General News - RPG of the Year 2020 @ RPG Site

The RPG Site selected their RPG of the Year 2020:

RPG Site Best of 2020 Awards - our picks for the best of the year

2020 was a memorable year for several reasons, not all of them good. Despite the various hardships of the year, when we were lucky enough to have a chance to look back on 2020 as it pertains to RPG Site, we can see with a little more clarity now how this year still managed to be quite a remarkable one for RPGs. The previous console generation finally came to a close, some long-awaited games big and small finally released, and as always, several surprises came out of nowhere. It's time to discuss them all in our Best of 2020 awards.

We've been running this current iteration of our awards feature since 2018, and we've kept it largely the same this year. That means that in this article you'll find several Category Awards that highlight games for nailing specific aspects of their style or systems. Then you'll find ten games we whittled down from a much longer list as our best of 2020. The first five of these are runners-up, games that we recognize as some of the best of the year, but did not land into our Top Five. Then we list our non-winning Top Five, which ended up falling just short of our overall winner, but remain as RPG of the Year-caliber releases in their own right. Finally, at the very end, one of the Top Five is crowned our official RPG of the Year 2020. At each benchmark, we had to make some incredibly tough decisions and concessions to end up at our final rankings. A couple of final important notes to consider is that we include some RPG-adjacent titles in our deliberations, and only games released before December were considered for this list.

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Best Writing & Storytelling - 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
Best Art - Star Renegades
Best Music - Final Fantasy VII Remake
Best Design & Immersion - Hades
Best Ongoing Support - Monster Hunter World Iceborne
Best Non-RPG - Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Best Re-release - Persona 5 Royal

Best of 2020: The Near Misses, aka the Runner-Up Five

• Assassin's Creed Valhalla
• Moon
• Fae Tactics
• Wasteland 3
• Sakuna of Rice and Ruin

Top Five RPGs of 2020

• Nioh 2
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon
• Hades
• 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

RPG of the Year

• Final Fantasy VII Remake

And the readers' vote:

Readers Choice:

1. Final Fantasy VII Remake - 24.9% (Square Enix - PS4)
2. Yakuza: Like a Dragon - 15.4% (Sega - PS4, Xbox, PC)
3. Persona 5 Royal - 12.6% (Atlus - PS4)
4. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - 7.5% (Atlus - PS4)
5. Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition - 7.2% (Nintendo - Switch)
6. Wasteland 3 - 6.5% (inXile - PS4, Xbox, PC)
7. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV - 6.3% (NIS America - PS4)
8. Hades - 4.1% (Supergiant Games - Switch, PC)
9. Nioh 2 - 2.1% (Sony Interactive Entertainment / Koei Tecmo - PS4)
10. Genshin Impact - 1.5% (miHoYo - PS4, mobile, PC)

More information.

Rinse…repeat…repeat again. Same for every other list this year.

This is just sad

If you look at the PC-RPGs - the Readers' Choice is pretty reasonable for me:

Yakuza: Like a Dragon
Wasteland 3
Hades
Genshin Impact

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III could be inserted as well instead of IV, because it was released in 2020 for the PC.

The definition of RPG has become a bit "open" these days - I would not consider some of those games to be true RPGs. RPG elements maybe. Simply having some element of RPG doesn't make a game RPG to me and at this point the concepts of level ups, skills/talents unlocked via leveling up, etc, are more like basic game elements than RPG specifics.

It'd be like calling Skyrm a shooter due to it being first person perspective with gun like aiming of spells.

Yeah and it predicts me and the average gamer have nothing in common once again this year. Seems I played maybe three games on both the site list and reader list.

Is this the RPG site or the JRPG site?

Joking aside, I have no idea what most of these games are. Pretty disappointing all in all that there were so few good RPG's.

Turning Japanese I think we're turning Japanese I really think so….

Originally Posted by Voqar
The definition of RPG has become a bit "open" these days - I would not consider some of those games to be true RPGs. RPG elements maybe. Simply having some element of RPG doesn't make a game RPG to me and at this point the concepts of level ups, skills/talents unlocked via leveling up, etc, are more like basic game elements than RPG specifics.

I've seen people saying the same in PC Gamer's article giving Valhalla the RPG of the year award. Lots of "you can't just have a few elements" but never saying what you DO have to have that the game doesn't have.

I actually went through our CRPG Analyzer for AC: Odyssey and it came out as an RPG. Valhalla is supposed to be even more RPG'ish.

Valhalla is my pick. Didn't expect to say that, I must admit.

Valhalla is a boring and buggy pos, it's dark souls meets RDR2 wannabe that (so far as I haven't finished it yet) doesn't fail only in the second Asgard visit.

RPG of the Year is a remake? That's quite the year

My RPG of the year is Cyberpunk 2077. What kind of arbitrary cutoff is removing it from consideration on these lists? It came out in 2020. It's 2020 as I type this. What the hell.

My runner up is FFVII Remake. Liked it much more than I expected.

Nothing else here would be on my top RPG list, though a few would be on my top game list. I started Yakuza: Like a Dragon the other day, and that's as fun as expected.

Originally Posted by JFarrell71
My RPG of the year is Cyberpunk 2077. What kind of arbitrary cutoff is removing it from consideration on these lists? It came out in 2020. It's 2020 as I type this. What the hell.

My runner up is FFVII Remake. Liked it much more than I expected.

Nothing else here would be on my top RPG list, though a few would be on my top game list. I started Yakuza: Like a Dragon the other day, and that's as fun as expected.

What does it matter?

If it doesn't make it this year, it will make 2021.

Of course, if CP2077 is RPG of the year - it's a very, very sad year for RPGs indeed - regardless of the number in itself.

Well, unless it's the version that's not Early Access and out of alpha, of course.

Hades is an RPG? Never heard of 13 Sentinels. Star Renegades had the BEST ART?! Monster Hunter is an RPG?

Weird. I've never really followed that site, seems like it's geared towards anime and Asian-style games/console games more than anything else. Hades is fine but it's an action rougelike, etc etc. Weird "RPG" list.

Originally Posted by DArtReturns
What does it matter?

What does it matter that the games of the year be drawn from the games of that year? Matters if you want to bother to have a "game of the year" in the first place that the definition of "year" is agreed upon.

I don't give a crap how sad you think my opinion is. I've had more than enough of being told how shitty Cyberpunk is. Don't play it.

Originally Posted by FurtiveNyctophile
Star Renegades had the BEST ART?!

It's that phenomenon, often observed in the gaming space, in which pixel art is de facto beautiful art, regardless of how good that particular pixel art is relative to other art or even other pixel art.

Originally Posted by JFarrell71
What does it matter that the games of the year be drawn from the games of that year? Matters if you want to bother to have a "game of the year" in the first place that the definition of "year" is agreed upon.

I don't give a crap how sad you think my opinion is. I've had more than enough of being told how shitty Cyberpunk is. Don't play it.

Oh, so 2020 is better than 2021 for game of the year? The technicality aspect is what's important.

Doesn't make much sense to me, but ok.

I don't believe I've commented on your opinion - but rather the fantasy of it being a shared one. Thankfully, a significant amount of critics have managed to dodge the corruption bullet on this one. Not as many as one would have hoped, but still enough to balance it all out.

CP2077 isn't shit, really. It's just nothing like what it should have been. The sad part is the talent that obviously went into creating it - that will never be recognized because of the atrocious release state.

I'm going to play it once it's finished.

I would recommend that to anyone who's not in denial about it.

IT CAME OUT IN 2020. Fuck me, this isn't complicated.

Originally Posted by JFarrell71
IT CAME OUT IN 2020. Fuck me, this isn't complicated.

I get it. The number is the thing - not the game of the year thing. Not the thing that matters thing.

Cool.

I know OCD. I've been suffering from it for years.

Of course, I've learned how to contain it. It's not easy.

Originally Posted by DArtReturns
I get it. The number is the thing - not the game of the year thing. Not the thing that matters thing.

Cool.

I know OCD. I've been suffering from it for years.

Of course, I've learned how to contain it. It's not easy.

The game of the what now? The year? What's a year, though? According to you, it's meaningless. So for you it must be game of the something else.

If your mom's birthday is in, say, March, and you don't call her or acknowledge her birthday in any way you would argue that calling her in April is effectively the same. And if she's angry about it or wonders why you didn't call, she has "OCD" about her birthday month.

Okay. Interesting. The rest of us will continue to use calendars and assign shared meaning to concepts like "year" and "month."