This Week In Retro: 2025 (Patreon)

2025: Turn the volume up

by Diamond Feit

I think we can all agree that 2024 could have gone better and that the fallout from last year's mistakes weighed heavily on the events of 2025. Five years ago, I remember writing a wrap-up of 2020 that expressed exhaustion but at least we had an election that gave me reasons to feel optimistic about the future. Meanwhile, I would describe most of this past year as one nightmarish headline after another—headlines we all knew were coming because we remember what happened the last time this same abhorrent cretin sat in the Oval Office.

However, I also recognize that with no authority or ability to directly influence the president of the United States, I can't let his ineptitude or corruption ruin my life. I refuse to abandon my plans to visit the country of my birth, nor will I allow pessimism to overrule common sense: Nothing lasts forever.

Besides, 2025 had its share of surprises, even in the world of politics. A 34-year-old assemblyman shocked all the pundits and defeated a do-nothing establishment candidate for the mayorship of New York City, all while running a grassroots campaign that celebrated the city's best qualities. Any world where such an upset can occur is worth living in and worth fighting for. 

So while we bade farewell to many beloved creative people and institutions this year, I remain eager to celebrate wins of all sizes. I drew the best possible fortune at a shinto shrine on January 1st and here I am, still breathing at the end of December. Dick Cheney can't say that—or anything else, ever.

Speaking of New Year's Day, I took advantage of Japanese retail customs to pick up a copy of 2024's much-discussed Astro Bot. Part-action-platformer, part-PlayStation-propaganda, I found the game's charms outweighed the cynical corporate shenanigans that must have fueled its development.

Astro Bot imagines an alternate universe where sentient robots explore the galaxy in a massive spaceship shaped exactly like a PlayStation 5. These little guys love PlayStation almost as much as they love to party, as many of them resemble characters associated with Sony's gaming legacy. Their celebratory voyage gets interrupted by a sinister green blob-like alien who tears their vessel asunder and rips out its central processor to enhance its own flying saucer. Heavily damaged, the gargantuan monolith plummets towards a nearby desert planet, scattering all of its passengers and most of its internal equipment during its fiery descent.

Fortunately, a Dual Speeder survives the crash half-buried in sand. The player shakes their PS5 Dual Sense controller—the basis for the Dual Speeder's design—to free its on-screen counterpart and revive a nearby broken bot. Sporting a small cape, this fellow serves as our protagonist as we guide him on a quest to recover the components of the downed spacecraft and rescue all the other robots now strewn amongst the stars.

Astro Bot operates much like a 3D Super Mario title with various themed levels grouped together into larger worlds. Players enter each level with a primary goal of reaching a flagpole but along the way they'll gather coins and liberate their lost crewmembers. With hidden paths and alternate exits squirreled away throughout the game, players have plenty of reasons to revisit past stages hunting for stuff they missed on their first run.

One thing I love about Astro Bot is its simplicity in the face of modernity. Sure, it's a very pretty game to look at, but your bot has only two abilities of any note. One button jumps and you can hold down the button to hover in place for an extra second. The other button punches which hurts enemies and liberates your allies. The game does dispense periodic, temporary power-ups—usually as a means to clear a specific stage hazard—but for a majority of the game Astro Bot does exactly what he did when you first began.

In comparing Team Asobi's virtual obstacle course to Nintendo's past adventures, I'm glossing over the fact that at every turn, Astro Bot goes out of its way to remind players about the history of PlayStation. Most of the bots you gather at your base take the form of avatars of classic games like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, or Street Fighter. I will admit that I got a kick out of seeing these virtual cosplayers, but I also think these franchises deserve better than serving as nostalgia bait. Dressing up my robot pal as Parappa the Rapper is cute, but imagine if Sony paid his creator Masaya Matsuura a living wage to make new games.

I enjoyed my time with Astro Bot and its adorable cast of characters, eventually powering my way through the extra-hard challenge levels which lack checkpoints en route to earning a Platinum Trophy. Given the choice between acknowledging the history of the medium or acting like only new games exist, I of course welcome a work like Astro Bot steeped in the past. I just wish console makers and license holders like Sony put a greater effort into maintaining access to their back catalogs on modern platforms.

By January's end brand new indie games began to arrive in force on Steam and Itch.io, some of which I had anticipated for months while others surprised me. I consider myself a Metroidvania connoisseur and I know the artists at Team Ladybug excel at crafting worlds pixel by pixel, so I was looking forward to Blade Chimera. Giving the hero a melee weapon and a gun creates interesting combat scenarios where players need to choose on the fly whether to risk approaching enemies or try to pick them off from a distance. Your companion, a sentient Demon Sword, imparts information to you and can assume other forms with both offensive and defensive capabilities.

On the complete opposite spectrum, Dead Letter Dept. invoked memories of my past working for the U.S. Postal Service, albeit with a nightmarish twist. The game sits players at a virtual computer where they're fed images of undeliverable mail. All you need to do is read what text you can and type it into the database to send these lost items on their way. You're free to write your own address and receive them at your company-provided apartment, of course, but helping yourself to too many freebies will attract attention. More concerning, however, are the envelopes with messages rather than addresses written on them, missives that suggest this job has a dark side.

Yet it was through a stray announcement on BlueSky that I discovered The Roottrees Are Dead, an ominous title for a research-based game about digging into the family tree of a (make-believe) wealthy empire after an accident claims the lives of three celebrity sisters. Players dig through documents and search a faux-internet to determine exactly how many heirs might lay claim to this sudden inheritance. While there's a hint of morbidity given the inciting incident, there's no sense of dread like in Dead Letter Dept.; I bought it on a Friday night and refused to put it down until I felt I had sufficiently solved the mystery. For a similar but much shorter experience, I can also recommend A Hand With Many Fingers, another research-centered game but one about a real conspiracy instead of a fake family.

March turned into a big month for me as my children graduated from their respective schools. They're both teenagers now, a weird feeling given that my job requires me to re-examine media from my own adolescence. Watching them develop their tastes as I continuously look back at what I did when I was their age, I can't help but make comparisons between the 1990s and today. My wife and I chide them for spending too much time watching videos online but if YouTube or Netflix existed 30 years ago, I never would have left my room, let alone my house.

Speaking of 30 years ago, I put time aside to finally play Chrono Trigger so I could cover its anniversary in my weekly Retronauts column. Typically in these situations I give myself a couple hours to get a taste of the subject matter before switching gears into writer mode, but Chrono Trigger refused to relinquish its grip on me.

First off, I'm a sucker for tales of time travel because it's a fantasy that comes with inherent risk attached. We all have our own ideas about what we could do given the power to change the past or witness the future before it occurs, but we also recognize that disrupting the record of events would surely carry a heavy price. Once you start tugging at the threads of history, you run the risk of unravelling all that we've accomplished.

Chrono Trigger takes that core time travel concept and builds an epic role-playing adventure around it, beginning with an accidental jump into the past that threatens to erase the future descendants of a missing monarch. Things only get more complicated when the heroes learn that all of civilization will end in a thousand years, persuading them to risk their lives in order to save the future of the planet. In other words, Chrono Trigger oscillates between "we need to undo damage done to the timeline" and "we need to change history" by letting players see the consequences of their actions (or inactions) over and over.

I don't have a good excuse as to why I never played Chrono Trigger until 2025. I watched my friends play it and listened to them extol its many virtues. I heard the music and thought it sounded great. I suppose if I had access to an actual time machine, I might go back to 1995 and tell myself not to put off playing it for any longer, although advising teenage-me to spend more time with my SNES is awfully low on the list of things I'd want to do in such an unlikely scenario.

Whatever my reasons, I'm just happy to report the game holds up extremely well today. Writing these weekly columns over the past five years has given me cause to play a lot of retro titles that I never got around to before. Often the weight of expectations can push me away from trying something I "should have" already experienced and that line of thinking just doesn't make any sense. The best time to play Chrono Trigger is whenever you pick up the controller and press start—full stop.

Having spared the world from the wrath of Lavos, I again focused my energy on indie games. The good folks at Kaizen Game Works saw fit to send me a pre-release build of their latest creation, Promise Mascot Agency. While completely unlike their previous work Paradise Killer (which I named my game of 2020 right here in these very pages), Promise Mascot Agency proved no less captivating in part due to its contemporary setting. The game's fictional locale of Kaso-machi stands in for countless real-life Japanese villages currently struggling with dwindling populations, economic stagnation, and a general decline in morale.

In the 25 hours I spent playing the game, I developed real feelings for Michizane "The Janitor" Sugawara as well as his cadre of wacky employees. "[Promise Mascot Agency] made me care about make-believe people in an imaginary place," I wrote in my review on Retronauts.com back in April. "By grounding the game in our world with its real problems, Kaizen Game Works injects a sense of hope right when I needed it most. I may not live in Kaso-machi but the issues facing that community plague millions of people in the 21st century."

Lest I paint too bleak a picture of Promise Mascot Agency, the game has more than its share of light-hearted moments—as did a number of other indies I enjoyed around this time. Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 pokes fun at gaming in general with its title and meta-storyline about a protagonist forced to complete an unfinished, unreleased sequel. Players line up colorful tokens to simulate the hero's investigation into a bug-filled haunted house simulation while conducting conversations in-between levels to guide him towards a variety of endings. The Steam page describes Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 as a "match-3 survival horror comedy RPG metroidvania" which doesn't really make sense but it also tells you everything about the game's sense of humor.

Blendo Games' Skin Deep takes a similar comedic approach to storytelling, although I laughed hardest at the scenarios I stumbled into on my own accord. Taking control of Insurance Commando Nina Pasadena, I accepted her mission to protect her client's cargo vessels from nefarious pirates—in space. Each stage takes place entirely on one ship under siege from intruders who have locked up the crew.

Since guns and ammo are scarce, Nina must make do with whatever equipment she can scrounge together to fight off the pirates; this includes slippery soap, sneeze-inducing boxes of pepper, and improvised explosives. The pirates show up wearing heavy armor and special technology that can revive them after death, so even if you successfully slay one you have to eject their disembodied head into space or they'll respawn.

You can tell Skin Deep is fictional because Nina prioritizes freeing the ship's crew rather than securing any merchandise. She doesn't even have to repel the hostiles if she's sneaky enough to remain out of sight. I usually pick them off one at a time with careful traps but I did challenge myself to save a ship with zero body count. Indeed, the best moments of Skin Deep occur when you task yourself with finding new ways to solve Nina's problems. Pick a pirate's pocket to grab a key. Trick them into shooting at flammable gas to blow themselves up. Toss a wrench at a valve handle to violently decompress an airlock—every stage is a playground where you make the rules.

Did I mention the spaceships are entirely run by cats? Talking cats, to be specific. What a delightful romp.

While I enjoyed these disparate indie creations in the privacy of my own home, I also made another attempt at streaming video games to the world via the internet. I couldn't tell you if this urge comes from my profession as a podcaster or my dreams of acting for an audience, but every 10 months or so I dust the cobwebs off my Twitch channel and take to the airwaves.

This year, I opted to share Kyoei Toshi (巨影都市), a sci-fi spinoff of the Disaster Report series. The mainline games focus on regular people surviving natural calamities like earthquakes and floods, but Kyoei Toshi drops that conceit for a tale of giant monsters and robots doing battle in Tokyo. Publisher Bandai Namco brokered deals with multiple Japanese studios to authorize the appearance of well-known titans like Godzilla and Ultraman in the game, a costly endeavor which I suspect prevented the company from releasing Kyoei Toshi internationally. An English language roundup of my PlayStation activity for the year dubbed this game City Shrouded in Shadow but as of this writing, that title has never been localized into any other languages.

Given the game's untranslated nature, I took it upon myself to livestream the action while also attempting to explain the story and dialogue to viewers on the fly. I made plenty of mistakes as I encountered unfamiliar kanji and grammar, but thankfully playing video games is a low-stakes endeavor. More importantly, I had a lot of fun steering a hapless protagonist through city streets on a quest to find her girlfriend without getting trampled. The Disaster Report games put up a serious front but they're extremely silly thanks to the cornucopia of choices they offer the player. The most-watched clip of my Kyoei Toshi playthrough features my character imitating a cicada to successfully shake a gunman tailing her; I had to pause the game because I couldn't stop laughing when her ridiculous gambit worked.

If any of this sounds appealing to you, I invite you to visit my YouTube page and view my preserved playthrough which includes my commentary. Kyoei Toshi is also an easy game to find second-hand since PlayStation 4 software doesn't have regional restrictions and runs off the disc on any PS4 or PS5 console. Bandai Namco printed plenty of copies so it doesn't cost much to pick up Kyoei Toshi used, but as noted above you'll need a working understanding of Japanese to make sense of the story should you wish to play it for yourself.

Nintendo cast a long shadow over this entire year with news and the release of a long-awaited follow up to the Switch—the cleverly named Switch 2. It's the safest, most conventional console they've released since the 3DS replaced the DS, and at least that thing had a weird screen that made the graphics pop out if you looked at it just right. I don't begrudge the company for iterating on success but I'm still taken aback by the lack of real changes between the Switches.

With demand for the new machine sky-high, Nintendo and Japanese retail outlets sought to head off scalpers by conducting online lotteries to dole out Switch 2s. Nintendo only offered slots to active, registered Nintendo Account users while most brick-and-mortar outlets restricted drawings to store credit card holders. I found the entire process frustrating, especially as plenty of brand-new Switch 2 consoles showed up online priced at a steep markup despite all the restrictions.

Yet Nintendo pulled the biggest surprise by announcing that all Switch 2s sold at retail in Japan would only operate in the Japanese language and only permit Japanese accounts to log on to the console. While not a pure return to the region-locked days of the Wii or 3DS, this decision meant the Switch 2 I managed to acquire from Amazon Japan made for a poor Switch 1 replacement. I know enough Japanese to play the new Mario Kart and similar action games, but I also enjoy text-heavy genres like RPGs. The fact that my new console artificially blocked non-Japanese languages from appearing on the screen just didn't sit right with me—especially as Nintendo offered multi-language models on their website that cost an additional 20,000 yen. Why should I pay a premium for such basic functionality?

I dealt with my dilemma in the simplest possible manner by purchasing a second Switch 2 when I visited New York in August. Unlike merchants in my current home, American stores had plenty of stock and did not demand I jump through any hoops to buy video games. My Japanese model now rests in the hands of my children, although I think they spend most of their time playing Switch 1 games like Splatoon 3 rather than anything custom-made for the new platform. In the end, Nintendo got plenty of cash out of me despite my grumbling.

Even though I invested much time and mucho cash in obtaining two new consoles this summer, I hardly touched them when I wanted to actually play games. I volunteered to judge entries at BitSummit which meant downloading and evaluating what felt like a hundred different demos in a matter of weeks. It made for a smoother visit to the show in July, the biggest one yet in the event's 12-year history, as I arrived having already played a majority of the exhibited software. This freed up my time for interviews with developers which turned into an entire podcast for Retronauts. The format worked so well, I repeated it two months later when I headed east to the Tokyo Game Show in September.

Outside of my time judging indie titles and futzing with Nintendo's latest hardware, I spent a huge chunk of my summer inside with Dragon Quest Builders 2. I knew it had plenty of fans—moreso than the first Builders game—but its so-called Jumbo Demo coaxed me into picking up the full thing. My initial skepticism concerning a fusion of RPG and Minecraft-style open-world play proved unfounded; while the demands of a narrative do place limits on player expression, there's still an abundance of freedom afforded here.

In fact, the structure of Builders 2 lends itself to extra creativity as your character journeys between different islands, all with a distinct ecology and wildlife. Each new environment you visit demands that you build a new base made from whatever materials exist in that area. Normally when playing Minecraft I quickly establish a single hub but Builders 2 insists that I diversify. Adding in iconic Dragon Quest monsters who raid your village increases the pressure on players to keep building and reinforcing their constructions.

I'm not the biggest Dragon Quest fan around so the storytelling here left me a little underwhelmed; the game grants you a mysterious amnesiac companion who just so happens to have the same name as a major villain in the series, so it's not much of a surprise when he discovers his roots. However, I'll forgive any game this engrossing for skimping a bit in the plot department. I do wish the localization used less Britishcisms; at times I felt the original Japanese would have been easier to understand.

Travel dominated the second half of my 2025, both domestic and international. My aforementioned jaunts to Kyoto, Tokyo, and New York all put me in contact with people I had longed to meet like Stuart Gipp and Jess O'Brien—friends I only knew as voices on the internet. Unfortunately, these frequent outings drew me away from my family as my wife works full-time and my teenage children have commitments that require their presence at school even during breaks from classes. We squeezed in a quick trip to Seoul in August, departing Osaka one day after I returned from New York; we all appreciated a chance to try dishes we'd normally never eat at home.

In October, just as the summer heat finally faded from Japan, I made a solo flight to the Pacific Northwest. Ostensibly, I did this so I could visit Oregon and the Portland Retro Gaming Expo for the first time, but in practice I was more eager to spend one week in Seattle first. I had only set foot in The Emerald City once, right before the pandemic in 2019, and I wanted to reconnect with friends in the area. I also just happened to arrive as the Seattle Mariners faced the Toronto Blue Jays in the playoffs, a coincidence that convinced me to throw down too much money for a rare chance to see postseason baseball.

The Mariners lost the game and the series, but my time in Seattle proved more rewarding than I anticipated. Staying with friends and operating off-the-clock, I felt relaxed in ways I seldom manage to achieve. Normally I wake up early even on weekends when I have no business doing so, yet in Seattle I managed to sleep as late as 9:30AM. I'm also not much of a cat person but I think spending a few days with my friend's pets gave me a new appreciation for their soothing qualities—though I still don't know why they kept trying to follow me when I went to use the toilet.

Beyond this invaluable facetime with lovely pals (human and feline), walking around Seattle and Portland provided me much-needed casual exposure to queer and trans people. I know these communities exist within Japan, but it felt so rewarding to just encounter them in public without any willful searching or attending a Pride event. Even the crowd at PRGE featured a broad constituent of non-cis-presenting people, a welcome reminder that gaming as a hobby appeals to so much more than just straight white men—especially the warmongering type.

I only took one console with me for these autumnal excursions as I was fully dedicated to Shuten Order, the latest creation by Kazutaka Kodaka. While only credited as penning the story, his particular brand of wild characters and complex scenarios are the fuel that drive the entire game. Indeed, in the leadup to its release I found each promotional video for Shuten Order more confusing than the last, leading me to buy the game just so I could see how all these people get along.

Shuten Order is essentially five different games held together with an overarching story about the end of the world. You assume the role of a doomsday cult member surrounded by devout worshipers who welcome their destruction, although you have trepidations because you can't remember signing up for any of this. Under the direction of two self-described angels, you must investigate five high-ranking officials for the recent assassination of the cult's leader.

The catch: You were the cult leader and God brought you back to life to solve your own murder.

Underneath this umbrella narrative, Shuten Order features five distinct stories surrounding the suspects; only by getting to know the cult's ruling ministers will you uncover the culprit and the truth behind the entire organization. It's a text-heavy game though not strictly a visual novel; you'll also solve puzzles, make deductions, and at one point sneak through a condemned factory avoiding a chainsaw-wielding maniac.

Shuten Order had more than enough intrigue and plot twists to keep me in suspense until the final act. I wish it had a bit more gameplay apart from pressing the A button to advance the dialogue, but for a story-driven experience it overdelivered. Kazutaka Kodaka has—like Kotaro Uchikoshi—proven to me that any story he comes up with deserves my attention. I would have played their collaborative effort The Hundred Line which also launched this year, except I've heard that game literally has 100 endings and that's simply not feasible for me at my age.

What can I take away from my 2025? Riding airplanes taxes my body and I should avoid scheduling flights without at least one month at home between treks. I love watching baseball more than ever even though every team I went to see in person ended their season on a down note. The more time I spend in the company of gay, queer, and trans people, the better I feel about my own transition (even if I'm making slow progress).

On the matter of media superlatives, the best games I played all year were Chrono Trigger and Promise Mascot Agency. I saw well over 300 movies in 2025: I'll never forget sitting with a lively New York crowd for Weapons, but I think Sinners was a better picture overall. While I'm certainly biased after meeting him in Brooklyn, I'd still call Chuck Tingle's Lucky Day my favorite novel of 2025.

I don't have any hard plans or resolutions for the coming year. With the 30th anniversary of Resident Evil approaching, I'm certain I'll devote many hours to filling in my blind spots in the series and I'm excited to make time for that new game as soon as possible. I want to continue to attend live events and present my opinions in panel form; it's not the same as performing on stage but it scratches a similar itch. I intend to keep up my Retronauts contributions although I'd love to branch out and write or podcast about other topics. If this is how I'm going to make a living, I might as well diversify.

I hope everyone reading or listening to these words found time to enjoy 2025. It's not easy to witness a global superpower dismantling its institutions one by one, all while the wealthiest Americans scheme to hoard as much capital as they can while scapegoating immigrants and minorities. All signs point to more of the same in 2026 but I'll be damned if I turn away now. It's okay to get angry in the face of unchecked abuses of power. Just don't devalue your own life or your work or your relationships with others. Embrace life's small victories, whatever form they might take.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet. Music in this podcast comes from The Gregory Brothers, Astro Bot, Blade Chimera, Chrono Trigger, Promise Mascot Agency, Kyoei Toshi, Mario Kart World, Dragon Quest Builders 2, Weird Al Yankovic, Shuten Order, Promise Mascot Agency (again), and Chrono Jigga. Thanks for sticking with me through another year of looking back at gaming's past; I'll be back with a new column on January 11, 2026.