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!

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!

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!

Okay that’s it, I don’t think I can keep this rate of posts up. The last ~2 weeks have been crazy here on JOBOCAN Game Reviews. I’m gonna slow down a bit now, but I did just finish this after grabbing it from a boxing day sale, so let’s talk about it!

It came out in early 2021, but I had other stuff I was playing back then and it took until now to finally jump in. I do like to try out all the stuff Nippon Ichi Software puts out, even though a lot of it hasn’t been amazing recently.

Let’s see if Nippon Ichi has a winner with this third-person shooter!

It’s Halo! It was meant to come out last year with the launch of the Xbox Series X, but it was delayed a whole year. Finally we got it.

Halo is not the series I have the most experience in. I played part of 1, part of 3, I think all of 4 and part of 5. I have zero care for the story, basically. I have enjoyed my time with Halo, but I’d generally stop playing to play other stuff. So Infinite is a rare instance of me actually beating a Halo game.

So let’s check it out! And yes this is just a review of the campaign, I don’t play multiplayer shit. I’m sure the multiplayer here is great.

And also I will take a moment to complain about Game Pass. I actually got the 1$ Game Pass thing to play this and a few other games.

I’ve been pretty curious about this game since it was first shown at, I believe, the PS5 “reveal” event, it being an action-y space shooter. It looked like it could be fun. It didn’t end up getting all that much attention, and it did end up being released on everything anyways, which is good.

So let’s check it out!

I don’t know why I bought this. I never played the first Caligula Effect, or the “Overdose” version which I hear is much better. What I did experience was a few episodes of the Caligula Effect anime, which is an adaptation of the first game’s story. I wasn’t sure, watching that kinda-meh anime, how that translated into a video game at all, it was lacking in segments that could have gameplay other than boss battles… and that’s basically because, obviously, they removed the dungeons from the anime. It wasn’t a very good anime.

So anyways I got this one, hearing that it’s basically self-contained so knowing the original game’s story isn’t very important… let’s see if this is good!

This is a game that seemed pretty interesting when they talked about the idea, but it had this weird issue where they wouldn’t show a lot of the gameplay, or show how the game flow was going to be. They showed their “wacky” characters, which is a weird decision considering the characters are kinda ass in this game, and tried to show it had a “wacky” atmosphere, but it kinda doesn’t… Anyways, I was interested in this one, but I was gonna wait a bit to get it.

So anyways, I got it not too long after release, played it for a couple days, finished it, and it’s time to review it… so let’s go!

It has been a little bit since the last Tales of game, with Berseria in 2016. Actually the longest gap between “main” releases in this series. So I was pretty excited for this one. I usually like the Tales of games, though I haven’t played all of them. This looked decent from what I saw pre-release.

Not much else to say in an intro… Let’s just go!

I haven’t played every game in the Ys series, but I did get to a few and I hope to play more. Ys is always an interesting series because they’re fairly standalone so the fact that it’s a sequel doesn’t really matter. All you need to know is that Adol is an adventurer who gets into some wacky world-ending shenanigans wherever he goes. I had a lot of fun with Ys 8, so I was pretty excited for more of it.

Let’s gooooooo!