. (And the Vita dating sim Hyperdimension Neptunia Producing Perfection, which I’m still yet to beat properly.)

Hyperdimension Neptunia was effectively a visual novel punctuated by repetitive dungeon-crawling sequences that ran at an appalling frame rate and featured a genuinely interesting but somewhat clunky battle system. I actually rather enjoyed this latter aspect a lot more than many other people; I appreciated the puzzle-like nature of setting up custom combos that you could chain endlessly — perhaps swapping back-line characters in and out along the way — and I was fascinated by manipulating the AI-driven in-battle item “crafting” system. This latter aspect was just plain bizarre — you had to set percentage chances that characters would use specific items upon meeting trigger conditions, and there was no means of just manually using an item.

The former aspect — the visual novel-style story sequences — proved to be the real draw for me, though. They were what kept me coming back time and time again, more than happy to endure the dungeon-crawling in the name of advancing the story and seeing what Neptune and her friends were up to next.

Hyperdimension Neptunia’s story wasn’t particularly complex, but one thing the series has been quite consistently throughout its surprisingly short lifespan is clever. Yes, that’s right, clever. On the surface, it might seem like moe anime fluff full of squeaky-voiced girls squeaking at one another. And to a certain extent that’s true. But beneath that candy-coloured exterior lies some clever, well-written satire of the ridiculousness that is gaming. Not the stupidity we’ve seen around gaming in the last few weeks, mind; rather, a series of on-point observations and sidelong glances at the way the different “factions” of the industry have behaved over the years. The way Sony likes to believe it’s the best; the way Microsoft has habitually catered to specific types of gamers; the way Nintendo handles business with ruthless efficiency, even when it doesn’t make any friends while doing so.

Not only that, but the series has been packed with plenty of references to numerous video games — through its dialogue, through its incidental recurring characters and even through the monsters you fight, which include space invaders, Pac-Man ghosts and sentient dating sims. All this added up to a considerable amount of charm that far outweighed its technical and design shortcomings.

Re;Birth1 had a lot to live up to, then. And based on an admittedly short amount of time with it so far, it appears to be living up to expectations. Rather than word-for-word recreating the original with the modernised, much better gameplay systems of Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, it instead acknowledges (and frequently lampshades) the fact that it is a remake. Basic story beats have so far been similar, but the specifics of how you get to them are a bit different. And the gameplay has been totally revamped, featuring Victory’s fantastic combat system — now explained far better than it has ever been in any previous installment — plus some interesting new tricks such as the “Remake” system, which allows you to “craft” everything from items to be sold in shops to new gameplay mechanics.

Amusingly, it runs far better on the Vita than it ever did on the more powerful PS3, too, and despite making use of a lot of the same audio-visual assets and even maps from the previous two games, it feels like a pleasantly fresh experience to be able to carry it around in your pocket.

If Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory was anything to go by, I expect Re;Birth1 to keep me busy for a very long time indeed. Now, if only there weren’t a zillion and one other brilliant games out now all vying for my attention, too…