Fingerschmaus
1995
The DSi/3ds for some reason takes a photo of you every time you reach a checkpoint or die.
why
why
2024
Mars After Midnight is a game I have been anticipating to play for around two years now, more specifically after completing another Lucas Pope- and now one of my favorite games ever made Return of the Obra Dinn. While not the only reason, the announcement of Mars After Midnight as a Playdate exclusive of all things, was a big contributor to me buying the console and I don’t think I’m alone with that, as their tweets about the game are noticeably more popular and comments about it riddle the sections of tweets that don’t even mention it.
After the announcement of the release date, around two weeks ago, even after playing through this game, it still doesn’t feel real to finally own it after this long time, so I probably don’t have to describe how high my expectations for this game were.
Did it meet said expectations?
Yes!
Did it exceed them?
No, but that should never be a standard to hold anything on now, should it?
Mars After Midnight is another entry in Lucas Pope’s paperwork series and is (to my knowledge) the first one based around a job that has yet to exist.
You will see yourself as the owner of a Martian-help-center and work at the reception while finding out which Martian, Robot or even Human needs help. The ways of going about this are relatively simple. Some you can deduce, for some you need to use a device and for others both, just know that there are always 6 Martians that need any given kind of help.
After letting someone in, they may eat some refreshments and may leave a mess, which you may have to clean up for the next customer to dabble in said refreshments. After the session is done you get two Mars-Dollars for every right customer. These Mars-Dollars can then be used to advertise, buy food etc. for the next Martians. They can also be spend on items or new treatments, sold by a merchant that shows up every day.
Planning out your next day is always fun, with you looking at the map of your colony, with the living quarters of the six Martians you want to attend being highlighted and picking out where to advertise and which food is most popular at any given place, every day. The only issue I had with this is that it disincentivizes experimenting with new foods, as the cleaning-up process, the only one with a timer, will be different with every item of food. Furthermore the first item of food doesn’t only cover a lot of area, but becomes the easiest to clean up with your dependency on it in the early game.
I’m conflicted on the amount of Martians you have to get right, as 6 is pretty much the perfect amount, if you fail, as you will have more than enough time to deduce what you did wrong, but it does get a bit repetitive if you instantly know what to do and now have to go through a random amount of visitors to pick out the six obvious candidates. This small issue gets heightened by the fact that this game is really easy, and I only had to redo two jobs, because I forgot what reading was; so the fact that six is the perfect amount in those cases didn’t really come up. Even if you fail the punishments are relatively insignificant as you get paid more than enough, for those 2 Mars-Dollars not to matter, if you only miss a few.
As I already mentioned, there aren’t that many ways of finding out which Martian needs a given treatment, but don’t worry, there is enough variation in these ways of deduction for this to never get repetitive, over it’s relatively short runtime of ~3 hours. The gadgets especially, even with them being simple in concept, were fun to mess around with, just to see the reactions of the Martians you try them on, which is even incentivized by the reactions acting as a collectible, with new phrases being registered in the blab-o-dex, a sort of encyclopedia of the Martian language.
Now I’ve tried to stay spoiler-free up until now, but there is one small gripe I had with the game which I cannot talk about without spoiling something that happens at around 2/3rds through the game, so I will write my conclusion here while everything after may be a spoiler.
Mars After Midnight is probably not worth you buying a Playdate, solely to play it, for, even with it being a quality, although simple game. If you are on the fence of buying one anyways, with this game just being a big contributor to why, then there probably is no better time than now, as they have now ended the preorder structure, with me waiting for around a year for mine to arrive in September and there currently being a sale on their online storefront going on; some of my recommendations of other games on Playdate to keep an eye on are Resonant Tale and Sparrow Solitaire
The spoiler(-y) section will begin here.
As I already mentioned something happens in Mars After Midnight at around the 2-hour mark, being that you will leave your colony and go to the people’s colony, which primarily serves as a way for there to be more visual variety. My problem with this comes from the brevity of time you spend there, as the previous colony had 78 Martians to provide help for, while this one has only 24, which also means it is way smaller, which then means even less variety in the food items to use and such. I also found the ways to deduce way easier in this section than some of the more difficult ones of the first colony.
After the announcement of the release date, around two weeks ago, even after playing through this game, it still doesn’t feel real to finally own it after this long time, so I probably don’t have to describe how high my expectations for this game were.
Did it meet said expectations?
Yes!
Did it exceed them?
No, but that should never be a standard to hold anything on now, should it?
Mars After Midnight is another entry in Lucas Pope’s paperwork series and is (to my knowledge) the first one based around a job that has yet to exist.
You will see yourself as the owner of a Martian-help-center and work at the reception while finding out which Martian, Robot or even Human needs help. The ways of going about this are relatively simple. Some you can deduce, for some you need to use a device and for others both, just know that there are always 6 Martians that need any given kind of help.
After letting someone in, they may eat some refreshments and may leave a mess, which you may have to clean up for the next customer to dabble in said refreshments. After the session is done you get two Mars-Dollars for every right customer. These Mars-Dollars can then be used to advertise, buy food etc. for the next Martians. They can also be spend on items or new treatments, sold by a merchant that shows up every day.
Planning out your next day is always fun, with you looking at the map of your colony, with the living quarters of the six Martians you want to attend being highlighted and picking out where to advertise and which food is most popular at any given place, every day. The only issue I had with this is that it disincentivizes experimenting with new foods, as the cleaning-up process, the only one with a timer, will be different with every item of food. Furthermore the first item of food doesn’t only cover a lot of area, but becomes the easiest to clean up with your dependency on it in the early game.
I’m conflicted on the amount of Martians you have to get right, as 6 is pretty much the perfect amount, if you fail, as you will have more than enough time to deduce what you did wrong, but it does get a bit repetitive if you instantly know what to do and now have to go through a random amount of visitors to pick out the six obvious candidates. This small issue gets heightened by the fact that this game is really easy, and I only had to redo two jobs, because I forgot what reading was; so the fact that six is the perfect amount in those cases didn’t really come up. Even if you fail the punishments are relatively insignificant as you get paid more than enough, for those 2 Mars-Dollars not to matter, if you only miss a few.
As I already mentioned, there aren’t that many ways of finding out which Martian needs a given treatment, but don’t worry, there is enough variation in these ways of deduction for this to never get repetitive, over it’s relatively short runtime of ~3 hours. The gadgets especially, even with them being simple in concept, were fun to mess around with, just to see the reactions of the Martians you try them on, which is even incentivized by the reactions acting as a collectible, with new phrases being registered in the blab-o-dex, a sort of encyclopedia of the Martian language.
Now I’ve tried to stay spoiler-free up until now, but there is one small gripe I had with the game which I cannot talk about without spoiling something that happens at around 2/3rds through the game, so I will write my conclusion here while everything after may be a spoiler.
Mars After Midnight is probably not worth you buying a Playdate, solely to play it, for, even with it being a quality, although simple game. If you are on the fence of buying one anyways, with this game just being a big contributor to why, then there probably is no better time than now, as they have now ended the preorder structure, with me waiting for around a year for mine to arrive in September and there currently being a sale on their online storefront going on; some of my recommendations of other games on Playdate to keep an eye on are Resonant Tale and Sparrow Solitaire
The spoiler(-y) section will begin here.
As I already mentioned something happens in Mars After Midnight at around the 2-hour mark, being that you will leave your colony and go to the people’s colony, which primarily serves as a way for there to be more visual variety. My problem with this comes from the brevity of time you spend there, as the previous colony had 78 Martians to provide help for, while this one has only 24, which also means it is way smaller, which then means even less variety in the food items to use and such. I also found the ways to deduce way easier in this section than some of the more difficult ones of the first colony.
2002
For most of my Star Fox Adventures playthrough I didn’t feel like reviewing it. I definitively look upon it more fondly than most, but even then, I didn’t think I would have much to add to the discourse.
The starting hours of Star Fox Adventures were a blast, with very few hick-ups. I really enjoyed the gameplay-loop of finding a Gatekeeper making it able for me to get to a dungeon, finding a SpellStone which makes me able to find a Krazoa Spirit and then finding a SpellStone and so on.
Gameplaywise Star Fox Adventures brought with it an eerie feeling of familiarity.
Now I’ve never been interested in the mainline games, as I’m not big into on-rail- or any kind of shooter, so this feeling took me a while to understand, but after thinking about it for a while Star Fox Adventures really felt like a proto-Kameo, which makes more and more sense the longer I think about it.
You visit pretty much the same settings in both games, the combat system can feel similar at points (though not as fleshed out here) and these are only a few of the similarities between both games, which makes sense as it’s mostly the same people working on them.
Now unfortunately this game really takes a dive in the final stretch and starts decreasing in quality around the half-way point, which is around when you have seen all Dinosaur Planet has to offer and must start backtracking. They probably had to rush the game out, considering it came out a day before Microsoft announced its acquisition of Rare and it shows.
You will have to revisit old dungeons, which repeat their previous puzzles, but a little harder, one of the Gatekeepers is just a random guy and it all accumulates (slight naming spoiler for this 21-year-old game) Dragon Rock.
Dragon Rock is the worst thing any game has ever made me suffer through and this isn’t meant as some kind of metaphor, no! It is the worst part of any game I’ve ever had the displeasure of going through and me beating it should only show you how much I liked the rest of the game before it. I should probably say that at least some of my criticism of this part of the game is partly made worse by my controller being a bit overresponsive and having a few blind spots, both of which only becoming a problem when I had to do more precise movements.
Dragon Rock doesn’t start of all to bad. You had to shoot at some turrets using the Fire Blaster, which might be the wort controlling thing conceivable, but it isn’t too bad.
After a bit you get told to save a HIghTop and this is where it all falls apart and I started to embark on a journey. This funny little guy is trapped by four fire-blaster-targets, two in the back, two more to the front, symmetrical to the HighTop in the middle. It is your task to shoot all of these 4 points within around 10 seconds. When I got to this part of the game my in-game timer showed ~15 hours.
This task doesn’t sound too bad after all, but let’s talk a bit more about the Fire Blaster.
First of the Y-Axis is inverted, which at least for me didn’t mesh well with quick thinking, the controls are already overresponsive, which only got worse with my controller, the targets are far away enough to make it really hard to exactly line up your shots and if you miss the HighTop will start stomping and shake the screen, making you miss more and making him stomp more. He is also a big moving hitbox, sometimes blocking the targets.
Now the worst aspects of the Fire Blaster. When you stop moving the cursor it will snap back to the middle of the screen and when you want to turn forget it. Fox will accelerate in a way I don’t yet fully understand and then snaps back to some position like 3 screens away. The only way to kind of understand where your camera ends up is to look at the map, which has its own problems.
I tried for around 1 hour, when I got there on April 30th, to do it the intended way, but had to give up and started to investigate if I were the only person with troubles here and unsurprisingly, I wasn’t. Look at any comment-section of this part of the game and you will find complaints.
Not too long after I found positions on both the right and the left, where I can hit two targets by only looking further up. The one on the left is more finnicky as the target on the back-left is more towards the middle than its right counterpart.
I tried it using this knowledge for 2 more hours and went to bed after, thinking about giving up, or spending a lot of money to buy a more or less new first party controller, which was when I had an idea.
Why didn’t I try creating consistent set ups using visual cues to hit the targets, so I would only have to turn to said point, aim up and shoot.
On the next day I found out, that the soot-detailing could be used for such a set-up and the ledge get-up can be used to always shoot from the same position.
Using my amateur picture-editing skills I created my first consistent set up tutorial. After printing it out I noticed that I forgot one crucial point, the turning. As I said I was kind of able to look at the map, but this wasn’t by any means optimal. This set-up was also way to slow. This whole process took me another 3 hours.
Then I had another idea, the position on the right. I had written it off, as I couldn’t make it possible to always stand on the same position, but then I had another idea after looking at my stack of transparent paper. I think you know where this is going.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t ever able to draw out a 1:1 copy of the map, and I now could only use it to know where I had to shoot to hit the other two targets, but it was better than nothing. I tried this method for around 2 and a half hours, it was still to slow and hell to set up after using all your energy and having to run out of the building to replenish.
After 5 and a half hours of trying and failing miserably at what should be an easy task I reconsidered quitting and thought to myself that I might as well go for the whole 6 hour mark. My next strategy was to do it the intended way, but to shoot from the position I tried before, rather than the middle and to my own surprise I got it, not very confidently, but still. I think I just missed the 6-hour mark. But it wasn’t over yet, because what followed was a 3-minute long auto-scroller, which if you fail it you must free the HighTop again.
I luckily did it first try and saved a dozen times.
Dragon Rock doesn’t get much better after. Luckily I found out, through watching the speedrun of the game, to see if you could skip the part somehow, that you can skip a lot of the next by lining up Fox with a line on the wall, looking a bit to the left and throwing the barrel through the wall.
What follows is another (uncapped) auto-scroller and what many say is the actual hardest part of the game, even without a non-assuming third party Wave-Bird-Controller making you struggle even more.
This time I bit the bullet and got myself a controller with turbo-functionality as my fingers started to hurt after not too long.
This is Dragon Rock. I only completed it to finish a game I had thoroughly enjoyed before it and was it worth it? Unfortunately, I don’t think so. The only thing you might be missing is the best Krazoa-Spirit task after the most lackluster Krazoa-shrine.
I should also mention that my game crashed at the final boss, setting me back half an hour, as the game apparently ceased to auto-safe after big, ingame events.
A lot of people have already talked a lot about the let’s say “interesting” final confrontation with General Scales. I personally think it would’ve helped a lot as now the last two boss fights are on-rail shooters which is a really undercooked mechanic, which is only there to remind you that you are playing STARFOX Adventures.
At the end of the day, I still enjoyed most of Star Fox Adventures, but I will never replay it completely. The TV my Gamecube is hooked up on will now forever tell the tale of Dragon Rock with its glue residue.
Play it on an emulator with some kind of Fire Blaster fix, if that exists.
The starting hours of Star Fox Adventures were a blast, with very few hick-ups. I really enjoyed the gameplay-loop of finding a Gatekeeper making it able for me to get to a dungeon, finding a SpellStone which makes me able to find a Krazoa Spirit and then finding a SpellStone and so on.
Gameplaywise Star Fox Adventures brought with it an eerie feeling of familiarity.
Now I’ve never been interested in the mainline games, as I’m not big into on-rail- or any kind of shooter, so this feeling took me a while to understand, but after thinking about it for a while Star Fox Adventures really felt like a proto-Kameo, which makes more and more sense the longer I think about it.
You visit pretty much the same settings in both games, the combat system can feel similar at points (though not as fleshed out here) and these are only a few of the similarities between both games, which makes sense as it’s mostly the same people working on them.
Now unfortunately this game really takes a dive in the final stretch and starts decreasing in quality around the half-way point, which is around when you have seen all Dinosaur Planet has to offer and must start backtracking. They probably had to rush the game out, considering it came out a day before Microsoft announced its acquisition of Rare and it shows.
You will have to revisit old dungeons, which repeat their previous puzzles, but a little harder, one of the Gatekeepers is just a random guy and it all accumulates (slight naming spoiler for this 21-year-old game) Dragon Rock.
Dragon Rock is the worst thing any game has ever made me suffer through and this isn’t meant as some kind of metaphor, no! It is the worst part of any game I’ve ever had the displeasure of going through and me beating it should only show you how much I liked the rest of the game before it. I should probably say that at least some of my criticism of this part of the game is partly made worse by my controller being a bit overresponsive and having a few blind spots, both of which only becoming a problem when I had to do more precise movements.
Dragon Rock doesn’t start of all to bad. You had to shoot at some turrets using the Fire Blaster, which might be the wort controlling thing conceivable, but it isn’t too bad.
After a bit you get told to save a HIghTop and this is where it all falls apart and I started to embark on a journey. This funny little guy is trapped by four fire-blaster-targets, two in the back, two more to the front, symmetrical to the HighTop in the middle. It is your task to shoot all of these 4 points within around 10 seconds. When I got to this part of the game my in-game timer showed ~15 hours.
This task doesn’t sound too bad after all, but let’s talk a bit more about the Fire Blaster.
First of the Y-Axis is inverted, which at least for me didn’t mesh well with quick thinking, the controls are already overresponsive, which only got worse with my controller, the targets are far away enough to make it really hard to exactly line up your shots and if you miss the HighTop will start stomping and shake the screen, making you miss more and making him stomp more. He is also a big moving hitbox, sometimes blocking the targets.
Now the worst aspects of the Fire Blaster. When you stop moving the cursor it will snap back to the middle of the screen and when you want to turn forget it. Fox will accelerate in a way I don’t yet fully understand and then snaps back to some position like 3 screens away. The only way to kind of understand where your camera ends up is to look at the map, which has its own problems.
I tried for around 1 hour, when I got there on April 30th, to do it the intended way, but had to give up and started to investigate if I were the only person with troubles here and unsurprisingly, I wasn’t. Look at any comment-section of this part of the game and you will find complaints.
Not too long after I found positions on both the right and the left, where I can hit two targets by only looking further up. The one on the left is more finnicky as the target on the back-left is more towards the middle than its right counterpart.
I tried it using this knowledge for 2 more hours and went to bed after, thinking about giving up, or spending a lot of money to buy a more or less new first party controller, which was when I had an idea.
Why didn’t I try creating consistent set ups using visual cues to hit the targets, so I would only have to turn to said point, aim up and shoot.
On the next day I found out, that the soot-detailing could be used for such a set-up and the ledge get-up can be used to always shoot from the same position.
Using my amateur picture-editing skills I created my first consistent set up tutorial. After printing it out I noticed that I forgot one crucial point, the turning. As I said I was kind of able to look at the map, but this wasn’t by any means optimal. This set-up was also way to slow. This whole process took me another 3 hours.
Then I had another idea, the position on the right. I had written it off, as I couldn’t make it possible to always stand on the same position, but then I had another idea after looking at my stack of transparent paper. I think you know where this is going.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t ever able to draw out a 1:1 copy of the map, and I now could only use it to know where I had to shoot to hit the other two targets, but it was better than nothing. I tried this method for around 2 and a half hours, it was still to slow and hell to set up after using all your energy and having to run out of the building to replenish.
After 5 and a half hours of trying and failing miserably at what should be an easy task I reconsidered quitting and thought to myself that I might as well go for the whole 6 hour mark. My next strategy was to do it the intended way, but to shoot from the position I tried before, rather than the middle and to my own surprise I got it, not very confidently, but still. I think I just missed the 6-hour mark. But it wasn’t over yet, because what followed was a 3-minute long auto-scroller, which if you fail it you must free the HighTop again.
I luckily did it first try and saved a dozen times.
Dragon Rock doesn’t get much better after. Luckily I found out, through watching the speedrun of the game, to see if you could skip the part somehow, that you can skip a lot of the next by lining up Fox with a line on the wall, looking a bit to the left and throwing the barrel through the wall.
What follows is another (uncapped) auto-scroller and what many say is the actual hardest part of the game, even without a non-assuming third party Wave-Bird-Controller making you struggle even more.
This time I bit the bullet and got myself a controller with turbo-functionality as my fingers started to hurt after not too long.
This is Dragon Rock. I only completed it to finish a game I had thoroughly enjoyed before it and was it worth it? Unfortunately, I don’t think so. The only thing you might be missing is the best Krazoa-Spirit task after the most lackluster Krazoa-shrine.
I should also mention that my game crashed at the final boss, setting me back half an hour, as the game apparently ceased to auto-safe after big, ingame events.
A lot of people have already talked a lot about the let’s say “interesting” final confrontation with General Scales. I personally think it would’ve helped a lot as now the last two boss fights are on-rail shooters which is a really undercooked mechanic, which is only there to remind you that you are playing STARFOX Adventures.
At the end of the day, I still enjoyed most of Star Fox Adventures, but I will never replay it completely. The TV my Gamecube is hooked up on will now forever tell the tale of Dragon Rock with its glue residue.
Play it on an emulator with some kind of Fire Blaster fix, if that exists.
I have never really cared much about Bayonetta as a franchise, because the mainline never really seemed like they would be something I would like. Thus before playing Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon I've had only been exposed to the franchise through Smash Bros., trailers and whatever that situation with Hellena Taylor was about last year.
But when this game got announced at the end of last year and I saw the trailers, the art style and the very interesting looking gameplay, it instantly clicked with me.
Now it took me a bit to get around to start playing it, as I am have been participating in a Pokemon Draft League since January, but when I did 4 days ago (on my birthday) I got sucked in and the game not only met my-, but exceeded my expectations.
As I kind of alluded to before, the gameplay of Bayonetta Origins is very unique. If I had to compare it to anything (and take this comparison with a salt mine) this felt a bit like an isometric platformer/collectathon, as in Skylanders or Lego games, mixed with Kameo and a few sprinkles of Metroid Fusion (in terms of map-design) mixed in and then only the best parts of these games.
This is an extremely scuffed comparison, but it's the best I have got, as it is really original.
Originality for the sake of originality and nothing else is a pitfall for a lot of games or pieces of media in general and make them anything but fun to experience, but believe me when I say that Bayonetta Origins clears that.
I rarely ever go out of my way to 100% a game, even the ones I really like, with a few exceptions, but I had so much fun playing this game that I travelled through Avalon Forest for an extra 10 hours (estimation as the Nintendo Switch for some reason doesn't tell you exactly how long you've played something and doesn't at all until 14 days after starting it the first time.), just to see and experience everything it had to offer.
Now I should mention, that for you have to control 2 characters at the same time for most of the game, but the controls are easy enough that I had them down in under an hour (it probably didn't hurt that I have played this 1p2c), they are also mapped, so both characters can be played using one Joy-Con each.
I can't understate how much fun I had playing this and the ingenious overworld design definitely helped.
During my "item-clean-up" were multiple moments where I unlocked a short-cut, that made me go "wait you can go from here to there?" and this wasn't a one time occurrence.
When talking about the overworld-design I have to mention the map which at best is confusing. It's this games biggest flaw and did sour my experience a bit during said "clean-up" (shout out to Wrapper the wisp), but I think I can say that I kind of understand how it works now and it didn't occur to me as a problem during most of it and definitely not during the (for the lack of a better term) normal playtime of me going through the story.
I would also like to mention that when saying that I have 100%ed this game, I mean that I did everything in the main game and not the new game+.
Outside of the stellar gameplay loop this game also looks incredible. If you don't have an image of it already take a look at this trailer, which still doesn't do the game justice through all its compressed glory and the ost is also really whimsical and beautiful.
The story suffices. I had predicted a lot of story beats, but their execution was good enough for me to not care. I wasn't really the biggest fan of the voice work, but it isn't worse than botw's is and I also didn't care all to much in that game, but be warned if that is something you care about.
The story, such as the game is obviously more tailored towards children than the mainline games (which isn't a bad thing, for the record) and that also shows in its difficulty.
This game for the most part is easy. There is a supposedly harder new game+ though. The only times I died was during one-hit "Tír Na Nóg" trials, but there was one significant difficulty spike during one boss fight.
I have read another review, in which the author said they had problems with the final boss, which might be because they didn't collect the Vitality Petals and/or upgraded their inventory, which probably made the fight easier for me.
I really hope that Platinum will make more games like Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon. There aren't many people talking about it and I could also get the game on Amazon for 40€, which doesn't paint a good picture when it comes to sales figures and that is really unfortunate.
As someone who's first real exposure to this franchise was this game and already loved playing it as a standalone, I really implore you to give this one a chance if you are on the verge of buying it.
Get it! It's good.
But when this game got announced at the end of last year and I saw the trailers, the art style and the very interesting looking gameplay, it instantly clicked with me.
Now it took me a bit to get around to start playing it, as I am have been participating in a Pokemon Draft League since January, but when I did 4 days ago (on my birthday) I got sucked in and the game not only met my-, but exceeded my expectations.
As I kind of alluded to before, the gameplay of Bayonetta Origins is very unique. If I had to compare it to anything (and take this comparison with a salt mine) this felt a bit like an isometric platformer/collectathon, as in Skylanders or Lego games, mixed with Kameo and a few sprinkles of Metroid Fusion (in terms of map-design) mixed in and then only the best parts of these games.
This is an extremely scuffed comparison, but it's the best I have got, as it is really original.
Originality for the sake of originality and nothing else is a pitfall for a lot of games or pieces of media in general and make them anything but fun to experience, but believe me when I say that Bayonetta Origins clears that.
I rarely ever go out of my way to 100% a game, even the ones I really like, with a few exceptions, but I had so much fun playing this game that I travelled through Avalon Forest for an extra 10 hours (estimation as the Nintendo Switch for some reason doesn't tell you exactly how long you've played something and doesn't at all until 14 days after starting it the first time.), just to see and experience everything it had to offer.
Now I should mention, that for you have to control 2 characters at the same time for most of the game, but the controls are easy enough that I had them down in under an hour (it probably didn't hurt that I have played this 1p2c), they are also mapped, so both characters can be played using one Joy-Con each.
I can't understate how much fun I had playing this and the ingenious overworld design definitely helped.
During my "item-clean-up" were multiple moments where I unlocked a short-cut, that made me go "wait you can go from here to there?" and this wasn't a one time occurrence.
When talking about the overworld-design I have to mention the map which at best is confusing. It's this games biggest flaw and did sour my experience a bit during said "clean-up" (shout out to Wrapper the wisp), but I think I can say that I kind of understand how it works now and it didn't occur to me as a problem during most of it and definitely not during the (for the lack of a better term) normal playtime of me going through the story.
I would also like to mention that when saying that I have 100%ed this game, I mean that I did everything in the main game and not the new game+.
Outside of the stellar gameplay loop this game also looks incredible. If you don't have an image of it already take a look at this trailer, which still doesn't do the game justice through all its compressed glory and the ost is also really whimsical and beautiful.
The story suffices. I had predicted a lot of story beats, but their execution was good enough for me to not care. I wasn't really the biggest fan of the voice work, but it isn't worse than botw's is and I also didn't care all to much in that game, but be warned if that is something you care about.
The story, such as the game is obviously more tailored towards children than the mainline games (which isn't a bad thing, for the record) and that also shows in its difficulty.
This game for the most part is easy. There is a supposedly harder new game+ though. The only times I died was during one-hit "Tír Na Nóg" trials, but there was one significant difficulty spike during one boss fight.
I have read another review, in which the author said they had problems with the final boss, which might be because they didn't collect the Vitality Petals and/or upgraded their inventory, which probably made the fight easier for me.
I really hope that Platinum will make more games like Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon. There aren't many people talking about it and I could also get the game on Amazon for 40€, which doesn't paint a good picture when it comes to sales figures and that is really unfortunate.
As someone who's first real exposure to this franchise was this game and already loved playing it as a standalone, I really implore you to give this one a chance if you are on the verge of buying it.
Get it! It's good.
Everyone has that one game. The one which they have started to play but shelved at some point. But it doesn’t end there, as you will continue to think about it. The only thing stopping you from continuing your journey is you making up excuses from picking it up again.
For me that game was Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, a game whose existence has fascinated me way before I ever got the chance to play it, just as it does now after finally completing it; my playthrough spanning around two years.
My fascination of Soul Reaver sprung of, from another fascination of mine. I was born in 2004 and thus barely missed the time Sega was a competitor in the console business. They might just have the most interesting history in videogames and that is what made me suddenly really want to own a Dreamcast in 2021. Browsing through some of the more well received games for the console, I came across a relatively little-known game with maybe 500 logged players on this very website and a respectable rating, you probably know where this is going.
Looking up “Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver” on YouTube, I found a ton of people singing its praises, especially when it comes to its story; it was then that I realized I needed to play this, and I eventually did.
Back in January I released a Blood Omen review (which I don’t recommend reading), in which I stated multiple reasons, of why I might’ve stopped playing Soul Reaver and while they may have been a contributor as to why, they weren’t the main reason. Truth is, I didn’t enjoy the game very much.
While I could derive enjoyment out of the technical prowess and it’s devotion to telling it’s grandiose story without having to read a single word of text, it was the gameplay that kept the game from actually clicking with me and reading some of the reviews at the time, this wasn’t just an issue I had with it.
The game just isn’t nice to people who are conditioned to all the modern QoL improvements the industry has been blessed with, combat being the biggest offender to me back then.
So during the last hours of last year, only a day after completing this games predecessor, I sat myself down with my phone on a “tripod”, which I had constructed using a selfie-stick, when I was 12 years old and wanted to become a YouTuber, recording my whole journey through this game (which I unfortunately can’t share as I also used it as a form of a video diary) and most importantly started from a new profile, as I thought I might’ve missed something with the combat-system back then and therefore wanted to experience that opening hour, which made me shelve the game, a little more than a year ago, again.
And I was right, the moment I started playing Soul Reaver again, I couldn’t stop doing so and do now really enjoy what they tried to do with its combat and its way of incentivizing the player to scour your surroundings.
Every encounter you have with an enemy at the beginning of the game will play out like its own little puzzle, as for any non-human enemy-type you will not only have to beat them up, as they cannot die, but when they are stunned, find an object to finish them off and devour their soul. Said object of interest may be a spear, that skewers them, but it can also be a light source, a spiky part of the walls surrounding you, a campfire, an accumulation of water and many more.
Your creativity is only aided the longer you play as you might find enemies immune to one of these methods together with others that aren’t and now plan your fight accordingly.
The moment I got the titular Soul Reaver, which is basically able to defeat any enemy, I was worried that this would be detrimental to the combat-system, but rather than relying on it further on it would only proof as a new option in Raziel’s kit, as it will only be available to use at full-health (in the Material-Realm) which isn’t always sustainable.
Talking of which, the game incorporates a system of switching between realms. Not only are both loaded at any given time, but the game will remember every location of everything you have/haven’t ever interacted with. I cannot start to think what kind of sorcery this would’ve needed to be pulled of in the 90s, or even today for that matter. And when I see every object, I really mean that. During backtracking, which is mostly optional, but you are really missing out on some amazing side-content if you chose not to engage with it, I found myself thinking “oh I remember putting that there.” or “oh yeah that enemy followed me here back then, didn’t it?”, more times than I can count.
Outside of combat your gameplay will be spend exploring the landscapes of Nosgoth, which have changed a lot since your last adventure. If I had to compare the changes to anything, it would be how Gotham City changes during the Dark Knight trilogy, with it basically functioning as its own character in Begins, and existing as a background to the narrative of The Dark Knight, the only difference being, that I didn’t see this as detrimental in this case.
Nosgoth is definitely more videogamey here in the sense that the game starts you of with a platforming tutorial at a place that only exists, because you need to learn how to platform at some point, but these extreme cases are few and far between, as the game also has its high points of its world-design at pretty much all the major locations.
For example, the entrance to the Human Citadel is flooded to keep out vampires and only houses one of Rahab’s’ tribe, which evolved to swim over time. But if you change to the Spectral Realm, it will be the home of many more Sluagh than regular, which feast on all the lost souls.
The Human Citadel is a masterclass in level-design for a 3D-Zelda like game in general. I got there shortly after defeating Melchiah, at the beginning of the game and spend almost an hour just exploring and thinking I had seen most if not everything it has to offer. I then went on going back there after each new acquired ability and not only realized that my previous assessment was totally wrong, but that I had yet to explore the majority of its content. I have rarely seen a, dare I mention totally optional, location that opens up so much after each new chapter of a game.
This serves as a microcosm of Lok’s design, which is built around the fact that you may save at any time. But as I already mentioned, saving will not bring you back to your previous location, no it will bring you back to the beginning of the game, where you can select between fast-travel points; but rather save the location of every object, which serve as shortcuts.
This is demonstrated best with this game’s dungeons, which are in my opinion far better designed than any 3D Zelda dungeon, I have experienced.
Now they also aren’t close to being perfect. The Silenced Cathedral has an intentional softlock, if you enter the Spectral Realm in the wrong room, but said softlock, funnily enough, also signifies the biggest strengths of Soul Reaver’s non-linear dungeons, as even if you get trapped in a room, you can always save your progress and therefore barely lose any progress.
Was it still demoralizing? Yes, of course, you can observe a big gap in my playtime after it happened, after it happened to me, but the second I started to play again, I realized that what had taken me half an hour to get to last time, only takes around five now, as you can see (epilepsy warning) here, because every puzzle was already solved and serving as a short-cut, I never really lost my progress.
I won’t argue that softlocks are good game design of course, just saying that they would be more detrimental when they occur in any other game, because of how good this one is designed to accommodate that issue.
The dungeon design in general is more akin to a Metroid-Vania, as you will go through it without any new abilities, and see many points of interest, which you will then later check out after acquiring said ability after defeating the boss, which also uses it against you.
I won’t spoil any of the secrets, but the way your view of the Drowned Abbey changes, just by you being able to traverse the waters in the Material Realm could be a whole paragraph on its own.
Now the game (still) isn’t perfect, and I still have my own gripes with it, withholding me from replaying it anytime soon.
For one, this isn’t a game I can just sit down and enjoy, as you really must lock-in and search any nook and cranny for maximum enjoyment, something helped by the fact I recorded my playthrough and could easily rewatch any points of interest. If I didn’t have that, I would’ve probably had to look up a guide at some points, due to the lack of an in-game map.
Combat also can still be a bit tedious and it’s often just better to right-out ignore any enemies. The glyphs were more fun to hunt down, than use. The boss fights, while cleverly designed to be puzzle boxes where you must find your enemies weakness, and use your surroundings, to defeat them rather than hand-to-hand combat, still mostly don’t put up much of a fight.
The drawing-distance and camera are hurt by the hardware and unfortunately the fact that the world is constantly loaded twice, which probably is no issue when playing the fan-made HD-remaster, which was good enough to get the people responsible for it noticed by Crystal Dynamics and got them to work on the recent Tomb Raider remasters.
And that is not even touching on this games story, which is expectingly great coming off such a great basis, being Blood Omen.
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is not just a cornerstone of the medium as a whole and one of the most technically impressive games ever made, it is also one of the best games I have ever played and made me even more happy with my recent acquisition of a PlayStation 2, including every sequel of this game.
Soul Reaver will now, and the foreseeable future, be that game; that one game I always continue to think about and will always remember.
For me that game was Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, a game whose existence has fascinated me way before I ever got the chance to play it, just as it does now after finally completing it; my playthrough spanning around two years.
My fascination of Soul Reaver sprung of, from another fascination of mine. I was born in 2004 and thus barely missed the time Sega was a competitor in the console business. They might just have the most interesting history in videogames and that is what made me suddenly really want to own a Dreamcast in 2021. Browsing through some of the more well received games for the console, I came across a relatively little-known game with maybe 500 logged players on this very website and a respectable rating, you probably know where this is going.
Looking up “Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver” on YouTube, I found a ton of people singing its praises, especially when it comes to its story; it was then that I realized I needed to play this, and I eventually did.
Back in January I released a Blood Omen review (which I don’t recommend reading), in which I stated multiple reasons, of why I might’ve stopped playing Soul Reaver and while they may have been a contributor as to why, they weren’t the main reason. Truth is, I didn’t enjoy the game very much.
While I could derive enjoyment out of the technical prowess and it’s devotion to telling it’s grandiose story without having to read a single word of text, it was the gameplay that kept the game from actually clicking with me and reading some of the reviews at the time, this wasn’t just an issue I had with it.
The game just isn’t nice to people who are conditioned to all the modern QoL improvements the industry has been blessed with, combat being the biggest offender to me back then.
So during the last hours of last year, only a day after completing this games predecessor, I sat myself down with my phone on a “tripod”, which I had constructed using a selfie-stick, when I was 12 years old and wanted to become a YouTuber, recording my whole journey through this game (which I unfortunately can’t share as I also used it as a form of a video diary) and most importantly started from a new profile, as I thought I might’ve missed something with the combat-system back then and therefore wanted to experience that opening hour, which made me shelve the game, a little more than a year ago, again.
And I was right, the moment I started playing Soul Reaver again, I couldn’t stop doing so and do now really enjoy what they tried to do with its combat and its way of incentivizing the player to scour your surroundings.
Every encounter you have with an enemy at the beginning of the game will play out like its own little puzzle, as for any non-human enemy-type you will not only have to beat them up, as they cannot die, but when they are stunned, find an object to finish them off and devour their soul. Said object of interest may be a spear, that skewers them, but it can also be a light source, a spiky part of the walls surrounding you, a campfire, an accumulation of water and many more.
Your creativity is only aided the longer you play as you might find enemies immune to one of these methods together with others that aren’t and now plan your fight accordingly.
The moment I got the titular Soul Reaver, which is basically able to defeat any enemy, I was worried that this would be detrimental to the combat-system, but rather than relying on it further on it would only proof as a new option in Raziel’s kit, as it will only be available to use at full-health (in the Material-Realm) which isn’t always sustainable.
Talking of which, the game incorporates a system of switching between realms. Not only are both loaded at any given time, but the game will remember every location of everything you have/haven’t ever interacted with. I cannot start to think what kind of sorcery this would’ve needed to be pulled of in the 90s, or even today for that matter. And when I see every object, I really mean that. During backtracking, which is mostly optional, but you are really missing out on some amazing side-content if you chose not to engage with it, I found myself thinking “oh I remember putting that there.” or “oh yeah that enemy followed me here back then, didn’t it?”, more times than I can count.
Outside of combat your gameplay will be spend exploring the landscapes of Nosgoth, which have changed a lot since your last adventure. If I had to compare the changes to anything, it would be how Gotham City changes during the Dark Knight trilogy, with it basically functioning as its own character in Begins, and existing as a background to the narrative of The Dark Knight, the only difference being, that I didn’t see this as detrimental in this case.
Nosgoth is definitely more videogamey here in the sense that the game starts you of with a platforming tutorial at a place that only exists, because you need to learn how to platform at some point, but these extreme cases are few and far between, as the game also has its high points of its world-design at pretty much all the major locations.
For example, the entrance to the Human Citadel is flooded to keep out vampires and only houses one of Rahab’s’ tribe, which evolved to swim over time. But if you change to the Spectral Realm, it will be the home of many more Sluagh than regular, which feast on all the lost souls.
The Human Citadel is a masterclass in level-design for a 3D-Zelda like game in general. I got there shortly after defeating Melchiah, at the beginning of the game and spend almost an hour just exploring and thinking I had seen most if not everything it has to offer. I then went on going back there after each new acquired ability and not only realized that my previous assessment was totally wrong, but that I had yet to explore the majority of its content. I have rarely seen a, dare I mention totally optional, location that opens up so much after each new chapter of a game.
This serves as a microcosm of Lok’s design, which is built around the fact that you may save at any time. But as I already mentioned, saving will not bring you back to your previous location, no it will bring you back to the beginning of the game, where you can select between fast-travel points; but rather save the location of every object, which serve as shortcuts.
This is demonstrated best with this game’s dungeons, which are in my opinion far better designed than any 3D Zelda dungeon, I have experienced.
Now they also aren’t close to being perfect. The Silenced Cathedral has an intentional softlock, if you enter the Spectral Realm in the wrong room, but said softlock, funnily enough, also signifies the biggest strengths of Soul Reaver’s non-linear dungeons, as even if you get trapped in a room, you can always save your progress and therefore barely lose any progress.
Was it still demoralizing? Yes, of course, you can observe a big gap in my playtime after it happened, after it happened to me, but the second I started to play again, I realized that what had taken me half an hour to get to last time, only takes around five now, as you can see (epilepsy warning) here, because every puzzle was already solved and serving as a short-cut, I never really lost my progress.
I won’t argue that softlocks are good game design of course, just saying that they would be more detrimental when they occur in any other game, because of how good this one is designed to accommodate that issue.
The dungeon design in general is more akin to a Metroid-Vania, as you will go through it without any new abilities, and see many points of interest, which you will then later check out after acquiring said ability after defeating the boss, which also uses it against you.
I won’t spoil any of the secrets, but the way your view of the Drowned Abbey changes, just by you being able to traverse the waters in the Material Realm could be a whole paragraph on its own.
Now the game (still) isn’t perfect, and I still have my own gripes with it, withholding me from replaying it anytime soon.
For one, this isn’t a game I can just sit down and enjoy, as you really must lock-in and search any nook and cranny for maximum enjoyment, something helped by the fact I recorded my playthrough and could easily rewatch any points of interest. If I didn’t have that, I would’ve probably had to look up a guide at some points, due to the lack of an in-game map.
Combat also can still be a bit tedious and it’s often just better to right-out ignore any enemies. The glyphs were more fun to hunt down, than use. The boss fights, while cleverly designed to be puzzle boxes where you must find your enemies weakness, and use your surroundings, to defeat them rather than hand-to-hand combat, still mostly don’t put up much of a fight.
The drawing-distance and camera are hurt by the hardware and unfortunately the fact that the world is constantly loaded twice, which probably is no issue when playing the fan-made HD-remaster, which was good enough to get the people responsible for it noticed by Crystal Dynamics and got them to work on the recent Tomb Raider remasters.
And that is not even touching on this games story, which is expectingly great coming off such a great basis, being Blood Omen.
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is not just a cornerstone of the medium as a whole and one of the most technically impressive games ever made, it is also one of the best games I have ever played and made me even more happy with my recent acquisition of a PlayStation 2, including every sequel of this game.
Soul Reaver will now, and the foreseeable future, be that game; that one game I always continue to think about and will always remember.
When iterating on your previous work, you will get to the point where you must ask yourself, if you want to either add/improve what is already there, or you may not believe you are able to improve and do something completely different. While these are both valid ways to approach this problem, Soul Reaver 2 is often scrutinized for not going for the prior.
I do have a theory of why I think this criticism comes up so much more with this game than its predecessor Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, which already is the sequel to a completely different kind of game; as the moment you are done watching the opening cutscene, which shows you the final moments of LoK: SR and start controlling Raziel again, the game lulls you in the belief that this is but an expansion to the previous game.
Even to someone like me, who played the first game using a Dreamcast-controller and has barely ever even held a PlayStation 2-controller, when starting out with the game, controlling Raziel will feel eerily similar to how it was before. A few changes you will probably notice is how you won’t be able to shoot out the Energy Projectile, without aiming it anymore, with the button now reacting with a strong/heavy-attack, when you aren’t. This will be your first clue that Raziel never changed, it was the structure surrounding him that did.
Soul Reaver 2, unlike the 3D-metroidvania that was Soul Reaver (1), is a linear, action focused. This big change to the structure wasn’t done without reason though, as the story basically hits you over the head with how there is no such thing as free will and Raziel basically only doing everyone else’s bidding, even when he tries his best to avoid it.
Most changes can be traced back to that reasoning and I will start with the biggest one being the new and expanded combat system.
Soul Reaver 1 had a combat system, which in the best case, had you on the lookout for any weapons before confronting an enemy, as you wouldn’t have been able to defeat them otherwise. It was a combat system that incentivized the player to explore their environment and search for optional content, so it wouldn’t have fit here if it wasn’t changed and I believe the way they went about it to be really interesting, and it serves as a great example of Crystal Dynamics design-philosophy, when creating this sequel, of trying to not change the systems, but rather the structure around them to achieve something vastly different with them.
All the moves, you know and love from the first game, return, with only stealth and the energy projectiles receiving nerfs, they also expanded on it by allowing you to dodge into an enemy, without attacking, heavy-attacks and a complete overhaul of how the Soul Reaver works.
While I think the first two additions really helped making combat feel more expressive and get even better as you learn how to appropriately combine these two with the mechanics passed on from the first game; I believe the changes to the Soul Reaver to be at best misguided, as they nerfed it heavily, while at the same time trying to convey it being more powerful in the story.
Due to being able to call upon the Reaver at the press of a button at any time now, instead of it appearing at full health, it does not halt the constant draining of Raziels health anymore, which is also made more potent than ever in this game.
This was also not done without reason, as the only way to recover that lost health is to, you guessed it, reaving the souls of any enemies around. This in theory would work as great incentivization to dabble in the expanded combat system, but it was way to overtuned and became a great annoyance; made even worse by the fact that the game already has enough ways of incentivizing the player to defeat enemies, such as trapping you in a closed room with them, something that happens more frequently as the game goes on and towards the end went to such extremes that it tacked on at least another hour of playtime; and giving the weapons you need to quicker deal with enemies to the enemies themselves, which works as a fun little parallel to how the system worked in the prequel.
Just like in Soul Reaver (1), Raziels moveset is expanded upon in this game by visiting dungeons, which on paper is the logical thing to do. The problem is that these dungeon designs were the most hit or miss part for me, ranging from one of the best in the series thus far, to making me imagine Sisyphus as a blessed soul and easily the worst part of the game.
The dungeon design philosophy of Soul Reaver, which I talked about more in my review of that game, was mostly scrapped, probably because you barely have to revisit them, now being more akin to what you would see in a 3D-Zelda game, being built around a central room with branching paths. The puzzles you will find in the so called forges are mostly centered around doing the most obvious things enclosed in one room, located directly next to the central chamber. Most of these will have you just mindlessly interact with the first thing you see and have that be the whole “puzzle.”
When you finally reach the end of a forge the Reaver will absorb its energy and you will be able to use said energy for the puzzles of the next dungeon.
This mechanic, unfortunately, is entirely underbaked as elemental Reavers, to my best understanding, do not/have minimal impact on combat encounters, the thing the whole game is centered around, and their abilities are very similar in usage, being limited to interacting with other panels on the ground, most of whose only discernible trait being the symbol of the kind of Reaver you need to interact with them on it; and being able to shoot different stuff.
I might have made it sound more boring as I should have as the light and air Reaver came into great use in Janos Audron’s Retreat, the best dungeon in the game, and the puzzles centered around having to get somewhere with a different kind of Reaver and their own set of skills were really fun, albeit due to their nature could only ever be present in the later dungeons/forges. The dark Reaver centered puzzles were the worst offender and can be summarized to: ”get zapped by giant eyeball you didn’t see, search for a way to go back to the material realm, go get the dark reaver, shoot the eyeball” and I can’t really talk much about the fire-Reaver, as it was only used once in the whole game, due to the story and gameplay developing somehow asymmetrically.
The puzzles not centered around the Reaver were also a mixed bag and mostly straight up bad. One of these is the way you enter Janos Audron’s Retreat.
Soul Reaver 2 will see you exploring a few select places in Nosgoth during different times, a concept that sounds way better in theory. One of these places is the entrance of Janos Audron’s Retreat, which the first time around will serve as the entrance of the air-forge. If you ever get sent to the spectral realm there, which may happen as the difficulty suddenly spikes around this point in the game, and fall in the lake you will have to slowly be defeated by Sluagh, as there won’t be a way to go back to the material realm down there, which I, unlike in the first game, wouldn’t categorize as a softlock here, because the change of the saving system caused the creation of checkpoints, thus you won’t be sent to the start of the game.
While the checkpoint isn’t far from that point it still caused me to not ever want to change to the spirit realm around there again. So, when I had to revisit this location around 1-2 hours later and the game outright told me to do so to progress, I was understandably cautious and searched around the perimeter for any other solution. This should never have been an issue in the first place and, in my opinion, describes a lot of this games puzzle design.
One advantage you have when developing a sequel is hindsight and the publics reception of your previous work and this game does try to fix a lot of the issues, I had with its predecessor. For one this game does have an in-game-map, which I never used as the entirety of Soul Reaver 2 is taking place on a linear path, which is small enough to be memorized in its entirety.
The most baffling change was their reaction to both the handling of the glyphs and boss fights being that they completely removed them, as I would have loved their take on them, in a game that is able to focus on them more thoroughly due to being, say it with me, an action-adventure and in the case of the glyphs, not being optional anymore and having them actually be part of a combat system that can support them. They would’ve also helped fix the problem of the lack of an ability to break the blocks of enemies.
The camera and drawing distance were my biggest criticism of Soul Reaver and are not a problem anymore, as they have been completely reworked and benefit from the stronger hardware.
This might be the perfect time to mention the great presentation and story accompanying it. This game at points looked like an early Xbox 360 game, rather than early PS2. The Sarafan Stronghold might just be one of the most beautiful places I have visited in any game ever. While not as impressive as SR1, this game is still a technical marvel.
I won’t get into the story here as to avoid spoilers, just know it is the best one of the series yet, which is saying a lot. It does suffer from some pacing issues during the middle, but it does wrap up nicely and, in the process, manages to answer some questions from both previous games.
While I might have sounded overly negative during most of the review, that it stems from a place disappointment with how they went about the changes rather than contempt for the game. And then again, most of that does feed into the story and therefore makes it better; and while I have obviously not done so yet I believe they make this game more replayable, as the linearity makes it more easily digestible. Most of my criticisms were also most noticeable during the part between the dark- and shortly before the air- forge, after which the game gradually became better.
When looking back on it, I doubt Soul Reaver 2 will leave as much of an expression on me as its predecessor did, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is an easy recommendation to anyone eager to see Raziels story unfold, as I have the premonition that this might just be its beginning.
I do have a theory of why I think this criticism comes up so much more with this game than its predecessor Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, which already is the sequel to a completely different kind of game; as the moment you are done watching the opening cutscene, which shows you the final moments of LoK: SR and start controlling Raziel again, the game lulls you in the belief that this is but an expansion to the previous game.
Even to someone like me, who played the first game using a Dreamcast-controller and has barely ever even held a PlayStation 2-controller, when starting out with the game, controlling Raziel will feel eerily similar to how it was before. A few changes you will probably notice is how you won’t be able to shoot out the Energy Projectile, without aiming it anymore, with the button now reacting with a strong/heavy-attack, when you aren’t. This will be your first clue that Raziel never changed, it was the structure surrounding him that did.
Soul Reaver 2, unlike the 3D-metroidvania that was Soul Reaver (1), is a linear, action focused. This big change to the structure wasn’t done without reason though, as the story basically hits you over the head with how there is no such thing as free will and Raziel basically only doing everyone else’s bidding, even when he tries his best to avoid it.
Most changes can be traced back to that reasoning and I will start with the biggest one being the new and expanded combat system.
Soul Reaver 1 had a combat system, which in the best case, had you on the lookout for any weapons before confronting an enemy, as you wouldn’t have been able to defeat them otherwise. It was a combat system that incentivized the player to explore their environment and search for optional content, so it wouldn’t have fit here if it wasn’t changed and I believe the way they went about it to be really interesting, and it serves as a great example of Crystal Dynamics design-philosophy, when creating this sequel, of trying to not change the systems, but rather the structure around them to achieve something vastly different with them.
All the moves, you know and love from the first game, return, with only stealth and the energy projectiles receiving nerfs, they also expanded on it by allowing you to dodge into an enemy, without attacking, heavy-attacks and a complete overhaul of how the Soul Reaver works.
While I think the first two additions really helped making combat feel more expressive and get even better as you learn how to appropriately combine these two with the mechanics passed on from the first game; I believe the changes to the Soul Reaver to be at best misguided, as they nerfed it heavily, while at the same time trying to convey it being more powerful in the story.
Due to being able to call upon the Reaver at the press of a button at any time now, instead of it appearing at full health, it does not halt the constant draining of Raziels health anymore, which is also made more potent than ever in this game.
This was also not done without reason, as the only way to recover that lost health is to, you guessed it, reaving the souls of any enemies around. This in theory would work as great incentivization to dabble in the expanded combat system, but it was way to overtuned and became a great annoyance; made even worse by the fact that the game already has enough ways of incentivizing the player to defeat enemies, such as trapping you in a closed room with them, something that happens more frequently as the game goes on and towards the end went to such extremes that it tacked on at least another hour of playtime; and giving the weapons you need to quicker deal with enemies to the enemies themselves, which works as a fun little parallel to how the system worked in the prequel.
Just like in Soul Reaver (1), Raziels moveset is expanded upon in this game by visiting dungeons, which on paper is the logical thing to do. The problem is that these dungeon designs were the most hit or miss part for me, ranging from one of the best in the series thus far, to making me imagine Sisyphus as a blessed soul and easily the worst part of the game.
The dungeon design philosophy of Soul Reaver, which I talked about more in my review of that game, was mostly scrapped, probably because you barely have to revisit them, now being more akin to what you would see in a 3D-Zelda game, being built around a central room with branching paths. The puzzles you will find in the so called forges are mostly centered around doing the most obvious things enclosed in one room, located directly next to the central chamber. Most of these will have you just mindlessly interact with the first thing you see and have that be the whole “puzzle.”
When you finally reach the end of a forge the Reaver will absorb its energy and you will be able to use said energy for the puzzles of the next dungeon.
This mechanic, unfortunately, is entirely underbaked as elemental Reavers, to my best understanding, do not/have minimal impact on combat encounters, the thing the whole game is centered around, and their abilities are very similar in usage, being limited to interacting with other panels on the ground, most of whose only discernible trait being the symbol of the kind of Reaver you need to interact with them on it; and being able to shoot different stuff.
I might have made it sound more boring as I should have as the light and air Reaver came into great use in Janos Audron’s Retreat, the best dungeon in the game, and the puzzles centered around having to get somewhere with a different kind of Reaver and their own set of skills were really fun, albeit due to their nature could only ever be present in the later dungeons/forges. The dark Reaver centered puzzles were the worst offender and can be summarized to: ”get zapped by giant eyeball you didn’t see, search for a way to go back to the material realm, go get the dark reaver, shoot the eyeball” and I can’t really talk much about the fire-Reaver, as it was only used once in the whole game, due to the story and gameplay developing somehow asymmetrically.
The puzzles not centered around the Reaver were also a mixed bag and mostly straight up bad. One of these is the way you enter Janos Audron’s Retreat.
Soul Reaver 2 will see you exploring a few select places in Nosgoth during different times, a concept that sounds way better in theory. One of these places is the entrance of Janos Audron’s Retreat, which the first time around will serve as the entrance of the air-forge. If you ever get sent to the spectral realm there, which may happen as the difficulty suddenly spikes around this point in the game, and fall in the lake you will have to slowly be defeated by Sluagh, as there won’t be a way to go back to the material realm down there, which I, unlike in the first game, wouldn’t categorize as a softlock here, because the change of the saving system caused the creation of checkpoints, thus you won’t be sent to the start of the game.
While the checkpoint isn’t far from that point it still caused me to not ever want to change to the spirit realm around there again. So, when I had to revisit this location around 1-2 hours later and the game outright told me to do so to progress, I was understandably cautious and searched around the perimeter for any other solution. This should never have been an issue in the first place and, in my opinion, describes a lot of this games puzzle design.
One advantage you have when developing a sequel is hindsight and the publics reception of your previous work and this game does try to fix a lot of the issues, I had with its predecessor. For one this game does have an in-game-map, which I never used as the entirety of Soul Reaver 2 is taking place on a linear path, which is small enough to be memorized in its entirety.
The most baffling change was their reaction to both the handling of the glyphs and boss fights being that they completely removed them, as I would have loved their take on them, in a game that is able to focus on them more thoroughly due to being, say it with me, an action-adventure and in the case of the glyphs, not being optional anymore and having them actually be part of a combat system that can support them. They would’ve also helped fix the problem of the lack of an ability to break the blocks of enemies.
The camera and drawing distance were my biggest criticism of Soul Reaver and are not a problem anymore, as they have been completely reworked and benefit from the stronger hardware.
This might be the perfect time to mention the great presentation and story accompanying it. This game at points looked like an early Xbox 360 game, rather than early PS2. The Sarafan Stronghold might just be one of the most beautiful places I have visited in any game ever. While not as impressive as SR1, this game is still a technical marvel.
I won’t get into the story here as to avoid spoilers, just know it is the best one of the series yet, which is saying a lot. It does suffer from some pacing issues during the middle, but it does wrap up nicely and, in the process, manages to answer some questions from both previous games.
While I might have sounded overly negative during most of the review, that it stems from a place disappointment with how they went about the changes rather than contempt for the game. And then again, most of that does feed into the story and therefore makes it better; and while I have obviously not done so yet I believe they make this game more replayable, as the linearity makes it more easily digestible. Most of my criticisms were also most noticeable during the part between the dark- and shortly before the air- forge, after which the game gradually became better.
When looking back on it, I doubt Soul Reaver 2 will leave as much of an expression on me as its predecessor did, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is an easy recommendation to anyone eager to see Raziels story unfold, as I have the premonition that this might just be its beginning.
2019
Four words. 20 minute battle timer.
1972
Still waiting for the movie
2015
There was not a single stage in this game that I would even consider to be mediocre.
Well it does what it sets out to do. You will not be able to find a single human being in any lobby, so you will feel like a castaway.
SteamWorld Tower Defense feels like a time capsule to a time long forgotten; drowned by the luxury that is everybody being able to make and upload a game to a storefront and everybody then being able to experience said game. Through the passage of time and evolution technology gamedev has become way easier than ever before, which is obviously a good thing, but it sometimes makes me forget that it wasn't always like this.
It is especially interesting to me as it is the first game in a series I'm very fond of.
Unfortunately this wasn't only the first game in the SteamWorld series, but also the first of many games by Thunderful (which were back then known as Image&Form),
while they were going through the transition from edutainment games to full on indie-development in the year of 2010, where it wasn't nearly as profitable as nowadays and therefore obviously suffers from some growing pains.
That said, if you have ever played any game by Thunderful you likely how talented their developers are. They often try their hands on a new genre of game and hit it out of the park on their first try and a lot of those qualities are already present here, especially in terms of theirtrademark humor and visual delivery, which are both stellar.
The game could be a fun enough tower defense game if it only weren't for the overly punishing difficulty. Now I am by no means somebody who has played a lot of this genre, but the difficulty has not only been a problem to me, but is a sentiment of a lot of different people (some even on this site) and is not helped by the lack of documentation on this game.
The only gameplay video I've been able to find on the internet is the twelve year old one uploaded by the official YouTube channel, which doesn't show a minute of actual gameplay and the trailer. This game is so obscure that even the wiki page is far from complete.
To beat the last few levels I had to visit this Twitter thread from 2015 which has been visited by (comparatively) many people over the years and has responses all the way to last year and while it is far form perfect, it was the best resource I could find.
All in all I can only recommend this game to one specific kind of human, which is basically me, who is really into SteamWorld games and videogame/-history, which is something I would have said about 2 months ago.
If you want to play this game nowadays, you can't, because it has now outlived both storefronts it has ever been available on, being the DSi- and e-Shop. I would really like this getting the Anthill/remaster treatment where it was not only made available on the Nintendo Switch, but also given some quality of live improvements, after it became harder to access.
But as it stands that probably won't happen. The SteamWorld series is currently undergoing a now 3.5 year long hiatus, there have been three+ projects in the series we have been aware of, only one of which ever got an official name and a trailer being SteamWorld Headhunter, which itself we haven't heard a word about since last year (late 2021). Furthermore Thunderful has recently showed their disinterest of currently making another SteamWorld game via Twitter.
Even if a SteamWorld game releases in the next few years, it probably isn't this one as the last significant mention was a Vinyl released commemorating this games 10th anniversary
So if you are interested in playing this game or any new SteamWorld game, the best thing you can probably do is wait, re/play the previous games and spread the message as menial of an audience as it may reach, just like I did by writing this review.
It is especially interesting to me as it is the first game in a series I'm very fond of.
Unfortunately this wasn't only the first game in the SteamWorld series, but also the first of many games by Thunderful (which were back then known as Image&Form),
while they were going through the transition from edutainment games to full on indie-development in the year of 2010, where it wasn't nearly as profitable as nowadays and therefore obviously suffers from some growing pains.
That said, if you have ever played any game by Thunderful you likely how talented their developers are. They often try their hands on a new genre of game and hit it out of the park on their first try and a lot of those qualities are already present here, especially in terms of their
The game could be a fun enough tower defense game if it only weren't for the overly punishing difficulty. Now I am by no means somebody who has played a lot of this genre, but the difficulty has not only been a problem to me, but is a sentiment of a lot of different people (some even on this site) and is not helped by the lack of documentation on this game.
The only gameplay video I've been able to find on the internet is the twelve year old one uploaded by the official YouTube channel, which doesn't show a minute of actual gameplay and the trailer. This game is so obscure that even the wiki page is far from complete.
To beat the last few levels I had to visit this Twitter thread from 2015 which has been visited by (comparatively) many people over the years and has responses all the way to last year and while it is far form perfect, it was the best resource I could find.
All in all I can only recommend this game to one specific kind of human, which is basically me, who is really into SteamWorld games and videogame/-history, which is something I would have said about 2 months ago.
If you want to play this game nowadays, you can't, because it has now outlived both storefronts it has ever been available on, being the DSi- and e-Shop. I would really like this getting the Anthill/remaster treatment where it was not only made available on the Nintendo Switch, but also given some quality of live improvements, after it became harder to access.
But as it stands that probably won't happen. The SteamWorld series is currently undergoing a now 3.5 year long hiatus, there have been three+ projects in the series we have been aware of, only one of which ever got an official name and a trailer being SteamWorld Headhunter, which itself we haven't heard a word about since last year (late 2021). Furthermore Thunderful has recently showed their disinterest of currently making another SteamWorld game via Twitter.
Even if a SteamWorld game releases in the next few years, it probably isn't this one as the last significant mention was a Vinyl released commemorating this games 10th anniversary
So if you are interested in playing this game or any new SteamWorld game, the best thing you can probably do is wait, re/play the previous games and spread the message as menial of an audience as it may reach, just like I did by writing this review.
2015
Why are so many german, phone related creations labeled as crazy?
2018
I don't remember why I even bought this game. I didn't enjoy my time with the first Yo-Kai Watch and don't like RPG's that much, but I'm definitely not disappointed.
The combat system of Yo-Kai Watch 1 was always more an annoyance for me. Luckily this game doesn't have that combat system but an actually fun one. They didn't do away with three of your Yo-Kai being in battle at one time, but this time they are organized on a 3x3 grid and you can use any combination of Yo-Kai and put them anywhere you want on that grid. Some combinations are considered offensive some defensive making this system already more strategic than the old one. Some of the enemies attacks will also be telegraphed on the bottom screen making it so that you can actually avoid being hit instead of just tanking the hit.
The gameplay outside of the combat system was also really fun. This (for me) is one of those games I can play while doing something else, because this game isn't that hard. I had 2 E-Rank Yo-Kai in my team when I beat it, but I wouldn't consider that a bad thing.
The ost of this game is really good (just listen to the Rongo Swirll theme), the characters are fun and due to most of this game playing out in the USA there are lots of jokes about said country, which are always welcome. There were only a few minor gripes I had with this game.
1: While I don't really have that much of a problem with the key-quest system this game is built around, there were some that just didn't work for me. This could be because I can't update my game (for reasons I will get to later), or because of me having to play the german translation of the game.
2: There were a few occasions where you had to have befriended a certain kind of Yo-Kai to progress. There is a certain point where you are trapped in an enclosed space. The Yo-Kai you need are available there, but they could just not feel like befriending you. It took me around two hours until I could progress. There is an item that makes it so that Yo-Kai always befriend you, but do to the player character being trapped there you can not get that item.
3: You play most of the game as two characters at once. The problem I have with this comes when these characters stories inevitably collide. Until that point you should have two teams and two item bags. So what they do is that they just merge them together. The items being merged together isn't a problem, but you now have to decide between these two teams because the maximum team size isn't increased. Another implication of that is that there isn't really a reason to switch characters. They obviously make up excuses to make you switch characters, but some of them are just not good at all.
But as I said these are only minor gripes and didn't really destroy my enjoyment of the game and I would totally still recommend you to play this game, if you can get it.
The problem with buying this game is that it is one of the most expensive 3Ds games available. I got it digitally for 40€ but that came with it own problems.
This is a 27000 Block (Nintendo 3Ds storage unit) game. My New Nintendo 2Ds XL, with only one other game on it, barely had enough space to download this game, but I don't have enough space to download the update now.
But if you have 40€ worth of eshop gift cards and a basically unused 3Ds system I would totally recommend this game to you.
The combat system of Yo-Kai Watch 1 was always more an annoyance for me. Luckily this game doesn't have that combat system but an actually fun one. They didn't do away with three of your Yo-Kai being in battle at one time, but this time they are organized on a 3x3 grid and you can use any combination of Yo-Kai and put them anywhere you want on that grid. Some combinations are considered offensive some defensive making this system already more strategic than the old one. Some of the enemies attacks will also be telegraphed on the bottom screen making it so that you can actually avoid being hit instead of just tanking the hit.
The gameplay outside of the combat system was also really fun. This (for me) is one of those games I can play while doing something else, because this game isn't that hard. I had 2 E-Rank Yo-Kai in my team when I beat it, but I wouldn't consider that a bad thing.
The ost of this game is really good (just listen to the Rongo Swirll theme), the characters are fun and due to most of this game playing out in the USA there are lots of jokes about said country, which are always welcome. There were only a few minor gripes I had with this game.
1: While I don't really have that much of a problem with the key-quest system this game is built around, there were some that just didn't work for me. This could be because I can't update my game (for reasons I will get to later), or because of me having to play the german translation of the game.
2: There were a few occasions where you had to have befriended a certain kind of Yo-Kai to progress. There is a certain point where you are trapped in an enclosed space. The Yo-Kai you need are available there, but they could just not feel like befriending you. It took me around two hours until I could progress. There is an item that makes it so that Yo-Kai always befriend you, but do to the player character being trapped there you can not get that item.
3: You play most of the game as two characters at once. The problem I have with this comes when these characters stories inevitably collide. Until that point you should have two teams and two item bags. So what they do is that they just merge them together. The items being merged together isn't a problem, but you now have to decide between these two teams because the maximum team size isn't increased. Another implication of that is that there isn't really a reason to switch characters. They obviously make up excuses to make you switch characters, but some of them are just not good at all.
But as I said these are only minor gripes and didn't really destroy my enjoyment of the game and I would totally still recommend you to play this game, if you can get it.
The problem with buying this game is that it is one of the most expensive 3Ds games available. I got it digitally for 40€ but that came with it own problems.
This is a 27000 Block (Nintendo 3Ds storage unit) game. My New Nintendo 2Ds XL, with only one other game on it, barely had enough space to download this game, but I don't have enough space to download the update now.
But if you have 40€ worth of eshop gift cards and a basically unused 3Ds system I would totally recommend this game to you.
I’m still very conflicted on how I feel about Yo-Kai Watch 2. It’s the only one in the series that I would call derivative of one of its predecessors.
And while I can see it being an overall improvement over the first Yo-Kai Watch game, I did still not enjoy it as much; as I believe most of its improvements can be summarized by saying that there is a lot of stuff in this game; you will basically not be able to do everything there is in this game.
The version I played “Psychic Specters” is the definitive Version of Yo-Kai Watch 2, combining the contents of both Bony Spirits and Fleshy Souls, but unlike the Pokémon equivalents, which may mix and match aspects or even add some, this game gives you the choice of which versions content you want to engage with at certain points in the story, which is as interesting as it is flawed, because if you want to truly experience everything there is in this game you now have to either write down every choice you take, to do the opposite on your second playthrough, or basically just play through the base versions one after another on this fancier cartridge.
When it comes to your gameplay loop, this is basically a rehash of the first one. You might expect QoL changes, but I believe it to actually the other way around, as Mirapo, these games fast-travelling system, and the bike will be locked away from you for way longer, the latter you for some reason only unlock at around 85% through the main game. So most of your (early) game will be spend learning the ins and outs of the Yo-Kai Watch train-network, which takes you station by station (makes sense), it will ask you whether or not you want to exit every station, during the rides you will either be encountering people/Yo-Kai that basically tell you nothing, give you an item or battle you.
Another Mirapo related issue is when you travel to the past, you won’t be able to use them at all, with one exception (which doesn’t count), meaning you will have to walk everywhere, in these maze-like past versions of the city, which at least has some of the greatest music of the already great OST.
Speaking of which, the soundtrack while brief is as good as in any other Yo-Kai game. The only problem with it being that most of it is taken straight from its prequel, with most new tracks being restricted to the past areas. The most egregious example of old music being used is during one moment where the villains of the chapter show up and the Final Boss theme of the first game just starts playing for some reason.
One change I was really waiting to see is how they fixed how you befriend Yo-Kai, as it is my biggest gripe with the first game and it was (somewhat) fixed in the third one and color me shocked when I found out it’s the worst it has ever been. Now don’t get me wrong here, it’s roughly the same as the first in theory, but this game forces you to befriend Yo-Kai way more than that game. There is one point where you enter a cave, where you must use your Yo-Kai to change the water levels to progress. When I got there my playtime was at around 8 hours, the water can be at three different levels, and you need one specific Yo-Kai per level. Luckily you can encounter them in that cave, but remember if you beat them, it will take a seemingly random amount of time for them to respawn, and they might just not do so at all. So, you better pray that the RNG for them befriending you is in your favor, as the item that guarantees befriending does not exist yet, and guess what happened to me.
One of them, this guy right here, just hates me for some reason, and I spend a bit more than two hours in that cave just hoping that they would befriend me. Well at least you can get the Yo-Kai at the same place where you need them.
A bit later in the game you will hunt down some documents the protagonists dad lost on his way to work, which first forces you to ride the train multiple times, after doing that Whisper tells you to get a Yo-Kai called Flushback which will be able to go through the memories of you father and find out where he left the documents. Now guess three times where you might find such a Yo-Kai. The cave of course and if you didn’t get them last time, have fun walking from one side of the map to the other, if you didn’t activate the Mirapo and do all that encountering in the cave once again, just for that to not give you a clear answer as to where he left the documents.
Now to the thing I was the most disappointed with. The combat system is the same from the first game with two small changes. 1: When charging your soultimate attack, there is one new method of doing so and 2: if you click the center of the Yo-Kai Watch you have two new options, being a stronger soultimate (I think) and the option to spam-click the opponent and either deal damage, steal their soul-charge, or giving you a higher chance to befriend them, which does not solve my previous complaint as you have to first inspirit the enemy, it being random as to which effect it will have on them and it still not guaranteeing it.
Back in 2022 I wrote a review for Yo-Kai Watch 3, in which I called this combat system of Yo-Kai Watch 1 more of an annoyance than fun to mess around with, which is a sentiment I still mostly agree with, and guess what, these two minor changes don’t change much. This is magnified by the fact that I didn’t even like the boss fights in this one as much as I did in the others. There are some winners, but most of them are just bland and don’t require much strategy.
Let’s go back to the tidal cave (with the most minor spoiler warning I can give out), which I’ve spend so much time complaining about. At the end of your first excursion through it you will encounter some pirate-Yo-Kai-boss-guy (I think he is from the early-game of 1), whose name I can’t remember. The only thing I did was using all of my front three Yo-Kai’s soultimate-attack and he was basically already defeated, and this happens here more often than I hoped it would.
I will now talk a bit about the final boss, without spoiling who or what their attacks are, but if you feel unsafe you may skip to the next paragraph. I was really looking forward to seeing if they fixed the difficulty curve of the first one, where it is easy for all of the game, only for the final boss to suddenly become impossible to beat at your current level, which you thought to be over leveled, but in a funny twist of events that didn’t happen at all. This game is so derivative of its predecessor that it even copied the two-hour grind for the final boss.
My last point is on the writing of this game. Now don’t get me wrong these games are not known for their groundbreaking storytelling, with the story basically only existing to give you a reason for why you are now suddenly in an all-out Yo-Kai war, with some funny quips thrown in to lighten the mood, but I found this one in particular to be lacking in the latter. The main villains of these games usually don’t have a presence before the game is already basically over and while they are handled better here than in the first one, this is still mostly the case. My problem however isn’t that they did that again, that was expected, but much rather how they handled the new tribe of Yo-Kai, the Wicked-Tribe), which you can see on the box-art. They also only show up during the end of the game and do nothing, outside of being mini bosses that you can dispatch with two attacks, showcasing maybe the biggest wasted potential in this series. At least they give out around 700 experience points.
Now I spend most of this review being critical of the game but remember that is still an overall improvement over the first game, which is also flawed, but a good game in its own right. I’m just disappointed that it didn’t change more. This is also the end of my journey across the Yo-Kai Watch series, at least until this materializes into something, which started all the way back in 2021, or maybe even 2015 if you count my time with the demo-version of the first one and I don’t want to end it on such a downer, as this is such a great series and definitely worth experiencing, especially the third one, which I was so lucky to buy before the 3DS eshop closed down and has since become one of my favorite games of all time. My final ranking is 3 > 4 > 1 > 2.
And while I can see it being an overall improvement over the first Yo-Kai Watch game, I did still not enjoy it as much; as I believe most of its improvements can be summarized by saying that there is a lot of stuff in this game; you will basically not be able to do everything there is in this game.
The version I played “Psychic Specters” is the definitive Version of Yo-Kai Watch 2, combining the contents of both Bony Spirits and Fleshy Souls, but unlike the Pokémon equivalents, which may mix and match aspects or even add some, this game gives you the choice of which versions content you want to engage with at certain points in the story, which is as interesting as it is flawed, because if you want to truly experience everything there is in this game you now have to either write down every choice you take, to do the opposite on your second playthrough, or basically just play through the base versions one after another on this fancier cartridge.
When it comes to your gameplay loop, this is basically a rehash of the first one. You might expect QoL changes, but I believe it to actually the other way around, as Mirapo, these games fast-travelling system, and the bike will be locked away from you for way longer, the latter you for some reason only unlock at around 85% through the main game. So most of your (early) game will be spend learning the ins and outs of the Yo-Kai Watch train-network, which takes you station by station (makes sense), it will ask you whether or not you want to exit every station, during the rides you will either be encountering people/Yo-Kai that basically tell you nothing, give you an item or battle you.
Another Mirapo related issue is when you travel to the past, you won’t be able to use them at all, with one exception (which doesn’t count), meaning you will have to walk everywhere, in these maze-like past versions of the city, which at least has some of the greatest music of the already great OST.
Speaking of which, the soundtrack while brief is as good as in any other Yo-Kai game. The only problem with it being that most of it is taken straight from its prequel, with most new tracks being restricted to the past areas. The most egregious example of old music being used is during one moment where the villains of the chapter show up and the Final Boss theme of the first game just starts playing for some reason.
One change I was really waiting to see is how they fixed how you befriend Yo-Kai, as it is my biggest gripe with the first game and it was (somewhat) fixed in the third one and color me shocked when I found out it’s the worst it has ever been. Now don’t get me wrong here, it’s roughly the same as the first in theory, but this game forces you to befriend Yo-Kai way more than that game. There is one point where you enter a cave, where you must use your Yo-Kai to change the water levels to progress. When I got there my playtime was at around 8 hours, the water can be at three different levels, and you need one specific Yo-Kai per level. Luckily you can encounter them in that cave, but remember if you beat them, it will take a seemingly random amount of time for them to respawn, and they might just not do so at all. So, you better pray that the RNG for them befriending you is in your favor, as the item that guarantees befriending does not exist yet, and guess what happened to me.
One of them, this guy right here, just hates me for some reason, and I spend a bit more than two hours in that cave just hoping that they would befriend me. Well at least you can get the Yo-Kai at the same place where you need them.
A bit later in the game you will hunt down some documents the protagonists dad lost on his way to work, which first forces you to ride the train multiple times, after doing that Whisper tells you to get a Yo-Kai called Flushback which will be able to go through the memories of you father and find out where he left the documents. Now guess three times where you might find such a Yo-Kai. The cave of course and if you didn’t get them last time, have fun walking from one side of the map to the other, if you didn’t activate the Mirapo and do all that encountering in the cave once again, just for that to not give you a clear answer as to where he left the documents.
Now to the thing I was the most disappointed with. The combat system is the same from the first game with two small changes. 1: When charging your soultimate attack, there is one new method of doing so and 2: if you click the center of the Yo-Kai Watch you have two new options, being a stronger soultimate (I think) and the option to spam-click the opponent and either deal damage, steal their soul-charge, or giving you a higher chance to befriend them, which does not solve my previous complaint as you have to first inspirit the enemy, it being random as to which effect it will have on them and it still not guaranteeing it.
Back in 2022 I wrote a review for Yo-Kai Watch 3, in which I called this combat system of Yo-Kai Watch 1 more of an annoyance than fun to mess around with, which is a sentiment I still mostly agree with, and guess what, these two minor changes don’t change much. This is magnified by the fact that I didn’t even like the boss fights in this one as much as I did in the others. There are some winners, but most of them are just bland and don’t require much strategy.
Let’s go back to the tidal cave (with the most minor spoiler warning I can give out), which I’ve spend so much time complaining about. At the end of your first excursion through it you will encounter some pirate-Yo-Kai-boss-guy (I think he is from the early-game of 1), whose name I can’t remember. The only thing I did was using all of my front three Yo-Kai’s soultimate-attack and he was basically already defeated, and this happens here more often than I hoped it would.
I will now talk a bit about the final boss, without spoiling who or what their attacks are, but if you feel unsafe you may skip to the next paragraph. I was really looking forward to seeing if they fixed the difficulty curve of the first one, where it is easy for all of the game, only for the final boss to suddenly become impossible to beat at your current level, which you thought to be over leveled, but in a funny twist of events that didn’t happen at all. This game is so derivative of its predecessor that it even copied the two-hour grind for the final boss.
My last point is on the writing of this game. Now don’t get me wrong these games are not known for their groundbreaking storytelling, with the story basically only existing to give you a reason for why you are now suddenly in an all-out Yo-Kai war, with some funny quips thrown in to lighten the mood, but I found this one in particular to be lacking in the latter. The main villains of these games usually don’t have a presence before the game is already basically over and while they are handled better here than in the first one, this is still mostly the case. My problem however isn’t that they did that again, that was expected, but much rather how they handled the new tribe of Yo-Kai, the Wicked-Tribe), which you can see on the box-art. They also only show up during the end of the game and do nothing, outside of being mini bosses that you can dispatch with two attacks, showcasing maybe the biggest wasted potential in this series. At least they give out around 700 experience points.
Now I spend most of this review being critical of the game but remember that is still an overall improvement over the first game, which is also flawed, but a good game in its own right. I’m just disappointed that it didn’t change more. This is also the end of my journey across the Yo-Kai Watch series, at least until this materializes into something, which started all the way back in 2021, or maybe even 2015 if you count my time with the demo-version of the first one and I don’t want to end it on such a downer, as this is such a great series and definitely worth experiencing, especially the third one, which I was so lucky to buy before the 3DS eshop closed down and has since become one of my favorite games of all time. My final ranking is 3 > 4 > 1 > 2.
Lego Knights' Kingdom was very interesting to me as it was not only released a few months before the first TT Lego game and the subsequent redirection of Lego games, but also because it is based on an obscure Lego theme; being the second season of Lego Knights' Kingdom sets and these sets were really weird on their own.
Unfortunately the game itself is not nearly as interesting as its source material.
Lego Knights' Kingdom at its core is an isometric action adventure game. There are four playable characters, which all share the same basic actions and therefore have no differences in gameplay except their character models.
The gameplay loop alternates between combat- and find the button sections.
Despite being the games main focus the combat feels incredibly sluggish.
While there are in theory more than one way to go about fighting enemies, as in not only normal attacks and the shield, but also combos and any of the 5 special attacks, which can be performed by holding the A button and one hit most enemies. It will actually just end up as holding up the shield and listening for the sound queue of it being hit by the enemy and subsequently counterattacking, as there isn't enough time between the enemy being hit and your character being able to attack again, for combos to be even possible, some enemy attack animations being deceiving and not actually representing its hitbox' active frames and there usually not being enough time to execute a special attack.
The find the button portions of the game aren't much better.
Now let's start with the positive. The placement of the button is usually very clear, same as how to activate them, so finding them is no problem most of the time, but that is pretty much everything positive I can say about it as there is a severe lack of an indicator for if you have hit all buttons to open the door connected to them. Now I have to preface that said lack of an indicator is very inconsistent, but there where multiple situations where this really hampered the already not amazing experience.
This problem gets even worse considering the excruciatingly slow movement speed and sometimes deceiving background making it unclear as to how to actually get to the button.
There was also an example in the final stage of the game where the game laid five buttons in front of the player and they just had to guess the order in which to activate them. The chance of someone actually guessing the right order first time is around 0.83% by the way (the order is 32514 if you for whatever reason want to play through this game).
The game peaks at its last stage, which is actually pretty fun (outside of that one incident), as it marks the first time of the game being actually challenging.
Unfortunately there is another occasion around 3/4s through this around 20 minute long level, where the two hardest sections of the game take place one after another. This wouldn't be a problem if there were any checkpoints, but there aren't, so you have to play the whole level again for 15 minutes, if you don't get defeated before that, just to probably fail again. Fun fact: I spend most of the last three days of my journal in this level. Now these playing sessions where mostly just me failing once or twice and then getting unmotivated, but I thought it could still be interesting.
This should probably be the moment where I mention the lack of in game saves, but much rather a password system to save your file.
The level ends with this games only boss fight against Lord Vladek, which can be cheesed using the tried and true strategy of shielding and counterattacking their attacks.
There is also a second and third mode, being the tournament arena and last man standing.
The tournament arena is basically a mix between 1v1s of the four main protagonists, which can be won with the already explained cheese tactic, and jousting, which isn't properly explained and I couldn't bother finding out how it works, as you should still win the arena every time due to the points you accumulated in the 1v1 matches.
I also couldn't access the last man standing mode even after beating the game.
Now the ost is the best part by far (take a listen if you want) and definitely the reason for at least one of this games stars.
Another reason why I didn't absolutely hate this game was because its problems mostly only get really apparent in longer sitting. This game is sometimes able to provide short bursts of fun.
Which is actually my final verdict. If you still want to play this game, for whatever reason, restrict the time you spend with it and you might not regret it that much.
Unfortunately the game itself is not nearly as interesting as its source material.
Lego Knights' Kingdom at its core is an isometric action adventure game. There are four playable characters, which all share the same basic actions and therefore have no differences in gameplay except their character models.
The gameplay loop alternates between combat- and find the button sections.
Despite being the games main focus the combat feels incredibly sluggish.
While there are in theory more than one way to go about fighting enemies, as in not only normal attacks and the shield, but also combos and any of the 5 special attacks, which can be performed by holding the A button and one hit most enemies. It will actually just end up as holding up the shield and listening for the sound queue of it being hit by the enemy and subsequently counterattacking, as there isn't enough time between the enemy being hit and your character being able to attack again, for combos to be even possible, some enemy attack animations being deceiving and not actually representing its hitbox' active frames and there usually not being enough time to execute a special attack.
The find the button portions of the game aren't much better.
Now let's start with the positive. The placement of the button is usually very clear, same as how to activate them, so finding them is no problem most of the time, but that is pretty much everything positive I can say about it as there is a severe lack of an indicator for if you have hit all buttons to open the door connected to them. Now I have to preface that said lack of an indicator is very inconsistent, but there where multiple situations where this really hampered the already not amazing experience.
This problem gets even worse considering the excruciatingly slow movement speed and sometimes deceiving background making it unclear as to how to actually get to the button.
There was also an example in the final stage of the game where the game laid five buttons in front of the player and they just had to guess the order in which to activate them. The chance of someone actually guessing the right order first time is around 0.83% by the way (the order is 32514 if you for whatever reason want to play through this game).
The game peaks at its last stage, which is actually pretty fun (outside of that one incident), as it marks the first time of the game being actually challenging.
Unfortunately there is another occasion around 3/4s through this around 20 minute long level, where the two hardest sections of the game take place one after another. This wouldn't be a problem if there were any checkpoints, but there aren't, so you have to play the whole level again for 15 minutes, if you don't get defeated before that, just to probably fail again. Fun fact: I spend most of the last three days of my journal in this level. Now these playing sessions where mostly just me failing once or twice and then getting unmotivated, but I thought it could still be interesting.
This should probably be the moment where I mention the lack of in game saves, but much rather a password system to save your file.
The level ends with this games only boss fight against Lord Vladek, which can be cheesed using the tried and true strategy of shielding and counterattacking their attacks.
There is also a second and third mode, being the tournament arena and last man standing.
The tournament arena is basically a mix between 1v1s of the four main protagonists, which can be won with the already explained cheese tactic, and jousting, which isn't properly explained and I couldn't bother finding out how it works, as you should still win the arena every time due to the points you accumulated in the 1v1 matches.
I also couldn't access the last man standing mode even after beating the game.
Now the ost is the best part by far (take a listen if you want) and definitely the reason for at least one of this games stars.
Another reason why I didn't absolutely hate this game was because its problems mostly only get really apparent in longer sitting. This game is sometimes able to provide short bursts of fun.
Which is actually my final verdict. If you still want to play this game, for whatever reason, restrict the time you spend with it and you might not regret it that much.