Oooooooooooooooh boy. There it is. THE most hype game of the year.

The previous game in this series is Metroid Fusion, in 2002. Prime is a separate series, both in gameplay and story, while Other M is a spin-off (despite being a direct sequel to Super Metroid and it has references to things that happen in Fusion and contradicts… stuff from Prime… it’s for sure non-canon despite what Sakamoto says). But even counting Prime and Other M, the Metroid series has been rather dormant for a good long while. The only other Metroid games since Fusion were Zero Mission, a remake of the first Metroid on NES, and Samus Returns, a remake of Metroid 2 from the Game Boy. THAT one is important, because it is made by MercurySteam, the developers that would go on to make Metroid Dread, and adds some plot context that the original version of it didn’t have. It feels like a “if this game is good you can make the next one” kinda thing.

I’m a big fan of the Metroid series, and it’s great to finally get closure to the main storyline of the original series, after 19 years without a new mainline Metroid. My favorite of the series is Super Metroid (and probably still is), but the desire for more normal, non-3D Metroid (alongside more 3D Metroid, of course, Prime 4 getting its development reset was unfortunate) is always there. Metroid is a series that should be bigger than it is, and maybe Dread will be the breakout hit.

Nintendo seems to have gone all-out as far as spoiling this game before release, but thankfully for me all I had seen before release is the E3 announcement trailer… and one very spoilery screenshot. It’s nice that they were advertising it a lot, but they could’ve done so without… showing what seems like everything.

So yeah, this just came out, I finished it, and it’s time to review the game of the year (probably), let’s fucking go.

This was such a surprising release. It just popped up randomly in a Nintendo Direct without ever being announced first but, not only that, it also came out right then and there. For those who don’t know, Actraiser is one of the ultimate SNES classics. A game that combines side-scrolling action platformer gameplay with city building simulation and is good in both aspects. It’s great. The sequel was great too, but very different, focusing entirely on the action segments and making those really cool and unique, but having no city-building.

My headcannon for why this even exists is that Yuzo Koshiro, the amazing composer that made the music for the original game (and a lot more, look him up), recently made an Actraiser-inspired track for Korone of Hololive (which is awesome, btw), and decided he wanted to make one more, but had nothing to put it in, so he bullied Squeenix to remaster the original game and add a level to put the song in. Prove me wrong (yeah this is probably not real but I think it’s funny so that’s what I’m going with).

Well, this is a remake of one of my favorite games, so let’s see if they did it justice!

This is a game that seemed pretty interesting when they talked about the idea, but it had this weird issue where they wouldn’t show a lot of the gameplay, or show how the game flow was going to be. They showed their “wacky” characters, which is a weird decision considering the characters are kinda ass in this game, and tried to show it had a “wacky” atmosphere, but it kinda doesn’t… Anyways, I was interested in this one, but I was gonna wait a bit to get it.

So anyways, I got it not too long after release, played it for a couple days, finished it, and it’s time to review it… so let’s go!

This was revealed in one of the earliest PS5 presentations, might have been the first one. It was noted right away to not be exclusive, which is nice. It looked really good graphically, and the gameplay concept seemed pretty fun, so I was excited for this one.

It’s also an indie studio’s first game, which you can’t tell from looking at trailers. The devs previously did some 3D animations for different companies, for ads and such (some of which was pretty nice), so this jump into gaming is definitely an interesting choice.

Let’s see if Ember Lab’s first endeavor in gaming is a good one!

It has been a little bit since the last Tales of game, with Berseria in 2016. Actually the longest gap between “main” releases in this series. So I was pretty excited for this one. I usually like the Tales of games, though I haven’t played all of them. This looked decent from what I saw pre-release.

Not much else to say in an intro… Let’s just go!

My history with WarioWare is pretty limited. The only one I’ve played is a bit of the Wii one at a friend’s place, and otherwise I have purposely avoided the series. My reasoning was pretty simplistic: I liked Wario, specifically the Wario Land series, and saw this as a joke/insult to that series. Maybe it was undeserved, but I never “liked” WarioWare, despite never really playing it.

So this is my first WarioWare. I went into it with no idea if I’d like it. I do like this team’s other series, Rhythm Heaven, but I know they’re very different games. And this seems to be a pretty different take on WarioWare too.

So let’s go! I think this will be a short one.

I really liked Ace Attorney when the first one popped up in the Americas. It was a pretty cool mix of the classic point-and-click gameplay and some visual novel-style storytelling. Which is funny because I don’t like visual novels. As far as Ace Attorney, I played the first 3, Investigations 1 and Apollo Justice. I didn’t play the second and third Apollo Justice games, or the second Investigations.

This is a collection of 2 games in the series, a prequel spin-off series that takes place at least a hundred years before the first game, featuring an ancestor of Ryuichi Naruhodo, known to us as Phoenix Wright. These 3DS games didn’t previously come out in the west, so this collection is the only way to play these in english.

Considering the gameplay of Ace Attorney, this won’t be a super long review, especially since I don’t want to really spoil the story.

So let’s go!

So this was always a kinda weird series. The first game was mostly a retelling of the original NES game, with some extra stuff (specifically more characters). 2 had its own original story, where Jason, Eve and Fred the frog go to space to fight the mutant problem, joining up with more tank pilots. Generally I found both games to be quite good. So I was excited for the third one.

So because NEO TWEWY was so long it took me a while to finally get started with this game. And then it was over in what felt like an instant.

So let’s go and see if it’s as good as the last two!

Sometimes a game comes out that I’ll play all the way through, and then at the end I have basically nothing to say about it. The Ascent is one such game.

So because I can’t review it, I’ll still try to talk about it a bit and see if I can squeeze out… anything.

Let’s go? This will not be a review and should not be considered as such. I won’t really go in-depth with anything. I guess it’s gonna be closer to an impression post?

So The World Ends with You was this pretty good DS game. I remember liking it. I remember exactly nothing about it though because it’s been so long since I’ve played it, and I never replayed it. It was 14 years ago, pretty long time to wait to make a direct sequel, but there you go.

So there was a big pause in-between posts because… this game is fucking long. And I wanted to finish it before I reviewed it, and… yeah I’m not happy about actually doing that.

Let’s talk about why I didn’t like this 😀