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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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!

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.