At the beginning of last year we had a post asking which games we were anticipating for the year.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/451261/page/1

Now that the year has ended and we've had some time to reflect, how have those games stacked up? (and any others that have popped up over the year since marketing machines often aren't a year in advance)

Edit: Oh right, walls of text warning.

Slam Dunks:

Age of Wonders 3 - An excellent sequel to a franchise basically everyone thought was dead until Notch said "no way, too good not to deserve a sequel for that price". And I'm sure most fans are thankful he did as they got, well AoW3. Not so sure how he feels about it as an investment. As an AoW fan I got pretty much what I wanted. A game with a strong gameplay focus, interesting tactical combat despite having relatively simple pieces, a fairly short game length, and cool fantasy stuff. Some people oddly expected a whole bunch of other stuff which were never strong components of the first two, which kind of confused me. I guess people are really hungry for a MoM successor. Or more probably their idealised version of MoM since that game was fraught with problems, which is a recipe for disaster since nothing will live up to an ideal. But that's largely irrelevant. For me, AoW3 is a game that shows you don't have to introduce a million things to each iteration to make good sequels to a good game, you just need to focus on what drew people to your game -- what made it a good game -- and make that work even better.

Steins;gate - An excellent visual novel. Some herald it as one of the best visual novels ever which is kind of excessive in my opinion, but it still has in my opinion a very broad appeal and a very compelling story. The official release definitely got much, much, MUCH more work done on it compared to the fan release which... well, let's say there were many critical portions of the game that were held back by the lack of glossary. Now, I've only got an exceedingly basic understanding of Japanese but even I could tell from watching a few scenes of the fan release that there were VERY questionable translation decisions for accessibility reasons. And oh boy, with the amount of science jargon and otaku culture references and such in S;G, accessibility of the original fan translation was likely a huge problem. I'm fairly knowledgeable on those fronts and I still had to poke into the glossary once in a while.

Guilty Gear Xrd - And another long-awaited sequel, colloquially referred to as God's Gift (to airdashers). First off, graphically the game is AMAZING. This is by far the best implementation of a 2D look using a 3D engine. Absolutely unsurpassed in the fighting game field and I cannot think of any game period that has done better. People have said "this is what SF4 should have been" and "SF5 is going to have to step it up" and I could not agree more. When they first showed the Sol vs. Ky trailer last year I was wondering how they did the spin around on the clash since that must've been a LOT to animate. Then I learned they actually used 3D models and I was like... "whaaaaaat?" The pre-battle cutscenes look like super high budget anime movie material and yet are all done in-engine. The story mode, despite having no actual gameplay and not really mindblowing in the context of the larger game industry has definitely benefitted from the transition to 3D models and looks much better than previous story modes and is definitely one of the best looking story modes in a fighting game. The game, despite everything that I know and everything that SHOULD BE actually looks like a Guilty Gear game.

And that's not to say it doesn't feel like a Guilty Gear game, cuz it definitely does. It's fast paced, it's a game that rewards good reads (and stronger reads even more) and playing to win (as opposed to not-losing) well but with subtlety, it's got a cast of characters that all play extremely differently, it's got a good soundtrack (not as good as GGXX, but I don't expect you to do as good as one of the best game OSTs ever -- and well, to be honest no one cares if it's worse since you can just play with the XX soundtrack, one of the smartest moves to include that IMO), good mobility options, easy to understand inputs, and possibly one of the best refinements to what made Guilty Gear unique: roman cancels.

Engrish naming aside, gameplay wise what RCs allowed you to do was at the cost of some super meter, you could immediately stop what you're doing and return to neutral. This allows you to make moves with lots of recovery safe (which gives more mixup options) and gives more combo options since you can follow up a slow move that normally can't be followed up, albeit at a fairly high cost and with pretty demanding input requirements since you needed to immediately input the move you wanted to do after an RC which was three button presses simultaneously. A problem was in XX they added FRCs which had a high execution barrier (had to be done on 1-3 windows on certain moves) but cost less (half the amount of a normal RC) and could be done regardless of the situation (to do a regular RC, you needed to hit your enemy first). This was great in that it allowed the recovery of projectiles and other things which normally couldn't be cancelled, but the execution barrier was a huge obstacle on a lot of characters. RCs have long opened up a wide berth of options in GGXX but were not always accessible to new players. But all that was done away with. In Xrd they made a brilliant change that you can RC (almost) whenever you want (some moves can only be red RCed). Even at neutral which sounds stupid and wasteful but even THAT has uses. To balance it out instead the outcome based on what was happening. If your opponent is being hit (hit or blockstun) you got the old, higher cost red RC which comes with a long slowdown effect for dramatic tension as well. If your opponent isn't being hit and you're still in the startup of your move, you get a yellow RC, which is basically the old, lower cost FRC with a short slowdown effect. Otherwise you get a purple RC which costs the same as a red RC except with less slowdown. Often called the first RC "patch" to make YRCs less strong since you basically never want to do a purple RC. These changes made roman cancels more accessible in that you had more time to do what you wanted because of the slowdown and because you had a much wider frame to input a YRC than an FRC if you wanted to conserve meter. And yet in an elegant stroke, the slowdown also adds more depth for the advanced player. Since the slowdown does not effect your character (which by the way fits in brilliantly with the super-speed theme of RC) this allows combos that were impossible before, even with an RC as you could not close in fast enough. Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier you can YRC at neutral to use the slowdown as a "pause button" that allows you to assess the situation and make the appropriate response. Guilty Gear continues to be a series I point to that demonstrates that accessibility and depth don't necessarily run contrary to each other. They're orthogonal. But finding that sweet spot might be really hard.

Of course with all the praises I give Xrd, it's definitely not without problems. Online play is bad. I mean, it's GG, even at casual levels it's pretty fast paced so you expect the netplay to be bad, but it's REALLY bad. Like, "not even GGPO rollback netcode would fix this" bad. From the same company, P4 Arena and BBCP (coming up later) were not this bad so it was a bit out of left field. In Japan as far as I can tell from JP streams it's fine, cuz they don't have crap internet like over here, but I probably should not be getting this much lag from playing people down the street. They are at least dedicated to patching it (even though as far as I'm aware it's pretty expensive to release a patch on consoles) so kudos for that but without rollback netcode it'll always be problematic. The new Blitz Shield mechanic (Guard Impact from Soul Calibur pretty much) is pretty useless at high levels and really doesn't feel like it belongs in a GG game. The new RC system did introduce a pretty problematic option select that allows you to bait bursts between 25 and 49 tension for free (basically, RC after every move, if they burst you YRC, if they don't, the RC fails), which will hopefully get patched out/fixed in a sequel/people discover tech to fight it (imo most elegant solution is to lock you out of RCing for a certain time period if the RC fails for whatever reason -- and there are other reasons RCs can fail to come out in this game other than cost). But overall, Xrd is definitely a great addition to the Guilty Gear series.

The Not-Slam-Dunks

Endless Legend - Probably the best 4X released this year. It's definitely not without balance problems (imo worse balance wise than Endless Space) but it's definitely more flavourful than Endless Space. (look, when you make NP-complete references a guy who's spent multiple years working on such problems can't get the first time around, your flavour failed) It's definitely very unique mechanically and makes you think a lot about placement of cities. I prefer it design wise to Endless Space which is saying quite a bit for me since I liked ES's design quite a bit. They at least tried with diplomacy (and failed), but diplomacy has always been very weak in 4X in my opinion. You can give it character and whatnot but it's always either felt very empty or very exploity. Their initial attempt with the hands-off combat (I'm probably the only person in the world that enjoyed this combat in ES) was not well received and they tried to shoe-horn in a system on top of that one which didn't suck, but, well, anyone who's designed any system will tell you that will only turn out well by some extreme miracle. Good empire building, bad combat, par-for-the-genre course bad diplo, unique but pretty imbalanced factions.

BlazBlue: Chronophantasma - CP. Following in BBCSEX's footsteps of unfortunate acronyms, it was actually pretty good when it came out in the US (compared to the balance cluster**** that was Kokonoe being completely broken on JP release). Kokonoe was brought down to... reasonable power levels. Still generally agreed as the strongest character in the cast, but the tier listing didn't go Kokonoe, a completely blank tier because Kokonoe was that strong, two people in S-tier. It gave the esports moment this year in my opinion, Galileo vs. Dogura (heck, one of the best of all-time in my opinion).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=PPPe2qbF3dQ#t=668

Galileo after being 3-0'd by Dogura not 15 minutes before fights through the losers bracket in nailbitingly close matches with comebacks from the absolute brink of defeat multiple times. For those that weren't fans of high level play, you got cosplayers (in Top 8 alone, Dora cosplaying as Strider and playing Bang's Strider reference colours and Yoshiki putting on a Rachel wig another cosplayer wore because his name was mistakenly referred to as Yoshiko), a Tager player getting to top 8 (Tager was generally considered completely unviable at the competitive level, but Tiku came with solid tech and solid gameplay), and during pools you got this gem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zYOdv68D7xc#t=194

A person playing at Evo on stream, one handed, with a beginner mode character (unviable because they typically lack a lot of options) and not only winning against someone, but perfecting them. (as a bonus at the end of that video, a crossdressing James Xie cosplaying as Platinum the Trinity, the character he plays -- hilariously the Rachel cosplayer I mentioned earlier didn't play her, IIRC he played Kokonoe or Nu)

Unfortunately, with the direction the game is taking (and the release of Xrd) we'll likely be in dedgaem territory in a few months. But it was good while it lasted.

A Bad Year For Visual Novels I Anticipated Finishing

Well, Seinarukana didn't finish. I presume it got Jast'd and we'll probably eventually get it late this year. (I did not expect editing and testing to take two and half years on this thing, maybe they were busy with Steins;Gate?)

Dischan officially announced a few days that they've basically given up on Dysfunctional Systems. Not that I didn't see that coming from a few miles away with an extremely low kickstarter amount given the scope of what they were attempt showing a lack of knowledge, a likely then (and confirmed now) lack of processes, and their previous track record with Cradle Song. Disappointing, as Dysfunctional Systems was quite good (for an original English language VN), but their business skills definitely did not inspire confidence in me to kickstart them. (which was the correct move apparently)

Mahoyo I learned is apparently translated by an L1 Japanese, L2 English person, so will likely be stuck in editing for a really long time if hollow/ataraxia is any indication (not exactly the same thing, but reading a machine translation's about as hard as reading that sort of translation, I've experienced it)

Edit: I uh.... can't figure out why things broke here. So yeah.

Except For Those I Didn't Expect That Did

Fate/hollow ataraxia - after an extremely long time, the fan translation was finally released. I mean, it was at like 95% at the beginning of the year IIRC but it had been that way for ages, so I wasn't solid putting it out on a "it's coming out this year" list since I honestly thought it was two years out. Likely a pretty poor quality translation, but it does the job. The extended editing period has clearly helped immensely compared to the work from a few years ago (yeah, that's how long it's been going). As for the material, it's okay to good. Nothing revolutionary, but such is to be expected of a fandisk. (the fan is for fanservice, it's made by the makers of the original Fate/stay night which is one of the best visual novels out there, in my opinion. The fanservice is in the form of additional backstory and slice-of-life. Minimal nudity.) The one sex scene I saw was pretty eh as it lacked the horrible, horrible, horrible writing of the original's (which were definitely so bad it's good) so it didn't motivate me to look at the others. Luckily it's in the eclipse mode that isn't part of the main story so it's pretty easily avoidable. Unfortunately that might mean missing the gem that is Himuro, the Love Detective story, one of the greatest plot lines.  As a sequel, you definitely have to read the original first, it's definitely not a standalone work. (as is typical of fandisks)

fault milestone one - picked this up during its release window (well, the steam sale, but its release window was the steam sale). Kinda expected this one early this year. It's a fun little kinetic novel (I mean, it's got a choice but it doesn't really affect anything), probably not one I'd recommend to people not fans of the genre at its price tag as once again it's not going to win any prizes for originality or anything, but it executes well and it's not totally obvious from the get-go what's going on. There's a fairly long demo out on Steam for it, so it doesn't hurt to try I suppose. They left a big cliffhanger for milestone two (sorta, it's fairly obvious though if you think about things a bit I think). I'm thinking there's potential in this but if they hit a reset button at any point in milestone two that's going to be a big turnoff for me since I probably like Rune the most and that's a real possibility unfortunately. milestone two part 1 I believe released officially at comiket (ie. last week) and both parts (part 2 coming in feb) was announced so I'll look forward to that.

Overall, a surprisingly good year all things considered. I apparently managed to dodge the bad games this year by being an extreme anime hipster and having reasonable expectations.