Slovakia.. err, Hungary? Never felt so good!

Felvidek is a peculiar and particular JRPGMaker game with a runtime of four or so hours in which a playable priest and drunkard soldier find themselves embroiled in a multi-faceted religious-political conspiracy. I'll be honest the moment to moment plot and overarching narrative of this game were increasingly hard for me to follow as time went on, largely in part due to the long-winded speeches that site antiquated medieval European histories and faiths, but from what I was able to parse it was a fairly captivating tale. The conversational humor is tragically silly, and the fate of many characters is what you'd expect in a comedic 15th century title.

Where the game waned for me was in a randomness of difficulty. There is no levelling system, and I can't fault the devs here because the game is short, but you run out of ways to really bolster your character pretty early. You gain a few items that will make your party stronger by the means of armor, weapons, and buffs that permanantly boost your stats, but that takes enough time to kick in for early fights to hurt. Most encounters are short and enemies don't have too much health, but early on you'll feel the pain of just about everything. As you advance in the game and get new party members and a few items, things feel very doable as long as you have the coin to purchase items to spam during and after fights. There's a few times where you're locked into fighting with no way to gain back your health/mana equivalent and it felt a little unbalanced.

In all Felvidek is a mostly-forgettable Hylics-Like unless you're really looking for a walkthrough of Eastern Europe in the 15th Century with some neat visuals and music.

Minami Lane is an incredibly short but sweet management sim all about creating the most charming little road that you can! Accompanied by a helpful tanuki and beautiful low-fi hip hop soundtracking, you must work resident satisfaction and smart fiscal investing to grow your street to meet specific objectives. In each of the game's five missions, the missions and optional objectives all felt feasible without min-maxing any certain stat or investment scheme, an issue I've had with management sims in general. With a runtime of maybe two hours, it's hard to recommend this as hard as I want to, but with its low buy-in and wholesome enjoyment, I really liked Minami Lane.

Psychopomp is an hour-ish long dungeon crawler that takes place in a hypnagogic nightmare land filled with incoherent thoughts and peculiar characters. Mechanics are simple, operating in four directions in typical dungeon crawler fashion with the ability to consume items and converse with the denizens of whatever world you're in. Vibes wise it feels like the Milk inside/outside of a bag franchise but didn't have enough bones to stick out on its own as a captivating experience to me. It's short and it's free so I guess there's not a whole lot to ask for but I didn't find this experience necessarily worth it.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Runtime

Forever an infinitely difficult series to review without turning it into a minefield of spoilers, I'll tread carefully in my Infinite Wealth review and provide a fairly short writeup for a game that is as cavernously deep as the eigth-ish-ninth-ish (main) entry in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth was a game that despite being a tremendous fan of the series' heart wrenching moments, delicately web narratives, and impeccable lived in worlds, I was timid about actually playing. The gargantuan length of its immediate predecessor and slower grind-heavy gameplay took a lot out of me, even if I was a pretty big fan of the story being told. From what I'd heard through media outlets and friends alike, Infinite Wealth had made the game even larger and more grandiose, and after playing it myself I can verify that to be true.

LAD 8 is the first title within the series to take place significantly outside of Japan, this time having the bulk of its gameplay (mostly through Ichiban) taking place in the fiftieth American State: Hawaii. Previously I thought this would be a significant boon to my enjoyment of the title because I thought the series could use a fresh start outside of its typical close quarters Japanese city streets where you're shoulder to shoulder with pedestrians and throwing down in alleyways. It turns out that I actually wasn't a fan of the transition in the slightest. Never having been to Hawaii myself I can't verify this to the actual existence of the city, but much of Infinite Wealth's streets felt almost too large and full of empty expanse. With the series prior, I'd grown use to the almost claustrophobic feeling of having too much to see and too much to do around you. However many of the games taking place in Kamurocho be damned, I took to a significant liking of the familiar sites and sounds. As the series grew and expanded to Okinawa, Osaka, and Hiroshima, I felt like Sega and RGG did a pretty good job at introducing the player to new locales that played into the DNA of what players knew. Hawaii felt big and... interestingly empty for a Yakuza/LAD title. I didn't feel connected to the valley-like wide roads and emptiness between buildings... the beach and the town didn't really feel inviting to me, for whatever reason nothing took. In addition to this, the enemy placement for such an expansive entry was abnormally dense. It felt like I couldn't run my party more than a few feet without turning myself into an engagement. I understand this is probably beneficial to levelling up characters and jobs, but man does it make for a disrupted and un-rhythmic experience. I was dodging streets and pulling detours to a far greater level than I ever was in the beat-em'-up titles that came out prior.

On the topic of not being able to buy into the new world put forth by RGG in Infinite Wealth, the voice acting and languages used came off as a bit... strange. I understand that Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is a Japanese game that takes place in America, and in an American state that has a significant Japanese population, but I didn't understand the rhyme or reason behind how many characters spoke and understood English or Japanese. It seemed like the language spoken altered based on narrative convenience rather than a logical sequence, which made some characters that spoke in a broken English like the American born Bryce interesting. This doesn't really matter to anything in the long run but it made buy-in to the locale a little more difficult for me.

Now outside of the map being not my fancy, what actually rubbed me the wrong way? Mandatory fungames! I didn't buy Animal Crossing, please don't subject me to three days of woo hoo tee hee ha ha silly Animal Crossing on an abandoned Island in an otherwise (mostly) serious game. I didn't enjoy going from chasing disappearances and trying to dissolve Hawaii's gang violence to talking to the Western Kentucky mascot Big Red and cleaning trash so I could raise tourism to a location I did not want to be at. When I found out I couldn't leave at my own will, I looked up at the sky like that one gif of Willem Dafoe from At Eternity's Gate. Adding this on to the two forced moments in which you have to participate in a Roguelike a Dragon and I was (sarcastically) livid with several moments of the game. I get why you include these things, and in the long run its good for people trying to get the most dollar per hour value out of the game, but my plead with RGG going forward is that they strip this out of what the player has to do and leave it up to what the player could do. Rebirth made this same mistake and I'm wondering why this trend is proliferating in the modern JRPG space.

This review comes off as overtly negative, and for honesty's sake it kind of is... but there is a lot of Yakuza charm once again present in this title. There are the silly moments from Ichiban and company that have you (metaphorically) rolling on the floor in laughter, and the gut wrenching moments minutes later that the series is known to inflict. I was a fan of... about one half of this game and those were the sections devoted mainly to series mainstay Kazuma Kiryu. It's not necessarily because he's the old guy who we've grown accustomed to over the last few decades, but because his story felt more focused and mature. I do really enjoy Ichiban and think he's a perfect protagonist for the series henceforth, but the segments focused on him felt a little all over the place narratively and didn't hit me as hard as what we see the Dragon of Dojima go through. Familiar faces hit hard, and the cast in Infinite Wealth can go toe to toe with just about any game out there, I just wish they were employed in a more uniform and focused plot.

I usually wrap up my reviews with a plead to either play or not play the title based upon its expectations from the player base and my enjoyment of the title overall, but I feel like people looking to play Infinite Wealth and continue the story of Kiryu, Ichiban, and company will do it regardless. I didn't enjoy this title nearly as much as I did LAD7, but I'm glad we got to ride out with the crew one more time.

Animal Well Done

Like seemingly everyone, my appeal and interest in 2024's Animal Well stemmed from my even much earlier interest in Videogamedunkey, the head honcho of its publisher BIGMODE and longtime Youtube veteran. A fan of his for over a decade, cutting my teeth watching his now archaic League of Legends content, I knew that he had a knack (heh) for games that were fun if nothing else. I've disagreed with my fair share of his takes, but I knew with the announcement of Animal Well that there was a vision he had in Billy Basso's breakout title. Like many others, I waited with bated breath with more information about the game's mechanics and release date. Release came and reviews were staggeringly high for the ambitious sub fifty megabyte title, whose marketing campaign effectively boiled down to "Let Dunkey cook."

A disclaimer for this review: I struggle with Metroidvania's from a personal standpoint. I've played a handful of Metroid's, got into The Messenger, and maybe one whole hour of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, but I could never stick with them on the principal of how they play. Without a consistent path of clear exploration towards narrative completion, I struggle for reasons unknown. With Metroid I had a hard time putting together item unlocks to their eventual applications, and didn't do too well in remembering where to traverse. My problems with previous experiences translated almost completely to Animal Well which was... well quite a good game regardless.

Animal Well is gorgeous, one of the factors most apparent in its reveal. Each screen is filled to the brim with colour and purpose, the backdrops consisting mainly of statues, mysterious creatures, and absconding movements of water. As my little blob made his way through the games sub ten hour runtime (probably shorter if chasing the main path,) my eyes scanned just about everything within the environment because of the visual reward that entailed. One touch I greatly appreciated is the (optional) setting that places faux CRT scanlines on the screen for a more mysterious vintage feel. For a game as consistently dark and dimly lit as Animal Well, having a feature that exaggerates its despair and gorgeous loneliness like that accents your time with the game in quite a great way.

Platforming and movement in Animal Well is fairly par for the course within the realm of 2D platformers and metroidvanias as a whole. You use a small selection of items naturally found through exploration for traversal and puzzle completion. Apt timing is required for successful jumps, and running is done at a brisk enough pace to make the game feel like it has a sense of urgency and quick completion to it. One thing I do want to commend the title on within this space is that it never feels like it is trying to do too much or require a finesse in perfect timing or long jump sequences. Though the puzzles can become slightly infuriating and rub you the wrong way, the issue rarely lied in me having to gamble on a perfect platforming sequence.

I said "rarely" in that last paragraph because of one of my main gripes with Animal Well, which I might as well start off with now. One of the notable features of the game is that there is no combat... but the catch is that there are enemies. How do you fight enemies in a game where you can't actually hit them? By running away! This isn't the end of the world in theory but it leads into another issue with Animal Well: the save system. Not unfamiliar for the genre but saving and checkpoints happen at telephones scattered around the map. These are mostly well located and central to places in which you spend your time and often do unlock as you progress to become even more centralized than you first encounter them, but not all is well that ends well. There are several mandatory chasing encounters in which you must run away from a big bad that follows you screen to screen. Death, which can happen by taking damage down to zero hearts or being crushed by an object, leads you to reset at the most recently visited aforementioned telephone. I spent a disgusting amount of time last night failing in the late stages of a chase sequence only to reset at a telephone, having to run all the way to the encounter, and then run all the way to attempt to complete the segment. As a Souls player I am no stranger to runbacks, but doing this ad nauseum and having to repeat and repeat which the occasional random instant death on a platforming sequence was infuriating. Animal Well in multiple points lacks respect for player free time in having to traverse to an area where you had progressed. This becomes more annoying in the chases because you can't pause and open the map... an unfortunate page to take out of the Dark Souls cook book.

Overall Animal Well is a phenomenal debut title for BIGMODE and an impressive title put forward by Billy Basso. Even though there's no real narrative to stick to, the save system requires a lot of work, and the chase scenes are needlessly grifting... this game has a lot to like about it. I'd recommend Animal Well to casual Dunkey fans or fans of Metroidvania's.

Little Silly, Cute Kitty

I'm a cat owner and have been for the last sixteen or so years of my life. My first cat was an all black football cat named Lurkey. This was a name given by my father because our large lad spent the first year of his life with us after moving in from the frigid outdoors living in the shoe room only emerging from his cave to eat and use the litter. Lurkey passed and my parents obtained a new cat via the cat distribution system while I was away in college, her name was Esme and she was also a black cat with a shame reminiscent of a pigskin. I write this all to say that I have a long love for black cats, and Little Kitty Big City is playing right into its target demographic here... a gamer with a cat who grew up with black cats.

My ferocious feline, named Albert Whisker (yes RE fans that's for you,) began to maul at my screen as SOON as I started Little Kitty, Big City. Maybe upset he isn't getting the same adventure in my humble apartment as our purring protagonist gets in a bustling (presumably) Japanese city, but that's neither here nor there. LKBC gives you one simple objective as the procatonist: get home after a tragic fall leaves you... not home! What gives the game a runtime as long as you want is the world filled with a plethora of collectibles, objectives, and animals to meet and converse with around town. The humor is endearing, a continuous hide and seek match with a chameleon comes to mind here, and the charm of interaction with your surroundings is endless. The environment is easy to make your way around and becomes immediately familiar to the player after a few rounds. I commend the dev team for knowing how to stack things inside such a small area to make it fun and traversal not feel like you're spinning in circles through the same area.

Ultimately this is a short game without too many bones to stand on, but it was fun for the couple hours I ran through the "main story" and putzed around side objectives. I had a few bugs that I couldn't really call frustrating because well... look at the game, but they were a bit annoying when trying to time or prepare jumps that faltered right away. I only had to reload a save once after being stuck in a stool but again, I only lost about a minute or two of progress. Game Pass was the right price for LKBC, otherwise I probably wouldn't have bought it. I'd recommend to anyone with a subscription or people who just really like cats, it's a fun one.

Ballin'tro

I'd staved off a review of Balatro until I'd become victorious and completed a run. Many months and eleven hours of gameplay later I have finally notched my first victory... and boy was it worth it.

Balatro is a poker-based roguelike in which the player is tasked with making their way through eight antes (tiers,) three rounds each, in which they must clear an arbitrary chip count to proceed. To do this, you must take advantage of the rules of Poker and a plethora of accents and boons given to you through chance in the form of Jokers (accent cards that alter multipliers and round scoring,) planets (which create multipliers based upon which hand is played,) tarot cards (consumables that accent certain played cards,) and more. The benefit of this game entrenching itself within Poker is that it's a game that is already engrained in the minds of (most) of its player base. Poker is such a ubiquitous experience to most Americans that jumping into Balatro and its ruleset felt like second nature, making the learning of its tertiary mechanics much easier to parse.

It took some time (clearly) to finagle myself into creating decks that worked for me. At first I tried decks and bought into jokers that accented pairs and the chip gain I could get from playing these in quick succession. I tinkered with straights and flushes a little more before I realized I wasn't doing too hot with the assembly and heightened RNG required in suits that required more cards. I returned once again with a fresh mind into the pair based deck, stubbornly telling myself that I would find victory with two cards played at a time. I lost again and again, but I was getting smarter and going further. I understood the necessity of holding certain cards to heighten their sell value and discarding when I ultimately didn't need to, to boon jokers that gave me a higher multiplier if the lowest card in my hand was higher. Of course as you play more and get further in the ante's, Balatro rewards you with newer jokers, tarot cards, and vouchers that will make subsequent runs (likely) more successful. I kept at it, frustratingly losing even more in the sixth and seventh ante's. I ran into "The Needle," a stipulation that requires a player to clear the certain chip count in one single hand or else they will meet failure, a furious amount of times. Eventually I lucked out and was able to bypass The Needle on my sixth ante through some clever strategizing, and I knew I was in the clear en route to victory. After all this time I cleared the eighth and ante and felt qualified to write a review.

Balatro is a vindicating and involved roguelike that uses a familiar DNA to make a captivating game. The feel of the game's UI and playable experience is seamless, cards floating as you select them and everything snapping in the way that it should to make for a crisp and quick gaming experience that you will want to come back to. I eagerly await my next victory in Balatro... but it may have to come some time down the line when I feel more confident in attempting different decks and hand strategies. I heavily recommend Balatro to fans of roguelikes or for folks looking for a game that will be a good time spender throughout the year. I can't believe that this is the game going head-to-head with Persona 3 Reload as my GOTY so far and not FFVII Rebirth, but here we are.

Another Meh Soulslike

I had high hopes going into the final third of this game, I really did. Another Crab's Treasure for the majority of its runtime was a charming, funny, and ultimately creative endeavor that took a lighthearted approach to an overwhelmingly serious and intense subgenre of videogames. I found myself laughing at plenty of the character interactions and items that our protagonist hermit crab Kril encounters on his journey to return his former shell to his back. Moments like your first encounter with the taxes levied by the areas queen, making your way into New Carcinia, and rummaging through the Blighttown-esque Flotsam Vale fill the player with opportunities for laughter and intrigue. I had this game internally prepared for review as a Four out of Five Stars as I approached what should have been the final boss. It had its flaws, mostly lying in suspect hitboxes, poor camera angles, and a very low health bar, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It wasn't until this fateful fight in which I was bugged on perfect dodges that sent me flying to the sky and back down into boss one shots that I realized where the cracks began to show. I defeated the boss using an in game assist, of which there are plenty, and realized I had only cracked the shell (hehe) of how much more this game had left... and how little of it was enjoyable.

Say what you will about the majority of Souls or Souls-likes as made by Fromsoft, but the final segments of said games are so quick. They end when they should end. They know not to overstay their welcome. I'd make examples here, but this isn't a review of those games. There's a power in having your player built up for a major encounter and having them know they are at what should be the end of the journey, the collective moment where they way upon their experiences and know they can put it all together for one last huzzah. In Fromsoft's games, this moment of self Spirit-Bomb always makes sense and is apparent. Another Crab's Treasure, a game that ostensibly takes inspiration in many ways from Fromsoft (I mean the area is called the Sand Between for example,) Aggro Crab wildly missed the mark on having the finale play out at the right point. You beat the boss and the game keeps leading the player into the worst areas for traversal, littered with the most annoying and rhythm breaking enemies, only to have a handful of multi-phase boss fights left and a needlessly deep narrative introduced. Man, even Lies of P in its endless frustration let the player know that the game was going to end after the one big dungeon, because it made sense.

My frustration with Another Crab's Treasure is that ultimately this could and should have been a game that was much simpler and easier to digest than it was. I get why the developers felt the need to make it deep and introduce a grandiose narrative into it, but it didn't translate to an enjoyable experience.

The act of actually playing their sophomore effort is a different story, that was overall pretty enjoyable. Minus hiccups and difficulty in later game encounters, the variety in shells and shell abilities makes for a fairly fun experience. You are implored to try different shell combinations and levelling up your character in different ways to play with the way you like to do so. If you want to go more physical strength heavy, you are allowed to. If you want to take advantage of the damage and buffs you can derive from the shells that Kril finds upon his journey, you are also allowed to. I enjoyed this and the mixing and matching of playstyles that... mostly worked throughout the game. Parry/dodge timing was overall respectable, yet had a noticeable input lag to it, and damage against enemies/bosses was very apt. An issue I have with many games that try to mold themselves around the Souls games or hack and slashes in general (looking again at Lies of P here) is that they struggle with damage sponging bosses to make them feel more difficult than they should be. Another Crab's Treasure did not do that, and I applaud the developers for that. Outside of combat, traversal and platforming leaves a lot of room to be desired here. No movement from point a to point b is too complicated but many times I found Kril barely missing jumps because of clipping issues on terrain and the climbing mechanic not really snagging the environments as it should have.

In reality I should probably rate this game lower than I did because of how poorly it ends, but my first few days playing were overall very enjoyable and I was a pretty big fan of the direction it took until the last few areas. I can't recommend Another Crab's Treasure unless you're looking for a complete Soulslike in a fairly saturated genre.

Pacing Land

I caught Sand Land at the 2023 Summer Games Fest, an event I always try to catch in the postmortem of the once monumental E3. Despite being largely indifferent and avoidant of Bandai-Namco's arsenal of seemingly endless anime video games, something about Sand Land caught my eye. In the end it was reminiscing to my youth and those late nights spent watching Toonami when I was supposed to be asleep. Night after night I'd stay up and catch what I could understand about Japanese anime, something I was largely unfamiliar with and unsure about how to follow, but was enthralled nonetheless. There was one anime at the time that seemed to interject itself the most into the zeitgeist of my childhood, and that was Akira Toriyama's magnum opus: Dragonball Z. Despite this game clearly not being Dragonball, I gave that little preamble as a sort of introduction and reasoning as to why I became interested in the game Sand Land. I'd never read the manga, only ever having read maybe three manga in my entire life, but because it felt familiar. Watching gameplay of obviously Akira Toriyama created characters running around and engaging in general buffoonery felt familiar, and thus I was interested.

Now if you've read my reviews and looked at the score, you'll notice that the beginning monologue is almost always followed with a "but" in detraction to how "fun" the game was... and yeah here that is. Though it was nice to experience simple Saturday morning cartoon vibes in a fully voice acted anime game, I actually had to play it. I liked the cast, thought the game had some charming dialogue, loved the character art (re: familiarity with Dragonball,) and liked the general lightheartedness of the story, however the gameplay loop got tired eventually and the game itself was ultimately far too long.

The story revolves around the Prince of Darkness and Company running around on (initially) a quest for water what leads them to astounding secrets, betrayal, and a war against systematic power they could not have predicted. The first arc, taking place over maybe fifteen or so hours of the game's ~twenty-four hour runtime, was pretty fun and well paced. Your crew goes from one area to the next with a decent speed and the scale of enemies and power makes sense... mostly. It's once this first arc is finished and Forest Land becomes involved that things slow down to a shuttering halt and the pacing becomes pretty poor. You engage in many repetitive quests, dungeons, fights (re-used bossfights... yay!) and the ending quest itself lasts about three hours too long.

Gameplay in Sand Land is about 70% tank/vehicle based, which was a pretty nice 180 from the last few games I've played which largely ignore vehicle combat/interaction (minus Rebirth I guess.) The Prince utilizes a growing roster of Bots, Tanks, and Hoverboards that each carry their own use. The Tank is a great all-around damage dealer, the Jump Bot allows you to gain verticality in traversal in fights, the bike gets you from Point A to Point B in a reasonable amount of time, and so on. Sand Land does a pretty good job of allowing you to pick what you want for combat while making traversal a little bit of a gimmick, which is okay. Upkeep of the bots isn't too hard, and I found that levelling and upgrading was a natural progression of materials I was already finding in the world. Outside of the vehicles you engage in a hefty deal of hand-to-hand combat, which leaves a LOT to be desired mechanically, and also sneaking missions... because who doesn't love one button combat sneaking missions??? Playing the game outside of what is advertised and plastered in the marketing was a real snoozefest and adds just about nothing to playing the game.

While it was fun to get a mostly humorous fun adventure out of Sand Land, it was largely a nothing burger and definitely not worth full price. I don't recommend Sand Land.

Unstellar Blade

A game so milquetoast that it literally crashed my PC in switching inputs from my PS5 to my main display so I could write this review, and thus I lost all of my notes I had carefully constructed over the past three days of playtime. What I pulled together is that this was an attempt at making Nier: Automata without actually making it fun and without Yoko Taro.

I remember Stellar Blade's Official Reveal as Project Eve, named after the game's main character, jumping out of an otherwise uneventful and boring Sony State of Play with its flashy combat, beautiful environments, and overwhelmingly attractive protagonist. Hot character bait aside, I was interested in this game because of the influences it was clearly wearing on its sleeve in the aforementioned Platinum Games magnum opus. Many have tried and few have succeeded in nailing hack and slash as well as Platinum or their cousins in Capcom have done with the plethora of impressive titles between the two. Did I think Stellar Blade was going to go one on one with Nier, DMCV, or Metal Gear Rising? Absolutely not, but I did think it was worth a try, to see if there was a company out there who could go to bat with the best of them and put an effort forward that would be worth paying attention to in the years to come. I was excited for Stellar Blade as the release date neared, because it meant that I could one quell the discourse over the design of Eve by providing actual input on how the game plays, and secondly because the need for a fast paced hack and slash was weighing heavily on me after playing slower burn titles like FF7R2 and P3R fairly recently. Within a day of playing my interest waned but I remained hopeful, however on the third complete day of playing and the day I ultimately completed the game... I came away fairly perturbed.

The good, lets start with that why don't we? This game is downright beautiful. I played it on my PS5 on my 4K display with HDR enabled and woah nelly, it looked great. One of the greatest aspects of this title was how great both characters and the world looked from a graphical standpoint. As you transition from dilapidated buildings and streets into destroyed railways and misgiving deserts, your eyes will feast at the eye candy abound in the backgrounds of the world. I found myself navigating the camera up and down constantly at the world I was interacting with as it was tremendously rich in flavour and care from a design standpoint. I felt like the developers put a great deal of effort into creating a visually striking game, which unfortunately seems to have accompanied a trade off in other aspects of the title. More to come on that shortly, as I do want to praise the team for putting some of the best facial and body design in gaming forward. As I've already experienced, much of the conversation about Stellar Blade has been lost in the perceived attractiveness of Eve, but every character you interact with truly looks incredible. Though their proportions and mannerisms may not be totally... human, they are indubitably crafted with an intricacy and care to look astonishing. Stellar Blade if nothing else is a journey of eye candy, but that's kind of... it.

While not exactly fast enough to be a Nier-like, and not fun punishing and explore heavy enough to be a Souls-like, Stellar Blade attempted to forge a path forward that played out like a middle ground between Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and the Jedi: Fallen Order/Survivor games. Eve's combat relies on using a plethora of learned abilities and tech to parry and dodge her way through a litany of grotesque alien foes who have claimed Earth to be their own. Where this goes wrong is in quite a few places, but the most apparent and earliest was in the poor "janky" feel and lack of reliability in both parry and dodge timings. This can be sort-of remedied by investing in Eve's skill trees and upgrading Eve's exo-spine but never really feels... good. Even if I was a dissenter of Sekiro over all, I felt like it mostly gave the right kind of feedback and snap to the parry/dodge timings required to master such a difficult title. For a game as infuriatingly hard as Stellar Blade gets in its late game, I felt like I was at the whimsy of luck in my dodges not directly feeding into a followup attack by a boss and my perfect parries not being read by the game because of poor latency or buffer timing. Time after time I'd land a perfect dodge only to be hit by the boss moving faster than Eve could recover right after. Cheap is the way I'd put that and it proliferated throughout the entire runtime of the title.

Difficulty is something I've spoken about ad nauseum in action-rpg titles and I'll continue to do so as I have an affinity for these kinds of games. After grinding my teeth in the (generally) slower paced Fromsoft classics and the speedy Platinum/Capcom games of the last decade and change, I feel like I'm fairly qualified. Stellar Blade early on feels hard, but not in a way that cannot be conquered. If I was getting my tail kicked by a group of world enemies or a boss, I found that I could readjust my stratagems to craft a better gameplan, coming back smarter and using my abilities at optimized times to come out victorious. I found my confidence growing, something that did not happen this early in Sekiro, and I continued on to the later stages of the game. I opened up my Playstation menu to check my progress, a feature of the console that tracks how far you've made it through the main story, and saw I had notched at 89%. I labored on to the area boss on one of the last major quests of the game. It was here I through my face into a wall, stressing with every ability and item I had to make it through the three phases and effective six health bars that the boss had. I double this up because of the way shields work. See in Stellar Blade, simply doing damage and having fun taking down your enemy's health bar is simply not allowed, you must first deplete their shields before you can do any "meaningful" damage to their hitpoints. Meaningful in quotations because even then on a fully upgraded weapon, after laboriously taking away the superfluous shield bar, you are granted the ability to do slightly more damage to the bosses health per hit. I've played Dark Souls underleveled and with un-upgraded weapons enough to know torment when it comes to weapons doing very little damage to bosses... and even that does not compare to how insulting Stellar Blade's damage counter feels.

It wasn't even until a few bosses later that I truly came to terms with my disdain for the needlessly draconian difficulty that exists within Stellar Blade's late game boss fights. I threw everything together that I could into defeating the (name kept out of review due to spoiler) boss. I thought I could craft a winning effort of combining my ultimate abilities with my tertiary skills and burst maneuvers, but nothing was taking. I couldn't perfect dodge and parry any longer against the multi-faceted and multi-phase boss fight at hand. Visual clarity was completely nuked from orbit as I could barely tell what moves were hitting me, where certain objects were, or where my Eve's reactions would take me next. A greater qualm I have with games at large now, I wrote about these most notably in my FFXVI DLC reviews, is a complete lack of being able to actually see what's going on in boss fights because of the "ooh how cool" quality that moves need to have. Keeping this in mind, the bosses began to teleport away CONSTANTLY from Eve so as to reposition their efforts while tarnishing any offensive effort I had put forth. This was rhythm breaking and tore any motivation I had towards chasing the enemy down, I felt discouraged and unmotivated to capitalize on optimized windows because I knew the boss would simply teleport away at any given moment. After being unable to keep up with this, the visuals going on, and the randomly included DPS checks, I put the game on "story mode" (reminder this is in the last hour or so of a medium length title) and kept chugging. I'm not actually sure this did anything to make the game easier. What it does in theory is give you windows to dodge and parry, popping up with on screen prompts of what button to press to not be hit by the enemies maneuvers. Does this work? Absolutely not. Most of the time these move to fast to even parse what move you're supposed to use, and half the bosses moves don't even populate your screen with a prompt at all. Through the next couple bosses and into the final boss I became increasingly confused if this was actually a difficulty slider at all or simply an effort to make you "feel" better by putting a semblance of choice of difficulty in front of you.

A best in class soundtrack (potentially one of the best of the year) and impressive visuals couldn't prop Stellar Blade up enough to go against its resoundingly poor English VA (I eventually played in Korean,) drab narrative heavily borrowed from Nier: Automata, and impressively frustrating and unrewarding combat. This is absolutely not a title worthy of purchasing at a $70 price tag, maybe half of that at best. I commend Sony and SHIFT UP for putting together a brand new IP and throwing some serious marketing at making this game stick out, but it felt like a great value Sekiro meets Nier at best. I would not recommend Stellar Blade to anyone with a PS5.

This was... really not good.

A short form review for a short form experience, with a runtime of maybe four or five hours at best, Final Fantasy XVI's final DLC is a complete departure from what made the main title so good. Ultimately (heh) the issue with Rising Tide is that it's both not interesting and infuriating. The new locale Clive and the gang find themselves in is isolated much like the Echoes of the Fallen DLC. There's not much to do in the realm of exploring, and what you can poke around and interact with wasn't worth the price tag. The village and its populous are kinda just there with no real varied culture or intrigue to make me wish to interact with them further, and the setting chugs the Playstation 5 somehow to Bloodborne levels of framerate. The unfortunate thing for XVI here is that it is not Bloodborne and won't get a pass. I don't know, if I'm engaging with a civilization and its dominant unbeknownst to the greater world and largely lost to time, I'd like them to stand out just a little bit past their appearance?

The combat in Rising Tide frustrated me at similar levels as EotF did just before it, in that you're playing through a dungeon with raised difficulty levels (Which is okay!) however you're throttled by an inability to return to Outer Heaven and restock at any point. Now when you game over you can refresh potions... but this felt like a pretty annoying workaround. Bosses, namely the ultimate one, are genuine sponges taking a frustrating amount of time to defeat even if you're well equipped and geared for the task at hand. This was an issue I had with Rebirth and it rears its ugly head again here in the last bit of XVI we'll get. If I'm doing stagger damage of over two million... you'd hope to get a sense of vindication in healthbar removal moreso than you'll get in Rising Tide. Poorly tuned DPS checks, overwhelming mechanics that lack visual clarity, an enemy that is constantly flying away from you all in addition to the aforementioned sponge issue make for a resoundingly aggrivating experience.

For someone who was a massive fan of the main game in FFXVI and even had it as their Game of the Year for 2023, Rising Tide unfortunately tarnishes the legacy of an otherwise stellar title. It doesn't add much to the excellently crafted personas of Clive, Joshua, or Jill, as you get little in the way of conversation or captivating quotables, instead thrusting the player into a lukewarm time. I do not recommend Final Fantasy XVI: The Rising Tide.

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.