Cyseal, Cyseal, shiver me timbers and slither me eels!
Lettuce see if you can choose the finest greens.
No one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses.
Red, orange, yellow, and green, the finest veggies Cyseal's ever seen.
Potions to bemuscle you! Scrolls to entussel you!
Vwhere is my pepper? Did it sprout legs and run away? sneeze Ah, there it is.

Still working my way through this, but it's such a gem that I felt compelled to write a review early. Rarely does a game come out that's so original, witty, fun, and unique. I really can't compare this to anything else because although it's a monster catcher like Pokemon, Temtem, and others, this game feels like such a breath of fresh air to be in a league of its own.

The music is fantastic. I love the decision to include vocal tracks and have them unlock at certain key story moments. It's all very well done and doesn't feel distracting at all.

The story is incredible. Within the first hour or so it's clear that this isn't a cute little monster catching game - something is seriously wrong with this world. The denizens of the world talk about apocalyptic scenarios from their own worlds. It doesn't shy away from telling the message it wants to tell, which seems to be a message centered around hope in spite of everything wrong going on around us. A small community banding together to survive, rather than profit. Even the "bad guy" team hammers home this message.

The mechanics are new and interesting. Rather than simple water beats fire, we have complex interactions from water gunking up ground units, plastic being melted by fire, grass on fire makes smoke which increases the fire unit's evasion. It's really cool! Also love that we are transforming into different forms rather than trapping creatures in little balls until we want them to fight for us. And everything being cassettes is incredibly clever. You use a pencil to rewind your tape to heal it!

The character designs are also wonderful. We have a diverse cast - a good number of Black and brown characters, neurodivergence is represented, we have a character with a bi flag colored rug. Right wingers are going to hate this game because it's unabashedly queer and left wing in its politics. Climate catastrophe is a common theme throughout. And honestly, good! They won't get to enjoy one of the best games I've ever played, because they are part of the problem in the real world that we live in. I think that's fantastic.

This review is specifically for the Hardcore mode of Diablo 4. The game in its current state is simply unplayable for Hardcore players, and Blizzard has made it clear that this mode is less than an afterthought to them. I would be surprised if even a single person at Blizzard plays this mode, that's how bad the design surrounding Hardcore is.

Let's start with the marketing gimmick. Hardcore players know that we are a small minority of overall players. I think many of us were surprised to see a contest specifically featuring Hardcore mode - the first 1000 players to reach level 100 would be immortalized on a statue of Lilith that would reside at Blizzard's HQ. Okay, clearly this is to sell more copies of the early access passes, but still a fun competition for the minority that does enjoy the mode.

Turns out the contest was little more than a competition of who experienced the least amount of disconnects. Within the first couple weeks of the game, Blizzard would release updates that would sometimes result in the game going down for many players. One level 100 player (Quinn, I think) experienced a death on disconnect because they needed to take the servers down momentarily to update the cash shop. His is probably the most famous example, but far from the only one.

The disconnects wouldn't be so bad if they had kept in a feature that appeared to be working in beta: upon a disconnect, if the player had a Scroll of Escape in their inventory, it would automatically be consumed, bringing the player safely back to town. For unknown reasons, this feature was scrapped for the official release, with a new estimated date of Season 2.

Somewhere between 5-10% of players experienced a VRAM memory leak that would also lead to random crashes. People on high end PCs would, without any notice, crash or disconnect and log in to see their characters dead, sometimes losing well over 100 hours of progress. Every major Diablo forum, from their official ones, to Reddit, to their official Discord, was full of people talking about this issue. Players were met with utter silence from a company that earned over $5 billion in profit in 2022.

The issues were so common and well-known that Hardcore players tried to come up with ways to survive a disconnect that they would inevitably experience. Putting on defensive Aspects that would otherwise not see much play, simply in the hopes that they would grant you an extra few seconds of survivability. This was mostly ineffective because your character stays in the world, logged in, taking damage, for well over 20 seconds after a disconnect. This means that a simple white mob would mean death for 99% of players.

The game was clearly rushed out before it was ready. It shows in the story beats, the UI, and the gameplay loops. Perhaps this will be a good game after a year or two of live updates. Maybe grab it for 50% off at that point. Currently, for Hardcore players anyway, the game is nothing at all.

An incredibly compelling game that I wish I liked more than I do. The theme is fantastic. More than any other game I've played, this game grapples with the overall potential decline of humanity through climate collapse, economic decline, warfare, and chaos. As with any SMT game, you're fighting demons, but ultimately it's a story about humanity's choices that have led to this point, and where to go from there.

The characters are some of the best in any SMT (or even Persona!) game I've played. I became attached to all the crew members and their personalities and quirks. As the game progresses, they become even more interesting due to some spoilery stuff. You really feel connected to them; when your fellow crew are in danger, you instinctively want to work together to save them.

The music is wonderful. All of the most dramatic moments hit even harder due to the fantastic composition choices. There are some very funny moments where mechanics are a little at odds with themeing. One recurring moment would be a demon asking me if I want it to learn a new ability upon level up, I would tell it no, it would insult me, only to have a new dialogue immediately pop up with it telling me how much it likes me and giving me a free item.

With all the good stuff I've mentioned, why only a 3.5? Most of the time you're dungeon crawling. This is good! That's what we're here for, after all. Unfortunately, after having played other dungeon crawlers like Persona Q, Etrian Odyssey, and Labyrinth of Refrain and Galleria, the dungeons felt lackluster in comparison. Most of the puzzles consisted of teleport mazes (not the worst, you're mostly treading new ground a lot with some memorization) and arrow shenanigans. Or, as you progress, fake-out and illusory walls, which are a bit frustating but still doable with trial and error. It's not that the puzzles were particularly challenging, there just wasn't enough variety for me for how long the game took.

I ended up going with the Chaos route and the final boss is incredibly frustrating, RNG-based, and unforgiving. There is an attack that, to my knowledge, can't be resisted or blocked unlike every other type of attack in the game, and can simply wipe your entire party in one turn if you're unlucky. This fight is supposedly easier in other routes, so I think a lot of people won't encounter this same problem. It feels bad to have a deeply skill-based game end on whether you can get lucky enough at the end.

I really want this game to be a 5 and would love to see a new version or re-do of this with better dungeons.

This game was a blast, the PSP version holds up super well. I played this right after Grandia II and it feels like a perfect follow-up. Both are relatively short (by JRPG standards) due to a lack of sidequests, which was appreciated. It had a story it wanted to tell, and, like Grandia, the NPCs had a lot of flavor. The story itself is nothing to write home about, but the voice acting is great, the writing is fun precisely because it doesn't take itself too seriously.

Mechanically, the game is pretty interesting. There's a strategic layer, which I'm always a sucker for. You can move your characters around on the battlefield and moves have areas of effect. There's an AI battle if you want to speed things along, it performs well enough for the amount of time saved selecting actions. One thing I really appreciated was that Nall, a pet character who you start with, is always along in battle and will heal statuses and revive fallen characters after every fight. He'll also do this in combat, although less reliably. This, combined with healing upon level ups, makes grinding fun and easy.

While I really like the game overall, I do have to mention some choices I didn't care for. The first 10ish hours contain a lot of fat jokes, as there's a playable character who's mostly around for humor and to serve as the butt of jokes in general. These got old pretty quick. There's also a lot of "haha, gender" sorts of jokes. And one really odd decision to include items you can purchase that unlock little 5 second clips of the girl characters (I think they're all under 18?) in their beds with little clothing on. I'm no stranger to fanservice in games, it just feels weird to have the player pay a merchant for this reward.

My favorite entry in the Kiseki series so far, Trails the 3rd is a love letter to the series so far. This one feels like cheating since it's so laser focused on the dungeon crawling aspect, and it builds so much on the relationships and stories we've learned about all the characters so far. The Secret Doors are a super interesting and sometimes grim storytelling device. Kevin is lovable and deeply traumatized. The mechanics are pushed even further and the whole experience is a blast. Can't recommend this enough, but you have to play the first two first.

Finally played this iconic game for the first time, and boy does it not age well, especially with the reputation and legacy it has garnered. I first tried to play this without any mods and found the experience pretty miserable. Ugly graphics, tedious random encounters, a poor localization, and mediocre writing - a far cry from the best JRPG of all time. With the right combination of mods, however, it becomes an enjoyable experience. I could see myself loving this game as it is if I had first approached it in the 1990s. Today though, I can't really recommend it without mods. I think nostalgia colors a lot of people's memories about this game.