LoR has always been a problem child for me to form a definitive judgement on, because every time I play it my opinions vary wildly. The first time I finished the game, I went out thinking the story was melodramatic filth, the gameplay was decent but way too unbalanced, and the art/music/va was really good. The second time I finished the game, I realized the story was far better than I originally gave it credit for (and much less melodramatic than I thought), with a lot of layers of symbolism tucked beneath the seemingly matter-of-fact writing. However, I also discovered that the gameplay was far, far worse than I originally thought.
This review is based on the third time I played this game. Unlike the previous two times, I played this with mods, specifically nogrind (which vastly reduced annoyances in gameplay) and a few skin mods. And unlike the last two times, I walked away realizing that the game was, above all else, balanced. No singular element detracted from the experience or felt out of place, but every element had one or two individual flaws that prevented it from reaching its true potential.
For example, take the story. The story is, on paper, amazing. Every character is interesting and clearly disparate from each other, and are refreshingly fleshed out to be more than paper cutouts of stereotypes like in so many other games. Well, that is with one exception: Angela. Which is odd, given that she's the main female protagonist of the entire game, and ostensibly should be more three-dimensional than any other character. Yet, her characterization is notably shallow all the way through, and what is there is a medley of worn caricatures of androids wanting to be human that we've seen so many times before in every form of media imaginable. This is doubly confusing given that the other main character, Roland, is lavished on by heaps and heaps of gorgeous and sensible writing, eloquent stories, and a sense of humanity and emotionality that I rarely see in video game characters. The best parts of Ruina's story could legitimately rival not only top video game stories like Fata Morgana or Cyanotype Daydream, but even the pinnacle of literature: think Dickens, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Hardy, Flaubert, and Ellison. No, I'm not exaggerating. The strong parts of LoR are legitimately that good. Meanwhile, the weak parts of LoR's writing are slightly better than David Cage writing and on par with an average Ubisoft open world game.
Likewise, the core gameplay loop is incredible when it clicks. Satisfying, ethereal, terrifying yet exhilarating, LoR creates tension in ways no other card game could even dream of. Yet, the steps needed to make the gameplay simply click is so convoluted and needlessly frustrating that 90% of people will quit once they hit one of the many unfair difficulty walls (or, as the community likes to call it, "vertical difficulty curves"). Even I was frustrated by the later stages of the game at some bosses, and I am a veteran player that beat this damn game three times and am also using a mod specifically designed to minimize frustration and annoyances in gameplay. If I out of all players can still get frustrated, I shudder to think of the new player experience. And given that ProjectMoon has officially moved on to Limbus Company, it seems that any gameplay issues are etched in ink.
Library of Ruina, for around 1/3 of the runtime, feels like a 11/10 game, with seamless ludologic and narratologic intertwining, a story that both moves and excites, and gameplay that is simply breathless at its best. Yet, for 2/3 of the game's 80+ hour runtime, LoR is a slog, with story sections that are poorly written and gameplay segments that are poorly designed. As much as I would love to give LoR a 5 star rating for those brilliant segments alone, to be completely objective, the quality is simply not consistent enough to warrant a unhesitant endorsement. However, you should still buy it.
This review is based on the third time I played this game. Unlike the previous two times, I played this with mods, specifically nogrind (which vastly reduced annoyances in gameplay) and a few skin mods. And unlike the last two times, I walked away realizing that the game was, above all else, balanced. No singular element detracted from the experience or felt out of place, but every element had one or two individual flaws that prevented it from reaching its true potential.
For example, take the story. The story is, on paper, amazing. Every character is interesting and clearly disparate from each other, and are refreshingly fleshed out to be more than paper cutouts of stereotypes like in so many other games. Well, that is with one exception: Angela. Which is odd, given that she's the main female protagonist of the entire game, and ostensibly should be more three-dimensional than any other character. Yet, her characterization is notably shallow all the way through, and what is there is a medley of worn caricatures of androids wanting to be human that we've seen so many times before in every form of media imaginable. This is doubly confusing given that the other main character, Roland, is lavished on by heaps and heaps of gorgeous and sensible writing, eloquent stories, and a sense of humanity and emotionality that I rarely see in video game characters. The best parts of Ruina's story could legitimately rival not only top video game stories like Fata Morgana or Cyanotype Daydream, but even the pinnacle of literature: think Dickens, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Hardy, Flaubert, and Ellison. No, I'm not exaggerating. The strong parts of LoR are legitimately that good. Meanwhile, the weak parts of LoR's writing are slightly better than David Cage writing and on par with an average Ubisoft open world game.
Likewise, the core gameplay loop is incredible when it clicks. Satisfying, ethereal, terrifying yet exhilarating, LoR creates tension in ways no other card game could even dream of. Yet, the steps needed to make the gameplay simply click is so convoluted and needlessly frustrating that 90% of people will quit once they hit one of the many unfair difficulty walls (or, as the community likes to call it, "vertical difficulty curves"). Even I was frustrated by the later stages of the game at some bosses, and I am a veteran player that beat this damn game three times and am also using a mod specifically designed to minimize frustration and annoyances in gameplay. If I out of all players can still get frustrated, I shudder to think of the new player experience. And given that ProjectMoon has officially moved on to Limbus Company, it seems that any gameplay issues are etched in ink.
Library of Ruina, for around 1/3 of the runtime, feels like a 11/10 game, with seamless ludologic and narratologic intertwining, a story that both moves and excites, and gameplay that is simply breathless at its best. Yet, for 2/3 of the game's 80+ hour runtime, LoR is a slog, with story sections that are poorly written and gameplay segments that are poorly designed. As much as I would love to give LoR a 5 star rating for those brilliant segments alone, to be completely objective, the quality is simply not consistent enough to warrant a unhesitant endorsement. However, you should still buy it.
peter_funny
1 year ago