Well, last month was Monster Hunter month…kind of. Wilds released on the last day of February, but it feels like the entire month was building towards it. Maybe that’s only true in the circles I hang out in, but I swear I heard very little else aside from Monster Hunter chatter all throughout February.

Either way, my computer can’t run the game, so…no Monster Hunter for me. Instead, I got up to playing a handful of other games.

Jump to:

Pokémon Emerald

Starting off February, I decided I hadn’t quite had enough Pokémon with Blue Rescue Team, so I decided to start another playthrough of Pokémon Emerald.

But you know what? I didn’t actually finish the game, nor do I intend to.

I’ve played through Emerald more times than I can count, but I always forget exactly how boring the second half of the game is. You spend so much time crossing bodies of water, while fighting (almost) nothing but Water type Pokémon. This makes an already intensely repetitive game feel even more stagnant. With a mountain of other games that I actively want to play, including a much more enjoyable party-centric RPG, I just couldn’t hack it, and cut my nostalgia trip short.

And before anyone says it: yes I am, in fact, aware that Hoenn’s waterlogged design ties into Emerald’s story. Counterpoint: that doesn’t make it any less tedious to play through. Doubly so since it seems that all of these Water type trainers have only ever heard of Tentacool, Wingull, and Goldeen. All you need is one good Electric type Pokémon, and you’re good to go.

A quick reminder that my opinions don’t retroactively tarnish the time you’ve spent with the game, nor any positive memories that you have from playing it. Heck, until this recent playthrough I had (mostly) positive things to say about Emerald myself. Though this whole experience has got me wondering if we should’ve let the Too Much Water lady cook. She might’ve been onto something.

Notes from editing: I couldn’t find a half decent trailer for the original Gameboy Advance game, so I’m just using the animated trailer from the 3DS games.

Guilty Gear Xrd

I haven’t yet written about my experience going to a bar once a week to play fighting games in-person, but I intend to.

However, one of the benefits of going to locals is that you’re surrounded by many people with a shared interest in fighting games. This makes it a lot easier to find people to play with if there is an older game that you’ve always wanted to try, but missed during its original heyday.

Remember, I’m the guy who spent 9 months playing the same person in Guilty Gear Strive, so I only really need 1 other person to have fun. Doubly so if the other person knows a thing, or 2 about the game in question. This can help to remove some of the friction from the learning process, which ends up meaning I have more fun.

Luckily for me, there are several Xrd gamers at my locals, and they were very excited when I showed interest in playing an older Guilty Gear. They basically rolled out the red carpet for me when they saw I was playing Xrd. I was drowning in tips by the end of the night. Unfortunately, I didn’t retain most of it because my brain isn’t a sponge anymore (and I was drinking), but I’m sure they’ll all be more than happy to share the information again once I’m ready to receive it.

I suppose the other thing worth mentioning here is that Guilty Gear Xrd is the reason why I wanted to learn to play “real” fighting games. I’ve already written in the past how Smash Bros was my introduction to fighting games, but Xrd was the game that made me go, “Damn. I really want to play that.”

There are a variety of reasons why I hadn’t gone back to play Xrd, but, hilariously, all of those impediments have evaporated. Rollback netcode was added to the game in 2023, so it’s far more playable online, and I also have an entire community of people that I can play Xrd with locally. As such, it just feels like a good time to jump in.

As far as my time spent actually playing Xrd is concerned, most folks who are in lobbies are fairly friendly, so I’ve had a good time. May is a playable character in Xrd, but I’ve swapped to playing Elphelt instead. Partly because Xrd May feels significantly different from how she plays in Strive, and partly because Elphelt is unbelievably strong in Xrd.

Also, floppy anime tiddies.

It’s still early days, but I’ve been having a lot of fun playing Xrd. I honestly could have, and should have started playing it before now, but I’m glad I finally bit the bullet. I have a feeling that, long term, Guilty Gear Xrd could become one of my favourite fighting games, if not my absolute favourite. We will see what the future holds as I continue to play it.

Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist

Next we have Ender Magnolia, which I had intended to review. I think I still will, so I’m going to keep this section light instead of going whole hog.

For those not in the know, Ender Magnolia is the sequel to Ender Lilies. Both are Metroidvanias where you control a tiny girl who uses homunculi to fight on her behalf. As such, instead of unlocking random power-ups, you defeat different boss homunculi, and then enlist them into your service to gain their abilities for traversing the world, fighting baddies, or both.

There are aspects of Ender Lilies that I really enjoyed, but I didn’t find the whole package to be as compelling as some other games (I’m sure you know which ones) within the Metroidvania subgenre.

Generally speaking, my opinion hasn’t shifted too dramatically with Ender Magnolia. I think the sequel makes a lot of small improvements over its predecessor, but a lot of the aspects of the original that didn’t jive with me still don’t jive with me in the sequel. To be clear, that’s fine. A lot of the things that I’d like to see changed would actively make the game worse for most of the player population. This is just me wishing that the game was a little more tailored to my specific sensibilities.

Either way, it still gets a thumbs up from me, doubly so if you don’t typically jive with this sort of title. I’ll have a much more laborious breakdown of my personal pros, and cons in a review that’ll probably go live in a couple weeks, so check back in later if you want more information on Ender Magnolia.

Nine Sols

More Metroidvanias? Yes.

Upon completing Nine Sols, I decided I wanted to write a guide for it. There were a handful of times where I was completely stuck fighting certain bosses, but random tidbits of advice from internet strangers helped me to push through to a win. That made me think that there might be room for an article that lays out all of the tricks for beating Nine Sols’ different bosses, and so I got to work.

It turns out that writing a guide for a game’s entire roster of bosses is really time consuming. At the time of writing, I’m almost done creating the guide, but holy shit did it take way longer to write than I originally thought that it would. Never mind that I had to replay through the entirety of Nine Sols again to collect video footage of the bosses, fact check what I’d written, and test if there were easier ways to secure a win. Even just listing that out makes it sound like a lot of work, so I have no idea why I thought it would be straightforward when I originally conceived the idea.

Regardless, I have a very different perspective on Nine Sols now after playing the game a second time. I still think it’s more Sekiro than Metroidvania, but Nine Sols is significantly more fun on repeat playthroughs because you know what you’re doing.

In a lot of ways, my second playthrough reminds me of what it was like to replay Devil May Cry, or Bayonetta. So much information is thrown at you during your first playthrough of either of those games, and I find it really challenging to parse all of that information. This means, more often than not, that my first playthrough is a complete dumpster fire. I need time to learn mechanics, and combos like I do with fighting games. That takes weeks (or months) of practice before I’ve finally digested everything fully, and am ready to truly play the game.

As it would turn out, I’ve had enough time to digest Nine Sols, so my second playthrough looked completely different from my first. I was taking way more risks while exploring, which made the process of running through the game’s world a lot faster, and a lot more exciting. It turns out when you’re actually engaging with the platforming, the platforming is fun. Who’d ‘ave thought.

Also, the boss fights were even more fun than they were the first time around. Obviously, I had to spend a lot more time with them to document everything I needed for the guide, but it was crazy to see how much more competent I was while fighting everyone during my second playthrough. I think Jiequan was the single best example. That guy beat me senseless during my first playthrough, but I almost killed him by accident during my first attempt in my second playthrough. Unfortunately, I couldn’t 1 and done him since I needed more video footage, but it was still awesome to see how much I’d visibly improved at Nine Sols compared to my first time playing it.

So yeah – Nine Sols is still a really cool game. You should play it, and then replay. Trust me.

Demos (Various Games)

Finally, I wanted to touch on the demos I was playing throughout February because I spent a lot of time playing demos last month. Like just…look at what I wrote in February. There’s 2 Demo Dives, and 3 articles for the February Steam Next Fest. I think I actually spent more time playing demos in February than I spent playing Ender Magnolia.

Regardless, there’s a lot of really promising titles coming out in the next several months. I have a tendency to lose sight of how often exciting new releases drop, but March looks as stacked as February was, albeit with titles that have much smaller development budgets.

If you happened to miss any of my Next Fest coverage from last week then you can find those articles here:

  • Round 1 ft. Asgard’s Fall, Ghost Hand, Is This Seat Taken, Gnomes, and Haste: Broken Worlds
  • Round 2 ft. Mudborne, Isopod: A Webbed Spin-Off, Demon Tides, and Dark Deity 2
  • Round 3 ft. Kero Quest 64, Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping, He is Coming, and Wanderstop

There was also Demo Dives written for The King is Watching, and Monster Train 2 which participated in the Next Fest. I didn’t feel the need to cover both of them again as I’d already done so in detail. Well – that and I spent almost 8 hours playing Monster Train 2. I’m really looking forward to the full release of that one. It’s probably – no definitely – my most anticipated game of the year, especially since my computer can’t handle Monster Hunter Wilds.

Alrighty – that’ll do us for February. I’m not exactly sure what’s on the agenda for this month. I mean, obviously the Nine Sols guide, but I’m not sure what else. Writing that guide already completely destroyed my schedule from February, so there’s a few things I still want to write from my backlog. However, there’s also some reviews I’d like to do this month too.

I guess I’ll just see where the wind takes me.

Thank you as always for reading, and I hope to see you in the next one.

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