So this was a bit of a surprise announcement. The Atelier series is pretty popular nowadays but that wasn’t always the case. In fact the first 5 games in the series never made it outside of Japan (more if you want to count side games). Atelier Marie is the first game in the series and it took until now to finally get a western release.

So I grabbed it, to see where the series started. Let’s see if it’s good!

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.

It’s Pokemon. But not! There’s a few of these Pokemon-likes coming out recently like this, Coromon, Nexomon and probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting. This one seemed to be a bit more competitive-focused, with some small but interesting changes to the formula. It’s also been in early access for a while but I decided to wait until full release before getting it.

I actually took a lot of notes while playing this one. So I may address notes in this review more than usual since this is a game that can be described very quickly. Also I’ll just call Temtem, the creatures themselves, Pokemon. Because they’re Pokemon.

Well let’s talk about this!

I like digging a bit to find some interesting games, and this was certainly interesting. It had a demo that was pretty fun, but it had some issues to it, namely the controls being garbage with a mouse and keyboard. It was a pretty cool roguelite deck-building game, pretty similar to Slay the Spire.

Well I grabbed it when it came out and now I’m gonna review it… yay!

Let’s go!

I know basically nothing about the Metal Max series. I know it’s long-running, I believe originally from the Famicom. I believe the only game in the series to have made its way to the West before Xeno (and Xeno Reborn) is Metal Saga on PS2, a game I did not play (it does look pretty interesting). I know they’re these cool RPGs where you build tanks and explore a post-apocalyptic kinda world, but I never played any of them, until now. The only thing I know is that the sequel to Metal Max Xeno Reborn was just cancelled like a week ago, so that’s fun.

So anyways, let’s see what I’ve been missing, and see if this game is good! I hear it’s the worst in the series, so… yeah.

Kao the Kangaroo is one of the hundreds of Sonic rip-off characters that were a big thing basically from the Genesis to the PS2. It’s one I didn’t end up playing, and some of his games had weird releases. The second game in the series came out in Poland 2-3 years earlier than other regions, and the third one only saw a very limited Europe/Australia release, but again only some time after its Polish release. The games look fine though, I just never ended up playing any of them.

But because I’m looking for stuff to play (and Epic Game Store has 25% off almost everything right now so that reduced the price of an already cheap game), I figured I’d pick it up. So let’s see if this is good!

Okay I took a while to finally review this, but here we go!

I haven’t played Gotta Protectors on 3DS, but this isn’t my first tango with this series. My first time was playing a free NES rom some years ago called Amazon’s Running Diet, an infinite runner kind of game where the Amazon character needs to run to lose weight, but also avoid cake while running. Limited Run Games released a cartridge version of it, which they censored because they’re losers.

So anyways, I picked this up on launch, having previously no idea it existed and not listing it in the April release post. Let’s talk about it now that I took over a month to finish it!

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!

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.