That said, the ending is rather abrupt, and unless you actually liked the battles and catching Coromon, then you’ll likely be like me and be done with the game after your first playthrough. The story is just that eye rolling I could not stomach another run, and sadly, while some Coromon are pretty cool looking, especially in their shiny forms, a lot of Coromon are not very interesting at all. And worse yet, there’s no genders and no waifu looking ones. Heck, there’s very few human looking Coromon in general. A whole range of animals, but when it comes to bipedal, only a few who take a real wild imagination to sexify. My own team consisted of a giant bee, a polar bear, an underground weasel, a ghost cat, an octopus shaped water alien, and an electric tiger. I mostly ran this team for the coverage, and because all of them were some level of shiny, as Coromon has two levels of shiny type. Not only do shinies here look different from the regular versions, but they also have vastly better stats. So it pays to run a team with “perfect” potency. Overall it is what you’d expect from a knockoff Pokemon game, built with real gamers in mind and not stupid children and horny old men. But it was also written in a format closely resembling proto-brainrot, chuck full of cringe memes, terrible jokes, and face palming innuendos. The pixel art was great, but the lacking number of different Coromon and their genderless, waifu-less aspects bored my horny brain. Really wish Nintendo would make a Pokemon with the soundtrack of something like Violet, with the antagonist team from Sun and Moon, the mechanics of Coromon, and a story where you’re not a stupid kid who wants to be the very best. Lemme play as an adult dammit! Coromon gets a 6.6 out of 10
So what did ol Ubisoft do? How did they mess it up? First, the maps are no longer pixel art and hand drawn, they are all 3D and rendered like butt. Second, the units upgrade no longer has any significant difference in their appearance, they just get a color pallet swap. Third, the story is only loosely based on the previous entry and makes little to no sense for the most part. Fourth, the voice acting is god awful. Fifth, the story is no longer divided into factions as you play a single story just from different angles whose perspective is managed by a singular unit of a different faction. Sixth, the game is buggy with glitches and crashes. Seventh, the new combat system has made the automatic battles a mess. Eighth, the music is unmemorable and drab. Needless to say, this was a bad call on 3DO’s part, but I doubt they had much care since they too are no longer of this world. And #5 isn’t even the end of it, I’ve seen it, Ubisoft has released not 1 but 2 more Heroes of Might and Magic titles. I’ll reserve my judgment for those games until I play them, but just looking them over, they look even more dumbed down and focusing on the 3D aspect of things. I guess the best I can hope for is that they’ll get better at making sexier models of the units you use in battle, since we all know we ain’t summoning a succubus just for her to be bald and ugly. Which reminds me, Ubisoft also did away with some of the old units in favor of new ones. Like the multi-armed Naga from the Wizard faction, gone, replaced by a furry lioness that upgrades into a walking Mufasa. For shame. I tell ya, I do not hold out much hope for this series as it stands, but I’ll eventually get around to trying the next two in the lineup to see if those feelings remain true. Until then, having played all of Heroes of Might and Magic 5, including the DLCs, my thoughts remain that 2002’s 4th entry takes the cake as the best western turn-based RPG I have ever played.
What really sold me on Inscryption was its ending, which I won’t spoil as I would normally do, but I will say it actually made me cry and have a somber moment alone. It brought up old memories of my grandmother passing, of not being able to say goodbye, and it hit right in the feels so powerfully I was thinking about the ending for weeks on end. I went and watched others to see their reactions, bought the soundtrack to listen to on my walks, and I even came back for seconds with the challenge mode that unlocks after beating the game called “Kaycee’s Mod”. At first it was just because I wanted more, but then I found out there was lore to uncover, pages from Kaycee’s diary detailing their work on Inscryption in its earliest stages. Needless to say the challenge mode is in fact very challenging, but a seasoned Inscription player knows that with the right deck, good items, and a little RNG, no challenge is too tough. And heck, if you beat all the challenges, you’ll even unlock a secret boss! A boss I really wanted to fight after they had been introduced earlier on in the main campaign, and it is totally worth it. To conclude I am ending with the fact that Inscryption is the best game I have ever played, ever. Placing above things like Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age 2, Portal 2, Escape Velocity: Nova, and BioShock 2. Which were my original top five games of all time, however to date no game has ever gotten a perfect score from me. In anime this has happened a few times, but never for video games. Until now that is, as Inscryption not only takes 1st place on my top 5 games of all time but it also has the honor of being the only game I have ever given a full score. There was nothing about Inscryption that I did not like, it had me enwrapped and entranced and my only sadness comes from the fact I don’t see a second game coming out with how this one ends. But in a way, it is comforting, as this means this totally completed game will forever remain the way I remember it.
The main hook that got me about Moonlighter was the feeling of “one more turn”. You know, that same feeling you get in Civilization games? Where you reach a point you’re good to stop for the night, but then you notice one thing that leads to you going another turn, and then another, and then another, and before you know it you’ve got two hours of sleep before work the next day. This happens when you come back from a dungeon run, see you only need one more piece of loot to build a better weapon, so you run the day selling loot you don’t need, diving back into the dungeon, collecting the needed item, and returning. But then after that you see that your run to collect the required item lead yo acquiring more of another, which means you only need a bit more gold to afford the full armor set! So of course you run the shop another day and make bank, build that armor, and well, I mean, you might as well test it all out now in the new dungeon, am I right? You see? One more turn. Fun as this was there was also enough to drive me nuts, like the fact you can only carry healing potions in stacks of five, you can’t upgrade your backpack space, and the bloody teleport out artifact you have from the very start takes far too long to use. Sometimes you’ll run clean on potions, in a boss fight, but the stupid teleport takes time to activate. In the meantime the boss can hit you, and guess what? Damage will interrupt the activation. And while yes, you can find teleporting chests to offload loot into, that will send your acquired stuffs into a chest back home, these are not common and secrets you have to find on the RNG maps. So if you have a real good run on loot, and run out of backpack space, you’re boned. You’ll have to ignore all that cool loot just floating on the floor, because you’re too full up on stuff you already have and know you need more of. So dumb. Moonlighter gets a 7.9 out of 10
There are very few games I can say I have actively anticipated, and followed along with the development. Typically this is because, even with series’ of games I enjoy, I just heard about the game when it is close to being released or had a set date. Early access stuff however I do not pay any attention to, normally, but when a Heroes of Might and Magic inspired tactics turn based RPG is announced and then covered by SsethTzeentach my attention was had. The game I am speaking of is Songs of Conquest, and you may have heard of the title at least, as it was once listed as the most anticipated game back in 2021 during E3. You guys remember E3, right? Right? Songs of Conquest is a pretty good game, with detailed pixel art, a compelling story, and challenging gameplay. Developed by Lavapotion, a studio who has only ever developed one game, Songs of Conquest. So they’re off on a pretty good foot. The publisher is Coffee Stain Studios, who also published Deep Rock Galactic, Huntdown, and Valheim. So far, you should be feeling pretty good about this game from those two alone. A fresh faced developer full of life and hope, and a strong publisher that isn’t all about the numbers and is also not EA, Blizzard, or Microsoft. You may recall I mentioned early access, and that is because Songs of Conquest was in early access for about two years. Originally it had been slated for release in 2020, but COVID saw an end to that dream, and thus the game was out in 2022 with half of the intended campaigns. Now that may sound worrisome, but fear not, I did not play the game in the unfinished state. So I can not comment. Songs of Conquest gets a 7.7 out of 10
So yeah, the core gameplay was decent, but the story was marred by a weird alteration. So I mentioned that the leader is misgendered and that’s because, while they are all robots, they do have genders. The mage is a girl, the monk is a guy, and the knight is a guy. But is called a girl, because of some Sweet Baby Inc garbage inclusion that decided there where too many guys. So they made the quirky knight a rough tomboy, except they did it after the plot and game were done, so it comes off as very weird when it is mentioned. Everything about the knight is guy-ish, the way they talk, the way they dress, the way their backstory is about admiring knights and rescuing princesses, you get the picture. Even their name was more boy than girl, so whenever it was made a talking point it was handed really hamfistedly. Because of that quirk I was annoyed enough to be bothered, and the art style was kind of simple and boring. I can see it is from the lineage of other Steamworld type games with how it looks, but I honestly have never really liked the look of them. So I came for the gameplay lured in by the turn-based deck builder, even when the misgendering and basic animation did it no favors. It was good enough I beat the game but I ducked out of finishing the arena, which opened up one last match to fight an overpowered version of the final boss. Yeah, no thanks. SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech gets a 6.0 out of 10
Eventually you will be able to remove the laundromat area entirely, rebrand the building, and get a message from daddykins that he’s proud of you. Too little too late, hope you enjoy not having any family at the Thanksgiving day dinner, because you can burn in hell for all I care. Nothing redeemable about his character at all. Not that I liked miss “I want to be an artist” either, as she just takes the slapping from him all the time without just trying to strike it out on her own. No, she’d rather be a grungy, dirty, greasy failure that couldn’t even make it working for Pizza Hut- I mean Pizza King. None of the characters in this that I can name are likable, so yeah, the story was super flat to me. Did not enjoy it one bit. In fact I’m not sure what kept me going, possibly just wanting to be done? Because the arcade machines had games, but they were all very arcady, and I really never vibbed with arcade machines exactly for that fact. Why play it then? Because it was free and I needed something different from you usual intense and violent FPS game, and Arcade Paradise is very chill. You got a jukebox you can play tunes on, you can just sit in the managers office doing jack all until the day is over and still make bank from all the machines. It was something I could switch on, place the loser in her office, and just do something else while the dough rolled in. Every now and then having to fix a machine, clean up trash, and of course, plunge the toilet. Arcade Paradise gets a 6.0 out of 10
