Recent reviews by Quanta

Very gay, lots of cute ghosts to kiss.

I can actually feel the smoothness of my brain wrinkling away as I play thru the game.

Pizzas and Towers, together at last.

My first exposure to Dwarf Fortress was the Boatmurdered Let's Play from the SomethingAwful forums over a decade ago (you can read it here: https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/). Then I tried the game. My first fort all my dwarves died because they ran out of booze and died of dehydration when winter came and the rivers froze. My second fort, all was well and then I breached the caverns and a flock of elk birds came up from the depths and started harassing my dwarves and I had no military to deal with them. My third fort had one of my craftsmen go insane after they were taken by a strange mood and couldn't find the materials they needed so they ended up going around and killing their fellow dwarves, and even after they got put down the resulting bad feelings caused everyone to descend into a tantrum spiral to the fort's ultimate demise.

10/10 game is amazing

I was out exploring 2000+ light years away from human civilization and ran into a mining colony living inside of an asteroid in the middle of a random nebula I decided to fly to. It was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool.

'sok, I guess.

Combat is passable, in a button-mashy kind of way. There's barely any combo customization in this game. You have 5 basic combo strings, each corresponding to a direction on the left analog stick, including the neutral position, but all of these are set in stone: your Up+B, for instance, is the same 4 attacks throughout the entire game. You can vary your 4-hit combo by holding a different direction when you hit B, or you can weave in a special attack or magic (which use the left stick + A, and are assignable), but beyond that, it's the same attack strings over and over again. This is additionally complicated by enemy weaknesses, both elemental (which are easier to hit) and type (which are all over the place); enemies without elemental resistances tend to take longer to kill since it's more difficult to hit a type weakness a lot of the time, and enemies that resist all elements are particularly nasty, especially if you can't hit their type.

Equipment is extremely confusing. There's an upgrade system, but it interacts with a rune system that gives equipment specific special effects, such as more attack or super armor for spellcasting. All equipment has a specific rune in the first slot, and random ones in the other 3 (including no rune at all). When you upgrade (and you can only upgrade identical items, so a Calcite Sword needs to be upgraded with another Calcite Sword), these runes interact with each other, morphing into different runes depending on which runes are combined. This can be a blessing and a curse, since it can get rid of a useful rune just as easily as it can add a useful one. Nothing sucks worse than losing a big offensive boost because it morphed with another equipment's rune to produce an effect that provides nothing for your character. Additionally, these rune "upgrades" are locked at first, forcing you to battle to unlock them again. The random nature of the rune abilities on gear also means that getting the abilities you want is a massive grinding effort, and although you can microtarget specific runes after a point, you can't get them to spawn in specific slots, so you're looking at hours of grinding regardless trying to get the perfect runes on a piece of equipment. You're best off just ignoring the rune system altogether.

The world design leaves a lot to be desired. While there's some impressive setpieces in the overworld, the dungeons are a different story. You will explore ancient ruins that look almost exactly like the ancient ruins you explored an hour ago, only tinted green instead of blue. Caves will have a similar palette-swap scheme going on. Only a handful of dungeons escape this trend, and they're merely "okay" for the mostpart.

I would argue that the main selling points of this game are its characters and its plot. The characters are charming and fun, as you'd expect from a Tales games. The plot is an exploration of the complexities of morality, which I found compelling enough to see me through all the way to the end. It's for this reason that I'm going to recommend the game. Just keep these things in mind:

1) Play it on Normal or Simple (Simple will yield the most exp)
2) Ignore the rune system
3) Don't think too hard about combos, just figure out what works best for most enemies and use that
4) Buy it on sale
5) Play Tales of Berseria immediately afterward, which is a distant prequel to this game and expands on its themes (it also has much better gameplay)

This is a game that'll feel very real to anybody who's grown up or is growing up in a dying industrial town where there's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to do and nothing to look forward to. A reflection of the times in which we currently live (at least in North America). Very much recommend you give it a whirl.

This is what Fallout 3 should have been. It's funny, it's engaging, and it had less bugs on release than Fallout 3 did, which is saying something considering it's from Obsidian "Our ♥♥♥♥ Gets Rushed Out Without Testing Due to Deadlines" Software. 10/10, would play again.

I once went up against a boss duo who were killing me over and over again. Eventually, I got tired of it and beat them up wearing heavy armor. It felt good.

Then I got killed by a spooky ghost afterwards.

10/10 Would buy and play again.