Mi amigo Xevii me introdujo en la franquicia mostrándome Persona 4, juego que emulé y disfruté como un enano, y luego va y me regala este por mi cumpleaños.
¿Qué decir de Persona 5 que no se haya dicho ya? Es EL juego, es EL JRPG más importante de la generación y el que ha hecho que un nicho se convierta en un cúmulo de masas, en una de las sagas más mainstream. Todos y cada uno de los apartados de este juego son sublimes y si no ganó el GOTY de su año, es porque por desgracia comparte año de lanzamiento con Breath of the Wild.

Jugad Persona 5

What an interesting game. I wish I could love it.

I picked this game up quite a while ago because it looked beautiful and the idea of a rice farming game with platforming and combat was too weird to pass up. Of course, I then never played it, because it takes me an eternity to get around to anything. Once I finally started the game, though...

In my first two hours, I got to the first winter. Planting the rice is nice, I like the slow and free-form system to it, and the fact that the camera is always moving and doing its best to make sure you can't move in perfectly straight lines makes it feel natural unlike basically any farming game. Tending the rice seemed more and more complicated the more I thought about it, looking at all the bars and numbers and such, which was interesting... but none of it was explained at all, so it was also overwhelming. Only after getting to the final stage of growth did I realize I was supposed to be talking to the big guy every day to get the basic information, which is odd considering how much other information the game forces onto you with extensive dialogue and cutscenes. After harvesting the rice, I then found out that you must thresh the rice... which was alright. The repetitive but satisfying sequence of inputs to do that combined with the satisfying animation and sound, topped off with the relatively fast pace of progress leads to a sort of zen feeling. It took me 45 seconds. Less fine is the hulling. Up, down, up, down, up, down, nothing else, nothing satisfying about it, and it took several minutes to get white rice. Not exactly what I would call fun.

Then there's the combat. While the idea was interesting, the execution leaves me wondering why it's even included at all, aside from thematic relevance. I can see what they were going for, and they failed on every level. Clearly the goal was to have a fast paced beat-em-up style of combat where you can blast through small enemies in great numbers and need to work a little harder on large enemies, but nearly all of the combat system is redundant, the pace is stiff and inconsistent, the movement is slow, and the enemies are a total nuisance.

The combat pretends to have depth by giving you some options for different move types, but fails to account for the fact that mashing the light attack button is all you ever need. It pretends to be skill based by requiring you to dodge and making the dodge move extra flashy, but makes you completely invincible for the entire dodge animation, and while the game does apparently have a parry, it didn't ever tell me it existed and I couldn't figure out how it worked. Directional inputs change your moves, usually into something worse or undesirable, and even a 1% tilt on the stick is enough to trigger it. The insane direction sensitivity also makes it easy to accidentally start attacking in the wrong direction because of stick bounce, which is then made worse by it being impossible to change direction mid-combo, forcing you to either find a way to cancel, hope something walks into you, or let the animation finish. It kills its own pace by putting insanely long recovery times on several of your moves - sometimes over a full second - and making the enemies invincible when they're downed, forcing you to wait several seconds for them to get back up so you can deliver the last hit. Some enemies have little to no telegraph for their attacks, or have projectiles that are extremely difficult to see if there's anything else on the screen. Nothing about this combat is fun to me, and to top it all off, the game also creates difficulty not by making the enemies actually do interesting things - no, they all have two or three moves and spend most of their time not attacking - it just gives them bigger health bars and throws more of them at you. Ironic that the developers said on record that the rice planting works the way it does because "[they] didn't want it to be a process that you could finish with the push of a button" while also making the combat be exactly that.

This all boiled over when I reached the first boss fight, which was just a bigger version of a normal enemy with an obscenely large health bar... and infinitely respawning smaller enemies, including a smaller version of itself, and a ranged enemy. Unless they all got bunched up in the same spot, it was very easy to run into an attack, making taking damage an inevitability that felt unfair and broken rather than challenging or difficult, and of course the fight wasn't fun at all since it's no different from any other, just spam light attack and dodge whenever an attack winds up - and by "dodge" I mean the raiment, because the actual dash move is bound to double tapping a direction on the analog stick, doesn't make you invincible, and barely moves you at all, making it 300% useless. All of that combined with the low drop rates of myriad items that I was just starting to figure out were required to progress made it quite clear that the only thing the combat adds to the game is a dull grind, and I'm sure it wasn't meant to be that way. Beyond disappointing. I would prefer if the game had no combat at all over this fundamentally broken and wildly unpolished system, thematic relevance be damned.

But I kept playing.

Thankfully, most of my issues with the rice side of the game were noticeably improved by the second year. It seems intentional, because the quick growth of skills and unlocking new abilities both figuratively and literally reflect Sakuna's growth, which is the real reason I kept playing. I do still wish the hulling took less time though, and I honestly don't understand the point of the hand thresher, because it doesn't make it any faster, it just makes it less fun by simplifying the input to a basic right-left alternation instead of down-right-left which can be performed as a half-circle. The rice pounder, for its part, sucks in its own way because it only makes the hulling process even more boring in exchange for a minuscule time savings. Everything else is good though, because things get tangibly faster and better with every season, absolutely nailing the sense of progression and satisfaction, and the depth of fertilizing and tending the crop went from overwhelming to intuitive and fun very quickly... at least, on a basic level. There are a lot of variables at play for every step, and balancing those variables just right apparently makes the rice turn out better, but I never really got the hang of truly maximizing it. Honestly, I would probably enjoy a dedicated farming game that plays like this.

My problems with the combat, however, never got better at all, so I turned the combat difficulty down because it sucks, I hate it, it's not rewarding, I get nothing from it, and it's not even relevant. I didn't even notice a difference with the difficulty lowered, I'm not convinced it changed anything at all. If anything, it all got worse with time, because all but one of the bosses are just bigger versions of regular enemies with giant health bars and infinitely respawning nuisances, and the platforming became obnoxious. Poison gas, falling rocks that you can't easily dodge due to the dodge move being bound stupidly to double tapping the left stick, big floating balls of water that you have to wait around for and swim in that make you move in slow motion that also harass you on the ground during combat... I suppose I could have spent a few years just tending the rice without doing more than the bare minimum of combat so I could overlevel and trivialize the rest of the combat, but that seemed like choosing between a rock and a hard place.

I did at least eventually kind of figure out the parry. It seems to be similar to Metal Gear Rising, where you move the stick towards the incoming attack and press a button with perfect timing, but I never fully understood it, because even as I got more and more consistent with it, I would still often get hit anyway, regardless of how good my timing was, and other times I would parry successfully without trying to, not to mention the times where trying to parry triggered a dash attack instead. As the game progressed and I got more special moves, I could at least start to pretend the combat had something to offer by varying up my attacks, but mashing light attack never stopped being optimal.

I never knew how much of a story there was in this game since I pretty much bought it entirely on the concept of rice farming and the combat, but the story quickly became the best part. Not because it's particularly groundbreaking or amazingly written or anything, it just happens to appeal to me... after switching to the Japanese voices, that is. I tried the English ones, I really did, but the English voices in this game have the same problem that turn me off of almost every other English dub of Japanese media: Painfully overacted, feels faker than fake, and at least one of the voice actors puts on an incredibly grating voice. (This is often true for even a lot of native English media as well, and dubs from other sources of course, it's just most common with Japanese stuff in my experience.)

Sakuna is cute, but very stupid, and a massive brat. Watching her grow up over the course of the game, coming to terms with being made to get her hands dirty and work the field, slowly forming connections with the children of men she previously looked down upon, finding her place in the world, I like that. Also she can pet a cat, which is nice. All the other characters are charming in their own ways too, and I always enjoyed seeing them interact and doing their side quests. And rest assured, there were plenty of opportunities to see the characters interact, because short little scenes are peppered in everywhere - many of which also trigger new side quests - to keep things fresh, which I think is this game's biggest strength. All those little charming scenes keep the pace moving slowly forward, which does a lot to prevent the game from getting dull when you're not farming. Some kappa even show up. I like the kappa.

It also helps that the game creates an impeccable mood with its art, music, and sound design. Not one of these things stands particularly strongly alone, but together they are more than the sum of their parts. The character designs are wonderful and the world is beautiful to look at, the soundscapes are fantastic, and the music is perfectly composed to elevate the experience without taking undue precedence or becoming repetitive and boring. The only nitpicks I have are that the soundscapes are a lot louder than they could have been, sometimes making it quite a shock when you step into a building and it all suddenly stops, and the bloom is absolutely ridiculous at times... but I can't decide how I really feel about either of those things. The sound being so loud seems bad when I describe it and the feeling of it suddenly stopping is definitely weird, but it never really bothered me. I also turned the bloom off and on multiple times, and sometimes it's better off, other times it's better on, and that's coming from me, an avid bloom despiser.

But then it just... keeps going... and going... and going. Story progression for most of the game is locked behind your "exploration level", which you increase by completing objectives in the different levels, which means you have to spend more time in combat. Some of these objectives are very easy, some aren't, some are just plain annoying, and none are entertaining. After a certain point, you even discover a dungeon or gauntlet level with 100 floors, because apparently the developers were really confident that the combat was good enough that it would be fun for that long. Around that point, I started feeling the drag, because I always knew how much combat was waiting for me, along with more platforming that slowly but surely continued to get worse and worse, even though I just wanted to farm rice and enjoy the atmosphere. I will say, though, at least the first few floors of the dungeon were the best combat the game had shown me yet, because it was almost all ground enemies bunched together in great numbers, so there was always something to hit and I was constantly knocking enemies into each other. I would almost call it satisfying, if not for the fact that the combat still has no depth, no enemy variety, brain dead AI, stiff and clunky controls, and nonsensical recovery times.

Then it continues. Even still, it continues. That wasn't even the halfway point.

And after getting past the halfway point, when every single element of the combat and the enemy variety has been well and truly wrung out for every last drop, it recycles all of the same things even more, because for some reason, the developers really thought that a game of this scale with such a tiny enemy variety and combat that barely works at all could stretch out for 30 hours. Making things worse for me specifically, I triggered the midway point literally on the day my rice was ready to take inside and finish up, not knowing that the midway point negates all your work, so I ended up losing the whole harvest at the finish line and having to deal with lower stats than I could have had during a part of the game that lowers your stats, AND throws you at enemies with higher stats at the same time... including one that heals them all, and given how strong some of them are, it's entirely possible to be unable to deal damage faster than they heal. Oh, and just for good measure, enemies come in much higher quantities on top of it all.

This game has its flaws and its strengths, but it seems to go out of its way to hide its strengths, and not only highlight the flaws, but focus on them, almost glorify them, because it's quite clear the developers lacked the experience to create the game they wanted, and lacked the assistance to figure out the problem before it was too late. This is an 8-10 hour game stretched out far beyond its limits that actively works against itself the whole way through, making absolutely certain that the experience is worse than it should be.

It is at this point that I began to actively dislike playing the game.

But despite my growing disdain, I continued. A small and further shrinking part of me remained compelled to see this game through to the end, and once I got there, I was happy. Not just because it was finally over, but because the conclusion of the game was genuinely satisfying. I do love me a bit of the ol' indomitable human spirit. As the credits rolled, I put the controller down and smiled. That's the true strength of this game. It made me happy.

If every part of Sakuna was charming, endearing, enjoyable, satisfying, and rewarding, except for the gameplay, then it's a failure of a video game. It failed to deliver the experience that it was meant to, and yet, it delivered in so many other ways. The look, the sound, the style, the atmosphere, the charm, the love that clearly went into bringing it all to life... I truly believe that Sakuna would have been better made as an anime instead of a video game, but alas, Edelweiss is only a two person team. Wouldn't you know it though, there is a Sakuna manga that tells a different story, and it's wonderful.

The fact that Edelweiss is a two person team makes my grievances feel so much worse, because for all my complaining, all my criticism, all my vitriol that I believe is entirely valid and true... I still want to applaud the developers for what they accomplished. It is a genuine work of art that they should be proud of. If the gameplay is fun for people other than me, that's even better, I don't mind being a stick in the mud. If its massive success in Japan is anything to go by - half a million sales in its first month, nominated for five separate awards at the Famitsu Dengeki Game Awards 2020, including game of the year, and winning three of them (but not game of the year), plus an award at CEDEC 2021, and another from the Playstation Partner Awards - I probably am being a stick in the mud. I don't hate the game at all, and I'm not trying to bully or insult the developers with my criticism, I just wish the game was better so I could have loved it in full.

They have said that they want to make a sequel one day, and I sincerely hope that if that day comes, they can learn from the problems in this game, get some outside help if they need it, and take feedback early in development to ensure that the combat can shine as bright as the rest of the world does. Look at Dust: An Elysian Tail, for instance, another 2D side scrolling action RPG platformer, released eight years earlier and created almost entirely by one person. Devil May Cry it is not, but the combat is leagues ahead of Sakuna.

The world that Edelweiss have created here is a beautiful one that I would love to inhabit again one day, be it through a better video game, or through any other medium. But I will not be playing this particular game again.

In the end, Sakuna is for me the epitome of the phrase "I really wanted to love this".

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/sakuna-the-rice-is-ruined/)

Arte linda, trilha maravilhosa, narrativa interessante, jogabilidade ok.

Antes de começar um mini-rant, queria exaltar aqui que o jogo é bonito DEMAIS e a trilha é simplesmente incrível. Duas coisas que dava pra se esperar vindo de The Messenger mas eu acho que eles conseguiram ir MUITO além da minha expectativa aqui.

Acho que tá todo mundo cansado já de ouvir "Chrono Trigger" quando o assunto é Sea of Stars (eu sei que estou), mas só pra não deixar passar batido, o jogo faz muita referência óbvia sim a CT. Nem vou entrar no mérito de "sucessor espiritual" e nada do tipo porque eu honestamente acho isso a maior perda de tempo. É um jogo que obviamente se inspira nele, faz referência descarada mas ainda é sua própria coisa.

Eu gostei muito do jogo no geral mas o que dá uma pegada pra mim é que ele parece tão esticado desnecessariamente. Isso ficou muito mais evidente enquanto eu fazia o ng+ pra pegar a última achievement. Da primeira vez eu estava preocupado em prestar atenção em cada detalhezinho, em explorar cada canto então eu levava muito tempo de área em área. Mas rushando o jogo fica evidente o porque de lá pro final eu já estar tão cansado e querendo que acabasse logo. O jogo simplesmente te enrola pra caralho. Tudo que você vai fazer é dividido em no mínimo 3. Vai pra 3 lugares fazer X coisa genérica que geralmente é apertar 1 botão, pegar 1 item ou matar uns inimigos. E isso é basicamente o jogo todo, sempre tem uma desculpa pra você ter que ir numa fetch quest genérica fazer altos nada. Como eu disse, da primeira vez eu estava tão encantado com a história, arte e música que eu nem reparei tanto, mas o cansaço definitivamente foi se construindo. E é bizarro porque eu sinto que se podassem tudo isso o jogo nem ia ficar tão menor assim, só menos cansativo.

Eu gostei muito da movimentação, principalmente pelos itens que você libera, mas não curti tanto o combate. De cara parecia legal mas aí você rapidamente percebe que vai ter que spammar aquele moonerangue toda santa luta contra 5 inimigos genéricos e tudo leva uma eternidade... torna o combate especialmente contra inimigos menores tão mais lerdo e chato. Lá pra frente também tem alguns bosses que simplesmente te dão hitkill se você não acertar o block e apesar de não ter sentido que isso tornou o jogo frustrante, eu preferia que não tivesse isso não, não é o tipo de coisa que eu pessoalmente procuro no gênero.

A história do jogo não é nada surreal, mas é bem divertida. Os personagens são interessantes e me mantiveram bem engajado até o fim. Eu sinto que lá pro fim a peteca cai e as coisas acabam meio rushadas e sem muita justificativa, mas não acho que chega a decepcionar.

Gosto DEMAIS de The Messenger e Sea of Stars sendo do mesmo time faz um monte de referências que eu adorei, então talvez eu esteja um pouco enviesado nessa review. Meu saldo é super positivo e as coisas que eu citei que incomodaram nem chegaram perto de estragar minha experiência.

Callisto Protocol é provavelmente a experiência mais miserável que tive com um jogo AAA, deixa eu explicar:

Sinceramente eu não sabia exatamente o que esperar de Callisto Protocol, ele tem envolvimento do criador de Dead Space o trailer de anuncio dele era intrigante e isso era tudo que eu tinha de informação desse jogo até esse presente momento. Antes dele, eu tive vontade de jogar Dead Space e caso você queira saber o que eu achei, bem, mediocre, tenho meus motivos, comentei aqui no site também e ok, vamo virar essa pagina.

Mas fato é que enquanto eu jogava Dead Space eu me perguntava como transpor aquele jogo, para as convenções de hoje, o que seria Dead Space hoje? Eu inocente acreditei que essa miséria tecnológica seria um interessante ponto de partida pra sanar a minha duvida.

Mas e ai, e qual é o problema então? Tudo, desde as polemicas pelo crunch que ocorreu na produção, questões de filosofia de game design até o espancamento que foi pro currículo da Karen Fukuhara (Kimiko de The Boys) aparecer nesse jogo. Agora mais sobre o jogo, na primeira meia hora você já entende muito de como vai funcionar o loop de gameplay, é apresentada a mecânica de punch out da shopee, aonde você consegue desviar dos golpes melee dos inimigos apenas colocando o direcional para um dos lados antes de ser atingido, mas o que acontecer é que não importa o lado, você sempre desvia (isso quando o jogo não entende que você tá puxando o seu direcional com toda a força do mundo e ele simplesmente não desvia nem defende pois o jogo tá de lua), aqui também volta o desmembramento, claro né, estamos falando de um jogo inspirado nesse colosso da indústria não é mesmo? o problema é que ela não é uma grande coisa aqui, ela tá lá, mas pode não estar também, o jogo tem um grande foco em melee e vez ou outra tem muitos inimigos na tela, o jogo até tem habilidades que visam controle de área, mas elas só na funcionam porque O COMBATE NÃO PERMITE ISSO. Resumindo, muito das coisas que o jogo se propõem mecanicamente não funcionam, ou você pode simplesmente não usar.

Mas o que me deu mais desgosto é uma parada além disso, visto que, videogames estão na era da reprodutibilidade técnica, obras vão ser feitas reproduzindo tendências que deram certo num passado recente, e Callisto Protocol é um sintoma disso. Tendo uma linguagem audiovisual muito semelhante a de um exclusivo da Sony, o jogo tem o rosto pensa como Dead space, mas age como, sei lá, The Last of Us? God Of War? É apenas uma amalgama de referencias, vazias e sem alma, o jogo que Glen Schofield quer replicar não se aplica em nenhum nível as convenções de um jogo mais "cinematográfico".

Eu não sei o que Callisto Protocol queria ser, mas ele tá longe de ser um bom jogo, é uma afronta pro seu tempo, pra sua pessoa e pra indústria (essa ultima tem que se fuder mesmo) é um símbolo de tudo que há de errado com os videogames nos últimos 10 anos, é o tipo de jogo que se alguém me fala que só sai jogo ruim nos dias de hoje e me aponta ele, eu concordo, se me fala que os jogos não são divertidos e mencionam ele, eu confirmo, a pessoa passar a odiar videogames após ele, eu não vou estranhar.

De todo modo, foi horrível, pretendo falar mais detalhadamente no futuro, de forma mais estruturada em que eu não pareça um maluco, mas esse jogo mexeu comigo, eu to muito triste, mandem ajuda.

Played this game for 3 or 4 hours when I first booted it up, but never really got hooked. "Tons of games start off slow and get better" I told myself, so I went to give it another chance a few days later. Then I saw the timer of how much I had actually played. I had not played 3 or 4 hours, but in reality, only 45 minutes. The narrative and mechanics just moved so glacially slow that it felt 5x longer than it actually was.

The 5 seconds Sam Witwer was on screen were the best 5 seconds of that 45 minutes.

Admittedly, the graphics and performances were really top notch, but not enough for me to want to see it through to completion unfortunately

Mas que jogo horripilante dos infernos, e não no bom sentido pra um jogo desse gênero. Já se perguntou como copiar Dead Space da pior maneira possível? The Callisto Protocol é a resposta perfeita dessa pergunta, um erro crasso de Glen Schofield. É bonito visualmente, mas gráfico não carrega nenhuma experiência, ainda mais em um survival horror. A historia é genérica, sci-fi mais sem graça possível com um dos protagonistas mais desinteressantes que os videogames introduziram. E o combate é ainda mais repetitivo, não conseguiram nem fazer um melee bom.

Que jogo decepcionante. Uma experiência lastimável e sem alma.