Movies mostly lived up to the hype for me in 2025 and so, as is often the case, this year’s list is another all-in videogame beat-down. Um, yay?
As per usual, this list is a very personal vent session for all the petty things that let me down about entertainment media over the course of a year. More “serious” stuff rarely makes it on; it’s just a chance to shake the bad vibes off before getting into the accolades.
Let’s kick off another year, then.
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VR BEST OF 2025 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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5. The Sega Hangover
This industry has a regular, almost hum-drum habit of backing up failures with successes, and successes with failures. Though even the hardest-headed of haters would struggle to call 2025 an absolute catastrophe for Sega, hence the #5 placement, the sheer magic of its unprecedented 2024 run (which prompted an entire article by yours truly) makes this past year look like a bit of a rough one by comparison. It started well enough, with left-field Yakuza spin-off Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii scoring good reviews, but even that win came hot off the heels of the announcement that European sales juggernaut Football Manager 25 had been fully cancelled – a stunning slice of mismanagement that put the long-running franchise in an entirely new position. Then months later came the Nintendo Switch 2 reveal, and things really went south.
Sega was the only major company not to offer an upgrade path of any kind for its full-price launch-window titles, most glaringly the anaemic barely-impoved Puyo-Puyo Tetris 2S and Sonic X Shadow Generations – which was barely six months old as a Switch 1 game at the time of announcement. Fast-forward a financial quarter and the Switch 2 port of Persona 3 Reload – easily Atlus’ highest-profile 2025 release after Raidou Remastered largely slipped under the radar – ran with uncomfortably janky frame-pacing and missing visual features at full price, no Episode Aigis expansion included. It felt like a tone-deaf old-school Atlus move over 18 months after the first fan outcry on the issue, with no double-barrelled Game Pass inclusion to soften the blow this time.
Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, Sonic Racing CrossWorlds (plus apologetic late-arriving Switch 2 upgrade pack), and the very on-time Football Manager 26 all arrived late in the year to restore some goodwill and critical praise to the Sega stable, but the bigwigs would probably still love to put this year behind them.
4. A Brand New Batch of Botches
Since this list shrunk from a Top 10 a few years back, it’s become a tradition of sorts to collect all of the year’s videogame launches that upset me into one entry. I’d rather not have to do this, but this year you all get two separate entries with this theme! First up, three games that have almost nothing in common: Freedom Wars, Rematch, and Rugby League 26.
The former, a cult-classic PS Vita title that is now one of several former Sony Japan Studio creations up for re-release under Bandai Namco, became my first-ever Steam refund when it crashed repeatedly on me when it wasn’t running astonishingly poorly. Rematch, one of my favourite games of 2025 despite everything, released an 80mb hotfix patch on the first night of its release that completely broke almost every part of online multiplayer and scattered many of the players who might have saved it through word of mouth – but alas, now the game consists mostly of endless matchmaking screens. Rugby League 26 probably deserves its own list entry the most, but for international readers the quickest way to summarise that mess is that the game was the first new playable form of one of Australia’s premier sports in eight years, yet launched with almost identical gameplay to the last one – when it actually played without an armada of glitches and crashes.
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