Mento's Month: January '26

This year's Mento's Month round-ups are going to be a bit more truncated: I'm dropping the Master System games (though they might turn up elsewhere; I've become more curious about the 8-bit exclusive Sonic game library after watching Grubbkles non-figuratively drowning in its riches) and sticking to whatever articles I managed to sneak past the site's moderators that month (don't spread it around but I might have an "in" in that regard, hush hush), reviews for contemporary games that don't fit into any of my other features, and of course plenty of anime talk. Gotta get all that weebness out of my system one way or another, and by golly if this course isn't the least unseemly of my options.

Game of the Month: Astro Bot (Team Asobi, 2024)

Astro Bot isn't actually the best game I played this month—that would be A Link to the Past, though it's an unfair contest to stack that up against mostly anything else—but it is still a very, very good 3D platformer for an ecosystem that is sorely lacking for same, given they've redirected their three best 3D mascot platformer crafters (Insomniac, Sucker Punch, Naughty Dog) to open-world mapslop or, in the case of the erstwhile Jak wranglers, overwrought and overproduced misery porn. Astro Bot did well enough to win the coveted Golden Keighley for Game of the Year in 2024, passing the baton-shaped loaf of bread to Sandfall Interactive the following event, so you don't really need to hear me tell you how good it is. But, hey, it'd be a pretty short review if I didn't.

Astro Bot, as I'm sure anyone with a PS5 already knows given it's the only remaining exclusive on there worth a damn (excepting the Demon's Souls remake, which looks pretty sharp, and Ghost of Yotei that's only going to remain a Sony exclusive for like a month longer tops), is a platformer in which Team Asobi's AIBO-esque space adventurer has to reassemble his crew's spaceship after it gets torn apart by a jerkass alien, along with reassembling said crew which have scattered to the four corners of the local cluster. Very much following in the vein of the extended demo that was Astro's Playroom, the game mixes things up by introducing mech suits that change the game mechanics slightly in much the same way Mario's caps might: for instance, there's a monkey suit that can climb up walls which requires you tilt your controller back and forth like a five-year-old playing their first racing game, and a Lunar Lander type of spaceship that you maneuver through tight spaces and no end of laser traps. Largely, the game's built like Super Mario Galaxy both in the cosmic setting sense and in the way most of its courses are linear enterprises that, while missing the exploration element that comes with the more open levels of a Mario Odyssey or 64, do at least make it easier to track missing collectibles such as crewmembers by having them displayed in sequence; i.e. if you're missing dude #3 he's probably somewhere along that stretch of railroad between dude #2 and dude #4.

What Astro Bot nails, and few other platformers outside of Mario can, is that feeling that every stage has something new to show you. A new visual style, a new game mechanic, a new trick that it has yet to pull on you; it's what helps the Mario games—and there are a lot of them, "mainline" be damned—stay fresh not only from one level to the next but one game to the next. I think if Asobi can maintain this bottomless well of ideas for platforming stages then the Astro Bot brand will continue to do just fine for them and Sony both, provided the latter sees the wisdom in throwing money at the former to make new ones. If I have any reservations at all it's in how the game occasionally takes on a bit of the floatiness and the unreliable platforms of the LittleBigPlanet franchise: the former in how it can be a little unintuitive to plan your jumps and the latter in how you can just be shoved off a platform if you're standing on its tip due to a "roundedness" that probably carries some verisimilitude given how standing on the very tip of something wouldn't fly for long (not without a bunch of frantic arm waving to regain ground) but doesn't feel all that great gameplay-wise to have your stable footing suddenly robbed from you. They're still relatively new to all this though and I'm sure it's something they're looking to buff out of subsequent games: I've certainly faith that they know what they're doing by now. I guess the only real impediment to making a sequel is digging up even more obscure PlayStation characters to cameo: they were pretty darn thorough with this one (though I take exception to them including Capcom's Arthur from Ghouls N' Ghosts when I'm pretty sure Maximo was a PS2 exclusive).

(Incidentally, I also completed Astro's Playroom for the first time this month too but as it's pretty much the MGSV: Ground Zeroes to Astro Bot's MGSV: The Phantom Pain I don't have much extra to say about it that isn't already covered with the tepid Astro Bot takes.)

Other Gaming Tomfoolery

I started a new feature in January that's going to be a recurring thing this year and potentially beyond, consolidating my RetroAchievements retro gaming examinations into various series- and console-specific features—last year it was the Master System and the WonderSwan before that—into a single entity that is free to bounce around platforms and eras all willy-nilly style. RetroPiece Theater, which is the name I eventually settled on, began with a look at the third Zelda game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: one I was eager to have the RA mastery badge for purely due to it being one of my favorite games. The Zelda series is known for its many secrets and that RA set is a great means of discovering what lies beneath the surface of the first 16-bit foray into Hyrule. I'd played the game normally several times through and more recently again via demented randomizers (I had a screenshot blog series for those, but as images in older stuff are a little on the fritz right now after the site transition I won't bother linking to it here) so it was easy to delude myself into believing I knew the game back to front: this RA set proved things different on the discovery front, while still giving me some tougher challenges to sink my teeth into which helped restore some of the original playthrough's, uh, bite. Man, metaphors, huh? Moving targets. Anyhoo, be sure to check out that article to see if your own self-observed omniscience of that particular game holds up under closer scrutiny, or if you're new to ALTTP or just haven't played it in a real long time there's plenty to learn from that piece for you as well.

The staff, once community articles started appearing on the front page of the site. Probably. Persecution complex? Moi?

The next RPT entry missed the "end of January" deadline I set for myself owing to it being a bit more substantial than I had anticipated, but it's a fascinating DS game I want to get into more when I pen its entry. It's called Ore ga Omae o Mamoru, or I Will Protect You, and it's a fan-translated exploraction game with a more Wizardry/PSO sort of mentality to it while technically not being an RPG. Real cool conceptually, if a bit grindy and tough to start, so I'll be sure to have a full rundown of that in early February once I've reached its conclusion.

They make you mark the save rooms yourself. What is this, Etrian Odyssey?

In other retro gaming venues I started what is perhaps an ill-advised Dark Cloud 2 run largely because RA recently incorporated a feature that lets you chase after a game's subsets—typically way harder goals or, in DC2's case, super grindy stuff like item farming, monster raising, and its golf ersatz Spheda—without having to load up a different patched version of the ROM/iso, which meant having to pursue the main set and subsets independently that was finicky as all heck if you were trying to get everything in one playthrough. There's a few more of these "main+subset" playthroughs where I was waiting on this multiset feature to transpire before embarking on them, like the original SNES Secret of Mana, so it seems the time might be right this year. (Or I could actually start making a dent in my PS4/PS5 backlog instead, but hey. Nothing wrong with being spoiled for choice.) At any rate, I'm midway through Chapter 3 of DC2's story—the point where Spheda is introduced—and I've been going back to previous dungeon floors to get all their medals now they're available; just passed 80 achievements in the main set and not even a 1/5 of the way through it yet, to give you some idea of how many there are (and how much there is to do in the game, for that matter). That'll be another RetroPiece Theater way, way down the road: as of now, it's my podcast game and I suspect I'll be pecking away at it for a while yet.

It's really the only way to travel.

Here over in the picross corner I'm still chipping away at the horrors of Colorful Logic, which might be one of the harder picross games I've played for multiple reasons (that jank interface for larger puzzles isn't getting any easier to navigate), and I've also starting tinkering with Konami's iOS/Android nonogram game Pixel Puzzle Collection, which I'm enjoying due to QoL features like automatically filling the rest of a row with Xs once you have all the necessary squares in place but I'm probably going to be butting up against its F2P features before long. It has this feature where you can fight "boss" puzzles, 4x4 grids of 15x15 puzzles (sixteen total per boss), but you can only attempt one of those 15x15 puzzles every three hours... unless, I suppose, you toss some money Konami's way. Except I haven't found a means to do that (not that I'm champing at the bit to do so) so I guess they just artificially lengthened this game in order to throw more ads your way? Truly, the mobile gaming space is a den of iniquity I've little exposure to and I intend to keep it that way for the most part going forward. Happier to keep all my gaming time compartmentalized to when I'm at home with a TV and/or monitor in front of me than those on tiny screens filled with nagging commercials (I'm aware there's other mobile games that don't do this but, well, you gotta pay for those and who even has 95 cents lying around?).

That'll do it for all the gaming I've been up to, except for...

The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Kena: Bridge of Spirits (Ember Labs, 2021)

The site's still rolling out its "user article" feature and there's a bottleneck presently as the tools to process them remain admin-only, which means only one or two people working on them. In the future that might change but as such, I only managed to publish three Indie reviews out instead of the five I could've otherwise squeezed out of this month. The best of those is... tough to call, since all three are excellent with only a handful of caveats apiece keeping them from being "5 out of 5" all-timers. I'll give it to Kena: Bridge of Spirits (#452) because the production level is off the charts and I do admit to having some small nostalgic affection for these PS3-style light character-action affairs with nice big open worlds full of incidental puzzles to solve for various collectibles, not too dissimilar to the survival-sim Zelda games. Those bosses, for as much as they gave me trouble on the hardest difficulty setting (darn you insatiable achievement hunter brain goblins of mine), were pretty cool too with their own quirks and less-telegraphed ways to get the drop on them if you were to really take a hard look at the abilities/tools at your disposal.

Exorcising people and then taking all the stuff in their homes afterwards. Good work if you can get it!

Elsewhere, Laika: Aged Through Blood (#451) is an excellent exploraction game that has you take on a dusty post-apoc world on a motorbike, incorporating flips and other gnarly tricks into the gameplay and having a pretty harsh difficulty curve throughout that forced you to engage with the game on its terms, rather than the breezier Indie exploraction games you have elsewhere; and Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils (#453) is likewise an affectionate and endearing GBC-inspired platformer with an unusual depth going on in its wings, with a huge amount of incidental lore and secrets to find across its overworld whenever you choose to dip out of the stage-based acrobatics of its core gameplay loop. Happily recommend all three.

The Weeb Weeview

You want swords this anime season? We got swords. Oh, we got swords.

I've already spoken about the three sequel series I was intending to watch this season—that would be Frieren: Beyond Journey's End S2, Oshi no Ko S3, and Trigun: Stargaze, all of which I might circle back around to review-wise once I've seen more of them—but as per usual I've also picked up a fair number of new shows I've been enjoying. Given February is a month for luuuuurve and other cooties-centered content, I'll just stick to the action/isekai shows for now and delve into the romcoms next time (it's a pretty good season for both, fortunately). Here's what I'm watching, in descending order of how much I might recommend them to others:

1. Sentenced to Be a Hero: A sort of grimdark Berserk-but-not setting where the best of humanity is also its worst—the "heroes" are those not so much chosen by fate to lead the civilized races into victory against the corruptive force of nebulously defined "Demon Lords" (that, like the villains of Princess Mononoke, feel more like hapless animals transformed by a supernatural blight than actual monsters) but were sentenced to do so as punishment for some unforgivable sin. The forsaken Xylo Forbartz is one such convict, with the hero's curse that means his soul can be pulled back from the Abyss as many times as it needs to in order to serve his debt to society; he's become hardened and cynical as a result, still determined not to fall in battle after seeing the soul-hollowing effect this constant resurrection cycle has had on his fellow heroes, and it's only when he falls in with a praise-seeking "goddess"—implied to be some form of holy biological weapon the desperate world leaders are employing against the demons—that his personality starts to soften. It's a lore dense show but at the same time largely taken to action set-pieces which have some of the most incredible hand-drawn animation I've ever seen in a serial anime: it's more the domain of extravagantly produced OVAs and feature films. Given the story feels like derivative Berserk I, and I'm guessing many others, can't help but wonder why this level of devotion wasn't also applied to adaptations of Kentaro Miura's own work. Outside of Jujutsu Kaisen and a few other high-profile sequel series, this feels like the one to watch this season if you're primarily in this space to scope out the potential of this visual medium.

2. Easygoing Territory Defense by the Optimist Lord: Isekais often tend to reflect the mood of the video game genres they're riffing on, at least for those that are implicitly based on video game tropes and conventions which is still most of them, and this one's definitely more in the Minecraft/Terraria/Stardew Valley field of laid-back building sims. This was one I'd read the manga for ahead of time—I'm a sucker for this particular statecrafting/regular-crafting variety of isekai—and the anime's doing a great job bringing out the levity of the material, as the exiled son of a noble combat mage aghast that his offspring drew "production magic" as his literal god-given talent continues to astound his small group of followers with architectural feats far beyond the vague medieval period they're in (but not quite the modern day period he reincarnated from). It's your typical mid-tier animated isekai for the most part but, as with Campfire Cooking from last season, the more genial tone really helps give it an edge over the vast competition. Or a complete lack of any edge, as the case may be.

3. The Holy Grail of Eris: I don't watch enough intrigue shows, save for when it becomes a subplot in some romantic drama or other, but recently I've found myself wanting a nice 12-episode potboiler of an anime murder mystery whodunnit with some decent writing: a "Waifus Out" if you'd like. The Holy Grail of Eris is already proving promising with its pitch of a devious social mover-and-shaker named Scarlett who was cornered by a rival, sentenced to death for a crime she didn't commit (but was entirely capable of doing, if not worse), and finds herself haunting Constance Grail—the mousy and timid scion of the most trustworthy (if not particularly rich or powerful as a result) noble house in the kingdom—as they work together for mutual benefit and elucidation while digging into the seedier side of this kingdom's aristocratic stratum to discover whom precisely had Scarlett taken out. Definitely a show that attacts a certain type of audience, one I don't typically belong to, but I'm enjoying the skulduggery so far and the scenes where Scarlett takes over Constance's body and has her entire demeanor change into that of a no-fucks-given viper of an orator are dang satisfying.

4. The Demon King's Daughter Is Too Kind!!: A sweet little show about a fantasy world that has all but fallen to a ruthless demon lord, only for a new hope of sorts to sprout in the form of his kindergartner daughter, Doux. Doux is courteous, generous, and kindhearted to a fault, especially in the eyes of her brutal father and his chief lieutenant/secretary Jahi, a dragon who typically walks around in the form of a beautiful woman. Schemes to bring out Doux's cruel side inevitably end in failure as she finds ways to make everyone in her orbit happy, including a group of human slaves presently digging up magic stones in the underworld beneath the demon castle. The setting still feels apocalyptically grim in spots, outside of the rainbows generated by Doux with every step (figuratively, though possibly literally too if her magical power manifests any more), but the show keeps the tone light throughout regardless. It even has an original song every episode for kids to sing along with, even if I'd be pushed to say this was a show that children Doux's age should be watching given the aforementioned death and slavery happening peripherally. An odd idea but I can't argue it's not a cute show with some positive messages. (It also reminds me that the equally lighthearted show about demons subjugating humans, 'Tis Time for Torture, Princess, is currently enjoying its second season in addition. Not quite as dubious as it sounds, I assure you.)

5. Hell Mode: The Hardcore Gamer Dominates in Another World with Garbage Balancing: Here's our typical isekai power fantasy business, though in this case there's a conspicuous attempt to demonstrate that the hero, a fan of super tough games like your Sekiros and Silksongs, isn't interested in an easy overpowered ride for his next life. Reborn to a family of destitute serfs and given a curse of sorts that means he gains XP at 1% the rate of everyone else, he's nonetheless dedicated to figuring out the best way to overcome the ridiculous odds placed against him. He also softens on the whole "I'm gamin' here!" detached approach as he grows closer to his new family and the travails they go through with their limited means, switching from his min-maxing power gamer mindset to an approach where he can do the most amount of good for his kin in the here and now rather than deferring his level-up bonuses and such until later when he can get more bang for his buck. His discipline is summoning creatures, through which he also receives buffs to his stats, but he's finding out the hard way the limitations of that class and the world's certainly not going to pull its punches given this is "Hell Mode". It's more isekai slop with the animation quality level (and long-ass literal name) to match but there's something to this particular variant and how it's trying a more Re:Zero route where the hero doesn't get everything served to him on a platter that has my attention, if not yet my curiosity.

6. Kunon the Sorcerer Can See: I wasn't sure what to expect with this one, as the son of a noble is born with a "hero's mark" which feels more like a curse than a privilege after it robs him of his sight. His morose attitude surrounding his disability makes him a bummer to be around, especially for his politically-decided fiancée who is a princess fairly low down in the order of succession, but realizing that his prodigious water magic skill might one day be used as a substitute for his own eyes (given eyeballs are mostly liquid) his personality does a 180 and he becomes something of a flirtatious joker that leaves most in his orbit bemused but otherwise relieved that his depression has lifted. Since then it's been a slow-paced slice-of-life thing about him learning new tricks with water magic, winning over more friends with his unorthodox sense of humor and charm, and navigating the politically-charged world of the aristocracy with no small amount of goofing off. Hardly ground-breaking stuff but I find it pretty agreeable in a low-stakes sort of way, and there's something to be said for a blind hero who doesn't let his ailment dictate what he can and can't do (after that initial sadsack episode at least).

7. Kaya-chan Isn't Scary: I've only caught a few episodes of this so far but it's a supernatural horror show that is aimed for a younger set—think a J-Horror version of R. L. Stine's Goosebumps, though perhaps still a bit scarier than classic horror kid anime GeGeGe no Kitarou—about a kindergartner who has profound exorcism abilities that she mostly uses to save her fellow kids and teachers from ghoulies at an unusually bedeviled nursery school. It plays around with urban legends and yokai folklore and for the most part has been mildly spooky if nothing too heavy. That is, until the last episode I saw where a secondary character—a dopey-looking middle-aged man who was initially presented as some kiddy-fiddling weirdo with a strange fixation on the titular child—reveals his backstory of losing his young daughter to a traffic accident only to keep seeing her ghost, alienating his wife (who lacked the same gift with sensing spirits and just assumed he'd lost his mind with grief) and mystifying the parents around him whenever he took his invisible child to the park like they used to. After spending too long as a ghost, however, the daughter's human form eventually deteriorates into a wraith-like being looking to drag her parents into an unpleasant fate, only for her to suddenly get exorcised by a then-infant Kaya leading to the father's present-day admiration of her abilities. That episode got real dark real quick and now I'm left wondering what kind of bite future episodes might have; it's doubtful it'll take a turn into Junji Ito territory anytime soon but I am now a bit more invested than I was before.

In the interest of anime science, here's some other series I've had recommended to me that I've yet to check out but maybe y'all might be into: the political The Darwin Incident, the lugubrious Journal With Witch, and the leisurely Wash it All Away.

And here's a few sequel shows I evidently need to catch up on before too long given the hype around their new seasons: Jujutsu Kaisen, Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku, and Golden Kamuy.

Too Long, Do Relinks

• Indie Game of the Week 451: Laika: Aged Through Blood

• Indie Game of the Week 452: Kena: Bridge of Spirits

• Indie Game of the Week 453: Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils

• RetroPiece Theater: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past