Recent reviews by Garlyle Wilds

Fantastic title with its own unique twists on the cooking genre, taking a lot of visible inspiration from Fire Emblem. The resulting game is a unique mixture of strategy, puzzling, RPG, and relationship building, all within the backdrop of a super cozy tale about succeeding the family restaurant on a small Hawaiian island. I hope this game doesn't get lost in the depths of Steam, it's a real gem.

The Warriors combat formula and massive roster of playable characters turns out to make for a fairly engaging horde-survival type of gameplay, especially with effort put into the boss fights and all. What's really surprising though is that the usually shallow Warriors games instead have a multi-faceted depth in the officer system that serves as your main upgrade selection. The only real issue is that, with just one set of largely static challenges to run through, the breadth of challenges to match against that depth of customization is limited, but who knows, with the updates, maybe more will be added in time.

The free play mode is very good; it's a solid, if fairly typical, rhythm game, with a broad genre selection from hard rock to light memes. The core of this game is very, very good.

The surrounding aspects are where it falters. The tutorials (especially for Danmaku mode) just dump a ton of pages of info on you. The keys for UI navigation feel often arbitrary. And most notably the story mode suffers for multiple reasons: Repetition of tracks across multiple stages (despite the wide track list), unclear progression, and the RPG aspect in the Mitama cards... which can and do effect your score, resulting in "I got All Brilliant and the game still gave me a C rank" nonsense that doesn't feel right for a rhythm game at all. And Danmaku mode is cute but, without difficulty settings, feels like it's tuned only for players who've never touched a shmup before.

Again, none of these issues tarnish a great core rhythm gameplay and its free play mode. It's just all the stuff outside of that which is lacking, but that's not so important to a rhythm game to say this is bad.

Though definitely on the 'too easy' side because of how stupid OP Rage Mode and Items are, it's still mindless good fun.

A pretty good escape room puzzle with a fun concept. It's not reliant on jumpscares much, to its credit. However, its conclusion(s) leave much to be desired, and anyone with colour blindness may want to avoid it due to the many puzzles reliant on colours. The rest is good though.

Though there's some small corners that could be cleaned up, I had a blast with this one. It just feels super smooth once you get the hang of it and it has a great energy to it.

It's a no at full price, but a yes on sale in the future. I hate that Steam makes me choose because this really is a thumbs sideways situation.

When it's working well, it does a fantastic job replicating the unique insanity of Dragon Ball fights, and it's got an absolute ton of fanservice. The truly bonkers roster, big story modes, scenario editor, all the love that went into the encyclopedia; this is a game with a lot of quantity.

But it's frustrating in all the ways it comes up short on quality. It does a poor job teaching its mechanics, and even once you do get a grasp on them, controls can sometimes feel inconsistent or unresponsive (especially notable around character swaps), which isn't the greatest in a fighter. And that's not to get into weird gameplay glitches like clipping out of the map, the AI bugging out and giving up, or online issues like controls suddenly changing to other styles (Though theoretically many of these can be addressed in the future)

The animations and camera work can be fantastic for super attacks, but then story animations freeze up completely or the camera gets stuck in weird places in combat and that sucks. That huge story with all the branching what-ifs sometimes impresses, but also sometimes skips things entirely while spending far too long on other beats. The soundtrack is... fine, but as far as fighting game soundtracks go, really forgettable.

Above all else, everyone is so tied to the core combat mechanics that it feels hard to find meaningful variety. It's like Street Fighter if every character was a Shoto - sure, there are differences between Ryu and Ken and Akuma and Dan, but that's really the only playstyle you'll get, and that feels like a huge missed potential.

I do enjoy the game, hell I kinda recommend it even if you're not a super huge DBZ fan, but I cannot in good faith recommend it at the full asking price.

A pretty good, albeit flawed time. Mainly the actual villain is cliche and the second half is a bit weaker, feeling a bit overly attached to the flow of Trials of Mana. But it still has a likeable cast, gorgeous area art design, fun combat, etc; it's so close to excellence but settles for greatness.

what, and I cannot stress this enough, the ♥♥♥♥

Okay so Investigations 1 is honestly one of the most bland and forgettable titles in the franchise. But now that I've finally gotten to play Investigations 2? ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ we were missing out for YEARS. Absolutely top tier in a franchise known for excellence.