May sure was a big nothing month in gaming… Other than finally people are catching up to the fact that the industry is crashing… you’re over 10 years late on that realization but better late than never. Now if only game companies also noticed this. Yeah everyone seems to suck right now, good games are rarer than ever, all sequels/remasters/remakes are noticeably worse than the original game (with the only real advantage being that they’re actually available on modern platforms).

As far as games I played in May… Mahjong Soul, Pokemon TVG Live, and Eiyuden Chronicle. That’s it. I did get Skald: Against the Black Priory, but that’s going into next month’s update. So I don’t really have much to put in an update… Maybe I should put my notes about the State of Play here? I’ll think about it. Next month’s update will have not much again, with some notes on all the “E3” presentations.

So yeah… here’s stuff.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

I backed this on Kickstarter. I took a bit to play it because I was playing SaGa Emerald Beyond instead. I installed a mod to improve the localization because it’s bad (shit like this should not be allowed). It’s still not perfect with the mod which I assume only fixes a few specific lines that are particularly stupid, but it does help.

The game is meant to be a Suikoden-like, which is a series I actually have no familiarity with. Like, I know it exists and I’ve seen plenty of screenshots back in the day, but I never played any of them. It’s a turn-based JRPG with fairly simplistic combat (you get points you can use on skills every turn, as well as MP for spells if you have characters that can do magic), and you have a pretty small overworld with plenty of towns and a few dungeons.

The main goal of the game is just to go where the NPCs tell you and then have fights and stuff. It’s very fucking standard. But despite that main goal, the actual focus of the game is the sidequests. You explore the towns and stuff, talk to people, and many of them will join your rebel army if you do stuff for them (a few just join for free). Characters that join you can be characters you use in battle, characters that fit in the support spot of your team or they unlock new functions in your base like blacksmith, shops, chocobo racing and such. There’s a character you can only get once you get every other character. Some of them are slightly bullshit to find, or are hidden behind actually mechanically shit parts of the game (one of them requires getting through all of the cooking minigame, which is awful… it was originally glitched so you could beat it all with the shittiest egg recipes, now it’s undecipherable even with a chart that tells you which recipes are the favorite for each judge, winning is still 100% luck). There’s a few mechanics that are underdeveloped or just plain bad like duels (more on that later) and war (which are all basically auto-wins, I don’t think it’s possible to lose any of the war battles unless you fuck up on purpose… however the fuck you can even do that). I did think finding the characters was a pretty cool element, I just wish some of the things required to do so weren’t fucking stupid. Like the pixel hunts for fishing spots to find a specific fish for an army recruit that locks a big part of the town’s build tree… Just make it obvious?

I gave up on this game at the final boss battle, funny enough. I fucking hate the Duel system, which is something you do like 3 or 4 times in the whole game, where the enemy says something and you need to decide whether you’ll attack or counter based on what they said. The correct choice deals more damage to the enemy and less damage to you. It’s stupid. The final boss is 3 segments of this. Instead of trial-and-error, I just found a chart online of which lines require which action… Some way, somehow, this failed. Shouldn’t have failed, but it did. Fuck this game 😀

Overall, this game is a “very okay”. It has trouble choosing a focus, the mechanics for some things are just plain bad (cooking, duels, war), but generally I thought it did certain things quite well… I always kinda hate when an RPG has a shitload of potential party member but then you have only a few active party slots, so you never really end up using pretty much anyone that you recruit. Like, Lufia 3 had a lot of characters, but also 9 slots for party members. I ended up spending most of the game with the same 6 characters (with some replacements here and there if a new character just straight up had better stats than what I had already).

I’ll give it a recommendation when the publisher decide to not be shitty garbage and fix the localization, and, even then, only when it’s on sale. Also I hear the performance on the Switch version sucks, I dunno I played it on PC.

State of Play review

There was a State of Play. It was bad. Are you surprised? I’m not, they’ve all been bad. So anyways I’ll just talk about all the announcements/updates shown, since there wasn’t much. A common problem with this is that all the games shown here except for one are PC games, so just get them on PC. What Sony has continually failed to do is make the PS5 worth buying.

Concord was a stupid trailer here (not an announcement, it was revealed before). They show this big long cutscene that’s basically budget Guardians of the Galaxy without the comedy or interesting characters… but, even though this scene was lame, I thought this might be a cool idea… and then the show gameplay and it’s a… shitty Overwatch ripoff. Oh. What was all that story shit about then? Anyways, interest for this is at a big old zero. They didn’t even try to make any of the characters look good, all the designs are generic NPC  tier. Also it’s on PC, which is where you’d want to play a game like this anyways.

God of War Ragnarok PC Port. Sony decided they wouldn’t sell this game in 177 countries or territories for no reason at all, they’re really enjoying fucking themselves over in the PC market for no reason at all (which is weird because things have been pretty solid with their previous PC releases, until a few months into Helldivers 2). Sony are being really fucking stupid… Also don’t care about this one much. I was kinda okay-ish about the previous GoW, but it’s not a game I’d want to replay and it wasn’t good enough for me to want to touch the sequel. Maybe when it drops to 5$ and they remove the PSN requirement.

Dynasty Warriors Origins was an actual announced. I like me some Musou though I actually haven’t played many main Dynasty Warriors games, I’m mostly into the spin-offs like Hyrule Warriors and Fire Emblem. I’m actually surprised that they haven’t been any Musou games since 2022, considering it’s a series that gets 2-8 games a year (not even an exaggeration). This looks fine from the little they showed. It’s on PC.

Infinity Nikki is not a new announcement, but it is, weirdly, the most interesting thing shown here. It’s an open world dress-up game, whatever the fuck that means, and it features 3D platforming, exploration and combat. The graphics are beautiful though and it kinda looks fun. I am not at all familiar with this series, apparently this is the fifth game. Huh. Well if I play it, it’ll be on PC.

Ballad of Antara is random soulslike #1612269. The trailer shows nothing that really sets it apart. Also it’s a PC game.

Skydance’s Behemoth is a shitty-looking VR game. It is coming to PC.

Alien: Rogue Incursion is a possibly slightly less shitty VR game since it’s horror and that kinda makes sense for VR. It is coming to PC.

After the shitty GotG rip-off Overwatch rip-off, here’s the actual Marvel Overwatch rip-off, Marvel Rivals. I heard negative-to-okay things about it but I’m very much not interested in this. Obviously not a PS5 exclusive.

Where Winds Meet was not a new announcement (it being announced for PC around a year ago). As for what it is… it gives me some Sekiro-like vibes. Yeah it’s seemingly another soulslike, we don’t have enough of those right? Doesn’t look bad, just… very generic? I’ll keep a look on it.

Until Dawn is a shit game. It’s being ported to PS5 and PC. Whatever man.

Path of Exile 2 is a point-and-click action hack n’ slash RPG in the style of Diablo. I never played the first one. There’s really zero reason a game like this should be played on a console. Get it on PC. It’s free-to-play (I don’t know how bad the monetization is).

Silent Hill 2 Remake was shown with an October release date. People aren’t happy about a lot of what was shown. I don’t care much about it either way, not a big horror gamer but this did give me more RE vibes than SH vibes. It’s on PC.

Monster Hunter Wilds obviously will be on PC. And this overall was a pretty weird thing to even take time on in a State of Play for this year considering it’s out some time next year… and you know exactly how it’s gonna play already because it’s fucking Monster Hunter. Yeah the game is hype but… whatever, what’s it doing here?

Astro Bot was one of the only actual announcements here (alongside Dynasty Warriors Origin), but is the only one that’s actually interesting… because it’s the only one that is not on PC (and might actually remain PS5 exclusive). And it looks pretty good too.

Overall, this sucked. Very few actual announcements, and only one of them is PS5 exclusive. Everything other than that announcement is a PC game, so not worth playing on PS5. Sony’s problem of not supporting their own platform continues being very apparent, and man did none of the stuff here impress. I do think it’s one of the better State of Plays, in retrospect, but it was generally pretty bad anyways. I think part of it is how bad of a taste Concord left in my mouth right from the start and how nothing else in there had any impact.