GHG will be back on Monday, but I just wanted to wish everyone a fun and safe holiday weekend. We’ll be checking out the fireworks show here during the Fort Dalles Fourth, the first in over 25 years!

I plan on getting caught up on a few games over the weekend as well, including Pokemon X (3DS), Nier (PS3), and Shovel Knight (PC).

I’m about 15 hours into Game Freak’s Pokemon X — this being one of the first games in the series I’ve ever put any time into — and I’m enjoying it.

There’s something irresistible about these cute and unique monsters, figuring out what skills to keep or replace, seeing what each monster evolves into, and understanding the various characteristics of all the Pokemon in this world. As a relative newbie, I’m still rather overwhelmed by the complexity and variety on display here. Just keeping tabs on what Pokemon I’ve caught and organizing them feels like a game in and of itself. The satisfaction of whittling down a Pokemon’s health and capturing it in a Poke Ball is also pretty great.

I’m particularly impressed with Pokemon X‘s soundtrack. I was expecting a standard and light set of tunes, but there have been many times where I’ve just sat there and listened to the catchy music found all over Kalos, like the “Gate Theme”, which is just so good.

Some things about the game annoy me, like how it can be a bit difficult to position your character to speak to NPCs, or the slow pace of battles even with the animations turned off. On the flipside, the game is very pretty, and small touches — like how you physically bend down to talk to children — show great attention to detail that give the game its unique charm.

Even though I’ve put a decent amount of time into Pokemon X, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. This is the kind of game I could easily see myself sinking many, many hours into, like I did with one of my favorite Nintendo DS RPGs several years ago, Dragon Quest IX.

I just started Cavia’s Nier a few days ago, and only have a couple hours logged. It’s a game I’ve had in my backlog since 2012, and after being urged by a friend to play it for at least the past year, I decided to finally give it a shot.

From the beginning, I didn’t think I’d make it past the intro. The game suffers from sub-par visuals and a combat system that — at least initially — feels simplistic and repetitive. The first battle in Nier seems to take forever, and for a moment, I thought I was doing something wrong.

I wasn’t feeling much better a little later, as the game’s inhabitants were perfectly happy to send me on countless, mindless fetch quests. However, after I played through and finished the first dungeon — including the first boss — I started feeling differently.

There’s a lot going on in Nier, with many ideas borrowed from genres you wouldn’t think have any place in an action RPG like this, but nevertheless, they’re in here and they work quite well. The story is interesting, which is elevated by some pretty good voice acting. It was certainly better than I was expecting, with the title character Nier and your early sidekick Grimoire Weiss having solid performances.

So far, Nier is proving to be better than I was expecting, and even though it has numerous flaws that can’t be ignored, I find myself compelled to play it, and that’s what’s most important: that a game be fun.

Finally, there’s Yacht Club Games’ Shovel Knight, which I just wrote about yesterday. Having put around 4 hours into it so far, I’m about halfway through. It’s just a fantastic platforming adventure with so much to do.

Challenge and difficulty feel just right, although if you are not used to playing side-scrolling games like this that have limited continue points and other consequences for dying, it might initially feel punishing. It’s not Mega Man or Ninja Gaiden levels of punishing, but players just wanting to quickly fly through the game to see its ending will be met with a quick demise. In fact, many rooms are designed in such a way that you’ll take a hit and usually fall to your death — or at least get knocked back to the previous screen — if you just run in blind.

I can’t say enough about how good the game looks and sounds. Art and animation are of the highest quality, backgrounds have a ton of detail, and the music gets in your head and stays there. Jake Kaufman, with some contributions by original Mega Man composer Manami Matsumae, outdoes himself here. “La Danse Macabre”, a song that will bring to mind a very popular vampire-slaying series on the NES, is one of many standout musical pieces in what is already an amazing soundtrack.

Shovel Knight would have to seriously pull the rug out from under me at this point to fail. What a game!