Recent reviews by StackzGaming

Unlike quite a few of the others here...this "Don't Recommend" is not because of the dub (it's perfectly fine) or the editing from the original (not major stuff).

No...the problem with this game, just like with the original (apparently...didn't play it due to the lack of English dub) is that it's just too darn long and padded.

There are SEVENTEEN (basically) chapters in the game. The story being told could have been told with half the chapters. Majima's segment feels entirely tacked on even though it's more interesting than Kiryu's side.

But worse than that: there's just too much that drags the game down. Leading around a blind girl through stealth segments, slow-walking to follow behind someone to the next cutscene, walking around town to burn time until you get paged (and frankly, the pager is underutilized in the game), etc. It's difficult to focus on the parts that matter given so much fluff.

Also, pointlessly, story cutscenes are skippable, but sidequest silliness cutscenes are not. Basically them wanting to force you to engage with the nonsense that adds zero value to the game, such as a guy in a diaper that was dancing in a club.

Kuze overstayed his welcome after the third time fighting him.

Kiryu - just like Ichiban ("Like a Dragon") is too forgiving, letting antagonist after antagonist off the hook with empty threats that never get closure.

From a pacing and length perspective, "The Man Who Erased His Name" was perfect. This was a slog. Not a bad story...just a padded one.

Went into this not as a fan of the alchemy aspect, but the idea of a role-playing game was appealing. It wasn't worth anywhere near full price due to the lack of English dub - a shop had the Deluxe edition for $35, well worth that at least. It's certainly not a terrible game. If it had English voices, it would have helped get through the last third slog - go in another room and do something while listening to the members talk about either nothing or the underlying story. Without the dub, you're forced to sit and read, which for a game with this many cutscenes wasn't fun.

It's to bad. As mentioned, the spirit of adventure here was decently good. In fact, it's what "Tales of Aionios" (referred to elsewhere as "Xenoblade" Chronicles 3) should have done with its story and exploration. Same basic concept: something's off with the world and its people, you can't put your finger on it, but exploring the world helps tell the story slowly. That portion wasn't too bad, held back - again- - by the lack of English dub, because there are so many cutscenes that it bores having to listen to Japanese voices; plus every game has Japanese shrill voices that make it even worse.

The battle engine is decent, not overly fun, not terribly boring. It got to the point that fights had to simply be avoided because there ae too many areas where it felt like forced battles to pad the game.

Music was a highlight. Some of the tracks in the game were very good.

Graphics were nothing special. The camera was a nightmare because of the developers' significant effort to avoid upskirts. (hint for developers: how about, rather than wonky camera work, you just don't put your characters in skirts? Or how about not having the level up cutscene feature your main character high leg kicking in a skirt?) Because then, in at least three cutscenes, the characters are sitting around a fire and you're blatantly shown upskirt anyway. Which makes them nerfing the camera stupid to begin with.

Atelier Firis remains the favorite. It felt like the one that worked the hardest to entertain without overstaying its welcome AND it had English dub.

Lastly there was too much that simply wasn't of interest. There's a fundamental storyline dealing with the world that gets buried among a bunch of other uninteresting prose. Some antagonist characters show up, nigh unstoppable, then disappear for the vast majority of the game. Other characters associated with the protagonists are discussed but then never revisited. It felt like the fundamental story was written and developed, then someone said "this is too short, we need to add some padding to make it longer". Things felt tacked on and not consistent. It was jarring.

Atelier Yumia would have been an acceptable game with a dub. Not a great game. Not an amazing experience. But an acceptable game at $30. Without the dub, the game had to rely on too much other stuff that didn't really entice.

It's one of the better "Atelier" games for those that don't like the heavy focus on alchemy. While alchemy is certainly important here, it never holds the game back if you breeze through the majority of it. But if you're one that only cares about the alchemy for whatever reason, you'll find this one lacking in that regard.

It may sound oversimplified, but in terms of a numeric score: without the English dub it's a 4 out of 10 at best. If it had an English dub, even a not-very-good one, it would have been a 7 out of 10.

So we'll say "recommend" only because it's not "bad". We're not suggesting it's good. Just that it's not bad.

It suffers from what feels like disjointed storytelling. It really isn't an "Octopath" game, frankly. You're not playing out the eight paths. They could have just had this be a new IP and it'd been a perfectly serviceable game. It's just not really an "Octopath" game.

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The best way to describe this game: if you took Triangle Strategy, made it a regular turn-based game and added a half-assed town builder, you'd basically end up with this game. Which is fine...just don't call it "Octopath" is all.

Grinding is basically mandatory - which is unfortunate, since once the random encounters were removed, the game became a lot more tolerable.

But worse than that: the story you're presented at first is disconnected from the "real" story. You choose a scenario that is basically just to determine which of the action traits is easier to master; but the people involved in those mini-stories basically have little to do with the "real" story. Those mini-stories are actually quite a bit more interesting, because the larger "real" story is thrown at you (despite plenty of cutscenes) in a way that you simply don't care about what happens to most of these people.

At two points, you'll encounter what up to then is your strongest team member, only to have them just randomly leave. The game doesn't play favorites, but you'll find certain characters are almost indispensable (Celsus) and certain ones are garbage (Saoirse). As with real Octopath games, the characters don't interact with each other beyond the initial meeting.

Last, the game does seem to suffer from "girlboss" - characters like Sita become stronger than it seems they should, and others such as Phenn get left in the dust. Most of the men end up with lower SP for no obvious reason - Pius is the only notable exception to this that we saw.

It also has "they/them" pronouns for your main character, and "Physique" instead of gender. So just be aware there's a bit of wokeness running around outside of the girlboss stuff.

So - we recommend only because it's not "bad". It's just not Octopath anything, and should have been a different IP entirely.

One of the most common gifts for kids "back in MY day" was a video game system. Plenty in our household. Then one day, a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) showed up with the Duck Hunt/Super Mario Bros. combined cartridge and the light gun.

Super Mario Bros 1 and 2 weren't that fun. Super Mario Bros. 3 being launched at the same time as the movie "The Wizard" (look it up) was the only reason it got any attention, but it turned out to be quite the fun game and amazing tie-in that's never been replicated. Duck Hunt...well, it had its moments, especially when you cheated and went right up to the TV.

Digressing. Sorry.


The point is, role-playing games were always more appealing; and Dragon Warrior was the first. The commercial was on TV, and we were hooked from the moment it played out, remembering every word, decades later:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qL5_3EhqK8

Now of course, there was no horse (that rhymes). And there still isn't. But Dragon Quest has now arrived, after many different console re-releases, and it doesn't ruin the core story. Some of the story beats are a bit questionable, but by and large it's the game you remember with slight tweaks.

For example, sigils (which were first introduced in Dragon Warrior 2) are now present here, and they provide enhancements to skills; but we found them to be overall a gimmick that wasn't worth the level of effort (you're required to gather them, by the way).

There's more story, told by way of voice acted cutscenes, that flesh out what's happened and why, including various towns. This gives more of a sense of the threat of the Dragonlord; but then it pulls a cliffhanger, implying that there's more to the Dragonlord than just a regular evil. This is never explored - there are links back to Dragon Quest XI and Dragon Quest III Remake; and playing both games is the only way to connect the dots. But this is a completely new narrative than what was.

Some of it is outright padding, such as the entire segment with the fairy village and the Field of Flowers (which was their excuse to introduce the sigils). Also, unlike Dragon Warrior, you can't just do the quest your way and go out of sequence (for example, never rescue the Princess) - because the Princess' assistance is needed to pass a new dungeon whose sole purpose seems to be to block your progress until you rescue her, as well as a new dwarves segment that is needed to cross over to a land that previously was wide open (but in Dragon Warrior nothing was out there). A lot of progress blockers added (things that people complained about with Xenoblade Chronicles 2, by the way.)

Some bosses were blatantly unbalanced even at higher levels. The Dragonlord's final form seemed to be dishing more damage than expected; not a difficult fight if you knew how to deal with breath attacks, but still seemed to be a bit unbalanced compared to Dragon Warrior.

Ultimately, Dragon Quest 1's enhancements were generally fun, even though the embellishments and additions weren't really that good and didn't add much to the experience.

2's story was fleshed out in a bad way. The underlying theme is one of necessary abuse: Hargon isn't just some random evil (same retcon as with Dragonlord) - to say more would spoil, but Hargon was given a connection to Dragon Quest III, Dragon Quest XI and Dragon Quest 1's Dragonlord.

Separate from this, the other theme (which doesn't spoil) is that there are monsters who only serve Hargon because they've allegedly been forced to. This is a complete retcon from Dragon Warrior 2; and it makes the game feel soft and tame in comparison to the original. Rather than saving the world from a great evil, it comes across as a pointless attempt to make you feel for everyone in the world instead of just the humans.

But the most egregious sin of DQ2 is what feels like a forced linearity and excessive padding. Keys, for example: what was the Golden Key is now the Ultimate Key; and unlike in Dragon Warrior 2 where you just need to rescue some fisherman and find a dog's burial roughly midway through the game, you don't get the Ultimate Key until the very last area, and it's locked behind the story beats. In fact, you don't get ANY keys until midway through the game.

Dragon Warrior 2 had a point where you got a ship, and from then on, the order of operations was basically entirely up to you. There was very limited guidance and almost no limitations outside of going to Rhone. In DQ2 this is all changed; keys as mentioned, but also other simple things like the battle arena in Osterfair or going to certain shrines (because of the keys), or people randomly blocking paths until you progress to a point in the game. Then there are forced narratives like the faerie side quest stuff (which is new and mandatory) as well as the mermaid stuff.

Some stuff is good, such as the added backstory to the Dragonlord's Great Grandson. But this a limited set of stuff.

One other point on DQ2: the bosses were all - except for the ghost ship boss - complete cakewalks that over-relied on magic attacks. Nullifying or taking away their magic made them pathetic, even Hargon and Malroth (who just used Fullheal). The ghost ship boss has a skill that lets them reflect physical attacks and they had significantly more HP than most, resulting in a rather challenging fight (Which if you wanted to complete one of the sidequests was basically required). That boss was 3x harder than Malroth, which shouldn't happen.


Dragon Quest 1 feels refreshed and fun, though slightly padded, but Dragon Quest 2...though fleshed out, just felt needlessly excessively so. It's always good to have more narrative, it's just that it could have been a better narrative than what we got. More context around Rendarak/Rhone for example - history, flashbacks, etc. A lot was skipped over in favor of fleshing out Hargon.

Got it for effectively half the price. At which point it was fair to try it out.

First the good:

✅ The voice acting for MAINLINE characters is good. It helps with following the storyline which is otherwise a bit dry for the vast majority of it.

✅ Significant resources starting out makes it easier to get over the initial humps.

✅ Ability to completely skip random battles while traversing the map.



Unfortunately that's about it. Arguably everything else is a step back. And we're not even diehards about it.

❌ Removal of "Male" and "Female" terminology. Instead, you're expected to just look at sprites and look for long hair plus terrible female voices (who themselves sound like men). It's basically "Body Type A/B" without that terminology.

❌ Given the above, the balancing setup from the original is gone. Most people didn't know: in the original, the males were overpowered, the females somewhat underpowered, but the females had exclusive accessories as well as Zodiac compatibility bonuses to make up for it, resulting in a natural narrative balance. Here, there's almost no reason to have females on the team (including Agrias) because the males outstripe them easily, and you have no way of correcting this without cheats. Men can crossdress, giving them superpowers and leaving the females behind. It's offensive.

❌ Hard locked at 1080p/60.

❌ While it doesn't need significant framerate, everything is too zoomed in and overlarge. Banner of the Maid had the same issue - you always have to zoom out for every battle because things are way too zoomed in.

❌ Because of the aggressive zoom, and because they had to rebuild the game from scratch, the angle depth (for isometric games to be able to see between buildings, for example) isn't deep enough. Triangle Strategy had a similar such issue, but because it had a greater depth limit, you could work around it without excessive zooming in.

❌ The character filter is abysmal - characters all look like blobs when played on a large screen (no, we're not sitting at a computer desk, we're sitting facing a TV at distance, like normal people).

❌ They added what they call a "Burlap filter" - which is a gridded type filter similar to Valkyria Revolution. The problem is, it looks terrible here because of the lower resolution AND limited motion. It didn't look great on Valkyria Revolution either, but this is arguably worse. There's a mod to remove it - but you shouldn't have to do a mod, it should be a setting in the game not to have it.

❌ They added difficulty options, but they're no match for the difficulty spikes from the original game, which weren't addressed. For example, Wiegraf's distance attack is still grossly overpowered even on an early battle. If you're going to drop difficulty, that means dropping damage given by the enemy. Otherwise there's no point in the difficulty options. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is the only game to perfectly understand how that should work.

And no, "play the original, doot doot doot!" is NOT the answer. Not when they want to charge $50 for what's essentially a ROM with no enhancements. If they had applied the voice acting to that side, you might have an argument. They didn't.


We didn't list the absence of the WoTL enhancements or others as "negative" because at least there they were transparent that they excluded that. They never told you they'd go Body Type A/B, thus that's a negative. It's Bait-and-Switch.

As-is, it's NOT worth full price, nor should you pay full price for it.

As much as we generally enjoy the game, it's horrifically buggy.

Regular gaming PC with a 4060ti and i7 processor, the game only uses the CPU and never touches the GPU, which is just strange. Stuttering, severe framerate drops, etc. It's unplayable.

ROG Ally, it doesn't do that and the performance is fine, but there's a gamebreaking bug in one of the Lu Bu stages where the game will completely lock up on a black screen when you attack a wall (which is believed to be triggering a cutscene of some kind). Easy to replicate, same point every time, progress completely lost.

So no, can't recommend the game.

Unfortunately, playing through the various Atelier games won't include completing this one, as a game-breaking bug was encountered with a fight in the ruins where the enemies for some reason were not losing any HP.

Game-breaking bugs mean we will not recommend it.

This started out decently good, but at a point, it felt like it was just dragging; needlessly longer than it should have been, where arguably the middle 30% or so of the game could have been trimmed. It was trying too hard to be creative with how it told the story and not efficient with the telling at all.

The other issue is the complete lack of connection back to Ayesha - the Ruins were a clear and blatant opportunity to draw a straight line between the events of Ayesha and the events here, but instead they decided to write it as largely parallel - the same "Dusk" but different threads, just like with some of the Zelda pathing, which is not good storytelling. All they had to do was say that the Ruins found in Escha & Logy are the remnants of the Herb Garden (it's literally the same building) and showcase Ayesha's abandoned Atelier, have Nio tell some stories etc. None of that happened.

It got so bad that I basically stopped at the "find this food that barely increases stars for the Central City because the restaurant guy doesn't actually cook food" quest. It's unfun and not worth doing, certainly not compared to the others.

In terms of the gameplay, it's better than what came before. The battle engine was good, the alchemy was simple to follow (but the inability to make more than one at a time without gimmicks got old fast) and the party concept felt more fleshed out (although there were simply too many playable characters; many of them - dudes, mostly - went unused).

So basically:

Have to be honest: Ayesha is such a frustrating experience that it simply cannot be recommended. But it's buggy, freezing and crashing at least three times, corrupt maps, plus the game itself...so much potential, just not quite there.

The alchemy engine is excellent though. Things are easy to craft and understand and it's not the convoluted mess that older games were in the series.

Battle seems like an afterthought (Which isn't a bad thing necessarily). Very few fights after the first few hours; a lot of exploration and backtracking.

A bit of an issue with the constant "team building" - having to stop and seek out people for cutscenes. Firis had something similar, but it didn't feel as frequent as Ayesha does/did.

There's a better story here than in the Arland trilogy. A missing sister, mysterious hints about flowers, Ayesha not realizing that she's got the chops for alchemy (and had basically been doing it all along), etc.

Roughly 30% of stuff was voice acted - not unexpected but a bit disappointing, since the characters were more interesting here. There was more voice acting in Meruru, at least so it seemed.


Can't say it's a terrible or unplayable game. But the bugs made it a no-go for recommending.

Playing through the Atelier games (minus Lulua since these jerks chose not to dub it for whatever stupid reason) and I finally took the time to complete Meruru.

It's interesting - Meruru feels like a "mature" version of the game. Very close in maturity to Firis which was much further in the future. Rorona and Totori felt clunky, half-baked and (at least with Totori) needlessly spread thin with questionable graphics.

✅ Meruru had excellent music almost all the way through (though Hagel's theme was completely butchered).

✅ Not sure if it was the controls or just the recipes, but alchemy felt more intuitive and natural than Totori.

✅ The town development and population growth mechanics added a bit more spice to a series that was generally dry (some people just like doing the alchemy. If that's all there is, it can't be asking $60).

✅ Unlike with Totori, you get two Homs about a third the way through the game, and they are of great help, doing simple synthesis and/or gathering of stuff at a very high pace.

✅ Hanna. One of the greatest characters who really did deserve her own game.


❌The Population mechanic adds too much unnecessary tedium. It's not hard to avert it (it basically is there to force you to do the Tavern quests), it's the principle. Many of the quests are the exact same and it gets old fast. There should have been a way to delegate a Hom to clearing these (the idea is, if they don't see Meruru every now and then, she loses popularity)

❌IF there was a warp mechanic, we didn't find it, and it certainly needed it. Way too much backtracking (Although this is common for the series).

❌The interruptions felt way too frequent; you'll be doing ingredients for a certain alchemy only to get disrupted by a pointless scene with Rorona or something.

❌The menu for alchemy is terrible (better than Totori, but that's not saying much - desperately needing SORT BY NAME as an option.

❌Totori's map was more appealing than Meruru's. A LOT more. Meruru's "comic book" layout was annoying on the eyes. The town being built out was too cluttered.

❌The ending. While yes, it was told what would happen, we expected something a little more exciting.


While there were a lot of negatives, they were more pet-peeves than dealbreakers. Meruru is arguably the best of the Arland trilogy; and enough was given in exposition that you don't even really need to play Rorona or Totori to enjoy it. (it's too bad that Gust/KOEI started declining the series after this, since Lulua was basically a stepchild that's not worth even trying.)