Recent reviews by Hirisen

16 hours of peace. That's how I felt playing through this game, even when I was constantly crashing out from being unable to control the car. It's simple in premise and almost all the way there in terms of execution but for what it is, it's brilliant and an excellent use of my time.

The cars themselves felt different to each other to drive in subtle ways that really mattered when I was trying to drift them at a 100km/h. The general driving model felt great to play with on automatic (I haven't found the courage to try and hit those drifts with manual shifting yet haha). I chose to turn down steering assists and counter-steering by a significant margin and turn up the damage setting to the maximum because it made me drive more carefully. Driving more carefully made my pace a lot better though, funnily enough. I could definitely feel the lack of grip on the dirt and wet roads which made regulating my speed a fun challenge.

The tracks, although slightly repetitive, were really well done, with a mix of high speed and low speed sections. I personally struggled a lot with the 90 degree corners (which were usually blocked off on both sides) more than the hairpins and the high speed corners so I wished there was just a little more space for me to use all of the track on more than one occasion. I'm happy to write that off as a skill issue, though.

The music was decent. Some nice tracks on there but personally I was hoping for something just a little more ambient. I enjoyed the simple visuals but I was getting surprisingly spotty performance on a PC that should be crushing games that look like this. I also liked the little bits of information and history that the game gives you about rally as a sport. Generally, the aesthetic felt congruent, so good job to the team there.

It's a great game and nice way to unwind, especially when you start getting a feel for how to control the cars and extract pace from them. Art of Rally is a relaxing, yet moderately challenging game where you need to be focused, and I can heartily recommend it.

This was a decent game to pass the time. The traversal mechanics are the strongest they've ever been and the gadgets feel the most useful they've been. The combat framework broadly remains the same as the previous two games, something I didn't particularly care for personally, but it is what it is. The stealth was about as good as the other games, which is to say that it came off quite pleasant to me.

Story-wise though, Arkham Knight is a significant downgrade to Arkham City. The core plot felt so disjointed and just generally unappealing. I personally didn't feel like the game really incentivized me to dive into the side content in any way right until the end where it suddenly wanted me to go clear a bunch of side stories to see the true ending. At that point I considered the game finished and went and watched the ending on YouTube. When the game is trying to push this sense of urgency in the plot, it feels extremely jarring to just go out and do other things, even if the game explicitly tells you to.

Also, I want to briefly touch on the Batmobile sections in this game. As individual puzzles and set pieces, I think they're pretty good elements to have in a game like this. It didn't control the best but I think some of the ideas with it were cool and interesting. However, it felt like there was a general lack of restraint in utilising what's a decent set of mechanics and it felt like I spent a solid 40% of game time in the damn thing. Sorry, but the mechanics are simply not robust enough to carry that much of the experience. It's decent but there's simply too much of it.

Arkham Knight looks genuinely incredible considering that it came out nearly 10 years ago at the time of writing this review. There were a couple of central plot elements that were quite fascinating but really didn't do enough to offset the clunkiness of the overall story. The environment design of Gotham was quite striking visually but mechanically, it felt broadly forgettable when traversing in the Batmobile and a lot of it just existed as a grappling point when I was gliding. It's not bad for its time but it could have used some work.

It's not a strong recommendation from me but there's enough to sink your teeth into and have a decent time, especially if you're into Batman stories.

As with all Trails games, Trails through Daybreak II is a good game. This is, however, one of the more flawed experiences in the series for reasons I'll be covering in a bit.

Daybreak II fleshes out Calvard as a setting quite a bit without diving too deeply into the more important lore elements, a choice that seems intentional on Falcom's part as they seem to be saving the good stuff for the next game. The game also has this issue where the different elements of the story come together in this disjointed way that still kind of works, but lessens the impact that you might have expected from the early set up. There's a whole chapter in the game that felt like a complete non-sequitur that, funnily enough, was probably my favourite part of the game from a story perspective. So the main plot writing, while it works, is just a bit messy.

While the main story feels a bit messy, I really loved the work done on the characters in this game. There's a fair few returning characters that get a lot of screen time and quite robust and complete character arcs. In addition, the connect events in this game are my favourite bonding events out of all the games in the series. The general sense of banter between the crew is still there and is even stronger now that they've bonded. There's some absolutely hilarious dialogue in this game, and the banter alone is worth the price of admission in my book. I can't extend the same praise to the work done on the main villain of this game though, but I think I'll leave it there for now as some further re-contextualising from a sequel might change my mind.

The combat has some small new additions that make the overall feel of the game incredibly slick and streamlined, even more so than the first Daybreak. Things like field arts and ex-chains weave in so naturally into the current combat framework that it almost felt like Falcom had filled up little holes in the system I didn't even realise existed. Also, the final boss fight for this game, mechanically speaking, is not only just the best boss fight in the series, but one of the best in the JRPGs that I've played.

Minigames, an element that was a staple in the past several entries barring Daybreak, make a return with a decent range of activites. I particularly really liked the mechanics for the new fishing minigame and the hacking minigame was really fun too. The basketball minigame was a bit too simple for my tastes, but I still had fun watching this cast of characters basically be the second coming of Kobe Bryant. I wasn't a fan of the new card game though, felt a bit shallow and random.

The music hit about the same as the first game for me. There are a couple of standout tracks and some decent battle themes throughout the experience. To my ears, at least, it felt like there was less repetition of the tracks between scenes in comparison to Daybreak, which is a welcome change for me. There is a dungeon crawler mode in this game as well that allows you to choose music from a bunch of older Trails games that I thought was just perfect. It was amazing getting into combat and hearing the battle theme from Trails in the Sky kicking in. The voice acting was also pretty good all around, felt like the standard Trails affair.

The visuals, while remaining quite similar from an artistic and fidelity perspective saw huge improvements in the cutscene animation. There are a few scenes in this game that have bombastic action play out and the animation matches the intensity of the moment more often than not in a way that amazed me. I never thought I'd be saying this sort of thing about a Trails game, which have usually chosen the visuals as the first place to cut back on, so I'm a very happy camper indeed.

In the broader scheme of things in the series, this is a set-up game, which follows another set-up game. While a complete experience, Daybreak's most important job was introducing us to Calvard and the new cast while setting up some elements and Daybreak II continued with that task while traditionally fans would expect the game after the set-up game to be where things start moving quickly. Personally, I welcome this change as Calvard as a setting is much too diverse to simply get through in one game, but I do sympathise with people that feel like this game failed to move the needle of the overall plot much.

Obviously, this is a Trails game, and a sequel to boot, so don't skip this one. "Filler" might be a term that people use for this game but I assure you there are enough things in this game that make it anything but filler. On its own merits, Daybreak II does a lot right and stumbles at points, but it's a great game that I enjoyed. It's worth playing.

I'd been on a 4 year long odyssey in my efforts to catch up to this series leading up to the release of this game. This game is absolutely not kidding when it calls itself "Infinite Wealth" because that is exactly what it feels like as you play it. Regardless of what level of investment you're going to choose to put into this game, I can assure you that the game is likely longer than you're expecting.

This game has the largest amount of side content I have seen in any single-player game ever. It is genuinely absurd that a game like this exists and is sold at the same price at other games. Not all of it is amazing, mind you, but this is one case where quantity simply trumps quality due to how unique every system ends up being on average. There's a novel minigame everywhere you look, accompanied by a signature wacky Yakuza story that we as fans have come to expect and appreciate. Honestly, it's standard fare for these games to have an insane amount of optional stuff to do but this really just takes the cake.

The turn-based combat receives a significant upgrade from Yakuza: Like a Dragon, making combat feel more streamlined and less finicky when it comes to positioning. It also adds a bunch of fun systems on top of everything that already existed and greatly improved the class system to actually incentivize you to switch classes as you play the game. There are a couple cool gimmicks in there too that I really enjoyed and won't spoil (in case the internet hasn't done so for you already).

I really loved the vibe they captured with Hawaii. It truly felt like I was on a vacation, which meshed really well with the wacky shenanigans the crew gets up to; it felt like collecting stories to tell the family back home when I returned. I've always prized these games as being a means of virtual tourism and they've knocked it out of the park yet again.

The writing, while great for the side content, was a bit scattered for the main story. The main characters are written well, but the villains really needed some work, and some parts of the plot towards the end had me going "wait, that's it?", which is not really the reaction you want to have after a 100 hour journey. That said, these games are about the journey itself, and Infinite Wealth definitely did not disappoint there. The choice to effectively split the focus of the story around two protagonists worked out well for the protagonists, but it did feel like the plot suffered a bit for it.

Visually, it's about on par with the rest of the Dragon Engine games if I'm being honest. There are slight improvements here and there but broadly, it's nothing I would consider a leap between game to game. Not that there's any real issue with this at all, but it's something worth noting. I did really dislike the purple filter they put over the background when you get into fights though, but I stopped paying attention to it as I got further into the game. The music is generally decent, and there's a couple songs I really enjoyed, but I'm still not fully into the actual vibe of music they use in these games so my appreciation for them comes mainly from just listening to the tracks as they come up.

I had countless instances where I jokingly told friends that they should've just called this game "Infinite Game" instead of "Infinite Wealth" because of how it just didn't end and at some point it really didn't feel like a joke anymore. However, when things finally started to come to a close, I couldn't help but feel extremely emotional about everything ending and wished it could still go on a little more. There are tense and emotional character moments the likes of which you've never seen before from RGG, and this game will find ways to move you no matter what.

I strongly recommend Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Play the entire series leading up to this and I promise it's worth the payoff.

Crumble feels like a polished tech demo of a game. I love the commitment to the wild physics and the sparse level design that encourages you to use momentum to get to wild places. However, it does still feel like it needs some calibrating across all fronts to make it feel as good as it truly can.

Combining the super sonic speed with the spider-man swinging mechanics is an excellent idea that works even better if the controls feel consistent as all speeds which, in my opinion, was not the case. Further, the choices at certain points in the level design to control your speed felt somewhat randomly placed and could be frustrating to play through. The visuals are really where it feels like a tech demo, but it didn't really bother me. I thought that it was worth mentioning anyway, though.

For about a couple hours of messing around with an interesting physics model, I think it's worth a shot. Just be prepared to deal with some level design that might frustrate you.

Children of the Sun, while being slightly too short for my tastes, is an exceptionally well conceived and designed video game. It challenges you to consider 3D space as a puzzle as you zip from one point to the other in the avatar of a bullet, manically causing fatality after fatality of the heretics who oppose you.

The visuals and audio serve to set the tone beautifully and induced me into this strange fever dream-like trance where the only objective is clearing a level and moving forward. The story is effectively told in flashes and it does just enough to give you an idea of why you've decided that being the second coming of John Wick is your only recourse in life.

The level design is absolutely outstanding. In conjunction with the abilities, you're given a fair bit of freedom in how to approach levels. With your character being a sniper, the distance that is involved in this sort of assassination gameplay is also well respected by the game design. This makes strange things like shooting someone from a hundred meters away and then immediately turning your bullet around 180 degrees and sniping someone on the other side of the map feel completely natural. There are some fun challenges as well, one per level.

I wish this game was a bit longer just so I could see a little more of that story and see where else this gameplay model could have been taken. It's really not a gripe or anything, and mostly comes off to me as a testament to how good the game is. But yeah, maybe another ability and 5 more levels would have really hit the spot for me.

Absolutely incredible game. Not really sure exactly what to say other than it nails every bit of what it was going for. Just impeccable vibes all around. Highly recommend playing this.

I'd been looking forward to playing Trails through Daybreak since it first came out in Japan in 2021. It either delivered on or exceeded all my expectations.

It's a fresh start for the Trails games, and so I consider it a fair enough starting point for someone interested in getting into them. There are things that would make more sense if you're familiar with the entire series but I don't see them as major aspects.

Visually, just wow. What a massive step up for Falcom. It's not quite AAA graphics or anything just yet, and honestly it really doesn't need to be, but the fact that I even had that flash of a thought for a moment is insane to me. The animation, lighting, and fidelity have all improved massively across the board, allowing Trails to finally have set piece moments where the visuals meet the narrative at the point of impact, where it matters. It's still no Xenoblade or Tales yet but it definitely feels like Falcom are on that track now.

Sonically, it's solid. Not their absolute best outing, but I hold the opinion that nothing really beats the first few games in that regard. It definitely felt like an improvement over Reverie to me personally. The tracks were great individually, though with a couple of instances where they were awkwardly placed in scenes. Solid, like I said.

The gameplay felt like a breath of fresh air. The hybrid system is a really good new foundation for Falcom to build off. I say foundation because it's still a bit basic at the moment, but it never really detracted from my fun over the 138 hours I played. I get the feeling that it's going to be something great over time, mixed feelings on the quartz system aside.

Now we get to the good stuff. The writing in this game is a return to form after Reverie. I thought Reverie's plot went completely off the rails towards the end. Daybreak follows the same structure as all the previous "1st in the arc" games in the franchise, in that it spends its time very carefully building up the world (in this case, Calvard) and bringing up questions you're dying to know the answers to. Above all, the character writing in Daybreak is the strongest in the series, especially across a single game. I hold the main cast of characters in the same high regard that I hold the characters of the Sky games. The side quests were the best in the series as well, with a really interesting range of scenarios that actually had me reminiscing the Yakuza games at times. The villains were the only weak point of the story for me, with the lead villain being the only properly interesting one. The rest were either underdeveloped or straight up annoying in my opinion.

As an overall package, Daybreak takes a couple hours to get going but it builds itself up methodically (as all Trails games do) and gives you something to remember. I strongly recommend it.

If you're coming to this game from Ys VIII, you'll need to recalibrate your expectations a lot.
The traversal is pretty good, and was the only aspect of the game I considered properly fun.
The combat is very similar to VIII, which was a let down for me, but your mileage may vary.
The writing across the board is uncharacteristically bad for Falcom. I don't know what happened here but it's probably the worst story of theirs that I've played. Its only saving grace over Tokyo Xanadu in my eyes is that it didn't waste as much of my time.

All in all, I really don't feel like I can recommend this unless you're trying to finish all the Ys games or are just that interested in the traversal system. There's a unifying soul to its various aspects that this game feels like it's missing.

As far as puzzle games go, this is one of the best uses you could have for a spare hour. Inventive, cheeky and satisfying.