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!

My first review this year! And it’s a game that came out early last year!

This is a weird one because, out of all the anime I’ve seen, Record of Lodoss War is one that passed me by. It’s been on my to-watch list for a long time though. So I’m playing this with exactly zero knowledge of the source material. I figured it wouldn’t require that anyways (though it’s on my to-watch anime list). I saw a trailer of it on Steam and figured I should pick it up. It was about to come out and was on discount in early access as well, so I grabbed it then. Little did I know it would be on PC Game Pass by the time I’d play it… But I already had it, so eh.

Let’s talk about this random thing! I’ll make this a very quick review I think.

There’s a couple games that I recently played at least a bit of, but that I don’t think I’ll fully finish or get to the end of, at least yet. Some of those came from my recent subscription to PC Game Pass using the absolutely awful Xbox app on PC, some I got on Switch.

The 6 games I’ll be quickly “review” here are Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 1: Phantom Brave / Soul Nomad, Dodgeball Academia, Astria Ascending, Dark Alliance: Dungeons & Dragons and Forza Horizon 5.

So there you go, before I go into my GotY posts, here’s a couple games I’m not likely to post full reviews for.

Let’s go!

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 saw this first in a Nintendo Direct, though I think it was announced a bit before. It looked pretty interesting presentation-wise. The demo came out, it was pretty fun but a bit slow. I picked it up after playing SMTV because I figured I’d get a smaller, simpler RPG experience after the 50+ hour of difficult RPGing that was SMTV.

Also this is a Yoko Taro project, so I figured it might be somewhat interesting.

Let’s check it out!

Pretty slow month for posts on my side, with 2 semi-long JRPGs being reviewed. I do have a few other posts on the way, I’m playing Ziggurat 2 and Voice of Cards and I have some other “backlog” kinda things to jump into once that’s done, so it’s not like I don’t have things prepared (and a rant that I’m making sure I’m fully satisfied with before I post it). And I’m gonna play a few new releases in December as well, including maybe looking at the 1$ game pass PC trial for some of them.

So December 2021 is a bit weird. In the sense that it actually has several interesting games. December is usually, weirdly, an off-month for game releases, with sometimes a game or two worth looking at. But this time there’s a couple cool ones actually, and this is with some big-ish games getting delayed. For December 2021, I’m listing: 8 multiplats and 4 Switch releases. I’ll probably be playing 3-4 of these 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.

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*