The post is a the latest iteration of the Xbox Excellence Awards, which was created last year to celebrate how players engaged with various releases on Xbox. The Store Rating category lists 2025 games with the best ratings on the Microsoft Store, with an added requirement of the title having at least 500 ratings. Player Engagements is about the average number of hours spent on a game by each player within the first six weeks of a game’s release. Daily Active Users celebrates titles, expansions or updates with the highest single-day active users throughout the year. And finally Units Sold is fairly self-explanatory.

Going down the lists, you’ll find many of the biggest releases of the year, from ARC Raiders and Battlefield 6, as well as award-winning RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Indie titles have also been well-represented, with games like Crime Scene Cleaner and Satisfactory making it into the lists. There also doesn’t seem to have been a singular genre to dominate the lists, since everything from sports games like EA Sports Madden NFL 26, to fantasy adventure life sims like Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, and even fighting games like Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics are well represented.

Curiously, none of the games was present in all four of the categories. At most, we got to see titles like Borderlands 4 being able to make it on to three of them: Player Engagement, Daily Active Users and Units Sold. Even ARC Raiders, which has seen quite a bit of success, is only on the Units Sold and Daily Active Users lists.

Microsoft has also emphasized that the lists represent a diverse collection of games developed by studios of varying sizes. All in all, it represents 48 unique developers based out of 13 countries, with 24 publishers having had a hand in their release. 19 of the games were self-published. “Taken as a whole, it’s an encapsulation of development on Xbox – we want gaming to reach you wherever you are, and for the teams making those games to find you from wherever they are,” wrote the company.

Full list of games:

Store Rating:

• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Crime Scene Cleaner
• Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles 2
• Digimon Story: Time Stranger
• Dreamcore
• Dynasty Warriors: Origins
• Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
• Final Fantasy XVI
• Lies of P: Overture
• Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
• Little Nightmares III
• Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics
• Minami Lane
• Mullet MadJack
• Poppy Playtime Chapter 4
• Satisfactory
• Silent Hill 2
• Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds
• The First Berserker: Khazan

Player Engagement:

• Borderlands 4
• Digimon Story: Time Stranger
• Dynasty Warriors: Origins
• EA Sports College Football 26
• EA Sports FC 26
• Elden Ring Nightreign
• Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
• Farm Together 2
• Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles
• Helldivers 2
• Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
• Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
• MLB The Show 25
• Monster Hunter Wilds
• NBA 2K26
• NHL 26
• Rust
• Satisfactory
• The First Berserker: Khazan

Daily Active Users:

• Arc Raiders
• Avowed
• Battlefield 6
• Borderlands 4
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• DOOM: The Dark Ages
• Elden Ring Nightreign
• Fortnite
• Forza Horizon 5
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Grounded 2
• Helldivers 2
• Marvel Rivals
• Minecraft
• NBA 2K26
• Rematch
• Roblox
• Rocket League
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege

Units Sold:

• Arc Raiders
• Assassin’s Creed Shadows
• Battlefield 6
• Borderlands 4
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• EA Sports Madden NFL 26
• EA Sports College Football 26
• EA Sports FC 26
• Elden Ring Nightreign
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Helldivers 2
• Hollow Knight: Silksong
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
• MLB The Show 25
• Monster Hunter Wilds
• NBA 2K26
• PGA Tour 2K25
• Ready or Not
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• WWE 2K25

Level 5 has officially announced Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time for the Nintendo Switch 2, and confirmed it as a launch title for the upcoming console, meaning it will be available for it on June 5, the day of its release. Players can expect improved visuals and frame rates and faster load times on the Switch 2 compared to the Switch.

The game will be available on the Nintendo Switch 2 for a price of $62.58, but Level 5 has confirmed that those who already own the game on the Switch will be able to upgrade to the Switch 2 version for just an additional $2.59.

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is currently available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

Set centuries after Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (also on Game Pass), the sequel focuses on Evan Pettwhisker Tildrum, who was to ascend the throne of Ding Dong Dell. Unfortunately, after a sudden coup, he’s forced to flee and establish a new kingdom. He’s joined by Roland Crane, the president of an Earth nation suddenly transported to this world and other allies.

The Prince’s Edition includes two DLC – The Lair of the Lost Lord and The Tales of a Timeless Tome. Each contains new quests, equipment, items and dungeons to explore. For more details on the base game, check out our review here.

White Knight Chronicles is a franchise you might not have ever heard of, especially if you just started really paying attention to gaming and the last seven or eight years or so. Originally launching in late 2008 in Japan and a couple years later in North America on the PlayStation 3, White Knight Chronicles released to an audience that was fairly mixed on the game and there wasn’t really a strong consensus one way or the other.

The game play, to most, was very boilerplate for the genre at the time and today would be considered downright generic. It’s pretty standard RPG fare. You learn attacks, you level up, you maintain and acquire materials after battles would you use to enhance various other elements of gameplay, and there is a real-time combat system that can be freely initiated once you come across enemies in the world. This was perhaps the original sin of White Knight Chronicles. It just didn’t really do anything new or particularly interesting even for the time. If you wanted a good RPG with that Japanese style you had countless other games to choose from that arguably did it better and have a little more meat on the bone.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t really save the experience by being about as generic. A king is killed, a princess is captured oh, and an unlikely hero is tasked with suiting up in a mysterious suit of armor to save the day, and that he does. With very little deviation into anything noteworthy or unique along the 20-to-30-hour game which, for that genre, is a fairly short adventure. Now that’s not to say that the story or the action were executed poorly or fell apart in any major way, but it just didn’t stand out in a huge way on the PS3, which as anyone who played a lot of PlayStation 3 knows, was a JRPG bonanza. Between Final Fantasy, the Tales series, Disgaea, Eternal Sonata, Resonance of Fate, etc., it was a pretty crowded field, then White Knight Chronicles showed up to the gunfight with a toothpick of a concept.

While many would praise the game for how well it integrated its different systems and how intuitive it was able to make its complexities, including its relatively interesting online functionality, there would be just as many complaints about its half-hearted online modes and a story that was overly simple and predictable – even by JRPG standards. Still, despite general lukewarm reception with a handful of detractors in both directions, White Knight Chronicles sold pretty well especially in Japan and at that time that was more than enough reason to seriously consider and pursue a sequel which Japan Studio did with White Knight Chronicles 2.

The sequel to White Knight Chronicles would improve on the originals’ shortcomings in some notable ways. Combat was way more fluid with combos that you can chain together, more flexibility with different armor types and some light crafting, and the overall presentation was a little bit nicer with larger more appealing areas to explore and a better sense of enemy variety. That said, it still fell short of the competition more notably than it had improved on its own issues. From the perspective of anyone outside of the White Knight Chronicles Ultra fandom circles, it just felt too similar to the original game with a story and set up that didn’t even try to do anything new and more online integration that just didn’t add enough to the experience for it to be worth messing with. Most of White Knight Chronicles compliments would come from what they got right about the single player offline content anyway so it was a bit puzzling as to why they didn’t just spend all of their time with the sequel focusing on that. In any case White Knight Chronicles 2 was by just about all accounts a flop especially when compared to the last game which did notably better in all measurable ways despite being a rougher game overall.

That said this would not be the end of the franchise quite yet, Sony was beginning to shift focus the new hardware and new horizons, the White Knight Chronicles series will be brought to the PlayStation Portable with a new game White Knight Chronicles Origins. It had a few surprises up its leaves with a far more interesting cast of main characters than either of the two previous games could ever dream of having.

White Knight Chronicles is a perfect example of a game series that just never quite figured itself out. There’s plenty I’ve games out there that are like that but the thing about White Knight Chronicles that hurts the most is that it really kind of started to get it right at the end. The problem was, with the previous two games performing as badly as they did, you can’t really blame Sony for pushing it off to the side and giving the spotlight and budget to other games that were coming out to close out the PS3 on a stronger note than it had started with. Maybe if they had given a PS3 style budget and similar resources that Guerrilla Games had when they made Killzone 3, it might have surprised everybody and done well.

But given the situation that the PlayStation was in at the time where they needed to be as consistent and impressive as possible to compete with the Xbox 360 and shore up support for the next generation, it’s easy to understand why they just didn’t want to take that risk at that time. And with Japan Studio being concentrated further down into the team that made the Astro games and pretty much filtering out everything else now, the odds of another crack at the White Knight Chronicles franchise are pretty low to say the least. It’s a series that just didn’t find itself until it was too late and even then, it just wasn’t good enough to really stand among the games that it needed to compete with in order to maintain any sort of profitable relevance. That said, the games still exist and for those that love them they can always be played again. But that is probably all there will ever be from this franchise that never quite found its footing.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

While the Yo-kai Watch series didn’t quite hit the potential it seemed to have at one time (there was a point where it was seriously considered a potential rival to Pokemon), it still retains a decent following. The newest entry in the series is also getting the typical release with a typical weird Japanese subtitle called Yo-kai Watch 4++ announced the developer today.

The enhanced re-release will include multiplayer, new areas, and new yo-kai to battle and collect. This will mark the first time the series will come to the PlayStation 4, as well as the first time it’ll come to a non-Nintendo system. Those who own the Switch version of the original release can download the new content as DLC.

While it’s been confirmed that Yo-kai Watch 4 will come westward at some point in time, only the Japanese release date of December 5th was announced for 4++. Presumably the localized version will be based on this. We’ll keep you updated.

Level-5’s classic role-playing title Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is out this week. It’s releasing for the Nintendo Switch in its classic form while the Remastered version is coming to PS4 and PC. Check out the launch trailer below to check out how the visuals have improved.

Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch tells the story of Oliver, who gets into an accident but is saved by his mother’s sacrifice. When grieving, he’s contacted by Drippy, who tells him of another world where the mage Shadar imposes his rule. Wanting to meet his mother’s soulmate, Oliver sets out to the other world, meeting companions along the way.

Acclaimed for its animation, which was done by Studio Ghibli, and music by Joe Hisaishi, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch Remastered runs at 1080p resolution and 60 fps on the PS4 and PC. The Switch version runs at 720p resolution and 30 fps. The gameplay seems to be relatively unchanged so we’ll see how it holds up when both versions are out on September 20th.

Level-5’s RPG franchise Yo-kai Watch has been exclusive to Nintendo hardware since its inception, starting out on the 3DS and then moving to the Switch with Yo-kai Watch 4, which launched earlier in the year in Japan. However, that will be changing soon, and Yo-kai Watch will no longer be a Nintendo exclusive franchise.

Level-5 have announced that Yo-kai Watch 4 will be coming to the PS4 as well. No exact release date or window was provided in the announcement trailer (which you can view below), but a Japanese release has been confirmed. There’s no word yet on whether the game will receive a localization in the West for the PS4 as well.

On the Switch, Yo-kai Watch 4 is confirmed to be coming West, though no release date for said localization has yet been announced. An enhanced re-release of the first game in the series is also coming to the Switch in Japan- there’s a chance that this ends up getting announced for the PS4 as well.

Dragon Quest 9: Sentinels of the Starry Skies is a bit of an odd game, especially from the perspective of veteran Dragon Quest fans. Though officially a numbered entry in the series, it is often overlooked due to its focus on multiplayer features and how much it differs from a traditional mainline Dragon Quest entry. That said, the Level-5 developed Nintendo DS RPG has its fair share of fans- and there might be some good news for them coming in in the not so distant future.

In a livestream celebrating the tenth anniversary of the 2009 Nintendo DS RPG (which you can view below), members of the Dragon Quest team revealed that a Dragon Quest 9 remake for the Nintendo Switch is something that they are considering (thanks to Gematsu for the translations), especially considering the fact that the first eight Dragon Quest games have all been ported and/or remade at least once. Though there are no actual plans to do so just yet, and while Square Enix has nothing to announce right now, the developers spoke openly about what such a remake would look like and how much it would differ from the original game.

Visually, the remake – if it were to be made – would use the visual look and style seen in last year’s Dragon Quest 11. Though the game would try to replicate the multiplayer aspects of the original – which relied on the DS’ StreetPass feature – the developers feel it would be worth playing even if it just encompassed the game’s story content, remade with completely new visuals. New visuals, in fact, is something they seem particularly excited about, as they feel they would help bring the original game’s art to live much better than the DS could.

The remake could also include completely new story content, as the developers also feel that thanks to the original’s meaty endgame and post-game content, most players don’t remember its main story too well. Extra new story content would be geared at making the main narrative more memorable. The developers also made it clear that if such a remake were to happen, Level-5 would be the ones to work on it.

When speaking of a timeframe in which this could happen, the developers said that thanks to already having an engine and experience with the Switch under their belts, feeding Dragon Quest 9’s data into it wouldn’t take too long and could be done in a matter of months- though if the remake were to include new story content, that would kick up the development time requirements considerably.

It’s all hypothetical for now, but it’s great to know that it’s something Square Enix are seriously considering and have given so much thought to. Dragon Quest 1-8 have all seen remakes or ports at some point in time, so a remake for Dragon Quest 9 wouldn’t be out of the question. One that gives it a completely new look and makes its story even meatier would, in fact, be quite an exciting prospect, especially for series fans. Here’s hoping it ends up happening.

Yo-kai Watch was, at one point, on track to rival Pokemon in its success (at least within Japan). Unfortunately, the series has fallen a little short of that with recent entries- but still remains pretty popular in Japan. The latest title, Yo-kai Watch 4, released there last month. We’ve been waiting for a release date for the west for a while and today, finally, we have an official announcement that it’s happening.

At the Anime Expo 2019, Level-5, the game’s developer, made the announcement. There were no photos or videos allowed or released at the expo, but thanks to Twitter user HDKirin, we have the information. Unfortunately, there’s no date, so when it will actually come to be is anyone’s guess. Apparently, a trailer was shown, but in Japanese with subtitles and no dub, meaning it could be a good bit before it happens.

Nintendo has handled the publishing of the series in the past when it got particularly big on the 3DS, so it’s possible that could happen again here. We’ll just have to wait and see, but at least we definitely now know that Yo-kai Watch 4 will be coming to the west for the Switch.

https://twitter.com/HDKirin/status/1147245137522642944

Level-5 president Akihiro Hino has spoken about the Japanese studio’s plans to greatly expand the Ni no Kuni property, which entails projects across multiple media. That includes new games, as well as the upcoming anime film adaption of the property.

In an interview conducted by Japanese business outlet Nikkei, Hino spoke of Level-5’s plans for the Ni no Kuni franchise in the coming months and years. In doing so, he confirmed that Ni no Kuni 3 is in development, and that the third game in the RPG series will be out after the upcoming Ni no Kuni film – due out in Japan in August of this year – though how long the gap between the two will be isn’t something he went into.

Meanwhile, plans for Ni no Kuni’s expansion also include a Ni no Kuni-related smartphone app, which should also release “later”, not to mention the upcoming PS4 and Nintendo Switch release for the remastered version of the first game in the series, Wrath of the White Witch.