When you look at the best games of this year onMetacritic, you see games like the incredibleClair Obscur: Expedition 33,Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2,Death Stranding 2: On The Beach,Monster Hunter Wilds, andSplit Fiction. It shows what fantastic shape 2025 is already in, buoyed even further by the fact thatmany of this year’s top titles have come from indie or double-A studios.
As we round out the first half of 2025, though, one major Japanese outlet has decided to poll its audience on the region’s Game of the Year so far, and there are a handful of surprising omissions.
Both Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 And Monster Hunter Wilds Missing From “Game Of The Year So Far” Poll
Japanese news outletGame Sparkrecently polled its readers to find out what games were in the running for 2025’s Game of the Year. It found that the frontrunner, perhaps as surprising as some of the omissions, was Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, with players praising it as “A legitimate evolution from the previous game, with more content and easier playability.”
The site noted that other popular picks were Elden Ring Nightreign, The Alters, Dynasty Warriors: Origins, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and Raidou Remastered (which we scored a 2.5/5). It’s a solid selection of games, but there are two games one might expect to be there that aren’t.
First up is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a gamethat wears its Japanese RPG influences on its sleeve. The game fails to get a single mention in the Game Spark article, despiteRPGs being comfortably the most popular genre in the country. Notably,Clair Obscur received high praise from many Japanese developers, making it all the more interesting to see that it failed to resonate with theJapanese audience.
Of course, there’s the likelihood that Clair Obscur had such a wide reach in the West, given that it launched onXbox Game Pass, a service which isn’t very popular in Japan, but you’d still expect some mention of the title on the list.
Arguably, more surprising than Clair Obscur’s omission is Monster Hunter Wilds'. The game has, of course,had numerous critical issues on PC, which have led to itdropping to ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ reviews on Steam. However, as PC is the minority platform in the country, most players wouldn’t have been affected.
Monster Hunter is a game that isconsidered a cultural phenomenon in Japan. Affectionately nicknamed MonHun, the series has long been a favorite of the country, so for it to be excluded from this list is quite a shock. Instead, games like Warriors: Abyss, Shadowverse: Beyond, Fantasy Life I: The Girl Who Steals Time, and even the Xbox version of Final Fantasy 16 got the nod.
Maybe sentiment will change between now and the close of the year, but it’s certainly an unexpected set of results.
