JOBOCAN Game Reviews - Jovial Outlook Based on Centuries Analysing Nonsense

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!

There’s the usual February Nintendo Direct. I am gonna react to it. Whoa! So yes I am writing this intro before actually watching the Direct. It could be the most hype Direct ever, it could… not be. I have no idea, and I have no real expectations.

The rumor mill was a bit dry, but got a bit better… 2 hours before the Direct. There’s the Advance Wars rumors which are kinda dumb (the SKU changed on the eshop so people think that means it’s coming out right away, the other is a random wal-mart employee saying he saw a standee with a February 10 release date for it but provided no proof)… possible, but not likely based on why Nintendo indefinitely delayed the game. There was a bit of an “oof” rumor from Exputer saying they saw video evidence of a remake of Baten Kaitos, though this rumor is weirdly contradicted by this image just popping out a bit before the Direct showing a remaster collection of Baten Kaitos 1 and 2 rather than a remake of the first (could be faked of course). So either way, that’s possible. And that’s about it as far as anything interesting and new. There’s a Syluxhunter thing from last year about some F-Zero related thing, though no timing or details were given for that so… eh. Oh and there’s the whole TotK 70$ price and Metroid Prime 4 appearing/disappearing from online stores kinda randomly, I don’t think that’s particularly useful info as far as content… but it WOULD be bullshit if Nintendo upped the price of their games.

As far as expectations, I’m expecting Tears of the Kingdom to be shown very briefly, I feel it will be a bit more of a tease, leading to a separate Direct just for that game closer to release. I’m expecting something about Pikmin. I’m expecting to not see Metroid Prime 4. And I’m expecting DLC stuff for Fire Emblem, Mario Kart and maybe Splatoon. So that’s a good 5-8 minutes of the 40 that was announced accounted for, which means there’s a lot of time which could just be anything. And also Samba de Amigo since that popped up just a bit before the Direct started, no excitement for that.

So as usual, I’ll be giving short comments about everything in the presentation, and finish it off with my overall thoughts.

Let’s go!

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!

Hey I guess I’m doing this early and will probably regret it because more dates will probably pop up soon, let’s go! January was a bit quiet review-wise, with some catching up, games I decided not to review, and one new game. Currently playing through Fire Emblem Engage which I will review (so far so good) and Forspoken just finished pre-loading (that game is not looking so hot)… not sure if I’ll review Forspoken, but I will post about it either way because big Squeenix game. And there’s still Pizza Tower and the new Spongebob I want to check out, but they might end up on the maybe list.

So February is a fucking packed month. I’m highlighting 16 multiplats, 1 Switch game, 4 PC games, and 2-3 PS5 things. There’s 4 or 5 or 6 games on my “getting for sure” list, and like 10 in my maybe list. There’s absolutely no way I’m playing all the interesting stuff that’s coming out in February, especially since I’ll still be catching up with January games. Thankfully (for now) March is a bit quieter so I should be able to get into a bunch of these.

So anyways, 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.

Also there’s a few cool retro re-releases like Truxton, Zero Wing and Montezuma’s Revenge.

EDIT: removed a game

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.

So this game is a game that took… really long to come out, and seems to have had a kinda troubled development, what with the change of devs what seems like no more than a year before release, and it was delayed… like, 3 or 4 times… But people were pretty excited for this one, and I was one of them.

So it came out in July, and I… bought it in November at half price during Black Friday. Yeah I took a while to get to it.

So let’s see if the long-awaited game is good!

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!