Recent reviews by Faelim

Dragon Quest (Warrior) 3 was the very first Dragon Quest game I had beaten as a kid. It holds a very special place in my heart.

This is faithful to the experience I grew up with, and I am thankful it exists. I am happy.

Update: I've since beaten the game, and it was everything and more to what made me love the original game. I'd say it might be a harder recommendation to someone who's wholly unaware of what to expect from the game (since it might be grindy or have surprising difficulty spikes), but this is an easy recommendation for people who loved the original.

While it's too early in the game for me to comment on the story, I just wanted to say that the game has been charming and delightful so far. The world is colorful and vibrant, and it reminds me a lot of Xenoblade's worlds (not quite as sprawling, but great to explore). The gameplay is highly reminiscent of Trials of Mana, or what I figure is probably standard ARPG fare these days, but it's fun and easy to get into - I've been playing on Hard and it's been a decent challenge. I'm enjoying what I've experienced of the class-based system, and am excited to see more of what it unlocks. The game has clearly been inspired by earlier titles in the series, and has had enjoyable references and nods to the previous games.

Honestly, at this point I can't see the game severely disappointing me or changing my overall opinion, so I wanted to drop this preliminary thumbs up because I think it's shaping up to be a great entry in the Mana series (which has been getting quite the revival between Trials and this title).

This game is truly incredible. It feels less like a modern indie JRPG, and more like what could've been a AAA JRPG from the 90s, and I mean that entirely in a good way. It carries the feeling of nostalgia, while also being an entirely brand new experience. It looks great, it feels great to play, and the music is fantastic.

I can't recommend this game enough. It truly deserves a playthrough.

Forgot to review this when I played through it half a year ago, but this game is truly the most faithful Dungeon Keeper spiritual successor to date. If you even remotely enjoyed Dungeon Keeper, then this game will most likely tickle your fancy. Very well made, very enjoyable!

This game is basically Dungeons 3, but dialed up to 11! Where Dungeons 3 was like a buffet with a little bit of everything in terms of your dungeon comp and army, this game has the added depth to let you focus on a specific racial army if you so chose, and still amass your legion. If you've played Dungeons 3 before, this is the same game in many ways, but more, more, MORE! You'll have more rooms, they'll be bigger, your armies have way more units, and everything you do will just be... more.

Played through the entire campaign with my girlfriend, and we absolutely enjoyed it. She got to primarily take care of the dungeon, while I took the army out for walks. Co-op in this game was a blast, as usual. Highly recommended for couples or best buds to take out their sadistic pleasures on smug goody-two-shoes heroes.

First off, thank you and rest in peace, Yoshitaka Murayama. Your dedication towards continuing the Suikoden legacy, if only in spirit, is greatly appreciated and I'm saddened at the thought that you don't get to see people enjoy it.

To give some background behind my review, I am a longtime Suikoden fan that played through the original series and even Tierkreis. I have long been a vocal supporter of the series, for what it has accomplished and what important lessons I have taken from the series. It has always been near and dear to my heart, and it is clear that Eiyuden hoped to remind me of that.

For fans of the Suikoden series, this game will bring about a sense of nostalgic familiarity, particularly with regards to Suikoden 1 and 2. In many ways, this is exactly what I wanted, a brand new Suikoden experience to revel in all over again. It is both very new and very familiar at the same time.

I am loving building a base all over again, filling it with a wide variety of interesting and unique characters. The music by Motoi Sakuraba and Michiko Naruke are absolutely fantastic, and while I had to adjust a little since I'm not used to hearing their styles in an experience like Suikoden, they have quickly grown to feel truly natural and wonderful to listen to. The games' aesthetic is impeccable, and the 2D pixel art is beautiful especially when overlaid onto the 3D environments. This couldn't be truer than during the duel segments, which are eye-poppingly gorgeous.

The game is not perfect, however, and while I have greatly enjoyed my time playing it, its flaws were hard to ignore. I take no umbrage with the localization specifically (it's pretty standard JRPG dialogue, as far as I'm concerned), and I feel like the general complaints regarding it are overblown and highly dramatic. There are errors, to be sure, but to suggest that alone can ruin the game is sheer hyperbole. My bigger concern is less the localization and more the actual game's story. While enjoyable, it carries a much more light-hearted and optimistic tone than the Suikoden series, and I feel that it loses a drastic amount of emotional tension and weight as a result. The Suikoden games were often always bittersweet and had left me with serious considerations about war's impacts on humanity. This game had no such impact on me, and I'm saddened by that. There were no real stakes in this war at any point in the game, and I just felt like it was hard to get behind the characters motivations.

The game also had a plethora of questionable design choices that led to less efficient gameplay than I'd expected from the Suikoden titles. They weren't gamebreakers for me, but they did take some teeth grinding until I'd gotten used to them as quirks of the game.

Aside from all that, I did genuinely really enjoy playing the game. While it wasn't quite the game I wanted it to be, it did a great job of nailing a lot of the core Suikoden experience and was a lot of fun if not particularly impactful. I don't regret backing it, and I sincerely hope the devs continue to give it some TLC over the next while to soften some of those rough edges.

I had never played a Persona game prior to this one (though I had played Tokyo Mirage Sessions, which doesn't really count but it's the closest I'd gotten). A friend absolutely insisted I play it, however, and thus play it I did.

The game is exceptional. There's a lot to love in the game, and while I was inflicted with a severe case of analysis paralysis when I first started playing, as I became more and more familiar with the game (and the Voice feature), I managed to navigate my way through one of the better JRPGs I've ever played. The cast is fun and interesting (though Yosuke is the worst), and while there are some scenes in the game that I don't feel particularly aged well, they were overshadowed by everything else the game had to offer.

P5R and P3R are looking mighty appealing now that I finished this one...

Just recently finished a playthrough and I really enjoy this game. On Normal difficulty, it's quite a challenge (particularly if you're trying to minimize casualties, though not required to do so) and the variety of units and their capabilities is really neat. The story has its weak points, but overall was satisfactory.

Jumping right into NG+ to experience more of the game, for sure!

Overall really solid title from Zeboyd Games. Graphically, the game looks phenomenal -- a very strong leap ahead from their previous titles. Music from Hyperduck is fantastic, as always; they manage to capture their inspirations very well while also establishing their own style.

The only aspects of the game that I feel a bit lukewarm about were the writing and the balance within the game. The story is generally decent, but a lot of the dialogue leans a little too much on flippancy which I feel detracts from the enhanced scale of this game compared to Zeboyd's earlier titles. The balance of combat varies drastically based on your understanding of the core systems and tools available to you... once you understand what you're capable of, you potentially end up obliterating any challenge the game has. I also feel like there was a lot of lost potential regarding how the Shields perform over the course of the game.

Overall, an enjoyable experience and a really well done wink-and-a-nod to all its inspirations. Fans of 90s/early 2000s JRPGs will see the game laden with throwbacks, hitting the nostalgia home!

Truth be told, I don't really like CCGs all that much.

... but this game was amazing. The less you know, the better.