Here comes Nintendo to once again save the gaming industry from a tremendously shitty Not-E3 here in 2023. It’s actually crazy how subpar Not-E3 2023 has been, but here comes Nintendo flying in with what should be a great show because… I dunno, no one else was good, someone has to be.

I did actually watch this before writing any of this, because of reasons, and I even missed it live because of the same reasons, but let’s actually go through the show now. I do like going by Highlights and such, so I’m doing this here again. Highlights at different levels talking about my favorite parts of the show, down to the ones I liked least.

Let’s-a go!

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.

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, like I said in the previous post, I will continue doing these release posts. I’ve been actually not playing much as far as new games, and couldn’t really review anything anyways. Like, I’m near the end of Octopath 2 but I kinda got tired of it. I’m playing like 2 levels of Pizza Tower ever other week pretty much… And that’s about it though I might buy 9 Years of Shadows. There’s something I am playing, but I will do a post about it soon because… why not!

For April 2023 I’m highlighting 15 multiplats and 1 Switch games. Not much of note here but a few interesting titles. I also decided to remove some highlights, trying to be more focused on actually interesting stuff. I’m

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’m not getting much out as far as posts recently. Somehow increasing my “games I didn’t review in 2023 post” without actually making full posts. I’m progressing through a few games. I’ll try to get some things out, there’s some games I’m playing and some games I want to play that game out in the last month-ish, but some of them are pretty long so I dunno. I’m gonna try. In the meantime, at least “games coming out soon” posts are pretty easy to do.

For March 2023 I’m highlighting: 14 multiplats, 3 Switch games and 3 PC games. It sounds like a good amount, but as far as big releases, this month is pretty quiet. There’s 2 games I’m getting. So I might be able to catch up a bit with all the other shit from february I didn’t get to and review yet.

So 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.

Hey I guess I’m doing this early and will probably regret it because more dates will probably pop up soon, let’s go! January was a bit quiet review-wise, with some catching up, games I decided not to review, and one new game. Currently playing through Fire Emblem Engage which I will review (so far so good) and Forspoken just finished pre-loading (that game is not looking so hot)… not sure if I’ll review Forspoken, but I will post about it either way because big Squeenix game. And there’s still Pizza Tower and the new Spongebob I want to check out, but they might end up on the maybe list.

So February is a fucking packed month. I’m highlighting 16 multiplats, 1 Switch game, 4 PC games, and 2-3 PS5 things. There’s 4 or 5 or 6 games on my “getting for sure” list, and like 10 in my maybe list. There’s absolutely no way I’m playing all the interesting stuff that’s coming out in February, especially since I’ll still be catching up with January games. Thankfully (for now) March is a bit quieter so I should be able to get into a bunch of these.

So anyways, 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.

Also there’s a few cool retro re-releases like Truxton, Zero Wing and Montezuma’s Revenge.

EDIT: removed a game

First proper review of a 2023 game! I actually played other stuff, namely Atelier Sophie 2 (a game from last year) and Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider (came out last week I think). I won’t review either, but this is a bit bigger and a bit more interesting to talk about in a full review.

I’m a longtime fan of One Piece. Started watching a bit before it got to Skypeia in the anime. Watching the damn thing was nearly impossible back then (ignoring the awful 4kids dub), some episodes were just not subbed at all, and the quality of the subs were frequently questionable at best for a long time when you did end up finding an episode (hoping that the video file named “One Piece Episode 202 subbed.mpg” wasn’t Bible Black again)… But that didn’t stop me from enjoying the show. I eventually transitioned to reading the manga, though I’m way behind at this point (I’m probably a bit past halfway the Wano arc)… I need to catch up. I’ve played a few One Piece games, enjoyed some of them. This one looked pretty interesting, it seemed to have a pretty unique battle system. So I picked it up, kind of on a whim.

Let’s see if it’s good!

Valkyrie Profile could’ve been one of Squeenix’s big series. But they just kinda started pretending it doesn’t exist. The first one was solid and had a good PSP port (that just got ported to PS4 and PS5), the sequel on PS2 was pretty good but a bit more traditional, and then there was a DS game that I haven’t played unfortunately.

So this spin-off was announced a little bit matter-of-factly in I think a Sony Direct. I kinda wanted to get it solely because it was a new VP game, pretty much. So I did, when the PC version came out 2 months late, and then I took like a month to actually play it because I had so much other stuff to play. And then I took a couple weeks to review it.

Well let’s go! This won’t be super long.

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!