Goty of every year this century

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2000-Zelda: Majora's Mask
Still the best plot in Zelda and a game that uses its gameplay to tell a story about death and human connections, definitively not what you'd expect from Nintendo.

2001-Silent Hill 2
The most well written game I've ever played, by a long shot. James' plight still haunts me like no other game ever has.

2002-Metroid Prime
Fantastic combat, puzzle solving and world exploration coupled with intriguing lore told through collectables, which feels right at home in a metroid game, leaving the amount of plot in the game up to players to decide.

2003-Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
Likeable characters, excellent platforming and gameplay in sync plot in an elegant manner (both are about correcting mistakes)

2004-Tales of Symphonia
havent played it in a long time, but i remember really enjoying it and there's not much else this year I played more. I guess Metroid Prime 2 would be the closest runner up

2005-Shadow of the Colossus
My favorite game by my favorite developer. Absolutely amazing concept, flawlessly executed (except for framerate) coupled with intriguing world, themes and ideas.

2006-Okami
A little slow to get started, but really endearing story and refined the zelda gameplay with deeper combat and excellent bosses. The build up to Orochi and Ninetails were definitively highlights.

2007-Super Mario Galaxy
Just behind 64 (and maybe Odyssey) for my favorite Mario game. I miss the exploration, but the excellent level desgin and controls more than made up for it.

2008-Braid
A more "artistic" explorarion of I was talking about with PoP sands of time. Amazing puzzles push the concept as far as it will go, making for an excellently desgined game.

2009-Demon's Souls
Still has the best selection of bosses in the souls series if you ask me. Not to mention it was the first to come up with the excellent combat system and cryptic lore

2010-Donkey Kong Country Returns
not many a lot of games I liked this year, but dkcr is pretty good regardless

2011-Dark Souls
Took the already pretty strong foundation of demons souls and placed it in a metroidvania-esque world, allowing for interesting sequence breaks and more explorarions

2012-Journey
Great game feel and visuals come together to create a game that manages to elevate itself above other 'walking simulators' by tackling themes of rebirth and relationships purely through gameplay

2013-Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
TLoU came really close, but in the end ALbW is just better designed imo. Maybe it's me being a hipster, but this is genuinely one of my favourite zelda games

2014-Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze
Possibly my favorite 2d platformer, I love how high the skill ceiling is. Just look for some speedruns of this game and you'll know what i mean

2015-Bloodborne
Everything ds2 and ds3 should've been, with a new setting and new mechanics. This is probably my favorite souls game in terms of plot and lore.

2016-The Last Guardian
Stupid bottom prompts aside, I really loved this game. I understand its not for everyone, since some of its design decisions would make for a bad game everywhere else, but everything here is geared towards creating a real relationship to explore themes of nature vs programming, which I loved and cant wait to replay to learn more about how it works

2017-Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Easily the best open-world exploration anywhere. Just the act of moving from point A to B is fun and the freedom to experiment with combat keeps things really engaging.