Recent reviews by shxrks

Shadow of the Erdtree is a perfect expansion to Elden Ring. It has the same quality of world design, enemy and boss encounters, and fun weapons as the base game, and pushes everything to their limits.

The Realm of Shadow is so intricately thought out, with layers and layers of places to visit. I'd say many of my favorite locations and legacy dungeons are from this expansion-- I had similar moments to discovering Siofra River for the first time while venturing through the incredibly vertical and beautiful terrains.

I got absolutely beaten down in the first few hours-- this is normal. PLEASE explore and pick up scadutree fragments, especially with the recent calibration it will make the early game so much more bearable (plus again, the world was an absolute delight to explore).

I loved many of the bosses, I'd say that the majority of them had the perfect balance between extreme difficulty and fairness. There are like two that I think stray in the direction of pretty unfair, but this doesn't really change my overall feelings on the expansion. The majority of your time will be fighting the amazing bosses and exploring the sprawling world and that is what I enjoyed the most.

A quick note about the story, I really liked it. Since the events of Shadow of the Erdtree take place during your journey, you feel like you have a much more active role in the story. I especially loved the NPCs, every one of their quests is worth doing and it was awesome seeing them piece together what was happening alongside you.

If you love Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erdtree is a no brainer. It is more of what you love, but bigger and bolder than before.

It felt strategic and satisfying, and the best part is it only gets better-- all the way up until the game's final moments, may I add. I had countless moments where I would just sit and think 2 or 3 turns ahead to cook up a strategy for big juicy damage. The times where those strategies worked were some of the best feelings I've ever had playing a video game. The amount of options to customize your team and the freedom to create wild build also is incredibly welcomed-- especially the latent power system, which is new to this game. Each traveler has access to a secondary job to help customize their playstyle, but they all have their unique latent power that differentiates them and makes sure they aren't made obsolete by another traveler. Combat is easily my favorite part of this game.

Random encounters always get annoying for me eventually and to be honest it felt like there were a decent amount of them. Fortunately, the combat was so fun that I felt like I wanted to fight for most of those encounters, and in the other times I popped on a skill that reduced encounters, which is very welcome and made me enjoy overworld exploration much much more. On the topic of encounters, there thankfully wasn't too much grinding. The way the game spaces out the traveler stories makes for pretty solid progression if you switch out your party members often. I think I only spent 4-5 hours total out of my 115 hr playtime strictly grinding.

I'm fine with the HD-2D graphics, and there are some moments where the game looks really beautiful. Sprite animation is intentional and fluid, and battle effects are really pleasing to look at. Not astounding, but certainly nothing bad.

One of the best OSTs I've heard, ever, in anything. Each song is beautifully crafted to fit the setting it plays in. There of course are reused, generic songs that play a lot, but even they sound good. Slight spoiler (I guess), the ending credits features a medley of songs from the game, and I found myself humming along while reminiscing my time spent playing . There's basically nothing to complain about here-- sometimes it feels like I paid $60 for an album with a game on the side and I love it.

In my opinion, this is where the game can shine the brightest but also is where the game can become iffy.
I would say not every story was created equally, but in the end I found each traveler's story to be good or even great (besides one). Coming off some games with thoughtful and interesting writing, there were certainly moments that had me questioning "wtf is this." Since the stories progress in chapters (40-50 minute chunks of story), a lot of the time characters have unusual development that make the writing feel really poor and rushed. There might be a side character that is introduced to help develop our protagonist who undergoes a complete character arc in the same chapter. It makes the side character feel super artificial, like they were engineered and produced in a factory specifically to develop our protag in 30 minutes.

And, I think, inherently, the way this game is structured can lead to some disappointing or downright upsetting moments like those. Obviously, the game's structure is incredibly important and is what makes this game special. But if the game wasn't structured the way it was, this would be really easy to fix. The biggest example of this, for me, was one of Throne's chapters that had branching paths (slight spoils ahead). There are full details revealed and explained in one route that get a reaction out of Throne, but the other merely alludes to those same details and still gets a reaction out of Throne. To me, this made the game feel very disjointed and unresponsive to the way I chose to play the game, and it took me out of an otherwise intriguing story. Again, it's because of the way the game is structured, and I'm not faulting it for that, I just can't ignore how these moments hurt my overall enjoyment at parts.

I kind of just ♥♥♥♥ on the story a ton, but let me make it clear that it also left me moved and full. The times I do play JRPGs, which, again, are rare, I play long, long games with overarching stories and memorable characters-- this game is not an exception. I grew to love each and every character (except one) in their own ways. As cheesy as it is, you really are along for the ride on their journey through Solisita. Again, I thought (nearly) every story, overall, was well done and had satisfying conclusions. The variety in the traveler stories were also good, there's a good mix of happy-go-lucky fun and insufferable trauma. There are plenty of moments of joy, sadness, anger, and everything in-between, and the lore actually is quite expansive and well thought out (again, it doesn't always play out smoothly, but in the end you can appreciate it). Seeing the way the travelers' individual stories came together, and how they ended was really satisfying.

It was in the game's final moments when I really realized how special of an adventure I just played through-- there is no other game that contains an experience like this. There is no other game that, despite it's large flaws, has left me this astounded and satisfied. There is no other game like Octopath Traveler II.

besides the first, I guess-- but this game seems better in every way than Octopath 1

On paper, my number scores might look... not great. I would rate it higher if I could, but unfortunately numbers don't care how I feel. Trust me, I feel like this game is worth your time and will bring you enjoyment. The experience is much more than just a score, and I implore you to start your journey.

it was a genuine surprise that I enjoyed this game so much. haven't been this invested in a game in a while. being able to run it with minimal game breaking bugs actually lets the world and story shine. would definitely recommend if you have the specs to run it-- truly a special experience.

FOR REAL?!

I put this game down in May 2022 and came back last month in hopes to play the new DLC.
I beat the game today, just in time for its release tomorrow.

This is undoubtedly one of the greatest games ever made. The grandiose scale of this game, while still being jam-packed with content, just shouldn't be possible. It is insane. There are so, so many discoveries, encounters, and scenic views that just feel impossibly crafted and intentional. And the number of weapons, sorceries, and incantations allow for endless amounts of creative, fun, and stupid builds.

Even if it seems incredibly daunting, the game provides so many ways to work around difficult portions of the game. FromSoft really nailed the accessibility of their biggest game. Go explore, level up, look up a guide, use spirits, summon players, whatever. It's all there for you so that you can triumph and experience this masterpiece of a game.

10/10. See you in the Land of Shadow.

yeah its kinda good

persona

Story - 9/10. This was a great Star Wars story. I can't really complain about too much, although the ending felt a bit rushed. It was a major breath of fresh air from the sequel trilogy. And that's all, I'll let you experience it for yourself.

Performance - 7/10. Certain planets lagged my game more than others, but for most of the time I was able to reach 60+fps on a GTX 1060 6GB. There were also some stutters during combat.

Sound Design - 10/10. The sound/music in this game is Star Wars. all the sounds are from the movies and the music does a great job capturing the feeling of John Williams' scores.

Gameplay - 8/10. This was my first "souls like" game, so at the beginning I really struggled with timings and combat. I got used to it pretty quickly though, and the game progressively became less and less challenging. Granted, I was on Jedi knight difficulty (the recommended difficulty to players like myself new to the souls like genre), there were no major difficulty spikes until the final boss. A looming plague over the gameplay and combat, however, was the sometimes clunky camera angle, the above mentioned stutters, and a few minor bugs that made the gameplay a bit harder to enjoy.

Completionist - 6/10. There is a lot of stuff to collect in this game. If you're like me, and like getting achievements/100%ing the game, content wise it's not too bad. But I found during my time 100%ing the game and getting all the Steam achievements to be rather painful and slow. If you plan out every little thing to do when searching for collectables and secrets, this may go better for you, but for someone who first wanted to experience the game without being a Completionist like myself, finding obscure force echos, logs, and secrets became incredibly painful. This would not be nearly as bad if there was some sort of fast travel system post-story/game. I constantly found myself slowly trekking back to a location all the way across the map to find a single echo or small room that was preventing me from 100% a planet, or missing out on an obscure seed for the terrarium that was also 1000 miles away. This may just be in part to my carelessness/blindness to certain small collectables, but this constant slow backtracking really annoyed me.

Overall Average - 8/10. I highly recommend you buy this on sale (currently $24 on the winter sale 2020), I do not see myself enjoying this game as much if I had paid a full $60 for the game. The story lasted me half my playtime, and the other half was spent looking for that 100%. So yeah, it's good, but there are issues, and more than a few at that.

YES pt.2

worth it for calamity alone

YES.