Recent reviews by Coffee

Blue Prince was a uniquely frustrating game that I felt was extremely poor in its execution.

There are puzzles in this game that are interesting, fun to solve & satisfying. The problem is that you have to spin the equivalent of 50 roulette wheels to get to the point where you can put those puzzle pieces together.
This is exacerbated heavily by just how crushingly slow and dull the moment-to-moment gameplay is. I literally installed a mod to speed things up & skip some animations, and it was still unbearably sluggish.

I have played and enjoyed puzzle games. This is the first one where I ended up looking up a puzzle as soon as I found it, because it took me upwards of 50 days to even reach the puzzle in the first place! Right after that I realized I needed to uninstall.

I can't shake this feeling of utter insanity I get looking at the reviews for this game. People with 100+ hours saying its the deepest game ever & constantly engaging. Maybe there is a gold mine of puzzles under the mountain of busywork and chores this game presents, but I am not willing to slog through the awful gameplay to reach them.

The platforming is fun and the areas / music all look / sound great, but the area gates requiring you to grind food to proceed killed a lot of enjoyment for me.

A bite-sized version of FFXIV raiding in a roguelike package, all for an affordable price. It's genuinely impressive how smooth it feels to play, regardless of if you're familiar with MMO raiding or not.

Dragon's Dogma is a very quirky game that is unfortunately saddled with one of the most underwhelming first halves I have seen. Despite this, I do believe this game hits its stride and genuinely rises to greatness...eventually. My gripes with DragDog are mainly the story, the open world, and the pawn / companion system.

Story (Includes spoilers):
Dragon's Dogma has a very good SETUP for a story: A dragon attacks your village and steals your heart, cursing you with the fate of eventually defeating it. You travel the land in search of ways to prepare yourself for this confrontation.
Unfortunately, the setup is really all there is. You might expect this simple motivation to blossom into something more meaningful, especially with the way the Duke and his wife are introduced, but no. This isn't inherently bad, I could see myself enjoying a game whose story is just "get ready to beat this dragon's ass," provided that the dragon was more involved. As it is now, you see the dragon when he steals your heart, and you see him when you fight him. That's it. I think some extra scenes talking with the dragon and building up his character definitely would've provided some extra substance. The game just doesn't have anything to keep you interested between points A and B (story-wise anyway).

Okay, so the story's pretty barebones, maybe the NPCs and quests will be interesting? Sadly, this is the part of the game I feel Dragon's Dogma fails the most. NPC conversations are extremely static and just straight up boring. There are some exceptions with side quests that have cutscenes (shout out to the duke and aelinore) but outside of those it feels like talking to an Oblivion character, just without the funny jank. The most you will get out of quests and the NPCs that give them are the item rewards, it's hard to get emotionally invested.

Open World:
Dragon's Dogma's open world falls into the trap that most open world games do: not having enough stuff in it. Fast travel in this game is limited to about 5 places that the player can set themselves with an item, as well as two permanent spots seperate from that. What this means is that you'll be running from location to location more often than not, unless you're smart about placing those 5 teleport spots. While I do recognize that limited fast travel was a design choice, you really need to have more interesting things in your world to not make running through it a monotonous task. Combine that with limited stamina even out of combat, and you'll be groaning every time you see a quest marker 50 miles away that you don't have a teleport near.

Pawns / Companions:
Ah, the pawns. Yeah, they're annoying. Yeah, they talk way too much. Yeah, their voice lines are super goofy. The part that matters to me is how they're characterized. A party formed of characters you can get attached to is one of my favorite aspects of RPGs, but in Dragon's Dogma your pawns are all slaves to your will. And I don't mean that metaphorically, they're literally your slaves from the slave dimension whose only purpose is to serve you. It's just so....uninteresting. Now take the sparse main story, bland NPCs and quests, and tedious to traverse open world and add the pawns onto them. It's not doing the game any favors.
On the gameplay side of pawns, they are all completely AI controlled. You have exactly 3 options to command them with: "Come!", "Go!" and "Help!", so good luck figuring out what those will do. A quick wheel menu or some such to select what move your main pawn uses would've been a huge quality of life addition.

So those are my problems. There's some more minor stuff but it's not a big deal in the grand scheme. Now let's talk about the combat, and what I meant when I said it has a bad first half.
Combat:
This is it. This is the reason this game exists.

The combat in dragon's dogma is not perfect. It is not precisely balanced. The difficulty curve is not perfectly paced. But it is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ FUN. Let me clarify though. You won't be having a blast straight away hacking at goblins and wolves. Like most RPGs, the fun starts once you've gotten a good base of skills to work off of, and the enemies grow in complexity to match. The first time you climb up a cyclops' back and start making mincemeat of its head, or the first time you annihilate a group of enemies' health bars with a powerful spell, that feeling is exhilarating. Colossal enemies such as the cyclopes, ogres, wyverns and dragons are what this game was made for, and you can really tell.
The variety of classes (or Vocations) allow you to really decide how you want to take these beasts down. I can't vouch for every vocation, as I mainly played assassin, but weaving through a monster's attacks all the while slashing them with my daggers until I see an opportunity to parry for big damage was a feeling like no other. From what I've seen, the magic options in this game seem to be absolutely insane (my main pawn was a sorcerer, a magic focused dps).
We'll cover gear progression in a bit, but for now just know that it's mostly linear. See item with bigger stat, equip item. You may have to make exceptions for weapons that inflict ailments, or are enchanted with a certain element however.

(Spoilers for pretty much every part of the game below)
Post-Game:
The part of this game that made me love it is what comes after you have defeated the titular Dragon. The game transforms from bland and derivative medieval fantasy open world quest simulator into a Monster Hunter-esque dungeon crawler / boss rush. A giant hole (The "Everfall") opens up in the main city, and you dive in and make progress through a bunch of chambers, killing enemies, gathering loot, and fighting bosses, warping out when you need to upgrade / deposit your items.
In this part of the game, there's nothing holding it back. You can enjoy the satisfying combat and gear progression without having to run for 30 minutes between every fun part. Since defeating the dragon gives you a powerful weapon too, you can make steady progress without having to go grind. It's the tried and true formula of "Defeat enemy to get materials to be able to defeat more enemies better."
The actual goal of this part is to acquire 20 "wakestones," which some of the bosses here drop. It's a testament to how much I was enjoying this part that even after I acquired 20 of these, I kept going and kept trying to upgrade my gear as much as I could to make sure I was ready for...

Bitterblack Isle:
The dlc area of Dragon's Dogma is a ruthless gauntlet that puts all of your equipment, vocation and of course skills to the test. The toughest enemies with of course, the best loot. At this point it's more of the good stuff. Make progress in the dungeon while finding gear and fighting the most roided-up variants of all the enemies the game has, all while some of the best music in the game is hyping you up.

I think it's important to note here that both of these parts of the game, the post-game Everfall and DLC Bitterblack Isle, have essentially just removed the open world and limited NPC interactions heavily. Trimming down some of the fat of Dragon's Dogma improves it immensely. There's an argument to be made that maybe they should've made the whole game like this, and cut the open world and NPCs almost entirely, but I think pushing through that mediocre journey made the destination all the more satisfying.

Here's hoping the sequel improves on those aspects so it can realize its potential.

Sea of Stars not only has the combat and looks of the all-star classic JRPGS, it has the soul too. It does nearly everything right and almost nothing wrong. A perfect 10/10.

Sifu is a beautiful reminder that if you have the determination, you can and will improve with practice. A truly inspiring game that is worth your time.

Might just be the worst JRPG I've actually finished playing.

Velvet's outfit is beyond stupid, I kept her normal villager clothes on for the rest of the game and it was far more tolerable.

The combat system is so utterly bloated and pointless that at one point I realized you can literally set your own inputs to auto battle. The battles will fight themselves, and not like in other games where auto battle means only basic attacks, auto battle in ToB makes your character use their whole moveset, so why bother using anything else? Just turn on auto battle and occasionally dish out healing and revival items to your team. Save your thumb and controller the pain and become the JRPG equivalent of a team manager.

The "dungeons" in this game are pathetic. Bar the very last dungeon in the game, you are going to be walking for hours through caves, grey corridors and grass fields. You can also prevent enemies from running after you by walking into a wall, which I assume was a bug but was handy for avoiding the metric ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of enemies placed in these areas. There are technically puzzles in some of these, which consist of pressing A on an object to be able to walk somewhere else. I'm not joking, that is the most common type of "puzzle" within this game's "dungeons."

Much like the combat, the equipment system is also quite pointless. Equipment is dropped randomly from enemies, and this is the primary way to obtain it. Shops also have random equipment, which is just silly. I spent a bit of time micromanaging stuff at the beginning making sure to only swap out equipment once my characters had mastered the skill on their current one, but after turning on auto battle I realized that equipment didn't matter either! Just put on whatever has the highest attack or magic attack stat and call it a day. Combine this with auto battle, and it starts to feel more like a movie than a game. In fact, maybe this should've just been an anime or a movie.

I know this is an anime game, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ does the english voice acting and dialogue leave something to be desired. Every time Laphicet or Magilou opened their mouths I felt the uncontrollable urge to skip what they were saying. If you actually like these characters then great, because there are hundreds of side conversations that constantly pop up after everything you do, and completely halt the pace of the game to talk about something that is most likely not relevant. It's probably one of the several hundred instances of "girls like this and boys like that" talk. Seriously, what the hell is up with that lmao. I wish this game made me give a ♥♥♥♥ about the party members because a couple of the conversations actually got a chuckle out of me. It's a shame.

Don't have much to say on the story. Nothing really pulled me in at all, and again I got the feeling from some of the story scenes that if the rest of the game managed to grip me, they might actually have some impact. To be honest I was just bored most of the time.

I finished this game out of spite, mainly trying to see if I could actually beat the entire game on normal difficulty using Auto-Battle, and I did. Glad I bought this on sale for $5.

This is the best Yakuza game. Wanna know why?

It has turn-based combat.

good game, wish the combat was turn-based ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Soul Hackers 2 is probably the most derivative megaten game that I've played. There's not much to set it apart from any other title in the franchise, and while it does do everything somewhat competently, it doesn't do anything particularly outstanding.

The sabbath mechanic is similar to demon co-op from strange journey, map navigation is similar to Tokyo Mirage Sessions, you control humans with demons attached like in Persona, it has a set of dungeons similar to Mementos in Persona 5 that I literally thought were randomly generated because of how boring and samey their aesthetic was. The most unique thing about Soul Hackers 2 is the story which is fine? I do really like the characters but for whatever reason the overarching narrative just wasn't that gripping to me. At around 40 hours long this game is one of the shorter games in the megaten franchise that I've played.

My three main gripes with the game are the Soul Matrix, the character voice lines and the DLC.

As I said before the Soul Matrix dungeons are literally identical to one another and they are astoundingly boring. There's a billion side missions to do in here so that you keep trudging around the same endless gray platforms for hours. The game's skill unlocks are also partially tied to it. If you want to be more effective in combat and get cool skills, you MUST do this dungeon regularly.

I can't exaggerate how ludicrous the character voice line play rate is. The navigator will tell you every single time that an enemy has appeared "An enemy!," that they're running at you "Be careful!." and that you're safe after you hit them "Now we can relax." It happens EVERY SINGLE TIME. Once you get into a battle the fun doesn't end, because nearly every action you take or button you press in the battle screen will trigger a voice line. Sometimes multiple characters saying lines on top of each other! For me, using the menu in a quick and efficient way is one of the most satisfying parts of a JRPG, and it really gets on your nerves constantly hearing voice lines play. It was so egregious that I actually just muted voices altogether a couple hours into the game. If you can have fun without voice acting and let the music carry battles and scenes, then I highly reccommend playing this way as well unless you can somehow withstand the barrage of voices telling you what to do.

The last thing I want to touch on is the day 1 dlc for this game. ♥♥♥♥ you Atlus. The dlc issues that plague this company are downright insulting. SMT V had a superboss and iconic demons locked behind dlc, and Soul Hackers 2 has extra story and dungeon content PLUS demons, seemingly picked at random, also locked behind a paywall. If you decide to buy this game, don't buy the DLC. Please don't support this anti-consumer ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Putting that aside, overall Soul Hackers 2 is a very okay game. It could have literally any other name and still be a good Atlus JRPG, but for some reason they went with the soul hackers branding. If you have played basically every other megaten game then pick this up and you'll probably enjoy it, but the rest of Atlus's catalogue far exceeds Soul Hackers 2.