Taking a break from my best games list, I need to write about Ace Attorney: Investigations. The Ace Attorney series of fictional lawyering was one of the best things on the DS. I played and loved the first four games. Even Apollo Justice’s tossing aside the main cast didn’t much lessen my enjoyment. Unfortunately, when Ace Attorney Investigations came out, I was not in a financial situation that allowed me to get the game. Fortunately, I recently saw it on Amazon.com for twenty bucks and I just had to jump on that. Now I’ve beaten the game. Thanks to some fundamental changes, it isn’t quite as good as the rest of the series. Still, it is scratches the same itch as its predecessors and has me rearing for AA5 coming out later this year.

The first big change that isn’t really effective is Miles Edgeworth as the protagonist. I really like Edgeworth, he was the best opponent Phoenix had in the series, and he worked well as an occasional ally after that, but he really doesn’t work as the main character. The series requires the main character to frequently look like a fool. This worked for Phoenix, both when he was a rookie and later due to him always being thrust into cases knowing next to nothing. Apollo was no different from Phoenix. Edgeworth’s haughty demeanor is completely undercut by him not knowing what is going on. The problem is the game was made because he is such a popular character that they had to get him his own game. With a little work I am sure they could have arranged things to make Edgeworth not look like the incompetent goofus that Phoenix always looked like. Instead, we got an Edgeworth that spends most the game being talked down to by everyone short of Gumshoe. Gumshoe is another problem. The one way that the lack of knowledge for Edgeworth was addressed was by making Gumshoe completely incompetent. Not that he wasn’t before, but I think they went a little heavy on him in this game. While Edgeworth does get to show his trademark smugness at the end of cases, it could have used more work.

Then there is the reliance on old characters. With Edgeworth as the main character, I knew we’d be seeing Gumshoe and Franziska quite a bit. I expected some of the usually witnesses to show up, but I did not expect them to be relied on so much. Other than the criminals, most of the witnesses are returning characters. That robs the cases of drama, when there are few options as to who is responsible. It doesn’t help that the last case, the big case, features testimony from both Oldbag, my least favorite AA character, and Larry Butz. I don’t mind seeing old characters again, but in the easy early cases, not in the climax of the story.

The last problem is a fault of the big change to the game; the lack of courtroom scenes. This is Ace Attorney Investigations; this is not about the courtroom it is about them investigating. But they didn’t change how the game is approached. Yes, players get direct control of an Edgeworth sprite to look around, but that is a cosmetic change to how the game advances. It is still split between investigation and cross-examination. Without the courtroom, however, the cross-examinations make no sense. Sure, they call them interviews, but they put pointless restrictions on them like the courtroom stuff in the other AA games. It makes everything seem rushed and weird. They have to invent reasons to cut investigations shot to add some drama where there should be none. The only case where it works is the last one, where your opponent has the authority to stop the investigation.

Still, the writing is mostly good. Only the last two cases are really memorable, but that is not too different from most of the series. The new characters, though too few, are entertaining. Agent Lang is trying to be Edgeworth’s rival, like Edgeworth was for Wright. It isn’t as clear a relationship as that one, but his hostility is the only thing adding any tension to most of the cases. Kay Faraday steps in to Edgeworth’s Maya, with her own goofy trick to help him with his investigations. While the timing of the Yatagarsu stuff doesn’t seem to quite add up, it still gives her reason enough to stick around.

It is still Ace Attorney, and I am always up for more Ace Attorney. I am kind of sad that we’re not likely to ever get the second Investigations game, but I am glad I played this one.

Super Mario Galaxy

Super Mario Bros 3 is a beloved game that largely perfected the gameplay that Nintendo originated in Super Mario Bros. Super Mario Galaxy did the same thing with the style of game that came about in Mario 64. It did so by primarily by taking a few pages from SMB3. Instead of the sprawling playgrounds of Mario 64, SMG uses bite-sized chunks more like the levels of SMB3. It also added a plethora of new power-ups. Ice Flower, Bee suit, Spring Suit. Again like SMB3’s proliferation of abilities. It took one of the best 2D games ever and transplanted its spirit into 3D. It is one of the most amazing games ever.

Super Mario Galaxy is the game that sold me on the Wii. I had held off on a new system until that point, waffling between the underpowered but interesting Wii and the too expensive PS3 while steadily thinning my stack of unbeaten PS2 games. Then I saw Mario Galaxy and my mind was made up. It was everything I could have wanted in a video game. Mario, as always, controls perfectly. It looked better than anything else on the Wii, better than most PS3/360 games one pure art direction. While there were some clunkers of star, like the trash destruction ones, since the games moves from goal to goal and area to area so fast, it is easy to bypass and ignore the crappy ones. At least until you whittle it down to about 10 starts left to get.

What I love SMG for the most, though, is that it brought me back to Mario. I hadn’t really played a Mario game since Mario 64 and while I played that I was possibly the only N64 owner to did not own that game. I hadn’t touched any of the 2D games since before even that and other than Smash Brothers I mostly ignored the spin-offs. But SMG reminded me that I loved Mario and his world. It made me want to go back and see those old games again. The Virtual Console allowed me to do so, but as much as I love all of those games I still love Galaxy the best.

The most visibly amazing part of the game is how you run around the small planetoids that make up the bulk of the game. It adds a layer of suspense, because you never quite know what is over the horizon, but it not at all difficult to navigate. There is just something awesome and intuitive about jumping from small planet to small planet. It works well with Galaxy’s limited but essential use of the Wii Remote’s pointer function. The pointer was always the best new Wii functionality, even though waggle got all the attention. The pointer is used to grab stars and fling Mario around. It is simply a new move to add to Mario’s arsenal and it makes for some fun tricky puzzles.

I just love Super Mario Galaxy. It, or its sequel, is the best 3D platformer ever made. It simply does everything well and just oozes the classic cartoon charm of the Mario series. It is a great game.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

My #9 game is the same game that stopped my series of Zelda replays cold. (I promise to get back to those soon.) It wasn’t playing the game that held me up, but writing about it. I had, and continue to have, a hard time articulating my love for A Link to the Past. Me saying LttP is great for a thousand words wouldn’t be very interesting. I don’t feel I have much to add to this conversation. It has few flaws, even fewer of which are worth mentioning at all, so I can’t make an argument to excuse them. I also don’t have much nostalgia for it, having first played after it came out on the GBA (I played it on a SNES, but I know the GBA version had just come out.) and I didn’t own it until I bought it one the Wii Virtual Console. Still, even ten years after its release, A Link to the Past is obviously a great game.

LttP belongs to that special category of SNES game that was the apex of their line of game design. After the SNES everything was about 3D and while some games were similar, they really did their own thing. This more recent resurrection of 2D games has largely been homage or imitation, not evolution. A Link to the Past is Nintendo perfecting what they started in Zelda 1.

LttP manages to improve on just about every part of the first Zelda game, while bringing in almost none of the bloat that has crept into more recent Zelda entries. Most of that bloat is due to the newer game’s greater narrative ambitions. LttP has no such goals; it is pure gameplay. It is astounding how fast LttP gets the player to the meat of the game, the dungeons, compared to its sequels. Despite its lack of storytelling ambition, LttP provides as cohesive a world imaginable in 16-bit. Sure, the NPCs lack anything resembling personality, but the world they live in makes sense.

As someone who cut his gaming teeth on the original LoZ, A Link to the Past is all that I could have hoped for in a sequel. It keeps all of the sense of adventure and exploration, but lost most of the confounding obtuseness. It is nearly perfect.

Lately, I haven’t felt any burning desire to write on my blog here. I have a few posts all but finished sitting on my computer. I just can’t force myself to finish them and get them posted. What was supposed to be a fun hoppy has started to feel kind of like and obligation. So I took a step back and thought about what I really wanted to write about. And what I want to write about are video games, specifically video games that I really like. So for the next month or so, I am going to be writing about my 10 favorite games.

Now this is not a list of the 10 games I consider to be the best, though that list would contain several of the games on this list. These are my personal favorite games, games that despite their flaws I end up coming back to time and again. Making this list was surprisingly difficult. I have played a lot of games, and there are plenty that I really like. My first draft, including any game at all that came to mind when thinking about my favorite games, was about 40 games long. Many of them were pretty easy to eliminate from contention. Most of those were games I played recently, with memories fresh enough that I put them on the list, even if I will likely never play them again. Getting the list down from 20 to 10 is where it got difficult. That is why I am doing this post. Because there are a lot of games that aren’t going to be on my list that I really want to at least mention.

Plenty of games got left off due to my arbitrary rule of no more than game per series, a rule I broke at least twice in the final list. However, unless I wanted my list to be almost entirely Final Fantasy, Legend of Zelda and Super Mario, I had to try and restrict those series somehow. So Final Fantasy 9 and Final Fantasy 12 got left off the list even if they probably should have been. I played FF9 just before my freshman year in high school, most of it after grueling two-a-day summer football practices. It kind of set the tone for most of my high school free time. I played a lot of sports and I played a lot of video games. At least until I got my driver’s license. FF12 helped bring me back to video games after I drifted away during the last year or two of high school and first year or so of college. It also was the best representation of the world of Ivalice that I fell in love with in FFTactics, another game that narrowly got left off the list. Nearly every Zelda game could have been on my list, but I forced myself to cut it down to two. The one that I feel the most conflicted about is Wind Waker. Despite its lack of things I tend to value in Zelda games, dungeons and puzzles, the look and world of Wind Waker won me over completely. I love that game. I love sailing its endless seas and just plain running around as the most charming Link ever. As for Mario, again most of the series could be in my top ten. Super Mario World deserves special mention, because it blew my mind back in the day. I had seen nothing like the change from the NES to SNES, and SMW was the game that showed me those changes. It helps that it is one of the best games ever made as well.

Then there are the last few games that I really wanted on the list, but ended up being the last few cuts. Games like Okami, which is beautiful and massive and engrossing. It is the only Zelda like game that is even in the same neighborhood of quality as a real Zelda game. The two games that were the hardest to eliminate were a pair of RPGs, Lunar 2 Eternal Blue and Earthbound. Lunar 2, which I played on the Playstation, was a breath of earnestness in a post-FFVII sea of cynicism (I don’t really blame FFVII for this, but it was the trendsetter). It wore its heart on its sleeve, told a fairly standard JRPG adventure story with a tight, old-school battle system. Though its translation could be goofy and inappropriate, it worked on the whole to make an engrossing world. Though I didn’t play the original Lunar until much later, Lunar 2 really made me care about its world and characters. I think it helped that I was just the right age for it. Unlike many PS1 PRGs, it had a tone more like a 16-bit game. Which is because it originally was, but I didn’t know that at the time. I can’t really point to anything it does better than most other games, but I love it anyway. It is the perfect video game comfort food.

Earthbound is absolutely number 11 on this list. Really, had it made the list, it might have moved higher than the 10 slot. But I couldn’t remove the last inclusion, which was a second Zelda game, if I really intended this to be my favorite games list. Earthbound, though, fell out because I haven’t played it in more than 10 years. A friend of mine had a copy, but I haven’t had access to it for a long time. I did play it through twice as a kid. I have also tried to play it on an emulator, giving up, or accidentally losing my save, around Threed every time. Still, this game meant so much to my childhood that even though I haven’t really touched it in years, it still really felt like it belonged on my Ten Favorite games list. Before this game, and even after it, most RPGs were all set in vaguely medieval worlds. Since they all descend from Dungeons and Dragons to some extent, they all carried that aesthetic. Even the supposedly sci-fi RPGs tend to end up with the main character trapped on a medieval world. Earthbound was set in the then contemporary late ’90s. The protagonists fought with baseball bats, yoyos and bottle rockets. They used teddy bears to deflect blows. And despite how out there the world of Earthbound got, it was always grounded in this sort of realism. It was different, but somehow familiar and comfortable. The closest thing to a downside the game has is that is played just like Dragon Quest (Another series of games that nearly has multiple entries even though it ended up with none), with battles being just a touch too slow and a touch too random. Still, despite the long time between playthroughs, I still remember the majority of this game. I remember tricks and enemy names and strategies and that stupid dream segment that I hate so much.

Yeah, so I am going to be writing about the games that did make the list starting later this week. Up first is Number 10: Chrono Cross

In all the furor over Project Rainfall and Nintendo of America’s baffling refusal to release games in America, one Nintendo game that seemed to get no attention, or maybe I just wasn’t paying close enough attention, was the second DS Fire Emblem game. I was slightly concerned about its US release. Only slightly, because while I was worried that a once Japan only series would become so again, I really thought that Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon was ass. I know it was a remake of the first FE game, but they did not remake it enough, because it still felt like a dinosaur and was if anything uglier than it was on the Famicom. When I heard about the 3DS Fire Emblem, I hoped that it would not share the fate of its DS predecessors, being neither left in Japan nor complete ass. One fear was soon remedied, as the game was announced for US release, but what about the other? I am happy to say that one was put to rest too. Fire Emblem Awakening is possibly the best game in the series.

As far as thing so secondary importance (graphics, sound, story) go, FE: A is aces. The sound, at least what I heard of it since I do most of my 3DS playing with the sound off, is excellent. The graphics aren’t quite as charming as the GBA’s sprites, but they are easily better than whatever was going on on the DS. The storyline is largely of the same mold as previous games in the series, with one twist: time travel. Poorly explained time travel, but it serves its purpose. Crom is one of the more entertaining leads, and the player avatar actually has a place in the story. Really, the avatar in this game is probably the best use of that type player insert I’ve seen, and that’s including big Western RPGs like Skyrim. While the story is not going to win any awards, it is solid. Really, the video part of this video game is very good, if not groundbreaking.

The gameplay in Fire Emblem Awakening, despite being largely the same as previous entries in the series, is changed just enough to take the game from good the great. There have been some nods to casual players that even welcome by series veterans like me. There is casual mode that removes the series’ signature permanent death mechanic. To me this takes all the tension out of the fights, but it was a legitimate hurdle to many would be players. As long as I can keep playing the game in classic mode I am happy to welcome other options for players with other priorities. That is a kind of meta game change that significantly widens the pool of potential players while preserving the classic feel of the series. While normal mode is actually very easy, hard mode has one of the most satisfyingly difficult collections of maps I’ve encountered. Enemies move in bunches instead of as individuals, and they actually get the same skills that players do. The Ai seems a little better about exploiting the weapons triangle than before too. The only fly in the ointment is that enemy reinforcement’s move on the same turn they arrive. This is a big problem in a game about careful movement and being highly selective about how engages in combat with whom. More than half of my restarts were thanks to some bow wielding jerk showing up and taking out one of my fliers.

The pair up system is the one big in battle addition. In many of the games units could rescue other units, picking them up and taking them out of danger for a modest stat penalty. In Awakening, that is reversed. Units pair up to receive stat bonuses. It accomplishes what rescue did, but turns it into a plus instead of a negative. That changes it from a highly situational ability to something the player comes to rely on. Can’t get your Knight to the choke point he needs to hold? Pair him with a Pegasus Knight, who can fly him there. Your new unit too weak to stand on its own? Pair him with your most powerful and watch him catch up in no time. As the units build support level, the bonuses become even better. It is a small change that fundamentally changes the way players approach battles. By the end of the game, I had a team of seven pairs with at least A Rank supports sowing destruction across the battle field.

Many of the character building systems are evolutions of earlier game’s systems. The support system that seemed to get more and more lost after the GBA games is back in full force and now you don’t have to wait until the end to see if your pairing gets together, since marriage has become a mechanic of the support system. There is the class change system from Sacred Stones, only this time it is more in depth and easily abused. It is great, since even a character in a class you don’t like can be changed into something you will use. That is combined with the skill system from the Radiance games. Now, instead of learning skills from scrolls, each class has two skills to learn. Characters can equip up to five, so changing classes to learn the right combination of skills is rewarding, if time consuming. In a throwback to a FE I’ve never played, there is also a second generation of warriors, who inherit skills and stats from their parents. Again, it is time consuming, but ultimately worth it. All together, this makes Fire Emblem Awakening the Fire Emblem with the most going on behind the scenes of the battle.

Awakening tries to be every game for everybody, and somehow succeeds nearly perfectly. It looks good, sounds good and plays good. It has the biting strategy to satisfy the masochists as well as a toothless mode for those who just want the story and to steamroll enemies on a grid. I have liked nearly every other Fire Emblem game I’ve played, but I don’t think I’ve enjoyed one this much since I first played Sacred Stones. Plus, there is tons of DLC that actually seems to be worth the money to uber-fans. I couldn’t be happier with Fire Emblem Awakening. I hope Nintendo has a sequel in the works.

Rayman: Origins came to me very highly recommended. I had heard effusive praise, people calling it the best 2D platformer on the Wii. Seeing as how the Wii is also home to New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Donkey Kong Country Returns, that is particularly high praise. While I won’t say that the praise is completely undeserved, something about the game is not quite right. All the pieces are in place for a great game: controls, design, aesthetic, but thanks to a few flaws it comes together as more good than great.

As far as look and sound goes, Rayman Origins is incredible. The graphics are beautiful 2D that we just don’t get enough of these days. The sound is both excellent and incorporated into the theme of each level. One whole world is made of didgeridoos, and the music is didgeridoo music. It is all just well thought out and beautiful.

The problem comes with something that many people consider a strength of the game: how it handles death. There is virtually no penalty for death. This seems like a good thing. In many ways it is. However, there are plenty of difficult sections and especially hard to reach collectibles. Since there is no penalty for dying, there is no incentive to not try and try again to get those lums. However, trying the same spot over and over again is tedious. In something like Donkey Kong Country Returns, when you see that life counter ticking down you know it is time to move on.

Another big problem is tying collection into the player’s progress. You need electoons to open up new stages. In addition to a few hidden in each stage, the game also gives them out for collecting enough lums. It makes those hard to get lums less just a challenge of skill and a near mandatory impediment to progress. It makes stages that should be brisk romps into tedious slogs. The problem is that for many stages, there is no challenge other than trying to get the lums; so the options are either rushing through with little to no impediment or spending half an hour trying for the hard ones. Once you get to the later levels, it stops being so hard to get the extra lums, instead it is just difficult to complete the stage. While I am sure the difficult final few stages are appealing to some people, but not me. It is not that doing them is hard, it is that there is one true path to get through the stages and any deviation results in immediate death. There is little skill involved, only memorization.

It is frustrating, because between the dully easy early levels and sadistic later levels, there is some genuine fun there. This game has personality. The world made out of didgeridoos is not even that much of a highlight in this game. It makes players want to like it. And the gameplay is nearly good enough. There are just so many things that keep it from being legitimately great. There is just too much that bogs it down, that slows what should be a zippy adventure. Still, it is far from bad.

One of my goals for the new year was to ignore my video game backlog and play whatever I want to play. This probably doesn’t sound like a revolutionary thought to any sane person. It is pretty much how anyone with half a brain spends their free time. Unfortunately for me, though I have made changing my mentality about this a goal before, I continually fall back to trying to beat every game I have purchased and check them off a check list. If I want to replay Lunar or spend two weeks playing nothing but Mr. Driller, I damn well intend to do so.

There are several reasons I do this. The first is that if I spend money on a game, I want to get my money’s worth by playing it. It would be a waste of money to buy a game and not play it. Even if I have other games I would rather play and now I’m wasting my time as well as my money, I’ll keep going back to game to get them beat. The other reason is that beating a game and crossing it off my list gives me a sense of accomplishment. It feels like I did something rather than just waste my time playing games. I plan to break this pattern by first buying fewer games. Unless I intend to play it almost immediately, I will not buy games this year. Even if they are really cheap or part of a special deal, Steam sales be damned. The other way is that I will stop keeping a backlog list. I’ll still use the backloggery site, but I’ll stop manually making lists and stop organizing my games with the unbeaten ones in front.

How’s it going after two weeks? Pretty well. I’ve beaten Muramasa: The Demon Blade on Momohime’s path. It is a game that would have been near the top of my backlog list, but it was also a game I really wanted to play. Two things stand out about Muramasa: it is beautiful and it is shallow. It is a lot of fun and it ends before the glaring lack of depth really becomes a problem, though.

Vanillaware has done wonderful things with 2D sprites in this game. The graphics are crisp, clear and colorful. It makes me pine for a world where 3D graphics never took off and 2D games still ruled the land. I also never encountered any technical hiccups, slow-down and the like. While there are some oddities, like the ponderous breast on anything female, no one could ask for a better looking game.

It is too bad the gameplay is not as excellent. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad game. It just lacks any semblance of depth. Muramasa is a brawler. They try to dress it up by grafting some RPG mechanics on to it, but they do more to hinder the experience than help. Making the most of the fights essentially random battles just slows everything down, killing any fluidity it would have. And while your character levels up and supposedly gets stronger, enemies always take about the same number of hits. There are more than 100 blades to forge, but there are really only two different kinds, though there are plenty of different special attacks. Really, most of the things they add get in the way and they add less depth than River City Ransom had back on the NES.

Fortunately, the base mechanics are solid. Jumping, running and slashing are good fun. It is so smooth to plow through hordes of ninja. It lasts about six hours, and that is about how much game there is. Sure, you have to play it through multiple times to get the real ending, but I think taking a break in between each play through will help keep the game fresh. I don’t fault the game for being a beat-um-up. I like this sort of game. The RPG mechanics are superfluous , but they don’t get too much in the way of the rest of the game. This is a refreshing throwback. There need to be more games like Muramasa: the Demon Blade.