Well, the hint's not wrong, and yeah it should have been 24. Anyway, all three are correct.

One left to guess from last batch and a bunch more to catch up to live.

40. Tactical JRPG set in China. 1st game in the series. The name is basically the old name + Tactics instead of the beat em up name.

Moving on the map is similar to chess in that unit types have varying levels of movement (i.e.: horsemen can move more squares forward than the footmen). The order of each unit is decided by whoever has the highest morale during a day of battle. The battlefield's terrain also affects how armies can proceed on the map. After a successful move, the army will be asked to face either north, south, west, or east. Their positioning affects the unit's capability to defend from attacks or help allies.

32. A JRPG from a long running series, this entry was the first to put a lot of budget in graphics.
31. Souls meets 3 kingdoms China, this entry however is closer to Sekiro than Dark Souls.
30. Another JRPG from 2022, this game features dungeons within the main characters themselves.
29. This JRPG is unlike others, because it is set on the streets of modern Tokyo.
28. This 2015/2016 JRPG is from a media franchise that used to rival Pokemon
27. This JRPG is kind of a celebration of a certain JRPG series, the world is full of famous characters.
26. This 2022 JRPG released to universal acclaim, featuring an open world more monstrous than anyone could have imagined.
25. This is the first direct sequel to one of the games in the main series, though it seemed to add more questions than answers.
24. This game featured more of gothic/horror theme.

After yesterday's outage we're missing a day, so hopefully with these hints the last three of this batch will be easier.

#29: This game features a rather original solution to prevent you from going out of bounds as you'll just get blown away halfway across the map if you try.
Hint 2: This happens in two of the game modes, which feature a big open desert area for you to drive in, when you ride up the steep cliffs on the edges and actually manage to reach the top.
Hint 3: The main mode though is just about you racing against opponents on tracks in a stadium. These have a tile-based layout, and there's a great editor that easily lets you make your own tracks for this mode.

#27: Though this is technically made by another company, it was branded by its publisher as part of a well-known, wider series where each game's name has a certain prefix.
Hint 2: That series deals with a whole bunch of themes; like ants, earth and cities.
Hint 3: While those all have wider, more zoomed out themes, my game just deals with a single building. Guessed by Mnementh - SimTower

#26: Try to keep your units away from the 'inquisitors', they're relentless and basically always win.
Hint 2: Even your highest ranking family members aren't really safe, especially if you aren't sufficiently catholic. I guess it's because of those inquisitors' high 'piety'.
Hint 3: They are actually agents of the AI controlled Papal States, and trying to assassinate one to save yourself can be risky, because failure will severely damage you standing with the Pope, and you wouldn't want that.

#27: Uh SimTower. I saw Maxis there in when I looked the Sim games up, but apparently Maxis acted only as publisher for that game.

Might as well try to guess a few of these.

32: Could be Dragon Quest VIII

29: The World Ends With You?

28: I guess this could be Yo-kai Watch.

25: Bit of a longshot, but Final Fantasy X-2?

24: Shadow Hearts?

Only 25 is correct.

Correct!

It was developed by a small Japanese publisher. They also made a sequel a couple years later called 'Yoot Tower' (after the lead designer) without Maxis publishing.

Dwarf Fortress made 20 years ago the subgrenres of simulating a colony with multiple workers surviving harsh environments. There are many games that do that too. But some add a twist to that, and Against the Storm is among them. What they add as a component is the run-based gameplay of shorter stints with each colony but acquiring upgrades and progress each time and therefore having a global progress as well. And this simple little addition changes the typical genre feel so much, that the game feels fresh and new.

This change in how the game feels to play is supported by it's theme, which is in accordance with the name: storm. The world is ravaged by the blightstorm. The survivors have fallen back to the last bastion of civilization: the Smoldering City, ruled over by the scorched queen. The blightstorm is cyclical, so in phases the storm is relenting caravans are sent out into the wilderness to establish temporary settlements to gather resources and send them into the Smoldering City. You are playing as one of her viceroys tasked with establishing these settlements. Once a cycle ends and the blightstorm comes back, these settlements are destroyed and you start again in the next cycle close to the city.

In one cycle you usually have multiple settlements, creeping deeper into the wilderness and exploring more and more. Your successes allow you to unlock more buildings and other boons in the Smoldering City, so your next settlement can have more success. Deep in the wilderness you also can reforge ancient seals to slowly tame the blightstorm, allowing for more time to get deeper into the world.

Each of the settlements works like a more classic colony builder, but the time of each run is limited as you either reach a goal in reputation with the queen or running out of the queen's patience, signified by blue and red progress bars at the bottom of your screen respectively. As the blightstorm ravages the land it looks different each cycle and the map is mostly covered in a thick forest. There are different biomes (like coral forest or scarlet orchard), resulting in different tree types like big mushrooms or things like that. These lands have also differing modifiers which make the gameplay different. More importantly though you also have to unlock building plans with the queens reputation and you get a random selection, which also changes how you play. The random selection is based on the unlocked plans and you also can unlock some buildings to your base plans so they are always available.

As most of the land is covered in forest you are starting off cutting down trees (the wood also is a basic resource). With clearing out forest you gain room to build more buildings, but also uncover glades. Most glades have some glade events (like ruins from the previous cycle) you have different options of clearing. Many of the glades have dangerous events, that have nagtive effects if left unworked for too long. Also as you progress through the map the forest gets more and more hostile, which in turn lowers the resolve. So as your settlement grows you need to fulfill more needs of your citizens to offset the negative effects to their resolve, which if it goes to low leads to citizens leaving.

With all this the game manages to exude a feel very different from other colony sims or city builders. There is especially a feeling of progressing into a hostile environment which bites back as you clear the forest and a feel of non-persistence, as all your settlements will be destroyed in the next cycle. For fans of the genre I can only recommend to give the game a try, and even people who shy away because usually you play so long at a single settlement can look into this, as each settlement is done in one or two hours - and you go on to the next with different parameters. The game is still early access, but set to release in 1.0 version on December 8th. So this week. So let's build - for the queen!

Initial trailer from a year back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GioJK1pT6vY

You can see some of the changes made in the early access if you compare it to the trailer for the 1.0 version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcFX2Ep1GPA

#29

Change YoY: =   My Rating: 9.2 / 10

Proof positive that open world games don't have to be obscenely massive to be great or memorable. Yakuza 0 presented the player with a much more compact open world compared to most other modern games in the genre, and then simply filled its concise and intricately designed world with a wide variety of different engaging things to do, from absolutely ridiculous side quests to activities that have no reason to be as deep or elaborate as they are. And yet they are, and the game is all the better for it. It also features two protagonists, who have impressively different gameplay styles, both having their own fighting styles and side quests. Both characters also have their own side business they can run, Kiryu with his real estate company, and Majima running a cabaret club.

Yakuza 0 balances the ridiculous with the serious amazingly well, as the player might go from a life and death battle with a yakuza boss to a side quest about teaching a dominatrix how to be better at her job. It's quite the balancing act, and the game somehow pulls it off near perfectly. It's this strange mix of tones that have no problem jumping from one extreme to another seemingly on a moment's notice that gives the game its unique charm and style. There's just nothing else quite like this series, and I would take Yakuza 0's well-designed, compact world over most of the massive and repetitive open worlds filled with hundreds of indistinct markers denoting another pointless collectible which have crowded much of the video game industry for the last decade and a half. Some do it well, and there are a few examples of that coming up on my list as well, but as Yakuza 0 shows, the constant rush by certain developers to create increasingly massive worlds for their otherwise bland settings isn't the only way to do open world games well.

Let's get the next batch of games guessed:

#30: Deus Ex: Human Revolution as guessed by haxxiy.

#29: Octopath Traveler as guessed by Darashiva.

#28: Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIV as guessed by Machina.

#27: UFO: Enemy Unknown as guessed by Darashiva.
Turn based tactical strategy game from the 90s. First game in the series. This one features base building for your soldiers fighting against the global threat you try to defeat.

#26: Jagged Alliance as guessed by Darashiva.
Turn based tactical strategy game from the 90s. First game in the series. This one features very... individual(?) people to hire for your team.

#25:
First game with this pirate trainee.