This game is boring. sure it was groundbreaking and influential during the time, but idc about the legacy it sucks now.

The combat is terrible which, to be fair, doesn't really matter because it's a stealth game. The openness of the game seems cool on the surface, but in reality most parts of the maps just look the same which discourages exploration.

I read online that the higher difficulties are more fun and supposedly very different. Nah not really. The higher difficulties play pretty much like: let's check every room (which look the same) to find the extra values whilst I do these tedious additional objectives.

The most liked review for this game compares this to leonardo da vinci and michelangelo what the fuck are gamers man. its either low standards or rose-tinted nostalgia

EDIT: original review below. i played it on pc with lightning-fast loadtimes and no performance issues, and guess what? this game still kinda sucks. it made the game playable, but it didn't make it good. my kingdom for another good fuckin rune factory game.

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oof, this is a tough one to write. rune factory 4 is one of my favorite games, ever.

i knew rf5 wouldn't live up to rf4. the only way to do that would be to make a game that is rf4 with a different story/characters/setting/etc. a huge reason rf4 works so well is because everything is very quick. you can knock out an entire day's tasks in five minutes if you want to.

this game, on the other hand, suffers from long load times and really intense performance issues on the switch. i'd love a buttery-smooth pc port, and i don't normally mind jank, but it really hurts this game's pace given the repetitive nature of farming sims.

i will pick this back up, i love rune factory too much to ignore it forever, but the switch to 3d environments was something i was dreading after the ps3 game, and i was right to feel that way. the combat is sloppy and also hurt by the framerate issues. the environments are huuuuge for no reason whatsoever.

here are a couple nice things about it: i have decent first impressions of the characters. i think i will be able to grow to like them once i get to know them more. also, the intro cinematic is clearly going for a persona vibe and it totally succeeds, i watch it every single time i boot up the game. and lastly, the north american release marked the addition of actual same-sex marriage in this series. no more having to switch your character sprite and being stuck with the wrong pronouns or whatever. wooooo

that said, you still select your gender at the beginning by answering a question either masculinely or femininely, lol. baby steps i guess.

My initial thoughts based on about 20 hours with the game I originally posted here will be quoted at the end of this but I'm now done so I can actually talk about it. Purely on a mechanical level, this is absolutely one of the better games in the series, but that's the one level I can say that. It's just so vacuous and inconsequential on every other front that by the end what I felt playing it was an obligation to finish it more than anything. When this game was announced, I wanted it to be set after Lydie and Suelle. A more mature Atelier protagonist would have been a fun spin on the series, especially for an anniversary game. But instead we get a weird interquel between Sophie and Firis, and that leaves Sophie's character so flaccid and uninteresting. She cannot be allowed to develop because that would ruin the mystique of her maturation in Firis and LySue. She can't entirely go back to the clumsy and airheaded self from the original game either! She developed from that. So we're left with a strange flanderisation. Ramizel is the heart of the game and she's great. Partly I believe this game exists for Ramizel, someone really wanted to make a young hot cool version of Sophie's grandma, hats off to them. Plachta from the past is enjoyable, but she too is mostly static or slightly transforming into the Plachta we already know. It's limiting and dull. That's what the construction of this game is on the conceptual level, limited and existentially dull. And too long. Almost as long as LySue which is also too long but with imaginative locales and interesting scenarios and a genuinely affecting core narrative. All of which this game lacks. Ugh. The biggest backhanded compliment I can give it is that it's the least worst version of a game I didn't want to exist. If this is what I was missing from not playing the Ryza games I'm thankful.

Initial observations:
"I'll save my full thoughts for after having finished this but this is a solid enough game but retains all the thematic uninterestingness of the Mysterious subseries. I got into Atelier with the Dusk series, and what I found really compelling about Dusk was how empathetic and understanding it was of young people. How sensitively it treated depression and loss without even explicitly pointing it out as lesser games aimed at audiences these games are aimed at might do. Dusk was a world dying its second death, but within it, it had a place for people who were torn apart like Ayesha, people who were failed like Logy and people who were broken like Miruca. It expected you to see these people for who they were and accept them as people worth life and love. The world of the 'Mysterious' series has no place for people like that - only 'good' people who want to 'become better'. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the setting of this game, a dream utopia where 'good people' with 'good dreams' can take forever to achieve them. And this is arguably fine. It's comfy and chill and ふわふわ and all that. I also recognise that Dusk was born during and out of the 2011 disasters and it's unfair and impossible to expect them to consistently revisit that trauma just because I find it more compelling. oh well, I suppose. Play Blue Reflection Second Light."

Ah

I really needed that.

Hard to be cynical, hard to analyze what I needed emotionally in the moment. Something to plug a hole I didn't realize was bothering me. Sometimes the verisimilitude of a hike that I can't currently get right now is the best medicine for my mental state. The lighthearted soul of something really warm, uplifting that makes my heart soar. I cried to very small, very clearly crafted, earnest messages. I wandered, I explored, I went to the ends of the island and back, and I got something to remember this day forever.

Thank you for the gentle reminder to look forward head high.

Suggested by Phantom. Thank you

This is meant to be more of a review of the environment that this game created, as I have very little credibility when it comes to the critique of its mechanics. I don’t play Super Smash Brothers Ultimate competitively, and I have rarely looked into the deeper mechanics at play. I still get frustrated by Sephiroth’s neutral B catching me while not paying attention, and I frequently spam Banjo’s side B to my friends’ equal dismay. If you’re interested in reading the experiences of a high-level Ultimate player, this is not the place to do it. What this game accomplishes on the gameplay side of things is enough to facilitate having fun with my friends, and that is all it has to do. Smash Ultimate was more than just a game to me in the excess of three years it has continually been in the public eye for. While the character reveals for Smash 4 were monumentally hype, especially as it opened to door for characters like Cloud and Ryu, Smash Ultimate solidified the “character reveal event” with the Fighter Passes. Everyone would come together for each Nintendo event with bated breath, wondering if enough time finally passed for a new fighter to be revealed. These characters captured everyone’s imagination, and Joker’s reveal gave credence to anyone’s left field bozo pick. Dante? Definitely in the conversation. Doom Guy? Not too out there. Steve from Minecraft? He actually made it in, and it still feels like a fever dream. The funny thing is that, other than Sephiroth, I don’t particularly love any of the DLC characters included. Even Sephiroth, while a very left field pick, didn’t really wow me in the same way Cloud did for obvious reasons. The truly surprising door was already opened by the likes of Cloud and Joker, and every character that followed them was a little less surprising. The community aspect was still there for characters like Byleth and Min Min, but nobody’s dream was coming true. That kind of cynicism that felt so antithetical to Smash Brothers, the series that embodied everyone’s childhood fantasies, started to creep its way in. For the final DLC character, it felt like almost an inevitability that they would disappoint. Despite the overwhelming amount of soul that Masahiro Sakurai (one of my all-time favorite creators) has given Smash Brothers as a series, and the equally astounding care put into each character in their every facet, even I started to feel like Smash Ultimate would end on a down note. I was ready to post some unoriginal and unfunny joke when I believed the character would be from Dark Souls. I was anticipating my cynicism to be rewarded as it usually is in this world, and I would feel the momentary satisfaction of coming down on this labor of love that shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t even the knowledge that Sora would be the final character that quelled this feeling. I had considered Sora to be a leading candidate despite the licensing nightmare that is his existence. It was the love that was put into his cinematic, and the silly but bittersweet knowledge that Sakurai’s wild ride was coming to an end.

I don’t even like Kingdom Hearts that much. I think 2 is a fine game, and Birth By Sleep and underrated gem, but the rest of the series I can take or leave. I grew up banging my head against the original Kingdom Hearts, having restarted it countless times. The game was difficult, and the narrative was like nothing I had seen in any other game. I never grew to like the game, but I certainly remember it like few other games. I would probably call Kingdom Hearts my least favorite series that I cannot get enough of. There are times where I truly hate it with a passion, but there are other moments that still get me teary eyed. I’m not sure why I expected to look upon a hypothetical Sora reveal with steely eyed stoicism. Any representative from a game that I had played tirelessly before the age of 10 would have had an effect on me. Sakurai could have thrown Crash Bandicoot in and my heart would have fluttered a little bit. Sora, in his great experience with doing so, unlocked something in my heart. The unashamed love that I could have for something, a feeling that I seldom experience in my 20s, came back to me for a while. I sat watching this silly sales pitch for downloadable content in a game I have spent over $100 on, knowing exactly what it was, but not being able to stop the tears in my eyes. The image of all these characters I’ve spent my life with emerging from their plastic state and having one last hurrah for their final visitor made me more emotional than I should be willing to admit. I don’t know if there’s going to be anything like this for the rest of my life, but I can’t imagine it will be as exciting. I’m not part of the “smash community” (and I don’t know if I want to be), but I am part of the internet community. It’s this larger group of people that made Smash Ultimate special. I couldn’t go two hours after the reveal of Sora before I heard the news being talked about among people outside of my circles in real life. Everyone, regardless of how they felt about this character or how much they play Smash Brothers, knew that there was magic in what Sakurai did. In retrospect, that magic was always present, and we didn’t appreciate it enough. It’s not until summer vacation is over that you regret taking it for granted.

In the middle of two much larger projects I'm working on, I decided to take a little time to write down my experience with this game. For context, I enjoy Journey quite a bit. I also enjoyed Abzu despite its lack of originality. It was like eating the same really good meal for lunch and dinner. If The Pathless was "Journey in a forest" in the same way Abzu with "Journey in the ocean" I would have been satisfied. Unfortunately, The Pathless is a study in maximalist game design, and minimal originality. In a misguided attempt at adding new gameplay mechanics, Giant Squid walks a terrible line between not being mechanically interesting or allowing you to fall into that "Journey Feeling". While Journey was never a mechanic heavy game, it submerged you in a world that never took you out by throwing a million red targets all over the landscape. It all feels like the developers had an okay concept, but began adding things to it to make it more “full featured”. In many ways, it’s a very bad attempt at mimicking Breath of the Wild’s success. Someone should have told Giant Squid that Breath of the Wild was not great because it added a hundred tepid puzzles around the world, it was in spite of that. Speaking of those puzzles, if you thought they were boring in Breath of the Wild, you have a tall glass of lukewarm water to sip on here. The only concrete reward you get from most of these puzzles are essentially keys to unlock the next level. I nearly wrote that that was the only reward you got from these puzzles, because the other reward is a miniscule amount of progress on a bar. This bar, when filled up all the way, increases your run meter. I believe many of this game’s issues all lead back to this meter. Its existence pushed the developers into adding so much unnecessary filler to the world. One of the game’s main draws is its movement, and this meter just puts a limit on how much fun you can have with it. Well, it would have if the movement was any good at all. It’s not even as fun as pressing R2 in the Insomniac Spider-Man games. At least in those games there was some sense of momentum, that every swing would bleed fluidly into the next and (pardon my cliche) make you feel like Spider-Man. If you let go of the run button in this game, your character grinds to a halt. In fact, doing anything except holding forward, holding the run button, and pressing R2 over and over again to hit targets ends any semblance of inertia. I feel like this is a step backwards from the simplicity of Journey and Abzu. In the process of trying to make the movement more of a mechanical interaction, Giant Squid removed any overlooking I can do in favor of aesthetic.
It goes without saying that The Pathless also rips Team Ico off at many turns. Its bosses are big forces of nature that have an attempt at seizing empathy in their death. While its narrative isn’t wordless, it certainly feels like it should be. It’s the desolate world that evokes Ueda’s output the most though. It’s no surprise that The Pathless doesn’t do a good job with its Team Ico inspiration (I can’t really think of a game that does), but its attempts at replicating the smaller moments really irked me. In all of Team Ico’s games you would happen upon little interactions with your NPC companion. These range from dialogue to animations to physical input from the player. It’s a little time for you to grow closer to the person/animal you’re journeying with. They have no pretensions, and just give some humanity to digital creatures. I almost put my controller down and shut off my console when The Pathless directed me to press square to pet my eagle. This was, of course, after a forced stealth segment where I had to turn my brain off lest I lose my mind of boredom. The way it all plays out is downright insulting, down to the miniscule patches of darkness that you have to go back and rub before you proceed. This game is just so passe. I don’t remember the last time I’ve played a game this bankrupt on fresh ideas or simple fun. I’ve also never played a game whose title reflects the developers much better than the product itself.
Edit: Out of morbid curiosity I finished the game. I can't believe how bad the ending is. I thought that the ending would lift the game up in a similar fashion as Journey and Abzu, but I was wrong. I knew that they would assume that I cared at all about the eagle, but I didn't know that that was going to be the main conceit of the ending. My review also neglected to mention the lack of a health bar, which worked in Giant Squid's previous game, but it siphons any stakes from the boss fights in this game. It's not like simply placing a health bar into the game would make it any better though, as every boss is insultingly easy after you learn their patterns. For some reason, the final boss has the most evergreen patterns in the game. Once you beat his first phase, you will have a hard time failing. This is probably the worst game I've played since Outlast 2. It's a Frankenstein's Monster of good ideas from other people, but with none of the tact to bring it back to life.