Alternately you can disregard this post and play 18 Wheeler American Pro Trucker on Dreamcast if you haven't yet. And watch Ace wo Nerae and read Wada Shinji's Pygmalio. And play Ogre Battle March of the Black Queen on Super Nintendo. Finish the game once and then check a guide on Gamefaqs and play the game again.
Like, if you're playing some soshage like Genshin or Uma Musume right now but never played Tales of Phantasia or Chrono Cross you gotta stop right now and play these instead. You can play all these games right now with emulation, no need for remasters. If I was in charge, gacha systems would be banned, soshage would be banned for minors, and it'd be forbidden to play them without having played or watched a certain amount of pre-2000 games and anime first. That way you don't easily fall in love with ZZZzzzzz legally-distinct female Vergil from Devil May Cry n°1544150 (I think her name was Miyabi) and don't feel like pulling them.
But I'm not your dad, and even if I was, I can't force you to do anything. Unlike what mainstream media and most politicians want you to think, it's forbidden in my religion to force people to do stuff.
My favorite game of 2025 released in 2025 so far with Trails in the Sky Remake, VVPDOAX, Machine Child, and maybe some other things I forgot. The trailer is a lie though. It's not some frenetic action game.
Really good simple stress relief management game. You could almost say it's a clicker game, but it does have a lot of depth if you wanna get a high score.
Queen Beast (need to be logged in because of the anime + nudity tag I think , but it's not an R18 game) Really awesome visual novel if you like 80s OVAs. And it's free and longer and better than what you'd expect. It has some really scary parts though.
Real time strategy + RPG + visual novel. I barely had the time to play it so far but I like it a lot. It's gonna release on Switch too on Oct 23 2025. If you could collect resources and build buildings yourself like in Age of Empires 2 or Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun or KKND Xtreme, it'd become a game very close to Hundred Swords on Dreamcast. I hope I can replay Hundred Swords one day and actually finish it insha Allah.
Two of Kogado Studio's many masterpiece. These two are in English on Steam for a few years now, but they were Japan exclusives for decades. I wrote a little bit about Tristia here. I played both of these games for the first time in 2025 and they're among my favorites I played this year.
Incredible game. I still hope Tamsoft will remake the other Onee Chanbara games one day, and keep Enami Katsumi chara designs. I guess right now they're working on DLCs for the Bleach game.
That's the most complex raising sim/ management game I aver played and it's extremely hard to keep track of everything. But it's pretty fun. I never finished it yet.
Really fun action RPG with a really good original story. Especially the True Ending. When you finish the game once, if you didn't get the True Ending and can't figure out what to do then look it up. I played this in 2018 or so maybe, I forgot. It takes like 20 hours to clear the main story but there's a lot of fun stuff and bonus dungeons and post-game.
I still didn't get the time to play these myself but I used to follow their news cycle closely pre-release in Japan back when I had a stable news writer position in games media, or I follow the developers, so I'm sure it's good
I still haven't finished this because I suck at reading Japanese (I'm much better at speaking and listening) and it's not voiced. But it's really good I'm sure.
