74 reviews liked by Knyrps


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.

I had a lot of hope for Tyler Model 005 as the game looks very nice graphically and has an above average soundtrack considering that this is Reversed Interactives first game. This game was published by Maximum Games, which is a name I knew, but didn't really remember from where. If you are currently facing the same situation or haven't heard of them before, Maximum Games have also published a game called Troll and I, which would've been a red flag and turned me away from buying this game, but obviously this didn't happen.

As I already mentioned, I do not have any problems with this games graphics or soundtrack. My real problems lay in the controls and mechanics.
At it's core Tyler Model 005 is a 3D action platformer with RPG elements. Unfortunately none of these elements are implemented in any sensical way.
I'm pretty sure Tylers jumps aren't physics based, meaning that they just move you up and forward by a bit. Tyler also has the ability to move objects with the left bumper. As I already mentioned there isn't really a physics engine, meaning that objects won't fall down whatever is beneath them as long as they touch that other object. I should also mention that this ability is only needed to be used during the tutorial.
Tyler has two abilities when holding the A button. The first one is an auto jump to a ledge, which is fairly well implemented and whose only problem lays in it needing the same input as another ability, leading to a misinput.
The second ability situated on holding the A button is a wall-run. This only works in theory as it sometimes just decides to stop working. Another problem with it is that you can use it against sloped objects. This builds up infinite speed and creates a backwards long jump situation where you are able to clip through floors, which allowed me to skip a whole section of the game.

This game also just happens to be home to one of the worst combat systems I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing. Tyler has a knife which can be used by first pressing Y to actually equip the thing and then the right trigger to use it. Now you can also not use the knife, but due to doing way less damage without it, this is never practical. Now my problem with this stems from Tyler sometimes just randomly unequipping the knife for no reason. But even when you hit an enemy, there is no indicator, that you have actually hit them. Combat is also, with one exception, entirely optional.

The only reason why you might want to attack an enemy is them dropping experience points, leading to Tyler leveling up.

Most of the abilities you can get by leveling up either make the game even worse or are almost useless, but there is just one ability, that only attempts to make the game a bit less insufferable, which is increasing Tylers battery life, which gets me to talk about the main gimmick of the game.
Tylers battery will continuously drain, when he isn't in close proximity to a light source. Not only does this mechanic not add to the game, but it rather gets worse because of it. For example, I died around 5 seconds after starting the game while reading the tutorial, because it starts you off in a dark area. This mechanic frankly is nothing more than an annoyance and has no reason to exist. As I already mentioned, you can upgrade Tylers battery life to last up to 40% longer which does fix this problem for the most part, but leads to a whole new problem, as it lead to me forgetting about the mechanic a few times and then randomly dieing when I put my controller down due to getting bored of this game.

While this game is graphically impressive for such a small game studio, the actual environments look very boring. You basically move around rooms of a run down house during the 1950s and later the 1970s. The rooms themselves look mostly the same. The enemies and other models also tend to look like Unity stock assets and after looking up the developer Reversed Interactive online I found out that they are mostly known for creating and selling said assets, which is not at all surprising.

This games story is unsurprisingly mediocre. To summarize it a bit, Tyler basically wants to find out what happened to his creator. This is an alright basis, but they didn't really do anything with it. After meeting a second robot called Conrad you basically only do what he says and things just happen around you for no reason. About halfway through the story shifts to suddenly be about time travel and I don't have to tell you that they didn't manage to create and subsequently follow a ruleset for this.
The game ends with one last filler mission where you have to find four switches, two of which require to be powered (so you have to find out how to do that too), which are hidden randomly around the house. Finding these switches was anything but fun.

Overall Tyler Model 005 was one of the greatest wastes of money and time I've had to endure in my life. I basically only beat it because it being only about 4 hours long. I would not advice you to ever consume this game in any significant way. Please stay away from it.
I only didn't give this game half a star because of it's small length. The rush of positive emotions I experienced when the credits rolled are yet to be matched by anything else.

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.

" Heard the bosun ain't doin so well after Morocco "
X " Aye, what does he have? "
" 'Perantly is something called Ligma "
" среди нас самозванец | sredi nas samozvanets "
X " Who's that Stevay Jobs?"
" ME BALLS "
gun shot

there's nothing quite as amazing as playing a game that is like nothing you've ever played before

I love how atmospheric this game is.

Honestly it's kinda good
It's the exact opposite of PoE, it's like the least complicated game ever, and i appreciate that a lot as a break from all the other CBT-tier games i like to play
You have 3 equipment slots (Melee, Bow, Armor - you end up being able to upgrade each in a lot of neat ways which dedicate your playstyle) and 3 artifact slots (All kinds of things to help you, from an extra heal to a forcefield to a Loki cube that just lasers everything in your way).
Instead of having a class and a skill tree so long it feels like you're doing taxes, you just kinda have a freeform character based on what you mix and match equipment-wise and what works for ya.
Honestly the game didn't seem like much but it gets pretty fun and hectic. Needless to say though, if i couldn't play it co-op then i wouldn't be interested much.
Also it has this season pass thing where you can unlock dab dances and such, at least you can pay a one time fee to keep unlocking some cool lil things through gameplay instead of being charged per dab emoji like in most games.
And yeah i generally like the minecraft aesthetic a lot, i'm suuuuuuuuch a blockhead lol.

Loses a bit of steam around the end of the game and the bosses pale in comparison compared to Prime 2, but this is still one of the most important games ever made and one I love a lot.