MetalCaveman

Taboo Trial This is a rogue... lite? Like? Rogue adjacent? Which is the one where when you die you lose everything you got that run but also get a currency to buy permanent upgrades? Point is, each run is different, after clearing a stage you can get a buff for that run, defeating bosses gives you items that can be used to buy permanent upgrades for your character, and buffs for your next run, you also get items which can be given to other characters in the main hub to allow you to play as those characters, although the change is purely cosmetic. The Viking mythology meets sci-fi shenanigans thing is pretty neat, though enemy designs are pretty basic and don't change much throughout the game (other than they'll be red in Muspelheim, white in Niflheim and stuff like that) they still look cool, best design by far though, is Mimir, that whole stage is pretty cool, though really short too. A cool thing is that, while all playable characters are female, you don't play as a Valkyrie, instead, you're one of the Einherjar. The "twist" at the end and how it connects to the gameplay aspect of doing multiple runs was cool too. The run where I finally managed to clear the game was fun, basically got lucky enough to get buffs and skills that made my character essentially immortal, damage reduction, turn damage into HP, restore HP with each kill, etc. After being wiped out in the first stage a couple of times, it was fun to make it to the last boss without worrying about HP. I did have some issues with performance and translations though, it would sometimes spike GPU usage to 100%, had to manually restrict FPS in order to keep things under control. In terms of translations, some descriptions don't make sense and some skills are referred to by different names, sometimes it doesn't make much difference, like unlocking Mjolnir and then getting a buff for Hammer of Thor, other times it can be a bit confusing, unlock skill Illusory Stranger but get a buff for Mysterious Illusion and stuff like that. Overall, a fun game, def see myself going back to try more runs, though I doubt I'll be as lucky as my last one. Grade: A

Onechanbara Z2: Chaos A hefty change from previous entries, the gameplay has been revamped and improved a fair bit, though with some issues. The biggest change is that the level up system is gone, instead, you buy skills, rings, items and upgrade weapons, using yellow orbs, which used to be the EXP that you used to level up. Weapon variety is cool, and the descriptions are fun, there's one that's a reference to the God of War series, one that says "this is a failed weapon, but its designer refuses to admit to it", it's neat. Further, you can upgrade weapons and buy skills during each chapter, by using the goddess statues found in each area. The downside is that now character HP is fixed, for the most part, you can buy items that temporarily increase HP and there's a ring that does the same, however, you can only get each ring once, so you have to choose which character gets the extra HP. Another issue with this system is that, while buying items is straightforward, open store, select item, select amount, buy, done, weapons and skills work by allocating points into each, which confused me at first since I thought you'd have to finish the game before being able to upgrade stuff, turns out, you have to select a weapon/skill and then use the d-pad to allocate points into it until unlocked. Another big change, you can now call in the other characters to fight alongside you, and, unlike previous entries, which allowed you to bring only two characters, now you can bring four, which means you can bring the entire cast and have everyone fighting at the same time. This is pretty cool and makes some arena and boss fights much more manageable, the downside being that the other characters will basically use the exact same attacks you use, except for skills, so when using a skill the rest of them just stand there doing nothing. Enemies are also much more aggressive this time, you actually have to combine attacks, skills, and dodges in order to clear each area. Bosses are also more aggressive and require some (admittedly extremely simple) QTEs in order to defeat them. In terms of story... It's a thing lol, technically this is a sequel to Z Kagura, which never got an English release, had to go on youtube and watch a translated playthrough there lol, biggest thing is that now there's another duo, vampire sisters Sayaa and Kagura, and that zombies now come from another dimension lol. The two new characters are really fun, Kagura is loud, arrogant, jumping into action before even looking or thinking about what's in front of her, constantly trying to pick a fight with Aya and Saki, meanwhile Sayaa is pretty much the only one with common sense of the group lol, unfortunately she's also a bit shy, so as much as she tries to think of how best to approach a situation, in between trying stop everyone from trying to kill each other, she rarely succeeds. Both characters are voiced in JP by Miyuki Sawashiro (Mordred in the Fate series) and she flexes her range with Kagura being loud, arrogant and throwing random English phrases here and there while Sayaa is quiet, meek, with a more cutesy voice tone. Pretty cool stuff. All in all, a neat improvement over the previous entries. Fun characters, silly, cheesy story, cool music, most excellent character designs , good stuff all around. Grade: A+

Onechanbara Z2 Chaos, it really does change things up lol, previous games you could just mash buttons and win without issues, outside of the blood mist enemies, which required a Cool Combo, this time around, you do have to be much more careful, enemies are more varied and aggressive, bosses deal a ton of damage and can take a while to beat. There's a bunch of other changes too, overall, a much better game than before. \m/ \m/

We have the overall GOTY, but figured we could also use one for our personal game of the year. For me the answer is easy: Armored Core 6 It delivered everything I wanted in a new AC game, biggest issue I had was with the new focus on more traditional boss fights, which were a bit annoying, although, currently playing on PS5, with the latest patch, and so far they're much better now, first boss was a tad too easy, but the rest have been much more fun. If you dropped the game due to boss fights in the first patch, I'd recommend giving it another try now. One thing I'd like to see them try is allowing you to play with different versions, in ACFA, you could choose which patch you wanted to play with, although for online you had to use the most recent, it allowed them to do fun things with some patches like an infinite energy patch, and (iirc) 1.4, AKA the missile patch. I really, REALLY hope it did well enough that we don't have to wait 10 years for a sequel or expansion. Runner up: Alan Wake 2 Any other year and this would have been my GOTY, if Alan had a giant robot that could reduce the dark place to rubble, it would have been the best game ever lol. Still, it was pretty close, both are awesome games that I love, and both came out after about a decade from the previous ones (though I guess AW had the remastered and American Nightmare in between lol), also, both were worth the wait.

Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad After finishing Zombie Slayers, I wanted to go back and play this one, found out it is backwards compatible so I played on by XOne lol. My first reaction was "this looks way better than I expected" obviously the Wii was never a graphics powerhouse, but I still thought this one would look along those lines, given that the series isn't known for cutting edge graphics, even so, I was pleasantly surprised with how good it has aged. Also, I did remember right, this game has a zombie whale boss. Another thing that surprised me, since I did not remember this one, was Reiko's character arc, in Zombie Slayers she has this redemption arc and acts more calm and more science/research/save the world oriented, while in this one she's just another one of the evil organization's minions. The last boss was also a surprise lol Overall, it was fun to see this game hold up so well, my biggest issue was that in Zombie Slayers you could use guns to deal with some bosses and enemies that would normally block all sword attacks, while in this one bosses can guard against gun attacks too. Grade: A+ Looking at some of the other games I'm playing, I'm fairly sure this will be the last one I finish this year, so, my list for 2023: Pokémon Scarlet Ghostbusters: The Videogame Remastered Dragon's Crown Pro Wish: Ishrafil Saga Waifu Uncovered Cyberpunk 2077 Moero Crystal H Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Seven Pirates H Bioshock Remastered Bioshock 2 Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles Resident Evil Darkside Chronicles Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild Seed of the Dead Daemon X Machina Hero by Chance Warlord by Chance Mortal Shell Seed of the Dead Sweet Home Wolfenstein Old Blood Prey (PC) God Eater 3 Lords of the Fallen (2014) Alan Wake 2 Armored Core 6 Resident Evil 4 (Wii) Onechanbara Bikini Zombie Slayers Onechanbara Bikini Samurai Squad 29 Games, not bad! A good mix of new, old and everything in between lol. Looking at my list from last year, I'm up by 14!! Granted, a lot of these were fairly short, but still, a decent list.

On a Onechanbara kind of mood recently lol, currently replaying Samurai Squad on my Xbone , so it was also the perfect time to pick this one up. Debated between this one and Origin, but this one actually continues the story, while Origin is a remake of the first two games, that made the choice easier lol, supposedly, the Z series has more technical combat than previous entries, let's see if that's true.

Just for fun lol, this isn't the kind of series that tries to come up with some self contradicting (remember The End from MGS3? lol) reason to justify one of its main characters wearing a bikini.

Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers Aeons ago I got a game for the 360, got it pretty much just based on the title and cover, Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad. Around the same time, there was another game in the series, this one for the Wii. I didn't have a Wii back then so I didn't play it, and then recently, after finishing RE4 I wanted to play something else while my Wii was still plugged in and in use lol, this one felt like an obvious choice. The English releases were on the same day, which made me think they were different versions of the same game, but as it turns out this is a sequel to BSS on the 360. There are four characters, each with their own story, though one of them is decidedly not canon. Aya is the titular Bikini Zombie Slayer, then you have her younger half-sister Saki, clone soldier Reiko, and Misery, she's just kinda insane and wants to kill everyone lol. The story is not bad actually, sure it won't win any award, but it's enough to keep you interested. Basically, zombies are roaming the land, except they're not all humans turned zombies, instead, it's earth that created humanoid beings to kill humans before humans destroy earth (though a character mentions it might have been a virus in a meteorite), at the same time, people who have Baneful Blood (a sort of curse) have their powers awakened, growing stronger with every zombie they kill though occasionally losing control and going on rampages. Aya and Saki are two such people, trying to live a normal life but unable to do so as they're drawn to kill more and more zombies. Each of the character stories then expands on this stuff, the best one though, was Reiko's, she goes from just mad scientist clone lady who wants to experiment on the main characters, to someone who wants to find a way to stop the zombies and cure the baneful blood curse. Misery's story is just "she kills everyone, the end." Gameplay is pretty simple, but there's some depth if you're the kind of person who wants to land the best combos with the highest hit count, there's even an enemy type that cannot be destroyed unless you use a Cool Combo, which requires some very VERY precise timing. Zombies vary from just shambling corpses to zombie soldiers with gatling guns, and the combat is musou/warriors style, just mowing down hordes of undead, even in the highest difficulty it's hard to get hit, unless you just stand still for a while. Overall, it's a cool game, pretty short, unless you try to 100% all challenges, and obviously the graphics haven't aged that well (even when new, it was a niche, low(ish) budget game), but well worth a play if you're interested in this type of game, though it's also decidedly not for everyone. Main issue is that iirc BSS had some pretty cool boss fights, I remember a zombie whale and other stuff, in this game the only bosses are the other characters, and you can defeat them in 1 or 2 hits of the special skill attack. Except on the highest difficulties. Would have been cool to have some more variety. It has some pretty nice tunes too, spoiler tagging because the thumbnail is about what you'd expect from a game called Bikini Zombie Slayers lol. Grade: A+

Resident Evil 4 (Wii Version) Controls take a bit of time to get used to, but once you do, it's pretty fun. Aiming is easier, specially with how the reticle changes colours when aiming at enemies or items. Other than that, it's RE4, you already know it's good. Grade: A+

Legit surprised was so low lol, didn't play it so it wasn't going to be on my list, but I figured it'd be on everyone else's list lol. Really happy for ACVI, didn't expect it to be so high on the list. \m/ \m/ Wait a minute... My list: Armored Core 6 Alan Wake 2 Fate/Samurai Remnant Lies of P Street Fighter 6

Played on PC before, but all the cool emblems I've seen are on PS4/PS5 so...

Best update ever. \m/ \m/

Armored Core 6 HELL YEAH!!!!! That is all. OK, I lied, that's not all lol, but it does sum up my thoughts. Definitively feels like a mix between third and fourth generation in terms of movement, it's not quite as fast as 4/FA, but it's def way faster than whatever was going on in 5/VD. Story and story missions also felt a lot more, not linear, since there's still some choices, but definitively more focused, For Answer had a lot more mercenary missions just "go blow stuff up" kind of thing, this time feels like every mission is contributing in some way to moving the story along. Overall, I loved it, it's great to see this series return, and I hope it did well enough to get a new one without having to wait another 10 years. There were however, a couple of things I wasn't a fan of, most of them minor nitpicks, the biggest one however, is the boss fights. Some of them were cool to look at, but most of them were kinda annoying, while being able to access the assembly menu in the reload screen is a huge welcome, it still doesn't change the fact that some bosses just felt almost impossible to beat without cheese builds. Beyond that there's a couple of things from previous games (specially from FA) I would have liked to see: Shoulder weapons/auxiliaries. The WHEELING03 + MUSKINGUM02 combination was one of my favourites in For Answer, really took missile boat builds to the next level. Weapon arms. Machine gun arms carried me through a couple of really hard missions in FA, would have been fun to see them return here, would also allow for heavier back weapons without needing to change the entire frame since you save some weight with these. Back mounted gatling canons. Related to the above, machine gun arms + gatling canons was really fun to use, chewed through ammo like there was no tomorrow, but it was well worth it. Bringing mercenaries with you. Story might not allow for this, but it was fun to be able to bring in another mercenary with you on missions in FA, choosing whether you wanted to take a smaller cut of the pay in order to bring someone who could solo enemies or get more pay but bring in a glorified decoy was neat. Company affiliation. Once again, not something the story might allow for, but it was a neat detail how you could choose to, at the start of the game, affiliate yourself with one of the companies or be a freelancer, choosing a company would give you a better starting AC but lock you to missions for that company, freelancer allowed you to work for whoever, but you started with a crappy AC. All of that is nothing though, I still enjoyed the hell out of 6, and can't wait to (hopefully) see more soon(ish). Grade: S

Best part of the TGA \m/ \m/

This is back lol First season was... Something. Something best forgotten. From a first look this looks better, but I know better than to get my hopes up.

Didn't recognize until his name popped up lol.

Alan Wake 2 Holy cow this was a trip lol. I did have some issues with gameplay, specially the inventory management, that got pretty annoying and tedious, that said, I loved everything else about this game. The heavier focus on horror, the story that gives you one answer and leaves you with ten more questions, the music, the Everything was most excellent. Can't wait to see where they go from here, both in DLC and in Control 2/Alan Wake 3/whatever comes next for Remedy. Grade: A+

Sounds like a fun idea, I'd be up for it. Definitively feels like there's enough good games that came out this year to make a top 10 so that's OK with me.

https://hyte.com/store/y70?v=162 Depending on where your PC is, it might be useless, but it's still a neat thing to have, Jay's video showed that the box mentions waifus so I can already think of a reason to have that thing... Although I currently have a monitor in front of my PC so it would barely be visible.

Lords of the Fallen (2014 ) This was a thing, a whole thing... The first hour or so was OK, kinda fun even, thought it'd be a somewhat janky but still acceptable Soulslike, and then they introduce shield enemies, and it all goes downhill from there. For starters, everything Harkyn(?), does is SLOW, I'm talking Slow Mo Guys style "swimming through molasses at 2 million FPS" kind of slow. Even the fast weapons are ridiculously slow. Enemies of course, aren't bound to the same laws of physics so they move and attack way faster than you could ever hope to. Shield enemies are the worst when it comes to this since not only can they just turtle and poke, there aren't many effective ways to deal with them. Trying to get close when two handing a weapon to kick them results in poke, or shield bash depending on the enemy, anything less than great weapons just bounce of their shields, great weapons take a ton of stamina to break their guard, the most efficient way I found was to use the gauntlet's projectile mode, which take a while since you have to wait for the skill to recharge and for mana to regenerate. Then there's the ghost dudes that are immune to physical damage... There's also this ridiculous camera shake, the moment you start moving the camera shakes like it was on a platform made of jell-o during an earthquake. It actually came close to making me sick with how strong the effect is, and there's no way to turn it off or down, it just is. Physics are also wonky, specially when going down stairs, trying to run down stairs can cause the fall animation to trigger, and in some cases you can die from this, got stuck in the falling animation while going down stairs a couple of times, leading to some really frustrating deaths. It is funny when an enemies dies only to bounce into the sky though. Environments are very samey too, not in a thematically cohesive way, but more in a "I don't know if I've been here before or not because every single room, hallway and arena in this place looks the same!" kind of way. This also means that you can easily miss the right way to go in certain areas where everything just sorta blends together. Magic, like melee, takes way too long to cast, though I did enjoy the cleric's shelter spell, that one pretty much makes you unkillable, reduces incoming damage, heals you and reflects damage back, great all around, assuming you find the time to cast it while in combat lol. The story is pretty meh too, you can see the twist coming from a mile away and though the last bit was cool, it's not enough to make up for everything else. On the technical side, there was this bug that kicked in a few hours in, every time I died, it was impossible to continue, game would be stuck in a black screen, the only way to continue was to pause, and go back to the main menu. It never went away and I had to finish the game while dealing with this stuff. There are however, some neat things here, the XP bonus is cool. As you kill enemies, you build an XP bonus, which goes away when you use a checkpoint, or when you turn it into attribute or spell points. So you can choose whether to risk it and try to get a bigger bonus, or play it safe and level up before going into a new area. While I had issues with the environment, the art style is cool, closer to Darksiders or Torchlight than most other Soulslikes. It also does that thing at the end where it takes some choices you made and weaves them into the story, sorta like Prey but more janky lol. TL;DR: One of the worst Soulslikes I've played, frustrating and annoying for all the wrong reasons, avoid like the plague. Grade: F

Surprised with this one lol, Mägo recently lost their main vocalists, and the time between when that was announced and when they announced this new album was extremely short, so I didn't know what to expect from whoever would be stepping in. Result is pleasantly surprising lol. The English bit at the start and the end is kind of awkward though, IMO doesn't fit well with the rest of the song.

God Eater 3 First GE game made exclusively for consoles, and it shows, at least in the graphics department lol. Everything looks way better than GE and GE2, performance is also better, specially when fighting a bunch of monsters. That said, I still had some issues with it. Gameplay overall was an improvement, controls feel better, the new weapons are fun, but there's still some issues with menus, opening a menu to use an item or to give orders to your teammates is still a fairly clunky thing, would be better, if there was some quick heal button, along with using one side of the touchpad for items and the other for team orders, though this may be hard to implement given that this is a multiplatform title. The new monsters look cool and they're fun to fight, to a certain point, they now have their own devour attacks, which for the most part are easy to dodge or parry, except that this only applies to you, AI teammates tend to do everything in their power to get devoured, thus making the monsters that much stronger, even if you're playing perfectly, your team might still decide it's a good time to get chomped lol. Bullets have been nerfed to uselessness, yes, they were hilariously OP in previous games, but this was too much IMO. Custom bullets are now limited, before, they used the same oracle as your normal bullets so as long as you had enough you could fire them, and this allowed for some really powerful recipes that used more oracle. Now, you have a max amount of oracle allowed for custom recipes, and no way to increase this, max is 1200, so if you have a bullet that uses 400, you can only bring 3 of those. Overall, their effectiveness was extremely reduced. Normal bullets are as useless as before lol. This nerf has the side effect that now certain monsters are much more annoying to fight, things like the Sariel, which were made somewhat tolerable with range DPS now take longer to kill since you either bring one really powerful bullet, or just waste time with weak ones waiting for it to get within melee range. Outfits are much more limited this time around too. Before you had all kinds of different outfits and moving to higher ranks unlocked new cool ones, now it's just. Military jacket Military jacket but with more pockets Military jacket with rolled sleeves Military jacket with less pockets Military jacket with scarf And smaller variations of the same theme, there's a couple of cool ones and eventually I did find a combination I liked, but the vast majority of the outfits are boring as hell. Character episodes are now part of a DLC unlocked by completing the main campaign and the first DLC, they're also now structured like missions as opposed to previous games were they felt more natural. The stories are cool, and learning more about the characters is always nice, but the main issue is that bond level starts counting once you unlock these missions, which means that even if you've been playing with the same team all game, you still have to farm bond levels to unlock their character episodes. Finally, although this is more of a personal nitpick, I wish monsters had different states, and that destroying certain parts had an effect. There's a monster that has a drill hand that it uses to burrow underground and launch surprise attacks, it'd be cool if destroying its drill prevented it from doing that stuff. Also, during cutscenes, they're shown eating other monsters, meanwhile, during gameplay, all creatures just laser focus on you and your team, would be cool to see some of them fighting each other, or just doing damage to each other while fighting, even monsters that do AoE attacks only affect you and your team, other monsters are immune. All that said, I still had fun with it, it still is God Eater, the story was cool, and the new weapons look awesome and were fun to use. TL;DR: If you like GE, no reason not to play this one, otherwise, there are much better monster hunting games out there. Grade: B+