IT IS TIME FOR THE GAMES OF THE YEAR 2022! I’m actually surprised at how good 2022 ended up being as far as games. There were a lot of good ones, so much so that I couldn’t play all the interesting ones. There was just no time. Not that all games were good, Sonic Frontiers and Return to Monkey Island exist, after all. But overall, there was plenty of good stuff.

So it is this time of the year where I can talk about all the great games I loved that came out that year. I usually do 6-7 GotY winners, one of which would be my grand TOP GotY choice, but I don’t know if I can do that this year.

I will also rant about the year as a whole, as usual, with a focus on the big 3.

There’s some games I was interested in during 2022 that I have yet to play, in case you’re wondering. Who knows if I’ll get to them, but if you think they’re really good and are sad they’re not named here, know that I probably hold no ill will against them, I probably just didn’t play it.

Amongst big games I haven’t played that could’ve had a chance: Digimon Survive (actually bought it but haven’t played it yet), A Plague Tale: Requiem, God of War Ragnarök, Horizon 2, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher, Choo Choo Charles, Signalis, Soulstice, Sports Story… and many others. A lot of interesting games came out this year, was a bit hard to get to all of them.

So let’s go!

Click here to skip to the winners if you’re not interested in my inane rantings.

I’m still not quite getting all the reviews out that I want, though I did get several posts out this month anyways. At this point I’m just planning on making a post near the end of the year with very quick paragraph-long impressions of them for games I skipped reviewing. Still, there’s some games I want to do full reviews of, such as TemTem and DioField Chronicle (which I’m probably close-ish to the end). Plus, of course, there’s stuff coming out, and games I haven’t played yet that I will (like Freedom Planet 2 and Metal Hellsinger), so I have a lot of potential content coming still. Good stuff!

October feels a bit less busy than some other months this year, but there’s still… stuff. Basically, this is gonna give me a bit of time to catch up. So for October I’m highlighting: 17 multiplats, 7 Switch games and 4 PC games. As far as what I’ve getting… there’s 4 I’m getting for sure, and a couple maybes.

Let’s go!

*EDIT 09/29: Added a PC game*

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.

This was announced last year. It is Square Enix’s new HD-2D project after Octopath Traveler, also featuring a weird title.

I did play the first “test” demo for this one, but not the prologue demo which basically, IIRC, gets you through the first 3 chapters. I enjoyed the combat in that first demo, and I’m not sure much changed since (it has been a while), but I was decently hyped for the final product. I very much enjoyed Octopath, so I was pretty interested in seeing more of that.

So let’s go and see if it’s a good one!

Well, I’m going in with this post a bit earlier than usual. The reason why is the same reason I posted my Sifu review before fully finishing it… because things are about to get WILD. Monark is out tomorrow, Elden Ring is out on Friday… and March has a LOT of games. So I’m just getting a bit ahead of the game here, basically.

For March 2022 I’m highlighting: 15 multiplats, 7 Switch games, and 2 PC releases. That number doesn’t look like anything special in a vacuum, but what IS special is what games are there.

Literally, I’m buying at least 8 of these for sure, and there are several “maybes” as well. And even some of the games I’m not interested in myself ARE huge, or look really cool but might not be something I’m that interested in. This might be one of the biggest months in gaming in YEARS.

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.

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!

This is gonna be a pretty simple post. I’m just looking at the next year of games and trying to figure out what the games I’m most excited for. I’m keeping it straightforward. I’ll list my 6 most hyped games and talk about them quickly, then just have a big list of other games I’m interested in (with some comments next to some of them), and finally a smaller list of games that might end up being a big deal but that I don’t care about for whatever reason (either because they’ll be shit, or because they’re not my kinda game). Of course, I’ll have a bit of ranting at the end there because why not. Just to be clear about my choices.

So let’s go and discuss the hype for another year of games!

Then I can get back to normal, I still have the January games list to post 😀

EDIT 01/03 I ADDED A GAME (in the “Other games I am excited about” list)! I won’t do this much but the post is still new so why not.

Another one I dunno if I’ll post, we’ll see after the thing ends, see if I have any particularly big reactions or not. Or something to rant about like with the Playstation thingy where Sony had nothing to show. I will note I am writing this intro hours before the Direct starts.

There are rumors, but they’re very solid, because they literally come from Nintendo’s japanese website. Bayonetta 3 finally getting SOME real info would be solid, and I’m really curious about that Kirby game (Kirby Discovery of the Stars, I think that title is probably wrong). Outside of that leak, there’s lots of rumors for a new Xenoblade, I’m not putting a lot of stock into that one. And there’s some stuff like new systems added to NSO which… who cares, paying for online on a console is a scam.

I do have fairly low expectations overall for this Direct, but September directs always have some kind of big announcement. There’s definitely gonna be a bunch of stuff we already know about for some of the games coming out this year as well as some of the early-next-year stuff, the possibility of a Smash character reveal (though I could see that being later). We definitely won’t see Metroid Prime 4.

So it’s starting in a minute, let’s see if there’s something here, and after we’ll see if I’m even posting this. Let’s go!