We made it to the end of another year, everyone. Good for us. As always, that means it's time to hand it off to Stick Figure JC Denton to hand out some coveted Mento Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Video Game Excellence - or the MGAs, for you busy millennials on the go.

Disclaimer: I barely played any new games this year, so this awards show should only be consumed as a form of entertainment. They're not legally binding objective truths about the year's best, like the Keighleys are.

Best 2016 Game of 2017

Nominees: Eidos Montréal's Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, HAL Laboratory's Picross 3D: Round 2, Ska Studios's Salt and Sanctuary, DrinkBox Studios's Severed, Naughty Dog's Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.

You know how it is. You spend most of one year playing everything you missed last year as they all go on sale and/or bring out value-added "GOTY Editions". In 2017, I played twenty games that were released this year and twenty-five from last year, so really I should be making this whole awards blog about 2016. I'd certainly have more nominees to choose from.

The winner of this category is Salt and Sanctuary, the neat 2D Dark Souls-slash-spacewhipper from the grim and gritty folks (I'm sure they're really super chill) at Ska Studios. The temptation would be to call it an Indie Souls clone, but it really does far more than just recreate the thrills and spills of FromSoftware's spooky serial suicide simulators in a scaled-down format. Like Bloodborne and this year's The Surge, S&S represents how the model could be expanded in so many ways both thematically and mechanically, and I'm so down for turning it into its own sub-genre. Just need a good name for it, one that can stand the test of time as well as "spacewhipper".

Commiserations to our runners-up Uncharted 4 (fine recovery after 3, but still overlong), Severed (great style, and it was unusual to see an action dungeon-crawler), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (fun to explore, but kind of low-key), and Picross 3D: Round 2 (I love some Picross, but they could've made it harder to accidentally misclick a box).

Just for funzies, since I also played a lot of games from 2014 and 2015 this year, my Best 2015 Game of 2017 was Xenoblade Chronicles X (I spent so much goddamn time on that one) and the Best 2014 Game of 2017 was Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (too cute!).

Best 2017 Game of 2018?

Nominees: Larian's Divinity: Original Sin II, Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nintendo's Super Mario Odyssey, Monolith Soft's Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Nihon Falcom's Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana.

You know, I studied Fortune Telling in college for a few semesters before I ended up dropping out. Just couldn't see a future in it. That doesn't mean I can't use what few lessons I learned to predict what I'll be enjoying in the months ahead from the enormous pool of games I couldn't get around to in 2017. I think the easy choice is the new Super Mario Odyssey, which feels like a 3D Mario platformer tailor-made for my collect-a-thon proclivities. My thanks to Nintendo to going to all that trouble on my behalf, even if it does mean buying yet another one of your goshderned tablet consoles for babies.

Of course, I've no doubt I'd love Breath of the Wild, Xenoblade Chronicle 2, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, and Divinity: Original Sin II almost as much, seeing as they're all well-regarded entries in franchises I already adore. Just nearly not enough days in the year, my peeps.

Bucket List Tick-Off of 2017

Nominees: Double Fine's Full Throttle, Capcom's Onimusha: Warlords, Ubisoft's Rayman Revolution, Burst Studios's Toonstruck, Looking Glass Studios's Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss.

2017 was a big year on the retro gaming front. Not only did I finally complete a long-standing project to get every SNES and Super Famicom game on the wiki, in a reasonable level of detail to boot, but a large segment of my blogging time was spent on two features that plumbed the depths of video game history: the PS2-focused The Top Shelf, due to be concluded next week, and May's "May Maturity" which revolved around playthroughs of various PC games made in the 1990s. My favorite of all of these, as well as what turned out to be a fairly significant game from a historical standpoint, was Ultima Underworld: not only the first dungeon-crawler with panoramic movement, but my first Ultima game as well. Never could get into those top-down ones, not even VIII.

Props also go out to the excellent Who Framed Roger Rabbit-inspired point-and-click Toonstruck, the remastered version of Tim Schafer's (first) ode to heavy metal Full Throttle, a 3D platformer I clearly should've paid more attention to back in the day called Rayman Revolution (a.k.a. the PS2 version of Rayman 2), and Capcom's more action-heavy historical horror game Onimusha: Warlords.

Best New Character

Nominees: 2B (PlatinumGames's NieR: Automata), Aloy (Guerrilla Games's Horizon Zero Dawn), Monika (Team Salvato's Doki Doki Literature Club), Rhin (InXile Entertainment's Torment: Tides of Numenera), The Whole Crew of Talos I (Arkane Studios's Prey).

Without playing Divinity Original Sin II, Persona 5, or a great number of RPGs that came out this year, this category's going to be a little more incomplete than usual, I suspect. My pick for favorite character is NieR: Automata's 2B, but not for the reasons you might expect. Unfortunately, the full explanation requires some major spoilers, so here we go:

Runners-up include: Aloy, the put-upon savior heroine of Horizon Zero Dawn with a mysterious origin and a whole lot of baggage; Rhin, the benevolent street urchin of Torment: Tides of Numenera who presents a number of quandaries from both a gameplay and narrative standpoint; Monika, the (seemingly) most sane and (seemingly) perfect choice of Doki Doki Literature Club's harem of highschool beauties; and all 268 members of the Talos I research station who collectively comprise several hundred little stories about surviving, or not surviving as is more often the case, an unstoppable alien infiltration.

Weirdest F'n Game

Nominees: Spike Chunsoft's Danganronpa 1.2 Reload, Doki Doki Literature Club, Horizon Zero Dawn, Cavalier Game Studios/Tequila Works's The Sexy Brutale, Torment: Tides of Numenera.

My favorite award category, given to games that either utterly break the mold in new and fascinating ways or just enjoy being weird for the sake of being weird. The world of Numenera makes Torment an easy pick for this year's category, stocked to the gills as it is with some of the strangest quest design and settings I've seen in a traditional CRPG. That you spend half the game inside what is essentially Azathoth, or that your mindscape is an elaborate labyrinth that contains the consciousnesses of untold numbers of people, or that you can be vaporized moments after you start by poking a crashed spaceship's glowing power conduit, or that most of the world's industry is based on finding space-age garbage and junk from other dimensions that no-one knows how they work or how they're made but can sometimes confer beneficial effects or just look pretty. It's a surreal setting that takes hours of exploration and thousands of words of dialogue and descriptions before it begins to feel normal, if it ever does, and I loved the challenge of trying to figure it out.

We also have: Doki Doki Literature Club, for self-evident reasons if you play it long enough; Danganronpa 1.2 Reload, which I wasn't going to count for GOTY purposes because they're remasters but they really are some of the most batshit insane games I played this or any year; Horizon: Zero Dawn for its bizarre premise of robotic animals co-existing with a post-apocalyptic tribal society that the game spends its entire length explaining; and The Sexy Brutale for the way its time-travelling puzzles can mess with your brain, though fortunately not to breaking point.

Best Indie Game of the Week

Nominees: Zeboyd Games's Cosmic Star Heroine, Moon Studios's Ori and the Blind Forest, Yacht Club Games's Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment, Severed, Image & Form's SteamWorld Heist.

This overlaps with a few of the other categories, but I thought I'd take in the fifty games of the Indie Game of the Week feature (the fiftieth is kind of out of luck, since I haven't actually played it yet, but I've picked out something I doubt was going to win, so...) and figure out which of them I liked the most, actual date of release be damned. It's going to have to be Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment, a game that is also on my top ten for this year, for improving on an already near-perfect game. That's not an easy feat to pull off, especially for a free expansion.

Close runners-up include the beautiful and fluid spacewhipper Ori and the Blind Forest, the winning combination of XCOM style turn-based strategy and the careful aiming of a Worms or Artillery that comprises SteamWorld Heist, the confident and inventive 16-bit JRPG homage that is Zeboyd's Cosmic Star Heroine, and the dungeon-crawler with the atmospheric Central American-flavored netherworld called Severed.

Best Soundtrack of 2017

Nominees: Cosmic Star Heroine, Atlus's Persona 5, NieR: Automata, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. (Honorable Mentions: Prey, The Sexy Brutale, SIE Japan Studio's Gravity Rush 2, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment.)

This is the always the hardest category for me, because I don't limit myself to just the games I've played - most soundtracks are available on Soundcloud or YouTube, if only the highlights - and there's often a lot of very talented musicians and composers finding multiple gigs per year. Just boiling it down to five soundtracks I would happily buy and listen to on repeat proved to be challenging enough.

I think NieR: Automata's soundtrack is simply phenomenal, and much like its precursor not only puts in a huge amount of work - the singer invented an entire fake language based on how we might sound in the far-flung future - but perfectly establishes the mood and tone of every scene it scores. Nier wouldn't be nearly as emotional or affecting if not for its soundtrack, and the otherworldliness of it always takes my breath away.

Ys VIII's soundtrack, meanwhile, has the sort of balls-out sheer awesome that Falcom's Sound Team JDK always bring to the table. Frankly speaking, in any other year Ys VIII would sweep this category hands down. Every Ys soundtrack is SO GOOD. I'll never get tired of those insanely fast boss tracks for as long as I inhabit this Earth, and I'm glad that the new Ys has allowed the franchise to find some kind of recognition at last (if, unfortunately, for perhaps the wrong reasons if the furor over the lousy localization is anything to go by). Xenoblade Chronicles 2 delivers a reliably amazing soundtrack, filled with a huge number of tracks that reflect the time of day as well as the regions they pertain to, but I'd have to play the game to get the full experience. Cosmic Star Heroine's soundtrack is beyond catchy, and I loved its more atmospheric city pieces as well as its battle jams. Calling the Breath of the Wild's soundtrack great is fairly redundant, since every aspect of that game is apparently stellar even by Zelda standards. Finally, we have Specter of Torment, in which Jake Kaufman is tasked with remixing Shovel Knight's entire soundtrack to have a more somber feel that better reflects its moody new protagonist, as well as including a new main theme and new hub music. It's a spectacular undertaking, but I've ceased to underestimate Kaufman's talent.

Best Individual Track of 2017

Nominees:

• Cosmic Star Heroine ("Araenu")
• Doki Doki Literature Club ("Your Reality")
• Flinthook ("The Galaxy's Greatest Pirate")
• Gravity Rush 2 ("Lei Havina")
• Persona 5 ("Last Surprise")
• NieR: Automata ("Weight of the World")
• The Sexy Brutale ("The Sexy Brutale")
• Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment ("Hidden by Night")
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 ("Battle Theme")
• Ys VIII ("Sunshine Coastline")

Really just an addendum to the above. I wanted to let these tracks speak for themselves, as they all perfectly represent the games they pertain to, but I feel I owe them all a small footnote just in case.

• Araneu is the theme for the planet of the same name, a noirish cyberpunk world full of wealth inequity and corporate oppression. I particularly like this track because of how much it reminds me of Cowboy Bebop. I'm sure it's deliberate.
• Your Reality, or Monika's Song, is the full version of the song loop you hear for approximately 80% of the game's runtime. It's a cute little piano melody with equally cute lyrics when devoid of any context, but one that becomes downright haunting by the time you hear it in-game. I... might recommend leaving it be if you intend to play the game at some point.
• The Galaxy's Greatest Pirate is the secret to Flinthook's success: that opening expositional movie, with this swashbuckling music in the background, creates the finest first impression a game could ask for. The version above is a variant of what plays on the main menu.
• Lei Havina is named for the affluent old town region of the game's primary city of Jirga Para Lhao, and I just love the smoothness that this track exudes. It's like the backing track for a daydream sequence in a 1960s French movie. Hard to place culturally, but weirdly familiar, and I loved gliding gracefully through the air while listening to it.
• Last Surprise is effectively the theme of the Phantom Thieves, as well as the main theme of Persona 5, and indicative of the game's surfeit of style and sass. It was a hard choice between that and Life Will Change though. It's an album where I'm trying to save most of it for a playthrough, but I've been listening to selected tracks from it since last year.
• Weight of the World is told from the perspective of 2B and is NieR's most emotional track, and there's a version of it at the end of the game that is somehow even more of a tearjerker, which I excluded here because its name is a spoiler (but you can hear it here if you're not too bothered). It is the crown jewel of an already incredible soundtrack and makes me misty-eyed with gratitude every time I hear it.
• The Sexy Brutale is one of the few games to give Persona 5 a run for its money for sheer honey-dripping charm and a loveable cast of flamboyant masked ne'er-do-wells. The heavy bass on its theme tune is incredible when it kicks in, but the real brilliance is in how the in-game version of this track and many others take on different tones as the day progresses, building up to mirror the dramatic demises of its characters. It's worth hearing it all in action.
• Hidden by Night is Specter of Torment's remix of the Lich Yard, which was Specter Knight's stage back in Shovel Knight. Honestly, every remix in this game is incredible; I just picked this one because it seemed the most appropriate.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is another game I'm being cagey learning too much about, since I've yet to play it, so I'm just giving you the standard battle theme here. It's still one of the best battle themes ever made, but that's the Xenoblade series for you. Very Grandia-ish, feels like. (But "Incoming!" is really good too!)
• Ys VIII was a maddening choice between "Crimson Fighter", "Deadly Temptation", "Gen D'armes", "Red Line -021-", and "Sunshine Coastline". I went for the first area's BGM over my usual boss music jams though because it so perfectly sets the tone for Adol's new Mediterranean island adventure and still manages to kick ass despite being stage music, which are often a little more low-key for the sake of atmosphere.

Giant Bomb's Best Feature of 2017

Nominees: Steal My Sunshine (e.g. The Block That Wasn't There), Murder Island (e.g. The Death Shack), GBE Playdate: Tender Loving Care (e.g. "Fucking Pizza!"), Quick Look: Bequest (e.g. The Haunted Chair), Live at E3 2017: Nite Three (e.g. The Jeep Grand Cherokee Story).

Choosing a handful of hilarious moments for this category in the past has always been a nightmare to narrow down, and TurboMan's got most of them with his "Best of" series, so I figured I'd zoom out a little bit and instead consider Giant Bomb's best overall video features of 2017.

It was a difficult choice between three in particular: Murder Island, the semi-regular Monday PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds feature full of drama, suspense and innumerable total party kills; GBE Playdate: Tender Loving Care, a melodramatic FMV "erotic thriller" with a slumming John Hurt that never stopped delivering unforgettable moments; and, of course, my personal favorite Steal My Sunshine, which takes a moderately popular if slightly unstable Mario platformer and transforms it with a vaguely antagonistic betting meta game.

Respect as always goes to Giant Bomb's regular E3 coverage and nightly interviews, this year's massive spread of Quick Looks, and all the other video features that didn't quite rank as highly in my estimations: there was definitely plenty for everyone this year, and now that both studios are operating at full capacity I look forward to what 2018 has in store for this site and its community.

Best Game of 2017

Nominees: Horizon Zero Dawn, NieR: Automata, Prey, The Sexy Brutale, Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment.

My full list can be found over here, with my absolutely truly for-real and no-foolin' finalized 2017 GOTY list that'll probably get edited at the very last second to include some game I got for Christmas. Such is life when you insist on making conclusive Game of the Year declarations in the middle of December.

My reasons behind each pick and their placement are explored more in the list itself, but suffice it to say it was a very strong year for games and I'm not wholly sure that list will contain my absolute favorite 2017 games for long. All the same, I can wholeheartedly recommend every one of those ten items and I'm reasonably satisfied that it'll stand the test of time for that reason, even if it's perhaps woefully incomplete for now. Hey, I can always think of it this way: there's a lot of great games on there that might've had trouble finding their way onto other lists, given the sheer number of games to choose from this year. If it manages to convince someone to check out a game they would've otherwise overlooked and they end up falling in love with it, then all the better.

That's going to do it for the 2017 Mento Game Awards. Thanks to everyone who has read, commented, liked, subscribed, recommended, laughed at, pilloried, tolerated and contributed to all my blogging output this year, as prolific as it ended up becoming in spite of my laziness, and I hope to see you all again very soon.

Until then, enjoy the holidays, enjoy the January "Awesome Games Done Quick" streams, enjoy Downtown no Gaki no Tsukai New Year's Batsu Game, and enjoy spending the next few quiet wintry months catching up on everything that came out of 2017 that didn't suck. See ya.