Like I mentioned before, Game of the Year is just essentially a popularity contest on how much they enjoyed the games of that year. So it ultimately doesn't matter what I say as I'll probably be in the minority for Zelda (and Persona) in this case. Horizon on the other hand was more of a surprise that didn't have any expectations going in like the other two either.
[customspoiler='Zelda: Breath of the Wild']
Breath of the Wild looks nice and is fairly fluid. The glide mechanic and climbing mechanic work well in the environment they crafted, but are hardly new or revolutionary despite hearing the occasional person saying they are. However the problem starts to arise when you add those things and don't fully build the world. Technically it's all there are it's decently well crafted, but there are a ton of areas that are left empty and void of anything outside of basic ground textures. This is something that happens far too frequently in open world games and it provides a big disconnect, booting you from any immersion I may have found myself in.
Next up as you've probably already guessed one of my gripes is the weapon/shield system. Nintendo changing the battle system here and there in every iteration is nothing new. However, I don't feel the battle system really got the polish that the series typically gets. You have a lot of weapons, but they all boil down to a couple types. The attacks you can perform with them are fairly shallow and a lot of combat is best to use 'perfect dodge' to get a flurry in. Doing this repeatedly with how they implemented that feels like it drags out the combat. This is probably my smallest issue because all Zelda games have issues with combat in some way or another.
Though the biggest issue I have with the combat is that they put in the awful durability system. Anywhere from like 5 to 20 attacks with any weapon causes it to break entirely. It doesn't matter if its wood, metal or the god damned master sword. When you're stuck managing you weapons, bows & shields all game it tends to wear on you over time. It's also a bad sign when you feel that Bombs with their terrible damage are a better choice half the time than actual weapons. I would much rather have had some smith crafted weapons that very slowly broke down but could be repaired and have far less durable weapons from Moblins and the like. As for the Master Sword, that shit should never break or wear down. Bows on the other hand could have their bow string snap, which you could replace as well. Shields are similar to weapons where Moblin trash breaks, crafted shields from metal have significant durability and the Mirror Shield would be indestructible. You've also got Guardian weapons and shields, but I think they would do well to have more of a 'battery' life to them where you would go and recharge them in exchange for Ancient Cores or something.
I'd even take it a step further than that and say that fighting enemies is a waste of time and resources unless absolutely necessary. If fighting enemies means you're going to lose at least one weapon or spend a lot of time trying to kill them via bombs or the environment, then why bother? It gives little incentive to actually fight enemies since they drop no rupees except for a few rare enemies and the weapons they drop usually aren't particularly great.
Food... ugh. Implemented in the worst possible way. You have no recipe book despite having a god damned tablet that records damn near everything else, but it can't store some recipes? Also cooking itself is an abomination. You have to go into your inventory, hit X to start holding items and then find them and then back out of the menu, finally throwing them into the nearby pot. If you want to make the same thing again? Repeat the process. What the
? Seriously, who the hell tested this and didn't think this was the dumbest
ing idea? As for potions, I think it would've been cooler to have a Witch element to it kind of like Link to the Past. You would find out recipes through her and be able to use monster parts to create some interesting potion types. You could do it manually without her too, but learning them through her would increase the effect, duration or lower required ingredients over not learning them. If you made it manually, she would "update" the recipe for you.
I also want to point out the voice acting. The voices themselves felt off in more than several occasions where I felt the voice director didn't do a particularly good job for how little of the game is voiced. There would be sudden changes in tone out of nowhere as if half of the line was one voice clip and the second half was a completely different voice clip. If it were most other dev/publishers, I'd just ignore it but I expect better from Nintendo. There were also several occasions where I didn't feel like the dialogue progression made any sense. It's like everybody just accepts Link, as a stranger, without questioning a god damned thing. The biggest offender of this were the Rito in my opinion as they seemed like a very proud race, which went against the flow of the dialogue.
Puzzles and dungeons is probably another topic that should be touched on. There are no real dungeons in the game, at all. You have four things that are remotely close, but they're just slightly bigger puzzles than shrines are. There's no dungeon feel to them at all. You start one, get a cutscene that says "HEY, GO GET THE MAP!" because they have to make sure to have you get it since its integral to completing the puzzle. So due to this it was actually quite disappointing because I've always enjoyed the dungeons in Zelda games and for them to remove them entirely was a big loss for me. I will say that the puzzles in this game are better than most other Zelda games, except for a few that weren't enjoyable as well as the god awful motion control ones.
I also don't mind shrines, but I think having as many as there are eventually makes you feel bored with them. Especially since the combat shrines are a repeat of the same thing, just having the enemy you face have more health and deal more damage. The tactics it uses is always the same and the change you need to make is virtually non-existent outside of the occasional different environment you fight it in where you might have to actually use your tablets abilities. Plus the chest rewards in shrines are often awful. You're telling me I just fought a guardian that drops 40-60 damage weapons only to open up a chest to something that gives me a pathetic 20 attack? Where is the incentive to do more shrines beyond the necessary for something optional that's somewhat tied to it.
Rupees are also given a backseat in this game as well. Unless you go farm mining nodes for gems or abuse mini-games, you don't really gain shit in the way of money in this game. I don't recall past games being that big of an issue like it was in this one. Especially since that one Great Fairy wants 10k and non-normal arrows cost a boat load as well. They just didn't do a good job managing natural progression for rupee gain and is probably the worst in the series to my knowledge.
Mounts were also very disappointing to me. Having played past Zelda games as well as games like Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption, I felt the horse riding in this was extremely annoying/poor. The horses themselves were stiff and having to tame any wild ones just amplified that feeling of horse riding not being enjoyable. Now I liked Sand Seals, they felt fine. I did not do any of the other unique mounts and won't spoil what they are, so those might be better. It just caused me to very rarely use my horse. Ended up walking, climbing and gliding all over the place because of how poorly horses felt for me. I'm not asking for horses to be able to turn on a dime either, just be a bit easier to control to make it feel more enjoyable from a gameplay perspective.
I have more complaints such as Korok Seeds, but I'll leave it at that. I see the game as a 7 out of 10 on the Zelda scale but as an Action-Adventure by itself it's an 8 out of 10 at best. To me it feels like it wasn't completely finished and rushed a bit towards the end to make sure that it launched with the Switch. I don't see it as something that received quite the care that Nintendo traditionally gives its main titles.[/customspoiler]
[customspoiler='Persona 5']
Persona 5 I could see it being an RPG GOTY, but I feel like it played it too safe. Ever since the series took off after Persona 3, I feel like they haven't really done much in terms of improvements with Persona 4 & 5 to really merit it being a great sequel. I'm not saying the game is bad, but it has become quite formulaic as a Persona game. I don't really need to say anything about the graphics/style or gameplay as they're fairly solid and I don't have any serious complaints about them except the lack of quality of life changes that would improve the pacing of non-boss battles. The issues I mostly have with it come in the form of the non-dungeon elements, story and character interaction.
The story itself isn't terrible, but people paint it as a sad and bleak story that's the darkest Persona story yet. Honestly, the way the story handled itself, I felt like they were playing it insanely safe and not properly touching their subject matter as strongly as they should to get their point across. This might be due to not increasing the rating in Japan, but it pussyfooted around. When you touch on subjects of sex offenders, greed, corruption and more, I feel it's best to be direct and show it more true to form for what it is and what actually happens. Instead we got a sugarcoated reality that's more carebear than it should be. Basically it feels like the story is through a child's naive mind instead of something a little more real. It can be debated for either viewpoint though, but I feel that say South Park does a much better job on tackling mature subjects without demeaning what they really are. Besides the tone, the story dragged out too much. About 3/4ths of the way through I was asking myself if it was going to wrap up soon. This isn't so much because of the story itself, but in part due to the long non-story segments in the game.
With the non-story segments, they should have made things a bit more real to life I feel. Some of it coming in quality of life improvements, while others with common sense. For example, during Summer Break, you should have one more time slot to work with and the game should be balanced around it. Possibly even on the weekend as well. Why do I do something in the morning only for it to end up being night and yet I gain the same bonuses during that time frame as when I do something at night? The same with being forced into bed when you get moved to your room. If I don't have anything to do, why can't you just advance the day forward instead of having me check everything to make sure nothing else is doable? It feels like a waste of time.
One thing I would have liked to see is also the implementation of some slight smartphone usage. The character clearly has one as you use it for basic texts but the only way I can check weather is through an old analog TV? Wat. Also there should have been a calendar integration into the game using your phone which would tell you when your plant needs to get watered, when the next market show comes on, etc. This would help immensely in planning and being able to quickly check trivial things that shouldn't require so much time and effort to check. This I think would have been a huge improvement towards the gameplay experience in non-dungeon segments.
As for the character interactions, I have a huge issue with this. The game universe revolves entirely too much around the main character. Nothing ever really happens unless the main character commands it. I understand that many people are fine with this, but it's a huge immersion breaker for me and something that needs to never be used in games. Going forward I feel like they need to design interactions to not require the main character for them to actually happen. This is something that could be hugely improved with just making more use of the existing smart phone. You could keep up-to-date on events that way as well as realize that the world actually exists beyond what you see on screen.
Both Atelier and Trails games do this fairly well with Trails doing it significantly better. Atelier, similar to Persona revolves around a time mechanic. If you don't do certain things within a certain time frame, you can't see that event anymore. Yes it sucks losing out on things like that, but in turn you gain more immersion into the world. More so if they still talk about what you missed, which is something Atelier games don't really do well. Trails on the other hand is a different beast. You've got NPCs galore that all have their own stories and arcs to them. You can visit and talk to them all and they'll all get updated dialogue after a story event. If you miss talking to them after a story event and go back to them several events later, they are farther along in their story arc. You may miss out on pertinent information to fill in the blanks, but they feel like they're living lives just like everybody else.
Now Persona doesn't have as many NPCs as a Trails game, not by far, so it's something quite possible with Atlus' resources. The hardest part of implementing something like this is making everything work in the context of the story events going on, but part of it is already in place with the time system Persona has. Now I'm not saying every single thing needs to be independent of the main character as there are plenty of interactions you could do that would require the presence of the main character. They can be time gated from the NPC or ally who instigated it or it can be a anytime throughout the game sort of thing, depending on context of the event.
Semi-related to this, I just also want to say that I am extremely tied of seeing the overused trope of a character who acts before thinking and being a general idiot. Most of them are implemented poorly and I feel like Persona 5 is in this category a bit too. I'm just so tired of watching the story forcefully interject parts where the idiot can't control themselves and causes negative consequences against the main character and rest of the party. That's just something that bugs me in general, not so much specific to Persona 5.[/customspoiler]
[customspoiler='Horizon: Zero Dawn']
Horizon I don't have a whole lot to say. The game did well fitting the environment and everything to the story. I found the story quite interesting, especially with how they blended technology into it even if it's not the greatest story ever told. The gameplay, while it can get repetitive was quite varied. It allowed you to take down giant enemies in a variety of ways, but I imagine not many people did that. I know I killed things in very different ways than my friend did. Most importantly though, I felt that the story did not really overstay its welcome too much. The graphics were also really good for console and it looked pretty damn awesome in motion.
If there's something I didn't like about the game, I'd have to say that I didn't care a whole lot for mounts. They weren't bad unless there were a lot of objects around and the auto-follow on roads could have used a bit more work, it's just I tended to enjoy sneaking around more for the most part and when necessary I would warp to wherever I needed. It's something I switched to shortly after messing around quite a bit with a mount after you're first able to get one. Otherwise, the only things that would benefit the game more would be substantial sidequest stories and even more variety of weapons or better weapon mods that can completely change how ammo types work and what not.
I just went into the game expecting nothing as just a way to fill time, but ended up really enjoying my time with it. It didn't have any unnecessary expectations of previous games and if anything, my expectations would have been low because I'm not particularly fond of the Killzone series that Guerilla Games has made. It's similar to how people play Witcher 3 and get blown away by it not having played the previous ones, whereas I was a fan of the series prior to the third game.[/customspoiler]
Unfortunately the longer ago I played something, more often than not the less I can remember specific intimate details. My memory works more from muscle memory and triggered via senses. So going into more intimate specifics on Persona 5 & Horizon is a bit more difficult for me without watching footage or picking up the game again. Plus by the end of writing Zelda & Persona my mind just kind of gave up trying to remember anything specific on Horizon. I tried looking for my past posts on it, but sort of gave up because this sites search sucks.
I think my top three favorite games this year so far are Horizon: Zero Dawn, Trails in the Sky the 3rd & Utawarerumono: Mask of Deception/Truth. Persona 5 falls in somewhere after that and then Breath of the Wild a bit after that.
Resident Evil: Revelations
Resident Evil: Revelations 2
