William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typing machine, kickstarting the cyberpunk genre as we know it and imagining how computers and virtual reality would actually work decades later. Years after, he claimed to have been disappointed by the real thing, probably because he played this game and found out how some people imagined virtual reality as a good place to play incest with your sister.
So, Baldr Sky, one of the most legendary visual novels, teased for years and arrived on the English scene just last december. This game is all in all massive, it takes over a hundred hours to even complete the main story and the scope of the game shoots to achieve the matrix-levels of thought-provoking insights on virtual reality and the role of men in a world of rising AIs. Sounds terrific on paper, but the plot is at best very cool and poignant and at worst (and more commonly) barely serviceable. Despite beginning in medias res in a futuristic battlefield where mecha pilots are gutting unmanned wardrones, which is how most of the game will play out, the average time spent on the story of Baldr Sky will deal with teenagers and young adults going around, talking about sci-fi jargon and interesting concept but without much charisma to deliver a compelling narrative. Tens of hours of explanations grow tiring in a story which is also riddled with repetitions, stereotypical dialogues made by stereotypical characters, and where many sections just drag on and on, seemingly forever.
I get the sentiment that long flashbacks segments and info-dumping were needed to create a connection with the cast and understanding the core concepts, I really do, it’s fundamental to feel invested in the emotional climaxes and to appreciate the thematic answers at the end of each route. Yet, was it really necessary to stretch the story over so much with so many plodding bits? As an ulterior testament to how mind-numbingly slow this is, despite its length and scope Baldr Sky only has around twenty recurring characters, and not even all of them receive an in-depth arc or development to fully understand their personality or motivations. Almost all of the villains for example have their share of reasoning behind, but that doesn’t make them less repetitive and annoying when they are mostly just the same stereotypically evil caricatures (fat greedy rapists, arrogant violent psychos, narcissistic monomaniacal churchmen, etc.) in every route, furthermore never providing a satisfying counterbalance to the obvious ‘good’ of the main characters.
A huge portion of the game isn’t limited by its story restrictions, thankfully, sometimes actions calls in and the gameplay starts. The gameplay is the meat of the game, and it’s worth the entry price: structured as an isometric beat ‘em up, Baldr Sky offers a wide arrange of progressively unlocking weapons (for a grand total of just about 130 different weapons), which can be developed and chained in combos for massive style and damage. The weapons cover every possible playstyle, from long to short range, bullet vs explosive weapons, light vs heavy, slash vs smash, there are tons of finisher and other stuff to try out, but the game doesn’t want the player to just choose a category and roll with it. A long-range stagger can be combined with a dash move to close the gap and then immediately go to an air launch, followed by a high kick, a sword stun, heavy smash, a drop and close with an explosive punch. This is just one possible combination, not even a full one, out of thousands viable approaches to dispatch single enemies or crowd control hordes. It looks like a very retro take on modern action games on the vein of devil may cry, or bayonetta, and the adrenaline rushes are just as strong. There are videos out there showing people one-shotting the final boss in a single, two-minutes long combo on the hardest difficulty and it is just pure video games aesthetic.
Of course, it doesn’t always work perfectly. One major complaint regards how chains and weapons can be decided only before every fighting sections and never be changed midway until it’s over and story resumes. Meaning that if the players poorly planned a combo, either they have to start all over again (which can mean even half or a full hour of gameplay) or stick with it and hope there isn’t a boss encounter. This can happen quite often because, and here’s the other great issue, before every section the player is given a simulation where to choose weapons and try them out, yet a combo working ten times in a row in a simulation can still fail during the actual combat or on actual enemies, for some reasons. Moreover, same as for the story, many battle sessions just last far too long: for example, closing almost every major route there is a gigantic rush of enemies that kills the pacing and makes the final boss seems a beath of fresh air after so much repetition, rather than the climax one should be expecting.
Art style and sound design are competent, the characters likability requires having some degree of appreciation for anime and the likes, even in the voice department which is pretty good regardless but riddled with typical onomatopoeic clichés. The soundtrack is a banger while the mech designs, despite being small sprites, are very varied and a pleasure to look at.
All in all, Baldr Sky is a hard one to recommend, it is certainly worth if one felt invested in anime on a similar vein of fullmetal alchemist, attack on titan or code geass, but it also presents many of the limits of the genre. The gameplay may seem tiring at first to someone just interested in the story, but it grows on the player, and it is also one of the rare cases where the normal to hard difficulties are recommended to fully experience the investment throughout the highpoints of the story. If one can afford the tens of hours needed to reach even a single ending, the tens more needed to form a somewhat complete understanding of the story’s stakes, and can digest standard anime-tier writing, this game can prove to be absolutely amazing.
So, Baldr Sky, one of the most legendary visual novels, teased for years and arrived on the English scene just last december. This game is all in all massive, it takes over a hundred hours to even complete the main story and the scope of the game shoots to achieve the matrix-levels of thought-provoking insights on virtual reality and the role of men in a world of rising AIs. Sounds terrific on paper, but the plot is at best very cool and poignant and at worst (and more commonly) barely serviceable. Despite beginning in medias res in a futuristic battlefield where mecha pilots are gutting unmanned wardrones, which is how most of the game will play out, the average time spent on the story of Baldr Sky will deal with teenagers and young adults going around, talking about sci-fi jargon and interesting concept but without much charisma to deliver a compelling narrative. Tens of hours of explanations grow tiring in a story which is also riddled with repetitions, stereotypical dialogues made by stereotypical characters, and where many sections just drag on and on, seemingly forever.
I get the sentiment that long flashbacks segments and info-dumping were needed to create a connection with the cast and understanding the core concepts, I really do, it’s fundamental to feel invested in the emotional climaxes and to appreciate the thematic answers at the end of each route. Yet, was it really necessary to stretch the story over so much with so many plodding bits? As an ulterior testament to how mind-numbingly slow this is, despite its length and scope Baldr Sky only has around twenty recurring characters, and not even all of them receive an in-depth arc or development to fully understand their personality or motivations. Almost all of the villains for example have their share of reasoning behind, but that doesn’t make them less repetitive and annoying when they are mostly just the same stereotypically evil caricatures (fat greedy rapists, arrogant violent psychos, narcissistic monomaniacal churchmen, etc.) in every route, furthermore never providing a satisfying counterbalance to the obvious ‘good’ of the main characters.
A huge portion of the game isn’t limited by its story restrictions, thankfully, sometimes actions calls in and the gameplay starts. The gameplay is the meat of the game, and it’s worth the entry price: structured as an isometric beat ‘em up, Baldr Sky offers a wide arrange of progressively unlocking weapons (for a grand total of just about 130 different weapons), which can be developed and chained in combos for massive style and damage. The weapons cover every possible playstyle, from long to short range, bullet vs explosive weapons, light vs heavy, slash vs smash, there are tons of finisher and other stuff to try out, but the game doesn’t want the player to just choose a category and roll with it. A long-range stagger can be combined with a dash move to close the gap and then immediately go to an air launch, followed by a high kick, a sword stun, heavy smash, a drop and close with an explosive punch. This is just one possible combination, not even a full one, out of thousands viable approaches to dispatch single enemies or crowd control hordes. It looks like a very retro take on modern action games on the vein of devil may cry, or bayonetta, and the adrenaline rushes are just as strong. There are videos out there showing people one-shotting the final boss in a single, two-minutes long combo on the hardest difficulty and it is just pure video games aesthetic.
Of course, it doesn’t always work perfectly. One major complaint regards how chains and weapons can be decided only before every fighting sections and never be changed midway until it’s over and story resumes. Meaning that if the players poorly planned a combo, either they have to start all over again (which can mean even half or a full hour of gameplay) or stick with it and hope there isn’t a boss encounter. This can happen quite often because, and here’s the other great issue, before every section the player is given a simulation where to choose weapons and try them out, yet a combo working ten times in a row in a simulation can still fail during the actual combat or on actual enemies, for some reasons. Moreover, same as for the story, many battle sessions just last far too long: for example, closing almost every major route there is a gigantic rush of enemies that kills the pacing and makes the final boss seems a beath of fresh air after so much repetition, rather than the climax one should be expecting.
Art style and sound design are competent, the characters likability requires having some degree of appreciation for anime and the likes, even in the voice department which is pretty good regardless but riddled with typical onomatopoeic clichés. The soundtrack is a banger while the mech designs, despite being small sprites, are very varied and a pleasure to look at.
All in all, Baldr Sky is a hard one to recommend, it is certainly worth if one felt invested in anime on a similar vein of fullmetal alchemist, attack on titan or code geass, but it also presents many of the limits of the genre. The gameplay may seem tiring at first to someone just interested in the story, but it grows on the player, and it is also one of the rare cases where the normal to hard difficulties are recommended to fully experience the investment throughout the highpoints of the story. If one can afford the tens of hours needed to reach even a single ending, the tens more needed to form a somewhat complete understanding of the story’s stakes, and can digest standard anime-tier writing, this game can prove to be absolutely amazing.
This Wahfuu guy likes it so i dont
The ways by which we find how best to communicate with each other are incredibly flawed and are where most of conflict between us comes from, with this misunderstanding branching us off into our own circles of groups of people who understand each other but barely try to understand outside those circles and end up disregarding them.
This is the basis by which Baldr Sky tackles its themes, and it does it incredibly well. A meticulously crafted VN/Action game that juggles core themes around the nature of qualia, our conscious experience, and communication branches around our feelings with Artificial Intelligence and technology as a whole. The story is incredibly well done, both in terms of pacing its elements throughout, slowly delving deeper into the many motivations and arguments around these themes, and also in terms of general writing, with all of the events and characters tied so neatly together that it often becomes too easy to predict what comes next. That's a very good thing though, the story rewards your understandings of the characters and doesn't shy away from getting complex with that structure, fancifully playing around with that structure in the final route where the metanarrative pulls the rug out from under you and ties everything together.
The characters are also fantastically handled, each of them with strong motivations and personality, tied together in the story in ways that both make sense and work on the relationships between each of them. One of the things that pleasantly surprised me is that even the somewhat one-note characters get their own fleshed out motivation and use in the story that doesn't just go down to their archetype. This also ties into the romance, which is just as pleasant to read and works in the many routes nature.
Another component that takes up a huge amount of time in Baldr Sky is the 2D isometric mecha combat, which is near perfect. You have an intricate combat system that utilizes great spatial awareness and is very enemy design based, which the game uses well by continuously delivering new enemies each with their own movesets to learn and deal with that are all used in combinations with each other. The enemies make use of the base fundamentals of whiff punishing, okizeme, kiting, armor crushing, zoning, and risk management. Combat situations are well structured, with each of the enemy combinations leveling difficult challenges that require you to be continuously moving and considering your options from moment to moment. Progression is solid too, unlocking new moves, tools, and abilities all the way to the end of the game. I for one didn't even unlock everything that I could have after finishing all the routes, which goes to show the replayability on offer here. There's so much combo potential to utilize too, with an entire practice mode that allows you to work with your many cancels and changeable movelist to craft any combination you like, all of it utilizing juggling enemies well and awareness of your move properties.
Even after the game is over, you still have content for the gameplay side to work with, having an entire DMC Bloody Palace like with waves of enemies known as Survival Mode. In my experience it's pretty difficult but very well paced too, slowly ramping up the challenge just as well as the base story content.
Outside of the nitty gritty appeals, Baldr Sky also has an amazing aesthetic to offer, with the UI being completely seamless to gameplay and story and offering a great soundtrack to match the somber and heart-pumping moments. There's also of course, a bit of fan service to enjoy outside of the general romance structure. The menu itself is very customizable too, as well as your experience. Difficulty settings to entire aesthetics changes are at your fingers from the outset of the game.
The only real issue I have with the game is a required recap called Reminiscence, placed after Route 4 that must be read to continue on. The idea of it is sound, chronologically putting all of the events before the "present day" together where in each respective route flashbacks were pulled whenever relevant. But since Baldr Sky is actually really good at establishing where and when we are at any given point extending out to the flashbacks where character relationships change naturally, it ends up giving you nothing that you couldn't infer or connect on your own up until the final 5% of it. It's a massive waste of time that fortunately you don't have to touch twice. Another minor but relevant issue to this is having to continuously repeat flashback text and having no real way of skipping text until you've read it before, which gets grating when some flashbacks that you may have already seen won't let you skip.
Overall, it is a fantastic experience, a complete 60-80 hour odyssey that I recommend wholeheartedly to anyone. (9.5/10)
This is the basis by which Baldr Sky tackles its themes, and it does it incredibly well. A meticulously crafted VN/Action game that juggles core themes around the nature of qualia, our conscious experience, and communication branches around our feelings with Artificial Intelligence and technology as a whole. The story is incredibly well done, both in terms of pacing its elements throughout, slowly delving deeper into the many motivations and arguments around these themes, and also in terms of general writing, with all of the events and characters tied so neatly together that it often becomes too easy to predict what comes next. That's a very good thing though, the story rewards your understandings of the characters and doesn't shy away from getting complex with that structure, fancifully playing around with that structure in the final route where the metanarrative pulls the rug out from under you and ties everything together.
The characters are also fantastically handled, each of them with strong motivations and personality, tied together in the story in ways that both make sense and work on the relationships between each of them. One of the things that pleasantly surprised me is that even the somewhat one-note characters get their own fleshed out motivation and use in the story that doesn't just go down to their archetype. This also ties into the romance, which is just as pleasant to read and works in the many routes nature.
Another component that takes up a huge amount of time in Baldr Sky is the 2D isometric mecha combat, which is near perfect. You have an intricate combat system that utilizes great spatial awareness and is very enemy design based, which the game uses well by continuously delivering new enemies each with their own movesets to learn and deal with that are all used in combinations with each other. The enemies make use of the base fundamentals of whiff punishing, okizeme, kiting, armor crushing, zoning, and risk management. Combat situations are well structured, with each of the enemy combinations leveling difficult challenges that require you to be continuously moving and considering your options from moment to moment. Progression is solid too, unlocking new moves, tools, and abilities all the way to the end of the game. I for one didn't even unlock everything that I could have after finishing all the routes, which goes to show the replayability on offer here. There's so much combo potential to utilize too, with an entire practice mode that allows you to work with your many cancels and changeable movelist to craft any combination you like, all of it utilizing juggling enemies well and awareness of your move properties.
Even after the game is over, you still have content for the gameplay side to work with, having an entire DMC Bloody Palace like with waves of enemies known as Survival Mode. In my experience it's pretty difficult but very well paced too, slowly ramping up the challenge just as well as the base story content.
Outside of the nitty gritty appeals, Baldr Sky also has an amazing aesthetic to offer, with the UI being completely seamless to gameplay and story and offering a great soundtrack to match the somber and heart-pumping moments. There's also of course, a bit of fan service to enjoy outside of the general romance structure. The menu itself is very customizable too, as well as your experience. Difficulty settings to entire aesthetics changes are at your fingers from the outset of the game.
The only real issue I have with the game is a required recap called Reminiscence, placed after Route 4 that must be read to continue on. The idea of it is sound, chronologically putting all of the events before the "present day" together where in each respective route flashbacks were pulled whenever relevant. But since Baldr Sky is actually really good at establishing where and when we are at any given point extending out to the flashbacks where character relationships change naturally, it ends up giving you nothing that you couldn't infer or connect on your own up until the final 5% of it. It's a massive waste of time that fortunately you don't have to touch twice. Another minor but relevant issue to this is having to continuously repeat flashback text and having no real way of skipping text until you've read it before, which gets grating when some flashbacks that you may have already seen won't let you skip.
Overall, it is a fantastic experience, a complete 60-80 hour odyssey that I recommend wholeheartedly to anyone. (9.5/10)
There are a few reasons as to why I love this game so much. Maybe I'll list some of them out.
1. It's a visual novel.
2. It's a visual novel that features giant robots punching each other really hard.
3. It's a visual novel that features giant robots punching each other really hard and you also get to actually PLAY these giant robots in fast paced frantic action gameplay with an extremely freeform combo system and quite literally way too many weapons.
Hmm yeah idk why i like this game i have no idea
1. It's a visual novel.
2. It's a visual novel that features giant robots punching each other really hard.
3. It's a visual novel that features giant robots punching each other really hard and you also get to actually PLAY these giant robots in fast paced frantic action gameplay with an extremely freeform combo system and quite literally way too many weapons.
Hmm yeah idk why i like this game i have no idea
Epic SF plot combined with deep action gameplay, what's not to like?
I grew up never really reading much science fiction, and I credit Baldr Sky with fostering an interest in the genre in me as an adult (I first played it in 2011, when I was 21 or so). In that sense, it's a game I'll never really forget. I still think its take on AI is really cool, too.
I grew up never really reading much science fiction, and I credit Baldr Sky with fostering an interest in the genre in me as an adult (I first played it in 2011, when I was 21 or so). In that sense, it's a game I'll never really forget. I still think its take on AI is really cool, too.