Most Promising Video Games Of Fall 2011

Top 5 Most Anticipated Video Games Of Fall 2011
We’ve arrived on the doorstop of Fall when all of the biggest video games are released. The remainder of 2011 is a stacked season of hit titles and having to narrow it down to only 5 wasn’t an easy job.
1 Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is the globetrotting, death defying action adventure event of the Fall 2011 season, a game that justifies its claims with not only a storyline chock full of cliffhangers, but scenario writing to match. Nathan Drake is back on the hunt, along with fellow smuggler Victor “Sully” Sullivan. This time, they are up against an enemy who knows them all too well, how and where to hit them where it hurts. With action that takes place all over the Arabian Peninsula, this treasure hunting duo must contend with the mysterious matron of a powerful crime family who has stolen Nathan’s familial heirloom. This time around, Nathan and Sully aren’t in a race for the treasure; they’re out for what’s theirs. This ring is only the first piece of a puzzle that will ultimately lead them to the location of a forgotten city buried underneath waves of sand, laid to waste long ago by forgotten gods rueful of the former city’s arrogance and luster.
2. THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM

Topping out the list is the newest addition of the long running Elder Scrolls franchise. Taking place in the northern province of Skyrim you play as an unknown prisoner (again) who is the last living Dragonborn (Dragon Hunter). You must embark on a quest to defeat the God of Destruction known as Alduin who takes the form of a Dragon (of course) and is hell bent on destroying the world. While this main quest is sure to be thrilling much of the fun to be had will be in exploring the vast open area of Skyrim. Along the way you will visit cities, discover hidden ruins/caves, come across mysterious inhabitants and partake in many of the sure to be well written sidequests. Bethesda is one of the best in the industry when it comes to crafting a deep immersive world that you will lose yourself in for literally hundreds of hours. Also a brand new graphics engine will debut that promises far longer draw distances and detail, come to expect the developer’s most visually striking game yet! Elder Scrolls veteran composer Jeremy Soule returns to deliver another of his beautifully orchestrated soundtracks as well.
3. BATTEFIELD 3

The King in class-based shooters returns in this latest release! When it debuted for the first time earlier this year everyone was instantly wowed by it’s gorgeous visuals. Powered by the new Frostbite 2.0 engine which promises even further environmental destruction and graphical enhancements this is in contest for the best looking game of 2011. Some gameplay tweaks include a more fluid movement system and the long awaited return of prone ability. The unrelenting intensity and adrenaline you feel from trying to hold a captured control point or disarming a bomb with all of your friends online is something very few games can match. The Battlefield series does a fantastic job in encouraging teamwork above all else and making it the key to victory. If you have an unresponsive team you are not only likely to lose but also have barely any fun. One new feature being introduced which should help in this department is called “Battlelog”. A free social media site that keeps track of you and your friends progression. It allows you to comment on each others progress and instantly join matches together anytime online.
4. RAGE

id Software. They are what I consider to be the Godfather of First Person Shooters made most famous by the 1993 hit Doom. It’s been nearly 7 years since their last big title and now they are set to release RAGE. Described as a mix of Borderlands, Fallout & Mad Max all rolled into one post apocalyptic package. Set in 2029 you play the role of a survivor after a devastating meteor impact upon Earth. As you were safely tucked underground in a shelter known as The Ark everyone else was left to fend for themselves. The world you emerge into now is as mysterious as it is deadly. Being an id game means that shooting will be the core focus of gameplay. You will be armed with such deadly weapons as the boomerang blade which is exactly as it sounds or the crossbow that can fire electrified bolts. For traversing the vast wasteland is a personal dune buggy that can be modified or upgraded. Elaborate enemy A.I. has been a top concern and will have foes performing all manners of kartwheels, sliding, wall running and other unpredictable tactics to bring you down.
5. BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY

Batman has had a rough past in gaming history but developer Rocksteady caught many off guard with Arkham Asylum in 2008. It perfectly captured the Batman universe with it’s setting and expansive cast of villains. With an easy to use but difficult to master combat system few games surpassed it and now the sequel is nearly upon us in Arkham City. The newly anointed Mayor Quincy Sharp has expanded his prison into the slums of Gotham which now harbors criminals and many of Batman’s nemesis. Riots have spread out all over and it’s up to Batman to stop them. All of the familiar gadgets from before make a return including a revamped detective mode. Arkham City will be roughly 5 times larger than Asylum which also brings much more challenges and side missions to complete. New allies such as Catwoman make an appearance and will even be playable at some points of the story. The result will likely be an entertaining atmospheric adventure that promises to last 25+ hours.
Other Honourable Mentions
Assassin’s Creed Revelation
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Just kidding that is unless you are alright with spending $60 on the same game you bought 6 times already.)
Silent Hill: Downpour
Dark souls
Cave Story 3D

Gears of War 3 storms into the top spot as the biggest video

In a completely unsurprising turn of events, Gears of War 3 has trounced the competition in this week's UK All-Formats chart. The muscular Xbox 360 exclusive is reportedly the biggest launch of the year, its opening weekend outselling the corresponding launch windows of the previous Gears games combined. Impressive stuff. And well deserved, in our review we called Gears of War 3 "at times, nothing short of spectacular."

Racing into an impressive second place is Codemasters' outstanding F1 2011. While Sebastien Vettel zooms off with the title in real life, it seems plenty of people are up for giving the mercurial German a run for his money in a fabulous racer we said was "as exciting, tense and engaging as any video game released this year."

The rest of the top ten is largely a reshuffle as the new big guns at the top take their place on the podium. last week's number one Dead Island drops to third, while Zumba Fitness keeps on going at number four.
Nothing much to report elsewhere, except for the fact that Supremacy MMA failed to make the top 40 on its first weekend on sale after slinking into shops without much fanfare.

Gears of War 3's reign at the top is likely to be a short one as the terrific FIFA 12 comes out on Friday and will almost certainly knock Epic's shooter off the top at the first time of trying. In all the excitement, we beg you don't forget to pick up your copy of the ICO and Shadow of the Colossus collection out on PS3 on Friday. A sublime slice of gaming history that our five-star review called a "compulsary purchase."

1 (New entry) Gears of War 3 Xbox 360


2 (New entry) F1 2011 PC, PS3, Xbox 360


3 (▼1) Dead Island PC, PS3, Xbox 360


4 (▲6) Zumba Fitness: Join the Party (Ages 3 and over) Wii, PS3, Xbox 360


5 (5) Deus Ex: Human Revolution PC, PS3, Xbox 360


6 (▼4) Driver: San Francisco (Ages 12 and over) PC, PS3, Xbox 360


7 (▼2) Warhammer 40K: Space Marine PC, PS3, Xbox 360


8 (▼3 ) Resistance 3 PS3


9 (▼7) Lego Pirates of the Caribbean (Ages 7 and over) 3DS, DS, PC, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360


10 (▼8) Rugby World Cup 2011 (Ages 3 and over) PS3, Xbox 360


11 (▲16) Call of Duty: Black Ops (Ages 18 and over) DS, PC, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360


12 (▲22) Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood PC, PS3, Xbox 360


13 (▼10) Cars 2 DS, PC, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360


14 (▲15) The Sims 3 (Ages 12 and over) DS, PC, PS3, Xbox 360


15 (▼11) Red Faction: Armageddon PC, PS3, Xbox 360


16 (▼20) Just dance 2 Wii


17 (▼9) Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 (Ages 7 and over) DS, PC, PS3, PSP, Wii, Xbox 360


18 (▲38) Michael Jackson: The Experience DS, PS3, PSP, Wii, Xbox 360


19 (▲33) L.A. Noire PS3, Xbox 360


20 (▼17) Gran Turismo 5 PS3

Witcher 3 on the way

While CD Projekt Red is currently busy bringing its PC game The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings to the Xbox 360, the developer already has plans for the next installment in the series of action role-playing games.

Speaking with Eurogamer yesterday, CD Projekt Red game designer and writer Jan Bartkowicz said the Polish studio has definite plans to continue the franchise beyond The Witcher 2. He noted that preproduction on the title actually started while the team was still finishing up Assassins of Kings.

"We still have at least one big title ahead of us in The Witcher franchise," Bartkowicz told the site, adding, "I don't know if it's going to be The Witcher 3 or something else that covers the story, but there's probably going to be some releases in the future."

The Witcher 2 is a direct sequel to the events of the original and picks back up with professional monster slayer Geralt following a failed assassination of Temerian royalty. Geralt then sets out on a quest to track down the king's attempted killers, while also continuing to pursue those responsible for murdering other witchers. The game features a branching storyline and allows players to develop Geralt to their tastes, upgrading his magical abilities, alchemy skills, or combat proficiency as they see fit.

Originally released on the PC in May, the game is receiving a free Version 2.0 update on September 29 that will introduce a new Arena mode and a revamped tutorial system, among other changes. The Xbox 360 version of the game is expected to launch next year.

Worst Endings to Fantastic Games

The Legend of Zelda



For many of us, The Legend of Zelda is probably the first game that ever made us feel any kind of a sense of story. There are goblins, dungeons, weapons, fire-breathing monsters, and the theme song. Oh, the theme song. This theme song makes us sad for the prospect of a film adaption of this franchise, because if they don't live up to the greatness of the theme, our dreams are dead. Even just hearing the intro to it, no not the chorus, the intro from the 8-bit opening screens, brings a tear to our eyes... which is why we felt so betrayed at the end of this otherwise classic and timeless accomplishment.

You see, you go through all these dungeons, all these quests, monsters, weapon upgrades, and arguably the best music in video game history... only to hit a "Thank You" screen.

There have been many games that end with Thank You screens, but this one is by far the most disappointing. You see, a "Thank You" screen is not appreciated by real gamers. We want to thank YOU, the programmers, for giving us this wonderful game to which we have established an emotional connection. At the end of The Legend of Zelda, they robbed us of our involvement with the character and story by rubbing our faces that to the makers of the game, this was just a lark.

Battletoads had essentially the same problem, but Battletoads was so hard it was like signing up for a boiling acid bath with a sandpaper sponge, so the "Thank You" was offensive in an entirely different way.



Fallout 3



One of the best RPG’s of 2008 had a huge numbers of endings. All of them were pretty bad. In one of the endings if the user chooses to sacrifice himself he is dead for good. In short the ending depends on the player’s decision and the stuff he does with modified FEV virus.Also on the PS3 version there was no way that player can continue the game since the character has died. A patch was made by Bethesda later to solve that. Fallout 3 had a miserable ending one that I will like to forget.



2 Half-Life 2



The games in the Half-Life franchise are regarded as some of the best games ever made. The story, main character, gameplay and tone make the games some of the most engrossing gaming experiences in existence.

But how does Half-Life 2 end? Getting zapped out of the frying pan right when the poop hits the fan... Man...

Even Valve (who's responsible for the game) admits they didn't get the ending right, which is why they created episodic continuations of HL2 instead of just working on Half Life 3.

In one of the best 1st person shooters ever, you fight your way through zombies, aliens, hard as c**p to kill tripods, fight your way through a giant factory, only to get to the lamest boss battle of the game and a quick cut to, "You've done your job. Let's get you out of here before this place blows up. Oh and we're leaving your friend behind." BYYYEEEEE!!!

This may actually be the biggest rip-off since Columbia House. It's like the developers just said, "Screw it. If there's one thing audiences hate it's a strong denouement." But of course, the only thing audiences hate about a strong denouement is having to pronounce it correctly.

"De-NOW-ment?" "Day-no-MAH?"



Halo 2



Halo 2 is one of the best action first person shooter games of all time. There. We said it. Haters can be hating all they want, but the controls were flawless, the battles intense and the storytelling pretty flawless until the PIECE OF S**T ending of this game.

You know what? It wasn't even an ending. It was a trailer. It was a trailer for Halo 3. We spent a really long time playing through a glorified trailer.

The game ends with Master Chief flying through space towards what appears to be the last level in the game. All the pieces are in place for the epic conclusion of Halo 2. And when he's asked, "Master Chief, do you mind telling me what you're doing on that ship?" Chief says, "Sir... Finishing this fight."

The End.

Uh, no, you're NOT finishing this fight. You're ending on an abrupt, and even worse, a cryptic cliffhanger that provides no emotional satisfaction whatsoever to your enormous and devoted audience. We appreciate that there's another Halo game coming, what we do not appreciate is shortchanging Halo 2 just to sell more copies of Halo 3. Newsflash, assholes. We're already BUYING Halo 3 anyway.

Fuck. You.



Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty



Huh? In a great espionage/supernatural/ninja game, and one of the greatest-looking franchises in gaming, we're forced to play as a side character? That's fine. The game truly is a blast and everyone really should give it a try.

But after defeating Solidus Snake (what??), we're treated to 10 minutes of Michael Bay-style "America RULES"-tone exposition that makes no sense, PLUS we were playing as Raiden the whole time?

Raiden taking out Ocelot is like playing as WaLuigi for a level of a Mario game, then having HIM save the princess. And having your game deleted.

At the very least, this ending could have rounded the story off kind of well, right? Wrong. All the dialogue seems really thrown togtether, proving once and for all that even with the greats, the end of a game seems to be what game designers think about LAST.



BioShock



Bioshock is to videogames what a funhouse is to life. It's crazy, melodramatic, maybe a little cheesy, but really fun and actually really fucking creepy. It has the best and most organic ambiance of any game that's come out in the last few years. The gameplay is amazingly fun and it really takes first person shooters to an amazing nightmare world that rivals some of the most oppressive survival horror games out there.

BUT...the payoff was obviously the halfway point. You know the one we're talking about. It would have been an absolutely awesome conclusion, but then the game kept going and then the "real" ending came along.

Last level: You spend the whole day (it's hard as hell) working your ass off killing Fontaine just to get a crappy cut scene about either A) Splicers taking over the world or B) Raising the Little Sisters as your own daughters. The ending you get depends on whether or not you killed the Little Sisters over the course of the game. Sigh...

Each ending is less than a minute or so long, and neither of them actually resolves your story or give you anything you actually would have wanted to happen with the character. The story you've spent the whole game investing your heart and spine into is sent into the crapper because they spent a long time designing one of the greatest videogame storylines ever, and but couldn't decide on a single decent ending so they gave you two half-assed ones instead. Dudes... Weak...

Top 5 Most Compelling Video Game Storylines

Silent Hill 2



The Story

James Sunderland receives a letter from his wife asking him to come to their "special place." Trouble is, his wife Mary has been dead for three years. He's drawn to Silent Hill, a quiet town that they had visited in the past, before the sickness finally took her. Upon arriving, James runs into meaty skin-walls, gruesome monsters and precious few humans at all. And the people he does meet all seem to have their own problems, like a dimwitted man who's killed someone, a teenager searching for her mother and a little girl who doesn't even notice all the awful things happening around her. Then there's Maria, who's a spitting image of Mary, albeit sexed up far beyond his wife's more subdued behavior.

After countless close calls with Pyramid Head, a masked killer brandishing a sword so large he has to drag it, James finds more and more clues about his wife, her letter and what's happening in Silent Hill. The more he understands, the less fearsome the town becomes, and it turns out that everything you've seen is a reflection of James' inner torment over killing his wife. Yes, it turns out you murdered her and have hid from that fact all along, creating the constant purgatory known as Silent Hill.



Why it's the best

Holy Christ, is this game intense. The premise alone - find out how your dead wife sent you a letter - is terrifying, and when coupled with the horrific setting and creepy denizens of Silent Hill, it becomes a near-unbearable level of dread. Every hallway, every door could contain another awful monster or suggestive conversation about James's past, but it usually doesn't. You're constantly on edge, wondering if the worst is about to come... or just another empty room. It's a slower burn than Resident Evil by far.



Silent Hill speaks in metaphors, not bats in the hair or dogs crashing through windows. Plunging deeper into the town symbolizes his inner conflict, and as you hack away monsters, you're also hacking away his mental blocks that hide the truth. The further you dig, the more you question him - is he really an innocent man who unjustly lost his wife or not? The other characters have just as much to add to the story too - Angela, the teen searching for her mother, apparently killed her abusive father and fled to Silent Hill. She tries to kill herself, but James intervenes, setting into motion her final moment near the end.



BioShock



The Story:

In the 1940s, driven by a need to escape societal, political and religious authority, the entrepreneur Andrew Ryan built a utopian metropolis under the sea and invited like-minded citizens to join him there. In the end, however, he gave his community too much freedom. Rampant commercialism led to crime, class systems and eventually civil war. Unchecked scientific experimentation led to a decimated population of genetic freaks, corpse-harvesting little girls and brainwashed super cyborgs. By 1960, although the city of Rapture is in abandoned ruins, four powerful personalities are still vying for control: Ryan, the founder; Atlas, the opposition leader; Fontaine, the supposedly dead mafia lord; and Tennenbaum, the doctor responsible for many of the people's mutations.



Why it’s the Best:

Ryan, Atlas, Fontaine and Tennenbaum are remarkably academic characters for a videogame; their psychologies and philosophies manage to reference everything from Ayn Rand and George Orwell to Walt Disney and Keyser Soze. One could teach a graduate class on the various influences and archetypes at play in BioShock. There is seriously heady, mind-warping stuff here.
What is brilliant about the story, though, is that these four dominant forces are not the most memorable or important characters. Despite appearing on dozens of billboards and blabbering away in dozens of radio messages, they are completely eclipsed by the real stars of BioShock... stars who are almost impossible to put a face to.

The first is Rapture itself. The city is so fully realized and so dense with detail that it becomes not only a unique personality, but also a narrator of its own sad tale. You don’t need anyone to tell you what has happened here... the environment speaks silent volumes. Garish and extravagant entertainment districts now flooded with dirty water. Posters that advertise genetic upgrades as if they were fashionable new hats. Majestic and living trees trapped in man-made glass tubes. You know exactly what to expect from the crazy surgeon at the end of the first level because you've already seen his bloody handiwork splattered all over the walls. You suspect Atlas before he betrays you because of the visual foreshadowing his creepy pamphlets provide.



The second star is... you, the game's protagonist. What's so surprising about that? Mute, unseen heroes are a dime a dozen, especially in first person shooters. Their transparency allows players to believe that they are the real heroes. The formula is tried, true and familiar.
But BioShock flips that equation upside down, and then shakes it around until it feels nauseous. As soon as you've placed yourself comfortably inside the hero's shoes, the game reveals a disturbing twist - you are no generic Everyman. You are a mentally programmed errand boy, specifically created and trained to do whatever your evil master demands, including murder. And when you, the player, try to distance yourself from this squirm-inducing new back story, you can't... because, minus the "evil" part, how is that description any different than what you do in all first person shooters?



Metal Gear Solid



The Story:

Secret agent Solid Snake is yanked out of a well-earned retirement and sent to a remote island in Alaska, where a military black-ops team has gone rogue and seized a nuclear weapon. Once there, Snake meets a bunch of interesting people, snaps most of their necks and endures capture, torture and the company of a guy who pees his pants when ninjas menace him. He soon learns he's part of a government cloning project, and that his clone "brother" wants to use a giant, walking, nuclear-armed tank called Metal Gear to kill him. Moreover, some of his allies seem intent on betraying him, and there's no way to know whom to trust. Overcoming impossible odds, he ultimately saves the day (and the girl, if you're lucky) by accidentally infecting his brother with a lethal virus for which he was made an unwitting carrier. Snake is unaffected by the virus - but for how long?



Why it’s the Best:

A big part of what sets Metal Gear Solid and its sequels apart from other games is their moral ambiguity; while Snake is always on the right side of the law - or at least seems to be - the people he fights are almost never truly evil. Their motivations are complex, and more often than not, they're fighting on the "wrong" side because they're clued in to the monstrous, uncaring conspiracy that's operating behind the "good" guys.
Nowhere was this more true than in the first Metal Gear Solid. Each boss battle is a story in itself, and everyone you kill will deliver a strangely poignant monologue when you off them. One of the villains, Sniper Wolf, even has a weird romantic thing going on with Snake's new buddy, nerdy engineer Hal "Otacon" Emmerich - and her death at Snake's hands completely obliterates any notions Otacon had about the nobility of war. As the plot evolves - largely through "codec" radio conversations that drop in treatises on nuclear war and escalation of powers - you'll start to wonder if you're on the right side at all, thanks in part to several of your "allies" covertly manipulating you into doing their bidding the whole time.



Of course, all doubt about which side you're on goes out the window when you're captured and tortured by Revolver Ocelot, simultaneously one of the most likable and hateful villains in videogame history. He's a sadist, but he's also got a certain charm, and the broken-fourth-wall torture sequence ("Don't even think about using auto-fire, or I'll know!") remains one of the most memorable in the game - partly because something was actually riding on it. Fail to resist the torture, and the life of Snake's love interest, Meryl Silverburgh, is forfeit.

Then there's the eerie Psycho Mantis scene, in which the floating psychic reads your memory cards and moves your controller across the floor. And the strange appearances of the Ninja, a cyborg assassin who seems to know Snake. It all culminates in the final, inevitable confrontation between Solid and Liquid Snake, the latter of which refuses to die even when he's been blown up, beaten half to death and shot full of holes by a jeep-mounted machinegun. Gripping from start to finish, the first MGS still stands as the most compelling - and least confusing - entry in the series so far, and a damn good story to boot.



Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic



The Story:

The story changes depending on the choices the player makes throughout the game - gender, class, good/evil, etc. - but the “canon” play-through still makes for a good story and many of the main plot points remain the same.
You start out as one of the few survivors of a botched mission run by Jedi badass Bastila Shan with no memory of who you are or what you were doing on her starship. You fall in with one of the good guys, who’s out to save Bastila after her escape pod crash lands somewhere on a Sith-controlled planet. Bastila is captured and handed over to the Sith lord Darth Malak, the evil badass who overthrew his own Sith master, Revan, for a chance to destroy the Jedi. Through events of the game - played either as a good guy or an evil one - the quest to get a hold of Bastila morphs into a quest to find star maps that will lead the player to the Star Forge, a battle station that will decide the outcome of the Jedi vs Sith conflict.



A little more than halfway through the game, a major plot twist is revealed: you are Revan… or you were until your prick of a team-killing apprentice Malak offed you. With this newfound knowledge, players have an even greater incentive to destroy Malak, regardless of whether they’re playing as a goody-two-shoes or the ultimate bastard. Then Bastila turns to the Dark Side - despite being the hoity-toity good-girl Jedi - and the player has a whole new set of plot points to navigate through to one of the game’s multiple conclusions.



Why it’s the Best:

Knights of the Old Republic has a lot to offer in the way of a good story - setting, plot, characters, a killer climax - to name a few elements. Developer BioWare had a leg up in setting on the count of borrowing almost everything from the Star Wars canon - but they did go the extra mile to make their own fan fiction and make it work for Star Wars. So even if you can bring yourself to dispute our claims that the climax is awesome and the characters were compelling, you can’t deny that this game felt like Star Wars in a way that Jedi Knight and Shadows of the Empire never did.
KOTOR is filled with interesting and talkative characters but the most compelling one in the whole story is you. In other games, your character is made for you - even if they do let you pick out the color of your hair and let you name yourself Pr1ncess McWh00pass. But KOTOR gave the player real choices that had real effects on the story. From being a girl to being totally evil, to making a Wookie kill his Twi’lek best friend, KOTOR’s story never ignored your choices. Instead they stretched the linear events to accommodate whatever you came up with and it made you, the main character - and the plot - that much more interesting.



Now the plot doesn’t sound like anything special: galaxy in turmoil, kidnapped chick, huge weapon, stuff happens. But when you actually sit down to play the game, the pace of the story keeps things from feeling like an endless grind and you will willingly suffer through side quests just to find out what happens next. Then comes the plot twist: you are/were/are going to be again the baddest of bad guys in the galaxy. Even if you had been playing as the perfect paragon of Jedi goodness until that point, the great reveal gives you pause. First you experience a barrage of philosophical questions: what makes a man evil; can evil be unlearned; etc.

And then you find yourself asking: “Wait, am I supposed to be evil? Have I been playing the game wrong?”

It’s a funny thing to see an entire generation of gamers grow up in one moment. That moment came when we poor souls who were conditioned to follow where a game led us stopped dead in our button mashing and realized that, no, we hadn’t been playing KOTOR wrong; we had a choice in the story. And whatever we chose, it would be effin’ awesome.

So of course KOTOR makes our list of best game stories - because it was our story, whoever we were when we played it on whatever path we chose to take.



Final Fantasy VI



The Story:

An oppressive regime is attempting to unlock magic that nearly destroyed the world a thousand years earlier. In the process of re-discovering these forbidden mystic arts, the empire creates magic-infused soldiers that harness destructive abilities not seen in ages, one of whom is finally driven insane and seeks to not only overthrow the empire, but also reshape the world in his twisted image. He eventually succeeds after finally discovering the source of all magic - three statues that house actual gods - and plunges the planet into ruin. Your party, having failed to stop the nutcase in the first place, is scattered across the globe and has to try all over again to stop a man that seemingly has all of creation under his sociopathic control.

You can condense it further to "crazy guy becomes all-powerful, wrecks the planet, then is killed by heroes" and it loses all semblance of depth. But pry just a hair's breadth deeper and you'll find a cast of characters that rivals anything else on the market, past, present and most likely far into the future.



Why it's the best:

Final Fantasy VI is all about personality. Each lead in this 14-strong ensemble cast has a distinct past, a reason to fight and a load of emotional baggage that'd make the staunchest of psychologists weep. Terra, after being used as a puppet of the empire, finds she's the product of a union between a human and an Esper, who are all that remain of magic in the world. She's an unholy mix that frightens the heroes and excites the villains, all alone in her quest for identity. Cyan has to watch his entire castle, wife and child included, poisoned and killed. After the world is destroyed, Celes believes all of her friends are dead and attempts suicide in one of the most heart-tearing moments we've ever witnessed in gaming. The soul-shearing barbs keep coming throughout the story, making FFVI much more personal than any before it, and arguably any since.



See, this was the last Final Fantasy that had to focus on story and characters because the graphics were too primitive to showcase anything but blinking eyes and sagging heads. Even FFVII, widely hailed as the best thing that mankind has ever created, resorted to stereotypes and flashy cinemas instead of nailing down an unrivaled narrative. FFVI stands as the last line of defense against modern-day, style-over-substance RPGs. You spend so much time appreciating the technology that you forget how silly and trite some of the interactions really are.

Then there's Kefka. We named him one of the series' best villains before and aren't about to step down from that opinion. By the time you run into him, he's already lost his mind and is well on his way to overthrowing the empire and claiming ultimate power. Like literally, ultimate power. Once imbued with said abilities, Kefka takes a scalpel to the planet, ripping up continents and murdering vast numbers of people just to see if he can. Then, with what's left, he creates a towering pile of refuse and junk to act as his massive throne. His reaction? Laughter. Constant laughter.