 2023 might have been the best year of video gaming I've ever experienced. It was like 1993 of basketball or 2018 of ninja, you know, can only get worse. But here we are in 2024. And you know, the start of a new year is always really slow in gaming as developers rush out their hot new release by Christmas time, regardless of the fact that it's actually finished or not. But I digress. Here's a bunch of games I've been playing that I really like, although there's a couple that I really don't. Hey, what? Hey, get out of here, you two. We're this close to hitting 2 million subs, and you guys are only going to help. Go on, get! Rebrushed, rehydrated, remodeled, reboot. So many classics. Persona went with Reloaded because, uh... Oh, I love the Persona series. And by that, I mean, I've never played a Shin Megami Tensai game, or even the first two Personas. But man, this is my favorite series. Persona 3 was the first in the bunch to add in the slice of life elements, where you're just a normal teenage kid living day to day life in Japan. And by normal day to day, I mean, at night, you defeat untold, unspeakable evil. I mean, you're essentially Batman without the mask, except in Persona 5 where you have the mask. The original Persona 3 first launched on PlayStation 2 back in 2006, later receiving an enhanced version in 2007 called Persona 3 Fez. Then they decided to slap this sucker on a PlayStation portable, but it removed a lot of the changes from Fez and added different stuff. The issue with all of these versions is that there was never one, this is the Persona 3 experience to play. Until, not even now, because this also is not complete. It is a full remake of the original core game. And it doesn't have any of the additional stuff that came later. I mean, blow my brains out. Having said all of that though, I still think that this Persona 3 Reloaded is the best version of the game to play, for the visual upgrade alone. I hope later on they release an upgraded Fez version of this game. So then it can finally be completed, and I can look back annoyed that I just spent 60 hours playing a worse version of the game. It's tradition. Oh hey, it's me in different clothes, because guess what? I've been taking so long to make this video, Persona 3 DLC just got announced. Yay, I was right. I don't know man, the developers said they weren't gonna do any extra content. I guess, thanks for lying. No really, thank you. I'm glad you lied. I want this. It's the missing PlayStation 2 epilogue content. We still don't have any of the PlayStation portable content, but we're one step closer. Oh, I spit a big shark! Oh! Surf shark. And they said I was bad at transition. Surf shark is a VPN. That's a virtual private network, if you didn't know, and why, what don't you want? Your own private network. I mean, it's like the difference between a basic economy plane where you're stuck with everybody else, just staring at your coffin all over you, making you sick probably, or, whoa, yeah, I get a private jet. How swanky is that? I mean, the only issue is this probably costs a fortune. What's that? All of this costs about the same as a cup of coffee? And I get to keep the pillows? A VPN will mask everything that you do online, keeping all of your information private. If anyone tries to hack in and snoop on you, it'll be like, oh, blurred out for them. They won't be able to see your credit card details. But other than keeping you safe online, there's some other fun things you can do with a VPN, like, I don't know, travel the globe? From the comfort of your own home, you can go to France, Australia, Japan, and while you're there, why don't you try logging in to Netflix, refresh the page, and watch all the region exclusive content pop up? Whoa, all of a sudden you have access to the entire Netflix library? That actually makes the $40 a month, or whatever they just hiked it up to recently, a little bit more worth it. There's no risk in trying it, because they have a 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can download Surfshark on all your devices. It's all the same account. You don't got to pay any extra. So if you want to surf the web privately, why don't you click that link down below? Use code beat-em-ups and get an extra three months free. That's right, baby. Three months free. You play as Makoto Yuki, or if you're a wacko, you can change the name to something else, which if you do that, I trust you just about as much as I trust someone that changes the link's name. What game are you playing? Makoto, as he is named, is transferred to this new city and new school, and as he steps off of the train, he finds just blood everywhere, and a bunch of coffins. He doesn't seem to care at all. I guess it doesn't even faze him. Where'd he transfer from, Detroit? Things only get weirder, though, as this small child makes you sign a contract and then disappears into the night. High schoolers come out of nowhere with handguns, and you're not supposed to question that yet, and then everything in your room just so happens to match the color of your hair. Turns out at the stroke of midnight, it turns into Twilight Zone, where all the people inhabiting the city just turn into coffins, except for a few people who have a special ability that allows them to not do that, and they can even summon their personas to fight the evil. How do they summon their personas, you might be asking? And the kids in the other persona games thought they had it tough. It's the mysteries upon mysteries that unravel as you play through the story that make the game that much more intriguing. Other than absolutely banging along with the awesome soundtracks, I mean, this is just my dormitory. I just walk through here to go to bed. The sacks does not have to code this hard. You spend your time on a day and night cycle, divvying up your school life, part-time jobs, relationships, eating giant burgers and more. Everything that you interact with around the world will strengthen you as a person. Hanging out with friends will grow your relationships and open up more story with them individually. But doing all of this will not only open up a bunch of things for you to do in the real world, but will have a direct reaction to how you experience the dark hour. Here, you'll enter classic JRPG-style term-based battles. There is a rich and complex battle system here with strengths and weaknesses, party members switching on the fly, or all-out attacks. Also, all the creatures that you face, you can capture them all and use them as your persona, which adds a creature-collecting element to all of this akin to something like Pokimans. If Pokemon were sexy. These games are easily my favorite JRPGs, and by the time I finish one, I always feel just so sad and defeated, like I'm losing all these friendships that I've made. Over the last 150 hours of gameplay, I mean, geez, these games could be a little shorter, so I don't feel such existential dread when I finish one. Speaking of dread, I bought, played, and I'm hopefully going to return Skull of Bones. I mean, I just cyberpunk from time to time with its 11-year development cycle, but at least I finished that game. Skull and Bones also had a whopping 11-year development time. It looks worse than a game that came out almost two decades ago. That's impressive for all the wrong reasons. They set out to try and recreate elements from Assassin's Creed 4. I loved Assassin's Creed back in the day. I started with Assassin's Creed 2, which is why Ezio will always be my boy. I loved almost all the Assassin's Creed games up until Unity. That's just when my heart shattered into a thousand buggy little pieces. People often remember the fourth Assassin's Creed for the pirating ship mechanics that it included, but did you know that they actually had those in Assassin's Creed 3? You could sail a ship, shoot cannons, even board enemy ships. I mean, that part was a cutscene that after it played allowed you to take over on the enemy ship, but that was still really cool, you know, for the time. Growing up, Pirates of the Caribbean was also just one of my favorite movies and I used to be obsessed with pirate games. I used to play this one called Sea Dogs. It was an RPG with all of the ship-battling mechanics my little baby gamer brain could have wanted. They even made a sequel, which in development ended up getting bought out and it became a Pirates of the Caribbean game instead. So it was literally Sea Dogs 2. One of my favorite games got a sequel and it was my favorite movie, 13 Year Old Me, losing his mind. So now you know that at that time, I was a big fan of Assassin's Creed and Pirates and Pirate Games in general. You could imagine how I felt when ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. That's Game of Thrones. Part of the Assassin's Creed series, so it actually had a budget. Pirate games were kind of niche back then and no one really had the money to make it good, but this was back when Ubisoft actually tried. You took the helm of the Jack Door, armed with all types of different cannon ammo, like chain shots or mortars. You could have Grazier ships to have more cannons or even add the ability to ram into other ships. There was so much strategy in how to maneuver around the battles and the ships felt weighted and real. You could walk around your ship whenever you wanted, explore shipwrecks and islands freely. You could swim. We'll get back to that. Bored enemy ships in real time. You just grabbed a rope and your jack sparrowed on board and started just stabbing. It was so cool. I guess Ubisoft saw the value in this and decided to spend the next 11 years fleshing that out and making it its own game. And now we have Skull and Bones. And you can't do anything that you could do in Black Flag. Ship battles are boiled down to holding the left trigger and then rapid firing with the right trigger. Kind of just feels like playing Call of Duty with boats. The ships now maneuver like cars and GTA. It's like they have no resistance to the waves or the ocean at all. You can't swim in a pirate game. If you want to get off the ship and explore land or a shipwreck, it cuts to an awkward and clunky black screen as you load into the land. Boarding an enemy ship isn't even possible. You can activate a boarding process where it has a little cutscene and then just brings up some text that says boarding successful. You see some cool loot in the ocean you want to grab? Sail on by, press a button, and then it will pop up text that says what you got. The visuals in Skull and Bones are worse than the 15 year old Assassin's Creed Black Flag. One of my favorite things about Sea of Thieves is the water. I swear, sometimes when I'm really stressed out, I just load up Sea of Thieves on my TV. I sit on the beach and just listen to the waves crash on the ocean. And suddenly all my feelings of wanting to summon my persona just melt away. Then they come flooding on right back as my gameplay is interrupted by a Ubisoft pop-up that says, don't forget, this game isn't even complete. And I mean, hey, Ubisoft, some nice cosplay there. Who's the real pirate? This one really stings as somebody who's a big fan of pirates and pirate games. But you know what makes it even worse? You remember the sea dogs and Pirates of the Caribbean game I gushed about earlier that I loved as a kid? Yeah, those were published by Ubisoft as well. I don't know what happened to Ubisoft or when they stopped trying, but I think it's safe to say the best years of this developer might be behind us. Oh, I'm a kid now. I'm a squid now. Splatoon 3 Side Order DLC. I did hear that this Side Order DLC was like Hades meets Splatoon. Even before that, I was a little intrigued by this because of the art style alone. In a game series that's known for its bright, vibrant colors, they completely stripped all of that paint out. See what I did there? Like paint, paint strip? Never mind. That was funny. Now we have this bland, but still sick looking world. And that mixed with the promise of roguelike elements. Oh boy, I'm hooked. You get it? Like fish, like you hooked. This idea of adding a roguelike as DLC into an existing game worked so well for God of War. Hey, that sounded sarcastic. No, it actually did work really well. I've been playing that too. Side Order has you play in a giant tower. You ride in an elevator and you're given a blank color palette. Before each floor, you get to pick what type of room you go to next. And depending on what you pick, you'll get a different color chip to add into your palette. Are you following me? These chips upgrade you in many different ways from adding to your damage or giving you piercing rounds, lock on shots, making your ink last longer, but you can't just go picking chips willy-nilly because often the better the chip, the harder the room. These rooms aren't just waves of enemies for you to defeat, but rather they're challenge rooms with a specific goal, like destroy the enemy spawning portals, chase down these motorbike fish, defend a zone, and a bunch of others. And then you have the typical flair of a boss flight every 10 floors, currency you can only spend on the run and you'll lose it at the end of the run, permanent currency that you get to keep and then you get to upgrade yourself after the run. I mean, you've played Hades. Now, two things. One, I really love what they did here by creating these Zelda shrine style challenge rooms for every floor. There's so many different kinds and variations and it took way more effort and game design to build all of these than just rooms of enemies to splat. Two, I wish there was rooms of enemies to splat. As fun as some of these challenge rooms are, I want to sometimes just mindlessly kill things. I wish it was at least an option for some of the floors that I can just go in and kill some things. But the challenge rooms are what separate this from your typical rogue-like and it's very splatoon-y in of them to do, so I'm okay with it. More credit to the game design here. Some of these rooms ain't easy. Don't even get me started on the rigorous rooms. I don't even know what level of difficulty this is supposed to be, but I don't think I've ever survived one. At the end of a run, all your currency, chips, and floors are added up and converted into the permanent currency and then you can upgrade yourself by getting extra lives, damage output, discounts at vending machines. Look, you've played Hades. Also, you get keys for defeating bosses, and those keys can be used at a giant set of lockers, and as you open a locker, you might get a new color palette. That color palette will have a different weapon, a different sub-weapon, and then a different ultimate than any other color palette. And since you can only get three keys for each palette, it really encourages you to try different weapons for runs, and that helps keep it fresh. The only thing I don't like about that is there are certain weapons I just do not ever want to use that are, in my opinion, completely useless. If it's not a gun, I don't want it, especially the bucket. The bucket can go f**k itself. Splatoon 3's side order is probably the most fun I've ever had with Splatoon ever. I don't know, I'm a sucker for roguelikes, and this was very good. Also, the God of War Valhalla DLC is free and incredible and features a whole original story with cutscenes. The amount of weapon variation and customization that you can do, I was addicted to that for like a solid week. Speaking of God of War, actually, that's a good transition because they made a God of War VR game. I bet you didn't know it because I'm lying. I don't often get to talk about VR games because VR games are often not worth talking about. But just like Haley's Comet every once in a while, there's one that comes around and it's worth looking at Asgard's Wrath 2 is that game for me right now. And I'm not kidding about it being a completely unapologetic rip-off of God of War. Its setting is Norse mythology, and you will immediately meet all of the A-Star Norse God characters that you just met in Ragnarok at the very start of this game. And I know God of War didn't invent Norse mythology, but hold your knickers, there's more. For starters, you wield an axe that you can throw and then recall at will, and you can also leave it spinning in place. And I gotta be honest, this is so much freaking fun. There's even platforming in the way of predetermined ledges that you can hop up on. And then once you're up there, if you have solved the puzzle, you can drop a rope or a chain or a ladder that you can reclimb up later. I mean, it's the exact level layout from a God of War game. Epic set piece battles. You have you flying through the air. It's like an epic Dragon Ball Z fight. Okay, I know that none of this is actually infringing on God of War's copyrights, but the inspiration is clearly there. And while I'm playing this game, I feel like I'm Kratos, playing this weird spin-off God of War adventure in VR. And I'm pretty sure that's what it was supposed to feel like. The combat feels great with blocks and parries, timing your swings just right, weak spots to go after, or you could just spam your axe like crazy. But where this game really shines for me are these big puzzle rooms where you can take your godly form above move things around with your hands and then go back into the body of not Kratos and platform and explore the world differently, depending on how you move it around with your big boy hands. Which in between the two forms to solve these puzzles feels really organic and it's pretty cool. God, I know it looks so bad. There's something weird about VR where you just kind of have to be there when you're just looking at the gameplay recorded on a monitor. There's something about it that suddenly the coolest looking game just looks like Bubsy's 3D when you're watching it on your iPhone on the toilet. You just kind of have to believe me. If you own a Quest 3, this game is free. If you're one of the seven people watching this video that actually owns one of these, you're welcome. Wait, wait. Hi. Hey, how are you? Sorry, me in different clothes again. You can probably see where this is going. So my editor, Zach, had already completely finished editing this video. It's done. It's ready to go up. Oh boy, howdy. I had to go and f*** it all up by playing this. And I want to talk about it. I love this game. I wasn't even going to play it. I was not excited for it to release, and it might be my favorite thing. Back in the day, I was a Final Fantasy IX kid. All of my friends in school would always be talking about cloud this, cloud that, something about bust, a big bust. I don't know. I didn't care, man. You know why? Because of this guy, Z-Dane. He was my man. I mean, you want to talk about big old sword. This guy's got two of them and a tail like goat. Tail like Goku. Also, Erytha who? At least my girl and I can watch the credits together. So when the remake came around, no, I wasn't part of the crowd of screaming fans. But I did play it. I mean, they'd been working on it for years, and I wanted to see what they'd done with it. And oh boy, it was incredible. It's probably the best remake of a game to date. And without giving too much away, I adore what they did with the story. We all thought this was going to be a series of fleshed out remakes based on the original. Kind of like how they took that really great skinny Hobbit book and then stretched it out into three average big giant movies. Yeah, like that. But the Final Fantasy 7 remake was anything but just okay. They crammed so much extra content and story into the game to flesh out this world like never before. But on top of that though, throughout the game, they kept tweaking things, changing elements to the story and changing the fate of what actually happened to the characters. And the characters themselves started to become very aware that a story was being told about them and that their fates were predetermined. But they didn't want their stories to be told for them. They wanted to decide their own fate. By the time you get to the end, the Final Fantasy 7 remake, the whole remake part of it has just gone out of the window. Now it's a whole new thing. And oh boy, did you say whole new thing? This can't even be considered a remake anymore, which is made clear by the title of these two games, which is exactly what the characters were fighting for in the last game. They didn't want this to be a remake anymore. They wanted it to be a rebirth. All right, I've got to take this sweater off. I am like getting drenched in sweat. Rebirth starts with a short prologue of storytelling, similar to the first game, focusing on cloud and Sephiroth relationship and where it all went wrong. But then just a couple hours in, they throw you into the open world and just give you everything. I spent easily 10 hours just in the open world doing side quests, meeting characters, battling creatures, collecting material, scanning crystals, rounding up moogles, which by the way, what happened here? This is giving serious original Sonic movie vibes. In every new area, I put off moving on and doing any story beats until I finished every single little thing I can find around the world and I'm having so much fun doing that. And the best part of it is when I do decide to move on, the story is also awesome. Games like this only come around once every so often and I'm not even that big of a fan of Final Fantasy VII. If they did this to Final Fantasy IX, I'd be, I'd be buster, I'd be, I'd bust my big bust, my load sword. I'm not even sure what my favorite part of the game is, but the combat is refined to perfection. Cloud has his big sword and he can switch between two different styles, kind of a heavy and a light. Heifer is hand-to-hand combat and you can charge her up and unlock more attacks the more you charge up. Aerith is a mage and she uses wards and other spells and things of that nature. Barrett's got a big gun. This thing's a rat dog. They all have a laundry list of unique abilities they can use. You can stuff material into their clothes, weapons, swords, whatever and give them more abilities like elemental attacks. Each one has their own limit break, special attacks they can use. You can use special summons like you can literally summon gods to help you, although I don't know why you would when you can summon this cute chocobolan mucal combination. There's also tag team moves that you can do that usually are devastating attacks, but then will also give you bonuses into the battle. It's also complex, but then you can pause the gameplay and then activate that strategy side and pick what spells or abilities are best for that situation and it perfectly blends that old-school style of Final Fantasy VII but a new style that keeps my 2024 Gamer Brain actually invested in what's happening. It's so good. There's also so many nice little details inside jokes, animations that flesh out this game like whether you raise the sign by hand or when you're sat on the back of a chocobo it's a different animation. There's whole side missions where they animate little movements and details for that one mission like when you go to pick flowers and you have to hold a little picture and you look at it and you're like oh that's the flower and then when you pick it he picks the actual flower. They don't have to animate that. When you go to play Queen's Blood there's a neat little sword holder for Cloud to put his sword in which seems very specific just for Cloud like they knew he was coming along specifically and Queen's Blood alone I thought that would be just a fun mini game. I didn't expect that to dive into a deeper arcing storyline. Everything feels fleshed out even each of the individual side quests. The characters involved with them typically have motivation or some reason why you're doing the thing for them. The side quests are usually varied with what you're actually doing and then it leads to actually having merit in the world. And all of this happens in the game's engine too so the cutscenes end up bleeding straight back into the gameplay and it makes the whole thing feel so polished. All of the little details I keep stumbling upon flaw me every time. Like when I found out not only could you play the piano but they coded a whole piano hero game into it. Huh? The dialogue is so charming and endearing and just fun. It makes all the characters so likable and relatable. I say we get his ass up. Often it feels silly but always in a lighthearted way and it's just really upbeat and positive to play. This game is honestly on another level and I have nothing but good things to say. I have no complaints. Great game. Uh go go go play it. Oh but this video never ends. Hi now I'm vlogging. Now I'm now I'm down to the point of vlogging. Just because I want to get this video out I don't want to do any more green screen. It takes too long but I just played the Princess Peach Showtime demo and I wanted to talk about it. It's the first 30 minutes of the game and hey it's very cute. I think for a younger audience this game is going to be a lot of fun. It actually reminds me of games I used to play as like as a kid. Like the point and click interactive style games. You went screen by screen and just kind of interacted with what was on the screen around you and it was the joy and wonderment of just what happened every time you tried this or you tried that. It's not something I think I could enjoy personally as a 33 year old man. I'm not going to play through the whole game but for a younger crowd this is a very cute animated adventure. But yeah just a bite size little left to right platformer where you interact with the things around you and it's cute and it's fun. Not for me but uh yeah. That's a bunch of games that I've been playing lately. I hope this year is good for video games. I highly doubt that it'll compete with 2023 and looking at the list of games coming out in 2025 we might have another banger year on our hands. They just announced Pokemon Pizza. I'm actually very excited for that but there's not a lot that I'm looking forward to this year and I've been playing and making switch content now for the last seven years. Really looking forward to the Nintendo Switch 2 coming out in 2024. Watch that. Take a look behind me. No. No I don't think I will.