Archive for the ‘Lists’ Category

22 Dec

Best of 2025: Top 5 Disappointments

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2025, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

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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21 Dec

Best of 2025 Intro

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2025, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , .

Yet another year is in the books, and while looking back it was as complicated as any other, the entire thing as a whole thankfully did not simply blow by. I got properly into Formula 1 and followed the whole season, moved jobs, made new friends, learned new skills, and finally succeeded in journalling every day for virtually the entire year.

As far as this site is concerned, it was a bit of a banner year. 2025 featured the highest sheer number of Vagrant Rant posts since 2016, when I was still writing regular individual movie reviews. More elusively, for the first time since 2014 – the last time I didn’t have a full-time job – this site had at least one post uploaded every single month! The arrival of a new Nintendo console certainly helped the output, as a lot of people sure were saying a lot of things about the Switch 2, and the ground for discourse was fertile for a good while there before things settled down.

In other relevant arenas, 2025 saw a relatively unassuming little Sony Animation film send a jolt of electricity through the K-Pop industry, and though it skipped the big screen thanks to the partnership of Netflix’s wildest dreams, a fleet of other pretty fantastic blockbusters made IMAX their ideal home in between plenty of anticipated follow-ups from acclaimed directors. There’s an awful lot to talk about, and we get started tomorrow.

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VR BEST OF 2025 DISCLAIMER

These lists represent my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting them as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.

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24 Oct

25 Linkin Park Songs For 25 Years of Hybrid Theory

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2024, K-Pop, Lists, Music. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Here’s something a bit different.

On October 24th, 2000, a quirky rock band from Agoura Hills, California released Hybrid Theory, a “nu-metal” record that blended rap, screaming vocals, hauntingly beautiful harmonies, electronic soundbites, and shredding guitars to shake up multiple pockets of the global music industry at once. Nearly three years later, a very young version of me purchased the band’s follow-up album, Meteora, with his own money, and like many around the world, his life was altered forever.

To celebrate today’s milestone and take a break from writing about videogames for a minute, I thought this would be as good a time as ever to break my nine-year dedicated music article drought and count down my top 25 favourite Linkin Park tracks.

This will of course be a very personal ranking, as music lists often are. However, to ensure the page doesn’t simply resemble a playlist of Hybrid Theory and Meteora on shuffle, I listened back through every album over the last few weeks and tried to balance my thoughts on musical composition and legacy against my own emotional leanings and ingrained memories of time and place. The latter still features prominently, or else the list wouldn’t be worth writing, but every album except One More Light features in some way (I still find that one a difficult listen due to what happened right after its release).

Regardless, the countdown has only one clear rule: Linkin Park, especially in the early years, were famous for remixing and re-releasing songs, so only one version of each track can make the list. Let’s get started.

25. Session

It feels right to kick off the list with something from Meteora, and I also wanted to include at least one of Linkin Park’s customary instrumental tracks. Cure For the Itch may be more iconic, Drawbar more emotional, Wake more thematically impactful, any one of A Thousand Suns‘ many linking interludes more immediately engaging. But Session, well, it’s just cooler than any other LP instrumental. From the moment it turns reverb into a halfway-pleasant sound effect to the percussion rollercoaster atop low synth to the manic scratch climax, Mike Shinoda and Joe Hahn’s indulgent flex straddles Y2K edge and prophetic late-2000s EDM to satisfying effect.

24. My December

I’ve always valued the softer side of Linkin Park’s sound quite highly, and if you ask me the group stumbles just as much when they neglect it as when they shelve the screams and distortion walls. Yet the band is renowned for weaving quieter, heart-bleeding moments between loud bursts of energy; nothing on the first two albums was quite willing to commit 100% to anything even approaching a full ballad. Enter ascended demo / Hybrid Theory bonus track My December, a song that I like precisely because it has always felt more like an experimental proof of concept than a fully-fledged potential B-side. It sure sounds like a Linkin Park track, though: that deliberate beat complete with accompanying whisper-rap, the echoed scratch effects, and the un-garnished, inimitably sad Chester Bennington vocal line. Listen out for that hauntingly restrained bridge.

23. Somewhere I Belong

It definitely feels weird to single out one song in particular for its “nostalgia” value – pretty much this entire project is all about that very emotion – but the opening zipper-tone of this track just hits me on a more fundamental level than any other Linkin Park song. This was, after all, the first of their music videos I saw as a kid, naturally on top-40 countdown staple rage at about 6am one morning in 2003, and so was an absolutely massive factor in my decision to make Meteora the first album I ever bought with my own money. As a song, however, I don’t think the relatively basic composition holds up as one of the band’s very best, so it may not even have made the list if I had discovered the lads any earlier or later. Still, I can’t help but love it, and chances are if you like this one you’ll probably enjoy a whole lot more of the band’s output.

22. The Emptiness Machine

I tried to include more than one song from LP’s latest, um, LP, as I really do like a lot about how they’ve handled the tricky challenges of a post-Chester world. But as much as I enjoy the likes of Casualty, Overflow, and Two Faced, I find myself coming back to the first song of the Emily Armstrong era as its best work thus far. Maybe it’s the impact of that deftly-handled livestream that re-introduced Linkin Park last year with this song; or the way Emily doesn’t even make her presence known on the track until every other classic Linkin Park element has flexed its muscles; maybe it’s the fact there’s just a good, catchy hook at the centre of the song, and it changes up perfectly right before the end. Yeah sure, The Emptiness Machine represents a promising new future for one of my favourite bands of all time, but it’s also just good on its own.

21. No More Sorrow

Minutes to Midnight represented a significant step away from the nu-metal sound of Linkin Park’s first two albums, which needed to happen for the sake of the band’s longevity and artistic growth but proved a source of controversy at the time to say the least. Suddenly the electronic elements were replaced with steel drums, organs and raw piano; the lyrics were less personal and more political; Mike Shinoda was actually singing; Brad Delson was even writing guitar solos! But the largest perceived sleight among the young fanbase was the drastic reduction in loud Chester anthems, and No More Sorrow felt like a built-in apology for that. Hurtling in right on the two-thirds mark within the eclectic album’s tracklist, my fourth-favourite Minutes song never fails to deliver with stadium-tuned panache. The sheer venom in that “thieves / and / hypocrites” line was burned into the neurons of my brain in 2007, and has remained there even since.

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30 Jul

Ten More 2025 Movies Summarised in Ten Words Each

Posted by vagrantesque in Lists, Movies.

Just one month into 2025’s second half and a dense whirlwind of blockbusters has almost completely blown through town; I honestly can’t remember the last time we had this many big-deal action movies packed into one season – and they were all pretty good! Five of these ten event movies cried out for IMAX, and I obliged on four of them without regret. The remainder of the list isn’t quite as universally strong, but you can’t win ’em all.

Maybe it’s related to all the big movie hype, but I feel like I’ve heard a lot more mentions of Letterboxd on my podcast feeds and in person this year; the app has reached a new level of mainstream presence and so it’s probably worth mentioning I’m on there @vagrantesque. I only catalogue and update lists on there, though. Actual movie thoughts still live right here.

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The Accountant 2

“Great when Bernthal and Affleck are bantering, kinda forgettable otherwise.”

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

“After a rickety first act, fires on every possible cylinder.”

SEE MORE

2 May

Ten 2025 Movies Summarised in Ten Words Each

Posted by vagrantesque in Lists, Movies.

This usually-biannual format of lightning-quick movie reviews has been going on for eight years now, but not since the very first one all the way back in 2017 have I been able to say that I saw all ten of the films on the page in actual cinemas. Perhaps due to all the bountiful writing material surrounding Nintendo Switch 2 hysteria, I had the luxury of taking my time to get this first batch out, so I didn’t have to jump on any streaming-only releases just to make March or April. Of course if there was a major streaming release with buzz around it that would have been a different story, but here we are.

We’ve got bountiful action, a couple of thrillers, a notably coherent Marvel comeback push, more than one runtime epic, and even a bit of horror sprinkled into this group of films – and the year is only just getting started!

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Wolf Man

“Creative, tragic, well–directed… then turns into a horror movie.”

The Prosecutor

“Come for the Donny Yen fights, stay for the drama.”

SEE MORE

1 Jan

Best of 2024 Closer

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2024, Lists.

That’s one long year done and dusted.

Not that this makes for a massive change based on recent history, but 2025 is looking extremely intimidating for entertainment media. Concerning what I don’t tend to cover, I am ludicrously excited for the second season of The Last of Us television show, as I still haven’t had my fill of discussing the narrative choices the game series made in 2020 and can’t wait to see what Craig Mazin and friends do with that source material.

The major hitters in comic book movies return in the new year with a fresh attempt at big-budget Captain America, as well as the century’s third attempts at making both the Fantastic Four and Superman work on the big screen. There’ll be no shortage of blockbuster sequels as the likes of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Predator: Badlands, Zootopia 2, and Wicked: For Good land with hype behind them, but will my favourite films of the year come from unexpected places? I hope so.

As for videogames, the year’s first quarter already looks just as stacked as the last few, with Assassin’s Creed and Monster Hunter towering above a period that also includes Avowed, Split Fiction, yet another new Like a Dragon spin-off, and a trio of JRPG remaster projects that seemed like they’d never happen: Freedom Wars, Suikoden II, and Xenoblade Chronicles X will return!

But let’s be honest: any excitement over 2025 is all about the next Nintendo console for me. Time and health permitting, you’ll have a post all about it right here on this site as soon as that reveal drops, and likely one or two more on the topic before the year is out.

In the meantime, here are the ten countdowns (and 100 list entries) that summed up a memorable 2024 for me:

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Top 5 Disappointments

Top 10 Game Re-Releases and Expansions

Top 10 Movie Characters

Top 15 K-Pop Singles

Top 5 Game Consoles

Top 10 Movie Scenes

Top 10 Gaming Moments

Top 10 K-Pop Albums

Top 15 Games

Top 10 Movies

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31 Dec

Best of 2024: Top 10 Movies

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2024, Lists, Movies. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

Superhero movies are dead; long live superhero movies.

They will be back – and soon – but for this brief moment in history, we had a real spicy year for varied cinema.

For reasons that may have made themselves apparent in yesterday’s list, I didn’t quite have as much 2024 free time to devote to spontaneous cinema adventures as I had in previous years. This meant at several points throughout the year I was more sensitive to early movie reviews than usual, and ended up completely missing the likes of Moana 2, Alien: Romulus, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Joker: Folie à Deux, and all three of the new Sony Spider-Man spin-offs. If a sharply positive or at least mildly interesting review did not come across my feed for a new movie and/or a friend didn’t reach out to see it, more often than not I just moved on.

I still reached bang-on 30 new-release films watched in 2024; these are my ten favourites.

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VR BEST OF 2024 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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10. The Fall Guy

A supremely silly yet triumphant time at the movies, ascended stuntman David Leitch and his team of action veterans bring abundant life to one of the most underrated – and unlucky – films of the year. The Fall Guy features plenty of real-life spectacle with a wink or two at the camera, elevated by a Sydney setting that allows for much more than novelty: all the tourist-y hallmarks of the city, as well as some of its lesser-known quirks, are used to their fullest to stage pretty crazy sequences. But the best thing about this well-made gem is its cast; Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham, and Winston Duke are all fabulous, but every scene shared by Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt is electrifying. Hilarious, adrenaline-charged fun.

9. Deadpool & Wolverine

Speaking of winks at the camera, the single comic book movie to make it on here does so because everything maligned about the recent Marvel Cinematic Universe movies works incredibly well in the context of a seasoned fourth-wall obliterator. It’s kinda hard to stick the well-worn “too many jokes, weird stakes, unimaginative villains” MCU tags on a movie starring Ryan Reynolds’ already-iconic interpretation of Deadpool, especially when Hugh Jackman plays his even more iconic Wolverine mostly straight as a foil. That pitch makes for a solid core, but the inventive – and pretty impressive – action scenes add plenty of gravy, and the myriad extended cameos not only land on multiple meta-levels, but give us some of the most memorably camp MCU performances in years.

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30 Dec

Best of 2024: Top 15 Games

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2024, Games, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

Look, I know I tripped over myself to emphasise repeatedly just how good 2023 was as a videogame release year, and I stand by that; it really was an all-timer. However, while that year had a real “something for everyone” vibe going on amongst its treasure trove of big-budget heavy-hitters with huge review scores, 2024 was arguably just as good if viewed through a narrower genre lens. If you’re a fan of RPGs – especially if you partake in the Japanese variety – the sheer onslaught of quality that hurtled past you this year was every bit as crazy as in 2023; maybe even more so. The more mainstream western genres did show up by the end, thanks largely to a resurgent Microsoft/Ubisoft double act (which was nonetheless blunted by the late delays of Avowed and Assassin’s Creed Shadows respectively) and a very important EA release, but the weebs of the world will likely remember this one for a long, long time.

I must also give a shout-out to the general cadence of the releases this year: I wasn’t truly overwhelmed by the volume of releases on my personal hype list at any point throughout the year, but from mid-January to yesterday, I was always playing something good.

Of the fifteen games that make the 2024 list, only a third were developed by Western studios, and only one of those is American. That latter stat may be an all-time low for this website, but not simply due to the Japanese gaming heartland’s banner year: China and Korea also took larger chunks out of my playtime pie chart than ever before, and I certainly wasn’t alone in that experience. We’ve also got two “reimaginings” on the list – otherwise known as re-releases too ambitious for last week’s countdown – and one of the longest honourable mentions sections ever.

What we don’t have, unfortunately, is Dragon’s Dogma II, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero (a few dragons going about this year), Another Crab’s Treasure, Visions of Mana, Warhammer: Space Marine II, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Lorelai and the Laser Eyes, Tekken 8, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, UFO 50, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble, Star Wars Outlaws, Marvel Rivals, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, The Plucky Squire, Metal Slug Tactics, GranBlue Fantasy: Relink, 1000xRESIST, or Mario & Luigi: Brothership. All of these games were either on my wishlist, briefly owned, or even started by me throughout the year, but fell victim to the relentless passage of time, soft reviews, and/or the always-rolling videogame release calendar, preventing me from reaching the five-hour playtime threshold I use to determine eligible games. There’s also no Palworld or Hades II, because we’re still miles away from a year with a dry enough schedule to convince me to break my personal rule against games with some form of “early access” tag.

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VR BEST OF 2024 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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15. Another Code: Recollection (NS)

Released at precisely the wrong time for a whole community of Nintendo fans reeling from the news there’d be no Switch successor till 2025, Another Code: Recollection was largely dismissed when it squeaked out at the very beginning of 2024. You could argue a slow-paced double-bill adventure game throwback was hardly going to set the charts on fire anyway, but I think it was still rather unlucky, because the striking comic-panel art direction that drives the ground-up reimagining of 2005’s Another Code: Two Memories handily reinvigorates a DS cult classic two decades on, leaving many obtuse quirks behind to ensure the game’s devotion to both atmospheric puzzle-solving and unsettling mystery help it stand out from its fellow Switch exclusives.

The move from snappy stylus controls and once-unprecedented kitchen sink gimmickry to proper third-person 3D exploration and fully-voiced cutscenes means puzzles have been changed and/or completely removed, the time between brain-teasers is noticeably longer, physical layouts have been shaken up, and some of the creepier touches have been sanded down. But the more lively, believable environments in the 2024 release help tie together the game’s overall story in an arguably superior fashion, delivering twists with a pulpy watercolour flair and sticking the landing under a clearly modest budget. As the credits indicate, this is very much a “based on” angle from developer Arc System Works, taking inspiration rather than instruction from the original.

And those drastic changes don’t just serve the first game: the previously Japan/Europe-only Wii release Another Code R not only makes its worldwide debut here, but the story continues unbroken from the Two Memories save file and uses all the same UI elements, producing a near-seamless end result. The second reimagining in the package sacrifices puzzle density for plot even more than its predecessor, but with a cast so large that it feels like Game of Thrones in comparison and some truly heady Black Mirror-esque sci-fi ideas along for the ride, it’s justified in doing so. The fabulously-titled Recollection may be of modest means, but I have never seen anything in the vast realm of videogame revisitations use an approach quite like this, and it deserves a nod at the top of this list.

14. Helldivers II (PS5)

An entire book could be written on the life and times of Helldivers II – and I wouldn’t be shocked if that does actually happen one day – but the occasionally scandalous mismanagement of the game’s trailblazing Steam-on-day-one release strategy, not to mention the odd parasocial relationship built afterwards between players and developers of the game, is not enough to negate the crazy amount of fun I had spreading managed democracy among the fictional planets of Helldivers II in the early part of the year.

Among the legitimately countless tales of failed online multiplayer titles across all of 2024, the fact that one of the only real success stories came from a comparatively small team that made a brutal top-down twin-stick shooter on the PS Vita back in the day just warms my cynical heart. The fact it launched at a significantly lower price point than, I dunno, random example, Concord – with much fewer opportunities for microtransactions to boot – is hilarious. Helldivers II feels magnificent to control, looks far better than its relatively low resolution settings would suggest, and only kicks you down in a way that you quite literally asked for when you knocked that difficulty up a notch.

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29 Dec

Best of 2024: Top 10 K-Pop Albums

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2024, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

This is one of the hardest intro paragraphs to write each year, because it’s the list most intensely personal to my tastes, and yet is often the one that lasts the longest, as it tends to get the most attention late into the following year and beyond. Most years all I can really point out is the pattern of album types making the list each year, so here we go:

Oh my word; the boys sure did come out to play in 2024. Seven of the ten total albums on this sub-divided page (honourable mentions aside) and all five of the full-album entries come from male acts, which I’m pretty sure is unprecedented. In addition, for the first time ever there are no girl groups on either of the two top fives. I don’t know why that is; I wasn’t trying to do that as I worked on the lists. It just so happened that I liked more of the lads’ work throughout the year.

Predominantly English/Japanese albums don’t count for this page, so Rose’s much-hyped rosie won’t be here, but it’s pretty good – and you should also check out Milena’s Foggy if you enjoy relaxed R&B.

1-3 tracks = not eligible

4-7 tracks = mini album

8+ tracks = full album

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VR BEST OF 2024 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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MINI ALBUMS
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5. ACT – Kang Daniel

Kang Daniel’s 2024 EP puts its MV track in the crucial third track slot, which is such a rare move even this far into K-Pop’s globalised album production era that I had to take notice as soon as a mate recommended ACT to me. But it turns out it’s no quirky, showy play: that very song, the catchy bounce and double-keyboard drive of Electric Shock, needs a full track’s worth of distance between itself and opener Losing Myself, which is simply one of the best B-sides of the year and was at risk of overshadowing the lead single. That chorus build-up and the chaotic ensuing breakdown takes over any pair of headphones, threatening to collapse upon itself with a gloriously cacophonous breakdown. The rest of the EP is no slouch: soft harp vibes contrast with crunchy garage beats to beautiful effect in Chung Ha duet Come Back to Me, and closer 9 Lives turns up the bassy synth as Daniel proudly declares he’s “leveling up”. I’ll say.

4. The Winning – IU

Another *ahem* winner of an EP from one of the most reliable artists in the business, IU not only makes The Winning sound effortless, she gives off the unmistakable vibe that she’s enjoying every note. Trademark wispy vocals saunter through Holssi over the kind of offbeat backing not seen since her Chat-shire days, and the way everything harmonises together should not come as a surprise – but it still sounds so fresh. Immediately afterwards comes Shh.., one of the most indulgent songs at its conservative BPM level I have ever heard. Jazzy, sassy and fabulously supported, the track has the gall to end with an acting segment even though the EP is nowhere near over – which still works because Love wins all starts real soft. That’s an IU power ballad, though, so you just know it’ll be swelling with sheer orchestral scale soon enough – and it sure does. If anything, the opening and closing tracks are the most vanilla of the package, but of course they’re still produced and performed to the highest standard.

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28 Dec

Best of 2024: Top 10 Gaming Moments

Posted by vagrantesque in Best of 2024, Lists. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

I sure hope you like JRPGs and visual novels – or at least appreciate their existence – because this list is positively teeming with them. Come to think of it, there’s an overall theme of Japanese theatricality running through a good 70% of this thing, so strap in if that’s your speed. Japanese or not, these specific moments from 2024 videogames stuck out to me for all manner of reasons; a couple for their challenge, a few for their spectacle, a couple for their immediately evident significance within a wider franchise, a sprinkle for their shocking turns, and a handful for sheer novelty.

Just be warned that, naturally, there are some real gnarly spoilers ahead – and some of them come from several dozen hours into pretty long-ass games.

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VR BEST OF 2024 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.

MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW!

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10. The Frozen Ocean – Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

The stunning art direction of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown ensures its world impresses whenever you enter a new area: from cascades of jewel-encrusted sand waterfalls to grimy pitch-dark caverns and towering citadels, the imagination of the team behind the great Rayman Legends clearly had a lot of ideas stewing during their decade-plus away from the relative spotlight. But there is one locale in the game so striking that I actually gasped once I realised what it was attempting to depict.

As our hero Sargon approaches the easternmost edge of the map and looks out to sea, a towering wave comes into focus, and the wide-lens scrolling effect soon reveals that it isn’t moving. Cue a morbidly beautiful sequence made up of traversing airborne ship debris and weaving through static airborne enemies that ends in a thunderous crash as Sargon reanimates everything all at once, bringing a hail of enemy attention down upon him. Art direction meets game design at its finest.

9. Chocobo Gold Cup Finale – Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

If you haven’t played the truly gargantuan Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, it might seem outright odd to see a moment from a sidequest as my singular favourite. Alas, Rebirth’s weaknesses are tied up in its unavoidable middle-chapter identity lacking both the twisty novelty of its predecessor and (hopefully) the emotional release of its successor, while its strengths lie in the kind of properly-integrated open world wonder Square Enix has been trying to recapture since the PS1 days. That extends very much to the sidequests, many of which only unlock in a particular region if you have met and helped the relevant characters in a prior locale.

So long story short, I was rather fond of the underdog-slash-family-trauma Chocobo racing story that spans essentially the length of the entire game if you keep up with it. The unexpectedly heartfelt reappearance of VII Remake’s Chocobo Sam only added to the bittersweet satisfaction of its finale.

But that isn’t what pushes the sidequest over the top for me; no, that’d be the real-time realisation I had on the final lap of the final race that my chosen Chocobo’s unique hovering ability wasn’t just for gliding across rough terrain Mario Kart shortcut-style. With the smarmy shonen-style villain just ahead of me, I decided in the desperation of the moment to try and find out if she could also glide across wide-open pits like the one just before the final turn. To my immediate shock and fist-pumping glee, she absolutely could, and Cloud pulled out in front right at the very end of the race to initiate a shower of confetti and one of the most satisfying renditions of the FF victory fanfare I have ever experienced.

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