2025 was one of the roughest years of my life. I only had about a three month period where I didn’t want to perform a self-amputation of my right foot, my job is still an exhausting mess, all the BS the 11th province is pulling which affects a lot of my friends… 2026 can’t be worse, can it?

And because of the nature of this gig requiring me to be Extremely Online, I can’t even escape into games to calm down. At least Game Informer and Giant Bomb resurrected following various deaths this year, but Polygon was not so lucky. And on the game dev side, it’s really starting to feel like 1982 in the North American console market, which is NOT GOOD.

And Jeff Hoffman picked a real bad time to turn into a pumpkin.

So with that in mind, and restricting this to Switch (2) releases because I don’t feel like I can litigate Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s anything, my top 10 for 2025 is the games that made me angry and why. It’s in a descending order, from mild displeasure to wanting to become Adam Page and burn their collective house to the ground so we can run it as a yule log on Twitch and YouTube next Christmas.

#10: Pokemon Legends: Z-A + Mega Dimension DLC

Crime: Not including the Clamperl family somewhere in the list of returning Pokemon

Clamperl and its evolutions are around the point where my Pokedex counting fades. They’re a branched evolutionary family that was one of about 7.8m Water-typed families introduced in Ruby and Sapphire, and I don’t think they’ve ever been more than Pokedex filler since on the occasions they do show up. So why am I (mildly) disappointed at their lack of appearance?

Because Legends Z-A and its DLC combined to reduce the number of Pokemon not already permanently available on Switch by 75% (24 down to 6). Alongside that, they had a lot of Pokemon that were very rare on Switch and only in games I didn’t want to replay to show my work. The latter games were Let’s Go - though I suppose it’d be more accurate to say “play” in that case - and Brilliant Diamond. To catch them all, I’d just need to create a save file for Let’s Go and play BD long enough to get to the save-bonus Mew and Jirachi. With good speedrunning, I could be done in 45 minutes.

Except for the Clamperl family. Because of them, I have to roll credits on the game, unlock the National Pokedex, and get a post-credits item to fish up Clamperl and its two trade evolution items. And Brilliant Diamond locks credits behind trying to use a playthrough team to beat an Elite 4 and champion with movesets, effort values, and held items like they’re going to a VGC International Championship (or since it’s singles, the main event of the World Series of Pokémon). This could have been a whole lot easier if we were able to catch clams in the Lumiose Sewers.

#9: Winback

Crime: Forcing Switch 2 Scarlet and Violet to be the new Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE

This will be fully revealed next week in gaming magazines, but for those who don’t understand the reference, our Game of the Decade feature in 2020 (for 2010-19) included a game created in 1995 that wasn’t even all that good to begin with at the expense of Tokyo Mirage Sessions. And so it happened again, with Winback sniping Scarlet and ViIolet Switch 2 patch edition.

Though I fully accept that Winback was the maker of a lot of rules in third person shooters, I tend to give more credit to the thing that codified the rules and made them popular - in this case, Resident Evil 4. I care a lot about baseball, but I’m not exactly down to watch a game of rounders.

#8: Persona 3 Reload

Crime: Forcing me to stare down several hundred bucks in equipment replacement

P3 Reload came at the tail end of my most recent short-term disability time at work, so naturally I tried to use my capture setup (which dates back to 2019-20) to grab some footage for the review. Only to discover that I couldn’t get audio on the recording, regardless of what HDMI on the TV (which might be 15 years old at this point) I was using. And also I seem to be missing the USB cable it came with. I suppose it was time to replace it, even if I don’t have a 4k set to hook it up to for full-res Switch 2 recordings (if you’re lucky).

But in the process of troubleshooting, I also found that the HDMI port I had been using was donezo as well. So I have to consider the difficulty of finding a new TV in 2026 that is basically a stereotypical jock: big, and DUMB. That’s not negotiable. And it seems like I need to find a 40” computer monitor because I’m pretty sure your average “smart” TV will not allow me to do anything unless I give it the wifi password and expose myself to multiple barrels of ads. Joy.

#7: Bubsy in: The Purrfect Collection

Crime: Existing

I tend to cut Limited Run Games as a publisher a lot of slack - though virtually none as a game distributor for reasons broken down by friend of the site Seafoam Gaming - because they published the Switch version of the only 10 I’ve ever awarded on NWR. Even if one of the people involved in the localization got busted for sex crimes last year. So when they published stuff like Night Trap and Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties on the Switch, I shook my head and moved on.

But as part of their attempt to speedrun “Bloomless Rose Any%” this year with continued blowing of their physical releases (shoutout to the Trails in the Sky and Sonic x Shadow Generations Switch 2 debacles), they also announced a collection of Bubsy games. I had played the original on SNES and it was one of the first games that made my 9-year old self realize that not everything can be fun. I have a fever dream of playing Bubsy 2, and it was worse. I have heard the horror stories of the other two games in that collection. I’m ok with preserving games, but Bubsy is one of the main reasons I’m not an absolutist about it. Sometimes, it’s OK for things to die.

And not only that, we’re now getting a new game from Fabraz (Demon Turf et al). Why are they being sucked into the Bubsy morass?

#6: Bravely Default HD

Crime: Being the most prominent example of Game Key Card discourse

Outside of the Nintendo realm, we have been installing games to the internal storage of a console (not to mention PC) since 2006. For the record, that’s the year I graduated from university. We have been inserting something into a console to download the full game since 2013 with the PlayStation 4. Yet suddenly, when Nintendo does it with Game Key Cards, people grab torches and pitchforks for a riot outside Shuntaro Furukawa’s office.

I picked Bravely Default because it’s the lowest-cost game I know of that uses a GKC, but this could also apply to Yakuza 0, Disgaea 7 Complete, Madden NFL 26, or basically any third party game - and the broader Nintendo fanbase isn’t exactly beating the “only buys Nintendo games” allegations as it stands. If you’re concerned about an inability to download the games at whatever future date the Switch 2 eShop becomes unavailable, the only system that you can’t download games from a closed store right now is DSiWare on the DSi itself - it’s still accessible on the 3DS. We’ll probably be on Switch 5 by the time this becomes an issue.

I’m probably the wrong person to worry about game ownership since I’ve been digital-only ever since I got “renovicted” into my current apartment with two weeks notice. But we’ve covered ownership before - and if you think buying the PS5 version of multiplatform games that are key cards on Switch 2 is some sort of political statement, they’re doing the same thing. (My one prediction for 2026 is that there will be a fully first party - no Pokemon Pokopia - Game Key Card release from Nintendo in 2026, but it will be a release similar to the retail release Tetris 99 got in 2019 as an online-required title.)

#5: Hollow Knight: Silksong

Crime: Being too bloody long and making it so I couldn’t be in the room while it was played - while injured

I will give Team Cherry credit for expertly trolling His Holiness, Doritos Pope Geoff I by dropping the release date for Silksong and the DLC / Hollow Knight updates within 72 hours of one of his interminable dog and pony shows. And it was nice to have freedom from the rest of the eShop for a few minutes on its launch day. But that’s all I’ll thank it for, because Silksong is an over-scoped mess that led to one of the more annoying parts of my September recovery from a week-long hospital visit. (A majority of which I spent in a hallway.)

See, my roommate is one of the many people who brought down the eShop on launch day. He’s been waiting for this for years. And within a day, with both of us sitting on the couch, he asked me to not move a muscle since it was distracting him during one of the many interminable boss fights. It got to the point where once he was done, I had to relocate to my bedroom to avoid the game because I didn’t want to look at it anymore. Turns out, I can be comfortable in the bedroom, or I can keep my foot elevated. Pick one.

The last thing I want is for any part of the Silksong DLC or the Switch 2 upgrade to the original to come out while I’m off work for a week, because I may have to flee the country at that point.

#4: Any eShop “Hentai” game

Crime: Showing up ad infinitum

My annual State of the eShop column is out already (spoilers: it still sucks) but I’m carving out part of it here since there have been on average, three games a week in 2025 that have “hentai” in the title that show up on the eShop. There’s normally only one or two publishers that are responsible for this, but they have become a plague upon the eShop that makes me dread opening it to track the releases every week. I’ve been sick a lot and had a lot of travel issues this year, so the Downloads post has been delayed far too often, but part of it is I just do not want to have to log another five games that if they were actually as the title claims would not be on the eShop since they’d be rated AO and therefore be denied cert by Nintendo.

And there’s one thing that leads to the ability to spew these out at a rapid pace, but… that’s for the next game.

#3: Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road

Crime: Being the Nintendo ecosystem’s most expensive product of the plagiarism machine

There are three groups of people who should be identified by first, middle, and last names. They are: assassins (John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald), mass shooters (Eric David Harris, Dylan Bennett Klebold)... and AI executives, specifically Samuel Harris Altman. The AI bros are subsuming perfectly good aspects of video games (upscaling graphics, procedural generation, the very act of referring to playing against the game) into the morass of their plagiarism machines, and in the process laying off people by the thousands. Your average white male C-suite member sees something that could potentially maybe allow them to cut their expenses related to employment by 75% and four hours later, they have to call their doctor.

One of two things is going to happen with this in 2026: either the entire US economy is going to crash and NIntendo will be able to pick up nVidia for hundredths of a cent on the dollar, or everyone’s job gets replaced by a large language model and the entire US economy crashes because nobody can afford to buy anything. The odds are respectively 99.999…..% and 0.00…..1%, by the way. And yet, corporations are forced to talk about their “AI” plans because an irrational market only wants to hear about that, including in the game industry.

So what does that have to do with Inazuma Eleven? Well, the most publicly supportive gaming executive of game-production-by-plagiarism-machine is Level 5’s Akihiro Hino, a man who never met a trend he didn’t want to suck dry. He has doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on use of these models in game development, and Inazuma Eleven - following multiple delays - is a complete mess of an RPG that makes me DREAD what they’re going to do with Professor Layton and the New World of Steam next year (allegedly). Are we going to get graphics with absolutely no human work? Are all the puzzles going to be completely unsolvable because they’re literal hallucinations? Who knows. But there’s a reason we only got code for the new Inazuma Eleven just before the holiday break and nobody wants to touch it with the 39.5” pole from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

#2: Mario Kart World

Crimes: Costing more than launch-day Chrono Trigger AND going open world

The MSRP of Mario Kart World in Canada is $114.99, which leads to an after-tax price of somewhere between $120.74 and $130.18 (digital / physical, 5%/14% sales tax). Chrono Trigger at its Canadian launch was $99.99, or $118.85 after tax (effective rate 18.87%) with a Canadian dollar about where it is now against the greenback. Senator, I know Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger is the greatest game ever made. You, sir, are no Chrono Trigger. (I am well aware inflation exists, you don’t have to point that out.)

But I only paid $70 for Mario Kart World (from buying the Switch 2 bundle on launch day). So once I got the game, I played it for about a week and haven’t gone back to it, and the chief reason is because some games are just fine with prescribed levels and completely lose the plot if they go open world. Mario Kart is one of those games. I want to: pick a driver, create a kart, spam “I’m using tilt controls!” in pre-race chat, pick a track, and go. Mario Kart World, with its insistence on open world structure and with a 0.6 Donkey Kong 64 level of bafomdad collection in Free Roam, is completely incompatible with that. And they took out the tilt controls option, though I think that made its way to Kirby Air Riders?

The open world structure also feels like it’s in service of a character unlocking structure that quite frankly should have died years ago. The roster does take some huge swings with the Mario franchise writ large, but the fact that I can’t access all of it without Magikoopas Only, Final Destination (an option that only became available six months after launch) means I’m never going to see it. The Mario Kart series (especially 7) is a large part of meeting a lot of my friends, and the fact that I can’t have a similar experience again is infuriating.

#1: Shuten Order

Crimes: Rampant transphobia, driving an important voice out of game criticism

I have never edited a review before that caused me to react the way I did when I read the review of Shuten Order, which was all-caps “@$&!ing yikes”. The points raised in the review were entirely valid, and yet people jumped down Melanie’s throat for saying it?

I’m just going to link Melanie’s thread on BlueSky for the rest of the details because I’m not sure I can talk any further about it without getting arrested for uttering threats.