It’s the big game everyone’s talking about! So I guess I’ll talk about it too!

My experience with the Souls series is a bit scattered. I rented Demon’s Souls on PS3 (yeah renting was still a bit of a thing back then), found it okay but didn’t fully get what was up with it at the time, didn’t end up getting too far into it during my rental. Played a good portion of Dark Souls 1 but not 2 and 3. Enjoyed it decently. Got Bloodborne at launch, really liked that one a lot. Got Sekiro at launch, it is my favorite of the series. And, finally, got Elden Ring at launch, after not being… particularly hyped for it.

The reviews kinda blow my mind because, while Souls games do review very well, this was getting 10/10 scores all over the place, and no game deserves a 10/10… So I was approaching this game with a lot of skepticism. Games that get this kind of hype (from shitty game journo reviewers) tend to get it very… unwarrantedly? Is that a word? Especially when it’s Souls, which is a series that game journo types tend to complain about for extremely stupid reasons, such as them being “too hard” (and trying to make that into an accessibility issue… which it isn’t, game difficulty is never an accessibility issue and anyone who says otherwise is either stupid or lying).

So let’s go and see if this is the good shit or if the scores are dumb!

I had high hopes for this one, it being a game made by ex-Persona staff. So I got it at launch last week and played it a bunch in-between playing Elden Ring.

I am now 20 hours in and I’m fucking done. That puts me around the halfway mark of the game, and I feel like things are either getting worse, or I just can’t take it anymore. This is very unfortunate, but wow, this game is something else. And not in a good way.

So I am NOT reviewing it since… you know… I can’t (because I didn’t finish it… take note, “professional” reviewers), but at least I’ll give my impressions so far and explain why I’m done with it… This is as much as you’re getting from me review-wise for this one.

Let’s go!

Well, I gotta say I was not expecting this. Trailers for this game weren’t very exciting, so I almost ignored it. But a few people on the twitters were putting up gameplay videos of it and I thought it actually looked better than the few trailers I had seen, so I figured I’d pick it up (plus, with the coupon deal on EGS a couple weeks back, it was 30$ Canadian around launch). Well, I fell in love with it. This game is good.

As to what this review is, I’m more willing to call it an “impressions” post rather than a review if you want. The reason is that I’m not 100% done with the game, but also there’s a bunch of games coming out very soon and if I don’t review this great game now, I might forget to do so. So it’s basically a review, but I do want to be clear that I have not gotten the true ending.

Well anyways, let’s go!

Konami almost made a game! Whoa! Actually, they got someone else to make it, but it’s nice. What’s even nicer is that this is a sequel to a classic game that no one knows about because it never made its way outside of Japan (random note: stupidly, you can get the classic game alongside this, but you need to get the deluxe edition of this game and it’s not available otherwise… which is fucking stupid… also it’s not translated).

Getsu Fuuma Den was a bit similar to Castlevania, but it also had a world map to explore, NPCs to talk to, and dungeons where you’d have a cool “behind-the-back” view of Getsu Fuma. It was pretty darn cool, and it never got a sequel up until now (with a sequel planned for PS2 that was canned). You may have seen Getsu Fuma in a few places, like the shitty Castlevania smartphone game, or as a few cards in Yu-Gi-Oh, or as one of the playable characters in the also-japan-only game Konami’s Wai Wai World (also a great game). He’s been around, but generally, it’s been a dormant series since the Famicom. So I was pretty hyped when this was announced… and then the release was shadow-dropped during the last Nintendo Direct, so that’s fun.

Let’s see if it’s a good revival!

This was a bit of a random buy. A friend told me about it, and the one trailer I checked looked cool, so I picked it up, knowing not too much about it otherwise. Had some cool retro game inspirations there.

I think I’ll make this a fast review, so let’s not waste time in the intro. Let’s go!

Well there you go, I am done with the first big game of the year! I’m a decent Pokemon fan. I was 10 when the first game came out here and I’ve played most of the mainline entries other than… gen 3 I think. Yeah, I know nothing about that one. A common complaint about the series is that all the games are basically the same since the first one… and that’s fair, but I don’t know if it’s a problem. Sometimes a dev tries something and it just works, and Pokemon is one of those things, it only sees minimal gameplay improvements/changes every gen, with obviously better graphics because of hardware. I’m personally fine with it. But something very new would be nice.

And here’s Pokemon Legends: Arceus, a game that is not a mainline Pokemon game, that changes pretty much everything you know about the series. I played through the whole thing. Caught all the pokey manz, did all but 3 sidequests, didn’t 100% any of the pokemon entries in the Pokedex… but I don’t feel compelled to do any of that.

So let’s talk about this completely different Pokemon experience and see if it’s a cool direction for the series!

The Mary Skelter series is a bit of a weird one, but it’s pretty fun. It’s one of those first-person grid-based dungeon-crawling RPGs, but with JRPG combat. There’s a lot of these series recently, and most of them are pretty good. Mary Skelter separates itself a bit with the heavy amount of puzzles/traps in the dungeons, as well as the stalking nightmares.

This is the last game in the series, at least following the current plotline, so I wanted to play it but had a bunch of other stuff to play back when it came out, so it took a backseat. And finally, I’ve played it.

So let’s go and review this thing!

My first review this year! And it’s a game that came out early last year!

This is a weird one because, out of all the anime I’ve seen, Record of Lodoss War is one that passed me by. It’s been on my to-watch list for a long time though. So I’m playing this with exactly zero knowledge of the source material. I figured it wouldn’t require that anyways (though it’s on my to-watch anime list). I saw a trailer of it on Steam and figured I should pick it up. It was about to come out and was on discount in early access as well, so I grabbed it then. Little did I know it would be on PC Game Pass by the time I’d play it… But I already had it, so eh.

Let’s talk about this random thing! I’ll make this a very quick review I think.

There’s a couple games that I recently played at least a bit of, but that I don’t think I’ll fully finish or get to the end of, at least yet. Some of those came from my recent subscription to PC Game Pass using the absolutely awful Xbox app on PC, some I got on Switch.

The 6 games I’ll be quickly “review” here are Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 1: Phantom Brave / Soul Nomad, Dodgeball Academia, Astria Ascending, Dark Alliance: Dungeons & Dragons and Forza Horizon 5.

So there you go, before I go into my GotY posts, here’s a couple games I’m not likely to post full reviews for.

Let’s go!

In my Ziggurat 2 review, I noted I was gonna review another Roguelite FPS. This is one I almost tried in early access, it was pretty interesting-looking. But I try not to buy early access games, so I waited a good long while for it to come out.

Just quickly pumping this review out before I get my GotY stuff out (I want a quick “games I won’t review” kinda post, maybe another review, and of course the GotY 2021 celebration itself). Let’s go!