I'm sad I couldn't swap a few stragglers on my list out for Hollow Knight and Berseria before the deadline (not that the latter would have made it anywhere close to these lists regardless), but it's still incredibly cool to see a sequel to Nier so high on these lists, especially when its competition is the juggernaut duo of fuckin' Zelda and Mario.
My suggestion for this category and Best Looking that will never be read by anybody:
Show, don't tell. Get out of that stuffy room and into the studio and get people to showcase some damn games in motion. You can't sit there and try to convince a room of people how great a game looks with screenshots or low quality gifs on your 12 inch laptop screen. I think they've done about the best they can with the Best Music category, but the two Aesthetic categories could really do with the help, especially when over half the staff hasn't even played a game in contention.
PUBG is definitely GB's Game of the Year. As in, none of the staff will care about it next year.
Shitposting aside, I do think this is a pretty accurate representation of "2017 at Giant Bomb", based on what and how certain games were talked about this year. I'd say the deliberations were a little too long and repetitive this year, so hopefully next year they put some effort into smoothing out the process for next time. At the very least, they need to get better about stonewalling if they intend to keep going with this many people at the table.
I swear every category this year has a "walk in" game that's on the list the entire time that I'm always like "...what?", when it doesn't get cut, so I was happy to see everyone put to the test to explain why Wolfenstein II has a good story.
That said, the fact Yakuza 0 got cut for being "a perfect example of one of those" when that's basically the only argument anyone's made for Cuphead winning anything is sad.
Even as someone who doesn't think Horizon had a very well told story (mostly just a good backstory delivered badly with dull characters, too many text logs, and bad pacing), I'm also surprised it didn't even get a mention when Assassin's Creed of all things was on there.
All I'll say for Route E is that it legitimately surprised me that I still had enough faith in people to want give up my save, knowing full well (as the game points out) some asshole I don't care about might just throw my "help" in the garbage and scoff.
I would also throw "First trip to the Amusement Park" in there as a best moment, but that's mostly for how it perfectly ramps up the music and visuals and action as you go through and explore the area, and is then capped with a beautiful, haunting boss fight. Think Alex said something similar, but it was definitely the point (even as a huge fan of the first Nier) where I got fully on board with the game for the remainder of its run-time. If any developer takes something from Automata, I hope it's this kind of fine-tuning of audio integrating with the game/level design.
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