A cute and fairly simple roguelite from cygames.

I played Dragalia Lost basically from the day it started to the day it shut down. I was a big fan. I saw this game on sale on Steam and was curious because some of the character and monster designs reminded me a lot of Dragalia, so I went ahead and picked it up.

Despite not playing anything like Dragalia I had a lot of fun with this game. The combat and platforming are tight and it feels really good to execute combos, especially once you get some of the mobility and special attack unlocks. Your attacks center around creatures you collect called lilliputs which are completely random each run. I found it very fun to find a good combo string out of the various creatures in my 'deck' each run. The game is completely random and the variety of creatures and accessories you can get increases as you interact with the meta progression systems, so there's a lot of variety.

The game is fairly easy on normal and I was able to finish it in about 7 hours. Each run takes about an hour or so if you completely clear every room on each floor. There's only a limited number of bosses so once you learn their patterns it's a fairly easy game to complete, although I don't necessarily consider that a problem. It's a nice change of pace from the pain of grinding out high BC runs in Dead Cells or something.

My only real complaint would be the lack of variety in the levels themselves -- every run consists of the same number of levels and the same small-ish pool of bosses and challenge rooms. It would have been cool to see more branching paths or more special rooms / events. The story is also fairly basic but that shouldn't be why you play this game so it doesn't really matter to me.

The game also looks nice and has a style that will feel familiar to players of Dragalia, or perhaps something like Bravely Default even. Noah is a cute protagonist and I had a lot of fun with the game overall. Nice and breezy. I will probably keep playing on the harder end game modes for a bit before retiring this one. I'd recommend this one to anybody looking for a light, casual roguelite.

I think that the script of Baldur's Gate 3 is generally average, but there's a real Star Trek TNG sitaution going on. The actors are very good, and they can elevate an okay script into a great overall presentation.

The PC version has better UI/Controls than on PS5 vesrion, but I still find it rather lacking as an interface system. I'm frequently able to "do the wrong thing" and a disaster happens where I might as well load. "Lokathor, what are you talking about?", well here's some examples:
- I've clicked on a door frame by accident and then shot at that instead of the enemy.
- I've clicked on a party member by accident and then stabbed them instead of the enemy.
- I've clicked the ground when I didn't realize that melee attack was selected and then stabbed the air instead of moving the character.
- I've clicked a spot where I thought I was placing a summon, but there was a button to pick what type of summon that I hadn't clicked yet, so instead Shadowheart walked to where I'd clicked, provoking an attack that killed her.
- Characters following the "leader" character will happily walk over traps even once the trap has been spotted by a party member.

Even when there's not some disaster that forces a reload, there's interface stuff that's just not great:
- I wish there was a button to actually highlight all containers, not just the "important" ones. There's a mod for this, but it shouldn't take a mod.
- I wish the dice rolls didn't have so much ceremony involved. In 20+ years of playing DnD and other TTPRG games, never have I ever thought to myself, "what would make skill checks be better is if they took longer to resolve". Again, this is a mod, and it would be a simple check box, why doesn't the base game support it?
- Inventory management isn't great. If you're collecting a lot of stuff and going to sell most of it, you have to right-click all the stuff you wanna sell once to "add to wares", then usually a second time to "send to camp", and then you can't sell directly from the camp stash to a vendor, so you have to warp to camp, grab the whole stash up, and warp back to the vendor and sell it all. EDIT: You can hold shift to multi-select items when doing all this wares/stash stuff, but this only speeds up the process of sending things to camp, it doesn't really fix the general issue of not being able to sell stuff directly from your stash.

The game will track and show you how much the party members like you, but I wish that the game also tracked how much the party members like each other as well. It would likely be a small thing, but I think it would really help make the party feel like they've got some sort of dynamic going on beyond just a Main Character centered universe.

Very early in the game you have to get Lae'zel out of a cage trap, but some Tieflings are stopping you. If you just attack the Tieflings and you're an Order Of the Ancients Paladin then that breaks your Paladin Oath. The game has considered this, and has a special option for Paladins where they can make a DC 10 Deception check to convince the Tieflings to go away. However, if you fail this check, then you're just out of luck. You can't try anything else. You can't try Intimidate, you can't try to bribe them, nothing. Just load the game, or leave Lae'zel there, or break your paladin oath. It's not great, and if it was an oversight then I guess I could get over it, but there's specifically a Paladin option available, so we know that they looked at this specific encounter with Paladins in mind, and wrote it this way anyway. I ended up reloading and trying the Deception check again for nine minutes.

This game is usually pretty cool when it's all "working", but it also frequently isn't quite working right, and then it's just a slow drip of frustrations.

I've previously dabbled with FF1 for NES when I was in middle school, and I got the GBA version in high school. This Pixel Remaster version is definitely the most fun to play version. With the ability to turn encounters on and off with a single click, you can focus on getting where you need to go without being distracted with each little fight. The auto-battle and GP/XP boosts combine to make the parts when you do face off against monsters stay moving at a quick pace, without dragging the game down. The graphics are largely similar to the GBA version, just in wide screen. The real new winner here is in the sound department. The "arranged" musical tracks have full instrumentation, and they all sound amazing.
Overall, I strongly encourage everyone to give this game a play through.

Want to experience the highs and lows of high school in a special way? It was hard enough for Alicia at the famed Wintermoor Academy before the Principal declared a snowball war between clubs! Now her club's only hope is to transform from nerdy nobodies into fantasy heroes. Unravel a reality-bending mystery with your friends and test your strategic mettle against an avalanche of colorful characters. And remember! High School is all about learning and making friends!

Wintermoor Tactics Club is a very charming, turn-based game about (essentially) a D&D club tackling a real life adventure. There's an underlying message about inclusivity and being true to yourself, but ultimately it's a cute Saturday morning cartoon type of game about the Power of Friendship! The tactics part of the game is not overly difficult, but some parts of it can offer a slight challenge.

The game offers a huge emphasis on characters and story, though the combat is also important. It's a wonderful little game that I spent a good chunk of time in, and I think it's fully worth it in the end. The story was intriguing and kept me on the edge of my seat, where as the characters were all lovely and unique, with their own little quirks and styles.

The game is very much worth it even at full price. Highly recommended.