Check out http://world-8.net to see what Chase Koeneke, Bryan Edelman, and Jordan Baxter picked for their persona top 5, and listen to the latest World 8 podcast to find out which games won all of our crazy awards!

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Kirby's Epic Yarn

I'm no kid anymore, and I probably wouldn't want to be caught dead playing a game full of rainbows, gumdrops and butterflies (yes, this game actually does have all three of those things), but damn if Kirby's Epic Yarn doesn't make me wish I were 13 again.  I didn't have the privilege of playing many games around that age, but Kirby Super Star was one of the few and most fondly remembered, so he'll always hold a special place in my heart.  Epic Yarn puts on a cute facade, but there all still shades of that "hilarious badassery" from Super Star, because I still get to torment cute critters by dismantling them into pieces of yarn, blowing them up, or what have you.

The controls are super tight and responsive, just like a SNES platformer; the music is extremely catchy and faithful to the Kirby series; and I can't help but smile at every instance of Kirby treating the backgrounds of the levels like fabric that he can bend to his will.  It's the least challenging game I've played this year, but I don't need more frustration in my life as is.  Kids are going to love it, but for those of us who have outgrown our diapers, it will throw so much irresistible cuteness at you that you'll wish you were a kid again anyway.

Bit.Trip Runner

Speaking of not being able to play games when I was younger, I don't hold the same affection for "retro" style gaming that many others seem to.  I started in the middle of the 64-bit era, so the novelty of a modern game designed to evoke the sense of old-school through pixels and blocks is lost on me.  Guess what?  All of that is totally, 100% inconsequential when it comes to why Bit.Trip Runner is amazing.  It's the simplest platformer I've ever played in terms of mechanics, but damn if it doesn't get balls-to-the-walls hard.  I refused to surrender, though, because the music so perfectly matched up with my emotions.  Missing a jump and starting back at square one causes the once pulsating, lively music to die down, just like my spirits, but it still sounds calm and serene, and that keeps me from blowing my top.  Whoever came up with the idea of this game is a certified genius, and I want to see more developers copy it.  It's the only WiiWare game I bought this year, and I don't regret it for a single moment.

Super Street Fighter IV

Fighting games designed around the arcade stick always disappoint me in the end.  Not even with the original Street Fighter IV last year.  I was stupid enough to invest in an arcade stick for my PS3 last year, but even after purchasing SSF4 on a whim (yay for $40 retail price) and messing around with it at first, I saw no signs of improvement.  The precision required to compete at high level play was simply beyond my grasp.  "It does a Shoryuken every time I try to do Ryu's Ultra 1?  Screw this - I'm sticking with Smash Bros."

I still have these issues from time to time, but something just "clicked" with me eventually. SSF4 became the de facto gaming spectator sport not named Starcraft II, and I ate it all up.  Accepting the fact that these people who have dedicated all of their free time to mastering their characters were better than I'll ever be wasn't very hard, but I could at least take up pointers.  Now I know how to pull off a basic blockstring, the right time to throw, how to maintain two charges at once, and most importantly, how to make Guile put his shades on.

All fighting games stop benefiting from just adding more characters at a certain point, so when I first heard about the number of new characters being added to Super, I thought "35 characters in a serious fighting game is a bit much," but since playing and watching it for hours this year, I can no longer come up with a good reason why "35 is too much."  Some characters are going to be slightly statistically better than others in certain situations, and that's unavoidable, but SSF4 is the first fighter in a long time where I can't pinpoint a small handful of characters as "the obviously best ones" or "the most overplayed ones."  That's the definition of balance.  So even if I suck at it, I can't help but admire it, and I hope it continues to entertain me in some fashion for years to come. 

Mass Effect 2

I'm a relatively late bloomer to the whole RPG party, both Eastern and Western alike, but I do know that if it's an RPG from our current generation, I'm looking for a deep, interesting story and likeable characters.  OK - Mass Effect 2 is one of the sharpest-looking games for the 360, and it blends third-person shooting combat with RPG mechanics in a fun and unique way.  Great.  Fine.  Whatever.  You guys can have those.  Mass Effect 2 resonated with me because it was ABOUT the characters.  The entire structure of its narrative centers around meeting and acquiring members for your crew, convincing them to fight for your cause, and helping them resolve conflicts in their personal lives.  The game let me delve into these characters' minds, discovering every human (or alien) flaw that lied within them, and when you get attached to video game characters to the point that you wish you could hang out with them in real life, you know you've got a good game on your hands.

The series also continues to provide exactly what I'm looking for out of a dialogue system: the freedom to choose what you want to say, but without removing that character's voice or waiting for awkward pauses of silence in between exchanges.  I'm fond of a lot of other Eastern-style RPGs for different reasons, but I can't help but feel jealous that Mass Effect got the whole dialogue thing figured out before any of them.  Rip off BioWare, people.  No one is going to blame you.

Persona 3 Portable

Listen to our podcast World 8 for a single episode, and you'll figure out rather quickly that I'm certifiably crazy for Persona, mainly for those same reasons I listed above for loving Mass Effect 2: characters.  Atlus figured out how to have its cake and eat it too: Persona can be both a wildly fantastical and implausible adventure about kids traveling into other dimensions and summoning demons with their minds, but also a frighteningly accurate reproduction of the simple act of getting to know new friends in high school.  Somewhere under that anime-styled exterior are characters whose lives and personalities are so far gone from any preconceived stereotypes that they might as well be the people you knew from your own high school in real life.  These games tackle subjects that make you feel just as morally torn as you did when confronted by the same subjects during your own high school years.  When your high school friends suddenly confide in you for things like feeling confused about their sexuality, being accused of rape, or how to cope with their parents' divorce, what advice could you possibly offer at such a young age?  Whoever makes these games clearly has been put in these tough spots before and aren't afraid to shy away from them.  If the goal is to make real, believable characters, Persona's approach is refreshingly uncompromising and appropriately (but surprisingly) tasteful.

But enough serious talk.  I started with Persona 4, and right around the time I started considering picking up Persona 3: FES, Atlus went ahead and announced the portable version with additional features, convincing me to wait it out.  So you could say P3P is my new favorite game of 2007 and doesn't really belong on this list, but the female perspective might as well be its own new game.  It's something that I was willing to endure all of the pink menus and cheerful pop music for to experience, because it's an important perspective with tons of untapped potential that the series had been lacking.  Just seeing and hearing the original characters react to you in totally different ways was enough of a reward.  Atlus also took the opportunity to re-structure the Social Link schedule for the girl by more evenly spreading out the characters available for hanging out between daytime and nighttime, making the task of getting to the max S-Link rank with every character possible before the final day much less stressful.

The best thing I can say about Persona 3 Portable, though, is that Atlus made it more like Persona 4.  The save points are more reasonably placed around town, ranking up the S-Links of your party members has actual benefits in combat, and you can finally (and mercifully) take direct control over which actions your party takes instead of relying on flaky AI reasoning.  I also greatly appreciated the flexibility with which you could challenge yourself, and I was more than happy to take on the newer, more difficult Maniac mode and conquer all of its optional, unfairly difficult challenges (eventually).  Then there's Skill Cards - the option to just plop specific skills onto your Personas instead of passing those skills on through fusion.  On one hand, Persona 4 (and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, earlier this year) forced me to learn how Fusion works the hard way, and if I wanted a Persona to have a specific set of skills, I had to work decently hard (and get extremely lucky with the randomized skill rolls), so removing that element feels like a cheap cop-out for everyone who never got into the series because "fusing was too hard."  But when you sit back and think about it, why is that a bad thing?  If the game becomes more accessible for newcomers, that's the complete opposite of a bad thing.

If you're interested in RPGs in the slightest (especially for their stories and characters), you own a PSP, and you're on the "the longer the game, the better" end of the time/value spectrum, you can't beat a game designed to be played twice through for around 200 hours like Persona 3 Portable.  So go ahead and make your Dawson's Creek jokes.  I've got a Junpei hat, and you don't.  So there.