I decided two things at the start of the year. The first being that I would not play more than a single game at a time when it comes to going through my backlog. For the last couple of years I tend to have a bunch of games on the go, I peaked at one point at 7 concurrent playthroughs of different things and while I don't struggle to remember the goings on of each game for the most part, it does mean that the rate at which I complete stuff becomes immensely slow so this year I want my playthroughs to be a bit more focused. The second is that I want to focus in on the Dreamcast this year and explore its library a bit more closely.
Around Christmas last year I was wandering around the retro game stores in Nagoya and while going through the aisles of a Super Potato I started looking at all the Dreamcast games. The Dreamcast was a system I owned back when it was new, I remember vividly the birthday that I got it with a copy of Powerstone and I played the shit out of that thing, there's a lot of fond memories tied to Sega's final piece of hardware. But one thing I realized when looking at the selection of titles in Super Potato is that my experience with the system as a child barely scratched the surface of what the system really has to offer. Sure, I played a ton of Powerstone 1/2, Dynamite Cop, Shenmue, Resident Evil: Code Veronica and other stuff but really I was only scratching the surface. There are tons of interesting looking titles, a lot of which were locked to Japan and even if I could have got hold of them back then, my younger non-Japanese speaking ass wouldn't have been able to get a lot out of them.
But now its 2024, I live in Japan, fluent in the language and Dreamcast games are easily obtainable, I can go hog-fuckin-wild on this thing and get real intimite with it's library. There's stuff that I have lined up that I have never heard of like Visual Novel JRPG deSPIRIA or Diablo clone based on an anime Record Of Lodoss War as well as games I always new about but have never had a chance to try like Blue Stinger and Cannon Spike. A quick google of "obscure games for the Dreamcast" has led me to quite a number of interesting titles that I can't wait to try out.
I did decide to be boring though and kick things off with a game I've already finished once, Grandia 2. I haven't touched a Grandia game since my high school playthrough of Grandia 2 on the PS2 and since it was sort of a big deal on the DC back when it launched I figured I'd kick off my year with a trip down memory lane. It's an extremely good game but maybe I should have played a bunch of shorter stuff first to get some completions under my belt instead of jumping right into a meaty JRPG, but oh well, not gonna stop now.
If you are interested in my exploration of the DC and how my individual playthroughs are going then I talk about it in my weekly backlog vlogs so give those a gander if you want to see what weird and obscure shit I come across over the course of the year.
If there's any stuff you think I should play, leave a comment or tell me in my stream or something. Between exploring this system and some of the new stuff on the horizon I'm pretty excited for this year in games
