So today was the first day of the Tokyo Games Show 2025! And what a day! It felt like a whole new show compared to the usual editions. I’m not sure what happened suddenly, but the show is bigger than ever. More booths everywhere, and a lot, and I mean A LOT of games to see and try out everywhere. I walked around the whole place during the day without taking a break and I felt I barely scratched the surface! Which is good or SAD! depending on your point of view. Let me first share of the games I have tried and my first impressions. This is not exhaustive - I have done a lot more stuff during the day, but time is of the essence so let me start by this.

Games

The New Onimusha

There was barely anyone waiting for it so I could quickly try it out at the beginning of the show. We had 20 minutes of playtime. Forget the old Onimusha, this is very much a game like the recent Resident Evil 2, 3 and 4, with a similar concept: you move around in narrow spaces (this is not an open world) and you fight monsters and demons. The demo took place in Kyoto, in the Kyomizu temple, a famous spot I visited again very recently - except that in the game it’s overrun by demons and ghouls and you are sent to clean things up. The demo is mostly a tutorial showing you the different movements. You can do single hand attacks and two-handed blade attacks, ingest souls once you kill enemies, and pary and dodge. There are some kind of QTE events when enemies are weakened. And you get boss fights - I could see the first one, and beat it (after dying twice). And this was the end of the demo.

Quite well done, very nice cutscenes, but nothing too original per se, and this feels like yet another Capcom game with a different skin.

Pragmata

Now we are talking about something new. Pragmata puts you on a lunar base, and since I decided to skip most of the story because I was NOT in the mood to read a novel before playing, somehow there was some kind of incident and your character is badly injured. As you start the game, a little girl with blonde hair, who is actually an android, comes to your rescue and heals your injuries. Soon after, you are confronted with a robot trying to kill you, and the girl jumps on your back to hack the robot as you fire at it. And this is where you are introduced to the core of the gameplay. You basically have to use the left stick to move, the right stick to aim, and the trigger to shoot, while the A, B, X, Y buttons can be used to do the hacking actions. Hacking is a big word, since we are talking about reaching a specfic part on the grid, and A, B, X, Y act as the 4 different directions to move on the grid, avoiding obstacles.

This is basically a game of multitasking. Your brain needs to focus on the action, the enemies, doging, firing, and at the same time hacking the shit out of enemies. It’s not hard but this is something that will somewhat stressful when you are attacked by several enemies at once - or during boss fights. I went to the end of the demo with a ED-209 like robot you have to kill - I could manage to finish it in one go, but it took a while and it did not feel easy.

I must admit I was not convinced when I first saw the trailers for Pragmata, but now I can kind of see the point of the gameplay. The only issue I have with the game is that the story seems really dull so far, so here’s hoping that it turns out to be more exciting than what I could see so far.

Dragon Quest I and II 2D-HD Remakes

I did not play very long, just to have a quick go at the remake and see how they looked like. It’s definitely in the same style as Octopath Traveller, albeit with the old gameplay that did not translate very well to 2025. It’s probably not for me!

Undefeated Genesis

This is a game I have followed for a long time - developed in Japan, and inspired by Dragon Ball and other concepts where heroes can fly and send beams of power, and using Unreal Engine 5, the game looked good until this year. This time, they have decided to replace the more realistic hero by Ken from Barbie, and it looks awful and makes it look like a low-tier game. I would strongly suggest to reconsider that design decision, but maybe it’s just me?

In other news, there is now a story and NPCs, and they look as generic as the main character now. As impressive as the first action scenes we saw a few years ago, the current state of the game does not inspire confidence. It’s still on its way to release in 2026.

Opus; Prism peak

A game I have had in my crosshairs for a while, since it mixes things that I like: adventure and photography. This is one of the first times we get a playable demo for this game. The whole start is a long introduction to the background of the main character. He is a 40 years old man, broken by life: divorced, lost his job, and has no idea what to do next. After a car accident, he wakes up in some kind of parallel world and meets a young girl who forgot her own name, but knows that she needs to find a way back to the mountains to go back home. You decide to help.

As you discover the world, you find out that it is inhabited by spirits and demons, and that your old trusty 35mm camera can help to reveal them, and activate other magical artifacts. I could only play for about 20 minutes. It’s well produced, it has strong Ghibli vibes too. But it’s hard to judge a game that will ultimately sell on its story during such a show. I remain cautiously optimistic.

Way too Many Indie Games

The second hall, outside the main facility, is usually hosting indies and other things like merchandise and VR. This year they went overboard and the amount of booths inside there was completely crazy. There is just no way for anyone to cover all the games in there in a single day - you’d need a week!

This is where I felt that the TGS 2025 has become a lot bigger than before.

Hardware Stuff

Microprose

I had no idea that Microprose still existed. Apparently it’s mostly a brand that’s used to market Flight Simulators apparently, and on their small booth they were showing a fairly complete Flight simulator system for the Falcon fighter, with a huge amount of buttons and controls replicating what you find apparently inside the Falcon. They paired it with pedals and a VR headset, and as a whole it was cool - while the framerate was apparently a little low (you could see the stutter when you moved your head too fast, or when you were close to the terrain).

This is not something for consumers - probably mostly B2B as they have a rental business for that kind of gear. I didn’t ask for the cost :-)

XEO Hi-Fi

XEO’s into providing accessories for gamers. They were already well known for their polygonal chair, the Xeo Pod to give you surround sound inside a seat for gaming or watching movies. This time, on top of that chair, they had a few more devices, like a VR headset that felt very good - only 200 grams. The Xeo Big. You barely feel it on your head.

It was connected to Steam and they were demonstrating a game (Gloomy something?) that is more story telling than anything else - but it was very impressive with that headset. I could not see any pixel, and I think the screens were OLED as they had excellent contrast. It still needs a wire to your PC, but this is the kind of VR I would actually consider: not cumbersome or heavy and fairly low-key, yet giving a good immersion. Of course, I would only consider that if there were VR games worth it, and you already know what I think about the market.

The other piece of equipment they were demoing was a pair of speakers (the Xeo 202) with an aluminium casing, with three speaker elements to cover a wide range of sounds.

They used Call of Duty Black Ops to demonstrate the quality of the sound (not sure if that’s the right choice?) but you could certainly hear very well the gun popping when sniping enemies. They are marketing this as speakers that sound better than their actual size, and that would be perfect to put on a desk next to a gaming PC. Possibly. I would need to spend more time with them to have a clear opinion, and probably not just play games to see if they can also do music well or not. Price wise, it’s not fixed yet, but I overheard one guy saying that it could cost probably more than 700 or 800 USD. Speakers can go from very cheap to very expensive, so whether or not this is good value depends on the quality of the setup in the end.

Simucube

An awesome racing system with a char that moves in several directions when you drive, along with pedals and a racing wheel. The sensations are excellent, especially when you hit the brakes as you feel the car lunching forward thanks to their system. I tried it for 10~15 minutes and it was very convincing.

Looks like the whole thing is very expensive, so this is probably not for the consumer market.

Xbox Portable (ROG)

I almost forgot about the fact that this was releasing at the end of the year, and that it was marketed by ROG. The ROG both was full of such units, both the black and white editions. Despite the ridiculous gamepad-like shape, it actually works well in your hands. I tried a few games, and the screen was convincing too. It’s pretty much like a ROG Ally under the hood, with an Xbox branding.

What was less convincing was the interface. I had no idea how to return to a game that was minimized, it’s a series of confusing menus and shorcuts - at least I can clearly say that SteamOS has an edge in terms of UI right now. Where this machine wins is the directly availability of Game Pass. So this will be probably have some appeal for current GamePass users.

Stage Events

Since I really like Persona (at least in theory, as I hate its grinding elements), I knew that the lead singer (Takahashi-san) of Persona 3 and Persona 5 songs was going to be there for a mini-live concert (20 minutes). But that was a treat! They chose some of the best songs from Persona 3 Reload, and the stage was on fire!

I captured more videos about this stage event, but I will share them a bit later.

That’s it for today!