4gamer's posted their customary end-of-year wrap-ups, which see hundreds of devs & gaming figures running down their most interesting games, media & personalities of the year, as well as their ambitions for 2024. As usual, I'm just gonna pick out the bits that interest me and ignore most everything else, so there's tons in here that I'm not touching.
EDIT: Yoko Taro offered an uncharacteristically sincere call to action for 2024 that has nothing to do with games, and is worth reading.
(One spoiler, if you want to call it that: Arc System Works' Kazuto "Pachi" Sekine, who typically uses this wrap-up to shout out and/or share tech for obscure indie fighting games, didn't contribute this year... they're Arc's general battle system director and a lead on Granblue, so yeah, not hard to imagine he may have been too busy to contribute.)
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Arc System Works' Daisuke Ishiwarari chose Super Mario Wonder as their GOTY ("it's like being beaten by a straight ball you see coming from a mile away"), with The Witch: Part 2 being their media of the year; rather than offer a particular person of interest for 2023, they talked about being interested in the progression of foreign horror movies and how they enjoyed watching creators individually pursue aim to produce interesting works from more unique and specific vectors, rather than attempting for a broader, quantitative increase in "quality". As for 2024, going back to horror, they want to produce products that don't fall into the pattern of many horror movies by being overly dependent on tropes.
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Arc System Works' Ken Miyauchi (Strive producer) chose Kamone from French Bread as their person of 2023—they took a lot of overseas business trips together this year, and Kamone apparently broke their record for eating French bread in France
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M2 president Naoki Horii chose Exit 8 as their game of the year, and their person of interest is one of the new programmers they hired, who hit the ground running and pulled off a lot of impressive work but also made some massive fumbles, so he's looking forward to watching them mature. As for M2, they have an original game coming in 2024... but as always, if they're self-funded and they decide to keep working on it, they will, so he's being vague because that may very well happen (and has happened, multiple times, for multiple games).
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Capcom's Monster Hunter producer Genki Sunano lamented the ending of James Corden's talk show, which they apparently use for English study (...)
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Capcom's Takayuki Nakayama (Street Fighter director) chose two games as GOTY: Viewfinder and Furikake Spacy, a game I'm shocked was even on their radar. (You can read more about it on @indietsushin, including this interview with the dev.)
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Capcom's Shuhei Matsumoto (Street Fighter producer), as always, recommended a bunch of hip-hop-related stuff in his wrap-up, including Wu Tang: The American Saga, the producer ATL Jacob, some JP hop-hop content creators, etc. (Sure would be nice to see a little more of that reflected in SF6...) They also shouted out Gaming Shiitake, a line of mushrooms being sold by pro SF player/community member NAO that he introduced to the JP SF scene after an overabundance of mushrooms forced him to find creative ways to offload excess without tanking the price, and now they're seen as something of a delicacy within the scene and are being sold with game branding, used as tourney prizes, etc.
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Crim CEO Sawaki Takeyasu (El Shaddai creator) seems quite pleased about the upcoming El Shaddai Switch remaster (they got it running at 60FPS in handheld mode with fewer loads & higher res than the original), and they also have a 3D Vampire Survivor-esque game coming to early access in February.
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ZUIKI's Yuki Yonai chose GOROman, an old X68000 fanatic who's been doing all sorts of nonsense with X68000Z, as one of their people of interest
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Akira Yamaoka, currently at Super Trick Games (dedicated Let It Die studio), chose the EGG Console reissue of Xanadu as their GOTY
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Square-Enix's Yosuke Saito (Nier producer) chose Pokemon Sleep as their GOTY (which I didn't know had even been released...)
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Square-Enix's Masayoshi Soken (FFXIV composer/sound director) chose Party Animals as one of their games of 2023 ("I didn't think it was ever actually going to come out, and then it suddenly showed up")
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Jiro Ishii (author of 428 and many other acclaimed ADV/game-adjacent writing) loves real-time mystery games, and chose Tenshi wa Hana Akari no Shita de as their pick for 2023, alongside Paranormasight. For 2024, they say they're looking to break from collaborating on big projects and strike out with their own work under their own name, including stuff in genres they've never touched before.
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Sega's Seiji Aoki (Virtua Fighter producer) chose the RE:4 remake (including DLC) as their GOTY, and as for their plans for 2024, they said... absolutely nothing worth repeating.
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Sega's legacy hardware producer Yosuke Okunari chose the recent unlicensed Mega Drive port of City Connection as their GOTY; they were impressed by the fact that it was licensed from the IP holder, that the port was very specific about merging the contents of the arcade version with the play feel of the Famicom version, etc. They also had a former Jaleco person as an old boss who'd tell stories about how the company would manually swap bug-fixed Moepro ROMs into replacement carts by hands, so the fact that City Connection's MD carts are hand-assembled might also tie it back to Jaleco. On the 2024 front, they're writing a new book to follow up Sega Hard Senki, but don't have anything particular to announce about their main gig, except that they saw the reaction to the recent mass of Sega IP revivals and want to also provide something that'll provide a similar pay-off for Sega faithful.
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Sega's Mizuki Hosoyamada (Puyo Puyo producer) chose the Apple Arcade game Hello Kitty Island Adventure as their GOTY, and specifically highlighted how they went in expecting a relaxed game and were caught completely off guard by the opening. (I know nothing about this game... is it not a straightforward Animal Crossing clone?) They don't offer anything super juicy for 2024: the remark on how it's the 20th anniversary of the big 2/4 promos they ran for Puyo Puyo Fever, and how while the Puyo Puyo Tetris series has broken 3 million copies and awareness seems to be growing in the US, they want to do more to spread awareness globally and get more people playing, particularly in Japan/Asia, so next year ("Nisen Puyo-nen") will be an opportunity to promote the series in a big (but unspecified) way.
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Sega's Ryosuke Horii (Ryu ga Gotoku chief director) chose Woman Communication as GOTY, not just because it's well-made and a fun concept but because it's the exact sort of game that a big studio like his could never get away with. (The Steam page is geolocked, so for the unaware, Woman Communication's an ADV with the gimmick that you're trying to identify and call out sentence fragments that spell out juvenile dirty words: for example, taking ううん... 混みませんかしら? and highlighting うん混 to single out UNKO, which will appear in big romaji and possibly a HEAD SHOT exclamation.)
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Sega's Jun Matsunaga (director on Chain Chronicle, Sangokushi Taisen, etc) chose Goodbye Volcano High as their GOTY, and that the climax beats that of the recent Bocchi the Rock! anime: "Those scenes where the student band plays a big, emotional one-off gig, like in Linda Linda Linda, Solanin, Beck, etc are the coolest... I used to dream about somehow capturing the greatness of those moments in a game, or getting people to play them in music game form, and it finally happened. For the first time in my life, a music game made me cry."
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Taito's Yuichi Toyama (producer on Taito's legacy reissues) chose the already-about-to-die 404:GAME RESET as GOTY, and they chose Takayuki Komabayashi of Cat Hui Trading as their person of interest—they're producing an original horizontal STG for Famicom with a bunch of ex-Compile folk and are looking for a publisher, so he encourages potential publishers to hit them up (but Taito can't help, apparently). For 2024, they say they want to launch an original project in tandem with reissues... but they say that every year and it never seems to happen, so don't hold your breath.
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24frame's Yusuke Tomono (ex-Level 5, Metal Max, Fatal Frame, Tales of, etc) chose Black Faith: Forsaken as GOTY; it's one of those small-scale games that rarely even makes it to release, and is hard to gauge whether it's actually good or not, but just seeing the amount of progress the dev's made and watching the evaluation of the game slowly climb upward has been super intriguing.
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Tookyo Games' Kotaro Uchikoshi (AI, Zero Escape, Ever17, etc) chose Garten of Banban as GOTY... but it's something friends recommended that they haven't had time to actually play, so you'll have to let them know whether it is or isn't fun.
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Namco's Katsuhiro Harada (Tekken producer, etc) has Sega's president Yutaka Sugino as their person of interest, specifically because they've been watching for an announcement on Virtua Fighter 6, and they'll be watching again next year, too...
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Platinum Games' Takahisa Taura (Astral Chain, Nier Automata, etc) chose the Yu Yu Hakusho Netflix series as their media of 2023... before they'd actually watched it, so I wonder if they might be regretting that choice right about now.
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another vote for Woman Communication from French Bread's Kamone (Under Night In-Birth, etc)
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Hideki Kamiya makes it a tradition to write insanely long end-of-year writeups where he nitpicks vintage game reissues for hundreds of thousands of characters, and nothing's changed: his GOTY is ostensibly EGG Console, but he used the opportunity to rant about Arcade Archives being quiet about Banpresto games, Sega and Capcom still ducking ACA, content edits to old games (like the edits made to the Arkanoid games on Egret II Mini) and how reissues should implement their own editors to allow players to backdoor in the original content, the misuse of "retro" vs "vintage/old/classic" etc, several complaints about ININ/SLG's Wonder Boy collections, personal ramblings about Hydlide 3 and Sorcerian, a huge list of games he wants to show up on EGG Console and more. If there's anything constructive to be taken from his rambling, it's that he wants to see them work more on reproducing the hardware experience of playing these old games—stuff like the clicking of the disk drive or whatever—as well as reproducing as many versions of these games as possible, not just sticking to one hardware set; he also hopes they make the effort of getting "bad/obsolete" arcade ports, and licensing Nintendo stuff like Punch Ball Mario Bros. (This is followed up by a similarly-lengthy takarazuka review; his plans for next year, which would traditionally just say "whatever [Platinum Game's] Inaba wrote (I didn't read it)", are now "I want to get a job so I can make games and earn money".)
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Yoko Taro picked Diablo IV and a bunch of different people of interest (including John Ricciardi of 8-4 for their recent efforts with Superdeluxe Games), but it's his aspirations for 2024 that are worth sharing: he tells a story about how when he was younger, his friend shared his attitude to wooing girls—simply ask 'em out, and if they're not interested, move on and try with someone else; even if the success rate's 1%, that just means you gotta do it 100 times, and it's a simple matter of playing the numbers game. He then turns to discuss the war on Gaza and the reports that 5000+ children have been killed by conflict this year, and how he feels utterly useless to affect change as a game creator, but in times like these, he thinks back to his friend's approach with girls: in order to take those feelings of impotence and reframe them as a simple matter of probability, he urges everyone to start thinking about how they might address the issues of senseless war and death, if only for a minute a day, and if we can get hundreds, thousands of people all committed to dedicating at least a little effort to solving this problem, then eventually somebody must be able to come up up with something, and it might even be you.
I didn't do a rigorous count, but the new Zelda was far and away the most common GOTY pick; other more frequent picks include Street Fighter 6, Paranormasight, Final Fantasy XVI and, to a lesser extent, Armored Core 6 and Suika Game.
