So, my current favorite game podcast, Into the Aether, because they don’t just play games from the current year, has come up with this idea called Games of the Other Year, where they rank games they played that year but were from other years. The rules are more fluid, but I generally make my own list by following two rules: I have to have either played it for the first time or finished it for the first time, and then I rank them. I’m not going to do full-blown write-ups, but I wanted to post this anyway.
Sekiro – I’m amazed I went so long without playing this game. So difficult, so fun.
Bloostained: Ritual of the Night – More Metroidvania goodness.
Dragon Quest III HD-2D – Continuing from 2024, this game is brilliant.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – A better representation of what made Bethesda great than Starfield
Tunic
Metroid: Zero Mission – Since it was a remake of Metroid, and I like Fusion more I never picked this up before now
Perfect Tides – I started this when it came out and never went back to it til now. I’m so glad I saw it to the end. Meredith Gran is one of my favorite writers.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 – Like I said about 3+4, I am bad at this, but it is so fun.
Risk of Rain 2 – Megabonk brought me here, and it is better. Playing this with my friends in November has been a lot of fun.
Yakuza Kiwami 2 – I wish Tiger Punch didn’t get nerfed from Kiwami but I really enjoyed this part of Kiryu’s story
There are some games from 2025 that I wanted to get around to playing more but plan to play more of in 2026.
All my PS5 Games of 2020 – 2023 – Since getting a Steam Deck in 2024 and a new PC in 2025, I’m kind of done with my PS5. A lot of the games I loved on there I have bought for much cheaper on Steam and will either play on Steam Deck or on my PC where they’ll run even better than the console (Maybe even a Steam Machine if the RAM prices going up doesn’t make that impossible.)
Surprisingly, Monter Hunter Wilds – I know people have said it runs poorly even on really good PC but I was basically done with that game before I got my new rig so I want to see the game in action on it plus by the time I get back to it, they’ll be enough new content updates to get me back in the loop again.
Final Fantasy Tactics / Dragon Quest I+II HD-2D – I just know if I were to play more of these games and revise my GOTY list, one of them would definitely be in my top 10
Pipistrello and the Curse YoYo – An original indie game that is an homage to the best of Game Boy Advance. It can be punishing sometimes but I really want to beat it.
Unbeatable – I’m not really a rhythm game kind of guy but I want to be and this game is so much fun with a really weird story going on.
Demonschool – Tactical demon fights in a weird high school on an island with a calendar system, sign me up for more.
Lumines Arise – Lumines is one of the best puzzle game series, period, and I want to get into this one even more because the music is awesome.
Once Upon A Katamari – Katamari was a game series I heard about on one of the first gaming podcasts I ever heard, maybe from IGN, but I didn’t own a PS2 until about 2006. So this is only the second Katamary game I’ve ever played
Constance / Possessor(s) – I want to finish both of these Metroidvanias that I really like but don’t love as much as Silksong. Still a while before that DLC, for it comes out
Sektori – I used to love Geometry Wars, so this is right up my alley, it just came out really late into the year.
In 2026, I can’t wait to play as Leon Kennedy and Kiryu Kazama again. I’ve never played Dragon Quest VII, but I can’t wait to see how exactly they have reimagined it because I’ve heard nightmares about how long the intro takes. Pragmata is a Capcom game I am looking forward to, maybe not buying it exactly when it comes out because I want to see how others feel about it first, but I am intrigued by it. A visual novel series I really like, Coffee Talk, is going to have another entry set in Tokyo that I am highly anticipating. Control Resonant looked really cool, so I should probably finish Control before playing that.
In general, I want to know more about what Nintendo is doing for 2026 because right now the only Switch 2 game I am anticipating is Fire Emblem Fortune’s Weave but FromSoftware’s Switch 2 exclusive game, The Duskbloods, might also come out this year, and I tend to check out everything they do, even if Elden Ring Nightreign was not my thing. ArcSystem Works desperately needs to reveal new characters for Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls, cause right now my anticipation is waning on that with so little information. I don’t really know what’s going on with Mina the Hollower, but I was looking forward to that in 2025, and hopefully it comes out relatively early in 2026. The return of Onimusha in Way of the Sword, I’m frothing at the mouth to try, while Wolverine, I am keeping at a slight arms distance because it’ll come to PS5 first, and I might not get it until it comes to PC.
I played the first game of Perfect Tides just in time for the sequel to come out this year, Perfect Tides: Station to Station, and hopefully, that early access for Slay the Spire 2 launches this year. I’m not sure if I’m going to play The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon when it comes to the U.S. or keep playing in order as I wait for Trails in the Sky Chapter Two remake. There are definitely other games than this that I am anticipating for 2026, but these are the ones currently on my mind.
My most anticipated game through is just part of one with Deltarune Chapter 5 set to come out this year and the Hollow Knight Silksong DLC: Sea of Sorrows set to come out in the spring.
I decided to do my top 20 games, briefly write on 20-11, with 10-1 being the main part of this volume, so let’s jump right into it with some honorable mentions, which are mostly games that might have made the top 20, but I didn’t play them enough. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo brings back that classic The Minish Cap on Game Boy Advance feeling, including a fake GBA filter you can put over the game, though sometimes the game feels overly punishing. Peak didn’t hold my attention for long, but when playing with friends, it was a real fun time. Capcom Fighting Collection 2 contains a lot of games I love, but I just didn’t put in a lot of time into it this year. Let’s get into number 20 and beyond.
20. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4
As a kid, I did not play the Tony Hawk games and only played 1+2 starting in November of 2024, so plain and simple, I am bad at this game. I understand what people are saying about the difficulty of getting good at fighting games because this feels similar, but I still enjoyed it a lot. It being a genre I basically never explored before feels so novel, as funny as that sounds. It feels like a game series where, for the longest time, I didn’t get it, and now I get it, although it might be far too late. Music: Good
19. DOOM: The Dark Ages
Alright, I’m going to say it, I miss DOOM Eternal’s platforming. I know people hated but I loved it. This game, I really like the gameplay with the shield and the different fantasy guns and power-ups, but I found the dragon riding kind of annoying. I kind of think they listened to too much of DOOM Eternal’s criticism and almost did a two steps forward, one step back situation. Unlike others, although it is stupid, the story of DOOM with this entry included, I find to be stupid fun. Music: Pretty Good
18. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
People might be mad at this one, but I think this game is the definition of very good, but it is not the perfect RPG people claim it to be. The whole controversy about using AI texture placeholders aside, and the whole fact that it isn’t really an indie game, just based on the game itself, I like a lot of it, but there are design, gameplay, and writing flaws that kept this game lower on the list for me. I’ve seen others say this, and it echoes my sentiments. The more I played this game, the more I disliked it. I think I wanted more Expedition 33 and less Clair Obscur. Music: Incredible, but that one guy’s singing and the heavy guitar actually make that song everyone loves worse, and I’m not afraid to say it.
17. Monster Hunter Wilds
This was my most anticipated game of the year, and with over a hundred hours in it, I can’t say I didn’t have fun. When it came out, I played it non-stop, but then I reached the end of the story and, well, didn’t have a reason to continue, go back, or continue the loop to min-max my character. I can’t speak on the performance because I played it on an underpowered computer and have yet to try it on my new rig yet but I am going to go back eventually. The previous two Monster Hunter games had me returning to them again and again and again. This one, though a lot of fun, is not so much. Music: Alright
16. Blue Prince
Anything I tell you about Blue Prince is too much. You inherit a house and must reach room 46 to keep it. There are all sorts of puzzles to unravel to reach that room as you choose the rooms of the estate to reach the end. Sometimes the RNG of the game comes down to luck, and that can be a bit frustrating, but the puzzles of each room and how they interconnect reveal a story deeper than just inheriting the house. I found it captivating. Music: Mesmerising, great to put out when you’re writing.
15. Possessor(s)
Any and all Metroidvanias were going to have a hard time competing with Silksong in both challenge and style, but this game has it in spades. The game feels generous in what power-ups it gives you right away while keeping it challenging, like Silksong, if you don’t use everything at your disposal. Luca and Rhem’s clashing personalities and growing understanding of each other are a real highlight of the game. The combat and platforming are really cool, but I didn’t expect how much I would find the story engaging. Music: Very Good
This probably would have been higher if I had played it sooner and more. Did I play through Dragon Quest I, then move on to II? No, I have ADHD, so I’m bouncing back and forth between the two. Since DQXI was released, it has become one of my favorite game series, and I am ready for more remakes, especially of 4 through 6. Music: It’s fucking Dragon Quest of course it’s great.
12. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
From one dragon to another. All the parts of playing Majima in Infinite Wealth’s Hawaii, I found a lot of fun alongside the Pirate Ship battles that occur. The combat is addictive even when I was maxed out, and I loved looking for more outfits to unlock. At times, though, this game looked like shit, especially its lighting, and the extended cast minus Samoa Joe were kind of annoying. It was all worth it for the final scene of the game, which had me emotional for Like a Dragon 9. Music: Alright
11. Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles
Like DQI+II, this would have been in my top ten if I had not gotten it so late and played so little of it, but I am already hooked on this, having never played this game in previous incarnations before. This is my first experience with FFT, but I’m already finding the story better than 16, 15, and 13. Whether it’s better than any others, I’m not far enough into it yet to determine, but I may like it more than 12 and 10. I’m not going to presume, though. I’m going to be playing this a lot in 2026. Music: Great, classic Final Fantasy quality.
10. Kirby Air Riders
It shouldn’t be better than Mario Kart World, but it is, and boy, this game is a lot of fun. It’s a weird game, to sure sure, and I don’t know if I’d recommend it to everyone, but I am having a great time playing it. It can be, at times, overstimulating, but it has that Sakurai touch of gold upon it that’ll keep me coming back next year. The thing is, even when I’m doing poorly in any of the different modes, I feel like I am having fun, which I’m not sure I can say the same for Mario Kart or other similar racers. Sometimes, even better in a video game than the number going up is the feeling of Oh, I’ve unlocked something and you unlock something in this game, doing nearly everything, and there is so much of it. Kirby and Persona share that trait of Oh, let’s go on a mundane adventure, and then at the end, we fight a god. This game is no different. Music: Kirby as fuck, very good.
9. Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O World Stage
Before Street Fighter 4 was even announced, the original Virtua Fighter 5 on Xbox 360 was my first steps back to fighting games. Now, Virtua Fighter is back, baby, and in a way, this remaster of this old ass game is better than a lot of fighting games out right now. It’s still incredible, it still holds up, and they updated it twice on Steam to make it even better, especially when I don’t feel like playing it online. I’m so happy Virtua Fighter is back, and I am going to play much more of this in 2026. Until whatever the next Virtua Fighter game is going to be called comes out, this game will be on my regular fighting game rotation with Street Fighter 6 and Guilty Gear Strive.
8. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
I have no nostalgia for old Shinobi games because I don’t remember ever playing them. It’s funny because I do have history with Ninja Gaiden and I bounced off NG: Ragebound pretty fast. I picked this up because the art is so beautiful, and stayed because the combat feels like I’m playing Street Fighter, stringing combos together to take out my enemies, unlocking new moves, and new ways to traverse to get through the stages. Joe Musashi, without ever saying a word, is the coolest ninja in 2025. The only downside I found from this game was it was quite easy when it came out, and after playing Hollow Knight Silksong, I found the challenge of this game even less so. Still, I can’t wait for that DLC they have planned. Music: Good to Very Good.
7. Absolum
It was hard to choose between this game and Shinobi, which would be 7 and which would be 8, but ultimately, Absolum brings something new that I’ve never tried before: a rogue beat ‘em up in a fantasy setting, plus it has a frog wizard. Since the Ninja Turtle games of the early ’90s, Streets of Rage, and Maximum Carnage, I have loved beat ‘em ups. Turning a beat ‘em up into a roguelike is such a smart choice, and obviously, this is determined by your own skill level, but I seldom failed a run and felt like I got absolutely nothing out of it. The game’s art is fantastic, the animation is so fluid, and the combat feels like multilayered beyond most beat ‘em ups. The branching paths and sidequests they give you to incentivize you to take those paths are something I hope future beat ‘em ups will emulate, even if they’re not roguelites. I actually really loved the story and the moments of exposition, where you get info about the different places you visit, are so fleshed out, and the reason for the entire run leads up to a really strong finale that felt satisfying while also giving you a reason to get all the way to the end again. Music: Incredible
6. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter
Trails in general has been a series I’ve been hovering over, waiting to dive in, and boy did I actually have the worst timing. After I got my Steam Deck in August 2024, I bought the original Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter but didn’t start playing it until two weeks before the remake came out, without knowing it even existed until it was mentioned on Into the Aether. One day, I’ll return to the original, but I started the remake on day one of release. It’s a slow-paced RPG for sure, but something is charming about it where other slow RPGs can be frustrating, mostly because the pacing feels intentional rather than poorly planned. Despite the complaints, I like Estelle’s dubbed voice, even if I was picturing a more Sailor Jupiter dub voice for her character or a Hilda from Fire Emblem: Three Houses type voice when I briefly played the original. I understand why Trails fans called her Bestelle because I love her character, Joshua, not so much, but he’s growing on me.
The stakes feel low to medium, and from my understanding, it’s the end of the game and chapter two where the stakes get really high, but there is something chill about helping out your neighboring cities, working your way to become a full Bracer with Estelle and Joshua. The rotating extra party members is a fun addition as you travel, giving you different strategies for different areas. All the different systems involved, from the way combat works with different areas of effect and the orbment system for customizing your character’s abilities, are really fun to play around with. Fighting in battles as you travel doesn’t feel like a grind the way the battle system is designed, and I like figuring out what works and what doesn’t, even though the games lend you a hand in what an enemy’s weaknesses are straight away. Music: Three different options, all great.
5. Hades II
It’s more Hades, both to its benefit and to its detriment. The stakes feel higher as you go to war with Cronos to save your family, but the ultimate payoff at the end of that war is wishy-washy as hell. Melinoe is a character I love most of the time, but the way she is written sometimes, as a result of her upbringing, being young, and isolated, she sometimes sounds like a cop or a snitch. She doesn’t quite have the rebellious spirit Zagreus had, and the writing can reflect that both positively and negatively. Going up in this game the first time was such a cool surprise, but the journey to reaching Mount Olympus felt like what I wanted out of a sequel to Hades. I feel like the combat of Hades II is better than Hades, but I still like most of the weapons from the first one more. If they tuned them up somehow and said they were going to add those weapons to this game as a DLC, I’d definitely want to buy that, but the weapons from this game I gravitated towards, like the axe or the dual wands, I may like even more than the ones from the first, but boy, do I miss that shield.
All the gameplay that involves actually traversing up or down feels fine-tuned from the first one, but there is way too much currency that could have been pared down. It feels kind of overkill, but at the same time, what I get from the currency never felt like I was being ripped off or wasting my time. I feel like Hades being released in lockdown helped that game but hurt this one because I played so much Hades, and I’m seeing this sentiment a lot in other places, that this being so similar has me taking a break much sooner than I thought, bringing this down from what I thought it would be on my game of the year list for me. Still, it’s more Hades, and Hades is awesome. Music: Just as Incredible as Hades, if not more so.
4. Tokyo Xtreme Racer
What if a racing game were an RPG? Apparently, this was a Dreamcast game. I wish I knew about it because I would have loved it, but the original developer got back together and decided to make a new one in 2025, which they launched, and I bought in early access. Watching this game develop to 1.0 has been fascinating and fun as different aspects get tweaked, changed, and added. Driving around on this one giant expressway, challenging racers to rise in the ranks in a system that is like a combination of an RPG battle and a fighting game fight, but you’re just racing instead. Learning how to tweak the different cars featured in the game has been a learning experience as someone who knows nothing and, quite frankly, doesn’t care all that much about cars.
All the rivals you fight have cool and endearing names like Deep Green, Golden Beast, Lightning Shift Takuya, Lonely Jackal, Drift Baby, Full Moon Lunatic, and Midnight Cinderella, with different personalities you only get to briefly see through conversations with them. All of them have different shades of obsession with racing on this highway, while some in the parking garage will give you hints on how to race rivals called wanderers. The progression feels mostly good, but the late stages of the game really require nitro, maybe too much, without any way to fill out without finding a parking area or going back to your garage, which can break the flow of the game. Still, I surprisingly liked tuning the different parts of my car and trying to figure out what were the best options. Music: A bit repetitive but all bangers, the kind of music that makes you feel like your car is going faster.
3. Deltarune Chapter 3 and 4
I don’t care that it isn’t the full game yet. Chapter 1 sets up the main characters and general premise, Chapter 2 introduces side characters and expands upon the world, but then Chapter 3 begins with a bombshell reveal that you think is interrupted by a fun premise but underneath that reveal in the beginning is an integral part of that premise that hits you in the climax only for everything to go completely balls to the wall in the finale leading to Chapter 4. It also has sections off the path that you don’t have to do, but give some insight and hints about Kris that had me biting my nails to know more. Music: The Absolute BEST of the Year, in my opinion.
Chapter 4 cranks up the dial, not a touchscreen, on the setting, plot, characters, reveals, music, and, quite frankly, my emotions. Kris, or we controlling Kris, may be the protagonist, but Susie might be the hero of the story. After the ending of Chapter 3, Chapter 4 could have brought the tension back down to earth and done like a next-morning reset of the status quo, but the tension remains high and even exceeds it by the time you reach the end. The way this chapter hooked me with both the story and the gameplay, it was the first time playing this game that I thought “Oh, this might turn out better than Undertale by the end,” or at least that I might fall in love with it more than Undertale. Along with my number one game, this is a game that I could not stop thinking about after I was finished with it, and the only reason I did not replay all of the chapters again before the end of 2025 is that I’m going to do so when Chapter 5 comes out in 2026. Music: Best of the year.
2. Donkey Kong Bananza
I loved Donkey Kong Country on Super Nintendo, and I actually did really love Donkey Kong 64 when it came out originally but I haven’t really given a shit about Donkey Kong since then. He was not a character I liked playing in Mario Kart or Smash Bros, nor was I impressed at all by Donkey Konga or Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. By the time they did Donkey Kong Country Returns and DKC: Tropical Freeze, I was completely checked out of Donkey Kong. This game is pure Nintendo magic for making me care about Donkey Kong again. His new design, along with everything about Bananza, is just pure fun because it is fun to be a big gorilla who can smash nearly everything.
The game is an essential Switch 2 pick-up. It has so much of what I love about gaming in it. Unlockable outfits, number go up, unlockable abilities after number go up, destructible environments, references to older games without soaking in nostalgia too much, nonsense languages and music like a blend of Splatoon and Banjo-Kazooie, and a finale with a reveal that was just unbridled joy for me when it happened. After I beat the final boss, I went back and did it two more times just to experience it again and make sure I loved it as much as I thought I did. The moment and the music that goes with it alone would keep this game in my top ten, but the game was so much fun it was the only thing I wanted to do when it came out. I know when I start a new game, it’ll likely happen again. Music: A central theme of the game, and therefore fantastic.
1. Hollow Knight: Silksong
I haven’t really stopped thinking about Silksong since it came out. If my backlog wasn’t so large with games I know are excellent, I’d easily have two hundred hours in this game before the year ended. When I am playing other games, I’m thinking, if there is even a second of a lull, hey, maybe I’ll stop and play Silksong. They’re not tired of it yet, but my friends are soon going to grow tired of the Silksong fan art being posted in the group chat. I even modded the game on my PC to include a Christmas tree in one of the towns and put Hornet in a Christmas-like dress with a white Santa-like frill and a jingle bell (Thank you, Nexusmods). Even now, as I’m writing this, I’m thinking of stopping to go play it.
Now, when Silksong was announced, I was like, for so long, “Oh, cool, I think Hornet would be cool to play as.” I loved Hollow Knight, and I thought the idea of a sequel or whatever it was going to be considered was simply, you know, neat. When it kept getting delayed, or no news was coming about it, I was really phased. I’ve been on my share of delayed games before; you have no idea what it was like as a kid waiting for when Zelda 64 was finally going to come out after that was delayed multiple times. I was looking forward to it, but I was thinking about it all the time, or anything. It wasn’t until they finally announced the release date two weeks before the game was coming out that the hype hit me all at once, where I made a high-frequency sound that only dogs could probably here.
I’m not going to talk about its difficulty because I won’t be mean about it, but what I have to say might sound a lot meaner than my intention. I will say, I had a much harder time with Hollow Knight than this game, and I think it’s either cause I was picking up what Team Cherry was putting down as far as movement is concerned in combat, or I was so hyper-focused on this game more than any others at the time of release. Each tool and power-up you get in this game feels so satisfying to learn how to use, especially against bosses. There are power-ups I like and use more than others, but I don’t have any that I actively dislike so much that I’m like anticipating replaying the game using the different tools that I don’t tend to favor.
I love the Knight, and in general don’t mind silent protagonists in games, but Hornet is now one of my favorite video game characters thanks to her writing and voice in this game. When she speaks to NPCs, she balances speaking reverently to those who perceive her as younger, being kind to those who are young and naive, while calmly threatening her enemies. Whoever on Team Cherry writes the dialogue of the game makes deliberate diction and syntax that I just can’t get enough of. I know people want Team Cherry to make a different kind of game next time around, and that they’re a small team. However, Hornet is Team Cherry’s Samus Aran for me, and I want her to be the main character of this series, and for it to continue with her exploring new kingdoms. What makes Samus so cool they nailed it in Hornet by being a compassionate but no-nonsense badass.
There is no better way to describe it than I’m likely going to be playing this game in some capacity for the rest of my life. Music: Haunting and Incredible.
Those of my games of the year, I’ve got a little companion piece that is much shorter than this of Games of the Other Year, Games of 2025 I want to play more of, and Games of 2026 I’m looking forward to coming, probably tomorrow, but all this writing about games makes me want to play them instead. 2025, a great year for games.
As I write this I’m here preparing for Christmas, doing some last-minute cleaning, some last-minute gift buying, checking out the Steam sales, thinking about the three main categories of this site that have the most Christmasy/Holiday feelings without being explicitly about the Holidays. The first one, books, is easy.
Books – The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
In the year 3018 of the Third Age of Middle-earth (S.R. 1418 if you’re using the Hobbit calendar) at the Council of Elrond on October 28th, it was decided that Frodo would take the One Ring to Mordor, and his companions, chosen, formed the Fellowship of the Ring. It was on December 25th that the Fellowship departed Rivendell on the quest to destroy the ring. J.R.R. Tolkien knew what he was doing when he picked that day.
This gif is ancient now.
Wrestling – Coming Together
Obviously, over the years, there has probably been a Christmas-themed plunder match. The New Day were known for this kind of thing, so I imagine they were involved where all sorts of Christmasy types of weapons were used, like big candy cane decorations or whatnot, but that’s not what we’re going for here.
What part of the wrestling has those Christmas vibes? It feels like it’s about coming together or those moments of eucatastrophic moments where the babyfaces, who previously had been at odds with each other, have a united front against the heels and triumph. It could be when the underdogs who everyone expected to lose get the surprise victory, like getting that surprise present you wanted but had no expectations you’d actually get. The parts of wrestling that probably feel the most like Christmas are the ones that feel straight from a storybook. The lone wolf babyface who used to be a heel is struggling to overcome the odds, but finds out they have unexpected allies after all. Reunions also have that kind of Christmas magic to them with tag teams, factions, or groups that have long since broken up, having a reason, even if temporarily, for one night only, to get back together.
Games – The North Wind Howls
Batman: Arkham Origins, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Parasite Eve all take place during Christmas, but obviously, the games (and books for that matter too) that probably have that feeling of Christmas are the ones that you received on the Holiday and cherish. As an adult looking back, I feel pretty lucky to have a dad who worked many Thanksgivings and many Christmas Eves to make sure we received the presents we desired which for me was video game consoles. So many Christmases my parents would be like “Sorry you didn’t get many presents the game console you wanted was expensive (or previously, it took Santa a lot of work to make the game console) and I’d be like “It’s cool this is what I wanted! Video games are awesome!”
Games like Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Street Fighter II Turbo, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Star Fox 64, Bomberman 64, Metroid Prime, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and others I received on Christmas I’ll forever associate with those Christmasy vibes.
1996 was like the Holy Grail of Video Game Christmases for me. From my parents I received a Nintendo 64 and Super Mario 64, my grandmother gave me Sonic and Knuckles, and my godmother/aunt gave me Super Mario RPG and it was one of those Christmases, if I remember correctly, where it was in the middle of the week so the school district had no choice but to give kids two weeks off. One of the best Christmases ever and not just cause of video games.
As far as vibes though, something about Chrono Trigger’s fairy tale like storytelling gives Christmas vibes to me. If the developers had put a quest to save Santa in it, it would not feel out of place. Neither would any Dragon Quest game to be honest. It’s those sword and sorcery traditions that give me that feeling.
Likewise, I can’t quite put my finger on it, I associate Raiders of the Lost Ark with Christmas time, maybe that’s when I watched it as a kid, but Indiana Jones and the Great Circle I’ve now played mostly in December likely for the same reason.
I’ve been rewatching matches, finishing some 2025 games, and reading up a storm to wrap up the year, plus to be hones,t working a lot more to have some extra money for Christmas presents, Steam sales, and whatever deals may interest me. I haven’t found any worth it though, and by the time my normal bills came a calling.
This post is going to be mostly on all the end-of-the-year wrap-ups I’ve gotten this year as I work on a longer post. I hope everyone reading this has a good holiday.
Music
Halfway through this year, I cancelled my Spotify Premium account and switched to Tidal, then proceeded to listen to very little music so my Tidal 2025 wrapped doesn’t paint much of a picture of my 2025 music. I’ll just say it was a lot of Paramore, The Beaches, Kendrick Lamar, Aesop Rock, Freddie Gibbs, the scores for Deltarune chapters 3 and 4, and the soundtrack to Hollow Knight Silksong.
Since it’s likely to be my last wrapped, I did temporarily reinstalled the app to get it, so here you go. The only surprise to me here is how fast the Deltarune Chapters 3+4 shot up my personal listening stats, considering I quit Spotify in July and those chapters only came out in June. Last Girls at the Party is not only, in my opinion, a good song but a real earworm that gets my ADHD brain playing it on repeat.
Nintendo introduced their own music app either late last year or early this year if you’re an NSO subscriber, so of course they had to do their own wrapped. My number one and two are a result of Donkey Kong Bananza and Mario Kart World’s great soundtracks that harken back to older games. I do wish Nintendo were faster on the draw to bring those games’ soundtracks to the app, maybe next year.
Games
Speaking of Nintendo, they’ve delayed their 2025 recap release to January, so expect me to include that whenever it comes out in any post I make then. I will, however, make some educated guesses. With the release of the Switch 2, Donkey Kong Bananza is probably at the top of my list,t with Super Mario Odyssey in second because I wanted to replay before making the switch from the first Switch to the second. I put in a decent number of hours of Mario Kart World before I became bored with it, and maybe Kirby Air Riders or Metroid Prime 4 squeezes in towards the end there, depending on when Nintendo chooses a cut-off date.
I expect my stats to be much more spread out between my Switch 2 and Steam next year, but with getting a Steam Deck OLED last August, saving and purchasing a new gaming PC this year, and Switch 2’s launch titles being kind of dry until November – December, these are some very Steam-heavy stats. Plus, I may have spent way too Steam Sale purchase happy Fall 2024 with how I excited I was about my Steam Deck, so I had a lot of different games to play this year. Plus, after receiving a fancy new monitor for my birthday, I really wanted to see the difference between my Nvidia 2030 and my 5060 TI.
What was I doing December 6th that ended my Streak? No idea.The Steam Deck really changed things up for how and how much I play, huh?
Monster Hunter Wilds and Hollow Knight Silksong served as two peaks where I really locked in. The big difference is with Silksong if I didn’t own so many other games I want to play, I’d still be playing it. Actually, no, I am still playing the window of time is just smaller since release. Monster Hunter Wilds, while I do very much like it, once I finished all the main quests, it left me nothing to keep me going through the loop like previous games did, where I’d unlock different add-ons and such to min-max my gear for future scenarios. I do plan on returning to it next year since they’ve had so many updates, but I expected to put in like a hundred more hours than I did on that game. Silksong, though I will continue to play especially when that Sea of Sorrows expansion comes out in the Spring. It’s not only my number one most played game on Steam this year, but my Game of the Year. More on that later.
On the other games on my list. With the release of Sagat, my favorite character to main, SF6 could easily have been number one, but I’ve played so much Street Fighter 6 that I needed a break and that so happened to be when Silksong came out. However, with a recent patch that buffed Sagat I’m ready to dive back in and really learn Sagat until whenever the New Virtua Fighter Project comes out.
Persona 5 Royal could also have been number one, but I did mod the shit out of the PC version to reduce the time I need to play it. I’ll accept no judgment. I’ve 100% this game twice on PS4, once on Switch, and once on PS5, so a little modding won’t hurt anyone.
The last game on my list I bought before finding out about the BDS Movement, so I’ll be posting a link to that instead.
Between the Switch 2, the Steam Deck, buying games on Steam Sale, and buying a powerful new PC I’m just about done with PlayStation, and my time playing it this year reflects that.
2025
Now look at 2024. All these games I own on Steam now and have paid half the price. Why would I buy anything on PS5 ever again? They mostly don’t have any! Not pictured in 2024 is Dragon’s Dogma 2, which I also own on Steam now. What I’m going to do with my PS5 now, I’m not sure cause not even playing Ghost of Yotei before it comes to PC could entice me. With the basic end of exclusives between the Steam Deck and maybe purchasing a Steam Machine in the future unless Playstation 6 has something crazy to play on it where I can’t play it anywhere else I’m probably done with it.
Books
I’ve been putting in the work over on GeeklyInc.com with my reviews, which is also part of why this post is so delayed after Thanksgiving, and I’ve got two more I hope to get out there this week. I’ve also snapped into it and been reading a lot since Thanksgiving, just about eleven books with two more probably before the end of the year. One of those books is from one of my favorite authors, Jenn Lyons, who this year raised money on Backerkit to publish a science fiction book called Full Negative. The digital copies came out to backers about three weeks ago, and I just finished it about a day ago. I loved it. I’m working on a full review that’ll be published later, but here is a link to the BackerKit if you want to preorder a future copy (Sorry, I don’t know exactly how that works.
While I don’t have my Books of the Year list complete, that’ll be a future post. Here is my article in what I likely consider my favorite book of the year I did for GeeklyInc
The problem every fan has to deal with when it comes to their favorite wrestlers is two things: one day, they’re going to hang up their trunks and no longer wrestle, and when they win the big one, they’ll eventually have to lose the big one. I expected Hangman’s reign to eventually end, maybe even before the year was over, but I did not expect it to end in such a stupid way. Hook being the catalyst to end his reign is such horseshit. Hook’s first match was in December 2021, and it was exciting because he looked like he had a lot of potential as the son of Taz, likely the greatest ECW World Champion ever. The problem is that just a little bit above that level of his debut is where he has stayed since then. He doesn’t seem interested in improving either with just eighty matches since he started. Never seen him advertised for an indie date, hardly ever see him on Ring of Honor, never hear about veterans working with him like they talk about other wrestlers. So, after All In using Hook for this person seems such a foolish idea.
It mostly doesn’t matter, though, because none of this shit after Hangman’s loss is going to matter. A month ago, Samoa Joe being the one to dethrone Hangman at forty-six in what should be a young man’s company, while also having acting jobs he’d have to be written off TV for at a moment’s notice, seemed just as foolish as using Hook. Now MJF is back, and nothing Samoa Joe has done for the past month is going to mean a damn thing. Neither will Swerve Strickland’s return nor his teaming up with Hangman. At World’s End in a four-way for the AEW World Championship, MJF is going to win, and we’re going to have to deal with his bullshit flavor of ice cream until Will Ospreay beats him a Wembley Stadium, which is 251 days away. So, for those who shit on Hangman fans when they were upset (at least they fucking felt something, which is part of the point of pro wrestling), I hope you enjoy Swerve taking a backseat and MJF delivering what is likely going to be a borderline racist promo to Bandido at Maximum Carnage.
To all my readers, I hope you have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holiday, in whatever way you celebrate.
There is a strong possibility that I will skip writing one of these next week and be back with the next one with some of my favorite books, games, and wrestling matches of the year, but I have a lot of work to do in other parts of my life, so one week off will have to do. AEW’s Full Gear is tomorrow, and I wrote down my predictions for the show, which takes up the bulk of this week’s entry.
Books – Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders
I don’t know how I feel about the current book I’m reading. Is it possible for sections of a book to both bore you and fascinate you at the same time? I’m forty percent in, and the intensity of the situation is just starting to rise. Jamie and Serena make a decision that feels like it’s going to have a ripple effect on the rest of the book, but I’ve grown used to seeking out fantasy books with more snappy beginnings. The best parts of the book so far is the backstory of Jamie’s parents, Serena and May, how they met, how they decided to have Jamie, the rough patch of their relationship, and how they came to a resolution to mend it. The parts that bore me and fascinate me at the same time are the parts too familiar to my own former academic life when I was writing a thesis.
The book Jamie’s paper is on has passages that appear in this one, where you can see, upon reading, what Jamie is seeing as it relates to her thesis. The academic life of Jamie made me think of working on my own thesis both the good and the bad but the problem for me is that style of the fictional book Jamie is writing her paper on is the kind that I was bored to tears of in College so while it is interesting to see what Jamie sees my eyes also glaze over imagining sitting in the library trying doing a close reading of this and finding other sources. I can sense a growing tension between Jamie and her wife, Ro, as Jamie and Serena grow closer as it relates to witchcraft and magic, but I need the book to begin pushing that snowball down the hill instead of packing it tightly at the top, trying to make the perfect snowball to keep me hooked on Lessons in Magic and Disaster.
Addendum: Ten minutes after writing this, I’ve reached an inflection point in the story that really has me turning pages, but I wish we had gotten here a bit sooner. Sometimes that is just how books roll.
Games – Chrono Trigger on Steam / Steam Deck
In 2018, when Chrono Trigger was announced, it was coming to Steam. I had no computer to play it on when it came out. I just would have to wait, but it was something I’d have to look forward to. Upon release, it was like looking into the window of people opening a Christmas present we all wanted and finding out their parents had bought a knock-off version instead. Of all the versions they chose to port to Steam, the publisher’s choice to port the mobile version with some weird upscaled resolution was one of the worst options they could have chosen. By the time I got to play it, though, Square had done everything they were going to do to fix the Steam version of Chrono Trigger to make fans happy, but the damage was done, and the fixes shouldn’t have been needed on the first play. They had an easy golden opportunity to not fuck up, and they royally fucked up. It’s still not the best way to play Chrono Trigger today. The fact that there haven’t been any ports of it since then is strange as well, when it could have easily been put on the Nintendo Switch like many past Square games before.
Now, years later, I am playing this version of the game with the classic resolution on my Steam Deck. I know I don’t have to play it this way. There are many other ways to play Chrono Trigger, even on Steam Deck, but I decided to see this version of Chrono Trigger to the end. It’s still Chrono Trigger, one of my favorite games and one of the greatest games of all time. Now, this may just be my perception, but Square Enix’s reputation for getting it right is much improved since February of 2018, even if some people didn’t like everything about Final Fantasy Rebirth or Final Fantasy 16. If, after the positive reception of Octopath Traveller 1 and 2, Live A Live remake, and the remakes of Dragon Quest I-III is a green flag at Square to release an HD-2D remake of Chrono Trigger, I hope they’ve learned their lessons from Chrono Trigger for Steam and pull off the once again golden opportunity for Chrono Trigger HD-2D on multiple platforms.
Wrestling – Full Gear Predictions
Full Gear is coming up, and I’m feeling more excited for the card than WrestleDream, though the Venn diagram of my brain has a larger circle for books and video games right now, and wrestling, plus the looming holidays just over my shoulder. Still, here are my predictions for the main card of the show. On the subject of the Death Riders, I think Pac is going to get a surprise upset over Darby Allin that’ll play into another surprise upset, which is Kyle O’Reilly defeating Jon Moxley in a No Holds Barred match. A stipulation is often used to soften the blow for a loss of one top talent while elevating another, but that’s not the main point. The main point is that Pac will have done something Jon was unable to do recently, and Kyle will have Moxley tapping out once again, ultimately leading to an angle with the Death Riders turning on Jon Moxley. I am unsure if this heel Jon Moxley has completely run its course, but turning him babyface once again isn’t a terrible idea. Who will lead the Death Riders in his absence? I am not 100% sold on Claudio leading the group, but the betrayal definitely feels like it’s coming.
Speaking of both stipulations and Death Riders, I think the Sisters of Sin will get a surprise win in the four-way tag match against the Babes of Wrath, Time Love Bombs, and Megan Bayne/ Marina Shafir to determine their own stipulation in a match against Willlow and Harley that’ll lead to a Sisters of Sin vs. Timeless Love Bombs final. When Kyle Fletcher vs. Mark Briscoe was announced, I was so sure this was the moment Mark would get the win over Kyle and Kyle would enter the C2 to be part of the Takeshita vs. Okada drama, possibly leading to Takeshita vs. Fletcher semifinal. Since Kyle announced that beating Mark would beat the record for most TNT title defenses, I’m not so sure. I’m currently 55:45 on Mark winning, but if Kyle won, it would not surprise me, but it would seem strange to do all that work on the Conglomeration music and video package only to take out one of their core members a month or so later.
What I am sure of is that Mercedes is not winning the world title at Full Gear. She has touched that belt one too many times in the last couple of weeks to be winning it. I like the idea of not only Kris finally showing her growth after a year of uncertainty, after a weird face turn when she lost to Mercedes twice by beating Mercedes, but the women’s world championship being out of her reach from both Toni and the person who beat Toni. Hangman will have a great match against Samoa Joe in a steel cage match and ultimately defeat him. Will Samoa Joe learn his lesson from it? How violent will it get? Will Hangman delve into the darkness within from a year ago to avenge his family against Swerve Strickland? These are the questions I am asking myself leading up to this match. I imagine either MJF or Swerve will return at this match. I’m leaning more towards MJF, which I am not looking forward to. World’s End has been my last favorite AEW pay-per-view two years running, and MJF beating Hangman at it would really put the nail in the coffin for that show for me. I’m still not sure if that is the direction they’re going, but it is an anxiety I definitely have as someone who is not a fan of Maxwell.
You know what else gives me anxiety, and I am not a fan of, but I am more sure of? FTR beating Brodido for the AEW World Tag Team Championships. Two things can be true. I can say I am enjoying FTR as heels so much more than faces, but I also never wanted them to be tag team champions again. Their heel work with Stokely has been far more entertaining, but them at the top of the tag division fills me with dread after their last tag title run, which was one of the most boring tag title runs in AEW history, and don’t quote that match against Bullet Club Gold to me. I am one of the few who actively dislike that match, so them beating Brodido, who has given that tag belts life again after a terribly boring run on the Hurt Syndicate, is not something I’m looking forward to. Especially if it leads to a returning Christian and Copeland feud, which has those two winning the tag belts off FTR. It would be a nightmare for me personally to have them be tag team champions and MJF Men’s World Champion at the same time again.
The only thing I’d have to comfort me is whatever Elite drama is cooking in Kenny Omega and Jurassic Express versus the Young Bucks and Josh Alexander. After a humiliating summer and fall Don Callis has come calling to help Matt and Nick’s money troubles. All they have to do is join the Don Callis Family and beat their former friends Kenny Omega and Jack Perry with one million dollars on the line. Here’s the thing: the Bucks don’t seem thrilled about joining the DCF, nor do they find Don or Josh particularly entertaining, but with Okada trying to encourage them and Don Callis’s bolstering roster putting them in a situation where they might not have a choice, I am not so sure where this is going. Perhaps the Bucks choose to join but lose the match, but Kenny offers the money back to Don to get them out of the Don Callis Family contract. Maybe the Bucks decided Josh Alexcander and Don Callis have given them a bit too much of what the rest of the roster found annoying about the Bucks in their EVP phase, and just choose Kenny by superkicking their tag partner and walk away. I’m not sure where exactly this is going, but I am here for it.
I pretty much know what my game, book, and wrestling match of the year are as far as number ones, it’s everything else underneath I’m not sure of. I’m working on an article/review for GeeklyInc.com on what I think is my favorite book of the year. The part of the end of the year, even though I only do this for fun, that I have a tough time balancing is finishing the last releases I haven’t finished yet, finding time and space for writing, and getting ready for the Holidays. Hence why I mentioned wanting to make more use of the library in previous volumes.
Books and Video Games – The Lord of the Rings and Metaphor ReFantazio
You might not know this, but the date the Fellowship of the Ring leaves Rivendell on the quest to destroy the ring is December 25th. Therefore, I tend to associate at least the first book of The Lord of the Rings with the beginning of November to the end of December season. It has been a while since I’ve read through this book, probably since 2017-2018. It’s one of the few books I insist on reading a physical copy despite owning it digitally in multiple places. I’ve read it all the way through six times, so I wonder if this time away, I’ll observe something new from it. I will say, to anyone reading it for the first time I think you can skip the Concerning Hobbits prologue chapter until at least finishing The Fellowship of the Ring. As much as I love it, it does feel like it slows down the pace immediately.
On my mind is the connection between finishing Blood for the Undying Throne, rereading The Lord of the Rings, and replaying Metaphor ReFantazio in the form of a quote from Tolkien’s book itself, “The hands of the king are the hands of the healer.” In College, with my thesis advisor, we’d discuss the connection between William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and how the kings, such as Macbeth, The Witch-King of Angmar, and Aragorn, affect the land positively and negatively. This obviously has biblical roots, which I am no expert on, so I won’t delve into it, nor the real political implications that monarchies believing themselves to be divine have had on our history. This is more the exploitation of the idea of the king in terms of mythology and fantasy. Major Metaphor ReFantazio endgame spoilers ahead.
In Metaphor, the king dies, and a contest is held to determine who will be the next king. In the game, there is a connection between the king, magic, anxiety, and the “humans,” who are abominations in the game based on artwork by Hieronymus Bosch. The magic that Euchornia has turned into an industry, called magla, turns out, towards the end of the game is revealed to be the physical manifestation of anxiety. If a person succumbs to their own anxiety, magla can actually turn them into a human. Louis, the main antagonist, wants to do this to everyone, and whoever can survive, aka overcome their anxieties, will be part of the new world with him as king. The protagonist you play ends up being the other character vying for the throne to improve the inequality in Euchronia. It’s all a cycle; you and the main character are trying to break it as there are multiple tribes of humanoids, and they don’t all get along. The game surmises the prejudice the different tribes feel towards each other is rooted in anxiety, thus creating more magla, thus creating more opportunity for people to turn into humans.
The death of the previous king and the absence of a replacement will lead to increased anxiety and tension between the tribes, thereby increasing the likelihood that people will succumb to their anxiety and transform into a human. Therefore, the protagonist becoming king will heal the land by healing the people’s anxieties. If the main character makes the serious changes in society the party and he intends to throughout the game as they meet more people and make more connections, this will ease the anxiety of the people. The connection between you and the protagonist is through the royal magic the previous king had cast, which is revealed at the end of the game, connecting you to the protagonist to guide them. Therefore, it is you, the player, who is also the king with the hands of a healer who heals the land by easing the anxiety of its people, including the main character you play and his party. This and many other reasons are why Metaphor ReFantazio was my game of 2024.
Wrestling – Blood and Guts 2025
Straight off the bat, while Blood and Guts is my preferred War Games style match, it has never been my favorite match stipulation. The need to do it every year doesn’t help at all, either, though I know it tends to be a ticket mover. With two different Blood and Guts this year, a Men’s and Women’s, they were always going to be compared, and while the Men’s Blood and Guts was good, the Women’s blew it out of the water.
It comes down to urgency and hatred. The participants in the Women’s B&G showed they had an urgent desire to get their hands on each other with real hatred. The build to this Blood and Guts was odd, but it had the roots of several feuds, giving it heightened tension. Like a spider-web, there is a line of connection each team member had with the other team throughout the year, and continuing past Blood and Guts into the Women’s World Tag Team Championship Tournament. I think AEW did its due diligence towards the event with matches between the two sides, but it definitely needed some more time and promos. Can Jamie trust Toni Storm, given their history? Have Willow and Kris buried the hatchet with the help of Harley Cameron? How did they talk Mercedes into joining the team? Questions that should have been asked and answered but it did not affect the quality of the match.
It had proper violence between Kris and Mercedes. It shortly ended at Willow and Kris communicating before the heels ruined it. Harley Cameron got to display both her silliness with the Mercedes puppet and equal violence in the match. Marina Shafir, whose wrestling matches I have never been impressed with, absolutely showed out. The key to all this is the speed at which they did this. A lot of these Blood and Guts matches have moments where they stall the action to set up a spot, but this one didn’t feel like that at all to me. The ending I thought was the best heel ending to a Blood and Guts yet, with the heel team forcing a lot of the big guns out of the cage and the Triangle of Madness forcing Toni Storm to surrender to save Mina Shirakawa. This will surely come up again in the tag team tournament.
For the Men’s Blood and Guts, all I have to say is never sleep on Kyle O’Reilly again. I will say, though, I think I loved the Hangman Page vs. Powerhouse Hobbs Fall Count Anywhere match better than either of these two Blood and Guts matches, and am of the belief Hobbs should have been Hangman’s Full Gear opponent instead of Samoa Joe, but I think I’m in the minority on this.
It’s November, and to be honest, I’m terrible at doing end-of-the-year writing, but this year I’m determined to do some posts on here and GeeklyInc.com in the “…of the Year” variety. There are only eight weeks left of the year, but I’m not against talking about the best or favorites of 2025 into the first weeks of 2026. Wrestling is the easiest to talk about because most of my matches of the year have already happened, but with the Continental Classic, one Ring of Honor PPV, and two AEW PPVs I don’t want to write off the potential of those shows. I don’t think anything will top my number one book, game, or wrestling match of the year, but it’s everything underneath that is up for grabs.
Wrestling – Random AEW Musings
I don’t have one particular topic in mind, but I do have some thoughts. Between All Out and now, AEW has been relatively good to very good. I’m enjoying myself even if I have some criticism of the booking here and there. For example, and keep in mind this is someone who relatively enjoys the C-show that is Tony Khan’s Ring of Honor TV, but there is no reason for Yuka Sakazaki to be wrestling on ROH and not be appearing in AEW, especially with her new presentation and music. As a big fan of hers, at first I was just happy to see her back from injury and wrestling regularly, but her team-ups with Alex Windsor have been good enough that I am left scratching my head as to why they’re not on AEW TV or having Yuka in singles matches on Dynamite or Collision. I am hoping they’re just spinning their wheels with them before having them on TV, since Women’s Tag Championships will need contenders.
I miss Will Ospreay and Swerve Strickland, but Bandido has been filling that void they have left for me. It’s between Hangman and him, for me personally, for wrestler of the year, but I must admit I have been watching far less of other companies this year than in previous years. It’s one of my goals for next year to watch more CMLL, Stardom, and TJPW. Perhaps some NJPW as well, but it has not been hitting for me much this year except for Goto’s tite reign and Konosuke Takeshita.
Games – From Xbox 360 to PlayStation 4
If you’ve read enough of these entries and came back with the thought “Josh might have undiagnosed ADHD,” I would probably agree with you because I went from a theme of Xbox 360 games to PlayStation 4 games as I was sucked into God of War (2018) full throttle to the point that I beat every Valkyrie and completed the game. That somehow transitioned to me diving deep into another of my personal PS4 mainstays, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which I played to completion, but I find the having to choose different options in Chapter 9 to unlock different quests to complete every side quest in the game so tedious that I attempted it once, got annoyed, closed the game, and uninstalled. Completing both has left me excited to start God of War: Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on my new, fancy PC, but I might play more Silksong first, as well as replay Metaphor ReFantazio on PC, which I previously played on PS5.
Lastly, I’ve been delving briefly here and there into some DS Pokémon games such as SoulSilver, Platinum, and Black, with the latter being the first time I’ve ever played that generation. I think the release of Z-A and every gaming podcast discussing it to different degrees led me to have Pokémon on my mind.
While I was editing this, and since I’ve been playing Platinum, I was reminded that Piplup might be top five favorite Pokémon ever, and the YouTube algorithm decided to remind me of this.
Books – In Between Books
I am at the moment in between books, having finished both Blood for the Undying Throne by Sung-il, Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan, and a rereading of The Incandescent by Emily Tesh. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what I am going to read next, but I’ve definitely felt the pull of reading this autumn that I did not feel in the summer. It has been a while since I have reread The Lord of the Rings, which used to be an annual event before I started expanding my fantasy library, and there has been this illustrated edition that came out a few years ago that has been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read.
I also have some advanced reader copies for next year that maybe I should get the jump on, but I am unsure and would not be able to talk about them here, making this section very short and boring. We’ll see. The podcast will be reading Network Effect, the fifth Murderbot Diaries book, soon, which is the full-blown novel of the series rather than a novella. It is my favorite book in the series. Murderbot has to go off planet with Dr. Mensah’s teenage daughter, and hijinx ensue that force it to bond with a teenage girl on a deserted space station. It feels like a culmination of the first four novellas and the starting point of the rest of the series.
I want to use my local library, specifically, I want to walk to my local library, which is only about a ten-minute walk away, and write these on my laptop at the library. I had planned to work on it Monday through Friday, but one thing after another kept happening, so I ended up skipping a week. The theme of this one is in the title, as I’m rereading The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, released last April, I’m playing games that I played in the Xbox 360 era on my PC, and in AEW, a lot of the men’s feuds seem to be continuing to mixed results.
Books – The Incandescent Reread and Blood for the Unyding Throne Release
The urge to re-read The Incandescent by Emily Tesh from earlier this year took over me about a week ago, and I just finished it again. That may be my favorite book of the year, even more so than The Devils by Joe Abercrombie, who is one of my favorite authors. I don’t often describe a book as beautiful, but to me, that is a beautiful book. Particularly this time around I find Dr. Walden’s meeting with Nikki Conway just heartbreaking. A teenager, barely an adult, is thinking of turning down a great opportunity to be the support system to her friend, who, like her, has no support system in a world where money can determine everything you have in life. Through this conversation, Dr. Walden has to kind of reassess the privilege she has had, which the character of Laura Kenning pointed out before she lost her job. It’s honestly such a great take on the British magical boarding school; it’s going to end up being one of my favorite books ever.
The terminology of academia may seem like an obstructing wall of jargon—and sometimes, perhaps, it is—but far more often than that, it is a set of keys. You cannot understand the forces you are dealing with, still less wield them meaningfully yourself, unless you have the words to set around them. The language of power is the handle on the knife.
The hardcover for Blood of the Undying Throne came out this Tuesday and I didn’t want to say anything about it when it was on my advance reader copy but the official copy has a quote from my podcast No Page Unturned on the GeeklyInc podcast network. If you don’t know, often praise for the previous book of a series will be quoted on the next one from various sources who talk about it. I didn’t know this was happening and was quite shocked in a good way to see this. It means a lot.
Games – Xbox 360 Games Come Back Around and God of War (2018)
It seems, without realizing it, I’ve wandered back to my Xbox 360 era with the games I’m playing recently. I already mentioned Mass Effect: Legendary Edition in the last volume. Still, I’ve been crafting a private list on my Backlogged of my personal best 100 games of all time, and I came about to a discussion with my friend Hiro about how Batman: Arkham Asylum is essentially a Metroidvania. So that discussion has me playing it, to see where in 2025 it falls on my list, and it holds up amazingly well, especially the combat system, considering how many games have taken it and evolved it since then. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on my Steam Deck, but its sequel, Arkham City, does, so I’m also playing that on there bit by bit when I am lounging on the couch, taking a break from reading, or lying in bed in the morning. It’s also October, so I installed the Dead Space remake from last year onto my desktop. That’s another Xbox 360 era game I played a lot. Now that I think about it, weirdly, the last year has been filled with throwbacks to the 360 days.
Almost a year ago the first Red Dead Redemption came out on PC.
Sega put out that remake/remaster of Sonic Generations that added Shadow content.
Valve updated Half-Life 2 last November for the 20th Anniversary and put it out for free.
Dead Rising came out with that Deluxe Remaster last September.
Castle Crashers put out new DLC and updated all the art for that game.
Oblivion received a remaster earlier this year.
Gears of War Reloaded was released for the Playstation and PC.
A new version of Ninja Gaiden II was released called Ninja Gaiden II Black
All of this brings me to say, where the fuck is a new Peggle?! Also Capcom, make vanilla Street Fighter 4 on Steam playable again, thanks. Back to the subject of my 100 greatest games list, I don’t know where they fell on the list, but Batman: Arkham Asylum and God of War (2018) were, I believe, close together, so somehow playing Arkham Asylum led me to installing God of War and sinking my teeth into it once again, and deep.
Oh, wait, I remember now. I was listening to a gaming podcast where one cast membner said they haven’t replayed the new God of War games because they’re only fun when Kratos is fully kitted out, which I fundamentally disagree with. After playing twenty-two hours of the PC version, I vehemently disagree with this. It’s still amazing how good that axe feels in it, when you swing, when you throw, when you bring it back to your hand. The incredible feeling of it never goes away, even after seven years, three if you’re talking Ragnarok. When our family received money for our possessions in our house that were lost in the fire in 2017, I, on a whim, bought a PlayStation 4 Pro and God of War (2018). In a weird way, those two purchases for a time represented all the systems and games I lost in the fire, which was not a small amount, going back to my childhood.
Wrestling – AEW Forbidden Door to Full Gear.
AEW Wrestledream was great, but I think I missed my moment, personally, to write about it when I skipped writing about it last week. The only comment I will make is that I didn’t love the main event so much that Samoa Joe versus Hangman Page shouldn’t have been a main event, but I also am not Darby’s biggest fan. I’m sure what is coming out of it will be great, but I’m going to be perfectly honest, Samoa Joe v. Hangman and Darby Allin v. Jon Moxley really didn’t need to continue.
I said the other day I kind of miss when AEW only had four pay-per-views, and that’s not completely true. The truth is, the spacing for Forbidden Door to All Out (or vice versa with All In mixed in) to WrestleDream to Full Gear to World’s End is kind of a mess as there are so few weeks in between those to build feuds. It doesn’t help that sometimes a Dynamite after a PPV can be the real end of the feud, with Dynamite acting as a sort of fallout for the final match of the feud on PPV. Neither do the specials like Blood & Guts, Ring of Honor PPVs, Grand Slam, Anniversary episodes thrown in the bunch there. It’s all kinda messy. I say this, when in fact I’m not unhappy, really, with AEW at all right now, but it does feel like the late summer to fall to winter lineup needs some sprucing up especially when you compare it to Revolution to All In.
Personally, I think World’s End is a cursed pay-per-view. The first one was not only boring but represented a lot of what was wrong with MJF’s first title reign and his vision for AEW. The second one, even with the Continental Classic finals, was tarnished by Jon Moxley’s terrible idea for a four-way with AEW top guys at the time, where the Death Riders just made them look like idiots, and then Adam Copeland returned to make them look even more like idiots. Throw it in the bin, put WrestleDream in that spot on the calendar, have the C2 finals there, and move Full Gear up by maybe a week or two to give space between it and WrestleDream. You can have whatever special TV episodes you want, like Blood & Guts, Grand Slam in NY, etc, between All Out and Full Gear when WrestleDream would originally take place. Forbidden Door would maybe benefit and be seen as more special if it were biennial. That’s one solution to the too-tight schedule that is AEW’s late August to December, but I’m sure Tony could come up with a different or better plan if he tried, perhaps.
In this week’s volume, I talk about Orange Cassidy becoming AEW Men’s World Champion one day, share my progress and a review of Blood for the Undying Throne, and talk about Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Team Cherry’s Samus Aran, and the worst order to play the Yakuza / Like a Dragon games.
Wrestling – Orange Cassidy as AEW World Champion: Important to AEW’s legacy
In the main event of AEW All Out 2023 Orange Cassidy defended the AEW International Championship against Jon Moxley and lost after 326 days, in one of the best matches in AEW history. I already believed he could be before this, but in this reign, Orange proved himself as a main eventer, a regular TV wrestler, a member of your roster you can count on, and get behind. Since he lost the International Championship the first time, his booking has been kind of stop-and-go due to injuries and, to be honest, not capitalizing on the hype of this run. After the match with Moxley, though, Orange stood in the ring with Best Friend members Chuck Taylor, Trent Beretta, and Kris Statlander as the crowd gave him a standing ovation and thanked Orange for this incredible run. The Best Friends are no longer together as a faction, but this photo of them at the end of All Out will live on forever.
Someone posted this photo in a Best Friends channel in a Discord I’m in, and said, “Honestly, this reunion will be so sweet though when OC wins the Men’s World Championship. That had me really thinking about it. AEW has a lot of amazing talent that would make great world champions, but I’ve never been of the belief that every one of them needs to be a world champion, except Orange. There is a list of people who will definitely be the men’s world champion or repeat champion. A lot of them are inevitable.
These three will be the men’s world champion multiple times.
I think Orange needs to be the men’s world champion sooner rather than later. It feels important to All Elite Wrestling‘s legacy to say yes, the man who weighs whatever from whenever should be the guy, no matter how long a reign he has. By mainstream wrestling standards, before AEW was founded, Orange as a top guy would be unconventional, but with his International Championship run, he proved he could be that guy who carried the company on his back to everyone that mattered, and even some who disagreed. Orange Cassidy is a foundational piece of All Elite Wrestling, and to have him in the lineage of one of your top titles is, in my opinion, essential.
Books – The Blood for the Undying Throne Review from Christina
I’m still working my way through The Blood for the Undying Throne by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur. I haven’t made much progress, but it is the main book I’m reading this week, and by the time next week’s edition of BGW comes out, I will likely have finished the book. In the meantime, you should read my podcast co-host Christina’s review of the book. I haven’t read it yet, just in case of spoilers, but Christina’s reviews on GeeklyInc are always smart, thoughtful, and entertaining. She edited my reviews for a long time, and when we were done they were always better than my earlier drafts.
Games – Paragon Path, Hollow Knight 3, and the Worst Like A Dragon Order.
A friend got me talking about Mass Effect because he started playing the Legacy Edition, and somehow I’ve been sucked into playing it again, and rather than continuing where I left off in Mass Effect 2 from 2021, I started a brand-new Shepard in Mass Effect 1, and I am already into the same Shepard in Mass Effect 2.
Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 2, Street Fighter 4, those were my all-timer Xbox 360 games for a long time. Back then, I thought Mass Effect 2 was a perfect sequel, adding new elements that improved the game and taking away a lot of unnecessary elements from the first. Now, maybe it’s because I’ve played so much more RPGs since the early 2010s, I see it a little differently. I wish some of those elements weren’t so stripped away, the different weapon attachments that change your ammo type, the different armors, and weapons. I miss all of them now in Mass Effect 2. The way they do powers in the second game, either the biotics or the tech powers, is much improved.
Back then, there was this code at the bottom of the 1st game for your custom Shepard that I wrote down because I didn’t quite like how my Shepard looked in Mass Effect 2 when I transported it over, so I kept a .txt file that I used to do this. I still have that .txt, so the Shepard I had back then is the Shepard I’m using now, over fifteen years later. That’s kind of amazing to me.
I’ve never played Mass Effect 3 since I finished it for the first time the year it came out. To be honest, I don’t remember how I feel about the ending, but I do know that I played through Mass Effect 2 all the way through at least 7 or 8 times before ME3 came out, and after finishing the third game, I never played any of them again. I don’t think I was angry or disappointed by the ending. I just kind of felt empty about it. I remember thinking the father telling the story of “the Shepard” to his son, which meant to show how the story of Commander Shepard became a timeline myth, was just corny and poorly done. My point is, I think this time I will play Mass Effect 3 again, this time with all the DLC I missed the first time, and see how I feel about it. I’m sure I’ll write about it.
I was thinking about this. A lot of people have been making fan art of what could be the next Hollow Knight protagonist, and it had me thinking if there was another Hollow Knight game, Team Cherry should just make Hornet their Samus Aran. Hollow Knight as a series doesn’t need a new main character; they’ve already got the best one. In Silksong, Hornet felt like both an established character and developed throughout that game at the same time. In fact, she reminds me a lot of Samus. Hornet speaks with a dignified air of someone who is long-lived and is compassionate to those in Pharloom who deserve it, and shows her prideful warrior side to those who deserve that. So, like Samus visiting new planets, Hornet can go to new kingdoms, gain new powers, and continue on in as many Hollow Knight games as they like to make.
One of my favorite gaming podcasts, Into the Aether did a special episode all about Yakuza 0. One of the co-hosts Brendon Bigley has said and maintains on this podcast that the best order for three of the Like a Dragon games that star Kiryu is Yakuza Kiwami 1 to Yakuza 0 to Yakuza Kiwami 2, and I agree! Kiwami 1 is much more of a breezy introduction to the series than 0 which is a fine introduction to Kiryu and the world of Like a Dragon doesn’t exemplify exactly what you’ll be getting out of most of the Kiryu games or what Kiryu is like as a character. 0 is amazing, but Kiwami 1 is a better introduction.
Do you know what order you shouldn’t play these games in? The order that I played in them, which was pure chaos. Here is the order in which I played the games. In 2018, I played Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6, you know, the prequel game and what was going to be the finale of Kiryu’s story. To this day, I don’t know why I did this. I think I might have picked two I had the money for at the time during a sale, and was like Oh, surely these two will be a good introduction to the series. What was I thinking? You might say, Josh, you knew about Yakuza: Like a Dragon coming out in 2020 with a new protagonist? No, I did not, but that was the game I played next. Then, when they announced Infinite Wealth would have both Kiryu and Ichiban as dual protagonists, I played Yakuza Kiwami 1 and The Man Who Erased His Name. Infinite Wealth basically took up the last quarter of 2024 because it is that damn good. This year, I played Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, followed by Yakuza Kiwami 2. So here is my Like a Dragon order in all its chaos
Yakuza 6
Yakuza 0
Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Yakuza 7)
Yakuza Kiwami 1
Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
Yakuza Kiwami 2
A list of pure chaos, but I had fun nonetheless. The thing about Like a Dragon is, whether you know the story or not, you just have to buy in, and even if you don’t know the details, you’ll get what is at the heart of the stories, no matter which one you start at.
There was a tweet, as much as those have value these days, that has stuck with me from Randy Milholland, who writes and draws the webcomic Something*Positive, that I remember seeing sometime between 2012 and 2015 that said, “It’s not an affront to dislike something. People are allowed to dislike things you love.” Something I like to keep in mind when other people discuss what I love, and something you should keep in mind when reading this.
Books – Samantha Shannon’s The Roots of Chaos
Have you ever been recommended something so much that it acts as a deterrent to you actually trying it? My good friend recommended the first season of True Detective so much in every conversation when we saw each other that it made me want to avoid watching it even more. However, when a bunch of us got together to watch it, it turned out to be pretty good. The Priory of the Orange Tree was one of those books that every list, every algorithm, every book influencer, every bookshop recommended as a must-read fantasy book to the point where I resisted reading it. It helped that the book had an enormous page count, but when my friend Tim, with whom we’d exchange DMs back and forth about the books we were reading, told me he was loving it so far, I finally decided to try it. Turns out this book was recommended for a reason. Despite its length, it felt entirely earned, and while the pacing wasn’t fast, it was steady and never felt like it overstayed its welcome.
My main bookcase is organized unusually. They’re separated by hardcovers and paperbacks, and then organized by favorite series / favorite authors, in descending order. This is because I got tired of Tolkien being at the bottom of my shelf, where I couldn’t see the books. I bring this up because The Priory of the Orange Tree, after reading it, shot up to the second shelf, that how much I loved it right away. I thought of it because there is a new The Root of Chaos book out, Among the Burning Flowers, that takes place shortly before Priory, which I want to read sooner than later.
So on the podcast,No Page Unturned, our episodes where we cover one book on one episode are called Booklings from the word booking, meaning little books. We’ve been developing a tradition to do a horror book Bookling, and this year we’re doing The Eyes are the Best Part by Monika Kim, about a Korean-American woman in college development into a serial killer. As of writing this, I’m seventy percent through it, but by the time this is published, I’ll probably be finished with it. The main character, Ji-won, deals with divorce, her father disappearing from her life, her mom’s racist boyfriend, a stalker-ish college student who can’t del with rejection, and failing grades. All that plus a lot of eyeballs. I highly recommend it
Games – Trails to the Sky 1st Chapter Remake
When I got my first gaming PC, a game a friend insisted I had to try because he believed it was an action RPG that deserved just as much love as The Legend of Zelda was Ys: The Oath in Felghana. I loved it, but little did I know that so many years later I would find myself playing another series from Nihon Falcom, particularly a remake of a beloved game. I picked up the original version of Trails to the Sky 1st Chapter last year after I got my Steam Deck OLED, having zero idea that there was a remake in the works. All I knew was my friend Ben loved the series, and I wanted to start with the one that was commonly suggested to start with, plus it was on sale during a Steam sale for a great price.
I got a few hours into the original game throughout the year, but it wasn’t until late August that I found out there was a remake coming out. That is the version I’ve been playing the most and plan to complete. Eventually, I’ll go back to the original, but I think I’ll play that in bed on my Steam Deck here and there.
Now, I know very little about the Trails series in general, except that I’ve heard of the main characters Estelle, sometimes referred to as Bestelle, and Joshua, which, well, is my name also. I have seen some call Estelle annoying, but that is far from how I feel about her. She’s brash, naive, reckless, headstrong, hyperactive, blunt, and maybe lacks some tact, and quite frankly, I love her and she’s the best. In a way, she kind of reminds me of Naruto, as they both learn better in the field than by studying, and will jump headfirst into danger to help someone else. Both characters are also called annoying.
You know who Joshua reminds me of, then? That’s right, Sasuke, and quite frankly, like Sasuke, Joshua is the one I find fucking annoying. Constantly acting like a know-it-all, correcting everything Estelle does, undercutting her actions, no matter the decision she makes. Unlike Sasuke, Joshua can recognize all of Estelle’s good traits, but man, is this character constantly getting on my nerves. From what I can tell, not a lot of people see him that way. It’s not taking me out of the game, no, this is more like the good kind of annoying, as in I’m interested to see how this character grows, changes, and possibly change my mind. I just hope it’s not with a oh, poor me backstory because that isn’t going to cut it.
Wrestling – AEW WrestleDream Card
WrestleDream is turning out to have a real stellar card so far. They’ve added AEW World Tag Team Champions Brodido (Bandido and Brody King) versus Kazuchika Okada and Konosuke Takeshita this week. I’m actually pretty excited for how the future feud between Takeshita and Okada develops from this match. I imagine things will break down, and they’ll lose, causing a rift between them. Ever since Okada joined the Don Callis Family, I’ve been highly anticipating a face turn from Takeshita. If we can get Kenny and Hangman in the mix, I’m all for it, too. A scenario that involves Hangman Page vs Takeshita for the AEW World Title right before Takeshita fully turns would be an ideal situation for me.
It’s not an affront to dislike something. People are allowed to dislike things you love.
FourofFiveWits 