Best of 2025: Top 10 Movie Characters

2025 was a pretty rich year for quality films, although this time around my draft document for potentially memorable movie characters looked a tad smaller than normal. These ten plus the honourable mentions represent almost the entire shortlist, which means I jotted down a potential candidate at a rate just under once every two 2025 films I saw. I suppose this year featured a bunch of direct sequels with largely unchanged ensembles (MI: The Final Reckoning, Wicked: For Good, The Accountant 2), films where a memorable cast wasn’t really the point (The Naked Gun, Wolf Man, F1), and films where no one character stood out because everyone was so well-realised (Sinners, Fantastic 4: First Steps, the How to Train Your Dragon remake).

Also, unusually for a character list, roughly half the entries are either hiding some major secret, are absent from their films’ trailers, or both, which necessitates some mild spoiler talk to even discuss why they’re so memorable. The plot gloves aren’t completely off, but veteran moviegoers may pick up on a twist or two by implication, so be warned.

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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. MILD SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW.

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10. Akasa – Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle

As shounen anime arc villains go, Demon Slayer’s Akasa is one of the more memorable ones I’ve seen: even before getting into the significant amount of screen time his chequered backstory receives inside the confines of Demon Slayer‘s long-in-development Infinity Castle movie, his design is just really cool. Within a sea of seemingly insurmountable foes rocking gimmicky weapons and hidden power sets, this dude just beats people with his bare hands; that’s usually the realm of heroic characters. Then there’s the fact that virtually every viewer wanted to see Akasa’s demise after his final-act rudeness at the end of the Mugen Train movie – which, let’s not forget, was at one point the highest-grossing animated film of all time. Did the visually stunning sympathy play work? That’s up to the viewer, but either way the kid makes an impression.

9. Mickey 18 – Mickey 17

This guy does feature in a Mickey 17 trailer, although not the one I saw initially; regardless, the appearance of the 18th edition of corporate clone-fodder Mickey is one of that chaotic plot’s many inciting incidents, and turns the amber light in front of Robert Pattinson’s most outlandish performance tendencies fully green. As the movie gets more complex and unravels a bit as a result, Pattinson remains an unhinged joy to watch, playing a nervous wreck and a daredevil against and alongside himself to riotous results. An unpredictable plot isn’t always the best move when your world-building is thin on the ground, but an unpredictable character in the hands of either Pattinson or writer-director Bong Joon Ho has yet to be anything other than a magnificent spectacle.

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Best of 2025: Top 10 Game Re-Releases & Expansions

Ever since the debut of this list a few years ago, I wonder when the day will come that there won’t be enough content to fill it. But so far, each time a year has started slow for re-releases and/or expansions, it has well and truly recovered. 2025 was no different; in fact in the end I didn’t even have room for the likes of Ninja Gaiden II Black, System Shock 2 25th Anniversary Remaster, Suikoden I & II HD Remaster, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Yooka-Replaylee, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Avatar FoP: From the Ashes, or Lies of P: Overture. In fact, I barely needed to play them.

The rather different nature of this year’s Game of the Year list means this page is where most of the best JRPG-adjacent content of 2025 lives; it’s also where a good chunk of Switch 2 stuff is eligible, as the industry’s slower and slower development cycles begin to clash with Nintendo’s modern commitment to consistent releases. I also thought about easing off on the policing of that Remake-vs-Reimagining line this year, but I don’t think there were any real examples that challenged it anyway.

Parentheses indicate the version of each slice of gaming goodness that I played.

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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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RE-RELEASES

5. Dragon Quest I + II: HD-2D Remake (NS2)

This nice little value package from Square Enix lovingly recreates two pixelated classics in the mould of last year’s Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake – and for virtually the same price as that single game – but I wouldn’t know much about the trailblazing lone-protagonist first entry because, on the recommendation of a few reviews, I’ve exclusively been playing II. And as a complete Dragon Quest scrub for most of my life, I think it might be my favourite of the original trilogy. It’s the only one to feature a full RPG party of pre-formed characters with their own backstories, which have apparently been heavily expanded in the remake, and they all have that warm old-school fantasy charm.

Otherwise, everything that was true about III last year continues to shine: the most colourful iteration of the HD-2D aesthetic to date, plenty of neat quality-of-life tweaks, and a wonderfully orchestrated soundtrack. Only now the Switch 2 (finally) exists, so you can enjoy all those things with the same simplicity yet a crisper resolution on a train ride.

4. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater (PS5)

One of the strangest visual remakes in recent memory, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater applies an absolutely gorgeous coat of graphical paint to an all time classic, replacing every character model and bringing in entirely new lighting systems to frankly stunning results. It also removes the “3” from the original title to better reflect the chronology of the Metal Gear story, but effectively does not touch the original game’s animation framework or voice track (with some tiny exceptions), preserving the exact feel of an all-time videogame classic for better and worse. Modern Konami brass were clearly petrified of overriding Hideo Kojima’s vision in any way save for that iconic title sequence, which results in a very unique product: one that holds up magnificently for the most part. And yet, for some reason (oh hello Unreal Engine 5), the remake’s performance regularly brings even the PS5 Pro to its knees, with judder and frame inconsistency around almost every turn. And that ain’t great.

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Best of 2025: Top 5 Disappointments

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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Best of 2025 Intro

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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The Joy of Games You Can Play “Wrong”

Way back in early 2011, the last big hitter of the DS generation hit store shelves. Pokemon Black / White Version kicked off what I would later recognise as the peak of the series, Generation Five. With zero older Pokemon to find during the main story, 150+ brand-new ones in their place, and months of prior research under my belt scouring grainy message board screenshots for every scrap of news from the Japanese release, I thought I was more than ready to tackle the main story with a predominantly Grass and Bug-type team. I liked a lot of the new Pokemon designs within those types, and I’d been playing Pokemon for over a decade already; I was ready for the challenge. What could go wrong?

Well, some things, as it turns out. Though the first two elegantly tutorial-leaning gyms of Pokemon White were easy enough to overcome with my deliberately tiny party (I was holding space for additions I couldn’t catch yet), the Bug-type master of the third gym halted me dead in my tracks. The already offensively-weak Servine at the head of my team, the frail gift monkey Panpour in the back, and the deliberately buff Patrat I had over-levelled just to annoy my friends in early battles had their attacks laughed off by a Grass/Bug ace ‘mon with defenses higher than anything in the game up to that point. One Fire or Flying type would have made it a breeze, but I persisted with the team I had chosen despite multiple failures and the bubbling anxiety of falling behind my friends’ story progress.

Thanks to a strategy heavily reliant on stat drops and confusion gambles, I eventually made it through. I would go on to relent a bit in my team-building philosophy, balancing types out just a bit more than I had planned, but like any main-series Pokemon game, White didn’t stop me from making bad synergy decisions. And that’s probably why I was just as excited to play through the game as I was Diamond, or Leaf Green, or Ruby, or Silver before it. The main series Pokemon games, well, they let you play them wrong.

Now the title of this rather quickfire post is technically a little disingenuous, as I don’t personally believe it’s even possible to play a videogame “wrong”; speed-running and challenge runs exist after all (as do mods, of course, but that’s a completely different topic), and regardless I believe the vast majority of the time however you enjoy playing a game, that’s the way you should play it. What you definitely can do, however, is play a game inefficiently – and God knows I have spent plenty of time doing that over the years. Some games fight you when you try, but I prefer the ones that give you just enough room to be an idiot.

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25 Linkin Park Songs For 25 Years of Hybrid Theory

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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The Switch 2 Launch Window is Over – Now What?

Or: Not Another Switch 2 Update Post! Yes, I’m Afraid So.

Indeed in this hardware-dominated gaming year January, April, and June each provided relevant, compelling reasons to talk about Nintendo’s newest headline magnet, and at the beginning of this month the Switch 2 officially passed its three-month anniversary on the market. Yes, we’ve already lived through an entire financial quarter with this thing, and more besides. All the games dated in the big April Nintendo Direct have been released, more have been announced and/or given dates, the calendar for the rest of the year is set, and we have a pretty good feel for the current strengths and weaknesses of the console.

I don’t really have much of a personal stake in extolling the pros or eviscerating the cons of the Switch 2 at the moment. As that mammoth June article covered, it’s a rather straightforward upgrade over the Switch 1, and almost all my friends who had the last console already own its successor. I am, however, morbidly curious about tracking the 2’s market presence against that famously back-against-the-wall version of Nintendo that pulled out all the stops way back in 2017, and maybe throwing in an update on some developments that weren’t exactly obvious on release weekend. Time to dive back in, then.

Who Wore It Better?
Switch Launch Year Face-Off

If there’s one thing the first Nintendo Switch was notorious for getting right, it was the pitch-perfect release schedule stretched across its now-legendary first year on the market. So naturally any close follower of the industry would be mighty excited to compare the first year of any would-be successor, as directly as possible. Naturally, he writes, as he squirms uncomfortably in his chair. So uh, yeah, let’s do that.

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The Best & Worst of Pokémon: Generation IX

Games/Expansions
Pokémon Scarlet
Pokémon Violet
The Teal Mask
The Indigo Disk

Platform
Switch

Region
Paldea/Kitakami

New Pokemon
120

+7. The return of landmarks!

We kick off with a bit of a reactionary point as far as the chronology of the Pokemon series is concerned, but one I certainly keep close to my heart. When Pokemon Scarlet and Violet launched at the end of 2022, the series had gone almost a full decade without a game that seemed to care about populating its world with memorable cities and towns worth revisiting: Sun/Moon‘s commitment to a cohesive laid-back vibe significantly hobbled the “memorable” part; and Sword/Shield‘s fear of inconveniencing the player in any way ensured that “revisiting” wasn’t on any line of the game’s design document.

Happily, the ninth generation games ensure that the series’ second allegorical visit to mainland Europe is just as geographically fleshed-out as its first. Meaningfully different stock offerings in shops all across the map, important venues/NPCs with immovable homes, and town positioning along well-travelled paths ensure that despite the games’ fully open-ended structure, plenty of built-up map markers are worth a return or twenty. The distinct art design of each locale certainly helps; from the multi-levelled water features of Cascarrafa and kitsch futurism of Levincia to the bustling markets of Porto Marinada and Iberian tile art that lines Alfornada, the landmarks of the Paldea region tick all the boxes for me. But those are just the populated ones, which brings us to…

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Ten More 2025 Movies Summarised in Ten Words Each

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.”

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Very Quickly Breaking Down an Almost-E3 to Remember

Geoff Keighley, you son of a gun.

The actual 2025 Summer Game Fest show may not have been one for the history books, but something has clearly shifted around the event by now. Despite the largest console launch in gaming history just days earlier, and an ongoing reluctance from the big-boy publishers to allow their messaging to clash with that of their rivals, the light shining from Geoff’s would-be E3 replacement in 2025 was too irresistible to ignore for too many important names, and we ended up with an unusually dense June showcase season.

Because I only just put up a monster post for the Switch 2 launch, this annual show analysis will be much shorter, less formatted, and perhaps slightly more unhinged than usual, but I wasn’t going to miss doing one anyway.

The first of the big names to show themselves in that sweet early-June hype slot was – rather surprisingly – CD Projekt Red, who teamed up with Epic Games to release a mighty impressive State of Unreal demo for The Witcher 4 at this year’s Unreal Fest. The demo was so impressive, in fact, that the comparisons to that infamously overambitious E3 2012 Watch_Dogs trailer immediately came out in force among YouTube commenters. More like Un-Real, am I right?

All that said, despite the old-school E3 stage vibes of the presentation I am slightly more inclined to believe this crazy demo – which is purported to run at 60 frames per second on a base PS5 – is more likely to lead to something comparably playable than that fateful Ubisoft misdirect over a decade ago. Epic has already proven that Unreal Engine 5 can improve its capabilities and efficiency through the games releasing on it, and CD Projekt just proved with Cyberpunk 2077 on the Switch 2 what they are willing to do in the name of optimisation. Cautiously exciting stuff that started the season off with a bang.

“Live service games? What are those?” mused a pensive Playstation as they kicked off one of the best State of Play shows ever with the glorious return of Lumines. The company’s traditional tendency to ignore Summer Game Fest in nonchalant fashion and do their own thing now looks suspiciously like a multi-year plan to circle slowly around the June hype season until they can go before Xbox; I joke, of course, as not much about Playstation’s last five years screams “well-planned”, but if they bring the heat like this again we will be in for some good-old-days June appointment viewing.

The flavour of the 2025 State of Play could hardly be more different from that of last year, as even third-party online multiplayer game mentions were kept to a blatant minimum. The cheeky return of Pragmata set off my Capcom-streak alarm once again – the game is looking fabulously different from anything else in their current catalogue – and closing with an all-new Arc System Works Marvel fighter could not have shouted “hardcore traditional audience” any louder from the proverbial rooftops (announcing a new official Sony fight stick came close though). Elsewhere, the return of Suda51 via Romeo is a Deadman (a title that not-so-subtly pairs with the protagonist of Lollipop Chainsaw) will always be welcome in my house, it’s great to see the ongoing survival of the Bloodstained and Nioh series, support for Astro Bot remains stellar, and Final Fantasy Tactics LIVES! More of this please, Sony.

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