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

2025 was a real storm of a year, for both the game industry at large and myself, personally. Partly thanks to those changes, much of my playtime ended up with games released well outside the 2025 window. Besides that, my free time was often spent reaching for the comfort of the familiar, whether that took the form of an older game I was already playing, or a game deliberately designed to evoke happy memories. In some ways it was actually for the best that I was too ill to join the full RPG Site game of the year deliberations, considering how little time I was able to make for many of the front-running entries.

Nevertheless, I was able to carve out *some* space for some good games launched in 2025, and I'd like to use this little listicle to highlight my favorites.

The Honorable Mentions

This sub-list is where I want to shout out the games I really liked but didn't get enough time with, or otherwise deserved recognition despite not quite making it into my most favorite titles of the year.

• Umamusume: Pretty Derby - If you're the kind of dweeb I am, with little time to spare for games about actual sports, Umamusume's diabolical blending of cute anime girls with no less than horse racing brings the joy and pain of sports-watching to the dweeb-like-me audience. There's something real and true about the exhilaration of watching the horsegirl you trained for the last hour or so take first place at the Arima Kinen despite struggling with training failures and debilitatingly slow metabolism. 
• Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog - The PC-98 was before my time when it comes to gaming, but even without that background (besides a few Windows ports of PC-98-era adult games), one can see the sheer love that went into The Gun-Dog's presentation. The story itself also feels somewhat vintage in the best way, tapping into that vein of military anime-inflected sci-fi that feels underutilized in contemporary games and anime series. I'm excited to see where Space Colony Studios sets its next set of Stories from Sol.
• Skin Deep - The last few years have seen an excellent run of killer immersive sims emerge from the indie space, but for my money nothing hit quite like Skin Deep, which combines a nonlinear focus on being Die Hard or McGuyver in Space with developer Blendo Games' goofy sense of humor and unique aesthetic. Nina Passedena should be an all-time game protagonist.

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

With last year's picks I tried adhering to RPG Site's own deliberation rules about excluding remasters and certain remakes from the main list, but this year's crop of reissued classics were just too good to pass up for recognition, in addition to my whole spiel earlier about reaching for the comforts of the familiar. Suikoden I&II HD Remaster Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars in particular were long overdue for a contemporary makeover, even if Konami kept its remastering touch light, restricted to convenience features, bug fixes - finally, Earth magic that works - , a background art touch-up and a properly polished English localization.

Nevertheless, the HD remaster revived the appeal of Suikoden for players on contemporary platforms, and hopefully signaled the eventuality of future Suikoden remasters (assuming Konami's not putting 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 would wager that Final Fantasy Tactics is my most formative console RPG experience, even if, in truth, I only truly appreciated what was great about the game when I revisited it later in life, at an age where my brain cell (singular) was capable of processing its intricacies.

That game returns in fine form in Square Enix's enhanced remaster, which, in exchange for sacrificing some of my beloved Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions content, brings the game to modern platforms with a convenient new UI and a few welcome speed-boosting features. While my heart of hearts still struggles to call it the "definitive" edition of Final Fantasy Tactics without my beloved Dark Knight job, it's an easy one to love and recommend all the same.

8) Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road

Occasionally we at RPG Site joke about the "super game." Technically this is a reference to Sega's codename for the still-gestating project that will allegedly involve the entire gaming ecosystem, but in my mind you can still use the term "super game" to refer to something like Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, Level-5's incredibly dense, maximalist anime football RPG opus. To add to what Josh pointed out in his feature on the game, Victory Road truly conjures up a world where football is the most important thing in the universe and treats it accordingly, with all the dramatics as appropriate. That it's also a damned decent RPG with seemingly every possible concept one might cover of the course of a typical sports anime series is just icing on the cake. Like Umamusume earlier in the list, Inazuma Eleven's pure, heartfelt appreciation for its sporty inspiration breaks past personal and cultural barriers, making for an infectious, easy-to-recommend game for folks regardless of their affinity towards the core subject matter.

7) Dispatch

I've missed games like this, I have to say. I was a big fan of Telltale Games back in the day, and since its implosion a few years ago, I worried that that style of cinematic storytelling had fully fallen out of favor. Luckily, we've seen the efforts of ex-Telltale staff landing at other studios and starting their own efforts bear fruit in the last couple of years, with Dispatch's inventive adaptation of superhero antics into a workplace drama perhaps being one of the best executions on the classic formula to date. It's also well-elevated by a cinematic quality that wasn't always evident in Telltale-era games of the same type, making eat just as easy to treat like a high-quality animated series watched passively as a storytelling-focused game with an emphasis on "They'll remember that"-style choice-choosing.

6) Avowed

Every game I've played in Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity setting has been something of a breath of fresh air. The first heralded the return of classic-style Infinity Engine RPG play, while the underappreciated second game, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, translated that over to a new part of the world (with ships, to boot). Avowed repeats the feat by changing the format to first-person, leveraging some of the lessons of The Outer Worlds along the way. The result is a fun romp through some of the coolest fantasy environments I've seen this year, a well-sized adventure with a cast of likeable buddies and perhaps one of my favorite takes on first-person melee combat ever. Avowed might not be the breakout innovative success of 2025, but hit all its marks with aplomb.

5) Ghost of Yotei

Once again in keeping with the appeal of things I more or less knew the shape of going in, Ghost of Yotei was in many ways (both positive and negative) a second crack from Sucker Punch at Ghost of Tsushima, this time with even more slightly eyebrow-raising homage to popular samurai films and that gorgeous fantasy-tinged approach to rendering a playground version of Japan's frontierland of Ezo (now Hokkaido). Excellent performances by the cast elevated an otherwise rote riff on grief and vengeance (those jokes about many of the big Sony-published games being about these themes are only half-joking), but none of that distracted from being able to speed around a gorgeous vision of Japan and chop up baddies endlessly, occasionally stopping to play some shamisen or bond with a cool wolf buddy.

4) Assassin's Creed Shadows

If Ghost of Yotei and its predecessor present a Japan that seems so disconnected from reality that it might as well be fantasy, Assassin's Creed Shadows seemed more capable of making that historical connection, despite being more overtly stylized and open about its cinematic references in its bearing and plotting. Its rendering of Japan's nighttime forests, environments, and seasonal changes feel spectacularly vibrant in a way that's tough to match at any other scale, and its changes to the underlying systems of modern Assassin's Creed also make it the easiest of the post-Origins series to approach. 

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

Say what you will about Square Enix's HD-2D Remake trend, but I credit it with finally helping me fill a long-held RPG blind spot by introducing me to my first Dragon Quest games. Artdink managed the seemingly monumental task of translating one of the most iconic games ever made to a format more suited to contemporary tastes and preserved their charm for more to enjoy - at least, that's how I imagine it went. I can't help but acknowledge some of the distance between these remake projects and their much different original versions, but I'll also admit that framing the Erdrick trilogy this way made it a lot easier to grasp what people remember so fondly about those games. Even now I can hear the main theme in my head!

2) Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

Occasionally you'll think that "they don't make games like this anymore" about something you've played, but that's not really true. Oftentimes tastes simply shift and whatever game will fall out of favor in the market or be subsumed by other genres, to reemerge later.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-, though, feels like a truly singular work, a mammoth hybrid visual novel/tactical game with dozens of hours of stories and routes and wildly variable quality stretched over its lengthy runtime. A "super game" of the adventure genre and a true proof of "Too Kyo" games' chosen studio name. It may be far from the first long VN to exist, but for my money it's one of the most ambitious of the last few years.

1) Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

There's no doubting that on a bunch of levels Death Stranding 2 is a lesser game than the original, if only for sheer novelty. The first game felt like the kind of title that doesn't need a sequel, and if it had pulled a NieR:Automata-style "delete your save" gimmick at the end, I wouldn't think twice about letting it go and having it exist as a single title in time, letting Kojima Productions and Hideo Kojima move on.

And yet I'm glad that this sequel did get made, allowing Kojima to indulge his fancy, scan his celebrity friends, exercise his clout as a tastemaker, introduce me to new songs and bands, and generally make the kind of art that almost no one else gets the leeway to make at the same scale.