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!

2023 is starting! January is usually not a very big month for games, and I’d say this January isn’t changing the trend. But there’s still a few big things coming out anyways. And I’m still doing my thing, I have 2 reviews I’m currently writing, they should pop up soon, and there’s gonna be more to come.

So for January 2023, I’m highlighting: 12 multiplats, 1 Switch exclusive and 1 PC exclusive. As far as anything I’d buy, there’s 2 I’m getting for sure, 2 I’m pretty sure I’m getting, and a maybe or two more. So not a very big month, but there’s stuff coming out, mostly later in the month.

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.

And no I’m not including such masterpieces as “Webcam Sex” and “Hentai EroElf”. Steam has really weird standards, I gotta say. Japanese RPGs and visual novels get censored or taken off the store weirdly frequently for no reason at all, but those shitty puzzle games with nudity remain somehow.

*EDIT 12/31: Added a game, oops*

Nintendo was doing these mini indie directs this week, with some news and a few releases. One that caught my eye was The Punchuin, by a company I quite enjoy, Shin’en.

So in-between work, writing my GotY post, writing my 2023 hype post (coming soon) and doing christmas-y stuff with the family, I downloaded, played and finished this game.

I have nothing to say about this game, really.. So I’m not reviewing it. And the “Games I played by didn’t review” post was already posted so OOPS.

Just quickly, it’s a puzzle game where you’re a penguin who punches blocks around, try to get them in lines of 3 of the same color. It’s okay. The gameplay is well designed, though a few levels are a bit weird about giving you the block colors you need (when I need reds and get only purples, it’s a bit annoying). The game is 2 hours long, has 2 endings, and… yeah, that’s it. I think if it was 5$ it would be an amazing deal. It’s not 5$. So I wouldn’t recommend it until there’s a sale. Not Shin’en’s best, but not a bad game.

So yeah that’s it. There’s nothing after the read more.

IT IS TIME FOR THE GAMES OF THE YEAR 2022! I’m actually surprised at how good 2022 ended up being as far as games. There were a lot of good ones, so much so that I couldn’t play all the interesting ones. There was just no time. Not that all games were good, Sonic Frontiers and Return to Monkey Island exist, after all. But overall, there was plenty of good stuff.

So it is this time of the year where I can talk about all the great games I loved that came out that year. I usually do 6-7 GotY winners, one of which would be my grand TOP GotY choice, but I don’t know if I can do that this year.

I will also rant about the year as a whole, as usual, with a focus on the big 3.

There’s some games I was interested in during 2022 that I have yet to play, in case you’re wondering. Who knows if I’ll get to them, but if you think they’re really good and are sad they’re not named here, know that I probably hold no ill will against them, I probably just didn’t play it.

Amongst big games I haven’t played that could’ve had a chance: Digimon Survive (actually bought it but haven’t played it yet), A Plague Tale: Requiem, God of War Ragnarök, Horizon 2, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher, Choo Choo Charles, Signalis, Soulstice, Sports Story… and many others. A lot of interesting games came out this year, was a bit hard to get to all of them.

So let’s go!

Click here to skip to the winners if you’re not interested in my inane rantings.

So I reviewed a decent amount of games this year. But I played more than what I reviewed. I did have a few “I don’t want to review X game” posts, where I’d give a quick synopsis of why a review felt a bit pointless, or I didn’t finish the game and had little to say about it. Like Dawn of the Monsters which I found kinda meh, or Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes which I really liked but didn’t review because it’s just another Warriors game.

So I figured, let’s take all these games I played and didn’t review, and put them all in one big stupid post. Why not!

Here are the games I’m having a look at in this post: Windjammers 2, Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 2, Azure Striker Gunvolt 3, Hot Wheels Unleashed, Blossom Tales 2, River City Saga: Three Kingdoms, Shovel Knight Dig, Metal Hellsinger, Omega Labyrinth Life, River City Girls 2, Freedom Planet 2, Demon Throttle, Gungrave G.O.R.E., Ground Divers. A bit of a random post, but hey I like talking about most of the games I play, so there it is.

Well, let’s go!

I love me some Dragon Quest. Squeenix, or at least the people who decide which of their games are localized, don’t seem to always agree with me, as the likelihood of even getting any of the games in the series to be officially localized is up in the air. With Treasures being a spin-off, that put the odds WAY low… but it did actually get a worldwide release, so that’s good. Now if only the last 3 Dragon Quest Monsters games could come out here (Joker 3, Terry’s Wonderland, and the rom of the GBC game on Switch), that would be great.

This gave me some Monsters vibes, but obviously this was gonna be different from the Monsters game with the focus on treasure hunting. So I thought it was pretty interesting.

Well, let’s go and see if this is a cool one!

I saw videos of this a few times. It looked cool. So I bought it. And now I’m reviewing it.

Only hype, detailed intros on this website, I tell ya.

Let’s go and see if this is good or whatever!

Squeenix sure are busy boys right now. They had so much stuff this year, but especially since September. Since then they’ve released Diofield Chronicles, Valkyrie Elysium, Dragon Quest X Offline (for those who speak japanese), Star Ocean: The Divine Force, Harvestella and Tactics Ogre: Reborn, and then there’s a few more coming out in December with Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered, Dragon Quest Treasures and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion. That’s a lot of games for one company in just a couple months, and that didn’t include a few collections and ports (like the upcoming PS4/5 port of Valkyrie Profile Lenneth), and I’m actually not sure what their involvement with Front Mission 1st: Remake is as most info I’m finding doesn’t include them (which is weird since it was always published and sometimes developed by Square)… And it’s not like they were quiet the rest in the year with some BANGERS like Stranger of Paradise. There’s not a lot of companies with output like this anymore, it’s pretty cool to see.

As for Harvestella, I always thought it looked cool, but also it’s in a subgenre I have basically no familiarity with. Basically, the last farming game I played was Harvest Moon. On the SNES. I haven’t touched any since. I have yet to try the Rune Factory series, which I feel like I should. I haven’t touched Stardew Valley either. And there’s just so many farming games right now, but I haven’t played any of them. So I figured… why not start here! I did hear some people were disappointed in the demo, but that Squeenix actually fixed some of the issues people had there in the final version, so that’s great to hear.

Let’s check out if my first farming game since the SNES is cool!