Some likable characters and funny moments but a lack of choices that matter apart from getting people infected, lack of an ending that gives characters closure, and ends up not knowing what to do with most of the cast by the halfway point.

A group of camp counselor are stuck in the area for one extra night after everyone else goes home and sees them facing off against a strange family of hunters and werewolves with some nods to 80s horror films. For the most part has a likable cast where even characters that aren't often portrayed in the best light get a moment or two to humanize them a bit. There are some funny moments, and the whole things feels like it has a bigger budget and more effort than the studio's Dark Picture series.

On one hand you can get everyone infected by werewolves and that can cause changes based on when they get infected or if and how they might get cured and where a character might end up at certain points of the story, which is great, but in focusing on that there is a lack of choices and interactions that tend to matter and the survival or infection of character is typically just coming down to whether or not you hit or missed a QTE event as opposed to finding items, a build up of choices over time, or how the relationships between characters grow or change based on things you do or say. It does the Telltale style "this character respects this," "this character is disappointed," "this character is excited over this," etc and I'm pretty sure there is only one time where any of that ends up meaning anything and it pretty much amounts to did you upset the guy by shooting him or not which is a bit more obvious than the guy you will never see again being sad that you eavesdropped on his phone call.

Actually has a character you meet in between chapter that serves as a kind of narrator and confidant to the player that actually has a role in the story and tries to influence your decisions to the path she wants as opposed to the Robert Patrick looking curator of The Dark Pictures games who contributes nothing but wasted time as far as I can tell from the ones I've played. Lance Henriksen had no reason to be in the game, as his character says almost nothing and does even less. Jedediah could have been played by anyone or removed from the game entirely with no effect. The entire Hackett family, save for one member, all could have used more time in the game, more so for the ones you could have met in camp earlier on.

The ending sections of the game lack any real excitement or extended action for this type of story and it all ends too abruptly, ending the threat with no closure. Even the playable cast is half full of characters who just fall out of the story halfway through the game and contribute nothing. Even some of the more main characters end up not doing anything that really matters in the last two or three chapters. There's really a feel of, "oh you didn't fail the QTEs and get people killed or infected and written out of the game, well then I guess they just wait in the basement, sit in the woods for the last 1/3 of the game and do nothing, follow another character around and contribute nothing." For some reason the game has no wrap up ending. Based on some very specific choices or letting certain people die you might get a kind of ending for two sets of characters but most people won't as those achievements both seemed to have around a 1% and 3.5% unlock percentage. If characters had multiple sections or backstory worried about what they will do with their lives next, family problems, wanting to save their infected boyfriend, relationship issues or choices none of that is getting solved or mentioned again. It's like if Die Hard immediately cut to credits as Hans Gruber was falling and you never had the scene where you got to see Officer Carl Winslow get over his holdup over using a gun again after accidentally killing a child by shooting the last gunman, allowing him to move on and continue his life as proper cop away from deskwork with a new mentality that will allow him to kill more kids with toy guns in the future. Except in The Quarry, there are like 5-8 people who probably could have used a bit of an epilogue based on your choices who never get any kind of choice made or character growth from their backstory. That might work in a horror movie where the entire cast is dead except one, two, or a very rare three people by the end but when there isn't much reason for anyone to die and even getting someone turned into a werewolf might just save them by the end it doesn't work well.

The developers are clearly intentionally designing their games to have no respect for their players. The Dark Pictures series was bad enough in that you can't skip scenes or conversations that you have seen before but The Quarry does not give you a chapter select until you beat the game, autosaves immediately after everything you do, gives you one save file while not even allowing you to go back to a previous chapter after you beat the game on a new file like the Dark Pictures games do but instead erasing everything that comes after, and going back to previous chapters wipes out your collectibles to the extent that even the achievements don't keep track of what you found. Then there is the ridiculously slow movement speed of characters and camera issues. There is no excuse for this with this being the fifth game they had made exactly in this same style.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1716203607568351279

Some likable characters and funny moments but a lack of choices that matter apart from getting people infected, lack of an ending that gives characters closure, and ends up not knowing what to do with most of the cast by the halfway point.

A group of camp counselor are stuck in the area for one extra night after everyone else goes home and sees them facing off against a strange family of hunters and werewolves with some nods to 80s horror films. For the most part has a likable cast where even characters that aren't often portrayed in the best light get a moment or two to humanize them a bit. There are some funny moments, and the whole things feels like it has a bigger budget and more effort than the studio's Dark Picture series.

On one hand you can get everyone infected by werewolves and that can cause changes based on when they get infected or if and how they might get cured and where a character might end up at certain points of the story, which is great, but in focusing on that there is a lack of choices and interactions that tend to matter and the survival or infection of character is typically just coming down to whether or not you hit or missed a QTE event as opposed to finding items, a build up of choices over time, or how the relationships between characters grow or change based on things you do or say. It does the Telltale style "this character respects this," "this character is disappointed," "this character is excited over this," etc and I'm pretty sure there is only one time where any of that ends up meaning anything and it pretty much amounts to did you upset the guy by shooting him or not which is a bit more obvious than the guy you will never see again being sad that you eavesdropped on his phone call.

Actually has a character you meet in between chapter that serves as a kind of narrator and confidant to the player that actually has a role in the story and tries to influence your decisions to the path she wants as opposed to the Robert Patrick looking curator of The Dark Pictures games who contributes nothing but wasted time as far as I can tell from the ones I've played. Lance Henriksen had no reason to be in the game, as his character says almost nothing and does even less. Jedediah could have been played by anyone or removed from the game entirely with no effect. The entire Hackett family, save for one member, all could have used more time in the game, more so for the ones you could have met in camp earlier on.

The ending sections of the game lack any real excitement or extended action for this type of story and it all ends too abruptly, ending the threat with no closure. Even the playable cast is half full of characters who just fall out of the story halfway through the game and contribute nothing. Even some of the more main characters end up not doing anything that really matters in the last two or three chapters. There's really a feel of, "oh you didn't fail the QTEs and get people killed or infected and written out of the game, well then I guess they just wait in the basement, sit in the woods for the last 1/3 of the game and do nothing, follow another character around and contribute nothing." For some reason the game has no wrap up ending. Based on some very specific choices or letting certain people die you might get a kind of ending for two sets of characters but most people won't as those achievements both seemed to have around a 1% and 3.5% unlock percentage. If characters had multiple sections or backstory worried about what they will do with their lives next, family problems, wanting to save their infected boyfriend, relationship issues or choices none of that is getting solved or mentioned again. It's like if Die Hard immediately cut to credits as Hans Gruber was falling and you never had the scene where you got to see Officer Carl Winslow get over his holdup over using a gun again after accidentally killing a child by shooting the last gunman, allowing him to move on and continue his life as proper cop away from deskwork with a new mentality that will allow him to kill more kids with toy guns in the future. Except in The Quarry, there are like 5-8 people who probably could have used a bit of an epilogue based on your choices who never get any kind of choice made or character growth from their backstory. That might work in a horror movie where the entire cast is dead except one, two, or a very rare three people by the end but when there isn't much reason for anyone to die and even getting someone turned into a werewolf might just save them by the end it doesn't work well.

The developers are clearly intentionally designing their games to have no respect for their players. The Dark Pictures series was bad enough in that you can't skip scenes or conversations that you have seen before but The Quarry does not give you a chapter select until you beat the game, autosaves immediately after everything you do, gives you one save file while not even allowing you to go back to a previous chapter after you beat the game on a new file like the Dark Pictures games do but instead erasing everything that comes after, and going back to previous chapters wipes out your collectibles to the extent that even the achievements don't keep track of what you found. Then there is the ridiculously slow movement speed of characters and camera issues. There is no excuse for this with this being the fifth game they had made exactly in this same style.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1716203607568351279

One likable badass character can't save the rest of the game from a terrible cast with some awful acting, poorly shot action scenes, and needless point A to B walks for tedious collectible gathering.

House of Ashes sees a group of people trapped in underground ruins in Iraq during the 2003 US invasion attempting to escape vampire like demons that have been down there for thousands of years. The main characters include a CIA operative with a hideous character model that is for some reason in charge of a small group of the most incompetent Marines I've ever seen who have apparently been existing in a combat zone in an unready state while hoarding some war crime white phosphorus grenades, until her husband that she has been away from for a year shows up to take over. Her husband being an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose satellite project is being used to try to find hidden weapons of mass destruction and is what finds the old ruins. There are two marines main characters with one being the guy the CIA agent has started a relationship with while away from her husband, and another one who is a racist with a 9/11 hat. The last character is a member of the Iraq Republican Guard who is there to be the only competent, badass, friendlier person, who might just be able to make the racist marine not as racist anymore and if the entire game was just about him fighting the Americans and the demons it would have made for a better time. Unfortunately, he can't save the game all by himself.

The previous entry in the series, Little Hope, wasn't good but it at least had some ideas and moments that could have lead to it being good if not for the terrible overarching premise, this looks like it might take the series into something the developer can do a better job with by making a more action packed faster paced ridiculous ride but it manages to mess even that up. While Little Hope had some very strong acting in a mostly mediocre script, Ashes doesn't even have that with the best actors giving just passable performances with the exception of Ashley Tisdale as the CIA operative who is always terrible. The constant finding of items and collectibles to slowly examine take you away from the immediate story as much as before, but even more so here in what should be a more dangerous fast paced situation.

The action scenes end up being laughable incompetent with every shot seemingly being a tracer round that frequently show the bullets going nowhere near what anyone should be aiming at. The scenes where US and Iraq forces fight make Steven Seagal movies look well shot and better able to follow a logical event chain. The monsters don't even seem to react to being shot in the face multiple times in certain scenes but can apparently be stabbed and killed with old slightly pointy objects not designed to be used as weapons. The camera is completely unable to handle some of the confined or narrow areas you find yourself in. Characters mouths don't always move when they are speaking and there are frequent fast jump cuts in multiple scenes either like frames missing from action scenes or like it was possibly looking for a scene or line that might have happened if different choices were made then cut somewhere else when it couldn't find it. The characters apparently all have an infinite supply of ammunition (until near the end of the game when they finally start running out), though that doesn't end up being very useful to them. They find out UV light will set them on fire so when they start breaking through one of the doors they are defending they decide to shoot at the door instead of just shining the light on their hands or through the open cracks of the door (or shooting larger hold in the door that could then have the UV light shine through it). The dialogue is ridiculous, any soldier in the game tends to be written in the most stereotypes ridiculous way imaginable. A side character dies after seemingly being shot in the legs, making you think that the plot might understand that getting shot is actually bad, only for multiple characters to be shot later on only to have them completely ignore it and to go on with it never mentioned or considered a problem for them. Like all bad monster media the creatures are as fast or slow, strong or weak, and smart or stupid as the couple minutes needs them to be before deciding to do the opposite in the next scene.

Being that it stars characters that are CIA and marines invading a country outside of WWII I assumed I'd want them to die but these characters were nearly David Cage levels of unlikable and incompetent to the extent that I'd want them to die no matter who they are or what they were doing. It also makes it difficult to want to go back and see what changes different choices can lead to as it doesn't allow you to skip any of the scenes that you have already seen before.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1713804446118068427

A well made side campaign that keeps what makes the gameplay of the main game fun and allows for some atmospheric though more brief segments, while having the same expanded story elements when compared to the original PS2 mode.

For about $9, Separate Ways gets you seven chapters and about 3-4 hours of gameplay, Ada's path taker her mostly through the same areas as Leon but with a few differences, new enemy placement, and new boss fights. Her grappling hook has a fairly large role in the gameplay allowing her extra traversal options in each areas, fast ways onto a roof in some boss fights, the ability to launch or swing over obstacles. Ada has her own melee move set, one that can also make use of her grappling hook that she can use to pull herself to enemies or to pull away their shields, and she has access to a new sawed-off shotgun and crossbow that fires explosive arrows that can explode over a very large area once upgraded enough.

A lot of the new content are sections similar to things that were missing from the original Resident Evil 4. You get to see the laser wire trap room, the brief ride down a gondola as crossbow wielding enemies attack you, Pesanta who appear next to Verdugo when you meet Salazar then never appears again in the main game is a major antagonist multiple times through Separate Ways.

While you can get through it fairly quickly as the early sections can feel a bit devoid of enemies and are able to be more easily rushed through and the puzzle sections tend to be quickly and easily solvable in a way that makes most feel a bit pointless, most of the content is the same high quality as the main campaign while also expanding on its narrative and locations. We also get to spend a bit more time with Luis, which is never a bad thing.

The gameplay has evolved in positive ways, customization is a high point with a variety of options, the maps are large and beautiful. It's unfortunate that so many missions aren't even worth the time they take to load into because their design is either stuck in 97' or they waste time telling an uninteresting and rushed through story as you go around scanning wreckage targets.

You will customize the parts of your mech by selecting different parts for the weapons, leg, core, head, booster, targeting computer, and armor setting type before going out on fairly short missions that have you fighting against other enemy ACs and the much weaker mass produced models of mechs, stationary defenses, and drones that will go up against you. Arena battles against AI units from the game and online player vs player modes are also available. Enemies and your own AC can take a certain amount of impact damage before they are staggered opening them up to taking massive amounts of burst damage, making use of your quick boosts to avoid too many heavy or consecutive hits is important as is trying to keep a heavy attack, melee, or charging kick on hand for when you do manage to stun your enemy.

The enjoyment you get from Armored Core VI is going to be largely dependent on how much you like to edit your mech and try out the different styles of play available to you. You have access to a wide variety of weapons that you can equip on your left and right arms and shoulders and you can unlock the ability to store arm parts on your shoulders while rapidly switching between them as the stored parts reload and cooldown. Each type of leg part can change up the way you play quite a bit with the the normal set acting as a balanced type, the low weight supporting reverse joint legs giving you a lot of height when you jump without using up energy and being fast, quad legs allowing you to hover in midair for very little energy and to fire heavy weapons without stopping, tank treads limit your boost speed and can make it a bit more difficult to control your movement but gives high health and defense, the highest weight limits, and absorb recoil like the quad legs do. As you play through the game the first time, and in its new game+ and new game++ you will continue to unlock new parts as you do different mission paths for the first time and trying out those weapons and builds can be a lot of fun, which is good because many of the missions are terribly designed and are even worse when you have to replay them.

The biggest issue with the game is the wasted use of so many large and beautiful maps and a focus on an extremely uninteresting story that because it's From Software has no shortage of Youtuber's posting amazing hidden plot threads that the game blatantly spells out for you immediately after they happen. So many of the early missions feel like they are just their to get you up to speed and used to the gameplay, with almost nothing to actually threaten you during the mission. This would be great, if they changed those missions up when you start hitting the new game+ playthroughs but most of them don't change and many some that do don't change in a way that makes them any more mechanically interesting. There are missions where you just walk up to some targets to extract data from wrecks with almost no enemies, missions where you fall down a hole to shoot the core of a stationary device. The first time you play a mission where you take down a giant weaponized mining machine can be fun because it looks so cool as you destroy the back leg an watch it collapse after you climb it and blow up the core but, especially after one or two more playthroughs, you realize all you really did was walk up to something and shoot a few stationary targets while hiding behind a wall from to avoid its defenses a couple times.

What the game needs is some DLC maps and missions that completely ignore the pointless main story that often makes a slog of the main campaign. There's a fun change up late game mission in space where you shoot down an enemy fleet of battleships while making use of endless energy boosts. Make a whole mission or three out of that but with multiple sides in a massive battle with enemy pilots and wider enemy variety and some allies and give people their Gundam fantasy, a large number of the shared AC builds are already almost perfect Gundam unit recreations. Do an Ace Combat 6 style mission, drop a player on one side of a massive battlefield between different forces where you can go help out different units, maybe make a minor story of the battle with a chain of missions where choices or actions can effect one or two future missions. Have a mode where you can choose one of the maps and set the enemy placement and play co-op (since team based multiplayer is already a thing). Instead we get so many fight some pitiful enemies before destroying stationary helicopters, walk around a foggy city trying to find an object to scan as a couple drones occasionally annoy you, fall down a hole, try to locate drive cores in a maze like room with a time limit, a mission with multiple factions fighting somehow turns into blow up two ACs that were fighting some weak enemies then go fly to a boss fight. There are good missions in the game but there are also so many missions that aren't worth the time it takes to load into them and it wouldn't take much to make them much more interesting because everything else the game needs for them to work is there.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1710124544542097479

Plays like a fast paced Hotline Miami that trades the melee combat and stealth elements for the dives, rolls, and slow motion filled shoot outs common in Hong Kong action cinema. Pick from duel pistols, a shotgun, rifle, or a single and later upgrade-able to duel SMGs. Base gameplay is a lot of fun, simple to control with exciting to watch gunfights taking apart the environments.

Suffers a bit from a lack of variety, four dull boss fights that all play the same, same three challenges on every level. Occasionally some movement issues, like diving over balconies to other buildings not working, or enemies that don't really react to things where they might just be standing around while you are shooting in the room or even right by them while you are in a different room.

Gameplay Montage:
https://youtu.be/xFIv0Hid4-M?si=AwLt6WxNfb9ti6ch

Strong character customization, even allowing you to choose different music scores as a type of theme change for your character, you can build companions how you want as nothing is locked to a class. Strategic combat with some of the best ability synergy in the genre. Great writing with a lot of small details to give the world and quest more meaning. One of the rare games with a crafting system that gives you some good options. Offers a variety of ways to solve many of the quests. Divinity has some unique changes to common fantasy races and tropes. The conversation options specific to a certain race, gender, character, etc and being able to play as your potential companions allow for different conversation/quest options and endings.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/994668948426711040
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/943979398646054912
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/995644208772857856
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/994670053873270784

Investigate murders, town history, and the secrets of villagers in a small changing town in Bavaria from 1518-1544. Unique, well written, good use of art history, nods to period films and stories, and many details to discover as you see your seemingly small choices ripple through the community over time.

Pentiment is an adventure roleplaying game set over three acts each taking place between 1518-1544 in the small town of Tassing and the nearby Kiersau Abbey in Bavaria. You play as Andreas Maler, a university drop out and soon to be master artist, who is working on a commission for the abbey before returning home to enter into an arranged marriage, as a requirement to be known as a master of his trade is to be married. Shortly before you have complete your masterpiece you become involved in a murder investigation that can put you at odds with the local abbot. Whether you help convict the right suspect or not, your investigation seems to imply that there is something bigger going on and a person working to attempt to influence your suspects to become killers. After the initial act is over, you return to a town that is both the same and changed seven years later as a now disillusioned master artist with a young apprentice. Both of you quickly being caught up in even more dangerous events as the rift between the peasants, tradesmen, and abbot have deepened. The final act takes place 18 years later with you controlling a different character as you put together parts of the town's past and learn how those remaining from that time and the newer generation look to that past both the events Maler was involved in and people who lived in the area during Roman times and before.

Early in the game you will make a series of choices for Maler that tell what he has done and learned through his life so far. You will pick where he has traveled (Basel, Flanders, or Florence) to influence the languages he knows and his knowledge of other cultures and their artwork. A background to describe how you have lived your life (hedonist, bookworm, rapscallion, craftsman, businessman). What your primary area of study was (theology, imperial law, or medicine). Finally you can choose two other areas you studied on the side (Latinist, logician, orator, occultist, or heaven and earth). Knowledge of other languages, books, artwork, and the occult all can become important or shed more light on events when dealing with certain characters or objects while your background and certain fields of study can open up new options when dealing with people or when examining objects or books.

The game deals with the exploration and relationships you build with the townsfolk and brothers and sister of the abbey based on your choices, knowledge, and background. You learn the town and people's histories, secrets, traditions and a large thematic parts of the game deals with people trying to come to terms with pasts and how they are dealing with them now and what grows from the ruins of history and you witness the effects of your seemingly small choices that can have more or just as large of an effect on a character's life as the major decisions you make, and how those choices change the lives of those in the town in the years to come. It's very well written, you get more of a feel of who your character is and what befell them between acts 1 and 2, your background choices can lead to a lot good or amusing moments, and there are a lot of minor details to find out about a lot of the characters or just things that add to the setting like what you see and hear when you spend your meal times with different people or families or about character's hidden relationships. There is some excellent music at more major moments of the story. The history of the setting is handled in simple interesting ways without taking up too much of the game's content or requiring too much explanation, and the art style of the game unique and fits both its more lighthearted and its darker moments.

There are a few negatives to the game. It doesn't feel like a game that really benefits from a time limit and what events pass time are not always clear, not much seems to come from being made to replay the game when a lot of the primary scenes and story beats aren't going to change or not change that much. Act 3 is odd because it suddenly becomes more railroaded and there are two obvious characters that you would play as one being the young daughter of the family you stay with that you can have some influence on or your apprentice who is with you for 99% of act 2, you end up playing as a girl who wasn't born in act 1 and is only around three years old in act 2 who you can buy a book for that later influences her background knowledge of the world before you can choose three other things she is good at during a conversation. A little strange that you are constantly told that you are pretty by people when you seem to be one of the least attractive young women in the game and for some reason look both haggard and closer to 40 than 20 based on how everyone else has started or aged. You end up playing as one of the kids that probably made the least impression on you, though your past influence is still effecting other aspects and characters in the village. Dealing with the village and how things have changed is a good fitting element to the themes of the game but the actual ending that ties into everything that has been happening since the start of the game is one of those all too common parts of games where the exploration and side content tend to be the best parts, the ending works and makes sense but it's just not very interesting for all the build up. Exploration can also become a bit tedious once you start hitting multiple moments where you run into, "ok I need to go here now, to do that I need to run through these ten screens then I can run back nine screens to do the next thing, etc." Could have at least used that common double click on an area divider to move to that next section.

The game keeps your one save file for a playthrough but it is fairly easy to fix a mistake made or change something you now don't want to have done by going back to the main menu and being able to scroll through a list of previous auto saved. So if you want to see other options, go back and try to pass a persuasion check, get achievements that are exclusive to one another you won't necessarily need to replay the full game.

A lot of great unique elements to the game that make it an easy recommendation despite some minor issues and the main plot ending not hitting too hard.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1690584244622606336

Mech combat action game. Decent flashy visual style and a good soundtrack, mechanically does just about everything you would want in a game of this style while offering some of the varied styles of missions you would see in something like Ace Combat, it just does it all badly with a rushed tropey unfocused nonsense story that drops entire characters at random and for some reason includes a horrible attempt to have Metal Gear Solid 3's boss fight against The Sorrow as one of the stages.

Gameplay has you piloting a variety of mechs where you can rotate and fly in any direction while boosting forward, back, sideways, and up and down while locking onto and engaging enemies with a small number of different weapons and a few defensive abilities. You can cycle through weapon that include different version of a rapid firing gun, different types of missiles that you can fire in a group or lock onto the current locked target, a longer ranged high damage rail gun, a very high damage slow to recharge particle gun more for larger enemy ships, and the defensive items include energy shields, decoys, and flares. A few of the units you can pilot have the ability to switch to a flight mode that I never found useful and some have melee weapons with better ones being able to chain attack more quickly, how useful the melee weapons are was based entirely on how the game was feeling at any given moment as an sword icon has to appear to use it (when it will appear is questionable), then you have to actually hit the enemy with it (even though you do a magical lunch towards them that you would normally be incapable of doing if they are moving at all you will probably miss), and then even when you do clearly hit them about half the time it just does no damage (as opposed to many other ranged weapon that can just decide not to do any damage closer to 1/4 of the time).

The controls are awful (both in the overly floaty movement and in terms of button placement) and unintuitive. The lock on system that you have to engage with constantly is one of the worst I've ever seen in a game like this, it has an on and off mode that when you turn it on will target what you are currently looking at and sometimes switches to other targets nearby when you shoot one down. When you play a game like this ideally you want options like swap target to aimed at, swap to nearest, next, or previous not on or off. Enemy "aces" are barely noticed and some entire missions and capital ship fights can be over in a minute before characters even finish talking. The most and only difficult battles, meaning cheap nonsense you have to exploit the game to win comes when the two most main characters you control fight two times during the game. Ground targets are a mess with your hit doing nothing a much higher percentage of the time than aerial targets, as ground targets are never really a threat the amount of missions that need you to shoot them just wastes times and adds to frustration. While there is a variety of units to pilot it isn't like planes for different roles in Ace Combat or mechs for different roles and with entirely different styles to them like in Armored Core, here it mostly just comes down to can the mech do more, less, or a lot less and once it gives you more it's not much fun to go back to less especially when ideally the game should be getting more exciting as it goes on with more and wider varieties of enemies (never really happens).

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1688818356848377856

Update to a classic Saturn rail shooter that looks decent for an update to an old title and keeps the same level design but loses the otherworldly feel of the original, has a lack of extras, and a poorly handled "modern" control scheme that is disabled by default.

The game plays like a normal flight rail shooter where you move a reticle around to target enemies and your dragon moves in the direction you are aiming to avoid the obstacles or shots that you can't shoot down. You can rapidly push multiple fire buttons for a very fast rate of fire that can be good for more damage on one target or to shoot down enemy shots, or you can hold the button while you scroll over targets for an auto lock laser shot that fires at its targets when you let go. You can rotate the camera your view to the left, right, and behind you where your dragon will lose it's maneuverability while it allows you to deal with threats from those angles. A radar identifies which side enemies are on by showing them in yellow and can show more active attackers in red. For an update of an old game it looks good and mostly stays in line with the style of the old by just greatly expanding on what was already there and removing the frequent obstacle and texture pop in of the Saturn title, the gain of clarity and having a much wider, brighter, and detailed environment does make the game lose the otherworldly feel of the original game though. The soundtrack is good and there are some enemies and moments that make use of the ability to shift facing in a way that is interesting compared to a lot of other rail shooter.

It is a very short and easy game, setting it to medium difficulty I beat it in under an hour without ever losing a life and shooting down about 95-99% of enemies on each level and I believe dying would have just used one of the 11 or so continues I ended up with that could put me right back at a boss fight. The modern control style when used will allow you to aim and move separately from one another, which should be a less awkward way to control the dragon and make the game even easier but the severe decrease in movement speed and for some reason the choice in turning off the ability to rapid fire your weapon by quickly hitting multiple fire buttons make it both a poor choice and not really how the game was designed. As you aren't flying a ship but riding a dragon the original way also makes it feel more like you are attempting to guide the dragons movement rather than just flying a ship that reacts in the exact way you want it to. Beating the game unlocks a few minor options like a stage select, god mode, most helpfully a rapid fire button option where one of your fire buttons can just be held down to shoot quickly saving the need to quickly mash them. Nothing that will change the game in a way to make it last longer though or make new playthroughs any more interesting.

For a likely quickly done remake of what seems to usually be considered the worst and most basic game in the four game series it's a fine playthrough but it's not going to be as interesting as it was on release and hard to justify buying at the full $25 price.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1688379991950766080

A simple and enjoyable game system with a well written and interesting setting, but a lack of real threat and waiting can hurt the pace and ability to do and to excel at everything with lack of consequence can hurt the themes.

Citizen Sleeper combines a tabletop RPG style system with visual novel aesthetics that has some minor survival elements. You play as an escaped Sleeper, a sentient robot body with a mind emulated from a scan taken from a live human body. Your rights to be seen as a human signed away, memories of your life as a human fragmented, and the Essen-Arp corporation views your body as their property and wants you back and if they can't get you back your lack of access to the supplements now required by you will see you drained of power soon enough. You and many other Sleepers attempt to escape your poor treatment by stuffing themselves into cargo container, the one you were in landing on the run down and partly lawless space station of Erlin's Eye.

You have a choice in character creation where you will start with a negative one when using one of the five skills but a positive one in another skill, as well as a passive perk associated with your positive skill. Every day will be given 1-5 dice that are rolled on the start of each day valuing from 1-6. Attempting to complete tasks will either require you to assign an item or money or to assign one of your dice to a challenge, any positive modifiers based on your skills (from -1 to +2) will be added to the die and that will decide on your percentage chance of positive, neutral (a weaker success or a success with additional bad effects), or negative results. The number of dice your receive each day is based on your current condition level that will drain each time you sleep or if you are damaged in some way, finding or buying food is also necessary as reaching a low enough energy state will cause you to lose additional condition each day. Exploring the setting is a large part of the game as meeting certain characters, traveling and opening up new paths on the station, and performing tasks like asking for directions or searching a new location will unlock new points of interest. Your skills are Engineer (fixing mechanical devices), Interface (hacking and remotely controlling things), Endure (withstanding harsher conditions or repetitive labor), Intuit (awareness and consideration of problems), and Engage (more direct and physical solutions to problems) and their associated passive skills will allow you to more easily manage your decaying condition, haggle better when spending money, reroll your daily dice rolls once a day, etc.

Your goal is going to be to get yourself to a point where you become self sufficient enough to manage your condition and energy needs while also being able to complete the game's tasks and quests (called drives). When a drive is complete you will gain an upgrade point which can be used to increase your five skills enough to get up to a +2 in rolls associated with them and each skills two passive perks. You might decide a life on the station is freedom enough for you going through all the tasks you can while living day to day, especially if you have been making friends, working to improve the place, and feeding a stray cat each night, or you might find people that you can travel off of the station with or an entirely different way to leave your current existence behind. Deciding if the life you've managed to build is enough or if surviving day to day isn't as interesting as the possibility to find something more is a large part of each of the game's endings (choosing to leave will allow you to then reload your save right before you left so you can instead choose to stay allowing you to continue with your other goals without needing to go through the entire game again, also nice since the free DLC requires you to be on the station).

It's a simple and enjoyable game system, very well written, a nice art style, and gives an interesting setting to explore but a lack of real threat and waiting for things to happen can hurt the pacing. When you start the game your failing condition is a threat, you don't know what's going on at the station, events are constantly happening, and there seem to be more branching paths to minor events as even one of your first jobs can take a more negative route for your relationship with the first person you meet if you keep failing or putting work off with the limited starting dice you have. What will soon happen though is that you will get to a point where money is no longer an issue and fully repairing your condition and raising your energy is also easily taken care of once you have more locations unlocked, with those threats gone you will also frequently have multiple events where you are either waiting a few days for timers to run out so they can continue or you will just slowly pick away at the ones you want to do first as almost none of the events have any kind of real time or failure state.

Early on you learn you have a tracker installed on you and someone is coming to the station to find you, this would get you to think you might die or have some large penalty if that happens. Instead it has to happen, you meet a bounty hunter who ends up letting you stay if you pay the bar tab he runs up over the next week, and if you don't pay the tab he will just show up to steal all your money with no penalty if it was less than what the tab was anyway. The events and the characters you meet through that situation are all written well and enjoyable to go through but the constant ability to do everything in the game and to never be in any real danger seems to be a bit at odds with the feel and themes of the game. Nearing the end you can even come close to maxing out every single skill so it's not even a game where you are forced to specialize for certain tasks in a particular playthrough, there are a couple tasks that you can't do without having a +1 in the skill but by the time you reach them that's not much of an issue. On the other hand, there are multiple people having tantrums about their inability to complete the first part of the DLC successfully in the 12 or so days the event gives them after they start it, and as I completed the event without really trying (because, even though you are locked to one save, you can definitely make use quits to the main menu before the auto save triggers on skill checks or dice rerolls) of in six days I suppose I can't really say what in the world other people do in games like this to cause themselves so many problems.

It's a great game, just a little odd and feels a bit against message when technically in one playthrough your character is a savant in all areas, is basically every factions friend and the friend of an AI now influencing major station systems, inherits a ship repair business, improves the food quality of the station, joins a commune but also has three other places to live, etc, etc, etc. Is the daily grind of life enough is an easier question to answer when you are rolling in money, friends, and allies.

Screenshots:

A turn based RPG built around having a card and tabletop roleplaying aesthetic for visuals and narrative, neither of which it takes advantage of. Leaving it a short, overpriced, mostly mediocre RPG.

The visuals of the game are based around cards, this includes the menus, the characters and enemies, the map and dungeons you move around on are cards that flip over to reveal terrain as you move, during battles your equipped skills show up as cards with art and their description on them. As a game styled around a tabletop RPG, the story, events, character dialogue, and sometimes just descriptions or hints as you explore are narrated by an out of sight game master.

At a glance I would have assumed I would have enjoyed the game quite a bit because of how much I like those two things but it ended up being a fairly dull playthrough that takes advantage of neither of the elements the game is built around. With the fairly ridiculously high price of the game (as well as needless cosmetic DLC), especially with all the indies that have done much more interesting GM and/or card focused RPG games, they could certainly have gone further at making the card aesthetic a lot more visually interesting with less generic tiles you move on, the monsters you fight and your character skills could have had cool looking detailed artwork like you would get out of something like Magic/Lord of the Rings LCG/Netrunner/etc instead of just a generic small variety of monsters just drawn in a rectangle or weapon and element symbol with text of what skills do, the characters could have been drawn onto cards in different ways or on not just generic blank backgrounds to show emotion and be more visually interesting. What could have been a much more interesting world to explore ends up being fairly generic. The style actually lead them to having some other issues. Everything is a bit slower than it should be and the odd card style of the menus make them slow and more of a chore to navigate than they should be, even lacking basic functions like cycling through characters with the shoulder or trigger buttons when you are swapping out equipment (it all functions even worse with a mouse and keyboard). I used no combat items in the game until the final battle but for some odd reason instead of limiting the max number of certain kinds of items you can hold they give you an inventory limit of 30 total items. This lead to a lot moments in the last 1/3 of the game where I would find a chest and be given a useless item or finish a battle and be rewarded with a useless item that would then slowly bring up a text about having too many items before slowly taking me to a screen where I can slowly choose one item to throw away before being allowed to move on.

The GM narration focus is also a thing that really doesn't go anywhere. He's just kind of there to only need to pay one voice actor and for some reason to give away any hints when a dungeon does anything different (dungeon has walls that turn into doors when you move onto them, "Why don't you try moving there"). The entire Game Master thing is never really used to add anything to the world and ends up just taking away from it, even more so because the added assumption of having a GM would be that the characters would have their own players but it's just the GM narrating what few inner thoughts or actions they take.

What you end up being left with is a short, overpriced, and mostly mediocre RPG. What little story there is can have a few moments of humor but doesn't offer much for world or character building. Every town will have the same shops and a couple people to talk to, you can explore three larger landmasses near towns to find the dungeons or other towns you need to go to or to run into often repeating random events. There is never really anything interesting to the design of dungeons, the biggest thing they do is put some spikes in some tiles right before you reach the end boss that you just don't want to step on to avoid taking any damage (these spikes are clearly visible, though one of the character's best weapons does require you to just walk through a couple spikes to reveal a chest a few spaces in). There are no route deviations or big side quests as it is a primarily linear game, you can get four choices for your ending that will amount to a few lines before the credits roll.

Most of your time playing will be taking a few steps, getting into a random battle, and completely destroying those enemies (over and over and over again because the low enemy variety doesn't help things). If you remember to upgrade your equipment at new shops, 80% of battles will be over before enemies can even get an attack off. With an ice attack spell that can freeze enemies permanently and causes you to break them out of the ice but do double damage when you hit them, even the first couple bosses didn't get to attack me. You start off with a party of three characters and get two more characters to join you over time, one coming fairly late but you have a limitation I've never been a fan of of only being able to use three characters at once but then two of the characters seem more focused on buffing or having some defensive skills and this is a game where healing and buffing has no use 99% of the time. At least this is one of the games that doesn't make the mistake of older titles and the characters in reserve still gain full XP from battles. As characters level up and change their equipment they can add to their health, attack (which influences all skills be they melee, ranged, or magic), defense, and speed and gain access to a few passive skills they always have (mostly element or status effect resistance), and active skills of which they can equip four of. In battle your skills are powered by crystals, you start a battle with one and gain another at the start of every character's turn. A basic attack costs nothing but using more powerful or status effecting skills can cost between 1-4, so you will want use your heavier hitting skills or skills that enemies are weak to while focusing on basic attacks or turn passive to help prepare stronger attacks.

While the battle system works and can be simple and enjoyable at times, the AI is terrible. In addition to all those times where enemies just couldn't do anything there will be so many times where when they do get to act they will try to do something like buff itself as it is near death and all of your characters move next. You will frequently see an enemy use a turn to slightly debuff one characters defense or elemental defense, often to a degree less than what their hit damage would have done only to then have their other allies attack other non debuffed characters. One positive here is that even with the battles taking place with the card visual style the attack animations do have varied effects for every type of skill and additional critical hit they can do while moving the cards around, making it a bit more visually interesting than the what you would get with the old first person kind of Dragon Quest/Wizardry battles that the animations would resemble otherwise.

It's a simple and fairly quick play (taking me about 9 hours) with a few funny moments but with all the good ideas aesthetically and mechanically or ideas that can be used in a much more interesting way it doesn't take advantage of anything and when it is selling for $30-$40+ there are a lot of other games with some similar themes that are worth more, cost less, and support an indie studio.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1686640421357985792

Fun combat with varied characters and great looking models and animations, but loses the personality from growing characters and your town over time and replaces that growth with busywork and a surprising lack of content for a sequel.

Darkest Dungeon 2 changes up the formula of the previous game, instead of upgrading a town and a roster of characters over time while sending them on short excursions to explorable dungeons, you know choose a party of four characters that traverse different locations in a stagecoach fighting or interacting with events as you choose route directions with upcoming obstacles possibly revealed through random scouting chances when you enter a map or by finding watchtowers or scouting through an event. Instead of the short dungeon trips that you can finish, retreat, or get everyone killed in broken up by upgrading your town to improve characters, items, and healing and sanity regeneration you now have a much longer run as you attempt to manage your groups sanity and relationships by choosing random events that hopefully raise character affinity to one another, attempting to land on hospital locations to remove negative character traits or diseases, and you will attempt to kill at least one location boss in each run by fighting through the boss lair to collect a trophy from that boss. The goal of each run is to travel through a set number of locations, with inns that offer healing, sanity restoration, skill training, and item sales between each location, before you get to the final mountain location which requires a boss trophy to enter. At the end of the mountain is one of five bosses depending on the current confession choice you have selected before each run.

Combat is still very similar to the previous game and is fun, has some great animation, and narrated with some well done and entertaining voicework. Your party members each have five equipped skills with each skill able to be used in certain positions in the formation and can be used to target allies under certain conditions or enemies that are standing at a targetable spot in their formation. Your skills can inflict a mixture of damage, critical hits, heals, sanity restoration, stuns, knockbacks, pulls, burn damage over time, blight damage over time, dodge chance, armor to cut a percentage of damage, shields that have one character taking damage in place of an ally, bleed damage over time, set other characters up for additional skill effects, etc. Between each fight while traveling to the next event you can access the skill screen where you can swap out which five of a character's 11 skills will be active in the next battle, change your formation, and you can equip each character with two trinkets and one item they can use in combat. The ability to use items as a free action in combat, varied trinkets with some being made for certain characters, and each character now having a generic or three sub class types that makes certain abilities or resistances they have better or worse there is some good variety when it comes to party composition. Although a few of the subclasses can be a bit questionable in terms of viability or are clearly going to be worse than other options unless you are just wanting to mess around.

Character sanity levels have to be managed as well. Taking a critical hit or damage from certain types of attacks can raise their sanity meter from 1-10. Once you are around four you have a high chance during travel that someone's bad mood might worsen relationships or have negative effects, but in battle hitting the max of 10 will cause either a meltdown where they lose significant health and lower their relationship with allies or a small chance to become resolute where they will empty their sanity meter and heal themselves. Character relationships are raised or lowered through random event choices, random positive or negative effects during travel, item use in inns, and occasional based on actions taken in battles. Lower relationships give a chance for negative effects between two characters to take effect while higher levels give a chance to gain positive effects whenever you leave an inn. These relationship effects cause characters to give positive or negative effects to allies when certain skills are used or can have their friends jump in to buff, attack with them, or defend them in some way.

For the most part the game works fine except for a few issues people that liked the previous game or who would prefer that system might have. You are stuck with the same party (unless someone dies then a new character for each death can be randomly selected at an inn, which is potentially its own problem given some party compositions now working well), you are much more effected by bad luck or lack of area knowledge due to the much lengthier runs, the only thing you can carry over for a character is if they survive a run and you use them again they will keep the same positive and negative quirks and any disease they had by the end your skill training, relationships, and items are all reset.

The biggest issues with the game are the lack of content and busywork built into the design. Each location has one boss, a few repeated enemy types, and each of the five confession choices do little to influence the game other than possibly changing how many locations you need to go through, what kind of buffs certain types of enemies use, and the final boss. Some characters certainly feel a bit stronger than others but they all have their own feel to them and are well animated, but there are less characters than in the previous game and the Bounty Hunter has now been relegated to being a random chance party add you can find at an inn that has to replace one of your other characters for one location. When it comes to busywork you now have to find shrines during runs in order to unlock the majority of skills for each character. Each character starts with five unlocked skills and unlocks the other six by going through five events at these shrines, most of these are text/narration based that give you more insight into a character's past but a few will have a little objective based battle you engage in as their past self. A cool way to give more personality to characters and something that can come into play for them during the final boss battle with the last confession, but you might need to make 2-3 full runs per character to unlock all of their skills and many locked skills are things that are needed for a character to be useful. The game is significantly harder when characters lack their basic skills, especially when some parties just don't even have the ability to deal with certain threats without these options. This amounts to hours and hours of time to get these skills unlocked and as just an obvious bad design choice it means that when you see these shrines scouted you are almost certainly going to go for it no matter how bad of a route choice it might be as you ignore a part of the game just to get this over with.

The town upgrading over time has been replaced by a series of shrines you access before a run where you spend candles to unlock things, candles are gained from completing objectives or finding them in runs or by doing a character tasks that they have on each run (often killing a type of enemy or using an ability so many times in one battle). These unlocks are passive upgrades like unlocking other characters for use, increasing character resistances, unlocking subclasses, bonuses to your stagecoach that can include better scouting or ability to carry more items or find more candles, and you can use candles to unlock a wider variety of items that you can find in your runs, passive items that can make the game easier or harder like pets you or different types of flames you can add to the stagecoach, etc. At its best, you are spending time to basically just unlock basic game mechanics or to make things functional in the same way you do by unlocking character skills, and at worst once you have what you want the entire candle system just become almost pointless for the rest of the time you plan to play the game. On a positive note, a lot of games that have you unlocking a lot of items you can find in roguelite runs over is adding things to the world that are either nearly useless in general or nearly useless for many playstyles and while you can see items you will likely have little use for I tended to just notice more wider varieties of similar item types rather than a complete lack of things I need that have been replaced with more and more garbage over time. An odd oversight seems to be that you also start a run with the random items you have unlocked since your previous run so that added element could have given some minor use to the candles you will get at the end of each run but once you have unlocked everything it no longer allows you to spend candles on random items. It is also kind of unfortunate that, while you unlock some cosmetic character changes that alter weapons or colors, you can't unlock their past looks that characters have during their shrine events, it's also a minor annoyance that you can't save skill and subclass settings and that you need to reselect everything for each new run.

The randomness of the design can also lead to some unfortunate occurrences like just not having items you want appearing for sale, constant repeated types of events you are trying to avoid, characters wanting to do things during events that upset other characters (and probably don't often make mechanical sense or sense for the personality shown by them during their shrine events) or just don't make sense like wanting to get scouting information when you already have the map filled or are at the end of it or wanting to fix stagecoach armor or wheels when both are already at their highest condition.

It's a fun game but if you are trying to complete each of the character skill sets and get through every confession you are going to be seeing the same content over and over and over and it's a shame they didn't give much personality to characters when it comes to their interactions with each other since they took a route where each one is now their own unique person with their own past they you see. With future plans to add new enemies, bosses, and characters to the game more of the needed variety to your runs should be given as the game continues to grow.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1685793792908275713

Videos

Darkest Dungeon II - Seething Sigh Resentment Boss Battle: https://youtu.be/c7qMjAZjqQw
Darkest Dungeon 2 - Focused Fault Obsession Boss Battle (1.0 version of boss): https://youtu.be/fSk4bX5VW3I
Darkest Dungeon 2 - Ravenous Reach Ambition Boss Battle: https://youtu.be/YB6zVYO41Vo

An SRPG with multiple story paths to take, a large cast of characters to use in fairly simple but varied battles, and while it can be inconsistent in every area it's a frequent shift between average and excellent.

The plot has you taking control of a young noble that is quickly betrothed to the half sister of the ruler of another nation and is given control of his house due to his father's illness. The continent holds three nations, Aesfrost in the north that focuses on ironwork and a system of freedom through meritocracy that has lead to a massive divide between the rich and poor, Holy State of Hyzante in the east that controls the one known source of salt on the continent where all the citizens seem to be cared for but all have to follow the teachings of and worship a goddess, and the kingdom of Glenbrook which boasts a fairer climate than the other two nations harsh snow and desert and whose rivers and location makes it a center of trade. After a long war ended 30 years ago a joint mining venture between the three nations brings many of the higher ranking members of each country together to celebrate their alliance, but shortly after the delegates return home Arsfrost attacks and takes over the capital of your kingdom. As the new lord of one of the kingdoms three most prominent houses you, your best friend and youngest prince, future wife that is descended from a persecuted people in Hyzante, and your father's long serving advisor have to decide the best way forward.

The writing is often a more average JRPG quality with the normal ridiculous moments of characters things like "haven't we shed blood as well," "how can we hold on to our honor," "shouldn't peace and friendship be our goal." I've defended my party and people from bandits, a nation of imperialist cultists, imperialist betrayers, and bandits I don't think we need all the whining. But when the game hits the bigger moments, the character defining moments, the ends of narrative arcs, the clashes between some of the main enemies or ideologies the writing starts to get quite good, not Tactics Ogre Let Us Cling Together quality, but reaching a bar many games of the genre don't and in those moment the music often goes from a normal good but forgettable standard to also suddenly being excellent and working to further enhance the best moments of the game. It was nice to see that, despite the setup, I've again played one of the seeming few JRPGs where they did not take the narrative route of setting up a monarchy as a good system of government so long as it ends with a nice guy on the throne.

A strong point of the game is that many chapters have two or three options laid out by different characters as a way to proceed and the main members of your house vote on which route to take, with you being able to attempt to persuade anyone to the side you want and with the deciding vote if there is a tie. You can more easily persuade people if your conviction in one of three areas is aligned with what and who you are talking to, combined with choose the right dialogue with some possibly locked behind information found through exploration. You build points in morality utility, and freedom by your choices when talking to people, vote choices and persuasions, and smaller amounts of points through more minor actions based on a variety of actions you can take in battle or exploration. While the routes are interesting and some of the choices are difficult to guess what will happen and how much it can change the story, the actual voting and conviction system I really could have done without as it isn't mechanically interesting and never had any real effect on anything.

The conviction system thankfully stays out of the game enough where your past choices, potential for the true ending aside as that requires certain routes to be taken, won't lock you into any set options in the the future, which that just further highlights how meaningless it tends to be. You are really only using it to do two things, building up enough of one or two of the three types of conviction that side characters will come to join your house and higher values of a particular type make it easier to convince the seven main characters in your house to vote the way you want them to when making a decision that will alter the plot or change the next or next couple sections of the game. Unless you really focus on only one area, you can pretty much get the group to do whatever you want, and you should have so much of each conviction in a new game plus (which the game clearly wants you to run through multiple times to see that paths, get the true ending, unlock all characters, get all the character upgrades, etc) that you can definitely do whatever you want then. It is nice to see character's perspectives on different issues, but it might as well have just had them all talk it out and you pick the way the conversation gets steered instead of taking a vote where you may or may not have convinced particular characters of the choice and no one ever mentions any kind of disagreement again. I went into the game slightly blind and assumed that the voting system was you trying to convince other nobles of your kingdom or people from other nations to take up plans that change the games or that might give positive or negative effects to situations and battles, not that you would just be dealing with your seven friends that can typically be easily convinced of anything.

The battle system typically has you deploying from 9-12 characters with two of the main mechanics being to manage each character's TP that allow them to access their skills and to maneuver your characters in such a way that you can attack enemies while having a character on each side of them (or firing off a ranged attack while an ally is on the opposite side of them). There are a few considerations to take into account such as archers having greater ranged if they are on higher terrain, attacks having a higher hit chance if you have the high ground or are directly behind an opponent, and terrain can either offer minor benefits or can have spells chain lightning over water or freeze tiles to slow movement, start fires in some areas, or melt ice to create puddles. Every character gets a move action and can use one of their abilities each turn, this can be done in any order and there are a few movement skills that allow you to move, use the skill for further movement, and then take another skill action. It's a fairly simple system as characters learn only a few active and passive skills as they level up and are promoted but it works well, is easy to get into, tends to play out fairly quickly, and some of the map designs combined with the varied types of characters you can use keep things interesting. Each character has a main attack that used no TP and abilities that use between 1-4, 0 (for some rare abilities you can acquire passives to reduce the cost of), or all the TP the character currently has. Depending on their current class promotion, each character can hold between 3-5 points, recovers one each turn, and starts a battle with three. Certain characters might have various ways to gain more such as killing an enemy, standing on a certain kind of surface, not moving, hitting multiple enemies at once, starting a battle with more TP, or being able to add or give TP to other characters or to remove it from enemy units.

There is a large roster of characters that each have their own class and many with skills and passives completely unique to them. Some of those skills and a few entire characters specialize or can do things that are so situational or so time consuming to set up that they aren't that practical to use in comparison to other skills or characters, or a character might take so long and so many promotions to learn some valuable skills that they just won't be too useful or interesting to use until very late game or into new game plus (though the game's format does make multiple runs with different routes the main way to experience the full story, side battles, and mechanics), or they are an ok character that could have been a lot of fun to use if they just went a little further with their skill set in giving them a more defined role. One character can set up ladders on the battlefield so he and other characters can climb up to higher terrain like up buildings or steep cliffs, usually completely worthless especially as you unlock more movement based skills but you can basically break some battles with this as he can remove the ladder so enemies can't use it. Each character can have upgrades by spending money and resources at your blacksmith in the encampment area. The upgrades include bonuses two weapon upgrades that alter the look of their weapon and give access to tier 2 and 3 upgrades, upgrades to damage and/or healing done, most characters have an upgrade that you can toggle between two different options that can influence their skills or make them better at filling a certain role, an ultimate weapon ability that gives the character one new high TP cost skill, and unfortunately a lot of very underwhelming stat increases. The material cost of these upgrades increases on a tier with each upgrade very quickly and as materials can be difficult to find and you will likely take the more obviously useful upgrades first you can be left with a lot of dull +1 defense, +1 magic defense, +1 speed, etc style upgrades that just isn't that exciting when your stats are probably around the 20s-50s anyway and a few of the characters have some passive upgrades that just isn't of much use. +1 Defense to your mages isn't going to do much to their ability to tank damage, or to survive at all most likely.

Each of the eight main characters and 22 side character that you recruit either through story choices or by getting one or two of your conviction scores to the needed level will also have short scenes for their own personal story unlocked when you use them enough times in battle. The stories are of mixed quality, usually they rush through them with most only having a recruitment scene and two others doesn't give them much time to develop but through those scenes they do tend to interact with members of the main cast throughout many of their events. One issues with a few of the side characters and the conviction system is that there are a few of these potential recruits that should have a much larger impact on the story once they join you and it makes no narrative sense that they don't become main characters or have more or any plot interactions and even though they join you like some of the main characters do they have no say or appearance in any of the voting segments further highlighting its uninteresting mechanics.

Through an option at your encampment, that you can enter from the world map or during exploration, every main story battle that you have fought can be replayed (and they carry over in the list in new game+) as well as a large number of side battles with new and more difficult ones being added in the new game+ mode. Some maps are reused here but they will have some mixture of new unit placement for both sides, new enemy units, and possibly different objectives. Having new side battles, higher level enemies, and having all the abilities of characters now in earlier fights can make playing through the game again interesting, more so when taking new routes, but you will be seeing a lot of the same fights again and even more so if you attempt to unlock every character that would require at least four playthroughs.

A more recent patch added an epilogue scene to the true ending that gives some of the characters a more complete ending to their stories.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1685382576456990720