Code Vein is an okay game, I really feel like the hate it gets is undeserved and especially the criticism towards the devs being assholes or things in that line of thought. Please at least refrain from insulting developers for no reason.


Soulslike combat with some tweaks:

Combat is pretty much the Souls system: but with one weapon: you get your light and strong attack, dodge, block and parry. It is not as good because of the weapon feedbacks and messy hitboxes but it’s overall decent.

On another hand, the game adds a nice skill system allowing you to equip up to eight skills at once, ranging from melee attacks to spells or buffs. This is where the combat shines as it adds a lot of variety and compensates for the weaker Souls imitation that the core combat is. With the addition of skills, the combat becomes really fun and different from Souls games. It also allows you to switch builds on the go, freely going from a caster to a melee build or anything you’d like to.

However, the code system is also pretty restraining. The main way of unlocking skills for free use is to equip a code, equip the skills you want to unlock and go kill enough monsters (usually around the length of an entire map segment). This essentially means that the game encourages you to constantly switch builds and makes it difficult to sustain a playstyle, let alone make an optimal build (which is a problem in NG+, when you start getting wrecked). I think this problem would be solved by having fewer codes. A lot of them are pretty similar and it turns into an oversaturation of choices for similar results. Likewise, there are many duplicates of skills. In both cases, one is always better than the rest.

The heavy focus on the companion system ultimately leads to a lack of balance. There are a lot of gank fights similar to Dark Souls 2 and the game relies on the NPC partner to compensate for the jankiness of many aspects of the game. The companions are rather interesting and I like them personally, even though I would totally solo a Souls game instead. However, they really trivialise many sections of the game because of how strong they are and sometimes you wish you could only call them when you actually want to. On another hand, you may also be thinking that the combat isn’t so good that you would want to challenge yourself on it, anyway. Very few fights seem fun in solo, most enemies are extremely aggressive and the only downtime you get from them is when they switch aggro to your partner. Even basic enemies will not leave you a second of respite as they can surprisingly run to catch up to you and attack you before you get any chance to heal.

The game also suffers from its overall choice of enemy patterns and hitboxes. The hitboxes are pretty bad at times, oftentimes you just don’t hit for no reason and it can be very frustrating especially with some weapons that require precise hits like the stabbing lance. On another hand, the enemies are very likely to hit when they should not. For example, a thrust attack can often hit you if you’re close enough to the side or even behind the enemies. What’s also terrible about getting hit is that a lot of enemies in this game have either good tracking or wide swing attacks, this means that they are likely to reach you no matter your placement. It reduces the importance of positioning and forces you into always having to dodge, but this problem is also exacerbated by the fact that the game relies heavily on gank fights so you can only imagine the result of having to fight a lot of enemies at once when all of them have such extended reach.

Hardcore souslike level design with a tweak too (the map):

The level design is cool. Seriously, I really liked it. The environments are varied but the decorations themselves are relatively subpar. However, every level has a lot of branching areas and secrets to be found. I had an absolute blast looking for them. The game makes an extensive use of verticality and having you drop down or climb up ladders to access hidden areas. One of the most infamous areas of the game, a certain copy of Anor Londo, was especially fun in my experience.

A lack of cohesiveness is also the level design’s weakness, while early areas tend to branch out more, later areas are more linear but they’ll instead have more shortcuts and circle around back to the checkpoints. It’s unfortunate that this design element appears so late in the game and the early levels are full of checkpoints instead. There are many cases where the placement is quite questionable, especially when the checkpoint is before a straight line leading to a branch of more paths: why not put the checkpoint there instead so the paths all lead to it?

There is an intriguing map system. By default, the map only registers your footsteps until you reach a certain spot where you can “unlock” a part of the real map. This footstep system allows you to manually map the levels and is very helpful in remembering where you went. I thought the combination works really well. This is also why I think the confusing layout of levels works because with your footsteps being tracked, it’s very easy not to get lost. Also, the solution to most levels is ultimately pretty straight forward because most branches are dead ends, so honestly it’s not that difficult to find where you’re going. The only weakness is that the map doesn’t show every vertical layer, which can be troubling in some areas or if you want an overview.


Weak story and chara design, but some cool ideas:

One thing I’m not a fan of is the character design. While male characters are mostly cool, the female ones can really be summed up to “boobies” for a huge part and that was very disappointing. A lot of the monsters look cool, on another hand, but when you get close up you realise they are also often naked female monsters so yeah… I think other games from Bandai Namco like Scarlet Nexus had much better designs overall.

The story is okay, not amazing but not completely boring either. I rather liked it and I think the character interactions are pretty fun. There are one or two sections in the game where you get bombarded with cutscenes for twenty minutes or more and it gets kinda boring.

The game uses a unique storytelling method of having the player collect memories which will be told in a theatrical manner as you walk down a corridor. This feature was cool and there were a lot of interesting ideas, however I think there are way too many memories and it makes them more boring than anything at some point. The lore points that they add are cool and allow to deepen some character backgrounds. The most annoying part is really the way you have to walk through them at a slow speed, only a few of the memories take advantage of this to do something interesting (and those were really well done). For most of them, you just walk as you observe scenes in the background in the form of theatre plays, you might as well just have been standing still no?


Overall, Code Vein is a fun soulslike with some flaws, it’s very subjective whether you’ll enjoy it or not. I’d say the game is pretty similar to Dark Souls II if anything, so if you really enjoy DaS2 and anime isn’t a problem for you then you’ll probably like this game.

I only played this game for a little over two hours. Naturally I won’t rate it but I think it’s enough to know if I would like this game or not and I will try to explain why I don’t think this game is for me and not to say that I think Vesperia is a bad game.


A slow, very slow start:

As I started the game, I was quite intrigued by the initial events. Something casual like a fountain breaking and the local hero running to the rescue is a very good way to start things, I think. Plus the game looks nice, the art style is really good looking and the town environment is much better than a lot of more modern and also flatter 3D JRPGs.

Then after about ten or maybe twenty minutes, I’m down to my first dungeon right after the tutorial. A dozen or so guards to fight with but basic attacks. After every combo I have a long recovery during which I can do nothing and I get ganked a lot. I know, the game will provide me better tools but why am I thrown at a dungeon so early with none of them? The combat at that point is really not very interesting and I think it expresses perfectly what I don’t like about this game’s pacing. Instead of putting things in your hands right away, it’ll instead slowly do so over the course of multiple hours while throwing bread crumbs at you.


Loading screen, battle, loading screen:

There are a lot of fights right from the very first dungeon and they have a very particular way of happening. When you encounter an enemy, you’ll have an animation of battle starting which is sort of like what Pokemon did, this already takes one good second. Then you have a loading screen, then another animation (thankfully you can disable this) with at least one second of nothing happening before you can move. Then after the fight you get at least one fade-in into a screen with your score, then maybe a level up screen, probably some party dialogue which is very repetitive especially when you fight every few steps, then another loading screen of 1-2 seconds to go back to the map. You’ll probably walk a few steps and do the same cycle again. This is very, very painful to me. I played other JRPGs, usually they try to lessen the time for these things. Final Fantasy for example (I only played the 2D ones) had pretty straight to the point fights, get an encounter, beat the enemy and move forward. Chrono Trigger doesn’t even have loading screens at all, not even when moving to new areas. I just can’t get used to this pacing.

A while later, you fight your first boss. You may have levelled up and unlocked a new move which doesn’t change the way you fight at all. Anyway, you get your second party member and from now on the game is mostly about you out-healing hits. It sort of plays like a mmo where you just attack and get attacked back. Sometimes you’re stuck in the middle of a group and get stunlocked too.


Too many skits, can’t jump lines:

When you get your first party member, the game also introduces skits, short conversations that show party interactions every once in a while. You get a prompt telling you about it and you can choose to watch them or not, granted the way it’s presented with such a big popup makes it seem like an essential part of enjoying the game (and so say the fans). Two new problems appear here:

First of all, you cannot skip dialogue lines. I can’t read it like I would read a visual novel and skip to the next line. Considering the length of these, I cannot believe there’s no feature to just move on to the next line. You just have to stop what you’re doing and sit there for a minute or two for the characters to finish their voice lines. I honestly find it very awful. Added on top of that, they happen every few steps you take. Seriously, every few steps I just felt bombarded by skits. Why is the game trying to make me stop so often to watch skits? Why can’t I do anything without constant interruptions? You enter a new area, skit. You fight some monsters, skit. You move midway, skits. You reach the next checkpoint, skits and probably a cutscene of the party resting. Even when you reach a new location, suddenly you can’t go out of town until you move the story forward because the game removes your party and won’t let you out another.


A combination of slowness building up into… slowness:

So yeah, I feel like everything is designed to break the pacing in this game. The way battles work, the skits, the long loadings even on a modern computer, the speed of menus and even the speed of things like a dialogue box transitioning into the other. I didn’t mention it but cutscenes are also very slow with a lot of moments where the camera just sits there before moving to the next shot and the overall pacing of the story is also oriented toward slowness so it just doesn’t help. Why is the game so slow?

Is it a problem for a game to be slow? No, I don’t think so. I’ve played Trails games and they are very slow, slice of life JRPGs. Why didn’t I dislike them? Because the slowness is only in the pacing of the story and adventure, not literally included in the game mechanics. On another hand I absolutely hate Animal Crossing for its tedious menus where I love most farming games with efficient menus. I don’t like games that force you into cosiness and taking your time, but I could spend hours in Monster Hunter doing nothing and chilling in the environment because I decided to do it myself in a game where I love the gameplay, menus and pacing. I dislike Red Dead Redemption 2 for its overly slow animations for everything and it seems natural that I would not enjoy Vesperia, I guess.

I just feel like it wastes my time for nothing. What do I get out of taking my time so much in the game? Do I need it for immersion, character development or something similar? I really don’t want to spend so much time when I feel like the game could have been twice as short just because it doesn’t have a button to let me move the dialogue forward or because of its movement speed or another feature like that.

This seems to be a fairly uncommon opinion so I thought I would share it. I tried looking up similar opinions on the internet and I only found a few people expressing these concerns. Somehow, the usual response was “have you ever played a JRPG” as if they’re all like that. The only other game I can think of which is this slow is perhaps Ni no Kuni, although 3D JRPGs seem to be generally slower than the older 2D ones from the little experience I have with them. Sure a lot of them would have fillers, random encounters and other ways to just lengthen the game but at least those made you play the game. You wouldn’t play a Final Fantasy if you dislike the battle system and a shitton of encounters is annoying in its own way, but it still makes you play the way the game is built ultimately. A filler arc is still a part of the game where it plays the same as usual. Vesperia on another hand won’t let me play and will constantly remove the game out of my hands.

F&H is one of these games where people just look at the qualities and I don't see much being discussed about what I actually find problematic, therefore I thought it'd be interesting to give my point of view.

Fear and Hunger is very bad at one core thing: the gameplay. Most of the gameplay involves you tediously gathering ressources by clicking left and right on everything that looks like a container. It takes forever. You die, you restart and you redo that before you face any serious decision or have to strategise anything. Tedium is what I think is the main weakness of games like this or Pathologic because it just wastes hours in trying to make you immersed.

Try to imagine this game another way. For example, a purely textual game where you get choices with consequences. You have a time limit and choosing to explore will nail you ressources, but at the same time it will cost you time. This replicates the exact same feeling and makes you imagine just as much, but it doesn't waste YOUR time. This is how I would have liked to see games like this.

The game has a ton of good ideas and a good concept but I just don't feel like playing when most of my playtime, I'm seeing none of that because I'm walking in a RPG maker game and interacting with storage areas.