Stellar Blade is a surprisingly very polished game with good production values. The graphics looks nice in general from the environment to the character models. Lighting is decent most of the time as well. Loading times are very minimal and surprisingly did not run into any glitch or technical issue.

The story is a somewhat standard post apocalyptic story. It starts off with Eve and her airborne group of sister warriors descending from the space colony to destroy the Naytiba monsters populating the planet. Lots of issue arise and Eve becomes the sole survivor after the landing battle. Saved by the Scavenger Adam, he helps him retrieve energy cells to support the last known human settlement.

The story is rather straightforward and has predicable plot twists within the sci-fi genre. Not much actually happens for the first few hours which remains consistent for most of the game. The story takes the slow reveal approach.

That said, even a generic sci-fi story would keep me interested and that was the case with Stellar Blade's story. The plot twist at the end of the game did take me by surprise though and the endings did set up for a potential interesting sequel that I hope come to fruition.

There aren't many story characters in the game. The few of them are mostly undeveloped outside of the main trio. There are few notable side characters that are unrelated to the main story. They aren't developed much either outside of a few of them.

The music is good overall. Admittedly, I only liked a few tracks in my first playthrough, but have grown to appreciate more tracks in my subsequent playthroughs. There's a lot of piano pieces with soft vocals which didn't really move me much. The tracks use for boss fights are usually of the metal and rock variety which I vibed more with in general.

The combat is the biggest selling point of the game. I enjoyed it, but I do have mixed feelings about it. The combat isn't quite as fast paced as I would think based on the cutscenes. Well, at least the normal attack chain isn't as fast as I'd expected. The battle flow does move quick once you get accessed to all of the parry/dodge followups and Beta/Burst skills. In the regular attack chain, you can mix the weak and strong attacks for different combinations, but it's not really needed most of the time. All hits except for the final ones can be guard and dodge cancelled. The final hit forces you to commit and they have long recovery frames.

The combat isn't very difficult in general. You do take decent damage and can die in about 5 hits with the starting health amount. Blocking is not too effective considering that you still take chip and shield damage when blocking hits. A broken shield gauge will expose you to nearly the full damage and the shield breaks easily in just a few hits. Perfect dodge is one of the main defensive tool, but I can never pull it off consistently outside of the dodging projectiles. It's not that reliable, but it's very much needed since unblockable attacks are common. They come in three versions, yellow, blue and purple. Blue allows a special dodge counter if you dodge directly towards it at the right time (a flash will tell you when). The purple one requires a dodge directly backwards. Despite the supposedly easy counters to do here, the input is apparently very strict where a slight angle could be enough to fail the button press. Getting the right timing was never really an issue, but getting it to register forward or backward was a constant issue. The yellow unblockables don't have any easy counters like the other and requires the standard dodge.

Parrying on the other hand is a lot easier to pull off and safer to do in general. A failed parry usually means that you block the attack at least.

Mob enemies are more tanky than I'd liked for the medium and larger sized ones. I don't mind them too much when fighting 1v1, but fighting a group of them is a real massive pain. I don't think the game has sufficient tools to deal with groups. Parrying and perfect dodging them when attacked by groups is very difficult. A failed dodge or parry is going to lead to a death by stunlock. After replaying the games a few times, I find that I don't enjoy mob fights very much. It doesn't really feel satisfying parrying and dodging their attacks since fights get drag on longer than I'd liked.

Boss fights on the other hand are very fun. All story bosses and most of the ones in sidequest are fought 1v1. All of my attention can be focused on parrying, dodging and executing followups. The battle flow in boss fights are very satisfying.

The special moves, Beta and Burst skills are flashy and looks great, but they require building up a gauge to do.

The game does give you consumable attack items, but there's little variety and limited amount you can hold at once. The game also surprisingly has shooting elements where the drone can turn into a gun. The gun variety is decent, but it's not a useful option for most situations. The ammo that it can hold is limited and ammo drops are not that common. They are also near useless against boss fights since the time it takes to go into or out of aim mode is notable enough that you'll likely get hit by the boss in the mode transition.

One of the other highlights in the game are the level designs. They come in basically two types, the semi-linear ones and the opened areas. There are only two of the latter ones and while they are technically different, both are basically of the desert/wasteland theme so visual design is lacking. They are quite large in size too. They are decent at first, but after a while, it becomes a pain to move around.

The semi-linear levels on the other hand are quite good and fun. Some puzzles here and there and limited exploring for hidden items. They somehow remind me of some PS3 era action games. I wished they removed one of the opened areas and made more of these semi-linear ones instead.

Despite having a reputation as a "Souls" games, it's not very difficult or punishing. Resting at camps does respawn enemies, but that's mostly it. Dying and getting a Game Over just puts you back at the last check point or camp, but these are many of them close together. Progress like opened chests, items obtained, doors opened and exp gained are all retained. No need to go to a specific place to retrieve lost exp or anything like that.

The game has three endings which can be a pain to do since it basically requires playing the game three times outside of uploading saves to the cloud or something. Also annoying is that two of the endings are 90% the same.

There is a NG+ option which also unlocks Hard Mode. Enemies deal more damage and have much higher health. Since you keep everything on a NG+, most mob enemies don't become noticeably more challenging, but they get a lot more tanky to defeat. The same for the bosses, but the ones near the end of the game who were already challenging on normal, become a lot tougher where 1-3 hits can get you killed.

One thing I liked about the game is that there's a lot of outfits to unlock. There's about 35 and a different recoloring of those same ones can be unlocked on a NG+.

While I haven't heard much of the English voice acting since I played it with Korean voices, I thought they were quite good. Even Lily who does sound a lot older than I'd expected in English.

Since there's a lot of discourse on the fanservice, I'll put in my thoughts on the matter. If you remove Eve, the fanservice is nearly non-existent. The characters are filled with cyborgs with metal implants for limbs and even heads for a few of them. As for Eve, her design isn't that heavy in fanservice, but the camera angle does emphasis her behind at times. She does have jiggle physics as well. As for her outfits, a lot consists of fetish type costumes which are heavy in fanservice. Fortunately, there's also a good amount of normal ones as well.

Overall, Stellar Blade was fun to play with a story that kept my interest. I liked the main trio even though the remaining story characters are lacking. Definitely would like to see a direct sequel based on how the endings turned out.

Buried Stars is the first Korean VN I've played. If I didn't know any better, I would've thought it was another JP one since the mechanics and presentation aren't particularly different than many JP ones. Of course, the game deals with Korean characters in Korea so that's different.

The story deals with a few young B-Tier celebrities on some sort of music talent reality show. In the middle of the finals stage, the ceiling begins to collapse. The contestants soon find themselves alone and trapped within the venue building along with one staff member. From there, they try to get in contact with the outside world while finding a way to escape. A person later winds up dead setting up a murder mystery.

Despite the murder mystery, that element doesn't get much focus. A large portion of the game has the survivors stand around and chat about various topics relating to the current situation inside, the in-game twitter chats and their prior histories and backgrounds. A major theme of the game deals with Korean celebrities, the reality shows and the dark side of the entertainment industry there.

These segments do reveal a lot about the characters and gives them quite a bit of depth by the end of the game. They are written pretty well overall. Getting a look into what does on in the industry is also interesting.

The murder mystery elements are also solid despite not having a lot of time focusing on it. The circumstances of the death would be explored throughout the game instead of in one moment. The setup works well and is fairly grounded in the genre so that it's very reasonable to figure out how a character died.

Figuring out the culprit is another question however. The game throws a lot of red herrings at you and it took me pretty much right before the reveal to get the complete picture.

The character art looks great as well as the few CGs in the game. The backgrounds looks decent, but there isn't much variety. The whole game takes place in the building, but there are very few rooms that the characters visit.

The music has some rock elements, but otherwise has a lot of oppressive songs to reflect the tension filled atmosphere.

The gameplay is mostly split into two segments. The main story segments are pretty much linear with little player control. Other than a few dialogue options, you're just watching a lot of people talk here. In between those, there's the investigation segments which gives you a lot more control over what to do. You gather topics from the various "twitter" posts during a moment and discuss them with the other characters along with any other story relevant topic at the time. At the minimum, you need to gather all of the keywords for this part before you can advance. In some cases, you need to use every topic for every character to get all of the keywords.

Some of the topics can adjust the trust the characters has in the MC. Some of them gives you a dialogue choice which can also alter the trust. The MC himself has an insanity gauge which gets adjusted throughout the game and from the topics he has with the characters. You get a game over if the gauge hits 0.

Other than these investigation moments, there isn't much else for gameplay.

The story route structure is a bit strange at first. You're forced to go down a linear route and reached the first ending regardless of the choices you make. You then have access to the story split on a subsequent playthrough, but unless you have a save just right before the split that occurs pretty close to the first ending, you'll have to replay that segment again.

The game essentially has 3 story routes (A, B and C). A is pretty good overall. While B provides the additional information that A didn't have, it was generally a disappointing one. C is short and not really a full route, but an amusing one.

Overall, the mystery is decent and it did leave me guessing until pretty much the end. I enjoyed the exploration of the characters and focus on the characters as well. I did wished that there were more major story events since it just feels like there isn't that much that happens.

There isn't an in-game timer, but I figure it takes about 15-20 hours to complete all of the story routes.

There aren't many games that can emotionally move me as much as this game does. It starts off as a slice of life story between a high school couple and a simple date to the movies. The story then quickly spirals into a mystery where strange occurrences appear throughout the town. Lots of supernatural and fantasy elements here.

The story deals with some serious and mature themes and even starts off with a warning of such nature. Despite the colorful tone and atmosphere early in the game, there are a lot of dark heavy moments hiding beneath it that left me uncomfortable at times. The emotional journey does end with a satisfying conclusion albeit leaving some plot points up to interpretation.

Other than the main characters, there's a lot of NPCs to interact with and a decent chunk of them are involved in the main story. Their personal stories are decently developed despite their small screentime. The writing as a whole is well executed.

The art direction and the pixelated graphics looks great with a decent range of animation.

The music is on the pleasant side with many well composed piano pieces. There are a few vocal tracks that help supplement the emotional moments.

The gameplay is similar to point and click adventure games. You move a character on a 2D plane and enter different rooms or areas on the side. There's a large amount of NPCs roaming the area that you can talk to. Puzzles are placed throughout the game and range from incredibly simple to more complex ones. The latter are not very common.

There's a mechanic that allows the player to dive within the mind/soul of a character to help resolve issues. All of these involve solving puzzles in some form.

Despite how it seems, there are actual combat moments which mostly involve inputting QTEs. These aren't difficult in general fortunately.

There are collectibles and a few optional sidequests in the game. However, getting all of these collectibles can be a hassle if you want to view a bonus scene at the end of the game. Many of the collectibles are chapter locked so there's no way to go back and get them if you missed out the first time other than do a completely new playthrough. Fortunately, Youtube exists.

Overall, the gameplay is decent and relaxing most of the time. Just a few frustrating moments on some of the QTEs and puzzles. The gameplay is actually very similar to 13 Sentinels' story portion of the game for those that are familiar with it.

The game takes about 10 hours to complete on a blind playthrough and recommended for those that want to experience a strong emotional story.