Following the theme of my previous thread (GotY’25… NOT from 2025), do you have any games NOT releasing in 2026 that you’d want to have beaten before the year’s end?

For me, I’ve got a whole catalogue of games I’m hoping to tap into. From all the PS1/2/3 games (on my new PC) to Banjo Tooie and 3D Sonic. DKBananza is a big one I’m really looking to sink some time into. And maybe MKWorld if/when 200cc is added.

DK Bananza. I'm still at the end of the elephant section.
FFX HD. I've been playing it for a little over a year now and struggled.
Stellar Blade. Struggled despite playing on the easiest difficulty.

Biggest ones I'm focusing on are

FF7 Rebirth - I played FF7 Remake. Loved the presentation, combat, and music, but the story limped along, awful side content, and entire chapters were just moving characters from one end of rubble to another end with little to no story progress made (which coincides with the story limping along). So overall, I was disappointed, but, I feel like I should at least continue the story, so I finally picked up Rebirth with the holiday sales and started playing it last night. I know it's a much longer game, so I'm hoping to complete sometime in early 2026.

Borderlands 4 - I love the franchise, and from what I've heard, there's a great co-op looter shooter there, but I've been holding out for additional patches to iron out performance, which seems to still be an issue to this day 3 months after launch.

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - I for the most part 100% Breath of the Wild. The only thing I didn't completely collect were the korok seeds. After that, I was pretty much satisfied with that world of Zelda. So I was kinda bummed when I saw Nintendo was making a direct sequel in the same overworld, just with sky islands. I felt I got my fill of that world and didn't have any desire to go back. After seeing the major technical improvements the Switch 2 hardware provides, I feel like I would at least enjoy the experience more, so I went ahead and picked up the Switch 2 edition of the game.

Both are worth beating the main story and some side content. Keep it up. 

My backlog is embarrassingly huge, and I aim to dig into it as much as I can, though I'm not sure how possible that will be with how much stuff I'm interested is releasing just in the first few months of 2026.

On Switch 1 I still have Wolfenstein Young Blood, Cadence of Hyrule, and Sea of Stars to beat, on Xbox One I plan to start Quantum Break ASAP, and on PS4/5 I wanna get around to Shadow of the Tomb Raider when I get a gap in my schedule.

I really wanna play Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and the two Divinity Original Sins but I dunno if I'll get through all four of those next year since a big one I'm for sure playing is Forza Horizon 6 which should give me hundreds of hours of fun. Other potential ones include Rain Code, Last Defense Academy, the new scenario in Danganronpa 2x2, and the recent Somnium Files game.

I'm also itching to play through another highly regarded visual novel series since the last time I did that was the Ace Attorney series in the first half of 2024 so a couple contenders there are Higurashi and Unimeko. With a ton of my gaming time being spent on just a single game this year it's possible I play more shorter ones in 2026 but I love getting sucked into something massive so there will be at least one big game or series for sure.

Baldurs Gate 3

Ive replayed it like 4 times, never beaten it once. Im one of the many victims of Act3s change of pace. Act2 is so climatic that i lose interest in Act 3. Raphaels fight is goated tho.

I’ve 16 days left of PS+ so I want to get Skate Story beat, will be my first game I’ll try to finish in 2026.

There's hundreds of games in my backlog.

These are five I'm likely to get to next year: Cyberpunk, Like a Dragon Gaiden, Burnout 3, AC Unity, Pokémon Pearl.

That's interesting to me since act 3 is my favourite part with act 2 being my least favourite. The story and character arcs getting to their most interesting points combined with the insane amount of NPCs and in general just how dense it is makes the lower city in particular easily one of my favourite areas I've experienced in video games. Seeing so many NPCs to interact with felt overwhelming initially but in the best possible way.