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 was a pretty good month post-wise. I’m also writing a rant right now, it’s a good one, not sure when I’ll post it. Still have some things ongoing that I will review soon-ish-maybe. Kinda randomly bought Caligula Effect 2 (despite not having played the first), and there’s a couple things I’ll be getting that are out soon or in November. Surprisingly my “want to buy but haven’t yet” list has been going down smoothly enough, much of the stuff remaining in it that came out this year isn’t very high-priority stuff anymore. So things may calm down a bit, but there’s still plenty for me to review this year.

This month I’m highlighting: 13 multiplats and 4 Switch releases. As far as big releases, November is pretty quiet, but there’s still some cool stuff, including the SECOND hypest game of the year. Wow! I’m getting a couple of these.

Also I’m going with some weird inclusions I usually wouldn’t look at this month, because I figure it’s fun. The theme? Games from the same company (Microid), all based on franco/franco-belgian comics, that actually have weirdly okay collector editions and the games themselves don’t look quite as shit as they probably should. It’s really weird, not sure why there’s 3 of these this month. But there you go.

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, small interesting ones 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.

The first Axiom Verge was this awesome Metroidvania, with the first Metroid having the largest influence for a lot of the game. It had lots of cool movement abilities, cool bosses, a fun map to explore. It kinda did everything well.

So when a sequel was announced, I was pretty hyped. I liked the first one, Tom Happ was obviously also making this one, clearly it should be pretty good. I saw it getting lots of negative comments in different places, but people tend to have wrong opinions about games. So they should be good, right?

Let’s go and talk about it!

I have no idea what happened with this universe that I’m actually reviewing this game. I’d usually  just straight up ignore this licensed rip-off kinda deal. But this game, it got my attention.

And I wasn’t the only one, as it got the attention of the competitive Smash fanbase in a pretty big way, and the Smash fanbase overall. The moment it got peoples’ attention is when the dev was revealed to be Ludosity, who previously made Slap City, a Smash clone that I hear is pretty okay, but also with the gameplay demos (including in-depth moveset showcases for all the characters) we were shown a game that looked way better than you may expect from something like this. As in, it actually looked good.

So yeah… let’s talk about this one! I don’t think it will be a super long review, but we’ll see.

*EDIT: As I was writing this review a patch came out for the game and I didn’t notice, it does fix some things I mention, mostly as far as character balance*

This was such a surprising release. It just popped up randomly in a Nintendo Direct without ever being announced first but, not only that, it also came out right then and there. For those who don’t know, Actraiser is one of the ultimate SNES classics. A game that combines side-scrolling action platformer gameplay with city building simulation and is good in both aspects. It’s great. The sequel was great too, but very different, focusing entirely on the action segments and making those really cool and unique, but having no city-building.

My headcannon for why this even exists is that Yuzo Koshiro, the amazing composer that made the music for the original game (and a lot more, look him up), recently made an Actraiser-inspired track for Korone of Hololive (which is awesome, btw), and decided he wanted to make one more, but had nothing to put it in, so he bullied Squeenix to remaster the original game and add a level to put the song in. Prove me wrong (yeah this is probably not real but I think it’s funny so that’s what I’m going with).

Well, this is a remake of one of my favorite games, so let’s see if they did it justice!

Actually got several posts out in September, that was decent. 2 of them were reaction posts, which is fine. I don’t always do these, but sometimes I feel like it makes sense. I wouldn’t do a reaction to the Smash showcase on october 5th, for example. That’s not really worth reacting to. As far as future posts, I do still have a so-called “backlog” (i.e. games I want to play but haven’t bought yet), I haven’t bought No More Heroes 3 yet, or Axiom Verge 2 (amongst many others), and I was made aware that Deathloop may actually be an okay game so I just started that. And there’s obviously upcoming games I’ll write about. So I still have plenty on the go writing-wise.

So this month I’m highlighting: 17 multiplats, 2 Switch games, 2 PC games and 1 PS4 exclusive for some reason. For me, in all that, there’s only 2 “getting for sure” games, 2 I’m probably getting, and a couple that are going on the maybe list. It’s actually a weirdly quiet month despite having the hypest game of the year, so I might be able to get into some backlog games.

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, small interesting ones 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.

This was revealed in one of the earliest PS5 presentations, might have been the first one. It was noted right away to not be exclusive, which is nice. It looked really good graphically, and the gameplay concept seemed pretty fun, so I was excited for this one.

It’s also an indie studio’s first game, which you can’t tell from looking at trailers. The devs previously did some 3D animations for different companies, for ads and such (some of which was pretty nice), so this jump into gaming is definitely an interesting choice.

Let’s see if Ember Lab’s first endeavor in gaming is a good one!

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 really liked Ace Attorney when the first one popped up in the Americas. It was a pretty cool mix of the classic point-and-click gameplay and some visual novel-style storytelling. Which is funny because I don’t like visual novels. As far as Ace Attorney, I played the first 3, Investigations 1 and Apollo Justice. I didn’t play the second and third Apollo Justice games, or the second Investigations.

This is a collection of 2 games in the series, a prequel spin-off series that takes place at least a hundred years before the first game, featuring an ancestor of Ryuichi Naruhodo, known to us as Phoenix Wright. These 3DS games didn’t previously come out in the west, so this collection is the only way to play these in english.

Considering the gameplay of Ace Attorney, this won’t be a super long review, especially since I don’t want to really spoil the story.

So let’s go!

I don’t even know if I’m gonna post this. I’m writing this intro literally 2 minutes before this presentation is going live. We’ll see after the presentation if I do end up posting it, I only will if there’s something to actually talk about here. And I will look things up before I post too.

The PS5 has been a massive disappointment so far, and I certainly hope that they’ll try to reverse course here and actually announce games. That’s all I want, for the console to have something that makes it worth buying.

So let’s go, it’s starting in a few seconds, let’s hope it’s good.