Monthly Summary: April 2024

It’s Monthly Summary time again! April has been a fairly steady month, yet I’ve filled my time with some incredible media – if only everything could be this good all the time! I’ve crossed off another few games from the backlog list, watched some excellent anime and J-Dramas, and the amount of amazing songs released this month has been overwhelming. It’s actually super nice to end a month not feeling like I could’ve spent my time better elsewhere. With that in mind, here’s what I got up to:

Sympathy Kiss Review

Sympathy Kiss is a slice-of-life, office romance, otome visual novel that was first released in Japan in November 2022 for the Nintendo Switch. The game was developed by Design Factory / Otomate, and published by Idea Factory, then later localised in English and brought to the west by Idea Factory International in February 2024.

I’d been desperately awaiting Sympathy Kiss ever since it was announced for localisation in July 2023 and it remained as my most anticipated release ever since. After getting stuck straight into the game on release day and finishing it all in less than 2 weeks, I can now confidently say that I was right to be so excited as I thoroughly enjoyed every second! After digesting my experience, I can now say I loved Sympathy Kiss even more than I initially thought – so much so, that I felt compelled to write a review!

Monthly Summary: March 2024

It’s the end of the month, which means it’s Monthly Summary time again! March has been a pretty crazy month for gaming and I’m incredibly pleased with my progress as well as the quality of the all the games I chose to play! Some of these titles have even encouraged me to write again, so I hope to work on some reviews in the near future. It’s great to feel this excited about gaming again, and also to be inspired to make more content for this blog! Here’s what I got up to:

The Co-op Chronicles: 7 Top-Tier Co-op Games

Today, this little blog celebrates it’s 7th birthday! A lot has changed over the years with this space starting life as a place for Guild Wars 2 guides and Smite patch notes, evolving into a spot for some sporadic game reviews, anime lists and now even music posts, but despite the content changing, one thing has always remained the same… I’ve always come back to share my favourite things over the years.

I was struggling to come up with an idea on how I should mark this pretty huge milestone, until it suddenly became obvious that there’s one small section of my gaming preferences that I don’t often talk about here – local co-op games! When people typically think about local co-op games, it’s usually party games that come to mind. I decided to specifically avoid party games on this occasion to show that there are plenty of other amazing games out there that you can play with a friend, or three, that have much more depth to them. I absolutely LOVE to play video games with my fiancée and we’ve found some absolute bangers over the years, so today I’d like to kick off The Co-op Chronicles, a blogging series dedicated to co-op gaming, and share 7 of our favourite local co-op games that I think everyone should give a go!

Monthly Summary: February 2024

Hello and welcome to another Monthly Summary here at gamergal.exe! February has been another productive month despite it being the shortest of the year (even if we do get an extra day this time)! There’s been plenty of super exciting things happen this month with the release of one of my most anticipated games, an online live by one of my favourite artists, and some other great games and manga picks to top it all off! Let’s get started!

#LoveYourBacklog 2024

It’s backlog appreciation time again! Kim over at Later Levels has once again dedicated the month of February to showing some love for our backlogs, something every gamer should really do every once in a while. Kim has once again provided a small list of brand new prompts for anyone to answer and join in the fun, as well as supplying badges for us all to feature in our posts!

Top 15 Otome Opening Songs

Happy Valentine’s Day! ❤ What better day for an otome appreciation post than today? For the past few years, I’ve dedicated February 14th to an otome post here on the blog with my previous entries being answers to the prompts for Otome V-day week – a series of questions that were popular on Twitter a while back (see my posts for 2021, 2022 and 2023 here – contains mild spoilers). I wanted to do the same this year, but my answers haven’t really changed all that much over the past year (apart from finding a new best boy in Virche’s Lucas), so I opted for something different – appreciation of otome OP songs! I’ve been wanting to share my favourite opening songs for a while and never found the right opportunity, so I’m taking that chance now! Let’s go!

Monthly Summary: January 2024

Welcome to the first Monthly Summary of 2024 here at gamergal.exe! I’m honestly amazed at how much stuff I’ve managed to cram into the past few weeks, whether it be games, manga, dramas or music! I haven’t invested a great amount of time in games this month, but I am really looking forward to a handful of February releases so I’m sure I’ll have much more gaming topics to report on then. I’m also hoping to start some more backlogged games too with a focus on some bigger titles. First though, let’s take a look at what happened during January!

Otome Localisation Announcements: 2024

Last year was an exciting time for English otome fans, and 2024 is already looking to be another strong year ahead with a bunch of games already announced! Since there’s so many, I decided to make a fresh post for the year that I can add to along the way. But for now, let’s take a look at what 2024 already has in store for otome gamers:

*These games are loosely listed in order of release

Completions List: 2023

Happy New Year! 🎉 Welcome to the first post of 2024 here at gamergal.exe where I’ll be taking a look back at all the games I finished during 2023. I managed to finish another 35 games as I have done for the previous two years (happy coincidence, again) which I documented on a nerdy spreadsheet – so here’s a post showing my results!