This years Ragey's will be a tad more bared boned this year because with the X+Y thing I didn't get as many written as I would have liked to. Still though, this year had its series of ups and downs and while all of the games I've played might not have gotten site reviews, I still played an awful lot of games. Hopefully I'll have a slew of games to review in January and those that don't I'll make a new omniderp video to cover, but until then please enjoy.....
The 2016 Ragey's
Seriously, Who does a nobody have to blow to get a sponsorship for their blog???
Seriously, Who does a nobody have to blow to get a sponsorship for their blog???
10: The "Empty Best Friends Photo Frame" award for "Game I wish I got to play" goes to....
Attack On Titan (PS4)
Originally, this was Persona 5 because it keeps getting delayed. But it's coming soon so I just need to hang on. Instead, I found myself rather infatuated with the Attack on Titan game that came out earlier this year. I enjoy the show so all I really wanted to see out of this game was flying around in the 3d gear and killing big naked titans. And I'll be damned if that's not exactly what this looked like. It looked like it really maintained a lot of the fun swinging around in the old Spiderman 2 on PS2 had, so I look forward to actually sitting down with this one.
9: The "Jesus Christ, People actually voted for Trump" garbage award for "Biggest Disappointment" goes to.....
Nights of Azure
I'm a huge fan of Gust games, and the trailer made this seem so damn cool with fast moving action and combos. It was Gusts first attempt at a more action based game so I was willing to be kind with it, but I have to call a spade a spade here. At best, this game was decidedly average. The music is good and the action is ok, but the combat all feels very mashy and loose. There's no real weight, the side quests seem trite, it doesn't have a lot of clear direction in what it wants to do, the story tries to be tragic and heartwarming but it never seems to do a good enough job explaining the stakes, and if I'm being honest it was incredibly easy.
I beat the game expecting there to be more to it but apparently I had little struggle with any boss in the game. It wasn't a terrible game, it was just incredibly underwhelming. That said, If they revisit this and change some things, it has potential to actually be something I think.
8. The "Holy Shit, Cleveland Actually Won a Championship" award for "Biggest Surprise" goes to.....
Doom 2016
Sometimes, people just get it right. And that is exactly what happened here. As guy who is lukewarm to shooters I came into this wanting just to shoot iconic baddies with iconic weapons on mars while moving really fast. Not only did Doom deliver on all of those fronts, but it also handed me one of the most bad ass soundtracks I've heard in a game in a long time. Honestly it might been the best soundtrack this year (but only because another item on this list came out at the end of last year.) I enjoyed my time with Doom so much that I considered it a must own. I haven't even bothered with the multiplayer and I still want to go back and play it.
7. The "Esports Tourney Grand Finals Match" award for "Most Hyped game" this year goes to.....
Blizzard didn't reinvent the wheel here, nor did they make something truly original I feel. But I would be an idiot to deny what a cultural force Overwatch has become. Comics, cosplays, fan dominated alternate character story lines, hilarious misrepresentations, I Hanjo, and even an dedicated pornography fanbase and bdsm community (this actually isn't surprising, but the fact that major sources highlighted it is). Overwatch was an exceptional game and earned the hype it generated. Credit where its due on this one, Overwatch generated a hype machine and deserves all of it. It got a guy who doesn't like shooters to play it all the time.
6. The "Another Marvel Movie" award for "Flash in the Pan" game of the year.
Street Fighter V and Revelator get to share the worst value award because despite being technically sound fighting games that are very good, they both went the bullshit cash grab route. SF started off promising by telling people that anything was in the game you could unlock by playing it. I was happy to hear that. I was immediately unhappy by learning that the ways to do this were so arduous and time consuming that I lost interest in the game before I actually unlocked a character. This is Capcom though, so this is to be expected.
Guilty Gear however should know better. It was almost 10 years before we finally got a new iteration of the game and I was pretty stoked about it, even with the 2 extra paid DLC characters. But what seemed like not even a year later, they put out a new full priced version of the game with a few more characters, but no English dialog even though the last one had it. Sorry, the stuff that got put in could have just been a DLC update. That's a cash grab. Bad year for fighting games.
4. The "15 Dollar asking price for this game" award for "Best Value" goes to....
3. The "Because I don't hate myself enough" Honorable mention goes to....
Of course its Undertale.
7. The "Esports Tourney Grand Finals Match" award for "Most Hyped game" this year goes to.....
Overwatch
I don't like putting this one here because I consider "overhyped" be a negative connotation, and despite what I thought, Overwatch is really a great game. But if there is any game that had a hype train building around it, it definitely was Overwatch. So this year, I'm removing the "over" in this years award. A lot of people were very excited for this game, and when they started putting out all the nifty trailers to promote the game, it even got me to take notice of it.Blizzard didn't reinvent the wheel here, nor did they make something truly original I feel. But I would be an idiot to deny what a cultural force Overwatch has become. Comics, cosplays, fan dominated alternate character story lines, hilarious misrepresentations, I Hanjo, and even an dedicated pornography fanbase and bdsm community (this actually isn't surprising, but the fact that major sources highlighted it is). Overwatch was an exceptional game and earned the hype it generated. Credit where its due on this one, Overwatch generated a hype machine and deserves all of it. It got a guy who doesn't like shooters to play it all the time.
6. The "Another Marvel Movie" award for "Flash in the Pan" game of the year.
Uncharted 4: A Thief's end
Uncharted is a very good series of games. But when you start rehashing the same game over and over, all you can really change are the maps and story. I don't feel Uncharted was wearing out its welcome but it was getting to the point where they weren't exciting me anymore and when you do the over the top blow up action movie as your base model, that's a problem. Uncharted 4 was not a perfect game because a lot of the things that annoyed me in the other games still hold true here.
But what this game does very very right? Is that it closes the book on the Nathan Drake story, and does it satisfyingly so. When this game ended and I did the epilogue sequence, I was left feeling very happy with how things shook out. I was able to put this series to bed and be happy to do so. I hope naughty dog sticks it too. Uncharted 4 doesn't break the mold but it does what it does, and does it well. Just another solid entry in the action adventure genre.
5. The "2016 Cleveland Browns Season Ticket Package" award for "Worst Value" goes to....
Street Fighter V/Guilty Gear Revelator
Guilty Gear however should know better. It was almost 10 years before we finally got a new iteration of the game and I was pretty stoked about it, even with the 2 extra paid DLC characters. But what seemed like not even a year later, they put out a new full priced version of the game with a few more characters, but no English dialog even though the last one had it. Sorry, the stuff that got put in could have just been a DLC update. That's a cash grab. Bad year for fighting games.
4. The "15 Dollar asking price for this game" award for "Best Value" goes to....
Stardew Valley (pc)
The Internet actually went insane when this game came out in February. People who pirated the game loved it so much they went back and paid for it honestly. People who loved the game actually paid for copies of it for pirates to have when they couldn't afford it. I never got to play Harvest Moon growing up but always wanted to. Then I saw Kotaku posting about this game very frequently so I decided to check it out.
And what followed was close to 200 incredibly chill hours taking care of my hilariously immature named farms, fighting monsters down in the mine, courting the many singles of Pelican Town, marrying the lovely Abigail (the of course fictional perfect woman for me who doesn't fucking exist.), and harvesting dem blueberries. I still sink hours a day playing Stardew Valley and am ready to buy it again when the multiplayer mode gets released so I can infect my sisters with it too.
3. The "Because I don't hate myself enough" Honorable mention goes to....
Darkest Dungeon (PC)
Similarly, another steam game that ate and is still eating a significant chunk of my life goes to this mother fucker. A game that quickly teaches you that progress is not linear, and that everything you knew about RPG grinding is wrong. The game is relentless, merciless, and in a lot of ways fucking hopeless. This game deals a lot with the occult, which is fitting because it has no soul. And by the end of it neither will you.
I struggled so much to progress. Caught in chains of trying to keep dead weight characters alive because I didn't want to start over, Trying to hang on for one more room to finish a dungeon instead of getting out when I should have and losing 2 or 3 people. Preparing teams for near hours for a high level dungeon only to get completely fucked inside the first fight. Or most recently, having the perfect set of circumstances break your way in a dungeon before an approaching boss fight only to have mean nothing and STILL get your shit ruined at the end.
Darkest Dungeon changes a lot of the rules on how RPGs are played, and not everyone is going to get through this game. The only reason I still play it, is I've hit an ironclad state of "Fuck you game, you will not best me."....... But I've been wrong before.
2. The "Pretty Much ALL Of 2016" award for "Worst Game of the Year" goes to.....
Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness (PS4)
Ugh, Someone at Tri-ace really dropped the ball on this one. I don't think I've ever played a Star Ocean where I was so underwhelmed and bored at the onset that it killed any desire I had to play it. Shakey camera, poor acting, awkward controls, unlikable characters, droning unskippable cutscenes, and this is the flipping opening of the game! How did it all get messed up so badly? Why does square insist on trying to reinvent something that worked and worked well. Even Star Ocean: The Last Hope for all its hokey acting and flaws still was fun to play all the way to the finish. I couldn't even get this one started.
I might go back to it to see if it gets better later, but literally any other game I had available to play took precedent over this. If you want to play a Star Ocean, play literally any of the other ones. I'm pissed I paid 60 bucks for this.
I might go back to it to see if it gets better later, but literally any other game I had available to play took precedent over this. If you want to play a Star Ocean, play literally any of the other ones. I'm pissed I paid 60 bucks for this.
1. The "Game that surprisingly isn't Dark Souls 3" Award for "Best game of the year" goes to...
Undertale (PC)
Of course its Undertale.
I was a little late to the party with Undertale. Something I wholeheartedly regret. If I had played it around when I actually bought it, it had an honest shot of being my game of the year last year. It's time to make up for that. Undertale as it stands alone is a JRPG/Bullet Hell hybrid with some very quirky characters and exceptional music. But that's not what makes it great. The game pitches itself as the game where nobody has to die.
And that, my friends, was the whole fucking point. The game's creator, Toby Fox, took great care in crafting the opening tutorial area of the game. It's entire point was to put you in the mindset that sympathetically designed monsters are just making the best with what they have and may attack you, but don't really want to fight. Adhering to this lesson treated you to one of the most emotionally satisfying games I've ever played in my life. To the point where I actually shed tears at its true ending (and still do every time I see it). If you ignored Toriel's advice and resorted to violence, you are treated to an unfulfilling neutral ending. If you took the effort to do a genocide run, You were treated as you should have been: the only real monster in the game. It was fucking brilliant.
So many people I tried to get to play this game, and almost all of them killed monsters and ignored the story and never saw what I did. Missed out on so many of the emotional punches. And its a damn shame (although some did eventually see the light, so credit to those few.). That's really my only complaint about the game: All the bullshit reasons people tell me why they won't. "I don't like the graphics", "It's too quirky", "I don't use steam", "It sounds stupid", "I don't like the fandom". Conglaturation, you missed out on something truly special for very stupid reasons.
THIS game could have won most overhyped, but I feel it deserves every single bit of hype it gets and then some. Almost everything about this game is perfect: The music, the story, the characters, the play time, the fan created AU's, the merch. I love Undertale. It might be one of my favorites of all time. Easily, EASILY my game of the year. Fuck, I'd give it game of the year for the next 10 years. It's that good. If you want any more proof, its the game that got me to stop talking about Persona 4. A copy of it was given to the Pope for fucks sake.
Can't believe I'm still writing on this thing considering how little traction it gets. Here's to the next year of it. Thanks for reading. -- CannonMan ┌∩┐(◣_◢)┌∩┐
