I will be splitting this review into 2 separate parts, these main paragraphs is the main game and when I get to it, I will edit a smaller review below going into the side stories and post game. After being so absolutely burnt out due to CS4 and taking a break with college coming back around, I finally got around to finishing up Haji/Reverie. Note that this is the take of someone who played the game on Abyss difficulty on a fresh new game start and I will be saying Haji instead of Reverie due to that's being the name I learned about this game through and since I played the JP version with the English patch (we hate NISA, I want my Reverse Babel back)

Haji is a game I had a lot of expectations for going into it. With Sky 3rd easily being my favorite trails game and almost even my favorite game of all time, me hearing that the layout of Haji is like that in layout gave it big shoes to fill. With that, I would say it did a very good job and I genuinely love this game. But as you can see, it is not a perfect 5/5 for me as I think Sky 3rd is. As I think and many others agree, Haji is one of the absolute peaks of character writing up to now in the series. C being the character I think absolutely steals the show for me. C as a character shows the complex ideals of a man living with the weight of his sins. The scene with C and Lapis will live rent free in my soul until the day I leave this world. Lapis due to who she is has a very different view of humanity as a whole and what this does for C means so much. Alongside C, Swin and Nadia are characters I would say absolute peaks. Swin less so strength wise, but Nadia is easily one of the most interesting written characters in the series. That main idea of trauma being transferred to dependence with what the Emperor did to them 2 and Swin wanting to keep up the promise he made with Ace, their bond absolutely brightens the scenes they had with each other. But the most absolute surprising win I had with this game is the development Rean gets. Rean is a character I had a very mixed love/hate relationship with. He never got much good character writing in my personal opinion in CS1-4 and since those were games I don't really love (as you can see with my reviews lmao), he just never intrigued me. But the thing I always did love about him is what he meant as the mc. Not the stupid fact that he's breaking the boundaries of power scaling in becoming so powerful so fast it's boring, but as this man who keeps trying his absolute best and just keeps becoming shattered internally because of it. With this beautiful game, they gave him some very good character writing and finally made an iteration of the character I genuinely believe got what he deserved. Since again you can see it's not a 5/5 game, there are some problems I have with this game. The biggest one being that the story as a whole just did not interest me at all. [BY THE WAY, I WAS KEEPING IT SPOILER FREE ABOVE ON PURPOSE, THIS IS WHERE I WILL BE GETTING INTO SPOILERS, YEAH? Good, back to the review. The key story to me was just, acceptable. Elysium as an idea is fine, but it really just feels like it could have unironically been an idea picked out of a hat and slotted in. Trails stories honestly always have been a bit to, extra for me. Like fuck the curse, it's such a shit and boring way to create """evil""". The robot doppelgangers is a very interesting idea to an extent, but I feel like wasn't done to the peak it could have been done. The robot Rufus was a perfect foil and development tool for the real Rufus and the rest of that squad, but the rest are just "POWERFUL ENEMY IN LORE MADE AGAIN". The best addition via Elysium is Ishmelga Rean. Ishmelga Rean making both endings of CS4 canon is an insanely cool thing to do, and I love what Ishmelga Rean means for the core idea of the story. A version of Rean who just, lost his fight with Ishmelga and became someone who he is not. Another thing I didn't fully like is that sometimes the groups didn't feel fully sealed with each other. Like Rufus' group is a great example. Rufus, Swin, Nadia and Lapis all work with each other so fucking well. But then, Renne kinda gets slotted in only to help the story advance and does nothing else. Her story completed mostly in Crossbell and even more in CS4, so she has nothing to do. She is just there.

Now for the combat, lol. As someone who played on ng Abyss difficulty, I found the combat to be interesting. Early game combat was completely mashing Burning Heart into Aeon Shield, mid game is mashing Burning Heart into Aeon Shield/Evasion and end game is mashing Burning Heart into Aeon Shield/Evasion/High Heavens. Lloyd never leaves your team if you have the choice and if you don't use him YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY THROWING. Another thing I am not a huge fan of is needing to wait for your evasion tank (you basically need to use an evasion tank) to have aegis which enables you to actually use phys units. If you don't have aegis, the split aggro is probably not worth it. This leads you to pretty much using any of these casters (Crow, Nadia, Towa and Tio). It opens up when you actually get aegis which made me actually enjoy the combat more. I can see why a lot of people don't do it cause it is much more gimmicky than genuinely difficult. Fights can easily be invalidated with Lloyd. But this all changes with some fights lowkey being RNG dependant. Some fights with dis-orders early on can just steal your defensive utility and one shot your whole team. And if Lloyd is on field when you get wiped and not in the first slot, you wont be able to revive him and lose your ability to create BP. There may be a silly 4 legged robot that does this exact thing which is INFINITELY WORSE CAUSE THEY FORCE FUCKING ALISA AND SHARON IN YOUR TEAM. Many fights basically just wipe you off the start and you need to wait for a good start to event attempt the fight and that's kinda cringe. With this all being said, I do not regret playing on Abyss. I have been complaining about Nightmare difficulty for multiple games now, so this was a very much needed addition. This difficulty gave me some of the best rushes after beating a fight I have felt in a JRPG in a long time, which I genuinely missed. I had to beat Abyss or my friend would rub in my face that he did and I didn't, so I simply did.

As a whole, to me it is hard to not compare this game to Sky 3rd. When I do that, I miss Sky 3rd. Sky 3rd genuinely changed my life and how I perceive games now and forever. This game, just didn't do that for me. Sky 3rd's character writing felt so real and what happens in Haji feels so far away from me. I did not dock points just because it isn't Sky 3rd, but it's just an example of a similar formula done better. Fuck the beach minigame I will never do it

Date beat (Main Game): 5/24/24
4.5/5

Post Game:
Fuck man, that shit eating grin I had on my face hearing Azure Arbitrator again in that final boss. I was very surprised to see how, easy that final boss was? Yes I was using very good teams on a """meta""" standpoint (A: Sara/Rean/Olivier/Renne | B: Elie/LeGuin/Jusis/Nadia | C: Fie/Mcburn/Vita/Crow) but defensive brave orders just pretty much invalidates much of the fights. The phase 3 1hp move doesn't matter if I make sure I'm always above 5bp for High Heavens, and phase 1/2 are just not even note worthy. I do wish it was more than 2 floors and a couple mini bosses before Demiurge but I can't complain. Many JRPGs don't even have a post game like this, this is awesome. The story was interesting and how the little amount of it flowed reminded me very much of Sky 3rd (I SAID THE THING). I was expecting more when I heard from my friend a while ago that it has a post game, but we ball. Big fan of this game, can't wait to play Kuro

Date Beat (Post Game): 5/29/24
4.7/5

This is a game I have played, yep. This is gonna be my longest review by far due to this game having way too much to talk about. This is a game I had such insane low hopes in before I went into it due to hearing some things here and there from my friends on discord and since 2 Xenoblade faces on twitter were playing it around the same time I started CS4, which is maybe why I can give it some slight props in certain situations. I’m the type of person who can find some things to enjoy in a game where all else fails, and there were some things in this one I did find. The one thing I found myself really enjoying was the non-true ending. It was something I did not expect for them to do and I really took a lot out of that. It kept a sense of stakes in previous events (that the true ending reverted cause fuck stakes) and added more on top of that. A second thing was that the combat was so fucking broken that I found comedy in it. I’m sorry, I should not be doing half of the hp of a final dungeon boss on nightmare difficulty. The difference between this game being easy and a game like CS3 being easy is that CS3 is too easy due to corny things. I will 100% rather broken caster Crow over broken Spirit Unification and Sledgehammer easy. I honestly really like how the game flows into getting Rean out of the BW. It’s a great change in pace and a pretty decent difficulty boost in showing that Rean really is the core of every group he is in. And lastly it would be a disservice to knock the good scenes the game has. There are more great scenes in this 1 game then the past 3 games which has to be some pluses to it. But we’ve all run out of things I enjoy, you know what time it is. The amount of fraudulent characters in this game is hilarious. You make a game which has characters like Cedric and Claire and expect me to enjoy these villains. There are only at max 3 villains in this game I enjoy and thats so fucked up. The only character that I feel like kept getting real development in this game was Ash, and this is only because Joshua was in this game. Another thing I really don’t like was that it feels like they tried to fit way too many references into this game as to previous games. It’s been known that Cold Steel is just a big Sky reference but holy shit there's just so many in this game that it just feels like they just wanted to reference it. There's a scene where Ash says for no reason that Joshua would look good in a dress and it is 100% only there so they can say it is a reference. The worst offender of them all is the story. Jesus it's so nonsensical, nothing happens for genuinely 35 hours of the game. The curse is an awful story mechanic where it is only there to help create needed conflict to evolve the story. “Huh, how do we make x event happen? OH YEAH IT’S THE CURSE THAT CAUSED IT”. And finally, why the FUCK did they reintroduce Gilbert. It is an awful character who is so painfully unfunny but APPARENTLY THIS WHOLE COMMUNITY LOVES HIM??? WHERE DO YOU SEE THIS I GENUINELY CAN’T TELL MAN. Coming from someone who genuinely really enjoyed CS2, I really wanted to end this all saying that it wasn’t the only Cold Steel game I genuinely enjoyed. Coming out of that, I can’t say that this was an experience I would recommend. There are some great things about this game, but the other side of the coin is much heavier. Take me back to Crossbell please

Date beat: 10/23/23
2.8/5

This game hurts me inside. First off I'll say what I enjoy about this game (it is shorter than what I dislike :3). There are multiple greatly written characters in this game. Juna is a character where she hits a perfect spot for me (when her writing isn't completely revolving around Rean). I fucking adore more human character writing like that and it completely caught me off guard. (Most) of NC7 are really fun to be around that it was a great breath of fresh air. But onto the disliking part, there more than I want to admit. First off, the story. Its uh, not good in my opinion. It at least a perk above Cold Steel 1 that this game feels like it has a direction, but what it spews is some clown ass stuff. 2nd off, this game is so insanely easy. Again, played on nightmare and every fight just evolved into
SPIRIT UNIFICATION -> SLEDGEHAMMER -> ARCANE GALE -> WIND BLADE
Rean and break are so insanely powerful that it is making the beginning of Cold Steel 4 feel harder cause they aren't a real option LMAO. 3rd one is ironically back to the character writing. Yes I know I just gushed about how Juna was mainly written, but every new character have this really unfortunate character ideal that they all need to impress Rean Schwarzer omg Rean I love Rean. It makes everyone feel more shallow cause they all have to impress their almighty overlord Rean. Also Musse sucks. 4th and final one is HOLY SHIT THAT ENDING WAS AWFUL. It goes to a genuinely sad and great scene into the worst ending of all. I'm glad I was able to play this game but I will never do it again

Beat: 10/9/23

Simply one of my favorite games to ever release. Character writing in this game is some of my favorite I have ever seen in vns (C;C fans I'm sorry please do not murder me) and just stays near and dear to my heart. Character art by the amazing artist Huke brings life to a genre which can start to blend with each other very easily on top of some of the best voice acting I have ever heard in a video game. There is always the cons though. This is a vn from the 00s, there is gonna be some weird ass scenes that you really rather not see. But if you get through those, you have something extremely special and completely worth your time.

Beat: 9/3/21

Very very good game yes. Aesthetic is extremely good with some of the goofiest combat in the series. Smirk may be insanely broken but it's very fun. Story is fairly weak but people who say that they avidly play smt for the story is very funny to laugh at. Characters are interesting but to an extent they feel a lot like walking holders of chaos/law than previous characters. Walter and Jonathan really just feel like "Hey I'm LAW/CHAOS" which is harsh. The rating looks higher than my review is so far just because the game is so god damn fun.

Beat: a long time ago

This is the game I am the most absolutely tore open to rank. I played this game straight off the rip of release, which means covid flared up and started closing schools right then. When my senior year of HS was tore from me, this game was literally all I did. Fun fact: I was in the top 1% to beat p5r on release :D. At point point I really loved vanilla p5 before p5r released (which uhhhh, I don't exactly agree with these days). But this game to me is somehow impossible to hate. Yes the dungeon design is repetitive and boring, characters become cardboard cutouts after their focused dungeon, the story is very weak and difficulty is laughable. Even with all of this, I just can't. (Most) characters are really enjoyable to be around and music/hud are absolutely gorgeous. The main thing saving this game is the royal additions. The new characters, changed characters and new 3rd semester are just very good. The 3rd semester is the main reason where I have hope for the future of this series. Maruki is one of my favorite characters of all time period, his characterization is a great breath of fresh air and a great change for the stale neo-persona games. But yeah, this really is a game

Beat: 4/6/20

The game of all time. P4g is a game that really is an anomaly to me. It has some of the best peaks in the series but it also has some of the most dull boring parts as well. Combat isn't anything fancy, but the biggest con about it is that this is probably the 2nd easiest persona game in the series. If I had 1 major thing to complain about, it's just that the characters are so inconsistent. They all feel like they never disagree with Yu in a scenario where varying views would help the story evolve so much more than it does. The game flows horribly cause nearly every single chapter is the same thing. Even if I dislike p3, I would at least rather play that instead of this (especially when the remake releases). It really is rough out here

Beat: a long time ago