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From the moment it booted up, Sakura Wars exuded a charm that kept me engaged through my entire playthrough. Tite Kubo's designs are preserved shockingly well in 3D and provide a lot of character to the cast. While the other guest designers' characters feel a little more generic, their distinct sense of style and aesthetic help give texture to the rest of the cast through their differences. And all of the characters have charming, if tropey, personalities that play off of each other well and make each of their encounters feel tailored to them specifically rather than feeling cookie-cutter. The story of reviving the Japanese revue from the original Sakura Wars (1996) plays alongside this game as a revival of its franchise, and the ripped wallpaper and worn structures in the theater help to tell this story as well. While it can be a bit indulgent at times for the game to constantly talk about how good the previous entries are, most of which are unavailable in English, it provides a framework for the game to build on in order to create something new, and I would love to see a sequel that doesn't feel as tied to its predecessors. I would also love more Koi Koi, as I got deep into playing that minigame between story beats. The combat is pretty one-note, there are too many scenes where you are required to stop your character from being a pervert, and the romance is so far removed from the story that it's relegated to a handful of small scenes right at the end of the game. Despite that, Sakura Wars hit me in just the right way to be my Game of the Year.
NUMBER 1:
Sakura Wars (PS4, 2020)
Sometimes a game just sparks an indescribable sort of joy when playing it. For me this past year, that was Sakura Wars. I hope one day, when Shadow Tokyo is banished, we can all return to the theater for another performance.
The Roottrees Are Dead is a deceptively simple game, asking you to piece together a family history with just readily accessible information on an older Internet, but its depth of puzzle-solving provides a lot of meat to the experience. It feels a lot like Hypnospace Outlaw, where tangential connections can lead down rabbit holes with tons of Easter eggs and stories to find. The amount of detail in the game, from the actual story content to the dead ends to the extraneous details like finding playable music tracks from relevant characters was so much fun to discover. There was such a sense of joy playing this game with my girlfriend, excitingly solving puzzles to put together the family tree and all the nasty details that come with uncovering family secrets. The base game feels just about flawless, and while the bonus scenario can often feel too obscure with its connections, it still provides that same sense of discovery once you finally start piecing everything together, and the initial conceit is truly an all-timer.
NUMBER 2:
The Roottrees Are Dead (PC, 2025)
Love to go on the internet and unravel mysteries while piecing together a family tree. The Roottrees Are Dead is an adventure game filled with so much love and detail that it's hard not to love it, and the evolving mystery is a ton of fun to follow.
Where Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana showed some growing pains in its systems and storytelling, Ys IX opts for an adventure that's smaller in scope but no less deep or engaging. Being trapped in the single city of Balduk helps make the world and the characters feel more dynamic throughout the story, as the history of the land and its inhabitants unfold and long-buried secrets get revealed. The back-and-forth chapters between Adol in the city and Adol investigating the prison felt more connected to the narrative than Adol and Dana did in VIII, and the interplay between the two scenarios had some really cool puzzle-solving moments as well. The characters feel more balanced and diverse to let players adjust their play style to their preferences, even if some of them (Hawk) never quite felt right. The raid battles feel way less arbitrary and the side characters helped provide more texture to the world as they revealed additional aspects to Balduk's history and culture that played into the greater story. The Switch is definitely not the ideal way to play it, with particle effects going out of control and the secret boss occasionally bringing the game to a complete halt, but it's an exciting adventure from start to finish. I think stories like these help sell a sense of adventure just as much as any other Ys game and it's fun to see them try new concepts. But also how come Dogi gets relegated to running restaurants and building villages instead of crushing walls and kicking ass?
NUMBER 3:
Ys IX: Monstrum Nox (Nintendo Switch, 2021)
The fun never stops when Adol and Dogi are involved, and it's fun to have an adventure that really explores the history and culture of a single location while discovering hidden secrets. I just wish the game didn't try to make my Switch explode.
It's been a couple years since I played Syphon Filter the original, but where I remember that game having a million ideas and mechanics that the devs wanted to try out in order to create complex levels, Syphon Filter 2 feels like it took the ideas that really worked from the first game and refined them into a more focused and clean experience. This also made the game much harder than its predecessor, not helped by the fact that I had forgotten some of the finer mechanics in my time between the games. But even with that sort of handicap, I found myself enjoying figuring out how to tackle each level and encounter and feeling myself getting better at the game. The levels were well put together and had some fun dynamics to them that still led to some chaos; there was a mission where one of my targets took a bad jump over a piece of burning ceiling that had just fallen so he immediately died lol. The plot was an insane development on the first game's, the cutscenes and cartoonish characters were as good as ever, and solving the final boss encounter was a gleeful experience once I realized how to beat him. Just good old fashioned fun from to to bottom, though you don't get nearly as much taser time as the other games. While Syphon Filter 3 did not make the top 10, I love how it wraps up the trilogy's plot as a series of missions told through the main cast in a series of congressional trials, the "Xenogears disc 2 of Syphon Filter" as my girlfriend so eloquently put it.
NUMBER 4:
Syphon Filter 2 (PS1, 2000)
Espionage at its finest, Gabe Logan and Lian Xing against the world as they try to stop the widespread release of a biological weapon while being branded enemies of the state. Incredibly stupid plot but deeply entertaining, and the gameplay is cartoony fun.
After beating Final Fantasy II, I decided it was time to finally dip my toes into the larger SaGa extended universe. The Legend of Legacy, like many Furyu titles, brings an A-list staff together to create a mid-budget title with big ideas, and I think it largely succeeds like that. In a general SaGa fashion, the story is light and basically just gives you enough direction to start a journey, after which the player is free to engage with the game as they please. But where the story is barebones, the plot as it is delivered gives texture to the world, giving meaning to each node on the map and its unique features. The magic system, requiring characters to engage in an additional layer of combat as they compete with the enemies to call upon elemental spirits in order to use their associated spells, gives a lot of good push-and-pull to the combat as well as provide some charming overworld puzzles that require different elemental energy to activate. While the combat is mechanically easy to parse, the way that skills are learned and the incentive to fight monsters above your weight class to spark skills more quickly provides incentive to really dig into the nuances of magical abilities and different damage types for weapons in order to take down stronger enemies. While the mechanical freedom to engage with the game feels like it falls apart against the final boss who requires a pretty specific strategy, there's still a lot to like about this game and its focus on player expression.
NUMBER 5:
The Legend of Legacy (3DS, 2015)
Another step towards SaGa, The Legend of Legacy presents a light narrative and a battle system that demands attention and has a good push-and-pull to it that's satisfying to figure out.
Dragon Warrior is the platonic ideal of the JRPG, a perfect encapsulation of the genre's unique sense of adventure in a tight 10 hour experience. Its charm is in its simplicity: one character against the world as you grind for gear, travel to the next town, then grind again as you pick up clues to your next destination along the way. Most of the puzzles are spelled out well with NPC dialogue and give you the direction you need to never feel truly lost. There's definitely some mechanical cuteness to some of the navigation-related puzzles that feels a bit too clever for its own good, but solving them still feels satisfying when the trick is revealed. The world is laid out well, with just enough iconography to keep track of everything without too much trouble, and the soft progression checks with things like bridges and poison tiles give a texture to the world and help guide the player naturally through the adventure. All in all, it's just a good game that never overstays its welcome and leaves a strong impression. The Dragon Quest HD-2D Remake effectively removing the choice to join the Dragonlord at the end of the game and therefore decanonizing Dragon Quest Builders, among other grievances, is a complete coward's move.
NUMBER 6:
Dragon Warrior I (GBC, 2000)
Sometimes, you just really can't beat the classics. They really had this JRPG thing figured out day one.
Dragon Quest V is a game of high highs and kinda middling lows that still makes for a charming, if uneven, DQ experience. I really like its three act structure where you play as one character through different stages of his life and centering the story around relationships and family. There are some really great moments and evocative scenes, especially in between acts, and the way the world and characters evolve between generations gives a lot of life to the game. But for a narrative that centers around relationships, you spend a shocking amount of time alone on your journey with only friendly monsters going "ooze it or lose it" to keep you company. Then after an abrupt marriage and little time to really meet your wife, the game's time dilation ramps up and you're almost immediately thrust into another scenario where you don't get to travel with your wife again for many hours. I was a little underwhelmed by the bachelorettes as well. The game gives you two primary women to choose from, and then really guilt trips you into picking your childhood friend over the other one, but both of them are presented as pretty boring demure sort of characters. The DS version adds a new third woman as an option, but she's got a nasty attitude so everyone treats you like a weirdo if you choose her, even though she is given the most space to grow as a character throughout the adventure. I think moment-to-moment it can be an uneven experience but on the whole it's still a good Dragon Quest game filled with the series' classic charm. Also it seems unbelievable that they decided they didn't want to commit Bianca to a lifetime of depression and loneliness if you marry Nera like in the original version, effectively shaming the player if you didn't pick your childhood friend, only to turn around and write a "joke" bachelorette option that receives the same fate just because she's a spoiled daddy's girl. Justice for Debora.
NUMBER 7:
Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride (Nintendo DS, 2009)
Dragon Quest V is clearly a head above its contemporaries in terms of a multi-generational video game story, and makes up for many of its stumbles through sheer charm. I just wish Yuji Horii would stop taking my wife from me.
Not much to say about the classic GBA Fire Emblem experience. The expansion on class promotions gives more agency to character builds across your army, even if there's generally a right choice for everyone if their stats aren't completely messed up. The game on Hard Mode does present a decent challenge, especially on Ephraim's route, and while the game does give you a lot of tools to make the experience easier they're largely unneeded and the game feels well-balanced overall. That said, the game gets progressively easier after the two routes reconvene, and the two storylines start to wear out their welcome as you have to do the same final maps with no changes. I do wish there were more differences between Eirika and Ephraim's stories through the endgame but some of the smaller details, like how Joshua and Caellach's relationship changes based on what side of the story they see, do help to build out the world outside of the maps. I played this one in tandem with my girlfriend and it was fun to talk about strategies, which characters surprised us or let us down, and which supports we had gotten. I feel like the general difficulty in grinding out supports pre-Awakening has led people (me included) to think early FE is way more serious than it is, because some of these characters have truly unhinged dialogues with each other.
NUMBER 8:
Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (GBA, 2005)
Sacred Stones brings a lot of updates to the GBA Fire Emblem formula that help to make the games more open-ended and replayable, but underneath that is the same satisfying tactical gameplay that drives the franchise.
I came into Pokémon Legends: Z-A a little cool on the concept of another open world-esque adventure after finding Pokémon Legends: Arceus extremely tedious and tiresome. Thankfully, this new title fixes basically all of the gripes I had with the first game, and helps bring a little more finality to Pokémon XY. Catching Pokemon is fun again rather than a chore, with side quests that ask you to find specific types of Pokemon like the biggest Pumpkaboo or every color of Flabebe feeling way more satisfying than being tasked with catching 20 Bonsly so the professor can figure out their favorite flavor of baby shampoo and compatible star signs. The combat is dynamic and engaging when combined with the real-time catching mechanics where you're as at-risk of attack as your Pokemon, where Arceus' battles felt aggressively unbalanced on every axis. And building out a singular large city for exploration rather than a bunch of empty biomes helped give a sense of place and character to the game, even if parsing navigation points and hotspots within Lumiose City got difficult very quickly. I think that the story was a bit weak in regards to its connections back to XY, and the focus on combat in the story quests and many of its side quests got tiring by the end of the game, but Z-A had a lot of heart and has me excited for wherever the next Legends game goes.
NUMBER 9:
Pokemon Legends: Z-A (Nintendo Switch, 2025)
It's like if Pokemon Legends: Arceus was fun. I love running around the city, parkouring over the rooftops to find more weird animals. The gameplay loop is a bit short for how often it repeats but there's still a lot of fun to be had.
A lot has been said about Final Fantasy II's leveling system, but playing the game naturally will accomplish the same thing as having your characters punch each other for hours, just without the tedium. Much like the rock throwing grind in Final Fantasy Tactics, it seems like gamers love to suck the fun out of games in the pursuit of optimization rather than engage with the systems on their own level. FFII is a game about how swinging a sword makes you better at swordfighting, and shooting a fireball makes you shoot better fireballs. Grinding is offset by fighting stronger enemies, who give you more stat upgrades. And the rotating cast of characters helps you see the pros and cons of different builds and weapon choices which lets you consider how you want your permanent party members to fight. This can get a little tiresome when your last party member joins 10 minutes before the final dungeon, but even then the game allows you to engage with that however you want. And for being the first Final Fantasy with characters and story, I think it does an admirable job at building out its cast and escalating the stakes of the story in fun ways that feel authentically Final Fantasy. The constant abrupt deaths of every fourth party member for the entire game are also very funny, especially with the Rebirth of Souls post-game story allowing them all to join forces and re-kill the final boss in Purgatory.
NUMBER 10:
Final Fantasy II (PSP, 2007)
I loved basically everything this game does to try and push Final Fantasy forward, and I think it succeeds in all of them. This will make a SaGa fan out of me yet.
Also what did they do them in the FMV intro, none of them look or dress like this.
A host of RPGFan's Retro Encounter podcast once described Chrono Trigger as "only a perfect JRPG", and that's stuck with me since completing the game myself. There is nothing glaringly wrong with the game; the pacing is tight, the story is fun, the combat keeps you engaged regularly, and the character writing is charming as well. The problem is that Chrono Trigger largely stops having "characters" once the fourth party member joins, and outside of some smaller sequences they all get siloed into engaging with just their personal stories. This feels even more egregious when the PS1 cutscenes play and whoever your third party member is has to stand offscreen or in shadow the whole time to support all possible configurations instead of just having the whole party together. I wish there were more moments like the campfire scene because that was the only time after the first few hours where I felt like I had a party of characters and not an interchangeable set of game pieces. There's nothing inherently wrong with the game, but I feel like so many games excel in specific areas where this one is just competent in all of them. As a prequel to its more engaging successor in Chrono Cross, I'm glad I finally experienced it, but I came away from it feeling sated and not truly satisfied. That said, it did get me out of a major slump so that has to count for something.
HONORABLE MENTION:
Chrono Trigger (Nintendo DS, 2008)
While it fails to live up to the precedent set by Chrono Cross, I think it's a finely tuned game and I understand why so many people love it. I just found the charm points to be fewer and farther between than most.
Since March 6th is National You Can Still Post Your 2025 GOTY List Day, I'm going to do just that! I'll have a short blurb for each game in the post body, and then more detailed thoughts about them will be in the alt text for the accompanying image.
Now, let's get started with the countdown!
That's what the H stands for in Jesus H. Christ.
Single guys on Valentine's Day are stronger than the armed forces and carry a burden greater than all world governments combined.
Don't worry, they were exonerated in Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces.
Fucked up that they added a part to Kiryu's big hero speech with "The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They h
Upgraded on the fake meter because the ending has you leave Miles MacKenzie to die.
He was always there for you... Guarding...
I get you, I read Yu digitally and it took me forever until I got a dedicated e-reader. Looking for those volumes physically now is a bit of a hassle. But glad you're enjoying it so far! That monkey gets into all sorts of trouble.
Oh hey a fellow Wukong-head! I read the Anthony C. Yu translation since it was unabridged and heavily annotated, you'll have to let me know how the Lovell translation is.
Yeah, it'll be not good if they don't have more Miles MacKenzie.
Can't believe they're trying to keep Miles MacKenzie from you.
They're pivoting to focusing the Secret Lair on the Paul W. S. Anderson movie.
Looks like Diddy took a Scottie Pippen slam dunk.
Roll for your swag check.
Ys has it beat; the Ys I & II TG16 release came two years after Ys I and one year after Ys II, but certainly of the modern era Gungrave is the GOAT (Gungrave Of All Time).
I hope they add Dark Souls-style parries to the battles and also a dodge roll.
Southpaw's Flame Atronach
I only believe in the guiding light of Ogg Vorbis. We must fight to the death.
