Hexxproof
2020
Man, this game is pretty boring and I feel pretty confused about where all the praise is coming from. To be clear, and to begin on a positive note, I do see and respect just how much ambition went into this game. The devs spent a lot of time and energy on every aspect of this game. It's like Rogue Legacy quadrupled. The problem is that this is the problem! There's way too much thought here and not enough fun. As the first example, let me mention that this game has inflation in it. Actual fucking inflation. As if that's a fun real-life concept to put in your game.
So, the game design is still the same as it ever was. You play a sort of light metroidvania in sections, where you do have access to the entire map, but are really only meant to play each section in increments where you die over and over but make it out with gold to upgrade your castle so you can beat the area you were focusing on and move onto the next. In 2013, I loved this design since it felt fresh and new and I get very addicted to games with tons of unlocks and bars to fill, which is really the only thing Rogue Legacy has going for it. As a combat platformer, it's perfectly fine and controls well, but the level and enemy attack design always feels either simple or just annoying, and that hasn't changed at all. This sequel is exactly the same on that front. Some basic jumping around on platforms you are very unlikely to miss, and some smacking enemies around in situations that are mostly easy until they just feel unfair.
The core gameplay is fine. It's all of the thousands of layers of other stuff that either adds nothing or detracts from the experience as far as I'm concerned. For one thing, I'm not sure why this game has like 175 classes when most of them are just minor variations. Gunslinger is just a minor variant on Archer. I forget their specific names, but the black hole mage is a major difference from the regular mage and both are fun to play, but I really struggle to tell you any major differences between Knight, Duelist, Valkyrie, Assassin, Barbarian and Ronin. They're all sword users and, sure, they have differing attack damage, range and their own unique class skill, but the core experience is extremely similar. You jump close to enemies, bop them on the head and dodge attacks. Archer is at least wholly different in that you shoot arrows in stead, which changes the strategy, and the black hole mage is also cool in how it changes your whole playstyle and makes you "lay traps" instead of punching enemies in the face, but the melee characters all feel more or less the same except some of them do shit damage and are as such frustrating.
Then you have all of the other stuff. The fact that there are 7000 statuses to memorize the name of. You've now found an "empathy" which lowers your "handicap" in... Hell, I forget what the part of the game was called. This game needs to come with a physical glossary so you can look up what the countless words mean, and the worst part is that none of them seem to matter. So this item gives my main weapon the ability to "apply Combo". Okay. And what's that? I haven't noticed any difference when I pick that thing up. And that's really perhaps the worst part about the game for me. Picking items up. Not only do most of the items suck with very boring effects like "slightly raise crit chance", the devs have also included a sort of tax system for items. Picking one up severely lowers your maximum HP, to the point where you're only allowed to safely pick up 2 or 3 items. I have no idea why they did this to their game, since it absolutely murders run variety. Every run feels the same when the items are both lame and prohibitively expensive to pick up and as you traverse the same few rooms now assembled in a slightly different order.
They do sell an upgrade for this, because of course they do, so maybe you can have more fun with the items with a raised "resolve" (that's what the item limit system is called, because everything needs a name to memorize), but the problem is the aforementioned inflation. After you've purchased some unlocks, there's actually a text pop-up telling you that the price of labor has increased and will continue increasing. So not only does the game have a simple tier system where upgrade A1 costs 50 coints, A2 costs 100 coins and so on, the game also has an inflation system, so once you've purchased A1 and A2 at a total of 150 coints, B1 will then change from costing 50 coins to 75 coins. After you've purchased B1 and B2 at the new, inflated, cost of 75+175, C1 will change from 50 to 75 to 100 coins and so on. Why? Why the fuck would you do this? Who would ever want inflation in their videogame? This is the actual worst. Does this go away if I spend like 150 hours grinding out more resources and coins (because of course this game desn't just have gold, it also has 47 other currencies)? Do I care? No.
Another thing is the trait system. I remember RL1 as being a good mix of good and bad traits, but in this game, I feel like I either don't notice having a trait at all (which does happen often) or it's some negative bullshit that makes me kill the character immediately. Everything is greyscale now! Nope, instant suicide. Only critical hits deal damage! Hell no, instant suicide. Everything is sepia toned and all of the sounds are tinny and distorted! Niet, instant suicide. Your character now shrinks on taking a hit and you have to smash everything to desperately find mushrooms because Mario! Nahhhh, instant suicide. You are now a pacifist and can't deal (but can take) damage! Yeah, no, instant suicide and rage quit.
This game is well-programmed and I didn't run into any glitches. It looks and sounds very good, even though I preferred the pixel art of the original over the cartoon hand-drawn in this game. The platforming and combat is simplistic, but servicable and can even be enjoyable. At least some of the bosses were pretty cool. The ambition here is massive. But it's not fun. It's a grindfest so offensive that even a grind addict like me hates it. There's been too much thought put into pesky, annoying aspects of the game and not enough on the fun. There are too many classes with too little variation. Too many unlocks that split it into too many more unlocks, and then you have to unlock more unlocks by finishing New Game+18. And the game has motherfucking inflation. That should just tell you everything you need to know about how boring this game is. I'm done. I've stuck with it for some 10+ hours because I'm such a roguelite nut and because I had fond memories of the first game, but this game just sucks and isn't even a game. It's a boring unlock simulator with inflation in it. No, I'm never letting that go. They put inflation in their boring-ass game! I really have no idea how so many others are praising this game. It sucks and I hate it.
So, the game design is still the same as it ever was. You play a sort of light metroidvania in sections, where you do have access to the entire map, but are really only meant to play each section in increments where you die over and over but make it out with gold to upgrade your castle so you can beat the area you were focusing on and move onto the next. In 2013, I loved this design since it felt fresh and new and I get very addicted to games with tons of unlocks and bars to fill, which is really the only thing Rogue Legacy has going for it. As a combat platformer, it's perfectly fine and controls well, but the level and enemy attack design always feels either simple or just annoying, and that hasn't changed at all. This sequel is exactly the same on that front. Some basic jumping around on platforms you are very unlikely to miss, and some smacking enemies around in situations that are mostly easy until they just feel unfair.
The core gameplay is fine. It's all of the thousands of layers of other stuff that either adds nothing or detracts from the experience as far as I'm concerned. For one thing, I'm not sure why this game has like 175 classes when most of them are just minor variations. Gunslinger is just a minor variant on Archer. I forget their specific names, but the black hole mage is a major difference from the regular mage and both are fun to play, but I really struggle to tell you any major differences between Knight, Duelist, Valkyrie, Assassin, Barbarian and Ronin. They're all sword users and, sure, they have differing attack damage, range and their own unique class skill, but the core experience is extremely similar. You jump close to enemies, bop them on the head and dodge attacks. Archer is at least wholly different in that you shoot arrows in stead, which changes the strategy, and the black hole mage is also cool in how it changes your whole playstyle and makes you "lay traps" instead of punching enemies in the face, but the melee characters all feel more or less the same except some of them do shit damage and are as such frustrating.
Then you have all of the other stuff. The fact that there are 7000 statuses to memorize the name of. You've now found an "empathy" which lowers your "handicap" in... Hell, I forget what the part of the game was called. This game needs to come with a physical glossary so you can look up what the countless words mean, and the worst part is that none of them seem to matter. So this item gives my main weapon the ability to "apply Combo". Okay. And what's that? I haven't noticed any difference when I pick that thing up. And that's really perhaps the worst part about the game for me. Picking items up. Not only do most of the items suck with very boring effects like "slightly raise crit chance", the devs have also included a sort of tax system for items. Picking one up severely lowers your maximum HP, to the point where you're only allowed to safely pick up 2 or 3 items. I have no idea why they did this to their game, since it absolutely murders run variety. Every run feels the same when the items are both lame and prohibitively expensive to pick up and as you traverse the same few rooms now assembled in a slightly different order.
They do sell an upgrade for this, because of course they do, so maybe you can have more fun with the items with a raised "resolve" (that's what the item limit system is called, because everything needs a name to memorize), but the problem is the aforementioned inflation. After you've purchased some unlocks, there's actually a text pop-up telling you that the price of labor has increased and will continue increasing. So not only does the game have a simple tier system where upgrade A1 costs 50 coints, A2 costs 100 coins and so on, the game also has an inflation system, so once you've purchased A1 and A2 at a total of 150 coints, B1 will then change from costing 50 coins to 75 coins. After you've purchased B1 and B2 at the new, inflated, cost of 75+175, C1 will change from 50 to 75 to 100 coins and so on. Why? Why the fuck would you do this? Who would ever want inflation in their videogame? This is the actual worst. Does this go away if I spend like 150 hours grinding out more resources and coins (because of course this game desn't just have gold, it also has 47 other currencies)? Do I care? No.
Another thing is the trait system. I remember RL1 as being a good mix of good and bad traits, but in this game, I feel like I either don't notice having a trait at all (which does happen often) or it's some negative bullshit that makes me kill the character immediately. Everything is greyscale now! Nope, instant suicide. Only critical hits deal damage! Hell no, instant suicide. Everything is sepia toned and all of the sounds are tinny and distorted! Niet, instant suicide. Your character now shrinks on taking a hit and you have to smash everything to desperately find mushrooms because Mario! Nahhhh, instant suicide. You are now a pacifist and can't deal (but can take) damage! Yeah, no, instant suicide and rage quit.
This game is well-programmed and I didn't run into any glitches. It looks and sounds very good, even though I preferred the pixel art of the original over the cartoon hand-drawn in this game. The platforming and combat is simplistic, but servicable and can even be enjoyable. At least some of the bosses were pretty cool. The ambition here is massive. But it's not fun. It's a grindfest so offensive that even a grind addict like me hates it. There's been too much thought put into pesky, annoying aspects of the game and not enough on the fun. There are too many classes with too little variation. Too many unlocks that split it into too many more unlocks, and then you have to unlock more unlocks by finishing New Game+18. And the game has motherfucking inflation. That should just tell you everything you need to know about how boring this game is. I'm done. I've stuck with it for some 10+ hours because I'm such a roguelite nut and because I had fond memories of the first game, but this game just sucks and isn't even a game. It's a boring unlock simulator with inflation in it. No, I'm never letting that go. They put inflation in their boring-ass game! I really have no idea how so many others are praising this game. It sucks and I hate it.
Addictive busywork game that has less busywork than an Ubisoft game, and with pretty graphics, but the combat plays itself and the grimdark vibe feels pretty tryhard for Tolkien.
There we go! Much better than Circle of the Moon. Like Nathan in Circle, Juste is a limited whip-bearer, compared to the sword-swingers in other Igavania titles, but he doesn't control like a corpse and actually feels fluid and smooth to play. I could go on about how much better this game is, but really, it's just better at literally everything than Circle was. Yes, even the graphics, which I don't think are ugly. They're odd in a way I can't quite put my finger on, but they're not ugly. They kind of remind me of SOTN's mish-mashed aesthetics and it's got a punk collage kind of vibe to it. The only genuinely ugly part is the blue outline around Juste, which I believe is there because all of the character sprites have a very pale color scheme and they figured at the last minute that Juste was too difficult to separate from the background in certain areas. Understandable, but still not very pretty.
I think about the only thing I really dislike about this game is the overall castle layout. Not the rooms and individual areas by themselves, but the castle as a whole. I'm really not into the whole forced teleportation mechanic and how we kind of randomly explore the castle, and how segmented that makes each area feel. I also dislike how we teleport to a new area and are presented three equally open paths with no clue which is the right one and which is just a waste of time without the upgrade that one of the other paths leads to. Obviously, this is common for the genre and part of the experience, but I felt like the paths in this game went on for quite a while with no save points and only to find out at the very end that, nope, this was not the right one.
One detail I especially liked were the various physics-related things, like how you smack a pillar to drop a floor down to make a ramp right as the game begins. Or how about the giant hammer you use to smack an equally giant armor into a wall in order to smash or, even better, the giant armor that you intimidate by smacking it around with your whip until it retreats right into a giant grinder that not only destroys the armor, but spits out the pieces for you to wear! That one in particular made me excited and happy when it happened.
Some people complain that the game is too easy, and the combat is too easy, but this game offers one of the biggest exploration challenges in the series, with how hidden some of the body parts are, or for example how you have to figure out to find and equip certain things to move on. Also, and this is an unrelated aside, Maxim mode was surprisingly fun compared to the alternate modes in these games. Usually, the unlockable alternate mode is one that makes the game harder and more frustrating, but Maxim is a ninja on meth that's fun to control and speedrun the game with.
That's really it. I'm enjoying everything else. I'm enjoying the return of money and much more interesting loot than in Circle. I'm enjoying Juste's controls quite a lot more. Enjoying the even better soundtrack, which I believe I recognize a few SOTN classics in. Great game and a return to form for the series.
I think about the only thing I really dislike about this game is the overall castle layout. Not the rooms and individual areas by themselves, but the castle as a whole. I'm really not into the whole forced teleportation mechanic and how we kind of randomly explore the castle, and how segmented that makes each area feel. I also dislike how we teleport to a new area and are presented three equally open paths with no clue which is the right one and which is just a waste of time without the upgrade that one of the other paths leads to. Obviously, this is common for the genre and part of the experience, but I felt like the paths in this game went on for quite a while with no save points and only to find out at the very end that, nope, this was not the right one.
One detail I especially liked were the various physics-related things, like how you smack a pillar to drop a floor down to make a ramp right as the game begins. Or how about the giant hammer you use to smack an equally giant armor into a wall in order to smash or, even better, the giant armor that you intimidate by smacking it around with your whip until it retreats right into a giant grinder that not only destroys the armor, but spits out the pieces for you to wear! That one in particular made me excited and happy when it happened.
Some people complain that the game is too easy, and the combat is too easy, but this game offers one of the biggest exploration challenges in the series, with how hidden some of the body parts are, or for example how you have to figure out to find and equip certain things to move on. Also, and this is an unrelated aside, Maxim mode was surprisingly fun compared to the alternate modes in these games. Usually, the unlockable alternate mode is one that makes the game harder and more frustrating, but Maxim is a ninja on meth that's fun to control and speedrun the game with.
That's really it. I'm enjoying everything else. I'm enjoying the return of money and much more interesting loot than in Circle. I'm enjoying Juste's controls quite a lot more. Enjoying the even better soundtrack, which I believe I recognize a few SOTN classics in. Great game and a return to form for the series.
Damn it! I absolutely cannot stand when an overall very fun game throws a completely bullshit challenge at you that sucks all the fun out of the game and that's what I'm experiencing with this game.
First of all, this is a straight-up Mystery Dungeon ripoff game. It plays exactly like pretty much any ChunSoft game and that's perfectly fine by me. I couldn't care less if a game is original, nor do I care that this game doesn't add one single new idea and is just an uninspired clone. It's still fun, and this game is certainly a very solid Mystery Dungeon entry with the added bonus of chocobo cuteness. All of the graphics and story and all that is very cute and silly, stupid fun. The game does what Final Fantasy side games usually do and it has your typical plot about some world-smashing god that needs killing and whatnot, but it's on a smaller and cuter scale. I like it.
And I just generally love the whole Mystery Dungeon design. Shiren on the DS was the game, way back when, that taught me what a roguelike even is and made me love the concept and even to this day, I think I really only like Mystery Dungeon games and not roguelikes in general even though I call myself a roguelike fan. This time, I found myself realizing that I actually very much like turn-based battles; I just don't like the J-RPG style that doesn't involve any tactical movement. I like this style of turn-based and I like it a lot.
The problem with this game is that it's got a strong yin and yang, heaven and hell, type of vibe. It's equal parts cute chocobos and brutal roguelike design by it's very nature, but it's also equal parts good designs and just awful ones. Good dungeons with interesting quirks and barely playable ones that suck all of the fun out. You've got equal parts fun depth and incredible tedium, like how spread-out the city is and how much running around you have to do just to maintain your inventory.
The worst offender is the bonus dungeons. Man, most of them are so boring, and they actually make up the meat of the game. You've got the campaign, which is I think five dungeons long and each one grows in size, difficulty and loot quality compared to the last one. The campaign and regular dungeons have a roguelite-inspired structure where you're meant to escape, which you can do with any staircase, if you find a good drop that you want to keep. It also offers checkpoints so you can get back to about where you were and continue on with your upgraded gear. This might be something different from ChunSoft's style, actually, as I don't recall them being this generous with hopping in and out of the dungeon, and it obviously makes the game easier, but I like this lighter change of pace and the heightened focus on upgrading equipment. With this part of the game, you do get a solid 50 hours of enjoyment so if all you do is the campaign, you've still made a solid game purchase.
However, there are more bonus dungeons than there are campaign dungeons, counted both in amount of dungeons and their combined numbers of floors (because one of the bonus dungeons has 500 floors so it alone wins that contest) and, man, do most of the bonus dungeons suck. They feel like unfair chores where RNG decides whether or not you win far too often. They're so high in difficulty that one miss can be the difference between winning and losing, and missing is pure RNG. The worst offender is the one called just Mystery Dungeon and it has so many bad designs that it's forcing me to stop playing to save my sanity right now. It's 50 floors long and you start from level 1 with no equipment, meaning that you have to painstakingly explore every corner of every floor to make sure you find every possible upgrade (since you can no longer partake in the leaving the dungeon to upgrade weapons in town system) and there are no shortcuts, meaning that you have to do the entire 3-5 hour dungeon in one go. And it won't let you save mid-dungeon, even though the game has that feature for other dungeons. Why would you ever do that? That's not difficulty design, that's just you being an asshole. In fact, whoever made these design choices is such an asshole that they won't even let us have a quit or abandon option. If you we enter a dungeon that refuses saving and we suddenly have to leave due to real-life issues, we have to find a staircase or intentionally get killed in order to safely leave without risking corrupting our save by quitting incorrectly. That's just...wow, what an asshole design decision to make.
In short, this game is a super fun lightweight roguelike with lots of charm if you just stick to the fairly easy but not too easy campaign. It's a very solid game that doesn't really suffer from anything except low quality of life with things like an inconvenient city design and, of course, the graphics that were dated even when the original came out in 2009, but that's not a very big deal. The game looks fine. Unfortunately, though, this game becomes an unenjoyable nightmare if you're a completionist who wants to take on all of the challenges and the game becomes tough to give a score for. I'll settle for four stars since the campaign was a lot of fun but the bonus content was lame, and the campaign is long enough for it to not feel like a ripoff of any kind. It just pains my completionist side that I now have to uninstall it because the bad dungeons frustrate and bore me too much.
First of all, this is a straight-up Mystery Dungeon ripoff game. It plays exactly like pretty much any ChunSoft game and that's perfectly fine by me. I couldn't care less if a game is original, nor do I care that this game doesn't add one single new idea and is just an uninspired clone. It's still fun, and this game is certainly a very solid Mystery Dungeon entry with the added bonus of chocobo cuteness. All of the graphics and story and all that is very cute and silly, stupid fun. The game does what Final Fantasy side games usually do and it has your typical plot about some world-smashing god that needs killing and whatnot, but it's on a smaller and cuter scale. I like it.
And I just generally love the whole Mystery Dungeon design. Shiren on the DS was the game, way back when, that taught me what a roguelike even is and made me love the concept and even to this day, I think I really only like Mystery Dungeon games and not roguelikes in general even though I call myself a roguelike fan. This time, I found myself realizing that I actually very much like turn-based battles; I just don't like the J-RPG style that doesn't involve any tactical movement. I like this style of turn-based and I like it a lot.
The problem with this game is that it's got a strong yin and yang, heaven and hell, type of vibe. It's equal parts cute chocobos and brutal roguelike design by it's very nature, but it's also equal parts good designs and just awful ones. Good dungeons with interesting quirks and barely playable ones that suck all of the fun out. You've got equal parts fun depth and incredible tedium, like how spread-out the city is and how much running around you have to do just to maintain your inventory.
The worst offender is the bonus dungeons. Man, most of them are so boring, and they actually make up the meat of the game. You've got the campaign, which is I think five dungeons long and each one grows in size, difficulty and loot quality compared to the last one. The campaign and regular dungeons have a roguelite-inspired structure where you're meant to escape, which you can do with any staircase, if you find a good drop that you want to keep. It also offers checkpoints so you can get back to about where you were and continue on with your upgraded gear. This might be something different from ChunSoft's style, actually, as I don't recall them being this generous with hopping in and out of the dungeon, and it obviously makes the game easier, but I like this lighter change of pace and the heightened focus on upgrading equipment. With this part of the game, you do get a solid 50 hours of enjoyment so if all you do is the campaign, you've still made a solid game purchase.
However, there are more bonus dungeons than there are campaign dungeons, counted both in amount of dungeons and their combined numbers of floors (because one of the bonus dungeons has 500 floors so it alone wins that contest) and, man, do most of the bonus dungeons suck. They feel like unfair chores where RNG decides whether or not you win far too often. They're so high in difficulty that one miss can be the difference between winning and losing, and missing is pure RNG. The worst offender is the one called just Mystery Dungeon and it has so many bad designs that it's forcing me to stop playing to save my sanity right now. It's 50 floors long and you start from level 1 with no equipment, meaning that you have to painstakingly explore every corner of every floor to make sure you find every possible upgrade (since you can no longer partake in the leaving the dungeon to upgrade weapons in town system) and there are no shortcuts, meaning that you have to do the entire 3-5 hour dungeon in one go. And it won't let you save mid-dungeon, even though the game has that feature for other dungeons. Why would you ever do that? That's not difficulty design, that's just you being an asshole. In fact, whoever made these design choices is such an asshole that they won't even let us have a quit or abandon option. If you we enter a dungeon that refuses saving and we suddenly have to leave due to real-life issues, we have to find a staircase or intentionally get killed in order to safely leave without risking corrupting our save by quitting incorrectly. That's just...wow, what an asshole design decision to make.
In short, this game is a super fun lightweight roguelike with lots of charm if you just stick to the fairly easy but not too easy campaign. It's a very solid game that doesn't really suffer from anything except low quality of life with things like an inconvenient city design and, of course, the graphics that were dated even when the original came out in 2009, but that's not a very big deal. The game looks fine. Unfortunately, though, this game becomes an unenjoyable nightmare if you're a completionist who wants to take on all of the challenges and the game becomes tough to give a score for. I'll settle for four stars since the campaign was a lot of fun but the bonus content was lame, and the campaign is long enough for it to not feel like a ripoff of any kind. It just pains my completionist side that I now have to uninstall it because the bad dungeons frustrate and bore me too much.
2014
I've tried twice on PC and now twice on console and I just can't get into this game. I guess it's the added layer of another dimension; having to do all of this survival game busywork while also having to deal with floating and how resources can be located anywhere in a full sphere around you. It just makes everything feel like that much of a chore. It doesn't help that all the cool discoveries in this game are far away and it feels like there's nothing especially cool to find in the vicinity of your pod. Just a load of survival busywork of having to constantly gather up Bladderfish to drink and hauling metal scrap back and forth. I usually like that in a lot of these games, but here it all feels like too much of a chore for me and add the fact that the game doesn't offer an in-game map for some unfathomable reason and I'm going to go ahead and peace out for the final time.
2018
Surprisingly good Souslike that might be the overall best one I've played, but suffers some serious problems. The game boasts a pretty and very cool art style quite unlike anything we've seen before and that stays strong throughout most of the game, perhaps one area excluded. It has combat that's similar enough to Souls to be comfortable and recognizable, but also distinct enough to feel like you're playing a retread, with the major difference being that there are more encounters with multiple enemies, tailored for this game's more co-op-focused design. The world is enjoyable with many things to find in every corner, leading to satisfying and fun exploration, especially once you find the ability that lets you throw spears to teleport to certain statues, which really changes how you view and investigate the environment around you.
The best part deserves its own paragraph; in this game, your goal is to establish a village and help out other survivors for some vague story reason I've forgotten. As you complete missions and recruit new citizens to your village, it will change and grow as you return to it to complete quests, and the most charming part is that you can see the characters working on the houses as they're being built. You start with just a campfire and finish with a full-blown little village of houses of various styles and sizes. You also begin with nothing and end with several different types of smiths and workbenches to do various things with. I love it and want to see things like this in every RPG!
When the game works as intended, which is most of the time in the overworld area of the game, it's addictive and enjoyable. When the game is at its best, it's probably even the best Soulslike out there. Traversing the normal world, with the exception of the third, ash-filled, area that is just a drag to both explore and look at it, is always enjoyable as the world is pretty and there is a reasonable amount of enemies placed in locations that are interesting to search. The combat isn't quite Dark Souls level, but it's good enough for what it is, and most enemies reach at least a base level of enjoyable to fight, with only a few exceptions. Basically, and in short, the first half of the game and up until you reach the infamous Matriarch is a joyous experiences.
However, the game has a few too many problems, mostly related to the focus on co-op and how bad the AI companions are. They are mostly fine and often quite helpful, which makes it even more frustrating when they decide to just despawn out of nowhere and for no reason, walk off a bridge and die while leaving you alone for the rest of that mission or just stand there and stare at a wall while you scream for them to stop it and come help you. It really doesn't help that the worst areas for AI survival are also the hardest dungeons, since they're unnecessarily filled with thin walkways and pitfalls that your programmed friend just can't handle, and this issue is made even worse by the sheer size and length of those dungeons. Dark Souls never makes you play stretches this long without a single bonfire in sight, forcing you to replay a solid 45 minutes to get back to where you were and regain your "souls", but this game does it in several places. Since the game is so heavily co-op focused with many fights that are unfair without help, the poor companion behavior brings the's game score down quite far. The most frustrating part is that this seems like developer pride, and that they really needed to accept that their companion code was a bit shit and that they should have offered more respawn stations for the AI in the tougher areas to make up for it just wandering off a bridge and ditching the player when they need the help the most.
As an aside, I personally didn't appreciate that this game is always online in co-op with an open lobby without ever telling you either that you're playing in an open lobby that people may join at any time, while also not mentioning that someone has joined you in any way whatsoever. I figured out that, wait a minute, I'm in an open co-op lobby and my "AI" friend is actually a human player when I saw the companion start to pick up loot and try to use the beckon feature to make me follow them. The game seems to employ some kind of automatic system where you join other people's games, and vice versa, without either player actually knowing that it's happening. That felt like, I don't know, some kind of mild invasion of privacy, that the game just puts you in an open lobby without ever telling you and then there's no info pop-up whatsoever that someone has joined you either. This is the only time I've had someone else show up in my game without so much as a "XxPussySmasher420xX has joined your party" or anything and it felt kind of uncomfortable and weird. I don't feel better about it since a human witnessed my perhaps most embarassing death, when I accidently pressed the jump button instead of loot on one of the aforementioned tiny ledges.
Let's not even talk about the absolute absurdity that is the ridiculous final boss. No, wait, she sucks so much that I have to dedicate a paragraph to her. She prevents me from ever getting the platinum trophy for this game since that requires you to play on hard and there are Dark Souls veterans around the internet who say that completing this boss solo and on hard is literally just impossible. I believe it and I'm never even going to start hard mode in this game. She was stupid-hard on normal and I've never struggled that much with a boss in any Soulsborne game. She isn't even a boss design since she's just good at literally everything and I don't think that qualifies as a design since a child can come up with this. Lightning fast and just steps out of your attack combo without ever being stunned, does absurd damage and can 2-hit you with a stunlock inbetween hits and has two absolutely massive health bars. She's made even worse by the fact that you have to replay her dungeon every time you want to try again, the companion happily dies often in said dungeon and each new attempt costs resources in spears, health and the damage resistance potion. She also demands a heavy weapon with a wide swing and I had chosen a heavy with precision attacks, which are just too slow for this speed demon on meth, so I had to spend a few hours upgrading a different axe just to be able to stand a chance. This boss sucks and is a really sour end to the game.
So, quite an enjoyable experience in most areas of the game, where the AI companion can behave and the game flows as its meant to, with a few too many misguided areas that could've been polished and where the developers just needed to swallow their pride and make some changes for the betterment of the game. Cool artstyle, solid enough combat that feels like Dark Souls Lite, enjoyable exploration with things to find in every corner and with some very sneaky and fun-to-find hiding spots, but the review score is brought down little by little, every time your idiot AI friend just attack combo's their way off a ledge and leaves you alone to take care of like a dozen enemies at the same time, and by the completely absurd final boss that comes out of nowhere. Was going to end the review by saying that I hope that the game made enough money for the studio to still be around, but they appear to be fine and have already shown off their next game, which actually looks cool even though it no longer has a unique art style. As much as I may have complained in this review, I will definitely be trying the team's next game to see if they've learned from Ashen and created an even better game. I hope they do!
The best part deserves its own paragraph; in this game, your goal is to establish a village and help out other survivors for some vague story reason I've forgotten. As you complete missions and recruit new citizens to your village, it will change and grow as you return to it to complete quests, and the most charming part is that you can see the characters working on the houses as they're being built. You start with just a campfire and finish with a full-blown little village of houses of various styles and sizes. You also begin with nothing and end with several different types of smiths and workbenches to do various things with. I love it and want to see things like this in every RPG!
When the game works as intended, which is most of the time in the overworld area of the game, it's addictive and enjoyable. When the game is at its best, it's probably even the best Soulslike out there. Traversing the normal world, with the exception of the third, ash-filled, area that is just a drag to both explore and look at it, is always enjoyable as the world is pretty and there is a reasonable amount of enemies placed in locations that are interesting to search. The combat isn't quite Dark Souls level, but it's good enough for what it is, and most enemies reach at least a base level of enjoyable to fight, with only a few exceptions. Basically, and in short, the first half of the game and up until you reach the infamous Matriarch is a joyous experiences.
However, the game has a few too many problems, mostly related to the focus on co-op and how bad the AI companions are. They are mostly fine and often quite helpful, which makes it even more frustrating when they decide to just despawn out of nowhere and for no reason, walk off a bridge and die while leaving you alone for the rest of that mission or just stand there and stare at a wall while you scream for them to stop it and come help you. It really doesn't help that the worst areas for AI survival are also the hardest dungeons, since they're unnecessarily filled with thin walkways and pitfalls that your programmed friend just can't handle, and this issue is made even worse by the sheer size and length of those dungeons. Dark Souls never makes you play stretches this long without a single bonfire in sight, forcing you to replay a solid 45 minutes to get back to where you were and regain your "souls", but this game does it in several places. Since the game is so heavily co-op focused with many fights that are unfair without help, the poor companion behavior brings the's game score down quite far. The most frustrating part is that this seems like developer pride, and that they really needed to accept that their companion code was a bit shit and that they should have offered more respawn stations for the AI in the tougher areas to make up for it just wandering off a bridge and ditching the player when they need the help the most.
As an aside, I personally didn't appreciate that this game is always online in co-op with an open lobby without ever telling you either that you're playing in an open lobby that people may join at any time, while also not mentioning that someone has joined you in any way whatsoever. I figured out that, wait a minute, I'm in an open co-op lobby and my "AI" friend is actually a human player when I saw the companion start to pick up loot and try to use the beckon feature to make me follow them. The game seems to employ some kind of automatic system where you join other people's games, and vice versa, without either player actually knowing that it's happening. That felt like, I don't know, some kind of mild invasion of privacy, that the game just puts you in an open lobby without ever telling you and then there's no info pop-up whatsoever that someone has joined you either. This is the only time I've had someone else show up in my game without so much as a "XxPussySmasher420xX has joined your party" or anything and it felt kind of uncomfortable and weird. I don't feel better about it since a human witnessed my perhaps most embarassing death, when I accidently pressed the jump button instead of loot on one of the aforementioned tiny ledges.
Let's not even talk about the absolute absurdity that is the ridiculous final boss. No, wait, she sucks so much that I have to dedicate a paragraph to her. She prevents me from ever getting the platinum trophy for this game since that requires you to play on hard and there are Dark Souls veterans around the internet who say that completing this boss solo and on hard is literally just impossible. I believe it and I'm never even going to start hard mode in this game. She was stupid-hard on normal and I've never struggled that much with a boss in any Soulsborne game. She isn't even a boss design since she's just good at literally everything and I don't think that qualifies as a design since a child can come up with this. Lightning fast and just steps out of your attack combo without ever being stunned, does absurd damage and can 2-hit you with a stunlock inbetween hits and has two absolutely massive health bars. She's made even worse by the fact that you have to replay her dungeon every time you want to try again, the companion happily dies often in said dungeon and each new attempt costs resources in spears, health and the damage resistance potion. She also demands a heavy weapon with a wide swing and I had chosen a heavy with precision attacks, which are just too slow for this speed demon on meth, so I had to spend a few hours upgrading a different axe just to be able to stand a chance. This boss sucks and is a really sour end to the game.
So, quite an enjoyable experience in most areas of the game, where the AI companion can behave and the game flows as its meant to, with a few too many misguided areas that could've been polished and where the developers just needed to swallow their pride and make some changes for the betterment of the game. Cool artstyle, solid enough combat that feels like Dark Souls Lite, enjoyable exploration with things to find in every corner and with some very sneaky and fun-to-find hiding spots, but the review score is brought down little by little, every time your idiot AI friend just attack combo's their way off a ledge and leaves you alone to take care of like a dozen enemies at the same time, and by the completely absurd final boss that comes out of nowhere. Was going to end the review by saying that I hope that the game made enough money for the studio to still be around, but they appear to be fine and have already shown off their next game, which actually looks cool even though it no longer has a unique art style. As much as I may have complained in this review, I will definitely be trying the team's next game to see if they've learned from Ashen and created an even better game. I hope they do!
2019
Just good, clean fun in this little metroidvania romp starring a cat in a mech suit. A catroidvania, if you will. No? Fine. The game is quite good, though. Really nothing to complain about except that you always want a game this solid to be longer than the nearly exactly three hours it took me to beat it, and I think maybe the game really didn't need to have any difficulty at all so everyone could enjoy it. That one boss in the heating department is going to be a bit of a shocker for more inexperienced players. Outside of that oddly difficult boss, compared to everything else in the game, there really was no room or time to get bored and the game is a very enjoyable evening's worth of gaming.
Have to give a little shoutout to the hidden color schemes you can find, which is the game's only real collectible and reason to find secret rooms. If you told me that palette swaps for the game was the only thing to really find, I might not have bought it, but finding and enabling each visual theme as I found them was much more fun than I had ever thought it would be, even if some of them were kind of eye-burning. My favorite was, uh, the one named Urine. Though that's a final negative note; I don't really know why this cutesy game needed a bunch of color schemes named after things like piss and shit. Keep it cute, guys!
(Oh, and dog lovers needn't worry! A dog is a major part of the plot as well, and not as the villain. The villain is a mouse.)
Have to give a little shoutout to the hidden color schemes you can find, which is the game's only real collectible and reason to find secret rooms. If you told me that palette swaps for the game was the only thing to really find, I might not have bought it, but finding and enabling each visual theme as I found them was much more fun than I had ever thought it would be, even if some of them were kind of eye-burning. My favorite was, uh, the one named Urine. Though that's a final negative note; I don't really know why this cutesy game needed a bunch of color schemes named after things like piss and shit. Keep it cute, guys!
(Oh, and dog lovers needn't worry! A dog is a major part of the plot as well, and not as the villain. The villain is a mouse.)
Feels like I should have so many opinions and comments after one hundred and fifty-four hours (154!), but at this point I'm just exhausted. There is such a thing as too much game, and this is it. It's also a very good game, but a tiring one that overstays its welcome.
This game is, script-wise, a prequel to Origins and the entirety of the Assassin's Creed backstory, even more so than Origins, but on a gameplay level, it's really just Origins again, except a little bit worse in many ways. Like Origins, the environment is incredible and riding around on your horse and just absorbing the tranquility as frail rays of sunshine find their way through leaves and leaves and motes of dust dance in the wind is eerily close in feeling to actually being on that vacation yourself. Like all of the games in the series, this one made me routinely stop and wonder if this is what Athens actually looked like, or if this is how Greece society actually functioned. As far as recreating ancient Greece, this game is a resounding success and it's getting almost scary just how good games can be at tricking your mind into thinking that you're actually there. The humans and animals still have some ways to go, graphically, but the environment looks incredible, and an environment like ancient, obviously massively historical, ancient Greece can only serve to elevate it.
The story is also fine for the most part. I don't want to dig too deep and uncover spoilers, but I never agreed with Origins being the, well, origins of the whole story, but this game does a good enough job of explaining why that is. For the first time in the series, we get rather enormous info dumps about the First Civilization and other information. Juno, who I don't think we've seen for like ten games by now, even makes a re-appearance. I haven't been able to care too much about this story for however many entries into the series, as Ubisoft clearly didn't care for the longest time either, but it does seem like their trying to find their way back to lore that makes sense. They get a passing grade on this one.
Another thing that was as excellent as it was unexpected was the amount of player choices and real consequences this game has. Conversations can at least play out differently in every single scenario, depending on what dialogue option you chose, and in some cases you make large changes to either the surrounding area or the story, whether it be a side quest or the main campaign. There are choices with actual consequences literally the game constantly, and they're not fake choices where every choice just leads to the same outcome either. Quests seem to play out so wildly differently that it almost feels worth re-playing this game to see the other outcomes, until you remember that it's a 154-hour game. Ubisoft should definitely get more praise than I've heard for how deep the conversations and consequences actually are in this game. Feels like I have to make some kind of comment about how Fallout 4's dialogue system was basically one of those devices that lets dogs "talk", and they just repeat "let's go park now!" over and over, but Ubisoft are the ones delivering true choices with true consequences. Genuinely good work that kept me guessing and made me reload a few times when I wasn't satisfied with how my choice played out.
Oh, and while I'm at it, I'll add some praise for the fact that this game lets you play the entire thing without map markers or other Ubisoft-style hints. If you pick exploration mode and turn some settings off, this game quickly becomes an oldschool-style game where you have to solve every single clue yourself, and even if you play in guided mode, the game expects you to think much more than I think more or less any previous game has. I chose guided mode as I prefer to turn my brain off with these games, but even that mode made me really look at and investigate the situation several times. Reminded me of how Unity and Syndicate would expect similarly of the player.
However, there are also so many problems... The game is simply too bloody large and long. Ain't nobody got time for this. It's time developers start building smaller worlds with more interactivity, because this has just gotten ridiculous. More Deus Ex-style neighborhoods where every single door and drawer can be opened, less entire countries where you can really only marvel at how pretty everything is while nothing can be interacted with.
I don't like how the simplified and sped up combat by removing the shield and speeding up various animations. That just felt like it removed a layer of strategy and made combat more confusing for no real gain. I hate how they introduced a new movement glitch that I don't think was present in Origins, where the code that's supposed to determine whether or not you're allowed to sprint or jog (which is determined by whether or not you're in a city) constantly glitches out and forces you to ride your horse at a slow trot in the middle of nowhere. With the sprintbutton entirely removed, this can become enormously frustrating as you try to traverse the entirety of Greece. It doesn't help that this game introduces absolutely savage load times on the PS4; upwards of several minutes every time you fast travel. This rather severe downgrade of your movement options, as the player, is a constant disappointment for me, as these games tend to require you to zip back and forth in the world to complete tasks, and doing so with this murderously slow fast travel just isn't enjoyable. Thankfully, Odyssey is mostly linear while you're on the ground and you rarely have to fast travel to do something, but I hear Valhalla is more or less the same except it adds a loading screen every time you visit a merchant, which sounds like a bad time all around. And, hey, where'd crafting go and why are there so few types of animals in this game compared to Origins?
I also kind of really hated all of the DLC. Hated how the First Blade forces you into a romantic situation that you are offered no control over and all of a sudden your character just takes a several-year break from your adventure and settles down no matter what dialogue options you chose, just so the DLC can end with their dramatic death. Cheap and lame. Then it was off to Elysium, Hades and Atlantis and I was pretty excited, only to be quickly disappointed. Elysium was fine, Hades was dreary and boring and Atlantis was pretty and boring. Each area has a new mechanic that just makes the game suck, and the worst for that was the previously unmentioned freebie DLC on Korfu. Elysium had "wings of Hermes", the name of which had me pumped for the idea that we would be allowed to fly, but they're really just teleport pads with fancy names that let you skip climbing. Hades has some lame barrier system where you have to gather armor pieces before you can fully explore. Atlantis has another barrier system that works slightly differently. Korfu commits the to me cardinal sin of not just taking your abilities away for a short while, but keeping them away for most of the expansion. Absolutely loathe that in every game that does it and this was no exception. It was like the game wanted to give me one final fuck you after several dozen hours of mediocre DLC content.
Special mention also has to go to how they ruined the sense of progression in this game by making everything scale to your level. As early as level 35 or so, the game scales the entire world up and continues to do so. This resulted in my character not feeling like she grew very much, as there were times when the enemies outpaced me and only took MORE damage the more I leveled and that just felt wrong. I really don't know why they thought max level 99 made sense, since doing literally everything left me at the frustrating final level of 91.
Very good game with some huge flaws that bring it down for me. I think this is the best world in AC so far, but the game and the changes they've made since Origins doesn't live up to it and Origins still beats this game as the overall experience. Now to wait like four more years to finally play on Valhalla, and that one will definitely be played on an SSD so that I can actually enjoy it and not spend half the time staring at loading screens.
This game is, script-wise, a prequel to Origins and the entirety of the Assassin's Creed backstory, even more so than Origins, but on a gameplay level, it's really just Origins again, except a little bit worse in many ways. Like Origins, the environment is incredible and riding around on your horse and just absorbing the tranquility as frail rays of sunshine find their way through leaves and leaves and motes of dust dance in the wind is eerily close in feeling to actually being on that vacation yourself. Like all of the games in the series, this one made me routinely stop and wonder if this is what Athens actually looked like, or if this is how Greece society actually functioned. As far as recreating ancient Greece, this game is a resounding success and it's getting almost scary just how good games can be at tricking your mind into thinking that you're actually there. The humans and animals still have some ways to go, graphically, but the environment looks incredible, and an environment like ancient, obviously massively historical, ancient Greece can only serve to elevate it.
The story is also fine for the most part. I don't want to dig too deep and uncover spoilers, but I never agreed with Origins being the, well, origins of the whole story, but this game does a good enough job of explaining why that is. For the first time in the series, we get rather enormous info dumps about the First Civilization and other information. Juno, who I don't think we've seen for like ten games by now, even makes a re-appearance. I haven't been able to care too much about this story for however many entries into the series, as Ubisoft clearly didn't care for the longest time either, but it does seem like their trying to find their way back to lore that makes sense. They get a passing grade on this one.
Another thing that was as excellent as it was unexpected was the amount of player choices and real consequences this game has. Conversations can at least play out differently in every single scenario, depending on what dialogue option you chose, and in some cases you make large changes to either the surrounding area or the story, whether it be a side quest or the main campaign. There are choices with actual consequences literally the game constantly, and they're not fake choices where every choice just leads to the same outcome either. Quests seem to play out so wildly differently that it almost feels worth re-playing this game to see the other outcomes, until you remember that it's a 154-hour game. Ubisoft should definitely get more praise than I've heard for how deep the conversations and consequences actually are in this game. Feels like I have to make some kind of comment about how Fallout 4's dialogue system was basically one of those devices that lets dogs "talk", and they just repeat "let's go park now!" over and over, but Ubisoft are the ones delivering true choices with true consequences. Genuinely good work that kept me guessing and made me reload a few times when I wasn't satisfied with how my choice played out.
Oh, and while I'm at it, I'll add some praise for the fact that this game lets you play the entire thing without map markers or other Ubisoft-style hints. If you pick exploration mode and turn some settings off, this game quickly becomes an oldschool-style game where you have to solve every single clue yourself, and even if you play in guided mode, the game expects you to think much more than I think more or less any previous game has. I chose guided mode as I prefer to turn my brain off with these games, but even that mode made me really look at and investigate the situation several times. Reminded me of how Unity and Syndicate would expect similarly of the player.
However, there are also so many problems... The game is simply too bloody large and long. Ain't nobody got time for this. It's time developers start building smaller worlds with more interactivity, because this has just gotten ridiculous. More Deus Ex-style neighborhoods where every single door and drawer can be opened, less entire countries where you can really only marvel at how pretty everything is while nothing can be interacted with.
I don't like how the simplified and sped up combat by removing the shield and speeding up various animations. That just felt like it removed a layer of strategy and made combat more confusing for no real gain. I hate how they introduced a new movement glitch that I don't think was present in Origins, where the code that's supposed to determine whether or not you're allowed to sprint or jog (which is determined by whether or not you're in a city) constantly glitches out and forces you to ride your horse at a slow trot in the middle of nowhere. With the sprintbutton entirely removed, this can become enormously frustrating as you try to traverse the entirety of Greece. It doesn't help that this game introduces absolutely savage load times on the PS4; upwards of several minutes every time you fast travel. This rather severe downgrade of your movement options, as the player, is a constant disappointment for me, as these games tend to require you to zip back and forth in the world to complete tasks, and doing so with this murderously slow fast travel just isn't enjoyable. Thankfully, Odyssey is mostly linear while you're on the ground and you rarely have to fast travel to do something, but I hear Valhalla is more or less the same except it adds a loading screen every time you visit a merchant, which sounds like a bad time all around. And, hey, where'd crafting go and why are there so few types of animals in this game compared to Origins?
I also kind of really hated all of the DLC. Hated how the First Blade forces you into a romantic situation that you are offered no control over and all of a sudden your character just takes a several-year break from your adventure and settles down no matter what dialogue options you chose, just so the DLC can end with their dramatic death. Cheap and lame. Then it was off to Elysium, Hades and Atlantis and I was pretty excited, only to be quickly disappointed. Elysium was fine, Hades was dreary and boring and Atlantis was pretty and boring. Each area has a new mechanic that just makes the game suck, and the worst for that was the previously unmentioned freebie DLC on Korfu. Elysium had "wings of Hermes", the name of which had me pumped for the idea that we would be allowed to fly, but they're really just teleport pads with fancy names that let you skip climbing. Hades has some lame barrier system where you have to gather armor pieces before you can fully explore. Atlantis has another barrier system that works slightly differently. Korfu commits the to me cardinal sin of not just taking your abilities away for a short while, but keeping them away for most of the expansion. Absolutely loathe that in every game that does it and this was no exception. It was like the game wanted to give me one final fuck you after several dozen hours of mediocre DLC content.
Special mention also has to go to how they ruined the sense of progression in this game by making everything scale to your level. As early as level 35 or so, the game scales the entire world up and continues to do so. This resulted in my character not feeling like she grew very much, as there were times when the enemies outpaced me and only took MORE damage the more I leveled and that just felt wrong. I really don't know why they thought max level 99 made sense, since doing literally everything left me at the frustrating final level of 91.
Very good game with some huge flaws that bring it down for me. I think this is the best world in AC so far, but the game and the changes they've made since Origins doesn't live up to it and Origins still beats this game as the overall experience. Now to wait like four more years to finally play on Valhalla, and that one will definitely be played on an SSD so that I can actually enjoy it and not spend half the time staring at loading screens.
Do you need anything other than the title to know that this is a pretentious game that's far up its own ass? What is even supposed to be wrong with shaders?
2016
Beautiful and cool, but just not fun.
2006
Late night Uno on Xbox Live back in 2007 was a different and wild time.
My favorite story was when a very drunk mom got on her son's Xbox for middle-of-the-night Uno and she gave my tryhard, tough-guy friend a cuddly nickname just to troll him as a cool drunk mom should. That became his permanent nickname for many years (because he hated it, of course).
The less fun story was the one time we found a girl that sounded quite nervous but also happy to be playing with us. Eventually, she revealed that her boyfriend didn't allow her on the Xbox but she snuck some game time in when he wasn't gone. We thought she was kidding when we heard a door slam open, a man shouting in the background and her going "OH SHIT" before immediately went offline. That one was less fun to experience.
There were also dicks and people fucking on cam because why the hell not. The internet was more fun back in the day. Oh, and you can also play some sort of card game in this one I guess. That part's all right.
My favorite story was when a very drunk mom got on her son's Xbox for middle-of-the-night Uno and she gave my tryhard, tough-guy friend a cuddly nickname just to troll him as a cool drunk mom should. That became his permanent nickname for many years (because he hated it, of course).
The less fun story was the one time we found a girl that sounded quite nervous but also happy to be playing with us. Eventually, she revealed that her boyfriend didn't allow her on the Xbox but she snuck some game time in when he wasn't gone. We thought she was kidding when we heard a door slam open, a man shouting in the background and her going "OH SHIT" before immediately went offline. That one was less fun to experience.
There were also dicks and people fucking on cam because why the hell not. The internet was more fun back in the day. Oh, and you can also play some sort of card game in this one I guess. That part's all right.
2021
Not very relaxing, is it? While I do appreciate that this game just gets started - with a few sentences about how you totally inherited this shop or whatever and now, go, bake things and sell them - I didn't like how it's also very grindy immediately and it doesn't look like your skill tree will unlock anything that makes the game especially easier or more automated. It's just Diner Dash-style constant running back and forth and trying to meet needs while barely succeeding, and making very little money per day and I can't see anything in the skilltree that would improve it. This game had gotten old and repetitive after only like an hour, and looking at the trophies, they want you to play like 50+ hours of this game, yet it doesn't look like it's going to expand much further than what it is. You run between stations to pick up flour, sugar and blueberries, throw it in the oven and then deliver it. You can automate cleaning of tables but the item description doesn't say anything about automating picking of berries or taking food from the counter to the customer (and the counter only has one spot anyway).
So, yeah, it's like what if Diner Dash had a few too many tasks to feel elegant, while also having you run for too far too many times in a day with no unlockable improvements on the horizon. I might launch this game again in a while, but probably not.
So, yeah, it's like what if Diner Dash had a few too many tasks to feel elegant, while also having you run for too far too many times in a day with no unlockable improvements on the horizon. I might launch this game again in a while, but probably not.
I am confused and saddened by the fact that I hate this game now. I'm a big Igavania fan (even though I know that this one in particular wasn't actually made by Igarashi's team) and have always considered the whole collection of Castlevania games from the 00s to be some of my favorite games of all time, but they've also been very difficult to play, unless you want to pay like $200 per cart, for so many years and as such I haven't revisited them in a very long time. Now, so many years later, I'm finding this game to be massively irritating and just plain unfun. It's clear that the team's design goal was to combine classic, and annoying as hell, Castlevania gameplay with the at the time more modern Igavania format, and I just hate it. So many arrows and fireballs coming from off-screen and so many enemy movement patterns that are much faster and more agile than Nathan's geriatric ass.
The controls are slow, unresponsive and clunky. Controlling Nathan feels like playing a corpse with rigor mortis. Performing an action comes with a punishment where the game doesn't accept inputs for a certain number of frames after performing said action, so if you swing the whip, you can't move again for a few frames. Absolutely no cancelling of anything ever. To some, this is oldschool and retro, but to me, it's just primitive and frustrating. Games are so much better coded nowadays and are more fun because of it.
That said, there are good parts, of course. This is a Castlevania game produced by Konami in one of their golden periods, so of course it isn't all bad. The soundtrack is full of bangers, because of course it is, and this game actually has a few Castlevania classics like Vampire Killer in it (which is the worst part of Igarashi games; the fact that he generally refused to use the classic jams in his games). The graphics are a little odd, but the pixels are nice and chunky and it looks overall good. Ridiculous but kind of cool anime-style character designs. The castle design is fine and outside of the hyper-boring sewer area with the levers, the areas feel mostly good to explore and traverse. Even the clock tower is surprisingly un-annoying in this game and the medusa heads have been used shockingly sparingly for a game that's otherwise so often irritating.
But the game is still just kind of...bad? I really hate to say it and I feel like I'm betraying my own favorites, but I just kind of hate playing this game now. The DSS system is interesting but doesn't really work out, partially because it was just a stupid and obtuse design choice to hide the cards behind increasingly more rare drops for each new card, and partially because it's over-designed with way too many cards that serve no purpose. Who has ever used the various fireball cards for anything? Or the elemental resistance cards? No one has. They serve no purpose other than to confuse and bog down the whole system.
I don't know... I really don't like this game anymore and I'm hoping that I will like the other Advance Collection games more as I go through them. They're supposed to be easier and that alone should make them less irritating. I guess I've simply moved on and have more modern tastes now. Hollow Knight is just better. Blasphemous is just better and has cooler goth-style art than Castlevania ever did. This game just sucks now.
The controls are slow, unresponsive and clunky. Controlling Nathan feels like playing a corpse with rigor mortis. Performing an action comes with a punishment where the game doesn't accept inputs for a certain number of frames after performing said action, so if you swing the whip, you can't move again for a few frames. Absolutely no cancelling of anything ever. To some, this is oldschool and retro, but to me, it's just primitive and frustrating. Games are so much better coded nowadays and are more fun because of it.
That said, there are good parts, of course. This is a Castlevania game produced by Konami in one of their golden periods, so of course it isn't all bad. The soundtrack is full of bangers, because of course it is, and this game actually has a few Castlevania classics like Vampire Killer in it (which is the worst part of Igarashi games; the fact that he generally refused to use the classic jams in his games). The graphics are a little odd, but the pixels are nice and chunky and it looks overall good. Ridiculous but kind of cool anime-style character designs. The castle design is fine and outside of the hyper-boring sewer area with the levers, the areas feel mostly good to explore and traverse. Even the clock tower is surprisingly un-annoying in this game and the medusa heads have been used shockingly sparingly for a game that's otherwise so often irritating.
But the game is still just kind of...bad? I really hate to say it and I feel like I'm betraying my own favorites, but I just kind of hate playing this game now. The DSS system is interesting but doesn't really work out, partially because it was just a stupid and obtuse design choice to hide the cards behind increasingly more rare drops for each new card, and partially because it's over-designed with way too many cards that serve no purpose. Who has ever used the various fireball cards for anything? Or the elemental resistance cards? No one has. They serve no purpose other than to confuse and bog down the whole system.
I don't know... I really don't like this game anymore and I'm hoping that I will like the other Advance Collection games more as I go through them. They're supposed to be easier and that alone should make them less irritating. I guess I've simply moved on and have more modern tastes now. Hollow Knight is just better. Blasphemous is just better and has cooler goth-style art than Castlevania ever did. This game just sucks now.
2020
Look, I'll start by admitting that I get addicted to gambling and that I am addicted to this game and still do my dailies after six months of playing it. I will also admit that there are some very good and interesting parts to this game. But, make no mistake, this is a bad, stupid, shallow and shockingly greedy game. Do not play this game. Don't get addicted to something this hollow and bad.
Let's begin with the good:
- The world is actually fantastic! It's very colorful and pretty, but it's also compelling and fun to explore, as there is something to find every few steps you take. From chests either hidden or in the open, either guarded or trapped, to various forms of puzzles plus some side quests and collectibles that actually have value since they upgrade your character, there's always something to find and exploration is very satisfying and fun.
- The combat system is interesting and I've never seen anything quite like it. You very quickly switch between characters and use that quick-switch mechanic to apply various status effects and then combining them to create a new and more powerful status effect. Like setting fire to an enemy and then starting to freeze them applies the melt effect, which has a damage bonus. That's actually a really cool system.
- At the beginning, the game is actually very generous. You are showered with free gambling money as well as in-game resources like money and upgrade crafting supplies. You get something like 400 free "wishes" if you complete all content and that's shockingly generous considering how greedy the game feels once this opening romance period is over.
- The events are overall quite fun! The really big ones, like chinese new year, are actually great and offer tons of mingames and other content and even the small ones can be pretty great too. The most recent one as of this review was the little music game and while it obviously couldn't compete with a proper Konami music game, it was actually very good for a mixed-genre open world ARPG style game and it was addictive and fun.
But here's the bad, which there is much more of:
- There is no endgame and nothing to do once you finish the (admittedly very lengthy) campaign. They could just use assets they already have and create some randomized challenge dungeons, but they just don't. That costs money to do and Hoyoverse is absolutely not in the "gotta spend money to make money" business. They're in the "give me your money and fuck you" business. The only thing close to an endgame is the perfection of characters and artifact grinding, which I wouldn't mind, if it wasn't for the fact that artifact grinding is also designed to be manipulative trash. You see, you can't just farm for the one piece you need. You get to farm for the SET you need a piece from and not only do you have to farm for a set, each dungeon contains two sets. So if you need a headpiece with a certain stat type, you have to go through like 850 layers of RNG to get to it because you need to RNG the right set, the right piece, the right stat and then the right sub-stat (of which there are four). This is mathematically and statistically absurd, and it's exlusively designed to make it nearly impossible to build a good character so that you can you ever feel finished with the game. The idea is to keep you hooked by making it almost impossible to feel like you've conquered the game and built the best team that you can build.
- FOMO abuse. This game is obsessed with FOMO, to the point where important cutscenes were FOMO'd and newcomers aren't allowed to see certain things, like the entire introduction of a certain character who seems like he will become important in the future. Since the developer only cares about manipulation and FOMO, they have no interest in allowing important details like that to be part of the game in the future. They do the same with certain weapons and equipment, that appeared once and never to be seen again. How is this even FOMO? If you missed out on the best weapon for your character and you are never allowed to get it again, how is that supposed to motivate you to keep playing? It would make so much more sense if these event-exclusive things came back, since that would keep a player hooked until it comes back. It never, ever coming back isn't FOMO, it's just irritating and stupid. For a specific example, the character Albedo's best weapon was an event-exclusive like a year and no event-exclusive item has ever come back or been introduced to the general item pool. If your favorite is Albedo, you are now forever fucked and can never build the best version of him. How is that FOMO? How is an Albedo lover supposed to be spurred to spend money when they are not allowed to build the character they favor?
- This FOMO obsession also leads to stagnation in the game design. Instead of permanently introducing new mechanics, everything is temporary and the game isn't allowed to grow. For example, there's a recurring event where you play hide and go seek with other players and that even is a little underdeveloped but pretty fun and also offers some PvP in a game that's pretty barren and dead in endgame. It makes no sense that Hoyoverse just refuses to let us play that whenever we want and are obsessed with FOMO'ing it. Just...release the fucking minigame as a permanent feature and allow your game to grow and expand instead of obsessing over how every possible thing has to be as manipulative as possible!
- It should probably also be noted that this game originally had a 5-year plan, which, according to rumor, has been expanded to 12 years, meaning Hoyoverse hopes that this game is still popular in 2032. In 2021, they had already fucked their character balance up so irrevocably that they had to introduce game-breaking mechanics to counter their own design. You see, Zhongli's shield is basically unbreakable if you build him with a lot of HP and using him breaks the game, so Hoyoverse decided to counter that by breaking the game even further by introducing "corrosion", which simply means that enemies do damage to you, through shields or whatever you may have, just by being close to you. Your HP drains away because the monster in question simply exists near you. They similarly broke the anemo element, which is wind and generally meant to use the powers of wind to round up enemies. Venti was one of the first (if not THE first?) gacha characters released and his hurricane elemental burst was so powerful that they've introduced enemies that simply cannot be affected by anemo's wind powers. They just stand there and ignore it. That's the best they could come up with to counter their own overpowered designs, and these things happened in YEAR ONE. What is year eleven going to look like? How are they going to fix these issues long-term?
- The elemental system just doesn't work the way they've implemented it. There are six elements with a seventh coming soon, but you're only allowed four characters in a party, and you are of course not allowed to switch your party mid-combat or in various other situations. This means that you can and will find yourself in situations where you unknowingly walked into a trap of, for example, cryo enemies that are immune to cryo while you are rocking an all-cryo team. All you can do is just quit the quest and start over with this new information and that's just stupid. Immunity shouldn't exist when there are many characters that simply cannot do physical, non-elemental damage (that actually applies to most of them). This is just an example, but this kind of feeling stuck with the wrong element situations happen constantly and there's nothing you can do to stop it. If all you have is a cryo character because you haven't been playing for that long, well then too bad for you because you cannot kill these cryo-immun enemies and can no longer progress.
- The solution, of course, is for you to buy more characters! However, this doesn't work either, because the game is also extremely stingy with your playtime due to the horrific "resin" system, which is a system that prevents you from playing the game as much as you want. Once you've finished with the overworld content, you are now only allowed about 30 minutes of playtime a day, as the activities that remain once you've cleaned out all of the quests and exploration all come with a cost of a resource you get very limited amounts per day. Once you've spent that resources for the day, there is no more gaming allowed that day. They won't even allow you to whale out and pay for playtime, because you can only buy 30 more minutes of playtime before you're shut off completely. This means that there is no way to quickly build a new character, so the game doesn't even allow you to whale out to get past the aforementioned cryo-immune situation. All you can do is just give up and go do something else. This also clearly doesn't work and isn't especially thought-through.
- And, yes, resin is such a bad idea that it gets its own bullet point. People on the internet defend it by saying that this is what all gacha games do, but the thing is, those other gacha games have to prevent you from playing too much in order to stop you from realizing how incredibly shallow the game is. Most gacha titles are glorified PNG collections with some incredibly lame auto-battler or an overly simplistic strategy game tacked on to sell it as a "game", when it's really just a heinously expensive digital trading card (and/or waifu) collection. They have to hide the lack of depth by limiting gameplay or people will get bored too quickly. Genshin is an actual videogame and doesn't need to do this, but pointlessly does it anyway, because the developers aren't really used to developing videogames.
- This last point ties into this game's incredible greed. I guess I'm out of the loop, but when I played gacha games maybe five years ago, wasting $50 a month on them was a lot of money and would get you a pretty decent spot in the rankings. You couldn't beat the whales since the games offered the option to pay even more money for even better gear, but you could get by and have every character even if you were F2P or only spent $50. Gacha games are apparently now completely out of fucking control and this game is no exception. Maximizing a character with their signature weapon costs something absolutely fucking retarded like $5000 in this game. And there's going to be powercreep in a year that makes your $5000 investment useless. And you need EIGHT characters because the final challenge dungeon requires you to build two teams. Basically, if you want to max this game, it's gonna cost you like $50,000 and you're gonna have to cough up that amount again in a year or two. How is that not absolutely fucking insane? How did people only react when Diablo did it? Where the hell are politicians with laws that prevent shit like this? Because people think "whales" are saudi oil princes and that it doesn't matter if rich people get ripped off, but that's not what reality is. In reality, your average whale is a lonely gambling addict with an average job who is being manipulated and scammed out of their money. This shit NEEDS to stop. We NEED laws against this absolutely insane pricing and brainwashy manipulation.
- At this point, you might think that I'm talking about myself, but no, this isn't my first rodeo and I knew what the manipulations would be going in. I'm a so-called dolphin that spends this game's $30 a month subscription fee, since it has a hidden one in the sense that you will really fall behind and struggle to make progress if you don't pay for the two (!) types of monthly subscription, plus it's the cheapest way to buy some wishes to get characters. I'm talking about the poor saps that are playing this as their first gacha game, especially if they're young and easily manipulated. I'm not going to bother googling what the rating is in the US, but in the EU, it's rated PEGI-12 and Hoyoverse themselves deem 12 to be an appropriate age for this game. Kids that young can't see boobs because, oh no, they will become corrupted satanists if they see a tit, but it's perfectly fine to manipulate them with greedy tactics and siphon all of their (or their parents) money? That's what morals are to rating boards? Fuck off. This game should be rated PEGI-30.
- What makes this game's terrifying morals even worse is that the script for this piece of shit is awful and absolutely WILL - NOT - STOP - MORALIZING. Not only is this script incredibly long-winded, repetetive and condescendingly over-explaining like we're mentally challenged toddlers, it also moralizes absolutely constantly with asian morals. You already know what I mean. Respect the elderly! Work hard! Don't slack off! Respect contracts! Don't sleep in because you should get up early to be productive! Always apologize for everything ever even if you didn't even do anything especially bad! It's absolutely non-stop with this shit and that's just offensive when the core of the game is about as immoral as a videogame can get. Just shut the fuck up with telling me that I'm not allowed to sleep in while also stealing my money and giving me nothing for it. In fact, in Kuki Shinobu's recently released "hangout quest", this damn game even moralizes about how you shouldn't be playing it, which admittedly is about the only moralizing that they get right. In that quest, you run into some children who say that they snuck out and played "Genius Invocation" (Genius Invocation... Genshin Impact... GI...) instead of doing homework but that they realize that they probably shouldn't play so much "Genius Invocation" or they'll grow up to be losers. This game literally just spat on its fans while taking their entire paycheck for one single character. Yes, it's supposed to be a joke, and I did scoff at it, but the fact still remains. The game literally told us to stop playing it. Maybe it's one of the writers calling for help?
- Oh, and your sidekick, Paimon, fucking sucks. There's a provocative loading screen that says "Paimon, best travelling companion ever!" but she is so very not that. She's an uppity little cunt that always has something condescendingly sarcastic, or irritatingly stupid, to say. Everyone in the community hates her. Her worst attribute, though, is that she always repeats what another character just said about something that requires absolutely no clarification. A character will say that their favorite food is sushi and Paimon will act deeply confused and ask like 10 follow-up questions about what said characters favorite food is, and you sit there on your couch feeling your brain melt and drip out through your ears as you have to sit through this bullshit since the game does not offer a proper skip cutscene option. You just have to suffer through this horribly long-winded, moralizing, patronizing and obnoxious script and it goes on for hours and hours and hours and hours. The most recently released character quest took 90 minutes even though I button-mashed past dialogue boxes as fast as the game will allow (which is not very fast). 90 minutes of mashing through inane writing and that's just one quest.
So, yeah... I'm addicted and I will begrudgingly keep playing for another few months since I'm invested now and it does only take 30 minutes a day, but no one should ever play this horrific gambling trap. Don't do it. Get your anime fix somewhere else. Anywhere else. Watch the worst-rated show on MAL or something before you play this game. Do literally anything but playing this game. Eat your own foot instead of playing this game. Do not do it!
Let's begin with the good:
- The world is actually fantastic! It's very colorful and pretty, but it's also compelling and fun to explore, as there is something to find every few steps you take. From chests either hidden or in the open, either guarded or trapped, to various forms of puzzles plus some side quests and collectibles that actually have value since they upgrade your character, there's always something to find and exploration is very satisfying and fun.
- The combat system is interesting and I've never seen anything quite like it. You very quickly switch between characters and use that quick-switch mechanic to apply various status effects and then combining them to create a new and more powerful status effect. Like setting fire to an enemy and then starting to freeze them applies the melt effect, which has a damage bonus. That's actually a really cool system.
- At the beginning, the game is actually very generous. You are showered with free gambling money as well as in-game resources like money and upgrade crafting supplies. You get something like 400 free "wishes" if you complete all content and that's shockingly generous considering how greedy the game feels once this opening romance period is over.
- The events are overall quite fun! The really big ones, like chinese new year, are actually great and offer tons of mingames and other content and even the small ones can be pretty great too. The most recent one as of this review was the little music game and while it obviously couldn't compete with a proper Konami music game, it was actually very good for a mixed-genre open world ARPG style game and it was addictive and fun.
But here's the bad, which there is much more of:
- There is no endgame and nothing to do once you finish the (admittedly very lengthy) campaign. They could just use assets they already have and create some randomized challenge dungeons, but they just don't. That costs money to do and Hoyoverse is absolutely not in the "gotta spend money to make money" business. They're in the "give me your money and fuck you" business. The only thing close to an endgame is the perfection of characters and artifact grinding, which I wouldn't mind, if it wasn't for the fact that artifact grinding is also designed to be manipulative trash. You see, you can't just farm for the one piece you need. You get to farm for the SET you need a piece from and not only do you have to farm for a set, each dungeon contains two sets. So if you need a headpiece with a certain stat type, you have to go through like 850 layers of RNG to get to it because you need to RNG the right set, the right piece, the right stat and then the right sub-stat (of which there are four). This is mathematically and statistically absurd, and it's exlusively designed to make it nearly impossible to build a good character so that you can you ever feel finished with the game. The idea is to keep you hooked by making it almost impossible to feel like you've conquered the game and built the best team that you can build.
- FOMO abuse. This game is obsessed with FOMO, to the point where important cutscenes were FOMO'd and newcomers aren't allowed to see certain things, like the entire introduction of a certain character who seems like he will become important in the future. Since the developer only cares about manipulation and FOMO, they have no interest in allowing important details like that to be part of the game in the future. They do the same with certain weapons and equipment, that appeared once and never to be seen again. How is this even FOMO? If you missed out on the best weapon for your character and you are never allowed to get it again, how is that supposed to motivate you to keep playing? It would make so much more sense if these event-exclusive things came back, since that would keep a player hooked until it comes back. It never, ever coming back isn't FOMO, it's just irritating and stupid. For a specific example, the character Albedo's best weapon was an event-exclusive like a year and no event-exclusive item has ever come back or been introduced to the general item pool. If your favorite is Albedo, you are now forever fucked and can never build the best version of him. How is that FOMO? How is an Albedo lover supposed to be spurred to spend money when they are not allowed to build the character they favor?
- This FOMO obsession also leads to stagnation in the game design. Instead of permanently introducing new mechanics, everything is temporary and the game isn't allowed to grow. For example, there's a recurring event where you play hide and go seek with other players and that even is a little underdeveloped but pretty fun and also offers some PvP in a game that's pretty barren and dead in endgame. It makes no sense that Hoyoverse just refuses to let us play that whenever we want and are obsessed with FOMO'ing it. Just...release the fucking minigame as a permanent feature and allow your game to grow and expand instead of obsessing over how every possible thing has to be as manipulative as possible!
- It should probably also be noted that this game originally had a 5-year plan, which, according to rumor, has been expanded to 12 years, meaning Hoyoverse hopes that this game is still popular in 2032. In 2021, they had already fucked their character balance up so irrevocably that they had to introduce game-breaking mechanics to counter their own design. You see, Zhongli's shield is basically unbreakable if you build him with a lot of HP and using him breaks the game, so Hoyoverse decided to counter that by breaking the game even further by introducing "corrosion", which simply means that enemies do damage to you, through shields or whatever you may have, just by being close to you. Your HP drains away because the monster in question simply exists near you. They similarly broke the anemo element, which is wind and generally meant to use the powers of wind to round up enemies. Venti was one of the first (if not THE first?) gacha characters released and his hurricane elemental burst was so powerful that they've introduced enemies that simply cannot be affected by anemo's wind powers. They just stand there and ignore it. That's the best they could come up with to counter their own overpowered designs, and these things happened in YEAR ONE. What is year eleven going to look like? How are they going to fix these issues long-term?
- The elemental system just doesn't work the way they've implemented it. There are six elements with a seventh coming soon, but you're only allowed four characters in a party, and you are of course not allowed to switch your party mid-combat or in various other situations. This means that you can and will find yourself in situations where you unknowingly walked into a trap of, for example, cryo enemies that are immune to cryo while you are rocking an all-cryo team. All you can do is just quit the quest and start over with this new information and that's just stupid. Immunity shouldn't exist when there are many characters that simply cannot do physical, non-elemental damage (that actually applies to most of them). This is just an example, but this kind of feeling stuck with the wrong element situations happen constantly and there's nothing you can do to stop it. If all you have is a cryo character because you haven't been playing for that long, well then too bad for you because you cannot kill these cryo-immun enemies and can no longer progress.
- The solution, of course, is for you to buy more characters! However, this doesn't work either, because the game is also extremely stingy with your playtime due to the horrific "resin" system, which is a system that prevents you from playing the game as much as you want. Once you've finished with the overworld content, you are now only allowed about 30 minutes of playtime a day, as the activities that remain once you've cleaned out all of the quests and exploration all come with a cost of a resource you get very limited amounts per day. Once you've spent that resources for the day, there is no more gaming allowed that day. They won't even allow you to whale out and pay for playtime, because you can only buy 30 more minutes of playtime before you're shut off completely. This means that there is no way to quickly build a new character, so the game doesn't even allow you to whale out to get past the aforementioned cryo-immune situation. All you can do is just give up and go do something else. This also clearly doesn't work and isn't especially thought-through.
- And, yes, resin is such a bad idea that it gets its own bullet point. People on the internet defend it by saying that this is what all gacha games do, but the thing is, those other gacha games have to prevent you from playing too much in order to stop you from realizing how incredibly shallow the game is. Most gacha titles are glorified PNG collections with some incredibly lame auto-battler or an overly simplistic strategy game tacked on to sell it as a "game", when it's really just a heinously expensive digital trading card (and/or waifu) collection. They have to hide the lack of depth by limiting gameplay or people will get bored too quickly. Genshin is an actual videogame and doesn't need to do this, but pointlessly does it anyway, because the developers aren't really used to developing videogames.
- This last point ties into this game's incredible greed. I guess I'm out of the loop, but when I played gacha games maybe five years ago, wasting $50 a month on them was a lot of money and would get you a pretty decent spot in the rankings. You couldn't beat the whales since the games offered the option to pay even more money for even better gear, but you could get by and have every character even if you were F2P or only spent $50. Gacha games are apparently now completely out of fucking control and this game is no exception. Maximizing a character with their signature weapon costs something absolutely fucking retarded like $5000 in this game. And there's going to be powercreep in a year that makes your $5000 investment useless. And you need EIGHT characters because the final challenge dungeon requires you to build two teams. Basically, if you want to max this game, it's gonna cost you like $50,000 and you're gonna have to cough up that amount again in a year or two. How is that not absolutely fucking insane? How did people only react when Diablo did it? Where the hell are politicians with laws that prevent shit like this? Because people think "whales" are saudi oil princes and that it doesn't matter if rich people get ripped off, but that's not what reality is. In reality, your average whale is a lonely gambling addict with an average job who is being manipulated and scammed out of their money. This shit NEEDS to stop. We NEED laws against this absolutely insane pricing and brainwashy manipulation.
- At this point, you might think that I'm talking about myself, but no, this isn't my first rodeo and I knew what the manipulations would be going in. I'm a so-called dolphin that spends this game's $30 a month subscription fee, since it has a hidden one in the sense that you will really fall behind and struggle to make progress if you don't pay for the two (!) types of monthly subscription, plus it's the cheapest way to buy some wishes to get characters. I'm talking about the poor saps that are playing this as their first gacha game, especially if they're young and easily manipulated. I'm not going to bother googling what the rating is in the US, but in the EU, it's rated PEGI-12 and Hoyoverse themselves deem 12 to be an appropriate age for this game. Kids that young can't see boobs because, oh no, they will become corrupted satanists if they see a tit, but it's perfectly fine to manipulate them with greedy tactics and siphon all of their (or their parents) money? That's what morals are to rating boards? Fuck off. This game should be rated PEGI-30.
- What makes this game's terrifying morals even worse is that the script for this piece of shit is awful and absolutely WILL - NOT - STOP - MORALIZING. Not only is this script incredibly long-winded, repetetive and condescendingly over-explaining like we're mentally challenged toddlers, it also moralizes absolutely constantly with asian morals. You already know what I mean. Respect the elderly! Work hard! Don't slack off! Respect contracts! Don't sleep in because you should get up early to be productive! Always apologize for everything ever even if you didn't even do anything especially bad! It's absolutely non-stop with this shit and that's just offensive when the core of the game is about as immoral as a videogame can get. Just shut the fuck up with telling me that I'm not allowed to sleep in while also stealing my money and giving me nothing for it. In fact, in Kuki Shinobu's recently released "hangout quest", this damn game even moralizes about how you shouldn't be playing it, which admittedly is about the only moralizing that they get right. In that quest, you run into some children who say that they snuck out and played "Genius Invocation" (Genius Invocation... Genshin Impact... GI...) instead of doing homework but that they realize that they probably shouldn't play so much "Genius Invocation" or they'll grow up to be losers. This game literally just spat on its fans while taking their entire paycheck for one single character. Yes, it's supposed to be a joke, and I did scoff at it, but the fact still remains. The game literally told us to stop playing it. Maybe it's one of the writers calling for help?
- Oh, and your sidekick, Paimon, fucking sucks. There's a provocative loading screen that says "Paimon, best travelling companion ever!" but she is so very not that. She's an uppity little cunt that always has something condescendingly sarcastic, or irritatingly stupid, to say. Everyone in the community hates her. Her worst attribute, though, is that she always repeats what another character just said about something that requires absolutely no clarification. A character will say that their favorite food is sushi and Paimon will act deeply confused and ask like 10 follow-up questions about what said characters favorite food is, and you sit there on your couch feeling your brain melt and drip out through your ears as you have to sit through this bullshit since the game does not offer a proper skip cutscene option. You just have to suffer through this horribly long-winded, moralizing, patronizing and obnoxious script and it goes on for hours and hours and hours and hours. The most recently released character quest took 90 minutes even though I button-mashed past dialogue boxes as fast as the game will allow (which is not very fast). 90 minutes of mashing through inane writing and that's just one quest.
So, yeah... I'm addicted and I will begrudgingly keep playing for another few months since I'm invested now and it does only take 30 minutes a day, but no one should ever play this horrific gambling trap. Don't do it. Get your anime fix somewhere else. Anywhere else. Watch the worst-rated show on MAL or something before you play this game. Do literally anything but playing this game. Eat your own foot instead of playing this game. Do not do it!
2020
Acceptably fun action game with some light metroidvania elements and a clear Souls influence. Nice graphics, decent sound, more or less decent everything, but nothing that really excels. Fairly simple levels with mostly obvious secret areas and the combat is just okay. I really don't understand the massive recovery delay after shooting, since the game feels like it's kinda meant to be Bloodborne with you popping off quick shots in the middle of melee, but the cooldown after taking a shot is too long and ruins that. The melee combat is obviously inspired by Dead Cells, and feels like it, but the enemy and boss design really only calls for rolling behind them, attacking a few times and rolling again when they turn. Solid and enjoyable but not much more.
Minus points for bulling this bullshit where the game cannot be fully completed in one run, because there has to be a trophy for each outcome of the choice that happens at the very end. Boo. Stop doing that, please.
Minus points for bulling this bullshit where the game cannot be fully completed in one run, because there has to be a trophy for each outcome of the choice that happens at the very end. Boo. Stop doing that, please.