I wouldn't say that I'm a "Dark Souls elitist." I don't care if a "soulslike" follows the formula or not, I just care if it's good. And Remnant is good!

All the guns feel nice and impactful and the shooting feels good. I like the trait system instead of a typical level up system, it's nice to go in depth about what particular thing you'd like to level up, instead of a broad stat. It's a nice, refreshing take.


Though the game has a host of problems.

Farming in this game is both good and horrible. The good thing is that you can reroll individual worlds without touching your campaign so if you need to grab something quick, or if you need to farm money or upgrade materials, it's quick and easy.

However, actually doing that is just awful. Which ring/amulet/armour you get is random, meaning you will have to reroll worlds many many times.
(Do you know how many times I rerolled Earth to get the Chicago Typewriter? Minimum 30 times lmao)
And you can get duplicates of the items you already get which is just a plain bad idea (You get an amount of scrap ranging from 100 - 500 which is pretty bad).

Having there be multiple different bosses that you fight makes each playthrough unique which is cool! But it also means if you don't play the game more than once, you miss out on half the bosses. Which is just a weird design.

I played through the game solo on hard. It starts off really rough as Earth has only one guaranteed weapon (for some reason???) and it's the sniper rifle which you get after beating the Root Mother.
I was midway through Rhom where the stage sections started becoming much more manageable. Though the bosses stayed consistently harder than the stages. A stage could be easy but it's entirely possible to get stuck on the boss.

The weapon variety is weird for lack of a better term.

(wip)

What a strange little game.
Played one on a whim and finished it in a day. It's not exactly hard but it's fun.

It's a nice little time capsule to see how far touhou has become so I don't know if I can rate it fairly by looking at it from a modern lens. The ideas are all laid out here, like with one of Karumi's attacks being really similar to Nazrin's first spell card, Rare Metal Detector. It's cool!

There's some weird mechanics as it's one of the PC98 games.
Bosses are really short.
There's basically a survival spell at the end of every stage (except 6). Yuuka's master spark is unreactable so you just have to know when she's gonna use it (so it's not so bad).
No visible hitbox. Movement is really sluggish but easy to get used to.

Some backgrounds for stages 3 and 5 make it really hard to see bullets, I think that's from the limited colour palette of the PC98 (is that why Reimu's hair is purple?).

There's a lot of parts, much more than later games (I don't think it's even a thing in the windows games), where enemies just try to run into you to deal contact damage. It's strange to see but it's interesting.

When you use a bomb, it shows a really cute image of the character you're playing. This should come back, ZUN please.

Bad Apple still slaps and it was nice to hear the original.

If you can get an emulator working (I used Neko Project 21) then I would recommend it at least for the history.

For some reason I just could not get a good handle of any of the spells and I felt uncomfortable with each one. I'm not sure if it's the new engine, or the fact that all bosses have some sort of laser attack or any other reason. I dabbled in the other games before fully committing to this one and I think it's cause of those reasons.

It's not as majestic as PCB or as impactful story-wise (at least emotionally, lore-wise, it's very important).

It's also infinitely harder and for me, more frustrating for some reason (I didn't get frustrated at all when I played PCB but Kanako was a little frustrating). Don't listen to anyone who says to start with this one, please start with PCB instead, it's much more managable.

Aya is a menace who claims she'd go easy on you and it's a complete lie. What other game has a stage 4 boss with a survival card? At least Sanae is easier than Youmu though she still trips me up sometimes (though compared to the rest of the cast, she's a bit of a pushover). Kanako is one of the hardest bosses in any game I've ever played in my entire life. Right out of the gate, she's hard and only gets harder. She has some bullshit cards (the jellybeans) but overall, she's decently fair but she demands skills and playstyles that are hard to execute properly (swapping between focus and unfocus on a dime).

But still a great game of course. Amazing soundtrack, great characters, unique artstyle different from the other games. It's nice and it serves its purpose as the start of the later windows games well. It has a good tone and setting and it introduces new characters that become a mainstay. It expands the lore and setting, setting the basis for the next 2 or 3 games. The backgrounds are so beautiful that they're honestly distracting but in a good way.

The new bomb mechanic is pretty fun too, makes bombs really strong which saved my ass so often.

Though, when I finished PCB, I wanted more, I played it again and beat it another time. When i finished MoF, I was relieved to be done. I'm not really sure what that means.

If I see Yuyuko in my dreams, I see Kanako in my nightmares.

Simply the best the Dark Souls series has to offer.

The best bosses, Gael, best soundtrack, Gael, best areas, Gael, Midir, Gael, Good story, amazing themes, anything that does the theme "it's okay to let things go" is automatically 5/5 for me.

Though somewhat limited in playstyles due to magic being not so good.

(update):
The story is about what you'd expect from a souls game. Fallen kingdom, lots of lore and names about things you never see, kill four dudes to collect their souls and then bring them to the final boss area to fight the final boss. It does what it says on the tin but with a lot of references and characters from Dark Souls 1 (and some of 2).

It's very rote and I'd almost have a problem with that if it weren't for the meta-narrative and themes presented in the game.

With the degradation and corruption of old characters and locations from the other games, it embodies series fatigue. Its setting, its characters, its bosses, are all tired, exhausted, in pain. They beg for the end, but it always continues (This is literally the plot of the Ashes of Ariandel dlc so it's not exactly subtle). There's always someone to light the First Flame and extend the Age of Fire despite no one wanting it to continue.

The Ringed City dlc takes place where the lore starts, where the first undead are but it also shows the very last things to ever happen in the Dark Souls universe, the very end, and the absolute ruins of everything.

Gwyn couldn't let go of the golden age and we can see the consequences of his actions. And that's what the series, especially Dark Souls 3, is about. It's about letting go and moving on and doing other things in your life. It's about how everything no matter how good or bad, must come to an end and how scary that process is, but most importantly, how hopeful that can be. (You can see this with the painting girl using the literal Dark Soul to paint a new world at the very very end of the game.)

Dark Souls 3 is the last Dark Souls game we'll ever get, and that's okay.

It's a good game but also terribly overrated. It's not god's gift to video games or media in general.

The hyperfocus on realism makes doing simple actions annoying and honestly immersion breaking. That's not something I really care about, but having Arthur slide over the floor to get into the proper position to grab a can of beans on the shelf is just bad.

The controls are weird and dumb (why do I have to mash X to run/ride faster?). The gameplay is bland and uninteresting for how long the game is. I can stomach the mediocre Uncharted, Tomb Raider 2013, etc etc, third person cover shooter gameplay for only so long.

The open world is boring and uninteresting. The map is pockmarked with interesting things to do but in between that is nothing other than nice looking environments.

The missions are connected very poorly and the disconnect between the mission format and the open world gameplay is very apparent and jarring.
One of the first missions of Chapter 2 has you drive Uncle and the women into town to do things and pick up info, some dude recognizes you as someone from blackwater so you chase him, then you finish the mission. You come back to town and see that Uncle, the women, and the carriage you drove had left, leaving you stranded. Why does this happen so often?

The game should've been an on-rails story focused game rather than an open-world game, it would've worked better for the story they're trying to tell.

HOWEVER, voice acting is probably the best I've heard in a video game, each character's voice is unique and performed so well (except jack). The characters are great. The story is good but I feel like I didn't get the most out of it because I ONLY spent 88 hours in the game and didn't do all the missable side missions with every single character so the character development was a bit awkward, making it frustrating.

Overall a great, campy game.

Amazing soundtrack, super cheesy (affectionate) dialogue, good characters, good game-feel, David Hayter.

It's everything you could want in a Metroidvania.

A terrible game. It symbolizes everything wrong with the modern (2013) game industry. The writing is awful and it's made by torture fetishists so it's really awkward. The gameplay is terrible, there's so many QTE's, the guns have no impact. It's an incredibly boring, unfocused mess.

The game is written so poorly that Lara's "badass moments" are entirely undeserved and almost insulting in how they hit you over the head with them. She starts out as a uwu softe girl who can barely do anything then at the end she's heckling people as she's shooting them. And I have to ask why? How? What happened to her to make this change? It certainly can't be how many people she's killed, because she's been doing that since the start of the game. The disconnect between story Lara and gameplay Lara is atrocious. Why is there a survival mechanic, where Lara has to get food, that disappears literally the second you kill a deer and then never appears ever again? Why are there berries to pick that give you 10 exp? Why are there random animals to kill?

The writing is so bad that it's honestly insulting. The puzzles are insulting, if they're even there. Tombs are made up of the most barebones "puzzles" ever conceived by man and what do you get out of it? 250 money, I mean scrap, I mean salvage. There's no reward for exploration or doing anything.
You only get the currency you get by doing literally anything in the game. Imagine if in Dark Souls you open a chest and you only get souls, not even an item to save them for later, but literally just currency. Also you can't skip the tediously long tomb chest opening animation. There's LITERALLY TREASURE PHYSICALLY in the chests and all you get is salvage. It's a joke.

The game speaks down to you like a child through overexplaining of basic concepts (Lara sees a bow, "That bow, I could use that bow! I need to find a way to get that bow."). If a game has a button that highlights all usable objects / tells you where to go, that means the devs fucked up.

It's actually incredibly racist despite how it's a "feminist" game. You have the Spiritual Aboriginal Guy who's also fat and half his dialogue is about food. You have the Angry Black Woman who is angry. Why is she angry? Who knows! But then she stops being angry during the last hour of the game for some reason. You have the Cowardly White Guy who only cares about his career I guess and betrays everyone despite being the only reasonable one here. I mean, who are you going to listen to in this situation? The people who've captured you and will kill you if you don't listen to them or your colleague who just so happens to be stronger than god and can kill everyone (no one knew about this before)? The only good character was Roth cause he was voiced by Robin Atkin Downes so it was nice to hear Kaz Miller again (this is the only reason why he's the only good character).

The fact that 95% of the enemies are random white guys who formed a cult who I think are supposed to be Russian (one of them is named Nicolai, and two others have Russian names but I forgot what they were) yet have thick American accents despite the entire game taking place on a Japanese island. The fact that these white dudes formed a cult around a Japanese princess and then the first Japanese women they meet just so happens to be a descendant of the princess just seems so weird and contrived and kinda racist.

The environments are so goddamn ugly and colours are washed out and are mostly varying shades of grey and brown. 20% of the game takes place in a self-described shantytown. Why are we here? Are we not supposed to be on a Japanese island? Why is the palace section 20 minutes long and then it's on fire and you never return there? A real missed opportunity for anyone who likes to look at things.

All those reviewers from 2013 who gave the game "critical acclaim" should listen to the black man with the lightning.

What a waste of time.

An incredibly fun bullet hell game with satisfying patterns, one of the best soundtracks ever made, and a final boss comparable to the likes of Gael or Artorias.

If you're into the niche genre of bullet hells, I highly highly highly recommend it (I cannot stress this enough).

Yuyuko my beloved...

This game is actually amazing. A hell of an improvement compared to re3make. A lot of remakes could learn from this game despite me not having played the original re4.

Incredibly charming, cheesy, and campy. A lot of love went into the game and it shows.

Unfortunately not scary but that's me nitpicking, the game itself is lovely and charming.

Performance is pretty meh on PC and forced TAA is a sin against mankind itself.

It's great! The updated mechanics (third person over the shoulder shooter) make it incredibly fun. Despite the newfound control they give you, the game is still very scary, especially when Mr X is released.

The puzzles are good, the guns feel great though they sound kind of pathetic.

However, on subsequent playthroughs, Mr X gets more annoying than scary. Claire's weapons are kind of bad. Why does she get like 3 pistols and the electric thing is kind of meh but I barely used it.