Can gamers at least try to be consistent when trashing games for having MTX, it feels like such random games always catch heat for it when there's much bigger offenders even among Capcom's own library (Monster Hunter World & Rise lmao)

I can at least understand people being upset over optimization (even if in my experience I've had little to no issue in the 5 hours I've played so far), but obviously the issue differs from person to person.

Game is fun tho, I'm having a blast, this really is just an improved version of the original Dragon's Dogma and I'm all for it.

Lies of P copies from Bloodborne and Sekiro like a child does from his friend's homework, it has all the answers but it doesn't understand the assignment.

Developer Round8's main takeaway from Dark Souls is that you die a lot, and everyone seems to really like that about it. After all, it's telling you to Prepare to Die right in the title, so clearly that's what people show up for. Well, Lies of P would like you to die too, only it's not so invested in making anything about that loop fun. Round8 has not read deep enough to figure out what makes Dark Souls so engaging and has produced a frustratingly clumsy imitation for it, one that is at times mean-spirited and cheap because that's what Round8 assumes Souls to be.

Lies of P's combat system places a significant emphasis on perfect-parries, which are initiated by hitting the block button a few frames before the enemy's attack lands. Against normal field enemies who throw out one or two attacks at a time, this feels pretty good. Bosses, however, love to initiate absurd 15-hit combos full of staggered animations and straight up fake-outs intended to trip you up and punish you, and that's where I start to fall off with how Lies of P operates. The speed at which your parry is initiated and the level of precision involved makes this system unreliable against flurry attacks, and a severely neutered dodge roll gives you little to fall back on. The game also takes a very Dark Souls 3 "poise for me but not for thee" stance, so I hope you don't mind watching Timothee Chalamet slowly get his wooden ass back up until you save enough Quartz to upgrade his P-Organ so he can dodge while prone.

Perfect-parries, fable arts (see: Dark Souls 3's weapon arts), and charge attacks are all necessary for quickly building stagger damage, because of course this game has a stagger mechanic. It also makes no attempt to convey when you should be pressing the attack or playing defensively, because it obfuscates its stagger meter for absolutely no good reason. Almost all bosses have a second health bar, too, because they all want to be the giant monkey from Sekiro so badly. At this point, I think Sekiro's impact on game design has been a net negative.

Round8's rote copying doesn't end there, however. The door knights from Dark Souls 2, giants from Dark Souls 3, sawtooth blade from Bloodborne, and animation for attempting to use an out-of-stock consumable from Dark Souls are all here. A veritable greatest hits. Round8's wholesale theft isn't limited to Fromsoft, however. Skip this next paragraph if you don't want to spoil some late game character beats and reveals:

Lorenzini Venigni, a friendly NPC who upgrades your Legion Arm (think Sekiro's shinobi prosthetic), is an orphan turned playboy millionaire whose parents were murdered after watching a fantasy-adventure film with their son, leaving him in the care of his faithful butler. The identity of his parent's killer? The King of Riddles, of course. Italian Riddler saying "riddle me this" is as funny as it is brazen, but the biggest laugh Lies of P's borderline-litigious character writing got from me was the post-credits reveal of Giangio being a double agent, which is presented in an extremely Metal Gear-esque way, complete with a "Mr. President..." level name-drop that sets up a potential series of public domain Souls-likes.

Doing something new with something old seems to be the overarching theme of 2023, and Lies of P plays hopscotch on that thin line between inspiration and mimicry. Thankfully, Round8's attempts to recontextualize Carlo Collodi's Adventures of Pinocchio do often result in success, and a strong emphasis on narrative helps pull together borrowed and original ideas to tell a cohesive story that builds upon its primary source material in interesting ways. I was way more invested in the lore of Krat and its inhabitants - yes, even Italian Batman - than I thought I'd be, and some solid art direction and excellent music left me flirting with the idea of a second run.

I also had a great time with the crafting system. You can strap a gigantic blunt wrench head to a pole and use it like a spear, which is exactly the level of stupid I want out of something like this. Hilts determine scaling and attack animations, while blades affect speed and raw damage. Being able to configure a greatsword that's usable on a dexterity build made me feel more inclined to try out weapons without ever feeling like I built my character wrong or locked myself out of something. It's also nice that throwable items remain viable throughout the game, meaning I always had them in my kit whereas I typically phase them out pretty early in most Souls games.

I'm sure this game will attract some annoying people that are very good at video games who will insist Lies of P is beyond reproach, where every flaw is in fact borne from a lack of skill, asserted in a way that reads more as veiled self-aggrandizement than serious criticism. Par for the course with Souls games and the "get good" crowd they attract. I firmly believe that Lies of P is a deeply flawed and derivative game in dire need of re-balancing and new ideas, regardless of how long it took for me to realize I needed to continually dodge left to beat the King of Puppets.

Anyway, I should've stolen Larry Davis' review and changed one or two things about it. Really give you all the true Lies of P experience.

Sea of Stars is superficially impressive, but as you spend time with it, it's impossible to ignore its gigantic flaws in design. While the game's pixel art, music, and exploration are impressive, the writing and battle and progression system drag it down tremendously.

This game suffers from having a failure to launch. You are stuck on a guided path and drip-fed mechanics at a rate that is unacceptable. The battle system gives a great first impression by combining timed hits, a break system, and characters synergizing. After the first couple hours I was ready to unlock new skills and start having some strategic battles... but it took 8 hours to add a fourth character and third special attack. I assumed that surely now it would open up, but it got stale again after an hour or two, and the game took another 8 hours before adding ultimate attacks and a 5th character.

Having all characters level up at the same time and assigning points to them also seemed interesting at first, but it really made it really feel like your level and choices had no effect on the battle system. It's a game with a lot of forced encounters and not designed around grinding, but it always feels easy. The challenge comes from preserving your resources between save points, which are pretty generous.

The battle and progression system's limitations would have been excused if there was a good narrative behind the game, but the story lacked focus and needed a lot of editing. The first hour is extremely slow, and the story only gets more long-winded and pointless as the game goes on. The story makes pacing very uneven, with smooth sailing when the story is in the background, but long story diversions drag out everything. The story is told in a way too complicated for its own good. The idea of a true ending might tantalize some players but the base story is not noteworthy enough to earn my desire to go for it.

The game meanwhile plays a little bit of a trick on the audience by convincing them it's streamlining things, when what its streamlining isn't exactly a problem. The exploration is based around unlocking shortcuts on the map, the enemy encounters are telegraphed, all party members gets upgraded at the same time including fainted characters, and the game has party members resuscitate themselves without having to use an item. But these aren't 'problems' to fix. Having a phoenix down in battle or characters at different levels or the looming threat of a unexpected encounter make JRPGs more strategic. You aren't 'saving the player time' when your game still has areas with too many battles and too much mandatory dialogue. In fact, not being able to escape battles can be extra annoying with respawning or cloning enemies.

Ultimately, I don't think this game really understands the full appeal to the games it tries to imitate like Chrono Trigger/Golden Sun/Secret of Mana. Those games give you a sense of freedom that this game lacks. Even if it's linear, you can break open their systems as you see fit. This game however refuses to take off rails and once you understand the puzzle you want it to do, it loses the charm.

I actually despise this game so fucking much holy shit what a slog, its crazy how these TROGLODYTES will tell you this shitstain is somehow an improvement on the original and FES because they took inspiration from Persona 4's garbage ass mechanics because they can't deal with the ai you can remove with a pnach file, literally all of the atmosphere and cinematic flare is drained from a game in which those aspects are some of its greatest strengths because all of the ways in which P3 achieved those highs such as its wonderfully moody cutscenes are reduced to blurry images and descriptions; all that's being done is the story being communicated, and that's where it ends. The emotional moments don't hit at all because they're replaced with these ugly fucking sprites and the gravitas is erased, the gameplay is actively less fun than FES, the point and click overworld fucking sucks and drastically worsens the experience, don't get me fucking started on the female protagonist who gets a "SHE'S BETTER THAN THE MALE ROUTE!" because again they tried to steamroll the game with persona fucking 4's ideas, her party links don't add shit and the fact that you can revive a dead character, removing the impact of their death and ruining multiple others arcs is a disgrace, actively ruins any reference to the event after the fact and any impact it could have - this is what i consider one of the biggest issues with Portable, it has no respect for the identity or themes of Persona 3. All of the ""improvements"" to make it more like P4 just make the game worse, it just blindly adds things like social links for the party because ooo P4 did it without considering it properly, they don't even work with the fucking story - Junpei feels far more emotionally mature far earlier than he should for example. Akihiko's adds nothing, Ken's is centred around pedophilia for some reason, why does Koromaru have a social link. Also the remaster is bad, the backgrounds look smeared in Vaseline and the fact that some of the basic UI is very clearly AI upscaled to smudge detail is funny as fuck. This game being the most accessible way to play Persona 3 pisses me off to no end and i hope we get a remake to make it truly irrelevant. Any points I will give it are because it has some of P3's good elements like the characters and the music, but make no mistake FES is the only way you should be playing Persona 3