Recent reviews by jayjayjay

Not sure I'd actually recommend it. It's a good little RPG for its time, but it's extremely rough around the edges and filled with bugs that were never patched (good old PiranhaBytes). It is extremely linear for an RPG but you can definitely see its influence in other games like Fable. I don't think your choices really have any impact in the game and there's only one ending, which ends on a cliffhanger for the sequel. I didn't enjoy the final boss fight at all, but in hindsight (after writing the original version of this review), I don't think it's as bad as I thought it was initially.

There's a ton of backtracking, the dialog is poorly translated (or poorly written?), the voice acting is god awful, and the whole thing reeks of early 2000s Eurojank.

That being said, I enjoyed most of the time I spent with it and if you're able to pick this up for a dollar like I did, it's probably worth it enough -- assuming you can put up with the myriad of technical problems and you're okay with having to fix the game manually with mods. The thing this game does well that later PiranhaBytes games completely fail at is that it's not overly ambitious. This game was made with a small budget and a very small team, so they stuck with a very small world and didn't worry about excessive side quests, sticking to an extremely linear (but mostly fun) main story line and eschewing excess. The result is a bare bones but typically enjoyable RPG that enjoyed some extremely modest success, mostly in Europe.

If I were to give it an arbitrary rating, I'd probably give it a 6/10. Not amazing, but it's fun enough.

Don't buy if you're trying to play the game with ray tracing. It is super wonky and wildly demanding. I struggled even with an RTX 3070 and low RT settings. Wait until it's patched!

UPDATE 12/19/22: The hotfix they released has resolved...some things? It seems somewhat less stuttery with maxed out settings, but the framerate hasn't improved much. The game also has the persistent issue of changing graphical settings in-game resulting in lower framerate regardless of the settings you choose. Restarting the game or returning to the main menu every time I change settings *seems* to improve this, but the fact that the issue is still happening is obviously problematic.

Hopefully CDPR will fix this soon. Unfortunately, I doubt all the kinks are going to be ironed out immediately.

Solid Batman game, does a decent job tying up the series but leaves a little to be desired in terms of pacing. This is a weirdly long game that starts to lose a bit of its charm near the end.

The DLC is whatever, just adds a few missions to the game where you play as different characters. Nothing is really set up for a sequel in these DLCs. The season pass adds on maybe ~3 hours of content if you're being really generous.

Definitely need to utilize the community patch on Arkham Knight's Nexus page to fully enjoy the experience. Even with that though I still get crashes every once in a while. The unmodified game is definitely prone to bugs, though, so any reduction in that department is solid.

same as the last one. smooth brain open world game for people with smooth brains.

best game in the fromsoft lineup

takes all the stuff they learned from the other souls/bloodborne/sekiro games and improves on it

fun/10

nah

weird slavjank, boring and uninteresting story, poor and disinterested voice acting

pro tip: unless you've got a developed reputation about being good story tellers, don't start the game with an unskippable, long "interactive" cutscene where nothing you do matters.

Not an especially well-made game, but it's fun for a few hours.

The gameplay is definitely not what you're playing a Yoko Taro game for -- that's always where his games fall apart (though Automata is actually pretty fun...most of the time). What you're here for is the story.

That being said, the story here is fine. It's contrived and convoluted in a way befitting of...well, any major Japanese production. It's confusing, extremely slow, and there isn't any guarantee *you* will actually see everything for what it is.

It's a lot more confusing than Metal Gear Solid's story, and that franchise is notable for being difficult to grasp, particularly because of its massive walls of exposition and extremely abrasive lore.

The game demands quite a bit to actually understand what's going on -- you will have to beat the game five(?) times to get all the endings, and they might not actually make sense unless you have recently played Nier: Automata and remember everything that happened in that game. Like, literally, everything.

It's also very loosely connected to Drakengard. I don't think it's worth exploring Drakengard as a series, though. The games are, frankly, very bad -- the only one that is actually any fun is the third entry, and that one is also extremely confusing story-wise.

Can't recommend this to someone who isn't already into Yoko Taro's work. It's extremely flawed, grindy, and repetitive. A solid 5/10 for the effort -- the story is interesting even if it's nearly incomprehensible and filled with contradictory elements and plot holes. But it's experimental and I think there's an argument somewhere in there about it having some artistic merit to it.

Also, props to Yoko Taro for exploring queer characters in videogames way before anyone else did. They don't feel especially shoe-horned in and there is (a little) subtlety in how they're portrayed.

it's fun, but it takes an absurd amount of time to level up at all. it's definitely one of those games where they want you to pay out the ass just to enjoy it. avoid.

still doesn't work for me after all these years and all these patches. buy at your own risk.

there's a mini game where you get to rub your nuts all over a guy's face