With 2019 now done and over with, eShopperReviews is celebrating some of the year’s highlights in a week of awards, starting on Monday, January 6, 2020! Is it a bit self-indulgent to have a full week of awards selected by me? Absolutely! Is that any reason not to do it? Hell no! 2019 is over, and this is my way of celebrating the highs and lows of the year! Woo!

Okay, let’s get a few things out of the way here first – this list is only going to include Nintendo Switch games that I have reviewed. That means no Fire Emblem: Three Houses, no Luigi’s Mansion 3, no Mario Maker 2, no Astral Chain… a lot of the year’s biggest titles won’t be found on this list. Also, this list will only include games released in 2019, so as much as I love Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Gris, you won’t find those games here.

Oh, and then there’s re-releases and ports of games released to other platforms, which is kinda’ unavoidable on the Switch. So, I’m going to place this restriction on the games listed here: with the exception of the nominations for Best Port, Best Compilation, and my Top 5 Most-Played Games of 2019, a game will not qualify for an award if it released for a previous generation of consoles unless the Switch version has significant changes or improvements. Otherwise, this list would be loaded with Final Fantasy ports, I imagine. Ports from this generation of consoles will be considered, as well as games that previously appeared on Smartphones, PC, Vita, and arcades but are only just now making it to console.

One more restriction I’m giving myself here: In listing my runners-up, I am only going to list at most five games in each category. I absolutely want to give credit to as many games as I can here, but I also recognize that credit starts to lose meaning when it’s a game that’s just one in a long laundry list. Five runners-up plus one winner in each category (and for Game of the Year, it’ll be five runners-up, plus one bronze, silver, and gold) hopefully means that you know if I mentioned a game, it is one of the absolute best examples in that category this year.

What this will hopefully be is a collection of some of the best new releases on the Nintendo Switch, many of which have not gotten the same exposure and publicity as Nintendo’s first-party releases. With any luck, you’ll find some titles you hadn’t heard of or considered previously. Anyway, here are the categories you can expect to see next week:

Day 1: Specialty Awards

Best Port/Remake

Best Compilation/Collection

Best Game for Kids and Casual Players

Best Multiplayer

Best Value

Funniest Game

Most Underrated

Most Overlooked

Most Original

Best Third-Party Publisher

My Top 5 Most-Played Games of 2019

Day 2: Technical Awards

Best Music

Best Song

Best Sound Design

Best Graphical Style

Best Graphics

Best Story

Day 3: Dubious Honors

Worst Microtransactions

Most Overrated

Laziest Copycat

The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award

Most Disappointing

Worst Game

Day 4: Genre Awards

Best Platformer

Best Action Game

Best RPG/Action-RPG

Best Strategy Game

Best Graphic Adventure Game

Best Puzzle Game

Best Driving/Racing Game

Day 5: Highest Honors

Game of the Year: Bronze Award (Third place)

Game of the Year: Silver Award (Second place)

Game of the Year: Runners-Up

Game of the Year

And that’s a wrap! The eShopperReviews 2019 Game Awards are done! I hope you found some good games among all of the recommendations!

You can now support this content on Patreon! Please click the link to learn more!