[magus113]

Love me or hate me here's my list:

Zelda - Ocarina of Time

Once again, at the top of my list, and not because it was extremely meaningful to me when I was younger. It was, but the problem was I never finished it until I got the Wind Waker special pre-order bonus disc that had the game on it.

But maybe that's why it was so good to me. To think that after four years and new advancements in technology I could go back and start the game fresh, and it still is as compelling and fun to play as it was when I (unsuccessfully) played the game back when it was popular to be into it. (Kind of a moot point because people still love to love this game, but again, all for good reason).

Zelda - Twilight Princess

Uh oh. More Zelda in the list? Don't care. Simply don't. I played the Wii version, and this was at a time where my purchasing/finishing games ratio was absolutely skewed towards more purchases than completion. I hadn't been this bad until...well recently with more of my used game purchases for older consoles.

Twilight Princess to me was an amazing way to take the storytelling from OoT and expand on it, with the missing princess, your relationship with your helper (Midna), and exploring two worlds that while similar were also different (although OoT definitely saw more differences between the two; you could argue the other world in TP was the same world with a filter over it). I dunno, I was amazed at how good a Zelda game could be. It was like playing and finishing the OoT that I never did years ago.

I felt this attachment to these characters and this world and you can believe that I was sad when the events of the ending came to pass. I still watch the ending on YouTube from time to time to make sure that the way the ending came together with the music, and the plot conclusion came out were as good as I remember it, and it still is. I blame the music for my attachment to it mostly. I'll listen to the end credits music over and over because every note from the part with Midna to when the words The End come up are pure gold.

Shadow of the Colossus

This was my first entry in the Team Ico world as I had never played Ico simply because I never knew what it was and never bothered to spend the money to find out (I eventually bought the game and played through it, but that's neither here nor there). I had burned Shadow of the Colossus out of curiosity for my then hacked PS2 because I had seen it on top PS2 game lists and I wanted to know what the fuss was about, and boy did I find out quickly.

It's another perfect example of great simplicity in it's storytelling by just having you, your horse, this one girl who you shouldn't care about because to you the player, she has no real connection, and this voice that keeps instructing you on what to do and where to go.

I was just blown away by the scale of all of the colossi (except for maybe the bull; that thing was a douche and a half), the way the music changed to increase the intensity, all leading up to this ending where I personally stood shocked and saddened by the outcome. Simply amazing.

Chrono Trigger

I should say the Chrono series really, because Chrono Cross is the one more relevant to me as I was growing up since I didn't experience Trigger until my days of emulation, but Trigger is the only one I've come back to to get a refresher on the story, and to get 100% completion of as a matter of fact. I own the game both for the SNES now (bought it used in high school) and I have recently completed the DS version of the game so I got to experience it twice since the translation was different and they adjusted the controls for the battles blah blah WHATEVER. It's still as fun to play (and easy to break) as I remembered it being once I bought the original copy and finished it, and that was including going the extra mile to finish all of the side quests (including the new ones added for the DS version) just to see that one new ending that tied the game a little more to Chrono Cross.

For the record, I'm usually against Square Enix retconning (see: Shinra in Final Fantasy X-2 possibly being some crazy ancestor of whomever started Shin-ra in FF7 and the baby son of the last dragoon in FF2 being named Kain or some shit like that). This ending probably is just that retconning, but I was at least curious enough to experience it myself instead of delegate that time to doing a YouTube search to see it.

Silent Hill 2

It wasn't my first foray into the series. It wasn't my last. It was definitely the best for me though. It was where the series really hit its peak. It wasn't scary because it was scary. It was scary because it didn't need to be. It did enough psychological scarring from the imagery of Pyramid Head and all the other new monsters that it didn't need to scare you. It knew that it was gonna have it's effect on you without a cat jumping out of a locker out of nowhere to make you jump.

Akira Yamaoka's music is another reason the games have stood so well after so long as well. It's industrial. It's ambient. Sometimes it's more one than the other, but it knew when it needed to be one or the other. It drew you into the town with it's fantastic sound direction. Yamaoka's departure is probably marking the official departure of the series, because at least Homecoming and Shattered Memories were okay. Who knows about Downpour, and for fuck's sake Book of Memories is an isometric top-down multi-player game. They can't even do the re-dub of voices right in any way for Silent Hill 2, and the voices were what drove the game to where it did as well. It was miles away from the voice acting in the first game.

Okay I'm done I swear