My Top Five (Non-Incremental) Games I Played in 2025

1. Wanderstop (My 2025 Game of the Year)
2. Haven
3. DC’s Justice League: Cosmic Chaos
4. Caravan SandWitch
5. The Gunk

Other Games From 2025 That Probably Would Have Made the List but I Haven’t Played Them Yet

1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
2. Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time

I was more stressed in 2025 than I have been for a while. Based on historical data, I assume this is why I also played more games this year than I have in a while too. And because of the nature of the stress, I also played a lot of incremental games in particular. I may write some of my thoughts about their design trade-offs later; for now, here are my favorites from the year.

The Best Incremental Games I Played in 2025

1. Digseum
2. Astrodle
3. Magic Archery
4. Tower Wizard
5. Nodebuster
6. Progress Racer RPG

They say we seek in our escapism what we miss in our normal life. It’s helpful to keep this in mind when your tastes change and you find yourself drawn to something new, as it can reveal things you didn’t even realize were bothering you, and point to what you most need to fix.

For example…

For me, the start of 2025 was a stressful and unpredictable time. Without getting too into-the-weeds on my personal situation: I was working toward a very important life-changing goal and knew roughly what I needed to do, but it was something I’d never done before and a lot of the particulars were outside my control. There were significant aspects of it where I just had to wait and hope. (Everything has turned out fine so far, by the way, and I am in a much less stressful place now.)

At the same time, I suddenly found myself drawn to incremental games more than ever before. Sometimes also called “idle games” or “clicker games”, these are games where the central mechanic is Number Go Up. Typically, you accumulate a resource by clicking, and then spend that resource on various ways to make Number Go Up faster, such as increasing the amount of resource rewarded by each click or making it so that the resource is also accumulated passively over time. A ton of games have built on this basic formula in a lot of varied and interesting ways, but that’s the heart of the genre.

That means these games are more directly about progress itself than most games (heck, the generally-accepted “first” incremental game is called “Progress Quest”). And that progress is clear (you can see Number and watch how fast it Go Up), player-driven (it’s your own actions or choices that make Number Go Up), and inevitable (there’s some challenge to figuring out the best sequence of actions to make Number Go Up as fast as possible, but as long as you keep doing things Number will Go Up).

In thinking about this, I am reminded of Bennett Foddy’s introduction to Getting Over It, in which he contrasts his game to ones that are “empowering” and “inch you steadily forward”. And while there is definitely a place for games that reject that paradigm, there’s also a place for games that embrace it.

Incremental games helped me avoid feeling powerless at a time when I couldn’t tell if I was moving in the direction I needed to go. I’m grateful for them.

My Game of the Year

• Dungeons of Hinterberg

Literally the Only Other 2024 Game I Played This Year

• Cat Quest III

Game I Played the Most This Year

• Farming Simulator 22, which I still play with Senpai-chan

Games I Returned to This Year

• Faerie Solitaire Remastered, which kept me sane in a lot of hour-long work meetings for which I had to be on camera the whole time but only needed to pay attention for a couple of minutes
• Orbit, an obscure game for an obscure platform that scratches a specific itch that’s otherwise pretty hard to scratch these days

Game Which I Might Have Bought This Year, Except I Felt Burned on Early Adoption of Indie Titles

• Caravan SandWitch, which seemed fun and chill, but after both of the indie games I bought and played around their release had significant updates adding content and polish after I finished playing them, I felt like I was being punished for early adoption and remembered why I often wait to play indie games

There’s a subgenre of game where you launch something and it travels a distance based partly on skill and partly on luck, and the further you manage to go the more resources you collect which you can then spend on upgrades that let you go farther and farther. Like Yetisports: Pingu Throw with a progression treadmill, and kind of a precursor to endless runners like Canabalt and its descendants.

I feel like there were a lot of these for a while, but people largely stopped making this kind of game. Maybe the mechanics were a bit too simple, or maybe endless runners were more appealing. But even the games that were made are now mostly lost to time. The problem is that their style of gameplay as well as the era in which they were popular meant they were mostly Flash games, which of course is now a dead platform, or early iOS games, which is an anti-preservation platform. (Or both.)

One of my favorites was Orbit, which came out exclusively as a PlayStation Mini. Like PlayStation Mobile, PlayStation Minis are a now-defunct platform of small digital-only games. These were aimed primarily at the PSP, but also often playable on the PS3 and later the Vita and PlayStation TV. I think the Minis might technically still be purchasable and downloadable if you have the right hardware, but some of them (including Orbit) are long-since delisted.

If you weren’t in the PlayStation ecosystem when Sony was pushing PlayStation Minis, it’s hard to even find evidence they ever existed. Try searching “PlayStation Mini” now and you’ll mostly just find results for the PlayStation Classic instead. So Orbit is even deader than the Flash or early mobile games of its ilk.

These games were pretty popular, but they effectively only existed for a few years and have been all-but wiped from history. Their remembered impact is so minor that I can’t even find an agreed-upon genre name for them (I call them “distance games”).

It’s a shame, because sometimes this sort of mindless progression is just what the doctor ordered, and I feel like it would still be right at home on mobile. Maybe they just don’t monetize as well as gacha bullshit.

There are two main reasons that game genres are such a mess. The first, which seems to be slightly better known, is that categories are hard. But the second reason, which is both more important and less understood, is this:

A game’s genre label isn’t really about that game. It’s about every other game.

Genre labels are shorthand used for setting expectations. They convey what sort of experience a game provides by invoking a shared reference point. Claiming that a game belongs to a certain genre is a statement that the game is, in important ways, similar to other games in that genre and different from other games outside that genre. Therefore, the most useful genre label for a game depends completely on which other games do and do not have that label.

Suppose Apex Legends had come out in 1994. The exact same game, played the exact same way. It would have been called a “DOOM clone”. That would have been the most useful label at the time. But since it instead came out in 2019, into a world that had seen Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, Battleborn, and so on, it was more useful to call it a “hero shooter”. The only difference was which other games people were familiar with.

The best-known example of someone trying to push this in the other direction is of course Hideo Kojima referring to Death Stranding as the first “strand game” when nobody knows what that means. This completely fails to clarify what kind of experience the game provides. But who knows; maybe in a few years “strand” will be a widely-understood genre label.

It’s expected for the set of commonly-used genre labels and their meanings to shift over time, and for this to accelerate as more games are created more rapidly. And on top of that, the more games come out, the smaller the percentage of them that even the experts can possibly be familiar with.

I don’t really play shmups so it is not particularly useful to me to distinguish between their subtypes. For my purposes, a bullet hell game and a trance shooter game are in the same genre. I literally didn’t even know that “trance shooter” was considered a shmup subtype until I looked it up just now, even though one of the listed examples is Super Stardust HD which is one of my favorites! But of course, to people who care a lot about these particular types of games, the distinctions are significant and having the subgenre labels is quite useful.

Add this all together, and what we have is: genre labels are hard to define, shift over time, and mean different things to different people. This is fine. The goal of a genre label is to compare a game to the constantly-shifting reference points around it; of course it will also be constantly shifting. Trying to “fix” this by getting super-technical and specific with your definition is like trying to plant a flag in the ocean.

(Naturally all this applies to genres in all kinds of media, and a lot of other categories too.)

For me, the most important thing an RPG can do is make its setting feel like a real world inhabited by real people. Having recently played Star Ocean: The Divine Force and Star Ocean: The Second Story R back to back has provided me with a couple nicely illustrative examples to share. Minor/vague spoilers follow for both games.

I’ve been playing Star Ocean: The Second Story R and loving it.

Among the many improvements in this remake are some that make it much easier to collect different endings (much appreciated since there are ninety-nine of them). I decided to make myself a checklist tool, and then I figured I might as well publish it. Pretty niche, but maybe someone out there will get some value from it. So here it is.

Star Ocean: The Second Story R Ending Checklist

Oh, and happy new year.

Based on how much joy they brought me, not on objective greatness.

1. Star Ocean: The Second Story R
2. Star Trek: Resurgence
3. Sonic Frontiers
4. Star Ocean: The Divine Force
5. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog

Again, this is most of what I actually played this year. I almost called this “My Five Games” instead of “My Top Five Games”.

Special award for joy that comes less from the game itself and more from the social experience the game enables:

1. Guess The Game, which I play daily with Allie
2. Farming Simulator 22, which I play with Senpai-chan

Games that came out this year that I didn’t get to but which are high on my wishlist:

1. SteamWorld Build
2. Dave the Diver
3. Sea of Stars

Top games I’d like to see announced:

1. A follow-up to Kirby and the Forgotten Land
2. A follow-up to Star Trek: Resurgence

I finally played Star Trek: Resurgence, which I’d had my eye on for some time. It’s an interesting game in its own right, but also significant as the first game from Dramatic Labs (a studio formed by Telltale Games veterans) and as part of a new wave of licensed Star Trek games during an exciting time for that franchise.

So naturally I’m here to ignore all of that and instead discuss a specific design decision that most people would probably ignore instead of fixating on. (What can I say? You come to my house, you get my bullshit.)

Okay, so. Resurgence is mostly a game about making choices. There are a few other flavors of gameplay including stealth/combat sequences, shuttlecraft piloting, walking around and investigating areas, a handful of minigames and QTEs, and so on. But the core is making dialog choices that have various effects on the characters and the relationships between them.

Correspondingly, those choices are the foundation of the game’s achievements/trophies. There aren’t any for, say, clearing a combat section without taking damage. None of them are skill-based (except inasmuch as you need to be able to complete all previous parts of the game to reach the particular decision the achievement is for) and I think that’s absolutely the right call. Those more-active parts of the game are for pacing and immersion; it’d be weird to turn them into things the player has to master for full completion.

What seems like a less-right call to me is that the achievements aren’t for passing decision points, but for making specific choices. Like at one point there’s a crisis, both your science officer and security officer have recommendations for getting through it, and you have to decide which one to follow. There isn’t a trophy for getting through the crisis: there’s one for following the science officer’s recommendation and one for following the security officer’s. Almost all the achievements are like that. (On PlayStation, there is additionally the Platinum trophy for getting all other trophies; on Xbox, there are additionally three progress trophies for getting through the three “acts” of the game.)

Now, that does mean that a player’s achievement list for the game becomes a reference for the choices they made, which is kind of a cool thing to have and to be able to share with other players (though the achievements have pretty explicit descriptions so the list is full of GIANT SPOILERS until you finish a playthrough). But the game’s website already provides a mechanism for this, and achievements are particularly poorly-suited to this goal.

By positioning all the alternative choices as items in a completion checklist, the game signals that you should see them all before you can consider yourself truly done. This isn’t as obnoxious as it was in Q.U.B.E. 2, because the game is at least about the choices and there is new stuff to see on a replay, though I still think it smacks of insecure design. But it does mean that anyone who replays the game to make other choices and get all the achievements renders their list useless as a reference for their “actual” choices–and it turns those choices from ones that allow the player to express something about their values to obligatory ones that are just checked off a list with no personal meaning. And the more effective the game has been at creating a real-feeling world and characters, the less interested I am in doing that.

(It’s the same reason I was so relieved to see that Resurgence didn’t have secrets or collectibles. Hunting through all corners of the map to find golden ships or research data would destroy immersion instantly; I was really happy I could just go where my character would go and not worry that I would be mechanically punished for it.)

Resurgence wasn’t a perfect game, but it did a better job than anything else ever has at making me feel like a Starfleet officer. I loved the scenarios it put me in and the opportunity to make decisions that best reflected Federation values and balanced protecting my crew with advancing our mission. I recognize that I’m more sensitive to this than others, but I resent feeling nudged to go back and make different decisions that will turn Resurgence from a world populated with people to a series of arbitrary levers to pull.

It’s common for people to complain about a game getting convenience/difficulty/accessibility/approachability features they personally won’t use and which thus won’t directly affect their own experience. My mental model has been that this happens for several reasons. In no particular order:

1. Status quo bias. If you already like something, change is scary.
2. Status signaling. If more people can do something, that thing is less impressive.
3. Gatekeeping. The more people enter a given fandom/community, the more the community changes to be like the mainstream, and the more the property will change to target mainstream tastes. (I haven’t written about this subject directly yet, though I’ve brushed up against it. My feelings are complicated and mixed: it frustrates me when something niche that I like reinvents itself to chase mass appeal, but there are also properties that I only fell in love with after they did that. Something to dig into another time.)
4. Opportunity costs. If a developer spends time on these features, that will consume resources that could have gone elsewhere.
5. The “intended experience”. I disagree with this one pretty strongly, but my attempt to frame it generously would be something like: Giving the player more ways to tweak the experience makes it more likely they will change it to a version significantly worse than what they could have had. (Sometimes this comes with half-hearted concessions for accessibility.)

For the first four of these, I can at least understand where people are coming from. I generally think they are not sufficient reasons to keep these kinds of features out of games (at least games that aren’t super-small and super-niche) but I can at least see the possible outcomes these people say they want to prevent. There’s something real going on there.

But for that last one, “intended experience,” I’ve always been a bit confused. I’ve usually chalked it up to a lack of empathy, with people not realizing these features are for someone else and just because you wouldn’t use or benefit from them doesn’t mean nobody would. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking - what if the problem is actually that people don’t want these features because they would use them?

Sonic Frontiers does something really weird with its final boss fight and I wanna talk about it.

Obviously, mechanical spoilers follow. No narrative ones, though.

When I bought a Steam Deck, I wasn’t too concerned about its specs or compatibility with new stuff. As a rule, I don’t exactly rush to play the latest AAA releases. But sometimes I want to play a newish big-ticket game that happens to be significantly worse on Steam Deck.

Sonic Frontiers was one of those games. It’s perfectly playable on the Deck and the graphical issues didn’t get in the way of the experience I wanted, but they did make me laugh when I saw that there was a photo mode.

I do love it when games allow for creative expression that you can capture as persistent play artifacts, but it’s hard to get excited about setting up photo ops when the platform I’m on means the resulting image will cap out at 720p with limits on draw distance and texture quality and possible glitches.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen often enough that it would be remotely worth buying a new gaming PC or current-gen console, but it happens enough to be annoying. It’s another reason to hope that the Steam Deck keeps doing well and becomes a widely-targeted platform by the AA and AAA studios and not just the indies.

So, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog was pretty good. But playing it also awoke my long-dormant Sonic fixation and made me want to spend more time with those characters.

The problem is that as a rule, Sonic games are not the kind of game I want to play these days. They tend to be built around mastery challenges, which was great for me when I was learning perseverance but not so much now at a time when I’m uninterested in friction and failure. I just want to chill with Sonic and friends, but Sonic games have no chill. (Yes, there was one RPG, but it was terrible.)

But! It just so happens that the latest mainline Sonic game, Sonic Frontiers, is an open-world game apparently taking some cues from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It has tons of chill!

So I picked it up and am loving it. I’d expect it to be divisive - games that branch out from the formula in crazy experimental ways are normal for the Sonic franchise, but this feels like a more radical departure than usual. And it certainly has flaws, as expected for the first installment with a new structure and gameplay approach, but it hits me in just the right way for what I’m looking for. Some reviewers call the open world empty and desolate; I find it peaceful and calm. Some complain that the platforming segments are isolated and decontextualized; I like that I can approach them on my own pace and schedule. Some complain that the most-traditional elements of the game, the cyber space levels, are so short; I like that they are so manageable and I can generally achieve all of their objectives after just a few tries and then switch to whatever other kind of gameplay I’m in the mood for.

I think this is yet another reason why it’s borderline meaningless to try to assign review scores to games as though their quality and enjoyability are objectively quantifiable, instead of just clarifying what kind of experience they provide. Frontiers is not an objectively great game, but it’s great to me, today. If I’d tried it some years back or even when I was just in the wrong mood maybe I would have dropped it quickly.

What games did I correctly dismiss years ago that I’d actually really enjoy today?

Here’s what frustrates me about the discourse around NFTs in games: it’s not actually about NFTs.

We’ve already had, for a long time, digital marketplaces for artificially-scarce virtual goods. There are many games where players can buy, sell, and trade their in-game goods, but to prevent counterfeiting and fraud the players need to go through a central server to do so. If the server is down or inaccessible you can’t do any of this, and if there’s real money involved the publisher-or-whoever takes a cut to pay for that server. Moving a system like this to an NFT-backed one would allow players to trade directly with each other regardless of central server availability and without needing to subsidize its maintenance.

This was a decently-well-known possibility for years, but no big publisher implemented it, because while it would have improved the player experience, it would have cut off a revenue stream. Taking a cut of every transaction pays far more than just the associated maintenance costs and can actually be the main way these games make money. No publisher is going to just give that away.

So when NFTs did catch on with publishers, it wasn’t for valid and player-friendly use cases in games where it made sense. It was for illegitimate cash-grab bullshit forced into games where it didn’t fit at all, or as the basis of a scam or pyramid scheme. And when those started getting big is when most people first heard the term “NFT”, and so it’s what they associate it with.

Players rightly deride these schemes, but this derision is now associated with terms like “NFT” and “blockchain” because the bad use cases are the only ones most people have encountered. So now if a game comes along with a good NFT use case (such as a digital trading card game that uses NFTs to make cards into unique and distinct entities that can be upgraded, traded, and sold player-to-player), it has an uphill battle because for most players it will be lumped in with the bad use cases and dismissed as just another scummy NFT game.

The problem was never the NFTs. The problem was the short-sighted player-hostile money-grabbing. But since that’s how a lot of people were introduced to NFTs, the conceptual well was poisoned. Once it gets in that state, the problem is self-reinforcing, because player-friendly publishers will mostly want to avoid tarnishing their games with this reputation, while player-hostile ones with nothing to lose will keep pushing for the player-hostile revenue streams.

I never owned an Xbox. But for several years I maintained a list of games I wanted to try if I ever got one. The list grew and shrank over time as new interesting games came and eventually got ported to other platforms, but for basically its entire lifetime the list’s top game was I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1

Released in 2009, Z0MBIES was a quirky and bite-sized twin-stick shooter (at a time when I was very into those). The game was small and mechanically simple, but this was the start of the indie games boom and the game was downloadable for a single dollar. Plus it had a personality that catered to what was popular on the internet at the time, with an irreverent and self-referential soundtrack, references to other popular games, and of course a leetspeak title. It was one of the most successful indie console games of 2009, and though it wasn’t enough to persuade me to buy a Microsoft console when I already had Sony and Nintendo ones plus a gaming PC, I always wanted to try it and be part of the moment.

The game isn’t talked about much anymore, but I recently found out that in 2021, it was ported to Steam. This would make me happy on grounds of games preservation and art history regardless, not to mention the generosity of releasing the game for free–but I was also just really excited that I was finally going to be able to play this game. I could hardly believe it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been into arcadey twin-stick shooters. My gaming in general has slowed down considerably and I’m particularly uninterested in chasing high scores. But I was so happy to install this game onto my Steam Deck and finally give it a whirl. For a few minutes there, it was 2009 again. A very different time in the life of the games industry, and in mine.

I still don’t plan to buy an Xbox. But I guess I can finally take this game off the list.

Based on how much joy they brought me, not on objective greatness.

1. Kirby and the Forgotten Land
2. Vampire Survivors (which according to my Steam Replay accounted for fully 50% of my Steam play time this year)
3. Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova
4. Shadows Over Loathing
5. The Last Campfire

(I spent so much less time playing games this year that I didn’t really have enough to fill out the usual ten.)

Honorable mentions to Inscryption and The Fall as other games I finished and didn’t hate.

Most anticipated game for 2023:

1. Star Trek: Resurgence

Special award for joy that comes less from the game itself and more from the shared daily habit of playing with Allie, plus what the game means and enables:

1. Wordle
2. dordle

Via Kotaku: Right Now Is A Great Time To Jump Into No Man’s Sky

I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about this for a month.

On the one hand, it’s a gratifying surprise that No Man’s Sky’s 4.0 “Waypoint” update seems like it finally deals with the problems I had with the game, and I went ahead and redownloaded it. But it’s also bittersweet, because Shamus Young had the same problems, so my immediate reaction to the news is to wonder what he’d have to say about this—

And then I remember.

I still don’t know what to say. I wrote before that I no longer had heroes in the talking-about-games-online space. Shamus was the closest thing left. I don’t think there was anyone I looked up to more.

I never met Shamus or even managed to have a direct interaction with him, but it’s hard to overstate his influence on me. I’ve been reading his work for something like fifteen years. There’s a reason he’s the first link in my blogroll and I’ve quoted or linked to him several times. I’m going to feel his absence for a long time, and I’m not the only one.

No Man’s Sky is just one game, and though Shamus wrote about it several times it’s not in the top handful of games that are most associated with him. But I can’t help but find it tragicomic that after he revisited the game multiple times and repeatedly found that its core issues weren’t fixed, they finally are and he didn’t live to see it.

You have to find the humor in these things, because otherwise there’s only the darkness.

So, I’ve been reading the Star Trek comics set in the world of the reboot movies. They are surprisingly good.

The sixth volume makes references to the events of the then-recent Star Trek game set in the same world, which surprised me–most Trek comics exist in their own isolated continuities, since mainline Trek continuity is dense with decades of lore by this point. But the reboot movies started with a cleaner slate and thus can have a single continuity between comics, movies, and games (well, there was just the one game, but still). So that’s kind of cool.

But it’s also clearly cross-promotional. If you read the comics and they tease you with references to the game’s events, maybe you’ll get curious and go buy the game. It’s a little blatant, but, well, I enjoyed the comics so much that it actually worked on me. I decided to pick up the game, which I’d previously ignored due to its poor reviews.

Here’s the dumb part: you can’t buy this game anymore. Not new, anyway. It came out in April of 2013 on PS3, Xbox 360, and Windows/Steam. In April of 2016 - just three years later - it was delisted from all platforms, presumably due to license expiration.

I don’t know much about licensing deals, but this really feels like a terrible model in which everybody loses. If I could have bought this on Steam, I would have, since I have a Steam Deck and no portable way to play a PS3/360 game. Instead, I bought a used physical PS3 copy and not a cent of that sale went to the developer, publisher, or IP owner. The cross-promoting comics convinced me to give Paramount money that Paramount actually refuses to take.

This is also a clear argument against digital-only distribution. If the game hadn’t been sold physically, it would now be almost impossible for me to play it at all… at least legally.

Thankfully, the game was sold physically, so I was able to grab it off eBay for ten bucks, and now I am excited to go play this terrible game.

So, okay, Sega is apparently developing films based on two of its classic titles: rhythm game Space Channel 5 and beat ’em up Comix Zone. Which–okay, cool, whatever; this early it’s impossible to say whether they will be any good. (Though my immediate thought was “Okay, now do Crazy Taxi.”)

But here’s what caught my attention: the Space Channel 5 film will apparently “tell the story of a hapless fast-food worker who is recruited by a freedom reporter from the future to save the world from aliens using the one thing that unites all people on the planet: our love of silly viral dances.” If you aren’t familiar with the source material: the game Space Channel 5 stars a future reporter saving the world from aliens through dance. There’s no “hapless fast-food worker” in the mix. That’s new for the film.

To be clear: I’m not trying to pick on this film in particular. This is a really common pattern. The Sonic the Hedgehog games (and comics, and I think mostly the shows) are about Sonic fighting Eggman, while the films are about James Marsden meeting Sonic and helping him fight Eggman. The Transformers cartoons (and comics, and old movies) are about good and evil transforming robots, while the Michael Bay films are about Shia LaBeouf meeting good transforming robots and helping them fight evil transforming robots. And on and on; you get the idea. As part of an attempt to give an adaptation of a niche property more mainstream appeal, the studio adds in what TVTropes calls a “lead you can relate to”. As if the audience can’t understand a fantastical setting unlike modern Earth or relate to any of its characters unless there’s a wholly non-fantastical person along for the ride to comment on how unlike modern Earth this all is (and probably end up playing a key role in saving the day despite being wholly unqualified compared to the setting’s preexisting characters).

(Note that this is unnecessary for the Comix Zone adaptation since that game was already about a normal artist getting sucked into the world of their comic; the movie can just do the same thing there with no problem.)

Now, I have to assume from the sheer number of times this has been done and the unimaginable amount of money involved that the strategy works more than it fails (or at least seems to). But it perplexes me. Of course it feels bizarrely patronizing–the source material didn’t need to have an everyman audience surrogate in order for the audience to know how to understand and react to the premise and setting. The audience just had their own actual reaction.

But beyond that, naively it seems like this sort of move should reduce the overall appeal of the adaptation.

For the existing fans, the new viewpoint character is an extra layer of metaphor distancing them from what they came for. They’re here to enjoy retro-futurist dancers / brightly-colored forest animals / transforming robot battles, not to watch someone else enjoy them. Any time or focus the film spends on the normal everyday person is worse than useless because it takes away from the time or focus spent on what makes this IP what it is and the reasons the fan enjoys it.

So presumably the idea is that having a “more relatable” lead character will gain you more mainstream appeal than it costs you in niche appeal, but like… having a generic protagonist is not a unique selling point, by definition! All it does is make the movie more interchangeable with other movies, and there are so many movies out there–if you’re someone who needs that “relatable” lead, are you even going to choose to watch Space Channel 5 instead of an actually-mainstream film in the first place? Why would you, unless the fantastical setting appealed to you? In which case, do you even need the “relatable” lead?

It doesn’t make sense to me. It really seems like this kind of adaptation just waters down what sets the source material apart; taking away some of the reason to watch it in particular, replacing it with weaker generic appeal that makes it stand out less.

I can see where that’s a good approach if there aren’t many choices available to the audience and you just need to avoid pushing people away and thus remove reasons not to watch your film. But given the options available to modern film audiences, I’d expect you to be better off giving people a clear reason to watch your film by offering something other films do not.

It’s fun to dust off the old Rock Band controllers and pick the game back up.

It’s even more fun to discover that you played so much fake plastic guitar back in the day that you can, even now, jump right back in on Expert.