I didn't expect much, but I thought this game was fun!

The shooting feels really unique, most of the upgrades feel meaningful enough, there are some really visually striking areas and effects, I liked yokai hunting and traversal, and I loved the buddy cop dynamic between KK and Akito. I liked that the story had a little bit of that anime melodrama going on, but coming out of a type of game that you wouldn't expect it from, and the dub is surprisingly good/ And hell, the game even has a bit of that patented Yakuza virtual tourism going on!

That said, as many people have said before me, this game is not without flaws; specifically and most glaringly the open world is extremely by the books in its design and a lot of the sidequests are busywork. There are also points in the story that are a bit hamfisted and I feel like it skips a beat sometimes, but I feel like it sufficiently makes up for that in the long run. I can also see the complaints of lack in variety, there was just enough in my book but I think one more spell element, an additional non magic weapon, and a couple new more aggressive enemy types would have helped. Plus I feel like it could have maybe used a bit more polish in general.

This is the kind of game I would love to see a sequel to, tightening up everything, polishing it up, and taking feedback into account, though who knows if it could ever happen. It might be an unpopular opinion, but given the choice between a new Evil Within and this, I would absolutely choose this with no hesitation. That said, as things are now I heartily enjoyed this game, a perfect and surprising little gem of a palette cleanser.

Future Connected is certainly not perfect and leaves some dangling plot threads to likely be touched elsewhere, but I found it to be a solid, and most importantly tonally consistent bookend to the Xenoblade 1 story. It's simply a nice, short, sweet little chunk of gameplay to put you back in that world and put good use to scrapped content, and knows not to outstay its welcome. It won't blow you away with incredible fanservice, but it's a nice little pop of screentime for Melia and a more-than-competent closer to her arc.

I really, really wanted to like this, as someone who was reasonably excited for the Hundred Heroes Kickstarter. But there is barely anything good to say about Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising.

Let's start with positives: the visuals are quite nice, I thought the character writing and characters themselves were moderately good, and there are a couple parts more than 5 hours into the game where I vaguely had a bit of fun once the game actually gives you some mechanical freedom. And on the most basic level, it runs well enough, is mostly functional, and is not glitchy.

...That's about it.

The game is overstuffed with dialogue first and foremost. It almost feels like they wanted to make a prelude visual novel rather than a sidescrolling adventure, and despite the localization adding some much needed flavor, it unfortunately can't save the fact that a lot of the text is spent painfully and needlessly dragging out the basic exchange of information. I started reading every possible text box, but 4 hours in I just had to start skipping stuff that wasn't the main story because they would continuously drag out simple requests or single points of conversation for 3-4+ text boxes.

This abundance of text is especially annoying in regards to fetch quests, which you will be doing 75% of the time you are playing this game. Dear lord there are SO MANY FETCH QUESTS. Are there story events currently happening? The game has now decided to make you completely stop any momentum or intrigue only to send you back to the village for some old guy to tell you his whole life story ending with "get me some wood from the forest". Content! A couple times early on, you will literally do one story relevant thing, get sent to the village for a couple sidequests, go back to do one more thing, and have the exact same thing happen again. It is incredibly painfully bad. To be fair, the sidequests do effect the building of your hub town and that stuff is at least kind of aesthetically cool and gives you a nice pop whenever you upgrade or build a facility, but again, it mostly exists in the form of farming resources for single step sidequests and nothing deeper than that.

This strange pace negatively effects the story on its own, but on top of that Rising is more or less a bog standard adventure to introduce you to the world and characters, some of whom don't even feel like they needed to show up for any reason aside from blatant fanservice intros for Hundred Heroes. There is some lingering intrigue there, but I was not chomping at the bit to get to the 2024 game any more than when I started.

The gameplay itself is incredibly simple and takes such a large portion of the game's full runtime to give you any interesting gameplay options it's kinda insane. It's a basic action platformer, with the gimmick being that you have a party member on each face button, and by timing your character switching you can reduce the downtime between combos. Without a party, the game is exceedingly simple and boring with short combos and standard traversal, and it takes multiple hours to get your first party member and almost half the game to get your second. Just so incredibly strange. Encounter design is also either braindead simple or "we dropped 10 enemies onscreen attacking at once" with no inbetween. Level design is near nonexistent, with vague hints of search-action influence... but really it's just gated linear content. lol

I can't think of much to say about the soundtrack except it exists. Nothing about it stood out as good or bad.

It feels like an exaggeration to say that this game is one of the worst games I've played this year, but I was just so incredibly bored throughout the thing that it's not much of a contest.

The biggest standouts here are the mechanics related to your support character; they felt really satisfying and unique and did a decent job setting the game apart from other Warriors games. Other than that, the presentation is pretty weak and restrained (excluding the character models and prerendered cutscenes), what I played of the story wasn't anything to write home about, and I know they were really trying to keep this one simple for players unfamiliar with action games, but sheesh the level design is simply the worst in the whole warriors series. I definitely see the potential here though; I hope they decide to iterate or expand upon this foundation, whether it's a sequel or otherwise.

I found the gameplay to be the true drag here. While it is a very polished game with nice little well-designed combat sandboxes scattered throughout the 20+ hour campaign, Part II is also very content to waste your time and drag with countless oversized areas, pointless walk and talks, and unnecessary looting among other things. Coming off the first game, which had decently tight pacing, I just couldn't get into it as much.

Contrary to some, I thought the story wasn't too bad. But it also drags a lot, and I felt the questions and thoughts that it left you with were markedly less interesting than its predecessor.

For me, AI: The Somnium Files benefits greatly from the fact that it is significantly more character-focused than any of Uchikoshi's recent works. It also helps that it's brilliantly localized, making it also one of the most funny games I've ever played. Everyone is a little stupid and a little bit of a freak, and the game rewards you with near-endless fun dialogue for poking around in its often dense environments. And on top of that, the main plot holds up well to its predecessors, even if it's not able to reach the lofty peaks those mysteries were able to hit.

Somniums could use some work, QTEs should be ditched altogether, there is a tad too much perving at times, the animations need some polish, and ultimately I think including the flowchart jumping aspect was unnecessary here. But despite its flaws, AI is easily one of my favorite adventure games of all time, and there are a lot of aspects here that I think other games could stand to learn from.

Everything I hoped it would be. Addresses almost all of my issues with the main game of Rise and then some. There are some really fun monsters to fight in here, and a lot of really fun new tools to mess with. I loved follower quests and the followers, one of the best new features in awhile and I hope they come back. A near perfect expansion if not for three things: I think the monsters they chose for each tier of MR story advancement weren't always the greatest, I don't particularly like the huge endgame MR grind (though at the very least the progression is slightly more even this time), and I don't really enjoy the DLC trickle from the modern games (hopefully it proves to be more exciting than it looks).
Looking forward to yet more hours of hunting!