Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes was a successful Kickstarter (so far), with that game coming out next year. It’s interesting, being a Suikoden-inspired RPG (and I think some of the original Suikoden devs are part of the team) with, as the title says, at least a hundred characters you can use to build your party. Looks cool.

Rising is a prequel to that game, which, I presume, features a few of the characters and a very small look at the world of the final game. This one is an action RPG instead.

So… yeah, let’s review this!

Got a bunch of reviews out since the last monthly release post, that’s nice. Those were mostly for March releases though (and a game from last year). April has been a whole lot of nothing, so the only actual April 2022 game I might end up having a review for is one I didn’t even list last time because I completely missed it, that being the Gotta Protectors sequel.

May isn’t quite as dead as April, but it’s still a bit on the quieter side, with no BIG releases. There is some cool smaller stuff though. Some game companies (specifically Nintendo) seem like they might be waking up starting in June, with a bunch of games being on the way at that point. For May, I’m highlighting: 11 multiplats, 3 Switch games, and 3 PC games. And there are games I will actually get in there. I’m thinking there are 4-5 games I might get.

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.

HMMMMM.

So I really disliked Borderlands 3. It’s the first Borderlands I didn’t play beyond finishing the final boss when 1 and 2 both got a lot of play from me (True Vault Hunter modes and playing different characters), and I even played through the pre-sequel more than once. Not only was Borderlands 3 pretty meh, but Gearbox is also an awful company that does shitty BS all the time and is led by a weirdo… So I figured I’d give them one last chance to impress me before never buying anything they do again… And what better last chance than yet another Borderlands game, this one headlined by the shittiest character in the series!

Well, let’s see how much this sucks!

I was pretty excited about this game. It looked really cool. It’s pretty okay, but by the end, I was just tired of playing it. I have 92% of the game done now and I’m not feeling like finishing it.  I don’t really have a whole review’s worth of things to say about it. So I’ll keep it quick, and vague, and I will not even have a real “read more” link.

The game is kinda fun with the deliberately slow movement/attacks (which makes sense, to simulate the kind of stuff you see in Kaiju movies… it’s not a complaint I’m actually completely fine with this) and an okay amount of okay attack options, but every level is the same thing with the same combat scenarios over and over, there’s barely any level design, and not much going on other than the fact that it’s a super cool concept that’s executed okay-ish. I like what it’s doing, but I wish it did it a bit better.

I’d recommend this one at a good discount only, as there are lots of much better recent beat ’em ups like Streets of Rage 4 or River City Girls or the Kunio-kun + Double Dragon collection. Get those before getting this one.

I honestly wasn’t expecting to be reviewing this so quickly, but yeah, I’m done with this game in a mere 14 hours… which is fine, I don’t mind short-ish games, but I was totally expecting it to be longer considering it’s an open-world thing.

I remember when this was announced. I think most people forgot about that because this is the game presented by Ikumi Nakamura at some E3, who made a big impression with her presentation, but said presentation is what got all the attention and people kinda forgot about the game itself. Also, this game is a Shinji Mikami game, in some capacity.

I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this… so let’s see if it’s fun!

*EDIT: I was so focused on writing about why the gameplay isn’t great that I completely forgot to mention that the localization team for this game is awful and fucked up the translation in every way possible by writing lines that literally aren’t even there in the original japanese version. Why is it SO HARD for localizers to just take the japanese text and write it in english? Plus, it’s not just the western localization that’s awful, as the chinese localization is also garbage pushing weird propaganda… This is why I leave japanese voice acting on in games, my minor understanding of the language is a decent bullshit detector*

Well January, February and March were quite the decent first couple months for 2022. Things are certainly calming down now, evidenced by the fact that fucking nothing is coming out in April. Game industry giving gamers time to breathe, finally. Heck, unless announcements start happening soon there’s also nothing coming out in May. Hopefully game companies actually start announcing release dates for the rest of the year because things are getting a bit empty other than some of the stuff Nintendo announced at their recent Direct.

As for me, well I just reviewed 3 pretty solid games, and I have started Ghostwire Tokyo and Kirby, and Tiny Tina’s Probably Crappy Game is downloaded, so those are getting reviews soon. I actually don’t know if I’ll be buying anything that’s coming out in April, I think there’s 2 “maybe” games… but there’s a few other 2022 games I haven’t gotten to so it’s not like I ran out of stuff to play… thankfully. And I’ll have time to catch up on anime which is nice.

April 2022 has basically nothing to highlight, so I’m trying hard to get any content here. I’m highlighting: 3 multiplats, 5 Switch games, and one game journalist Sony fanboy fail. There’s one game of note pretty much. The rest is filler. This is also a “why is this a game that actually exists” kinda month, half these releases should probably not be a thing.

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.

Sometimes a game comes up that you have basically no expectations for, but they end up being very impressive. Stranger of Paradise is one of these. The first trailer was wacky as fuck, made kinda no sense, wasn’t a good explanation of what the game would be like, and all that people really seemed to get out of it was “CHAOS” and the slew of memes that came from that. Unfortunately for this game, this ended up not being a good thing because that’s all people think of it, and they think it’s bad because of that meme or something. It’s really weird, you mention this is a good game and people think you’re trolling. But it is good.

I actually avoided all gameplay videos and trailers for this game after the announcement because that announcement completely convinced me to buy it, because it was so weird and stupid.

So let’s go and talk about what is one of the best games this year so far! Yeah.

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!

I had high hopes for this one, it being a game made by ex-Persona staff. So I got it at launch last week and played it a bunch in-between playing Elden Ring.

I am now 20 hours in and I’m fucking done. That puts me around the halfway mark of the game, and I feel like things are either getting worse, or I just can’t take it anymore. This is very unfortunate, but wow, this game is something else. And not in a good way.

So I am NOT reviewing it since… you know… I can’t (because I didn’t finish it… take note, “professional” reviewers), but at least I’ll give my impressions so far and explain why I’m done with it… This is as much as you’re getting from me review-wise for this one.

Let’s go!

Well, I’m going in with this post a bit earlier than usual. The reason why is the same reason I posted my Sifu review before fully finishing it… because things are about to get WILD. Monark is out tomorrow, Elden Ring is out on Friday… and March has a LOT of games. So I’m just getting a bit ahead of the game here, basically.

For March 2022 I’m highlighting: 15 multiplats, 7 Switch games, and 2 PC releases. That number doesn’t look like anything special in a vacuum, but what IS special is what games are there.

Literally, I’m buying at least 8 of these for sure, and there are several “maybes” as well. And even some of the games I’m not interested in myself ARE huge, or look really cool but might not be something I’m that interested in. This might be one of the biggest months in gaming in YEARS.

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.