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Dynasty Warriors: Origins feels more like an Empires game than one of the mainline games. The focus is more on your customized character and ends up feeling like it takes away from the historical conflicts. The good news is that it doesn't have that weird open world map of Dynasty Warriors 9 or the whole EX weapon of Dynasty Warriors 8. But, I still would've liked there to be more focus on the other characters rather than on your custom one. You also can't readily switch between your characters like you can in Warriors Orochi so it feels like you're just back down to one character even though you technically have a second. Those strategems are great and the ability to rally soldiers for a charge attack is definitely amazing. The points of conflicts are also an improvement with more time to react to your allies before they die unlike a certain Nintendo one. But overall, I dislike this shift towards the Empires style of games, especially if you don't even get to conquer the map.

This game is a mess. The planetary navigation system is awful and how spread out things are makes it difficult to find group queues for anything. The combat is also weirdly "floaty" and you end up running long corridors or hallways where not much happens because of how quickly everything dies. The only time it feels like there's an actual fight is during the boss battles and everything else is just a long run to it. You will be doing this a lot because farming for stuff with low drop rates can take 40+ runs in some cases and you still have to spend multiple days waiting for it to be assembled in your ship. The worst part of the game is that it seems to have some kind of automated system that flags you for everything from taking too long to clear missions to not having logged in for a long time and it forces you to message a moderator/administrator to get it resolved. If you don't, you might get banned until you do. This system is flagged as a trojan by other forms of anticheat and even some antivirus, so just be aware of what you're getting into.

Once again, Atlus releases a definitive edition **** that they released not too long ago. This feels like the norm now and it is hard to justify buying this game at full price. They add new characters and convenience features (most important is speed reading). There's a lot more information that is provided to the player in the form of tutorials and map icons as well. If you don't already own Persona 5, then Royal is a fine place to start. Otherwise, wait for a steep discount because this is content that could've been patched in.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Baldur's Gate 3 is what happens when you give a CRPG like The Witcher or even Mass Effect and crank up the player options to 11. It opens up the game to having many different ways to play it and complete objectives. This is by far the most appealing aspect of the game. However, as the game goes on, it's clear that they either had problems or started running out of money. Instead of going through all the possibilities, you will eventually reach that level cap and that means nothing beyond 6th (I think) tier spells. It would have been insane to be able to get up to 10s and all that. There's also the fact that towards the end of the game, you start getting railroaded a bit and the possibilities begin to diminish.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Persona 3 Reload is a remake that takes some of the newest features from Persona 5 and brings it back to the old game. The result is that you don't have the problems that you used to have with your allies plus a few extra things like the baton passing from Persona 5. The biggest of course if the option to have full control over your allies. The problem is that P3R is not a definitive edition by any means. It's lacking the female main character bits as well as The Answer from FES (this is supposed to be DLC). The thing that I hate the most is the higher difficulties. Hard mode just changes how much damage both you and the enemies deal, which just ends up padding out the fights more than anything. Oh and if your main character dies on hard mode, it's game over, so you have to work hard to keep them safe.

Definitely one of the best tower defense games out there, but a decade of refinement has helped it. The heroes are all pretty nice though costly. However, certain bonuses like pierce and non-energy based attacks seem to have preference due to things like purple balloons. MOABs are definitely the other big barrier you have to cross since they are just giant bulks of health. The biggest change this time around is the third upgrade path, which provides a lot more possibilities. However, the final upgrade can only be acquired once on each map, so in higher difficulties where you have to complete 100 waves or endless, this forces you to diversify your build. The upgrades gradually unlock, so you'll be stuck on Easy for a while. There are microtransactions to speed up unlocks and get double money. The game also feels like it's trying to get you to buy money by significantly reducing rewards for replaying the same stage. However, the most difficult mode of the game, CHIMPS, takes away most of these unlocks and microtransaction bonuses, so it is more of a test of skill. The problem is that due to the preference of certain aura effects and monkeys, you're likely going to choose a specific one over the others a majority of the time. Nerfs and buffs have also created problems clearing some of the harder maps on CHIMPS mode too.

Valkyria Chronicles is one of those turn based RPGs with a twist. You can position your characters and they'll fire on enemies within their line of sight, allowing you to set up a form of defense that you can't really do in other games. You get different kinds of units including tanks, scouts, snipers, shocktroopers, lancers, medics, and the newly introduced grenadiers. Each one has their own functions and advantages. The story of the game is decent. Much like the other ones, it generally focuses on a single campaign of a much larger conflict with a few twists. They do a good job of making you sympathetic to a few of the villains, but also could have done a lot better with developing your allies as well. It's not bad, but it's not great either. The grenadiers presents the biggest problem for this game as they destroy the barricades and have the ability to fire pretty much anywhere any allies can see. Because of this, the cover system that was so prevalent in the previous games just suddenly feels pointless unless there's an indestructible roof over your head or a thick patch of grass your character can lay down on. Otherwise, the grenadier is just going to blast them. The most enjoyable part of the game for me tends to be the boss battles with the exception of the final boss battle because there's a lot of RNG involved in that one. Each one features some kind of unique mechanic that forces you to take advantage of their weak point in order to win. This makes it more interesting as it generally takes away from the grenadier problem, but not always as one of the bosses is just a super grenadier.

This is definitively the best Warriors game in history, beating out even its sequel. Though it uses the time traveling as a plot device and a lot of the story is portrayed through images on the screen, the cutscenes and overall story is amazing. The ability to replay an alternate version of stages where you rescue characters who had fallen previously was definitely an interesting feature to add. The narrative restriction placed on this ability also ends up solving the "why don't they just do x" in a lot of cases. Having 3 characters at your command that you can deploy together or switch around makes it much more interesting, especially when characters have roles that give them a bit of a type advantage. One power, one speed, and one technique tends to be the general distribution. Though your options are limited, you get new characters at every stage and your roster grows extremely quickly. It can be tough to manage, but you'll eventually find ones you like. The different characters and weapons means that each character does have different movesets even though a a few attacks might appear similar. The one downside is that specific items tend to only appear in specific stages and locations. With a bit of RNG involved, you'll be running through the stage to get a higher level version of the item for a higher stat boost several times. Once you can do it on the highest difficulty, it gets a lot easier. Unfortunately, the Brilliance trait on weapons tends to completely outshine anything else, which is arguably the worst aspect of the Orochi games in general. The one part of the game that I don't like is the time limit on the Gauntlet Mode through Miasma. Hang around a stage too long and enemies get tougher. This means you're generally in a hurry to find the next floor and you don't really have time to explore and loot things. The ability to switch between characters really helps things out here though.

This is an action RPG that feels like it's afraid to commit to the action or the RPG. Weapons are just there for stats, not for variety. Combos are encouraged, but damage multipliers for doing so barely go up, so it's better to just button mash short combos. Many side quests feel repetitive and might offer something lore rewarding, but usually not. Many of those "come walk with me and talk" style cutscenes. Yet, no party members. The world might not be as empty as FF15, but still feels quite empty and doesn't help distract from the sense of linearity. Cutscenes are excessive and are definitely huge problems in the Eikon transitions. It's made worse by the QTEs in said fights. It looks amazing, but the style over substance makes for poor gameplay. There's also A LOT of parallels to .hack//G.U that I cannot unsee.

A pretty solid action game. The weak point has to be the game's main story. Its slowness prevents it from being interesting. I found the side quests being far more interesting. The combat is pretty good though I did seem to have issues with targeting when fighting multiple opponents at times. I had a habit of avoiding stealth because I **** at it and just went in to try to kill my way through most of the time. Luckily, the different stances and styles they give you to counter certain enemy types made it all the more enjoyable. The open world is alright compared to most other games. There are certain times when it does feel empty, but over the course of the game, they add a few things here and there to try to make it more interesting.

The Last of Us Part 2 is an example of how not to write a story. The main characters of Joel and Ellie from the first game are broken up early on. While this is a good starting point for pushing Ellie's plot, the issue comes from the split perspectives between Ellie and Abby. It is meant to draw comparisons between the two characters, but it ends up becoming an anachronistic story told from different points of view and different periods of time. There was one point where it was even a flashback within a flashback. The most disappointing part of the story was the ending as it cannot really be called an ending. The same fight plays out twice with the same inconclusive end to it. The biggest issue comes with the game's controls. The only way I can describe it is that it is bad. I found myself struggling against the controls during combat more than I was with the enemies. Aiming on a controller is just awful and most close quarters combats play out like bad quick time events. In the end, I had to turn the difficulty down because of how hard it was to aim with the controller and melee combat was impractical on higher difficulties. The platforming parts of the game are just as bad with the controls. The only thing I can say is positive about the game is the graphics. It looks good and there are seamless transitions between gameplay and cinematics. The environments are nice. Character animations are nice. The character models on the other hand are bad. I feel that they fall into that uncanny valley where the realism starts to creep me out.

This is a disappointing reimagining of a series that no one asked for. While the dating/social elements are back, they are far more superficial with less choices and options, so they no longer feel like you are taking part in an actual conversation. The open roaming areas are a nice touch compared to the menus, but the actual combat aspects of the game are spread out way too far apart. In lack of allies in combat essentially turns the game into a beat em up much like Dynasty Warriors, but with only one ally with you on the map. The mecha aspects of the game also feel very forced. If you are looking for a good beat em up game, I suggest you drop this and just get Warriors Orochi instead.

The biggest problem of the game is its inability to decide whether it's an action game or an RPG. The combination ends up feeling like someone lazily cobbled the two together without a concern about how it worked. The main feature is circled around using enemy weaknesses to pressure them, then stagger, and finally damage/kill them. The problem with this is that enemies have super armor and do not flinch until you can pressure or stagger them. Bosses will change patterns several times over a fight and make it harder to do this each time with the occasional instant kill in their final form. Melee characters also have a hard time hitting the mobile aerial units because they were not designed for that. This is especially noticeable for someone with short reach like Tifa who sometimes fails to hit them even if they are right in front of the target in the air. Item uses (not allowed in hard mode by the way) and spells are limited by the ATB bar which you get two charges of. Some skills require one, others require two. There is a special skill to get three bars for a fight, but you will rarely have the opportunity to use it, making it a waste. This is different from previous games, but they probably wanted to make magic and items more meaningful compared to their other games. But by doing so, it ends up making a lot of other things in the game like materia linking kind of useless. The game's story is okay, but the end is rushed. There's a ton of good voice acting too. The problem comes towards the end when a lot of things are not explained and all of Cloud's headaches and freak outs throughout the game are visions that we do not actually see until near the end of the game. This is fairly important, yet we the player as Cloud never actually see them until the end. Overall, this feels like a halfway experiment between incorporating the old more turn based elements of the RPG genre with the elements that are normally only found in action games. If they decide to make a sequel, they should just abandon the older RPG elements in favor of the action elements they are already favoring to make it better rather than try to keep elements they clearly have no interested in just for the sake of nostalgia.

Shenmue 3 is what happens when you take a 15 year old game and put it through an HD filter. While this game might have been incredible 15 years ago, times have changed. Shenmue has not. It continues to use an old and dated graphics along with voice acting that is mediocre at times and awful at others. Unlike other games from that period that have made it to this time period such as the new Resident Evil games and the Yakuza games, Shenmue has failed to improve on its existing systems, making its gameplay clunky and awkward. On top of that, the game comes to a screeching halt during the climax. There is no epic boss fight, just an unwinnable one where the bad guy is completely invincible and just throws a few punches before the entire game abruptly ends. The result is that you get a game that is woefully incomplete. At least Shenmue 1 and 2 had the decency to wrap up the story in their respective regions by the conclusion, but Shenmue 3 cannot even do that. Instead, it feels like much of the game's length was being dragged out by arbitrary grinding and the game stopped before the story even began in earnest.

The latest entry into the Pokemon series feels bare. There's ten routes, two caves, two forests, a battle tower, and one big "Wild Area." With most cities having three identical buildings you can enter and a Pokecenter/Mart, a clothing store, and a hair salon, towns feel absolutely empty. Much of the game focuses around just going from gym to gym and whenever the B plot comes up, they literally tell you to let the adults take care of it while you go to the next gym. While some areas like the dark forest on the way to the Fairy Gym is nice with the interactive light up mushrooms, much of the game just feels barren. The Wild Area is also poorly designed, with arbitrary Pokemon levels that sometimes scales and sometimes does not. The result is that about halfway through the game, you will encounter Pokemon you cannot catch until two gyms later. Dynamax Pokemon are interesting, but the fact that you cannot use them outside of gyms and the Wild Areas make them kind of pointless most of the time. And for some reason, legendary Pokemon cannot use Dynamax. The raids are the worst as you have to match up with AI players to try to bring down the giant Pokemon and their stupidity will usually cause you to fail. I tried to get other players, but all the online features for the game were broken and by the time I finished the game about eighteen hours later, I still could not complete my first equivalent of the Wonder Trade that I started the moment that it was available (about 30 minutes in). The gym puzzles are interesting, but they gave up on those about halfway through with some dungeons not making sense at all, such as the rock type gym being on the snowy mountain. Towards the end of the game, the opponents you face suddenly jump ten levels too, making it seem like something was missing. But the biggest problem of all is the pitiful selection of Pokemon. For the first time ever in any Pokemon game, I reached the end of the game without a team that I felt confident with taking down the champion because I just did not have the ability to deal with many different types due to the limited selection of Pokemon. By the end of the game catching every unique Pokemon that I encountered, I had about a hundred Pokemon, but perhaps only ten of them were actually usable due to poor status values. The only thing positive I can say was that the gym leader battles definitely feel a lot more exciting. Most trainers will move when they declare an attack now. When you get to the gym leader battles in that stadium, the crowd reacting to knock outs is absolutely amazing. It was a shame that the same effort was not put into other battles too. The gym trainers on the way to the gym leaders did not even have a background.

This game fixes some of the problems with the split story of Fire Emblem Fates, but still suffers from some of the same problems even though the story splits later on. You have a case in which three of the four paths just feel like they didn't bother to resolve all their problems while one of them does. Gameplay wise, it's a return to the older days and is more like classic Fire Emblem era games than Awakening. If you were a fan of Awakening and Birthright, this is not the game for you. If you liked Conquest and the pre-Awakening era games, then Three Houses is for you. The game is divided into two major segments. The first is the school life where you hang around the monastery and talk to people, give them gifts, build relationships and such. This is modeled after the third person stuff they developed from Echoes and built on it. The other part is the traditional turn based systems. But like with Conquest and pre-Awakening games, you're pushed along the story with what is essentially an action limit so you are not free to take your time. The result is that even though it feels like there's a lot to do, your ability to actually do things are capped by an artificial time limit. As someone who is bigger fan of the Awakening era games, this is disappointing considering that they even said they would use Fates as the metric for determining the future of the series. The series is gradually falling back into the old ways and needs a course correction.

The game's story is short and padded out with a few pointless side quests as well. The game doesn't really take off until post game (level 20) at which point you can start doing strikes and getting Legendary Gear. The game plateaus at item level 260 at which point you basically need Legendary and Exotic Ingrams to get any better gear. The best part of the game comes from doing Strikes. Nightfall Strikes require a group of 6 with no way to find groups in game, so you are screwed unless you have five friends to play with. PvP is extremely imbalanced with no matchmaking. However, be very careful for playing this game as I got banned for latency issues with no way to appeal. Apparently, it is embedded in their terms of user agreement.

Final Fantasy 15 feels like it should have been called Type-0 2. It lacks all the elements of a traditional Final Fantasy game. It starts off with an incoherent story. It feels like there are three story arcs going on in the beginning, but none of them result in a satisfying conclusion. Instead, we are sitting through Noctis's road trip. At no point in the game does it feel like a coherent story. Noctis's friends already know each other very well and you only get to know them a little more through a few scenes at certain gas stations. It feels like three or four different stories were patched together to make a game with the final story arc being what should be the real story of the game. The game allows Noctis to switch between four different weapons and one of those can be magic. The problem is that magic is extremely scarce and hard to come by. If you give it to your allies, they blow all of it near instantly, forcing you to use it yourself. For the most part, magic feels impractical and you are forced to use your main weapons. There are also Royal Weapons that are acquired from tombs throughout the game, but they drain your HP and are thus also impractical. Combat isn't that good as well. It feels like a dumbed down version of one of Square-Enix's action RPGs. You just hold Square to defend and Circle to attack. Triangle and the D-Pad are basically for special attacks at this point. There just seems to be very little when it comes to combat. I feel like most of the time, I am just defending until I can get a Parry and Counter. Most enemies do not flinch from your attacks, forcing you onto the defensive while they just attack aggressively. The large world itself is massively disappointing. There are a few diverse regions, but it is populated by a whole lot of nothing, just open fields and if you are lucky, you will see a few monsters. Most monsters are encountered through instanced hunts until much later in the game. You will rarely run into anything in the wild, even if you are deliberately looking for a fight. There are invisible walls around many rocks that appear for no apparent reason, even when you should be able to clearly jump to them. You will spend a majority of the game just watching Noctis and his friends ride in a car as you go from point A to point B. They needed to cut the distance between destinations by like 90%. There was no justification to having such a large and pointless world when you're not even going to populate it with anything. A big problem I ran into during the course of the game was extremely long load times. When I press Load Game, it takes the game up to two minutes to load sometimes with two separate loading screens. Using fast travel results in massive load times. There are times when the game loads into a black screen and I have to wait even longer before I can move or do anything.

Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization feels like a step back from Lost Song. The game has a nice tutorial to teach you the basic of the games, but it is extremely frustrating. It also doesn't help that most of the game is focused around the main story. There are only a few generic killing and item collecting quests. A lot of the quests that the characters mention just play out in scenes with three or so of them having actual playable battles. The first major problem of the game is that every enemy you face has super armor. This means they do not respond or flinch to any of your attacks. The only way to cancel it is to use the "Switch" mechanic that is available once every 20 seconds. This only works about half the time late game and it isn't guaranteed to work. The biggest problem comes from the duel with Genesis. It consists of a battle where you as one player has to deal with an insanely buffed, immune to everything boss with four life bars. He also has a ten second stun that is almost a one hit kill (his follow up makes it a guaranteed instant kill unless you are very over leveled). Ironically, even the normal humanoid enemies use this insane AI and just spam sword skills non stop though at a lower speed. The second problem is that the AI is extremely stupid. They rarely trigger sword skill combos on their own. They barely attack on their own and they do not even dodge on their own. If they encounter any obstacles, such as tree branches or rocks, they get stuck running against it because they can never get into position to trigger the skill chain. Changing your allies to tank or healer doesn't do very much. When you ask an AI to draw agro, ALL of them will provoke the enemy, not the designated tank and often, one of the characters that does this is a healer. You will need to rely on Switch to change agro. Even Lost Song's was much better than this. There are a lot of frustrating mechanics in this game. Sword skills longer than four hits and even some three hit skills are useless because of how easy you are knocked out of them. Longer skill chains, such as everything from the Celestial Blades (Dual Wield) skill chain is basically impractical because of it. The most useful skills are the ones you get early on that are two hits, like Horizontal Slash because of how quickly it activates. You have to order them to dodge AoE attacks and they sometimes only dodge backwards rather than sideways, leaving them still in the hit box. Asking AI to heal will make them use a heal item on themselves, even if they are a healer class. In the end, all your allies only serve as meatshields and setup for your skill chain so that you can trigger Infinity Moment to cause noticeable damage to bosses. The game also has massive frame rate issues and even crashed on me twice in about eighteen hours. The opening of every major boss battle is waiting for the other underleveled NPCs to die and despawn in a few hits so that your frame rate becomes just tolerable. The map is also very inconsistent and hard to notice. There are small blue or green marks on the map that sometimes mark objectives. You can open them up to zoom in further by touching it, but it is still hard to notice. Some story objectives require you to enter and exit an area multiple times until the special event monsters you need spawns. Some zone changes are marked with white lines, but there are others that are not. The enemies of the game only come in about six varieties, not counting floor bosses. The main ones you need to deal with are the named monsters because you need to hunt them for weapons (field bosses) and armor (floor bosses). Some field bosses are just supersized versions of normal enemies. Others are the exact same model. The most annoying of these enemies are the jellyfish. They can literally freeze you, then not touch you at all, forcing you to wait a minute to unfreeze because your allies cannot be bothered to heal you (this was not a problem in Lost Song funny enough). There are also other problems. The DLC for the game in the launch bundle did not work. NPCs can draw hate from a boss then run, resetting its HP and force you to start over. Damage is dependent mostly on levels rather than equipment or even personal stats. You literally have to sit there and press guard (not hold) for over an hour to unlock the Righteous Cross (Heathcliff's EX skill). Money is practically useless for anything other than upgrading equipment and even then, you have to farm the items, which is harder to get than money. Overall, Hollow Realization feels like a step back from Lost Song. The only positive thing is the online play, which fixes a lot of these problems. Too bad you have to play story mode first to unlock the areas and has severe frame rate issues with six characters on screen unless you have the PS4 version.

I recently started playing this game on Steam. It is a 2.5D side scrolling beat em up game with MMO elements. You can level your character and get new skills to make them even stronger. Each character class has a unique focus that makes them different from the other and they have sub-classes that you get quite early on at level 15 which transforms some of your skills into different ones. At level 45 and 75, you can get Awakenings that unlock even more powerful abilities. The problem with the game ultimately comes from its hard focus on the fatigue system and the daily limits that other MMOs have. The game manages to avoid grinding through level 86 (the current cap), but it suffers heavily in the end game. It takes months to farm items because of multiple currencies needed to actually play. Gold is pretty much useless outside of a few quests and weapon upgrades. This has led to insane prices for a lot of items. You already have fatigue, which limits the number of rooms you can enter each day (you can pay for Neo Premium Plus to nearly double the amount). You then need Demon Invitations to play on the hardest difficulty so that you can hopefully get some unique items you can dismantle. Then, there's Daily Quests that reward specific types of currencies. The result is far more currencies than you can keep track of and an insane grind for end game items. If you can't play every day, then the grind becomes even worse.

My experience with Overwatch has been a mess. The graphics of the game are bright and colorful instead of dark and gloomy like every shooter out there. Each of the characters has different abilities that they can use to their advantage in order to try to control whatever objective they are aiming after. A lot of the tanks have some kind of shield that can block damage. There are characters that specialize in tank slaying as well. The least played role is support though. There is a time limit to capturing the points, but it doesn't really matter since as long as someone stands on the point, it goes into overtime and overtime can extend indefinitely. The increased death timers do not really matter. If a match gets tied at the end, the game goes into sudden death where whoever captures the first objective instantly becomes the winner. I'd rather have the game just reward whoever did it faster with overtime counting against the team as well. One of the best things about the game is its focus on objectives rather than just flat out kills. Individual players matter a lot less than a group that can play together. But here in lies the problem. Players are grouped together based on a Dynamic Queue and premade groups inherently have an advantage. While the game does try to pit premades against other premade groups, it doesn't always work out. You often get very one sided match ups, especially since they allow for a massive variance in skill in ranked. There was one game where I was playing with a rank 30 and a rank 60 pairing on the other team while I was in the high 40s. Needless to say, the rank 60 wiped out everyone and I still had to suffer a massive rank decrease for it. My biggest complaint about the game is the lack of sense of progress. Your progress is measured by collecting experience from games. It takes 22000 experience to gain a level with most games netting you about 2000 experience. In about 11 to 12 games, you should gain a level and earn a loot box for 4 random items. The problem here is that duplicates are turned into very tiny amounts of currency, I'm talking like maybe 5. The cheapest items need around 25 while the most expensive cost 1000. There are some that you also cannot buy, such as the pre-order bonus Widowmaker and anything marked under "events," like the Summer Olympics themed items. When I heard this game was buy to play, I was hoping that it would be free of all the problems that came with free to play games, but I was wrong. This is a buy to play game with a cash shop and they do all of the things that free to play games do. They start with pretty bad servers. There are times when I randomly get disconnected for no apparent reason even though my Internet went down. There are times when Blizzard randomly decides to implement a patch with no warning, forcing everybody out **** and having everyone take a loss. You can purchase loot boxes with real money to earn items faster and duplicates do get turned into currency. The second complaint about the game is balance. I really have no idea what they were thinking when they did some of their patches. Soldier 76's and D. Va's shots were made to be highly unstable to the point where you literally have to be in their face to use it. McCree constantly moves between insanely broken and insanely useless. To top it off, too many characters have invincibility abilities. While invincibility might be nice for something like an ultimate, far too many people have it as a defensive ability, especially when they can still be targeted by allies for things like healing and they still are counted as contesting a point.

First off, I must state that this game is an Etrian Odyssey game. If you were hoping that it is a Persona game, you are looking in the wrong place. The only thing here from a Persona game is some of the combat mechanics. While there is dungeon crawling in the game, it is not done in the fashion of a traditional Persona game. Instead, you explore with a group of 5 in order to reach the end of a dungeon. The problem is that because of the high encounter rates, you will often tire yourself out and have to backtrack several times in order to complete a dungeon. Your inventory space is extremely limited as well, forcing you to carry little to no healing items because your consumable inventory shares the same space as your drop inventory with a cap of something like 50 different items. Each consumable counts as 1 item by the way and each monster has at least 2 if not 3 different drops you have to collect. This feature makes the game very annoying. The game allows you to draw a map with the touchscreen, but it is tedious and the automatic filling leaves out many things still. There are no social links and only a few random conversations with some people to see them interact. Leveling up does not seem to grant you very much and 20 levels in, I still feel like I had the same amount of HP and MP that I did at the beginning of the game. There's no sense of growth in power, even as I switch out new Personae for all of my characters. To top it off, there are chests that you can only open by exploring a map 100% (often not possible until way later in the game due to the presence of absurdly powerful enemies) or if you spend absurd amounts of Nintendo Coins from walking around for a week to open them. In short, do not buy this game if you are a fan of Persona because of the gameplay. This game is a game for fans of Etrian Odyssey, not for fans of Persona.

Lost Dimension is an attempt at a different kind of turn based strategy game, one where your allies and enemies change with each playthrough. In each chapter of the game, one of your allies becomes a traitor and you have to find out who otherwise at the end of the game, they will join the last boss and fight you. It becomes a task of grinding through an easy stage and switching out your allies until you narrow it down to 3 potential traitors. Then, you have to use the main character's special ability and enter the suspect's mind in order to see if they really are the traitor. Afterwards, you have to manipulate the votes so that the traitor does die. This can get tedious, but there are stages that you can finish in one turn to make it a little easier. One of the interesting things in the game is that you can pass a fallen comrade's abilities onto another character. Some abilities can only be unlocked by using specific combinations of abilities. For example, if the main character takes on the abilities of the teleporter, they will be able to use a teleporting bullet that guarantees both a back attack and a critical hit on the enemy. This was quite a nice feature. The problem is that the fallen comrade's abilities cannot be improved. They are stuck at the point in which they died. In the case of your first playthrough, you're basically stuck with one near useless Fate Materia because you never even get a chance to level the traitor up. One problem is the enemies. They more or less try to rush you and gather in a straight line, giving you a chance to just wipe them out with line attack focused abilities. Late game, enemies either kill you in two or three critical hits or you kill them in a similar number of hits with the exception of the large enemies. At the last two chapters of the game, enemies receive a significant boost in health and damage. Getting the best Vit focused armor makes it so that literally only boss enemies or the giant robot enemies can actually deal significant damage to you. There are also a few very annoying stages because there are enemies that spawn other enemies. Each playthrough changes because of the difference in traitors. It is nice to see that, but the story is fairly thin and basically condensed into first five minutes and the last five minutes of the game. The other characters besides the main character and final boss don't do much other than make a few comments after someone is killed at the end of a chapter. during the opening battles of the last floor, or if you do their special quest.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward is by far one of the worst MMO expansions that I have played, especially one that costed nearly $60 since the expansion did not come with a subscription fee. While the initial story was intriguing, all of the build up from the previous entry was thrown out as the characters fled North after the end of the previous game. Numerous character deaths were undone and the story itself held no meaning until you got to near the end of the game, when they are finally able to kill an Ascian only to introduce the Warrior of Darkness and end on a to be continued. The game makes numerous callbacks to previous entries in the series, with the final boss having a memorable attack from Final Fantasy 7. The three new character classes do not offer anything new. The Dark Knight is just a combination of a few existing tank classes. The Machinist is just another form of a summoner. The Astrologian just replaces traditional heals with heals over time and is probably the most unique of the three classes to me. If I had to describe Heavensward in one word, I would say tedious. One of the benefits of the game is to unlock flying for your chocobo, which can only be done by exploring the entire map. The problem is that the map is designed extremely awkwardly with wide opened empty fields everywhere you look. Each map only has one major city and tiny small outposts yet it takes more than five minutes to run across the map by chocobo without flying. There's even a map that's divided into level 51 on the bottom half and level 57 on the top half along with a misleading road that leads you north only for you to find nothing but dead ends. The only thing enjoyable to a degree are the dungeons, but the problem is that many of them now feature absurd puzzles and just pointless DPS checks instead of strategy while most bosses rely more on luck than anything else. Enemies in Heavensward are made tougher, but the problem is that it ultimately makes it unrewarding. Experience rewards are low and tons of quests involve obnoxious levels of exploration that uses the elevation of the game against you because your map is unable to show it. I eventually found myself back in Northern Thanalan doing FATEs at level 58 to 60 instead because it was much more rewarding. The main problems of the game still remains. Your drops are limited on a weekly basis so it is impossible to gear up a class to prepare for the next content release for more than one class. As a result, the ability to play as multiple classes do not really serve much of a function since there's no way to make more than one raid viable at any point. The end game raids still feel more luck based and have arbitrary time limits placed on them. The puzzles are interesting at first, but it quickly becomes whether or not you can finish the raid before you repeat the same pattern for the third time. Whether you fail a dungeon or not can depend on whether you get either a tank or a healer pulled out from the battle or the two DPS characters are sent to die on their own as they are split. Go too long and everyone dies from damage stacking by the enemies. There are better choices for paid MMOs out there and FFXIV is one that I highly recommend that you skip over, especially if this is all an expansion is offering a year after its release. At $14 a month and incredibly slow updates, there's much better games to play. All they have to support them is the promise of a better game, one that they have failed to deliver and instead have begun to repeat the mistakes of the past.

One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 is the first of the Pirate Warriors games that I have played. It is a spin off of the Dynasty Warriors franchise from Koei Tecmo and basically replaces the characters with characters from One Piece. The game's story mode is by far the best feature as it follows through all of the major battles that occur in the series. The problem is that these are loosely based and you won't get much of a story out of it. There's only a few conversations in battle that push the story along a little, but it isn't exactly well done. Combat is very limited with a lot of attacks by characters being impractical. I noticed a significant improvement with the post time skip versions of the characters available at the end of the game, but it takes a long time to reach that point in the game to unlock them. While there are a few challenging objectives and a long story mode, ultimately, the gameplay is lacking with a lot of characters actually being impractical for combat. I only found Luffy and Boa Hancock to be semi-enjoyable.

Samurai Warriors 4 Empires is a vast improvement from the previous Empires entries. You play as a chosen ruler from which you have to either complete a certain objective, such as obtaining a land. The game no longer requires you to conquer everything on the map in order to actually win There's lots of user friendly options that allow you to pick from what the NPCs recommend as well as choosing to develop your faction by your own choice. Strategems are much easier to use this time around compared to past entries as well though some of them do require you to complete objectives on the map, giving you more of the traditional feel of a Warriors game. While there's only a few scenarios with numerous factions available to choose from, you also have the option to design your own scenario. One of the things that I dislike about the series is that there's no option for everyone to start off at a higher level state, which could provide new challenges or the same amount of depth that a main entry gets while allowing you to use custom characters as well, something that the main Warriors games have been lacking for a long time. Overall though, Samurai Warriors 4 Empires feels like one of the best Empires games and combines the action elements of a Warriors game with a simplified faction development system present in some of the newer Nobunaga's Ambition or Romance of the Three Kingdoms games.

**** Valley is another farming simulator that is reminiscent of the old 2D Harvest Moon games. What it does better than the Harvest Moon games is that it does not gate its content behind time limits. From the very beginning, you're able to complete any of the objectives presented to you in game provided that it is the right season. After playing the frustration that was the latest Story of Seasons that required you to sit through 4 years of game time to unlock everything, this was a nice refreshing change. The story is fairly plain and there's not much that develops it, but it doesn't matter in the long run. My only complaint is the rather small inventory size, especially when a single item has at least three item qualities meaning that it can take up three item slots.

Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright is one of three Fates games released. The game follows a prince/princess who was abducted at a young age and now attempts to reconnect with his or her biological family and abandoning the family that he or she has known all their life. Nohr had just given Corrin a sword that literally exploded and was used to attack Hoshido, so Corrin has the common sense to not go back, thus creating conflict with his or her biological family. The problem here is that while Nohr is marked as an evil kingdom with an evil king, the siblings are not evil and are acting out of fear (though they have multiple chances to run away, they never take them). One of the good features of the game is the introduction of Phoenix Mode, which is like an easy mode because the only way you can lose is if all your characters die on the same turn. It prevents a single mistake from completely screwing you over considering how many instant kills there are in this game. The battles are pretty straightforward with most maps having you walk down some narrow corridor towards your enemies and killing all of them. Sometimes you only have to kill the enemy boss though. The problem is that there are no unique objectives and some battles rely more on luck than strategy. Dragon Veins are able to manipulate the battlefield, but the changes are often undone at the end of the turn. That spike pit the enemy created will always be there and will only hurt the enemy too if you choose to activate the Dragon Vein. There was another where you had a 50% chance to set the entire map on fire and a 50% chance to open up the next section of the map. Pretty stupid function if you ask me. I just used save scumming to get the right one and never touched that map, even for grinding purposes again. The biggest problem I had with the game is the forced online feature when online does not even work most of the time. I can access Inbox just fine, but the moment I try to update My Castle or connect to someone else's the game just fails. The problem is that you must go to other people's castles in order to collect the resources needed to upgrade your weapons. Without doing so, the late game is much more difficult due to the lower stat caps, useless specialized weapons, and that you can only get one or two resources from your castle at a time. If they had other means for you to acquire these items, it's not a big problem. However, the only other way you can acquire them is through dumb luck from talking to people with exclamation marks on their head in your castle.

Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest was the Fire Emblems that was marketed as one being like the classic Fire Emblem. A game that was difficult because it required strategy and because of its complex story involving royal families. The problem is that none of it is here. The story is fairly simplistic. You are a prince/princess that has chosen to side with Nohr, a country where your adopted father/king just tried to use you as a suicide bomb. You show up demanding answers only to learn that you are being sent to your death because they want you dead. All attempts to not kill a character is made pointless when your evil allies show up and kill them anyways. This repeats for the next 20 or so hours. The game itself ends on a to be continued and the crowning of a new king, but that's about it. What makes the game difficult is not because of strategy, but rather because of near unlimited enemy reinforcements. The enemy will get reinforcements at regular intervals, such as every 3 turns. You have limited resources to purchase healing staffs to mitigate this. And that is the real challenge of the game. Do it right though and you will have access to near unlimited experience which then turns the game on its head by providing you with absurdly powerful characters. Dragon Vein puzzles amount to just "hold this position with a unit" though even that part of the strategy is limited because only members of the royal families can use Dragon Veins, thus limiting your party member choices in a majority of battles. They will also have to waste turns to activate them. On top of that, the first half of Conquest is basically the second half of Birthright in reverse. You literally go over the same maps again.

Story of Seasons was my second trip into the 3D farming of Harvest Moon. The game revolves around your character who is chosen to run a new farm because their own community is dying. By building up your farm and shipping things, it builds trade with neighboring countries and unlocks new products and opportunities for you. The biggest problem I have with the game is that there are no obvious hints on unlocking the last two countries other than what the Rose Country merchant says when they are first introduced. There's a massive barrier for unlocking the last two because you have no idea what you are supposed to do other than ship four categories of products (online research stated it to actually be 6 once I looked it up). On top of that, a lot of the features are locked behind time. As of writing this review, I have played the game for about 85 hours and I'm only at the second week of Spring on the 3rd year. That means I still have nearly two years of the game's time (probably another 50 hours) before I am able to unlock everything in the game. Gating content behind these things rather than accomplishments from shipping 30+ million G of materials just felt like something dumb. If they were going to make such high milestones for unlocking those last two countries, they should have added tons more in between to fill it.

For me, Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate represents the pinnacle of the Dynasty Warriors PS2 generation before they added all those weird weapon interactions to make it more complex. The game follows an original story where the last surviving group that tried to fight against the creature known as Orochi travels back in time to prevent their bad future from happening. It is a dramatic turn from the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors games that have redesigned the same maps and battles over and over again. In this one, there are even some modern environments. Each of the 140+ characters have different move sets and different abilities to use. The only problem is that it can take quite a long time to max out a character because you have to level them up to 100 multiple times to ensure that they have max stats. One of the things I liked a lot about the game is the weapon customization. You can fuse weapons together and transfer their abilities to one another, giving a weapon properties like extended reach, bonus damage against officers, or recover health when using certain attacks. I found this very useful because it could make even the most worthless of characters tolerable. The only problem I have with the battles is that you have to play them out as they are scripted. You often cannot take shortcuts like rushing the boss because you have to open a path to them. This restricts some of the choices and hurts the overall replay value of the game because it limits your strategies.

Trillion: God of Destruction is a dating sim with some combat elements. The goal of the game is to train one of the Overlords so that they are able to face Trillion in battle. If the Overlord dies, they can use their power to weaken Trillion or help the next Overlord stand a chance against Trillion. The game ends when Trillion is killed. The game is divided into Cycles where Trillion is awake and sleeps. When it wakes, your Overlord has to go face it. Any damage you deal to Trillion stays and carries over. When Trillion sleeps, you have time to train your Overlord, giving her new skills and abilities when you earn enough experience to do so. The only other types of battles in the game is when exploring the Valley of Swords for items, or when you spar with a sibling to earn new skills. The main problem with Trillion is the lack of strategies. For the most part, Trillion will kill you in one hit, making defense useless. Trillion's attack patterns force you to build certain strategies. For example, the first form is best if you can just get behind it to attack it. However, starting from the second form on, it becomes much more limited, with minions being useless and needing movement skills to hop around and avoid the two balls with near infinite HP that chase you around. It also uses attacks to pull you into its poison, forcing you to get a movement skill to avoid being pulled in. The third one takes this one step further by playing keep away and forcing you to use movement skills to get close, then movement skills to avoid its near full map AoE. The last form also is unpredictable because the attack warnings does not actually follow what it does, rendering most strategies except for sacrificing an Overlord to seal its attacks useless.

Hyrule Warrior Legends is an attempt to make The Legend of Zelda into a Dynasty Warriors game and it does a great job of it. The story of the game follows the Hyrulian forces as Cia leads an invasion in Hyrule in order to free Ganondorf. The game then focuses on stopping Cia before jumping to other campaigns that eventually lead to fighting and defeating Ganon. There are some other side campaigns such as Cia's rise to power and Linkle being late for every battle, but showing up to help whoever is there to defend them from further attacks. The story is not bad, but it's not great. The gameplay for the most part is good. Each character has a unique style and some even have access to multiple weapons. The problem is that most weapons are locked in Adventure Mode and you have to do some random side quest on a map in order to unlock them. About half the characters are also locked in Adventure Mode like this and with the puzzles in Adventure Mode, it feels tedious to unlock them because you have to repeat maps to get Compass, then repeat maps for the items you need to unlock the reward, then you have to A rank the map in order to collect the reward. The worst problem of the game is that the AI on your side is absolutely useless. They are unable to defend a base and will be stopped by almost any officer type enemy. Bases fall in about two minutes and you basically just use them for buffers to buy you time while you try to rush and complete the objectives. The ability to switch between multiple characters and use warp points on some maps help, but they are unavailable in many. You are literally the one man army because all your allies are stopped and can possibly be killed by a single enemy officer.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]