Nioh 2: Aria of Sorrow

February seems to be Nioh month because I played Nioh 1 almost 6 years ago in February while I was waiting for Dark Souls 3’s final DLC to come out. Elden Ring hasn’t made a sound about its DLC yet so I guess the similarities end here.

But you know where the similarities pick up again? Take a wild guess.

What makes Blue Archive so popular?

Ten years ago I poorly explained three multimedia franchises that were booming within the burgeoning internet communities of the 2010s. Today, I hope to try in competently explaining why I think another booming franchise with cute anime girls is doing well for itself.

The topic of today’s analysis is Blue Archive, a Korean Gacha Game that has recently just celebrated its 2nd Anniversary and is enjoying a boom in popularity. I myself picked this game up a month or two after its global server release last year and seeing the reactions to it have been entertaining and in my mind, well deserved. Blue Archive is not my first gacha game, I’ve been afflicted by this genre since 2017 when FGO caught me in its clutches and then Azur Lane entered my life a year later. With multiple years under my belt, I kind of knew what to expect, but Blue Archive definitely lands on a different strike zone compared to the other two.

Yakuza 6- The Cycle of Love and Hate

If chasing one’s dreams is the heavy-handed theme of Yakuza 5, familial relationships would be the one for Yakuza 6, although a bit more competently conveyed. I took a longer than average break between my playthrough of Yakuza 5 and 6 compared to how long I waited between 3 to 4 and then 4 to 5 and that was initially because of not only burnout from Yakuza 5 but also because I didn’t expect any good from the plot when the cover featured Haruka but also her son. After what Haruka dragged me through in Yakuza 5, I wasn’t sure if I could take more of it and I shelved Yakuza 6 for a while after tasting the first 5 minutes with the introduction (more of a return in my case) to the Dragon Engine tutorial fight with Nagumo.

When I came back however I was pleasantly surprised with what I got.

Ruined King: A League of Legends Story- Two Steps Forward and a Half Step Back

I sat on the Battle Chasers post for nearly 3 years because I didn’t have a lot of pics of my playthrough so I made sure to take as many as I could for Ruined King. Lo and behold, I took up close to 300 pictures when I needed less than 10 for this post.

Riot has really spread its wings after developing their single game for the better part of a decade, no doubt tired from balancing Summoner’s Rift for the millionth time. Between the incredibly successful Arcane and breaking out into different game genres such as Valorant and even having a fighting game in production. One of the other additions to multimedia franchises was Ruined King and I was pretty excited to learn it was made by none other than Airship Syndicate. News for the game didn’t really show up for a while until the game just released and I wasn’t able to get my hands on it for at least a year until it finally went on sale 2 months ago. Personally, while I believe it is superior to Battle Chasers in many ways, a couple issues hold it back from being as memorable.

ELDEN RING- The Price of Ambition

I’ve put this one off for nearly a year so let’s talk about our proud 2022 Game of the Year winner. As far as my opinion goes, it didn’t really have that much competition. The math tells me it took 52 days for me to finish Elden Ring but I count around 46 because I took a couple days off because I was busy with obligations and had no time to fit in a session because most of the early game stuff would take me like 4-5 hours a day, this game is THAT hard to put down. Allow me to preface this by also saying that I apologize for so many of the pictures being boring UI/Menu stuff, I mostly discuss the newer additions to the game as a long-time player of Fromsoft games so those were the elements I liked to discuss.

Let’s review the calendar and rewind the clock a bit. The last Fromsoft game was Sekiro in 2019 and Dark Souls 3 was another 3 years before that in 2016. You could consider the Demon’s Souls remake as one but that doesn’t count for me since I already played the original. It’s been SIX YEARS since we’ve had a traditional souls game and it definitely feels like it has been that long because it was such a refreshing system to return to. I was so glad to be back that I spent the first two hours of Elden Ring killing the Tree Sentinel because I knew I could do it. I was laughing through the whole thing as I committed his patterns to memory and finally killed him and unleashed myself to the rest of the game’s world.

Now, there’s no real reason for me to explain the gameplay of Elden Ring but I will be talking about the changes and my impressions on the new additions to the core gameplay. Then we’ll address the open world and the few of my issues for the experience.

Battle Chasers Nightwar: Some-when in Time

I’ve held this off for 3 years with the intent to take better pictures of the game’s screenshots out of sheer respect for the fun I had with this game. I had wanted to go through this game’s NG+ run through for the Platinum and take proper screenshots as necessary. Clearly I’m late with that promise and I still haven’t completed that NG+ run through, especially with how unforgiving some of the mechanics can be before you start one-shotting everything. Now that I’m almost finished with Ruined King, I wanted to close the book on this one before I moved on.

When you explicitly list inspirations from Final Fantasy, Suikoden, Chrono Trigger, and Phantasy Star, you know that you’re going to get something quaint.

Disco Elysium- Brain Blast

Writing about this game is going to be pretty tough since it’s not so much a videogame experience as compared to a point and click adventure game with a lot of fun dialogue. If I was to describe Disco Elysium in a single world it would be “cerebral” because one of the most charming points was how the player character’s different brain functions would converse with each other as if they were your party members. Playing off on that, the entire world of Disco Elysium is a detailed alternate universe history where historical parallels have made an entirely different world and it is presented to you in a pleasantly weird and unique way.

I apologize in advance for the lack of pictures. For one, they delayed this post for at least a couple months and also because I don’t have much variety here aside from some quick thoughts.