Recent reviews by Ani

First things first, as for technical quality the game doesn't work out of the box, as the right stick actions that involve rotating the stick are not read by the game. This is due to the deadzone configuration provided by the game's default layout, which is wrong, I had to change deadzone size to allow the stick to be used on the full range. Besides that, the game is quite janky, I had to set Music and FX audio channels to 10% while keeping Voice at 100% to be able to hear the voices, otherwise the voices were completely muffled and unintelligible. The Bink Video cutscenes have poor quality but you can install a mod to improve them. Another big problem is that the game is also 60 FPS locked for no good reason besides them not wanting to properly unlock the game for PC while porting it.

As for the game quality, visually, the game shows its age, it's a very straightforward PS3 port of a game that already wasn't one of the best looking titles the console had to offer, it could really use a remake. The forced camera behaviour that they used to try to have another element to add to a cinematic experience often gets annoying, I think this came could really use a free camera movement option. Many of the quick time events are useless for the story and do not change the outcome whatsoever even if you ignore all of them. Soundtrack felt very reused, I can only remember that one OST playing for most of the game, and often being able to feeling the hard audio cut when it loops.

For the positive points, the story is quite interesting and I didn't expect many of the plot twists as the story developed. The achievements are quite fun to get but you will need a guide to get the missing ones as they are all set as hidden achievements so you can't know what you have to do beforehand. Game has native support for Sony controllers with the correct UI elements, which is crucial on a game purely based in quick time events.

Overall, I still recommend it, as the story is very interesting, even more if you like 20th century crime games. Runs perfectly on Linux, has a very fair price and no anti consumer tricks. It's quite a short game and one of the PS3 era's must play games.

A game similar in gameplay style to Journey and Abzu, another great game from Don't Nod in a genre they haven't tried before. As I was playing Chapter 4, I got some strong Made in Abyss vibes in a certain area, which was super cool. Soundtrack is pretty good, but they went with the audio design decision of not playing a lot of soundtracks throughout the game, to let you feel the loneliness while climbing up. Good detail in game settings, specially audio where they even allow you to configure audio dynamic range.

Technically, this game does not feel optimised at all, but Unreal Engine 5 might be to blame here. Having a R9 5900HX + RX 6700M, and even after lowering settings a lot, I couldn't run the game at stable 1080p 60 FPS, for something that visually could have well been developed for the Vishera era APU of the likes of PS4. Movement was often janky, with the character sometimes becoming stuck out of nowhere on some invisible object and requiring some button spam to get out of it.

Surprisingly it has native support for DualSense with the corresponding UI, a fair price and no attempted anti consumer tactics by the publisher. Easily a must purchase, despite the technical issues.

It's Trackmania, was fun 15 years ago, and still is fun today.

The shortest VN from studio Key, a nice way to get into visual novels for those looking to do so.

The game does not have native controller support but it can be played with a controller if you use Steam Input with layout Keyboard (WASD) and Mouse.

After you play this, there's an anime only sequel that shows events past the VN's ending.

No officer, I didn't use the x-ray zoom-in feature on the anime girls' clothes

Port issues:
- Only has Xbox controller UI, no PlayStation UI
- Resolution doesn't go above 1080p
- No graphical settings
- Game crashes if you try to open steam overlay

A bunch of talentless parasites took over the game from its original studio and proceeded to launch an update that censors it. Stick the update up a certain place where the sun doesn't shine, too bad for you that the good version of the game is already eternally preserved both on PC and consoles.

What a delicious experience from Ninja Theory, this is the type of innovation we need in video games.

Overall it's a good game from Acquire Corp which follows the artstyle of Octopath Traveler, but with a tactical RPG battle system and without an open world.

There are some low resolution textures, mainly for the ground, as well as weird background textures outside of the playable square area, which breaks a bit the immersion of the pixel artstyle that is otherwise very solid on Octopath, forcing Anisotropic Filtering to 16x and other settings through UE4 config files does not change this whatsoever. The game is also locked to 60 FPS for no reason without an in-game setting, needs to be unlocked through UE4 config files by overriding the max FPS setting, other settings such as Bloom also need to be configured manually through the .ini engine files as they are not exposed ingame. Also, as expected from Square Enix, the game doesn't support PlayStation controller prompts, so you need to play with Xbox prompts even if you use a DualShock/DualSense.

Some plot points are weird, specially the one at the beginning of Chapter 17, but the story is enjoyable overall. The soundtrack is also enjoyable but there's no track that really stuck on me during the whole game.

As for the battle system itself, it is quite unbalanced at best, it almost feels like it's designed to force you to play the New Game +. Just following the story, grabbing the items on the floor - which by the way, sometimes are not possible to spot unless you wander around the whole area spamming X - grabbing the spoils when possible and buying materials to upgrade/enhance your characters is not enough to be on the required level/power for the battles as the game progresses on certain harder battles - and this while playing on Normal. You're expected to grind EXP but the game is not open world and there's no real way to do it that fits the story unlike in Octopath where you can level up between areas. To try to reduce the impact of this, they made it so that if you lose a fight, you can retry it but keep the exp/level that you've earned when fighting the previously lost fight, so you get stronger when retrying fights, which feels like a band-aid game design decision.

I think it's definitely worth a try but this game is not worth the selling price of 60€, it's worth 30€ at best, so if you see it discounted go ahead and give it a try if it interests you, but don't go into the game expecting something at the level of Octopath Traveler.

Take notes Square Enix: now remove Denuvo from Octopath Traveler 2 if you want me to buy it, otherwise I will continue to ignore it like I did with this game until it was removed.

Negative review because the full game has Denuvo.

Will re-review after Denuvo is removed from the full game.

Miku ☑
Picross ☑
Delicious!