To lead off, the game runs really well, looks really nice, and plays very competently. Gameplay and combat rely heavily on traversal, and with each character having unique movement options, it helps aid that you get a relative unique experience if you decide to hop between characters. It's really enjoyable to play. That's about all I have for positivity though, as this is an incredibly stale game at best, and a terrible, lifeless and, depending on how much you actually care about DC, even insulting experience at worst.

While the gameplay is good, the avenues to supplement it are very poor. Most missions boil down kill enemies travel to next waypoint repeat, and it doesn't help the boss fights are same-y and stale, while mobs are made of paper to your arsenal, meaning build diversity doesn't matter all that much. Loot is tiered like in every other game, but you get unique and legendaries extremely early in. Normally this would be a good thing but what this devolves into is 99% of the gear you obtain will be crap. Most side missions have an addendum such as you can only kill enemies with grenades or shield breaks, making what would be a fun enough time waster when doing basic defend the point or collect the data from enemies, into such a tedious endeavor where you're forced to duck and dodge about waiting for ammunition to restore or cooldowns to come off. Between loot being inconsequential and the missions expunging tedium, most people will probably gravitate to just finishing the story, which doesn't fair well either.

It's "Kill the Justice League" but you would expect some more fanfare from following that path. Legacy heroes are treated like the fodder you'll murder in most of your playtime, and with the direction the story goes the tag line ends up feeling like an afterthought. It also doesn't help that some heroes get special, tasteful send offs while others are left laying there as background corpses, so it throws away the potential hook that the squad is just that disconnected from humanity, because they aren't. Not to say the game doesn't have the occasional charm, and if you've been a fan of the modern retelling of Suicide Squad, you'll find more entertainment here than most. Just know that the beginning is the peak of quality in terms of tension and writing. All on top of this technically being a sequel to Arkham Knight, which is an entire mess of worms you have to let sink in.

And with the hook deflated, that's really about it. Suicide Squad does absolutely nothing to stand out amongst its contemporaries. Open world action loot shooter with cash shop, battle pass and rotating seasons. There's really no reason to play this over the 40 other live service loot games that do the same exact thing. Come back in 3 years when the game's been marked down to $2 and has almost double the content with 0 charge, don't support this beta test.

I have a strong bias towards the Battle Network franchise, and I'd argue this is one of the best games ever made. It does just about everything I love in these RPG's, with extreme amounts of customization, a rich and colorful world that progresses with you and the plot, a ton of fights and unique bosses that will test every aspect of your deck building prowess, and just an abhorrent amount of content. Compared BN titles before and after this one, there is just so much to keep you distracted, from boss time trials to grinding out different forms and battle chips to side quests and NPC offerings littered in the overworld and net world.

There is a whole lot I want to say about this game, but genuinely I believe it would edge into rambling territory, so I'll cliffnote the important bits and disclaimers to try and make this as good as a sales pitch as I can.

They've vastly improved on every aspect of this game from its predecessors, from even more unique chip interactions, better navi customization that allows you to fine tune both parts of Megaman, for the most part net worlds and the overworld are made so concise that it never grows tiresome to explore either of them, while at the same time never stepping into repetition territory with endless amounts of needless backtracking, a pitfall nearly every other game in the franchise falls into. Style changes, which are basically different forms Megaman can change into, have a lot more power and influence in most combat encounters, are very easy to grind out of if you don't like a particular form, and if you're green to the series, always comes as a nice surprise to what you get and makes the early and mid game so much more enjoyable for it.

So I guess a few precautions for recommendation, as the issues I list aren't issues to me personally, but they can unfortunately work as deterrents. I've mentioned grinding a few times, and the game can be just that. You'll have to have 1 of every single standard chip to see 99% of the game's contents, and it takes 100 battles minimum to change forms. Again, not really an issue for me since that usually just surmounts a video on the second monitor, but it can be grueling if you're new and you're pushing for post-game content for the first time.

There's also the "Blue" in the title. This is the BN game that started the trend of multiple versions, and unfortunately Blue just has better things going for it. A ninja (shadow) style over White's ground style, which while the latter has some really cool applications, shadow style's ability to just avoid damage is just vastly better. Blue comes with a unique boss fight in the form of Punk who, while doesn't drop anything besides money, begs the question why he's only in Blue. And Blue having one of the best chips in the entire franchise with FoldrBak, a free chip you can put into any deck that you can use whenever to reshuffle your hand and deck and draw new hand. Anyone with a basic understanding of card games can understand how absurd this effect is, while White gets a chip that lets you... use the last navi chip you used. So in terms of version exclusives, you're either choosing a free mulligan + draw 7 at any point in a fight, or 50-100 extra damage maybe.

Lastly, if you want to see EVERYTHING this game has to offer, you have to either trade chips with other versions, chips that are exclusive to each game (you cannot trade FoldrBak btw) or modifyyour game file. While this is made easier with the Legacy Collection available on all modern platforms as of writing this review which comes with online connectivity, you're still forced to find another human being to trade with. You aren't missing out on much, just the T4 versions of bosses to fight, but it's still annoying to have this restriction nonetheless.

All that said, Battle Network 3 is still a gem people should absolutely experience. It's an amazing game that still holds up to this day, and it both wasn't and won't be my first and last times playing it. If you want to jump right in there's no harm starting out with this game, but just for plot sake I'd at least recommend playing through the first 2 Battle Network as there are some narrative beats that come out better with context from the first 2, including a fairly major spoiler between Megaman and Lan, the protagonists.

Please play Battle Network 3.

For a bit of history, Magic the Gathering has always had a string of terrible PC games with poor customization, poor optimization, no match making, very limited format and deck options, terrible monetization, and negative support post-launch, and it's usually a combination of all these issues.

I bring all this up because Arena circumvents nearly all of these problems, and is arguably the best digital CCG that WotC has put out. Of course outside of a few weeks at launch I put off actually putting time into the game, as its release meant the death of their previous live service title, Duels. Unlike Duels though, it seems like Arena is here for the long term. (Hopefully) And unlike at launch, it's a much more packed game.

For comparison, the game launched with just standard. Anyone that knows anything about standard will tell you it's a hellscape. Luckily there are a ton of fairly active game modes available. You have brawl which is basically mini commander, you have alchemy which uses digital only cards as opposed to just the physical equivalents, you have historic which is the game's legacy lite, and a bunch of events, drafts and rotating experimental game modes. There's certainly a lot to do here, and similar to other CCG's like Hearthstone, the cards and board are well crafted and animated. There's a lot more polish here compared to what we were dealt with in the past 2 decades.

Of course it's not all rainbows and sunshine. Despite having the most polish of any MtG title, the PC version is optimized poorly. Even on mid and low settings the game will lag and stutter, something I've never seen with any other card game on my computer. And it's not just isolated issues there, as even on my phone I'll get occasional crashes. Despite me gassing it up, it's not doing anything real technical. You don't have Elspeth or Liliana standing on cardboard with 3D renders. I can only theorize it being a server issue, but it really adds to a mixed experience during long sessions.

And that brings to whats my opinion the main issue; the monetization. And it's real messy. A pack is 1000 gold. You get about 300 gold a day, and about 2k gold a week. That's about 4 packs a week if you're choosing to be f2p, which really isn't good. To compare, Hearthstone you can get a pack a day at worst. That's really not good, and to boot the cash shop has the usual flood of cosmetics, overpriced pack bundles, random (pretty) uncommons sold at some few thousand gold each, it's a mess. The 1 upside is you can obtain wild cards as you open packs, which you can trade in for cards you want, ie a rare wild card let's you get any rare card you want. I would say it's more generous than your average dust system, until you realize you probably need or want 4 of the same rare or mythic in your list to stay competitively, which can really jack costs up.

Now that's not to necessarily say the game is p2w (well in some formats it will be p2w) but say we have climbing the standard ladder as the benchmark, you can make a relatively cheap mono red or mono black deck and climb to mythic (the game's top rank) without too much trouble. Paying is if you want variety in deck building and other game modes, which I imagine is most of the fun for most deck builders.

I mentioned how much gold you could make a day, and yeah that's another issue which creates a real monotonous gameplay loop. Each win nets you 25 gold, sometimes a random uncommon card. You get 15 wins a day for earning gold. Meaning you'll be playing about 15-40 games depending daily. Most of those games will either be with a very linear deck like mono red or mono black, or with a constructed starter deck. You get your dailies done, and that's about it. There's nothing here to keep playing and work towards. You can grind out ladder rank for end of month rewards, and you can gamble and try to go infinite through drafts, but it's not consistent. So for months, this will be MTG Arena, until MAYBE you get a somewhat sizeable card pool.

As such, this makes Arena an incredibly difficult game to recommend for the long term. If you never played Magic then I couldn't recommend this game more solely to introduce you to the franchise, but as far as spending goes? Your money is better spent either on MTG Online or the physical game itself. And if you want to goof around with friends, you have much cheaper alternatives like Tabletop Simulator or Untap.

My opinion on this game has been rapidly fluctuating for the past week. My first run though had me soypogging at all the Spiderman stuff from start to finish, and I had a genuinely great time.

And then I kept playing and did the worst thing you can ever do with a product; turn your brain on. Replaying the game and letting some of its issues settle in started to, not sour, but gave me a more objective and realistic glance at the game. And I figured I would use this to sort of springboard my issues, as well as highlight what I enjoyed, as nothing will take away my initial enjoyment.

Traversal is kind of the same, but with a newly added wingsuit, and I get it because the map space is twice as large as the other games, but it doesn't feel as nice as web swinging and I'd argue it almost takes away from it. Would argue many aren't playing Spiderman so they can emulate the worst parts of Superman 64, but it's a very minor nitpick. (For now)

Combat remains mostly the same on the surface, but a lot of core aspects changed up really starts to weigh things down compared to the original. For starters, there are no longer costume powers, replaced with a static super for both Miles and Peter, and here's where the problem starts as Miles gets his relatively early, while Peter is missing his for well over half the game. And it only gets worse.

There are less gadgets and to compensate we now have cooldown abilities. Insomniac worked on combining both aspects from the first 2 games, leaning more into the Miles Morales systems. We get 4 gadgets (5 if you really want to count the web shooter) and 4 abilities which have interchangeables for each slot. This creates a different kind of gameplay loop from what we had in the first game. Rather than using all your gadgets and abilities in tandem to control the flow of the fight and dispatch individuals, it's round up individual targets together and go wild with a myriad of crowd control and area of effect abilities. Most of your tools will have the intention of crowd control, which back then crowd control was the exception and not the rule, and gadgets here only perpetuate more AoE ability spam fights, which in turn works better for Miles who has access to multiple AoE abilities early on, while Peter is stuck primarily single target until fairly late into the game. This once again makes Miles more enjoyable to play for most of the game, which makes enforced Peter sections feel rather lackluster outside of very specific parts of the story.

I mentioned less gadgets and that plays into another issue, there are less tools to perpetuate more stealth playstyles. That isn't to say stealth 'killing' mobs is no longer possible, you just have less tools to work with such as no impact or tripwire webs. There's actually a significant lack of stealth sections and missions this time around be it in the main story or as side content, which makes it all the more awkward for Miles to have his camo carry over when there's not much reason to deploy it.

Speaking of which, side content. Feels awful lacking here as well. And that's not to imply there's nothing to do, but there's a lot less involvement and ties to the core gameplay. Before you had combat courses, web swinging time trials, stealth missions, the occasional pseudo boss fight with Taskmaster, for the most part the side activities helped you improve at the game overall, but here? At most you have the Mysterio combat trials which in of themselves are built narratively so they don't even feel like true combat arenas. Most side quests are doing a very campy request for a student, or solving a wall puzzle for Prowler, or playing a fetch quest with maybe a small skirmish at the end of it. There's nothing that really helps you improve at the game while you explore between main missions, and while activities like research stations existed in the first game, once again that remained the exception and not the rule. At least with this issue I expect it to be remedied with any potential DLC, but given that the base for the first game didn't have this problem leaves me concerned for future titles from Insomniac.

The game narratively feels like it's at odds with itself occasionally. Peter comes off as generally rusty while also accidently and inadvertently starting several of the game's largest conflicts. Despite that, he has a good cast of supporting characters to mitigate those shortcomings like MJ, Harry and Norman that make experiencing his side of the story rather entertaining.

This contrasts with Miles, who doesn't really have a proper supporting cast to bolster his side of things up. Ganke is the only one that provides a brief respite for conversation, but the issue is it's very brief compared to what Peter has, and every other character on Miles' side like his mother and Hailey never offer any real push back or interesting beats for his character building. And while I really did enjoy the Martin Li angle, it felt very short lived compared to the A plot. All the while Miles coming across as far more capable than Peter in most situations, making Peter feel like the B Spiderman in the major conflicts of the game, while the narrative feels like it's tugging in the complete opposite direction. I never understand how Miles ends up as the superior Spiderman here, and I never understand why Peter decides to slack and fall in most major moments of the game. Sometimes he doesn't even feel like the original Peter, and I'm not referring to the symbioted version of him.

Nonetheless I still enjoyed it. It's still fun to play as Spiderman, it's still fun to swing around the city, and the major story twists and happenings were really entertaining for me. Despite my moaning I'm probably rating this game lower than it deserves, but my main issue comes from the final package feeling incomplete. The combat feels a lot more spammy, the story feels rushed and unfinished, and there's a lot less going on in this game then there is in Spiderman 1 despite having twice the map size and literally twice the Spiderman. And for the most part I don't see many people bringing up, not just my own issues, but problems in general. The loudest group of individuals are the ones race baiting which doesn't bring anything constructive, and between a lack of proper criticism alongside Insomniac openly doubling down on the MJ sections (they're still pace destroyers) I'm just worries about the future of these games. I'm worried for less polish and care, replaces exclusively with spectacle and flare. And again maybe any future DLC will quell these worries, but I don't feel all that confident given we had 2 games prior to this not exhibit any of these issues.

I'll still buy a Venom game though.

There are an exemplery amount of cases where the gameplay will be so much stronger than the narrative tied to it, that even if the writing is bad and the plot is full of holes, it doesn't affect the end product because the game is just that fun. Tons of games depend more on the player getting lost in its gameplay loop rather than the lore, despite the latter usually having an insane amount of work and detail put into it.

And then there's the rare opposite. Where the story itself disrupts the gameplay to such an egregious manner. Where it becomes so hard to ignore. Where the devs want it to be the primary focus rather than the video game itself. And when the writing itself just isn't good enough to make up for all of it.

Gearbox chose to lean heavily into their writing with the release of 2 and that never changed over a decade later, and while yeah there are glimpses of good setpieces in the franchise that became of this like Handsome Jack, fact of the matter is it slows down gameplay. Roadblocks where you're forced to hear characters talk, quests where you're forced into town for a 5 minute unskippable dialogue interactions, and an exhaustive amount of dialogue where, up until post game where you're exclusively farming bosse or running dungeons, there will ALWAYS be a character talking, and with each new release they've tripled down on this problem. I've had people tell me they either download mods that force skip talking interactions or simply play the game on mute, and that really isn't good given how much effort Gearbox has put into the writing and voice talent for these titles. So when the latest release once again doubling down on this issue despite it being the largest detractor from the last game, it reaches a point of being simply intolerable.

Which leads me to believe that I might not be the target audience, despite the gameplay being quite literally right up my alley. The game does a mix of nonstop jokes and occasional virtue signaling in a universe that consistently paints everyone as a garbage terrible person, and I probably smirked twice total in my 60 hours of sitting through paragraph long "jokes" that just weren't funny, despite being aware enough of the context of both Borderlands itself and the setting they were aping off of.

And despite there being a TON of class variety and reasons to replay, I can't stomach running through the story again, even if by means of speedrunning. The game quite literally dies by its own tongue, where even a game like YiiK isn't nearly as verbacious.

Watch a video of the first quest, and if it looks like something you can tolerate for 40 hours, then you'll probably enjoy it.

It's kind of wild rexperiencing the black sheep of your childhood favorite franchise and really seeing all the issues stem up. As someone who admittedly frequents *Chan boards for older game discussion, I've always seen the obvious negative disdain for 4, so coming onto here and seeing such a mixed reception is rather validating. Still after both a current and ongoing playthrough, it's really interesting to see what exactly Capcom got wrong with this entry, and really elevates the other titles in the franchise for things many would had taken for granted, and in my opinion that alone at least makes BN4 worth experiencing. But nearing the end of my 2nd playthrough I just really wanted to record my thoughts and really articulate what's wrong with this game.

Acknowledging the positives first and foremost, it's still Battle Network. The gameplay loop, despite some issues in this one, still holds really strong. The netnavi still have amazing designs, animations are great, for better or worse the formula hasn't been shaken up that much which is possibly the mentality Capcom had with the games up to this point. Versus and the free tournament feature are also pretty nice, moreso with the latest Switch release having online capabilities.

And now to nitpick and complain. There isn't a whole lot of good TO say here, and I imagine if this were someone's first game in the franchise for whatever reason, there would be nothing but disdain, and nearly everything here is fumbled, but the easiest target first would be the soundtrack, which admittedly has never been a series strong suit. There are combat tracks which are generally nice, but a lot of the overworld themes are just absolutely painful. Dendome definitely stands out for such an irritating pager ringing start and I dread ever having to go there, it's just mixed overall which admittedly is to be expected when they develop completely new OST's for their annual releases of these game boy games.

I commented on how it's still Battle Network, yet there are a lot of issues to the combat and starting with a lot of the new mechanics introduced. Gone are the style changes introduced in 2 and expanded upon in 3 and in their place are double souls, temporary forms you can obtain by sacrificing chips of specific types which is really cool on paper, middling to outright terrible in execution. You don't start with the form so already having to throw away a chip just to activate the form feels bad, meaning delving into double souls means you're already neutering your deck by either throwing away one of your cards or stunting a combo. This wouldn't be an issue in itself, but another issue with double souls is a lack of scaling. Each soul will do a set amount of damage, and it varies drastically, but for most souls they'll fall off drastically in damage and utility, and only serve as a net negative overall. For the easiest example, the aqua soul will always do 20 damage, which is great early but by mid and even late game where your buster can hit harder and fire faster on enemies even the aqua soul would be good against, it becomes a completely wasted form. This is a severe balance issue that's reprimanded in the next entry, but having a bulk of forms become a hindrance is such a massive oversight that becomes all the more apparent the more you play. And yeah some souls do have utility you can rely on, like junk soul recycling some used chips or number soul giving you 10 chips to work with per turn, but the balance discrepancy is still there, and building around some souls is much easier said than done, especially once you're deep into your 2nd playthrough.

Speaking of undercooked new features are dark chips, very powerful chips that will drain your max health for the rest of the game on use with no way to circumvent it, and other than becoming a sort of meme amongst discussion, really serve no purpose in indulging. Not only is there no way to circumvent the effects, and not only do you have to be on critical health just to gain access to them, but there's more than enough ways to supplement similar damage and protective numbers. It's an addition that just feels pointless and barely expanded on, and is potentially the biggest reason why the add feature was cut, meaning you can no longer cycle some chips in to easily find your combos for some extended fights... of course there is ONE reason why you would rely on the dark powers, but it isn't a good one.

Chip selection sucks compared to previous entry, and deck building just feels worse compared to previous and later entries. The general rule to making a good in-game BN deck is to stick to as few codes as possible, but during your first few playthroughs your options are stunted, and building around 1 or 2 codes leaves you with a ton of garbage you're stuck with, and no I'm not expecting some omni game killing folder similar to guts shoot an hour in, but it's just the complete inverse here, forcing me to rely on either lifesword and varswords, or air hockey's and boomerangs with a splash of assorted asterisk cards for most of my playthrough, and while yeah my options will expand once I get to post game after 2 or 3 playthroughs, but that's a good 30-40 hours in before the consistency and variety really start coming in, and you're not hamstrung into relying on really bad chip decks, which admittedly is where the dark chips might come into play, since even with one of the few consistent strategies, some fights can be rather rough.

So let's just make an overview on the gameplay changes here. Chip folders will be bad and stunted because most options are locked behind new game plus, and you have less options overall because the game expects you to utilize double souls and dark chips in some capacity. Double souls either fall off to the point of being literally useless or require ample amount of late game chips to even consider a build around. Dark chips are an overall net negative, will never come up if you're staying healthy health-wise, and would only come up in a practical sense because the chip selection early is really bad. All without mentioning the biggest issue the game has, and these are all issues that continually feed into one another, and it's so amazing because no other game in the franchise has these kinds of problems at this magnitude. And yeah you can turn your brain off, not consider any of this, and just use chips that look cool, but more than likely you'll be struggling on a lot of fights in the FIRST playthrough, especially if you're still rather green to the series.

The story is another gigantic mess even if it does have its own charming sparks here or there. Characters still act like they normally would, there's a ton of fun flavor text, and some references to other individuals like the Hideo Kojima stand-in (kind of subtle) and the Boktai series. (not nearly as subtle) The primary issue is the game is more or less filler in the worst way possible, and does ample amounts of damage to the gameplay in turn. To put it shortly, it's a tournament arc they somehow fumbled tremendously, which is genuinely a first for me in any sort of medium. You have 3 seperate tournaments where you see your opponent, and perform a side quest involving them, many of which involve you backtracking through the net, performing some unrelated minigame, or usually a mix of both. It takes the concept of a tournament and one of the more enjoyable segments of BN3 and turns it into a slog, and these make up most of the game. The core plot more or less happens at the start and at the end, and the rest are randomly generated tournaments that incentivize you to run through NG+ to endure every scenario. And worst yet are the optional navi fights and double soul forms locked behind these, and you will not have access to every unique navi fight until you've beaten the game 3 times. This isn't including secret navis or hidden boss fights, but regular content.

And I've mentioned it several times, but genuinely it is the worst part of the game, unique to Battle Network 4, and that is New Game+. Multiple boss fights are locked behind NG+. Tons of chips are locked behind NG+. The post game dungeon isn't accessible until you beat the game 3 times. And having to run through so many of these terrible and repetitive side quests with wonky new mechanics and a very skewed and admittedly terrible selection of chips just creates an ouroboros of issues that just endlessly feed into one another, and many might not even get past the first playthrough after the initial lukewarm experience it gives.

The biggest sin this game commits is serving no purpose. There's nothing in the story that adds to the plot before and after, and even if it's still Battle Network, there are 8 much better options for you to invest time into. I've lowered the rating about 3 times now writing this out and that stings because this is a franchise I absolutely adore and one I would recommend to people.

Just skip 4.

Given how this game's expansions and whatnot work, it's hard to talk about Destiny as a whole without an excessive amount of extra annotations, like how expansion in x months will completely eradicate any criticism had prior to it, or how you can no longer experience the base game's story, but what comes with the package is a fairly intricate shooter that has more depth than Halo but never comes close to something it wants to parrot like Diablo or Borderlands, all while once again having several asterisks tied to it.

Starting off is the incredibly high production value. Now Activision funding is partially to blame for the game running as nice, looking as nice, and sounding as nice, but given years later after splintering off from that deal and production quality staying all the same only showcases that Bungie had all the magic. Guns feel incredibly nice to use, killing even the most basic of trash mobs brings equal catharsism that you would gain from headshotting grunts in the Halo titles. I don't have much history or knowledge of who's still around and who left the project, but point being is the quality never waivered from their initial sales pitch of the first game almost 10 years ago.

The gameplay not only benefits from the sheer display of amazing presentation, but there's also an ample amount of skills and differentiations between each of the 3 classes, and each of their 3 (currently 4) subclasses that really makes what you're playing feel unique, and given how incredibly easy it is to switch subclasses on the fly, you'll most likely gain a ton of mileage out of 1 character. There are some guns that do feel rather weak, and given that there are still relatively useless stats like mobility and intellect that have been meager investments since launch, but besides some brazen nitpicks the entire gameplay package remains incredibly sound.

I've hope I've gassed the game up enough to where the punches I'm about to throw will really make the game sound horrendous. First off the story, it's always bee disjointed. Destiny's biggest issue with storytelling is having 90% of its exposition put into lore books or lore files, with campaign missions that have 1 character explaining a situation while another will be putting on his best Tony Stark impression, meaning you'll be grinding out a Destiny wiki if you actually want the bigger picture, but it gets worse than that. As mentioned, you cannot play the original campaign anymore, and it's due to their incredibly wonky engine that Bungie has been forced to exorcise older expansions and campaigns. One of the most popular characters in the franchise was killed off almost 5 years ago, and your only options to experience the content is either through a youtube video or a text dump. I really cannot think of any other game that handles content like this, and it makes late investors into the franchise dissuaded from actually learning about the world, the lore and the story, which is a real shame that such worldbuilding is put to such waste here.

But it doesn't really stop there, as more than half of Destiny 2's content runs on expansion content, which again some of which you can't experience fully anymore, but are still expected to purchase. If you're looking for a simple Halo Wizards Edition for PvP, then for the most part you'll be left to your own devices. But if you're looking to run some of the post-game PvE content like nightfall or raids, then it's a complete dice roll on whether or not you have that expansion. Don't have the $20 Forsaken Upgrade Expansion? I guess you aren't doing nightfalls this week, sucks you have to miss out on gear like that. Most other similar MMO games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 will eventually bundle their prior expansions together with the latest one, meaning newcomers just have to pay the one-time fee and be completely up to date on all the content, while Bungie will ask more and more from the player as you invest more time, which on some level is fair, but given the game is aping MMO's it just makes the entire experience look incredibly expensive from an outsider's perspective.

So just to paint it in the worst light imagineable just to get the point across; the base game is free. There are 4 expansions currently and a new $50 one releasing at the end of February. If you want the complete package, you'll be spending $145 minimum, potentially more if some expansions leave their current sales period and if you want to invest into the battle pass. The game does have a battle pass by the way, and a cash shop to boot. I understand that investing in your own project with no publishing backer like Activision is really rough, but this kind of stuff scares away new players. This is what has them glancing at the game from outside and just buying Borderlands 3 or Diablo 3 at a significantly discounted price.

For a bit of history, I was an early investor of Destiny 2 at launch and subsequently dropped the game after the first expansion dropped because there was simply nothing to do, and from then to now that's almost night and day to where we are now. There's almost TOO much for me to do and I barely even touched on how great raids and dungeons are as we'll probably never get such mechanic heavy content in an FPS outside of this. It's just a shame that FF14 of all games is much easier to recommend comparatively because of all the negative stipulations tied to it.

So I don't want to downplay this game, and the talent that's over at Bungie is still extremely talented. Just know that it's still a hard commitment to a game that's roughly 7x the asking price compared to most other games also worth your time right now.

It's a blessing and a curse that Bethesda had absolutely 0 confidence in this title given that it was instantly released despite having 5 supposed years of development with no marketing or advertising. More eyes should had seen Hi-Fi Rush long before we even knew of its conception, and yet it unknowingly dropping on the market lead to an incredibly unique and entertaining surprise.

Just from the trailer you can tell the game oozes with charm, signifying the heavy importance of its visual audio presentation. Being a character action game with a heavy emphasis on rhythm, the environment will move and display itself to match the constant tempo that's tied into the gameplay loop. The game wants you to move to the beat, as everything is tied to it. From platforming sections to enemy attacks, simply keeping conscious to the rhythm is the absolute best means of performing well in combat sections.

As for the story and writing, it's very "Saturday Morning Cartoon" all while staying consistently entertaining. It never meanders far enough into Borderlands territory where the jokes and punchlines become grating, and never shatters the fourth wall to a degree that most other cartoons in the current modern are are so obsessed with doing these days. Really if you've played similar character action titles like Godhand and Vanquish, a lot of this will be entertainingly familiar, which is nothing but more praise for the work.

With all that praise out of the way, I do have some issues that aren't really present in other titles. For starters, this is a character action game with added emphasis on platforming, and despite that, Chai both lacks varied jump heights and general horizontal movement. You press the jump button, and you will always go the same height. There's no context sensitive amount or means to hold the button for more distance, and while you do have access to a double jump and an air dash, the act of jumping feels like it's more in line with combo and combat structure and far less when it comes to platforming, which again is something you do a lot of.

Though that's very minor compared to the sheer lack of horizontal mobility. Many attacks don't propel you forward enough, which doesn't aid itself when fighting several enemies that will actively make attempts to avoid you. You have the grappling hook to close the distance, but that doesn't leave enemies in a stunned state, and will often just run away the moment you grapple to their position. And this problem only elevates itself further when platforming comes to mind. There will be several jumps you simply miss because of a visual misconception of how far the jump sent you. And again you do have an air dash, but not only is that also a set distance, but at times it can undershoot and overshoot certain obstacles. I wouldn't want anything comical like Kratos and friends ice sliding to their targets halfway across the map with each hit, but at times it really feels like Chai is stuck in mud and not nearly as mobile as he appears.

But these few issues don't overtly detract from the experience, and given that it's either a very fairly priced $30 title or extremely generous offer on the Game Pass, I can't recommend this game enough. It's almost surreal we got something like this in the current year from such a major publisher, and I'm more used to seeing these sorts of titles in the very sparse indie scene. Not only is this a tremendously grand experience, but I hope it only sends further messages to major gaming studios that people don't want these 200 million budget empty sandboxes or walking simulators. There is a market for games that have such a vibrant pulse that don't cost a ridiculous amount to fund and create.

This was someone's passion project, and I seriously hope we see more from them.

Really enjoyable roguelike with a really interesting concept that desperately needs to be expanded upon.

The positives are cooked in the concept alone, where you work on building and maintaining a cult that feeds itself into your dungeon exploring progression, and both systems loop into one another. However the execution leaves a lot to be desired, with the main issue being the main draw, your cult, feeling more like a tech tree with extra steps you see in similar titles all the time, and that stings since that's what makes the experience unique, as combat encounters in general are very plain compared to its contemporaries, where there's essentially little to no synergies or bombastic weapon and item combinations like you would find similar in Isaac or Gungeon. At best you'll have some fairly powerful spells, but nothing that can steamroll a dungeon run, which again wouldn't be a problem if the cult side of things came up stronger.

I did play on medium, so perhaps some of my woes can be circumvented on higher difficulties, but there was only a single point of cult disruption and that's when I fed everyone grass and didn't have enough rituals to bring my positive status back to an immediate green, so the mid game ended up having the bulk of that important back and forth stressing proper micromanagement and stressing resources, where early game felt like a borderline tutorial with how automated things felt, and late game feeling almost like failure states didn't exist between the obsessive amount of rituals and materials I had access to, food being a non-issue entirely and cultists relations never dipping down past a 90% approval rating, even when hard pressing the bulk for donations. Despite diligence on every front, I barely got half the building upgrades through the cultist tech tree while maxing out on everything else long before, and many of the later unlockable buildings simply just make things easier and were never really mandated for my victory, which again cultivates the problem that the main selling point of your game doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.

So of course my main complaint is simple; more importance needs to be added to the cult side of the game. If you're decent at these isometric roguelikes, you can get an easy clear without utilizing most of the game's systems. And unlike other roguelikes, there's a hefty amount of content you need to do to get to that point of facing the final boss, which decentivizes new playthroughs, and subsequent dungeon runs do nothing more than give you more resources to implant into your cult, which already emphasized doesn't do a whole lot anyway.

Still the charm does exist, the dialogue is witty and the experience is generally good for a first time playthrough, and they are working on future updates for the title. Just that this feels rather rare for a roguelike that there's not much reason to return after completion, despite not having everything unlocked and upgraded, where a game of the same genre like Enter the Gungeon rings completely opposite where, despite having all unlocks, I still find reason to start up new runs on the occasion.

And I really hope Cult of the Lamb strings up its own identity, as comparing it to Gungeon feels incredibly unfair, but the comparison is only made because every gameplay facet feels incredibly average.

I won't sugarcoat it, this is yet another bad Pokemon game with a myriad of features and ideas that could elevate it to an amazing game if handled properly, though that can be said about nearly every Pokemon game released in the past decade. And I think a lot of the promise of something truly spectacular is why people rate these titles higher than usual, but being an avid Pokemon veteran I know all too well that it isn't going to mean anything in the long run.

Let's chip away at the positives first. This is arguably the most open-ended a Pokemon game has ever been. At your own pace, you can choose to do whatever you want in any order with 0 sense of urgency or expectations, all while having a lack of an evil team trying to enforce you to take matters somewhat seriously. It's really what Pokemon should be, and was at its narrative peak with the first 2 generations.

And in turn leads into arguably the best story we've seen. Personally I'm not a fan of modern writing, and presenting the story within unskippable cutscenes instead of properly laying out exposition and lore regarding the region and towns amongst NPC's has been a major bane against the franchise ever since Gamefreak started to push narrative heavy plots back in gen 3, but this story really does stand out above the others. Nemona is as battle hungry and as linear as any other generic rival template we've seen in past games, but she works so much better when it's not just her in the spotlight. Arven has an incredibly interesting backstory and connection to the plot, and without getting into the semantics of how bullying works within school systems, the Team Star conflict works out well without having to resort to some sort of generic doomsday plot.

And as far as overt positives, that's really about it. I don't have a lot of nice things to say about it and even compared to its contemporaries released decades prior or even in the same year, it just falls short. I will say nearly every Pokemon design is nice, and coming at the franchise with the bold take of "Gamefreak sucks because ice cream and car keys" only deflects the absolute worst issues plaguing the game. So in the off chance that a good chunk of this write up comes off as nitpicky, just know my true issue is all these issues build up into something as a whole that cannot be ignored, and you really have to tear it apart from the bottom up, otherwise you're simply left with "game bad" and nothing else, which isn't very constructive.

But as I said, we'll start from the bottom. As of writing this, the game still looks terrible and runs terrible. And I've already seen the heaps of rebuttals that graphics don't matter or performance shouldn't have much an effect on what is essentially a turn-based RPG, but let me spin things around and explain my rationale. There are heaps of games that look and run better on the Switch. There are games made by Gamefreak that look and run better on the Switch. And in the grand scheme of things, they aren't doing anything unique or impressive. It really is difficult to peg the graphics without opening half a dozen other can of worms in the process, hence why I've sort of dreaded even bringing this up in full, but it complies as issues nonetheless.

"The game looks bad because it's massively open world" is one of the main counter arguments I've seen against these claims, but it looks bad in spite of Gamefreak taking so many shortcuts already, and the performance plays a huge part of this as well. Characters popping in and out of existance even from a very short distance. Frame rates on characters and objects slowing down to a complete crawl if they are in view from a distance. Textures dilluting themselves almost to a comedic extent unless you're brushing your character completely against the model. Some textures not even loading in properly like if you hop on a building in Levincia. The game is ugly, and if it were a linear, turn-based RPG we could just leave it at that. There's also just a sheer amount of emptiness and isolation you'll face exploring Paldea. Most areas don't feel crowded with Pokemon, and you'll barely see any unless you've either purposefully isolated yourself to a single zone or you're standing completely still for a minute so all the Pokemon can phase into existance and start crowding around you. The few towns and cities feel empty with very little to explore within them all while many idle NPC's function as pesudo ghosts just phasing in and out after reaching the border of the area. Outside of within the academy, you really do just feel alone, something I never really felt in any other Pokemon title.

But there's more to it when its poor graphics and performance affect the experience as a whole, because again it's an open-world title. You're meant to traverse the entirety of Paldea soaring through the skies, swimming through the lakes, scaling the mountaintops, and all the while you see on full display just how off the entire experience is, all while the game struggles to maintain a consistant 20fps. If this were a linear corridor with a few open paths every other route, then yeah this presentation would make a lot more sense. But currently it feels like we have the worst of both worlds, when most features lack detail or true polish while lacking the linearity for its own saving grace to boot. The wild area in Sword and Shield looked absolutely dreadful while many of the enclosed routes and towns looked on par to even better than what we had experienced with Gamefreak's 3D capabilities prior, and yet they decided to triple down on the former here to blisteringly poor effect.

And the absolute worst of it is we've seen what Gamefreak can do when they aren't phoning it in. Pokemon Legends Arceus at worst has poor textures from afar like if you were to fly overhead to Lake Verity in the Obsidian Fieldlands, but outside of that? Tons of Pokemon litering every area, detail and foliage in things like grass and trees to sprinkle in that extra amount of detail. Jublife Village feeling, ironically, more alive and active than the entirety of Paldea and all of its towns and cities combined. All while taking very minimal, if any, hits to the general performance. And this isn't to put PLA on its own golden pedestal, but compared to SV it like comparing Crysis to Daggerfall in terms of visuals and presentation. Really makes me question the development for these games where they can absolutely nail one game while bombing on another in the SAME YEAR.

But yeah to surmise, this is easily the worst looking and worst performing title Gamefreak has ever put out, so much so that Nintendo even stepped in weeks later to apologize on their behalf for the incredibly shoddy performance. It's just a real sad state of affairs, and we're nowhere close to being finished.

Gamefreak has been cutting features from their games since gen 5, and they range from major events and activities to very minor stuff they had to go out of their way to cut like enforcing Exp Share when the 3DS family of games had no issue keeping it as a simple toggle. In this latest iteration, you can no longer change battles from Shift/Set. What this did was ask if you wanted to change Pokemon in-game after KOing a Pokemon on the opposing team, and instead you're now always asked if you want to change for every single Pokemon you KO with no way to opt out. Not only does this make the game much easier by default, but it also increases the tedium. Now I have been labeled for wanting the games to be like Dark Souls simply by calling the latest iterations way too easy compared to what we had, which is and will always be a ridiculous counter claim, but my main issue is just having to waste time between Pokemon mashing B through text. If anything should be changing between titles, it should be the severe reduction of tedium, and in some aspects Gamefreak gets that right. For example, it's incredibly easy to get a Pokemon up to competitive snuff compared to the old days of breeding endlessly just for a decent chain of good IVs while spending a good hour or 2 grinding out EV points, longer if you never got lucky enough to get Pokerus, whereas it can take only a few minutes to go from freshly caught to online ready provided you have the income, and changes like these where you're forced to sit through more and more text with each new release is antithetical on what we should be expecting from sequel titles, especially ones running on this long. Imagine if they brought back the limited RBY inventory spacing with the sole intent of cutting more corners, people would be furious, yet dozens of changes that make QoL all the worse are always handwaived away, like animations which are always on, meaning you're forced to sit through every single animation and attack during battle. Now granted I never turned this feature off myself, but it's yet another option that's gone for no good reason, and the people that relied on that feature just to speed things up get punished for no reason.

Speaking of which, inventory management has gotten far messier compared to its contemporary with SwSh. Putting all your stat increasing items, evolutionary items and held items all in 1 tab makes sorting and finding specific items you want nothing more than a chore, while digging through your TM list to find a specific move remains just as tedious, despite a clear solution of dividnig TMs up by typing exists in the crafting system at Pokemon centers. You also can't move Pokemon in bulk like you could in SwSh, so instead of picking up a stack, clicking the box button and putting them in a freshly new box, you're now forced to mash through the LR bumpers through a somehow laggy and buggy iteration of the PC box just so you can move that bulk stack to another section. Finally, the new Pokedex entries are amazing and a step up from what we had before, but between not having the option to change specific forms (ie Lycanroc) or visuals in the Pokedex, or not being able to press one of the bumpers to quickly cycle through the dex, having to manually scroll past 200+ Pokemon just to see the one you specifically want is yet another layer of tedium. And I completely understand this stuff can come across as nitpicky, but not only does it all add up to make the entire experience just feel ever more clunky, but it was always a non-issue in previous titles. Again SwSh didn't have most of these problems, and only showcases that Gamefreak refuses to invest in simply checking their games for quality.

Let's talk about gameplay! As far as combat goes, it's exactly the same as it's been for over 20 years, and many detractors will say that makes SV objectively better than PLA for not taking things in such a different direction, but I would argue otherwise, and not for contratian exclusive reason because, yeah SV has the complex combat system we've spent over 2 decades learning, but what does it do with that combat system? A lot of the really intriguing portions of it never come up in single player, and with each new iteration they provide less and less double battles. Pair that with the removal of the Battle Tower, the only place you could emulate online and complex battling in a single player environment, and what does SV do with its combat system that somehow makes it better than PLA? You aren't worrying about speed tiers, you aren't thinking about defense and special defense values, you aren't taking into account how much power your opponent's Pokemon may be packing. You're just clicking on the super effective move. And that's it. Despite not having abilities and held items, PLA has some fairly tough encounters and scenarios that force you to actually take other variables into account, while none of that is present in SV. And again this isn't me wanting the games to be hard per say, but why praise a combat system when the games themselves refuse to take advantage of it? You're basically playing a lengthy 40+ hour tutorial and then MAYBE partake in online in case hitting the SE move over and over again really sold you on how great competitive battling really can be. Inversely, not having online battling hurt PLA a bit for me since testing out such an experiemental battle system against others in an online environment would had been amazing, but oh well I suppose.

After obtaining your starter and sitting through your mandated academy tutorial cutscene, you have 3 primary objectives; clear all 8 gyms and become Pokemon Champion, beat every single titan Pokemon scattered throughout the land, and clearing out every Team Star base, leading to an apt pseudo dungeon as the resolution past these 3 events, and as simple concepts these are all fine, but as a hateful nitpicker all 3 of these display some form of laziness that wasn't demonstrated in previous titles.

Let's start with the gym challenges. For the most part it's fine though, and there are some portions that have repeatable minigames upon completion. Nothing extraordinary, but a cute extra they didn't need to include. My main issue comes from how simple and linear these fights end up being, and that's partially in part to the new terastallize mechanic, which hard changes your Pokemon's type. Mechanically, it actually has a considerable amount of depth that the in-game process will never take advantage of. Going into a same tera type will give you a significantly higher same type attack boost, while defensive applications like switching a hyper offensive Pokemon to water or fairy can demonstrate an indestructable monster. It is a lot better than dynamaxing which simply doubled your health and gave you 3 turns of free z-moves. And what the gym leaders do with it is take one a Pokemon not of their regular type, and tera into their designated type. The grass gym leader will tera his Sudowoodo, a rock Pokemon, into a grass type, and it is a cute nod and play the first time, but doesn't necessarily live up to the same hype after the 12th time. Leave it an ironic state that Gamefreak actually makes a new mechanic with a decent amount of depth and do absolutely nothing inventive with it outside of a gag or 2. Which leads gym battles as a whole to be the most disappointing aspect of the 3 main quests. Also as a subjective take, I think the hats look incredibly stupid and would had been nicer if they did literally anything else for transformation designs. As one positive step note, you aren't fully healed doing the E4 challenge like you were in SwSh, so at the very least there's some bite left to that.

Next up is Arven and his quest to hunt every titan Pokemon. This ties in with the Pokemon that's used exclusively for your mobility, your Koraidon or Miraidon, as with each titan defeaded, your ridemon gains a new traversal ability, be it letting it jump higher, climbing mountains, swimming or even flying. (with style) It serves as a beneficial way and has arguably the best incentive of the 3 questlines since it affects how you traverse this rather sparce map, but the issue is the titan battles themselves are incredibly shallow. Comparing to the noble Pokemon fights in PLA which had its own entirely unique affair and multiple loss conditions, with titan Pokemon you walk up to the Pokemon in question, battle it once, chase it somewhere else, and team up with Arven to finish it off. That's it. There's no battle complexity here or test of skill, it's just another instance of testing numbers, and after seeing what they COULD do with boss Pokemon, I left really disappointed by comparison. To somewhat make up for it, Arven does have a fairly touching story tied to clearing out each titan Pokemon, so despite being the most simplistic, it's also the most rewarding.

Finally there are the Team Star bases. There's an interesting narrative tying each base leader to the big boss of the team, but it's yet another mechanically unintersting affair as well. The team bases exemplifies the new auto battling mechanic. That's right, auto battling. You tap the shoulder button and send your Pokemon in a direction, as it picks up any item or fights any Pokemon in its radius. It's a novel mechanic and you can perform it while mounted, but it's just so unintersting, especially when once again PLA did it better, trading the ability to auto battle Pokemon with being able to manually throw your pokeball and have your Pokemon collect whatever at a very generous distance, all while not having that air of clunk reside around it, where sometimes sending it off to auto battle would result in it going in the wrong direction or stopping after a few steps to do absolutely nothing. And in order to fight a base leader, you have to run around and auto battle 30 Pokemon. There's again no real strategy here, and you're rewarded with a pseudo gym fight where their final Pokemon will always be their car, which is a beefed up Revavroom with the team's appropriate typing. I'd say mechanially it's the worst of the 3 quests because it ends up being such a repetitive formula.

And it is a positive you can do any of these in any order you prefer, it's just a bit of a shame that each quest ends up being so painfully surface level. Which leads to the final dungeon, or the exploration of Area 0. I won't really talk about it much since there are some nice story beats worth experiencing unspoiled, but instead segway into talking about the game's other "gimmick" being paradox Pokemon. Generally, they're extreme regional variants with stat buffs and their own unique abilities with both versions exploring past and future variants, but that's really as far as paradox Pokemon go. Now I'm a fan of all their designs but the fact that these Pokemon and the 2 professors is as far as the games will go with exploring different timelines is disappointing. Going into Area 0 and expecting either a lush prehistoric forest or chromitized mechanical city only for the trek down to be the exact same in both versions really took away what could and should had been, and remains yet another statistic of wasted potential. Really seeing Gamefreak never going all out with a concept and experiencing years of blueballing is one of the largest disappointments of the franchise, and a refusal to commit to what will probably be a once in a generation feature when something like Black and White could manage 2 entirely unique, version exclusive zones is just disappointing. So basically I'm a fan of the idea of not too fond of the result.

The last thing to really talk about are the raids. Raiding is a 4 player fanfare where 4 people (or 1 person and 3 NPC's) work together to take down a boss Pokemon. These are procedurally generated and I imagine served as the post-game activity Gamefreak expects players to do ad infinite upon hitting the credits, and just like in SwSh, they really don't do it for me. Anything under 5 can be overcome by just spamming SE moves to the specific tera type, and while it may seem like 5-7 raids create nuance and depth for differential team-building, there's a universal setup to clear all of them with no effort. Pokemon like Azumarill, Iron Hands, Gholdengo and Slowbro/Slowking can solo even the hardest content with no issue, and your rewards for winning are herbs for making sandwiches, items for competitive team building, or treasures to sell for items for competitive team building. Just like in SwSh, it's as deep as a puddle and serves as the game's infinite content, but it's a bit worse than how raids were handled then.

See rather than keep things turn-based, raids are now on a timer. In theory this helps raids always last a set amount of time and not feel like a chore, but in practice it's a complete, inconsistent mess, either through the timer always ticking down regardless of action, or that continual lack of polish that has you locked in some menus with no ability to do anything, and of course this is made all the worse in an online environment. You could spend a 4th of the timer doing absolutely nothing because of poor load times and the raid Pokemon just doing way too many moves in succession, and despite having the ability to one shot most raids, it still ends up feeling inconsistent because of these technical abnormalities. Like most other problems in the game, a 2nd review over and even the lightest coat of polish could had made raiding feel better, but given there's no true reward unless you're really into shiny hunting, and the fact that you can raid whenever you want in the game, it just feels like yet another forced, undercooked feature.

And for the most part that's Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. Once you hit credits, besides grinding out raids you can partake in some school courses or dialogues for some minor rewards. You can redo some of the gym activities for a one off reward. You can check into the auction marketplace to bid on overpriced apricorn balls (maybe) once a day. And you can hunt down spikes to capture the 4 hidden legendaries, but unless you're avidly into either shiny hunting or competitive battling, which are sub groups that barely make up 1% of the entire fanbase, that's really it. It's yet another game with a sparse amount of post-game activities in a franchise that fanfared how much content you have to do with the introduction of gen 3, and was only built upon since then. There are no contests. There is no battle tower. There's no national dex to incentivize building up on a living dex. There's a very limited amount of one-off legendaries that are always in static positions. There's just really nothing to do once you finish this 40 hour tutorial.

And that's really the saddest part. From start to finish, the game just feels empty. It feels like they checked off the minimal amount of ticks to have this pass as an open world game, and did absolutely nothing to emphasize that you were playing a Pokemon game. There's no bite, no challenge, no content, no stargazing features, and in most of the areas that matter, the Pokemon game that launched in the same year as it does it all better, and it's hard to really know what to blame for all of it. Given SwSh's beta leaks, we know these games get 2 years minimum development time, which is enough time for Ubisoft to recreate most of Egypt and have it showcased in museums for study purposes. We know it can't be publisher interference since no other Nintendo title shares these vast amount of issues, and I really doubt Nintendo is telling Gamefreak to step back on GOOD changes they made in another game IN THE SAME YEAR. Maybe it's the lack of passionate developers, since there are glass door reviews stating how many of the veterans no longer have a passion or fire for making these Pokemon games, which fair enough but at that point some newer, more passionate blood should be injected instead of these non-caring old heads sticking around.

Regardless though, the game sold over 10 million copies in 3 days, so them doing the bare minimum while still pushing out these insane sales numbers is working for them. It's just sad to had been a fan of this series for decades and seeing themselves continually degrade and make mistakes the last game never came close to making, how each new entry ends up worse and worse in several areas, to the point where even poor performance is now a trademark issue.

Anyway there's my rambling review of Pokemon Scarlet. I'm sure it's come off as extremely disjointed, but that's exactly the feelings that this game conveyed to me gave off, and I'm probably giving the games way too much credit in the first place writing up something this long for its sake. Given Nintendo, not Gamefreak, acknowledged and apologized for the games releasing in such sorry states though, my only solice of hope left is if someone from Nintendo actively steps in and starts taking over projects, since despite all my rage I would rather not see the franchise I grew up with completely degrade itself into a multi-billion dollar joke.

There's a lot of cool things going for the first iteration of this franchise, as well as a myriad of archaic features most will pan the turn-based RPG genre for as a whole. Excessive amount of random encounters, the literal need to grind up a numbers advantage just to progress, the need to exhaust dialogue from every NPC just to get a vague idea of where you're going.

But outside of the grind mandate, it's not all bad. Most battles are rather quick so increasing your levels doesn't feel too much like a slog. The world is open but not too big meaning you can cover the bulk of it without much hassle of getting lost or not knowing where to go. Every single spell has its usage, and some enemies can be hard countered with very basic game knowledge such as scorpions being easy to farm with Sizz or armor knights having their entire movesets shut down by Fizzle. And while there's an excess amount of dialogue needed to get a general idea of your goal, that works in its strength as you can basically surmise each goal and item location from simply talking to people, and it's nice having a game not be as cryptic as a 90s point-and-click title while also not gripping your hand walking you through the game with no resistance.

As a starting point for the journey, I have no issue recommending it. It's a very short experience that doesn't demand too much of your time to clear. I'd personally recommend either the original NES version, Famicon version or the GBC port of the game. And in the worst case, the game is still first of its kind and predates a ton of tropes and mechanics long before other more popular RPG's came up to bat, and that it really does only improve from here, so to speak.