I will start off by saying that for people like me who love video games to their core, this is going to be an astonishing 365 days. Developers are putting out games guns blazing, “Indie” and “Triple A” devs alike are putting spotlights on their projects in an attempt to make a well-earned profit, not unlike most years. However, this year is a little bit different, as 2017 seems to be filled to the brim with quality products, brought to us by experienced and renown developers from both America and Japan. This blog in particular serves to list off a few of the upcoming releases that I’m in anticipation for. I have been planning to get a job at some point this year, and it seems like I might as well do it sooner rather than later, considering the fact that they’ll all rip my wallet to shreds.

• Persona 5 – This game is the successor to the PlayStation 2 cult classic Persona 4, and/or its PSVita adaptation Persona 4 Golden. This beloved hype train is conducted by Atlus, known solely for their unique anime aesthetic in their games, including Shin Megami Tensei, Catherine, and Persona’s most formidable rival Danganronpa. Like its predecessors, Persona 5 has a theme that will drive the story. While Persona 3 had a blue motif and the idea that humans must push through despair though wishing for death, and Persona 4 had a yellow motif and the heroes were drived towards finding out the truth, P5 will have a red motif and a theme of thievery and work in the shadows. This title was delayed twice, finally being moved to April for its release, though to the chagrin of fans.

• Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash – From the wonderful minds over at Marvelous AQL, this is tehcnically a game considered NSFW, so I’ll make this quick, explaining it in three simple sentences, a haiku to boot. [Girls with water guns | Shoot clothes off your enemies | Celebrate Fifth Year]

• Four Goddesses Online: Cyber Dimension Neptunia – Over on Japanese soil, there lies a certain company named Idea Factory, which as their name suggests, is a factory for intriguing ideas. One day, Fall 2010 they teamed up with another company by the name of Compile Heart, and together they took the world by storm with the first entry of their biggest breadwinner: Hyperdimension Neptunia. Based on the personification of the gaming industry as a whole, this is the most recent entry in the Nep-Nep franchise, centered around an online MMO played by one of the series’s most renowned characters, Vert, aka the Goddess Green Heart representing the Xbox 360. The majority of Neptunia games are placed in the genre of turn-based RPGs, and this’ll be the first game in the series based around an open world battle system similar to that of Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts series.

• Nier: Automata – Speaking of Square Enix, one of the most influential game companies in history, they themselves have been very busy at work developing and licensing their own games. Some of the lesser examples of this year (at least on my list) include World of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts 2.8. Now this game in particular is developed by a company named PlatinumGames, but the game will be published by SE. Automata will be based set in a dystopian world set after the events of its predecessor Nier, which in itself is a spin-off of the PS2 classic Drakengard, all masterminded by the elusive Yoko Taro. The demo had been released sometime last year and the game is set to release next month, where the player takes control of the platinum-headed, blindfolded android, waifu war candidate 2B and her small bot partner which launches small projectiles while she mows through machina left and right.

• Nintendo Switch and its Affiliates – Oh boy, here we go. Nintendo has done it agian, going out and announcing the release of the new Nintendo Switch console. This console has been setting the world on fire, making hype trains go full steam ahead, however, it also has diminished the faith in some Nintendo fans, who believe that they have not learned their mistakes from the Wii U (which was trash overall in my personal opinion). There are a plethora of titles that will be coming soon after the initial official release of the Switch, including Splatoon 2, Arms, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, and the one that I’m personally pumped for: Fire Emblem Warriors. For those more interested, the presentation for the console can easily be found on YouTube, as well as multiple reactions from YouTubers who are equally as exited for this console as I am. Also as a side note, Fire Emblem Echoes for the Nintendo 3DS family of systems, a remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden which originally released on the Famicom back in 1992, a full twenty-five years in the making