Recent reviews by Carrington

NGL, a lot of the minigames and assorted nonsense are just kind of bad. Shogi is bad. Fishing is bad. Many sidequests are bad.

Here is the greatest criticism I have, though: the combat? Really bad! It's like 2009 level bad.

I still love Kiryu and Majima. I won't platinum this game unless a desperate bout of depression and need to create something with a veneer of 'lasting' push me to it. Which is possible.

It'd be impossible to explain what this game means to me, so I won't try. It is the best game I have ever played.

EDIT: I regret to change my previously positive review of the game, but I feel an ethical obligation to do so. I believe Shigeru Miyamoto once said that you should never be prevented from completing a game because of a prior mistake, and while LoP does not formally make completion impossible, I am certain many players will find a certain point in the plot insurmountable.

At the point I mentioned, the game removes your ability to fast travel, to fully respec, and to buy most consumable items. This is before a boss, and there is no warning whatsoever. I anticipate fan rejection of what I've said, so please check my achievements: I beat the boss. It took a few tries, but I did so. I am also a veteran player of this genre, and I do not expect every player to be able to match that. 'Git gud' is not a response to a flawed game. Asking $50 for a game you may have to hard reset 2/3rds of the way through is not acceptable. The developers made a catastrophically bad design choice, and I will remain a negative review on LoP, regardless of its many other high points.

Original review follows:
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So Lies of P is a good game. I want to stress that, and I'm going to highlight the highs first.

1) The records are some of the greatest music ever encountered in a game. They are just perfect, that sweet, melancholy, aching sort of composition. I invite anyone to hear Feel and not think about the people they've cared about most, and yet lost. I invite anyone to hear Fascination and not just feel the pain of life drawn up and exposed, like someone expertly massaging a knot in the back muscles.

2) The bosses are good! They're quite good, they're nice.

3) The opening levels are great, just fantastic design.

Okay. I really like this game. I wanted it to succeed, and it's a miracle it did. These are the things that don't work:

1) The level design past the first third is awful. If the designers didn't want you to simply run past every encounter, I have no idea what they were doing. If they *did* want you to run past every encounter, that's awful. That's just bad. The frustration of every level will ramp and ramp and ramp for artificial, stupid reasons, and you just have to roll with it if you like the game.

2) The bosses aren't amazing. I required no more than three tries on any boss so far, and I'm near the end game. Most bosses I one shot. This ties back into complaint #1: the difficulty of this game is bad design, not legitimately interesting design. You won't find Friede or Orphan or Malenia (so far, in my experience). You'll get a *ton* of Abyss Watchers-esque fights. Just so many. None of them are as good as Abyss Watchers, or Nameless King, or any other 2HB From boss you want to name, but lord will you have to fight them anyway.

3) The story ain't great. It's fine, but it won't scratch that weird itch. I started finding holes and just, like, 'why is this this way' things early on and it never gets better from what I can tell.

4) This is stupid, but Hotel Krat is obviously a modern-ish situation, the walls don't look Belle Epoch at all. Also, where are all the bathrooms? Does Geppetto pee out the window?

I've been trying to love this game for three years. I can't even like it. This isn't a good game, and everyone suggesting it is living a life where they're trying to derive meaning from glories past. 2016 was a good game; this is not. Games are not getting better, they're generally getting worse. We live in a reality, era, and society where polish and craft are, and will be, increasingly punished, and this game was the harbinger of that trend.

There's not much positive to say here. We're not going to have a nice time.

Heartily recommend that horrible fog that makes you go insane!

Santa Claus suffocates woman in beach house as her partner sleeps beside her. Details at 11.

I got out of the tutorial, turned right and a dragon ate my face.

The love for this game is obviously based in nostalgia. Direct comparisons to games like SDV are being made as though this is remotely comparable. It's not. The controls are clunky and unrefined, the dialogue is stilted and some of the worst in terms of JRPG cliches I've encountered, gender ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is rampant and the story feels like it was written by a middle schooler. The combat is nothing special and really adds very little to the game, and the farming feels like an after thought.

If you like SDV and can find this on sale for ~$10, it's probably worth picking up, but understand you'll be fighting with it and often reloading because the controls caused you to destroy/gift something important.

Is Bannerlord as good as or better than Warband? I would argue yes, it's in fact better, though with the caveat that much of what made Warband great (the mods) is in a constant state of flux right now. But, for an early access game, this already has so much to enjoy in it that there is absolutely no reason to wait. If you love or loved Warband, Bannerlord is absolutely worth trying out.

Pretty much all the high points have been covered, so I'll just say: buy this, not Dorfromantik.