Recent reviews by Splat-A-Tat

In Like A Dragon: Ishin!, you play through as Sakamoto Ryoma during the “Baka Mitai” period

Challenge: Get through your first playthrough without using Retry

Edit: I write this after beating the game because I am somewhat surprised the game hasn’t attained an Overwhelmingly Positive rating, even when not considering the immense amount of praise it has received, as I believe the game matches and exceeds the quality of other beloved Atlus (mainly Persona) titles in terms of writing and gameplay.

This game does not make it a secret it pulls most of its elements from other Atlus games, and to those who expected something revolutionary from Project ReFantasy, it’s understandably disappointing to just see this new IP be “Fantasy Persona”. However, though it’s individual elements admittedly and initially seem compromised under analysis, the complete package flows together very well nonetheless.

Somewhat of a stand-out for me is the writing of this game. Though the character writing is unsurprisingly one of the game’s strongest points, the meta and social commentary was a noticeable improvement to me. I was initially drawn to Persona 5 with its stylish themes of rebellion against society that had appealed to me at the time, but while I overall liked the broader messages it communicated at its end, the execution of its concept was extremely underdeveloped and stagnant in my opinion past the first two dungeons (though its portrayal of the villains were seemingly more accurate than I had thought in hindsight). While Metaphor does not say anything revolutionary about discrimination and prejudice, I felt it utilizes these themes in a consistently well-executed manner throughout most of the runtime and accurately nails down both the human causes of these feelings and the external factors that continually perpetuate it, even if most of it ultimately boils down to a variation of the “power of friendship” at the end of the day. At the very least though, these themes lend themselves excellently to world-building, and the meta elements of the narrative were genuinely clever and well-executed. Though the plot itself does not reach the heights of P5, Metaphor’s plot doesn’t come close to its lows either.

As my first experience with Press Turn, the gameplay is satisfying but smart, especially on harder difficulties, but it unfortunately falls into the same pitfalls as late game Persona where you’re doing incredibly absurd Phys damage, bypassing your actual interaction with many game mechanics. If you know what you’re doing, you can avoid taking any damage for literally any fight after September, including late-game and final bosses. The Press Turn system still made me adequately plan my actions as I made an active attempt to not take any damage by that point, but if you don’t care for that or play on a lower difficulty the game becomes a cakewalk - nowhere close to mainline SMT.

I also felt the game had some issues with deadlines and pacing, somehow being a more eventful and non-eventful story compared to Persona. There was section of the narrative I felt was missing an entire dungeon even. Gameplay progression also felt off as many interesting Archetypes that’d grabbed my attention never saw use as arbitrary restrictions made them far outlive their usefulness by the time they got unlocked. There was also very little happening in the final month for the story, making me really want to just wrap things up fast. The game is already long enough as it is, but there should’ve been more time spent on some more important elements and seeing more of the physical world in my opinion.

Overall, it’s a great game that is undoubtedly worth your time, but I express doubts if this gameplay framework can really set the foundations of a distinct third pillar for Atlus. It works great as a 35th Anniversary game but I’m not sure about anything beyond that. Still, I feel the game has definitely earned much of the praise it’s achieved at this point.

Infinite Games

This game is pretty ♥♥♥♥ phobic

Retconning Kaito to be attracted to women was an extremely bold choice

Yagami harasses a woman for a week straight then gets her killed, another 10/10 RGG experience

Say NO to the world 🗣️🗣️🔥🔥

I forgot how goated this game is. It has a surprising amount of content (especially on Steam with the Workshop) that even buying it at full price with all the DLC is worth it. I’d say it’s one of the best indie games ever honestly

With high system requirements, questionable artstyle decisions, and overall performance issues, this is not the definitive way to experience Portal, even if you have a capable system.

The stuttering issues mentioned in the other reviews seem to stem from a flawed Frame Generation implementation, as turning it off eliminates stutters, but at the cost of a lower average FPS. This is very perplexing, as one of the points of this game was to show off the benefits of Frame Generation, but ends up making it look worse in the long run. It really speaks to the quality of this demo.

//

RTX 4070
Ryzen 7 7700

DO NOT PLAY ON VERY HARD