Recent reviews by [̲̅i̲̅̅c̲̲̅̅E̲̲̲̅̅̅̅]~°ت

Top tier coop game. Every new level had me and my friend surprised with the level design and mechanics, and had us looking forward to seeing what came next the whole time.

Excellent roguelite. It has a solid amount of content, good sense of progression, and most importantly it's extremely fun. There's even more content in the upcoming 2.0 patch and I'm looking forward to it.

Unfortunately there's no online coop but Steam Remote Play works well enough.

Fantastic games. I've never played the originals and had a great time with these two games.


- Short and sweet. Clocked in under 15 hours on a first playthrough.
- The story is lighthearted with great pacing, and enjoyable and funny dialogue from the cast and characters.
- A good amount of the cast of 108 stars is surprisingly memorable despite the sheer number of recruitables and short playtime.
- Creating a party of whoever seemed cool is a perfectly viable way to play.
- Combat isn't that deep, but is quick and enjoyable. Most of the fun comes from party composition and rune assignment.
- Not grindy at all. There is a catch up mechanism to quickly level the members that aren't frequently used.
- The battle speed up remaster feature is greatly appreciated.
- Visuals look good.

- The inventory management system is annoying. There are limited slots per character and no shared inventory. The game holds up very well for its age except for this point.
- Adding onto the annoying inventory management, swapping armor between characters is annoying since you cannot see the stat changes.
- Speeding up battles also speeds up battle music.
- There are missable recruits, though looking up a spoiler free missables guide and playing with that in mind is not bad at all.
- Transition screens between zones is a bit long.
- The autosave feature added in the remaster is pointless since it only triggers when you enter a room with a save sphere.


- Longer gameplay time while maintaining good pacing and touching story moments. Took me about 35 hours. Easily would be longer if I explored more.
- Story is more fleshed out with a larger focus on war and conflict of ideals. It's still a lighthearted adventure and not that deep, but the stakes are bigger and emotional moments hit harder.
- The second game keeps what's great about Suikoden I and greatly enhances each element. The inventory system is a good example. There is now a bag for shared inventory, armor switching shows stat changes, and rune slotting is easier to manage.
- Visual fidelity is particularly impressive in the second game, especially the fire/water and improved expressions from character animations in and out of battle.
- There's a lot of charm in the first game, and the second one elevates that with more likeable characters that have their own unique quirks in battle
- Seeing familiar faces is generally great. It's particularly nice in Suikoden II because they mesh well with the new cast and have their moments without hogging the spotlight.
- There's more music in the soundtrack.
- The remaster has a new feature to pause the event timer, allowing time specific quests to be completed at your pace.

- The map is overall bigger, there's more freedom to explore, and recruits have more complicated criteria. This is actually a good thing, but it also means there's more backtracking, confusion on where to go next, and getting places is sometimes tedious.
- Battle music is still sped up when battle speed is increased, and the autosave is now even more annoying since there's one right before you enter the room you always go to to progress the story. This is annoying because the screen transition time is long when autosaving.

Overall excellent games and I'm very happy to have been able to experience them.

positives:
- hunts are engaging and the monsters are really fun to fight
- the core gameplay loop of hunting monsters and crafting weapons/armour is rewarding. the monster hunter series' strength doesn't lie in its story, and the same goes for this entry. it's just there as a vehicle to progress through the game and get to the end game content where the fun really starts

negatives:
- story is not great. but the monster hunter series never had the story as a strength
- ui is confusing
- multiplayer is archaic and has a bunch of hoops to jump through just to play with friends
- performance is terrible. a game that looks like this should not run as poorly as it does
- the game is not difficult. the previous entries had walls to overcome and forces you to change your gameplay to accommodate different monsters. in this entry you can just spam attack and dodge every once in a while for every fight til late end game
- low monster variety
- unless you like grinding the same monsters over and over again and trying out different weapons, there's not much else to the game

overall this is a great game with an extremely engaging core gameplay loop with tons of replayability

solid game. has ultrawide support and runs at 90 fps out of the box on the steam deck. this is my first saga game and the inheritance system alongside using skills to level them up were enjoyable mechanics that set it apart from any other jrpg i've played

there isn't much to write about the story and characters. there's a serviceable story to drive the events of the game, but the core focus is the combat loop. strengthening your characters and building your party is enjoyable and rewarding, however i find myself running away from enemies a good amount of the time since it can get tedious

overall it's a great game with good replayability to try out other classes, spell, and party compositions

solid dlc. the new storyline was great with moral quandaries in your decisions, and the new characters were compelling, dogtown fits right into night city's atmosphere and integrates seamlessly into the base game. the new content is enjoyable but also pretty small, the dlc has much better value at sale price

it's like overwatch, cept my friends will actually play with me

solid coop game. great progression system where both players make progress no matter whose world you're playing on. exploring is super fun and rewarding. not a great game if you don't like the gameplay loop of going through the same worlds over and over again to try new builds and find new loot

great game that follows persona's formula and greatly improves upon its many flaws

the story is full of hype and intriguing moments that kept me wanting to see what happens next. the pacing is solid for the majority of the game, leaving very few "dead days" where you're simply wasting time and waiting for the next story beat to happen. the story isn't particularly deep, the politics are weak, and the subject of race doesn't serve much purpose other than setting the protagonist up to unite the people. the world, characters, and combat carry the game and the story is pretty much just entertaining

the social links are guaranteed to level up when you spend the day with them. in the persona games you're pressed to pick the most optimal answers when spending time with people so you don't feel like you wasted time. this alone makes the game infinitely more enjoyable where progression isn't hampered by arbitrary choices that encourage you to google things instead or reload a save over and over

combat is woven neatly throughout the days between story events. in the persona games, you're encouraged to clear the story dungeon in one day then spend 2 weeks or so talking to people. in metaphor taking trips to dungeon locations also allows you to spend time with certain characters and keeps the gameplay loop from going into heavy blocks of combat followed by visual novel. the overworld action combat is alright and much appreciated to help clear trash mobs. the turn based combat borrows from smt and is very enjoyable

the gameplay experience of metaphor is basically what i wanted persona to be. a more tightly woven experience with major quality of life changes and less fluff. the main downsides are characters aren't that lovable, the ending drags on a bit too long, and everyone still talks too much. the archetype system is cool but is slightly clunky. overall a very entertaining and fun experience

i enjoyed the ending of persona 3 reload, though the journey to get there was abysmal. it takes far too long to get there with so much meaningless crap along the way. the pacing is horrible and it's an absolute slog to get through

- the game is a yap simulator where 90% of dialogue has hardly anything of consequence
- for the first ~30 hours of the game, literally nothing of note happens. the story doesn't progress at all
- when the story progresses or something of interest happens, the game goes back to mundane and uneventful activities
- the social links are garbage. they're front loaded with nonsense for the first 6/10 times you talk to them, then they focus on a singular issue that doesn't have much depth or impact
- tower climbing is monotonous and boring
- although good, there's like 4 songs in the soundtrack
- the last few ingame months are good but are paced terribly with long stretches of shallow interactions and tower climbing
- there's very little motivation and backstory to the villains. they just show up and start obsessing over salvation