Video games are a medium with heavily invested fans. This list could be near limitless. Perhaps more genre or console specific lists should be made in the future. Do you agree with this list? Have another Top 5 you'd like to see? Let us know in the comments below! Check out Gamezone.com for any news and reviews on your favorite series and subscribe to our channel.
1. Dark Cloud
Dark Cloud 2 is one of my favorite games of all time and its predecessor isn't too far behind either. They're dungeon crawling action games from the PlayStation 2. In both games, the world is more or less "destroyed" and all houses, people, and items are placed into these Georama spheres that the player must fight in dungeons to recover. You can rebuild towns how you see fit and basically make your own RPG villages. The first game had many characters to choose from, but the story was a little weak.
But Dark Cloud 2 had an amazing story involving two fully realized protagonists (as opposed to the 6 nearly-voiceless characters in the first). Their names are Max and Monica. Max is from the present where he lives in an industrial city where nobody has left for years, or else they'd notice the world around them has more or less disappeared. Monica is from the future and comes back to find out why the world's inhabitants disappeared and try to fix it.
This game has so much to it. City building, dungeon crawling, mech building, party gathering, weapon leveling, time travel, monster transformation and even a game similar to golf. Maybe it's nostalgia speaking, but I haven't found a game so chock-full of content sense. The voice work was even pretty highly praised with voice actors such as Scott Menville (Robin from Teen Titans), Philip Proctor (Howard Deville from Rugrats), Alan Oppenheimer (Falcor), Anndi McAfee (Cera from Land Before Time) and Paul Eiding (Roy Campbell).
This series deserves a comeback. If the jump in quality from the first and second one was any indication of the potential, just imagine the jump from 2, created in 2002, to a modern day sequel. The best part was the fact that it could truly be enjoyed by all ages. I know this from experience, as I've gone back to beat it at least three times in my life!
2. Beyond Good & Evil
Aah, Beyond Good & Evil 2… will we ever see you again? This Top 5 list was actually inspired from yet another piece of news involving the development of Beyond Good & Evil 2, a project that's been in and out of development for YEEEEEARS.
The latest news is that Nintendo may be looking into bankroll the series much like they did with Beyonetta 2. But for those who are unfamiliar, Beyond Good & Evil was a stealth action game set in a distant future on a dystopian world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals and humans alike. It's very cartoonish, but also has some pretty serious tons, which is turning into a theme with this top 5 list.
You play as Jade, a woman that fosters a number of animal-children and are assisted by her quote-unquote uncle Pay'j the boar-like creature. Jade takes it upon herself to do a little investigative journalism in retaliation to their poor treatment her people receive from their oppressive government. The game fits comfortably in between a platformer, a stealth game, and an action game. The most fun part of the game is the world itself. It's so weird and creative that I have been begging for more since 2003. There's still no word on any sort of details or even a release year for Beyond Good & Evil 2, but the fact that it keeps sprouting up in the news can't mean that its dead.
3. Banjo Kazooie
Pretty much everyone who owned a Nintendo 64 knew about Banjo Kazooie. While Super Mario 64 was the system's herald, Banjo Kazooie seemed to take everything that was good in Super Mario 64 and made it better. They didn't stop there though, Rare Entertainment made a game that was amazing in its own right.
Banjo Kazooie was the talk of everyone who played video games. The way they utilized two characters as one, the creativity of the world, and the clever traversal of the levels made this game a beloved treasure.
But in the end of the N64 era, Rare looked into potential buyers from other publishers due to the rising costs of game development in 2002. Microsoft bought them and it was then that Rare started to, quite honestly, lose their touch. With a number of flopped in-house projects and the eventual focus on the Kinect years later in 2009, Rare kind of floundered compared to their glory days.
It's quite possible that we may never get another Banjo Kazooie again, but a number of former Rare employees actually founded a studio called Playtonic Games and are working on a spiritual successor with the indie title Yooka-Laylee: A game staring a Chameleon and a Bat that bare a striking resemblance to Banjo and Kazooie. Yooka-Laylee even has very similar music and platforming. It plans to release in October of 2016
4. Crash Bandicoot/Jak & Daxter
Naughty Dog deserves plenty of credit for most people's memories of the PS1/PS2 days. Crash Bandicoot was essentially the mascot of the PlayStation, and even spawned retaliations to both Mario Kart and Mario Party. On the PS2, they more or less moved onto Jak & Daxter, a series I also loved at the time.
The best part about Naughty Dog was that, being a 90s kid, I felt like they grew with me. In my younger days, I stomped around the forest collecting Wampa Fruits with Crash Bandicoot. In my teenage years, I joined Jak & Daxter as they grew from a Crash clone to their own gritty, somewhat angsty characters. It was during the PS3 days that Naughty Dog moved onto more realistic worlds with Uncharted. While Uncharted is a great series in its own right, Crash and Jak & Daxter had a certain element that's been missing ever sense, which is why I lumped them both together for number 4.
5. The Mark of Kri
I'm not sure how many people remember this game, but it was released on the PS2 in 2002. It was created by SCE San Diego Studio and was heavily influenced by Polynesian culture. I liked to call the art style "If Disney went Rated R" because it was cartoonish and exaggerated yet gruesome and violent in nature.
The Mark of Kri was a stealth action game where the protagonist Rau takes on a mission as a favor, which leads him to learn about an evil organization known as the Kasai.
The story is somewhat loose and the motivation behind reminds me of epics such as Beowulf. Rau does missions to keep his people safe and eventually because he learns that it's his destiny. The reason I find myself wanting more from The Mark of Kri is because of the simplistic nature. Rau does this because he's destined. That mixed with the otherwise severely under appreciated Polynesian culture really makes this game ripe for the picking. It spawned a sequel called Rise of the Kasai in 2005, which was also great, but absolutely nothing has come from this series sense.
While gaming is a relatively new means of entertainment, it has been around long enough for some series of games to fall to the wayside. It has also advanced at an alarming rate, and with that, sometimes the reason we love certain games is lost. There are a number of games out there that weren't released too long ago, but deserve to make a comeback and we aren't talking about a remastered version of old games.
We want new and good additions to these games series.
