It feels like they learned a lesson from Ultra Despair Girls and decided to ditch trying to be an action game in favor of just being Danganronpa with full 3D models. Only spiritually, though, despite a few times I was convinced they were going to go there. In that respect, it mostly works. As much as Shinigami tries, she’s not Monokuma and can’t quite carry the game as much as it wishes she could. The other characters are entertaining enough but only just. As usual, Masafumi Takada is the real MVP. All the mini games are fine and that’s all I really ask from these games.

Most of my complaints are possibly just with the English audio. They made no effort to match the lip sync and the overall mix is poor. A couple (but unfortunately heavily reused) of Yuma’s random “ohs” are ear-splittingly louder than anything else in the game while other lines are buried under the music. Half of Shinigami’s speech during the equivalent of a DR execution is nigh unintelligible. The other main complaint is that it’s unnecessarily slow sometimes during sequences where all you do is walk in a straight line. That’s fine when you’re just hiding load times but then the actual load times pop up afterwards and they’re not exactly great.

The overall plot is okay but there’s definitely a few headscratchers. There’s a big mystery about the city but the cases you solve usually have nothing to do with it. Between the time it comes up and the point it’s resolved, it’s hard to imagine why no one thought of a solution a long time ago. Without spoiling too much, there’s also a major plot twist that relies entirely on whether or not you buy the game’s explanation for why Yuma doesn’t make a bigger deal about it when he notices it. I can’t say that I do, even though I acknowledge that the idea is kind of clever.

Xenoblade 2 takes a long time to get going, not because it’s a long story but because it spends a lot of it’s run goofing around. Once the actual plot kicks into high gear, it’s decent. Where it eventually goes has its moments, even if its a typical “bad guy wants to blow up the world because reasons” affair. The villains are pretty weak, especially the twist villain who you never once give a shit about. The recurring mini boss squad feel like discount Organization XIII members and they wear out their welcome quickly, especially when it becomes really obvious that we’re supposed to sympathize with them later (which came too little and way too late).

All that said, it’s hard to tell what is the fault of the script and what is the fault of the English dub. The actors have talked about how they had no direction and boy, you can tell.

Blasphemous 2 is significantly better than the original, making any issues I had feel like nitpicks. It kind of has the Dark Souls 2 problem where most of the bosses are relatively normal swordsman and dudes in armor. I wanted more freaky shit like the baby that rips you in half. To be honest, the imagery overall feels a bit toned down from the first one.

All that said, it plays so much better that it’s hard to be disappointed. The Miracle granted me double jumps and an air dash so I can handle a bit less gore.

First replay since the 360 days and I more or less have the same opinion. It really depends what your expectations were going into it. If you’re here for the gunplay, it’s arguably better than the original. If you liked Bioshock for the plot and world building, it’s a clumsy mess of retcons and weak characters that feels like it was made because execs thought “drill man cool”. While it is true that drill man is indeed cool and you can totally rev that shit like it’s Gurren Lagann, it does feel like it’s completely missing the point of the first game. Also, the escort mission was the worst part of the original and repeating it as a main gameplay loop is a bit obnoxious.

That said, it has the inverse progression of the original where it starts out weak and ends on a high note. Delta also feels hilariously OP by the end and it’s fun to just watch hypnotized brutes kill each other while security bots fly around and you just laugh while killing everything else with chain lightning.

Omori's biggest problem is that it's just too long, which is odd given that some of the battle mechanics feel undercooked. There's only one fight where the emotion system was fully utilized and after that, I could usually brute force everything. As far as the length, it needed to lose at least 5 hours. That said, outside of meandering in a whale, I don't know specifically what I would cut.

8/25 - All that said, Omori is one of those games that sticks with you for a while and it deserves more credit than I initially gave it.