341 reviews liked by Lewisisphat


This review contains spoilers

What a fucking DOWNGRADE? The combat has improved a decent amount and the world is much more fun to explore but that's really as far as the pros go for me.

Overall the enemy variety is abysmal and even when you get into the postgame it barely changes. Monsters from DD1 are just completely missing such as the Hydra, Cockatrice and the Evil Eye. New enemies are mostly just the absolute worst to fight, especially the Dullahan. Encounter rates are also terrible, you're fighting goblins or harpies every 4 steps and they aren't even tough fights, they just take up time.

The story overall is fucking awful, it feels like nothing has happened and then boom you're at the ending. It's such a big load of nothing with very little going for it.

Most "Setpieces" function very poorly and aren't as big and cool as they wanted them to be. The Gigantus is a major one where you have to stop it by destroying all the crystals on its body. Problem is the climbing in this game is absolute dogshit compared to 1 and if you're any class that isn't thief, climbing it is a nightmare. It also just keeps walking once you destroy all the bits and you're just meant to wait without it being conveyed to you.

That's what half this game is, things happen without information being conveyed to you properly.

Speaking of classes, don't pick any class except Thief, It's not worth it. Thief does insane damage output and solos the entire game. Every other class gets absolutely fucked over in every department.

The Pawn system is somehow worse? They never do anything they're told to do. You'll be scrambling around on the floor or staggered, getting eviscerated by an enemy and they'll just stand there casting heal or ignoring you. They run off to fight enemies you have no interest in fighting every two seconds, they fall off cliffs and just disappear needing to be summoned again. They never shut the fuck up about running places. Honestly, just terrible.

Traversal is also absolute ass. At first I didn't mind walking everywhere. It's fun to explore and find new things....but only for so long. Fast travel is limited to a very expensive and rare resource (or you can spend real money, thanks capcom!) and while I don't mind that at first, it gets absolutely tedious when you're spending 90% retreading the same paths over and over. Ox Carts are another way to get around but most of the time you're spending money to wake up mid ride with the cart being demolished by a monster and having to walk the rest of the way.

I wanna talk about the post game or rather...the real game. When you get the "true ending" (Which without really looking it up or asking someone you probably wont get) you are taken to the Unmoored World and the games title screen changes to "Dragons Dogma 2" which while kinda neat feels like this is the real game. It's the original map completely demolished with insanely OP enemies everywhere. It's pretty neat at first...until you realise you have not only one life to beat the entire area, but also if you rest too many times you will end the game and be forced into NG+. This essentially limits your exploration time in this world massively and makes it feel more like a chore you're speeding through to avoid taking too much damage to need to rest. It's honestly a terrible concept and just takes all the fun out of the game for me.

Overall the game is very interesting and can be pretty fun in places, but that fun is soon overshadowed by repetitive nonsense, abysmal writing, poor game direction and poor cohesive instruction to inform the player of things happening.

Also the Dragons Plague being a mechanic is terrible, whoever thought it was a good idea to make your own party able to wipe out entire towns is an asshole.

some of yall have gone so far deep into anti-gamefreak rhetoric (which yeah, is wholly valid) that you've shifted the pendulum in order to defend this slop. is palworld really the hill you want to die on?

literally just play spectrobes instead

on the one hand, i feel bad for spike chunsoft and kodaka because i predict that they will likely never be able to escape danganronpa (DR) comparisons for any work they publish for the rest of their careers. i know that this review is going to invoke several comparisons just by itself. on the other hand, this game practically begs for them. the presentation both in art style and music is identical, and some specific plot twists turn the screw against veterans of the DR series in a devious way. still, this game ultimately works best for an audience that hasn't played any of the DR games before, because mystery labyrinths feel like diet class trials and the murders are less characteristically zany or intricate with victims and murderers who you are less invested in as characters. in fact, the worst part is that this game's mysteries are a lot more guessable, to a detrimental point. still, i feel part of the blame is the baggage that master detective archives comes with for a lot of people, and, in that respect, i feel sympathy for this work receiving a lukewarm response critically, financially, and (most importantly) with fans.

let me clarify what i mean when i say "the mysteries are too guessable" because it's a very loaded statement. danganronpa mysteries tend to function with a certain amount of known and unknown variables. when you walk into a class trial for the first time, there's a high likelihood you'll know how some of the events transpired, but you'll lack critical information to really cement how all of it played out. sometimes this can be a certain character being cagey about their whereabouts during the murder, or it can be characters obfuscating evidence with their own motivations for doing so. this means the game will have to provide that information during the trial before you can get a plausible idea for what happened. good examples of this would be 1-2, 2-1, 2-2, and 3-2. it's not necessarily impossible for someone to be able to say "the killer for this case is x, the method they used is y, and their motive was z", but i would say there's basically no case where you can guess all three before the class trial begins.

so, knowing that, let me tell you now that with no exaggeration i was able to guess the murder and methodology for every murder case except the last one before even setting foot in the mystery labyrinth. (the motives were a lot more of a crapshoot. this game places a lot softer of an emphasis on motives for killing especially compared to DR's habit of having monokuma tempt the students with things like "if you don't kill someone i will reveal your darkest secret" or "kill someone and you won't have to deal with a class trial", etc. and instead you'll get more normal motives like killing for profit.) i am not saying this to brag or imply that i'm some super meta-genius when it comes to these things. if anything, i consider myself below average when it comes to solving murder mystery type stories, so you can see the problem i'm presenting here. these mysteries are too undercooked and too simple to really catch me off guard. maybe the DR poisoning has made me keenly aware of certain clues/killers, but i truly believe this is more a failing of the game not presenting enough variables and interesting situations. process of elimination will solve most of the "who is the culprit" guessing before the mystery labyrinths even begin. where's the tension there?

and, to be absolutely clear, there is nothing wrong with a murder mystery being solvable. in fact, some of the best mysteries are the ones where you have all the information and can solve on your own. the problem is pacing. the investigation segments of this game take a fiendishly long time, even by DR standards, and so much of the mystery labyrinths are dedicated to repeating back things the player likely already deduced. i would go so far as to say something like 10% of the game's script is just summarizing either already known plot points or explaining what the player just proved. i actually enjoyed some of these mysteries in spite of this repetition (with chapters 0 and 2 being the most enjoyable of the game imo), but it didn't help that it constantly felt like i was 2 steps ahead of the game all the time.

master detective archives takes a very hard veer away from DR formula as well by constantly introducing new characters as suspects for each case. the problem was that DR reusing characters for suspects was part of the brilliance of its premise: someone who you'd expect to never commit a murder in the first chapter could easily be the murderer by the third. it also invested you greatly in the cast because you didn't know who would make it to the end and who would take that dark left turn to murder. i feel a lot less investment in accusing a character in chapter 1 of this game, for instance, when literally none of the suspects have names. seriously, you're telling me i have to pick between priest, nun, servant, and worshipper instead of people with names? you also get scant precious time to actually know these characters, some of which you'll interact with potentially only once before having to accuse them. again, this is playing against a DR trope, so i get what they wanted to do, but it's sort of like saying "i'm known for writing stories with several endearing characters, so what if i break tradition and give you a bunch of NOTHING characters huh? would that fuck with you guys a bit?". and, well, it results in a lot of moments with deflated tension. that's probably why chapter 2 was my favorite case; you're given an uncharacteristically large amount of time to learn who the suspects are before the mystery labyrinth, and it invested me so much more in the story going on there.

this stringent economy of characters also works against itself with the recurring cast too. there's only about 6 characters that get any development throughout the entire game, and most of the time their presence ends up being mutually exclusive. so, that means you'll get to spend chapter 1 with a, 2 with b, 3 with c, and so on. i think the attempt at quality vs. quantity is a worthy goal, but it lacks for execution. desuhiko somehow ends up being worse than any of the sex pests in the DR games, fubuki's ditzyness borders on "if i leave this girl alone for two minutes i'm gonna walk in on her licking an electrical socket", and generally i'm just left underfed for a lot of these characters as a whole. all of them abruptly disappear in the final chapter as well, which makes their presence feel even more undercut. gumshoe gab does go a bit of a ways to helping characterize them more, but the majority of the time you're gonna be spent with yuma and shinigami, and their dynamic wears thin pretty quickly.

i certainly wouldn't say i hated master detective archives, but it started to lose me at the halfway mark and basically never recovered. i think the fourth and fifth chapters are especially bad because chapter 4 ends up cutting a lot of corners in its mystery as well as just having several parts that either make no sense or go unexplained. meanwhile, chapter 5 is largely just a lore dump in the investigation and then a regurgitation in the mystery labyrinth. most of the "big" twists of the endgame are things that i had already loosely predicted and just lacked the exact details to hours ago. again, these things being guessable isn't the problem, the problem is rooted in the game thinking these mysteries are big reveals that justify so much slowburn. mystery labyrinths in general just need a lot of retooling because reasoning death matches are a poor man's non-stop debate, shinigami puzzle is "what if we made hangman's gambit somehow shittier", and everything else is just either walking while characters talk, a QTE, or a multiple choice question. i don't think it's wrong to expect better gameplay than just aping what was provided in a PSP game from 2011. at the same time, this game is making me question if kodaka's ever going to want to make something that requires breaking out of the DR formula. sure, the DR series is over, but games like this could functionally be considered danganronpa 4 for as little identity and innovation that they bring to the table. everything good here DR did better, everything bad here is done in spite of DR.

this game was an interesting experience for me because i played it with my boyfriend; he didn't necessarily have a glowing opinion of it, but he did at least find more enjoyment with it than i did. i've told him that's partially because he doesn't know how much is being borrowed from DR (he has never played any of the games), but i think it also helps seeing this as a first from SC and kodaka. i'm going to repeat what i said in that this is a game that does the best with people who have minimal exposure to DR, because the lower gear shift here is felt harder with that experience. i would still consider this better than SDR2, but that stems more from virulently hating SDR2's refusal to deliver on several dangling carrots + incredibly horny for teenagers energy. this game ironically also suffers from that, just to a lesser degree. the one thing i could say in SDR2's defense is that it hits much higher highs than master detective archives: rain code ever comes close to. and while the lower lows aren't felt, i won't deny that i'm much more likely to forget the majority of this game in a month compared to the lasting memory i have of SDR2. i think that sentiment has been echoed in how little i heard about this game going into it. i remember seeing the trailer, thinking "i should play that if i get some free time", and expecting to witness at least a little clamor over it on launch but instead hearing nothing. hell, by the time it even came back to mind, it was several months past launch and no one in my circles had even mentioned it, DR fans included. i was hoping this would be a situation where it was an overlooked gem, but i think its relative unpopularity with both critics and fans alike speaks for itself.

If Parappa the Rapper is a low-level drug trip groove through an increasingly weird week, then Um Jammer Lammy is the ecstasy-laced fever dream weekend. The story follows Lammy trying to get to her band's gig on time but constantly running into characters who insist she helps them with their high-stress jobs. Things move at such a frantic pace that it's difficult to have any idea what's going on. Characters are constantly yelling, cutscenes have 5 edits every second, and, unlike Parappa's story beats, Lammy's hurdles are completely random and unrelated to her personally, so it's just a blur of complete chaos. Unfortunately, that carries into the gameplay itself.

Lammy's music is seemingly written to be intentionally confusing. Nearly every song is plagued by bizarre time signatures, button prompts that don't match the cadence of the lyrics, and segments that require a level of speed and button-mashing that Parappa never came close to. This game also amplifies a problem in the first game: the small delay between pressing a button and the audio of Lammy's guitar actually playing makes it absolutely impossible to keep time consistently. Most levels feel like they're won with dumb luck, especially Level 6 that features an atonal, arhythmic stage aria. Most times failure comes at the very last moment of a song, forcing you to start from the top and struggling against the game's design again and again.

Um Jammer Lammy feels like it learned all the wrong lessons from Parappa, which already had its own issues. Chaotic in every way, from story to gameplay, Lammy frustrates and annoys with each new riff screamed at you by another anthropomorphic psychopath. Much like Lammy's guitar, this game is out of tune.

I like what I've played, but Zero Mission is more accessible. This version is still unrivaled in ambience and soundtrack though!

This review contains spoilers

A beautiful and perfunctory RPG experience. Perhaps the most disappointing experience you will have this year.

Sea of Stars has no good reason to be an rpg other than back of the napkin ideas the devs must have had since childhood. Equipment are all small incremental flat stat increases, with only certain accessories even broaching the idea of customizability. One of them (the abacus, which lets you see enemy HP) is so vital though that there is little point in thinking about it. Characters are flat and largely unexciting, dialogue is uninventive and exists in the same space as settlements in this game. They need to exist, and in large quantities, to check the right rpg boxes, but they're superficial pitstops with little to admire besides the art. Eastward and Chained Echoes do so much more in a similar genre space with their settlements that I cannot give Sea of Stars a pass.

Combat itself is serviceable, but SoS gives neither the tension of difficulty or resource management, nor the thrill of customization and experimentation (your characters will still only have about 3 skills to use apiece by the end of the game). If this was a simple action rpg it might have received lower scores, but it would be a healthier game simply from the surgical removal of unnecessary fat.

Boss encounters are actually structured cleverly enough but even on Hard they never hit hard enough to seriously endanger your party, healing is plentiful, and even a stray KO is only a temporary inconvenience since your party member will self-revive with half health after only a couple of turns.

Dungeons and puzzles, such as they are, are busywork lovingly crafted to trigger the bespoke animations that are the actual heart of the game. More often it felt like I was plodding through Mario Maker autorunner levels, or a Sony game's climbing section.

The story is atrocious. Anything attached to the writing is nails on a chalkboard. It is in desperate search of conflict of any kind, but refuses to develop its MCs and their buoyant tagalong sidekick as anything other than the most bland genre versions of themselves. So you get a situation, with no conflict and no pushback, where the game has to pull conflict directly from its rear in deeply unsatisfying ways, falling into jrpg tropes disseminated, dissembled, and parodied decades ago and doing them in the most bland ways you can imagine. The character assassination required to do this is YiiKian in nature but even YiiK had the foresight to engender some kind of conflict to move the story forward, instead of just-so macguffin scenarios and jiu jitsu ass pulls.

The journey becomes predictable in its unpredictableness, a stale bowl of refried bean jrpg pastiche.

So, now the positives (with caveats).

Sea of Stars is the prettiest game released this year. I don't think it's particularly close. If you want to play a spectacle game, avoid FF16 and play this. It is arguably the best looking 2d rpg I have played.

But there are two exceptions to SoS immaculate graphics. First, the portraits are amateur, ill-fitting and immersion breaking. The problem is not necessarily the artistic skill at work, but the game's entire lack of identity. Chrono Cross has a divisive art style for its portraits, as an example, but it all coheres much better than SoS. Second, animated cutscenes play at random intervals of the story. They remind me of the CGI cutscenes inserted into SNES classics by Square when they ported the games to the PSX. Unnecessary and distracting. The pixels can more than speak for themselves and with how underwhelming the rest of the game is, they have to.

in a lot of ways this game is better than the first. the gameplay is much more streamlined - somniums make more sense now! in a lot of ways, this game is also on par with the first. the music is still amazing. for a game that had its dub recorded during covid it's pretty solid aside from the few scenes at the start where boss sounds like she's in a microwave. its new cast is the highlight of the experience - special shoutouts to ryuki and tama, as well as mister minecraft steve - and most of them are integrated into the AITSF relationship ecosystem in a way that is believable enough.

...most of them! This is where my problems start. to name a few:
- the story is a lot weaker than its predecessor. the stakes are absurdly high and i guess this makes sense within the context of them exploring simulation theory a lot but it loses me.
- and what plot points from the first they do reuse are just done so stupidly. like when they spoil one of the first game's biggest twists for ... some reason? after going through the pain not to explain what the cyclops killings were about and who date is? Alright.
- for a game where she's actually playable this game does mizuki so dirty it physically hurts. i don't want to go into spoilers but it sucks shit and i don't know what they were thinking when they messed with her backstory
- what is up with the grown men crushing on / lusting over high school girls i'm SICK OF IT!!!!!!
- a lot of time is spent with the newer characters, which means that older characters like the sagans and pewter are sidelined. that's fine, i guess, even if they're the reason i would WANT to play a sequel, but moma and mama in particular experience something worse than being shafted: character assassination.
- that said, there's a handful of characters whose characters are improved from the first, like the sunfish pocket mermaid shrouded in mystery or one of moma's lackeys, but both of those examples were so minor in the first that they basically weren't characters until aini.

also, much like the previous game, this has multiple endings. the endings are pretty lackluster, though; one of the things i liked about ai1's non-canon endings is that all of them give you different pieces of information that you eventually connect when you get the big reveals in the game's last act.
here they try to go for this as well? kind of? but they end a lot less satisfyingly because they don't change the story meaningfully (unfotunately the most ambitious one with this is the hardest to take seriously) and thus don't give you enough time to let the route-specific info sink in before they reveal it on the main path.
maybe it's because of how they were telling the story across two points in space-time but it means we don't get the slippery slope of annihilation, the "WE FUCKED UP BAD" realization of iris, or the conclusion of mizuki. the one branch in ryuki's side of the story kind of has the heartwarming to retroactive horror ota's route does though i can give it that

amame was really good, though. she's one of the best characters and is my overall fave. the bits of postgame content were also a highlight. i liked the tamagotchis. it's an alright experience overall but it takes a big shit on the reasons why i liked the first game And For What. to make this an entry point to the series? at this rate i don't want uchikoshi to make an AI3.

Please do not start with this game if you want to get into metroid! If you want to experience the first game in the timeline, play Zero Mission (the remake of this game), or if you want to start with a more linear experience start with Fusion. The only reason anyone should play this game today is if you are already a metroid fan and you really wanna see how the series started cause this game is not good. Plus if you play Zero Mission and you still feel the need to play this game, Zero Mission includes an emulation of the original metroid with its only unlock requirement being beating an actual good metroid game.

The lag and sprite flickering are annoying and slow down the pace of the game even more than its already slow gameplay. Being unable to shoot downward or crouch also make actually hitting enemies really obnoxious to the point where it's not worth trying to hit anything until you get either the screw attack or the wave beam. I haven't played the og metroid 2 yet, but I am pretty confidant that the simple addition of being about the crouch and shoot downward already make it much better than NEStroid.

The screw attack is by far the best upgrade in the game and greatly improves its playability but its also really janky. It feels like it doesn't work about 30% of the time which really adds up in a game that will require you to grind for health or missiles at some point if you are going for 100% like I did. The drop rates for health and missiles especially are also terrible. The missile drop rate is randomly decided when you entire a room and once you hit that random cap, no more missiles will drop until you enter a new room. This random number can be as low as 0, so if you're really unlucky with the rng you can spend as long as 30-40 minutes grinding for missiles and health.

Exploration is pretty bad as well. I didn't have trouble navigating without a map since I've played Zero Mission many times, but NEStroid has so many "hidden" paths that lead nowhere and there are many areas which would have greatly benefited from some sort of hidden shortcut to reduce the amount of backtracking or taking overly long routes to what should be an easy to reach destination or item. A bunch of the rooms have the exact same layout too which can get confusing if you're not keeping track of where you're going or if you're unfamiliar with the general metroid 1 map layout.

As far as positives go, most of the music still holds up really well. Brinstar and Kraid are obvious highlights, but tracks like Norfair and the escape sequence are also pretty solid. The only track I really don't like is Ridley since I think the loop is too short so it gets really annoying.

I cannot stress enough, do not play this unless you really need to know how the series started. That's the only reason why I finally got myself through it after multiple attempts over the years. It's a game a have a lot of respect for since it started one of my favorite videogames series, but I'm never playing it again since Zero Mission completely replaces this game.

I'm sure I'll come back a re-evaluate this later.

I think it was fine! Good in some places, great in a few! I'm not sure if anything in the game ever surpassed those first couple of hours from the demo.

There's some amazing set pieces that I'd be hype as fuck for in Kingdom Hearts or something, but felt a little TOO intense for everything else that was going on in XVI.

I really loved the combat at the start, but by the end you never have to engage with any of the cool mechanics any more like juggling, and it's just Zantetsuken into Diamond Dust into Gigaflare, Raging Fist counter, repeat.
It's weird that there's zero difference between spells or Eikon elements. It sucks that the core actions never change after the first couple of hours. The enemies are dumb as bricks, and some more mages to mix things up is sorely needed.

The pacing with the sidequests totally sucked throughout but really killed the momentum at some key moments; especially right before the final story quest.

Some of the core cast is great, most of the baddies are good (except the main one...), many others have no personality (Jill is a real disappointment, even in her big moments).

I thought I'd be totally buzzing for New Game+, but that makes you slog through a lot of stuff I hoped I'd be able to skip, and the combat is just super spongey.

Yeah! I dunno. For all the seriousness of most of it, the last hour or so is just a Kingdom Hearts ending.

BUT, big fan of Gav, so swings and roundabouts.

This review contains spoilers

BIG SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!


Well, to preface this, I absolutely adore Bayonetta as a character. As far as the games go, I love the first one and thought the second one was a bit weaker, but still good, which seems to be an unpopular opinion. Then, there is this one…

This is really hard to write a review for. I am giving it 3.5 stars because while the gameplay was all over the place with seemingly no structure, especially at first, it was fun in a guilty pleasure kind of way. I should probably elaborate on “all over the place.” For me, it seemed to go from traditional Bayonetta gameplay to everything else under the sun. First of all, you have three playable characters. One is fun…guess who? Bayonetta. The others, Jeanne and newcomer Viola, just don’t play well. Jeanne’s stealth missions were short, and that was their saving grace. They weren’t satisfying or interesting at all. I was not even stealthy, and still beat them all pretty easily. This desperate attempt to switch up gameplay didn’t gel with me. Viola’s? Her levels made me a tad ragey. They were considerably more difficult than all the others…yet they were mixed in here and there (I think one for every two Bayonetta and one Jeanne chapters?) I have a pet peeve in games when the difficulty jumps around. I like when things progressively get more difficult. Difficulty spikes are fine, but Viola’s levels made some of Bayonetta’s later ones very underwhelming difficulty wise. I am not sure how many people would agree…could have been me.

The demon summons took forever for me to like. Most of them move so incredibly slow, and just aren’t enjoyable to fight as. Also, meeting a new demon in almost or maybe even every chapter got tiring and very formulaic. I might have actually liked one or two of them as characters. Baal stands out for me.

Speaking of characters, well…all the good ol’ faces are there, but I don’t always love their execution. Bayonetta seems not quite as badass as she once was, Jeanne seems like an extension of her, and why is Luka such a hero now? His clumsiness and ineptness is part of why I liked him! Switching up the gender roles made the series fun…as did Bayo (who I always perceived as bisexual) having a sort of “love triangle” with him and Jeanne. I don’t like having a canon couple, but unlike a lot of other people, I wouldn’t have been happy if she ended up with Jeanne either. The playfulness and casualness between Bayonetta and the other two spiced up the series. I don’t think it was cut out to be romantic.

We also have newcomer Viola. For the most part, I found her annoying, probably until the last few chapters where she became endearing. Fighting as her is a pain in the ass, as I mentioned, and everything about her is…lacking. I hate to say it, but I could have done without her.

The ending? I can’t tell you how sad the part after the first credits made me. Annoying “true” final boss aside, Viola taking center stage is just painful. I kind of felt viewing that ending like I did when my favorite band broke up: empty and numb. I guess I will buy the fourth game, but am I looking forward to it? Can’t say I am. Such a shame too, since it was one of my favorite series with one of my favorite protagonists.

All in all, fun, but a disappointment. I don’t know why the writers thought that direction was okay to go in. I love a good multiverse plot too, but this one made me kind of sad, especially at the end, where a story should truly shine.

Glad I played it, but won’t return to it. RIP Bayonetta!