Spring Anime Skirmish 2022: Round 1

May is the month where I dedicate my blog to the world of anime! I’ve done this in various ways over the past few years, but for 2022, I decided to do something I normally wouldn’t do and dive into the spring anime season while it’s still fresh. I’m the type of person who prefers to binge watch shows as my memory is pretty terrible for single episodes, but there were just so many shows that caught my interest this season that I couldn’t wait for them to finish airing. I decided to turn this endeavour into some sort of “anime battle” to find some new favourites, so I spent my long bank holiday weekend watching the introductory episodes of 16 different anime from the spring season.

Monthly Summary: April 2022

It’s the end of April already, which means it’s time for another Monthly Summary! I’m pleased with the progress I made this month by finishing 3 games and I also started some more great games that have been in the backlog for way too long. I’m trying my best to work through some of the longer games I’ve previously put aside in between new releases and I even hosted my first Twitter poll on which game I should play next. This was actually a lot of fun and I’ll probably end up doing this every time I need to start a new game as I waste so much time trying to decide when I could be putting that time into a game. Music releases have also been phenomenal this month which has encouraged me to play my guitar more in between gaming with hopes of someday releasing my own covers…

That’s a topic for another day, so let’s take a look at my month in gaming. Here’s what I got up to during April:

Otome Announcements: March 2022

Last August, I wrote an Otome Announcements post featuring all of the new titles announced by Aksys Games and Idea Factory International. A lot has changed since then with some of those titles now out and other localisations being confirmed, so I thought I’d do an up-to-date post including all the new information! It’s been a just over a week since the major announcements during the NGPX show on Thursday 31st March, and although I’m a little late, I still thought now would be the perfect time to update things all in the same place and keep everyone in the loop!

Here’s all the info on 10 confirmed otome games and further details of the IFI Mystery Title:

Monthly Summary: March 2022

Welcome to another Monthly summary here on gamergal.exe! I was correct with my previous prediction that I would be using March to continue with the games I’d started last month, and although I managed to cross one of the list, I still have one to go and a new edition. I didn’t play a large selection of games due to this, but I’ve played each one enough to give what I feel is a valid opinion of them all. March has also been an incredible month for music, so be sure to check the bottom of this post for updates on new music coming out of Japan! So, let’s take a look at March’s report:

Priority Backlog 2022!

Welcome to post no.333 here on gamergal.exe! I’m writing this post in place of the celebratory 5th anniversary post I had planned about my Top 30 games of all time – it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it ended up being so incredibly long and detailed that I didn’t have the time to finish it. It’s been a busy month but I knew I had to at least write something to mark the occasion.

Anyway, back to the topic in hand – a topic everyone loves to complain about: the backlog. With over 250 games in my Steam backlog and a couple of handfuls of other titles elsewhere, it’s is quite frankly a problem. Things were different at the start of the year. I’d pretty much walled off my backlog due to the amount of new releases I was excited to play throughout 2022 as I’d made the decision to play as many as possible. I made a list of 15 games I was looking forward to back in January, but this in fact didn’t even cover half of the upcoming games list I had jotted down in preparation…

The Great JRPG Showdown!

Today, I am submitting my entry to The Great JRPG Showdown, a new community event created by pix1001 and Winst0lf! I’ve always admired JRPGs from afar with views of sinking my thumbs into some highly praised titles, but unfortunately due to the nature of these games often being crazily long, I’ve never managed to find the time. For this reason, and the fact that I’m always spoiled for choice, I’ve only managed to finish a select few. However, the handful that I have played certainly deserve some praise, so here I am to do just that!

Here are my Top 5 JRPGs in no particular order:

Steam Next Fest: February 2022

Steam held another one of their Next Fests a few weeks ago, featuring over 700 demos available for free from February 21st to the 28th. If you’re not familiar with these festivals, Steam host a week long event where hundreds of upcoming indie developers release demos for their games, and anyone with a Steam account can download them to play completely for free! This is the perfect opportunity to gauge your interest in some new games and show your support to indie devs at the same time!

It’s become some sort of tradition for me and WesleyWhale to take part in these festivals and it’s amazing to see just how far the event has come since we first saw one in the summer of 2020. We noticed a significant rise in quality this season and there seemed to be an incredible mixture of genres to choose from, including some multiplayer games! Since the schedule was changed from the usual Thursday evening start to a Monday, I ended up with a lot of wasted time waiting for the weekend to roll around, hence this blog being slightly on the delayed side… but better late than never!

During Steam’s previous Next Fest back in October, we managed to play 21 demos which really stressed us out due to the time limitations, so we both decided we weren’t about to repeat that. After scrolling through the store page, we settled on 14 demos that we wanted to try, but after dropping a few of these and mixing things up a bit over the course of the weekend, we ended up playing 16 overall. Around half of these were a joint experience with WesleyWhale, but I played a few more by myself this time. We’ve reused our previous format for ease of reading and also included our brief thoughts individually as to whether we’d be interested in the full game or not. Please take note that we use 3/5 as our average score, but everything else should be pretty self explanatory.

One last thing, these games are listed in the order we played them and not by favouritism. If you’d like to see our favourites, we’ve each listed our top 3 at the bottom of the post! With that out the way, let’s get to the demos!

Monthly Summary: February 2022

Welcome to another Monthly Summary here on gamergal.exe! February has been pretty jam packed thanks to the new releases coming so I can already feel myself using March to catch up on everything I need to. I’m in a much better head space than I was last month and I feel much more excited about gaming again so I’ve dropped the J-Dramas and my full attention is back on the games – I’m even spending much more time writing here than usual! I have plenty more stuff in the works for March, but before I get onto that, let’s take a look at what February had in store:

Otome Backlog [2022]

After the disappointment of Aksys Games announcing Piofiore Episodio 1926, Lover Pretend AND Paradigm Paradox all for a ‘Fall 2022’ release, with Kimi wa Yukima ni Koinegau for 2023, there’s a lot of time between the release of Variable Barricade and Aksys Games’ next (assumed) release of Piofiore Episodio 1926. Although Idea Factory International still have Birushana: Rising Flower of Genpei and another mystery title (rumoured to be the Cupid Paradise FD ‘Sweet & Spicy Darling’) up their sleeve, they haven’t confirmed any release dates either, although July 1st has been set as Birushana’s release date on the website I buy my games from. There’s also talk of PQube possibly having acquired the localisation to a new otome game, but again this is all uncertain for the time being with claims based solely on Twitter reactions and some reading between the lines.

Assuming there will be no new otome releases between February and “Fall”, that means there’s a lot of time to catch up on the otome backlog. So, which games are in my otome backlog, you may wonder. My gaming backlog in general is pretty hectic, but there isn’t an awful lot left in terms of otome, which leads to the topic of this post. Here are 5 games that are currently in my otome backlog which I hope to find time to play before “Fall” – whenever that is.

Upcoming 2022 Games

There are so many games that I’m excited for this year! I watched a whopping 35 trailers for games expected to be released during 2022 to create a Top 11 Upcoming Games list like I did last year, however, there were just so many great titles announced that I found it incredibly difficult to it narrow down. Therefore, I present my Top 15 Upcoming 2022 Games list featuring, you guessed it, 15 brand new games! Unfortunately, a handful of these games have very vague release dates, if any at all, so it could be likely we won’t even see some of them this year. Even so, there’s still plenty to look forward to at various points throughout the year, so, let’s take a look at some upcoming 2022 releases!