Rogue Legacy is something of a classic at this point, being one of the early takes on the “rogue-lite” style of game that is so popular nowadays. It came out just 2 years after Binding of Isaac and a year after FTL, 2 of the games that were a big influence in the subgenre/style/whatever you want to call it. Rogue Legacy was a good time that did a bunch of interesting stuff.

Well, let’s go and see if the sequel retains what made the first one good!

In this episode of “buying random older games because nothing is coming out right now”, this is a Metroidvania that I thought looked a bit interesting. It’s made by a studio in Israel, and as far as I can find it’s that company’s first game, which is pretty cool (and the studio itself seems a bit strange, actually being the internal game development company of a school? Huh).

So let’s check it out!

Games need to start coming out again, ASAP. I’ve been looking for stuff to play, and I’m kind of just drawing a blank as far as new stuff to play. So I kinda have to go… experimental.

So anyways I had Bright Memory: Infinite on my Steam wishlist for a while. I saw it was discounted. I knew it was a short game, but I figured it would at least give me something to do for one evening. And yeah that prediction was pretty good considering I not only finished the game but wrote this review in the same evening!

So let’s go and talk about this one… very quickly.

I talked about how short I felt Ghostwire Tokyo was when I reviewed that. I must apologize to Ghostwire Tokyo because THIS game is literally 3 times shorter than Ghostwire. I bought this yesterday evening, played it for around an hour, then today played it part of the afternoon, then in the evening tonight I played… the last level. And that’s it, I’m done, and ready to review it.

So this review is coming really quick after finishing it, which came very quickly after buying it. Let’s just go, this won’t be a long one.

I kinda completely missed the first Blue Reflection game (though I did research it very mildly before writing this review). I’m not entirely sure WHY I missed it, as it’s an RPG made by what seems to be the team behind the Atelier games, or at least a team somewhat related to it (considering how crafting works), and this offers something pretty close to Atelier. You figure I’d have checked this out, but it took me until the sequel to notice it.

I ended up buying it recently while it was on sale at Amazon Canada, and then I waited because early this year was super busy game-wise, and I had plenty of other stuff to play through, so this took a backseat for a while. But finally, game releases calmed down a bunch, and I got to finally play it.

So let’s see if it’s good!

HMMMMM.

So I really disliked Borderlands 3. It’s the first Borderlands I didn’t play beyond finishing the final boss when 1 and 2 both got a lot of play from me (True Vault Hunter modes and playing different characters), and I even played through the pre-sequel more than once. Not only was Borderlands 3 pretty meh, but Gearbox is also an awful company that does shitty BS all the time and is led by a weirdo… So I figured I’d give them one last chance to impress me before never buying anything they do again… And what better last chance than yet another Borderlands game, this one headlined by the shittiest character in the series!

Well, let’s see how much this sucks!

I’ve mentioned a few times recently that I previously gave a very negative review for the last Kirby game, Kirby Star Allies. It was pretty pathetic how bad it was in every gameplay aspect (a game that actively hated the fact that someone was playing it, so it beat bosses for you and solved puzzles for you and had no actual… design). Star Allies is the only bad mainline Kirby, as Kirby was previously a solid series with only good games. So when this was announced, I was definitely liking what I was seeing, but I was a bit wary of it. You know, just in case.

But I still got it at launch after avoiding the demos and every trailer other than the announcement one. So let’s go and see if Kirby is back to his usual quality!

I honestly wasn’t expecting to be reviewing this so quickly, but yeah, I’m done with this game in a mere 14 hours… which is fine, I don’t mind short-ish games, but I was totally expecting it to be longer considering it’s an open-world thing.

I remember when this was announced. I think most people forgot about that because this is the game presented by Ikumi Nakamura at some E3, who made a big impression with her presentation, but said presentation is what got all the attention and people kinda forgot about the game itself. Also, this game is a Shinji Mikami game, in some capacity.

I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this… so let’s see if it’s fun!

*EDIT: I was so focused on writing about why the gameplay isn’t great that I completely forgot to mention that the localization team for this game is awful and fucked up the translation in every way possible by writing lines that literally aren’t even there in the original japanese version. Why is it SO HARD for localizers to just take the japanese text and write it in english? Plus, it’s not just the western localization that’s awful, as the chinese localization is also garbage pushing weird propaganda… This is why I leave japanese voice acting on in games, my minor understanding of the language is a decent bullshit detector*

Sometimes a game comes up that you have basically no expectations for, but they end up being very impressive. Stranger of Paradise is one of these. The first trailer was wacky as fuck, made kinda no sense, wasn’t a good explanation of what the game would be like, and all that people really seemed to get out of it was “CHAOS” and the slew of memes that came from that. Unfortunately for this game, this ended up not being a good thing because that’s all people think of it, and they think it’s bad because of that meme or something. It’s really weird, you mention this is a good game and people think you’re trolling. But it is good.

I actually avoided all gameplay videos and trailers for this game after the announcement because that announcement completely convinced me to buy it, because it was so weird and stupid.

So let’s go and talk about what is one of the best games this year so far! Yeah.

This was announced last year. It is Square Enix’s new HD-2D project after Octopath Traveler, also featuring a weird title.

I did play the first “test” demo for this one, but not the prologue demo which basically, IIRC, gets you through the first 3 chapters. I enjoyed the combat in that first demo, and I’m not sure much changed since (it has been a while), but I was decently hyped for the final product. I very much enjoyed Octopath, so I was pretty interested in seeing more of that.

So let’s go and see if it’s a good one!