I want to like Astral Ascent. It has a dedicated Linux version (as per the Linux EULA, I'm obliged to mention I use Linux), the visuals are good, the music is fine, voice acting is pretty good, and the action is decent. But, I, just, dunno, it's, just, kinda, clunky. I've played for a dozen hours at least, and I still don't really understand the upgrades. It's unnecessarily obtuse, I don't even have a "fire shield", why am I offered an upgrade that boosts its duration? What's the difference between Gambits and Imprints? Why would spells need two different types of upgrades? The spells can level up, too? How am I supposed to tell the effective difference between a Nimbus, Plasma, and Lightning Orb if they're all electric elements? It feels like Disgaea level micro-management without the possibility to power grind. And back to the action, it's good, but it's not nearly as snappy and fun as ScourgeBringer's. The story seems better, at least, but it's not nearly as interesting as Hades. I dunno, I'd rather play something else.
You know, I had a hard time picking a score for this game. For the most part, I like ScourgeBringer (SB). It has super tight action, interesting level and enemy design, a cool aesthetic, and some bopping tracks. But it is veeeeery hard. Now, I'm no pro gamer, but I have finished Ninja Gaiden Black on Very Hard (quick flex here). Haven't tried Master Ninja Yet. ANYWAY, I don't completely **** at games is my point, but I did find SB quite difficult. And ultimately, I'm not sure past a certain point the difficulty serves a purpose. I've beaten the final final boss and gotten the "true" ending, and, ahhh, I dunno, it didn't do much for me. There are tiny info capsules (shaped as NES cartridges) hidden here and there throughout the levels, and then some text can later be decoded, but I just did not gain any satisfaction or appreciation for the story or characters or world through these. I wanted more from the story, and it doesn't really have much to say here. The real draw is the gameplay, and yeah, the gameplay is good. Learning how to approach enemies and bosses is really the main way to go, mashing won't work. Sometimes **** feels unfair and the screen can get really messy, but I think it has an interesting learning curve. In a manner not totally unlike Ninja Gaiden, it's not just 100% about raw performance and twitch muscle speed, it is about spacing and tactics and timing. And that's honestly a pretty good compliment I think. If "hard games" are not for you, I'd avoid this one. If you like platformers and a strong challenge, it's worth a shot, especially when it goes on sale.
This is a review for the Xbox One version, not the game itself. The game itself is good, but if you're wondering which version to get, just stay away from Xbox One. From the moment I click on the game's icon in the Xbox main menu, we get: 35 seconds of splash screen; 40 seconds of black screen; it asks me which account I wish to sign in as (I only have one, it's always the same); then I get a popup asking if I want to join Xbox Live (no, I don't, stop asking every time); then it takes about 30 seconds to check for downloadable content; about 30 more seconds of black screen followed by a loading screen; and finally after about 2:30 I'm in game. Then I try to start a match. Between the time I pick my characters and the match actually starts, it takes about 1:45. I started up the game about 6 minues ago, and I'm just starting to play now? For the sake of comparison, I booted up all the fighting games I have on PC to see which was the slowest to get into a match. And I'm not trying to be disingenuous, I know even my old NVMe will still smoke an Xbox One S, but hear me out. The slowest game took just over 2 minutes, and this included downloading an update and processing Vulkan shaders. Without those, the slowest game was Xrd Rev 2, clocking in at 1:15, and that's with the intro screens. If I skip those, by modding the *.ini file - which is something you can do on a PC - we're talking less than 60 seconds. Nick Cage would be proud. I can't imagine DBFZ being that much slower to load, and even if it took twice as long to boot as Xrd it would still be about 3 times faster than on Xbox One S. And PC also has free online play. If you can get the game on a different platform, go ahead and do that and save yourself the aggravation.
I feel a bit bad giving a 6 to Berserk Boy. It looks decent, it doesn't sound bad, controls are quite good, I just think it's kinda boring. As the game progresses you get access to different forms, but apart from the starter set and the ninja set, they kinda ****. In a game that moves swiftly and quickly, why would I use a form that doesn't have a dash? The game's built around speed, 3 out of 5 of these forms are slow. Level design - as fast and fluid as it often is - is still kinda bland. There are like 5 or maybe 6 different enemy types in the whole game, things get repetitive real fast. Oh no, I've just beat a boss, that means the ship is under attack. Again. I dunno, I want more from this game. Still, it's not without merit, but it's definitely not a must-play in my mind.
Nine Sols, on some levels, looks like a pretty boilerplate Metroidvania game. But it separates itself from the pack with its futuristic-Chinese mythology-dystopia setting, its mechanical complexities, and its difficulty. Visually, the game does quite well. Backgrounds use a mix of 2D and 3D elements in a surprisingly seamless way, stuff never looks out of place, and said backgrounds look quite good and never obfuscate the platforming elements. Average mooks can have a bit of that early 2000s newgrounds look, but bosses and large enemies look amazing. Animated cutscences are beautiful, too. High scores for visuals. Audio-wise, I can’t say the music is memorable, but at least it’s not annoying. The final battle’s music really sets the tone well, however. Gameplay-wise, it isn’t that different from most Metroidvanias, but it’s the hardest one I’ve played to completion. The game has a parry mechanic that is apparently similar to Sekiro’s (haven’t played that one yet), and for most of the game it’s useful, but not necessary to master. Also, if I’m going to nitpick, I feel like the timing of it is a bit inconsistent. I feel like some attacks need to be parried earlier than others, which I’ll come back to later. The game is hard, but I never felt like I was stuck because of the difficulty... until I got to the final boss. I have mixed feelings about the last boss, Eigong. It’s a great boss fight, no doubt, but it is MUCH harder than the rest of the (already) difficult game. It took me about 19 hours to get there, and then I spent another 3 or 4 just on Eigong. On some level I’m always glad to see a final boss that isn’t a complete pushover, but the spike in difficulty is pretty rough. If you don’t like “hard games”, this one will be frustrating for sure, and the fight might be impassable for some players. And here is where I’m coming back to the parry’s timing. After spending all that time on the final boss, I tried my hand at the Boss Rush mode, and lo and behold, I was parrying too late on the first boss’ attacks. The centaur’s attacks need to be parried much earlier than Eigong’s, and the readjustment is a pain. Parrying seems like a crapshoot for much of the game, but it’s a necessity for beating Eigong. Sure, I spent 3 hours fighting her, of course I got the timing right, but I only got the timing down for THAT FIGHT. I didn’t gain a skill that was transferable to the rest of the game, and I didn’t initially come into the fight with the intention of spending so much time parrying, because the game accidentally disincentivizes the player from parrying with its inconsistent timing. Still, is the difficulty worth it? Yeah, actually, I think it is. The story is surprisingly interesting, a rare occurrence for a Metroidvania. It has character development, some mystery, and an emotional ending. It’s good. The game made me feel feelings. Well done. Ultimately, your enjoyment of Nine Sols may depend more on your tolerance for difficulty than anything else. If your bread and butter is **** Valley and Animal Crossing, then stay away from this. If you think Ninja Gaiden 2 (non-Sigma) should have been more difficult, you’ll probably manage this game fine. Good luck if you find yourself in between those two things, but I do think the story is interesting enough to make it worth a look.
I tried out this game for the first time recently, and boy oh boy did I try liking it until I didn’t. It’s not all bad, it’s almost good, which kinda makes it worse. For a PS2 game, it looks pretty good. I like the various character designs and varied locations, even if I find enemy designs kinda clunky. Audio is fine, the music isn’t great, but the voice acting is surprisingly competent for a game of its era. Not bad so far, but otherwise the game is clunky. The menus are clunky, the fighting is clunky, the stores are clunky, just so much clunk. Clunk everywhere, I tells ya. Here’s a quick rundown. In the main menu, there isn’t a “Status” or “Equip” option. There’s “Allies”, which serves double duty as equipment and member swap/formation. Quick note, formation is completely pointless in this game, and for large parts of the game your team isn’t actually changeable. Changing equipment is frustratingly inefficient, with prompts at every stage of the process. The item page has a bunch of tabs, which is kinda terrible, reorganizing stuff manually is incredibly slow. Among these items is an animal (?) that kinda acts like the alchemy pot in Dragon Quest 8, but for weapons only, but (and?) it talks. When you add a weapon to fuse, it has to be picked from the item pages instead of having a list of the available options – something the game clearly can do, because it does exactly that in the equipment section. Then the animal will speak. They’ll speak again when it’s time to add a second weapon, and again when it’s about to spew out the result. Quitting this alchemy pot prompts a dialog asking to exit. It’s unnecessarily verbose and slow. There’s also a factory minigame of sorts to create new items from regular junk, and I just couldn’t get the thing to work. It’s clunky as hell. As far as the actual gameplay goes, it’s also kinda clunky. In the early chapters, it actually works reasonably well, even if most new enemies always create massive difficulty spikes, which often leads to grinding. Some enemies have a roll/dash attack which can hit about at least 5 times, and will mostly be an instant KO for whatever party member who wasn’t defending, and sometimes even if they were defending. If you get swarmed by enemies, the camera is probably going to get stuck somewhere, and you’ll just die. Certain enemies have shields which have to be destroyed using a charge attack – which I’d forgotten existed because I’d been playing for about 10 hours since the last time I’d had to use it. One boss has a close range AOE attack that will 1-hit kill your members – but there’s no way to quickly tell your teammates to just, you know, stay away or block. I don’t want to go into the menu every time, that’s not fun. Same thing for a boss that has a counter, your teammates will just attack brainlessly and get killed. Another “standout” boss fight basically requires to block until an opening appears, there’s no roll or dodge either, so it’s just block block block block block block blo- OH NO, ATTACK ATTAK ATAK ah crap heal block block block... Also sometimes your character’s stamina will run out after a single attack after blocking for a whole minute. Why doesn’t stamina regenerate while blocking? It’s a really long fight, it can take like 5 minutes, and it’s probably 4 minutes of blocking. That’s just garbage design. As the game progresses, these frustrations keep stacking, and by the end it’s just a massive pain. The story moves really slowly, it’s fairly episodic until about chapter 7, at which point the actual plot of the game finally makes an appearance – which leads to more unrelated episodic arcs with characters we’ll never see again. At some point the game almost hints at social commentary, but all we really end up with is Super Saiyan Space Jesus. The guy that is setup as the big bad mostly disappears midway through the story, and the real big bad only gets a backstory before the second to last fight. So the story’s not great, the gameplay isn’t either, the characters aren’t particularly interesting, it just doesn’t do anything for me. I’d pass on this one.
Death’s Door is terribly charming. It has a great visual style, charming animations, nice music, decent gameplay and controls. It’s not a life-changing experience, but it’s a really fun romp. I wish I had more to say about it, but usually that's when I have complaints, and I don't really have any. I guess I wish it were longer.
Metaphor: Refantazio. Wow. What a title. How Atlus came up with this name, I’d love to know. As a long time Atlus fan, I’ve been disappointed in quite a few of their recent efforts. I didn’t really like Persona 5. Persona 3 Reload, while being a lot easier to digest than the original or FES, loses some of the grime and dread and vibe which were so integral to the game. Soul Hackers 2 was just really bland. SMT 5 was pretty good, but it felt unfinished, especially the character development and late game. So how does this game fare? All in all, I can’t deny it’s a competent game. Visuals are okay, character design is good, I quite like the voice acting, combat is pretty well balanced, there are some good music tracks... it’s not bad. First, some nitpicks. I think the menus are overdone. I know it’s kinda Atlus’ thing since P5, but here I just find the menu hard to navigate and unintuitive. Managing equipment is a huge pain, I can never tell who’s wearing which piece of armor. Seeing character stats involves pressing the triangle button inside the menu, which just feels really weird. In the menu, characters only have access to the skills they have associated with their current archetype (the game’s job system). If I want to heal in menu, I might have to switch jobs. Come on, Atlus. Switching characters with R1 and L1 in the job menu doesn’t move to their equipped job, it leaves the cursor in the same spot... it’s just kinda finicky. Everytime a character learns a new job, there’s a magical girl transformation animation, which ****, because there are over 40 jobs and 7 characters. The travelling combined with the time limit feels even more restrictive than in Persona games. The secondary dungeons are variations on one of three models: the crypt; the forest; the tower. It gets old by the end. Gameplay-wise, as mentionned it’s pretty good, but there aren’t many AoE attacks, I’m not sure there’s an ice based one. Kinda weird. The camera shakes during cutscenes, which I sometimes found uncomfortable. The social aspects aren’t bad, but it feels even more railroaded than in P3-5. I felt like I was just going through the motions instead of identifying with the characters’ issues. Some of these stories are interesting, to be fair. But ultimately, I’m here for the main story. Does Metapoor: Reeferantonio deliver? Does it have the goods? DOES IT BAKE MY BEANS?!?!? No, not really. The pacing, thanks to the limit date system, is a pretty big mess. For the most part, the dialog isn’t as painfully verbose as P5’s, and the story itself isn’t complete crap, but the final act kinda ruins everything. To say the finale is clunky would be an understatement, and it seems to last forever. We get back to P5 levels of dreary rambling from the team, and it’s painful. Early on in the game, the main antagonist makes a fairly compelling argument for his view of the future: a land where birthright doesn’t exist, nobility doesn’t exist, where one’s position in life is based on skill and power. Kinda faschy, yeah, but still better than full-on monarchic or theocratic fascism. But wait! It turns out our bad guy is actually an accelerationist! Yay! We can now comfortably stay within regular parameters and accept monarchy (but with a good monarch) as the one true happy ending! That’s it. The good monarch is the good ending. How bold. There’s even a character who mentions how the world would be better without a king, but naw, we can’t have that, that would be too, dare I say, fantastical. I restarted a new game+ to see how far I’d get on a second playthrough (spoilers: not even through the first dungeon), and I was reminded of many strange plot holes and forgotten characters. There are a bunch of strange twists that don’t amount to anything and only amount to mild shock value. It felt a bit half-baked, kinda like SMT 5. So yeah, I’m kinda bummed about this. How this gets a bunch of 10/10 scores is beyond me. This isn’t Persona 3, this isn’t Nier: Automata, this isn’t SMT 3, it’s just not a game I’ll be spending weeks or months thinking about.
DNF Duel seems like a decent fighter to me, but kinda suffers from some weird decisions. Characters don't have names, they are defined by their class. I don't know about you, but I don't want to fight as "Kunoichi", I want to fight as Ibuki, I don't want to fight as "Grappler", I want to fight as Potemkin. I enjoy getting to know the characters I play, I enjoy reading about their backgrounds, I enjoy seeing them evolve from game to game, I enjoy seeing the personalities clash. How much personality can these characters have if they don't even have a name you ask? THEY AIN'T GOT NONE. There's a character that is a "Dragon Knight", and fights with a pet dragon named Astra. THE FREAKIN DRAGON HAS A NAME. Like, wow guys, I mean, come one, dudes, how? It's also worth mentioning that the game doesn't support my fight stick (Toodles Cthulhu PCB), it doesn't recognize half the buttons, which wouldn't be a problem if I had this on Steam, but I got this for free from Epic. Adding the game to Steam doesn't work all that well, because the Epic has an overlay that doesn't jive with Steam, and I can't get the game to boot that way. This is on Linux, Windows users probably don't have this problem. But, BUT, if you use an arcade stick without LS or RS buttons, it is possible to soft lock in the trials or tutorial section. Nice. And that's too bad, because it seems to plays pretty well. It has some interesting mechanics. It's snappy, it looks good (even if the designs are - to me, at least - a bit overdone and forgettable), the balancing isn't terrible. Didn't try online, so I can't tell if there are any chances of getting into a match. Would I recommend paying for this? It's more expensive than FEXL, it's not as snappy as KoF, it doesn't have the player base of SF, it just feels like a gaccha version of GG but it's not that much cheaper. Probably pass this one.
I want to give Nine Witches a strong review. I like the visuals, I like the setting, I like the dialog and dumb humour, I like the general idea. For the most part, the game is pretty fun, but the last few "puzzles" have some of the most annoying and obscure "solutions". For example, at some point your characters need fertilizer. I figured there might be some at the farm, because, you know, IT'S A FARM. No, that's not the right place for fertilizer. You need the Horse Manure(TM), other stuff won't work. You can't pick it up with your hands, so you gotta find something to pick it up with. A shovel, right? Cuz that's what you use to pick up large amounts of poop, like the kind of voluminous poop that comes out of a horse, right? No. Put it in an empty can you have? No. How about in that watering can, that's a container, right? Nope. The bottle? No. Think of all the ways you could pick up and store Horse Manure(TM), look at all the items you have that could be used, and then realize that there's only one item that the game will let you use to pick up up said poop, and honestly it's far from being my first choice. Lots of backtracking is involved, too. I gotta go back to the docked U-boat to get some helium so fill a balloon from the middle of the map to enter an area on the complete opposite side of the map from the U-boat. Come on, guys. And like lots of puzzle games, lack of flexibility is what prevents this from being really successful. I understand it's hard to plan for all sorts of contingencies, and this game seems to have been developed by only 5 or 6 guys, and an extra 5-6 playtesters. That's not a lot of people and resources to go around, but as much as people talk about those old LucasArts and Sierra Online games with rose tinted nostalgia goggles, no one really wants to put a banana on a metronome to create a "monkey wrench". Still, it's not an expensive game, and I mostly had some fun with it. If you did enjoy putting a banana on a metronome, you would probably love this game. Otherwise it's hard to recommend for people who aren't fans of the genre.
Hiya folks, welcome to this week's episode of "way too late reviews", where I'll be reviewing The Legend of Zelda : Tears of the Kingdom, the sequel to the legally distinct 2017 game, Breath of the Wild. There are rocks in the sky now! Seriously though, it does feel different. There are improvements, for sure. New monster types are cool, bokoblins wearing armour is cool, fusing stuff is cool, ultrahand is cool, coolcoolcool. I have some minor gripes about these things, but for the most part, the game builds on BotW with success. But there's a lot of stuff that annoys me. The intro ****. BotW's Great Plateau was a great tutorial section, it gave players a shocking amount of freedom while teaching the basics, and I just don't think the Great Sky Island works nearly as well. The sky islands don't allow that kind of freedom, and it feels restrictive. At some point I was kinda stuck, and figured I should just warp back to a different point to take a different path, but the warp ability is locked until later. Why? It's harder to navigate the islands than the plateau, and BotW has the teleport ability available eariler. Finally, I leave the islands, get back to the ground below, and I got no map. Clearly there's going to be towers, but I don't see them. Sure, Purah will tell me, but I have to spend another 10 minutes walking around talking to people before I get to check it out. Now Purah gives me the paraglider so I can be shot up into the sky from a tower to get the local map info, which is cool. But at the same time, the game doesn't really incentivize the type of exploration that made the first game so fun. The shrines are harder to see, instead of glowing a bright orange they're surrounded by this greenish mist that doesn't pop at all. I used to spend a few minutes at the top of a tower scoping the area for bright spots. Now, I jump into the air and try to pick a destination within a few seconds. Once I've hit one of these targets, I would usually end up teleporting back to the tower to start the cycle over again. I don't have a sensor, I can't see any shrines, I don't have any armour worth mentioning, I'm low on weapons, just going off isn't viable. I never felt like walking aimlessly like I did in BotW. Walking aimlessly sounds bad, but BotW actually made it good. Now, the loop of catapulting high into the sky and paragliding over to a shrine doesn't promote that relaxing, interesting, secret-discovering walking that was central to BotW. And I get it, it can't be the same as in BotW, but this new paradigm of travel rarely produces that feeling of wonder that BotW seemed to be able to dole out with such consistency: seeing a Divine Beast for the first time; catching my first glimpse of a dragon; climbing the Akkala citadel; seeing a goddamn bear. That's a hard act to follow, and I don't want to be disingenuous. But I gotta callz'em like I seez'em, and I kept seeing a game that prevented me from doing what I wanted to do. Where's my shrine sensor? I got to this tower, and it didn't work. Gotta make some porridge before buying stealth armour. A Hyrule-sized map of the Typhlo ruins (the Depths) isn't my idea of fun. Caves almost all feel and look the same. The memories don't force me discover the world like they did in BotW. Spears are OP now with fusion, and 2-handed weapons kinda ****. I don't care about Bubbulfrogs. The sky islands look cool until you've seen the same one five times. Shrine rewards are garbage, I don't want a large battery. Speaking of armour, I'm 50 hours in, where are my upgrades? I had to check a guide to activate a fairy fountain, and I needed to do 4 (FOUR!) quests to see 1 (ONE!) fairy. AND THEN I GET CHARGED TO UPGRADE!? Preposterous! Scandalous! Ignominious! In a game where random exploration should be enjoyable, why would I want to get bogged down with these restrictive quests? Why do I have to do THIS specific Main Quest event to get access to fairies? Why am I being punished for doing them out of order? BotW didn't have this, this, this video game equivalent of c*ckblocking. Why are there so many item types? Why do I need 75 pieces of armour if I only use like 5 different sets? Why can't I just put on a whole set at a time yet? Why does enemy damage seem way out of whack? Why do I need colour-specific enemy drops for upgrade when I have 75 armour parts to upgrade? I haven't seen a red Lynel in about 40 hours, how am I supposed to find its specific parts? Why are enemy horns in the codex but not fangs? Why can't I fuse items to my weapons or shields in the menu? Why can't I scroll through the menu with the right stick anymore? Why do the avatars ****? WHY WHY WHY WHYYYYY I just don't really want to return to it. I'm done with it. It's obviously not a bad game, but ultimately I gotta tell Mari Kondo that BotW sparks joy, and TotK does not.
Persona 3 (FES) is one of my favourite games of all time. Yes, it is. I tells ya, it very much is. And I don't like remakes. I almost inevitably feel like they miss the point or the vibe the original had, and make terrible story-telling decision. And listen folks, I'm not going to be charitable here, P3 Reload definitely gave me some bad vibes right off the bat. That prologue video? It's garbage. Absolute, terrible, stinky refuse. FES did it so much better. FES showed us a bustling city full of odd and colourful characters (admittedly never to be seen again). There were extreme close-ups on important characters' eyes, establishing shots where the protagonist isn't completely visible, you know, artsy stuff. Scattered through these bits of manic city life are a few scraps of Yukari's mental state. Dutch angles, extreme closeups on her shaking hands and dilating pupils, sweat beading around her mouth, the unnerving sound of water pouring out of a faucet, we focus on the trigger of her gun, there's the deafening sound of a train car braking, the music gets louder, we're disoriented, she falters, whimpering in shame as we observe her through her room's window, slightly distorted through a fish-eye perspective. Chef's kiss. In Reload, we instead get these generic long shot with the blandest set of bystanders I've seen in years, then we see a full-body shot of Yukari, and then, THEN, SHE SPEAKS. "ThErE's nO wAy, i CaN't Do It", she tells us, and falls to her knees. WHYYYYYYYYYYYY How does this happen? 2 minutes into the game, it breaks one of the top rules of story-telling: show, don't tell. I'm not a **** screenwriter, I'm not an editor, I'm not a director, I'm not a film student, HOW CAN A WHOLE TEAM OF PRODUCTION CREATE THIS NEW VID, PROBABLY USING THE ORIGINAL AS REFERENCE, AND SAY "YEAH, WE DID IT BOYS"? Take a cutscene, any cutscene, and compare the two versions side-by-side, and watch in disgust as the original makes the new game look like a bad high school play. And that's too bad, because it does great everywhere else. I don't love the new visuals, but it's not as bad as the initial screenshots led me to believe. I don't think it constantly looks amazing, but for the most part it works. The audio? Voice acting is fine, and the newly recorded tracks and/or remastered tracks are great. The new battle theme slaps, and Color Your Night - a remix of FES' When The Moon's Reaching Out Stars and Joy - is a bona fide banger. Menus look super slick, it's great to equip all party members without talking to them. Quick travel is nice. There are QoL improvements all across the board, which was probably the biggest barrier to entry the original had. Action wise it gets some upgrades, and it does make the game less frustrating. It keeps the 6 base elements and 3 weapon types, which I like, gives the player control of secondary characters, which I like, gives us a baton pass- I mean, Shift, which is a baton pass, which I like. I don't know why the card shuffle doesn't actually shuffle the cards anymore, the "weapon cards" are now skill cards, which I don't particularly like, but that's just me. The new arcana cards are don't seem to reverse, so there isn't really any stress or excitement about getting one, but it does remove the pain of getting a reverse card. The game is a lot easier than FES, I played on Hard, and though some boss fights were pretty close, I never hit a wall like, say, the OG difficulty spike Sleeping Table. I finished the first full moon battle with 13 seconds left, I actually turned on auto battle to make things go faster to make sure I didn't run out of time. So a good level of difficulty, I think. Normal is probably too bland for long-timers. But there's Hard mode and Merciless mode, so go off I guess. Honestly, if someone mods this game to have the OG cutscenes, proper colour temperature, and better shaders? 9.5/10.Right now? Still a good 8-8.5. Wait for the Golden/Royal treatment, get it on PC, and install all the future and the NexusMods. It plays fine on Xbox One, but doesn't hit 60 fps consistently.
GravityCircuit is so much fun. I've played a lot of Mega Man games, I own all the legacy collections, I was thoroughly disappointed by 9 (I haven't played much 10 or 11 yet), but this game, THIS EFFIN' GAME is what modern Mega Man should be. A fun powerup system, great level design, great cartoony aesthetic, tight controls, fair but challenging gameplay, I dunno man, it just does it all right. I was never really irritated with it, and still felt respectable levels of satisfaction as I overcame challenges. It's just a really good game, and it's pretty cheap, too.
9/10, GOTY, critical acclaim, Chained Echoes (CE) gets all the accolades. But I think we need to have an intervention, fam. 9/10 should mean one of the best games ever. Is this really at the top of your lists? How do I think this game stacks up? Let's start with the music? It's actually quite good, but sometimes feels derivative. The hideout sounds kinda like the Rito village track, and there's this quirky song that plays for comedic effect that sounds a lot like FF4's Mysidia track. Still, I thought the music was quite good, not top tier, but good. 8/10. What about the graphics? I'd give it a solid 7/10. It doesn't look bad, but there are definitely better looking pixel art games. Oh, you want me to name them? Sure. Just in the past few years: Eastward; Sea of Stars; Celeste; Owlboy. Does CE come close to any of these games in the looks department? Please be honest with yourselves. What about the gameplay? Is this one of the best playing JRPG-style games ever? Is it more innovative than the Chrono games, Xenogears, Undertale? Is it extremely polished and balanced? IS IT REALLY EXCEPTIONAL? Naw, bruh. I think its action is closest to Battle Chasers (BC), with the Overdrive mechanic put on top, but I honestly think BC has the better system. Even as slow as that game moves, CE's battles feel longer, mostly because enemies have tooooons of HP. In BC, I consider how much HP and MP/TP I'm willing to spend at any point in a battle. Here, I just go all out all the time. Starting with full health and skill points mostly takes some of the strategy out of the game. Why should I not just spam my strongest skills all the time? Battles end up repetitive because tactics aren't necessary, saving HP and TP is not the main concern, instead it's finishing fights as fast as possible. I often wondered if I should let some of my characters die to make certain battles go faster, because there's no real downside to that. Apart from the action, a lot of stuff seems directly lifted from classic JRPGs, but done worse. A character eats enemies to gain skills, but you can't use that skill until you use a skill point- oops, sorry - use a gRiMoIrE sHaRd to be able to use that skill in battle. Your party splits into three groups, and the thief has to steal clothes to sneak by unnoticed - except this is done in a cut scene instead of through the gameplay. The team has an underground base that is eerily similar to the Returner's hideout, and the main character has an existential dilemma about their stance on war - but it mostly gets resolved quickly. You can recruit people to join your hideout (BoF 2), the three wise men are referenced (CT), there's a dude who says stuff like "goodly good" (CC), a boss that has 4 crystals floating behind it (SMRPG), a trio of bad guys that are large monsters surrounding a small floating platform (Zable Fahr from SD3), the main character has a skill called Whrilwind Slash (CT again), and some bad guy is carrying around the spear of Longinus from Evangelion... I dunno, man, at some point it kinda felt like bad fanfic. I should have taken notes during my playthrough, because I'm sure I'm forgetting tons of bits like this. Again, being derivative isn't all that problematic, it's just that every derivative thing is worse than the original. But how about that story, yeah? Is it a sprawling affair or betrayal and coups, shocking us and surprising us at every turn? No, not really. There are some "twists", but they mostly made me groan rather than surprise me. One main antagonist has a plan so devious, so obtuse, so inscrutable, so improbable to actually work, that when it "came to fruition" I could not physically prevent my eyes from rolling back into my brain. The ending is entirely unsatisfying, not in the unsatisfying but interestingly open-ended ending of a Murakami novel. A bunch of secondary characters are completely unnecessary to the plot, some "important" ones are immediately forgotten once their minor act ends. The game also has some other minor mechanical issues: some sprites kinda jitter on screen (PC version); menus are janky; store interfaces are bad; buying materials for crafting is a huge drag because it involves going to like 5 different stores; using a DualSense, many button prompts are incorrect. None of these minor gripes really matter, but on top of all the other unfulfilling stuff, but it does add to the overall irritation this game cooks up.
Metroid Dread is, well, very much a Metroid game. Have you played previous Metroid games? Did you like them? Save yourself the read, and decide based on that. That's the short of it. The long of it, on the other hand, starts off with little fanfare. The early game is a bit of a slog. With few power ups and very few areas accessible, the game feels a bit claustrophobic. It took a few hours before I felt like I had some autonomy to explore. Metroid games have always been somewhat linear, but some parts here felt very restrictive. One time, I couldn't figure out what to do, and thought I had soft-locked myself into an area I wasn't sure I was meant to visit. It turns out there was a destroyable bomb block hidden in a tiny space that I had "missed", which opened up to a powerup or something that would allow for more exploration. Sadly, this wasn't a completely isolated event. Many times during my playthrough, the game kinda prevented me from exploring, and really railroaded me to my next destination. Which is not necessarily bad in itself, but it often felt like I was just exploring at my own pace, enjoying the experience, and suddenly I'd be forced in a direction I didn't really want to take. I remember this happening a bit in Super Metroid, but never quite as harshly as this. Maybe this was intentional, removing the player's autonomy to give the atmosphere a certain sense of, you know, what's that word, a feeling of, of, of impending doom... Ah yes, a feeling of dread.*BADUM TSSS* Seriously though, there are some moments where the game is stressful. Running away from EMMIs can be nerve-wracking, even if the consequences aren't that dire. Disclaimer, I'm not a horror game fan, Resident Evil and Silent Hill are too scary for me. If your idea of a relaxing evening game session is playing Alien: Isolation or Outlast, you'll probably find Metroid Dread very mild. But for a pansy like me? It's stressful enough to get my heart pumping a bit, but not scary enough to prevent me from sleeping. It's not a bad thing. Later in the game, we've got all these skills, all these powerups, and what can we finally do with all these? Not much really, except hunt for missile tanks. And that kinda blows, because I want to find new places, I want to see new things, fight new enemies, but there just wasn't anything really interesting to find at that point. It was just prepping for the final boss and doing the completionism thing. Admittedly, though, the final boss is tough, and any prep was welcome. In fact, bosses are probably one of the high points of the game. Having mostly complained up to this point, the game certainly has some strong points. It is, for the most part, quite fun. It took me a while to get comfortable with the controls and movement, but Samus certainly is mobile in this game. Wall jumping is quite a bit easier than in Super Metroid, which makes me happy to not fuss with it, but also kinda sad that I don't get the satisfaction of being a gatekeeper to one of the only gates I can keep. Also, bomb jumping, like in Samus Returns, is much harder than in previous games.Actually, now that I've mentioned Samus Returns, Dread functions almost identically to it. But for some reason, I prefer Samus Returns. I think the power-up pacing was better, especially in the early game, and the teleport system is much more practical. I didn't feel as railroaded, I rarely got stuck. I dunno, I just think of that Marie Kondo meme; Samus Returns sparks joy, Dread does not.Still, the game's a lot of fun. The boss fights are great, it's pretty challenging, the EMMI sections are intense, it looks pretty good. If I were into speedrunning, I'd probably rank this a 10, but I'm not, so I didn't. Really, I just wished I liked the game more.
I really like The Messenger, so when I heard about this title being on Kickstarter, I backed right away. I mean, a classic JRPG inspired by Chrono Trigger made by an indie studio I like? Sign me up. And the game certainly has some high points. It's beautiful, truly, there's some wonderful pixel art in there. The lighting effects are fantastic, and coupled with some of the level design, I really wonder if the game secretly runs in 3D with a coat of 2D pixel art on top. It's really quite impressive. It's almost like they played Cross Code and had the same issues I had with the level design, and fixed them. Some of the music is also quite good, as well. For the most part, I like the battle system. It's a nice twist on the turn-based system, but I think the progression and leveling is too slow. After about 30 hours of gameplay I was at level 21, and I was using the 20% EXP bonus relic. That's not a lot of stat progression, and it kinda feels like the team doesn't get that much stronger. Having said that, the balancing in the game is well done, there aren't any massive difficulty spikes, even if I didn't feel like I was getting stronger. Changing equipment also rarely feels like it makes much of a difference. Kinda strange. Boss fights are visually impressive, as in, the bosses look really cool and they're usually fun, but these fights are for the most part very easy. Seraï's Distortion skill is exploitable in these situations, and It makes boss fights much easier than they should be. I don't want some random encounters where multiple enemies attack every second turn to be harder than boss fights. The toughest fight in the game was against 4 enemies in the colosseum in the gold level. Not the boss of the gold level, not the boss of the platinum level, not the final boss, not the FINAL final boss. Just 4 randos. Still, the game starts off really well, it sets up a bunch of characters, we can see their relationships, their goals, their frustrations. I was invested in the story, I wanted to see where things were going. And as the game progresses, we meet some new characters, see some new locations, and boy oh golly gee was I excited to see how everything was going to tie together. But ultimately it doesn't. When I got to the last areas in the game, I thought this was some weird padding, a side-quest of some sort. But no, this was actually part of the main story. And the main characters are incredibly bland. It's hard to describe how bereft of personality they are. Side characters are, for the most part, relegated to their single story beat, never to be seen again. I didn't really get any emotional through-line, no important themes beyond making friends along the way. The bad guys I was hoping to learn about are just really tie-ins to the Messenger. I like the Messenger, but that's not what I'm here for, I don't want MCU-style easter eggs or story-telling, I just want the one good story. And when the game ended, that's all I felt I got out of the game. A bunch of easter eggs. The big dragon you befriend? An easter egg. The three sibling witches? Easter egg. Those creepy masked bad guys? Easter egg. The big bad? Easter egg. I still enjoyed the gameplay for the most part, and if there were lots of post-game content, I'd probably feel better about it. If there were some ways to grind your team to some unfathomable power levels in hopes of beating some wild super-boss, I'd probably stick around for it. But there isn't so I didn't. There are some late game quests that clearly want to remind you of late game Chrono Trigger, like, maybe I'm going to fight a huge dinosaur, or fight an AI in the future, go to court again, eff yeah, this is going to be awesome. But it turns out, most of these "quests" involve very simple puzzles to get one item. It takes more time to move around the screen than to figure out what to do. Oh, and speaking of moving around, the main map walking speed is really slow. Why? It was even a topic of debate on the Discord channel. JUST MAKE THEM WALK FASTER, THAT'S WHAT EVERYONE WANTS. Once all is said and done, I found Sea of Stars pretty underwhelming. It's pretty, it plays well, but the boring characters and story and general lack of content was a disappointment.
I'm a Platinum Games fanboy. There, I said it. When I heard that this game was coming out, I pre-ordered. I hadn't even played Bayonetta 3 yet, but I bought it anyway, because whatever Platinum makes, I'm gonna throw my cash at it, even if it's weird.
And this game is kinda weird.
It's such a strange mix of non-Platinum stuff, it's probably going to alienate some of their fanbase. It barely has any connection to anything Bayonetta. It doesn't look like Bayonetta, it doesn't sound like Bayonetta, it doesn't feel like Bayonetta. But ultimately, I'm not sure anyone would have bought this game if it weren't for its connection to Bayonetta. Having said that, there's absolutely nothing wrong with not being Bayonetta. Cereza and the Lost Demon has all sorts of wonderful things going for it. It is one of the most beautiful games I've played. To describe the forest of Avalon - the area in which most of the game takes place - as anything less than a meticulously painted tapestry would be doing it a disservice. It is filled with whimsy and charm, its groves, trees and shrubs mysterious and dangerous, yet alluring. And, unlike me, it never comes off as pretentious. Enemy designs are also quite good and varied. It's always easy to identify which enemies have shown up to the fight, and which skills are necessary to get rid of them. I also quite like Cheshire's design, and his different elemental-infused looks are great. Stuff still gets a bit messy visually, but after B3, it's not that bad. If anything, I appreciate how easy it is to tell what elemental attribute Cheshire has. I'd just played CrossCode before this, and even though it has a similar elemental system, it was much easier to manage in this game. I have some gripes, of course. The game's pace is fairly slow, especially early on. With very few abilities available at the start, making a few plants grow here and there and mashing the attack button for Cheshire gets old pretty fast. I thought that battle and exploration started getting interesting once I had gained two elemental upgrades, which took me maybe 7-8 hours to get. I'm not the fastest player around, but 7 hours of "not super fun" felt pretty long. The forest is definitely hard to navigate, which makes diagetical sense, but the map is pretty useless when it comes to helping me figure out how to get from one place to another. Some frustration, but nothing tragic, really. The real tragedy, however, is that Hideki Kamiya has left Platinum. How will we ever get over this betrayal? Why, Kamiya-senpai, WHYYYYYYY
Ah, Mega Man. The Blue Bomber. The classic hero of the late '80s/early '90s, er, classics. I spent a lot of time in my youth playing Mega Man games. The games were painfully hard, but somehow my friends and I loved them, and we just kept stubbornly playing and playing and playing... Seriously though, the music slapped, the bosses were cool, the weapons were fun to use (at least some of them), and the huge bosses in Wily's castle blew our minds. So how does Mega Man 9 compare to its predecessors? Does it capture that magic? Does it tickle my nostalgia bone? NOPE At first I was okay with the game, but even early on I found certain parts very aggravating. Level design seems extremely inconsistent, from shockingly easy to frustratingly difficult. Spawn points are sometimes in frustrating places, far from the extremely hard parts that require practice and repetition, and enemies don't really pose much of a threat. All difficulty seems to come from environmental hazards. Getting past enemies is mostly a cinch, if occasionally slow and dreary. I didn't feel that any enemy created a sense of dread, like the Big Eyes from Mega Man or Sniper Armors from Mega Man 2. That stuff was terrifying. Now enemies are more of an inconvenience than anything. I also feel that enemies aren't really positioned all that strategically in levels, no grasshoppers to jump on, no light-bots that turn the room dark if you shoot them, no penguin-bot generators... the levels are just, I dunno, kinda bland. "Let's add some spikes, these games are supposed to be hard, right?" I just never really got any satisfaction from beating bosses or finishing levels, more like mild relief that I was getting closer to the end. Once I got to Wily's Castle, the previous issues just got exacerbated. Tons of super tight jumps. Insta-kill spikes and lava everywhere. Enemies that dash across the screen faster than a mega buster bullet. And tons of areas require special weapons to clear. Ran out of Rush Coil? Too bad, ****, go grind for some weapon refills, cuz you ain't going nowhere, bucko. The music isn't all that good, there's no slide, no charge attack for the mega buster. Why would I play this? It's just not fun. I don't need this in my life. This game ****.
I've never had particularly strong feelings about the Tomb Raider games. I didn't own a PS1, and those games looked kinda crappy anyway. I played the 2013 game on PS3 for that one month that I got Playstation+ for free for the 2011 hack, and I didn't hate it. But my goodness, this game is bland. I just don't have much in the way of positives to say about this game. I suppose the game plays well on my PC, which shouldn't be an issue at this point, but we all know how PC ports tend to fare. Voice acting is pretty good I suppose, but a lot of the dialog is kinda cringey. That's about it, folks. The game doesn't look particularly good, especially considering it came out AFTER Horizon Zero Dawn. I mean, I didn't love HZD, but I could at least look around at the world and marvel at it. Lara's face in particular teeters on the edge of uncanny valley; her plastic skin and emotionless eyes just feel uncomfortable. I'd expect a Tomb Raider game - arguably one of the biggest franchises in the world - to look better. The gameplay is almost a copy paste of HZD's, which is probably a copy of some other game, but the point is that it's getting kinda old. Grab some branches and junk on the ground, make arrows, shoot arrows into dudes' heads. WAIT WHA- SHOOT ARROWS INTO WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT??!?! And this is the part that felt the strangest of all. It's not like some killing dudes is so unusual for games. It doesn't feel all that strange in games like Uncharted, or even HZD, but here I'm 5 minutes into the game, and Lara just freakin shivs a man to death, then headshots another seconds later, picks up his gun and **** mows down 10 guys. It's uncomfortably savage, and makes her feel like a murderous sociopath. A bit later there's this big action setpiece in a typhoon/tsunami, and Lara witnesses a child falling to their death. She barely reacts to it, and just a minute later in a cutscene she's all like "WE GOTTA DO OUR MISSION, LET'S GET TO THE CHOPPA" - in a monsoon, no less. How am I supposed to feel sympathy for a character who shows none for a literal child? Sociopath Lara constantly shows up throughout the game. That moment when a father thanks me for murdering a bunch of gangbangers - played completely straight, mind you - is oddly off putting. I mean, yeah, Lara objectively improved his life and saved his son, but I'd be pretty terrified of a complete stranger going on a murderous rampage for my child. The disregard for bad guys' lives is wild, and yet, AND YET, in the final moments of the game, after finally taking out the big bad, the game stops and has the gall to try to make us feel bad for him. (ಠ_ಠ) On some level, if the action was great I wouldn't get hung over this part so much, but it's really not, and the game really leans hard into the story-telling bits. And since the story's not all that interesting, it tries to lean into its characters. But Lara kinda ****. There's this sidequest where Lara has to meet up with people who have been shunned from society, and she has to tell some dude what she's learned from interacting with them. Her response is some Tony Robbins self-help garbage. I couldn't believe such bargain bin level inanities could make it into a [Captain Sterling voice] tRiPle AaA [/Captain Sterling voice] video game, but that probably says more about me than the industry, really. The truth is, writing this review, it made me appreciate Horizon Zero Dawn more. If you absolutely have to play an open-world adventure game with arrow-based action and crafting, just go play that instead. HZD has a better, bigger open world, that's less linear and railroaded. HZD's story is better, the action is better, the heroine is better, there is more arrow and weapon variety, the upgrades are more interesting... The only thing Tomb Raider has going for it would be the tomb and crypt puzzles, but if you want to do puzzles get a puzzle game instead. Thank god for free games on the Epic Store, I'm glad I didn't pay for this.
I wanted to like CrossCode. It's beautiful, the music is really good, and it controls well. But there's so much jank and frustration otherwise. There's tons of quests, but they're mostly boring and have terrible rewards. There are tons of trading materials, but the vast majority are kinda useless, apart from completing quests and filling out the item encyclopedia. Trading can be a massive pain, moving between a bunch of different locales in hopes of getting one upgrade. Early on, the game outright tells the player that leveling up isn't all that useful, that gear is what matters. Yet good gear is few and far between. Not particularly fun. Overall progression is also kinda bad. Once the character's level is high enough, enemies quickly start giving 1 exp point, even some pretty strong ones. Like, 3-4 hits to kill strong. One enemy a few levels above my character took off 75% of my character's HP in one hit. SEVENTY FIVE PERCENT OF MY HEALTH And this is where I start complaining about the action. Enemy damage output is sometimes ridiculously high, and all projectile attacks track with varying degrees of success. Exploding rocks shot out of a sandworm's mouth? They track. A moth's fireball? Those track, too. Jumping goop? Yup. Doesn't sound so bad, but many of these explode as they land, which usually requires two dashes to avoid. Again, not that bad, but remember, one hit can be 1/3 HP, and there's a 3 dash limit. So, if two enemies launch projectiles at inopportune times, that's basically a guaranteed hit. And I'm not even talking about those attacks that are basically Epyon's Energy Bomber from Endless Duel. Just obscene amounts of damage, even while blocking. Not very fun. And what about dishing out damage? Well, it feels anemic. Enemies are massive sponges, and damage output mostly relies on breaking the enemies' guard. Remember that mechanic? Guard break? So much fun. Bosses usually have multiple phases, and since 2 attacks are often enough to kill, without prior knowledge of the bosses' tactics in each of their forms it's pretty hard to avoid those 2 attacks on a first run. So yeah, I died a lot against bosses. I just never felt strong, like I would in Bayonetta or DMC or Ninja Gaiden. Am I being unfair thinking this isn't fun? What about the puzzles and level design? Early on, I found this part pretty fun (yes, fun!) but as the game progressed, area layouts got more and more tedious to navigate, which is something your in-game allies will make sure to point out. Lampshading so intense it even surpassed that last terrible Marvel movie. You know the one. No no, the other one. Yeah. There's no clear indication which platform is at what height, so I'd often walk along these narrow ledges, eyeing my next landing spot, only to realize it was one level higher, and I'd have to go aaaaaaaaaall of the way back to the beginning of this "course". Early on, these paths are obvious and short enough that my middling parkour skills didn't prevent me from enjoying the experience. As the paths get more complex and difficult, it becomes frustrating and works against the desire to explore. Unfun. Puzzles mostly involve shooting charged bullets at stuff in hopes of something happening. Some require such precise aiming and such strict timing that it just becomes a chore to do them. They're not challenging otherwise; it's not hard to figure out what to do, it just takes tons of tries to get the timing right and the aiming true. Some I couldn't do with a controller, and had to switch to keyboard and mouse because I just couldn't aim precisely enough or fast enough. In the eternal words of the Stooges, "NO FUN". And what about that story? Well, it moves i-n-c-r-e-d-i-b-l-y slowly. Every time I thought things were moving along, "don't forget about this raid", "let's meet up at the Rookie Hub", "help me plant some vegetables, Noc-" sorry, wrong game. When the story does actually move forward, it's in tiny, minuscule increments. It has an interesting premise, but doesn't work out anything particularly meaningful out of it. It asks "what does it mean to be human", and responds with "the power of friendship". So deep, bro. Fairly early on, I realized that I kept wondering when the game would start letting me have some fun. Any time I was in a groove, the game would grind to a halt by throwing an overly strict puzzle at me, or having me go back to the beginners' hub, or have some super long boring banter. I wanted to charge in and slash away, but I've got to guard break enemies to do any sort of damage. It's constantly preventing me from moving forward, slowing me down, preventing me from having some enjoyment. If the game just let me play, just let those puzzles be slightly less strict, cut down on the awful dialog, remove the guard break and let me fight however I wanted, I would probably love it. But that's a lot of ifs.
I loves me some Bayonetta, but will Platinum keep their strong track record in tack with Bayonetta 3? Is the action good? Is it funny? Will we finally see Ed and Edna IRL? Why is the fandom salty? These questions may or may not be answered in this review. I've finished the game twice now, on standard and on expert mode. And I think there are some legitimate criticisms to be made about the game. But all in all, I think it's a solid romp, and I have many positives things to say about it. The one aspect of B3 that I think really outdoes the previous games is the music. I didn't dislike the previous OSTs, but the music slaps hard this time around. The jazz is pumped up compared to the previous games, and Gh()st is a legit banger. Eff yeah. Action-wise, I like the overall feel of the game. I like the witch time system better than in B2. There, the time available for doing combos was so short, I'd always just mash punch-kick-punch to get the shortest wicked weave, and usually the last hit would happen outside of witch time. Now, on a well-timed dodge, the witch-time is much longer and allows for longer combos. I also liked most of the arcadey bits in the game. I like the rails shooter, I like the Panzer Dragon bit (though the camera could have been better), I liked the opera scene. The ones controlling Gomorrah are a bit meh because he moves so slowly, but on average I think these “mini-games” are fun. The Jeanne levels are a ton of fun on Normal, but kind of a hassle on Expert. On Normal I felt like I was really infiltrating a secret, high security bunker. On Expert, the enemy respawn rate is too high to really move around discreetly and do the fun spy stuff. I'm not excited about trying it on Infinite Climax. The James Bond/Persona 5-style intro is absolute fire, though. I like Viola's gameplay, but it does seem a bit restrictive that she only has access to one weapon and one demon. I get that it makes sense thematically and for the story, but for a gonzo action game it would not have affected my suspension of disbelief if she had more skills to choose from. A lot of people seem to hate Viola, but I don't know why. She's supposed to be an edgy annoying emo teenager, but that’s kind of the point? Kids, they're a mess, you know? I think her lack of self awareness contrasts well with her constant slapstick goof ups. Viola probably owns a Thrasher t-shirt without realizing it's a skateboarding magazine. It's funny, you know, the ignorance, it's funny, just laugh, they're kids, they don't know better, just nod and smile, they'll get there eventually. There are a few things I dislike about the action. First off, the camera can be so far away from the action it's hard to see Bayonetta at all. There are lots of particle and swooshing effects that seriously compromise visibility. The Dark Strider fight was particularly frustrating; the boss is mostly black on a dark purple background, with all those swishy effects on top. Groan. I don't love the Demon Slave mechanic. Being able to control huge demons sounds cool, but they move much slower than Bayonetta, and I don't get to play that fast, twitchy action that I love. Against large enemies, regular attack seem to do so little damage it's almost mandatory to use demon attacks. Most fights involve large areas with at least one large enemy, so the most efficient tactic is to abuse demon attacks. I like the smaller fights with smaller enemies in restrained spaces, but these are a rare. Enemy design is alright, but maybe a bit weaker than previous entries. I didn't mind the story so much, but I did find the big bad's motivations to be kinda vague. I've watched all the cutscenes without skipping at least twice, and I still didn't know what the antagonists motivations are. The fact that a seemingly omniscient, multiverse destroying, infinite monster-producing factory's master plan actively works against itself is pretty dumb. There are also a few scenes that made me go "no, don't do that, that’s dumb don’t- you did it". The pacing in the last few chapters feels rushed which isn't too surprising for a Platinum Game (i.e. Vanquish, Astral Chain), but for those other games, I didn't feel quite as invested in the characters as I am with Bayonetta and her buddies, which probably explains the salty fandom. My biggest complaint though might be about Bayonetta herself. She is not nearly sassy enough. I want a Pure Platinum level of sass. Over 9000 sass. Not some mid-tier sober Barney Stinson sass. What I NEED is a RuPaul's Drag Race best cattiest compilation Youtube video from user bestCelebComdeyKlips2004 level of sass. Anything less feels lacking, and Bayonetta just doesn't ham it up enough for me this time around. So, is Bayonetta 3 worth your monies? I'd say, not all of your monies, but some of them for sure. It still has good action, but it’s also still average story-telling. It’s not any better or any worse than the previous entries.
I liked TWEWY when I first played it about 15 years ago, and I liked it again when I played it last year. I enjoyed the pin collecting, the clothing system and stores, trying out food, walking through Shibuya, I even liked the combat. It's a memorable and touching game, and I was pretty worried about NEO when I played the demo. It felt like a thin veneer of the original, a Rise of Skywalker to the original trilogy. All the stuff you remember seeing, but none of the stuff you remember feeling. Quick shoutout to Jupiter, the studio that co-developed the original, as well as other classics like "Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy", and "Kemono Friends Picross". Before I talk about the game I feel like I gotta talk about Tetsuya Nomura. Listen, I get it. You're suspicious about this game. I was, too. I hate Nomura's story-telling shtick, too, and at his worst he ends up making "The Bouncher". But the thing is, as much as we all hate him for his shenanigans, at his best he's actually a very good character designer. FF6's Warring Triad is a great example of his talent. And as much as I find his simping for current fashion annoying, if there's one place it actually works it's in TWEWY's Shibuya. Sometimes I wonder if Nomura should just be hired to make up random game plots and gonzo mechanics, and then have other people take that stuff and make something functional out of it. I just don't think he's fit to create functional stories or reinterpret existing ones. I'm not sure he understands thematic cohesion or subtext, but if we're talking wacky high-concept garbage, he's good at that. The new gameplay also works surprisingly well. The way the light puck has been reinterpreted works well with the team-action mechanics. Getting long combos going takes some consideration and effort, and I find the action rewarding in itself. It's not a Platinum game, but it's still engaging. I do have a few complaints. One is that at some point, most pins that I could upgrade used the same input, so I was stuck waiting for that previous pin to master before swapping. And the other is that combat efficiency and pin collecting can be at odds. The game wants to get the player to level up pins and evolve them, but there are certain pins that are so fabulously inefficient or impractical in the new battle system that using them feels like a massive waste of time. I know the bombs are powerful, but trying to time the puck pass/beat drop with the explosions is a mess. Healing pins are also unappealing for most of the game, since for a good portion of the game only 4 pins can be used at a time, and reducing that to 3 severely reduces the team's capacity for keeping those juicy, juicy combos going. Stat upgrade pins are also kinda pointless early on. Stat progression is a bit weak, it was pretty easy to max out my team's stats without grinding too much, but I didn't feel like I'd become much stronger. The game gets a bit grindy on occasion - the original did, too, to be fair. It's not so much that the difficulty spikes in a traditional RPG manner, but whenever new enemies appear they usually have waaaaaaay more HP than their previous palette-swap versions. There aren't as many enemy types as in the first game, so the difficulty doesn't ramp up so much as spikes whenever new baddies show up. I find some of the huge HP pools to be a bit of a problem, especially considering that even with maxed out attack stats, damage output is still kinda low. This can make for very long battles. Here, a 10-reduction battle can easily take over 20 minutes on higher difficulties. Also, OG used to change tracks between rounds, in NEO we get one song the whole way through. I honestly kinda like the soundtrack - some of the songs really slap - but if I'm stuck fighting for 30 minutes to the same track, I'll get tired of hearing it. The last day of the game is much too long, and kinda undermines the intense emotions it stirs up. But the last scenes feel good, and the credits are super cool. That's right, the end credits are amazing. All in all, is this a must-play? No, but I really like it. It's not perfect, but it does a lot of things right. There isn't too much bloat, characters aren't completely unlikable and have decent development, the story is touching, the visuals are good, I enjoy the collecting, and the action is fun and fast and original. If you liked the first, you should definitely try this one out, and even if you've never played the original, it's worth considering. It's a bit laggy on Switch during messy fights, but it's still very playable. On PC it occasionally hangs and crashes. It's not Squeenix's most egregious PC port, but that's a very low bar. The higher framerate on PC seems to make it a bit easier to play, but it's not particularly difficult. PS4 is probably your best bet.
It's hard for me, an ex-diehard Square stan, to review a game like this on so many levels. A lot of my formative years involved Square games. FF1 through 9, Chrono Trigger and Cross, Secret of Mana, FF Tactics, Super Mario RPG, heck, even Parasite Eve. Back in the early- to mid- '90s, it seemed like Square had the Midas touch. So whenever news of their work would appear, I'd get very excited. I still remember my first glimpse of FF2/4 in Nintendo Power, close to a screenshot of Battle Dodgeball with a chibi Ultraman or something. A tiny screenshot, a fight against Ice Beasts in the tower of Zot or Bab-il, in a magazine from July of 1991. I remember the feels. The promise of excitement, the seemingly infinite potential of 16 bits. Square totally delivered on that promise, and kept delivering for a really long time. Squeenix can still dangle some quality IP carrots in front of me, and the compulsion to taste the forbidden vegetable remains. There's an absurd amount of high quality games in their back catalog. That's what makes this review so painful. FF7 Remake makes me feel very different feels from that 1991 Nintendo Power snippet, or the feels from first starting up the original FF7. I don't feel hope and excitement for the future, I don't imagine the infinite possibilities video games can offer. All I feel is mild shame and regret that my almost middle-aged ass needs to cut ties with one of the formative entities of its youth. To save everyone some time, I'll just list the stuff I dislike from the game. I am a '98 PC guy, so she's Aeris to me. In somewhat chronological order, I do not like: - Jessie's unwanted advances and persistence; - how Sephiroth is introduced; - the dementors; - the sidequests and "changing water filters"; - the new Johnny; - Chadley; - that Cloud doesn't have a hangover after getting paid; - the motorbike section, it's way too long; - Roche, he's pointless; - that there are other, more moderate branches of Avalanche, it makes Barret look like a psycho extremist; - turning off the solar lamps; - Cloud almost beheading Reno; - that everyone and their uncle in sector 5 keeps telling me how sweet Aeris is; - Kyrie; - Mireille; - helping kids (in the game; in real life I'm indifferent to helping kids); - Butch, Beck, and Burke; - that we need to see them more than once; - the robot arm "puzzles"; - running from one of the Wall Market's map to the other just to pad for time; - Wall Market's new song; - the Hell House fight; - the sewers and the pump mini-game; - the ghosts in the train graveyard adding playtime, yet nothing to the story or Aeris' characterization; - Aeris walking slowly during the plate bombing crisis; - Wedge surviving falling from the pillar thanks to his grappling hook; - Wedge surviving a city falling on top of him; - that Tetsuya Nomura - a man over the age of 50 - seemingly kept Wedge alive just to make fat jokes; - the game undermining the shock and inhumanity that the destruction of Sector 7 conveyed in the original by saving most of its residents; - the generic bad guy music that plays in the president's office instead of his soothing classical music; - the Cait Sith cameo; - Barret shooting rocks (who came up with this one?); - Elmyra telling the team to not rescue Aeris; - Aeris seeing the future and becoming an exposition machine; - Leslie and the incredibly stupid plan to get help from Don Corneo; - the purple ooze instead of blood; - that Barret - previously established psycho extremist Avalanche guy - saves his mortal enemy, the president of Shinra, from falling to his death; - president Shinra dying 30 seconds later for "reasons"; - Sephiroth's buildup being so weak; - Sephiroth's motivation being undefined; - Barret getting stabbed and then magically surviving; - basically anything that happens after this point. I don't think any of these are particularly spicy takes. When the game constantly reminds me how terrible the new content is, how much better and more efficient the storytelling was 25 years ago, it's hard to think of this as a good game. I blindly supported Squeenix for literal decades, spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on their products, so this just hurts. Is this what they think of their fanbase? Is this what they think of ME? I've been in this toxic relationship for too long, and FF7 Remake just demonstrates how much we've changed and drifted apart in the past 15-20 years. They can still produce some decent stuff - they co-developed NEO: TWEWY, at least - but when the majority of their products are buggy remakes of great games - i.e. making their old games worst - I just have to reevaluate my life choices and cut my losses. I'm sorry Squeenix, it's not you, it's me. ... Who am I kidding, it's you, you ****.
I've already reviewed Persona 5 for PS3, and I admittedly found it somewhat frustrating. I really want to like it, being a big fan of P3 and P4, but whenever I look at my P5 box, I just feel mild exasperation. Cue GamePass and P5 Royal. By most accounts it's a better game than vanilla P5. And, I have to admit, one of the things that annoyed me about the original (at least on PS3) were the load times. They weren't that bad, but they were everywhere. Between rooms. Walking up a set of stairs. Exiting the classroom. And the ones after battles annoyed me most. Thankfully the PC version - even the Xbox One S version - blows through these loading screens almost instantly. How much faster? Well, my good readers, I've painstakingly compared between versions how fast I could get to the part of the game where choosing daily activities becomes available, and here are the results P5 PS3: 100 minutes P5R PC/Xbox One S: 75 minutes Yes, that's right, 25 minutes of loading times removed for the intro. It's probably less noticeable on a regular playthrough, which would take about 4 hours to get this far, but over the course of a 100 hour game it will make a huge difference. But ultimately, Persona 5 Royal is just, I dunno, more Persona 5, and it still annoys me. The first 4-5 hours encapsulate pretty well all the stuff I dislike about the game. Morgana is incredibly annoying and condescending. On top of re-explaining some of the stuff we already saw in the intro scene, he's mostly set up as an exposition dispenser, and everytime he opens his mouth it's a bad case of "explaining it makes it worse". There must be 20 fights early on where Morgana explains all sorts of mundane mechanics. "Use special skills to hit your enemy's weak points", "Enemies are weaker when they're downed", "Your fake gun works here because reasons". I know how a knife works, the pointy bit goes stab-stab. In case you couldn't understand these very basic video game mechanics, after Morgana explains them to you a popup window will reiterate everything post fight. Come on, Atlus. I still find the raw amount of dialog frustrating. Conversations take much too long to get to the point. If a character is present during a cutscene, that person will talk, even if they don't have anything useful to add. I don't need 12 paragraphs of discussion to decide we're going into a palace, I just want someone to say "are we going into a palace?", so I can answer and move on with my life. And the chatter just never stops, even outside of conversations or cutscenes. Post-fight quips, tips while exploring, warnings while sneaking around enemies, excitement when there's a chest in the room, in the middle of a fight. Please, just be quiet for a few minutes. Aren't thieves supposed to be discrete? How about that new stuff? The grappling hook sounds cool, but it seems like a solution to a problem that didn't exist. The mild inconvenience of going up a set of stairs wasn't magically solved by using a grappling hook, Elon. I always find myself irritated when my imagination goes "hey, a grappling hook would be really useful right now" in a place where it can't be used. The palaces were good without it in the original anyway. **** appearances were clearly added in post, and these scenes feel kinda weird compared to all the other interactions. Maruki's inclusion feels a bit better, but how rapidly his Confidant rank goes up early on is a bit off. I think the guns are better, but still poorly balanced. I don't know why we need Jose or the Thieves' Den. Mementos still ****. Still, it's hard to not look at Royal as the definitive version of the game. I have had some mild performance issues with it, which is pretty strange for a PS3 era game. I mean, I'm running Death Stranding on max steadily over 50 FPS, but this goes down to 30 in crowded areas? It's not a game breaking thing, and I don't mind the game running at 30 FPS anyway - I'm going to get hate for this, but some animations in this game look bad at 60 FPS - but these performance issues seem to be a fairly common issue on the Steam Forums. If I could make vanilla load on my PS3 as fast as it does on PC, or get RPCS3 to work decently, I wouldn't bother even considering Royal's existence. If you love Persona 5 and want the best version possible, PC is probably it, though I don't think it's worth more money than any other version of it. If you weren't sold on vanilla, Royal is not going to change your mind.
After quitting partway through Tales of Vesperia, for some reason that is still unknown to me I decided to pick up Tales of Berseria. I am concerned about my obsessive desire to like these kinds of games. The thing is, Berseria is close to being a good game, but there's just enough jank and stupidity in there for me to keep distancing myself from anything that kinda looks like it. First of all, the game doesn't look very good. I honestly think Vesperia, a PS3 game from 2008, looks better. The environments look even blander than Vesperia's, lighting and shadow effects are practically nonexistent, enemy designs are often really boring. Character designs aren't too bad, but it's pretty hard to justify Velvet's outfit. It's often referenced in the game, "a lady shouldn't dress so immodestly", "aren't you cold wearing that outfit?", "you should be careful going around dressed like that". It would be much more productive for Velvet to wear a less inconspicuous outfit and fit in with the general public, but instead she wears something so revealing we can tell she's into "ladyscaping". The game is oddly sexist. The male characters often make broad outdated statements about women, and then the female characters make broad outdated statements about the men. What year is this, 1957? I find it really strange when a video game tells me women are fickle things and men are oblivious sex-crazed monkeys, when every other interaction does not point to those "facts". Sexist comments aside, I actually don't mind the cast this time. Velvet however is so emo and grumpy you'd think this is a Final Fantasy game. She's way worse than Noctis, somewhere close to Squall levels of emo-ness. Laphicet 2.0 is kinda terrible, but he has a decent late game turn. The others are'nt too bad. Rokurou is pretty likable, Eizen is surprisingly informed, Eleanor is kind of annoying but somewhat endearing, and Magilou is infinitely irritating in the best possible way. I like Magilou. I shouldn't, she's awful, but I like her anyway. The battle system is at least more fun than Vesperia's. It feels a lot faster, and there's no jumping, I'm not constantly swinging at the air when enemies aren't moving directly towards me. However, it is infinitely complex, to the point that 20 hours in I'm still getting tutorial screens explaining new garbage. It's possible to map 4 different skills to each face button, but I don't really understand the point of being able to change "button skill tree" mid-combo, since most enemies are immune to one element. I just mapped elemental attacks to the buttons that matched those colours, and mashed that until said enemies would die. Which takes a while, because enemies have tons of HP. These random mooks can take a serious beating, while simultaneously dealing very little damage to my characters. Why does a 40 hit combo not kill an enemy that hits me for single digit damage? I still don't really understand why I can hit the same enemy, during the same battle, with the same skill, and have damage values range between 85 and 1400 points. There is very little risk involved in random encounters (at least on Normal), but they often overstay their welcome. I also find most fights to be visually messy - particle effects, numbers, spells, it's so busy. Controlling a spell-caster is terrible; enemies have a tendency to target the controlled character, and the spells take so long to activate enemies will rarely let your character get a chance to actually finish casting. Ultimately, I don't enjoy the action all that much, mashing is good enough to finish the game without really grinding on normal, but I haven't found it to be particularly satisfying mashing. Story-wise, it's definitely better than Vesperia. I haven't felt like my intelligence was insulted at every plot turn, which is a pretty big improvement. The bad guy is not just some random deus ex machina existential threat to the world, and the beef between the bad guy and Velvet is set up early on and drives the plot forward. No random "oh, let's visit the desert" garbage this time. There are a few minor detours, but it never feels too forced, and the team still retains a sense of agency. The game is very linear, but I'd rather have a decent linear story than a crap story with tons of freedom. The late game pacing is definitely on the slow side, though, and I was getting tired of moving from one dungeon to fight some mooks and then get a cutscene to get access to a different dungeon to fight some more mooks before getting another cutscene. The music is terrible. All in all, should you play this game? If you like the Tales series, you'll probably like this game. If you don't like the series, you'll probably be lukewarm at best about this game. I'd avoid it in that case.
I like Scott Pilgrim. I own the books. I have seen the movie. Although I never identified with Scott as an individual, the story and themes hit pretty close to home in the mid 2000s when I first read the books. It felt very relevant to me at that time, in the same way Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared did. It has a special place in my heart. But this game is kind of a bust. I remember playing the demo, presumably in 2010, and wanting to like it but being kinda bored with it. Well, 12 years later, I bought it, and it's still a bit boring. It's not an inherently broken or poorly made game, I just don't think it's a good brawler. For us oldies, it's a very obvious modernisation of River City Ransom (Street Gangs for you PAL people, or Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari for Japan). I really liked RCR, in fact I still own the cartridge (quick flex here). I spent many, many hours playing through it and boosting my stats by eating croissants and going to the sauna. It was fun, the soundtrack absolutely slapped (it still slaps, really), and coop was a blast. A pair of bosses were called Benny and Clyde, I mean, come on, that's awesome. Scott Pilgrim vs The World is very much a "spiritual successor", and is ultimately but a minor mechanical upgrade. You go around beating up punks, getting cash, eating food and reading books to improve stats, and that's about it. But I think it's just a bit too old-school in its mechanics and stats. Sure, there's more variety than in RCR, but it feels slow and unexciting compared to more modern beat'em ups, like Streets of Rage or the new TMNT game. The walk speed is incredibly slow, and yeah, sure, you can increase your base speed by eating food, even at max speed stat it's not that fast. Attacks feel good when they hit, but defending doesn't work for me. A lot of times I'd expect an attack, block, but then the enemy would just stand there until I stopped blocking, and hit me the instant I let go of the block button. This encourages turtling, slows down the already sluggish pace, and just isn't particularly fun. Wanna get through a level without getting hit? Block all day, baby, just know it's going to be a long day. Also early on, it feels like enemies have a looooot of HP. The game just moves very slowly, and one strategy I found online is to grind using a money cheat code in the first level and stat boost - which does make the game move more swiftly (I've done it). Thing is, once stats have been boosted, the game gets snappier and ultimately more fun. That seems a bit telling about the stat progression, but that's just like, my opinion, man. Honestly, the game is pretty difficult even on the easiest mode, so I don't know why base stats are so anemic, yet so easily boosted. Again, poor progression. Ultimately, I just don't find it very fun. It's not without merit, though. The pixel art is very good, and the music is good. I like the general concept, but I wish it were built a bit better and it moved a bit faster. I would only recommend the game to hardcore Scott Pilgrim fans, or hardcore beat'em up fans, or some combination thereof. Everybody else should probably abstain.
Scarlet Nexus should be so much worse than it is. But incredibly, against all odds, Bandai Namco has actually made a game I don't intensely hate. MY WORLDVIEW IS CRUMBLING Scarlet Nexus is basically an action game with possibly the most ridiculous high-concept universe ever made into a game. The mechanics are overly complicated, the story is full of dumb twists, characters are walking tropes, and yet - AND YET - I kept playing to see what happened next. I don't hate it, so it can't be that bad right? So what does it do well? ... I'm not sure, really. Visuals are a bit of a mixed bag. It's not that they're bad, but the mismatch between the very stylized anime characters and everything else doesn't work for me. Environments and enemies are realistically modeled, coloured and shaded soberly. Characters on the other hand have extreme proportions, are super colorful, and are cell-shaded. It's not that I don't like the designs; overall, I actually like how the characters look, and the enemies are pretty disturbing. Individually, designs work, but as a whole I think it produces an incoherent look. Characterisation isn't too bad. The main male character (Yuito) is the generic oblivious anime teenager, and his teammates are mostly a collection of tropes, but some of their early interactions aren't too bad. Later on, the supporting cast doubles in size, and the numerous supporting characters don't really get a chance to do anything other than stand in the background and yell "Yuitoooooo!" during cutscenes. We then spend lots of time with the MC, but he's kinda boring. I haven't played through the female's story. While we're talking narrative, the game is littered with massive info dumps. These dumps can be so dense and hard to follow that the game actually has its characters text message each other the plot, because the devs knew players would be lost. So yeah, the story is a mess. After finishing the game, I'm hard pressed to understand how any individual event really affected the ultimate fate of the planet. Imagine man A buys a lighter for man B, which helped B save himself from a zombie apocalypse, and B's survival would later make it possible for him to go back in time to make sure A met his future wife, because A would not have had kids otherwise, and the kids picked the the lighter, and later A's wife disappears to go into the future to save the world, which she accomplished by bringing that same lighter onto the alien mothership that allowed her to set up a chain reaction - powered by the power of friendship no less - that destroys the invading alien horde that initially caused the zombie apocalypse. Which was the instigating event? I haven't spoiled the story for you, but I kinda feel like I did. I don't mind the general gameplay, but it's clear that to really master/exploit the mechanics one has to really commit to its more esoteric elements. Slashing and dodging is not going to cut it; heavy use of secondary abilities is paramount to success, especially later in the game. Ultimately it's not really my bag, and I can nitpick all day. Stealth is kinda OP but doesn't work against bosses, there aren't many options for long range or AOE attacks, I **** at swapping between items or skill sets in battle, there are 3 meters and 3 HP bars to keep an eye on... it feels finicky to me. During most of the game 4 alternate skills are available, which I found fine, but when the team doubles in size the skills shoot up to 9, I never really got proficient with those. If you really like this kind of complexity, Scarlet Nexus has you covered. I prefer simpler things. The game also has Persona-style social stuff, but it doesn't work nearly as well. It works in Persona because there's pacing, there's buildup. Here they're all lumped together at the end of a chapter. After a 30-minute dungeon, there will be the opportunity to hang with your homies. At first, it's not too bad, but with the large cast, tons of items to give, long "bond episodes", it just gets very tedious. After 40 minutes of bonding and gifting, I want to move on, not ask Luka about his protein shakes. The supporting cast doesn't really get any interesting development in these events, either. I know not every side character can be Akinari from P3, but I want a bit more than "I want to work out and get big muscles because I'm insecure". Still, with all that being said, it's a decent game. I like that it's unique in its action, general aesthetic, and overall concept. It doesn't feel like a ripoff (except for the social part), and I feel like it was crafted with care and passion. So yeah, not bad, Bandai Namco.
Tangle Tower is VERY charming. After playing Trials of Mana, Tangle Tower's voice acting is soooooooooooo refreshing. Performances are absolutely top tier, it was almost hard to understand after playing so many crap games. I'd almost forgotten that voice acting could be a good thing, that it could add charm and personality to characters in a video game. Visuals are similarly fantastic. Backgrounds are beautiful, and the way each character sways and moves and twitches adds so much to their characterization. It's great. I also like the music. There are lots of different styles and they're all done well. I like most of the puzzles. Occasionally I'd get frustrated by the specificity of certain puzzles, like, "this thing was a result of that thing" being incorrect while "that thing resulted in this thing" being correct. I understand the mechanical necessity of the system, but I had some mild irritation with a few puzzles. Sadly, its weakest point is the ending. It feels rushed and leaves tons of dangling loose ends. Oh, you want to hear about this interesting plot point we discovered about 12 minutes ago? Naw, we're not going into that. So yeah, mild disappointment aside, Tangle Tower is beautiful and fun. It's definitely worth purchasing for point-and-click fans, especially when it's on sale.
As fondly as I look back on Secret of Mana, Trials of Mana (aka Seiken Densetsu 3) never really did much for me. I had tons of nitpicks about the action, the story felt a bit underwhelming. Sure, it was a technical tour de force back in the day, and I think it still stands as one of the best-looking pixel art games ever made, and its OST was and remains very good. But so many tiny things annoy me about it. How does the remake fare? The story is an exact play-by-play retelling of the original, with all its backtracking, macguffin searching, and lack of agency intact. It's too bad that the story wasn't streamlined, because it feels like padding nowadays. There's not much character growth, the bad guys are bad because, uh, *checks notes* because they're bad guys. Motivations are kinda flimsy, and connections between characters and arcs are tenuous at best. It's kinda bloated. The whole Domperi arc could have been removed. The group doesn't really "search" for Shade as much as they run into him by accident. The volcano arc is completely unnecessary. The story seems epic at first, but compared to Secret of Mana, it's kinda bland. SoM is full of tragedy: Randi's exile from Potos; Dyluck's story; heck, even Geshtar's return as an undead warrior is pretty dark. Trials never really hits as hard. I never liked the enemy leveling system in Trials. I understand that it's somewhat necessary for the non-linear part of the game, but I just don't want to fight level 40 rabites, I'm tired of seeing those guys. It never feels like the characters are getting more powerful, because I'm stuck facing the same enemies over and over again. The action really frustrated me in the original, and it's somewhat improved here, but it kinda falls flat as an action RPG. A lot of times it just feels like I'm waiting for enemies to die. Dodging doesn't feel good, attacks don't feel very snappy, and hits aren't satisfying when they connect. Enemies are hp sponges, especially some bosses. Considering how much fighting there is in the game, I want and expect better mechanics than this. So the story's kinda bland and the action kinda weak... why am I playing this again? For the graphics maybe? Visually, Square did this game dirty. From arguably the best-looking 16-bit game ever to borderline PS2 era graphics. Characters look like plastic, some enemies look awful (Molebears, what have you done to the molebears?!?!). Lighting is flat all around, so most locales feel bland and lack personality. I couldn't even tell if it was day or night in some areas. I've been told the models are "aCcUrAtE tO tHe oRiGiNaL sOuRce mAtErIaL", but that seems like a cheap excuse for making stuff that looks bad, while completely missing the point of the original concepts. The music is still good, I mean, it's hard to ruin one of the best OSTs of the 16-bit era. I think Secret of Mana's music is better overall, though. I was still considering looking past some of these transgressions, but the cut scenes really hammered in the final nail in the coffin. The voice acting is possibly the worst I've heard, period. It runs the gamut from incredibly stiff to ludicrously hammy. Charlotte is probably the worst, with her "accent" coming in as offender number one. She's a 15-year old in the body of a 6-year old who speaks like a 3-year old (change all letters "r"s and "l"s into "w"s, example: "I'm weawwy sowwy to have to wwite wike dis"). Why WHY After playing FF7 Remake, Trials of Mana was interesting to play because it kinda fumbles for completely opposite reasons. FF7R takes tons of liberties with the original, adds lots of content, but almost everything good about it is pulled straight from the original, and most if not all of the new stuff is awful. Trials, on the other hand, has a lot of the same pitfalls as the original. Action that's a bit weak, and a story that's not great. The QoL improvements make the game much more playable though, and the last stretch of the game felt snappier than the original, so there are improvements. The Mana games have a specific vibe and whimsy to them that is hard to find elsewhere, and that's kinda sad. I find it depressing to see a classic flagship game with tons of potential be wasted on what is essentially a budget title that panders to the fandom, but you know what they say: "CAPITALISM, BAYBEEEEEEEE"
I didn't like the first Ori very much. I thought enemies were hard to see, some of the platforming was frustrating, the chase sequences frustrating, navigating the world a pain... Wasn't a fan. Will of the Wisps solves basically all the issues I had with the first. It's even prettier than the first game. The different locales all look and feel different, and the level design is improved. The action is also better this time around. Instead of shooting tiny dumb sparks, Ori has a cool spectral sword. Secondary weapons involve a wimpy bow, a grenade-like projectile, a Guilty Gear Burst, and a massive exploding spear. The spear is awesome. And the improved arsenal actually comes in useful in the brand spanking new boss fights. Boss fights! In an Ori game! They're actually pretty fun if a bit messy. I still have the odd issue here and there. Some late-game platforming can get frustrating, though it's not as bad as some of the stuff from the first game. The final form of the final boss actually confused me, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Was I supposed to find a platform that was off-screen, like in the previous steps of the boss fight? Where's the boss attacking from? What's with all this smoke? I can't see anything, help a brother out. Anywho, that issue only took a few minutes to resolve, and is a pretty minor blemish on this very good game. The story even has some poignant moments. Will of the Wisps won't make it onto my all-time favorite list, but it is extremely well made. It's gorgeous, touching, and just plain fun.
Tunic looks good. It's pretty, the music is nice, it has some cool visual effects. It's definitely cute and charming. But it's such a pain to play. Controls feel super sluggish, walk speed is incredibly slow. Inputs feel laggy, attacking and rolling, even walking feels unresponsive. I'm controlling a fox for chrissakes, he should be running circles around everyone. Enemies hit like tanks, the windows for dodging and attacking are super tight. Some enemies track mid-swing so you can't really dodge around them to counter, just away from them. Coupled with the anemic striking range, battles often stretch out. I don't know where I'm supposed to go, and it takes forever to get there because of the walking speed. Getting items doesn't feel all that satisfying. The items aren't that original, I never felt like I had just discovered something exciting. Compare this to Ori, where lobbing fireballs can help me jump higher; that's interesting skill design. It's just incredibly frustrating, and there's not much payoff. I've given up on games before, but rarely as quickly as I have with Tunic. 100% honest here, I full on ragequit after a very short amount of time. I like the concept, but I hate the execution.
I like Dodgeball Academia. I really do. But I wish I could say I love it. It has so much going for it, yet I somehow feel somewhat empty playing it. I feel like I'm staring into the abyss, and as the void stares back at me it screeches: "Terry, why do you keep doing this to yourself? Why do you keep nitpicking and slamming everything you watch and play? Can't you just enjoy yourself for once?". And I always wonder: "Who's Terry?" DA is wacky through and through, and that's great. Character designs are amazing, both in their aesthetics and characterization. The animation is some of the best I've seen in any video game, ever. Characters twitch and sway with tons of personality, and even though characters aren't super deep, they're all memorable and I never felt indifferent to any of them. Otto should be bland and boring, but he manages to stay entertaining and likable. While not straying all that far from the traditional anime main character, he still feels unique. I liked (or enjoyed disliking) every character in the game. It's great. I do like the overall gameplay, though controlling a 3-person team with no AI is a bit of a pain. Certain characters can catch balls and some counter them, and because the timing and how to approach the game can vary wildly between these two moves, it makes team management a bit of a pain. Countering isn't all that useful against the CPU, though it probably works great against human opponents. It's honestly a bit frustrating facing an enemy that counters, and as far as I know it's impossible to tell if said enemy can counter until it does. I'm expecting enemies to catch, which they do 90% of the time, so the 10% of the time they counter it's a huge shock and basically a guaranteed hit. The main overworld theme kinda grates, but other tracks are pretty good. I wish there was a fast travel mode, I get it doesn't always work with the story, but sometimes it's just kinda boring walking from one end of the map to the other. A lot of main quest stuff involves walking to some spot, doing a few battles, walking back to a different spot, doing a few battles, rinse and repeat. So much of the main quest hinges around walking through the main area that it gets dull quickly. As much as I like the characters, the story doesn't do much with them. I mean, I like Otto and company, but there's no real development, the stakes are very low, there aren't any moral dilemmas, I just wish there was a bit more to it. And the last chapter happens, and the stakes are a bit higher, and we have some decent conflict, and I was really into it. And I wanted it to keep going, but it just ended. I can imagine this being a lot of fun to play with friends, 3v3 would probably be an amazing time, but I just don't have that many friends anymore. I feel like a few quality of life improvements could be made. There is no dedicated map button, which seems odd, especially considering the select/back button does nothing. There are so many types of items that they become a pain manage. Healing items are not that useful because the infirmary is free and practically always accessible. Also, the game gets a bit choppy in the main area. I've got a 6600 XT, it's not that starchy, it should run better than this. Can I recommend Dodgeball Academia? I dunno. It's pretty, funny, charming, and fun, but it also feels a bit empty for a large portion of the main quest.
Borderlands 3. What a time to be alive. I really enjoyed the first Borderlands game. I thought it was a great mix of looting, humour, grinding, and cartoony looks. It wasn't perfect; the AI ****, the looting was hit-and-miss, and the endgame was like a bad Crysis fanfic. Then came Borderlands 2. It was mostly the same, the characters had somewhat been Flanderized, Claptrap wasn't quite as funny, but it was a snappier, faster experience. The new guns were cool, slag was clever, but the leveling curve had some issues. Badass enemies weren't usually the "fun" type of challenge. "Bullet sponges, bullet sponges everywhere" - Buzz Lightyear The Pre-sequel? What's a pre-sequel? Seriously though, B3 is an improvement over the Pre-sequel, but I'm not sure it's that much of an improvement over B2. It looks better than previous games, but I don't think the visuals have really scaled up that well. Gameplay hasn't changed, AI still ****, looting feels even worse this time. There's so much loot, every battle there are dozens of guns lying around. There's no point in picking up a white or green weapon, ever, because there are always at least 2 blue ones from any fight. I dunno, I'm not sure what the point is anymore. The download is about 100 gb, B2 was less than 8 gb, what am I spending my bandwidth on? The game's not 12.5x bigger and better, I just don't know what all the bloat is for. Isn't Elden Ring around 50 gb? I do prefer the leveling curve compared to B2, so at least there's that, and enemies are way less spongy than in B2. The voice acting is still good, but the characters aren't quite as memorable. Presumably after the "failure" of Pre-sequel, management decided to bring back more of the original cast to pander to the fans, but I think it's a detriment to the story. The game tries to shoe in so many people that we don't really have time to stop and engage with them. As soon as a chapter's done, their 5 minutes of fame are over, and we get some new faces for the next chapter. Unless they're from the previous games, like Lilith, Hammerlock, and Tannis, those guys are around for the whole game. But I don't have to build relationships with them, those already exist. So I don't get a chance to build anything new and meaningful; it's either nostalgia or relationships too shallow to be interesting. The game's also pretty buggy. I've had my mouse stop moving the camera and instead just act as a pointer on-screen during the game. The map is pretty buggy, sometimes I can't zoom or scroll or pan, and when I try to pan I end up fast-travelling by accident. I guess these are mouse-specific bugs, maybe it's not an issue with a controller. Alt-tabbing makes the game crash way more often than it should, and sometimes it even causes the game to switch screens in my multi-screen setup. Some bullets would occasionally be invisible. The game also crashes every now and then, citing memory location errors. Receiving a Teams call also closes the game outright, just don't tell my boss. Anywho, if you can't get enough of Borderlands, then you should get Borderlands 3. If you feel like you want something new from Borderlands, don't get Borderlands 3. If you want to get into Borderlands, save your bandwidth and cash and get B2.
Are you feeling despair in this year of our lord 2022? Are you looking for a fighting game that's both serious and accessible in the hopes of virtually punching the frustration out of your soul? Confused by terms like meaty and BnB? Do you identify as a filthy casual? You looked at Guilty Gear. How are you supposed to learn all these weird setups? Bedman? More like Bad, man. You tried KOF. You say you can't win any matches because you can't pull of j.C, cl.C, f+A, [BC] cl.C, qcf+AC, dp+BD, qcb+ACx3, qcf~hcb+P~qcfx4+A? Git gud you scrub. You went to Street Fighter, but didn't actually make it into a match after watching 12 consecutive ads for Nissin Cup noodles. You checked out BlazBlue and some other anime fighters, but you're not a perv or a weeb so you hated them. Smash? Stop touching me inappropriately, you weirdo. TIME FOR FIGHTING EX LAYER (FEXL for serious players, and Fexxle for us n00bs). Fexxle is the perfect game for a disgusting beginner such as myself. Can't link attacks properly? Weak-medium-strong attacks chain. Can't do full circle grappling moves? Use the progressive input mode and pull those moves off. Have a hard time managing your super, ultra, hyperdrive, guard and burst gauges? There's only one gauge for supers. Your footsies ****? TOO BAD. And if you're actually serious about shedding the scrub label, you can woodshed in the "Expert Room", basically Street Fighter's Trials mode, and then hit the Training Room with its decent dummy options. The Training Room even has a Kumite mode, which is good because I now hear Jean-Claude Van Damme saying "Kumite" in my head every time a new opponent appears. There's enough depth for serious players (or so I've been told), yet it's still a lot of fun for bad/average players (I'm telling you). It's not perfect though. The Expert Room only shows skill names, and not their inputs. How am I supposed to know what Shinkyaku-Geki is? Kyakuhougi? Crouching Heavy Kick? Come on Arika, throw me a bone. Pullum has annoying sound effects and Sanane's cry is grating. There are no subtitles for battle intros and victory speeches, so I have no idea what's going on. The clearly non-native english speaker saying "FAI-DING EEEE EKSSS LAYURRRR" at the title sounds cheap. But I don't care, I like the game anyway. And for the non-scrubs? There's rollback. (Note to the scrubs: you don't need to know or care what this means) If it were actually possible to get into an online match, it would be perfect! But remember, this is 2022.
I do love me some good MegaTen, and SMT 5 is good MegaTen. It's close to being great, but that's also what make it so disappointing. I gotta say, SMT 5 is very accessible. What makes it so accessible? Quality of Life improvements, baby. First off, we got rid of random battles, which is nice. Scanning an enemy for stats and weaknesses is better. Battle animations can be skipped, for snappier battles. Demon Fusion now has Reverse Search and Reverse Compendium search, making it much easier to figure out which demons are accessible, and skill inheritance remains selectable. Fast travel is quick. Visually, I think the game looks good, but it is pretty grainy and draw distance isn't great. The game stutters in some areas though. It's not too problematic, but still... Environments aren't super varied in looks; desolate sandy urban wasteland counts for at least 80% of the game. I wish there were more variety, like Nocturne has. The areas themselves are pretty elaborate, and some areas can be hard to navigate - which isn't a bad thing. The music is quite good, with some outright great tracks here and there. Voice acting is fine, some stuff is kinda clunky, but it's not Octopath-level cringe. Gameplay-wise, I have some gripes. I'm not a huge fan of Heavy-level attacks that pierce, seems like a cop-out to me and doesn't really promote skill and demon variety. And when a boss casts Impaler's Animus (basically Charge/Concentrate with the Pierce effect added), guard with your MC and just hope for the best, because it's practically a one-hit KO. Regular attacks are painfully weak, to the point of being useless. Here, skills are so essential to deal basic damage that MP is often the limiting factor in both boss battles and exploration. It doesn't help that skill MP consumption is way higher than it was in previous games. Luster Candy and Debilitate usually took about 50 MP per cast in previous games, here it starts at 150 MP with baseline support affinity. ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY Like in SMT 4,physical skills use MP, so a demon with high HP and low MP is useless. Damage output is heavily correlated with character level, and the level scaling effect seems a bit too drastic. Any fight with a level gap over 5 is often too great to overcome. Exp gain is also heavily nerfed when above enemy levels, and without a decent late-game or post-game dungeon (at least without DLC to my knowledge), late-game grinding is incredibly impractical without level-up items, which I wasn't super careful about hoarding in my first playthrough. So there I was, trying to beat the superboss, under-leveled and getting rekt with little recourse but hours upon hours of super slow grinding... or buying DLC. I mentioned earlier that the Demon Compendium is easier to fill, but at the same time it makes the whole process less exciting and more mechanical. By the end of my second playthrough, I was just fusing all the demons I didn't have, with little regard to what skills they should be getting or what role they'll have in my team, because my team was already set with all those piercing skills, anyway. Ultimately, when playing on Normal for a "casual" run, these issues aren't that problematic, but during my second playthrough on hard where I wanted to change up my build, these issues became a bit more obvious. The second playthrough also exposed some issues with the story. A lot of "important" parts end up being forgettable and irrelevant to the overall arc, and secondary characters seem like they'll have something interesting or important to say, but they just end up being background noise. Only one character gets any sort of development, and he's the most annoying character in the game. And that's really too bad, because at the start of the game, when all these secondary characters are introduced, it seems like they're going to be really important, and that they'll have all sorts of interesting things to say and do, and that we'll get to see them grow and influence the world, but nah, they don't do anything. Endings-wise the Neutral choice is kinda chaosy, Chaos doesn't feel all that chaotic, and Law is so hardcore authoritarian it's hard to consider it a serious option. All in all, I don't think SMT 5 will convert non-fans into stans, but it's still a decent. Will I ever revisit this game? Not for the story, it's not particularly interesting or deep. A hard run? The level scaling would probably make it a crazy slog. Purely for the gameplay? I prefer Nocturne's, honestly. I think that's what makes it disappointing; mechanically it's solid, the gameplay is fun, but ultimately the weak story and poor characterization make the experience bland and forgettable.
So I got this game for free a while back, and I decided to give it a fair shake. Eeeeh It has some things going for it. It doesn't look too bad, the story UI stuff going through a book looks good, character design is solid, and the illustrations are great. The actual gaming portions look fine, though a bit bland. There's a great sounding voiceover that functions similarly to the one in Bastion. There are some interesting upgrade systems in the game, though it doesn't seem to affect gameplay much. I don't remember the music. The story and how it's presented are interesting at first, but the way the game is structured makes it very frustrating to press on. The game necessitates many "endings" to access the actual ending of the game. Combat is not very responsive yet very easy. I don't want to gatekeep and say every game has to be Ninja Gaiden, I'm also very okay with middle-of-the-road action like Zelda, but here the action doesn't really do anything for me. It's just not very snappy, and that kills the fun. I never felt in control, but I would still blow through enemies like a herd of wildebeests trampling through... through whatever wildebeests trample through. There are no boss fights, only a handful of enemy types, and of these about 4 are mild variations. It's not really fun. Compounded by the fact that there are only a few areas to visit - and without a guide I visited these few areas many, many times - and playing through bits of the story in hopes of getting one of the correct endings to progress is a slog. Even though a single run takes about 20 minutes, I was still bored way before I had exhausted the possibilities of landing on a useless ending. So to Steam discussions I went. "Wait, THAT's the correct path?!?" If the action was half as good as Hades, I would have tried to get every single ending. After about 5 runs, I had maxed out my weapon and amulet upgrades, so there was no point anymore in exploring locales. The detours had nothing to offer except restorative items I didn't need. I just went as fast as I could to the end of the level - not as some sort of challenge, but to rid myself of the burden of the gameplay. Sadly, Stories: The Path of Destinies is a really interesting concept with middling execution. I'll steep keep an eye out for the devs' next game.
I really wanted to like Flynn: Son of Crimson, but I feel like it fails on some key elements, and it really brings the experience down. First off, the game looks wonderful. It has some of the best spritework around, characters and enemies look great and are animated very well. Locales and backgrounds are full of details, and the whole package looks fantastic. The music is pretty good. All around, the presentation is strong. There's some decent variety in both looks and level design, and levels all feel unique. There are a few annoying levels here and there, but for the most part it's solid. One level is really annoying because of some other mechanics, so I'll get back to that one later. The story? Well, it's not great, but it's not a deal breaker. A lot of "twists" are revealed in text dumps in a late game level, and it feels kinda cheap. I just didn't have any attachments going in, so at the reveals I just kinda went "meh". The action is where stuff kinda went south for me. The game controls well, but a few things annoy me. Grabbing ledges works really well, but climbing up requires the jump button and letting go uses the down button. It just always felt strange. Moving while hanging on ropes is really slow and usually boring. The general battle mechanics also don't do it for me at all. I know it's all nitpick, but it feels like death by a thousand cuts. Attacking just didn't feel good to me. It seemed kinda slow and laggy. Attacking while jumping stops the character mid-air, which seems really weird. Basic enemies take too many hits to kill. Practically all enemies act the same and can be defeated using the same tactic; roll when they're about to attack and hit them from behind. The only difference being the number of rolls it takes to kill them. With many enemies around, the roll cooldown is pretty frustrating. The long range attack is slow, its range is too short, and the cooldown before moving is too long. There's a "Devil Trigger" mode that's so OP that there isn't any point in using the meter for other attacks. All enemies attack for the same amount of damage: 1 HP. It doesn't matter if it's a tiny bee stinging you, or a huge sentient armour stabbing you with a spear. 1 HP. The really bad level I mentioned earlier has to do with the long range attack. Certain obstacles can be interacted with using an elementally charged long-range attack. Water blocks can be frozen to use as steps, torches can be lit, certain enemies can be stunned with lightning. But changing elements and charging the long range attack are finicky and slow. For that one terrible level, I needed to constantly swap between elements to hit enemies and freeze ice blocks and then light torches to see what I was supposed to do next. It was the slowest, most boring level in the game. It's not challenging, it's just slow. The game has a pretty brisk pace otherwise, and all of a sudden you gotta stop every second platform to swap elements, charge, shoot, swap again, charge, shoot, continue. I don't understand how this level got through testing. On the other hand, levels where the mountable dog runs around are a lot of fun. There should have been more of these. So yeah, Flynn... it could have been pretty good. There's hope for the devs, for sure. But this game falls very short of my expectations.
Blasphemous is a pixel art metroidvania game made in the aesthetics of Spanish Inquisition catholicism. Important themes are guilt, sin, penitence, and lots of disembowelment and beheadings. How is it? It's pretty good, but I do find some stuff kinda finicky. Visually, it's quite well done. A lot of it is ugly, and I don't mean badly done, I mean intentionally ugly because enemies are dirty and greasy and bloody and disturbing looking. At some point I got a bit tired of seeing disturbing imagery, though YMMV. The library and art gallery portions of the map were pretty cool. In fact, most backgrounds are pretty impressive. Audio wise, the voice acting is very good. Music is fine, it's never annoying but for the most part it's very low and atmospheric, so kinda forgettable for me. Story-wise... It seems that it's interesting, but I honestly couldn't really understand what was going on. I ended up reading a lot of fandom pages to try and figure stuff out, who these enemies were and why I was fighting them. It's reminiscent of Souls game in that regard; the story isn't fed to the player at all, one has to actively search for it, and in all honesty that doesn't really work for me. If you love that kind of story-telling style, you'll probably enjoy Blasphemous' story. The story isn't the only obscure part of the game that kind of annoys me. Quests can be pretty convoluted, and I didn't really actively try to complete them as much as I accidentally picked up random items that NPCs wanted. For a metroidvania, I don't think this is really problematic, although one key item (not necessary to finish the game, though) requires a set of actions obtuse enough that I would never have figured it out without a walkthrough. I didn't actually know until after I'd finished the game how I'd accumulated all those extra accessory slots, because they're not called accessory slots, they're called "mYsTeRiEs Of ThE rOsArY". I honestly thought I was getting lore dumps for the Extras option from the main menu with a name like that. Just call it a freaking accessory slot. I hate it when a Japanese games invent stupid names, I think it's stupid here, too. The menu kinda ****, I only really want to use it to change loadouts, and the three pages for that use aren't next to each other and I never could tell which tab image represented which page. The random items all have massive text lore dumps that I just find infinitely unappealing. Again, if you like that stuff, you'll probably like Blasphemous. How is basic gameplay, you ask? It's fine, but I don't think it's such a standout. I often felt like the controls weren't responding to my inputs, it never felt crisp and clean like, say, Hollow Knight. It's unclear to me when or why some enemies and attacks can be dodged through with the slide and others can't. Ladders are surprisingly frustrating to latch onto while jumping. Hitboxes while on ladders are kinda wonky, which doesn't really sound like an issue apart from that one place where lightning bolts are flying everywhere and I felt like I kept getting hit - and falling back down to the bottom of the stage - when I was confident I had cleared the attack. I often got knocked over by enemy attacks, only to get up and get knocked over immediately again, like, 5 times in a row. A few late game enemies take insane amounts of hits - I'm talking 20 to 25 hits - and do about a third of a full health bar of damage in one hit - a hit that often leads to getting knocked over. On some level, they're not that hard, but slowing down to kill a bullet-sponge of a mook isn't my kind of fun. It feels more like a roadblock than a challenge, and the game is already a bit slow to begin with. Bosses on the other hand are great. Varied and original, challenging without being frustrating, they're definitely the highlight of the action. Some people seem to complain about spikes, which really wasn't an issue for me beyond one challenge room, so I dunno, it's not that bad. Would I recommend Blasphemous? Depends. If you like Souls games and metroidvanias, yeah, probably. If you don't like either of those things, I'd say avoid it.
It's catharsis time, boys and girls. I tried hard to like Monark, and to be fair it has some things going for it. The illustration work is great, and the main cast' s designs are good. There's an anime style intro movie that is super hype. I like finding hints lying around that hold solutions to puzzles. Some tracks are catchy, but some kinda stink. The UI looks good. That's about all I like about it. The 3D graphics are pretty rough. Enemy designs are bland and forgettable, character models look strange and lifeless, and environments are uninteresting with flat lighting. The camera is also very limited in its movement. When picking a dialogue option, the main character will randomly flap his lips for about 5 seconds while gesticulating, which is one of the strangest, most disturbing, and unintentionally hilarious things I've ever experienced. All boss levels have J-Pop tracks with vocals which feels a bit out of place. They are very well produced, and sound professional at least. The voice acting is mostly... *checks notes* ...bad, yeah it's bad. On some level, the voice actors never really had a chance because the dialog is awful. It's so bad it made me laugh out loud on many occasions. Gameplay is mostly split into two parts: exploration and battles. Exploration mostly involves going into an area that is full of "mist" to look for its source and snuff it out. Obstacles involve the "MAD Gauge" that slowly fills up, easily avoidable "insta-death" NPCs that try to block the way, and stray phone calls that start random battles. Individually, these ideas aren't so bad, but the way they are implemented is poor. The "insta-death" is basically a quick-travel trip to the infirmary, which isn't all that inconvenient, and the stray phone calls can just be ignored - which they should be because they're unwinnable battles. So there's no real tension to the exploration, just mild annoyance. No random battles sounds nice, but story battles don't provide enough EXP to progress so grinding becomes necessary anyway. Winnable stray-phone call battles that reduce the MAD Gauge while giving decent EXP would have been a much better use of these ideas, giving the player time to actually, you know, explore, while reducing the need to grind. Finding the source of the mist usually means solving small puzzles. Many of these involve talking to students to add them to a database which may contain information relevant to said puzzles. This is kind of interesting, but it ends up being really frustrating to sift through the database. At some point I realized that the students were sorted by class level first, and JAPANESE KANA ORDER second - Nice localization job, NIS. Non-Japanese names being sorted by their first name instead of their last name just adds to the confusion. The battles stick to pretty standard TRPG stuff, and try to center around the MC's "Resonance" skill, which shares skills, buffs, but also ailments between resonating characters. It's a novel idea that probably allows for all sorts of different tactics... right? Sorta, at best. It's terribly implemented, because early on, when the MC is the main damage dealer and buff skills are rare, Resonance is basically useless. The game kinda forces the player to not use it, and by the 70% mark it's suddenly super OP and the rest of the game is a breeze. In the last battle of the game, one lone, sad enemy unit attacked, once. I did not see what the final boss could do, because I managed to kill it in one turn using this one Resonance gimmick, as I had done with every other enemy in the game once I'd found this trick. And then there's the story. You guessed it, it's bad, but the script is so anus-clenchingly cringe that the story seems epic in comparison. Each boss character is supposed to have thought-provoking motivations, but their actions are so unambiguously bad it doesn't make them relatable or redeemable. Late-game clichés involve warped memories, Ayanami clones, the third impact, a mummudrai, time travel, ridiculous leaps of logic, and one of the least surprising reveals of all time. The seven sins angle doesn't really do anything thematically, and there isn't much social commentary. Character development is basically one big exposition dump per secondary character near the end-game, which doesn't really recontextualize any of their previous actions. The pacing is terrible, too; some randos die truly horrific deaths, but as soon as those cutscenes end, we never see or hear of these events again. No one pauses for the tragedy, no one pauses to reflect, we're just off to the next battle. Ultimately, I can't recommend this game to anyone, really. There's no real redeeming value to be found that could offset all the frustrations in the story, dialog, gameplay, and exploration.
The first thing you need to know before even considering playing Tokyo Mirage Sessions (TMS) is whether you are a weeb or not. Don't know what the word weeb means? Don't play this game. You know what weeb means and you ain't one? Don't play this game. You are a weeb? Read on. Now, for you weebs, you have to consider how much weebness you can tolerate, because I myself - a good 6/10 on the weebish scale - could not endure the onslaught on J-Pop imagery and saccharine neon colors and cheesy characters this game threw at me. I dislike the characters. I low-key hate the music. I feel insulted by the stupidity of the plot. And I despise the musical numbers above all else. Which is too bad, because beneath that indigestible mix of Idol tarts and Boy Band dorks lies a mechanically solid game. It plays a lot like a mainline SMT game, which may not be for everyone, but I sure like it. The battle system is very similar to Strange Journey's, where hitting an enemy's weakness will make other party members do a follow-up attack. And it's fun, and can be surprisingly challenging. The first time I saw an enemy cast Javelin Rain, I knew I was going to get rekt. TMS can create a peculiar sense of impending dread not unlike what the PS2 SMT games did. Running into a tough enemy in TMS can feel like encountering Flauros in Nocturne or Samael in DDS, like, feces just got real. It's really refreshing to have to seriously consider your actions in a random battle where failing to kill an enemy before it strikes can be the difference between a washout victory and total annihilation. Most battles are over pretty quickly, and random encounters can be avoided, so exploring dungeons doesn't end up as an exercise in tedium. Said dungeons are reasonably varied, and not so long as to cause nocturnal anxiety and perspiration. It's not bad. But once the boss is beaten, a ridiculous cutscene will remind the player how dumb this all is. One worrying instance involves the main character - an oblivious 18-year old Japanese student - putting his hand on an 11-year old girl's chest, making her gasp in semi-orgasmic fashion, causing a ball of concentrated friendship to come out of her body. Yo wtf One of the first main plot points involves a "great disappearance", where a bunch of people disappear during a concert. Five years and some hijinks later, one person reappears, and you'd think that would play an important part of the story, but it's just like, "Yay, she's back!" and that's the end of that arc. No PTSD, no reporters showing up to ask what happened, no issues reintegrating into society, no asking what was it like during those five years, we're all just one big happy family. NGHHHHHHH Visually, the game is a mixed bag. Battle models are pretty good, battle actions are really well animated, enemy designs are okay, locales look decent enough (better than the last few Tales' games I've played at least), but some basic stuff kinda looks bad. All characters have this weird janky walking animation that falls directly into uncanny valley, and character's everyday life models aren't great. Menus look pretty good, and the game is responsive all around, but getting new skills and weapons is terribly bloated. To get new weapo- er, I mean, a new Carnage (yes, another Japanese game with stupid made up words), these can't be simply purchased, they need to be created by doing a "Carnage Unity". Le sigh. Anywho, that's not that annoying yet, but every time a new "Carnage Unity" happens, there's a magical-girl styled transformation animation that takes place. Every single time. I wanna create 7 new weapons right now, I'm tired of pressing B to skip. The same thing happens when creating new skills. I don't know, show it to me once and never again, this is not necessary. I'd be willing to look past most of the minor issues in the game considering how engaging the action is, but the story is so dumb that it actively disincentivized me from playing. If you happen to enjoy the visual style and J-Pop tomfoolery of Tokyo Mirage Sessions, you may be able to enjoy this game completely, minor mechanical gripes aside. I just can't.
I like Eastward. I wish I could give it a 10/10, but it has a bunch of **** issues that really bring down its mathematically analyzed score. The game is beautiful. It has some of the best pixel art I've ever seen, and I think it sets a new standard for the style. Animations are fluid, lighting effects are breathtaking, character sprites are expressive and charming, locations are detailed and varied, enemy designs are simple yet effective. 13/10 The dialogue is great, and it's impossible to not become attached to the plethora of wacky characters in the game. 11/10 The music is pretty good, but I find the widely varying styles to be a bit distracting. Going from an orchestrated track to full-on chiptune is a bit odd. Still I think the music is solid. 8/10 The action is mostly classic Zelda-like, with a main swinging attack, and some sub-weapons like bombs. Generally, the gameplay is fun, and some dungeons often have engaging puzzle sections. However, late in the game some basic mechanics get real testy. The main characters don’t get knocked back when hit, and enemies mostly bee-line for them, so when they get hit, enemies just stay on top of them, and once the invincibility window closes BAM! Another hit. Sounds pretty standard, but the enemies' walking speed is often quite a bit higher than the playable characters, so it’s hard to move away, and the invincibility window is EXTREMELY short, so the hits start piling on real fast. Also, lots of late game mooks take tons of hits to kill, over 10 for many of them. This makes fighting them mostly unfun. John's regular attack has a very short hitbox, and it also has a very long cooldown time before he can move, so once you start swinging you don't really want to stop, so I ended up mashing the attack button once I was in a somewhat decent position. I also found hit detection a bit frustrating with some of the smaller enemies. These problems aren't really present in the first half of the game, so for a good chunk of Eastward is fairly unchallenging, and then all of a sudden feces gets real and it's kinda frustrating. Dungeon design is really good thankfully. 6/10 for general gameplay Story- and plot-wise I feel like the game has some issues. It's fairly episodic, and I never felt like our heroes had much agency, mostly going from one place to the next either at random or because of outside forces. The pacing of the story can take sharp turns into filler-town when going from chapter to chapter, and that can lead to some odd tonal shifts. The game gets quite dark at times, but then swaps to a really cheery mood and we don’t have a chance to really sit in those dark vibes. Some of the lighter filler is quite good, however (chapter 6 is great). Some "main quest" stuff involves walking all the way to one end of the map, having a mostly pointless conversation, then walking all the way back to the start point, only to be sent back to the other end of the map again. Said maps aren't usually that big, but it's still boring. Having finished the game in just about 25 hours (not 100%), there are still many unknowns to me about the story. I am not averse to open-ended stories, but here it feels like lack or foresight. I can't really say what any character's motivations are beyond "be a good guy" and "be a bad guy". There is no moral dilemma to any of the decisions our heroes make. I know what the bad guys’ aim is, but I don't know why. I don’t understand the relationships between a bunch of characters. If the story had made me ponder my own humanity or mortality, I wouldn't really care about the previous points, but it doesn't do that. The premise is really interesting, but it seems like a waste of a setup for a bunch of thinly-related events that don't really offer any overarching theme or questions. 4 out of "Themes are for 8th-grade book reports" Within the world of the game, there is a playable arcade game (yo dawg I heard you like video games), called EarthBorn. It’s a short, dumb, frustrating take on old school Dragon Quest games. I love it. 9/10 Ultimately, after finishing the game I'm not really interested in a second playthrough. It is by no means a bad game, in fact it has many great attributes, namely its visuals, sound, and dialog. It's super charming. The action isn't terrible, but it really isn't worth writing home about. The fact that the story is weak kinda ruins it for me. If it had been a tale of human hubris - which is what the premise kinda implies - I'd have taken all the garbage with it and given this a 10. If it had a New Game+ game, where I could try and find all the chests and recipes I'd missed, I'd give it an 8. But starting a new save file from scratch? Groan. *Edit: an update now allows chapter select, though it's not working with my file right now.* You'll probably have to forgive me for my poor math skills, but I give Eastward a [**** voice] 6 out of 10, closer to a 7 than a 5, bye [/**** voice]
As a man without a PS4, when I first saw this game, I was kinda sad I didn't have access to it. Thankfully Horizon Zero Dawn went to PC and it quickly got onto my wishlist to purchase at a later date at a discount. And I'm not sure how I feel about it. The story is thought-provoking, but not really through its plot. I’ll stay spoiler-free, but basically the setup to the premise is more interesting than the events that take place in the game. I also feel like there’s also a bit of a dissonance between the overarching theme and the events that happen in the game. There’s critique of capitalism and blind fanaticism and cult of personality, but it’s also not really relevant to the plot. Neither Aloy nor any of the secondary characters seem to face moral dilemmas, it’s all very clear-cut good vs bad, and I feel like that’s a missed opportunity. Killing machines serves a purpose, and I never felt bad about it like in say, Nier: Automata, but killing tons of humans indiscriminately feels strange in a story that is ultimately about saving humanity. You meet randos who have family members that are any combination of lost/injured/imprisoned, and saving them never feels particularly satisfying. These sidequests often come down to vengeance, but there's never any discussion about whether the resulting violence and death are really justifiable. Aloy is a decent main character, but it seems like she suffers from Captain Marvel syndrome; she seems to be defined less by a personality and more a combination of adjectives. “Strong”, “honest”, “courageous”, “empathetic, yet sassy”. She seems like a forced attempt at feminism, but considering a lot of her actions are dictated by male mentor figures it feels a bit vapid. She doesn’t have much agency, she doesn’t have much of a plan, she somewhat randomly ends up where she needs to be, and because she’s “special” she kinda just happens to save the world. The supporting cast is really weak. Don’t you love it when a character goes: "I will tell you these things later, as I've been sworn to secrec- GAHHH I'M DEAD". There's a minor antagonist that gets killed early on that could have been a really interesting character. His death doesn't have any impact, since we barely know the guy it's not even mildly cathartic, and there's so much that could have been done with him instead as a survivor. From a purely mechanical point of view, the game is quite polished. Menus look good, interactions are snappy and responsive, voice acting is really good, but the conversations have that weird [Jim Sterling voice] TRIPLE A [/JSV] format that I personally find odd and jarring. Loading times are a pain, but once in-game it plays pretty seamlessly. It annoys me that lots of save points are really close to enemy spawn points. I wish the world had less enemies so that walking around randomly weren’t such a stress-inducing activity. Resource management is a pain, and I found myself going back to earlier areas to farm stuff on occasion. The game is visually impressive, even on my semi-potato of a computer. I kinda wish the visual style were a bit less realistic, as I really enjoy Loish's concept art. The enemy designs in particular are great. As impressive as the world looks, it does feel a bit empty – apart from those machines. A lot of really interesting vistas serve no purpose beyond being eye candy. I've often thought: "Look at this old dilapidated building on a small island, surrounded by dangerous machines, surely there's something inside!" Nope. Destroying machines is pretty fun, though it can get tedious when facing large groups of them. Any one machine can do quite a bit of damage in a single hit, so stealthily taking them out one by one seems to be the prime tactic. Once the enemy number becomes less than 2, melee strategies become functional and the difficulty drops tremendously, even against the really big guys. Large enemies have tons of HP, so killing them often turns into a battle of attrition. However most story related battles have you start in plain view of the enemies, so those great stealth tactics I’d spent hours honing went down the crapper. Flying enemies ****. Ultimately, am I going to replay this at some point? Probably not. The story did leave me uneasy (in a good way I suppose), but most of the interesting stuff is told through exposition dumps found in discoverable info drops, which is inefficient and kind of a boring when it happens. It’s dark and depressing, and it got me thinking about my own mortality, but the emotional impact it had felt somewhat exploitative. None of the actual plot has any moral ambiguity or much emotional depth, that stuff is only relegated to backstory and premise setup. The action isn’t good enough to bring me back, either. I gotta say it’s pretty cool that they got cool AF badass Lance **** in the game... but I wish it were LeVar Burton.
Hades does a lot of things exceptionally well. The game's visuals are amazing, the voice acting is some of the best ever, the story is pretty interesting if the pace a bit slow, but what makes it so addictive is the gameplay loop. It's amazing how easily I get caught up "doing one more room", thinking "oh, this is a great build" or "Is that Artemis up next?". Even though I should be bored at this point, going through only 4 levels, having to play about 25 minutes at a time (approximately the time of a run) to get a tiny drip of story, the idea of having a tiny bit of exposition revealed by running into one of the gods is incredibly tempting. "Oh, Artemis is up! I wonder what she'll say this time". The countless "sidequests" are so well integrated into the gameplay and story that it's hard to think of them as sidequests. The rewards are also quite good, so the incentives are both materially useful and thematically satisfying. Chatting up Artemis and getting all her boons gets you gems and access to a weapon's secret form? Sign me up for a Zoom call right now. Considering how varied the skills can be, it's actually pretty amazing how narrow the gap is between a bad run and a good run. Sure, a 2% increase in critical hit chance from Artemis doesn't seem like much, but add in her skill that shoots out tiny arrows with every attack - also seemingly useless - and the damage can rack up surprisingly fast. Thanks again, Artemis! More seriously, I have some minor issues with it. Sometimes I wish I could get more story without going on a full run. I wish I there were an auto-kill to go back to the beginning instead of continuing on a doomed run or just letting myself get killed (which can take a lot of time with a few Death-defiances left). I wish I could run into Artemis more often without using her trinket. But really, that's about it. One thing that people don't mention is how quick the game flows. The only loading in the game happens at startup, a few seconds here and that's it. Zero loading otherwise. After playing FF15, Hades feels incredibly refreshing. The gameplay is super tight and responsive and fun. Picking up stuff is easy, fishing doesn't take forever, every interface is extremely efficient. The fact that I can jump in and out almost instantly is very beneficial to keeping the ultimately repetitive nature of the game fun. So yeah, Hades is an amazing game. It has a compelling story and characters, an enjoyable and addictive gameplay loop, beautiful visuals, great voice acting, tons of side content that is actually rewarding, and all this executed superbly with no basically no load time. A+ Now I need an Artemis spin off game.
FF15 is a game that clearly lacked direction during its time in development hell. The game is not without its charms, but - at least for my tastes - a whole lot of dev time was wasted on stuff that doesn't really add up to making FF15 a good game. I think FF15 does reasonably well with its story and characterization. I think it's fair to complain about the pacing - I'll get back to this - but ultimately the overarching story isn't bad. It gets pretty wonky at the end, but hey, this is Final Fantasy and Tetsuya Nomura is involved, so it's expected. The bad guy has a lot of potential, but his potential is kinda ruined by his confusing motivations and stranger origins - which are not really explained in the main game. Time to read some fandom.wiki articles! The lack of direction is apparent when looking at secondary characters. Aranea, Loqi, Cor, Jared and Talcott, even Ravus and the emperor - whose name I can't remember - they probably all could have been cut or replaced with random mooks, and the story wouldn't really have been affected. Their existence is probably a result of having them involved in all the FF15 ancillary media. Gotta monetize that FF15 universe! The main characters however are surprisingly likable. Noctis thankfully looks much more emo than he acts, and if you ignore the ridiculous haircuts and outfits, the whole team is pretty fun. The story actually builds these characters up reasonably well - mind you I haven't played the DLC - and I felt attached to the 4 mains fairly quickly. I don't like all of the music, but there are definitely some great tracks in there. I find the visuals to be a mixed bag. I mean, some stuff looks incredibly realistic, but looking realistic and looking good are two different things to me. When the rain stops just as the sun is setting, the world is absolutely beautiful. Some of the architecture is amazing, the city of Altissia is really impressive. Most dungeons actually have really intricate designs, but it's usually so dark in there I couldn't see **** The world has some arresting vistas, but at the same time most of it seems bland and empty. The really impressive stuff isn't explorable, and what is accessible is kinda boring. It's like the opposite of Breath of the Wild, where your goals are always to get to those special places. Here, the impressive stuff is just eye-candy, you can never get in real close, and there aren't really any payoffs for finding interesting locales. I find the enemies overdesigned. I've beaten tons of monsters that I still wouldn't be able to recognize in a police lineup. Because they are "realistic", they're not particularly colorful and don't pop much on screen and are just hard to see. I also find the juxtaposition of 4 guys in extravagant Harajuku streetwear driving around in what looks like a fancy European luxury car against '50s style diners and old rusty cars driven people wearing khakis to be really jarring. Odd choices. These odd design choices permeate basically every part of the game, including the basic game content. The game is massive, no doubt. There are almost 200 sidequests, and the gameplay hook is pretty enticing. The temptation to do "one more quest" is very strong, and I've binged on these seemingly endless quests in hopes of gaining obscene amounts of EXP. EXP aside, the quest payouts aren't particularly good, but having the capacity to later blow through main quest events is oddly alluring. So I guess that part worked out. But ultimately the vast majority of the game's content resides in sidequests. Out of the approximately 50 hours I spent on the game, maybe 10 of them were story related. After spending way too much time doing hunts and fetch quests, I figured I'd jump back into the story, and what happens? "Oh hey, Noct, how about we stop here for a sec?" "Yo Noct, wanna check out this waterfall?" "Help me with this garden, Noctis". I JUST SPENT 15 HOURS DOING SIDEQUESTS, I'M READY TO MOVE ON All this side content ultimately messes with the pacing of the story, which tries to be extremely urgent and serious. That is, until the game prevents you from doing sidequest completely. Why was so much energy devoted to so many pointless things instead of the main quest? Why are basic actions like getting into the car and talking to people and picking up items on the ground so clunky and frustrating and slow? Why is the camera always stuck behind trees or boulders during battles? Is this really the battle system the devs were aiming for? Is the game trying to be a open world game or a horror game with those dark underground levels? Did Squeenix try to make a game that is 100% sidequest as a weird market study? If you want a time sink, this game has you covered. If you want a well-paced, cohesive story, you may want to look elsewhere. The lack of direction and emphasis on aspects that I find unessential ruin the great potential the game may have had.
I first laid eyes on this game back in 2008, and I was super hyped. Over ten years later, the definitive edition goes on sale for Switch, and I finally have a chance to play it. Meh. I've tried, but I'm just not much of a Tales fan. Tales of Phantasia blew my teenage mind back in the late 90s when Dejap released a fan translation that I played on ZSNES, while I listened to Limp Bizkit and Korn. Good times, my dudes, good times. Seriously though, I enjoyed ToP, and it was definitely a tour de force back in the day. I've since played other Tales games, but I've always come away feeling somewhat indifferent. For Vesperia, I'm less indifferent, and more irritated. There's stuff to like about the game. It's reasonably pretty, even in 2021, with good character and enemy designs. There's a lot of content, so for people who enjoy the game, it can last forever. The voice acting is pretty good. But that's about it for me. The action is not great, which I should have suspected given the word salad "Evolved Flex-Range Linear Motion Battle System". Regular attacks have very short range and are pretty slow, so hitting moving enemies is oddly difficult. Enemies have really long invulnerability frames when knocked down, which bogs the action down. Pressing up makes the character jump instead of just moving forward, which is mostly useless and sometimes makes high attacks or using techs activate jumps instead. Enemies have tons of HP, so even mooks can take a while to defeat. Bosses vary wildly in difficulty, from pretty easy to practically impossible (Gattuso, you bastard). Status effects are practically an afterthought, and only seem to show up in boss fights. The fixed camera in cities and dungeons feels old and restrictive. Aiming the Sorcerer's ring is terribly frustrating. I also always run out of cash. Micromanagement of equipment is pretty tedious. Just about any weapon may be necessary for creating better weapons later, so I just ended up hoarding all my stuff in fear of missing out on an important item. Apart from the characters and enemies, the visuals are kinda bland. The lighting is really flat in most locations, making backgrounds really uninteresting. Lots of dungeons have identical rooms that make navigating them confusing. Most locations are pretty bare in background details, so they don't have much personality. I'm not a big fan of the music, but I'm sure some people like it. So what about that story? Well, it kinda ****. It's not the worst, but the pacing is horrendous, the plot is mostly delivered in exposition dumps, and the pace constantly stalls for all sorts of dumb reasons. "This person can't see us you today, so let's randomly go walk in the desert in the meantime". "Let me tell you the most important secret we have kept hidden from you since your bi-- AAACK I'M DEAD". "I have so much to tell you abo- AAACK I'M DEAD". "I have multiple personality disorder - AAACK I'M DEA- oh wait, I'm back!" The cut scenes involving action are probably the worst I've seen in any video game. Bad composition, weak and stunted choreography, and poor music and sound effect choices make these downright painful to watch. Further slowing the pace are small dumb decisions. I don't need to be told "Karol has left the party", only for him to join up again two minutes later to be told "Karol has joined the party". The game constantly slows down to let you walk from one cutscene to the next. It's bloat. I also hate the trend in japanese media to make up dumb words. Why call this magic rock a blastia? What is a Cyano Ciel Apatheia? How is it related to Aer Krenes? Formulas do what? Why is the leader of the guild called a Duce instead of just "boss" or "president"? Are the good guys the l'Cie or the fal'Cie? There's a guy called Duke, is he a Duce ? I'M CONFUSED BECASE DUCE LITERALLY MEANS DUKE The main cast varies pretty wildly in likeability. Yuri is a pretty good MC, even though I feel like his moral dilemma doesn't get much of a resolution. He often sounds disinterested in the team's dilemmas. Estelle is pretty flaky for most of the game, but she's still pretty likable. Karol is kind of annoying, but in an endearing 12-year-old way. It does break my suspension of disbelief when he is having a profound existential crisis about his powerlessness in the face of complicated world-wide geopolitics. Repede is a dumb name for a cool dog. Raven is alright for a while, but the old man jokes are kinda weird for a 35-year-old guy. I mean it's not THAT old, is it? Judith is real pretty, but she's kinda bland otherwise, and the mysterious femme fatale thing fells kinda thin. Patty? Why is she here? But the worst is Rita. I hate everything about Rita. I hate her tsundere shtick. I hate her dialog. I hate her motivations. For me, this game was lots of frustration and not much payoff. If you're not a Tales fan, I'd suggest avoiding this one. It plays fine on Switch, if you're still interested in buying.
So I just finished Dandara, and I feel a bit conflicted. There's a lot of stuff I like, but at the same time I found the game occasionally infuriating. The pixel-art graphics are great, the levels are varied and have personality. The enemy and boss designs are OK, not great. I did find it a bit strange that the first boss in the game is the humongous head of M. Bison. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I really like the way the story is presented, there are no large exposition dumps stalling the game. All the characters presented (they are fairly few and far between, however) all have a certain individuality that makes them unique. If there are weak points as far as characters go, the two final bosses are kinda bland. The story is intentionally made vague, and the way the story is told through small artifacts found on the ground in random places is intriguing, but I can't say I had any strong feelings about the big bad. The final boss was added in the "Trials of Fear" update, so story-wise it feels thrown in haphazardly. Though I usually don't care much about music in video games, I gotta say the soundtrack is amazing. I kept being surprised by the music, and every time it changed it was appropriate and fit the settings. Honestly one of the best OSTs I've heard in recent years. The gameplay is where things start getting a bit annoying for me. I'm probably kinda old by Metacritic standards, and Metroidvanias are nothing new to me. But I've never played a game with a movement mechanic like this. Technically, there's nothing wrong with this, in fact it's a really novel idea that works quite well for level design, which is for the most part very good. However, after almost 10 hours of playing this game, I still haven't gotten comfortable with the controls, and often end up jumping in the wrong direction. I didn't grow up with analog sticks, so this may be a good part of it, but it was a source of frustration for me. I've often jumped onto off-screen enemies when aiming for different areas. In areas with lots of flying projectiles and enemies, the difficulty spikes and I often found myself unable to aim properly to where I wanted to go, and the unforgivingly short invincibility time when hit often leads to successive hits, and things turn bad really fast. The very short range of the main attack can worsen things, and the shield never seemed to work for me, and especially special skill meter management can a pain. The last battle is also much more challenging than anything else in the game, and I can see people kinda giving up at this point. The second to last boss is not particularly hard, so the transition is pretty harsh. On the other hand, the final boss did stress me out more than any other game I can remember. If you're looking for intense gameplay, I guess this game has it. All in all, Dandara is a well-made, original, mostly enjoyable game. The story and themes are interesting and worth checking out, though some frustrating difficulty spikes may be enough to turn some people off.
I was a big Darksiders fan, I enjoyed the first game enough to get all trophies, and enjoyed the second one quite a bit as well. I didn't enjoy number 3 very much, and though Genesis is a lot more fun to play, ultimately it doesn't do quite enough for me to come back to it. I've always and still like the aesthetics of Darksiders, and I think Genesis does pretty well in this regard. It's not the most graphically demanding game out there (especially the Switch version), but I think the strong art direction overcomes the "low-spec" aspects. If there's one thing I dislike about the presentation it's the distant camera, but that decision has much more to do with the gameplay than graphics. However I feel like the level of detail in the character models is lost, and when the camera occasionally zooms in during boss-ending scenes, it's possible to tell there was effort put into the details, which seems like a waste to me. The framerate seems locked at 30FPS on Switch, and there is some pretty heavy slowdown in a few areas, but it didn't bother me that much. Gameplay-wise, it plays pretty smoothly, and whatever frustration Darksiders 3 produced in me is long gone. Admittedly the game is pretty easy on normal, but I don't think the challenge of higher difficulties would feel as unfair as D3 did. War and Strife play similarly enough that one is never going to feel completely foreign to the other, but at the same time I wished they played a bit more differently. The action is fun, and the powerups and wrath skills are pretty well balanced. All around the gameplay is quite good, but it's not strong enough for me to come back for just that. Story-wise, Genesis doesn't do anything for me. It's fun getting to know Strife, and the interplay between him and War is actually pretty good, but they have very little agency. They're constantly being thrown around on random missions by external forces, and each chapter is episodic and mostly unrelated. There isn't much of an overarching theme, there isn't much character development, there aren't any real big reveals about what's going on in the 'big picture'. Meh. Apart from that, I don't have too much to say. The game is a bit buggy (not as bad as D3, but similar to Battle Chasers (another Airship Syndicate title)), but nothing game breaking. Sound design was unoffensive, voice acting is good. I'm not sure if Strife and Dis being coded black is a genuine effort to add "diversity" or tokenism. Strife talking like he's from the inner-city to Thor-wannabe War is a funny contrast, but it seems diegetically off. I haven't played with a partner, only single player, and I imagine a 2 player game being a lot of fun. So, is it worth it for you? Hard to say. I'm not sure it's a must play for even Darksiders fans, even though it's a decent game. If you want to play it, and want the best performance, I'd say go with a different platform, but if convenience is king, the Switch version is more than functional enough to be considered.
I tried really hard to like Battle Chef Brigade. It's by no means bad, but after finishing it, I feel like it has some big issues that will prevent me from going back. The cooking part is pretty fun, but I can't say (after finishing the game mind you) that I have any idea what I'm doing. The mechanics are fun, but I find some of the time limits a bit too strict for me to be able to actually plan out more than one meal, and instead I just throw stuff in based on color rather than what might actually work out together as a meal. The action is pretty weak. Controls are floaty, hit boxes seem kinda wonky, and there is basically 0 difficulty involved in the action sequences. The idea of fighting interesting monsters to cook their innards is cool, but there aren't that many types of enemies, and there are basically only 3 areas with 3-5 different enemies to beat. After a few chapters, you'll basically have seen every ingredient in the game. The graphics are nice, but the hand animated anime-styled sprites are probably animated 'on twos' for a lot of actions, which looks pretty jarring with the game running at 60 fps. Some battle animations look really good, Mina's dash/parry looks great, and her somersault kick attack also looks good. But the walking animations all look kinda floaty, some attacks seem/feel really slow, and it annoyed me. The story is pretty bland, and the first 3 (of 6) chapters have nothing going on, then there's a bit of plot in chapter 4. Finally, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next... then chapter 5 is filler. The big bad is unremarkable, we only see him for the first time in the game in the second to last scene in the game. The good guys are also unremarkable, although nice and pleasant, their personalities are so weak and interchangeable that I wouldn't be able to tell who is talking without looking at the names on top of the text bubbles. There's basically no personal growth going on for anyone, good or bad. The voice acting is pretty good at least. The fake accents may annoy some. All said and done, I'd like to see a vastly improved sequel. With good action, a solid story, and interesting characters, it would be right up my alley. I suppose you could say that about any average game, but I do like the concept. I'm just disappointed with the execution.
