evaltus
2021
pretty awful combat both in pve and pvp, but the game's writing (eden treaty in particular blows most other games out of the water), presentation, and music are phenomenal. cool setting as well despite basically having an all girl cast. gacha on the global version is especially brutal with the accelerated schedule though.
a pretty good and unique mystery game with fantastic music that stumbles a bit in the last ~10% where it felt like I had to pick blindly rather than making educated guesses
Simon and Athena's stories were pretty engaging, but otherwise, I don't have many positive things to say about the game. The final antagonist was an incredibly lame reveal,, and the game probably has the worst overall cases in the series
2018
Judgment's combat might be the most fun I've had with the Yakuza series's action combat system but it still ultimately retains most of the issues I've had with it. The bosses have enough hyperarmor that I still ended spamming tiger drop as soon as I got it, but at the very least the game gives you more tools to deal with bosses via the craftable consumables (though they honestly felt a little too powerful, so the combat never ended up feeling very balanced even once I banned myself from using them). I do wish they had used completely new animations for the finishers since it's pretty noticeable that a lot of them are reused from Kiwami 2, and I appreciate the ability to wall jump now though since I think it feels pretty good to do. The murder mystery kept me pretty engrossed throughout the game, but neither of the major antagonists were very fleshed out, so I ended up feeling a bit disappointed by the end (we even have the tired cliche of one of them revealing their tragic backstory before they die). Overall though, I don't regret my time with the game, I think Yagami and Kaito are a very fun duo, and apart from the antagonists, I thought almost all the other major characters were well-written., so hopefully the issues I have with the game are fixed in Lost Judgment, whenever I get around to playing it
2022
Pretty fun if you treat it as a boss rush since the towns and open world are both pretty barren. Music is good (really good at times) and the main trio have some depth to them, but all the good parts of the game are weighed down by most everything else.
2019
broken ass game
It's pretty good! I thoroughly enjoyed Sinnoh, the physical/special split is a great addition, and it can actually be pretty challenging when played with nuzlocke rules. My first attempt ended at the distortion Cyrus fight because I thought bringing a kirketot with only HMs as moves would be a good idea, but on my 2nd try I only lost mons at Cynthia, which is probably the most fun fight I've done in pokemon. The game isn't without its flaws; Barry is a little obnoxious to constantly deal with, defog is just an annoyance, battles can feel slow if you're not playing on speedup, and, there are (almost) no fire pokemon anywhere in the region.
1999
One of my first pokemon games as a kid and coming back to it as an adult hasn't done it any favors. There are a ton of pokemon from here that I still love, but man, Johto really just has too many problems as a region, and (broken record noise) not having the physical/special split just makes some pokemon unusable. Also don't really see a point in playing this now when HGSS exist.
2022
While I appreciate that LAL experiments so much with its game design across all its chapters, it ultimately falls flat for me because it's placed along side some of the most bland and cliche-filled writing I've ever experienced. I actually almost dropped the game at the first chapter I played (pre-history) because it was just boner and fart jokes for 2 hours, with nothing of substance in between. I also have to talk about the music because while there are some decent tracks, a lot of them made scenes feel very corny or sappy despite that clearly not being the intention (especially the new rendition of Megalomania if I'm being honest). If the rest of the game matched up to the quality that is shown by how the game reinvents itself each chapter despite being in the confines of the same system, then LAL could have been great, but unfortunately, it never managed to accomplish that for me.
played through this as my first nuzlocke with no items in battle, no over-leveling, and on set mode and it was unfortunately still frustratingly easy. hate to beat a dead horse, but not having the physical/special split made the game feel worse to play too, and kanto was a super boring region to explore, especially compared to what comes later in the series.
great remake of some not so amazing games. level curve and difficulty kinda suck and I'll never forget fighting rocket grunts for like 2 hours.
i think it takes itself too seriously at times and has some pretty silly logic even for an ace attorney game in some of the cases, but overall it's pretty fun
a lot of the romance feels half-baked and I think they could have done a better job of splitting up the combat and reading portions by lowering how much of the former you have to do, but the actual sci-fi plot going on is really cool and kept me engrossed for days.
2022
This review contains spoilers
Elden ring feels like a game with 30 hours of content with 20 of that being repeated over and over again for 70 hours straight. With 88 hours as my final time, I'm looking back on the game, and I realize that around 80% of the game was just not worth my time.
I'll start off with the things I did like about the game:
The environments are super pretty! Apart from Limgraive and the Weeping Peninsula (which are mostly just typical open world green grass + grey mountains), I was never tired of finding new areas to explore because they would almost always be a treat to look at. The underground areas in particular are a highlight IMO. Speaking of areas, most of the legacy dungeons are some of the best levels fromsoft has designed. Stormveil felt massive and going through it the first time, I was consistently amazed by just how much there was to explore. I wasn't as big a fan of the Academy or Volcano Manor, but they were still pretty solid. Leyendell was the next great place for me to explore, and while it didn't quite match up to Stormveil for me, it came close. One thing I really liked is that the combat in ER is probably the best it's ever been in the souls series (because this really just is open world DS). It feels like a refined version of DS3's (which in turn was a refined version of DS1's), and it's pretty fun! I think the extra additions like jump attacks and guard counters are pretty cool and add some more options for people to try in combat. The spirit ashes are a good way for people to be able to tweak the difficulty to their liking, and being able to swap out your weapon art is a nice option that adds more freedom to player builds. I also really like how you can respec your character (which I did myself a few times) and upgrade as many weapons as you want to +9/+24. I do think it's a pretty bad design choice that they limit you on how much you can respec/get a weapon to +10; there really should've been a way to farm or infinitely buy those mats. Finally, I think the last few areas and their bosses are some of the most challenging fromsoft has made. I did a gauntlet of Malenia, Mohg, and Maliketh in one day, and while I think all of those fights have some issues (especially the first one and her flurry move that I think is impossible to dodge in some scenarios), they were some of the only fights that took actual effort, and it felt great when I finally managed to beat them. Unfortunately that's all I can priase Elden Ring for.
Going into the problems the games has, the one that stuck with me from my 15th hour all the way until the end is the insane amount of recycled/reused content. I don't think there's a single enemy that I fought in limgraive that didn't appear somewhere else in the game, and that was incredibly disappointing. On top of reusing content that is introduced in ER, the game even copies and pastes enemies from dark souls. It feels unreal that this is a new IP and yet the game just rips the dogs, Silver Knights, and other enemies from DS, changes their appearance a bit, and then calls it a day. And that's not the only thing that feels like it was pulled right from DS either. The ploti s basically "what if someone did a madlibs version of the stories from dark souls". Just replace Hollow with Tarnished, Flame with Elden Ring, etc. I do think George R. R. Martin's involvement helps make the setting and world more cohesive, and it's nice that we have a loremaster in the game in the form of Gideon, but at the end of the day, it just feels like the same plot fromsoft has been using for over a decade now. One thing that ties back to the problem of reused content is the dungeons. I'm pretty sure I did every single one, and my god they were awful. There were maybe a handful that were worth doing but the rest were awful caves/mines with no semblance of level design that would always end with me fighting a boss that I'd already gone up against like 5 times that would grant me a useless reward. Now, I know I can't expect every item I get from exploring to be useful to my build, but man, even after switching up my weapons and stats close to 10 times, there were so many items just left sitting in my inventory that I never used. Speaking of bosses, Elden Ring manages to give DS2 a run for it's money in terms of worst bosses in modern fromsoft games. For 80% of the game you're going up against bosses that only have a few moves that are super easy to dodge and once you get to that last 20%, you can finally go up against the ones that really felt like they required full atention. It certainly doesn't help that this game makes DS2 look tame in it's recyling of bosses, but also every single dungeon boss was just a cakewalk. I don't think i died more than 10 times total across all the dungeons, and a good part of the reason for that is because after doing a couple I already ened up learning the moveset for the ones I would be doing for the rest of the game. One thing to note about the comat, is that even after all these years, fromsoft has still kept in the god awful input buffering and the camera is just as bad as ever. Last thing I want to talk about is the music. I know fromsoft doesn't like to use music very often and it's a clear stylistic choice, but it's one I've always hated and it's no different here. There is at least some very faint bgm in the openworld, but I think the game would be better if it had some actualy music to add to the atmosphere.
I'm glad so many people enjoyed this game, but to me it's a game that has made me lose faith in fromsoft being original. DS3 has some similar problems in being too referential and reusing content in regards to DS 1/2, but at least there it was used in a way that made sense thematically, as the game was a conclusion to the series. Here? It feels downright lazy and derivative, and ultimately Elden Ring is just a boring game, something that I didn't think I would call a fromsoft game.
I'll start off with the things I did like about the game:
The environments are super pretty! Apart from Limgraive and the Weeping Peninsula (which are mostly just typical open world green grass + grey mountains), I was never tired of finding new areas to explore because they would almost always be a treat to look at. The underground areas in particular are a highlight IMO. Speaking of areas, most of the legacy dungeons are some of the best levels fromsoft has designed. Stormveil felt massive and going through it the first time, I was consistently amazed by just how much there was to explore. I wasn't as big a fan of the Academy or Volcano Manor, but they were still pretty solid. Leyendell was the next great place for me to explore, and while it didn't quite match up to Stormveil for me, it came close. One thing I really liked is that the combat in ER is probably the best it's ever been in the souls series (because this really just is open world DS). It feels like a refined version of DS3's (which in turn was a refined version of DS1's), and it's pretty fun! I think the extra additions like jump attacks and guard counters are pretty cool and add some more options for people to try in combat. The spirit ashes are a good way for people to be able to tweak the difficulty to their liking, and being able to swap out your weapon art is a nice option that adds more freedom to player builds. I also really like how you can respec your character (which I did myself a few times) and upgrade as many weapons as you want to +9/+24. I do think it's a pretty bad design choice that they limit you on how much you can respec/get a weapon to +10; there really should've been a way to farm or infinitely buy those mats. Finally, I think the last few areas and their bosses are some of the most challenging fromsoft has made. I did a gauntlet of Malenia, Mohg, and Maliketh in one day, and while I think all of those fights have some issues (especially the first one and her flurry move that I think is impossible to dodge in some scenarios), they were some of the only fights that took actual effort, and it felt great when I finally managed to beat them. Unfortunately that's all I can priase Elden Ring for.
Going into the problems the games has, the one that stuck with me from my 15th hour all the way until the end is the insane amount of recycled/reused content. I don't think there's a single enemy that I fought in limgraive that didn't appear somewhere else in the game, and that was incredibly disappointing. On top of reusing content that is introduced in ER, the game even copies and pastes enemies from dark souls. It feels unreal that this is a new IP and yet the game just rips the dogs, Silver Knights, and other enemies from DS, changes their appearance a bit, and then calls it a day. And that's not the only thing that feels like it was pulled right from DS either. The ploti s basically "what if someone did a madlibs version of the stories from dark souls". Just replace Hollow with Tarnished, Flame with Elden Ring, etc. I do think George R. R. Martin's involvement helps make the setting and world more cohesive, and it's nice that we have a loremaster in the game in the form of Gideon, but at the end of the day, it just feels like the same plot fromsoft has been using for over a decade now. One thing that ties back to the problem of reused content is the dungeons. I'm pretty sure I did every single one, and my god they were awful. There were maybe a handful that were worth doing but the rest were awful caves/mines with no semblance of level design that would always end with me fighting a boss that I'd already gone up against like 5 times that would grant me a useless reward. Now, I know I can't expect every item I get from exploring to be useful to my build, but man, even after switching up my weapons and stats close to 10 times, there were so many items just left sitting in my inventory that I never used. Speaking of bosses, Elden Ring manages to give DS2 a run for it's money in terms of worst bosses in modern fromsoft games. For 80% of the game you're going up against bosses that only have a few moves that are super easy to dodge and once you get to that last 20%, you can finally go up against the ones that really felt like they required full atention. It certainly doesn't help that this game makes DS2 look tame in it's recyling of bosses, but also every single dungeon boss was just a cakewalk. I don't think i died more than 10 times total across all the dungeons, and a good part of the reason for that is because after doing a couple I already ened up learning the moveset for the ones I would be doing for the rest of the game. One thing to note about the comat, is that even after all these years, fromsoft has still kept in the god awful input buffering and the camera is just as bad as ever. Last thing I want to talk about is the music. I know fromsoft doesn't like to use music very often and it's a clear stylistic choice, but it's one I've always hated and it's no different here. There is at least some very faint bgm in the openworld, but I think the game would be better if it had some actualy music to add to the atmosphere.
I'm glad so many people enjoyed this game, but to me it's a game that has made me lose faith in fromsoft being original. DS3 has some similar problems in being too referential and reusing content in regards to DS 1/2, but at least there it was used in a way that made sense thematically, as the game was a conclusion to the series. Here? It feels downright lazy and derivative, and ultimately Elden Ring is just a boring game, something that I didn't think I would call a fromsoft game.
A mostly great send-off to the the ascian storyline the game has been going through for almost a decade now. There's a small stretch of quests around 88 that absolutely kill the pacing, the real killer is the ending that clashes with the themes the game has been going for with this expac. Overall it's really good though!