by barrabas
Showing 1-10 of 10 items
A lot of people are a bit down on the end of this game, and I can't argue too much with that. It was definitely weird, and how it ends up being received in the long run will depend largely on whether the final game in this trilogy can stick the landing. Regardless of the ending, the journey to that ending was fantastic. The remakes continue to make me like the FF7 cast much more than the original, and I can't wait to finish this journey with them in the final installment.
This might be the most underrated Mario game. I think a lot of people blow it off as another New Super Mario Bros game, but it's much better than those. The art-style is so much more charming, with lots of little flourishes given to animations in what I assume was a deliberate attempt to set it apart from the New Super Mario Bros franchise. The Wonder seeds were also a great gimmick for the game, making me excited to dive into every level to see what that one's wonder seed did. This is easily the best 2D Mario since the Super Nintendo.
When I switched from being an Xbox owner to a PlayStation owner in the PS4 generation, the one game franchise I really missed having was Forza Horizon. The games always seemed to be a little too taxing for whatever computer I had at the time, so the pc versions were never much of an option for me. Well, I got a decent laptop at the end of last year, and I finally got to play Forza Horizon 4. It did not disappoint. It had been a long time since I played a great open-world racing game, and it was good to be back. I look forward to eventually diving into Forza Horizon 5, though now I suppose I could play that one on PlayStation if I wanted to.
Sword of the Sea was a game from this year that just missed out on my top 10 games of 2025, and it's probably because I played this game first, and I kind of got my fill of Journey-style games from it. It's a great take that format translated into a game about rock climbing. I really enjoyed exploring this world, learning about the civilization of the people who used to live there as I progressed through the game.
Another game I don't have too much to say about. I should have gotten to this years ago, but I finally got into it just this year. This is an absolutely excellent love letter to metroidvanias translated to rogue-like form. I assume most people who are fans of both those genres have already played this, but on the off chance you haven't, you really need to.
I'm sure some people will disagree with me, but this is the best Kirby game. It's a very successful translation of Kirby into 3D that honestly was long overdue. I'm usually not the biggest Kirby fan, but I really enjoyed playing through this game. I beat the game, I beat the post-game stuff, I beat all the tournaments, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
If you really like Hades, I recommend giving this game a shot. The actual combat is way more Diablo-like, but the overall structure of the game is so similar to Hades that I thought this must have been heavily inspired by it. Maybe it was in some ways, but I was surprised to learn this game didn't come out a long time after Hades; they were contemporaries. It came out between Hades 1 going into early access, and its full release. This is a wonderful roguelike with a charming story about a family coming together in the face of a world-ending catastrophe. Most of the family members are characters you can choose to play as, similar to choosing a weapon in Hades, and I enjoyed playing through the game, bouncing around from character to character, finding my favorites to play as.
This is a game that should be much higher on my list. I love the characters, the world, the story, and the general style of games from the Persona team. I just hate the mana system in this game. At one point, I was fighting the boss in what I'll call the worm dungeon. I killed the boss, but lost to one of its remaining adds because it could only be hurt by magic attacks, and I was all out of mana and had no items I could use to kill it. I ended up having to redo the whole dungeon, and this made me so paranoid that in all the side-dungeons from this point on, I would run past all the enemies, kill the boss at the end, and then explore the rest of the dungeon. This wasn't a particularly fun way to play these dungeons. For the last two main dungeons, I finally set the difficulty to storyteller, and while this eliminated any challenge in the game, I had a much better time not having to worry about the mana. I know that was a lot of complaining for a game that still made my top 10 list, but that just goes to show how excellent everything else about the game was. If I didn't hate the mana system so much, it would probably be number one on this list.
I got this game after getting really into Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising (the fighting game). I didn't really know anything about the Granblue franchise, so I decided to give this a try. I didn't really learn that much more, as this is sort of a side story set apart from whatever is going on in the main Granblue game, and only a couple of characters from the fighting game were involved in the story. There were many characters from the fighting game in this, but most of them were relegated to playable characters in the game's mostly endgame monster hunter style mode. That mode was a really interesting addition to the game, but it didn't really add much story-wise. Overall, this was a very good and surprisingly beautiful rpg with a very unique endgame. I didn't have the biggest expectations going into this, but I really enjoyed my time with it.
I don't have too much to say about this game. It's an excellent little mystery game with multiple possible endings for you to discover. It's very impressive for something that started life as a Skyrim mod and was eventually developed into a full game.