Top 5 Games of 2015

#5) Shadows of the Damned: Labeled as “a Suda51 trip”, Shadows of the Damned continues Goichi Suda’s legacy of grindhouse style, wacky humor, and exhilarating action. Demon Hunter Garcia Hotspur pursues his girlfriend’s soul after it is taken to the depths of hell, and squares off against a host of sadistic and twisted foes, armed with three different firearms that all handle quite differently but pack an oh-so-satisfying punch. Much of the game’s best banter results from Garcia’s edgy coolness and his transforming weapon/guide/friend Johnson. Shadows of the Damned isn’t afraid to experiment, throwing in bowling and pachinko minigames, a turret sniping section, and a couple of horizontal shoot-‘em-up sequences. Shadows of the Damned also delivers one of the freshest visions of hell seen in a video game in quite some time, with impossible spaces and outlandish visions of locations that could easily appear in the real world, were it not for the fire lake below a rock bridge or the hazy blue and black sky above.

#4) Fast Racing Neo: That hole left by the many years without a new F-Zero-style game has finally been filled, thanks to Fast Racing Neo, one of the most buttery-smooth futuristic arcade racing titles I’ve ever had the pleasure of engaging at blazing speeds. Fast Racing Neo lives up to its name, and doesn’t shy away from throwing a ‘trial by fire’ at players – even the most frustrating series of crashes play into the learning curve. Fast Racing Neo is hardly unfair, shying away from ‘rubber band’ catch up effects with opponent racer A.I., but it does add a welcome spin on the established genre by requiring players to shift between two colors in order to maximize boost strips. This is a game all about course memorization and careful timing of turns and boosts. And what a sight to behold those courses are, as your hovercraft zips by vibrant colors and chrome structures at an almost-always-perfect 60 frames per second. Aside from controlling as wonderfully as anyone could hope of a spiritual successor to F-Zero, the game is easily one of the best looking titles on any console this generation.

#3) Splatoon: The freshest IP on the block this year, Splatoon is a stylish and colorful team-based shooter that opts for cooperation in covering the map in neon shades of orange, green, blue, and pink over racking up kills against opponents. The weapons are wonderfully inventive, and while each player will find their preferred Roller, Charge Rifle, or – yes – even Bucket, each loadout is surprisingly well-balanced. The lack of a voice chat is actually to the game’s benefit, as objectives are straightforward, and maps are never too large to lose track of your relative location. Every inch of this game oozes style, from its downtown Tokyo-inspired hubworld, to its Jet Set Radio-influenced soundtrack. Splatoon is a great game for players new and old to jump into, and it’s easy to sink a few hours at a time, whether it’s the objective-based ranked game types, or standard Turf Wars.

#2) Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: The final Metal Gear title to be led by Hideo Kojima, The Phantom Pain is set in the 1980s, and fills in some of the last remaining pieces of the series’ lore. Plenty of familiar faces show up, including Ocelot and Kazuhira Miller, while the villainous Skull Face and his powerful Metal Gear stand at the center of all the conflicts Snake and the Mother Base soldiers will take on. The Phantom Pain boasts what is easily the most slick and enjoyable gameplay in the entire series, as well as among the majority of the games released within the past year. The two major maps Snake is left to explore are expansive, and there is plenty of room to experiment with some of the game’s wackier offerings, like Fulton balloon recovery, the prosthetic Rocket Arm, and the less-than-stealthy robotic D-Walker. The story, however sparse it may be, is impactful and tense when it comes into play, and paints a terrifyingly convincing case for how and why Snake and his brothers-in-arms would come to be recognized as villains many years after they were hailed as heroes. Unfortunately, the greatest weakness facing The Phantom Pain is that it is simply an incomplete game – there is one major plot point left hanging that throws a bit of a wrench in the entire series, and while footage has since revealed what was meant to be delivered in this final mission, its absence having been replaced by retreads of previous missions certainly stings.

#1) Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth: One of the best spin-off titles of any well-established series I have encountered to date, Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth is a love letter to fans of the series. It may lack the depth of Persona 3 and 4’s Social Links, and the dungeon-crawling may bear a striking resemblance to the Etrian Odyssey series. Still, Persona Q offers a complex system of fusing new Personas as you level up, as well as a well-rounded cast of characters to build your party. Each dungeon is masterfully crafted, offering greatly varied puzzles, enemies, and aesthetics as the story progresses. The final hours of the game are both challenging and incredibly rewarding, while the 60+ hours you will spend getting there is an absolute joy, and makes Persona Q one of the strongest entries into the 3DS library to date.

2015 Year in Review: Video Games

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD

My rating: 8.5

Bayonetta

My rating: 7.5

NES Remix

My rating: 5

Pokemon Shuffle

My rating: 7

Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth

My rating: 9

Forza Horizon 2: Fast and Furious

My rating: 6

(Mario Kart 8)

DLC review – Animal Crossing x Mario Kart 8

My rating: 7.5

Animal Crossing: New Leaf

My rating: 8.5

Splatoon

My rating: 8.75

Shadows of the Damned

My rating: 7.25

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

My rating: 7.75

Metal Gear Solid 3D: Snake Eater

My rating: 8.75

Fast Racing Neo

My rating: 9

Wii U review: Fast Racing Neo

In an era where futuristic arcade racers like F-Zero and Hydro Thunder have largely disappeared, Fast Racing Neo seeks to reignite that spark of wonder and excitement these titles of yesteryear once offered. At first glance, Fast Racing Neo might look like a direct F-Zero successor under a different name and from a different developer. The game boasts a dozen hover racing vehicles, tracks vary from desert domains to space stations, slick ice-capped mountains, mining facilities connected by giant tubes, and jungle vistas with ninety degree inclines.

Each of these vehicles handles a bit different from the next. Some are quick on acceleration, but have lower top speeds, and vice versa. Some handle sharp turns on a dime, while others have longer and heavier frames that force a larger turn radius. But each vehicle is capable of blazing through gorgeous environments at incredible speeds, all without dropping the framerate below a perfect sixty frames per second. It’s a bit of a shame that the vehicles can not be given alternate color schemes, but their names and designs do well to pay homage to the era of gaming that inspired them.

Track layouts similarly feel the part of F-Zero GX’s offerings, and are, in some cases, even more challenging when attempted at the higher speed settings. Not unlike Mario Kart, the Subsonic, Supersonic, and Hypersonic ‘difficulties’ have less of an impact on the capabilities of the opponent racers’ A.I., but rather increase the speed at which everyone zips along the track. Fast Racing Neo avoids a ‘rubber-band’ catch-up system, so there are rarely rival racers that follow closely behind you for the four tracks within any single cup. This of course also means that you as a player still need to shoot for the front of the pack, as the overall rankings are less predictable than in other arcade racers.

Fast Racing Neo controls with buttery-smooth precision, though as mentioned, no two vehicles control in quite the same fashion, so it may take a few runs to get the feel for which vehicle is best suited to your personal play style. Similarly, each course dishes out something new as you progress, and the best way to beat the competition is learning a track’s ins and outs through a trial-by-fire approach. Fast Racing Neo, oddly enough, also gives a nod or two to Ikaruga and other shoot-‘em-up games, with the incorporation of a color-shift system. Certain boost and jump pads are blue, others orange, and you must shift between the two on the fly to make the most of these. Jewels scattered across the track, meanwhile, will fill up your boost gauge, which you can then utilize whenever you so choose.

In the event that you crash while attempting a jump, the game quickly respawns you at the section of the race track closest to where your machine exploded. You are granted a small amount of boost to try and catch back up with the competition. An unlockable Hero Mode ups the difficulty even further, as it demands players manage their boost meter as a shield meter as well (not unlike the F-Zero series), as well as finish in first place to further progress. It’s a bonus mode for the most determined of players, those who haved proved their skill by completing all of the previous difficult settings.

Fast Racing Neo does include online play, wherein players vote from a limited selection of courses. Their vote is then cast into a pool with the votes from each of the other players, and selected roulette-style, not unlike Mario Kart Wii’s online selection process. However, there is currently no way to vote for the difficulty/speed setting, and the game appears to default to the lower end of that. Despite rather bare-bones menus, the game makes up for this with vehicles and courses being covered in gorgeous, shiny visuals, making Fast Racing Neo one of the best looking titles on any console this generation yet. The techno soundtrack is a great, adrenaline-pumping match to the game’s sci-fi setting, and further cements Fast Racing Neo as a worthy successor to a genre that has largely fallen into obscurity.

My rating: 9 (out of 10)

Gaming, Anime, and Comic Book Update: "See You, Space Cowboy..."

2015 saw many major titles delayed into the following year. From Star Fox Zero, to the new Legend of Zelda, and even Persona 5, the holiday game offerings for this Fall and Winter were slim compared to years past. Those aforementioned Wii U titles, as well as the Shin Megami Tensei x Fire Emblem title, will certainly be purchases for me this coming year. I also recently picked up Xenoblade Chronicles X. While I’ve spent a decent amount of time with it already, given how long the game is reported to be, I highly doubt I will get around to reviewing it until January, at the very earliest.

Fast Racing Neo, meanwhile, will likely be my last game review to be posted for 2015. It has managed to impress me so greatly that I have no doubt that it will land in my top 5 games for the year. I also recently purchased SteamWorld Heist for the 3DS, which is reported to last around 13 hours or so. I’m not sure if I will get a chance to write up a review for that game by the end of the year, so for the time being, given how I intend to continue devoting most of my gaming time for the next month or so to Xenoblade Chronicles X. Also on the radar for early 2016 will be Shin Megami Tensei IV, as I recently added it to my 3DS library as it was on sale in the eShop. I’ve never played a core SMT title before, but my experiences with the Persona series that spun off of it have been largely positive thus far.

On the anime front, while I did manage to start a number of series this year, I didn’t finish nearly as many as I had hoped. This was due in part to my trying to juggle too many series at once, and also partly due to personal events outside of the blog that demanded my attention more so than my viewing of these anime. As such, I hope to deliver quite a few anime reviews early next year, but am expecting to cut my year-end anime countdown to a ‘top 3’ this year, instead of my usual ‘top 5’.

On the comic book front, however, I manage to crank out quite a few more reviews than I initially expected. The short-lived nature of many of Marvel’s Secret Wars spinoff series helped bump the overall number of comic book reviews up significantly, while I was still able to devote time to more intense and lengthy reading material, like Black Science and Age of Apocalypse. I still have a number of comics that I picked up at this year’s Grand Rapids Comic-Con that I have not yet begun to read through, and those will most likely make for some of my earliest comic book reviews in 2016. The remainder of the year, meanwhile, remains largely ambiguous. No doubt I will continue reading Black Science, Tokyo Ghost, Nova, and Guardians of the Galaxy, but there are a couple of series I’ve had my eye on that may serve to replace Saga on my reading list.