Bio
"It's ain't much but it's honest work"

I just generally enjoy nearly any game I played lol but it's super hard for a game to truly blow me away

🔴Currently an overly passionate and obsessed JRPG enthusiast
🔵Former Playstation™ exclusive simp and recovered Rock Band addict
🟢Played a ton of variety (especially in the past) such as action, shooter, fighters, WPRGs, racers, and platformers
🟣I have sold my soul to FFXIV

⭐Favorite series are Trails, Final Fantasy, Tales of, Atelier, Drakenier, Metal Gear Solid, Soul Calibur etc.
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5★

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Liked 50+ reviews / lists

GOTY '23

Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event

GOTY '22

Participated in the 2022 Game of the Year Event

2 Years of Service

Being part of the Backloggd community for 2 years

Popular

Gained 15+ followers

Best Friends

Become mutual friends with at least 3 others

GOTY '21

Participated in the 2021 Game of the Year Event

Liked

Gained 10+ total review likes

Noticed

Gained 3+ followers

Gamer

Played 250+ games

N00b

Played 100+ games

Favorite Games

Final Fantasy XVI
Final Fantasy XVI
Baldur's Gate 3
Baldur's Gate 3
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Into Reverie
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Into Reverie
Ar nosurge: Ode to an Unborn Star
Ar nosurge: Ode to an Unborn Star
Alan Wake II
Alan Wake II

363

Total Games Played

009

Played in 2024

132

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

Dragon's Dogma II
Dragon's Dogma II

Mar 22

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Feb 29

Granblue Fantasy: Relink
Granblue Fantasy: Relink

Feb 11

Maji de Watashi ni Koishinasai! S
Maji de Watashi ni Koishinasai! S

Feb 11

Tekken 8
Tekken 8

Jan 30

Recently Reviewed See More

When I heard Majikoi had obtained several sequels beyond the original, the next order of business was to play Majikoi S. Returning to Kawakami City and revisiting the Kazama family, Majikoi S serves more of an expansion to the original game rather than a continuation.

There are routes that take place after the ending of the five main routes and the Agave route for the original game. However, The main focus of S is on the brand-new characters that further add insight into the Kuki Corporation and introduce a new rival school known as Tenshin Academy. As well as characters from the original game that have not gotten a route have received one in S While the expansion sounds exciting and some of it is well executed, there is also quite a lot of content in S I less than enjoyed.

Majikoi S plays the same as the original game but with a few improvements. Since Majikoi S is fully voiced (just like the original game if you patched it), the addition of a voice timer to let you know when a character has finished speaking is greatly appreciated. Especially since there are times from the original when I have proceeded to the next line before the character is finished talking because I thought they were done talking (it can be a bit hard to tell at times since the voices are only in JP).

New to Majikoi S are short animated clips of action scenes that occur during fights in the game. Considering the nature of Majikoi and its focus on martial arts and combat, these short clips elevate the fights to be more engaging and entertaining to experience rather than just solely using text, voice, sound effects, and still images to depict these scenes.

Also, the route selection is much more straightforward this time, since you use a timeline to select which route to start, rather than spending X amount of time with a character after the prologue in the original game. From there, only the choices you can select can impact the game. While some choices will just alter the dialogue for the next few lines, others will impact what route you will proceed to. And Majikoi S rather has quite some endings that can be very difficult to get without using a guide.

At the end of the common route (which is 2nd-year 1st Semester + Future without a Relationship), the player character, Yamato Naeo, is presented with four “heroines” to pursue their routes. Tsubame Matsunaga, Margit Eberbach, Kokoro Fushikawa and Monshiro Kuki. Tatsuko Itagaki is also considered a “heroine” in S but her route must be accessed in the Agave After route. From what I have noticed, out of these options only Tsubame and Monshiro’s routes cover the bulk of the new S content while the rest of the routes are fairly self-contained to the heroine herself.

I was suggested to start with Tsubame’s route first since it was the route that further introduced the most amount of new characters. And for the most part that was true thanks to the tournament that takes place during her route as well as her need to advertise her natto brand (which means naturally encountering a bunch of characters). Maybe because I love it when girls are older than me or I just love the whole Onee-san trope but I ended up loving Tsubame’s route a lot and she ended up being my favorite character in the game, even if I can understand why some would dislike her at the end. Her route is split into two sub-routes. One route when Yamato “takes the lead” and another when Tsubame “takes the lead”.

The next route I have done is Monshiro’s route. While her route is considerably slower and less action-packed than the previous routes in Majikoi, Monshiro’s route gives the player plenty of insight into how the Kuki company is operated and the employees of the company. Not to mention as far as character writing and development, Monshiro is the strongest route for that in S. After all it’s just really hate to not like Monshiro, she is just really precious and I have claimed her as my “daughter”. Monshiro’s route can have various endings but the “Future with Monshiro” ending is the main ending for her and will unlock her “after” routes.

Margit was the next route I have completed and frankly, it’s rather disappointing. While this route made me enjoy Margit more as a character compared to the original game, I did not like it was so sex heavy with several explicit scenes. To the point, I think half of her route was just sex. It's just a bummer that this is how the game decided to treat Margit when she’s one of the more interesting characters in the games.

Kokoro was next, and while her route hardly focused on any of the new content, it was still a fairly enjoyable route as you get to learn more about Kokoro that was never revealed in the original game. I found her just very annoying and arrogant before, but her route made me see Kokoro in a new light. Now I just can’t help but laugh at her every time she fails at something and cries about it since it’s so comedic and amusing to me. There is a handful of sex scenes but not to the point I thought the sex was overwhelming (although I was quite disgusted with the end of one of them).

Then you have Tatsuko’s route, which began on the Agave After route as well as the after routes for the original’s game five heroines. These routes will assume you have played the original game since the after routes rather work as extended epilogues of the events that took place in the original game. There isn’t much to say since their main plotline is completed. You just go on romantic dates with the chosen girl and engage in plenty of sexual acts with them. Which for me, range from me enjoying them to absolutely loathing them.

Majikoi S is undeniably very sex-heavy in general and because of that, it is important to note that all of the involved characters are 18 and over. In fact, I have discovered the word “nukige”. A term I found out because of this game that means it explicitly focuses on the graphic sex scenes, and by that I mean it’s porn. I rather not get into details since I want to keep this review as clean as possible. But I thought they have overdone it with the porn. The original game had 20 and they are all removed if you play the Steam version while S had nearly 50 porn scenes.

Not to mention they are all very long and unrealistically dragged out. I was uncomfortable seeing a handful of sex acts (for reasons I rather avoid mentioning to not make things problematic) but for the most part, I just ultimately got bored of nearly all of them (I will admit I enjoyed two of them though) since they’re all written the same way and quite frankly, I get very impatient with sex scenes. So in the end I ended up turbo-skipping over all of the dialogue.

However, my biggest complaint is you have to endure much of the porn just to unlock the childhood route. To unlock it, you must complete all 5 routes of the newly added heroines for S as well as all of the after routes of the heroines from the original game. I think that only completing Tsubame and Monshiro’s route should be the requirement to unlock the childhood route considering they are directly tied into the new S content while the rest was fairly irrelevant to the new content. So enduring 8 sex-heavy routes just to unlock what I consider to be the best route in the game is heinous and what I consider the biggest fault of the game.

Once you do unlock the childhood route, which will lead into the Koyuki’s route since Koyuki Sakakibara is considered to be the “secret” 6th heroine for S. The childhood route is easily the most epic, action-packed, and exciting route in the game since it’s such a love letter to classic battle shounen series such as Dragon Ball and Bleach and even take influences from Star Wars. As someone who grew up on those series, it was just nonstop joy from beginning to end thanks to the tight pacing despite how huge the Koyuki route is in scale.

However, I thought any romance for Koyuki was forceful and shoehorned due to the lack of time you spend with her. If the Koyuki route was named something else (I think it should be called the Bushido Plan route instead), then I would have no major issues with it. However, considering that the route is named after Koyuki and considering there’s a huge lack of focus for her. The naming convention is rather confusing and jarring.

Majikoi S in the end is a severable sequel with new improvements to make enjoying the visual novel easier and the new characters are overall great and help expand the world of Majikoi. The porn is frankly overwhelming, does overstay its welcome though and I dislike a handful of them. And due to a lack of an option to skip or censor those games, it makes Majikoi S very difficult to recommend even if someone loved the original game. However, if you can overlook the high amounts of porn, then Majikoi S is a treat for anyone that wants more adventures with the Kazama family and the people that surround Yamato Naoe.

Played 12 hours of Tactics Orge before the start of the new years. It's not bad but due to a couple reasons I'm gonna shelve it for now.

From an historical perspective, it's nice to see where Final Fantasy Tactics and Triangle Strategy got its inspiration. But my main thing is just how slow the battles are, even on high spreed mode. Idk, it just feel like it takes forever to take down an enemy. Especially since there's an "union level", so an unit can't go pass the union level until it's raised after a couple main story battles. I get this exist so you won't have anyone overleveled and rely less on "tactics". But I kinda wish the union level didn't exist if enemy gonna be huge health sponges. At least the AI mode is nice if you wanna grind up units on training maps.

Story is fine, it's nothing wow (maybe because the stories of FFT and TS spoiled me) but it's serviceable enough for a tactics game, especially for its age. I like how you can make choices to shape up the story and having certain characters you have recruited to have extra lines during battles is nice. It was the main reason why I kept playing despite the dragged out battles.

There's also an another good reason why I'm shelving the game but that's something I really can't really explain, at least not in the public (let just say it isn't just about me for this reason). I am aware of the age of Tactics Orge and even the remake is quite old at this point. But I'm just at the stage when there's just so many games to play, I don't really have the time to just settle for "okay". I might return to it one day since deep down, I do enjoy it enough to keep playing. But right now, there are just bigger priorities than Tactics Orge.

Over the weekend I played the free DLC for God of War Ragnarok which is the Valhalla mode. Finally, I went in with no expectations other than it's just more God of War for free with a roguelike mode (that I was curious how that would work with the gameplay). Still, I left with a fantastic conclusion to Kratos' journey and growth as a character.

Valhalla isn't very narrative-heavy in terms of plot. The overall story is just Kratos coming to terms with who he was as a person back in Greece compared to who he is now and each "run" he does in Valhalla is Kratos facing different aspects of his past and how he views his past self isn't as black and white as he thinks it is.

Valhalla being a roguelike works wonderfully for the introspective journey Kratos takes in Valhalla. Gameplay-wise, while Kratos is in Valhalla, he can unlock temporary perks, weapon enchantments, stats, HP and rage recovery, etc to make a "run" easier. Upon death, Kratos is sent back to the shore and must restart the run until he completes a run after battling randomized enemies and bosses across all the areas seen in the base game.

A huge emphasis on Valhalla is that Kratos is always making progress towards "mastery" regardless of whether the run is successful or not. Since at the shore, you can make permanent stat and Valhalla upgrades Kratos can have those at the start of every run thanks to mastery seals and later on spirit seals he gets to keep to use on those upgrades.

However, what really impressed me was the self-reflection Kratos was doing. As someone that been into the God of War series for over a decade now and played every game in the series, it's rather very satisfying to see Kratos' evolution from an angry vengeful violent person to someone who only wants to fight to protect who he cares for and to freed others from tyrant gods.

There are a lot of references from past God of War games that just make Valhalla more satisfying to play if you have been following Kratos over the years. And not only Kratos reflects on the major events that happen in the first three mainline games. But also he takes a look back on his actions in the lesser-known God of War games such as Chains of Olympus, Ghost of Sparta, and Ascension.

Overall, as one of the biggest unexpected surprises that have appeared towards the end of the year, God of War Valhalla stands tall as one of the finest pieces of gaming this year. By serving as an extended complimentary epilogue to the already masterful Ragnarok and finally giving the closure Kratos deserves as a character. Considering Valhalla is completely free of charge, if you have completed Ragnarok, then I can't recommend it enough to play the DLC ASAP.