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RPG Site Best of 2017 Awards: Readers' Choice in Detail

by RPG Site Staff on 29 December, 2017

As is now tradition, we close out our end-of-year awards with a poll of you, our readers, to find out what you ranked as the very best RPGs and games for RPG fans out of all the games released throughout 2017. This year marked a record voting for our end-of-year poll, with thousands of you voting to determine your favorite RPG of the year, over doubling the votes we saw last year. The results are interesting, with many of your choices mirroring ours in our staff-picked best of 2017 awards.

As always there are some notable differences in your picks from our staff top ten, however. Be sure to check out our staff best of 2017 picks, which include a couple of different games and a different pick for RPG of the Year entirely. The poll also looked to see which your favorite numbered Final Fantasy title is - but we'll reveal that in a separate post. If you want to know what we make of your choices, be sure to read the official RPG Site Best of 2017 Awards where we dish out our staff-picked honors. This year, our opinions overlap quite a bit.

For the sake of argument polling also included a few of the games that aren't really RPGs but skirt close with RPG-like themes or mechanics - basically bending the rules in the same way we do with what we review here on the site. It seems it's good we did, as a few of those games charted this year, picking up a lot of votes.

So... how did you, the great RPG-playing public, vote? Here's the results - the winner is something of a landslide victory...

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Your Top Ten RPGs of 2017

10.   The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky 3rd - 2.2% (Nihon Falcom / XSEED - PS4, PC, Vita)

9.      Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia - 2.3% (Nintendo - 3DS)

8.      Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood - 2.7% (Square Enix / PS4, PC)

7.      Horizon: Zero Dawn - 3.8% (Guerilla Games / Sony - PS4)

6.      Yakuza 0 - 3.8% (Sega - PS4)

5.      The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 4.4% (Nintendo - Switch)

4.      Xenoblade Chronicles 2 - 5% (Monolith Soft - Switch)

3.    Divinity: Original Sin 2 - 5.4% (Larian Studios - PC)

2.    NieR: Automata - 16.3% (Square Enix - PS4, PC)

1.    Persona 5 - 36.9% (Atlus - PS4, PS3)

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Additional Facts and Figures

  • Persona 5 follows in the footsteps of Final Fantasy XV and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as a winner of the poll in previous years (2015 Results / 2016 Results). It records by far the biggest winning margin on record in our reader polls.
  • The top five of readers is this year almost identical to our staff top five of 2017 - but on our staff list, Yakuza 0 made top five while Xenoblade Chronicles 2 did not.
  • Narrow misses for the top ten for 2017 include some big name titles including Tales of Berseria, South Park: The Fractured But Whole (both of which missed out on the tenth spot by just a few votes each), Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA and .hack//G.U. Last Recode.
  • A lot of remasters and rereleases managed to pick up a good number of votes this year, with the number one remaster spot being taken by Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, which ultimately picked up nearly 2% of the vote. Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 HD ReMix and Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen both picked up a good number of votes for their current-console rereleases, while the enhanced Pokemon Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon also impressively stole away a few votes from more all-new games.
  • The phenomenal lead held by both Persona 5 and NieR Automata over their peers shows how much they've dominated public discussion of RPGs this year, and this is the largest voting we've seen in all the years we've been running public votes.
  • While Divinity: Original Sin II and Horizon: Zero Dawn make the top ten, other Western RPGs failed to do so. Perhaps the biggest shocker is Mass Effect Andromeda - this time last year we'd have pegged it for a likely top five spot, but a buggy, messy launch ensured it only picked up a handful of votes.
  • This year's most voted publisher is Atlus and Sega if you combine their Persona and Yakuza votes, since they're the same parent company. Just as in 2016, however, Nintendo picks up the most votes spread across a large number of games, driven by Zelda, Fire Emblem and Xenoblade.