Well being quiet on the blog is nice. I’m not playing as many games recently, though I did have some obsession with TotK so there’s that. And I’m playing a couple other things, some I might even review.

So June 2023… Weirdly empty month. But hey there’s a game on PS5 that other platforms will get later, 9 multiplats of dubious quality and a Switch game that looks pretty okay… Yeah it’s a pretty quiet month, I have a maybe or two and that’s it.

Note: There is a copious amount of “man this series used to be great but it’s lame now” in this post. I’m old leave me alone!

Let’s go!

Disclaimer: I only list games that I think are worth mentioning. This includes games I’m personally interested in, games that will likely be popular, highly advertised games, some more niche stuff I may notice, and such. Not just games I care about myself, I highlight as much as I think makes sense. And of course, I can’t see the future, so I may be missing games and I may be listing games that may get delayed.

I haven’t reviewed anything in a bit, so let’s do it for the biggest game of the year! I actually wanted to write a mini-review for Trinity Trigger when I finished that, but I had so little to say about it, it just wasn’t worth it. Game’s pretty underwhelming.

So anyways, we’ve got the sequel to Breath of the Wild now. I watched the first 2 trailers for this, then nothing else until launch, so I had no idea what to expect beyond “this looks a lot like BotW but it has new powers”.

So now I finished it and I’m gonna do a quick review! Let’s go I guess! This will be a simpler review.

It is E3 season! But with no E3! So there are presentations that will probably happen. We just got the Playstation Showcase which was… a thing… And there’s an Xbox one that will happen soon-ish, so I’ll comment on that one too, and we’ll see if anything else noteworthy happens, may it be some Nintendo thing (which there should be… something? Because Nintendo has nothing this year past Pikmin 4) or other summer game presentation thingies.

So usually when I do this I just react to everything as it happens and then post those live reactions, I’ll just post the highlights, lowlights, and a few “eh?” things, then rant about it a bit.

And first up is Sony being lame, so let’s go!

Oh yeah I said I’d still do this. Yay! I’ve not been playing that much recently. I’m going through Trinity Trigger right now, it’s okay. Otherwise, playing lots of mahjong and pokemon tcg live. I’m almost done with Mega Man Battle Network 2 from Volume 1 of the MMBN collection, good shit mostly (almost to the point of getting a rant out of me… I’m thinking about it). And I got the Advance Wars thingo, that’s great though a bit more barebones than I was expecting after a year delay. I’ve been skipping games left and right, though some seem to be a good thing to skip right now. Maybe I’ll get the Jedi game later after there’s a few patches. And review coming? I dunno. I’m thinking I’ll do micro-reviews or something.

So for May 2023 we’ve got: 9 multiplats, 3 Switch games and 2 PC games. Seems like not a lot (and there’s all sorts of STUFF that don’t seem interesting enough to be worth highlighting), but there’s a few big games, including THE BIGGEST GAME OF THE YEAR. As for what I’m buying… there’s one very obvious one, which I do have pre-ordered using NSO vouchers. There’s 2 others I’m pretty sure I’ll get. And there’s a few maybes too. One of them will get a review for almost sure, we’ll see about the rest.

Let’s go!

Disclaimer: I only list games that I think are worth mentioning. This includes games I’m personally interested in, games that will likely be popular, highly advertised games, some more niche stuff I may notice, and such. Not just games I care about myself, I highlight as much as I think makes sense. And of course, I can’t see the future, so I may be missing games and I may be listing games that may get delayed.

…I forgot to put the PS4 and Xbone releases of Hogwarts Legacy. Oh well.

Well something kinda weird happened. The youtube algorithm, for some reason, has been REALLY pushing pokemon card content onto me in the last few months. It’s weird, considering the last time I bought or played with Pokemon cards was literally in 1999, Base Set 2 being the newest set at the time.

Eventually (late Feb/early march) I just figured… Let’s buy a couple Pokemon things, for fun. And now I might be stuck in it.

So what I want to do is talk about my history with the cards and how things look to me, which is kind of being on the outside looking in, in a way.

So let’s go I guess!

This game truly came out of nowhere. It’s from Tango, who made… questionably okay games before (I really wasn’t a fan of Ghostwire Tokyo gameplay-wise, though visually it was very nice). There was something of a “Microsoft Direct” to showcase 5 games, which felt completely pointless… except for this new game being not only announced, but released a couple hours later. Nice! I think games need less time between announcement and release, not more, especially nowadays.

So I picked up a 1$ trial of Game Pass to play this, despite it being a budget-release at 30$. And that was weeks ago and I’m finally writing this review, oops (created the template for this review 15 days ago and only writing now lol).

So let’s go and see if this surprise announcement/release is good!

It’s a new Fire Emblem! I took way to long to actually post this review! I’ve had this, like, half-written for the last almost 4 weeks now.

I’m not the biggest FE fan out there, but I enjoyed all the ones I played before this (the original Famicom one, the GBA ones, Awakening, Three Houses). This one, I saw the announcement trailer, and watched absolutely nothing else. So I wasn’t exactly sure what I was getting into, but it did look cool.

Let’s see if it’s good!

There’s the usual February Nintendo Direct. I am gonna react to it. Whoa! So yes I am writing this intro before actually watching the Direct. It could be the most hype Direct ever, it could… not be. I have no idea, and I have no real expectations.

The rumor mill was a bit dry, but got a bit better… 2 hours before the Direct. There’s the Advance Wars rumors which are kinda dumb (the SKU changed on the eshop so people think that means it’s coming out right away, the other is a random wal-mart employee saying he saw a standee with a February 10 release date for it but provided no proof)… possible, but not likely based on why Nintendo indefinitely delayed the game. There was a bit of an “oof” rumor from Exputer saying they saw video evidence of a remake of Baten Kaitos, though this rumor is weirdly contradicted by this image just popping out a bit before the Direct showing a remaster collection of Baten Kaitos 1 and 2 rather than a remake of the first (could be faked of course). So either way, that’s possible. And that’s about it as far as anything interesting and new. There’s a Syluxhunter thing from last year about some F-Zero related thing, though no timing or details were given for that so… eh. Oh and there’s the whole TotK 70$ price and Metroid Prime 4 appearing/disappearing from online stores kinda randomly, I don’t think that’s particularly useful info as far as content… but it WOULD be bullshit if Nintendo upped the price of their games.

As far as expectations, I’m expecting Tears of the Kingdom to be shown very briefly, I feel it will be a bit more of a tease, leading to a separate Direct just for that game closer to release. I’m expecting something about Pikmin. I’m expecting to not see Metroid Prime 4. And I’m expecting DLC stuff for Fire Emblem, Mario Kart and maybe Splatoon. So that’s a good 5-8 minutes of the 40 that was announced accounted for, which means there’s a lot of time which could just be anything. And also Samba de Amigo since that popped up just a bit before the Direct started, no excitement for that.

So as usual, I’ll be giving short comments about everything in the presentation, and finish it off with my overall thoughts.

Let’s go!

I really wanted to like this game. Some bits of gameplay highlights looked really awesome. Some didn’t.

But then they showed a lot of story stuff and holy fuck was it bad. People talk about Marvel-level dialogue, but this is way worse than even the worst Marvel lines. But that’s just story. It’s a video game, story is not important if the gameplay isn’t good, so I still had hope that the gameplay would be okay, which is why I kept my discounted pre-order going.

So I gave this game 10 hours of my time. And I’m done with it. So let’s talk about why I’m giving up on this!

So this game is a game that took… really long to come out, and seems to have had a kinda troubled development, what with the change of devs what seems like no more than a year before release, and it was delayed… like, 3 or 4 times… But people were pretty excited for this one, and I was one of them.

So it came out in July, and I… bought it in November at half price during Black Friday. Yeah I took a while to get to it.

So let’s see if the long-awaited game is good!