Recent reviews by Groyer

After languishing in the mines of “mid-to-♥♥♥♥” for the past few years (excluding DW8 imo), the series has soared from the wastes to the skies. I’m glad that my cynicism after the absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of DW9 has been thoroughly broken with this game’s release. As the kids say: we’re so back.

Dynasty Warriors Origins is a retooling of the Musou formula that makes it feel better than ever to play a Musou title – and all future Musou games of any shape from Samurai to Hyrule & beyond should be molded in this style. The gameplay naturally graduates from the mindless fodder slasher into a hack-and-slash with engaging officer encounters.
Full unmarked spoilers below, TL;DR at the end.

(+) for positive, (-) for negative, (=) for neutral:

++ Battles feel the best they’ve ever been. You can still be the army of one, but it is much harder to do so. It feels like older DW titles where barreling into a mob of grunts will absolutely get you torn apart, especially with the Morale mechanic really coming into play. With proper preparation & smart gameplay, it’s still very possible and very satisfying. Commanding a small regiment of soldiers is a great feature that can really turn around a fight going south for your allies or start a battle heavily in your favor.

++ Officer duels return from older titles and even have the old chime that plays when you start the duel. These serve as an effective way to break up a large force and they aren’t afraid to shove your face in the dirt if you bumble around and lose.

++ The characters are portrayed very well, with nobody being overly goofy or trope-ish like in previous games. Zhang He isn’t overly flamboyant & Xu Zhu isn’t overly dopey or stupid. They still have their “tropes” tastefully sprinkled in their writing – Zhang He still finds beauty amidst chaos and Xu Zhu focuses on fighting for the farmers and loves food. Especially for Zhang Liao – no longer is he a wacky hippie crack smoking warlock (sort of), but someone who is rightfully conflicted about their sudden rise to power and doubts of carrying the beliefs of a nation on his shoulders, almost unwillingly so. They turn him into a sort of tragic villain, which I enjoyed a lot.

++ The player character feels like a smart, natural integration to explore the story of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. You are a catalyst for battles to be won that normally would have been won anyway, and tragic defeats & losses will still happen regardless of your status as “main character”. This of course excludes the moments where you can prevent historical deaths and move the story onto a “true path” where everyone lives and the best outcome for each ruler happens.

++ OST is still populated with Certified Bangers™ along with damn good mixes of old tracks.

+ Officer fights in general feel pretty solid. They’re concentrated down to small boss encounters where you parry and dodge their attacks, then break a guard meter for a big attack or finishing blow. Later bosses can be quite spongy and flirt with tedium, but I was still engaged with longer fights.

+ Weapon variety is truncated down to 8 weapons. This also means that officers do not have all of their signature weapons, which may be a bummer to some. For others, this means that there are a few weapons to really nail down and make them feel good, and I belong in the latter camp. Sure, I miss using Guo Jia’s weird pool cue or Xu Shu’s edgy back-grip string sword, but the weapons present all feel real damn good. After completing one campaign story, they add in Lu Bu’s halberd as a 9th weapon. It is satisfying as hell. Devs were pretty creative in hiding this limitation and keeping some officers feeling true to form. Xu Huang still has his big-ass axe, Yu Jin still has the trident and Han Dang still has the short pike. These all however use Guan Yu’s guandao moveset, just with skins. Honestly though, don’t mind it at all.

+ The world map navigation feels just fleshed out enough to enjoy running around collecting pyroxene and doing random battles while being condensed enough so it doesn’t feel like it’s wasting your time. I didn’t use fast travel very often since it is easy to move around.

+ The story ends at the Battle of Chibi. It’s a very good endpoint before telling the story of the Jin and the Sima clan. For those expecting the full plot to the end of what DW7/8 expanded to, sorry but nah. Thankfully there is still plenty of content in NG+ challenges and doing the other stories.

+ NG+ is cool -- unlocking Ultimate Warrior for additional challenges per mission to get rewards and allowing you to time travel to points in the game to replay missions to unlock their true routes add quite a bit to the gameplay. It also lets you free battle the missions, pairing up with every officer available.

- The other unique characters in the story feel pretty whatever. They really feel like nothingburger characters. I just couldn’t really care when the plot tried to focus more on the Wanderer and show off these characters.

-- The English dub is rough in the “it feels like there was no quality control” sort of way. There are some good performances mixed in the classic DW-era voice “acting” from most everyone else, but it isn’t endearingly hammy. I want to say it’s a mix of inexperience from some of the talent as this is their first and only credit, and majority blame on poor voice direction. The cast features some recognizable talent such as Mark Whitten (FE3H’s Seteth as Zhang Liao) and William C. Stephens (FF7R’s Rude as Guan Yu), but their performances sound wooden and amateurish. They have… strange pauses between… words that don’t feel… natural. Almost like they’re trying too hard to do a Shatner-esque pause. Overall, English dub is just ass, won’t sugarcoat it. I swapped over to the JP dub and didn’t go back.

TL;DR – Dynasty Warriors Origins is an amazing return to form for the Musou series and is laying the foundation for future Musous to build upon. My only hope is that they didn’t hit the peak here, then begin another long descent into garbage for another decade or so. I would highly recommend this game for anyone who’s ever played ANY Musou game of any kind, or complete newcomers. I’d buy this full price, on sale would be a no-brainer.

A pleasant mirror into the past for Suikoden 1 and 2 enjoyers, and those who also enjoy games that feature a large roster of characters (i.e. Chrono Cross) that makes the game feel more like a character collector that happens to have a story. After finishing it, I would prefer to give the game a neutral rating, but would lean positive when forced, which I am.

Some overlooking points:
+ The gameplay is pretty solid, if not a little on the basic side. Combat moves along quick enough, though I do miss having an option for cursor memory. Characters that are "behind" tend to level up quite quickly if you bring them along -- I never felt the drag of having to baby a character just to level them up to my party's overall spec which I greatly appreciated, compared to the RPGs of old that have a massive cast. The game also makes it fairly easy to outfit a new member with skills and runes to give them a proper "test run" to see if they fit well or if you like them. It felt like the game respected my time, which is a big plus for me. Tag attacks, however, felt pretty weak, which is a bummer.

++ The sprite work and art are great. The soundtrack is also well crafted and a pleasure to listen to throughout the entire game. A good mark for a JRPG for me is if the battle theme makes me want to loop it on YouTube or lop my ears off, and it firmly landed in the former along with a few other songs from the soundtrack.

+ There's a fairly good variety the characters you find and unlock. The various designs gave me reminders of Chrono Cross where I would recruit some fairly generic Sir Knightly or John Mercenary first, then recruit a sentient tree or a cool dwarf afterwards. They get enough time to show you what they're about and then kindly step out of the way (unless they are plot relevant in that moment), though if you do take them along they will occasionally comment on the quest with their own personalities and lines coming through, which I appreciated when they came up.

++ The minigames are pretty great, and were hilarious & fun to come across. Encountering a YuGiOh GX character that then added in a card game was great, which followed up in my playthrough with unlocking the ability to LET IT RIP. A Chocobo racing and breeding styled minigame soon followed, so there's something for everyone. The minigames are pleasant to play, so going through them to unlock characters for "completing" them doesn't feel like a chore.

= Base building felt a little tacked on. It did give good incentive to find and recruit characters to unlock certain nodes. There were also moments where it felt like a waiting game or unnecessary grind to get certain materials. Was it a long grind? Nah, but they were pit-stops that had to be made nonetheless that weren't entirely necessary additions into the gameplay loop.

= The war game sections of Eiyuden felt shoehorned in. It never felt like I was being tested or pushed up against a wall tactically, and it was pretty milquetoast in terms of presentation. Not offensive, but also not weighty enough for me to care.

- The duels, however, felt entirely unnecessary after the first couple. I know that Suikoden was about having climactic character duels at big plot moments, but all of the duels in Eiyuden felt tacked on and unnecessary. They also drag on for far too long watching the same overly drawn out animations over and over again, and until you know all the phrases (or just look them up) you will most likely fail some a couple of times. Thankfully you can just restart them from the beginning immediately (except for one that is plot critical & feels unwinnable, but you can win it for bragging rights).

- The plot is pretty basic, damn near approaching "tap water" levels of standard. If you value in-depth stories that provoke thought, emotion, or the element of surprise, you won't get it here. If you don't care and are just here for the character collecting RPG, then you're fine. If you do, then it'll suck a bit, but it isn't enough to completely detract from the game's overall enjoyment.

- Character balance feels off. Obviously I do not expect all the characters to be amazing party members. I came in with Chrono Cross expectations of getting some characters that will strictly just be bad. It felt like there were more characters that sat in the "mid to awful" category while those who had great stats were *miles* ahead of everyone else. There are also two characters that are casters with confused stat distributions -- their standard attacks scale with Magick, but the have much higher Strength stats. They get rune slots catered for casting but, again, have much lower Magick and higher Strength. It was frustrating too, since I liked both of these characters that came up, but I just had to bench them because they were implemented poorly. Other characters will also just have terrible or painfully average stats that make you go "why do you exist" and some of them require a bit of effort to recruit, only to reach those conclusions. I will acknowledge this is more of a gripe on my end, because this game can be cleared with "sub-optimal" parties with no issue. It just felt more jarring here than in similar titles.

-- This is the big blemish for me, but the script in the game just has big misses. There were a lot of lines and slang that just strictly didn't belong here and felt like someone on the team just *had* to put them in because they thought they were clever or funny. I don't give a damn about "wokeness" or w/e other socio-political beligerence that everyone else wants to partake in, but there were too many lines just made me roll my eyes strictly under questions of "Did we really need to re-write this to be this verbose? Or this memey? Or this much of a dragged on nothing-burger of an exchange? Did this even have a point? Did we need these lines immediately after this event to explain it?" It was clear that the localization team were not interested in properly localizing the game to fit the target language's rhetoric, but to insert their own "fanfiction book" level of writing that was wholly unnecessary. I couldn't play the game with the JP dub due to the text being so wildly and obviously different through spoken word, it felt too jarring. A spoken "nani?" would be nearly nine written words of a verbose "huh?", as a metaphor. There is a patch on the Nexus that fixes this thankfully, but this shouldn't be necessary. That patch, however, does not and probably cannot fix all the unnecessary line padding. That is a problem that is not a fault of the localization team, but the script writers as a whole that shoehorn in a lot of text that is just not needed (i.e: You press a button to unlock a door. You will now get 3-4 lines of dialogue explaining that you unlocked a door. You will probably get more while you keep unlocking doors until they're all open or the big progression door is open. You are mentally a 5 year old and must be repeated to. ).

Despite the massive negative wall above to conclude though, this game is a fine addition to any RPG collection. If I were to give it a score, it would be a 7 out of 10. I would recommend this game on a sale, but full price wouldn't be too big of a ouch in my opinion. I'd happily welcome a sequel.

An delightful & charming monster collecting game. Pleasant splashes of Pokemon and Digimon float in the river of this game's flow, along with small sprinkles of decent platforming and puzzle solving in-between. Nothing too boggling to stump someone nor too arduous to break the flow of gameplay (both in regards to platforming and puzzles).

Big gameplay plus that stood out for me is that the "shiny" cassette beasts, called bootlegs, are actually different and unique beyond a swap in colour palette. They will learn new moves, are of a different element, and have higher chances to learn more powerful versions of moves that can either make them more powerful, or allow your other cassettes to use those buffed moves in their repertoire.

An absolute high point and special "well bloody done" to the music team for this game. The songs in this game are stellar. Ambient tracks aside, the vocals kicking in "Wherever We Are Now" for the first time was so damn cool. The rest of the vocal tracks coming in throughout the game were just additional treats up until the end.

The only (quite small) knocks I could have against this game are that the battles do become fairly simple when you have a good moveset locked in, then you just have to worry about having a good fusion partner to prevent getting screwed over by bad reactions for bosses. The second is that the extra game modes, like the randomizer, do not unlock until you finish the game. For me, however, those are very small scratches on an overall fantastic package of a game. I purchased this on a whim and didn't regret it for a second.

It is the year 2022 and we still don't have a "neutral" option for recommendation. I would tip this toward a negative if forced, which I am, so here we are. I’ll be focusing on the gameplay and story bits of it since I feel I can elaborate on that better. Other stuff will be very briefly touched upon.

There will be some unmarked story & event spoilers, so the TL;DR is: solid gameplay marred by poor balance and a continually decaying and predictable story with flat characters. If you can ignore the story part of JRPGs, then go for it. If you can't, don't. Or wait for a sale.

Symphony of War combines Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle (abbreviated SoW, FE and OB for brevity) by combining squad building and management of OB with the personal growth and "hero" character leads of FE into one SRPG. You will form squads around individual hero units, with some of said heroes clearly having a preference for which style of squad they prefer (i.e. Barnabas has a trait to reduce cavalry unit cost). Experimentation is still heavy encouraged and rewarded, and you can have "a-ha!" moments when crafting a squad that you really like or find out is very effective in certain scenarios. Resources used for unit promotion are part of a shared pool that is refunded if you downgrade anyone, which can be done at any time, so you are free to keep trying out different things.

When entering a mission, the map style and layouts remind me of Genealogy of the Holy War (FE4) -- they are fairly large in size with smaller objectives to capture throughout the map which gives you resources to be used later or during the mission. The missions with confined & linear maps have a clear focus on what needs to be done on the chapter, so you aren't distracted with other side objectives. On the larger maps with locations that are out of the way, usually markets or resource nodes, it is worth your while to go for them.

Battles play out automatically when you enter combat, so you are not assigning your individual squad members individual attack orders. You can, however, give them a general tactic to follow. These range from focusing the enemy leader, to attacking units with lower HP to get them out of the way faster. This can start out annoying, especially against enemy squads with heavy units in front that the AI will be forced to fight first before any backrow, but there are units to circumvent this and tactics to get around it. Certainly a learning experience by doing it, and it’s satifying to learn. The gameplay flow feels good and clicks quickly. Its ease of play will arise quicker to those who are familiar with FE and OB, but newcomers to both will still find this easy to slip into. There’s also a handy dedicated turbo button that speeds up the entire game.

My gripe here, however, is the difficulty curve. The game’s intro sequence of missions lend themselves well into the typical layout of “tutorial first, then we let you swim a bit”. The missions here are balanced nicely and provide enough to think on without completely berating you like a child. When the second half of the game starts, the difficulty then goes from “this is a bit tricky” to “this is ridiculously easy” like a whiplash. Your cast of main characters become literal gods and gain powers in accordance. This includes map-wide dances (extra turn for one unit), AoE damage, 5-range teleport, etc. Your other units at this point will also be quite strong into the mid-to-late game and will be able to handle most situations beyond the ones where you just aren’t paying attention.

The undo mechanic also is in this game. For those in the know, this is equivalent to Mila’s Talisman or Divine Pulse from FE:Echoes or FE3H. I’m not going to beat on the fact that it’s here but I will beat on the fact that this game has it as an unlimited resource, while the other two games at least give it some limit in use. The main difference in SoW’s rewind mechanic is that you cannot rewind an individual move, and if something terrible happens on the enemy’s phase, tough luck. However, you can just rewind your own turn infinitely until you get the perfect RNG or the perfect scenario to play out, or just rewind the whole mission like nothing happened. While a frustration saving measure, it also removes all agency of protecting your units and valuing your moves when the safety net is just one button away and has infinite uses. With the aforementioned dip in difficulty, you probably won’t use this for any problems, but probably because you mis-clicked a move and need to re-do it.

Hoo boy.

The story definitely feel like an FE script that reads poorly. It starts off harmless enough – you are a lord (with blue hair even!) in charge of putting down a rebellion. The entire scenario gives off “are we the baddies?” vibes, especially when the prime minister in charge of it all looks the part. It follows very standard beats until, again, the half way point, when your character is executed by the totally-not-evil prime minister and then resurrects as a god avatar. They are re-introduced doing a bunch of anime “totally cool” things, acting out the fantasy of that kid at the playground who keeps getting cool powers to not lose their make-believe fight. It wraps up by getting the gang back together, killing the bad prime minister, then the big evil demon who was “the real baddie all along!” shows up and you beat him up in space or something. If you have read the story for or played FE7 or FE8, you have read or played a better version of this game’s story.
Whenever anything happens to these characters it always falls flat since I do not know any of these characters long enough to care about what happens to them. One of the big “uh, ok?” moments I had was when they decided to dump the big twist that Jules is the rightful heir and king to Sayunaa, and Narima was meant to find him. This is… never hinted at whatsoever. There is one passing remark which Narima tells Jules to keep himself safe shortly after you recruit her, but it’s written as if it’s because she’s looking out a fellow countryman. They try very hard to get you to care though. The rest of the cast comes off fairly flat. There are a couple that remind me of FE derivatives (Jules → Wolt, Cybil → Serra, in concept).

Big killer for me are the “support” conversations that units can have. Usually in FE titles, they start at “C” rank where they get to know each other, and then grow to either an “A” support where they are close friends, or sometimes “S” rank where they are in love and get married in the end. In this game, that doesn’t happen. Characters will interact multiple times feeling like they are stuck in “C”, while other times, one character will talk to another one singular time only, having never interacted in plot or otherwise, then suddenly be madly in love and bonded. Abigail and Zelos’ support is the huge red flag for this. These two characters never interact and do not even know each other, but they have ONE conversation where Abigail asks about Zelos’ exploits as the (previous) Champion of Zanatus and when he starts talking about murdering innocents and soldiers in droves she thinks it’s “really hot” and just wants to bang. And Zelos’ response is “bro, sweet”. ♥♥♥♥♥♥’ yikes.

This is what killed this game for me. The gameplay continued to get dull and easy while the story never really took off the runway. By the end, I was holding the turbo button going “let’s get this done already” so I could file the game away. The music is fine. Sprite work is stellar. Art is… okay.

All in all, it’s a solid game with solid gameplay that starts to taper off with iffy balance, and the story never really takes off. It feels very safely derived of its inspirations, leaning for the worse. Again, if you can ignore the story in JRPGs, go for it. If not, wait for a sale or just… don’t.

A pleasant little RPG adventure. Music is wonderful, and the game has the pleasant essence and flavor of Yoko Taro's team throughout which put a smile on my face. I can easily recommend this game as a light RPG game, either to be enjoyed in one or two long sittings, or casually picked at in-between other games as a cool down or palette cleanser.

Though be aware: if you expect a typical JRPG's mechanical depth and length, you will not get that. This is a a tabletop adventure game led by a narrator, with light RPG elements (leveling, character growth, combat, etc.). My completion time on 1st playthrough (roughly 12 hours) included uncovering all map cards and finding the secrets for the best ending, through natural play, without stopping to read any guides or any miscellaneous pauses or stepping away that might have fluffed up play time.

Controls are awkward as hell. Dodging and aerial attacks are bound to the same button for whatever reason. Skill attacks delay after an odd amount of time before you can dodge or follow up with another attack, but sometimes it's instant. It feels simultaneously sporadic and rigid.

Performance is inconsistent at best. I've had the game run silky smooth in instanced areas or open fields, but the second anything has to load or pop in, especially in towns, the game struggles. At highest graphical settings this game feels like an uprezzed mobile game at times.

The biggest knock for me is that the camera literally CRAWLS to pan over to your character or your target if you lock on or swap characters. It literally takes a cinematic fly-by to catch up. It's most noticeable if you lock onto an enemy and immediately sprint off to engage the target. If I can press toggle character and leisurely walk my character off the screen while the camera drunkenly finds me, there is a fundamental problem with the game. When your camera isn't working in an action RPG style game, let alone a game in this current era, there is an issue.

This game is a mess. Unless patches can fix the problems with camera, inconsistent performance and haphazard problems tied to miscellaneous things (such as long load times being tied to the frame rate/vsync, poor CPU optimization reported by others, etc.) then stay far away from this game. Certainly is not worth $60, and the amount for their season pass is the laughable Bamco standard.

This is for the Steam Grand Prix thing, to get that out of the way.

But as a Mon Hun veteran, this is a fantastic pillar in the series. The PC port has its quirks, and while I can say "it works fine on my machine :^)" in most instances, I've always found it to be stellar in delivering the Monster Hunter experience from games past, with its own fantastic spins.

Extraordinarily innovative RPG in terms of class customization, battlefield tactics and control, and the sheer infinite amount of ways to surpass obstacles and defeat enemies. Playing it with a friend will only serve to heighten your experience even further.

You haven't lived until you kill a goblin by throwing a painting at him.

It's like Civilization but in a more fantasy style setting. Has grid-based strategy combat which is ♥♥♥♥♥♥' sweet. Highly recommended.

>get the game
>"jesus christ look at all this ♥♥♥♥ to build"
>build base, build small vessel after 8 hours of game
>"alright, let's got to space!"
>fly to the moon
>enter the moon's atmosphere, game freezes for 5 seconds
>while I was frozen I was shot down and destroyed by a enemy drone base that was 612m away out of field of vision or rendering distance

5/7, would get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over by sudden load times again

(it's actually pretty fun, much more so than No Content's Sky, but it's an alpha so getting ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over by bugs like that is just going to happen eventually."