It's a short game that was developed after a game jam project and it's pretty well done. The game is certainly functional and isn't really lacking in any department: it looks okay, plays okay, the sound and animation qualities are there.

It could help if it had a few more improvements such as being able to get out from the zoom mode by using the left mouse click, making it less tedious to turn the clocks or having the cooking pan always land in the right direction instead of flying around but those are minute details in a game that's about two hours long.

Amanda is your typical horror game that tries to take advantage of childish things, here it’s obviously Dora. It doesn’t really hold any surprise but it’s fun enough to play. I do wish it went further with its themes or it focused better on one of them instead of multiple ones, I think there are a few good ideas such as a child being stuck in a TV world which turns into some kind of hellish place: it’s an interesting concept that doesn’t try to make the player scared for their lives, instead it’s just as scary as hearing about what a killer could have done to a kid. You’ve got a kid right in front of you, suffering, and you can’t do anything about it. There are vague hints of this but ultimately the game stays at a surface level with everything. It seems more like a mix of ideas and jump scares than something cohesive, which is a shame.

It’s a very good parody of Dora on the other hand. The presentation is really top notch.

The puzzles can also get really cryptic. One thing I didn’t understand personally is that at some points in the story where you hit a game over, I wasn’t experiencing a bug where the game didn’t save but it was intentional.

I think you just can't imagine how bad a "visual novel" can be if there was a delay of one second between every line. Like holy shit what's wrong with this game? I can't even get to the part that others are criticising because of the delays. It's even worse if there's an actual transition, it's something like 10 seconds.

That and I'm not sure how I feel about a game where the first choices I get as a supposed amnesiac characters are "Touch her butt" and telling someone to "Show me your panties".

Pocket Mirror has everything to reach excellence as a RPG Maker mix of horror/cute. Unfortunately, it has some heavy issues that lessen the experience.


A game that’s frustrating to play

As someone who’s played a few RPG Maker games, I certainly don’t have a problem with its default and limited core mechanics such as the grid based walking. This is not where this game has problems.

One of the issues of Pocket Mirror is in its game design, based around puzzles you need to solve to progress throughout the story. A lot of the puzzles are very time wasting because they are based on trial and error and their presentation doesn’t help you in solving them. For example, for one puzzle you get three keys to pick up in a room and you have to go back and forth between that room and another to try them. As far as I know there was no clue on how to proceed. Honestly, I didn’t even understand most puzzles.

The second issue is the most important and goes in pair with the problem of centering the puzzles around trial and error: you die A LOT. Dying in this game has two consequences: the first is that you are sent back to your last save and the second is that you have to endure an absurdly long animation before you can do so. Whenever you die, you have to redo all your progress and that means going through all the cutscenes on your way, which can take forever.

It doesn’t help that checkpoints can be quite rare in certain parts of the game and the nature of the deaths encourages you to go back every single time you trigger a cutscene, out of fear of having to restart them. You never know when you might die: perhaps a conversation will trigger a choice that leads to your death. Perhaps it’ll be a chase that starts as soon as the conversation ends: these chases don’t give you a single second to figure out they started before you die, making it almost mandatory to die on your first attempt. I find the deaths in this game to be extremely cheap for these reasons.


The first hour and a half of the game can be quite frustrating because of these problems and the lack of build-up for the story. That aside, I’d like to talk about what I, despite these problems, liked about the game after enduring a rough introduction.


A very beautiful RPG Maker game

If not for the gameplay quirks such as how you walk, perhaps you would not guess this is a RPG Maker game. The sprite work is absolutely beautiful and rich. The locations can get very varied and detailed with few repetitions. I also noticed some nice animations for the sprites here and there.

The game also has very pretty portraits for every character and some occasional drawings to illustrate a specific scene.

As far as music goes, I wasn’t impressed but neither was I disappointed. On another hand, the sound design works well to complement the atmosphere and the eerie noises used in this game work well. There’s a lot of ambient tunes heard throughout the game as well as a variety of noises meant to distress you.


I can’t say much about the story, I did enjoy it but I don’t think it’s a standout. The start is very slow however and there isn’t much of an introduction to anything at the beginning. It’s the overall experience which is pretty cool.

If you like the trendy mix of horror and cute things, then you will like this game. It doesn’t really do anything surprising but it’s not a bad game either.

999 seems to often be recommended as some kind of entrypoint into visual novels and maybe point and click, as a mix of both, somewhat similar to Ace Attorney. Hell, it has ladder jokes so you can see the common points.

It’s also an escape game… game. You are locked in places and you’ve got to figure out where to go. The game alternates between these escape puzzles and story sections where the party will progress inside the boat, looking for an exit.


The atmosphere is spot-on

You are locked inside a big boat and it’s gonna sink. The environments are modelized in very basic 3D but this works in the game’s favour because the poor 3D models make everything feel cold, alien and eerie. Similarly, the sound design is really nice. The sounds of the interface also have that eerie feel and the soundtrack manages to convey tension throughout the game.

The story perfectly captivates the vibe of being locked inside a mysterious location which you get to know through your progress in the game and your multiple runs, revisiting locations as the game centres around a few spots. It will introduce future locations early on too so you can get used to it: see that door? It’s locked, but now you know there’s a mysterious door with a mysterious symbol on it.


The puzzles are satisfying but not exceptional

999 is a hybrid between two genres and I don’t think it excels at puzzles. However, they are decent and provide a good amount of fun. I think that a lot of the puzzles are too linear and the solution comes up way too naturally: you usually can only do one thing at the beginning and you’ll easily know what to do next, until the end of the puzzle. For example, you do not get to pick up a lot of items that you’ll use later, especially because of the game’s nature where every puzzle is isolated instead of being a whole

You don’t get to visit the ship yourself but through the story, this is a pretty heavy limit and I think it does not play in the game’s favour as I would actually have loved having the freedom to do so. Linearity aside, it’s just too easy to guess what to do and the characters also give a lot of hints. Honestly, I think most hints sounded silly because the puzzles are simple enough yet you have to read all these talks where the characters are trying to figure out the solution but where at the same time the writing is trying to hide the actual answer.


A story too constrained into a single ending:

A lot of visual novels have multiple paths you can take yet ultimately a single “true” one. 999 is no exception and it comes with the flaws of the genre. The alternative possibilities in this story do not offer much and the main use is to have the player experience multiple attempts at solving the story. This ends up quite repetitive because the information you acquire through the alternative routes is eventually used in the true ending and thus had to be explained again, in a clumsy and redundant manner mostly (although there is a neat gimmick about it too).

Another problem 999 has is that it somewhat lacks a story for a good portion of the game. Because of the way the plot is designed, there aren’t many secrets to be revealed or progress to be made that wouldn’t give away the entire plot. Thus, the plot is heavily concentrated into the true ending of the game. This route is actually quite long and took me about a third of my entire playtime of the game, compared to other ending branches which would be maybe 30 minutes long.

Because the story is so concentrated, the feeling of progress is lessened and the incentives to move forward are limited. There are only little details that matter in most routes and nothing big to retain from them. You do one route, reach a dead end with no explanation of why you failed and you just got to try another path. Thankfully, the PC port has a flowchart allowing you to go back to any point in the story instead of restarting everything, this makes it very convenient to play through the entire content and I am not convinced at all by those who criticise this system.

The reason why I believe the flowchart is essential is that there’s no impact to the choices you make and your progress is up to luck. Almost all of your choices are about which door to go through and you wouldn’t know what happen ahead of time. The other choices are choices that appear pretty inconsequential yet they are required to reach two of the endings. I thought they were really bad. At one point, a character asks a maths question and I had to answer wrong to unlock a certain path: there’s no way I would guess it without indications.

That aside, I did actually enjoy the story and I think they were some very touching moments.


Pseudoscience and fun facts, I say no:

One last thing I strongly dislike about this game is how pedantic it can get. To explain this, I will try to make up a situation that didn’t happen in the game but in a way that would happen in the game:

The group finds a nuclear bomb with a timer counting down. They panic but one character manages to keep their calm and starts explaining, “this is a nuclear bomb, do you know how nuclear science has allowed us to make a nuclear bomb? It was discovered by…”. After a lengthy explanation of how nuclear bombs work, another character will reveal their expertise in this science and start adding some precisions, “hey, this is actually a 1 megaton bomb, the radius of explosion would be around 10 km. If this exploded, we’re all dead!”. After this, we finally get to see the characters do something and how it’s gonna matter in the plot.

Quite a lot of the time, the story is interrupted by this kind of needless jargon you would hear from a high schooler trying to tell you cool science facts, if not pseudoscience. Yeah, the game also has a lot of pseudoscience and because of the way it was introduced I really wasn’t convinced. Not only is the introduction improper but the fact that all of the characters turn into some weirdos with random fun fact encyclopaedias in their head is just absurd to me.


Overall I did enjoy the game and appreciated it. It’s not the VN nor puzzle game I liked the most but I still think it has its merits.

As a long time player, what did MH Rise offer to me?


A modern redesign of my favourite maps:

One of the things that blew my mind about Rise is how they recreated older generation maps, modernising them in a much needed way. Not only are they now in high definition but they have also been reworked into seamless maps. Some of those were my favourite and Rise makes you feel like you’re replaying a game from Gen 3 again.

The greatest addition to the maps is a lot of verticality. You can climb and find a lot of secrets or resources. Fights don’t take advantage of this though, for the most part.

The only regrettable aspect is that you can still see the corridors separating areas, an obvious leftover from the original design idea. We’ve learned that the developers didn’t initially intend to make the maps like this but after seeing the development of World, they decided to rework the maps. In my opinion, the result is worth it.


Solid roster and old favourites:

One of the undeniable additions that Rise did to World is bringing back many of the older monsters, which needed to be reworked into the newer engine. The selection is great and they didn’t just focus on the big classic ones, we get a lot of the smaller ones like Arzuros or Lagombi too and I think it’s great. Once again, the game just digs into my Gen 3 nostalgia.

The newer ones are also cool and Rise has a unique identity in that regard. For once, the monsters are not based on nature as much as they are designed on Japanese folklore. Still, I think they fit well into the series. I don’t think I was disappointed with any of them and I was especially impressed with Magnamalo, which I learned to love after grinding it in the demo challenge.


Further improvements to MHW’s weapon redesigns:

Rise takes the weapon redesigns in MHW and continues to improve them. As an example, the Switch Axe has many more moves during which it can now change forms. Additionally, the game brought back the hunter arts from MHGU into a new form and they’re also great additions. The combat is dynamic and perhaps the most refined the series has ever seen.

Some problems arise though. First, the new wirebug skills can be quite spammy for some weapons. The hammer meta for example is to throw Impact Crater as many times as possible. Of course, nobody forces you into doing that and it’s perfectly playable otherwise, just don’t aim for speedrunning times.

I also am not a fan of the Hunting Horn rework, it feels like a completely different weapon from World. Using the right move according to your position does not matter any more and the main combo is pretty much to spam A. It feels much faster paced and less heavy.


Some problems regarding immersion:

Immersion is a big deal for me and I have always loved what the Monster Hunter series has done. I am a person who enjoys spending hours gathering or going on hunts to kill small monsters, knowing I am hoarding a wealth of materials I would never need. It was a relaxing activity for me. I also happen to like the item management part and I wasn’t a fan of World removing a lot of them: pickaxes, hot/cool drinks… Well, Rise is pretty much the same in this regard.

The monster AI is where immersion suffers the most and I dare say it’s the worst the series has seen. For example, the ways the monster moves in the now seamless maps can get quite ridiculous and it also happens way too often. The monster encounters are also not only annoying but immersion breaking. They are very scripted events and the outcome is always the same: monsters which are not your target have a mount threshold which is very low so whenever they meet your hunting target, one hit from it will make them available for mounting so it’s always the same pattern. Whether you mount or not, which monster you chose to knock down: the outcome is always predictable and you just choose the most optimal choice, if not the most annoying.

You can also instantly locate them now, removing the entire searching process. This is not entirely a bad thing but it does contribute to giving the game a more arcadey feeling. I hope the next game will improve in this regard and find a proper immersion formula.


Some things have improved, others have not. I also don’t disagree that the games are getting easier. However, I am still very hopeful for this series. I can tell the devs understand what they’re doing and I appreciate that they always try to do something new, whether it’s hit or miss. If I want to play the older games, I still can and if I don’t enjoy an entry, maybe I’ll like the next one more!

A solid, somewhat linear platformer with really cool stuff. I really liked the environment, I think they did an extremely good job designing them and they look beautiful on top of being varied and interesting.

The game often plays around with gimmicks that make the platforming more interesting instead of sticking to core concepts. For example one area will have a changing layout, another one will have wind or some sort of jumping mushrooms… The game also has the unique ability of bashing which allows you to dash through objects and also to send them flying in a direction, it’s a very cool ability that offers a lot to the gameplay.

The game is linear but also story driven. The story is light but emotional and has beautiful moments. I really don’t have much more to say, it was a pleasant experience.

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.

When I first saw footage of this game, it immediately caught my eye but I was pretty suspicious if it really felt as good to play as it looked, since I tried previous ARPGs from Bandai without finding much satisfaction.

Well I was wrong, this game absolutely rocks on the gameplay side of things and props to Bandai Namco for having a permanent demo available on Steam, something not many developers outside of indies seem to do. And what's the deal with demos that are only temporarily available?


Good gameplay, good ARPG:

Scarlet Nexus offers a unique sort of beat 'em all where you play a ESP user whose main attribute is throwing things, but you'll be able to do a lot more. The game slowly expands your abilities with the power of your teammates and by the end of the game, you have access to more basic battle abilities, nine types of ESP, a lot of interactable items and multiple types of special attacks that all come up very regularly.

I wish the game unlocked all powers earlier though, it takes quite a while until you get a complete set of four partners and then even longer until you get all nine of them. And then you restart from scratch for the second character (well, you keep a lot of your knowledge honestly).

The combat offers a lot of tools at the player’s disposal and I think every power you unlocked filled its own niche. You have purely attack focused powers, then you have one which strengthens your counter/dodging and at the same time it’ll allow you to keep track of some special foes, then you have invisibility and sneak attacks, duplication… The powers are awesome and as you progress, they also get more special effects added to them. For example there was one power I only used to spot invisible enemies, I didn’t care for the effect of increasing the timing of dodges. It became my all-time favourite when there was the added effect of staggering enemies after a dodge; invisibility is pretty limited at first but later you can attack while staying invisible and it becomes much more interesting. And then every power you don’t use, you can instead trade the power’s usage gauge for a special move instead.

The game benefits from having a more than decent level design. While it's pretty linear, I found the levels to be interesting enough. First of all, they look beautiful and detailed, there really are a lot of details all around. The throwable items all over the place fit in the world, there are even specific interactive objects depending on the area you're in such as bulldozers in a construction site, trains in the subway... and they're all really cool to discover and use. A few branches here and there have optional fights and rewards so overall I had a lot of fun exploring.

It could have been more organic though: the levels are very independent from one another and most of the interactions are inside the hideout area. The town areas are essentially useless outside of your first exploration and only serve the purpose of getting quests. Some other games which attempt this end up having a more organic world as a result and it would be welcome here with the attempts at doing RPG stuff.

The maps also have way too many save points and you can see why. Since the game is linear, you’re not gonna go back to save after beating a boss so you need a save point before and right after the fight. This is where rethinking the save system could have helped, especially since it’s literally a human NPC who acts as such and he’s all over the place. Or they could map the map into a Dark Souls circle, unlocking a shortcut that sends you right back to the first checkpoint.

They could definitely reuse the old areas more too, especially with a scaling system for the monsters. Speaking of monsters, the game has a huge and interesting roster. There are multiple groups of enemies with cool designs and in each group, there are variants of the same monster. It provides a lot of change as they’re not just recolor but they can have a different weak area for example and different attacks too. Even the special endgame missions have unique monsters that were never seen before so that was cool. The bosses are no disappointment either, the game nails this part.

It’s worth mentioning that the game has 5 levels of difficulty. I played on very hard and I felt like it provided a fun challenge, the monsters were just tanky enough to have me exploit all the cool mechanics of the game to their fullest. Normal felt too easy and I would kill monsters before having the time to do cool combos.


Before I get into the bad parts, I want to say that this game was just very good at what it does well and that I really enjoyed it. I like this game, however it's pretty bad at some things which I'll detail next.


An action game crippled by its pacing:

First of all, the overall pacing can be somewhat burdensome. While SN is an excellent action game, it will regularly interrupt you with pretty long cutscenes and especially with a sort of "interruption" sequence (called phase standby in-game) where you will get the opportunity to interact with your teammates, gather quests, etc. This part is the main reason why the pacing sucks because where a level takes about one hour to go through, this entire segment can also take anywhere from 30min to an entire hour and unfortunately it's a pretty average section. You can thankfully skip most of it but you'll lose on some of the progression so it kinda sucks.

The so-called phase standby segments are really where the game is lacking. The way you interact with teammates is by raising an invisible relationship meter until you trigger enough points for events and level increases, which will unlock new abilities. Unfortunately I think it was a pretty bad choice to tie the relationships to abilities because it somewhat forces you to go through it to get the most out of the game, even if you don't like this section. While the events themselves are relatively okay and I do like the characters, I think the pacing of just having them included in a separate section of the game and spending a good hour between levels doing this was not the most fun.

Perhaps this separation is the main problem. The levels are not tied together when they could have been and the hideout section is too separated from the rest of the game. The switch from action to a Persona emulation is pretty jarring. I have played other games such as Dusk Diver which attempted this and I think they were more successful because of the overworld you move in and how you'll come across quests while going to the main location and then naturally coming back and talking to characters on your ways instead.



Painful menuing experience:

The gift system is also pretty gruesome. I think it was a really cool idea to incorporate the gifts into the game, everything you offer to your mates will eventually show up in the hideout and it gets very lively by the end of the game. Unfortunately the system itself is not very organic. Firstly, there are too many gifts and a lot of them have negligible effects, you would need maybe 30 copies of them to get a level up. Secondly, you obtain gifts by spending another five minutes in a menu where you craft them with confusing loot obtained from monsters or from exploring the environment. I think it would have been more fulfilling if they were just obtained in the environment or if there were less materials to keep track of for everything, it's just too complicated when you aim to complete the list.

Another menuing experience that detracts from the main game is the side quests. This is perhaps the single worst aspect of the game but before I criticise it, I really need to emphasise that this is completely ignorable and mostly useless in-game. Nonetheless it's a missed opportunity. As mentioned before, you don't really evolve in a world outside your hideout and therefore obtaining quests which require you to go back to a few peaceful areas where there's no reason to be is not organic. Every once in a while you waste time doing these rounds, just teleporting and checking if a quest appeared on the map. I really think they missed the opportunity to put these areas to use because outside of your initial visit during the story, they really are useless. It's a shame because they're beautiful and really detailed, they could have made the game's universe feel more alive.

The quests you obtain this way are essentially optional challenges to complete (and guess what, there is also something called "challenges" which is another submenu to take care of). Almost all of them just require you to kill mobs in a specific manner. Have X power activated while killing Y or use Z move to kill A. The problem is that a lot of the quests are so specific that you have to go out of your way to do it, you also obtain these quests after going through the area where you meet most of these monsters (until maybe a new encounter much later) and you have no reason to go back to areas (which don't scale, I wish they would).

A certain portion of the endgame has additional quests to unlock ultimate weapons and oh boy they really are not fun. At that point you not only do not remember where to find the monsters you need (with no form of indication whatsoever) but they ask you to kill them in extremely specific manners that require you to carefully deplete their health and spam a special move a few times, making sure they die from it and not another attack.


Decent story with comic-like vignettes:

While the game has numerous good ideas, most of them were hardly exploited at all. The game will drop a lot of things and move on to the next element instead, for example the story begins with mentions of discrimination between scouted soldiers and volunteers yet it is completely irrelevant to the story. They’ll occasionally mention some discrimination and all the lore adds up, it’s great honestly but the presentation doesn’t work. I feel like this game needed Falcom NPCs to carry that lore or some good side quests focused on those. Ultimately the story feels very unfocused with a lot of things going on. The characters are the nicest part, I felt like they all had their charm and I appreciated the interactions between them.

One pointless addition in my opinion is the mail system. It was genuinely unnecessary, it’s yet another menu to keep track of and an interruption. On top of having characters talk to each other, you’ll receive a mail which says pretty much the same thing but you won’t know before you read and you have to open a menu that interrupts the on-going conversation. Oh and if you don’t read them you might miss out on your opportunity to answer them! Which does… does it do anything actually? Maybe not, maybe it slightly raises relationship points, either way it was slightly annoying and didn’t add much to the story.

I’ve seen many criticisms for the visual presentation of the story but I personally liked it. Not having cutscenes means that the pacing is much faster than your usual game and I appreciate being able to read it like a visual novel instead of being stuck having to watch cutscenes. It looks pretty cool and the vignette storytelling is pretty well paced, with some animations that express what’s happening. It was really a welcome change in my opinion, I hope to see more of this. One thing I didn’t like is that on top of the main vignette, they’ll almost always add a bigger portrait of the talking characters and they can look lifeless at times, plus they are just redundant when the main picture is more expressive. I also have to note that both cutscenes and those vignettes will show your character costumes and weapons so that was really cool!!!

Both character have their own branching on the story but it doesn’t add much. There weren’t enough changes between the stories, too much of it is the same and since it’s hard to tell what’s different, especially when the differences in a same event are very minor, you don’t know what part you can skip so I ended up sitting through it all. NG+ has a nice option of resetting levels which… is pretty much necessary if you want to enjoy it, because there’s unfortunately no scaling. So you either overpower the game or you restart and relearn every ability progressively. I would have liked to steamroll through the game but not because I deal higher damage, instead because I had all my skills unlocked and could do sick combos from the beginning. Instead I had to go back to basic attacks.


Lastly I will say that the soundtrack is a blast. It’s a mix of electronic and jazz, I really liked it and some of the tracks are stuck in my head.

Overall, Scarlet Nexus is a great experience. It has an interesting setting and a unique concept. It's a great beat 'em all/ARPG but not a good JRPG, which it also tries to be. I hope this game will get a rightful sequel where the developers can improve the few things holding it back from being a well-rounded good game and not a flawed one.

VC is a unique game and you have to give merit where it's due. It's a hybrid mix of TRPG and third person shooter a way I've never seen before. As a kid, I always wanted to play this game but unfortunately I had no machine that was able to run it, hence I never did.

Unfortunately, the game is very far from being flawless and can turn into a rather frustrating experience.

By the way, there's another mechanic in this game which I find quite unique: you can play the same character multiple times per turn, granted you're willing to spend your command points on them and they'll have 33% less action points every time. This has its merits but at the same time, I think it also points the game into a narrower direction and encourages players to spam a small group of characters, if not just one or two and therefore lessens the strategic aspect of the game.


An opponent that doesn’t feel humane is not fun:

This game is frustrating in many ways. For example, you'll often find yourself shot by rocket launchers or tanks that manage to snipe you from very far away when you have nearly no chance of doing the same. Interception fire seems very useful until you realise that while you're getting shown under a rain of bullets every encounter, your characters will barely shoot any bullet before an enemy's turn is over because your opponent is a robot that doesn't hesitate and stops to get shot while thinking of what to do.

Your character has to be smart about approaching a tank because you'll get shot by the machine gun otherwise and die within seconds but when an enemy approaches your tank, they act so fast that your tank will hardly shoot once and deal extremely little damage to them, so they'll just come from the front. Essentially, the enemy seems to have many advantages the player does not, as if it were a cheating player.


Lack of balance:

All units except scouts also have a very low movement potential and it makes it so that the scout sets the entire pace of the game. Combined with the fact that you can use a single character multiple times per turn, it's really no surprise that the optimal strategy ends up being the "scout rush". Even if you want to use other characters, they seem to not be built for this game. What exactly are you supposed to do, spend multiple turns just to get them to the same position as a scout? The maps are big and not very dense, spending multiple turns just to move your characters from point A to B does not sound intuitive at all. Thankfully, there are mods that try to balance this issue.

Many things also feel very random: for example, the AI might decide to spend an entire turn spamming multiple attacks of the same character against one of yours and you see no strategic merit to it, it just feels unpredictable, random and fucks up your plans out of nowhere. It doesn't feel like the AI acted in a smart manner and managed to outsmart you so it's frustrating.


Too linear, not enough freedom. No strategies, just die and retry:

The game also seems to be designed more like a puzzle than a very complex strategy game. Oftentimes, it feels very limiting in the approaches you can take and it's even more so the case when there's a strict objective to follow. Some of them are really horrendous, boring and take a long time to accomplish. It's really easy to lose the game and restarting a map often involves redoing the exact same strategy until you arrive at the point where you fail and take another decision. It's very "die and retry" at times, which doesn't fit the genre. The worst about this part is that the game genuinely wants you to retry missions, there are so many things pushing you into this. You don't even get a map showing you the limits of the area before you actually deploy a character, there are hidden enemies whose placement only serves to kill the main character sending you to a game over screen, gimmicks are not explained or don't happen before you reach a certain point in battle (usually, you need to move to a specific part of the map) hence you can't take them into account on your first attempt...

There are many ways the game could have given more freedom to the player. For example, some maps have two paths where you need to deploy troops and simultaneously lead an attack from both sides. Why not... let the player take this decision on their own and simply create branches on the map? Why not have branches on EVERY map instead of having them be so linear? And I really think the game needs to be more forgiving considering all the uncertainty it involves.

If the above didn't clue you in to the fact the game is more about solving puzzles than tactics, then I'll let you know the game has absolutely no interaction with the environment. There's a crouch mechanic behind sandbags, that's IT. You can't crouch behind anything else, you can't hide behind walls and shoot, enemies have absolutely no sense of their surroundings and won't spot you for killing their friend right next to them, a mortar shot will not damage allies of the shooter or destroy anything, not even mines. Hell even the grenades are just another type of rifle, their area of effect is so reduced you can hardly hit two enemies at once.

This isn't much of a problem if you save and reload a load. It may just be me but I was completely unaware that you can save during a battle until the last third of the game and it's a game changer. It would certainly be better if you didn't have to rely on savescumming but I highly advise it since it allows you to counter many of the game's problems such as not having a proper oversight of the battlefield until you deploy or messing up a character's turn.


Gorgeous game with a unique artstyle, but uninteresting story:_

On another hand, the game is gorgeous to look at. The art style is very neat and I personally love it. It's a shame that most cutscenes are limited to 720p and suffer a lot from aliasing. These cutscenes don't offer much unfortunately, despite the game being very story driven. The story is a mess and not very substantial. While I enjoyed the banter between some characters, *it can get extremely tropey and even the characters end up very shallow, which is really a shame. All that's needed in this type of game is a solid cast with good interactions but I can't say this game goes far enough. One thing about the story that especially bothered me is that I was expecting a somewhat grounded war setting but at some point it introduces some kind of magical power... yeah.


So it's a fun, unique game overall but also a pretty frustrating experience and I would only recommend it while mentioning that you can savescum. Do it, do it a lot and at least use the "Quality of life" mod. It's not missing a lot to be an absolute blast but it doesn't have this "not a lot", unfortunately.

TLG is a weird game which I’m not sure how I feel about. This is the last Fumito Ueda game I played, after completing Ico and SOTC which I both enjoyed greatly. Ico was the last one I played and hearing that TLG was similar, I decided to jump right into it.

My first experience with the game was that while it has immediately apparent flaws, it felt like a magical experience. Trico is really an endearing creature with detailed animations and a behaviour that, for the first hours of the game, is incredible. You’ll spot the wild creature playing with a chain, being attracted by the smell of a pot or sniffing random stuff and it is nice to just look at it (spoiler, this pretty much doesn't happen in the later half). You also have the two characters obviously getting closer over the first few hours, until they eventually trust each other. Magical is really the word that comes to my mind to describe this part of the game, I was especially impressed by the part where you have to rely on Trico to grab you in midair while you jump as that completely renewed the logic of the game, where the protagonist was the one taking the initiative for everything and Trico was, until that point, just a wild animal indirectly supporting you.

My first problem with the game appeared around halfway through, when you almost reach the top of the main tower. At that point, something happens to make both your characters fall. I cannot emphasise enough how much I hated this moment. Ico and SOTC are both short games with a very clear progression, in Ico after around an hour you’ll know you need to go to two places to unlock the final area and SOTC will right away tell you that you need to fight 16 colossi, you know pretty much exactly how far you are from finishing at any point. This led me to believe TLG would also be a pretty short game and indeed the game does lead you in that direction. Everything else seems to indicate that. Is there really enough in this game for a 10+ hours game? No, clearly not, I’ll detail this in the next section. And here is the problem, the game suddenly throws you back down and you have to climb yet another way, for about two more hours and guess what? The game does it again! You are thrown down twice and have to climb up again.

At this point, the magic just broke. I thought I was almost done and suddenly I’m hit with “not this shit again” about everything the game had to offer. You’re telling me I still have multiple hours of this “looking for a lever” thing? Trico is not listening to me again? Oh please, just let me end this game. Everything pretty much turned into a distasteful frustration. I am not sure if it is because of my negative feelings, but I feel like the game just became worse outside of a few moments. It doesn’t help that everything feels like an unneeded filler at this point, since the game just repeats the same pattern all the time, but I feel like Trico’s AI just started bugging all the time.

It’s obvious that Trico is on rails for most of the game and this doesn’t actually bother me, in fact I think this should have been the entire game. It’s obviously very difficult to create an AI of a giant beast that will be exploring corridors and solving puzzles and it shows. Whenever Trico has any freedom, he’s likely to just blank out at your orders, go back and forth, bark at you like you’re asking for the impossible and then after five minutes of waiting, he suddenly does the thing you’ve been trying to order him to do. Yes, Trico feels like a real animal WHEN he is on rails. When the AI takes over, he’s just blanking out and acting buggy. Trico staring at a wall is not lifelike. Trico doing two jumps then decides to go backward or blanking out before the third jump is not lifelike. It is just frustrating, especially when the game announces you’re not even close to the end and the game starts being repetitive, you just want to finish it and it hits you very hard how clumsy Trico is. It is obvious this is very badly managed or I would have said the game definitively needs to make Trico speaks more. Trico already barks and complains a lot, the problem is that it happens for something he'll suddenly do 5 minutes later so it doesn't clue you into anything at all. Another very frustrating aspect of Trico blanking out is that you need to restart some segments if you die, which can happen a lot because of other reasons I mention, and especially in the lategame they distance the checkpoints more than before, with segments where you need Trico to do something and it takes forever every single time you restart.

For the first part of the game, I think these problems are much less apparent because Trico is pretty much on rails all the time. The game only teaches you that you can command him after a few hours, so I am guessing you didn’t need to press R1 at all until then (I played Ico first, so I just assumed I can use it and never realised the tutorial didn’t tell me about it). There’s a logic I quickly learned: if Trico doesn’t do something, you probably need to look for another path and it proved to work (not that it’s a positive aspect of the game, the progression is often very artificial: you see a path but no you need to go another place first for an interaction with Trico THEN you can finally go there). I was almost never stuck and would always quickly find the way to go. This turned out much less obvious in the second half of the game as Trico’s AI would just bug out and there are things that just don’t make sense. There are a few parts of the game where you need to just walk to the right spot to trigger something or the game won’t progress. The voiceover gives you some clues, but even for these you sometimes need to trigger something or you can wait forever and it just won’t tell you anything. Sometimes, it also spoils the game right away without giving you any time to think. In fact, I think it was meant to spoil you all the time, it’s just that I didn’t always trigger it fast enough (or didn’t trigger it at all, most likely). There are also these dumb moments where you need to feed Trico or he won’t lead you to the next spot and the only way to learn is either the voiceover (which can make you wait forever, as I said) or looking everywhere and not finding anything (and if you’re lucky you’ll find the food before being stuck). Since the food is usually hidden somewhere, you just have to guess that it's time to actually look for food, not very intuitive.

By the way, most of the commands are literally useless. I don’t think I ever needed anything other than plain R1 and R1 + circle / square which orders him to smash something (which I did like twice, including the tutorial). I have no idea why they didn’t just remove this and simplify the game.

I mentioned earlier the game has apparent flaws but I could ignore them: the longer the game goes the more frustrating they are. The character’s controls are terrible and surprisingly worse than Ico. Not only is it very annoying how frail they made the boy this time, with a more “realistic” approach (not being able to run/jump while carrying something, no jump spam, struggling animations when climbing…) but they made things very annoying and confusing. The auto-grab is really a pain especially when you press the button to let go but he decides to grab something midfall, then you have the controls which can be confusing. In Ico, you approach a ladder and he climbs it, here you need to press the grab button. The thing I hated the most is how they’ve removed the auto-tracking for jump grabbing things. In Ico, you’ll never miss a chain because of the tracking but here, you really need to aim for that chain. The camera is also pretty terrible and really unfit for the combo of large beast + tight environments. It fades out to black a lot whenever it can’t manage to show something and it’ll often not show you what you want. I’m glad we can at least control it like a normal 3D game this time around though, as I really dislike the Ico camera. I don’t understand though why in every Fumito Ueda game, you just fucking can’t move the camera around without it centering back on the main character especially if you’re moving. What if I just want to observe some landscape?!

I like the overall design of the environment in this game and it looks very pretty with the cell shaded style and all. Not very immersive though because it quickly becomes apparent how much the place is designed for the player. Ico slightly had this problem but here it’s really emphasised. Literally everything you need has a magical lever to solve your problem. What’s the most immersion breaking is that they could have at least made a logic to those levers, but no. A gate you need to open will have a lever close to it, but not all gates will. Trico has a lever for the armour and chain at the very beginning, but not later beasts. Whenever you go off tracks you’ll notice how much the game has designed a path specifically for the player. Aside from these levers, the rest of the game is just as nonsensical. What’s the purpose of this entire place? It’s just full of empty rooms, big corridors and gates like the entrance of a castle. There isn’t a single room with anything useful and whenever it’s not empty, it’s some weird design like the traps that make Trico mad. Even the placement of the guards is weird.

And the guards… this is by far the worst part of the game. The guards are really annoying and the mechanic of mashing keys to free yourself is utterly terrible. Being pursued by them while you have to solve a riddle is just terrible. There’s even a section where I just restarted because if you get spotted by them, it’s impossible to have the time to pull a specific lever before they grab you. Then there’s the fights, where you just watch Trico beating the guards and can’t do anything. This is also where Trico’s animations are the worst as he’s jumping around in a really clunky manner and this is even more so terrible because it means you can’t even stand still on his back, remove spears or anything because it’ll constantly shake you. Oh yeah, you can’t even AFK because of this so don’t try it. Then after the fights Trico is angry and you need to appease him, which really gets tiring especially toward the end of the game where you need to do it multiple times in a row because they kept piling up fights. The end of the game is really a terrible section honestly with some of the worst segments of the game.

There were many cool moments but it feels like the game should have really just been that without the extra fillers: the first time you cross a bridge in midair and need to get rid of the eyes, the fight against another beast, when you’re left alone with the other beast, etc. Then the game would have been about 5-6 hours just like the previous games and I think people would appreciate it a lot more. The flaws are pretty easy to ignore when you make the game a much shorter experience. It really doesn’t offer anything to climb towers for an additional 6 hours with the same riddles all the time and frustrating mechanics. Some of the cool moments are even ruined because of how often they are used. I was really impressed the first time you have Trico jump and rescue you by grabbing you when you’re falling but then they kept doing it all the time. You also have the “oh no he missed you but surprise he’s using his tail to grab you” which just doesn’t work after the first time.

Remember how I mentioned that Trico and the boy become closer over the first few hours? It all stops after that and there’s pretty much no evolution until the last 30 minutes. There’s a part where Trico will actually fight the eye dudes because you’re in danger, but then he goes back to being scared by them again. That’s about it.

Finally, I’ll mention the lack of variety if I didn’t explicitly say it already. It’s always about finding a magical lever or having Trico jump somewhere, there’s pretty much nothing else. They really could have thought of better interactions, both for the boy and the protagonist. Maybe using a crate to push a button? Hell, Ico already had more ideas. They even added an item, the mirror, which you will use for about one hour in the entire game because it’s unavailable the rest of the time.

So despite all this, I actually enjoyed most of the game. It sorts of feels like a Ghibli movie, but that’s really about it. Even the story is honestly pretty uninteresting, Ueda gets praised for the minimalistic approach but I really don’t see anything special in this case, the story doesn’t complement the game or add anything, neither artistic nor a message. It doesn’t even particularly tie into the lore of the previous games. This game is basically Ico 2.0, some things better and a lot worse and it’s not terrible by any means but it’s definitely disappointing overall. I've seen people praise this story telling style but I feel like the game is very generic, it's almost just a Ghibli movie in my opinion. Yes, I like a minimalistic approach but really, what is left here? If I missed some details, I'd be happy to hear about it. I know there are some details in the game but they are really way too sparse. Compare to a game like Dark Souls for example, which is inspired by Ueda and also has a unique style of story telling. I'm not talking about how it has lore through item descriptions: have you noticed how much the environment tells you? You'll find statues of specific characters, broken things that indicate something was removed here, paintings, etc. and they clue you into additional lore. TLG just has bland environment, there's maybe two rooms (like the one with the mirror at the beginning) which clue you into anything but it's so lackluster that I think anyone theorising about this game's story is just inventing their own, entirely.

Even if you're a fan of Ueda's previous games I'm not sure I would recommend it. I would like to say that it's worth playing at least the first few hours and then you can drop it, unfortunately many of the good short events happen lategame so you'll still miss a lot.

Chained Echoes is not perfect, it's not the most artistic game I've ever played and it definitively has its flaws, but it was an extremely fun experience. I went into the game not expecting much but I was really surprised by what the game gave me.

Let me start with the worst parts: yes, this game's story is a mix of maybe too many things, you don't always understand where the creator wanted to go and many things feel rushed if not unexplained. Despite that, I think the game has a likeable cast, an extremely solid intro of over ten hours and the story manages to be good enough to be enjoyed and have its touching and memorable moments.

That aside, what this game does is something I don't often see in a JRPG. The gameplay is extremely FUN. From the combat to the exploration, this game really nails it and in a lot of ways it reminded me of why I loved CrossCode. You have to go from point A to B but the level is so big and full of stuff that you might spend hours just looking up for every small chest instead of doing the main quests.

As for the combat, I never got bored of the combat system and every trash fight was enjoyable even if not providing a challenge because the game has so many fun skills to use or combos to create between different abilities that I really enjoyed just mindlessly wrecking a horde of trashmobs, instead of trying to save my MP while spamming physical attacks.

And perhaps the strongest point of the game is the sidequests. The game has very humorous and lively quests that are unlocked as you progress or that you discover by exploring. They're all fun and there is a LOT of optional areas to explore. Hell, at some point the map really opens up and you get an overwhelming amount of things you can do at once, I thought it was a blast.

Chained Echoes is a really good game. It knows how to be fun and I could feel the author's spirit. I don't care that it's flawed, I think it's fine the way it is because ultimately the author wanted to do an homage to his childhood games and I think he managed to do so.

This version is pretty much the same as the original, so you can check my review for it here.

Having the game on a bigger screen feels really nice and the game has been adapted well to work without the 3ds touch screen. There are some improvements like a few RNG events not being random any more.

On another hand, the upscaling is pretty disappointing and they did a much better job with RF3S. It's a shame that the best game in the series will not get such a treatment because this remaster came first.

We can also finally use Japanese dubs without hacking a ROM and using a custom 3ds firmware so that was nice.

Note : RF4S is a slightly better version especially because it's not on a 3ds, but if you actually want to play on a 3ds then this version is perfectly playable. If you can, pick a ROM with Japanese dubs.

There are a lot of times I look at farming games and think they look painfully bland. You position yourself in front of a farming tile, you press a button and watch a one second animation during which you do nothing, something happens -either you plant, you till or gather something-, you move forward in a janky manner and do the same thing in the next tile of your grid based farm.

Then you have Rune Factory 4. When you water your plants, you have to move along your land to progressively water it. You can press the tilling button repeatedly to till forward. You can even charge your tools like you would charge weapon. It FEELS like a game, it feels GOOD. Even when you pick up items, there's this positive feedback because there's a weight to the item, it's not just a long animation where your character picks up something and you're stuck watching, unable to move. Hell you can even pick up multiple items at once and stack then on top of your character. All of that is what makes the farming in this game really good to play.

When I first started this game, I thought it would be an average mix of anime tropes, maybe some JRPG elements and farming. I wasn't wrong but the game also delivered so much more. Sure, the story and the characters are very tropey but at the same time, the game makes such a smart use of dialogue that I've never felt like a game was this alive. The amount of dialogue is insane and even after a hundred hours of playing, you'll still have new things to read. Every day, every character says something new. They also talk to each other. There are also random events in town involving them and there are multiple dozens of them! Quantity over quality is not something I usually appreciate but RF4 is perhaps the only game that manages to deliver something out of that. The end result is that the tropey characters have a lot of nuance, personality and that ultimately I learned to love them and to not mind living alongside them. This goes to the point that I just cannot stand most similar games because none of them offers one tenth of RF4's writing. I've really seen no other game with such an organic town and characters and it doesn't help in making me enjoy other farming games.

RF4 is a great farming game, a great slice of life game and it's also a great adventure and RPG. Not only does it combine aspects of management and adventuring rather well, but the game also has a lot to offer. Crafting and cooking are core mechanics and the crafting in this series is perhaps the most in-depth I have ever seen in any game, with an enormous amount of freedom given to the player when it comes to customisation. You can use any item in the game to craft and almost all of them have a specific effect. You want to make a weapon with every single status effect? You can. A giant spear bigger than the screen? You can!!!

The freedom given to the player is a huge part of why this game feels fun. There are tons of ways to break the game, for example you can throw bad food at enemies and it'll affect them the same way it affects you. Have a rotten food which deals -50% HP? Throw it at a boss and see what happens, the developers did not prevent you from doing so! Every time you find such a thing, it feels rewarding and at the same time not out of place. Ultimately the game is a lot about minmaxing, grinding and optimizing things but in a fun and stressless ways. It's not a hard or frustrating game and yet it still is quite fun to break.

Despite its limitations, the game also offer a great amount of exploration in the style of ALTTP dungeons, with every screen usually being a separate map area. The world is huge and there are a lot of dungeons, enemies, items to be collected... Did I mention you can capture every single enemy and use them as fighting pets, mounts or have them work in your farm? And if you don't like them, then bring up to two villagers alongside you in battle, you can even equip them as you wish!

The game has a ton of such systems and you never get bored. Grinding is a core mechanic and everything in the game has stats, from walking to sleeping to taking a bath. Sure they don't amount to much but it's still great hearing the skill up jingle every time you level up your walking.

Perhaps what I like the most about the game is its ergonomics. Teleport home whenever you want. Need something? Press L1/LB to open your quick menu which allows access to your ENTIRE INVENTORY within seconds, seriously no other game can rival this. It feels like you don't waste a single second and everything is as optimized as it can get. It feels... great! Truly, one of my favourite games of all times.