One of the few cases of a game dificulty making me hate it for how unfair it feels.

To go into more details, the gameplay of this game feels like it wants you to focus on combos, however, most enemys have super armor and won't flinch with yout attacks. But the same doesn't happen the other way around, a single hit can send you flying, enemys have attack animations with no startup and can spam it, there are rooms with 3 to 4 enemies like that, where as soon as one attack goes of, another follows it up, most times leading to a combo that will get you from 100% to 0%.

"Why don't you just get good?"

The thing is, that argument only really works if you are already invested in a game, there is no reason for me to waist my time and effort trying to get better at a game i didn't like. It doesn't help how obnoxious the narration is all the fucking time, or how repetitive the areas are. I get it is trying to pull a nier automata, but it didn't work for me.

Holy guacamole this game is abysmal from start to finish. Like nothing in this game is enjoyable, the writing and narrators speech is laughably bad, the game itself contradict with gameplay with wanting you to combo enemies but the enemies have the same goal and can spam you into oblivion and the meta narrative aspects are so ham fisted and garbage, its like they took a look at Stanley Parable or Neir and decided to copy spark notes of what they did correctly, so its narrative makes 0 sense. Genuinely got baited with the positive reviews what do people see in this game?

I always had an itch to play this but the price always seemed to steep for me so thanks to user Detchibe for gifting this for me for my birthday. I can now say with full affirmation and disappointment that this is one of the most dulling games I've played in a good long while.

It's almost as if every single component of this game was to be just "good enough," like the developer mission here was to merge half baked percentages of ideas to make a 100% "complete" game. It's a game with "tax writeoff" levels of care and effort.

It's not that Monster Hunter could never work in JRPG format, or that the presentation is too kiddie. It's that MHS2 brings absolutely nothing to the table so it masquerades as kiddie shit to deflect criticism, probably unintentionally but is unfortunately what happens. A half-baked, boring rock-paper-scissors battle system doesn't mean it's an "easy" battle system for children; it means it's half-baked. It's simple in the worst way; it's simply unengaging. Battling the same overworld monsters becomes so repetitive and uninteresting that the "S" rank you'll gain after from peerless play after each battle will mean nothing every time. There's a distinct lack of challenge and real strategy even though the game will always tell you about the "unpredictable" monsters, unpredictable in the sense that they only spam Rock but glow when they're about to use Scissors so watch out!

An annoying companion and a "power of friendship" plot aren't child-friendly ideas to tell a story, they're stale bread JRPG story tropes that dominate a story with nothing of substance to tell. I played about 7 hours of this 50+ hour game and I took it upon myself to see how the rest of the story goes through synopsis reading and cutscene watching and it has absolutely nothing more to show. It's a low stakes morality story that never once feels like it gets its feet on the ground. Everything is not just horribly cliché, but horribly anime cliché, like a stab wound but the already boring anime art style is like a little bit of lemon juice on the tip of the blade to make it hurt just a little bit more. If I can be real I found better "Stories" in the past 4 mainline entries of the series where it served as nothing but a standard backdrop of context to the gameplay.

I see too many reviews writing this off like "but it's for kids so," and I ask why so many people leave it at that. Since when has children's media been barred from such criticism? Especially since so many other JRPGs for children exist like Ni no Kuni, early Tales of, Yo-Kai Watch, Paper Mario, hell even Pokémon. Maybe I was saved of having to spend $60 on this but are we all just trying to justify a purchase here? So many middling reviews but I've never seen so many excuses. A game doesn't have to be "kiddie shit" to be boring and vice versa. MHS2 was obviously a spinoff made with skimpish resources as it shows with the repetitive overworld design and over-reuse of assets, but was never intended to be made with enough love and care to make something fulfilling out of. There's no heart, there's no soul, it feels like a product of a JRPG lab. If you want your kids to get into Monster Hunter just make your youngest play Freedom Unite and watch his ass get kicked by Nargacuga instead of trying to play Rock Paper Scissors with it.

I wish I'd gotten to play this during its heyday. As a huge fan of the original Ragnarok Online there's been few games quite like it, but this one really feels like a spiritual sequel that I would have adored.

The art style captures that beautiful Korean cartoon style in 3D, the music is done by SoundTeMP who worked on the RO soundtrack, and the gameplay is a mix of classic MMO class skills and light/heavy melee attacks which give it an action RPG vibe.

The bones of a really solid game are in here, but sadly everything is so intensely geared towards getting you to max level, playing with the existing player base, and getting you into the shop that it's almost impossible to play the base game without constantly shunning the advancement rewards.

Even ignoring all that stuff the game is very, very easy and it's such a shame. The world is beautifully realised, the dungeons look great, the monsters and characters look great, the story is fine, the content is heavily PvE and grindy which I'm fine with because the gameplay feels good, and there's a huge variety of subclasses to explore.

The PapayaPlay version launched recently and while less aggressively monetised it still whisks you through the levels with constant XP bonuses, more tolerable, but no less eager for you to be at end game spending money. The game is definitely there under everything but the developers just do not want you playing the bulk of its content.

A serviceable twin-stick shooter both improved and let down by its musical focus.
+ remarkable diversity in music genres (even if most individual songs are rather generic and some unsuitable for a rhythm game)
+ clean art style featuring short but well-animated cutscenes
+ very slick UI that looks modern and is generally efficient to use
+ satisfying combat hit effects
+ straightforward co-op feature
+ functional song import (which isn't impressive however, considering it only takes BPM)
- mediocre equipment system for player customization
- simplistic campaign structure with 10 themed locations of 10 stages each and no real climax
- boring story told by embarrassingly written dialogue between shallow characters
- monotonous rhythm gameplay unaffected by difficulty settings
- too many copy-pasted environments with low enemy variety

The combination of rhythm game and twin-stick shooter is a great idea, and the game plays well and looks great. The OST is amazing, with songs ranging from R&B, over Classical, to EMD and Rock, so there is something for everyone here.

However, it is unacceptable that - in certain songs - the metronome is wrong. It's a rhythm game, that's the one thing that you need to get right!

That's why while going for Multiplatinum, where you have to beat all stages on the highest difficulty doing all actions perfectly on-beat and whithout taking damage, I had to lower the music volume and have the metronome very loud, so that I could hear when it would go off-sync.
On Playstation, we didn't get the balance patch that released on steam, so doing Multiplatinum requires you to play with a specific character and kill everything with her special weapon, as regular weapons don't deal enough damage and stages can't be completed in time. That's a shame.

I'm contrarian. If something's popular I'm not eager to like it just to fit in. In fact, admittedly I'll probably try a little harder to hang on to the parts I dislike about it in any future discussions about said piece of media.

So when I finally tried what is probably the most unanimously beloved not-Nintendo owned JRPG I expected to be whelmed, doll out the "Yeah it's good but--" lines in any future discussion and die on those hills. But no, I loved it. The charming writing and cast, the well paced action scenes the well designed overworld map and area maps in general. The game was cool, it was fun. I couldn't put it down. I fell for its allure hook, line, and sinker.

I didn't finish that play through due to hardware failure, so fastforward to 5 years later and I'm even more jaded of a person. And I'm gonna try Chrono Trigger again, and while I enjoyed it last time, and I'm sure I'll enjoy it this time, I'll obviously see the cracks in the walls of this game this time.

And yeah, I did. The game can fall into some of-it-time JRPG trappings, espcially towards the end where I found myself mashing the A button more than I ever had. This game's got flaws but...who gives a shit? Everything that I experienced through my last playthrough still holds up. The cast is just as charming, the story just as well told. Music still hits. It's still one of the most cohesively put together games you could experience on any console, and if you're a fan of the JRPG genre, it is an absolute must play.

Chrono Trigger is truly the result of when amazing talents all share the same vision on a project, and if it can even make a noted hater like myself turn into a fanboy who is already planning his next playthrough in the future, I cannot recommend it enough.

I will not mention Disco Elysium in this post.

Citizen Sleeper is a narrative-adventure game much heavier in the way of narrative than adventure. From the outset, you're given a handful of six-sided dice per day and told that you're allowed to spend them however you want in order to find your place onboard this ringworld station. Your start is going to be appropriately alien and confused, with you getting lost, and making mistakes, and taking hits to your very limited resources. As time marches on and more of the station opens itself up to you, you'll be given the opportunity to spend your dice on an ever-growing list of activities under the threat of time pressure. You can only do so much, the game warns, and your time is the most valuable resource of all.

This isn't true. You can do everything in one playthrough without any real challenge.

In fact, there's so much to do that your struggle is mostly going to be figuring out how to spend your off-days, when all of the NPCs who can progress the story wind up gating you behind a timer of arbitrary length before you can speak with them again. To be frank, I can barely remember most of their names. They all fit a bit too neatly into their archetypes — Good Dad with Cute Daughter, Hackerman, Gold-Hearted Gang Member — and you can kind of see where all of these people are going to end up hours before they actually get there. The story as a whole is too obvious for its own good.

This is a world where that which is moral is that which is correct. It’s a curious little foible I’ve noticed in a lot of these smaller-scale games with gestures towards socialist thought; pragmatism is dedicated exclusively towards villains, and idealism is dedicated exclusively towards the (virtuous) player character and their (morally unobjectionable) allies. You get a bounty hunter set upon you in the early stages of the game, and his entire deal is that he’s willing to not turn you in so long as you keep paying his bar tab. I was ready to dig in, pay up, and take the hits at the cost of buying my own freedom. However, you only need to pay once, because he gets so shitfaced after the first time you pay him off that he drops his gun the next time you see him.

You can give it back to him.

You can give the guy who has a price on your head his own gun back, and you suffer literally zero penalty for this because the bartender stole his bullets while neither of you were looking. He then gets kicked out and completely ceases to be a problem. In terms of pragmatism, giving a bounty hunter who’s coming after you a gun is a miraculously fucking stupid idea. But if you look at it idealistically, you’re refusing to point the gun at him because you’re not going to do violence unto violence, or something. The same thing happens again with the Killer AI; killing it results in your friend NeoVEND dying with it, while binding it eternally in a hellish loop from which it can never escape is the more difficult and thus more “moral” option, so NeoVEND gets to live.

There’s a long, long questline of exposing corruption on the station in the interest of getting your tracker disabled, and it seemed like the closest thing to a core path that the game was offering. There’s a timer constantly ticking down to warn of hunters being set upon you, with the final and most dangerous one taking something like 24 cycles to complete; an in-game “day” is counted as one cycle, so this is an absurd amount of time. I managed to get the tracker disabled with about 16 cycles to spare. And just like that, my body was no longer considered the property of my owners. They wouldn’t come looking for me, anymore. I was free. I could live out the rest of my days onboard this station in my little apartment that I made, hanging out with my stray cat and moving crates all day to buy fungus bowls and stabilizer shots while helping out at the greenhouse commune.

I was satisfied with that, but the game told me that I wasn’t. If I wanted to see credits, I was going to have to either figure out a way to leave the station right now, figure out a way to leave the station eventually, or destroy my body to live in the cloud. The credits rolled for every time I insisted on sticking around — three times in total, four with the DLC — and it wasn't hard to get the feeling that I was overstaying my welcome.

Uh. Why?

No, seriously, why? The Eye is a decent place with good people who I just sunk tons of time and resources into helping. Why leave? Why even think about leaving? Where am I gonna go? A different station, somewhere else, to do it all over again from scratch? Why should I forsake my body and go full computer when we’ve made the point time and again that Sleepers aren’t just programs, and are in fact the sum of their parts, tangible or otherwise? I know that the game needs to end, because a story can’t go on forever, but why like this?

I suppose this was a common complaint, because the DLC addresses the problem by tossing in what you could charitably call an actual endgame scenario, and what you could less charitably call rocks fall, everyone dies. I'm not sure how many people here have ever read a fanfiction as it's being published — don't be shy, I know it's a lot of you — and the conceit of the expansion has that same essence of someone on AO3 writing their responses to reader comments directly into the story. There's no impetus to ever actually want to leave the Eye? Add one in ex post facto! There are far worse things you can do with your narrative, but there's something about saving your actual ending for extra content that betrays some development struggles.

Speaking of, Fellow Traveller needed to get Gareth an editor. I know it's the absolute peak of being a Melvin to complain about a game having typos, but there are a lot of them in here. Like, grammar and spelling mistakes which are consistently wrong. Count the number of times that quotation marks close without punctuation at the end. Characters will use homonyms rather than the words they're actually shooting for to amusing effect, as seen in the phrase "make hole". It's sloppy. I get that writing this many words is hard, and it's just as hard to leaf back through it all to make changes, but I've seen way more people complaining about this than I haven't. Very few people care about spelling mistakes as much as I do, so imagine how rough it must be for them to notice.

But I did still like Citizen Sleeper, and maybe that's why I'm being harsh on it. There is something here that I think could have been outstanding, but it's a little half-baked. The DLC doesn't seem to have helped it much, if at all; when you're loaded to the gills with chits and meds and scrap, the game devolves into just slotting dice into the square hole until text appears. It drags. Ironically enough, for something that's "tabletop-inspired", this would probably work a bit better with a human GM and players at a table, rather than between one person and a computer that has no sense of whether or not its wasting your time. At least your game master has to keep to a human schedule and will thus hurry you along to the juicy bits.

The Sleeper is no Harry DuBois, but at least they're not Kay from fucking Norco.

Sad to say Citizen Sleeper is a pretty neat little experiment that I only wished I could’ve loved more than I should. I really vibe with the visual look, music, it's more hands on approach to cyberpunk themes and concepts, and the Disco Elysium approach to the gameplay lacking conventional combat in favor of story exploration and dice roll mechanics. The game is also fairly non-linear, allowing you to basically pick and choose whatever quest lines or stories to follow in the Erlin’s Eye and pretty much make up your own personal main story to progress through. But once you’ve cracked down on how the cycle progression and dice rolls work in the game it just starts to feel very dragged out because you’re basically clicking and waiting for the real interesting stuff to happen occasionally. Everything in between those parts to do with waiting and resource management just doesn’t feel engaging because there really isn’t too much to it gameplay-wise and story-wise nothing is really going on yet. This didn’t tarnish the experience dramatically because of how short the game is, and if you’re willing to get pass that easy enough this should click with you more, but I would’ve liked to see this concept a bit more fleshed out to live up to its full potential.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was the first M rated game I ever bought. I don’t remember my exact age when I bought it, but I definitely remember it being in between the years of 2012 and 2015. I didn’t really understand how RPGs worked, so I treated the game like it was a fantasy-themed Grand Theft Auto game by just committing crimes and wreaking havoc. Even after all this time, I never actually beat the main story or completed any of the guilds fully until now.

I remember TotalBiscuit (May He Rest In Peace) saying that Skyrim was as wide as an ocean, but as deep as a puddle, and I honestly couldn’t agree more. This game is incredibly shallow and repetitive, as a large amount of it is spent clearing out Nordic ruins that all look and feel exactly the same. This repetitiveness not only plagues the gameplay, but it also plagues the quests and the guilds, as they all involve being granted high-ranking titles in each guild after completing only a few minor quests. Gaining all of these titles also doesn’t feel as important as the one-dimensional characters try to make me think they are, because no matter how many quests I completed and ranks I’ve earned, all of the NPCs treated me as if I was a complete stranger, and the world as a whole wasn’t affected in the slightest.

Despite all of this, I still had my fun with Skyrim, as doing things such as exploring the world and leveling up my character were fun in their own ways, but even these aspects of Skyrim have their flaws. Although the world is technically detailed and especially impressive for the Creation Engine to pull off, the drab, muted color palette and uninspired art direction made me feel like I was visiting a funeral rather than exploring a vast fantasy world. The level up system can’t really go anywhere but up, and some of the skills that are practically essential, such as Smithing and Alchemy, are a chore to level up.

Overall, I don’t think that Skyrim is a very good game, but I still had my fair share of fun with it despite that. I hope that other installments in the Elder Scrolls series, such as Oblivion and Morrowind, will captivate me in ways that Skyrim didn’t.

Hylics like you and I will hang a basket over a shopkeeper’s head, ransack his life’s work from under his nose without consequence, laugh at how ridiculous this is and heap it upon the list of Skyrim’s alleged shortcomings. Game developers will look at the same situation, hang it up on their wall and adhere to it as a design philosophy.

Developers have commented on this sort of contrast between their own perspective and that of players before; most famously, designer of Civilization III and IV Soren Johnson coined the old adage of “given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game.” This is no less true of The Elder Scrolls than any other RPG, but in its case, a different sort of contrast also exists in what’re generally considered the best quests. Ask anyone what their favourite part of Skyrim is and you’ll likely hear Ill Met By Moonlight brought up, or often The Mind of Madness, or any number of the ones which incidentally lead them to discover Blackreach for the first time. In a game packed with so many spectacular highlights, who in their right mind would find themselves longing for what most of us would write off as fetch quests, rote tedium amounting to nothing more than having to collect a certain amount of a certain item? The answer’s none other than Todd Howard.

He’s completely right about this. It’s been almost ten years since I’d last played Skyrim, and I still vividly remember the relief I felt in finally coming across a random, unnamed Bosmer bandit whose blood sample was the last one I needed to complete one of the main quests. As Todd describes, I beat the quest in a time, place and manner which were all purely unique to me, which – despite the apparent mundanity of collecting different races’ blood samples – is more than enough to have firmly embedded it in my brain as much as any Daedric artefact hunt or murder mystery or mediation of a truce between two sides of a civil war.

What this speaks to is the greatest strength of Skyrim and Bethesda’s catalogue in general: experiential value. Radiant AI’s long been the butt of jokes, largely thanks to Skyrim’s big brother in particular, but the fact that it enables these games to effectively react to themselves and create genuinely dynamic situations no two people will come across is probably taken for granted. To make an open world feel alive and lived-in’s an elusive undertaking, but even so much as attempting a system like this puts Skyrim several steps ahead of near enough everything else outside of its own series. As invariable as it is that your Dragonborn will eventually become a stealth archer (in part because of how much character building’s been watered down compared to its predecessors), unique, organic experiences and roleplaying opportunities still abound thanks to it.

Both frontrunners for all sorts of industry awards last year were also dark fantasy action-adventure games with RPG elements and emphasis on exploration. There’s absolutely nothing in either of them remotely as cool as being able to ride a dragon and have it fight another dragon in the sky in a battle that can end up seamlessly spanning an entire province, which you can also explore nearly every inch of and interact with nearly any object in on foot (on 7th gen hardware, no less). This is the same game that lets me eke out a quiet life as a married woodcutter with a hoard of cheese wheels of dubious origin in my cellar, or Tamriel’s most indirect serial killer who instigates fights throughout the province by leaving valuables in the street, or an opportunistic necromancer who employs nearby corpses to solve all combat encounters for me, or an Altmeri master thief who stalks and then knicks the belongings of any and all Bosmer I run into because the Thalmor aren’t extreme enough for his taste, or essentially anything else I can imagine. At every turn, on every playthrough, is the stuff you’d see on the cover of a classic fantasy adventure book, something I’d wager only one other game released since Skyrim can lay claim to.

It’s for these reasons that I’ve not given Skyrim a numerical score. Until this revisit I had it logged as a 3/5, which in my view is “just alright,” but there’s two problems with calling Skyrim just alright. For one, games which actually are only just alright don’t have even a fraction of the longevity Skyrim’s demonstrated in so many different metrics, and two, what standard are we comparing it to to arrive at the idea that it isn’t much more than that? There’s no other game that does what Skyrim does, exactly like Skyrim does, but better. You don’t have to love it to recognise that; as of the time of writing, Skyrim isn’t even my second favourite TES, but not even its own predecessors fit the bill since all of them are so starkly different both from it and from each other.

You can easily point to better alternatives for specific, individual aspects of Skyrim. Dragon’s Dogma puts its combat to shame and even features an NPC relationship system more in line with Oblivion’s. Its quests would be more rewarding if it were designed like an immersive sim so that attempted solutions like this would actually work. Its dialogue system’s arguably even more limited than Fallout 4’s, without the excuse of being burdened by a voiced protagonist. The lack of a climbing system like Daggerfall’s or Breath of the Wild’s feels more and more conspicuous every time you bump into invisible walls on slight inclines. The aforementioned simplified character building means that the days of leaping across Vvardenfell or Cyrodiil in a single jump are sadly long past us. It goes on, and on, and on.

Skyrim’s so evergreen despite plenty more issues than just these because there’s no holistic package that compares. There’s being bloated, and then there’s offering such a wealth of varied gameplay opportunities each delivered to a (in the grand scheme of things) relatively high standard that you learn to tolerate its many dozens of cracks. Your favourite game, and mine, probably doesn’t have worldbuilding this well-considered, feature any areas that compare to Sovngarde musically or visually, let you live out the idyllic mammoth farmer lifestyle we all secretly pine for, and/or suplex talking cats. This picture looks like a joke at first glance, but you’ll eventually come to realise how true it is.

~ GetRelationshipRank <ProudLittleSeal> 0 I work for Belethor, at the general goods store.