GOTY 2016
2016 was a strange year for me. It was filled with moments and experiences that will probably stick with me for the rest of my life. I moved out of the suburbs of Cleveland to the actual city and was here to celebrate the Cavs first championship. I spent the Summer at Jacobs Field, watching my favorite team in my favorite sport put together a magical season that came oh-so-close to another championship. I was fortunate enough to get tickets to the International and got to spend a week in Seattle with my Dota friends from all over North America. It honestly was one of the best weeks of my life.
But, 2016 was also a year where I struggled through bouts of deep depression. There were times where I wasn't sure if it was worth it to keep going. I hated my job and moving to the city didn't suddenly ignite my social life the way that I had hoped it would. I felt hopeless that anything would ever change and there were more than a few days where I couldn't make myself get out of bed.
I haven't talked about this with anyone really which probably just made it worse. Why am I bringing it up in a Game of the Year blog? Well, writing about it is much easier for me than trying to find the words to say to someone in person. I can spend hours putting together my thoughts into something that is hopefully coherent instead of mumbling words that might turn into full sentences. Writing is cathartic for me and I haven't done nearly enough of it over the last few years. Mainly because I'm afraid of criticism (from myself and from other people) and because I just didn't make time to do it.
That's going to change. One of the things that I saw artists doing on Twitter and Patreon is drawing something every single day. It seems to be the best way to practice and improve and even though writing and drawing isn't exactly the same thing, the idea is the same. Starting with this list of my favorite games of 2016, I will be writing something on my blog on this site every single day. I'm probably going to keep it mostly about games, whether it be thoughts on a game I'm currently playing (for example, tomorrow's blog will be on Dishonored, Deus Ex, and Hitman) or why I'm looking forward to a specific game or something else. There probably won't be any fiction writing, at least not right away. Non-fiction, reporting style writing was always what I was better at (I was even a Journalism major at one point; maybe one of blogs will be about how I ended up switching majors if I can't think of a games story).
Oh, right, this is supposed to be a Game of the Year list. My Top 10 list, with my thoughts on each game, is below. There's a bit of a surprise at the top of the list if you happened to see any of my posts on various sites about what my top games of the year were. I swapped the order of a couple games while putting this whole thing together because the process of doing this reminded me of just how much I loved Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Whoops, spoilers.