So far first impressions but I can't think of a single thing wrong with the game so far.

Movement and combat is some of the best in series. Hard mode is challenging but manageable (I have beaten smt 3 on hard so maybe I'm just built different.) The UI is incredible but you've seen 50 million reposts of it on Twitter.

A lot was added to the story and dorm life to flesh out the story and they knocked it out of the park. I felt more connected and interested in the characters this time.

If the game can stick the landing this will be the best persona game.

I'm a sinner for early access survival games. I had fun in Ark but that's something I couldn't recommend to anyone in good conscience. This game is equally time wasting but at least twice as good. There are legitimate criticisms you could have about the "Pal" designs in this game where's it pretty clear they were too close to pokemon. I swear to god I saw a meganium and gyrados in this game. However, anyone calling them an asset flip doesn't understand what an asset flip is, and Nintendo, one of the most litigious game companies out there still hasn't sued really does say a lot. The idea of using your pokemon as base workers instead of just as tools like ark does is a considerable upgrade. There's also a lot more pokemon than there are dinosaurs. The map design is pretty generic. The combat though can be a bit fucked. Whether thats due to lag or to dumbass decisions is unknown. For example, many moves are piercing which means they'll also pierce the pokemon you're riding and hit you. Armor in this game is also fake. It breaks basically instantly and barely gives you the HP to compensate. You are still in high danger if you ever want to be an active participant and you will be because the aggro will randomly switch from your mon to your player character. You also can't control the mon unless you're riding it. The pokemon will just randomly use one of 3 moves you assign it based on cooldown. So the combat isn't particularly fun, I mostly played to get stronger pokemon and expand my base. It's a very good game to turn your brain off to though.

TLDR Good brain off survival game. If you liked Ark this is much better, play this instead.

Just finished this as my first Ys game and I'm not as positive on it as a lot of other people seem to be.

I've heard people say that Ys VIII has one of the better stories in this franchise and let me tell ya, that's not exactly encouraging. I have some amount of tolerance for convoluted stories but I do have a threshold where it starts to get too much. For the majority of the game I was on board with the plot, but the nonsensical elements ramped up until the ass-pull true ending where the story lost me. What's worse is that I grinded sidequests and menial tasks in order to get this ending so I'd get a satisfying conclusion to this game that I spent a long time on. I wish this game and other games didn't have requirements in order to avoid getting the bad ending because I did not enjoy the grind. And even though I didn't get the so-called 'Bad Ending', It still feels like I got a bad ending... as in a lackluster, poorly written one.

But I wouldn't be bothered by the ending if I didn't care about the story up to that point. And yeah, I enjoyed a lot of aspects of this game's story and characters. The protagonist and his makeshift JRPG squad are castaways on an Island after their ship sunk. It's a pretty neat setup for a game like this and I enjoyed how simple it was at the beginning. But they added a lot of new elements to the story, which was okay at first because some of these elements were interesting... but some of the added elements just muddied the parts that I liked about the story.

I've talked a lot about story so far and from what I understand the Ys franchise isn't usually about the story. But I have similarly mixed opinions on the gameplay. Ys VIII is an Action RPG, which is a genre that sometimes feels confused as to what it is. Are you an action game? Or are you an RPG? Or are you a Jack of all Trades, Master of None? Well in my opinion an Action RPG like Ys VIII should be judged mostly as an action game, because for all intents and purposes that's what it is. RPG elements like equipment and defensive stats matter somewhat in battle, but for a lot of encounters I was able to ignore these things by simply dodging the enemy's attacks. So it's not purely strategic in the way a turn based RPG is. And for that reason I can't help but be underwhelmed by the fact that so much attention was put into the RPG elements of the combat while the action was nothing special.

Ys VIII's combat is okay. Not amazing. Definitely not even close to being Platinum Games level, even when you compare it to some of their weaker combat systems. Enemies in Ys VIII have a bad habit of not reacting visually to being hit, which makes combat look stiff and lifeless. Hits don't feel like they have any impact. I do think they managed to design a number of interesting boss encounters, but I never thought that the action combat felt great to play. Interesting game design, but poor game-feel. What I did like about the combat system is that you have a ton of moves for each character that you can allocate to four move slots. This slightly alleviated the game-feel problem because at least I was using moves that I thought felt the best to use. It definitely didn't come close to solving the issue though. Another thing that I appreciated about the combat system was that status effects required certain items to heal. As an Action RPG skeptic, things like that really help justify this genre's existence.

I found things to like about this game but no individual part of it was a slam dunk. The story has its moments, but I'm left unimpressed on the whole. The gameplay has its moments, but I'm left underwhelmed. The exception to all of this is the incredible music, which is what made me interested in playing this game in the first place. When the Falcom Sound Team is firing on all cylinders there's no word to describe to the results but magical. So I'd be interested in playing another Ys game, even if only for the soundtrack. But I do think it would take a Ys game that's a giant improvement over this one to really get me to care about the franchise.

This update partly saves itself by being completely free, I got a lot of time out of it although I'm mixed on the package as a whole. While it still is a lot of fun it suffers from a myriad of issues that I hope Sonic Team takes seriously for their next big project.

The biggest thing that harms this update is the difficulty spike. It's really odd when you have a difficulty spike that makes it's easy mode harder than the base game's hard mode. There is no regular enemies in the open-zones and instead you have suped-up mini bosses which take forever to kill if you don't max out your characters to 99. I wish the game notified me about this before I began with a Sonic that only had 47 damage. The emphasis on perfect parry in the final trial was really annoying seeing as how the titan bosses weren't designed to support that split second timing needed for finishing it with the bullshit 400 rings time limit for the three. Some of the tower climbing feels like it goes into kaizo territory where it's just haphazardly made difficult making you fall and start over, I did learn to use Sonic's mid-air dodging and parry to position myself to avoid falling to the bottom. I appreciate a challenge and while there was aspects of it that were fun, it generally was such an odd way of doing it.

The biggest part of it is the new playable characters and I'm kind of split on them. Running around as Tails, Knuckles and Amy in this massive 3D space and having dedicated trials for them which utilize their movesets was pretty fun. Tails and Knuckles especially though leave a bit to be desired, they have these unneeded wind-up animations for their aerial movement which kills the momentum and pacing. I did like some of their challenges but they did eventually get very samey and kind of clunkily designed. Also the mini-bosses aren't best designed for the move-sets these characters have and take way too long to kill. Amy was a really fun character to play with but the de-emphasis of her hammer for her cards was really odd. I loved having them here and it was fun exploring and doing their challenges but I hope Sonic Team learns from the issues they have and gives us the best version of these characters in the next game.
After you complete their individual chapter, it pulls a DK 64 where you have to awkwardly go back to the main tower to switch between them which is a terrible pace-breaker. I went out of my way to apply a mod which allowed you to swap between each character on the spot and it really saves the pacing and made the exploration of the island a lot more fun.

Some of the cyberspace levels were the biggest highlight of this update. I died a lot and it took me forever to get through some of the bonus challenges they set up for each level (it bumped by playtime to almost 60 hours😬) but it was really rewarding learning the levels and continually improving and increasing my speed in doing the required challenge for that run. The levels are built with the spin-dash in mind allowing you to fly through entire areas and as you master it and learn where to best land it becomes such a rewarding thrill.

The revised final boss was a vast improvement over the base game, the new Super Sonic form had so many awesome animations in battle. It genuinely was one of the most hype inducing Sonic spectacle sequences in the franchise. Next time try not to place your final boss where you big ass trees blocking the projectiles he throws at you, Sonic Team.

It took me three tries over the years for this game to finally click, but wow did it ever. Even if the dungeon gameplay was a low point, I couldn't stop playing.

The cast makes this game what it is. Every character in the main cast is incredible, and their individual story moments all had me engaged and interested to see what came next.

The story itself surprised me multiple times throughout. The twists kept me on my toes throughout, all the while having great moments to showcase.

The game definitely shows its age in some respects, but overall I'm glad I finally got around to getting through this game and understanding the appeal. What a ride.

Opus Echo of Starsong is an emotional journey. It doesn't have the best narrative by far, but it focuses the storytelling on each character's growth and relationship. The gameplay is nothing special, and the puzzles are something an eight year old could do, the hard part is just finding the object to interact with.

The game is short (7-10hrs) and the good thing out of this, is that things rarely slows down for a long time, it can go from 1 to 100 in the span of a chapter or even half of it. The bad thing out of it is that the game is very lore heavy. There are so much lore surrounding the whole place that you need to process in the short span of the game.

Character developments also plays a huge part in this game, however only Eda was somewhat "stated" to grow by the end of the story (despite her actions proving otherwise so...). Whereas Jun is still the same person throughout, obsessing over "honor" and his "clan" from the beginning to the end, the only development he got is being infatuated with Eda as the story continues. Remi, as well stays the same for most of the story, she did soften up to Jun near the end and even becomes his close friend after a certain part, however their reconciliation just happens. She suddenly feels guilty towards Jun. It feels too fast, and it's just resolved after. Though, unlike Jun, I do like Remi and find her character tragic. Unfortunately, the character developments are not handled well.

The length also affects other character's relationship, as at times, things are developing too quick. Bones and Jun for example, although he did save Bone's life, he was the one that placed his life in danger in the first place, and somehow after writing him letters, they became close buddies? This is one of those they tried to explained as one of the "things" that just happens during the time skip (which happens a few times), so it feels out of nowhere.

The biggest emphasis of the problem are also on Jun and Eda's relationship (The biggest driving point of the game) which feels underdeveloped. You will get one or two major scene/s between them every chapter and the rest of it is mostly implications of their relationship developing, and the funny part is, a lot of it are actually from other characters, while other times it's merely little things like worrying about each other. Jun's feelings toward Eda however does come from a place of love, although not said explicitly, but he stated that meeting her is one of the best things that happened in his life. Though Eda does feel the same way, it is only implied, it is also apparent that she cares for Jun's wellbeing a lot. She tends to have a "tsun" attitude toward Jun whenever he's doing or saying something with romantic connotation, sometimes showing discomfort and even keeps dismissing his sincerity as "jokes" or not acknowledging it much, this never really change till the end, especially her choice at the end. It feels like they are trying to write a blooming love story while at the same time, trying their best not to make it apparent, and so the clear imbalance of what is said and implied makes it so that, in the short span of the game, not enough development between them is seen to be built. It's a very big reason why I think the game should've been longer. The ending between them didn't hit me as much as I thought it would.

MAJOR SPOILER WARNING
A good storytelling method for me, would be one that stood somewhere between "exposition" and "implication". If a story loves doing expositions, then I might as well be watching Dora the Explorer. If a story goes full implication, then nothing might as well happened. A narrative that does more implications (foreshadowing/underlying meaning) can be executed well if the payoffs are expositions (big twist/reveal), this game however pays off implications with more implications, which some may like, but not me personally. This brings me to the ending scene in which Eda planted the flowers for Jun. In this scene, it's supposed to be the culmination of their relationship throughout the game, however their relationship is still underdeveloped due to not much has been explicitly established, and so it doesn't really hit me as much as I thought it would. Eda planting the flower, could also be seen as a lot of things, I've seen a few took it as her "declaration of love" to Jun, although it might be, among other things, it just feels out of character for her. I see it more as her keeping her promise to him as well as atonement for leaving him and Remi behind. But again, it could really be any or all of these. They also seem to reunite in their young selves somehow? even though it's only explained that emotions and thoughts are the only thing that can travel through time, unless it is in the afterlife, it doesn't seem clear as it just cuts off which is why I'm disappointed as the culmination of their relationship growing being insinuated before this is even more insinuation. It's not a terrible sequence, but I am just more in awe than I am emotional.

Overall, It's still a journey, and though I've mostly mention the flaws, it's more coming from a place of wasted potential. The story is nothing grand and doesn't evolve beyond what it already is, but it'll still pull your heart strings regardless.

Yeah its really cool there are new playable characters, but this entire thing just kept pissing me off more and more. These new characters all start at level 1, which yeah i get its reason to do the open world stuff, but FUCK man i just came off max level'd Sonic which feels fucking awesome and now I gotta play as these slow ass nerds AND the difficulty is higher like COME ON.

The floating geometry is also just not as fun because all 3 characters share the island at the same time, so you might just start a thing and then that character just can't do it. OR they might just be harder then I fall down and like I dont wanna climb that shit again. In the main campaign you know everything just works for Sonic and feel fucking great.

A combination of me not wanting to fucking level people, and the confusion of the floating geometry just led me to not knowing how the fuck get to the main objective as tails and the game was actively just draining me and I was having ZERO fun.

And the worst part IS I DIDNT EVEN GET TO THE FUCKING NEW LEVELS. I WANTED TO PLAY THE NEW LEVELS AND I DIDNT EVEN GET TO AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

"Mom I want Persona"

"We have Persona at home"

Persona at home:

Eternights is truly a video game, and one that jumped on my radar almost immediately after watching a Sony State of Play sometime last year. As my intro details, it was effectively billed as a hack and slash Persona-lite with heavy dating sim elements. Knowing myself as a filthy Persona consumer and a reluctant weaboo, I cautiously wrote down the title as something worth keeping on my docket for whenever it released. I vividly remember reviewing the games I had notched as "interesting" following the State of Play and thinking "There's no way this one is any good right?" and it turns out... yeah it wasn't really all that great. To be level with you the reader, Eternights is pretty much the Coors Light of video games. It's not great, it's a lesser version of something you can get better elsewhere, it doesn't stay with you long, but it's not the worst way you could have spent your time.

The game begins with a zombie apocalypse, as many do, and of which you and your best friend (who felt like a very watered down version of the Ryuji/Yosuke archetype) must survive. You quickly run into Japan's biggest pop star, Yuna, and link together with a mysterious force to fight against the architect of this malice. The premise of the story is mildly exciting at best, which is whatever because that wasn't necessarily the guiding light of the allure of Eternights. What drew me and probably most people into the title was the dating sim and Persona-esque nature of it. Now naturally you are a male protagonist on a train venturing out to do some dungeoneering with a team of waifus and two husbandos, all of whom you can earn affection and I believe romance with. Just like Persona these conversations are checked with substats, but instead of guts, charisma, or intelligence, you have acceptance, expression, and confidence (and a few more.) I appreciated this game for doing more of what Persona did, but I found the way that you gain each of these respective stats was a little too hamfisted and awkward. Much like Persona you do the bulk of it through selecting the right words in conversation... but I felt like what my intention was (for instance, trying to level up expression) didn't always match what I was saying in conversation. Early on in Act 3 I decided that I wanted to romance Yuna, but my expression wasn't high enough. I spent the rest of the act and the one after trying to pick the answers in conversation that leveled up expression... but I was wrong almost every time. This was okay in the end as I got to romance another character and go down their route, but it was mostly via incident and not intention. Persona did it right in having alternate routes to level up these stats (P5 for instance eating at Big Bang Burger leveled up your guts,) however that was not present in Eternights and made the dating sim element, a main draw, unfortunately too vague.

The other main element of the game outside of the dating sim aspect is the combat, and man did it look real nice in the trailer. An ongoing issue with anime action games is that the combat will often look pretty and clean (Tales of Arise, Scarlet Nexus) but in practice feel like slapping sand against a brick wall, and that is an apt descriptor of Eternights' combat system. Much like Scarlet Nexus you wail and wail against waves of enemies in a group in a button mash style. These enemies will sometimes have barriers that require popping with your elemental powers granted to you by the select group of waifus you call your team. While not every enemy has a barrier, and you can bypass many of these weaknesses by just using whichever element you want, it just becomes another game of matching the shape to the peg hole. This is what killed a lot of Scarlet Nexus for me, it was just lukewarm button mash combat with added in weakness hunting. On top of that, the game will throw a lot of enemies at you that require dodging before you can attack, and man there's few things I dislike in action games then staring at your opponent waiting for them to attack so you can get your own hits in... it just straight up kills any pace and flow that the title has.

I feel like this is probably way more than anyone will write about Eternights, but what else are we to do.

The positives of Eternights are thus: it's actually pretty funny and self aware of the lewditiy of it all... and no that is almost assuredly not a word. And honestly? Sometimes a Coors Light can hit the spot, they're low in ABV and go down like water, and sometimes you just need water. I'm between Starfield and Lies of P, with a Cyberpunk DLC on the horizon so this game tucked in with a pretty short runtime and some decent humor that got me to crack a grin every now and again. There were a few callbacks to animes and videogames that must have been influences on the developer that I appreciated (hello Final Fantasy X!) as well.

I can't recommend anyone to play this game, unless they really like Coors Light. It's a decent at best game with some weak to middling dating sim elements that are better done in many other series, and an unfortunately poor combat loop.

Went out of my way to 100% this expansion as much as possible and here are my takeaways.

-The new cyberspace levels were really good, with 4b, 4e, and 4g as my favorites, however I don't really like the newly introduced collectibles to 100% each level

-I think all the new characters are fine. Amy is my favorite to play, Tails is close just because of his Max Ring move, and Knuckles is... mehhhhhh.

-The towers were a bit tricky to deal with, but I would've thought the trials minus the last one would've been more tricky. The only one that was out of the 4 was with those annoying shell enemies you have to cyloop

-The final trial is annoying purely because Wyvern exists. Fuck Wyvern.

-The final boss is a really cool spectacle because of Cyber Super Sonic being very stylish, but I find the fight itself kind of annoying because of this game's stupid lock-on system, and I think Cyber Super Sonic as a transformation is just... kind of lame honestly. Visually at least. He is just THAT guy. The ending is not too different, but the last bit with eggman is cute.

I think I still prefer how the main game ended over this expansion, but I do like that they flesh out ouranos a bit more. I liked what was there in the main game, but the new characters and conversations do add to the appeal a bit. I feel there's a few things they could've done better, but it's fine for what it is.