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.

The first Axiom Verge was this awesome Metroidvania, with the first Metroid having the largest influence for a lot of the game. It had lots of cool movement abilities, cool bosses, a fun map to explore. It kinda did everything well.

So when a sequel was announced, I was pretty hyped. I liked the first one, Tom Happ was obviously also making this one, clearly it should be pretty good. I saw it getting lots of negative comments in different places, but people tend to have wrong opinions about games. So they should be good, right?

Let’s go and talk about it!

Back in the Wii days, NMH was the shit. It was quirky, but had pretty fun gameplay to go alongside the quirkiness. After the Wii, the series went largely dormant, other than a top-down action game that I’ve heard nothing good about (and the gameplay I saw looked shit) so I didn’t play it.

So this one finally came out, People were a little bit excited for it. I was too. I just took a while to finally jump into it. So let’s talk about it! This might not be a long review.

Kinda funny to be posting this right after the Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl review… I want to be clear, Smash Ultimate is very much the better game, but Nick Brawl is a cool new alternative that has a lot of potential if Nickelodeon decide to keep it going past the first game.

Well anyways, Smash Ultimate is done. We finally got the last DLC in the second and last Fighter Pass. No more speculation, no more big updates for the game (just some possible balance patches), this is the final Smash Ultimate.

I’ve done a couple Smash-related posts on the old website, mostly speculation/wishlist stuff for the DLC, alongside my review of the game. I figure, why not talk about all the DLC characters now that they’re all released.

In my mind there’s 2 important things about DLC characters in Smash specifically: what they represent (historical importance in gaming, and to Nintendo specifically), and how they play. If they’re fun to play, that’s good. If they’re also an interesting choice as far as representing something important or interesting in gaming, that’s even better. I think most of the DLC here does at least one of those, which is good.

So I will talk about those aspects of each of the 12 DLC characters.

This is all just for fun, I do think the DLC is worth getting if you’re a Smash fan either way, though it is a bit on the expensive side (I think DLC characters should be a bit cheaper than they are, I will expand on that idea later).

Let’s go!

I have no idea what happened with this universe that I’m actually reviewing this game. I’d usually  just straight up ignore this licensed rip-off kinda deal. But this game, it got my attention.

And I wasn’t the only one, as it got the attention of the competitive Smash fanbase in a pretty big way, and the Smash fanbase overall. The moment it got peoples’ attention is when the dev was revealed to be Ludosity, who previously made Slap City, a Smash clone that I hear is pretty okay, but also with the gameplay demos (including in-depth moveset showcases for all the characters) we were shown a game that looked way better than you may expect from something like this. As in, it actually looked good.

So yeah… let’s talk about this one! I don’t think it will be a super long review, but we’ll see.

*EDIT: As I was writing this review a patch came out for the game and I didn’t notice, it does fix some things I mention, mostly as far as character balance*