Well, I gotta say I was not expecting this. Trailers for this game weren’t very exciting, so I almost ignored it. But a few people on the twitters were putting up gameplay videos of it and I thought it actually looked better than the few trailers I had seen, so I figured I’d pick it up (plus, with the coupon deal on EGS a couple weeks back, it was 30$ Canadian around launch). Well, I fell in love with it. This game is good.

As to what this review is, I’m more willing to call it an “impressions” post rather than a review if you want. The reason is that I’m not 100% done with the game, but also there’s a bunch of games coming out very soon and if I don’t review this great game now, I might forget to do so. So it’s basically a review, but I do want to be clear that I have not gotten the true ending.

Well anyways, let’s go!

Konami almost made a game! Whoa! Actually, they got someone else to make it, but it’s nice. What’s even nicer is that this is a sequel to a classic game that no one knows about because it never made its way outside of Japan (random note: stupidly, you can get the classic game alongside this, but you need to get the deluxe edition of this game and it’s not available otherwise… which is fucking stupid… also it’s not translated).

Getsu Fuuma Den was a bit similar to Castlevania, but it also had a world map to explore, NPCs to talk to, and dungeons where you’d have a cool “behind-the-back” view of Getsu Fuma. It was pretty darn cool, and it never got a sequel up until now (with a sequel planned for PS2 that was canned). You may have seen Getsu Fuma in a few places, like the shitty Castlevania smartphone game, or as a few cards in Yu-Gi-Oh, or as one of the playable characters in the also-japan-only game Konami’s Wai Wai World (also a great game). He’s been around, but generally, it’s been a dormant series since the Famicom. So I was pretty hyped when this was announced… and then the release was shadow-dropped during the last Nintendo Direct, so that’s fun.

Let’s see if it’s a good revival!

This was a bit of a random buy. A friend told me about it, and the one trailer I checked looked cool, so I picked it up, knowing not too much about it otherwise. Had some cool retro game inspirations there.

I think I’ll make this a fast review, so let’s not waste time in the intro. Let’s go!

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!

It’s really a rarity for me to jump into retro games as far as reviews go… mostly because they’re old and generally a well-known thing. It’s not because I don’t like them, I actually do have a somewhat sizeable game collection, spanning from the Magnavox Odyssey to… now. I have a lot of appreciation for all of gaming and I do feel like gaming used to be considerably more interesting.

That said, this game shows a massive gap in my gaming knowledge. I vaguely knew about the Neo Geo Pocket Color but I never touched one. So there are actually some pretty cool-looking games for it I never played. This is one I heard a lot of good about. This recent shadow-dropped Switch release includes both the SNK and Capcom versions (and you can trade cards between them), though both games are essentially the same, just a different starter deck and a few minor differences otherwise.

So let’s go and talk about this cool game!

I saw a lot of people being pretty excited about this game. I wasn’t convinced by the videos I was seeing, but I’d somewhat frequently see people calling this the game of the year for 2021. I know people exaggerate a lot, but I saw that enough times to think there may be something there… And then it popped up on Game Pass which I have a temporary account for, so why not play through it!

Not much to say here, let’s review this! Very quickly, this is not a long review.

The Mary Skelter series is a bit of a weird one, but it’s pretty fun. It’s one of those first-person grid-based dungeon-crawling RPGs, but with JRPG combat. There’s a lot of these series recently, and most of them are pretty good. Mary Skelter separates itself a bit with the heavy amount of puzzles/traps in the dungeons, as well as the stalking nightmares.

This is the last game in the series, at least following the current plotline, so I wanted to play it but had a bunch of other stuff to play back when it came out, so it took a backseat. And finally, I’ve played it.

So let’s go and review this thing!

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.

In my Ziggurat 2 review, I noted I was gonna review another Roguelite FPS. This is one I almost tried in early access, it was pretty interesting-looking. But I try not to buy early access games, so I waited a good long while for it to come out.

Just quickly pumping this review out before I get my GotY stuff out (I want a quick “games I won’t review” kinda post, maybe another review, and of course the GotY 2021 celebration itself). Let’s go!