Recent reviews by Particle

The story is a bit slow, but overall, the improvements to normal raids and dungeons, the great music and zones, and more time with some great characters all make Dawntrail more than worthwhile.

Wuk Lamat is a gem.

I have cherished (parts of) Persona 3 as a story and as a work of art in the eight years since I first played it. I never replayed it in all that time until P3R came out, and I finished my P3R playthrough this morning.

I have so much I want to say, but in a nutshell:

If you are willing to accept/do without the inclusion of the female protagonist from Persona 3 Portable, and if you can stomach the inclusion of some misogynistic tropes (sexual harassment of female cast members played for laughs, optional cosmetic bikini armor), Persona 3 Reload is a transformative experience.

Except for the aforementioned caveats, P3R in my eyes is a perfect remake. It keeps the things that gave Persona 3 its unique soul and character, compared to both past and future Shin Megami Tensei games, and what it adds always fits well. Theurgy, for example, is an immensely satisfying and helpful combat mechanic that helps tie character development into gameplay changes without rewriting or harming the original Persona 3's attempts at the same thing. The music is all redone but all recognizable, familiar enough to kindle nostalgia but fresh enough to not be defined by it. It's a pleasure to both recognize and not recognize a song, and these joys often happen simultaneously in Persona 3 Reload's soundtrack. They also changed an overtly transphobic scene from P3 FES/Portable and made it actually funny instead.

In what I would call a bold decision, P3 Reload also keeps the generic Shadows and the procedurally generated structure of Tartarus from earlier iterations. This won't be popular with people who were introduced to the series with Persona 5's demon negotiation mechanics or handmade Palaces, but I found (to my great surprise) that I did not miss these innovations. In ways I cannot adequately discuss in a spoiler-free review, something about the expressionless masks of P3's Shadow enemies and the tedium of Tartarus... actually works with P3's atmosphere, to me.

However, while I cherish what Reload brings to the table, I also want to take a moment to thank Persona 3 itself. A game with this many tonal shifts - from casual school life sim to an emotional main story to a delightfully camp and self-indulgently emo aesthetic in turn-based battle - has no right to feel this earnest in its central thesis, but Persona 3 manages to be sincere despite the frequently fantastic and dramatic turns of its battles and plotlines. I do not want to expound at length on what the game is trying to say, find out for yourself- but I am in a part of my life where I needed to hear Persona 3's message again, and I will always cherish Persona 3 Reload for letting me do that, if nothing else.

By way of a small comparison, I actively dislike Persona 4 and 5. I used to adore these games, but I have soured fully on them as I believe they have terrible writing for their female characters and make light of the topics they try to tackle. P3R proved to me (subjectively, of course) that Persona 3's story and cast are not merely the best writing in modern Persona by a country mile, but also one of the most poignant stories about finding one's purpose in the entire medium in my eyes.

Had to refund because after 2 days of troubleshooting the game would still crash my graphics driver and freeze up my PC barely a minute into the game, I'm not the only one with the issue and I had to get a refund. Will gladly come back and amend this, hopefully, in a year when I get it for 50% off after all the needed patches have come out.

This is EASILY the most ameteurish board game adaptation I have EVER seen. Practically no effort has been made to ensure that the game transitions smoothly into a computer program. There are barely ANY animations in the game, despite a lot of pieces moving back-and-forth (you only see ships move, everything else happens instantaneously), there's barely any UI design and the game just uses card images with relatively tiny text to denote planet names (for reference I was playing on a pretty big 1080p monitor and the text was difficult to make out), and so on.

YOU CANNOT SAVE A GAME HALFWAY THROUGH. That's genuinely baffling in terms of how bad it is.

You cannot alter the few options from the main menu either, you have to go into a game to do it.

The tutorial ends up being pretty bad due to all the above reasons, but also the tutorial dialogue just appears in the middle of the screen in a huge dialogue box that obscures what you need to click, 90% of the time.

I played through it in a single sitting and got one ending in (going by Steam's timer) 2.5 hours.

Honestly, I enjoyed this quite a bit more than I expected. I would've gladly played a game ten times longer with a similar scenario, but it's a perfectly haunting short story as it stands.

The atmosphere is quite nice, and I enjoyed the writing. It's definitely quite stark in tone and subject matter, perhaps more than I initially expected.

Puzzles are quite simple for the most part, but they're still fun to solve, and quite cleverly designed.

The biggest surprise for me was the music, it's genuinely great, bought the OST as soon as I finished the game.

Overall, great short story to spend a day or an evening with.

This adaptation is lovelessly done.

I got this game yesterday and have played 5 or so rounds since- it's sold me on the real game! This is a fun little game I now want to buy so that I can keep it on a table somewhere to idle away 10 minutes with someone if I so wish.

The board game itself is great. In short: You buy one of 3 queued pieces of fabric, place them on a grid to make a quilt, with as few empty spots as possible. You pay for these pieces by both "buttons" you get from some pieces and "moves" you have to make on a timeline track- most of the time, you don't want to progress too quickly, so it's a fun balance. When both players reach the end of the timeline, you tally scores (buttons, filled/empty quilt squares, a bonus) and see who wins!

It's great, simple fun with an approachable and creative theme that pushes some of the same buttons (ha) as Tetris.

...

So why do I not recommend it?

Well, I do not recommend it *without reservations*.

This port is clearly a low-effort port of the iOS/Android versions of the game. Here's how I know:

1. The text scaling in menus is clearly intended for a small screen (i.e. phones). They're way too large on a computer screen.
2. The loading screen when you first boot up the screen says "Tap to continue". Tapping, for a PC game.

There are also some bugs. A few are graphic glitches (when you click on a tapestry you can sometimes still drag around the fabric queue which makes their tags show up above the tapestry still in focus), and some are gameplay-related (sometimes the game doesn't let me interact with a patch I should be able to buy and I have to quit the session and reload from the main menu).

A few odds and ends are also unsatisfying (for example, the number of buttons owned by each player are written in a featureless, ordinary font, even though the rest of the game uses a custom font, including for numbers), but they're not a big deal.

The art is nice and the music is surprisingly great- it's very relaxing!

TL;DR: It's not a very polished port, and I cannot recommend it without reservations, but it's fun regardless.

This is a disappointment.

Otherside is the first developer I would've trusted with making an immersive sim, but this is not what I wanted at all.

The save system is nonfunctional. It'll always start you at the beginning of a level, and it'll keep your inventory the same but reset the level completely, including the items you've already picked up.

The UI is very bad (generic at best), the characters are generic, sound effects are grating, controls are very clunky, the hour I played of the game was very linear.

I don't recommend this game in its current state. Here's to hoping it makes a turnaround.

>make a 100-solar-mass black hole explode
>game crashes

I like it

(An online acquaintance has gifted me this game.)

NOTE: There's a content warning list here if you have psychological sensitivities (SPOILERS!).[blog.mangagamer.org]There's a downloadable demo[blog.mangagamer.org] as well.

Copy-pasted from a r/visualnovels thread I made:

Fata Morgana is one of those works of art that roll around every other year, one of the master works of the genre, one of those immaculately done paintings that are never hanged on a wall befitting their excellence and beauty. It's a testament to many things as a visual novel: It shows us how a VN does not need the slightest inkling of Japanese culture in it to be a masterpiece of the genre; how the art, music and prose can mesh together to form a magnificent crescendo of literary beauty, how one can craft a story so poignant that every single person -from the happiest to the most sorrowful- can relate to it in some manner; most importantly of all, how one can prevail over unrelenting abuse and torment.


Fata Morgana begins as you, ???, wake up inside a run-down, gloomy mansion that feels as desolate and dead as the Maid who greets you upon your awakening. She calls you "Master". In order to reawaken your memories, she decides to show you around various rooms in the mansion. Every room leads to a different era, a different cast, a different tale...


Fata Morgana is a master stroke in terms of narrative design. Every single member of the cast has believable motivations and they are presented as complex characters; breathing, living people both in their cruelty and compassion. The pacing is virtually airtight save for a few possible stretches that last less than an hour, and I personally welcomed them for giving me a rest and time to wind down from the rest of the experience. It's a tragic tale, but a tale that harbors hope, and a tale that takes its (heavy, grotesque, tormentful) subject matter seriously. By the time the utterly cathartic ending rolls out, you have an experience on your hands that could very well keep you thinking on it for life. The prose is quite well-written (It's no Planescape: Torment, but it is easily an above average translation), and many variations of dialogue and scene depictions, internal monologues are all written in a manner that is not pretentious or overly complicated.

Fata Morgana's most distinctive feature at first glance is its art style. The sprite work is meticulously detailed and somewhat realistic while still retaining some artistic flair. All characters are drawn expressively while the backgrounds are filtered photos that appear as abstract CGs- which might ring alarm bells for those who loathed Higurashi and Umineko's original backgrounds, but the truth of the matter is that -at least for me- the backgrounds in this game resemble oil paintings, reflecting a distant but not yet fully forgotten past. The only significant flaw of the (2012) game- and perhaps the whole VN- is that it is in 4:3. The art is in beautiful tandem with the music as well, which brings me to my next point...

Fata Morgana's soundtrack could have single-handedly let this VN be a GOTY contender. As it stands, it is still potentially the best aspect of Fata Morgana and that is not light praise. It has the best soundtrack I have heard in any videogame or VN, bar none (yes, that includes Umineko :P). Fata Morgana's tracks range from wistful to catchy to ominous and hectic to peaceful and they are quite varied for each era you visit. Especially songs with vocals are incredibly touching and quite a few of them have stayed with me since (to the point where their emotional baggage makes it difficult to listen to them). Giselle and Hex in particular are godlike, though I'd recommend you to not listen to those two before fully experiencing the VN. The OST is mostly comprised of sad tracks (melancholic, wistful and distressed) but that makes the stellar peaceful and happy tracks stand out all the more. The music's effect is amplified unimaginably when you hear them in the VN- as I said before, the art and music in Fata Morgana are in beautiful, priceless harmony with each other.

Menus: The game's menus are decent, with a few options for text speed and separate settings for BGM and SFX. By saving at choices and particular spots in the story, I almost ran out of save slots. But the number there should be fine if you do not mind overwriting here and there.
Choices- There are a fair number of choices in the game, but they're all really straightforward so unless you want to go for 100% completion, you really don't need a walkthrough.
Extras- After the completion of the game, you unlock galleries for art and music as well as a lengthy, non-canon "backstage" scene that's pretty funny. The vocal tracks have illustrations you can view that display the original and English lyrics for each song, and they look great! The game's DRM-free OST is available through Steam as well, as DLC. Definitely worth it.

Fata Morgana is a classic. Its art, music and its masterful execution of its subject matter cannot be found anywhere else in the medium. Fata Morgana strains the definitions of what a VN can be and can accomplish, and it needs to be tried just for that.

"This ain't scary at all...DAMNDAMNDAMNDAMN RUNRUNRUNRUNRUUUUUUUN *piss yourself*