Nintendo was doing these mini indie directs this week, with some news and a few releases. One that caught my eye was The Punchuin, by a company I quite enjoy, Shin’en.

So in-between work, writing my GotY post, writing my 2023 hype post (coming soon) and doing christmas-y stuff with the family, I downloaded, played and finished this game.

I have nothing to say about this game, really.. So I’m not reviewing it. And the “Games I played by didn’t review” post was already posted so OOPS.

Just quickly, it’s a puzzle game where you’re a penguin who punches blocks around, try to get them in lines of 3 of the same color. It’s okay. The gameplay is well designed, though a few levels are a bit weird about giving you the block colors you need (when I need reds and get only purples, it’s a bit annoying). The game is 2 hours long, has 2 endings, and… yeah, that’s it. I think if it was 5$ it would be an amazing deal. It’s not 5$. So I wouldn’t recommend it until there’s a sale. Not Shin’en’s best, but not a bad game.

So yeah that’s it. There’s nothing after the read more.

So I reviewed a decent amount of games this year. But I played more than what I reviewed. I did have a few “I don’t want to review X game” posts, where I’d give a quick synopsis of why a review felt a bit pointless, or I didn’t finish the game and had little to say about it. Like Dawn of the Monsters which I found kinda meh, or Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes which I really liked but didn’t review because it’s just another Warriors game.

So I figured, let’s take all these games I played and didn’t review, and put them all in one big stupid post. Why not!

Here are the games I’m having a look at in this post: Windjammers 2, Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 2, Azure Striker Gunvolt 3, Hot Wheels Unleashed, Blossom Tales 2, River City Saga: Three Kingdoms, Shovel Knight Dig, Metal Hellsinger, Omega Labyrinth Life, River City Girls 2, Freedom Planet 2, Demon Throttle, Gungrave G.O.R.E., Ground Divers. A bit of a random post, but hey I like talking about most of the games I play, so there it is.

Well, let’s go!

I love me some Dragon Quest. Squeenix, or at least the people who decide which of their games are localized, don’t seem to always agree with me, as the likelihood of even getting any of the games in the series to be officially localized is up in the air. With Treasures being a spin-off, that put the odds WAY low… but it did actually get a worldwide release, so that’s good. Now if only the last 3 Dragon Quest Monsters games could come out here (Joker 3, Terry’s Wonderland, and the rom of the GBC game on Switch), that would be great.

This gave me some Monsters vibes, but obviously this was gonna be different from the Monsters game with the focus on treasure hunting. So I thought it was pretty interesting.

Well, let’s go and see if this is a cool one!

Squeenix sure are busy boys right now. They had so much stuff this year, but especially since September. Since then they’ve released Diofield Chronicles, Valkyrie Elysium, Dragon Quest X Offline (for those who speak japanese), Star Ocean: The Divine Force, Harvestella and Tactics Ogre: Reborn, and then there’s a few more coming out in December with Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered, Dragon Quest Treasures and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion. That’s a lot of games for one company in just a couple months, and that didn’t include a few collections and ports (like the upcoming PS4/5 port of Valkyrie Profile Lenneth), and I’m actually not sure what their involvement with Front Mission 1st: Remake is as most info I’m finding doesn’t include them (which is weird since it was always published and sometimes developed by Square)… And it’s not like they were quiet the rest in the year with some BANGERS like Stranger of Paradise. There’s not a lot of companies with output like this anymore, it’s pretty cool to see.

As for Harvestella, I always thought it looked cool, but also it’s in a subgenre I have basically no familiarity with. Basically, the last farming game I played was Harvest Moon. On the SNES. I haven’t touched any since. I have yet to try the Rune Factory series, which I feel like I should. I haven’t touched Stardew Valley either. And there’s just so many farming games right now, but I haven’t played any of them. So I figured… why not start here! I did hear some people were disappointed in the demo, but that Squeenix actually fixed some of the issues people had there in the final version, so that’s great to hear.

Let’s check out if my first farming game since the SNES is cool!

Man I have so much to review still. Just got the Pokemon review out, I have Star Ocean and Harvestella reviews on the go (coming eventually), and I just started Evil West, I haven’t started Valkyrie Elysium yet (taking a slight break from RPGs), and I’ll need to get Gungrave and Front Mission 1st: Remake and maybe The Knight Witch and whatever the shit’s coming out in December… busy busy busy. Might need to move things around as far as what I’ll play/review… I don’t NEED The Knight Witch.

But yeah, there’s stuff coming out in December. Decembers are usually relegated to smaller releases, maybe one big one on one of the systems but it’s never super busy. This isn’t much different, but there’s still a bunch of potentially good stuff and at least one game I’m really excited about. So this time I’m highlighting: 13 multiplats, 2 Switch games and 1 PC game. As for what I’ll be buying/reviewing from these, there’s ONE “for sure ASAP”, and 7-8 games that are at varying levels of maybe.

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, some more niche stuff 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.

Well, there’s a new Pokemon! I tend to not really review Pokemon unless something new is done. I mean, you’ve reviewed one Gen 7 or lower Pokemon game, you’ve reviewed all of them. That’s why I didn’t really review the Diamond and Pearl remakes in my post about them, but I did review Legends Arceus, because that was a more unique spin-off.

And in this case, it’s different enough to be worth reviewing… so yeah. I played the story and did some post-game shit, I’m about done with it myself though. I will do things a bit different than usual reviews because the usual format doesn’t work for this.

Let’s talk about it!

Bayonetta is a great series. The original took the fast-paced well-designed action gameplay of the Devil May Cry series and added a coat of magical, sexy, camp paint to the mix. The games featured great gameplay, a fun character that liked to dance, and crazy boss battles against massive enemies, to a scale unlike most games before, with the first game ending with Bayonetta destroying literally God in the Sun.

This game has been announced probably too early, in 2017 as it had only recently started development. It took a while to get any new info, but it did eventually come, and the hype was pretty high. So yeah I got the game and finished it in 2 days, then took weeks to finally write this review.

Let’s see if the series continues to be very good!

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was a really weird one. It actually had rumors but it sounded fake because who would believe rumors about a strategy RPG featuring Mario and Rabbids. Well, marketing material popped up and… this looked like a decent idea. And then we saw it and it actually looked fun. It became a huge seller at 7.5 million copies sold (most probably at pretty low price, because Ubisoft), so clearly people thought it was interesting.. But people wondered anyways if a sequel may happen since it was a pretty unique project.

Well, it happened. It looked cool, of course. So I got it, and played the poop out of it. Let’s go and see if the sequel is as good as the original!

I actually have 3 other reviews that I’m writing right now, taking my time on them. In the meantime, I started playing this thing and… well, this impressions post needs to take precedence.

I had no expectations for Sonic Frontiers because the marketing has been crap but some things looked okay. But I was worried when it looked like it was going for an open world angle. Because basically every open world game is shit. But I still wanted to give this a chance because, despite most post-Genesis Sonic games being bad games, I always give him a chance. I always hold hope that, one day, Sonic will be back to his former glory. Spoilers: he’s not.

After almost 6 hours of playing this game, I think I’m done. This is not a game I want to finish playing. But I still want to talk about it, so let’s do this!

This is NOT a review, since I’m not done with the game. But I won’t be done with it, so this is the most I’m putting out about this game.

I find this a weird nostalgia bait thing. Like… Kids cared a little bit about this back in the 80s, and it even got a really crap movie because of the success of the cards, but I dunno if all that many people really look back that fondly on Garbage Pail Kids, beyond it being a product of its time. However, I’m kinda into this concept of making new games for old systems, especially now if you make sure to, you know, make them available on modern platforms too. One of the best examples of this is Battle Kid, a game that was stuck on NES for a bit but is now available on Xbox and hopefully will come to more platforms.

So I figured I’d grab this on a sensible system so I got the PC version. It will come on an NES cartridge later if you like spending like 7 times more than the game costs to get a collectible version of it… Yeah, not a fan of that price point.

So let’s see if this is a good NES game or whatever!