My 5 Favorite Games & Soundtracks of 2025

Looking Back at 2025

I played a lot of games in 2025. It was a good year for gaming! For one thing, the Nintendo Switch 2 launched. For another, we got about thirty million racing games from Kirby Air Riders, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, and Mario Kart World to the long-awaited Garfield Kart 2: All You Can Drift.

Like the aforementioned Garfield Kart 2, 2025 was a year of long-expected games coming to reality. After 26 years, Donkey Kong Bananza finally saw the eponymous ape return to the third dimension. We also finally got Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Hollow Knight: Silksong after cult followings became mainstream clamoring. On the other hand, Grand Theft Auto 6 got its billionth delay and there’s still really no update on The Elder Scrolls VI other than it’ll have more trees than TES V: Skyrim did.

I also got around to playing a lot of older games for the first time in 2025 thanks mostly to Nintendo Classics. I dipped my toes into the weird world of Wario games, playing WarioWare, Inc: Mega Microgame$! (2003) and Wario World (2003). I had a lot of fun with Luigi’s Mansion (2001) even though its controls are hellish.

But enough of all the preamble. Here are my top games from 2025!

Special Mentions

Nobunaga's Ambition (1993)

Developer: Koei

Music: Yoko Kanno

My Rating: 2.5/5

Definitive Music Track:

Every now and then, I like to flip through the Nintendo Classics library to see if any retro games catch my eye and to potentially increase my gamer cred by playing them. One day in August, I happened upon a game with a samurai on its cover art. Samurai are badass, so naturally I launched the game.

I was not prepared to spend the next ten hours of my life listening to the same two songs on repeat while role-playing as the Great Unifier and Demon King of the Sixth Heaven Oda Nobunaga on his quest to unify Japan in the mid- to late-16th century.

Nobunaga’s Ambition plays out like a wildly in-depth game of the tabletop strategy game Risk (1957). Instead of arbitrarily drawn global regions, though, the player chooses from a selection of Sengoku-period fiefs. As the daimyo of their selected fief, the player is tasked to fulfill Oda Nobunaga’s dream: violently unify Japan. To do this, the player must go through a cycle of domestic development and wars with other daimyo.

I can’t stress enough that music is not Nobunaga’s Ambition’s claim to fame. The entire soundtrack is only two and a half minutes long, composed of seven tracks between ten and forty seconds each. There are only really two tracks that play with any regularity in the game. The first is typical safety-state music that plays over a tactical map of Japan, and continues to play while you navigate game menus to allocate your resources, develop your land, and make marriage offers to other provincial governments. The music is vaguely folkish and plays with some common signifiers of Japanese music.

The danger-state music, “War,” plays any time the player witnesses or takes part in a skirmish between enemy territories. The real-time strategy and grid-based combat of Nobunaga’s Ambition ensure that battles take a hefty portion of time. When your military is especially beefy toward the endgame, battles can take up to thirty minutes. The length of battles is very mentally taxing, and to be honest, becomes very boring.

To make matters worse, the battle music only lasts about fifteen seconds before looping. Its 16-bit texture is very flat even when compared to other examples from SNES-era soundtracks, and the melody retains the stratospheric range of some of the most grating 8-bit music from the previous console generation. Listening to the track while writing this is like having a flashback to a real war.

If I find so much of this game annoying, why did I play it for ten hours?

In spite of how aggravating it can be—sometimes you can lose the game in the first round simply because you picked the wrong daimyo to role-play—Nobunaga’s Ambition is addictive. Once you’ve taken the time to figure out how to efficiently develop your territories, care for your citizenry, strengthen your militaries, bolster your alliances, sabotage your enemies, and pick your battles, the game really opens up.

What sucks, though, is that it took me six hours to figure all of that out, and the other four hours were spent repeatedly trying to topple the computer daimyo who had also figured the game out.

And sitting through the music doesn’t get easier.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition (2017, 2025)

Developer: Nintendo EPD (Production Group No. 3)

Music: Manaka Kataoka (lead), Yasuaki Iwata, and Hajime Wakai

Sound Team: Mitsuhiro Hikino, Tarō Bandō, Yohei Miyagawa, Ryu Tamura, Takuro Yasuda, Eiji Nakamura, Chiharu Minekawa, Hiroki Taniguchi, Kensuke Matsui, and Shunsuke Hongo

My Rating: 5/5

Definitive Music Track:

I’ve sunk an inordinate amount of hours into Breath of the Wild since it released alongside the Nintendo Switch in 2017. I should be bored of the game. I know all the narrative beat-for-beat, I know the solutions to all of the game’s puzzles, and I often fulfill the requirements for side quests before I’ve even received them. I even know the locations of most of the 900 hidden Koroks by heart. There shouldn’t be anything left for me to uncover, but every time I play Breath of the Wild is a unique experience.

This was especially true when I played through the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of Breath of the Wild. The graphical upgrades, including a consistently smooth 60fps frame rate and 4K HDR resolution, are enough to make Breath of the Wild feel like an entirely different game from its 30fps, 1080p iteration on the original Switch.

While the enhanced graphics were by-and-large the most advertised feature of the rerelease, Breath of the Wild’s Nintendo Switch 2 Edition also comes with enhanced audio. The audio from the original Switch version was already top-tier, nearly winning the game the Game Award for Best Audio Direction in 2017. With the Switch 2 Edition, you can hear all the tiny sonic details with even more clarity. You can clearly hear the difference between walking around with fabric clothing versus metal armor. You can hear the difference in sound between walking across short grass, tall grass, sand, dirt, wood, stone, pavers, and snow and how different boots alter that sound. You can hear how metal equipment clinks and how wooden equipment clatters on Link’s back while he runs across Hyrule. The Foley work of Breath of the Wild takes my breath away.

The rest of the game isn’t half bad, too.

5 • Hollow Knight: Silksong (2025)

Developer: Team Cherry

Music: Christopher Larkin

My Rating: 4.5/5

Definitive Music Track:

Hollow Knight: Silksong is a punishing game. Playing as spider-wyrm warrior princess Hornet, the player must navigate platforming puzzles with pinpoint precision, defeat impossibly difficult enemies, and memorize the labyrinthine land of Pharloom—an insect kingdom haunted by silk, and get this, song. Most of my time playing Silksong has been repeating the same mindless trek from checkpoint to insane boss battle for hours. A lot of the time, Silksong really isn’t all that fun.

Reggie Fils-Aimé, former president of Nintendo of America and the mastermind behind Pizza Hut’s Bigfoot Pizza, once asserted, “If it’s not fun, why bother?”

It’s like practicing a sonata for a recital. It’s tough work and rarely enjoyable. Sometimes you get stuck repeating the same four notes for hours on end without making any progress. Sometimes your face and fingers stop communicating with your brain. Sometimes even the easiest passages trip you up and make you question everything. Sometimes you just have to put your instrument away, take a walk, eat some food, and try again later.

But then it clicks. You go about your practice more thoughtfully and everything falls into place. You mark specific notes or passages that give you grief and you work to even everything out. You ask your friend to show you how they do it, and it starts to make sense.

That impossible run feels natural under your fingers. The measures start coming together to make actual musical phrases. With enough practice, you’re able to transcend technical difficulty and have fun playing some real music. And then you get to learn a new sonata.

That’s the beauty of Silksong. Sure, a skilled Metroidvania player could make their way through Pharloom without any issues. But it doesn’t take a skilled player to beat Silksong. It takes a willingness to fail repeatedly, learn from that failure, and make incremental improvements that finally lead to a win. (Some shit really isn’t balanced though. cough Savage Beastfly cough.)

And once you’ve mastered the game mechanics, you’re able to see what makes Silksong really shine: mystery, characters, environmental storytelling, and music.

4 • Undertale (2015)

Developer: Toby Fox

Music: Toby Fox

My Rating: 5/5

Definitive Music Tracks: "Hopes and Dreams"  ·  "ASGORE"  ·  "MEGALOVANIA"

I’m often very late to playing universally lauded video games. The first time I played The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), for example, was in 2021. In 2024, I played Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010) and Metroid Prime (2002). I finally got around to playing Undertale in 2025, and I’m glad to have waited the ten years—a thirteen-year-old me would not have appreciated or even understood the point of Undertale.

Undertale is a weird game. In a role-playing genre predicated on defeating enemies to gain experience points, Undertale’s tutorial advises you, “While you are in a FIGHT, strike up a friendly conversation.” It challenges you to spare your enemies rather than attack them.

And so I did. I spared every monster I came across, even when boss monsters protested. Sparing everyone allowed my character to develop friendships with their once-enemies, to learn their stories, and to grow attached to the underground world they sought to escape. In the end, I was able to save all of the monsters imprisoned underground and bring them back to the surface. By going out of my way not to kill any monsters, I had accomplished the requirements for the game’s True Pacifist Route.1

The monsters that inhabit the Underground world of Undertale are all filled with personality. They’re also somewhat goofy. A goat lady, who wants more than anything to be a mother, makes butterscotch-cinnamon pie for the protagonist. A human-hunting skeleton—whose goal is to be a member of the Royal Guard—really just wants to design puzzles and learn to cook the perfect spaghetti. A robot designed to kill humans is a cooking show personality, news anchor, and musical performer. If you pet a dog warrior too many times, its neck joyfully extends to the point that the screen can’t picture it all.

The music for Undertale is also filled with personality. This is due largely to Toby Fox’s extensive use of leitmotifs, short musical ideas associated with Undertale’s characters and places. Fox develops these leitmotifs from the very beginning of the game when the player first encounters Flowey, a cheerful golden flower who teaches the protagonist the basics of Undertale’ gameplay. Flowey’s leitmotif is likewise cheerful, marked by the juvenile naïvety of a nursery-rhymish melody. This leitmotif is almost immediately reframed as sinister as Flowey attempts to viciously attack the protagonist: “You idiot! In this world, it’s kill or BE killed.”

By the end of the True Pacifist Route, Flowey returns as the final boss and his happy leitmotif returns in the tracks “Hope and Dreams” and “SAVE the World” to signal his former childlike innocence as Asriel, Flowey’s former self and the prince of the Underground. It’s very effective, but far from the only incredible use of leitmotif. For more, I recommend Jason Yu’s series of essays dissecting the appearances of leitmotifs in Undertale.

Beyond leitmotif, the Undertale soundtrack is filled with sarcastic humor. A track that accompanies a bird that carries you over a disproportionately small gap (entitled “Bird That Carries You Over a Disproportionately Small Gap”), for instance, is epic and grandiose.2 Not at all does it fit the imagery of a small bird carrying you over a gap that you could easily jump across, but it does make you chuckle.

The soundtrack also seems to remember the kind of player you choose to be. Following the game’s Neutral route—defeating some enemies while sparing others—Undertale ends with an epic, emotionally charged boss battle against the sympathetic King Asgore, complete with music to match the inevitable tragic conclusion to the battle. The Pacifist route, by contrast, culminates in a long, narratively powerful battle against Flowey/Asriel, underscored by music that shifts between unsettlingly soulless and fervently uplifting, reflecting both trauma and redemption. The Genocide route ends with the massively popular track “MEGALOVANIA,” a piece that reframes you—the protagonist-turned-antagonist—as the game’s final boss.

Undertale is truly a marvel in indie game development and game music. Almost single-handedly, Toby Fox created a gaming touchstone with cult-status music and catalyzed the rise of indie developers to prominence in the game industry.

3 • Donkey Kong Bananza (2025)

Developer: Nintendo EPD (Production Group No. 8)

Music: Naoto Kubo (lead), Daisuke Matsuoka, Reika Nakai, Yuri Goto, and Tsukasa Usui (with original music by Yukio Kaneoka, David Wise, Eveline Fischer Novakovic, Robin Beanland, and Grant Kirkhope)

My Rating: 4.5/5

Definitive Music Tracks:

I’ll be honest. I didn’t understand Donkey Kong Bananza at first. People were treating it like the best thing since sliced bread when it came out in July, but I was mostly bored by trying to find fossils and banana chips by smashing all the terrain to oblivion.

I really had to look inward at my approach to playing video games to get why I didn’t agree with everyone else. When I was still in the tutorial area of Bananza after playing for five hours, it occurred to me that my biggest weakness as a gamer is my proclivity towards completionism. Completionism is the biggest hindrance to enjoying a game like Donkey Kong Bananza, where thousands of collectibles exist solely so you don’t have to collect them all.

Once I got past my urge to get each of the one thousand Banandium Gems, I was finally able to enjoy how radically bonkers and self-referential Bananza is. Donkey Kong games have never really had a coherent plot. Most of the time, they revolve around a massive crocodile stealing DK’s hoard of bananas and the subsequent globetrotting quest to recover them. Bananza’s plot is similarly nonsensical. DK and his pal Pauline race against Void Kong to reach the wish-granting Heart of Gold at the center of the Earth. Naturally, DK’s greatest wish is for a hoard of bananas. The narrative is goofy, but suddenly becomes totally immersive in the game’s final act due to a massive(ly foreshadowed) plot twist related to the fourth Definitive Music Track I listed above.

Donkey Kong Bananza follows the traditions of three separate Nintendo franchises. Most obviously, it picks up where Donkey Kong 64 (1999) left off, returning the titular gorilla to a massive three-dimensional world with more than enough collectibles, interesting characters and enemies, and dozens of mini-games sprinkled throughout which frequently make reference to levels from the side-scrolling Donkey Kong Country (DKC) series (1994–). Musically, too, Bananza regularly ties in themes from previous titles, including Eveline Novakovic’s “Stickerbush Symphony” from DKC 2: Diddy's Kong Quest and David Wise’s “Aquatic Ambience” from DKC.

Bananza was developed by Nintendo EPD’s Production Group No. 8, the same team that produced Super Mario 3D World and Super Mario Odyssey. This lineage is obvious in Bananza’s mechanical fluidity, which affords players the freedom to make wild leaps and simply have fun in its game world.

Donkey Kong Bananza also restores The Legend of Zelda series’s fixation on the power of music. Especially in the Y2K-era Zelda games—Ocarina of Time (1998), Majora’s Mask (2000), and The Wind Waker (2002)—music often plays a diegetic narrative role in the Zelda series as a source of and conduit for magic and personal autonomy. In Bananza, music—and particularly the singing voice of Donkey Kong’s companion Pauline—has the power to transform Donkey Kong into various “Bananza” forms including a speedy zebra and an ostrich that inexplicably has the ability to fly.

Bananza has some of the most understated yet effective musical interactivity of any game I’ve played. This is largely due to the prevalence of Fractones—mineral-based lifeforms that guide Donkey Kong and Pauline on their quest. Any interaction with a Fractone from normal conversation to just punching them cues musical sound effects that smoothly weave into the musical architecture of whichever location DK happens to find himself in. Like battles in The Wind Waker, this allows players to directly collaborate in the construction of Bananza’s music. Pretty cool stuff!

Nintendo will forever advertise Bananza with its credits song “Breaking Through (Heart of Gold).” It’s so corny and makes the game’s central metaphor so blatantly clear that it almost makes it ineffective. But it’s funny, so I like it.

2 • Baldur's Gate 3 (2023)

Developer: Larian Studios

Music: Borislav Slavov

My Rating: 5/5

Definitive Music Tracks:

I have tried for years to play in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I played as a bard in a campaign with my dad and sisters. I impromptu DM’ed a campaign with a friend group in college. I put a lot of effort into DM’ing for another college friend group. None of these campaigns lasted longer than one session. I was finally able to experience a Dungeons & Dragons campaign when, while crashing at my friends’ house, I discovered Baldur’s Gate 3. Finally I didn’t have to deal with other people’s schedules!

Baldur’s Gate 3 starts like any D&D campaign: making a character sheet. It took me nearly two hours to craft my halfling bard, read up on cantrips and spells, and develop a backstory. I lovingly named them Glorgio.

As a bard, I was proficient in instrumental performance. I could play violin, lute, flute, and drums like nobody’s business. My companions—a vampire rogue, an emo cleric, and a humorless warrior—were unfortunately not gifted in the musical department and couldn’t join me in playing tunes like “Bard Dance,” “Old Time Battles,” and “The Power.” Luckily, I eventually jammed out with some carnies while onlookers threw coins at us.

Music plays several roles within and outside of BG3’s diegesis. Like with Undertale, BG3 makes liberal use of leitmotifs, with musical themes that represent Bhaal (D&D’s God of Murder), Mind Flayers, a charismatic tyrant, and J.K. Simmons (the God of Death’s “Chosen”). There are also happier and more heroic themes, like the Baldur’s Gate theme that appears in almost every track.

Some of BG3’s strongest music lies in its battle cues, which scale in intensity from skirmishes with goblin raiders to an apocalyptic clash against a gargantuan brain for the fate of all living things. At one point, a devil even sings his own boss theme with operatic bravado, albeit with some very dumb lyrics.

If you play as a bard, music is also the source of your power. Musical performance allows you to persuade, deceive, distract, heal, and inspire all rolled into one (or, ideally, a 20).

When I reached Act III after over fifty hours of gameplay, I realized I had missed so many storylines and opportunities in Acts I and II. After defeating the Elder Brain and Mind Flayer army with Glorgio and their motley crew, I immediately started a new campaign as an amnesiac wood elf with diabolic ancestry and the urge to murder indiscriminately. I make sure they resist that urge, though. I couldn’t resist, however, making them a bard.

1 • Mario Kart World (2025)

Developer: Nintendo EPD (Production Group No. 9)

Music: Atsuko Asahi (lead), Maasa Miyoshi, Takuhiro Honda, and Yutaro Takakuwa

My Rating: 5/5

Definitive Music Tracks:

Holy shit. It should be illegal for a game soundtrack to be this good.

Mario Kart World’s soundtrack is a Mario music jamboree. In addition to compositions and arrangements for the game’s 30 racetracks, World’s music team (led by Atsuko Asahi) arranged an additional 230 tracks from every previous Mario Kart and Super Mario game with others from the Wario and Donkey Kong franchises. Most of these arrangements can only be heard as background music in Mario Kart World’s “Free Roam” mode, a feature that allows players to drive at their leisure through the vast open world that connects each racetrack.

The arrangements reframe original Mario music in entirely new musical contexts. There are samba, bossa nova, and flamenco arrangements. There’s funk, blues, bluegrass, big band, rock band, and honky-tonk. There’s lo-fi hip hop radio beats to relax/study to, ambient music, and rave music. The serene “Sky & Sea” theme from Super Mario Sunshine (2002) is even transformed into a 100 gecs-esque hyperpop fever dream. If you can imagine a music genre, the Mario Kart World music team probably arranged Mario music in it.

Mario Kart World also celebrates the cult status of some Mario music. In an arrangement of Mario Kart 8’s “Dolphin Shoals,” Kazuki Katsuta’s wild saxophone run dubbed the Mario Kart Lick is scored for the entire saxophone section. The arrangement of “Coconut Mall” is somehow more exuberant than it was in Mario Kart Wii.

The music for the new Rainbow Road is one of the greatest pieces of video game music I’ve ever heard. It checks all the boxes for what great game audio should be. First, it’s memorable—its melody simple, effective, and ear-wormy.

Second, it’s adaptive and interactive. A unique section of music is mapped to each of the race’s four sections. As you pass from the exciting first section into the more relaxed second, the music drops to half time and slowly becomes more texturally complex as you make your way through the trickier turns of the section. It’s like the racetrack, the soundtrack, and you are all connected with your behavior being informed by and informing the behavior of the race and music.

Lastly, it’s immersive. A lot of this is due to the ludic aspect of the music playing along with your gameplay (and vice versa). It’s also due to the meticulous mapping of the music’s interest curve to that of the race. Almost without fail, the climax of the soundtrack arrives as you round the curve at the end of the racetrack, and almost without fail, it makes me tear up.

The soundtrack to Mario Kart World is far and away my favorite of any video game.

And don’t even get me started on the gameplay. You can get stamps for doing fun tricks and you can play as a cow! What more do you need in a video game?

Every Game I Played in 2025 (backloggd)