Recent reviews by Drakni

Excellent. Just excellent.

I have to hand it to Atlus. As much as I had apprehensions at the start of this game they truly know how to make me care about their characters in the long-term, which is the absolute shining light of this franchise.

I don't know what else I can reasonably say, the persona games have been cemented as some of my all-time favourite games and this is definitely no exception.

I was thoroughly unprepared for this. What a novel concept to apply roguelite elements to a city builder of all things; and yet the genres meet PERFECTLY.

I'm an avid lover of roguelites and have dabbled in some city builders with decent enjoyment, however I always find that the learning curve of a city builder often means areas of the city get somewhat abandoned; un-optimised sectors left to decay or completely torn down to be replaced with newly unlocked buildings or approached with new knowledge on better layouts etc.

So, naturally, when I saw this game advertising itself as a roguelite city builder I was incredibly intrigued -- a city builder which leans into the "make mistakes, learn better ways to organise, unlock new buildings, abandon your city to implement your knowledge" is such a good idea and this game executes it fantastically. Instead of the failed abandoned city being a forgotten sector of your new city, or being outright replaced by a fresh save file, it's now instead drawn to the history books as a successful outpost providing a stepping stone to your next village offering a fresh slate to apply new knowledge, new buildings, and encounter new challenges.

EDIT: So 100+ hours later I've finished this game and it has firmly planted itself in my top 5 favourite games of all time. My initial thoughts about several characters being quite dull/one-dimensional have been THOROUGHLY humbled out of me -- It seems Atlus know what they're doing with character development as I have since shed actual tears for characters that I absolutely did not care for in the first 20 hours of the game.


Original review:
I've been pleasantly surprised about this. When I first heard it announced I must admit I figured it was going to be a lame cash grab, and was hesitant to buy at this price until I saw the overwhelmingly positive tag last several days - I could not have been more wrong about my hesitance.

I had P3F and P4 on ps2, but didn't really get into either very much but managed to get heavily into P4G on the vita which to this day is in the top 5 of my all-time favourite games. Returning to P3F/P3P and also trying P5 they didn't quite have the same draw for me as P4G between the characters and how the dungeons function.

This remake/remaster has implemented my favourite upgrades to the UI/combat from P5 and integrated them perfectly into a game whose story/characters/dungeon has managed to suck me in more than P5 could. Combined with an incredible face lift to the graphics and far more voice acted lines than I had expected, I'm absolutely blown away by the quality of this remake.

I believe that the characters in P4G blow these ones out of the water [at least of the characters I have met], and I still prefer how the dungeons in P4G work; so personally speaking I still prefer Persona 4 over this game [though, if it could one day get a remake treated with as much love as this, that would be my GOTY with no questions asked] however this version of P3 has sucked me in way more than any prior version and allowed me to actually experience this excellent game.
EDIT: as mentioned, the characters in this game are a slow burn. For many hours I found several characters dull, boring, and shallow. However, some of these exact same characters flourished into being extremely compelling as the story progressed. I recommend to give them a chance to grow on you.

This is a truly exceptional puzzle game where the puzzles are compelling but the instructions to the puzzles are, themselves, a great language-based puzzle rewarding you for cross-reference and picking up on context clues.

I found out about this game through a youtube video and was instantly intrigued. Immediately after completing the demo I had to buy it. It did not disappoint.

A hearty recommend for language lovers and puzzle gamers

Full disclosure, I'm a big fan of the Harry Potter series so my opinion on this game is heavily biased by this.

TLDR if you're a Potter fan seeking an environment rich in exploration opportunities, this game is 10/10. If you care much more for story over exploration, it's still well worth the price. I can't speak for non-fans of the series, but I've seen several friends with no interest appear to be thoroughly enjoying the game.

I came into this game with low expectations. Given the low depth of past Harry Potter games, and recent history of various game devs over-promising and under-delivering I made a point to assume this game would be awful so that I could be pleased no matter what. Out of the gates I was absolutely floored.
The scale of the game is enormous. I was expecting the castle, Hogsmeade, probably the forbidden forest, and then maybe a little bit of fluff in between. Imagine my surprise when I opened the map and found that it not only zooms out (several times) but also seems to scroll down forever. The map isn't barren, either, it's fairly well packed with puzzles, easter eggs, camps, etc.


The exploration in this game is, for a Potter fan, the absolute peak of this game. I've genuinely spent hours just walking around Hogwarts with the mini-map disabled, wandering aimlessly specifically to get lost in new places with new secrets. Finding a small reference and going "hey, I recognise that" and then being able to mentally place that reference next time I encounter it in a re-read of the books has greatly enhanced the game and the series as a whole for me.


The combat is a neat new idea that I think has managed to feel unique without feeling too gimmicky; however due to so much exploration I tended to out-level and out-gear most content meaning sadly I haven't engaged as fully with the combat as I would have liked. Is it the best combat out there? Definitely not. But I wouldn't call it a negative either.


I think the story is fine for the most part. I don't personally follow game stories too deeply, so for me to actively pay attention to this one is probably worth something. The side stories generally feel better quality than the main story, but I thought the main story was still above average. Thankfully the story isn't propped up by references to the original series; there are a couple of namedrops here and there but the story in no way assumes that the player knows the reference nor relies on it.

A truly exceptional co-op puzzle/escape-room style game. The entire series is fantastic.

This game is a major step-up in quality of puzzles, story-telling, and environment compared to the first three, especially noticeable upon entering maybe the most amazing / mind-bending puzzle room I've ever witnessed.

One or two of the puzzles are noticeably worse quality / harder to follow than the rest, made worse when it felt to us that the puzzle had become bugged (maybe it hadn't, though) BUT the sheer quality of the remainder of the game is high enough that these few experiences aren't enough to tarnish my overall experience.

It's not the longest game, but from my experience with this genre of games this is definitely on the longer side, and each game in the series has been progressively longer; I would not call the length of this game a downside. For the price and given the usual length of this genre, the length is perfect.

An absolute masterpiece. An immediate and definite recommend for any lover of roguelites.

I'm a sucker for the roguelite style of gameplay so was very interested when I first found this game. I was hooked immediately.
As far as I'm concerned, Hades is a near-perfect epitome of the genre.


The roguelite elements are superb. With several weapons having completely different individual playstyles combining with the several in-run upgrades, every single run is almost guaranteed to have a unique feel to it. Even after 120 runs and even while trying to make builds I recognise, I frequently end up having some unique combination of boons I haven't yet experienced.
There's also a sizeable amount of meta-progression to make future runs slightly more manageable, and even this has setup choices to allow for even more opportunities for unique runs.
Each run is around 20-40 minutes which is my personal ideal length; long enough that you can get the most out of a particularly fun build, but short enough that you can pick-up and drop-out without issue, or soon get back into a new run to find new synergies.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is solid and satisfying. Some roguelites don't work for me because I can't get into their gameplay, however Hades is easily the best-feeling dungeon crawler hack and slash game I've ever played. Though I do play with a controller, so can't speak much for keyboard+mouse controls.

There's so much charm to this game too. All the text boxes and short quips are brilliantly voice acted and even after 140 hours I'm still reading/hearing completely fresh lines, exploring new story or just hearing arbitrary quips that really keeps the game feeling fresh and makes the world feel alive. The graphics feel very nice, there's a gorgeous hand-drawn feel to them making the game almost feel like a comic.

I cannot recommend this game enough. Seriously, if you are even remotely interested in roguelites, dungeon crawlers, or hack and slash, you need to try this game. If this game was double the price, I'd buy it again in a heartbeat.

I found this game while watching one of the E3 panels with a friend, and we both were instantly intrigued by both the premise and the gameplay. 16 hours of gameplay later with a 100% achievement save file between us, I cannot express just how lucky I feel to have caught this at E3. I haven't played any part of this game solo, so anything I say pertains to the online co-op.

This is hectic co-op gameplay done very well. The tasks are chaotic in nature, where teamwork is quite difficult to achieve efficiently but can come naturally from enough practice at a level. This leads to frustrations at times, mainly when going for gold score times or on some of the more annoying typewriter levels, but ultimately leads to a more satisfying completion of a level - the times where we were struggling on a level for 10-20+ minutes to then suddenly smash the gold medal time when our brain signals were synchronised through the practice runs were very satisfying for both of us.

It's not a perfect game, however. I personally feel it could have potential being longer (though for this price, it's fine. Maybe new DLC levels are in the works or there's room for a sequel) and the game has a fair few bugs, most notably an occasional desync from the server where my game showed information to me that conflicted with my friend's (this happened maybe 3 times in the full 16 hours so not a big deal), though nothing that can't be relatively overlooked as they're not super frequent. Some levels are particularly infuriating too; mostly the later typewriter levels where it can sometimes feel like a never-ending game of hide and seek with the keys.

It would also be nice if there was a built-in leaderboard. I'm pretty sure we achieved some particularly good scores/times on a couple of levels and it would be nice to see a comparison to others. This may also give some additional longevity to the game as it would potentially give us reason to continue playing past the 100%.

I definitely recommend this to anyone interested in this style of co-op game if they have a friend to play it with. You will both need patience, with the game and with each other, if you want to get good times on some levels -- some gold medal scores are rather tight. But for a playthrough less oriented around high scores, I feel this game is an easy one for players of all skill levels to pick up.

Definitely one of my favourites of the FF series, but easily the one with the largest nostalgia factor for me, and to this day it still brings me joy to play through this yet again.

Heartily recommended for any lover of old-school JRPGs.

The game has aged pretty well too; while still dated, the graphics are decent for what I would have expected, the story is fantastic, and the music is incredible.

Finally, I give massive respect to Square Enix on this port in particular, it's a well-thought-out port. While this game has a tendency to crash more than I'd like it to, it's a port specifically built with PC in mind, having autosaves (offsetting the impact of crashes), additional integrations for mouse and keyboard (such as click-to-move) as well as perfectly usable controller compatibility out-the-box.
I emphasise these points mainly as I own both FF7 and FF8 on steam, which I personally believe to be particularly poor/lazy ports, where even controller usage is difficult and sometimes unintuitive.

This is genuinely one of the best games I've ever played. In fact, "play" isn't the right word for it.... "live" perhaps.

You can't really just play it for a couple of hours and then leave it.
You play it for 18 hours a day for a week straight and then wonder why you're hungry.

Your whole life becomes factorio while playing it, and that's not entirely a bad thing -- there's ALWAYS about 10 things to do.
I need A
But to get A I need B and C
I'm making B but if i do D and E I can make B faster
To get C i need E, F and G

The list continues infinitely, I can't begin to imagine how many times I've lost my train of thought being about 20-deep in distractions.

Yes, it's incredibly time consuming to play it to its best, but seriously, it's the most rewarding experience to improve all the automation, making it more efficient to help yourself later on down the line.


And finally, as long as you figure out robots, this game features the single best inventory management system in any sandbox-like game I've ever played. Gone are the times of Minecraft when I would blindly dump items in random chests to free some space, to never find them again. With Factorio bots, AI does that for you! It's the most joyful experience to come back to main base after an excursion and watch hundreds of flying bots effortlessly manage your entire inventory perfectly.

I cannot recommend this game enough. It's an absolute steal at even 3x the price.