Young Writers Society

There has never been more of a cinematic experience than with The Last of Us. But the games with the most staying power for me have always been Kingdom Hearts and KH 2.

I have two I am a complete nerd for. Actually, nerd is a bit of an understatement for how much I obsess over these games. They're both a series btw.

The Legend of Zelda

Kingdom Hearts

It'd be extremely hard for me to specifically pick out my favorite game from their trilogy, so I'm going to leave that unanswered. >.< But seriously, we are instant best friends if you like either of these games.

Right now I really really am loving Fantasy Life for the 3DS.

It's a rather simple game, you have several jobs you change between and you basically follow a simple plot, then get to the end, and just... live, but I really love those games.

Some of the charm for Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon is that you don't really have to fight at all, just live life, like life is lived [plus a lot of time constraint and chores that you'd never have to do in real life.] and I find that in Fantasy Life with the challenge to succeed being my ability to craft and create what I want to make.

Zelda is also amazing
and Pokemon,
and Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing,
and Rune Factory,
and uhh, I have madd respect for Desgaea and a place in my heart for MidBoss forever.

Love Harvest Moon and its variants too, but only the later titles. Started with Rune Factory 3, so I got used to the easier gameplay and faster pace and couldn't adjust when going backwards.

But that doesn't mean that I like easy gameplay. My main genre of video games is the JRPG, and I've gotten into pretty challenging ones: Shin Megami Tensei, Fire Emblem, DARK SOULS (game is like it's made for masochists).

Games like those are kind of an on and off experience for me though due to arbitrary grinding, unless the stories are really good. Dark Souls has really deep lore, as well as Metal Gear Solid, which is not an RPG. SMT only keeps my attention because it features mythical creatures from various cultures and I love my mythology.

Shout-out to some fighters and Character Action games too. God of War, Bayonetta (give in to the insanity), Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Marvel vs. Capcom...

Favorite game? Think that would go to Metal Gear Solid IV. Masterpiece of a game, and as it was an ironically great introduction to the series for me, it served as an amazing conclusion for the story of the Snakes (even though Kojima, the developer, is still making a sequel that takes place in between the main 4 games but is still called V).

EDIT:

Remembering more games after Kyo's mention of Ace Attorney, which is a great series. Trying to catch up and play all the games until the new one comes out if it ever does in the US. Like Fire Emblem, Ace Attorney's an overlooked title. The latest one was released for digital download only.

Another niche title similar to AA is the Zero Escape series. Only two games were made so far, 999 and Virtue's Last Reward. Instead of solving court case puzzles, you're trying to find a way out of a prison, either through playing the game your captor is forcing you to play or through other means. The games have multiple endings, and like every game like it, forces you to bactrack and get all the bad endings before the real one.

Memento Mori, when the Nineth Lion eats the Sun...

And the Mother series, another RPG but it has some unique mechanics, and a trippy but memorable story to boot.

The Last of Us has already been mentioned multiple times, and I'm just going to add another mention. It isn't my favorite, but it's great.

Bastion is another really great game. The visuals, gameplay, and music are just wonderful, and everything enhances each other.

Xenoblade is wonderful.

In the vein of games you've probably never heard of, Nostalgia for the DS is really cute. If you like JRPGs, it's definitely worth checking out, and it's usually available for pretty cheap since no one knows about it. The game definitely lives up to its name.

I can't believe no one's mentioned the Ace Attorney series yet. If you only play one of them, play the first. It's more a visual novel than a video game, but it's one of those games that you'll remember playing for a long while after.

Speaking of visual novels, I cannot not mention the glory that is HATOFUL BOYFRIEND. It's available on Steam. Go play it. It's even more entertaining if you read the original Let's Plays.

There's also Hakuoki. Also comes with a Let's Play.

Going back to more gamey video games, Fire Emblem is one of my all-time favorite franchises. My favorite one in the series is FE7: Blazing Sword (which was ported over as just Fire Emblem for the GBA), but FE13: Awakening is a really good intro to the series, and it's available for the 3DS. It also sees the return of some really old gameplay mechanisms, which I was really happy with. I don't recommend playing FE11: Shadow Dragon unless you've already played FE1: Dark Dragon and Sword of Light because while the graphics are lovely, they really didn't do anything to update the gameplay and it's a pretty terrible play experience if you don't have a ton of nostalgia to help the pretty graphics make the game shiny for you. FE12: Heroes of Light and Shadow unfortunately never made it overseas due to FE11's huge flop, but it's pretty fun and it introduced quite a few of the mechanisms (namely the player unit and class changes) that helped make FE13 a huge success.

I like Fire Emblem a lot and it's a really under-appreciated/relatively unknown series, so I ramble about it whenever I get the chance. >.>

My all-time favorite video game though remains LoZ: Ocarina of Time, though A Link Between Worlds is a really close second. I love all of the Zelda games, and I've never been disappointed. I'm pretty excited about the Majora's Mask remake for the 3DS even though MM is my least favorite Zelda game (the entire game is a giant timer and I hate timed missions).

And there's a ton more games that I would recommend if I could remember them off the top of my head right now. >.>

EDIT:

How could I forget the Persona series? Persona 4 is the most accessible, and it's also my favorite because it's a lot more lighthearted than the others. It's worth noting that the Persona series is a spin-off of the Shin Megami Tensei series, which is also worth playing. Another spin-off of SMT is the Devil Survivor series. All of them share monsters and basic game mechanics (to an extent), but they have very different storylines and timeframes. The Persona series also has its own spin-off, Persona 4 Arena, which is completely different gameplay-wise, but is a sequel to Persona 3 and 4 story-wise.

SMT is really big.

At the moment I would have to say Majora's Mask is my favourite. Never played the original so I got the 3ds version on my birthday last year and played it until completion because I am a sucker for punishment. What captured me about it was the atmosphere it had managed to create just by having a large frowny face emoji looking down on you (I honestly preferred this to Ocarina of time, which I didn't care much for please don't hate me but for a puzzle game it was light on puzzles for the most part).

I also have to say I have a thing for kickstarters at the moment, possibly because their mostly spiritual successors of acclaimed games that were before my time... anyways is anyone looking foward to BLOODSTAINED? If so what do you think is neat about it (.e.g. the fact that koji igarashi may appear as a boss/guest appearances from other indie heroes such as shovel knight/that opening theme).