Game of the Year 2017 Day Four: Debut, New Characters, Story, and Styyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyle

Good thing Hellblade is getting acknowledged other places because giant bomb has completely ignored this game. The brief 20 second discussion about that game on day two was really sad especially considering how much they want to talk about the emotion of something like Nier or Dream Daddies, Games that have been talked about to death practically everywhere. Even after all these years I still sometimes have to remember that even though I love this website and hearing them talk about games they generally never seem to have a very diverse cross-section of games. Anytime someone does, like Jason, he is basically told “ you have 60 seconds to talk about this “. I get that that is a joke but at the same time I think it’s pretty indicative of game discussion in general on the site.

Abby should have won Best New Character ?

Wow, I could so easily get banned for saying what I have to say about the best story winner being this not something else. Wow.

Persona 5 got ROBBED!

How did Persona 5 not win Best Style? That's wild.

Persona 5 got ROBBED!

Persona 5 has the best style of any game I've ever played. Cuphead should be nominated, but I found the gameplay and the visuals to be at odds with each other at times. Both work extremely well independently, but put together there are some issues. The focus required to play the game superseded appreciation of the art style for me, while time spent trying to admire the animations led to frustration at the hands of the gameplay. The game was amazing but style wise its two biggest draws felt incongruent at times.

Great write up as always!

Let me talk to you for a second about Persona 5's menus...

Don't matter what people say, Cuphead is the rightful winner to Best Style.

Persona 5 has nice style, but it's pretty much just a natural evolution of Persona 4's style and overall it has been done before multiple times on videogames. No game so far as done such a good job of representing a specific era in such an amount of detail as Cuphead. Also, Cuphead was the game that made everyone want to play it just based on a couple of seconds on a reel, because the game looked cool. That alone is enough reason to highlight it on Best Style.

I'm really bummed by how Horizon has been just ignored completely in these discussions. It has been pushed aside in basically every category and at the very least I thought it'd get something during Story/New Character but it just got the shaft. I don't quite get it.

I think it could be Mario, Zelda, Wolfenstein, or Night in The Woods too. The strengths of the games you mention are specific to categories, whereas the strength of Odyssey for instance is in the gameplay itself. I think PUBG could easily win but that game has a host of problems and some of the staff seem like theywould be very resistant to it winning overall GOTY.

I think this is the first day of deliberations that didn't leave me completely baffled (Best Debut aside--PU has made this game before, my duders). I wasn't as high on Nier as most but I did dig the story. And Bayek is bae.

I like Bayek, but I don't love him as a character. Oh well.

Edit: Also as a representative of the "anime avatar", I just want y'all to know I'm keeping my cool.

PASCAL GOT ROBBED

Agreed. It really sucks that this great game feels like it's getting completely screwed over for weird reasons.

I feel weird thinking it but after listening to "Best Debut" today and Horizon getting shafted again, and somehow PUBG continues to be hoisted onto this "It's like nothing we've ever seen before" pedestal (even though we have), I kinda lost all interest in the rest of these discussions. I'm not interested in hearing the topics for day 4. It seems like madness to me.

I'll probably check in on the GotY talk but all these other categories seem pre-destined. PUBG will probably win for Best Story because it's all about the crazy story you create as the player and with your friends.

Because they're talking about Best STYYYYYYYYYYLE, not best Story.

PERSONA 5 WAS ROBBED.

It is weird to have PUBG as a best debut when it really is just the first one of these that really caught on with the biggest crowd.

I think that's worth acknowledging but it just sounds strange.

i think it really comes down to the fact of when it was released, it came out and then a week or so later Zelda came out. No one played or finished Horizon because Zelda came out, and when they played it later in the year they didn't really stick with it. I find it mind-boggling too, since Jeff played it up to being one of his favorites of the year when he played it.

lol @mike was right, lots of people getting mad up here.

EDIT: Looks like you already were ready.

Persona got what it deserved.

I completely agree with this for every reason described. It's a shame. It's unquestionably in my mind the "most 2017 video game."

Yeah, seriously. Cuphead has such an incredible style that people look at the game and think 'holy fuck! This is actually a real video game? How the fuck...?'

Which made it a very deserving winner of Best Looking Game!

Style Though... we got better options.

Here's the thing about Bayek: his facial expressions of various emotions were great. It was what carried the entire story. The main theme of the setting never changed from "Egyptians are oppressed", and the main story can be summed up as "kill x number of bad guys", but Bayek frowns, growls, side eyes, grins, and broods through every story point. At some point I removed the veil from his costume, because I needed to see his face to be engaged with the stories.

I think work on Cuphead is so well done to the point where people jus take it for granted without even realizing things like how the animations are all multiple drawings done by hand just like traditional animation and how there's a crazy amount of small details that took lots of research (seriously, they even switch the color of Cuphead's shoes from white to yellow between scenes because that was a common mistake that used to happen on old cartoons). The details are what make the style on that game work so flawlessly. The scratchy sound, the animation, the character-design, the right amount of blur, the slightly misaligned colors and so on. Without them it would probably fail to give the correct feeling they were going for. And not only that, they also added their own personal style to it, inspired on retro-videogames.

And yeah, you could probably grab a freeze frame from it and people would either think it's from a cartoon or some concept art for something else.

Nothing against Persona 5 though.

Persona 5 was robbed, taken out back, and shot. I appreciate Ben and Alex going for it with it on style, but I feel like they should have given a lot of play by plays on what you see in that game. For instance, after you complete a battle your main character is fleeing is the scene as the battle stats are presented, the sequence ends with the main character in the dungeon again. You might be able to fight Satan in Cuphead, but you can freaking have your choice on which version of him you want to recruit (Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satan, etc). Or maybe you don't want to stick with Christian mythology, then go Vishnu, Ganesh, Set, I mean come on!

And I get the love for big band music. I love it too but another easy arguing point is it was for white people during the big band era. Its not mood music, its flash and bang. Persona 5 took the seedier elements of jazz, combined it with Japanese pop (and lets face it, people need to educate themselves on Japanese music and instruments, Nier and Persona 5 are anything but typically JRPG soundtracks) and applied them to the game. The main character in P5 punches the screen when you pause!

I'm mind blown. In terms of era tribute animation, sure Cuphead is the first to go for the early Mickey Mouse era, but other games such as Banner Saga, Dust: An Elysian Tale, Ori and the Blind Forest and have presented fantastic animated styles as well in previous years and arguably have better gameplay.

Persona 5 got ROBBED!

@jlaue317 said:

Persona 5 got ROBBED!

I don't even like P5 very much, but it losing best style is definitely some sort of crime. I'm a law student, I know these things.

Pleasantly surprised to see Bayek take Best New Character, though.

Cut best style if you are just going to give it to the game that "looks" the best.

Persona 5 was robbed etc, etc...

@sharkman said:

That definitely seems to be it, Dan even mentions it in this podcast. It's so infuriating since I just do not get Zelda hype at all, I never have. Horizon is probably one of my favorite games ever and none of them seemed to give it a fair shake at all. I'm already gearing up to be frustrated by the top ten list when they spend all their time talking about which is better, the early access shooty game or the Zelda game with the same story but you can climb the mountain instead of having to walk around it.

Is persona the new undertale?

Breath of the Wild had a story? I must've missed it.

Zelda BotW - Biggest Disappointment of 2017.

I don't care that Persona 5 didn't get best style, I am just happy that Night in the Woods got nominated for something.

Yep i guess now i can prepare for Horizon to just be completely shut out of anything and will probably barely make it on the top 10 list. I hear a lot of talk about games not being polished, running poorly or even having gross microtransactions. Horizon has one expansion DLC that is awesome for under $20 and is basically flawless in all other aspects and yet it seems to have been completely forgotten. When was the last time a 5 star game got such little recognition (Witcher 3?)

Also with all the talk about female protagonists not being represented Horizon was a huge AAA game with a female protagonist that wasnt sexualized in any manner and yet it seems to have been completely overlooked. Luckily it sold fairly well or else that really would have sucked for Guerilla.

Aloy always feels like a character who was supposed to be somewhere else and showed up on set for Horizon instead.

The only thing Persona 5 should have won hands down was Best Style. Nothing else comes close this year. It's unfortunate, but art and art direction isn't something that can be reliably argued for or against. You either see it one way or you don't.

lol that was the one time i agreed with them...

I think this is the first time i've ever been angry at a GB game of the year thing. Persona 5 definitely had this in the bag.

Nier!

@gablekevin: yeah, that was frustrating for me too. Finally 2 games in a year with solid female performances, and they really overlooked because of the time they came out. Senua's Sacrifice would probably also be an odd example of best female lead performance as because she had a mental illness, but if the game makes you believe her, that's the best example of great acting with in a game. To think the actress who played her was not an actor is amazing, even more so since her actual body wasn't in the game.

Horizon on the other hand was a strong female lead that no one questioned that she was a badass, with a beautifully unique world, and it was just completely ignored.

I like Nier: Automata's story and its play on the philosophical understandings of why we play games, and the cycle of primal human urges. But, people that only finished the first play through cut themselves short to not see the rest of the game, so they end up looking at the game from the first play through, and see a scantily clad lady lead character and get distracted by it postive/or negative. They don't see that if they finished the games multiple playthroughs that was actually part of the point of the story, where we play games to to fulfill our primal instincts as a form of catharsis, never mind who we might be hurting by enjoying these things, because we aren't questioning what our lizard brain's want.

*not sure if i should include spoilers here, or if that would essentially make my point worse, by hiding information that would encourage people to play a game.

Fuck yeah Bayek, getting the recognition he deserves.

Every year I listen to these podcasts I find myself always opposite of every single one of them. I loved Horizon, Persona 5, and Hellblade which are all games being just set aside and that's mind-blowing to me.