Japan’s Best Games of the Year
Offering a personal and entertaining view, our Tokyo-based columnist Tim Rogers offers up his favorite 20 games of the year from Japan.
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5. Toro: Mainichi Issho
SCEI
PS3
In ‘Together Everyday’ a cat called Toro sits in his room. He rolls around on the floor. You can't control the camera. Or Toro. You can only call up a menu or exit the game. Once (or sometimes twice) a day, the game's intrepid staff uploads a news program to the server. It appears in the menu. You can watch Toro and his pal talk about various topics. They talk about movies and sports, or the weather or videogames. Sometimes they ask trivia questions.
Obviously, this is marketing. It's marketing wrapped in a gorgeous package. The characters are fun. There are contests and prizes. This non-game is obviously designed to entertain people on a daily basis. I've personally not failed to check it every day. Why does it work? Because the material is well-written and interesting. It's a blog that’s actually worth visiting.
4. Final Fantasy XII
PS2
Square Enix
Players complained that the characters were boring; the main character was ineffectual, and the story was dry. They didn’t like the ‘Gambit System’. They wanted the "wet epic" style of Final Fantasy games, with swirling emotions and ending worlds and giant monsters. Sure, it grows thin at the end; the ingenuity promised by early dungeons vanishes, and the game becomes all about hacking forward. The final boss is poignant yet dull. There is no doubt, however, that the game is actually a masterpiece in disguise. RPG battle systems are, in the end, just a crude tool for representing combat. FFXII's battle system is an actual piece of originality and great design. The RPG genre has become horribly stale and unoriginal in Japan. FFXII is a way forward.
3. Blue Dragon
Xbox 360
Microsoft
A traditional RPG, a hacked-together second-generation game for the most flatly rejected piece of hardware on the Japanese market, the cheesiest story in an RPG since Final Fantasy V. Its battle system is basically Final Fantasy X, quasi-real-time, with a turn order bar scrolling at the top of the screen. You equip your characters' dragon-shadows with a ‘job’ system like in Final Fantasy V.
And you know what? The game moves forward. It's clean as a whistle. Characters cry, and laugh, and cry again, and laugh again. Battles are big and memorable; the boss music features live guitars and drums, and heavy metal vocals. The game rolls without stopping right to the end, forty hours later. And the player shouldn't feel like they wasted any time.
Though for all its reaching and flailing -- hell, because of the reaching and flailing that went into its making, it's perhaps Sakaguchi's best game since Final Fantasy IV, in the weirdest, subtlest way.
2. Mother 3
Nintendo
GBA
The game world in this RPG is small; the plot developments are easily digestible. The battles are simple. There is basically no challenge. But the dialogue reads like poetry. Rhymes and rhythm. It's fantastic and it’s beautiful and it’s compelling. It has a story to tell you. It tells you the story. Only 200,000 were willing to listen to the story. I'm certain that all of them, like me, listened all the way to the end, and then probably started listening all over again.
1. Dead Rising
Capcom
Xbox 360
What makes it so great? Structure. Design-wise, the game is as compelling as games get. It takes the sandbox formula and puts a leash on it. It evokes memories of old games where all you need to do is move to the right and jump over pits. Only now, you're free to jump over the pits however you want. That the environment is chock-full of zombies means there's always some thumb-exercise within reaching distance. In fact, the game never, precisely, rewards you (except with occasional experience points) for killing zombies. Avoiding them is key. Yet if you feel compelled, you can clear a whole room before moving on.
It's tough to find someone who doesn't at least admit the game is clever. Dead Rising is evidence of the Japanese game development community looking at Western games and thinking about ways to genuinely make them better. The playing is so violently fun. It's a joy to move, to swing weapons, to shoot guns. The magic of a whole sandbox game is, ideally, contained in every moment.
