Recent reviews by 794

Amazing game, the short answer here is that yes, this is worth your money and time playing.

Starting with the good, the game looks incredible. I love the art style and it's definitely reminiscent of Torchlight, which is what led to me looking forward to the release of this game. Exploration is fantastic, and the world expands in a unique way that surprised me when it first happened. As you expand the map, the game does a great job of making sure you can easily and simply move and backtrack between sections of the world. The game doesn't hold your hand with where you're supposed to go and what you're supposed to do, although it doesn't really need to because everything is quite straight-forward.

Now onto the bad. The game doesn't just strongly recommend a controller, it straight up doesn't fully support KB/M. There are no prompts in the game that tell you what key to press, only prompts that tell you what action to press and you have to go through the menus to see what the controls are. The default KB/M controls aren't awful, but I don't see why they couldn't have put in the simple feature for people to choose their own controls and rebind keys. Using the map, especially the fast-travel map is not nearly as nice as I would have hoped, you can't use the mouse at all to select travel points.

For the most part, using KB/M wasn't that bad, though. There are only one or two instances of platorming that were a pain in the butt, but there's a lot of platforming in this game and the rest was fine. The camera is dynamic but locked, most of the time the camera was placed well but there were a few times it could have been better. The camera does a good job to show you hints about collectibles.

The game will keep you occupied for about 10 hours, give or take, depending on what kind of pace you play at. Exploring the world is amazing, which is exactly what I was hoping for. As I was playing the game, I was planning on making a point of how easy the game makes it for you to track collectibles. Once you see them they show up on the map so you can go back later and collect them when you have the necessary abilities to. However, now that I've finished the game and have collected everything that I had found, I realize the game does not make it easy to find what you're missing. Once you find an item on the map, it disappears. This means that if you want to compare to a complete map, or you want to look at your own map and see where the obvious gaps are, you can't tell what you've already collected. The map also doesn't show entrance points to dungeons, and it would have also been nice to be able to see from the main map which collectibles were left at what dungeons. This definitely isn't a game-breaker for me, but it did kill my motivation to 100% the game like I was originally planning to. I would end up having to either run circles around the world, hoping I look in the right places, or follow a video guide and redundantly visit every item location I've already been to.

In summary:

- Beautiful visuals, world feels alive
- Exploration is awesome and relaxing
- Combat is fun
- KB/M controls are okay but the only reason they aren't better is due to developer choice.
- Map is helpful for your initial world exploration, but awful when you're at the end and want to 100%.
- Puzzles are a little too simple and straightforward, but they're still engaging enough.
- Approximately 10 hours of regular gameplay.
- Performance is fantastic. I played at 5760x1080 and was running over 120fps on ultra a majority of the time, with only occasional dips down to the 60 range. Never went below 60. (GTX 1080)

Paid mods BS, Bethesda is losing their reputation big time. Highly unlikely I'll be buying any games developed or published by them in the future.

As for the game itself, also 'meh'. RPG elements have been completely gutted out, the game has no staying power and gets boring fast. The engine is old and runs like garbage, but they're too lazy and cheap to build a new engine from the ground up.

Straight off the bat I can see just how much worse this is than Hiragana Battle.

- Cringey voice over that if you want to disable, you have to lose all your basic UI sound effects as well.
- Battles are way, way slower paced and thus more time is wasted not learning. Characters yell the sound of the katakana they are attacking which sounds awful and makes the player less likely to sound out the katakana themselves. (Again, this can only be disabled if you also have disabled all of the game's basic sound effects.)
- Battles no longer have you select the character in a window showing the character in computer text. I liked this in Hiragana battle as it further cemented my memorization and allowed me to regularly see characters in both written and typed font styles.
- The writing animations in lessons are way too slow.
- Story is worse and gameplay focuses too much on being an RPG instead of actually learning like the first game did.
- BUGS. The game has been out for 8 months now and not a single patch. Really? Keyboard configuration is completely broken, and from reading what others have said there are even incorrect translations which will cause player confusion.

Overall I would have rathered a carbon copy of Hiragana Battle with katakana subsituted in than this mess. Personally I'd advise people to find another way to learn their katakana, which is exactly what I'm going to do as I'm now getting a refund for this game.

Very creative teaching mechanism that works quite well! If I had to crunch down on papers and paragraphs of strictly academic learning, there's no telling how much I'd lose focus and how much more drained I would feel after studying.

Throw in characters, gameplay, sidequests, and buying new weapons and armor, and things are suddenly more interesting. Grinding to level up doesn't feel like grinding, it feels like studying.

After 10 hours of gameplay, 9 of which is actual studying, I've got most hiragana memorized. Due to the fact some are more memorable than others coupled with the fact that some appear in the game more often than others, there are a small amount that take me a few more moments to remember.

In any case, I'm very impressed with how effectively this game taught me. It probably helped me that I took two years of Japanese in high school some years ago, but by now I had completely forgotten most hiragana.

I definitely recommend this if you want to learn hiragana in a fun and interesting way!

Devs are super active with game updates and are providing regular drops of new content and events. Art style is fantastic, music is great, voice acting is awesome. Gameplay is heavily reliant on RNGesus but it's fun to play with friends. The single player is also entertaining enough to play, but the AI can be pretty damn brutal.

And really, the game is cheap to buy even at full price. Well worth your money and certainly worth your time if you like the anime art style and games that you can sit back and relax while playing it.

One of the best VNs I've ever played. Incredible music, amazing art style, fun characters, good storytelling. Of course I want to get all the endings, I need as much of this game as I can possibly get.

I've heard rumours there's a sequel in the works. If so, I seriously can not wait for it!

Seriously, seriously fun with friends. Easy for people to pick up and learn, and it gets so fast and intense! Playing with friends collectively earns experience points to unlock new characters, maps, and items, which is how you do multiplayer unlocks right. I love that feeling of everyone contributing to earning new stuff to play with. I've got over 50 local multiplayer games and this is easily in the top 5, I highly recommend it.

Terrible port, as expected from Platinum. KB/M (keyboard and mouse for those who don't understand that) controls are crap, and it doesn't support wide resolutions. (AKA no wider than 16:9)

I'm a huge, huge G1 fan and it saddens me that I wasted my money on this game only to never play it. This game and NieR are what taught me that Platinum doesn't give a rat's butt about proper PC ports.

TIL Steam users aren't much better than console peasants.

Why a first person based game would recommend using a controller is beyond me. Plays perfect with mouse and keyboard.

Very nice game, I bought this solely based on the fact that it's made by the same team as The Unfinished Swan, which was an amazing game that I loved.

This game definitely surpassed my expectations of what I thought it would be, telling many stories in creative ways. I wish it had come to a little more of a conclusive ending with some more closure, but it was good enough still.

Only takes a couple hours to beat, may be more worth your money when it goes on sale.

Intense and addicting. As you get better with your reflexes and learn the progression of enemies, you get just enough better at it that you don't feel too enraged. Definitely the kind of the game you need to take breaks from after a dozen runs or so.