judgementblade

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Disclaimer: This review assumes you played and finished TotK and AoC. 1. I despised BotW and loved AoC. In the same manner I disliked TotK and liked AoI. It has a lot of common grounds. On a technical level, I can't make out much of a difference if any between AoC and AoI but given we have better hardware that's a negative but there is so much going on on screen in normal gamplay, you probably don't notice unless you look for it. In AoC I didn't experience any slowdowns the way I played or at least not in a way I noticed them and the same goes for AoI. 2. Game has a lot of mechanics but handling unique Character attacks and Zonai devices with Elemental chain mechanics is a bit much. Wish I had a shortcut menu for one and for the other so I can switch depending on the situation but as is, I just have to constantly adjust what is assigned to what button and this is honestly too much work for me to bother. So I didn't take much advantage of it and under standard difficulty without trying to do special assignments for prices it works good enough. 3. But you know what, there was one thing that put a big smile onto me when the game threw it at me after a few missions. As you know AoC had the Sacred Beast sections. Well, this time you have Shmup sections. When I saw this I smiled all through my face and was like “...and suddenly this is Starfox.”. 4. The character selection though was a bit disappointing. You get your main cast and then you also get 2 extra people for each faction that are basically just named captain characters. Would rather have wanted a couple more truly unique and surprising new characters like the mysterious beings the depths have statues of or maybe it could also have had “river” Zoras that look vastly different. I could name others but I have only so many letters for a review here. Even the Mysterious Construct is just a Link stand-in. It's fine since I still have plenty of characters I like playing as but in that regard AoC did a bit of a better, albeit at the cost of being it's own timeline. 5. Story is what it is. I mean it's a Musou game. Story isn't what drives it though as someone who love seeing more of Hyrule lore, I would have wanted it to spent a bit time on things like the Gerudo Civil War with those who didn't wanna go with Ganondorfs rule before he attacked Hyrule or the child of Rauru and Sonia, who should have existed by then because Sonia is killed early on in the story and Zelda supposed to be a descendant of those two. Could serve as a story point for after the defeat of Ganondorf for a bit of a post-game til Zelda transform into the Light Dragon. Also lore about the Hero's aspect and the three guardian Dragons. It's still fun and who can tell what dlc plans Nintendo has. 6. They simplified the weapon and weapon upgrade system, which I'm very grateful for, but they are still too stingy with giving out Rupees/ask for too much compared to what they give players. Also they don't give enough Zonaite Steel for upgrading compared to how much you need to level up the weapons. You can unlock an increased chance of material drops which you can then sell but since you can only sell with an increase of 1 unit at a time it might be less of an headache to just wait til your full and then have extra material be sold automatically after battle. 7. While this time there is no passive effect to increase Rupee yield if you go for the “Aside Quest” challenges you automatically get a lot of money. It just **** that only 3 per character per battle are active and don't count unless they are currently active. You might also be locked out of them if you wait too long since sometimes you have to fulfill a certain number of “quests” for it and repeating battles doesn't count while the other quests are finite. 8. Enemy variety is nice and more varieties than AoC had are in too but sadly they still didn't include Gold Enemies and elemental Magis don't exist in it either. I had much rather dealt with the stronger Gold Enemies than with the Vicious enemies that kill you in 3 hits, even after applying all possible damage reductions. 9. The amount of maps AoI has is much smaller than what AoC had, even before it's dlc. 10. Overall it's a nice action game but if you abhor Musou games this won't change anything and for being a story expansion for the reboot Zeldas it's a bit lacking in some areas. I'd still recommend buying/playing it for a short turn-off-your-brain-and-enjoy-carnage sessions otherwise just get a video summary or something.

I played the Switch 1 version on a Switch 1 console so it makes a for good comparison. 1. This game tries to be 3 kinds of RPGs, Action-RPG, Farming-RPG and Townbuilder-RPG. It makes it work alright but comes with a lot of limitations and simplification of mechanics you otherwise expect from these games. In most cases it's welcomed but what I don't like is that while you can have random villagers do the planting and watering of crops, you have no say about what and how much gets used from your inventory which can screw your plans over. I ended up doing all the farming myself while the villagers do other jobs until I had most seeds on max level and it cost A LOT of extra time probably not meant to. The farming part also comes with less crops to grow than you'd hope for. 2. Limitations for the Action RPG part also means much smaller variety of monsters and dungeons be less plentiful and not very deep. There are a few very cool themes for the dungeons though, that haven't been used as much in the many other RPGs I played in my life and very on-theme for the games feudal Japan inspired world 3. The town building section while telling you exactly how many more buildings and decorations you can place, will never provide you with enough space to even get all the missions done, without at the very least finishing some then tearing apart your town to focus on meeting the next objective. Maybe there is an optimal build to get it at once but then again, you have to find the recipes first and some only unlock after town growing milestones. It would have been a welcomed price for post-game at least to have one giant area you can freely build your town in. 4. There where a lot of quality of life improvements in resource gathering, party organization and forging and I really like them. However, in the late and post-game crafting and upgrading equipment is WAY TOO EXPENSIVE with the limited ways you have to get actual money. Since your fields share the same base as town buildings it restricts you a lot because you really need tons of Gold Crops to sell to get enough currency to pay for incremental upgrades. At least at this point, there is not much left of them game and you don't need to be at the absolute top in equipment, at least on normal difficulty. It still annoys that you have to grow 2 in-game weeks worth of Gold Crops to get enough money for 2 or 3 levels on 1 piece of equipment if you don't demolish most of your town to have planting space (I had about 200 tiles of field to grow crops reserved through all the towns). 5. Graphically it wasn't improved much since RF5. The environment looks more 3D-ish and now you can go more freely through areas with different elevations but the world feels much smaller and all the textures look more swampy? murky? blurry? pixely? Not sure how to best describe it. Character models also look like they barely have any details and are more apparently 2D skins on polygonal models. 6. One of the biggest issues with RF5 was the excessive loading times, especially when leaving and entering buildings. The solution here, you don't have building insides anymore and the area loading times are still there but not as annoyingly long. On the contrary, most buildings are half open rooms or rather boxes with a few decorations inside now but completely rendered into the world. 7. Often however, models and textures or maybe layer, can't say for sure since I don't code and know the terms aren't loaded in quick enough after the player can walk through the area and there is a lot of pop-up. I even had a case where a person was loaded with the wrong vertical positioning and while the mini-map shows their location, they are moving below ground so you can't interact. It did seem to be patched out eventually or at least I didn't encounter that bug anymore. 8. Overall, it's a pretty good spin-off? Side-game? For Rune Factory and people who enjoy it will still enjoy it and be very happy with all the sense making improvements in organizing things but it's still a watered down farming experience if that's important to you. I don't think though it will draw in much new blood but fans will be satisfied.

1. The graphic is a more simplistic cell-shading style which I'm not sure if I like. Still, I can say it does weird me out sometimes and it REALLY bothers me that Mario and Luigi have this weird blue tint on their clothes. 2. Fighting is good but it annoys that you have little ways to avoid battles with weak enemies and it's still round based. If you don't like it, this game won't do anything to change your mind. Eventually you also will end up to constantly using the strongest brother attacks and skill and equip your characters to optimize their use, just to get quicker through the many battles you can hardly avoid, not matter if the enemy is strong or weak. 3. Each of the major bosses has unique abilities and mechanics and if you haven't mastered the dodge mechanic facing them, you will have a bad time. It is fun how different they are however. 4. On different islands you have different actions and gimmicks to go through to finish it and it's nice and varied so it never overstays it's welcome but some of them can get real infuriating, especially on subsequent visits for completion. One especially enraging is the rhythm mini-game that keeps on getting worse and it gave me a real bad time but it might just be me that has an issue with it but it was bad enough for me to drop the rating one extra point. 5. The “plug” system works nice at first, allows to adapt to situation and is just rightly restricted but as you craft more of them, it becomes a bit redundant because the way you end up playing and the enemies you face on the regular becomes narrow and the recharge is a bit long and some plugs you hardly ever use, only as a “just to have something until it recharges” case. 6. Overall it's a pretty good new entry of the series and a good return but it has a few issues and doesn't revolve or evolve the series but also doesn't do anything wrong so there is no reason to avoid it, unless you hate the kind of game it is.

1. I liked FF because it was an RPG with no overbearing action in its gameplay but times are changing so I try to judge it accordingly. 2. Graphics look really good but also rather dreary in towns and some of the dungeons for at least ½ to 2/3 of the game but I can't blame it if my aging eyes have issues following the action so I can't really enjoy moving around the camera to look at the landscape. 3. That said, let's continue with the combat. It took me an eternity and a half to get used to the R1 dodging. The battle-system is still alright and it's nice that you have so many ways to combine different Eikon powers to fit you play-style. It is held back by how stingy the distribution of ability points is compared to the abilities available and also how much you have to progress through the game to even unlock these new Eikonic abilities. So you might need a lot of resetting to get your set together or even more grinding. Even though after about halfway through the game you get access to an accessory to increase ability point gain from battles a little, it's rather small and I still didn't want to keep on resetting skills until I found my thing so I stuck to what I was somewhat comfortable with. 4. Speaking of Eikons and Eikon powers, while the Eikon fights are quiet cinematic, they feel a little too long and dragged out because you have so few options to fight and the opponents have such a vast health pool (feels like FF 12 Yiazmat fight all over again). The worst however is probably Titan. You could make a case of it making sense being Earth element and all but 3 painfully long phases till you beat him was way overboard. 5. I like to have a mini-map for orientation. I get it's for immersion but in this case, just make it toggle-able. 6. Crafting is almost pointless since you only have one character you can equip and you don't even get secondary effects like paralyzing or poisoning or resistance to those things so just leave out the collection of crafting materials and let me only pay money to get them (instead of money and materials). Money is scarce enough as is, if you want to buy all the music pieces and you also don't get that much to stay upgraded if you choose to ignore sidequests or most fights. 7. It's a pretty and alright game but the action is something I personally don't enjoy as much and would have preferred it to be tuned down. It would as have been added to the game to be a bit more generous with ability point hand out and money drops.

1. I never was into Playstation until 3 so I missed most of the series but I watched a lot as lps on yt and I liked it so much, that I decided then, if there is a new entry, I'm gonna get it and I do not regret that decision. It is a fun game and I enjoyed it throughout but that doesn't mean I ignore annoying issues I encountered. 2. Let's start with the graphics. They are nice and colorful and I like the variety of worlds and their biomes. 3. Sound design is also bopping and really gets the switch between normal exploration and battle. 4. Battles are fun and I love the different and sometimes crazy fantasy guns. It feels so good shooting them and see the bolts rain. While the lack of ammo compared to the amount of battling you do at one place is a bit borked, all the guns are fun and effective so I enjoy switching them around as my ammo veins. 5. The enemy variety is alright but I wouldn't mind if it had a few more. 6. Now, there are still some technical issues, even very late in after the release when I played it, when those things should have been patched out long since. Things like wildlife models getting halfway stuck in environmental objects and one time I was locked in an invisible box after an automated event with cut-scene and had to let myself be killed by enemies to get back to a checkpoint so I can move and shoot again. 7. Speaking of checkpoints, there are plenty and should you get killed in a battle you re-spawn close by with ALL of your weapons having half the maximum size of ammunition, even after you upgraded them. I just wish I could also manually save, even if just at special savepoints. I want that partly because I come from a time where you only had limited save options and partly because more and more modern games get **** out incomplete so I have a bit of a paranoia of gamebreaking or savegame killing bugs and perma-locks so I like the option to go back to a point in time of my choosing, where I have a bit of an idea how to avoid a bug or lock I encountered that got me stuck. 8. Finally the name giving rift mechanic. It's basically just a hookshot variation with the occasional isolated obstacle room and sometimes is used as a narrative tool for chase sequences and the story. It's not outstanding but it is implemented good so it's fun and doesn't overstay it's welcome. 9. Much as I like the game, I wish it would have a mini-map so I don't have to always open the whole map screen just to check if I'm still going the direction I wanted to for collectibles or resources. 10. It's nice if the game comes with free costumes and cosmetics and the ones you unlock while playing but I would have liked it more, if I could have a preview of how it looks on the character in-game, without having to go out of the menu and sometimes even have to perform extra actions to actually see how it looks. 11. I also missed a bit more of a quick travel system for the planets to get to more places faster than only having 1 or 2 warps for major points on the map. The worlds are too big and sometimes complicated to traverse by foot when looking for collectibles or resource you have missed in your first go-through. 12. Overall it's a sweet and enjoyable game and as someone who isn't too attached to the ip, I liked what the plot presented, even if it's just an “alternate dimension where the villain who always lost, has total control of the universe” plot.

1. I enjoyed this game SO much more than Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. It was much smaller and more varied so you don't have to drag yourself through endless same-looking landscape and it doesn't feel like looking for treasure is wasting your time. You do have to to tolerate the graphic style though but in my personal case, I like it. 2. More than that, you aren't constantly annoyed due breaking equipment and you don't prefer avoiding enemies as much as possible since fighting them doesn't make you think it's not worth it. Unlike the weapons in the Switch games, Echoes may “break” too but at least you can immediately summon them again with fresh health. 3. Speaking off, some bosses are still a real chore to fight because they damage you so much while you can only attack them so many ways and they still just won't go down cause there over-bloated health pool. Additionally you have only limited ability to directly attack and sometimes that's the only way to do things. So if you don't have enough recharges on hand it gets to an unhealthy attrition. The A.I. of you Echo-monster also leaves a lot to be desired to be useful against bosses and certain enemy combinations. 4. Other things also need optimization. The menu for Echoes is still too big or rather long and sorting doesn't help much either. There are just too many Echoes, especially with Monsters that just make you groan on how much time you spent in the menu just to choose the Monster/Object you need or want. Even after you have your favorites, you still need to switch every so often to solve a certain puzzle and there are always new things coming, stretching it even more. You never know what you might need or you just want. While everything still has many possible solutions on occasion you still need to get to the Monsters/Objects that can archive what you need. 5. That said, I REALLY appreciate to have more proper dungeons, bosses and puzzling to augment the gameplay experience. For old school Zelda fans like me, this finds a much better balance in almost everything than BotW or TotK had, though it still lags better story directing even if it's not as bad as BotW or TotK in that regard. 6. Ultimately, EoW may be just a “pocket version TotK” but due it's more condensed world and at least some light restrictions put on the player in dungeons it did the experience so much good and while people have complained about performance, I didn't notice any of it. It's a worthy play but you do have to make your peace with the graphic style. I would rate it an 8,5 due the few issues it has, they do accompany you through the whole game but that is not possible so I choose 8 but that is still way higher than what I gave BotW and TotK which is lower than 3 to me. Take from that opinion what you want.

1. For so many years I wished for a proper new Mana-RPG but when it finally becomes true, it chooses such an unfortunate release date, where it has to compete with the likes of Black Myth Wu Kong and Star Wars Outlaws. While Star Wars Outlaws may have turned out ... less than ideal, Visions of Mana still vanishes in the shadow of big games like this and will sell way less than it would deserve otherwise, meaning it will under-perform and reduces the chance of future games much more significantly. Despite having such a cool and unique cel-shading style and fun gameplay with an genius soundtrack. 2. Combat is a bit boring and repetitive. Even on higher difficulty it's just stat inflation but it's also good in it's simplicity (and the monster designs are rather cute as well so it isn't that bad though I miss when monster sprites were half to 2/3 of your character size, they are just so tiny compared to you this time). You will occasionally encounter enemies that do way too much damage compared to their and your level though and you have an insane difficulty gab between “elemental aeries” and the rest of the game. The time limit for those is already merciless and allows no lead but they also scale to your level and have other mean conditions/challenges to it. Better bring time and patience and maybe a guide. At least stats decrease if you lower your difficulty should it pose too much of a headache. Doesn't necessarily help enough though. 3. Due it's ability/skill system you can customize your characters a lot to change how battles feel but it only opens up as the game progresses. 4. Thanks to combat being rather easy though, I can enjoy traveling the world which is rather pretty btw, without too much stress. I'm only saddened by the inability to go into peoples houses and look around. It's part of the world building to see how people live, far as I'm concerned. 5. Another slight inconvenience is that Action/Confirm and Jump are on the same button which can lead to unwanted actions when you try to jump/open chests/talk to people. You might also encounter a visual bug where enemy models (corpse) get stuck mid-air upon death in the world, even after they re-spawn but leaving the loading area and coming back solves it. It doesn't really affect the goings far as I could tell and sometimes even ends up looking funny. 6. There is however an Audio bug? That appears randomly in which the character talking sound like they speak into tin can or something and it really is bad. 7. Story is classic straight and retro and uses it's “lack of choice” for narration with pre-determined outcome but for me it works. Just gotta get it in your mind how this game handles it. 8. There is just an annoyance for all the backtracking with the later sidequests, that often chases you across continents and gets tedious which is made worse by the issue of always having to re-activate elemental travel points and even with quick-travel, you need to go to fixed points and can only travel in-continent. Overall it's main target audience is a mid 90's gamer but it's a good resurgence of the Mana-IP and could serve as an introduction of the Mana-Cosmos to a new generation with it's modern quality of live improvements.

Not much to say about this one. Only that it's dialogue is so bad, it counts as modern torture. Didn't take me long to get a refund and keep that money for independent developer who make spiritual sequels to beloved but by their owner abandoned ips.

Jabba would be proud of Ubisofts scammy and scummy business practices. Not only do they lock iconic missions beyond even more overpriced versions of this E-Waste, because you HAVE TO activate the game Online, they can make millions of copies useless plastic by yoinking the ability to activate it through taking down activation servers for any petty reason. It also means you cannot delete the data from the hard drive of your console or switch it out, since it would mean you will lose the activation and thus have to buy a new copy for full price. Same goes if you want to play it again later on a “pro” version of your console or a new Gen console that is downwards compatible. It has a heap of other problems even if your a Star Wars uber fan but that would explode the word count beyond what the side allows so I just stick to: DO NOT BUY FULL PRICE OR EVEN HALF PRICE. If you really must buy it, don't spent more than 20-30 bucks.

1. The Outbound Ghost is a charming RPG reminiscent of Paper Mario on N64 and GCN, when it still was a good game, except you basically have only the partners fight. You can basically get all enemies as playable characters but the mass might be overwhelming because there is also a lot of ability crossover. From the beginning you can customize difficulty or have randomizer settings though the translation needs some fixing. Some words aren't translated and one of the option sounds in translation that you have to check it if you want enemies to re-spawn when you actually disable re-spawning by checking it. It also has some issue with text in some languages where the sentences won't fit the speech bubbles and considering how long it's out, you would expect they have fixed the text by now but it very well may had many more terrible issue I luckily didn't encounter, on version I played. 2. Character designs are adorable but it still takes too long loading any kind of transition and I encountered multiple crashes throughout the game. 3. Gameplay is nice though still just a round based battle system from older RPGs. It's nice roaming the world and albeit weird, it's interesting in it's narration. 4. As a narrative journey you switch through multiple characters viewpoint at set points in the game. It's a cool idea but incomplete in the end product. Honestly, after I saw the ending I was like “what is that for an insulting stupid story. First you can name your main character optionally but the story is a fractured **** and the character you start with, doesn't even matter in the end. He doesn't even get a resolution to his arc. It's like after 2/3 of the game the writer either dropped out, gave up or when most of it was made, somewhere fell the decision to do a completely different story. It's a classic case of a screwed up conclusion of the story completely ruined the game. I won't spoil any of it though pretty early I already figured half of the solution but I wanted to experience the path towards it and learn more about the character I started with. It was nice, a bit confusing but decent enough and I found out about the character I played for most of the game but then this character was completely dropped when nothing was solved and on somewhat of a cliffhanger. It started out as a 9/10 for me but the dumb way the story was handled towards the end dropped it to 6 for me. 5. In conclusion, it's a nice game and if you like Paper Mario styled games you'll enjoy playing this, maybe even play around with the gameplay options but only if you can completely ignore a story that ends with bad, incomplete writing. Otherwise you will likely fall off a lot towards the end.

1. It's a nice looking game in Cel-shading style but sometimes the screen gets cluttered by holographic things. 2. The plot is kinda “Anime” and for the full picture you need at least 2 playthroughs with a different main character but it's still alright. Unfortunately the difficulty even on normal isn't very balanced. Sometimes enemies die like flies but there are a lot of situations were even if you vastly out-level them, they take too much damage and dish out too hard, especially since they tend to focus on you and leave your party alone. There is a “stagger mechanic” and a “weak point option” that allows to stagger fast and quickly kill, if working, but the system often doesn't gives you the means to utilize it or the stagger bar just won't deplete enough to really be a help considering how easily you can go down. Often you first have to uncover a weak point which takes almost as long as just wailing on the enemy until it dies. Also, the lock-on assist gets in the way of hitting a weak point and for manual lock on, camera and fast enemy movement make it not really feasible. 3. You also have a quick item use action but considering how often you need to use it, it just isn't any good. Cycling through the different healing and recharging items is clunky and slow and not only do you have a cool-down for item use, you also have a use time. While you can spec into a skill that gets rid of the use time and fasten the cool-down, it isn't any good for how often you'll have to use it. At least save points with shops to restock are frequent enough and they give you a full heal. 4. As I already mentioned, you have multiple lock-on assist functions but I could not find a comfortable combination that actually helped playing the game. It's more like the assist fights against you instead of working for you. It tends to get in the way of utilizing the stagger and weak point system while at the same time, completely switching it off also won't serve you in going for weak point staggers. 5. Next is the menu. It is so full and complicated, it rather annoys. There is so much switching through menus and lists and still you might not get to where you want because you messed up the button presses a little while trying. It's rather exhausting and could have used some slimming down. 6. Now, if you already think “kill x enemy” quest are stupid and annoying, this game makes it worse by adding a few hard to line up conditions for doing so. At least they let you turn in quests anywhere. 7. A good thing about the game was that I didn't encounter any bugs or glitches except that occasionally my party didn't make it to a battle arena and I was stuck alone with a group of enemies. Normally I would say they are stuck with me but in this game, as little as the party member are sometimes of use, you really will have a worse time without **** game has some flaws alright and battles often weren't fun because your fragility but it wasn't enough to make me stop playing. You will however need to bring some grit and patience if you wanna get through but it's good enough to be worth it. Just don't play too long per session or the issues might really get you.

Sadly it's titles like this, that make me more likely to avoid Indie-titles. Not because the game is bad or cheap but because the technical errors ruin the joy I have. Frames constantly dropped to 0, a lot of clipping through everything, including fully submerging in ground or animals walking at the bottom of bodies of water, loading times are so horrid you often wonder “did the game freeze or will it crash soon” and something is wrong with the saving or the manual loading of it. 1. For the first 25 hours it was nice. Graphics are decent on Switch and despite 2 or 3 crashes I had fun. This was the closest to come to Dark Cloud I've seen for years. Afterwards however, ALL my save files didn't work anymore and the game kept crashing whenever I tried to load any (there wasn't even a patch or so between starting the save file and them destroying themselves). Even after I disgruntled swallowed my loss of progress and started a new game, I got crashes when trying to cash in a quest reward. I somehow overcame that by doing other stuff and try again afterwards but I lost my remaining trust in the game then. 2. For the gameplay loop, the “worlds” to tend to are basically just a handful of generic assets reshuffled again and again, sometimes with different color pallets, to create a new area and you have to repeat the menial tasks, hoping to get the essences you lack. The random villager quests are pretty lame fetch quests that sometimes make no sense whatsoever and the random nature of getting items only makes it worse but the town building and exploration was fun. I just wish the game had allowed me a little more building. I couldn't make the different districts completely like I wanted (I'd say about 85% of what I wanted to do I could) because the limit on buildings and decorations is too low. Irksome is that you not only need random essences to build, depending on the area of the town you want to build in, but also you have NO OPTION to create whatever item you want as well. All you can do is hope that whatever you need is randomly dropped when singing to plants, random chests or fulfilling a quest. You can build stores or open vendors with progress if you're lucky to get the material but they still have a random selection of limited numbers. 2. Townsfolk is very “faceless”, generic and lacks any sort of personality or soul. Whenever they are at the border of the field of vision they lose all of their visual features and regress into polygon-skeletons. 3. Player customization is nice but not as good or varied as I wanted. It does shine with hair colors though. 4. You can also assign jobs to the villagers. As everything is random and generic so is what stats they have and what job they prefer. Both as far as I can tell affect how much currency they generate doing their job, which allows you to pay for town buildings, clothes and cosmetics for your character and the villagers though you still can only buy a very small variety of them (and it won't take long until you sit on a pile of money with not really something you want to spent it on left). Thing is however, stats and dream jobs are random as daily new arrivals come and go. You might be lucky to find items that increase stats if you gift them to villagers and while later you can buy some re-rolls and stat increase items, it's still random. Now, so far so annoying but there are also town quests that require you to put a certain amount of villagers in their dream jobs so you either are forced to wait until rng is merciful or built the town as new arrivals come to get the quest, then have to tear it down again if you want to change things after the quest is done. But you can't sent villagers away once they are assigned homes. It's especially annoying if the right jobs you need arrive in another town district while the district you work on, never gets any and you can't just move people between districts either. Luckily the amount you need for each district, while increasing every time is low, you really should be able to move people around all districts, no matter where they arrived or better yet, if everything is generic anyway, why can't you just sent out whatever you need as offers so at least people with that dream job arrive. You can still select candidates after that on whatever criteria you want to start with.5. If you like Dark Cloud or even Animal Crossing this is at least worth a looksie if you are interested in a game in that fashion, as long as you are willing to risk the technical troubles that is.

1. What to say, it's Mario. Graphic is great and varied, even for the Switch and sound design is awesome too. It strikes a great balance between easy and difficult for all kinds of players and you can also use badge to customize (and make it easier) how it **** was fun almost all the way through except a handful of more or less optional levels. You have your world themes like usual and a bunch of collectibles to go for if you want a bit more of a challenge or at least get a bit more mileage out of the game.However, there were two levels that weren't so fun and they weren't difficult but unfair because the wall jump and certain bouncy enemies are a bit janky but after some frustration you will eventually get them and you can always change things by using different badges if you can't find what works for you to beat them. 2. It's especially lovely in some details like Koopa-Troopers bro-bumping their shells when they touch each other, Hammer Bros looking towards you with grit, determination and fighting spirit or Goombas and Cheep-Cheeps that have obvious fear and distress on their faces when they head towards a Fireball you shot and then it barely misses them. 3. While I enjoyed the game it wasn't fun enough for me to go for completion so I did not revisit levels to get the golden flag or grind for purple coins and only went for the unique level collectibles but if you want, you can and the various badges to choose from make it quiet easy (I personally went through almost all of the game with the Float Jump badge and got most golden Flags first try). 4. Well, it's a treat to play this game no matter what kind of player you are and there is literally nothing to speak against buying it as long as you like video games.

1. I enjoy Dragon Quest more than Final Fantasy and I love the Monsters spin-off. Which is why I try to be more critical because I want the best possible experience for one of my favorite series. 2. Since it's a Switch exclusive, obviously the graphics are not as great as they could be but it's still a super-charming cell-shading style. Stylistic graphics usually age better than realistic ones but we have to see how it holds up in 10, 20 years from now on. However, it's still very obvious that it is a graphic that already is behind. I do like that it is semi-open world with big but sectioned areas and especially loved the "Sweets" theme environment. Extra flavor is added by the changing seasons mechanic that changes a few monsters here and there and allows to reach different places during different seasons. It's a nice touch. Although, we have seasons and the occasional region specific weather effects (though sometimes it gets annoying when hunting for specific monsters that only appear during certain seasons and/or weather conditions) but no day-night cycle. There isn't that much to discover asides from herbs and treasure by utilizing the different seasonal states and there aren't that many unique areas that can only be accessed via a certain season. 3. There is some decree of customization in what skills a monster focuses on and the game distincts monsters by 2 size classes, S and L. L Monsters are bigger, have better stats and special traits but use up 2 monster slots of your party. That is fine and all but there are also multiple sizes within those 2 classes and the bigger the monster, the better it's base stats but you only have the model size as distinction and with so many, you'll have a hard time finding the random monsters who are the biggest in their class and thus have the best **** that you can also check the map for local monsters but it fails to tell you which monster appears during which season or weather so it's next to useless asides one short check if you discovered all already. The rest, you better have good memory and hope the weather and season line up. Monster are also annoying aggressive and you WILL pull out your hairs over it in late game when you just want to get certain monsters you need for the last few synthesis that require specific combinations, to finish the collection and the rng for certain monsters you can't just scout anywhere is also an absolutely **** decision. 4. You have much freedom in how directly you want to involve yourself in battles and you can speed them up a little as well. You can seamlessly choose how much you affect. The game also has a jump mechanic that is botched. For most of the game, it doesn't affect anything but in some late game areas you have to do some jumping to get to your quest location and it quickly gets ****'s nice that you can manually save anywhere and after every battle, cut-scene or room transition it auto-saves (which luckily allows you to save-scum for Metal and Gem monsters for experience and money respectively if you spot one). The problem with that, you don't have multiple save slots so it's pretty dumb and you still can end up in bad situations because you can't go back to an earlier save. While usually, decisions don't matter much in Dragon Quest Games I do like to read the different text when choosing options the game doesn't account for but I also don't want to start the game anew just to see the alternative text.Also, better prepare for heavy grinding to get you monsters up to snuff, there are some weird difficulty spikes with bosses but you don't get that much EXP in general and EXP gains sink the higher your level gets, at least it fells like it.Last, you have no way of seeing enemy health and even Buffs, Debuffs and Status Ailments only show up as an icon that there are some but not which or their duration and how long they can last isn't static. 5. I still spent many hours with the game and while a lot of it was grinding or scouting monsters, it didn't bother me thanks to auto-battling so I could just run around, check on known metal monster locations and can watch or listen to other stuff while doing so.

9/10 for normal players 8/10 for completionists. Persona 5 Tactica is a great S-RPG with a cute and charming graphical style and I love it. I still can't get enough of the Phantom Thieves so I might be a bit biased but aren't user reviews kind of subjective most of the time? For those who know, I would say this game crosses Mario & Rabbids with Fire Emblem in a good mix of access and immersion, with ever the lovable characters, situated in the Persona (5) Universe. We are also unfortunately in a gaming space where more and more games get thrown on the market incomplete and what used to be the minimum requirement is delivered through patches spread over a way too long time so I am glad I can say, there were NO BUGS OR GLITCHES in this entire game, not even minor ones I encountered. So a shout-out for a rare case of a complete game AT LAUNCH! Anyway, it's gameplay is what I would call simple complexity. Note, I'm speaking of my experience on Normal difficulty like the developer intend the game to be played. It does allow quick understanding and still offers enough depth to not get boring fast. Most of it's strategic element is positioning and making sure to get the enemy out of cover without loosing all your moves/actions and optimally still stay in cover. There is no weakness mechanic, despite sort of an elemental table instead it is more based around status effects to catch enemies unguarded for extra actions. Throughout the game I never really was in danger of a wipe though I do have some experience with Strategy-RPGs so for a normal player it's prolly not too easy or hard either. If your just playing through the game you will not get stuck on a mission for very long and have a nice 30-40 hours experience if you read through all the dialogues and watch the cut scenes patiently, as long as you don't hate sitting through them. You do need to be open on reading most things since voice acting is restricted to important (story) scenes. If you tend to completion though, you'll have a hard time on grinding for money. Even after optimizing the grind for money, I still stood at over 80 hours of game time, with a lot of it farming money, when I beat the game. It has nice music but the audio mixing is a bit low on the voices, even after adjusting other sounds they still were rather low, especially in the English dub. I still think it gives a nice sound atmosphere. For people having played through other Phantom Thief involving games there are also a few nice Easter eggs (though I didn't like that Royal characters had no hand in the main story and were relegated to paid dlc but if you like the game it's still more of it). If you think about purchasing the dlc, I would say it's a bit short for the price tag (just the story content is 20 bucks though I'd say it should only be 10-15 bucks) but I still had just a bit over 5 hours fun while playing it. It has 5 rather tough challenges (where you can't change any setup) as well, after you beat the dlc main mode. The Challenges only give bragging rights and some extra playtime in for players if you like but it took me something between 1-2 hours to beat the Challenge Missions 1-4 and I had a really tough time with the 5th one due it's turn limit alone (clocking in at least 1 hour alone for this one. Hint, you have to clean the map with Triple Threat once per turn). However, challenge missions aside, it gives some bonus content for the main game. While it is technically a prequel story I would still recommend to play it after you beat the main story once due it placing restrictions in what tools and options you get to work with so knowing everything in the main game is recommended. The bonus content you get from beating the dlc is only available for the NG+ mode of this game as well. I can easily recommend buying this game, as long as you don't loathe reading a lot of text for a full experience and don't mind Strategic Role Playing Games. Completing needs some grit though.

It's a nice little pixel style game where you manage (simplified) a bathhouse for Yokai inspired spirits, with some life sim mixed in.Despite the lack of tutorials where they were needed (I always taught seed bags were just sell-ables until I was in my first year winter with almost all spirits and upgrades because I saw recipes I didn't know how to get ingredients until I looked up online for example), most of it is quickly understood. It is however hampered down by badly optimized and unintuitive controls for Switch players (with a Pro **** menus it's too sensitive while other times a button press doesn't get registered and in the fishing minigame it's for some reason inverted and I can't change it and since you have to be on the fish it tends to overshoot too when you have to quickly change from one direction into another. The singing minigame is also crazy beyond the first song. At least they are just minigames. The cooking mechanic is way too convoluted and complicated and you really SHOULD be able to just choose a recipe you want and the ingredients get automatically added instead of searching through multiple storage's that don't even show all the pages when you choose in the cooking menu. Add to that the sensitivity that may cause you to choose something different from what you thought you did and the occasional not registering of your A presses and you get how annoying it can be. The re-spawning of only forage-able ingredients is also botched. And some like the Cloudleaf, Snail Fruit, Pumpkins, Sun Melons or Ugly grass flat-out don't re-spawn ever. At first I though maybe because it's due a different Season they don't spawn anymore but even in the following year no sign of them. At some point you'll need sakura blossoms for a recipe that you could easily need to use 6-9 times per day, depending on rng but it hardly re-spawns at all. Add to that that you might not see if they lay on the ground due the tree foliage covering the screen and for a wild reason don't get transparent when it would cover you like in other layer shenanigans of this game. Asides the unfortunate way you have to choose and use your tools from the bag and can't permanently sort your tools in the top row, your “advisor” spirit Wonyan isn't very helpful in most cases. He isn't specific enough for you to understand what you have to do or rather what you are supposed to do for later story events, if he has anything to point you at all.There are also treasure maps for some items and they are absolutely useless in most cases, they give you a bad to no sense of distance or were it really is and often were absolutely not helpful to determine where exactly it wants you to dig. It also stockpiles maps no matter if you found it already or not and you can't easily look at the maps not found yet. You can recruit townsfolk to help you out in the bathhouse for Spirits but you can only really employ 4 per opening and 4 jobs at the same time (while it's ALWAYS you that has to decide where to place the visiting spirits). Considering the amount of spirits and the randomness involved, at least for scrubbing you should be able to use way more at once. Further during late/endgame additional mechanics come in play and you are the only one that can execute em. It would have been nice to also have jobs for “Monkey Chaser” “Outdoor Scrubber” and “Lord Spirit Attendant” you should be able to make the connection once you reach that point. In order to recruit townsfolk for the bathhouse you need to max out friendship. It's not entirely clear when and how often you can increase friendship with the townsfolk and there are some seemingly text message bugs for events that you already cleared. I also had a bug where an NPC I was walking with, slid around out of bounds and another one where I was stuck in the bug catching animation (no pun intended) and effectively soft-locked. Also has some other persistent graphical bugs (though it was kinda funny to see that painting on many screens and even during credits). Somewhere after 50 hours I also noticed downward phantom inputs for moving while it worked with other games so it couldn't be my controller.Bugs that get you stuck are especially annoying since you can only save by sleeping. As a working adult and with a gaming system that can be used mobile, I need to be able to either save anywhere, anytime or have generously distributed save points. By the time you read this, these bugs might be patched out though. It sounds rather negative like that but it is still a nice pass time otherwise I wouldn't have given a 7 out of 10 though I'm more leaning towards a 6,5 out of 10. I like the nice background music. Just don't get too into everything it offers or you end up frustrated not relaxed. All the inconveniences in interacting with the game pile up to a worse experience than it really needs to be, even if it was made by just one person. Most of it could easily be patched as well I'd wager.

It's the better Zelda compared to BotW or TotK (but still not the Zelda I wanted) but also it isn't that type of game. I can only call it a mix of JRPG, Monster Collection and Action-Adventure. Anyway, it pretty good and looks charming in it's cell-shaded Dragon Quest style. What I don't quiet understand is the enemy scaling system but even if I did, I ALWAYS hated enemy scaling systems. It's just no fun for me if I can never outlevel enemies and I never understand what's the point of using a leveling system, when it doesn't matter in the end since the enemies will still be as strong or as weak compared to the player when you were level 1 as if you were max level. If it is for abilities and such, it's a much less annoying system, if you can just for example buy them. This way it even allows you to customize by deciding instead of getting this ability, I rather save up for that ability and such. The biggest problem with this as well is, that enemies scale to the MC but the monsters you scout do not, when it's the monsters that do most of the fighting. This results in being stuck with low level monsters at times unless you keep on grinding easy to get treasures in the tutorial area just to make them a viable option. I tolerate enemy scaling when I can switch it off or it is limited by area like in area 1 all enemies level with you until 20 and then you start outleveling them, as the game progress while in the last area enemies level with you up to 90 instead but never to 100 which is your max level. The sheer amount of pellets for the slingshot you have is overwhelming.Even early in the game you already have way too many with different effects and it's only a low Tier effect. You have low tier and high tier but even if you have 0 of one kind, it still shows up in the selection needlessly increasing the time to get to the pellet you want. It's way too much. It also doesn't help that it's so tedious to choose them when you only can use the digi pad to scroll through them. At least game is on pause while you do and they are grouped. Quality of life features like custom map markers and the ability to change the party through your menu unfortunately aren't there. Quest requirements cannot be fulfilled retroactively which means the longer you wait in progressing them, the harder, more tedious and annoying you make it for yourself. You can also feed your monsters for temporary buffs but in order to do so, you need to get in close and personal into melee range then you have to press and hold a button for a few seconds and choose the food with the digi-pad. As if that wasn't annoying enough, when you get close enough to start feeding them, they move away from you for some reason and you have to restart the progress. So you can imagine that soonish you don't wanna deal with it anymore. And speaking of food, in order to make food, you need recipes but most recipes can only be found in random chest spread throughout the world and you have no idea, not even a hint where they might be. Now, in order to scout some monsters you also need to offer them a certain meal at times and if you haven't found the recipe for it, well tough luck. At least give me a hint in which area I need to search for a yet undiscovered recipe. It's a bit annoying that you can't run unless you have a monster with you that has that ability (also applies to other traversal options), even then it's still limited for time and needs recharging. It wouldn't be that bad if it wasn't for the Treasure Forecast which means for the highest chance of finding treasures, the main thing of the game, your party needs to have certain passive skills. At least you can send out teams for additional chances on finding treasure while you explore somewhere else. Overall it's a solid game that deserves an 8/10 but the horrible unbalanced level scaling against you and the inconveniences for the player knock it down to 7.

Pikmin 4 is a cute and charming game but handling all the different colors of Pikmin and a dog might be too much for kids. It's stylized graphics are lovely and the controls are mostly great though it still took me a while to get used to them. Even later in the game I fumbled them a bit. Difficulty is low but it still makes you feel bad in an otherwise soothing game, for messing up and killing those unquestioning loyal little critters, even as they die. What I didn't like are the unreasonable long loading times, given it isn't that demanding on a technical level, even considering it's a rather outdated hardware. Not even Tears of the Kingdom, which is a much bigger and more technical demanding game doesn't load as long comparably. I also HATE that you only have vertical splitscreen which is insufficient and confusing to play with, for a game that requires so much micro-management. I need horizontal splitscreen for a game like this to adequately keep track of all the things going on in those duels. It makes it even worse is that it's a solo thing too and an NPC isn't really that impacted from the lack of overview as a human would be, making it a disadvantageous predicament to the player. It's alright if you just wanna win it but not if you want to try for the gold or even just silver medal. If you want any better than Bronze, which is the minimal requirement to beat them (and progress) you better be VERY good at multi-tasking and micro-management. If you want the best medal - platinum, you better be (or become) a god in multi-tasking and micro-management. Not worth the suffering in my opinion. I personally would like that the game doesn't restrict me to 3 kinds of Pikmin in the levels because it means I have to keep going back and switch out my goofy little helpers. At least you get multiple bases, where you can place the dispenser to at least slightly improve it. I didn't like the Auto-Aim much. It got in the way more often than it helped and pretty much became useless as soon as 3 or more objects where near each other. If your on an over-tight time limit, with a limited number of Pikmin you need to micro-manage fast, it only causes problems that your Pikmin automatically start to carry objects when they touch them while walking or have other problems with path finding. A manual save (without quitting) would also have been appreciated but the system as is, is fair enough so not that big of a headache. You can even rewind the time a bit in case you did a major screw up. What is a headache though, is the timed challenges, even for just winning them you have way too little time. They should at least give you 15-30 more seconds, depending on the challenges. Otherwise it's a good difficulty but kids will likely find it too hard in parts and experts too easy and you cannot adjust it in any way. Over all it's a fantastic game and I still like it a lot. While there is no "perfect game" it could have a better quality-of-life to add to the enjoyment but it's a fun play that can be as short or as long as you want it to be. Until the postgame it's a 8/10 but the postgame timed challenges dumps it down to 5/10 because it accumulates all the flaws, minor as they may be by themself during normal play, in a hellish agitation. In the end though I settle with 7/10 because until post-game it's pretty good and while the post-game is part of the over all experience it's not the main intended game.

I don even have enough characters here to adequately address all of this game issues so I try to sum it up. Nintendo somehow managed to make TotK even worse than BotW, which in of itself is a feat though. At least it looks good... for a Switch game. So I DO NOT RECOMMEND!!! If you really feel you have to buy it don't pay 70$ for it, better spend that money on the lottery or so. Depending on condition you shouldn't spend more than 50-55$ on this atrocity. It's just the same game, same problems but different name. Sadly TotK only contains the same core problems of BotW with new, fancy mechanics that are actually useless where it counts (more on that below) instead of actually addressing the customers wish and solving the problems. It was pretty much to be expected. Nintendo doesn't care about their customers as long as they buy their s*it I guess that's just everywhere in capitalism but it dissapoints. The last GOOD (3D) Zelda (not counting remakes and HD remasters) is now over a decade old (I'm talking Twilight Princess). Now, let's go down the list, shall we? 1. Questmarker still only show the quest giver not the objective/objective area causing you to be lost more often. 2. Until late in the game when you have maxed out armor enemies will easily kill you in a few hits and they like to swarm you making it more unlikely you life. That enemies get substitute with stronger color swaps and equipment as you progress will assure you will keep on dying. 3. Speaking of Equipment, the game still ruins the fun with the durability system who just discourages the player to interact with anything moving (like 5 times as bad as BotW as you'll learn if you read more) and it's a 5 year old game from basically 2 Gens ago (since I wouldn't really call the Switch last gen on a technical level). There is ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD REASON TO NOT GIVE OUT AT LEAST WEAK BASE EQUIPMENT TO THE PLAYER THAT DOESN'T BREAK OR NEEDS RECHARGING so players aren't left hanging if an enemy needs more hits than the weapons currently on you can take. Sure you can use "Fuse" to get SLIGHTLY stronger weapons but since you can't fuse Melee weapons or Shields with anything from the inventory directly and always have to first put down the material then fuse, it is pointless in active battle once the strengthening parts break off. Heck, even your Shield is as good as useless because enemies just hit through it when you hold it up, as if it wasn't even there, no matter what kind of weapon they use. 4. This time it's 150 shrines aka puzzle rooms and 1000 Koroks to find and you need 400 something to max out slots. 5. Then even with about 6 years passed in-game almost no one remembers the Hero who ended the apocalypse?! Attracting new players? If you do a direct sequel you do it for the fans it already has not to attract new players. Otherwise you only piss off the fans and won't get many new faces that haven't come with the first game. 6. World is still big and mostly empty with more pointless empty space filled by the Sky Islands that are even more annoying to get from place to place since they are not connected in any way, shape or from to navigate other then gliding. Even less is going on in the depths asides endless darkness and a couple of extra bosses. The land of Hyrule in TotK is 80% monotonous, repetitive, filler landscape. What makes TotK worse than BotW in that regard is the depths itself are like 95% filler land because the few "dungeons" in it could easily be handled in a contained room and would save you the boring walking into them and the Sky Islands are also so much filler landscape. BotW/TotK has the BIGGEST YET MOST BORING DESIGNED HYRULE WORLDMAP since the later eighties where old ass, 8bit NES debut of the IP was. Further you still don't really want to explore the world for prices or discoveries because in most cases, you waste more resources than you get back. You won't even get a sense of accomplishing if you still choose doing so. 7. Before I forget, what's with that stupid money and material grind?! The franchise IS SUPPOSED to be fun exploration and unique puzzle solving, not a monotones drag of money and material grind. You LITERALLY ARE FORCED TO save-scum because material drop rate is so absurdly low. 8. We still only get puzzle rooms and mini-dungeons for the story. At least bosses are much cooler this time around. 9. From my 370 hours when seeing the credits, most was spent traversing boring landscape and searching for ANYTHING interesting, even knowing the general area and only 15 hours actual game. Really though, DON'T BUY THIS TRASH HEAP OF PROGRAM CODE FOR FULL PRICE, because YOU WILL REGRET IT. I can't believe I made it through the whole game, though there was NO WAY I tried to do it by my own exploration without Internet help. It's just too much of a torment to play the game and try to find everything or just the bare minimum to reasonably get through yourself.

It takes a little too long until you get the option to manually save so if that is as important to you as it is to me, you speed through the first in-game week following the story or prepare a 5 hour playing session until you get there. Graphics, obviously a game like this wouldn't get much polish in graphics and the Switch isn't that strong of a system anyway but at least they could have done better with Character models and animations. It might be just the view-angle but on the regular the character models look all outta whack. The proportions of the upper half to lower half of the models have such a discrepancy. They look like they were made by two different teams with vastly different skill levels, a small torso on giants hips and legs or so. I can deal with the environmental graphics but they are not that great in quality though. However, they did at least put some effort in creating nice graphics that feel unique to this world and didn't just basic good looking pre-made assets and called it a day. I do like the indication of loading zones and they aren't so bad, Rune Factory 5 had worse. What I don't like is you get no map indication of unopened chests or not collected items, even if you just pass by them with a bad camera angle and thus miss em. They certainly did a smart and give the player easy watering where you just can pour water endlessly on the fields. You also get some nice skills as you progress to make farming easier but that is somewhat expect so at least you can't say to fail on quality of life mechanics. On the other hand, what I didn't appreciate was the lack of selling value in descriptions so you had to note it down during shipping if you wanted to know. You hardly make any money plus compared to the price of the seeds. It also is a VERY terrible decision to not give you any way to break big stones on your field until close to endgame. UI is nice and clean and the map helps out though you have to "use" gathering spots at least once before they appear. Bit weird of a control scheme but not that bad to get used to. Many quest have surprisingly deep themes behind them. Cookie points for not making the player carry materials on you if you wanna craft something. Still a bit of a pain that you can only carry 9 of an healing item per each slot in your backpack. It doesn't do a good job to tell you all the places you can mine or gather specific materials. Another issue with that is that I like a reliable source of certain materials, especially heavily used ones and hate it if it's "RNG be merciful" all the time so either give me a shop to purchase materials (after you discovered them) or make it so "this spot only yields this material" and don't be too cheap with the amount you can get per day instead of 1 or 2 per spot. Over all it's a nice game. Sadly, it turned out to be exactly what I worried about when first I heard of it. It tries to be an RPG and a Farming-Life-Sim and didn't do either proper. For an RPG it's too short and simple where you leveling hardly improves anything for you and for a farming-sim, it's too shallow with too few crops, livestock variety and too little customization. You can't even have a pet (that isn't like a horse) and there are no festivals to attend do during the year. The trailer and previews also showed decoration but you only get 3 fences in color **** even have to place all your processing equipment on your field and can only use for one item at a time on the lower levels and a set amount of material for the higher ones.

The Psychonauts art-style is still charming but also looks even better. The hub area has multiple big areas to explore for collectible and it is very completion friendly with telling you with check mark if you collected everything in a section of the levels. It also has pop-up notes in the semi-open hub area to tell you how many you currently have and still need to find. Most of the things also can be obtained as you go through the level the first time with only a few collectibles and upgrade items locked behind Psi-Powers you only obtain later. Normally you have plenty chance to upgrade your powers and increase life but you can make it through most of the game without touching purchasable healing items since there is plenty healing scattered throughout the levels. The levels are all unique and crazy like you like and expect it from Psychonauts. It also has plenty of quirky characters to enjoy interacting. The story won't boggle and twist your mind but it's still nice to follow and wonder about. Bosses are also fun. Sound design also slaps though in some areas the volume mixing is too high or too low. Just gotta adjust manually on your TV then. The only thing not so good was I still fought with the controls at times by the end of it. It just wasn't as crisp as I would wish it to be, especially when it came to wall jumping. The way to open and choose the "wheel of Psi-Powers I also kept confusing where I put which Psi-Power on the shoulder buttons since some Psy-Powers you need regularly while others change often as you explore a new section of the levels but nothing too bad since it's rather forgiving. Over all really cool sequel just like we wanted after these years of wait.

Bullet points why it's just a decent game and a terrible Zelda: Zelda used to be quality, fun games with an interesting world and not a big open space of mostly Empty plain or mountain which could easily be left out and not subtract anything of the game, in fact, it would add to leave out 70% of this empty world since it would mean less empty space to traverse to find something interesting. The world had fun lore and story that made you follow it which BotW has almost nothing of and the only reason I excuse the empty, lifeless world is the lore of it being a 100 years after basically Armageddon. It was fun to engage with enemies and try different items to play around with them but weapons breaking all the time isn't fun at all. It only discourages to fight because you will only loose the weapons you have since most chest are locked behind "kill all enemies in the vicinity" flags and at best you get something worse that again, breaks after a few uses. If you at least had weak base equipment with the only special trait to be unbreakable and infinite use to fall back once you run out it would make this acceptable. Heck, not even the legendary Master Sword can't be used all the time since it needs recharging every so often. Zelda used to encourage exploration to find cool stuff but that doesn't apply anymore because at best you find more stuff that just breaks so you would not have any feeling of finding something precious, it's just throw away trash you could substitute whenever. Dungeons were fun and "awe-inspiring" and now all we get are puzzle rooms and mini-dungeons with annoying motion controls at time. You can't even call the divine beast a dungeon since they are so small and have little unique look to it.

Graphic is sufficient I guess and could be better but game has a lot more greenery than any other RPGs I've played in recent years though A LOT of 2D textures for it. Occasionally to an annoying degree. However, rocks/mountains look TERRIBLE. While speaking of graphics, I'm not that far into the game yet and am already pissed at the ridonkoulous amount of pallet-swaps. Sure, can't be avoided in games of that scale and that is fine but 5 enemy types with at least 5 pallet-swaps within the first 7 areas of the game? That is just insulting. Another thing that annoys me surprisingly, no NPCs to talk in cities other than those involved with quests, shopping and some kind of mini game I couldn't even try through 4 cities because I only got a starter pack in the 5th and I already have no interest in even trying it out. You won't even get a tutorial upon receiving the pack and the Ranking is weird the lowest 4 Ranks all have unique descriptions and then it's just Master Level 1-9 and Grand Master with multiple Levels and all are just slightly bigger white dots on the map but to find out which level they are and if you can play against them you need to talk to them. Then, they really botched the menu, especially in terms of shopping. Why the heck would you have to confirm twice if you want to buy 1 of something. It even defaults to cancel and why can't you have the same piece of equipment with the same abilities and values in one stack? Just confusing and cluttered. While playing I had a weird audio bug that made it sound like dialog was the echo of a tin can in some places though that could be fixed by now. Something else they screwed up was the crafting system. You have 8 types of item creation. Some of it is restricted to just a few party members but the issue is, everyone has random varying random factor for success and a unique set of items they can make in each category. You have 10 levels to reach. That isn't that much of an issue as it is that the level ups take so freaking long, unless you spend all your level up points into strengthening creation skills and you have to waste A LOT of money and materials to increase the level otherwise. A couple of sidequest require you to create a number of things only accessible on higher levels and are at the mercy of rng. In other cases sidequest don't give you markers or even enough information to solve them and your not really encouraged to figure them out yourself since it takes way to long and way to specific variables need to be met. The AP battle system is one of the most stupid systems I have ever witnessed. Not only does it reset if you reload the game every hit you take reduce it by one, effectively forcing you to at best attack twice until you have to wait a few seconds to attack again. This gets increasingly annoying as the insane health pool of enemies and especially bosses swells peaking in plenty bosses you can hardly, if at all blindside to bring it up again. The last dungeon is one of the worst I have ever played and almost made me ragequit. Not only has it random, invisible warps but also see-through walls you may or may not need to break to move on an on top you have to re-fight the two worst enemies in the game one of which you can only damage after breaking his shield which takes multiple attacks and it he has a multi-hit attack that instantly reduces you to basic AP gauge and now you have to hammer through the shield while he keeps killing the party even when your at a level that theoretically would make the final boss afterwards very easy.

403 abridged version: A decent game and a better Sonic than Forces. It looks alright and it's story isn't too intricate but it's Sonic so I don't expect much in this department. Didn't notice much music most of the time but not sure if this was a good or bad thing. Daddy Egghead was a nice change in pace. Annoying was that I often got locked into side view areas when I was just exploring and the controls weren't always as good as I wanted them to be. They also should have had a checkpoint for bosses to where Super Sonic Phase starts because it's annoying to do it all over again after failing QTEs towards the end. That it only had 4 Zone environments was disappointing. Also thankfully the fishing was a simple and an easy way to level up with the Egg Memos for more flavor. Overall a nice game with some flaws and I want to believe they can do MUCH better and just dipped their toes in open world Sonic with this "prototype" and do much better with the next game (hopefully a proper Adventures 3).

403 issues short version: Great graphic, neat story and good characters but combat with off-camera cheap shots often from projectiles in enemy swarms ruin the fun. Resurrection doesn't help either if you have no I-frames to adjust camera and die again immediately. Some puzzle triggers were to picky at times even if you have the right idea but it doesn't work due that. Menus are cluttered and caused issues all to the end. Over all great game with one of the best ways to do story, lore and characters I've seen for a while.

Demon Turf is most certainly not a game for beginners. You should know your way around Plattformers because this is much more precise then Mario. It requires good controls to work and luckily the games controls are very crisp, sensitive and precise but that is a blessing and a curse. Very easily (out of habit) you might react erratic to correct and instead of making it and saving yourself, you kill yourself or at least loose a lot of progress. You will swear and rage on over this on occasion but you realize most of the time, it was you fault so don't go blaming the controls too much. BUT often enough the jump inputs were also eaten and it can cause you to fall to your doom and that is not the players fault. The wall jumping is also a bit weird. Sometimes a slight touch that wasn't intended and not looking like you were touching the wall causes you to get **** to the wall and use an unintended wall jump, flinging you into the abyss or screwing up you jump. Other times when you actually want a wall jump, it doesn't recognize you touched the wall in some sections, even though you jumped broadside on the wall and this can ruin you. (Premature end of review because 404 issue)

The first thing that immediately annoyed me seconds after I started it was that unlike in 1, your sword is now locked to B instead of A and I don't like it. Especially since you have to press B to talk to people but have to continue the text by pressing A. That is so unintuitive it hurts. Admittedly I also played 3D Zeldas which lock the sword to B too so it's not that much of a hassle to get used to but this doesn't change the fact, that you still have to interact with B while continuing with A while 3D Zeldas have interaction and continuing on A while canceling with B. The stamina system wasn't changed much but now you get a dodge roll on X. Sadly, while you can get more stamina commonly used items seem to use percentage of stamina because I wasn't able to use them more often as the stamina bar increased and as it grows bigger, it takes longer to recharge. While deaths remain mostly pointless since every room is a checkpoint and you start from it's beginning it's just bad game design if you have invisible obstacles while swimming because of a water level mechanic. You also are defenseless while swimming and while you can use a swim boost, it doesn't help against homing projectiles that come from enemies that are often close to or even in the water. There are other unfair situations where you are defenseless because the environment doesn't allow you to attack like when climbing on vines towards a small plattform with enemies where the enemies can charge at you and block your way onto the plattform. It also is pointlessly annoying that there is no verticallity when using items. It might look like you can throw a bomb down from a ledge or a stair but it doesn't work. It will explode as if they were walls. Something they did improve is that now you can pick up items with your sword since in 1, it could happen often enough, that items landed on tiles that can't be walked on while right next to the player character. It also is better that falling in holes doesn't make you start at the room entrance but at the hole border. Unfortunately even progression puzzles became way to convoluted and complicated as soon as the second dungeon to still be fun. Thank god though they mostly got rid of the "Simon says" puzzles. I didn't find everything (because frankly the game is not good enough and some annoying mechanics discourage completion). And don't, please just don't put enemies on puzzles where you have to move around a lot, it's not challenging just annoying. While the enemy spam has been reduced, there still is an issue with tank-y bosses, even with double damage and bullet hell fights and now even regular enemies take way to much of a beating. Further in close quarter fights ground based attacks reached over pits, can hit you and you can't do **** about it because you lack movement space. Other issues include: 1. You still can't reorder your inventory and the inventory isn't that good so you can't make it more comfortable to use. It would also help if you could get an item description as a reminder of it's functions but mainly for key items to recall what to do without the need to search and talk with related people again. 2. Due the new crafting system and the limited number of bottles, money gets useless even earlier than in 1. 3. The map is bad so it won't help you find something specific. 4. Game 1 gave too many hearts at times and 2 now went wrong the other direction and gives too few hearts. 5. When you transition between screens, chances are you run into an enemy you couldn't possible see and get knocked back to the previous screen or worse killed because you didn't have enough health to take that hit. Similarly you might end up stun-locked in tight areas because of that. 6. The "choose your own adventure" part is utilized slightly more but still barely notable Still, it's a good game that improved some things to the first entry but made other things worse. It's still worth playing if you liked one and if you haven't played 1 it really won't detract much.

It is a nice homage to 2D (top-down pixel) Zelda games and has an interesting but slightly annoying stamina system to use items but you get used to it eventually. Controls are nice for the most part but can get tedious in close-space areas for stick controls. Unfortunately though, you don't have a dedicated shield button and instead it goes for the item slot. You are also locked into the sword being on the A button (Switch) and while I don't mind that, I got used to it by playing the old Zelda games (and am very comfortable with it) other people might not like this. Story is simple stuff and the "choose your path" aspect is very under-utilized to a point that it shouldn't have been implemented and just give a straight narrative. The game has a very uneven difficulty. For most oft the time exploring, enemies don't pose too much of a threat and then you come to mid-bosses and bosses that have way too much HP and spam the screen with bullets you can hardly avoid with the finicky controls. In some rooms there is also enemy spam with way to fast respawn ruining the fun. Another terrible part of the game are the "Simon say's puzzles" that go on way too long and have random patterns all the time. It wouldn't have been that terrible (but still bad) if they wouldn't always reset to zero if you make a mistake and just have you try the current phase again until you either get an easy pattern or can remember it all. In some cases the triggers are too close together so you accidentally hit the right and the wrong one at the same time. In other cases it simple was good puzzles but going on way too long and/or unneeded enemies to make it more tedious than it should be to get through. Or you just had no hint what it wants, where it wants you to begin with or from which view angle or position the solution is supposed to be. It's not a bad game by far but it has it's issues and the game being what it is, can't avoid being compared to old Zelda games that were just done much better in terms of gameplay and mechanics. It is a "first" development so it will have issues but air to improve so I won't be too harsh. It's definitively something I recommend for classic Zelda fans and a good entry for kids or younger generations who want to see where Zelda started without playing the old (overpriced) classic old school games.

I did miss out on Kingdom Battle but I loved Sparks of Hope. It just has something charming to it. Doesn't mean it's perfect but nothing is. Obviously it's still the Switch but I'm not that needy in terms of graphics so this was just a good, colorful style Mario is known for to me. It didn't take long to me to got everything in terms of controls and gameplay mechanics down and it was one enjoyable ride till the end. I only played on standard difficulty and I never felt it was too hard or too easy. Some missions were easier others not and if I had trouble I just had to mix up my team a bit and adjust my approach and I made it through the mission. Just what you expect from Mario games, open for all so to say. The map though wasn't too helpful and I always despise enemies in an RPG environment to scale without an option to switch it off. What's the point of character progression if the ALL enemies grow equally stronger. Might as well save the work implementing RPG elements like this for other things. At least there is a cap on scaling per world. But I'm still someone who wants to be rewarded for the time grinding with being maxed out in everything eventually and stronger than anything the game offers. Although, I'm aware I'm in the minority of this standing and it's not like you NEED to grind as much I just do it because I like it to some extent. Still, without even trying to and just taking all Missions and Fights coming my way capped me at level 30, the max, a third through the second last world. You don't even get enough skill points to max out everything. Despite all that, the game does have some bugs though only Completionists will get annoyed by them since the game didn't register me finishing the sidequest in 2 worlds so I'm stuck with 99% on those. Maybe it's just in the EU version and maybe it's something very few will encounter because it just happens that my individual way of playing triggers them. I couldn't tell. It did seem that there is a pretty good progress tracker (god more developers need to get a more detail progress tracker for Completionists/Pseudo compleionists who do almost everything asides some really annoying and time consuming things) but maybe there are some secrets that aren't tracked that well. I usually try to do everything I can in my first visit to places so it could be that I just wasn't throughout enough and what I missed is next to impossible to find now since it's also badly tracked. Then there are some minor bugs that will affect you even if your not completing. Sometimes you get stuck on air while walking around and your directional input is not recognized and the echo blocks you'll encounter early on and are required to move/activate for some environmental puzzles everywhere may not work at times (specifically one in world 5) but it seemed I either had to reload the area or progress in plot to make them move again. No other issues or performing problems asides from all the loading getting on your nerve sometimes, especially if you try to reload a battle because you made a dum-dum and can't recover. That's about it. Good game and I'm looking forward to the dlc when it comes.

I'll try to keep this short and on point. For starters, Gen 4, namely Platinum is my favorite Gen (Gen 6 being 2 and Gen 3 ironically 3). It is also one of the tougher games in the franchise, which still holds up compared to most other Pokemon main games. As such, I was rather looking forward to it. Unfortunately these remakes were not that good. I chose Shining Pearl since originally I played Diamond on DS. Like for many, the Chibi-Style didn't resonate with me at first. After a couple of hours it didn't bother me anymore. Still, I really LOOOOOOOOVED the contest in Platinum and can't believe HOW MUCH they screwed them up in this re-make.I had hardly any fun with them anymore. It would have been fine if it just had been one round. Sadly, that **** they came up with here, is all that was left of the original really great Contests. New player though won't know what they botched here. The new Underground wasn't that great either. I assumed stupidly that I would be able to catch new Pokes before the national Dex but no, so a rather pointless addition and also terrible to not be able to decorate my secret base with carpets, poster and other furniture like originally, only with rather useless statues until post-game. However, I love the new trainer animations when they lose, they are charming. This doesn't help how annoying the menu delay is though. Don't be surprised if your too fast for the game and use an item in a way you didn't intent due the delay screwing you over. I never cared for competitive play and not even catching them all since Gen 5 so I won't go more in-depth than this. It was fine to play through it again but I rather play the originals, you even got a holiday estate in Platinum in post-game but not even that anymore. So, don't buy it for more than 20-30 bucks if at all, unless you just want a modern look on Gen 4 that you missed for one reason or another.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Well, this is long enough purchasable that this won't do much so I try to keep it short but: THIS GAME ROCKS, IT'S J-RPG GOLD STANDARD ALONG GIANTS LIKE DRAGON QUEST XI AND TALES OF BERSERIA. I put in far more than 500 hours with repeated playthroughs not counting the original P5 release. Having that said, if one played P5 initially, this isn't worth an upgrade for full price though by now that prolly won't matter since the market price is down due it's age but all still or all the more reason to get. The graphics are good enough, controls are sweet, given it's round based battle anyway and you have some strategizing to do while playing without asking too much of players. The gameplayloop is invigorating to addictive and you have tons of options or rather reasons to replay it with a different approach although on your first round the bosses might give you more trouble then they worth it but there is always New Game + and it is so satisfying to steamroll anything that gave you trouble before int consequent playthroughs. Really, I can't get enough of the Phantom Thieves and would love to follow them to college in another game before moving on to Persona 6. Though I know this won't happen. A short mentioning of Strikers, I won't fully review it here and it was sad, it play in the P5 universe instead of the P5 Royal universe and while it was nice to travel with the Phantom thieves in that one, it was much more of a hassle and not so encouraging to replay. Ultimately I just say, if you like J-RPGs or are just curious since you heard so much of it, go for it NOW, even if your not too inclined to this kind of games it's still worth to look at. I would say it's a must have and must play for anyone that appreciates J-RPGs.

I was very disappointed at this game. Years I was waiting for a good new Mario Golf and when it finally came to be it was a half-assed games-as-a -service attempt. You barely have any content asides from a mediocre RPG-single player story mode and you can't even level up your Mii outside the story with Stroke plays and such. Heck you don't even have a tournament mode. There was hardly anything to unlock like Characters via Matchplay or gaining points by doing Tournaments to unlock new course. We don't have Ring shot or Minigolf as well. Sure I'm glad we also didn't get Slot Golf but I would hardly call this a game whatsoever. This is just another example of how Nintendo fails to make a good game for not taking it serious enough because it isn't a mobile money machine. Further WHY THE HECK MAKE BALL CONTROL RANDOM NOW? in older installments you had to have some kind of skill to make sure the Ball fly's straight and where you want it to land but noooooo this time it has to be random, prolly to better appease casual players but even back then, all you had to do is time you button press well to get the optimal control what's so hard about that that casual players need to be pampered with randomness to not be overwhelmed. This game could have been good but with such a development failure of course it will sell even worse once word got out and puts in the final nail in the coffin for this "unrentable" franchise. If your a company that long on the market you should feel an obligation to maintain your franchises good standing for at least every "Generation" your on the market, even if it isn't the big selling product but for keeping a positive image and to have continues relevance. There is always a smaller but passionate market that you shouldn't sour your relation towards.

I'm not a pro player or speedrunner but I like myself some Metroid so this is the view of an average player. I mostly loved what was there. Not much this game does, that gets it on my bad site but I do think the damage output of enemies is a bit too harsh at times. Although on the other hand it makes you feel so much better ones you topped off your upgrades and such though there still will be enemies that get on your nerve with that. The checkpoints are more that fairly planted but why do you have to manually skip cut-scenes EVERY TIME! This gets extremely annoying after your third death and you will die, often at that on bosses. My average death-count just on bosses must be 7 or more. You do understand bosses once you died enough but they still will challenge you and there will be times where you wonder "how the heck do I avoid that" or "did I hurt it or not, I can't tell" but keep on going and you will overcome. I think the boss that was the hardest to me took about an hour to beat with die and repeat. Most optional upgrades will be not too difficult to obtain and while not mandatory can help you out. You shouldn't have to much trouble getting them with some more movement options and the game helps you pretty well on keeping track around the area they are hidden. Still, my percentage to Item completion was 91 % by the end of the game. I really only missed (from what I can tell) some that required crazy Speedbooster shenanigans and Morphball movements over fall blocks even with the X-Bomb upgrade and Nintendo should have made it easier for players like my but by no means they make or break finishing the game. Loading time happens only when going to an new/different region of the game and are tolerable though I wouldn't mind shaving of half of it. Otherwise the game runs quiet stable and fast and I never noticed any slowdowns or hickups. I found the graphics pretty good for 2.5D sidescroller on Switch (docked mind you, I never use the Switch to play mobile), if you have any issues with that you have some delusional standards and should get your head checked. For the controls, they are mostly good but I have an issue with having to press in the Analog Stick I move with for movement options and it **** that you can't aim with missiles or the Beam and walk at the same time. It always gave me headaches that you have to keep the Grapple Beam pressed when using it, I never got used to it. Luckily you don't use it that often to get at you. The Space Jump also doesn't work as good as I wanted it and troubled me sometimes. Do better Next Mission Nintendo. The Melee-counter mechanics did overstay there welcome a bit and were basically mandatory at later points in the game and nothing this tedious should be mandatory so much.

I got introduced to the Tales of... series with Symphonia and since then played most mainline games (and caught up on the games that were released before then). So in part I'm a bit biased but also BECAUSE I love it so much more critical. Now for the actual review (in short): + good graphic (which is most likely responsible for the high score) + technically mostly clean even on a standard PS4 (just some character model delay pop-ups in cities and occasional collision issues getting me stuck on air near objects) # mostly interesting characters - feels like the midgame was cut/lost/left out - - insulting amount of pallet-swaps for enemies review (long): I would call this game alright but missing something to be as enjoyable as for more recent examples like Tales of Berseria and Dragon Quest XI. I would say I only have two major gripes with it but for that all the more. Generally I'd rate it alright and not doing too much wrong but what it does wrong, it screws up enormously. One thing that REALLY rubbed me wrong was the insulting amount of pallet swaps among enemies. It's like you only have 10 or 12 standard enemy types that get recycled every new region you visit with a pallet swap. The elite/boss monster are a bit more diverse but even then they get recycled 2 or 3 times. Another issue I had was that the game felt like it was missing the mid-game. You basically rush from your first assigned string of story missions to the endgame when you think, now is when the game really starts off. They advertise two planets linked and made me think they get treated almost equally much but they didn't. I have the suspicion that for one reason or another they gave up on doing part of the game and without spoiling much, many people playing it and who played some JRPGs before will notice that point. It's where you expect the second act twist to kick in. Instead of becoming the mid-game I thought, it turned out to be early post-game content. This also links to a minor gripe i have, the party having it's moments but ultimately feel like they not as close and well thought out as the game wants me to believe. It's a bit hard to put into words but I think two of the six playable characters (not consider spoilers since the opening movie literally shows them) got the short straw in that department and at least one of those would have likely had a major role in what seems to be the missing mid-game from what the game hints to in other places. Another minor gripe to me is the party AI. While you can customize some actions it feels like the AI still prioritizes aggression even when the team is dying. They seem to have difficulties to ascertain weaknesses in their attacks and you can't even tell them to specifically aim for them which causes unnecessary grieve in some battles. It is also insane how some enemies dish out when they should be around your characters level. Another problem was the money. I mean sure, wild monster shouldn't drop any money, at best some sparkly trinkets or gems that they just like but human enemies should drop some amount every time. Sure you get spoils to sell but compared to the costs for supplies and crafting and the value and amount of things you get to sell, it's imbalanced. Most RPGs have the issue that the later the game, the more useless money you have, here we have the opposite extreme you never get enough without hours of grinding and I did have a discount perk that came with the Collectors Edition. Since I did have some perks with the Collectors Edition I used for almost all the game that might otherwise be behind a paywall I can't really say for difficulty but even with them, I got into trouble a few times during the playing. There was a bit of a jump in enemy levels from 30-35 in one area to 40-45 afterwards and then 50-55 for the next area which is endgame (60 for final boss, on normal mind you) it further feeds my suspicion there was some mid-game cut and bad balancing to mask it. That about sums it up what I think of the game. While the last game I remember for outrageous palette-swaps on enemies was Tales of Vesperia (which is rather old comparingly), it's still good to remember for other things too but I suspect, I will remember Tales of Arise mostly for it's absurd amount of palette-swaps and not much else. Now to put in perspective for more recent Tales of... games, I really like Tales of Xillia 1+2. Tales of Zesteria was pretty bad as a Tales of..., I really did love Tales of Berseria so I guess Tales of Arise comes in closer to the Zestiria side of things and makes me hope that the next Tales of... will be just as baffling to me as Berseria was. But I still wouldn't say I regret paying 70 bucks for the physical copy of the game alone. It just wasn't as good as I hoped it will be. With that, see you and have a good time playing.