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.

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.

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!

Right?

I mean, it’s a faithful remake of the old one. It has some new post-game stuff you probably won’t care about. It has the Grand Underground which is pretty meh so far. It has EXP Share, either you like that (like I do) or don’t. And it has no need to use pokemon for HMs, so you can have a full team at all times (which means you don’t need to evolve your bidoof anymore, and keep it in its godly state). Not really much to say about it, you already know, right now, if it interests you. Not worth my time to review it. I WILL review Legends though.

So, fuck it, I’m not reviewing it.

Did the Nuzlocke thing (up until Pokemon League, where I just kept trying over and over with the underleveled team I had at the time), it went okay. That Jirachi might look like overkill (and is probably against some of the rules people use, I had to take an executive decision late in the game to have anything on my team), but it was level 48 when I started the Elite 4, so he was basically useless (in fact everything here was below level 55 when I went in, except for Skuntank). And the first 2 members would wreck me because I had bad weaknesses to most of their pokemon, lul. Also didn’t implement many rulings for the Grand Underground, my final decision was to use only the first fossil I found and nothing else, which ended up being a cranidos that died early lol.