sefrabu

I thoroughly enjoyed Xenoblade Chronicles 2, even if with a hiccup here and there, the biggest of which was the character design which, although great, was too much on the freaky-anime side for me (I'm talking about you, girls looking 12 and having early Pamela's boobs). When I saw the design for XC1 DE was a bit more on a "realistic side" (can't believe I said that about design where people have eyes the side of tennis balls), I was on board. 60 hours later I came out a bit disappointed, but still generally entertained. To get the obvious out of the way, I haven't played the original Wii/DS version, so I'm at the (dis)advantage of not seeing how much the game has improved, or how I could have experience it 10 years ago, and so I have to take it at face value, AD 2020, and I have to admit, save for the character design, XC1 is a bit inferior experience to its younger sibling is basically every aspect. The character progression, the exploration, the combat, almost everything gameplay-wise makes it obvious that XC1 is an older game. But since it’s not that much of an issue (I still had fun with the game’s mechanics), I’ll give it a pass. What I can’t give a pass to is the story, or, to be more precise, its direction. Which is as much anime as it gets, with constant revelations of an unimaginable significance every 15 minutes, deus ex machina exploited ad nauseam, the power of friendship and love overcoming literally everything, and heroes and villains shouting "Could it be...?! But it's impossible...!" interchangeably at explosions of light every other cutscene. You can tell that a given villain is not actually a villain the moment you meet them just on the basis of their voice tone, and all the female characters will have huge boobs, skimpy clothes, and the sole purpose of their existence will be to sacrifice themselves for their man, be it a boyfriend, brother, or father, in between cooking for them and doing other housewife stuff. The final revelations regarding the actual nature of the world and what actually is/was going on is actual deep (if not convoluted) philosophical and morally provocative gold (for a video game), but the way to it is filled with so much teenage drama and evil laughter that a gamer over the age of 16 will be reacting to the cutscenes with a smirk and a frown at best. Which, to be honest, seems to be quite typical for a jRPG - to make a game with incredibly deep lore, a head scratching story, complex and multi-layered gameplay, and fill it up with characters who talk and act like they are in a pre-teen school play. What is unquestionably good in the game is the visuals and the score. The remastered character design is fantastic, most of the locales are beautiful and their exploration is pure joy, especially when paired with great music. This combo works so good that I found myself sightseeing only for the sake of sightseeing, with no particular purpose, just to see stuff and enjoy the atmosphere. The game, in fact, gets much better when you complete the story and do all the side stuff, and feels like a very good MMO (whether it’s an advantage or disadvantage depends on your personal preference). I also need to commed the collector’s edition, which includes a nice steelbook, a beautiful fat artbook, and a vinyl record (there’s also a poster and some stuff to download), and the quality-content-price ratio is really good (this being said by a person who also bought the collector's edition of FFVII Remake which is total garbage). If it’s your thing to get a collector’s edition **** now and then, this would be a good choice. All in all, if you are a jRPG fan, you will have a lot of fun (add 3 points to the score). If you are not, you will not, and possibly you won’t manage to go through the first 10 hours of the game (subtract 2 points from the score). As a person who is somewhat more of a jRPG enthusiast rather than a fan, those 60 hours with the game was generally a time well -spent. But not a minute more.

So! The Remake has happened and as a long-term fan, who played the original in 1997 (which, by the way, made me a video game enthusiast that I am now), I'm incredibly torn (meaning: disappointed). Everyone already knows the obvious: yes, the visuals are gorgeous, the music is amazing, all the fan-service and easter eggs are there, and all of that could and will make a senior FF7 fan shed a tear of nostalgic joy. The fact that this is a Midgar-only installment is controversial not without a reason, and the expanded, or even altered at some points, story, will rub some fans the wrong way. But I won’t talk about this, as this has been discussed ad nauseum already. What I want to focus on is the general atmosphere of the game, something that I’ve already seen in FFXV, and which not only annoys me, but also is, in my opinion, slightly disturbing (yes, the word is correct). No, not only the fact that the game is a PG-16 title, and most of the dialogues and themes seem to be directed at 10 year olds. No, I wasn’t expecting something at the level of The Last of Us, but I was slightly hoping that the game, at least in some portion, will be directed at people who played the original, who are sometimes well over 30, and expect the game to grow up with them. Unfortunately, it’s not the case, but this can be forgiven easily, given that the developers need their income, and apparently there are many more gamers younger than 20 than older than 30. No biggie, I can seriously plough through this and even enjoy it at times, it’s an entertainment after all, not the philosophical alternative cinema club. What I can’t savour though is the share amount of completely generic, uninspired, boring and sometimes downright shallow amount of content, seen mostly in the side quests, but sometimes even in the main arc. The game is stretched to impossibility by side quests which literally say “go there and kill that”, which wouldn’t be that bad if it wasn’t just that, Cloud is a mercenary after all, and having any background for grinding is, or at least seems to, be always better than having to background at all. But when a mercenary, who blows up equivalents of our nuclear reactors killing hundreds of people in the process takes up an order to kill a few rats in the backyard from a whimpy twink, who also has the gall to say pretentious stuff like “you did it, I knew you would, you’ll be a mercenary in no time”, this is when I need a coffee break, possibly for a day or two. The side content not only seems to be rammed in the game well after the postproduction to artificially extend the play time, but also seems to be made by people who not only have never played Final Fantasy 7, but who haven’t played any Final Fantasy game at all, and the only point of reference for them are MMOs, and only those less ambitious ones. I would really be less offended if the full play time was 10 hours, or that the only way to get some additional levels was to mindlessly run in circles in a dungeon. Seriously. This, and also the fact that the vast majority of the main story that was added or expanded in respect to the original FF7’s Midgar chapter is borderline boring and void of any significance, made me go through this game for a long time, because I couldn’t make myself play for longer than an hour or less a day. This is a first for an FF game for me, as even FFXV, which to date is my least favourite, made me play continuously till the ending for 2 days straight. I don’t know if it’s me getting older and bitter, or just having impossible expectations towards the Remake (and accidentally the most influential piece of any popular entertainment that is the original FF7 in my life), but FF7 Remake didn’t only gravely disappoint me, it made me question my whole interest in the gaming industry at all. (The score is as it is, because as bad a FF7 spawn this game is, I still can recognize it as a good game on its own, which plays nice and has great production values; however, if you, like me, are approaching it from a sentimental point of view and expected something that would grow up with you since 1997, this score is obviously way too generous).

It is quite astounding that with such bloodsoaked and boisterous predecessors, the new God of War is all in all quite a cerebral and introspective experience. The cold lands invite you to calmly walk around and inhale it all, to the point that you can almost feel your frosty breath in your throat. There’s no sign of a bloody conflict, only the sad remains thereof and eerie yet cleansing silence. By this very setting the game, and it’s a rare feat, employs what is best in any franchise, which is maturing with their audience. Now that you are not a fun-focused teenager infatuated with the impune violence, and you might have even become a parent yourself, you might find yourself brooding over your past while making sure that your kid becomes something better. In that way, it actually is “dad simulator” which many gamers jokingly nicknamed this bold attempt at being an actual adult entertainment, but if a simulator it is, it’s the best one I’ve played in a long time now.

My score might be just slightly overblown, as there is no new content, no actual remaster in place, and the game is 7 years old and is sold for a full price. But hey, I'm in the Nord realm again, and it's my, like, 20th playthrough, and I'm still glued to the screen like a teenager, a long, long time ago. And this time, I can take if everywhere with me. If you own a Switch, it's a must.

Mass Effect Andromeda is yet another game released in the recent months that made me question myself if my playing computer games is actually a form of the Stockholm Syndrome, a sentiment from the past I cling to, without any actual joy. I won't even start with the technical issues, everyone knows what went wrong here. But go past the uninteresting premise, the lackluster protagonist and their equally bland companions, ignore the writing on the level of a medicore fanfiction and the wasted potential of the story which goes nowhere near to the original trilogy - basically take no heed in any Bioware staples, and you will have a game which seems like something experimental that was released before (yes, before) an already not-so-perfect Dragon Age Inquisition, which so desperately wants to be a very typical free-to-play MMO with no multiplayer option, full of dull fetch quests, vast and empty spaces and absolutely no reason to play beyond the 21-hour final mission mark. I have absolutely no idea what happened here (save for the multi-corporation mess which seem to gradually strangle every good franchise as soon as it gets a few dollars above a certain threshold), but what suprises me the most are the user reviews giving this mess of a product a score higher than 7. I just can't understand this, understanding as I usually am. By doing this we, players, give the gamedevs premission to continue producing worse and worse games. Please. Stop. (My score is a bit higher than it should be due to the multiplayer matches, which are the only aspect of this game which is not broken. If you don't care about the multiplayer, feel free to substract 2 points from the score.)

The XVth installment of one of my favorite franchises is a horrible letdown. I allowed Enix to hype me to a great level, and I enjoyed both Kingsglaive and Brotherhood, which promised something grant. Alas, the more I went into the game, the more depressed I felt. Let's get the good out of the way, for the sake of integrity. The music is one of very few things that will let you know that you're playing a Final Fantasy game. The moment a battle started I felt some nice vibes long time not felt. Then, the general premise of the game is amazing (though the execution thereof is abysmal) and Lunafreya might just well be the most amazing Final Fantasy character to date. Also, Noct's teenage angsts in view of the grim situation he finds himself in are nicely developed. Gameplay-wise, the leveling system is the best thing that happened to JRPGs since the sphere grid. But. For a game that was in development for 10 years, it is surprisingly pedestrian. As mentioned above, the overall idea for the story is great, but it is directed poorly. It is short, lackluster and incoherent, to the point I got myself thinking if the translation from Japanese was botched Final Fantasy Tactics-style and that's why the script felt like borderline lunacy. Doing silly side quests along the way does not help at all. I really advise skipping them and doing only the main story for your first playthrough, it actually improves the experience. Unfortunately, it is not The Witcher 3, where most of the side missions are so intertwined with the story you sometimes aren't sure if it's the part of the main arc or not. At the very least, they fit the wartime atmosphere and the protagonist's profession. Here, the quests is random generic stuff, and putting it the gloomy premise that your family is dead and you're the only heir of a kingdom occupied by a Third-Reich-like empire that wants your head is just not right. The atmosphere of a road trip is adequate only to some point, and after some events take place I was expecting something like going underground and a fellowship-of-the-ring journey, but all I got was four happy-go-lucky millennials doing whatever they feel like at the moment, like fishing, or taking goofy photos during an enemy raid, and completely ignoring the fact that they're seriously screwed. Nope. The graphics is "just okay", I'm actually quite baffled by it being praised all around the web. The models of the main and main-supporting characters are great, many of the locales are really outstanding, but to balance this, some parts of the world look like a generation below. In towns some non-essential NPCs look like taken directly from FFX, and you can see their exact clones sometimes mere meters from each other. It is that bad. The world is huge, but astoundingly unremarkable and painfully empty. It is great and monumental to watch from the car, but as soon as you get off Regalia, you are treated to vast and plain nothingness. Exploration is a bit meh, and traveling by foot will bore you to tears, as both enemies and points of interest tend to be scant (the former is especially bizarre for a FF game). Dungeons have the graphic suggesting they are generated procedurally and mostly feel like a chore. And there are those small things that make you involuntarily facepalm in utter disbelief. No, not only the revelations of the dumbest Final Fantasy story ever, although they definitely get the cookie. They are small things. Like invisible walls, or obstacles on the level of Noct's bellybutton, which he can't get through; or the moments, when you climb a higher ground and realize you can't jump over a wall just below, because it invisibly extends to the sky. Or those moments, where you slowly move over a thin ledge, and your teammates won't go over it unless you look away to allow them magically reappear next to you - because they don't have the animation to go over the ledge. Or the moment where one of your teammates is whisked off by a Mysterious Something, which happens, of course, when you're not looking, and you try to locate him by listening to his screams, but you can't, as the audio is inconsequential and all over the place. Small things? True, but for a PS4 game 10 years in the making? From one of the most experienced developer in the gaming industry ever? If it was a spin-off game, or another Square franchise, made on a whim in a year, I would let it go. But as a person who played every single Final game since FF4, and of an opinion that most of them constitute some kind of a breakthrough not only in the genre, but in the industry at all, I do not only feel disappointed, I feel plain offended

The new map is obviously beautifully crafted and should be a feast for the eyes, but you can't enjoy it much as there's so little to do. The same groups of enemies spawning at alarming rates (sometimes I couldn't even defeat the previous pack when the new arrived) makes exploring a drag. The story is nothing to write home about, and since everything is essentially more of the same and considering the fact that the base game is already packed with similar content, this DLC feels absolutely unnecessary.

Beautiful, eye and ear catching, fan service to the core. Superficial, boring, trivial, auto-fire and please-skip-the-cut-scenes all the way. It reminded my how I miss Squaresoft.

My "original" version with a few basic mods (which I still play from time to time) looks better and runs smoother than the Special Edition. I see no reason why this should be sold as a full-priced game. Fortunately I got it for free as I owned the Legendary Edition, but still utterly disappointed to be honest.

Allegedly made on the budget, The Technomancer is far from an inventive Indie game you would expect and feels like a cheaper version of the Mass Effect. Although the gameplay is decent, the fights enjoyable and the leveling system quite interesting, the game lacks a lot in the storytelling department. The absolutely worst part are the dialogues, bland and uninspired, and the voiceacting is abysmal (it hurts so much that I actually attempted to switch the spoken dialogue off, but you can't do that actually). A wasted opportunity at something really grand.

And yet another game which the reviewers love and the players hate. I'd say I find myself in the middle - after my first walkthrough years ago. But each time I go back to Kirkwall I realize that these are the Dragon Age characters, story and art direction I liked the most. The intrigue unfolds nicely, the gameplay is - contratry to the popular opinion - quite strategic and satisfactory (provided you're playing on higher levels), the outcomes of you actions are really different each time you play, and the "small scale" (you're saving "only" one city, not the whole world for once... or are you?) is quite refreshing. I can't give DA2 any higher score due to the infamous dungeon recycling and the limitation of the locales to one city and a few (painfully recycled) outskirts, but had this game been in development for a few months more to make the locations more varied, this would have been at least a 9.

Came back to this due to the incoming special edition. As I used graphics mods, it felt like it was released a few months ago, and the gameplay didn't get old a tiniest bit. Elder Scrolls never ceases to amaze me.

Like most of the disappointed players I expected something more Skyrimish and less mmoish. There's a good deal of storytelling, and the music is great, but the gameplay is utterly boring, and the graphics don't impress that much. Stay away if you expect an Elder Scrolls game. If you're a fan of the series, grab a discount like I did, it's actually worth a few bucks - but not more.

Do yourself a favour and savour this DLC like the whole game should be savoured. Don't fast travel, switch off all the marks on the map and explore. It's actually amazing how amazing this game is.

The game is great... to the point. The wasteland is beautiful, in its own post-apocalyptic way (if only the new Fallout had these graphics...), the gameplay both in- and out-of-car is lots of fun, there's lots of side quests to complete and lots of fascinating locales to explore. But after 10 or so hours it begins to be awfully repetitive, to the point that when I stopped playing after a few evenings, I didn't even notice, or miss it. In the age of the Witcher 3, devs need to keep up with "worthy" side-quests, or even the best-looking and best-playing games will end up like this one.

My MMO romances are turbulent. I tried to turn to Final Fantasy XIV (due to my sentiment to FF), ESO (due to my sentiment to Skyrim) and WoW (due to my sentiment to Warcraft 3), but they always fell flat for me in comparison to Guild Wars 2. I return to Tyria on regular basis and this is officially the only MMO game I don't refuse to play.

Note: This is an update to my review of Sep 30, 2015, when I gave this game a 5. I find it hard to rate a game so low. Even in the worst games you will find something that saves it from a total disgrace, say some music tracks, maybe graphics, maybe even one little thing, like a loading screen which you find particurarly artsy, or this one voice actor, who saves a day. Anything. In case of HOMM7, I've never been so close to being a troll hater and give a game a zero. As an avid enthusiast of Heroes, I bought VII on the day of its release. And for the last few months I was trying to find in this game something, anything, that would earn it a few points above total nothing. So after some strenuous exercise I found it: let's say that the new skills wheel is quite neat, that some of the creature design is fine, and that pattern for the campaign - the stories told by some heroes - is interesting. And this is all. Now, I had a few gos at VII and I've never managed to make myself play for more than a week or two in the game's terms. It's boring, as there's nothing you haven't seen in the previous entries. It's ugly - there's no art direction, there's no balance in the presentation, your eyes literally hurt after 15 minutes of playing. It's largely unplayable - the number of minor and game-braking bugs is astounding! And even if you plow through all of this, as a heroes-loving person you are, you will soon realize that the story is dumbed down to the level of PG7, the already mediocre music and graphics is recycled so much you don't even know which game you're actually playing, and the trademark of the series - the castle screens - look like a cheap browser game. The broken "cinematic" cutscenes of ugly rendered people always frozen mid-sentence only confirms it: this game needed at least half a year in development to be decent, and a year to be actually interesting. Someone decided otherwise. But even now, after so many months after the launch, not much has changed. I only hope this little monster has not finished off the franchise. (Note: if you loved Heroes 3 or 5 - feel free to substract 3 points off my score)

I got pleasantly surprised by this game, as I came across it by pure chance, since it doesn't get much publicity. Which again, makes me think how many good games are out there that we even't don't know they exist. I'm taking one point out of the score for introducting a game mechanic that disallows playing a local multiplayer. Other than that, it's a pleasant breather from all those "great" tripple A games.

I randomly checked 10 profiles of reviewers who gave Fallout 4 zero ranting and, surprise surprise, 8 out of them have not reviewed anything else than Fallout 4 ever. Some of the zero raters admit they haven't even played the game yet. Some of them claim they want full refund after 2 hours of playing. It is not only Fallout's problem, as lots of games get this kind of treatment, but Fallout is one of those games, who especially don't deserve that. So, since this is not a perfect, but still one of the best games I've ever played, I'm bloating my score to 10. If you can kick someone without a reason, I prefer to give them more cookies than I normally would.

I have every reason to believe that initially Square wanted to make a Chrono Trigger - Pokemon crossover and after the script was written, they decided to put Final Fantasy XIII characters in it. The whole thing is disjointed, infantile, unispired. At my 4th (sic) go at this game over the past few years nothing has changed - it is still the only Final Fantasy to date that I haven't finished.

My fourth walkthrough (courtesy of latest PS4 GOTY half-price edition, which accidentally made buying the complete game on PS4 better than buying all DLC separately for PC), and second on the nightmare difficulty, and I already feel like plunging into a long forgotten habit, asking myself why would I ever stop. It's amazing how the dialogue, setting, and even the whole plotlines change each time you pick a different race, or change the tapestry in the Keep. It's still buggy, unpolished at times, and the ending is still horribly 'meh' (still haven't finished the Trespasser, which, I believe, and hope, is the true closure), but it is still one of the best games I've ever played.

This game will make you throw your controller across the room as you used to back in the days when games were actually challenging. It will beat you black and blue, rip your intestines apart and spit in your face. And you will be still coming back for more.

A very different experience to an average game, great graphics, amazing music, and offers quite a challenge if played on the highest difficulty. I hope there will be more such games.

I've come across this comment on the "Mass Effect 3 ending controversy" - "I didn't know the ending was bad until I read it on the Internet". This is a "review" inspired by my yet another walkthrough, when - yet again - the story for almost each character was unique, the different class choice resulted in very different playing experience, and the ending provoked some thought. One of the best games I played.

I'm starting to believe that most of Metacritic user reviewers are a bunch of paid haters, considering how much acid comes out of them on the very day of the release, especially from those listing what the game lacks after, probably, an hour of gameplay. So I will do the same, but quite opposite: I'll write my first GOOD impressions. After around 15 hours of gameplay I'm catching myself thinking how to manage my free time to spend as long as possible in this postnuclear wasteland. It's worth notifying that 15 hours is probably the total time I devoted to Fallout 3 and New Vegas alltogether, as they didn't work with me. I spent a number of (satisfying) hours with the first two Fallouts, so I'm not a complete stranger to the series. The graphics are medicore indeed (switching from Witcher 3 was a bit painful), and the third person perspective is predictably inferior, but I'd say these are the only drawbacks of this game. The artstyle and the atmosphere is perfect. The perk system works nice. The crafting system can draw lots of your attention. The settlement creator feels like a game in a game. The story, at least so far, is interesting enough to keep going, although it's hard to skip sidequests, which, though interesting as always, have the tendency to dilute the primary experience. All in all, I highly reccomend it and can hardly wait for the next Elder Scrolls.

I believe this is the only game I've ever played that I can give 10/10 with absolute conviction, but this is probably due to the fact that a) I've read the Witcher novels and b) I'm Polish. Since I devoured all the books as a teenager, coming back to this world was like meeting old friends long not seen (a feeling strangely absent from my experience with The Witcher 1 and 2, neither of which I completed, by the way) and the game translates the world of the Witcher impeccably. This world also derives a whole lot from the ancient slavic and Polish traditions and legends, so you really need to be Polish to get 100% of the atmosphere. Yet again, if you don't speak Polish, you will have a great opportunity to experience something a bit different to your typical heroic fantasy reality. Don't be fooled by the "standard" medieval setting of the game - when you encounter mages concerned with "ecology", expansive empires championing gender equality, or a representative of a common folk discussing "democracy", you'll know what I mean.

After reading some reviews of this game with 0-3 ranting I really don't understand what's wrong with the reviewers, especially when they admit they gave this game between twenty miuntes and two hours of their precious time. I can understand the rambling about uncomfortable controls on PC (which is very true), the virtual lack of any background story for the Inquisitor (which really hurts), or the not-so-good tactical view (this hurts most), but these are hardly arguments to review this Dragon Age so low. The story is very good, the characters well written and interesting, the graphics and music outstanding, there is so much to do and see it's hard to grasp. After my first walkthrough (hard difficulty, around 60 hours) I could give it 9/10, and after spending some time on the hardest difficulty with my second walkthrough, the rating would go down to like 7/10, but come on, give me a game where you detect more serious than trivial flaws only after playing so long? My count of the total time spent with the game is now around 230 hours and I still haven't seen everything. I don't believe I devoted so much time to any game ever in my life, and I went through most of the most recognizable ones.