Recent reviews by Tsuki

A remaster so faithful they even remastered the performance issues. The stuttering in the open world actually gives me a headache if I play too long. Sorry, but my nostalgia goggles are not thick enough to ignore this.

Yoshi P gave us one week to beat this. It wasn't long enough.

Bought after watching a Warden of Time, a rock, and a nephilim play.

It's fun for a while, but it quickly feels like after you've won about a dozen times that you've likely seen what there is to see. I'm sure there's still plenty of heroes, items, and enemies I haven't encountered, but there isn't enough to really draw me into continuing to play. There's no meta progression, no over-arching narrative of any kind, or any real reason to build and get attached to your characters beyond your current match. I suppose Darkest Dungeon has just ruined me.

Don't get me wrong, it is fun, and I got my money's worth. But I don't expect I'll be playing this for hundreds of hours.

Are there glimmers of fun? Sure. Is it better than it was during its disastrous launch? Absolutely. Is it worth it? No.

This game just does not respect your time or your money.

If you're trying to get into Fallout, go play New Vegas or the first game. Hell, even Fallout 4's lackluster RPG elements and bad writing can be smoothed over with enough mods. The only reason to play this over any other Fallout game is so you can play online with friends. But the grind is near insurmountable, and your time (and money) is probably better spent elsewhere.

An important trendsetter that has gone on to inspire many more games that have evolved and refined the mechanics presented here. While I find HoloCure to be the superior and more entertaining game, I will always respect this indie and come back to complete the new achievements they add to keep this damn game on my profile showcase.

Can't believe Baldur's Gate 3 won GOTY over this masterpiece.

This game is mostly amazing, but slightly overrated. It has a lot of minor flaws that quickly add up over a 100+ hour playthrough, and the overhype this game generates really makes those flaws all the more souring.

Firstly, I am completely unfamiliar with DnD and was gifted this game and persuaded to play with some friends. My first 10-15 hours of this game were some of the most confusing onboarding I've ever had playing a video game. Part of it was due to my friends already being very familiar with DnD and BG3, and so they were always running ahead and doing everything to progress the game while giving pretty terrible lessons on the various mechanics. But also, the game itself just seems woefully unprepared to really teach you the necessary basics and mechanics of DnD that the game's core is built upon. As a newcomer, there were so many stats and terminology that I had to wrestle with trying to understand, and it just felt very frustrating. It wasn't until I took some time on my own to do my own external research with videos and wikis that I was able to even understand the basics of the game. By then, I was able to enjoy playing, but my god, what a horrible first impression this game had. If you are a newcomer to DnD, be prepared for an insane learning curve.

As for the rest of the game, as I said before, it is mostly amazing. The story is pretty average, honestly. The first half of the game presents you with many really broad objectives that just serve as background dressing while you explore the world and get involved in various conflicts and clash with different factions. The story is very versatile and very dependent on how you interact with the world and its characters. It's a strong strength that only video games can really take advantage of, and it's really cool to see the outcomes and consequences of certain choices and actions. But I wouldn't say it's a great story. It just doesn't have the same narrative punch as a more linear and deliberate story would. I had much more emotional highs experiencing the stories in Final Fantasy XVI and Phantom Liberty than this game.

Companions and their questlines is where I'd say the writing excels the most, and where most of its heart lies. Unfortunately, if you're playing this with more than I'd say one other friend, you'll likely not even get to experience most of these questlines. It also just dampens the story overall the more people you have altering the world and progressing the story and quests on their own. At most you can only listen in on what one other person is doing, and depending on how disciplined your party is, the story and writing quickly becomes a mess as you try to keep track of characters someone else talked to and choices someone else made. If you really want to experience the best of this game's story, you should probably play alone at least once.

Otherwise, the music is serviceable. I don't think it's as amazing as Lies of P, or FFXVI, or even Octopath Traveler 2. But it does its job adequately for the long journey. It really suffers from just being such a long game and a lot of the common themes playing too often and the better special themes playing too scarcely. Performance is really great up until Act 3 where it takes a significant dip with the massive increase of NPCs it has to account for loaded in. But it wasn't so bad that it was unplayable like Starfield's launch.

But now, we get to a lot of the minor issues I had whilst playing. You can chalk a lot of this down to maybe nitpicking, but honestly, it adds up quick with just how long the game is.

• Warlock multiclassing is bugged so that you cannot select to use a Warlock spell slot to cast a non-Warlock spell if you have normal spell slots remaining to cast with instead. This severely guts the strength of Warlock spell slots replenishing on short rest.
  
  
• Sometimes AI controlled enemies and allies will take several seconds after completing their actions and movement to actually end their turn. This isn't so bad at the start, until it happens consistently throughout the game and absolutely drags the pacing in some of the larger-scaled battles later in the game.
  
  
• When interacting with objects that need an item to be inserted into them, a small window will pop up with an empty space. Clicking on this empty space will bring up your inventory and cover 90% of the first window. You will then need to drag the first window out from under your inventory to the side, so you can drag the appropriate item into it. Similarly, when accessing a container and and opening your inventory at the same time, the inventory will often cover the container window. And if you try to open more containers like when trying to sort your camp chest, many times the newly opened windows will spawn completely behind your inventory screen, making you close you inventory, drag the new windows to the side, and then reopen your inventory.
  
  
• A severe lack of ways to actually sort your inventory or even your camp chest. You can try and stuff items into various bags and pouches, but with no way of renaming them so it's a mess trying to find and organize what you want without opening every bag each time, and then you run into the issues in the bullet above. You also cannot open your bags in the trading menu, meaning you have to pull the items you want to sell out of your bags preemptively, which can be a hassle.
  
  
• No official transmog or reskin system. Real shame that your characters will often be wearing a mix-mash of gear and the only real way to get any outfit cohesion is by trying to dye everything the same color.
  
  
• Speaking of which, no preview on how a dye will look like on a piece of gear before you use it.
  
  
• Dialogue options may sometimes bug and you will only be presented with the choice to "Continue" and presumably pick whatever option 1 is in dialogue. Considering how important and crucial dialogue is in this game and how powerful it can be at changing the game world and characters' viewpoints, this is a pretty annoying issue to have.
  
  
• And most horridly, there are an alarming amount of fruit baskets that actually contain only vegetables in them.

So, yeah. Would I still recommend this game to others? Yes, with the warning that the learning curve can be massive and they should probably look into external guides on how to play first. But I still don't think it's the masterpiece people make it out to be. But with enough mods and maybe some official patches, one day it might be.

Quality over quantity. Starfield wishes it was half as compelling as this.

The only flaw with this expansion was that the gimmick in the "Somewhat Damaged" quest definitely overstayed its welcome. It became frustrating, really killed the pacing of the climax of that ending branch, and also undermined some of the character moments in that sequence.

I am glad that King of Wands was my first ending as it was my favorite. It feels like V really bonded with So Mi and saw a kindred spirit in her similar to Johnny. Harnessing Blackwall powers, the pleading with Reed to just let So Mi go before having to finally draw your gun on him, having Johnny reflect on Songbird's actions and actually being glad she made it out alive while watching the shuttle launching... it felt like the intended ending, to me. It feels like helping So Mi helps V and Johnny move forward just a little bit more, Reed gets some semblance of peace in death, and you get to give the finger to Myers.

One of the best games in the genre, honestly. It's absolutely criminal that this didn't get nominated for best soundtrack or sound design at TGA.

I personally found the deviations from Fromsoft's games to be a nice and refreshing experience. People will often critique this game by comparing it to Bloodborne and Sekiro where it takes some obvious inspiration and complain that it doesn't play exactly like those games or that the mechanics are haphazardly slapped together. I don't really believe that to be true.

This game seems to value patience and places a lot of emphasize on blocking. There are three major forms of mitigation: dodging, perfect blocking, blocking and regaining chip damaged by attacking. As you'd expect, perfecting block is the most ideal, but the other two have their place if you can't nail the timing perfectly, and I never felt like an enemy was being unfair or needlessly difficult.

I've read so many comments that say that the enemy design is bad because the tells are unconventional or that blocking feels inconsistent, and honestly I think it's just the Fromsoft mindset being too ingrained into them and it prevents them from learning this game's specific mechanics without resorting to comparison and calling foul. It seems like those people will likely never be satisfied with games that are not made specifically by Fromsoft, even though many of Fromsoft's games have many of their own flaws too, and it's a shame since this game definitely manages to prove itself and stand on its own.