My Top 10 Doctor Who Stories of 2025

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2025 wasn’t a great year for Doctor Who. The actual TV show didn’t have a lot of highlights and was straight up hated on by a rather unpleasant part of the “fandom” and Big Finish audios didn’t do a great job of picking up the slack, though at least there were SOME highlights throughout the year, and the new on-going Ninth Doctor / Rose and Thirteenth Doctor ranges have been welcome additions… So let’s take a look, oh and I’ll point out that once again I haven’t listened to the December Big Finish releases yet (bar “Dare You”) so if any of those really stand out then, um… oh well!

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My Top 10 TV Series/Seasons of 2025

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While another rough time in my life has curtailed my enthusiasm for review writing I have managed to assemble enough motivation to keep my streak of yearly Top 10s going! I think more than any other category I’m always wondering if I’ve even watched enough new TV to make a top 10, but each year I just about manage it, almost entirely due to my love of animation to be fair… so let’s take a look!

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Doctor Who: The Last Days of the Powell Estate Review

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The Ninth Doctor and Rose stories continue on with a genuinely creepy and very original story despite being once again set on the Powell Estate and featuring Jackie Tyler for the second release in a row. We get a fun villain, a fun new guest character and a big dramatic Time War speech from The Doctor for oddly the first time in Eccleston’s long audio run, so let’s take a look…

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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (PS5) Review

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“Super predictable review alert!”. Yes, the internet doesn’t need another glowing review of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but I’ll undoubtedly be putting this on my Top 10 Games list at the end of the year and I always like to link back to reviews of things that make it on there as much as I can, so… Get ready for another long glowing review of Clair Obscur!

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Dragon Ball Z: Infinite World (PS2) Review

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We’re technically jumping quite a bit ahead here, as the entire Budokai Tenkaichi (or “Sparking!”) games were released in between Budokai 3 and this game, plus the first 7th Generation game and true spiritual successor to the Budokai series in “Burst Limit” as well. This game was essentially a “make good” to people who hadn’t been able to jump to the next generation and were still on the PS2 and as such it feels very much like Budokai 3 with extra bits, and therefore it made just too much sense to have it follow on the Budokai trilogy in this set of four reviews rather than reviewing it all the way down the list. So is “Infinite World” really just Budokai 3 with extra bits or is it worth tracking down? Let’s take a look!

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Dragon Ball Z: Bardock – Father of Goku Review

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Time to close out this first of four chunks of DBZ with the first TV Special, “A Final, Solitary Battle: The Father of Z-Warrior Son Goku, Who Challenged Freeza”, or more simply for the English speak market: “Bardock – Father of Goku”. Really this should be with the Frieza arc stuff in the next batch of DBZ but that would make this chunk have three films/specials compared to… well, a lot more for each of the others, so for the sake of spreading them out a bit let’s consider this a “preview” for whenever I get round to the next  bit, plus it’s obviously set well before it and the Saiyan arc anyway, so… Yeah. The two Z TV specials have one thing in common and that’s that they’re far more mature and brutal compared to the manga/TV series they’re based on, with this taking a look at the Saiyans and how they fell in a story that in reality has no heroes in it at all…

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Doctor Who: Terror of the Zygons Review

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The latest Doctor Who Blu-Ray set has arrived, and sadly they used some pretty poor AI upscaling thing that makes the picture look… weird, even to my eyes that often doesn’t catch that sort of thing, to the point where I’ve taken screenshots from the DVD release instead, which kind of goes against the point of these reviews but oh well! While it does introduce the Zygons, a great alien race that oddly never reappeared on screen until 2013, many decades after this story, my favourite thing about it is that it’s pretty much a Third Doctor era UNIT story with the Fourth Doctor… and being set in Scotland. Still! It’s a great story, so let’s take a look at it!

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Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3 (PS2) Review

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Budokai 3 is the “peak” of the Budokai series of games, although some handheld versions and a sort-of reboot happened after they all had little issues that dragged them down to below this game. I was definitely excited about it at the time and I was looking forward to replaying it for this countdown and I can say it held up exactly like I knew it would, sadly didn’t exceed my expectations but thankfully didn’t drop in my estimation either. Want to know more? Let’s take a look!

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Dragon Ball Z: The Tree of Might Review

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The third DBZ film, “A Super Decisive Battle for Earth” or “The Tree of Might”, holds a special place in my heart as, for whatever reason, I’ve always loved Turles / Tullece as a villain. I think it was the voice work for the original pre-FUNimation dub of the film that sold it, and then when I got into the Japanese dub hearing Masako Nozawa do an evil version of her Goku voice didn’t hurt my opinion either. Much later on I found out that all of the “Tullece Crusher Corps.” had a paragraph of backstory written for them as well, weirdly fleshing them out too. But fun villain cast aside, is there much else to like about Movie 3? Let’s find out!

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