Alright, strap in. I have a lot to say.

Let's get the elephant out of the room before I actually talk about this game. I am going to bring up issues I have with the game's art direction later on but none of that has to do with how sexualized the character designs are. I am fine with all of those other characters you want to use as a counterargument. That is not the core of my issue with this game, but before I get into that, I'll talk about what I DO like because I do still like this game.

I think on a graphical level, the game looks amazing. It runs consistently well and has been thoroughly play-tested which I shouldn't have to appreciate, but most great games usually have at least some small level of bugginess that this game does not have. Additionally, on this aesthetic front, I love the game's soundtrack, probably one of the year's standouts alongside Rebirth and Prince of Persia. I also think the linear and open-world missions in the game are, for the most part, quite fun! There are some survival horror-type missions that I found particularly memorable, even if they clash really hard with the rest of the game, but we're not there yet!

But the place where I have the hugest amount of praise for this game is its combat and enemy encounters. I'm gonna talk more about the game's "identity" later but this is where Stellar Blade's identity is strongest as it can't really be put in any camp for these 3D hack-and-slash games. It's not slow-paced and deliberate like a souls-like, but it's not super quick and combo-heavy like a DMC or a Bayonetta. The combat feels like a good mix of light comboing, really nice feeling parries, strong finishers, and a good amount of diversity in the way that you can approach combat. The enemies and bosses are also very well-designed and super difficult. The game shines brightest when focused on its great combat and there is a sequence near the end that works well for this game. It's great!

The game for the most part is really fun, super polished, and not particularly painful to go through. If someone might not have some of the same issues I do later on in this review, then I can see someone loving this game to pieces. But.. I have some SERIOUS issues with this game.

Starting off is the one that everyone, even the people who like the game is bringing up. On a narrative front, Stellar Blade is an absolute mess. The game's script is written so awkwardly, almost like it was machine-translated rather than actually localized. The dialogue is super awkwardly written and some moments in the side missions just feel kind of... embarrassing? The story setup is mildly interesting (until you notice something I'll bring up later), but the story's themes are barely explored apart from naming conventions and a couple of moments at the beginning and end.

The narrative didn't even need to be particularly deep or anything. Bayonetta and DMC games don't have deep stories, but A, they're not really trying to, and B, they do have a memorable cast with personalities at least. When I heard from reviews that Stellar Blade's cast isn't the strongest out there, what I DIDN'T expect to find was the most emotionless and barebones main character this side of The Callisto Protocol.

Eve is such a remarkably bland character, lacking a single actual personality trait. They try to develop Eve in a couple of ways regarding her ambiguous relationship with Tachy, who is also boring and has no character and then dies. They do a scene with this relationship in particular near the end of the game and it just felt so stilted and not super earned. But surely the other characters are better, right? I mean... I guess so? Lily at least has.. a personality and Adam, as boring as he is, at least has some interesting things happen with them later on, but the character writing is so incredibly weak in this game and the voice acting, both in Korean and English only makes it worse.

Okay, so that's the narrative stuff out of the way, what's that other major problem I have with the game that I've been edging you out of? This game does not have a fucking identity. I've been trying my best to hold back on comparing this game to NieR Automata up to this point, because I wanted to judge this game on its own, but it's so blatantly apparent just HOW MUCH of this game was derived from it. You play as a sexy android lady from a space base and are sent down to get rid of all of the bad guys that took over the Earth. You run around a semi-open world with a little drone that follows you around everywhere and talks to you. The game goes into detail on who the guys you are fighting and who you're working for REALLY ARE and there are themes of Identity and Religion and Life. The main character is very stoic and emotionless, but unlike 2B, here it's because they aren't written to have one. Hell, there are characters named Adam and Eve IN NIER AUTOMATA.

I know this all seems super surface level, but these comparisons wouldn't be such a huge problem if they had a super strong identity on their own and it really REALLY doesn't. The most distinctive thing about this game is that you're fighting Semi-religious gross penis monsters called Naytiba instead of robots. But that feels more like it clashes with the game's sci-fi aesthetic more than anything. Speaking of clashing, the character designs don't even really feel like they belong in the same game, most notably when you compare Eve, Lily, and Adam's designs. And they are the main 3 characters of the whole game. And most of the side characters don't even have faces, which is super weird? Why does the hairdresser have no hair? What are we doing here?

This also extends to the locations, Xion just feels like a pretty generic post-apocalyptic world. Half the time, in these linear missions, you fight in ruined cities and sewers and the two semi-open world areas you get are both bare empty deserts. I know asking for visual variety in a post-apocalyptic game is asking the wrong questions, but maybe have at least one of the open-world areas not be a desert??

All of these things combined, the art style clash between the different characters, friend, and foe, in this game, the super generic areas, the basic and derivative story, the lack of any characters with more than one personality trait, and the themes it doesn't touch on very much at all, leads to a game that doesn't really have an identity of its own. Hell, even though I love the music, it sounds very much like NieR music. The game's identity shines brightest in its combat, in its missions, in its boss encounters, and in one section near the end of the game that I thought was actually excellent.

This is clearly a talented team and the fact they were able to make a big console game this good on their first try is astounding. I can only hope their next game has more of a unique identity.

TLDR; The game is well-polished, has some great music, some decently fun linear and open world missions, and some exceptional combat and boss fights, but the character designs clash super hard with each other, the environments don't feel distinct, the story and character writing are incredibly bad, and the game just doesn't have a strong identity outside of copying NieR Automata's homework.

so....idk where to start. i discovered this game from gab smolders on youtube. usually i cant really play horror games cuz they stress me out too much but since i realized this was a turn-based game that didnt require running away from things i wanted to give it a try. and let me just say, i started falling in love with it pretty quickly. so much so that even unnecessarily sexualized images of women who were victims of violent crimes (even d*ad women sometimes) were kind of bearable as i knew lots of visual noves games (esp. japanese ones) incorporated overly sexualized images of women to cater to their male audience. despite that, i LOVED the friendship blooming between the mark bearers, the suspense, thrill and plot twists. in order for me to really like a game, most of the time there has to a group of friends that are bonding over time together because it makes me want to play more in order to see what else they're gonna get through together. so i really liked that aspect, along with the stories behind the vengeful spirits, the mechanics and the mystery of it all. however, i have to say that the female victims always having to die extremely violent deaths that men don't or showing female victims in overly sexual positions that do not add ANYTHING to the plot nor the gameplay annoyed me very much. they already had a pretty good thing going on for the game in terms of the plot, the characters, the art and many more. catering to an audience full of horny incels who do nothing but objectify women's suffering doesn't do anything positive for the games legacy, if anything it destroys it. i still enjoyed the game thoroughly enough to immediately download the second one to play.

The first level in the game is the best part, but it slowly gets worse. Three of the four levels are great, and each one is a bit different. Escaping from a hospital, exploring your home and finding out who you were, and being a detective in a hotel following a string of murders using your psychic powers. The main issue with the game comes from half the boss fights; they're trial-and-error bullshit that wouldn't be hard at all if it weren't for the fact that this game utilizes tank controls. These controls are fine for the majority of the game; it's just those sections where you feel like grinding your teeth with a belt sander. The final level also decided to mostly focus on combat and is just a tower where you fight a few enemies on each floor before reaching the top, when the game before hand never focused intensely on combat. There are a lot of good ideas, especially in the story and atmosphere, but they fall flat in areas that just make it an okay PlayStation 1 game.

So, today marks the date of my completion of the adventure main campaign (haven’t started new game+), and I wanted to write a review for it, but it struck me that most people usually look up reviews of this game to ask, “does it work to lose weight / make me fit” and the answer I’m gonna give to you is a resounding “it can (with proper dieting and routine)”
Which is always frustrating to hear as every exercise tool is always given this answer, I get it too, you just wanna be able to determine if you can get fit with this game but if you’ve ever been interested in losing weight you know that exercise is only about 25% of the deal, I’m not a nutritionist not even a huge fitness person so I’m not gonna tell you if its gonna work to lose weight or gain muscle, but what I am going to tell you, is ring fit adventure a good exercise tool? In my amateurs opinion, yes!
But as I’ve been introspecting in between my exercise sessions, I wanna write a little bit more so in this review ill go over some pros, cons and talking about the story of adventure mode and my personal story with the game, cw for eating disorder talk on the rest of this review.

Pros
- Obviously, it’s a good way to get exercise at home as a newbie, I didn’t know most of these exercises and frankly didn’t know how to do how to properly do 90% of any of them before playing the game.
- The game is really nice to you, I really mean it, I said this in an old review here, but the game constantly encourages you, and never shames you for lowering the difficulty or taking breaks in your routine.
- I may just be a huge daydreamy nerd when I’m saying this, but this game makes me feel like I’m inside an rpg, as dumb as this sounds, the visuals and the sound design made me feel like I was actually a hero struggling trough a cool fantasy adventure, the physical struggle that I felt doing the exercises didn’t make me feel like usual when I used to exercise, you know, bored, in pain, waiting for it to end so I could go to have some real fun, but instead it immersed me and made me feel like I was running around the world and actually beating monsters, it kept my mind out of the exercise and the goal of weight loss and instead made me feel that my goal instead of losing x weight was to go and defeat dragaux, not to say I didn’t feel the exercise physically I obviously did but when I did reps of some exercise I didn’t feel like giving up or just plain bored, I just felt like I was a good ole rpg hero and I was just casting a move that was strenuous, daydreaming is a good way to get me to do things, so the game tricked me into doing more and more time and putting more difficulty level as I went ahead
- The best thing about this game, I think , is that its not at all focused on weight, unlike Nintendo’s past fitness endeavor, this game only uses your weight ONCE, to calibrate your fitness level, it never brings it up again nor does it inflate your mii character and play a comic trumpet sound effect while telling you you’re fat unlike…other Wii balance board based game of Nintendo’s roster….which is really good for someone like me whose weight is something that can be pretty triggering as I’ve dealt with eating disorders in the past and the urgency to lose weight really triggers it, if I had a Wii fit and I had to weigh myself EVERY DAY and see my bmi charting I would have basically died.
- A small little pro that doesn’t really matter if you’re just in it for the training stuff it doesn’t really “matter” but GOD I LOVE the sound design of this game, not only the instructions given by ring, the sound effects can make you tell if you’re doing an exercise well or not, and not to mention THE MUSIC while you’re in battle, the tempo changes while you’re doing more faster or slower exercises, and did you guys know that since some of the exercises are synced to the bpm of the background music, and the boss music is slower than the regular battle music, making you feel the exercises more, and so making the boss battles way harder physically, that’s really fucking neat!
- This is gonna be a hot take but…. I LOVE RING!! I know that he says weird stuff sometimes, but he is encouraging and nice and my only personal trainer ill ever have because ring would never be a dudebro pt he’s very nice….
cons
- Since this is all solitary, and the switch peripherals aren’t perfect, there’s ways to fuck up the exercise you’re doing and it still counts it, good posture is key in exercise and if you unknowingly have bad form, you can not only not do as much as work as intended, but fuck up your back, sometimes both, so make sure to follow tipp as best as you can! Once I was doing mountain climbers and fell down and the game counted it as me doing perfect reps, lol.
- If your switch joycons are fucky (whose aren’t?) you’re gonna get interrupted a bit while working out, there’s countless times I’ve been interrupted by my left joycons batteries being super fucked up.

Lastly I wanna talk about the story a little bit since no one is really doing it, and ik talking about the story of a fitness game sound silly but it frustrates me that people just say that its an excuse for the exercise, which in technicality it is, but it so much more than that. Spoilers
The dark influence is a running thing in the game, the four masters and dragaux himself are affected by it, making them cartoonish villain versions of themselves, the dark influence is a metaphor for toxic fitness culture, no shit, but as simple as it is it really did hit hard for me.
Small trauma dump, So, I first started playing this game in 2020, I was 15 and I had always been overweight, and the game offered me some sort of way to move, I was having fun! I reached about world 16 until burnout hit me, hard, I don’t exactly remember why, probably some sort of depressive episode, and it only got worse when my father started doing remarks of me not keeping my routine, in the end I left it for about 3 full years, as now presential school had me extremely busy and I didn’t care much for my appearance at the time
That’s until we had to perform a dance in front of the school for our senior year and I started getting outright bullied for being fat, plus I had my graduation suit hand tailored and although I know that’s a great privilege, the pressure of the bullying made being measured all the time to make me even more self-conscious, so I quit the dance, and started going on a calorie deficit , I only ate up until 500 calories a day and most days even less, if I felt like I exceeded it, I forced myself to vomit, that small period was maybe the worst period in my life, in the end It all ended with my meds getting upped and I stopped myself from engaging in ed content, I went to my first college semester and everyone was way cooler about it, we weren’t teens anymore after all, I took walks from the subway station to my campus as my exercise and didn’t go up nor down ever that year, undisturbed I kept going up until this 2024 where as I organized my living room for Christmas decorations I noticed the ringcon collecting dust on one of my shelves, and new year new me, January first 20204 I picked the game back up, recalibrated and was surprised at how hard the game was now that my skill level was way up from the recalibration and I had a ton of fun, but the thing that really made me happy was seeing the characters realize their strengths and be freed from the dark influence
Long things short, the four masters are rid of the dark influence and realize that the toxic fitness culture that was ingrained into them made them over excerpt their bodies to make up for their problems, Allegra was jealous of her mentor, Armando just wanted a girlfriend, Abdonis felt alone and abandoned, and guru andma felt self-conscious of her age, and as I saw them accept their flaws and why the dark influence took over them, I saw myself in them, I was self-conscious of my weight and took weight loss to an extreme, feeling like I had to be skinny to not hate my body anymore, and now as I was taking normal steps to exercise and are in the process of booking a nutritionist that works with mentally ill people such as myself I saw myself in them as they understood their real strengths, and at the end, beating not dragaux, but his toxic mentality, and seeing he’s actually just a big softie who wanted to open up a gym but he was too afraid to be seen as too weak so he took training to a cartoonish extreme made me very emotional , and I know I get emotional over very small things but I’m not above being happy for a fictional cast of characters from a fitness game and seeing myself in them
Ring fit adventure isn’t just a silly exercise tool, it’s a simple yet great story on why we should avoid toxic fitness culture and that staying fit should be a tool to stay healthy and have fun, not to fit a standard, that’s important too.

(btw! if you read all this, thank you! im gonna reply to myself with my ending stats and gonna update it when i finish ng+ and ng++ if i remember!)

After having liked the first episode of the series, enjoyed the second one, and endured the third, I had very low expectations of this. And yet it has been way worse than I expected.
Except for the lore, the game is so (both narratively and interactively) clunky, so obtuse in the aesthetics, so kitsch and machinic in its mechanics, so anticlimatic and poor in its atmospheres, so lazy in its nth borrowingn of j-horror... I almost can't think of a single good thing about it. Which is quite sad for a golden-age-survival-horror-lover like me.

Just got the Platinum after around 47 hours and 5 playthroughs, I guess it's time to drop my thoughts. I was originally interested in this because I'm a massive simp for Stefanie Joosten and wanted to see what she was doing after MGS, and it delivered in many ways and not so much in others.

First some negatives: I'm aware these are common criticisms and I don't want to sound like I'm just repeating what others say, but I agree with a lot of them. The pacing of levels, ESPECIALLY on a first time through, is very inconsistent. A few missions definitely could have been trimmed down, particularly during the second third of the game. While the game does take place in one castle/city within one night, there still could have been more of a variety in the visuals (hopefully this gets improved in a future sequel). The lock-on felt VERY inconsistent, much of the time it locks onto the nearest enemy, but other times it targeted random mook #2109 instead of elite enemy that I actually wanted to lock onto, and flicking between targets sometimes felt inconsistent as well. On higher difficulties, the remixed enemy setups don't feel like the DMC standard it aims for, many of the layouts lack synergy (extremely ironic since synergy attacks are a central part of combat, lol). I don't feel this is a huge downside, but enemy encounter variety could have used a few more unique types as well. The camera being an homage to DMC1's fixed camera wasn't too bad during traversal segments, outside of a handful of moments, but the camera can be rough if you're cornered by a bunch of big enemies.

As for what I liked? The combat, once you unlock everything, is EXTREMELY fun and satisfying and scratches the DMC itch. It's been compared to the DmC reboot and I feel it does things better than the reboot did, namely the color-coded enemies don't forced you into using specific weapons. The weapons flow pretty seemlessly into each other during combo branching points, there's even cool stuff you can do that isn't explicitly explained, like cancelling a full pause combo into rapture state. While enemy weaknesses to certain weapons didn't play as big a part as I expected outside of a few specific enemy types, but I didn't mind since I was having fun styling on them.

The aesthetic and art style of the game is pretty neat, it feel edgy in a throwback-to-00s-action-games way so it appealed to me. The story wasn't particularly unique, but it was interesting enough to keep me watching. Stefanie Joosten voicing both Briar and Lute deserves a special mention, since it shows her doing distinct voices for the two of them. The score was another great part of the game, it combines the standard orchestral sounds you'd hear in action games with dubstep-oriented synthesizers and drums.

The bosses are more good than bad. A few end up coming back as stronger enemies, but none of them are particularly bad. The major transcended bosses are great though. Donovan makes for a cool Vergil-esque mirror match, Jared and Jadon taking the form of a giant head is pretty creative, transcended Donovan is my favorite fight in the game (he reminds me tons of Urizen in DMC5). The final boss was kind of a bummer my first time through, then I learned a way to melt her lifebar and enjoyed it thoroughly.

I might be rating the game too much here, but I can't help that I had so much fun here. One of my personal favorite games of the last few years, and knowing that Reply Games aspires to make action games like Platinum is really endearing. Whether they follow up with Soulstice 2 or a new game altogether, I hope they take the lessons from here and work on the fixing the downsides to make something super cool. I'm aware this game won't be for everyone and the flaws might bother others a lot more than it did me, but I had a blast with this.

8/10

quando eu comecei a jogar Wattam, eu não esperava que ele seria sobre perdão. o ato de perdoar mesmo. é uma historinha muito simples, mas é contada com muito coração. mas além de tudo, me fez lembrar o quanto que ser criança é bom. acho que eu queria ter sido criança por mais tempo.

é uma pena q esse joguinho tenha tido um desenvolvimento tão conturbado. claramente ele não recebeu o tratamento que merecia, e podia ter ficado um tempinho a mais no forno (apesar dos 5 anos de desenvolvimento). mas acho que isso não tira nenhum mérito dele. é uma experiência muito doce, pelo tempinho que dura.

Here's one that has sat high up on the backlog ever since I saw it's extraordinaryly good release date trailer. I saw that, played hylics 1, and then always had this one very close to be playing played. Even when I did get here, I wasn't able to finish it in time for new Zelda.

Love the claymation models. The swirly backgrounds are fun too. The post rock, shimmery guitar work of the soundtrack is great. Songs usually glide and elide around a melody, sometimes forming into triumphant almost grunge moments for boss battles. Flying in the airship is sick as hell.

It's a bit obtuse to play, the impatient among us (me too) will need a guide for some late game areas, including a first person dungeon which is a neat perspective shift but too droll and difficult to navigate in execution. Additionally, combat balance seems wacky, and some enemy combies are hell, like the poolmane who multiply, a guy who does an aoe attack on a cool down that'll wipe the party, someone who constantly casts this barrier that you have to break to damage them, but breaking it makes you take damage, and they can heal, and they just put the barrier back up in one turn???