It’s time for the only Games of the Year awards that matter!
… Just kidding, no GotY awards matter. But I like doing them (which does, in fact, make this more relevant than the VGAs), so here we go.

I am choosing 5 winners, and then one TOP GAME OF THE YEAR winner, just to attempt at variety, and then posting all my honorable mentions which are games I liked but that weren’t GotY material. This is obviously going to be based on games I played myself (which is still over 50 games, even though I reviewed very few of those). So if there’s a game you liked and it doesn’t appear as one of my winners or honorable mentions… it’s because I didn’t play it. And I probably didn’t play it because it was obviously bad.

As far as notable games I skipped one that aren’t bad (or probably aren’t bad), there’s still a few of those. I skipped on both Like a Dragon games, Baldur’s Gate 3 (I will get it at some point), Persona 5 Tactica, Remnant 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Lies of P, Dave the Diver and probably a bunch of other games that were pretty popular and probably-good. Also didn’t play FF16 which… I’ve not been convinced it’s good, but I’m waiting for the PC version so I will review it when I do play it.

And there’s a few obviously bad games I didn’t touch, like Alan Wake 2, Starfield, Redfall and Diablo 4 (I played the beta, it was not good, so I skipped on the full game). And of course there’s some bad games I did play, like Forspoken and Sonic Superstars… or that were fairly subpar like Spongebob Cosmic Shake.

As a general rule, remakes and remasters will not make the list unless they’re substantially different from the original, but some might make it into the honorable mentions.

Anyways, time to rant quickly, then go through the winners and stuff. LET’S GO!

So this is the Game of the Year. Spoilers!

Yeah, when this was announced, I knew it would rank highly as one of my favorite games this year, but I didn’t know exactly how much.

This is a series that us non-japanese people haven’t gotten any of in a long while. The last game in the series we got in the west is Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2, in 2010. We missed on the Pro version of Joker 2 (which is particularly stupid because the Pro version came out in Japan 6 months before the vanilla version came out in the west… where’s the logic?). We missed on Joker 3 and its “Pro” version. We missed on the 3D remakes of DQM1 and DQM2. We missed on all the mobile games (Wanted, Super Light, and the mobile port of the 3D remake of DQM1) except for Tact which barely counts. And we even somehow missed on Terry’s Wonderland Retro which is just a port of the Game Boy version of DQM1 with some extra UI added around the game screen (with stuff like monster stats and labyrinth info)… which is a really fucking stupid game not to port to the west considering an english translation literally already exists from 25 years ago… It IS a fantastic series, but Squeenix hates us.

But when this was announced for a worldwide release, the hype was off the charts. FINALLY we get a new one!

So let’s see exactly how good it is… or whatever it is I’ll write after this, I have no idea.

IT IS TIME FOR THE GAMES OF THE YEAR 2022! I’m actually surprised at how good 2022 ended up being as far as games. There were a lot of good ones, so much so that I couldn’t play all the interesting ones. There was just no time. Not that all games were good, Sonic Frontiers and Return to Monkey Island exist, after all. But overall, there was plenty of good stuff.

So it is this time of the year where I can talk about all the great games I loved that came out that year. I usually do 6-7 GotY winners, one of which would be my grand TOP GotY choice, but I don’t know if I can do that this year.

I will also rant about the year as a whole, as usual, with a focus on the big 3.

There’s some games I was interested in during 2022 that I have yet to play, in case you’re wondering. Who knows if I’ll get to them, but if you think they’re really good and are sad they’re not named here, know that I probably hold no ill will against them, I probably just didn’t play it.

Amongst big games I haven’t played that could’ve had a chance: Digimon Survive (actually bought it but haven’t played it yet), A Plague Tale: Requiem, God of War Ragnarök, Horizon 2, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher, Choo Choo Charles, Signalis, Soulstice, Sports Story… and many others. A lot of interesting games came out this year, was a bit hard to get to all of them.

So let’s go!

Click here to skip to the winners if you’re not interested in my inane rantings.

2021. It was 2020 again, but weirder. On my side, I’ve been stuck in my house, working from home, since March 2020, I’m fine with that. Just working, working out, watching an unhealthy amount of vtubers and playing an unhealthy amount of video games. I had cataracts all of 2020 and early 2021 so I could barely see for a while, I got those fixed this year so that’s nice. I don’t really have much else to say on the non-gaming side of things, no big health emergencies in the family this year so that’s good. Not much activity overall. That said there was SOMETHING new… this website. I talked about this in the first post I made here, but I had a different site before this (called The Save Points, which originally was a group project but became a solo project fairly quickly), but ran into some DNS issues and decided to abandon the site I had built for the last 13 years. Switched how I did a few things, but yeah, having fun with this new site now. Definitely want to improve things a bit, I want to post more than I do.

As far as gaming, 2021 was actually pretty solid. I don’t know how it happened, but I constantly had something to play. Every month had at least 2 great games (plus a bunch of smaller decent games) which is not something that happens in most years. I didn’t even play all the games I was interested in this year, it was too busy. I didn’t even play too many stinkers, pretty much just Outriders, Axiom Verge 2 and NEO TWEWY.

So I have my own way of doing things for the GotY. Instead of being lame and choosing one winner, or being even lamer and doing a bunch of weird meaningless categories that have a ton of shitty nominations (made by people who hate video games), I just choose, like, 7 winners. I do put one winner on top of everyone else for maximum subjectivity, but yeah, 7 winners, the 7 best games of the year, let’s fucking go.

Since this IS an end-of-year post about the top games of the year, I do want to take the time to look back on some things, so I’ll rant about the console manufacturers a bit and whatever else catches my fancy, then select the 7 GotY winners. I also list a bunch of honorable mentions because I’m just a nice guy like that.

Oh hey I conveniently linked to the relevant sections if you want to skip my inane rantings. You’re welcome.

• Rant (seriously skip this part if you just want to see the winners)
• Games of the Year Winners
• Games of the Year Super Winner
• Honorable mentions

I will note before this that there are in fact games I haven’t played. So if a game you liked isn’t on the list, know that it’s either that I didn’t play it, or it sucked balls. It’s okay, you’re allowed to like bad games. Also I didn’t get a PS5 this year (for reasons I might rant about), so the one good exclusive on it is also a game I didn’t play. I’m sure Ratchet is great (impressions are basically all positive), I just didn’t want to buy a PS5 just to play that one game. I didn’t play Village (though I did analyze the gameplay from watching Gura playing it, it needs some help). I hear great things about Inscryption, I didn’t buy it. And there’s other games I’m interested in I didn’t play like Cruisn’ Blast, Super Robot Wars 30, Eastward and probably some others. I also literally just got a few other 2021 games that I will review later, maybe they’re good too.

Without further ado, let’s do this thing. 2021 Games of the Year let’s fucking go!