Welcome back to my monthly blog! Despite being a shorter month, February was still my most played month since I started tracking last year. This included wrapping up the Citizen Sleeper series I started in January as well as continuing my Final Fantasy journey with the infamous second game. I also continued my way through the Game Pass catalog, beat my first randomizer, and got some more co-op gaming in. But first, let’s start with my game acquisitions.
Game Acquisitions
More decent bundles on offer last month, with a healthy dose of freebies sprinkled in. I’m especially looking forward to some of these visual novels and platformers I picked up. Still a good amount of spending happening here, but nothing egregious and still a great bang for my buck if I do say so myself. There’s another itch.io charity megabundle going on right now that I picked up, but I haven’t gotten around to cataloging the games yet so I’ll hopefully have that reflected in March. I was very tempted by a boomer shooter bundle on newcomer Digiphile’s website (former Humble Bundle employees), but the mix of price and already playing Mullet Madjack last year helped me talk myself out of it.
# of Games: 42
Total Money Spent: $40.25
Price/Game: $0.96
And here is every game I’ve gotten so far this year. It’s already starting to look like a lot. I probably won’t have a blurb here in future updates, I just wanted to explain why there are two acquisition pictures included now.
# of Games This Year: 94
Total Money Spent This Year: $84.73
Price/Game: $0.90
Game Recaps
I went back to the first Citizen Sleeper game after beating the second so I could see the rest of the endings. That’s how you know I enjoyed my time with it. What a great cyberpunk space story! My review of that is below. I also went back to one of my top games of 2024 with The Messenger to play it randomized through Archipelago with other members of the HLTB community. It was an OK time, but it reminded me why I almost never replay games. It was especially frustrating that I was constantly locked out of progression, missed most of the story beats, and didn’t fight like half the bosses. I was also never really a huge fan of the second half of the game anyway which the randomizer locks you to. I probably will not be playing any more randomizers in the future, but I hope the other HLTB people enjoyed their time.
Shortly after beating Final Fantasy I back in January, I’ve already played through II and had an even better time with it despite its reputation. Full review is below, but the story and characters were a big leap from the first game and that was enough for me. The third game has been added to Game Pass so it looks like I’ll be rolling right into that as well. I can’t wait! I don’t know anything about III, it seems like nobody talks about it. I hope that doesn’t mean it ends up being bland. I have high hopes after II though. I was planning on playing Inscryption before starting Final Fantasy III, but I just found out Myrient is shutting down soon which hosts a lot of roms I was planning on getting for my big emulation project. As a result, I’ve resumed work on that which is why this post is delayed and I haven’t gamed for a week.
Lastly, I finally had some more co-op gaming with my friend. We completed two runs of Monster Prom 3 with the first one ending in failure. The second one though was a huge success. We even got a date ending out of it! The resource management made this game much more interesting than 2 in my opinion. Full review below, but we enjoyed it enough to add the first and fourth games to our list, so that probably says something. We also played a bit of a small indie game called Kaiju Control Force. It plays a little bit like the original Donkey Kong with the platforming and avoiding things on ladders. The goal is to avoid all the different types of enemy mice while keeping the power on and buying all the items in the shop needed to boot up the terminals to advance to the next level. There are six levels in the game, and we were one terminal away from beating the fifth level. So close, but the game gets very chaotic and difficult quickly so I’m not sure if we have the skill level to beat the whole thing. Hopefully we give it another go in the future! I had an OK time and I think he enjoyed it too. Check out my playthroughs for every game I played and recorded last month, as well as Expedition 33, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Neon White which still have videos coming out. Please note that the video backlog is still pretty backed up. I’m uploading every day so I’m trying my best to catch up. As of the time of writing, the first Final Fantasy II video will be up March 6th, the first Citizen Sleeper 2 video will be up March 27th, and the first Nine Sols video won’t be up until April 20th. Everything is subject to change, and I can’t really plan these videos two whole months in advance 😅
Game Reviews
Citizen Sleeper
Citizen Sleeper is an RPG/visual novel hybrid about an android with an emulated human mind (known as a sleeper) who escapes their maker/employer on board a ship that is subsequently sent to a scrapyard on a space station known as The Eye. Unlike the sequel which takes place across a few different stations and asteroids, this one stays on just this one station. I didn’t feel like this detracted from the experience at all. If anything, it helped me grow more attached to the station and the people on it, which made several of the endings where you decide whether to stay on the station or leave that much more memorable. The gameplay loop consists of rolling six d6 dice which serve as the number of actions you can take on any given day (called cycles). Actions vary but typically involve working for money (called cryo), scouting new locations within the station, talking to NPCs to advance their storylines, and buying whatever resources you might need. There are two meters to pay attention to: energy and condition. Energy is lost or gained depending on the actions you take and always go down at the end of a cycle when you rest. Condition is the same way, but the worse your condition, the less dice you roll each cycle and thus the less actions you can take. This makes it imperative to stay on top of these things.
The game is confusing at first, trying to juggle the myriad of storylines happening at once and the various timers that sometimes affect if/when they progress. Cryo can be tight at the beginning of the game which makes resource management a more critical gameplay component, but by the mid-game, you basically have everything you need to focus on the stories taking place. Speaking of, I found most of the stories and characters to be enjoyable. I especially liked Lem and Mina, a father-daughter duo with the father trying his best to raise a little girl alone by trying to find work building a spaceship and eventually booking passage off the station on that same ship. As mentioned earlier, there are several endings to this game that usually boil down to whether you want to leave the station (which rolls credits) or stay (which also rolls credits but lets you keep playing afterwards). The Lem and Mina storyline, for example, has at least four different endings which are variations of these two possibilities. I 100% the game which let me see every ending and I thought most were good.
Citizen Sleeper is a game with many positive qualities, but also a couple neutral/negative ones that prevented me from giving it an even higher score. The writing and characters are once again the biggest highlight here. The music/sound design fit the space theme well. The graphics are average at best, although the character portraits are charming. I liked the character progression and some of the perks, even if a few seemed useless by the time you unlocked them. The main gameplay mechanic of rolling dice and slotting them into various actions to read the results is exciting at the beginning, but it can get repetitive by the end. By the mid-late game, I was running on autopilot doing the same actions over and over. I would start the cycle by buying food if energy was below three bars, use stabilizer if condition was below 60%, replenish resources, use low dice on risky actions and high dice on dangerous actions to advance the story, then rinse and repeat. At that point, I felt the dice only slowed my progress instead of enhancing my experience. Still, if you enjoy a good space story and don’t mind a game that is mostly reading, you can’t go wrong with Citizen Sleeper and I highly recommend it. It felt more personal than the sequel (and less stressful due to lack of a literal stress mechanic that breaks your dice and can permanently glitch your character). As a result, I liked this one more than the sequel, but still recommend it if you like this one.
Time to beat
(Completionist) - 17h:50m
Rating – 8.5/10
FINAL FANTASY II
Only a couple weeks after my Final Fantasy I completion, I managed to complete Final Fantasy II. I haven’t played any other Final Fantasy games so I’ll only be able to compare it to the first one. In my opinion, this game is much improved compared to the original. I know this is the black sheep of the series due to the odd leveling system, but maybe the Pixel Remaster version managed to smooth it out because I didn’t really have issues with it. Unlike the first game which employs a basic system of earning XP from combat, leveling up, and getting stronger, this one doesn’t have traditional character levels or classes. Instead, each weapon type and spell has its own level for each character that can only be increased by using it in combat. Everything starts pretty weak at level one, but the more you use it, the better it gets. This allows you to make your characters however you wish because everyone has access to every spell and weapon type. I ended up making Maria (they have names now!) the sole mage with both white and black magic, with Firion and Guy having a melee focus. I was constantly rotating weapons between them which kept them well-rounded and allowed me to equip them with any new weapons I found without having to grind. I felt that this worked well throughout the game, only struggling a bit in the last dungeon when instakill and lifesteal enemies became more prominent.
The story is a much bigger focus in this game compared to the first much to my delight. The first game told most of its story in a text crawl at the end after defeating the final boss. Here, it’s present throughout the game and there are even a couple “cutscenes” rendered in-game in the remastered 8-bit style. This helped the game flow more smoothly and even helped me figure where I was supposed to go next, my biggest gripe of the original. It also helped me become more attached to the characters, since they were actually characters this time and not just class names with no personality. This alone was enough to propel this game ahead of the first for me.
Not everything was great about this game though. The weirdest thing to me is that throughout the game, there were only three primary party members despite the four-person party. This meant the fourth slot was always filled temporarily by a rotating party member who never stuck around for long and was always underleveled compared to everyone else. They almost never held their own in combat and were generally useless. I never wanted to teach them any magic because I didn’t want to waste a spell tome only for them to leave at the end of the dungeon, so the best I could do was give them any leftover weapons and armor not used by other party members and hope for the best. Speaking of combat, despite keeping enough focus to evenly level the various weapon types and spells, I still found myself fast-forwarding through most fights by the mid-game similar to the original. There wasn’t enough variety to warrant anything else, and even the annoying instakill and lifesteal enemies mentioned earlier were eventually taken down by RNG. A lot of complaints for this game say you have to grind by attacking your own party members to level up HP and defense, and that may have helped with these enemies in particular, but I never resorted to grinding and managed OK without it.
I only have a couple other minor nitpicks that detracted from this otherwise good game. They tried to add some complexity to dialog by having some characters mention key terms, which you would then have to learn and then ask other characters about those terms to advance the story. I see what they were trying to do, but it wasn’t always clear what I was supposed to say to whom or what item to present which led to a couple roadblocks to progression in the early game. I also don’t like the addition of missable enemies, locations, and chests. If you aren’t going for 100% this won’t really affect you, but as someone who unexpectedly got 100% in the first game, I thought this one would be just as easy to do so and I was wrong. I had to replay almost the entire game again (I was at 21 hours after beating the final boss the first time) just to clean up anything I missed. Word of warning: while the location and bestiary achievements can be obtained across multiple playthroughs, all chests have to be obtained in one go for it to count. As a result, I likely won’t be going for completionist in future entries which is unfortunate. Still, despite these problems, I enjoyed my time with the game. I can kind of see why some people might prefer the first game if they really vibed with that combat system, but otherwise, Final Fantasy II is an improvement in every other way. I recommend it to anyone not afraid of an early experimental RPG with modern QOL features to smooth out the bumps if necessary. I’m still excited to continue my Final Fantasy journey, so II at least accomplished that.
Time to beat
(Completionist) - 29h:26m
Rating – 7/10
Monster Prom 3: Monster Roadtrip
Another entry in the criminally underserved party/visual novel/dating sim genre. I haven’t played the first game in the Monster Prom series yet, but I can compare it to the second game Monster Camp. In this game, 1-4 players take turns picking one of two locations to go to that will increase and decrease at least two of your resources (those being Hype, Magic, Mind, Money, Soul, and Stamina) depending on which choices you make at that location. They all start at 10 and the goal of the game is to raise one of them to 25 while keeping the rest above zero, otherwise it’s game over. When you reach 25, you trigger reaching the destination tied to that resource, and the ending screen showed three different destinations per resource. While the dating elements are toned down compared to the last game, you can still choose to romance one of the many characters which will trigger a special ending with them too if you successfully make it to a destination after picking the right dialog options with them.
As you can see, this game has a ton of replayability. There are a lot of locations you can choose, scenarios to read through, characters to romance, and destinations to reach. I only played two runs with a friend, with the first one ending in failure and the second leading to the Magic resource destination and romantic ending with Scott. While this was enough to be able to visit every location, it wasn’t nearly enough to see the hundreds of different scenarios. While I was pretty tired of the last game after a handful of runs (which you can’t fail unlike this game), I wouldn’t’ve been opposed to playing this some more to reach more destinations. The resource management added another layer of complexity that made it feel more like a game to me instead of just reading the same scenarios over and over again. It’s worth noting that the tone of this game is just as raunchy as ever, so I would avoid playing it around children. If the idea of a party game with a lot of reading, charming characters, pop culture references, and sexual innuendos sounds like a good time, I think you’ll like this. Just be aware that the gameplay is still mostly reading.
Time to beat
(Main+Sides) - 7h:50m
Rating – 7/10
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Nine Sols
Nine Sols is a Sekiro-like 2D metroidvania where you play as a cat-like alien creature called Yi on a revenge spree against the other nine members of the Sol council for dooming their species and betraying him. The reason I say Sekiro-like instead of the more common soulslike is because combat heavily revolves around parrying attacks and is faster paced. The game started off in a traditional Chinese-inspired village which led me to believe it would be taking place hundreds of years ago, but after a quick prologue, I was soon thrust onto an alien spaceship with advanced technology which completely threw me for a loop (in a good way). There are still clearly East Asian cultural influences throughout, and that juxtaposition with alien tech led to a kind of setting I don’t think I’ve seen in a game before.
I like the overall presentation of Nine Sols. The graphics are mostly in flat 2D with a pleasing art style, but there are a couple notable objects that are fully 3D which still somehow fit seamlessly into the world. The story is also delivered in a cool way, with boss fights starting and ending with a short manga strip continuing the East Asian influence. I still bemoan dialog that’s presented as text boxes with the occasional grunt from a character instead of full voice acting, but I understand that’s likely a budget constraint. I was intrigued by the story beats, and it was enough to keep me engaged and wonder what would happen next.
The combat as mentioned earlier revolves around parrying (although dodging is also an option) which gives you a Qi charge that can be planted on an enemy and detonated to do damage. There are also ability enhancement items called Jades which give small but noticeable perks like expending a Qi charge to increase the third hit of a triple slash or immediately powering up a charged attack after a successful parry. You also have a bow with three different arrow types with a small amount of ammo that either explode, pierce multiple enemies, or lock on. The bow didn’t seem to do much though and I mostly used it as a desperate finishing move if I was close to beating a boss and was about to die. One interesting feature of the combat system is that there are two different types of damage you and the enemies can take, internal and direct. If you manage to parry an attack but don’t get the timing perfect, you’ll take internal damage which is reflected as a dark red color on your health bar. This will start recovering slowly on its own after a few seconds if you don’t take more damage (or you can equip a Jade that heals internal damage by inflicting damage like I did). Failing to parry additional attacks will result in the internal damage becoming direct which can only be healed with the healing pipe or resting at a node. This once again encouraged parrying and aggressive attacks so you can heal yourself while also capitalizing on the damage you do to the enemy, and I felt that it worked well.
I do have some problems with this game though, although some people will see one of them as a positive. Like many metroidvanias, there were some moments in the story where I could not figure out how to progress. After searching literally the entire map, I had to look up where I was supposed to be going next which is never fun. Besides a couple key story moments, there were no map markers (nor any way to mark the map yourself) so the only way to know where to go was to pick up context clues. There are several collectibles in this game, and when you collect the map data chip from each area and give it to someone at home base, it will show you exactly how many collectibles you’ve gotten in each area and how many are left. However, there’s no indication of where in the area the collectible is. If you’ve already uncovered the whole area and don’t remember seeing a collectible you couldn’t reach (because once again, you can’t mark anything on the map), you either have to scour every inch of it again or consult a guide. I couldn’t be bothered to do this and unfortunately missed quite a few in my playthrough. My biggest negative, though some will see this as a positive, is that the game is just so damn difficult. The final boss is likely the hardest fight I’ve successfully beaten in a video game, and my aging hands did not approve of the button mashing required to pull off all the precise parrying required. There were a handful of bosses that took me over an hour to get through, and even some of the regular enemies could kill you if you aren’t careful. Good luck if you start getting swarmed by multiple enemies at the same time while also dodging projectiles and environmental hazards. I would also be remiss not to mention a frustrating stealth section partway through where you can’t use most of the abilities you’ve gained up to that point. All of these points led to a gameplay experience that was less smooth than I would’ve liked. Even with these negatives, the game was still quite good, and I can recommend it to anyone who likes metroidvanias and difficult combat. There is a story mode difficulty and accessibility options to make things easier if the difficulty is the thing holding you back from experiencing this.
Time to beat
(Main+Sides) - 35h:35m
Rating – 8.5/10
Stats
My first monthly stats section! It’s still a relatively small dataset since we’re early in 2026, but I think what’s here is still interesting. First of all, I think it’s so weird that an RPG isn’t in the top spot for most played. I suspect that might change with the later Final Fantasies, we’ll see. For now, congrats to the metroidvania Nine Sols! 35 hours would put it at fifth most played if I played it last year for perspective. Moving on, there is actually a correlation between money spent and games acquired so far. I spent slightly less in February than January and got slightly fewer games as a result. I think these numbers will change drastically in March given I got a ton of games in the itch.io bundle for relatively little. And as mentioned earlier, February marks the most time I’ve spent gaming since I started tracking. I did have basically a week off work which definitely helped so I don’t see myself topping this. 100 hours in one month is absolutely crazy though.
Conclusion/Upcoming
I didn’t realize how packed my YouTube schedule was until I sat down and wrote out all those playlist links in the game recaps section. Starting a game in February that won’t get a video out until April is ridiculous. As I mentioned in my last post, now that I’m uploading entire play sessions instead of cutting them down to an hour each, the video backlog will slowly start going down. I’ve got Metaphor: ReFantazio and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 videos (the last of my hourlong videos) going out every three days instead of six or more like my other videos to try to get them out of the way quickly. Right now, the last Expedition 33 video is slated for May 18th so the other game videos will be able to fill that slot and come out earlier. Good thing I consider myself an organized person and have everything tracked in a spreadsheet otherwise I have no idea how I would be able to keep it all straight.
My goal for March is to play through Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island which leaves Game Pass soon, Final Fantasy III, and Inscryption. I'm not sure if this will take up the entire month, so next on my Game Pass list is Balatro. It doesn’t really look like my kind of game, but apparently it can be pretty addictive, so we’ll see how long it keeps me entertained. If it doesn’t hook me, I’ll finally be starting Little Rocket Lab which I said I would get to last month and never did. That’s what I get for trying to make plans I guess 😅 I’m more hopeful now that Final Fantasy IV will be added to Game Pass in April since Microsoft added I-III like clockwork on a monthly basis. That will mark the switch from NES to SNES and from purely turn-based to the active time battle system so I have high expectations. That’s still a ways out though, and you saw what I just said about making plans. Before I do all of that, I’ll need to do some emergency work on my emulation project due to the rom site shutting down. Thanks everyone for reading, I’ll see you again next month!
Backlog total: 3,897 (+41)
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