[Question] The Gamingforce Game of the Year 2015: Too many massive RPGs - voting edition

40 points - Rocket League

I'd give Rocket League all 100 points if I were allowed. In recent years, there's been a lot of whining about how gaming is dead, nobody knows how to make a good game anymore, monetization is evil, and so on and so forth.

Rocket League is the Ideal Video Game. Priced reasonably for the amount of content provided, a DLC and post-release support apparatus that are obviously feeding into each other and not being greedy about it, and a robust and responsive relationship with the community.

But none of that matters, because Rocket League is FUN. Rocket League is tuned to perfection, with a skill ceiling high enough to immediately and naturally foster high-level eSports play, but an ease of understanding and playability factor that enables less hardcore people to easily pick up and enjoy it. It also makes for a wonderful "shooting the shit with buds" game.

Rocket League does everything a game should do. It made me feel really good to read that the game has made upwards of 50 million dollars for Psyonix. Rocket League should be held up as the gold standard for how it is, in fact, possible to make a quality video game in this day and age.

Undertale - 40 points

Undertale was a wonderful experience from start to finish. I don't generally get sucked into a game with quite the level of fervor that Undertale caused, but holy crap did I binge this and then drive chat (especially Skills) BATSHIT by not stopping talking about it.

It deserves it, too. While it's a bit shaggy around the edges in spots (some segments are bit long or unnecessary, and I can see the art style not being for everyone), even those shaggy spots feel like they're... if not entirely deliberate, at least it was considered to be an acceptable fault. Everything in Undertale is thought through, and was made with great care, and it shines from beginning to end.

The fact that it lands the emotional beats it does is also extremely satisfying. What starts as a seemingly goofy lark eventually turns into a very moving story of friendship, loss, and the beauty of life. I'm not ashamed to admit I cried like a goddamn baby at the "true ending".

Which, as an aside, is another thing I actually liked; there was technically one more ending to this game I didn't get. I started along the path to do it, and quickly realized that I didn't want to. Without getting into details for those who haven't played it, it would have involved doing things that, after playing through the game already, felt *wrong*. The fact that I felt that strongly about fictional characters to stop where I was actually took me by surprise, but made me feel that much more firm in my decision to just leave the game where it was. Maybe it's just me looking for things where they aren't there, but I can't help but feel like that was part of the point; you don't *have* to see everything. It's allowed for the experience to end when you want it to.

More games should have something to say the way Undertale did. The fact that it did so with a wonderful sense of humor and style is a bonus.

10 points - Monster Hunter 4

MonHun suffers a bit from my very strong feelings about the above two games, but I really did enjoy this game a lot. 4 showed that Capcom does occasionally have a grasp of how to make a game that easily-distracted people like me can play without boggling at spreadsheets. Its deliberate, fussy-but-not-too-fussy gameplay, combined with a... not completely awful... lobby system, kept me playing with bros on the Intertron far longer than any multiplayer-focused game has in recent memory. That alone earns it some points.

Lego Dimensions - 5 points

Lego Dimensions is a super fun game. It combines a frankly asontishing amount of pop culture franchises in a way that doesn't feel *too* forced, while managing to take the time to really get what makes each franchise tick. The range of broad strokes to really specific in-joke references is really impressive, and shows how much care went into making it. The puzzle design is also much more fun, even if it's still not exactly difficult. It is a game for kids after all.

Splatoon - 5 points

Nintendo needs all the encouragement it can get to make more games like this. As a company, it's been pretty clearly in the middle of an identity crisis for a while now. Splatoon, with its very fun, very accessible gameplay, and most importantly, NEW styling, shows that Nintendo can in fact make a new thing that doesn't completely suck out loud. It provides hope that the NX will make up for the Wii U's missteps, and that's good enough for me.

Jam it back in, in the dark.