You see, Radio Free Nintendo runs on the March to February fiscal year - but ours trail the calendar year by three months, rather than leading it by nine. As such, our Top 5 Games of 2025 is precisely on time for a year that contained the launch of Nintendo's newest console.

This is an impossible lie to maintain. I do not know why I evented attempt it. We're just late. Arguments can be made that we are fashionable in our tardiness, but given the show's membership I suspect this like will likewise implode under the most cursory scrutiny.

I much prefer this "Top Five" approach to attempting either consensus or categorization. It does create tremendous variability in how we approach the activity - person to person and year to year. We talk about last year's selections to kick the show off - and it is deeply amusing to me that I did not even recall that my #1 last year was a 2024 game. I can confirm, it is - and it was a justified selection.

I'd be curious what the exercise for a consensus game would look like - but I suspect the answer is probably just a very bland answer. It largely just becomes "what game did the most people play?"

Category winners is an equally dubious exercise: are there often enough RPGs to make a category? What of sports games? Platformers? It would just push out some of the smaller or stranger titles that leak into our lists because of their oddity.

Without spoiling our selections, I can offer the following observations:

1. No host shared #1 selection
2. In fact, no two hosts shared 2, 3, 4, or 5
3. Every host had two games that only they mentioned

Trying to reach an agreed outcome would never give us such variety.

I can't say much else, so enjoy the Top Five of 2025.

And no, we didn't talk about the Pokémon Presents, it happened after recording. Just know that the extremely stupid Game Boy music player would have created all kinds of disruption this episode did not require.

If you crave this disruption, you can ask about it.

• (00:02:23) What were our Top Fives of last year, again?
• (00:10:47) Our Top Five-to-two of 2025.
• (01:40:03) Honorable mentions.
• (01:50:04) Discover our four Top one games of twenty-twenty-five.

This episode was edited by Guillaume Veillette. The "Men of Leisure" theme song was produced exclusively for Radio Free Nintendo by Perry Burkum. Hear more at Perry's SoundCloud. The Radio Free Nintendo logo was produced by Connor Strickland. See what he's up to at his website.

This episode's ending music is "Meeting and Parting" from Pocket Monsters Original Soundtrack Best 1997-2010 2. Composition by Shinji Miyazaki. It was selected by Greg. All rights reserved by The Pokémon Company.