Bio
Video game enjoyer, pressured into making an account by Dalaam.

I am primarily a JRPG player who also enjoys casual games, visual novels, and more. I am willing to go outside of my comfort zone for the right game.

I try to be fair in my reviews and balanced. Subjective opinion will always be important so once you understand my tastes my ratings will make more sense, but I primarily try to review based on the impact of the game. This is why you will rarely see games below a 2.5 rating from me as video games as a medium are a difficult thing to create and even managing to get a working product that is serviceable out the door is enough to earn a 2.5 from me. Buggy messes and games that are offensive or otherwise damage the medium get below this from anywhere from 1-2.0. On the other end of things, a 5.0 from me is a game that excels in all fields: innovation, interactivity, art, sound, and animation to provide a wholly beautiful work that moves the medium forward which are as equally rare as 1.0s
Personal Ratings
1★
5★

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Gained 10+ likes on a single review

Gone Gold

Received 5+ likes on a review while featured on the front page

N00b

Played 100+ games

GOTY '23

Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event

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Mentioned by another user

1 Years of Service

Being part of the Backloggd community for 1 year

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Become mutual friends with at least 3 others

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Gained 3+ followers

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Gained 10+ total review likes

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Favorite Games

The World Ends with You
The World Ends with You
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VII
Persona 4 Golden
Persona 4 Golden
NieR: Automata
NieR: Automata
Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium

105

Total Games Played

000

Played in 2024

012

Games Backloggd


Recently Reviewed See More

Vanillaware must live on.

Unicorn Overlord is a complete game where one can feel the ambition at every turn. So much ambition in fact, that there are some aspects that needed to be cut as the game was well documented as going over budget like most Vanillaware games. While these parts are things that I wish I could have seen as I was quite gripped by this game, I also understand why they needed to be cut and the game is still worth its price tag either way.

While the story is not as complicated or in depth as 13 Sentinels, there is still a bare bones enough story to lead the characters from start to finish, the characters themselves being quite enjoyable and a few of the twists getting me. I would compare it to some Fire Emblem games, where it is mostly a story around conquering set from a sympathetic angle that just rarely brings up the consequences of war. Despite what some crazy people online will say, the localization was actually quite excellent as well.

The rapports in the game are what serve as ways to see character interaction, and after viewing all of them, I can say that while there are a fair amount of good ones that range from very funny, cute, to tragic with some great prose, some typos do come up in the script and they could be stronger. Part of this I find is particularly since the game can struggle to explore other relationships with characters beyond Alain. There are still a few good standouts such as Sharon and Ochlys and Aramis and Primm, it often feels like a lot of it is afraid to let characters get too close due to the Ring of the Maiden system.

As a part of this game, the player can marry another party member, and this is where I see a lot of the flaws with the character writing in the game. While you can marry anyone, all the male characters you can choose do not get treated in the same way as the intended women characters. And even amongst the women characters only a handful are taken very seriously which can be indicated by completing a character's rapport after Alain is already engaged with the ring and seeing if he says, "Twas but a dream, it didn't happen. I wouldn't think of cheating." or not. If he does, it shows the rapport was intended to be romantic, and if it doesn't, then it wasn't meant to be taken romantically. I found around ten women units where the line came up, but it never came up once for men which is a shame.

The game has a lot of variance however in that system though, along with others. There are many points where the player can challenge the final encounter early on, and similar to Chrono Trigger, if done at different times it will result in the ending sequence changing, but ultimately resulting in a bad ending due to the mechanics related to the ring of the maiden and ring of the unicorn as I mentioned before. Hence I do understand why they let you marry men despite not taking it seriously, because it is more of a gameplay mechanic than anything, since who you marry determines the ending sequence's final battle since the ring of the maiden and ring of the unicorn impart special skills when fully unlocked required to see the true good ending. They allow this since you have to use the two characters in the same unit, so this affords a player to pick someone for Alain purely for gameplay factors and having them be in the same unit as Alain which is understandable, but I wish they treated gay sexuality with more respect. Especially considering the implied sapphic characters in the game that are treated better.

Speaking of gameplay mechanics, I had found the option to spare or execute characters to feel contrived and meaningless. There is no risk of a character stabbing Alain in the back or being a mistake to spare, it ultimately just decides whether you get a unit or resources, and a unit will always be more valuable than resources. Even for characters you would think do not deserve to be spared, it is ultimately the right decision, which makes each of those decisions feeling hollow. For what it is worth though, the characters you do choose to spare do typically have pretty good rapports.

Which finally gets us into the heart of the gameplay, the battle system. Connecting to the rapport system, is the general battle system which is clearly where everything connects and becomes a beautiful interconnected web. Every character in the game has a set of unique skills based on their classes, which can be programmed with an in game decision tree to determine what a character does on their action. This works similarly to the Gambit system from FFXII, but in this case there are more limited options per character, but so many more different interactions to make it easy enough for a new player to make something passable, to a professional player properly taking advantage of this tree. Decisions are made using if statements which can be programmed with statements that are true or false and will only activate under certain conditions, such as only using a ranged attack if it is against a flying enemy, in which case if its not it will move to the next decision, to setting priorities like using magical attacks on armored units first. There is a large selection of conditions, and each move can receive two conditions each, making a rather large ability for a player to create specific AI for each of their units in the same way a programmer would. What makes this work beautifully and come together is how you can build units of up to 5 characters that battle an enemy set of 5 characters, with ten deployable armies you can control at once. This takes the strategy to a new level, and can be modified on the spot where you can see yourself the results of each change in AI, and see how it plays out in the gorgeous art style that had made Vanillaware famous. With well balanced weapons, shields and items with unique abilities to slowly upgrade your army and add complication to the strategies you employ, and improving rapport between your units so that they give each other better statistical upgrades, an overworld conquest system where you can get continuous rewards from stationing guards while having an expansive overworld to explore with side quests, it all comes together to make an addicting battle system for anyone interested in the SRPG genre.

As said, the art style is beautiful, and I lament on the team running out of budget, as once credits start to roll, you can see how many backgrounds that were never used in the story or rapports come up to show where each character has gone similar to other SRPGs. However, these backgrounds clearly were intended to be used with all the rapports which are unfortunately all on the overworld using the tiny sprites instead of the larger battle sprites. Which is a shame, and clearly a mark of the budget running out, as some of these backgrounds were nice, and it would have added a lot to many of these rapports if we could see the character models interacting instead of the overworld sprites.

The audio luckily did not suffer at all, with a number of beautiful tracks, great voice acting, and gripping sound effects that fit the game perfectly.

Ultimately there is so much good about this game that it has me longing for more, which is a shame since there are hints at what could have been if Vanillaware didn't run out of budget for this title. The lore entries in the journal make mention of things that barely come up in the final product and likely had to be cut, there are the rapports that could have taken place on the beautiful backdrops with all the unique character models they had, and more. Yet, what is here is undeniably a complete and wonderful SRPG. I only hope that Vanillaware is able to rightfully get rewarded for this, so their next project gets a larger budget.

There is a good monster collecting game in here somewhere, but its mired by the games excessive faults.

This game just feels cheap, of course its a spinoff series, of which the spinoff series was always originally on handhelds so of course it would not stand toe to toe with the mainline Dragon Quest games. However the transition to the Switch was faulty at best, and a complete floundering at worst. The Switch is a weak console, and this game was not prepared for it, with frequent crashes that interrupted gametime (Only saved slightly due to the frequent auto-saving), environments on some later worlds being very drab, and endlessly reused music from other Dragon Quest games instead of relying on new tracks. This game feels like a disappointment.

The story is a semi-retelling of DQIV through the perspective of Psaro, a fan favorite villain of the series and the central villain of DQIV. Though, the telling of the story leaves a lot to be desired. Psaro only having a voice when capturing monsters and not having a voice in the story strips the player of being able to get into his mind since he can't speak, and the game tries to present multiple points where you choose what Psaro says, but every choice is an illusion since Psaro is a pre-established character and you cannot alter his story by doing things he wouldn't do. This can be confusing at many points as you have to get into a silent protagonist's head to figure out what the game wants you to do, but he never tells you and so you will say yes to a dialogue option, only to have characters berate you because Psaro actually meant the other option. This impacts the whole story as they then need to have an abundance of flashbacks that do nothing for the player but stand in for Psaro's background, because he can't just talk about it since he's silent. Most of the worlds have alright little self contained stories, but each world is disconnected and you only get the pay off way later in the game, as a result, you do 6 introductions, 6 midway points, and then 6 separate conclusions to each world. Culminating in finally the ending of the main story that is admittedly not bad with some homages to the DQIV party. But the rest of the game can just feel like a checklist of things to do.

Taking us into the gameplay, where it feels like the monster collecting section of the game is off. While the start of the game functions fine, leveling your monsters, fusing them to get higher power talents and getting more talent points from fusing, and then using your new powerful higher ranked monsters to tear up the competition, the end game ends up being miserable despite this. This is due to the fact that every time you fuse your monsters, they are reset to level 1, which would work well, but they all gain experience at roughly the same rate, with small adjustment changes like you'd see from Pokemon. This proves to be a problem, since later on, it feels very tiresome to fuse your A rank, S rank, and X rank monsters for what amounts to very little actual power difference compared to your B rank monsters, especially when you have to re-level them all the way up after fusing, when leveling at that point will take a lot of grinding to get back up to the levels required of you by that stage of the game since ranks don't impact their experience gain. The main concession then is metal slime hunting, which is based on luck, or using a guide to hunt them down which is using outside information to limit your grind. Similarly, some of the fusions requirements for A rank, S rank and X rank are very obtuse and lead to frustration in even getting some of your A rank, S rank and X rank monsters, requiring a lot of fusing and grinding for the hopes of getting some monsters that barely out-perform B rank monsters, and will be weaker at level 40 than your level 70 B rank monsters at that point. The game is then more enjoyable with using the fan created guides and I'd recommend that, but it seems the game would rather you do something else... Giving into paying for the DLC that helps your grind. It feels like the game is trying to push you toward it, beause unlike SMT you cannot resummon previously created monsters, BUT you can buy the DLC that lets you refight monsters you already have in your compendium to recruit. How kind to put this behind a paywall along with the gold and EXP farming zones. Not predatory at all.

All of these combined factors soured this game on me a lot. While the core monster raising, the strategy that comes from late game fights, and the idea behind the characters(Even if not executed well) kept me playing to the end, the game has too many flaws to rate it higher. 2.5/5.

WitchSpring R had incredible potential and was an absolutely adorable and fun game, but through bloated content and too much melodrama, the game falls quickly from the heights the early hours of the game present.

The gameplay of WitchSpring R combine small amounts of alchemy, simple RPG combat, and overworld exploration to create an addictive gameplay loop that does not overstay its welcome for its gametime, with possibilities to defeat hard enemies early on with the right strategies, enough diversibility that different builds can range drastically, while also having satisfying progression from start to finish apart from the end game where one can be overpowered for everything except the final boss which will prove to challenge even those who grinded excessively.

Combined with its simple art style and music that accompany this, it fits in perfectly as a smaller RPG to enjoy with a childlike adorable story mimicking the style used for children's stories. However, that story begins to drag and grows tiresome very early, as repeating events around the second quarter of the game really slow down progression and cause the story to be stuck at Lalaque village, with a few more segments feeling similarly poorly paced. Too many characters of which some are not very important end up dividing the screen time too wide, especially with some of these elements being repeated too often with some of these characters. I feel a large portion of the middle section of this game could have been cut as it adds pointless melodrama and at some points make some characters feel nearly irredeemable despite their status at the end of the game where they are redeemed. Such as Livya who had done mean things to Pieberry one too many times before she redeems herself to the point the repetition was eyerolling in Lalaque village when combined with all the other repetitive cutscenes in that section of the game.

The characters for what its worth are fun and fulfill their purposes in this very whimsical and childlike tale well, and Pieberry works wonderfully as a lead character to lead this story while learning more about other characters and befriending everyone along the way. I liked many characters, from Livya the tsundere knight, Luna the frost witch, Ralph the merchant, to Vernstein the leader of the rebellion.

As WitchSpring R is a recreation of the first game of the series, I'd say it does an admirable job of presenting this series to new comers and sets up well for its sequels, it just sadly is mired by a lot of segments that slow it down far too much in the middle segment of the game. The first two chapters of this game feel wonderful and if only reviewing that section I would give it a 4/5 because that is how good of a start this game has for leading you into its magical world. Sadly, as it goes on the payoff while satisfying does not justify the bloat in the ending. WitchSpring R serves as a good entry point to alchemy games, and has its own unique style that is fun and entertaining. Definitely pick this game up on sale if you're interested, I know I'll be keeping an eye out if WitchSpring R2 is announced.