December 2025

A role-playing game used to mean sitting around a table, rolling dice and telling tales.

Now it means diving into immersive, fictional worlds on your screen – where who you play and what you do affects how the story unfolds. And where no fantasy is ever final.

Welcome to the gaming edition of The Monthly Tech-In.

Xbox’s new handheld gaming devices are getting a nostalgic boost from a remake of 1997’s Final Fantasy VII, which featured a power company exploiting a planet’s life force for profit.

The first installment of the trilogy, scheduled to release in January, is directed by Naoki Hamaguchi, studio head for creative at Square Enix, one of Japan’s best-known game studios. Hamaguchi first played Final Fantasy as a child and remembers thinking: “Someday, I’d like to create a world like this.”

Since the debut of the first Final Fantasy game in Japan in 1987, the franchise has regularly popped out different fictional worlds, becoming a global phenomenon.

Hamaguchi’s reimagining of Final Fantasy VII promises to feature the attention to detail and legendary craftsmanship for which game developers in Japan are known.  

The trilogy is available on multiple platforms including the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X handheld gaming devices with a small built-in screen – launched this past October for gamers on the go.

Elsewhere in Microsoft’s global gaming stable, California-based Obsidian Entertainment released The Outer Worlds 2, a sequel to the popular role-playing game set in a future that is part Wild West, part sci-fi.

In the colony of Arcadia, an authoritarian regime rules over subjects who meekly engage in “mental refreshment” – also known as brainwashing – when they feel they have thought the wrong thing. As the regime’s mantra goes, “thinking is best left to our betters.”

The sequel introduces three battling factions: the Protectorate, Auntie’s Choice and the Order of the Ascendant, each possessing qualities that resemble a government, a corporation and a cult.

The Outer Worlds 2 launched at the end of October on Xbox Series X|S, PCs, PlayStation 5 and cloud gaming.

As with any industry, gaming is only as good as its pipeline.

Since 2020, Xbox Game Camp has been helping budding creators, storytellers and game studios around the world to make it in the industry. Hear from those who’ve recently benefited from its mentorship and support, from SuYoung Ha of South Korea’s PepperStones to Mergery Wanjiru of Kenya’s P3C0 and more.

It’s a vibe

Coding used to be solely the domain of engineers and those who had learned computing languages. In the era of AI, meet “vibe coding:” talking through an idea with an AI tool, which then writes the code to build the software. 

The term, coined by prominent computer scientist Andrej Karpathy, describes a way AI is helping newcomers and developers alike.

Ask Doher Drizzle Pablo. Vibe coding helped Pablo to vanquish a mountain of travel receipts incurred from work trips, all without knowing how to code.

She simply began chatting about her situation in plain language with the AI-driven Plan Designer in Microsoft Power Apps. Within two hours, Pablo, who is based in Sweden, was using her own custom expense management app, amazing her manager as she filed receipts on time or even early, she says. 

She now uses AI tools, including Copilot within Power Platform, to create programs that help with everything from planning events to sharing customer leads with her team. 

Brazil levels up

Over in Brazil, some 2.5 million people have had a chance to learn AI skills through ConectAI, a Microsoft initiative started in September 2024.

It helped Julia Ribeiro land a dream job as a cloud analyst while still in college, earning 10 times what her mother made as a housecleaner.

It helped teacher Virginia Chagas leverage AI to respond to the hundreds of emails the district’s schools receive each day.

And it helped Lamonier Barbosa go from tinkering with broken computer parts to working with a multinational consulting firm, turning his life, he says with a flourish, “from water to wine.”

Working with the Brazilian government and 26 partner organizations, ConectAI aims to help 5 million Brazilians use AI by the end of 2027. Microsoft is also investing 14.7 billion Reais over three years – approximately $2.6 billion – in cloud and AI infrastructure in Brazil.

Call your agent

Finally, in Asia, Eric Jing wants to shift the conversation from simply using chatbots to incorporating AI as an everyday companion to get work done, all from one platform.   

That platform is Genspark Super Agent from Mainfunc, an AI startup Jing co-founded in Palo Alto, California with offices in Singapore and Japan. 

On Genspark, users communicate a prompt in natural language directly to the digital agent that is producing their slides or spreadsheets. “If the outcome is a slide, you are talking to the slide directly. If the outcome you want is a spreadsheet, you talk to the spreadsheet,” says Jing.   

There are more than 80 agents on Genspark, delivering services such as video editing, generating images, creating websites and more. The agents are also available on Microsoft’s Agent 365. 

Businesses across the world are already deploying thousands of agents to automate routine tasks, according to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index report. Analyst firm IDC predicts that number will rise to more than 1.3 billion by 2028.

As we say farewell to 2025 and welcome 2026, one thing is clear: When it comes to the workplace, using AI daily is no longer a fantasy, it's game on.

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