this is probably very obvious to most people, but if you liked breath of the wild or thought that it was flawed but a good jumping off point for a sequel, you will probably enjoy tears of the kingdom. however, if you thought breath of the wild was bad as a game and/or as a direction for the series, tears of the kingdom is not going to make you a fan.

the dungeons are better, but they're still formatted like in breath of the wild. the shrines are better, but they're still shrines. the bosses are much better, but they're still fought with the same combat system. the world is technically bigger, but it's built off of the same world as before. the story is definitely better, but it's still shown and told the same way. the construction gimmick gives you and arguably encourages more avenues to experiment with the game's systems, but they're still the same systems. there's still korok seeds, there's still bad swimming, and the enemy variety still leaves a lot to be desired. it's a game that does a good amount to polish the game that came before it, but it still is adamant about being it's own type of zelda and that won't be for everyone.

for me personally, i enjoy tears of the kingdom as a sequel to breath of the wild and that's how i've chosen to view the game because that's what it was trying to be. the traditional zelda aspects, while improved somewhat, haven't been improved nearly enough for me to see it as a good zelda in the same way i see other zelda games as good zeldas but it wasn't trying to be other zeldas and that's okay with me, but it won't be for everyone.

not at all worth $70 though (no game is)

【１０　ＪＵＮＥ　２０２１，　ＴＨＵＲＳＤＡＹ_ 】

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ᴸᴱᵀˢᴴᵁᴳᴮᴿᴼ
Augh... █

ᴸᴱᵀˢᴴᵁᴳᴮᴿᴼ
Not this again... █

C
I + M
S

[M]
C + S
I

ᴹᴼⱽᴱᴹᴱᴺᵀ
[E]
S + N
W

ᴹᴼⱽᴱᴹᴱᴺᵀ
[N]
W + E
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ᶜᴼᴺᵀᴬᶜᵀ
[computer]
[C]
I + M
S


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(letshugbro) "The Silver Case", huh... █
(letshugbro) Looks interesting. █
(DongSmoker420) it's one of the best games of all time u dumbass █
(K0J1M41SG0D) it's suda51's masterpiece █
(letshugbro) Hmmm.... █
(letshugbro) I guess I should play it. █
(Charizardscumhunter) KILL YOURSELF █


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>> 21/06/21 • Steam Store • Your order... <<
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--------------------------
10th July 2021
From: Steam Store
To: Lets Hug Bro
Subject: Your order of 'The Silver Case & The 25th Ward: The Silver Case Digital Limited Edition'

Thank you for your recent transaction on Steam.
The items below have been added to your Steam Library.

If you are new to Steam, you can get the free Steam application here.

Purchased DLC will automatically be added. You can find it on the Library page of the base game.
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ᴸᴱᵀˢᴴᵁᴳᴮᴿᴼ
. . . █

ᴸᴱᵀˢᴴᵁᴳᴮᴿᴼ
Okay. █

ᴸᴱᵀˢᴴᵁᴳᴮᴿᴼ
Guess I'll try this game out... █


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ᴸᴱᵀˢᴴᵁᴳᴮᴿᴼ
What the fuck was that all about? █

Good game with a great story but definitely not a game without its flaws. I enjoyed the soundtrack and exploring Lospass Island, but I did not get that DS feeling when I had to constantly go back and forth across the island to do fetch quests. Pretty sure the joke Suda wanted to tell is since video games are considered to be just time wasters, the game decides to literally waste your time by doing the former and with having to do like 30 basic math problems at the end. As annoying as some of the gameplay can be, I still had a good time with the game but think it would have benefited from having more of a visual novel style like The Silver Case did.

i wish i liked signalis more. but i feel like a lot of the enjoyment i got from it was just from it being in a genre i love, which is only recently getting a resurgence, and not from the choices the game actually makes.

the game is inspired by a lot of fantastic media. resident evil (the remake of 1 in particular), silent hill (mostly 1 and 2), evangelion, the shining, lovecraft, and more. i can tell because it won't shut up about it. i'm not opposed to wearing your inspirations on your sleeve, but this game does it so blatantly and so frequently that it distracts me from the game i'm supposed to be playing and enjoying, and makes me thinks of other things i like better instead. yes, signalis, i remember the part in resident evil where jill plays moonlight sonata on a piano to open a secret passage. that was a cool moment. you aren't recapturing that by putting a piano in one of the save rooms and playing moonlight sonata in the background, because it's not tied to anything, it has no relevance, you're not doing a new twist on it. you're just making a reference to a game you like. yes, signalis, i recognize the carpet from the shining. yes, signalis, i remember angela from silent hill 2. yes, signalis, i've seen end of evangelion. can we make our own thing now? the worst of it is the blatant, absolutely shameless lifting of an entire major area from silent hill, taking its mechanical gimmick, its aesthetic, and even its name. the game even has the nerve to recycle an entire major plot moment from SH2 in that area. there is a line between "cute reference" and "borderline plagiarism" and signalis crosses it.

signalis strikes me as a game made by people who like a lot of things, but don't understand why they like the things they like. they like the resident evil remake, a game where some downed enemies will eventually get back up unless their bodies are burned, and need to be killed again in a stronger form. but they wanted to one-up that mechanic, so now EVERY enemy gets up unless burned, infinite times, which discourages combat too much. stealth quickly becomes the dominant strategy, slowing the pace of the game down and leading to the player stockpiling way too much ammo and healing. by the time i reached the final boss, my item box was stuffed with dozens of healing items and bullets for every gun, and i'd never touched any of those guns aside from the pistol, and maybe the shotgun once or twice. it's not that the game is too easy once you've figured it out, it's that it's too easy to figure out. enemy encounters should be as much of a puzzle as any door code or wall safe combination.

maybe the biggest offender is the save system. resident evil requires you to spend an ink ribbon to save for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is pacing. in a game where every bullet/healing item is precious, the player is gonna wanna save often to lock in their progress. by tying your ability to save to a resource, the game keeps you from ducking into a save room every 30 seconds and slowing the game to a crawl. it also means that if you wanna savescum to try a room over and over until you can do it without spending bullets or healing, then it'll at least cost you a save ribbon, probably two since you're gonna wanna save again after your perfect run. it's another thing the designer has to balance, but the effort is worth it.

signalis takes the easy way out and allows infinite free saves. so if you wanna play safe, which you SHOULD because that's the name of the game, then you'll shatter the game's pacing by saving after every single room clear. you'll savescum rooms over and over until you get by without taking a hit, then you'll save again, and it won't cost you anything. call that exploitative if you want, but we already had a mechanic that stopped players from playing this way nearly 30 years ago in the original resident evil for ps1, and signalis fails to learn from that despite constantly referencing that game. even the resident evil 2 remake, which had free saving, still had a hardcore mode which brought back the ink ribbons. i wish signalis' hard mode did the same, instead of just lazily increasing enemy health and damage.

also, for god's sake, why do the defensive items take up an item slot? and why can't i have a stun rod and the flashlight equipped at the same time? REmake doesn't make you give up an item slot to carry a taser, and silent hill doesn't bar you from using melee weapons if you have your flashlight out. this is just a stupid, misguided attempt to make inventory management more intense, when what it actually does is make stun rods worthless to carry around, force you to run back to the item box every time you wanna go through a dark room, and make the theoretically cool in-game screenshot item a waste of time and inventory space.

the story is fine, but it takes a lot of skill to pull off this sort of lain-esque, stream of consciousness, highly interpretive storytelling, and i don't think signalis sticks the landing. there's only one Serial Experiments Lain, and that's for good reason. i'm not sure even david lynch could put "Image Intentionally Left Blank" where a cutscene would normally go and make it work. i understand the story fine, but it's trying way too hard with its presentation. simple in-engine sequences would be much more effective than the 15 different styles of cutscene this game cycles through, especially the amateurish-looking anime ones that are way too clean and pretty for such a grungy, rusty, bloody game. though i suppose i haven't seen many games before which have such explicit lesbian overtones. depending on who you are, that element might hit hard.

if i weren't such a junkie for Scary Hallway Logistics Simulators, i'd probably be more down on this game. when i actually think about it, so much bad comes to mind. but even if it's fucked up, inferior resident evil, it's still resident evil, which i'll never stop finding fun. and given this game was made almost entirely by just two people, it's a monumental achievement. i just wish it were a better game.

The absolute rock bottom of the Persona series, and one of the worst Megaten games as a whole. Every bit of gristle and texture that Persona 3 used to make its otherwise simple combat system meaningful is gone, in favor of being more "convenient." The three distinct types of physical damage are condensed into a single generic type, reducing depth and overemphasizing physical weaknesses/resistances. You now get extra turns from AoE attacks even if one of the enemies you hit isn't weak or is already knocked down, meaning you can mindlessly spam weaknesses without caring about getting your own attacks reflected back at you by half the enemy mob. The reworking of the Shuffle Time system means you can gain immense, completely broken advantages like full level-ups or skills you shouldn't know for the next 10-20 hours, just because you got lucky. Dungeon floors are nothing but long, empty, randomly generated hallways with chests and enemies. And of course, the lack of direct party control that lent so much to P3 mechanically and thematically, is gone, because too many babies who couldn't be bothered to learn the tactics system complained about it.

That's beyond the story being glacially paced, nonsensical, and populated almost entirely by unlikable characters. The pace was already bad in the vanilla game, and Golden goes ahead and adds terrible terrible filler sequences, like your group for some reason forming a band to play a concert at the mall, which is immediately forgotten about after it happens and does nothing but waste an hour of your time. The plot constantly requires characters to act like complete idiots who can't put 2 and 2 together, don't follow up on plot threads until they suddenly become sentient several hours afterward, and never explain anything to anyone until there's basically a gun to their head. Almost every character is intolerable, from Chie screaming constantly and never once coming across as if she even likes her friends, to the only words coming out of Yosuke's mouth ever being "me horny" or "haha ur gay," to Teddie making me want to rip my head off every time he speaks. And of the more likable characters, like Kanji or Nanako, the game basically treats them like garbage.

Social links are STILL bad. They had issues in 3, but they were a brand new major series mechanic, and you would assume those issues would be addressed. Instead, they're worse. They're STILL walkthrough bait, since even a single wrong dialogue choice can sabotage a 100+ hour playthrough and keep you from completing all social links. They're STILL completely scripted and linear, meaning you can form a rank 10 bond with someone even while treating them terribly. They're STILL mostly padding where the first five out of ten ranks are completely worthless nothing scenes. Except now, you can't even reverse the links anymore. Nobody ever gets upset at you. Nothing bad you do to them will ever have consequences. You can get to rank 6 of a link, see someone cry their eyes out about their emotional problems, then abandon them for the next 80 hours of playtime, and they'll never once say anything about how you left them to rot, let alone reverse the bond. And now the stories themselves are decent at best. P3 had some bad social links, but at least it had high points to balance them out.

Thematically, the game hates you. If you have any real criticisms of the society in which you live, then at best, it thinks you're a confused and immature person who needs to figure yourself out. At worst, it thinks you're a misanthropic jackass who should be forcibly removed. Every character starts out wondering if maybe the society and conditions into which they were born are unfair, and they end by making the beautiful realization that, no, actually, they should just suck it up and deal with it. And then it has the gall to have scene after scene where the main characters call the majority of humanity sheeple who refuse to acknowledge the truth. It would rather say that everyone is just dumb because they love TV and that's what's wrong with society, than that maybe people's problems come from the Walmart that just moved into town and is crushing the life out of the local economy. That's what you get.

I give it an extra half star for the visuals being nice and some of the music being pretty good. Other than that, this game blows so fucking bad. Play a real Shin Megami Tensei game like Nocturne or Strange Journey.