Very unique game that's more of a text adventure than a typical western RPG. In the game's sci-fi fantasy world, you are a castoff - a newly-realized consciousness in an immortal body that was previously inhabited by the Changing God. There's hundreds or thousands of castoffs like you, created by the Changing God, who are making their way in life while trying to escape a supernatural-like force that's trying to eliminate you all. The game takes place in the Planescape D&D universe, which is basically a mixture of worlds, technology, and civilizations that seemingly has no limits in its variety. That's a good recipe for a typical nonsensical children's story, but the developers here actually succeeded in making the writing cohesive and intelligent. I'll cover the story only slightly, as it's best to experience first-hand. Your primary goal changes throughout the game as you gather more information, but you're primarily looking for the Changing God, to figure out what his plans are. Each of your goals are meaningful, intelligent, and make sense, which is more than I can say for most RPGs these days. The only major downside of the story is its rushed and abrupt ending. It's a bit cliche, with your final opponent basically telling you his master plan, when he could have done so previously, which would have saved all sides a lot of trouble. But besides that, there's nothing else I'd really consider dumb or a big plot hole. Gameplay primarily consists of talking to people. You can spend hours talking to a single person and trying to complete his or her quest line. That usually involves talking to other people, getting more information or items, and then returning to that person to continue the process. And by no means are these nameless fetch-quest givers. Their stories are intricate and always involve or benefit you in some way. Various skills help you in your conversations with people. Persuasion, deception, dexterity (grabbing/stealing things), and a load of other skills can move situations in the direction that you want, with your party members able to help with many of these. The only real issue with skill usage is that it gets too easy over time as you gain bonuses in those skills. This can make many actions that were previously costly or difficult free with a 100% success rate. Though if you're playing this like a typical western RPG, you might use skill points for combat skills, which aren't very useful since combat is rare. Either way, every obstacle has multiple solutions, so you won't get stuck, even if you fail at all of your conversation rolls. Additionally, there's side stories. You'll gain artifacts that allow you to relive a portion of different castoffs' lives (in text format). These are all interesting, but most have no relation to your current goals or setting. So they seem random and disconnected, as if you start reading the middle of a new novel when you haven't finished reading your current one. The writing style is typical for fantasy novels, based on the few Forgotten Realms novels I read 30 years ago. Even though this is a video game, visual aspects of people, scenes, and actions are described in great textual detail, while the images on screen remain static. So this is definitely a game for readers and not the typical young impatient gamer. And thankfully, the writing respects your intelligence enough to not outright tell you characters' inner thoughts. It leaves that up to you to determine though their words and actions. The game surprised me. While it doesn't reach the psychological depth of the best Japanese RPGs, it's more practical in nature and far more intelligently-written than every other western RPG I've played. As a teen, I didn't play the original Planesape: Torment due to there not being enough combat. Now, it's on my list of games I must play.
Another victim of the DLC fighting game age. Not much for single players, and what is there is worse than previous SoulCalibur games. The graphics and fighting mechanics are good. Though the characters still have funny looking faces that was the result of a redesign a few games back. The character roster is low compared to previous games, unless you're willing to shell out extra for DLC. Unlockables are almost non-existent. There's one character to unlock and you can spend in-game points to buy a very limited number of customizable clothes. There's no alternate outfits for the characters, but you can piece together your own outfit and have it look decent enough (although not nearly as good as official costumes). There's a story mode that's not any better or more interesting than previous SoulCalibur games. Going through it unlocks nothing. The big single-player aspect in this game is the mission mode. You create a character and go on a sort of side-story, fighting battles and exploring a map to fight more battles and continue the story. The issue here is that the story in incredibly long-winded. There's so much text dialogue that you could just skip entire sections and still know what's going on. It doesn't help that the story also isn't very interesting. The mission mode mechanics are also quite limited. You can find and upgrade weapons, though there's not much fun in this as you'll just equip whatever weapon is strongest and upgrades don't do much. Buying weapons from shops is pointless, mercenaries that you can use to fight battles for you quickly become over-leveled, and by the time you finish all of the required battles, you'll have enough money to buy just about all of the limited number of costume pieces. Also, you can't use your mission-mode character in any of the other modes. The single player content isn't nearly as interesting as it was in the SoulCalibur 3 days. Well, after getting through the story mode and mission mode, I was done with the game in just a few days. With nothing left to unlock and no other single-player challenges, this will go in the pile with Tekken 7.
Good story, but written more for young or novice readers. I won't go into the story details, as much of that would be considered spoilers. Though generally, it's a relatively unique conspiracy-themed time travel story with some basic romantic tangents. Several moments in the story are quite good or shocking. It's the plot that ties those moments together that's lacking. Yes, plenty of plot holes, unbelievable science, and a few unbelievable character actions make this a sloppy story. I say the story is for young or novice readers because everything is explained to you. The characters' inner thoughts and science are all written out to you in excruciating detail, so there's very little room for interpretation. Interpretation and vagueness are required for intelligent fiction; In addition to just being more real, it gives the reader the opportunity to analyze actions and characters based on what others see, giving them a sort of intellectual puzzle to piece together as more things are revealed. That doesn't happen here, but that alone doesn't make it bad. The plot holes, science issues, and dumb character actions are what bring the story down. I'd say about 80% of the science in the game is accurate, but the other 20% is so dumb that they should have just kept it hidden. You'll definitely have issues with some of the dumb science on display here if you're into physics or software coding at all. And the plot holes, while not huge, are distracting, especially when the game tries to explain them away. I imagine the writers thought that certain plot holes were so big that they had to have characters try to explain them away, on the fly. This was done poorly though, and again, these explanations should have been left unsaid. Dumb character actions are fortunately rare, and normally revolve around suicide or killing someone else. But at least due to the time travel mechanics, most of those are undone and it helps more intelligent readers forget that happened. Besides the game's storytelling, it has a few technical issues, such as videos cutting/jumping quickly, 2:3 video judder, and typos (a few repeated lines of text). They were annoying at first, but I got used to them eventually. Also, the game has a whole chapter and ending that is only shown if you send the right emails to certain people during your playthough. There's no indication given that this will happen, and I found out after the game was over that I had missed those (due to not getting to the last chapter). So you'll need a guide if you want to see the whole game as it gives you no clues on what to choose. So an interesting and decent enough story if you're into sci-fi time travel, but isn't intelligently written at all.
I went out of my way to get a new copy of Steins Gate Elite on PS4 just so I could play this extra game, and am disappointed that it wasn't worth it. Recommended only if you loved the storytelling method of Steins Gate, loved the characters, and don't mind some less-competent, less important, and even more plot-hole-filled writing. It goes off in such wild directions with the characters that it's obviously fan fiction.
This is one of those games that I knew wasn't for me, but decided to give it a try since it's based on a book, and those sorts of games usually at least have good stories (meaning intelligent and well thought-out). Unfortunately, this one doesn't. It seems as though all it got from the book was the basic setting. As the protagonist, you then go off on your own doing absolutely stupid things because you're the protagonist in an action game and are invincible. You quickly learn the truth of the world and wonder why and how it was hidden from you. You then basically take point at getting everything important done by yourself, because you're an action game protagonist. It's like everyone else in your company is useless. After about my 5th trip of going out into the world alone to get something absolutely necessary for my company to succeed, which involves fighting mindless monsters or random humans who attacked me on sight for no reason, I got tired of it and put it down. At least the game is pretty. It's got a photo mode and will make sure you don't forget it.
The best metriodvania I've played. Well, slight correction there: There's almost no Castlevania in this one; It's a better and more mature version of Metroid. If you're into intelligent and vague stories, then this one has a great one. While performing an experiment with your research organization, there's an accident that seems to cause you to be transported to a different world or dimension. There, you're tasked by the dying electronic/robotic giants with saving them (by restoring power, releasing repair drones, etc.). Well, exactly what happened, what you're doing, and even your existence is up for interpretation, which you'll have fun trying to figure out as you find documents and progress the story. A great part about this, is that while your protagonist isn't the smartest guy around, his actions are believable and he's got a good moral compass. This makes his ending choice make sense, even though it's a shame you can't choose the other option. This is a story you'll want to uncover for yourself, so I'll stop the story explanation here. The game is excellent gameplay-wise. After playing roughly 10 metroidvania games, I got a bit bored of the same repetitive level design, tools, and ways to open up new parts of the map. This game takes things in a different direction and seems to scrap everything from the past 20 years and starts over with Metroid as its base. For example, you get a high jump early on, but you still can't jump high enough to reach some areas. You'd expect that a higher jump or double jump is next, but no.. The game offers three completely different skill-based solutions for getting higher, two of which I've never seen before. Using your own abilities isn't the only way to progress and find secret areas. You get a sort of hacking skill that modifies your environment in various ways (in addition to making you wonder whether you're in a digital world - just one of many of the game's thought-provoking elements). You can also hack enemies, with each one reacting differently, and unexpectedly per standard video game logic. There's multiple digital aspects to the world. In addition to hacking, there's passwords to find and enter (game genie-style), and glitched secret areas that are beautifully broken. Getting close to a secret area and entering it has various random effects that you'll be familiar with if you've played NES games. The game expertly integrates these segments into the gameplay and story. I won't talk more about the gameplay because experiencing these unique mechanics blind is one of the reasons the game is so good. The only real downsides to the game are its length (10-15 hours based on how much stuff you try to find), and how it presents its lore. The lore that you'll uncover (or maybe not uncover) its random because much of it is hidden around the world map. The lore would would work better if told in order or after certain story segments. But that would go against Metroid mechanics, so I see why it wasn't done that way. So with its excellent mechanics and mature sci-fi story, the game is a must-play for intelligent story lovers and metroidvania fans. I just learned there will be a sequel, and it's a definite buy for me.
Average submarine-based metroidvania game. The story is told like a children's fairy tale and is much more coherent than Child of Light (if the rhyming dialogue in that game irritated you then you'll like this one more). As a young girl, you go searching for your father, who went missing on a fishing trip. You build yourself a rickety submarine and go off exploring looking for him. Along the way, you meet magical creatures that help you, in a typical children's tale manner. The tone of the story is a bit dark, but not too dark for children. As an old man, I didn't get much out of it. Nothing amazing and nothing stupid (such as big plot holes) happen; The story is just average all-around. The gameplay is decent. Controls are easy with your left stick controlling your thrust and direction simultaneously. You get a close-rage hook weapon that fires in whatever direction you're currently pressing, and you get several missile types that all home-in enemies. This is by far the easiest ship-based game I've played recently. If you're looking for a challenge, you'll want to increase the difficulty. Battles are fairly easy. As soon as I learned I could spam my rockets and monster drops would quickly replenish my rocket energy, I did just that. Only a small number of enemies require special tactics - the only one I remember being giant crabs that you must hit from behind after they perform their attacks. Metroidvania mechanics are not great. Exploration is okay, but there's not enough variety in the environments and you always know where to go next (thanks to big X's on the map). So there's not much reliance on your own exploration abilities. You're also railroaded into the items you need to get to the next area. For example, right after you beat a boss, you get an item or skill that allows you to get to the next boss. The items and skills aren't too interesting. You get a hook early that lets you open doors, you get different rocket types that break down certain barrier types, you get lights that make some impassable creature walls disappear, and you get a multi-purpose sonar that opens walls, damages enemies, and activates certain devices. These are all okay, but none really stood out as being unique or amazing when compared to other metroidvania games. There's a few puzzles in the game, with the light puzzles being above-average and somewhat unique. You'll reflect light beams on reflectors and your knife (you can exit the sub later on) to activate various doors and other devices. You'll have to combine the beams sometimes into different colors to activate certain devices, and stronger beams hurt you, enemies, and exploding devices that you'll need to move around. The light puzzles are the most memorable part of the game for me. So this is an okay metroidvania game. Not recommended unless you really want another average metroidvania to play. Though it would be a great game for kids to practice their problem-solving abilities while letting them experience a good "take action to save your father" story.
Not intended for story lovers. This is seemingly a pure monster hunting simulator. I wasn't able to complete the game, but played a few hours and the first few missions before I decided that this wasn't the game for me. The basics of the story are that you and a load of other hunters are coming to an island to research monsters. There's no notable characters to speak of - everyone you deal with has virtually no background and seem like nameless hunters after a while. After several missions of just hunting monsters in the same map for the sake of hunting monsters, I determined that this is more of an online cooperative monster hunting game than an RPG. So then we have the combat. I've played the God Eater games, which were supposedly inspired by Monster Hunter games, and the combat in those is bad. I incorrectly assumed that the real Monster Hunter would have significantly better combat (at the levels of Tera, at least). Combat is sloppy. The main strategy is to keep hitting the monster with whatever attack you have from whichever direction it isn't attacking in. Monsters are slightly more reactive to you than in the God Eater games, though they're still generally nonreactive. They seem like they're attacking randomly or have incredibly slow reflexes, so it's too easy to avoid their attacks. They should just go right for you, but they don't. The battles are long and boring too, with some taking 15 minutes or more, including chasing them when they decide to run away. Things could get better later on, but with other games to play, and its poor performance on my PS4 pro (it's not a smooth gameplay experience), I decided to put this one down. But if you don't need a story, don't need an interesting combat system, like tracking and hunting monsters, or like to kill monsters cooperatively online, then this might be the game for you.
Great strategic and atmospheric survival city builder. FrostPunk is all about surviving hellish winters around giant heat generators. While limited in scope, it does an excellent job with what it has. Unlike most city builders, the goal here is to keep your people alive rather than building an interesting city. And with common temperatures much lower than you'd expect people to be able to survive in, you can make that happen.. Sometimes. The game's story scenarios cover different settlements that have been created in the wake of people leaving New London for various reasons. New London being the last known large outpost of humanity. For each, you get a well-written and voice-acted opening explanation, which leads you to your goals for that scenario. For example, in the first scenario, you're simply trying to keep your people happy to prevent them from leaving. In another one, you must deal with a huge number of refugees. In another, there's a lack of people, so you must build robots to maintain resource production facilities. At the default difficulty level, they're all challenging, even for someone who likes these kinds of games. You likely won't ace a scenario your first time though. Instead, you're probably **** by with the bare minimum needed. An example here is that during one scenario, you find another outpost that is struggling and you can choose to send them resources. The easier way to complete the scenario would be to ignore the other outpost at the cost of having your people become more discontent from you allowing them to die. On my first time through, I was barely able to keep my outpost afloat, so had to sacrifice the other outpost. The building types, policies, and tech trees are done well, but aren't as complex as some other games. Arguably, they don't need to be complex and fit the game perfectly. Though this does limit the game's replayability. Building types primarily consist of housing, services that reduce discontent (churches, guard posts, arenas, etc.), medical, and resource gathering (coal, food, wood, metal). There's several other miscellaneous building types too. Your primary goal will be to keep everyone warm though heat production, meaning mining coal or wood to turn into coal. You'll additionally need metal to create certain building and research new technology. The primary challenge is to anticipate future resource usage and gather the resources needed to build and research things that will improve that resource usage. The game constantly throws you curve balls though. One example is severe temperature drops that could make the most technologically-advanced city fall if you're not prepared with enough coal stockpiles and medical facilities that will be needed to treat severe frostbite (leading to amputations) that is sure to come. Then there's the three policy trees. The main one covers things like improving medical facilities, making food last longer by making it less satisfying, and allowing duels or prostitution to reduce discontent. For the other two trees, religion or order, you can pick only one. Both work well to keep people content, but in different ways. And both can be exploited to their fullest potentials to make sure you stay in power. For example, the top religious policy basically makes you the voice of god and those who disagree will be killed. It works, but is definitely not one to pick if you want the best ending in a scenario. If you're a city building strategy fan and want something easy to learn, but challenging, and with a good atmospheric story, then this is the game for you.
Only for those who like real-time first-person dungeon-crawlers and the writing in Danganronpa games. I wasn't able to finish the game, as neither of those apply to me. Here's my five-hour impressions of the game up to beating the first boss. If you like conspiracy theories, this game has you covered. It starts off strong with these and heads in the direction of things getting even weirder. But like Danganronpa, it sacrifices believability for the sake of weird things happening. The story seems to be built around the game mechanics rather than the other way around. For example, the game has its characters live for only 13 days before they die of old age and are reborn. While living through different age ranges (child, adult, middle-age, elderly) characters have different skills that activate based on their age. This is the main game mechanic and the story tries hard to justify that this is something that you should take seriously. Unfortunately, it doesn't pull it off for the more intelligent players with hobbies or careers in science. Don't expect the levels of believable science fiction that were in the first two Zero Escape games. The writing here is much worse in comparison. While I didn't get to spend a lot of time with the characters, they were mostly uninteresting, except for one particular amputee, who was obviously hiding a secret or big plot twist that will likely happen later on. As for the dungeon crawling, it might satisfy real-time dungeon crawler fans. I didn't find it as interesting or strategic as the last real-time first-person dungeon crawler I played (Legend of Grimrock). And it's definitely not up to par strategy-wise with turn-based games, such as Demon Gaze. The environments aren't very interesting and consist of mostly big open spaces. You have to manage your stress and pee levels, which isn't very fun. And managing your inventory is a pain, due to the limited weight you can carry. Combat strategy consists of having your four party members attack, back up (run away) until you can attack again, and then you repeat. The first boss is the same, except required many more attacks. So here's my partial review for the game. With its bad writing, believablitly issues, and uninteresting/unstrategic combat, I doubt I'll start this one up again.
An interesting visual novel that's a bit all over the place, but not bad. Comparing this game to Danganronpa and Zero Escape, the story is much more intelligent and well done than Danganronpa, but not quite as good as the first two Zero Escape games. Unlike those games, there's no investigation or notable gameplay mechanics. This is a pure visual novel. As you can probably guess by the title, your protagonist loops through the same events (like Groundhog Day), and is ultimately trying to end that cycle while trying to keep himself alive, other people alive, and learn why this is all happening. The loops consist of you visiting a small superstitious village at a time when supernatural/psychological forces cause the inhabitants to want to kill each other. In this village, mists come around every decade or so, which signifies the return of the wolves. The wolves secretly possess a small number of villagers and kill one villager per night. All villagers meet during the day to decide which of them are wolves, and can kill one villager per day. Some of the non-wolf villagers gain abilities, such as being able to determine whether the person they killed the previous day was a wolf, or protecting a single person from being killed by wolves at night. You spend a lot of time with the villagers, each with their own interesting personalities, while you primarily work to stay alive through three major loops, where you have a different role in each. The story is full of minor plot holes and a few moderate ones, so don't expect expert writing here. The game focuses less on making a believable story and more on making interesting situations. And the situations sure are interesting. Without spoiling anything, the first main loop is a warm-up, where you get acquainted with its characters and rules. The second is where you have more control and things get more serious. The third loop is downright evil, due to you taking a more active role in cheating, lying, and murdering. It's the sort of route that, if the whole game were like that, video game ratings boards would have surely not approved the game. Though near the end of the third major loop is where the decent writing ends. Believability goes downhill and plot holes go up from there. It's a shame too. At that point, I was looking forward to another day or two of meetings with the villagers to decide who to kill next. Stakes were very high, but it all fizzled out into near-nonsense. The post third-loop gameplay takes about as long as each of the three main loops and consists of you primarily going back to different points in the story and "unlocking" answers that you couldn't choose before. This leads to long and not-always-relevent expositions about the villagers and their history. You use the information gained there to go back to the end of the third loop and get the "good" ending. Well, that's what the game wants you to think happens. The problem is that the information gained was not adequate enough for the protagonist to make the decisions he made. It's like he was just guessing and all of his guesses ended up being correct. So it unfortunately didn't end on a good-writing note. I'll also point out that the choices in the game are very limited. Don't expect Zero Escape levels of choices and trees. There's really only one main path and if you make a bad choice, you quickly die and get to retry. Making bad choices sometimes gives you keys to unlock better choices, but it does this arbitrarily. You don't learn anything from making a bad choice that would cause you to make the right choice next time; it's just another random choice based on what the writers were thinking. You could have easily made that choice the first time, but the writers didn't want you to because they have a specific path that they want you to follow. So it's not a bad game, but really should have ended at the end of the third major loop. Fans of typical Japanese mystery/murder visual novels should definitely give it a try. If you like intelligently-told stories, you might not like it so much, but give it a try if you run out of other games to play.
A decent game, but a lack of cohesion between its parts and its not-so-well executed main theme keeps it from being great. This is another "good story" game I've tried out in my quest to find the best writing that video games have to offer. I wasn't expecting a run-and-hide survival horror game, but there's actually not much of that here. You'll spend most of your time walking place-to-place, finding objects (essentially keys) that unlock the next section. Occasionally, a monster or ghost will be patrolling the hallways and you'll need to look away or hide before you can continue going about your business. To avoid spoilers, I can't say much about the story. I will say that the setting of a research facility in a damaged world is at least interesting, although not very unique. If you've played Half-Life, Doom 3, or Bioshock, you'll see many gameplay and setting similarities here. Unfortunately, the game takes the conveniently-placed, -timed, and -drafted email/audio recordings approach to telling its story, even though you essentially have an all-knowing companion with you who could tell you most of those things. Believability takes a big hit when you frequently come across over-explained emails and audio recordings of things that people wouldn't normally record. But I suppose the target audience is teens and people who don't actually work in research facilities. As for the monsters and ghosts, they simply don't fit well within the story and world. Why they're here, why they want to kill you, and why they like to show up right when you pick up a particular key doesn't make much sense. Though I hear this is typical in survival horror games, so this probably won't bother fans of the genre. They seem scary enough; at least my kids were scared while I was playing. Though I preferred to walk right up to them and get a good look and let them kill me, just to see what would happen. In most cases, you actually get two chances to escape from monsters. The first time, you get knocked out and get back up with the monster having disappeared. You don't normally have to reload until they knock you out a second time. This at least helped distance them from the story somewhat and made them seem more like dumb bullies than an actual threat. Well, except for that one section where after you take a particular action, you must accurately and precisely run from the monster through a maze to make it to the next section. At that point, I was a little disappointed that I couldn't switch to easy mode mid-game. So I ended up spending a good 10 minutes mentally mapping out the correct path to run to get past that section. This wasn't the best design choice to improve immersion. And finally we come to the main theme of the game, which I can't say outright due to it possibly being a spoiler. It's existential in nature and any sci-fi nerd would have already come to terms with this after contemplating a popular mechanic in Star Trek. Our protagonist, however, has not. He even gets a huge preview of what's about to happen to him and he still throws a tantrum at the end of the game when it actually happens. Well, it's okay that our protagonist isn't very smart, but our researcher/scientist companion should be, right? Unfortunately, she's no Neil deGrasse Tyson, and botches the explanation to our protagonist, which leads to his tantrum. Though if you're an average-intelligence person who doesn't consider existential ideas, I could see how this could be relatable and even amazing to you. Just don't expect this to impress any consciousness or existence philosophers/researchers. I spent the last several paragraphs explaining why I don't think the game is great. Though by no means is the game bad. It's interesting enough, even for the most intelligent players, and is at least pretty to look at. It's likely perfect for people who like the genre and can't get enough of it.
A decent platformer with some metroidvania elements. I don't really like platformers and only somewhat like metroidvania games, but was pleasantly surprised by this one, mainly due to its wacky writing, art style, and relatively unique character transformation mechanics. This review will be short, so I'll only cover a few things that stood out to me. As far as Japanese/anime-inspired games made by western studios go, this is the only one I've played that I could easily mistake as being fully Japanese-created. If there weren't western studio logos at the start of the game, I wouldn't have known any better. The art, animations, themes, and even some of the writing just feels Japanese. And that's a good thing. The game hits all of the high Japanese design points while also pulling in some fresh ideas from a western perspective. Though the game is short and limited in scope. I did not buy the DLC, but might in the future if there's some sort of "complete" edition. The writing is wacky, though not consistently so. The first two bosses and sections are quite good, with the 2nd being better than the 1st, but then it goes downhill from there with the game settling into a sort of norm and no longer surprising me with witty lines, crazy scenarios, or wild boss fights. The metroidvania aspects are relatively unique, but are a bit condensed since there's only 5 levels in the game. As you learn new transformation abilities, you'll go back to previously-cleared levels to unlock hearts, magic, or new abilities. The transformation abilities are good and fun, but are normally limited to unlocking only a couple of puzzles each. Turning into an elephant to bash blocks, a spider to walk on ceilings, a mouse to get through tiny mazes was fun, but there's only so many times you can do similar puzzles using those forms before you become tired of it, which is probably why they weren't overused. After you complete the short main game, there's not much to do unless you buy the DLC. The pajama mode seemed interesting, but I got tired of it quick after I realized I was just going through the same levels again with some overpowered abilities. Decent game that I wish it were longer. Though I might be expecting too much from the platforming genre.
It's basically stripped-down 3D fighting game that's a retelling of the anime. The story is okay by anime standards. It's definitely on the weird side as you only see a small slice of the world and that slice is dominated by students fighting over super-powered cloth and clothes in preparation for the coming of the great yarn god. Well, that's basically what I got from it. Without spoiling anything, there is a good explanation for all of this at the end, even though that explanation is a bit cheap and lazy. So, on to the fighting. It's serviceable. It's in a 3D format where you're unable to control the camera - it just goes where it wants, so sometimes you're on the far side of the arena with your enemy between you and your character, which isn't ideal. You occasionally have to fight multiple enemies at once and there's no real targeting system - it just seems to choose whoever is closest to you. Also, it seems as though the character animations are 15 or 20fps, which seems a bit strange. this style is normally limited to 2d fighting games, such as Guilty Gear, so that you can better time your moves. But the move set in this game isn't nearly complex enough to need something like that. I would have preferred 60fps animations since the game feels more like a brawler than a serious fighting game. Character fighting style differences aren't very big. If you learn a move set on one character, chances are, that will translate very well to another character. The animations might look different, but they'll still do the same things (melee attacks, ranged attacked, dash attacks). So after you get through the 4-6 hours of story mode and have unlocked everything, there's a few more things. There's some time attacks and survival battles, though they're not very interesting. Then there's the digital figures, like in Guilty Gear. This is okay, but you don't get all of the character costumes - you only get their battle costumes. This is fine, I suppose, if you like their string/strap bikini-styled costumes, but I would have much preferred their normal clothes. And that's about it. If you don't plan to play this multi-player, you're only going to get about 6 hours worth of play out of this. That 6 hours isn't horrible, though it does feel like a partial game.
A unique take on the "stuck in a video game" genre, and it pulls it off better than similar games I've played. You start out as a programmer who receives a strange email from the director **** you worked on, who has been missing for a year. You quickly find out that this person is stuck in that game, even though it was canceled during development. From there, you switch perspectives between the programmer in the real world and the director in the video game, trying to find out why this is all happening and to get the director out of the game. Dumb character actions and plot holes are common in these types of games, but this one is an exception. The characters are smart and make good decisions based on the information they have. Several questionable things come up while you progress through the story, such as programming working more like magic than actual programming, and many conveniently timed and placed clues that lead you to your next objective. Though by the end of the game, most all of this is explained and makes sense (although the explanations are a bit weak). Something that seems out of place in the game are the occasional gore/graphic death scenes, which are mostly text based. You experience them rarely and they're normally the result of one of the many bad endings, so you just reload from a point when your characters were in a more optimistic mood. Because of this, the characters don't have to deal with the consequences of these horrific scenes, so they seem disconnected from the main story. The game has multiple final endings that are easy to unlock. No weird farming or grinding needed, like in earlier Idea Factory games (such as Omega Quintet). Basically, you get an ending for each female character, that either triggers randomly or based on which character hit the final boss last. I didn't test this since I just watched all of the endings on Youtube after I got one. Most of them are well-written and somewhat vague, but one in particular, for the main character, reaches levels of happiness, friendship, and dimensional-twisting nonsense, that it basically ruined what little dark tone the game had. Don't expect a lot of mature themes and deep thought here. The game is not nearly as profound as I wish it was. Combat is okay. It's a variation of the typical Neptunia/Idea Factory position-based combat system. Changes are that you can position yourself anywhere on the battlefield during your turn and many attacks knock enemies around pool-style (doing damage when they hit other things). It was somewhat challenging at first, but quickly became easy after the characters learned resurrection spells and I figured out that certain skills do massive damage to certain enemies. Combat has no major issues, though it's not not very strategic, challenging, or interesting. Character power growth isn't great. Your equipment upgrade path is very limited and doesn't matter much as long as you equip the strongest thing you've happen to find. Not once did I need to buy equipment from a shop. The equipment found in the next dungeon would be stronger than it anyway. Each character has a different skill set, and you unlock skills by stringing together your existing skills in different ways (you can use three skills per turn). Through simple trial-and-error, you can easily unlock most skills early-game. Though the high-powered skills went mostly unused, as more economical skills would do almost as much damage, but with far less mana cost. But of course, after you learn a certain summon, mana is no longer an issue as you can easily replenish it all whenever you want by using that summon. I wasn't expecting much, but was glad that the game turned out good. The story is by far the best and most interesting part of the game. Thankfully, it is well-done, even though early-on, it seems like its going to be a childish plot-hole filled mess. I'll definitely play the sequel to see if they were able to improve on this formula.
Having fond memories of Solar Jetman, I bought this game, looking for something similar. It's not at all like Solar Jetman. It is a roguelike and is very difficult, even by roguelike standards. You will be going through 5-15 minute missions to find stuff or kill enemies. The story mode has 4 seasons with 5 missions each, and it took me a good 10 hours to get through the first two seasons due to my constant dying. The main difficulty comes from the controls, which are not rebindable. I've played a lot of space games, but this is the first I've played with such a control system. The left stick points you in a direction and the triggers move you frontwards and backwards. The right stick is limited to moving the screen around so you can see a bit farther, which isn't the best use of the stick, in my opinion. So no, this isn't a twin-stick shooter. Though a twin-stick layout would have needed some major modification done to your ship model and mechanics to work well. I was all up for learning the controls and getting better at moving my ship, but my carpel tunnel got in the way. Using the top triggers frequently doesn't work well for me, and with no option to rebind keys, after 10 hours (and two seasons), I had to put the game down. The first season was relatively fun and easy. I especially liked the commentary between the pilot and the ship's captain. It successfully pulls off being serious, corny, and silly, all at the same time. Both characters also had appropriately-cast voice actors. The second season is a big difficulty spike, with a clear rate of 3% on PS4. You simply must learn to control your ship (and its robot form) better, including creating tactics for getting rid of especially big/fast enemies. On the easiest mode, I was thankfully able to restart after each mission, rather than starting all 5 over again (which is the intended way to play). The missions varied too. So each time I had to restart a mission, the map and dialogue between the characters changed, which was a welcome addition. At the end of the 2nd season, another character joined the bunch, who was not nearly as interesting or well-voice-acted. With my wrist in pain and my dislike of the new character, I then moved onto the next game in my backlog. The game also has what appears to be an endless score-attack mode, where you fly forever, getting items and killing enemies in a more traditional roguelike setting (without much of a story). I lasted about 10 minutes here and decided it wasn't for me. So for hard-core roguelike fans who are able to easily learn new control schemes, this game might be just what you're looking for. I don't really recommend it for anyone else, unless they add in a super-easy mode in the future.
Idea Factory has its ups and downs, and this is definitely one of the ups. Similar to Fairy Fencer F, but more focused in scope, slightly shorter, better writing, and a more experimental combat system. The setting is quite interesting and unique. There are divisions of witches, dragons, and humans, all who are against each other for various reasons. Witches are essentially going extinct due to their cursed nature. They gain their magical powers through dragons growing inside them. Eventually the dragons mature and eat their way through the witches (or the witches become the dragons - that's not too clear), ending the witches' short lives. Humans hunt witches due to them producing dragons. And dragons eat everything else. You take control **** of witches, including one unlikely recently-turned witch, and start the game primarily trying to stay alive and out of reach of humans and stronger dragons. As you progress through the story and meet other witches and humans, you learn more about the world, each character's history, and a possible way of ending the witches' curse. While doing this, you're also basically managing the health of three younger-generation witches (around 10 years old). You must feed them just the right amount of dragon meat - too much or too little will cause them to turn into dragons, which leads to one of the less-optimal endings. The game's writing quality is good. There's very few plot holes, characters don't make dumb decisions, cool stuff doesn't happen for the sake of cool stuff happening, and the characters don't overly-explain their actions, as the reasons for their actions are self-evident to the typical adult. And while limited in scope, the game's handling of themes such as racism (humans vs witches) and sacrifice for the greater good, are handled well. So if you're tired of the typical dumbed-down JRPG story, you might like this one. Combat mechanics are good and unique. You fight on three different height levels, primarily against a wide variety of dragons, on a semi-grid layout. The grid only applies to enemies, and you can cast spells or do physical attacks in their 3D space. Depending on your attack type, you can target a single enemy, a specific grid size (such as 5x5) on one level, or a grid size on all levels. I recently played Bard's Tale IV with its excellent strategic grid-based combat system and this game isn't as good in the strategy department. While the height-based combat is interesting, it doesn't really add much to the typical turn-based JRPG combat formula. Though while it doesn't innovate as much as I'd like, the combat here has no major downsides. And then we we have character ability growth. This is done through devouring dragon enemies. As you do damage, the percentage that you're able to devour and kill them goes up. When devouring a new enemy, you get an individual sphere grid (like Final Fantasy X), and can spend points to unlock new skills and base stats. This works decently well, though there's not a shortage of grid-unlocking points, so it's very likely that all of your characters will be relatively the same (with the same grids unlocked) during most of the game. Differentiation in your characters primarily comes through the limited number of spells they can equip and their weapons. Some characters naturally have high physical damage weapons, so you'll likely make them physical attackers. While you'll likely make everyone else magic users and equip their strongest spells. You can then equip characters in your back row with different elemental spells, so you can switch them in (at no turn cost) during battle to use those spells when needed. Overall a good Idea Factory game that's above average for them in just about every aspect. Definitely for you if you liked Fairy Fencer F, or you like the Neptunia games, but wish they were less fanservicy and more mature.
When compared to the first game, this sequel is overly-long, cliche, has more plot holes, and is not nearly as interesting. The combat is mostly the same as the last game and there's about twice as many combat missions, though that's due to the game being nearly twice as long. Combat is slightly harder. Where I failed no missions in the last game, I had to retry two missions in this game (one being one of the final bosses). Though this isn't really a game you play for the combat, so I'll get onto the story. I'll be brief and general here, as talking about the story could spoil the previous game (Mask of Deception), which you should play before considering playing this one. Whereas the last game kept me interested in the world due to strange (and believable) things being uncovered, this game takes a much more generic approach. There's very little new and interesting happening and the characters unfortunately become solidified into their stereotypes, which makes them less interesting. The first half of the game is all about a war that you're leading. The writers are not very good at war stories, so if you're into those types of stories, you'll be disappointed here. One of the main things they do is to have one side discuss what possible battle options there are, make a decision, and then switch to the enemy, who discusses the exact battle options. This is a writing trick to convince the reader/player that those are the only options that exist, which adds credibility to the plot. But the more critically-minded will see a large number of options that weren't discussed and see that the narrow-mindnesses of the opponents is due to the writers wanting to force the story to move in a certain direction, while providing these explanations as an attempt to improve believability. I should also point out that during the war section of the story, there's an individual enemy who vows to kill you, but never actually does. You get into numerous battles where he is about to make the final strike and possibly end your life, but something silly comes up that requires his attention and it turns into a children's "I'll get you next time!" fiasco. Oh, and there's the mind-altering bug that's implanted into a different individual to manufacture another opponent for you. Yep, we've got mind control here and it's the only instance of something like this being used with no reasonable world-explanation for its use. That's not bad on its own, but nonsensical stuff like this just keeps coming up over and over in the story. After the long (and arguably pointless) war section, you get back to the interesting stuff, such as the origins of this world, its people, and yourself. This section is also drawn out and has very little new to offer when compared to the previous game. New enemies are manufactured for you to fight, and for some reason, you must fight them multiple times. It seems as though the protagonist in this game has a hard time verifying whether someone is dead before declaring victory. You'll run into other writing issues here too, such as learning it's much easier than you expected to get this "key" that unlocks the secrets of the world - making some of the major actions in the previous game pointless. And coming across not one, but two, people/entities who want to destroy the world because they're depressed. Oh well, at least there was one well-written and touching scene in the middle of the game regarding a particular mother. Not exactly the game/story for people who easily notice (and dislike) plot holes, but decent enough if you liked the first game and just want to get more of these characters.
Not a bad harem-focused visual novel with a small amount of okay strategy combat. I'm always looking for games with intelligent writing, and while this one doesn't quite qualify, it is at least interesting and kept me coming back to find out what will happen. To summarize the basics of the story: you're a normal human who wakes up with no memory in a pre-industrial world of animal-eared and tailed people. The girl who finds you takes care of you until you can become self-sufficent. Along with her, and many other girls you befriend, you establish a home base of sorts and do jobs for particularly famous government official, who isn't exactly well liked by the other heads of government. While navigating the political landscape, you also learn more about your past, the world's past, and eventually uncover most of its sci-fi-like secrets. The story seems to be targeting male teens, as I can only describe your situation as harem-like. You spend a lot of time getting to know the girls that become your friends and who assist you with your work. There's a bit of nudity here and there and a set of particular girls are very sexually-suggestive, but your protagonist never crosses into the territory of having a deeper relationship with any of the girls. And of course, because this is a psuedo-harem, most of the girls have various levels of unexplained love for you. There's minor plot holes and issues here and there, but they weren't big enough to distract from the rest of the story. For example, the explanation of why you are able to move up in society so quickly is a bit unreasonable. The game points out that you're much smarter than the average animal person, but the so called "intelligent" acts that you perform are questionable at best. And they get even more questionable after you realize just how smart everyone else is. Many of the "dumb" animal characters have expert levels of determining others' intentions. Understanding of human psychology is typically much more advanced than being able to figure out how to swap broken gears or pushing a monster down a cliff (which are two example of your protagonist being "smart"). But I guess if the animal character were actually dumb, they wouldn't be very interesting to talk to, and you spend a lot of time talking to them. And finally, writing-wise, this is a game that leaves nothing to the imagination, and nothing to analyze. You're constantly given character's inner thoughts, so everything is clear. It's a story suitable for beginners and for people who don't understand psychology. It all just washes over you, requiring no work on your part to understand a character's true intentions, as those intentions are always written out in plain text. This, in addition to the story not tackling any mature themes, is why it is sub-par, intelligent-writing-wise. But hey, it sure is interesting. Taking the slow grind to figure out why the world is the way it is, uncovering your past, and navigating the political landscape kept me wanting to keep playing the game, which is more than I can say for most games I play these days. As for the combat, it's basic square-grid strategy combat and there's only about 15 battles in the entire game. Characters move across a grid and either heal or attack, and that's it. Being a strategy-game veteran, I found normal mode to be easy, and never lost a battle. I didn't feel like I wanted a challenge in the game, so never increased the difficulty level - the story was much more interesting to me. So if you like interesting / sci-fi-ish stories and pretty anime girls, this is a decent choice. I don't even particularly like visual novels and ended up not regretting my time with it. Just don't expect Shakespeare or Nier levels of writing, and you'll be fine.
If you have a soft spot for 90's experimental JRPGs, then this is right up your alley. There's just not much else out there like this these days. To summarize: It's a turn-based JRPG where you primarily control tanks in your quest to look for other human life in a world ravaged by global warming and AI. The story is basic and straight-forward. And thankfully, it's not full of plot holes and dumb character actions, like many popular JRPGs are these days. It starts out quite rough, with your revenge-focused protagonist simply finding a tank and then using it to carry out his revenge. But the story expands as you quickly find an advanced shelter with a couple of humans and agree to search for other human survivors for them. Throughout your journey, you find several survivors, each with a different, but realistic take on this world where humanity is almost extinct. Some interesting ideas and conversations come up as a result, such as when you find your first female: she's worried that she'll simply be used to make babies in an attempt to prolong humanity. And the scenes dealing with sexual frustration are interesting and warranted given the characters' situations. These scenes thankfully don't go over the top and things stay reasonable. The story doesn't have a definitive end. After about 30-35 hours of play, you will defeat the biggest threats and get your base in a state where they can survive a bit longer, and that's about it. You don't quite get to the point of repopulating humanity or saving the world. Though it is a nice change from the typical "hero saves the world" story that is in 95% of RPGs. The gameplay is relatively unique. It's simple and arguably easy, but tank combat is more about your setup than skills. Essentially, you will be finding, creating, and modifying your tanks and weapons to do as much damage as possible in as few rounds as possible to kill bosses. For example, you can equip multiple cannons and guns to your tank, modify them so they're more powerful or shoot more than once per round, and equip chips or use skills that let you fire multiple weapons per turn. Oh, and ammunition for many tank weapons is limited, so you must pick weapons that have enough capacity to last throughout a boss fight or during exploration. Refill your weapons for free by returning to base. There's more interesting tank mechanics, such as upgrading their engines to add more power, installing dual engines, balancing available power between your weapons and shields, countermeasures that automatically take down enemy missiles, and more. Finding new tanks and configuring them differently remained interesting throughout my entire playthrough. I even played the new game+ briefly, which lets you replay the game (with or without the story), but with new and better weapon options. But that's not all - you also have non-tank ground combat. This isn't as interesting, but is great for variety. You'll normally switch to this type of combat when you enter building ruins looking for items, technology, or the next quest objective. Also interesting here are the variety of enemies you can encounter on foot. Some are too powerful to reasonably fight (some being the enemies that you normally fight in tanks), and it's usually best to run away. So while in a dungeon on foot, you'll learn quickly which enemies to fight and which to run away from. Along with that, your characters have jobs, where they gain access to different skills, depending on the job level. These aren't that amazing, with each job having only one or two skills that I found useful. But again, it adds to the variety without taking away from the rest of the gameplay. Overall, I enjoyed my time with the game. It's the sort of game I got burnt out on in the 90's, but since there's not much out there like it these days, it's a refreshing change. If you're an old-school JRPG fan and are looking for something a bit different, give this one a try.
As someone who played the original Bard's Tale when it was new and has liked grid-based, turn-based, first-person RPGs ever since, this isn't exactly what I was looking for, but it's not a bad western RPG. Lets get the bad out of the way first. On PS4, there's a lot of technical issues. The frame rate is bad (even on PS4 Pro), there's annoying (but not game-breaking) visual/audio/interface bugs and glitches everywhere, and they even have a mouse cursor on top of the ending movie - They really missed that?? And this is the only game on PS4 that was physically painful to look at for extended periods - and I've played a lot of first-person games. I attribute this to the game's incredibly heavy motion blur when moving the camera horizontally. At first, I moved the camera sensitivity up to 80 since it was too slow for me. But that made the headaches and eye fatigue worse due to the increased blur, so I settled on 50 and avoided moving the camera quickly from then on. Related to this, they do offer a grid-based movement system in the settings, which prevents you from moving in ways that causes motion blur. But the game is very annoying to play in this mode as the levels/maps were seemingly not designed with grid-based movement in mind. The story is unfortunately cliche and generic. Although not bad, and not full of plot holes, it's based on the same plot that 90% of Western RPGs use: Evil being wants to control/destroy the world for some unknown reason, and you're the only person who can stop it. It plays out exactly how you expect, except there's much more getting magical items to get to the next plot point than normal. So lets get onto the good. If you like turn-based combat, you'll be glad to know that the combat here is good, relatively unique, and challenging. You're on a small grid with your opponents, with each side having half of the grid. There's skills that target specific squares of the grid and those that target enemies. For example, you can set fire to a specific square and enemies who step in it will catch fire. An enemy can start channeling for a powerful skill that will hit certain squares (related to him) on the next turn, and you can either kill him before that happens or use another skill to move him - either so you take no damage or the enemy skill hits his allies. And this is just one of the interesting mechanics. There's several other mechanics that keeps combat fun and rewarding. The puzzles in the game are good. They start out simple and get more complex as you make your way though. There's moving blocks through mazes onto switches, spinning pieces of circular puzzle boards to line up images, getting fairies to unlock doors by controlling their movement via totems, rotating devices to get strange blood magic to flow certain ways to unlock areas, and more. The puzzles don't make complete sense in the world, but they do a good job at keeping the player mentally engaged. In addition to standard puzzles, there's plenty of riddles that require you to read lore to figure out what to do next. Don't expect any hand-holding with these - some are relatively difficult, while avoiding being so abstract that they don't make sense. Use of pencil and paper will definitely help out with some of these. And then we come to the music. I normally don't mention music, but the game has some of the best vocal Celtic music I've heard in a game. This will vary based on your taste, but I think it's a great fit for the world. The only downside to this is that the music is a bit too good for the world. You'll be walking by a house, hearing this perfect pre-recorded singing and it seems a little too good for what you'd expect going by some random person's house. I had a decent time with the game, which is more than I can say about most games I play these days. The ending is a bit weak, the world seems a little small (even though it took me nearly 60 hours to complete), and I didn't have much motivation to go into the optional dungeon after beating the game, but I don't regret my time with it. Definitely a game to consider if you're into old-school western RPGs or turn-based RPGs.
An interesting Dark Souls clone that does a great job at level design and graphics, but gets everything else mostly wrong. The story is better (more mature) than the typical anime-style game (such as God Eater), but still has a far way to go to get to the level of Dark Souls or Bloodborne. The story is basically Dark Souls all over again, but with a lot of explanation and impact-on-daily-life stuff thrown in. This might be great for someone who thought Dark Souls was too vague or abstract to understand. But if you understood Dark Souls, then Code Vein will seem dumbed-down to you. A big aspect of the story is looking at peoples' memories to unlock skills. So just about nothing is left to the imagination. You know exactly how everyone feels, and unfortunately, they all feel about the same. This makes these memory sequences feel repetitive after a while. So take that, along with a bit of power-of-frienship and melodrama and you'll get an idea of what this story is like. The level design is actually pretty good. It does its best to emulate Dark Souls and Bloodborne and pulls it off to some extent. I don't like exploration in games, but liked this one due to how similar it was to the good soulsborne games. And while exploring those levels, you get some pretty good area graphics. That's important for a game like this since you'll likely be going to the same areas multiple times. The character models and customization options are also impressive for this style of game. While you're all basically undead, there's no shortage of pretty characters. At least they give you a good number of scars and evil-looking tattoos to choose from to at least make yourself look partially dead. Clothes options are decent, but you get only one skirt for your female characters. At least they didn't restrict the camera angels, so if interested, you'll get to see that they modeled all parts of the characters equally well. And then come the negatives. Combat is just not as good as Dark Souls. It's modeled after Dark Souls, but ends up feeling more hack-and-slashy. Spending too much time trying to learn enemy moves and attacking them at the right moment always ended up being worse than just running straight up to them and flailing away. This is mostly due to just about every enemy having extra-wide-swinging attacks, so you're frequently getting hit even when standing right behind them. So your best option is to hit them frequently, causing them to be staggered/stunned, and then just continue hitting until they're dead. And I rarely ran into a stamina issue. For most non-boss enemies, you'll need less than a full bar of stamina to kill them. The normal monsters are easy when fighting them by yourself. And they're even easier when you bring along one of your NPC companions (who you'll have for most of the game). The game seems to realize this, so it sets up about one section per level where hordes of enemies attack you at once. Those are really the only challenging parts of the game to an experienced soulsborne player. And then we have the bosses, all of which are worse than every soulsborne boss. I was able to take down the majority of them on the first try - which is unheard of in a soulsborne game. Just hit them from behind until you're out of stamina, run away, and repeat. Their attacks are either forward-facing or are slow and easy to see, so you can easily dodge out of the way. But then there's the traditional hack-and-slash bosses that somehow made it into the game. These bosses are constantly flailing about, making very quick attacks, hitting everything around them, and hitting you from across the room when you get too far away. These fights are all about having a high damage output weapon. You will get hit, but if you can hit faster than they do, then you'll win. So very disappointing boss battles from the game without the strategy or learning aspects that you get from soulsborne. But at least compared to standard hack-and-slash games, they were decent. I'll talk a bit about the spells and skills. They're mostly worthless and there doesn't appear to be an easy way to make a mage character, like you could in Dark Souls. Physical attacks were always more effective per my testing and it wasn't even worthwhile to use spells to augment my physical attacks, as that took away time I could have been swinging. So it's a great effort at making a dark souls like game, and might be just for you if you're looking for something easier and less vague, and don't mind teen-focused stories.
An okay game, but primarily for bullet hell fans and not old-school side-scrolling shooter fans (such as Gradius). I'll talk about the story briefly. It's really all over the place, with you taking on the roles of different people for each level, and with each one having way more backstory than you need for this type of game. Somehow they decided to add in profanity and **** references, so it quickly becomes a game you normally wouldn't give to young kids. Although they'll likely just skip all of the story scenes, since that's what I did after the first two levels because the stories aren't very interconnected and have very little to do with what you're doing gameplay-wise. As for the gameplay, it's very basic. You can upgrade your main weapon, primarily giving it a wider firing rage, by getting random upgrade items during the level. You have a special attack that varies from killing everything on screen to doing a large forward-facing blast, depending on which person you're playing. And you can slow down time temporarily. That's it. There's no between-level shops, loadouts, or upgrades. So if you're a fan of games like Gradius or U.N. Squadron, you might be disappointed by this one. What the game does do fairly well is bullet hell. I've don't play these sorts of games, so don't have much to compare it to. Just know that you'll be doing a lot of dodging of small balls in a variety of patterns that make no practical sense, weapon-wise. But that's the point of these sorts of games. As someone who doesn't play these sorts of games, it was challenging, with the last two levels (out of6 levels), taking multiple retries to get through on Normal mode. There's some minor annoyances in the gameplay, such as not being able to shoot behind you (things frequently show up behind you), and it being difficult to tell the difference between the terrain and sky. But with enough deaths and retries, I got used to these. And then there's local multiplayer options. The three different versus options are incredibly basic. They have you on a static screen shooting at each other twin-stick style. I and my daughter got tired of them quick. So then we tried the co-op main campaign. It has the 2nd player flying in one of the twin-stick crafts while the 1st player is in the normal plane. And unless you're both decent at bullet hell games, you'll have a bad time since your life pool is shared. If one of you is no good, then you'll both die very quickly and not have much fun. So it was an interesting 5 or so hours to get through the game, but I have no plans to replay it.
Decent game if you're looking for an American comic-book-like turn-based RPG without a lot of depth. This appears to be based on the Battle Chasers comic book series and does a good job at representing it in video game format. The primary issue here is that the world and characters aren't fleshed out very well in-game. That's supposedly done by the comic books. So don't expect much character or world building here. The story takes you on a very generic young teen comic book journey. The main plot consists of your group coming to this unexplored land for mana (which I can only guess is valuable to them), and then eventually encountering a demon who wants to rule/destroy the world, so you go on a quest to defeat it. There is a minor interesting twist near the end, but overall, the story is sub-par and generic and we're given little reason why our heroes are doing what they're doing besides that they're comic book heroes and you're just supposed to accept this. This leaves us with very little character building since the target audience has either read the comics or is fine with one-dimensional heroes. The only worthwhile character interactions happen during your stay at the inn. Each time I stayed there, the characters talked with each other, which helps you better understand their personalities, but not so much their motives for partaking in this journey. The gameplay is simple, but relatively unique for recent turn-based RPGs. It's challenging, but not very rewarding and has lots of annoying aspects. I could go on and on about the annoying parts, but I'll explain just one here. You're frequently poisoned or given some other de-buff that causes damage every turn. Turns are individual-based and start when it's that character's turn. Casting spells takes two turns. So if you have a character that can cast a spell to remove poison, you must wait for that character's turn, while your other characters are having their turns and taking damage, take damage yourself when you start the spell, wait again while all of your other characters take damage again on their turns, and then finally get to your spell-casing turn, where you take more damage from the poison before it's cured. And sometimes, by the time you finally cast the poison-curing spell, it has already worn off on other characters (especially if they've been taking fast actions on their turns). The game is also grinding-based. Don't expect to just go into every dungeon once, clearing out all enemies along the way to get enough experience to beat the game. You will eventually need to go back into a dungeon or grind enemies on the world map. Though the amount of grinding isn't bad and I was able to beat the game in slightly under 40 hours. The game world is pretty small and there's normally no reason to go back to a place you've already been, giving it a linear feel. Though at least there's various things you can do, such as fishing (which doesn't give much benefit besides trophies), a battle arena, at least two puzzles, at least three side quests, and about six extra areas where you can explore for treasure or your final ultimate weapons (which are very easy to get compared to other RPGs). The art style of the game is quite good and seems faithful to the comics. Though many dungeons are overly-dark and there's technical issues here and there. While simply walking through a dungeon, the game will pause occasionally, seemingly to load more data. And that's on top of already long loading times. I encountered graphical glitches occasionally; normally during battle where sprites, such as the blast from a gun-firing, would sometimes show up as big squares. So it is an interesting game to get though, although its difficulty and challenge was more about overcoming its annoyances rather than it being intellectually challenging. I'd say it's a worthwhile game to play if you like turn-based RPGs. While it doesn't have a lot of depth, it is at least unique.
More cohesive story than the first game, but not worth your time if you didn't like the first game. The game is basically Nights of Azure version 1.2. Much of the same stuff happens here, but they've made small improvements to the world, story, and characters. The story is much less nonsensical this time around. That might be bad if you're a fan of stories where amazing stuff happens for no reason. Considering that the first game didn't do so well in Japan, I'm guessing they tried to make the story more believable this time around. And it is more believable, but still in a kid's cartoon, not-as-good-as-Sailor-Moon, sort of way. Don't expect any mature themes or deep thought here. It is still firmly on the dumb side of the JRPG intelligence spectrum. To summarize, you're off to save your friend/lover as she's being offered up as a sacrifice to save the world. It would be great if these Final Fantasy X-copied plots would copy more than just this - I mean it's all right there for the taking: the great character drama, growth multi-layered storytelling, and tragedy. But they've decided not to for this game and the results are disappointing. Nothing really happens besides going place to place getting nonsensical things so you can get to the next nonsensical thing. Oh, and you get to rescue/find a new female friend every now and then, for a total of seven girls who can join you on your quest. The game is definitely more focused on the relationships between you and your girlfriends. But unfortunately those relationships don't progress very far. The gameplay is relatively horrible. Choppy animations, meaningless skills and moves, and just a general feeling of not having full control over your character. The overall gameplay quality reminds me of the large number of bad MMORPGs that came from Korea and China about 10 years ago - with the lag included. The combat is third-person (instead of top-down like the first game). You can choose two creatures and one human to go out and fight monsters. The creatures are mostly useless in combat (unlike the first game) and I primarily used them to open shortcuts or open doors to treasure (the treasure and equipment being mostly useless). Your human companion is much more useful, but is primarily there to pull off a move randomly, give you a buff, or participate with you in a combined special move. There's not much impact to hits, so for some attacks, you'll feel like you're just slashing away at air. Surprisingly, some of the combined special moves have some of the least impact, as if they forgot to add in the sound effects for them. Monster-fighting strategy is also nearly non-existent. Spamming the same attack takes care of everything except certain bosses, where blocking becomes necessary. "But this is a game about scantily-dressed lesbians" I hear you say. So what about the fanservice aspects? Overall, It's a bit better than the first game, but still not up to par to other horrible fanservice games, such as School Girl Zombie Hunters. This is a breast game, with all character outfits showing off various breast aspects. Unfortunately, low camera angles are not possible, but that's okay since the character rears aren't very nicely done. The characters all have one default costume and one swimsuit, which are all nonsensical and likely not appealing to most people. Though you'll just have to judge for yourself by looking at the character models. There's somewhat of a dating aspect of the game, where you can fill up hearts with the various girls by taking them out to battle with you. But nothing comes from doing this besides short not-very-good post-credit cut scenes or the "good" ending if you max out the hearts on the right girls. I decided that wasn't worth my time, so only maxed one girl and settled on the bad ending. Thankfully, the game can be completed within 15 hours, if you skip all of the meaningless side content and affection grinding.
Good game. The only problem is that Estival Versus exists and is better in almost every way. Unfortunately, there's very little new with the Burst Re:Newal installment. It's primary new feature is its retelling of the original Senran Kagura story. In addition, we get a higher resolution for PS4 Pro, the game seems to be better optimized (higher framerates), and there's various minor gamelay tweaks that makes controlling your character and learning moves easier. Besides that, it's an exact copy of Estival Versus, but with less stuff. Less characters, less costumes and underwear (primarily due to having less characters). No team-based battles, and no multiplayer/online options at all (so no online character posing contest like in Estival Versus). And of course, no character-fondling mechanics, since the censors decided that was no longer appropriate for mature adults. The story differences are worthwhile to point out. Burst Re:Newal actually tries to be serious with its generic plot line. That's good if you want to learn more about these characters and their origins. While on the other hand Estival Versus is overly perverse and excels at giving the target audience more of what they want (girls doing perverted things) while not adequately explaining the backgrounds of its large cast. Unlocking costume and underwear mechanics are disappointing. Most costumes and accessories are available to buy immediately and others just become available to buy after beating certain missions. There's secret documents to find and collect, but they serve no unlockable-item purpose. Oh, but you can get many of the Estival Versus characters and costumes in the game, but be prepared to shell out more than the price of the game itself in DLC. Or just buy Estival Versus. Overall, I had a good time with the game for a few days, going through all of the missions. I felt like I was playing Estival Versus all over again. But there's only so many times I can play what's basically the same game before getting tired of it, no matter how many breasts and asses it throws at me.
The next-level giant pet simulator. That's all I could think of while playing the game. If you like pets and don't mind them getting beat up every now and then, then this is the game for you! The game is basically ICO, but full of obstacles and basic puzzles that require your giant pet to progress. The variety in puzzles is a little disappointing. They mostly consist of opening doors to get your pet through them, and then after you get your pet through the door, having your pet jump to an area that was previously inaccessible to you. Also disappointing is that there's normally only one way to solve each puzzle. Many are carefully scripted with specific pet actions, so there's not much thinking outside of the box possible here. Initially, controlling the pet is annoying. You get some hand signals later on that improve things, but then it just becomes slightly less annoying. The story is vague, though less vague than ICO or Shadow of the Colossus. You'll actually get some background story information and closure with this installment. The game goes for an animal friendship theme and does it pretty well, though some people aren't big fans of this type of story. Oh, and don't forget the Uncharted moments. There's plenty of impossibly amazing moments in the game, primarily consisting of your giant pet's weight or size breaking bridges or other things and then you just barely escaping though no skill of your own, but because it's a scripted scene. I'm a bit sad that the studio who bought us ICO and Shadow of the Colossus has stooped to this level of dumb storytelling. But hey, kids these days like it. So it was an alright game for me. After I got used to the initial pet-controlling annoyance, I ended up completing it in less than 15 hours. And I'm glad it didn't take longer than that.
If just by looking at this game, you think that this isn't your kind of game, then you're probably right and should move on. I'm into intelligent stories and strategic gameplay, and this game has neither. What is does have is dumb fun and cool ways to kill monsters with an axe and other god-like powers. It's great for the typical Uncharted fan who wants more of a fantasy setting. I don't particularly like Uncharted and had my fill of the series after playing only part 4. And after starting up this game, for only a few hours, I found that it's Uncharted 4 all over again, just slightly different. For example: Disposable beautiful environments that you only see once, enemies or climbing sections around every corner for no good story reason, and a threadbare story that's there to make you feel cool/special/powerful without getting in the way of the gameplay. I was initially pleased by the dynamic between father (protagonist) and son, with the father being overly strict as to man-up his scrawny mama's boy of a son. Though that gets toned down quickly and I started seeing several instances where the father characteristically should have taught/disciplined his son, but he didn't. I assume the writers didn't want people thinking the protagonist was a total jerk, so they decided to tone down his strictness, at the expense of believability. Magical nonsense also happens frequently in the game. I was initially relieved at the introduction of a witch character as I was started to get bored, but she quickly turns into a tool to get you over pits and to new areas. Why she does this makes no logical sense, but in this game, gameplay and progression come before storytelling. And then there's a pair of dwarves that just show up randomly where you happen to be so you can upgrade your equipment. When one was pressed about how he got to a certain place so quickly, he eventually told us that it was because of his secret magic. Again, gameplay is more important than story consistency. I got increasingly annoyed by the story and repetitive gameplay that I gave up. If I wasn't an old man, I'd have more patience with and might even enjoy killing monsters over and over, but I don't.
Quite the annoying little game with about 2% of the depth of the old great god strategy games, such as Black and White or Populous. I played the game for a couple of days and still don't quite get the point. Or maybe my expectations are way off and I'm expecting some sort of meaningful advancement, like in the old-style god games. Either way, you play on a circle (globe) and make the land habitable for people, who you can't control. Use your various gods to make improvements to the annoyingly-limited amount of land around your peoples' settlements and just watch them use more and more resources without nothing else much happening. That's the gist of it. And because the gameplay is so shallow, they throw in these time limits. For example, have your people use as many resources as you can within 30 minutes to get an achievement, and then start all over again. That's just no fun. I should point out the land advancement annoyances, since that's the main thing you'll be doing in the game. For example, one god makes plants, so you make a plant. But making a bunch of plants or other resources isn't enough to advance your people. You must chain bonuses off of that plant. Some other god can make a mine that gets certain bonuses if next to a plant, so you make the mine. But then you need to upgrade the plant because it's not powerful enough, so you do so, but then the bonuses for the mine go away and you have to redo that whole section of land. And then you find out that this new plant needs some sort of advanced mine to get a bonus that you can't make right now. You'll need to advance a particular type of people so much that they give you a particular type of representative that you'll need a particular type of god to pick up so that you can upgrade that mine so it gets a bonus from the upgraded plant. And then you upgrade the plant again and the annoyance cycle starts all over again. Good luck trying to do all of that before the 30 minute time limit is up. I quickly realized that the game is best played with a spreadsheet, so you know exactly what upgrades to do at what time and what type of people to advance. There's just too many options that don't make common sense. The game doesn't require strategy - it requires memorization (or a spreadsheet). So yeah, not the game for me.
Decent, but short (12 hours or so) Japanese horror game. Unlike some other popular Japanese story-based games, this one is relatively grounded, mature, and free of big plot holes (opposite of Danganronpa). There's still the occasional issue or dumb thing happening here and there, but I was able to forgive it (and I'm very picky about stories). What's best about the game is its great representation of modern Japanese folklore and myths about ghosts and the supernatural. Many Japanese adamantly believe this stuff, likely because of their lack of recent widespread god-fearing religions, so it's great to see this first-hand from people who understand it. The main story is 5 chapters. You start out having lost the majority of your memories due to a curse (the death mark), encounter other people who have the same mark, and then work with them to destroy or save the spirits who caused them. All the while, you're learning more about spirits and your past, with a few believable twists thrown in for good measure. It's well-done, but short. Thankfully there's a post-game chapter that's pretty long that extends the playtime a bit more. The game deals with themes such as **** and suicide and the characters thankfully don't overreact to them. They instead talk about them maturely, which is quite the relief after being disappointed by many other supposedly "good" Japanese game releases, that in hindsight, were obviously aimed at kids. The nudity and gore are also relatively well-done, reminding me of my time I spent looking at crime scene photos (which is a great way to horrify normal people). Although the game made the nude girls, even the dead ones, just a little more sexy than they would have been if this were real life. The gameplay is decent. It's not as involved as the Zero Escape games, but is definitely more than you get from visual novels. Dialogue sections are very long, which makes it feel like a visual novel at times, but then you get to the point-and-click adventure style gameplay and life-or-death decision making sections. The point-and-click adventure sections are were most of the gameplay happens. you will be searching haunted areas for items and clues that will help you progress through the area or give you information to fight the main spirit. The game makes it very easy to know what parts of the scenery is intractable, unlike in Zero Escape, where I sometimes had no idea that I could interact with a certain thing. Exploring areas was quite fun, and a bit scary. Finding dead bodies, ghosts, or even new characters who join you is interesting. The game does standard jump scares occasionally, such as when you move into a new section, it will pop up a ghost face and make a noise. It didn't overdo this, which I appreciated. Also, when shining your flashlight on dark areas, you'll sometimes see ghosts who quickly disappear. I prefer this over the jump scares and wish it was used just a bit more. And then we get to the decision-making sections. Spirits will occasionally put you in life-or-death situations and you must make the right choices or use the right items to survive these or defeat the spirit. For the most part, these are well done and make logical sense, as long as you've been paying attention to the clues you've been collecting. Just don't overthink them, as the solutions are normally quite simple. Though there were a few instances where the choices made no sense and I had to simply die and try again (the game makes it easy to retry). Even after these few encounters, and re-reading all of the clues and information, I couldn't figure out how I was supposed to know these things. Maybe it's a localization issue, or maybe I missed some clues. Either way, this didn't happen often enough to ruin the experience. Also, there's multiple ways to solve each main spirit encounter, which is a nice touch. Normally someone dies if you choose the not-so-optimal path, and everyone lives if you choose the best path. Either way, you get to proceed with the story and I had a lot of fun reloading and doing both, just to see the different character reactions. So I liked my time with the game and will pick up the sequel.
Great game for teaching good morals to teens, but doesn't have much to offer to old JRPG veterans. I finally got around to playing this series, revered for its grand storytelling and turn-based combat and ended up disappointed. All except the last few hours of this 70-hour JRPG retreads just about everything that great JRPGs have done in the past. Which is teaching you though example, the dangers of discrimination, nationalism, corporate greed, turning a blind-eye to tragedies, and backing your family or group even though they're wrong. The game is very up front about pointing out what's bad, with frequent long conversations between the main characters that show you how they decided these things were bad. And to the game's credit, it gets them all right, unlike Persona 5, which teaches that discrimination of adults is okay because an adult or two hurt some children in the past. Much of the game reminded me of the original Scooby-Doo cartoons. Meddling kids are always exposing bad people's crimes in the face of inaction or corruption by law-enforcement organizations. And you'll get this a lot, with the bad guys even pointing out that they would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for you meddling kids. The problem with this is that the game is centered around the idea that your protagonists, just going about their school assignments, are more capable than adults whose jobs it is to solve these things. This is great if you want to empower teens, but it's not very believable to an adult. The story is also full of an unbelievable number of conveniences. Your class goes on several trips to learn about the world, and something amazing/unexpected happens each and every time, at the exact time you're visiting, just so that you can solve the problem and save the day. For example, when a military complex is attacked, your teen protagonists, who were previously proven to be much weaker than adults, end up repelling the attack. All of the soldiers in the complex just mysteriously disappeared at that time. The political representation in the game is frequently praised. But I found it to be basic and full of conveniences. I give the writers credit for creating a functioning political landscape, but when tragedies occur, their systems mysteriously break down, paving the way for your teen protagonists to save the country. Also, there's a big emphasis on a particular terrorist group that continues to attack various sites (that you just happen to be visiting) Their goals and motives make little sense, even after the protagonists explain them to you, and make even less sense once you get to the end of the game. After learning their true goals and capabilities, the astute players will wonder why they partook in some of their earlier missions. I can't explain the end-game twists to avoid spoilers, but just say that they turned this decent JRPG story and world to being borderline nonsensical. It's not nearly as bad as what happened in Persona 5, and will be acceptable to the game's teen target audience, but intelligent adults should beware of the incoming poorly-done anime tropes. There's much more to say about the story as there's a lot going on in the game, but I'll move on to the gameplay. The turn-based battle system is average at best. Great turn-based battle systems have one thing in common: using the tools and training given, you can create strategies to beat the challenging enemies and bosses (or those who aren't good at strategy can just level grind). This game, on Normal mode, was just too easy. After I got used to the battle system, I frequently skipped enemies (to reduce my level) and skipped upgrading weapons and armor since that was the only way to get any sort of challenge. Harder difficulties might have been better, but the game doesn't let you change difficulties mid-game. Also, I must point out that while position-based combat systems are normally great, this one was annoying. Changing your position takes a turn and performing an action (such as attacking or casting certain spells) automatically moves your position to where the game thinks you want to go. So it's annoying to get your characters in the position you want them to be. If I perform a normal attack, and I have movement points to spare, why must it move me in a straight light right at the enemy? Why can't I run to the side? I got used to it, but was disappointed that the typical Idea Factory RPG has more strategic combat. So with the game being overly preachy with its morals (although they are good morals), leaving nothing up for intellectual interpretation, having way too many story conveniences, having a disappointing combat system, and a downright silly twist ending, there wasn't much for me to like. It's not bad - I've just done all of this before. Though the typical teen should love it and there's a lot of good stuff for them to learn here.
I've finally gotten around to playing what is one of only two simulation racing franchises on the PS4. And it's not bad. I'm not big into racing games, preferring to race my own C6 Corvette in real life (rarely). Also, I'm not much into multiplayer, so only played the single player portions of this game. My overall score basically comes down to having no games to compare this to, having not played a racing game since the 90's. In the game's current updated state, I found it to be slightly above average for what I was expecting, hence the "6". The game is set up like a mobile game, where you can spend real money to more quickly unlock the cars and upgrades you want. After playing the game a good 80 hours, I found no need to spend money and it didn't distract much from the experience, so I was pleased. The car selection is a little disappointing. It's heavily Japanese-based, which makes sense given it's a Japanese game. But I was a little surprised at the lack of famous classic European and American cars. My own C6 isn't there along with the C5, which were unstoppable monsters during their periods in racing. There's also an obvious lack of Porsche and Ferrari models. Though this isn't a huge deal since the cars all felt very similar. It basically came down to: the newer the car, the better it handled (primarily traction). For the most part, the older cars just seemed like they were on junk tires with junk suspensions. Car upgrades are passable, but a bit disappointing. You spend "mileage points" to unlock several levels of power or weight upgrades. Mileage points are gained pretty easily just by racing in the game. You can then dial the power or weight up or down within the range that you unlocked. So no "real" power train upgrades, such as buying actual parts for your engine. There's no real tire upgrades. You just have a list to choose from that are available for each race. Suspension upgrades don't exist, but like your tires, you can modify suspension/ride height settings at any time before a race. So it isn't bad, but is aimed at folks who just want to race with an even playing field rather than those who want to experiment with various parts. As for content, there's a bunch. Pages and pages of racing leagues where you can just jump in to races with set restrictions A driving school, where there's another huge page of "missions" to complete that are meant to improve your driving skills. Then there's the large number of mission challenges where you're asked to do a large variety of tasks, such as complete sections of tracks within set time frames, pass a certain number of cars without hitting him, and hitting top speeds within certain limits. And then there's the circuit experience, where it gives you turn-by-turn experience in the game's large number of tracks. Completing any of the above net you a gold/silver/bronze trophy with appropriate money to match, making it easy to buy all but the most expensive cars. And if you can't afford certain multi-million dollar cars, then it's no big deal because the game gives you a random free car every day if you race at least 25 miles. After 1-2 months with 80 hours of play, I got everything I wanted and could have easily sold the cars I didn't want to get other desirable cars. The actual racing is surprisingly accurate. An experienced racer (or reckless driver) will be able to point out the small differences, but they're acceptable to me. I played through the entire game with a controller, and while I felt I wasn't nearly as accurate as I could have been, It didn't prevent me from getting gold in all of the challenges. Braking is the most difficult thing to master in the game. At first, auto-breaking is turned on, and it seems almost necessary, not being experienced with the cars or tracks. But after going through enough of the training missions and challenges, you realize that the auto-braking is overly-aggressive and the only way to get gold in some missions is to turn it off. Afterwards, you'll end up relying on the brake indicator and the double-cones set up around the tracks (which are interestingly at near-optimal breaking points). Overall, the game did a great job at weaning me off of auto-breaking. So even though it's focused more towards fair online racing, I had plenty of fun with its single-player modes and don't regret the purchase.
A big graphical improvement over the previous entries in the series, but besides that, it's basically the same game as God Eater 1 and 2. More than any other game I've played, the God Eater games seem to be "versions" of the same game rather than being full-blown sequels. The stories in each are incredibly similar, the mechanics are nearly identical, and the gameplay has only minor tweaks. The only big change this time around is the graphics I play games primarily for their stories, so I'll get into that first. This time around, we have basically a magical little girl that we're trying to protect from just about everyone/everything else. The military wants to experiment on her and the monsters have an uncontrollable urge to eat her, but she's just so cute that everyone in your party wants to protect her. No, that's not a copy and paste from one of my previous God Eater reviews. It is actually the same main plot. God Eater has historically been set up like a dumb super-powered teen anime, and that hasn't changed. Though it is slightly less dumb this time around. The writers seem to be working to make this series a little more believable, which is what I like to see. However, the average teen should see no issues with its story as-is. Though what's missing are the numerous character interactions. They were too heavy in the last games, which made you think they were trying to be an anime instead ****, but they're way too light this time around. I ended the game not knowing or caring much about the characters at all. The story is also far less wondrous this time around, which helps its believability (though doesn't fix it). It seems as though they just cut out the overly-wondrous bits and replaced them with nothing, leaving us with what feels like a short and partial story. This could be why there have been so many updates to the game since its original release. Maybe the developers felt a bit disappointed in their final product (I sure would have been). The gameplay is more of the same, but there's positives and negatives over the last installment. If you haven't played a game in the series yet, know that the combat is clunky, not very responsive, and very repetitive. It's less clunky this time around and could actually be fun to those who don't mind its repetitiveness. Though it's unfortunately dumbed down a bit. In the previous games, there's a big emphasis on attacking certain parts of monsters - attacking the wrong parts would simply do no damage. But in this game, attacking all monsters (except for the final boss) anywhere is fine. You can do more damage attacking different areas, but it's normally not worth the risk. Also this time around, about half of all enemy movements are impossible to read. They complete their attacks so quickly and without any tells, that you can't prevent being hit. Everything is much more flashy this time around too, so it's hard to see what the enemies are doing. To compensate for this, they seemed to have lowered the overall difficulty - I found it much easier than the last two games. That's not a good thing in a game all about repetitive combat. Strategic combat keeps people interested, while repetitive button mashing (which is what this installment has migrated to) just get boring. Normally what keeps me interested in these dumb anime-ish games are the costumes to collect or unlock for your characters. Upon the game start, you immediately get most of the costumes, including some of the best in the game. As you complete missions, you can buy others (and have to craft them), but they're not any more interesting than what you already have. There's a lack of skirts/dresses in the game, but I supposed they are trying to be more believable overall, so that's to be expected. The bottom line is that for costume hunters, there's very little effort required to obtain costumes, so it's not very fun. Unfortunately, the best part of the game for me was when it ended. I was thinking to myself that I had to go through another 50-100 missions to complete the game and I was just at the half-way point when I killed the only unique monster I had fought up until that point. But nope, that was actually the end. The game requires you to go through about half as many missions as the last game to complete it. I was a little disappointed that the final boss was far less interesting and difficult than in the previous games, but on the plus side, I didn't have to play the game anymore. I did play a few of the post-game missions. I found that there wasn't much story to them and they were primarily about grinding more repetitive battles to upgrade your weapons even further, so I quickly quit.
A great parody of old-school (80's/90's) western RPGs while being a decent game mechanically. If that sounds interesting to you and you're up for some well-done crude and witty humor, then you'll have some fun with this one. You control The Bard, who's all about women, wine, and song, in that order. The Bard's main skill is that he can summon a variety of creatures and other beings, primarily to help fight. And to introduce our protagonist, the first thing we see him do is secretly summon a rat to scare a local barmaid, so that he can swoop in and remove it to get some female affection. The Bard is a smart guy, but frequently thinks with the wrong head or makes other not-so obvious mistakes that lands him (or others) in hot water later. Eerly on, he learns of a trapped princess and somewhat begrudgingly agrees to help free her, constantly weighing the pros of the promised riches and pleasures against the effort required to obtain these rewards. From there, you're off on your journey to save the princess, meeting many funny characters and encountering silly circumstances along the way. By far, the best part about this game is its comedic writing, and how it takes standard RPG tropes and scenarios and makes fun of them or turns them into something silly. And it does this while mostly remaining serious. It never gets to the level of nonsensical comedy for comedy's sake. The game mechanics are decent, but not deep at all. The most interesting mechanic is the summons, with you being able to eventually summon 16 differnt minions. Each has different abilities and strengths, such as having high health, ranged attacks, multi-enemy attacks, heals, etc. It was decent fun trying to find which set of summons worked best for situations. And you'll definietely need to think about each situation differently since the game difficulty is average by old-school standards, which means hard by today's standards. There's a small varity of weapons to choose from that also keeps the Bard's combat somewhat interesting. Shields and armor exist, but do very little. There's no inventory management in the game; it simply equips the best equipment automatically and auto-sells what you previously had on (keeping all of your weapon types separate). And every sellable-item you pick up is automatically sold. There are no equipment upgrade options: so no blacksmiths, socketed jems, magical enhancements, or anything like that. The only real usable item in the game is gems. These seem to be limited, found only in specific locations or as rewards for certain actions. Their primary use is to fully heal you, which I found to be required in certain situations. I was a little worried I'd run out, but ended up with over 100 unused gems by the end of the game. So this isn't a great game if you want something mechanically deep. Though if you just want to get to the next dialogue section to hear some more of the funny story and interesting characters, a simple combat system is all you need.
This is simply not the game for someone who needs well-written believable characters in a believable world. After spending over 10 years playing games specifically to find the most well-written stories, I've come to find that the typical gamer doesn't notice, or isn't bothered by poor writing. Good writing basically means that the characters' actions and the world the characters inhabit are believable. After a few hours of playing this game, I found that both are completely unbelievable. Since the action/stealth gameplay was doing nothing for me, I found little to like about the game. To explain a bit, the protagonist is a modern, politically-correct 20's/30's girl, transplanted into a late-teen's body in a tribal/pre-industrial setting. Our protagonist was isolated as a baby and has lived in the wild, interacting with about three other people for her entire life at the time we take control of her (as an adult). But somehow, she has perfect speech, manners, and ability to deal with 100's of people at once. She's even an expert at sarcasm, which is strange given there's no indication that her guardian taught her to be like that. She's also seemingly devoid of most young-girl desires. Love/sex? None at all - maybe she was spayed. Hate/spite? Nope - that would clash with her politically-correctness. Need to fit-in? Nothing here either - it seems like she could care less about her newly-joined society after her childhood-long isolation. Though she does have a seemingly-unfounded need for a mother. This makes little sense unless others were constantly trying to convince her that she needed one. That happened only once in isolation, which isn't enough to ingrain it into someone. Oh, but the plot is about finding her mother, so we must simply accept it... So yeah, she just doesn't make sense. Though maybe the game is trying to appeal to people who just want to see themselves in a video game. So we end up with this modern-age generic person that is meant to appeal to as many people as possible, despite a person like this not actually existing. The world and setting has several issues too. The tribe you first encounter is tiny and appears to be modeled after nomadic hunter/gatherer tribes. I didn't see any farms large enough to sustain them and they've stayed in one spot for the entirety of the protagonist's lifetime. So how do they get food? They surely don't eat the mechanical creatures within meters of their camps. And what about those mechanical creatures? They attack and almost kill me just for walking down the road. How can their children exist with these things so close? And in my first quest, some kid got caught up a tree with machines surrounding her while her dad was stuck on the ground with a broken foot. How are they dumb enough to get in that situation? How did they both not die? I climbed up that same tree later and the machines could attack me easily. Oh, and those silly tribal rules seem to be made up on the spot. So the protagonist is outcast because she has no mother - why would anyone make that rule? But she can come back if she completes a deadly challenge when she's an adult - did the same dumb person make this rule? And no one is supposed to talk to outcasts. But everyone is constantly breaking that rule, so why does it exist? And how on earth do we have white people, black people, asian people, and middle-eastern people all in the same tribe? Tribes don't normally work like that, and there's no indication that these people just showed up all at once from different parts of the world to make this tribe. This is obviously a game about gameplay and graphics first. The protagonist, world, and beginning of the story is so poorly done that I have no reason to continue. Though I suppose I'll keep it for showing off HDR on my TV.
Basically the same game as the last two installments with very little to keep a solo-player interested (besides the forgettable story mode). No tasks or challenges to unlock content - Some costumes are unlockable by blindly grinding fights (it gives you no indication of how to do this). I got tired of that, so found the cheat code that unlocked all costumes. Well, I mean 15% of costumes - the rest are all DLC and the game proudly shows this to you each time you try to pick a costume for a character. I don't buy DLC, so lost interest in the game within two days. Well, at least the character models are nice...
Oh boy, it's Final Fantasy 13 all over again, but with teen angst, less of a story, and a worse combat system. The short review is: If you like Final Fantasy 13 and are looking for a more action-oriented combat system, you'll probably like this. When first starting game, I was a little surprised at how well the opening cinematic was done. It shows great care in the tragedy and death taking place, surrounding a particular soldier and his chocobo. It was a bit drawn-out, but was good. Unfortunately, the story goes downhill from there. Shortly afterwards, we're introduced to our large number of protagonists who are immune to the magic-blocking effects that's causing the death/destruction in the area. They then proceed to repel the invading army single-handedly, because this is a teen power fantasy story, of course. Besides our protagonists being created, there's little reason given why they have their powers, so we must simply accept their super powers. The protagonists aren't badly-written, but they are generic. Because of the large number of them, very little character building time is given for each. But if you're used to Anime/JRPG character stereotypes, these will fit into your existing preconceptions nicely. The remainder of the story is dark for a Final Fantasy game, with plenty of death due to the seemingly pointless war happening. But whenever I took a step back and asked why this was all happening, I could come to no logical conclusion other than that's what the writers wanted. The character actions simply aren't believable when properly analyzed. The major issue with this game (and Final Fantasy 13's) story is that it revolves around what appears to be gods that are influencing humans in the most cryptic ways possible, thus creating conflict. The gods are unfortunately not at all consistent, so things just happen randomly. These gods just seem to be a thin veil that the writers use to cover up their lack of good creative writing. I'm not a fan of Square Enix's attempt to morph turn-based combat systems into bad action combat systems, and this game is a prime example of that. This one is more action-oriented than most, with no way to pause or slow the combat at all. You'll just have to deal with its fidgety targeting system, melee characters that hop around when attacking, and it's easily-disruptable, charge-based, and limited spell system. Sure, you can learn it and become great at it, but it's simply not good. I was able to cheese my way through most of it (without any level grinding) by waiting for the random targets to appear on enemies. If you just stand around and wait for them to appear, and then attack with a fast-attacking character, you'll do massive damage, possibly killing the enemy instantly. So being a full 20 or 30 levels below your opponents is no problem, as long as you don't get hit. The game's skill trees are disappointing. They're more like small lists, full of skills that you'll never use. You can equip only two at a time, and your standard attack is much more useful in most situations. The side content in the game is disappointing. You can spend your free non-mission time talking to people in your city or by monster grinding and doing fetch quests outside (in its horribly-presented overworld map). At first, I liked talking to people since I got a better sense of what the world was about. But it didn't take long before they ran out of interesting things to say, and instead started talking about events that I had already participating in (seemingly trying to validate the typical player's power fantasy). And that's about it. After suffering through 13, 13-3 (13-2 was okay gameplay-wise), and 15, I'm done with these modern, pretentious, horribly-written, dumb-gamer-focused Final Fantasy games. As an old man, there's only so much of this I can take.
Not as good as the first game, but decent. The story and character interactions are relatively bare in this second installment. Most of the character interactions now take place during battles, so it's hard to pay attention to them while you're busy killing things. So unlike the first game, I knew very little about these new characters. A benefit to that is that unlike the first game, there's no "power of friendship" nonsense going on here. It would have seemed especially weird here since only a few of the characters seem like friends (due to the overall lack of interaction). And if you thought the story was generic in the first game, be prepared for an even more generic story here. It starts off good enough, but quickly looses steam due to a dwindling amount of story exposition. And like in all Dragon Quest games, the story is believable and competent (meaning not full of plot holes), even though it's aimed at kids. Not much to say about the plot other than you're saving the world because you're the chosen ones, of course. Combat is mostly the same, but the open world makes it much less interesting. In the first game, you regularly fought 20+ monsters at once in small areas, which was great fun. In the sequel, you're in large open areas and you mostly encounter groups of 2-4 monsters scattered about randomly. Big groups of 20+ monsters are still there, they're just rare this time around. Also, there's more of a focus on fighting single strong special monsters. Given the large number of AOE attacks your characters have, these drawn-out single-monster battles are just not as fun. Compared to the first game's segmented world, the open world in this game seems smaller overall, and is definitely less interesting. The location variety isn't as good as the first game, but is decent enough. As for things to do, there's really only chests to find, most of which don't contain anything interesting. So you'll primarily use this big open world to get to the next instanced battle, fight the occasional monsters (primarily for the game's quests), and get nearly-useless items out of chests. There's nothing else to do in it. Oh and the big kicker is when you get to a particular phase in the story, they make you walk all the way through that open world all over again with no teleporting. And somehow I ended up with less playtime in this game than the first game. They were really trying to pad it out to get the standard 40-hour JRPG playtime. And then we come to the final battle. It seemed like it was supposed to be the battle before the final battle, because it wasn't very interesting, and not grand at all (like in the first game). This isn't a bad game, but every aspect of it is just less good than the first game.
I see now why the series has historically not come to the west. It's a horrible grindy RPG with only pretty girls and dating sim mechanics holding it up. The story is generic and dumb. You're a boy with a dragon stuck in him, who, for little reason, is saved by a warrior princess from the guys who imprisoned you. You then just hang out at their kingdom doing nothing much until some major military efforts need to take place. And who do they send? Not their general and his army (who puts the warrior princess to shame strength-wise), but you and your harem (well, there's a couple of guys you can bring). For each mission you go on, you meet your opponents and possible future allies. At least 10 times this happened, and they all end the same: You fight with them over a misunderstanding, and they either run away, decide you're not worth killing, or join you. I found it amusing (which is not good) that in three battles with one particular guy, he ran away because I was too weak twice, then thought I was too strong on the third battle. In addition to the main story, there's lots of mostly-unrelated generic character interactions (including the dating segments). It's like they had a list of generic anime conversation topics and went through it, putting every one in this game. There's shopping conversations, a makeup conversation, loads of cooking/eating conversations, self-doubt conversations, and plenty of "trying to find out about another character" conversations. It was a little jarring going into these daily-life conversations almost immediately with very little world building or character information before hand. They were so meaningless to the story as a whole or for character growth, that I eventually started skipping them, just to get the reward for watching the scenes. The gameplay isn't horrible, but is very basic. It's similar to Tales combat, but is slower and a little less chaotic. It rewards grinding/leveling over smart play, which is a disappointment. The game has built-in grind dungeons, which it expects you to repeat over and over. I hate grinding so much that I lowered the difficulty and fought only new monsters and ones that were in my way. This wasn't too bad, even when the enemies I was fighting were 30 levels higher than I was. Though fighting bosses required lots of resurrecting. There's quests in the game, but they're the most basic quests you can get (go kill xx monsters or get yy items), their descriptions are so unimportant that they're not worth reading, and they repeat themselves. So after you complete all of the town's quests and reload the map, most of them are back for you to do again. The girls look good, but there's not much depth to them. The dating sim elements are bad (worse than Sword Art Online). You can talk to the girls after time has passed and can potentially go on dates with them where you walk around town. After 4 dates, you're basically done and can see that girl's ending at the end of the game. The events are not very meaningful. Also, expect the dialogue in your conversations and dates to repeat frequently. Costumes are limited. You get some nonsensical-for-the-world costumes: Maid, bikini, modern school girl, idol outfit. You just get them, so there's no fun in unlocking them. These are so silly that I just use the default costumes, which were actually much more beautiful anyway. There's also a model viewer in the game, where you can view the main characters at any angle. Character models are unlocked through a random lottery thing, where you pay 500g per random model (you can get duplicates). And then the game-stopping nails in the coffin are: - When you first start the game, you're encouraged to use Original mode and not Refrain mode. What they don't tell you is that in Refrain mode, you get a couple of extra characters and events that are only accessible in Refrain mode. Besides that, they're identical. So there's no reason to start Original mode, especially when it's obvious that the extra characters will eventually join you due to the fact that most opponents in the game join you, and even the game cover shows you one of the extra characters. It's not at all a different experience like I assumed, and I'm not keen on replaying the game from scratch just to get a few more events. - At one point in the game, you're required to fight through an event with two male characters. Since the game is primarily about pretty girls, I doubt people will play those male characters often. Characters not in your battle party don't level up, so these two characters were a good 40-50 levels below their enemies. I gave it a good effort: Spent 2 hours grinding and loaded up on potions and healing items, but that wasn't enough. Many more hours of grinding would be needed to get past that point, and that wasn't worth it to me. So, that's it. It's rare that I don't finish games. The pretty girls were alright, but everything else was quite bad.
As an old man who got tired of these types of games long ago, and who wasn't very impressed with Bloodstained, I'm not exactly the target audience. But I was lured in by the recent sale price and this being perfect for my kids, who will likely play it within the next two years. It's a short game at under 13 hours for me. I explored every area of the world, but did not find all of the hidden items. I didn't play the first Steamworld Dig, but had no issues understanding the story in this second installment. Your goal in this game is simply to find your friend, who was lost underground in the first game. The story and characters are simple, but well-written (no noticeable plot holes). The characters have genuinely interesting and useful things to say. The story and character believability is actually higher than in Bloodstained, due to the lack of conspiracies and magical nonsense happening. There's no deep themes or ideas to explore, but it's entertaining for kids and believable (within its world) for adults. The gameplay is fun enough. It's nice to see a mixture of digging and metroidvania mechanics. It nails the metroidvania components, although slightly simplifies them. Digging is fun enough, but is greatly simplified when compared to Terraria or Minecraft. Though different block types, including ones that come back after a few seconds, add to the puzzling aspect of the game. Puzzles in the game are good. There's a few traditional puzzles, such as moving things around to hit switches at the right time. Then there's breakable wall/platform puzzles, where when you hit one part of the wall, it starts to slowly break away and you must run along it or jump up it while it's breaking to access areas. And then there's rooms where you must use your available equipment, such as your hook shot and jet pack, to progress. Some of the optional puzzles seemed too hard, requiring precision jumping and ability usage. But when I came back with more abilities later, they were a breeze. Upgrading your gear is relatively fun. You level up your pick axe, backpack, water tank (used for bombs), and other gear by spending money, which you get from mining ore and gems. You can then add various bonuses to these items (such as more damage, longer reach, extra health/water/money when killing things) by using cogs, which are primarily found in secret areas. Those secret areas are tiny and spread about the main map, but are also in small separate dungeons, where most of the puzzling takes place. There are a few bosses in the game, but they're fairly easy and can be brute-forced, with very little move-learning. The last boss is the most difficult, but they give you plenty of health items to get through the battle. So it's a decent game with no real flaws besides its length, world size, and that its target audience is kids. Though it is great for kids and likely anyone else who's looking for a fun and easy metroidvania game.
This is essentially old-school SimCity, but modernized, which is great if you like SimCity. I played through the standard game and there's not much point to it besides building the city you want, while keeping your citizens happy. There's not a lot of challenge to it, but I don't think that's the point. Some thing are simplified compared to what I remember from SimCity, such as water and electricity delivery. Water pipes can be built in the general area of buildings, and you'll rarely need to build power lines - power is transmitted automatically between close buildings. And then the road and traffic system is greatly complicated, and is the only true challenge in the game. Garbage trucks, hearses, resource trucks, goods trucks, and all of your citizens must transport themselves along set routes. And if there's too much traffic, they'll be late. This causes your stores to close, garbage to pile up, the dead to pile up, industries to stop producing, and stops your power plants from getting fuel. So you'll learn early on that filling every square inch of the map with buildings, while using the smallest road size is a bad idea. After you get over the traffic and road-building learning curve, it's smooth sailing from then-on-out. You can just keep building until you can unlock the best buildings, that do things like reduce all pollution, educate all citizens, and power your entire city. Maybe I'm just naturally good at it, but I quickly had more money than I knew what to do with, even with tax cuts and polices in place that decreased revenue in favor of citizen happiness. Although there was this one time when I built a dam in the wrong place in a nearly map-filled city and it ended up flooding everything. Even though there were buildings destroyed and people were leaving, they just kept coming back, so it was barely an inconvenience. So yeah, great for those who want a sandbox city builder, but not so great for those seeking story modes or game-set goals.
Another great Yakuza game. Overall, not as good as 0, but better than 1. I'll keep this short since everyone reading this should have already played another Yakuza game and knows what to expect. This is likely exactly what you expect. The story is good, better than 1, but not as good as 0. Less brutal masculinity when compared to 0, and has a few more plot holes than 0 or 1, but is still more believable than most video games. Again, the main plot hole is your protagonist's fists. He will win every fight he gets into, regardless of the number of opponents he's facing or the weaponry they're using. Something I noticed in Kiwami 2 when compared to 0 and 1 is that your opponents on a few occasions will spill their master plans before they decide to kill you (which of course, they fail to do). Thankfully there's an equal number of events where your opponents don't do this, or even refuse to do so before starting their attack, so it's still acceptable story-wise in my opinion. Also, the game seems like a direct sequel to Yakuza 0 due various references to that game. You get to play a short 3-chapter side-story as Majima, where he revisits people and places from Yakuza 0, while simultaneously setting up the events that lead to Yakuza 2. There's some well-written storytelling going on in Majima's story, so it shouldn't be skipped, especially if you played 0. I loved the wacky side quests in 0 and 1. In this game though, they're a bit less wacky overall. Also, the side games were overall less interesting to me. I didn't like Virtua Fighter and Virtual-on, so I rarely went to the arcade. The pissing mini game is very basic with not much variety, and the Majima construction company side-business wasn't very fun, with its incredibly basic and drawn-out real time strategy gameplay. I had a good amount of fun with the cabaret club game, but it's essentially identical to Yakuza 0. The video booths are also a bit disappointing, with you only hearing what's on the video and seeing your protagonist's reactions. Though there is a camera gravure section, where you see real models posing. They have slightly different reactions based on what you say to them. The gravure section is okay, but there's not much gameplay to them. You essentially just pay money to see all of the girls, so unlocking them isn't very satisfying. Despite my nit-picking, it's still a great game and a must for anyone who liked 0 or 1. Though I'll be taking a break from Yakuza for a while before playing 3.
As a 90's combat flight simulator veteran, and as someone who knows how real military missions work, I am disappointed with this one. The story and 20 missions basically promote jet fighters and air power, while ignoring just about everything else that goes into conflicts. The story doesn't even try to hide this. It outright tells you that your jet fighters are the only way to win battles. The story isn't very good. It has a few meaningful scenes here and there, but they're strung together by nonsense. It's also mostly told from your opponents' side, and not your own, which makes things slightly confusing. About half way though, I got tired of the nonsense and started skipping story scenes. If you're familiar with military operations, you'll probably find the missions here to be silly at best. Instead of focusing on what you need to do to complete missions, they go into an incredible amount of unnecessary backstory. I eventually started skipping the mission briefings, just to get to the the one-sentence objective at the end, such as "destroy all targets" or "get enough points within the time limit." Yeah, points. They didn't even try to disguise this as something more realistic, such as "Kill X forces within Y time before Z happens." And I must point out the dumbest part of the story/missions. At one point, you're convicted of a crime, so you're sent to a penal colony with other pilots. And what do you do to atone for your crimes? Fly missions for them. Yep, they give multi-million dollar planes to criminals to fly and expect them to do their missions. How absurd! As for the gameplay, it's obvious that the game was made to be cool and not accurate. The planes simply don't handle like real planes. You also get unlimited bullets, rockets, and fuel. An interesting thing to note is that your enemies also have unlimited missiles, but you have less than 10 countermeasure flares/chaff. Well, since they work 100% of the time, I suppose they had to create a limit. Your radar and HUD have serious flaws. There's no radar depth indicator, so you have to rely on a big green arrow in the middle of the screen that tells you where your target is. Worried about the other 10 planes trying to take you down? Well, too bad, you only get depth data on one target. As for the HUD, if you're pointed at a light background, such as the daylight sky, it's simply unreadable. To add difficulty, enemy planes are simply unrealistic (even more than your plane). Late in the game, you'll frequently encounter planes and drones that seemingly reverse direction instantly. They'll also take upwards of six missile hits to take down. Well I suppose that makes sense since it takes at least three to take your plane down. During my first mission, I was disappointed that I didn't get to take off or land. You're just automatically in the air. Later on, you get to do optional take off, landing, and in-flight refueling sequences. And they're bad from a flight sim standpoint. Taking off consists of holding down the accelerator button until the game decides to take you off the ground and pull up your landing gear. Landing consists of following the landing lines and hitting the runway nose-gear-first below a certain speed or you'll instantly explode. These sections were so unrealistic and no fun that I just skipped them later. This is a shame since taking off and landing are some of the best parts of realistic flight simulators. Bombing is a joke in this game. Actually, bombs don't really exist. Everything is missile-based and you're expected to fly directly at ground targets to get a lock-on before you can release your "bombs," which are just guided missiles that can't target air targets. This is a pain in missions with lots of ground targets. You'll be flying at the ground, trying to get your target and release your bombs before hitting the ground. Do that 30 more times without crashing to complete the mission. The plane models are pretty good, but there's not a lot and they're mainly focused on modern jet fighters. By going through the story missions, I was able to purchase more than half of the planes, all the way up to the top-of-the line F-35. After you complete the game, you also get the opportunity to purchase a sci-fi plane. The only way to earn more money to purchase all planes is to replay the same story missions. I was hoping for some post-game standard missions, without all of the nonsensical story baggage, but that unfortunately isn't here. The game would have worked better with a sci-fi setting. With real planes and the attempt at a real military story, all of the silliness just doesn't fit. Though if you have no idea how militaries work, how planes actually fly, or how many missiles a jet fighter can actually carry, then you'll probably be fine with it. Just don't go in expecting a realistic story or flight simulator, or you'll be disappointed.
Overall a good South Park game and RPG, but short. Being a fan of the South Park style of comedy is a must to enjoy this one. And while it reuses much from the TV series, the main plot is different enough to be its own thing. You play as a silent player-created protagonist who's just moved to South Park. You join the humans, led by Cartman, to fight the elves, led by Kyle. This is done in the style of a kid's made-up game, which works well. Over the next three days, the battles escalate and weirder stuff happens to the town until you reach the climax. And each night (two nights), when it's bed time, some extra-weird stuff happens that really helps diversify the plot. All the while, you're bombarded with South Park's signature crude, offensive, and shocking comedy. Most of it is great, if you're a South Park fan, but it does frequently feel like it's rehashed from the TV series. And when you're not progressing the main plot, there's a fair number of side quests. They're essentially fetch quests for known South Park residents, but the writing and comedy for each one makes them all worth doing. The turn-based combat is well-done. It takes the typical Dragon Quest combat system and adds a few tweaks to make it its own thing. For example, during a character's turn, you can choose to use a special ability or item before you attack. Combat is full of comedy too, being able to throw poop, fart on people, set people on fire, or summon a variety of South Park residents to help you (such as Jesus, Mr. Slave, and Mr. Hanky). And if you like Dragon Quest references, there's a pretty big one later in the game that I enjoyed quite a bit. My only complaint about the combat is that many special moves require unique button press combinations to execute properly. I always spent my first four or so attacks just learning how to do the move properly since the on-screen instruction is frequently inadequate. Late in the game, I typically preferred to use a skill that I already knew know to do rather than gamble with using a new move that I hadn't practiced yet. Weapons and armor are good. There's lots, each with unique abilities. And each piece of equipment changes the look of your character. Because of this, you'll look like a fool most of the time (if you choose to equip the best gear), but that's not bad, given the world you're in. The last part of the game (the last half of the third day) seems a little rushed compared to the prior days. The game unfortunately ends less than 15 hours after it starts. But there wasn't much more that the game could explore without seeming more repetitive. So overall, the ending was satisfactory. So this a good game, but best for South Park and RPG fans who don't mind a short game.
A competent Metroidvania game, but with no amazing or stand-out points. I'm primarily into story and atmosphere. Both are serviceable, but not great. Much of the story and character actions are questionable, but are acceptable because of the story's vagueness. The best way to avoid plot holes is to not explain certain things, and the writers here know that. But there are a few points here and there where it slips up. For example, many of the people you meet could simply explain their goals to you to prevent conflict, but they don't. And at one point, you need to show an ID to an automated system to board a train. Someone will let you borrow their ID, but you'll need your own photograph to paste to the ID. You'll need some silver bromide from a particular boss to take a photo. Why does the boss have silver bromide? And does this automated train system really scan your ID photo and compare it to the person holding it? It's getting close to logic plot hole territory here. But anyhow, it's obvious that the story takes a back seat to the gameplay systems. The exploration is good. Uncovering parts of the map, finding treasure, finding secret breakable walls, and finding new skills that allow you to progress further are what the game is primarily about. The world does seem a little small though, with me being able to complete the map (and game) in about 17 hours. Dealing with the enemies in the game is difficult. Unlike 3D action games that have several options for dodging, blocking, or parrying, you're much more limited here. Sometimes spamming your attack while the enemy is hitting you is the most efficient way to get through an area. Bosses are more complex though, with it being necessary to learn their patterns before you can effectively defeat them. Healing is also very difficult, requiring expensive and limited healing potions, and a few spells that heal you only tiny amounts. There are no hearts or generic healing items to pick up, so your main limitation to exploration will be your health bar. Melee combat is good, given the genre limitations, with several weapon types and loads of weapons to find, craft, or buy. But most effort appears to have been spent on magic combat. For just about every enemy in the game, there's a magic type you can obtain. The options are overwhelming. The amount of time that it would take to farm the magic and items needed to upgrade all magic, so that you can see which one you like best, simply isn't worth anyone's time. Because of that, I stuck with only a few magics that I got early game, which were not the optimal ones to choose. Post-game play is limited. There's a boss rush mode, speed run mode, and that's about it. Unless you want to farm to get the best weapons and armor, or finish clearing the map or mundane fetch quests (given by a few people in town), there's nothing to keep most people coming back. Not a bad game at all, but it does seem basic. Before buying future games in the genre, I'll research to make sure there's substantial improvements over this game.
This is a bare bones, badly written, JRPG with a poor combat system and nothing unique going for it. I've played fan-made RPG maker games that are better. Unfortunately, people seem to look at classic JRPGs and remember the grindy level up/progression systems first and disregard the often unique, weird, or existential stories. It's obvious that the creators had a grindy progression system foremost in their minds. The story mechanic of towns and people disappearing while you go about restoring them is very similar to Soul Blazer (SNES) and is no where near as good. In that game, the mechanic is vague and mystical, while in this game, it's fully-explained early on and ends up being silly and shallow. In Soul Blazer, the mechanic is fun and is primarily how you progress through the game, while in this game, it's just your standard means of going to a new area The dialogue is long-winded and not intelligent. Dialogue is about 4 times longer than it needs to be, with your characters frequently stating the obvious and making up far-fetched reasons for how to progress (which always turn out to be correct, despite almost no research being done). For example, in one section, you need to sneak into an area. And what do your characters determine should be done to do this? Make the sun set, which hasn't happened in the lifetime of the main character (yeah really, that's their first idea). So you create day/night cycles to the world by restoring a tower. This seemingly **** event is then ignored by everyone else in the world - No one mentions it after sneaking into the area. The game is full of instances like this. Characters have nearly no background, and don't seem like real people. For no compelling reason, you go off on a quest to save the world and take a very heroic and stoic approach to this, and you remain that way for nearly the whole game, except for a few forced moments where your main character becomes slightly depressed, which are fixed by long-winded and unnecessary dialogue sections. In fact, all of your characters seem the same. Cover up their names, and I bet you couldn't tell who said what. There's very little personality to them and it seems as though the main writer just used the same template to each, even down to their speech patterns (which may be the fault of the localization). The world isn't very believable. You're dealing with a particular empire throughout the game that seems to be doing the opposite of what their king wants. The game deals with this by having the king disappear voluntarily for most of the game, which is just sloppy writing. And then you flip-flop allegiance to that empire several times depending on whatever general you're dealing with at the moment. And of course, that empire constantly makes stupid decisions, because of course they do. You're the hero after all. Early in the game, you're sent on a quest to obtain some supposedly-rare mech suits (that just serve to make combat slightly more annoying). Your three-character party gets them, because they're the chosen ones, of course. What's strange about this is that every other character that joins you just so happens to have their own rare mech suit. So this thing that starts out as special early-game ends up being a silly gimmick and bad writing later on since everyone ends up getting one with no effort. The combat system is basically pulled from the Hyperdimension Neptunia games, being area-of-effect based, but is poorly done. The biggest annoyance is that you can't accurately control your attack area. The Neptunia games solve this by having set buttons slowly move your attack area around after getting into position. In this game, the L2/R2 buttons are unused. So I ended up constantly dealing with the fiddly analog inputs to reposition my attack area. Also, there's skill cooldowns for some reason. Want to cast that heal spell again? Too bad, you need to wait 2 turns. This goes for attack skills too. So I couldn't use the most effective attack skills and instead simply went down the list of skills in every battle, since they at least do more damage then normal attacks. There's several bosses that, without warning, explode when they're killed, damaging all of your characters in the process. If they don't have 75% health or higher, then it's game over and back to the last save point - that makes no sense story wise, as you have backup characters that can switch in any time, but it's still game over if your main battle party dies. Your combat power is unfortunately level-based. If you skip battles, you'll end up not being able to progress, because all of your attacks will miss. So when you can't hit a boss, it's necessary to go back into the dungeon and grind a bit. This is not a DQ or FF combat system, where smart play is more important than levels. So I didn't like this one. At least it was only 20 hours.
Excellent JRPG, though aimed at kids. I played the original Dragon Warrior games on the NES back when they were new. Dragon Quest XI is a near direct evolution of those games, retaining the same overall feel. The series didn't grow up with me though, with its story and themes still best experienced by children and early teens. I've long since gotten tired of gameplay for gameplay's sake in video games and have instead been looking for amazing stories and compelling/mature narratives to keep me playing a game. This game reaches the bare minimum required, having a basic quest to save the world, and not containing major plot holes (when considering the target audience). The story consists of bad guys who are bad for no particular reason, and an adventure to get objects and powers to defeat those bad guys. The plot unfolds nicely, but nothing happens that an adult or JRPG veteran will be surprised by. Characters are basic. The ones who join you are understandable and have their own background sections in the game, but they're not amazing, and they don't experience any growth that I'd consider mature. Though the story and characters are great at teaching kids basic morals, honor, and responsibility. Combat is basic, but incredibly well-balanced. They've basically used the exact same combat system and difficulty from earlier Dragon Quest games without dumbing it down, like other JRPG series have done. This means that it's hard and will require thought and planning to get though most battles (which is more than I can say for other recent JRPGs). Though when compared to earlier Dragon Quest games, combat is overall easier since you can avoid most enemies and go straight to the bosses of sections. So you no longer need to fight conservatively to make sure you have enough hit points, magic, and items to fight the dungeon boss. Leveling doesn't have much affect on character power, so if you do decide to skip most battles, you'll still be able to beat the game as long as you play strategically . Also, it seemed like metal slimes (which give lots of experience) always showed up after I skipped loads of battles, so the game seemed like it was intentionally giving me experience points when it think I needed them. As for the other things to do in the game, there are things to collect, things to find, things to craft, sidequests, and even random things that work like sidequests that don't show up in your sidequest list (I love the old-school feel of these where you just have to remember what someone said or write it down). All of these give useful in-game rewards, so there's incentive to do them. Crafting in particular is simple, but fun, and you can go through the whole game only crafting your equipment instead of buying it from stores. The typical Zelda fan will like the game due to the exploration and treasure finding possibilities. I long thought that exploration for exploration's sake was no longer entertaining to me, but this game proved me wrong, and I had a bit of fun exploring the world and finding treasure in remote locations. If the game were 40 hours, I'd rate it a 5 (average) or 6 (slightly above average) based on its story and mechanics. But I spent 120 hours in the game, with it consistently giving me a goal or things to do, all without DLC. Yes, this is one of those games that truly goes old-school by having no DLC, and instead having costumes and other things unlockable in-game. Because of this, its value proposition cannot be denied. But in the end, this is a game for kids and not necessarily for me. My kids are going to have a blast playing through it.
Okay, so this released before Uncharted 4. So then why is this game better than Uncharted 4 in every way? Well, even though it's better in every way, it's still a dumb action movie turned video game. Just less dumb than Uncharted 4, and with more interesting things to do. The story is a standard Indiana Jones knockoff, with this one focused on searching for what is basically the fountain of youth - for no particular reason other than your dad died looking for it. While the ideas behind all of the unexplored ruins and character actions are quite far-fetched, they're at least less far-fetched than Uncharted 4. As long as you're okay with the typical blockbuster action movie, you'll have no problems with this story. The action sequences are quite unbelievable. You'll frequently be running through exploding buildings, falling canyon walls, and crumbling ruins, just barely surviving each time. Yeah more dumb action movie nonsense, but less dumb, and slightly more believable than the same stuff in Uncharted 4. And then there's the combat and climbing. You're basically superwoman disguised as a normal woman. You'll be able to take on groups of gun-armed troops with only an axe, by running directly at them, one-shot multiple enemies at the same time with a single shot from your trusty bow (after you get the skills to do this - which makes most guns useless), and climb near-vertical cliffs with your scrawny not-at-all-suited-for-rock-climbing arms. So if you're still young and on a power trip, this game has got you covered. Realism in enemy placement is done better than in Uncharted 4. In that game, people would just start randomly attacking you, like everyone in the evil organization knew exactly what you looked like and where you were at all times, even when going to remote random locations. At least in this game, you're typically going into enemy-protected territories, so it makes sense that they'd fire on whoever showed up. When you're not doing combat or running through exploding corridors, you'll be exploring and solving physics-based puzzles. Some of this is required to get through the main story and much more of it is optional. The great part about this is that there are skill-based rewards for finding and completing optional tombs. So you don't just get a useless relic, but something that feels tangible in-game, and is normally quite useful. The puzzles are pretty good, although a bit on the easy side for an experienced puzzle solver. After I found all of the levers, ropes, interactive objects, and the end-goal of each puzzle, it was easy enough to figure out the solutions and then climb my way around to activate the right parts in the right order. The exploration and puzzle aspect of this game was far more interesting to me than Uncharted 4. And then there's the crafting. There's a good number of items and weapon upgrades to craft that require animal skins and other things you find lying around or on enemies. After you craft something, its yours forever, so you will eventually run out of stuff to craft. Well, besides usable items, such as fire arrows, exploding arrows and poison arrows. And thankfully the raw materials are plentiful enough for those that I never felt the need to try to conserve my arrow use. The crafting aspect of the game makes it much more interesting than Uncharted 4, which had nothing like that. Oh, and there's loads of costumes. None are really fan service related, but at least a few show off the main character's assets well enough. They're all quite normal clothes (mostly winter clothes), with some giving various benefits. Most are unlocked by default with this 20th anniversary edition, but you get a few others by doing story content, side content, and collecting money in-game. Besides all of the above, there's lots of relics and documents to collect. Relics don't do much, and are basically just an achievement goal. Documents give in-game lore for various periods of time. Having 100 year old documents sitting around doesn't make much sense, but at least they all have a summary at the top. Most documents aren't very interesting (don't expect any thought-provoking writing), so I normally just read the summary - again, better than what Uncharted 4 offered, which was no summary for its documents. I'm not at all awed by visual realism in games, but this one does a pretty good job at it. The game surprised me. I wasn't expecting the well-done puzzles, crafting, or slightly-more-believable story than Uncharted 4. So now I'll be looking for a good deal on its sequel.
This is a hard thing to do, being that this is the only Final Fantasy game that had absolutely nothing for me. Well, at least now there's a Final Fantasy that I like less than 13. Here's basically what's missing: - Well-told story - Well-thought-out world - Intriguing characters - Intelligent character actions/motivations - Multi-dimensional villains - Intelligent strategy-based combat I bought the game over a year ago, played about two hours then, and realized at that time that it had nothing for me. It looked graphically outdated, so I waited until now, when I got a PS4 Pro to force myself to finish the game. And, there was a steady stream of disappointment throughout, beating the game in 17 hours, doing almost none of the optional side quests. The combat system is simply dumb. I miss the times in X where you could intelligently use magic, character rotations, equipment variations, enemy weaknesses, and special skills to take down enemies that would be otherwise impossible though just auto-attacking. But in XV, auto-attacking, using potions, and cinematic button-presses gets you though everything. They chose style over substance here, which I suppose makes sense now that Final Fantasy is mainstream. The world makes no sense. It's great that they've got magical airships, ancient stone cities, and trailer parks all in the same game, but there's a lack of worldbuilding and exposition that would allow a skeptical person accept this. Overpowered monsters roaming around within walking distance of small settlements (with no protection) full of people also make no sense. They could have at least posted some high-level guards outside of these. The main characters are okay, I suppose, but required that you either like or accept the millennial way of life. You're basically playing as a millennial who mopes around, being seemingly dragged by his friends to complete his duties. And he experiences no growth at all through any of this. Well not until that near-end point where he suddenly loses his millennial tendencies with little reason as to why. The main story is not very cohesive. It primarily consists of obtaining relics and god powers so that you can become the next king. Yeah, no studying, understanding of the people you'll govern, or improving the lives of your people. Just picking up things. And you don't find out until near the end that you needed all of those relics and powers to defeat the main villain. How convenient. The main villain makes no sense. He seems to want to kill you, but instead strings you along and makes you suffer throughout your thing-collection journey. It's like he's not a real person, but simple plot tool to keep the story going. As for some of the main plot points, it takes powerful moments from the Final Fantasy franchise and throws them in here half-assed. If you've played all of the previous games, you'll know them when you see them. I was shocked how how simple and lacking of depth they were. The story is simply not well-told. I sometimes think that because of the time spent making the story, the creators got so used to the world and lore, that they inadvertently left out important facts and information that someone new to the world needs to know to understand what's happening. So yeah, that's it. This is one of the worst games I've ever played. I guess I'm just old now and don't understand what kids like these days...
I played about 20 hours of Death Stranding, but figured out in the first hour that it wasn't really for lovers of great writing. I then sold my copy (while the value is still high) and will rebuy it when it's under $10. I plan to revisit the game later, but for now, here's my mid-game impressions. Your primary goal is delivering packages, and that gameplay mechanic is actually done pretty well. Though it is slow paced and isn't for everyone. You'll get reasonable means to improve your package delivery capabilities as you play, such as vehicles and augments for your body. This keeps the package delivery interesting. The challenges for delivering packages seem difficult at first, but quickly become easy. Slow and steady wins the race of package delivery. learning to offload packages before fighting bandits will normally allow you to win with no consequences. And the primary enemies of the game (the ghost things) become a bit too easy after you obtain means to kill them. The graphics are the best I've seen on PS4, but It's too bad I'm not a graphics nerd. I'm here for the story.. And the story is disappointing. Specifically, the world building is bad and the character motivations are unbelievable. I should have known going into a game with characters named Mama, Deadman, and Die-Hardman. The writing is a complex web of near-nonsense that the average person considers "deep" since they don't take the time to analyze it. It's full of random references with no meaningful themes. For example, the director apparently likes ****, so made his own super **** with its own shallow backstory so that players can have something to eat to rejen health (blood). Every bit of video-gamey nonsense has its own backstory: How people deal with the dead is related to ancient Egyptian mummies. Babies that you carry around can help you see the dead because they basically weren't born. A persistent sickness in the world is primarily being cured by "likes" that you get for delivering things (yes seriously, facebook-type likes). The reason why you must walk to deliver packages is because there's dead-people particles in the air. Writing backstories for all of this nonsense isn't good writing if nothing links the stories together. The best I could do to tolerate it was to start ignoring the nonsense and keep trucking along with my packages. Although I was frequently pulled out of my ignorance-is-bliss lull when the characters started spouting nonsense again. I did frequently wonder why I was apparently the only guy able to deliver packages and why they had me walking most of the time when there were perfectly good vehicles sitting in the parking lots.. So I made up my own story: everyone you see is a hologram and they can't interact easily with physical goods, and here I was saving the world, being the only physical being in existence that could help them.. If only that were the actual story...
