This entry was fairly slight, so here's a bit more that I recall about Eternal Ring. It is, in retrospect, a very FromSoftware game (lots of half-remembered spoilers ahead):
The game introduces a hub early. That is, an area populated with friendly NPCs that will sell you stuff, let you rest, give you information about the island, etc. You're also introduced to a teleportation nexus of sorts that lets you warp back and forth from dungeons and other parts of the island, so the impression is that this hub is a place you'll return to frequently to restock and recharge. After the first major elemental dungeon, you come back to this hub settlement to find it on fire, everyone's dead, and one of the major story NPCs has transformed into a demonic creature and flies away when he sees you. This is about 20-25% the way into the story, I'd estimate.
This demon guy keeps showing up throughout the game, by the way. He's also the second-to-last boss.
There's a beautiful and mysterious woman on the island who occasionally saves your life but generally tells you to leave the island as soon as possible. You spend a lot of time trying to figure out who she is. She dies too.
The final, final boss is the final creation of the mages who once inhabited the island, almost all of whom are dead or were turned into dragons. He's called the Homunculus, but he's really an immortal, omnipotent being created entirely by alchemy that's meant to usher in a new age of enlightenment. At least, that was the idea, but instead he was created with the mind of a child and the casual oblivious cruelty of same (as well as a creepy child voice). He's the reason everything on the island is screwed up. The aforementioned dead woman was its caretaker and tutor, and had been trying to teach him the importance of death so he would stop killing everyone. Once you beat the boss (though he basically no-sells it, being a deity and all), he finds the body of his only friend in the world and suddenly comprehends the meaning of life and death. This allows him to fully mature, becoming Perfect Cell (sorta) in the process. It is a weird direction to go with a final boss encounter, is all I'll say.
At this point it's looking exceedingly unlikely that I'll find Tokyo Mirage Sessions for a reasonable price. It's doing that thing that happens with all Nintendo games at the end of a console generation where it stays at full price forever until it finally disappears from shelves because its console died years ago. It's a shame because I've been hearing a lot of promising things from GOTY lists this year, yours included. At least, from the perspective of a JRPG fan, of which this site appears to have very few.
This is a good list, though. You've got at least five games mentioned I'll want to play at some point, so it's good to hear that they don't all suck. Hope you enjoy Lightning Returns next year (you probably won't); that's a weird one.
I'm trying to imagine drawing comics for thirty award categories. My hands would fall off. There's a lot here to chew on, so thanks for the ideas for next year's bevvy of RPGs and adventure games to catch up with.
TheBUTT does display a lot of cheek with those "Boy, aren't these types of scavenger hunts kinda contrived and dumb? Well, go do them anyway" scenarios, but I was still impressed with how much they managed to stuff into TheBUTT, almost to the point of discomfort. It's rare I see an adventure game last that long without long stretches of non-progress due to me being an idiot; I think a lot of what makes that game great are its quality of life conveniences, like the removal of immaterial hotspots once they've said their one goof about them or how often the game flushes your inventory.
I'm clearly going to have to get into XCOM 2 and I Am Satsuma some point next year, but I think I might be JRPG-ed out with what I have in the wings. I just bought Trails of Cold Steel, for some reason, to go with Xenoblade X, Zestiria and Yakuza 4 playthroughs that are for sure happening. I picked up Steins;Gate too, so I'll let you know how that goes. (I had to skip around the rest of your list, for obvious spoiler reasons.)
And ZP's Final Fantasy deep-dives really have been great. I think that's two of us now that consider him blogger VIP this year, for all the awful conversations he subjects us to.
Did Dark Souls 3 get mentioned during "best looking"? I don't think I picked it out. Probably not in the top three, but Irithyll and a lot of the bosses looked really good.
@majormitch: It did feel a bit disingenuous to award it to FFXV since I've not played the game yet, but after determining that I couldn't give it to Ys VIII or Persona 5 my heart wasn't in the award so much any more. Some great music this year, still.
@nukleon: The anime catgirl stuff is becoming a real problem. Apparently there's a new game on Steam where they all form a J-Pop band?
I'm glad to read someone else's take that is similar to my own, back when I wrote about Hitman last month. It's the first episodic game in a while to make that delivery format work for me, and I think we concur that it's because Hitman doesn't have a whole of narrative threads to follow and subsequently forget about as they stay suspended in the months-long interims.
I'm starting to feel the same way about some open-ended games that see a gigantic patch of two several months after release, like Terraria or Stardew Valley. Folk play those games until they either get burned out on them or they run out of content to discover, and the injection of free content those patches provide (which makes them more like complimentary DLC, really) give both parties an excuse to return after some time away to recharge their interest level. I suppose the MMOs were the ones to start that practice, given how vital it was to their longevity and subscription model, but it appears to work for a surprising number of game types.
None of the 2016 games I've played so far stand out much musically, so I've been listening to the soundtracks of those I didn't play. Right now I'm having a minor crisis trying to figure out if I should count Japan-only releases that will almost certainly see US/EU releases in 2017: both Persona 5 and Ys VIII came out in Japan this year, and those soundtracks are phenomenal.
Otherwise, I think it's either Doom, Furi or FFXV for me so far. Though Let It Die's making a strong case.
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