Lokathor
2024
This game is just way too hard for me to play. After failing to do a jump 3 or 4 times in a row, it just sucks the life out of things. So you give up and go somewhere else, and it's another screen full of impossible jumps. Then you fall down from there and get stuck in yet another different screen of impossible jumps. If you don't have amazing 2d-platformer type reflexes, I wouldn't get this one.
It's really bad, which would be fine, but also it's unplayable.
2023
I played a few levels of the demo, but it didn't really seem like my thing at all. The art is cute and the narrator has a lovely voice that's spooky and mysterious, but the actual puzzle part didn't seem very interesting, and also seemed to be pretty strict on how tightly you needed to beat each level to get full points.
Gameplay wise, Rebirth is approximately better than Remake. The pacing issues are less bad than Remake had, though not really totally solved.
I liked Queen's Blood. I was surprised to like a card game in an RPG, but I gave it a fair shake, and it's really neat. It's not making me want to run out and play every card player out there, but it's definitely good enough to keep me from resenting when card matches are part of the main story quest line.
The bosses are still so tanky that it's exhausting. I think that the latter chapters feel like they're dragging on and on. This is probably because, as the story builds up, you want to keep advancing the story to see where it leads. That's exactly when you're confronted with immense sequences of "stuff" that ultimately doesn't matter much half the time and gets in the way of the story flow.
Speaking of story: I finished the game, and I still don't know what's going on. This is some real kingdom hearts shit for sure.
However, I also don't care anymore? I can say one thing I do know: that Unknown Journey stuff was all a lie. This has gotta be the biggest waste of video game story potential since Mass Effect 3. The ending made me think, "that's it?". It retroactively reaches back across the whole game and sours a 4/5 experience into just a 2/5 at best.
I liked Queen's Blood. I was surprised to like a card game in an RPG, but I gave it a fair shake, and it's really neat. It's not making me want to run out and play every card player out there, but it's definitely good enough to keep me from resenting when card matches are part of the main story quest line.
The bosses are still so tanky that it's exhausting. I think that the latter chapters feel like they're dragging on and on. This is probably because, as the story builds up, you want to keep advancing the story to see where it leads. That's exactly when you're confronted with immense sequences of "stuff" that ultimately doesn't matter much half the time and gets in the way of the story flow.
Speaking of story: I finished the game, and I still don't know what's going on. This is some real kingdom hearts shit for sure.
However, I also don't care anymore? I can say one thing I do know: that Unknown Journey stuff was all a lie. This has gotta be the biggest waste of video game story potential since Mass Effect 3. The ending made me think, "that's it?". It retroactively reaches back across the whole game and sours a 4/5 experience into just a 2/5 at best.
One of the few 3DS games where the 3D effect really "works" and seems to add something to the game.
This basically did all the cool stuff that I'd wanted FF16 to do, but in a mostly better way. I kinda wish there was more town stuff, but I get that it's not really part of the design to do those sorts of things.
2015
A worthy successor to Baldur's Gate.
This is the first Metal Gear Solid that actually plays well. Certainly not perfectly, but still far better than 1 or 2.
This game would be 5 stars except that all the little fiddly stuff to get 100% is such a pain in the butt.
The story and music are great. The art looks great, and I think it's aged pretty well.
However, the actual game parts, the combat elemenets, cloisters, and other minigames, only come out to "passable at best".
While the combat mechanics are interesting on their own, the actual performing of the fights isn't so fun. You're either having to fight too many small encounters to get all your sphere levels built up, or you're fighting a boss with twice (or more) as many HP as it should have to avoid being tedious. And all the high-damage spells that you'd use on a boss have animations that are neat the first few times but that kinda just take too long after that. And to top it all off you have to switch around the party every fight to make everyone gain EXP evenly.
The sphere grid sounds interesting when first presented, "ooh, so many possibilities to level up!", but the actual amount of player choice it adds to the game, compared to the amount of busy work it makes the player do, is just abysmal.
Ever since FF7, the Final Fantasy series has mostly consisted of cool stories with great music trapped inside of bad-playing video games. FFX is a proud member of this tradition.
However, the actual game parts, the combat elemenets, cloisters, and other minigames, only come out to "passable at best".
While the combat mechanics are interesting on their own, the actual performing of the fights isn't so fun. You're either having to fight too many small encounters to get all your sphere levels built up, or you're fighting a boss with twice (or more) as many HP as it should have to avoid being tedious. And all the high-damage spells that you'd use on a boss have animations that are neat the first few times but that kinda just take too long after that. And to top it all off you have to switch around the party every fight to make everyone gain EXP evenly.
The sphere grid sounds interesting when first presented, "ooh, so many possibilities to level up!", but the actual amount of player choice it adds to the game, compared to the amount of busy work it makes the player do, is just abysmal.
Ever since FF7, the Final Fantasy series has mostly consisted of cool stories with great music trapped inside of bad-playing video games. FFX is a proud member of this tradition.
2012
As soon as I realized that the jump is limited and doesn't just recharge on landing, but depends on the little flag pickups, I basically emotionally checked out from this.
This game really didn't age well, but I think even if I'd played it at the time I wouldn't have liked it too much. The 3D looks pretty bad compared to other PS2 games, the voice direction is terrible, it often sounds like the actors don't even know what's happening in each scene as they read the lines. The game doesn't at all signal to you what you're supposed to do to progress the story. The best I can say about it is that the combat is sorta fun I guess.
2020
Every time I try to play the game more, I just get sick and miserable.
Basically the problem is that this game is way too slow at having anything significant happen. In the 12 hours I played we went on a field trip an arrested a crime gang, then went into a haunted house a little bit. Dag, that's not much. I could have watched 2.5 seasons of anime with that 12 hours. All the characters take way too long to say way too many words that don't really matter anyway, and then the camera will pan slowly over to something, and then someone else will say way too much stuff, and it just goes on and on. All the scenes move at a snail's pace. The RPG fights are pretty neat, but the small encounters as you go through the maps get repetitive quickly. There should probably be like 1/4th as many small encounters that just give 4x as much experience, so that you can smack around just a few birds or wolves and then do a boss fight.
I got 1 and 2 at the same time on sale, and I didn't like 1 much, but I figured I should try a little of 2 since I already had it. Based on just the prologue, it seems like the same basic problem of 1 is present in 2: everything is just slow. It all unfolds at a snail's pace.