Ni no Kuni is a stupendous game because there's so much to do in it, and because all of it is just so good. The hallmark of the greatest RPGs is that you don't want to stop playing them, and Ni no Kuni proudly joins that elite group of games providing such an enticing world that you can't imagine never having visited it. The only problem, of course, is that you may never want to leave.

Source: GameSpot

Few RPG franchises have stuck around this generation, but Tales hasnt lost its steam. The series entered this generation with Tales of Vesperia, and more recently saw Tales of Graces f for the PlayStation 3. Tales fans have long been frustrated with the entries that havent come to our shores, but with Namco Bandai announcing Tales of Xillia for North America, the Tales fervor lives on for ­another ­game.

Source: Game Informer

It's a shame there are so many problems with the core components because Rainbow Moon is quite enjoyable at times. Powerful enemies (usually part of a side quest) roam the land, some much stronger than you, so there's a constant pull to become stronger so you can finally stand in the same arena as these creatures. There's an undeniable rush when you finally topple a being who has hounded you for hours, and that blood lust pushes you forward to see what new beasts there are to slay. This lure is present in many role-playing games, however, and there's nothing Rainbow Moon does to separate itself from the crowd. Even with dozens of hours of content, Rainbow Moon is a flawed and uneven adventure that stumbles as often as it entertains.

Source: GameSpot

In many ways, playing Tales of Graces f is itself a parallel to the game's theme of friendship. Like getting together with an old friend, there are awkward moments when you must become reacquainted before the familiarity sets in. It's an often troubled friendship, too, with the difficulty spikes from bosses threatening to end the whole relationship on multiple occasions. Pushing through these hardships may be unpleasant, but it's worth persevering to see this charming tale through to its conclusion.

Source: GameSpot

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings - Enhanced Edition is an excellent port of a superb game, embracing many of the elements we love about RPGs without skimping on any of them. But it's the way it handles player choice in particular that makes it most notable. There are no contrived right-versus-wrong decisions to exploit. The results of your decision don't just influence minor details: they lead you down wildly disparate paths, each as entertaining as the others. The Witcher 2 is a mature game indeed--not just because of its sexual themes and violent images, but because of its complex portrayal of morally ambiguous individuals struggling in a morally ambiguous world.

Source: GameSpot

Mass Effect 3 has its flaws, but they're of minimal consequence in a game this enthralling. By filling the Milky Way with vibrant, singular characters, the series has given you a reason to care about its fate. Ostensibly, Mass Effect 3 is about saving the galaxy, but a galaxy is just a thing--an idea, an abstract, a meaningless collection of plutinos, planets, and pulsars. But the game is actually about saving people. And there's a big difference there. Watching cities burn from orbit tugs at your heartstrings; watching a beloved companion die cuts to the bone. Whether you possess a storied history with the series or come with a clean slate, Mass Effect 3 expertly entangles you in its universe and inspires you to care about its future.

Source: GameSpot

How much you love Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning depends on what you look for in a role-playing game. Let's say you long for a pervasive sense of time and place, for a great story featuring memorable characters, or for varied quests given weight by superb context. If that's you, then Kingdoms of Amalur will disappoint. Then again, you might want wonderful battles against cool creatures, terrific looting and leveling, and lots of ways to customize your skills and equipment. If so, then this is the world you should inhabit. The context is hardly inspired, but you'll be having so much fun that you may not care.

Source: GameSpot

Square Enix should be commended for addressing Final Fantasy XIII's problems and for once again delivering a fun and highly playable RPG glowing with visual beauty and saturated with simple but universal sentiments. Nevertheless, the improvements feel less weighty than they might have--mechanical triumphs in a game that feels less than the sum of its parts. You won't perform awe-inspiring summons as a matter of course, and the ending--well, the ending isn't likely to leave you with the sense of closure you might want. Yet the monster collection and time-hopping freedom alone are enough to make it worth embarking on this enjoyable adventure. Just remember to keep your expectations in check: Final Fantasy XIII-2 isn't a timeless adventure in the grand tradition of the beloved series. But if you're curious to see the next stage in this ongoing tale, there's no reason you shouldn't chase after Lightning. After all, she can't defeat Caius without you.

Source: GameSpot

Fans who were divided about Final Fantasy XIII's "corridor RPG" approach can rest assured that this sequel contains that semi-illusion of nonlinearity and choice present in past Final Fantasy titles alongside an assortment of activities to pass the time (so to speak). It also helps that the action and a majority of the game's mechanics are out in full force right after the fourth hour, give or take. The story requires extensive past knowledge of FF XIII, but there's a narrative recap of the prequel on the title screen if you are inclined to check it out.

Source: GameSpot

If you've played previous Elder Scrolls games, glitches and oddities don't come as a surprise. Nevertheless, Skyrim comes in a year graced with multiple quality RPGs that feature tighter combat, fewer bugs, better animations, and so forth. But to be fair, none of those games are endowed with such enormity. Yet The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim doesn't rely on sheer scope to earn its stripes. It isn't just that there's a lot to do: it's that most of it is so good. Whether you're slashing a dragon's wings, raising the dead back to life, or experimenting at the alchemy table, Skyrim performs the most spectacular of enchantments: the one that causes huge chunks of time to vanish before you know it.

Source: GameSpot

Your personal commander Shepard won't be available here; he (or she) is much too busy romancing aliens and punching reporters. Instead, a new character must be created from the game's most humanoid races--Asari, Turian, Drell, Krogan, Salarian, and human--and established cIasses. Your character's abilities are tied to his or her cIass (there are no racial abilities), and which weapons you bring is up to you. However, your cIass will determine firearm proficiency.

Source: GameSpot

Into that world of fantasy genre tropes, Dragon's Dogma brings an original gambit: customisable companion characters called pawns, of which three form the party that follow you around and into battle. Your primary companion character, your main pawn, accompanies you through the whole game. You create him or her in the same way you customise your player character, in a deep, multi-slider character generator, teeming with all the hairstyIe options, face and build variables, limb types, tattoos, and skin colours an obsessive amateur character designer could crave. You also select a cIass for your main pawn and establish their personality by completing a short questionnaire on their behalf. Personality governs your pawn's general AI-driven behaviour in combat.

Source: GameSpot

It's not fair. Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, and the rest of the fellowship get all the glory, but without the brave struggles of so many others, they never could have succeeded on their vital errand. The Lord of the Rings: War in the North tells the tale of three new heroes who helped make the fellowship's success possible, and it gives you much of what you'd want from a hack-and-slash role-playing game set in Middle-earth. There's plenty of great loot to collect, a number of powerful abilities to acquire, and tons of orcs and cave trolls to slay. Unfortunately, these bright spots only make it that much more disappointing when frustrations arise and overshadow this heroic adventure, as they so often do.

Source: GameSpot

Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny starts with a battle. That may be surprising for a series that bills itself as a fantasy farming simulation (a spin-off of the popular Harvest Moon franchise), but it sets the tone for a game that maintains everything fans love about the series while embracing more of its action role-playing trappings. The result is still a game that blends farming, monster taming, and simple dungeon crawling, but one with more emphasis on the latter. It's still simple, often slow-paced, and potentially monotonous, filled with systems that will turn impatient players away, but Tides of Destiny deviates from the formula just enough that it feels like a solid new entry in the series, rather than a simple repackaging of old ideas.

Source: GameSpot

Fallout: New Vegas - Lonesome Road is aptly named because the path you travel through this linear add-on is a solitary one. Your sole companion is a hovering robot that speaks in bloops and bleeps, though your adventure isn't devoid of human connection. This robot--ED-E is its name--also serves as a conduit of both the present and the past. In the present, a fellow courier named Ulysses growls solemnly at you through ED-E, tantalizing and annoying you with piles of vague, oblique dialogue. Meanwhile, snippets from the past tell you of ED-E's creation and creator. This narrative structure is thematically relevant: Lonesome Road is about the faded memories of the past and how they affect the choices you face in the here and now. It is an unusual adventure, more scripted and less open ended than you might have expected, but it's dotted with the kind of signature moments that Fallout: New Vegas typically lacked. This is the last of the game's downloadable adventures, and it's entertaining on its own terms, if not an expansive and explosive conclusion to the New Vegas tale.

Source: GameSpot

Dark Souls requires intense focus. This isn't a lighthearted romp in a bright and colorful fantasy world; it's a methodical journey into the frightening unknown. And that's what makes it so riveting. Some games try to scare you with bump-in-the-night shocks and far-off howls, but Dark Souls doesn't require such predictable methods of terror. Its terrors emanate from its very core, each step bringing you closer to another inevitable death. How amazing that such a terrible place could be so inviting. The game's world is so memorable, and its action so thrilling, that it might invade your thoughts even when you aren't playing, silently urging you to escape the real world and return to this far more treacherous one. Dark Souls doesn't just surpass other dungeon crawlers; it skewers them with a razor-sharp halberd and leaves behind their soulless corpses.

Source: GameSpot

The Disgaea series has always fused wickedly humorous storylines featuring ostensibly evil heroes with deeply strategic and rewarding battles. The good and bad news about Disgaea 4 is that very little has changed. A smart and funny tale invigorates this quest: the vampiric Valvatorez is perhaps the series' most likable hero yet, and he stars in what is almost certainly its richest and funniest story. But the battle system has seen little change since the previous entry, so as satisfying as the combat is, a feeling of sameness pervades this adventure. Still, Disgaea 4 gives you plenty of absorbing tactical concerns both on and off the battlefield, making it an enjoyable way to spend anywhere from a few dozen hours to a few hundred.

Source: GameSpot

Unfortunately, The Baconing does have two major strikes against it. Poorly balanced combat often makes you partake in tedious activities that lead to frustration rather than exhilaration. But the larger problem is that DeathSpank's latest adventure is just too similar to his previous offerings. For anyone who has played through the other downloadable efforts, there is a constant sense that you've done all this before, even though the jokes and environments are different. Because of this familiarity, the novel sheen that helped make earlier games so endearing has worn off to some extent, and the lows are more noticeable than before. This is still a fine effort, though, and there's even a handy local two-player mode to help you move past the overly long combat sequences much faster. The Baconing is a slightly deformed version of its predecessors, but there's enough merry fun here to satisfy those hungry for another thong-fueled quest.

Source: GameSpot

Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues' primary flaws are those that carry over from the main game. Entering VATS (the Vault-Assisted Targeting System) could result in a minute's worth of slow motion in which you never take a single shot or swipe at your target. Voice-overs might interrupt each other--a shame, when you want to savor the funny dialogue and fantastic acting. And the poor lighting and indistinct textures can make it difficult to spot mines or even quest items. But there's a good amount of content in here for enthusiasts--along with some new perks, a five-level increase to the level cap, and various weapons and clothing to take back with you into the Nevada wastes. You even earn a device called the transportalponder, which allows you to freely teleport between the crater and the desert. But the best reason Old World Blues gives you to return to Fallout: New Vegas is its nonstop humor, which is so outlandish as to make you laugh out loud, yet restrained enough to never be tasteless. At one point, you are told, "I have very good raisins for everything I do." And there is no better raisin to return to Fallout: New Vegas than this hilarious add-on.

Source: GameSpot

Dragon Age II: Legacy makes a valiant attempt to strengthen your bond with Hawke, but ultimately it makes little impression. Not that there's anything wrong with a bit of fun combat and a nice new set of armor. But there are few standout moments in Legacy, unless you count the glitches and other sloppy details you might encounter. This downloadable content is entertaining in its own mindless way, but without a forceful narrative arc to support it, Legacy is soulless. It just goes through the motions and nothing more.

Source: GameSpot