Vintage Devilry の最近のレビュー

Capcom's DLC business practices for SFV should be enough to kill it outright. I paid for two season passes and felt legit nasty after the second. I won't continue to enable their greed and naked contempt for the people keeping them in business. You shouldn't either, because it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gross.

Update 12/13/18: They've now added in-game ads to a game that costs well over a hundred dollars if you're a completist and need all the characters/season passes/stages/etc. Even better, they're hiding Fight Money behind the ads being enabled. Predictably, the forums are alredy flooded with sycophants rushing to Capcom's defense of this astonishingly anti-consumer move.

If you continue to support this game, you're absolutely part of the problem.

There are a lot of fighting games on Steam now. Some of them substantially better than Street Fighter V. Stop bending over and try something different.

Now I know you're looking at those sprites and wondering if Romancing SaGa is some long-lost cousin to all those classic Final Fantasy games you know and love. Abandon this train of thought immediately. In fact, if you're in any way expecting a nuanced plot, developed characters or a linear structure, start mashing that "back" button as hard as you can. If you're impatient or easily discouraged, abandon all hope. The SaGa games hate you and they'll do everything in their power to ensure you don't enjoy them. They're hard. Really hard. Instead of leveling up, you improve individual stats based on how each character participated in the preceding fight. New skills are acquired quite literally in the heat of battle by (what seems to be) total chance, and that's not even getting into how the multiple weapon types influence what you learn. None of this is explained in-game. It feels like there are a million underlying systems at work, and all of them are actively trying to kill you.

And yet...

To the chosen few of you (masochists) that are undettered: you are in for a treat. This particular installment grants you an entire royal dynasty - complete with recruitable allies and subjects - to gradually sharpen across multiple generations into an unstoppable death squad. The objective? You've gotta kill seven resurrected heroes from antiquity that don't seem particularly heroic this time around. That's it. How you accomplish that is up to you.

Pretty ambitious for a Super Famicom game, isn't it?

While the original version launched way back in 1993, what we're presented with here is a port of the mobile remake. As with SE's other mobile ports, it's pretty shabby. You have no graphics options to chose from and have to force fullscreen if that's what you prefer to use. The mobile UI has been retained and of course looks hideous. The remake itself is actually quite nice, keeping the sprites and excellent soundtrack of the original while updating the maps in HD. Of all the mobile remakes SE has published on Steam, this is easily the least offensive to the source material from an aesthetic standpoint.

As frustrating as I sometimes find this series, I've nonetheless always appreciated how unconcerned it is with trends or accessibility. If you're one of the lucky few that can appreciate Romancing SaGa 2's many quirks, an amazing experience awaits.

Recommended to those gamers, and those gamers only.

Great port that I've been running maxed on my middle-of-the-road system (i5-4590/GTX 960/10gb RAM/Windows 10). Much speedier load times than the console versions and you get all the aesthetic options from the PS3 version of the game, which means you can ditch the unnerving 3D portraits and horrific English voice acting straight away. The game runs at 60fps and there's a robust selection of graphics settings to play around with.

Sadly, the game still sucks beacause of:

- Creepy anime sex dolls vaguely emoting every trope under the sun at each other!

- tri-Ace's inability to develop a game that doesn't have annoying pacing issues - hope you enjoy being railroaded into talking to every NPC, grinding for levels and inventions to get past unreasonable difficulty spikes and wandering around aimlessly at regular intervals!

- A god awful racket of a soundtrack by Motoi Sakuraba that's so bad it actually tarnishes my memories of the preceding games' music!

- The worst characters in the series!

- Since it cannot be stressed enough, the WORST characters in the series!

- The worst writing in the series (handily unseating the previous champ, Till the End of Time)!

At least the post-game content is decent and you get four person teams back, right? Not sure why SE thought The Last Hope was the best introduction to the series for Steam users, but look at it this way: no matter which installment comes out next, it'll be an improvement. Maybe grab this one on the cheap during a sale.

This is a series I’ve been bouncing off of since Tales of Destiny hit western shores back in the 90s. Of the three games considered the high-water marks by longtime fans (Symphonia, Vesperia and Abyss), I only made it past the halfway point in Abyss; the other two bored me to death by the 10 hour mark. I can’t ever seem to see past the tropes, mediocre soundtracks and bland stories.

So imagine my surprise at discovering that Tales of Berseria (and to a lesser extent, Zestiria) is one of the best JRPGs this side of Falcom’s Legend of Heroes franchise. I’m actually a little shocked it’s part of the core “mothership” series considering the significantly darker, revenge-at-all-costs tone and its eclectic cast of anti-heroes, which in my opinion is the finest the Tales games have ever produced. I really can’t overstate how well-written and developed this group of misfits actually is; not a single arc is fumbled or neglected if you're willing to put the effort in to see them through. I grew to love them so much that I’m actually a little sad to leave them behind as I move on to a new adventure. The battle system is typically brilliant, bolstered this time around by an awesome mechanic that allows you to tackle two groups of enemies together if you can bunch them up on the map before initiating the fight. This allows you to both clear maps at a quicker pace and gain levels significantly faster thanks to the massive exp yields these brawls produce. Hell, Motoi Sakuraba even woke up enough to contribute a few songs you may actually remember when you turn the game off. And finally, I’m happy to report that unlike the other Tales titles on Steam, this one runs beautifully at 60fps.

That said, there’s one potentially major issue that needs to be addressed. Quite unlike Zestiria, which at times felt needlessly overloaded with maps and dungeons and activities, Berseria seems very small in scope with a few dozen areas you’ll be visiting and revisiting and re-revisiting across its 50+ hour playtime. If a lot of backtracking bothers you, this may not be the game for you. I was so enamored with the cast that it didn't grate as much as it might have otherwise, but by the last ten hours I was getting pretty tired of visiting the same two major port towns every time I’d sit down to play.

In all, though, I had such a blast that I’m going to retroactively explore some of the other Tales installments to see if I judged them a little too harshly. If they're even half as fun as Berseria, it'll be more than worth it. Highly, highly recommended!

Hell is other people.

Poorly optimized garbage. My system is more than potent enough to run this game, yet it stutters and jerks along like I'm trying to run it on a laptop from 2009. Memory leaks are apparently a massive issue, and the most recent patch has actually broken the game even worse than it already was. Definitely have a look at the discussions page before deciding to commit.

tl;dr: hey it's another lackluster Square Enix port!

Set in Larian's imaginative and light-hearted Divnity universe, Dragon Commander initially seems to be a heavily flawed RTS, with most skirmishes being too simple and too unbalanced in some way (entirely too easy early on, suddenly extremely difficult later). Mind you, these sequences aren't completely without fun, as the novelty of blasting through the sky as a dragon wearing a jetpack(!) is a satisfying one during the early hours of the game. But once that novelty wears off, what are we left with? Quite an interesting dynasty simulator, as it turns out! As the emperor, you'll enact new laws and social policy reforms for a variety of issues that have real-world analogues. Will you cozy up to the various factions in an effort to please everyone, or rule according to your own personal moral code? Do you marry for love or for political gain? No matter what you choose, be prepared to face the press and a fickle public. It's in these segments that Divnity: Dragon Commander really comes into its own, and why it deserves a sale purchase if you're even a little curious about it.

Remember that scene in Alien where Dallas hid in a vent starting at a motion tracker for five minutes until the Xenomorph wandered off enough that he could take three steps, jump into another vent and start the process over? Remember when Ripley had to backtrack like crazy and hunt down all those tools and key cards to get through the Nostromo?

God, that was a tedious movie. At least it was pretty.

I spent more time trying to fix this badly-optimized port than I did actually playing it. A rare misfire from Nixxes.

You should probably be playing Dishonored, anyway.

Keiji Inafune and his team at Comcept set up a Kickstarter to create a spiritual sequel to Mega Man, a franchise he put many, many years' worth of work into (but didn't create - I sure see that bit of misinformation being spread around a lot lately). It took much longer to do this than they anticipated, in part because they spread themselves too thin trying to port it to as many platforms as possible. Their plans and business decisions were frequently ill-advised along the way, but in the end they delivered what they said they would.

And now we're making Inafune a pariah because we were inconvenienced a bit, or had to wait longer than we wanted, or because the game doesn't look like a handful of concept art mock-ups shown during the pitch. I see people howling for blood, wanting to know what the money was spent on, apparently unaware that game development is REALLY EXPENSIVE and the 2.6 mil or so they actually cleared after Kickstarter fees and backer reward costs isn't anywhere near enough to make the HD, hand-drawn adventure they naively believed they were getting. I've seen Mighty No. 9's graphics compared to a PS2 game by people that apparently never actually played a PS2 game if they honestly think that's true. I've seen truly remarkable individuals boycott the game altogether because they hired a community manager that's openly a feminist. I've seen it bashed by professional reviewers for being too much like Mega Man. As ever, Kickstarters fail to understand that their pledge wasn't a pre-order, nor a guarantee that they'd get whatever they were envisioning when they hit that donate button. Yet here we are, awash in another sea of crowdfunding bitterness. I'll be glad when that particular fad passes, if only so I don't have to keep reading about this silly, entitled drama over and over and over again. It's a 20 dollar game about a robot boy that fights other robots, not a moral line in the sand. Mighty No. 9's fate was sealed long before it ever released, brought low by a bunch of manchild angst and internet slacktivists eager to turn EVERYTHING into a cause.

So, all that said, how's the game?

Frustrating, occasionally brilliant and surprisingly addictive. The dash mechanic gives a certain fluidity to the Mega Man-derived combat that even the X series only hinted at. This comes at a cost, as a lot of environmental hazards are basically rendered harmless and certain sequences intended to be setpieces fall a little flat. The antagonists sport some great designs (Dynatron and Battalion in particular are awesome), but you'll likely find the powers you gain from defeating them less effective than your standard blaster in most situations. The presentation and design of certain stages are cleverly done, yet others verge on being an afterthought. Yes, the graphics - much like the engine rendering them - are outdated, yet I was pleasantly surprised throughout by some neat lighting effects and fun little details that are there purely to add some character. You get the sense that if the game was ever permitted a sequel, we might have something really special on our hands.

Seems pretty unlikely right now, and that's a shame. Inafune wasn't out to swindle anyone. He was just overwhelmed, as so many before him have been when trying to realize a crowdfunding dream. If you're a fan of classic Mega Man and have an open mind, give it a shot. You might be surprised.