We finally got a fully voiced Byleth but at what cost?

I've read fanfiction better than this. Not like I had much hope about the story in the first place since it's a warriors spin-off game with a completely new protagonist. It has some good scenes and fights of course. Especially SB. I actually kinda liked the route and more Edelgard content is always a win, but man ...all in all this game is really kind of a mess.

Some characters behave strangely in order to fulfil nothing more than pure fanservice and awful tropes (looking at you AG). And some of them are just irrelevant in general.

The secret chapters are a joke and just prove that the original characters are unnecessary and only exist because it's a warriors game. I guess that was to be expected but it's still disappointing to see. Welp, I'm glad this isn't canon.

The gameplay is fun for the first few hours then it's getting too grindy and tedious for me.

Overall Three Hopes is an alright game if you like the cast because the new supports and character interactions are fun to watch, but this game only made me appreciate Three Houses even more to be honest.

I know this is a fanservice spin-off "nobody dies" AU, but the circumstances surrounding the lords this time around are too convenient imo. There was simply no tension. Even the endings felt too abrupt and all routes lacked the emotional impact Three Houses offered. The routes were lacking in emotional investment, mostly due to odd pacing and lack of exposition in certain things and character interactions.

(The game leaked a few days ago, so I had the chance to play it early.)

This might be controversial due to the generic anime story and fanservice, which I wasn't all that fond of either, and the general hate surrounding this game, but I actually enjoyed my time with it, especially the soundtrack. It's so good.

Storywise, it's definitely not the best FE has to offer. The premise was good actually, but the execution failed pretty hard for me. Some characters were nothing but quirks, though this game also has some decent and likable characters who I came to enjoy. This, along with the fun gameplay, boosted my enjoyment. The poor localization and some of the fanservice were quite annoying sometimes, though.

Also, playing this with the Gay Fates patch made the experience definitely more fun for me

Conquest > Birthright >> Revelation

I may return to this at a later time, but I feel pretty disappointed with it right now.

The idea of the setting is cool, but as every other Team Ninja game I've played before, the levels are completely bland and uninspiring, which is also somewhat of a double-edged sword in this one as they want you to clear them in order to raise your power level to fight bosses.

The bosses themselves are okay, but there's no intimacy to any of them or weight that makes them feel exciting, which is a huge step back from Stranger of Paradise that, for all its other flaws, had some amazingly fun boss fights.

I don't believe Wo Long is necessarily a poor game or anything, but I just can't find myself wanting to play it when there's so much more out there that does excite me. I will just leave my review with a sophomoric: does not pass vibe check.

It really is Sekiro to Nioh's Dark Souls, but Sekiro is more careful about what it cuts and keeps from its sibling series.

One of the things that keeps Nioh playable despite all its cluttered menus and Diablo-like loot drops is the ability to press a single button that will explain almost anything on your screen. It's not perfect - Nioh's got a lot going on - but it will at least help you understand the value in keeping equipment with bonuses to "Tenacity" and "Low Attack Break". Wo Long doesn't even bother with actual explanations for game mechanics, resulting in a situation where you can read multiple paragraphs about the real life philosophy behind the Five Phases but the actual effects of morale, a central concept in the game, are never explained beyond "it increases your combat power". This lax approach to game clarity carries over into that Help feature too, with most explanations offering up "Health Recovery improves Health Recovery" or similarly enlightening statements.

Combat has been pared down a bit, with the complete removal of weapon-specific skill trees, stamina, and stances. Instead of stamina and limited charges for magic spells, your Spirit bar serves as as a combined mana pool and posture meter, depleting as you do bad things or special moves (dodging, taking damage, using magic) and replenishing by doing good things (successfully landing hits, deflecting attacks). It's a fine system, one that's more intuitive than it sounds because you're likely already avoiding damage and landing hits of your own. Spells, on the other hand, require such a large investment in their stat and the spirit costs are so punitive that hybrid builds are nonexistent for large chunks of the game. What this amounts to for most players is a game in which you have very little incentive to do anything other than light attack or deflect. The window in which you can deflect an attack is much larger than you'd expect - think of a Dark Souls roll that regenerates stamina when you successfully dodge an attack. When deflecting is so easy and actively benefits you, it's easy to forget that blocking is even possible.

And companions? Complaining about NPC companions is as old as NPC companions are, so we'll keep it short. The game is visually busy already, and the companions are as visually noisy as they are incompetent in battle. What's worse, the companions have collision - I was knocked off ledges multiple times while platforming due to my companion landing on my head. I also frequently found that if (and that's a BIG "if") my companions were able to survive more than one or two attacks from a boss, the boss frequently gets stuck in a loop of big, AOE, zoning attacks that make it harder to hit. It's hard to appreciate that you're fighting alongside Liu Bei or Cao Cao when they're getting one-shot by a horse demon within ten seconds of the fight starting.

It's a shame, then, that it feels great! Your character moves like they're in a musou game. Deflecting attacks is hands-down the most satisfying thing in this game despite its ease, emitting a ka-SHING with an impact that has more in common with a lightning strike than two swords meeting. The game feels so good that you can play for a long while on that alone, riding the high of scoring a fatal blow on the boss right when you were most desperate for it. That you can spend the entire game coasting on light attacks and deflects doesn't matter when you're still enjoying the novelty of trying out each weapon's Martial Arts.

Kotaku's Levi Winslow repeatedly called it an "accessible" Souls-like in their review of the game, and I think I would agree with that assessment if we're speaking strictly about the combat. The main issue is that at some point you're going to have to interact with those menus and the loot and the Five Phases system as it interacts with leveling and magic and resistances and it's going to be a LOT to throw at someone who can't touch on reference points from Dark Souls, Nioh, and Diablo. Hell, the PC version displays Playstation button prompts when I'm using an Xbox controller, so something as simple as "the ability to match what's on the screen to my controller" is out the window too. I wouldn't go so far as to call this game "safe," but it's squarely in Team Ninja's comfort zone, and they've done very little to make this game stand out as its own IP and very little to offer an olive branch to new players, even those coming from Nioh. It's a fine time (especially early on!), but there are so many frustrations for a game that lacks a distinct personality.

EDIT: It's been pointed out that you can manually switch the button prompts from Playstation to Xbox in the settings - thank you to HazeRedux for the correction!

Fantasy action-souls in a Chinese mythological setting. A bit of a mixed bag overall but I liked it a lot despite the problems.

The combat is the main focus here, it's very fast paced and momentum based with an emphasis on parrying rather than dodging. Instead of attacks costing stamina, you gain stamina on successful hits and parries which can then be used for special attacks like weapon arts in Elden Ring. Enemies also have a 'stamina' bar that can be broken down leading to them being staggered and you get a free attack with a crazy anime animation. I had a fun time with the combat once I knew what was going on but found it a bit button-mashy and repetitive later on, 1vX feels pretty bad also.

The difficulty is a bit all over the place but it’s not generally unfair, just obscure since there are a lot of mechanics and the tutorialisation is not effective despite being heavy-handed. This is probably less of an issue if you are more familiar with Team Ninja or action games in general. I’m not, so there was a steep difficulty curve at times but after Lu Bu clapped me for 4 hours, I learnt how to play the game properly and it was smooth sailing from there.

The level design is much simpler than Souls, you have a little bit of exploration and some shortcuts but it's set in discrete levels that mostly take less than an hour to see and fight everything, then you finish with a boss and a cutscene to setup the next level. It’s much more old-school and arcadey than Dark Souls so don’t expect as much immersion but there are some neat environments and a lot of cool design ideas for bosses. The music is also a strong point.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t stick the landing when it comes to the visuals, there are some nice colours and effects but the finished product looks half-baked, the shadows and lighting look scuffed and many assets are reused or low-detail. I think with a bit more work, this game could look really great but as is, it's mostly scuffed like Dark Souls 2 but less ugly.

This becomes more of a problem when you factor in the performance issues of this game, this is one of the worst games I've played on a technical level. It was almost unplayable for me on my previous PC but I recently upgraded to a 7800x3D which is more or less the best CPU for gaming and it's still poor. You can play this game at 120 fps which is nice but the frametimes feel terrible unless you are maxed out and using an external FPS cap. I had to play at a lower resolution with image scaling and DLSS to try and maintain performance but even that wasn’t consistent. The native game scaling makes turns any low resolution into a blurry mess so I did that in my desktop. Also, custom resolutions don't work and you can't change half of the graphical settings from in-game which is particularly annoying because the loading times for this game are incredibly long, far longer than any game I can remember playing on PC. I must have spent hours trying to configure this game optimally. My end result was playable enough but I'm going to put off the DLCs and other side-content for a future playthrough when my PC can handle this game more comfortably. This is a decent game let down by a garbage port.