Ren_
100 reviews liked by Ren_
Planescape: Torment
1999
such a transcendent experience. only a few games dig deep into heavy philosophical questions such as mortality and human nature and still manage to emotionally cut into the player's heart. it's incredible how raw and self-reflective the game is, even in the fantastical world of planescape. it is truly a masterclass in RPG writing, and one of the best narratives i've had the chance of experiencing.
An absolute mess both as a game and as a story. What it does have, though, is some pretty hot characters. As far as the bishojo game-ization of Fire Emblem goes, it's more successful than the 3DS games. Edelgard is an order of magnitude hotter than all previous Fire Emblem characters AND you can gay marry her, so it's no competition. Too bad the story on her route is barely anything.
I'm a sucker for genre mixing and I like this weird raising sim/war sim fusion concept in theory, but in practice, it's often tedious and insanely unbalanced. The monastery segments are pure busy-work and don't even demand the level of decision-making that Persona does, as you have very few actions that consume your relatively plentiful activity points, and some of those actions serve little purpose. As far as the character raising side of it goes, you more or less know what two or three skills you want to focus on for each character from the start, and it's just a matter of raising those continuously throughout the game. The class options available are also bizarre, with most of the final classes being worse than the penultimate class options and cumbersome to transition into from those classes. I hope there's another attempt at this style of Fire Emblem though, and I'm sure there will be given this game's success.
I'm a sucker for genre mixing and I like this weird raising sim/war sim fusion concept in theory, but in practice, it's often tedious and insanely unbalanced. The monastery segments are pure busy-work and don't even demand the level of decision-making that Persona does, as you have very few actions that consume your relatively plentiful activity points, and some of those actions serve little purpose. As far as the character raising side of it goes, you more or less know what two or three skills you want to focus on for each character from the start, and it's just a matter of raising those continuously throughout the game. The class options available are also bizarre, with most of the final classes being worse than the penultimate class options and cumbersome to transition into from those classes. I hope there's another attempt at this style of Fire Emblem though, and I'm sure there will be given this game's success.
Three Houses is an amazing game to start off with if you are new to the FE series. The gameplay is really fun, although easy sometimes, the bonds you make between your students and allies are all heartwarming in their moments, and the music is soooo good. I did one of the many endings and I'd love to replay this game again.