JayLando22

The gameplay is meaningless. All you can do is make hot drinks but it has no bearing on the narrative. I looked it up, there are unlocks but no matter what you do the story is the story. So the story is PRETTY IMPORTANT! Too bad it is the laziest tropes and an offensive grafting of the "its about racism but it is orcs and elves as the minorities". It is just as lazy as that Will Smith film everyone called ORC COP. I "played" this for an hour and got through a few in-game days and when it was not cringe-inducing or offensive it was BORING! I quit because I started to fall asleep playing and thought "what am I doing?!"

I played the last version a few months ago and it was a buggy mess but playable. Now I have spent some time with the latest version and it is a MORE playable buggy mess. It is fine though. All the core parts that are broken still are but the game is fine. They said it is at Fallout 3 level now with NPCs... and yeah, it is certainly at least as good as the multiplayer version of a buggy 12-year-old game. And for the most part, it is enough. To me, this is a MULTIPLAYER game so the fact that you can be on the same mission as your friend and at the same part but doing their instance does NOT credit your mission is SUPER annoying! I wish they at least gave you an option or let you redo it but to make it that you regularly have to solo chunks of the game is A DRAG! Oh well...

This will be wholly spoiler-free. I never finished the original FF7 but I have gotten to disc 3 probably twice back in the day. I watched my friend beat it when it originally came out. I did not particularly have any fondness for the series but I acknowledge its importance. I tell you that so you know what colours my experience with this remake. On the whole, I really liked this! There are pacing issues and story issues and remake issues but overall this improves my engagement with the story as a whole. I think one of its faults is you MUST know the original FF7 to really "engage with the text". I think the Kingdom Hearts-esque combat and the story will be enough for people new to the story to hold on to but to really appreciate what it is doing and where it is going an understanding of its subversion is needed. The fact that the original came out before 9/11 and this one is after that is truly reflected in the story even though this is a Japanese game it is impossible not to see certain parallels. I like that it has really leftist political talking points, even if it sometimes fumbles it, I think it does some good stuff. Unfortunately, it also seems like a Libertarian can also feel like their beliefs are being reflected. The give-and-take I feel is reflected in the final hours. I love the story, the lore, and where the narrative went... BUT, the combat suddenly flips you around in different party settings in a way that bogs you down with managing builds and materia. Like the fighting gets in the way of keeping the pace. All-in-all this has me more interested in the future of the series where before I was not interested or excited about this game at all.

I put about an hour of roaming around and trying to interact with the game in any meaningful way. I could not find it. It is based on a pretty old DOS game but it gives you NO HELP AND NO TIPS ON WHAT TO DO OR HOW TO PLAY! I read the in-game kind of intro and guide and was like what?! Everyone I tried to interact with did not understand anything I said to them. They only said "What?" to everything which is worthless! At least, when I used to play DOS games typing HELP would get me a legend or a direction! Anyway, there were 3 objectives to start, I found no way to progress in them. I got into some random battles and never connected with a hit even though my main PC had high strength and fighting and pugilism skills! Well, I guess that is not enough to do 1 point of damage on a rat! **** What a frustrating experience. I guess they wanted to capture the "charm" of the original but would it have killed the remaster to make ANY concessions so I could play it in 2020?

I really liked this game. It is a visual novel with an interesting story and characters. It has a match-3 game component that is pretty fun and lazy fan service aside only adds to the title. My issue is I CANNOT get the true ending because of a known bug. I did a lot of research on it and it was supposedly fixed last year but I am seeing it and just bought and downloaded it this month! I tried all the different ways I could to reach but Devs but got no reply. It had been a few weeks since I have been stuck here so I decided to just YouTube the true ending. It is SO FRUSTRATING because I really was one final "Battle" from the true ending trigger. I missed out on MINUTES of game with this which makes it extra irksome! I probably would have given this a 4 or 5 except for that.

I will probably keep coming back to this from time to time, but I am going to "call it" now because I went from playing EVERY day since it came out to not touching it in over a week and no real plans to return to it. Still, I got a LOT of great slice-of-life gameplay. I had good times with friends online. I made my island exactly how I wanted it. (Though I only got 3 stars) The annoying bits (the time to "travel", text repetition, DIY-ing multiple copies, limited storage space, etc.) are very annoying but the charms of the animals, the addiction of collecting, the beauty of the game and its buildings and biomes are all wonderful and I appreciate my time with it.

I came into this knowing nothing and just getting it because it sounded interesting and was on sale in the E-Shop. It makes a good first impression by allowing me to express my veganism and my pronouns and graft those on the main character. I would say the characters are good and interesting, the story is interesting, the retro Genesis looking graphics are nice and the voice-over stuff is never annoying. It seems relatively progressive in some ways but also lacking in enough that it stood out and then I read that it is from a 2013 Kickstarter and I was like, "OH, that makes sense." Also, playing it now its feelings about cops are a little too cozy. Anyway, overall it was a worthwhile experience and I would play another from the company.

I have not played it since it first came out and with some distance, I got to see how my feelings about the game have changed. At the time I thought the ending painted Joel as the anti-hero but playing it again in 2020 and watching the first ten minutes of that game I changed my feelings. The game tells a very simple "Dad video game" plot though very ahead of its time but might accidentally be saying something profound about the failure of systemic leadership. Anyway, the beginning really set up the ending but I am not sure if it is intentional because the writing in this game is so bad. I think at the time before Uncharted 4 I appreciated that they were trying to fix the ludo narrative dissonance by making everyone a murder sociopath in a murder world. Compared to Uncharted it seemed clever but ultimately it is pretty shallow. The audio and visuals still hold up. The guns sound good and the narrow corridor level design does look really nice, even if you can see its Crash Bandicoot roots. I liked it enough then, I still like it now, but other than all the time and money spent on the audio and visuals and animations and VO, it really never really rises as something special, just expensive.

An interesting enough story conceptually speaking, but in execution, it feels too shallow. It is interesting that Ellie was canonically **** for this long but I never played this before. It is interesting to finally use enemy humans and zombies against each other. So a good story thing and a good gameplay thing, the problem, not enough narrative or gameplay hooks for how long this is. It is not very long but it feels so dragged out that it feels kind of annoying before the end and then ends flatly when I feel like it should be more engaging.

This game would be fine if not for its laughably bad story and its over-long run time. The combat is largely the same as every ND game since Uncharted 1 making the same small iterative changes but it works. The graphics and animations are AAA but... ****/the-last-of-us-2-easter-egg-appears-to-make-light-of-cr-1844123982 ...based on how they are produced, fluff not worth the human toil to create them! I say some version of this in every Naughty Dog review I give, but, STILL, the "adventure" of this action-adventure is still just a tarted-up Crash Bandicoot! Bigger straight paths and more control in the animal riding segments but mostly still true! I think it may actually be a step back, there is less Ellie on a water puzzles but compared to Uncharted 4 the environments seem less story motavated. Speaking of story, holy **** from the macro to the micro, shiny as it may look this really is a dog turd. The laughable way it keeps shouting out random names while you kill the same 12 character models over and over again. The super simple and basic revenge story that does nothing new. The horrible pacing that added TEN HOURS instead of just ending the game! About halfway in I started to get bored of the gameplay loop and then a few hours later there is a huge change but it only made me go from bored to annoyed to really hating this game. The gameplay stays the same throughout but the ludo-narrative dissonance does not so much "take a dive" as Wile-E-Coyote falls down a canyon. The game makes the gore and guns and throat-slitting fun and sound satisfyingly juicy but also wants to try to critique violence? Everything just feels like it is working against everything else and what a mess! The gross way they have a trans character and lazily making their entire arc only about being trans. If the rest of the characters were not this shallow I would have been more offended, but luckily(?) everyone is lazily written. Ellie gets the worst of it. When you play the first one, narratively you think about how they will deal with the fallout of "Joel's Choice" and how interesting it would be to play a whole game as Ellie. WELL... what you get is another Joel in an Ellie skin and about a minute of a sequel. Instead a very basic hunt these people who wronged you that could have taken Ellie out entirely and only have to change 2 flashbacks! What a **** step backwards in nearly every way!

I got this in the **** Racial Justice bundle ****/b/520/bundle-for-racial-justice-and-equality but HOLY **** is this worth getting on its own! The visuals are simple and charming. The score is evocative and fitting. The writing is top-notch. The characters are interesting. The gameplay is simple to understand. But what makes it so special is how everything blends together so seamlessly to make a wholly unique experience! To explain why this game works requires more than learning to play the actual game. It is about communication almost like CRPGS but instead of being purely stat and RNG driven it is loosely a "deck builder". You have a limited deck/vocabulary to use to "talk" using a hand of 5 cards to a wide range of people and you must always add or subtract cards. You can never build a perfect deck. Besides debuffs you acrue from fatigue, you will find yourself unable to express yourself in every situation. This is the most realistic representation of the flow and frustration of talking I have ever seen in a videogame! Another way to describe it is, if you have ever had a fight with someone you care about where you want to be understood but nothing you say is working and understanding is something you cannot reach in the moment... that is this whole game! There are no meaningless interactions, everything matters! Every conversation can be innocuous but also every conversation can feel like a boss battle. It never got overbearing but the game is FULL of tension while I played. Anyway, there is a bunch of replayability because if you want to see everyone's story you need to focus on different "cards". My first playthrough was about 5 hours but it can be much shorter I just happened to be "on the road" as long as possible the first time. Anyway, my favourite videogame I have played in a LONG time!