Well, this was rough. I honestly am so relieved I am finally done with this game because it is honestly one of the most excruciatingly tedious and drawn-out experiences I have played.

This is an action game that is inspired by the likes of DMC, Bayonetta, and the general vibe of early-mid 2000s ultra-linear pure action games. There are really only three categories of 'things' you do in this game: listen to dialogue, complete shitty platforming "puzzles" and of course combat. By far the best of these three is the first, my best and really main positive takeaway from this game was the two main characters, voice acting, the story, kind of. I didn't really 'get' the story (and didn't care enough to try to) so I can't speak exactly for what it was getting at, but for the most part it was pretty boring and even at the end I did not care for much of it except for the 'memories' that you experience, wherein you learn of the main two character's backstories, the only two really good things about the game. The voice acting honestly is quite impressive overall, I find Briar's voice actress to be wonderful and I would love to see her in future roles. The rest of the characters that appear are okay, I guess. Truly nothing special, which is a sentiment that I echo for basically everything about this game.

I'm not a big fan of Soulstice's combat overall, and I am certainly not a fan of the gameplay outside of the combat either. In-between the dreadfully repetitive combat sequences, you progress through the dreary and depressing world in the most linear way imaginable, one you rarely see from games these days. You have really no control over the camera, and instead move from room to room as the camera shifts to different angles, as if you're playing Silent Hill. This is ridiculous in a modern context and constantly leads to issues of moving the wrong way as you enter a new room. Depth-perception was my biggest issue with the static, strangely-angled camera. There are plenty of "platforming" sections of the game that are very obnoxious in their own right, but combined with the fact that you can hardly even tell how far away your jump is with no way to adjust your view, they can be downright painful.

Every single area in this game looks more or less the same, with essentially no exceptions. It is entirely acceptable graphically for a mid-level AA game, although I encountered huge amount of frame rate drops on Performance mode on the PS5, which I do not think should happen for a game of this graphical fidelity. The main issues with the visuals is that you are going to be staring at dark blue basically the entire game. Across all 25 painful chapters, EVERY single goddamn fucking area looks the same. Soulless repetition is a bit of a theme that this game carries throughout, which leads me to the combat.

I do not exactly hate the combat in a vacuum for Soulstice. Eventually, you end up with a total of seven different weapons, each with different roles that are "strong" versus different enemy types. The most glaring issue with Soulstice's combat sequences are simply how many of them there are and how excruciatingly similar one is compared to any other. During the last third or so of playing through this game I was basically begging it to stop, to the point where I lowered the difficulty—something I very rarely resort to—simply because I could not stand how bloated each enemy's health pool is on the game's Hard mode, only to find out it's basically the same on the Normal-equivalent. Apart from the most basic chapter 1 type enemies, everything in this game is an absurd health sponge. As you progress, you get more and more enemy types thrown at you, all similarly bland-looking, each with increasingly obnoxious attacks and larger health pools. The main gimmick of Soulstice's combat revolves around using Lute, Briar's (main character) sister, who is basically a ghost by her side, to project two different fields that allow you to damage certain enemies based on what their associated color, either blue for ghost-type enemies or red for crystalized, possessed enemies. The fields are only so big however, and if you keep them out too long without directly attacking an enemy associated with said field, Lute will 'overcharge' and disappear for a few seconds. Because this overcharge meter is tied to the 'parry' system of the game as well, be prepared to hear one of the five or six voice lines for Lute about to overcharge about 700 times in a full playthrough. In the second-half of the game, each combat counter generally consists of some half-assed amalgamation of strong enemies that have no interaction with each other whatsoever; it feels like at some point they gave up trying to make anything work together cohesively and decided to just throw as much bullshit at you as possible. The combat sequences are encounter-based, so you will walk for a bit, go into a closed-off area where you must defeat every enemy, get a grade on your performance, then move on. This creates some points where you go through one encounter and then 10 seconds later find another one, which is probably even worse than the last, just seconds apart. There were some glimmers where I felt like I was kind of enjoying the combat, moments where something would click and it felt alright, but these were few and far between. This game made me frustrated SO quickly. I would start another play session, get to my first combat encounter, and realize that I'm just going to be doing this for the next three hours. Dodging and 'parrying', which is really just pressing circle whenever you see the prompt (which sometimes parries but sometimes slows instead for more powerful enemies), does not really feel very intuitive, fluid, or satisfying whatsoever. There is very little about the combat that feels that intricately designed. Each weapon has its own moveset, including an attack that is supposed to launch you towards and enemy, but sometimes it just, doesn't work? Enemies also constantly are moving around and you aren't very naturally fast, and have to wait a second if you dodge three times in a row, so a lot of the combat is just running around trying to catch up to things flying around faster than you. The worst of this comes out in some of the game's bosses, which are maybe some of the worst I've ever seen in a game. Truly, apart from the final boss kind of, they are miserable. Each and every one is just awful, an amalgamation of every negative thing I've said here, all wrapped in a bow of awkwardly transitioning into a cutscene every tenth of their health.

Soulstice is not a good game. I respect the effort of the developers to put it together, and can at least say a couple nice things about the story and characters, but it is an absolute slog to get through and it is hard for me to imagine anyone not thinking so, particularly by the last third of the game. There is so much more I could complain about regarding this game, with countless many more minute details that were insanely frustrating. After completing it I feel still like there is a bad taste in my mouth that I am trying to get out by writing this.

There definitely is a group of people that would enjoy and get more out of this game than I would, and I will say that there are absolutely some redeeming qualities about it, the problem is that a lot of them are only barely such, and end up getting beaten to death from repetition by the end. I personally could not recommend anyone playing through Soulstice's 15-20 hours.

5/10

Um tolete bem duro boiando dentro do vaso, que jogo ruim cara, tudo que ele tinha pra ser bom ele tem de RUIM. O começo realmente passa uma vibe de que ''nossa esse jogo vai ser bom" mas depois de algumas horas você percebe que esse é o jogo mais maçante que você já jogou na vida. Combate sem graça e muito repetitivo MUITO MESMO, mapa sem graça e vazio sem alma alguma. Viagens de carro que duram 5/6 minutos?????? eu quero jogar cara, legal que essas viagens de carro são umas das coisas que o pessoal mais elogia nessa bomba aqui mas na verdade não tem nada demais, eles nem interagem direito e fodase que tá tocando música dos ff antigo. A arvore de talentos é bem grande mas nada que você upar nela fará um diferencial na sua gameplay. O botão de interagir é mesmo que o de pular, então sempre que você for interagir com algo você vai ficar pulando que nem um idiota, puta merda cara como os cara tem uma ideia dessas, isso foi uma das coisas que mais incomodou o jogo inteiro. A historia é sem pé nem cabeça, não faz sentido do começo ao fim, roteiro horrível, personagens sem graça, diálogos fraquíssimos. Sério, Noctis fica em isolamento por 10 ANOS e quando volta os caras reagem como se tivessem visto ele semana passada. O jogo não sabe construir clímax algum, qualquer momento ''impactante'' que era para acontecer acaba não tendo emoção alguma por não ter uma construção de clímax bem feita. A luta final é horrorosa, você não sabe nem o que tá rolando naquele protótipo de luta de sayajin. Enfim, esse jogo foi uma decepção pra mim, foi o primeiro jogo que comprei para o meu ps4 pq eu botava muita fé nele, então a decepção foi enorme. Depois de um tempo de jogo eu apenas fiquei focado em acabar isso o mais rápido possível e com certeza deve ter mais coisas pra reclamar que eu não estou lembrado agora.

Os únicos prós desse jogo são as cutscenes que são lindas demais e a outra são as fotos do Prompto que eu achei uma sacada bem legal, pena que no ps4 as fotos as vezes ficam com uma qualidade bem merda.

It’s a mercy to forget, but you shouldn’t forget Jack’s game. Sweet music, a story that ends up being surprisingly affecting by the end and an accessible yet slick combat system all add up to form a legit great ARPG that’s much more than what the post-post-ironic meme culture surrounding it would have you believe. Comparisons to Nioh are easy, but leaving it there would be reductive; Stranger of Paradise has plenty of ideas that help it stand on its own two feet and which I’d like to see carried forward into future iterations of this genre.

The star of the show is probably the job cancelling system. Being able to instantly cancel special moves by switching to another job makes combat a real sandbox for creativity – the first time I remember instinctively saying “oh shit” out loud was when I scooped up a bunch of enemies with Aeroga, switched to Ronin and wiped them all out with one fully charged slash that would’ve left me vulnerable otherwise, but that kind of thing is only really scratching the surface of what’s possible. Throw in one of the more fun magic systems this side of Dark Messiah, customisation of your combo trees and party members, experimenting with enemies’ hit reactions (like launching them into the air or splatting them against walls), directional attacks, stealing enemies’ attacks like a human Kirby, etc. and you’ve got a really robust set of mechanics that invite replays just by virtue of how much variety’s on offer.

In particular, I like what an emphasis Stranger of Paradise puts on positioning. Soul bursting an enemy causes a small AOE explosion that damages nearby enemies’ break gauges and sends them flying, which gives you more to think about in terms of timing than just exploiting i-frames. Inputting a direction when you job cancel makes Jack dodge in that direction, which can and will often save your ass in a pinch on top of giving you the drop on your opponent (accentuated by the fact that you get automatic crits when hitting an enemy from behind). Bosses tend to have a specific body part or other quirk that can crippled in some way, rewarding you for being in the right place at the right time by staggering them or occasionally disabling some of their more troublesome moves. All good stuff that gives you a bunch to consider when it comes to the simple act of just moving around.

Anyway, how’s the music? I mean, good God. How am I supposed to not like a game that’s launching an all-out assault on my eardrums with a constant stream of phat beats like this, or this, or this? It’s sick, in other words, but it offers more types of tunes than even these. I’m a big fan of the Nier-esque choir that kicks in during the fight with Tiamat, for example, or the watery acoustic guitars that string you along through the two forest levels. Mizuta & co. knocked it out of the park.

I won’t give much away story-wise, because the whole second half really deserves to be experienced yourself, but I will say it’s nice to have one that gets better as it goes along for a change. By the end of Stranger of Paradise, which is well executed enough that even the initially weird timeskip at the very beginning starts to make sense, I was more eager to see what came next than with most modern games I’ve played which got a lot of praise specifically for their stories. Part of the credit for this surely goes to the voice actors, most of whom are surprisingly relatively new to the industry, because I can’t imagine Jack & f(r)iends with any voices other than the ones they have. Mocean Melvin in particular said he made a point of researching Final Fantasy to really sell his role, and I think it shows. Case in point: Lich's introductory cutscene is already legendary, and anyone who's played up to that point will know what I'm talking about.

This isn't all to say that Stranger of Paradise doesn’t have a few issues, of course. In contrast to internet hyperbole, the level design never really dips below ‘functional,’ but it could still stand to be a bit more interesting. 150+ hours on the PS3 version of Dragon’s Dogma has made me basically immune to caring about framerates, but it’s still worth mentioning that SoP is a little wonky in that regard (though never to the point where it affects parrying). Visually, it would’ve helped if the contrast had been dialled down a smidge too – I sometimes found it hard to see where I was going in the (still good) penultimate level in particular before I eventually caved and turned the brightness up.

Overall, though, it’s too enjoyable in too many ways for this stuff to weigh it down much. And it’s got heart, dagnabbit. Did you know that despite being introduced in FF2, Amano drew concept art of a Behemoth for FF1, which until recently was the only instance of it ever having wings? And then along comes Stranger of Paradise, FF1 prequel-sequel-reimagining extraordinaire, featuring a Behemoth with wings? Bellissimo, says I. A thousand chef’s kisses. That's not all in the way of small, lovingly crafted details either - pay attention to the colour of Jack's hand as he finishes off the final boss.

Between NEO TWEWY and this, I can only hope Square keep hold of whoever is greenlighting all these poorly marketed but really good ARPGs that feel tailor-made to my tastes. If Stranger of Paradise’s DLCs are at all comparable to the Niohs’ quality-wise, it’ll only keep going higher in my estimation and it’s already pretty up there. Can’t wait to see more of Jack’s antics, whether there or in future spinoffs (fingers crossed).

Until then, goodbye... Jack.