This was a difficult year to pick from. Not because I played a huge number of amazing games, but because nothing I've played from the year is quite among my all time favourite games. Red Dead Redemption was good, but I found a lot of it cumbersome and very few things in it were actually great. Xenoblade Chronicles is a very good JRPG, but has plenty of issues of its own. Seemingly a third of the characters you meet are various shades of annoying, you could cut about 20 hours from the game and lose nothing of importance, it takes ages for the story to properly get going, and the gameplay can get really repetitive, especially early on. Alan Wake is a good horror game with wonderful atmosphere that suffers from annoying and repetitive gameplay and Birth by Sleep, Peace Walker, and Valkyria Chronicles 2 are the three best PSP games I've played, but all of them pale in comparison to their home console counterparts.
AC: Brotherhood was a great open world game, and still one of my two personal favourites in the series along with 2, but it isn't quite in the GotY range. If I was judging these on just their stories and characters, then I'd give the nod to Nier, but the gameplay in the original version really isn't all that interesting or engaging and holds it back. Limbo was a wonderfully atmospheric platformer, but it didn't leave quite the impression on me than it did on a lot of others. Vanquish was also very close to getting my vote on the sheer strength of its impeccable gameplay. I don't think I've ever played another 3rd person shooter that is as exciting to play. However, it's also a very short game that barely cracks four hours on normal difficulty, and the story and characters are mostly just an excuse to go and shoot things. That's not a bad thing, but not the kind of thing I would ever consider the best game of the year.
Super Meat Boy is a great platformer, but unlike the very best in the genre, I've never felt much desire to go back to replay it after finishing the game. Finally, though its actual western release didn't happen until 2022, The Legend of Heroes: Trails From Zero is technically a 2010 game since we're going with their original release dates. The series is also a perennial favourite of mine, but Trails From Zero is also the weakest game I've played in it thus far.
So what exactly do I pick? No game from this year would win my GotY in most other years, and since at the moment there's the yearly greatest games event happening on the site, I noted that there isn't a single game from 2010 on my personal top 50. I think I'll just give it to Trails From Zero purely on the strength of the series as a whole. While it doesn't quite reach the heights of the other titles, the storyline connections to those other games do lift it up by association. It's not going to win, not even close, but it's probably the one I'm most likely to go back and replay at some point. I suppose Xenoblade Chronicles is a close second, but it annoyed me far more so it falls short of the top spot for the year.
Last edited by Darashiva - on 26 November 2023
