Recent reviews by That Melodic Shart

Re-writing this because I finished a couple days ago (and I'm still playing).

This game is an actual masterpiece. A far cry from what anyone could've expected from such a small team, and it really puts all the AAA companies to shame.

This game single-handedly defines gaming as a form of art. This is what happens when a game is made for the consumer and not for shareholder.

Sandfall absolutely killed it.

While I'm loving the gameplay and I'm probably not gonna stop playing soon, I'm keeping my thumbs down on this because the optimisation is garbage, and the story is so much more forced upon you that you can't help but to hate it.

There is no reason why this game should be this intensive, we had the beta and the benchmark which performed significantly better, but now suddenly we get the game with our wonderful parasite Denuvo, and the game can barely run.

I'm on a 3080 (well above the recommended) and my GPU usage is capping out on Low/Medium settings. How the hell did Capcom not learn from the disaster that Dragon's Dogma 2 turned out to be?

My thumbs stay down until that venereal disease of a DRM ♥♥♥♥♥ off, or Capcom cleans this up.


As for the story, good god. I wouldn't have a problem with a MH story normally, because it never mattered, but instead of Capcom realising that nobody cares about some grand story in the MH universe and we just wanna play the game, they instead doubled down and shove three times as much of the most ChatGPT vomit of a plot I've seen, while using the moments between hunts to turn you into an escort NPC that can't move faster than the NPC let alone look in the other direction at times.

The game is good. It has it's flaws sure but what MMO doesn't?

There's a lot of takes on here that are valid, and a lot that are definitely a reminder that we are on the internet in 2024. Visiting some of these points from a critical take:


This definitely needs work, it's not necessarily bad, it's just that it predominantly has mobile UI vibes and there needs to be some option or adjustment to allow for a more intuitive UI design.

For example, smaller icons in the storage tabs. We don't need gigantic buttons taking up the only 2 rows we can see at a time, or the gigantic chat window that takes up the whole width of the screen.

It's definitely an inconvenience, but not crucial to the game experience as some UI elements are very customisable and I just hope we see that in more aspects.

There is one exception however, the map needs more detail on the tiles or something, and maybe make it easier to find the user on the map, the tiny white dot with even tinier blue cone is not intuitive. It's very difficult to navigate it even with the tools provided.


This is a non-issue that people have been throwing around like a boogeyman. Yes you have to have a different gear set and level a different combat skill for each zone, but that doesn't mean you throw those gear sets away. It means that every zone has it's own progression. Chapter 1 does not end at Chapter 2, these are just different progressions, and nothing is "reset".

This might sound like an inconvenience, but the game has super simplified how to handle gear swapping to the point where it takes 2-3 clicks to do in the space of a few seconds.

I think a lot of folks aren't understanding that this is a healthy way to deal with the future of the game's content, every chapter having it's own progression means you never just arrive anywhere overpowered unless you've put your work into that zone.

This does not eliminate the purpose of gathering professions either, as you will need to use the gathering skills from different zones to craft certain items from any chapter at any point.

In other words, nothing gets reset, this is a gross miscommunication.


At this time the game's progression is solely your own progression. For those who play OSRS (or dare I say RS3) think of it as Ironman for now. But this is the result of collating early access feedback. The dev has stated that they will be adding in PvP and trading into the game. Other features will be added in time based on community feedback as stated by the dev himself.

While a lot of folks might see this as a bad thing, I think it's again a healthy way to approach this. Especially with trading. Having to understand the playerbase and how they may effect an in-game economy is a crucial thing, as this is always the first thing that gets exploited by botters in every MMO, resulting in a decline in interest for trading and interacting with players. Will it solve that problem? Of course not, but I think this is an approach that serves as a deterrence to that exploitation.


Brother if you came here looking to play Runescape, turn around, and go play Runescape. I love OSRS, and sure I came here to this game because I have an interest in OSRS, but if the game actually played any similar to OSRS, I would just go back to that instead.

They've given this a unique spin whilst keeping the fundamental progression of the old days of Runescape. It's not going to be the same thing, why would it? That would serve no one.

It's a game with professions, quests, tile based movement, and progression that reminisces upon the old days of MMOs when MMOs were thriving in quality. But it is not Runescape, it is it's own thing.

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At the end of the day, this is not going to be a game for everyone. This is not going to be a clone of an old franchise. This a fresh and humble take by passionate devs, in an industry that's polluted by greed, incompetence, and FOMO practices.

For all it's core values, this is a good game. If you like it, awesome. If you don't, well at least you didn't have to pay, right?

There will be spoilers. TLDR at the bottom.


First off, I'll start by saying the new dungeon mechanics and trials are definitely good, they've taken difficulty a bit more seriously with this expansion and this was needed. I don't always agree with vertical scaling of difficulty but this did take a more lateral approach and added some creativity which was heavily lacking towards the latter half of Endwalker.

Some of the zones are nice, I personally enjoyed Shaaloani the most. The music is hit or miss for me personally, the songs aren't bad, but some will become extremely obnoxious with time or do not fit their setting, especially the Crash Bandicoot theme of Tuliyollal, hub zones having drums that assault your ears are not hub zones I ever want to sit around in.

The graphics updates and the 2-channel dye system are a welcome addition, even if the dye is still heavily limited, it's still something. The graphics have gone a long way, the only negative I can say is that it's not ideal for those with lower specs, but there's so many layers to that onion that you can't necessarily fault SE for the change.

Now to get into the real crux of the issue - the MSQ.

I think it goes without saying that nobody was going into this expecting the next ShB or EW, it's unfair to say that anyone who didn't like the story didn't like it because it wasn't as spectacular as those patches. It's a ridiculous take, and disregards the concerns that most people have already brought forward.

The writing in this expansion was weak, it was all tell and very little show. It was very clear that they chose this medium to afford themselves the task of actually showing, through retcons such as using a voidgate asset as a portal to another shard (presumably the 9th), and having Y'shtola just randomly say "btw not all voidgates go to the void" the moment it's shown.

You spend hours in the early parts of the MSQ trying to learn about the world through being told about it and zero substance to back this up.


You go to Kozama'uka (bird village) with Wuk Lamat to be told that a storm had recently killed several people and ruined their homes. There's a few torn structures, but the real issue was the fact that no one acted like anybody died, even though they repeatedly tell you that this small village of people had casualties, surely someone would mourn or grieve, but instead you get silly little scenes where the main character of the expansion and the village people just dance around and smile and just have nothing to show for this devastation that was wrought upon them.

This chapter wraps up with a plot that retcons the way aether works, showing some dying crops that aren't fully grown, turn into fully grown healthy plants ready to harvest after 1 drop of aether and in another case, a transfusion of wind aether. Aether does not speed up time. Never in the story has aether ever been established as a force that can speed up the growth of things, by that notion you could force feed a child aether and they'd become an adult. It makes no sense.

Urqopacha's chapter doesn't do anything egregious at first, but they tried to turn the MSQ into some kid's story book about the straw millionaire. It was long, and completely unnecessary. That entire chapter could've been written out and nothing in the story would change. The part that was really stupid was the kidnapping section, how are a group of scions standing 50 feet from Wuk Lamat, unable to see that she was taken captive by the equivalent of a trash mob. It was such a forced sequence that made no sense and the resolution was once again a tale from a kid's book.

I don't have any real criticisms for Yak T'el, I think the development of Bakool Ja is welcome, and personally I enjoyed Shaaloani for the most part.

I'm not gonna touch on the design for Heritage Found, Solution 9 and Living Memory, I was never going to be a fan of those to begin with but I'll keep my take out of this review as it's mostly personal preference, but I will just say the sense of urgency is so lost when exploring these zones. You're in the middle of a war and going shopping with the queen of the enemy nation is somehow a priority.


Let's just get this out of the way right now, Wuk Lamat is a poorly designed character. This has nothing to do with the VA performance, I personally think they did a good job with the hand they were dealt, but Wuk Lamat as a character is insufferable.

I don't think many people would've had a problem side-charactering for her if she just wasn't designed to be such a farce. Every 2 seconds she takes on a new anime protagonist trope, it's tiring, and fully lacks consistency. Remember how she's always been afraid of boats? Scroll up a sec and look at what she's doing 30 seconds into the gameplay trailer. Yep. Anyways.

She lacks any structured development, constantly wavering from serious to stupid, written like a child's picture book character, she's impossible to take seriously, even when we're trying to discuss how to help a land that gets ravaged by a storm and her people are suffering, she just acts like comic-relief without the comic or relief, it's so unbelievably forced and unwelcome.

The best I can say about characters in this expansion are regarding Bakool Ja and Koana. Both took on very big developments in their characteristics, none of which just happened overnight, they were well designed characters, seeing Bakool Ja slowly get humbled and still be himself but for the better, and Koana being a mystery that slowly emerged from his shell, these were great.

As for Zoraal Ja, that was unfortunately just a very typical villain story with no point. This antagonist tells us about his reasons for betraying his father, was because he wasn't given the throne, even though he had the chance to be given the throne and failed it. He resorts to betraying everyone at the end of the competition, murdering his companion and going into "the golden city", later returning to announce that he's powered up and has apparently still been harbouring this grudge for 30 full years, proceeds to kill his father in another dishonourable act.

After all the transgressions and chaos, the innocents slaughtered, the city laid to waste, he could very easily have achieved his goal upon his initial siege, but he decides no. He must battle Wuk Lamat in an honourable duel later and cancel the siege... Very consistent. It also ends with us going 8v1 against him because of course it does.


I see so many takes about how this is building a new foundation on the world, but nothing about how this is disregarding and throwing aside factors of the world that already exist.

I've already explained my issue with the aether retcon above.

Moving onto more serious factors, why is there no mention of the Final Days? The whole world was attacked by Meteion's assault, yes only areas weak in aether experienced the full force of the assault, but as the EW role quests had shown, there were still cases all over Eorzea of several people becoming Blasphemies, but this just didn't happen across the entire continent of the New World?

What's going on with the (supposed) 9th shard? How does a shard with such an outstanding force, and such a huge advancement in weaponry not be noticed by the Ascians upon their initial plan to rejoin the source? The Ascians had always utilised the most powerful forces of nations to aid in their goals, but no one thought to go use space-tech that can travel between shards without the assistance of an Ascian to lay waste to anyone opposing them?


I have no more room to type so I'm ending it here.
If you like deep-lore, you'll be disappointed.
If you like Disney kids movies, maybe this is for you.
Dungeons/Trials are fun though.

I finished this last night, and had some time to think about a lot of the DLC, and it's hard to say whether this was a good or bad DLC. My real opinion is mixed, because in some cases this DLC was great, it started off strong, you go into big open world once again, get humbled by the decrepit old man wielding a dagger, and get stomped on by your first boss for hours. It was a good fun start.

Where it starts to sour is mostly due to a few bosses, including the final boss. Which is really sad, because the rest of the DLC was great, but these handful of bosses undid all the goodness of the game.

I won't go into too many spoilers, though there may be some hints at things here and there, but here's a summary of the problematic features:

- Cheap attacks are everywhere with these bosses. The bosses in this DLC are turned up to attack at almost every interval, so finding a window to strike is far less doable, but adds to that fun challenge of learning and figuring out the fight, but where this goes south is where bosses have instant flicks they can do that cancel their current animation to hit you for more than half your health. In other words every window of opportunity you have can turn into you losing half your health/dying, it's purely RNG.

- Overlapping attacks, this has become too present, especially in the last boss fight, where you simply can't evade anything. Boss will do an attack, you roll, but the end of your roll launches you into another attack. Now normally I would just learn to roll in a safer direction, but fights like the final boss fight make it impossible. For example, you will get attacked, and the boss repeats this motion 3 times in a row with almost no time in between, before doing it one final time, in each of these strikes, there are strikes happening all over your position, you can't stay still, you can't move, you just have to pray RNG is in your favour.

- Mismatching hitbox to models is a huge problem in this DLC, it's everywhere, it's not so bad for some bosses so it's like "eh whatever" but when you're up against certain enemies (specifically a mounted one) who charges at you with a hitbox that requires you to perfectly dodge, you will almost always get clipped by some hair that flew off the mount's ass 5 meters behind it and take full damage.

- With all that said above, Scadutree scaling feels redundant, at level 16 (out of a supposed 20) my damage to the same old starter mob has barely increased, and I can still get taken down by them in just a couple extra hits, I don't feel the progression I felt with the base game at all, in every part of the game you get smacked down like it's nothing regardless of your level.

I feel like a lot of this could be resolved very easily with a few tweaks here and there, making the cheap shots do significantly less damage and/or making them less frequent, ease up on the overlapping attacks, fix hitboxes to match what the player can see, and possibly reworking the scaling in general.

Boss design this time around was just lazy, there was a disregard for flow and just wanted to make everything random. I get that they wanted to make the game hard, but in most cases it's become a thing of RNG and not of getting good anymore.

I wish I didn't feel like the urge to make this review, but after getting the flattest ending to the biggest challenge I've had to put up with, and getting the most tone-deaf response from the devs about how you just need to get stronger with the Scadutree fragments, I just felt disappointed overall.

I'm not finished with this game, and my review will be so unbelievably biased due to my love of the previous game, but you can't stop me. Everything about this game so far has met and exceeded expectations.

If you feel like you're super smart and definitely not victim to the Dunning Kruger effect, then this is the game for you, go show off your skills and learn how wrong you are truly blessed you are, this series is calling for you.

Don't listen to those devs saying that "this is an anomaly" or "don't raise the standard/expectations" or any of that other garbage. This was the direction games were headed in 15 years ago and greed got the better of the industry.

From price to quality, this game makes AAA devs look like chumps.

I still have more to play of this game, but I know I've barely scratched the surface. The most I can say in the way of cons is there are a few graphical bugs I've had so far, but they've been so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hilarious I hope they never patch them out.

The game is a journey you make up as you go along. Maybe it's not for you if you aren't into turn-based games, but there are so many other reasons this stands out, so I would recommend anyone give it a try.

S-tier game

I wish I could forget everything and do it over again...

Imagine buying an early access game, playing it for 2 hours, then downvoting and complaining it's not a full game.

For real though, at this point in time, it's got a decent amount to do, and the developers are more than reliable enough to continue pushing out the development of this game + more.

I have way more faith in this team than most (if not all) AAA devs.

If you're a fan of the old, get it. If you're new and worried about early access, try the first one. That's the best way to demo what this game's potential will be.