Pacing Land

I caught Sand Land at the 2023 Summer Games Fest, an event I always try to catch in the postmortem of the once monumental E3. Despite being largely indifferent and avoidant of Bandai-Namco's arsenal of seemingly endless anime video games, something about Sand Land caught my eye. In the end it was reminiscing to my youth and those late nights spent watching Toonami when I was supposed to be asleep. Night after night I'd stay up and catch what I could understand about Japanese anime, something I was largely unfamiliar with and unsure about how to follow, but was enthralled nonetheless. There was one anime at the time that seemed to interject itself the most into the zeitgeist of my childhood, and that was Akira Toriyama's magnum opus: Dragonball Z. Despite this game clearly not being Dragonball, I gave that little preamble as a sort of introduction and reasoning as to why I became interested in the game Sand Land. I'd never read the manga, only ever having read maybe three manga in my entire life, but because it felt familiar. Watching gameplay of obviously Akira Toriyama created characters running around and engaging in general buffoonery felt familiar, and thus I was interested.

Now if you've read my reviews and looked at the score, you'll notice that the beginning monologue is almost always followed with a "but" in detraction to how "fun" the game was... and yeah here that is. Though it was nice to experience simple Saturday morning cartoon vibes in a fully voice acted anime game, I actually had to play it. I liked the cast, thought the game had some charming dialogue, loved the character art (re: familiarity with Dragonball,) and liked the general lightheartedness of the story, however the gameplay loop got tired eventually and the game itself was ultimately far too long.

The story revolves around the Prince of Darkness and Company running around on (initially) a quest for water what leads them to astounding secrets, betrayal, and a war against systematic power they could not have predicted. The first arc, taking place over maybe fifteen or so hours of the game's ~twenty-four hour runtime, was pretty fun and well paced. Your crew goes from one area to the next with a decent speed and the scale of enemies and power makes sense... mostly. It's once this first arc is finished and Forest Land becomes involved that things slow down to a shuttering halt and the pacing becomes pretty poor. You engage in many repetitive quests, dungeons, fights (re-used bossfights... yay!) and the ending quest itself lasts about three hours too long.

Gameplay in Sand Land is about 70% tank/vehicle based, which was a pretty nice 180 from the last few games I've played which largely ignore vehicle combat/interaction (minus Rebirth I guess.) The Prince utilizes a growing roster of Bots, Tanks, and Hoverboards that each carry their own use. The Tank is a great all-around damage dealer, the Jump Bot allows you to gain verticality in traversal in fights, the bike gets you from Point A to Point B in a reasonable amount of time, and so on. Sand Land does a pretty good job of allowing you to pick what you want for combat while making traversal a little bit of a gimmick, which is okay. Upkeep of the bots isn't too hard, and I found that levelling and upgrading was a natural progression of materials I was already finding in the world. Outside of the vehicles you engage in a hefty deal of hand-to-hand combat, which leaves a LOT to be desired mechanically, and also sneaking missions... because who doesn't love one button combat sneaking missions??? Playing the game outside of what is advertised and plastered in the marketing was a real snoozefest and adds just about nothing to playing the game.

While it was fun to get a mostly humorous fun adventure out of Sand Land, it was largely a nothing burger and definitely not worth full price. I don't recommend Sand Land.

Unstellar Blade

A game so milquetoast that it literally crashed my PC in switching inputs from my PS5 to my main display so I could write this review, and thus I lost all of my notes I had carefully constructed over the past three days of playtime. What I pulled together is that this was an attempt at making Nier: Automata without actually making it fun and without Yoko Taro.

I remember Stellar Blade's Official Reveal as Project Eve, named after the game's main character, jumping out of an otherwise uneventful and boring Sony State of Play with its flashy combat, beautiful environments, and overwhelmingly attractive protagonist. Hot character bait aside, I was interested in this game because of the influences it was clearly wearing on its sleeve in the aforementioned Platinum Games magnum opus. Many have tried and few have succeeded in nailing hack and slash as well as Platinum or their cousins in Capcom have done with the plethora of impressive titles between the two. Did I think Stellar Blade was going to go one on one with Nier, DMCV, or Metal Gear Rising? Absolutely not, but I did think it was worth a try, to see if there was a company out there who could go to bat with the best of them and put an effort forward that would be worth paying attention to in the years to come. I was excited for Stellar Blade as the release date neared, because it meant that I could one quell the discourse over the design of Eve by providing actual input on how the game plays, and secondly because the need for a fast paced hack and slash was weighing heavily on me after playing slower burn titles like FF7R2 and P3R fairly recently. Within a day of playing my interest waned but I remained hopeful, however on the third complete day of playing and the day I ultimately completed the game... I came away fairly perturbed.

The good, lets start with that why don't we? This game is downright beautiful. I played it on my PS5 on my 4K display with HDR enabled and woah nelly, it looked great. One of the greatest aspects of this title was how great both characters and the world looked from a graphical standpoint. As you transition from dilapidated buildings and streets into destroyed railways and misgiving deserts, your eyes will feast at the eye candy abound in the backgrounds of the world. I found myself navigating the camera up and down constantly at the world I was interacting with as it was tremendously rich in flavour and care from a design standpoint. I felt like the developers put a great deal of effort into creating a visually striking game, which unfortunately seems to have accompanied a trade off in other aspects of the title. More to come on that shortly, as I do want to praise the team for putting some of the best facial and body design in gaming forward. As I've already experienced, much of the conversation about Stellar Blade has been lost in the perceived attractiveness of Eve, but every character you interact with truly looks incredible. Though their proportions and mannerisms may not be totally... human, they are indubitably crafted with an intricacy and care to look astonishing. Stellar Blade if nothing else is a journey of eye candy, but that's kind of... it.

While not exactly fast enough to be a Nier-like, and not fun punishing and explore heavy enough to be a Souls-like, Stellar Blade attempted to forge a path forward that played out like a middle ground between Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and the Jedi: Fallen Order/Survivor games. Eve's combat relies on using a plethora of learned abilities and tech to parry and dodge her way through a litany of grotesque alien foes who have claimed Earth to be their own. Where this goes wrong is in quite a few places, but the most apparent and earliest was in the poor "janky" feel and lack of reliability in both parry and dodge timings. This can be sort-of remedied by investing in Eve's skill trees and upgrading Eve's exo-spine but never really feels... good. Even if I was a dissenter of Sekiro over all, I felt like it mostly gave the right kind of feedback and snap to the parry/dodge timings required to master such a difficult title. For a game as infuriatingly hard as Stellar Blade gets in its late game, I felt like I was at the whimsy of luck in my dodges not directly feeding into a followup attack by a boss and my perfect parries not being read by the game because of poor latency or buffer timing. Time after time I'd land a perfect dodge only to be hit by the boss moving faster than Eve could recover right after. Cheap is the way I'd put that and it proliferated throughout the entire runtime of the title.

Difficulty is something I've spoken about ad nauseum in action-rpg titles and I'll continue to do so as I have an affinity for these kinds of games. After grinding my teeth in the (generally) slower paced Fromsoft classics and the speedy Platinum/Capcom games of the last decade and change, I feel like I'm fairly qualified. Stellar Blade early on feels hard, but not in a way that cannot be conquered. If I was getting my tail kicked by a group of world enemies or a boss, I found that I could readjust my stratagems to craft a better gameplan, coming back smarter and using my abilities at optimized times to come out victorious. I found my confidence growing, something that did not happen this early in Sekiro, and I continued on to the later stages of the game. I opened up my Playstation menu to check my progress, a feature of the console that tracks how far you've made it through the main story, and saw I had notched at 89%. I labored on to the area boss on one of the last major quests of the game. It was here I through my face into a wall, stressing with every ability and item I had to make it through the three phases and effective six health bars that the boss had. I double this up because of the way shields work. See in Stellar Blade, simply doing damage and having fun taking down your enemy's health bar is simply not allowed, you must first deplete their shields before you can do any "meaningful" damage to their hitpoints. Meaningful in quotations because even then on a fully upgraded weapon, after laboriously taking away the superfluous shield bar, you are granted the ability to do slightly more damage to the bosses health per hit. I've played Dark Souls underleveled and with un-upgraded weapons enough to know torment when it comes to weapons doing very little damage to bosses... and even that does not compare to how insulting Stellar Blade's damage counter feels.

It wasn't even until a few bosses later that I truly came to terms with my disdain for the needlessly draconian difficulty that exists within Stellar Blade's late game boss fights. I threw everything together that I could into defeating the (name kept out of review due to spoiler) boss. I thought I could craft a winning effort of combining my ultimate abilities with my tertiary skills and burst maneuvers, but nothing was taking. I couldn't perfect dodge and parry any longer against the multi-faceted and multi-phase boss fight at hand. Visual clarity was completely nuked from orbit as I could barely tell what moves were hitting me, where certain objects were, or where my Eve's reactions would take me next. A greater qualm I have with games at large now, I wrote about these most notably in my FFXVI DLC reviews, is a complete lack of being able to actually see what's going on in boss fights because of the "ooh how cool" quality that moves need to have. Keeping this in mind, the bosses began to teleport away CONSTANTLY from Eve so as to reposition their efforts while tarnishing any offensive effort I had put forth. This was rhythm breaking and tore any motivation I had towards chasing the enemy down, I felt discouraged and unmotivated to capitalize on optimized windows because I knew the boss would simply teleport away at any given moment. After being unable to keep up with this, the visuals going on, and the randomly included DPS checks, I put the game on "story mode" (reminder this is in the last hour or so of a medium length title) and kept chugging. I'm not actually sure this did anything to make the game easier. What it does in theory is give you windows to dodge and parry, popping up with on screen prompts of what button to press to not be hit by the enemies maneuvers. Does this work? Absolutely not. Most of the time these move to fast to even parse what move you're supposed to use, and half the bosses moves don't even populate your screen with a prompt at all. Through the next couple bosses and into the final boss I became increasingly confused if this was actually a difficulty slider at all or simply an effort to make you "feel" better by putting a semblance of choice of difficulty in front of you.

A best in class soundtrack (potentially one of the best of the year) and impressive visuals couldn't prop Stellar Blade up enough to go against its resoundingly poor English VA (I eventually played in Korean,) drab narrative heavily borrowed from Nier: Automata, and impressively frustrating and unrewarding combat. This is absolutely not a title worthy of purchasing at a $70 price tag, maybe half of that at best. I commend Sony and SHIFT UP for putting together a brand new IP and throwing some serious marketing at making this game stick out, but it felt like a great value Sekiro meets Nier at best. I would not recommend Stellar Blade to anyone with a PS5.

This was... really not good.

A short form review for a short form experience, with a runtime of maybe four or five hours at best, Final Fantasy XVI's final DLC is a complete departure from what made the main title so good. Ultimately (heh) the issue with Rising Tide is that it's both not interesting and infuriating. The new locale Clive and the gang find themselves in is isolated much like the Echoes of the Fallen DLC. There's not much to do in the realm of exploring, and what you can poke around and interact with wasn't worth the price tag. The village and its populous are kinda just there with no real varied culture or intrigue to make me wish to interact with them further, and the setting chugs the Playstation 5 somehow to Bloodborne levels of framerate. The unfortunate thing for XVI here is that it is not Bloodborne and won't get a pass. I don't know, if I'm engaging with a civilization and its dominant unbeknownst to the greater world and largely lost to time, I'd like them to stand out just a little bit past their appearance?

The combat in Rising Tide frustrated me at similar levels as EotF did just before it, in that you're playing through a dungeon with raised difficulty levels (Which is okay!) however you're throttled by an inability to return to Outer Heaven and restock at any point. Now when you game over you can refresh potions... but this felt like a pretty annoying workaround. Bosses, namely the ultimate one, are genuine sponges taking a frustrating amount of time to defeat even if you're well equipped and geared for the task at hand. This was an issue I had with Rebirth and it rears its ugly head again here in the last bit of XVI we'll get. If I'm doing stagger damage of over two million... you'd hope to get a sense of vindication in healthbar removal moreso than you'll get in Rising Tide. Poorly tuned DPS checks, overwhelming mechanics that lack visual clarity, an enemy that is constantly flying away from you all in addition to the aforementioned sponge issue make for a resoundingly aggrivating experience.

For someone who was a massive fan of the main game in FFXVI and even had it as their Game of the Year for 2023, Rising Tide unfortunately tarnishes the legacy of an otherwise stellar title. It doesn't add much to the excellently crafted personas of Clive, Joshua, or Jill, as you get little in the way of conversation or captivating quotables, instead thrusting the player into a lukewarm time. I do not recommend Final Fantasy XVI: The Rising Tide.