ClockworkLethe
1997
This was one of the most miserable experiences I've had with a videogame.
Every map is made of corridors and square rooms that look as bland and forgettable as they can, there's basically no way to avoid damage other than "take it and hope they die first", not a single button placement in this control scheme makes ANY sense. The story is written and delivered in the usual From Soft fashion: a whole lot of nothing told in incomprehensible fragments of nonsense. Barebone mech customization will make sure that by mission 6 you pretty much have what you're gonna need for the rest of the game, the pacing is all over the place, learning curve is a vertical cement wall, if you manage to learn anything from a game that categorically refuses to explain what you're supposed to do. Which is saying a lot, considering you start with a mandatory tutorial mission after which you know less than before.
I'll do you a solid: the last mission, the floating mines one, starts with a From Soft trope, "just put 100 enemies in a room", goes into an endless extremely precise platforming segment completely out of nowhere, and then another From Soft trope, "what if the same boss, but twice". Skip that one unless you love suffering.
In fact, skip the whole game, spend your time on better activities, like pondering why we keep pretending that From Soft isn't completely incompetent.
Every map is made of corridors and square rooms that look as bland and forgettable as they can, there's basically no way to avoid damage other than "take it and hope they die first", not a single button placement in this control scheme makes ANY sense. The story is written and delivered in the usual From Soft fashion: a whole lot of nothing told in incomprehensible fragments of nonsense. Barebone mech customization will make sure that by mission 6 you pretty much have what you're gonna need for the rest of the game, the pacing is all over the place, learning curve is a vertical cement wall, if you manage to learn anything from a game that categorically refuses to explain what you're supposed to do. Which is saying a lot, considering you start with a mandatory tutorial mission after which you know less than before.
I'll do you a solid: the last mission, the floating mines one, starts with a From Soft trope, "just put 100 enemies in a room", goes into an endless extremely precise platforming segment completely out of nowhere, and then another From Soft trope, "what if the same boss, but twice". Skip that one unless you love suffering.
In fact, skip the whole game, spend your time on better activities, like pondering why we keep pretending that From Soft isn't completely incompetent.
2023
If you don't know Submachine, this is a point and click puzzle journey into a surreal, slightly philosophical world of layered reality and fragmented locations across time and space. It's easily one of the best works to come out of the flash games era, all redone with beautiful hand-made illustrations and designs, and the 14 chapters all flow beautifully into each other. There's no moon logic puzzles, there's no obtuse riddles, just reasoning and an insane amount of locations to explore. TAKE NOTES, you'll be thankful.
If you know Submachine, this is the entire saga, including Network Exploration, all redone, cleaned up, improved and integrated into a very big, very choesive narrative and gameplay experience. All of Submachine, completely improved. There's a fair amount of new content too, particularly in the Network Exploration, there's SO MANY new rooms and puzzles, it's been turned into a more classic puzzle game, just on a massive scale. There's so many room.
This was a wonderful experience, very rewarding to the end.
If you know Submachine, this is the entire saga, including Network Exploration, all redone, cleaned up, improved and integrated into a very big, very choesive narrative and gameplay experience. All of Submachine, completely improved. There's a fair amount of new content too, particularly in the Network Exploration, there's SO MANY new rooms and puzzles, it's been turned into a more classic puzzle game, just on a massive scale. There's so many room.
This was a wonderful experience, very rewarding to the end.
2008
I didn't think it was possible, but they managed to make a game with not a single good thing about it.
2016
Going from Yakuza 0 to this was a BIG mistake.
The game is great, almost all the good in 0 is also here. It's great fun to play the minigames, the writing is as you'd expect from a yakuza drama, the sheer amount of insanity constantly happening is always entertaining. It's a great game, until it isn't.
First of all, if you loved Majima in Yakuza 0, forget it. He's a Jar Jar Binks in this one.
Yakuza is a series filled to the brim with fights and it becomes a problem when those fights are very poorly thought. Either you're spamming your best combo, or the enemy is spamming their most annoying move. You'll have to figure out bosses that spend five minutes chaining dodges so they're untouchable, and then immediately lunge into some attack that knocks you down, paralizes you, or stunlocks you. You'll spend more time mashing A to get up (it does nothing, by the way, don't bother) than landing actual hits with some enemies. By the last third of the game there's so many enemies with so much health and such horrible spammy programming that all combat becomes very repetitive and tiresome.
The biggest problem is combat. But the SECOND biggest problem is the central plot. Outside of the slew of quickfire plot twists that all come out of left field right at the end, which can be attributed to clichés of the genre, the rivalry between Kiryu and Nishiki was completely botched. it's played like this really drammatic, really heart-breaking story of two best friends driven to destroying each other. And it is heartbreaking, or it WILL be. Because it is a really strong and developed relationship in Yakuza 0, which hadn't come out yet when both the original and kiwami were out. Going by just Kiwami, these two share NOTHING. They barely talk at the beginning, then Nishiki just keeps doing the dumbest thing while Kiryu keeps just existing. Nishiki's role as final antagonist is as earned as Cloud of Darkness just popping into existence exclusively for the final boss in FF3. The entire plot is so dumb I don't even need to spoil anything, you already know it all before playing the game, and for some reason there's a lot of pure filler chapters where nothing really changes and you're handling new characters you'll never see again.
If you loved Yakuza 0, play Kiwami for a while, get to the first plot-related gauntlet, then go around the city doing fights and minigames for a while. You've seen it all, skip everything else.
The game is great, almost all the good in 0 is also here. It's great fun to play the minigames, the writing is as you'd expect from a yakuza drama, the sheer amount of insanity constantly happening is always entertaining. It's a great game, until it isn't.
First of all, if you loved Majima in Yakuza 0, forget it. He's a Jar Jar Binks in this one.
Yakuza is a series filled to the brim with fights and it becomes a problem when those fights are very poorly thought. Either you're spamming your best combo, or the enemy is spamming their most annoying move. You'll have to figure out bosses that spend five minutes chaining dodges so they're untouchable, and then immediately lunge into some attack that knocks you down, paralizes you, or stunlocks you. You'll spend more time mashing A to get up (it does nothing, by the way, don't bother) than landing actual hits with some enemies. By the last third of the game there's so many enemies with so much health and such horrible spammy programming that all combat becomes very repetitive and tiresome.
The biggest problem is combat. But the SECOND biggest problem is the central plot. Outside of the slew of quickfire plot twists that all come out of left field right at the end, which can be attributed to clichés of the genre, the rivalry between Kiryu and Nishiki was completely botched. it's played like this really drammatic, really heart-breaking story of two best friends driven to destroying each other. And it is heartbreaking, or it WILL be. Because it is a really strong and developed relationship in Yakuza 0, which hadn't come out yet when both the original and kiwami were out. Going by just Kiwami, these two share NOTHING. They barely talk at the beginning, then Nishiki just keeps doing the dumbest thing while Kiryu keeps just existing. Nishiki's role as final antagonist is as earned as Cloud of Darkness just popping into existence exclusively for the final boss in FF3. The entire plot is so dumb I don't even need to spoil anything, you already know it all before playing the game, and for some reason there's a lot of pure filler chapters where nothing really changes and you're handling new characters you'll never see again.
If you loved Yakuza 0, play Kiwami for a while, get to the first plot-related gauntlet, then go around the city doing fights and minigames for a while. You've seen it all, skip everything else.
Lately it feels like big studios see Unreal Engine as a free pass to ignore the presentation entirely, like the engine will do all on its own.
Crisis Core Reunion is still the same amazing game, but everything about the look and sound is as botched as it could be. The last straw was the pre-rendered cutscenes, they used the original psp movies for the remaster, not even upscaled or anything, and it looks crusty as hell. Ffs the game uses Sephiroth's new FFVII remake design and the cutscenes have the original clothes. Come on.
I get change is hard, and the new voice actors had some titanic shoes to fill. But they could have tried to record Zack's lines more than once. Most of the english cast sounds like they were recording while taking a piss right after waking up. Sephiroth is as interested in anything happening as a rock is interested in the latest financial trends.
It's still one of the best games in its field, the music is emotive, the story is heart wrenching, characters and references are perfect, the little gameplay changes are... fine, you get used to zack's 80's hairstyle and even his VA eventually grows on you. But I honestly cannot find a single reason to recommend this over the original, when a psp and a copy of the game are dirt cheap. They're better animated, better voice acted, and the low budget nature of the game feels way more justified there than on a godforsaken full price ps5 game.
Crisis Core Reunion is still the same amazing game, but everything about the look and sound is as botched as it could be. The last straw was the pre-rendered cutscenes, they used the original psp movies for the remaster, not even upscaled or anything, and it looks crusty as hell. Ffs the game uses Sephiroth's new FFVII remake design and the cutscenes have the original clothes. Come on.
I get change is hard, and the new voice actors had some titanic shoes to fill. But they could have tried to record Zack's lines more than once. Most of the english cast sounds like they were recording while taking a piss right after waking up. Sephiroth is as interested in anything happening as a rock is interested in the latest financial trends.
It's still one of the best games in its field, the music is emotive, the story is heart wrenching, characters and references are perfect, the little gameplay changes are... fine, you get used to zack's 80's hairstyle and even his VA eventually grows on you. But I honestly cannot find a single reason to recommend this over the original, when a psp and a copy of the game are dirt cheap. They're better animated, better voice acted, and the low budget nature of the game feels way more justified there than on a godforsaken full price ps5 game.
This review contains spoilers
I've been following DSD for a while, so I know that they can be extremely brilliant at times, and very disappointing at others.
First of all, The mortuary assistant is great. Wonderful. it gives you exactly everything it promises in a very tight package, it looks great, it sounds great, and with many moments that are truly blood-chilling. HOWEVER. The awe factor quickly runs out as soon as you figure out that there's no threat, there's no variety, and there's really no story either.
In order. This game is made by (mostly) a single dev, which is fenomenal, because the animations are rough but smooth and believable, the characters look like people (which in the game of the psx-horror obsession, it means a lot), the maps are very well done in terms of size, detail and usage. Everything in the game has a purpose, there's even a purpose for the weird matches that are the only thing you can take in the entrance. As for the game, it's exactly like in the title: you're a mortuary assistant, and wheter or not the tasks you're doing are realistic or not, they FEEL authentic, which is very important.
Now, the corpse routine is exactly the same for every single body, and there's always three bodies every night, with no variation and no increasing difficulty. And even though the bodies are randomly chosen, there's only like five possible ones, so you'll see the same faces a lot, considering there's five endings. That means at the very least, to see everything the game has to offer, you'll have to go through 15 bodies, out of the 5 available.
The scares and events are also random, which is good, but for at least 5 runs, there's not nearly enough of them. I've actually gone through the same scripted sequence three times in three consecutive runs, and there's no skipping these. You're forced to stop and do them all. On that note, you're not allowed to change the corpse task order either, you have to do number 1 before number 2, even if nothing should be stopping you, and if you start a corpse you have to do the entire procedure, you're not allowed to stop and put it away no matter what.
The key here is repetition. There's not enough variety for what the game wants to be, and there's not enough player freedom to be able to circumvent this problem. You're forced to do the same sequence and see the same things over and over for... not a whole lot. The story is basically all in the intro cutscene, and one or two endings. Even then, those two endings only give you a bit more context to stuff you can very well piece together from environmental clues, and the other endings are just slight variations. You even get the same burning cutscene wheter you chose the right body or not. That just makes no sense.
End of the day, it's a great game, really fenomenal. But for the price it has, I just wish it offered more than 3/4 hours-ish of stuff, of which, really just about an hour is interesting, and the rest is repetition. Much like me writing repetition so many times in this review.
It works great, but you could do better.
First of all, The mortuary assistant is great. Wonderful. it gives you exactly everything it promises in a very tight package, it looks great, it sounds great, and with many moments that are truly blood-chilling. HOWEVER. The awe factor quickly runs out as soon as you figure out that there's no threat, there's no variety, and there's really no story either.
In order. This game is made by (mostly) a single dev, which is fenomenal, because the animations are rough but smooth and believable, the characters look like people (which in the game of the psx-horror obsession, it means a lot), the maps are very well done in terms of size, detail and usage. Everything in the game has a purpose, there's even a purpose for the weird matches that are the only thing you can take in the entrance. As for the game, it's exactly like in the title: you're a mortuary assistant, and wheter or not the tasks you're doing are realistic or not, they FEEL authentic, which is very important.
Now, the corpse routine is exactly the same for every single body, and there's always three bodies every night, with no variation and no increasing difficulty. And even though the bodies are randomly chosen, there's only like five possible ones, so you'll see the same faces a lot, considering there's five endings. That means at the very least, to see everything the game has to offer, you'll have to go through 15 bodies, out of the 5 available.
The scares and events are also random, which is good, but for at least 5 runs, there's not nearly enough of them. I've actually gone through the same scripted sequence three times in three consecutive runs, and there's no skipping these. You're forced to stop and do them all. On that note, you're not allowed to change the corpse task order either, you have to do number 1 before number 2, even if nothing should be stopping you, and if you start a corpse you have to do the entire procedure, you're not allowed to stop and put it away no matter what.
The key here is repetition. There's not enough variety for what the game wants to be, and there's not enough player freedom to be able to circumvent this problem. You're forced to do the same sequence and see the same things over and over for... not a whole lot. The story is basically all in the intro cutscene, and one or two endings. Even then, those two endings only give you a bit more context to stuff you can very well piece together from environmental clues, and the other endings are just slight variations. You even get the same burning cutscene wheter you chose the right body or not. That just makes no sense.
End of the day, it's a great game, really fenomenal. But for the price it has, I just wish it offered more than 3/4 hours-ish of stuff, of which, really just about an hour is interesting, and the rest is repetition. Much like me writing repetition so many times in this review.
It works great, but you could do better.