tangledwings

I unfortunately landed on the 'stalker and assault' storyline on my first playthrough. The game does not allow you to tell anyone about the assault, despite ample opportunity, and forces you to knowingly meet this character alone afterwards. It's crazy, it's frustrating, it's honestly disgusting. Aside from that, it is just kind of dull.

Horse Ranch underpromised and yet still underperformed. Horses are pretty and well animated, but creating a custom horse in CAS is just bad. Instead of giving the player common markings to layer on, like socks, stars, blaze etc., you just get a paint tool to scribble on your horse. There are a few templates on the paint tab, but they inexplicably omitted all the common horse markings. It's bizarre and kind of pathetic. And because they chose this paint system over the layered marking system, they have no way to generate foals that are a mix of their parent's markings rather than simply copies of one or the other. Horses have a "breed mixer" button in CAS, so they clearly wanted to put in a decent genetics system that would mix traits from the parents, but didn't. It looks and feels half-baked. Speaking of half-baked, the nectar making skill is a 5 point skill instead of a 10 point. There aren't many varieties of nectar. Instead of the flavor profile system from Sims 3, you just use any fruit. I would like to see all these food and drink making skills thoroughly incorporated into Dine Out, but cross-pack compatibility is again ignored. For an 11-year-old game with tons of expansions, I cannot understand why they keep making these expansions stand-alone rather than using them to evolve and develop the original world. Players who buy most or all of the packs, for hundreds of dollars, deserve a better overall experience rather than an isolated bit of new content that they tire of quickly. I find myself waiting to really play this pack because I need mods to fix the genetics and fix nectar making. I know people are already working on it. Then I think, why are unpaid, individual modders doing so much of the heavy lifting for this massive company? If one person can vastly improve a feature in a week, there is no excuse for the dev team not doing it. It just makes no sense. Animations and most art assets are consistently good, but gameplay and functionality is mediocre at best. Same old, same old.

Piofiore is a darker and more mature Otome in many ways. It is a long game with a lot of unique content on the different routes. Setting The game is set in Italy in the 1920s, and I can’t help but feel like the developers did research by going to an Italian restaurant and ordering everything on the menu. The game goes into astonishing detail about the food that people eat, filling up the “dictionary” with pastries and coffee preparations. And then fails to give half the characters Italian names. Oops. Orlock the warlock! I mean, the church ninja. I mean, the disciple. Japanese games tend to make Europe feel like an alien planet and Christianity like a ride at Disneyland built by someone who doesn’t know anything about Christianity. The look of the setting is cool, the culture and dialog feels totally Japanese. I can practically feel the characters bowing through the screen. The crosses don't even look like crosses, the church has no priest, and adultery does not exist as a concept. Characters Ok so one day, our pretty, empty doll Otome protagonist will become a real girl. One day an Otome protagonist will be born with her memories intact, her wits about her, and an honest-to-god realistic personality that people can relate to. That day is not today. Who shows up in the middle **** war and gives a friendship speech? Liliana does! Liliana is far from the dullest main character I have ever seen, but she is still an innocent, naïve, pretty girl who gets passed around between the guys as a hostage for reasons having nothing to do with anything she says or does. She cooks, cleans, and smiles cheerfully at everyone. Guys fall in love with her mostly because she is around all the time. Dante’s story was particularly dull, because he goes to a safehouse with Liliana so she can cook and clean for him while he reads the newspaper like they are in a dish soap commercial from the 1950s. (How much training does it take to rinse a dish? None. The answer is none.) I like the characters; I just think the romances get sappy and generic in places. They have a lot of canned dialog that could be from any game between any characters. Plot The main plot is cohesive, relevant, and complex enough for the length of the game. You only have two routes available to start, but I like that because the first routes will tease information available in later routes. Each route has new plot info, which helps to keep things interesting. Whenever I got to a point where I was rolling my eyes at the characters, I continued playing for the plot, and vise-versa. There is sex in this game, but don't expect Liliana to say anything but "no" even when she means "yes." *Sigh* Routes: Dante- This is the "main" route, and while you get a lot of plot info; Dante himself is likable, but dull and serious. I found this route boring. Nicola- My personal favorite. You get almost no plot info on his route, but Nicola is a more complicated character with some darkness inside him. Orlock- This route has a nice mix of plot and character interaction. The "good" ending is very chaste though. Yang- Interesting and dark. Too dark for the good ending to be believably romantic, in my opinion, but still compelling. Yang was the villain in all the earlier routes. Very little plot info here. Gilbert- My least favorite. The romance is sickly sweet and generic, but you get a lot of plot info you don't get on other routes.

There are so many bugs in this expansion that it is beyond frustrating to play. There is no kitchenette in the dorm rooms, but the cafeteria doesn't open properly during operating hours. In fact, it is almost always closed. It also requires a loading screen to go to the cafeteria, so if you have more than one Sim, and they don't go to the cafeteria at the same time for every meal, you will lose control of the other Sim. Shall I continue? The game added one random roommate to my active household for no reason. The debate competition bugged out completely. Sims constantly put their homework down in the middle of nowhere and then leave. They also lose their bikes daily. University classes start whenever you arrive on campus, including noon on a Tuesday. You will be late to class and get docked for not doing your homework. The semester is only 5 days, and there is so much homework, you won't do much else. You cannot edit any of the buildings, and if you use cheats, it will completely bug out. Out of desperation, I added a fridge and stove to my Sim's dorm. Their dorm was removed from the list of available dorms and they were forced to move out at the end of the semester. All the other students started paying them rent, but would periodically move out because their "needs weren't being met", whatever that means. I didn't delete anything from the dorm. Fast speed and ultra speed stopped working completely. Every building is either a rabbit hole or has a loading screen, and yet campus feels empty and boring. There are so few buildings. The biggest dorm is still tiny. As other people have said, you can't send your Sim to class until after it has started. There are multiple academic buildings, so you don't know where their classes are. I hate this expansion. I hate it.

I played through the entire game. It is such a shame that this game decides to give you 1/5th **** in a 50 hours+ playthrough. Such a tedious, repetitive, frustrating, waste of time. It is impossible to enjoy the game because every time something interesting happens, it's always like "we'll maybe explain it in a future playthrough or paid DLC." The result is an empty, soulless experience where it's impossible to be emotionally invested in anything. During your first playthrough, you will have no idea what is going on. It's hard to put into words just how poorly the story is presented. 95% of your dialog options go like this: "I am person X from place Y." A: "Person X?" B: "Place Y?" NPC Answer: The same no matter what you pick. There are maybe 2 choices that actually matter, though there are few that seem huge and yet turn out to be completely meaningless: "Will you be my ally or my enemy?" A: Ally B: Enemy NPC Answer: Ok, we will be enemies regardless of what you pick. The player has no control over any interaction. Half-way through you will be asked to pick a side in a war where nobody explains why they are fighting or tries to convince you in any way. You will have 0 context for this decision. That is the biggest choice in the game. Even after finishing the game, I don't understand why we were fighting. I guess I can play through 5 more times to find out! The relationship building system is also terrible. Characters will bond and trigger various cut-scenes. Half of them will be fights where the characters clearly hate each other, so it's weird to call it bonding but OK. Characters have 1 personality trait and all interactions revolve around that. The last cut-scene will largely be the characters asking other characters to consider marrying them. One character will propose to like 4-5 different people, it's so weird. At the very end, you will get a text box telling you that certain characters got married, which seems entirely random and no one really knows the formula. All my end pairings were between people I consider incompatible. The player's own marriage is awkward and sterile. And of course, lots of characters will seem to be in love with you before the last battle, because there is only one path for each relationship and all paths that can end in marriage, end in marriage. There aren't many. 3-4 very short conversations with each character. This was my First fire Emblem game and yeah, I hate it. I don't understand what people find appealing about this mess. The music is terrible. The player character aesthetic, ugh. The empty coat sleeves flailing about, the fishnets with holes, the open fly, the floating collar, the green hair. It's everything that's ever been wrong about JRPGs. No customization, silent cardboard protagonist, grindy, bizarre color and style choices, tries to draw inspiration from medieval Europe but ends up just making everything weird.

I love Atlus but they can be hit or miss. This game is a hit for sure, with unmatched style, great music, and super fun gameplay. The only weakness is the story. Don't get me wrong, it's still better than 95% of games out there, but it doesn't compare to the story from Persona 4. In Persona 4 the dungeons were all personifications of the character's inner struggles, and the bosses were "shadow" versions of the characters that that didn't just have to defeat, but accept. This game greatly simplifies that formula by having all the bad guys be abusive authority figures and the protagonists being "rebels." There is little actual character growth, which is disappointing. Ryuji has something going on with his dad that is mentioned once. Most style than substance on this one, but still a great game. The last game also put gender issues front-and-center, whereas this one has the main female character grow by becoming skinnier to be a better model. I'm not joking, that is her character arc. It also has the player pressure her to pose nude for her stalker at his house, and gives you the option of telling her she should have let her teacher **** her. Oh yeah, and it has you blackmail your teacher after finding out that she works as a prostitute to support the family of a dead student. The game doesn't explicitly say that she has sex with you. It's implied. I still loved the game but there are some ugly flies in the ointment that I can't ignore. In some ways the characters are so similar to those from Persona 4 I literally call them by the wrong name. In other ways, it feels like it was written by a different person morally and thematically. Overall an amazing game that everyone should play, but not as good as Persona 4 if you value story and character/