2014 wasn’t exactly the most exciting year of video games. I ended up not writing very many reviews as there just weren’t that many that piqued my interest. In some ways, this year in gaming has actually been pretty bad, with games like Assassin’s Creed Unity and Halo: The Masterchief Collection shipping in completely broken, unplayable states.
We’re still pretty early into the life of these new generation video game consoles, but both the Xbox One and PS4 are slowly building up their game libraries. Oddly enough, this was amazing time to be a Nintendo fan, as the Wii U saw a number of great games finally make the system worthy of a purchase. Mobile games like Flappy Bird, Threes, and Crossy Road were also huge titles to both frustrate and delight mobile gamers and support their game addictions. Oh, and the Vita, despite a dearth of AAA exclusives, probably ended up being my system of the year.
So let’s count down my top 10 games of the year! I guarantee that my list won’t look anything like anyone else’s!
Tomodachi Life was the game that made me curse Nintendo’s region-locking policy, but this year it became evidence that weird Japanese games in America are thankfully not yet dead. Tomodachi Collection was first released in 2009 on the original DS and was a Japanese-only release. I ended up importing the game a number of years ago, and quickly fell in love with it, despite the language barrier. In what other game could I guide a digital cartoon facsimile of myself to make friends with John Cena, mediate fights between Tupac and Billy Mays, confess my love to Olivia Wilde, and do karaoke with Hulk Hogan?
The quirkiness of Tomodachi Collection lead to a lot of doubt of an American release of its 2013 sequel, but hope eventually prevailed when Nintendo localized the game in English as Tomodachi Life in 2014.
“Tomodachi” is the Japanese word for “friend” and that’s what Tomodachi Life is all about. Using Nintendo’s universal “Mii” avatar system, you can transform your friends or celebrities into digital dolls, place them in an apartment complex, and just watch them interact with each other. It’s basically a digital dollhouse, as you encourage them to become friends, date, get married, start families, and endure tons of weird life experiences in between. It’s like the Sims, except you have very little control over what your Miis do. They live their own lives, and you simply give them advice when needed.
Every scenario your Miis encounter are goofy takes on dramatic soap opera scenes. You convince Tupac to confess his romantic feelings toward a lovely lady Commander Shepard from Mass Effect by meeting her at a café. As Tupac pours his heart out to a surprised Shepard, he is shocked to hear a loud voice behind him. “Wait!” the voice cries out, emanating from the loud mouth of a tan Hulk Hogan, sitting solo in a booth behind the awkward couple. “I love you, too, Shepard!” he booms. “Wait!” yells another voice from behind the café counter. “I love you most!” Spider-Man reveals himself to also have feelings for Shepard! Things are tense in the café as Shepard must choose a partner or walk away from it all. After a brief hesitation, she turns to Spider-Man and says, “I didn’t know you felt the same way.” Facing rejection, Tupac sulks back to the apartment. The only agency you have in this entire scenario is the ability to console Tupac by feeding him a plate of his favorite spaghetti.
These are the types of weird, crazy plays you’ll find your Miis participating in as they live on their Tomodachi island. What makes it even weirder is you’ll actually hear them saying all these things thanks to a text-to-speech voice synthesizer that enunciates their lines. This game is almost too weird, and it’s a miracle it was ever released in America. Bravo, Nintendo. Keep it up.
Two Super Smash Bros. games came out this year, and only one of them is worth talking about (sorry 3DS version).
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is the fourth entry in the long-standing Super Smash Bros. series, and it seeks to correct many of the mistakes suffered in the last release on the original Wii.
While not quite the depth of Super Smash Bros. Melee, the new Smash Bros. definitely gets a lot right. The roster reaches nearly 50 playable characters, all video game icons of Nintendo’s past and present, and it’s great to finally see so many fan favorites in high definition after all these years.
The game has a serviceable online mode that works pretty well for the most part, and though there is a glut of superfluous game modes that you will probably only play once, the core multiplayer experience is compelling enough to keep you coming back to over-and-over. Plus, the game actually features support for 8-player simultaneous play! Thanks to the wealth of controller options, ranging from the Wii U Gamepad, old Wii Remotes, and even the older Gamecube Controller, getting 8 controllers for your friends probably won’t break your wallet!
Nintendo is finally embracing the competitive Smash Bros. tournament scene, at least in America. While this isn’t everything one could want from a Smash Bros. game, there’s certainly a bright future for the competitive life of the game.
Oh yeah, and those Amiibo things. Those are all sorts of crazy.
Of course, Project M 3.5 also came out this year, but perhaps that’s something I should talk about another day.
The Hitman games have long been a series of high-budget AAA games on consoles and PC, yet, with Hitman GO, they’ve been able to distill the Hitman stealth-and-murder formula into a minimalistic mobile game, and it somehow actually worked.
Hitman GO features an incredible “board game” aesthetic. All the characters are in the form of static, plastic figurines, and the levels are all toy-like dioramas. It’s a very charming aesthetic, and it’s even still able to be visually dramatic despite its minimalistic approach.
There are absolutely no text tutorials built-in to the game, but it still manages to teach the game’s mechanics through well-crafted puzzles. Your main goal is to reach a goal by eliminating your enemies on the board in a turn-based, tile-based fashion. The game gradually introduces new gameplay elements, like new items and enemy behaviors. You learn as you go through trial and error, and everything just clicks with little-to-no explanation. Each puzzle has multiple goals and additional objectives, such as collecting optional items and completing the puzzle under a certain number of moves.
Hitman GO is an excellent mobile puzzle game that’s both fun to play and pleasing to look at, and will probably keep you busy for a long time.
- Nidhogg (PC, PS4, Vita)
There’s probably no other feeling I’ve felt this year like the tension of a good Nidhogg match.
Nidhogg is a 2-player fencing game of highly competitive duels. You either play as the orange guy or the yellow guy, and then you try to stab each other and spill some orange (or yellow) guts all over the arena. However, the goal in Nidhogg isn’t actually to murder your opponent, but to run to the opposite end of the field and sacrifice yourself to a flying worm monster. If your opponent gets in your way, you know where to put your sword. It’s like 1v1 football, but with swords and giant worms at the end zones.
Single matches of Nidhogg can last well-over 10 minutes as players engage in an epic tug-of-war that brings them from one end of the arena to the other and then all the way back.
The graphics are so simple and Atari-like in nature that you wonder how such a game has never been made before. The game also features an awesome soundtrack that adds to the tension of combat, and if you can’t find anyone to play locally, there’s also an online mode. The game has multiple levels, but, come on, just play the Castle level. It’s the best one.
Rebirth is a remake of the original Binding of Isaac Flash game from 2011. Since it’s no longer made in Flash, it actually plays like a real video game, and it’s better than ever. Essentially, it’s a top-down “twin stick” roguelike shooter.
A “roguelike,” meaning randomly generated dungeons, items, and enemy configurations, making for a unique session every time you play. You have to beat the game in one try, but losing starts you over at the beginning with an entirely different set of levels. Not every run will be a good one, but once you end up building a completely over-powered character and breezing your way through the game, it ends up feeling very rewarding.
Completing the game multiple times or performing certain accomplishments will unlock more content to experience in the game, including new items, enemies, and bosses.
The game could be considered “sick” in a number of ways. The graphics are a callback to the 16-bit days of the SNES, rather than the, well, Flash graphics of the original. The aesthetic isn’t exactly pleasing. There’s a lot of poop in the game, and I mean actual poop. The visuals can be pretty disturbing, but in a cutesy cartoony sort of way: deformed babies, fly-infested corpses, gross piles of undulating flesh. It’s not rendered in any sort of realism, but it’s certainly not for the squeamish. This game earns its M-rating. It’s no wonder why Nintendo refused to allow this game on their platforms.
All that aside, it’s still too much fun for me to put down. The game is highly addictive, yet simple enough that you don’t have to pay that much attention to what you’re doing. It’s a great way to kill time.
Now this was a huge surprise. I have little-to-no investment in the Final Fantasy XIII series. I never finished Final Fantasy XIII. I never even started Final Fantasy XIII-2. Then here comes the third entry in the series, and I end up loving it? Yes, it’s true!
Lightning Returns strikes an interesting balance between turn-based and real-time combat that I can’t help but be mesmerized by it. It doesn’t play like your typical Japanese RPG, Final Fantasy or otherwise. The battle system requires you to act with impulse and precision, but at the same time be strategic and fast. This is because your character is highly customizable in such a way that encourages creativity in combat. Of course, this is basically done by playing dress-up within the game.
You could easily swap the Final Fantasy license with the Barbie one and no one would notice. You equip Lightning, Final Fantasy XIII’s main protagonist, with special abilities that are tied to sets of clothing. For instance, dressing her up like a nightclub bouncer will increase her attack, and dressing her up like a cat girl gives her healing abilities. There are tons of different outfits and abilities in the game to experiment with, and it’s absolutely ridiculous. That is why I love Lightning Returns. It’s ridiculous.
The game is almost a parody of itself. The failure of most Japanese RPGs is that they often take themselves too seriously. “The end of the world is coming! It’s only up to us to save it!” That sort of melodrama is still in place in Lightning Returns, but when Lightning is spending her precious last few days of the world playing dress-up, talking to house cats, and performing menial tasks like taste testing food at restaurants, it’s hard to take it seriously, and you definitely shouldn’t take it seriously. Embrace the goofiness. Don’t question why Lightning thinks the solution to getting over a wall is not to simply climb over it, but instead to become an actress, audition for a stage play, collect a bunch of fireworks, and blow up a statue. Just enjoy the madness while it lasts.
As for what the game is actually about, I have no idea. Having never finished the previous games in the series, the main storyline is nonsense, but that does not impede my enjoyment of the game one bit. I will continue to guide Lightning in throwing innocent forest animals into space, helping a journalist find his pen, and hunting down prank phone callers. Hopefully Final Fantasy XV will create just as compelling scenarios.
I was a big fan of the original Bayonetta from 2010. It was a stylish Japanese character action game from the father of the Devil May Cry series. What wasn’t there to love? Well, now in 2014, there’s even more to love in the form of Bayonetta 2, exclusively on Nintendo’s Wii U.
You play as the sensual yet badass protagonist witch Bayonetta as she cuts through angels with a sword in her hands and blasts demons in the face with the guns strapped to her feet. You feel like an absolute action hero as you flip around atop speeding jets, the caverns of Inferno, and the celestial planes of Paradiso, elegantly dodging enemy attacks and juggling monsters in the air with a barrage of bullets, whips, and chainsaws.
Then in the next level, you’re in a one-on-one duel with a Lumen Sage, flying through space as two godlike titans duke it out in the background. Almost every combat scenario is a magnificent spectacle to behold. It’s total non-stop action every single level of this game.
There are lots of neat unlockable weapons, characters and costumes to keep you playing the game well past the game’s conclusion. Being a Nintendo-published game, all the Nintendo-themed easter eggs and callbacks are sure to please any Nintendo fan’s heart.
Oh, and Bayonetta 2 actually comes with Bayonetta 1, so you’re getting two fantastic games for the price of one! Just make sure you have a Wii U Pro Controller, as the GamePad controls of Bayonetta 1 are oddly not suited to the game, despite being perfectly fine for Bayonetta 2.
It’s incredibly odd that both Danganronpa and its sequel debuted in the same year, seven months apart, but it happened. So two spots of my Top 10 list are going to be Danganronpa games!
I went over Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc extensively in my review of the game earlier this year. I never wrote a review for Danganronpa 2 because it would generally be focused on the same idea: frustrating gameplay with an excellent story and cast of characters that more than make up for any shortcomings.
However, the brilliance of Danganronpa 2 is how it plays on your expectations coming from Danganronpa 1. If you go into the game, thinking, “Oh, I’ve played this before. I know how this all goes,” you will be surprised. Characters from Danganronpa 1 pop up in Danganronpa 2 with no explanation, and just when you think you know why they’re there, the game flips those notions upside down. Everything you recognize from the original game suddenly becomes extremely foreign, and the game is just as unpredictable as the first one. The game knows that you think you know, but actually, you really know nothing. Confusing, huh? By the end of the game, everything eventually becomes clear, and suddenly you wish you went back to not knowing, because the story of murder and despair was somehow a lot happier before the truth bombs dropped.
If I sound like I’m speaking too vaguely on the events of Danganronpa 2, that is by design. Both of these games are games best experienced without much knowledge going in. If you have any interest in playing these games, do so before the Internet spoils it for you. You’ll be glad you did. I know I was, and that’s why these games have made it to the top of my list.
This is my favorite game of 2014. This game is the reason I bought an Xbox One in the first place. I spent $500 for this $15 game. Was it worth it? For me, absolutely.
D4 comes from the same director that brought the world Deadly Premonition, and just like that game was Twin Peaks through a Japanese filter, D4 does the same, but for all aspects of American culture, especially the food.
While Deadly Premonition was infamously seen as “so bad it’s good,” D4 proves that Swery can take that same charm from Deadly Premonition and actually build a serviceable game around it.
You take control of former Boston detective David Young as he investigates the tragic murder of his wife. In her dying breaths, Young’s wife uttered the phrase, “Look for D,” setting off David’s quest to investigate every criminal with a name starting with the letter “D.” Due to a graze with death thanks to a bullet in the brain, Young gained the ability to travel into the past by absorbing the memories contained in “mementos,” pieces of evidence associated with crimes of the past. Young uses this special power to find “D” and get to the bottom of his wife’s mysterious death.
Like Danganronpa, D4’s strength lies in its characters and storytelling. In addition to the oddball that is David Young, you’ll encounter all sorts of interesting characters, one being David’s room mate, Amanda, a feral woman that thinks she is a cat. In your investigations, you’ll meet an eccentric fashion designer that treats his mannequin like his life partner, a neurotic airline passenger that keeps thousands of notebooks to write down of every peculiar event in her life, a giant doctor with an obsession with eating utensils, and a curiously strong flight attendant that is a little bit too infatuated with his inhaler.
D4 is an adventure game, built in similar vein to Telltale games like The Walking Dead. You don’t have direct control of your character, limiting your interaction to a cursor, but that’s all you’ll really need. You’ll spend most of the game observing the environment, as investigating objects gives the player David’s internal monologue on his observations. Hover your cursor over a broken mirror, and David will tell the history of that mirror. Observe that mirror over and over in the following episodes and you’ll eventually learn that mirror’s entire backstory. These descriptions are constantly changing, with flavor text that brings you deeper into David’s personality, so exploration is greatly encouraged.
Speaking of personality, the game oozes it. Just check out these hilarious dinner scenes that shows the odd eating habits of David and his former BPD partner Forrest Kaysen. Watching David play with his food and Kaysen perform gluttonous acts with his meals as they discuss murder cases is a perfect example of how insane D4 gets.
Action sequences have you performing button sequences to guide David through hazardous scenarios ranging from baseball fights on airplanes to wrestling a piece of evidence from Amanda’s claws. The game can also optionally be controlled with gestures using the Kinect, which actually works pretty well. The gestures it has you perform can be quite fun, such as moving your hands in front of your face to emulate David’s signature pose as he travels into the past.
The game is episodic, playing out like a TV show, and watching the game’s incredible intro sequence successfully hammers that idea in place. The first season contains a prologue and two episodes… and unfortunately, that may be all D4 has to offer, as no plans have been announced for future episodes, currently leaving the story at a cliffhanger.
D4 is by no means a AAA high-budget game. It actually suffered a very unfortunate low-key release, but what the game showed off in its first couple of episodes has me salivating for more time traveling detective adventures. There’s a genuine sense of mystery and intrigue strewn throughout D4, and it would be a huge shame if the story were to never reach a proper conclusion.
The game will actually be available for free to Xbox Live Gold members in the month of January, so if you’ve got an Xbox One, be sure to download it and hopefully we’ll see more D4 in the future.
Looking Towards 2015
So there you have it, my Top 10 Games of 2014. There were plenty of other games this year that I just never had time to get through. I still plan on playing games like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Far Cry 4, and Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.
Next year looks to be a huge year for video games in comparison to 2014. 2015 promises a new Zelda, Final Fantasy, Halo, and numerous other hotly anticipated games. Let’s hope those games actually ship in playable forms!
By Alfredo Dizon, eParisExtra 
