Here's my original post if you care but you don't really need to read it to understand what I'm putting in this post:
Randomrings Blog: Only Games I Give a Crap About in 2018
DIGIMON STORY: CYBER SLEUTH - HACKER'S MEMORY (PS4)
Verdict: Didn't play
My main fear of Hacker's Memory was that it looked like a rehash of a game that hadn't even been out for four years and it looks like I was right. I'm not refusing to play it per se but it really doesn't look different enough to justify supporting its development when there are so many more deserving games out there right now trying to do something original.
DISSIDIA FINAL FANTASY NT (PS4)
Verdict: Didn't play
NT looks a lot more cash-grabby than I expected and I have heard from fans that the PSP version is still superior. By the time it came out, I lost quite a bit of interest, especially when the $60 version didn't even get the customer all of the base playable characters. As time went on, more games came to my attention, and funds dwindled, NT slipped farther and farther off of the fresh, wet blacktop that is my interest in modern games. Maybe I am missing something here and I am positive there is fun to be had here but I didn't deem it worth it and still don't. Maybe I will find it cheap one day and feel like a big old dummy for doubting it.
NT looks a lot more cash-grabby than I expected and I have heard from fans that the PSP version is still superior. By the time it came out, I lost quite a bit of interest, especially when the $60 version didn't even get the customer all of the base playable characters. As time went on, more games came to my attention, and funds dwindled, NT slipped farther and farther off of the fresh, wet blacktop that is my interest in modern games. Maybe I am missing something here and I am positive there is fun to be had here but I didn't deem it worth it and still don't. Maybe I will find it cheap one day and feel like a big old dummy for doubting it.
KIRBY STAR ALLIES (Switch)
Verdict: Played a demo of
I was fearful that the party mechanic would make the game way too easy. That is saying a lot for a Kirby game. Somehow Star Allies managed to make a Kirby game too easy. The art style has been kept intact since Triple Deluxe too. Triple Deluxe looked fine but almost every installment of Kirby before this game had a unique look to some degree. Star Allies just feels like "Kirby for Switch" and not much more. This was my main fear going into it and playing every part of the demo did not sway me at all. Even something about the controls felt a little off, which I did not think was possible in a Kirby game, yet here I am typing it out, being a big entitled baby about a free demo of a game. I'm sure there are moments where Star Allies shines more but for a full-price game, I don't care to see it. I would much rather just play Super Star, Nightmare in Dreamland, Crystal Shards, or Dream Land 3 again.
I was fearful that the party mechanic would make the game way too easy. That is saying a lot for a Kirby game. Somehow Star Allies managed to make a Kirby game too easy. The art style has been kept intact since Triple Deluxe too. Triple Deluxe looked fine but almost every installment of Kirby before this game had a unique look to some degree. Star Allies just feels like "Kirby for Switch" and not much more. This was my main fear going into it and playing every part of the demo did not sway me at all. Even something about the controls felt a little off, which I did not think was possible in a Kirby game, yet here I am typing it out, being a big entitled baby about a free demo of a game. I'm sure there are moments where Star Allies shines more but for a full-price game, I don't care to see it. I would much rather just play Super Star, Nightmare in Dreamland, Crystal Shards, or Dream Land 3 again.
FORTNITE (PC)
Verdict: Quickly lost interest/ 10
Fortnite was Epic Games' attempt at stealing the spotlight from PUBG. I guess it worked because I probably don't need to explain what Fortnite is to anyone reading this. Fortnite is currently damn near everywhere. Usually, I don't condone rip-offs like this but the case of Fortnite versus Player Unknown's Battlegrounds is more interesting. PUBG was, and in many ways still is, a faulty game that was even less functional upon its full 1.0 release. Fortnite looks less like something replicated in SourceFilm Maker and has its own pleasant art direction. This just took a basic formula and expanded on it so I can respect it at least a little. Overall, I really love the environmental graphics and I love how it is one of the rare shooters that prioritizes clarity over realism. Unfortunately, Fortnite made me realize why a 100-player battle-royale system is inherently not up my street, aside from technical aspects. Fortnite feels like another survival shooter game where you need to get items because you start with basically nothing and have to shoot the other players. It feels like a lot of people simply have access to guns that I don't have and although I will admit I am not the best at most shooters, I don't think it's because I have bad aim. I don't have great aim but I distinctly remember shooting people several times before getting completely obliterated later. I also frequently play Overwatch, so I'm not the worst. I can only imagine it might be because I didn't pay to play Fortnite but they allow a free version so I don't see the point in punishing me for it, if that is the case anyway. The building system makes Fortnite unique from PUBG and one of the most unique shooters I have ever seen but that doesn't intrinsically make it fun. The game asks you to be creative with the way you use its crafting system, which is commendable but if someone gets the drop on you anyway or starts tearing down your shit with blunt objects and explosives, all that work you put in is for not. At the end of the day, it's another survival shooter, which we already have plenty of. I prefer something like Star Wars Battlefront II (2005), Star Fox Assault, Overwatch, or even Halo where you can play quick strings of deathmatch rounds or even quick matches rather than playing one long drawn out one. One of the things I hate about most modern shooters is that they make me watch a screen with not much going on instead of letting me actually play the damn game. Fortnite accidentally does this too. Granted I prefer spectating something I understand and just got shot out of rather than terribly boring dialogue, it doesn't change the fact that Fortnite only has gameplay relative to your skill level. It's hard to get a higher skill level or build the motivation to become more skilled at the game if you get instantly slaughtered in nearly every match along the way. Because of these things, I don't particularly recommend Fortnite but it is cross-platform and has a lot of cool ideas. If you really like playing shooters with your friends then I can almost guarantee more enjoyment for you than what I had with Fortnite.
KINGDOM HEARTS III (PS4)
Verdict: Didn't come out
Okay.
Okay.
RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2 (PS4)
Verdict: Didn't play
It looks bloated as hell. Most of the universal praise I see for it is purely story-centric so I just don't give a fuck because even then the story-centric parts are bogged down with forced walking around. Red Dead Redemption 1 is one of my favorite Sandbox games and I'm not even that big of a fan of the way the story was handled in that. I shouldn't be so quick to judge a game I have not played but everything I have seen, heard, and read about Red Dead Redemption 2 leads me to believe that I will probably despise a lot more things about it than I will end up loving or even find entertaining. I'm not putting a snake in my own boot.
It looks bloated as hell. Most of the universal praise I see for it is purely story-centric so I just don't give a fuck because even then the story-centric parts are bogged down with forced walking around. Red Dead Redemption 1 is one of my favorite Sandbox games and I'm not even that big of a fan of the way the story was handled in that. I shouldn't be so quick to judge a game I have not played but everything I have seen, heard, and read about Red Dead Redemption 2 leads me to believe that I will probably despise a lot more things about it than I will end up loving or even find entertaining. I'm not putting a snake in my own boot.
THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU -FINAL REMIX- (Switch)
Verdict: Didn't want to play because the original is better
In the original "Only Games I Give a Crap About In 2018" post, I pretty much just bitched about the existence of this remaster. I still haven't played it but now that more information is available than there was when I talked about it before, it looks like they did everything I feared. Before you read this and think I'm just being a whiny idiot, keep in mind that TWEWY is one of my favorite games of all time and seeing it drastically changed in some aspects while watered-down in others is scary to me because I don't want this version to be how future generations see this game. TWEWY is still a unique experience on its own but one of the things that made it incredibly unique from a game design standpoint was its combat system. This is such an important factor in what makes TWEWY what it is that the combat system giving the game unique design is an almost objective fact. If you take away the dual-screen functionality, it just becomes another quirky action-RPG, granted one that still has a great story, incredible art direction, and a lot of fun and experimental design choices, now you will be able to just hit buttons and win. On certain settings, you could totally do this with the original TWEWY on DS but the gameplay forced you to stay alert in every single situation, making even the most ridiculously hard fights in the game fun. I commend whoever's idea it was to bring such an understated game back to a more popular medium. Let's be honest: current-day Switch has a lot more static and people eating up that static than 2007-era Nintendo DS did. I just feel like the original point of the game was completely thrown out the window. If you have considered getting TWEWY, I highly recommend getting the original DS version. I would even recommend getting a 3DS just to play it because I know the DS and 3DS have a lot of awesome gems that make the Switch's current library look a little inferior. If you don't want to buy a new console just to play this game, that's understandable too. As much as I don't like what they did with it, the Switch version still has a lot of things that make the original memorable and unique and have added content that I'm sure is fine but not enough to justify me buying the game again right now. Just remember that you are missing out on the core thing that made TWEWY a different "game" over being a different "experience".
BAYONETTA 3 (Switch)
Verdict: Didn't come out
That's fine by me. However long they need to take to make Bayonetta 3 a more unique experience from two of the best hack-n-slashes I have ever played is more than fine by me.
That's fine by me. However long they need to take to make Bayonetta 3 a more unique experience from two of the best hack-n-slashes I have ever played is more than fine by me.
THE LAST OF US PART 2 (PS4)
Verdict: Didn't come out
I don't know if I will get this one when it comes out but I am very curious to see what they improve on or butcher in this one.
I don't know if I will get this one when it comes out but I am very curious to see what they improve on or butcher in this one.
These next two were not on the original OGIGACA 2018 list but I am going to talk about them on the revisited version. I did not play many newly released games but I did play these two enough to find them worthy of talking about.
ATTACK ON TITAN 2 (PC)
Verdict: Great anime game / *****
I started reading the Attack on Titan manga this year and my friend showed me the recent game adaptation around the same time. I enjoy the story of Attack on Titan but from what little I've seen of the gameplay and now being pretty far in the manga, the game is kind of an awful way to experience the story. However, for an anime-based game, Attack on Titan 2 should not be near as fun as it is. When I was a kid, the reason that games based on TV shows were always so disappointing was that the development studios didn't have time to care and the publishers had no reason to care. This is what makes a lot of anime-based games specifically trashy and cheap. Attack on Titan 2 is by no means the greatest game in the universe but it really captures almost everything that makes the story of Attack on Titan so exciting and entertaining... if you ignore the story. The gameplay is stellar and fully incorporates the excitement and actual flying by the seat of your pants that makes the original story consistently suspenseful. You can even use a lot of items from the story but you have to build forts mid-match to access more of them and recharge your other resources. These give a nice time-sacrifice system to the game and make pre-game customization seem more important to the player. Fighting bigger boss Titans is fun and consistently challenging from the few hours of the game my friend and I played together (my friend showed me this game because he is a big AoT fan and thought the game was pretty tight, with which I agree). There's even a D-pad function to command your fellow soldiers to certain targets that works way faster and more comfortably than in any game I have ever seen try to do something similar. This really makes you feel like part of a collective with your AI friendlies save for the fact that the AI can sometimes be pretty damn stupid and don't do a whole lot on their own. The story depiction was the most crippling flaw I noticed. I really only played up to where I was in the story at the time and everything was done with a strange amount of censorship. There was way less gore and it made the most dramatic scenes of the early manga and anime look far less dramatic and more silly. The pre-rendered cel-shading cutscenes look okay but really pass the minimum requirements for looking like the anime without adding anything new without making things worse. One of the major differences between Attack on Titan 2 and Attack on Titan 1 is that you can make your own soldier. This is a cool system but characters will interact with you in pre-rendered cutscenes and it's more awkward and funny than it is engaging. Outside of cutscenes, you can talk to different characters and build certain relationships with specific characters to get more things to upgrade. The upgrade system with your weapons, armor, and equipment are already awesome without this and are always very clear about what everything is going to give and take away. You don't have to spend 20 hours of gameplay for this system to be rewarding. All-in-all I was very impressed with Attack on Titan 2 but because of it's cheap story depiction, I wouldn't recommend paying $60 for it. I am waiting for it to go on sale on Steam. There seems to be a lot of multiplayer fun to be had with it if you can convince friends to play it with you. It's probably a blast, if not the single-player mode is still alright. With the multiplayer components and the fun of the game as a whole, I would pay $40 and not feel rip-offed in the slightest but $60 seems like a stretch to me. Price aside, Attack on Titan 2 is one of the best anime-based games I have ever played and I recommend checking it out, especially if you love the manga and/or anime. My friend is a bigger fan of it all than I am and he loves this game. I'm not the biggest fan of the manga but that's a rant for another time. I still recommend trying the game or at least looking up gameplay footage.
SUPER SMASH BROS. ULTIMATE (Switch)
Verdict: Everything I wanted
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is one of the few games that is ridiculously expansive yet is mostly expansive in a way that does not bog down the overall experience. All of the extraneous content is made to constantly freshen up the formula of the general gameplay as opposed to trying to show off how much the developers could fit on a disk... well... cartridge. The game is not perfect but the main flaws because of this are typically pretty avoidable. Any item you deem unfair can be turned off. Any stage hazard you find annoying can be turned off. Anything stale and boring can typically be enhanced or ignored unless you are going for 100% completion. The adventure mode, World of Light, was fairly disappointing. I still haven't beaten it yet but it is more like the event matches from the other games than it is like Subspace Emissary, which I'm pretty sure is what people were expecting. Imagine dough. If you stretch it, it starts to lose consistency and becomes increasingly thin and less useful. World of Light is dough not thin enough to just be burnt to a useless crisp but still just throws as many gimmicks in as possible. Don't get me wrong, it isn't trash or anything. There are some minor puzzles every once in a while to spice things up but most of the progression of the game relies on beating the crap out of people. It becomes a bit mindless until a more annoying challenge comes along. I say "annoying" over "worthy" because most of the more difficult fights can be won by eating the enemy with Kirby and spitting them out underneath the stage, or so I've found so far. The spirit system has a weird type advantage system that doesn't seem to matter all that much. I commend the idea to add RPG elements to Smash gameplay but the way it is organized and presented left a bit to be desired for me. The loading times also get in the way of that and the rest of the game, though they aren't any worse than that of Smash for Wii U or 3DS, so another minor complaint. The new characters all feel like fun, fresh inclusions with the obvious exceptions of Daisy, Chrom, and Ken. Inkling adds a new mechanic to the game that is engaging for the one playing as Inkling and the one fighting them. Ridley feels like controlling a video game boss while still fair enough to not feel or be overpowered. King K. Rool is just ridiculous. Isabelle is just different enough to not feel like a clone of Villager and I think I already like her a bit more. There are new items that are pretty fun. I'm not sure how I feel about the inclusion of certain items and moves that completely obliterate an opponent under certain conditions as opposed to just doing an obscene amount of knockback. The fact that good timing can 100% guarantee a kill reminds me of PlayStation All-Stars and kind of makes me feel like such attacks defeat the original purpose of Super Smash Bros as a not-quite-fighting-game. On the other hand, every time I have been suscept to such an attack or dealt it to someone else, it never felt unfair or wholly unavoidable. If I had to summarize Ultimate in a way other than this giant paragraph on it, I would say "it's everything I like about Melee merged with the accessibility of Smash for Wii U". The physics and more specifically the weight are a lot closer to Melee yet it has a lot more goofy and ridiculous stuff to mess around with whether alone or with friends. Overall, so far, I would say this game rivals Melee for me, which has always been my favorite in the series. I think this game is worth getting a Switch for not only because the game itself is awesome but just because the console is so convenient.
That's about all of the ramble I have built up in me from these recent games. The only other one I can think about is the Seal the Deal DLC for A Hat in Time. It's fucking great, it just doesn't count as a whole game. If you have A Hat in Time, you should definitely get the DLC because it adds so much more to the game than I have even dealt with yet myself. If you love that game, the new world and levels added are worth the price of the DLC anyway.
Okay, now that is all of the ramble I have. Thanks for reading and maybe I'll do the same thing for next year, maybe I won't, maybe I will. I usually write these around January or February if I remember correctly so I might do a 2019 one. So far, I just don't have that much interest in anything coming out except for Kingdom Hearts III because I am a child. So again, maybe. Thanks.
I started reading the Attack on Titan manga this year and my friend showed me the recent game adaptation around the same time. I enjoy the story of Attack on Titan but from what little I've seen of the gameplay and now being pretty far in the manga, the game is kind of an awful way to experience the story. However, for an anime-based game, Attack on Titan 2 should not be near as fun as it is. When I was a kid, the reason that games based on TV shows were always so disappointing was that the development studios didn't have time to care and the publishers had no reason to care. This is what makes a lot of anime-based games specifically trashy and cheap. Attack on Titan 2 is by no means the greatest game in the universe but it really captures almost everything that makes the story of Attack on Titan so exciting and entertaining... if you ignore the story. The gameplay is stellar and fully incorporates the excitement and actual flying by the seat of your pants that makes the original story consistently suspenseful. You can even use a lot of items from the story but you have to build forts mid-match to access more of them and recharge your other resources. These give a nice time-sacrifice system to the game and make pre-game customization seem more important to the player. Fighting bigger boss Titans is fun and consistently challenging from the few hours of the game my friend and I played together (my friend showed me this game because he is a big AoT fan and thought the game was pretty tight, with which I agree). There's even a D-pad function to command your fellow soldiers to certain targets that works way faster and more comfortably than in any game I have ever seen try to do something similar. This really makes you feel like part of a collective with your AI friendlies save for the fact that the AI can sometimes be pretty damn stupid and don't do a whole lot on their own. The story depiction was the most crippling flaw I noticed. I really only played up to where I was in the story at the time and everything was done with a strange amount of censorship. There was way less gore and it made the most dramatic scenes of the early manga and anime look far less dramatic and more silly. The pre-rendered cel-shading cutscenes look okay but really pass the minimum requirements for looking like the anime without adding anything new without making things worse. One of the major differences between Attack on Titan 2 and Attack on Titan 1 is that you can make your own soldier. This is a cool system but characters will interact with you in pre-rendered cutscenes and it's more awkward and funny than it is engaging. Outside of cutscenes, you can talk to different characters and build certain relationships with specific characters to get more things to upgrade. The upgrade system with your weapons, armor, and equipment are already awesome without this and are always very clear about what everything is going to give and take away. You don't have to spend 20 hours of gameplay for this system to be rewarding. All-in-all I was very impressed with Attack on Titan 2 but because of it's cheap story depiction, I wouldn't recommend paying $60 for it. I am waiting for it to go on sale on Steam. There seems to be a lot of multiplayer fun to be had with it if you can convince friends to play it with you. It's probably a blast, if not the single-player mode is still alright. With the multiplayer components and the fun of the game as a whole, I would pay $40 and not feel rip-offed in the slightest but $60 seems like a stretch to me. Price aside, Attack on Titan 2 is one of the best anime-based games I have ever played and I recommend checking it out, especially if you love the manga and/or anime. My friend is a bigger fan of it all than I am and he loves this game. I'm not the biggest fan of the manga but that's a rant for another time. I still recommend trying the game or at least looking up gameplay footage.
SUPER SMASH BROS. ULTIMATE (Switch)
Verdict: Everything I wanted
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is one of the few games that is ridiculously expansive yet is mostly expansive in a way that does not bog down the overall experience. All of the extraneous content is made to constantly freshen up the formula of the general gameplay as opposed to trying to show off how much the developers could fit on a disk... well... cartridge. The game is not perfect but the main flaws because of this are typically pretty avoidable. Any item you deem unfair can be turned off. Any stage hazard you find annoying can be turned off. Anything stale and boring can typically be enhanced or ignored unless you are going for 100% completion. The adventure mode, World of Light, was fairly disappointing. I still haven't beaten it yet but it is more like the event matches from the other games than it is like Subspace Emissary, which I'm pretty sure is what people were expecting. Imagine dough. If you stretch it, it starts to lose consistency and becomes increasingly thin and less useful. World of Light is dough not thin enough to just be burnt to a useless crisp but still just throws as many gimmicks in as possible. Don't get me wrong, it isn't trash or anything. There are some minor puzzles every once in a while to spice things up but most of the progression of the game relies on beating the crap out of people. It becomes a bit mindless until a more annoying challenge comes along. I say "annoying" over "worthy" because most of the more difficult fights can be won by eating the enemy with Kirby and spitting them out underneath the stage, or so I've found so far. The spirit system has a weird type advantage system that doesn't seem to matter all that much. I commend the idea to add RPG elements to Smash gameplay but the way it is organized and presented left a bit to be desired for me. The loading times also get in the way of that and the rest of the game, though they aren't any worse than that of Smash for Wii U or 3DS, so another minor complaint. The new characters all feel like fun, fresh inclusions with the obvious exceptions of Daisy, Chrom, and Ken. Inkling adds a new mechanic to the game that is engaging for the one playing as Inkling and the one fighting them. Ridley feels like controlling a video game boss while still fair enough to not feel or be overpowered. King K. Rool is just ridiculous. Isabelle is just different enough to not feel like a clone of Villager and I think I already like her a bit more. There are new items that are pretty fun. I'm not sure how I feel about the inclusion of certain items and moves that completely obliterate an opponent under certain conditions as opposed to just doing an obscene amount of knockback. The fact that good timing can 100% guarantee a kill reminds me of PlayStation All-Stars and kind of makes me feel like such attacks defeat the original purpose of Super Smash Bros as a not-quite-fighting-game. On the other hand, every time I have been suscept to such an attack or dealt it to someone else, it never felt unfair or wholly unavoidable. If I had to summarize Ultimate in a way other than this giant paragraph on it, I would say "it's everything I like about Melee merged with the accessibility of Smash for Wii U". The physics and more specifically the weight are a lot closer to Melee yet it has a lot more goofy and ridiculous stuff to mess around with whether alone or with friends. Overall, so far, I would say this game rivals Melee for me, which has always been my favorite in the series. I think this game is worth getting a Switch for not only because the game itself is awesome but just because the console is so convenient.
That's about all of the ramble I have built up in me from these recent games. The only other one I can think about is the Seal the Deal DLC for A Hat in Time. It's fucking great, it just doesn't count as a whole game. If you have A Hat in Time, you should definitely get the DLC because it adds so much more to the game than I have even dealt with yet myself. If you love that game, the new world and levels added are worth the price of the DLC anyway.
Okay, now that is all of the ramble I have. Thanks for reading and maybe I'll do the same thing for next year, maybe I won't, maybe I will. I usually write these around January or February if I remember correctly so I might do a 2019 one. So far, I just don't have that much interest in anything coming out except for Kingdom Hearts III because I am a child. So again, maybe. Thanks.
