Recent reviews by Doom_Cookies

I want to preface this by saying I enjoyed the game, but I can not recommend it to anyone. The game's main story is complete, but other content is very clearly unfinished (and it even says as much when you beat the game). The ending does feel very rushed, with a lot of abandoned plot threads that were critical to the story up until the chapter before last - whether that was meant to be sequel bait or the story was rushed to a finish so they could have a "complete" game, I do not know.

The developers have not been heard from for roughly a year, since mid 2023, and seem to have abandoned the title. If this game were actively being updated and its content would be finished and its bugs fixed, I would have recommended it as a very ambitious indie JRPG. But as it stands, I cannot.

Just helping counter the clear on-release review bombing campaign.

The only valid critiques in all these negative reviews are that:

• There really are performance issues. The game's performance is impressively awful. There may or may not be bugs involved.
  
• Some people have had crashing when trying to boot the game. It's not widespread, but is fairly common. I'm not sure if this has been fixed, yet, or if there are workarounds, as I've not personally experienced it.
  
• A handful of negative reviews are about not enjoying the game. That's a matter of taste and perfectly reasonable as a negative review.
  
• Denuvo. Arguably overblown complaining about it, but it's surely not helping the performance issue.

Just about everything else is nonsense.

The most common complaint is the microtransactions. To be clear, absolutely everything being sold is either abundantly available in-game without any grind to get it or is fluff like the original Dragon's Dogma's BGM and SFX. Microtransactions are the bane of gaming and games would be much better off without them, but these specifically are completely and utterly harmless. It's the power equivalent of being able to buy healing potions in a typical RPG. There's nothing to it.

You won't even notice you're going without them unless you look at the DLC shop.

If the currency and item microtransactions bother you so much, just Cheat Engine them in to feel like you pulled a fast one on Capcom. It's free.

Such a complete non-issue that people are latching onto for dear life.

Edit: Common sense ability to start a New Game despite already having a save going was patched in. All negative reviews complaining about that specifically are out of date.

Simple and straightforward, Nevergrind Online is very easy to pick up and run with. You even know exactly what you're getting from the brief trailer. It has an enjoyable gameplay loop and is more engaging than it might seem at a glance. Starts off very slow until you unlock all your abilities at level 5, however.

Tales of Symphonia was a great game a decade and a half ago. The gameplay and story quality simply haven't aged well. Players who have played it way back when and want to experience it for nostalgia or diehard Tales fans who want to play through the entire series may enjoy, but I don't recommend Tales of Symphonia to new players.

If there is ever a sequel, I will be buying it.

I'm not going to list the pros and cons or give detailed rundowns of mechanics and game design decisions; there are other reviews for that. One of the biggest gripes about this game is its length, or lack thereof, and I just feel I should mention that I got 4 hours of fun out of half the cost of a movie ticket. Sounds like a good buy to me.

It's worth noting that there's an updated rerelease of Croixleur Sigma for the PS4/PS Vita with slightly improved enemy variety and two new unlockable characters. It might be worth looking into that instead of buying the PC version if you have one of the consoles.

I'm going to keep this succinct by explaining the pros and cons in short points.



~Pros~

- The combat in this game is fairly unique.

- The classes seem well thought out and feel different from one another.

- Dungeons have tons of difficulty levels, even solo and 2-man modes.

- Mounted combat.

- Tame just about anything as a mount/pet.

- Flying was pretty cool and unique. The "gliding" effect made it interactive and kind of fun.



~Cons~

- Nexon Guard. At least it's not nProtect.

- The game is P2W. Even for mount taming.

- Has the same bland fetch and kill quests that every other MMORPG has.

- The story just isn't that good. Or even coherent, at times.

- There is no Automatic Dungeon/Group Finder. Manual groups only.

- Terrible optimization. There's FPS drops in combat even on minimum settings.

- DX9 is the default version used. Enabling DX11 requires editing .ini files.

- Mount taming is completely RNG-based. You often 100% the taming minigame and still fail.

- Enemy attack damage and hit rolls are determined at the start of its animation.



To explain the last point in more detail:

Some classes in the game have some sort of dodge skill. However, if you dodge AFTER you see an enemy start an animation for a huge hit, you'll be hit with it regardless since the damage was already determined. In order to dodge an attack, you need to dodge BEFORE an enemy starts its attack animation. This is not a bug, and was determined to be "working as intended".