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.

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 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.

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.

Through a compilation of short videos of an interrogation room, this game manages to present a very compelling and fascinating story. Right from the get-go, it manages to captivate you with a single word, murder, and you'll have to understand what it means and you'll WANT to know why it's there.

It's amazing how this game manages to hook you so easily into doing this investigation work. The nature of the game also makes it that every player will take their own path and make reach a different answer. At the end of the game, I was honestly far from being fixated on an answer and I must admit to having watched all the footage in the proper order, in the game's folder, before I could really understand what's going on.

I think this game truly creates a morbid, fascinating atmosphere that really makes you feel the dread of your average household incident. It's a "slice of life" of real life horror.

Eastward is a beautiful game and has some of the best pixel art I've seen. Every screen is so vividly detailed and the game's design of abandoned urban locations really strike. There was definitively a lot of work put into this aspect.

It's not the best action or exploration game with both limited gameplay and level design, but it's a JRPG full of interactions before anything. It's essentially a travelling game with Mother-like vibes and characters. You move to a place, meet goofy characters and so on. The grand overarching story isn't much but every location offers its own story and I really enjoyed completing the quests and getting to know more about the characters.

Unfortunately, one specific chapter of the game gets the short end of the stick and I wish it had been longer, considering the importance it's supposed to have in the context of the story. The conclusion and overarching story also have quite a bit of plotholes but overall they work and provided an emotional closure to the game.

I'm very satisfied to have played Eastward and it's one of the most enjoyable Mother-like I played.

This game was probably worth being made for the "roguelight" pun alone. That aside, it's a pretty cool roguelite which is suprisingly short. Does a game have to be long to be good? I personally like short games like this that don't overstay their welcome and which I can finish and move on to something else.

The game has a really nice art direction with some gothic artstyle and a very simple pallet of "colours". There are a lot of cute little details in the animations, especially when it comes to the protagonists such as her victory poses, the main menu... Really cool. I really really like the artstyle and the character design is neat too, the heroine really stands out in my opinion.

For a roguelite, the replayability is more limited than usual but as I said, I didn't mind that and on another hand, the game manages to bring something new regularly. The runs are divided into story progression chapters and will unlock the full dungeon after three runs, then customised runs with gimmicks which bring some welcome changes. It's still fairly limited though, why not change the spawn point for example instead of always starting in the same area or have a boss rush, or runs that don't require completing every area for the umpteenth time?

There are also quite a few balancing issues. A lot of the weapons feel underpowered and some of them are way too good compared to the rest. For example, there's a weapon that scatters light directly in front of you on the ground, the range is extremely limiteed, the damage is the same as any weapon and it doesn't have any special effect. Another one just slows down projectiles, which is pretty much useless considering the small range of the weapon. A lot of them just don't stand out and there's seemingly no reason to pick them, hell they can be worse than the default weapon. It's the same for the weapon perks: why pick something that increases my damage after killing an enemy when I can find the same passive but it works at all times? There's seemingly no advantage to the killing version and the game doesn't make a good job at explaining how long it lasts, how much of a bonus it is... What is flash damage? I never understood throughout the entire game.

Another issue I find with balancing is that the game gives you too many upgrade slots. This ultimately means that you can combine all the useful buffs the game provides you and you have to worry very little about making choices, which is a big flaw in a roguelite. I can combine electricity, healing, daze and burning all at once and the buffs such as damage seem pretty limited, so there's hardly any moment in the game where you're stuck in a dilemma. Since the drops get better with the run progression, it's also pretty rare to find multiple equivalent drops and instead you just get better gear, so the game really doesn't raise the question of how to build your character.

Still, I really enjoy the game despite its flaws and I think it's worth playing.

Somehow this game manages to be worse than the previous one despite showing evolution. Unfortunately, it evolved in all but the right ways. See my review of the first game for more details.

Everything that made the charm of the first game is essentially thrown away, I'll just list some comparisons:

The minimalistic story is replaced with a much more involved narrative. Unfortunately it only serves to show how poor the writing is, whereas it didn't matter in the previous game because the story is relatively unimportant. The abundance of mini-cutscenes is also quite frustrating, the game taking control away from you for usually no good reason. Every so often you have to watch your character agitating the lamp in multiple directions as if surprised by a sound or something, instead of experiencing it yourself. It's the same for multiple scares, which don't work because the game takes control away from you at that point. Not only does it break immersion but it's simply frustrating because of how often this happens are and they really break the flow.

I must admit however that the story has a good surprise toward the end, but that's about it.

Where the previous game could have benefited from being more open ended, this one is even more linear than before. Almost every single location is locked in a precise way by those giant monsters or barricades that magically disappear when it's convenient for the plot, requiring you to take the path the game wants. The directions are also clearer but in a way that only emphasizes the linearity. The annoying dog appears every 10 meters to tell you where to go and it is extremely immersion breaking.

The chases are replaced by mostly awful boss battles that require you to die multiple times and go through the same ordeal to solve them. The biggest problem with them is that they're extremely tedious to redo and require a lot of waiting every single time. This is a very intentional design in many segment of the game where it's obvious that the developers intended for the player to die and it's just infuriating, especially when you consider that they did not put checkpoints and require you to backtrack in many cases. Oftentimes, the boss is just a matter of evading attacks for a few minutes before you can do anything that matters and this is where you die if you do not have the solution, forcing you to restart a sequence of waiting for minutes before trying again.

The biggest change by far : the environmental sound design is much tamer and ordinary. What made the first game stand out was how powerful the environment was, the strong sound of cicadas or the wind in the rice fields. This created a truly unique and captivating atmosphere. This time around, the town is mostly silent and you'll only hear your footsteps. What's worse, the monsters are much more aggressive and most of them have very annoying and violent sounds that completely shatter any peacefulness. Even the dog seems completely out of the loop, why put such an annoying sounding pomeranian? A much lower pitched dog would have done the job better, like in the first game.

Adding onto that, the monsters themselves are rather boring. In the first game, you explore a town where most monsters can easily be avoided and are almost harmless. This helped to create this mystical atmosphere which is not just horror. In this game, you walk through a desolate town where at every corner there's a white ghost looking to chase you for 100 meters while spamming the same annoying scream and death traps are also much more common. There are also less ways to interact with enemies such as throwing rocks so that the ghosts would not pursue you any more. Therefore the appeal of exploration is reduced and there are more chases through areas instead.

All of this just shows that the developers did not grasp what made the first game so interesting and instead invested into much cheaper directions, making a game which keeps the flaws but doesn't have any of the pros of the previous one. I would not recommend to play this game at all and it's pretty terrible in my opinion. The first game is also much shorter, it doesn't help that this one is double the length when it has nothing to show.