I'm not going to really speak on glitch/bug issues I had with the game, as I think most of them were attributed to me using an HDD instead of an SSD to play it and a number of things didn't load in quickly (or in some rare cases, at all). It was specified in the requirements that playing on an HDD might yield some quirky things. If anything, I'd rather praise the dev team for making a game that my potato rig can run on Medium for settings without much in the way of framerate drops.

As for the game itself -- well, I didn't think much of the original, and although there are improvements to this iteration, they just weren't enough to really make me feel fulfilled.

I think that I have a monkey brain and a lizard brain. When I'm playing Silent Hill games and a puzzle comes up, monkey brain comes along and tries to figure out how the pieces fit into the holes and I'm fine with this because it's a slow survival horror game and the tension and creep are supposed to build on you over time. When I'm playing an action-based horror game like Dead Space, my lizard brain kicks in and goes, "Me want shooty things" and I...shooty things. When you interrupt my shooty things moments with obtuse puzzles that kill the pacing, lizard brain just goes, "why am not doing the shooty things?" And I just go shrug-emote. Neither of us are satisfied, but we both do the puzzle so we can get back to shootying things.

Is it scary? Well, according to some friends that have been playing it, it's terrifying to them. I wouldn't take my opinion on it because when stuff jumps out, I just aim for the area and spray with no hesitation or concern. I'm not cool, calm, and collected -- I just don't seem to have that proper switch for fear unless it's spiders because spiders are awful.

Spoiler alert: There are no spiders in Dead Space. GOOD.

Everyone else seems to like it, so I'd say that if you want to play an action-horror game, you may as well jump on it. NG+ is supposed to have a new ending, so that's also a thing for previous players who are on the fence. That's all I've got.

I think this is my nominee for Average Game of the Year for 2019.

Things I loved:

+ The backgrounds are great to look at, especially further along in the game.
+ SOME bosses are interesting enough

...and that's really it.

There's a lot of stuff it does fine, but it also flubs things a bit because I feel like it's trying to be both a Metroidvania and a Soulslike game without really being strongly in either camp in a good way. I could write a long diatribe about prevailing issues with the game, but for how very average it felt, I feel like I'd rather just go play something else now, instead.

I'll give some short thoughts on this before pointing out the best softlock ever.

-- The pixel art is fantastic.

-- The horror aesthetic is great.

-- The initial descent into the facility works really well.

-- A particular point in the game where you learn more about your REPLIKA unit was probably my second-favorite moment of the game.

-- Kinda hate that the inventory is only six slots and you're using one of those slots for a necessary item for about half of the game, because it creates a lot of needless backtracking and pushes you to just run through areas instead of engaging enemies (or even dispatching them with tools).

-- The puzzles are a little obtuse at times, but it's not too hard to figure out what's going on most of the time.

But really, I'm here for when I beat the game and it softlocked during my ending. It was such a WTF moment because I'm sitting there on a screen that's not-quite frozen, with the words "YOU SELFISH MONSTER" just stuck on the screen while occasional artifacting happens. I waited ten minutes and then had to go look up the endings to confirm it was a softlock and not something else, since no buttons would give any sort of response to move it along.

YOU SELFISH MONSTER. Yep, that's me! Fun game, but also a real dick for calling me out like that. I got it on sale for 20% off and I think it's worth it at that price, given I got about eight hours out of it for 15 bucks. There's better survival horror out there, but this one definitely feels like a rather unique experience, if nothing else.

I'm not sure what my favorite part was:

1) Having the autosave crash the game at one point

2) Riding the Ferris Wheel a second time and having an out-of-body experience as I got to float around in the sky while overlooking the Ferris Wheel (in the same circular motion as said ride)

3) Riding the Roller Coaster ride, getting off, getting the flashlight, then having the game softlock me into a state of not being able to exit the ride until I closed and reopened the game and continued

4) Deciding to skip a number of rides you were expected to take, opening up some paths by interacting with stuff near those points, then going back to the previous rides, then coming back to those paths to find them closed off and discovering that even reloading would not reopen the path you needed to progress the game

5) The amazingly bad PT loop at the end of the game.

My wife when the game was over: "This is it? This is really it? This was not worth staying awake for, at all."

I can't even say I mastered the game because I checked and two of the trophies were locked off past the Roller Coaster section, so I would have had to play all the way back through to that point from the beginning if I wanted to 100% it that badly. AND I DO NOT.

I 100%'d this game. Uhh...I guess that's supposed to mean I liked it?

-- Enemy AI for bosses ranges from bad to just plain screwed up (looking at you, optional bee boss)

-- Moreover, some tactics for boss fights require you to just do ridiculous but simple things in order to get an edge over said bosses. In the case of one boss, you have to repeatedly jump into and out of a death pit (you don't have to fall all the way down into it) because you can't jump over the boss or use your wall jump to get higher than it.

-- The music doesn't loop properly, so every time you enter a room, the music for that area starts over again. Hope you don't clear rooms too quickly!

-- I guess it's a Metroidvania because there is gating, but the gating feels questionable and is tied to new arrows you get that are actually pretty awful for using on regular enemies, so you pretty much just use your new arrows to make progress and stick with your generic arrows for damage.

-- Healing seems to be busted, at least if you want to play with the D-Pad on a controller because it will let you move left and right just fine, but if you press Up, you heal (whether you wanted to or not). This gets worse when you attempt to fire arrows while falling and sometimes the game just decides that what you MEANT to do was to heal right then. Also, if you die while you're healing, don't worry, you'll hear the heal prompt go off on the "FAIL" screen just to let you know that it understood what you wanted to do and just didn't feel like executing it while you were alive.

-- The dialogue is varying levels of terrible and also needed some serious translation work.

-- It really doesn't take much effort to get from the endgame requirements to 100%ing the game (like maybe an extra 30 minutes of gameplay), but I think it says something that about 20% of people that have played the game have beaten it, but only 5% actually bother to 100% it. I am one of those suckers that bothered to do it.

-- There's no final boss. Well, not really. There's A BOSS that's in the way of the last area before you go back to the beginning to finish the game, but it has about as much impact as any other boss in the game and the exact same music.

-- When you die, you're warped back to your last checkpoint you rested at and all progress you made is reverted. Yes, if you beat a boss and died before reaching a campfire, you get to fight the boss again. It's one of THOSE games.

Do I have anything good to say about this? Well, it only took me just over four hours to 100% it, so I guess it doesn't make you suffer for too long!

Seriously, it's not good. But if I 100%'d it, I feel obligated to detail my thoughts and I feel like I could probably write a lot more about the failings of this game, but I'll just say that if you're really in dire need of a Metroidvania, maybe you pick this up at 75% off and punish yourself accordingly. I got it for about six bucks (35% off) and I regret the purchase, but maybe your mileage may vary!

What a mess. For a game that takes place in a location that feels a bit out of the movie The Collection (2012), you would expect a maximum number of ways to die and all the agency to get yourself ruined. Instead, it's one of the most linear "walk your way to our next trap" situations you can possibly get.

One of your characters can't even die for about 80% of the game and actively uses information they can't have access to based on what others have found out because that information never got shared with this person, but since the developers didn't account for certain permutations in who lives and dies, that information just gets used like it's common knowledge anyway.

I don't care if the Obol system allows you to purchase dioramas later on, it's just a worse Totem/Whatever system because its sole purpose is collectible currency for Extras.

Why are some of the doors marked with "locked" symbols on them, but some aren't, but neither can be entered in either case in any of the scenes where these things happen?

Why can I play through the game to completion but not get the trophy for completing the game unless I actively sit through the entirety of the credits without skipping through them, even though the game drops a gigantic prompt that urges me to skip the credits?

What a mess. Despite my complaining, I'll still play the Sci-Fi Space Horror game they drop for their Season 2 Premiere. Maybe we can get another House of Ashes in terms of fun. Here's to hoping.

I loved Blaster Master as a kid and couldn't understand how bringing a sequel to a more powerful system could result in such an incomprehensibly worse game. It was an indecipherable mess of structure, as it took the loosest elements of the original game and cobbled them together without the foresight to give the player an idea of how that structure should function.

If that explanation feels really vague, know that the game feels the same. I guess controls were fine, graphics were par for the course, sound effects were alright, and music was dullsville. I can't shake how much this game made me angry about the drop-off in value over the original Blaster Master. Go play that a million times over instead. Go pull up Stage 5 and Stage 6 music on YT -- it's so worth it. This game is not.

Take some of the fun aesthetics of the later Persona games and mix them with a bunch of questionable design decisions and a story that's very blah with a deus ex junkina of a reveal toward the end based on so very little reasoning.

Demon fusion feels half-assed, with four skills (upgradable to six EVENTUALLY) making every demon feel rather lackluster in their abilities. Sure, the restriction of choices should teach you to value your demons more, but there's so much overlap between various demons that it hardly feels like the endgame choices matter as much. And if you got yourself a demon you like before you unlocked your sixth skill slot? Well, hope you like teaching stuff to your Mitamas and fusing them with your demons, because that's about the only way you're going to be able to flesh out your skill set further.

I do like the inclusion of flavored Frosts, and I don't really care that much about the fusion system being completely basic (no moon phases to sweat or account for, no accidents, just vanilla fusing). I do take issue with the fact that it's ridiculously expensive to use the compendium and that performing sidequests to lower the cost only drops demon summoning costs by what...15 or 20%? Makes endgame mixing and matching fruitless because you don't want to spend all your money on just trying to hone a demon into something you'd specifically like.

Why? Because of COMP ingredient farming. Seemed like a great idea at first, as it makes all encounters seem fruitful when you're potentially getting ingredients needed for certain upgrades to your COMP system to make you more powerful. Except not every enemy drops an ingredient and ignoring any enemies in an area means you're likely missing out on ingredients necessary for some upgrades. So, why wouldn't you just fight every monster?

Because monster encounter rates are ridiculous to the point of exhaustion. Ringo moves slowly in her "run" and only Treasure Monsters actually try and flee from you, so you will spend most of the game slashing at monsters to knock them down and then fight them or go around them. And when I say most, I mean that in my 50 hours or so of playing, probably around 40-42 was spent slashing at monsters and engaging in combat. It's a genuine slog of the worst caliber. But if the level design is nice, doesn't that mitigate the issues, at least?

Except the level designs are poor. Early on, you're introduced to the Soul Matrix and you learn that you're going to be spending some time there if you want to be remotely equipped for the main areas of the game. There's a soul matrix area for each character with a number of floors that you can reach over time, though I won't get into how you unlock those floors. The floors for the soul matrix all look relatively the same, with some slight variations in how to progress in them that give a mild puzzle-feel to the area, but not in a clever or interesting way.

The actual areas of the game where the story progresses feel even more vanilla, with the exception of the final area of the game, which is a great time if you enjoy load screens and continuously backtracking to make progress.

I'd like to say that the boss fights make all the grinding and slogging worthwhile, but they don't stand out any bit more than previous SMT games do. Without the Press Turn system, there's no pressure on the player to sweat mistakes as hard, and especially no pressure to sweat demon choices, as being weak to something might cause you to take more damage, but does not give enemies more actions, so stress in the big fights is minimal. The Sabboth system seems like something that can be interesting, but it ultimately just culminates into getting all your Press Turn bonuses thrown into a stack that yields extra damage at the end of the turn. The Commander skills you eventually learn are alright, but outside of two particular ones, you can largely skip on most of them without bothering to scour for resources to unlock them.

I'd like to touch on the Soul Level system, but I'm trying to keep this relatively spoiler-free, so I'll just say that in regards to it, you can't really make any wrong choices (including during Hangouts), so go wild and unlock things in the direction that you want (unless you're going for platinum, in which case, go check a guide).

Sidequests are nothingburgers, the music is okay, everyone who isn't Milady is okay (Milady is great once you get past the "I'm a cold badass" bit) -- most of the game is just okay.

A friend I talked to that was also playing the game purchased the DLC (I don't know if she picked up the additional story level) and mentioned to me that regarding the costume DLC -- apparently, it only lets displays your equipped costumes in battle. Not during your constant running around or cutscenes, just battles. That sounds awful and if I recall correctly, it's like 13 USD for that, so even if you're interested in playing this, maybe consider passing on that particular DLC.

For reference, I played this on Normal all the way through. You can change your difficulty at any given point so if I'm being frank about getting the most enjoyment out of this by mitigating some of the frustration, I'd say to just play on Easy until you get to boss fights and then run it on Normal so you can at least get a feel for what the actual experience should be like without having to spend quite as much time grinding the regular demon battles.

Is it worth getting? If you're a diehard SMT fan, you're going to get it anyway. If you're looking at it as a curiosity, it feels closer in nature (to me, at least) to Digital Devil Saga. I'd say to absolutely wait on a sale for it, because the story and the content in general just simply are not worth it. There are so many better SMT games out there. Go play the first Soul Hackers, or any of the Persona games (maybe not the first). Go play NOCTURNE.

You can do better than this, because ATLUS could have done better than this.

I bounced off this so hard.

Credit to them for nailing the Bloodborne aesthetic (for better or worse in some cases) -- it's clearly what they were aiming for, even down to that sound you'd hear when arriving in a new area in Bloodborne...which gets really old when you're fast traveling all the time in The Last Faith.

People mention the boss fights as being solid in this game and for me, they were just rather run-of-the-mill experiences, with maybe the exception of Edwyn (which felt like a fun dance) or the Yegor & Leena fight.

People also mention that generic enemies get pretty old and that group battles are a pain and I'm fully inclined to agree -- especially in regard to challenge rooms and a particular icy area of the game. Challenge rooms are supposed to make you deal with threats you've mostly disposed of by themselves in unwieldy groups...which could be fun tactically, but ends up just feeling more annoying than anything. That is, until they decide to add in enemies you've never encountered up to that point, who often will surprise you while you're disposing of the ones you're already familiar with. There's a very "gotcha!" feel to some challenge room fights because it feels like they wanted to take the idea of enemies besting you because you're not aware of your surroundings and then cram it into a 2D game that doesn't give you the ability to really look around quickly when you're dodging enemies (a little more on this later). What should be an "Oh, I should have paid attention to that!" moment often turns into a "How was I supposed to be remotely prepared for that?" moment instead and it gets old.

I mentioned a particular icy area because there are hazards throughout the game that love to deal contact damage to you and you've got that Castlevania knockback going on where you might as well go grab a coffee while you wait to get up, it feels that long. Some of these hazards will be set up to knock you into pits to create an instakill moment (yes, there are pits, but the map is usually good about identifying them, unlike with some specific cases with Blasphemous). Some of these hazards are set up to just bounce you directly into enemies and happen to be on a path of sheets of ice that make you slide everywhere, making the whole trip a cumbersome experience.

The biggest offender for combat, however, is the lack of invincibility frames. If an enemy hits you and you're starting to get knocked back and two other enemies decide to hit you at the same time, you eat all three hits immediately. You can be juggled by an enemy group if you're unlucky and it feels like you just got invited to a mid-tier Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 match, except your lifebar will generally dissipate in 3-4 hits, depending on whether you've been upgrading your Vitality stat at all. One note -- there is a boss that combo juggles you and does significantly less damage during these juggles if they catch you off guard, and I did kind of enjoy seeing it in this respect, as it felt like the potential for what you also should be capable of, but generally aren't. The fact is, most regular enemies die to just slash-spam if you're upgrading weapons at regular intervals, so they become nuisances that drop the usual Soulslike currency when they're not just being challenge room pains.

I think Bloodborne's system works really well for Bloodborne, but shoving the limited storage system into The Last Faith feels just excessive, especially when they decided to forego some of the solid design decisions for Bloodborne in the process. Aggressive combat to promote getting your health back? Not present. Abysmally slow healing that makes Dark Souls II healing look like a speedrun? Yeah, The Last Faith has that in spades. Gun parrying? Nah, just a singular ability that you can try and tick off that doesn't feel as intuitive as it should, but hey, we've got guns still!

Even the exploration feels frustrating because this is a game that absolutely wants to take the Bloodborne concept and shove it into a Metroidvania, so finding explorable places off the beaten path usually doesn't amount to much because you're often going to need an upgrade that you get from traversing the main path of gating bosses that grant you those abilities. I can't imagine how much worse Bloodborne would have felt if every new area you found had the equivalent of a roadblock that asked you to basically go back to the main story for several more hours if you wanted to come back and explore again.

Nearly every aspect of this game is frustrating to me -- even the story, which pretty much everyone mentions as being so very front and center while conveying almost nothing useful about why you're so corrupted, but we're definitely going to let you know that you're corrupted every single chance we get!

I don't see myself ever going back to finish this, and that's disappointing because I was really looking forward to it. It feels, at best, like a middling Metroidvania just wearing Bloodborne's clothing awkwardly and I can't abide by that because it's just not a good fit.

Just going back and reviewing this because I decided to do a "platinum" run on RetroAchievements and it's been a hot minute since I got to plow through this game.

It definitely shows its age in how important grinding can be for some characters, especially if you aren't familiar with the fact that promoting some characters immediately at Level 10 is a death knell for their growth after promotion (and a harder time because you start at Level 1 in the new class with reduced stats from what you had previously).

It's still appealing visually, as far as Genesis games go, but the soundtrack gets pretty old, given how few tracks there are for the thirty battles you're going to have to endure. The cutscene fights are always fun to look at, but like some older games that share this style (I'm looking at you, Brigandine), the music for fight scenes can get REALLY OLD, REALLY FAST.

I still appreciate the numerous optional characters that you can find, especially since they largely encourage you to really just look around a bit before and after each fight (although you can hilariously miss characters that aren't supposed to be optional, like in the case of Diane). Some of the optional characters are siege tanks against your opponents, like in the case of Musashi or Hanzou near the endgame -- and it's so very easy to miss them.

Healers are awful to level up and make grinding even more tedious until they learn Aura and you're suddenly incentivized to take damage and bunch up in poor formations so you can maximize the experience earned by an Aura.

There are two overwhelmingly large problems with the game that are worth noting.

The first is relative to the grind -- knowing when it's a good time to actually grind out some levels is important and it's easy to just be on a good clip and think you'll be fine, only to run into a true wall that punishes you perpetually because you didn't take advantage of a good grind point earlier. The first and second stages of the Ramladu fight are the perfect example of this, as they're prime real estate for grinding -- but if you have even a couple decent characters, the actual fights are so easy that you might just rush through them without getting the myriad free levels available to you by just knocking out all enemies except the last one for each area (probably a Dark Priest in the first area) and Egressing. The second fight in the Ramladu section screams, "PLEASE GRIND YOUR CHARACTERS HERE."

But also worth noting, if you come in late with low levels and you're suddenly only doing 1 point of damage with most characters, getting those levels -- even in an area made for it -- is going to be an even worse chore than you're normally accustomed to. As an example, trying to get Luke to 20 before promoting him to GLDR means he couldn't use upgraded weapons, so he's running around with a Middle Sword from near the beginning of the game and doing about 5 damage to enemies when his actual damage output is probably one of the highest in the game post-promotion. It's a balancing act, and one that players aren't warned about.

The second issue worth noting is just one of statistics -- for whatever reason, some enemies in this game have god-tier evasion (bosses included) and you will just lose characters or entire fights because RNG said NO today. The biggest culprit of this are the Chimera at the very end of the game. I was keeping count on multiple whiffs during grinding of the Ramladu fight (there's six chimera in the first area) and my AVERAGE miss count was around SEVEN times when attacking just Chimera. I peaked at SIXTEEN in one particular grind run. SIXTEEN MISSES IN A ROW. That's an entire party's turn and another one-third of the next turn if they all could strike said Chimera! Yeah, sometimes you roll the bad RNG, but there are definitely enemies in this game where it's obviously noticeable that the numbers aren't right.

All that negativity aside, I still really adore this game. Pop on a soundtrack for a better JRPG or SRPG, try out some different character combinations, and ignore the fairly generic story and the bare bones is actually a solid time for your average SRPG fan. No reason not to give this a go if you like turn-based strategy games, and SEGA is really good at discounting it for their Mega Collection stuffs if you're getting it on Steam, so you can always just wait on a sale.