Recent reviews by Maulclaw

Garbage tool, and a complete waste of time. Guides aren't up-to-date, so things won't work. For example, I found guides that were contradicting themselves. Neither method worked anyway. Plus, their Discord server is beyond useless.

Don't waste your time or money with this crap.

This game had a great launch, but they just had to get too greedy...

I'm really liking this game, but the performance issues are pretty bad. I had to cap the game at 30 FPS just to make it feel consistent with the performance, as it'll constantly juggle between 20 and 60 (especially on cities and intense action sequences).

Glamrock Freddy is such a dad.

The online scene for this game is atrocious. Plus, the Premium Shop is predatory and riddled with FOMO.

I really, really wanted to like this Season Pass... but it's not good. It's a huge middle finger to casual players. While I do love how it wraps up the story, and how it makes all these references to Dissidia, the actual gameplay made the game worse. Unless you're hardcore into games like Ninja Gaiden, Nioh and even Souls-like games, and really like the grind and theorycrafting side of things, you won't enjoy the game as much.

Even though the base-game allows players to either breeze through the story or get a challenging experience, the DLC will make it mandatory to pick these new difficulty options that are ludicrous. They also wanted to introduce an endgame scene and add more replayability to things, but it ended up turning the game into a whole repetitive grindfest. My character has Level 500 equipment, proper affinity and still gets one-shot by common enemies. This is not good game design.

They did eventually add a mode that helps you cheese through the story, but... this shouldn't be necessary to begin with.

I loved my experience with the base-game, but the DLC made things harder just for the sake it, and that is enough to almost make my original rating of a solid 7.5 go down to a measly 5.

This will be an extensive review of the game.

When the announcement trailer came out, everyone and their mother memed on the game to death. But as more footage started coming out, I believe it's safe to say that people were starting to buy into the whole thing Team Ninja was cooking up. And once the demo was out... well, it seemed to have been proved pretty successfully.

Anyway, the game didn't really capture my attention because it was initially only on console, and was only made available for PC through the Epic Store. The PC launch was also met with a lot of negativity due to the insane amount of performance issues. Players would have to wait over a year until the game made its way to Steam, and it would only manage to peak at 2,5k players.

But how is the game, really? I went into this blind, expecting a game with fun gameplay and a story that falls down to "it's so bad, it's good" territory. The first few hours were rough, the dialogue felt completely out-of-place for a Final Fantasy game and it looked like it had been written by aliens. But as the game progressed, I found myself invested. The ending was actually pretty damn good!

1. The gameplay is pretty fun, and can offer a casual or pretty intense experience depending on the difficulty that is chosen;
   
2. There is a variety of Jobs (classes) and weapons that adds a lot of flavor to the gameplay and provides plenty of customization depending on the player's preference;
   
3. The game offers a "transmog" system that allows players to alter the main cast's appearance without having to sacrifice stats;
   
4. The finishing moves feels pretty satisfying and there's plenty of alternate animations depending on the boss or enemy type, the sheer brutality of it is pretty awesome;
   
5. The many throwbacks to past Final Fantasy games (including FFXIV) and how they designed the maps and soundtrack with their own unique spin + the way the game is so closely tied to Dissidia;
   
6. The writing is so campy and cheesy that you can't help just love it, and can actually be feel pretty emotional near the end. Jack is such a chad of character who's willing to swear and interrupt monologues whenever he's fed up;
   
7. The banter between the main cast is actually pretty fun, and you can feel how much they care for each other despite what is going on with the story;
   
8. The graphics are actually fine. It's Final Fantasy-ish enough and the lighting can look pretty good for the most part. Effects and particles can go a little crazy, but nothing that will actually distract the player from what is going on. Textures are sharp, characters will be soaked in blood and water, and there's some neat attention to detail at times;
   
9. The way multiplayer works is actually pretty fun and much better than going through the game with NPCs;
   
10. There is plenty of build customization and theory-crafting for those who are into that kind of thing, otherwise the base-game can be completed with whatever you're given;

1. While the base-game offers a solid ending, the Season Pass tried to expand on the story further, with plenty of fan-service and an additional ending. But made it mandatory for every player to play on new higher difficulties that can prove to be absurdly hard to go through. Keep in mind that the original experience is completely fine and that the Season Pass is entirely optional;
   
2. The game can be an insane lootfest, where every single enemy drops ridiculous amounts of items. Thankfully, the game has a big enough storage for it... but it can still feel pretty overwhelming, especially when one tries to organize things;
   
3. They exhaust all the armor sets and enemies at the start in order to provide an illusion of how big the game is;
   
4. Despite all the patches, and the addition of DLSS and FSR, the performance can still be incredibly wonky. In one minute the game is running buttery smooth at 60 FPS, and then the other it's dropping down to 20 FPS. The game is not well-optimized, but tweaking with some of the settings and using the "Special K" method could improve things quite a bit. There is also a mod meant to make the game run on potato machines;
   
5. While I personally enjoyed the writing and dialogue, it is not everyone's cup of tea and can come off as pretty cringe or confusing;
   
6. The character banter can get pretty repetitive and outright annoying during combat;
   
7. The game relies far too much on corridors and mazes;
   
8. The game can overwhelm the player with pop-ups and menus rather than try to explain things clearly, and expects the player to already know that by the end;
   
9. Multiplayer is dead and the chat options are restrictive;
   
10. There is no modding scene;

Overall, I still greatly recommend SoP's base-game. For me, it's a solid 7.5 out of 10 experience!

Great game held back by performance issues.

This game was a huge mess at launch, sure, but it really is quite the enjoyable ride nowadays!

One of the best games ever made.