Needless to say, I haven’t played the worst games this year. My free time is limited and valuable so I usually only play games that I like or am looking forward to. One glance at Steam Greenlight is all I need to know that there is worse out there than one I played. So this list is going to account for what I have played this year and may not even include bad games. Disappointing ones will be on this list as well.
So, without further ado, an arbitrary list of the worst games I played this year that were also released this year.
1. Bravely Default: Flying Fairy
I was looking forward to this game a ton. An RPG that harkens back to the golden age of console RPGs with an intricate job system? They even went through the trouble of giving it it’s own look rather than make it a Final Fantasy spinoff like they had initially anticipated. And after all was said and done, they may as well have. Bravely Default is an absolutely derivative title, essentially being nothing more than a modern take on Final Fantasy V. Every modern convenience thrown in (controllable random battles, exp, and difficulty sliders) is overshadowed by how dated the rest of the game feels.
Stocking attacks has never been entertaining in an RPG and this game is no different. Other wise it plays exactly as a 2D Final Fantasy made two decades ago. The story is bad, the beautiful concept art is traded in for nightmarish chibi figures, the characters are rather annoying, and apparently the game becomes a repetitive mess in later levels. I wouldn’t know, I barely breached Act III before boredom finally won out. My heart goes out to those who lasted longer than I.
The one upside is the job system is put together well and the ability to mix and match them is fun, but the grind to get the most out of them is another carry over from an age where we were far more tolerable of it.
2. Destiny
No other game disappointed me more this year than Destiny, the concept I am still in love with that likely won’t exist until Destiny 2 or 3. What Bungie built is an excellent foundation for a game that will be sold to us piecemeal over the next year or two while trying to make us once again salivate over the idea that the sequel will be the game they promised us in the first place. Thanks, but no thanks.
I already talked about Destiny at greater detail here, so I’ll keep this one short. Much like the first Assassin’s Creed game, I doubt I’ll ever hop on this series’ bandwagon again.
3. Super Smash Bros. for 3DS
Now, I don’t like the idea of portable fighting games in general and Smash Bros. is no exception. I love this series, for better or for worse, but I was always going to skip out on the 3DS iteration. That changed when Nintendo announced that players who registered both the Wii U and 3DS copy would receive the soundtrack for free (Mewtwo DLC hadn’t been annoucned yet, which was another nice addition). So for me I was essentially paying $40 for a limited print soundtrack of the game, which was fine by me.
I think I played the actual game on 3DS a grand total of 3 hours before I gave up. The 3DS slide pad is terrible, especially for how crucial it is in the game, and the screen is far too small to accommodate just how hectic the fights get. Super Smash Bros. on 3DS is exactly what critics of the series have always claimed it to be, a mess. I do not feel hyperbolic in saying that PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is a better portable version of it’s parent game.
4. The Letter
At some point over the summer after picking up my Wii U I was heading to the eShop to purchase Earthbound when I noticed a game being sold for fifty cents. That game was the letter and it claimed to be a horror game. I knew at fifty cents it couldn’t be anything good, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt my wallet either.
Maybe it wouldn’t hurt my wallet, but it certainly hurt my brain. The Letter is an unfinished game that somehow made its way to Nintendo’s store. Stock art assets appear everywhere, the game has no direction outside of blank white sheets of paper with the what can laughably be called the plot typed on them in Microsoft Word. From what I played of it — I made it to level 2 — the level design is not only nonexistent but bafflingly amateurish, consisting of a closed of valley containing a construction site, a barn, a playground, a what I guess was an oil pipe.
I don’t miss my fifty cents, I feel I got a chuckle or two out of playing for an hour or so, wandering aimlessly looking for the next piece of paper that might clue me in as to what was going on. But it is without I doubt the worst game I played this year.
The ABC's of Gaming 