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The game starts off well enough. There's a variety of weapons that all play a little differently, there's a big skill tree, you quickly discover places you'll need to backtrack too promising secrets. And then about halfway into the game it nosedives. You have all but 2 abilities to get around every obstacle and the game tasks you with gathering an unstated number of progress items that are either hidden in places you passed through or in wholly new areas with no guidance or story reason to go to those specific locations. It becomes "get 100% of the map because you don't know where the other two memory shards or EIGHT secret words are!" Which wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if every corner you checked at least had something worthwhile. Instead, many blocked paths just have healing potions or mp potions, which can be purchased at a shop, and are doubly useless when the game has a Souls-like healing ability that refreshes at checkpoints. At this point, the game reaches tedium, and you're some how expected to also know that you need to complete 2 of 10 possible endings in order to trigger the real ending, which isn't even real, it opens up a side story you HAVE to play in order to unlock the ACTUAL ending. A 200% run of Symphony of the Night would be faster and more enjoyable than just getting to the end of Afterimage, despite decades of growth in the genre.

Moonlighter had a lot of potential. It's hardly the first game in the action/shopkeep hybrid genre, but it's one significantly held back by the rogue-lite elements it insists on using. Rather than making steady progress through the game, using gear and your shop as a sort of level up system, Moonlighter decided to go the Binding of Issac path where each dungeon is a fixed 3 floors leading to fixed bosses, and fixed loot, but randomizing the layout and enemy formations each time you re-enter. What sounds like a fun, infinity dungeon rapidly spirals into tedium. You see, since the shop you run is functionally your rogue-lite upgrade system, there's never anything to find in the dungeons except trash to sell. Rarely will you find a potion, only from mimics which are also rare, and any equipment is several tiers lower than what you can craft at that moment. This means after just a couple attempts at each dungeon, you're only goin in to find the bosses as quickly as possible to make progress through the game. Which generates frustration with how hard the enemies hit. The early dungeons seem tuned towards a Dark Souls style"our game is HARD!" While later dungeons are significantly easier for seemingly no real reason. Almost like the late game gear is overpowered and the early game stuff is too weak. Whatever the case may be, this leads to more frustration than anything while you spend time clearing out rooms trying to progress only to die to some random mob that does half your hp with a tracking projectile. Even if you didn't lose any of your loot, it wouldn't matter since you're fully upgraded and simply trying to finish the dungeon and progress the game. Ultimately, the problem is how divorced the dungeons are from the shop. Yes, I'm dungeon diving to stock my shop, but the shop and gold in general, becomes useless after just a couple of attempts at each new dungeon, putting more emphasis on the game's rather bland combat and annoying difficulty spikes. The game feels very bare bones once you get to the 2nd or 3rd dungeon and it doesn't really improve from there either.

Game's okay at its best. I had a fine time in the first couple of hours until I realized... it's just Wuthering Waves without the anime aesthetic. You explore the world to find chests to do pulls on the gacha and level up your gear. Sure. The gacha isn't power creep characters and weapons, but Infinity Nikkie already did that too. It's just those two mobile games taped together in like UE5. It also runs like hot **** on consoles. My enjoyment quickly plummeted when fights became laggy in the open world, and cutscenes failed to render entire characters and models before they were meant to be on screen. At one point I had a whole cart spawn dead center in my view during a cinematic. The game LOOKS pretty, but feels cheap. Like many knock offs from China.

I bought this because I loved God Eater and enjoyed Code Vein. Given it was the same developer, I thought I was in for a good time. I can't believe people are saying the combat is GOOD. It's not even OKAY. It's really simple, most combat can be trivialized by using the correct skill, IE an enemy that goes underground to ambush you gets duped by turning invisible. It's like playing rock paper scissors. And then fights against normal enemies are like, fight seven of these guys throwing fireballs at the same time. No, we don't know why we gave you a three hit combo that you can chain into an aerial combo when you're never supposed to do more than 3-4 hits unless you want to spam items. There's too much crap going on in the average fight for you to really plan moves out. Bosses are the only points where the game does a good job of letting you be free, and then it gets boring because they just have 2.5 million HP while you're doing 100 damage a slash at level 20 and rely on using a gimmick to deal any significant damage. The game plays, the combat is better than a PS2 action game, but not much more than that. The story takes forever to get going, the characters are anime cliches, and I'd rather have the $30 I spent on this and the DLC back. It's really just an average hack and slash all around, surrounded by fans that scream, "NO IT'S NOT! YOU'RE PLAYING IT WRONG!" like you just walked into their house and started acting like their WWE action figure can fly.

Can't give the game much higher than "it functions." It's a tactical RPG, the plot is nice and dark, but the mechanics literally kill it. Why, tell me why, they decided you can move one unit per player turn, but the game gets to move each of its units independently. It's like playing chess where you get to move one piece as usual, but your opponent can move all of their pieces at once. It's not broken, you can play around it, but that's what it feels like. It feels like rather than coming up with a decent system, sticking to what works, and making something palatable, they went, "Let's make artificial difficulty out the wazoo with how you move your units, come up with a dozen BS systems that make late game weapons nearly useless, oh yeah, and we ran out of budget, so here's a mid-game twist that comes at the end of the game." This is why no one has heard of the Department of Heaven series. This is why Yggdra Union is the most popular game they've put out (because it's the most normal.) If you're a hardcore strategy game fan, this will probably give you all sorts of fun, but for the more casual audience, this game's just drek. It's not even worth pirating.

Game starts off really strong. Like, the first 30-40 hours, depending on how much exploring you do, are the most incredible feeling. But by the time you're reaching the end of a normal Souls game, 50-60 hours, the cracks start to appear. I'm at 70 hours, I just got past the royal capital, and I'm beating bosses in 1 try with multiple healing items left over. Bosses I've never seen before are doing LESS DAMAGE THAN NORMAL ENEMIES. This game feels like FromSoft inverted the damage, making bosses a joke and mooks a chore. I'm walking by hordes of foes chasing after me with everything they have because they take too long to kill, are too dangerous to engage, and at level 112 I know I can beat a boss in one try if I have all my flasks. It's not about the game being too easy or too hard, it's just plain unbalanced. Strength builds can barely get a hit out without trading, which can lead to you taking 40% of your life to deal 10% of the boss' life. Dex builds deal 1/20th of the boss' life, and rarely have the opening to swing more than once because the bosses swing 20 times in a row, do an AoE body explosion, and then do another combo that lasts a half an hour. Magic builds are flat out OP, even more than usual because of the open world allowing them to find all their gear right from the start and then start steam rolling bosses with non-boss spells. Elden Ring isn't a bad game, but FromSoft needs to do more than nerf play abilities to balance this game. The bosses need a second look, because I probably shouldn't beat Rahdan, Morgott, Astell, and Renalla in one try, but exploring the royal capital is like pulling my teeth out because of instant death curses in the sewers and knights stunlocking me with lightning damage in the streets. Balance.

I gotta hand it to this game, it looks really neat in trailers. A lot of the reviews here will say the same things, and that's because they're pretty much spot on. The game has a lot to draw you in. The art direction is top-notch, the story they drip to you sounds interesting, and I think this would all play out super well in an action game starring the "Mother" character you get to mess with during the tutorial. After that... you get three classes that may as well negate the whole permadeath thing, dialogue that gets repeated over and over and over and says literally nothing ("When will their suffering end?" I dunno, lady, but you've said that at EVERY LOADING SCREEN FOR THE PAST FOUR HOURS.) and a difficulty curve that makes Xcom look like Skyrim. The game's problems start with this description going around. There's nothing scary in the first several hours, if anything at all. There's creepy flesh monsters you kill in one swing that are only annoying because of how many the game throws at you for no reason. There's an incomprehensible plot about the ravings of a lunatic and a pandemic and some supernatural otherworld stuff. It sounds really neat, but the problem is in the presentation. You're going to read a lot of stuff that explains nothing while playing a game that features a meager three classes against about twenty or so enemies from the length of the bestiary at the start, and everything takes far too long to be enjoyable. My biggest gripe with the game is how slow it is. Not just the story and learning things, but the gameplay loop. Often I'll move my three characters and then watch five enemies move up and do nothing, but their turns take twice as long as one of mine, as if the AI has to THINK about what it's doing, or the game's loading things needlessly. There's just a certain pause that it shares with Xcom that really grinds my gears and makes me want to skip my enemy's turns, especially the uneventful ones, which is many of them. In the first Era, the game's chapters are divided as such, the game tries to give you the impression there's a lot of depth, but I couldn't find it for all the confusion and tedium. Skill that interrupt enemies cost HP, HP can only be regained by sacrificing a character of equal or higher level, therefore interrupt skills **** and you should avoid them, but they're also incredibly necessary for setting up big damage or saving other characters. Risk/reward has never felt so lame! Imagine playing Fire Emblem, or Xcom, and every time you shoot your gun you take damage. Yeah, it's just pointlessly hindering for the sake of difficulty. Like, they didn't want to copy the Xcom accuracy system, so here's something more annoying. Oh, and there's no other way to regain HP other than sacrificing, and I can't fathom trying to raise more than three characters at a time over level 3, because that's how many you get to take with you on a mission. Which leads me to the biggest downfall of the game. There's only three classes. There's only. Three. Classes. You get guns, a sword, and a spear and shield. That's it. Offense, range, defense. Not even, like, a mage? How about you use the damage skills in a more interesting way and make a blood mage that sacrifices HP to heal the other units, but can't heal herself? THAT would be better. But, no, here's three classes, you have three slots, they learn the same moves at the same levels, one swordsman is the same as the next. Yawn. Sure, they get different passives, but that implies you survive. The game honestly may as well reset if you lose someone, because you'll just hit a level wall if you keep going with an uneven party. And again, the stupid healing thing. The game has an easy mode, that's probably the better experience, but overall the game feels like it aimed at the Darkest Dungeon fans, and I can't say whether it hit the mark or not. It's not a bad game, it's just tedious and hard for the sake of hard. It's like a Dark Souls clone that changes the formula to make the game "harder" so they can put it on the box. There's nothing wrong with difficult games, there's something wrong when you make the hard part boring.

Smite is ... not fun. I say this as someone that has a very rocky relationship with MOBAs in general, having only started to play League of Legends a few months ago. I heard that Smite was a good console MOBA, and all the Smite fans brag about it being much more fun, that the graphics are great, and the third person camera makes things exciting. So, naturally, I tried it out. Boy, are those people brain damaged. First off, the MOBA aspect almost feels secondary to the Arena mode where you start at level 3 (having all of your basic abilities) and just brawl with other players. The whole defending turrets and killing minions stuff isn't even covered by the opening tutorial. You have to learn about that all on your own. Which I did by firing up a few training matches, just me vs the AI. In both games I played, my teammates, who are the same AI we're fighting against, died twice as much as I did leading to ridiculous enemy attacks. I didn't do well either, but the fact the GAME played worse than itself speaks volumes. The second thing is that the game is terribly balanced compared to something like League. See, you defend these things that shoot enemies if they get close, and they're kinda like safe spaces. If the enemy decides to fight you while you're near one, they're almost guaranteed to lose unless they kill you very fast. In my two matches playing as a Warrior in the solo lane, my opponent would engage me under my turret, and lived for dozens of seconds. In my first match it was Odin, whose constant shielding prevented him from taking any damage ever. That's not fair. In no universe of MOBA should a character be able to stand on top of an objective and survive for half a minute and still have HP left to lane. This was with me and the turret attacking, mind you. I could write this off as a one off issue, maybe Odin's too powerful in this current patch, I don't know. Games like these are always changing. What I do know is that at no point in my hour of playing did I have any kind of fun, which is what I had when I started League of Legends. League of Legends gives you a bunch of well placed items, "Take these first, then these, and maybe these." It's all laid out easy for you. In Smite I was spending minutes at the start of a match reading what items did what because the game just kinda throws this list at you without organizing it. You have a couple rows of items with "Core" and "Situational" over them. League? Starting items you take when the match starts, those go into the second tier, and then the final tier, with some extra ones below that. It was impossible to understand, and the way everything was displayed it took me literal minutes to sit there and read item descriptions and learn what did what. And to top it all off, I didn't find a way to see what they enemy had, so I never knew what the hell to build to counter them. In League you hold down Tab. In Smite on PS4... I have no idea, I tried every button that wasn't labeled, and even then, if I found it, there's no way scrolling through the entire enemy's gear is as fast with a controller as it would be with a mouse. Controllers are just no way to play MOBAs. Finally, and most importantly, during the early lane phase, where you sit around and fight minions and try to get more gold than the enemy? Every melee champ I played was awkwardly floaty, sliding around as I attacked, meaning you started attacks and then moved into position most of the time. It felt weird and like I had much less control than I really did. It made the simple process of holding down R2 to swing repeated feel uneasy. And this comes from someone that's only barely gotten used to clicking four or five different things to attack them in a top down PC game. I've played more console games than PC, but somehow Smite just feels awkward and unfinished. Which really came into play with hitting things. In League there's a cacophony of sounds that accompany hitting things. I've never adjusted the volume. When I shoot it makes a loud noise, when I hit something there's a satisfying pop, when they die I hear coins clinking, and all of my abilities make good sounds to let me know I'm using them. Smite? I could hammer every button and not tell you if something came out or not because they're almost no sound, enemies just stand there and take damage without flinching, again, it feels unfinished compared to League, and Smite is like six years old now. It shouldn't feel THIS BAD to HIT THINGS. But it does, plain and simple. Sorry for all the fans that think clicking is too much work and top down "cartoonish" graphics ****, but Smite fails to be engaging on the most basic level. Fricking Mario has better sounds when he hits a goomba than my character did hitting 8 guys with a hammer. That's a problem, people. Nothing was broken, but it wasn't fun.

I feel like the people saying the side missions were fun had to be stoned while doing them. The side missions are the WORST part of this game. They're designed in a very special way to screw the player. In one instance I had to avoid news vans that were trying to get pictures of someone having sex in the back of my car, how the news knew about this person getting a prostitute and how their footage could see through tinted windows (a common thing since the 90's) I don't know, so it's stupid already in premise. But then as SOON as I pick this person up a T shaped intersection, three news vans spawn, one down each road, and they all barrel towards me. I'm at a DEAD STOP IN A SEDAN, and yet these vans can OUT RACE ME. I ... I don't have to explain how stupid that is. It's not funny ha ha stupid, it's nonsense. If they were paparazzi in actual cars I'd be like "Okay" but they aren't, they HEAVY NEWS VANS DOING 70MPH AND TURNING ON A DIME SPAWNING OUT OF NOWHERE. And you can't just IGNORE the side missions in 2. No, god no. You have to do them if you want the good upgrades like MORE HEALTH. Who thought locking upgrades being allegedly optional content was a good idea should be taken out back and fired so they can't steal from the company. This kind of thing happened all the time in my 20 hours of play time. I did about 4 story missions and spent the rest of the time sampling the bonus missions which ranged from difficult but enjoyable to infuriatingly broken by design. "Mayhem! Cause mass destruction for big points!" But only destroy fences, because your multiplier means more than what you blow up, fences are easy to run over and when you need to get 800k in 4 minutes and a cop car is worth a piddly 4k at best and takes forever to blow up but a fence can be knocked down in a single shot and a couple hundred rack up to 100k a pop, it's dumb. When the police spawn right in front of you and then run you over, and then back up and run you over again and kill you instantly, it's not fun. When the AI can easily and accurately pit check your car but attempting to do the same to them causes you to lose control, it's not fun. People say games like Furi or Dark Souls are "hard for the wrong reasons" but they clearly haven't played this **** SR2 has the best story in the series, I know that. It's dark humor, over the top, but gritty and leaves you with feelings. The gameplay though feels like it was made on a toaster for the PS2, then upscaled to the PS3 with terrible draw distances, AI that's too skilled (Please, I've beaten every other SR game except 1 which isn't available digitally, on the hardest settings. 2 should not be killing me this easily), and a lot of just not fun things. I mean, honestly, people complain about the lack of Septic Avenger in later games, but it was the slowest and most boring side mission I've ever done. It was also really annoying because the AI driving would get STUCK ON THINGS ALL THE TIME AND JUST KEEP DRIVING INTO THEM. It's a fun game at staged, but overall it's a half baked open world game with some minor charm. Looking at it from a 2019 perspective, it just does not hold up a single bit.

Omega Quintet suffers from the same problem that almost every IF/Compile Heart game suffers from. Unoriginal **** layered with overly complicated systems that require massive tutorials. The story of the game itself isn't awful, at first. The world is threatened by these monsters called MAD that come from these things called Blare. The only way to stop them is with idol super heroines that sing and stop the Blares. You're an orphan (aren't you always) with a lady best friend, and you both get caught in the middle of a Blare attack. Your best lady pal discovers she can become one of the idol heroes by closing the Blare, and you're off on your adventure. Your adventure full of every cardboard cut out harem anime cliche, including The Ditzy Best Friend who is a girl, the spunky tomboy, creepy glasses wearing nerd, the ice queen, and quiet loli with a dark past. If you wanted fanservice from characters that are more two dimensional than the computer screen you're reading, this is the game for you. What sets this off most is that the battle system is TRYING. It's not awful, like the characters. What bogs it down is being overly complex while also missing what most would call basics. For example, each weapon works best at a certain distance. A certain distance that is based on both the attacker and the defender's position. This means you can get into a fight where the enemy is just in a bad place for your ENTIRE PARTY, which drags fights out unnecessarily. You can move during battle, but it's a system that just didn't need to exist in the first place. It doesn't add to the game at the end of the day, it's just minutia that you have to worry about. What's cool about the battle system are the attacks and a thing called Harmonics. But these are also flawed. You see, your specials have a move that they either compound with for more damage, or link with to get more EXP. You can see this information displayed at the bottom of every special attack before you select it, letting you pick what you want/need for a given situation. Grinding? Go with links. Boss fight? Stack on the damage. Unfortunately, the game isn't CLEAR WHEN THIS WORKS. And that goes for another thing in the game which are combo attacks. Picking certain sets of moves together unleashes a special dual tech, if you've played Chrono Trigger. Again, the game is mildly vague on HOW you do this, even after a tutorial prompt that has a paragraph of text on how it's done. It feels like the tutorials were supposed to keep happening DOZENS OF HOURS INTO THE GAME, but someone complained, so they put them up earlier instead. Which leads to a situation where you need to keep reviewing old tutorials, because some of the information in them suddenly becomes relevant HOURS after seeing them, but not the first time they come up. For the best example, the game teaches you about the dual techs, but doesn't tell you that they're not just locked behind figuring out what techs work together. They also don't explain when or how to do ones that require more than two characters, while one of the side quests at that time in the game REQUIRES all THREE party members to work together to make an attack happen. Again, this all leads to a very shallow story with confusing gameplay, and for an RPG you NEED BOTH. You can't have deep lore and shallow gameplay, like Skyrim, or shallow story and deep gameplay, like this. You'll be dealing with a lot of both of them, and if half of your product is boring, it doesn't matter how good the other half is. Which is why this gets a 5/10. The story is boring from the word go, filled with generic anime tropes despite an intriguing concept. The gameplay is interesting, but in typical fashion it's convoluted for no reason and lacks some basics like being able to stagger turns for set ups (If you have 4 actions, you have to use all 4 actions, which makes setting up combo moves a massive pain in the ass, for no reason. This has been a staple of RPGs like this for years now.))

This game barely qualifies as a game. While visually stunning there's nothing else in the game to really draw you in. From the very outset you are given very little story and progressing through the first hour or so reveals little, if any, more. Between those two points where a game like Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, two games people here feel fit to say this game is like, would have you dealing with enemies, RiME is just puzzle solving and platforming. Neither of which are hard. At all. There are no punishments for failure, no pressure, and ultimately this feels like a game I would give to a child. Not a 10 or even 8 year old, but like a 4 or 5 year old. Someone who can't stand challenge or doesn't comprehend it yet. The hardest part about RiME is putting yourself through the rest of the game once you get past the first area. Because the gameplay didn't evolve at all for me. Run around, press a button to yell, press another to pick things up, jump up here to yell at this thing to make progress happen. RiME feels like a glorified tech demo. "Look at how beautiful we can make games if we don't do hyper realism!" And in that regard, it works. It looks incredible and I would happily buy a game with this artstyle, provided there was actual gameplay in the middle of it. I don't mean that puzzle/platformers don't exist and can't be good, just that the studio should have put on their thinking caps and created some more interesting challenges for players outside of "climb this clearly marked pillar to yell at this glowing object to open a door." There's a good reason this game came out, had a few people play it, and then vanished. It's serviceable if you just want to go and look at pretty scenery, but the story and gameplay are not going to wow anyone that's read a book or played a video game before.

Knights of Valour is good for one thing and pretty much one thing only, good old fashioned arcade style gameplay with an internet connection. The game is fun, there's more depth than most old school cabinets have and it allows for single and multiplayer. Along with an RPG upgrade system there's potentially dozens of hours of entertainment to be had, and it costs nothing upfront. The only place it will start costing money is in characters, which I can see being a massive draw back. The freemium currency you get for daily missions and "achievements" (mostly just playing the game. I got the first dozen within a few hours) is sadly pathetic. A paramount concept with free to play games is that the first few hours indicates the grind for the rest of the game. If the first hour gets you enough currency to buy something, odds are you'll have enough to buy something else by the end of the day, then in a couple days, then a week, two weeks, a month, on and on about like that. In two hours of this game I still need 440 more currency to buy the CHEAPEST character on the roster. Factor in that paying almost 60 USD would get you 2000 currency (the two most expensive characters cost 900 EACH) and it's clear how they want to get their money from you. The most obnoxious thing about the game is that it occasionally pulls up a "recommended" thing to buy from the Playstation Store, in other words it pulls up a screen asking you to spend real money. It only happened once, but it kind of pissed me off. I understand they want money, but if I'm going to spend it I'm going to do it on my own, not because I've been prompted to recommended something. Knights of Valour is a little old, the "story" is nothing new or exciting, but the gameplay is fun, fast paced, and well worth a try considering the game is completely free. Prices could use adjusting, or perhaps rewards increased, but if it's possible to avoid paying money by simply grinding as it seems to be then this is one of the better free to play games on the market.

Let It Die is a solid game with far too many problems after the beginning. Like any free to play game, the beginning is the most fun part of the game. The first ten floors show off three bosses (two mid bosses, one big boss) a variety of weapons (Melee, ranged, even your fists) and you'll feel like you get a good grasp of the game after less deaths than Dark Souls. However, by floor 20 you encounter people with proper guns, and the AI has infinite bullets. Soon after you encounter people with sniper rifles, people who never miss unless you dodge perfectly because they are AI, and will often kill you in a few shots. At which point the devs said, "Put two assault rifle enemies and two snipers in a locked room with the player who will only have melee weapons." I was never able to get past the 20+ floors because of areas like this, areas that you could grind armor and in game currency to muddle through, or you can do what the developers want you to do and spend money to revive on the spot. And that's where the flaws of Let It Die start to show, when the developers clearly started focusing on getting you to spend money through their system of "No check points, pay money or try and get premium currency through buggy broken quests, to revive where you died." Also, yes, buggy broken quests. People have noted that many quests that give "Death Medals" the premium currency, sometimes don't register upon completion. I personally waded through an entire floor without weapons or armor, THREE TIMES, and only ONE of those two (doing it without weapons and without armor were two separate quests) eventually triggered as complete. Whether this was eventually fixed, I don't know, the quest system is so far removed from the part where you play the game I often forget about it. To explain, you have a hub where you buy "decals" (stickers that go on your character for buffs) weapons, change characters, and access multiplayer. BUT, then there's another room that you have to leave the hub to get to, and your quests are there. Why they aren't just in the hub makes no sense, and it makes getting and turning in quests take longer than it should. It's not a huge problem, like quests not working, but it's noticable. The game isn't bad. It controls well, there's cool kills and neat weapons and armor. Some people have played through the game without spending a dime, it's very possible. However, the game is geared towards being cheaper than Dark Souls to make you spend money and there are places where it shows. There are places where they want you to go and grind for items and money, and probably die, and get mad, so you'll spend money. The game isn't doable naked, like the Dark Souls games, you have to get better weapons and armor, and in doing so you will die, and when you die you'll lose your stuff, and the game brings up a character, yes, you die and a person shows up and says, "Oh, you died. That really ****. Want to use a premium currency to revive?" EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. It becomes more infuriating than seeing "You Died" or "Game Over." Because you can't skip it, you can't mash through it, even if you want to spend the token to come back. And when you die three times in a room to enemies you have no way of fighting (Unless you can see the future and knew where the gun touting enemies were before hand) you'll start to see how much of a waste it is reviving anyway. This has become worse now that they have added premium decals, buffs you can only get by spending the premium currency, and you only have a CHANCE of getting a good one. Maybe you spend a dollar and get the best buff, or maybe you spend fifty dollars and get the same one. That's some mobile game gachapon **** that would not be in a good free to play game. Even people who loved Let It Die when it came out are starting to leave because of choices like this by the developers/publishers. The game is slowly becoming more "Pay us money or else you won't stand a chance against the new super bosses!" and people DON'T LIKE THAT. So, personal recommendation, try the game. It's a whopping 50gb download (as of now) but there's a few hours of fun to be had before it turns into another free to play dumpster fire. Just be sure not to spend any cash, because it's not worth it.

I don't normally like to lay into a game like this, but with SAO Hollow Fragment I simply have to, because it's the way the game opens up. And it opens up with an alternate ending to an anime that the game decides to completely summarize TWENTY MINUTES LATER. This is the first of many issues that hold SAO:HF back. There is no reason for the game to start in a gameplay tutorial, and then give a reason as to why the protagonist was in that area, how he got there, and what led to that point. It reeks of an executive decision that showing off gameplay rather than giving players the option for backstory (and yes, it's optional) would be better. So, in emulation of the game, let us now go BACKWARDS to the first fault with HF. When you press New Game you are first brought to a character customization screen where you can rename and change Kirito from the SAO anime. The problem that will crop up instantly is that ... everyone calls you Kirito, regardless of what name you chose, and all of your gear starts set towards the canon path of dual swords. Unless you go buy junk equipment in the first town, which is almost sure to be worse than the starting swords, you're just going to be Kirito. So why give us these options to not be him if the game is just going to assume we're Kirito? The only excuse is that I hear there's multiplayer, and it would be really bad if everyone looked the same, but I doubt that mode is really great enough that it warrants alienating the player like that. The second fault is where the game starts, at the end of the anime. They pull some silly "the game is glitched" thing to reset your skills and nerf your weapons, but if you just knock roughly two zeros off the end of everything it would be the same as starting at the beginning. You're not level 100, you're level 1. You don't have 3,000,000 gold, you have 30,000, etc, etc. You don't really feel like an end game character that soloed several bosses in an MMO. You feel like a guy who just picked up the game, and there's strangely no reason for that to have not been the case. See, the game tries so hard to just make you Kirito that they missed out on a huge concept. Remove him instead. Kirito is a typical anime blank face. He doesn't have wild anime hair, or super natural powers, he's just an everyday schmuck who happens to be really good at VR WoW. Rather than start at the end, SAO:HF should have been an alternate universe where your made up character took the place of Kirito, you were the beta player, you get stuck in the game, and now you have to make all the choices instead. And I say this because so many features in Hollow Fragment feel geared towards that. Like the fact that Kirito is married to Asuna and has that magical data child ... but you can still go mack on the other girls that like Kirito, even to a point where they brought in girls from future seasons for almost no reason other than "Hey, more waifu material!" But because they game wants you to be Kirito you'll feel slightly scummy seeing you ENGAGEMENT RING equipped while you hold hands with Leafa. The combat is fine, though the tutorials are horrible (Bad translation is bad) and some of the dialogue can be very confusing. One of the worst things in this section is that dialogue boxes are as long as the Vita screen, right? That makes sense, they go all the way across the bottom. They will use less than half of that space and instead stack two sentences three lines high, roughly two dozen words total. It ends up looking something like this. And frankly it's not only annoying, it's probably easily fixed. All in all the game's not bad if you like SAO, there's certainly worse games on the market. However the game ultimately failed because what I wanted was an SAO experience, not a Kirito Life Simulator which is what I got. If the specific idea of being Kirito sounds fun, you'll have a blast. If you want something more in lines of a traditional game with familiar characters, I hear the second game did a better job of that.

Earth's Dawn is a boring game, and it does nothing to help itself in that regard. The opening scene is stills with a Japanese voice over and English text explaining how aliens invaded and almost wiped out humanity because our weapons couldn't harm them. It wasn't until we grafted their guts onto armor that we could fight. Now, this is a promising idea, unfortunately it's horrifically let down by weak combat that lacks instruction, a nonsense skill tree, and a failure of a story. Let's start with the story which is easily the weakest part. It's weak because after that introduction there's nothing to latch on to. You are a generic create-a-character, either stick leg woman or Hulk sized man, neither of which are really artistically appealing. I'm not the kind of guy that thinks graphics matter, but this looks like it was designed on Newgrounds in 2008. The graphics certainly do, but the art style is this weird mix of anime and Gears of War that comes off as unnatural and awkward when put with what looks like flash animation for gameplay and realistic portrait art for cut scenes. There's no one in the story to latch on to because of this, and the only characters you'll see in the first half hour are boring and generic, which is a good term for this game. It's boring and generic. The combat exemplifies this point because it's all done with one button (the other button shoots a gun, but the gun is trash because it's slow, nonautomatic, meaning you have to mash it faster than melee attacks for it to serve its one purpose, and you can just make the sword serve that purpose with upgrades) and directional input. Press up and Square, you launch the enemy. Down and square you get another move, etc. The problem is none of these are explained anywhere in the game. I had a whole fight where I couldn't stop throwing the enemy and I had no idea what did that. The worst part were flying enemies where I would sometimes tap a direction before attacking and do something completely different than what I wanted. You can chalk that up to inexperience, but I personally despise when holding forward while attacking isn't "Move forward and attack" but a separate combo altogether. Combat also grades you based on some kind of criteria, but I also couldn't find that information anywhere. In something like Devil May Cry you can tell what they grade you on, getting hit and doing sick combos. Earth's Dawn I did a whole fight without getting touched, never stopped moving, probably did every combo I could do, and I got a friggin' B rank. It was the fastest and most fun fight I had in the whole time I played, and the game said, "Wow, that was just barely average" but another fight where I mashed Square to get through some basic scorpion enemies was an S. A fight where I used all the systems in the game and didn't get hit, B; a fight where I walked forward and mashed Square, S. What? Even if this game had a budget and graphics these two core problems would still be there and it would still hamper the game greatly. None of the enemies are unique except in design. If you've played a beat em up in the past decade you'll know what all these guys do the moment they come on screen. The combat has some depth but without anything to explain it, and the apparent ease of mashing your way through a fight, there's not a lot of reason to dig into it. Worst of all was the story that reads like a typical alien invasion movie except for the bio armor idea, and ultimately no characters to latch on to and empathize with. It all leads to a game that had potential and squandered it by doing everything that every other game has already done without bringing anything new or changing up the formula in any significant way. The back of the box gave me promise, but in the end I was let down. The game gets a 5/10 from me because there's nothing broken here, they delivered a product that works as intended, no glitches or bugs to be seen, but beyond working there just wasn't anything that stands out. The absolute pinnacle of mediocrity, like a bologna sandwich without condiments, it does what it's supposed to (turns on and runs) but fails to be memorable or unique.

Contrary to the negative reviews here, Unlimited SaGa isn't a bad game. It's a horribly average one brought to us by the same guy who made FINAL FANTASY 2, not 3, not 6, not 7, not 10. 2. Final Fantasy 2 had a system where you didn't gain experience by killing enemies but simply by using skills and attacks. Want more HP? Take hits. Want more attack? Attack more. There's a really deep system involved with skills in U SaGa that is just poorly explained and leads to people scratching their heads minutes into the game. Combined with a lackluster story and a high difficulty curve and people will be turned off immediately. My first several HOURS of the game were spent in two or three towns, progress inching forward as I would need to spend more time battling to increase stats instead of trying to further the story. When I would finally make headway with the story a boss would inevitably pop up and slam me back into grinding mobs for stats until I was strong enough to fight the boss. This sounds like a very typical RPG set up, but realize that if I don't get hit my defense doesn't go up. So a fight could be me standing there guarding to take hits for several minutes, and then not getting a stat up because RNG decided not to give it to me. This can be mitigated and abused at times, but it also means that the average gamer becomes frustrated and gives up. In the end, the game doesn't innovate anything, it borrows from old ideas the designer of Final Fantasy 2 had, slaps them on a new art style, and is honestly a very mediocre game in the SaGa series. Yes, series. This isn't the only SaGa game, it wasn't even the first, and it wasn't the last. And quite a few of those are better than this one. It seems like the man behind FF2 is doomed to always fall when Square pushes his titles West.

I wanted to enjoy this game when I bought it at a Vintage Stock for like $20. It wasn't at my local GameStop and it was appealing to my hardcore weeb with its anime styling. It was a gift from my father for having good grades in college that semester. And my hope of it being good died when I saw the studios behind the game. I can't tell you how sad that made me. Agarest War Zero is a prequel sequel (Takes place before the first game but was made after it) and is one of a DOZEN CARBON COPY "strategy" games by the same developer. Now, you read that and think, "That can't be right. Only Assassin's Creed and CoD repeat themselves, and even they have minor changes" but you'd be wrong. There's a strange series of games that use this strategy turn based thing with the same title shop, weapon forging, useless item shop, and excessive grinding to be mediocre, just with different characters. When I saw the developer my face dropped from excitement to worry, and finally into despair as I got into the first town. The long made short is that this game boasts being strategical, battles take place on a grid and your job is to place all your units in formation to hit the enemy a whole bunch of times as hard as you can to kill them. Unfortunately, enemies will either be damage sponges or pushovers. The most common grinding technique in all of these games (including ones not called Agarest) is to use a turbo controller to mash X/A, with all the battle animations off, go to the hardest area you can fight in without dying, and let the game play itself on auto while you sleep. This is because the auto battle will most of the time pick decent attacks, heal itself, and turn 10-20 minute long fights against BASIC MOBS, into 10 minute auto battles you don't even have to look at. At the core of this problem are two things. Everything has to be crafted. Want better healing items? Grind out the low drop rate materials to make them. Want a new sword? Grind out the materials to make them. All they had to do was put new weapons and armor in the shop every chapter or so, nothing overpowered, just some new standards for the player to benchmark themself. Instead you'll often find yourself stomping a hole through everything until a boss suddenly knocks you flat in one turn and you realize that leather jerkin was from chapter 1, you're in chapter 5, and nothing has dropped the materials you need to make the iron armor so it's back to farming bats in a cave for six hours. It's pointless tedium designed, LITERALLY DESIGNED, to sell you on downloadable content that costs as much, or more, than the game itself which makes grinding faster or completely unnecessary. The second issue the game has is that 90% of the strategy is just setting your team up and leaving them where they are. The game has a link system where other units will join in attacking the same enemy as an ally if they're in a certain figure around that ally. This means you'll find a way to position most of everyone inside everyone else's union zone and fights become little more than animatics between cutscenes, until the previously mentioned difficulty hike boss shows up to make mince meat out of your party, and then a simple helping of three hours of grind to get materials and levels turns him into pudding. The greatest let down here is that I played a game EXACTLY like this on the PSP with a different story. Same combat, same everything, and it was equally as boring in the long run. There's nothing technically broken here, everything works as intended, it's just that working as intended the game is repetitive, uninspired (it's a clone from the company, there's literally dozens of games with the same gameplay across several generations of consoles), and ultimately not worth anyone's time. Even the story, which starts off with a good premise, falls horribly to the wayside for B anime tropes like harems, beach trips, swimsuits in a fantasy game, and dating sim elements that block your path to the true end. If you're interested in that portion of the game, just download a save, buy the game on PC, and watch the cutscenes. It's not worth "playing" the game to see them.

Before we get this started I have to say two things. One, though my rating is a 9 I would honestly say the game's an 8.5. Two, a huge complaint I've noticed from the **** of negative reviews is that this game "pushes the feminist agenda." Now if you think that having a female protagonist that's among the 10% of characters in the game that's not a **** eating ape is "pushing an agenda" I will gladly point you to any of a dozen male characters (Kirito from Sword Art Online for one) that are god tier Gary Stus that only get hated on for by a fraction of people and none of them say he's "pushing the meninist agenda." We'll get into the issues with Aloy, our protagonist, in due time. HZD, as I will abbreviate, is an open world game where you kill robot creatures with a bow and other long range weapons, as well as the occasional spear. The combat is NOT slow paced, unless you play stealth and only use the bow. You see, one of the interesting things about the game is that you get five or so weapons to fight with. Two types of bow, fast and strong, as well as a bomb tossing slingshot, tripwires that explode, and a harpoon that holds enemies down. Generally late game combat consists of you slapping on your high powered explosive slingshot and unleashing a volley of flaming destruction that only the two toughest enemies in the game could survive. Between combat you'll be looting enemies, human and machine, for materials and upgrades, using your own form of "detective vision" to follow trails for quests, and have chats with people with useless dialog options. There's really only a handful of quests that matter in the game, and they're tied to special NPCs and relatively easy to find when you think about it. Completing these is only important for a single trophy, but the character stories are fairly interesting so it's worth doing it for the sake of those alone. Speaking of stories, HZD takes place in some kind of apocalyptic future (Not a spoiler, it was in trailers and the first five minutes of the game) but it's so far into the future that no one remembers an apocalypse, there's hundred foot tall trees growing out of old ****, and humans are acting like it's the BC era. Aloy is an abandoned girl, shunned by her native American esque tribe for an unknown reason. She is raised by an outcast that tells her if she can become a Brave (special tribe warriors) the elders of the tribe will answer any question she asks them, like where she came from. From there Aloy goes on a quest to stop some great corruption that's turning once docile machines into overpowered killing ... machines... and leaving some kind of dark goo everywhere it goes. And her quest just happens to tie into what happened to the ancient people that mysteriously vanished. Now, here's where the negative reviews are getting their "feminist agenda" nonsense from, and it's because they missed history class. See, a lot of Native American tribes were pretty matriarchal, that is the women held a good deal of power. The Nora, HZD's Native Americans, are like that too. Combined with Aloy being a girl who has a couple of moments that are a bit too smart for any protagonist (Though the big twist of the game might explain that away, depending on how you feel about genetics and how much having smart parents affects a child's IQ) and of course raging males used to seeing a muscle man smash everyone's brains in feel small when the tiny girl knows the Earth is round. These reviews aren't worth paying attention to. Aloy has some problems, but she's relatively well developed compared to a lot of games like this (Notably, she has better character than Far Cry 3's protagonist who's just a rich **** that start killing people and never has the appropriate psychological trauma that would cause because viddy games). The worst sin of HZD are these little choices in the dialog that do... nothing. They affect how Aloy reacts in that moment and mean nothing afterwards. Maybe if there's a sequel the game will remember the choices you make, but right now they don't do anything at all other than give shallow replay value to see what changes if you hit the boy with a rock rather than not hit him with a rock. (He's still a **** later no matter which you pick! Surprise, it changes nothing, just like a Telltale game.) Overall, while the characters are average at best, the story is really interesting, and the gameplay is fun. You can be tactical, set up traps and lure machines into them, or jump out and go mad throwing bombs and shooting arrows everywhere, both are viable. Graphically the game's beautiful, and none of the collectibles people complain about are necessary, as a collectible should be. Too many games lock powerups behind out of the way nonsense. I got the platinum for this game in about 60 hours, and that's a pretty perfect play time for a game this big, and it was worth every minute.

I love how people think the characters in this game are terrible tropes. Play Graces F, the game with the literal tropes in them. Silent, obedient female, tsundere girl next door that doesn't like you at all b-baka, jealous younger brother that's much better than you but isn't the protagonist, protagonist that loves justice and has the attention span of a flea, and of course, the older veteran that knows more than he lets on. Zestiria's characters are frankly the most original JRPG characters in a long, long time. The protagonist is idealistic and naive, but he's not down right stupid. He learns, he observes and he make decisions. "We can't save this person" doesn't end with him trying and failing and wondering why, it ends with him realizing that's what needs to be done and that his ideals have to be compromised for the greater good. He's also got quirks that aren't incredibly dumb. He's an archaeology buff, so he gets to show off book smarts, which is rare in a Japanese protagonist in a video game. Some of the characters do fall into annoying tropes or suffer from cliche habits, but those aren't their main personality, which is what makes a trope character. The combat is also pretty grindy, unless you play on hard and above, which actually addresses another issue people have with the game being too easy. Turning the difficulty up means you have to actually exploit enemy weaknesses proper in order to be successful, but in turn you get really high level equipment very early on. This bonus is clearly less important late game, but if you're really concerned about the game being challenging, you wouldn't turn the difficulty down just to whine about how it's easy. The worst part of the whole game is the equipment skills system. Mostly because it's a massive, over cluttered mess that you shouldn't pay any attention to until the end of the game. Essentially, there are about ten skills across several element types. When you line these up either vertically or horizontally, you get a buff. The problem is that when you fuse two pieces of equipment together, the skills fuse too and change based on what the two skills are. Without a calculator to tell you what skills make what skills, it's just a headache to follow and the best buffs are just straight up stat increases anyway. It was a very silly idea that adds to the grind far more than simple leveling. Overall though, Zestiria is easily one of the better games in the series. It's not one of the greats, but it's not Graces F, it's not Destiny, it's not Hearts R. It's a solid game that lacks annoying, overused characters that Japan has been pushing out for waifu huggers since the mid 2000's. (And the story may be the "typical" save the world plot, but at least it's in danger in an interesting way instead of typical "evil emperor.")

The combat is **** and that's that. There's no defending it, there's no, "You get used to it" there's no, "It's like the other games so." If I wanted a game like the other games ... I would play them instead. The point of a sequel is to IMPROVE. Risen 3's combat is awful and it's awful for a single reason that could have been patched out. Your character INSISTS on twirling like a ballerina at her first recital FOR EVERY SWING. This isn't how a sword fight works. This isn't how it should play. The fact that a swing takes three+ seconds to come out is completely stupid, especially when enemy attacks are instant and sometimes drag the creatures across several feet of ground to hit you. It feels like they wanted to mix turn based combat and real time combat, but kept the worst of both. And dodge rolls don't always save you. I have been hit out of so many "dodges" AWAY from enemies because the game teleports them to me. On top of this, the most common healing item is a VERY SLOW regen. I don't mind that, except it should actually be useful. Just make it heal ... three times faster when I'm not in combat. That way I can heal without standing in a field FOR FIVE MINUTES while I wait to recover. I'm not kidding, it's too slow. You're better off just drinking alcohol (potions), except they cost a lot more money, are hard to find in the wild, and are better saved for the middle of a fight. So, combat boils down to using a companion to distract the thing you want to kill, hitting it in the back til it dies, then standing about while you eat a sandwich to recover HP at a rate of 1 point per 2 seconds, and then going to the next fight. This doesn't sound bad, until you realize that it makes playing without the AI impossible if you come across more than 2 enemies of any type, and fights drag on for 10+ minutes until you get overpowered via spells. There's literally one build that makes you essentially invincible for the whole game. Everything else, the graphics (passable), the story (passable), the voice acting (cheesy), the world (interesting) works very well. I enjoy the game for the most part, but the combat is a chore that doesn't get any better until you get powerful enough to essentially skip it. And that's not good in a game where combat is a majority of your time spent playing.

The game is plain and simple better on PC. If you've ever played Oregon Trail, you've basically played Organ Trail. It's basically a zombie themed remake that is actually a lot easier, on PC. I'm sure you're wondering what I mean by that, and I'll cut right to it. One of the biggest things about Organ trail is the scavenging and boss fights (in the Complete Edition at least). In order to aim you have to pull the right analog stick BACK in the OPPOSITE direction of your target. As a veteran in gaming from the classic NES days, I thought this would be fine. I was wrong. You see, on PC you can put the cursor on the zombie, and then pull back to almost always hit them. On PS4 you can't do this and many sections are now left up to blind firing as pull back, adjust aim using a doted line, and press button to fire, is MUCH MUCH SLOWER than click, drag, release. I'm sure someone is scoffing, "That just takes getting used to." And you're right, it does, but the sections where it's so necessary to survive feel appallingly unfair, even on easy, and it's worse when ammo is scarce. Frankly, there's no need for the game to play like this other than developer whim. It doesn't add to the game and detracts from the experience on PS4. If PC were equally as difficult we could call it a design choice, imitate a scared survivor in the apocalypse by making aiming hard, but since it's as easy as breathing on PC and as hard as eating a bowl of nails on PS4, it's an issue. But, if you're willing to stick with it there's a really good game here, assuming you can't buy it on Steam and like the Oregon Trail games.

There's only one word to sum this game up. Boring. Nothing about the game is responsive or feels good about controlling it. The enemy turn takes WAY too long, even on the first mission when they only have like 5 units. Now, I have to preface the rest of this with something. I like strategy games. I enjoy thinking my moves out and planning ahead, using the environment to my advantage, all things this game claims you need to succeed. Do you know what you don't get though? All of the information. Within the first ten minutes of gameplay they teach you how to capture buildings via tutorial. HOWEVER, if you're not reading the pages and pages of expanded text, you'll miss crucial information. Like how the D-pad opens up a unit/building specific menu, and that through this menu you can deploy additional troops from a certain type of building. Information that would have been useful three turns ago when they game taught you about buildings and not when you start asking yourself why the enemy has heavy tanks and you don't. This is all bundled on top of some of the worst console optimization I've ever seen in a port. Now that your unit has used every action it has for the turn, wouldn't you like to move to another unit? Well, I certainly hope you remember to press O every single time, otherwise you stay on that first unit. This wouldn't be the worst thing if it didn't lead me to moving units I didn't want to move. Oh, and for whatever stupid reason, either because the game is for "hardcore veterans" or bad design choices, you can't back a unit up. That's right, it's turn based, but you can't cancel a move. You can pull a piece back in CHESS, the most intellectual game man has made, but Battle Worlds Kronos says that's dumb, mistakes don't happen ever, right? Oh, and for my last piece. A section of the tutorial explains that this game is hard because "there are too many easy games already." Well, that may be true, but I have to say, there are difficult games that are a LOT more fun than this. Challenge doesn't make a game good or appealing.

The biggest complaints to this game are utter **** and for one main reason. You can apply them to every other game in the series. Final Fantasy XV is a Final Fantasy game through and through, and what people don't realize is that what they want isn't Final Fantasy. Already people have hit the "This review is garbage" button and moved on, and they're in what we call denial. Let's start with these gripes people have. "There's long stretches of going to a mission objective with nothing in between!" Much like the old games, where going from town to town was nothing except random encounters. Those encounters are still here, if you go on foot you will find them, if you drive at night they will find you. "The cast are a bunch of emo boys, and there's no variety between them! Old games had men and women and non human characters sometimes." Yes, and no. Final Fantasy V featured a cast with ONE male protagonist and 3 females. Final Fantasy 1 didn't have genders at all, and neither did the original FF 3. (Not 6, the original class based Final Fantasy 3.) 1 and 3 also featured characters with literally NO personality, no story, and it wasn't until the remake of 3 that we got that. So in terms of "blandest" protagonists ever, 15 is still a cut above several entries in the series. And the emo boy look started with Cloud, and you loved it, now you hate, because you aren't twelve and have taste, but nostalgia goggles at popular this year. "Well, the side quests don't have any story content to them. You basically go to a place, fight a monster, and go back. BORING!" Like Monster Hunter, like Elder Scrolls, like The Witcher, all high valued games. But let's take this in terms of Final Fantasy. ... Before 7 were there even side quests? I think there were a few in 6, but before that even if there was a side quest it was getting a summon or an item that certainly wasn't important to the plot. That's the definition of a side quest. And while the ones in 15 might not have much of a story, if at all, they make sense. Hunting monsters is what the detachment of fighters the majority of your party is made up of DOES. You basically just said, "Why are the soldiers fighting a war? That's stupid." And they even point out VERY early on that the all black "Emo" look is regulation uniforms. They're stupid, I'll give you that right now, it's very dumb that the king said "I want my soldiers to dress up like the Backstreet Boys!" but if that's the universe that's the universe. "The battles are so terrible though! Even if the hunts make sense the combat is just holding one button. You can do this with your eyes shut!" And if you played every other FF game right, you can win by holding down X. Yes, it's true. I know, take a deep breath. Final Fantasy by the very nature of a JRPG means that winning battles can come down entirely to being beefy. Do you think it's more tactical to select a skill and watch it happen, as opposed to having to time the use of the skill so it doesn't miss? Final Fantasy used to be pure numbers, it was all luck or grinding. FFXV removes a good chunk of that, and I can tell you right now that it does because I took down a level 30 Iron Giant at LEVEL TEN. Why? Because I strategized. I picked good magic, I built meter, I hit it with its weakness, warped out, used Gladiolus' special, warped in, hit it again, chained, rinse repeat. It was far more involved and tactical than, "Oh, a horde of monsters. *Summon Titan to deal 3000 damage to all of them* Oh, I won." And the story, every Final Fantasy gets weird at the end. If you don't think they do, rewatch the scenes on Youtube. Skip the gameplay, watch the scenes. So we're going to fight Sephiroth, who is this super solider, that's actually a genetic modified human from a petrified ancient, who now wants to destroy the world. Yeah, that makes complete perfect sense, totally not utter nonsense that you have to set aside disbelief to follow. How about Final Fantasy V? Where a tree with evil spirits turned into an evil warlock that wants to swallow the world into the void by smashing some magic crystals? Yeah, perfect sense. ... They're all slightly nonsensical, and at least FFXV has promised to help clear up a lot of the story, so benefit of the doubt until then. Overall, the game is a much needed breath of fresh air, even if it's not perfect. It has flaws, the combat can get VERY tedious, especially when you just want to complete a side quest, without fighting a bunch of wolves that are far below your level, or enemies spawning in front of your car at night when you're just trying to spend EXP. And the quips DO get boring and nerve wracking after a while, but 12 and 13 had both of those problems, in a sense. It's inherent in all video games. It's silly to think that FFXV was going to solve long standing issues with the medium. What it did do however is update the Final Fantasy formula into something modern. If you don't like that, that's fine, but it's not bad.

Put simply, Mankind Divided is more Human Revolution, but less than its predecessor. Now I'm sure you're wondering what that means, and I'll explain. Mankind Divided has basically everything from HR, but it's much more fine tuned. The gameplay is much sleeker, stealth feels more approachable without overpowering gunplay in terms of speeding through an area, your choices still have weight at times, and the story is still engaging. However, the few augments they add are not all that useful, and praxis kits are more plentiful than before. I've seen some reviews exploding at the game for microtransactions, but I didn't see one in my entire 40 hours of two playthroughs. Early in the game you are GIVEN TEN praxis points and if you're going sneaky that is literally all the points you'll ever need. I maxed out Jensen in less than a playthrough and a half. The biggest problem, the one that keeps this game from being a solid ten, is the obvious sequel baiting. The entire game builds up this underlying conspiracy, and never divulges a single thing about it. Where HR went through all these turns, maybe your boss is bad, maybe Megan is alive, the illuminati is real! Mankind Divided replays a couple of those but fails to wrap them up. It leaves room for an obvious third Jensen game, but it also leaves the player feeling somewhat hollow about the whole thing. Honestly, the game is well worth the $60 if you liked Human Revolution.

The average critic score for this game is surprisingly accurate. Extreme VS Force is decent. It's not good, it's not bad. On the good side, the game looks great, it's vibrant and dark when it's supposed to be, the style translates really well which is a problem for some Vita games. It's likely that some of your favorite gundams are in the game and reliving moments from the series is, as always, enjoyable. Offering to play your own music instead of the series classic is a nice touch as well and a very underutilized idea (I remember when the original Xbox touted playing your own music as a new feature and people loved the idea). However, the controls are stiff, you have to stop after doing ANYTHING including firing a gun, which leaves you far more open than it should. Try playing a melee intensive game like Dark Souls, and stop pressing the attack button for about two seconds after each swing. That's how this plays. Swing, 1, 2, 3, now you can attack again, or move, or whatever. The dash and jump button being the same, only you press twice to dash, is TERRIBLE, as I never find a big reason to jump, but always need to be dashing (Frankly the game should just have dash on ALL OF THE TIME as it's a more comfortable speed for any casual gamer, only a complete newbie to two stick controls would like the sluggish pace). Don't get me wrong, I understand that they're trying to convey a sense of scale, you're controlling a monstrous robot, but ... even Armored Core isn't this slow, and Armored Core is the best Gundam game to ever be made. Aside from that, stopping after attacking during combat is tiresome and while they want you to be strategic with the fights, unless you're playing another person there's no reason to, except for the artificial difficulty inflators known as Haro Medals. Put simply, each mission has 3 sub-objectives that earn you these medals which unlock things like letting you take more mobile suits out on a mission or more missions in general. After a few missions though, you realize there's a theme, every so many missions you can't take damage. And that becomes very hard to do when you have 4 Zaku, which are die in one hit annoyances, that will spam multiple shots at you from several angles, often after you get off your measly single beam shot. Even one hit cancels the don't get hit medals and will lead to frequent groans of irritation as you repeat the stage and its unskippable, untranslated introduction. That's another issue, there's no subtitles during combat. Yeah. Here's Amaro protecting white base, and having a conversation, and unless you speak Japanese, or have seen the anime several times, you have no idea what's going on! I'm sure many of you have always thought, "Wow, if only I had LESS story in my games!" Battles might hold my interest more if I knew what the banter was, but without it they're just clunky messes with unskippable, unreadable intros followed by talking to two of the most annoying characters ever made. (The main story involves these two AI fairies that bicker with each other, and something about evolution.) Finally, the lock on system is ABSOLUTE AND COMPLETE GARBAGE. Your laser fires infinitely in one direction? Cool, there's no manual aim and your lock on range is limited to about thirty feet ahead of you, even when you can physically see the enemy's mobile suit stomping down the path at you. If I can SEE them, if the enemy's model is completely on screen, I should be able to lock on to them. It's simple, and the enemy doesn't seem to have this limitation as I'm locked onto while tapping the lock on button, without tagging them. Overall, if you're a fan of the Gundam series, it's fun at about $20, if you just want some robot fighting action try one of the Warriors Gundam games or maybe import one of the Gundam Breaker games (Monster Hunter crossed with Gundam) they're available with complete English subtitling from play Asia, which is a better subtitle job than Bamco did here. If you don't have an interest in Gundam, try Armored Core. If you're really looking at this game though, be warned about the controls, I've played NES games with more fluid movement and combat.

The people giving this game bad reviews have all pretty much said the same thing, and it shows how little they paid attention. No Man's Sky is about EXPLORATION, not shooting enemies. Are there enemies to shoot? Yeah, I've landed on two planets that have highly predatory species that want nothing but my blood on their jaws and even trying to get the fuel for my spaceship becomes a fight for survival, which is what the other part of this game is, surviving. The two things you do in the game are explore and survive. Surviving requires finding materials to power your various space things. Your mining laser, your ship's three different engine types, your suit shield and environmental protection (which keeps you from dying when the planet is freezing or burning hot or has toxic rains). If that sounds boring to you, don't get the game. Other than those things there's nothing here, unless you're interested in finding minerals to sell to the computer for money, which is no different than pretending to be a trader in any of the most recent Fallout games. Basically, you have to either be very interested in looking at the different scenery on each planet, or be willing to, god forbid, actually role play with your game. You're either here for the view, or you're taking off and pretending you're a space captain or a bounty hunter, or a trader, and that's what it'll be, pretend. There's no class, no job, nothing. But it's fun, it's the most simplistic version of fun that gamers have lost with games providing hallway simulators that have story, or an open world with a paper script. Exploration for the sake of exploration is fun. Now, I will concede issues. The planets aren't all that varied, but they're not varied in the same way they were in Star Wars. Here's a desert, here's a water planet, here's a jungle, etc. Sometimes they mix. I landed on a tropical planet that gave way to ocean and some dotted islands which really stood out from the jungle behind me. But once you see a few you do get the idea that the game is just going to stitch together existing biomes from Earth. The animals you encounter are likewise just kind of slapped together pieces, but sometimes the pieces slap together in interesting ways. One planet I saw had dinosaurs with bug faces and claws. Nightmare fuel for days. The biggest problem I keep reading about though that I have to address, is the inventory "issue" people have. Which ... I don't get. Your suit powers run off of things like titanium or zinc, your energy weapons and engines run off plutonium. You can get titanium by killing this little eyeball robots (which is easy as the game has an aggressive auto aim), and plutonium is on every planet in the solar system as big red crystals. I keep four slots, two for titanium two for plutonium, and I never run out. That leaves me with 9 spaces for stuff in my ship and currently 8 spaces for stuff on my character. There's no inventory management going on, it's just keeping a slot open for minerals that are literally everywhere. If I had one complaint about the game it would be that surviving is TOO EASY. The only time I felt even marginally threatened was the planet where everything wanted to kill me, and I have a GUN to shoot the alien squirrels with so it wasn't that big of a deal. Overall, this game is fun where it is but I can see a lot of potential in the future if the game can be made challenging. At the moment it's a lot of flying around and looking at things and you have to be interested in seeing those things and being immersed in the game. If you're looking to shoot stuff but still want space try Rebel Galaxy or Free Space, those are probably more your taste. If you want to land on an alien world and look at things and go, "What the hell?" play No Man's Sky.

The game is interesting if you like things that are really really hard. I mean Dark Souls and then some hard. Essentially, Furi is a series of boss fights. There are no level ups, there's no crafting, just you getting good. All the skills you need are available from the get go and it's up to you to not **** to win. The graphics are simply amazing, the game has a style that OOZES from every single shot of the game. The colors are bright and in your face, the bosses are memorable and varied, the same as the stages you fight them on. Unfortunately, the story is rather uninteresting for a long time and I would easily call it the weakest part of the game. Between bosses you walk in a straight line (sometimes it curves) to the next boss while another character dumps exposition about things you don't understand. Frankly, I wish the game would just auto walk me because holding the stick forward for two minutes as my guy practically crawls forward makes my brain go numb. Honestly, pick the game up if you're interested in learning the specific patterns of a handful of distinct bosses and putting your skills to the test in a game that won't hold your hand and has less newbie padding than Dark Souls (at least you can grind in Dark Souls.) If you're the kind of guy that complains about losing because "That's not fair!" or "How could I have known that!?" then don't even bother with Furi and go back to something more casual. The controls are tight and responsive, but they do have a learning curve to them, which is where most people will get mad and quit. The visuals are sheer eye candy, but the story is a complete drag. The music is fitting to the sights and fights. All in all, Furi is gaming in its purest form. It's not about the story or the graphics, it's about solid controls and harsh but fair challenges that push the limits of your skills and demand you adjust your strategy or get wrecked. Furi is pure gameplay, and it does it well.

The Last of Us is, quite honestly, an 8/10. Most people go on and on about the story and how touching it was, how much they felt, and the story is actually the weakest part of the game. TLoU tells the story of a cliche single father whose daughter predictably dies inside of ten minutes without the player really knowing either of them, and we're supposed to care because she was his daughter. He then finds a replacement daughter 20 years later and that's about it. Naughty Dog themselves even said the entire game was built around Joel and Ellie's father/daughter relationship. And that was a stupid decision. The game, at certain points, suggests two VASTLY MORE INTERESTING stories, Joel's life in the post apocalypse as a smuggler, and his adventures with his brother shortly after the outbreak. Instead we get a typical "Father tries to connect with his step daughter on a road trip" Hollywood story, told in a kind of dark setting. The few times we actually do something other than be cliche are far apart and don't last long. The ending is also very predictable and didn't surprise me in the slightest. Where the game really shines is in combat. Shooting things is good, the stealth is difficult but rewarding (and infuriating, but we'll get to that), overall it flows very well. The mixed gameplay is fun to mess around with, and I'm a total **** for exploration that gives me upgrades, and crafting. There's enough variety for each player to make their own style in combat. Personally, I got addicted to throwing smoke bombs after kiting enemies into one area and then molotoving them and shotgunning the stragglers. There are faults in the system, however. There are enemies that kill you instantly that are very difficult to distinguish from a distance from ... literally any other enemy. You have to either stealth kill these guys, or spend quite a few bullets (in the early game) to take them out. This leads to incredibly frustrating areas where two or more are in close proximity, and since they use sound instead of sight, sneaking up on two in the same room is nigh impossible without serious shenanigans. The game also drops the "ammo is scarce! Use it wisely!" around the middle of the game unless you're playing on one of the much harder difficulties. Naughty Dog, again, have explicitly stated that TLoU uses some kind of ammo counter, and while you won't get every shot back after a fight, the enemies are programmed to drop enough for survival in the next area, which is generally more than enough. I cleared the game my first time through with more handgun rounds than I could use in a single fight. They also obnoxiously lock simple minded "skills" behind high walls. One of the most useful skills you can purchase allows you to save yourself if grabbed by a zombie by stabbing them. I don't know about you, but I don't need training on how to shove a sharp object into something that's trying to strangle me. It seems quite obvious really, and only serves to hide the more useful ability behind it on the upgrade tree. Despite those few flaws, the game is quite enjoyable. The story is fun enough the first time through, if predictable, and the voice acting really makes the characters pop. The graphics are good, though I wish we could have seen more of cities coated in mushrooms growing everywhere, give us the sense that the fungus was taking over. But most importantly, shooting guys is fun. Sneaking up on them is challenging but fun. Those are the most important things. The game is FUN to play. Too many people get hung up on the story and completely miss that the controls are smooth easy to understand, combat is challenging but rewarding, and the systems incorporated in the game make exploration worth doing. If there's one thing I hope for in The Last of Us 2 I hope they make the environments bigger and give us more things to craft and upgrade. But, maybe make the skill upgrades something that would need upgraded instead of simple self defense that a child could do.

The game has tons of holes in the story, which I won't discuss for the sake of spoilers in case you're interested in a six year old game that's actually worse than the one that just came out. People have been saying that Star Ocean 5's story is bland, but at least it's not riddled with inconsistencies, annoying unlikable characters, and horrid voice acting like Star Ocean The Last Hope. Even if you use the Japanese voices they're still pretty bad, and the character quirks are simply obnoxious, kay? And that doesn't even go into the myriad of technical issues. I lost several hours of progress, including several cut scenes, due to a freeze, and I had one friend who had nearly completed one of the post game dungeons and lost the whole thing. Gameplay wise it's a decent Star Ocean game, and pretty much what you would expect. But with characters like Edge Maverick, a man with the name of a Sonic the Hedgehog OC, and immortal lolita characters with bland as a trait, it's hard to enjoy. I would much rather have tofu that tastes like nothing than a bowl of crap like Star Ocean The Last Hope.

Time to update this review. Dissidia is a sort of arena brawler/fighting game hybrid concept using Final Fantasy characters. Duodecim 012 is an updated version. The 012 portion of the game is really more of a prologue to the primary section of the game, which is the same story from the original Dissidia. The story itself is interesting in a lot of ways, but is completely secondary to the combat. The story involves two deities, Cosmos and Chaos, who have brought together all these different heroes to fight on their sides. The 012 is the number of conflict, the Duodecim story is the 12th fight, and the original story (Which you get in 012 after clearing the 012 story) is the 13th conflict. It essentially justifies all these characters coming together. The combat is where I feel 012 went off the rails. Combat is simple, you have an HP number and a Bravery number. You can store bravery by attacking with the O button and the bravery that you have stocked deals HP damaged when you press square (assuming the square attack lands). Being hit by an enemy's O attacks drains your bravery, as yours does to theirs. Basically, it's tug of war with numbers. The tipping point is in stage bravery. When you reduce your enemy's bravery to negatives you get a bonus based on stage gimmicks. The enemy can do the same. When your bravery is broken it reduces to the negative of your max (If you have a maximum of 1000 bravery your bravery becomes -1000) and slowly goes back up to 0. When it reaches 0 you instantly get your max Bravery back. There's also blocking and dodging as any arena game would have. What separates this from others is the EX and Assist gauges. Now, here is where Square messed up in my opinion. The two gauges are supposed to balance each other out. The EX gauge, when filled up and activated, can do one of two things. Either stop time for a few seconds, or change your character into their super form for a minute. (Cloud, for example, gets Ultima weapon, Sephiroth goes into One Winged Angel form, etc). The Assist gauge lets you call in your partner who will do a preset attack. If your partner hits the enemy while they are in EX mode, they lose their gauge. This is faulty because they also made it take forever to build EX, but you can spam Assist attacks all night and day. EX builds up by collecting EX cores or gathering little motes of light after hitting enemies. Assist gauge fills up by hitting guys. The EX gauge, if you're not boosting it with items, can take five or six fully powered up cores. The Assist gauge will fill up in about four attacks. EX cores take over a minute to show up, you can attack a lot in one minute. This leads to a situation where you obtain your really cool EX mode, and lose it instantly because the AI Assist character cast a simple fireball that traveled half the arena to hit you. Beyond that there's little systems that irk me, like Chase attacks which basically involve a very short, but boring and pace **** mini game of dodge the attack. It's not hard, but it does shatter the flow of battle. For a PSP game the graphics are great, and frankly the game still looks good on the Vita. However, the little issues with combat, and the fact that this version only really adds eight new characters or so just doesn't do it for me. The original Dissidia was great, I sunk 80 hours into it easily, I would play quick matches against the AI all the time. 012 adds a lot of new things that just pad the game unnecessarily, to the point that some people have made guides on how to get the best equipment in a matter of HOURS. Yeah, HOURS! Of fighting the same guy over and over that has a material with a .01% drop rate to make one sword and you need one of that material for every single character in the game. FUN! (That's worse than the FF 14 MMO drop rates.)

Eyes of Heaven is a game I've been waiting for since it was announced. I got the demo the day it was released and found myself replaying the very limited fights it gave over and over again. Put simply, this game is for fans of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and no one else. More so than a Naruto game, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure has so many characters, so many jokes and references, that if you haven't read the manga or watched the anime, you just will not care. The plot picks up after the third arc of the series and travels through all 8 arcs that currently exist and doesn't explain much about them. This is why being a fan is a prerequisite to enjoying the game. Even in combat most of your moves are references or taken straight from the source material. With that out of the way, if you're a fan of Jojo and wondering "Is this any good then?" The answer is yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. (To non Jojo fans, I just made a reference) The gameplay is so much better than it was in the PS3 fighter. Eyes of Heaven is more of an arena brawler. You and a companion (generally AI) face off against another team of two in a decent sized area full of traps, usable items, and stuff to throw. Each character has a list of unique moves and even how their basic attacks work are different (Unlike the fighter where almost everyone was all punching and kicking all the time). Combat can be fast paced, the levels aren't big enough that you'll do a lot of running at the enemy, but they have height to them that you can use to escape and plan, if you're character is less inclined to face punching. Each area of the game was pretty much lifted from the manga itself, and the story was overseen by the creator of the manga, Hirohiko Araki. This is again where I stress that if you're not a fan this won't matter to you, but if you are a fan it's like a golden stamp of quality assurance. The story was drafted by Araki and in that way it's like we've gotten a bonus arc. Overall, if you haven't gotten it by this point, fans of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, either the anime or manga, should buy this game when it fits their budget. It's a fun game with a lot of characters to play as and the interactions between them are great. The story will be interesting and it's almost like an arc from the manga or anime. If you aren't a fan, don't buy it, don't look at it, pretend it doesn't exist, because all you'll see is an arena brawler like Power Stone with weird characters saying things you don't understandu. (That's a reference too.)

God Eater Resurrection is an enhanced version of Gods Eater Burst which came out on the PSP towards the middle-end of its life cycle, in America at least. The story follows your custom character who becomes a warrior called a "New Type" in a post apocalyptic world that was ruined by monsters called Aragami. Aragami appeared one day and started absorbing creatures, buildings, and weapons, mutating their bodies into those things. Humans were unable to fight back as the Aragami cellular structure was impervious to contemporary weapons. That's where the god eaters came in, humans that were compatible with an armlet that lets you damage the giant monsters with your giant sword that is made from giant monster material. God Eater is a Monster Hunter type game, but with massive improvements to things like drop rate and controls. The game is smooth and looks amazing in a very typical anime style. So the question you have to ask yourself is, "Does the idea of Monster Hunter, killing giant creatures with cool designs for their parts to enhance my own weapons, sound fun, but Monster Hunter itself wasn't amazing?" Then try God Eater. It's only $20 on Vita or you get it for free if you pre order the PS4 version of God Eater 2 Rage Burst (coming out in August). This is a game that I dumped over 100 hours into on the PSP and the vita Resurrection version has new weapons, new mechanics, new monsters, and new mission types. I am already thoroughly prepared to pour another 100 hours into this version and a further 100 hours into the sequel. The only detractor that some might find is that there is no dual audio, so if you want the Japanese voices you're outta luck. However, there's an option to turn voices down so you don't have to hear them. Though the voices, in my opinion, are vastly improved from the original game and the voice actors are pretty top notch folk in the industry. The plot ends up pretty much anime, so if you like anime you won't be disappointed, but don't expect any Hollywood movie story line. The combat is fast, responsive, there are 6 melee weapons, 4 or 5 guns, and dozens of monster types to kill. Unlike Monster Hunter where a hunt can take between 10 and 30 minutes a seasoned player can clear a mission of 4 monsters in about 10 minutes, tops. Rarely have I spent more than 5 minutes hunting something, which makes the game fantastic on the Vita.

The first question you have to ask yourself before buying SO: I&F is, "Do I like old school RPGs?" And when I say old school I mean unskippable cut scenes, areas that exist specifically for encounters and fights, standard progression, and limited save points. Because those are the biggest things people are complaining about. Star Ocean Integrity and Faithlessness is a classic wrapper that has a new food inside it. Things look very similar to previous games, but there's been a lot of gameplay tweaks since the last good Star Ocean game. Combat and cut scenes are now integrated into the game. When you bump into enemies on the map your characters pull out their weapons and the fight begins with no transitions. The same for a lot of the story, people simply start speaking. It doesn't cut to dialogue boxes or a scene, in most cases. Naturally there are going to be some scenes that aren't in game at some points. On top of removing transitions, SO has changed up how the mechanics of the gameplay. The rock paper scissors of previous titles is very prominent and easy to understand and works probably the best I have ever seen. I did an entire boss fight with counter attacks, which would have been difficult to judge in previous entries. Atop that skills have an upgrade system and a mastery system, as well as the game having a new system for learning skills instead of simply leveling up. They have also introduced AI altering "roles" which can be purchased with SP (which is used for buying skills of various types). Roles not only affect how the AI acts but give bonuses relating to the role, like increased damage to certain enemy types or extra stats. The crafting system is back and it's more fine tuned than SO3. You see the materials you need, and when you gather them up you can make the item. However, what items you can make are limited by your specialties, sort of passive skills that let you craft items or gather materials for crafting (in the early parts). Of course in an RPG we can't neglect the story and characters. Which, I'll admit, are rather dry. Around an hour in I had already predicted the big twist of the game (It's Star Ocean, of course it had something to do with space invaders.) But naturally the characters had to go through the phase of "OH WOW! WE WOULD HAVE NEVER GUESSED!" which is pretty annoying. As for the characters themselves, I feel like I've become jaded by college courses on how to write because none of them are particularly interesting. None of them are horribly offensive and annoying (Like half the cast in a Tales of series game, or completely lacking any depth like most Western RPG characters) but the game does feel kind of sped up. What does help in both of those regards is the PA system, which has returned. Private Actions are chats with your party where you often get to make a choice that raises or lowers their affections, and in previous games altered the ending for your protagonist. PA's are usually short scenes that add more depth to a character or situation and they're welcome as the main plot focuses less on the characters you're adventuring with and more on the action (a faux pas of professional writing. The characters and their reactions should be what's interesting, not wondering what the next set piece of the game is. I should care about the characters) Overall, Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness gets a 9/10 from me. It's a classic shell with new content and I've been craving an RPG since Fallout 4 let me down. The writing could have been better, but the combat is sweet and rewarding, the exploration is simple but the areas are visually stimulating and lovely. I think if Square had made this a PS4 exclusive (the game came out on PS3 in Japan) then it could have been a 10/10 easily with better textures and more development time. Unfortunately it's held back by the previous generation of consoles in some regards, but it's still a blast to play. The people who say they cleared it in under 30 hours are either playing on easy mode or ignored the side quests and are lying about that. I spent over a half an hour in the first exploration zone after spending fifteen minutes in the tutorial town. These are people trying to make it look bad by speeding through so they can **** out day one reviews.

Mana Khemia is the absolute best JRPG on the PS2. The characters are inventive and original, the story is interesting, and at times a bit of a mystery, and the leveling system is innovative. Simply put if you own a PS2 and enjoy JRPGs such as Final Fantasy, Tales of, and especially the Atelier series, you should own this game. The graphics aren't great, but if graphics are all you care about then JRPGs probably aren't your thing, the music is great, and memorable, plus with 8 different endings the replayability is sky high. Believe me when I say this game is must have for your PS2 collection, it's so great I personally had to buy 2 copies, one got scratched up so bad I couldn't play it because I played it so much. If you have managed to skip over this game, stop, and pick it up, the used price tag isn't bad nowadays, and if you already have it, you could always buy the PSP version on the PSN for 9.99, either way, it's a great deal for a fantastic game.

It's true that they could have spent a little more time porting this one over, especially since Mana Khemia is the single best JRPG on the PS2. The PSP port is really more for those who have played Mana Khemia on the PS2, and wish to take it with them. ON that note, get the download version from the PSN store, the loading screens are extremely minor, and there isn't any noticeable loading during dialog, an issue the UMD version has. Other than that the only real complaint about it is the lack of voice over during battles, a rather minor complaint due to the sheer size of the game. (eight endings, new features exclusive to the PSP, and the amazing game with you any time anywhere) Fact is if you liked the PS2 version and have 9.99 to spend on the PSN, this is a must.

Mimana Iyar Chronicle is a rather good game. The graphics aren't top notch, but they aren't horrible either. The voice acting has many memorable voice actors from other JRPGs, so it's sort of an all-star cast. The plot does take some time to start up, but once it gets going you get a sort of invested feeling (some time around the third dungeon). The characters may seem rather flat and one dimensional, but as with most JRPGs there is an underlying subtlety to their interactions with the main character. The battles are fun, but the loading times are a pain (usually takes 40-45 seconds to load a fight). Over all it's a good JRPG if you're willing to stick with it, and actually ENJOY the JRPG genre. (Better than Final fantasy, more original than Tales of)