After playing through Super Hero Operations, I managed to lose the Super Robot Wars bug (for now ;b) and re-catch the JRPG bug I had a year or two before that. Some other friends of mine across various friend groups also happened to be playing a fair bit of Dragon Quest around that time, so I thought what better time to finally get into the copy of DQ7 I bought last year. I played the Japanese version of the game on original hardware, and it took me around 105 hours.
The story of DQ7 puts you in the shoes of Hero (the main character whom you name), who in this game is the son of a fisherman on the one island in the whole world. You live in this tiny village with your family and play with your friends Maribel (the mayor’s daughter) and Kiefer (the prince of the nearby kingdom) and dream of adventuring one day. Your dreams are suddenly realized one day when a mysterious stone your good for nothing uncle finds leads you to the forbidden ancient ruins in the mountains north of town, where you’re flung back in time to a far off island to help save it (and eventually many others) from being sealed away by some strange dark force! DQ7’s narrative is a very strange one among both JRPGs and DQ games I’ve played. Though it has named characters, such as Maribel and Keifer and a few others, instead of creating your own blank-slate party members as DQ3 and 9 do, they have very minor roles in the story compared to DQs 4-6 before or DQ8 after. Most of the narrative’s MASSIVE amount of text is taken up by the minor characters on the islands you’re visiting and saving. On each island, you’ll play through a little adventure to free that land from the darkness and allow that island to reappear in the normal world. You’re not only going into the little sealed worlds of these islands, but significantly back in time as well, and they get to have all their history play out by the time they appear in the real world again. Visiting these lands both in their far flung pasts of peril and in the safe present when your deeds are distant enough to have become legend is a really neat story conceit, but most of these stories (though not all) are more or less self-contained from one another. The game has a vibe something like a playable shonen anime as a result, with each island being like a mini story-arc making up the larger story of the “series” that is this game. It makes it feel like more of an adventure for the sake of it than most other DQ games which usually have clearer stakes, but there are certainly larger things afoot beyond mere island saving. These stories really range a lot in tone as well, with some being more lighthearted and silly with others being quite emotionally affecting and some being truly harrowing. It gives a wide spread of stories to interact with, and they’re all so different from one another that I never felt bored going to a new island. It was always an exciting experience to see just what thing lay around the next portal~. There are just about 20 of these island to go through, and between that and mechanical things we’ll get to later, that’s where you’ll find principle blame for the game’s significant length. I ultimately quite liked the story, even though it’s pretty light on themes at the end of the day, but the sheer length and at time directionless-seeming nature of the story is definitely going to turn some people off, or at least be a significant obstacle in them sticking with DQ7 long enough to finish it. Mechanically, this is very much a successor to DQ6 and how it handles its systems. At the base line, it’s very much Dragon Quest as you’ve always known it. First-person turn-based battles, you can control party members either directly or with pre-set general behaviors, you can cast spells: a very typical JRPG as DQ so loves to be. The monster recruiting from DQ5 is more or less gone, and instead (around a 30 hours into the game) you unlock a job system very much like DQ6’s job system. The big caveat here is that unlike DQ6, the jobs here matter a LOT and affect your stats a TON. Being a bad or inconvenient class can really be a pain to play as, but you’ll need to play those classes a lot if you want to get past the weaker jobs and unlock the several tiers of prestige jobs in this game’s job tree. Once you get a skill (be it a spell or other special skill), you keep it forever in a continuously growing pile, and some jobs also have passives associated with them in general and most of them have a bonus for mastering the job. But when you master a job, you’re unlikely to stay as it for long if you can help it, as you need to get to your next job and start mastering that ASAP, because these things take a LONG time to master. The base level jobs (of which there are about ten and you’ll likely be mastering three to five of them) all take from 130 to 180 battles to master, with the intermediate and expert jobs taking from 200 to 240 battles to master. Top this off with EXP and money being very slow to earn as well, and you have the recipe for a game with a LOT of grinding, and that’s not even factoring in the Monster Job system which is like the normal job system but with piles more stuff to grind through. I kept track, and about 20 hours of the 105 of my playtime were just grinding through the game’s job system stuff, and I never even touched the monster job system. The sheer amount of endless grinding in this game is easily one of the biggest factors that would make me hesitate recommending this game to anyone not already very familiar and comfortable with retro RPGs (and especially retro DQ), as that level of endless grinding is sure to turn of players with more modern sensibilities towards such things. Speaking of putting lots of time into things, the signposting is another big sticking point for me with this one. I did my absolute best to play through this game never using a walkthrough. I used a guide for the jobs, but only a walkthrough near the very end when I was just so stuck I couldn’t fathom what to do next (and I’m glad I looked it up, because I would’ve been stuck forever otherwise XP). The game is usually pretty straightforward with how to progress, but that’s with the key exception of its main advancement mechanic: tablet fragments. These fragments are found in both the past worlds and in the present, and you use them to unlock new islands to travel to. These worlds aren’t particularly small or compact either, and you don’t even always find only the pieces for the very next island in the one you’re currently on. This means if you miss one or don’t realize what side quest in the present has suddenly progressed and that you’re meant to go back there, you’re up shit creek without a paddle. Now there is a fortune teller on the main island who gives story progression hints, but they’re VERY general hints, and I basically never found them useful. There’s thank heck a fortune teller for fragment pieces, but she’s quite well hidden and you don’t unlock her location for a couple tens of hours into the game. I didn’t even realize she was there until significantly after that either. Her hints are better, thank goodness, but that involves even realizing she exists in the first place. While I could deal with the grinding, the selectiveness with how well signposted was another really big factor that made this game harder to enjoy than I wanted it to be, and this is almost certainly a game you’ll need to end up consulting walkthrough for at some point or another. Aesthetically, it’s a very pretty mostly 2D game. Environments are 2D sprites on 3D-ish environments. Buildings and such are 3D, and you can rotate the camera either completely or a bit side to side depending on the area. The battles are entirely 2D and have some really nice 2D animations for the monsters (many of whom are completely new, as a good portion of this game’s monster roster is entirely knew from the comparatively quite homogeneous previous six games). I think some might be turned off by the 2D-on-3D aesthetic, but I really liked it. I think there’s a good reason they used this style for the remakes of 4, 5, and 6 on DS and then for the remakes of 1, 2, and 3 on 3DS (other than that the PS1 remake of 4 used this engine and in all likelihood they just ported that version to the DS and then that set the format for how the rest of those remakes would look :b). The music is also very good and Dragon Quest-y as usual. If you like DQ music, you’ll likely really like what’s here too~. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game is a really mixed bag. The good stuff is really good and fun. It’s a lovely sort of swansong, in retrospect, to the Enix-era DQ games before they became Square Enix and so much changed. If you can get past the poor signposting and loads of grinding, you’ll likely have quite a good time with this, as I did, but if you’d like a more forgiving time in those regards, seeking out the 3DS remake will likely be better worth your time. DQ7 is a bit of an odd black sheep of the DQ series, but it’s one I think still has a lot of merit and charm to it despite its flaws.
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This is a game I’d heard nothing but excellent things about and have been meaning to play for years, but the perfect storm of reasons finally got me to play it. Thing number one was my partner wanting to play it together (or rather, go through individually at roughly the same time) at some point this year, and the other point was it being down to just $10 on Steam. I was about to finish Super Hero Operations, and still had the ability to stay home and no-life the game if I wanted because it was still winter break, so now seemed like the absolute perfect time to go through it, and so I did. Over the course of 50.5 hours in less than a week, I finally played through Disco Elysium. It’s a game so dense and just full of stuff that it’s kinda hard for me to write about and not feel like I’m missing something, but I’ll do my best~.
DE sees you waking up from some kind of stupor, nearly naked in an upstairs hostel room. You pull yourself together and bump into a nice young woman in the hallway, and you’re informed that it’s year ’51 of the Current Century, you’re in the district of Martinaise in the city of Revachol, and you’re apparently some sort of policeman. As for you, all you remember is… nothing. You have no memory of this place, of your name, of your face. Even concepts like “money” or “government” are entirely foreign concepts to our Detective. You venture downstairs where you’re told you’re here to not only investigate a murder, but you’ve been here for three days already. The murder isn’t just a hanging: the body still hasn’t even been taken down after over a week. With no idea what your past or future have in store for you, you meet the man who will end up being your number one compatriot for this adventure, Kim Kitsuragi, and venture outside into the world of Disco Elysium. DE is first and foremost an adventure game, and a very player-directed one at that. If you’ve played Shenmue, it almost has that quality of “no objective markers. You wanna solve the mystery? Then you best get to detecting, Mr. Detective!”, though I’d say this accomplishes that style of self-directed gameplay in a much more well realized product than Shenmue (even if they’re not quite going for the same type of experience). It has the perspective of a Black Isle CRPG, but there isn’t any combat to speak of. The developers have been very forthcoming with how one of their old favorite games, Planescape Torment, helped inspire DE, but this game has the good sense to omit actual combat mechanics, unlike PT does. Even encounters you could call “combat” still take place within the game’s framework of dialogue trees. All that out of the way, DE is a very personal as well as a very political story with mysteries surrounding both topics. Martinaise is a constantly shifting and changing world over the days you spend there, with tons of NPCs to meet, locations to explore, and quests to find and do, or not. Figuring out just what kind of person your detective is going to be, even down to trying to learn what your name is or looking in a mirror to even get a picture of what you look like (if you don’t, your picture in the lower left will just be a cloudy haze the whole game), and that’s reflected in the game’s stats and mechanics. Detective has four primary, Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics that each contain six skills within them. These skills are not just skills however: They are aspects of his personality (you could even view them as members of his plural system, if that’s something you’re familiar with). A friend of mine described it as a kind of Greek Chorus (the theatrical term) with you at all times, so “the Chorus” is how I’ve taken to referring to the skills as characters. The higher level of points you have in a skill, the more likely you are to succeed not only active checks (some of which can be retried, others of which can’t) in the dialogue, but also passive checks both inside and outside dialogue. In fact, if you have a skill *too* high, then that Chorus member can outright take the spotlight from you and have Detective do things you otherwise wouldn’t’ve had him do. The sheer degree to which your skills are characters unto themselves is just one more thing that makes the world of Disco Elysium so much more engaging and interesting. There’s not only a rich outer world, but a rich inner world to explore too. The developers of DE are Estonian, and it really shows in how their world is constructed and how their narrative plays out. There are a lot of aspects to the world that will probably be pretty familiar to anyone who’s versed in Eastern European literature, but they do a lot to subvert those tropes as well. DE is not just a very political story in the terms of how its story has Detective working in very political situations to try and sort out the main murder mystery, but it’s also a very politically designed game in how it gets the player to try and analyze their own beliefs about the world in the process. The world of Elysium is one crafted to both be very evocative of the world we live in, but also one divorced enough from real life to let you view things from a fresh angle. From the money-focused “Ultraliberalism” to the likely more familiar “moralism”, the game does a lot to push you to view aspects of our real world from a new angle. I could write or talk for hours about different analogies and metaphors that DE uses to different effects (and in terms of talking, I already have I assure you x3), but I’ll conclude this narrative section by stating once more that it really does it expertly. It’s hard to really say much more than that because of just how easy it is for one playthrough to be *so* different from another. The way your skills interact with the world, especially passive checks, are done so subtly that it’s almost impossible to realize what you even *could* be missing if your stats were just arranged a bit differently. DE is absolutely a game I intend to replay not only because of how much I know I missed, but especially because of how much I’m excited to discover how much I don’t know I missed. A lot of the mechanics of the game are wrapped up in its writing, so I’ve already covered most of the mechanical aspects, but I’ll elaborate on another few things here that aren’t quite so explicitly tied into the storytelling as such. You gain EXP by doing quests and gathering information, and a level up gives you another skill point to raise a skill by one. There are a lot of mid-conversation active skill checks you can try to do all manner of things, and raising a skill point (or learning new info diegetically that affects your skill roll) can give you another chance at those skill checks, as well as just generally making that skill stronger. The game uses a system of rolling 2 d6 + whatever your skill is to pass checks as trivial as 8 and as godly as 18, but a 2 is always a failure and a 12 is always a success. The game is very transparent about these active checks, and it’s really nice to see just how clear the game is in general with how its dialogue trees are put together. There’s never any ambiguity in terms of what a dialogue option will do when it comes to outright ending a conversation (or concluding a mid-convo topic) will do, and in a game where it matters *so* much what dialogue options you do and *don’t* pick, that’s a really good feature not to skimp on. There is also the “thought” system, where you can pick up “thoughts” to dwell on an “internalize” in your Thought Cabinet. After taking however many hours in-game it takes to think about those things, the associated bonuses (usually penalties) from dwelling on it will disappear and give you a new semi-permanent bonus (or penalty) depending on the thought. You can spend a skill point to expand your thought cabinet, or burn a skill point to get rid of a thought you particularly don’t like. Internalized thoughts can have all manner of bonuses, but there’s no way of knowing what that bonus will be until you finish internalizing it. This is the one aspect of the game I don’t so much like the implementation of. It feels a bit tacked-on compared to everything else, and while a lot of the bonuses are truly great and worth having, just how much in-game time (which is large, but not infinite) these take to complete makes them sometimes pretty serious investments. Time only passes when you’re talking to people, so undoing an internalized thought by loading an old save involves undoing a LOT of progress, most likely. That said, you’re also very unlikely to run out of time in the game. You *can* run out of time, but like a game like Fallout 1 or 2, you’d really have to be trying to do that for it to happen. At any rate, not knowing what internalized thoughts will ultimately do is an unwelcome level of opacity in design in a game otherwise very transparent and forthcoming with info, and I never felt that it complemented the rest of the game’s systems the way the other respective system do one another. The aesthetics of the game are very striking and beautiful. The whole game has this sort of painted aspect to how the graphics look, with details both 2D and 3D looking like they walked out of some twentieth century work of art. Character portraits are striking and give great insight as to who you’re talking to, and the voicework in particular is absolutely excellent. The most major addition that the Final Cut edition (which is basically the only version you can buy these days, and is the version available on consoles too) is fully voicing all dialogue, and damn is it effective. The music is also very good, with the game having a great soundtrack to underscore scenes of all sorts and set the tension appropriately. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Though this wasn’t the first game I beat this year, really, we’re starting this year off incredibly strong just like I did last year with Dandy Dungeon. Disco Elysium lived up to the hype and then some. It’s an incredibly well crafted thought provoking adventure game not to be missed. This is absolutely in the territory of “how will anyone, including the guys who made it, ever make something better than this?”, though I’m absolutely excited to see them (or anyone else) give it a shot! If it even comes close to this well crafted an experience, then my hat is truly off to them. Until then, the only question left for me at this point is not “if” I will replay Disco Elysium, but “when” x3 This is a game I’ve been vaguely aware of for a little while, as some close friends of mine played through it and really loved it last year. Well one of those friends was then super lovely and gifted it to me on Steam, so I knew I just had to play it and quickly since I had so much time over the winter break. I streamed about half of my playthrough on Twitch as well, so she could for sure watch me experience as much of it as she could ^w^. I didn’t finish it on stream, but with a little bit of playing after, I 100%’d it in about 5.5 hours. I played it on Steam with my Xbone controller.
Lil’ Gator Game is a story about the titular lil’ gator, who loves playing with their big sister and imagining exciting fantasy worlds to explore. Fast forward to her entering college, and our lil’ gator is having trouble adjusting to just how busy their big sister is. With the help of their friends (and a whole bunch of *their* friends), they put together a big island’s worth of adventure to go through to try and convince their big sister to set aside school work for a while and play together like they used to. It’s not terribly long, but it’s a story that’s delightful, charming, and even a bit queer to boot, and I think anyone with siblings will probably get a lot out of this like I did~. As for mechanics, the easiest way to describe LGG is “Breath of the Wild but adventure game.” You’ve got quests to complete, islands to explore (one smaller one to teach you the basics, and then a bigger one to use them on), you’ve got a glider, you can climb anything (complete with stamina bars), and you’ve even got a sword and a pointy hat! The one thing you don’t have is… enemies. You’re just a lil’ gator playing with their friends in a nature park. What would be attacking you? You’ve got environmental puzzles to solve, cardboard cutout standees of monsters to slash at, and all manner of people and collectibles to hunt for, but there is never any sort of failure state to fear entering by doing things wrong (not even falling can kill you~). This makes LGG a super chill and fun romp for an adult, and an excellent game for younger folks or those just getting into games for the first time, but something like BotW is just too challenging or intimidating for them to hop right into. For its aesthetics, you have an island full of simple and pretty cell-shaded environments populated by cute anthropomorphized animals~. While certain aspects (especially your “glider” of a T-shirt you fly around with) are certainly BotW-inspired, the main influence of the game’s graphics are much more Wind Waker in style, and it’s delightful~. The music is very atmospheric and happy, underscoring the action very nicely. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Lil’ Gator Game wears its heart on its sleeve, and it’s a big, wonderful heart to behold. This is an absolutely excellent game, and a wonderful way to spend part of a weekend, or a wonderful gift for the young (or not) Zelda fan in your life. It’s a super charming indie adventure super worth your time and money, and it’s hard to really be more positive about it than that~. This is the 3rd game in my journey through the Gundam & Tokusatsu crossover JRPGs that Banpresto published in the 90’s. This is the first one they not only published, but also developed in-house as well (as they were starting to do with Super Robot Wars around this time). Releasing in 1999, it’d been a good few years since the absolutely awful previous entry in this kinda-series was released, and given that this was Banpresto themselves, I had a fair bit of hope that this one would at least be pretty good. It took me around 36 hours to beat the game in Japanese on real hardware.
Though it’s a licensed game, the story of SHO follows an original main character as the main point of view character (in a very Super Robot Wars-y fashion). There is a male and a female character to pick from, but I chose the male character Ingram. You start in the very G Gundam & Gundam Wing-y future, sent on a mission to chase down the Devil Gundam, but upon falling to earth to chase and fight it, it flings you back in time 40 years to the very Ultraman and Metal Heros-y past. While this game does adapt just about all it can of Ultraman, in a change from previous games in the series, the *only* Gundam adapted is G Gundam and Gundam Wing, so no U.C. Gundam stuff at all. Most strange of all is how we are also deprived of any Kamen Rider and instead we have a lot of Metal Heroes (and adjacent franchises like Kikaider and Kaiketsu Zubat) characters in the story instead. This came out right on the deathknell of Metal Heroes as a larger franchise (and on the eve of Kamen Rider’s rebirth), which makes this an especially interesting and odd bit of crossover fiction from a historical and cultural standpoint. As far as quality of the writing goes, it’s a really mixed bag on a lot of levels. The general structure of the game is one-by-one doing general reconstructions (within its own framework) of popular episodes from the properties its adapting, not unlike a SRW game or something. The issue most prominantly with that is that in a JRPG, we don’t have the luxury of skipping to the most intense bits of battle or plot or whatever that an SRPG can get away with, so this invites more problems than it solves. The first half or so of the game is really slow with a lot of clunky design mixed in with pretty same-y Ultraman missions. The game is sorta based around plot cul-de-sacs as a matter of point, as a result, but in some cases it’s way worse than others. The Gundam stuff in particular is located almost entirely in the few and far between future segments, making it very jarring and hurried when we finally return to those stories. Some aspects of the story are done really well, like the Kikaider and Metalder parts in particular, but so much of it is sorta all over the place and confusingly related that it’s hard to get terribly invested in. The plot really starts taking shape around the 60% or so mark, which is when a few more interesting and important characters get introduced as well. The end result of all of this is that, compared to another game in this kinda-series like Hero Senki, this game has a lot more trouble standing on its own, and I’d say someone not already quite invested and interested in the represented series is going to have a much lesser and more boring time with it than someone who isn’t. Mechanically, it’s a pretty unremarkable JRPG. A party of four and eventually you can swap characters in and out in between battles as the size of your party increases (and it gets pretty hilariously large, frankly), and the battles are simple turn-based affairs. There are some neat little mechanics to battle here and there, like HP slowly recovering in between fights, MP being recovered by doing normal attacks, and an overcharge meter that gets filled slowly by normal attacking with full MP that will give you a free and more powerful spell when you finally cast one. But the game is more mechanical missteps than it is successes. In total honesty, the game moreso comes off as an adventure game masquarading as a JRPG with just how much text there is and just how little actual gameplay you do compared to more typical JRPG games from ’99. The story is entertaining enough for someone who likes the series represented in this game, but the actual playing of the game is clunky and cumbersome enough that it makes playing the game solely on its narrative merits more difficult than I’d like it to be. For starters, everything about menus and inventory is so busted and poorly done that it’s hard to believe a company as big as Banpresto developed this. The game has a TON of items, but you can’t see what they do in battle. You can only check that in your inventory between fights, and you’ll just have to remember what they do. You can’t see the actual effects that most equipment items do, just what stat they affect, meaning you’ll be swapping in and out items to try and get a sense of just what they even do to try and see what equipment is most worth using. Of course this means shopping is a nightmare too. You can’t even sell items at a normal store. A store can only buy things that they already sell, so getting rid of early-game equipment can be a really annoying hassle, and more unique items, well you’re stuck with them forever. This is all even more annoying with how there’s no inventory sorting of any kind. It’s just one giant list. You can filter the list by what class (i.e. what series) can use those items, but otherwise it’s just equipment and consumables in one giant pile and you just gotta sort through it every time. There are also secret collectible trading cards that almost universally serve no function other than simple completion too, so that’s one more thing to clog up your mega list of an inventory. As an icing on the cake, you can’t even see your current HP or MP when using restoring items in your inventory. You’ve gotta look on the main screen, remember who needs healing and how much, and then go into your items menu to actually heal people. It’s absurd just how poorly put together this inventory system is for a major release by a major publisher in 1999, because I’d call this level of clunkiness embarassing even for 1994, let alone doing it in nearly 2000. And the general clunkiness and rough design unfortunately doesn’t stop there. The game is put together with pre-rendered 3D assets, a lot like a game like Super Mario RPG is. This means that there are a lot of nearly identical looking areas because of how often they just reuse maps, and they reuse them a LOT. This combined with generally rough signposting means a more than fair amount of getting lost, especially in the four or five endless expanses of similar repeating maps the game has over its duration (which is even better because map edges aren’t clear either, so it’s diffciult to know if you’re exiting on a diagonal or not, so making mental maps is that much harder). Combat is mercifully never difficult, almost literally. A lot of the bad design in other places would be far more worth complaining about if the game were actually difficult in any way, but it really isn’t. I encountered only a single actually difficult fight in the game, and other than that, as long as you’re just fighting things and gaining levels (the most important way to get stats), you’ll be fine. Combat takes too long and the buttons for your commands are such low resolution JPGs that they’re almost impossible to read, but at least it’s a trivial exercise. The balancing between characters is also awful, with Metal Heroes being the stand-out best among anyone and Ultramen being hilariously awful (you need to burn a turn to turn into Ultraman, and given that most battles are over in two turns, this means they rarely are actually useful, and they’re also very weak even when they’re Ultraman). While I’ve spilled a lot of ink here about how the mechanics are rough, it all really just comes down to being annoying. Like I said before, the game is really more of a glorified visual novel with a JRPG paint job given how simple the mechanics are and how much text there is. Heck, I think there are more event boss battles (ones you can’t win or are just glorified cutscenes) than actual boss battles. The main point of this whole section is basically just to exhaustively explain why anyone looking for a good JRPG should stay away from this game, as really it’s only the story that you’d wanna come for. I’d love to say the aesthetics are worth coming for as well, but that’s another pretty mixed bag. The pre-rendered 3D model SD art style is gonna be hit or miss depending on who you are. I think it doesn’t look very nice, as did most of my friends I showed it to, but that’s all down to taste at the end of the day. One of the best things worth noting about the presentation visually, however, is how they go out of their way to recreate bits from the show in different ways. In one of my favorite ways, they inter cut live action shots from the shows for events like the Metal Heroes guys transforming, which adds a lot of silly tokusatsu-y energy to it all. Similarly, battles may take way too long, but a lot of the Metal Heroes special moves in particular really go out of their way to recreate the tons of cuts between jumps they'd do in the show by having it do the same thing with their animated 3D models mid-fight. It definitely takes too long, and most enemies are too easy to actually warrant using special moves on at all, but it's a touch I found very fun. A bigger and more measurable problem is in regards to the game’s music. There really isn’t much of it, and while what’s here are pretty good original track and arrangements of licensed tracks (which are sometimes also incredibly funny), there just isn’t enough of it. This game is one of the very few I’ve found to have the “Lufia 2 Problem”, as I call it (as that was the first game I played that has this as well). There are so few songs and they do an exceptionally bad job of using music to underscore what should be more affecting and dramatic moments of the story, meaning a lot of moments (especially nearing the climax of the narrative) hit way weaker than they otherwise should. It’s not a death sentence for the writing by any means, but for a game that has so little to go on beyond its story, it’s really unfortunate that the music makes that story hit so much less hard than it should. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I’ve complained a lot about this game both here and in many places over the course of playing it, but ultimately, it’s just OK. I more or less had the read I do now like two hours into the game that this would be a solid 6/10 experience, and I ended up being more or less correct on that assumption by the end. Having finished it, I enjoyed the parts I enjoyed more than enough that I don’t regret playing it, but I think only people who are already invested in the series this represents will end up feeling that way too. Unless you’re a huge SRW and/or tokusatsu fan, I’d stay away from this one. It just can’t stand on its own merits well enough, and it only really succeeds at being astoundingly mediocre or sub-par at most everything else it tries to do. It’s not a bad game, but it’s also one you’re probably better off hearing about than actually playing yourself. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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