Games of the Year? No, just Games I played this Year in the Year Of 2025

I've been a niche guy since the Playstation 2; I hardly play anything Relevant anymore, so I'm not the dude to ask for Game of the Year. Which is why I know what the game of the year was.

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Virtua Fighter 5 REVO World Stage is the game of the year because that’s the one I played for 200 hours.

You’re supposed to play fighting games forever, and Virtua Fighter 5 is the case where I actually have. I played it on Xbox Live on my 360 twenty years ago (oh god), I played it years later when Final Showdown finally came to consoles. I played the PS4 remake and the balance patch we’re calling VF5 REVO. Every couple of years away from it, I’d inevitably miss it and come back to it for a while. But there were never many players, and the online play was a bit sluggish.

When the game finally got high-quality online play with rollback late last year, I knew it was going to be my main game in 2025. Because VF is my game. Tekken 7/8 were fun, but I only ever thought of them as hold-overs for the real thing. It’s possible that I won’t be happy with the Virtua Fighter reboot. In that case, VF5 will still be there for me. (And, if I want to go all the way back to my youth… VF4 will, too.)

Virtua Fighter 5 is so rich with depth and variety that it has never gotten once boring to me. I’ve learned half the characters, played thousands of matches, trained and experimented for hundreds of hours. The options are complex, but the core game is ultimately so direct and raw: with every punch, guard, and sidestep, you and the opponent are actively reading each other. Missing any one of those reads could expose a player to a crushing hit. And the player who reads best, who keeps the opponent confused, always wins. It never fails to captivate.

But REVO does not hold VF5 as holy and inviolable, either. The developer took a look backwards at the game’s character balance, informed by two decades of play at the highest levels, and offered some very reasonable answers to the state of the game. Nerfing only the most egregiously powerful individual moves (Akira’s guard break, Taka’s uppercut slaps), the fixes made to REVO instead seek to bring all of the cast up to the level of the strongest characters. Characters have new tricks, their useless or pointlessly unsafe moves are fixed: it’s more fair without removing the fun.

And Dural is there, because they even decided to actually tune the game’s overpowered final boss for tournament play. I found this character very strong but also kind of boring to use, as she simply has the best of every type of move in the game- best elbow, best low attack, best throws, you name it– without a cohesive style.

The other big addition to REVO was World Stage, a single-player mode like in previous Virtua Fighters where players fight an onslaught of progressively more difficult computer-controlled opponents to unlock items in a light (but rather long) quest mode. However, contrary to prior entries in the series where the bots could barely play the game properly, World Stage opponents get tough, real fast. I expected not to lose a single match— like in previous games— and was humbled as early as the third area by bots who fight back pretty seriously. It’s genuinely tough, which is surprising as these modes were always aimed at a less competitive audience. I just wish I could get the locked dress-up items some other way: I get why players love these modes, but I want to fight people.

Anyway, game of the year. Game of the Year 2024 was Shiren 6, by the way. I want to invent the Hyperbolic Time Chamber so I can play Shiren 6 for 30,000 hours.

2025 Game I would have normally finished by now: Super Robot Wars Y

This is a check-in at about thirty hours played. Unlike the interminable SRW30, I am taking the scenic route through this game, playing all the story side missions.

The good news is that Gameplay Is Back in the SRW series: playing the vastly improved Expert mode, I have to actually use tactics to defeat tough opponents. Cash is precious and pilot upgrades few: even micro-management is tough and you won’t be building any god pilots. This is also why SRWY has taken me so long: it’s possible to lose now, especially in main storyline quests where every boss is well past the capabilities of your team.

(Of course, hard modes are optional, but I also imagine this game is completely flavorless in Easy mode.)

The bad news is that with SRW games getting longer (counting DLC, this game definitely has over 100 maps), the quality of the maps is starting to suffer. Every battle has you facing off against 25 of the same unit, followed by reinforcements, repeat over and over again. The DLC stages are even worse, as the bad guys command an army of two recycled units from the previous SRWX. Turning SRW from a 40-hour game into a 100-hour game has really been bad for the overall experience.

Some good news to soften this blow is that the playable units are more mechanically interesting and thus more fun to play than ever. For example, Getter Arc can transform whenever it wants (including at turn end), effectively putting all of the Getter forms at your disposal at once when traditionally players only want to use Getter One. Though there are certainly too many units— especially when the Macross brings in the full Valkyrie squad— the game does a great job of bringing out their individuality in gameplay.

The real downside of strong enemies and too many playable units is that a lot of your characters will quickly become unplayable unless you specifically work to level them up on purpose, or play the boring filler experience-grind levels that really aren’t necessary in a game this long. I think an “XP bank” feature would be good, here.

Attack animations are flashy as always, but I don't think you can really call it "sprite animation" anymore like in the old days: like TV anime itself, the animations have a low frame count and high detail.

The character interactions are the main draw of the story, which hasn’t even really begun to move at this point in the game. The DLC’s extreme oddball combination of the J9 mercenaries from Braiger, the detective team from Kamen Rider W, and the Big O’s Roger Smith and Dorothy seems completely random, but I was impressed at how the writing team found the common threads and mutual understanding between these characters. (They’re all effectively private security/detective services, after all.)

Recently in the story I had a laugh when Kallen from Code Geass and Allenby from G Gundam noticed Mirage from Macross Delta crushing on the hero and commiserated with each other over it, being themselves designated “she’s got no chance with him” heroines. “I see what’s happening here.” “I’m rooting for you, girl…” As they stare blankly in to the distance.

Overall I’m glad to see SRW starting to return to form, but I’m also starting to accept it’s never going back to the PS1/2 days, with more defined maps and objectives and real tactics. Every time I play one of these games I tell myself I’m going to play through SRW Alpha Gaiden or SRW3 or something, and then I don’t. I’m fully expecting to start playing Fantasy Maiden Wars (the Touhou SRW-like) and like it better than this game.

I am a bit disappointed— even though Chuchu’s Demi Trainer is a sniper unit— that Chuchu’s final attack isn’t a punch.

Game I shouldn’t have taken up right before Xmas: Shadowverse Worlds Beyond

I had about 100 hours in the original Shadowverse, Cygames’ ripoff/twist upon the stripped-down Hearthstone-style trading card game. I spent most of that time playing random draft matches and largely avoided ranked match: it seemed prohibitively expensive to actually build a competitive deck, for reasons I’m about to explain.

I’ve had the reverse experience in the sequel, Worlds Beyond. To the end of actually getting players participating in the competitive ecosystem, the game showers them with free card packs so that they can at least run low-rarity standard decks. I of course chose the deck (Portalcraft Artifact) where you slowly build a giant robot to annihilate your enemy in one shot. But after trouncing the low ranks (I’m in Ruby), I quickly felt the limits of my deck against players who actually pay attention to the meta-game.

As in the original Shadowverse, competitive decks are about building synergies with and between Legendary-rarity cards whose extraordinary abilities (read: all the really fun stuff) effectively theme your deck, and those are a real bitch to get no matter how many free card packs the game dumps on you. The kinds of decks that win consistently and ascend the ranks are on a completely different power level, frequently involving multiple copies of multiple Legendary cards. I’m looking to graduate from my first deck and finding that while I have a key Legendary card here and there, I don’t have the amount of them– or the Legendary cards necessary to support them– to run a truly effective deck.

Couple this with the fact that a new set is about to hit in a couple of weeks, a month after the last one, and I can see how people wind up spending so much on this. I might even be next.

(By contrast, my experience with MTG: Arena was during Covid; it was that set with the extremely broken animal companions? I gave the game $100 (because it was Covid lockdown and I was going insane), built a Zenith Flare deck, and got to Mythic without even trying. After making Mythic, I stopped completely, satisfied.)