Recent reviews by Scorp721

Really fun turn based tactical game with quite a bit of unit customization, a kick ass soundtrack, and some great pixel art. You build up and fortify your haven during the day, then fight for your life at night against hordes of enemies. If you survive until the final night, you take on the boss(es) of whatever area you're in.

The new QoL features make this game so much more fluid to play. No more pressing select on your Archer's Aim +5, seeing its gonna happen 6th in the turn order, then moving your cursor to the enemy you're planning to attack, then checking their turn order to see that they act one turn before your Aim +5. Then going back to your Archer, checking the turn count for Aim +4, going back to that enemy to check their turn again, etc. Now there's an FFX style turn order on the left side of the screen and you can get all of that information from a single glance.

You also don't get locked in to story battles when one area has more than one battle. Even though it was kind of a right of passage to softlock yourself in the series of fights with Weigraf in the OG tactics because you saved your game after battle 1 and got your ass stomped in battle two. Now you can exit to the world map to buy more supplies or gear, or you can just instantly retry the fight with the option to change your starting formation incase you want to field someone else. You can also just search for battles without having to run laps on the world map if you wanna grind out some cash or a few jp, and you can just chose to ignore the fights if they pop up when you just want to travel.

The Chronicle thing is also really great. With all the towns and cities and people and so much info to keep track of in this game. You can go to the Chronicle and read about all of it. Like oh this guy is working with that guy, and he's related to this guy whos working for this other guy, etc. You even get lore on people who get mentioned but you never actually see in the game which really helps to refresh your memory and to help retain all that info. You can also get a story summary if you have to be away from the game for a few days and need a refresher when you come back.

The voice acting is also really well done, though a couple people kind of sound similar. I just hit act 2 and so far every single line of dialogue has been voiced. So far I think I like the voice acting of the 'bad' guys more than ramza and delita which is kinda sad, but I'm kinda seeing a Zack Fair situation with ramza at the start of act two. Which is understandable considering the time difference, so maybe it'll get better.

I was also iffy on this game considering SQEX history with pc ports, but so far there have been zero issues, and they actually learned a bit from their mistakes with the pixel remasters and finally gave us the option for V-Sync.

All in all, I'd say 50 bucks is a little high, but given this game hasn't seen the light of day since the PSP except for mobile, I think its worth it. There's also a classic version if you end up not liking the voice acting and some of the QoL stuff. My review was mainly focused on the new stuff, but anyone unfamiliar with this game will be in for an amazing story, interesting complicated characters, fun as hell tactical gameplay with a bunch of different classes and skill combos, and a great soundtrack.

I honestly don't know how we got here from Hollow Knight. This game isn't so much difficult as it is overly punishing, and there are some conflicting ideas and mechanics at play. Like, they gave us the ability to run, to do a running attack, and the diagonal downward thrust, but all the bosses do two masks of contact damage. Like if you misjudge that dash attack, or slightly misposition that downward strike, bam two masks damage. You can't just tap run then attack or run then jump, you're forced to run a few steps before you can do anything, so its difficult to use when the boss is also moving towards you. You die to a boss, you got an oftentimes lengthy, enemy filled runback every single time. Healing takes your entire starting Silk meter and takes like 9 attacks to charge it from zero, so it makes you not want to use your silk skills and instead hoard your Silk so you can heal from all the double damage.

All of the double damage also makes your first completed mask upgrade feel useless, because going from 5 masks to 6, when everything is doing 2 masks of damage doesn't increase your survivability much at all. There's one early boss in particular, that you fight on platforms floating in lava. The boss will smash those platforms and make them sink into the lava for a little bit before floating back up. That boss does double damage and the lava does too. So if you get hit into the lava, that's 80% of your health gone in one second.

Tools are really powerful, but they're double gated behind an ammo count that only refreshes when you rest at a bench, and also limited because it consumes a secondary currency when it does replenish the ammo. There's also the Silkline ability where you throw your needle forward with a line of silk attached to it, and then you pull yourself to where the needle stopped. It costing one notch of Silk to use feels so bad. If you hit an enemy with it, it will refund the cost, but if you use it for platforming (there are these rings that you can grapple to and hang from) it doesn't refund the cost. So you end up just hanging out on those rings waiting for that one bar of silk to regen constantly. I dunno why they didn't just make it a free cast. Its just kinda cumbersome for no reason.

The early game is pretty devoid of currency, even though there's a lot you need to pay for, like maps, benches, and fast travel, plus whatever is in the shops you find. To top it all off, a lot of enemies don't even drop money. Oftentimes you go through an entire area with little to no money drops and are still expected to pay just to be able to pop a bench up. Bosses don't even drop anything anymore, and some enemies that do drop money, when fought in an arena room (the trapped rooms that seal you in until you kill all enemies) for whatever reason the devs decided that those enemies won't drop money like they do everywhere else. There's often no real feeling of victory in these circumstances. Where in Hollow Knight, bosses would explode in a shower of Geo (money), here they drop nothing. In Hollow Knight, you'd finish off the last enemy in an Arena Room and you'd have a ton of Geo scattered about on the floor to pick up. Here you get nothing, except to just continue forward. I can't imagine what a let down it will be if this game has a Colosseum like Hollow Knight did, and to finish it and not get showered in money by the fans in the crowd.

Then Bilewater... my God Bilewater. The water, in Bilewater, is infested with Maggots. Maggots will sit next to your health bar and slowly drain away all of your Silk. There are only two ways to get rid of them, you either rest at a bench, or you cast a heal (or you can just die so I guess three ways). The thing is, you're expected to land enough hits on enemies, to get enough Silk to heal, while they are actively draining your Silk. It. Feels. Terrible. It takes like 9 hits to build up enough Silk from zero to cast a Heal. Now thats 9 hits in incredibly hostile territory, and if you don't get those 9 hits fast enough, some of your Silk will get drained and you'll need a few more hits, and a few more hits, and then you finally cast your heal and get rid of the maggots, but oh no!, you took some damage trying to get that Silk. Now you need 9 more hits just to be able to heal that damage because the Heal that removes the Maggots DOES NOT actually heal you at all. It only gets rid of the Maggots. Then if you fall in the water again at any point in time, its another heal JUST to get rid of the maggots again. You can get a charm to kind of prevent it, but its found way later compared to when you get access to Bilewater, and the damned thing actually breaks after a bit of exposure, and stays broken until you visit a bench to rebuild it. There are like two benches in the entirety of Bilewater. That area is absolute hell.

I also don't care for all of the fetch quests they added. If you can stumble into them BEFORE you explore an area you'll be alright because you can do them as you explore around. Oftentimes though, you have to backtrack and just grind out some enemy kills World of Warcraft style. Traveller please go murder 10 Boars and bring me back their meat. You think I'm joking but I literally just picked up a quest where I have to get 10 pieces each of 3 different types of meat by killing enemies with specific tools. Literally just farming those boars. There was also one earlier for I think it was Roach Meat. Then there was one for x number of robes that boiled down to just killing specific enemies over and over. Same with the one for Pin weapons, just killing specific enemies a bunch until they dropped their weapons. Also can't forget about the quest where you have to deliver some meat (among a bunch of other things that take you all over the map), but the meat is on a spoilage timer. Its pretty similar to the flower quest in Hollow Knight, but instead of only a single mask shard being locked behind it, here its a frigging Needle upgrade.

All of that said though, the atmosphere is great (although a bit too dark in too many places), the music is stellar, the tools are fun to use despite being double gated, the crests mix up the combat in fun ways, and the price is even cheaper than I expected. There are also a few really standout bosses so far. Honestly I wish I could give an on the fence or a maybe instead of just a yes/no. The devs have already released a patch to tone down some of the environmental damage, and they changed a boss or two. If a few other changes were made, I could go from an on the fence to a definite yes. I'd say if you liked Hollow Knight, then 20 bucks isn't much of a risk to try this game out. Just know that this game will punish you way harder than Hollow Knight ever did.

Every day this game moves farther away from what made it such a good game. Gun parts? Gone. Survival style clothing with things for hot and cold weather? Gone. Now we have 'biome challenges' and little scout badges that say you're allowed to be in a specific biome. Then they say they hear the complaints, but all they do is reskin the badges into gear, and you still have to do the challenges, instead of I dunno, looting or crafting warm clothing to survive the cold. You know, the thing that makes sense for a survival sandbox game....

Current farming also doesn't feel as good as it used to when you could hoe the ground and add fertilizer and stuff. Now its just making boxes that hold dirt, which aren't bad on their own, and could be used pretty well in alternate circumstances like growing crops in tall or underground bases, but now the dirt box is literally the only option. There are also zombie spawners in pois now where, instead of having a mini horde fight right before the loot area, its now just a couple of spots that periodically poop out zoms which just takes longer to do and isn't as fun. You kill like 4 zoms, wait for the next ones to spawn, kill them, think you're done, no wait a couple more materialized right before your eyes.

Being able to physically place your minibike frame on the ground, and add to it piece by piece, so that you have actual visual feedback on your progress while you piece it together is now just dumping the parts into the workbench. No more sitting in base at night admiring your almost completed Minibike every time you pass by it, which built up even more excitement for that last piece. There are also hardly any vehicles in this game that you can actually drive (without mods of course).

Storms are poorly implemented and us having an exact timer on screen and a warning to get to cover is way too gamey for a 'survival sandbox' game. Instead, we should be able to tell by looking around that a storm is coming, like the sky getting darker, wind getting stronger, hearing thunder in the distance, etc, but that would make too much sense. Relegating water to the dew collector sucked. The two new zoms (Plague Spitter and the Yeti looking thing) don't fit the games atmosphere at all, yet they got rid of the football player zombies and some others that actually did fit in.

Not to mention they skipped the beta phase and just jumped straight from alpha (22?) to '1.0' so they could jack the price up and start selling cosmetics. They're literally calling this still in Alpha game a realized 1.0 product. We still don't have the bandits they promised years ago, we don't even have a story yet. The magazine system also isn't great. Not only does it clog your inventory, (because you might pick up magazines that a friend needs. so you gotta cart them back to base) but any dedicated stay at base players, like builders and gatherers, can't get enough magazines for their stuff to keep up with everyone else, which forces them to change their playstyle.

Learn by doing was so much better than the magazines, but the devs do not listen to the player base at all. (their recent 'town hall' made that pretty obvious, as if it wasn't already obvious) You'll play this open world sandbox survival game the way they want you to play it and anything else they'll patch out, flat out remove, or change up to something completely different. I heard someone say that the devs 'keep taking the sand out of the sandbox' which sums it up pretty well.

The majority of my 1250 hours in this game were either before A20, or done in overhaul mods like Rebirth, Afterlife, Darkness Falls, Undead Legacy, etc, etc.

TLDR: The game has progressively been simplified with survival elements and fun systems like gun parts and learn by doing being removed, made more gamey with biome challenges, storm timers, and poi zombie spawners, and moves farther and farther away from sandbox survival with every update. If you really do want to try it (which as I said, the overhaul mods are great), I'd at least wait for a decent sale and try to get some friends to join.

Tough but fun metroidvania/soulslite. The controls feel a little rough at first, but once you get used to them, and get the block/parry timings down, its a ton of fun.

My only real gripes, are that the positioning for grabbing ladders is too precise, and the movement related progression items should have just been passives, instead of something you have to juggle in the menu. There are six total items in this category, and you only get three active slots, so it requires a lot of menuing for no real gain. There's already Rosary Beads, Sword cores, and Spells, we don't also need to manage which progression items we have equipped.

We need more games like crab souls. Super creative design, full of charm with a great sense of humor, and damned fun to play. It's absolutely criminal it didn't get Indie Game of the Year.

I hate to do this, but if Capcom isn't even gonna put the effort in to make good ports, then I can't support em. Its downright sad to see so little care given to these classics.

The input lag is awful and there are problems present with certain settings that the end user has to fix on their own. They aren't even complicated fixes. Literally just changing a value in the .ini file. This mess should have been patched by Capcom within the first week of release. Free SNES emulators run the games better than whatever Capcom is using in this collection.

Mega Man deserves better.

I'm not even going to focus on the 'memes' because if anyone has seen anything about this game, its probably that. Besides that, the combat is extremely fun, the voice actors all kill it (especially Raiden's va), the music is perfect, and there's actually a story here if you pay attention. It touches on quite a few serious topics like Artificial Intelligence and what it means to be human, as well as the darker parts of war. Though you can absolutely just focus on the combat while you jam out and laugh at the more humorous parts.

The boss music in particular stands out in this game. They all have vocals and the lyrics are actually about the bosses themselves and reveal a lot about their personalities and their motives/beliefs, even some backstory. Not only that, but there are specific times in the boss fights where the vocals will go silent, only to return at specific points in the fight, and it makes those moments hit that much harder. I haven't played the game in quite some time, but I still to this day listen to the music while I'm playing other games.

Seeing people recently discover this game is what motivated me to finally leave a review and I should have done it sooner with how much I liked the game. No matter how much you disliked Raiden in MGS2, this game will absolutely change your mind. It's criminal how under the radar this game went and it still holds up great despite coming out in 2013.

The story, dialogue, and cutscenes you remember from the PSP are pretty much unchanged, but they've made quite a few changes elsewhere (for the better imo).

Different in Reunion, Enemy Special Attacks (the ones that had little cutscenes during battle) now have a Gauge that starts at 100% Power and they will channel for around 5 seconds before they use the attack. The more damage you deal to them during the channel, the gauge will decrease in power from 100%/75%/50%/25% and if you completely break them it will cancel the attack. There's also a bit of a combo system where Command Materia will hit harder if you chain it after a few slashes. So like slash, slash, slash, Jump, will have Jump hitting a lot harder than it would if you just spammed it without attacking first.

Also, when you get the Buster Sword, it has a Proficiency % that you can level up by blocking attacks with its Guard Stance (similar to one of Cloud's stances in VIIR). You also gain % by killing enemies from attacks or Command Materia used from the Stance and it gives your Command Materia a boost similar to using them at the end of a combo. The stance also gives you super armor so that you don't get staggered during attacks.

Missions are also different in that if you die at any time during a mission, you can chose to immediately retry the fight, or you can chose to jump into the inventory to change your loadout before trying again. So like, you run into an enemy with Stun on their attacks and you get CC'd to death, instead of getting kicked completely out of the mission and having to start over, you can chose to go to the inventory and equip some Stun prevention and go right back to the fight. Also, the battle areas have been reduced slightly, which means you can more easily run against the wall to avoid encounters. Which is a godsend because this game has waaaaay too many missions and they're waaaaaay too repetitive.

Probably one of the best changes, if you end a battle before the DMW roll finishes, it will auto finish instantly and you get whatever you get. I've seen dozens of end of battle level ups and materia growth. The new limit system is also really great. Instead of limits being auto used as soon as they come up. You now have two limit slots and can use them when you chose. You get one slot for Summon Limits and one slot for Character limits. So you could hold on to a Chain Slash to deal with an enemy Special attack Gauge or save Aerith's healing for when you need it. The only catch, is that if a new limit rolls and you already have a limit in that slot, it will overwrite it.

The game does have a few quirks though. Like the super hi-res character models really stick out against the backgrounds and Zack's movement isn't as precise as you would like it during some of the mini games like the Stealth Mission or the Treasure Falls. It's caused me to accidentally trigger I dunno how many battles when all I wanted to do was glance around the corner to look for chests. It's nothing major though and as far as Zack's new VA......My kneejerk reaction was that I didn't like him, and he does have some corny sounding lines like the way he says "Yeah, I'm on fire now!" during Cissnei's Limit. Though over the course of the game I actually grew to like him, especially after the midgame where Zack changes his tone when he grows his hair out. I feel like that's the part where the new guy really hit his stride.

TLDR. Same story you remember from the PSP, improved combat and gameplay systems, better graphics, give the new VA's a chance.

Huge old school Mega Man vibes from this one. The gameplay, art, sounds, and music are all top notch. Also, if you bought the game before the first dlc came out, not only did you get that dlc FOR FREE, but you also got the next TWO dlcs free as well. Name a company other than Team Cherry that is that generous these days. They weren't even minor dlcs either. They were full blown expansions. Each having a new playable character (Plague, Specter, and King) and a new story campaign to go with each of them plus some other things like King Knights card game.

If you like old school Mega Man, or Hollow Knight, or just Action Platformers in general, you'll like this one.