Character creation, for sure. That's pretty much the only reason I own SoulCal V. The Mister and I have a slew of characters from our imaginations to...well, a recreated Austin Powers. Story is a big one for me, but specifically those along the fantasy vein. It helps if there's magic and pretty artwork involved - Okami for instance. It doesn't need to be complicated or have realistic cgi to be visually appealing to me. Above all, I'd say humor is really attractive in a game. Nothing is more sad to me than when a game takes itself too seriously, gets pretentious, and kills itself with its own ego before I even pick up the sticks. When decent games come of it, I try to support those independent games. I'm personally sick of big companies running movie-scale tv ads for games that ultimately are more limited than their earlier titles. Oh and those lollipops...candy helps. [:
