Help me choose my GOTY 2024

[J1M]

I maintain an eclectic personal Game Of The Year list going back to 1995. Some years it is very clear what should win, I even selected a winner in May once. But my impression of 2024 releases was rather dismal.

Looking at the RPGs people put up for the 2024 GOTY at this site makes me pretty sure I'm going to select a winner for 2024 that is not an RPG.

So please recommend the 2024 releases you enjoyed the most for my enjoyment and consideration. Past winners include everything from FPS to RTS to 4X to handheld puzzle games.

[methoxetamine]

Only play it if you are interested in 10/10 God tier masterpieces. It will often be called a Metroidvania but it's really not one since there's no backtracking shenanigans. Best game I've played in years and an extremely easy GOTY choice for me. (For the record I really don't like Metroidvanias at all)

[Valter]

Hmmmm. I don't think I've played a single 2024 release. Persona 3 Reload would probably be my pick seeing as I loved the original, though Silent Hill 2 Remake has piqued my interest and is on the backburner...

Only play it if you are interested in 10/10 God tier masterpieces. It will often be called a Metroidvania but it's really not one since there's no backtracking shenanigans. Best game I've played in years and an extremely easy GOTY choice for me. (For the record I really don't like Metroidvanias at all)

I have heard high praise for this game. Indeed an interesting one.

[ThulsaDoomer]

I realised that I haven't played a single RPG that released in 2024, but I have played some other genres, if only a little.

I guess Dominions 6? That released in 2024, probably one of the few recent games I could say has genuine sovl. Sorry, not much help. I'll be watching this thread for others suggestions in case anything catches my interest.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I stand by Granblue Fantasy Relink being my favorite 2024 game. Great aesthetics from the character models to the environments to the spectacular animations, fun combat/movement feel, good music by Uematsu's apprentice Tsutomu Narita and various arrangers. The story was nothing to write home about but was tight and hardly ever boring, lots of fun setpieces. The game provided me 300 hours of fun progressing in the online co-op and building up Vaseraga and finally beating Lucilius. Really exciting battles like the Behemoth, Proto Bahamut and Lucilius while the spectacular animations are going off and the catchy songs are playing. Can't wait for a sequel.

Downside was that visually it wad the Nth rehash of Phantargade's aesthetics as opposed to something more novel like Nahlegrande. Too few fodder bosses so you wind up fighting the same recolored dragons several times as you progresd through the higher difficulties. Some netcode issues where you spent a lot of time for the matchmaking process to fail the hookup even when there are lots of people playing.

Runnerup would be Kuro no Kiseki 1/Trails Through Daybreak 1 if you count the official Western release (I played it in 2023 with the fan translation patch). I liked the artstyle, increased visual fidelity, some cool looking characters like the Zin redesign or Shizuna, the ability animations, the combat, soundtrack was overall good, acceptable presentation of the story, etc. You get to go to a lot of towns. The side characters are good. PC port was generally solid outside of the stuttering on certain S-craft animations.

Downside was that it is a 110 hour long game, but the tension doesn't really pick up and have me on the edge of my seat until the 70 hour mark when they get stuck in traffic and the two guys on the radio are hesitant to announce the news. The combat was mostly very easy and boring even on nightmare difficulty. The most of the main party are unmemorable. Catching up with the hundreds of Edith NPCs every chapter is a chore and kills the pacing. The long awaited country of Calvard is boring and feels devoid of passion. Infuriating retcons/historical revisionism. Some irritating woke and secular stuff.

Is this game good? Yes ka No ka Hanbun ka?

Yes, it is very good, probably my favorite game to come out this year. Spent 300 hours playing. I played through the story on hard difficulty and then beat everything up through the Lucilius true final boss. Only thing I didn't do was the four patch super ultra hard quests, which I don't think the devs intended for everyone to beat. It probably helps though that I had already been reading the visual novel gacha for 7 years prior and was already pretty invested in the characters, Hideo Minaba's art, and Uematsu's and Narita's music, and was looking forward to it getting a high production value 3D game.

• Good aesthetics, faithfully adapts Akihiko Yoshida's and Hideo Minaba's designs from the gacha.
• Fantastic soundtrack by Uematsu and Narita. Also reuses a couple stellar tracks (Zero from the gacha, and the Wings of Terror cover from the Stella Manga album)
  
  
  
  
• Pleasant characters, the good guys are good. I didn't want to punch any of the heroes in the face, which is a sadly low bar these days.
• Good Japanese voice acting. Dunno about the English dub. I'm used to hearing the Japanese voices from the gacha, and what little I heard of the English dub from trailers did not sound inspiring.
• Nice looking fantasy environments. If I had to nitpick, I was a little bummed as the Zegagrande Skydom that this game is set in is an aesthetic rehash of Phantagarde, which is overexposed. Phantagarde was the first Skydom in the gacha and most side storylines are set in Phantagarde since the devs want new players to have easy access to those side storylines without having to play through 80 chapters to get to Nahlegrande with it's more original fusion of medieval European castles with Japanese/Chinese/Thai architecture. (See my recent post in the art thread for examples)
• Story is good enough. The writing in Relink isn't deep stuff like Xenogears or Trails or even some of the gacha's storylines, and some moments can be rather cliche, but it serves its purpose as getting you from cool setpiece to cool setpiece, and some of the moments were admittedly pretty fun. If you're a fan of the gacha game like me then some of the lore in Relink makes no sense and can feel a little fanficy, though (where are the Enforcers aka the world police during all of this? How does this random cult in this completely different Skydom know about Lyria and Gran? There being inexplicably being a 3rd Bahamut when the origin story of the GBF setting is that there was only one Bahamut and he got split into two, etc).
• PC port is overall good. I've had no major issues, though the framerate does drop a little in the first town (Folca) even on a 3070ti at 4K, which I thought was a little odd. Also, if you press F12 to take a Steam screenshot, the game will stutter for a second. I had to use the Nvidia geforce screenshot keybind (or Microsoft Xbox screenshot key, I forgot which) to take lots of screenshots without constant stutters during gameplay.
• There are network issues, though. I might queue up for the most popular quest in the game at prime time but then get repeated "no matches found" and have to retry over and over until it work, even though the game still has a big active playerbase on steam. The matchmaking/network connectivity issue is a common complaint. If you make a lobby and then queue for a quest it works just fine, though.

From what I have heard, the English dub was not very good, and also you could tell at times reading the subtitles that they did not match the tone of the gacha or how the characters are supposed to act (most conspicuous moment was Rackam saying "well, that just happened").




























The character models (when properly lit in cutscenes and certain battle areas) and the visual effects look fantastic. I'm hard press to think of other anime JRPG with characters and VFX that looks this good. Trails and Valkyria Chronicles come close in the character department but this is really something else, and nothing comes close to the VFX quality. The environments also look good, though Xenoblade probably has the edge in more imaginative and grandiose JRPG environments. The Granblue 2D illustrations look superb as usual.




One of the new characters in the story (not playable), Gallanza, felt pretty derivative. Draph male who is one of the chief lieutenants of the empire who wants fights. Already seen him two times before in the mainline game with Ghandharva and Baragona. I quite liked the new original characters of Magielle, Roland, and Id. Shame they haven't been added to the mainline game yet.

Story wise, I'm a little peeved by there being a third Bahamut. The foundational lore of the setting in the gacha is that the god of the GBF setting, Bahamut, was split into two and the universe was split into two: the Sky realm which GBF takes place in, and the Astral realm which is never visited. Gran's sidekick Vyrn is the reincarnation of the Sky half of Bahamut, and the Astral realm Bahamut is over in the Astral realm which is inaccessible to the Skydwellers. No one has managed to cross the boundary between worlds since the Astrals retreated at the end of the War 2,000 years ago, and the Astrals who were left behind (Loki, Lucilius, Beelzebub, etc) have been unable to return home. It is highly unlikely that this is the Astral side Bahamut. So where did this Third Bahamut come from? It's never satisfactorily explained.

If I had a complaint, it's that the postgame bosses are rather unimaginative. You get to fight the cool story bosses a couple of more times but otherwise you're mostly fighting generic enemies: more goblins riding wolves, more giant skeletons, more golems, more crocodiles, and more dragons, etc. The penultimate boss was the only thing new that I hadn't fought before. It's a shame, because the gacha has a wealth of fantastical monster designs but they're unused here.








I liked that the true final boss was human sized, Lucilius (not a spoiler since it's just a bonus fight that was patched in and has nothing to do with Relink's story), so you weren't slashing at the back of a dragon's ankles. Was pretty climatic.







Other issue off of the top of my head is that a lot of the roles like tanking and healing or buffing/debuffing become pointless in the endgame, since almost all missions boil down to "kill the boss to win". There are only a couple of "hold out and defend" sidequests early on, and that's it. And because you have limited resources, and later on have a 10 or 15 minute timer, and because of the sheer damage potential of damage oriented builds and due to this being a 2 or 3 hit game where you can't really tank hits and live (also making healing roles pointless), you wind up just turning everyone into a glass cannon to try to burn down the boss before you run out of lives/time. For a Relink 2, I would like to see the other roles be tuned to be more viable, and more variety in mission objectives/design so as to encourage setups other than 4x glass cannons.

If you guys want to play together (as in do the quests, can't do the main story together) I would be happy to reinstall. I mained Vaseraga in the endgame, though I can also switch to a different character if one of you guys want to play as Vas. I found him to be the most comfortable to play since I can't button mash or do combos, and Vas is just about charging up for 2 seconds your XXYY quadruple heavy swings.

[wndrbr]

None of the 2024 games I played deserved to be named goty.

[Vaako]

2024 was only Eldenring addon and that chinese ape game really. Most other big games just flopped.

[Tinky Winky]

Drova is the only real choice, pretty much the only non-Gothic game that managed to catch the "Gothic" feel other than the original stalker trilogy.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1585 ... saken_Kin/

[Cipher]

My GOTY for last year was U-Boat:



A sim game about a German crew in a U-Boat submarine having to make your way through WWII. You have to manage your crew, munitions, chart your course, prime your torpedoes, calculate their trajectory and launch them, escape when discovered and outnumbered, sneak in to sink cargo ships and slip away unseen by destroyers and aircraft.

You can automate a lot or you can go FULL autistic sim mode and micromanage every single detail. Extremely customizable experience. Yeah... its not flashy like AAA slop, it doesn't have "le hollywood cast of voice actors" or "next gen graphics" but it has a LOT of soul and passion with the attention to detail to really sell you on the experience of being in charge of a U-Boat crew going on missions. I sank hundreds of hours on it because it really scratches the "just one more mission" itch.

Executing a perfect stealth kill and slipping away like a bandit is always very rewarding. Manning the guns and taking down planes is exciting. And the storylines that come from the emergent gameplay of how you tackle missions and what happens to your crew keeps me coming back.

Certainly not a game for everyone but if any of the above has tickled your fancy, don't sleep on U-Boat.

[Tangerine]

I was recently informed that Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth was the best game ever, so you should pick that.

[J1M]

I was recently informed that Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth was the best game ever, so you should pick that.

Thank you, but I found Goldeneye 007 (N64) to be a more appropriate choice for GOTY 1997 and early access titles are not eligible.

[rusty_shackleford]

Looking at the RPGs people put up for the 2024 GOTY at this site

when did we do this

[J1M]

Looking at the RPGs people put up for the 2024 GOTY at this site

when did we do this

viewtopic.php?p=189117-rpghq-2024-best- ... rd#p189117

[Acrux]

That's not an official poll, though. The RPGHQ 2024 GOTY list won't happen until 2026.

I've never heard of most of those games, anyway.

[J1M]

That's not an official poll, though. The RPGHQ 2024 GOTY list won't happen until 2026.

I've never heard of most of those games, anyway.

Yes, but it is still a thread with people making RPG suggestions for GOTY. It doesn't need to be stamped official for me to see that it is uninspiring.