25. Skylight Freerange (Dragoon Entertainment, Playstation 4, 2014)

I bought Skylight Freerange because it confused me. I saw a screenshot of its sequel (Skylight Freerange 2: Gachduine) in a discussion forum about the worst game available on the Playstation 4 and it immediately intrigued me. Crude, cartoonish 3D models that all looked very similar to each other, but one of them was a huge blue face with black veins coming out of the eyes. It looked like a middle school project. I had to know more.

Looking up the game on the Playstation website,  plot details mentioned a post-apocalyptic Canada, and at this point I knew I would play the game someday. And it's my year of one game a day so I thought why not. I booted the game up expecting a weird, crude, singular experience, and that's pretty much what you get.

As mentioned earlier, the game is set in Canada in the year 2041 after a fire called "The Northern Burning" (wow) ravaged the country. The game begins and gives you a weirdly in depth character creator for how ugly every create-able character is. The game takes a lot of cues from Final Fantasy VII, from its blue-gradient menus to its story involving a rival who is a mythically powerful former member of your military unit. The story is chock full of enough made-up proper nouns thrown around that it gave me Final Fantasy XIII flashbacks.

Your created character is the leader of a squad of 8 other playable characters. The dialogue is for the most part very poorly written and very much feels like something that myself or friends would have written in high school. There is a weird character who constantly feels the need to remind you how weird she is. None of the characters are particularly likable, which is a real kiss of death for me in an RPG.  Other characters had a tendency to get homophobic, which turned me off of the game. 

The world feels extremely empty, moving around is sluggish, and every building has the same boring square architecture. The camera is horrendous; it constantly makes you feel trapped and even reading speech bubbles is difficult. The battle system is a ripoff of the gambit system from Final Fantasy XII, and battles themselves were either way too hard or way too easy. It does seem like there is a bit of depth in the battle system, but I can't be asked to sit though the excruciating dialogue or tedious exploration.

1/5, the least impressive game made by one person I've ever played (wow maybe that's too mean)