I can't tell you the exact moment that Unicorn Overlord sunk its claws in me but I seemed to have 100%'d the game in five days. I enjoyed it, but I really can't definitively say what exactly hooked me. I think I enjoyed how most of the stages are very bit-sized and feel almost like quick puzzles than the usual time slog a lot of SRPGS fall into.

My only complaint if there is no way to fastforward through battle animations. You either have to watch the entire battle play out or you skip the battle entirely. I found this really annoying when trying to test out formations to see why some of the would completely fail. A fast forward would have really made me tinker with formations. I ended up just coming up with about 4 really good teams and just giving up with the rest.

EDIT: Gunbusted corrected me. There is a fastforward button. I have no idea why I never noticed this. Thank you for correcting me! I wish I had found this sooner.

After doing every single mission in the game, I just wanted more. I dunno, a 50 hour game where you end up still wanting more might be a really good game. So many games outstay their welcome or feel padded but Unicorn Overlord felt just right.

Initially teased as a Dragon Quest Monsters title, Treasures ends up feeling like a long lost cousin to that series. Instead of focusing on monster collecting, Treasures still manages to squeeze a shallow amount of that into its core gameplay while also focusing most of its time and energy on treasure collecting.

Its kind of crazy how much Dragon Quest Treasures ends up feeling very similar to Pokemon Legends: Arceus. In some ways, Treasures feels like it gets more mileage with its open world-like areas than Arceus since Treasures' gameplay loop of finding treasure thats been randomly hidden across these biomes has a very addictive draw to it. I spent a few days going "Okay, just ONE more treasure hunt" only to find myself still playing Dragon Quest Treasures for a few hours after that declaration.

Its an enjoyable game, however if I have to be perfectly honest Dragon Quest Treasures loses its steam once you enter the game's post game. Having already collected dozens and dozens of treasures just for the fun of it in the main game, being greeted with the objective of "collect 50 Iconic treasures" as the post-game challenge was kind of a let down. I had already collected 36 of these and while I just needed 14 more I had kind of hoped that the post-game would have been a bit meatier.

Despite that, I think Treasures is another decent Dragon Quest spin-off game thats well worth your time

Wayforward has always excelled at presentation and River City Girls is probably their best looking game yet. You can tell Wayfoward was very motivated in making some truly special with how many short animated scenes and neat manga-like cutscenes are interspersed throughout the game. Sadly, despite that, River City Girls is easily Wayforward's most irritating title I've played so far.

Most of the boss fights have to waiting for the boss to cycle through their attack patterns before you're allowed to actually deal damage against them. Theres two fights in particular that have you waiting for what seems like minutes before you're graciously allowed to attack. Its some of the worst boss design I've seen in a long time and really shouldn't exist in a Beat 'em up at all.

Obviously, since this is a beat 'em up the story probably isn't something that I should gripe about too much. I don't have an issue with River City Girls' story as much as I have a problem with almost every line of voiced dialogue in the game. Its very off-putting and, as the kids say, "cringey." Theres a bunch of weird jokes and weak quips that aren't funny at all and it never stops. Maybe its unfair of me to rate the game so low because of a few bad boss fights and skin crawlingly bad dialogue but it honestly does taint how I look at this game. If you have a higher threshold for this kind of stuff then it's probably a solid 3 stars.

Did I just play a completely different build of RE4R than everyone else?

Enemies have arbitrary super armor now so while in the original a headshot always rewarded players with a stun and a melee attack, in RE4R its a coin toss. The entire point of the melee system in the original was for the player to have a crowd control attack when encounters became too claustrophobic. So now, not only is this crowd control mechanic not consistent, but if you end up getting a stun headshot the enemy will reel backwards a bit. This means that in order to get your crowd control kick, you have to run into a crowd of enemies generally. The problem with this is that:
1. enemies feel like they get out of the stun state significantly faster than in the original
2.Leon's i-frames feel like they've been cut in half.

this lead to two outcomes:
1.You don't reach the stunned enemy in time because you now spacing yourself further away from enemies than in the original because headshots no longer consistently stun. This leads to to getting swarmed and punished. Punished for trying to even attempting to use the crowd control melee that the game wants you to use for situations like this in the first place.

2.You do get the melee attack but even before the animation of the kick is completely finished. an enemy can actually damage you.

The diminished i-frames this is especially noticeable when you boot up the Mercenaries mode but its also a big problem in the main game too. I've had this happen multiple times: The bull head mini boss enemy kicks Leon to the and while Leon is in the middle of his getting up animation the mini boss can just kick you back down again. I've have multiple runs get cut short because of this and its so irritating.

I forced myself to finished RE4R and this is from someone who thought RE3 remake was bad but still played that game twice back-to-back. This should have been such an easy homerun for Capcom and its honestly baffling to me that the Dead Space Remake ended up better than RE4R.

Once I started Hard mode I came to the realization that the combat really isn't that great. You perfect dodge or parry to gain meter and then use that meter to deal damage. You pretty much can drop using the weak and strong attack buttons entirely because they deal practically zero damage to bosses or the bosses have such tight combo strings that you'll never even get a chance to use the buttons. It just doesn't feel very balanced or great after the halfway point. If you still get massive amounts of dopamine from parrying or dodging, then I think Stellar Blade will satisfy you. If you go in thinking this is going to be the next Great Action Game I think you'll be sorely disappointed.

Stellar Blade does excel with its sharp presentation, level design(for the most part), and excellent music. I had enough fun with the game to play through Hard Mode New Game + and got all the endings, but I firmly disagree that the combat is anything but mid. Its not going to be sitting at the table with Devil May Cry 5, Bayonetta, Ninja Gaiden, or Nier Automata but its I guess passable for a first attempt. I hope Shift Up reworks the combat for the inevitable sequel.

An exceptional survival horror game that hopefully gets recognized as one of the few great games to be released in 2022.

The structure is a bit repetitive since you end up having to collect six items to open a door three times but most of the puzzles are actually really clever. I don't think I've played a survival horror game with such an emphasis on puzzles since the original Silent Hill games and I found it very refreshing after playing so many so-so Resident Evil games lately.

Any gripes that I have with Signalis like occasionally getting stuck trying to open doors feel trivial when measuring them to the game's outright stunningly bleak dream-like atmosphere and its nostalgic low poly artstyle.

Mameda no Bakeru wears its Goemon influences on its sleeves proudly but it ultimately is a game that is more comfortable in its own skin than just being a spiritual successor of a series from yesteryear.

Aside from framerate issues in a number of the later levels, Bakeru is a very solid 3D platformer with a shockingly high amount of levels. I did not expect this game to have over 60 levels and figured it would just be a cute short cashgrab that tried to cash in on the sever absence of the Goemon series and its not. By the end of the game you'll be going "Goe-who?" I really hope Bakeru becomes a fullfledged series because I think Goodfeel really nailed this and I'd love to play another one that has a little bit more challenging platforming.

If you really like old school Ys games specifically the sidescroller RPG Ys III: Wanderers from Ys then you'll probably love Astlibra.

There are a number of sore spots like the Aguni boss fight in the lava area and a number of really frustrating bosses in the post-game story where they'll throw multiple 150k HP bosses with 1 hit kill lasers but despite all that I ultimately enjoyed the 60+ hours I spent with this game and would highly recommend it to anyone who:

1. enjoys the difficulty of the Ys series
2. has a lot of patience

The post game is excellent btw: it kind of turns into a diablo-like loot game where enemies start to drop Weapon/Armor/Accessory boards which basically makes all equipment viable at the end game by letting you slot in extra bonus stats or skills into everything.

Theres one other thing I should mention: I feel like this game is weirdly balanced around an ability in the game called "Berserk" which basically gives you 3x damage but also makes it so if you're hit once you die. Now maybe its because I was playing on Hard Mode but I was dying pretty much in 1 hit anyways without that ability. And if you do end up using healing items in boss fights, they don't reset if you end up having to restart the fight from a death. So, if you end up playing the game I would suggest going into the game knowing that you're probably going to have to use this ability at least for the main game.

The further I got into Pikmin 4, the more I began to dislike it.

I never played Pikmin 2 and apparently Pikmin 4 is meant to be a compromise between the time management pikmin games(1 &3) and a more leisurely play-at-your-own-pace pikmin game (like 2?).

All I can say is that a lot of the elements from 2 that they incorporated into Pikmin 4 did not resonate with me at all. The caves were interesting at first but I began straight up avoiding any of them that were Dandoori levels. The timed puzzle dandoori levels were fine but the battle missions where the game forcibly splits the screen were incredibly irritating. I almost never needed to see what the CPU opponent was up to so these sections became something I dreaded having to play after the first one.

I also found the gameloop to be far too noticeable which made Pikmin 4 seem more like an extensive chore than anything. I think a good game
is one that masks their gameplay loops so that players aren't even aware of them. I find a lot of recent Nintendo games have really been dropping the ball with this.

A good chunk of Pikmin 4 can be boiled down to:

Explore to find manhole caves which can lead to dandoori challenges which rewards players with rescued npcs with an ailment that the player needs to cure by doing night tower defense missions. over and over and over again.

By the end of the game I was ignoring a chunk of the content because it became too tedious. Maybe people will love the 20 floor dungeon at the end of the game, but I was pleading for the game to be over because it became such a slog.

Its very possible that Pikmin 4 just isn't for me, but its very hard for me not to see a good 75% of Pikmin 4 as just unnecessary padding.

Pikmin exploration: Great, wish there was more!
Caves: fun diversions at first but become a slog in the second half of the game.

Dandoori battles: padding

Night tower defense missions: padding

Pikmin 1 or 3 may be much leaner games than 4 content wise, but I found Pikmin 4 too overstuffed with content that became less and less appealing as the game went on.

Dezatopia is one of the most unique shymps I've played in and while and its too bad that its as obscure as it is.

Dezatopia uses all four of the Switch's face buttons to fire a different type of shot in the direction of that button. ex: X fires up, B drops water bullets down, A fires to right etc. If you hold the button down your shot is steady, but weaker but if you don't press the button for a while the shot becomes more devastation. Its a nice trade off and makes certain bosses more interesting. Do you fire continuously for steady damage or do you hold and and do massive damage?

There are so many other mechanics at play in Dezatopia and honestly there are just too many for me to explain for competently but one of the most notable aspects about Dezatopia is its Stage structure. Dezatopia doesn't have 7 standard stages. It has multiple routes you can choose each with their own specific stages. Each route has its own specific objective you have to complete in order to unlock the Final Boss fight. For instance, in Route A you have to beat the first 5 stages in under 15 minutes while another route requires you to collect 100,000 animals.

I actually really like this attempt to allow players to choose what challenge requirement they want to focus on. What I didn't like about their last game Mecha Ritz was that you had to engage with a Boss time limit mechanic to get the most out of that game. Dezatopia giving me multiple different options on what requirement I can choose to reach the final boss was a really excellent compromise on their part and honestly makes me want to go back and try out the other requirements in the other routes.

The controls and all the mechanics take a few playthroughs to finally "get" but if you stick with Dezatopia for a while I think it really grows on you.

Ghost Trick feels like a demo for what could have been a really amazing puzzle game. Its not a bad game by any means and now having finally finished it, I get why its so fervently loved by its fans, but I also think Ghost Trick frontloads a lot of the more clever puzzles and situations, leaving a good chunk of the middle kind of a slog.

Its a tragedy that Capcom didn't make more of this IP because I think it could have been nurtured into a exceptional puzzle series, but I can't say Ghost Trick was a perfect outing.

Its worth playing but I'd suggest maybe lowering your expectations if you go in believing all the hype.

A prequel that feels more like it was made for convenience rather than necessity. It has a handful of moments that will pique the interest of a hardcore Utawarerumono fan but it doesn't ultimately deliver something as gripping as Mask of Deception. Without saying too much, the mystery boxes the story leaves for you to mull over once the game is over just aren't that interesting.

The transition from turn based strategy to a more tradition ATB battle system isn't graceful either. I don't even think the developers were very confident in this new battle system because its very easy to overlevel which basically allows you to kill enemies on the overworld without even having to enter a battle. 70% of the game was me just auto killing everything and occasionally having to fight a boss legitimately occasionally.

As a big fan of Utawarerumono, my biggest fear was that Monochrome Mobius was going to be a flop that might tarnish my love of the previous games and while I don't think Monochrome Mobius exactly hit that mark, I feel very confident that I should probably quit while I'm ahead. I don't have much faith in this series going forward.

Just an overall letdown.

Tedious classically designed arcade shmup where the developers blindside you with "gotcha!" deaths. The stages are twice as long as they should be. Theres a point in the game where you suddenly get bombarded with bomb pick ups and power-ups and you might be under the impression that the game is ramping up to some crazy final boss but nope....thats the halfway point. Forced myself to finish this one and while I generally don't coun't shmups as "completed" unless I 1CC them, Truxton is going to be an exception.

The only thing Truxton has going for it is the neat Skull Faced Bomb explosion it has. I honestly think thats the only reason its kind of managed to stick around in the shmup public consciousness. There are better shmups out there. Truxton isn't really worth playing or learning.