Favorite Games Ever (Besides Ninja Gaiden, Obviously)

[Avaitor]

Thoughts on this list?

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Can someone just post his top 10 entries? Personally I can't stand this guy's videos so I'm not sitting through 30 minutes of this. Sorry, but my opinions on gaming just can't seem to match up with Sage's in the slightest, and I don't care if I'm being biased.

[Avaitor]

10- Secret of Mana
9- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
8- Mass Effect 2
7- Rock Band 3
6- Bioshock
5- Indigo Prophecy
4- The Suffering
3- Final Fantasy IV
2- Crono Cross
1- Metal Gear Solid

Yeah, I can see how Sage annoys you with his tastes in gaming. There's some good stuff here, his entries started out promising, and obviously like him, the first MGS had a strong impact on me, but he seems very biased towards story in gaming over most else, even atmosphere for the most part. In his piece for FF IV (another game I'm partial to, so it's not like I'm holding it against Sage for singing its praises), he even said how games like this proved that there's more to gaming than just "Mario jumping over Pirhana Plants", or something to that extent. Yeah, okay.

I'm not familiar with his other videos, but I've been watching his Top 10s out of curiosity, with mixed results. His movies list especially bugged me, since he didn't have a film made any earlier than 1970 on it, and he seemed kind of reluctant to add that particular film (Little Big Giant) in. His top 10 artists faired better for me, but I can't take a guy who prefers Kings of the Stone Age to Kyuss seriously. I haven't bothered with his anime list yet.

[Spark Of Spirit]

5- Indigo Prophecy

I can hear Foggle cringing from here.

The dude has no platformers on his list, so it goes without saying that I disagree.

[talonmalon333]

10- Secret of Mana

Still haven't gotten to it. But from everything I hear, it seems to deserve a place here.

9- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
8- Mass Effect 2

Can't argue with these at all.

7- Rock Band 3

Huh?

1- Metal Gear Solid

Of course it's excellent, and I can't argue with this. But I think MGS3 beats it in every way. Few games compare to that in terms of story and gameplay.

[Avaitor]

7- Rock Band 3

Huh?

According to Sage, this is the game he clocked the most hours in over all, especially when you combine RB3 with the previous 2.

[Foggle]

5- Indigo Prophecy

I can hear Foggle cringing from here.

A decent list overall, but yeah.

The dude has no platformers on his list, so it goes without saying that I disagree.

Also, this.

[Grave]

I'm just going to share my top 10. If I were to even attempt to do a top 25, it'll be chucked full of sequels and prequels.

01. Street Fighter 4/Super/Arcade Edition/2012
02. Marvel vs Capcom 3/Ultimate
03. Devil May Cry 3
04. Mass Effect 2
05. Shenmue
06. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater/Subsistence
07. Okami
08. Halo: Reach
09. Assassin's Creed 2
10. Final Fantasy 8

Honorable mention: Ninja Gaiden 2, God of War 2, Gears of War 2, Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark (N64)

Even though I have it, I've yet to play Uncharted 2. I have seen the game played from beginning to end, and enjoyed what I've seen. When I do play it, I'm pretty sure that Final Fantasy 8 will go into the honorable mention. Same with MGS3. I have MGS4, but I've yet to play it. (I have a lot of games in the backlog that I've yet to play due to me putting in what little time I have in trying to get better in SSF4)

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I'm actually currently playing DMC3, which is great and I can see cracking my top 10 list eventually. That said, my favorite hack n' slash game has always been Ninja Gaiden Black. Its one of the few games that gets better the more I replay it, with the harder difficulty settings changing things up greatly from enemy types to item placement, and the mission mode on top of that is extremely addicting and caused me to sink just as many hours into it as I spent on the story mode, effectively doubling the length of the game. To this day I don't think that I've ever found a game that personally offers me more replay incentive and value than this one. Everything about it just feels like its cranked out to its possible best. That's an experience that I've only gotten from a few other games ever made, such as Yoshi's Island, Resident Evil 4, F.E.A.R., and basically any of the other games that managed to make my top 10 list, but NGB has always been my favorite of them by far. That said I'm pretty sure I'm the only one here who's bothered to beat that game on any difficulty above Normal, let alone Master Ninja mode at that.

Halo: Combat Evolved is still probably my favorite campaign mode, despite how horrendous of a level The Library is. That said, Halo: Reach is the most consistently good Halo campaign mode and easily the best one of this generation as well as the best one since the first game, IMO. It easily tops Halo 2, 3, ODST, and 4 in terms of quality and content. That's referring to the campaign mode, though. I still think that Halo 3 has the best multiplayer, whereas Halo: Reach's multiplayer was a bit of a disappointment for me, but honestly I'm one of the few people who actually mainly only plays Halo games for the campaign mode, anyways, so it didn't bother me that much.

[Grave]

I'm actually currently playing DMC3, which is great and I can see cracking my top 10 list eventually. That said, my favorite hack n' slash game has always been Ninja Gaiden Black. Its one of the few games that gets better the more I replay it, with the harder difficulty settings changing things up greatly from enemy types to item placement, and the mission mode on top of that is extremely addicting and caused me to sink just as many hours into it as I spent on the story mode, effectively doubling the length of the game. To this day I don't think that I've ever found a game that personally offers me more replay incentive and value than this one. Everything about it just feels like its cranked out to its possible best. That's an experience that I've only gotten from a few other games ever made, such as Yoshi's Island, Resident Evil 4, F.E.A.R., and basically any of the other games that managed to make my top 10 list, but NGB has always been my favorite of them by far. That said I'm pretty sure I'm the only one here who's bothered to beat that game on any difficulty above Normal, let alone Master Ninja mode at that.

Halo: Combat Evolved is still probably my favorite campaign mode, despite how horrendous of a level The Library is. That said, Halo: Reach is the most consistently good Halo campaign mode and easily the best one of this generation as well as the best one since the first game, IMO. It easily tops Halo 2, 3, ODST, and 4 in terms of quality and content. That's referring to the campaign mode, though. I still think that Halo 3 has the best multiplayer, whereas Halo: Reach's multiplayer was a bit of a disappointment for me, but honestly I'm one of the few people who actually mainly only plays Halo games for the campaign mode, anyways, so it didn't bother me that much.

I'll go into detail about my choices a little later, but for now, yes I agree that Ninja Gaiden Black, hell, even Ninja Gaiden 2 are great games. Ninja Gaiden has some of, if not, the best controls you could ever want in beat em up/hack n slash game (NG2 improves upon that greatly), but for me, Dante and Vergil are my favorite characters in video games, and with Dante being flashy, and Vergil being cutthroat just won me over. My dream game is to have a game with DMC's flashiness, GoW's camera (and graphics), and NG's controls/gameplay elements (and of course having characters like Dante and/or Vergil, Ryu is always a plus). No doubt when I played NG2 on mentor it turned into a completely different game, but, unfortunately for me, my thirst for challenge is gone. I play games just to have fun and relieve stress/anger.

As far as Halo goes, I'm not a multiplayer guy. The only way I'd do multiplayer is if there's a bunch of us playing Street Fighter or Marvel, but I'm a sucker for the Halo campaigns (although I will say that I didn't like ODST at all). I don't know what it was about Reach, but everything just felt good. I enjoyed the characters (hell, my gamer tag for PSN is NobleSavage). But what really pushed Reach over the others was that there were no floods what-so-ever. As much as I like Chief, I hate them floods. They make going through the later levels a chore whereas Reach just buffed up the covenant and it all felt good.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I'll go into detail about my choices a little later, but for now, yes I agree that Ninja Gaiden Black, hell, even Ninja Gaiden 2 are great games. Ninja Gaiden has some of, if not, the best controls you could ever want in beat em up/hack n slash game (NG2 improves upon that greatly), but for me, Dante and Vergil are my favorite characters in video games, and with Dante being flashy, and Vergil being cutthroat just won me over. My dream game is to have a game with DMC's flashiness, GoW's camera (and graphics), and NG's controls/gameplay elements (and of course having characters like Dante and/or Vergil, Ryu is always a plus). No doubt when I played NG2 on mentor it turned into a completely different game, but, unfortunately for me, my thirst for challenge is gone. I play games just to have fun and relieve stress/anger.

I agree that Dante and Vergil are great characters in terms of their personalities. Dante is a really fun character that has a great sense of humor but can also be taken as a serious threat, whereas Vergil makes for a great villain to face Dante and as his brother is really the only person in the series who has ever been worthy of being a rival to him. Ryu is a great character to control from a gameplay standpoint, but he's way too stoic and dull in terms of his personality, which makes sense because he's a world-class ninja and basically a trained killer, but his personality honestly makes him kind of boring, even if I do like his sense of honor that most other characters from hack n' slash games seem to lack. Bayonetta is probably supposed to come off as a playful tomboy and maybe a bit like a female version of Dante, but whereas Dante is likable, Bayonetta comes off a bit more like a bitch to me then a fun character. And as for Kratos, there's just something about him that I can't stand. I get that they are trying to push him as a bad-ass by making him ruthless, but to me he just comes off like a dick who I really have no sympathy for. Really, Dante is the only main character from a hack n' slash series that I find to a good character at all, and Vergil is the only worthwhile villain that I've seen in this genre. And of course they both have great gameplay as well.

As for NGB compared to NG2, I love both games myself, but NGB wins out for me since NG2 clearly has a lot of flaws. The camera seemed to have been changed for the worse, whereas I honestly had very little problems with the camera in the first game. But my main gripes is with the game's balance issues, which aren't really all that apparent on the Acolyte or Warrior difficulties, but start to rear their ugly head on Mentor and Master Ninja mode. On Mentor, those cheap enemy tactics can be manageable and they aren't frequent enough to spoil the experience, which makes Mentor mode my preferred method of play for the game. But Master Ninja mode on NG2 turned out to be one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had with a game that I've actually bothered to finish, and beating it on that difficulty could feel like a real chore most of the time. With Ninja Gaiden Black, the game felt way more balanced, and far more polished at that. I also liked its pacing better, as it knew the right time to give you a break from the fights rather than just throwing constant action at you. It also had better level design, IMO, with a less linear structure and more room for exploration, and I actually preferred the lower enemy count but more balanced enemy AI to the higher enemy count and more blindly aggressive enemy AI that NG2 had. That said, I think NG2 has the best combat system in any hack n' slash or melee-based action game by far, and its still probably my favorite hack n' slash game from this generation, despite its flaws.

As far as Halo goes, I'm not a multiplayer guy. The only way I'd do multiplayer is if there's a bunch of us playing Street Fighter or Marvel, but I'm a sucker for the Halo campaigns (although I will say that I didn't like ODST at all).

Personally, I actually enjoyed ODST more than Halo 2 and 3 by quite a bit, with Halo 2 having more sections that annoyed me than ones that I had fun with, and Halo 3 having a pretty bland campaign mode experience, IMO. That isn't to say that I found ODST to be great, but aside from the pointless hub area in-between levels that dragged down the pace of the game, I found the game to be much more enticing to play that any of the direct Halo sequels.

I don't know what it was about Reach, but everything just felt good. I enjoyed the characters (hell, my gamer tag for PSN is NobleSavage). But what really pushed Reach over the others was that there were no floods what-so-ever. As much as I like Chief, I hate them floods. They make going through the later levels a chore whereas Reach just buffed up the covenant and it all felt good.

I agree, the lack of Flood and more focus on making balanced combat with the Covenant made Reach the most consistently good Halo game in the entire series, IMO. Halo 3: ODST may have had no Flood, but it also had no Elites which is my favorite enemy type in the game. Halo 4 also has no Flood, but it has a lesser evil in the form of Promethean Knights and Watchers, which, while not as bad as the Flood, honestly aren't that much fun to fight, especially with the Knights being as overpowered as they are in how they abuse that cheap teleportation ability.

That said, I only really had a problem with the Flood in Halo: Combat Evolved in The Library. In 343 Guilty Spark they weren't that bad because they didn't have any weapons until towards the very end of the level. In the rest of the campaign mode, they were actually fun to fight since Bungie wisely mixed them in with the Covenant and Sentinels and had each side fighting against one another. This was great because it made it so that not every enemy was completely focused on you, and you could either sit back and let 2 groups of enemies take some of each other out and then capitalize on finishing them both off once their forces were weakened, or you could let one group finish off another group if you were more patient and finish off the remaining enemies from the remaining group, or you could even skip entire battles while 2 sides were distracted from you since they'd be too busy fighting each other. It gave you multiple options to deal with really interesting situations that unfortunately rarely ever came up in any of the subsequent Halo games, which is a feature that I really miss from the first game, and in an odd way it managed to take the biggest weakness of the series on the whole and actually turn it into a creative way to approach battles, and it was done in the first game itself, at that. The Flood just downright sucked in Halo 2 and 3, though, and it didn't help that by that point you were mostly basically forced to fight them alone, rather than having a lot of the interesting combat situations that the first game offered.

[Grave]

Ryu is a great character to control from a gameplay standpoint, but he's way too stoic and dull in terms of his personality, which makes sense because he's a world-class ninja and basically a trained killer, but his personality honestly makes him kind of boring, even if I do like his sense of honor that most other characters from hack n' slash games seem to lack.

For the most part I agree, but I like that kind of character as well. And even then he's what I expect a ninja to be. I don't want to see a ninja that's some sort of hyperactive idiot.

And as for Kratos, there's just something about him that I can't stand. I get that they are trying to push him as a bad-ass by making him ruthless, but to me he just comes off like a dick who I really have no sympathy for.

We're in agreement here. I have a hard time calling Kratos a bad-ass mainly because he's so ruthless. I consider Dante to be the ultimate bad-ass.

I refuse to even bother talking about some of the enemies in NG2, especially on the higher difficulty levels. I'll just say I hate them damn dogs, water thingies, and whatever those dinosaur creatures are that you can really only attack with projectiles. I can probably go in on those things alone lol.

Personally, I actually enjoyed ODST more than Halo 2 and 3 by quite a bit, with Halo 2 having more sections that annoyed me than ones that I had fun with, and Halo 3 having a pretty bland campaign mode experience, IMO. That isn't to say that I found ODST to be great, but aside from the pointless hub area in-between levels that dragged down the pace of the game, I found the game to be much more enticing to play that any of the direct Halo sequels.

My thing with ODST is in FPS, I'm the type that like to go in guns blazing, and because ammo seems to be so scarce made it seem like I had to sneak through the game. Never finished it because of that.

It's weird to hear talk about Halo 2. I know I played it, but I don't remember anything about it at all. In some ways I can see bits and pieces of the game, but nothing about it truly stands out that I can remember. I will say that since Bungie or rather, 343 remade Combat Evolved they need to do the same to Halo 2. I would love to experience the game again.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I know this is some people's favorites around here so, Bayonetta could get an eshop release if Nintendo wants it.

More chances for the game to succeed seem like a good idea to me. It might help promote the sequel and the eshop at the same time, too.

[Foggle]

I won't say it won't happen, but that's really just a typical flippant Kamiya Twitter response rather than a statement intended to make people hopeful. Plus, if Bayo did get ported to the Wii U, Platinum would have to be the ones behind it, as they've stated before that they will never let a third party group port one of their games again after what happened with Bayo on the PS3, and they simply don't have the time or money to go back to 2010. This is why you'll never see Vanquish on the PC or MadWorld on the PS3, despite the fact that they'd fit very well on those systems.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Alright, here's my somewhat revised list (as this thing is ALWAYS changing):

10. Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening (This could potentially climb even higher when I finally get to my Vergil play-through)
9. Mega Man X
8. The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages/Seasons (I alternate these 2 with The Wind Waker every now and then)
7. F.E.A.R.
6. Resident Evil 4
5. Max Payne
4. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (Can occasionally alternate with Super Mario World, for me)
3. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
2. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
1. Ninja Gaiden Black

Jet Set Radio Future, The Wind Waker, and SMW are the 3 games that got cut off of my list, this time. Now, to be fair, as you guys can clearly see, my top 3 games never really change, so I'm not just one of those people who constantly changes what my most favorite games of all time are, because they just mean that much to me. Anything below that, though, can certainly be considered to be one of my favorites, but since 10 is so few a number of spots, occasionally my preferred favorites will change depending on my general mood at that period of time.

Some Honorable Mentions:

Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles
Halo: Combat Evolved
Halo: Reach
Jet Set Radio Future
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Super Mario World

And a bunch of other games that would take me forever to list.