I am going to go out on a limb here and state outright that I assume no developers set out to make a mediocre game on purpose.  This is a bold claim, I know, but I’m going to stick by it.  The thing is, there are many choices a designer can make that, individually, don’t seem very critical, but when added together as a whole can water down an entire experience.  Add to this the comfortable ease in sticking with the tropes well-established in a particular genre, and before you know you end up with a final product that doesn’t really excel at anything it does, but doesn’t do anything that poorly, either.

When Suikoden Tierkreis was released a few months ago, I was a little trepeditious about picking it up, having no past experience with the series.  Sure, I could do some light reading on the internet to try and catch up, but that’s really not the same.  The thing is, I kept hearing good things about the game, from the general buzz of lots of people playing it, to a lot of very positive reviews (including Famitsu, who stated it was “a game with no noticeable flaws”).  Deciding to give it a closer look, it turned out that Tierkreis was a Suikoden spin-off, as opposed to a sequel, and had almost nothing to do with the core series itself.  Intrigued enough, I picked up a copy.

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With the end of the year in sight, one cannot help but give in to tradition and present some kind of look back on all that has gone on over the last twelve months.  2008 was a year that hit some really high highs, and some really low lows, and I’m not just talking about in gaming.  Fortunately, we’re only here to talk about the games, so that makes things a little easier.  With that in mind, let’s see what our Spectacle Rock team thought about the year that was…

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