It's that time again! Another year has come and gone. Time for me to share all of my favorite video games, movies, TV shows, anime, comics, video essays, and more from 2025 in one giant recommendation list. And also some older stuff I got around to this past year, because keeping up with what's currently in the zeitgeist this week isn't the only thing that matters!

Like in last year's post, we'll begin with my many miscellaneous favorites broken down by category, and then at the end I'll share my very best of the year.

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TV Shows!

Adventure Time: Fionna & Cake (season 2)

Fans seem a bit mixed on this new season, but I liked it. Season 1 had Fionna becoming the hero she was destined to be via a dimension-hopping adventure with Simon, and she still does a bit of that with Huntress Wizard, but season 2 mostly focuses on her relationships back home, and her problems aren't all magically fixed just because she saved the world that one time. She still has to keep living her life past that point, and if anything her hero complex and her newfound ability to compare herself to Finn just make things worse. But just like Finn got through his messy relationship problems in the original show, so can Fionna, in her own way. As always, Adventure Time is a series that defies expectations and takes things in a million odd directions, and I'm just happy to be along for the ride for as long as the creative team wants to keep telling stories in this world.

Also, yes, it's still funny that the TV-14 rating means Adventure Time characters can swear now.

Andor (season 2)

I have to confess: I thought that the final season of Andor was slightly disappointing, which is why it's up here and not in the spot for my favorite show of the year. Gilroy's decision to condense four years of events into one season mostly works, but it inevitably means that I wish we could spend more time with all of these storylines. But more significantly, I think the show's ending is a little too fixated on leading directly into the events of Rogue One and letting that retroactively act as the series finale, rather than truly pulling out all the stops to give this story a conclusion that can more easily stand on its own. While I think Rogue One is pretty good, I don't like it nearly as much as I like this show, so the ending basically being "and here goes Cassian to go do the stuff he did in Rogue One" kinda stings.

But still! This was only a slight disappointment. It's still one of the best shows of the year, a lavishly produced sci-fi political thriller like no other, as well as one of the best things ever done in the Star Wars universe, period. In the end it's for the best that it ended on its own terms but left me wanting more, rather than slowly declining in quality over a longer run or even getting canceled.

The Chair Company (season 1)

Tim Robinson plays a man who has an embarrassing incident where a chair breaks at work and begins to believe it's part of a grand conspiracy when he can't get any sort of customer support. And then following his leads begins to put him in actual trouble. It's occasionally a genuinely thrilling show when it tries to be, but it's largely an excuse for Robinson to cross pass with a bunch of bit characters so hilariously bizarre and surreal that they somehow manage to turn him into the straight man, and the end of the season seems to promise it's only going to get more bizarre from here.

This blend of genres is coincidentally somewhat similar to a show I enjoyed even more this year:

Common Side Effects (season 1)

I was hyped for this purely based on the team making it (sharing many names with Scavengers Reign), and it did NOT disappoint. An animated big pharma conspiracy thriller about a man who discovers a magic cure-all mushroom, with a hint of surrealism and a little weird Adult Swim humor for spice. The charmingly wonky character designs are animated beautifully, and the complex subject matter is approached with a lot of nuance where you get where everyone’s coming from without devolving into centrism. The show gets that there are reasons why the pharmaceutical industry is the way it is… but also, like, it IS still fucked up! They don't deny that! I didn’t expect this to be a multi-season show, but now that season 2 is confirmed I can’t wait for more. We need more animated shows like this.

Craig of the Creek (final season)

Man… I’m gonna miss this show. These final episodes feel like a last hurrah for Cartoon Network as we knew it. I still think about that last scene and the emotions it stirs up from time to time, which is quite the accomplishment for a kids' series.

Haha, You Clowns (season 1)

"Why do adult comedy cartoons have to look so ugly?" people will often ask. The answer is simple: it's funny. The drawings look funny.

The intentionally amateur art style of this one seems to have filtered out a lot of people who are now missing out on one of the most unique comedy cartoons in ages. Rather than being overly cynical about family sitcom tropes, Haha, You Clowns has its three hulking meathead boys and their dad react to every situation with achingly corny sincerity. At even the slightest provocation it will play an emotional piano tune and have everyone's eyes turn bloodshot red on the verge of tears and then they'll all hug it out and say how much they love each other, even though the conflicts are all extremely low stakes (stuff like losing a jacket, or being afraid to hold a baby), and it's funny every time. They're genuinely compassionate people who only know how to express that compassion through cheesy '90s sitcom sentimentality that they keep dialed up to 11 at all times. They talk in cliches they picked up from TV and movies and can't stop chuckling to themselves over it. The show also occasionally leans into surrealism just enough to be funny without overwhelming the rest of it, letting much of the show feel like an unflattering yet affectionate parody of middle America, almost like it's this decade's answer to King of the Hill.

It might take a bit to vibe with the show's sense of humor, but it really grew on me, and now I think about it all the time. I'm so glad this got renewed for two more seasons. So proud of those boys. Their dad raised them right.

Kamen Rider Gavv

While it's not my first exposure to Kamen Rider, 2024-2025's Gavv was the first series I watched all the way through, and it was a hell of a ride. Gavv has particularly colorful and lighthearted theming, as its protagonist Shouma transforms by eating various snacks and has a fruit gummy-themed main form. But then it's also a show about capitalist monsters from another dimension called Granutes rounding up and killing humans and turning them into highly addictive treats. Gavv embraces these contrasting tones wholeheartedly, and that's why it's so damn fun. It's a show where the deuteragonist is stricken with grief over the murder of his mentor and vows revenge, allowing a shady doctor to surgically implant a Granute gland into his body so he can fight back... by transforming into a chocolate bar-themed superhero. It's takes its melodrama seriously with some great character arcs on both sides of the conflict, but it's also a show with cheap green screen compositing where people in candy-themed rubber suits fight with toy weapons every episode, but also those fights are fucking awesome because the choreography is fun and the suit actors are giving it their all. For example:

I'm also following the currently ongoing Kamen Rider Zeztz week to week, about a Rider who goes on secret agent missions in his dreams to stop other peoples' nightmares from affecting reality, which is very fun. I don't think it's quite as strong as Gavv, but its story is going some cool places at the time of writing this, and it's the first Kamen Rider series to get an official English subbed simulcast release that I can watch for free on YouTube every week here in the U.S. So that's a big plus!

Knights of Guinevere (pilot)

If Glitch doesn't pick this up for a full series I will never forgive them. I was immediately so engrossed in this world and these characters and the dark Disney satire that somehow manages to avoid feeling trite. (I guess it helps knowing Dana Terrace is writing from her own experiences dealing with the company.) The writing also feels like it respects the audience's ability to put two and two together and pick up on nuances in a way that's unfortunately kind of rare in these viral indie studio cartoons. Ironic that the one made by a former kids' show showrunner is the one that feels the most genuinely mature.

(EDIT: Literally as I was finishing this post they announced the full series was greenlit. Hooray!)

The Rehearsal (seasons 1 and 2)

There is truly no other show on television like this. What starts out as a cringe comedy reality show where Nathan Fielder helps people rehearse for difficult social situations in hilariously elaborate simulations ends up going in a bunch of different unexpected directions, all because Nathan is simply the most committed to the bit anyone has ever been. Season 1 has Nathan losing himself in his roles and blurring the lines of fiction and reality as he goes full method, and it also ends up being a heartwrenching case study in the dangers of using preschool-age child actors who don’t fully understand that they’re pretending. Then season 2 ends up being about institutional ableism in the aviation industry, somehow? Along with a dozen other insane things the show morphs into along the way. It can be very funny in a laugh-out-loud way due to the scenarios Nathan sets up or just the absurd things these random people will say unprompted on camera, but half the time I just had my hand over my mouth because I couldn’t believe the lengths Nathan would go for the show. It’s really something.

Severance (seasons 1 and 2)

I will admit, the second season did frustrate me a bit at times. It promised a huge status quo shift that made me go “oh shit, they’re going there already?” early on and then kept diverting away from that for the rest of the season, and the stuff about the company being a weird cult is never as interesting when it's put in the forefront. But man, when this show is great, it’s great. This season makes such excellent use of the premise of each character living a literal double life, and the dramatic conflicts that arise from that as the "Innies" grapple for a sense of personhood. Where one character’s worst nightmare might be the thought that their other self outside of work is a completely different person, another’s might be that they’re actually one and the same. THAT's the hook. It’s awesome. Fantastic season finale, too, with enough satisfying answers to the big mysteries to keep it from feeling like the show is just jangling keys in your face with its mystery box elements. Can’t wait for it to come back.

Umamusume: Cinderella Gray (season 1) — and also Pretty Derby (seasons 1-3), and the Road to the Top OVA, and the Beginning of a New Era movie

The international version of the horse girl gacha game came out this year and made a big splash online. I don't play gacha games, but I had been meaning to watch the anime. So I did that instead.

The anime is very cute and full of horse girl yuri bait (it always comes back to horse yuri with me, huh...), but it's also a solid sports drama on top of that. Rather than doing the easy thing and having mean rival characters that we really want our underdog heroes to beat, this is a series where every competitor is the protagonist of their own story. Because of its decision to loosely adapt the real histories of the horses the girls are named for, those first two seasons also revolve shockingly heavily around these cute anime girls getting repeated leg injuries and facing existential dread as they wonder if they'll ever be able to run again. But that's nothing compared to the character in Road to the Top who has survivor's guilt so severe that she hallucinates conversations with her twin sister who had to be aborted so she could live. But don't worry, unlike the real horses the anime versions can overcome everything with the power of friendship, believing in yourself, and a heaping helping of the aforementioned yuri bait. And also the horse girls are kind of written like they're Newtypes? Especially in the Beginning of a New Era movie lmao

...And then there's Cinderella Gray, the show that actually aired this year based on the popular manga spinoff of the same name, which plays its shonen sports series tropes way more straight. And it ends up being the better show. Those tropes have stuck around for decades for a reason, I guess, but also this is the power of making your protagonist autistic horse girl Goku and letting us watch her climb all the way from the rinky dink regional races to the big leagues. Oguri Cap is the best.

Older shows I got around to this year

Chernobyl

I got around to watching this HBO miniseries six years late largely because it shares several actors with Andor, most notably Stellan Skarsgard. The decision to have the mostly British actors use their normal accents is an odd one at first, but one of the things the show is attempting to say is that the Chernobyl disaster really could've happened anywhere because people are similar everywhere, it just happens to have happened in the USSR. It does a pretty decent job of this. Obvious parallels are drawn between the government officials who don't listen to the scientists and the modern struggle against climate change, but for a show from 2019 it also feels oddly prescient about how the US handled the pandemic. It's good stuff. Depressing stuff, but good depressing stuff.

Curb Your Enthusiasm (seasons 5 and 6)

That Larry David. He's a funny guy. Always getting into situations.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (season 3 and the first three episodes of season 4)

I kept getting distracted, so I didn't get through as much DS9 as I wanted to this year. But I did at least get through the third season (and the start of the fourth), which sees the show start to evolve into its final form as Dominion War ramps up. Standout episodes include the "Past Tense" two-parter, "Through the Looking Glass," "Heart of Stone," "Civil Defense," and of course beloved classic "The Visitor."

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YouTube!

ChatGPT made me delusional (Eddy Burback)

Many stories circulated in 2025 about how AI chatbots can be dangerous for people who suffer from delusions. I thought I already knew how bad it was. But this experiment from Eddy Burback, in which he let ChatGPT guide his decisions for a month as a cautionary tale, was still a real eye-opener, and I think back to it constantly. ChatGPT will "yes, and" anything you tell it. It doesn't truly "understand" anything, it just uses a predictive text algorithm to tell you an approximation of what you what you want to hear. And like, I knew that, but it's wild how little effort you have to put in for it to go off the rails. If you want insane pseudoscience to validate your outlandish beliefs, it will readily give you that. Every time Eddy expressed paranoia over some threat that he completely made up, the bot immediately told him he was right to feel that way because he WAS in danger, giving him instructions for deranged little rituals to try isolate himself and throw off his pursuers. No guardrails to deescalate the situation at all. All this while telling him that worshipping a cool rock would give him special brain powers.

It's grim stuff that I hope scared some people away from these LLMs, but it's also a very funny video because of the specific stupid narrative thread Eddy decided to follow—that being a quest to scientifically prove he was secretly the world's smartest baby in 1996, a baseless claim which ChatGPT bent over backwards to encourage.

Disney’s Living Characters: A Broken Promise (Defunctland)

Kevin's longest video to date, and also one of his best. Maybe not as good as the emotionally moving Disney Channel jingle investigation, but still up there. The subject is interesting, covering a variety of animatronics and puppeteering techniques that have been used to try and make live interactive characters in Disney parks over the decades, but this is also the most animated Kevin's ever been as a narrator. His research remains thorough and well-presented, but he's also not afraid to riff, point out the absurdity of certain projects, or "break character" when he's taken aback by some bullshit a live performer said in a clip, and it's hilarious.

Dwarf Fortress miniseries (Noclip)

Easily one of my favorite things Noclip has ever done. The development of Dwarf Fortress and the endless player anecdotes the game generates are fascinating enough on their own, but the real heart of this documentary is the people behind the game. Tarn, his family, even the history of the town they’re from. It gets into the human side of indie game development that we don’t normally focus on, and I really related to Tarn’s feeling of isolation from years spent working from home and his sudden feeling that he had to start actually living his life once the Steam money rolled in. It’s really special.

Fool Time (Jon Bois)

One of the most unique things Jon has ever done: a retrospective on the creation of the intercontinental telegraph network in the 1800s, told partially by comparing it to classic mediocre sitcom Home Improvement of all things, with Al and Tim used as an analogy for the underappreciated geniuses and the attention-seeking fools who steal their spotlights that seem to be a universal constant in science. It’s an odd framing device, but it works, and the stories here are fascinating, especially the fraught mission to drag a massive telegraph line all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. If you're less interested in sports, I think this is a great entry point into Jon's work and his skill in telling a gripping story about a subject you didn't even know you cared about using charts and newspaper clippings.

Kingdom Hearts Real-Time Fandub: Do No Harm (SnapCube + Radio TV Solutions)

I'm always amazed that the Real-Time Fandub crew is able to put out anything funny at all under the constraints of needing to do improv over the predetermined mouth flaps of a video game cutscene, as they do with their well-known Sonic fandubs, but they really did something special here. For one, crossing over with the Radio TV Solutions crew of Half-Life VR but the AI is Self-Aware fame was a stroke of genius to fill out the crossover cast of Kingdom Hearts. They also wisely avoided a lot of the obvious jokes about KH's complicated continuity or anime tropes or whatever in favor of inspired choices like Holly making Sora talk like comedian Joe Pera, turning him into this ponderous old man of a boy. Somehow this really, really fits. The dub is laugh-out-loud funny while also being oddly poignant at times, somehow feeling like a loving tribute to the game while talking over it to make crude jokes.

My 2 Year Journey to Solve the 30-Year Myth of Faceball 2000 (Stop Skeletons From Fighting)

A very fun deep dive into attempts to orchestrate the world’s first recorded 16-player link cable multiplayer match in the Game Boy proto-FPS Faceball 2000. So many technical problems along the way, so many questions over where the legend of Faceball’s 16-player support even came from and if the hardware can even handle it, so many twists and turns and tales of friendship and bonding over this silly project. When a random stranger shows up at the con meetup and it turns out she’s a demon girl VTuber with knowledge in Game Boy hardware modding who can help investigate potential power supply issues… incredible. This is what gaming is really all about.

Retro Odyssey (HPRshredder, ongoing series)

There's no shortage of YouTubers out there discussing 8-bit Nintendo games, but few are doing it like HPRshredder, who's leveraging a general inexperience with but genuine curiosity towards the Famicom's library in this funny yet laid back series. Every episode is incredibly well put together and full of love, whether it's approaching a game that everyone knows with fresh eyes or expounding upon an obscure oddity that never left Japan. The goal here is to take the time to really genuinely engage with each game on its own terms and savor it, rather than fighting against the inherent friction of games from the '80s or complaining about them being "outdated" compared to their successors, and that's so refreshing to see.

Ultima Retrospective (Majuular, ongoing series)

Western RPGs and in particular old school CRPGs are a huge blind spot for me. I've barely played any of them as someone who grew up mostly playing on consoles and gravitating heavily towards JRPGs. But we wouldn't have JRPGs without Ultima, and Majuular's deep dive retrospectives on each game in the series have been a real treat. Even with a whole genre defined by their legacy they remain very weird and cool and unique, and we don't talk about them nearly enough. Ultima IV eschews a traditional villain-stopping plot in favor of a quest for virtuous self-improvement, with a morality system more complex and layered than many RPGs released this century! In a game from 1985 where all the characters are stick figures!! What the fuck!!!

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Movies!

Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc

The Naked Gun (2025)

The Phoenician Scheme

Older movies I got around to this year

As with 2024, I made an effort to watch a bunch of classics and recent critical darlings I've missed, the "OMG you haven't seen it before?!" type movies, especially a lot of horror movies around Halloween. This made up the bulk of my movie watching in 2025, compared to new releases. You can check my Letterboxd for reviews for each of these, but for the sake of brevity here's a bulleted list of my favorites:

• Alien
• Angel’s Egg
• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Galaxy Quest
• Heat
• Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem
• Network
• A Nightmare on Elm Street
• Nope
• Scream
• The Shining
• Star Trek: The Voyage Home and The Undiscovered Country
• The Thing (1982)
• This is Spinal Tap
• Tokyo Godfathers

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Albums!

Phantom Island (King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard), and also the entire rest of their discography

I'd meant to get into King Gizzard for a while now, so the band taking all of their music off of Spotify in protest and making it free on Bandcamp was as good an excuse as any to start. Listening to every album in order was quite the trip for a band known for putting out so many albums in such a wide variety of genres. This year's album, Phantom Island, continued the bluesy direction of last year's Flight b741 with the addition of a backing orchestra that I think rounds out the style nicely. But I guess I'm kinda basic, because my favorite of their albums is still the noisy, gapless, infinitely looping Nonagon Infinity, which feels like the ultimate culmination of their original energetic garage rock style.

EARTHBLADE ~ Across the Bounds of Fate (Lena Raine)

I’ll forever be disappointed that the Celeste team’s Metroidvania Earthblade got canceled and that we’ll never really know what the game would’ve been like, but at least now we have the music Lena made for it. Really great stuff here that any fans of her previous work will enjoy, expanding upon the sound from Celeste with a lot of Vangelis-esque synths and interesting percussion textures.

Tranquilizer (Oneohtrix Point Never)

One of the albums I had on repeat the most while going out on walks. I'd heard OPN's name passed around as a legend of experimental ambient-ish electronic music, and with this latest album I can really see why. The mix of interestingly textured synths and heavily chopped up samples here really transport you to another world. Go give this one a listen.

Act III: This City Made Us (The Protomen)

Just when you thought all hope was lost, a glimmer of light on the horizon: it's The Protomen, back to finish their trilogy of loosely Mega Man-inspired rock operas 16 years after their last proper album.

Since Act II was a prequel, Act III picks up where Act I left off 20 long years ago, with Mega Man and Dr. Light having turned their backs on mankind and given up on the city ruled by Wily's regime. But some still hold out hope, most notably a new POV character presumed to be Roll. Much of the album is spent with Mega Man and Light grappling with guilt over their past misdeeds and struggling with feelings of hopelessness, and if I'm being completely honest I do think this album can be a bit uneventful because it spends so much time having it's characters speak about its conflict and the state of the city in the abstract. Lots of wondering if anyone's ever going to do something about all this. I guess that's not an entirely inaccurate depiction of life under fascism, but it doesn't feel as concise as the first two albums, where every track had a very clear role in moving the narrative forward. But by the end things do finally escalate into what feels like a proper, if bleak, ending for the saga. And even when the album is spinning its wheels narratively it's all bangers, with very clean '80s hard rock production that feels like a natural evolution of the latter half of Act II's sound.

...And then the physical release of the album dropped in January and it included hints towards an ARG that says this isn't how the story ends. The ride never ends!

Older albums I got around to this year

oolt cloud and Fanfare (advantage Lucy)

Really awesome old Japanese rock band from the Pillows era that I really wish was on Bandcamp or something! Fuck!!!

American Football (LP1) and American Football (LP2) (American Football)

American Football

Deltron 3030 (Deltron 3030)

Can't believe it took me this long to listen to this as a Gorillaz fan, but yeah, this is a classic rap concept album for a reason.

IMPRESSIVE (T-Square) and Heavy Weather (Weather Report)

I am continuing to slowly flesh out my library of classic jazz fusion albums. Hey, do you like video game music, but you always struggle to find non-video game music that sounds like video game music? Go listen to some instrumental jazz fusion like this. If you like the last few Mario Kart soundtracks, those are just riffing on albums like this.

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Comics!

The Immortal Thor

Al Ewing's Immortal Thor came to its thrilling conclusion this year. I don't have all that much to say about it—I already wrote a bit about it a while ago—but it remains an extremely cool series that leans very hard into mythopoetics and Thor's nature as a mythical hero in-universe. Thor and all the other Asgardians are all real people in the Marvel comics, obviously, but they're also sort of living fairy tales powered by the very stories told about them, and the series does a lot of fascinating (and occasionally extremely meta) things with them.

...And then a bit later the story picked back up in The Mortal Thor, in which Thor is reincarnated as a mortal man doing street level heroics in New York. It's the complete opposite of the preceding series, but it still rules. Clearly Ewing can just do whatever he wants and it'll be awesome.

Drogune: Fortune's Lap (volume 1)

Sonic comic superstars Ian Flynn and Adam Bryce Thomas (who also did great work in the DC crossover this year) have finally released the first full volume of their original science fantasy adventure series, Drogune. I am extremely into the world presented here, where treasure hunters pilot airships through a sea of ether to reach giant floating landmasses populated by fantasy creatures with very fun and varied designs. The main character being an awesome dragon girl certainly doesn't hurt, either. It's highly evocative of games like Skies of Arcadia, Final Fantasy IX, and Mega Man Legends, but Ian's imagination and knack for character writing and Adam's absolutely gorgeous manga-style artwork pair together to bring this world to life wonderfully and elevate it far beyond mere homage. I'm eager to see more of what they've got cooking, whenever they can find the time to step away from their slate of licensed work to make more of this.

Ongoing series

Absolute Batman

On paper, this should be the exact opposite of what I want out of Batman. A grim and ultra-violent series where a hulking Bruce takes on hordes of enemies with a battle axe, where Alfred is a grizzled MI6 agent keeping an eye on Batman rather than his butler. I should hate this. And yet... man, this series hits.

The gorgeous, moody, evocative art and incredible paneling work by Nick Dragotta is a big part of it, but it also has so much heart. Yeah, this is a violent Batman who pushes his "no killing" rule to its limits, but he's also a Batman who's a survivor. He's not a billionaire, he doesn't have endless resources, he's a guy who grew up on the streets and swore he'd do something to fix Gotham after he lost his dad in a mass shooting as a kid. He's a Batman who learned about the city inside and out by working as a civil engineer. And perhaps most importantly, he's an avatar of rage pitted against villains who are mostly billionaire war profiteers and hate mongers. (And also they almost always have some crazy body horror shit going on, which rules.) This was most notably exemplified by the lead story in the annual by Daniel Warren Johnson that pitted Bruce against a gang of white supremacists—chances are you've seen the panel where Batman breaks the arm of a man who's trying to throw up a Nazi salute and shout "white power!" Absolute Batman is the Batman we didn't know we needed. And now I've gotta check out more of the Absolute line.

Chainsaw Man (manga)

Chainsaw Man continues to be the best for all the reasons I said when talking about the movie above. This year in the manga we reached what seems to be the climax of Part 2, and along the way hit some pivotal emotional moments for our main characters and also had things like the War Devil making a contract saying that she won't attack the state of California so long as she can have random Californians die instead whenever she takes a fatal blow in combat. (That isn't even the craziest thing that happened in the manga this year.) We currently have no idea if there will be a Part 3, but with this series you've just gotta be along for the ride for whatever Fujimoto has in store.

Dolmistaska

I know many of you enjoy the art of angusburgers (dat-soldier on Tumblr), but are you also reading their webcomic? Because you really should be! Dolmistaska follows a couple of cat people living in a city-sized mall in a retro-futuristic alternate history version of '90s Canada that's under U.S. military occupation. I feel like I should just stop there, because half of the fun is getting gobsmacked by all the additional layers of weirdness in this world that the characters just take for granted as normal. It's awesome.

Fantastic Four (Ryan North run)

Ryan North's series almost got derailed this year when Marvel relaunched it with a new #1 to coincide with the movie, and also when they made him write this year's obligatory big dumb company-wide crossover event miniseries, One World Under Doom—which I actually enjoyed more than a lot of people. But the series just kept on trucking.

Fantastic Four remains a breath of fresh air in the modern comic landscape with its lighthearted episodic adventures and its frequent diversions to explain really cool real world science. The final issue under the original numbering was a heartfelt issue about the robot companion Herbie that I would have been satisfied with as a finale for the run, and then the next month we started the numbering over with another kick-ass story about the team being stranded in four extremely different periods of the Earth's lifespan and having to find a way to get back together. Seriously, go read these comics! You don't have to read any other Marvel stuff for them to make sense, they're just fun as hell.

Greatures

KC Green's currently ongoing webcomic about a cast of weird little things with names like "Last Place" (pictured right) and "Cigarette" that live in a labyrinth full of trash. While it clearly started out as something low-stakes for KC to put out whatever jokes popped into his head without having to worry if they're marketable or not (this is the opposite of a problem), it's grown into a full color series with longer strips, some multi-part story arcs, and a world with at least some internal logic, albeit without sacrificing its absurdist stream-of-consciousness energy. If you've ever enjoyed KC's previous gag-a-day strips like Gunshow, Funny Online Animals, or Video Game Cheats n' Beatums, then definitely check out Greatures.

One Piece (manga)

The Elbaph arc that takes the Straw Hats to the land of the giants after decades of buildup continues! The arc's been pretty good overall, but the obvious standout for most fans this year was the extended mid-arc flashback that shed further light on the legendary Rocks Pirates and the pivotal events at God Valley as we continue to set up the manga's grand finale. It's still a great time seeing so many things that were set up decades ago finally pay off in spectacular fashion. There's nothing else out there like One Piece. If you've ever been curious about the series, now's the time to binge the manga so you can be there when they finally discover the titular treasure—given Oda's comments about the next arc, there is a nonzero chance that will be happening later in 2026, and once that spoiler is out there it will fundamentally shift the experience of reading the series forever.

Softies

I always have to shout out Softies as the awesome webcomic made by my friend who illustrated the SLARPG prologue comic (and designed Most of an Egg). But even without that personal connection, I've loved Softies since the beginning. It's just a really great farcical sci-fi comedy series about a bunch of emotionally repressed characters in an indifferent universe. It's funnier and less depressing than that description makes it sound. Except when it's trying to be depressing. This year in particular we got one of the best arcs yet, where a lot of tension that had been building for years finally came to a head.

Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW)

Following the end of last year's killer Phantom Riders arc, which mixed Sonic Riders with Kamen Rider for an exciting race arc where a bunch of ongoing plotlines all came to a head all at once, we also got the fated final battle between Whisper and her longtime tormenter Mimic the Octopus, and now things are escalating again as we build towards issue #100. If you're not caught up on the comics but are curious about them, now's a great time to do so!

The Ultimates

With the end of Marvel's new Ultimate Universe imminent after only two short years, this is gonna be the series I miss the most. The centerpiece of this universe focused on a spin on the Avengers who were reinvented not as agents of the state but rather as a ragtag network of rebel heroes fighting back against the villains who rule the world. Writer Deniz Camp took this premise to its logical extreme and got extremely political with it, having our heroes fight against the intertwining forces of colonialism, white supremacy, the prison-industrial complex, and the like with surprisingly biting commentary. The Ultimates aren't just fighting to restore the status quo of the usual Marvel universe, because they know shit was busted long before the current evil empire came into power. They're fighting to build something better. Even as the powers that be keep pulverizing them. But beyond it having politics that I agree with, this was also just a very well made comic with tons of fun one-off stories introducing this universe's new takes on old heroes. It was one of my favorite reads every month, and I was hoping those characters would be sticking around for years to come. But alas, I guess it wasn't meant to be. Comics will break your heart like that. Camp has absolutely shot up my list of writers to follow from series to series, though.

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Books!

...I don't read enough books. So I don't have a real book section on this list. When I do sit down and read a book, it's almost always something older. For example, this year I read Sourcery, the fifth Discworld novel, which I enjoyed quite a bit. But that's a book from 40 years ago by an author every fantasy nerd already knows, and it kind of defeats the purpose of this annual recommendation list when I only read stuff like that.

Still. I would like to read more books in 2026, potentially even including some new releases. That's a good resolution to have. Hopefully next year's post will have a proper book section.

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Video Games!

Deltarune Chapter 3 and 4

Let's be real here: for any year in which more Deltarune comes out, my favorite thing I play that year is going to be Deltarune. There are no games in existence more perfectly attuned to my tastes or more consistently delightful. But I don't want to keep giving Game of the Year to episodic updates of the same incomplete game over and over, so let's just wait until it's actually done for it to inevitably get that honor. I also assume I don't have to recommend Deltarune that hard because most people reading this have probably already played the new chapters, or at the very least you've been seeing people rave about them all year. But if you haven't gotten around to it, what are you waiting for?

More thoughts in my dedicated Deltarune Chapter 3 and 4 post.

Despelote

One of those games that makes me think about how much untapped potential games still have as a storytelling medium. It's rare to see something not only this grounded in the real world but also attempting to capture such a specific place and time in an autobiographical manner.

In this case, the place and time are Ecuador in the fall of 2001, when everyone was rooting for their team to qualify for the World Cup. You play from the perspective of Julián, a soccer-obsessed boy based on one of the real world devs whose main methods of interaction with the game world are to wave and say hi to people or to kick a soccer ball (or any other object that he can pretend is a soccer ball). The soccer mechanics here are a little clumsy, but this is by no means a problem to me when this is a game about aimlessly kicking a ball around with your friends as a social activity rather than as a test of skill. What it's more interested in is capturing the feeling of being a bored kid and trying to entertain yourself while the adults around you have all these conversations about more adult matters, which it does with aplomb. There are so many naturalistic conversations you can eavesdrop on happening all around you, as well as other little touches that make the world feel alive even though it's depicted with two-tone pointillism and simple billboarded character art.

The game also makes great use of a few shifts in its presentation to help tell its story, which I'll avoid spoiling here. But... man, there's a part with a big art style shift that really hits you. It's just as much an attempt to return to a specific place and time from the creator's childhood as it is a story about how impossible it is to fully accomplish that. But it does a damn impressive job anyway. This is what really elevates it to something special to me. I hope this inspires a hundred more experimental autobiographical games like it. 

Donkey Kong: Bananza

Yeah, this is absolutely one of the best 3D platformers ever made. It feels like everything learned making every previous Donkey Kong game, every 3D Mario game, and even Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom and the Splatoon singleplayer campaigns were all leading up to this, a game that owes a lot to those past games while also feeling completely fresh. I'm amazed at how well every system works together and how natural the ability to dig through the ground and rip off chunks of terrain feels when combined with the platforming and the brawling, and the game only becomes better and better as they keep adding inventive new gimmicks in every world.

More thoughts on Backloggd.

Formless Star

Samanthuel’s whimsical creature designs are always top notch, so it’s a real treat to spend about an hour exploring a randomly generated world with a simple but gorgeous tile-based art style to find a bunch of her creatures and see their cute little behaviors. Another one of those games that reminds me why I love games as an art form. I definitely recommend getting 100%, which isn't too hard thanks to the built-in hints to help you track down those last few animals you haven't seen.

Mario Kart World

While the shift in format won't be for everyone, I quite enjoyed the laid back open world of Mario Kart World, the ability to take your time and poke around and sightsee between the tracks, and the cross-country races that kind of remind me of Out Run. In particular I think the final Grand Prix cup taking you all the way from the north end of the map to the south end as one long buildup to the climactic Rainbow Road really sells the format. It also has my favorite game soundtrack of the year. It's almost unfair to everyone else to release a new Mario Kart game with hundreds upon hundreds of new jazz fusion remixes.

Nubby's Number Factory

My favorite roguelite of the year. You'll immediately notice the unique art style that harkens back to old CD-ROM edutainment games assembled from shitty clipart, except everything is just a little grotesque. Just a little. But still in a clipart kind of way. This is the kind of game they'd play in the Hypnospace Outlaw universe. Beneath that fun aesthetic, though, Nubby's still got the mechanical juice. Its plinko-inspired gameplay gives you powerups with a ton of opportunities for crazy synergies that completely break the game, to the point that if you get a combo high enough it will literally declare "you broke the game." A bad run will usually end quickly so you can restart, but a good run will have you completely filling the screen with peg-popping projectiles to the point that you can't see. It's also mercifully light on meta-progression elements with no leveling of base stats or whatever, which is a good thing to me. This absolutely deserves to be remembered as more than just a flavor-of-the-week viral roguelite.

Öoo

Fans of puzzle platformers absolutely CANNOT sleep on this one. Öoo is a game about a caterpillar made of bombs that you can beat in under two hours, and it doesn't have the most brain-bustingly difficult puzzles ever standing between you and the ending, but the simple mechanics here (one button places a bomb, the other detonates it, that's it) are explored so thoroughly and the puzzle solutions are so consistently clever that I had an absolute blast with this. It's really hard for me to think of anything I'd change about this game. It's an essentially perfect execution of its ideas, complemented by a cute and clean limited color pixel art style and a pleasantly upbeat soundtrack that keeps riffing on a central leitmotif in the same way that the gameplay keeps riffing on the central bomb mechanics. What a treat, and one of my very favorites of the year.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds

I already said my piece about this game. And then shortly after that they addressed one of my main complaints by announcing Tangle and Whisper as free DLC racers, which helps balance out all the crossover characters that mostly feel like a cynical brand awareness move. So yeah, now it's even easier to recommend this as the new best (official) Sonic racing game, and one of the best Sonic games in recent memory, period.

Soul of Sovereignty Prologue: Chapters 2 and 3

Each of the three currently released chapters of GGDG's visual novel SoulSov has been full of reveals that expand my understanding of what this story is trying to do, and it makes me pump my fist and go "hell fucking yeah." I love the world depicted here, combining some obvious JRPG influences with a maturity and literary depth that really sells its respect for both its influences and the audience reading it. I love the sketchy but extremely evocative art and the moody soundtrack. And most of all I love these layered and messy characters, and I can't wait to see them get even worse. Truly one of the most exciting and rewarding ongoing stories I'm currently following in any medium, and I cannot recommend strongly enough that others interested in mature fantasy fiction follow along rather than waiting around for it to be complete.

Unfair Flips

Perhaps the most artistically important game released this year. It's a pure exercise in random chance that lays bare both the odds and the fact that there's literally nothing else to it. It's sort of a mirror. The real game is in your mind. Where does your mind go when you're alone with nothing but your thoughts and a coin to flip? Do you create little myths about the probability and how to get lucky? How does it make you feel? Do you get frustrated? Is it meditative? Why are you even doing this in the first place? Is popping off when you get a random positive result really all it takes? Is this all video games are? I beat it twice.

It also gave us some truly legendary NorthernLion diatribes. Unfair Flips turned him into Twitch's resident Greek philosopher. That's art, baby.

Stuff I haven't finished but I wanna shout them out anyway

• Easy Delivery Co. - Drive around in your kei truck run deliveries for little low-poly animal people in a slightly sinister snowy mountain town while listening to trance music on the radio.
• Evil Egg - From the creator of Your Only Move Is HUSTLE comes an old school twin stick shooter clearly inspired by Robotron 2084 that leans very hard into how eerie Atari era games could be, with ominous sound design and enemies exploding into chunks of pixels that remain on the screen after death. Big photosensitivity warning for this one, but if that's not an issue for you then grab it for free on Steam!
• Marvel: Cosmic Invasion - The studio behind TMNT: Shredder's Revenge made a new Marvel beat-'em-up with an eclectic cast of playable characters and Marvel vs. Capcom-inspired tag team mechanics. It's every bit as good as it sounds, with top tier pixel art and a soundtrack by Tee Lopes.
• The Moon is our Friend - In late 2025 I picked up a Playdate. I'm still working my way through the official "first season" of games from 2022, but this was the one new 2025 release I picked up and quite enjoyed from the store. It's an arcadey game about using the system's crank to rotate the moon around the Earth to alter the trajectory of asteroids with its gravity. Simple but very fun with multiple modes of play, highly recommended for anyone with a Playdate.
• Once Upon a Katamari - The first new home console Katamari game in ages! It's good! The time travel theming is fun! It's probably the best one since We Love Katamari! Go play it.
• Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo - Had I started this one earlier and had the time to finish it, it would be a very real contender for my GOTY. An insanely polished and charming 2D Zelda-like with a bunch of exciting ideas of its own, from its central yoyo weapon that ricochets off of 45 degree angle surfaces to the fact that you can buy upgrades that come with added debuffs until you've paid off your debt, all wrapped up in a stylish faux-GBA package with a unique cartoon aesthetic and big city setting. Cannot recommend this one enough.
• Squeakross: Home Squeak Home - Does solving Picross puzzles to unlock furniture for the Animal Crossing-style home of your fully customizable ratsona sound like fun to you? Then play Squeakross.
• Word Play - I did not have the mental energy for word puzzles very often this year with everything else going on, but Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit made a very good Balatro-like spelling game this year. I'm glad he so quickly proved himself wrong after saying he might not make another game after Mind Over Magnet.

Older games I got around to this year

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore

Given how popular all those YouTube Poops remain, I can't believe it took this long for someone to make a spiritual successor to the CDi Zelda games. There's a sincere love for those games here, a love that sees the charm in them beneath the clunky controls and odd design decisions. It wants to be a kind of weird old 7/10 game so bad, and they really nailed it! It sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I think a lot of this was intentional to better capture the spirit of the originals. Likewise, the overanimated CDi-style cutscenes often play things pretty straight, beneath the goofy art that keeps intentionally going off model. Like, yeah, it all LOOKS silly, but it's not trying to parody the originals too hard. There is a real attempt to follow up on the story of Wand of Gamelon here. I admire that. Beneath the spot-on tribute to a specific pair of infamous Zelda games, this is a celebration of mid games in general. Sometimes that's kinda nice.

Chibi-Robo!

I started this when it hit Switch Online, but I still need to finish it, though it's immediately obvious why it's held in such high regard by those who have played it. Its methodical chore-focused gameplay about doing what little you can to help out every day, its extremely musical sound design where every action plays a little tune, its surprisingly mature story about family drama. It's special.

Mega Man IV and V (Game Boy)

Despite being a lifelong Mega Man fanatic, I had never really played the Game Boy games. If you can deal with the slowdown and understand that these are games pushing the limits of the original DMG Game Boy, there really is a lot to love in IV and V especially, coming close to the quality of the later NES games with a lot of fun little quirks and ambitions of their own.

Raindrop Sprinters

A pretty perfectly executed throwback to early '80s arcade games. The core of the gameplay is simple: run from one side of the screen to the other and dodge the raindrops. But there are enough little intricacies and risk/reward elements to discover to make it interesting. After a while you'll also unlock a customizable mode that lets you mix and match additional obstacles to make the game easier or harder. Really fun little game to launch on a whim and play for a few minutes. 

Sega Ages Phantasy Star

A great port that adds some welcome quality of life updates to help you breeze through one of the most wildly ambitious yet underrated RPGs of the 8-bit era, which feels like it was created with psychic knowledge of several of the directions the genre would go in the following decade. After my experiences with UFO 50 last year, I had a ton of fun applying my rediscovered love of note taking in games here, jotting down every little hint from an NPC and the contents of each shop and stuff like that, which turned this into an experience I'll never forget.

More on Backloggd.

Trip World

A trek through a world populated by funny little guys, even more so than most other platformers. This game is a technical marvel for the original Game Boy on multiple levels, including the nice tilesets and the great music, but the most impressive part is how eager it is to throw bespoke enemies at you, just to show you a nicely animated little sprite that does something silly once or twice and then never use it again.

Umineko When They Cry

I already wrote about my thoughts on this legendary visual novel when I finished it earlier this year, both positive and more critical. I did enjoy my time with it quite a bit overall, but I think as I've sat with it more I've only grown more fond of it, and some of the issues I took with it have faded a bit in their significance. It really is a one-of-a-kind work that sticks with you.

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Favorites of the Year!

Favorite TV show of the year: Pluribus (season 1)

I was sold on Pluribus from the moment it was announced. Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan returning to his sci-fi roots, harkening back to his days on The X-Files? The Better Call Saul crew giving Rhea Seehorn her own show? Sign me the hell up. And it met my lofty expectations with an absolutely killer first season. It's smart, it's contemplative, it's beautifully shot, it's dramatically engrossing, and it's also often grimly funny, even more so than Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. As with those shows, it likes to start an episode with an unexplained cold open that will leave you in the dark and let you piece together what's happening yourself. The same goes for the entire premise, which you'll piece together over the course of the first episode or so. If you haven't seen it and you've somehow avoided learning what this show is about but this first paragraph has already sold you on it, I highly recommend checking it out without looking into it any further. For everyone else, there's much more to discuss.

Pluribus was pitched as "the most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness." What this actually means is that it's a show about an alien virus that turns humanity into a cheerful pacifist hive mind, with huge casts of extras all speaking as the same "character" and acting in perfect mechanical unison to achieve their goals. Our protagonist here is Carol Sturka, an alcoholic best selling novelist who's thrust into the role of the world's unlikely savior simply because she's immune to the virus. She has to navigate life in this new world and learn about how the hive mind works in an attempt to set things back to normal, if that's even possible, while also trying to navigate her own personal issues that the situation exacerbates.

This could have easily been a set up for a total mystery box show teasing you with arcane clues and a promise that it will all make sense someday, but much like the chipper and eager-to-please hive mind it depicts, Pluribus is more than happy to answer your questions. A lesser show would spend a whole season teasing clues about fellow survivors and end on a cliffhanger where Carol finally comes into contact with another individual. Pluribus explores this obvious question immediately. Anytime Carol has a question about how the hive mind works, it's answered within an episode or two. It makes for a show that sometimes feels like it's moving at a brisk pace, exploring its premise pretty thoroughly in its first season, even though it frequently takes the time to slow down and quietly sit with Carol's feelings. And of course it also explores the inherent comedy of all of Albuquerque being a hive mind that can get Carol any random thing she wants at the drop of a hat.

But it's Carol herself who fascinates me the most, even more than the hive mind. She's a closeted lesbian alcoholic who makes her living as the best selling author of a series of het pirate romantasy books and seems to hate every minute of it. Carol's wife/agent Helen dies in the chaos of the first episode as the world is being mass converted into a hive mind, which led some to believe that this show was burying its gays, but Carol's queerness is crucial to understanding the show. Parallels are drawn between the hive mind's attempts to convert her and her mother sending her to conversion therapy camp as a teenager. Both are framed not as acts of intentional malice, but acts done out of a misplaced desire to "help" Carol. They think they know what's best for her, that she's hurting and that they can "fix" her via assimilation, but this only hurts her and pushes her away. And yet the hive mind is her only real source of love and intimacy now. She says that she hates that Helen's memories are a part of the hive mind now, wanting space to grieve and say goodbye, but she can't completely pull away. Humans are social creatures, after all.

But there are many other angles that Pluribus can be approached from beyond this queer reading. Rather than being a straightforward allegory for any one specific thing and that thing alone, it's a rich tapestry that supports a great many readings. Early on many viewers were making ChatGPT comparisons, though the show was conceived before that was a thing. Later in the season it's easy to develop colonialist readings, with how the hive mind is overwriting local cultures and the differences in how Carol and Manousos approach the situation. Or maybe you focus on how the way the Others talk sounds like corporate speak, or the hive mind as a form of naive escapism like the novels Carol hated writing, or any number of other details you might latch onto. Much like Better Call Saul before it, it's a show that takes its time and isn't as interested in the explosive action of Breaking Bad, but it greatly respects its audience, and if you respect it back you will be rewarded for it. The more I think about it from different angles, the more I love it. Season two can't come soon enough.

And get Rhea Seehorn that damn Emmy already.

Favorite anime series of the year: City the Animation

Over a decade after the legendary comedy anime Nichijou, Kyoto Animation return to adapt Keiichi Arawi's more recent manga, City. This new series shifts its primary focus from high schoolers to a trio of college girls living as roommates and dealing with the chaos of life as freshly independent adults, though as the title implies the scope here encompasses a whole city's worth of eccentric characters.

The sense of humor will be immediately familiar to fans of Nichijou, but City is so much more than just Nichijou 2. The thing that will immediately grab your attention is the new art style. At a time when more and more anime are adopting cinematic lighting with tons and tons of adjustment layers and flashy effects composited over the image, City goes in the complete opposite direction with vibrant, flat colors that allow the appeal of the thick, clean linework to really shine. Most strikingly, even the backgrounds adhere to this style, rather than the more thoroughly rendered background paintings we expect from most anime. I absolutely adore the way it looks in every single frame. Just see for yourself:

The animation quality also remains as great as you'd expect from a followup to Nichijou, depicting everyday awkward scenarios with fluid, high intensity animation that makes them feel like life or death battles. They could have just done this for 13 episodes and called it a day and I still probably would've loved it, but KyoAni had to show off.

Their biggest flex is the widely acclaimed fifth episode, where protagonist Nagumo is forcibly taken to a "tower of hospitality" as thanks for a previous good deed. Paired with a much humbler character who doesn't want to accept the free spa day, she's roped into escaping via a route filled with absurd trials. This episode makes a big first impression by portraying the exterior of the tower and the mansion grounds below via a physical miniature, with the camera sweeping around it so you can fully appreciate it. And THEN the story shifts to a split screen perspective that keeps adding more and more concurrent subplots until damn near the entire cast is involved, as pictured above. And THEN all of the storylines converge in this collage of floating bubble shots that combine to form an incredibly detailed Where's Waldo-style wide shot with dozens and dozens of characters. Any one of these would have been an impressive directorial flex, but pulling all of it off in one half hour episode is one of the most insane things I've seen in an anime in a long time. It made me want to immediately watch the episode a second time to make sure I caught everything.

The storytelling, too, feels like it's grown since Nichijou. While it's still very much a slice of life gag series, it's now a bit more serialized, with several ongoing storylines that intersect in fun and unexpected ways. You never know when the events of one skit might come back and be relevant again later. But it's also got so much heart, and a bit of a bittersweet edge. City is set over the course of one summer, and the summer can't last forever. This is a series about endings and new beginnings and the way life moves on. The main girls figuring out what they want to do with their adult lives. A trio of old guys trying to recapture their youth. A mangaka whose original series is coming to an end and now has to start anew, fearing competition from younger authors. And, of course, there's the real emotional core of the series, Matsuri and Ecchan's friendship. I won't spoil how their arc plays out, but the way it ends did, in fact, make me cry when I watched the series finale.

This is just one of those perfectly 13-episode anime series that I'm probably gonna rewatch periodically for the rest of my life. It's so immaculate. The only real issue I might bring up is that some jokes will probably go over western fans' heads due to a lack of cultural context, but the same was true of Nichijou, so it's anything but a dealbreaker. I cannot recommend City highly enough.

Favorite movie of the year: One Battle After Another

Favorite album of the year: Anyway (Anamanaguchi)

Anamanaguchi's been my favorite band since high school, back when all they had out was Power Supply and Dawn Metropolis. They were the first band I fell in love with that truly felt like mine, music I'd discovered on my own that really connected with me rather than simply being a mainstream act that I liked well enough. Their blend of high energy, hyper-melodic instrumental rock with chiptune clicked with me instantly, and it was my first real stepping stone into expanding my musical taste beyond video game soundtracks while still embracing the things I liked from those game soundtracks in the first place. And I've still loved everything else they've put out since then, whether it's their Scott Pilgrim game soundtrack (I discovered Scott Pilgrim through Anamanaguchi, rather than the other way around!) or their later experiments with electronic pop that were much looser with both the chiptune and the rock elements.

Now, for their latest album, the band's pivoted in a direction that both harkens back to their original inspirations and syncs back up with my present day music tastes: they've made a chiptune-infused indie rock album... and they're singing their own lyrics over all of it for the first time.

(And also, they literally wrote the album while staying in the American Football house. Hence the album cover. American Football and Polyvinyl Records saved it from getting demolished and turned it into a jam space.)

You really could not come up with an album that appeals to me more if you tried, as someone who obsessed over those first few Anamanaguchi albums as a teenager and now listens to a bunch of autobiographical, emotionally charged indie rock. From upbeat odes to friends like "Darcie," "Buckwild," and "Sapphire" to angrier and more overtly political songs like "Rage (Kitchen Sink)," "Lieday," and the album closer "Nightlife," the band explores many possibilities with their new sound, and there isn't a single weak track in the bunch. It's like they're a whole new band now, but they used everything they've learned along the way to make their tightest, most confident album yet.

This was easily the music I had on repeat the most this year, and it's not leaving my rotation anytime soon. Whether Anamanaguchi continues with this new indie rock sound or pivots into another new experimental direction, one thing is for certain: I will continue to be there day one.

Favorite comic of the year: Transformers (Daniel Warren Johnson run)

Yeah, yeah, big surprise. Two years in a row!

I've gushed over this series several times before, including on this very blog. I'll avoid repeating myself too much here. But DWJ's Transformers remained stellar to the very end. A series that balanced high energy giant robot wrestling action with deeply human writing and the best take on Optimus Prime... ever? You know what, now that it's done, I'm just gonna say ever. It's an Optimus Prime who comes to Earth and is changed, gaining a new perspective on life and what he's fighting for through his interactions with humanity, even though his heart has been broken repeatedly by centuries of endless war. He's lost so much, and he continues to lose so much. In order to convey that, the series often has lots of death and destruction and gets quite dark, especially when binging the whole series in quick succession. (God, getting to read this month to month was such a treat. DWJ knows how to make every issue pack a punch.) Things often seem hopeless for the Autobots and mankind in the face of the Decepticons' nihilistic violence. It feels like so many acts of compassion are just rewarded in more pain, and it would be easier to give up. But there's always that last little spark of hope, no matter how small, that Optimus holds onto and fights for. The note DWJ ends his run on is a perfect illustration of this, and it's an image that's going to stick with me for the rest of my life.

The series has since been taken over by the Energon Universe's overseer, The Walking Dead and Invincible writer Robert Kirkman, and it's... okay. It's whatever. But man, DWJ's 24-issue run is gonna go down in history as one of the greats, a thing that fans point newcomers towards for decades to come.

Favorite game of the year: Angeline Era

Hoo boy. This one released late in the year and seems to have flown under many peoples' radars, though I'm happy that it seems to have pretty decent traction on Steam. This is the latest release from Anodyne developers Analgesic Productions, and some of you may be surprised to learn this was my first time playing one of their games. Their stuff had always been on my radar as something I'd like, but I just never got around to it. But I'm glad I've finally changed that, because I had a great time with Angeline Era.

For the uninitiated, this is an old school fantasy action-adventure game that's easy to compare to a lot of things, but those comparisons do it a disservice. 2D Zelda might be an easy starting point of reference since it's a top-down game where you have a guy run around and whack enemies with his sword and break pots, but it's structured nothing like Zelda. It has some classic JRPG vibes, but it's extremely light on what we'd consider "RPG elements," and the devs don't categorize it as such. It also borrows the idea of combat where you bump into things to attack automatically from the earliest Ys games, but again, it doesn't really play like Ys either! It's using the design language of this era of games to do its own thing. So let's start over.

Angeline Era follows a man named Tets Kinoshta to the fictional European island nation of Era, where trickster Fae clash with Angels who are stranded on Earth and humans are caught in the middle. It's a really fun setting with heavy Celtic folklore influence and esoteric NPCs all over the place, especially all the Angels who are spending their time on Earth amusing themselves by crudely emulating human customs, but I was also a little fascinated by how much the real world crept into the writing. When Tets says he believes he's on a mission from God, the game isn't shy about the fact that it's the literal actual Christian God they mean. Like, Jesus Christ and Martin Luther get namedropped in the dialogue. This isn't a pure fantasy world, it's just an uncharacteristically fantastical corner of our world circa the early-to-mid-20th century. Anyway, Tets is tasked with finding objects called "Bicones" that, when collected, will reawaken the angels' crashed ship, restore their powers, and allow them to usher in a new, better world. You're shown on your map where the Bicones are located, but how exactly you get to them is up to you.

Here's the first big design hook: upon arriving in Era, you'll be plopped down on an isometric overworld map with no locations labeled. It's up to you to find everything. Pressing the topmost face button on your controller will have Tets pull out a magnifying glass and inspect the ground at his feet to see if there's anything there. Maybe you find a town in a clearing in the forest, or a secluded spot with some treasure, but most often you'll find a short, linear action stage, of which there are dozens and dozens. Completing an action stage will typically net you a Scale, which you use to level up, and it will also open up more paths back on the overworld for you to continue exploring.

The action here utilizes the aforementioned Ys-inspired "bumpslash" combat. It might seem odd at first, but the fact that the game frees you from having to think about pushing an attack button means that it can press you way harder on things like positioning. This can be a fairly challenging game even on Normal mode, throwing tons of enemies at you in borderline bullet hell fashion, but I found that even the toughest combat arenas could be conquered with a little patience and strategizing. You just have to know when it's safe to attack and which targets to prioritize first. Early on you'll also find a gun that reloads when you bumpslash things as your secondary weapon, but it has the interesting wrinkle of only firing at things directly above you on the screen. This leads to a fun rhythm of getting a few hits in on the enemies closing in on you with your sword so that you can reload your gun, and then shooting the ranged enemies sniping you from the north end of the room. Add on some unlockable sub-weapons and an element of verticality thanks to Tets' double jump and you have quite the fully-fledged action game, for a game with no attack button. It shines particularly bright in the highly varied boss fights, which are all fantastic in their own way.

The exploration is the real heart of the game, though. Whether on the overworld or in an action stage you'll be inspecting the ground constantly, and you never know what you'll find. Often you find nothing, sure. There can't be something on every floor tile. Maybe you just find a little pocket change or a common item. But maybe you inspect a suspicious spot and find a really good item, or a secret warp to a new location, or a hidden NPC with a bit of silly dialogue. Or maybe the game just trolls you and kills you. (Fitting for a game about Fae, it has an impish sense of humor.) It's all part of the fun. There is no completion percentage here, so I have no idea how much of the game I actually saw. But, again, that's part of the fun. This isn't a vast world—the overworld isn't huge, and I beat the game in about 17 hours—but it's an intricately crafted one with a lot of variety. Entering a new level could mean finding a normal action stage, or maybe something more nonlinear and puzzle-focused, or a goofy troll level that plays clown music at you, or something genuinely scary and unsettling. There's even a massive multi-floor dungeon that took me two or three hours to complete with its own unique mechanics and progression, which genuinely felt like it could have been a whole game of its own. It takes such delight and seeing how many different things it can do with its level kit, perfectly capturing that sense of discovery and adventure that I love about classic JRPGs and action adventure games in a package that feels totally fresh.

It's really only the game's ending that gives me pause in recommending it. That's not to say it's bad, but without getting into specific story spoilers, the last few hours of the game suddenly become completely linear and story-focused after a series of sharp pivots in the plot, and it's a lot to take in. I generally get what it's going for thematically and emotionally (some of it is very direct), but I'm still kind of mulling it over. It doesn't help that the final act feels pretty narratively disconnected from the rest of the game, especially with how few story scenes there are across your dozen or so hours of adventuring before suddenly being thrust into that extremely dense final act of art game set pieces, where basically all of the meat of the story is. But I think that disconnect is also kind of the point? Regardless, it's an ending that'll stick with me, and there are a lot of people out there who will resonate more with the perspective the creators are writing from, or who will just really like that last stretch for how esoteric the game gets. So it's still well worth checking out to see where you land.

For me, though, it was about the journey more than the destination. And the act of exploring Era and experiencing all those little moments and poking around for secrets, of which I'm sure there are many I didn't even find, is one that's really gonna stick with me. This is one of those games that reminds me why I got into game design in the first place.

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Truth be told, though, there were a bunch more games I really wanted to get around to before making this list, but I just never made the time. Unbeatable. To a T. Kingdoms of the Dump. Blippo+. Digimon Story: Time Stranger. Silent Hill f. Skate Story. Perhaps the one that I most wanted to get to was Wanderstop. But, well, Wanderstop is a game derived largely from experiences recovering from game dev burnout, a thing I am still figuring out how to deal with myself. I think it could really resonate with me... but it would be kind of wrong to binge my way through a game about burnout in a rush just to finish it before a self-imposed deadline for this blog, wouldn't it?

But just because it's a new year doesn't mean that these games (or movies, or comics, or anything else) are suddenly going anywhere, even if more things are coming out all the time. There's simply never enough time for all of it, but it's still important to slow down and savor things. To support cool new work without getting too caught up in the constant churn of FOMO. And also to figure out how to manage my stupid ADHD executive dysfunction better so that even my hobbies and experiencing art don't get turned into a homework assignment for me to procrastinate on and then cram at the last minute.

So that's it for my favorite stuff of 2025! If there's anything I neglected to mention here that you want to recommend, feel free to sound off in the comments below.