Recent reviews by Clive

It's soulless corporate unreal engine slop. The music sucks and every moment I was playing it just reminded me how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AAA games have become. The game is designed for idiots and babies you every single step of the way. It has the production value of a budget Vita game but asks for $120. Oh yeah, and the localization is filled with modern woke-isms and california valley speech, too.

This company is a lost cause.

Surprisingly fun and robust for a gacha game take on nuPersona. There's a lot of good here and I wish I could recommend it, but SEGA is SEGA and I just cannot in good faith tell people to play this.

If they gave us the same experience as China/Korea/Taiwan, everything would be great. However, of course, SEGA just can't help but be scummy greedy ♥♥♥♥♥, so Global is being shafted and treated like a cash grab. Poor translations, bugs, reduced rewards, the removal of soft pity (tl;dr, our currency is worth less than other regions), and now as of the 1.1 livestream we're even having our banners messed with. On CN/KR/TW, when a non-limited character gets a banner, they're immediately and permanently added to the standard pool when that banner ends, so there's no FOMO.

Well, the first non-limited banner is pretty famous in the asian versions for being an extremely useful and meta character, so of course everyone who knows this is saving up standard pulls to get her so that they can also grab other limited characters like Makoto or Futaba later. Well, not on Global! For us, not only is her banner being doubled in length, she isn't going to the standard banner afterward... right away. When will she come? Who knows! It'd be a shame if you got impatient and spent your gems to get her now instead of needing to potentially wait several months!

It's just slimy, and makes me feel like a mark whenever I even play the game, let alone anyone who considers spending money on it.

edit: holy ♥♥♥♥, 1.1 released and sega has made it clear that they just don't give a ♥♥♥♥
7.5 hour maintenance for... horrendously nerfed rewards compared to CN (including 1/3rd the maintenance compensation), the "log in for 7 days to get 10 pulls" standard thing was nerfed to be weapon banner pulls and only 7 pulls, every single event has reduced payouts, the newbie missions have the super powerful healer surgically removed from the reward track, oh and zero bugs from the launch fixed, they even started the event exactly 7 hours before daily reset with exactly enough days to complete it so the majority of global players are going to be screwed over at the very end
the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ climax of the launch story is broken and the antagonist clips through the wall in the cutscene I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ CANT with this publisher bro

Ignore my playtime, the garbage PC client stayed open overnight after I closed the game.

Permanently lost my several year old account because I had the audacity to... press the Play button on Steam expecting I would be allowed to log in. Now my real account is trapped on some empty ghost nexon ID that was automatically created and I don't have access to while trying to play on steam greets me with a fresh level 1 blank one. Support is useless and responds with an automated reply that tells me to do things that don't help, and then has the audacity to politely inform me that for more help I should just contact them in-game.

Yeah, I'll get right on that, ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I bought this back in Alpha 7 and was hopeful until Alpha 17.
The game I paid for almost 10 years ago got morphed into some lame-ass pseudo-mmo themepark, and somehow runs even worse despite being a sterile, lifeless world. It's ass, don't bother. I paid the price for being dumb enough to buy an early access game.

Decided to give it a shot after dropping the original a long, long time ago due to the localizers censoring cards for the global version. Well, the localization still sucks, the cards are still censored, the game asks me if I want to be a Type 1 or Type 2 after a long, boring, forced tutorial, and then hits me with a shop where everything is 2-6x more expensive and grindy than the original with seemingly nothing new to justify any of that. No thanks, I guess.

For a little while, I got to remember the magic of what it was like when games were just fun.

The core of a really great game is there; it's one of the better blobbers I've ever played. However, the monetization is so nakedly horrible that the second the honeymoon period ends (and it ends quickly) you're left with soulcrushing misery. It's like a parody of what people think of when they try to joke about greedy gacha games. $4, per pull, a 100-pull spark system with no carry between banners, a focus on getting numerous dupes despite the currency dripfeed being so tiny that you may as well not even bother (2 entire banner pulls per week outside of events, and a handful of standard pulls with horrible rates if you can find them). On top of that, the game is just buggy, and now that the steam version is out it seems apologems aren't a thing anymore. Others have probably explained all the things the game does right in their own reviews, but none of it matters in the face of just how bad the monetization is. If you want to read the rest of my thoughts, make sure to buy the Clive Reviews Wizardry Daphne Celebration Pack ($99.99)

I want to recommend it, but this... this ♥♥♥♥... is so ass.

I just killed a beloved story with my freaking mind! Haha!

This game has the potential to be one of the best of all time.
Unfortunately at the moment, the developer doesn't seem to understand the difference between challenging design and malicious design.

As it stands, I'd give a neutral review, but the excessive and frustrating bugs (no not that kind) push it to a thumbs down.
Yes, I decided to make this review directly in response to extracting with full super samples and then having the server go "nah" and not count them. Yes, I'm mad. Fight me.

edit (5/4/2024): lol

It's actually, shockingly, genuinely fun. They looked at a bunch of different games, thought "What if we put all that into one megagame" and are actually doing it. If nothing else, it makes ARK look like garbage in comparison. Very hopeful for what this game can become with the insane stack of cash that just fell onto the developers' laps. It really does show how much money Nintendo is leaving on the table by refusing to care about their breadwinner franchise.

Plus, it makes all the worst people angry, can't argue with that.