Recent reviews by Limie Pie

I've waited for so long and after 100% completing the game I can't say I recommend it.

Gameplay-wise it feels okay-ish. Never used any "castle guns" because they're just too weak or boring. Deal damage, heal, slow enemies and that's it. Most of units you might want to use them on are immune to those effects anyway. In the balance department it's also quite sad. Developers didn't learn their lesson from DQ1 and two ranged units just break the entire game and solo almost every single level.

Progression is worse that in its predecessor. The dev seemingly wanted to make it more interesting, but as a result you have 5 abilities per character, and each ability can be upgraded by three skills. However, only the captain has somewhat interesting upgrades, cause all other units' upgrades are the same. The shooting lady has damage for skill 1, enemy penetration and electricution. These three upgrades are used in all 5 of her skills. The guy that pushes enemies back? The same: damage, push, side-effect like stun or slow for all 5 skills. Store upgrades are extremely cheap. I just played the game casually and managed to buy every single weapon and armor, cause the game providesa lot of materials for that. And there is no choice involved: everyone has 1 armor slot and 1 weapon slot, but you can't select anything, because you simply upgrade current weapon (to gain +4 damage!) and this is it.

And... art. This is subjective, cause everyone has their own definition of beauty, so you might like it! just open the community hub first and look throught the screenshots cause in-store ones don't show the things I'll mention here. My eyes literally hurt. Cutscenes and dialogue backgrounds use a lot of anaglyph effects, I had to skip the story because I just couldn't read the text with backgrounds like these. Characters are drawn extremely well, but... I’d call them ugly! Disproportional, weird, with strange facial expressions, following them was also pretty hard for me. People did have their problems with DQ1 artstyle because it was too simple, but here... It feels like a Picasso's acid trip. And this goes to everything here, from backgrounds to map and enemy design. Just a mesh of colors, shapes and objects that sometimes don't even fit within the chosen artstyle. I do prefer DQ1 here cause simple isn't necessarily bad, cause at least it's universally recognizable.

I do shake my hand to the art director for this bold decision to show their unique vision, but this is just not for me. 10 years and I can't say what was done in that time besides the art. No secret levels. No side quests. No interesting progression. No balance. No cute turtle castle. And a lot of small inconveniences that were solved by many other games in the genre. All of this just made me disappointed cause I did wait for the release since the first announcement. 10+ years later, and the penultimate level is a freaking spiral map as if it’s baby's first TD map, are you serious?!

Well that's an interesting spin on the formula.

Really addicting

Despite the short playthrough time, this game offers a phenomenal variability. It’s easy to get lost in each root, hard to remember each ending and it feels impossible to find every single nicely voiced piece of dialogue. And it’s beautiful in its complexity.

This is a love story, after all.

Cute, simple and yet challenging at times.

Best feature: being able to pay rent.

Pros:

-- Quite a refreshing take on the formula.
-- Feeling of emptyness on each of dead and deserted island is passed nicely with both audio and visual design.
-- Gameplay in open spaces is interesting. It's always fun to traverse given landscapes and finding some special places even though there is no reward for finding them. The world and big amount of goals kept me going from one thing till another. "One more tower and I will go" ended up in sessions till 3-4am for a couple of days.
-- Music is great, as always.
-- Even though dialogues are quite... simple of nature, you can finally feel they were written by people who actually know the franchise. And characters finally talk with dialogues instead of jumping around after every single word. That being said...

Cons:
-- I wish characters in dialogues did at least something. During most of the cutscenes they just stand there and blink while talking.
-- Virtual Worlds (regular levels) have different physics. Controls there are stiff and you feel really slow. Every move or attacks stops you in your tracks. I've ended up just jumping and boosting over everything just to make it on time. Feels especially terrible after playing with (kinda) good physics in open world.
-- Third Island is freaking awful. It's a volcano with a lot of small stones, ice and lava everywhere. Boosting here will send you flying upwards 99% of the time. It's hard to cyloop due to debree. Almost everything you touch turns gameplay into a 2D section with platforming even if you didn't want to go there. You're constantly sent in those and it's hard to escape them. And since some keys are not functional in those 2D sections they may stop working even in 3D just because you touched any 2D section. First two islands were great to explore. The third island takes your exploration freedom and forces you into platforming. Also final boss is the easiest one on this island.
-- Terrible menus and UI. They are slow. My hardware is top notch but when menu appears you cannot interact with it for 2 seconds. When you hit Pause (the P key, since you neither Esc, nor Enter, nor Tab can be bind to menu or map) you need to use jump button to select the menu tab before you can interact within it (even though the game uses mouse as a default input). Can't change any setting before you choose it's category and then the setting itself. Smells like a cheap console port.
-- Impossibly slow Koco progression. There are a lot of small fellas hidden in the world, but you need way too much of them. You need 20 Kocos to level up a single time... out of 99 for both rings and speed. And you do it one level at a time. Also, due to slow menus the upgrade process is really tedious. ["What do you want to upgrade?"] [2s pause] [Select "Speed"] ["Okay I will upgrade speed"] [Upgrading animation] [Giant text "Speed Upgraded 17lvl -> 18lvl" sits there for 5 seconds] ["I have upgraded your speed"] ["Do you want another upgrade?"] [2s pause] etc. And you need to do this 196 times. Thanks, but no.

Concl: I'm still having fun in the open world. Kind of sad that these issues are here but you can complete the entire game without upgrading or playing virtual stages to 100%. I am still doing this cause I hate myself, but you can just skip all of that. Except for the third island. Screw the third island.

How do I stop?

First and foremost: would I recommend this game? Yes, absolutely. But only if you really know what this game is.

If somehow you've managed to avoid spoilers or maybe you just want to jump the once again speeding bandwagon... Don't buy this game! Go play the free one first! You'll have to trust me on that because after this I'm going to the spoilers territory.

If you've played the free game then you should know what actions are required of you in the final act. This edition of DDLC was made specifically for consoles so the most obvious solutions is to build a PC emulation within the game. IMO it needed to be revealed after the moment you enter Sayori's room. But no, you're introduced to file system almost immediatly and that may break any surprises about the further actions that will be taken.

But that's not the only problem with this virtual machine. Do you remember how after certain realization you are free to toy with game's files by simply pressing Alt-Tab? Forget about that. For A) the game controls your access to files. You are not allowed to touch certain stuff until certain moments in the DDLC. B) It takes more time to close the game, open the files, open the game directory in virtual machine to open the easter egg (have a nice weekend) then close everything and re-launch DDLC with that intro and content warning.


New conent itself... It's interesting to unlock arts and they feel like achievements (although some actions could also award you with art like red-eyes effect, de ja vu scene, rare Sayori pattern or choosing Yuri against Monika's control over cursor). But anything else is... New music tracks are nice but they didn't stick to me personally. Secret lore stuff on vitual machine didn't bring anything new to the table, it's just the same stuff fans already knew or speculated about. Except for "we are creating new universes with side quests that conflict with main universe nooooooo". Nothing mind-blowing here.

Side stories... turned out to be just a single prequel story cut in 6 parts. These are nice but... The writing is kinda sad. "Yes I am going to do that because I love you!" I... I don't know who these are made for. Well, maybe there are DDLC fans who actually liked the first half of a game and thought "I wish this game had no horror elements". But it was a psychological horror. It got successful because of that. And these "side stories" have zero interaction (you cant even hide the UI, save or load the game. You don't need that though since they are really short) and nothing unexpected. Two characters of 4 get into a situation then they talk about it and it magically resolves. Do this six times for each pair of characters. Overall it feels like My Little Pony episodes but with tears and self-hate of all parties involved (and only one episode goes to grimdark territory, the first one). If you expect any horror, death, glitches or Just Monika - sorry, there's nothing like that.

It feels lika a fan package built into the game. For console players -- sure, it's a great opportunity. But PC... all true DDLC stuff is free to download and it works better. Cause, no, Monika, I don't go by "Administrator". Nice guess, though.

The last time my mind was blown in a similar fashion was when I've played the first Portal. Even Baba is You didn't make that strong effect.

If Stanley Parable was a puzzle it would be this game.

This puzzle makes you think out of the box. One of the rare situations when you see the solution and think that it's really obvious from the getgo. The last time I've felt this mind-blowing feeling was the first Portal. And this do say something.

Great mod if you’d really like to visit City 17 again. Better graphics, new secrets to find, still well-refined experience as you may remember it... and same old achievements to complete one last time.