Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3

"He found me cryin' like a baby at the convenience store, surrounded by a bunch of coffins."

We can't find ourselves on top of each and every series worth playing. If you took RPGs alone, there'd surely not be enough hours in the day for you to experience them all, so you've got to stick with what you know and like, or go and explore something that comes highly recommended by someone you trust.

It took me far too long to listen to people pleading for folks to play the Yakuza series. Have I made the same mistake by overlooking Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3?

In the right circles, all you hear is Persona this, Persona that. Shin Megami Tensei is too foreign a title for me to get behind, it's too weird, I'll never be in the right frame of mind for that, I thought. But even the series' title has fallen as game after game gets released and re-released as Persona something or other.

There's something going on here. A world I know nothing about, but one that people have high praise for. What's going on?

Jeanne d'Arc

Mon Dieu!

Some historical stories just beg to be retold, and the life and times of Joan of Arc is one such tale. A French peasant leading an army against the English because she heard God telling her to do so? Sounds like there's at least a little something to explore in all that, right?

What about if we added magic and animal-headed companions and anime, though? Well, we'd get Jeanne d'Arc, the tactical RPG for the PSP, from the minds behind Dark Cloud and Rogue Galaxy, and more. Geez guys, just stop it already, let other developers make it onto this 1001 list, yeah?

Hitman: Blood Money

"Names are for friends... so I don't need one."

I'm a fan of the Hitman series. Not a massive fan - I still haven't gotten around to the latest trilogy yet - but a fan nonetheless. Thanks to the success of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin on the PlayStation 2, I was introduced to the series, but didn't venture out to play them all, with Hitman: Blood Money being one that I didn't bother playing.

A mate did. He said it was good. That's about all I know of the game, beyond the obvious 'murder people and get away with it' deal that Agent 47 has going on...

I imagine this to be a great improvement on the formula, perhaps easier to control for console players. Not as brutally strict with its enemy AI as previous instalments have felt. Eh, enough speculating, more discovering.

Guitar Hero II

Clack Clacklack clack Clack Clack Clack

I am so close to writing "It's more of the same, move along" and just call it a day, but apparently Guitar Hero II is more than that. It marks the point at which the series showed the music world that these kind of games are going to stay, and at the same time represented the series peak before the developers split off to do Rock Band while the Guitar Hero name was dragged around the world.

Or something. I'm not really interested. One clacky plastic instrument functions the same as another, does it not?

Let's get this over with.

GTR 2 - FIA GT Racing Game

Realism Redefined

I called GT Legends a 'museum for the forgotten', a game of old circuits and older cars, simulated to degrees far above what I was expecting. I like GT Legends, novice driver that I am.

A year later, the simulator picks up the pace considerably in the form of GTR 2 - FIA GT Racing Game, allowing players to get behind the wheels of cars from the 2003 and 2004 FIA GT Championships, complete with a dizzying array of realism settings and sliders to give you the closest taste of racing you can get without wearing flame retardant overalls.

I get the distinct impression I won't be winning many races in this one, but we'll see how we fare nonetheless.

flOw

It's so safe to play along.

Source // PlayStation

If there's only one unusual trilogy on the PlayStation 3, it has to be the non-trilogy that is flOw, Flower, and Journey. The 1001 list was written years before the release of Journey, but it would definitely get a spot on the list alongside the other two games.

These games aren't anything alike or connected beyond the fact that they are pretty chill experiences, asking you to reflect as much as play and explore. If video games have too much going on for your liking, maybe you just want to drift through life as an amoeba-looking thing in the first game, flOw.

God Hand

"You can wax on, wax off all you like. I'm still kicking your ass."

I've been playing an awful lot of Yakuza 0 recently, and no matter how many fights you get into, it's always fun to just destroy your opponents. You don't just knock them out, you squash their face into parked cars and smack them around the head with baseball bats. Every hit is felt and they all seem to hurt quite a bit.

Take out all the boring Yakuza plot and you'd have God Hand, a game all about destroying your opponents with equally satisfying and wince-inducing assaults from your fists and feet. The beat 'em up just got brutal...

Ōkami

"A handsome guy like me should never be covered in wolf slobber!"

Source // PlayStation

Games and art. They are one and the same, no? A game is a work of art whether it looks like a Hollywood film or a piece of garbage. Who are you to judge what is and isn't art? Some games take more obvious inspiration from the world of art and have a style of their own based upon brushstrokes and line drawings. Cel-shaded games can be found everywhere in the last two decades, but there's only one that allows you to get your own brush out and change the game directly (please let there be only one).

Taking on the role of saviour of the land/divine being Amaterasu, Ōkami has you control both a wolf on a mission and a spiritual brush with ink that can change the world. It's not too often you can describe a game like that now, is it?

Final Fantasy XII

"I am simply myself. No more and no less. And I want only to be free."

They just don't stop coming, do they? Final Fantasy is the gift that keeps on giving, should you be a fan of the JRPG series with far more entries and versions and spin-offs than I'm even aware of. I'm still very much an outsider, even having played a few for this 1001 list, but you can't not know about FFVII, or FFX, or FFXIII.

You can picture the art style, you can have a pretty good guess at who the main characters are, even if you don't know their names... but when I tried to remember anything I had come across for Final Fantasy XII, I was drawing a complete blank. No characters sprang to mind. No look, no environments, no mechanics. Nothing. Was this the black sheep of the family?

For once, I'm actually going into an FF title completely blind, rather than mostly. What will I find?

Art Style: Orbient

That's not how gravity works...

Games don't need stories. Stories can just emerge from gameplay. You can personify inanimate objects, moan when something bad happens to them, cheer at something good. That's pretty much all the story you'll get from Art Style: Orbient, a gravity 'simulator' puzzle game that has you control a star drifting through the galactic neighbourhood.

And for the old folks out there, it uses just two buttons. Wow. Stripping gaming back to its roots here, eh? Let's find out how many laws of physics we need to relearn.