Games I Played in 2020: Snack World The Dungeon Crawl Gold

Snack World The Dungeon Crawl: Gold is a game developed by Level 5 (Professor Layton, Fantasy Life, Yo-kai Watch, etc), originally released as a 3DS game in Japan that never got localized, called Snack World: Trejurers. The Dungeon Crawl Gold is the localized version of Trejurer's enhanced Switch port. Aside from the game, it has a manga series, and a CGI anime available on Netflix but I have no particular interest in looking at those from my experiences with this game.

Let me say from the beginning that I wanted to like this game, I really did. From trailers, a lot of it looked like a fun, multi-player experience in a quirky RPG world, something that could echo the experiences of playing Fantasy Life with my friends who all got it for the same reason. Unfortunately it just falls flat on So. Many. Different Levels that I have a hard time figuring out how to list everything I found this game fails at. 

Games I Played in 2020: Digimon Story Lost Evolution

Digimon Story Lost Evolution is the third series of the Digimon Story series of games, released after Digimon World DS and Digimon World Dawn/Dusk (Yes, despite the subtitle of 'Digimon World', they're both 'Digimon Story' games and are called such in Japan), released on the Nintendo DS in July of 2010.  In a lot of ways it's a perfect missing link between the DS Digimon Story games and Cyber Sleuth/Hacker's Memory, including a lot of changes and improvements that would continue into CS but keeping a lot of the gameplay quirks of the DS games that CS lacks.  Due to it's title as a Digimon Story game, I will be comparing aspects of it to Dawn/Dusk and Cyber Sleuth in particular, to compare and contrast aspects of them to help give a better idea to other Digimon fans who might be wondering what it was like.

Since this game never got a proper localization and is completely in Japanese, I'm writing this review less as a plea to get people to play it, and more as a general, 'how I felt about the game/what to look forward to when the english patch comes out' for other Digimon fans. I don't think this game will appeal much to people who don't know about the franchise to begin with/have some history with it, and is a lot less beginner friendly than Cyber Sleuth/Hacker's Memory. That, plus some incredibly frustrating gameplay design makes it a hard game to recommend unless you're already a Digimon fan. Then, I think, the pros of this game will vastly outnumber the cons. Because of this, I won't explain too much about Digimon lore since I assume you probably already know the basics if you're reading this.

Game List

This is just my current list of games I started/am in the middle of playing/want to play for future reference and how far I am in them.