Recent reviews by Sophilautia

This game ♥♥♥♥♥♥ rocks.. I've always struggled to get into fighting games, but turning it into a turn-based strategy, and suddenly everything clicks for me. I'm actually beating people in pvp matches online! I'm damn addicted to this, honestly one of the coolest games of 2023 easily.

Grab the game and fight me! Please? <3

This game isn't going to be for everyone. It's a bold MMO that flies in the face of convention, committed to creating an emergent player-driven experience, with no quests in sight. Progression through the game is much less a straight line towards 'endgame', and much more an experience you craft for yourself. You can be a trader, following market trends to capitalise on demand, shipping items where they need to be to sell the most money. You can be a bandit, going after trades to steal their goods. You can be a mercenary, an explorer, an animal trader, a spellbook scribe, you can work with others to build a town or kingdom. Or you can just, take a stroll through the world and see what you find, hoping someone doesn't come to kill you.

This game is hardcore, but not as hardcore as you think. Sure, you lose all but your most important loot when you die, but everything you lose is replaceable. Death is inevitable in this game, and with each death, you grow a little wiser, and a little more adept and less likely to die the next time the same situation comes up. It's a world full of mysteries, where knowledge is power, and players will accumulate secrets that give them a strategic advantage. Potion crafting for example is a huge enigma. It's possible to make potions that can make you younger or bigger, but the recipes to those potions are classified trade secrets, so as to ensure the alchemists maintain their monopoly on the market. So to compete with them, you're gonna need to experiment for days, weeks, months until you happen upon a recipe that works. Even fishing is a matter of finding the right pond to use the right bait and the right line and the right hook with the right measurements to get the fish you want. And combat in this game is much less a stats and gear game, and much more about genuine skill. Carefully timing your parries and slashes, or aiming your magic right on the enemy. There's no targeting system, you need to aim for the enemy yourself. So while stats can help, it's skill and strategy which ultimately determine the outcome of each battle.

Many people might call Mortal Online 2 a player-unfiendly game. But to me, it's the kind of virtual world I've been looking for ever since I got a taste of the genre back in World of Warcraft and Runescape, the delivery of a promise I've long been waiting for. Be prepared to fail, but be open to socialising with others. Make friends, join a guild, and before long, you'll have found your new home.

So yeah, Mortal Online 2 is probably the best MMO I've ever played. It may not be for everyone, but it's absolutely 100% for me.

Colonialism goes wheeeeee

Still to this day my favourite Final Fantasy game. The XIII series is completely undeserving of the negative reputation it's garnered over the years. What you'll find here is one of the tightest and well-written stories in the franchise, the more fun and tactical combat system of the series to date, some of the most memorable characters you'll ever find, and a world that's remain stuck in my imagination for years after finishing. I can't think of any RPG I've had a more consistently great time with than FFXIII, though the sequels are also amazing and well worth playing.

The biggest nitpick I can think of is the start of the game being a bit of a slow burn as it gradually eases players into the new combat system by introducing features one step at a time. I can understand how people may have felt a bit frustrated with the first two hours of the game having almost no tactics or player agency to speak of, but trust me when I say this game gets better and better, and it's well worth the investment. The first two hours are pretty much an awesome anime movie, I've had friends who watched me play it get a little sad when the game shifted into more gameplay since they just wanted the story to continue hahah. So it's not like the first few hours are devoid of value, but I do think they are a poor representation of how awesome and fun the FFXIII gameplay can be.

As for the complaints that it's linear, I really think people just need to approach it with an open mind. The linear gameplay serves the story extremely well, and from a gameplay perspective it's touring you through its immaculately crafted world like a rollercoaster, with practically no boring moments or grinding to speak of. That said, the game DOES become a lot more open-ended and filled with sidequests in the latter half, if that's something you're excited for. And the way this all ties into the narrative of fate and free will is super interesting to consider from a ludonarrative perspective.

Give FFXIII a chance. Even if you don't love other FInal Fantasy games, you might just love with this one. I know I did.

This review is based on the free beta. I've since purchased the full game.

This game is unlike anything I've ever played before. I guess the closest approximation is a little bit of 5D Chess with a little bit of (insert single player FPS here). It's a 1v1 or 2v2 shooter played in a 25 second time loop. You each take turns playing, and every time you play, you add a new version of yourself to the 25 second time loop. Your actions are recorded, and unless they are disrupted by the enemy player, they will take the same actions each time.

At first it was super confusing, because the meta here is unlike anything I've experienced before. I can pick up and play any shooter or platformer and play pretty competently because my skills transfer over, but with Lemnis Gate I feel like a baby walking for the first time. But hey, so is everyone else to start!

My best recommendation to get into this game is to play with a friend. Ideally someone who is also new to the game, or otherwise someone who is kind enough to lend you their time to teach you the ropes. Reason being is that it can feel very demoralising to play the game with randoms right from the start, because you'll feel like a fish out of water. I had the most fun when I played with a friend, and we learned the game through repeating games with each other. At first we both sucked, but after trial and error together, we managed to learn the meta bit by bit, and the game got more and more fun each time.

Anyway, to explain the appeal of the game I like to go through a basic loop me and my friend would go through. I would start the game by capturing all 3 points in 25 seconds. In my friend's turn, they might send out a sniper to kill my past self at the start of the loop, so they don't capture the three points. In my next turn, I have the option of either following a new path and trying to capture other points, or I can protect my past self by throwing a shield on him, protecting him from my friend's past self's sniper shot, restoring the future where they capture the three points, leaving me free to use the rest of the 25 seconds to capture another point or something. My friend then has the option of spending another turn trying to fight to stop my first self again, or taking the offensive instead. The game continues until 5 turns are up, and then we play a second round with the starting player switched (since the player to take the final turn has a significant advantage). The winner is determined by total victory points, and if there's a tie, they round up a score based on kills and damage dealt.

Now this may sound really intimidating, and it is a little at first, but it's also incredibly rewarding to get the hang of, especially when you're playing against someone of equal skill level. I still have a lot to learn with this game, but once the full game is out, I'll definitely be picking it up and playing with friends. Not many shooters that are fun to play 1v1!

Only downside is, you do need to have a bit of a strategy mind and some fps skills to be able to play well, which isn't something for everybody. But if you've read my review and it sounds like something you'd enjoy, please give it a chance! And rope a friend in too, if you can!

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this game is addictive

The game, is fun.

What a brilliant, chill experience. I can't think of any game that made me feel like a genuine explorer of a strange galaxy like this game did. Goes to show you don't need massive worlds to make awe-inspiring experiences.

When I first heard of Noita, I kinda dismissed it as a Terraria clone with some cool physics stuff. What I got when I looked under the cover was one of the deepest and endlessly replayable gaming experiences I've ever had.

Of course, the physics stuff is a big part of the Noita experience, but I guess I'd describe Noita more like an alchemical rpg with permadeath. I'm hesistant to call it a roguelike because I feel like that term is a bit reductive, and doesn't really sum up the gameplay loop of Noita in a satisfying way to me. Forgive the comparison but Noita has a darksouls-esque crypticness to it. You're thrown into a vast 2D open world with semi-procedural environments loaded with secrets. The obvious path is to go into the dungeon and keep going deeper until you reach the 'final boss', but there are so many secret objectives, secret locations, secret bosses and secret endings to be found if you go off the beaten path, which the game encourages you to do.

One of the biggest features that isn't publcized enough is this game has an incredibly deep wand and spell-crafting system. Every wand you pick up has different stats that determine how spells are cast, and how fast and regularly they are cast. In safe zones you have the ability to tinker with wands by removing and adding spells from the wand's slots, which all interact in a way that's almost reminiscent of coding more than crafting. This comes from the minds of Baba is You, and as you might expect you can create absolutely insane combinations of spells that can come out in an infinite number of ways. By the endgame you'll have a rapidfire wand that conjures rapidfire lightning bolts that jump from enemy to enemy and freeze them, or a wand that summons goats that launch nukes that home on enemies. It's really insane what's possible in this game, it makes every playthrough exciting and unique. The game encourages you to find ways to break it.

Something that is really emblematic of Noita's design is the fact that the game's saferooms you find the in dungeon typically close off when you leave them. But if you have certain spells, you can dig through the walls of the saferoom and make a tunnel to allow you to come back whenever you want. This isn't an exploit, because when you do the game punishes you by summoning a powerful messenger of the Gods to stop your exploits. It lets players control the way they want to play while presenting interesting risks to the potential rewards of breaking the typical flow of the game.

This is all just scratching the surface though. This game is deceptively massive, and I feel like I'm going to be playing it for a long time, and that's before even getting into the huge number of mods. What a fantastic game, unlike anything I've ever really played before.

Also btw there's a pseudo-Multiplayer mod that's really fun to play with friends. Check out 'Noita Together'.

(This review is based on the Switch version of the game. I will make a note when I start getting into spoilers in the review.)

I've played many of Raging Loop's contemporaries, real landmarks of visual novel storytelling. The setting is immediately reminiscent of Ryukishi07's Higurashi, while the structure of the game is evocative of Kotaro Uchikoshi's Zero Escape series. It's like there's some timeless appeal to visual novels like these. Being stuck in a remote location with seemingly supernatural phenomena going on, an intriguing killing game that requires the reader to figure out who to trust and who to suspect, a mysterious time loop the protagonist is aware of and is looking to escape, and a flowchart of choices that is gradually unlocked as the protagonist gains new information. Raging Loop has all of these things, wrapped up in one neat package. As a fan of its contemporaries, and a sucker for games like this, I ate it up.

But man, it goes to show that you need more than those fun hooks to write a good story. Raging Loop is one of the most disappointing visual novels I've ever read. And yet, for some reason I read the whole thing. Maybe it was some kind of stockholm syndrome, or FOMO? It even took me a good 24 hours after finishing to realise just how much I disliked the game.

It's not like it was all bad I guess... Ultimately, the premise of a visual novel in which the characters are living out a Werewolf/Mafia scenario has its appeal, for all the same reasons Werewolf is a fun game. You're trying to figure out who the Werewolfs are, and the game gives you just enough choices to feel like you have an impact on the outcome of the game. And as this is a time loop story, there are multiple rounds of Werewolf with different role distributions, so you get to play the game from three different perspectives. This was ultimately the most fun thing about Raging Loop, and maybe just barely justified the investment? But everything else just leaves me with a really bad taste in my mouth. The only reason I can think that I kept playing is, wanting to see what happens. And man, what a terrible ending.

I'll be getting into spoilers starting now.

Firstly, the worldview of this game is so overwhelmingly negative it's exhausting. Yeah, we got a happy (?) ending in the end, but I felt more confused and miserable than anything. All the characters are weird and unlikeable. The protagonist Haruaki is.. Certainly memorable and unique. He's a genre savvy Detective Fiction author, so he's a lot smarter than your usual mystery VN protagonist, but half the time he's hiding what he's really thinking to the reader (unless you're playing NG+), which just leaves him feeling like an enigma. I can see some people might like this, but I found it impossible to get in his head, empathise with him, or even understand half the mystery as a result. In short, Haruaki is a psychopath that seems very detached from normal human emotions. One second he's the most reasonable member of the cast, the next he's ranting and raving about how morality is a social construct and therefore doesn't matter, and killing and grooming children is perfectly okay. He's a very special kind of ass****. Later in the game when he starts getting used to the loops, he really starts leaning into it and doing f***** up s*** and killing himself to end the loop when convenient, and it's just... So needlessly edgy. This is more a matter of taste, but I really can't stand this kind of writing.

The rest of the cast are completely unremarkable, creepy, or downright awful. There wasn't a single character I really attached to over the course of my playthrough. The main heroine, Chiemi, is completely insane and unhinged, and can never decide if she wants to be an innocent maiden or a murderous psychopath. Again, because of the loop, but I still can't stand it. And Haruaki is the kind of bastard who will call her psychopathic nature sexy, ugh. I was at least a little attached to Rikako since I felt like she was a victim of unjust prejudice, but in the end she ended up being the most horrible, irredeemable villain in the whole series... And they just kinda laugh it off at the end? This literal child rapist, genocide-attempting woman was at first presented as a sympathetic heroine, and then when the mask is off, she's just reduced to a ditzy "You're such a baka, baka baka..." villain. What the f***?? I really can't contain my disgust at that. Yeah, all the characters suck, moving on.

Maybe you're thinking, at least the mystery is good right? Well, no, unfortunately the mystery doesn't escape the curse of s***tiness either. The werewolf games, completely isolated from the rest of the story, were mostly fine, until you realise that the rules aren't real and characters actively break them, so none of it even matters. The REAL mystery is about how all of this has been orchestrated by some greedy faceless adults we've never met from the neighbouring village, all because they're greedy and fearful. Wow. This story started off which supernatural intrigue, and it was just kinda presented as part of the setting you were meant to accept. The mysterious fog (still don't get that one), the huge werewolves that come at night (Oh they're just dogs with rabies and men dressed up as werewolves? You're telling me that CG is a man in costume??), the way all the humans fall asleep at the same time and wake up at roughly the same time, except the wolves who wake up in the night (Sleeping gas?? Where was this foreshadowed that there's a network of sleeping gas connected to every shack in the village??), doors that magically unlock when the wolves touch them (electronic locks??? in these dingy shacks??? Where was that foreshadowed?), corruption that turns you mad (rabies....), a literal kaiju who destroys Japan in one route (IT WAS JUST A METAPHORICAL KAIJU, 100% FAKE...) and then all the lore surrounding the deities of the village. The story gets really wishy-washy about whether or not Kami (gods) exist. By the end, it feels like I'm receiving some incoherent first year philosophy student's lecture on the true nature of god, and then expected to just sit and accept that this is a satisfying answer to your MYSTERY NOVEL. Does Shinnai sama exist? No, they're just made up because politics, and we can kill them if everyone stops believing! But also, there are two others Gods that MAYBE exist, or are maybe just a split personality? Or maybe some kind of brain parasite, or an information virus/meme/entity? Seriously, you're writing a mystery story here, yet the answer you've presented is this incomprehensible mess of half-baked metaphysics/philosophy. It's so unwelcome. Also, what the f*** was that nonsense about "This mountain is trapped in a dream world" that was never explained in the main story? Yeah, there's extra content that might clear some of this stuff up slightly, but I really don't have the patience to sit through another 10 hours just to have the writer attempt to cover up for their failings in writing a comprehensible mystery in the actual game.

Just like... What is the point of this story? Guy wanders into creepy villy full of creeps, makes lots of snarky comments, ends up swinging with a bunch of girls (one of which is literally underage), everyone keeps killing each other in a time loop, there's a kaiju going to destroy Japan unless he solves the mystery, turns out the kaiju didn't exist and the killing game didn't matter and God isn't real but also is real maybe, and Haruaki is back home writing mystery novels again, seemingly not at all traumatised or phased by all the sins he committed along the way.

What a s***ty visual novel. I really expected so much more considering the 'Overwhelmingly Positive' reviews on Steam and all the awards and commendation it's received in Japan. But to me, Raging Loop is just a half-baked s***ty imitation of the classics of mystery visual novels. Don't be swayed by the hype.