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.

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.

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!

One of the first few posts in this blog, after terminating my old blog The Save Points and starting JOBOCAN Game Reviews, was a reaction to the February Direct last year… So I figure… why not do it again? I’ve actually reacted to most “main” Nintendo Directs even though I wasn’t planning to, so I might as well keep it going. I haven’t been doing this for much else outside of E3 since the competition isn’t announcing or releasing anything, or doing fun events like this (and, when they do, they’re awful… Hi Playstation), but hey, at least Nintendo tries to be somewhat interesting.

I am writing this intro the day before the Direct, as I always do. I have no real predictions here. There are some weird rumors like a 1-2 Switch sequel, and TWO different Metroid Prime rumors that have been going on for years without anything happening (Prime Trilogy rumors being around since 2017, and those have transitioned into Prime 1 Remaster rumors more recently… pick a side, shitty fake leakers), but I’d say there’s nothing really good to latch on to that’s even slightly believable except the Batman one… which is extremely minor so who cares.

I don’t know what to expect beyond probably a bit of Splatoon 3 stuff since that’s probably coming out around E3 season, but otherwise, it could be anything. I am 99% sure Metroid Prime 4 won’t be there because it’s only been 3 years since it started development, so it’s not like it’s in hell status or anything, and I don’t think the BotW sequel will be there either as that will likely get a big E3-season blowout. So… Yeah, could be fun, might not be, I have no idea. There’s plenty it could be, but Nintendo is largely unpredictable. Like, last February’s Direct had 4-6 new first-party game announcements depending on how you count that. So there’s reason to believe they might do that again… but it’s Nintendo, they don’t do patterns, so they might not.

No idea if I’m actually gonna post this, we’ll see if I click the publish button after writing it. If I do post it… let’s go and watch this Direct!

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!

Well, I at least managed to do some catching up in January, played a couple of games I had missed out on last year before big 2022 releases come out. We do have a new Pokeymanz coming out in a couple of days so that’s something.

While January didn’t have anything big outside of the upcoming Pokemon game, February is basically signs of 2022 starting to shape up a bit. There are several big games, some medium-ish games, and a few I’m getting. There’s actually a good variety here, not a bad month.

For February 2022 I’m listing: 13 multiplats, 3 Switch pieces of filler I included for the lulz, and 1 PC release. As far as what I’m getting, there’s only 2 for sure, but there’s a good 5 “maybes” in there too.

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.

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.