I picked this up when it launced, made it to around the King Pridemoor fight, and then put it down. After picking up Shovel Knight Dig, I had an itch to go back to the franchise proper and it made perfect sense to return to the one campaign I had never finished. I can't believe what I was missing out on!

Everything about this game is firing on all cylinders. The levels are all a joy to play and manage to flip how you think about your spin-move constantly (especially some of the side areas in the Mole Knight levels). All of the new (and old) NPCs are hilarious and in particular I have to mention the step dad-like relationship King Knight has with King Pridemoor and his Mom. The music is, as usual, quite catchy and well-composed but longtime fans of the series might be disappointed to hear some direct repeats from the previous entries in the mix.

One of the main new features in this campaign is Joustus which is a card game that serves both as a welcome distraction from the action-oriented levels and also plays a prominent role in the plot. In fact, King Knight's whole reason for going on his adventure is to become the titular King of Cards. While I've really grown to love Joustus, I found it to be really frustrating when I first started. I think part of this is due to the fact that some of the nuance of the card game goes unexplained within the game and also because you are able to face off against some opponents early on when you have a deck that realistically cannot compete against them. For me, the key was to realizing that Joustus should primarily be played reactively (e.g., focusing on removing opponents cards from gems rather than on placing your own cards on gems) and that the graveyard should be really treated as an extension of the board and is crucial for creating "locks" in the board that will secure gems.

Aside from my minor grievances with how Joustus is taught to the player, I think that Shovel Knight: King of Cards is both a fantastic standalone game while also brilliantly complementing the other Shovel Knight campaigns. I would recommend this game to anyone who is fan of platformers and/or card games, period.

Vallkyria Chronicles 4 is a mostly enjoyable experience for returning fans of the VC series.

In terms of gamplay, the mechanics are just as satisfying as in VC1 and the new additions (sometimes) add a nice new layer of strategy to the mix. However, it remains very easy to cheese these mechanics and avoid most of the challenges the levels put forth through the use of orders (which remain broken) and the APC. If the scoring system was different, this would be no problem since you would be punished for using such a strategy. Unfortunately, the game actively rewards these strategies by basing the ranking on turns to completion alone. In addition, some mid-battle objective changes or enemy appearances can make planning for a battle feel like a waste of time.

When it comes to story, there is also not much here that is very engaging. It is a very run of the mill plot that acts to ferry the player from battle to battle which, in principle, is fine for this type of game. The main problem is that the characters here are generally very flat or, in the case of Raz, incredibly misogynistic. Despite this, the game doesn't really address these flaws and somtimes seems to actively encourage them which can make for an uncomfortable play experience.

In spite of of these flaws, the core mechanics of VC4 (when you ignore the scoring system) are still quite fun to engage with. I just wished the game wasn't trying to discourage me from doing so for the majority of my playthrough.

This game surprised me in a good way. In fact I almost dropped it in the first hour or two before becoming quite addicted to the fast pace of levels and ricochet-style combat at play. I'm still not really a fan of the dialogue which in some places has aged somewhat poorly (e.g., collecting "swag" throughout the level), but the main beats of the story actually had me excited to move through the current area and on to the next one. As mentioned in other reviews here, the swapping of enemies (both asthetically and mechanically) between areas really helped to keep the gamplay fresh throughout this 10-20 hour experience.

This is a really fun rougelike that is best experienced on mobile. The concept of using actual die to roll your moves is really clever and is explored thoroughly through the various classes, enemy types, and items you'll experience. A major gripe I have with the game is how the upgrade classes are not linked in any way to the current classes of your characters. This can lead to some frustrating scenarios where you turn down crucial character upgrades in the late game because they don't gel with how you've built your character/team. One potential solution could be to group classes into archetypes and restrict the possible character upgrades to classes of the archetype to which they already belong. Then, allowing for a class reroll (also with dice) at the beginning of the game could be a fun way to keep the randomness of the current class system but allow for a bit more strategy.

Ambitious sci-fi storytelling meets the best implementation of the active time battle system to date. If you are at all interested in this game, try to go in knowing as little as possible.

This game is essentially one part visual novel and one part real(ish) time strategy smashed together. The gameplay hook of having 13 characters really works since each story has a different focus. Some are more personal whereas others play directly into the central plot from go, allowing you to jump around as you see fit. The story hits on just about every sci-fi trope, but in a very self-referential way that is equal parts hilarious and compelling. Because of the amount of twists and the ways in which you can dictate which parts of the story you experience, you will eventually look like the Charlie conspiracy wall meme.

The second part of this game plays out as an RTS/tower defense battle. I mention above that its more of a "real(ish) time strategy" game because the battles pause when actions are being chosen, allowing you to strategize around the current situation. Although the rather abstract visuals are a little disappointing at first (compared to the beautiful visuals of the other half of the game) they really capture the sense of spectacle of a battle between giant opposing forces. This is especially the case later in the game when the enemy forces grow in size and sheer number. Aside from the primal exciment you get from blowing up kaiju, I was really impressed by the ways in which the battles play into the story, both through dialogue before and after fights and even in the mechanics of the battling itself. Since the visual novel half rewards you with this game's version of EXP, there is a really nice synergy between these two game modes that keeps you bouncing back and forth.

My only major gripe with this game is the way in which many of the women and LGBT characters were handled. I understand that this game is toned down compared to their last, but some of the depictions of women in this game (notably, Ms. Morimura) are extremely male gazey and the way that most of the men in the game talk to them is, at times, just gross. Couple this with the fact that most of the major characters are high schoolers (a fact which I try to just block out of my mind) and it feels even more inexcusable. Tsukasa Okina is a character I have a lot of thoughts about, but this review is already too long as it is. All I'll say is that it's ... almost ... good queer representation, which is a step in the right direction for Atlus, but they're still not quite there.

Overall, this game is a triumph for the visual novel genre and, as I mentioned in the opening, potentially the best implementation of the ATB system. If it weren't for some poor representation this would be a near perfect experience from start to finish.

Got the expansions for the base game years later to work on my living dex and had a surprisingly good time with the DLC. The secret sauce here is that the whole island is a wild area. I think this represents an important step for the franchise that wasn't talked about at the time because in the end I also agree that this should have been in the base game. As we can also see from Scarlet/Violet, the concept of gaining a legendary at the beginning and growing alongside it is a formula that makes you feel much more attached to the mon in the end and IMO makes for a better overall experience. It was just a bit too short in the end.