After several hours and experimenting with a ton of decks/joker cards, I FINALLY got my first win. I think I can talk about it now seeing as it's simple and I "beat the game" in a sense.

This game is fantastic. It's the textbook definition of "beauty in simplicity." Everything is streamlined and the overall harmony of the visuals and audio (like the weird film grain, the pixelated art for some of the Joker "cards," distortions to the main theme when you play cards) is perfect. The Joker Card system is brilliant in that it can be expanded on indefinitely with new cards and it rewards investment and creativity. I pulled a Blueprint Joker and continually moved it around my Joker Card deck to get buffs and multipliers that best suited my situation rather than getting locked into one "build" for example. It's so satisfying.

The ONLY critique I have, hence the half a star missing, is the boss mechanics. I understand that you need to keep a semblance of a challenge when I can theoretically get a 500 bazillion multiplier. That being said, some boss mechanics are absolute bull. The "only being able to play one hand" boss has ended so many of my runs and I'm not sure how I could have played better. I had one run where I invested in hearts and flushes and the second boss was debuffing hearts. There's not enough stages/time to realistically counter some mechanics, so it just feels bad to see the boss mechanic and know the run is likely over.

Absolutely worth your time and giving it a try if you like roguelike deck builders.

an ambitious game that absolutely stuck the landing. this game will return everything you put into it and fully realizes the world of Faerûn.

you are SPOILED with choice in this game and it actually, truly matters in game. that's easily the best part about it. characters i thought i'd forget in an hour return repeatedly in the story and my decisions shape their lives. how you approach an encounter can radically affect the larger story, the rewards, and difficulty. there are a few "unfairly punishing" choices imo, but the game is GENERALLY, pretty good at indicating "hey this is going to be difficult" or otherwise catastrophic. that's the half a star missing on the score. genuinely, it's the only thing i didn't like though.

i understand that the genre might not be everyone's cup of tea, but you absolutely should try this if you're an rpg or ttrpg fan.

oh my god i forgot to review lightfall.

i guess The Death of The Studio and a hundred billion day delay to the next expansion is a good time to make the scathing review. this is getting an essay because i need a place to vent my frustrations about this franchise. i’m a consistent, end-game level player who at one point idolized the franchise. house of wolves veteran and all that.

i will be spoiling the main story, but, honest to god, it is not worth the spoiler tag. no one should care about story spoilers for this campaign.

here’s the short of it:

lightfall was a misguided, poorly thought-out money grab with decent improvements to gameplay that were instantly mired either by poor balancing or a greedy company. the following seasons of content were a bug-filled, uninteresting series of maintaining a status quo. the new raid was visually stunning, but a gameplay flop that, quite literally, caused such a complacency problem in the raiding community that it became a meme. the dungeons have similar problems. i’ve watched some of my closest friends lose interest in the video game that brought us together and i can’t help but join them now. being a fan of this series has become miserable.

ok, full review:

lightfall, as in specifically just the expansion, was not supposed to exist and it absolutely feels like it. already starting off strong, the first cutscene and last cutscene of lightfall were clearly supposed to be the first cutscene of the final shape but it is awkwardly split and edited to not appear that way. though you are the most valuable defender of earth and The Main Bad Guy and his forces are literally in earth’s orbit blowing up the Traveler and Earth, you are told to leave and hunt down a MacGuffin in Deus Ex Machina City neomuna. the entire story takes place in a rushed, lifeless city that we are told is thriving but feels lonely and abandoned. you walk through the levels and feel like you missed a party and are cleaning up the cabal janitors. the friendly new factions called the cloudstriders you meet in the campaign and people of neomuna as a whole exist to either be annoying, die in an explosion two minutes into meeting them, or give quests. hey, remember the macguffin mentioned a minute ago? yeah, the game keeps forgetting about it. you spend half the campaign “mastering strand” and the explanation of WHY you should care about getting the macguffin and this story are explained in post-campaign, HIDDEN, lore dialogue dumps and a few season cutscenes that came out weeks after the campaign. god, i wish i was exaggerating. the developers had to say in a blog post that “we know people have questions!” because the fan base was so upset about a complete lack of answers.

oh my god, i still haven’t even mentioned calus.

the other half is spent trying to properly defeat darkness buffed calus which, admittedly and given the bullshit conditions around it, was sometimes cool. his cutscenes with the witness and the final showdown (both holding down a perimeter with caital and the last boss) were the best parts of the expansion for me. it’s clear that this story beat was the only thing they were able to properly cobble together and i gotta give them credit for making it work. that’s the half of a star over one star.

that being said!

everything you did in the campaign is undone in not-well executed bullshit. the more i think about it, the more upset i get. i’ll give it to bungie for foreshadowing repeatedly that the witness can take control of our ghosts. fine. there was no foreshadowing that it can “make a link” with the plot device you refused to explain, our character, caital, and the stupid cloudstrider just fucking watched our ghost sloooowwwwly fly up to the plot device and honestly Second Macguffin, and no amount of “chekov’s gunning” this is going to remove the sin of invalidating all the player’s efforts this expansion. why did we abandon the main story just to get rug pulled in the last moment? the game smugly acts like “the witness outsmarted humanity’s best efforts” and it absolutely did not earn it. my friends and i finished the campaign wondering what actually happened and i had to read a summary. garbage. just plain garbage.

strand adds a few, new debuffs to the game like weakening the damage an enemy deals, a grappling hook, and a new element to the system. that’s really it. the larger game doesn’t support it like installing grappling spots everywhere for example and tying the grapple to your coveted grenade ability. the developers keep nerfing the potency of strand, gutting creative ways the community uses it (weavewalk and DOT), or not tightening core gameplay (strand warlock is centered around making threadlings. threadlings continue to be mid at best). everything else is just Green Damage. same old that you knew.

stuff that’s usually good like the OST stayed good also. no real change there. oneirophobia is probably my favorite raid theme now.

speaking of raids, lightning round for the seasons after, the raid, and the dungeons. the seasonal stories have been a gauntlet of tying up loose ends either by killing off characters or awkward severing remaining story threads week by week. not great. there’s no meaningful changes to the gameplay loop or grind that make them better than “meh.” like i said WAY earlier, the raid is visually stunning but flops in the gameplay. i absolutely fuck with the direction, lore, and wider premise of root of nightmares but i can’t stomach another boring, rng dependant run of scission. the reprised raids were also fine, but are just nostalgic romps and nothing else. nothing new and engaging. the dungeons are clearly designed now to be “marathons” for people trying to solo flawless the dungeon and, as a result, dungeons are slogs even in full teams. it’s a weekly chore. besides gameplay, dungeons are fine (art, music, whatever). the loot for both is also weirdly awful?? i wouldn’t have brought this up if just the ghost of the deep loot was mid, but why were the potential perks for both so bad??

so, worst expansion in my opinion. it’s the worst because it has all the experience and lack of excuses for the curse of osiris and shadowkeep. bungie wanted more time for final shape (which STILL wasn’t even good enough and has its own delay) and this expansion reeks of that desperation. i’m playing up to the final shape to tie a bow on my time playing this series (as a house of wolves veteran), but i’m not playing this franchise again after the witness croaks. judging by the direction of news about the company, Bungie might implode after that expansion anyway.

whole situation is a bummer.

alright. didn't like this one.

i'm not gonna give this game an entire essay, so the short of it is i just wished i was playing any danganronpa or somnium files game. i appreciate the "new" parts of this game like the side quests that deviate from spike chunsoft light novel heavy catalogue, but i feel like everything as a whole missed the mark. it wasn't funny. the gameplay felt kind of awkward. the quality of mysteries is a roller coaster of up's and downs. i didn't hate or particularly like any character. shinigami and yuma have this weird bullying relationship going on that feels like a less charming knock-off of date and aiba.

like the game isn't offensively bad. don't get me wrong. i can see how people could like it. but, man, i just wished they put this game's development time into either of their other mystery series.

i’m currently grinding away to get the last few achievements, but i’ve played the game more than once and I feel comfortable reviewing it now.

this is probably the purest sequel to exist. it’s “safe” in that the only gameplay changes are adding two, new drink bases, the ability to give some items to customers, and most of the original cast returns with a few new faces. that “safe-ness” is not a bad thing though! it’s familiar and the game leans into the theme of change, but wanting stability. big fan of this. guess i’ve been burned by bad sequels too many times lol.

new characters are cute ‘n fine. jokes and story maintains the quality of the original. music is still fire.

i really don’t have any critiques for this game, but it doesn’t hugely innovate. it does everything well like it did in the first one which is all i could’ve asked!

This game is worth a try imo. It's pretty polarizing from what I have seen, but I'll try my best to summarize what I liked about this game.

This game feels like it's a sampler of all favorite parts of Titanfall's mobility and pace of combat AND the solid environmental and gunplay of old Battlefield. It feels like almost every mechanic is dedicated to making a match feel dynamic with the amount of map altering or ability range a player can utilize. There are some balance issues with certain choices being more or less fun than others (like the heavy class feeling a lil too chunky for me in a game built to promote movement), but I'm really impressed for a game that just released. It's the current game for "boy's night" right now which is an achievement for any game. They just need to balance some abilities (please buff some weapon magazines) and give me more destruction and mobility tools for medium and the heavy class imo.