Today, June 24, 2025, marks the sixth anniversary of Final Weapon. In many ways, this past year has by far been our biggest. We’ve grown tremendously this past year, even despite the continued daily battle we face for viewership with Google Search and the looming threat of AI. To celebrate our sixth anniversary, I’d like to highlight our achievements throughout this past year, as well as outline our plans for Year 7.
Expanding Our Offerings
As you’ve likely seen, Final Weapon is putting out more articles than ever before. One of my major initiatives this year was to double our review output from 2024, and we are well on our way to accomplishing that goal. Our team has grown this year, with new faces and voices joining the website to review some of the biggest and best games out there. In the past year, we’ve added three incredibly talented writers: Jordan Brown, Estelle Mejia, and Ryuji Shiryu. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading their work, in addition to the work of the rest of our wonderful staff. These three, in addition to Chris Sanchez, Alex Patterson (Itch), and Andrew Brown, have been instrumental in our ability to review as many games as we have this year. It is truly an honor to work with such creative and talented individuals each day, and I hope our readers appreciate the incredible work this team puts in each week.
As for news, Final Weapon has doubled down on our anime and manga coverage. While we have extensively covered both in the past, 2025 has seen a tremendous uptick in covering all announcements regarding both genres. Despite this ambitious approach, our reporting on gaming has not slowed even a bit, and I’m incredibly proud of our team for that. I want to specifically shout out Raul Ochoa (Soul Kiwami) and Saras Rajpal for their work leading news coverage each day, in addition to our staff who regularly assist on this front. We continue to provide lightning-fast coverage at each digital event, showcase, and awards show, and this is not possible without the leadership and coordination of our news team.
Another new initiative for Year 6 was a written article series on Final Fantasy XIV – Unending Horizons. Led by Ryuji Shiryu, this series dives deep into every new FFXIV update, with Ryuji sharing his thoughts and experiences. Our audience has asked for content on the popular MMO for years, and I’m glad we were finally able to make it happen. Moving forward, I have plans to provide even more avenues for our staff to create featured series this year.
Additionally, Final Weapon finally received a long-deserved website redesign. Alongside my duties as EIC, I manage coding and theme building for the website. This year’s redesign, internally called “FW 3.0”, was a complete refresh for desktop that prioritized style and readability. Everything was created from the ground up, offering a new design that is a huge departure from how things looked previously. We’ll continue to evolve available features on the website as time allows, but I’m satisfied with the result and response to 3.0.
Overall, Final Weapon is creating more than ever. We continue to challenge and push the standard each and every day, as there is no room for complacency in our mission. As readers, I hope our work this past year has been informative, nonsense-free, and everything you hoped for when opening an article.
Video Content: A New Medium for Final Weapon
When discussing this past year, there was no bigger new initiative than YouTube. My approach to this venture was simple: how can we provide the same quality content you expect on our website, but in video form with our own spin on things? The answer I found was what you see today: the Final Weapon YouTube Channel is home to video reviews, previews, podcasts, and a plethora of video essay & discussion content in the form of one-offs and our exclusive video series. I wanted our channel to exemplify everything our brand is about — quality, nonsense-free, and collaborative — and I believe we’ve greatly succeeded. What you’ve seen is the result of blood, sweat, and tears from our staff over the last 10 months. My role essentially doubled overnight with the launch of YouTube, but I am so thrilled to be able to create even more content for our audience. In just 12 months, we have grown the channel to almost 7,000 subscribers thanks to the support of our community.
Our primary focus with video content is bringing new viewers the written content our audience has come to love. That starts with our reviews and previews, which we aim to make as comprehensive and insightful as possible. Each writer on our team has a unique voice, and that greatly shines through on our channel. Some reviews are over one hour long, while others might be 10 minutes. We believe this range not only showcases the diversity of voices on our staff but also stays right at home with our mission of being a hub of creativity. My Co-Founder, Noah Roman, has played a critical role in crafting our review and preview content, and I hope you’ve enjoyed our take on what a video review should be.
We kicked off essay-style content with a 3-hour feature developed by Payne Grist & me in August 2024 called FINAL FANTASY VERSUS XIII: THE REALITY & LEGACY OF FINAL FANTASY’S LOST TITLE. This project was the result of months of hard work scraping the internet for every single piece of infromation surrounding the famously troubled game. As of today, the video has surpassed 102,000 views, making it one of the most-viewed videos on the topic worldwide. Our development timeline, which includes sources that were either vastly overlooked or lost to time, was also published as a community resource for years to come.
August also saw the reveal and start of Under The Plate – A Final Fantasy VII Series. This was the first Final Weapon original video series, and today we sit at 27 episodes published with over 100,000 views in total. We’ve created episodes primarily focused on theories for the upcoming third and final game in the Final Fantasy VII remake project, held discussions on beloved characters, and even created retrospective lookbacks.
In October, we launched Beyond The Conduit – A Xeno Series. This video series focuses on the wide world of Xeno, including Xenogears, Xenosaga, and Xenoblade. While we planned this series right alongside Under The Plate, Nintendo may have forced our hand with the announcement of Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition (but we were thrilled to get the series out there!). Today, Beyond The Conduit has over 82,000 views across 11 episodes.
At the beginning of 2025, we launched Final Weapon’s first two podcasts: Weaponized & Switch Point. Weaponized touches on gaming, anime, manga, and even beyond, with new episodes weekly that cover both current and past topics. Switch Point focuses on Nintendo exclusively, and we’re thrilled to discuss Nintendo Switch 2 each week. Both podcasts have received tens of thousands of views across YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts thus far, and I look forward to evolving our output here throughout this year.
Last but not least, we launched The Lost Pages – A Kingdom Hearts Series in May 2025. Once again, this was in the works for months, but we finally were able to make it happen last month. With Kingdom Hearts IV on the horizon, we’ve got numerous video ideas that we plan to release over the next few years. So far, we’ve launched three different video series: Under The Plate (Final Fantasy VII), Beyond The Conduit (Xeno), and The Lost Pages (Kingdom Hearts). These have each been tremendously successful thus far, and I’m thrilled that our community has enjoyed them just as much as we love making them.
Looking Forward
So, what can you expect to see from us as we move into our seventh year of operation? Above all else, Final Weapon will continue to rise to the occasion and live through its mission: to provide high-quality content you can’t find elsewhere. That goes for our written articles, videos, podcasts, and anything under the Final Weapon name.
This year, we have plans to continue pushing into video content, with a variety of exciting ideas already in the works. While I won’t reveal what it is here, I can share that we have a brand-new video series premiering here in the next few weeks. Additionally, we are working to publish at least two feature-length retrospectives by 2026. I thank you for your patience, especially with these videos — our team is small, and I’m personally working on many of these myself while overseeing both arms of our outlet. The wait will be worth it, and we have plenty of content to offer until we’re ready to share our big videos.
I also aim to continue expanding our team to bring new voices in, which will allow for even more games to be reviewed. Game reviews not only allow us to share critiques with our audience, but they also serve as an outlet for readers to discover brand-new games to play each month. The more games we can cover, the better. Alongside more reviews of new games, we’ll be rolling out a new stream of content covering older games here in the next few months.
With games media in particular in an unknown place right now, I know there is uncertainty on what the future holds for not only Final Weapon, but all the wonderful outlets in this space. I can assure you that our work here at Final Weapon will not cease, and that we will only continue to make each year better than the last. All I ask is for readers to continue sharing our content when you see it, as word of mouth has been a driving factor in why our website continues to receive the viewership it does.
Thanks so much for the support we’ve received over the past six years — that goes for readers, viewers, developers, publishers, and PR teams. I sit here today feeling that these last six years have flown by in the blink of an eye, even despite the numerous sleepless nights. The fact that we are closer to our 10-year anniversary than our founding is surreal, but our hard work brought us here and kept things moving. I, alongside everyone at this site, put everything into it daily. It’s been the journey of a lifetime, but we’re just getting started — here’s to a great Year 7!
