Reid Main

I'm going to catch a lot of flak for this list I'm sure but at this point in my life I really don't care. Games are supposed to be fun and developers nowadays feel like gamers should just be thankful to play their game. The amount of games that have time wasting built into their core components is frankly disgusting and my patience for this sort of thing is absolutely gone.

1. Pokémon Legends: Z-A

Pokémon Legends: Z-A is the nail in the coffin. Game Freak simply does not care about making these games anymore and is just shitting out the absolute bare minimum they can to give the addicts another hit. I believe I have purchased every single Pokémon game the day it was released but no longer! This franchise is dead to me.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A is the epitome of a game designed to waste your time. Doing an 8-ball is arguable more productive. In a world where Nintendo is developing / publishing games like Donkey Kong Bananza and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it is insane to watch them release something as subpar as Pokémon Legends: Z-A. If this did not have the word "Pokémon" in the title you'd think it is some mobile game built by students for their senior project. Remember that Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise of all time and yet indie devs are building more in-demand Pokémon games then Game Freak.

I would kill to be a fly on the wall during conversations inside Nintendo as to the future of this franchise. Are these shitty games starting to damage the brand or do reviews not matter as long as they hit their sales quota?

2. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

On the shortlist for the top 10 things I hate would undoubtedly be parrying in video games, quick time events, and French Nihilism. So hopefully you can understand why I did not enjoy Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. But not enjoying those things does not make it a bad game. Story is obviously very subjective and just because I am not a fan of parrying and quick time events does not mean I think every fighting game is trash and should not exist. Some games are just not my cup of tea and after getting all the way to the midpoint of Act 3 I realized that and stopped playing.

But the universal acclaim that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is receiving makes absolutely no sense to me. It is being held up as this example of a new way "indie" games can be made, while glossing over the fact that Sandfall Interactive got tens of millions of dollars from investors and outsourced large parts of development to Europe and Asia. This isn't inherently bad but let's not kid ourselves thinking that all indie developers can be like Sandfall. This was nepo babies getting loans from their rich friends and family to take a stab at making the game they wanted. Over the last decade there are dozens of example of this exact same scenario resulting in spectacular failure.

However, what truly confuses me is how so many people appear to forgive asinine gameplay decisions when there is a good story accompanied by Unreal Engine 5 graphics. If this was Ubisoft we'd be raking them over the coals but because this is an "indie" game we don't care about:

• Overuse of QTEs. You literally need to push them with every attack just to do regular damage.
• An "open world" that doesn't have anything worth exploring. A Super Mario Bros 3. style world map would be more effective.
• No mini-map.
• Bad checkpointing.
• No built-in bestiary or way to quickly look up information about enemies you're fighting.
• Easy to create "bad" character builds due to lack of explanation and respeccing isn't free.
• Platforming. Fucking why? It's like someone on the development team wished they were making Only Up! instead.
• EXP is not shared amongst party members so grinding is back on the menu.
• Enemy health pools and your damage is built around hitting parries. So you are punished for not hitting them instead of being rewarded.

And again, to be clear, none of this means that you're not allowed to enjoy this game or that it is undeniably bad. If Expedition 33 got like 80% on Metacritic and won best narrative / story at various game awards I could totally understand that. But to hold it up as the best of 2025, and label it as a better RPG than Kingdom Come: Deliverance II with better art than Hades II and Ghost of Yōtei is utterly insane.

It will be interesting to see what sentiment is like in 3-5 years when a sequel is released. Is Sandfall going to use the same tropes or perhaps attempt to do another genre? Will this defeatist story still have the same appeal? Only time will tell.

3. Super Mario Galaxy 2 for Nintendo Switch

I had never actually played Super Mario Galaxy 2 until this year. I cannot remember why I did not buy it for my Nintendo Wii but I am glad I didn't because I cannot imagine liking it 15 years ago either.

It is by no means a bad game. It's just not the type of Mario game that I was looking for. It is so much more difficult than the first and contains so many instant failure scenarios that frustration quickly became my primary emotion. I know there are tons of people who enjoy this sort of difficult platformer. The popularity of kazio Super Mario levels is a testament to that. But after playing absolute gems like Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Bros. Wonder it is really hard to go back to Super Mario Galaxy 2 and derive a lot of enjoyment.

4. Elden Ring Nightreign

I really wanted to enjoy Elden Ring Nightreign but it is just not a game for me.

I've written before about how I don't love Soulslike games because of the "git gud" mentality and their predilection towards wasting your time. That's why you're not going to find me reviewing Hollow Knight: Silksong. I understand the appeal but I just cannot get over how the developer actively chooses to waste your time by forcing you to run back to collect your currencies or retry bosses.

One of the greatest things about Elden Ring were Stakes of Marika that respawned you right outside boss battles. You may see where I am going with this because Elden Ring Nightreign is built around you running back for 30 minutes to retry every boss. Again, I understand why people are enjoying the game and I do not want to say or do anything that would make a developer question building it. Quite the opposite actually, it really makes me want to see more Battle Royale games that focuses on PvE, but from a developer that just isn't as "hardcore" as FromSoftware.

5. Mario Kart World

I have already ranted about Mario Kart World in my June retrospective so I'm just going to point you there if you care about the details. At a high level I dislike Mario Kart World because it is a regression from the previous games and squanders a lot of opportunities they unlocked with the open world design.

We live in a universe where Burnout Paradise exists. And yet Nintendo created a Mario Kart game where you can drive across a massive open world to access any of the tracks but almost nothing exists in-between them. It is a glorified level selector that can be completely bypassed by simply selecting the level you want from the start menu. I struggle to comprehend how any of this got through the most basic of playtesting.

I really hope that I am not in the minority and Nintendo is hearing this feedback. My greatest fear is that they will double down for the next Mario Kart game and it will become another franchise that I enjoyed but which is no longer for me.

6. Hades II

In the age of microtransactions and Ubisoft-like open world design, there seems to be a universal hatred for games that have a multitude of different currencies / resources because they usually just exist to force the player to grind and drag out the playtime. So you can imagine how disappointed I was when I saw similar designs in Hades II.

At its core Hades II has much of the same gameplay that made the original great. I'm not going to sit here and say that if you liked the first game you're not going to like the sequel. All of the things that made Hades great is still there. But they layered on top so much cruft that I stopped enjoying the idea of starting a run and began to dread it because I had to think about what sort of resources did I need to grind for.

I put 28 hours into the original Hades, escaped hell 10 times, and got to see the canonical end to the story. I was super invested in it and when I saw the true ending I felt a moment of catharsis. For that entire time I never thought about what resources did I need to advance the story and beat the game. Everything was coming to me naturally. I grabbed a weapon, started my escape, and reacted to the challenges put in my way.

I had similar feelings for the first 10 hours of Hades 2. There were a lot more things you could care about before the start of a run but I tried to let those things unfold naturally and just focus on the task at hand. But then I hit a wall where I felt like I was no longer making any progress. Defeating enemies seemed to be tied to various upgrades which I needed incredibly specific resources for and unlike the first game it wasn't really clear where to get them. I started looking up information outside of the game to try and understand why I wasn't progressing. I then grinded for several more hours but still could not complete a single run. At this point I had played 24 hours and with no clear goal or end in sight I just put the game down and never played it again.

7. Battlefield 6

Battlefield 6 is a competent Battlefield game that is catering too much to the Call of Duty crowd. The squad based combat across expansive maps is there and for the first dozen hours that will probably entertain you if you are a fan of the franchise. But after a while you'll probably start to feel that the large maps are more designed to be cut up into smaller versions for use in the other game modes that focus more on the Call of Duty frenetic gameplay. Conquest can still have those Battlefield moments but modes like Rush or Breakthrough are completely unbalanced and feel like they were an afterthought.

After release Battlefield also shipped their versions of Battle Royale and multiple new modes focusing on teams of 4-8 players. Ironically the maps you compete on are massive but they aren't available for classic Battlefield modes like Conquest.

To no one's surprise this attempt to have their cake and eat to too is causing Battlefield 6 to haemorrhage players and while 100,000 DAUs would be considered a success for most games, the development costs of Battlefield simply require more. The Battle Pass and microtransactions have already started running rampant in the first three months after launch. If they do not get a large percentage of whales buying up AI slop generated stickers there is no way EA will support the game long term.

Oh and the campaign is not just bad it is insulting. The plot makes no sense, the writing and acting are atrocious, and the levels are boring. It honestly feels like they only built 30% of what they wanted and were forced to ship it.