2010, Game of the Year

[Jaicee]

SvennoJ said:

Jaicee said:

Cultural Impact: I remember hearing mostly about Call of Duty: Black Ops in and around this year. That was like people's game of the century up to that point, it seemed like, sort of just continuing trends that took hold in the culture in a big way during the prior decade.

That said, I think it's also worth mentioning Xenoblade Chronicles here in this category because it started a trend in JRPGs toward seeking to mimic the open-world type structures of their Western counterparts and downgrading the narrative emphasis in general. This is where they began to lose their Japanese-ness, or at least the aspects thereof that I'd found more appealing anyway. I've generally been less interested in the subgenre since.

Favorite Games: If my tone toward the above seems negative, it's because I didn't relate much to gaming culture at this point in time. My favorite game in 2010 was Heavy Rain, which felt like a breakthrough for interactive movies owing to the consequential nature of one's decision-making and range of different player characters and the roles they play. Looking back at even this entry today though, the truth is that it's not as special to me anymore as it once was. These days the inevitable genre flaws (like the unavoidable disruptions to the flow of conversation that come with voiced dialogue choices) have an immersion-breaking affect on me that didn't seem as pronounced at the time when this type of game design felt fresher. Still a 2010 favorite with real nostalgia value for me nonetheless though.

Final Fantasy XIII was actually another favorite of mine from this year in that it launched in 2010 here in the U.S., but obviously isn't a voting option since it had come out the prior year in Japan.

I also remember liking Enslaved: Odyssey to the West a good deal. There was just a sweetness to the relationship between Monkey and Trip and the way it evolved over the course of the game that got to me. This and the fact that Rock Band 3 continued that franchise's tradition of awesomeness pretty well rounds out all the commentary I feel the necessity to offer on this particular year in this category.

Other Notes: This was kind of the trough for my interest in video games really. The 2010s were actually my favorite decade in gaming so far, contrary to the impression my commentary here may have just given you. Seriously, most of my top 50 favorite games of all time were released in this decade! My relationship to this medium did improve and you'll start to see that soon. The shift in my perspective was closely related to the ascent of the indie gaming scene that I slowly began to take more notice of soon after this point.

Ah Enslaved: Odyssey to the West was in 2010 as well, loved it it. It felt like a spiritual follow up to Beyond Good & Evil to me. The game play was quite clever and indeed Monkey and Trip were great. The environments were awesome as well, no clue why this game got so few sales, 460K sold in Feb 2011. A shame cause I really like this kind of game and it sort of died off in favor of "todo list" games.


Another favorite of that year was Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, one of the last A games before that bracket completely disappeared (with only indie and AAA left nowadays). Majin had great gameplay, fun puzzles, great world to explore, nobody bought it. VGChartz has it at 290K sales total.


A shame, two games I would like to replay, stuck on PS3 :/ I should get a new PS3 controller (the ps3 is still fine) and enjoy that library again. These 2 games marked an end of an era for me. 'Full games' had to become longer and longer with more and more filler, with indies taking over from A games. We still got The Last Guardian later but only because it was delayed.

Counting up my top 50, the 2000s have most of my interest
1990's 0,1,1,0,1,0,0,2,5,1 = 11
2000's 0,4,2,0,4,1,2,3,1,2 = 19
2010's 1,3,2,2,0,0,2,3,2,0 = 15
2020's 1,0,2,2                          = 5

2010's is part indies, part PSVR or it would have been the lowest category.

You know, you're right, Enslaved actually does feel kind of like a spiritual successor to what Beyond Good & Evil had been before it. I hadn't been able to put my finger on just what felt so oddly familiar about it to me before you put it that way! Now Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom is a title I don't remember, probably for the same reason you didn't recall Enslaved: it's just been a long time since then. Looks kind of interesting though. Has that same very distinct kind of vibe to it in that screen shot you shared.

My top 50 list skews heavily recent, being composed mostly of games from 2011 on, with nearly all of them falling into what's considered the indie category. There's just so much more variety out there that way today than there's ever been before and so many more topics and settings we're seeing games take on so much and experimenting with so many different play styles and genre combinations and refinements that I can't help feeling a revived interest, at least in this particular scene of gaming. It feels like the way things used to be before game companies got too massive to be adept and development costs got too astronomical to permit much real risk-taking. I like that. I really do. We're also headed toward the women's revolution in gaming (which I have pegged as essentially 2012-17, overlapping with some larger cultural trends that were somewhat analogous but also somewhat not) at this point in terms in terms of years we're covering with these threads and yeah, that helped a lot for me too, especially where those trends seemed to overlap. And also toward the onset of "normcore" (ya know, Lorde, The Hunger Games, The Last of Us, heightened valuation of authenticity, no brand names plastered all over people's clothes, Great Recession economic crisis aura etc.), which sorta displaced the previous cultural emphasis on indulgence and extravagance and just also a general aura that I found to be kind of a welcome relief by this point. All somewhat related developments, incidentally, I would assess.

Last edited by Jaicee - on 26 November 2023