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*

Well the GotY stuff is done, so not much is left to do this year other than… get hyped for next year! I also have 2 reviews that I’m writing, and the january release list. So I’m doing stuff!

2022 was a pretty fun year with a lot of pretty solid games. 2023… I’m not quite sure if it’s lining up to be quite as good, but it very easily could. There’s a good number of really interesting games coming up, but I’m actually not sure about big badass games yet, as a whole.

So I’ll do my yearly usual post, giving my top 6-ish hyped games, make a big list of big-to-small games I’m interested in, and make a list of big games I’m not interested in. Just trying to get excited about the future and stuff.

So let’s go!

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 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!

Star Ocean is a series. It has games. Some of them are good, namely the first 3, and I remember having fun with the fourth even though that one was rather disliked overall. The fifth, on PS4, is one of the few RPGs I gave up on after less than 5 hours played. I don’t even really remember it, I just didn’t like it.

So this new one was kinda announced out of nowhere, I think in a Playstation Direct, and to basically no hype at all… So I picked it up at launch, finished it weeks ago, started playing and reviewing other things, and now I’m finally reviewing this.

Well, let’s go and talk about this video game!

Man I have so much to review still. Just got the Pokemon review out, I have Star Ocean and Harvestella reviews on the go (coming eventually), and I just started Evil West, I haven’t started Valkyrie Elysium yet (taking a slight break from RPGs), and I’ll need to get Gungrave and Front Mission 1st: Remake and maybe The Knight Witch and whatever the shit’s coming out in December… busy busy busy. Might need to move things around as far as what I’ll play/review… I don’t NEED The Knight Witch.

But yeah, there’s stuff coming out in December. Decembers are usually relegated to smaller releases, maybe one big one on one of the systems but it’s never super busy. This isn’t much different, but there’s still a bunch of potentially good stuff and at least one game I’m really excited about. So this time I’m highlighting: 13 multiplats, 2 Switch games and 1 PC game. As for what I’ll be buying/reviewing from these, there’s ONE “for sure ASAP”, and 7-8 games that are at varying levels of maybe.

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 actually have 3 other reviews that I’m writing right now, taking my time on them. In the meantime, I started playing this thing and… well, this impressions post needs to take precedence.

I had no expectations for Sonic Frontiers because the marketing has been crap but some things looked okay. But I was worried when it looked like it was going for an open world angle. Because basically every open world game is shit. But I still wanted to give this a chance because, despite most post-Genesis Sonic games being bad games, I always give him a chance. I always hold hope that, one day, Sonic will be back to his former glory. Spoilers: he’s not.

After almost 6 hours of playing this game, I think I’m done. This is not a game I want to finish playing. But I still want to talk about it, so let’s do this!

This is NOT a review, since I’m not done with the game. But I won’t be done with it, so this is the most I’m putting out about this game.

I find this a weird nostalgia bait thing. Like… Kids cared a little bit about this back in the 80s, and it even got a really crap movie because of the success of the cards, but I dunno if all that many people really look back that fondly on Garbage Pail Kids, beyond it being a product of its time. However, I’m kinda into this concept of making new games for old systems, especially now if you make sure to, you know, make them available on modern platforms too. One of the best examples of this is Battle Kid, a game that was stuck on NES for a bit but is now available on Xbox and hopefully will come to more platforms.

So I figured I’d grab this on a sensible system so I got the PC version. It will come on an NES cartridge later if you like spending like 7 times more than the game costs to get a collectible version of it… Yeah, not a fan of that price point.

So let’s see if this is a good NES game or whatever!