📄︱July 2026 Recap
What an overwhelming month!
A Revisit to a Terrible Game
In the first week of this month, I dreamt about me playing Brave Dungeon: The Meaning of Justice, the sequel to the dungeon crawling JRPG subseries created by the same developer as The legend of Dark Witch: INSIDE SYSTEM. I've abandoned the game previously, and reviewed it on Backloggd years ago, and my opinions on it were... bad. You can read my full thoughts about my experience here, but to summarize it, I've given the game a 1/5 due to it having a multitude of issues with the story, gameplay, graphics, soundtrack--everything with the game.But despite the odds, I've decided to finish the game this July. Even if I've finally seen the final chapter and the ending for the first time in English, my opinions on The Meaning of Justice remains the same cause I still (and KNOW) that this game could've been better if it weren't for the developer's issue with banning Early Access players for reporting too many bugs (even if they were persistent), and the since discontinued vTubing group Beatus Creation never existing. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Beatus Creation since it was something brand new and not another Dark Witch spinoff, but according to my knowledge, having so many waves of vTubers for an IP that I don't see people talk about as much as Touhou or any other doujin developer out there would've been a risky idea. Thankfully one of them, Mika Drop, survived, and continues to make content to this very day, even if they're still underrated compared to any other notable Japanese vTuber. The fact this game is more expensive than DELTARUNE and has this terrible quality is... something.
As far as things outside of The Meaning Of Justice, Episode 2 has (FINALLY) been but onton the Switch, Episode 4 happened, and four spinoffs came around and after the time of its release: A traditional/smash-like fighting game prototype, Versus One (Mario Party Minigame-like collection of Mini games featuring the Episode 4 cast), an unnamed ARPG Rougelike seemed to be based on Brave Dungeon, and Dark Witch Match!, a Dark Witch Connect-like competitive Puzzle game (featuring the Episode 1 Renovated Cast). As of writing this, the developer teased more content for what it seems to be from Episode 4, but all I can either think when it came to that is that its new content for Episode 4, a brand new game using Episode 4 as the base, or a remake of Episode 3 using Episode 4 as the base. My hopes for this series has since been died down, and talking about this more gives me a headache.
Side note, the nostalgia from the pre-2019 era of The Legend of Dark Witch (Episode 1, 2, Brave Dungeon 3DS/Switch, Dark Witch Story: COMBAT, and Episode 3) continues to haunt me, and with other factors such as Twitter and my Indie games being in the mix, it seems I can never truly detach myself from this game...
Major Gaming Industry Hurdles
Another thing that gives me a headache is what's going on in the gaming industry at the moment. As you may or may not already know, Sony announced they're winding down on selling physical discs around 2028 and discontinuing the PlayStation 3 and PSVita stores for good. The response to this went viral, with people deciding to end their relationships with the company since a good chunk of people want to play their games physically, and not have to worry about their games disappearing forever like the ~500 movies that were taken away from multiple users' libraries on their systems. It started when the latest entry to the Grand Theft Auto series, GTAVI, announced where the physical box will only contain a code.As for XBOX, I honestly haven't paid attention to what they're doing, and Nintendo released Rhythm Heaven Groove and Splatoon Raiders, so... I think they're doing perfectly fine. Their Blue Ocean strategy about not following the major trendsetters that other companies are pretty much known for is working out real good, and seeing what used to be Sony players buying Nintendo Switch 2s to play whatever they have in their collection is making me seem that the things Sony's doing is helping Nintendo out with sales and whatnot. I'm even hearing that Raiders is actually a wonderful spinoff on the Splatoon series!
But the Sony backlash... Its insane. And it's still going too as of writing this. The backlash was so strong it made the emulation/homebrew scene for the PS5 grow even stronger, starting a whole wave improving emulators for the PS5, with active progress even if a little bit of Artificial Intelligence was used in the process. I'm all in it for people ripping their systems apart, cancelling their subscriptions and such, but honestly, even if its not affecting Sony much, its still impactful, and ever since they announced it, my timeline has always had one or two few many people saying "Fuck Sony." You'd love to see it.
oh, and speaking of emulation...
Switch Homebrew Scene Growing Very Strong
GBATemp is a wonderful site. It keeps me updated with what's going on in the emulation scene, and has a wonderful cast of members and developers that make the site much better. Throughout this month, they've kept delivering new information about the Switch emulation scene as they've announced four major groundbreaking emulator ports done by a developer named Nagaa being made for the base Nintendo Switch: NetherSX2 (PCSX2- PS2), Dekopon (Azahar- 3DS), Cemu-nx (WiiU), DrasticDS (NDS), and Dolphin (GameCube/Wii).The most jawbreaking one for me to hear about though was PCSX2: One thing I remember during the years of the Switch being onits last few legs, is that its userbase were talking a lot about how underperforming the system was compared to the PS5 and Xbox Series S/X, and that they're hoping a new console that can have all of what the Switch provided but stronger.
Meanwhile, even if the Switch 2 was announced and released, hearing PLAYSTATION 2 AND WIIU EMULATION being a reality on their past system is just jawbreaking, including GameCube and Wii. There's a whole app dedicated to adding GameCube support for the Switch 2, and now with the original (modded) Switch having Dolphin it makes that system capable of playing all GameCube and Wii games while the Switch 2 got like... a few. No wonder why people are always asking Nintendo to add more GameCube games to the library. It's like that one Disney meme of cutting a break in ultrathin slices and serving it to others.
Now I did hear people mention you had to overclock the system and expand the memory a little bit, and I do think its a little bit of cheating, but WHO CARES. I LOOOOOOOOVE SEEING ACTIVE PROGRESS ON THE SWITCH HOMEBREW SCENE (or any Nintendo based systems that have a scene like this tbh), delivering some of the most impossible breakthroughs I've seen in any gaming console's homebrew scene.
Family/Friendly Time
To also add to the best part of this month, our family and I have done quite a bit of stuff! We've went on two mini vacations to see some fireworks UP CLOSE and to watch some gigantic boats, and I've done my Eagle Scout ceremony1 (finally!) I know I've made Eagle this time and around least year, but due to time constraints, I wasn't able to have a ceremony up until now. Thankfully this puts a proper closure to my Scouting journey and that too has been a nostalgia thing hitting me.College Update
they've declined my next semester, and I'm actively working on trying to get it sorted out so I can have a next semester.Website Update
Not much has changed since the last time I updated my main website! Meanwhile for my Bear Blog....
A Little Break from Getting Items and Traps
And to wrap this recap off, I'm taking a little break from Archipelago Randomizer. Well, besides the one I'm doing in one of my Discord servers. I'm already burnt out of doing them.Because of my limited taste in games, I don't have a lot of ones to choose from when it comes to generating and playing new archipelago secessions, and even if I add a bunch of people into the mix, it would be through the same games with more of a chance of being BK, and the paths being different and all that. it gotten to a point where I've spent wasting the middle half of July using Claude to make an instance of The Legend of Dark Witch 4, and even though I gotten VERY CLOSE to the days spent "working on it," it decided to not work at the end, and now I'm left with the same games to do a secession with again. If only I knew a human with C# skills, I would see if they're able to help me with this since not only I want to actually learn how The Legend of Dark Witch 4 works on the coding level (a dream of mine since the beginning of me knowing about this series), and it being useful for my journey towards making my games in Godot (C# its the "Tails" of the "Sonic" that is GDScript in Godot if you get what I mean) To make matters worse, when I've had one of my friends to talk to INSIDE SYSTEM about getting an officially supported instance, they mentioned it would be troubling due to copyright restrictions. Thankfully after looking at their guides it seems that modification is possible, provided you don't advertise it as official or extract the game assets from it to make it work. You have to own the original DXLib version of Episode 4 (which costs money) and select the Unity Beta to sue it. It uses the Mono Backend which to my knowledge, makes modding the game easier.
I won't be using AI to help me with anything code-related anymore from this point on as I want for either myself or other people to do things like this by their own skills, and not relying on a chatbot to do it for you.
That was a lot, but with this month being exciting, it makes me more excited for what's to come in August. Stay tuned for that!
NEW/Revisited Games I've played and/or reviewed this month:
Note: I've started playing these games in date order.