Camanesis
BACKER
A good game but nothing necessarily groundbreaking . I’ve always been a person who preferred linear compact games over open world games with barren landscapes with sparse interesting gameplay beats sprinkled across the map . I enjoyed my time with it but if it wasn’t Zelda I’m 100% certain I would’ve never played this and even then it only barely feels like a Zelda game
This review contains spoilers
I think In terms of story presentation this is where the mainline smt games peaked. Descending from mikado tower just to find out it’s a post apocalyptic Tokyo is such an intriguing and mystifying feeling. The music and art direction in this game is near perfect and I love constantly fusing new demons. My only real complaints are how broken smirk is and how bland the dungeon exploration feels but I still enjoyed every second of this
I hated the padded out gameplay sections and bad endgame level scaling but the way this ended will be stuck in my mind for years. A proper send off to the klaus trilogy and the somewhat cliffhanger ending and ties to xenosaga at the end make me very excited for the future that’ll be connected to that. My hopes for the future have the series have been more than redeemed up to now
1987
2019
2016
This review contains spoilers
I started with 0 so maybe I was spoiled in that regard but this game was just “Ok” compared to that in my opinion. The story was well executed here but they didn’t let dramatic moments and death scenes linger long enough and show their effect on kiryu until the very end. I feel like more time should’ve been given to show him trying to cope because he literally lost the most important people in his life during the end half of this game. Another thing that feels jank and rough around the edges was the combat. The new feature where bosses can recover in combat doesn’t seem balanced at all and I had a strange issue where enemies I would attack from behind would rotate around mid combo and start blocking in the middle of it and the closest thing the player can do in that regard is countering in brawler style. My last gameplay complaint is that fighting any sort of armed enemy is or enemies in groups is abysmal because no matter how much I equipped dragon shirt and upgraded my defenses any small poke from a knife turns kiryus knees into jelly. Honestly the plot was really solid and well executed aside from the very telegraphed predictable death scenes. When I saw the grenade laying next to shimano I just sighed because I knew what was going to happen. Or when characters magically teleport in front of bullets after the triggers are pulled. I still think the story’s themes of found family are very beautiful and the final shot of Haruka and Uncle Kaz walking off put a tear in my eye. Solid game but it could’ve easily been so much better
2022
2015
This game is amazing and my favorite route was blue lions. The discourse surrounding this game has become incredibly annoying because of how serious in nature the way war is presented and I see people online refusing to like these characters because they’re “war criminals” (this mostly happened after engage released because recency syndrome makes people bash previous installments in a series) and honestly it doesn’t surprise me how stupid this fanbase can be about stuff like that when a vast majority of the games are ok at best
2011
2011