2025 was a helluva year for gaming

Long time, no post! I wanted to come back to this blog because of the waves happening in gaming journalism. So many layoffs and dissolutions, as well as AI (and really poor writers) creating absolute dogshit articles. There is a ton of very quality journalism and reviews on Youtube, but I know there are people out there who still like to read opinions. Yes, even if they're amateur and undeveloped, like mine.

I really should stop saying that X year was the best for gaming. This year launched the Switch 2, French developer Sandfall made a JRPG with heart and soul, and we also saw a Doom sequel that is as different from Doom: Eternal as that was from Doom 2016.

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Switch 2: a confident upgrade to the first console.

I held out about a month before strolling into a Best Buy in July and walking out with one. Nintendo handled their distribution of new systems amazingly. By comparison, the only reason I got a PS5 within a month of launch was that I spend something insane like 30 hours glued to my PC, refreshing websites. I went through the same hell trying to get a disc drive for the PS5 Pro that stupidly shipped discless.

One core memory with the Switch 2 is that my friends and I hung out at an AirBnB this summer. The 8 of us have taken different paths into and away from gaming in our early 40s, but Mario Kart World brought us back. We passed around controllers and over the weekend, each of us won a race at least once. I know some players abhor the Hand of God/blue shell because they would otherwise dominate every single race, but not having a 100% winner kept us playing and talking shit all session long. And that's the point of gaming with friends.

Miraculously, this was the only screencap I took.

I also got DK Bananza, which is a weird-ass game that I still haven't finished. Reading opinions online, there were gamers who bounced off of this game, and those who thought it was the best platformer for the system. For the latter sentiment, I saw an article with the same phrasing, and wonder if those were marketing bots. The game is wacky and silly, and it's kinda cool for Donkey Kong to tear through a map Minecraft-style. You even get these weird abilities to turn into different animals that have bananas for appendages. I think the bosses would be more fun with larger health bars because I found the fights ending in about a minute. That's a minus for me.

Also, because it needs to be said: BU-NAH-NAH!

Other than that, my wife and I have benefitted immensely from activating a Nintendo Switch Online membership, as she is constantly using the Virtual Consoles to play SNES RPGs and all versions of Zelda. I look forward to trying Breath of the Wild, all upgraded with the DLC packs. Maybe it'll stick this time!

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Playstation 5

As mentioned earlier, I got a PS5 Pro at the tail end of 2024 and have enjoyed the higher fidelity and solid framerates.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Ex 33) is one of the best JRPGs ever created. The soundtrack is amazing, the worldbuilding is incredible, and it's nice to have a different culture put their perspective on the genre. I still love Papa Sakaguchi (Final Fantasy creator), but Sandfall veered us back into turn-based combat after the larger game studios abandoned it. I'm growing tired of these mega-hits all being gigantic metaphors for depression ala Death Stranding, Last of Us and now Ex 33, but at the same time the 'Final Fantasy' series has always explored themes of death.

The characters of Ex 33 undertake a seemingly hopeless journey to try and save the world after the previous 32 expeditions failed. The game even begins with your main character contemplating suicide as he appears to be the only survivor of an ambush. It's a bleak scene, but then he finds more party members. And that's where you meet the smokeshow mage who is Lune. She is super hot, and there is one distinction from so many existing JRPGs. Anime and videogame characters are so often an exaggeration of White or Asian features and don't actually look like real people. I used to take this personally as proof that Japan was racist or something, but modern productions have been way more representative and character writing has evolved, too.

Bae Lune is pondering how to magick the hell out of haters

Back to Ex 33, spoiler: there is a romance that forms between a character who recently lost their husband and another who is sympathetic. I thought it was human to move on from an old relationship and find a way to celebrate (via sex!) in the face of world-ending doom and gloom. I haven't seen attraction depicted this way in a game, even if the game itself had other mature themes, like FF16. Most main characters in most games are the hottest characters in the universe and there is absolutely no acknowledgement of their looks by other characters, though at least there is usually emotional attraction. Spoiler over.

The turn-based combat has a parry mechanic, because the Dark Souls Epidemic has infected everything (even Doom has a fucking parry mechanic!) I think it adds to combat and I enjoyed it for 70 hours of my 80h playthrough. My experience with the game was that I finished the story at about 55-60h, but there was another 20h of endgame content that went on too long for my tastes. That was my choice to pursue the platinum trophy, though. To round out my experience, I attended PAX this year and got to see the game's actors talk about their experience making Ex 33. At least 100 audience members dressed as mimes with baguettes strapped to their backs, and it was pretty cool to be part of an endearing community of a game that feels so isolating at times.

Doom: the Dark Ages was a really fun experience, and I had a blast the whole time. At first, I didn't see any graphical quality updates from the previous Doom: Eternal. Then I started destroying things in the environment, and fighting larger amounts of monsters and realized all that processing power went to this layer of great physics. These physics have the most believable sense of impact I've seen, and the developers know this! I say that because one of the weapons is a hydraulic ball and chain, and when it hits an enemy, chunks of their flesh come flying off. Gruesome. Nasty. But fun as hell.

Atlan chaingun: meet what's left of this titan's head

id Software has made a trilogy of Doom games that all play differently: I thought this one felt like Halo with a parry mechanic. Run n gun, vehicles, almost no platforming, barely hidden secrets, and a shitload of violence. It was immensely fun and satisfying.

I am about 15 hours into Death Stranding 2, which feels like the 2025 Metal Gear Solid that Kojima was developing while other studios were simply remastering the MGS titles released this year. There are a ton more gadgets, combat and stealth/espionage is way more involved, and traversal is more streamlined. Plus, the game actually has music this time. The first DS supposedly had these musical cues triggered by arriving at certain locations on the map, but I missed most of them and remember the game blocking my use of the Spotify app to play my own music during the long road trips. A few hours into DS2, you actually get a music player and can play the game's soundtrack as you please. The game looks incredible, as everyone will tell you, and it even remains incredible looking in the newfangled Power Save mode for the PS5.

I will talk about other games in another post, but the last 2025 major gaming experience I want to talk about is Split Fiction. This game is responsible for another one of the best weeks of the year. This game, like its prequel It Takes Two, weaves a story about two characters into a variety of gameplay types. I think it's a bit reductive to call it a 'series of minigames,' as there's a good bit of writing backing the context. Minor spoiler: you play as a science fiction author and a fantasy author who are put into VR by a company that wants to steal your ideas. Minor spoiler over. Throughout the game, you cross over into each other's worlds, and the levels get better and better. Most of the game involves cooperative platforming, such as one character controls a sea creature that holds up lily pads and reeds for the other character to jump between. But then you'll arrive to a sequence where one of you is tiny and the other is big, but both of you are fighting a robot. The tiny person navigates the death traps and tries to destroy the internals, while the other avoids the robots projectiles and tries to stun the thing so the tiny one can do her job.

The game is gorgeous, with plenty of colors and the music is awesome. The thing that makes this game great is the intimacy of two players working together. That's probably obvious, but there's a level of trust and dependence that modern coop games don't employ all that often anymore. I played It Takes Two with my wife, and certain sequences were really challenging for her to the point that we had to swap controllers after so many repeated attempts. That is totally fine, and I still had a great time. I played Split Fiction with one of my best friends, who is also an experienced gamer. The sequences in this game were overall harder, but both of us are good enough that we were often held up at the same points and quickly overcame them.

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Closing thoughts

I have no verdict for a singular 2025 Game of the Year. Each game mentioned brought me a load of meaningful experiences, whether it was having fun with friends or navigating complex relationships in the face of death. I'm also writing this 2 days before Metroid Prime 4 is released, so 2025 game releases aren't quite done rocking my socks off.