Recent reviews by Ken Arashi

This review is spoiler free*
A good second attempt, but quite disappointing for fans who played Xenoverse 1.

Between the two games, the only thing you can really highlight are the minor differences, because for all intents and purposes, it's the same game but with a few fixes to gameplay. extra characters and a new city.

The things that they have actually improved upon and fixed are actually numerous, The way instructors work now took out the pointless grinding, Super Saiyan is more balanced instead of a hit ultimate a million times to win button. There's more characters, more skills, more clothing, improvements to the different races. That's all nice.

The story however, is buy and large the exact same as it was from the first one, and there were a lot of moments in the ending that either make it obvious that there will be a Xenoverse 3, or that it will be cleared up in a DLC mission that we don't have yet. Things like that can be good if it's highlighted well enough as a cliffhanger, but in this case, two events happen, and the consequences are not shown or hinted at. You as a player get a choice after each event. The choices boil down to "DURRR OKAY" or "DURRR UH-OH", only for an NPC to tell you that your choice doesn't matter either way, and it's never mentioned again.

The game is fantastic as DBZ / Super fanservice, all the right attacks are there, it feels great to blast someone with a Galick Gun or blow them away with a Special Beam Canon. The fighting is fast and frantic, and it's fun to zip around each area with the freedom you get from the flight mechanics. But again, a lot of it is there completely unchanged from the first game.

As a Xenoverse 1 player, I found myself so bored by the sameness of the story missions that I ended up doing all of the parts that were actually interesting, the Instructor Quests, the racial quests, until they forced me to go back to the story which I was now horrendously overlevelled for. There were a few cool moments in the story that came from getting to import my character from Xenoverse 1, but these moments were very few and far between. The actual story payoff of the character import comes very far into the end game, but they never mention why your new character is literally repeating the same missions and fixing the same exact scenarios that your old character had in Xenoverse 1.

Now arguably one of the most fun things in Xenoverse, is the fact that you have a character that can learn every attack in Dragonball Z, dress them however you want and find a build of cool skills to try out and test and see what feels good or what plays well. You obviously need the different attacks to do this. I mean, what sane person wouldn't want to be able to get a ton of skills and abilities?

The chance of a skill dropping in a parallel quest is pure RNG, and sometimes, RNG really likes to make you its ♥♥♥♥♥. So to get a single skill, in Xenoverse 1, I'd spent hours playing the same quest, over and over and over and over in order to get a single skill to drop. One quest I cleared upwards of 30 times. Playing the same tiny sequence of events, for hours, just to get one single ability to unlock. There are hundreds of Parallel Quests, all with the same RNG problem. It was one of the most widely complained about issues in Xenoverse 1, so I honestly couldnt believe my eyes when the same quests were in Xenoverse 2 untouched, and with the exact same grindy RNG artifical gameplay extending BS as the first game. They literally didn't listen to the community whatsoever on this.

----------------------Bottom Line--------------------------------

Xenoverse 2 feels too much like an expansion pack for Xenoverse 1. I give it a 6/10.

If they had listened to community complaints, spent more time on making sure that mandatory tutorial quests were not bugged, and actually made a new storyline, this could be a 9/10 for me.

As for whether or not I would recommend this. If you've played Xenoverse 1, ask yourself if you're okay with purchasing a £40 expansion pack to Xenoverse 1 that asks you to start from Level 1.

If you're a newcomer to the Xenoverse series, I would recommend this game, as it's the definitive version of Xenoverse 1, and you wont miss anything from the first game.

Thanks for reading <3

A really fun little hybrid between character action game, RPG and dating sim / visual novel. Has a fun and unique combat system and one of the few games that I actually enjoyed playing on the highest difficulty.

Akiba's Trip is full of esoteric anime and Japanese culture references, mainly due to the fact that it's a highly detailed virtual recreation of the real life Akihabara in Japan. If you want a game where you can customise your character to look almost exactly how you want it to, then this game is for you.

I found this game to have some really interesting customisation options. From the generic Torso, Legs, Head and accessory slots, there's also a slot to customise how your character walks, and how your character finishes off enemies. In addition to this, upon completing the game you gain the ability to play as nearly every character in the game as your lead character. You can also customise other lead characters in this manner.

The customisation mentioned above is obviously bare-bones at the start, as your options increase as you unlock them through playing the game. Some options can only be unlocked after clearing the game, meaning replayability is through the roof as everything is unlocked after playing through the game about 6 or 7 times.

Aside from the interesting customisation system, replayability, and fun anime / game references; the gameplay is solid, easy to understand, fun and varied.

I found my favourite part of combat was trying out all of the different makeshift weapons, as every single one has its own moveset, animations and effects in combat. From what I can tell, there are over 100 different weapons, from wooden swords to laptops and dakimakura, that's a hell of a lot of combat variety. Even with all this variety, you end up finding a moveset you love, and for me it was my trusty ol' High Quality Wooden Sword (which I upgraded to "godlike" status along my several playthroughs).

In terms of story, the writing and dialogue isn't too bad. About as good as you can expect from an RPG in a modern fantasy style setting. But still it's no The World Ends With You! The music is fantastic, and the ambient sound ringing through the town of Akiba as you rampage around really makes the game feel like a bustling, living city when it comes to the atmosphere.

Now to adress the elephant in the room. The titular (s)tripping. It might put off a lot of people, or embarrass those who want to purchase it / play it but are afraid of people on their friends list saying "Ew, are you playing a porn game?".

I assure you, the stripping scenes are presented in a more humorous way, rather than sexualised or erotic. 90% of the time the most you see is a characters underwear, and if you manage to chain strip your way to a finisher where you remove the underwear as well, everything is coated in a liberal layer of censorship sparkles, so there's no chance of seeing any actual nudity. If you're worried about the game being gross and derogatory towards women, there's actually a very even split of the genders when it comes to enemies. You'll be releasing just as many men from their textile prisons as you will women.

Sadly there is weird unrealistic boob jiggle physics where apparently every character with breasts has them made out of some kind of gravity defying super jelly. But I guess when you buy an anime game, it's part of the package, so to speak. Titty physics seems to be the calling card of a vast majority of Japanese developers, love it or hate it.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this game for all that it is. A tongue in cheek modern fantasy game where you use giant anime pillows to beat the clothes off of vampire-like beings until they melt while you wander around the mecca of games and anime.

(Also if you dont like how the game looks in terms of colours, there's a visual editor feature where you can change literally every colour hue in the shader. So if you want you can make it look like a clown exploded on your monitor, or hey, turn it all brown and enjoy playing Call of Moe: Modern Waifu 3)

A classic RPG. Chances are that if you enjoy any RPG's at all, you'll most likely find something you like in this.

This is a port of the iOS version of Final Fantasy III, so it has an upscaled 720p version of the graphics. With that being said, things still look quite primitive and blocky, and the battle arenas more often than not look like you're stood inside a disc floating in space with a jpg wrapped around it. If that kind of thing is absolutely unbearable to you, than maybe avoid this title.

If you dont care too much about graphics, and you're all about the gameplay, FFIII works on a classic turn-based system, and has a classic Job system that Final Fantasy is renowned for. Character classes and archetypes are classic, recognisable and feel unique enough to make a difference in how you fight. If you've played Bravely Default, Final Fantasy 5, Final Fantasy 10-2 or even some of the Dragon Quest games, you'll feel right at home here with this classic rendition of the Job system.

FF3 provides you with quite a challenge at times, especially with the bosses, and even some monsters (Lookin' at you chimera mage) Can surprise you with an attack that can wipe out your party if you're rushing too much. I'm not saying be prepared to grind for years, but if you try to charge through, you're probably going to get frustrated when you reach the next crystal boss.

Some of the achievements are a serious pain, such as the 100% Beastiary and 100% Treasure achievement, due to some areas where certain monsters are missable completely, and the same is true for chests with no possibility to return to those areas. The last achievement that can be annoying is the "Jack of All Trades" achievement which requires you to reach Job Level 99 for every job, with every character. This is literally a matter of grinding, and even using optimal methods, it will take you several hours of mindless boredom and repetition to accomplish.

Overall, aside from some of the grinding, and the graphics leaving something to be desired, I'm proud to have this title in my library, and you should be too! Fingers crossed that Square finds it within themselves to bring more and more FF titles, and other RPG's to Steam.

A love letter to Stealth fans. This game takes its place amongst legends in the stealth Genre such as Thief and Metal Gear Solid, but it continues to bring it's own style and flavour to the table.

The world is impressive in both visual and narrative aspects. The graphics are nice and well suited to the game itself. The Gameplay is fantastic, with the wide range of abilities and options you can truly figure out your own playstyle in this game.

Fantastic game, I hope for a sequel, if not direct then another that takes place in the same world. But until that day comes, this game has enough replay value to keep me going.

A very interesting game where the gameplay is derived from your music (Can you tell I like these kinds of games?). The storyline is this otherworldy demon has infested your music library with demons, evil and other bad things.

The overlords of these demons infesting your ear tubes are the corrupted souls of our histories great composers, such as Bach, Beethoven and so on. The only way to "Liberate" your music from these tortured souls is to collect the 5 pages of the "Symphony of Souls". You get a third of a page each time you beat an overlord, and they get tougher to beat each time you fight them until the third time, where you free them for good.

The gameplay itself is a lot like Gradius, or Touhou, or Ikaruga. You only shoot in one direction unless you have powerups that let you do otherwise. As you play songs, you'll unlock weapons belonging to that song which you can use to customise your ship.

The ship customisation is very in-depth, and overall, this game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome.

A quirky and interesting DDR styled RPG. You attack, defend and regenerate MP through hitting notes during a song, and it gets pretty intense at times!

The artwork is very pretty, the music is awesome and memorable, and the gameplay is fun as hell.

The storyline is well crafted, with funny and interesting characters, and some very natural, yet entertaining dialogue. I had a lot of fun with this game, and still come back to replay it from time to time even though i've 100% completed it a couple of times.

There's a very intriguing meta aspect to the game that only shows itself if you're interested in getting ALL of the achievements. However, I thought what the developer did was novel and impressive, and quite reminiscient of the Portal ARG, but on a smaller scale.

Overall, this is one of the best Indie titles in my game library, and i've got a lot of respect and admiration for what Sequence is, and managed to do.

Amazing roguelike dungeon crawler with random character upgrades for each run. Random areas, random enemies, random bosses, random items and loot.

If you get this game, get the Wrath of the Lamb DLC as well, because it pretty much doubles the game content! Amazing game, tons of fun to just drop in for a 10 minute run, or to play for a good few hours!

Intriguing tetris style action puzzle game. In Chime, the music builds in intensity as you do better, there's 5 awesome songs, and a bonus Portal level set to Still Alive, which just doubles this games level of awesome.

A damn good game if you've got 15 minutes to kill and you don't know what to play!

Simple, yet complex, while being addictive and incredibly fun. The game is quite a grind-fest, but character upgrades such as levels, weapons, gear and pets keep the feeling of progress going, not to mention the fun multiplayer aspect and combination of character classes.

Dungeon Defenders is definitely an awesome game whether you only have a few minutes to spare, or want to sit down and play for hours. I found myself staring at awe at the gorgeous visuals of the levels and different parts of the game even before i'd set up to fight in that level.

A beautiful and fun game that is worth every penny spent.

Nostalgiagasm, epic fast paced gameplay, gorgeous graphics, amazing music and hours worth of sidequests all wrapped into this awesome little package. Pick it up, if you've ever liked any Sonic game, you won't be disappointed.