DarthFronz85

It's a well made, tightly playing action RPG as far as the combat is concerned and, so long as you can resist the allure of the Gacha mechanics, you have yourself a better-than-average free game. The characters and setting are clearly taking a lot of inspiration from the Persona series (Time of day cycles, missions you can do for people around a hub, shop Sim elements, and even a mission where you serve coffee in case the inspiration wasn't smacking you in the face hard enough). This is a good game to play when you want something that looks really nice and isn't too complicated. The mechanics of combat are simple: Hammer attack until the enemy's stun Guage fills, then hammer your special to trigger a chain attack. Red flash from the enemy means dodge to get a slick slo mo counter and a yellow flash is an opportunity to swap to another party member on your squad to get a cool switch attack. Once you've gone buck wild a while, you can unleash a super attack. Simple and satisfying. Having mentioned the gacha mechanics, the game has, so far, given me plenty of pulls and a lot of fun characters. The character design leans a little TOO heavy into weebs and furries for my personal taste (the human characters with shark tails are absolutely repulsive) but the overall design is what you'd expect from the JRPG crowd. The cons: Menus. There are WAY to many menus in this game. There are several different menus in different areas where you claim rewards, all with more tabs to more menus. It's actually difficult to claim all the things you've earned because the game hides them all in separate menus. Second, the currencies. I know this is a free to play model and this is how it goes, but holy cannot. You have a currency to pull normal players, a currency to pull exclusive players, a currency that can be used to purchase pulls for normal players, a currency that can be used to purchase pulls for exclusive players, a currency to buy Bangboo stuff, a currency to pull Bangboo, a slowly regenerating currency you can use to earn upgrade currencies for your characters. And again, I get what kind of game this is but the currency system is so unnecessary convoluted and the menus so dense and confusing that I genuinely had to stop and make sure I wasn't accidentally spending real money on currency rather than trading one in game currency for another. Even in a game where the idea is to get players to spend money to buy currency, I don't see why you can't just have a single premium currency to use for all your pulls. On the other hand, the team certainly aren't hiding the predatory aspects of the game; the vast number of unique currencies makes it painfully obvious to any but the most slow witted that this game is trying to use Sunk Cost Fallacy against the player. Even if you want to sink money into the game, it's hard to know how. You have the City Fund, the battle pass, and a dozen premium currencies to choose from. As stated above for myself, who plans on spending nothing here, this is incredibly confusing. It's like the studio simultaneously wants to open all possible avenues for revenue AND ensure that players have the hardest possible time figuring out how to give away their cash. There are 36 ways into your wallet and each of them requires a detour for the detour to get there. All in all, if you want a good looking game with a typical JRPG story and dumb-but-fun combat, you'll have a good time here. Oddly enough, ignoring the gacha elements actually leaves you with an above average game. If you actually want to spend money, good luck navigating those menus.

I decided to give this game a go and, 15 hours in, I am having an absolute blast. From a story that borrows from its source material while simultaneously working to stand alone as it's own fiction, the game is like playing a spinoff "Harry Potter" novel. Without spoiling anything, you arrive at Hogwarts, starting your Wizarding education at 5th year for reasons the story goes on to explain. You get to see that sort of "fish out of water" of being new to magic while being a bit older to allow for more mature themes. I won't go into the plot at all except to say that it takes place in the late 19th century at a time when most of the characters we know and love would have been too young to be at Hogwarts. This allows the game to make some loose connections to the books and movie universe while also allowing it to stand apart as it's own story. The gameplay is decidedly open world, action adventure RPG with a Diablo-esque loot color system that will have loothounds (like myself) always looking for the best gear. Even better, I enjoy fashion and this game does not disappoint: Any style of armor you find (which includes slots for gloves, hat, mask/glasses, Scarf, Cloak/Cape, and the Outfit you wear under your cloak or cape) becomes available as a cosmetic appearance. This means you can equip what gives the best stat gains while also coordinating an outfit you like. You do also get to customize your wand and can find handles for it, generally as quest rewards, adding to the fashion fun! The open world is fun to traverse whether by broom, mount, or on foot. Professors give you extra work to learn new spells which add a fun "metroidvania" aspect to the game. Coming back to early areas with late game spells can result in some tasty treasure. As was expected with the PS4, there are some graphical issues. Doors have to load to open which isn't a huge downfall but is slightly immersion breaking. There is also some fogging and texture pop-in present in particularly dense areas, such as common areas at Hogwarts or in Hogsmeade. These don't detract too much and the PS4 Pro handles a lot of the graphical craziness this game does pretty well but it's clear that things would move a bit more smoothly with the SSD present in the PS5. So, minor graphical **** aside, this one helps to let me enjoy a childhood dream: Being a wizard at Hogwarts. With crafting, base building aspects, and plenty to discover, this one is sure to cater to any Potter Head!

Please note that this is two weeks after launch for the review. This is a beautiful, massive game, it's fun to play, has great systems (fishing, anyone?) and would EASILY be a 9 if it worked. It doesn't. Twice, I've lost several hours of progress due to save glitches. This is the cardinal sin of the launch game; a beautiful experience that can't be enjoyed because the save system is, frankly, technically incompetent. I have to revire the game so low because it's obviously an awesome experience, well crafted if a little bloated... but that's meaningless if I can't actively save progress. Ubisoft's fix "in the coming weks" isn't heartening for a game I soent $120 on.

The bugs are back in the final episode of this series. Usually the story would be able to carry the game to a slightly higher score, but not in this case. The sound cuts out constantly, turning almost every scene into a reading game. Occasionally the sound will cut back in while another character is talking, causing the dialogue to descend into a chaotic cacophony. Also, if you were expecting any kind of resolution, every major plot thread is left dangling in the wind in an obvious, shameless attempt to stretch the story even further into a second season. Nice try, Telltale, I'm not falling for it twice.

Unfortunately, I have to give the game an average review. The story is fun and excellently crafted; it's a great time to feel like a character within this universe. The game does an excellent job of making you love or hate certain characters just like the books (Never watched the show, so I can't speak for it). There are some technical problems, however, that sometimes wash it out. The first thing that irked me was that it takes a good ten minutes to get from pressing the "A" button on my dashboard to actually playing the game. The load times in this game can make it borderline unplayable. During about 90% of the scenes there is so much slowdown that the flow of the game is lost and I stopped counting how often the sound just stopped. The UI is unintuitive and sometimes doesn't reflect onscreen what you'tr doing with the controller. All in all, it's a good story presented in a horrible way. If you have the patience for something that will take forever to load and not always do what it says it's going to do technically, then by all means, enjoy yourself. I myself am more than miffed that I spent $30 on this technical nightmare. It fucntions as a story, just not as a game.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Let me start by saying that I want to give it an 8.5 but the option simply doesn't exist. Death's quest to redeem his brother, War, by resurrecting Earth's entire human population seems like a silly story, and it kind of is. However, it gives you a thinly veiled excuse to romp through colorful dungeons with incredibly fun and satisfying platforming segments, several "AHA!" uses of equipment shamelessly ripped off from other games, and an interesting tale loosely based on biblical mythos. The combat is a satisfying hack n slash affair that allows you to move between primary scythe attacks and secondary weapons with ease; the smallest input makes death whirl around like a hulked out, angry Wolverine. This gives an 'Oh, wow!' eye candy flair to the whole affair, and you can actually find some pretty useful combos in there if you check your button imputs and time your strikes properly. It also moves much more fluidly than the first game as death dodge rolls around giant monsters as they narrowly miss with what would have been devastating attacks. The best part of the game is, of course, the loot system stripped directly from Diablo. The equipment even uses the same colors to illuminate how rare a particular item is. One little tweak, though, is the rare Possessed Items. You can sacrifice your equipment to a Possessed item and it will gain attributes based on the properties of the equipment it was fed. For instance, if you want a Possessed weapon to do more fire damage, you must feed it other weapons that do fire damage. Upon leveling the weapon up, you can choose a new attribute for your weapon based on its diet and you get to see how your choices have updated the attributes it already had. The game plays like a mix of Zelda and God of War with a dash of Diablo and (Believe it or not) Portal. As I said earlier, it shamelessly takes things from other games and equips them like a better item in a loot drop, but it does it so well that I really can't complain. It's almost like a giant love letter to the games we all loved stamped with new characters and a moderately interesting story. It's just a well executed and entertaining game that does way too much and does it swimmingly. Solid title, loads of fun.

I'm going to start with praise for this ttile simply because of all the years of enjoyment I got out of it. I remember being a fresh-faced new adult when the game came out originally, a (at the time) sprawling and colorful world full of original characters. The morality system that is now very nearly mandated in all RPGs was brand new to most main-stream gamers and the physical effects of your moral choices inspired awe and multiple playthroughs. Collecting the legendary weapons and trying to find and buy the best pieces of armor kept me playing for hours, the combat multiplier was intuitive and awarded the player's particular playstyle. The Lost Chapters added a new region and several new and entertaining quests, as well as a boss battle that was as epic as the original game deserved (The vanilla Jack of Blades fight was weak sauce, I remember beating him with leather armor and an oak crossbow back in 2004). All in all, an amazing piece of gaming history. Unfortunately, it probably should have stayed history. Ten years and a console generation later, Fable returns looking bright and shiny. The character models are updated and crisp, the brightness has been toned down to add a bit of realism, and the facial animations sync up with conversations better, at least with main characters. The children still look like mutants and most of your 'average villager' character models look like they didn't get much of an overhaul. Unfortunately, the new look ends up being just a gimmick. Cheap fights abound as the Slow Time spell allows your enemies to remain alive and fighting after their HP has dropped to zero, something that hasn't been fixed from the original. The smartglass app is another fun gimmick, but only that. It shows maps and treasure locations, but for anyone who had this game a decade ago, it's unnecessary. The time they spent on that could have better been spent on the chugging framerate that seems to drop as the game progresses, even if you install it. In true Lionhead fashion, they offer neat new armor and weapons that can only be obtained through real-money purchases. Unfortunately these items are essentially a gimmick, just like everything else in this remake. All in all, I could have forgiven the choppy framerate and lack of new content if Lionhead had chosen to add some of the new premium items into the game for free. Like I said, they're gimmicky, but at least it's something new for the fans instead of just rehashing an old game with a new coat of paint that does nothing to conceal the old technical issues. Chugging framerate and several hard freezes in a game that has been moved to a more advanced console is simply unforgivable. Adding new content that must be paid for in a game that costs twice what it's worth is unforgivable. Finally, charging old fans for new content in an updated game is downright betrayal. I will be hard-pressed to purchase a Lionhead game in the future. They have been unscrupulous before, but this is, as they say, the last straw.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

This is deifnitely one of the best gaing experiences I have ever had. The beautiful, hand drawn graphics assault the eyes with euphoric wonder. The characters are wonderful and memorable (Kamiki Village's Elder being one of my favorites, wait til you see his dance moves) and the quests are fun and engaging. The puzzles are fairly simple but make great use of the abilities the game doles out and lend to one or two 'Aha!' moments. It follows the Legend of Zelda formula of having areas being inaccessible without certain abilities and a long first act that leads to a world-traversing adventure. All in all, just completely enjoyable.