What I Finished, What I Played in 2012 ...

As everyone here already knows, I have some problems finishing games, while having absolutely no problem buying new ones. My list of games to finish, though, has listed 5 games as being finished, and three of them came this year. Adding in that I also played a number of games this year, and it seems like a good year to look back at what I managed to finish and what I played over the past year (since, you know, I’ll actually have stuff to talk about).

So, let’s start with what I finished:

Oblivion: Despite some false starts, I did manage to make my way through this game, including the Shivered Isles. It was actually fun, which is more than I can say for Morrowind. And Skyrim perhaps, but I’ll get to that later. But it really is a single-player MMO. Its main story seems to be less of a story than The Old Republic’s in a lot of ways, and it has a massive amount of side quests that can easily distract from it. But overall, it is entertaining and it gives you a bit of flexibility in determining who you are. That being said, it being so massive means that its replayability is hurt; you are unlikely to want to pick it up again with a new character.

Persona 4 Arena: The combination of Team Persona’s characters and story-telling with Blazblue’s ability to tell a story through a fighting game made this a surprisingly strong game. Even though at some point you know what happened to the main antagonist, when you walk through her story — even though there’s no fighting at all — you will still be shocked, horrified, and touched. I’ll probably never walk through that story again, but it was fun to play and the story was amazing.

Persona 4 Golden: While I’ve finished Persona 4 on the PS2 a number of times, the Vita remake is worth the price of admission, and is probably how I’ll get my Persona 4 fix from now on. It keeps the key parts of the PS2 version and only adds more stuff like events and costumes and S-links. And I haven’t even finished off all of the extras yet. Great game. I will play it again.

So, that’s that. Now onto what I played:

Star Wars: The Old Republic: I have a level 50 Sith Warrior and a level 44 Smuggler, but I won’t count this MMO as finished until I finish one of the personal stories, and I’m stuck on a hard fight for the Warrior’s, and can’t just level up past it anymore. I’ll try to get a group together someday (although I’ve been saying that for months now). If it wasn’t for the story, I would probably have given up on this game long ago, like I did with WoW (one weekend) and DCUO (not much longer). The combat is repetitive but too frequent, but it’s worth it to get to the end of that story arc and see how it plays out, and to get married (both my characters did). I can see myself playing this game for a long time, unless I get totally sick of it.

Record of Agarest War Zero, Record of Agarest War 2: I really should have liked these games. They were both contenders for games to finish multiple times. The story is good. The combat is crap in both games. It isn’t clear how much you need to level up to beat a boss, and the difficulty varies very, very widely. There are a ton of skill and armour and weapon and other sorts of combinations that you have to spend money on and pay attention to, which is a right royal pain since it’s quite involved. And yet, as far as I know there’s no other alternative. There’s no game like this out there, with the dating sim combined with a generational outlook. I really want to get to a new generation … but the combat stops me, even on easy mode. I may return to it, but right now I’m just bitter over the whole thing, and so would rather try to find another pure dating sim than this game which, if it was less complicated, would be an ideal mix of dating sim and turn-based party-based strategy game.

Persona 3 PSP: I had to try out the female protagonist. It’s fun. But the PS2 version is better, at least in part because the PSP doesn’t have the power to run the full PS2 functionality (while the Vita does for Persona 4). And after playing Persona 4 Persona 3′s main problem just seems worse: the dungeon combat is just training and isn’t tied to the story, and so is mostly just annoying if you aren’t playing on a New Game+. I should finish that game, but I likely will play the PS2 FES version when I want to play it again, unless I really yearn to play the female protagonist.

Skyrim: It’s too pretty for me. Really, I found the new updated graphics a bit distracting, although the game itself was okay. I suppose trying to play it while playing TOR was a problem, since they’re both the same type of game but TOR’s story is better. So, I guess I’ll have to take it up again when I finish TOR … which likely means that I’ll get around to it sometime in 2014. Maybe.

There are a number of other games that I had a cup of coffee in, but I don’t think they’re worth mentioning. So that, basically, is what I played and finished in 2012. T’is a pretty short list for someone who claims to play games as much as I do …