Best Original Music Score of 2022

Best OST was just as decisive as Best Art Direction, with 1st place claiming 40% of the vote and 2nd getting 21%.

Most Disappointing Game of 2022

A close result this one. Four games managed over 12% of the vote, and the winner & runner-up were separated by just 1.65%.

I'm surprised Babylon's Fall was so close to the first place. Did many expect this to work after so many SE blunders? Or is it because the expectations for Scarlet/Violet were low as they were?

Best Surprise of 2022

From a close result to THE closest result of this year. The winner managed 23.95%, the runner-up 22.87%, and third place 22.51%!

Most Anticipated Game of 2023

No surprises here - it wins Most Wanted all the time after all. But the margin if victory wasn't as high as I expected (I thought this would be the most one-sided result of the year) - the winner managed 40.07%, runner-up was on 20.91%, and third 19.16%.

Was Spider-Man 2 third?

VGChartz often goes for the underdog when it comes to Overall GOTY. Did it happen again?....

Overall Game of the Year 2022

Full results breakdown:

I feel like such a boring sheep but yeah...Elden Ring man. IT's so good. even the complaints I had about it last year are melting away as time goes on and it feels like those 'problems' were deliberately there (like how so many of the bosses are ganks, basically making you engage with either coop or Spirit Summons.)

So many of the game's criticisms are either...people playing the game wrong and blaming the game for it (Refusing to engage with the game's systems because they want this to be more like Dark Souls, like this weird idea that you have to solo every boss and anything else is bad) or complaining about the things that it had to adapt to work in an open world setting (Repeat bosses, a less strict difficulty curve, etc).

Some things about that game that were frustrating at the time actually were very good in hindsight. Just like most souls-style games. When you are playing there's a clear 'this is unfair' or 'this is BS' vibe to some fights, but then you beat it and think 'oh, okay, I get it now'. Sometimes that doesn't happen, but most of the time it does.

I put about 500 hours into Elden Ring and I want to keep playing it. I'm forcing myself to not do it so I can come back once there's some DLC and enjoy it from scratch. it will never be my first time again but hot damn I want that sense of adventure and exploration I got that we all enjoyed in the first few months of the game's release.

Pretty hard to breach my top ten of all time list (most of them are SNES nostalgia favourites), but Elden Ring absolutely makes the cut. That and Bloodborne are probably my two favourite games not on the SNES. And I couldn't be happier. No matter what Miyazaki and his team makes next I'll be right there to get it.

Congratulations to Elden Ring and the people who made it on the solid win! A very fair choice.

In overall Game of the Year awards, Elden Ring now leads not only for this year, but for all time with a new record so far of 394 according to ResetEra's current tally. Impressive! Although it may be worth pointing out that its lead is smaller in Reader's Choice awards (68 versus 30 for God of War: Ragnarok) and that The Last of Us Part II still leads in the Reader's Choice all-time record at 114 GOTY picks. In other words, this was a big win for Elden Ring any way you slice it, but it's critics more than ordinary gamers themselves who are making it into an unprecedented landslide. Nothing else released this last year even came close to those two games though in awards. Everything else so far is in the single digits for GOTY selection, so it seems clear that these two games had the most impact on the gaming landscape this year.

What's more interesting to me at this moment is the fact that the VG Chartz community, by contrast, picked Xenoblade Chronicles 3 as their runner-up choice overall. While I think we know good and well that Nintendo fans are heavily represented on this site already, this choice to me is interesting in that it suggests VGC is home to a particular kind of Nintendo fan really. Out of all the games published by Nintendo this year, unless I'm mistaken, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 might've be the worst-selling entry, yet it's the most appreciated one here. By contrast, Nintendo's best-selling new game of the year, the Pokemon Scarlet and Violet versions, won the dubious distinction of Most Disappointing Game here on VGC. So while this community may feature many devoted brand loyalists, that doesn't mean it's composed of a bunch of sellouts who just go for whatever's popular. Rather, VGC Nintendoids seem often to favor the big N's single-player (and/or single-player-focused) adventures, and not just the top-selling ones with the Legend of Zelda and Super Mario labels attached to them, but also many that wind up selling fewer than 5 million copies. For example, VGC gave Metroid Dread its top award last year and has shown a lot of love to games like Astral Chain, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, and Bayonetta 3. I find that interesting because it's actually more the multiplayer-focused Nintendo games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Animal Crossing: New Horizon, and of course Pokemon that seem to sell the best and move the most Switch systems in the grand scheme of things. Says to me this is a community of somewhat older Nintendo fans who maybe harken back to the days when most video games were designed as solo escapades.

Speaking of, you know, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 really did look like something special when I saw the trailers for it. I never did wind up getting around to it for *grumble grumble* financial reasons, but something that's got me interested enough to put it on my list of titles to catch up on in the coming months is the fact that it's the game's storyline and themes that seem to be most often mentioned and discussed among its fans, which isn't a trait I associate with its genre or with previous Xenoblade Chronicles installments or with Nintendo games in general for that matter.

Well anyway, my personal top 10 favorite 2022 games so far are...

1. Perfect Tides
2. Immortality
3. Butterfly Soup 2
4. Pentiment
5. Norco
6. Freedom Planet 2
7. God of War: Ragnarok
8. Never Awake
9. Wayward Strand
10. Return to Monkey Island

I'd also like to give a shout-out to a few retro collections though, including Atari 50 above all, Sonic Origins, and TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection that were all thoroughly enjoyed! And of course, to Shredder's Revenge. And yes, Elden Ring. (Its win here certainly isn't unfair, IMO, just a bit unimaginative.)

Although some of the games I liked best were pretty obscure, Immortality actually managed to nab 8 GOTY awards (notably one more so far than Xenoblade Chronicles 3), Pentiment managed to get 4, and Norco a couple as well. This site provides handy links to all the GOTY award articles, organized neatly by game, and I'd like to highlight, within that, the Slant magazine top 2022 games ranking article because I liked their list of top 25 selections a lot and thought they did a good job of explaining the reasoning behind their picks. And also the argument for Immortality offered by Video Game Are Good.

I'm not finished catching up on games I've missed. I'm currently playing Chained Echoes and am looking forward to playing Neon White after that. Then I'm looking to FINALLY get around to playing Outer Wilds at long last after many delays. And then after that, perhaps I'll buy and get started on Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

Alright, I guess that about sums up my thoughts.