I haven’t reviewed anything in a bit, so let’s do it for the biggest game of the year! I actually wanted to write a mini-review for Trinity Trigger when I finished that, but I had so little to say about it, it just wasn’t worth it. Game’s pretty underwhelming.

So anyways, we’ve got the sequel to Breath of the Wild now. I watched the first 2 trailers for this, then nothing else until launch, so I had no idea what to expect beyond “this looks a lot like BotW but it has new powers”.

So now I finished it and I’m gonna do a quick review! Let’s go I guess! This will be a simpler review.

This game truly came out of nowhere. It’s from Tango, who made… questionably okay games before (I really wasn’t a fan of Ghostwire Tokyo gameplay-wise, though visually it was very nice). There was something of a “Microsoft Direct” to showcase 5 games, which felt completely pointless… except for this new game being not only announced, but released a couple hours later. Nice! I think games need less time between announcement and release, not more, especially nowadays.

So I picked up a 1$ trial of Game Pass to play this, despite it being a budget-release at 30$. And that was weeks ago and I’m finally writing this review, oops (created the template for this review 15 days ago and only writing now lol).

So let’s go and see if this surprise announcement/release is good!

It’s a new Fire Emblem! I took way to long to actually post this review! I’ve had this, like, half-written for the last almost 4 weeks now.

I’m not the biggest FE fan out there, but I enjoyed all the ones I played before this (the original Famicom one, the GBA ones, Awakening, Three Houses). This one, I saw the announcement trailer, and watched absolutely nothing else. So I wasn’t exactly sure what I was getting into, but it did look cool.

Let’s see if it’s good!

I really wanted to like this game. Some bits of gameplay highlights looked really awesome. Some didn’t.

But then they showed a lot of story stuff and holy fuck was it bad. People talk about Marvel-level dialogue, but this is way worse than even the worst Marvel lines. But that’s just story. It’s a video game, story is not important if the gameplay isn’t good, so I still had hope that the gameplay would be okay, which is why I kept my discounted pre-order going.

So I gave this game 10 hours of my time. And I’m done with it. So let’s talk about why I’m giving up on this!

So this game is a game that took… really long to come out, and seems to have had a kinda troubled development, what with the change of devs what seems like no more than a year before release, and it was delayed… like, 3 or 4 times… But people were pretty excited for this one, and I was one of them.

So it came out in July, and I… bought it in November at half price during Black Friday. Yeah I took a while to get to it.

So let’s see if the long-awaited game is good!

Nintendo was doing these mini indie directs this week, with some news and a few releases. One that caught my eye was The Punchuin, by a company I quite enjoy, Shin’en.

So in-between work, writing my GotY post, writing my 2023 hype post (coming soon) and doing christmas-y stuff with the family, I downloaded, played and finished this game.

I have nothing to say about this game, really.. So I’m not reviewing it. And the “Games I played by didn’t review” post was already posted so OOPS.

Just quickly, it’s a puzzle game where you’re a penguin who punches blocks around, try to get them in lines of 3 of the same color. It’s okay. The gameplay is well designed, though a few levels are a bit weird about giving you the block colors you need (when I need reds and get only purples, it’s a bit annoying). The game is 2 hours long, has 2 endings, and… yeah, that’s it. I think if it was 5$ it would be an amazing deal. It’s not 5$. So I wouldn’t recommend it until there’s a sale. Not Shin’en’s best, but not a bad game.

So yeah that’s it. There’s nothing after the read more.

I stopped watching Rick and Morty after season 3, which was a pretty shit season overall with only a few high points. I know basically nothing else about Justin Roiland’s other work, and have not played any of his previous games. But this one looked pretty cool, I liked some of the ideas I was seeing here. So I picked it up!

Well, let’s see if the game with the Morty gun is any good!

I love me some Dragon Quest. Squeenix, or at least the people who decide which of their games are localized, don’t seem to always agree with me, as the likelihood of even getting any of the games in the series to be officially localized is up in the air. With Treasures being a spin-off, that put the odds WAY low… but it did actually get a worldwide release, so that’s good. Now if only the last 3 Dragon Quest Monsters games could come out here (Joker 3, Terry’s Wonderland, and the rom of the GBC game on Switch), that would be great.

This gave me some Monsters vibes, but obviously this was gonna be different from the Monsters game with the focus on treasure hunting. So I thought it was pretty interesting.

Well, let’s go and see if this is a cool one!

I saw videos of this a few times. It looked cool. So I bought it. And now I’m reviewing it.

Only hype, detailed intros on this website, I tell ya.

Let’s go and see if this is good or whatever!

Squeenix sure are busy boys right now. They had so much stuff this year, but especially since September. Since then they’ve released Diofield Chronicles, Valkyrie Elysium, Dragon Quest X Offline (for those who speak japanese), Star Ocean: The Divine Force, Harvestella and Tactics Ogre: Reborn, and then there’s a few more coming out in December with Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered, Dragon Quest Treasures and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion. That’s a lot of games for one company in just a couple months, and that didn’t include a few collections and ports (like the upcoming PS4/5 port of Valkyrie Profile Lenneth), and I’m actually not sure what their involvement with Front Mission 1st: Remake is as most info I’m finding doesn’t include them (which is weird since it was always published and sometimes developed by Square)… And it’s not like they were quiet the rest in the year with some BANGERS like Stranger of Paradise. There’s not a lot of companies with output like this anymore, it’s pretty cool to see.

As for Harvestella, I always thought it looked cool, but also it’s in a subgenre I have basically no familiarity with. Basically, the last farming game I played was Harvest Moon. On the SNES. I haven’t touched any since. I have yet to try the Rune Factory series, which I feel like I should. I haven’t touched Stardew Valley either. And there’s just so many farming games right now, but I haven’t played any of them. So I figured… why not start here! I did hear some people were disappointed in the demo, but that Squeenix actually fixed some of the issues people had there in the final version, so that’s great to hear.

Let’s check out if my first farming game since the SNES is cool!