I slowly wrote this over the span of a few days because I had a lot to talk about. I didn’t complete any games in 2025, unfortunately, but I did watch a lot of shows and play a lot of games that I enjoyed. Honestly, it feels like time is passing quickly but the events from the start of 2025 feel like they’re from a century ago. My sense of time is all messed up these days.
It’s easy to come up with an idea for a game, it’s hard to actually fill in the actual details and work on the mechanical parts (i.e. battle system, inventory management, etc). Ultimately this is part of why I get discouraged to finish my games, the act of making all the systems myself ends up actually being a lot of work to the point where I get distracted by real-life circumstances or I just lose motivation to work on it. Finishing a game gives me more of a sense of accomplishment than finishing a drawing, I don’t really care how many people play my games so it’s not that either (regardless, I do appreciate anyone who does play my games, thank you very much for playing and giving your thoughts), but it’s just difficult to commit to one project without getting distracted or losing motivation. I truly envy people who can work on a single project for several years straight without being led astray. I had more free time than usual this year, so it feels bad not being able to complete any game. At the same time, I can’t really force myself to make things, I make things as a hobby and I don’t feel any obligation to create if it’s not fun.
I have an idea of what I want to work on in 2026.. Well, we’ll see if it pans out by the end of 2026! For now, here's a few mockups I made in 2025.
There's a few nice looking UIs, huh? I didn't finish any of them, but I might make them into something in the future.
Anime adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. Cool artstyle, I never finished reading the original novel but it’s more faithful than you’d expect. You may take issue with Albert being the protagonist but it makes sense with how the story is structured (in the novel, they start off from when the count’s working as a sailor to when he’s wrongfully imprisoned to when he becomes the count).. here we start from Albert’s POV when he goes to the moon (in the novel, he goes to Rome lmao) and meets the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo. It’s interesting to be on the outside, slowly learning about the Count and mysteries that surround him. I bet a lot of fujoshi loved this show.
The dueling mechs are cool as hell, people are just wrong about them. ← Someone with a soft spot for bad, clunky CGI
Jouji Nakata as the Count is perfect.. this is my favorite iteration of Edmond Dantes. I know F/GO fans love Electric Komaeda but the Count here is really cool, handsome, charismatic (etc etc) in his own way. He really chews the scenery.. The way he overflows with charm is something else. Gankutsuou wouldn’t be the same if the Count wasn’t so cool.
I realized only at the end of the show that all their names were based off of eggs and egg dishes.
I watched the premiere of the final movie at ACEN this year with a bunch of other puppet fans. The seats were uncomfortable, the seating wasn’t ideal, it was late at night, but I felt the audience’s love. It was really special hearing other people’s reactions in real time to everything in the movie. I just can’t believe it’s over, man. 2016 couldn’t have been that long ago, right? I was just starting my freshman year of university when they aired season 2. There’s no way so much time has passed since then…
The movie itself was a good conclusion to the series. Everyone’s favorite ruseman doesn’t let up with his tricks, and I loved the conclusion to Chao Feng’s character (I adore her, most Urobuchi-coded girl in the show, more psychotic lolis filled with LOVE should be in this world). I don’t like how they killed off Locust, the conclusions in the other series had me going “NO WAY, SO THAT’S HOW THEY’RE GONNA PULL IT OFF, HUH!?” but this was a bit lukewarm. *Those* felt like logical conclusions that you could come up with in the setting, but this was a bit too much of an asspull for me. Maybe I’m not familiar with the genre and this is a sort of genre convention but whatever. I was satisfied.. The other revelation at the end of the movie is really funny too. Reminds me of a certain reveal in ZTD!
I really would have liked to see the WHOLE series as PILI and Urobuchi intended, but it was (unfortunately) cut down into a single season + a movie. Many of my favorite works have been subject to budget constraints and whatnot (i.e. YU-NO, VTMB), so I can’t really fault them for this, but goddamn does it feel bad. But I guess having such a niche series get 4 seasons + several movies was enough of a blessing.
Either way, I hope Urobuchi continues working with PILI, or at least continues to write wuxia stories. Kikokugai in all of its dirty, perverted, and hot-blooded glory is one of his best works, and I really think he could make something that has the same blood flowing within it. Personally, I think something like Kikokugai in puppet form would be glorious.
One of the 4 great loli shows, according to the Chinese internet (alongside Cardcaptor Sakura, Alien 9, and ママは小学4年生). I think it’s up there myself.
The scene where Tsubasa gets hunted down by the alien actually is scary, but the rest of the series is a slice of life/coming of age show interspersed with fighting. It is in an interesting 48 minutes per episode format.
I’ve always been in love with the idea of a symbiotic being/kinda ‘soulbonded’ creature that knows you better than anything else in the world, and Figure 17 kinda scratches the itch. Hikaru and Tsubasa are two separate beings, but Hikaru is always pushing Tsubasa.. I think one of the best scenes in this show is when Hikaru tells Tsubasa just how much she cares for and loves her.
Great healing (?) anime that’s also very sad at times.
I never watched Digimon growing up, actually. I did watch a bunch of what came on at night (Bobobo, Zatch Bell), but Digimon just wasn’t on my rotation whenever I watched TV. Out of all the digimon shows, of course Adventure 01 is the most known one and.. I think it holds up really well! Plus, the digimon are CUTE and COOL. Gomamon is the digimon of all time
One thing I really like about these shows is how they actually show the relationship between the children and their parents AND also what their family is like. It’s not the main focus of the show, but you really understand why the characters act the way they do. I think a large blindspot a lot of stories have is to have the characters exist in a vacuum without their family, especially if they’re teenagers or children. It’s fine if they’re distant from their family, but stuff like that is something that should reflect on their character too.
02 is a messy show, but I still liked it. The main villain definitely is pitiable.. I guess he has a happy end, but it’s a little bittersweet if you think about it long enough. One of the problems of 02 is that I feel like they should have introduced parts of certain character’s characterizations earlier. The stuff with the dark seed is dubious, too.. I think children can act out on their own without the help of Some Mysterious Evil Parasite. I can see Ken torturing Digimon for fun just because he doesn’t think they’re real the same way somebody would torture people in the Sims, the same way I messed around in Flash games and just exploded things because it was funny.
I have a lot of praise for this series. I honestly thought it’d go harder on the themes of government surveillance, but it turned into something else.
Guilmon, most moe creature I’ve ever seen. I think Takato acts the most like a ‘real’ kid out of all of the protagonists I’ve seen so far in Digimon. Even his solutions to problems are the kinda thing I’d come up with when I’m 10. His bond with Guilmon is *special* too, considering that he literally made him! Something like Guilmon is the dream of every child. One of the episodes that hold the most weight is probably the one where Takato loses it and almost loses Guilmon. When it happens in 01 it’s because Tai is honest to god kinda an asshole, but here it’s his pure uncontrollable rage coming out and him immediately regretting it. It holds a lot more weight because Guilmon is his boy, he made him!
Terriermon is the sort of mon who’d go KWAB. I think Rika would do this too, but she’d go ‘hmph, KWAB’ and then walk away.
Jeri is about to have 60 children with Takato. I don’t mind how hard they pushed the romance in this season, they went kinda halfway in Adventure 01 and 02 and I appreciate how they committed to it here. The focus on what she goes through in the last arc is also real good. In general, I think the idea for the final villain was a total hit for me.
I have to stop myself from going on a tangent about how cute Rika is, she definitely is the best girl in the series so far. Yolei and Mimi I really liked, but Rika is on another level. Her offstandish attitude and cool, rebellious look!
I think the parasimon in the movie with Rika was erotic. The episode where Icedevimon basically stalks her so that he can ‘convince’ her to be his tamer, hmm, that sure was something. I think they even upped the implications in the English dub. What did they mean by this? Evidently, others saw my vision because there are more than one doujins on this subject. Thank you, Digimon.
The Jijimon and Babamon episode is probably one of my favorites. You might consider it filler but I really, really like slapstick filler episodes. What can I say?
Anyways, I’ll talk about Jeri again and also the point I made about family in 01. At first I was wondering where her family was, but then you actually get to see them and it makes a lot more sense why Jeri is the way she is. What the fuck is her dad's problem?
Sho Aikawa-written show with a lot of love for tokusatsu, kaiju, and heroes of all kinds. I’m not enough of a boomer to understand a lot of the references, nor am I a big tokusatsu fan, but I loved this pastiche world filled with superhumans and non-humans of all kinds.
Sho Aikawa.. I’m intrigued by most of his works, a lot of which have a strong political bent to them (especially UN-GO and Neo Ranga). This show is not an exception. The allusions to real life Japanese history were interesting, though I’m admittedly not very well versed in most Japanese history.. Luckily for me, this is the sort of stuff that gets me going. If you look around, there are timelines that show which episodes correspond with which events in history. I was a little shocked by the not-so-subtle reference to Unit 731.
I didn’t really take an issue with how the show is formatted in the first cour (they skip from the present day to the past to contrast how character motivations have changed), but they eventually drop most of it in the 2nd season, which I was disappointed by.
Individual episodes I enjoyed: this show is a lot more episodic than I expected, though all the episodes show different sides of what it means to be a superhuman in the setting. The not Sazae-san episode was cool (written by the actual writer of Sazae-san, lol), and I’m a big fan of Earth-chan. From the 2nd season, I liked the episode from with the not-Garo guard-dog youkai girl. I wish the show was a little bit longer..
What I loved the most is how the villain of the show is the complete opposite of the protagonist: the kind of guy who laughs at everything, tries to turn everything into a cynical money-making scheme, the kind of person who doesn’t actually believe in anything and does everything with a sense of irony. In Concrete Revolutio’s eyes, this is the enemy.
It’s probably one of the most unique shows I’ve seen in a while, but your brain needs to be configured a certain way to enjoy it.
Jiro Matsumoto’s most famous manga. I actually read this a few years earlier but I don’t remember finishing it, so I decided to read it for real this time around. This is probably one of the best portrayals of an actual (most likely) schizophrenic, down to his thinking patterns not making any sense to the average person but having their own strange logic. The way Kano reacts to things with 0 expression in his face most of the time can be so inappropriate that it loops back to being funny. Kano, what a guy.
God, I love Jiro Matsumoto’s style. I like his color work, but his sketchy-looking artstyle is something else. Some of the panels with less details look like pen scribblings in a notebook (compliment), but he really goes all out whenever he draws a scene in high detail. There’s a page where a guy gets punched real hard in the face and the amount of detail in that makes you feel his pain.
I think the best sidestory was seeing Mizoguchi slowly lose it AND seeing how he became the #1 domestic abuser. He’s a despicable human being, but he’s also very funny to watch. A kinda pathetic guy, but you feel bad for him.
Apocalypse Now but with schoolgirl mechs. I say this but it’s one of the coolest settings I’ve seen in a manga. Kinda dystopian hellhole with alternate dimensions and an AI that controls and decides everything.
I have to mention that the sex scenes feel really nasty and sweaty. Jiro Matsumoto’s specialty is kinda disgusting sex scenes, but you feel it especially in this one. There’s an entire volume filled with them.
The main ‘villain’ being a direct foil to Takigawa in terms of motivation is really cool too.. Takigawa is just so affixed to reality, the truth because of what’d happened to him in the past but the villain only knows about this made up ‘setting’ that it was born in. One of the best scenes is the one at the very end where the protagonist is just talking to the main villain (having a smoke) as everything around them falls apart.
Reread of my first Jiro Matsumoto manga. Story of an abused child doing the only thing he knows how to do, AND also Alice!
It’s raunchy, bloody, and HITS emotionally. What I love about Jiro Matsumoto is how much real emotion is in between all the goofy and disgusting parts of it. Shu had a hard life.
People dislike the ending or find it anticlimatic, but I think it was the only place it could go. Fucked up child surrounded by fucked up people can only grow up into a fucked up adult and continue doing what he always does, while the people around him actually change. It’s pretty sad, but I understand.
A diversion: Urobuchi’s older works (i.e. Kikokugai, Saya no Uta) have always had a sort of antisocial bent to them that made them so appealing to me. The sex feels filthy, the violence is self-indulgent, and the sort of love in them is the kind that destroys everything around it. These same antisocial qualities make his stories repulsive to most people (i.e. normalfags) are what make them so appealing to me. I think Jiro Matsumoto stories have this same unfiltered antisocial feeling that Urobuchi works used to have, but Jigoku no Alice is the most direct about it. The protagonist outright rejecting the world that hurt him to be in his kingdom forever and be like a god.. I really like it, I love it.
Starts off as a cynical, materialistic gorefest, eventually gets to a point where there are a few characters that you really care about and not just a few mob characters who are there to just die. It kinda mirrors Kei’s own character development where he finds people he cares about and stops being as much as a guy who only thinks about his cock. I avoided watching/reading Gantz for a while because I only thought it was an edgy nihilistic gorefest and I had a personal aversion to that sort of thing, but I really enjoyed it. People don’t make things like Gantz anymore.
DINOSAURS and Osaka definitely my favorite parts, but I don’t hate the final part with the giant alien race either. There’s a sense of escalation for the aliens, where you THINK you reached the strongest enemies but they keep getting stronger and more fucked up. The only place to go, I suppose, was a giant advanced race of aliens. I preferred when it was them just fighting weird looking aliens in those skin-tight body suits but the complete change in scale was welcome too. I think the ‘answer’ to what Gantz was is the sort of thing where the answer will always be disappointing compared to the mystery surrounding it.
People take issue with the part with the God-Alien, but I think most of the manga blasts you with this sense of materialistic nihilism while the characters just continue to reject it.
The body suits are cool as hell by the way! It appeals to my chuuni sensibilities a great amount, especially whenever Izumi (MY FUCKING HERO, a REAL motherfucker) is on the page. Izumi is the best character. He’s responsible for one of the most infamous pages in Gantz and some of the other best characters as well. Whenever Izumi isn’t on the page, characters should be asking “where is Izumi, that motherfucker?”. He should have been there at the end but he chews the scenery too much, I understand why he had to die. Gantz has a lot of characters that are just ‘cool’, like the guy who walked out of a fighting game or Kato.
I didn’t watch the anime much, but I think the opening fits perfectly with what the series is. A kinda underground, rebellious, fast-paced feel.
My first foray into this series was with the GBA games, way back when I was a child. In those games you’d summon monsters by entering “passwords” that’d generate monsters based off of the characters you entered, but the original games had a gimmick that made it stand out against every other monster collecting game: creating monsters from CDs!
To this day, I still think that the CD collecting gimmick is one of the coolest I’ve seen in a game… I’ve heard that the modern remasters just let you search through a song library to generate a monster, but I think that takes away a great deal of the charm of looking through your OWN CD library at home and trying all of them out.
When I got my first smartphone, I’d downloaded some kind of cute girl collecting app called Barcode Kanojo that did something similar (scanning barcodes to generate girls). Why can’t we get anything cool like that these days?
In my opinion, Suezos are definitely my favorite race. You have your flying eye monsters, but what about your walking (hopping) eye monsters? They’re a bunch of lovable little freaks.
The first monster I raised was a Melon Suezo named Beeety Gottz, and I loved him very much but I couldn’t get him very far in the tournaments… He liked to play, and I could never figure out the minigame but I thought it was very cute that he just wanted to play around. I couldn’t bear to see him die, so I froze him and raised another monster just when he was about to pass on. I created the ultimate lifeform from the combination of Beetty Gottz and a Kasumi named Tittietittie.. his daughter, Sexy Gottz. It took a while but she won EVERY tournament and became a legend! I love you Beeety Gottz! I love you Tittietittie! And I love you Sexy Gottz!
Even though I really hate seeing them die, I think reading a guide to maximize your monster’s lifespan and stat gains kinda ruins the magic of the game… it’s a little like reading out someone else’s strategy for a boss battle.
I fell in love with this game after trying it at an arcade. The gameplay is simple, but it gradually speeds up to the point where you can’t relax at all.. I honestly wish sometimes that the wish started off with the speed that it goes at in later levels. I have it on my Vita now and I spent a day at a courtroom playing this game, waiting for my name to be called.
Also known as Hippa Linda or Freak Out.
For a long time, the only Treasure game that I’ve played was Ikaruga, which I don’t have particularly strong feelings about and haven’t really attempted a 1cc of. I’m in love with the style of this game! Let me stretch some more! It took a little bit to adjust to the controls, but when it CLICKED I felt like I learned how to use a new body part. I want to play more Treasure games in the future.
I didn't know I was so bad at platformers until I played this game.. it's really difficult at times, you have to precise, AND the way it saves means that you'll have to repeat a level if you die on another level. Really punishing if you don't play 3d platformers much like me. I gave up and used save states which means I DIDN'T BEAT THE GAME, I CHEATED MYSELF, well, I had fun. I still need to finish 2, but 2 isn't THAT bad in terms of difficulty. That, or I just got used to the difficulty in 1.
Gameplay is more or less the same as the first game.. maybe a little more forgiving compared to the first game in terms of difficulty.
I like the new characters introduced, Lolo is definitely a cutie-patootie. I didn’t write about Klonoa 1 on here, but Ghadius definitely is the coolest character, right!? He’s so cool!
I didn’t care for the snowboarding sections.
Very gorgeous game at times, by the way. My favorite areas were the Kingdom of Sorrow and the Maze of Memories. I don’t like how the remaster messes up the colors of the game, you should play the PS2 version instead.
I played the Mage (twintails == the best portrait for female mage, the best hairstyle for anything) and Monk routes. It really is a magical experience, I’ve been missing out all these years.
The combat is just the default 2k battle system, which I actually quite like, but some people associate the default battle system with a sense of cheapness and zero balance (you CAN have a custom battle system that’s unfun but technically impressive but that’s another story). Thankfully, the battles are actually well-balanced in Ruina AND party members have their uses outside of battles as well. You might end up taking some of them along just because you like their party interactions though like I did (lol)... Ruina isn’t difficult to the point where you need to optimize the party members you bring along and that’s fine with me.
Everything said about the presentation and story has been said elsewhere, but it really is impressive. I love how the map opens up as you check all the points on it, and I love how you’re rewarded for exploring the dungeon without going back to rest. It’s a very nice way to make the risk of going through the dungeon without returning to save and heal up feel satisfying. I’ve only done two of the routes, but the way character interactions change ever so slightly really impressed me.. I think it really is a sign of how much soul was put into this game that the developer thought of almost everything and even rewards the players for finding unorthodox solutions.
Syphon is best boy, obviously, forever and always. That damn tsundere shota mage brat..
I was still a high school student who had nothing but time to waste back when I played YU-NO, so I spent a good part of my summer playing through that game, combing through theory posts, and listening to the soundtrack. I don’t think anything can beat playing YU-NO for the first time, but Kanno’s other games definitely hit the same spot. There’s a reason EVE Burst Error was the #1 Sega Saturn game of the year at one point.
The game is split into two sections: down-on-his-luck detective Kojiroh and super-agent Marina. Also, I have to mention this somewhere because I barely see anyone discuss this game, even in VN circles: Marina really, REALLY wants to fuck old men. I’m honestly impressed at how consistent of a character trait this is. Kojiroh is lecherous in the way you’d expect from a Kanno protagonist but holy shit Marina doesn’t stop. This is not a criticism of her character, I’m in no position to criticize her anyways, but I was in shock at how much she was lusting after older men.
I think a hallmark of Kanno’s games are the goofy character interactions and how good he is at setting up ‘hooks’ in the story. The beginning felt a bit slow, but after the first hour I couldn’t stop going through the game! The game has it all: red herrings, crazy twists, bad jokes, if you’re playing the English version they keep referencing Bill Clinton having sex with Monica Lewinsky, sexy graphics, and a wonderful soundtrack by the king Ryu Umemoto. I don’t mind the gameplay, BUT it isn’t hard to get stuck on one part of the game and wonder ‘what am I missing’ and it turns out to either be “you need to clear something on the other scenario first to progress” OR “you need to keep clicking on the look option until something triggers”. Sometimes the exploration gameplay is fun, but other times it’s a total pain.
I really like both Kojiroh and Marina as protagonists.. It’s kinda hard to come by protagonists these days who are confident about their sexuality, but oh boy do these two get around. It’s a breath of fresh air to have protagonists who openly flirt and fawn over other characters, and they do it while being cool. The hacking scene might be the peak of the game, where you see the two of them interacting with each other while not actually talking.
The ending revelation of the game is pretty divisive, but I thought it was satisfying on an emotional level.. Seeing the entire sequence with [CHARACTER]’s inner thoughts made me see their character in a different way.
I played both around the same time, so I’ll write my thoughts on the two of them.
First off, I DLATMOL is a full package in terms of presentation, story, and gameplay! Really impressive, but I haven’t played through a romhack since TLP. I’m not really fond of Skills in GBA FEs so I haven’t touched any newer hacks with them in it either (except for code of the black knights lol).
I don’t consider myself to be ‘good’ at Fire Emblem, and DLATMOL really had me questioning my skills halfway through. It starts off manageable but the maps at the end of the game really tested my patience. I gave in and used save states eventually, but the last few maps still took a lot out of me. Maybe I got really unlucky with stat growths, but Francine was unusable 2/3rds of the way through unfortunately. I wanted to use Jenna more, but her lack of speed growths also really hurt. I think the cheeseman is a cool character but I just don’t use thieves much, unfortunately. Kiri and Freesia were my MVPs (Freesia truly is the best, huh).
I really enjoyed the story and the characters, Freesia is fucked in a way that’s very amusing, I love her. Made me wish that I went male tactician to get her ending. I think it’s interesting to have the tactician go “what the hell are we doing here?” when Orion starts going along with Freesia’s Hellfire and Brimstone moments. I didn’t think much of Freesia at first but she really, really ramps up. Freesia’s mom being a cute hippie tomboy wasn’t what I expected but I approve.
Tacthack is unfinished, unfortunately, and you really start to notice near the end of the game. I felt it was easier to get through than DLATMOL. The tactician is kind of a dork in this one, I don’t have much to write about unfortunately. The ESL mercenary is cute.
Two abused children licking each other’s wounds, also a lot of rape and consensual sex sometimes. It’s a Setoguchi VN I haven’t read to the very end, so I thought to give it a go again.
Manabu is a funny guy, some of the H-scenes in the first scenario have amusing tangents. He was really cute and cool in Risa’s scenario.. his life kinda sucks, but he still manages to be a cheeky little fellow.
I think Izumi is cute, and her side-route was pretty amusing as well, but by the time you finish Risa’s scenario you’ll just be thinking “you thieving cat! Risa might be okay with this, but I won’t stand for it!”. Risa really is the best. She’s a little bit similar to the main girl in SWAN SONG, but Risa doesn’t have a sort of spiteful tinge to her. She really feels like a Dostoevsky heroine in how much she’s willing to sacrifice for Manabu and in how little self worth she has.
The game ends on a happy note. For just a brief moment, the main two are having a good time, but it feels bad knowing that it probably won’t last. But I want to believe in their happiness, even if it’s for that moment.
Alright, that's all, mostly. I've left some things out since I didn't have anything to say about them.
Games I want to play in the future:
Histoire, Citadel, Dungeon Antiqua, Robot Girl’s Dream, Mischief Makers
Thanks for reading. I want to keep on making whatever I want and living.
In terms of art, I want to keep working on pieces with backgrounds and, if I get a good idea, try working on a short manga.
I will enjoy 2026, and I hope you do so as well.