Let me just make it clear right off the bat that I'm ranking the games that I added to my collection last year. So the games listed below aren't necessarily video games released last year. Also this ranking is limited to Nintendo games...yeah. Sorry if I, in some way, failed to meet expectations and disappointed well meaning visitors of this blog because of the slightly misleading title.
Following a strong outing on 2014, having dominated E3 and releasing Mario Kart 8, Super Smash Bros. 4, and Bayonetta 2, Nintendo seemed to have picked up the pace for the Wii U and finally made the console a strong contender for the current console generation. They looked to gain the same success, if not surpass it, last year with a similarly strong lineup even though Zelda U was delayed to 2016. In a way Nintendo still accomplished that with Splatoon, Yoshi's Wooly World, and Super Mario Maker. However, competition was stiff last year and with the various happenings in the company, especially after the loss of then Nintendo President Mr. Satoru Iwata, it can be said that 2015 wasn't Nintendo's year.
I can testify to that because otherwise I would've collected more games than usual. Yeah. Makes sense.
I added eleven new games to my library last year (four of them are digital copies) but I'll only be ranking 8 of them as I haven't played enough of Link's Awakeing, Twilight Princess and 999 to give them a ranking (even if it's an easy top 3):
And now I'm just gonna take the lazy route and not bother segregating them by platform.
So, ready?
8. Yo-kai Watch
Yep.
Maybe there's something wrong with me but I didn't see what makes Yokai Watch so appealing in Japan. It could be because a lot of things in the western release got lost in translation, or the combat system is essentially a mini game while the real action happens 'automatically', or I'm just not part of the appropriate demographic intended for the game.
What I like:
The world is just the right size. Plenty of side quests. Colorful characters. Child friendly. Jibanyan
What I don't like:
Said world doesn't really have many points of interest. Said side quests are repetitive. The combat system. Weak humor. Too childish. Too short.
7. Gunman Clive
What do you get when you mix the appealing spaghetti western theme of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly with Megaman-like gameplay? Gunman CliveYou get Gunman Clive.
This game is fun. It's simple to play yet offers a new experience per level. It doesn't go on for too long, but it begs to be played again and again after one playthrough, and it's fun. Plus you can play as a duck.
What I like:
Megaman-like gameplay. The setting. Play as three different characters, each with a unique experience.
What I don't like:
It's not supposed to be played for three hours straight with varying difficulties.
6. Box Boy
A strong contender for 3DS game of the year. Box Boy is a simple platform puzzle game with simple but difficult to master gameplay mechanic. The objective of Box Boy is to use the player-controlled character's ability to replicate/transform itself to create platforms, bridges, etc. in order to reach the end of each stage. It's the kind of game where creativity is more rewarding than straightforward gameplay.
Sometimes games try too hard to be fun, Box Boy doesn't but it still clicks.
What I like:
Simple, minimalist design. Addicting gameplay. Cute characters (it's a square with eyes and legs, I love it). Brilliant level designs.
What I don't like:
None. I'm good.
5. Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth
How I loved playing through this for hours on end during mid year last year. I'm still at the P3 route that I started with and nowhere near the end but I've played enough to get a firm grasp on Persona Q. It's a good dungeon crawler RPG with a good story to boot. It is a little grindy but such is the case with any Persona title. But this game should not be compared to the main Persona games as Persona Q is a very watered down version of P3 and P4 at its best.
Still fun, but if you've played P3 or P4 you're going to get a little disappointed.
What I like:
The music, heck it's a Persona title. Good combat mechanics. Good customization options. Zen and Rei are interesting new characters. P3 meets P4 is truly golden. Yukiko Amagi. Who doesn't like Yukiko Amagi. Throw in Chie while we're at it. Actually all of the characters aren't just chibi-fied versions of themselves, even their personalities. And I like that. Chibi Aigis is best girl.
What I don't like:
It's structurally the same story for both routes. Extremely watered down version of the main series. No social links. Every character is essentially given the Wild Card ability reserved for Yuu and Minato (Makoto, whatever his name truly is) with the Sub-Persona mechanic. Manual Map creation - seriously? And wtf is Poinking?
4. Shovel Knight + Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows
Shovel Knight was released 2014. I'm not exactly sure why only played it last year but yes Shovel Knight is a brilliant throwback from games way before I was born. It features tight controls, a sense of humor, addicting gameplay, and a good story that makes it captivating. The game is short and could be completed casually in four to six hours but it keeps puling you back. It doesn't get old (despite its age old presentation) and it proves that the 8-bit era still has a place in the video game community.
It's expansion, Plague of Shadows, features a new playable character with completely new controls, and story in Plague Knight. Though it uses the same levels, it finds a way to give another unique experience without sacrificing what the original Shovel Knight has built upon.
If you haven't played this game, you're missing out a lot.
What I like:
Do I have to answer?
What I don't like:
It's short, but the added dlc expansions make up for it so, I'm good.
3. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D
I was stoked when I got the game and spent three straight hours on my first session. It's a Zelda game, and it's the follow up to Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask is great whichever way you look at it. Termina is much more interesting than Hyrule in Ocarina of Time. Plenty of things to do, plenty of sidequests and things to discover by just running (or rolling) around. The main quests also offers plenty of reason to play for long sittings as there are plenty of backtracking and straw-millionaire segments. But yeah I'm unfortunately one of those people who's not a fan of the three day cycle.
Picture this: you have three days to save the world, you play the Inverted Song of Time to slow down the time, you enter a new dungeon. You go through the dungeon solving the various environmental puzzles until you finally get the boss key - but you only have less than a few hours left before that friggin' moon plants its face on the surface of the world. What do you do? You play the Song of Time. You warp back to the dawn of the First Day. Consumable items revert back to zero, you go back to Clock Town. You travel back to the dungeon only to find the environmental puzzles reset. Disappointment. See the problem here?
The fascinating thing about Ocarina of Time's environmental puzzles is that, for the majority of the time, it lets you observe it first without the threat of time running out. Take as much time as you need. Majora's Mask on the other hand is the complete opposite. It plays on the concept of loss not just in the game's main theme but also in its core gameplay. Time management is part of the game. And it seriously takes away the fun of solving puzzles and gives frustration instead.
Seriously, not a fan of the 3-day cycle.
What I like:
For the most part it's similar to Ocarina of Time, just darker, twisted, and plenty more things to accomplish or discover.
What I don't like:
Probably obvious by now. Also the camera can be shaky at times, especially in the Great Bay Temple.
2. Super Mario Maker
As a platforming game it's an unlimited dose of user created levels ranging from level 1-1 remixes to kaizo-level difficult courses.
As a level editor it's a fantastic course creation game with a user-friendly interface featuring almost everything in every 2D Mario game ever released (save for a bulk of Super Mario Bros. 2, the US version) and then some. It's a fun game to play alone and with other people even if it's not multiplayer. It's a game where you create it, and then play it.
What I like:
E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G
...
Ok the online highlighting feature is a little disjointed but that's just my courses not getting the limelight (boo-hoo).
What I don't like:
The initial nine-day unlocking limit. Online filtering (the Bookmarking system makes up for this).
1. Xenoblade Chronicles X
Here's my GOTY. XCX is the spiritual successor to Monolith Soft's Xenoblade Chronicles.Where the first game features fantasy themes, Xenoblade X is heavy on sci-fi and tells a futuristic story where mankind has left Earth and found a new (hostile) home in a planet called Mira. Mira has five very different continents:
Primordia, the home of New Los Angeles (NLA) abundant in wildife and other natural resources,
Oblivia, the Valley of Oblivion
Noctilum, the Forest of Nightglow,
Sylvalum, the Continent of White Trees, and
Cauldros, the Continent of Black Steel
What I like:
All five continents are freely accessible right at the start of the game, some are just hard to reach on foot, but if you run (or swim) long enough you'll definitely get there. It's a massive world that's just begging to be discovered and as I progressed through the game it just gave me more reason to keep straying from the main mission and just freely roam around Mira. Seriously, every landscape shot on Xenoblade X is wallpaper worthy. Just look at that visual slendor:
The story is divided into chapters where it is further divided into missions. Story missions range from gathering, surveying, to hunting in a specific area until the gears turn advancing the story. Because of this the story is linear and you'd have to be at a certain required level to progress through the story.
The combat system leans more on strategy than action despite it being real-time. Each class has two weapons: ranged and melee. The type of ranged or melee weapon depends on the player character's current class. There are 10 classes total starting with Drifter and there the player gets the option to choose from three mid-tier classes. Each mid-tier class has another two end-tier classes where reaching level 10 in end tier grants mastery of the specific weapon required. Mastery over a weapon type means being able to equip it even if the current class of the player character is different.
While in combat the player has access to Arts. Arts depend on the type of weapon equipped and the current class. Standard melee and ranged attacks are done automatically as long as an enemy is targeted. Arts can be activated at any time once they have cooled down. Activating Arts after specific Soul Voices grants special stat boosts and hp regen to the party.
Later in the game Overdrive is introduced. Overdrive basically allows spamming of Arts over a period of time. However, Overdrive itself cannot be spammed as it consumes TP. TP in Xenoblade X is synonymous to other RPG's MP (or Mental/Magic/Mind points). TP is earned through Soul Voice bonuses or standard melee and ranged attacks.
Also late in the game are the use of Skells (Dolls in the Japanese version). Skells are mech. suits that grant an increase in overall power when in combat. When not in combat it grants fast travel and flight granting access to places not available while on foot.
The are plenty of side missions available and are classified either as Bounty, Gathering, or Social. There are also affinity missions which improves the player character's relationship with other party members.
The music in this game is brilliant. From Primordia to Oblivia, the music defines the theme of the continent. You feel like you're right there standing in the meadows, or flying through the white trees with the music up so loud.
What's not brilliant are the combat rock combat music that suddenly destroys the atmosphere while in combat or in NLA.
What I don't like:
The main story's theme is survival not just physically but also mentally. Humanity is on the brink of extinction after a war against hostile alien creatures, the Ganglion. For some reason the Ganglion are hellbent on eradicating humanity off the face of the universe - a large portion of the story plays around this for a long time. However, story-wise it doesn't do pretty well. Outside of the main chapters, the story is pretty much unimportant. Sure NPCs and other characters will talk about the sudden changes as the story moves forward but it doesn't have the same importance as when a story mission is active.
Also for a game covering such a massive scale that even mentions the Universe, the story is very constricted and self-contained.
There are a couple of plot twists here and there but I find it not so compelling for the most part.
Still Xenoblade X is my GOTY.
Following a strong outing on 2014, having dominated E3 and releasing Mario Kart 8, Super Smash Bros. 4, and Bayonetta 2, Nintendo seemed to have picked up the pace for the Wii U and finally made the console a strong contender for the current console generation. They looked to gain the same success, if not surpass it, last year with a similarly strong lineup even though Zelda U was delayed to 2016. In a way Nintendo still accomplished that with Splatoon, Yoshi's Wooly World, and Super Mario Maker. However, competition was stiff last year and with the various happenings in the company, especially after the loss of then Nintendo President Mr. Satoru Iwata, it can be said that 2015 wasn't Nintendo's year.
I can testify to that because otherwise I would've collected more games than usual. Yeah. Makes sense.
I added eleven new games to my library last year (four of them are digital copies) but I'll only be ranking 8 of them as I haven't played enough of Link's Awakeing, Twilight Princess and 999 to give them a ranking (even if it's an easy top 3):
So, ready?
8. Yo-kai Watch
Yep.
Maybe there's something wrong with me but I didn't see what makes Yokai Watch so appealing in Japan. It could be because a lot of things in the western release got lost in translation, or the combat system is essentially a mini game while the real action happens 'automatically', or I'm just not part of the appropriate demographic intended for the game.
What I like:
The world is just the right size. Plenty of side quests. Colorful characters. Child friendly. Jibanyan
Said world doesn't really have many points of interest. Said side quests are repetitive. The combat system. Weak humor. Too childish. Too short.
7. Gunman Clive
What do you get when you mix the appealing spaghetti western theme of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly with Megaman-like gameplay? Gunman CliveYou get Gunman Clive.
This game is fun. It's simple to play yet offers a new experience per level. It doesn't go on for too long, but it begs to be played again and again after one playthrough, and it's fun. Plus you can play as a duck.
What I like:
Megaman-like gameplay. The setting. Play as three different characters, each with a unique experience.
What I don't like:
It's not supposed to be played for three hours straight with varying difficulties.
6. Box Boy
A strong contender for 3DS game of the year. Box Boy is a simple platform puzzle game with simple but difficult to master gameplay mechanic. The objective of Box Boy is to use the player-controlled character's ability to replicate/transform itself to create platforms, bridges, etc. in order to reach the end of each stage. It's the kind of game where creativity is more rewarding than straightforward gameplay.
Sometimes games try too hard to be fun, Box Boy doesn't but it still clicks.
What I like:
Simple, minimalist design. Addicting gameplay. Cute characters (it's a square with eyes and legs, I love it). Brilliant level designs.
What I don't like:
None. I'm good.
5. Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth
How I loved playing through this for hours on end during mid year last year. I'm still at the P3 route that I started with and nowhere near the end but I've played enough to get a firm grasp on Persona Q. It's a good dungeon crawler RPG with a good story to boot. It is a little grindy but such is the case with any Persona title. But this game should not be compared to the main Persona games as Persona Q is a very watered down version of P3 and P4 at its best.
Still fun, but if you've played P3 or P4 you're going to get a little disappointed.
What I like:
The music, heck it's a Persona title. Good combat mechanics. Good customization options. Zen and Rei are interesting new characters. P3 meets P4 is truly golden. Yukiko Amagi. Who doesn't like Yukiko Amagi. Throw in Chie while we're at it. Actually all of the characters aren't just chibi-fied versions of themselves, even their personalities. And I like that. Chibi Aigis is best girl.
It's structurally the same story for both routes. Extremely watered down version of the main series. No social links. Every character is essentially given the Wild Card ability reserved for Yuu and Minato (Makoto, whatever his name truly is) with the Sub-Persona mechanic. Manual Map creation - seriously? And wtf is Poinking?
4. Shovel Knight + Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows
Shovel Knight was released 2014. I'm not exactly sure why only played it last year but yes Shovel Knight is a brilliant throwback from games way before I was born. It features tight controls, a sense of humor, addicting gameplay, and a good story that makes it captivating. The game is short and could be completed casually in four to six hours but it keeps puling you back. It doesn't get old (despite its age old presentation) and it proves that the 8-bit era still has a place in the video game community.
It's expansion, Plague of Shadows, features a new playable character with completely new controls, and story in Plague Knight. Though it uses the same levels, it finds a way to give another unique experience without sacrificing what the original Shovel Knight has built upon.
If you haven't played this game, you're missing out a lot.
What I like:
Do I have to answer?
What I don't like:
It's short, but the added dlc expansions make up for it so, I'm good.
3. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D
I was stoked when I got the game and spent three straight hours on my first session. It's a Zelda game, and it's the follow up to Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask is great whichever way you look at it. Termina is much more interesting than Hyrule in Ocarina of Time. Plenty of things to do, plenty of sidequests and things to discover by just running (or rolling) around. The main quests also offers plenty of reason to play for long sittings as there are plenty of backtracking and straw-millionaire segments. But yeah I'm unfortunately one of those people who's not a fan of the three day cycle.
Picture this: you have three days to save the world, you play the Inverted Song of Time to slow down the time, you enter a new dungeon. You go through the dungeon solving the various environmental puzzles until you finally get the boss key - but you only have less than a few hours left before that friggin' moon plants its face on the surface of the world. What do you do? You play the Song of Time. You warp back to the dawn of the First Day. Consumable items revert back to zero, you go back to Clock Town. You travel back to the dungeon only to find the environmental puzzles reset. Disappointment. See the problem here?
Seriously, not a fan of the 3-day cycle.
What I like:
For the most part it's similar to Ocarina of Time, just darker, twisted, and plenty more things to accomplish or discover.
What I don't like:
Probably obvious by now. Also the camera can be shaky at times, especially in the Great Bay Temple.
2. Super Mario Maker
As a platforming game it's an unlimited dose of user created levels ranging from level 1-1 remixes to kaizo-level difficult courses.
As a level editor it's a fantastic course creation game with a user-friendly interface featuring almost everything in every 2D Mario game ever released (save for a bulk of Super Mario Bros. 2, the US version) and then some. It's a fun game to play alone and with other people even if it's not multiplayer. It's a game where you create it, and then play it.
What I like:
E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G
...
Ok the online highlighting feature is a little disjointed but that's just my courses not getting the limelight (boo-hoo).
 |
| serious bragging rights right here, now about those PangaeaPanga courses |
The initial nine-day unlocking limit. Online filtering (the Bookmarking system makes up for this).
1. Xenoblade Chronicles X
Here's my GOTY. XCX is the spiritual successor to Monolith Soft's Xenoblade Chronicles.Where the first game features fantasy themes, Xenoblade X is heavy on sci-fi and tells a futuristic story where mankind has left Earth and found a new (hostile) home in a planet called Mira. Mira has five very different continents:
Primordia, the home of New Los Angeles (NLA) abundant in wildife and other natural resources,
Oblivia, the Valley of Oblivion
Noctilum, the Forest of Nightglow,
Sylvalum, the Continent of White Trees, and
Cauldros, the Continent of Black Steel
What I like:
All five continents are freely accessible right at the start of the game, some are just hard to reach on foot, but if you run (or swim) long enough you'll definitely get there. It's a massive world that's just begging to be discovered and as I progressed through the game it just gave me more reason to keep straying from the main mission and just freely roam around Mira. Seriously, every landscape shot on Xenoblade X is wallpaper worthy. Just look at that visual slendor:
The combat system leans more on strategy than action despite it being real-time. Each class has two weapons: ranged and melee. The type of ranged or melee weapon depends on the player character's current class. There are 10 classes total starting with Drifter and there the player gets the option to choose from three mid-tier classes. Each mid-tier class has another two end-tier classes where reaching level 10 in end tier grants mastery of the specific weapon required. Mastery over a weapon type means being able to equip it even if the current class of the player character is different.
Later in the game Overdrive is introduced. Overdrive basically allows spamming of Arts over a period of time. However, Overdrive itself cannot be spammed as it consumes TP. TP in Xenoblade X is synonymous to other RPG's MP (or Mental/Magic/Mind points). TP is earned through Soul Voice bonuses or standard melee and ranged attacks.
 |
| I modeled my character after Hinata Hyuga from Naruto |
The music in this game is brilliant. From Primordia to Oblivia, the music defines the theme of the continent. You feel like you're right there standing in the meadows, or flying through the white trees with the music up so loud.
What's not brilliant are the combat rock combat music that suddenly destroys the atmosphere while in combat or in NLA.
What I don't like:
The main story's theme is survival not just physically but also mentally. Humanity is on the brink of extinction after a war against hostile alien creatures, the Ganglion. For some reason the Ganglion are hellbent on eradicating humanity off the face of the universe - a large portion of the story plays around this for a long time. However, story-wise it doesn't do pretty well. Outside of the main chapters, the story is pretty much unimportant. Sure NPCs and other characters will talk about the sudden changes as the story moves forward but it doesn't have the same importance as when a story mission is active.
Also for a game covering such a massive scale that even mentions the Universe, the story is very constricted and self-contained.
There are a couple of plot twists here and there but I find it not so compelling for the most part.
Still Xenoblade X is my GOTY.
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