Konic64
2024
Reina Mishima, if you can hear me. Please Reina Mishima. If you can hear me please save me. Please save me Reina Mishima I'm asking you. Please save me.
2022
I liked the part when Ringo was like "I'm going to Soul Hack". And um. Uhh. There's honestly no punchline she actually said that in game and it was pretty funny.
I wanna quickly preface this by saying I have only played Persona 3, 4, and 5 and the only experience I have had with it's father series Shin Megami Tensei is through trailers and watching a bit of gameplay. (I'm sorry, I wanna play Soul Hackers 1, Nocturne, SMT 4 and 5. I hope my sins are forgiven).
Alright so Soul Hackers 2. I remember hearing about this game way back in 2022, because of a somewhat infamous scene where the main protagonist is seen verbally retaliating a rapper with """cringe""". Frankly I thought this specific line was one of the funniest things I had ever seen a MegaTen protagonist ever say out loud and I was instantly sold on the game. It's "cringe", yes, but it's good "cringe". It's funny, however this itself was not enough for me to pick it up the game on release day. Then the game came out and I had heard a lot of middling to very negative things about it. I remember the review bombing on this site with this game in particular. All of this made me want to pick up the game and see why so many people were so negative about it. Having played the game now over a year after it's release, I can understand why people may not have liked this one. However, it also does not deserve the insane hate it has gotten either.
Soul Hackers 2 is a game with an identity crisis.
This is all speculation on my end so take it with a grain of salt. ATLUS saw the flourishing popularity of the Persona series with Persona 5 and especially it's expanded rerelease Persona 5 Royal and wanted to create a MegaTen game that would be easier for Persona fans to ease into while also having something for the original MegaTen fans to get excited about. A sequel to the original Devil Summoner game on the PS1/3DS? Sounds awesome right? However, from what I've seen of Soul Hackers 1, it's not a direct sequel and takes specific ideas from the Devil Summoners games such as characters and groups but not much else.
Think like how Final Fantasy does it's games aside from dedicated sequels. It has recurring characters such as Madam Ginko and Dr. Victor, and character groups such as the Yatagarasu and Phantom Society which were present in Soul Hackers 1, but not much else. Unfortunately, by trying to appeal to everyone, they have appealed to no one. That and it's major lack of advertising, and middling perception from review outlets and negative response from players, made this game just kind of come and go from buildup to release. It's why you can regularly find the game physically for less than twenty dollars and that's how I picked it up. I was actually able to get the pre-order bonus character cards included when I picked it up a few months ago. That's not a good sign...
I suppose I'll start out with the story. The story follows two Aion, (sentient lifeforms but not humans that are born of the collective data from digital networks), that are born with the purpose to prevent the end of the world. That's the CliffNotes of it and there's obviously way more to it, but this is a spoiler free review so I won't go much into it. I thought it was somewhat predictable at times, but are a number of times where I was taken for a loop as well. Overall, it's a fine story. Not amazing or anything, but not terrible. It was engaging enough for me to finish the game and see the ending through, so I suppose that's a plus. I cannot say the same for the gameplay however...
Soul Hackers 2's combat is... boring. It's very boring. It's turn based, but there's just not much to it. It feels like a "whale on the enemy until it dies" type of game. Adding demons to the stack and trying to get the highest number stack possible is very satisfying no doubt, but other than that it's not very engaging at all. This is all accentuated by the game's poor dungeon design.
The dungeons in this game are so visually bland. It would have been extremely easy to get lost without the in-game map. There aren't a lot of differentiators between where you are and when and it just makes a lot of it blend in. The only dungeon that looked distinctly different was the last dungeon in the game which had an ethereal feel to it. Don't even get me started on the Soul Matrix though.
These are distinct dungeons for the party members and to get to learn more about them and make them stronger, you have to trudge through this boring ass area that once again are not visually distinct for the characters. It sucks because the characters are the best part of this game but I'll get to that later. I have genuinely fallen asleep playing this section of the game it is that boring. The first three floors are fine but it feels like when it comes the fourth and fifth floors they just gave up on designing anything fun. Portals. Portals everywhere. It's not fun in the slightest and it is extremely easy to lose progress. After seeing the character's conclusions on the fourth floor I wanted to see if there was anything interesting on the fifth floor. Nope. Did not do a single soul matrix beyond that point.
Moving on from that, let's talk about the cast of characters. One of the most redeeming qualities of this game is having a protagonist that isn't silent. Ringo is full of sassy, spunky, energy and I'm absolutely in love with her. Megan Taylor Harvey hit it out of the park with her performance of the character. She's easily one of my favorite Megaten protags and honestly one of my favorite protagonists ever. She's a really neat and funny character. That doesn't mean the other characters didn't do great either. I loved everyone. I'm much happier with an adult cast rather than what I'm used to.
Figue, the other purple-haired Aion, acts as a Navigator for the group and kind of provides a motherly support for the team. She's rather soft spoken and is more emotionally charged than Ringo. She's a great buffer for a lot of Ringo's shenanigans. Arrow, working for the Yatagarasu group, is your everyday man. I almost feel like at times he was supposed to be the protagonist given how basic he is. I still liked him just not as much as the other two in the gang. Milady, of the Phantom Society, is a cold hearted assassin who's not one to mince words. She's scary when she's mad but also has a bit of a soft side to her when exposed. It's very cute and I like her a lot. Saizo's my goat though. A freelance devil summoner, dressed to impress, with a chill attitude and some witty one-liners. If it weren't for Ringo, he'd definitely be my favorite of the major characters. They all don't have great chemistry with each other or anything and oftentimes have conflicting ideals making them interesting to watch/listen to. The game is almost fully voice acted, by the way, which I did not expect. I really hope the actors were paid fairly for their work.
One thing I have not touched upon much is the music. It's uh.. alright. The soundtrack was not done by Meguro or the Persona sound teams. It was done by Keiichi Okabe mostly known for Tekken and Dragenkard OSTs under the guise MONACA. Under that alias, I found a number of anime soundtracks including The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Monogatari and it's subsequent series', and Black Butler just to name a few. Kinda forgettable at times but there are still some good tracks in there. The Boss Battle theme is really good and I especially liked the themes that play when you're at the COMP Smith, and Bar Heidrun. However the dungeon music is some of the most repetitive ambience sounding music ever. It's worse than Mementos' theme in my opinion. The problem mostly being that they play the same music for almost every damn dungeon. Why? Once again the only time they change it up is at the final dungeon. If the music was actually catchy this would be a nonissue but unfortunately here we are.
I thought graphically the game is fine, and it ran well on the PlayStation 5. There are some really ugly sections of the game, mostly having to do with it's dungeons, but I loved the look of the Mansei Realm, and Shinsando. I got a consistent sixty frames per second all throughout though so I'm not complaining too much, and I don't really care TOO much for graphics in my video games.
Finally let's talk about updates and DLC. First of all, I can't fucking believe they shipped this game out without a Dash feature in the dungeons. If I had played this back when the game came out it, dungeon exploration would have been GLACIAL. The fast battle option in battles is really damn nice too. Made battles that would have lasted way too damn long really quick at times. Good feature. Day one DLC is still something we have to deal with when it comes to ATLUS' titles unfortunately. They shipped out a bonus demon pack, item pack, costume + BGM pack, and a whole damn side story the same day the game released. These are really scummy practices as you can tell, they could have easily put these into the game creating a complete experience. But why do that when there's extra cash to be made? Bullshit. I hate it. They better not pull this crap with Metaphor Re:Fantazio.
Overall I hope you can see why this game has such middling perception. The story's pretty good, characters are great, music is alright, but the gameplay is just... lacking. By calling this game "Soul Hackers 2", they alienated fans of the original by altering some things that are just not MegaTen such as the gameplay and progression and confusing the consumer by calling it a sequel. Suddenly questions start to go through their head. "Do I have to play the first Soul Hackers to completely understand everything in this game?" among others. It's a real damn shame this game did as badly as it did as it stops ATLUS from taking more chances with Megami Tensei and focusing a lot more on Persona. And I love the Persona games, but I wanna see and play more of what MegaTen has to offer.
With the 50 hours I've spent on this game, despite it all, I enjoyed what I played but cannot recommend it to hardcore MegaTen fans. It's kinda difficult to recommend this game to anyone really. Ringo still cute though, I'd let her soul hack me any day.
tldr:
Story was pretty good. Entertaining throughout. Gameplay boring grr. Great Characters with sweet cringegirl swag Ringo being a standout. Music was alright. Graphics are fine, but not great in some areas. Game overall is fine. Not amazing, but not terrible.
I wanna quickly preface this by saying I have only played Persona 3, 4, and 5 and the only experience I have had with it's father series Shin Megami Tensei is through trailers and watching a bit of gameplay. (I'm sorry, I wanna play Soul Hackers 1, Nocturne, SMT 4 and 5. I hope my sins are forgiven).
Alright so Soul Hackers 2. I remember hearing about this game way back in 2022, because of a somewhat infamous scene where the main protagonist is seen verbally retaliating a rapper with """cringe""". Frankly I thought this specific line was one of the funniest things I had ever seen a MegaTen protagonist ever say out loud and I was instantly sold on the game. It's "cringe", yes, but it's good "cringe". It's funny, however this itself was not enough for me to pick it up the game on release day. Then the game came out and I had heard a lot of middling to very negative things about it. I remember the review bombing on this site with this game in particular. All of this made me want to pick up the game and see why so many people were so negative about it. Having played the game now over a year after it's release, I can understand why people may not have liked this one. However, it also does not deserve the insane hate it has gotten either.
Soul Hackers 2 is a game with an identity crisis.
This is all speculation on my end so take it with a grain of salt. ATLUS saw the flourishing popularity of the Persona series with Persona 5 and especially it's expanded rerelease Persona 5 Royal and wanted to create a MegaTen game that would be easier for Persona fans to ease into while also having something for the original MegaTen fans to get excited about. A sequel to the original Devil Summoner game on the PS1/3DS? Sounds awesome right? However, from what I've seen of Soul Hackers 1, it's not a direct sequel and takes specific ideas from the Devil Summoners games such as characters and groups but not much else.
Think like how Final Fantasy does it's games aside from dedicated sequels. It has recurring characters such as Madam Ginko and Dr. Victor, and character groups such as the Yatagarasu and Phantom Society which were present in Soul Hackers 1, but not much else. Unfortunately, by trying to appeal to everyone, they have appealed to no one. That and it's major lack of advertising, and middling perception from review outlets and negative response from players, made this game just kind of come and go from buildup to release. It's why you can regularly find the game physically for less than twenty dollars and that's how I picked it up. I was actually able to get the pre-order bonus character cards included when I picked it up a few months ago. That's not a good sign...
I suppose I'll start out with the story. The story follows two Aion, (sentient lifeforms but not humans that are born of the collective data from digital networks), that are born with the purpose to prevent the end of the world. That's the CliffNotes of it and there's obviously way more to it, but this is a spoiler free review so I won't go much into it. I thought it was somewhat predictable at times, but are a number of times where I was taken for a loop as well. Overall, it's a fine story. Not amazing or anything, but not terrible. It was engaging enough for me to finish the game and see the ending through, so I suppose that's a plus. I cannot say the same for the gameplay however...
Soul Hackers 2's combat is... boring. It's very boring. It's turn based, but there's just not much to it. It feels like a "whale on the enemy until it dies" type of game. Adding demons to the stack and trying to get the highest number stack possible is very satisfying no doubt, but other than that it's not very engaging at all. This is all accentuated by the game's poor dungeon design.
The dungeons in this game are so visually bland. It would have been extremely easy to get lost without the in-game map. There aren't a lot of differentiators between where you are and when and it just makes a lot of it blend in. The only dungeon that looked distinctly different was the last dungeon in the game which had an ethereal feel to it. Don't even get me started on the Soul Matrix though.
These are distinct dungeons for the party members and to get to learn more about them and make them stronger, you have to trudge through this boring ass area that once again are not visually distinct for the characters. It sucks because the characters are the best part of this game but I'll get to that later. I have genuinely fallen asleep playing this section of the game it is that boring. The first three floors are fine but it feels like when it comes the fourth and fifth floors they just gave up on designing anything fun. Portals. Portals everywhere. It's not fun in the slightest and it is extremely easy to lose progress. After seeing the character's conclusions on the fourth floor I wanted to see if there was anything interesting on the fifth floor. Nope. Did not do a single soul matrix beyond that point.
Moving on from that, let's talk about the cast of characters. One of the most redeeming qualities of this game is having a protagonist that isn't silent. Ringo is full of sassy, spunky, energy and I'm absolutely in love with her. Megan Taylor Harvey hit it out of the park with her performance of the character. She's easily one of my favorite Megaten protags and honestly one of my favorite protagonists ever. She's a really neat and funny character. That doesn't mean the other characters didn't do great either. I loved everyone. I'm much happier with an adult cast rather than what I'm used to.
Figue, the other purple-haired Aion, acts as a Navigator for the group and kind of provides a motherly support for the team. She's rather soft spoken and is more emotionally charged than Ringo. She's a great buffer for a lot of Ringo's shenanigans. Arrow, working for the Yatagarasu group, is your everyday man. I almost feel like at times he was supposed to be the protagonist given how basic he is. I still liked him just not as much as the other two in the gang. Milady, of the Phantom Society, is a cold hearted assassin who's not one to mince words. She's scary when she's mad but also has a bit of a soft side to her when exposed. It's very cute and I like her a lot. Saizo's my goat though. A freelance devil summoner, dressed to impress, with a chill attitude and some witty one-liners. If it weren't for Ringo, he'd definitely be my favorite of the major characters. They all don't have great chemistry with each other or anything and oftentimes have conflicting ideals making them interesting to watch/listen to. The game is almost fully voice acted, by the way, which I did not expect. I really hope the actors were paid fairly for their work.
One thing I have not touched upon much is the music. It's uh.. alright. The soundtrack was not done by Meguro or the Persona sound teams. It was done by Keiichi Okabe mostly known for Tekken and Dragenkard OSTs under the guise MONACA. Under that alias, I found a number of anime soundtracks including The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Monogatari and it's subsequent series', and Black Butler just to name a few. Kinda forgettable at times but there are still some good tracks in there. The Boss Battle theme is really good and I especially liked the themes that play when you're at the COMP Smith, and Bar Heidrun. However the dungeon music is some of the most repetitive ambience sounding music ever. It's worse than Mementos' theme in my opinion. The problem mostly being that they play the same music for almost every damn dungeon. Why? Once again the only time they change it up is at the final dungeon. If the music was actually catchy this would be a nonissue but unfortunately here we are.
I thought graphically the game is fine, and it ran well on the PlayStation 5. There are some really ugly sections of the game, mostly having to do with it's dungeons, but I loved the look of the Mansei Realm, and Shinsando. I got a consistent sixty frames per second all throughout though so I'm not complaining too much, and I don't really care TOO much for graphics in my video games.
Finally let's talk about updates and DLC. First of all, I can't fucking believe they shipped this game out without a Dash feature in the dungeons. If I had played this back when the game came out it, dungeon exploration would have been GLACIAL. The fast battle option in battles is really damn nice too. Made battles that would have lasted way too damn long really quick at times. Good feature. Day one DLC is still something we have to deal with when it comes to ATLUS' titles unfortunately. They shipped out a bonus demon pack, item pack, costume + BGM pack, and a whole damn side story the same day the game released. These are really scummy practices as you can tell, they could have easily put these into the game creating a complete experience. But why do that when there's extra cash to be made? Bullshit. I hate it. They better not pull this crap with Metaphor Re:Fantazio.
Overall I hope you can see why this game has such middling perception. The story's pretty good, characters are great, music is alright, but the gameplay is just... lacking. By calling this game "Soul Hackers 2", they alienated fans of the original by altering some things that are just not MegaTen such as the gameplay and progression and confusing the consumer by calling it a sequel. Suddenly questions start to go through their head. "Do I have to play the first Soul Hackers to completely understand everything in this game?" among others. It's a real damn shame this game did as badly as it did as it stops ATLUS from taking more chances with Megami Tensei and focusing a lot more on Persona. And I love the Persona games, but I wanna see and play more of what MegaTen has to offer.
With the 50 hours I've spent on this game, despite it all, I enjoyed what I played but cannot recommend it to hardcore MegaTen fans. It's kinda difficult to recommend this game to anyone really. Ringo still cute though, I'd let her soul hack me any day.
tldr:
Story was pretty good. Entertaining throughout. Gameplay boring grr. Great Characters with sweet cringegirl swag Ringo being a standout. Music was alright. Graphics are fine, but not great in some areas. Game overall is fine. Not amazing, but not terrible.
2021
The 'A' key on my laptop broke while playing this game and I had to spend $15 to replace it. 15 fucking dollars to replace a single key. That's fucking maddening. Also I don't think this genre of video game is for me. I got gifted the game for free so I guess it's not all bad. 15 fucking dollars though seriously? For a single fucking key on a keyboard? And that was the cheapest I could find too.
**Played via the Un-Working Designs Patch (Which if you consider playing this game, I definitely recommend that version). Slick has left a bit of an impression on me.
Popful Mail is a quaint little game. It's an Action RPG/Platformer released in 1994, by Nihon Falcom and Sega and reworked for the west by Working Designs. I had heard about this game while randomly doing research on Sonic the Hedgehog, and found out that the game was planned to be localized in the West as "Sister Sonic". Having played the game now I'm so glad that plan never went through. The charm and personality of it's characters and world should never be replaced.
That being said, the actual game, itself, kinda sucks to play. The physics they use in the game make everyone kind of feel like butter on the ground and jumping is very odd. You keep your momentum in the air, but when you want to go in a different direction, you keep that same momentum and just go darting from one side of the screen to another. It's very weird and, for lack of better words, clunky feeling. Makes the actual platforming you have to do in-game very difficult at times. It does not help that there's an ice world in the game that accentuates this issue tenfold.
Besides that the gameplay is rather standard. You get from Point A to B on the screen cutting through everything in your path for cash. You'll occasionally visit shops where you can grab food that can restore your health, trinkets that give you some extra buffs, and weapons and armor that'll make killing foes easier. It's extremely simple but I can appreciate that simpleness. What I don't however appreciate are the absolute lack of invincibility frames after you get hit by something. It lasts for roughly half a second, and then you'll just get hit again. This also made some sections and bosses in the game very frustrating, and this is the patched version. The original version absolutely jacks up the difficulty by making the damage multipliers do 3x the damage and makes you, the player, much weaker. They probably did this because, without it, you can finish the game in around 6 hours or less and it would feel like a waste of money on the consumer.
I didn't like the gameplay too much, but everything else is chef's kiss for the Sega CD. The game is vibrant and beautiful, and the soundtrack is full of earworms. The FMV cutscenes are also a treat and the comedic and cheesy tone they took with the dialogue, really makes the game feel like a saturday morning cartoon. I used to watch a lot of anime like this as a kid, so it hit home for me. Also the characters! The titular character, Mail, is a funny, tomboyish elf that'll take on any job as long as she's compensated well. I'm absolutely obsessed with her character design. She was my favorite character to play in the game because of her interactions with the other characters. Although she was weirdly ableist in one scene, but I assume that's just a weird translation quirk.
There's also characters Tatto, a somewhat soft spoken, and friendly magician, and Gaw, a little dragon-like gremlin who has a bit of an attitude. Thank God he's not the comic relief. That goes to another elf named Slick, who constantly finds himself in the party's way. I should also mention that almost all the interactions are fully voice acted and surprisingly very well voice acted as well. It surprised me to hear such lively performances from a medium where we usually don't get things like that for it's time. The actors and actresses breath so much life into the characters.
Overall, even though I did not much enjoy the "game" itself, I enjoyed every other aspect surrounding the game. If the controls and little quirks of the game were tweaked just a bit more, this game would be a certified cult classic. However as it is, the Un-Working Designs patch is the best we've got. I'd love to see Falcom come back to this series sometime, but that does not seem likely for the foreseeable future. With that being said, I'm claiming Mail as my OC. None of you can do anything about it.
Popful Mail is a quaint little game. It's an Action RPG/Platformer released in 1994, by Nihon Falcom and Sega and reworked for the west by Working Designs. I had heard about this game while randomly doing research on Sonic the Hedgehog, and found out that the game was planned to be localized in the West as "Sister Sonic". Having played the game now I'm so glad that plan never went through. The charm and personality of it's characters and world should never be replaced.
That being said, the actual game, itself, kinda sucks to play. The physics they use in the game make everyone kind of feel like butter on the ground and jumping is very odd. You keep your momentum in the air, but when you want to go in a different direction, you keep that same momentum and just go darting from one side of the screen to another. It's very weird and, for lack of better words, clunky feeling. Makes the actual platforming you have to do in-game very difficult at times. It does not help that there's an ice world in the game that accentuates this issue tenfold.
Besides that the gameplay is rather standard. You get from Point A to B on the screen cutting through everything in your path for cash. You'll occasionally visit shops where you can grab food that can restore your health, trinkets that give you some extra buffs, and weapons and armor that'll make killing foes easier. It's extremely simple but I can appreciate that simpleness. What I don't however appreciate are the absolute lack of invincibility frames after you get hit by something. It lasts for roughly half a second, and then you'll just get hit again. This also made some sections and bosses in the game very frustrating, and this is the patched version. The original version absolutely jacks up the difficulty by making the damage multipliers do 3x the damage and makes you, the player, much weaker. They probably did this because, without it, you can finish the game in around 6 hours or less and it would feel like a waste of money on the consumer.
I didn't like the gameplay too much, but everything else is chef's kiss for the Sega CD. The game is vibrant and beautiful, and the soundtrack is full of earworms. The FMV cutscenes are also a treat and the comedic and cheesy tone they took with the dialogue, really makes the game feel like a saturday morning cartoon. I used to watch a lot of anime like this as a kid, so it hit home for me. Also the characters! The titular character, Mail, is a funny, tomboyish elf that'll take on any job as long as she's compensated well. I'm absolutely obsessed with her character design. She was my favorite character to play in the game because of her interactions with the other characters. Although she was weirdly ableist in one scene, but I assume that's just a weird translation quirk.
There's also characters Tatto, a somewhat soft spoken, and friendly magician, and Gaw, a little dragon-like gremlin who has a bit of an attitude. Thank God he's not the comic relief. That goes to another elf named Slick, who constantly finds himself in the party's way. I should also mention that almost all the interactions are fully voice acted and surprisingly very well voice acted as well. It surprised me to hear such lively performances from a medium where we usually don't get things like that for it's time. The actors and actresses breath so much life into the characters.
Overall, even though I did not much enjoy the "game" itself, I enjoyed every other aspect surrounding the game. If the controls and little quirks of the game were tweaked just a bit more, this game would be a certified cult classic. However as it is, the Un-Working Designs patch is the best we've got. I'd love to see Falcom come back to this series sometime, but that does not seem likely for the foreseeable future. With that being said, I'm claiming Mail as my OC. None of you can do anything about it.
Ayo Mr. Emblem. It's alright Three Houses, you can call me Fire
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is a sequel to the original Fire Emblem Warriors and a weird spin-off alternate universe version of Three Houses. Instead of critically thinking out each action in tactical strategy RPG gameplay, you mow down hundreds of soldiers with a few different characters and mashing one or two buttons. It's a musou game, I don't know what I expected.
I like musou games in bite size sessions. They're mindless and give me a good chance to whale away at a large horde of enemies. They need that special sauce that makes me want to continue playing. Fire Emblem Warriors didn't really have that, but it was also the first game I got on my switch so I played a lot more of it than I would like to admit before I could buy something else. Persona 5 Strikers integrates it's RPG elements into the musou gameplay well, and had an engaging story as well as the Phantom Thieves I grew to love.
This game has a fine story (of what I've played) and not too much else. Nothing you'll get compared to playing Three Houses but it's serviceable. The game has social conversations, and you can hangout with the characters in the house of your choice/recruited one on one. However, this game just goes on and on, and absolutely overstays it's welcome.
Musou games don't have too much staying power on their own which means you have spice it up pretty often otherwise it'll just get boring. I'm sorry, but the social events included just aren't enough to justify continuing. Shez is cute as hell though. Waste of a good character design.
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is a sequel to the original Fire Emblem Warriors and a weird spin-off alternate universe version of Three Houses. Instead of critically thinking out each action in tactical strategy RPG gameplay, you mow down hundreds of soldiers with a few different characters and mashing one or two buttons. It's a musou game, I don't know what I expected.
I like musou games in bite size sessions. They're mindless and give me a good chance to whale away at a large horde of enemies. They need that special sauce that makes me want to continue playing. Fire Emblem Warriors didn't really have that, but it was also the first game I got on my switch so I played a lot more of it than I would like to admit before I could buy something else. Persona 5 Strikers integrates it's RPG elements into the musou gameplay well, and had an engaging story as well as the Phantom Thieves I grew to love.
This game has a fine story (of what I've played) and not too much else. Nothing you'll get compared to playing Three Houses but it's serviceable. The game has social conversations, and you can hangout with the characters in the house of your choice/recruited one on one. However, this game just goes on and on, and absolutely overstays it's welcome.
Musou games don't have too much staying power on their own which means you have spice it up pretty often otherwise it'll just get boring. I'm sorry, but the social events included just aren't enough to justify continuing. Shez is cute as hell though. Waste of a good character design.
2022
This game made me vomit the first time I played it I'm not even lying.
2021
What a horrible night to be the bullet hell.
Vampire Survivors is a simple, fun time. It's got a large assortment of characters with different weapons and you can combine certain status trinkets with weapons to create more powerful weapons. And, well that's kind of it actually. What you see is what you get. I love the Castlevania-esque aesthetic, character on the box art that is 1:1 Bayonettas's whole pose, and a naming scheme that I often confuse with Vampire Savior (Darkstalkers).
I've needed a casual game that I can just pop in-between classes for quite some time. It's also great to have a game I don't have to actively think about while playing. Honestly needed a bit of a break from all the story driven games I've played this year. I don't find the game extremely addictive or anything, it's just a really nice casual play when I have the time. It's very cheap and free on mobile if you want to trial the game before purchasing like I did. It's not for everyone, but it's worth giving a go if you have some time to spare.
Vampire Survivors is a simple, fun time. It's got a large assortment of characters with different weapons and you can combine certain status trinkets with weapons to create more powerful weapons. And, well that's kind of it actually. What you see is what you get. I love the Castlevania-esque aesthetic, character on the box art that is 1:1 Bayonettas's whole pose, and a naming scheme that I often confuse with Vampire Savior (Darkstalkers).
I've needed a casual game that I can just pop in-between classes for quite some time. It's also great to have a game I don't have to actively think about while playing. Honestly needed a bit of a break from all the story driven games I've played this year. I don't find the game extremely addictive or anything, it's just a really nice casual play when I have the time. It's very cheap and free on mobile if you want to trial the game before purchasing like I did. It's not for everyone, but it's worth giving a go if you have some time to spare.
This review contains spoilers
Are we really at the beginning of this One Way Dream?
Sonic Frontiers came out over a year ago now (wow!), and exceeded my expectations for a new formula that Sonic would proceed to move forward with at high speeds. That being said, I feel with this update that Sonic tripped over and fell into the ocean of the Starfall Islands and took his friends with him. Playing through the new content included was an absolute slog. It was frustrating, boring at times, and just plain unfair. I can absolutely see why so many have dropped the update completely, and a need to play this and get my thoughts out were the only reason I continued myself.
This is the 3rd update to the game promised by the developers at Sonic Team to add new playable characters and a new story. One of these is correct anyway. I do not believe a new story is taking the exact same events that occurred on Rhea Island (Sonic getting fully corrupted by the Cyber energy, and having his friends save him) leading to Ouranos, and playing it. I'm not sure what I expected with a new story however this is anything but.
The new playable characters include Tails, Knuckles and Amy who all play rather similarly to Sonic. By similarly of course, I mean they all have a boost. For some god forsaken reason, you have to unlock a number of really basic abilities with the characters. I believe with Knuckles you have to unlock the ability to attack, who has been able to attack in every single goddamn game he's been included in since Adventure 1. They all have to unlock the Stomp, Attack, Parry, Spindash, and some particular special moves through 𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡 characters own skill tree. I have no fucking clue why they decided to separate every skill tree it just amounts to triple the work exploring the island. When I saw the trailer leading up to this update's release, I was under the impression that all of their, or at least the most BASIC moves would be usable without the skill tree. At this point I've played Sonic for so long that it feels wrong and weird to play characters similar to him without the most essential moves. Anyway Tails, can fly, Knuckles can glide and climb specific walls, and Amy can jump really high. Big woop.
Tails doesn't control terribly, but the camera doesn't follow where you steer him while flying, so it creates this awkward mess in my hands where I'm holding the jump button while moving the character and the camera. Come the fuck on. He also has the Tornado as an unlockable ability and he can fly wherever he needs to as long as he has enough boost. You can get infinite flight by cylooping to make an infinity sign though giving you endless boost. It breaks world design and it hurts that it's the most fun I have playing as him. Knuckles is not great. He weirdly has a second of charge up before he glides and the actual in-air movement is slow like I'm controlling him underwater. Compared to something like Adventure 2 where he follows where the player moves with even the slightest stick movement. You could mash the stick and he'd be going left, right, up and down and all around. Realistically, it doesn't make sense to make him control like that but that made him much easier to control with on the fly movement. In the Final horizon, however, this is not the case. As I said earlier, it feels like I'm controlling him underwater and I feel like he'll randomly just clip off the wall sometimes as well. He's really not that fun to play as here. However, because of that second of gliding startup he has a glitch very similar to the Knuckles in Rise of Lyric, where where you can do the three hit attack and keep rising up into the air. It's pretty funny and absolutely destroys some world design. Amy looks like she plays similarly to how she did in Adventure 1. I would not know, because I still haven't played it. She's the most complete feeling character and it's actually pretty fun to bounce around with her stomp and reach higher places. Instead of using her Hammer for most of the attacks, she uses fortune telling cards which had been a forgotten aspect of her personality until recently. I like that they're bringing it back, but I seriously believe using her hammer for the majority of her attacks is just better aesthetically. Sonic controls the exact same, only now, if you didn't already have the spindash unlocked, the game auto unlocks it for you. And amazingly, it controls better than the boost, and once again breaks world design. It is so unbelievably fun to shoot off into space off an incline and still control where you're going in the air. With the spindash, you have almost no real reason to use the boost unless you want extra air or something.
Ouranos has been given a new look and by that I mean it is the exact same just with more shit in it for the new characters. There are character specific sections of level design made for Tails, Knuckles and Amy respectively. They are color coded so you know who goes where and honestly thank fuck, but it would've been really nice if all the character just shared one new giant skill tree. At the end of these little platforming challenges you find Koco who give you character specific skill points. You can't accept the points unless you did the challenge as the specific character in mind, which is stupid. I know that if you could it would break the game and just make you play as one character for the most part but that's just more fun to me. The pop-in is even worse than the base game making some really simple platforming challenges extremely frustrating. How is it this bad? The guardians in the overworld have been upgraded, but feel like your average "super hard mode" mod. They all move and attack extremely quickly now to the point of not even being react which just sucks to play against. It means I have to find a way to cheese them all somehow rather than look cool destroying them. They all also do much more damage than normal. If you're not careful you can dig your own grave very quickly. Rather than wanting to fight these guardians and test my skills I went out of my way to avoid them as much as possible. Don't even bother trying to fight them with characters other than Sonic by the way and even then good luck with him.
Added with the changes to the island, there are now Koco Trials that you access through climbing these towers. These towers you climb are a true test of your patience as sometimes Sonic will just not homing attack onto something, or will randomly just go flying off for one reason or another. Call it a skill issue but I couldn't give a damn. It was here that I learnt if you changed to difficulty setting, from hard, a lot of these challenges would just kind of play themselves, and you know what? I'd rather that than try to do that shit over and over again. The trials themselves also wildly vary in difficulty having some trials that you finish almost immediately first try and others that you'll likely spend over 10+ minutes on. It's really inconsistent and oftentimes felt like absolute bullshit. There's one trial which is essentially a boss rush where you have a limited amount of rings, and very little upgrades. A chance to revisit these adrenaline pumping fights wouldn't be so bad if the parry wasn't so terrible. They changed it here now requiring the player to have perfect timing with it to function. That being said, none of these bosses are designed with this new parry system in mind. It's very difficult to tell what exactly is the right time to parry and the bosses' animations do not sell it well like the games it's trying to mimic (Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Rising, Bayonetta, etc.). If you fail this particular trial you have to start all the way from the beginning. Having to do the same 2 minute wyvern cutscene over and over again, I years being taken off of my life.
I'll make the cyberspace section quick. It is easily the best part about this new update. There are no new stage themes, but these are the most cohesive, fun levels since Generations. To my knowledge they are all completely original by design and once again they're just really fun to play. 100%ing them kind of makes me want to rip my hair out, but after some time I stopped caring about that type of thing and just played the stages to get the fastest time and S Rank.
One subject of much controversy in the original game was the ending. Yeah we're talking about this now. Supreme in the previous game was just a half-baked, worse Giganto and left a poor taste in the mouth of many players. And if you beat it on hard mode, You got an Ikaruga clone to play. Yippee. I do like the ending where Sage sacrificed herself for the sake of everyone else around her including her father figure. Most of the impact of that was taken away when said father figure revealed he had a backup of her, but whatever. In the new update, they retcon this ending having it finish off primarily with Gigan- sorry Supreme. The first phase is the exact same as the one in the main game. Underwhelming, and done in a flash. However, Supreme is immediately given new life thanks to 'The End'. It is here where we also see 'Super Sonic 2' glowing crimson, and having blue eyes instead of red. I think this is the first new super form since Black Knight in 2009, with Excalibur Sonic. I am fully sure the naming isn't coincidental. Anyway the boss fight itself is... something. Once again, the new perfect parry system is at play here and it still feels terrible. It's still very difficult to tell when exactly to be on the defense since the bosses animations make it difficult to tell when an attack will hit and when it will not. Supreme also sends these meteors at you that you also have to parry. It sends a ton of them at you and unless you're a god or something you're not parrying every single one. Supreme constantly has a stream of regenerating health to it that the game, straight up, does not teach you how to get rid of. I was stuck on this boss for almost an before I just gave up and looked up how to beat it. Playing against this boss felt really archaic. Like I was playing an old JRPG boss, or playing an old game with arbitrary difficulty. Unfortunately, I am not a child with all the time in the world anymore to solve this puzzle. I am a college junior taking 17 credits, I was lucky to even finish this DLC. Anyway, once you finish the boss off, Sonic gets not one form but two new special forms. Unfortunately 'Super Sonic Cyber', completely overtaken by the cyber corruption and glowing a black and light blue along with some sharp teeth, is literally only seen for 43 seconds and immediately obliterates 'The End'. And it's all in a damn cutscene. Talk about wasted potential.
Before I move on to my final thoughts on the new update, I have to give my kudos to Tomoya Ohtani and everyone else in the music division at Sonic Team. Once again, they hit it out of the park with the music in this game, and this update cemented Frontiers as a whole being one of my favorite Sonic soundtracks period. Again, I'm not sure that Drum and Bass is exactly my thing, but I feel like in this scenario it works considering the stages take place in cyberspace. They're all remixes of tracks that were previously in the game, but they all sound great. The new character themes, which play in the overworld, don't really fit the characters all that well, except Amy. Knuckles' and Tails' themes sound a bit out of place for the characters but that doesn't stop it from being good music. And as much as I hated some of the Koco trials, the music is alright. The guardians themes have also been changed a bit and with some you can very much tell they went back in the lab, while others sound way too samey to the original. The only major downgrade was the Spider's Theme which got rid of the trumpets that play about 2/3s into the song, which was extremely reminiscent of Sonic Unleashed's OST for me. Of course nothing needs to be said that hasn't already been said about the orchestral and revisited versions of 'I'm Here'. Honestly the only enjoyable part of the Supreme boss fight, was hearing both of those and especially hearing Kellin Quinn's raw vocals in the remixed version. Since the game has come out the boss fight themes have become iconic to the Sonic series and I hope to hear more just like it in the future.
Man, I can't believe over a year ago, I stayed up till 5am day one just playing the game. I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome that Sonic Team put out here, and they dropped the ball so damn fast. It almost feels like a stroke of false advertising. I would see all the characters interacting with the skills that you needed quite a number of skill points to actually get, and almost never saw them facing off against the actual guardians. Like they almost didn't want to show it off. I wouldn't have had a problem with a marginally harder Sonic game if I was told that that was what I was getting. But playing the game was a facelift I was not expecting. I heard mixed, but mostly negative responses on this game and goddamn I can see why. While this update fixes some issues that the original game had, it accentuates so many other problems making the game a slog to play. I almost cannot tell if my initial playthrough of the game, and review was my genuine honest reaction, or just the giddy of playing a new Sonic game after five years of nothing. It pains me because I love this blue goober but they have got a lot of damn work to do if they want to even remotely be close to Mario right now. The One Way Dream can occur. Just not like this.
Sonic Frontiers came out over a year ago now (wow!), and exceeded my expectations for a new formula that Sonic would proceed to move forward with at high speeds. That being said, I feel with this update that Sonic tripped over and fell into the ocean of the Starfall Islands and took his friends with him. Playing through the new content included was an absolute slog. It was frustrating, boring at times, and just plain unfair. I can absolutely see why so many have dropped the update completely, and a need to play this and get my thoughts out were the only reason I continued myself.
This is the 3rd update to the game promised by the developers at Sonic Team to add new playable characters and a new story. One of these is correct anyway. I do not believe a new story is taking the exact same events that occurred on Rhea Island (Sonic getting fully corrupted by the Cyber energy, and having his friends save him) leading to Ouranos, and playing it. I'm not sure what I expected with a new story however this is anything but.
The new playable characters include Tails, Knuckles and Amy who all play rather similarly to Sonic. By similarly of course, I mean they all have a boost. For some god forsaken reason, you have to unlock a number of really basic abilities with the characters. I believe with Knuckles you have to unlock the ability to attack, who has been able to attack in every single goddamn game he's been included in since Adventure 1. They all have to unlock the Stomp, Attack, Parry, Spindash, and some particular special moves through 𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡 characters own skill tree. I have no fucking clue why they decided to separate every skill tree it just amounts to triple the work exploring the island. When I saw the trailer leading up to this update's release, I was under the impression that all of their, or at least the most BASIC moves would be usable without the skill tree. At this point I've played Sonic for so long that it feels wrong and weird to play characters similar to him without the most essential moves. Anyway Tails, can fly, Knuckles can glide and climb specific walls, and Amy can jump really high. Big woop.
Tails doesn't control terribly, but the camera doesn't follow where you steer him while flying, so it creates this awkward mess in my hands where I'm holding the jump button while moving the character and the camera. Come the fuck on. He also has the Tornado as an unlockable ability and he can fly wherever he needs to as long as he has enough boost. You can get infinite flight by cylooping to make an infinity sign though giving you endless boost. It breaks world design and it hurts that it's the most fun I have playing as him. Knuckles is not great. He weirdly has a second of charge up before he glides and the actual in-air movement is slow like I'm controlling him underwater. Compared to something like Adventure 2 where he follows where the player moves with even the slightest stick movement. You could mash the stick and he'd be going left, right, up and down and all around. Realistically, it doesn't make sense to make him control like that but that made him much easier to control with on the fly movement. In the Final horizon, however, this is not the case. As I said earlier, it feels like I'm controlling him underwater and I feel like he'll randomly just clip off the wall sometimes as well. He's really not that fun to play as here. However, because of that second of gliding startup he has a glitch very similar to the Knuckles in Rise of Lyric, where where you can do the three hit attack and keep rising up into the air. It's pretty funny and absolutely destroys some world design. Amy looks like she plays similarly to how she did in Adventure 1. I would not know, because I still haven't played it. She's the most complete feeling character and it's actually pretty fun to bounce around with her stomp and reach higher places. Instead of using her Hammer for most of the attacks, she uses fortune telling cards which had been a forgotten aspect of her personality until recently. I like that they're bringing it back, but I seriously believe using her hammer for the majority of her attacks is just better aesthetically. Sonic controls the exact same, only now, if you didn't already have the spindash unlocked, the game auto unlocks it for you. And amazingly, it controls better than the boost, and once again breaks world design. It is so unbelievably fun to shoot off into space off an incline and still control where you're going in the air. With the spindash, you have almost no real reason to use the boost unless you want extra air or something.
Ouranos has been given a new look and by that I mean it is the exact same just with more shit in it for the new characters. There are character specific sections of level design made for Tails, Knuckles and Amy respectively. They are color coded so you know who goes where and honestly thank fuck, but it would've been really nice if all the character just shared one new giant skill tree. At the end of these little platforming challenges you find Koco who give you character specific skill points. You can't accept the points unless you did the challenge as the specific character in mind, which is stupid. I know that if you could it would break the game and just make you play as one character for the most part but that's just more fun to me. The pop-in is even worse than the base game making some really simple platforming challenges extremely frustrating. How is it this bad? The guardians in the overworld have been upgraded, but feel like your average "super hard mode" mod. They all move and attack extremely quickly now to the point of not even being react which just sucks to play against. It means I have to find a way to cheese them all somehow rather than look cool destroying them. They all also do much more damage than normal. If you're not careful you can dig your own grave very quickly. Rather than wanting to fight these guardians and test my skills I went out of my way to avoid them as much as possible. Don't even bother trying to fight them with characters other than Sonic by the way and even then good luck with him.
Added with the changes to the island, there are now Koco Trials that you access through climbing these towers. These towers you climb are a true test of your patience as sometimes Sonic will just not homing attack onto something, or will randomly just go flying off for one reason or another. Call it a skill issue but I couldn't give a damn. It was here that I learnt if you changed to difficulty setting, from hard, a lot of these challenges would just kind of play themselves, and you know what? I'd rather that than try to do that shit over and over again. The trials themselves also wildly vary in difficulty having some trials that you finish almost immediately first try and others that you'll likely spend over 10+ minutes on. It's really inconsistent and oftentimes felt like absolute bullshit. There's one trial which is essentially a boss rush where you have a limited amount of rings, and very little upgrades. A chance to revisit these adrenaline pumping fights wouldn't be so bad if the parry wasn't so terrible. They changed it here now requiring the player to have perfect timing with it to function. That being said, none of these bosses are designed with this new parry system in mind. It's very difficult to tell what exactly is the right time to parry and the bosses' animations do not sell it well like the games it's trying to mimic (Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Rising, Bayonetta, etc.). If you fail this particular trial you have to start all the way from the beginning. Having to do the same 2 minute wyvern cutscene over and over again, I years being taken off of my life.
I'll make the cyberspace section quick. It is easily the best part about this new update. There are no new stage themes, but these are the most cohesive, fun levels since Generations. To my knowledge they are all completely original by design and once again they're just really fun to play. 100%ing them kind of makes me want to rip my hair out, but after some time I stopped caring about that type of thing and just played the stages to get the fastest time and S Rank.
One subject of much controversy in the original game was the ending. Yeah we're talking about this now. Supreme in the previous game was just a half-baked, worse Giganto and left a poor taste in the mouth of many players. And if you beat it on hard mode, You got an Ikaruga clone to play. Yippee. I do like the ending where Sage sacrificed herself for the sake of everyone else around her including her father figure. Most of the impact of that was taken away when said father figure revealed he had a backup of her, but whatever. In the new update, they retcon this ending having it finish off primarily with Gigan- sorry Supreme. The first phase is the exact same as the one in the main game. Underwhelming, and done in a flash. However, Supreme is immediately given new life thanks to 'The End'. It is here where we also see 'Super Sonic 2' glowing crimson, and having blue eyes instead of red. I think this is the first new super form since Black Knight in 2009, with Excalibur Sonic. I am fully sure the naming isn't coincidental. Anyway the boss fight itself is... something. Once again, the new perfect parry system is at play here and it still feels terrible. It's still very difficult to tell when exactly to be on the defense since the bosses animations make it difficult to tell when an attack will hit and when it will not. Supreme also sends these meteors at you that you also have to parry. It sends a ton of them at you and unless you're a god or something you're not parrying every single one. Supreme constantly has a stream of regenerating health to it that the game, straight up, does not teach you how to get rid of. I was stuck on this boss for almost an before I just gave up and looked up how to beat it. Playing against this boss felt really archaic. Like I was playing an old JRPG boss, or playing an old game with arbitrary difficulty. Unfortunately, I am not a child with all the time in the world anymore to solve this puzzle. I am a college junior taking 17 credits, I was lucky to even finish this DLC. Anyway, once you finish the boss off, Sonic gets not one form but two new special forms. Unfortunately 'Super Sonic Cyber', completely overtaken by the cyber corruption and glowing a black and light blue along with some sharp teeth, is literally only seen for 43 seconds and immediately obliterates 'The End'. And it's all in a damn cutscene. Talk about wasted potential.
Before I move on to my final thoughts on the new update, I have to give my kudos to Tomoya Ohtani and everyone else in the music division at Sonic Team. Once again, they hit it out of the park with the music in this game, and this update cemented Frontiers as a whole being one of my favorite Sonic soundtracks period. Again, I'm not sure that Drum and Bass is exactly my thing, but I feel like in this scenario it works considering the stages take place in cyberspace. They're all remixes of tracks that were previously in the game, but they all sound great. The new character themes, which play in the overworld, don't really fit the characters all that well, except Amy. Knuckles' and Tails' themes sound a bit out of place for the characters but that doesn't stop it from being good music. And as much as I hated some of the Koco trials, the music is alright. The guardians themes have also been changed a bit and with some you can very much tell they went back in the lab, while others sound way too samey to the original. The only major downgrade was the Spider's Theme which got rid of the trumpets that play about 2/3s into the song, which was extremely reminiscent of Sonic Unleashed's OST for me. Of course nothing needs to be said that hasn't already been said about the orchestral and revisited versions of 'I'm Here'. Honestly the only enjoyable part of the Supreme boss fight, was hearing both of those and especially hearing Kellin Quinn's raw vocals in the remixed version. Since the game has come out the boss fight themes have become iconic to the Sonic series and I hope to hear more just like it in the future.
Man, I can't believe over a year ago, I stayed up till 5am day one just playing the game. I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome that Sonic Team put out here, and they dropped the ball so damn fast. It almost feels like a stroke of false advertising. I would see all the characters interacting with the skills that you needed quite a number of skill points to actually get, and almost never saw them facing off against the actual guardians. Like they almost didn't want to show it off. I wouldn't have had a problem with a marginally harder Sonic game if I was told that that was what I was getting. But playing the game was a facelift I was not expecting. I heard mixed, but mostly negative responses on this game and goddamn I can see why. While this update fixes some issues that the original game had, it accentuates so many other problems making the game a slog to play. I almost cannot tell if my initial playthrough of the game, and review was my genuine honest reaction, or just the giddy of playing a new Sonic game after five years of nothing. It pains me because I love this blue goober but they have got a lot of damn work to do if they want to even remotely be close to Mario right now. The One Way Dream can occur. Just not like this.
2023
It's really tough out here in the streets.
I love Street Fighter. I've loved playing the games since I was a kid. I skipped out on 5, but eventually played it at a friend's house and was promptly okay with it. I didn't like the way the game felt or looked and even though I played it after it's abysmal launch, I was still not satisfied with it and preferred the 2D sprites and game feel of old. 6+ years later and Street Fighter 6 is announced. And it looked good. Damn good. I was hyped for this game from reveal to release, constantly looking out for any new bits of information I could get my hands on. New characters, as well as old characters redesigns, new features, modes and more.
After two months of the game's release, I feel like I can say, without a rose tinted view, that this is one of the all time greatest fighting games (with my somewhat limited knowledge of these things), and that the amount of content and things to do in this game, should be the standard for fighting games going forward.
The release of this game compared to the previous installment is like night and day. The big difference being, this is an actual video game. The game looks absolutely gorgeous, running off of Capcom's proprietary RE Engine which powers the more recent Resident Evil games (who would've thought), and Devil May Cry 5 just to name a few. I didn't expect a more realistic style to fit Street Fighter as it is a much more "anime" looking series, (Alpha and Gem/Puzzle fighter especially), but the characters all translated very well to the more realistic art style. The game feel is snappy yet feels nice enough to pick up and play for veterans and newcomers alike. It's a simple game on the outside with lots of depth hidden in. The characters all have amazing designs and differ in play styles so anyone will be bound to find a character that fits their fancy. The different play options available here are awesome as well. Some people don't wanna take the time to learn how to do complex inputs, and others physically can't, so the modern play style was a great move to expand the player base. It is the crux of some controversy from veterans of the series people crying about getting their asses beat by a modern player who has no skill or whatever. I play using classic controls because that's what I'm used to, but who the hell cares in the grand scheme. If another player finds the game more fun to play using modern controls who am I to stop their fun. I also recall seeing a steam review of the game with the writer noting that they had a disability and wouldn't be able to play the game normally without the modern control play style. Now steam reviews are also the same place you'll see "40 year old men playing games with their kids and getting closer to them through it" or whatever but this one really seemed genuine.
There are three major aspects of Street Fighter 6. The World Tour, Battle Hub and Fighting Ground. Let's start with World Tour and just go onwards down the list. I'll definitely have more to say about some game modes than others.
World Tour is an open area single player campaign that puts you in the fighter's seat. You create an avatar and explore the Final Fight's world of Metro City. This game mode is an excellent tutorial for people who have never played a Street fighter game before or really any fighting game for that matter. It has multiple side quests that ease you into the mechanics of SF6 throughout it's runtime and a large world to explore where you can beat up almost anyone you want in the streets, take part time jobs that act as little mini games subconsciously teaching you inputs while earning some in-game cash, deck out your avatar with drip and swag as the kids say, and meet the roster of characters in SF6 which you can learn moves from, and learn more about them. That last part of that run-on sentence is the major highlight for me as you occasionally get these beautiful art CGs to look at while the character explains their lore. It got me to raise everyone's bond levels to max just to see all the art. The actual story of World Tour is... serviceable. Nothing amazing but it was able to keep my attention all the way through. However I did have some gripes with the world tour. After a few chapters, of which this game has 15, the novelty of smacking anyone you want starts to wear away and starts to become more of a chore than something you want to do. There are hostile enemies in the over world that will attack on site and they become more of an annoyance than anything else when you're 20 levels above them. This is more of a me issue but still impacted the way I played the game. World Tour is the most graphically intensive part of sf6. It's the only time I've ever had a game chug with my RTX 2070. This only happens occasionally in intensive parts of Metro City but it's still an annoyance and even when I set everything to the lowest setting possible I still lose frames. This last gripe is also purely a me thing. I spent over 40 hours in WT almost getting 100% completion in side quests and character mastery. That being said I feel like it lasted way longer than it should've. I know right. Person is complaining about spending more time in the game and still chooses to spend more time in the game. Yeah it's a pretty mundane complaint but I like to play as much as I can at an accelerated pace if that makes sense. Overall though, WT is the new standard for single player fighting game content. I'm not saying every other fighting game has to have a character creator and have an open world or all that. But every game should strive to explain it's mechanics in such an intuitive form as this. I've never seen anything like it and we probably won't see anything like it again. It's seriously super cool and if you haven't already played it definitely give it a go.
Battle Hub. The only place in SF6 where you can watch some freakish avatar amalgamations attempting to be human fight it out, get told off by a diamond Ken that you suck and will never amount to anything in life and play Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. The Battle Hub is the big social aspect of SF6. A giant lobby where you can communicate with others, drip out your avatar, take photos, play retro Street Fighter and Capcom games, have a rave party, watch major games on the big screen and more. It's really cool that you can just hop on a cabinet and find some people that are looking to improve, fuck around, and have fun all in the same place. It's just not really my cup of tea unfortunately. I really only go in there to see what retro games are on rotation. (Currently holding out for Third Strike, Gem Fighter or any Darkstalkers game for that matter.) Overall the Battle Hub is cute and neat, but that's kind of it for me. I don't normally go here to play my matches though. That is reserved for the...
Fighting Ground. The Fighting Ground is where you play matches offline, play any character's arcade mode, labbing characters and learning how they play, some more casual "for fun" modes and of course online. Unfortunately I haven't played anyone's arcade mode yet, but I'll make sure to do some sometime. The training and labbing sections of the game are absolutely superb, some of the most in-game resources for any fighting game I've ever seen. You've got character guides which teach you each one of any character's moves and what situations to best use them in and combo trials if you don't value your sanity. I was able to get by with a Silver 2 Cammy for two months just off the resources in-game. Not impressive, I know, but it's my achievement. I haven't actually haven't been able to try out the Extreme Battles either, which are the "for fun" casual matches you can play with zany rulesets. I definitely want to though they look super fun. Now for the online, you can either play casual matches that don't weigh on your elo, and ranked matches which do. You can also set up a personal room to play with close friends. I don't have any that play fighting games the way I do though, so it's mostly just ranked matches for me. I don't even really care too much about the rank itself I just wanna see how far I can go and gain character knowledge from other players.
I still do have some extra gripes with the game. DLC practices and the goddamn fighters pass. Look. I get it. Without these two things the game would be dead in the gutter in a few months. And it does elongate the life of the game. With dlc I don't really mind it too much cause I've gotten used to it at this point. But the fighters pass is not something I'm a fan of. I've never been a fan of this business model to be quite honest. You get free goodies by doing certain tasks in a game, but you can pay a premium to get even better stuff. The only thing that really did catch my eye is that there are old games on rotation to own and play on your own time in the premium fighters pass, and it rotates with each pass. I didn't have enough money to even buy this game at full price. I bought it off a damn grey market site. You expect me to shell out extra cash just to own a digital rom of Street Fighter 1? Hell nah. At least put a good game in the premium pass. I almost forgot to mention that there is Denuvo in the PC version of the game as well. For what reason? I do not know. Denuvo's worthless these days cause games always get cracked regardless so it's just more strain put on a computer's CPU for no reason.
Nonetheless, Capcom really blew it out of the park with this game. A launch that eclipsed the previous installment, engaging gameplay, a treasure trove of content, visuals that really pop, a fun and varied roster of characters and an okay soundtrack. I completely forgot about talking about the music to be honest. It definitely strikes me more as something I have to listen more of to really start liking it.
Anyway Street Fighter 6 is pretty cool. Fighting games are fucking back.
I love Street Fighter. I've loved playing the games since I was a kid. I skipped out on 5, but eventually played it at a friend's house and was promptly okay with it. I didn't like the way the game felt or looked and even though I played it after it's abysmal launch, I was still not satisfied with it and preferred the 2D sprites and game feel of old. 6+ years later and Street Fighter 6 is announced. And it looked good. Damn good. I was hyped for this game from reveal to release, constantly looking out for any new bits of information I could get my hands on. New characters, as well as old characters redesigns, new features, modes and more.
After two months of the game's release, I feel like I can say, without a rose tinted view, that this is one of the all time greatest fighting games (with my somewhat limited knowledge of these things), and that the amount of content and things to do in this game, should be the standard for fighting games going forward.
The release of this game compared to the previous installment is like night and day. The big difference being, this is an actual video game. The game looks absolutely gorgeous, running off of Capcom's proprietary RE Engine which powers the more recent Resident Evil games (who would've thought), and Devil May Cry 5 just to name a few. I didn't expect a more realistic style to fit Street Fighter as it is a much more "anime" looking series, (Alpha and Gem/Puzzle fighter especially), but the characters all translated very well to the more realistic art style. The game feel is snappy yet feels nice enough to pick up and play for veterans and newcomers alike. It's a simple game on the outside with lots of depth hidden in. The characters all have amazing designs and differ in play styles so anyone will be bound to find a character that fits their fancy. The different play options available here are awesome as well. Some people don't wanna take the time to learn how to do complex inputs, and others physically can't, so the modern play style was a great move to expand the player base. It is the crux of some controversy from veterans of the series people crying about getting their asses beat by a modern player who has no skill or whatever. I play using classic controls because that's what I'm used to, but who the hell cares in the grand scheme. If another player finds the game more fun to play using modern controls who am I to stop their fun. I also recall seeing a steam review of the game with the writer noting that they had a disability and wouldn't be able to play the game normally without the modern control play style. Now steam reviews are also the same place you'll see "40 year old men playing games with their kids and getting closer to them through it" or whatever but this one really seemed genuine.
There are three major aspects of Street Fighter 6. The World Tour, Battle Hub and Fighting Ground. Let's start with World Tour and just go onwards down the list. I'll definitely have more to say about some game modes than others.
World Tour is an open area single player campaign that puts you in the fighter's seat. You create an avatar and explore the Final Fight's world of Metro City. This game mode is an excellent tutorial for people who have never played a Street fighter game before or really any fighting game for that matter. It has multiple side quests that ease you into the mechanics of SF6 throughout it's runtime and a large world to explore where you can beat up almost anyone you want in the streets, take part time jobs that act as little mini games subconsciously teaching you inputs while earning some in-game cash, deck out your avatar with drip and swag as the kids say, and meet the roster of characters in SF6 which you can learn moves from, and learn more about them. That last part of that run-on sentence is the major highlight for me as you occasionally get these beautiful art CGs to look at while the character explains their lore. It got me to raise everyone's bond levels to max just to see all the art. The actual story of World Tour is... serviceable. Nothing amazing but it was able to keep my attention all the way through. However I did have some gripes with the world tour. After a few chapters, of which this game has 15, the novelty of smacking anyone you want starts to wear away and starts to become more of a chore than something you want to do. There are hostile enemies in the over world that will attack on site and they become more of an annoyance than anything else when you're 20 levels above them. This is more of a me issue but still impacted the way I played the game. World Tour is the most graphically intensive part of sf6. It's the only time I've ever had a game chug with my RTX 2070. This only happens occasionally in intensive parts of Metro City but it's still an annoyance and even when I set everything to the lowest setting possible I still lose frames. This last gripe is also purely a me thing. I spent over 40 hours in WT almost getting 100% completion in side quests and character mastery. That being said I feel like it lasted way longer than it should've. I know right. Person is complaining about spending more time in the game and still chooses to spend more time in the game. Yeah it's a pretty mundane complaint but I like to play as much as I can at an accelerated pace if that makes sense. Overall though, WT is the new standard for single player fighting game content. I'm not saying every other fighting game has to have a character creator and have an open world or all that. But every game should strive to explain it's mechanics in such an intuitive form as this. I've never seen anything like it and we probably won't see anything like it again. It's seriously super cool and if you haven't already played it definitely give it a go.
Battle Hub. The only place in SF6 where you can watch some freakish avatar amalgamations attempting to be human fight it out, get told off by a diamond Ken that you suck and will never amount to anything in life and play Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. The Battle Hub is the big social aspect of SF6. A giant lobby where you can communicate with others, drip out your avatar, take photos, play retro Street Fighter and Capcom games, have a rave party, watch major games on the big screen and more. It's really cool that you can just hop on a cabinet and find some people that are looking to improve, fuck around, and have fun all in the same place. It's just not really my cup of tea unfortunately. I really only go in there to see what retro games are on rotation. (Currently holding out for Third Strike, Gem Fighter or any Darkstalkers game for that matter.) Overall the Battle Hub is cute and neat, but that's kind of it for me. I don't normally go here to play my matches though. That is reserved for the...
Fighting Ground. The Fighting Ground is where you play matches offline, play any character's arcade mode, labbing characters and learning how they play, some more casual "for fun" modes and of course online. Unfortunately I haven't played anyone's arcade mode yet, but I'll make sure to do some sometime. The training and labbing sections of the game are absolutely superb, some of the most in-game resources for any fighting game I've ever seen. You've got character guides which teach you each one of any character's moves and what situations to best use them in and combo trials if you don't value your sanity. I was able to get by with a Silver 2 Cammy for two months just off the resources in-game. Not impressive, I know, but it's my achievement. I haven't actually haven't been able to try out the Extreme Battles either, which are the "for fun" casual matches you can play with zany rulesets. I definitely want to though they look super fun. Now for the online, you can either play casual matches that don't weigh on your elo, and ranked matches which do. You can also set up a personal room to play with close friends. I don't have any that play fighting games the way I do though, so it's mostly just ranked matches for me. I don't even really care too much about the rank itself I just wanna see how far I can go and gain character knowledge from other players.
I still do have some extra gripes with the game. DLC practices and the goddamn fighters pass. Look. I get it. Without these two things the game would be dead in the gutter in a few months. And it does elongate the life of the game. With dlc I don't really mind it too much cause I've gotten used to it at this point. But the fighters pass is not something I'm a fan of. I've never been a fan of this business model to be quite honest. You get free goodies by doing certain tasks in a game, but you can pay a premium to get even better stuff. The only thing that really did catch my eye is that there are old games on rotation to own and play on your own time in the premium fighters pass, and it rotates with each pass. I didn't have enough money to even buy this game at full price. I bought it off a damn grey market site. You expect me to shell out extra cash just to own a digital rom of Street Fighter 1? Hell nah. At least put a good game in the premium pass. I almost forgot to mention that there is Denuvo in the PC version of the game as well. For what reason? I do not know. Denuvo's worthless these days cause games always get cracked regardless so it's just more strain put on a computer's CPU for no reason.
Nonetheless, Capcom really blew it out of the park with this game. A launch that eclipsed the previous installment, engaging gameplay, a treasure trove of content, visuals that really pop, a fun and varied roster of characters and an okay soundtrack. I completely forgot about talking about the music to be honest. It definitely strikes me more as something I have to listen more of to really start liking it.
Anyway Street Fighter 6 is pretty cool. Fighting games are fucking back.
Gonna try and make this one short.
It's impossible to make this game worse than Breath of the Wild, because it expands so much on the ideas of the original game while also refining a ton of issues found there as well. Objectively, the game is Breath of the Wild x10. The amount of creativity at play here, with literally everything creates infinite possibilities on how to play the game. The amount of content in the game trumps Breath as well, to an almost overwhelming degree. The game is a masterpiece. However, it just lacked the magical feeling Breath had for me. It's still a great game, just felt monotonous much more quickly then Breath did.
It's impossible to make this game worse than Breath of the Wild, because it expands so much on the ideas of the original game while also refining a ton of issues found there as well. Objectively, the game is Breath of the Wild x10. The amount of creativity at play here, with literally everything creates infinite possibilities on how to play the game. The amount of content in the game trumps Breath as well, to an almost overwhelming degree. The game is a masterpiece. However, it just lacked the magical feeling Breath had for me. It's still a great game, just felt monotonous much more quickly then Breath did.
2022
Crazy that they drop this very very surprising bombshell right around the time I start having way less fun with the game. Like Clockwork.
I thought PvE was the whole reason they branded this game as Overwatch 2. It's even less than that now. It's a skinned version of the original with better aspects on some fronts, I'm ngl, but way worse on other facets. What a fucking disappointment. At least this game gets me get a lot of discussion out of the query "What makes a sequel a sequel". I'm really starting to think multiplayer shooters just aren't my thing.
I thought PvE was the whole reason they branded this game as Overwatch 2. It's even less than that now. It's a skinned version of the original with better aspects on some fronts, I'm ngl, but way worse on other facets. What a fucking disappointment. At least this game gets me get a lot of discussion out of the query "What makes a sequel a sequel". I'm really starting to think multiplayer shooters just aren't my thing.
"This world really ends with me huh Fret?" says Rindo.
"That's neo dude." says Fret.
A worthy sequel to the cult classic, but falters in some areas whilst being better than it's predecessor in others. The game is MUCH more accessible than the original taking on a more ARPG or Kingdom Hearts/ Modern Final Fantasy approach to it's gameplay. It's a bit mashy yes, but timing hits correctly gives me dopamine so idgaf. The original game you had like three different ways of playing it. Playing it on an og DS with the touch screen, an unorthodox playstyle but still unique and challenging, the mobile port which changes a lot of things so it can fit on one screen and the switch vers. which is basically just the mobile vers. but now you can play it on your TV and give yourself carpal tunnel. Now it's just universalized with one controller which is good.
The story isn't as hard hitting/impactful as the original for me just cause I relate much more to the previous protag (the char in my pfp) Neku, than I do Rindo. The og twewy was the type of game I could've really used during middle school. Anyway, it's sound and enjoyable from start to finish but I just don't find the main protag as interesting as the chars around him. They all have a lot more personality, and ended up being more likable imo. I don't hate Rindo but he's just ok. There's also a number of random plot devices that just get added into the game just for kicks. Lot of Deus Ex Machina type situations. The game has a time travel mechanic in which you go back in time to stop something bad from happening, but at times I felt that this mechanic just added WAY too much damn fluff to the game. It doesn't help that there are so many damn textboxes in the game either. I'm not joking there's so much fucking text in this game, and it turns out to be a massive pacebreaker sometimes.
Music is once again phenomenal. I didn't think they'd be able to translate the urban mid to late 2000s style all that well here. And yet it still works almost 20 years later. I don't love every single track in this game like I do with the original but there's still some major highlights in the form of 'Kill the Itch', 'OWARI-HAJIMARI - NEO MIX', 'We're Losing You', 'Breaking Free' (especially) and more.
On a performance front, I played half the game on switch and played the other half roughly on PC. It really doesn't make that much sense to me that the Switch version runs the way it does. The World Ends with You as a series strikes me as a Nintendo series in the same way that Kingdom Hearts strikes as a PlayStation series. I really wish they optimized the game for switch in a similar vein to how Persona 5 Royal and Nier Automata were optimized for switch. It runs at 30 FPS max but drops when way too much effects are on screen. The PC version on the other hand has an uncapped FPS, much better visuals, etc. Purchase this game anywhere but the switch if possible. The jump in frames genuinely took a bit to get used to as the gameplay was much faster. Other than that the game still nails this weird urban atmosphere that I'd argue the TWEWY series is known for and the visuals are nice enough.
Even though there is some really annoying shit in this game, some of the bosses, side quests, constant backtracking, overabundance of text, etc. I generally really enjoyed my time with the game. I played most of it on Hard mode and only had to switch to the easier modes a few times. It really feels like The World Ends with You again but modernized. Unfortunately, this seems to be the last we'll see of this unique, risk-taking series. It's extremely low popularity despite not even being advertised at all by Square and then again being shadowdropped on Steam the day before Persona 5 Royal released on PC solidifies it. I really love these games, and it's extremely unfortunate how poorly they were handled. Please consider these underrated modern classics.
"That's neo dude." says Fret.
A worthy sequel to the cult classic, but falters in some areas whilst being better than it's predecessor in others. The game is MUCH more accessible than the original taking on a more ARPG or Kingdom Hearts/ Modern Final Fantasy approach to it's gameplay. It's a bit mashy yes, but timing hits correctly gives me dopamine so idgaf. The original game you had like three different ways of playing it. Playing it on an og DS with the touch screen, an unorthodox playstyle but still unique and challenging, the mobile port which changes a lot of things so it can fit on one screen and the switch vers. which is basically just the mobile vers. but now you can play it on your TV and give yourself carpal tunnel. Now it's just universalized with one controller which is good.
The story isn't as hard hitting/impactful as the original for me just cause I relate much more to the previous protag (the char in my pfp) Neku, than I do Rindo. The og twewy was the type of game I could've really used during middle school. Anyway, it's sound and enjoyable from start to finish but I just don't find the main protag as interesting as the chars around him. They all have a lot more personality, and ended up being more likable imo. I don't hate Rindo but he's just ok. There's also a number of random plot devices that just get added into the game just for kicks. Lot of Deus Ex Machina type situations. The game has a time travel mechanic in which you go back in time to stop something bad from happening, but at times I felt that this mechanic just added WAY too much damn fluff to the game. It doesn't help that there are so many damn textboxes in the game either. I'm not joking there's so much fucking text in this game, and it turns out to be a massive pacebreaker sometimes.
Music is once again phenomenal. I didn't think they'd be able to translate the urban mid to late 2000s style all that well here. And yet it still works almost 20 years later. I don't love every single track in this game like I do with the original but there's still some major highlights in the form of 'Kill the Itch', 'OWARI-HAJIMARI - NEO MIX', 'We're Losing You', 'Breaking Free' (especially) and more.
On a performance front, I played half the game on switch and played the other half roughly on PC. It really doesn't make that much sense to me that the Switch version runs the way it does. The World Ends with You as a series strikes me as a Nintendo series in the same way that Kingdom Hearts strikes as a PlayStation series. I really wish they optimized the game for switch in a similar vein to how Persona 5 Royal and Nier Automata were optimized for switch. It runs at 30 FPS max but drops when way too much effects are on screen. The PC version on the other hand has an uncapped FPS, much better visuals, etc. Purchase this game anywhere but the switch if possible. The jump in frames genuinely took a bit to get used to as the gameplay was much faster. Other than that the game still nails this weird urban atmosphere that I'd argue the TWEWY series is known for and the visuals are nice enough.
Even though there is some really annoying shit in this game, some of the bosses, side quests, constant backtracking, overabundance of text, etc. I generally really enjoyed my time with the game. I played most of it on Hard mode and only had to switch to the easier modes a few times. It really feels like The World Ends with You again but modernized. Unfortunately, this seems to be the last we'll see of this unique, risk-taking series. It's extremely low popularity despite not even being advertised at all by Square and then again being shadowdropped on Steam the day before Persona 5 Royal released on PC solidifies it. I really love these games, and it's extremely unfortunate how poorly they were handled. Please consider these underrated modern classics.
Incredible style and interface very reminiscent of the Studio Trigger works. A great soundtrack with some bopping tunes. Characters seem great so far, but I wish we got to learn a bit more about Beat! It was a bit confusing learning the controls at first and it certainly takes some getting used to, but I love everything about this game so far. It's free. You lose nothing by trying it. Certainly looking forward to more!
Downloaded this game cause I heard Himeno is getting in it soon. Will update and rate the game accordingly solely based on whether I got her or not.
-EDIT- I got her :)
Alright. I think I've played like five hours of this game. I remember a friend of mine talking about it months ago, and I took a look and thought about how it has rather unique gameplay for a gacha, and proceeded to not think about it again. Then I hear about the Chainsaw Man collaboration and how I can have the chance of owning a animated jpeg of Himeno. I'm sold. I download the game a few days before the collab begins to grab some extra summoning stuff for when she's available.
I'm not gonna lie. I like a bit of fanservice in character designs, whether it be women or men, but holy fuck. This game goes way overboard for a game that's readily available on the app store and not considered a straight up hentai game (How did Volume's violently shaking ass get a Teen rating on the app store). Other than that the game is... eh. The story is mildly engaging, Anis is cute and honestly kinda carries the game, and the gameplay has a fun loop. To be honest, I don't really know what else to say about the game. It's a gacha. I got Himeno for free though so I'm happy.
-EDIT- I got her :)
Alright. I think I've played like five hours of this game. I remember a friend of mine talking about it months ago, and I took a look and thought about how it has rather unique gameplay for a gacha, and proceeded to not think about it again. Then I hear about the Chainsaw Man collaboration and how I can have the chance of owning a animated jpeg of Himeno. I'm sold. I download the game a few days before the collab begins to grab some extra summoning stuff for when she's available.
I'm not gonna lie. I like a bit of fanservice in character designs, whether it be women or men, but holy fuck. This game goes way overboard for a game that's readily available on the app store and not considered a straight up hentai game (How did Volume's violently shaking ass get a Teen rating on the app store). Other than that the game is... eh. The story is mildly engaging, Anis is cute and honestly kinda carries the game, and the gameplay has a fun loop. To be honest, I don't really know what else to say about the game. It's a gacha. I got Himeno for free though so I'm happy.
An absolutely wild time with a full four stack and one of the most fun multiplayer platformers out there. Great memories made and lots of screaming at the screen. Highly recommend if you've got a pack of friends that are down to finish the game in an afternoon or so.