Can gamers at least try to be consistent when trashing games for having MTX, it feels like such random games always catch heat for it when there's much bigger offenders even among Capcom's own library (Monster Hunter World & Rise lmao)

I can at least understand people being upset over optimization (even if in my experience I've had little to no issue in the 5 hours I've played so far), but obviously the issue differs from person to person.

Game is fun tho, I'm having a blast, this really is just an improved version of the original Dragon's Dogma and I'm all for it.

Bros will buy the game with scantily clad anime girls plastered all over it and complain that there are scantily clad anime girls plastered all over it. I just wanna ask what the fellas in the backloggd reviews were expecting when buying said game. This is the equivalent of some fella lookin at a war shooter and getting upset that it's indeed a war shooter but buying it anyways and complaining about that fact as if they didn't know exactly what they were getting into. I don't care how good the reviews are for said game, people should be able to recognize when something is clearly not made for them. (and also recognize that steam reviews normally don't mean shit in the first place)

Ignoring the weirdos that are upset about this and bought the game anyways, the gameplay here is good, very good, my favorite gameplay in fact. As someone who adores both platformers of the metroidvania variety and bullet hells this becomes something special with how it blends these two genres together perfectly. It really says a lot about a game's quality when I ACTUALLY want to go through the entire "beat difficulty to unlock higher difficulty" fiasco, something I didn't even do in something as good as DMC5. Also the boss fights are kinda phenomenal, they're very distinct from one another, have an absurd amount of attacks which constantly keeps them fresh, feel very fair despite the difficulty, and there's more than 30 of them lmao. The ost is also great with "Finale" being one of my favorite final boss tracks ever. overall a good time.

tldr game is very good but it attracts animephobic weirdos despite the very obvious exterior, obviously don't play this if you are for some reason scared of scantily clad anime girls like so many people in the backloggd reviews clearly are.

Edit after playing the Tevi demo: ANYBODY who likes this game needs to hop on Tevi, it's a spiritual successor to Rabi Ribi and is a perfect evolution of it. I very easily see it dethroning Rabi Ribi as my favorite game ever if it even matches the quality of the demo. The wait for Tevi's full release will be a difficult one... November 29th bros...

Not to sound like an epic gamer contrarian but Hollow Knight is a game I've never really understood the overwhelming hype for. It feels incredibly safe, lacking any originality whatsoever and desperately trying to appeal to the masses (which it obviously succeeded at). Most things it does pretty badly to fine with few things it's truly outstanding in.

Let me start off by explaining what I mean by saying Hollow Knight is <safe> and <desperately tries to appeal to the masses>. I think this is most obvious in its aesthetic, being minimalist scrimblo (bug)guys in a dark world. These things obviously work and have wide appeal. The easily ignorable lore-based story is also a victim of Hollow Knight's addiction to playing it safe, I really wish metroidvanias in general would get over lore-based storytelling, it's really boring. I could go on and on about how safe this game is from the world design, to the simplistic combat, to the movement upgrades being as bland as possible, but the point is that these things make game feel like it lacks any personality, putting that aside to be safe and easily marketable to the masses. It's basically The Minions but for adults. This isn't a problem depending on who you ask, but to me it really just made this feel super unremarkable. I love when games try new things being as creative as possible, this game is the opposite of that, some may even call it ehehhehehehehhehehehehhehe hollow.

Anyways on to the aspects of this game I actively dislike and think are bad. I think the easiest things to call bad are the bosses, while there are 2-3 great bosses the majority of them feel extremely underwhelming to outright bad. They just kinda feel like nothing and are very forgettable. Shoutout to the dream bosses for being especially nothing. The walk of shames back to bosses are also pretty bad but none of the bosses are really difficult enough for them to be that annoying, still worth nothing tho. The lack of good fast travel also makes some areas feel like an extreme slog to return to, very often having to retread the same ground you have before, the pretty w/e level design also doesn't help this at all. Most of the souls-inspired mechanics in general feel tacked on for no real purpose and only add tedium, I really wish games would stop taking inspiration from Souls when they have no clue what makes those games so good. I also wish there was more customization, the badges don't really give you much to play around with and aside from those there's practically nothing customizable which isn't great when this game is as long as it is.

That being said it's not like I despise this game, there's honestly a good bit of things I think Hollow Knight does absurdly well. Despite the boring setting the game visually looks fantastic and the sound design I'd easily place on top of the genre. This game also feels fantastic to control. I may think the bosses suck ass but the actual enemy design is really good, with plenty of enemy variety to make every area feel unique. It's absolutely worth noting that what this game does well it does VERY well. It just doesn't have much that really goes over the bar of <ok>.

tldr this is like basically the golf of video games when u rlly think abt it

Damn that was a game, time to explain why Tevi is my new favorite game of all time.

Just a warning I may ramble a little here.

Going over the most obvious thing first the bosses are phenomenal, I would say this was no surprise given how much I loved Rabi Ribi's bosses, but these broke ANY expectations I had going in. From start to end the bosses are constantly one-upping themselves, getting better and better culminating in some of the craziest final few bosses I have ever seen. Every boss is extremely distinct, all their movesets are completely original and at times will even take some VERY OBVIOUS inspiration from things such as Touhou and Devil May Cry. I love this, seeing Tevi pay homage to the games that very clearly inspired it is awesome, I adore seeing Tevi's own rendition of some iconic characters and attacks. These bosses are an absolute joy to fight, and this is one of those games where I will gladly bang my head against these bosses for hours on end not even realizing how much time has passed.

Alongside bosses being great Tevi also has ridiculously good balancing and gives a ton of customization through way of build variety and the multiple ways to customize how difficult the game actually is, even outside of the sheer number of difficulty options. The "ridiculously good balancing" part may seem controversial as it's very clear that some things are outright broken or have insane synergies but let me explain. A wise man once said, "You have control over the buttons you press" and that rings true here. Tevi's genius balancing stems from the sheer number of options you have that will vastly change how you play and how difficult the game is. Your base kit is balanced perfectly, everything you have feels about equal in strength with nothing feeling overtuned in the slightest. However, you can change this with optional equipment called "sigils" to make certain things stronger than others, and there are well over 200 of these equipables. You can obviously use a broken build with the sheer number of options you have, and spam consumable items while doing so, taking down endgame bosses with ease. But at the same time, you have the option to forgo those powerful options, making the game more difficult and drastically changing how you play at any point as you please. You can steamroll bosses, you can fight on an even playing field, or you could forgo all those customization options and fight with the odds completely stacked against you, I adore this type of game balancing. Very often I would fight a boss with a broken build, only to reset the fight near the end and switch to a build that would make the fight more difficult for fun. I always see people complaining about games with an obscene number of options having "balancing issues" because there's some obviously broken or weak options, even with Tevi, I've seen people complain about how bosses get easier as the game progresses, due to how powerful you can get. But I feel as if this is a misconception as to what good balancing actually is, outside of competitive games, good balancing isn't having all your options be at equal strength, good balancing is giving the player a wide variety of options to choose from with those options fluctuating in strength. Tevi masters this by having everything in your base kit be around equal strength, while having everything optional being at completely fluctuating strengths that you can change at any point. Using something less powerful will not detract from the actual gameplay and force you to avoid certain skills or mechanics, it will only affect how easy the game is, and that's why I believe Tevi's balancing is genius.

Exploration is also an absolute joy. I was a bit taken off guard at first due to how different this game's approach to exploration was compared to Rabi Ribi's. While Rabi Ribi is completely freeform with what you decide to do at any given point, Tevi takes a more linear route with bosses past chapter 1 being ordered and movement options essentially being unlocked with story progression. I may still prefer how Rabi Ribi handles its freeform progression, allowing you to get even endgame gear immediately, but that isn't to say I think Tevi is too far off with its linear progression. Tevi's linearity allows for the areas to be more catered to your current gear at any point, placing more emphasis on things that you may have just unlocked, leading to Tevi having far better areas in my opinion. Tevi's individual areas are a joy to explore and there were very few points where I wasn't having a complete blast exploring them, fuck mazes tho. Re-exploring areas to find hidden items and whatnot is also extremely fun with the only complaint I actually have being the odd number of places that look they should have items or resources.

Getting some last thoughts out of the way, aesthetically Tevi is fantastic. The soundtrack is incredible and goes way harder than it has ANY right to go and visually I adore how this game looks. Boss fights look incredible ESPECIALLY in comparison to Rabi Ribi. They have some of the coolest bullet patterns and attacks I have ever seen in a game period. I also love the artstyle of this game from the fantastic pixel art to the equally as good portraits to some of the best CGs I have ever seen, the quality here is unreal and they clearly were trying to go above and beyond in this regard. I also had fun with the story, while it's nothing too crazy and the main plot is pretty basic the characters are extremely fun, and dialogue is fantastic the whole way through. I especially love the main trio & the father/daughter dynamic between Tevi & her dad, it's really cute. I have also seen people already complaining about how "horny" or "anime" this game is and to that I say to refer to my Rabi Ribi review and read through the comments bc they're pretty funny (https://www.backloggd.com/u/AiriBan/review/953999/), for a tldr y'all complaining are pussies and only have yourselves to blame, fuck you.

I prolly missed something while writing this review but oh wellsies

TLDR this game is crazy fucking good and broke any expectations I had before it released. I love Tevi.

This game is so weird because most bad games are bad due to jank or lack of polish or whatever, y'know just normal stuff like that. But everything here feels very intentional. The shitty unintuitive sticker system and combat designed around it. The "puzzles" which either involve hitting something random with a hammer, finding some random "thing" sticker that the game likely doesn't tell you about, or some other random obscure solution (intentionally sink in quicksand lmao). The obscene amount of backtracking and level redoing. The bosses being tedious health sponges or dying immediately because you brought the right thing sticker. The boring and uninspired settings reminiscent of 2d mario games alongside the lack of any unique NPCs. The AWFUL "partner" character. The annoyingly heavy reliance on the paper gimmick despite every other Paper Mario game using it as a nice aesthetic. These are all TERRIBLE design choices but not one of them doesn't feel intentional. I'm almost convinced that Nintendo hates Paper Mario fans so much that they hand crafted this game to be the worst shit ever.

People always (fairly) rag on this game for random encounters quite literally being a detriment and there being no point to them, but I'd argue that's the best part about the game. Combat here is so unenjoyable and if you were forced to actually fight random encounters it'd be SO much worse. Because it's pointless, I can just run away from everything and save myself the headache. Yeah the run button barely works and is just RNG dependent but like anything is better than having to sit through all of the random encounters.

Also bowser doesn't even have a line of dialogue here like wtf man he's the best Mario character have some respect.

Also also people who think this is disliked because it's different from the other Paper Mario games are weird. This game is genuinely terrible even if you haven't touched a single Paper Mario game. If you say this is overhated I'm stealing something out of your house.

Wait everybody told me this game sucks why did it actually rock, this shit was awesome.

Obviously there's a good bit of negatives, for example the combat, but I never really cared for FF combat in the first place so this wasn't really unexpected, helps that for the most part it really isn't a slog outside of a few sequences (mostly Lightning and Hope hallway lmao). The story itself is also kinda whatever and REALLY likes to throw a ton of fantasy jargon at you which makes it a lot more confusing than it actually is. But also this is very much a game where the story is second to the main cast so I don't mind this point all that much.

Now lemme just get the best point out of the way, these characters are fucking awesome. I LOVE SNOW, the fact that he's ALWAYS playing the hero, being the positive presence in the party while also being the most childish mf in existence, such a fantastic character, also has a great dynamic with basically every character in the game which helps a lot. And he has a fucking motorcycle, that's the coolest shit ever. Sazh kinda goes without saying, I'd be surprised if anyone playing this game didn't adore him by the end. His dialogue's extremely fun and he has some of the best moments in the game, also he's a dad, we love dads. Sick car btw. Despite the constant moaning, Vanille is also really good, I mostly like her due to how great her dynamics with other characters are (especially Sazh that was REALLY good), and that's perfectly fine, dynamics usually make characters to begin with. Even Hope who I was really iffy on ended up to be great, yeah he's annoying at the beginning of the game but he gets a huge glow up past a certain point in the story, his development is fantastic and his dynamic with Snow is even better with him taking after Snow in a lot of ways. The cast just feels like a big family by the end of the game and that's great, especially when EVERYONE in the party has their own motives and aren't just following the MC because they're friends, it's a pitfall a lot of games tend to fall into and I'm extremely glad this game didn't do that. My only gripes are Lightning and Fang feeling super under baked, Lightning's case is especially unfortunate considering she's the main character and I tend to enjoy female characters being hardasses (Zero Drakengard 3 my beloved) but Lightning & Fang really don't get much meaningful dialogue and that's sad considering just how good the rest of the cast is.

It doesn't need to be said but this game is BEAUTIFUL, the pre-rendered cutscenes look incredible and still look better than basically anything today, which is insane. There's also just so many phenomenal setpieces like the entire Sazh and Vanille sequence in chapter 8, that shit was magical, it's such a great sequence that'll definitely sit with me for a while. The entirely of chapter 7 is also fantastic, y'know the one where Snow saves the day by pulling up with his sick ass motorcycle and takes out like 50 soldiers with it, awesome sequence. I especially adore Snow and Hope during this sequence and how Snow constantly trying to play the hero completely backfires on him as he's just saying the worst things possible to Hope, it's a fantastic character moment for both of them and another great sequence that'll sit with me for a long time. FF13 has a LOT of good shit like this and I love it for dat, awesome game despite the obvious flaws.

Snow is badass/10

My most fond memory of this game is one of my friends in high school coming to my house and saying something along the lines of "BROOOOOOOO I've heard of this new CRAZY game where some CRAZY stuff happens" and I was like sure man. So I took my laptop to his house after installing this on Steam and we played through it for a bit getting pretty bored because nothing was happening. After a bit of mashing through dialogue his brother came into the room and said "What the fuck is this gay shit you're playing <f-slur>" and then promptly left. We stopped reading after that. I treasure this memory dearly.

Onto the actual game I only went back and read this now because it would be the 69th VN I've read and I thought that'd be funny. The VN itself like kinda sucks hard though, the characters are nothing and the dialogue is mind numbingly boring, if this was any longer than 4 hours(?) it'd probably be a 1/10. The entire game really just feels like waiting for the <crazy parts> to happen and even when the <crazy parts> do start to happen it's still not all that interesting as you're really just reading the same (mostly unskippable) dialogue and occasionally one of the characters says some shit like "I FUCK DOGS" in creepypasta text with some weird glitch stuff happening. Aside from some exceptions the <crazy parts> also just feel like cheap creepypasta scares too. It was pretty funny when all the characters starting saying fuck tho I chuckled. Overall not good.

Tldr read You and Me and Her, it's like this but it has fun with the concept and uses it in a way that doesn't feel like cheap horror. It also has dialogue that's actually good alongside very fun characters (I love Aoi).

I was so confused playing this not long after English release, thinking it was ass, and then a few years later learning that people actually liked this game after it exploded in popularity. Humbling experience.
I thought this game had w/e combat made tedious due to the constant vision interruptions, a cast of mostly nothing characters with the characters that are actually relevant (like 3 of them in the main cast) still not being great, a fairly lame and cliche story only made only slightly better due to the cool setting, and a completely fucking lame final act. But clearly I went wrong somewhere because this is actually one of the greatest games ever made.
I cannot lie though, some story beats really hit me in the feelsies like when Dickson said "Can't say I feel too good about deceiving those kids." near the beginning of the game, powerful stuff.

When seeing people criticize this game I always see them talk about the dream world segments and the gameplay in general, which is justified because those are both insufferable and make this game an absolute chore to play. The gameplay lacks any depth whatsoever and becomes an absolute slog to play almost immediately. Dream world in general has a similar issue in being a complete slog with the dialogue being extremely dull and the segments being way longer than they have any right to be, this game is about 20 hours long but dream world makes it feel like 50.

What I don't see people talk about is the dumbass story with some of the most fake character interactions & dialogue I have ever seen in my life. Like brother there CANNOT be people who say this game's story is realistic when years of unhandled trauma are handled immediately and the main cast goes back to being friends with no problems whatsoever, obviously there's still the drama with Omori & Basil but that extends past that immediate friend group. I'm talking about the main 4 characters here, which is the main focus for the majority of the game and is resolved immediately. Even fucking Shark Tale had a more realistic conclusion between Fish Man and Mob Boss Shark and all they said was "We cool". The Dialogue after said issue is resolved is bland as hell and falls flat on its face with most of it just being them reaffirming the fact that they are friends, gj Omori, this is how real people act I think.

The real meat of the plot is so edgy and stupid it honestly circles back to being funny, Black Space and the real twist behind Mari's death are SO fucking dumb man, how do people take these seriously I need to know. Surely real children would see that beloved sister died and say "Ah man I don't want my friend to get in trouble gotta frame it as a suicide", very real and relatable traumatic experience thank you Omori this is definitely not edgy garbage trying to be something deep.

Crystal Project is an unfortunate one for me because on one hand I love what it's going for but on the other hand holy HELL it's bogged down by so much tedium and annoying design choices that feel very intentional and because of that becomes such a SLOGGGGGGG to play

I'll just get what I like out of the way first so I can get into the actual nitty gritty BULLSHIT I wanna talk about. I think the bosses are fucking awesome. They use the mechanics of the game to create fun boss fights that all feel unique, they're fun to build around and very seldom feel like they actually rely on RNG. I've had a ton of bosses that came down to my last character being put in a clutch or kick situation and that's badass. BASICALLY, I LIKE COUNTERBUILDING BOSSES. THIS GAME DOES THAT WELL.

Ok now time for the booboo ass shit i HATE abt this game. I THINK THE EXPLORATION FUCKING BLOWWWSSSSSSS. At the beginning I was down with it but progressing a bit more I was like damn, this shit stinks! Why's that? Well it's for a LOT of reasons. For one, I think the platforming kinda sucks most of the time and isn't fun. This may be considered quite controversial as most people I've talked to like the platforming aspect of the game a good bit. My biggest problem with the platforming is you'll often be put into situations where if you fuck up one instance of platforming you'll have to redo the entire thing due to how respawning works, that sucks. Another issue to go alongside this is a lot of the time I feel like the perspective is kinda fucked, so I'll often have to work around that which just adds to the tedium of platforming, not fun stuff. I also think the amount of encounters in areas can be super annoying especially when I don't like the normal encounters that much in the first place (we'll go over that later). Lastly, and this is probably my biggest issue with exploration, is that for some god forsaken reason they decided to make maps things you have to unlock??? Normally in super roundabout ways???? Like I get that's part of the exploration but exploring a game like this without having a map fucking blows and makes finding out where you're supposed to go next EXTREMELY tedious. Btw it's kinda up to you to find out where to go next, which I get that's part of the fun for some people but for me personally I just found it added to the tedium. This isn't a problem depending on who you are I just found that aspect of it to be annoying.

Anyways with that out of the way time to get to the actual combat. Combat is weird for me because on paper I like it and it does a lot of things right. You always know how much damage you'll do, how much delay you'll have so on and so forth. Very little is left to the imagination and nothing feels random and that's cool, I wish more jrpgs would follow suit with this. My problem mostly stems from the teambuilding options not feeling very satisfying to play around with. What I mean by this is that most jobs really don't have much fun options and it feels like the creators tried VERY hard to create something impossible to break the game with. Which is fair and I get that but at the same time this mindset restricts the classes so much to the point where I wasn't really excited to see what tools a class would give me. Most of the time upon seeing a classes skills I'd just be like "yeah ok" or "this class seems kinda bad". For a game BASED AROUND PLAYING WITH CLASSES this is NOT GOOD. If I don't shit my pants upon getting a new class literally what are you doing. I get this game is trying to create a balanced experience but it feels like I am being offered breadcrumbs instead of fun and unique classes to play with. Even the Bravely Games, which I am very lukewarm on, did this well. Yeah those games were easy to break but it's up to the player to break them, and I'm 100% fine with that because each class felt extremely unique, fun to play with and almost always felt worth using, as opposed to here where they do not.
Aside from the teambuilding options kinda sucking I found normal encounters to be tedious as all hell. Yeah bosses are sick but most of the time you'll be fighting the same encounters with an oddly high amount of HP and can do a pretty big number to you. I get wanting to make normal encounters difficult but I feel as if this misses the mark HARD and just turns them into an absolute slog. Even worse is that areas have a LOT of encounters and more often than not in dungeons they're very difficult to actually avoid meaning you'll have to go through a LOT of them which SUCKS when encounters take as long as they do. Overall not a good time.

Tldr: I like the bosses and game has some cool ideas but most of the ideas are kinda executed like shit which made this super tedious to play and made me decide to drop it.