Kao the Kangaroo is one of the hundreds of Sonic rip-off characters that were a big thing basically from the Genesis to the PS2. It’s one I didn’t end up playing, and some of his games had weird releases. The second game in the series came out in Poland 2-3 years earlier than other regions, and the third one only saw a very limited Europe/Australia release, but again only some time after its Polish release. The games look fine though, I just never ended up playing any of them.

But because I’m looking for stuff to play (and Epic Game Store has 25% off almost everything right now so that reduced the price of an already cheap game), I figured I’d pick it up. So let’s see if this is good!

Okay I took a while to finally review this, but here we go!

I haven’t played Gotta Protectors on 3DS, but this isn’t my first tango with this series. My first time was playing a free NES rom some years ago called Amazon’s Running Diet, an infinite runner kind of game where the Amazon character needs to run to lose weight, but also avoid cake while running. Limited Run Games released a cartridge version of it, which they censored because they’re losers.

So anyways, I picked this up on launch, having previously no idea it existed and not listing it in the April release post. Let’s talk about it now that I took over a month to finish it!

*EDIT* Lol the title said May for a whole month

Well maybe games are about to start coming out again soon. Possibly. Despite being able to get a few reviews out, it’s been kinda quiet in the last 2 months. Also I still haven’t reviewed Gotta Protectors, I should do that. And I have another review coming up probably tomorrow. Yay.

Well June LOOKS like a bigger month than May, but it’s still kinda lacking on big badass releases. Here I’m highlighting: 19 Multiplats, 3 Switch games and 2 PC things (one of which is just a possibly-leaked date). As far as what I’m getting… probably 5 games, and 1 (or 2) DLCs.

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.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes was a successful Kickstarter (so far), with that game coming out next year. It’s interesting, being a Suikoden-inspired RPG (and I think some of the original Suikoden devs are part of the team) with, as the title says, at least a hundred characters you can use to build your party. Looks cool.

Rising is a prequel to that game, which, I presume, features a few of the characters and a very small look at the world of the final game. This one is an action RPG instead.

So… yeah, let’s review this!

This is the fourth game in the Genkai Tokki series. You may not be familiar, partly because those were never released under that name in America, though they did see a release. Monster Monpiece is one of them (and a bit of a meh game), but Moero Chronicles and Moero Crystal H are both pretty fun first-person grid-based dungeon-crawling RPGs. What they all have in common is… there’s lots of lewdness going on, from sexy character designs to monster designs based on sex toys or breasts… Yeah, they’re all a bit weird.

And, speaking of being weird, this one is probably weirder than the others. I figured that was why it never saw a US release back when it came out on the Vita, and that it would die as a Japan-exclusive. This game is gonna be a bit odd to review because it may sound like I’m making things up, but I swear I’m not. This is a real game that exists.

Well… let’s try to review this.

In this episode of “buying random older games because nothing is coming out right now”, this is a Metroidvania that I thought looked a bit interesting. It’s made by a studio in Israel, and as far as I can find it’s that company’s first game, which is pretty cool (and the studio itself seems a bit strange, actually being the internal game development company of a school? Huh).

So let’s check it out!

Got a bunch of reviews out since the last monthly release post, that’s nice. Those were mostly for March releases though (and a game from last year). April has been a whole lot of nothing, so the only actual April 2022 game I might end up having a review for is one I didn’t even list last time because I completely missed it, that being the Gotta Protectors sequel.

May isn’t quite as dead as April, but it’s still a bit on the quieter side, with no BIG releases. There is some cool smaller stuff though. Some game companies (specifically Nintendo) seem like they might be waking up starting in June, with a bunch of games being on the way at that point. For May, I’m highlighting: 11 multiplats, 3 Switch games, and 3 PC games. And there are games I will actually get in there. I’m thinking there are 4-5 games I might get.

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 kinda completely missed the first Blue Reflection game (though I did research it very mildly before writing this review). I’m not entirely sure WHY I missed it, as it’s an RPG made by what seems to be the team behind the Atelier games, or at least a team somewhat related to it (considering how crafting works), and this offers something pretty close to Atelier. You figure I’d have checked this out, but it took me until the sequel to notice it.

I ended up buying it recently while it was on sale at Amazon Canada, and then I waited because early this year was super busy game-wise, and I had plenty of other stuff to play through, so this took a backseat for a while. But finally, game releases calmed down a bunch, and I got to finally play it.

So let’s see if it’s good!

I was pretty excited about this game. It looked really cool. It’s pretty okay, but by the end, I was just tired of playing it. I have 92% of the game done now and I’m not feeling like finishing it.  I don’t really have a whole review’s worth of things to say about it. So I’ll keep it quick, and vague, and I will not even have a real “read more” link.

The game is kinda fun with the deliberately slow movement/attacks (which makes sense, to simulate the kind of stuff you see in Kaiju movies… it’s not a complaint I’m actually completely fine with this) and an okay amount of okay attack options, but every level is the same thing with the same combat scenarios over and over, there’s barely any level design, and not much going on other than the fact that it’s a super cool concept that’s executed okay-ish. I like what it’s doing, but I wish it did it a bit better.

I’d recommend this one at a good discount only, as there are lots of much better recent beat ’em ups like Streets of Rage 4 or River City Girls or the Kunio-kun + Double Dragon collection. Get those before getting this one.

I’ve mentioned a few times recently that I previously gave a very negative review for the last Kirby game, Kirby Star Allies. It was pretty pathetic how bad it was in every gameplay aspect (a game that actively hated the fact that someone was playing it, so it beat bosses for you and solved puzzles for you and had no actual… design). Star Allies is the only bad mainline Kirby, as Kirby was previously a solid series with only good games. So when this was announced, I was definitely liking what I was seeing, but I was a bit wary of it. You know, just in case.

But I still got it at launch after avoiding the demos and every trailer other than the announcement one. So let’s go and see if Kirby is back to his usual quality!