Now and then you finish a game you love and wish there could be even more of it. The best DLC doesn't feel like content missing from the base game but rather an extension beyond an already appropriately expansive experience. The DLC listed here represent the best in content that brought us back into games we'd finished, and caused us to get sucked in all over again.

5. Mario Kart Tour - The Final Year - Justin Berube

Mario Kart Tour released in 2019 and provided great bi-weekly content updates up until the game's fourth anniversary in September 2023. These updates included additional tracks, drivers, karts, gliders, and more. When all combined, the amount of content even makes Mario Kart 8 Deluxe seem tame.

2023 saw an increased injection of new tracks and track variants as the game was secretly setting the groundwork for the yearly repetitive Tour service loop the game has entered into since new content ceased. Maybe if new content didn't end, Mario Kart Tour would have made it higher on our list, but still, what we did get was great and only a fraction of it made it into Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

This is the end for Mario Kart Tour being eligible for our yearly awards and it should be remembered as a game that advanced the Mario Kart Formula with track variants, Item Frenzies, special items, scoring, mini games, an improved UI, RPG-like strategic advancement, and more. You may worry about the future of the series if not for the innovative advancements found within Tour. Luckily, Tour exists, proving the future is extremely bright for Mario Kart, and we're excited to see what will happen next.

4. Mario Kart Booster Course Pass - John Rairdin

I need to start by reminding everyone that Mario Kart 8 is a Wii U game from 2014. Next year, it celebrates its tenth anniversary. Over the course of the last two years, this aging but unstoppable titan of a video game has finished doubling in size. The Booster Course Pass DLC has essentially provided us with an entire Mario Kart game’s worth of tracks both old and new. It brilliantly revises the classics, introduces some fresh content, and perhaps most importantly forces a lot of naysayers to admit that a lot of Mario Kart Tour’s track design is very good.

In addition to all those new tracks, this DLC also added eight new playable characters. These included fan favorites from Mario Kart’s past such as full-time surfboarding, part-time arms dealing Funky Kong and newcomers like Mario Odyssey's Pauline. Assuming whatever Nintendo’s next console is doesn’t also have a port of Mario Kart 8, the Booster Course Pass makes for an incredible send off to one of the most successful video games of all time.

3. Vampire Survivors: Legacy of the Moonspell & Tides of the Foscari - Joel DeWitte

I’ve worn my love of Vampire Survivors on my sleeve since first picking up the garlic and no longer fearing the reaper. Vampire Survivors' Castlevania-like, run-based survival combat levels have this beautiful ebb and flow in difficulty that make getting the right weapon and accessory mix feel like riding the crest of a wave, exhilarating and exhausting.

Legacy of the Moonspell and Tides of the Foscari are a DLC match made in heaven, offering a sweet mix of levels with cold mountain peaks and mellow sprawling forests. They introduce two weapons’ evolutions tied to just one accessory, a change that shifted my approach to how I mix and match them, not to mention transforming the end game minutes with evolutions that pop and screech like a fireworks display. Poncle Games has perfected a compelling, easy to understand but daunting to master gameplay loop mountain to climb. Legacy of the Moonspell and Tides of the Foscari give you exactly what any Vampire Survivor fan wants: more of it.

2. Pokemon Scarlet & Violet Expansion Pass - Donald Theriault

Given the… questionable… state of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet going into 2023, it’s no surprise that its Expansion Pass came out a fair bit later than the comparable one for Sword and Shield in 2020. The pass not only had to deliver performance, but also had one of the best Pokemon stories to follow up on. And while the former is still up for debate, the story spanning both halves of the pass ends up being a fine follow-up to the multiple tales spun in the base game.

But the most important thing the DLCs do is make more Pokemon available, and though the pass still left a few Pokemon MIA, it brought back a lot of old favorites for the first time, and made everyone’s first partner Pokemon available in one game for the first time in franchise history. The Indigo Disk also brought back memories of the GameCube Pokemon RPGs with their focus on double battles, bridging the gap ever so slightly between casual play and official Pokemon tournament play that focuses on the 2v2 format. If this is the way Scarlet and Violet will finish up, it’s certainly been worth the ride - and we’re still going to be getting a final update for the pass in January 2024, so the ride isn’t over yet.

1. Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed - John Rairdin

Anyone who read my review of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 knows that while I loved the game, I ultimately left it feeling somewhat disappointed in its conclusion. In many ways Xenoblade 3 felt as if it was intended to be the culmination of a trilogy, but it never really resolved in a way I or many others felt was satisfactory. Enter Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed which, despite being a prequel, managed to tie up almost every loose end I’d felt I was left with after the core game.

Future Redeemed allowed us to see characters we’d previously spent hundreds of hours with in a whole new light. It recontextualized the events of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and gave them a weight and purpose they had been sorely lacking. Beyond this, its intricately woven story echoed out beyond the world of the core Xenoblade series in a way none of us suspected. Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed not only provides a true ending to the primary Xenoblade trilogy, it creates incredible potential for where the universe could go next.