Well I'm going to be totally wrong lol.

Oops! Forgot The Messenger! That will be added to the Finalists and the list will be done shortly!

The toughest elimination yet:

Monster Hunter: World -- Such an evolution of the series. The streamlining made it something immensely more playable, but, although being obsessed with it for most of the beginning of the year, once I stopped, I never went back, not even to finish the last, big, non-DLC boss. It's kinda a lonely game if you don't have a group to play consistently with too.

God of War

Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Red Dead Redemption II

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom

Subnautica -- Moody and super-intriguing. I can almost tolerate the under water environment because it's so captivating. Great but there are too many good games this year.

Megaman 11

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey

Soul Calibur VI -- Best Soul Calibur in years. A true return to form, but it's Edged out by others.

Octopath Traveler

Dead Cells

Tetris Effect -- FUCKING incredible music, hypnotizing background elements, but it's Tetris. It's SO good it almost made it, but...

Hollow Knight -- I so wanted this game to be on my top-ten. I'm sure I'll RAVE about it once I actually get into it, but I tried it for ten minutes when I first got it, LOVED IT, but never formed a solid opinion on it and went back to whatever 100+ hour game I was wrapped up in at the time.

The Messenger

8. Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom -- Wonder Boy woulda, coulda, shoulda been to Sega what Zelda or Metroid was to Nintendo. Consistent, cohesive, stylized, colorful and FUN are all words that could be used to describe the games. They started as action and evolved into Adventure of Link / Metroid-Vania style adventure games. If you can recall from my Virtual Console topics, I owned, played and loved all of the incarnations across various systems. Sega let the series stagnate though until one company got the license to remaster The Dragon's Trap last year. This year Sega gave their full blessing for Monster Boy to pick up the mantle and run with it. They nailed the look and feel and even drop references to the older games throughout. Couldn't be happier with how it turned out!

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7. Dead Cells -- Nearly a perfect game! Take CastleVania: SoN and put it in a blender with the very best of the Rogue genre and you get Dead Cells. It's not an overly complex game, but it has lots of different weapons and gear, and fighting styles that go along with them. With random equipment drops, perma-death and ever-changing dungeon lay-outs, you never quite know what you're gonna get AND you WILL die often as a result, but it's sooo rewarding as you make progress. I can't say enough good about this game. PLAY IT!

For the most part, the first half of this list has been the games that reminded me of better days and made me smile. It's nice to know the past hasn't been forgotten and there are people who love the things you used to too. These games kept me grounded in times where I felt things were getting a bit out of control and the memories they recalled lighted some pretty dark days.

The rest of the games, save one that didn't make the list and the other that's not like the others, were my escape.

4. Assassin's Creed Odyssey -- The game I spent the most time with this year, believe it or not! This is the Breath of the Wild of the AC series. The lands you explore are IMMENSE; there are more quests here than you'll ever complete. Alexios is charasmatic AF and apparently has a nice set on him...    ...but there's even so much more than that. You earn your ability to assassinate, it's not simply a button press and instant kill anymore. The weapons you choose to use make a difference and change the way you play. The skill tree allows you to customize your character to tailor the game even more so.  Every time you think you've seen all the game has to offer, it expands more and more and more... and more! Did I even mention the loot? It's a great representation of the ancient Greek world; there's smatterings of mythology in there too... It almost beat out the next mythology-based game on my list, but that one had things going for it, AC: Odyssey did not.

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3. God of War -- What a game... I put this baby on Hard from the get go and threw myself at it, Kratos-style... and got my ass handed to me again and again and again. I wanted to earn each victory and feel as bad-ass as the God of War myself... Little did I know the game was going to make him so... human and dad-like. The way he was portrayed, the way that he developed, his relationship with the BOY... even the camera-freakin-angle made this game feel sooo personal, it's nearly indescribable. I love the way they kept the story simple, but still had epic twists throughout. There were spine-chilling moments too that I haven't had elsewhere. This one was a perfect example of modern, interactive story-telling and could have easily been my number one game this year if not for the other two.

2. Read Dead Redemption 2 -- I'm not even done with this game yet, yet here it is! Why? Open world games have been my escape from reality for a better part of this year. RDR2 is the most detailed and realistic representation of a world in a game for me yet. Sure, the big-plot twists haven't happened yet and the story isn't even half-way through, but THIS is a world you feel like you can live in. Hunt, eat, sleep, explore, work, bathe, track and skin animals, be good, be bad, gain weight, lose weight, grow a beard, grow-mutton chops, play dominoes, fish... You can spend hours upon hours in this game and not even touch the story. What a world too! So many sites to see, so many animals, plants and items to add to the compendium. Random encounters, shrinking horse-testicles! I don't know what impresses me the most with everything Rockstar offered up here. I'll sometimes boot up the game, just to hunt a deer and bring it back to camp. Such a mundane thing but tasks like that are rewards in themselves. You do them, just to do something, not because it advances the game. Yes, yes, it's super-awesome that Rockstar made this a prequal to RDR. It humanizes characters that were pretty much just targets and chapter objectives in the last game. You see how some characters came to be who they were in the first game, you see them (sometimes sadly) going through their motions although you already know what fate holds in store for them. Ironically enough, it takes a bleak and sometimes dismal game to draw me out of some bleak and dismal personal issues, but, hey, whatever works!  In the way God of War tells a great and personal story in a modern and interactive way, RDR2 lets you live a life and experience the death of the Old West first hand too. GoW was fantastic and mythological, RDR2 is grounded and ultra-realistic. Utterly FANTASTIC game... despite the install time!    Can't wait to dig into the online side of it too!

1. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate -- Words like Deluxe and Ultimate are thrown around the videogame industry way too often. They begin to lose their meaning. Marketers throw the word Ultimate at the end of a game's name when, in reality, most of the time, they should just say "Slightly Better than the Last Version." Smash Bros. is the first game I can think of that deserves it's moniker. When they said "Everyone is Here" I was psyched. When I saw Ridley and Simon Belmont I was elated. I was amused to see them throw in the Echo characters and shocked at the inclusion of Piranha and exclusion of Waluigi. Nothing, nothing, nothing prepared me for over 1000 Spirits though! It's no secret or surprise how many games I've played in my lifetime anymore. Just as people have an affinity for their favorite character, or two or three, and they get emotional when they see Solid Snake or Sonic, multiply that number times a few thousand and every, single last Spirit or Song that's in the game calls up memories and elicits an emotion from me. Every Pokeball, every Assist character everything from Super Scopes to Fire-Flowers, from Blargg to Chargin' Chuck and the Robot Masters and Old-School Roll from the Megaman Series... They all bring a smile to my face at a time when it's desperately needed! The World of Light is my playground, Rescuing Spirits and Challenging the Spirit Board will be my past-time for a long time... Yes, I actually go to the song menu, play songs and drift away in thought... I liken the beginning of the game to a metaphor for my life at the moment: When everything crumbles around you, just try to stay ahead of it, grasp for that light and start to take action. Is it ironic that Kirby was the sole survivor? The simplest of all the characters kinda has the right idea: Eat, sleep, be happy and do what you can to help to make things right again. If ever there was an Ecapsulation of who I was, what I want to be and everything I love about gaming, it's this game. There's NO WAY it wasn't going to be my number one. I have anticipated it more than any other game this year and feverish dove into it for the first dozen days it was out. Where many other games on this list were my escape, this game is my reminder of who I am... Not only is this my GOTY, I feel it is truly one of the greatest achievements in gaming creation and collaboration of all time.