Arkveveen の最近のレビュー

Visions of Mana! The long awaited next entry in the oft forgotten Mana series. As much as I love Final Fantasy and many other JRPGs, I can't forget the colorful high fantasy of the Mana games. Visions of Mana is like if you took a cozy blanket and turned it into a game.

There's a few things that are wrong, and it's ONCE AGAIN with the mixed english voiceacting and writing. You're either going to get sick of it fast, or get used to it. I got used to it in Trials of Mana, so of course I did for this game. It's not entirely bad, some of the voiceactors give it their all, and there is some heart to the story. The plot is pretty standard, but bursting at the seams with charm, and I definitely like the themes it tackles. There are a few surprises in the story that almost made me cry, so be prepared!

There's an extensive class system that has dizzying depth. You can learn abilities that can be used with any class, along different "elemental plots". But there are some abilities, like class abilities, that can only be used when a character becomes a class associated with an element, by equipping an "elemental vessel". The sheer number of classes is absurd, and I love it! No character shares the same class, and it's quite unusual to see this sort of variety, but it exceeds Trials of Mana's class system in every way. Unique and beautifully designed outfits for every class, and at least 2 to 3 kinds of unique weapons that each character can use depending on class. You can also get more abilities by equipping "ability seeds", They're spells, abilities, or passive bonuses. When you remove an ability seed, the ability is removed.

The locales are pretty huge, probably the largest in any Mana game to date. Well, besides Dawn of Mana. The places you go to are breathtaking in Visions of Mana, and I want to explore them as much as possible. You'll sometimes run into enemies that are too powerful to defeat, encouraging you to come back later, and they're often in ruins. Elite enemies keep you on your toes and up the challenge. "Elemental aeries" provide a timed combat challenge that will test your skills. There's tons of items and collectibles just laying around, even in towns. It just activates some kind of kleptomaniac gremlin within! I did hear that these areas "lack personality". Sometimes, there's plenty of fantastical landmarks and regional uniqueness, such as the windswept pine trees of the wind elemental region, to the gloomy fog and bizarre architecture of the dark elemental region. Your mileage may vary, but I find many of the towns gorgeous beyond belief and bursting with detail. The best looking and biggest Mana game to date! It's only hurt by one thing. You'll eventually find incomplete terrain and holes in terrain geometry, but it's rare and in out-of-the-way locations. I'm just surprised they even put in this much effort!

Side quests aren't good in this game and they're not interesting, involving collecting a certain amount of items, killing a certain amount of monsters, or finding an item/location/person. However, even if the side content is throwaway, they can be done QUICKLY making them an okay excuse to explore the breathtaking locations for awhile longer before leaving.

The combat isn't remotely sluggish. It was a concern I had during the demo. But it appears they have enhanced it, and attacks combo together more fluidly, and even into spells. The battles aren't as tight as the combat in Trials of Mana, but there is a lot of class and ability expression in Visions of Mana that keeps the action exciting. The bossfights are fantastic and present us with the same kind of MMORPG-style mechanics I enjoyed so much from Trials of Mana.

Once you beat the game, new game plus is unlocked and there's an entirely NEW endgame chapter unlocked with powerful gear to get, just the cherry on top of a pretty cozy JRPG!

Also, if you love dragons as much as I do, Visions of Mana will appeal to you with the dragonfolk, Ramcoh, and also Flammie. There's more than one sacred beast dragon?! Well, now I've seen everything and I love it! Ramcoh is a sweety after my own heart!

Visions of Mana is a fantastic return of a neglected JRPG series. People tend to focus a lot more on what else Square creates, such as Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts. So it's great to see this B series return in such a beautiful form! Adventure awaits!

Trials of Mana! Or as Charlotte says: "Twials of Mwana!"

Trials of Mana is a remake of a SNES classic that passed us by here in America. The old game holds up pretty well to this day, and this remake modernizes it perfectly. You never get lost, it's easy to explore, and it's pretty nice to look at albeit full of muddy textures, and bad PC options ( there seems to be no VSync ). The music is great as always, there are a few choice tracks I can think of. As a lover of dragons, and of Flammie, Flammie returns as your companion to ride on. You better believe I am excited to see him/her return for Visions of Mana, and Ramcoh the new dragon cutie to love.

As always, it is easy to get sucked into the tight and engaging progression, the dungeons are NEVER too long at just the right length. The game is quite addictive and difficult to put down once you really sink your teeth into it. Don't forget Lil' Cactus, a hidden collectible that gives some great rewards for exploring!

It's addictive to level up, get new gear, and experiment with the skills system. The skills are learned by leveling up various stat categories on top of the character's base stats: Strength Points, Stamina Points, Spirit Points, Luck Points, and Intelligence Points. Some skills are only available to certain characters and the classes they can become.

The class system is the star of the show in Trials of Mana. Each character can choose a Light path and a Dark path, which has no bearing on the story but it does give you access to a massive amount of total classes if you count all the characters. You have a choice of 2 unique classes per character, one Light, one Dark, then two more, until you reach the ultimate class that seems to be determined by the two major paths you can take down the class tree. There are a total of 4 different classes for each character, plus 2 ultimate classes it looks like.

The characters are... mixed. Their stories are actually pretty solid, and the main story is your standard "save the world from great evil" affair. The voiceacting is what really takes time to get used to. This is as cheesy as it comes, people, and you'll either get really sick of it fast, or you get used to it like I do then realize it isn't so bad and full of heart. Some of the performances they do give it their all, and sometimes it just seems like they phone it in so bad it is hilarious!

Also... Flammie Flammie Flammie. Flammie? Flammie! *Happy Flammie noises.*

Trials of Mana is pretty good, if it wasn't for the weird voiceacting and poor PC options this game would be perfect. But as it is, it's just great and after playing the demo for Visions of Mana I am certainly excited to see what they have in store for this venerable series!

Probably the first mascot horror game that didn't make me want to cringe at the very sight of it, or even the very knowledge of it. I love the characters, they are all so adorable, well designed, and bursting with personality. Rambley is probably the bestest boi in game history, and he must be protected at all cost!

I don't know about replayability, but there are collectibles, and I didn't find two of them. The gameplay is straightforward and pretty fun, there is a good sense of pacing and progression. There isn't an over reliance on loud jumpscares, which is a GODSEND, and there is some excellent tense atmosphere. I don't know about the game being "scary", but there was a least maybe one subtle scare that freaked me out early on in the game. It takes a lot to scare me, so it's no wonder this wasn't exactly the scariest experience to me.

I look forward to more from Indigo Park, I love these characters and want to see them again! Please keep Rambley happy, don't let him be alone!

Eiyuden Chronicle is an absolute delight so far, and bursting at the seams with nostalgic vibes. I really missed JRPGs like this, and even if I barely played the Suikoden series, I already enjoy games with lots of characters to play as or collect. The story, gameplay, music, and visuals are mostly on point here. There's a few glaring issues, such as text that doesn't display what the voiceovers say, annoying inventory limit, and an oldschool JRPG challenge that requires you to absolutely be prepared or you'll find yourself with no healing items. The latter isn't that much of an issue, because I enjoy that this game can be pretty challenging at times. But I really hate how you have a limit to the items you can carry, it is obnoxious! This issue with items also extends to MP items being rare and scarce... what is with these oldschool JRPGs and not wanting your spellcasters to have enough MP if you like to cast spells more liberally?

Despite Eiyuden Chronicle having a decidedly oldschool feel, there are some damn solid quality of life improvements. Grinding is almost not a thing, because if your characters get to a certain level threshold, they will earn less and less XP from enemies lower and lower levels than them. You will earn the inverse if you have characters lower and lower levels than your enemies, meaning even more XP for them. Yes, characters not in your party won't earn XP. You will also have an objective marker that will tell you where to go to progress the story, making knowing where to go a breeze, and checking out side content easier.

The biggest feature of the game is the massive roster of characters. Some can't fight alongside you in battle, but can help run things back at headquarters. Oh yeah, you manage a cool castle town and fortress, which is your HQ. You level it up, grow your population, gather resources during your adventures, build new facilities, and recruit characters to run said buildings. It's really quite a joy.

Eiyuden Chronicle is a fantastic return to a bygone era, one that I've been missing for awhile. Games like Octopath Traveler 1 and 2 also fit nicely into this growing collection of oldschool style JRPGs. More, please!

Addictive, fun, and frantic, full of delightfully varied heroes for just about any kind of person!

The one major problem is the 60 frames per second lock, I advise any NVIDIA users to try low latency mode to alleviate how awful it feels. Set it via your manual GPU settings on the desktop, not GeForce Experience. You will get used to it, if you have a 75hz or higher monitor like mine. If you have a 60hz monitor, it should feel good and look just fine.

Secondary problems with the game are the numerous bugs, balance issues, and other broken problems such as matchmaking not always working correctly especially in a lobby with friends. There's a ton of small glitches and problems with grading, fortunes, and things such as in-game audio still playing even after a match ends.

This is a game I never got the chance to play. It's wonderful to see game preservation like this for once, and as a fan of hero shooters like ORIGINAL Overwatch, MOBAs like League of Legends, and other character-based PvP games, Gigantic hits all the right notes.

There's a more Casual mode with Rush, which is such a perfect "just one more match" mode and great to get practice with any hero at their full strength, and to try out the many different builds you can either customize yourself or choose from two premade builds. Clash is the primary competitive mode, and it's very hard to describe, you just have to play it for yourself it is truly quite something. Unfortunately, Rush feels like a... well, RUSHED game mode and has some flaws, including players not seeming to understand the objective even slightly, resulting in extremely one-sided matches. Rush is still great, chaotic fun for quick casual matches, but Clash IS the bread and butter mode the game was born with.

In Gigantic, and if you're a fan of progression systems or rewards, there is so many things to collect it is DIZZYING. All the unlockables are here for free, just collect Crowns to buy what you want, and continue leveling up individual hero masteries. Fortunes are in-game achievements that can be complete to unlock lore tidbits for the world of Gigantic and the individual heroes themselves.

Visually, the game is kind of dated. But it's also quite a striking style that is colorful and full of life. The 60 frame lock is such a letdown, and feels pretty bad for input lag, but as I said you can fix this with low latency GPU modes. The fights do get very frantic and chaotic, which is hard for visual clarity, but it's also extremely fun and vibrant.

I see complaints about this game from detractors, and I hear you. And, to be fair, the market is saturated with MOBAs or character-based PvP games. But the thing is, Gigantic feels like it exists to NOT compete with those games. It clearly exists for us who have tried it for the first time and enjoy it, or for the longtime fans who miss the game from way back then. It is perfectly fine to worry for the lifespan of a PvP game that relies on engagement in the longterm. I want to see new heroes, I want to see more and more players to play with or against, and I want to see new maps. But the thing is... my argument? Just play the game and try to have fun, if it's so bad that the game is dead on arrival or already dying, then you can alleviate that... by becoming a player IN the playerbase rather than complain about the game dying. How about that, huh?

Horizon Zero Dawn was an excellent game, but some aspects of it have aged more poorly than others. However, Forbidden West takes everything excellent about Zero Dawn and makes it even better, while improving on so many things that have aged poorly from before. I highly recommend you play the first game first before playing Forbidden West, it's still a great game but you can definitely see and feel the age.

Character interactions and conversations feel much more alive, more realistic, and immersive. Side quests are way better and more varied, mainly because these NPCs are so much more interesting or likable.

Combat is more fluid, more punchy, and more fast, the archery itself feels better. Although it might be due to the hitboxes being more generous when shooting arrows, they almost feel like they home in on a particular weakpoint you are aiming at.

The skill tree is... man, where do I even start? In the first game, it was a decent skill tree with plenty of game changing abilities, but in Forbidden West there are so many skills and so much improvement it is dizzying. There are playstyle defining "ultimate" abilities, and they are so fun!

The open world is still full of a lot of map icons and stuff to check out, so if you're tired of that then it hasn't really gotten that much better than the first game. However, you will stumble upon "unknown" things that are question marks on the map, and they will reveal themselves when you get closer, and this is such an excellent way of improving this tired Ubisoft-style trope. You can still easily navigate the world with waypoints or fast travel, but as before there are fast travel packs which are a limited resource and more often than not I want to walk around on foot because the world is breathtaking. You can even climb on more surfaces that are less obviously climbable, but we still get some yellow paint objects. You can ping with the Focus to see where you can climb on natural geometry.

Speaking of map icons and the huge open world. There's A LOT to do in Forbidden West, a lot more than even in Zero Dawn. I love this in open world games, personally, but it's up to you whether or not this is all padding or worthwhile content. I feel like any excuse to explore the world, the cultures, the ruins, and the machines is a good excuse to me. If you're a completionist, you'll have A LOT on your plate with this game.

Speaking of breathtaking, the graphics are truly "next gen", at least in my eyes. The first game was the same way, and it visually holds up, but it's even better now in Forbidden West. I appreciate this commitment to color and visual style while still hammering home the graphical fidelity, and it all runs pretty damn good from what I can tell. There's a few odd little graphical glitches, such as flickering shadows for specific details on characters, especially indoors, but it's not that big of a deal.

The music is great, and it's full of motifs, which is something I love. The only problem is that the sound overall is kind of low or strangely mixed, where it feels like the music is too loud but the sounds are too quiet.

There is now swimming, you can dive and it's actually pretty terrifying for me as a thalasaphobe. You have to worry about water machines and drowning, which is scary, but I love that now there are even mechanics for swimming, such as grabbing an object and boosting yourself forward to swim faster. There is real attention to detail in how you navigate the world in general, on foot or even when swimming, such as wall jumping and other such climbing abilities.

There's tons of loot to find and to upgrade ( or to buy ), it's far better than in the first game in how fun it is, but sadly the upgrades don't change how your stuff looks which annoys me a lot. But this is how it often is.

Look, I could go on and on. This review was already going on long enough. So do yourself a favor and play the first game, and then this game, you will not regret it. Did I mention the story is tense, compelling, and amazing? Hm?

Banishers is excellent, if you love God of War and The Witcher 3, or other cinematic action RPGs, this game is a MUST PLAY!

This game starts out slow and kind of boring. But, it then starts drawing you in with the excellent voiceacting, cinematic presentation, and interesting world.

After that, it starts introducing the RPG and loot mechanics, which are all quite damn solid and fun, with a skill tree featuring branching choices that you can respec on the fly. I like this trend of offering choices instead of just allowing you to get every single skill in the skill tree, in Banishers you have to choose one upgrade over the other in a path.

I know we are all tired of color coded loot and whatnot, but Banishers makes it fun and rewarding again... well, just like any GOOD action RPG not trying to be a live service nightmare. You can upgrade your equipment with various items you scavenge, and I like how there is a lore reason for why you do it: Because Banishers are also alchemists, survivalists, wanderers, and herbalists who use plants in rituals or fur/leather/metal/thread to reinforce equipment.

The combat is standard, but it's challenging and starts growing on you, there is a real sense of weight to the sword swings and the game steadily introduces new abilities for you to use in combat or while exploring. Combat starts getting more fresh and fun.

The world is semi-open, with just enough branching paths to explore and find secrets.

Then, after all of that awesomeness, the game introduces the central story-driven choice mechanics. You are going to make some DIFFICULT choices, and it's up to you to decide whether or not it's right or wrong.

In summary, Banishers is a game that gets better the more you play it, just be patient with the slow start and you'll love it IF you loved God of War.

A solid free to play game, The Finals has excellent and fun game show vibes underpinned by a dystopian corporate theme, infused with neon-drenched and amazing disco synth music! Gunplay and gameplay are great once you get into a groove, then come to grips with how the game plays.

This is a game about teamwork and objectives, simply getting them sweet kills won't win anything. The more I play, the more I enjoy and appreciate the objective-focused gameplay. A deathmatch mode would sadly be more generic. The primary game mode is "Bank It", or some variation of it for the competitive Tournament mode. In Bank It, you collect coins from a vault ( or enemy players you kill ) that spawns at a random location, then you cash them in at temporary cashout points that spawn in and disappear at random locations, lasting a minute or two. In the Tournament mode, you have to BRING a cash vault to a cashout point which you have to defend until the thing is finished cashing in your coins. First team to reach $40,000.00 wins, from what I can tell, or perhaps it changes. It is hectic, good fun!

The environments are almost entirely destructible, and it's impressive just how much can be blasted down with little to no performance impact. Not to mention just how gorgeous this game looks, probably one of the most visually impressive free to play games I've ever seen. All of this with beautiful explosions and effects blasting away entire buildings until they crumble.

The Finals has you playing as 3 different classes. Light, Medium, and Heavy, all with their own entirely unique sets of weapons, with some shared gadgets, and totally unique gadgets or abilities as the cherry on top. You can customize them completely ( skins and all ), so if you prefer something different you have plenty to unlock using a specific in-game currency for equipment or abilities. Each class has their own strengths and weaknesses. Nothing too wild in terms of weapon selection, but still fun and packed with guns I tend to enjoy using in these games.

The Battlepass is far better than something you'd see in some other free to play or stupidly freemium games like Diablo 4. In fact, you can earn 1,500 in-game currency in the Battlepass which you can use to get next season's Battlepass which is only 1,150, which is $10.00. The game is still not without its faults in terms of monetization, there are still manipulative things here including a FOMO-inducing storefront that preys on impulse buyers. There's plenty of solid and fun skins and unlockables going on here. But it does feel like a strange mishmash in terms of themes. But it is weird enough to make it enjoyable rather than just bland.

The game does feel a bit "sluggish". It's hard to describe, but it's actually not even as bad as people are saying it is. The matches feel fast-paced and hectic. It's possible that the sluggishness is with things such as animation transitions between running and aiming down the sights of your gun. I feel that there. Or, perhaps it's because you have to manually switch to things like grenades, and there is a bit of a delay there.

The problem with The Finals, potentially for me or for others, is that without the destructible environments... is it even good enough to stand against industry juggernauts in an overcrowded market? You know, I'd say yes! This is taking into account the excellent, big, and open maps that also feature really fun GAMEPLAY MODIFIERS where weird things can happen such as alien UFO invasions, which can occur at halftime during matches. There are also other map modifiers which add exciting twists to existing levels, and you get a different one each time. Thanks to that, and the ability to make your character play however you want in a genre OBSESSED with strict-playing "hero" characters, The Finals actually is pretty good when standing on its own.

I hope The Finals can withstand the test of time. That's the main problem here. But so far, I'm having a blast and I love the vibes thanks to that excellent music and fun game show feel.

I played Laika for just a bit and it was sadly too much for me. This is a case where accessibility options are necessary, because I'm autistic and can suffer sensory overload. This is strange, because I beat plenty of very difficult games in the past such as Lies of P, Dark Souls 1, 2, and 3, or even Bloodborne. Sekiro was too much though. Laika hooked me in with its wonderful artstyle and compelling story, which was apparent from what little I played, but this game is overwhelming. I can't keep up with the difficult controls, having to worry about backflipping or frontflipping to recharge the deflect and reload my weapon. All the while dying in ONE HIT from any stray enemy bullet, and having to keep moving at a quick pace. It was sensory overload I don't think I quite experienced in a game before. This game, I'm sure, is something I would seriously love but the gameplay breaks my brain too much.

Dragon Spirits, in so many ways, is THE ultimate dragon game for dragon lovers. Every kind of dragon you can imagine is here in this Pokemon style RPG. 158 dragons ranging from fearsome and scary to gorgeous and expressive, sometimes even full of personality or humanity. It's great to see a game where dragons are mostly friends and not foes, making my heart soar as high as any dragon in the sky!

The artwork on the dragons is stunning, despite them all basically being static images bashing against eachother in the decently fun battles. The combat is a nice hybrid between turn taking and real time action, kind of like ATB in Final Fantasy 6, 7, 8, and 9. You can have up to 4 of these lovely, huggable, sometimes kissable dragons ( well, not always ) in your party and swap them out for others in a very Pokemon-like manner.

The main hurdle with Dragon Spirits is that if you like leveling up a lot, the level limit for your dragon friends is 20. The game features a very strange leveling system I'm still trying to get to grips with, but you basically build up your dragon's individual stats by using certain abilities or getting hit by certain abilities, or sometimes it's random what stats will increase. The main fun of the game, if not the progression system, is collecting dragons for your dragon friend army.

As the stats increase, your dragon levels up, until hitting 20. There is more of a focus on balance here compared to Pokemon, and over-leveling is basically impossible in Dragon Spirits, although you can maximize your dragon's abilities by combining trinkets, stat "potentials", and ability combinations which you can change at healing/rest points. Each dragon already knows a unique set of abilities, except for cool "talents" which are powerful passive abilities. Once your dragon hits level 20, the stats stop increasing.

The game is kind of huge. I'm actually shocked at how open-ended it can be. The problem is, earlier on you have to go to classes at the Dragon Spirit Academy, and if you want to explore the big open world or do side quests you have to skip class. The teacher... well, he'll come looking for you and chase you down. He is very tough, and if you lose to him in Dragon Spirit combat he will drag you back to school. You can, however, do those side quests before class or after class, but you are limited to where you can go to in the open world after class. So you MUST skip class if you want to explore the big world, dungeons, and more. You ARE rewarded for attending class, but you also might miss on certain moments in the story from what I can tell. Eventually, the game does give you a couple of weeks where you can explore the big world freely.

The broken English is annoying to say the least. It really takes me out of the game and it's an unfortunately huge flaw. I try to ignore it and make a big effort to immerse myself in the story or characters, but it's hard when they talk like how racists think Chinese people talk, in broken English. Despite that glaring flaw, there is another flaw in the form of poor visual quality, where the game is quite blurry in full screen, which I prefer to play it at.

If you love dragons like I do, you owe it to yourself to get this game. Because, well, we really haven't got much to speak of right now... besides Spyro: Reignited Trilogy, Angels with Scaly Wings, and Glyde. Some honorable mentions are Age of Wonders 4 and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. It's either way too many multiplayer games, or really bad asset flip singleplayer games like Dragon Forge. It's kind of dumb that we have to rely on indie devs to give us what we want, but for once I would just like a AAA dev to give us a game where dragons are either friends or you ARE the dragon. Dragon Spirits, for now, will wet my dragon-sized appetite for my true dream dragon game!