After the first chapter I can safely say the game is as tone deaf as it initially seemed. This is a total vanity project that really begs the question of "who the hell funded this?" Since the author is basically just some random indie dev with a small resume. Some good stuff but nothing crazy.

This is essentially a parody game since its played so straight. Well, its not a parody, or a game, so that doesnt quite work. We Are OFK is just an aggressively smarmy, paid ad for a mediocre band of internet nerds. The blue haired character is basically a self insert fantasy for the mastermind of the project, who is just some dorky white dude.

The dialogue is so....annoying? Everyone is just a smug hipster with aggressive vocal fry and an obsession wirh sarcastic quips and saying internet words verbally. They're not people, they're characters, a band of 4 scrappy doos.

The beauty of We Are OFK is the trainwreck aspect of it. Since theres no gameplay to mess up, anyone can watch it on Youtube and cringe at the dialogue for free. Its not quite gaming's "The Room", its more the recent movie "Music". A tone deaf misfire of a vanity project that makes you embarassed for the band and the inevitable wheel spinning that will follow.

Soul Hackers 2 is an endurance marathon of a video game that left me with an shockingly profound case of Stockholm Syndrome.

I gave 76 hours of my life that I will never get back to trudge through the most abysmal dungeons in any video game that I've ever played, a remarkably bland story, mostly unlikable characters, and I don't even know if I'm upset.

This game has so few redeemable qualities in regards to the time it requires out of the player, it is downright impressive.

Soul Hackers 2 is an affront to the adult human. Time is not respected. Sanity is not respected. Intellect is not respected. The hypothetical of watching the entirety of One Piece is a resoundingly better use of time.

Little about this experience in retrospect could be described by the four letter use of diction in the English language that is the word: good.

Usually I would write a long form review, as I do with most of my plays, for games that I have a generally strong positive/negative reaction to, but Soul Hackers 2 drained enough out of me, Dracula would be proud.

I liked Tokyo Mirage Sessions, but no game should have the player ever, in a modicum of occurrences, say "I would rather play Tokyo Mirage Sessions."

Seriously, I have never complained about a game I've played this much, for this long, and had that come up in my review. I am mellow, I am very mild-mannered, but Soul Hackers 2 had me considering donning a purple jacket, some clown makeup, and changing my legal name, that my lovely mother and father gave to me, to Arthur Fleck, also known in the DCComic Universe as The Joker.

Speaking of Joker, man do I miss Persona. This is an SMT game through and through, that should've been a sign to me. I knew it was SMT, and I kinda like SMT, but I don't Liiiiiiiiiike SMT.

I pledge to play video games that respect my time a little more.

The genuine pros of this game, is that the hub vistas that you revisit are quite beautiful and the game design of the environments (minus the dungeons) is great. The character design, minus Arrow, is awesome and some of the better that I've seen in the JRPG space recently. Ringo, Figue, Milady, Nana, and Saizo all had great and unique designs that were candy to the eye and played to their respective characters. Speaking of the (main) characters, they were pretty good actually. Though they were sort of juvenile in their approach
to the tentative apocalypse that would lead to the death of all humanity, they were fun to listen to talk and hang out in the downtimes.

The shop menus and art style was very well done too. The presentation of Soul Hackers 2 was the lone spotlight in a sea of begrudgingly depressing and miserable decisions.

I can't recommend you play this game, unless you have a lot of free time, and not the will to enjoy a good game.

This has legitimately numbed my approach to video games, I'm hoping in a sort of shell-shocked fashion that I will get over. I hope the next game I play, has some redeeming quality that makes me smile or interested in what I'm interacting with, Soul Hackers 2 may be a paradigm shift in the way I approach games. I hope one day, that the spark that Elden Ring brought will return, because playing Soul Hackers 2 is the complete antithesis of everything I enjoy.

The more I think about the plot, the more I want to go out into the country of the state I live in and lie in a field of grass so that I can forget how poor it is.

Saizo really was a great character though, I just wanted to let that be known.

Maybe I'm naive, but I find it hard to imagine that Soul Hackers 2 was born of corporate cynicism. You don't make a sequel to a niche, rad as hell JRPG like that without some passion for the original. I can just imagine a small gang at Atlus lobbying for years for the oppurtunity, and being ready to give their all for it.

But dear lord, this game is such a damp squib. Divorce it from its frankly, minor relation to Soul Hackers 1 and you're left with such a by the numbers JRPG with rock bottom production values and absolutely no hook beyond some pretty fun characters and some quite pretty aesthetics.

And those bits are pretty good. Ringo in particular is a proper gremlin, a really fun MC that works well, and the game can be extremely pretty, with strong environmental design whenever you're outside dungeons. In what's probably going to be the most controversial take of this review, I also think the combat is one of my favourite incarnations of the SMT systems - It ends up very fast paced in comparison to SMTV and even P5s systems, and it doesnt fall so much into some of the series' traps. Fights in general also feel like they're a litlte less common than normal for SMT, thank god.

But man is it so fucking bland otherwise. The characters might be fun but the plot of finding the 5 McGuffins to save the world from the SECRET SOCIETY is so, so bad. There is just no hook - it could still work if it had the cool themes of the original, bathed in the 90s tech paranoia and counterculture. Alas, you're left with a plot which is Dragon Quest levels of by the numbers.

Maybe the weakest aspect though is the production. It all feels so damn cheap. Whilst the game has some pretty locations, they are all hilariously small and there's next to nothing to do with them, and you'll spend most of your time in dungeons with the same 5 assets spammed ad nauseum. It didnt have to be an issue - your average Gust game has similar production values to this and I will gladly consume cute girl game #47, coming this winter. But where Gust work within their constraints and make games suited to the stories they can tell, focused on character dynamics, small worlds and small scale conflicts, Soul hackers 2 still wants to be the biggest game in the room. It feels a bit pathetic, honestly.

The end result is quite poor. A relatively short length and fun characters/aesthetic probably just puts it over the gargantuan Persona 5 and the dull as dishwater SMTV of the recent SMTs, but its a far, far cry from the series' peaks.

Cult of the Lamb is a super polished mash up of a colony simulator and an action roguelike. I had fun with it and it is better than the sum of its two halves, though either side individually is fairly shallow and doesn't actually hold up that well on its own.

Visually, Cult of the Lamb is really impressive. Everything has a super cute, vector art aesthetic that works really well juxtaposed with the demonic cult setting. There is a ton of custom animation in the game and everything just looks really cohesive and great.

The colony sim gameplay works even though there isn't much to it. It is satisfying to explore this part of the game and new cult buildings and rituals unlock at a pretty steady pace, keeping this side of the game fairly engaging up until the end.
There is some resource tension around how many cultists you have, how much food they have, and how happy you can keep them, but it never really becomes too difficult. I also don't have a clear idea why having less cultists matters. It is pretty easy (if time consuming) to recruit more, and they are all pretty interchangeable despite any positive or negative traits they may have.
The building is pretty rudimentary and the skewed placement grid makes beautifying your compound feel unsatisfying. Buildings arbitrarily break, which is just an annoying resource sink that doesn't actually matter.
Assigning villagers to things feels super soft and weird. It is never clear how many I have assigned to what thing or even if they are successfully assigned, since they will occasionally do what they want anyway.
The colony sim is ok as a backdrop to the action game, but there is definitely not enough of interest here to sustain a game on its own.

The action roguelike side of things fares worse for me than the colony sim side, unfortunately. It is pretty standard attack + dodge roll + special ability gameplay but there isn't a ton of variety in the weapons or the abilities.
Weapons only really differ by speed and damage with one weapon (the hammer) having an alternate, more deliberate attacking style. Every weapon takes control from you with extremely committed attacks or built-in movement that can be hard to control or unpredictable.
Special abilities fall into a couple of different flavors and are more interesting than the weapons despite their usage limitations.
The combat generally feels uncontrolled and chaotic to me. It is hard to tell if your weapon will connect with the enemy or if you are positioned to avoid enemy attacks. Enemies all flash white before they attack you as well as when you attack them, so this indicator is usually not apparent. It is fairly easy to mash your way through this game, but I definitely felt like I was arbitrarily killed a lot and that my skill didn't have a ton to do with my success or failure.
There are also minor upgrades you can get in the form of tarot cards which unfortunately don't mix things up very much. Mostly you get bonus health, damage, or speed, with the occasional change to some aspect of your character like leaving a fire trail when you roll or firing a projectile out of your weapon occasionally. None of these really impacted my gameplay that much. Fortunately runs are very short and you progress through the levels fast enough that things don't really get boring.

There is a very minimal narrative here. It serves as a fine framing device for the cult setting, but not much more.

I liked Cult of the Lamb, but was definitely done with it by the time I beat it and don't really have any desire to play it more. The combination of gameplay styles is cool -- both of them need a bit more depth.
Solid game that is worth at least checking out if the genre combination sounds interesting to you!

This is one of the worst narratives in jrpg, I ever played, with one of the worst cast of villains in all media, this is by far the worst of the trilogy.

I can't think of a single sane human in this planet say:
"wow the consuls were great characters, they really felt threatening "

or

"Wow dialogue was really good, the main cast started questioning why Moebius were doing this by the 50th time"

or

"Damn, now this surprises me, we are going to a colony, AND WE FOUGHT THE COLONY, THEN THE CONSUL, THEN WE LIBERATED THE COLONY BY 7TH TIME, NOT ONLY THAT, THE COMMANDER ASKED US TO DO THIS"

I actually felt like I had Shulk's future vision in this game, because I could see where the plot was going and what would happen next, because the plot is so poorly executed and predictable, that it made me turn in "Consul Generic Number 500" in real life.

I really want to talk about the "gameplay, class system, music, Ouroboros System", and I enjoyed these, but it's not enough to excuse every other mistake in scriptwriting.

And no, this game doesn't have an original story concept, there are about hundreds of films, games, books, that explore the concept of "war, aristocratic dystopia, controlled by some kind of secret organization", and they did not put a single effort in trying to revitalize or add something new to the twist.

Call "Review Bombing" if you wish, or call me a hater or a clown, your choice, but I invite you to play the game again, and question yourself if Noah is something other than a nice guy that knows every "Life Coach" speech, or better yet, if the Consuls and Moebius itself is anything!, other than COMPLETE VOID.

Alright I'll just take care of the elephant in the room right out of the gate: the story is awful. At first I was willing to write it off as "cringe anime fan dialogue" like everyone else has been, but once those jokes slowed down I did make a genuine attempt to get invested into the world and narrative. What I got out of it was a plot that tried it's best to make me believe that someone as abusive, manipulative and unapologetic as Neon Green deserves any sort of forgiveness, all because that's what God would want. Yippee.

It's a shame how it ended up souring my experience more than I expected it to, since the rest of it was basically everything that I never knew I wanted out of a video game. As someone who's a huge fan of platformers with an emphasis on time attack modes and speedrunning (translation: a Sonic fan), Neon White has one of the most fun and addictive gameplay loops I've ever experienced in the medium. It constantly introduces one new idea after another, opening up more possibilities for how levels can be designed. And as you replay them for better and better times, noticing how much each level opens up with shortcuts and ways to optimize your runs makes every single attempt a delight. It's also fantastic in presentation. I really adore the edgy 2000s aesthetics that ooze from every corner of it, along with a stellar OST from Machine Girl that manages to be both immersive and adrenaline pumping. This'd probably be a clean 5 star game if it just... didn't have a narrative this bad. Highly recommended to any fan of platformers and speedrunning.

I really don't like this game and it feels like every time I pick it up I find something that makes me want to put it all back down again. No More Heroes 3 is just... a disaster in my personal taste. The actual combat is fun and I do like it, but all my issues come with the story itself and the general nessecity of this game. Hot take, but I really don't think No More Heroes 3 was even a game that needed to be made. I feel where Travis Strikes Again ended was a good stopping point for the series and that it could have been left at just that. I feel like some of its major themes like revenge and stuff have already been treaded better by games like No More Heroes 2. No More Heroes 3 basically abandoned its theme of revenge immediately after a character death and doesn't bring it up until the credits- what was the point??
Another thing I dislike is the fact Suda seems to be putting in random thing after random thing- what is the neccessity of Miike in this game other than Suda being like omg I'm a Miike fan!! Even if TSA did the bringing back characters as cameos thing, I just feel like NMH3 doesn't even have a reason to have characters like Kamui Uehara there. What does he add to the plot besides being a scrimblo blimbo? This holds none of the charm and intellect of some of the old Grasshopper greats and we're left with a sad state of a No More Heroes game. I feel this game has nothing to make itself a worthy Grasshopper game in my eyes- it's not trying to say anything that hasn't already been said better and its execution makes it drop most of its core themes for scrimbling blimbling.
This game shouldn't exist- and punk's NOW dead.

Maybe the worst game released on the PS4, certainly the worst game from a major dev/publisher. Even years later, I can't force myself through the miserably bad combat system (I just finished Tenchu for the PS1 and its fighting was better) a second time to finally see the hilarious voice-acted cutscenes with dialogue worse than the Forspoken trailer. I also love how NG+ reveals that the deaf-mute protagonist isn't actually deaf-mute? So what was the point of making people sit through 30-minute silent exposition cutscenes? How is Square Enix still in business

Notes on Stray forcefully anti-intellectuals because it is necessary to think about video games outside the logic of video games or something like that

-I talk too much about spaces, their construction and exploration and I barely realize how important the height and size we use to move through it is, but I have always felt that small avatars are a little more interesting. Maybe because I'm 1.85, I have no idea.

-When Stray was released I saw a tweet that said something like "it's a game about being a cat but in BoTW you move more like a cat" or something like that. I found it a bit ridiculous because it seemed to disdain Stray's navigation based on pseudo-realistic logic, but in BoTW almost any surface is "sticky" and you can scale it like a lizard. That's not very catty bro

-The environments are excellent on their own, but they also seem to me to be an excellent architecture that reflects the dilemma of the automata.
There is a lot of beauty in walking around the district and just sitting next to any inhabitant, a robot, an npc, a mannequin. an inhabitant.

Why fool ourselves, if the game had been a cat Playground most of GamersTm would have been annoyed for not having objectives, "nothing to do".
goodoo.

-The complaint of many is that the game should have been a playground instead of a directed adventure with some freeform moments. I think so too, but against everything I believed, I ended up liking the direction, despite being quite conventional.

-Creating a fictional world through the aesthetic and cultural appropriation of countries with problematic political pasts (is there a country that does not have it?) can be problematic, but it is true that many countries have done it to a greater or lesser extent. It doesn't matter how; Turbo-capitalist revisions of Marie Antoinette of Austria, JRPGs with bucolic aesthetics or those martial arts movies where completely anachronistic techniques and movements are shown. Perhaps it would matter more WHO takes that culture to use it as background and decoration

-Alexis Ong's text isn't bad to be honest


-Sisi Jiang's text wouldn't be bad either. But back to the same.
It's not that I want to play the parry that we should be permissive with the romanticization (and appropriation) of a problematic aesthetic and culture for the sake of a freer and more experimental fiction... But if I'm doing it a little?? maybe?
Why complaining about the appropriation of pizza or the word (k)Otaku would be silly but doing it about Hong Kong architecture is smart?

-In the past, some Asian countries, by necessity or imposition, have also absorbed too much Western culture, now they appropriate it and, by necessity or because of the turbo-capitalism in which we live, they market their own culture.
I apologize if this may offend anyone but it is something that I see very real.

Developed by the legendary Yuji Naka, Balan Wonderworld is packed to the gills with hidden features, like a special difficulty if you're playing too well, and bonus trophies for defeating bosses with an unexpected costume.

But who cares?!

If Yuji Naka is legendary, then I'm fucking Bigfoot, because some of these oversights are basic and inexcusable. Let's get the obvious out of the way: the issue of jumping is but one problem, and they clearly assumed enough people would play multiplayer to have one poor soul be a dedicated jump-slave. The real issue is the level design and practicality of the disgustingly situational costumes.

Why have a dragon costume that can't even shoot fireballs very far, followed by a robot costume that shoots lasers a huge distance like 1 chapter later? These are some of the easiest design issues to reason out during the brainstorming phase of your game, but they must have been brain dead during that time. All of this was deliberate: Yuji Naka wasn't drunk when he did this, no sir.

He proudly walked in with a checklist and it said "3,700 costumes, but one button does everything, and get all that Sonic nostalgia out of your head, because we're only moving at the speed of a real hedgehog now." Clearly, we just can't understand his master plan.

The gameplay is 10/10, probably the best I've played this year, I am such a sucker for these quick twitch combat and/or platformer games, and this scratches the itch finishing Ghostrunner left hard (which scratched the itch from cluster truck hard). It's complex in its simplicity, there are only four controls but so many combinations of them and so many ways they're used and it all moves at a million miles an hour, the art design is recognisable yet utilitarian; being simple enough to not be distracting and making it easy to distinguish enemies and items when at high speeds.

So, why 4.5 stars? The story. The dialogue in this game is genuinely awful, the characters are bland and flat, about halfway through the game I couldn't take it anymore and just started skipping the cutscenes.

But if you ignore the story and cutscenes this could be one of the best games of the year, even in the afformentioned Ghostrunner and Cluster Truck, or similar games like Hotline Miami, I never bothered to get the high scores on every level, but in this game I refused to go to the next stage before getting the gold on every. Single. Level. It's fun, addictive and perfectly fair and balanced.

Instant recommendation, must play.