Recent reviews by saifis

I never really liked card games in digital format much, especially since they are mostly in other games as a side thing, The ones in FF8, Witcher 3, can't say I ever cared much.

But then thre is Balatro, I had no interest in it when I saw it nominated as game of the year in 2024 but, I saw it on sale and thought, "why nots".

I was pleasantly suprised by its grip and each session got me thinking of meta builds, it tickles the same part of the brain that got me hooked on bullet heavens, the nature of having to guage resources, in this case money and jokers compared to weapons in the bullet heavens, you always have to weigh in when to hold out hoping for a better card to come in or give up and go in on what you have, else you will loose the run because you fail the objective.

Anyway very fun game, should play.

Another Atlus JRPG down, TLDR, above average JRPG but not exactly a masterpiece like a numbered Persona game.

I say Persona because a lot of the DNA of the game is clearly Persona based, doing activities will cost you time which is limited between major events, exploring a dungeon will expend both day and night free time, your limiting factor of dungeon crawling is your MP, you have social links to max out which feed into the combat side, the only difference is there is no pokemon aspect to it collecting monsters.

Other things I want to talk about, the limited date system, I was never much of a fan, having a deadline always looming in the corner just kinda makes me anxious, it made sense for Persona, you are a highschool student and you have to go to school, make things work, also I suppose those games being 70-100 hour games even with time constraints it was a needed limiter. Compared to that in Metaphor you aren't a student, so having to be locked in on time constraints felt a bit contrived.

The combat although in the same vein as the modern Persona games has some welcome innovations, such as the press icon thing which gives much more depth to combat. Also the fact you don't have to enter turn based combat when you are sufficiently over leveled is something all JRPGs that have symbol encount should do from now on.

Music is as good as ever, don't wanna gush too much about that, character designs are... well the usual Atlus style.

Story was your common fantasy JRPG fanfare, I've seen people call it woke and such because of its commentary on racism and other social systems but, lets face it JRPGs have always had rather straight forward moral themes and hammering them in with heavy handed story telling, and as long as they do it well I don't really see an issue. That said I feel there could have been more character buildup for other antagonists outside the main one, even then I feel it was a bit underhanded.

If you dream of a game where you can build your own ships with unique factions that have completely different qualities and parts to build your ship, and then have the ships you've designed to propagate around the world, this game is for you. I really liked how each faction can have drastically different ways of being a meanace, some are milktoast, not strong not weak, has shields, some have no shields but are just brute force strong, some are farmers that will shoot spores onto anything it'll stick on and grow resources where as other races all have to scavange for them.

It also has a mechanic where you can send your designed fleet into the cloud, where they will appear in other player's worlds. What I did was send that farmer race where it has a variety of cheap ships that are annoying to take down, and a giant self resource growing ship building fort that will continuously multiply and replicate itself and fleets so if a player doesn't find them for an extended time it will grow a possibly game crashing amount of ships and fairly difficult to eradicate.

Very, very fun.

I think the last Tales of game I played before this was Eternia on the PS1, I remember dying so many times to common enemies in that game and I just fell off. I've bought several in the years since and played for a few hours just to fall off, Beseria, and some other one supposedly connected? I loose track.

The story was.... okay, characters had nice arcs of development and the chemistry between them and all that. Combat was a bit clunky feeling and the frequent cut ins that yank you out focus was a bit jarring, also the dungeon quality suddenly felt like it dipped in the last quarter somehow, not a big minus but it was an issue for me,

I do feel like the tales classic mechanic of characters having random conversation while you traverse the map was something I missed, those are nice.

A mix between Ys, stardew valley and factorio is the best way I can put it, although each facet of the mechanics are not as good as each but, it has a nice charm to it that got me hooked for 70 hours so, its well worth the price, I guess for me it was more of a automation optimization game, the Ys elements were fairly simple and the stardew was there but I didn't engage with it much.

Its basically 2D minecraft, no, not that one, this one is an isometric 2D with the usual set of crafting, farming, automation and exlporation, co-op is there too, although I don't really have friends to play with, its a nice thing to have.

It also has set bosses that you need to defeat to progress in the story/crafting ladder, its one of those games you can play with your brain off and have some neuron activation when you hit some nice resource or treasure.

Of the perhaps 2 dozen bullet heaven games I've played this one I feel has the hardest difficulty in terms of surviving to the end, especially if I don't get a good synergy with the weapon, In this one you have characters with a unique ability, and get to choose from a handful of weapons shared between all the characters, also upgrades you can purchase to persist between runs to add the rougeliteness.

Very simple visuals with it being mostly black and white, the feel of powerscale is very subdued in this one but if you want a more challenging bullet heaven this is a nice one.

Its one of those factorio like games where you gradually move up the tech by gathering raw resources and manufacturing more and more complex objects.

The main difference from the others is that you can fly out of the planet you started from and to other star systems, and build logistic lines to bring it all back to your main planet, also there is a grand goal for creating a dyson sphere, as the title suggests. Watching the sun gradually become covered by your structures is one of those moments in gaming that you randomly think of years later and you get the itch of wanting to play again.

There is combat in the game which is rather fun but, it at this moment lacks depth and is just "make 300 ships to overwealm the enemy base" kind of thing, don't get me wrong its nice to watch but I feel it would have been better to put the time and resources to create more non-combat mechanics,

However it is a fairly small gripe on a very addictive game loop. A must for those who like factorio like automation games.

So this is my most played game on Steam time wise, it's very basic graphics may decieve, but its a very addictive and deep game with many mechanics that will hook you and make you loose track of time, I usually loose about 50-80 hours at a time until I run out of things I want to do, so I drop it, only to come back months after to do it all over again. Replayability is endless due to its myriad of mods you can install from the workshop.

That said it is a game that is not for everyone, its one of those if its for you its for you, if not its just not gonna click with you type thing.

My favorite game of 2018, I didn't buy it until a few months after it came out but, its short, sweet and just full of great music and game play. I really like it because there is no down time or boring parts to it, it just is pure joy and happiness.

Also it is a lot more easier than it looks at first sight, which has challenge mode for the people who want a bit more difficulty