13 Reviews liked by Aiff


I'm going to be exposing myself as a scrub casual (among other things) by commenting on this but alas. The thing about these long-running games (or just MMOs and other derivatives) is that you have to balance around both people who have 12-hour shifts at the office and people who pretty much play the game for a living. Obviously any sort of "lifestyle" game is going to have this problem because they're the sort of thing where you're encouraging the fans to sink as much time into it as possible, so there's going to be huge skill gaps in between the hardcore players and everybody else, but when you staple on RPG elements and gear / ability builds it starts to get real wild.

I'm not new to these games, I've technically been playing since the beta of the first Destiny, but that obviously doesn't mean I'm amazing at it. Despite the fact that I've racked up quite a few hours in both games, I have friends who somehow beat my time investment within 3-4 months of getting into the series. I'm the kind of person who doesn't really have the time or energy to sink enough into the game to have optimal builds for three characters, whereas some of my friends seem to be paid 71.3 USD/Hour to whoop Atheon's transparent ass.

Lightfall is fine if you ask me. I think the content is fine. The campaign leaves a lot to be desired story-wise, but the ending is psychedelic and pretty unexpected, and the Season of Defiance narrative is endearing and pretty interesting. The thing is that this drop came with a bunch of changes to buildcrafting and, most importantly, an adjustment to difficulty in a bunch of sections of the game. What difficulty means in this context is that red bars (pretty much trash adds) can facetank any number of shots from your primaries and that you are limited to be several levels under in challenging activities if you can't get your season level high enough in time. This can be fine in certain activities, but a few, such as Lost Sectors, are frankly unbearable as of now.

Most importantly, the aspect most turning me off right now is the fact that Bungie just doesn't want us to feel strong. The buildcrafting rework is, functionally speaking, a "sunset" of pretty much all our builds. There are inferior alternatives to everything and elemental wells are just straight up gone, so good luck. Again, I'm the kind of person that will take a hot second to assemble a build, so it's grown to the point that I stop and think if it's worth grinding up something new because Bungie might just gut it completely.

The strangest part is a lot of the people I'm surrounded with seem to be perfectly fine with this, and I just don't understand. I don't understand what's fun about feeling like your power as a player is constantly fluctuating based on what Bungie thinks is being used too much. They claim they want us to feel like space wizards, but they actively go out and take away our best (and often most fun) tools.
The truth is a bunch of these changes are happening because of a very general complaint that the game is simply too easy. Yet it feels like everybody who I've heard say that is playing 24/7. Datto, my man, your videos are good and informative, but I'm not sure if I should trust you when you say that the game is too easy when your employment consists of playing it.

Like I mentioned before, it can't be easy to balance the game around two opposite crowds. It's often said that these sorts of games shouldn't be balanced around the casuals because they're often trend-chasers who won't stick around anyway. Yet I don't think that everybody who loves the series is necessarily skilled at it. I purchase all the expansions, I follow the lore, I play pretty much every chance I get, but I will never step foot inside a Grandmaster Nightfall.

It's not even that I mind a difficulty increase, I just wish Bungie would test their own game more, and not have me constantly missing stuff I used to be able to do with my weapons and abilities. How did you guys not notice that one of the ultimate abilities was dealing literally double the damage it was meant to? Seriously?

I'm writing this a few hours after contest mode for the new raid has ended, and of course, every fireteam has like four warlocks with Starfire Protocol. I feel like I'm staring at a man who's about to get his head shot off within a couple minutes. How grim.

This game feels like the exact opposite of Three Houses meaning its peak Fire Emblem

So good yet so glaringly flawed, and it's a shame that most casuals mostly pick up on the flaws and decide it's a bad game, because it's one of the most solid FE games with it's excellent difficulty and map design. The game is basically just a huge escort mission to get Roy to the throne, and yes, unit balance is terrible, and yes, hitrates are awful, it's a pretty janky game at times but it's otherwise so goddamn solid and genuinely challenging. As a strategy game, this is one of the better FE games.

probably the best of the GBA games but doesn't stick on a first playthrough. hard mode is really fun. suffers from being incredibly cryptic.

Great difficulty compared to other gba titles. Maps were very good and unit balance is all over the place. Story was good because your main character sucked.

The best GBA Fire Emblem. Sorry, I don't make the rules.

This is the twitter femboy version of dies irae

this was meant to be a funny sorry kamigigana ily

This game tickles me in the right way, shame I haven't gotten to the Triangulum arc tho.
Good writing, gameplay and music.

Play it.

apologies via and mr acosta for my 13 y/o self’s conduct on the lucid9 discord server

It's very unpolished and even the creator considers it a bit cringey but it's a certified flash classic

Honestly I don't think there's anything negative I can say about this game aside from the beginning being a tiny bit slow and some characters(Ren and Aelita) being kind of boring and not very good respectively but as the game progresses and the writing improves more and more with each chapter both characters also improve and eventually become just as well written as the other well written characters in the game. When the story starts to improve it always hits hard and I can't think of a single moment where it truly missed unlike Pokemon Reborn.

As for gameplay as this game is a Pokemon Reborn inspired fangame it's easy to compare it to Reborn so I'll be doing that.
Rejuvenation does everything Reborn does but much better with additions like Audino trainers to help alleviate the grinding a lot making it much easier to level up new team members for major battles which is something you'll need to do often that was a long grindy hassle in Reborn but not here. The battles are also much more fair while still being very hard similar to Reborn but as I said before Rejuvenation does everything Reborn does but better and that also applies for the battles too. It also features the same field system as Reborn with a lot of new fields and effects added that add much more depth and strategy to the combat compared to Reborn and especially the main series games.
The game also features a large myriad of side quests that while not required all have their own story lines that are all as solid as the main story of the game and even reward you with powerful items that will help you a lot with tough battles and even some slight alterations to future moments in the story as a way to reward the players for going out of their way to do the side quests.

The game also features some fantastic music by GlitchxCity and has some really good songs composed just for Rejuvenation that I found myself listening to quite a lot after finishing what is currently released of the game.

I HIGHLY recommend this to any Pokemon fan looking for a harder game or casual players who just want to experience a great story with well written and likeable characters on casual mode