Akc018

The story and setting is very good. The first chapter has some strong Uncharted vibe, but slows down significantly after that. Pacing is a bit too slow, there's also too much infiltration, too much close quarter combat. Not saying infiltration is not good, but it's getting tiring very fast, it slows down pacing and the "opportunities" left for infiltration feel unnatural. Towards the end I just want to finish and leave it aside.

I have always been a fan to the Room series. VR in this game provides a different and better experience to their old games. After getting used to how controller works for some initial game play, the VR controls are pretty easy to interact with. The VR really enhanced the puzzles, so it feels a lot more immersive and fun to play. It is overall a very good VR experience.

Pretty fun game, and very polished. However, it just doesn't hook me very much, there's not a lot of incentive to go for completion, or even finish it. I had similar feelings about Astro's Playroom. If you don't count the more modern appearance of the game, deep down, it's just a glorified Mario 64, and doesn't feel fresh.

It's for sure not a perfect game, and having some major issues. I'd still give the game a 10/10. It's a work of art, and you can see devs put so much passion and effort into it. The game has great art direction, and a fun combat system that is not too easy nor too hard. But the most important thing that stands out is its adaption of Journey to the West. It respects the source material, yet all aspects of adaption are filled with original ideas making it nostalgic yet refreshing, making it standing out with all the other JttW adaptions. Especially the 6 post chapter cutscenes, they are very unique, short films with distinct artistic styles, very much reminds me of Animatrix. The stories are related to the main game in a some what loose way, but with interesting ideas, deep philosophical questions, and makes me think a lot of the overall story and the game. The attention to details is phenomenal, the item design, skill system, the achievement system, even the calligraphy, shows so much aesthetic decisions and polish, it's really a joy to experience through it. Especially I played with the Chinese language and text, there are level of details and references that likely won't be fully conveyed in English. The combat is very fun, and enemy and boss design shows the amount of work put it. There are more than 80 different bosses, every one of them are unique in character design and combat design. The gameplay feels fluid with a lot of different build options. It can start a bit hard especially on certain bosses or mini-bosses, but overall the difficulty is not too bad. The game does have some issues, like lack of in game maps, invisible walls, and lack of guidance, etc. But overall the greats significantly outweigh these inconveniences. I'd definitely recommend this game.

While nobody expected it to come close to the story of end walker, it wasn't a bad story. The first part feels a bit slower but that's somewhat ok because this is a new story. I personally was pretty happy about the second part, there's a lot of story elements make it feel like a classic final fantasy story, the story turn, the contrast, the detailed writing, the superficial callbacks of classic final fantasy entries like ff9. I was getting a bit emotional in the last zone. Overall I enjoy the story a lot, of course it can't compare to EW and ShB, but it's not bad at all. Music is always good, the graphic improvement is subtle but noticeable. The gameplay seems to improve a lot, the new rail being rather fun and less repetitive. It's still the early expansion though so we will see how it goes. In general I really like DT, personally I'd rank it after EW and ShB.

Pretty fun game, with seemingly realistic physics, and quite additive. For mountain bike lovers, this may be the best game ever. Although I'm not, and the game feel too difficult and some times a bit frustrating.

Fun escape game. The puzzles are not hard, and is a good fit for escape rooms (obvious clues). There're a few puzzles that feels a bit cringy, otherwise it's not bad! There's a bit simple story that gives you more flavor than just the puzzle.

Certainly a very unique game, I would play it just for this reason alone. The centerline is rather religious related, doesn't really give me much thoughts

A lovely puzzle game. I was mostly drawn by the art style (reminds me of journey), but I was heavily expecting similar art style would not use voice as a main narrative vehicle, it was ok but I'd definitely prefer world building without language. Puzzling is rather good and fun, and blend nicely with the over world.

Valkyrie Profile is still a fantastic game to play in 2024. If you like JRPG and story driven game, this shouldn't be something to miss. Also don't let the pixelated graphics and voice acting in the profile turn you away. Once you get into it a bit more the graphics is really not so much a big problem, and voice acting is actually a lot better than what you get in the prologue. I initially was a bit critical about the PS5 version not getting better graphics, but a few hours in it doesn't bother me any more. On the other hand, the any time save/load and rewind, although looks simple, is a great addition to remove some of the barrier and frustration of the game play (i.e. too reliant on RNG), especially at end game content. I would highly recommend this game, and please do yourself a favor, find a guide (this game has that old school design and doesn't shy away from hiding its ending behind complicated requirements that are not meant to be easily found).

Still a good game, but much worse than the original. - the freshness is no longer there - exploration is a lot worse. The biomes are not as versatile and fun as the original, everything being too bright kills the suspense. Too many labyrinth type of explorations. - related to exploration, game progression is quite painful. When you miss something in the labyrinth, there's very little hint to the player what might be wrong and what the next step should be. This is distinctively different from the original: there was no labyrinth, the exploration was difficult but it was always clear on the direction, when you overlooked something the system would try to remind you - too much meaningless dialogs. I like that the original doesn't try to build a character out of the game, the situation is what matters, which is really good for immersions. BZ tries to build a lot of characters, but it doesn't really add up to the game - Vehicles are not as fun - Story wise, it almost looks like some after thoughts of the building part. I don't feel the urge to progress and see the rest of the story, and the ending is rather questionable.

It's a fantastic game! I heard about the game a long time ago from Outer Wilds community, it has been on my list and I finally got to it. I resisted looking up anything and it totally worths it. While it still can't beat outer wilds, it does scratch some of that itches. This is a great example how open world should be done. It's truly open, you can do whatever you want, without those artificial quests. The key attraction of the game is really explore and expect unknowns. For the entire time, I'm so addicted driven by curiosity. The gaming being set in a dark under sea environment thus limiting visibility, as well as not having any map system really also helps on that. It's a completely different experience compared to the normal boring "open world" games. Construction and resource management is a big part of the game, it's very well executed, apart from some occasional minor frustrations of finding stuff, the entire flow feels quite smooth and construction is fun and not annoying at all. The survival part, food/water/oxygen are a bit difficult but it imposes a slight but well put pressure on the player which also affects the game strategy. There're 3 types of vehicles, which have very distinct characteristics, they can appear a bit daunting initially, but since the game assigns different purposes to them, it makes all of them pretty much mandatory, this forces the player to pick up and get used to the differences. Once that initial familiarity is acquired, they are very fun to play with. The game can potentially be terrifying for some people, with it's dark environment and sometimes its fauna, but that also consists a big part of the exploration appeal. Overall, this is a near perfect game. I'd highly recommend it, and also suggest to play blindly without looking up anything.

Very solid and fun game. I love the combat system, it has many different classes with their special characteristics but leave the battle decision at high level (i.e. you don't need to manually select specific actions/abilities during the actual combat). This makes it deep but have succinct controls. The voice acting is outstanding in this type of game. The art style and music are both very enjoyable. The rapport system is fun initially but there're too many combinations, trying to go 100% becomes too much mundane work. The game's difficulty setting is pretty good. At tactical which I played, it's not a no brainer but I don't need to worry too much about unit configurations. Trying to min max the combat is way too much for me. I'd recommend it to everyone enjoying the tactical RPG genre.

I beat the game, but just because it’s a final fantasy and especially ff7. Otherwise there are several points in the game I would have ****’s a fine game but I just can’t find myself liking it to the level I hoped. The good: - stunning environment and world building - very great models for the main characters - follows the OG ff7 which is an established one of the all time great - music of course should be praised like all other final fantasy game. The bad: - It’s boring, especially the open world part. The first 7~8 chapters have very few things going on. - I didn’t like the combat. While a lot of people praised its combat system, it doesn’t work out for me. It’s not intuitive, and the game doesn’t even try to introduce it. Block and dodge doesn’t work as naturally as real action games. It sure seems to have a of complexity and customization, it just doesn’t feel fun and rewarding. I did the entire play through on Normal, it can be frustrating at times. Like RPG, leveling would help, but the boring and dragging open world makes it a pretty bad experience. - Excessive mini games. While some mini games can be ok and fun, there’re just too much, and some of them are even required in main quests. Card games and piano are the better ones, but there are also very bad mini-games like wrangling chocobos and luring the chicken back to the village (this one is just ridiculous) - The story is just not that fun. To a larger part, the story here is a story told twenty years ago, so it’s difficult to get surprise and delight. Chopping it to a trilogy doesn’t help at all. And because of that, the game tries to make it even more obscure with the parallel world thing. The entire story feels loose and confusing and not addicting. If I didn’t know about OG FF7, the story probably doesn’t make sense as a whole - Pacing is very bad, this contributes significantly to the boring feeling. So much stuff is designed to waste your time, like mini-games, the forced very slow walk through out all chapters, the slow animations and climbing, and branched story with different party members (the worst being the personal trials in chapter 13, when it pops out I was like “why SE? Why?”). I spent about 60 hours to finish my first play through. It probably would feel a lot better if it’s 30 hours. - The characters are too anime-ish, a lot of times they are cringy and unnatural. The character development is hit and miss. Outside of the main cast it’s worse. Btw, when there’re a lot of people like costa de sol, it feels more like Sims than a final fantasy game. Overall It’s not a bad game at all, it’s just not that fun to play

A fantastic game, although probably not for everyone. The use of different script fonts to make a text based game so engaging is genius. The story is powerful, and I learned how to read these more difficult fonts. More historical context would probably have been more helpful. And as a note, don't use "easy to read font"!

It's pretty fun but way too difficult. The game asks you to use mostly 2 primitive movement (left arm and right arm) to move around in space stations with no gravity. I guess real astronaut may be more intuitive

(I platinum'd the game but ending up disappointed, AW1 and Control are more fun for me) Trying to blend too many different styles, but also with problems: survival horror without usable stealth, detective game with supernatural forces, live action footage, two line story telling. This mix hurts story pacing and continuity. The pacing problem together with story itself, make it a drag for me half way in. The ending eventually is also not that interesting. While atmosphere building is strong, there're just way too many jump scares. I'd definitely prefer AW1 and Control over AW2.

Interactive drama similar to Life is strange series and Quantic Dreams games, but shorter and compact (about 4 to 5 hours). The game happens in a small number of scenes. There's no supernatural forces unlike a lot of games mentioned above, but with rather believable storytelling. To some level it resembles more to a suspense movie. I also found cinematography more interesting than other games. Overall the game is quite enjoyable.

The game has some interesting concepts, it was fun at the very start, but after the first two hours it wears off very quickly. The biggest problem is moving on the alchemy map is difficult and slow and limited by resources, and it doesn't get better as the game progress. This makes exploration of the alchemy map sometimes frustratingly unfriendly.

It's a fun language puzzle game to play. The 5 artificial languages are pretty well designed, and have their different features. That being said, at the end each language is just a small set of glyphs, and the way the game helps you to decode these glyphs and link them together is a bit forced. Decoding them doesn't give me as much satisfactory as some more sophisticated construct in other games, e.g. Tunic. Apart from language puzzle aspect, art style also has some similarities to Tunic. Most of the game are puzzle solving and explorations, I platinum'd for about 9 hours, it's a short and sweet game.

While generally not bad, after finishing day 2, it becomes a bit boring, almost didn't complete it.

This game goes far beyond my expectation and is one of the best metroidvania games. It probably cannot beat Hollow Knight because of HK's art style, but otherwise it's a great game, full of fun, challenging yet avoid being punishing at all. Also apart from being a metroidvania game, it's also a PoP game, showing elements that resembles Jordan Mechnar PoPs, which I was a fun for. PoP+metroidvania is such a good combination. A few things I don't like as much: requires Ubisoft connect, various bugs at launch (I'm stuck by a single bug that blocks out 3 trophies), art style may be a slight bit too flashy for my taste. The game has a very large map, but is very accessible. Unlike HK, it doesn't punish the player: tons of save points and teleport, the map updates in real time (and without the need of amulet), death penalty is as low as you can get, different difficulty levels, retry boss battles directly without respawn at save point. It makes me so happy! Battle is fun yet challenging, there're various combos similar to action games, boss fight is challenging and fast paced, which also shows some influence of fighting game. On normal difficulty, boss fights are not easy, but after a few iterations and the pattern becomes clearer, it's doable (with a lot of room for errors on lower difficulty) and it feels very satisfying. The game is overall very polished although with some bugs. It perfectly built on the modern metroidvania games (e.g. HK) but has its unique style. I'd highly recommend it.

Although I heard a lot about the reputation, I did not play the first game, and never looked much into the game itself. So getting into octopath traveller 2 was a largely blind experience, and I was blown out.. Eight travelers have their own story, you start with one and later on meet other travelers, having a bit sense of non-linear narrative. It was a very fresh form, each traveler's story can be short but engaging. After starting it for the first few hours I can't really put it down. For these shorter stories, the representation is almost perfect, especially the full voice acting. It was such a game changer to the otherwise traditional JRPG, making the story telling so much more lively. The combat is func and having a lot of different elements you can play with, it doesn't feel too difficult if leveled sufficiently so I was mostly casually playing through (maybe except for a few character final bosses). Half way through the game it becomes a bit repetitive and drag but can still mostly keep my interests. Like normal JRPGs, grinding is a necessary part, it was not as bad as I feared. Overall it's a great game, I'd definitely recommend it.

It's a small and beautiful very classic JRPG, with wonderful sound track. For a long time I have missed this game. Not knowing what it's about, I did see its cover on playstation several times. Its cover art style reminded me of adventure or puzzle games with unique artistic style, like journey. I got a good impression from that but not knowing it was a story based game I never bought it or checked the details. When I finally decided to give it a go, I was surprised. Oh boy what had I missed! It's a very classic JRPG, with a nice story, and an engaging beginning. The story certainly has influence and some level of resemblance to FFX in its setting, but can stand on itself without problems. I'm rather hooked for the entire game. The art style is simple, but gives a taste of fresh air. The amazing soundtrack features mostly solo piano, but the diverse score conveys a lot of emotions, without more elements like other instruments or other effects. Gameplay is also fun if you like old JRPGs. A lot of different customization or play styles can be checked out. It's not too difficult but also has its challenges if you don't want to over leveling. The one complaint I have is the lack of auto save. The game can only be saved in overworld or certain "save points". This is an old game feature that I don't really like, it can be unnecessarily punishing. Overall, this is a small but fresh JRPG, I'd fully recommend it.

A very good puzzle game with decent story and great visuals. I did not play the first game, and didn't expect much from this game, but a few hours in I was totally surprised. The puzzles are well designed, with high production values I don't normally see in puzzle games. The world building is also breathtaking with some unique elements. Puzzle solving at its core is very engaging, I enjoyed playing it mostly, but with some frustrations, especially some Pandora stars. The puzzles are well thought and with good pacing. They are not too difficult maybe except some final gold puzzles. World is fun to see but some times explorations are a bit mindless. Story is interesting but still feels a bit detached to the puzzle solving, it presents some interesting ideas but I constantly see myself skipping dialogs, at the end it doesn't really change anything to puzzle solving or even add much context.

I like the narrative style of this game a lot, the story in the game is shown as both the game progress as well as the manuscript pages, forming an interesting blending of parallel narrative elements. The horror atmosphere is made more prominent thanks to the narrative since I need to constantly try to think what is real and what is dream. Gameplay wise it's pretty straightforward, the combat may feel a bit repetitive, there's not much puzzle solving either. Performance seems to have some space of improvement but nothing breaking the experience. I would rate it higher but there's a game breaking glitch in episode 2 ("the elevator glitch") which seems to have existed for a long time and have affected a lot of people but never got fixed by the developer

It has an enticing opening with some pacing issues (some flashbacks being a bit anti climatic). The art style is fantastic, with beautiful environments and Japanese movie inspired cinematography. However, soon after the world opens up after the initial events, it very soon feels boring. There may be a lot of question marks or POIs on the map, but there's not much curiosity or story elements that urge me go anywhere. It's like telling you a long term goal and leave everything else to the player without good leading or bridging, which is quite different to lots of other open world games (you can have a tight main story quest lines but still free to deviate and explore the world). I just can't keep the interest to play to the end

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

It's a very fun game with challenging bosses and platforming. But a lot of times it feels unnecessarily punishing and may be too unfriendly to casual players. Things like sparse benches (save points), the map of each region needs to be unlocked first, current position not available on the map with a charm and a notch (a precious resource), etc. I beat a fairly hard end game boss (NKG) but there're still various content I don't even want to start just to avoid frustrations. I'd really love some more accessibility so people don't get locked out of contents, especially that consoles don't have mods

It's a masterpiece, my favorite game of all time. It's definitely a unique game, this is the only game I know of that blocked the game progression completely on player knowledge and nothing else in game. Through exploration we find how its universe works pieces by pieces and that knowledge teaches us new possibilities to try out and help progress the game. The sheer surprise and excitement given in this process is unparalleled by any other game I've played in all these years. Obviously spoilers are the biggest enemy of this. It's better to get into the world completely blind. It may not appeal to everyone, but if you like explorations I'd highly recommend this game. If you feel a bit lost at the beginning, give it a few hours and the universe should unfold enough to capture you.

Final Fantasy XVI is an amazing game. Gameplay, visual, story, characters are all great. Apart from what everyone already covers, one thing not mentioned enough is how stunning the visual is, especially its use of raytracing and HDR (thus a good HDR display or TV will make a very different experience). The art direction of the game takes a more realistic style, the level of details in environment, architecture, vegetation and clothing are simply incredible (which reminds me a lot the level seen in 2020 UE5 reveal). Raytracing and HDR make it even more believable. Horizon: Forbidden West is often considered one of the best graphics on PS5, but FFXVI arguably surpasses it as this a realistic modeling of the world is a lot harder to make and feel believable. I won't say much about everything else, you just need to experience it.