Not Funny: Didn't Laugh

I can hardly muster up the strength to review Immortals: Fenyx Rising. It's such an affront to every thing I deem "positive" within the history of gaming and the industry at large that it's honestly hard to narrow down in an honest and complete writeup. It's more Ubisoft garbage, meant in with full connotation of what such terminology in 2024 could possibly bring. Want your towers? You got it! Want your frivolous objectives to complete? You got it! Want your battle pass thrusted into your eyes at every conceivable moment (including completion of the game?) You got it!!!!!!!!! Hey and to chase that all down, we'll even include a faux mouse on the menu screen for controller instead of letting d pad select what you want... because why not!

Genuinely little to nothing about this game was good except for the fact that it was easy on the eyes? The terrain looked pretty swell, and the game ran crisply at high settings throughout... but man the world was lifeless and filled with nothing to interact with. I get that it's effectively the story driven playfield of Prometheus and Zeus as they telll the tale of your titular "hero," but the world felt pointless to explore. For a game that is as shamelessly a Breath of the Wild knockoff as Immortals, you'd think they'd have understood that part of what makes Zelda special (especially BotW) is that the world that is out there is teeming with life and fresh experiences to be had. You can find new villages with new NPC's that are sure to give you dialogue with sharp wit or humor along a hopefully interesting task. This title has none of that, it has vaults for you to complete... challenges for you to painstakingly comb through. Because why become inventive with your copycat title when you can simply become lazy?

I spoke briefly about the narration from the legendary titans in Zeus and Prometheus, and I'll warn the reader that this remains a constant throughout the entire game. From minute one to the end, these two narrate your every move and try their hardest to be "funny" the whole time. I won't try to argue that I know the complete definition of "humor," but the constant attempts at creating jokes and funny hee hee ha ha's wore thin as soon as it could. Again, the beauty of BotW and TotK lies within how many moments are spoken by the player's mind. The journey Link shapes as he explores Hyrule and takes in the sights and sounds of a boundless expanse lie ultimately in origin to the person guiding it. Immortals throws this all in the garbage, drives it to the incinerator, and turns the flames to their hottest temperature. No moment can be truly taken in by the player and enjoyed as is with the two speakers accompanying every single step.

I can't with good confidence recommend anyone play Immortals Fenyx Rising. This game isn't fun, it isn't funny, and it was surely a waste of the time and $6 spent on it.

Starved Ocean

Star Ocean is a franchise that remained largely out of my view for most of my life as I didn't make the crossover to JRPG's formally until I played FFX after it hit the Switch in 2018 or so. As a result, many famed series' borne from the Golden Age 90's flew under my radar and I didn't have a chance to experience them until fairly recently. Over time I've tried to dabble into many of these in an attempt to understand gaming history and get a taste of the genre as it grew. I didn't "play" my first Star Ocean until the Divine Force demo release on PS5, immediately confused by the plethora of mechanics going on and monotonous combat I dropped it. I'd only gotten into it because of name recognition, knowing that Star Ocean was one of the "big" Square/Enix titles from the SNES/PS1 era, but dropped it because I figured it wasn't going to be up my alley. I didn't want to remove Star Ocean from my lexicon though, because I'd known that a unanimously "good one" had to exist out there somewhere, and with The Second Story getting the remake treatment... I figured it was time.

Upon launch of Second Story R, I immediately fell in love with the science fiction setting and incredible HD-2D visuals. As a big fan of the graphical direction of the Octopath/Triangle Strategy team, Star Ocean's graphical sheen was an immediate reward to my eyes. I paused every few moments of meeting characters, running through villages, and existing within the world to take screenshots and send friends images from my playthrough. Enamored I was by the world and the plot leaving your imagination of what could happen next to a pilot landing in an unfamiliar world. That's kinda where the praise stops unfortunately, as the curtain fell pretty quickly after that into my Second Story R playthrough... along with my rating.

The bad wasn't necessarily as grating as a lot of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's bad was for me (which I reviewed recently,) it was just confusingly grating. To start is the seemingly random difficulty spikes and settings of Star Ocean: The Second Story R. I played on the "normal" difficulty equivalent for a majority of the game and it felt, fairly hard. I figured with some time dedicated to grinding that I could make the experience easier for myself and breeze through what I considered to be the "tougher" dungeons at the time. I found out after about two hours of grinding and gaining some thirty plus levels that there was no different "feel" in my strength levels. Enemies could still one shot you and perma stun your party with remarkable ease, your characters didn't feel like they did any better damage per hit, and the game didn't actually get any easier. Now this changed a bit later on as I grinded north of level 100 and gained new abilities for my secondary party members because they gained access to new spells that seemed to disrupt more and do more damage, but they got one shot just the same. All the way from world enemies to dungeon encounters to the final suite of bosses, I found myself furiously mashing resurrect items and healing spells to get through encounters that felt like they should have been a breeze with how much I grinded. I spent hours effectively AFK just listening to my own music while I ran around in circles soaking free exp, and nothing actually felt easier. I tuned up my stats across the board, which mediated issues I had with the difficulty, but I was still dying with 9999 hp from petrifications and paralysis' all the same.

This brings up another issue I had with Star Ocean... information and skill overload. I joke a lot about how Persona 5 effectively tutorializes the player for the first like, fifty hours of gameplay, but hey nothing feels confusing or rushed at that point in the game. Within the first few hours of Second Story R, the entire skill tree and IC/Speciality suite is opened up to the player to understand and dive through. It's more than just levelling up your attack, magic, and defense. It opens up the Pickpocketing, Crafting, Music, Writing, Alchemy, Cooking, list goes on trees that the player is supposed to fully understand. From what I knew with my experiences with these tertiary skills is that they accented the player and made it easier for me to level and be strong... but outside of training and scouting I had absolutely no idea. I couldn't tell how worth my time it was to construct books to level attack or perform songs to summon certain enemies because the tradeoffs were completely unclear and the materials necessary to do so were obfuscated or gated behind currency. This resulted in my levelling up train (sacrificing damage for exp gain) and scouting (populating more enemies on the world map) so I could stand still and let my characters go to town on consistently spawning enemies. I'm not sure if this was the best way to go about it, but I didn't want to have to study Star Ocean tactics for longer than I did to understand it. Grinding is pretty much never fun in games, especially in older JRPG's where the heal/save options aren't as desirable as they probably could be, but Star Ocean's levelling systems felt like watching paint dry, but the paint occasionally personified to get up and slap you in the face before going back to the fence it was being applied to.

Combat was bad, voice acting even worse, and the plot was lukewarm at best. Star Ocean: The Second Story R was an ultimately milquetoast experience that I'm not really even glad I got to play. It lands and bombards the player with lots of great visual fidelity (and the cutscene work/character portaits are rather impressive throughout) but lacks the sticking power to create a compelling experience worthy of note. I cannot recommend Star Ocean: The Second Story R to anybody except maybe fans of the old Action JRPG genre.

Slaps the roof of the Persona Franchise

"Ah yeah, this can fit so much peak in it."

Because I played Portable not all that long ago, I won't speak in as much detail as I usually do about new titles. My P3P review can be found here, what I do have to add is below:

Persona 3 Reload rectified an incredible amount of issues I had with P3P, a game which I played last year as it hit PC for the first time, jumping my Persona 3 experience from a 2.5 star to a 4.5 star rating. What did the Persona Team do in this recreation of a fan favorite? Viewable character models!!! Though that is a tremendous boon to my enjoyment of this title, it was just the tip of the "wow this is pretty damn good" iceberg that is Reload. Improvements made to the OST, design, and combat all turned this experience from a simple rehashing of a game I found decent at best to my smash hit of 2024.

"Persona Vibes" have been a joke in my friendgroup for some time... that silly stupid smile you get from simply existing in the Persona world going to school at whatever institution MC-Kun attends with the whatever group of misalined teammates that you call your friends with some of the best soundtracking to grace the medium of videogames... but damnit if it isn't really a thing and doesn't hit as hard as it does. The jump from Portable to Reload for me was a massive reward in this regard, just being able to run around Tatsumi Port Island with a high-definition display and consistently present hip-hop music creates an amazing vibe you can only get from Atlus' marquee franchise. I felt a noticable lack of buy-in to the world and characters at hand in Portable when I was mousing over and clicking on still profiles, it means so much more being able to physically approach and interact with the richly variable (yet still not deep) cast in terms of creating immersion. While I still don't find myself as into the cast of P3, nor the location (since its so small in comparison to P4 and P5,) it's still Persona at its roots. Maybe if I'd played FES or the original release, my approach to P3R would be a little more tempered, however I can't stress enough how nice it was to actually experience the world. I didn't forsee this being as much of a difference maker in my enjoyment of P3 (because I still have my issues with the game) as it was, but it did rectify the absence of Persona DNA and feel that existed in Portable.

As I've touched on a couple of times now, Lotus Juice and company did a fantastic job modernizing the work they and Shoji Meguro did in Persona 3's original OST. The instrumentation and mixing sounds far superior than in the original P3 suite, with the modern renditions of songs like Changing Seasons and the Dorm Theme (oh my gosh, they really did fix the dorm theme from the horrendous HEY HEY HEY version) as examples. It's more crisp, goes along with the redone and colorful locale, and lends itself to a more seamless Persona-experience. What I had originally imagined would be just a simple re-use of the already pretty strong P3 OST ended up as my front runner for Soundtrack of the Year. Normally I wouldn't count remaster/remakes/ports in this category but the lifting job in Reload to take an already great work of music into the stratosphere is as commendable as you can get.

I applaud the improvements made to integrating your party more into seeming like actual members of your crew through linked episodes which feed directly into the combat boons that are Theurgy's. Having a sort of ultimate attack/limit break in Persona is much needed for some of the longer weakness-lacking boss encounters, which are a plenty in P3R. You fight a lot of rather tough and long winded enemies in this game and it's nice to have a way to blast through that a little quicker while still having to retain a sound strategy and mind.

The negatives that existed within my P3P review that still remain in P3R include: horrible social link optics in many arcana's (Maiko, Maya, Kenji to name a few) which unfortunately were not re-written/fixed, abysmally slow pacing in the early sections of the game, and tartarus being the worst in-game mandatory dungeon in gaming (that I've experienced.) While these negatives still remain, the good in P3R was pretty damn good and enough to offset any and almost all sour feelings I had with my experience in P3P.

While it's not flawless, Persona 3 Reload rectifies Persona 3's biggest issues and breathes elysian life into a game that had the ingredients for a fantastic dish. I'd recommend Persona 3 Reload to fans of Persona and JRPG's alike, it's one of the best experiences I've had in a GOOD WHILE in games and has left a Persona sized hole in my heart once again. I mean with no announcement for Persona 6 what do I even do? Are there otherr games out there?