Recent reviews by Vapor

Hey, you. Person reading this. Do you like 2D-HD style sprites and environments, like you're playing in a 3d shadowbox? Do you like monster capture RPGs? Do you like decidedly 70s-90s music aesthetics like synthwave and cassette players? Do you like dissonant, eldritch horrors whose very existence classes with the world around them? If you said yes to multiple of these prompts, then I suggest you take a peek at this game.
But seriously, I suggest if you like monster RPGs, to take a look at this -- I enjoyed it so much, I played it in two separate playthroughs in parallel (one casually, and one for twitch streaming)!

As I write this for the 2022 Steam Awards, I lament one major thing -- that I cannot nominate this for more than one award. Of the games I've played that officially released this year, I find it sitting in a lot of categories -- GOTY, Soundtrack, "Sit back and relax", and if I had the steamdeck, Portable (game on the go) as well.

The game groves, it's very much a game you get to a point at and just watch the bar fill and numbers go up, and very much a game you can focus on in spurts (like "go to the kitchen, and deal with waves in between making yourself lunch" kind of spurts) which lends itself to the portable option.

As of June 1st, 2022, the game is dead -- they axed their premium features at that point. Which, if it was just cosmetics, would be one thing, but one of the premium features for the game was "the ability to host matches", which means with that no longer available, the game's in a death spiral of a small (and growing smaller) handful of users never being able to connect to one another, and will continue to be until the actual termination date of December 1st, 2022.

As per a news update today, July 25th, they're rolling out Easy Anti-Cheat because apparently thousands of users lose their accounts to sketchy modded clients, and also because apparently a lot of bug reports they get are "VRC Updated and broke modded clients".
Sure, this ain't Denuvo's pair of lag machines, but "we're installing epic's anti-cheat software because we're tired of 'turns out this is a broken mod' bug reports and people grabbing client mods from 'willBrickYourPC dot biz dot info dot bbq'" and, you know, not drafting a plan for an official modding API or something like that (instead opting for a "We've got to prioritize things, use our easily ignorable feedback page to chime in on what you want us to igno... add!")
Also, EAC won't help them deal with all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that I hear trawl the public worlds, getting their kicks from getting a rise out of others via slinging slurs and insults... I mean, that's a thing that plagues a lot of places too, but that's something I *also* have seen more complaints about than "help, I downloaded mods from a [sketchy] website and lost my account", XD

TL;DR: they're adding cheat protection used for competitive multiplayer games, for a social platform, and using cardboard and tin excuses for why.

It was neat. I liked 4 more (I own that on PS4), even if that one's best ending is the hidden one, but yeah, this was neat. Too bad Ubisoft's gone "♥♥♥♥ all y'all, we're shutting down servers and you can't have the DLC anymore" (or in some cases, the entire game) and on Sept. 1, 2022, it will be so.

Welcome to something many fans of this game have wanted since it came out on PS1 in 97/98... the game finished.

No, I'm not joking. As the selling points point out, there's a bunch of stuff re-added from the cutting room floors, to finish off stuff that was planned in some fashion, to make it a fleshed out version of the original.

Is it "the best it could possibly be"? Nah, but it's better than the original I feel. QoL added in many places, including helpful "Point Of No Return" warnings, and some mechanic explanations that were sorely lacking in the original. They decided to update tech names, for the most part, to match other SaGa series games' versions of the techs/spells (most specifically, the Romancing SaGa remaster names), which will be a stumbling block for players who had came to this only experienced with the original... and in the mix, they ruined a word play that admittedly was better in Japanese -- Red's Al-Phoenix X (which was originally Re-Al-Phoenix, which is supposed to basically translate as "True Al-Phoenix", being the ultimate perfection of the Al-Phoenix technique; the new version feels more 80s/90s Anime Protagonist Technique-in-English name, where they couldn't come up with something good and didn't want it to be "Ultimate [move name]" in case of a bigger one later)

All in all, though, and the tl;dr -- it's basically the best version of this game, and far easier to find.

I've poked at this on PS4, and when it was on battle.net before Bungie escaped Activision's diseased talons to come to Steam. I scooped up in some fashion, on ps4, Warmind, Curse of Osiris, and Forsaken. You'll notice at the time of this review, the first two DLCs I mention aren't listed. By February 2022, none of them will be. "Why's that?", you might ask. Bungie's said, basically, there's too much space on content barely played, so when Beyond Light came out last year, they axed Curse of Osiris and Warmind, and now with Witch Queen coming out, Forsaken too will die. Based on this, get your enjoyment with Beyond Light, if you care to flush US$40 down the toilet (at the time of this review) because it should be vaulting this time next year (late 2022). If you don't like devs going "We've got all this content people paid for, but don't play anymore because power creep makes people only want to play the most recent stuff, so we better zip it up and store it to save space for all new content we'll do the same to in 2 years.", however, either pass this by, or just play it because it's free and ignore the pay-for DLC (now including a US$25 anniversary pack celebrating 30 years of a company not many knew until 20 years ago when they released Halo)

This was a nice Gauntlet game. But things changed when the fire nation attacked they released the Slayer Edition and basically replaced 3/4s of the game with a new, dumbed down version. Like, after Slayer edition came out, I'd rather play Gauntlet Legends on PS1 (which is the worst version of that game) than this. Heck, I'd probably rather spend potentially a half hour getting Gauntlet II on NES to work and solo play that, than Slayer edition.

It might be worth the 75% off price (5 USD) at best, but it's really not worth your attention if you enjoyed any Gauntlet game, especially the likes of Dark Legacy.

If all this was, was an overhaul to bring all the VA work consistent, and the graphics to a newer standard, I wouldn't complain and I'd even feel like it was a decent game... and when I backed it on Kickstarter, I expect it to start that way before they expanded on new stuff -- get all the old stuff polished up and ready for testing and stuff while they worked on brand new content. Which, they did somewhat, but the new stuff starts almost right away too, because time shenanigans.

As it stands, this is like, 2/3s DD1, a heavy heaping handful of some of what they did in DD2 (and some of Eternity shaken in), and stirred up, and dumped into a baked pie crust and stuffed in the fridge for you to find the next day and go, "Ooo, leftover pie." and discover that it's woefully incomplete, even if it's got a foundation to sit on.

Baba Is Fun
is
You

No, really, Baba is you is fun, for the most part. Half of the interest and intrigue for the game is trying to find the weird ways to win a level, especially when you look at a solution and go, "No, that can't possibly work..." and then do it and it does. Or maybe it doesn't, but it does something you didn't expect, and that gives you new ideas on what you can do.