(Played via the Legacy Collection)

Wow. I never finished this game when it came out. I did this time, but mostly out of stubbornness.

Some games are rough around the edges. This one is basically all rough edges. The idea of this game is great, but almost every detail is incredibly frustrating.

- Very few areas to visit

- Nonstop backtracking

- Almost no guidance about where to go

- Story is extremely boring

- Translation is rough, and character limits make things very awkward

- Difficulty spikes a lot... even random battles can kill you quickly if you get unlucky

- The game never autosaves or checkpoints

- Despite being a collectible card based grid based RPG, this game requires way more reaction speed than you'd expect, leading to lots of deaths due to not being able to dodge attacks

- The last two bosses of the game have to be played in sequence without the ability to save

- The dungeon map design is absolutely horrendous, and there's no in-game maps or even names for areas ever

- You basically need to play this with a map on your phone at all times, and a guide to tell where to go next

## what i played

i spent 75 hours doing maaaybe half the shrines, a handful of side quests, upgrading my armor most of the way, and beating the final boss

### stuff i liked

- the art direction
- the music near the end of the game is incredible
- lots of cool shrine puzzles
- link is once again a hot little elf twink on display for us
- the sky islands were pretty cool
- the enemy design is so cool looking
- i just want to play a game about bokoblins thanks

### stuff i was meh about

- the framerate got really choppy whenever you do physics stuff, but was playable for most things
- the overall soundtrack direction is too subdued and ambient for my tastes
- frankly i'm not huge on the combat in BOTW/TOTK. the side dodge vs back dodge vs parry mechanics is way too much for me. dark souls doesn't even need this many types of parries. i never bothered mastering or even getting half good at this.
- only 5 full dungeons
- none of the boss fights were very fun to me
- why are horses still so useless?
- zelda has always had side quests but i think the structure of putting map markers everywhere and making lists of side quests and all that makes the game commodified in a way that feels uncomfy to me, and pressures me into doing more tedious shit than i would naturally
- the structure of the whole game is basically 100% flat, like BOTW
- everything is approximately the same difficulty with only minimal scaling
- because of this, dungeons can't really build on previous ones
- and you don't collect new and interesting upgrades over the course of the game
- i didnt really find building stuff as compelling as they must've expected
- on occasion i was like "oh shit!" but it was rare
- usually it was just tedious and boring
- due to the finicky physics and weird abilities, lots of puzzles can be cheesed, and it may not even be remotely clear what the intended solution is... leading to a dissatisfied feeling of cheating the game and/or yourself
- i feel like older zelda games had more unique types of enemies?
- most enemies here are just recolors
- it was tough to manage all 5 companions since they're 100% context sensitive actions :(

### stuff i didnt like

- feels too "epic" for zelda imo, which i associate with being a bit more cutesy and subdued
- too many cutscenes
- dialogue for almost every character is far too long
- shonen anime tropes really undercut the zelda mood for me
- the underground area was a huge bummer for me, and i chose not to fully explore it
- dungeon design is once again lacking. the dungeons are basically completely flat in structure: just do 4-5 puzzles in any order. also it's possible to cheese some of the puzzles via environment traversal. eek.
- the pacing of the final stretch of the game is all out of wack
- mech combat is a huge bummer
- "gloom" sucked because it punishes you for exploring and for not stockpiling certain types of cures
- and it makes you want to just run away from every battle involving it

## verdict

i would've had a lot more fun just loading up a classic 2d zelda and replaying it

i played etrian odyssey 1 hd on pc. i've played all the other mainline etrian odyssey games starting with 2 and i adore them.

eo1hd is a great repackaging with many of the modern convenience features of later etrian games (turbo mode, auto mapping, difficulty options, etc).

the skill trees are a bit underwhelming in this game and skill balance could use some work.

i played on "normal" or whatever which is actually easier than the original difficulty, but ultimately i was fine with that because it meant less grinding.

most of the floors were pretty fun, but the game leaned on tedium a bit more than the later games with how few fast travel nodes you get and the extreme rarity of shortcuts.

the music is still great but the monster art in the first game isn't as nice. yuzo koshiro is one of my favorite composers.

the story is shockingly good in this game. much better than later games. genuinely loved the whole 4th and 5th stratum from that angle.

sadly the 4th stratum's boss floor is a complete subversion of how FOEs and bosses work thus far in the game, but with essentially no explanation, and it's a slog.

i think toward the 4th and absolutely in the 5th stratum i was massively underleveled. the final boss could 1-shot my entire party with a single attack. so i used the auto walk + holding A to auto level 10 whole levels, which sadly trivalized the final boss.

wish there was more town dialogue and the town NPCs were more interesting like the later games.

there's certainly charm here and it's no surprise this game spawned a successful series, but i think it's definitely one of the series weakest entries. to be clear, a good game. and the 5th stratum is absurdly cool and memorable. they just added so much polish to the later games that i wouldn't recommend coming to eo1 until you've done at least eo2 and eo3 and decided you want more!

i think this game just isn't for me

it's obviously inspired by pokemon but copies way too much from breath of the wild in what i feel is a clumsy way

you have a stamina meter for sprinting that's absurdly low, and you get a glide ability early on

at that point it's trivial to accidentally go to countless areas where enemies will absolutely destroy you

the whole game structure seems to be based around obtaining quests from NPCs and doing them in any order you want

basically every battle i did was either way under or way above my level

you can barely hold any healing items

the music is not doing it for me... i find it just dull

THE PIXEL ART IS FANTASTIC AND SO WELL ANIMATED

i'm giving this game a 2/5 for incredible pixel art and cute monster designs, but unfortunately playing it just feels like a chore to me

Holy shit this game is so cute.

The vibes are off the charts. The art direction and rendering style are fantastic. The music always delights. The characters are cute and the dialogue is fun.

The challenge level is just right to keep you wondering and exploring without getting stuck too long.

This game is just about a little mushroom trying to get home to his family!

You collect lots of items, jump, glide, climb, and solve minor puzzles along the way.

This is a 5-10 hour delight. Maybe a bit more if you wanted to 100% the game.

There are lots of "skins" you can unlock... maybe like 10? I unlocked about 5 of them. Just adorable.

If you like old school 3D collect-a-thons, you should play this!

I mostly played on PC but it also ran great on my Steam Deck.

I am so conflicted on this game. On one hand it's about a queer roadtrip to defeat fascism, on the other hand, I absolutely cannot get into the combat at all.

For the most part I really enjoy the writing. That meme about writers who use subtext being cowards is totally relevant here.

I particularly enjoyed Act III for diving deep into Sam's psyche. I ran out of steam in Act IV, the final part of the game, against the final boss no less.

The combat system is... very weird to me. I've heard that it's like FFXIII, but as someone who hasn't played many FF games, this doesn't help me at all.

The tutorial is pretty short, and by Act III I had played the game so poorly I soft locked myself. See, I was like 4 levels below the boss I was trying to fight, so they literally instant killed all of my party members constantly, and I didn't have enough money to buy gas so I could keep grinding to level up. This game is weirdly a resource management game with the money in a way I've never felt so oppressed by before. I genuinely had to restart the game from Act I because I had been foolish enough to repeatedly save in the same slot, despite the game offering like 50 save slots or something.

So the second time around I minmaxed leveling as hard as I could... without making myself completely out of money since I could mess up the game again. AND I turned on Story Mode combat difficulty. Which, frankly I find the name a bit offensive. It's not like you can simply button mash your way thru boss encounters on that level, at least not the final one. See, the upgrade system is the whole way you level up, and there's lot of spells and if you don't read them all very carefully you can end up with a pretty shit build. I think that's what happened to me at some point and it was making the game a lot harder.

Sadly, the encounter rate just gets too high, and it literally interrupts party dialogue. Gracefully the game resumes conversations where you left off, but I found myself dreading the interruptions. Even on Story Mode where you apparently get more money, I constantly was running out of money for upgrades if i wanted to keep enough money to not run out of gas and lose the entire game.

Eventually I just looked up a Lets Play to watch the final boss play out. Also, apparently at some point the game was patched to prevent you from using your entire item collection during fights, because it was considered messy/confusing. As far as I can tell this was a massive nerf to your combat ability. You have to constantly remember to restock the items in your 5 slots, and it's hard to balance which items you want to take to each fight. In particular Act III and Act IV bosses have some items you really want to have around and I had to restart both fights because I hadn't taken the right loadout.

Anyways, the writing is definitely cheesy at times, but I like the parallels to fascism, LGBT rights, and ineffective liberal government "status quo" woes. Oh, and all the stuff about social media in Act III again was great.

Sadly, my lasting thought about this game is that it needs a massive balance tuning. Maybe I'm "bad" at the game or something, but it just didn't click and I kept feeling frustrated. I wish this game had just been a visual novel instead.

Played the entire game co-op except for the final boss, then did like half of another co-op campaign. I also beat the final boss solo.

I liked the first Remnant game, but based on initial reactions I thought Remnant II would be noticeably better. It really doesn't feel any better than the first game to me.

The randomized nature of the game is still awful imo. Extremely boring environments to walk around in as connective tissue for mediocre dungeons and roll-of-the-dice boss fights. Because each area has so many bosses, and each zone can appear in any order randomly, the entirety of difficulty is based on damage scaling, and frankly I think it doesn't feel good.

Especially in co-op the bosses get massively more health, and reviving your teammates requires several seconds of uninterrupted action. Many bosses can repeatedly attack you and move quickly, making it very hard to actually play this game co-op.

The medic class at least gets an ability to "shout" your teammates awake instantly, but it's got a long cooldown and so if your teammates fall repeatedly you're kinda stuck.

The loot is kinda laughable. Most stuff is absurdly buried in this game, and the trinkets you keep picking up give extremely meager upgrades most of the time.

The main character is written like they're in a Marvel film smiling at the camera as they spew snark... but everyone else is taking it very seriously.

The goat people are still cool btw.

Frankly I hated the final boss. Its second phase involves sooooo many flashing red lights and impossible to discern attacks, plus it employs intentionally glitched visuals and repeatedly teleports you along with changing forms. It's difficulty through extreme visual distress, rather than being about learning patterns and punishing you for being too bold. It's nearly impossible to resurrect your team in this fight, so if anyone goes down you're kinda screwed because the boss has an absurdly massive health pool in 3 player mode.

Also man do all the characters talk too much and just infodump weird shit at you.

Some of the puzzles were cool! Bit of a mixed bag though.

A lovely tribute to Jet Set Radio! My main complaint is I just wish the game was longer. I had a lot of fun.

Incredible soundtrack, beautiful art direction, lovely graphics, pixel art textures and cel shading... Level design is pretty good, though I wish they were a bit bigger. It could use a world map to help you find your way between zones.

The scoring system for combos is a bit weird and emphasizes extreme map knowledge over thumb skill.

Story was actually surprisingly interesting and bit confusing to explain.

There's apparently quite a few extra unlockable characters, though the game doesn't do much to hint at that to you. I don't have most of them right now, and I'm not sure if I'll make the time to go back and get them.

My main complaint is the weird emphasis on combat in this game. The boss fights are not very good, and one in particular completely changes the formula with 0 explanation and repeatedly insta-kills you until you magically deduce (read online) how to beat the boss. Also once you get high "rep" in an area (do lots of graffiti), cops show up absurdly fast any time you do graffiti. This doesn't change after beating the game, and it makes tracking down the final missing graffitis a drag. I didn't enjoy the "run from the cops to find a bathroom to change clothes" as a game mechanic, and the combat is underdeveloped and uninteresting. I think they could make a better game by scrapping the combat entirely and giving you timed escape sequences from cops as part of the story mode only.

Lovely game and I'm hoping for some cool DLC and maybe a sequel eventually.

wall kick mechanic is really obnoxious. it's like wall jumping but you do it way early or else you won't go as far.

getting super lost about where to go with no map to reference.

not enough save points.

quit after 90 minutes.

A gorgeous mess of high production value game with buggy quests and boring combat

## Combat

I hope you like D&D 5th edition combat! Because there's a shitload of it. And unlike a tabletop game session, you have to control four entire characters. The game is fully turn based like D&D, and by Act 3 the game compensates for your power levels by throwing massive amounts of minions at you.

Take a wizard. I didn't like Gale and I didn't keep him around most of the time because of that. But damn, wizards are good. Sleep, Blind, Hold Person, Tasha's Hideous Laughter, and the completely OP Otto's Irresistible Dance are complete game changers in combat.

I played the entire game on easy, but there were still quite a few fights in late Act 2 and most of Act 3 that had many characters near death. I've played D&D many times and the combat is absolutely the worst part of it to me, so I picked up this game probably against my better judgment because I was looking to fill that Bioware-shaped hole in my heart.

## Companions

There's decent selection of them (but no monk? and nobody who's a "small" race? pft). I romanced Shadowheart because she's a goth girl after my own heart. Her arc was decently interesting though not really surprising. I ditched Lae'zel once I got Karlach, but once I did the Githyanki Creche I realized that Lae'zel is way more involved in the game story than Karlach, and I swapped them back. Wyll is dreadfully boring to me.

## Immersion

Virtually everything is voice acted and mo-capped, and the graphics are beautiful. This game is a treat to look at. The music rarely blew me away, but it enhanced the experience. The game maybe tries a little too hard to be a sandbox in an "organic" way. I was constantly running into missions where any other game would just have you click a dialogue option to unlock a door, but in this game you have to right click the door and select lockpick. Same sort of thing with getting a captive out of chains, or rescuing someone who's on the ground. Rather than going with reducing friction, the game makes you think in the sandbox context a lot more than I personally care for.

In Act 1 it felt like the game had so much promise, and Act 2 almost kept it going, but Act 3 it felt like everything about the encounter design, combat system, quest log, map, the whole game felt like it was buckling under the weight of what they were trying to do. I went from excitedly launching the game every night to "alright, let's wrap this shit up", sadly.

Also, the game is constantly throwing extremely vague warnings about "better finish up what you were doing" when you go to new areas, with no detail about what will/won't be available after you go there. Be warned that Act 3 completely cuts of all areas from Act 1 and Act 2, so you need to finish up whatever you want there before leaving.

## Story

The main story was fine. That being said, a lot of really critical information is stuck in side quests you could easily skip. The ending won't blow you away, and the final fight is insufferable.

## The Hells

Make sure you do the quest line that has you go to the hells, but be sure to keep a save before you go. A poor party configuration won't succeed even on easy there. I was lucky in that I had a scroll in my back pocket that trivialized the fight. Everything about that mission blew my mind, especially the song in the boss room. "Here come the claws" is a phrase that's been living in my head ever since. Just incredible.

## Conclusion

This game started off really strong, but Act 3 soured me on the game. I played for about 110 hours and did most side quests in the game. This was probably a mistake. I definitely had more than my fill of this game and got sick of it by the end. I certainly had a lot of fun, but the game's combat encouter design was soul crushing to me, and numerous quest bugs almost ruined my experience throughout the game. Shout out to everyone posting workarounds on Reddit.

I love the new protagonist. Kiryu's stoic personality is so much less interesting than Ichiban's stubborn straightforward nature. The party members are fun. The story starts off really good. It kinda meanders for a while, but it massively picks up steam again for the final arc. Over the top cheesy drama like you'd hope from the series. Music is pretty good.

OK BUT. I don't hate JRPG combat, and I even love lots of JRPGs. This one is mediocre at best. Painfully slow combat animations. Extremely punishing job system. Horribly balanced classes. Later chapters need massive grinding. Enemies and bosses become massive health sponges. The 6 attack types are horribly distributed, with most attacks just being physical, and certain bosses resist that in order to ruin your fun. The dungeons are basically completely linear and you can't save in them. Fortunately I only died to a boss once. You can retry a boss by sacrificing half of the money you carry, or retry the entire dungeon. Luckily you can store excess money in an ATM before doing a dungeon.

I don't think Ijincho was as cool as Kamurocho, but it was cool that we visit Kamurocho, Ijincho, and Sotenbori all in one game.

BTW give the English voices a shot, I think the voice acting is great. My only complaint about English voices is a lot of random voice clips are not localized, so during battle you often get a mix of languages at once.

OH and. OK so how did I not mention yet? I want to shake the person who calibrated the SFX spawn rate. Battles are like a nonstop stream of every single character saying some 1-liner quip. It's infuriating. In addition to the combat not being fun, I frequently had the game on mute during the fights. It's absurd.

As usual for a Yakuza/LAD game, very few women, and the ones who do exist are generally sex workers / hostess club hostesses / moms. I think Saeko is great though. Eri is technically a party member but because she's optional she has no story presence outside of her silly capitalism simulator side quest.

### Stopped playing after a couple chapters ###

+ Great music
+ Good art
+ Weird murder puzzles
- Writing is soooo boring
- Pacing is awful
- Framerate is distractingly low
- Literally none of the suspects are even named characters; the stakes are so low
- Everyone from ch.0 goes away and the new cast is even less interesting with less setup
- ch.2 is just the same gimmick so many times
- Shinigami is soooo fucking annoying she needs to talk like 75% less
- Main character is overly stupid in a way that feels annoying rather than just being a stand-in for the player not knowing answers
- Amnesiac MC is so overdone and really doesn't do anything to endear me to him

Gorgeous art and beautiful music

It's a Metroidvania

The difficulty level of boss fights is frustrating even less than 3 hours into the game. The gameplay system where you have more "energy" than health, which powers your shields and also your gun (your strongest weapon), makes this game lean extremely hard into the high risk high reward playstyle. You literally have 2 HP besides your shields.

When your energy depletes, you have to do a weird QTE minigame to get half of it back, or fail that QTE and waste like 2 whole seconds standing still and probably getting destroyed by the boss. And when they interrupt you have to start completely over on getting your shield back.

The hydra boss has a "horizontal or vertical" attack you have to dodge in its 3rd phase and the timing is like maybe 0.5 seconds at best, leading to a lot of "unfair" hits due to it being hard to react quickly enough to dodge the appropriate direction.

I stumbled into another boss shortly after that, quite a ways away from a save point, and he jumps around the screen at lightning speed while also having twilring swords chase you around. Game just honestly needs to chill a bit more on the boss design especially around speed.

IDK this game is almost really cool but it's tuned way too hard for me and the shield/HP playstyle thing is too frustrating for me.