It’s been a rough year. I hope you were able to find some solace and escape in fiction.

I’d like to talk about the media that left an impression on me this year. Anything I personally experienced for the first time in 2025 is fair game for this post, not just things released in 2025.

As with most of the internet, this post contains Manosaba spoilers.

Best New Anime (original): Apocalypse Hotel

I already wrote a full review of this in the previous post on this blog, so go read that. Apocalypse Hotel is the sort of show where you finish watching it and immediately know it’s going to stick with you for a long time. When you’ve been watching anime for decades, series like this are harder and harder to come by! Hopefully Cygames keeps siphoning money from everyone’s wallets with their Umamusume-branded straws (this metaphor may have gotten away from me) so we continue getting series like this from them. Fun fact: Apocalypse Hotel is the highest rated anime ever on Bilibili. China has some good taste.

The runner-up for this category would be Turkey!. It has not left a lasting impression on me the way Apocalypse Hotel has, but it showed us how much pathos you can wring out of even the most absurd premise as long as you put your heart into it.

Best New Anime (adaptation): Ninkoro

Whoa it’s another show I wrote about in the previous post on this blog crazy!!! Ninkoro also became an instant classic for me, and it’s a fantastic adaptation of the source material to boot, transformative in all the right ways and demonstrating some of the classic Shaft pizazz. There’s no more suitable candidate for this arbitrary category I invented (one might say it’s my own invention).

The runner-up here would be mono. I know it’s a somewhat divisive show, but I really liked the cast and looked forward to seeing their adventures each week. The stellar production certainly didn’t hurt.

Best Old Anime: Seraphim Call

Shoutouts to Roak on Discord for recommending this one. Ostensibly a promotional vehicle for a Bishoujo Franchise ala Sister Princess, in actuality it’s more like a collection of unrelated short films, each with wildly variant tones, approaches, and subject matter. The first episode doesn’t give the best impression — it’s a lot of dated turn-of-the-century otaku humor — but everything thereafter I found fascinating for me. The highlight for me was the yuri twincest two-parter written and boarded by Mochizuki Tomomi. It’s very much Heisei yuri, focusing on a “closed” relationship and disconnected from real-world social justice issues; but it’s compelling within that framework, with novel presentation (we were calling it “yuri Inception” while watching) and well-realized characters given the runtime. It even manages to have a happy ending!

Best Gundam I Watched This Year: Char’s Counterattack

Gundam has become something of a staple food for me, as I suppose it eventually does for all otaku. This year, I was finally able to get through ZZ, thereby unlocking CCA for my consumption. CCA is pure, distilled Tomino, nothing but his excesses on parade for two hours straight. It is mesmerizing, and it is exhausting. An essential watch for any Gundam fan.

Best Yuri Anime: WataNare

At long last, the world has learned of Mikami Teren’s brilliance. The explosive popularity of WataNare’s anime has been a delight to witness; it will have a lasting impact on yuri and its fandom, mark my words. See, this is what happens when great source material gets a competent adaptation!

Best Surprisingly Good Yuri Anime: Bad Girl

What did I say about these categories being arbitrary? Not much to say here, I just wanted to shine a spotlight on a series that may have gone underappreciated by the yuri fandom. You need an appreciation for Kirara vibes^{[What are these?]} and some very risque humor, but the characters and pairings are all lovable in their own distinct ways. And it has NTR. And the mangaka looks like this.

Best Manga: Kami’ina Botan

Kami’ina Botan is a manga that gets off to a rough start. The mangaka threw a bunch of his favorite character designs together with only the very loose unifying theme of “alcohol,” and as a result the first volume is nothing to write home about. Give it a chance, though, and you’ll see Kami’ina Botan come into its own: a portrait of university students taking their first nervous steps into adult life and adult relationships. Its depiction of uncertainty and unease is haunting, arresting, beautiful. I’m counting on you to do it justice in the anime next year, Aninari.

Also, all of the girls are really cute. （小並感

Best Game Coming Out Next Year That I Played This Year: Distorted Travesty 4

First, read what Zephyr has to say about his own game.

I had the privilege of playing through a tester build of DT4 earlier this year. It was so absorbing that I played it for an average of ten hours a day, 18 days straight, streaming all of my gameplay. Suffice to say it is a masterpiece of game design and a monumental achievement for a single person. It is also a game that should have been made sooner — and by that, I don’t mean that Zephyr should have made it sooner. I find it frustrating that it falls to solo devs like him to advance the mechanical side of the medium, to design games of mastery. I am 36 years old and have been playing games for 33 of those, give or take; I am tired of games which do not assume basic literacy on the player’s part, and I hunger for games which iterate on conventional design elements. Thank you, Zephyr, for catering to players willing to rise and meet your challenges.

Now, how much more can I say about DT4 itself without spoiling the unwashed masses yet to experience it? Prepare to have your world upended several times over. It will test your raw platforming skills. It will test your understanding of the character you’re controlling and her moveset. It will test your ability to solve puzzles of both modern sokoban and lore-driven lateral thinking varieties (Zephyr played La-Mulana in between DT3 and DT4, and it shows). It will test your patience and perseverance as you grind bosses for hour after hour. But don’t worry. Throughout it all, you’ll never stop having fun.

Look forward to it in 2026. Or maybe 2027, but hopefully 2026.

Best Game That Shockingly Came Out This Year: Silksong

There are aspects of Silksong that I don’t expect other developers to be able to imitate, like the way it’s one of the most gorgeous-looking games ever. But I do hope it encourages them to start trusting the player a little more. Kayin’s excellent post about Silksong outlines this idea more eloquently than I ever could; do give it a read. My intentionally reductive take is that I hope Silksong inspires indie developers to make harder games.

It would also be nice if there were less indie games where the dialogue was painful to read. I’m pleasantly surprised that Silksong’s script reads as well as it does, given that I don’t remember seeing a script editor in the credits…

Best New Visual Novel: Mahou Shoujo no Majo Saiban

Who could have predicted that 2025 would have not one, not two, but three wholly original Japanese ADVs moving hundreds of thousands of units each? Enough people have gushed about Hundred Line and Urban Myth Dissolution Center already, so allow me to gush about Manosaba.

The elevator pitch for Manosaba is “Danganronpa meets Madoka”. You’ve got thirteen teenage girls trapped on an island together, forced to literally witch hunt one another via a series of witch trials. (Hence the title.) It wouldn’t be as successful as it is without something of its own, though. You can’t just copy popular things and expect it to work. What does Manosaba do that sets it apart, then? What is its special sauce? Answer after the obnoxious paragraph break.

Manosaba excels by addressing the death game genre’s greatest shortcoming: characters being thrown away. Death game scenarios must necessarily utilize death as a means to an end, a method of eliciting drama, and thus they struggle to ascribe real weight to it. Characters exist to be killed off, and thus it is difficult to become attached to them while they are alive or have a genuine emotional response when they are revealed to be dead. By incorporating timeloop elements, however, Manosaba is able to recast death as a tragedy to be overcome — while also ensuring each character is afforded their own story. It learned the right lessons from Madoka.

This approach is predicated on having a solid cast to begin with. Manosaba is a master class in crafting characters, from their costumes to their personalities. You will come out of it loving all thirteen +α of the girls, and you will sift through the mountains of fanart posted to social media daily. Sorry, but I don’t make the rules, Acacia does. If you asked me who I found the cutest right after completing the game, my answer would have been Noa and An’an, but after seeing so much fanart of Meruru recently (it’s her birthday as I’m writing this post), I’m starting to develop an appreciation for her, too… Here’s a nice post analyzing her character, contradictions and all, by an artist who draws a lot of her. The best pairings are of course Sherry/Hannah and any of the ones involving Hiro. That one Hiro/Reia bad ending (you know the one) is absolute cinema.

Damn, this section is starting to degrade into yuributa ramblings… I better cut it off here so I preserve my reputation as an erudite eroge expert. What do you mean I haven’t had that reputation for a long time now?

Best Decades-old RPG Maker Game: Seraphic Blue

This is another title I’ve already written a review for. I’ve been in the process of playing through some of the classic JRPGs I never got to in-era, and Seraphic Blue has made the strongest impression on me so far, followed by Valkyrie Profile. I considered putting Valkyrie Profile somewhere in this post, but I played it in December of last year, and I absolutely must preserve the sanctity of my flippant nonsense. Feel free to reflect on a time before Sakuraba was washed at your own leisure.

Best Soulslike: Lies of P Overture

I play a lot of Soulslikes, and I would say that 2025 was the best year for the genre yet. We saw a number of expansive, polished titles offering play experiences rivaling or surpassing those of Fromsoft’s originals. Leading the pack for me was Overture, the paid DLC expansion to 2023’s Lies of P. I found it to be a particularly balanced entry in a genre where games often come short in one are or another, combining diverse combat scenarios and environments with an emotionally resonant narrative.

This entry reads like a game journalist wrote it, and I don’t like that. くわばらくわばら

Best Soulslike If You Have Friends: Elden Ring Nightreign

We^[Who?] were all skeptical of this one before release, but it turns out we needn’t have been. I have over 100 hours in Nightreign as of writing this post, easily the most I’ve put into any multiplayer game ever. Nightreign proves two things: the core gameplay loop of Souls is robust enough to survive being repurposed in radical fashion, and Fromsoft is capable of designing a competent multiplayer action game. This unfortunately means that I will have to purchase a Switch 2 in order to play Duskbloods, so maybe Nightreign is bad after all.

Best Demon’s Soulslike: Dolls Nest

Unlike other Soulslikes, this one is about the robots level design REWORK THIS

It’s hard not to yearn for the days when Nitro+ was releasing ambitious, immaculately produced visual novels left and right. I think few people have more of a right to say that than me, if I may be so bold. At the same time, if Dolls Nest forecasts their work moving forward… it’s hard to be too upset with the current state of affairs. Its world of underground superstructures is perfectly realized, cavernous labyrinths of twisted metallic imitations of life which are beckoning in their pristine gruesomeness. It’s a testament to the sheer, unbridled talent of Nitro+’s development team that they managed to construct something as singular as Dolls Nest in their first foray into 3D action game development. The future may be brighter than anticipated.

Hopefully their next game has better performance though.

Best Library Simulator: Library of Ruina

Ruina is a one of a kind experience. That may sound hyperbolic, but you’ll simply have to accept that it’s true. Many stories can be described as anti-capitalist in some way, but Ruina truly earns this descriptor, displaying a keen understanding of the pressure modern society exudes on the individual (refer to the lyrics of Children of the City) while remaining optimistic that we can overcome them together. And it wraps this story in a deep, complex turn-based combat system, featuring some of the hardest fights you’ll ever come across in an offline, single player RPG. In every way Ruina is demanding, yet it is equally rewarding — you will get out what you put in, whether you are building teams or analyzing character motives.

The caveat here is that it takes at least 20 hours, if not more, for either the story or the combat to really start coming together. Be prepared for a slow start, and be prepared for some steep difficulty spikes. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, because the game itself seems repulsed by the idea of teaching the player anything.

Best Gacha Game I Should Not Have Picked Up Because I Already Play Multiple: Limbus Company

Having caught up on Limbus, I am most impressed by how it refuses to compromise The City as a setting, despite being a gacha game. It is every bit as horrific as it was in Lobotomy Corporation and Ruina, even if it is now viewed through the lens of an oudou JRPG travelogue. Cantos such as 4, 7, and 8 build upon themes established in Ruina from new angles; Limbus is not a spinoff, but a meaningful continuation of what precedes it. Depending on how you feel about gacha games, this may or may not be a good thing. Personally, I just wish the combat were as fun as Ruina’s. Sanity is a terrible system, with terrible implications for the rest of the combat design…

I’d like to shout out the English translation of Limbus, by the way. I played Ruina in English with Japanese voices and found both scripts to be… fine, more or less. No strong preference for either. In Limbus, though, I find the English script quite compelling in its own right, and feel no urge to switch away from it. Cantos 5 onward are a showcase of excellent localization work, and I commend the current translator for the consistent quality of their output… especially because I know firsthand just how rough working on a gacha game can be.

Best Yuri Couple: Konoha and Satoko

Botan and Ibuki are also pretty good.

Best Music Video: Sunfaded

I don’t play Gakumas, as I cannot stand the male protagonist, but it sure has some cute girls. The best designs in a gacha game since Blue Archive, if you ask me. Something else it has is great music. Sunfaded combines both of these things. Ethereal vocals overlaid on repetitious, grungy guitars as Shinosawa Hiro glides through blanched urban environments, ghostlike and transient. It’s all so captivating. I can’t stop listening to the song and watching the accompanying MV. I can’t believe this is idol music.

Best New Character: Nikaidou Hiro

Acacia was right to put her in all three games. She’s incredibly entertaining as a PoV character while also playing off the rest of the cast in fun ways. I love every single 正しくない and 桜羽💢エマ💢 meme. Looking forward to seeing how many new girlfriends she amasses in Manomura and Hanoura. Damn these 略称 are getting confusing though.

Best 3D Action Game That’s Not A Soulslike: Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix

This is the single game I spent the most time playing after DT4 and Limbus Company this year. I did a Level 1 Critical Mode run despite being wholly unfamiliar with both KH2FM itself and Kingdom Hearts as a series. It worked out surprisingly well. There were certainly some growing pains at first, but I eventually came to appreciate KH2FM as the exceptionally well-crafted game that it is. It contains a staggering variety of inventive challenges which encourage (some would say “force”) the player to explore every last nook and cranny of Sora’s kit. If you’re looking for a game that’s hard from hour 1 to hour 100, KH2FM is here for you. Its embrace is warm and loving except for when Genie Jafar and Vexen rub against you.

Best VTuber Debut: Fuzuki Miki

It’s got everything you could ask for. Unnecessary amounts of lore, a poorly labeled board game, the viewer being abducted and transformed into an alien hamster, a sudden cameo from Harada. I’ve always enjoyed Miki’s content, so it’s nice to see her back. Her new Live2D is really cute…

Best First Person DMC Clone: Ultrakill

In Ultrakill, stylish play is mandatory. I greatly respect the decision to tie the style meter to the player’s ability to regenerate health, and would not like the game nearly as much otherwise. Once you reach Brutal difficulty, you must play the game on its own terms to have any chance of success. That’s beautiful, if you ask me. Also the encounter design is really good and the story is cool and Fraud when and blah blah blah. Someone else can tell you about that stuff.

Best Shmup Or STG Or Bullet Hell Or Whatever We’re Calling Them Now: Stellavanity

The more shmups I play, the more I develop an understanding of what exactly I want out of them. And it’s pretty simple, really: either IKD or ZUN design. If you can blend both, that’s sick too. あうとさいど’s games do just that, and Stellavanity succeeds at doing so as well. I learned of Stellavanity some time ago from posts describing it as the game with the second hardest TLB (you know what the first hardest is), but it wasn’t until recently that I gave it a spin myself. I was initially somewhat put off by the notion of a shmup with RPG elements, but the design itself quickly won me over with its mixture of CAVE and Touhou conventions, plus a little spice of its own. Even if you’re a scrub like me who can never dream of seriously challenging the TLB, it’s at least worth a 1cc or two. It’s JP-only, but its page on the Shmups Wiki has everything you need to know to get it up and running, as well as translations for every text string in the game.

~~~

Okay, that’s all you’re getting out of me. You might have noticed that this wasn’t a reading-heavy year for me; I hope to be more proactive on this front in 2026. If nothing else, I’ve been diligent about keeping up with issues of Yurihime. Maybe I’ll do another megapost reviewing all of the series currently running in it, since the lineup is now quite different from when I did the last one.

Merry Christmas.