pirosvs
a game that can track you easily enough and is fun enough gameplay wise that i played through all of a realm reborn despite the story being somehow even more conservative than ffxv
1992
game that kills you as soon as you open the level
"the dark souls of gaming" - my girlfriend
"the dark souls of gaming" - my girlfriend
This game is really cool!! I think the way this game handles tone works really well! There are a couple moments where it's like.... how was the player supposed to figure this out actually. And those bits take away from the game as a whole, because part of the fun of a mystery is enjoying the challenge of a puzzle and getting a sense of accomplishment from working through them yourself, and when they feel less like puzzles and more like either knowing the answer or random trial and error until something works you no longer achieve that reaction so much as a sense of frustration. Setting a death timer on what seems like a largely trial and error puzzle feels..... not particularly fair. I guess that doesn't matter and it makes the experience more real? Who's to say if you were really in this situation that you could expect to survive, and why should the expectation of a video game be that you overcome all, or that you are supposed to be set up to win? But in terms of... playing a game, where that often is an expectation of the medium, it is certainly frustrating
1985
This game is very cool, and whoever made this should consider writing shounen, because every 3 seconds in this game some new incredibly out of the blue thing happens -- you dodge a car, dodge another car, dodge an explosion, drive on the wall, blast through a business and almost run into people, chase a motorcycle on the boardwalk, ramp off of it, drive through a hotel; just beat after beat after beat every action, and it works! The semi-absurdness of it lures me in and keeps my attention perfectly while not quite being long enough to get to a point where I start to question it. Also, this game is DEEPLY overwhelming in how it expects you to respond immediately while the visual and audio stimulus is doing everything possible at all times. Sensory overload if it was a video game. Also also, wish all these old racing games weren't just like, you're a cop and you're so cool and you beat the shit out of the evil legion of doom who killed your wife in cold cold blood and bombed the city and said they'll never go a day in their lives without killing because it brings them such joy, etc.
Drawful and Fibbage are fun, Word Spud has the potential to be fun but doesn't explain itself at all so you don't get the chance until it's too late, Lie Swatter is... not the worst but not good, and You Don't Know Jack makes this deserve a -10 million/10 rating. Overall has good opportunity, but if I ever have to play You Don't Know Jack ever again I'm fucking finding who made that game and haunting them forever.
Playing the arcade version of this on the actual arcade machine makes hitting the combo notes make much more sense and makes it much easier to screen read, which combined with how nice the buttons feel makes playing songs all the more satisfying. Annoying it only gives you two songs instead of the typical three though
This game runs fine, it plays like a normal Taiko game and didn’t have many issues on its own, it’s perfectly enjoyable as a Taiko game.
As I got this game mainly to be able to play it with a friend, my main complaint is they way it lets you play with friends non-locally, since it forces you to do a ranked match and just doesn’t factor the win/loss into your actual rank.
With ranked match you can’t choose the song and are stuck on whatever your rank difficulty is, so if you want it to be higher you either have to select that difficulty from the beginning or play a bunch of ranked matches to bring it up. Personally, I find playing ranked matches deeply unenjoyable, to the point that it makes me not want to play the game at all – losing for getting OK’s (or being an otherwise just average player) to people getting full clear near full perfects on higher levels just feels like it’s impossible to actually rank up. And then your difficulty is fixed, so there’s no doing a lower difficulty to just have a fun time or because you’re tired, and no taking a higher difficulty just to see or to try and get it because it’s on the border of what you’re capable of. There is only the difficulty you are on and you cannot change this except to go back and do ranked matches until your difficulty matches where you want it to be for that time. This also means you can’t choose songs, so you can’t do songs you or your friend like, and you will have to do songs you have no interest in playing.
The other thing I like about this game is that you can customize your character to give a personalized taiko drum to play with. I’m not sure if you get coins from playing on your own, but I sure hope so, because if you have to play the hellish ranked matches to get them….. Then that feature may as well not exist.
Overall, the game is perfectly fine, but why would I play this one over, say, the switch version?
As I got this game mainly to be able to play it with a friend, my main complaint is they way it lets you play with friends non-locally, since it forces you to do a ranked match and just doesn’t factor the win/loss into your actual rank.
With ranked match you can’t choose the song and are stuck on whatever your rank difficulty is, so if you want it to be higher you either have to select that difficulty from the beginning or play a bunch of ranked matches to bring it up. Personally, I find playing ranked matches deeply unenjoyable, to the point that it makes me not want to play the game at all – losing for getting OK’s (or being an otherwise just average player) to people getting full clear near full perfects on higher levels just feels like it’s impossible to actually rank up. And then your difficulty is fixed, so there’s no doing a lower difficulty to just have a fun time or because you’re tired, and no taking a higher difficulty just to see or to try and get it because it’s on the border of what you’re capable of. There is only the difficulty you are on and you cannot change this except to go back and do ranked matches until your difficulty matches where you want it to be for that time. This also means you can’t choose songs, so you can’t do songs you or your friend like, and you will have to do songs you have no interest in playing.
The other thing I like about this game is that you can customize your character to give a personalized taiko drum to play with. I’m not sure if you get coins from playing on your own, but I sure hope so, because if you have to play the hellish ranked matches to get them….. Then that feature may as well not exist.
Overall, the game is perfectly fine, but why would I play this one over, say, the switch version?
2008
I have a lot of love and nostalgia for this game, the dinosaur designs are really creative and fun, and there's a lot of different kinds of dinosaurs. It's a great entry in the creature-collecting genre in that way. The dinaurians are also just cool, like being able to be both fighter and dinosaur rules. But also, this game does a bunch of racist shit about indigenous people. I am actively begging games in fictional worlds to just not do the "uncontacted/ no technology tribes" move and just fucking learn to write something that isn't a racist caricature. Please
2008
The concept and gameplay of this game, the ability to create your own levels and play with friends, customize your pod and characters (AND save them to switch between saved looks), and the massive amount of online levels make this game a 5 in my heart, but I can't genuinely look at all the weird racist shit and give it a higher rating than this. Basically every story game area is a caricature of a certain country.
TLDR; 5 for the actual game, 0 for so much of it being racist shit
TLDR; 5 for the actual game, 0 for so much of it being racist shit
2016
This review contains spoilers
Enjoyable as a game about a friend group on a road trip, exploring male friendships that can be based around genuine care for each other and traits typically deemed masculine that don't veer off into pointless aggression.
The story itself is deeply conservative and boring, the music is ok, and I personally tend to dislike open world settings and realistic art. The story is largely just the divine right of kings and noblesse oblige but as real instead of propaganda, but I don't expect too much from a game series whose takeaways seem to often boil down to empires are bad not even because of one bad person but because that person is actually being controlled by/ is the essence of pure evil.
I enjoyed that silly quests (such as catching and grilling fish for a stray cat) gave more experience than fights generally, which I feel combined with how /utterly abysmal/ the combat is in this game can lead players to rethink an impulse to fight everything around them, which I always appreciate games doing. That said, the combat feels so bad it made me want to not play this game. Noctis is extremely squishy and once you get knocked past your health once it only gets worse, and the miniscule damage output combined with the constant need to heal makes fights feel awful and boring as well as take far too long. Granted, I forgot you could control the other characters until the end of the game, and wish I had had the opportunity to play them earlier, which might've alleviated this and just been more fun overall.
[Spoiler warning] They handle Ignis' becoming blind better than I expected by not using it to suggest that disability makes a person's life completely worthless, nor do they make any character's response to his continued wish to fight overly exaggerated in a way that would feel awkward. It's not a piece out of disability activism but it's not awful nor is it trying to come off as more thoughtful than it actually is, which is more than can be said of a lot of popular games.
The story itself is deeply conservative and boring, the music is ok, and I personally tend to dislike open world settings and realistic art. The story is largely just the divine right of kings and noblesse oblige but as real instead of propaganda, but I don't expect too much from a game series whose takeaways seem to often boil down to empires are bad not even because of one bad person but because that person is actually being controlled by/ is the essence of pure evil.
I enjoyed that silly quests (such as catching and grilling fish for a stray cat) gave more experience than fights generally, which I feel combined with how /utterly abysmal/ the combat is in this game can lead players to rethink an impulse to fight everything around them, which I always appreciate games doing. That said, the combat feels so bad it made me want to not play this game. Noctis is extremely squishy and once you get knocked past your health once it only gets worse, and the miniscule damage output combined with the constant need to heal makes fights feel awful and boring as well as take far too long. Granted, I forgot you could control the other characters until the end of the game, and wish I had had the opportunity to play them earlier, which might've alleviated this and just been more fun overall.
[Spoiler warning] They handle Ignis' becoming blind better than I expected by not using it to suggest that disability makes a person's life completely worthless, nor do they make any character's response to his continued wish to fight overly exaggerated in a way that would feel awkward. It's not a piece out of disability activism but it's not awful nor is it trying to come off as more thoughtful than it actually is, which is more than can be said of a lot of popular games.
Very simple, and good at doing what it's trying to accomplish. The dates are interesting and unique and range from doing an unexpected activity to learning a tragic backstory to haunting, which makes for a fun break from a traditional date quest. The character designs (including dialogue) are similarly unique and fun. Short enough that you don't have to block out time to play it for a little bit, which is great if you struggle to find time to play or to stay focused for long periods. The graveyard feature for ghost's you've already went on a date with is very cute :)
2020
Emotional, very cute, it's fun to move around in this game? Sometimes navigating is annoying, things are annoying to find, or the management aspect starts to feel a bit grating, and the game crashed a couple times, but it was fun and succinct and at no point were all of those things enough to make me not want to keep playing
Has enough songs and variety of songs without DLC to be enjoyable, is fun playing with motion controls or pro controller (or the drum), still the motion controls are kind of... bad sometimes and this game has a lot of extras to buy (DLC songs, drum) which are the two reasons I marked it down a bit. Nonetheless extremely fun, one of my favorite games and the game that got me into rhythm games, and a game that has played a valuable role in my personal life
Genuinely one of my favorite games, great for being being just enough of a game to distract me from depressive episodes and not requiring so much focus/ thought that I can't actually play it when I feel like shit. Only downside is I personally don't like connect 4 or battleship :(