I found the GOTY discussions to be rather frustrating because there was no genuine consensus there: it felt very much like people were just keen to get their pet games "the nod" of being in the top ten.
Really the two games that stood out as essential features of the top ten were The Last Of Us and Bioshock Infinite. Neither Zelda nor GTA V nor Mario (unfairly excluded from the final ten to pave the way for Rogue Legacy) really had the importance to contend for the Game of the Year title, and the rest of the titles that made the top fifteen or so will look in the future more like hipster daydreams than they do now, (which is really saying something).
2013 was a terrible gaming year on the basis of what I personally played. I sketched out a top nine earlier today and, of those, three were games from previous years and one (Bravely Default) was a demo! If you rearranged my choices to include only genuine 2013 releases you'd get: 1) Bioshock Infinite, 2) Brothers, 3) Kingdom Rush: Frontiers, 4) Ni No Kuni, 5) GTA V. Of those I'd say that only Bioshock Infinite and Ni No Kuni were real GOTY contenders, and the extent that No No Kuni had been completely missed by too many Bomcbast staffers came out during the "best new character" discussions.
One of the problems for me with Giant Bomb's list is that there's too much stuff there that plays only to journalists. Two or three hours of gameplay that you can base an article on may play well to people who are facing deadlines and want to get on with their lives, but most gamers want to assess the year in terms of hundred-hour-stealing monsters. When the Giant Bomb staff in general can't summon up the enthusiasm to play through really substantial games such as Ni No Kuni or Fire Emblem: Awakenings it's hardly surprising that you end up with the lowest common denominators being games they could power through in a single sitting. Even then, too many people seemed to be waving through games that they either hadn't played or, worse, actually disliked.
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