kragor
danganronpa voice: danganronpa
2022
It's Elden Mid #packwatch #ripbozo FROMSOFT is washed, worst game ever
(it's good, they actually managed to take the feeling of exploring Dark Souls 1's world and blow it up to ridiculous big scale, with all sorts of Really Good, Intertwining, explorable world bits and Secret side-paths that lead to secret side-paths that lead to secret side-paths. I only really wish they would go back to going hard on making the types of claustrophobic murder-dungeons that made Demon's Souls and Dark Souls The First so good for me.
I went in with very tempered expectations as someone who Tragically Preordered Dark Souls 2 and I gotta say as someone who felt incredibly let down by that for what I hope to you, the reader are obvious reasons if you've played that game, and Dark Souls 3, for being essentially a Biggest Stinkers Album, I was pleasantly surprised by Elden Ring and for the first time since 2011 truly felt the joy of exploring the world of a new fromsoft rpg for the first time again; I'll be honest I was kinda tearing up when the end credits hit because I've genuinely felt deprived of Good Gaming Food from fromsoft ever since I first played Dark Souls 2 and slowly felt a sense of True Dread setting in as I got further and further in. I suppose Bloodborne and Sekiro were a brief reprieve in a way from this feeling for me but even then THEY AREN'T SOULS GAMES. While not perfect ER very much feels like the first fromsoft RPG since Dark Souls The First that I genuinely found myself enjoying; in some ways I find it better and in others I find it worse. There aren't really any of the concessions one might expect if they were told FROM SOFTWARE is making an open-world Dark Souls. It's not Far Cry or Assassin's Creed, nor Grand Theft Auto or The Elder Scrolls. It's Big Dark Souls. With a Dedicated Jump Button. And that reflects for better and worse, with both the highs and lows of The First Dark Souls Game very much being magnified the same as the world-scale.
It has some low lows in the form of some mild gameplay baggage from Dark Souls 3 (they really gotta ditch that combat engine, the faster paced combat is really awful for Games That Aren't Bloodborne and it really shows, especially in some of the boss encounters), but mostly very high highs for me. Only other thing I want to mention is that they frontloaded the enemy stat-scaling in the game HARD; once you hit a point on a fresh new game everything just starts casually doing NG+ levels of damage and never stops. Pretty much every boss towards the end of the game will 1-2-shot you regardless of your vit which can make learning some of the harder encounters pretty gruelling.)
Now, I can finally get back to playing games that don't suck.
(it's good, they actually managed to take the feeling of exploring Dark Souls 1's world and blow it up to ridiculous big scale, with all sorts of Really Good, Intertwining, explorable world bits and Secret side-paths that lead to secret side-paths that lead to secret side-paths. I only really wish they would go back to going hard on making the types of claustrophobic murder-dungeons that made Demon's Souls and Dark Souls The First so good for me.
I went in with very tempered expectations as someone who Tragically Preordered Dark Souls 2 and I gotta say as someone who felt incredibly let down by that for what I hope to you, the reader are obvious reasons if you've played that game, and Dark Souls 3, for being essentially a Biggest Stinkers Album, I was pleasantly surprised by Elden Ring and for the first time since 2011 truly felt the joy of exploring the world of a new fromsoft rpg for the first time again; I'll be honest I was kinda tearing up when the end credits hit because I've genuinely felt deprived of Good Gaming Food from fromsoft ever since I first played Dark Souls 2 and slowly felt a sense of True Dread setting in as I got further and further in. I suppose Bloodborne and Sekiro were a brief reprieve in a way from this feeling for me but even then THEY AREN'T SOULS GAMES. While not perfect ER very much feels like the first fromsoft RPG since Dark Souls The First that I genuinely found myself enjoying; in some ways I find it better and in others I find it worse. There aren't really any of the concessions one might expect if they were told FROM SOFTWARE is making an open-world Dark Souls. It's not Far Cry or Assassin's Creed, nor Grand Theft Auto or The Elder Scrolls. It's Big Dark Souls. With a Dedicated Jump Button. And that reflects for better and worse, with both the highs and lows of The First Dark Souls Game very much being magnified the same as the world-scale.
It has some low lows in the form of some mild gameplay baggage from Dark Souls 3 (they really gotta ditch that combat engine, the faster paced combat is really awful for Games That Aren't Bloodborne and it really shows, especially in some of the boss encounters), but mostly very high highs for me. Only other thing I want to mention is that they frontloaded the enemy stat-scaling in the game HARD; once you hit a point on a fresh new game everything just starts casually doing NG+ levels of damage and never stops. Pretty much every boss towards the end of the game will 1-2-shot you regardless of your vit which can make learning some of the harder encounters pretty gruelling.)
Now, I can finally get back to playing games that don't suck.
This review contains spoilers
Be reborn as light itself at dawn
also Dougie Jones IS awesome
also Dougie Jones IS awesome
2023
PIZZAKINO
I fear that ArcSys is too fearful to ever make a fighting game this powerful ever again
2000
Don't remember if I finished it but it's lit
1998
a masterpiece
2019
This review contains spoilers
I hope The Chowder Man is doing ok these days
I've always personally considered getting the G rank crown special permit from beating [spoilers] the point at which you've "beaten the game", so even though I've played this one a lot over the many years its been out and in my hands, I don't think I've ever really "finished" the game until today, hence why I'm logging and reviewing the game now.
Of course there's still a couple tougher monsters I'll one day have to take care of, and I'm not even at the point of being able to try Lv140 GQ monsters, so overall there's still a LOT left for me to do in the game. Tutorial complete I guess.
I've been feeling pretty sentimental the past month, because I picked up the game again and have been hunting online again with some friends. This game came out during a bit of a rough part in my life that I'm still feeling the aftereffects of to this day, and it was my first Monster Hunter game. The online shutting down really feels like the end of an era. If I've ever been having a rough time this was one of my go-to's and I knew that even if friends weren't around to hunt together, there was always something I could chip away at on my own, or there was probably at least one person still playing the game that I could get to know for a couple rounds of hunting.
Looking at it now, MH4U is probably one of my favourite games period. Playing off and on over these 8-9 years, I feel like there's always been a new challenge around the corner. G rank in the older MH games really does not fuck around and being totally honest, it took me many years of chipping away at this game's, and also jumping between other MH games before I got to a level where I really felt like I could contend with the monsters at their quickest and smartest. Even then I still get caught out by shit all the time and it still feels like I have more to learn and improve on. I think the same can easily be said for most monster hunter games but it's just something that really jumped out at me coming back to this one.
Overall, it's a fantastic game. The loss of the online functionality is a tragedy and I really hope a project like pretendo network will be able to get the servers up and running again. Maybe one day Capcom will port some of the older MH games with some upscaling for larger displays, and a better-constructed online mode that won't have to inevitably shut down one day. I still plan to do as much online hunting as I can in these last few days, but for now I'll just say it's been real, you legends.
Of course there's still a couple tougher monsters I'll one day have to take care of, and I'm not even at the point of being able to try Lv140 GQ monsters, so overall there's still a LOT left for me to do in the game. Tutorial complete I guess.
I've been feeling pretty sentimental the past month, because I picked up the game again and have been hunting online again with some friends. This game came out during a bit of a rough part in my life that I'm still feeling the aftereffects of to this day, and it was my first Monster Hunter game. The online shutting down really feels like the end of an era. If I've ever been having a rough time this was one of my go-to's and I knew that even if friends weren't around to hunt together, there was always something I could chip away at on my own, or there was probably at least one person still playing the game that I could get to know for a couple rounds of hunting.
Looking at it now, MH4U is probably one of my favourite games period. Playing off and on over these 8-9 years, I feel like there's always been a new challenge around the corner. G rank in the older MH games really does not fuck around and being totally honest, it took me many years of chipping away at this game's, and also jumping between other MH games before I got to a level where I really felt like I could contend with the monsters at their quickest and smartest. Even then I still get caught out by shit all the time and it still feels like I have more to learn and improve on. I think the same can easily be said for most monster hunter games but it's just something that really jumped out at me coming back to this one.
Overall, it's a fantastic game. The loss of the online functionality is a tragedy and I really hope a project like pretendo network will be able to get the servers up and running again. Maybe one day Capcom will port some of the older MH games with some upscaling for larger displays, and a better-constructed online mode that won't have to inevitably shut down one day. I still plan to do as much online hunting as I can in these last few days, but for now I'll just say it's been real, you legends.
2005
Insane
still stinks
2021
This review contains spoilers
Insane. Very possibly GOTY 2021. 99% item completion on the first run. There's literally only one item to grab in normal mode + doing hard more before I would consider myself having "mastered" this game according to backloggd's criteria.
I won't go too far into the story even though I've marked this review as spoilers; I would consider the gameplay elements and upgrades you find in games like this to be as worthy of considering to be spoilers as the story itself, though I would not suggest that the importance of avoiding information on these parts of the game to undermine the importance of also avoiding story spoilers. All I will say on the story is that I really like it quite a lot and that some of the developments and revelations in this game may actually explain to some degree why Prime 4 had to start over development if they plan on connecting that game's story in any way at all with the ongoing narrative of the 2D metroid games up to this point.
Game feels pretty linear in terms of the progression of finding items to move forward in specific ways, however despite this linearity, it doesn't really attempt to railroad the player's path as aggressively as Fusion did aside from forcing you to talk to Adam when he has something to say (thankfully he doesn't mark EXACTLY on the map where you need to go this time). I already really like Fusion despite that game's considerably-more-straightforward-than-most-other-metroid-games' path, so the fact that this goes in a similar direction in terms of the flow of exploration while not feeling quite as overbearing, with the game only really opening up towards the very end, this isn't an issue to me; so I'll just say that it being linear doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad.
(edit: as of the unspecified time that I'm making this edit, people have been discovering some interesting sequence breaks now)
The actual feel of playing the game is great: Dread has what may remain to be some of the most memorable and exciting-to-battle bosses in this genre and it's absolutely due in credit to the various ways in which the combat systems of Metroid are expanded upon in this title. I love the parry, I love the flash step, and I love the slide. The fact that so many of the Dread original upgrades double as both exploration and combat (or evasion, in the case of the cloaking ability), is really cool; even as a non-first party metroid title, it demonstrates a passion for the 2D-Action-Exploration genre from the people that worked on this game that I've not felt from many other games I've attempted to play in recent memory that claim to be trying to break into this genre, and while I didn't really like the Aeion abilities at all when they were introduced in Samus Returns, it really feels like they hit the nail on the head with the return of the Aeion system in Dread: every ability in Samus' arsenal feels like it has a place.... even when the presence of some abilities is rather quickly overwritten by stronger ones, you can feel the merit of gaining every upgrade; something I would consider a key "feeling" to many of the good games of the 2D-Action-Exploration genre. Also I love how much the later E.M.M.I just cheat; games with forgiving continues shouldn't be afraid to ramp up to being "fuck you" hard when you can just start over and try again so quickly.
In short: this game is really, really good. I hope to see more new 2D Metroid games in the near, not-19-years-later future. It maybe doesn't quite reach the level of Super Metroid or Zero Mission, but it's still going strong in the top 3 for now.
I won't go too far into the story even though I've marked this review as spoilers; I would consider the gameplay elements and upgrades you find in games like this to be as worthy of considering to be spoilers as the story itself, though I would not suggest that the importance of avoiding information on these parts of the game to undermine the importance of also avoiding story spoilers. All I will say on the story is that I really like it quite a lot and that some of the developments and revelations in this game may actually explain to some degree why Prime 4 had to start over development if they plan on connecting that game's story in any way at all with the ongoing narrative of the 2D metroid games up to this point.
Game feels pretty linear in terms of the progression of finding items to move forward in specific ways, however despite this linearity, it doesn't really attempt to railroad the player's path as aggressively as Fusion did aside from forcing you to talk to Adam when he has something to say (thankfully he doesn't mark EXACTLY on the map where you need to go this time). I already really like Fusion despite that game's considerably-more-straightforward-than-most-other-metroid-games' path, so the fact that this goes in a similar direction in terms of the flow of exploration while not feeling quite as overbearing, with the game only really opening up towards the very end, this isn't an issue to me; so I'll just say that it being linear doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad.
(edit: as of the unspecified time that I'm making this edit, people have been discovering some interesting sequence breaks now)
The actual feel of playing the game is great: Dread has what may remain to be some of the most memorable and exciting-to-battle bosses in this genre and it's absolutely due in credit to the various ways in which the combat systems of Metroid are expanded upon in this title. I love the parry, I love the flash step, and I love the slide. The fact that so many of the Dread original upgrades double as both exploration and combat (or evasion, in the case of the cloaking ability), is really cool; even as a non-first party metroid title, it demonstrates a passion for the 2D-Action-Exploration genre from the people that worked on this game that I've not felt from many other games I've attempted to play in recent memory that claim to be trying to break into this genre, and while I didn't really like the Aeion abilities at all when they were introduced in Samus Returns, it really feels like they hit the nail on the head with the return of the Aeion system in Dread: every ability in Samus' arsenal feels like it has a place.... even when the presence of some abilities is rather quickly overwritten by stronger ones, you can feel the merit of gaining every upgrade; something I would consider a key "feeling" to many of the good games of the 2D-Action-Exploration genre. Also I love how much the later E.M.M.I just cheat; games with forgiving continues shouldn't be afraid to ramp up to being "fuck you" hard when you can just start over and try again so quickly.
In short: this game is really, really good. I hope to see more new 2D Metroid games in the near, not-19-years-later future. It maybe doesn't quite reach the level of Super Metroid or Zero Mission, but it's still going strong in the top 3 for now.
2004
This review contains spoilers
A cautionary tale about the dangers of unprotected sex without the permission of God. I will not explain what I mean by this.
1993
This review contains spoilers
They nailed it.
I think that maybe you should start with the dash. It's not really a big deal once you know that the ice stage just gives it to you, in fact, it's perfectly fine that you don't start with the dash, the dash is awesome; if you started with the dash, you probably wouldn't have as much of an appreciation for the dash if you didn't have to find it. I take back my statement about wanting to start with the dash. This game rules.
I think that maybe you should start with the dash. It's not really a big deal once you know that the ice stage just gives it to you, in fact, it's perfectly fine that you don't start with the dash, the dash is awesome; if you started with the dash, you probably wouldn't have as much of an appreciation for the dash if you didn't have to find it. I take back my statement about wanting to start with the dash. This game rules.
1996
this game kicks butt's