Well something kinda weird happened. The youtube algorithm, for some reason, has been REALLY pushing pokemon card content onto me in the last few months. It’s weird, considering the last time I bought or played with Pokemon cards was literally in 1999, Base Set 2 being the newest set at the time.

Eventually (late Feb/early march) I just figured… Let’s buy a couple Pokemon things, for fun. And now I might be stuck in it.

So what I want to do is talk about my history with the cards and how things look to me, which is kind of being on the outside looking in, in a way.

So let’s go I guess!

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.

Well, there’s a new Pokemon! I tend to not really review Pokemon unless something new is done. I mean, you’ve reviewed one Gen 7 or lower Pokemon game, you’ve reviewed all of them. That’s why I didn’t really review the Diamond and Pearl remakes in my post about them, but I did review Legends Arceus, because that was a more unique spin-off.

And in this case, it’s different enough to be worth reviewing… so yeah. I played the story and did some post-game shit, I’m about done with it myself though. I will do things a bit different than usual reviews because the usual format doesn’t work for this.

Let’s talk about it!

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!