I've ignored Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, A Hat in Time, and Deadly Premonition so far, but you know what's a game that I have been keeping my eye on, a game I recently played a demo for. Trials of Mana. The game where lots of old school gamers are putting it on their top ten most hyped games list and the game where lots of non-old school gamers forgot the game even existed. Played the demo recently, and my god this feels like a PS2 game. No, I don't mean that as an insult. I mean that as praise. This feels like it has the charm of an old JRPG from the PS2 era, from the clunky animations that reminds you of Dreamcast Sonic's weird mouth animations, the poor dubbing, the awkward in-game cutscenes, to how oddly PS2-ish the towns feel and one fan said the reason why it feels like that is because this is an almost exact remake of the original Trials of Mana, from how the NPC merchants dance to the exact layout of the towns resembling the old SNES layout.
The story seems pretty simple, the idea of different stories for different characters with different companions intrigues me and people say that unlike fan's expectations for Octopath Traveller, here it's the real deal, and then there is the combat. The combat is kind of like Kingdom Hearts combat but this really isn't Kingdom Hearts. There is stuff like jumping and evading, the animations are clunky, but the action is good enough to hold on it's own. It's kind of hard to differentiate it from Kingdom Hearts, it's like it's slower and heavier, it's still fast-paced, but this is clearly it's own thing. One thing I really enjoyed are the boss battles. Honestly I think it was the boss battles that had me intrigued the most and they are pretty fun here, requires a bit more strategy and this is where you really see the AI start to shine. Actually I think it's just basic evade the hitzone AI but it works pretty good in my opinion.
Overall, if you never played a Mana game like myself, go play the demo. This is one of those games where you can't simply sell with a show, not tell. You have to get a feel for the gameplay too because that trailer had me intrigued, but also confused me a bit what this game was like in terms of gameplay.