Gamers of the World

Pro wrestling is a variety show. Spend a few weeks with WWE and you’ll see how many tastes the product caters to. Segments can lean into different genres, such as drama, action, comedy, or even horror. Matches themselves are meant to capture a broad spectrum of styles, from Luchadors hitting highspots, to grueling submission matches to storybook endings by way of title matches that took years to build toward. The idea is to offer different styles and flavors to different segments of the audience. WWE 2K25 translates all of this variety very well, offering up many game modes, most of them worthwhile and often attracting different types of players. There are some flops on the card, but overall, this remains another main event-level display.

WWE 2K25 is a great game in its own right and feels like the culmination of several years of effort to fix the series by the Visual Concepts team. WWE 2K20 was so bad and went so viral for that reason that the following year, the game didn’t launch a new version–that’s virtually unheard of in the world of annualized sports (and sports entertainment) games. It clearly helped. Since then, it’s been slowly and steadily improving year over year, making WWE 2K25 the best game in the series.

In the ring, the biggest change is the addition of intergender matches. In the indie wrestling world, it’s very common to have men and women wrestle each other without any added drama or lampshading. Promotions simply depict the competitors as equals–save for someone working heel who might call attention to it, of course. But WWE has long avoided similar matchups. This year, the studio finally got the go-ahead from the wrestling behemoth, so you can now, in one surely popular example, play as Rhea Ripley and squash Dominik Mysterio ad nauseam. It’s great to see WWE becoming more comfortable with this idea and breaking down that needless barrier in its video game.

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Before Final Fantasy VII took RPGs as a whole into the mainstream, Suikoden made its mark as one of the first quality role-playing titles released outside of Japan on PlayStation. The game’s main conceit was based loosely on the Chinese literary classic The Water Margin: A young outcast and his friends gather up companions to form the 108 Stars of Destiny, building a magnificent rebel outpost and eventually toppling a wicked empire. Suikoden’s success would inspire multiple sequels, including immediate follow-up Suikoden II, regarded by many as a shining gem in the PS1’s RPG library.

With fame and acclaim, however, comes a price tag: Original copies of Suikoden II run in the hundreds of dollars, and that’s even with several well-known, game-breaking bugs that were inadvertently introduced in the English version. Here’s where Konami seemingly swoops in to the rescue, offering both Suikoden I and II together for a low price and promising beautiful new HD graphics and bonus features. This was announced back in 2022, and now, two and a half years later due to delays, we finally have Suikoden I&II HD Remaster–and I’m left wondering just how all that time this remaster spent cooking in the oven was spent.

First, let’s talk a bit about the games themselves. I first played both of these titles back on the PS1 many years ago. The original Suikoden was the game I was most excited to revisit, as it had been well over two decades since I’d last played it, and I’d forgotten so much about it. I was pleased to rediscover a pleasant, breezy RPG with a fast-paced story, smooth turn-based combat, and a charming sense of humor. It’s quite short, and with the lack of load times and addition of battle speed-up options, you can easily finish it in around 15-20 hours doing all of the optional content.

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