You know what? Since I’m so slow at posting reviews nowadays, why not simplify shit around this website? Instead of not putting out content at all, let’s just do possibly-monthly stuff. I’ll still do reviews for some of the more interesting shit if I manage to write them in a timely manner. But, if I don’t, I’ll just make posts like this. That way I don’t have an empty blog with nothing happening all the time.

So the plan is to just… talk about the games I’ve been playing. Say what’s been good, what’s been not good, and give a couple paragraphs about each.

Because it’s my first time doing this, I’ll include stuff from january and february. The included games this month are: Dungeons of Aether, 9 Years of Shadow, Mameda no Bakeru, Chained Echoes, Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, Palworld, Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Penny’s Big Breakaway, Pocket Card Jockey Ride On and Balatro.

• Dungeons of Aether
• 9 Years of Shadow
• Mameda no Bakeru
• Chained Echoes
• Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth
• Palworld
• Granblue Fantasy: Relink
• Penny’s Big Breakaway
• Pocket Card Jockey Ride On!
• Balatro

Dungeons of Aether

This is a kinda-roguelite-ish game with a cool dice-drafting mechanics for combat. For what should be a roguelite game, this has very little replayability IMO. Finish the game once and you’re good. There’s a few playable characters, each with their own abilities and attacks, some clearly better than others. You get upgraded versions of them for a mission each, then lose the upgrade, leading to a few final boss battles. It’s weirdly short, in the end. The combat itself is pretty interesting, though some specific enemies are designed to be purely annoying where you end every turn with both you and the enemy not dealing damage to each other and no progress happening. You basically draft dice into different stats, as does your opponent, and you try to have more attack than the foe’s defense and vice versa, that way you deal a hit while not getting hit yourself (with some exceptions based on different characters’ play style). It’s a cool system.

In the end I found this to be very okay. Clearly not a game at the level of Rivals of Aether (second one is coming this year I think, it looks good!)

9 Years of Shadow

This is a side-scrolling metroidvania that I thought looked pretty cool. Took a little bit for me to pick it up.

It ends up being a pretty cool Metroidvania that is kinda lacking in gameplay variety. You get a few different “armors” which have some different abilities, but their attacks are all the same so you might feel like there’s not much variety, and the progression feels a bit weak even as you get all the items to progress. There’s some cool movement options, but they just happen automatically as they’re needed mostly, so it’s not as cool as it sounds. That said the bosses and overall combat is fun.

Overall, pretty fun, but there’s better metroidvanias out there. This one is just very standard.

Mameda no Bakeru

I actually wrote like half a review for this and it’s still waiting for me to finish it… I won’t, probably. But this is a cool-ass game. It’s by Good Feel, but specifically it’s directed by Etsunobu Ebisu, the man who used to make Goemon games at Konami. And of course you can see the influence from even just the boxart. I imported this because it might not get localized, and of course this game is so japanese the localizers would ruin absolutely fucking everything about it, since almost every localizer is a massive anti-japan racist. The japanese in this game is very nice because they use furigana, so if you can’t read kanji, you can still read this game. In addition to just reading most of the text, I did use the google camera translation thing when there was some vocabulary I was unsure about. Very easy to play if you have no japanese skill at all, you’ll just miss the story and the collectibles that give you fun facts about various things.

So the game itself is a really fun 3D platformer. You play as Bakeru, a young tanuki who spends most of the game in a humanoid form. It’s level-based, with each level having the goal of finding lanterns to break, to destroy the influence of the villain’s evil festival. It has dodging, blocking, perfect versions for counters, different forms for different attacks, and there’s some good variety with stages that are like star fox, some racing stages, some giant robot boss battles and some auto-scrollers. The only levels that are really bad is the auto-scrollers, I fucking hate them. Probably the weirdest thing about the combat is the 2 attack buttons. One for the left drum stick, one for the right. There’s no difference between each side’s attacks, except you can charge both at the same time for a bigger slam attack. It does feel a bit random.

Overall, super fun game, import it.

Chained Echoes

This was from 2022, I just took a long time to get to it, I was very later to the party about that one. It’s a turn-based console-style RPG, with a lot of cool systems both for combat and leveling. It gives a feeling similar to playing some of the SNES RPGs, though the story kinda gets dumber as you progress. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one here, but I will say it’s a whole lot better than Sea of Stars, which tries to get the same kind of “nostalgia” feel. It’s not at the level of those classic SNES RPGs, but it’s a really good attempt. To me the issue is that it becomes a bit too “going through the motions” as you progress, so what is interesting gameplay early on gets a bit stale.

I’d recommend checking it out, overall.

Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth

I was hyped for this. I played a bit less than half of it, because it made me really annoyed. Specifically, the localization was really bad. Maybe the previous game’s was bad too, I dunno, my japanese just got better since then and now I’m noticing that almost every line spoken in japanese is incorrectly translated in the english written text. The errors range from “okay close enough” to “that’s just a different sentence completely”. There’s errors so baffling I refuse to believe someone who knows japanese actually touched the english script at any point. Like there’s a party where Chitose says “はい” (pronounced “hai”), in a questioning tone. That would translate to “Yes?” or maybe a “Can I help you?” kinda deal in that specific case. The idiots who handled this localization? They translated it to “Hi”. They’re actually braindead.

So anyways, the game’s good but the localization is awful. Awful enough to make me give up on playing it. I’d love to talk about the cool setting, the cool characters, the fun gameplay, the fun side-stories, the fact that the character classes are all based on Hawaii-related activities, but no, I have to just talk about how the localization was so bad that it was distracting and I didn’t feel like continuing through it.

Palworld

Palworld! I was kinda jokingly hyped for this game when I first saw a trailer for it a few years ago, and we finally got the early access of it, which obviously took the internet by storm with really stupid accusations of plagiarism that wouldn’t survive a minute in court, and of course just a lot of people actually enjoying the game and holy shit is it selling really fucking well. The game plays a lot like Ark, except there’s pokemon around that you can capture in pokeballs and then you can have them help you maintain your bases (which people joke about saying it’s slave labour… it’s not). There’s a bunch of resource gathering (that can get a bit annoying for some of the resources), finding towers with boss battles, boss battles in the overworld, monster collecting and much breeding if you want to farm the materials for cake.

It’s still early access so it might get more shit to it at some point, but I had a lot of fun with this for a couple weeks.

If I’d like to see things improved specifically, it would be the combat, the overall AI of the pals, and having a bit more to do overall… and of course fixing the glitches, but this is early access so bugs are obviously to be expected… and the game runs so well on PC it’s actually really surprising. What’s here right now is a nice base, but it could get better. Definitely worth checking out though.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink

I played a bit of the gacha for this, but gave up on it pretty quick, as I usually do with these stupid games. I liked some of the characters and all, but it didn’t hold my interest. This game though has been talked about for a long time, with it being announced in 2016 as a collaboration between Platinum Games and Cygames. Eventually it changed development team, and it was a long 8 years of waiting from announcement to release… but it did come out!

The game itself is a decent action-RPG with a bunch of playable characters from Granblue, each having different attacks, movesets, and elements. You’ll certainly find someone you’ll enjoy playing (I ended up mostly playing Cagliostro). The overall progression of the game is just talking to people in town until you can go to the next levels, and the levels are linear areas where you just fight shit to progress. But this is just the beginning, as there’s a lot more to do than just the story levels. Namely, the game functions in a Monster Hunter sort of way where you go to the mission counter to get missions, which are generally just fighting monsters in a set area from one of the story missions, though usually harder versions. You can gain resources from this, which you can use to upgrade your characters and weapons (and unlock characters, which you can do in any order which is nice). So it ends up being very Monster Hunter-ish overall, with less depth to the equipment part of it.

Overall this has a lot of gameplay here if you want to do all the missions since it continues for a while after the story, and it has pretty fun combat. Definitely worth checking out!

Penny’s Big Breakaway

So this just came out, being shadow-dropped during the Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase. I saw a few trailers for this before and it looked pretty cool, so I was pretty excited to try it out. It is also made by the same people who made Sonic Mania which is pretty cool. I’m not done with this game, I’m in the fourth world now.

This is a 3D platformer with visuals that feel like something out of the Sega Saturn (things that are far away get pixelated a lot to help emulate that sort of 3D style). The gameplay itself is fairly simple, where you run around, attack with a yo-yo, and use the yo-yo for a few special skills. You can ride it to gain speed in downhills, you can use it to swing in the air for some reason, you can double-press the button for a quick dash, and you can swirl it around you to attack all around. The riding feature actually kinda annoys me because, obviously you’re riding your yo-yo, so you can use your yo-yo at the time either. So if you do quickly need to use it, you gotta jump first, which leads to movement annoyances. Also, the dash attack is really easy to kinda just do by mistake, I’ve fallen off platforms make times because of this. That’s player error, but man is it annoying. The riding mechanic above water is also pretty badly made, at least for a few sections. There’s also not a lot of regular enemies, instead there’s these penguins that chase you, and if 5 of them catch you, you’re brought back to the checkpoint with one less health. Most damage will come from falling off holes, as it’s nearly impossible for enough penguins to catch you if you just mash buttons.

Overall this game isn’t quite the high-speed platforming action I was expecting, but it’s not bad. It’s just kinda average, so far. I fucking hated the first boss battle, the second one was okay though, and while the visuals are interesting. The levels overall have a few fun gimmicks but otherwise feel kinda same-y.

Pocket Card Jockey Ride On!

This is Game Freak’s new game! This is actually a sequel, the first one was on 3DS and I don’t think it was a huge hit. I never tried it. But I tried this one! I’m only on my first horse so clearly I’m not done.

How this works is that it’s a horse-racing game, but you play solitaire before every turn. It’s a different type of solitaire where you just have to remove the card on the board that is one away, up or down, from your current card, digging through each column of cards. The better you do at the solitaire, the more energy your horse gets, which will eventually make it faster in the homestretch (where you also have direct control of the horse as you try to pass the rest).

In-between solitaire bits, you decide where your horse will go on the track, such as going on the inside track outside. Not sure if the outside has any advantage, as staying on the inside allows to conserve stamina. Your horse might also have powers that activate in this section where they might get extra power based on positioning and such, and some cards fly at you that pop up in the solitaire bits (stuff like horseshoes that give you EXP or boosts that give you a boost for the homestretch which is really useful, or carrots which give you some stamina back). Wherever you end after the movement part determines the difficulty of your solitaire game, with the harder solitaire giving more power.

Right now I wouldn’t quite have this on the recommended list, but it’s decent little fun and it’s cheap. It’s pretty simplistic but pretty fun.

Balatro

The last game in today’s post!

I didn’t know anything about this game until I saw Jelly Hoshiumi play it, I think I saw a tiny bit of it in some trailer highlight thing before this but didn’t really pay attention to it. And I was instantly interested.

Visually, this game is not exciting, at all. Like, there’s hardly anything happening on-screen. But it’s very well designed. Basically you have normal poker playing cards, and you play poker hands by selecting 5 cards from your hand (which is usually around 8 cards big, but that can change). The better the hand, the more “chips” you get, and the bigger multiplier you get. You also get chips for the value of the cards (a 2 is worth 2 chips, etc.). Each level (called a blind) has a number of chips you need to beat it, otherwise the run is dead. You get a number of hands you can produce each blind, and a number of discards you can do (each discard can be up to 5 cards, discarding being followed by re-drawing the same amount). And there’s boss blinds which have some limiting conditions, making beating them more complicated than the small and big blinds (things like making certain cards have no effect or limiting which hands you can make to score).

You get money from winning blinds (and other shit), and that money is used for various things. The most important thing is Jokers. Jokers are placed in their own section of the screen, and get activated during the hand scoring. They can increase your chips or multiplier in various ways, may it be based on what’s in your deck or the suits being played and various other things. This is how you get the ridiculous amount of chips that later levels require. You can also buy more cards for your deck (some cards have special powers), tarot cards which can alter your cards in various ways, vouchers which give you some run-permanent upgrades (jokers can be sold so they’re not permanent unlike vouchers), planet cards to improve hands (so you can make the pair better in case you have to resort to a weak hand, or just make the hands you make more of better.). And it’s a roguelite, so when you lose, you restart from the beginning, but doing certain things in runs will unlock in further runs like more jokes, or new decks (each deck has its own special thing compared to others, like the red one gets more hands per blind, and the blue deck gets more discards per blind).

Who would’ve thought that a roguelite deck-building with normal-ass cards where you just play poker hands would be good? Well, there ya go. They did that. Super interesting game, do check it out, current best game I’ve played this year.