By the end of Spirit of Sanada you'll have learned something, enjoyed the prettiest Warriors game to date, and seen just how far Koei Tecmo's been able to take this series, so that it's no longer purely an action game. With Spirit of Sanada, we see a future for the Warriors franchise where every battle and event is given context and purpose, and it's a far deeper and more rounded experience for that.
It's a game for the here-and-now, made to give the 3DS one of its last hoorahs with a major franchise before all of Nintendo's developers move fully to the Switch.
On a technical level Caligula isn't perfect; characters can run right through doors, and enemies have a habit of getting stuck in scenery as they chase after your characters, but the art direction itself with its soft pastel colours and clean elegance is a massage for the eyes.
This is one of the best tactics JRPGs you can play. It'll last you a long time, become more rewarding the more time that you put into it, and runs just perfectly on the Switch's hardware. You could not ask for a better portable game than this.
While the game might not be better than its peers, it would fare better if it were judged separately.
For all its mechanical competency, The Surge feels as mechanical as its enemies through most of the experience. No where near enough was done with the science fiction theme, and after catching my attention with an intriguing set up, the game then lost me with a generally dull plot that it was never quite able to claw back.
I'm sure the developers went into NBA Playgrounds with the most noble of intentions, but this game is not the NBA I remembered. This game is one that young me would never have considered to be worth my allowance.
It's not a classic by any means, but it's different, interesting, and often quite clever. This is a developer with a bright future.
I appreciate that the game's also attempting to throw in some bullet hell elements and so on, but it's only middling at that kind of action too. There might be some limited interest in Deathstate for people who like to overcome difficulty spikes, but to be honest, you're better off dusting off that copy of the Gauntlet remake instead.
All in all, it's a generally smooth game let down by its idea of scale.
What Flinthook does do well is keep the variety of enemies, rooms, and environments strong from start to finish, and, generally speaking, the difficulty curve is reasonable. There's always the risk that random elements means a game will take massive momentary spikes in difficulty when you get unlucky and the algorithms work against you. Flinthook avoids that, and progress through the game does feel good, but it struggles to be compelling.
Unfortunately, Operation Babel: New Tokyo Legacy just asks too much of its players. An overwhelmingly pointless narrative, coupled with archaic systems and a user interface that tries to fight with the player at every turn make for a game that really drags at times.
Syberia 3 feels like a game that was made because everyone involved in the project felt an obligation to make it. It has its moments, and as a fan it's great to see Sokal's work reach a proper conclusion, but it's also difficult to see how this game will find an audience; even among existing fans of Syberia, tastes change over 13 years, and it's hard to see how this game has done anything to encourage people back for one more spin with Kate Walker.
Properly articulating what Birthdays means to me is difficult. It is the embodiment of the pure joy of gaming, where I can sit down and simply immerse myself within this space without feeling pressure or tension. There's nothing to "win," but everything to enjoy while, at the same time, the game is pointing out, in its very innocent and heartfelt way, a very simple but so important environmental message.
I've rarely been as delighted in simply immersing myself into a game as I've been with GNOG. It's weird, it's colourful, it's creative, and every time I completed a puzzle box, and was given another "parcel" to unwrap and unlock another puzzle, I couldn't wait to tear the parcel open, if for no other reason than to see just what kind of beautiful lunacy I'd get to see next.
It might not be the most refined experience (something young Burton's films were often guilty of as well), but that vision, and the rare mastery over a horror many of us feel but struggle to articulate, makes this game frequently surprising, intense, and always sublime.
It's the eye for historical detail that has always made Romance of the Three Kingdoms games so compelling. Like it shows with the Dynasty Warriors series, Koei really knows - and respects - ancient Chinese history, and while the Fame & Strategy expansion pack makes the base game even more strategically complex, the stories that the game tells, even when you'll be spending most of the game looking at a beautiful, but dry, map, makes this also one of the most accessible 4X strategy games ever created.
There's not much else I can say about Chaos Code. It works, but it's in an overloaded genre where, not only do you have big "blockbuster" options, from Dead or Alive through the soon-to-be released Tekken 7, but there's also a real wealth of options in the niche spaces, from BlazBlue through to a game featuring all your favourite characters from Nitroplus' game franchises.
As a horror experience Outlast 2 works as a bit of grindhouse exploitation. It's intense, it's sharp, and it's a grisly, beautiful game. But it's also so linear and tries to be so cinematic that it opens itself to comparisons to similar stories told in other media, and as weird as it is to say, Outlast 2 is also far too safe.
I've played a lot of visual novels in my time, and a lot of them are favourite games, but I've got to say, as a student of Japanese history, and a lover of good storytelling, Hakuoki is right up there with my favourite games ever made. Any game that, after finishing, I can put down and say to myself "if that story was presented to me as a novel I would have loved it just as much," is a good game, as far as I'm concerned.