Recent reviews by Blue A10

This is a lovely game. Bought it while off work during the holidays and it sucked me in for two / three days straight for my first playthrough. I intend to go back and finish my 2nd+ later but I'm kind of touring several games during this break. Maybe come back sometime and flesh this review out, but it's easily worth what I've experienced so far and if you think you might like it, you probably will.

I cried and "awwww"'d at several points, and overall it was a really refreshing and wholesome game that genuinely gave me a mental boost and reminded me that I used to be a kinder person. It's got interesting underlying plot threads to explore as well if you're into that (I am) and has a NG+ sort of system for easing subsequent playthroughs in order to see the other endings or plot points you might've missed or been unable to unlock.

Steam hours are way off for some reason, so don't let that trick you I've got a lot more.

It's pretty good sometimes

Gust went sick-o mode on this one. The technical issues can get pretty rough but hopefully they'll iron them out in the coming months. Performance with the steam overlay on is dreadful for some reason and screenshots break. I've been crashing a fair amount today however I'm using the atelier-sync-fix and haven't played without it so it's not clear to me if the crashes are normal or due to that.

That aside, this feels the most worth your money at full price out of Ryza games and seems like it'll just make 1 and 2 obsolete. The huge maps with minimal loading screens / teleports is such an awesome experience for these games and really gives it a grand feeling. I've only mainly been in the first map and some of the colors / scenery in it are absolutely beautiful. It gives off the impression of having 10x the resources allocated to it than 1 and 2 did.

I came into 1 for the thighs, got hooked on the crafting, went into 2 for more thighs and Klaudia + much more fun combat, and then went into this one just expecting more of the same but am having my expectations blown out of the water pretty frequently despite some of the issues I'm having to deal with. Love it.

EDIT: Clarification before the rest of this; I have been playing solely on Windows using a Windows fork of atelier-sync-fix: https://github.com/TellowKrinkle/atelier-sync-fix/tree/windows, which I compiled myself with VS. Ran into a consistent crash at the end of a mandatory conversation, so I removed atelier-sync-fix. Crash no longer occured and haven't seen one since. Still not sure if that is the sole cause but it seems like it might make things less stable. Performance surprisingly is not much worse without it, I had just assumed it would be as big of a gain as it was on Ryza 2 and went with it from the start. Playing on 4k max settings on my 5700XT and I don't know what the framerate it is but it feels only slightly worse. So, for anyone curious about atfix, maybe try it and lean towards avoiding it if it's not much better. It's possible I didn't compile it correctly as well and so maybe I'm totally at fault.

EDIT2: I'm getting intermittent crashes when accessing the Guide / Help in the game, but otherwise things are running well and stable, plus they even just toned down the DoF a little bit in an update last night / this morning. The crashes occur even completely vanilla with no overlays of any kind, so I believe that 100% is on the game's part. Which is a pretty rough crash as often you'll be synthesizing a lot and then you take a look in the Guide for a material or to get more info on an object, then you've crashed and lost potentially a lot of progress as autosave probably didn't kick in if you haven't left the same location and so you would need to manually save somewhat regularly.

RIP Keiji Fujiwara

I actually couldn't relate a lot to this I think because I've been kind of a recluse most of my life, though I liked all the nostalgic PC stuff and pop culture references. It's free and pretty short at like ~30 minutes for a full run, I think I might understand the message it's going for and can appreciate the way it was implemented, so despite it not hitting me super hard, I still recommend people try it out if for no other reason than to appreciate the creation of it, the nostalgia it evokes, and hopefully they also resonate with the story and message more than I did.

One of the few games I've gone through the effort of attempting to 100%, I was successful for the base game but am due for a return to play through the DLCs, which I've heard good things about for the most part.

It seems kind of hard for me to explain one of the new Fallout games to someone who's not heard of them before, but in case you've played Fallout 3 before, this is essentially like Fallout 3 but with even more soul and charm put into it, as well as some welcome gameplay improvements. I've not played 4 and have barely touched the original 1 and 2, so I'm afraid I can't compare it to them, but I've heard this one does a pretty decent job of capturing the spirit of the older games in some ways. It is immersive in a worldly kind of way though not in a presentation kind of way, if that makes sense. The enjoyable written characters and stories between them as well as those of the world around you all can suck you in and even vary a fair amount based on your own choices and even your character build. The gameplay is not anything super special, but can be very satisfying when your build starts coming together and you upgrade weapons with mods, or find some of the exotic weapons such as a automatic mini-nuke launcher.

New from Fallout 3 and a massive improvement in itself IMO, is that most weapons now have and use functioning sights of some kind. My main initial run where I 100%'d the game, I actually rarely ever used VATS, the quasi-turn-based targeting system, and opted instead to play it more like a pure FPS with manual aiming, and I had a blast. It was honestly much more fun than using VATS, and enabled me to snipe enemies from great distances where VATS couldn't even pick up the target or picked up the target at very low hit % chance. Not to say VATS isn't useful in some situations like close quarters or that it isn't fun, but it's a great feeling to feel less restricted to it like I felt in Fallout 3, where it seemed like it was designed for you to almost exclusively use VATS outside of melee or point-blank ranges.

This is a Bethesda RPG-esque game running on virtually the same engine as Fallout 3 which also runs on a very similar engine to TESIV: Oblivion, so it feels kind of like playing either of those games and comes with the ups and downs of that. The major upside would be modding, as the community has created countless mods and patches for the game so that you can turn it into almost any kind of experience you'd like. I highly recommend you look into some of the bug fix and/or unofficial patch mods for this game before you play, as IIRC it was notorious for randomly crashing or bugging out pretty hard just in it's vanilla state. Like most Bethesda RPGs with mods though, be careful not to fall down the rabbit hole and spend tens of hours modding the game without actually playing it. Probably focus on just bug fixes and stability stuff for the first run at least, then dive into the sea of more exotic mods after that if you're curious and wanting.

The story leaves a bit to be desired in some places, which is a shame considering the series this is a part of, but this is still an excellent and very fun game to play that I'll never forget. Having played the rest of the series does a lot to enhance the impact of this one, for better and worse, but even if you're new to the series I think you can probably find enjoyment in it still. The game doesn't go very far to reward it, but you can tackle most missions in a variety of ways almost like a more free-form Hitman game, with lots of both neat and wacky tactics/gadgets such as sleeping gas mines or traps to inflatable decoys of yourself, cardboard boxes and water guns to short out electronics. Some of the bits with your bikini'd partner can be a little hard to show others and not have it be embarrassing, so be somewhat prepared for that, but they're not common throughout the game outside of some cutscenes and if you decide to zoom in on her for too long in the helicopter.

It doesn't quite hit the same way Dark Souls 1 does still, but this is still an excellent game to play and an entry in the series that's probably the most consistently fun to play, with the bosses in the DLCs pretty much one-upping the last one each time they're introduced, of which the final DLC boss is my favorite fight in the series. You do need to be a bit careful online as it's not devoid of people using hacks for shenanigans and mischief and you can even be caught up in the shotgun punishment of them, but that aside the multiplayer experience is an irreplaceable one just as it was for Dark Souls 1, and something I think everyone should experience.

Never been so glad to have played a game like this. This prologue is better than a lot of full adult games you'll find on the store and it didn't even cost anything. The actual movement and controls during the roaming sections is a bit rough, but the characters have appealing designs and aesthetics, and their H-scenes have S-tier animation. So on an aesthetics front, the game is really impressive, and is overall impressive considering it is largely the work of one person. If you came for the adult content alone and are into monster girls then I don't think you'll be disappointed if you give this a try.

I may edit this review with my thoughts on the rest of what's here in the future, as there is more to the game than the sex scenes.

I never realized just how effective the Rule 34 community can be at marketing until this came out.