They warned me, they told me it was bad. They told me to skip it, I didn’t believe them. I thought maybe it would be like the Dark Souls 2 situation. Hell, someone once recommended I skip Trails in the sky 3rd and it ended up being my favourite game in the series.

No, this time they were right. The game is just as bad as everyone says.

Everything sucks about it except maybe the graphics. The melee moveset is pretty lame and a lot of the enemies require guns to be fought anyway. The upgrade system has been replaced by just numerical upgrades and honestly I’m not even sure I see the difference.

Mobs barely try to hit you. You can play most of the game by holding the button to fire your gun and you don’t even have to bother moving except for a few bosses. What’s more annoying is that it takes a lot of time to kill tanky enemies despite them not doing anything and the game loves throwing groups of enemies. You advance to a new area, you trigger a group spawn and you have to kill maybe twenty trash mobs. It never stops.

For my second playthrough as Lucia, I just skipped every optional encounter and the game was still dull. It feels like a bad copy of Mario 64 where I just follow the red coins. I don’t even know why I bothered playing this playthrough, it’s some of the same levels plus an underwater section and the cutscenes are barely different. Yes, even the cheesy cutscenes you get to watch twice.

Why is there even a story? Dante talks to a random girl who tell him to go somewhere and they both meet again there. Couldn’t they have do so right away? Then from a random village he’ll take a bike to go to a big city instead? Why? Why are you chasing this comical sorcerer dude and all? Why is there a full city “infested” (yes infested) by tanks?

Perhaps the only positive thing about this game is that it’s quite short, at least you only have to endure about six hours of suffering.

It’s a terrible experience, but real gamers don’t skip DMC 2.

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.

A controversial title but I liked it. The game is much slower paced and is set in a different location, but I really enjoyed the slice of life approach.

Unlike Kiwami 1 and 2 there's no complete remake, but the game feels modern enough. I actually like this combat system much more than the modern dragon engine, the only flaw is that enemies will constantly block you. Some of them will also dodge non-stop with i-frames which is absolutely horrendous, otherwise this would be one of my favourite Yakuza games.

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.

Overall a fun game but it's being held back by numerous, truly numerous, flaws.

Silent Hope is a roguelike that alternates between sending you inside a long, continuous dungeons to kill monsters, gather materials and move forward and another section where you are managing resources at your base.

First of all, the base management is absolutely horrendous. During the dungeoning, you gather materials which will be used to craft weapons, pretty straightforward so far right? Except you need to process them into processed materials first, for example turning wood into lumber or plant something for it to grow, before you can use them. This also takes time, which only runs when you are dungeoning. So to use new materials and ingredients, you essentially need at least two runs which is a weird decision that I don't really understand and only serves to hinder your progress if you rush through the dungeons, which start very easy.

The loot system of the game isn't spared from this. With a diablo-like loot system, you're gonna get a lot of weapons or so you thought. They're crafting schemes which you need to actually craft at the base using your materials. Unfortunately, the variable differences between weapons are very minimal: their base attack value is almost the same per weapon type and one area in a dungeon will usually only have the same weapon type, until you progress enough to get better weapons. Ultimately, you just end up with a lot of copies of the same weapon cluttering your inventory, and the inventory and crafting interface in this game are pretty bad and unintuitive. Did I mention how bad the processing interface was? Because you'll be wasting a lot of time scrolling to get the material you want to process, interrupted by an animation the first time you do it after every dungeoning session and then you'll waste even more getting rid of needless weapon schemes and whatnot. There's no easy way to scroll and sort your stuff, it's all very tedious and involves a lot of micromanagement and repetition.

There's also cooking and... yeah, it's not really much better than the rest.

The story is fairly unimpressive and serviceable. Despite being a part of the Rune Factory series, it doesn't really develop onto anything so it might as well not be a spinoff. Aside from woolies and a few weapon/ingredients from the main series, you'll hardly recognise anything. The music is also fairly limited and gets repeated a lot during your playthroughs. On another hand, I was very surprised with the voice acting, especially of the king, which was very good, but there are few instances of dialogue in the game (excluding the constantly chattering princess, which thankfully can be disabled).

Dungeoning is where the game is fun but even so, it's pretty limited. Most monsters hardly flinch so a lot of the game involves running back and forth by using the dodge feature whenever your skills are recharging. The more you move forward, the less useful your basic attack seems to be and unfortunately your skills have at least 4-5 seconds of cooldown for the lucky ones, 10 for the unlucky caster which is in my opinion the worst class in the game because of this. You can end up waiting a lot depending on your playstyle, just because your skills have very long cooldown and you can at most have three of them. This also creates a dilemma where you either try to get easily spammable skills to be effective or you try to focus on a good combo (like caster seems to be build for) but you'll be AFK for a while after every burst of attacks.

Some characters also suffer from terrible flaws. Warrior for example has an attack where she spins her weapon and it's supposed to attract enemies to her, stunning them if they get hit enough. However, this skill flinches the enemies, sending them away from you and resulting in them not being attracted nor getting stunned. Another one of her attacks is a charge which pushes enemies away and is supposed to deal multiple hits as long as you keep running into an enemy. The unfortunate result is the physics of the game will often throw an enemies ABOVE your head and they won't get hit until the end of your charge. This kind of game breaking thing is fairly common and pretty annoying honestly, even more so when I really enjoyed the concept of those.

The dungeons stay fairly basic with a limited number of enemies that repeat themselves in slightly different shapes. Overall it's alright, but the repetitive nature of being forced into the same areas over and over because you died or you need to process materials or you need to level up your previous characters is pretty underwhelming, even more so knowing that you already have dozens of every material type, that you are not going to get a better weapon or anything out of it... There is no fast way to progress, especially in the lategame where floors can be extremely long and tedious to go through, without any indication of an exit. I honestly spent more time just running and dodging enemies because I had absolutely nothing to gain and it's much more efficient to progress to newer areas to progress.

Despite this, one last thing will eventually hold you back. You might assume that you can simply blast through the game with one character and equip better gear on the others, allowing them to catch up. You would be wrong, as levels heavily influence your character's strength despite this, you will therefore be forced to eventually go back an area or two and grind them.

I feel like this game would really have benefited from allowing more than three skills to be funnier to play. It also doesn't really play into its concept of constantly switching characters despite the boosts you get from doing so and the frequency of crystals, because they really want you to stay stuck in the same area and level up every character individually. Additionally, you'll only unlock the third and last class of every character one dungeon layer after beating the main story boss and oh boy, you'll need to grind your characters and repeat that one area with each of the seven characters.

I would add the completely astounding price of 40usd on release as yet another flaw but at least by now you can get the game at 20usd on sales. Which is still fairly expensive in my opinion, there are better and cheaper roguelites out there. Ultimately, if it hadn't been a Rune Factory spinoff I probably would not have ended up playing it.

Typecast is a pretty unique game and it can be quite addicting, with a high skill ceiling at that. You control your mouse cursor as you have to avoid ennemies which you can kill by hitting the right keyboard key if they're within your attack range, and from then on it gets more complicated.

The concept is surprisingly fun and really allows the player to try and progress. The leaderboard is a really nice concept I love seeing in a game like this, it really pushes you forward and encourages you to beat your score. The only other game I played that did this was Killbug.

The presentation is also really nice, from the visuals to the sound effects it's very pleasing. I especially like the main menues and the voice over which reads some of the options like START!

Overall a good concept but I didn't really like the execution. The game is extremely frustrating for many reasons, such as :
- the terrible aiming and how precise you need to be to hit with guns
- hell, even melee weapons sometimes, why can't the character redirect himself with the left joystick like it does in the non combat areas???
- janky IA that randomly doesn't notice shots
- a screen that easily becomes unreadable AND enemies constantly out of your sight
- enemies that are so similar you can hardly tell which weapon they're holding
- the instant reaction speed of enemies and their 100% precise aiming
- the disastrous boss design (thankfully there's only two of them)

It feels very cheap to die when it's so easy for it to happen and how things are outside of your control. It also doesn't encourage me to learn and better myself at the game, I'm done playing it once.

The story part feels pretty poor, while it's interesting the execution is also mediocre. After playing Katana Zero, I'd say that game is a straight up upgrade in every concept that Hotline Miami wanted to execute.

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.

The game has a lot to show and always throws something new and interesting to the player. The story is simple and intriguing. Overall, the game is very pretty.

I feel like the linear structure and cinematic walking wasn't really necessary, as most of the game happens through transitioning into a new environment when you interact with something in the house. Having a more "movable" character and a free house to explore (like Gone Home, for example) would have been more interesting in my opinion. If there's a part of the game that doesn't add anything, it's surely slowly crawling through a hole, although I get that they wanted to pace the game like a movie (which it isn't, it's a game after all).

The game has many details but the overly linear and cinematic experience doesn't really emphasize going back to find them, so I do think it's a miss on that part. It doesn't feel as natural as finding something in Gone Home or maybe Deus Ex, for example.

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.

It's a fun game and a good concept but it overstays its welcome without adding anything new. The game up to chapter 3 is alright but the last chapter is too much of a grind.

This game has a very pleasant atmosphere about nothingness, which I'm surprised isn't mentionned more often. While the story is very minimalistic, the few moments of it are pleasant to go through. The dialogue is well written and the pixel portraits are awesome.

The game's main flaw is how quickly it becomes repetitive because everything major is unlocked early on. It's also easy to discover most possible combinations of cards, so the game gets stale. I honestly feel like the game just... stops. You've discovered everything, you HAVE finished it. Sure, there's a few cards requiring a lot of grind to unlock but you have seen 95% of the content, you have unlocked all classes and base facilities, you are at the last chapter and the next ten or twenty hours are a repeat of the exact same thing. At that point, the game feels incomplete, the gameplay loop starts falling apart.

It doesn't help that the game is very RNG oriented and there's little skill you can develop overtime and there aren't that many strategies either. Perhaps the worst part is the extremely punishing death penalty which slows down your progress, making it a serious grind to beat the final level.

The game is also so slow! Seriously, the maximum speed needs to be raised way higher. Too much of the playtime is just wasted looking at the screen while you can do nothing and there isn't even much in the way of animations to look at.

As a port, it does many things right and wrong. The graphics have been upscaled properly and unlike the pc port of RF4, the game looks really good on a big screen. On another hand, it's a shame to see the lack of many QoL features that should have been an obvious addition, such as your items automatically stacking together when you switch from one inventory to another, or indicating shipped items...

I think that releasing this game after RF4S, it was natural to expect the QoL features of RF4 to be introduced in this game, even more so when they are very simple and minimalistic features. Just like RF4S, the game also stays very simple when it comes to pc configuration and does not even have in-game configs, instead having you to go through an external executable as if the main game was some sort of emulated package.

That aside, the game is fantastic and pretty similar to Rune Factory 4, one of my favourite games. It's essentially a smaller scale version of that game but by no means is it a prototype. This is a complete package and rather than calling it a prototype, I think it's RF4 which is a follow-up to this one with a "best of the series" packaging.

The village is really fun to live in and I loved interacting with the villagers. They get a lot of development through their individual quests and I liked their design. It's unfortunate that many of them are relatively isolated however and hardly interact with the rest of the village, or stick to one topic almost entirely (such as a certain mother which complains about her daughter almost all the time...). But otherwise, they're fantastic, have a lot of dialogue and get a fair share of development. Some of the developments really came a surprise to me as they changed how I viewed a character or directly changed the way the character acted towards the protagonist, which I think is a welcome idea.

One thing I found fairly lacking in the game is the monster transformation. What I believe would lead to an entire feature where you can unlock different forms... never evolved. It's essentially just a fist-type weapon (like the RF4 one) and doesn't do any more than that. Ultimately it's pretty lackluster because it scales based on your stats and ignore your gear so it is pretty much useless on hell mode and in the later dungeons where your gear is extremely important. There is also a similar problem with the magic seeds which can't be improved and therefore stay rather limited in their use.

The game goes by pretty fast and in about 50 hours, I'd explored every dungeon up to the last maze, maxed out all relationships and shipped all items. But they were really fun and enjoyable hours.

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.