Recent reviews by Kitsune

- Jump to nearby wall.
- Rain starts the instant I land on it without any warning.
- Fall to my death with no way to avoid it.
- Uninstall, refund.

I idly played the original Shadowverse now and then and have been a Granblue Fantasy player almost from the beginning so was looking forward to a fresh release so I could get on at the ground floor. Welp, that optimism went right out the window with the appalling monetization schemes they've foisted onto this game. One of the most player-friendly pricings on a CCG has turned into one of the most player-hostile instead; there is absolutely no way I suggest anyone play this game and subject themselves to either a punishing grind or having to shell out hundreds of bucks.

This game does a very good job of scratching the itch of an uncompromising survival game, as long as you can overlook the occasional unpolished jank. It now has an actual story mission, but don't come in expecting Bioshock, it's fairly light and straightforward and mostly just serves as a framework for a player to be prodded through the various zones. Much like a lot of survival games, there's a tipping point where you get established enough to not be in constant terror of random death, but even with maxed out equipment you can't just wander through a horde of enemies without a care in the world.

A game with a solid premise, but nothing but an eternal grind and cash-grabbing beneath the surface. There's no real story or lore to speak of, because slipshod development makes stories peter off into nothing, while they break their own lore to try to sell more stuff to the players.

I was an avid player of Natural Selection, the original half-life mod. Still have the t-shirt from it, in fact. It was an utterly beautiful chaos that managed to give me some of my best gaming experiences in hours-long matches where both teams were holding on with their fingernails in desperation for getting that one step ahead of the other. Unfortunately, the developers made several decisions based on "competitive play" that upended the balance that made it so good for casual teams and sunk those long, fun matches.

Natural Selection 2 has carried those decisions forward, unfortunately. The asymmetry of the original (humans have a leader, aliens don't) is gone, making the teams much more like each other. The speed of resource gain is tuned for quick matches rather than drawn-out slugfests, and a team that makes a poor start is better served by quitting en masse rather than trying to recover.

An incomplete shell of a game that is billing itself as deeper (no pun intended) than it actually is. The gameplay is great in the opening hour or two, but once you have the bases covered and are starting to get established, the veneer quickly wears off and shows the lack of substance. The issues with No Man's Sky where a player would mine some rocks to get an upgrade to... mine more rocks is writ large in this game as well, so unless it receives some significant content boosts, I really can't recommend it.

I don't care one way or the other about adding paid mods, until doing so screws over the customers. Well this screwed over the customers. It forced a 2GB download on all of us and broke compatibility with free mods. That is past unacceptable.

This is an extraordinarily useful resource - if you take advantage of the fantastic community behind it. All of the negative reviews seem to focus on the fact that out of the box all they see is a blank screen with some dice on it. This is mostly true, it only starts with fairly barebones rule modules for a few common RPGs. Oh no, they say, now I'm forced to buy expensive DLC to use this thing I just bought! Well not so fast.

There is a ton of completely free community-made content for Fantasy Grounds. Shadowrun? Got it. World of Darkness? Yep. If you can think of a system, there's a very good chance that someone's made a module for it, all you have to do is take the time to get it and plug it in. The professional modules being sold for real cashola have extra polish and time-saving automation, but their purchase is NOT required to run a game. It's up to you to decide whether having the snazzy presentation and extra resources ready-made for you is worth dropping the money on; if you decide it isn't it's easy to go out and snag maps and tokens and portraits online to do it yourself.

I bought this because I was going to run a Star Wars Edge of the Empire game. I looked at Roll20 first, because it's free, right? Well, no, it turned out that making the dice system for Star Wars work in Roll20 would require that I pay ten bucks a month for the API access of a Pro account. Forever. Then I looked at Fantasy Grounds, saw that a user had made a great Star Wars module for it, shelled out the money for a lifetime license, installed the module and went along my merry way. Haven't paid a penny since. Maps and tokens have been easy to find online and import into the game as needed. At this point I would've paid MORE for Roll20 than I did for Fantasy Grounds.

All that said, here are my complaints about the program: It has no VOIP, music, or sound effect functionality. All of those things would be great to have, but right now you have to fiddle around with third-party programs to make that work. The interface is very unintuitive. Don't just buy this an hour before game time and expect to be running a great game, it took me a good deal of fiddling around with stuff on my own to work out how to display maps with masked areas, set up encounters with all the NPC stats and tokens, and generally get everything working smoothly. They're working on a new version of the program with snazzier graphics capability and I'm hoping that some of my issues will be fixed with that, but as of now they're not saying very much about what features are being added, so that may just be an empty dream.

Short version: It's not perfect, but it's still very good and has a ton of talented people coming out with content for it. It remains my favorite virtual table top program.

EDIT: The crash on launch seems fixed, though I still haven't reenabled the preorder stuff out of fear of future crashes.

That said, I'm still not changing the review to positive, due to Square's customer-hostile one-use one-save DLC and their shoddy DRM. Which is a shame, because Eidos made a solid game only to have the publisher ruin it with ham-fisted money-grubbing.

"No Man's Sky is in an early release state, basically. It's not done, it's not worth $60. I'd encourage any prospective buyers to wait until either the game gets considerably more work done on it, or the price drops." - Me, one year ago.

Well, they've done considerably more work on it, and while I'm still slightly salty that the game today isn't what I got a year ago when I bought it, I feel compelled to edit my review and acknowledge the effort and polish that has been added in the three major updates. It's still a very lonesome survival-exploration and won't appeal to a lot of gamers, but for people who enjoy the genre I can finally recommend it as a worthwhile game.