JOBOCAN Game Reviews - Jovial Outlook Based on Centuries Analysing Nonsense

Nintendo was doing these mini indie directs this week, with some news and a few releases. One that caught my eye was The Punchuin, by a company I quite enjoy, Shin’en.

So in-between work, writing my GotY post, writing my 2023 hype post (coming soon) and doing christmas-y stuff with the family, I downloaded, played and finished this game.

I have nothing to say about this game, really.. So I’m not reviewing it. And the “Games I played by didn’t review” post was already posted so OOPS.

Just quickly, it’s a puzzle game where you’re a penguin who punches blocks around, try to get them in lines of 3 of the same color. It’s okay. The gameplay is well designed, though a few levels are a bit weird about giving you the block colors you need (when I need reds and get only purples, it’s a bit annoying). The game is 2 hours long, has 2 endings, and… yeah, that’s it. I think if it was 5$ it would be an amazing deal. It’s not 5$. So I wouldn’t recommend it until there’s a sale. Not Shin’en’s best, but not a bad game.

So yeah that’s it. There’s nothing after the read more.

IT IS TIME FOR THE GAMES OF THE YEAR 2022! I’m actually surprised at how good 2022 ended up being as far as games. There were a lot of good ones, so much so that I couldn’t play all the interesting ones. There was just no time. Not that all games were good, Sonic Frontiers and Return to Monkey Island exist, after all. But overall, there was plenty of good stuff.

So it is this time of the year where I can talk about all the great games I loved that came out that year. I usually do 6-7 GotY winners, one of which would be my grand TOP GotY choice, but I don’t know if I can do that this year.

I will also rant about the year as a whole, as usual, with a focus on the big 3.

There’s some games I was interested in during 2022 that I have yet to play, in case you’re wondering. Who knows if I’ll get to them, but if you think they’re really good and are sad they’re not named here, know that I probably hold no ill will against them, I probably just didn’t play it.

Amongst big games I haven’t played that could’ve had a chance: Digimon Survive (actually bought it but haven’t played it yet), A Plague Tale: Requiem, God of War Ragnarök, Horizon 2, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher, Choo Choo Charles, Signalis, Soulstice, Sports Story… and many others. A lot of interesting games came out this year, was a bit hard to get to all of them.

So let’s go!

Click here to skip to the winners if you’re not interested in my inane rantings.

So I reviewed a decent amount of games this year. But I played more than what I reviewed. I did have a few “I don’t want to review X game” posts, where I’d give a quick synopsis of why a review felt a bit pointless, or I didn’t finish the game and had little to say about it. Like Dawn of the Monsters which I found kinda meh, or Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes which I really liked but didn’t review because it’s just another Warriors game.

So I figured, let’s take all these games I played and didn’t review, and put them all in one big stupid post. Why not!

Here are the games I’m having a look at in this post: Windjammers 2, Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 2, Azure Striker Gunvolt 3, Hot Wheels Unleashed, Blossom Tales 2, River City Saga: Three Kingdoms, Shovel Knight Dig, Metal Hellsinger, Omega Labyrinth Life, River City Girls 2, Freedom Planet 2, Demon Throttle, Gungrave G.O.R.E., Ground Divers. A bit of a random post, but hey I like talking about most of the games I play, so there it is.

Well, let’s go!

I stopped watching Rick and Morty after season 3, which was a pretty shit season overall with only a few high points. I know basically nothing else about Justin Roiland’s other work, and have not played any of his previous games. But this one looked pretty cool, I liked some of the ideas I was seeing here. So I picked it up!

Well, let’s see if the game with the Morty gun is any good!

I love me some Dragon Quest. Squeenix, or at least the people who decide which of their games are localized, don’t seem to always agree with me, as the likelihood of even getting any of the games in the series to be officially localized is up in the air. With Treasures being a spin-off, that put the odds WAY low… but it did actually get a worldwide release, so that’s good. Now if only the last 3 Dragon Quest Monsters games could come out here (Joker 3, Terry’s Wonderland, and the rom of the GBC game on Switch), that would be great.

This gave me some Monsters vibes, but obviously this was gonna be different from the Monsters game with the focus on treasure hunting. So I thought it was pretty interesting.

Well, let’s go and see if this is a cool one!

I saw videos of this a few times. It looked cool. So I bought it. And now I’m reviewing it.

Only hype, detailed intros on this website, I tell ya.

Let’s go and see if this is good or whatever!

Really the only reason to watch it this year is that Steam are giving away a bunch of steam decks.

Edit after the fact: When the first ever interesting moment of your awards show since 2003 is a kid trolling you with a weird Bill Clinton joke, you know your show is shit

Squeenix sure are busy boys right now. They had so much stuff this year, but especially since September. Since then they’ve released Diofield Chronicles, Valkyrie Elysium, Dragon Quest X Offline (for those who speak japanese), Star Ocean: The Divine Force, Harvestella and Tactics Ogre: Reborn, and then there’s a few more coming out in December with Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered, Dragon Quest Treasures and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion. That’s a lot of games for one company in just a couple months, and that didn’t include a few collections and ports (like the upcoming PS4/5 port of Valkyrie Profile Lenneth), and I’m actually not sure what their involvement with Front Mission 1st: Remake is as most info I’m finding doesn’t include them (which is weird since it was always published and sometimes developed by Square)… And it’s not like they were quiet the rest in the year with some BANGERS like Stranger of Paradise. There’s not a lot of companies with output like this anymore, it’s pretty cool to see.

As for Harvestella, I always thought it looked cool, but also it’s in a subgenre I have basically no familiarity with. Basically, the last farming game I played was Harvest Moon. On the SNES. I haven’t touched any since. I have yet to try the Rune Factory series, which I feel like I should. I haven’t touched Stardew Valley either. And there’s just so many farming games right now, but I haven’t played any of them. So I figured… why not start here! I did hear some people were disappointed in the demo, but that Squeenix actually fixed some of the issues people had there in the final version, so that’s great to hear.

Let’s check out if my first farming game since the SNES is cool!

Star Ocean is a series. It has games. Some of them are good, namely the first 3, and I remember having fun with the fourth even though that one was rather disliked overall. The fifth, on PS4, is one of the few RPGs I gave up on after less than 5 hours played. I don’t even really remember it, I just didn’t like it.

So this new one was kinda announced out of nowhere, I think in a Playstation Direct, and to basically no hype at all… So I picked it up at launch, finished it weeks ago, started playing and reviewing other things, and now I’m finally reviewing this.

Well, let’s go and talk about this video game!

Man I have so much to review still. Just got the Pokemon review out, I have Star Ocean and Harvestella reviews on the go (coming eventually), and I just started Evil West, I haven’t started Valkyrie Elysium yet (taking a slight break from RPGs), and I’ll need to get Gungrave and Front Mission 1st: Remake and maybe The Knight Witch and whatever the shit’s coming out in December… busy busy busy. Might need to move things around as far as what I’ll play/review… I don’t NEED The Knight Witch.

But yeah, there’s stuff coming out in December. Decembers are usually relegated to smaller releases, maybe one big one on one of the systems but it’s never super busy. This isn’t much different, but there’s still a bunch of potentially good stuff and at least one game I’m really excited about. So this time I’m highlighting: 13 multiplats, 2 Switch games and 1 PC game. As for what I’ll be buying/reviewing from these, there’s ONE “for sure ASAP”, and 7-8 games that are at varying levels of maybe.

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.