Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Wins Japan's Grand Game Award For 2024

Congratulations to all of the winners!

Happy for them, especially now that we have a more classic feeling Zelda game again

I don't think so.
My GOTY 2024 is Barbie: Project Friendship PS5.
And i have Oceanhorn 2 PS5 as my excuse to not play botw & ttok.

Yeaaaaah baby!

@Anti-Matter Neither of those were made by Japanese devs. Which is how you win Japan’s game of the year award.

Congrats to TotK. Well deserved.

TotK really was amazing (i beat it this month but haven't stopped playing it). And suika is a regular guest in my family's game nights. Mario wonder was also fantastic!

Congratulations! I very much enjoyed what little I played of TotK but then I got distracted by Final Fantasy XVI and just never got around to returning to it. I'm not really looking forward to much this holiday season so I should have a lot of time to return to my backlog.

Well deserved. I clocked up 200 hours and still haven’t found everything. I must get back to it eventually.

@Anti-Matter interesting that you’d choose an inferior knock-off over the real thing. I bet Barbie gets real interesting when you fire up a fat blunt though it must be difficult to enjoy it when it isn’t even out yet.

Best game of all time for, glad it won this

@SilentBluntman
I'm different.
Barbie Project Friendship on PS5 by Outright Games was my highlight of my GOTY 2024.
BARBIE on PS5, Girlie game on PS5, it was something that i have been waiting so long and that's why it's my GOTY 2024.
Also, Oceanhorn 2 on PS5 looked GORGEOUS in smooth 60 fps, thanks to PS5 power.
I prefer playing this zelda clone game over than botw & ttok because i saw something different, some gaming potential that made me interested to buy and play that game.

@Anti-Matter being different is fine, but you don’t know what you’re missing out on. BOTW & TOTK are two of the greatest games ever created. The Switch is the best console currently available and it isn’t even close. Nintendo just keeps knocking it out of the park and I can’t wait for its next console.

@SilentBluntman
I have ever bought botw in year 2017 and sold the game in October 2021 because i didn't feel clicked with the game.
Also, people have different perception.
What is great for other people, it might be otherwise for me and vice versa.
I still have my Nintendo Switch machine, still like my ACNH and have been playing for more than 1040 hours but i have least favorite with zelda franchise as i didn't grow up by that franchise, i grew up by 3rd party games on PlayStation machines.

just call it the nintendo award very few games have won this award that were not from nintendo.. going back 15 years

@johnedwin Monster Hunter won literally last year.

Keep feeding Aonuma’s ego.

Strange, do they often give game of the year to games from a different year?

@Alpha008 The Japan Game Awards cover the Japanese fiscal year, so all games released in Japan from 2023 April 1 to 2024 March 31 are eligible for the 2024 awards.

@nessisonett And Elden Ring the year before, and Ghost of Tsushima (which ironically was not by a Japanese dev) before that...

@nessisonett Didn't Ghost of Tsushima win one year? They aren't Japanese
@Alpha008 I reckon it's cause they like to go by fiscal year which is April to the end of March, but I could be totally wrong about that.
(Whoops saw right after posting @FirstEmperor already said all this, sorry 😅)

@babybilly I’m pretty sure GoT is the only non-Japanese developed game to win it in the roughly 30 years it’s been going on. And I guess it’s published by Sony who are Japanese, so it might count under the criteria anyway.

Congratulations to the winners! I played Tears Of The Kingdom for over 350 hours. I think that says it all, easily one of the best games ever.

@Maubari Hmm I agreed with your initial sentiment that it's silly to judge others for game preferences, but then you said things about those games I totally disagree with. I loved Breath of the Wild and admit it's not perfect.. but I loved it much more than Tears of the Kingdom. I don't think the names had anything to do with it either lol. Different strokes and all

@nessisonett Oh I actually looked it up, it apparently started as a requirement to be Japanese-made, but has since been changed to include international ones.

@Ooyah
I already watched the gameplay trailer of Barbie Project Friendship by Outright Games from their YouTube channel and i quickly sold with the gameplay feature, even if the actual gamellay after i played by myself is average, at least the intention of giving Barbie franchise a chance on PS5 machine, it's made me happy to see some support of girlie games like Barbie, My Universe, Monster High, Horse Club Adventures, Bibi & Tina, LOL Surprise, Cooking Mama, My Little Pony, etc on very powerful console PS5.
To able play Barbie games on PS5 machine is like i got AAA stuffs for my PS5, even the games itself is not AAA quality.
Remember, Everybody 1-2-Switch was my GOTY 2023 despite the gameplay quality was not AAA quality, but the franchise existence especially got the sequel was really made me happy.

Btw, i will really really serious with my words.
When i get Barbie Project Friendship PS5 version, i will take photo of the product with my PS5 Fat machine and myself as the proof of my bold statement GOTY 2024.

Congratulations to TOK

@Anti-Matter congratulations to Barbie’s friendship project

@johnedwin Utterly false. Here are the winners for the past 15 years (with 2014 and 2021 having a tie):

2010: New Super Mario Bros. Wii
2011: Monster Hunter Portable 3rd
2012: Gravity Daze
2013: Animal Crossing: New Leaf
2014: Monster Hunter 4, Yo-kai Watch
2015: Yo-kai Watch 2
2016: Splatoon
2017: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
2018: Monster Hunter: World
2019: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
2020: Animal Crossing: New Horizons
2021: Ghost of Tsushima, Monster Hunter Rise
2022: Elden Ring
2023: Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak
2024: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Number of winners by publisher:
Nintendo: 7
Capcom: 5
Sony: 2
Level-5: 2
FromSoftware: 1

Nintendo is number 1 but not far ahead of Capcom. Several non Nintendo games have won.

@FirstEmperor Thank you for adding that list. It would have been nice to see it in the article itself.

@8bit-Man You are most welcome. Though there really wouldn't be any point for a list like this in the original article, because the article is specifically about the 2024 awards. I was just correcting a blatantly wrong claim in the comments.

@FirstEmperor Great stuff, thanks for sharing.

@nessisonett not true. Ghost of Tsushima has won it previously and Sucker Punch is based in the US.

@FirstEmperor my point is most of the winners were on nintendo platforms and not on other like sony ..totk had no business being a winner in 2024 when it came out in may 2023..

Best game of the entire generation!

@johnedwin Those awards are handled differently, they always award games that came out a whole year earlier, is that hard to understand?

Deserved. People that went “It’s BoTW with DLC” either never played the game, an OoT Zelda fan zealot, or deliberately trolling.

@johnedwin Your claim was that "few games have won this award that were not from nintendo" and that is factually incorrect. Moving the goalposts to something that barely resembles your original post just demonstrates your inability to admit to being wrong.

And as I said earlier the Japan Game Awards cover the Japanese government's fiscal year, which starts on April 1. Therefore TotK has every business being the 2024 winner and no amount of whining can change that.

Truly one of the greatest and mechanically astounding games of all time.

Only thing a proper Switch 2 remaster could do is make it even better: more sky islands, one more dungeon added for each of the three realms, more extreme weather (thicker, more gorgeous cloudscapes, heavier rain, blinding blizzards), denser foliage, seamless Shrine entering/exiting, and... Loftwings!! Catch Loftwings in the sky just like horses on the ground! Stable them in buildable sky stables, one of the first quests available in the expansion. 💭✨