Recent reviews by Sabin

Now this is how you do a remaster! Hell, this is barely a remaster and more of a mother of god glow up! \o/ Crisis Core was always a truly excellent game, it was a crime against the series and gaming in general that it was kept locked to the PSP for so long. Such a fantastic story and setting, filling in the blanks from Final Fantasy VII whilst also expanding upon the lore and characters in order to further enrich the world -- and it was excellent! Now we have a substantial re-release in the form of "Reunion" and the attention to detail and absolute labour of love cannot be denied.

Visuals have been radically overhauled, replete with a complete engine switch to UE4 (and not shader stalls either, how about that!) that brings substantial model and texture detail upgrades with it. It's still the same PSP game at heart, but it just looks and plays so much better now. It's not quite up to the level of VII-Remake but it's definitely close! Gorgeous textures, super high detailed models, completely new FMVs for Summons, and what seem to be AI-remastered story FMVs from the PSP original.

Gorgeous, simply gorgeous.

I could gush about this for days, as a Final Fantasy fan I always enjoyed Crisis Core - even though VII isn't my favourite in the series - and to finally see Squeenix give it the respect it is due, and bring it back into the limelight is just fantastic. It's not a perfect game or remaster, the VA replacement for Zack leaves a lot to be desired, 300 side missions with the same recycled areas get frustratingly repetitive, and the still over-reliance on RNG with the infuriating DMW can turn a fun adventure into a grinding slog --------- but you can genuinely look passed all that and just appreciate the excellent story, beautiful music, and greatly improved/enhanced battle system. It's truly an excellent game at heart and that is only made all the better by a mighty impressive remaster.

I genuinely don't know where to start, this is an absolute masterpiece. This is absolutely, without hyperbole, the indie and RPG GOTY 2022.

*Spectacular pixel art, highly detailed for both sprites and backgrounds, yet perfectly nostalgic for the classic 16bit era of jRPGs. This would have been comfortable on the SNES and lauded for its visuals to boot. There was a definite missed opportunity for implementing a lovely scanline or CRT shader, that would have just amped the nostalgia factor \o/

*Orchestral soundtrack that was a genuine delight in every single track, melancholic and happy in equal measure.. fabulously composed.

*Probably the best classic-style battle system I've seen in a jRPG in a long, long time. Conditional turn-based like in FFX, and even has the same "swap party members in and out on the fly" mechanics too. Being able to swap your characters at will adds enormous layers of strategy and enjoyment. One of my favourite parts of the combat system was how ailments and buffs work, having a departure from the usual "immune to everything" enemy roster -- you can impart buffs and debuffs on any enemy or boss, adding more strategy.

Everything about the game just oozes charm, class, style, and absolute talent from the developers. The story is engrossing, mature yet not bleak or overly gritty for the sake of it, just a joy to get wrapped up in - dealing with weighty subjects with characters whose emotions and motivations feel real. Combat is enjoyable, the game pacing is brisk but not rushed, tons of equipment and items, a fabulous "deals" system that has you selling loot in order to acquire rare gear and materials, and even a thoroughly enjoyable "Grid" that rewards exploration and combat prowess.

My singular lament is the Gem System, something that had the potential to be truly powerful and enjoyable, a way of customising your characters statistic, allowing you to create and find gems to slot into your weapons/armour. Gems have "purity" and "size" and "rank" - and you have to combine gems in order to unlock stat changes. In reality it just becomes a chore trying to juggle clunky game mechanics and frustrating "purity" or "fake crystals" which can't be merged. So I largely just ignored it.

It's fair to say I loved every moment of this (gems notwithstanding, lol) and had I played this prior The Game Awards, or Valve's own Steam Awards, I'd have *happily* rated this RPG GOTY and my own personal GOTY to boot. Fabulous start to finish, a pure delight, and I urge any and all jRPG fans to NOT SLEEP ON THIS.

This was ♥♥♥♥♥♥' BRILLIANT! Just absolutely fantastic, what a pure genius choice of genres to merge; old school point and click story-heavy adventure, with a simple levelling system and honest-to-goodness turn based RPG combat! It was fabulous!

Phenomenal art style, excellent music, pitch-perfect VA, super simple controls, and one hell of a fun time.

My singular lament was the ending which was deeply unsatisfying. Sigh. Oh well eh?

Friggin' awesome is what this is. Wayforward are absolute masters of their craft and each of their games is immensely playable, with so much charm and character, and invariably a banging soundtrack to boot!

Short, sweet, Metroidvania based on the gruesomely maligned Universal Monsters' "Mummy", this was wicked fun from start to finish. Gorgeous pixel art, lovely soundtrack, loads of weapons and upgrades to find, and a relatively large map to explore -- what else do you need? :)

~edit~

Whoops, almost forgot! The game's enemy physics (movement/spawn/firing speeds) are tied to framerate! So if you have a high refresh-rate monitor it is absolutely imperative you cap the game to 60fps. Either via NVCPL/AMDCPL, or with some kind of external tool such as Rivatuner.

Or you could not, and suffer the rage-inducing nightmare of fast spawning, fast moving, fast firing enemies \o/

/Credit to Tiwill on the Steam forum for discovering this :)

It's a bit... egh. Time and time and time again do I wish we had a middle ground option on Steam. It's not "terrible", but neither is it all that good. Maybe with a lot of refinements and tweaks it could be a good game, but as it stands it's just a bit too... Mobile janky.

Phew!!! What's that, nearly 90hrs? Man, if there's one thing Tri-Ace can do best.. it's craft a fun game world that has insane grinding in it, heh. What is there to say? The game was a blast, it looked amazing (though I strongly recommend running a ReShade filter for sharpening), it ran flawlessly, and had some truly amazing characters with an engrossing story and a wicked-fast battle system.

Yeah, I enjoyed this immensely!

There is definitely a part of me, a not inconsiderable part, that wants to keep my old negative review up. The game launched broken and there's no getting around that, my righteous anger about *yet another* AAA title releasing in an utterly broken state just boils underneath the surface. There's no way the developers didn't know how utterly wrong it was to launch in such a state and that is inexcusable - even if they did "patch it" within 48 hours.

However, patch it they did and the game approached a significantly more playable state due to that. The game-crippling shader stalls have been largely eliminated and I was able to not only play the game start to finish, but also enjoy it immensely whilst doing so. Performance still left a lot to be desired, with frequent drops below 60 at 1440p with an RTX3080 - and without RT enabled of any kind, I might add - and the HDR implementation is completely broken, but it was still a playable and enjoyable experience.

As for the game itself? Well, there's really not much to say except "it's like Dead Space" - helmed by the same designer who created Dead Space, this is that... just with a different name. The animations, the attacks, the stomps, the glowing light health system, enemies bursting out of vents, it all just feels and looks and PLAYS like Dead Space. Even the story has a lot of similar elements, which isn't a bad thing but definitely compounds the fact that ... well... it's more Dead Space. I enjoyed it a lot, the visuals are quite beautiful, the audio design is excellent, along with more-than-competent VA, it's a good game.

... just a shame about the terrible technical issues it launched with on PC (and, to a lesser extent, Xbox too. PS5 seems to have been the platform of choice with the least and minimal issues, gotta love those 150 Sony-sent engineers eh?)

Do I recommend it? Egh. In the absence of a "Maybe" option, it's a hesitant "Yes". The developers are continuing to fix the remaining technical issues, so if you enjoyed Dead Space then I'd say pick this up once it goes on sale ;)

Hell yeah I'd recommend this.

It's another janky Spiders RPG with enjoyable combat, an engrossing story, and plenty of bugs and engine issues... yet none of which ultimately hamper the game itself. Yeah, performance can be incredibly rough in some areas, but it's such an engaging game with an excellent combat system that you eventually just stop caring when the framerate drops.

I'm not a Souls fan, so I have immeasurable gratitude for Spiders implementing what they call "Assist Mode" - an optional setting that impacts nobody who doesn't enable it, and for those of us that do; we get to adjust various gameplay settings to make it slightly more accessible. Want your stamina to regenerate faster? Sure! Want to take less, and deal more, damage? Go for it! Find losing your currency on death to be unlikeable? turn it off! Numerous options you can tweak and enable to make your experience more enjoyable .. there's simply no downside. Use it or don't, play the game how YOU want to play!

Sadly, if you're into this, but a great many achievements are bugged or glitches or whatever, as they didn't pop when they should - egh, it's a worthless metric anyhow.

All in all, issues aside, t'was a bloody good game with excellent atmosphere and a damned fine story. Well played Spiders, you continue to satisfy :)

This was fun! Short, sweet, and astonishingly nostalgic.. it genuinely felt like a warm happy memory of playing this originally on the Game Boy, so many years ago, despite the fact that it's brand new and quite possibly could never run on the GB in the first place :D

What an absolutely magnificent remake of an already magnificent classic jRPG :) They took everything that made Seiken Densetsu 3 so good, and amped it up with a modern 3D twist, all without sacrificing the heart and soul of the original.

This is how you do a remake!

Gorgeous visuals, excellent VA, breathtaking remade soundtrack, and tweaks to the combat system that made it much more of a joy to play; case in point, the original game stops action when you cast spells which makes mages all but useless due to how arduous it becomes just to play the game. Here the action continues during spell casting animations and attacks, it's a small change but an utterly crucial one! The ability to attack and run without consuming a stamina gauge is another greatly-appreciated tweak.

Yeah, this was excellent, truly excellent and I wholeheartedly recommend it to Mana series fans or action-based jRPG fans in general!