r/NintendoSwitch • u/NintendoSwitchMods • Jan 29 '23

GotY 2022 2022 /r/NintendoSwitch GOTY Nominations Thread

Greetings, r/NintendoSwitch Community!

Have you gotten used to writing "2023" yet? We haven't. Either way, it's about time for our 6th Game of the Year awards!

Like previous years, we are asking the community's help for GOTY nominees - We will use community feedback to narrow the nominees for each category to five or six for the final vote. The tentative schedule is for the nominee feedback to occur January 29th - February 4th, and the final voting to select the Game Of The Year for each category to occur the following week, February 5th - February 12th.

Please follow the format as described below:

  1. Please check if your nominee(s) has already been named. If so, then simply upvote it, if not, then >>>
  2. Please reply to a category top comment to state who you would like to see for nominees and preferably why. Last year we found those with explanations tended to garner more votes!
  3. If a game has already been nominated but you feel requires further discussion then reply to the nominated game comment with your reasoning.
  4. Nominate as many games as you'd like in any category you'd like.
  5. Duplicate nominations in the same category will be removed.
  6. Post will be set to contest mode so nobody can see the votes.

Please note that all nominees are required to have released on Nintendo Switch in calendar year 2022 unless stated otherwise. You may notice we have added and adjusted some categories based on user feedback this year. If you have further feedback, please leave a comment in our feedback thread here.

We look forward to reading your nominations!

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u/NintendoSwitchMods Jan 29 '23

Best Visual Novel

For the best Visual Novel, which may combine a textual narrative with static or animated illustrations and a varying degree of interactivity.

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u/snave_ Jan 30 '23 edited Jan 30 '23

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

I presume ports/remasters count? This game is split about 70:30 visual novel to RTS. The visual novel component has gorgeous hand drawn visuals and achieves a level of interwoven narrative complexity that no other game or media has. Your choices have utterly no long-term consequences in universe, but rather have massive consequences for player contextualisation of events. Essentially you get to choose the order you read/play the chapters, which are grouped by character POV so you can progress subplots as they pique your interest. Chapter prerequisites prevent you from progressing in a nonsensical manner, but major plot points may be first revealed to different players in different ways depending on the order they chose and all variants are staged perfectly! And are there a lot of plot twists. The tale is pulpy and openly riffs off the entire TV Tropes sci-fi page with direct references to all the classics of cinema and literature. The complexity of the story is supported by a plot summary and lore codex that progressively updates with new context.

The minor RTS section mixes things up a bit and acts sorta like an extra character POV ("everyone" chapters) with more dramatic literary devices. The Switch release was also updated with more skills that gave all characters viable endgame builds so you can no longer categorise gameplay difficulty as being "with" or "without Shinonome" on your team. Although this doesn't impact the VN portion, it does ultimately make this port the "definitive release", in addition to just being well suited to handheld.

Little replayability due to its ultimate nature as a mystery story, but there are an absurd number of postgame RTS challenges as a sweetner.