My Favorite Games of 2016

My gaming backlog is something impressive, as I typically buy a few more than I can play in any given year, and then those extras build up. The result is that I rarely play any game in its year of release unless it's a part of a favorite series, and even then, depending on how busy I am, a much anticipated game might get postponed.

But I'm not adverse to playing older games. As long as the gameplay is still there I generally don't care. Maybe that's the same for you?

These are the nine games I liked enough to finish for the first time in 2016, in the order I played them.

Virtue's Last Reward *

I enjoyed 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors for the Nintendo DS, so I intended to pick up the sequel, but took a while due to a bugged 3DS version (now patched) and not having a Vita at the time.

Virtue's Last Reward is quite simply the strongest entry in the Zero Escape series. Science, pseudo-science, multiple universes, time travel, non-linear gameplay, and an incredible cast of characters made this a joy to play. I was up at 3am with tears in my eyes (on a work night!) because I had to see a particularly bittersweet sequence through. Fair warning there is a lot of reading, and the gameplay is all making choices and escape room mechanics, but if that's even remotely your bag it's worth playing.

It'll mean more if you play 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors first, but the good news is that both games are coming to Steam in a remastered edition.

Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest

I was looking forward to Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest, and despite the child problems I blogged about, I enjoyed it. It was refreshing to have a game so focused on family and divided loyalties. I really liked the moral gray area that Corrin and her siblings occupied and as mentioned in my RPG Talk entry, I like that the final confrontation features Corrin standing together with her siblings rather than Corrin plus love interest and motley band of heroes. Familial relationships are usually set behind the romantic ones in games, so having family placed before everything else makes this unique.

Zero Time Dilemma

Zero Time Dilemma had a hell of a lot of hype to live up to, and at the end of the day I don't think it's going to be anyone's favorite out of the Zero Escape series, but it's still an enjoyable game. It keeps a lot of the same mechanics from Virtue's Last Reward, but suffers from a less satisfying mastermind than the other two. There's also a plot twist that people tend to either love or hate. But that said, it does a decent job of wrapping up the series, the escape rooms are still fun, and offers a lot of emotional rewards for fans of the previous two.

Code Realize: Guardian of Rebirth

This is the best otome game I've played to date. I would have liked to include it in my top three games of the year, and it was a narrow miss. Otome games are usually given lackluster, passive protagonists to serve as the female player insert, but not Cardia. That girl is amazing, whether she's piloting an airship, busting herself out of confinement, or being a supportive girlfriend, because why can't one person do all of that. The boyfriends are more interesting than average, with only one route that really bored me. If there's any fault to this game I'd say it's locking Lupin's route behind everyone else's and making it so clearly the "real" route.

Danganronpa: Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls

Ultra Despair Girls is a little strange in that I don't think it's a particular good game, though I still finished it. It's a third person shooter, which is a strange genre jump for what had been a visual novel series. I only played it when I did because the Danganronpa 3 anime had Monaca, who originated in this game. The story isn't bad, it asks good questions and even clears up some others (like where did Junko Enoshima get all those crazy robots), but I'm not a shooter fan and I can't imagine the overlap between visual novels, shooters, and Danganronpa is enough to justify this game's existence. If you suck at shooters though, there's no story penalty for playing on easy. You can still see the whole thing.

Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice

I still haven't posted my VN Talk for this, but the sixth entry in the Ace Attorney series was a bumpy ride. It was good, but it wasn't great, and I think this is mostly due to character bloat. Dual Destinies had three lawyer protagonists so by golly Spirit of Justice has to too, even when the game can't quite figure out what to do with them. Unlike Dual Destinies, where the story honestly belongs to all of them, when it comes down to it, Spirit of Justice is really about Apollo, but the writing tries to showcase everyone, including several supporting characters, which results in a lack of focus. But if you like Apollo, this is the game to play as he has his best moments.

This War of Mine *

I waffled a lot on whether to buy This War of Mine because the vertical cut-away view of the buildings made me think of old platformers I was terrible at, but This War of Mine needs very little in the way of reflexes. I bought it for the for miserable experience of surviving as a civilian in an urban warzone and I was not disappointed. There's no tutorial, but the basics can be picked up by point and click, which feels oddly immersive, as the characters you're tasked with caring for have no idea how they're going to make ends meet either.

Chances are, a first playthrough is going to be unsuccessful. People will die along the way, and you'll feel awful, which is the point. You get to put down the game and go home whereas the people who really lived this life could not. It was a sobering realization. (This War of Mine was inspired by the real world Siege of Sarajevo.)

The Room

This was a purchase based on a friend's recommendation because we both like escape rooms. While you're not escaping anything in The Room, the type of puzzle solving is familiar to anyone who has done escape rooms, and it's a affordable fix that can be done in an afternoon or two. The story is minimal and the atmosphere creepy, though it's manageable for those who scare easily (with one possible exception during the ending, but you've solved everything by then). I'm skipping the sequel because I react poorly to jump scares, even the ones that are so mild that most people wouldn't even consider them jump scares.

Civilization V *

When Civilization VI came out, I realized I wanted to play a Civ game again, but rather than getting the latest and greatest at full price, I decided to pick up Civilization V during a Steam sale, which netted me the base game and all the expansions and DLC for under $14. This turned out to be $14 well spent as I've now logged an embarrassing amount of hours on it. It's a lot of strategy and management to bring my chosen civilization to victory, but fun since the AI leaders of other civilizations have their own personalities. I had a really good tussle with Caesar in my Carthage campaign, which felt appropriate.

My only complaint is that Europe feels over-represented in the number of civilizations available. There are multiple options for a continent like Africa, with Carthage, Morocco, Ethiopia, Egypt, Songhai, and Zulu available, which show that the game designers did put effort into avoiding a Eurocentric world, but it feels like it's not enough when 15 of the 43 civilizations are European (17 if one counts Byzantium and Ottoman, which I'm not since they're partially in the mideast), making them slightly more than a third of what's available.

As I did with my book roundup, the three games I tagged with an asterisk (*) were my favorites of the year and definitely worth playing.

I'd also like to mention the four games I replayed this year since it's rare that I replay anything, and four is unprecedented.

Fire Emblem: Awakening (second time)
Dragon Age II (third time)
Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (third time)
Danganronpa 2: Good-bye Despair (second time)

The Danganronpa games were mostly because of the anime and wanting to relive the experience, but Fire Emblem: Awakening and Dragon Age II were purely unprompted, with the former having happened before the release of Fire Emblem Fates.

On Replaying Dragon Age II

I finished revising a short story recently and sent it off to one of my friends who does a bang up job of pointing out flaws. He's not a writer, which is important, because he doesn't suggest fixes. He just lets me know what looks wrong or weird to the untrained eye, which ought to be most of my readers.

What's this got to do with Dragon Age II?

Well, I knew I was going to be getting a reply back in a few days and I didn't want to lose momentum. It's terrible setting aside a project only for your mojo to leave you, so one of the things I sometimes do is go play a game with a customizable main character and play as my protagonist. This means that I get to think idle thoughts about my character during the empty times when I can't actually work on the story.

I picked Dragon Age II because it's the only one in the series that allows for a human character of common birth, and my protagonist is a scrapper.

This is not my first time playing through Dragon Age II (it's actually my third, since I did two back to back playthroughs when the game first game out), but it's been enough time that I'm able to look at it with more distance than I did before. And coming off the third game, Inquisition, it's a very different animal. But I still like it a lot.

I was never one of the people who disliked the second game, and despite any shortcomings, there's a lot to enjoy about it.

Usually I talk about a game's story on this blog, and while I do like the writing, particularly as far as the characters are concerned, this time I want to talk about the things I didn't appreciate the first time around.

For instance, the getting around town and doing quests is very user friendly. After the initial visit to any given location in Kirkwall, the player can easily rack up a bunch of main and side quests, and then systematically knock them out one area at a time. It makes it possible to completely clear out all or most of Kirkwall in an given story act with just an afternoon's play time. A second afternoon will cover the outlying areas and any backtracking.

The side quests are dropped right alongside main quests and are very easy to do along the way. Other than a few straggle quests that are usually related to major characters I rarely felt I had to go out of the way for anything. In these days with 100+ hour games I really appreciate the efficiency as time spent running around just getting from one place to another is time I'm not actively progressing.

I also find that I like the entire game being centered around a single city and its multiple districts, because how many games are built like that? I never felt like I knew Denerim in the first game, but I know Kirkwall. The good part of town looks different from the bad part of town, and the city itself has all kinds of flavor leftover from the empire that once built it. I don't remember being quite so disturbed the first time I played as I did now walking beneath the bronze statues of tormented slaves. (Seriously, who commissions those kinds of pieces?)

Dragon Age II got a lot of flak for its reused dungeons, and I remember being annoyed by them the first time around, but now I barely noticed. Yeah, it's the same cave for the fifth time, but most of the dungeons are very small and quick. I'm in and out so fast that I can run through a couple of them in a single night. I'd rather have a small dungeon reused several times than go through a long unique dungeon where I have to make several trips back to town in order to empty out my bags.

And bag management is quite reasonable. I love being able to do several side quests that involve lots of fighting and looting and not have to empty out my bags until I'm halfway through the act, and by most standards I'm a packrat.

Okay, there is one story thing on my mind though, and it stuck out at me more this time than it did before.

The whole thing with Kirkwall in Dragon Age II is that the simmering hostility between the mages and the templars who watch over them has reached a boiling point and the two sides are braced to shed blood over it.

I think most players are predisposed to feeling sympathy for the mages. Mages are born with their powers and they can't help being vulnerable to possession by demons, so the Chantry mandates mage Circles as a place for them to live and train with others like them. It's not a voluntary choice to live in one, and the templars oversee the mages should any of them tread down a dangerous path, but depending on the mage it's not a bad place to be. Ideally the templars are there just in case anything goes wrong, but each Circle and the templars watching over it are different.

My first playthrough was as an apostate mage (a mage who has never been in or has rejected the Circle) and I ended up siding with the mages in the final battle between mages and templars. It made sense that she would defend them.

My second playthrough I was determined to be a jerk to everyone and sided with the templars. I wanted a different playthrough and did one that would justify taking a harsher route in the end.

Now that I'm in my third playthrough, I know what's going to happen, but I have more distance, and my protagonist is not a mage. I think I'll end up siding with the mages this third time, but it's less of a blind choice than before.

Seriously, there are blood mages practicing illegal, sacrificial magic all over the place! I don't think it's that I didn't see it my first playthrough, but being a mage I was very much in the mindset of "not all mages." This time, my protagonist recognizes that there is a serious problem here and the mages are out of control. For a while I thought I might actually side with the templars and it'd make sense.

But I probably won't. My protagonist still can't imagine mass killing an entire group of people and that's what the templars call for at the end of the game; the Right of Annulment. Even if half of the mages are psychotic nutjobs, I couldn't condone killing all of them just to be sure no more of them turn. I suppose some characters could justify it, but my protagonist is a kinder person than that.

Good Writing, Dragon Age II

I recently finished playing Dragon Age II. What does this have to do with writing one could ask? It's a video game.

Well, I started writing because of video games.

I suppose if one goes back to the very first time I tired to write fiction it was really cartoons and toys, but when I was twelve, I played a particular video game and decided I wanted to write a story about it. It took me six months of on and off writing, but I finished that story, and decided then that I wanted to be a writer.

Video games have been a part of my storytelling consumption ever since. While I read books and watch the occasional movie, video games have always been one of my favorite methods of storytelling and probably always will be. Sometimes the quality isn't that good, not every game focuses on the plot, but a story adds something. It gives running through levels and fighting bad guys meaning.

I've watched storytelling in games rise from simple plot setups in the game manual, maybe in the game itself, to full fledged epics. I remember the first time I played a game and I felt my eyes water. I couldn't believe it. A game was moving me to tears.

Dragon Age II didn't make me cry, but it has been one of the best written games I've played in a long time and I attribute that to the excellent writing team at Bioware. There are moments I want to revisit again and again because they left such an impact on me.

In all role-playing games there is always a balance that has to be struck between player freedom and the need to serve the story. Some RPGs such as the Elder Scrolls series allow a great amount of player freedom, so much so that the story can be all but forgotten as the player roams a giant sandbox playing with whatever catches their interest. If there are other party members, they might simply be window dressing so the player has more people to control in battle.

On the other side are games such as the Final Fantasy series which are carefully scripted to the point where the player can only go to certain places and do things as dictated by the story. Choice is an illusion and the main character is quite likely a defined character on his or her own. There is only one way to save the world, one way to go through a cave, one destiny for a character to have, and the player will perform it in that fashion.

DA2 let me decide who I wanted my character to be within the confines dictated by the plot. While I could not make game-breaking decisions like pack up and move to another country, what choices were available did matter and I could not take the team of people I wanted to work together the most into my character's final battle because I had to make a choice.

DRAGON AGE II SPOILERS AHEAD

My version of Hawke, the main character, was played as a kind and helpful person; sympathetic to the oppression of mages. As an apostate (illegal) mage herself it made sense she would feel for those mages trapped within the Circle and managed by the templars, out of fear they could hurt themselves or others.

She met Anders, a fellow apostate with a kind heart working in a clinic for the poor; a healer. Anders had a problem, being possessed by a formerly well-meaning spirit that had been warped into a spirit of vengeance, but it was clear he was a good man. She liked him quite a bit.

At the same time, she met Sebastian, a former prince and brother in the chantry (church). He had lapsed in his vows to the chantry, but wanted to convince the grand cleric that he was ready to be committed again.

The way DA2 works, is that as the player and their party members roam around, the companion characters can talk to each other, so it's possible to hear what their views are, how they live, what they think of each other. Anders and Sebastian are only two of them, but they turned out to be favorites of mine so I had them in my party almost all the time. As the game progresses, there are special quests that are specifically assigned to each companion, allowing the player to find out more of that character's backstory and move their personal plot along.

The mechanics of the quest are the same for each player, but the dialogue changes depending on choices the player has made, giving the player something of a personal investment in how the story plays out.

For instance, Sebastian knew that my Hawke and Anders had entered a relationship with each other, so after I helped him with something he warned her that "He's a dangerous man. And selfish. Whatever he promised, don't believe that he will ever put your needs above his own."

And that bothered me as the player. At this point in the story I already knew that Anders was losing the battle keeping his own mind separate from that of the spirit inside of him, but Anders had been so kind earlier on that I couldn't put what Sebastian was saying together with the Anders I knew.

But then I did one of Anders's quests and found out that he lied about the reason he needed certain ingredients gathered, and he wanted Hawke to do something very shady for a reason he wouldn't tell her. He asked if she could simply trust him, and that what he was doing was for the good of all mages.

It was a very ominous thing, and suddenly I knew what Sebastian was warning Hawke about. But the order of the scenes, the way the dialogue came out, it wouldn't have been the same for every player. Not every player would even get the warning from Sebastian because not every player would have started a romance with Anders, not every player would become good enough friends with Sebastian, not every player would even meet Sebastian in the first place. While certainly there are a good deal of people who saw exactly what I did, it made what Anders was doing very personal.

The final straw came near the end of the game, when the mages of the city are arguing with the templars, and it looks like they will come to blows. There is a power vacuum in the city and the mages are sick of their templar overlords. In desperation, the mage leader says he will go to the grand cleric of the chantry to ask her to rein in the templars, and the templar knight-commander tries to stop him.

But the one who really stops them both is Anders. The chantry lights up in a magical explosion, an explosion Hawke unwittingly helped set up, because she agreed to trust him.

Anders had been slipping throughout the story. Particularly in the last third it had become apparent. He wasn't getting along with most of Hawke's companions, he was frequently irritable, and he was becoming more extreme in his belief that mages needed to be free of the templars. Was it really him, or the spirit inside of him? Hawke had been warned that getting involved with the possessed mage had been a bad idea, but he had been such a kind person, especially to Hawke when her mother had died.

Now an entire city block was destroyed and the grand cleric killed to remove any illusion of compromise. It was now war between the templars and the mages.

And I had to choose more than whether I would side with Knight-Commander Meredith or First Enchanter Orsino. I had to choose between Anders and Sebastian, both of whom were my dearest companions.

Anders expected to die for what he'd done, and Sebastian wanted him dead as punishment for killing the grand cleric and who knew how many innocent lives, but the choice is left to the player. It is possible to spare Anders.

I thought about it, and asked the other companion characters what they thought, and though the majority of them said he should die, one of them pointed out that if he lived he could work to put things right. After some deliberation, I decided this companion was right. Anders was clearly a tormented man who had done a horrible thing for what was probably in the grand scheme of things, the right reason. The mages would fight for their freedom now, because they had no choice. And there can be no redemption for Anders if he does not live.

Unfortunately Sebastian would have none of it, and he walked out on my party.

I can't say the choices I made throughout the game were in my favor, but they mattered. Would I have cared nearly as much about what happened to Anders if my character had not chosen to love him? Would Anders's betrayal have hurt as much if Hawke had merely been his friend? And then I lost Sebastian. It was an either/or with him and Anders. There was no way they could ever have come to common ground and gone into the final battle together.

A story, whether in a book or in a game, matters when the audience cares about what happens. It doesn't matter whether they are a player or a reader. I had become invested in these characters to the point where I wanted them to succeed. I wanted Anders to become whole again. I wanted Sebastian to find out for himself whether he should remain a chantry brother or reclaim his title as prince.

I looked on the Bioware forums and there is a thread over 300 posts long talking about Anders. Some players hate him. Some players love him. The fact that there is so much discussion about a character in a video game shows how much he moved us, one way or another.

A tip of the hat to Ms. Jennifer Hepler and rest of the Bioware writing team, for writing such a fascinating character. Traveling with Anders has been a painful journey, but a memorable one. Every now and then I meet a character who I consider an inspiration for what I hope to do in my own work. Anders is one of them.