It's the end of another quarter! You know what that means: only three months left in this bastard of a year! It also means I get to take a gander at what's coming up in the final weeks of 2018, and see if there's any last-minute additions to the GOTY discussion of which I should be cognizant. I've done a terrible job of actually playing games released in 2018, but I've plenty to go on for future years: God of War, Marvel's Spider-Man, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Dragon Quest XI, Valkyria Chronicles 4, Ni no Kuni 2, Octopath Traveller, Yakuza 6... and those are just the major AAA games released so far in 2018 that I'm itching to try. Looking ahead, it's highly possible that the industry has been saving its showstoppers for, appropriately enough, the end of the year (and certainly the end of the fiscal year with how packed February/March of 2019 is going to be).

October

Seems prudent to start with my favorite month: October, home of a whole heap of Halloween-themed shenanigans as well as a surprisingly packed month of releases. We start off strong on October 2nd with the international release of Sega CS1's (a.k.a. the Yakuza team) Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, a developer and license combination that's made in heaven and honestly the first real hope of a decent Hokuto no Ken game. While I still have some Yakuza catching up to do - Yakuza 0 will be next year's game, then Yakuza 6 at some future juncture - I'm gladdened to see that talented team continue to stretch their legs with new venues, even if there's not a whole lot of difference between punching people in Kamurocho and punching people in the wastelands of the post-apocalypse (or Judge Eyes, which is punching people in Kamurocho but to solve crimes). The 2nd also brings us the latest adventure of the Blue Bomber, Mega Man 11, which I'm hoping strikes a decent balance of challenge unlike the previous two throwbacks in that series. Also releasing this Tuesday is Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story, an RPG-sim I've had my eye on for a while - it reminds me of My Life as a King for WiiWare, in that you're not so much going on adventures but precipitating the adventures of others by creating the hero school and facilities they train at. Despite all the heroics, I found MLaaK supremely chill and a great sort of drop-in, drop-out game for podcasts and the like. Of course, if Valthirian ends up being a little more tough and demanding that's fine too. As long as it's good either way, right?

The 5th brings us a high and a low, albeit the sort of low that might be fun in the right context. The high is the next entry in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed franchise, which I swore off after Syndicate but am now reconsidering that decision. Syndicate wasn't bad, but it seemed to demonstrate that Ubisoft wasn't interested in making big sweeping changes to the format or even updating its hoary Anvil engine. While Origins does still use Anvil, there's a huge shift in how it's applied, and now the game resembles something closer to a Far Cry with RPG elements. I won't be playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey until I get a chance to try out Origins, but Ubisoft may have successfully dragged me back into the series. I no longer harbor an animus against the Animus, in other words. The low, at least if you ask the Giant Bomb crew, is Super Mario Party. It seems to drop the whole clown car aspect and returns to its original form, though if it includes a 50 turn mode I think GB's going to have to drag Dan across coasts and extract Drew from whichever Eastern European nation he's documenting this month. I'd be genuinely psyched if that happened, though I doubt the same would be true for series stalwarts Jeff, Brad, Drew, and Dan (well, all right, Dan would be ecstatic).

The 9th features a "definitive" version of the first Disgaea game, Disgaea 1 Complete, which compiles all the additional extras from its many rereleases for Wii, PSP, DS, PS3 and so forth. I've often said - most recently with last year's The Top Shelf feature - that if you were looking for a gateway into Nippon Ichi Software's silly anime SRPGs, the first Disgaea is perfect as an encapsulation of the sort of lunacy you can expect (Item World! Dark Assembly! Level 9999!) and a hilarious story if you just want to stick to the main plot battles. Klei's also releasing their own remaster this month too: Mark of the Ninja Remastered. I don't think I gave the original enough credit - I played it briefly for a May Madness feature years ago - so a definitive version might be all the push I need to retry it. I know Scoops thinks very highly of it, as do a few of the GB staff. There's also the new WWE 2K19 game that day, but I don't think anyone genuinely still cares any more. Maybe about WWE, but not the licensed games from that developer in particular.

The 12th has something for everyone: the massively successful Call of Duty with Black Ops IIII (ugh, those numerals), the chilling delights of Luigi's Mansion, and a rerelease I'm looking forward to finally playing, The World Ends With You: Final Remix. BLOPS 4 doesn't have a single-player campaign, which would normally be the only reason I'd ever buy a COD game, but it does have that Blackout battle royale mode which I'm curious to watch someone else play, at the very least. I'll take a pass at that 3DS Luigi Mansion remake, since I still have its 3DS sequel to complete. TWEWY, though, is a game I missed out on originally and am grateful for another opportunity to play it. I've been looking for more Switch games too, so this works out.

The 16th includes LEGO DC Super-Villains, which I'm nominally curious about because of how the player creates their own supervillain as their protagonist. Having a spin-off where you play the villains robbing people and avoiding heroic types also reminds me of the The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, so I hope this spin-off has a similar sense of non-canonical levity. We'll also see Starlink: Battle for Atlas, another game I almost certainly won't be buying but am curious to see in motion nonetheless, and the packed Musou crossover Warriors Orochi 4 which has some work to do appealing to long-time fans alienated by the apparently awful Dynasty Warriors 9. From what I hear, Warriors Orochi 4 tosses Greek and Norse gods into the mix this time. I mean, why not, right? They're public domain after all.

The 17th sees the new Jackbox Party Pack 5 drop, and with it a whole host of new party games to astound and embarrass your relatives come the holiday season. These are always fun to watch others play too, at least in my view, and I'm sure Giant Bomb and Polygon will get a lot of use out of them. The 18th, meanwhile, reintroduces the world to the bizarre and complicated tri-Ace gun kata RPG Resonance of Fate HD, which I might be convinced to take another swing at.

The 19th finally brings to us the long-awaited Dark Souls Remastered for Switch, finally allowing us to quaff our Estus flasks on the go. Even so, we all might want to wait and see what remastered Blighttown is like on the Switch's hardware before jumping into Lordran again. This day is also when the new Soulcalibur VI drops, and early reports from that multiplayer beta seem positive enough. I skipped V but if the Giant Bomb crew and other outlets make a big enough noise about VI I might be back on board. It'll take a lot to get me interested in a new fighter though, and right now the only one I'm really interested in is that Fighting EX Layer as a lifelong Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha fan.

Thankfully, as of writing, the final week of October looks to be relatively quiet. There's the My Hero Academia fighter My Hero One's Justice coming out on the 26th along with that Rondo and Symphony Castlevania Requiem collection that I'm stoked is getting another lease of life, and then there's Cyanide's Call of Cthulhu RPG arriving just in time on the 30th, a.k.a. All Hallows' Eve Eve. The new Disaster Report 4 is out that week too, but only in Japan. No clue as of yet for a western release date, but there is at least an English language website so that's proof positive of something. That's about it for October. Certainly nothing to do with cowboys that I couldn't be less interested in, no siree.

November

Entering November, as the States prepares to drum a lot of its craven Republicans out of Congress, the rest of us can rimshot away our frustrations with Taiko Drum Master: Drum N' Fun! for Switch and Taiko Drum Master: Drum Session! for PS4, both releasing on the 2nd. This marks the first time the Drum Master series has come to the west in over a decade, unless you count its cameo of sorts in Yakuza 5, and while rhythm games are the surest way of causing myself an injury there's something about the adorable little drum guys in Namco's percussive franchise that always makes me smile.

The 6th of November will introduce the world to Déraciné, FromSoftware's first dalliance with VR horror which is - to continue an ongoing theme - something I'm looking forward to watching other people play. Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is the next in the "I'm still a game behind!" series, though it's being handled by a completely different team from Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap despite being based on the same Westone franchise. Looks to have a similar pedigree at least, and I'm always down for retro platformers if done well. This busy day also sees the enhanced World of Final Fantasy Maxima, which is irritating to me because I still haven't played my copy of the standard version. I guess it's too much to hope that they offer the new Maxima content to us slowpokes gratis? I mean, what with Square Enix being super cool about all the free Final Fantasy XV DLC and all.

After that deluge, the rest of November's releases are sporadic, perhaps because it's still too far away for a full picture of what will come. The 9th is supposedly the release of trippy Tetris VR game Tetris Effect, and I'm looking forward to watching Jeff enter a tetromino fugue state once that inevitable VRodeo hits. The 13th is a banner day with Hitman 2 and its episodes dropping all at once, and the Spyro Reignited Trilogy for all of us that missed out on Insomniac's original platforming hero in his glory days. I'm looking forward to all the new Hitman content that Giant Bomb will produce, don't get me wrong, though I'm personally more invested in those 3D collectathons I somehow missed out on. The 14th heralds the release of Bethesda's Fallout 76, a curious experiment in online RPGing that I'm extremely ambivalent about to the extent that half of me wants it to be good and the other half wants it to crash and burn spectacularly so that Bethesda returns to single-player experiences. If I really wanted yet another single-player RPG from 2018 though, the 15th will (hopefully) have me covered with Underworld Ascendant, the long-in-development successor to Looking Glass Studios's pioneering Ultima Underworld. I only recently got to experience the two Ultima Underworld games and they've held up shockingly well for 25-year-old RPGs, so I'm excited to see what a modern remake can do. The only remaining November game I'm interested in is Darksiders III on the 27th. It sounds like it's returning to the format of the original Darksiders, which was The Legend of Zelda couched in the grimdark aesthetic of a Todd McFarlane joint and a surprising amount of fun, so here's hoping its development team hasn't missed a beat after being shut down and scattering to the four winds.

December

December's a little sparse right now, but I don't suppose it'll stay that way given it's the holiday season. It starts off with a bang on the 4th with all three Persona rhythm games: Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight, Persona 4: Dancing All Night (which makes its PS4 debut), and Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight. Great news for fans of those characters and that excellent music, as we get to spend plenty of time with both. The 4th also includes Just Cause 4, the next game in Rico Rodriguez's quest to blow up everything with even the merest hint of a red tinge. I'm hoping Just Cause 4 is a little more focused and polished than Just Cause 3, which I enjoyed but could've used more time in development and some fresher ideas. Finally, if the 4th wasn't busy enough, it also sees the release of the intriguing Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, which looks to combine adventure gameplay with tactical turn-based combat right out of an XCOM or Shadowrun Returns. It has a persistent party of goofballs, which suggests something closer to Vandal Hearts than the permadeath bummers of XCOM or Fire Emblem, so I can't wait to see it in action.

The rest of December is looking pretty good too. The 6th sees the remaster of The Last Remnant, solving the mystery of why it was suddenly removed from Steam. It's a weird game but worth the effort of figuring out how its levelling and combat works, since it has as many great innovations as it does bad and confusing ones. The 7th will inject the Switch with a lot of forward momentum between the debut of the mighty Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and everyone's favorite surreal roll 'em up Katamari Damacy Reroll. The Katamari Damacy game looks to be a straight remaster of the original, but that suits me because Europe never got to see that game. We all started with We Love Katamari over here, which might still be the franchise peak if you ask around. Meanwhile, I couldn't be more psyched for the new Smash, even though it's only been a few months since I finally got around to the Wii U entry. I just love completing all those single-player challenges and collecting trophies, even if there's probably going to be an insane amount of both with the sheer number of characters in this one. Meanwhile, GameFAQs seems to believe that the PS4 port of Subnautica will be out that day too, so that's something else I'm into. I like the idea of Subnautica as an Everblue fan, but I doubt my feeble laptop will enjoy trying to run it. That's about it for December from what I can tell, though I'm sure more will be announced closer to the month in question.

And that's also going to do it for the scheduled releases. However, there's a lot of games predicted to release at some point in the next three months, so let's check out a few of those before we wrap things up. Klei's Griftlands RPG is still gunning for a 2018 release, though I've no idea how far along they are with development. We're all still waiting on Kentucky Route Zero's conclusive Act V, not least because the collected console version (the "TV Edition") will be released along with it. ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove is another game that's been rumored to release for a long time now, and I know Drew's looking forward to it if nobody else.

After all that, we now come all the way back to crummy old September for our final blog check in. Just one this week! I missed the Tuesday slot because I had some ideas that couldn't quite coalesce in time. Next Tuesday should be back to the SNES Classic, and then hopefully I'll have my act together for the recently vacated alternate Tuesday slot.

• The Indie Game of the Week is the superlative Hollow Knight from Team Cherry. A distinct feeling of being the last one to play this game, as it feels like it's being regularly discussed on both the Bomb- and Beastcast. The hype is real though, as I'm finding it to be a great mix of traditional 2D spacewhipper action and a few vital Souls injections to the formula, not least of which is the game's haunting aesthetic and distinct lack of hand-holding. I take issue with some of the ways they make the game less convenient for the sake of increased challenge, but beyond that I'm still having a ball with it. My next destination in-game is the Deepnest, which I hear is just so much fun.

Addenda

No addenda this week! Well, not yet. I'll have a movie review here eventually, but I sort of went on and on listing all those game releases I'm excited about and need to catch my breath, as it were.

For now, have a happy, safe, prosperous, and - most of all - temperate autumn everyone. Go eat candy and watch spooky movies with my blessings.