Top and Bottom? Games of 2016

This is a bit more long-winded than I thought it would be. Mostly because I played more than I thought I did. Again, this is stuff I played this year and the stuff I liked more, or disliked, is farther down the respective list. Luckily, there was not that much I played that stank this year. That's always a plus.

It also bears mentioning that all of these games are available on PC; Steam or GOG.

Just a side note: I stuck Visual Novels into their own category and they are all solid likes. They are mostly narrative, though, so I didn't feel it was right to include them with the more interactive media.

Read it in chunks if you have to but it is mandatory to finish by the end of the year. It's best to force it on others as a punishment.

Games I Liked

Hyperdimension Neptunia U: Action Unleashed
If you love action games and you also love Hyperdimension Neptunia, then you might like this. You get a bit more control over your favorite characters and you get to feel really powerful when you dispatch hordes of puny enemies. I wasn't a huge fan of the clothes tearing mechanic(it's made by the Senran Kagura people; look it up), but it has options eventually to disable that. At least it gave stat boosts... So ya, it's fun for a minute.

Blade Arcus from Shining: Battle Arena
A  fighting game with solid mechanics and a huge variety of character. I cannot really speak to the game's balance since I haven't played it much with others(2 player lobby limit? Really?). You can swap between your main and assist in between rounds! It is solid, mechanically, and if you want something easy to get into, it's absolutely recommended.

The Cat Lady
This is a dark puzzle game with a theme focused on Depression. Sounds grim, right? Well, it is. However, it is also very imaginative. It also has a control scheme simple enough for literally anyone to play. Some of the puzzles and environment designs are really creative. It keeps you thinking all the way to the end. Quite probably a masterpiece.

Corpse Party
What could possibly go wrong when using the occult? Apparently, many awful things. This is another game with puzzles but its setting is a hellish school. It is extremely gory and has a ton of disgusting concepts(and its an RPG Maker game). That said, this game is extremely interesting. It is very interesting to play and the puzzles, while somewhat challenging, can be figured out pretty easily. I just had to push on and solve the mysteries of Heavenly Host. Extremely good.

Melty Blood
A legendary fighting game from the PS2 era. It never hit Western shores until this year. Lightning fast combat with limited defensive options makes this game feel extremely satisfying to play. The cast is also ridiculously huge. One downside is the gross hitboxes that you'll definitely encounter at some point. While I love this game, I have to acknowledge that it was not what I hoped it would be. As much as I love this game I don't recommend it because of issues regarding its own community.

Koihime Enbu
This amazing fighting game is based off a visual novel about gender bent feudal lords from ancient China. What? Ya! Seriously, though, this game is extremely good. It's a very basic and easy-to-grasp game. Most things are universal across the cast making it very easy to swap characters and learn the ropes. I highly recommend this game to anyone looking into fighters. No, stop, forget that it's all pretty anime girls, it's REALLY GOOD. If you want to learn how to play these things properly, this is the game you should play.

100% Orange Juice
Somehow, this game is surprisingly strategic despite the RNG. It's also a massive salt generator; in a fun way. What the hell is this? This game is very simple to get in and play. It's a dice-rolling board game that uses a central deck of cards to which all player contribute. The cards vary wildly as well as the cast of playable characters(all characters are from other Orange Juice games, thus the title). Hyper cards are unique to each character and give everyone a very different dynamic.

Long story short, 100% OJ is probably one of the most positive gaming experiences I have had this year. Hell, maybe in years. The community is great, and so are the developers. This game is still being supported years after release with new DLC, contests, and holiday events where you can collect costumes for your 2D characters! The music is a great mix of genre and it's also royalty free so go ahead and download it! The best part? This game is extremely cheap! Why aren't you playing this? Go, go go!

Visual Novels

Steins;Gate
If you have seen the anime of this already, well, then this is pretty spoiled. However, if you haven't, it is something you should maybe look into. If you like reading(and why wouldn't you if you are reading this section about Visual Novels), this is a must play. Accidentally inventing a time machine using a cell-phone and a microwave? What could possibly go wrong? Great characters, original premise, crazy protagonist: it has everything. I also really like how it was put together in regards to its multiple endings. It made getting them all much easier. Well, outside the True Ending..... Ya, check this out!

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
This game knocked me on my ass. The protagonist(Makoto) gets accepted into a prestigious school filled with people at the top of their respective fields. Immediately they are told that no one can leave unless they murder another student and get away with it. This barely fits into this category and could just as easily have fit into the first section above, but, since it's mostly dialogue, it is here. This game is kind of wacky in its premise but its immediately interesting. The gameplay is very simple and the trial sections to catch the inevitable murderers is an absolute blast. In fact, I have some major grievances with some of this game's trial mechanics but they barely matter because the game was so damn fun. I could not stop. Play this. Play it!

-fault- milestone 1 & 2
fault is a kinetic novel(which means it has little-to-no player interaction) set in a fantasy world. That's true until the protagonists have to make a hasty getaway and accidentally end up on the other side of the planet. We learn just how different the world is outside Rughzenhaide. Later in the journey we meet the main antagonist, who is frighteningly powerful, and prompts one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in a game. There is a lot of world building as we meet new characters and see new areas. The stories of the people met along the way are great and leave me wanting so much more. The music throughout the entire series is just beautiful and well-suited to each situation.

I may not have described this very well but it's definitely one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had all year. Please, keep in mind that this includes part 1 and part 2A, and that the story at large is not finished. It is an ongoing project. However, if this sounds even remotely intriguing to you, grab it on sale. I cannot recommend it enough.

Stuff I Liked Less

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin
Dark Souls 2 is a game I thought was a bit of a step down from the original. After moving to PC gaming for the most part, I went ahead and grabbed both games while they were on sale. Dark Souls 2 having the expansion with it and a host of performance improvements. Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin runs absolutely amazing. It's a shame that the rest of the game is still not that great. They actually even managed to make some things worse by moving around enemy placement.

I could spend a lot of time on this but I want to try and keep it short. It's not an awful game, but it always felt like a bunch of cheap bullshit until you knew where everything was. Careful playing was barely prudent. Still fun but far too frustrating to consider great. I still played over 100 hours....

Battleborn
This is a sad story. A fun game absolutely ruined by terrible marketing, awful matchmaking, and non-existant new player tutelage, among a host of other issues. I love this game but the PC version is just so botched and poorly supported that it makes me sad. Over 30,000 people own this game but it's not possible to find a day with over 300 concurrent players. Again, I could spend a lot of time here but I'll leave it at this. Oh, ya, it took me over 70hrs(a lot of which was spent in matchmaking queues), to even barely learn how to play the game.

There's a big Winter Update happening soon. Will it help? Doubtful.

Nitroplus Blasterz
A highly offensive fighting game with an easily abused defensive mechanic that allows for too-easy punishes. While it's a fun and flashy game, this mechanic alone soured the experience a bit for me. Giving the person on defense so much control is terrifying and it feels like the person pressuring is actually at a disadvantage. It's great if you don't take it too seriously but there's no way it can seriously compete with the 3 I listed above.

This Should Be Extinguished

Shadowverse
People told me this was a hugely-improved version of Hearthstone. If that is true, then Hearthstone must be a mostly decomposed and rotted out pile of @#$%. Now, I have never played Hearthstone, for several reasons, so I cannot compare the two directly. But I can spot some things that don't work so well mechanically.

The Bane mechanic to start: This is typically found on low-attack creatures of varying usability. It is basically Deathtouch from MtG. Sound good to use even later to kill bigger creatures, right? Well, not really. The opponent controls all damage on their turn so they will find a way to trade favorably so they don't lose too much from the Bane effect. Oh, sure, you can Evolve it later on to get in a kill before your opponent has a chance to pick it off early, but that wastes an Evolve for something that will likely trade evenly making the Bane effect completely superfluous.

Oh, and the Evolve mechanic: What a glorious joke. It's basically a buff of +2/+2 to whatever creature you choose, and allows them to attack other creatures the turn they are brought in. This sounds like a fun mechanic but it quickly becomes apparent that this mechanic is basically only used to counter itself. The idea is to get your opponents to burn theirs before you burn yours but it's just not that interesting and it rarely works out that way.

My last biggest gripe is that the starting hand size is 3! Yes, 3 cards! How often do I draw an opening hand that is garbage, only to have it replaced by garbage? If we had a bigger starting hand size it might make more sense to front-load your deck with a few more low-cost cards, so you can maybe have half a hand that isn't a joke and you can replace the rest. But as it is, doing so with such a tiny hand size means you'll only have more dead draws later and a probably decided-at-first-draw game.

If you dislike Hearthstone, then maybe give this a try. However, I felt like this game lacked imagination in a lot of areas and clever ways to work around mechanics. It is also possible I'm just bad at it but that still doesn't mean I enjoy it.

Good But Not Finished

*These are in no particular order of preference.
God Eater: Resurrection
This game is great if you want something that's good from a cost:time ratio. In fact, if you get the game on PC(this version), you get 2 games! I have been playing this game for a long time and it still is not finished!

It has some issues, though. The tutorials in the game are horribly inadequate. The post-mission character snippets do not respect audio settings. Lots of palette swapped enemies, too, at least there's a canonical reason for it. They do vary in attacks and such too so it's not all bad. Oh, and the AI seems to be completely brain-dead at times.

Overall, this game is still pretty damn fun. There's just something compelling about smashing up giant monsters repeatedly. The awful DRM has even been cracked if that's something that interests you. I'm not done with it yet but I do recommend it.

Muv-Luv
Another Visual Novel....Yup. I have only finished one half of this story. The non-canon half which is Extra. I have had a good time with this alone catching all the girls(yes it's a dating sim). This is actually an old VN that was recently localized and put on Steam. It has a lot of great humor and the characters all have pretty distinct personalities. My favorites are probably Sumika and Chizuru. Anyways, absolutely worth a buy if only for Extra. If I had one complaint it's that the routes are not nearly as accessible as they are in something like Steins;Gate but I'll live.

Suguri
I don't really play Bullet Hells but this is a game I learned about from 100% Orange Juice. Suguri is one of my favorites from that game so I picked up the title in which she is the lead.

Well, this game is the most merciless thing I have ever played. It's not just hard, it's cruel. In-game time is 5 hours and I've logged over 50 game overs. No joke. Fortunately, levels are really short so repeating them over and over trying for the win is not a hassle. It's also a ton of fun with a variety of different weaponry at your disposal. Keep getting killed and you'll probably eventually unlock something that better fits your style!

I'm only on level 5 of 7 but I really do recommend this. It's easy to pick up for a few minutes and do a couple runs and drop it. The music is awesome as well so you'll always have something great to listen to!