Recent reviews by D.Mentia

An enjoyable time waster, though it's really very simple and a bit too easy at the start. It's not a roguelike you can devote entire days to, but fun for what it is

With only 9 cards per king, there's just not that much variety - it's very easy to target specific builds when you get to pick from 3 (out of the 9) cards each round and can reroll them for pretty cheap. You get to pick cards from each king you beat, so you see more than 9 cards each run, but you usually just farm them for the one or two good cards each king has

A cool concept and a cute and well polished game, but poor execution

Mostly the roguelike elements are very disappointing. The only real choices you get are 1 of 3 random mods, every room, and then you find chests with a weapon in them and a whole random set of mods you can swap to, letting you reroll the whole run. The runs are extremely short and the mods are uninteresting, and you really just can't build towards anything

I kinda expect the game is tailored towards children, with extremely simplistic systems and the animal crossing style town building, relationships, and etc

The combat is interesting, but it's pretty pointless when you can't really make any sort of build with in your runs

A pretty and modern version of Oblivion, and a good sign for things to come from Bethesda - mostly that they've transitioned to using UE, instead of relying on their broken creation engine for everything (though it still likely handles a lot of things, but no longer deals with physics or graphics)

There are some minor gameplay changes, mostly around leveling up, but otherwise things are pretty much the same. That's both a good and bad thing; for example, there are still loading screens on almost every door, like when a building has multiple floors, and the constant loading screens seem worse than the original because now you can sprint between them

It's still a janky mess like all Bethesda games, but it's also still worth playing because of the sheer amount of content (like all Bethesda games), and much more enjoyable with a layer of modernization on top

Beautiful and polished, it reminds me of Nier Automata with the well fleshed out world and atmosphere. The dialogue and characters are especially well done, and the graphics are amazing. It has interesting combat mechanics and combos, with each character having wildly different skills

Unfortunately, all that's ruined by the combat system, which gives you the ability to negate every incoming attack with a very tight dodge/parry window - and fully expects you to dodge them all, because you die in 1-3 attacks. This means the only way to add challenge to the game is to make attacks impossible to read, occur in random numbers, one-shot, or all of the above, and they seem to specifically design monsters so you can't tell when their attack is actually going to swing. The only way to really win later encounters is to die to them enough times to learn their attacks, and the turn based combat is meaningless compared to just memorizing attack patterns and hitting the dodges

Early on they give you attack names that tell you how many hits and how fast they're gonna happen, and they're reasonably well telegraphed, but after a few hours you're just getting a generic attack name and it could be 2 or 3 hits, at differing tempos, that you have to somehow dodge perfectly or die instantly - so even learning their patterns isn't always an option

It's extremely annoying and defeats the entire point of turn based combat, which is a shame because the game seems so well made otherwise. If you like souls-likes, you'll probably like the combat, but if you're here for a turn based RPG, it's not really that

It's still tempting to recommend it anyway, because the story really is something else, and in Story difficulty, it's actually fun but challenging sometimes. But most of the time, when you're supposed to feel sad about some story beat, you just end up angry at how much BS they managed to pack into each fight, and relieved that it's finally over

Silly but entertaining, it nails the concept of progressing from manual tedious work, to automated work, to managing 'employees', letting you continuously scale up production and watch big numbers go up, kinda like Palworld or Factorio - but with a more immersive environment.

The systems are simple but well made, and none of the work is really too tedious, but it's just tedious enough that you jump at the chance to automate it

There is a little awkwardness towards mid-game, because not everything can be automated, and at a certain point it feels like you're so busy handling the not-automatable stuff that you can't possible scale up any more. But that's all there just to make you move on from mass-producing cheap/easy products, which I definitely stayed at for too long, so it's no surprise the game is making it difficult for me

Overall, it's surprisingly fun and well designed, and not at all the mindless joke game I thought it would be

I don't usually play retro games, and never really played this when I was younger, so I'll just review it standalone without lots of nostalgia about it

It holds up surprisingly well, with visuals that are a little ugly but can at least be understood, interesting combat mechanics, and of course a great story. Like all retro games, it has some issues with giving the player direction, but it's better than most - I only really got stuck once, not realizing that one of the walls in the sewer didn't have collision and you're supposed to go behind it.

The combat is interesting, but gets real tedious, real fast, when enemies respawn every time you enter an area - but there's a lot of enemy variety, and they almost all do neat things. Most fights are like a puzzle, to figure out how to beat them without triggering a dozen counter moves. But while it offers you the option to pause combat while you're picking techniques, it still heavily relies on how fast you can navigate the menus or spam A to make sure you get your attacks out before the enemies get more turns

It feels surprisingly small and short, considering you've got a ton of different time periods you can visit, but there's only a handful of locations in each one, and it seems your actions have little effect other than changing some dialogue - it's weird that it starts out with a Back To The Future trope of erasing one of your friends by accident, but then after that, none of your actions in the past seem to do much of anything to the future. It seems overall you can beat it in about 8 hours, 15 or so to do it right (the 'correct' one of the multiple endings), and probably 20 or so to 100% it, when I expected it to be more like 40-80 hours

But the pacing feels especially nice, never requiring you to grind, and constantly giving you new abilities, gear, and things to play with. But it may be a bit too easy, in most cases; the last boss I fought died in two turns, though most of the ones before it were a little more involved, though that mostly just meant throwing out some heals inbetween spamming A to attack as soon as my turns come up

Overall it's pretty enjoyable, but the tedious combat can become a slog, so it's probably a good thing that it's as short as it is

Pros:
- It's Monster Hunter
- The DLAA and Frame Gen looks great with minimal artifacting, and DLSS isn't forced
- Decent max graphics and solid performance with DLAA (no DLSS) and Ray tracing, 1440p at a steady 144fps (on a 4090); better than Avowed or FF7Rebirth in both graphics and performance, though the graphics aren't anything special, it just doesn't have terrible artifacting like other recent AAA titles
- Being able to gather resources at a distance with the grapple is nice
- Attacks go the direction you're looking, if you press the 'make attacks work like they're supposed to' button

Cons:
- English voices are terrible
- Long pauses after anyone speaks, making conversations awkward
- Most characters vibrate constantly when you talk to them
- No voice choices except re-pitching the one voice you have, which sounds terrible
- UI is made for controller, and awkward to use with a mouse
- Mounts auto-move toward the quest or waypoint by default, which is super annoying (but you can disable it)
- 4 Free DLCs that you have to get in addition to the game, just so they can force you to look at the paid DLCs while you're there
- Typical slow start and overwhelming number of mechanics that don't actually matter, but that's just Monster Hunter

... but, it's Monster Hunter, and the actual gameplay isn't affected much by all of that. If you can learn to hold the "make attacks do what they're supposed to do" key all the time, it's not too bad

Both ugly and awkward, feels like a 10+ year old game in most respects. Even with DLSS off and max graphics, huge amounts of forced TAA artifacting and other graphical issues just make the graphics bland and immersion breaking.

The silent protaganist is another dated design decision, making conversations weird like it's skipping your lines, removing any cinematic value they could have had, along with conversations being very shallow

Combat relies on stamina conservation and feels slow and unsatisfying, failing to satisfy the power fantasy itch that it should have targeted with otherwise weak RPG elements - it plays like Skyrim with a dodge mod

And then of course combat relies heavily on companions, without giving you any real control over your squad, minimizing your combat impact and making your character feel even more useless. Between this and the lack of voice for your character, you might as well just not be there, except for people to remark about how ugly your face is (which is, admittedly, pretty funny)

There's no mana regeneration, which immediately gimps a caster playstyle, and there's only two weapon slots, so you can't do something like cast spells and then swap to bow - you need to reserve your second slot for something that can survive in melee

Usually a game needs at least 2/3 decent systems to be enjoyable, between graphics, combat, or dialogue - and sometimes just one really good one can cover for the other two being bad - but this one fails on all three counts

I thought Integrade was a polished masterpiece, but this one is just an ugly mess on release. Between the camera randomly jerking around during combat (or whenever it locks your camera to look at something, which is all the time), and the blurry TAA ghosting on random pieces of scenery, and the constant pop-in problems, it's borderline unplayable.

At max settings, with or without mods to increase those settings even further, with or without HDR, everything flip flops between dark and colorless at night, and blown out white and colorless during the day, with tons of low poly models and low resolution textures interspersed between all the normal stuff. There doesn't seem to be any way to turn off upscaling, and the only Anti Aliasing options are TAA and DLSS, not even an option to go without. You can stand still and stare at your sword, and watch the lines on it move around constantly because of the various AI techniques all fighting to make it work

Even character visuals, which are usually so carefully done in these games, are screwy. Clothing/armor/weapons clip into eachother constantly, while (for example) Tifa's suspenders now stick out a few inches above where they should actually be touching her, with a noticeable gap. It looks like their breast reduction didn't include fixing her suspenders afterward

And that's not even mentioning the jank of the actual gameplay, which seems to spend 90% of its time making you move at a crawl for one reason or another - either your leg is hurt, or you're following someone and not allowed to go past them, or you're sneaking along a long linear walkway, or you're moving around mako filtration machines. Other times you're stuck doing weird QTE interactions like spending multiple minutes opening a valve (in a completely non-combat scenario), or crawling along the ground, holding a button each time Cloud needs to move each arm forward

Also, not even being able to carry over save data from the previous game is kinda just sad

I'd say the studio just got lazy after the success of Intergrade, and gave up on the usual polish that made it good. These are the kinds of problems you might see later in the game, because it's pretty normal for a game to lose polish as it goes on and players are already invested and already have a good first impression, but within the first few hours, it should have already been cleaned up.

Seems like a neat story, but the controls are just awful (with a controller, probably also without) - the gameplay is all about quicktime events, as usual for Quantic Dream, but this was before they learned to tell you what to actually press, and you're supposed to just figure it out based on how the camera happens to be angled at the time. The frustration of failing QTEs and having to start over, when they never told you what to even press, isn't worth it when you can just watch it on youtube and have basically the same experience