Lucas White
Game industry critic and reviewer
Writing For
Playstation Lifestyle
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Bleach being back in 2025 is wild. I was in high school back when the “Big Three” were exploding in popularity, consistently topping charts and pushing more manga and anime into mainstream spaces in the west. But while One Piece and Naruto are still a constant presence in media and games, Bleach fell off a long time ago. Bleach’s anime ended prematurely in 2012 and hasn’t seen a console video game (aside from crossover appearances) since 2011. Over a decade later, Bleach is back to finish the story with the Thousand-Year Blood War anime series and Bleach Rebirth of Souls, a brand-new fighting game, to go along with it.
There’s a sequence in Look Outside I’m never going to forget. I’m in a ravaged apartment, fumbling in the dark for supplies and equipment. The family that lived here was overcome by the thing outside, but it’s not over for them yet. I’m dealing with them one by one, out of a mixture of pity and curiosity I’m not proud of. One of them, used to be a young boy before the teeth erupted from his throat, didn’t attack me first. Whatever’s left of him inside just wants to play with his army men. I found a little green soldier in the kitchen earlier, and, in a moment that feels more like accepting defeat than when I beat the kid’s father to death in the hallway, sit down to play.
Just like its impressively long and unwieldy title, Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is a messy game. But it’s a messy game with lofty ambitions and a lot to like, even if which pieces you end up liking are not the pieces you expected or wanted to like, especially if you’re a returning Atelier fan. It’s also hard to recommend Yumia as a starting point despite its apparent interest in being one, when I can point to Ryza as a strong foundation that manages to justify itself as a three-part arc that never overstays its welcome. What we have here is an RPG that casts too wide a net for its own good, but has a lot of cool ideas and hits enough different notes in different ways that still make it worth playing. For folks willing to engage with a flawed experience in good faith and put up with some janky bloat, Atelier Yumia has a lot going for it. But those looking for a more realized vision that cleanly hits its targets will likely lose patience.
When I was a kid, “edutainment” was a thing in video games, especially on PC. I had several point-and-click adventures that had me solving puzzles, answering trivia, and other brain-wrenching exercises to get by instead of simply jumping on goombas or whatever. They were neat, even if they didn’t adhere to the same kinds of standards as a big budget franchise like Mario or Final Fantasy. When I had a kid of my own, I noticed those games all but vanished, relegated to mobile titles that would sort of teach about numbers, letters, and such, but be more laser-focused and inevitably ask for more money. Carmen Sandiego was one of the biggest edutainment IPs of its time, and playing a new one in 2025 feels like rediscovering a lost art.
Koei Tecmo has come screaming into 2025 with all kinds of wins, from bringing the hype back to Ninja Gaiden to successfully shifting gears in Dynasty Warriors. Even Atelier is growing in leaps and bounds. Somehow there’s room for more, as we saw during the February 2025 State of Play. A whole new Warriors game shadow-dropped, and it’s another intriguing experiment: a roguelike! Not just any roguelike, but one that goes out of its way to invoke Hades, one of the most tremendous of its kind in contemporary history. Generally I buy what Omega Force sells, but I wasn’t feeling Warriors: Abyss when I first saw it during the showcase. After playing it… well, I’m still not really feeling it. But I kind of am? Buckle up folks, it’s a weird one.
Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog is a remarkable tribute to PC-98 visual novels and hard sci-fi anime of a specific vintage. The visuals are pitch-perfect with multiple settings that offer different vibes, and the soundtrack is a complex beast of speaker-straining chiptunes that enhances the mood even further.
We’ve probably made life measurably worse for ourselves by building systems that feed on labor and thrive on diminishing returns. But while playing by the rules and struggling to get by is painful, there is still something innately precious about living and building what you can with the hand you’re dealt. That’s what I felt Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector was trying to communicate over the time I spent with it. It’s a conversation about selfness as much as it is a cool sci-fi video game about machines and dice. It challenges you with harsh conditions and constant dread while telling you a story about what work does to a body, practically forcing you to reflect on your own history. It doesn’t reward you with hope or simple optimism, but it does offer validation. In this case, that might be better.
To put it simply, if this was one of those retro re-releases that are basically fancy emulators with additional screen filters and save states, maybe online play as a treat, Star Wars: Episode 1: Jedi Power Battles (whew) probably would’ve been alright. Instead, we have this bizarre Frankenmaster that looks and sounds like the end result of someone playing with a PlayStation emulator for the first time and pushing the sliders all the way up. Preservation is important, even for games that aren’t “classics.” This isn't the preservation you've been looking for.
Blade Chimera is short, sweet, and simple. It’s also visually enthralling and just… really dang cool. It’s the perfect kind of game to run into in January 2025, especially after so much of my time up until now has been eaten by multiple dozen-hour RPGs. I blazed through this game in two sittings and loved every minute, cliches and all. Seeing Team Ladybug come out swinging like this for its first fully-original metroidvania is a delight, and Blade Chimera has fully cemented this team as one to look out for going forward.
It’s tough to say a lot more about Freedom Wars, despite the fact I had a lot of fun playing it! It really is the quintessential Vita game. It tries a lot of things, hits really hard on a few, and everything else doesn’t quite come together. It’s from before even Capcom struck gold with Monster Hunter World, still figuring things out and building momentum itself. The gameplay alone can sustain hours of squadded up, monster wrangling, gear upgrading fun. But the storytelling really whiffs despite a strong start, disappointing more as a result. And in terms of interesting stuff going on besides the main loop, Freedom Wars fails to find the sauce as well. This one is here for a good time, but not a long time. I should probably go to jail myself for that one, yikes.