Maximum Utmost’s favourite characters of 2025

Characters are sometimes an important part of video games. Sometimes, the character is just loveable you. But you don’t count! Instead, let’s look at some folks who were made from imagination and put in situations that were also made from imagination. These are the best characters the Maximum Utmost writers encountered in 2025.

Note, that these aren’t necessarily from games released in 2025. We’re chrono-agnostic here.

Zoey Handley – Caleb from Blood

2025 was the year of Blood for me. Not real blood. I’m talking about the 1997 2.5D FPS, Blood. But also real blood.

I have a fondness for protagonists who don’t let death get them down. Caleb starts the game by crawling out of a grave his old boss put him in. Caleb was a henchman for the world’s Big Evil, but Big Evil betrayed Caleb. Now he’s out for revenge. As I said in my (first) review of the game, “he’s not a good guy, he’s just the guy you’re rooting for.”

Like many ’90s FPS protagonists, Caleb is essentially just you and a bunch of one-liner voice clips, but even moreso than Duke Nukem, it feels like Caleb is having just as much fun as I am. Blowing up a cultist and hearing him cackle, walking into a room of corpses and hearing him recite The Crow, “Victims, aren’t we all?” or his excellent delivery of Big Trouble in Little China’s, “Sonuva bitch must pay;” it all just heightens the experience. It really feels like living.

Daniel Sanford – Entire Party from Final Fantasy 5 Pixel Remaster

Similar to the Best Narrative category, I don’t think too deeply about characters in video games. To me they are all just fake things you have to interact with the right way in order to be given the next objective. For me, the entire party of Final Fantasy 5 Pixel Remaster is my “character” because all of them mostly did not matter at all. There were things each of them did in the story, but from my perspective as someone who doesn’t care about that, it could have been “Party Member X” every time.

The characters being able to train in each class in a situational basis became the name of the game for me. I had a few of them that I preferred to be the magic users or fighters, with some passive skills being in play from cross-training, but the flexibility of letting me build the party however I wanted was the most fun part. The party could be as balanced or stilted as I liked, and it was up to me to suss out the need for more healers or more offensive capabilities. I suppose there was a story somewhere in that game about crystals, but I barely remember it. What stuck with me were the jobs.

I guess if we must limit to 1 character though, I’d choose the frenemy Gilgamesh, whose characterization shown through as a real bro who respected the party despite their differences and ultimately decided to help out.

Jonathan Holmes – Garrett the Garbage Man from A Minecraft Movie

In my write-up about my favorite game soundtrack of the year, I went on and on about my bruised ego, as it relates to my place in the video game industry and my potential status as a relative has-been. It’s a pretty weird thing to say out loud about yourself. In fact, for the majority of my life, the idea of a “video game personality has-been” didn’t even exist. But now, that special classification of weirdo that I’ve found myself partially defined by now has a face – Garrett the Garbage Man, as portrayed by husky-but-sloppy light brown actor Jason Momoa. Given how often my body is referred to as a big beige wonderland of sagging muscle and meat by some of my esteemed colleagues, that only does more to help me feel seen by the existence of this character. 

There are a lot of ways I differ from Garrett. For instance, I don’t pride myself on my level of masculinity, and I have never lied to a child in order to get Minecraft diamonds to make money to keep my vintage game store from closing. That said, I can absolutely picture myself doing these things, had prior events in my life led me to a different set of crossroads. If, for instance, I pursued reality show nonsense harder after my appearance on MTV’s Road Rules: Northern Trail all those years ago, I definitely could have become a guy who was so wrapped up in his own insecurities and ego that he made intensely pathetic decisions in the pursuit of nostalgic dreams of sustained grandeur, instead of just having mildly pathetic beefs towards Toby Fox. 

So thank you, Garrett, for both being a movie/game character to relate with in a way I never have before, and taking some of the traits in myself I like the least and amplifying them in a way that allows me to point and laugh at them. You’re the Will Ferrell’s Anchorman of video games, and for that I salute you.

Patrick Hancock – Basically the entire cast from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

No, not Delta, though I guess that works too assuming they didn’t change anything. 2025 was the year I finally played the original Snake Eater courtesy of the HD collection. I’ve slowly been making my way through the entire series, and so far, this has been my favorite largely because of the cast of characters and their interactions.

Originally, this was going to be a post about Ocelot. How could you not love his goofy lines during his boss fight and the entire final sequence on the plane?

But then I thought, what about The Boss? That final showdown and the conversation in the flowers as the culmination of everything that’s come before…

Or even The Sorrow, who not only has a super unique boss fight, but even shows up in first person and helps the player out from time to time?

OH! But also there’s Para-Medic, who drops great movie trivia on Snake every time you go to save the game (also also, calling Sigint about every piece of camo is amazing).

Bottom line is, most characters in Snake Eater are really great, and much of the game’s enjoyment for me came from the interactions, silly or serious. It’s rare for an entire cast of characters to stand out, making it impossible to only pick one. But if Sanford is picking one character from the cast of Final Fantasy V, I guess I’ll do the same: I pick the ladder that plays the theme music as you climb it.