Tokyo Necro is a vn which feels like it's going through the motions; shambling towards the finish line.

It wears the appearance of a VN from the company's glory days -- but its not.
The person who came up with the world, the characters, the general outline, wasn't the one who wrote most of it. That task was left to Vio Shimokura of Totono fame. While I'm going to critique this VN a lot in this review, I still think that Vio did a pretty good job given the way the vn was setup and the fact that he ultimately had to fill in the details for someone else's story. Unfortunately this here is the VN's ultimate weakness. That the person writing the story was incompattible and lacking the excitement to tell the story with justice.

Tokyo Necro is a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk themed story about a group of zombie killing mercenaries hired to discover the past of a bubbly, amnesiac girl named Hogyo Iria while shadowy organizations threaten to upend and destroy everything our heroes old dear.

This setup doesn't sound awfully original, but it sounds like it should at least be entertaining, maybe action-packed; the trailer certainly promises a spectacle with the amount of 3d animated action sequences shown off. The reality is the story is more interested in exploring the way characters deal with death when living in
a world capable of temporarily returning those once dead to how they once were -- emotions and all. The emotions that gave these people their humanity rapidly decay -- only after 2 weeks, most are just a husk, at risk of harming those around them. Conceptually, the game is well-thought out. The characters all have their purpose in the story.

My problem with the game is the execuation of its main elements. Outside of the major characters, most don't grow outside of their basic setup. If the story was more plot-driven, shorter, I would be willing to overlook the other failings the game has. I also think the game not having much different narration with a certain plot critical moment where the route split is a big missed opportunity with how much the game tells you the characters are different.

The most obvious shortcoming was the game aiming to be spectacle driven. Scale-wise, the game has a large amount of backgrounds, cgs, sprites and animations. If you look closer though, outside of the more important story sections, the assets on average look generic, lacking in detail, and in the case of the backgrounds, blurry. In general I think the quality of the assets are mixed.

Finally, I think the prose of the story is lacking. As the story simplifies a lot of elements that would normally be explained through text using the animations, there isn't a lot the story really can work with to make the fight scenes interesting. They're caught in the awkward middle ground as I don't think the animation work is impressive enough to fill the void the flavorless prose leaves.

I think the best way to summarize the game is that its a lot like a seasonal anime that'll be forgotten over time. It doesn't help that the one who conceptualized the story is an anime writer.

How can something this well made and with so much potential and looks fucking amazing be so fucking boring at times?
FUCKING ROBOT DINOSSAURS.
The game is great when you're fighting them but thats it.
Project Zero Dawn is cool to I guess.
How could they fuck this up this game has everything it needs to be solid as fuck but It falls flat on so many surfaces.
forgetable charactes
Weird fucking world design, you have the amazing fucking map filled with cool shit to explore but you also fill it with the most pointless side shit possible.
this is a brain boiler, I'm never playing it again.

I found it funny when I hear "recommended to JRPG fans"
For them it's a no-brainer. Duh.

But I've never gotten very far in any JRPG. Nowhere near the end. Tried. Couldn't.
Couldn't get through all those hurdles. Those brick walls. All those outdated barriers.
Even to inexperienced player of the genre, those are notorious.
None of them pose a problem here. Not in the slightest.

All puzzle pieces of this picture are just in their right places.
And they create a picture they were always meant to create.

It's rare for something to be so good that it transcends your preferences.
I thought I didn't like this genre...Apparently, I do.
I don't really enjoy those grand stories...Yet here I do.
Sometimes, there are things so extraordinary that they transcend the usual.

After finishing Chained Echoes I'm left with a memory of the world that gives home to so many interesting, complex and wonderful characters.

Got to know them. Lived there with them. Wouldn't trade them for anything.
When saying goodbye, I had a heavy feeling somewhere between my throat and heart.
I'll never forget them.

I genuinely think this is one of the best stories out there.
And personally, my favorite.

If I went purely based on my rage I would give this half a star. But I can't deny the game is very very pretty and I still love the characters.

On that note. Overwatch 2 is an absolute travesty. Taking everything that made the first game so good and ruining it beyond comprehension. 99% of cosmetics available for free and obtainable through a loot box that you'd get every level up? Gone. Simple things that made it slightly more fun like stat cards at the end of matches? Gone. The entire second tank and 6 player friend groups in general? Gone. New characters available for FREE on update??? GONE! The entire campaign mode with so much promised and an incredibly fun looking skill tree system? Cancelled with only a few campaign missions released per season behind a god damn paywall with the rest never to be seen.

But what really grinds my gears about this game, is that it paved over everything I loved about Overwatch. I can never go back to when Overwatch was fun and had 6 player teams and regularly releasing characters. Because it was all replaced with this garbage. I went my first Halloween since 2016 without playing Junkenstein's Revenge with my friends and it made me so sad.

I'm a fair reviewer, so as a game sure it can have 3 stars. But as an experience it deserves nothing.

As someone who went into this knowing only about the... questionable aspects of this game thanks to Twitter, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was an actual video game here.

Since The Coffin of Andy and Leyley (TCOAAL) is still in early access, it's obviously not going to be content complete, but there's still some meat on its bones, figuratively and literally. TCOAAL's main positive is the visuals, which are really good all around. Character designs are cute without drawing you out of the creepy atmosphere. The characters themselves aren't half bad either, particularly the two leads of Andrew and Ashley. Both are clearly messed up in different ways, but the game never tries to portray them as good people, just clearly damaged people dealing with extreme circumstances in often extreme ways.

That being said, due to the game only having two chapters out as of the time of me writing this review, the story is a bit lacking. The whole demon aspect of the plot feels unexplored, and there's some loose threads present that feel very arbitrary at the present moment. Lots of the game also feels very railroaded, which I guess is to be expected with a more visual novel style of story telling, but from an RPG Maker adventure game I expected a bit more in terms of exploration. As for the elephant in the room, the incest is a looming presence in the game, but isn't as big of a factor as you've probably been lead to believe. There's only one scene that actually implies anything explicit, and it's an optional scene that the game warns you about beforehand. It's definitely not preferable, but not something that soured the whole pot for me, at least. Overall, I enjoyed the game enough, but I'd say to wait until the full release to give it a try.

Yoshi's Island is an exploratory, secret-finding, puzzle-oriented, collectathon take on Super Mario World. It might very well be the best looking game on the SNES. Every level is gorgeous, with a ton of visual variety and a fantastic soundtrack to match. It's too bad that the SFX are mixed a bit too high and drown out the music with some really unpleasant noises.

I found the controls to be a bit too slippery for my liking, but the levels are generally well designed to match Yoshi's movement and abilities. Many of the levels were a bit too mazelike, a few excruciatingly so. Thankfully the boss battles are charming and puzzly rather than being excessively difficult.

About 1/3 through the game I stopped trying to collect everything. This made the game a bit more fun, as the collectibles were often frustrating or tedious to grab. But, I did get the sense that I wasn't playing the intended way. Since there's no real value to secrets other than score embiggening, high scores become the primary motivator for play. Without that, I felt like I was just going through the motions of platforming, with cumbersome movement to boot.

I've always wondered about the future F-Zero presents to us. at a glance it seems to be one that solved the energy crisis, one that populated other planets and has a general sense of peace. on the other hand these people keep racing to the death and apparently that's the most popular sport in the galaxy???? I can't figure out what they mean with this, is this supposed to be some sort of critiscism to our own dangerous racing sports like F1? some sort of commentary on men's fetishistic longing for the spectacle of the coliseum? is this just blade runner or something I'm not getting the reference because I didn't watch many movies? nevertheless, these people keep racing to win some fabulous cash prize so I can just assume inequality is still rampant on this world.

honestly this game is just not really good. don't get me wrong driving feels great, much better than it's sucessor, Super Mario Kart, that came 2 years later. but that's it. the grand prix mode beyond the standard difficulty is a terrible mess.

I'm a bit of a fan of games that will just resort to chaos and make you try over and over again due to said chaos. it's usually fun because more often than not designers know that they're being deliberately unfair. that's not the case here, anything on expert and up just feels untested, unbalanced, some sort of "ok let them deal with it" kind of case. game is already exceedingly brutal with it's 3-lives system per cup, but the cherry on top are the non-competitor cars present on these track. yeah, non-competidors because they're there just to mess you up, they do not count towards your overall position and they're extremely random and the exploding ones will drain a huge chunk of your life and honestly with all caps and every emotion I can muster here it just plain SUCKS. the rubber banding AI won't help you either because any tiny mistake, most of them which aren't even your fault, and you'll get overtaken instantly or rammed into or whatever bullshit the CPU decides it's gonna do next. even if I can accept that this is a 1990 game I don't think it wasn't just as unfair at that time either

if you want to play this because of the music (it rocks), because of the aesthetics (usage of color is incredible and this game is super pretty for the SNES, being a 1990 release too!) don't go beyond standard please. even if the game won't give you any credits screen or boomers on gamefaqs will tell you the game only gets fun in expert that's not true. if you MUST do expert, only go till queen league. if you MUST experience king league expert, abuse save states. don't be like me I'm a gal with too much patience and too much time and doing it "legit" was not worth it, not one bit.

but really just play F-Zero 99 it's a much casual friendly and funner experience than this, it's surprisingly less caotic and more fair too.

I was able to extract a bit of value playing this though, it should come up any time I need to prove that a rock solid foundation isn't everything or sometimes not even enough for a game to be good.

This is very clearly inspired by games like Limbo. While it has its moments, it lacks in quality and some design decisions. The game’s art style can be phenomenal. It’s well paced, has some moving music, doesn’t overstay its welcome and it has that appealing mystery with the world and where you’re going. However, the controls can be very janky. You know, when there is a small pause after pressing the jump button or there are times where you press jump but somehow your character doesn’t jump and you end up dying. The story is not told or shown in the game at all. You just suddenly wake up and you see beasts trying to kill you. It’s later in the game that I find secrets (the game’s collectibles) where the story is told in little written texts. Other games did this method of story telling better. You need at least some intro imo. Anyway, I found 5 out of 15. I thought about going back to some levels to collect what I missed. I expected to get the option to select the levels after completing the game. But that didn’t happen. The game even starts from the very beginning if you want to find the rest of the secrets, as the progress for the collectibles is saved at least. The game is not good enough to warrant a complete replay with no way to select the levels or checking which collectibles I’m missing in each level. The game is super short, so I’m positive they did this to extend the game’s length.

It might be a game worth playing on Apple Arcade or experience once on the cheap but it’s not worth going out of your way to collect everything or get all the achievements. This game could have been so much better but what we have is interesting enough.

TL;DR: play the base game and sam dlc instead, unless you want to find out the backstory of an ok character in the story.

This dlc is definitely the weakest part of MGRR, which is a shame as it was the last piece of content added to the game, and will most likely be people's last first experiences with it. This pack leaves a really sour taste in this otherwise amazing product as blade wolf is just not fun to play as. He dies in 4 hits and does no fucking damage, and most of the combat in this game boils down to stealthily avoiding enemies or delivering one shot killing blows which over the span of an hour becomes boring pretty fast. This goes horribly with the final boss in the game who you are required to parry quite often and have limited heals to actually kill. I sucked ass at parrying as blade wolf and while I will admit some of it was on me having a skill issue with the game, I never felt that the timing or hitboxes were consistent or fair, and it turned this otherwise ok boss into a nightmare that took me around 2 hours to beat, as I just ended up spamming air attacks and dodging at a safe distance which still ended up in me coming to a close win due to the aforementioned poorly designed hitboxes. That boss alone is enough for me to not recommend playing this pack, and to just stick with the base game and the sam dlc, as I genuinely believe it is up there with the Bed of Chaos from DS1 and the big fish from lucia's disk in DMC2 as one of the worst designed boss fights ever. But the rest of the dlc and blade wolfs mechanics results in the only redeeming quality of the pack as finding out the backstory to an ok character in the story of MGRR.