Welcome back to Aftermath's 2023 Game of the Year deliberations! And by "deliberations" we mean "celebrity deathmatch using inconsistent and infuriating comic book nerd rules".
With our first round matchups in the books, it's time for the competition to get serious. Only eight games remain, and after this, there are only going to be four. Time to place your bets! Unless where you live doesn't allow sports betting, in which case, just place your bets in your heart.
Because we haven't run one of these in a few days, it's time for a rules reminder. There were16 games in the mix for Game of the Year 2023. We're pitting them against each other in a knockout tournament, and are now down to eight. But we're not pitting the games themselves against each other; instead, we're selecting a Champion from in or around each game and having them duke it out in the arena of fiction in hand-to-hand (or weapon-to-weapon, or hand-to-weapon) combat. The winner, decided via a schoolyard "would Batman beat Superman" style debate, moves on. The loser does not. Here's how things stand after the first round:
Without any further ado, then--it's 2024 now, we've really gotta wrap this up--let's see how those four quarter-finals went down, starting with...
DREDGE vs CITIES: SKYLINES II
Riley: As a man who has had both teeth and boats, I have to say that things don't look good for Cities: Skylines II to me here. That said, my boat was overcome by a kind of teeth, but they were microscopic wood-eating marine shrimp, not mere human teeth.
Nathan: Hmmm, The Boat From Dredge's entire reason to be is fishing. If the teeth chew through its fishing line, then it can only bob there, achieving nothing, leaving no mark on the world. Additionally, the boat's primary vulnerability is Lovecraftian horrors. Surely at least one of those--probably several!--has a whole, whole bunch of teeth.
Luke: But those are Lovecraftian teeth, not these teeth. I think the teeth are in trouble. They overwhelmed a Jedi on land, sure, but he was made of meat. That many teeth would have shredded his soft flesh. But what are they gonna do to a boat? They're going to ping off the hull like raindrops. The boat might not even know what was happening, it might think it's just some light hail.
Riley: Yeah, I think the boat just continues puttering along, being a boat, as the teeth futilely chatter as they sink beneath the waves.
Chris: I agree the teeth sink to the ocean like a D tier villain at the end of an episode of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
Gita: I’m Team Teeth if only because my husband David played Dredge so I only associate it with someone saying something like “oh brother!” or “well that’s the way the cookie crumbles!”
WINNER: DREDGE
BALDUR'S GATE 3 vs LIES OF P
Nathan: If this is pre-spoiler Karlach, she basically immolates anything that touches her. Now I'm no fancy city lawyer, but last time I checked, puppets were made of wood. Fire burns wood. Karlach takes this, or at least has a thus far un-discussed upper hand.
Chris: This one is tricky. A Karlach throwing Barbarian build with a 3 level thief dip is real powerful and if she gets a turn off she can wreck him by taking like three or four actions provided she can hit him. The most difficult battles in Lies of P are one-on-one. But P can also throw stuff which is a surprisingly strong tactic for disrupting normal-sized enemies. So this is a build-dependent showdown. That said, I think P has the distinct advantage of being a gay puppet that doesn’t seem to understand what sex is, which seems to be how most of the Baldur’s Gate 3 cast seems to communicate. I’m giving P the slight edge on that alone.
Gita: I hadn’t considered that P wouldn’t be hampered by near constant sexcapades but that does give him an advantage.
Luke: You're right, P wins because he is the only person in the universe who doesn't want to have sex with Karlach. He has clarity.
Chris: I don’t like to subscribe to the idea that not having sex makes you more powerful but tactically, here, it does.
Gita: He just has less stuff to worry about!
WINNER: P
CYBERPUNK 2077: PHANTOM LIBERTY vs ARMORED CORE VI
Luke: You might think an enormous combat mech would be the easy winner here, especially since it's facing off against another human, and last time that did not go well for the human.
But I dunno…Cyberpunk 2077's Idris Elba has some tricks up the sleeve of his very nice jacket. He's not just a cybernetically-enhanced government killing machine, he's also super into secret agent spy shit, so who's to say he hasn't just rigged the fight ahead of time, and as soon as Balteus pulls the trigger the mech self-destructs or something?
Chris: I do like that we have switched from “who is hotter” to pure combat prowess in round two. AAP07 could get it, but that’s an aside.
Much though I would love to see Balteus take this one on principle, Solomon Reed is probably the weakest matchup for a mech. I could easily see him using an ICEbreaker to disable it while under deep cover as a bartender on a military base on Rubicon.
Riley: Yeah, I think Idris could pull some cyberpunk tricks to triumph. Being a person fighting a mech feels like a Cyberpunk 2077 quest!
Gita: I’m team Balteus. Losing to that bastard had to mean SOMETHING.
Besides, Idris won’t even show up to accept his award.
Chris: Oh fair point. He probably doesn’t even show up to the fight.
Luke: Or he sends V to do it while reminiscing solemnly about an old job fighting a mech that went bad and got his buddy killed, and V is disqualified because they're not supposed to be fighting, Idris Elba is.
Nathan: V fights a mech IN Phantom Liberty! My V made short work of it, with a sword, like Raiden in Metal Gear Rising. I haven't finished Phantom Liberty yet -- I started it a few days ago -- but I don't get the impression that Idris Elba's character could do anything like that. I think he wistfully reminisces so hard that the mech is like, "Hey buddy, you good?" And then they have a long conversation while leaning on a rail overlooking a vista that probably cost $30 million to create unto itself.
Gita: My vote is for Balteus.
WINNER: ARMORED CORE VI
LIKE A DRAGON GAIDEN: THE MAN WHO ERASED HIS NAME vs ALAN WAKE 2
Riley: Oh no, Alan. I don't think he stands a chance.
Luke: What can Alan actually do here? He won his first round by writing himself to victory. It's the only trick he's got. But you can't rewrite Kiryu's story! He's the most versatile man in video games. Whatever you want to turn him into, whatever character arc you want to set him off on, he's done it all already, and will have a moralising tale to tell you about how it made him a better man at the end of it.
Chris: Alan is out of his element here. I’m not convinced he knows anything about the structure of the Japanese criminal underworld to do anything remotely convincing and I think any attempt to engage in physical combat would end with him getting his head shoved into the microwave of a Family Mart. Theoretically he would be most comfortable in The Man Who Erased His Name because there are FMV segments there but any advantage would be quickly erased because he doesn’t know how to talk to women. Ultimately the joy of the writing would flabbergast him.
Gita: I think instead of fighting Kiryu should learn how to write a novel in a strange but sincere mini-game
Luke: Kiryu has written before, under the pen name "Judgement Kazzy"!
Gita: I think there’s a 100 percent chance that Kiryu is a better writer than Alan and that’s why he wins.
Chris: Imagine the self-help book he would publish, Gita. The world would be a much better place. Like all the Jordan Peterson nerds just become really cool, good people.
Gita: Everyone starts building new community centers and starting orphanages.
Chris: Kiryu, and by extension the world, wins.
WINNER: LIKE A DRAGON GAIDEN: THE MAN WHO ERASED HIS NAME
And that's that for the quarter-finals! We're now only two posts away from finding out who the winner of our 2023 Game Of The Year award is. Join us next time for the semi-finals!
