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.

I saw this first in a Nintendo Direct, though I think it was announced a bit before. It looked pretty interesting presentation-wise. The demo came out, it was pretty fun but a bit slow. I picked it up after playing SMTV because I figured I’d get a smaller, simpler RPG experience after the 50+ hour of difficult RPGing that was SMTV.

Also this is a Yoko Taro project, so I figured it might be somewhat interesting.

Let’s check it out!

Pretty slow month for posts on my side, with 2 semi-long JRPGs being reviewed. I do have a few other posts on the way, I’m playing Ziggurat 2 and Voice of Cards and I have some other “backlog” kinda things to jump into once that’s done, so it’s not like I don’t have things prepared (and a rant that I’m making sure I’m fully satisfied with before I post it). And I’m gonna play a few new releases in December as well, including maybe looking at the 1$ game pass PC trial for some of them.

So December 2021 is a bit weird. In the sense that it actually has several interesting games. December is usually, weirdly, an off-month for game releases, with sometimes a game or two worth looking at. But this time there’s a couple cool ones actually, and this is with some big-ish games getting delayed. For December 2021, I’m listing: 8 multiplats and 4 Switch releases. I’ll probably be playing 3-4 of these games.

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.

This is a series that has been overshadowed in recent times by a good-but-not-as-good spin-off that has way too much watching cutscenes and nowhere near enough actual “playing the game”. I will review this without comparing it to that other series, because it’s not needed. This is the main series. The existence of an inferior spin-off isn’t particularly important in this case.

SMT is one of those series that is consistently great, and I was hyped as hell when this was announced for Switch… in 2017. Yeah it took a while from announcement to release. Not quite the fifth installment in the series (since Strange Journey is also a mainline SMT game, and SMT4: Apocalypse is a sequel to 4 of course, and also there’s if… and NINE), it’s a series that has always had more of a focus on gameplay and team construction than the story, which is always a little bit barebones on the surface.

Let’s see if the wait for this game was worth it!

I don’t know why I bought this. I never played the first Caligula Effect, or the “Overdose” version which I hear is much better. What I did experience was a few episodes of the Caligula Effect anime, which is an adaptation of the first game’s story. I wasn’t sure, watching that kinda-meh anime, how that translated into a video game at all, it was lacking in segments that could have gameplay other than boss battles… and that’s basically because, obviously, they removed the dungeons from the anime. It wasn’t a very good anime.

So anyways I got this one, hearing that it’s basically self-contained so knowing the original game’s story isn’t very important… let’s see if this is good!

This was a pretty good month post-wise. I’m also writing a rant right now, it’s a good one, not sure when I’ll post it. Still have some things ongoing that I will review soon-ish-maybe. Kinda randomly bought Caligula Effect 2 (despite not having played the first), and there’s a couple things I’ll be getting that are out soon or in November. Surprisingly my “want to buy but haven’t yet” list has been going down smoothly enough, much of the stuff remaining in it that came out this year isn’t very high-priority stuff anymore. So things may calm down a bit, but there’s still plenty for me to review this year.

This month I’m highlighting: 13 multiplats and 4 Switch releases. As far as big releases, November is pretty quiet, but there’s still some cool stuff, including the SECOND hypest game of the year. Wow! I’m getting a couple of these.

Also I’m going with some weird inclusions I usually wouldn’t look at this month, because I figure it’s fun. The theme? Games from the same company (Microid), all based on franco/franco-belgian comics, that actually have weirdly okay collector editions and the games themselves don’t look quite as shit as they probably should. It’s really weird, not sure why there’s 3 of these this month. But there you go.

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.