Best Game Ever Contest: Utter BS? (Rant)

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Ketzal
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Best Game Ever Contest: Utter BS? (Rant)

#1 Post by Ketzal »

Alright, so I've been hearing for a while that there was a voting contest on the best game ever on GameFAQS, and while I didn't think much of it, a lot of other people seem to be, and for one reason: Undertale won the top spot.

Here's the page for reference

Now, I've played and thoroughly enjoyed Undertale, and I would readily recommend it to anyone else. This isn't a rant about Undertale winning, but in general I find the whole "best game ever" concept to be kind of stupid in the first place.

For one, it's putting games of all different genres and subgenres into one competition, and you get comparisons that honestly don't make a lot of sense. Where else are you going to see Phoenix Wright put up against freaking Skyrim? It just isn't fair because some games are entertaining for entirely different reasons than others: in the example I mentioned, PW is an awesome game because it has likable characters and interesting investigation gameplay elements, not because it has any open-world exploration or epic conflicts like Skyrim. There's no real basis for comparison, so why try it in the first place?

Second of all, timing can be a real issue. As great as it is, I feel like part of what won Undertale that top spot was all the hype surrounding it. It's pretty much running the gamut of any super-popular product: it grows a huge fanbase and gets hyped to hell, and then eventually calms down once the initial shock of whatever sold it is over with. But because the contest was held during that fansplosion period, the game already had a crazy advantage by being everywhere and on everyone's mind. Who's going to vote for old Ocarina of Time when there's this shiny new game that goes places you've never seen a game go before?

While I do understand that timing a contest to factor out the new-game-hype effect is pretty damn hard if not impossible, if there has to be a contest about the greatest games, then I feel we should at least stick to comparing games of similar genre or playstyle. Comparing Undertale to stuff like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy would be a more interesting and fair comparison than comparing it to Super Mario World, because those kind of games have similar structure and can scrutinized for the same kinds of selling points.

Then again, maybe the whole idea in general is stupid. Video games are constantly building off of ideas from past games, and while they may end up executing the idea better or breaking new ground, the fact remains that they just wouldn't exist without those old games that they built off of. Toby himself said that one of the inspirations for Undertale was Paper Mario, yet a lot of people would choose Undertale over Paper Mario because it's something new and tries some crazy stuff, whereas Paper Mario is more or less a cliche story of beating the bad guy and saving the day. It doesn't mean it's any less of a game than it was when it was released, but why compare the two when one's building off of the other?

TL;DR Umbrella video game polls that compare games from multiple genres are BS, and I don't understand why they're a thing because it's impossible to avoid hype for new games influencing the vote and they end up making comparisons that don't really make sense (Phoenix Wright and Skyrim).

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