All-New Saturday Summaries 2017-09-30: Q4 Report Edition

Welcome to the end of September everyone! It's been a wild, nostalgic ride for me at least, as Shelftember draws to a close later today with the final blog for the second round (not to be confused with the second blog for the final round, which will come way later). More than that, though, September has perhaps managed to pip the uncharacteristically insane early months of 2017 for quality video game output. Who'd have thought that when Knack II came out on the 5th of this month, we'd see many more even better games to follow? Ys VIII, Divinity Original Sin 2, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Cuphead, Metroid Samus Returns, SteamWorld Dig 2, Danganronpa V3, and the SNES Classic. But we've already talked about September's releases before on the Saturday Summaries. Let's look instead to the final quarter of the year and what it has in store.

Zelda and Xenoblade 2 had me teetering on the edge of buying a Switch, but Odyssey's going to be the thing to push me over.

October promises to be just as busy as September, at least as far as games I'm personally interested in. We start with the long-awaited Indie 3D platformer throwback A Hat in Time, which managed to find itself a cosy little spot between Yooka-Laylee and Super Mario Odyssey. Hopefully it'll get some attention before the latter steamrolls everything else this month. While plagued with controversy around microtransactions and paid DLC memoriams, there's also a lot of positive buzz around the sequel to Giant Bomb's 2014 Game of the Year: Middle-earth: Shadow of War. It looks like the developers are side-stepping the "generic open world" complaint of the last game by doubling-down on their Nemesis system, using the ensorcelled orcs to perform large-scale sieges and battles. Still surprising that no-one else picked up on that whole Nemesis idea in the three years it's been floating around. 2017's been a fantastic year for RPGs already, but ELEX could be another noteworthy addition to the genre. Developed by Piranha Bytes, the same German team behind the fairly good Risen games, ELEX has some dark sci-fi themes to explore and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with a new theme. Talking of RPGs that are likely to go dark early and often, we have South Park: The Fractured But Whole, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's swipe at a superhero parody. It'll be as scatological and universally offensive as the first, no doubt, though the centrist politics are starting to wear thin a little so I'm hoping more of its jokes will be at the genre's expense. More so, I'm hoping the new developers can maintain that Zeboyd-like focus for the RPG gameplay and mechanics, crafting each encounter to be its own distinct challenge like the first did. This month will also see the remaster for Rogue Trooper, a PS2-era third-person shooter with some clever ideas that I've been enjoying as part of The Top Shelf. It was a little surreal when writing about it earlier this month to suddenly discover that we were only days away from a brand new HD version. Finally, we have the one-two punch that are the same-day releases of Super Mario Odyssey, a game I'm unreasonably excited to play after hearing that Nintendo were returning to the "garden exploration" style of 3D platformer of the Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine variety, and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, which looks like it's going to outdo all the wonderful, poignant and surreal moments that made the previous game's story pop while maintaining the hyper-speed double-gun gameplay that made it equally a delight between cutscenes too. Jeez October, could you chill maybe?

Giant Bomb East is getting off easy if this is the only Mario Party thing they have to suffer enjoy.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, November and December look to be a lot more quiet by comparison. In November we're looking at another cute 3D platformer: Super Lucky's Tale, the sequel to the VR-only squirrel platformer that looks bright and colorful and everything I want my 3D platformers to be. November also sees that Mario Party: The Top 100 compilation, which I assume is just the mini-games and none of the arbitrary board game business. Some of those mini-games were bright moments in otherwise dire exercises in tedium (though they made for fun GB streams), so it could end up being a really good party game. Pity it seems to be 3DS exclusive for now, as it definitely feels like something that would perform better on Switch and its suitability for casual local multiplayer experiences. We also have Star Wars: Battlefront II, which has expanded its scope to various eras in the canon and features cool duder Janina Gavankar in a new expansive story mode. I might be more interested in picking up the game at some point if it has a decent single-player campaign to enjoy.

Best part? The return of the colossal titans! Coolest idea for a setting ever.

December's big highlight for me is Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and while the trailers haven't shown much to write home about, the core of those games has always been the genius micro-level game design that would be harder to show off in a five-minute promotional video. I'm not sure how I feel about these interchangeable "blades", and how half of your companions essentially stand behind the other half and keeps them buffed, but if the map exploration and visuals are anything like as captivating as the first (or XCX, which was an equally fine game if a slightly less good pop star) I know it'll give all the other RPGs this year a run for their money. December also brings us the Christmassy-themed Dead Rising 4, featuring a new Frank West and presumably a lot of creative zombie killing in a newly renovated Willamette mall. I'm sure they're kicking themselves for missing a Black Friday release. Finally, we're getting a HD remaster of Okami, a game that deserved more attention than it got for its original release. That game is a wonderful who's-who of Japanese mythology, and its watercolor world already looked incredible back when it was a PS2 and Wii game, so even knows how much better the HD version will look. Definitely some temptation to buy it again, though maybe after I'm done with every other highlight from this year.

Anyway, that's just one guy's look at the months' releases to come. I'm sure there'll also be many surprises from the Indie gaming scene, since those little guys frequently appear out of nowhere to be the major talking point for that week, and there's probably a lot of great games from genres I'm less excited about. Oh, and there's always a chance that PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds version 1.0 finally releases at some point during the next three months to sweep up a thousand GOTY awards. Never say never, right?

And I'll never say never to some self-promotion, so here we go with the week's new blogs:

I already love this game's look. "Hell-Tron"? "MatrHexen"? "Daemon Tools"?

• Shelftember winds to a close with this week's seven entries. We only have one more to go, due to be published later today, and then we're taking a break for October so I can play through a number of games I've earmarked for the final rounds as well as catch up on some GOTY homework. When November rolls around, we'll start on a weekly series of "Battle Royales" between sequels and otherwise very similar games in order to pick their sole representatives for the shelf, and then one final blog on the 26th of December to finalize the list of the 44 "shelf-esteemed" games. This week saw us tackle: Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga, a delightfully depraved take on Tron where all the little computer people turn into demons and eat each other; Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2, which is pretty much the same thing without the Tron aspect; Makai Kingdom, from a long line of Nippon Ichi Software SRPGs for PS2 and another freaking game with demons in it; Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, a tri-Ace space-faring action-RPG that I'm sad I don't enjoy more; Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone, an action-RPG that plays similarly to the Lord of the Rings games and features even more demons; Champions: Return to Arms, the sequel to the EverQuest spin-off Diablo clone with a more interdimensional focus (including hell dimensions with demons in them); and the superlative LucasArts strategy RPG and gladiator school simulator Gladius, which probably also has demons.
• The Indie Game of the Week on this occasion was Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment, a prequel to the original Shovel Knight that sees ol' moodyguts Scythe Knight take center stage as he brings the Knights of the Order of No Quarter together. If anything, the game is even more fluid and fast-paced than the original with the way Scythe Knight cuts through the air, and there's an affecting story at the heart of it all as Scythe struggles to let go of his former human self. I particularly love that everything got remixed: the stages, the bosses, and even the music. It really is substantial enough to stand on its own as a separate game, so getting it for free for being a Shovel Knight early adopter is beyond wonderful.

No additional section this week. I didn't play any more Danganronpa 2 (though you better believe I'll be dedicating the first week of October to it) and I've already covered the PS2 games I've been playing in detail, or will later on. Champions of Norrath in particular took most of my time this week, and I'll save my observations on that game for when I directly compare it to its sequel Champions: Return to Arms sometime in November.

Thanks for stopping by, and enjoy the comparatively svelte blogging output for October. I know I will.