The Best Games at Tokyo Game Show 2025

By Diego Nicolás Argüello | September 30, 2025 | 3:13pm

Video Games Lists Tokyo Game Show

The video game industry is very much still in its post-E3 era. Publishers and studios, both big and small, are scattered around the world trying to find a new place to settle in. This, in turn, allows for wider visibility: Summer Game Fest continues to attempt being the go-to hub in the June slot of the calendar year, while the likes of PAX and Gamescom continue to invest in their multi-region plan. And every year in September, Japan welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Tokyo Game Show.

While I’ll be exploring my general thoughts on the event in a separate piece, I did end up playing quite a few games at my first TGS, all in between interviews and zig-zagging thousands of people to get to my next appointment. Here are my impressions of some of the most interesting titles slated to be released in 2025 and beyond.

People of Note

tokyo game show people of note

People of Note introduces an intriguing blend between turn-based RPGs and rhythm games, which was bound to happen at some point after years of developers iterating on rhythm-based games. The mashup is also part of the game’s personality, the premise being that a pop singer traverses different regions to accrue music genre archetypes—the metal head, the EDM obsessed, and so on. It makes for a purposefully dissonant result, a sentiment that seems to be at the core of People of Note. The demo I played featured multiple combat sequences, which subvert the usual turns timeline by turning it into a stanza. There’s a BPM set during fights which affects the timing of your attacks, as you need to press certain buttons following the rhythm, and your accuracy affects how effective they are. Some enemies and attacks can affect the stanza itself, either making it faster or adding modifiers, forcing you to balance out the actions you’re doing in those affected segments to avoid the penalty. The music itself didn’t mesmerize me, but People of Note was the only demo that had me nodding with my head slightly while tapping with my foot in the middle of the show floor, and that counts for something.

D-Topia

The gap between our current times and fictional depictions of dystopian futures is growing narrower by the day, but I was still quite fond of the world of D-Topia and how it portrays contrasts. The title is born from the concept of a utopia where everything is digitized and made to fit every person, like a bot who adjusts their speech to cater to the person talking to them. Basically, the goal of artificial intelligence is to maximize everybody’s happiness. As a Facilitator, you begin each day getting out of bed, and focusing on the small things—eating breakfast, washing your face, all those human things that seem more like a commodity at this point. Aside from exploring the facility talking to people, fixing issues requires taking on puzzles. These were intuitive and easy to grasp, basically having you move cells inside grids to match the numbers on them to the corresponding slot, and based on the new permutations that were progressively added to them, I can see how they could get hard pretty fast. There wasn’t much in the demo itself, but the detail of the environments and the overall art style was quite eye-catching. And of course, the demo ends with a tease that something malign might be about to take place inside the utopia. Who would have thought that relying on artificial intelligence would yield ill results?

Scott Pilgrim EX

Another game that’s trapped in the “oh, something broke the timelines and a bunch of things are happening at once” trope. Based on what I played, the writing is quite goofy and simplistic, which is fine by me, considering the combat itself is very good. One concern I had going into the demo is that the studio, Tribute Games, hasn’t really focused on fleshing out its beat ‘em ups with some complexity in mind. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and Marvel Cosmic Invasion are fun to play, but they don’t quite capture the enticement I get from, say, Streets of Rage 4. Thankfully, Scott Pilgrim EX presents a varied toolkit of movements, attacks, and actions from the get-go, allowing you to do combos easily and with style. It feels good to play, and playing co-op, there seems to be a great potential for goofiness due to funny occurrences.

Scott Pilgrim EX has an open-ended structure in a similar fashion to River City Girls with objectives you can do at your own pace, as well as shopping districts (yes, you still have to purchase items at least once to see which stats they’re affecting), and additional areas to explore. For example, the demo featured a beach level with a massive ice structure—placing a bomb shattered it into pieces, and that opened a portal to an ice dimension. There, we fought against multiple enemy waves in order to recover a lost music instrument, which then culminated in a boss fight featuring a dinosaur with an emo hairstyle. There were some moments that dragged on for longer than they should have, including the tutorial itself and the aforementioned enemy waves, but it seems like a balancing that Tribute could iron out before launch. If anything, these moments aren’t that aggravating when playing with someone, as you can always just idle chat. The biggest flaw of the demo was being unable to hear the new Anamanaguchi soundtrack clearly with so much background noise.

Demi and the Fractured Dream

Demi and the Fractured Dream feels like one of the first games to take inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Even after a short tutorial section, there was a lot of show, don’t tell, which I appreciate amidst so many demos that constantly hold your hand. The smaller enemies I encountered in the dungeon didn’t say much, but I’m glad that the combat isn’t pushing yet again into Dark Souls territory. Rather, there’s a lot more jumping and agile movement involved. During a boss fight, I had to repeatedly jump to avoid ground slams as well as circular attacks where the enemy rotated on its own. Outside of combat, the dungeon had a few moments where I had to find keys to move forward, as well as use a massive leaf to push myself in platforms, as well as redirecting projectile beams from traps to hit a statue far away and open up a path. Despite being a short demo, I’m looking forward to learning more about Demi and how the final result will be, even if I’ll inevitably be thinking about Link in my head while doing so.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

I didn’t know what to expect from The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, but I can’t get the combat and assortment of weird little guys out of my head since I played the demo. Which is surprising, because there seemingly isn’t that much variety at the beginning: you button mash attack to use your sword, and then there are bombs and a bow with limited arrows, as well as a shield, but I was stubborn and didn’t get to integrate it into my muscle memory. But I had fun discovering and fighting the weird cast of enemies. In one of the dungeons, there were groups of toads playing instruments. One of them played a flute that gave everyone a shield until you killed it, and the melody was quite distinct. There were also reanimated armors that would collapse on the ground and rebuild themselves if you didn’t attack their core on time. After standing up again, they have an animation where they fix their helmet before resuming the offensive.

There are hints of the combat evolving over time—there’s a whole magic aspect that I didn’t even get to experiment with—but again, I’m curious about what the game will throw at you. A section of the demo involved a boss fight against a massive fish with an antenna on its head. At times you had to place a bomb on the ground while the enemy was trying to suck you into its mouth, and other times the area became a bullet hell section of sorts, with the fish spitting tidal waves and water bubbles. If The Adventures of Elliot can keep up with its enemy playfulness, it could make for some memorable fights.

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist from Argentina who has learned English thanks to videogames. You can read his work in places like Polygon, the New York Times, The Verge, and more. You can also find him on Bluesky.