Branching Path: Dave Francisco’s Top 10 Games of 2025

2025 was an actual storm of a yr, for each the sport trade at giant and myself, personally. Partly because of these modifications, a lot of my playtime ended up with video games launched properly exterior the 2025 window. Besides that, my free time was usually spent reaching for the consolation of the acquainted, whether or not that took the type of an older recreation I used to be already enjoying, or a recreation intentionally designed to evoke comfortable reminiscences. In some methods it was truly for the perfect that I used to be too sick to hitch the complete RPG Site recreation of the yr deliberations, contemplating how little time I used to be in a position to make for most of the front-running entries.

Nevertheless, I used to be in a position to carve out *some* house for some good video games launched in 2025, and I’d like to make use of this little listicle to focus on my favorites.

The Honorable Mentions

This sub-list is the place I wish to shout out the video games I actually appreciated however did not get sufficient time with, or in any other case deserved recognition regardless of not fairly making it into my most favourite titles of the yr.

• Umamusume: Pretty Derby – If you are the type of dweeb I’m, with little time to spare for video games about precise sports activities, Umamusume’s diabolical mixing of cute anime women with a minimum of horse racing brings the enjoyment and ache of sports-watching to the dweeb-like-me viewers. There’s one thing actual and true concerning the exhilaration of watching the horsegirl you educated for the final hour or so take first place on the Arima Kinen regardless of combating coaching failures and debilitatingly gradual metabolism. 
• Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog – The PC-98 was earlier than my time in relation to gaming, however even with out that background (in addition to a couple of Windows ports of PC-98-era grownup video games), one can see the sheer love that went into The Gun-Dog’s presentation. The story itself additionally feels considerably classic in one of the best ways, tapping into that vein of army anime-inflected sci-fi that feels underutilized in up to date video games and anime sequence. I’m excited to see the place Space Colony Studios units its subsequent set of Stories from Sol.
• Skin Deep – The previous couple of years have seen a wonderful run of killer immersive sims emerge from the indie house, however for my cash nothing hit fairly like Skin Deep, which mixes a nonlinear give attention to being Die Hard or McGuyver in Space with developer Blendo Games’ goofy humorousness and distinctive aesthetic. Nina Passedena ought to be an all-time recreation protagonist.

10) Suikoden I & II HD Remaster: Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars

With final yr’s picks I attempted adhering to RPG Site’s personal deliberation guidelines about excluding remasters and sure remakes from the primary listing, however this yr’s crop of reissued classics have been simply too good to move up for recognition, along with my entire spiel earlier about reaching for the comforts of the acquainted. Suikoden I&II HD Remaster Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars particularly have been lengthy overdue for a up to date makeover, even when Konami stored its remastering contact gentle, restricted to comfort options, bug fixes – lastly, Earth magic that works – , a background artwork touch-up and a correctly polished English localization.

Nevertheless, the HD remaster revived the enchantment of Suikoden for gamers on up to date platforms, and hopefully signaled the eventuality of future Suikoden remasters (assuming Konami’s not placing all its eggs into Suikoden Star Leap’s seemingly gacha-shaped basket).

9) Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles

Besides Suikoden 2 and Final Fantasy VI, I might wager that Final Fantasy Tactics is my most formative console RPG expertise, even when, in fact, I solely really appreciated what was nice concerning the recreation once I revisited it later in life, at an age the place my mind cell (singular) was able to processing its intricacies.

That recreation returns in wonderful kind in Square Enix’s enhanced remaster, which, in alternate for sacrificing a few of my beloved Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions content material, brings the sport to fashionable platforms with a handy new UI and some welcome speed-boosting options. While my coronary heart of hearts nonetheless struggles to name it the “definitive” version of Final Fantasy Tactics with out my beloved Dark Knight job, it is a simple one to like and suggest all the identical.

8) Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road

Occasionally we at RPG Site joke concerning the “super game.” Technically it is a reference to Sega’s codename for the still-gestating venture that can allegedly contain your entire gaming ecosystem, however in my thoughts you’ll be able to nonetheless use the time period “super game” to consult with one thing like Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, Level-5’s extremely dense, maximalist anime soccer RPG opus. To add to what Josh identified in his function on the sport, Victory Road really conjures up a world the place soccer is a very powerful factor within the universe and treats it accordingly, with all of the dramatics as acceptable. That it is also a damned respectable RPG with seemingly each potential idea one may cowl of the course of a typical sports activities anime sequence is simply icing on the cake. Like Umamusume earlier within the listing, Inazuma Eleven’s pure, heartfelt appreciation for its sporty inspiration breaks previous private and cultural limitations, making for an infectious, easy-to-recommend recreation for folk no matter their affinity in the direction of the core material.

7) Dispatch

I’ve missed video games like this, I’ve to say. I used to be an enormous fan of Telltale Games again within the day, and since its implosion a couple of years in the past, I nervous that that type of cinematic storytelling had totally fallen out of favor. Luckily, we have seen the efforts of ex-Telltale employees touchdown at different studios and beginning their very own efforts bear fruit within the final couple of years, with Dispatch‘s creative adaptation of superhero antics right into a office drama maybe being among the finest executions on the traditional system up to now. It’s additionally well-elevated by a cinematic high quality that wasn’t all the time evident in Telltale-era video games of the identical sort, making eat simply as straightforward to deal with like a high-quality animated sequence watched passively as a storytelling-focused recreation with an emphasis on “They’ll remember that”-style choice-choosing.

6) Avowed

Every recreation I’ve performed in Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity setting has been one thing of a breath of recent air. The first heralded the return of classic-style Infinity Engine RPG play, whereas the underappreciated second recreation, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, translated that over to a brand new a part of the world (with ships, besides). Avowed repeats the feat by altering the format to first-person, leveraging a number of the classes of The Outer Worlds alongside the best way. The result’s a enjoyable romp by way of a number of the coolest fantasy environments I’ve seen this yr, a well-sized journey with a solid of likeable buddies and maybe certainly one of my favourite takes on first-person melee fight ever. Avowed won’t be the breakout modern success of 2025, however hit all its marks with aplomb.

5) Ghost of Yotei

Once once more in line with the enchantment of issues I kind of knew the form of moving into, Ghost of Yotei was in some ways (each constructive and detrimental) a second crack from Sucker Punch at Ghost of Tsushima, this time with much more barely eyebrow-raising homage to widespread samurai movies and that beautiful fantasy-tinged method to rendering a playground model of Japan’s frontierland of Ezo (now Hokkaido). Excellent performances by the solid elevated an in any other case rote riff on grief and vengeance (these jokes about most of the massive Sony-published video games being about these themes are solely half-joking), however none of that distracted from having the ability to velocity round a beautiful imaginative and prescient of Japan and chop up baddies endlessly, often stopping to play some shamisen or bond with a cool wolf buddy.

4) Assassin’s Creed Shadows

If Ghost of Yotei and its predecessor current a Japan that appears so disconnected from actuality that it’d as properly be fantasy, Assassin’s Creed Shadows appeared extra able to making that historic connection, regardless of being extra overtly stylized and open about its cinematic references in its bearing and plotting. Its rendering of Japan’s nighttime forests, environments, and seasonal modifications really feel spectacularly vibrant in a method that is powerful to match at every other scale, and its modifications to the underlying methods of recent Assassin’s Creed additionally make it the simplest of the post-Origins sequence to method. 

3) Dragon Quest I&II HD-2D Remake

Say what you’ll about Square Enix’s HD-2D Remake development, however I credit score it with lastly serving to me fill a long-held RPG blind spot by introducing me to my first Dragon Quest video games. Artdink managed the seemingly monumental process of translating one of the vital iconic video games ever made to a format extra suited to up to date tastes and preserved their allure for extra to get pleasure from – at the very least, that is how I think about it went. I am unable to assist however acknowledge a number of the distance between these remake initiatives and their a lot completely different unique variations, however I’ll additionally admit that framing the Erdrick trilogy this manner made it rather a lot simpler to know what folks bear in mind so fondly about these video games. Even now I can hear the primary theme in my head!

2) Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

Occasionally you may assume that “they don’t make games like this anymore” about one thing you have performed, however that is probably not true. Oftentimes tastes merely shift and no matter recreation will fall out of favor available in the market or be subsumed by different genres, to reemerge later.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-, although, looks like a really singular work, with dozens of hours of tales and routes and wildly variable high quality stretched over its mammoth runtime. A “super game” of the journey style and a real proof of “Too Kyo” video games’ chosen studio title.

1) Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

There’s no doubting that on a bunch of ranges Death Stranding 2 is a lesser recreation than the unique, if just for sheer novelty. The first recreation felt just like the type of title that does not want a sequel, and if it had pulled a NieR:Automata-style “delete your save” gimmick on the finish, I would not assume twice about letting it go and having it exist as a single title in time, letting Kojima Productions and Hideo Kojima transfer on.

And but I’m glad that this sequel did get made, permitting Kojima to indulge his fancy, scan his celeb associates, train his clout as a tastemaker, introduce me to new songs and bands, and usually make the type of artwork that just about nobody else will get the leeway to make on the identical scale.