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Take a bow, Asura's Wrath. Take a bow for the lost and forgotten, the unloved hundreds of games that end each year as digital landfill with no-one to stick up for them.You were released in the first quarter, which from the vantage point of all the best-of-the-year lists might as well have been a decade ago. You're not a triple-A blockbuster or a cool indie. You were made by a developer known (if at all) for churning out licensed games. Your fading second-string publisher only had the marketing budget to push a couple of games this year - and you weren't one of them. You're a genre piece, but not a conventional one, and that meant that most people misunderstood you.
Take a bow for your brothers in arms: Binary Domain, Kingdoms of Amalur, Catherine, The Last Story, Unit 13, Yakuza: Dead Souls, Armored Core 5, Warriors Orochi 3, Kid Icarus: Uprising and dozens more of the great games that end each year as cultural flotsam on the beach of indifference. Solid, characterful, double-A genre games like these used to be the staple of an entire industry, but as the market for boxed console games shrinks and publishers get more gun-shy, there are fewer of them every year. You'll miss them when they're gone.
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