Recent reviews by Constable@ssbutt

Very cozy. It's obvious a lot of love has been put into the levels for this game. Levels are fairly easy to finish, but challenging to complete. The chief thing I noticed while playing through the game, is that there is a great sense of humor behind the level design. The employee of the month wall in Santa's workshop had me chuckling pretty good for a bit there, and the Christmas cracker dad jokes were groan-worthy in a way I tend to feel pretty wistful about during the holidays.

Great game to play with a mug of cocoa and a cozy robe.

Overall, I'd recommend the game. It's graphically beautiful and the soundtrack is lovely. It plays well, and I didn't encounter any major game-breaking bugs in my 100 hours with it. It's a simple, yet deeply satisfying RPG.

I'm something of a Dragon Quest purist; I played the first three games in the early 90s back on the NES, and became obsessed with the GBC remake of the third title.

For modern RPG fans, this game will feel somewhat barren. There isn't really any character development, and your companions are blank slates. That said, this game was envisioned in an era where the adventure, increasing your understanding of the mechanics, and improving your equipment loadout was the whole story. Do not expect a grand story. Dragon Quest III is a simple story with one-dimensional cosmic antagonists and idealistic heroes whose sole mission is to defeat evil and return the world to peace.

Where this game really shines is once you begin to grasp the systems that you are engaging with. Your main character works differently from your companions. Your companions can be reclassed to one of nine classes. Each class has its own spells and stat growth rates. You can complete the game without ever reclassing your companions, however, you are unlikely to be able to 100% the game unless you do. When you reclass your characters, they will keep 60% of the stats that they have earned and be returned to level 1, allowing you to repeatedly increase their stats. In addition, the spells and abilities these classes learn will aid you in finding hidden items in the world, as well as be more effective in combat. So it is in your interests to reclass your companions if you want to do more than just engage with the game's story.

As a player of the other remakes of this game, I did find myself disappointed with a few of the changes that were made to the postgame and the minigames. The GBC version of this game had an excellent minigame that dovetailed very nicely with exploration and combat, but this game features a monster arena that both removes the ability to gamble on monster fights (increasing the early game grind), and feels much more separated from exploration and battle than the other remasters' minigames. Also, the addition of monster wrangler has effectively made the hero class completely useless at endgame, even at maximum level.

The changes to the post-game were especially poorly designed. The temple of trials does not feel like a challenge at all. The enemies there are simply annoying, and it incentivizes you to avoid battle as much as possible, flee from battles, and use skills like blasto to eject enemies from battle instead of fighting. Three of the challenges are simple collection passchecks, which aren't challenges at all, and two of them are annoying slogs that require you to use specific weaponry --which can be impossible for certain classes to participate in effectively. The postgame simultaneously felt absurdly overtuned, and not challenging. This is by far the poorest part of this game.

Finally, I have some issues with the localization of this game. Each city in the English version is localized as a caricature of a real earth language-culture. There were several points where this localization felt, well, I'm just going to say it, stereotypical and disrespectful, particularly Baharata. I do not care for how Dragon quest has been localized since Dragon Quest VIII. It has been getting worse, and it weighs heavy as a black mark on an otherwise stellar franchise.

Yancy scratches all the right itches for me. It's difficulty is satisfying and doesn't come from arbitrary punishment of the player. The screenshots of this game don't do it justice; It truly is a polished piece of work that needs to be experienced in motion to really get a full picture of it.

On the surface, Yancy seems to be a straightfoward Zelda clone, but it doesn't delineate puzzling and combat. It's all one seamless adventure where your tool is your sword and your adventure leads you to bigger and better swords, and bigger and better swords lead you to increasingly dangerous challenges.

The puzzles are cleverly designed and will leave you scratching your head for a while until the answer suddenly, satisfyingly clicks. The demo alone is well worth the price the developer states he will be launching the title at. Just the 5 hours it took me to fully complete the demo left me ready for more.

I simply cannot wait for the full release of this game. If it were still 1986, this game would have made me a superfan for life. Even now, it's definitely made a mark that I will remember for quite a while.

I've played hard games. This is just a poorly designed game hiding behind an artificial, fun-crushing difficulty wall that offers you no reward for overcoming it.

From what I can tell, the way to enjoy this game isn't to explore it organically, but to look up builds online, bypass as much of the content as possible, focused on getting a highly specific build online. That might be some peoples' cup of tea, but it's just not mine.

The game requires the servers to be online in order to save. If the server is offline, you cannot start or complete a mission. The servers are down far more often than they are not. I just spent 3 hours trying to complete a mission. I did the mission in an hour. It took 3 hours to get the game to save so I could get on the pod and leave. The worst part? If you run out of time on the mission timer, you lose your character. Full permadeath.

And to add insult to injury, after 3 hours of being held hostage to this mission I had completed in an hour, the game didn't give me the rewards for completing the mission despite marking the mission completed.

It's a cool concept. It's just executed in one of the worst ways I've ever seen.

This is an unacceptable state, even for a beta. The game literally holds you hostage in a mission due to no fault of your own.

2023: The developers chose to relaunch this game with the release of a paid DLC, bringing the cost of this game to $85. Upon logging in to see if the game had improved, I noted that 100% of the progress I made a year ago was wiped. Apparently they migrated from hosting their own servers, which never worked right and made the game an unplayable nightmare, to a distributed model. Unfortunately, you had a limited time to claim your progress in order to keep it from being deleted. The developers never put out a news release announcing a fixed period of time to claim your progress. That time window is now gone, and 100 hours I put into this game was destroyed.

Expect the same treatment from these developers as I had. This will be my last attempt at installing or playing this tranwreck, as it's become very clear that there is no vision, no communication, and absolutely no shame with this development team.

This game radiates pure joy. The world is gorgeous and soothing, the combat is pretty engaging, and this game has what is hands down the most intuitive, satisfying building system of any survival game.

Don't be fooled by early access. This is the most polished game launch I have ever seen.

ROCK AND STONE!

Got it for free with Far Cry 5.

Took almost 3 hours of troubleshooting to make the game able to run on modern hardware. Thus far, the game has been an enjoyable little open world shooter, but the purchasable loot maps make the game more of a checklist than an enjoyable open-world experience.

Fantastic story/character development though.

I learned to read because my siblings played Dragon Warrior I, II, and III with me before I'd even started school. I played those games for years nonstop. I remember printing out pictures of sprites when I was young, cutting them up, and making my own maps in the dragon quest style.

This game was an amazing portal back to the early 90s for me. Amazingly simple, fun, and expansive. Worth the 80 or so hours it will take you to finish it if you are a fan of the series.

Anybody who makes an ark ripoff that isn't a buggy, poorly cobbled together piece of ♥♥♥♥ is gonna make a boatload of money. I want to like it, but 500 hours later I wish I'd spent those 400 hours beating my head into a wall. Yeah, that'd be just as big a waste of time as I spent on Ark, but at least the brain damage means I'd get something out of having done the other thing.