"Only humans practice deception so intensely for reasons that are so... unnecessary."

In my previous review I made a rather kneejerk response to merely seeing Lies of P on the store page, I see the word "Soulslike" as an adjective and I instinctively want to frumple up and cringe like I just had a warhead candy. But hey, it's on GamePass, and Iron Pineapple gave a glowing review for it but with a caviat that though not as bluntly put, is very succinctly written by u/psychebomb in their review about two paragraphs down, which I quote, "If you like Dark Souls, you'll probably like this game. If you've made liking Dark Souls into a defining personality trait of yours, you're going to fucking hate this game."; truer words have never been spoken on this site.

So, I decided to play it, it's practically free to me anyways and I'm just off the credits of the equal parts tranquil and exciting journey of The Last Guardian (review soon maybe) so I'm craving something a little more intense. Intense might be an understatement, right away I can tell I'm less equipped than most Souls games at the beginning, enemies are surprisingly tanky; what gives? Oh, it has the thing like Bloodborne where the enemy goes into a special state after receiving enough damage, then with the finishing blow of a charged heavy attack (or sometimes Fable Arts™, this game's "weapon arts" essentially) they get put into a position to deliver a Fatal Blow™. ...Alright I won't pretend the terminology in this game is a little goofy, but it's not difficult to understand either.
Anyways, the combat is already a lot more close and personal than Souls typically allows, likely due to the near complete rejection of ranged builds (there's only a limited use "gun", consumable throwables, and one weapon with a ranged Fable Art only); to offset this, the game has a parrying system similar to Sekiro where you block on reaction to Perfect Guard™, "but why would I need to do that when I can just circle strafe and block" says the DS1 fan, or "why bother playing the game when I can roll?" says the DS3 fan; the real spice here is this happy marriage of all of the similar mechanics wrapping around to something we saw in Sekrio: Unblockable, unrollable attacks; that can only be avoided by outright outspacing them or Perfect Guarding™ (or in special instances mostly only available to you in the late game). Immediately my Souls poisoned brain clenched, "NO ROLLING?", but the little bit of Sekiro I played clicked in instead, TWANG, I did it! TWANG, TWANG, TWANG, .... grabbed, SLAM SLAM SLAM CRUNCH!!! Oh, and not everything can be blocked either... lol... So I had to get these parts of my brain to agree on something: This isn't Block Souls 1 / 2, or Roll Souls 3, or Rhythmiro, or BloodBoR1ne, but will ask me to juggle all of these things in nearly equal amounts. That is to say, it all amounts to me using all of the knowledge I've accumulated from DeS, DS1, DS2, DS3, ER and Sekiro. To point to any one of these things as the thing it's aping is just plainly incorrect, because playing it like any of those (besides debatably Sekiro) will leave you in for a bad time.

That was a lot of words to basically say "some attacks ignore i-frames" but I cannot stress enough how much they use this to force you to be proficient in a variety of different combat situations. It's not just the bosses too, most enemies in general have an attack like this. You need to decide to space around it or go for the perfect guard. Now how about those enemies and bosses yeah? Overall pretty fantastic, I think the game has a notorious difficulty spike by the 3rd boss, because it immediately asks you to be able to perfect guard and identify when they're going to grab you (it's a subtle cue but you can definitely see it, I ate it like 10 times before finally never being hit by it on reaction). There's one explicit gimmick boss and of course it's probably the worst one in the game, though not nearly as bad as From's worst output (I'd list them but I want to keep those games spoiler free for those who haven't played them yet)
The enemy placement is often difficult in a variety of ways, either in group management, lack of space, or just a strong hitting "elite enemy" as I call em relative to the area you're in; they also love to hide them around corners and behind walls, crates etc. akin to all of the cheekiest moments from Souls and ER, which I absolutely love as it kept me on my toes, and despite that I fell for some obvious traps when I became impatient. The "lack of space" bit was very relevant at a lot of points where I'd switch weapons to a spear or something with a vertical arc to fight in hallways, reminding me of DeS in this regard (good), which leads me to the general level design: Significantly better than DS3, but that's a low bar; probably better than DS2 on average and a hair below DS1 (please stop pretending the game ends at Sen's Fortress, DS1 fans). The constant wrapping around to previous Stargazers (this game's checkpoints) and verticality is very impressive and shows the levels are a lot more deliberately thought out than the likes of DS3 just peppering its straight line with constant bonfires. The one thing the game is significantly weaker on is overall environmental diversity, well, at least compared to DS2 and Elden Ring; it's about on par with Demon's Souls, DS3 and a bit below DS1.

Gone is the habit of the classic Souls "you basically have 3 weapons because if you change you need to completely respec and grind materials", now you can usually buy the ones you need outright without seeking out some random mcguffin in someone's poop shack on the other side of the map to do so; and the weapons are in two parts: you only upgrade the blade, so if you have a good blade already but want to try a different moveset, you can just swap the blade to a new handle. The only downside with this is a lot of weapons are only proficient in either slash or pierce, a good number are fine at both though and if you want to spend the least resources I'd upgrade those. I ended up using probably 8-10 different weapons through my playthrough before settling on this heavy, oversized cleaver looking thing on a "dancer's blade" handle lol. I remember people saying "heavy builds are unviable in this" but I think the opposite, I think they're favored if anything at least for a casual playthrough; lightweight, fast weapons require a lot of Fable Art usage and timing to close the gap which while an extremely active and rewarding playstyle is incredibly demanding in a game that already demands a lot from the player execution-wise.
One thing that can be a little confusing, and again taking the wrong notes from Souls here, is that some upgrades and such can be kind of unclear about how good they are. All you gotta know is that in the skill tree, Dodge Link is a must.

Aesthetically I think the game has a really nice look for the most part, though I'm not as hot on the swamp and castle. People like to go "it's just BloodBorne" but it really isn't, there's been discussion about how both are rarely the architecture described (bcus people genuinely can't identify architecture 99% of the time and just repeat verbatim an architectural word they heard in front of an image they now associate with it with no further study) The weapons in particular are awesome and the ability to have a costume separate from defense items makes it a lot easier to create a look while optimizing stats and not looking like a clown. Tangentially related but the game runs like a dream for me on my 3700x and RTX 3080 at 4k "Best" settings (using DLSS Quality I maintain in the range of like 90-120FPS), all while stuttering less than DS3 ever did on the same system. Also, kind of unreal playing a game like this above 60FPS... It feels so good.
The music is serviceable, some boss themes are better, I just wish the game leaned into the clockpunk styling more and had a more industrial, mechanical, percussion-heavy soundtrack; seeing clockpunk boss with roaring choir orchestral music is serviceable but would've benefited atmospherically from this.

The character writing in this is okay, it's definitely weak at the beginning but a lot of them expand towards the back half as you get to know each other better. I think the story conceptually is pretty neat too, I've been a fan of the whole "what makes a human person?" philosophical conundrum for as long as I could read, and I think the way Lies of P handles it does a serviceable job in this regard, but I won't be reminiscing on it the same way I would DS2 (y'all sleep on that game's narrative too much). This isn't exactly glowing praise, but make no mistake that in this subgenre Lies of P has one of my favorite NPCs and a couple honorable mentions on top of that. One of them kept me engrossed in conversation for almost 10 minutes straight, which I can't say any other has really done. (personal favs are Stockpile Thomas, Ed, Andre, Seigmeyer, Saulden, Vendrick, Seigward, Hewg, Alexander, Rya, Blaidd, Ranni)
I'd decided on a score of 8 a third through or so, but it kind of only got better especially as the rather flexible weapon system kept things interesting for me.

I was quick to judge, and was happily wrong. Lies of P is the big surprise of 2023 imo that easily punches alongside FromSoft's greats, weaker in some areas but stronger in others. I'd place this firmly just above DS2 in my list of "Them wacky soulsemup things", all while having a team that gets completely dwarfed in comparison. Your enjoyment will highly depend on whether or not you're the kind of person who goes "Pac Land did it first" whenever people talk about 2D platformers.

In a word: Riddles.

Alright let's see what this is about.
starts trailer
"Lies of P is a thrilling souls-like"
closes trailer

I was reminded of this and I'm sad it didn't make it into the final game.

EDIT 10/01/2023: I was wrong, the game's great.

Most of the game is a strong 8 to me but holy hell the final boss gauntlet is agonizing, not because they're particularly difficult but because they're just so SLOW. OH BOY I CAN'T WAIT TO WALLJUMP IN A CORNER FOR 5 MINUTES!!! Missed the final boss's weakness that would've proly trivialized it bcus even tho I tested everything I guess I hit em at the wrong angle so XD

I also just think not refilling weapons or subtanks based on at least their state at the last checkpoint is awful, to the degree that during the final boss gauntlet you're better off game overing intentionally to get all your weapon charges back if you don't want to just do 1 bar at max charge (but don't system reset because the password makes you replay the entire first level too LMAO)

I'd probably like it a lot more on replay but the prospect of replaying games like this isn't particularly attractive to me, there's so many games and so little time to play them all. I DO think it's one of the more compelling ones to revisit though, alongside something like classic Sonic.

One of the few games to start making me cramp up and give me sore thumbs. Zero is cute also.

I want everyone to actually sit down and find it in themselves to meet this game on its own terms, which should be pretty easy to do with its stellar soundtrack holding you aloft better than any balloon or weed gummy ever could (the latter might help tho)

Kaze no Notam is beautiful, even if the "game" part of it is nonsensical; in a way I'm glad it gives zero heed to the players needs or wants at any moment. More and more I find games having complete indifference towards the player to be more and more attractive, and I don't just mean that they're brutally unfair execution tests but rather that they just continue to operate. I think Rain World embodies this the best, but this is way up there too in that field alone. I feel that my rating is a bit high but I don't really care, most I may do retroactively is make it an 8/10.

It's with this game that I must finally admit, the og PlayStation was absolutely the star of the 5th gen consoles. I don't know how I can argue otherwise anymore even with the handful of party games the Nintendo 64 had under its belt. Where Nintendo raised an Ocarina of Time to combat the Final Fantasy, they bring nothing when the likes of Kaze no Notam and Moon show up.

Shoutouts to Detchibe for bringing up this game thrice in the Backloggd Discord's Game Of The Week events to finally get it in the spotlight.

In a word: Luxuriate.

Oh wow I'm back in Beta Minecraft again, weird!

Anyways, my initial impressions of this mod are, to put lightly, underwhelming. While I think what they have done mainly in regards to simplifying install and performance is great (though much of the former is credited to MultiMC more than anything), I feel kind of actively mislead about what this mod would be.

"Better Than Adventure is designed to appeal to [older] players who enjoy the simpler gameplay of the old beta versions of Minecraft, yet also want to try something new and exciting. Think of it as an "alternate universe" version of Minecraft that attempts to maintain the look-and-feel of beta 1.7.3, while also keeping things fresh with new features and additions such as new blocks, biomes and quality of life improvements. Despite what the name implies, this mod isn't necessarily trying to offer something inherently better than modern Minecraft, just something different. Think of it as a long-lost branch of Minecraft, what could have been if Notch and Jeb took the game in a slightly different direction." - excerpt from the "Introduction" section on their site.

Slightly is the key word here, despite lofty claims such as saying it's so big it might as well be its own "fork" of Minecraft (never officially claimed as a category, but leaned on due to being similar to Forge with how invasive it is), it really is Beta 1.7.3 with some extra bells and whistles. Now, if you read their site, you might be wondering how I'm mislead about this, and really it's just word of mouth. Gullible or naive, whatever you deem fit, I decided to click on yet another "why Minecraft is losing its feel and why beta 1.7.3 is the Golden Age Of Minecraft" type videos. The video itself was fine, but I think they massively oversold what the mod does; which is ironic, because due to how invasive the mod is, many beta 1.7.3 mods don't work; what's being sold here is essentially a modpack more than anything that makes negligible tweaks that change little about beta 1.7.3's gameplay while ruining mod compatibility; you do gain rock solid performance, though.

As for notable features the mod has, it strips away the debug screen of its commonly useful info unless holding appropriate items like a compass or the new calendar, which frankly I think is an alright thing. The seasons thing is a nice touch too, but one I've seen for literally over a decade. Same version, too... A far more positive change is the reimplementation of all the old world types, as well as creative mode with a much appreciated proper no-clip attribute to flying. I'm kind of meh on the biomes added so far, I mean I guess I appreciate them existing rather than not but of all the ones to backport why bring the savanna?

A change I see only as utterly pretentious is adding the "cloth" item and changing bed recipes to include them, which only zombies drop; their reasoning is to "force players to actually survive the first night." which I think is hilarious given how riddled their support is with "what's the bed recipe? what's the bed recipe?" That's another thing, their documentation/wiki is very unfinished despite being two years deep; imo mods should have equal parts documentation/wiki developed alongside the actual mod which would alleviate the need debloat support channels by passive-aggressively creating a bot that automatically replies to keyphrases like "bed recipe?" with the recipe... Also, it's MAD ANNOYING TO HAVE TO JOIN A DISCORD FOR BASIC INFO ABOUT ANYTHING :V

Do I think this is a bad mod? Not at all, in the context of beta 1.7.3 mods and vanilla-style mods as a whole, I think it's well put together, poor documentation aside; but it rubs me the wrong way on a lot of levels like the aforementioned auto-reply bot, the tongue-in-cheek "Better Than Adventure" name (which they only justify because it's referencing an old forum post called "Better Than Wolves" which was someone becoming incredibly heated over the introduction of wolves in beta 1.4...), and version naming scheme ("continuing" the beta in a faux-official capacity by calling it beta 1.7.4, etc.)

I'm also just deeply tired of the narrative tossed around the community lately by people who don't actually read the blogposts/updates they complain about, of how the game is "actually limiting the player's creativity by..." checks notes "..adding completely optional things to do." ... 9_9 This of course actively discrediting how far people take the game's new mechanics or blocks in both engineering and expressive player creations. In a nutshell, there's a growing sect of Minecraft that has become incredibly gatekeepy about "the right way to do XYZ", and I hate it. This is allll deserving of a much longer post though, far more encompassing of Minecraft as a whole of which I may not bother writing.

I recommend this mod if you really wish you could play a mildly expanded upon Beta 1.7.3 (mostly in biomes), I don't recommend if you'd be disappointed they didn't also backport Lena Rayne's wonderful compositions. Good night.

11/12/2023 EDIT: Apparently back in September they added one new free map, which is great! And then replied to their own post complaining about how it's a missed sales opportunity! ??? dropping half a star.


Sold over 100k in barely a month on aesthetics alone, now struggles to break 300 concurrent players in a 24hr peak. You wouldn't think this is an issue, but I promise you it is, because most of these people are playing private lobby and the few who venture out into randoms will soon be blasted by the remaining 10% of the playerbase that has already grinded out the card/character unlocks and leveled up their decks. Median playtime: 8hrs. Median playtime among my Steam friends that own it: 2-2.5hrs, excluding the half who still haven't launched the game. What's with that, huh?

Did you know the game only has like 2 songs when you're not standing by the jukebox? Most of my friends have already muted the in-game music because they play this one song on loop whenever you're not in-game; thankfully when you're in-match the music stops. Uh, it just stops. There is no music at all in-match. What's really bizarre to me given that they tweet out other artists' songs overlapped with the game but afaik they literally only play if you go to the jukebox. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this. EDIT: OST has 6 songs, no idea what the other 4 would even be unless they're tucked in the jukebox.

Held back by a lot of really basic things, ordered by most important imo:
- Card unlocks are all generally more powerful than the base kit.
- Repeat card drops are fed to existing cards to level them up.
- Only 1v1 or 2v2 modes, no FFA and nothing higher even though maps can support it easily.
- Tiny map pool. The demo in February had 2 maps, the game launched with 4; none on the roadmap unless some offhand tweet mentioned it that I can't find.
- Can't rotate teams in private lobby without recreating lobby every time.
- Default/extremely basic Unity movement, no sense of weight or momentum which makes tracking anyone feel awful. (Feels extremely similar to Gunfire Reborn in this regard)
- Other characters need to be grinded out to even play as, really frustrating vibing with a design and being met with "erm, grind pls?" like uhhh okay then.
- Most of the guns feel bad imo, I feel like I'm actively downgrading myself when I swap to anything other than the default pistol besides the sniper (which might be a good thing given the card situation tbh)

Of all of the things to "go back to form" on with your FPS, including a gameplay-affecting battlepass/XP grind is not one of them. This was always one of the worst parts of playing CoD post-3 or any of the clones, like oh yeah sure just give the already experienced player mindless proximity mines and an auto shotty while the n00b gets a sawed-off. Lmfao get real.

The B-line to selling an expansion pass instead of reconsidering the unlocks at all or adding any new maps or modes is extremely disheartening, but it makes that "crazy good" 2/3 launch sale make a little more sense now I guess! Maybe I'm reading into that one too much but then there's this tweet which is uhhh??

I don't know, in a word I'd say "vapid" but that feels overly mean, but it's all I can really think of. Would love to see this get more gamemodes (FFA, KOTH, CTF) and a much higher player cap and absolutely desperately needs more maps. As it stands now? I don't know how you're supposed to get much out of this unless you love spinning a roulette endlessly while vaguely pointing in someone's direction.

I don't really feel like reviewing the first or second game as they're relatively basic (the latter relying on timers to inflate the "difficulty" which is null if you just keep retrying anyways), but I feel like this one's worth a start due to them clearly aiming for a larger scope.

We Were Here Together is the third title by Total Mayhem Games, who seem to have been founded specifically to focus on asymmetric co-op experiences. If you can't read the synopsis of the games, the idea is one player has information the other doesn't and vice-versa, and together they communicate this info to fill in the blanks or get rid of junk info. Together cranks that up to an absurd degree, and to make one of the final puzzles of the game be quite literally just reading from a book back and forth to each other and veeery slowly permuting was frankly kind of soul draining; the problem with this challenge in particular is that if you forget even one step of the chain you have to redo a large portion of it working from the earliest known info. Is this "puzzling"? I mean yes, until you start taking notes; there is no timer for this one anyways, eventually you'll find your way out just through brute trial and error and keeping notes.

The elevator section near the beginning of the game is absurdly huge, and nearly impossible to distinguish from player's perspectives. Some elevators are linked, which ones? Who knows! They all look the same and for most of it the players have no real way of identifying them short of beginning to reconstruct the entire scene plank by plank. It's not so bad though, we kind of just "fell upwards" through it naturally, it's not that obtuse I just think it's very poorly thought out; this was probably the most blatantly "over-scoped" part of the game in my mind, there's also just a lot of literal empty space around the foot of this section that made us think we were missing something, it should have had tighter invisible walls.

//////MINOR SPOILERS///////
The worst room easily had to have been the potion room, because it immediately presents you with relevant information FOR THREE DIFFERENT PUZZLES at the same time; this makes it overwhelming figuring out where to begin as the person in the potion room, unless person B in the pressure room figures out which part is relevant for you. There's also an annoying sound effect from the mixer machine that initially sounds like it's "reacting" to something but it's just ambient, and the actual first puzzle of that room has extremely little feedback for person A until person B kind of just gestures "erm, more pressure... less pressure..." and you need to figure out how much these nonsensical tubes even add up to, and they're bi-directional(???). Also, making the gear puzzle completely automatic when you need to stop person B's platform with them is annoying, just moving the gear in and out for a second at a time as it automatically trips it.
//////END MINOR SPOILERS///////

The game is also just, kind of buggy. There's a maze earlier on that I swear I got softlocked in due to clipping issues, but after an uncomfortable length of time my character finally broke free. It also wasn't super clear what the actual path was, we both felt we accidentally completed it and just kinda shrugged. Another section just straight up didn't perform its main mechanic, until we swapped positions and it magically just worked in the exact same order.

I don't know, I adore these kinds of experiences but we (/u/Nowhere and I) both agree that this one was frankly exhausting. For every good puzzle there was one more that was just "I have a list and you have a list let's subtract the difference, one at a time" often literally and thinly veiled as different through set dressing. I think I might prefer We Were Here Too over Together even, and all of these so far are a full tier minimum below my personal favorite asymmetric co-op experience in Tick Tock: A Tale For Two (which, tbf, came out after the first two WWH games, but it manages to have much greater contrast between the players' experiences while still seemlessly interwieving them, all while requiring no connectivity of any kind in-game; it's 100% playable over a phone call or just talking in the same room!

I still recommend this if you're looking for a relatively unique (albeit maybe the setting a bit stale by the third entry...) asymmetric co-op experience, but your enjoyment of this will probably fluctuate on what type of puzzles you enjoy. This kind of has everything, but also half of it is reading text back to one another.

Even playing this at 60FPS with the dogwater DOF removed, and all the little QOL touches, I can't help but feel I should have played DX instead. I like the renditions of the music in this for the most part, like I'm glad Nintendo acknowledged that bass wind instruments exist again, but I feel it was a horribly missed opportunity to flesh out the overworld with more than 4 themes, because unfortunately the game's soundtrack sounds a lot better in an album than in the game where half your time will be accompanied by 30-60 seconds of Overworld Theme a hundred times over. I'm also just really not a fan of how it looks, I've seen people beg Nintendo to give the Oracle of Ages/Seasons games and even A Link to the Past the same treatment and I think saying it looks "toy-like" is being extremely generous, as I would describe it as very sterile, albeit colorful in the most basic sense. It's not bad looking, but it feels very inconsistent in the look it's going for, too; I rarely looked at the dungeons and thought "toy-like", they just looked like a watered down version of A Link Between Worlds. I also just strongly detest the implication that retro graphics such as the NES, GB, or even SNES = "toys" or "childish", it's needlessly closed-minded about entire swaths of artistic direction. The more detailed look we get glimpes at by the photographer in DX looks so much better stylistically, it's sad to me they didn't go with that. Look how expressive they all are!! It's also ridiculous that the performance on actual hardware is weirdly terrible with constant frame dips despite being locked to 30FPS. The remake also weirdly draws out a lot of interactions and cutscenes, nearly every interaction with the owl takes 2X longer than it used to, as with every NPC interaction. I think this remake is "competent" at best, and I would generally encourage anyone to play DX instead.

inhale
ANYWAYS, enough about this remake specifically.

This easily has my favorite handling of "side"quests in any Zelda game and I deeply appreciate that this isn't yet another "FIND THA COOL RANCH DORITO OF MAKE GO AWAY". Another thing too is that everyone in this world seems genuinely so loving, in a very sincere way that doesn't reek of that usual quirky one-note Zelda stuff.

The dungeons themselves are probably the most complex and interwoven I've experienced in any Zelda game, though perhaps almost to a fault as I'd begun asking myself "alright, which of these 4 pairs of stairs are actually connected...". The game also expects you to use literally everything at one point or another, so even though the solutions at a couple points are a bit nonsensical I still also greatly appreciate they demanded that at all. It's something Tears of the Kingdom did horribly and I don't get why people aren't more bothered by it over there, to have the climax of the game be devoid of any meaningful statement about your progress because uhhh being able to say "erm you can finish it any time 🤓" somehow justifies how padded that game is with its unevolving, barely passable "temples" which don't build off of each other in any capacity.

Link's Awakening doesn't beg you to stop and smell the roses, it makes you, because goddammit they're romantic. It has my tied 2nd favorite ending in any Zelda game that touches on a thematic subject matter in a way I favor immensely, which I'll likely never forget, "or [her]"

Thank you /u/Nowhere for suggesting the game to me and referencing the photographer in DX.

Stereogram feels like the natural evolution of Lost In The Static (2007), quadrupling down on the obfuscation produced by the noise environment while asking the player to go cross-eyed and piece together the 3D environment produced by the stereogram, all the while asking for genuinely semi-tight platforming and timing with things like platforms that disappear on a cycle and chained walljumping and wallhanging into them.

Right away we're faced with one major problem though, and it's that for a lot of people this game is genuinely unplayable because of the cross-eyed bit; the only workaround to save it would be to create some sort of split desktop viewport in VR, or try one of those phone VR things. I think this is a perfectly valid way to play the game though, because the meat of the game is basically LITS 2.0.'

Its soundtrack is riddled with ambient noise very fitting of the scenery and each room has its own name to identify them, which immediately helped in creating a point of reference for me and a friend to go "oh you're stuck on Ghost Ladder too?"; it's similar to VVVVVV in that regard and I wish more of these room/chamber-based platformers had individually named rooms.

I really wish this would get a homebrew 3DS port, because that'd be far more accessible as it takes care of the cross-eyed part for you (that's how the 3DS's 3D works, after all).

Ultimately a highly unique game that leaves me with a twinge of guilt due to feeling inaccessible to people due to no fault of their own; their eyes work too good automatically and correct the stereogram back into its two screens making the game unplayable.
(CLIP IS ENDGAME SPOILER) Seriously, tell me if you can tell wtf is going on here without going cross-eyed (besides identifying me, the player)

I recommend playing Lost In The Static first (only 10~ mins), thanks Waverly for their review that tipped me off to it, the game site here. Stereogram can be found here.

Might be the most unapproachable/inaccessible game I've ever played, and for that I'm sorry.

Skullgirls is a fairly endearing if a bit risque fighting game that served to set the example that more than one FG can use rollback netcode to immense success, while oozing pure style and fluidity. It was also one of the earlier examples of an actually good in-game tutorial and walkthrough, making it by far one of the best on-boarders to the genre short of getting a veteran to coach you personally.

The music is lovely and the stage selection while literally just a flat line in physicality offers a lot of nice variety in tone and mood, preventing sessions from feeling stale so much; not to mention the countless character-on-character specific battle intro/outros, you can tell so much care went into this despite what's apparently pretty awful working environ- wait, I'm getting something...

Oh noeys my broskis, sisterinos and they/themmings, they're removing content from a game I haven't booted up in 6 years!

W-what content? U-um, yknow, stuff like uh..

sexual comments involving minors, allegorical nazi imagery, a few pantyshots, the announcer voiced by the creepy ass ex-CEO(/director?)..

This level of censorship is proof western civilization can only dream of creating masterworks such as Bakemonogatari.

Just remember to fight that good fight and not buy Skullgirls for the third time, /a/lrighty?


lmfao get real. Favorite piece from the OST.

The epitome of "This goes hard (actually good)"

Surprisingly more non-QTE game here than people let on, don't listen to people telling you to "just watch it."; that takes out like 90% of the impact.

Strongly considered giving this one a 9 but proly gonna stick with the 8.