Recent reviews by JayKaye

Short and sweet. I'd rate it about a medium difficulty overall, maybe a bit on the easy side but there's a couple real stumpers in there. My one criticism is there are possibly too many levels where they introduce new mechanics, and not enough levels where you get to put everything together.
It's a very cute game above all else, you can tell lots of care was put into making the animations, environment, and music.

Pros: Very fun game, great story, lots of ways to build your characters and party.

Cons: Kind of easy even on the hard difficulty. Only against the final boss I felt like I was actually struggling to win. Even he feels more like a chapter boss than a final boss. Though it's always very easy to make a mistake that gets a character killed.

Better than 4, much funnier, many scenes have more elaborate secret endings. I really appreciate the addition of the culture guide because google refuses to believe "Nontok" is a word.

UPFRONT: This is a slightly broken port of a mobile game. You may be better off playing the
mobile version. There are bugs present in the steam version that are not in the mobile version.

The Good: Very fun dungeon crawler game, definitely reminiscent of main line JP Wizardry games. It will unmercifully kill you many times without warning, and leave you feeling fairly screwed sometimes. All content can be beaten with low rarity characters. I think, I'm still at the third abyss as i write this, but I'm not in a hurry. I did use Yekatarina to make port town go a bit faster but she's not really necessary for the hard parts. The story is quite good for the first abyss, and the bi-weekly events are very rewarding, although quite grindy. There's also a large amount of character customization available. You can inherit the skills of different characters onto your favorites. Gacha veterans may be inclined to believe you're supposed to max out all your skills on a character, this is not that game. Skill exp and class change items are incredibly valuable and only to be used on your very favorite characters for skills unavailable through inheritance.

The bad: Very high prices for a gacha game, should you choose to spend. There's a $5 event pass for each event that's actually a good value IF it has summons, but outside of that you're looking at potentially $2.50-$3 per summon with typical bundles. A lot of the stats and systems are also fairly opaque considering this is a game with real money involved, but the community is working on deciphering them. Banners also tend to drag on and the gem income is very slow, so while the actual rate per pull for limited characters is high and there is a pity store, the total number of limited characters you're likely to get is comparable to other games. So in terms of the gambling aspect, it's very slow.

The ugly: There's a lot of bugs. Some of them are game-breaking, so keep an eye on the community and in-game notices for known issues. New ones crop up fairly often, but they are catching up on fixing them. Also their password linking system is not great, and will issue you a new password every time you open the issue password menu. It also uses confusing characters like l and I (L and i), and 0 and O. I've seen some comments about the steam version being broken in various ways but I'm playing on Linux and it works on my machine. Must be a windows problem.

Also, Nprotect Gameguard. This is an incredibly invasive anticheat known for snooping on all active processes including open browser windows. Drecom's privacy policy essentially says they're hoovering up all your data and selling it to anyone who will take it. So if that's an issue, stick to emulation, but keep this version linked so you have a reliable way to get into your account in case emulation or your phone breaks. Personally, I just use Linux.

Runs like trash no matter what settings you use.

Joining in the brigade to protest Enigma DRM. You don't own my PC, Capcom.

I wasn't even done with world and now I can't play it at all.

JRPG reminiscient of the Game Boy / Game Boy Color SaGa (Final Fantasy Legend in the US) titles.

The good:
Complex class system allows for heavy customization of units. Even if you mess up a party member you can just delete them and start over. You can even delete the main character, but Generalist as a class doesn't become available for creation until late.
Many abilities have uncommon mechanics such as attacking using the enemy's stats or doing heavy damage to enemies that belong to multiple monster families.
Difficulty is high enough to keep even hardcore JRPG veterans engaged.
Dungeons range from basic maze floors to extremely complex puzzle dungeons.
Tons of hidden stuff everywhere.
Weapons are varied and most mid-late game weapons and even some early game weapons are useful well into endgame due to some special effect or another.
Game is quite long and the story is pretty cool.
Repels are very cheap and you can refresh them without going into a menu.

The bad:
Encounter rate is through the roof, and the game does not have cursor memory (unless i'm stupid and missed it, or they pushed an update since writing this that included it), so you must go through your skill menu every time. This can be mitigated by repels.
It's very difficult to keep track of what buffs or debuffs are on you or the enemy. (Again unless i'm stupid and I missed it).

The ugly:
All the NPCs have better character portraits than you.

Garbage.

The good:
Actually nothing. I honestly can't think of anything good.

The Bad:
The NGS art style is garbage. Like the heads of toddlers put on adult bodies.
The story is non existent. There's about six hours of actual content, including the level grind. It is possible to max out every class in one day.
The characters are some of the worst collections of anime tropes I've ever seen and I have seen a lot of bad anime.
While there is a proper way to play every class it doesn't matter. Just mash buttons you'll do fine.
Current endgame revolves around waiting hours on end for a boss to spawn for 5 minutes, and you have no idea how much time you have to kill it, where it is, or how much HP it has.
There are about five bosses in the game, all content is just those same five bosses at different sizes and damage levels. A single weekly event in any mobile gacha game has more content than this entire newly launched MMORPG.
The game is "designed" for controllers, in that you have a hotbar three buttons long and a sub hotbar 10 buttons long that is basically impossible to use on controller, and you need to assign 12 weapon actions from your average multiweapon. But the weapon palette being so small also makes it awful to use on keyboard and mouse. Just the absolute worst of both worlds.
As far as the monetization, since this is effectively a gacha game, if we judge it by gacha game standards it falls short. 100 star gems is considered an amazing sweepstakes prize. 20-30 is considered a huge bonus. One scratch costs 50. Most of the shop items cost several hundred. You might get 50 a week through normal play. Effectively, star gems may as well not exist.
Gear is meaningless. It's all numbers that slowly creep up, nothing actually changes the way you play. A level 1 primm launcher plays the same as whatever maxed out ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ launcher you might be able to grind your way to.
THE MENUS OH GOD. The menus aren't usable on mouse and keyboard. You need a controller to avoid losing your mind trying to manage your storage. You know how nested context menus are the worst thing about old versions of windows? Every menu is that. Nested context menu after nested context menu. This was clearly not playtested.

The Ugly:
Nprotect GameGuard. Unlike most anti-cheat panics, this one actually IS spyware. It's even disclosed in their privacy policy. They specifically say they will collect "technical data" about running processes and machine specs, and then sell that data to their advertising partners. I'll give them points for not beating around the bush on that, but it doesn't make it acceptable. Testing this out, the game will crash if you attempt to load cheat engine, so it IS monitoring running processes. GameGuard also has been vulnerable to privilege escalation exploits in the past, so regardless of how good you think your security is, you're compromising that to play this bad game.
The monetization is unreal. You need their premium monthly membership to sell things in the shop, otherwise 90% of your meseta income comes from weekly missions. This means you might get one 4 star weapon or armor upgraded every two weeks as a free to play player.
I don't usually complain about this sort of thing, but the cosmetics are suggestive at best and degrading most of the time. If you're the kind of guy that likes to park 500 feet away from a playground with binoculars, this is the game for you. One of the main characters is a 12 year old wearing stickers on her genitals and calling it clothes.

The Good:
Very creative puzzle game.
Tons of content.
Actually really damn hard.

The Bad:
Does not introduce you to certain concepts very smoothly.

This review may not reflect the current state of the game because the game is always changing and I quit it some time before the latest expansion, but i'm currently trying to review everything in my library.

The good:
Core gameplay is incredibly solid and fun.
Exotic weapons are cool and varied.

The bad:
EVERYTHING ELSE.
Exotics are almost useless because they don't do as much damage as whatever meta legendary is this week and most older exotics don't have champion-defeating effects.
Balance is non-existent. There's always a god weapon that just plain can't be matched until it's nerfed into the ground and becomes the worst weapon in the game.
Crucible is absolute cancer. Remember Shotty Snipers in Halo? That's crucible. Just all the time. It's pretty bad when the most fair and balanced form of crucible is the one where everyone gets OHKO rocket launchers.
Every quest requires every kind of content. This is awful design. If I want a pvp weapon, I should have to do pvp. I shouldn't have to do a combination of strikes, raids, pvp, and open world events for every single weapon. And what is with multikill objectives why would you do that
Eververse is very greedy, and you can't mask the appearance of exotic armors so you're running around in a clown suit no matter how much you spend on fashion.
Armor system has you hunting for random armor rolls for your build, except most of the stats don't even matter.
Battlepass is effectively required to get anything good out of levelling.

The Ugly:
The story goes on without you. Personally I find this to be the worst aspect of it. If you haven't read the wiki, the supplementary books, and most of the subreddit, and log in every week, you will be very lost. The first three entire expansions are now optional side stories hidden out of sight.