Recent reviews by fugacity

Yes this is a good game, worth my purchase price at $36. No, it's not my GotY.

Ultimately, it falls down like a lot of games do last half and I can state the enemy that broke my want to care about the game, Dualliste. He didn't end my expedition, but only because I kept raising my party with phoenix down. But his attack pattern were just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. So I stopped trying to parry or dodge him, let him kill my character then just mowed him down. Many of the enemies later are like this, and I've 100%'d the game, so I've seen them all. The toughest enemy in the game, I just didn't even try to block or dodge. You have to build glass cannon builds to put out hundreds of thousands to millions of points of damage, so any one little hit in return is likely to kill you.

The game drags out to be charming to annoying. If I hear "Let's go!!!!" one more time....

Good art (who knows how much is hand placed), but that's to be expected when the crew is told, this is an artsy-fartsy game about art itself, go nuts. I do think they kind of blew their wad early though with the "underwater" level.

Good music, though not as great as some other games.

Gameplay is a gimick that is fun at first before it gets annoying. They should have made perfect blocks do 20% damage and dodges do 10%. Then remove the one shot kills if you miss a block.

Yeah, not a GOTY for me, but still good.

GoT I don't think would ever have been my Game of the Year. While the opening and middle acts are just fine, the final and DLC acts are drawn out full of enemies with bulletsponge health and unavoidable attack patterns. I finally realized that I could just reload checkpoints and force myself to the endings. This robbed the game of tension, but I'm glad there wasn't runback because I'd be even more annoyed. The only real resource to lose is resolve and a later game instant kill resource, which you lose all of from taking the smallest scratch. Also frequently when retrying areas, your meter and even environmental help like explosive barrels will have disappeared. Further, there doesn't seem to be any actual allowance in the game to play honorably as Jin will play as chaotic stupid in cutscenes, resorting to underhanded techniques no matter if you've played the whole game without a talking to from your uncle. For the last 4 days, I just wanted to be done with the game.

On the plus side, it is a beautiful look at a stylized Japan, has good music and animations.

Bought on sale for $36, it's fair at that price.

Just beat the NP and got the true ending, I'm sure other reviewers have pointed out some of the pros and cons of the game, the difficulty of perfect block timings, the awkward item interface (except for some grindstones and rare throwables use, never used any items), and lack of reward for avoiding specter use (not even an achievo?), the game was overall very enjoyable with a fairly interesting, if benighted world.

But to really earn that thumbs up, I wanted to emphasize that this game has my favorite new mechanic for souls-likes, one that all others should implement; you drop your souls on death just OUTSIDE the boss arena. No need to run in, be distracted trying to grab your souls back and enter the death loop. Also, if you had levels available the boss seems hard, you can go level right away instead of going back to grind.

Love and hate. You should not implement a save game system this restrictive unless your game system is 100% free of bugs and you can ensure the player cannot lose hours of progress arbitrarily.

For about $20, it's fine, but there's a lot wrong with it too. The bosses are less epic and creative, usually just a dude/dudette with a move set with a couple tricks they spam. The end boss especially just seemed like a set of damage zones and one weak point with no real strategy to it, just dodge and chip, too difficult for a plot boss, too easy and low complexity for a real boss. Splitting up the weapons was a step back except for traversal. But traversal itself seemed more of a pain than the first game. Perhaps because you got to see the yellow dots or inaccessible areas plainly pointing out that you can't progress until later, while the first game seemed more of a secret hunt. I hardly ever used any prayers except the ring toss quick spell and first flame wall then either invincibility/time stop/or dibella at the end game. They also changed some of the interface for no good reason, mapping the interaction button sometimes to UP and sometimes to Y when one button would do. Casting spells with DOWN and B was also unreliable and having those mapped to quick spell B and heavy spell Y would have been better.

The only thing I really appreciated is that they dialed way way up the fu&&ed-upness of the quest NPCs, though in practice, there was way too many fetch and collect missions. The plot overall felt a lot weaker. They should have continued the story from Ending B from the first game and had us play as the character <SPOILERS>who removed the sword from the chest of Penitent after he faded into a relic</SPOILERS>.

But for $20, shrug, it was OK. Also, I'm ticked that they included puzzles on the main game map that are unsolvable unless you buy DLC and more of the Achievements are either crap or needs the DLC. So not 100%ing like I did the first game.

Stole the ending C achievement from me.

In all, a fairly fun game with some problems.

Could not get a refund, bought it blind off a commercial from the Second Wind channel and as I've had some ideas for a game somewhat like this in the past and wanted to see if I had been beaten to the punch. This game is almost uncontrollable and indecipherable. It stinks.

Great souls-like with enough challenge, some puzzlely exploration aspects in a semi-open world, and great humor. Also, especially the beginning gives a good simulation of being a small fish in a small tidepool before being flushed into the vast sea.

Why do you need a review of game from 2014? It's a decent enough metroidvania. I did 100% it so it's not as difficult as some get-good games, but definitely some of the combats are a challenge. The only thing I hated was the yellow special attack. It was hard to use and I'd rather it had been dropped in favor of just red, green and blue attacks. Or map it to something else.

I'd only recommend it at the current price of about $10. I bought it at about $20 and was underwhelmed. There were some interesting mechanics and I had to think of some puzzles for a couple minutes, but a lot of the time it was fairly by the numbers with some backtracking. Apparently I missed some 7 secret collectibles. I'm not really motivated to go back right now.

It was pretty and ugly-pretty in a few places, so some of the art and music was enjoyable.

I believe it was trying to tell some sort of story with the abstract levels and bosses, but I'm not sure it was anything effective. If anything, the main character is kind of a d*ck since you wake up every boss by invading their area and damaging them first. Very meta, but very empty.

That said, some OK puzzles for an afternoon (beat it in about 6 hours with some downtime letting the game run in the background). But far too linear and no sign posting I found for missing collectibles, you basically chose wrong and went down the first path you come to.