Undertale was the only game released this year that i played (besides the first 20 minutes of Fallout 4, which was surprisingly decent but not enough to get an endorsement) so it sort of wins GOTY for me by default.
I think the bullet hell combat makes for some fun surprises and is also a clever way to allow for a pacifist playthrough of a JRPG with random encounters without forcing your character to be a damage sponge. people like to go on about EarthBound but the main hook of the game and the staging of combat is pure classic Shin Megami Tensei and the way it turns negotiation into a universally viable approach is certainly laudable. I love that befriending and coming to understand the weird monsters instead of killing them is the encouraged approach, and it makes the typical Power of Friendship and Love Conquers All ending feel more earned than usual. Itās also cute and stylish, has good music, and doesnāt overstay its welcome.
I think if you didnāt find it funny or effective thatās understandable. The frenetic goofiness made me smile, but i could see it being grating if thatās not your cup of tea, and i agree with Felix that itās not an especially deep game. Itās a one-trick pony and mostly works because that one trick is really neat.
I think bagging on a young creatorās first complete work for being immature and wearing its influences on its sleeves is more than a little unfair! Could do with less grumpy tut-tutting at that uppity millennial Toby Fox for trying to say something.
As for personal GsOTY that didnāt actually come out this year: i played through all of Demonās Souls for the first time and ā shocker! ā found it searingly brilliant from start to finish. Iāve already beaten it a second time and iāll probably do it at least twice more before iām ready to put it away. Kind of hard to find anything to say about it that hasnāt already been said, and iām trying not to compare it to its sequel(s) other than to say it has the strongest bosses of them all by far and that the level/encounter design of the Boletarian Palace areas made me nearly weep with joy.
Undertale really did it for me this year. I started the game in mid-december, went through the first playthrough in a few days, and thought it was a cute game. I enjoyed the bullet hell shmup mechanics and the way it was fluent in the language of video games and had callbacks to my own personal gaming history was a nice trick.
It didnāt move me greatly, but I had enjoyed my time with it.
Then, on a trans-pacific flight I went through my second playthrough, where the game really opened up. The characters in this game are juvenile, sure, and the writing isnāt very sophisticated, but there was something very charming about engaging with the game on a pure level. Iām okay with a brief return to innocence. The ending battle was a perfect payoff to what I put into the game, the aesthetics show a real reverence for the giants that came before it, and I can always appreciate the work of a dedicated auteur.
For me, this game made me think about life and valuing relationships and the choices we make a lot more than Mother/Earthbound ever did. Everyone compares it to that series, but it gave me some serious Persona 4 vibes, too. It does a great job of world-building and the NPCs in this game are treated with love and polish that many more involved games canāt manage.
PS. MGSV was probably some of the best game mechanics and joy Iāve had in a AAA game in a long, long time, but it fell apart for me when I was asked to perform repetitive, manual tasks to advance the story.
Still havenāt beat it. Sorry, doge.
Dark has a more thorough and interesting cosmology, and the way its entire world wraps around itself is nothing short of pure genius, but Demonās is a straight up better videogame. I actually prefer Dark because in my dotage Iām starting to prefer games that make me sit and think to games that offer knife-edge kinetics, but I canāt deny the power of Demonās.
Also, I played Demonās with every character archetype imaginable and utterly exhausted it before Dark even came out, so even though I preferred my experience in Dark I only played it through like one and a half times. There are real diminishing returns to Soulsā specific slowish third-person combat mechanics. Iāve got Bloodbourne sitting here and havenāt played it yet, but Iāll be interested to see how much it grabs me.
This is certainly an experience I see reiterated a lot but actually might take on a more cyclical approach, in the same way we see certain game genres rise and fall through time. Old RPGs seem to be seeing a resurgence right now where newer iterations (in the vein of Lightning Returns) are now falling off after nearly a decade of long hallway simulators with lots of stats management that saw a boom and subsequent bust from about the time of FFVII to present.
Bloodborneās combat gets rid of a lot of bloat at the same time codifying a lot of the fluff of Souls combat. I find that the increased pace is nice, but I also am wondering how this will work in Dark 3. Will Dark 3 be extra difficult for new comers? I donāt know. Part of me hopes that we get enemies in Dark 3 that are just as slow, but still as dangerous as pre-BB games, but part of me worries that increased player speed and reaction times will make this a difficult thing to achieve as elegantly as they once did.
Iād highlight Nuclear Throne as well even though I played more of it in 2014 as well.
Demonās is in a lot of ways broken as a videogame. When fighting PvE mobs, they all aggro one at a time and have the same amount of poise, so pulling them one at a time and stunlocking them to death is a universal solution to any combat situation. Most of the bosses are either pretty trivial or frustrating, leaving only a small number of good ones (Flamelurker, Tower Knight, Penetrator and False King, basically). Power weapons like Crescent Falchion are available too early and easy to find even on a first playthrough. Healing items are basically free and unlimited.
In my opinion the Souls series has gotten more rigorously balanced and consistently high quality in terms of gameplay with each subsequent entry. In Bloodborne the majority of bosses are as high-quality as False King or better; aggro, poise, healing and damage levels are carefully tuned, and in general cheesability is at a record low.
No boss has matched Maiden Astraea in the series. It hits the point of what makes a boss fight interesting: Challenge of purpose over challenge of practice always makes a fight more able to convey the world.
I agree with broco for the most part w/r/t enemy and boss design, but note that demonās level design is also in many ways the most surprising purely because it came first and because you arenāt necessarily expecting (for example) 2-2 to be what it is.
Itās tough for me to be objective because I played Demonās first, and so much. Which is kind of my point - there is a learning process to these games. But, to be more mechanically precise: Demonās is faster; poise was a failed PvP mechanic, if you care about that; there are more good bosses than you list (Astraea, Maneater, Old Monk) and fewer overall than Dark, which wears out its welcome a bit (though not near as much as Dark 2); and when it comes to level design, Darkās and Demonās highs are equal, but Darkās lows are much, much lower.
Demonās has the best bosses of any of the games if only for the diversity they present and the way they play with boss rooms as interesting extensions of the environment. Iād be more inclined to blast bosses like Adjudicator, the Storm King, or the Dragon God if they were overly frustrating, but they and others offer a degree of experimentation with their designs and emotional tenor thatās kind of hard to find in Bloodborne or Dark Souls/2. This might be the case because the team was less sure, given the initial foray into a more action-based approach Demonās (as a sort of evolution of the Kingās Field dungeon crawler mold) represented, of how far the mechanics in themselves could carry the weight of major encounters; and since then, as From has invested more confidence in the games mechanically the bosses have become more ābalancedā, but also more uniform.
(Bloodborne doesnāt particularly bother me because the mechanics are by far the most interesting to engage between any of the relevant titles, which invigorates the boss encounters in a way that Iām guessing might be absent from, or less present in, Dark Souls 3.)
From my experience with Dark 3, the difficulty level is about the same as when Dark came out. i.e. not very hard if you already have experience with the previous games.
Re: Demonās Souls. Iād be hesitant to qualify it as a strictly better videogame than its successors, because its disparate elements compare differently to the other games. I think it has one of the best if not the best individual levels of the series, and it remains the most experimental and inventive, but itās also too rough around too many edges.
Flamelurker can range from a challenging boss to an utter nightmare of frustration depending on which character class you fight him as. And the mechanical differences seem pretty arbitrary considering the wild variation in difficulty. Also fuck Maneater. That fight wasnāt balanced.
And letās not forget the grating Tendency system. Thatās the main thing I hope they revise for the rumored PS4 rerelease. Us living in euroland were playing in servers managed by Bamco, so we didnāt get to enjoy the frequent āspecial tendency eventsā that Atlus prepared for NA players. You had to grind the tendency the hard way if you wanted to play the locked-off bits.
I agree with diplo about the bosses. Sure itās nice to have a bunch of big fights that engage the dodge good and hit hard parts of Souls, but thatās not completely what the game is about, is it? What makes Demonās Souls bosses great is that they have so much personality. Like, Old Hero is one of my favorite bosses even though heās objectively easy to beat, just for the tension of creeping around as this blind, powerful foe hunts for you. Storm King is breathtaking in both the scale of the enemy and the feeling of power you get as you blow it out of the sky. All of the world 5 bosses are very easy, but theyāre excellent from conceptual and atmospheric points of view.
I donāt like the sound of every fight being like False King at all! That sounds exhausting and like itās missing what made False King or Flamelurker stand out.
Also: Demonās bosses have the best music. The Bonfireside Chat podcast that iāve been listening to plays the themes of each boss as theyāre discussed, and most of the Dark Souls/2 themes were SLAMMABAM STRINGS HORNS CHORAL SHOUTING but all the Demons from Demonās had their own unique tone. Think of stuff like False Idol or Old Hero.
Cannot be stated enough how good the music of Demonās is. The candor provided by the rough rhythms of Flamelurker or the contemplative tones of Astraea greatly contribute to how unforgettable those fights are. Should Dark 3 hit the personality and music of Demonās, the exceptional world design of Dark 1, while iterating on the mechanical creativity of Bloodborne, it would be a masterpiece.
ā¦
Not that such a thing would be easy, by any stretch of the imagination, mind.