AntiCavity
2023
I enjoyed my time with this game greatly, I have put in over 120 hours combined in my own single player story and ongoing coop game with my friends. It is packed with content, and I have only scratched the surface when it comes to the amount of playthroughs and things I can experience and see.
The full voice acting and mo capping of characters during dialogue, made me fall in love with the characters and kept me wanting to progress the game so I could spend time with them at camp and see how their stories unfolded. The romances are some of the best I have seen in gaming, fully utilizing mo-cap and voice acting to make their writing shine, and they actually are weaved into the entire length of the game, instead of the usual one and done or side quest chain that is the norm.
The best part about this game for me was the fact that it really made CRPGs finally make sense to me. I had played Divinity 2 and some others before this one, I never finished or even gotten close to finishing one before. Usually being thrown off by the gameplay or the lower amount of hand holding than I was used to. But through this game, I developed a love for the genre and have played quite a few more since. While I did not finish this game I love this game for the fact that it showed me how much fun CRPGs are.
The full voice acting and mo capping of characters during dialogue, made me fall in love with the characters and kept me wanting to progress the game so I could spend time with them at camp and see how their stories unfolded. The romances are some of the best I have seen in gaming, fully utilizing mo-cap and voice acting to make their writing shine, and they actually are weaved into the entire length of the game, instead of the usual one and done or side quest chain that is the norm.
The best part about this game for me was the fact that it really made CRPGs finally make sense to me. I had played Divinity 2 and some others before this one, I never finished or even gotten close to finishing one before. Usually being thrown off by the gameplay or the lower amount of hand holding than I was used to. But through this game, I developed a love for the genre and have played quite a few more since. While I did not finish this game I love this game for the fact that it showed me how much fun CRPGs are.
1997
The one word I would use to describe this game is concise. On paper it is a small game, it only has 12 locations with not a whole lot of quests. However the game leverages numerous techniques to create a sense of scale such as; utilizing an overworld map, random encounters, and quests having numerous solutions all contributing to make the world feel greater than the sum of its parts.
Every part of this game has the goal of making the world feel believable, The Diegetic UI, the ambient soundtrack, the numerous options you have in completing quests, the unforgiving combat, and the lack of hand holding all combine to create a believable and immersive experience that you can complete in 10-20 hours.
I greatly enjoyed my time with Fallout, and I am excited to see what’s in store in Fallout 2.
Every part of this game has the goal of making the world feel believable, The Diegetic UI, the ambient soundtrack, the numerous options you have in completing quests, the unforgiving combat, and the lack of hand holding all combine to create a believable and immersive experience that you can complete in 10-20 hours.
I greatly enjoyed my time with Fallout, and I am excited to see what’s in store in Fallout 2.
2024
This review contains spoilers
This was my first experience with Persona 3 in any form, I played both Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5, and I still have to play Royal.
The soundtrack is just as good as ever, from what I understand they covered some of the original soundtrack and added a few more, Persona consistently has some of the best soundtracks in gaming, and this one is no exception.
The gameplay was excellent, adding in a lot of the quality-of-life features from the other games, but still staying true to the original game, it does not have as many elements as the newer ones, nor personas, despite that it has gameplay that is a bit better than original Persona 5, because of the Royale features. Climbing the tower was interesting and reminded me a lot of mementos from Persona 5, It was a bit of a drag towards the end of the game, but it did not prevent me from finishing it.
The Social Links were hit or miss for me, some were among the best in the series link, the Sun social link and the Aeon social link being amazing. While some were really juvenile, one entails you watching your classmate ask out one of the teachers and navigating their relationship, and if you do not encourage him and go along with it, then you do not get any points towards the social link. Your male S.E.E.S teammates not having social links was a bit of a bummer, but Atlus tried to alleviate that by having link episodes, where you hang out with your teammates and learn more about their character, once again they really stuck with making the story part of it as close to the original as possible. I enjoyed all of the S.E.E.S social links and I am glad they added a platonic conclusion to their social links, since in the original you had no choice but to romance them.
The Life Sim elements were great, they had less attributes to level up, my only critique is that knowledge is extremely slow to level, some S.E.E.S social links require to level an attribute to the highest level, which prevents you from starting their social link till the last part of the game, I wish leveling your S.E.E.S social links was a bit more gradual throughout the game, cause it feels a little rushed to do their social links in the last month of the game. You can do activities with them after school, like watching movies, watering plants, cooking etc., as well as doing group study sessions during exam seasons, which helps alleviate that feeling of their relationship with the MC going a bit too fast, but once again this is from the original game, so they stuck to the source.
Storywise, this is probably the best Persona story I have played out of 3,4,5. It tackles themes of depression and finding your reasons for living, the characters you interact with all have their own traumas and struggles, and a lot of them overlap, including the MCs. And ultimately, your character is the one who is helping people find their reasons to keep going despite their trials and tribulations, and then after all of that the MC ends up sacrificing himself to save the world, which while it is a cliche on its own, adding on the emotional weight of building relationships with all of the character in and out of your team, makes this such an excellent ending. The credits roll when the MC closes his eyes after willing himself to keep his promise to make it through the end of the school year with all of his friends. Most of the social links also involve you making plans for after the events of the game, which adds so much more weight to this ending. With all of those factors, this makes this ending one of the best game endings I have experienced, and they are remastering The Answer, which is sort of an epilogue that involves your friends coming to terms with losing one of their close friends and how each character deals with it in different ways. I am very excited to play this and hope it impacts me as much as the main story did.
The soundtrack is just as good as ever, from what I understand they covered some of the original soundtrack and added a few more, Persona consistently has some of the best soundtracks in gaming, and this one is no exception.
The gameplay was excellent, adding in a lot of the quality-of-life features from the other games, but still staying true to the original game, it does not have as many elements as the newer ones, nor personas, despite that it has gameplay that is a bit better than original Persona 5, because of the Royale features. Climbing the tower was interesting and reminded me a lot of mementos from Persona 5, It was a bit of a drag towards the end of the game, but it did not prevent me from finishing it.
The Social Links were hit or miss for me, some were among the best in the series link, the Sun social link and the Aeon social link being amazing. While some were really juvenile, one entails you watching your classmate ask out one of the teachers and navigating their relationship, and if you do not encourage him and go along with it, then you do not get any points towards the social link. Your male S.E.E.S teammates not having social links was a bit of a bummer, but Atlus tried to alleviate that by having link episodes, where you hang out with your teammates and learn more about their character, once again they really stuck with making the story part of it as close to the original as possible. I enjoyed all of the S.E.E.S social links and I am glad they added a platonic conclusion to their social links, since in the original you had no choice but to romance them.
The Life Sim elements were great, they had less attributes to level up, my only critique is that knowledge is extremely slow to level, some S.E.E.S social links require to level an attribute to the highest level, which prevents you from starting their social link till the last part of the game, I wish leveling your S.E.E.S social links was a bit more gradual throughout the game, cause it feels a little rushed to do their social links in the last month of the game. You can do activities with them after school, like watching movies, watering plants, cooking etc., as well as doing group study sessions during exam seasons, which helps alleviate that feeling of their relationship with the MC going a bit too fast, but once again this is from the original game, so they stuck to the source.
Storywise, this is probably the best Persona story I have played out of 3,4,5. It tackles themes of depression and finding your reasons for living, the characters you interact with all have their own traumas and struggles, and a lot of them overlap, including the MCs. And ultimately, your character is the one who is helping people find their reasons to keep going despite their trials and tribulations, and then after all of that the MC ends up sacrificing himself to save the world, which while it is a cliche on its own, adding on the emotional weight of building relationships with all of the character in and out of your team, makes this such an excellent ending. The credits roll when the MC closes his eyes after willing himself to keep his promise to make it through the end of the school year with all of his friends. Most of the social links also involve you making plans for after the events of the game, which adds so much more weight to this ending. With all of those factors, this makes this ending one of the best game endings I have experienced, and they are remastering The Answer, which is sort of an epilogue that involves your friends coming to terms with losing one of their close friends and how each character deals with it in different ways. I am very excited to play this and hope it impacts me as much as the main story did.
This game created a new genre, Native Warband is a bit rough around the edges, but If you download a full conversion mod or just an enhanced vanilla mod, it is one of the best games of all time. A true sandbox, and not like a bland Ubisoft game where you just clear outposts and climb towers to reveal the map, more like letting you play however you like and not giving you a central goal, but coming up with that goal on your own.
2015
I liked this game overall, I only beat it once and got the basic ending, and played as a merchant, going into this game I knew that you had to specialize your character so I decided to talk my way through everything, I manipulated and bartered my way through the game, never needing to get into a fight, Overall it took my 6 hours for a single playthrough, but from what I can see, playing different starts and with different starts and builds change the game significantly. It does choice and consequence very well and has quite interesting world-building, I like how they flavor radiation as a sort of magical force instead of scientifically like most other post-apocalyptic games do. I can recommend this game if you enjoy CRPGs and go into it with a mindset of playing a specific role. Since I knew that as a merchant I would not be able to fight and that I needed to solve my problems with manipulation and bribery, I didn't find it as difficult as I was playing to my strengths. Overall, a solid CRPG, and worth playing if you are a fan of the genre.
Pathfinder Kingmaker is a great game with flaws that held it back for me.
Pathfinder 1e was an enjoyable system for me to play around with, before this game I was unfamiliar with it. There are so many builds that you can do to the point where it could be overwhelming for some people. If you are unfamiliar with the system you will likely need a guide to make an optimal build if you decide to play on the higher difficulties. Which isn't a deal breaker for me.
Compared to D&D 5e, it is not as accessible but I feel that it makes for a better game, as someone who likes more complex character creation and builds, this is miles better than DnD for me. While Baldur's Gate 3 did have alright builds, I believe that the system it is based on is just not as varied nor is it as mechanically in-depth compared to Pathfinder. While it is serviceable, I just prefer Pathfinder for the increased depth and variety in character creation, as well as how the combat itself plays out.
The difficulty options are alright, they range from piss easy to impossible unless you min-max, and in my opinion, there was not a good middle ground difficulty by default, where you had some sort of challenge without needing to min max. You can customize every part of the difficulty to your liking, so I believe there is a way to achieve that perfect difficulty, however, I did not spend too much time on tweaking it. I believe that the game could have been balanced a bit better, some fights in the early game were brutal for someone unfamiliar with Pathfinder. Because of these hard fights, it led me to lower the difficulty quite a few times, which thankfully you can do at any time. I would have preferred to not need to switch the difficulty and just have a consistent challenge at all parts of the game. Compared to Baldur's Gate 3, it offers a more difficult experience on the higher-end difficulties but is not as balanced in the middle difficulties, which can be a plus if you enjoy min-maxing and crunchy games. which I find myself enjoying. The encounters themselves got pretty tedious at times, which ultimately contributed to me not finishing the game.
I enjoyed the exploration aspect of this game, There are smaller maps, that contain various mobs, loot, caves, and the like which are tied together by a big overworld map in which you have to spend time traveling and to camp when your party gets tired, I loved this part of the game, it added a lot to the fantasy of it being an adventure. It created the feeling of this being a more living world that spans months rather than it spanning a week or two like Baldur's Gate 3, for example. While Baldur's Gate 3 felt like a faster-paced short-term adventure, the time felt wonky, each long rest is presumably one day, but you could take as many as you wanted with only a few quests reflecting the passage of time, this is not a thing in Kingmaker, because of the fact that you travel everywhere and that you need to rest once you get exhausted, the passage of time feels a lot more realistic, and conducive to a long term adventure that involves creating a kingdom and handling all of the problems that come along with it. Ultimately the two games are quite different and I feel the way each of them handles resting and the passage of time would not work well if they were swapped, but I feel it's handled better in this game
A lot of the encounters in this game require you to buff yourself before the encounters, and with there being sometimes 10-15 spells you need to case before fights, it takes a lot of the time away from the fighting. In the sequel, this is a bit worse, but at the least you can download a mod that lets you apply all the buffs you want at the same time, saving you 5 minutes before every big fight, which I did not have access to in this game and made it feel very tedious. Compared to Baldurs Gate 3, where buffing before a fight was not necessary to win most of your fights and the fact that there are simply fewer spells you need to cast, this issue is notable if you are coming from Baldur’s Gate 3.
I did enjoy the fact that there were options for real-time with pause and turn-based modes, the game was designed with real-time with pause in mind, but Pathfinder as a system was designed to be turn-based so each of the modes has its positives and negatives. The turn-based mode makes the harder fights easier since it is easier to micro your party members compared to RTWP but it makes the trash mob fights very tedious, while RTWP makes the game a lot faster, it does increase the difficulty a bit since it increases the amount of micromanaging you need to do. I found myself switching between the two quite often, but because the game is designed around RTWP while Pathfinder is turn-based it means both of the modes aren’t perfect by themselves, but since you have both it is not a big issue.
The kingdom management is interesting, but a bit tedious at times, it tends to throw a bunch of events at you at a time and can be a bit overwhelming, this system also requires you to watch a guide to get the hang of it, which depending on how much you mind reading guides could be a negative. While the system itself is not perfect, the existence of the system does a tremendous amount to make this game feel grand, compared to Baldur's Gate 3, I think Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous feel like grander adventures with their respective management systems. Thus while the management systems may be tedious to some, I believe it contributes more to the game than the sum of its parts.
The companions are serviceable, and most did not blow me away, but their stories were interesting enough to where you wanted to do their companion quests and most of those quests were solid, but I did not end up finishing the game so I did not see all of them.
This is an extremely long game, a full playthrough of this game will take you above the 100-hour mark if you are not rushing through the game, and while CRPGs are known for being long at times, compared to Baldur's Gate 3, it is quite a bit longer, but a decent part of that is not just main quests, it is mostly downtime in between acts, in which after rushing through the main story you get many in-game days of downtime, to catch up on kingdom management, do companion quests and other sidequests, and to explore the world map. Because of the downtime from the main quests, it feels a bit padded which inflates the runtime a bit compared to Baldur's Gate 3, which was extremely long because of the amount of side quests and area to explore, rather than downtime between acts.
The vast majority of main quests are on a timer, and if you do not complete them in time, you lose the game and your kingdom falls, these time limits were pretty generous however, time limits do not feel too good to me, thankfully in the sequel the time limits are a lot less strict and done a lot better in my opinion, which is a common theme of this game, generally the ideas in this one are more well executed in the sequel, Wrath of the Righteous.
This game felt like a grand adventure, while not all of the systems were well executed and there were a lot of quality-of-life features that were added in the sequel, I think this game is great, the parts all combine to create a truly grand adventure that spans years, However a lot of things held the game back that prevented me from finishing it, a lot of the encounters are designed with a specific counter in mind, which if you are seeing for the first time and are unfamiliar with pathfinder, might be hard to deal with. Comparing this game to Baldur's Gate 3, it feels a lot grander in scope, it spans many months in-game, and it fulfills the fantasy of being a Kingmaker, all of the systems come together to create an adventure that's greater than the sum of its parts, that is held back by the systems being complicated, the difficulties being either too easy or too difficult and just general polish. Despite the fact I did not finish it, I enjoyed it enough to try its sequel, Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, which alleviates a lot of the issues I had with this game, and takes the parts of Kingmaker that shine and elevate them to even greater heights, Increasing the amount of character creation options while adding polish and quality of life features that were needed in Kingmaker.
All in all, this game was a great experience, it had a tremendous amount of content and systems that combined to create a grand adventure that mostly fulfills the fantasy of being a kingmaker, what holds it back is the hard-to-get-into system in Pathfinder 1e and the somewhat convoluted kingdom management mechanics, if you do not mind reading guides and can deal with some of the lack of polish, this is an excellent game. And if it's a bit too rough around the edges Wrath of the Righteous might be right up your alley, since it feels like a more fully realized version of Kingmaker in many ways.
Pathfinder 1e was an enjoyable system for me to play around with, before this game I was unfamiliar with it. There are so many builds that you can do to the point where it could be overwhelming for some people. If you are unfamiliar with the system you will likely need a guide to make an optimal build if you decide to play on the higher difficulties. Which isn't a deal breaker for me.
Compared to D&D 5e, it is not as accessible but I feel that it makes for a better game, as someone who likes more complex character creation and builds, this is miles better than DnD for me. While Baldur's Gate 3 did have alright builds, I believe that the system it is based on is just not as varied nor is it as mechanically in-depth compared to Pathfinder. While it is serviceable, I just prefer Pathfinder for the increased depth and variety in character creation, as well as how the combat itself plays out.
The difficulty options are alright, they range from piss easy to impossible unless you min-max, and in my opinion, there was not a good middle ground difficulty by default, where you had some sort of challenge without needing to min max. You can customize every part of the difficulty to your liking, so I believe there is a way to achieve that perfect difficulty, however, I did not spend too much time on tweaking it. I believe that the game could have been balanced a bit better, some fights in the early game were brutal for someone unfamiliar with Pathfinder. Because of these hard fights, it led me to lower the difficulty quite a few times, which thankfully you can do at any time. I would have preferred to not need to switch the difficulty and just have a consistent challenge at all parts of the game. Compared to Baldur's Gate 3, it offers a more difficult experience on the higher-end difficulties but is not as balanced in the middle difficulties, which can be a plus if you enjoy min-maxing and crunchy games. which I find myself enjoying. The encounters themselves got pretty tedious at times, which ultimately contributed to me not finishing the game.
I enjoyed the exploration aspect of this game, There are smaller maps, that contain various mobs, loot, caves, and the like which are tied together by a big overworld map in which you have to spend time traveling and to camp when your party gets tired, I loved this part of the game, it added a lot to the fantasy of it being an adventure. It created the feeling of this being a more living world that spans months rather than it spanning a week or two like Baldur's Gate 3, for example. While Baldur's Gate 3 felt like a faster-paced short-term adventure, the time felt wonky, each long rest is presumably one day, but you could take as many as you wanted with only a few quests reflecting the passage of time, this is not a thing in Kingmaker, because of the fact that you travel everywhere and that you need to rest once you get exhausted, the passage of time feels a lot more realistic, and conducive to a long term adventure that involves creating a kingdom and handling all of the problems that come along with it. Ultimately the two games are quite different and I feel the way each of them handles resting and the passage of time would not work well if they were swapped, but I feel it's handled better in this game
A lot of the encounters in this game require you to buff yourself before the encounters, and with there being sometimes 10-15 spells you need to case before fights, it takes a lot of the time away from the fighting. In the sequel, this is a bit worse, but at the least you can download a mod that lets you apply all the buffs you want at the same time, saving you 5 minutes before every big fight, which I did not have access to in this game and made it feel very tedious. Compared to Baldurs Gate 3, where buffing before a fight was not necessary to win most of your fights and the fact that there are simply fewer spells you need to cast, this issue is notable if you are coming from Baldur’s Gate 3.
I did enjoy the fact that there were options for real-time with pause and turn-based modes, the game was designed with real-time with pause in mind, but Pathfinder as a system was designed to be turn-based so each of the modes has its positives and negatives. The turn-based mode makes the harder fights easier since it is easier to micro your party members compared to RTWP but it makes the trash mob fights very tedious, while RTWP makes the game a lot faster, it does increase the difficulty a bit since it increases the amount of micromanaging you need to do. I found myself switching between the two quite often, but because the game is designed around RTWP while Pathfinder is turn-based it means both of the modes aren’t perfect by themselves, but since you have both it is not a big issue.
The kingdom management is interesting, but a bit tedious at times, it tends to throw a bunch of events at you at a time and can be a bit overwhelming, this system also requires you to watch a guide to get the hang of it, which depending on how much you mind reading guides could be a negative. While the system itself is not perfect, the existence of the system does a tremendous amount to make this game feel grand, compared to Baldur's Gate 3, I think Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous feel like grander adventures with their respective management systems. Thus while the management systems may be tedious to some, I believe it contributes more to the game than the sum of its parts.
The companions are serviceable, and most did not blow me away, but their stories were interesting enough to where you wanted to do their companion quests and most of those quests were solid, but I did not end up finishing the game so I did not see all of them.
This is an extremely long game, a full playthrough of this game will take you above the 100-hour mark if you are not rushing through the game, and while CRPGs are known for being long at times, compared to Baldur's Gate 3, it is quite a bit longer, but a decent part of that is not just main quests, it is mostly downtime in between acts, in which after rushing through the main story you get many in-game days of downtime, to catch up on kingdom management, do companion quests and other sidequests, and to explore the world map. Because of the downtime from the main quests, it feels a bit padded which inflates the runtime a bit compared to Baldur's Gate 3, which was extremely long because of the amount of side quests and area to explore, rather than downtime between acts.
The vast majority of main quests are on a timer, and if you do not complete them in time, you lose the game and your kingdom falls, these time limits were pretty generous however, time limits do not feel too good to me, thankfully in the sequel the time limits are a lot less strict and done a lot better in my opinion, which is a common theme of this game, generally the ideas in this one are more well executed in the sequel, Wrath of the Righteous.
This game felt like a grand adventure, while not all of the systems were well executed and there were a lot of quality-of-life features that were added in the sequel, I think this game is great, the parts all combine to create a truly grand adventure that spans years, However a lot of things held the game back that prevented me from finishing it, a lot of the encounters are designed with a specific counter in mind, which if you are seeing for the first time and are unfamiliar with pathfinder, might be hard to deal with. Comparing this game to Baldur's Gate 3, it feels a lot grander in scope, it spans many months in-game, and it fulfills the fantasy of being a Kingmaker, all of the systems come together to create an adventure that's greater than the sum of its parts, that is held back by the systems being complicated, the difficulties being either too easy or too difficult and just general polish. Despite the fact I did not finish it, I enjoyed it enough to try its sequel, Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, which alleviates a lot of the issues I had with this game, and takes the parts of Kingmaker that shine and elevate them to even greater heights, Increasing the amount of character creation options while adding polish and quality of life features that were needed in Kingmaker.
All in all, this game was a great experience, it had a tremendous amount of content and systems that combined to create a grand adventure that mostly fulfills the fantasy of being a kingmaker, what holds it back is the hard-to-get-into system in Pathfinder 1e and the somewhat convoluted kingdom management mechanics, if you do not mind reading guides and can deal with some of the lack of polish, this is an excellent game. And if it's a bit too rough around the edges Wrath of the Righteous might be right up your alley, since it feels like a more fully realized version of Kingmaker in many ways.
This is the best argument for video games being art I have ever seen.