2025 Year in Review and Topics Left Uncovered

Holiday wrap up

Hope everyone is enjoying their holidays, to include Boxing Day for my British and Commonwealth subscribers, I know you pop in a couple times a month. I am currently on leave right now, seeing family in New York until January 2, so the first post for 2026 will be delayed most likely until later the next day. So this Boxing Day will be spent reflecting on pieces of entertainment that I consumed in 2025, even if it was older or not necessarily released this year.

I won’t be using any particular order or any kind of ranking system. This post is gonna be a free-for-all, so look forward to video games, TV series, movies, and animanga all in one post. For the video game front, the FPS genre suffered a devastating loss earlier this week with one of the founders of Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, Vince Zampella, losing his life in a car crash in Los Angeles. His work, along with that of Jason West, heavily influenced the trajectory of the FPS genre and the gaming landscape from spearheading the modern warfare concept up until he and West were unceremoniously booted on trumped up charges. Nevertheless, neither man was deterred and got back on their feet with the likes of Titanfall under EA.

1970-2025

Further hurting CoD was the mediocrity of CoD: Black Ops 7’s release last month. If ever a case was to be made in favor of delaying CoD’s dev time by a year or two, this is it. Overuse of AI, nostalgia bait, the weird decision to make the campaign a coop feature, and an unacceptable recycling of old assets pushed the fandom to pressure Activision-Blizzard to slow up on yearly releases. Even the multiplayer wasn’t up to snuff in many players’ eyes due to the aforementioned marks against the whole game. In 2019, the channel Knowledge Husk published a video examining the history and a trajectory of the franchise with hopeful, cautious optimism. It precedes the official release of the Modern Warfare reboot so it shows its age there. After over seven years, the topic needed to be revisited, which it was, by our friends at The Act Man and the Angry Joe Show.

Channel: Knowledge Husk

The game hub updates with each release, but thankfully I filled my time with the likes of World at War, Black Ops 1 and 2, and the original Modern Warfare trilogy. Nothing against the modern games, but these were at a time when CoD didn’t worry about courting controversy. It knew what it was and what it was doing back then. Speaking of games that offered subpar content, I happened across a forgotten ninja game for the PS2 called Red Ninja: End of Honor.

So many tropes are present and unfortunately wasted, I feel

It’s about a kunoichi who is hired to protect the Takeda clan during the lordship of daimyo Takeda Shingen. Japanese history time: the daimyo or feudal lords were the equivalent of vassals to the shogunate, with the land to manage and the samurai class as retainers to keep that land from falling into enemy hands, which was the hallmark of the Sengoku period until the early 1600s when the Tokugawa clan won out. In some cases, daimyo and samurai clans hired ninja clans to spy on their enemies and remove any image from your head about what they might’ve looked like. Ninja, or shinobi, typically dressed like commonfolk, peasants, farmers, merchants, artisans, and some even had the skills to sell the idea that they were what they claimed to be. It’s also worth noting that they were more loyal to their masters than the people they hired. See the Ashikaga clan and Ashikaga Takauji for more details.

Kuoichi or female ninja didn’t exist IRL, but have become a staple of popular media, especially in properties like the Naruto franchise. This game features a kunoichi named Kurenai who embarks on a revenge quest after her father was killed by the Black Lizard clan. Like the ninja of old, she pledges undying loyalty and even uses the typical ninja tools from popular media from kunai to string weaponry to blow darts to poison arrows. In nearly all media, the shinobi almost always have few armaments or protection compared to the bushi they were fighting. So stealth mechanics are ideal in a game like this, which is something I’m not against if the controls work and in this game it was knocked down because of that. Precision is desired in this game in order to complete the platforming sections and of all the platforming games I’ve played, this was the first one that demanded the player to cook omelets with a broken skillet.

The game demands precision while giving you nearly none to work with. Flimsy and cumbersome controls are the game’s worst aspect and yet the game’s plot is fairly interesting. I plan to go over it in more detail come the new year, say February, as I’ve had the time to recover from its god-awful platforming, but taking the plunge once again for review’s sake is gonna be interesting. I’m still near the beginning of the game as of this writing, and while I don’t wanna be too harsh, it encouraged me to play God of War 2005 again.

I love bearded Kratos, but sometimes I miss that preposterous Spartan jawline

In lighter news, an animanga series that I’d been following since debut years ago and had wrapped up its first season last year has been greenlit for a second season for 2026. (^v^)

It’s The Elusive Samurai or Nige Jouzu no Wakagimi or 逃げ上手の若君 or The Young Lord who Excels at Running Away. The second season is set to release in July 2026, around the same time as the first one. So that’ll be saved for the week of July 2026 for a first impression and a full review once all the episodes are out. At the risk of jinxing its production (unlikely since this is Clover Works at the helm), let’s it escapes the fate of One Punch Man S3.

You deserved so much better, Caped Baldy

Reading a little further in the manga, the group eventually hides in plain sight in Heian-Kyo/Old Kyoto where they find another to join them in the form of Sasaki Mima. Next to that, the coming battles against Ashikaga allied forces commences with a few familiar faces, notably Hirano Shogen. Specific spoiler incoming, if you’ve ever seen the meme of the woman headpatting some children with a photo of her in uniform denoting a past as an equivalent of a Class A war criminal (i.e. Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, Tomoyuki Yamashita, Masaharu Homma, etc.):

Specifically this meme template

This is exactly what Shogen has become in the penultimate chapters I’ve read up thus far. A past of slaughtering people, selling the children in slavery (hinted at times to be of a sexual variety interspersed with that of menial labor), ravishing helpless women across the land, and having the audacity to offer hollow prayers to Lord Buddha; clearly, it weighs on him in a couple panels, but not as much as a trip to Jigoku. Even after reforming his behavior and refining his battlefield technique to actually be useful against an enemy that can fight back, it doesn’t do much for him all things considered. Does make for an interesting battle on the page; now we just need to wait to see it animated.

I’m not saying there’s no such thing as redemption, just that even if you pay your dues, there’s always going to be one group or gaggle of people who’ll curse your name til the end of days. In real life and in fiction, the road to forgiveness is long and winding. Just ask this man:

Personally, redemption relies heavily on the severity of the offense and personal conviction. Proof and consistent evidence that the offender wants to be a better person going forward, while admirable, would still need regular checks to confirm they haven’t relapsed. How long this would last, I’m tempted to say for life like what 7th Hokage Naruto has with Orochimaru, but in his specific case, Orochimaru can create synthetic bodies of himself to jump into each time his mortality creeps up on him so Naruto’s problem becomes the next Hokage’s problem, i.e. Shikamaru’s.

The buck stops at war criminal levels. Hangman, firing squad, guillotine; fastest way to hell is the one to be taken. The anime stops right after the first confrontation between Tokiyuki and Shogen, so I’m certain the second season may stop after the second time we see Shogen or a bit after that.

In the gaming space, a not-insignificant portion of my time has been taken up by Victoria 3, Zenless Zone Zero, and the trio of Lewdtroidvanias I wrote about before. For Victoria, I main Japan, Germany, and the U.S. for the historian in me with Russia thrown in for good measure. I’ve been able to get the Empire of Japan going, but RNGesus doesn’t make the colonial aspect very easy. Praiseworthy, but after some updates regarding the Iberian kingdoms, it’s gotten even tougher than I recall, so I’m up for a grind.

Speaking of which, ZZZ has newer banners to round out the year and I’ve gotten lucky enough to avoid the cat Nekomata until recently.

Then again, she has a past as a cat thief (no pun intended) so I should’ve expected this at some point during my pulls.

For progress in the Lewdtroidvania front, with Midnight Castle Succubus, looking online for guides was a big help. I found all the girls and nearly all the crowns and finally saw Beatrix as a succubus.

Should’ve known the transformation also meant waiting 20 minutes for the honkers to pass before the rest of Bebe showed up, I guess.

More upgrades, health, a powered up form and I’m at the final boss who’s putting up even more of a fight than the final one to unlock the alternate map that I’m at right now. Thanks to the guides, I’m ever confident I can get through this. And while I’m at it, power through the other pixelated NSFW titles with that knowledge I’ve acquired.

Lastly, Red Ninja’s impression didn’t just leave me retreating to Greek God of War and The Suffering. That game and Tactical Bacon Productions had me returning to a specific Zero Punctuation episode from 2009.

Channel: The Escapist

In the beginning, one of the showrunners of Unskippable was dared to review a game called X-Blades in the same manner and interestingly, the game was featured on Unskippable itself and that show’s purpose is to take the piss out of video game intros. Through this, I bought X-Blades and its sequel Blades of Time to see whether it is Like God of War But. Yeah, the tower of content ain’t coming down and it ain’t gonna be finished whatsoever.

I plan on covering animanga releases slated for 2026 after everything is settled and I’m back from leave. I’ve so far only kept tabs on Featherfooted Daimyo, so I know I have even more to look forward to for the year.

Interspersed with my day job army-ing. Yay…

On a final note, one of my computers, an MSI Katana 15 B12V, has a key that works intermittently. The E key which has left me to hot key the copy-paste function to type just this post. A nuisance that I haven’t been able to fix, and I fear having to replace the thing to return to form. I have the old Acer Nitro 5 despite it sputtering to life much slower than before the SD Fiasco of ’24 and for all its faults, OneDrive still has all my precious files so nothing is lost, but for how long, I dread the day when I have to restart everything from scratch.

Tiberius ain’t ready (ToT)

Hentai Games Trio

The chickens came home to roost again

The time has arrived once again to do what I do best and talk about an obscure piece of media with zero problems showing breasts and p[nyan]sy. Last year’s post about High School DxD, Shimoneta, and Monster Musume was a teaser; Valentine’s Day’s post about Scarlet Maiden was a personal introduction to AO/R18+ gaming; Spring’s post about FlipWitch – Forbidden Sex Hex was a continuation; and countless other lewd and raunchy animanga series have been showcased on this blog. This time around, I bring you a trio of hentai video games. Like Scarlet Maiden and FlipWitch, follow the Metroidvania formula in shape and art style with endless travel and backtracking, pixelated graphics, a list of bosses without a discernible order in which to defeat them, and several others. These three games are known as:

  1. Midnight Castle Succubus
  2. Tower and Sword of Succubus, and;
  3. Castle in the Clouds.

I’ll cover them in chronological order in this blog. As usual, I haven’t finished them all 100% but have spent enough time with all of them to get an idea of the least played ones to understand what was being emulated design-wise. Now onto:

The one that loves Castlevania so much that it rubs its sweaty tits all over the original video game cartridge, Midnight Castle Succubus was developed by Pixel Teishoku and Libra Heart and published under the Critical Bliss horny umbrella on September 18, 2020. Its premise is that every century, an evil succubus lays waste to the lands, slaughtering all men (presumably to add them to her army, like another video game character that I know of), and unleashing hordes of horny monsters to kidnap and molest every woman they can find.

Somewhat connected sidenote: I read further along in Redo of Healer (my soul is not safe), and the second princess Norn is shown to be a somehow worse monster than most of the others in the Jioral Kingdom; the succubus by that description makes me think of a toned down Norn.

The protagonist of this venture is a crimson-haired nameless beauty who specializes in the art of the whip. For that, I’ll call her Beatrix. Her mission is essentially defeat the succubus, save the people, rescue the rape victims, don’t get raped herself; that last one happens whenever you die so it follows the FlipWitch variant of combat, but is thankfully more generous with the saves than FlipWitch was, so I can steamroll a level and knock the teeth out of Muscle Fat Ogress, die, come back and not have to worry about losing a trinket I collected along the way because I had the foresight to save prior.

Speaking of trinkets, the game offers quite a handful. Crowns and orbs, for the most part, with throwable weapons for pickup, almost all of which seem to have been airlifted from the 2D side-scrolling Castlevania games. For the characters, Beatrix doesn’t necessarily venture alone. She can recruit a quartet ranging from the mage, the monk, the thief, and the warrior. I have yet to find the mage, and there’s a power up you can grab from a wizard that allows you to be able to summon all four of them at once as opposed to swapping them out one-by-one. Not to mention another power up that lets you use your untapped succubus powers.

I have also yet to unlock this feature in the game and at 80% completion (map traversal notwithstanding), I’m not even done with the game. Classic Castlevania lovers are sure to get a kick out of it and lewd game enjoyers will surely enjoy select loading screens of Beatrix in various scenes of undress along with a handful of the women to save being aggressively passed around by horny orges while the boss protects them in their forced breeding endeavors. If that’s two much for you, the game has a SFW version so you don’t have to worry about innocent eyes rolling out of their sockets from two cubicles over. Now onto:

This game advertises itself as a 3-in-1, but so far I’ve only ever been able to play Tower and Sword. The third game, Succubus Hunter, I haven’t been able to access due to a technical issue with the game’s coding. Maybe this is some kind of odd developer oversight or I need to contact the lord of sex in order to get to work on any one of my machines, but anyway, it came out a month later on October 30, spearheaded by Japanese dev Libra Heart on a solo venture and carried once again by Critical Bliss.

In Tower, a succubus is void of nearly all her powers and needs to traverse a skyscraper, f[squelch]ing and plucking all the way up until she can f[uoggh!]k her lovers to death as the prince of darkness intended.

Taking a page from Scarlet Maiden, the design of this succubus, whom we’ll call Matilda, is that of more pieces of abnormally thick tooth floss covering only the important bits so that I don’t have to put the censors to work (wish I had better ones to use though, since those black squares don’t get paid enough), easily removed so that when it comes to magicking the life force out of a demon’s soul (read: penis), she gets ever stronger. Wait ’til Matilda gets to Level 100 and you’re jizz causes her to grow wings so that she can engage in endless flight. That’s the kind of magic that fuels anti-masturbation propaganda. “No, honey, I wasn’t wanking to that tramp over there! the Demon Matilda stole me seed! You’ve to believe me!!” And that’s how marriages fail. – Friar Maxwell, c. 1584.

I’m not certain if there’s a SFW version, but if there is it’d defeat the purpose of the goal of the game. Put these nun clothes on, dearie, won’t you please think of-wait, sexy nuns are thing, that’s a poor example.

For the second in this functional 2-in-1:

From stealing Alucard’s codpiece to raiding Zelda’s elf-eared panties, comes Sword of Succubus, whereby traversing the world is very dangerous without protection… and a sword. The succubus this time, Yolanda, gains the power of a holy sword by which to defeat the king of the demons. Now, succubi are only creatures, praying on mankind’s sexual temptation, so a being who robs you of your seed through her tits going on to do the same to Lucifer is a bit like Tanya from Mortal Kombat fighting Shinnok.

Hold on…

An MK X arcade run perhaps?

The layout definitely calls out more to Zelda’s first outing as opposed to the Belmonts with the pixelated succubus waving a sword and by way of lucky magical charming powers getting the sword buried deep within her enemies’ pants. That description makes me think of a female Fleece Johnson or !shock! Silvia from the KonoSuba movie.

Tall, dark, beautiful, and capable of penetrating you effortlessly…!

As a white hat succubus of sorts, Yolanda carries in her ginormous tits (also covered by easily-removable tape) life-saving milk that is the source of her immense power. It can be deposited for upgrades or traded between Yolanda and fellow succubi because real recognizes real or in this case breast recognizes breast.

Technically, I’m stuck on the first world, but the way this game is mapped out is a bit weird. It might have been the same as the original Zelda game back in 1986, but I have yet to run that through a ROM, partly because my interest in Zelda is quite limited, having only played Phantom Hourglass some 15 years ago, and Zelda had already come a long way seeing as she’s HD and thicker than a tower of king-size snickers.

The map has different teleportation points to go from one area to another with three different points in the town to a cave to a desert area and that’s the furthest I’m in so far. Different people interact with you with different reactions depending on what you’re wearing or not. The above photo shows Yolanda’s full dress and with enough hits, the thong, nipple tape and sleeves fall off. She’s clearly comfortable fighting naked (and most likely covered in c[hmph!]m after using her charm magic) and can do so quite well until her health drops to zero and you’re greeted with a “Game Over! Try Again!” with her tits in view or her giant ass taking up 40% of the screen. Do they make doors wider to accommodate?

Until I’m able to access Succubus Hunter, I’ll add it to the review list later. Finally, we’ve got:

Those aren’t boobs; those are the earth-movers that Obadiah Stane was developing in Iron Man: Armored Adventures.

Pixel Teishoku and Libra Heart teamed up once again to lead the development of Castle in the Clouds with Critical Bliss coming in clutch for a release date on October 8, 2021. The gameplay is even more fluidic than Midnight Castle Succubus where you can start off running as opposed to unlocking it in that game where Beatrix has an admittedly cute run, like when Senku cured Ruri and the first thing she did was run around:

Channel: Crunchyroll

The protagonist of Castle in the Clouds, Lily (an actual named MC this time), starts off as an agile, nimble fighter, armed again with a whip and all the purchaseable upgrades from MCS being available from the first pixel. Penelope stumbles upon a gang of bandits who molest her at the command of their boss, a coldhearted female bandit we’ll call Rachel. You do get your revenge and then some in a boss battle against her, but as you progress through the game, you gain work as a sex worker. Great! So slaying monsters by day and conquering “monsters” by night.

Lily is a bounty hunter and her main motivation is coin which she hopes to gain by slaying monsters across the world with presumably the same type of whip she uses for her clients. Not that it makes any difference since she can buy more whips from the weapons shop and not just whips (or chains). Swords, scythes, axes, staffs; she’s got access to numerous weapons though she’s still no God of War: Ascension Kratos.

A general has to know how to use all sorts of weapons, you see.

Lily’s quest for coinage explains her agreement to take on sex work on the side and is an interesting side hustle of hers, to say the least. The game apes more from the rest of the 2D Castlevanias whilst combining elements from Metroid and rounding out the whole lewd Metroidvania picture. I explored more of this game than Tower and Sword, but not to the extent of MCS.

With multiple different locales, we probably add Mario 3 to the list of games this game owes money to.

Does this in any mean that the sex scenes are any different? Not really, it’s the same across the board, but there are a few additions that appeal to the teasing aspect so you creative minded gooners have something to look forward to. Plot-wise, it’s not all that different from a mature isekai or a hentai whose plot just so happens to be in an isekai. Lily accepts quests from the guild, takes on the quest, and gets rewarded in coin.

There’s more of the game that I’m missing, but the presentation it gives me at the first hurdle is one worth exploring once I’m done with the others or reach 90% in the others, whichever comes first… and considering the content, the players will c[ooh!]m first.

Looking at all three of these games, let’s ponder for a fact that a woman is the main character of all these games. Agree to disagree on the game over screens being some form of rape of the character by the respective enemy types, only in defeat is the woman helpless and towards the end most of the time, she’s not just in control of the situation but so overpowered, they could become some sort of evil queen with the whips and chains to boot. Let’s one up Spike Spiegel, f[araara]k women who can actually just kill you; lay down the red carpet for the woman who can enslave you.

Channel: Gianni Matragrano

All three of these on Steam are available for $13 each, which is appropriate for obvious reasons. Spend $39 now on all of them or wait for an upcoming sale to knock a few bucks off.