I didn’t have any Islay scotch to add on top, but I’ll buy some soon to try it.

Try that if you can, I think the little bit of smoky whisky is what makes the drink truly shine.

I’ll probably play these games with basic knowledge of a couple of animes I have watched

Knowing/liking the original anime series helps, but it's not mandatory. You may get a bit overloaded due to the huge amount of characters, but they are introduced gradually and the game has a big encyclopedia to help remember who is who.

Do you think they will still be fun for me?

Will you like it for the first 10-20h? Almost certainly yes if you like strategy games and big robots.

Will you like it enough to play the whole 80h+ (assuming you go for Y)? That's a much harder question to answer, it will depend a lot on how much you enjoy the gameplay loop.

Started Ys IX: Monstrum Nox on PS5. Switch is generally my preferred platform for all RPGs but all reviews recommend to play it on another platform, if you have access to it.

Monstrum Nox performance is quite bad on the Switch. It's "playable" but there's some nasty framerate drops in some parts, in particular during the tower defense segments, though according to this video this is fixed if you're playing on a Switch 2.

At least the they moved to a new engine in the following game, which runs miles better even on Switch 1.

Finished Super Robot Taisen Y!

The previous game in the series (SRT30) is seen by most as the weakest entry on recent years. It had some interesting ideas, in particular with its approach with the mission structure - older games had linear missions with occasional "branches", while 30 (and now Y) give you a big list of mandatory and optional missions and you can tackle them in any order you want. However, the first attempt at this structure in 30 turned out bad - story felt disjointed, character interactions were limited, and they completely failed in balancing difficulty, that game was so ridiculously easy that it became mind-numbing boring. It also had some other issues (like weak story and uninspired "original" characters/mechs), but I think the ones I mentioned above are the biggest problems.

So I'm happy to say that Y drastically improved in almost all aspects over its predecessor. Story is much better, provides enough challenge to make veterans like me play carefully, "original" units are great. I have a ton of praise for the characters interactions, they really nailed them in this game - having the story revolve around a "flying city" was a brilliant touch, the characters are no longer just members of the same army but also neighbors and friends living in the same city. This added a lot of options for cross-series interactions and they made good use of it.

As for negatives, there's two: First is the the UI - it's not bad, and if this is your first game in the series you might not even notice it, but they re-did it for this game and it's significantly lacking compared to the old ones. I heard they migrated just to a new engine so this may be a temporary setback, but I really hope they do review and improve it for future games.

The second is the big one, and it's one of the issues from 30 that Y didn't fix: The ballooning amount of missions. A play through of 30 or Y is at least double the length of older games, and this makes one of the biggest weaknesses of the series very visible: The lack of mission diversity. The large majority is simply "defeat all enemies" or "defeat the boss", and with this many missions it's easy to get bored or burned out from this game. Since I'm familiar with most of the anime series present the character interactions helped "carry" the game, but if you're not in the same position you should consider playing it slowly to avoid this burnout.

Overall I had a ton of fun with the game and it got me a lot more hopeful about the future of the series after 30. I'll also be coming back to it in the future when DLC2 is released since I already preordered it.

Finished Sheepo!

This was the first game released by Kyle Thompson, and the most unique of the three. It's a "no weapons" metroidvania where you play as a small alien who goes around collecting eggs of different species and gains the ability to shapeshift into different forms. It's more puzzle and platform focused than the other two and also significantly shorter (but also cheaper), taking less than 5h to finish.

Overall I prefer the other two (my ranking is Islets > Crypt Custodian > Sheepo), but I had a good time with all of his games and I'm now anxiously waiting for the release of Well Dweller.

Playing Witch on the Holy Night!

With SRTY finally done I'm now focusing more on this one, currently midway through Chapter 7. This chapter and the previous one slow down after the big battle and go back to more slice-of-life content as the three leads have to adjust to a new lifestyle.

Are there other games like this?

The first thing to come to mind is the Zero Escape series, which are older (and much darker) games from the same author as AI. They mix VN-like sections with "Escape the Room" puzzles.

Played a lot of these in the last two years, with Ender Magnolia and Nine Sols being my favorites among them.

All-time I think I'd still go with Super Metroid, despite its age and having completed multiple playthroughs I still end up playing for hours anytime I boot it.

Honorable mentions for Rabi-Ribi (don't let the cutesy anime artstyle fool you, this is a fantastic non-linear game with some of the best boss battles in the genre), the recent Momodora games and the Team Ladybug games (with Touhou Luna Nights being my favorite of the three).

The Switch 2 launch felt oddly rushed.

Lack of details, initial backward compatibility list having only ~20% of games with basic testing finished, the need for SD Express cards that are hard to find. Even the GCK situation is probably due to cost/availability issues that will improve over time.

This DevKit situation looks to me like another example of this.

Like others said, it's not just Gen-Z.

Funny enough, the main reason I'm spending far less is not the shitty economy, but rather the gaming industry's push to kill physical copies.

I used to buy a lot of physical games at full price because they would be much harder to find later on, but if I'm forced to go with a digital copy this is no longer an issue, so I just let them sit on my wishlist until they're massively discounted.

This controversy is pretty much "You're having fun in a different way from what we intended. This is not allowed so we blocked it.".

Which is a very "Nintendo" thing to do. But hopefully they'll change things in the future and give a "classic" option or something similar.

Not surprising considering that most 3rd party games are:

1. Ports of old games so anyone who has a PS5/Xbox/PC can get them for cheaper.
2. Overpriced ports as well, and in a system that is already rather expensive.
3. Game Key Cards which won't appeal to collectors who could still buy them despite #1 and #2.

There's a lot of videos and articles like this one discussing how Stage 1-1 of Super Mario Bros for the NES is a cleverly designed tutorial for the core game mechanics.

So if it were clearly written on the Steam page, I don’t really get the complains.

It was optional for several months and the info on the PSN page contradicted that, so there was a lot of room for confusion.

Not surprisingly that PSN page was edited earlier today, but there's a million screenshots floating around already, plus you can check the previous version in the Wayback Machine.

And even if it was clearly written on all places, it's still a "too bad you didn't read the fine print, now you're past the limit time for a refund, so either let Sony track you or lose access to the game" situation which is very shitty. There's also the fact that they sold the game to people in countries where is PSN is not available, which should not have happened if that requirement was going to be enforced in the future.

Not hard to see why people would get pissed and lose trust in the developer. I also think that players have been annoyed for a while with this type of requirement (not specifically in this game), and they are now getting a good outlet with a lot of publicity around to vent about it.

The review chart is hilarious.

Doubt Sony or the developer expected this would happen.

Edit [May/04, 14h UTC]: Updated chart. More than 70k negative reviews already.