Recent reviews by LoliSauce

This game really surprised me with how fun it was. The combat is extremely "tactics lite", for lack of a better term, but the battles are pretty short and snappy, making it never quite feel like a chore. Character progression is pretty simple and intuitive as well, with a mix of external (active) and internal (passive) battle skills that level up through combat, items, and meditation. You also can gain special traits that grant all sorts of passive bonuses via character creation and in-world achievements. You level up via story events, combat, and meditation, and can raise your primary stats once every ten levels. Simple stuff.

The things that stood out as exemplary, though, were how the game handles things like travel, exploration, martial and political factions, and storyline engagement. There's an incredible amount of freedom in how you can engage with the game, and yet it has managed to "cut away the fat" from a lot of these pillars of play. There is no tedium to travel, and you can easily recruit animal companions to make cross-region traversal completely a non-issue as well. Exploration isn't an arduous experience of trying to find all of the hidden things around every nook in each stage, and each scene (and their secrets) are very intuitively laid out, or have maps and hints to guide you appropriately. There are tons of recruitable characters and factions you can join, many with their own small storylines to pursue at your leisure. There are dozens of endings and in-world achievements, most of which are quite easy to obtain and will reward extra player options on future plays of the game.

And even though the game is so easy to engage with and puts player agency and freedom first, the stories it tells are surprisingly varied in tone and structure and seriousness. It's been a really engaging experience, diving into this game. I expected a silly little martial arts tactics game, and got nearly a hundred hours of excellent wuxia short stories. Big thumb's up!

If you've never played Monster Sanctuary, and you love creature collectors, absolutely play this game. It deserves just about every word of praise it gets in the reviews. It has a great aesthetic built into every aspect of the game, puts player freedom first in the game's progression, and has a lot of features that clearly are designed with consideration toward making the player experience convenient to let us focus on the fun.

That said, my thumb's up on this review has an asterisk next to it, and my opening line is not subtle about why.

If you have played Monster Sanctuary, then you may still be able to enjoy this game, but you likely will be underwhelmed at the exploration, the combat, and the team-building strategies present. I've given both the Anode Heart demo and full game an honest try (at least 10 hours of play each), and although I recognize the many small improvements to the standard creature collector formula, it's simply not on the same level of fun or engagement as what I've seen is possible with larger changes to the core systems standard to the genre. I likely won't be finishing this game, though not because it's bad in any way, but simply because my own expectations are too high.

I've got a lot of mixed options about this game, though my opinion is overall more positive than negative.

The great:
- The game feels ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fantastic. Super responsive, which is crucial for such high-octane mech combat.
- Boss design and level design are at an all-time high in diversity. There's a lot of really fun and creative ♥♥♥♥ to experience.
- Creativity in building your AC is not only encouraged, it is almost required in order to tackle the various challenges the game presents. And the freedom to customize is, as always, as user friendly as it can possibly be.
- Replayability is clearly important to the game's design. You have effectively 3 different playthroughs of content. Although not all content is different from one play to another, there is constantly surprises and new things in store throughout each of those three playthroughs.
- The voice acting, mech designs, and overall aesthetic design is very clean and memorable.

The bad:
- Meaningful differences between weight classes is at an all time low. Both mobility and survivability are not significantly different between the heavy and light builds, because of the focus on learning and dodging boss patterns and the enforced reliance on healing via repair kits.
- Two major playstyles have been functionally deleted from the game (dual blading and sniping), as the game arbitrarily does not allow melee weapons or shields to be ambidextrous, and there simply aren't any gun weapons that can hit anyone effectively beyond 350 meters in distance. It seems like they want to enforce closer range combat in general, likely so that players have to actually engage with boss mechanics.
- The difficulty spikes in the game are pretty severe. Most stages will see even new players plowing through on their first or second try. Coral tech bosses will often require significant numbers of retries to learn boss patterns and/or alter builds to find a "right answer" to the boss mechanics.
- Multiplayer is in a particularly sad state after how much effort went into it in the 5th generation. There's no co-op play, the PvP netcode isn't very good, and there's no incentive to keep playing PvP at all. Also certain extensions completely invalidate the stagger system, which makes actual PvP really weird.

That said, the thing that matters most is that PCA officers canonically wield melee weapons in their right hand, so why can't we? The technology exists. Don't ♥♥♥♥ me like this, Yamamura.

Unfortunately, the game is currently in a state (Version 1.10) that I wouldn't consider fun, yet.

The game has some technical issues, with crashes happening in menus every so often (which almost always results in lost progress due to the way saving works), and it seems like any time you swap your current squad enough that it shifts the enemy levels, the entire game starts lagging massively (guessing ~15fps or so) until you relocate to another screen. I'm sure those issues will get worked out eventually though. The bigger issue for me was the drawn-out and stagnant feel of the game, lack of information on battle options, and lack of strategic depth to combat.

To address the first point, I spent my ~4 hour playtime trying to expand my ability to harvest resources (via upgrading tools), fighting battles to grow my team and the strength of my monsters, and progress one of the initial 5 main quest points. Despite the 1.10 patch making early game monsters easier on the resources/currency required to revive (recruit) them, it was incredibly slow paced and always felt like I was waiting just as much as I was actively playing. I was hoping the sluggish sense of progression would be offset by the battle system, which looked like it had some tactical elements going on, but it could really use some revision in its current state.

First big quality of life necessity that would make things better is to include information on what all of the character and space status effects actually do. Most of the skills say nothing about what the conditions do at all, and even when you are afflicted with a condition, I couldn't tell how to see in plain text what effect it was having. There wasn't even a help menu option to go over them. When some skills do absolutely no damage at all, and you're spending 7 MP for a status effect that has no explanation or standard gaming precedent, that really doesn't feel worth wasting the ONE AND ONLY skill slot you have unlocked at that point.

Second, being limited to a single skill slot really limits strategic depth at the start, and makes battles so absolutely routine that it's not engaging. Having two type affinity charts is nice and all, but when you have only one skill and no ability to change it outside of infrequent save points, that potential depth is squandered. Also, I would like to suggest that giving a quick visual indicator when selecting targets with a skill to see instantly whether something will be effective or ineffective is something we need in the modern day of game design. Encouraging people to memorize two separate type charts is really archaic when you can just have the highlighted space with the relevant monster just be highlighted a different color based on effectiveness. Lastly on these quality of life suggestions, please make skills auto-target a space that will hit a valid target instead of always targeting the top-left-most space. You're requiring more button presses than is necessary, and it's a trivial thing to put into the game. If not that, then at least allow for the player to undo commands, so that any potential mis-input can be corrected.

Finally, the value of strategic options seems wildly unbalanced. Not even the skills that you can attack with, but the actual tactical value of positioning itself. Front row gives you increased damage and pretty notable sustainability boost via MP regen. The back row weakens you considerably and gives a completely worthless amount of HP regen. It feels like it must be 5% or less of your max HP that you heal. My average monster HP at that point was 300-700 and I was still regenerating single digits most of the time. The Rest option also regenerates HP and MP, except only the MP seemed like it was at all impactful. I tried once to heal up someone from half health to their full value by putting them in the back row and having them exclusively select the Rest action for 10 battles straight. They managed to get to a grand total of 3/4 of their health, sustaining only the occasional hit. They would have sustained less hits by just staying on the offensive instead. Then you get to support skills that only have seemingly a 50% chance of hitting the tiles you're targeting, and it's just kind of like "Why are there even any options besides offense at all?"

All of these issues keep the game from being fun, but they very well may be fixed one day. Hopefully the game will reach a state where progression feels good and combat has the tactical value that they pitched in their video and home page.

Chained Echoes has a really bold steam page, but it really lived up to every expectation that it set. A friend of mine bought it for me as a holiday gift, and I simply couldn't put it down! For the sake of brevity, I'll put my summary up front: The game is fantastic. It's close to being the ideal JRPG, by my standards. Everything involving the Sky Armors is a little weak on the whole, and it could really benefit from more clarity and perhaps a Help menu, but it had me fully engaged and loving it from start to finish.

Now for the detailed thoughts.

First and foremost, the writing stands up on its own, rather than falling into every tired JRPG trope. The cast is very human and has a lot of charm. The story weaves together a lot of interesting worldbuilding into a solid plot that mixes political intrigue and large-scale saving the world fantasy. There were a number of reveals that caught me legitimately by surprise, and yet completely making sense in the greater continuity. Tastes will vary, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Second, the gameplay mechanics are quite well thought out on the whole. The reward board is a wonderful incentive to explore and try new things, yet doesn't intrude upon the natural flow of the game's progression. The Overdrive meter encourages building characters with adaptability as a focus, which as a player gets a more refined battle strategy, will naturally become an obstacle toward their battle plan. I, however, enjoy that it effectively prevents battles from getting too routine or boring, and introduces an element of improvisation to them. The mech battles, by comparison, became VERY routine. Gear shifting wasn't a bad mechanic by any means, but it did force a specific routine of timed up-shifting to manage your Overdrive and TP effectively. It left me feeling like I could turn off my brain and just go through the motions, whereas the on-foot battles required more engagement.

As an aside to battles, the milestone-based level ups via grimoire shards are an excellent addition. How skills, passives, and stats are split up into tiers are pretty interestingly grouped as well, as they introduce the most basic play strategy for each character first, and then gradually opens up to more diversity and specialization as you progress. Classes being a separate utility option to augment stats and skills is also a really nice convenience! As a whole, character progression and customization is very satisfying. Once again, mech progression and customization is simply a more shallow version of this, so it was fine, but not particularly engaging by comparison.

The only big point of criticism I have for the game is the major lack of access to information as a whole. Tutorial screens are impossible to review after their initial appearance. Status effects are often nebulous and not explained until some time after you gain access to or are exposed to them. There's no option to see detailed info about skills and passives, which often don't even use unified wording or terminology. That said, it's pretty clear that the developer has heard this feedback already, as there is word of a patch coming that will add various quality of life features. I eagerly await the patch to see what improvements it has in store.

I was gifted this game by a friend, but was not paid to review this game.

Despite the thumbs-up, this is a mixed opinion review. If you're picking up Gordian Quest for the rogue-lite experience, this thumbs-up is for you. However, if you want to play the longer form narrative experience (like me), then this game can fall a little flat.

There are four acts of the actual story (which was pretty well done and entertaining as far as simple, "save the world" type scenarios go), and a sort of post-game fifth act that follows after the story's completion. Fully completing each act of the campaign took between 20-30 hours for me, exactly as advertised. The issue with the campaign mode is that I had a fully complete build for all three of my primary party members before the end of act 2, and despite gaining another 30+ levels, there was never any meaningful change or growth to those builds for the entire rest of the campaign. To put it simply, the combat got stale. There were around 5 or so new enemy types with each new act, not counting unique bosses, but the actual mechanical differences from one enemy to another weren't quite impactful enough to stop me from just using the same strategy for the entire campaign.

That said, the game is still fun, and I can see how it was primarily designed for the rogue-lite experience, which plays out in a much faster and more frantic fashion. In my opinion, stick to that mode of play, and you'll likely have an amazing time.

For those with a shorter attention span, I'll put the important stuff first. Fae Tactics is one of the greatest turn-based tactical RPGs out there. What you have to look forward to:

• Amazing mechanical design. It's easy to learn and plays very fast, yet contains a lot of strategic depth.
  
• Writing on par with a quality young adult fantasy novel. It has sensible dialogue, an engaging cast, and a satisfying ending.
  
• Great art and animation. The portrait art's style is fresh and the sprites are beautiful.
  
• Solid musical score and sound effect design. It feels very frontier western meets urban fantasy, which fits the setting nicely.

I'm a huge tactical gamer, having been hooked on the genre from my young teens in the late 90s and playing through a wide variety of classic and modern titles alike. I've played this game twice through, once playing blindly on Normal difficulty back before the V1.009 update, and a second time on Hard difficulty at the current version of V1.010. Interestingly, my second time playing the game was noticeably easier than my first play, despite playing on the higher difficulty. This is partially due to just having more experience with the game, but also because of how well the game was rebalanced in the V1.009 update. There are still some summonable fae that are much more broadly useful than others, but the number of viable options for every strategy is much more robust now. The new gemstone equips are also incredibly influential, offering ways to tweak movement types, stats, or simply start a battle with one of a number of rare buffs. It definitely left me feeling like a kid in a candy shop with how many effective options I had at my disposal by the end.

The elegance in design of the game overall can't really be overstated either. You can only ever do three things in a battle: target an enemy to attack, target an ally to buff, or end your turn without doing either to self buff. The amount of variables to how those three things change from one unit to another is beautifully set up, and the progression of complexity is a very easy curve that spans the entire length of the game, with the single exception of the gemstone questline (which has a level of complexity to the enemies that exceeds that of the final boss). I've never seen another turn-based tactics game play so quick and punchy, yet still require so much strategy to both the preparation and execution of a battle. Really, hat's off to the developers.

Now to the criticisms, which are pretty sparse to begin with. Originally, I remember having issues with certain UI elements not having any explanation or tooltip, but that is pleasantly no longer an issue in the current version. The other minor gripe is with how late some of the cast's final weapon quests pop up. Some characters have their full kit available by the halfway point of the game, but others are so late that you'll have access to the "point of no return" final story sequence before the character's final story quest is even able to populate. It leads to some cast members feeling like they have much more diversity than others, at least in the initial play. It's worth noting that New Game+ opens the game with all prior equipment available from the start, including weaponry, scrolls, and gems.

More notably, there's no indication at all in the game that many character questline events (needed to unlock new weapons) require you to get kills and/or utilize their Ultra up to some hidden requirement. This only really becomes an issue if you choose not to use a character outside of their mandatory quests, though. The requirements generally seem to be rather lenient, as I managed to get all but two characters' full weapon sets blindly on my first run. Now that all of the cast is more balanced in effectiveness, I found myself regularly swapping between all cast members on my Hard run, and every character quest popped up without any grinding as a result. There's also no indication of a potential romance between two characters (a requirement for their "A" endings and one achievement), unless you just happen to have the first character in your active party during the second character's introduction battle. Considering that you can easily recruit the latter before the former, it's quite easy to completely miss and even permanently lock yourself out of those particular endings and achievement.

All in all, these criticisms easily pale in comparison to the mountain of praise I have for this game. Truly, I can't recommend the game enough, especially to veterans and fans of the genre. So please, treat yourself. I insist. You deserve it.

Edit: It's worth noting that at some point during my playthrough, some accessibility options were added to the game that allow a player to mitigate BOTH of the cons listed below, in addition to a number of other accessibility tweaks. A+ move on behalf of the developer.

I'm rather harsh on most attempts at classic/retro Japanese-style RPG design. I feel like all too often people are making the same poor design choices that were a relic of the time without thinking about how they could be improved upon. So when a friend recommended this game to me and it gave off a VERY big "I'm Final Fantasy with jumping!" vibes, my expectations were low. Color me surprised when this turned out to be the single best experience I've had in the genre to date!

Pros:
+ Exploration felt really awesome, and there are constantly ways for a skilled platformer to get to places far earlier than they should be able to. That was, in many cases, its own reward for me.
+ Class, skill, and gear diversity feels great. The game is really built to enable all sorts of build and team combinations, so creative minds will really be able to dig in. Optimization is also trivial, as you can easily respec and gender swap from early in the game. I absolutely love the amount of thoughtful and considerate design there is.
+ I never felt any crazy spikes in difficulty where the only answer was just to grind my way to overpowering strength. The progression curve was steady and as long as I was keeping up to date on new equipment, I always felt like I had a decent challenge without being overwhelmed on the Normal difficulty setting.
+ Both the Exp and Lp gain felt good. I would often master a class shortly after acquiring a new one of a similar role, so it felt like my team could consistently keep to a similar overall strategy while still progressing towards something new.
+ There is a fantastic amount of transparency and intuitive design present, especially in combat. You can very easily see all of the details of your characters, the enemies (including strengths and weaknesses clearly stated), which attacks the enemy will be using next and who they're targeting, and even which enemy skills are learnable are all available at a glance. It makes combat much more tactical, and allows for more interesting encounters.

Cons:
- There are only a limited set of locations that you can fast travel to, and each location requires payment for the items to enable the fast travel. This made exploration during the middle of the game (when you have few of your mobility options unlocked and money is tight) somewhat tedious, though it becomes less and less of an issue the deeper into the game you get.
- Money acquisition is the only thing that consistently feels too slow, and often is the only factor creating a need for grinding. Even just on Normal difficulty, I found myself regularly coming to a new shop after fighting literally every enemy I'd come across, yet with barely enough cash to buy even two or three items. It's no exaggeration to say that a lot of your experience is defined by your funds. Battles will become much more difficult if you're unable to stay properly geared up. Traversal between major regions will grind down your time and willpower without the money to buy fast travel stones. Even respeccing a character to try a new strategy against a tough optional boss requires a stack of cash. As it is now, money never truly feels like it starts flowing in at an appropriate rate until the endgame areas.

In conclusion, I highly recommend giving the game a play. I feel like it hits something for almost every sort of gamer, whether you're a tactician, explorer, completionist, casual player, or even just a fan of the classics looking to scratch that familiar itch. I feel like it could still use some tweaking in money gain before it hits the perfect spot, but even so, it's a fantastic adventure.

The game's not perfect, but I feel that it's definitely the best PvE experience Fromsoft has made to date. I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing so far, and will likely continue to come back to it for numerous other coop runs in the future. PvP doesn't have much incentive at the current moment and there are still a number of bugs and exploits that are steadily being ironed out, but all in all, fantastic game.

For those that are new to the game (and especially newcomers to Fromsoft's souls series in general), the most important advice is this: level your Vigor. You'll have a much better time in the latter half of the game if you've got a solid 40-60 in that stat. The endgame, in particular, is designed around the expectation that you'll be able to take 1000+ damage for a single mistake and live.

The quick and dirty review is that they tried to emulate Dark Souls, but somehow took all the wrong lessons from the game and didn't seem to actually grasp any of the subtleties of what makes it great.

Let's jump into some more details on the game's own merit (rather than as a comparison to other games), but first, a note about myself. I'm a long-time player and fan of the soulsborne series, having started with Demon's and with around 5k hours of playtime across the full series. I'm also someone who has an education in game design, for whatever extra nugget of legitimacy that may grant. I was interested in Mortal Shell from early on, but trepidatious at how little hitstun seemed to play a factor in the early footage presented, and now that I've finally spent a solid amount of time feeling out the game's systems, I've come to the conclusion that it has a few fatal flaws and a whole host of inconveniences. I also don't own the DLC, as I'm not interested in the alternate game mode.

First, and most importantly, the game rewards the wrong things. This is present in so many facets of the game, but let's focus on combat. The game presents three defensive options in the form of Harden, Parry, and Dodge. Harden is an awesome concept, allowing you to defend against a single incoming blow without sacrificing your offensive momentum. The problem is many enemies are not staggered by it (allowing them to still hit you as a result of multi-attack chains), or even worse, some can outright ignore it and damage you regardless of being Hardened. It is only situationally reliable, and requires blatant trial and error to find out when it won't work. Parry is massively powerful if you have Resolve to spend, but requires timing (which seemed a bit inconsistent for me at times, so the window must be rather small) and doesn't work against most enemies' biggest attacks. Your parrying instrument flashes bright red and makes a brief noise during the startup frames of any unparryable attacks, but you may have trouble noticing that as the ranged weapon on your back completely obscures the visual cue while locked on and the game's ambient music is nonstop violence against the player's ear. Oh, and if you don't have resolve, a successful parry either puts your opponent into a second of stun or puts you BOTH into a second of stun (giving you no reward for successfully executing it), depending on the attack you successfully parried. Once again, situational in usefulness, and has the highest skill requirement of use among the three options. Dodging gives you full invulnerability from everything, costs some stamina, and can be cancelled into a second dodge roll for additional distance coverage. The stamina cost makes it not a terribly reliable option while using low stamina shells, but if you're using a shell with moderate or better stamina, you'll quickly find that dodging out of the enemy's range is completely risk free and almost always gives you an opportunity to punish with your heavy attack (that has significant forward momentum), which can then safely be dodge cancelled again. Interestingly, this strategy works against everything I ran up against - whether mobs of any size or bosses - and also has the added benefit of exploiting every single enemy's paper thin AI process. It isn't even stamina intensive, as there's often enough time between when you dodge away and actually get an opening to punish that your stamina completely refills. The last half of my playtime was spent doing that exact same sequence of dodge, wait for the end of the attack chain, punish with heavy attack, dodge cancel back and repeat. It actively sucks the fun out of encounters when they are all addressed the exact same tedious way with no regard for having to learn anything more than "when are the breaks between enemy attack chains". I learned neat skills, upgraded my shells with new passives, got various bonus riposte effects I could swap between for parries...and yet, the most effective way to play was to actively ignore all of that and just keep using the same old tired pattern that flawlessly worked against every enemy and boss. Why bother with putting in the effort of learning how to play better when you can use the zero effort, zero skill, universally applicable answer to everything?

Second, let's talk about the environment layout and pathing. The environments are aesthetically distinct between stages, but often lack obvious landmarks for easy mental mapping within a stage, and frequently reinforce the player with a message of "don't bother with exploring" as there's often either nothing to be found, or a secret item that's just a run-of-the-mill junk item that has little value. The trouble is, they do occasionally (about once or twice per map) have one actually important hidden item nestled in somewhere amidst all the vast emptiness and trash consumables. It sends very conflicting signals, as if they want you to explore every nook and cranny of their world, but don't believe they should actually reward it 90% of the time. The other bizarre aspect is that, for most of the game's stage design being on rails, there are shockingly few shortcuts to reward successful navigation through objectives and encounters. To further stack upon this, enemies can't correctly navigate the stages. They will frequently get stuck on geometry or simply walk themselves into corners because they're trying to walk a straight line to the player instead of actually recognizing the path they need to traverse to reach you. This wildly reinforces just running through the stage, ignoring enemies to quickly rush down objectives without expending resources (such as healing items), which once again encourages player behavior of NOT engaging with the game (which loops back into the first point).

The final point is the lack of motivation they give the player. You are presented with a comical quantity of cryptic item and shell lore that seems to relate to various aspects of this bleak and pointless world, but absolutely zero narrative motivation to actually progress through the game content. The most you get is a giant bird-like prisoner asking you to bring it nectar, so that it might get free. That is legitimately your sole narrative direction to keep playing for some sort of implied payoff... except the payoff isn't even for you in the first place? Unlocking the various shells and weapons is only hinted at by a montage of 2-3 visual flashes of environment that you're intended to follow. There's not any narrative binding any of this, falling into the trap of just expecting the player to keep playing for the world lore snippets (which don't paint a particularly engaging story or offer any motivating drive) or the gameplay loop itself (which, we've already established actively encourages the player to ignore most of the content). As a result, I found myself not motivated enough to complete the entire game.

There are a host of other minor things that could be addressed, such as enemy poise reinforcing the no-skill combat loop, lack of meaningful difference between weapon movesets, reinforced behavior of spending time farming tar/glimpses/mushrooms, having to use items to find out what they do (including items that have outright negative effects), not being able to swap weapons in the field until you've completed an entire leg of the game, or locking the sole quick travel item in a shop that's only accessible after you've fully mastered a shell. Ultimately though, these are all minor inconsiderations of design and pale in comparison to the big three flaws listed above.